journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 5: march 2013 learning and pedagogic development: journals and collaboration andrea raiker centre for learning excellence, university of bedfordshire, uk david mathew centre for learning excellence, university of bedfordshire, uk let us introduce ourselves. we established and edit the university of bedfordshire’s journal of pedagogic development, a publication that appears three times a year in hard copy and online. its first issue was published in july last year, its launch taking place at the university’s annual learning and teaching conference. the timing of the launch was carefully chosen because we wanted to establish that pedagogic development and learning and teaching in higher education are inseparable. academics are knowledgeable and passionate about their disciplines, but how to communicate that knowledge and passion in a way that will engage and inform their students rarely forms any part in subject specific undergraduate and postgraduate courses. why should it? how many of us thought, when settling down bleary-eyed to a 9 o’clock monday morning lecture, that one day that slightly out-of-focus figure next to the lectern would be us? but that was then, and this is now. taking an existentialist perspective, university teachers will always arise from different times, environments and perspectives to their learners. pedagogic development is essential to close the gap of time and place so that the focus of the jldhe, how students learn and how they make sense of academia, can be understood and realised. this resonates with chris rust’s message in the jldhe’s first publication in 2009. he called for a paradigm shift to put learning at the centre of the student experience of a chosen discipline, and suggested that notions of ‘threshold concepts’ and ‘graduate attributes’ (rust, 2009, pp.2-3) could inform progress. threshold concepts offer conceptions of how we might close the gap, effectively supporting students through areas of ‘troublesome knowledge’ (rust, 2009, p.3) on a journey of transforming knowledge, increasing confidence and the attainment of graduate attributes. but paradigm shift raiker and mathew learning and pedagogic development: journals and collaboration journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 2 involves academics going on a similar journey through pedagogic development. to us, pedagogic development is not just the transmission of learner-centred teaching strategies. it is true that the journal of pedagogic development was established to provide a forum where good practice in teaching and learning, underpinned by research, could be shared to stimulate a ‘can do’ environment. we wanted our readers to put down their copy, or shut down the window, with the thought, ‘if they can do that, i can too. i’ll give it a go!’. but sausages on a one-pronged fork tend to fall off into the barbecue. it occurred to us that a process that combined several ‘prongs’ might have more chance of success. one of these is our annual writing retreats and we are delighted that john hilsdon has agreed to join us at our easter 2013 event as the external guest editor. the aim of the writing retreats is to provide early career researchers and writers with the support necessary to bring their work up to a publishable standard. the first stage is for prospective participants to submit a 300 word abstract by the end of october. successful authors are then asked to write up the full paper. they submit the first draft in january for constructive feedback from us. they then work on their papers for a second submission in march, prior to the retreat. at the retreat, authors peer review articles, attend seminars to improve aspects of their work, and work with us and our external editor to complete the honing of their papers. at the end of the retreat we encourage participants to ‘press send!’ – to dispatch their papers electronically to their chosen publishers. we look forward to talking to john about the next stages in learner development. ideas promoted by contributors to the jldhe and through the association for learning development in higher education (aldinhe), as well as by chris rust and his colleagues at oxford brookes, have been at the forefront of putting the student at the centre of the learning/teaching interface over the last few years. however, at the improving student learning through research and scholarship (isl) conference at lund university in sweden, organised by oxford brookes, chris rust (2012) told delegates that isl was at a crossroads. he suggested that this conference, celebrating twenty years of disseminating research into student learning by delegates past and present, may be the last because of his semi-retirement and the uncertainty of continuing engagement by oxford brookes. also, the keynote lecture, by professor graham gibbs (2012) of winchester, advised that papers presented over the twenty years showed inconclusive evidence of student learning processes, learning performance and learning gains having been improved. his analysis showed that presage variables such as funding, research performance and institutional raiker and mathew learning and pedagogic development: journals and collaboration journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 3 reputation do not explain much of the variation in educational gains identified between institutions. neither do products such as degree classifications, retention and employability, as these are predicated upon presage factors. the best predictors are measures of educational process, what institutions do with resources focused on student engagement to make the most of what their students have. gibbs highlighted class size, student effort and engagement, who undertakes teaching, and the quantity and quality of feedback as valid process indicators. these factors are aspects of teaching and learning and as such are the remit of academics. this is a massive expectation for the academics who came into higher education to spread the good news of the subject that they love. if any of the above sounds downbeat, this is no reason by itself not to acknowledge it. whether our primary field of interest is learning development or pedagogy, our student body is of paramount importance, and previous defeats can be inspirational – albeit after wounds have been licked. indeed, we advocate that journals like ours and the jldhe have an essential part to play in continuing the work of closing the gaps between inspiration, expectations and practice. we were also heartened in our role of editors and writing retreat leaders by other messages coming from the conference. clearly heard was the call to work with teams to disseminate individual good practice. swedish colleagues, for example roxå & mårtensson (2012) from lund university, reported that substantial funding in sweden on projects to improve student learning had done little to change practice. they suggested that the dreams and strategies of past conferences may be in need of fresh perspectives and/or interpretations, whilst emphasising that teaching through research is as much needed as before. the good work that was being done by individuals had ‘to come out of the silos’, and reach all teachers. they suggested that research should become a joint enterprise using common language, not left to individual endeavour. their key message was ‘don’t talk to individuals, talk to the teams’. we see the writing retreats and the journal of pedagogic development as ways of reaching not only individuals, not simply teams, but communities of enquirers whose everyday lives are embedded in scholarship and research. we fully endorse the need to encourage colleagues to come out of their silos and see both the journal of pedagogic development and the writing retreats as encouraging this. both initiatives aim to disseminate and embed individual good practice, based on research. raiker and mathew learning and pedagogic development: journals and collaboration journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 4 we believe that our relationship with the jldhe, through this editorial and our writing retreats, will support us in our pedagogic endeavours to deepen our knowledge and understanding of the exciting and fruitful developments in learning and teaching that are taking place beyond our silo. furthermore, although our respective journals might not seem, at first glance, to share much of a common readership, we believe that the jpd embodies ideas and ideals similar to those promoted by the jldhe: to encourage scholarly work in the field of learning development from the uk and elsewhere; to inform our readers of good practice emerging from other continents; and to represent the breadth of ideas in learning development and contemporary pedagogy. for these reasons we believe that our readers could learn from your readers and the papers that you publish; and vice versa. like the jldhe, we are focused on identifying and strengthening the links between research and practice in learning and pedagogic development; and we are grateful for the opportunity to express our views through this guest editorial! for more information about our projects, please go to: www.beds.ac.uk/learning/support/jpd. references gibbs, g. (2012) ‘improving student learning: where should we direct our effort?’, improving student learning through research and scholarship (isl) conference. lund university, sweden 29-31 august. roxå, t. and mårtensson, k. (2012) ‘the saga of isl – being at the bus-stop of a conference’, improving student learning through research and scholarship (isl) conference. lund university, sweden 29-31 august. rust, c. (2009) ‘opinion piece: a call to unite in a common cause’, journal of learning development in higher education, issue 1, february, pp. 1-5. rust, c. (2012) improving student learning through research and scholarship (isl) conference. lund university, sweden 29-31 august. literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 8: march 2015 work smarter: ten ways to improve your teaching a book review of smith, j. (2010) the lazy teacher’s handbook. edited by ian gilbert. carmarthen: crown house publishing ltd. ronan t. bree dundalk institute of technology, ireland. as educators, we constantly strive to improve our teaching methods. our focus centres on improving the scholarship of learning and teaching, entailing the design and implementation of innovative teaching and assessment strategies. students are appreciative of novel approaches that encourage learning and understanding, as compared to solely witnessing didactic teaching. any educator reading this will testify, teaching is a wonderful and rewarding career, even though we constantly search for the perfect teaching formula. in general, being ‘lazy’ with one’s teaching cannot be condoned, as it would certainly impact negatively on student learning. however, depending on your interpretation of the word ‘lazy’, this belief on ‘lazy’ teaching versus effectiveness can be changed. in 2010, jim smith published a superb resource entitled ‘the lazy teacher’s handbook’ with the catch line: how your students learn more when you teach less. firstly, it’s important that this title is not misinterpreted; the book does not promote general laziness but instead professionally focuses enthusiastic educators on teaching smarter, rather than harder. a hidden strength of this resource is that after reading through it, you will automatically reflect on your teaching practice whilst also being provided with numerous creative ideas and activities, each described concisely, to improve learning amongst your students. the book is written in a manner that it can be either read as one piece, or easily utilised as a ‘go-to’ resource. it is divided into eleven themed chapters, with each one presenting ideas to encourage learning: the chapters focus on teaching, lesson bree work smarter: ten ways to improve your teaching journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 2 outcomes, it, social and emotional aspects, marking and language, amongst others. while aimed at a classroom setting, many of the methodologies outlined are easily transferable to a third-level environment. in fact, many of the activities centre on developing metacognitive, critical thinking and reflective skills, ensuring students take responsibility for their own learning, a goal of most higher education research (boud, 1989; black and wiliam, 1998; taras, 2001). once armed with these activities, your planning will certainly commence, as the book states: plans are nothing, planning is everything. from reading this book, i generated a list of ten concepts i could easily introduce in my teaching. there were so many to choose from and i believe every reader will identify different combinations of ideas. below, i will outline each one from my list and explain why each may be worth considering. 1: think, pair, square, share (p.18) peer learning is regarded as an ideal method for improving student learning, understanding and motivation (brindley and scoffield, 1998; falchikov, 2007). here, students initially, in silence and individually, think and write down their key points/ideas on a topic. in the second step, the student pairs up with the student next to them and they discuss their key points/ideas. to ‘square’, two pairs group together to compile the important and quality responses from the initial discussions and elect a speaker. the nominated speaker presents to the student group the high-level key points/ideas generated. this simple task merges quantity in the first two steps with quality in the latter two steps. 2: group work – allocate roles (p.22) while group work is often utilised in various programmes and disciplines, the format of how it is implemented can vary greatly. however, after reading this book, allocating roles is a key aspect i will employ going forward. the book recommends the following: a facilitator to keep the work/project progressing and record what’s happening; a time keeper to act as bree work smarter: ten ways to improve your teaching journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 3 the team clock; a resource manager to collect and return any required resources; a qualitychecker to maintain the teams’ focus on the primary task/project and finally a team-‘rep’ who can represent the team at meetings with the lecturer. you can add extra roles depending on group numbers. the concept is about allocating the student a focused and responsible role, in addition to the main project/task. the book provides ideas on how to get the most from each of the roles, for example, the team ‘reps’ could be summoned to receive extra information to be fed back to the group in a clear way. it is important to rotate roles over multiple projects so that no one becomes stereotyped. 3: praising students (p.85, p.92) lecturer feedback is the key to student improvement (black and wiliam, 1998; nicol and macfarlane-dick, 2006; brown, 2007; price et al., 2010; quinton and smallbone, 2010). feedback often points out any errors made in a piece of work and how to improve them (feed-forward). however, sometimes there can be a notable absence of praise for what the student is doing well (echoed in brown, 2004). a suggestion is made to correct some pieces of work only focusing on the good points. i think this ‘praise’ aspect should be integrated in every form of feedback. pointing out what is being done well can be extremely motivating to any student. 4: 5-3-1 (p.72) this activity gets students to initially generate numerous ideas/points on a topic and subsequently focus in on more high-priority aspects. initially, the students write down five points on a topic; they are then asked to prioritise three. for one of these points, they are asked to expand on it or justify it, depending on the topic/task. the author shows how this could be developed further when he suggests students walk around the room aiming to find two people disagreeing with them in their justification. 5: word/time limit on how long you can speak for (p.116) the author recommends that educators not only consider what they are saying, but also how much they are saying. filling a lecture with one-way traffic comprising an educator’s bree work smarter: ten ways to improve your teaching journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 4 voice can often block learning opportunities. therefore minimising the time a lecturer spends talking can help promote student engagement and allow time for integration of further learning opportunities. using a time limit, or even a word limit, the author stated that students inadvertently listened to him more closely than before. you can even use software packages, such as ‘crazy talk’ mentioned in the book, to animate images and verbally communicate to your class. 6: self-assessment wording/reflection (p.123) self-assessment is a major concept in education (boud,1989; dochy et al., 1999; taras, 2001; nicol & macfarlane-dick, 2006). having students reflect on their work before submitting it generates a life long skill, embracing improvement. there are numerous work sheets available for self-assessment, but there were samples here that resonated with me. for example, asking the students to: put a star by the three things that you do not want me to miss and show that you have achieved your target; or tell me three things you are really proud of with your work; might obtain more information than simply asking for them to identify the strengths of the work. each of these statements can provide an opportunity to allow students to meet goals/targets. 7: pick a letter and a number (p.68) a student is asked to pick a letter from the alphabet and a number between one and ten. then they must come up with the selected number of words relating to the subject/topic being covered beginning with the chosen letter. the goal is to get the students engaged in an activity identifying key words in an enjoyable atmosphere. bree work smarter: ten ways to improve your teaching journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 5 8: create your own report card (p.74) in another approach based on self-assessment, students are asked to reflect and comment on themselves as learners and what aspects of their learning they are currently working on to improve. they then put this in a named, or addressed, envelope and give it to you. the author recommends giving them back the envelope after approximately one month with your comments. this task will assist students in identifying strengths/weaknesses in their learning approach and then subsequently allow them to reflect on how they have progressed. 9: ‘i resign’ (p.77) while every teacher believes they use the best method to teach and deliver a topic, student input has the potential to assist you in ensuring you select the most effective approach for a particular group. in this exercise, you announce that you are ‘resigning’ and that the students had to teach the next five classes, what is it they would like to learn? what teaching approaches would they use? this exercise can assist in revision of a topic, constructive application of the material and also add ideas to teaching methodology that students will enjoy and appreciate, all without a requirement for the educator to speak. 10: motivating language (p.118) as educators, we have the opportunity to guide a classroom. the language we employ is critical in communicating our message, engaging the student group and promoting learning and understanding. the author presents phrases/activities that can enhance aspects of a student’s life, e.g. their self-esteem, motivation and behaviour (and insists these phrases/activities are delivered with the right body language and in a genuine, heartfelt way by the educator). while many lecturers will automatically be using some of the phrases mentioned, it is a good reminder of how the language we employ can also be critical in generating a motivated classroom reaching their learning potential. overall, this teaching resource comes highly recommended for anyone in a teaching position. jim smith’s thought-provoking and professional guidebook will make each reader think about, and reflect on, their own teaching. it will ask the reader to consider things from bree work smarter: ten ways to improve your teaching journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 6 the students’ point of view and demonstrate how introducing simple, creative exercises could vary their day and promote a metacognitive and reflective learning environment, containing additional peer learning activities. the author leads the educator to recognise that, through the implementation of these creative exercises, one can become a more effective teacher by actually doing less, instead focusing on facilitating independent learning in the classroom. so start your planning now! references black, p. and wiliam, d. (1998) ‘assessment and classroom learning’, assessment in education: principles, policy and practice, 5(1), pp. 7-74. boud, d. (1989) ‘the role of self-assessment in student grading’, assessment & evaluation in higher education, 14(1), pp. 20-30. brindley, c. and scoffield s. (1998) ‘peer assessment in undergraduate programmes’, teaching in higher education, 3(1), pp. 79-90. brown, s (2004) ‘assessment for learning’, learning and teaching in higher education, 1(1), pp. 81-89. available at: http://www2.glos.ac.uk/offload/tli/lets/lathe/issue1/articles/brown.pdf (accessed: 25 march 2015). brown, s. (2007) feedback and feed-forward. available at: ftp://www.bioscience.heacademy.ac.uk/newsletters/bulletin22.pdf (accessed: 25 march 2015). dochy, f., segers, m., sluijsmans, d. (1999) ‘the use of self-, peer and co-assessment in higher education: a review’, studies in higher education, 24(3), pp. 331-350. falchikov, n. (2007) ‘the place of peers in learning and teaching’, in boud d. and falchikov, n. (eds.) rethinking assessment in higher education: learning for the longer term. oxford: routledge publications, pp. 128-143. http://www2.glos.ac.uk/offload/tli/lets/lathe/issue1/articles/brown.pdf ftp://www.bioscience.heacademy.ac.uk/newsletters/bulletin22.pdf bree work smarter: ten ways to improve your teaching journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 7 nicol, d.j., macfarlane-dick, d. (2006) ‘formative assessment and self-regulated learning: a model and seven principles of good feedback practice’, studies in higher education, 31(2), pp. 199-218. price, m., handley, k., millar, j., o’donovan, b. (2010) ‘feedback: all that effort, but what is the effect?’ assessment and evaluation in higher education, 35(3), pp. 277-289. quinton, s. and smallbone, t. (2010) ‘feeding forward: using feedback to promote student reflection and learning – a teaching model’, innovations in education and teaching international, 47(1), pp. 125-135. taras, m., (2001) ‘the use of tutor feedback and student self-assessment in summative assessment tasks: towards transparency for students and for tutors’, assessment & evaluation in higher education, 26(6), pp. 605-614. author details dr. ronan bree is a science lecturer in dundalk institute of technology, ireland. he holds a phd in biochemistry and an m.a. in learning and teaching. his published scientific research includes work on the molecular analyses of both embryo and cancer cell development. in the learning and teaching area, he recently led a study centred on improving the format and assessment of laboratory practical sessions (published in ‘the all ireland journal of teaching and learning in higher education’ in october 2014). outside work, ronan has a passion for landscape photography. literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 4: march 2012 supporting students as learners: two questions concerning pedagogic practice gavin fairbairn leeds metropolitan university, uk (this opinion piece is the second of two related articles, the first of which appeared in issue 3 of the jldhe, 2011) abstract probably the most important thing that any of us who work in higher education can do, is to help our students to say themselves more clearly, by communicating what they know, what they think about what they know, and why they think it. after all, it is by engaging skilfully in the processes of academic communication, whether in written or spoken forms, that they can persuade us that they have learned something and have thought about what they have learned. what a pity, then, that most university teachers do so little to help students to develop the skills necessary to write well. in this article i discuss two ways in which i have found i can help students in their development as writers capable of engaging, informing and challenging their readers. in doing so, i acknowledge some possible criticisms. introduction there are a couple of aspects of my pedagogic practice that i think are really worthwhile, but for which i am sometimes criticised. the first stems from my belief that feedback about students’ work is always best shared verbally, and even better when it is shared in a group context. the second stems from my belief that the best way to enable students to develop as academic writers is to enter into a kind of partnership with them in the development of their texts. fairbairn supporting students as learners feedback in a group setting sometimes, in common with many teachers, i share comments on students’ work in writing – marking them on submitted assignments or drafts; and sometimes i even do so in awful red pen. however, i much prefer to let them know what i think of their work in discussion, especially when i am offering feedback on work in progress. more than that, i favour feedback sessions with whole classes, rather than individual feedback, which puts me at odds with many colleagues who believe that to give feedback in a class setting is unhelpful because it could be embarrassing for a student to have her weaknesses discussed in front of others. indeed some colleagues have even accused me of unethical conduct when i confess to this aspect of my pedagogic practice, though interestingly, those who have seen it in action seem to have a different view. sensitivity to students’ feelings is laudable. however, i think it is a mistake to allow the possibility that students might take offence to dictate how and when you should deliver feedback, because given a certain degree of kindness on your part, sharing feedback about students’ work in a group, is nearly always a positive experience. i find this is the case, even when the feedback i am offering relates to the work of particular individuals. in any case, i always try to focus feedback mainly on mistakes that a number of students have made, and i never directly address the author of a mistake when i discuss it with a group, unless they identify themselves, which they very often do, perhaps because they recognise that i am trying to help and they want to get as much help as they can. knowing what you know (and what you don’t) in my experience students find it helpful to know that they are not the only ones who lack particular skills or knowledge, or who have made particular mistakes. for one thing, it gives them permission to avoid engaging in the kind of pretence that the scottish psychiatrist r.d. laing pointed out when he summed up the experience of the intellectual and emotional tangles in which many people become involved, in trying to avoid exposing their ignorance: journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 2 fairbairn supporting students as learners there is something i don’t know that i am supposed to know. i don’t know what it is i am supposed to know, and yet i am supposed to know, and i feel i look stupid if i seem both not to know it and not know what it is i don’t know. therefore i pretend i know it. r. d. laing, (knots, 1970, p.56) do you ever pretend to know what you don’t know? do you think that your students do? do you think that they ever pretend to understand what they don’t understand? or are your students brave enough – wise enough – to ask for help when they are uncertain, whether their uncertainty is about a piece of knowledge or skill, or just about their confidence in their ability? if they aren’t, i think it is important that you spare no effort in the attempt to persuade them that since their job is to learn, even at the expense of admitting that they don’t know, the sooner they learn to admit that at times they don’t know and understand, the better. to attempt to avoid looking foolish in front of their peers by pretending that they understand when they don’t, is just about the most stupid thing that a student can do, while honestly admitting to ignorance, thus opening themselves to the possibility of learning, is probably the most important thing they can learn to do. one of the best things that we can teach our students, whether, for example, they are children, adult learners or postgraduates, is that it is ok to be unsure about things, and that knowing that they don’t know is a sign of strength rather than a sign of weakness. one way we might do this is by teaching in a way that makes it clear that we don’t know everything that there is to know about anything. i find that this sits very easily with me, since by comparison to the vast amount of accumulated knowledge in the world, i readily admit to knowing comparatively little, even in relation to areas in which others might be inclined to believe that i have expertise. another way we can teach our students that admitting to a lack of understanding or knowledge is ok, is by engaging them in supportive discussion of one another’s work, whether in tutorials, or in feedback sessions in larger classes, of the kind that i have discussed above. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 3 fairbairn supporting students as learners of course, there are occasions when private, one-to-one feedback is called for. however, i believe that it is a very good practice for teachers at all levels from the early years of school to postgraduate level, to give at least some feedback in the context of a class discussion, because this allows them to draw attention to shared and common problems in an efficient way. this belief relates closely to my strongly held view that supervision of student research at all levels, from undergraduate dissertation to phd, is best when it is conducted in a group, preferably with students focusing on a range of research topics. working on students’ texts with them the second area of my pedagogic practice i want to raise, relates to the ways in which i try to help students to develop their skill as academic writers. here, i find that rather than responding to drafts on paper, ‘marking up’ their text as a copy-editor would, noting errors and making suggestions for improvements, it is far more productive to work with them, either individually or in a group, on drafts of their work. i know from experience, as you probably do, how soul destroying it can be to receive work back from another person covered in suggestions and questions and remarks. and i know, from a great deal of experience, how much my own writing benefits from occasions when friends and colleagues sit and read my work with me, suggesting as we do so, ways in which i might say what i want to say more clearly and concisely, or in more engaging ways. i think the reason that this is helpful is that other people are almost bound to read my work differently than me, because they didn’t write it. as a result, provided they take the task seriously, rather than ‘skip-reading’ to get a general sense of what i am on about, they are less likely to read over mistakes than i am. after all, as the author of my text, i was present at its birth; i am its mother and father. i know what i was trying to say, which is why it is so likely that i will ‘read’ my own written work as if it says what i was thinking as i wrote, even when it doesn’t. that is why it is important for developing writers like me – and you, and like our students – to develop the habit of always copy-editing our written work as if it was written by someone else; it is just too easy otherwise, to read what we think we wrote rather than what we actually wrote, and hence to fail to pick up mistakes. my preferred way of facilitating students’ development as writers is to work with them on their texts, whether they are essays or other assignments; dissertations or theses. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 4 fairbairn supporting students as learners typically this involves jointly reading the student’s text and modelling, in discussion, how we might interrogate it in an effort to see where changes might make it clearer. during this process i support the student in the attempt to frame changes that move the text forward strengthening arguments; restructuring, and recasting ideas in ways that aid clarity. this usually involves not only working with paper copies of their work, but working with the text ‘live’ on a computer, trying out different ways of saying things; moving text about; substituting words; restructuring paragraphs and so on. i discuss the process of live editing in a group in an earlier opinion piece (fairbairn, 2011). i find that entering into a kind of partnership with students, in exploring and working a little on their texts, is the least threatening way to help them to become more careful writers. my main aim in this is to enable them to develop the ability to read their own work as if they were not familiar with what it is supposed to be saying, and then to find ways of amending it so that it conveys more easily, more engagingly and more fluently, what as an author, they wanted to say. does helping a student to develop her text amount to cheating? i am conscious that many teachers will view some of what i have written in the last paragraph with alarm. they might even view my suggestion that teachers should contribute directly to the drafting of students’ written work as support for a form of cheating, and this is something that has occasionally been suggested by colleagues. after all, i have talked about ‘entering into a kind of partnership’ with students as we work on their texts together, almost as if i am suggesting that for that time, i become a co-author, a co-worker. actually that is exactly what i am suggesting, because i believe that working alongside someone with more advanced skills is the best way to grow in any trade. the apprenticeship approach to learning has a long history, and the idea of apprenticeship has been adopted quite widely in educational thinking in recent years. i dare say that in most trades, apprentices have always had a helping hand in building or creating or making, from someone with more skill. but just as a brick wall, a grave stone, a stained glass window or a perfectly formed loaf of bread, is the product of an apprentice’s labour, even when the mark of a master craftsman can be detected in some element of the finished product, when i assist a student to refine a piece of writing, the end product is journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 5 fairbairn supporting students as learners theirs, even when it carries my influence. the same is true when i offer advice and support to colleagues who are writing for publication (and as much of my work of this kind is carried out with professional academics as it is with students). harwood et al. (2010) discuss related issues in a helpful way in the context of their study of the wide range of thorny ethical issues that surround the practice of students purchasing the services of paid and unpaid ‘proofreaders’ as a way of improving their academic work before submission. however, it is important to draw attention to a significant difference between the practice in which i engage (and which i would like to promote) when i am helping students to develop their texts, and the use, by students, of ‘proofreaders’. whereas my approach is a development of my function as a role model for fledgling academics, intended to change how they think and how they behave, the role of the ‘proofreader’ is to make-up for the deficiencies in the student, with the aim of gaining them better marks in a particular assessment. contributing a form of words or suggesting a way of re-structuring a text, is no more cheating than the attempt to induce a change in what a student has written by pointing out that a sentence is ‘ungrammatical’, ‘unclear’, ‘irrelevant' or ‘makes no sense’; that a point is ‘poorly argued’ or an essay ‘badly structured’. it is just more supportive and therefore more likely to help a student to improve both her writing and her approach to writing. of course, where i have supported a student in developing a text, if ideas that i introduced to them appear in the completed work whether it is an essay or dissertation, i would expect to be cited, just as i would expect a colleague to acknowledge the part i had played in helping them to develop an article or conference paper. concluding remarks in this short article, i have shared a couple of areas of my practice as a teacher that some colleagues find surprising and which some even find ethically questionable. i would be interested to hear what readers of the journal of learning development in higher education think of them, and especially about whether others engage in similar practices or eschew them because they consider them to be ethically questionable. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 6 fairbairn supporting students as learners references fairbairn, g. (2011) ‘academic writing masterclasses: ‘shared live editing’ in a group’, journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3, march, pp. 1-6. harwood, n., austin, l. and macaulay, r. (2010) ‘ethics and integrity in proofreading: findings from an interview-based study’, english for specific purposes, 29(1), pp. 54-67. laing, r.d. (1970) knots, london: penguin. author details gavin fairbairn is professor of ethics and language at leeds metropolitan university, whose work in both areas is underpinned by his belief in the value of storytelling. in the past, after a career in special education and many years as a teacher educator, he was professor of professional development in nursing and midwifery at the university of glamorgan, then professor of education at liverpool hope. his research and professional activity is focused in two areas: applied ethics and philosophy, especially in relation to health, social care and reconciliation after conflict, and the development of academic and professional writing. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 7 supporting students as learners: two questions concerning pedagogic practice abstract introduction feedback in a group setting knowing what you know (and what you don’t) working on students’ texts with them does helping a student to develop her text amount to cheating? concluding remarks references author details literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special edition: developing writing in stem disciplines, november 2012 capturing and communicating advanced mathematical activity peter samuels birmingham city university, uk abstract unlike most other subjects, mathematical activity resides almost entirely within the cognitive processes of a mathematics practitioner and is therefore difficult to characterise. despite recent interest, the nature of advanced mathematical activity remains something of a black box to educational researchers. in addition, the production of advanced mathematical texts, such as theses or journal articles, is often divorced from mathematicians’ experiences of creating mathematics which can lead them to a sense of personal alienation from their work. this article proposes four practical techniques for capturing advanced mathematical activity. the timing of the use of these techniques is compared against a model of mathematical creativity and the writing process. the establishment of a new genre for communicating advanced mathematics is proposed which combines the product of the activity with the process of creating it. keywords: mathematical creativity; advanced mathematical activity; mathematical writing; data capturing techniques; mathematical activity corpus. introduction creating mathematics can be an alienating experience for mathematicians. this is because the product of mathematical activity can be far removed from the process by which it is created. marx (1974, p. 64) described alienation from product as: the worker is related to the product of his labour as to an alien object. for on this premise it is clear that the more the worker spends himself, the more powerful the alien objective world becomes which he creates over against himself – his inner world – becomes, the less belongs to himself as his own. samuels capturing and communicating advanced mathematical activity rowan (1981) applied marx’s theory of alienation to the traditional paradigm of research in the human sciences. i claim that it is even more applicable to mathematics research. the four stage model of the creative process is widely attributed to poincaré (1908) who described a four stage process for his own mathematical creativity: preparation, incubation, illumination, and verification. according to lubart (2001), by 1950 there was considerable agreement that this model describes the creative process in general (guilford, 1950). crowley (1977) suggested the application of this model to describing the writing process with writing replacing illumination and revision replacing verification. other writing process researchers have reclassified preparation and incubation as prewriting, writing as drafting and have added editing after revision. whilst the four stage model has been criticised for lacking psychological depth by guilford (1950) in its application to general creativity, and by flower and hayes (1981) in its application to the writing process, it remains an important initial model for understanding the sequence of psychological processes in these activities. providing accurate data on the process of creating advanced mathematics has proved notoriously difficult. mathematicians are generally private individuals with a large cultural gap between their logical research paradigm and the paradigms of educational research (nardi and iannone, 2004). apart from introspective reports like poincaré’s (1908) perhaps the most noteworthy example of an account of actual advanced mathematical activity is that of tall (1980) who was in the almost unique position of being a mathematician as well as a mathematics educator. tall’s approach could be described as analytical autoethnography in that he was ‘a full member in the research group or setting, visible as such a member in the researcher’s published texts, and committed to an analytic research agenda focused on improving theoretical understandings of broader social phenomena’ (anderson, 2006, p.375). the lack of any similar papers to tall’s since its publication, apart from chick’s (1998) deconstruction of her own thought processes in advanced mathematics, indicates that such an approach is difficult for mathematicians to emulate as they generally lack the ability to qualitatively reflect on and interpret the significance of their actions. rather than expecting mathematicians to qualitatively reflect on their own experiences or mathematics educators to capture advanced mathematical activity as it occurs, i propose that a more practical solution is to develop techniques by which mathematicians can journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 2 samuels capturing and communicating advanced mathematical activity capture their process of creating mathematics without distracting their concentration but not necessarily expect them to analyse it themselves. in this paper i present four techniques which i have used in the process of creating and writing up advanced mathematics. these techniques can be mapped onto different stages in the mathematics and writing creativity process, which i view as generally sequential, as shown in table 1. finally, i argue that the way mathematics research is communicated in journals should provide a means for mathematicians to present their process data as well as the product of their research which could then be analysed by mathematics educators or cognitive psychologists. table 1. data capturing techniques for advanced mathematics and their relationship with the different stages of the mathematical creativity and writing processes. process stage data capture technique reference preparation proof plan (wolska et al., 2004) incubation concept map (bolte, 1999; lavigne et al., 2008) illumination activity transcript (tall, 1980) mathematical creativity verification preparation incubation concept map (margerum-leys, 1999) writing writing revision annotated draft and transcript (eliot, 1971) the data capturing techniques the four data capturing techniques are described in the order that they might be used in the production of a mathematical research article. each technique has been illustrated by an example from my own phd research work. apart from illustrating these techniques, the second and fourth examples were chosen because their content appeared to be interesting from more than a mathematical perspective: the former contains an account of making a mistake, getting stuck and then overcoming it; the latter indicates my emotional state when reviewing my research writing and my struggles to remember something i had done in the past. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 3 samuels capturing and communicating advanced mathematical activity proof planning this first data capture technique proposed is proof planning. this term was probably originally used by wallen (1983) in computational mathematics to describe automated theorem proving techniques and is now commonly used in this field. however, little research has been carried out to compare computational proof planning with the actual proving methods of mathematicians (although, see wolska et al., 2004). it is used here to describe the process of creating an informal plan for a proof. an example of its use in advanced mathematics is provided in figure 1. i created this plan in preparation for a meeting with my phd supervisor. it is likely that this technique will be motivated by some kind of social interaction for the plan to be written down. in this case, the structure of the actual final proof was remarkably similar to the plan. figure 1. part of plan for a proof that a one dimensional unsteady wave equation is an example of a cusp catastrophe. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 4 samuels jou capturing and communicating advanced mathematical activity rnal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 5 bolte (1999) has proposed the use of concept maps for assessment in undergraduate mathematics courses. they have also been used as a research tool by lavigne and others (2008) for exploring students’ understanding of undergraduate statistics. margerum-leys (1999) promotes their use as an aid to understanding in the pre-writing stage of the writing process. figure 2 provides a concept map for a chapter of one of my mathematics research reports (samuels, 1989) on the method of characteristics applied to unsteady wave equations. graphical tools for organizing and representing knowledge. they include concepts, usually enclosed in circles or boxes of some type, and relationships between concepts indicated by a connecting line linking two concepts. words on the line, referred to as linking words or linking phrases, specify the relationship between the two concepts. (novak and cañas, 2008, p.1) concept maps are: concept maps an activity transcript is an account of an episode of mathematical activity. it combines notes from the mathematical activity with a journal style account. journal writing has been suggested for undergraduate mathematics classes (rosenthal, 1995) but is unusual in more advanced mathematics research. an example of an activity transcript for advanced mathematics is given in table 2. it is divided into four parts: a background to the mathematical activity (written eight days after it took place), notes from the activity itself, a written-up version of these notes (also written after eight days) and reflections on the activity (written after three weeks and written up after two and a half months). the time delay in writing up a mathematical activity appears to be important but an appropriate length of time may depend upon the writer’s context and personal preferences. this approach is similar to tall’s (1980) article but it records a single mathematical activity in more detail and does not include qualitative analysis of the significance of the experience. it is therefore more practical for a mathematician to use if they wish to write up a single episode of mathematical activity which may include mistakes, such as the one shown in table 2. activity transcripts samuels jou capturing and communicating advanced mathematical activity rnal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 6 table 2. four extracts from an example activity. my general aim had been to explicitly characterise regions to the solution of the one-dimensional unsteady wave equation by the number of solutions the wave equation has for each point in terms of derivatives of the initial wave speed. the standard solution technique is to plot lines on which the solution is constant whose slope is related to the wave speed, known as characteristic curves. the generally accepted result is that when the initial wave speed has an inflection point, is decreasing with respect to the base line and has positive third derivative then a breaking point will occur at which the solution surface initially starts to overturn. after this point, it is possible to locally obtain two curves called caustics which mark the boundary to the region in which the solution is triple-valued. outside this region the solution locally remains singlevalued. samuels capturing and communicating advanced mathematical activity figure 2. concept map of the method of characteristics applied to unsteady wave equations (produced using inspiration® – see http://www.inspiration.com/). annotated draft and transcript the final data capturing technique proposed here is an annotated draft and transcript. it is similar to the approach used by valerie eliot to represent the annotated draft of her late husband’s poem, the waste land (eliot, 1971). i developed this technique as a means to capture my ‘thinking aloud’ as i re-read my internally published research reports. an example of an annotated draft of an extract from samuels (1989) with its transcription is given in figures 3 and 4. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 7 http://www.inspiration.com/ samuels capturing and communicating advanced mathematical activity figure 3. facsimile of a research report with ‘thinking aloud’ comments. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 8 samuels capturing and communicating advanced mathematical activity figure 4. transcript of the ‘thinking aloud’ comments on the extract in figure 3. note: 1. ‘top’ refers to the top of the page – this is a list of variables defined on this page which indicates the short term memory load for the reader. 2. ‘ln’ refers to line number n. 3. text to the left of the colon in bold is a positional descriptor for an action or an annotation. 4. words in italics describe an action. 5. words in normal font are an annotation. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 9 samuels capturing and communicating advanced mathematical activity discussion in this discussion paper i have presented four data capturing techniques for advanced mathematical activities with examples of each from my own research. i have not attempted to analyse the data provided through these techniques as i believe this would be done more appropriately and objectively by another educational or cognitive psychologist researcher. however, as explained above, there was an additional non-mathematical motivation behind including the second and fourth examples. rather, they exemplify how a mathematician might present content laden data, with each technique potentially providing insight into their thought processes when carrying out advanced mathematics research as well as conveying their mathematical meaning. these techniques are easy to learn and are not time consuming to use. their use may actually enhance mathematical activity and the process of writing it up rather than detract from it, overcoming mathematicians’ sense of alienation from the production of mathematics research. i propose the establishment of a corpus of advanced mathematical process data, similar to the digital variants corpus (björk, 1998, see http://www.digitalvariants.org/) where mathematicians are able to supply their content laden data of different stages of the mathematics creativity process and the process of writing it up, and other researchers are able to analyse their thought processes. alternatively, this could partially be achieved by using the additional online resources facility available with some journals. references anderson, l. (2006) ‘analytic autoethnography’, journal of contemporary ethnography, 35(4), pp. 373-395. björk, s. and holmquist, l. (1998) ‘exploring the literary web: the digital variants browser’, in proceedings of literature, philology and computers conference, 7-9 september. edinburgh. bolte, l.a. (1999) ‘using concept maps and interpretive essays for assessment in mathematics’, school science and mathematics, 99(1), pp. 19-30. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 10 http://www.digitalvariants.org/ samuels capturing and communicating advanced mathematical activity chick, h. (1998) ‘cognition in the formal modes: research mathematics and the solo taxonomy’, mathematics education research journal, 10(2), pp. 4-26. crowley, s. (1977) ‘components of the composing process’, college composition and communication, 28(2), pp. 166-169. eliot, t.s. (1971) the waste land: a facsimile and transcript of the original drafts including the annotations of ezra pound. london: faber and faber, edited by v. eliot. flower, l. and hayes, j.r. (1981) ‘a cognitive process theory of writing’, college composition and communication, 32(4), pp. 365-387. guilford, j.p. (1950) ‘creativity’, american psychologist, 5(9), pp. 444–454. lavigne, n.c., salkind, s.j., and yan, j. (2008) ‘exploring college students’ mental representations of inferential statistics’, journal of mathematical behavior, 27(1), pp. 11-32. lubart, t.i. (2001) ‘models of the creative process: past, present and future’, creativity research journal, 13(3-4), pp. 295-308. margerum-leys, j. (1999) concept mapping as a prewriting activity: a presentation for macul 99. available at: http://www-personal.umich.edu/~jmargeru/conceptmap/ (accessed: 25 april 2012). marx, k. (1974) ‘estranged labour’, in marx, k. the economic and philosophical manuscripts of 1844. 4th edition. moscow: progress publishers, pp. 61-74. nardi, e. and iannone, p. (2004) ‘on the fragile, yet crucial, relationship between mathematicians and researchers in mathematics education’, proceedings of the 28th conference of the international group for the psychology of mathematics education, 3, pp. 401–408. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 11 http://www-personal.umich.edu/%7ejmargeru/conceptmap/ samuels capturing and communicating advanced mathematical activity novak, j.d. and cañas, a.j. (2008) the theory underlying concept maps and how to construct and use them, technical report ihmc cmaptools 2006-01 rev 01-2008, florida institute for human and machine cognition. available at: http://cmap.ihmc.us/publications/researchpapers/theoryunderlyingconceptmaps. pdf (accessed: 25 april 2012). poincaré, h. (1908) ‘l'invention mathématique’, bulletin de l'institut général de psychologie, 8e année (3), pp. 175-196. rosenthal, j.s. (1995) ‘active learning strategies in advanced mathematics classes’, studies in higher education, 20(2), pp. 223-228. rowan, j. (1981) ‘a dialectical paradigm for research’, in reason, p. and rowan, j. (eds.) human inquiry: a sourcebook of new paradigm research. chichester: john wiley and sons, pp. 93–112. samuels, p.c. (1989) shock behaviour and diffusion. technical report 12/89, department of mathematics. university reading. tall, d.o. (1980) ‘the anatomy of a discovery in mathematics research’, for the learning of mathematics, 1(2), pp. 25-34. wallen, l. (1983) using proof plans to control deduction. university of edinburgh, division of informatics, research paper no. 185. available at: http://www.dai.ed.ac.uk/pub/daidb/papers/rp185.pdf (accessed: 25 april 2012). wolska, m., vo, b.q., tsovaltzi, d., kruijff-korbayová, i., karagjosova, e., horacek, h., fiedler, a., and benzmüller, c. (2004) ‘an automated corpus of tutorial dialogs on mathematical theorem proving’, in lino, m.t., xavier, m.f., ferreira, f., costa, r. and silva, r. (eds.) proceedings of the 4th international conference on language resources and evaluation (lrec-04). paris: elra, pp. 1007–1010. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 12 http://cmap.ihmc.us/publications/researchpapers/theoryunderlyingconceptmaps.pdf http://cmap.ihmc.us/publications/researchpapers/theoryunderlyingconceptmaps.pdf http://www.dai.ed.ac.uk/pub/daidb/papers/rp185.pdf samuels capturing and communicating advanced mathematical activity author details dr peter samuels is an academic skills tutor at birmingham city university, uk, and a visiting research fellow at the serious games institute at coventry university, uk. his research interests include university-level mathematics education (especially the use of new technologies and serious games) and learning development. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 13 capturing and communicating advanced mathematical activity abstract introduction the data capturing techniques proof planning activity transcripts concept maps annotated draft and transcript discussion references author details literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special edition: developing writing in stem disciplines, november 2012 embedded writing instruction in the first year curriculum paula bernaschina middlesex university, uk serengul smith middlesex university, uk abstract for many university students writing is a struggle and this may be more pronounced for students studying the sciences and technology. they may not foresee the need for good writing skills for their future employability. this case study discusses and critically analyses progress so far with integrating the writing process into the wider employability skills framework devised by the school of science and technology (s&t) at middlesex university. it discusses areas of the thinking and writing process and highlights issues that have come to the forefront as a result. keywords: stem writing; embedding; employability; free-writing; reflective writing. introduction the role of the academic writing and language (awl) coordinator for the school of science and technology (s&t) is to work with the lecturers and to develop and deliver provision to their students. the awl team is part of the learner development unit (ldu) which is available to all students and offers extracurricular voluntary workshops and tutorials, in addition to the growing embedded work. a variety of workshops are offered throughout the academic year focusing on topics such as essay writing, presentation skills and critical thinking. confidential one-to-one tutorials are also available which offer students the opportunity to obtain feedback regarding aspects of their learning, especially writing. over the last few years the role of the learner development unit within the university has bernaschina and smith embedded writing instruction in the first year curriculum been evolving to accommodate changes at the institution. initially when the ldu was established it was part of learning resources, however, in 2010 it became part of the centre for learning and teaching excellence as a result of restructuring in the university. in this new structure the ldu has become more integrated into the schools and in the development of university strategies regarding student learning. when the incumbent started the role of awl coordinator in 2008, the school was without a designated coordinator due to changes in staffing and a lack of resources. as a result, the staff of the school needed to be made aware of the writing and language support available to its students. this was done systematically through meetings with senior management, lecturers and librarians. although some staff members were now familiar with the support available, over time it became apparent that only a small number of students in s&t were taking advantage of the provision available and that a new strategy needed to be put in place to emphasise the importance of good writing and try to improve the students' writing ability. embedded writing support was chosen to support writing skills which lecturers often stated needed improvement, including development of ideas, language and grammar. from experience it can be concluded that embedded support is a more efficient and effective way to assist students as those who usually need help tend to be the ones who are least likely to seek assistance. initially, embedded support consisted of the ldu lecturer working with five lecturers and teaching within their classes infrequently, usually once during the academic year. this meant only the students in those lecturers' classes were receiving some type of extra support. however, there were many more students who could possibly benefit from this assistance. there is some evidence that science and engineering students in general lack some of the writing skills (king, 2002) needed for success in the workplace. for a variety of reasons these students tend not to be ‘readers’ or ‘writers’ and often arrive at university not realising that they will be required to do research which requires academic reading and to write reports and essays to a high academic standard. they also have the misconception that these skills are not necessary in industry. the cbi higher education task force indicates that employers are least satisfied with new graduates’ self-management and communication skills (cbi, 2009). british universities have been increasingly investing in strategies to ensure that their graduates are equipped with relevant knowledge and journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 2 bernaschina and smith embedded writing instruction in the first year curriculum transferable skills to be able to respond to the changing needs of the job market (agcas, 2012). over the last three years different strategies have been used to find the most appropriate way of supporting our students at middlesex. according to wingate (2012), the delivery of writing instruction varies according to the type of higher education institution. taking into consideration the needs of our students, the following case study explores a strategy undertaken which combines learner support with the development of employability skills. rethinking the embedding in our work with the students from the school, the librarians and the awl coordinator had been attempting to make inroads into the modules. in 2010, upon recommendation from some members of senior management in the school and the ldu, a concerted effort was made to focus on the first year core modules for students studying computer science and it. in theory, the strategy undertaken to embed ourselves into three core modules appeared to be the most comprehensive way of working with the majority of students; however, this plan was flawed. it became apparent some students were receiving these sessions several times over the academic year since some of the programmes require students to take all three of the core modules. as a result, these particular students were becoming ‘turned off’ and less interested in participating in the repeat sessions. at the same time, the uptake of tutorials and voluntary workshops for this school was not exemplary, therefore it was important to continue being part of the students’ modules. however, the approach needed to be planned differently. in 2011 several meetings with the academic dean and the learning and teaching strategy leader (ltsl) of the school as well as the librarians were initiated. the aim was to target the provision to be more efficient and effective so the whole first year would receive help. it was decided by the ltsl, an academic member of staff in the school, that the embedding would focus on the programmes offered and not individual modules. in addition, the communication skills would focus on those needed in academic and professional environments following the confederation of british industry (cbi) guidelines for employability. the original purpose of the academic writing and language sessions embedded in the journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 3 bernaschina and smith embedded writing instruction in the first year curriculum students' programmes was to enhance their academic literacy and assist them in becoming more successful students. however, with the heightened need for our graduates to be employable, the focus has grown from academic literacy to include 'workplace literacy'. nevertheless, they should not be considered separate entities but rather a development from one to the other. although the reading and writing genres can often be different in these two environments, the skills (e.g. developing and structuring writing, critical reading and thinking, etc.) obtained through academic work can be transferred to the workplace. just as there is a need for good reading and writing skills in an academic environment, this is also almost always the case in employment, especially in the types of employment most university graduates are seeking. the uk commission’s report on employability and skills (2009) emphasises that it is the responsibility of all learning providers to create an institutional culture of employability, make employability part of their core business, and go beyond teaching specific knowledge and vocational skills. the cbi employability guidelines, which include self-management, team working, business and customer awareness, problem solving, communication and literacy, application of numeracy and application of information technology, are 'a set of attributes, skills and knowledge that all labour market participants should possess to ensure they have the capability of being effective in the workplace – to the benefit of themselves, their employer and the wider economy’. these competencies, the cbi believes, make up employability. there is no one approach for embedding employability across a curriculum. there are various methods which may be adopted (york and knight, 2006), as listed below. • employability through a whole curriculum. • employability through a core curriculum. • employability related modules within a curriculum. • work-based or work related learning within a curriculum. • work-based or work related learning incorporated as one or more components in a curriculum. our approach to embedding employability within the existing programmes in s&t has utilised two of the above methods. as an initial step, employability related modules have been identified within the whole curriculum by clustering the existing s&t programmes based on the shared first year modules. following this, within each cluster, three modules journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 4 bernaschina and smith embedded writing instruction in the first year curriculum have been identified as potential employability related modules. in the next step, the cbi employability guidelines were mapped onto sessions provided by the ldu. in the final step, in order to create a seamless integration of the ldu sessions into the student learning experience, the ltsl worked closely with the coordinator and module leaders to identify those sessions that were most appropriate in terms of the module’s practical activities and assessment. subsequently, the module leaders scheduled these sessions within the module timetable. this means that all students take these sessions as part of their study, and they are also tied into their module content, assessment and practical work. therefore, through the embedded work there has been a focus on the employability skills intertwined with the academic skills necessary for the students to do well in their programmes. noticeably, attentiveness in the sessions has increased when it is made known that these skills are needed for employment. prior to this some students were uninterested. embedding learner development work and linking it with employability has shown an increase in students' awareness of the necessity to be responsible for their learning. the writing the first year students have two challenges to face: becoming literate in the language of the university and their area of study; and also beginning to work on the skills and knowledge necessary for their future employment. although the act of writing is often considered to be a solitary one, in reality this is not the case, especially when the writing takes place in an academic environment. there are many steps that lead up to the moment when words are chosen to express and communicate the ideas and thought processes of the writer. without these steps there is nothing to write. therefore it is crucial that university students are aware of the process they need to undertake in order to complete their assignments. at this stage in our initiative emphasis has been placed on ‘free-writing’ (elbow, 1998) and reflective writing (moon, 2000). these two areas were chosen because first year students are often unfamiliar with them and they are approaches which can assist in the journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 5 bernaschina and smith embedded writing instruction in the first year curriculum composition of academic assignments, and can also be transferred to workplace writing tasks. free-writing allows a writer to unload ideas without restrictions often enabling a more fluid writing process. this is an important first step which can ease the beginning of the development of a written essay or report. the technique of free-writing has been integrated into the sessions based on past observations of students working on writing assignments. it is not rare for students to spend a great deal of time attempting to write the perfect sentence or paragraph. however, in the time spent perfecting a small piece of the work, the main ideas could possibly have been written down creating a first draft of the assignment. of course this draft would most probably need further development as well as editing, however, it would certainly contain many of the ideas needed for the coursework and there would be a sense of accomplishment. agonising over the structure of the sentence and their choice of words instead of allowing their ideas to flow and getting caught up in the creative process hinders the writing process (elbow, 1998). in the initial sessions students were often unfamiliar with free-writing but once it was explained and they were given the opportunity to use it they often found it to be a very positive experience; it allowed many of them to destroy the barrier which often stands in the way of their writing. in a survey presented at the end of one of the modules, 48% responded to the statement 'i did free-writing to warm up before writing the coursework’. reflective thinking and writing have been associated with the 'deep learning' (biggs, cited king, 2002) in various learning taxonomies (moon, 2000) and have been seen as important in uk universities over the last decade. reflective writing helps students to develop and refine the connections between their prior knowledge and newly gained knowledge through their studies. this practice also assists them to make critical connections between theory and practice. for many of our students who are more technical and less academic, the process of writing can be very difficult. when this is combined with reflection it can sometimes become problematic. the act of reflection has an important role in computing and it and although the students are usually familiar with the idea of reflection they often do not realise the importance of it for their academic and professional lives. a number of writing assignments in their programmes require the students to reflect on decisions or choices made in the process of designing software. these assignments have been constructed to assist the students’ development of journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 6 bernaschina and smith embedded writing instruction in the first year curriculum reflective skills which are necessary in the workplace. the decision making needed in industry requires a reflective approach. in our experience the analytical work needed in a detailed reflective piece is often missing from student work. as a result, during these embedded classes the concept of metacognition is discussed and students are introduced to kolb's experiential learning theory (kolb and kolb, 2005). this initiation into reflective writing assists in some of the second and third year modules in which reflective essays are part of their coursework. these particular students are expected to be able to write reflective essays or reports at all levels and it is a core feature or a component of assessed work in many of the modules; this assists them in developing important skills for the workplace. as a result of embedding, students from all years in the school are more aware of the ldu and the provision offered to them not only in their content classes but also outside of class time. the figures below show the increase over the years in embedded sessions, voluntary workshops and tutorials. overall there has been a very substantial increase in the hours provided to the school. the embedded sessions slightly decreased in the past academic year because of the focus on the programmes and not modules. table 1. ldu provision for the school of science and technology. 2009-2010 2010-2011 2011-2012 embedded sessions 25 hours 143.5 hours 133 hours voluntary workshops 40 hours 48 hours 114 hours tutorials 78.5 hours 129 hours 233 hours conclusion as our embedding grows and moves beyond the first year students, we believe that responding to the needs of the students to develop context-specific written communication skills will become an increasingly important aspect of our work. this initiative has not only raised student awareness of the existence of the ldu but also of the importance of journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 7 bernaschina and smith embedded writing instruction in the first year curriculum information literacy and academic/professional literacy in their academic work. in addition, the awareness of some of the academics has also been raised. they have requested the embedding initiative to be extended to several of the 2nd and 3rd year modules as well. moreover, the experience has shown that students are more engaged when the knowledge and skills acquired at university are made relevant to their future careers. the 2012 national student survey (nss) question 22 asks: ‘looking back on the experience, are there any particularly positive or negative aspects you would like to highlight?’ having received comments in the positive column such as 'english learning support [and] enhancement of employability' has been encouraging and shows the embedding has been effective. furthermore, there are several factors besides language which appear to be influencing students' written work and will need to be researched in order for the embedded work to be more successful. the most obvious was that some students were disengaged, not only from the work we were doing with them but from the whole academic process. this was evident in the module attendance rates and more importantly in the retention rate of the school. there are many reasons for this but, based on our impressions of working with these students, the two questions we would now like to address are: 1. are some of these students disengaged because they commute to the university and as a result do not spend enough time on campus to engage with other students and their lecturers? these students may be missing out on the opportunity to have time to discuss their work and get feedback, to rethink their ideas, and to actively take part in the review process (kuh et al., 2001). 2. are some of the students disengaged because they have less experience of academic discourse and practices? our students arrive at the university from a variety of educational backgrounds and often lack the experience needed to engage fully in university studies (hockings et al., 2008). references agcas (2012) universities invest in employability. available at: http://www.agcas.org.uk/articles/635-universities-invest-in-employability (accessed: 28 october 2012). journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 8 http://www.agcas.org.uk/articles/635-universities-invest-in-employability bernaschina and smith embedded writing instruction in the first year curriculum cbi (2009) future fit: preparing graduates for the world of work, pp. 8. available at: http://www.cbi.org.uk/media-centre/news-articles/2009/03/future-fit/ elbow, p. (1998) writing without teachers. 2 nd edn. usa: oxford university press. hockings, c., cooke, s., yamashita, h., mcginty, s. and bowl, m. (2008) ‘switched off? a study of disengagement among computing students at two universities’, research papers in education, 23(2), pp. 191-201. king, t. (2002) ‘development of student skills in reflective writing’, in goody, a. and ingram, d. (eds.) proceedings of the 4th world conference of the international consortium for educational development. the university of western australia, perth 3-6 july, pp 3. available at: http://www.tcd.ie/nursing_midwifery/assets/director-staff-edu-dev/pdf/developmentof-student-skills-in-reflective-writing-terryking.pdf kolb, a. and kolb, d. (2005) ‘learning styles and learning spaces: enhancing experiential learning in higher education’, academy of management learning and education, 4(2), pp. 193-212. kuh, g.d., gonyea, r.m. and palmer, m. (2001) ‘the disengaged commuter student: fact or fiction?’, commuter perspectives, 27(1), pp. 2-5 [online]. available at: http://nsse.iub.edu/pdf/commuter.pdf (accessed: 12 may 2012). moon, j.a. (2000) reflection in learning and professional development: theory and practice. london: kogan page. ukces (uk commission for employment and skills) (2009) the employability challenge – full report. available at: http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/+/http://www.ukces.org.uk/pdf/8080 ukces-employability challengefinal.pdf (accessed: 28 october 2010). wingate, u. (2012) ‘using academic literacies and genre-based models for academic writing instruction: a 'literacy' journey’, journal of english for academic purposes, 11(1), pp. 26-37 [online]. available at: journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 9 http://www.tcd.ie/nursing_midwifery/assets/director-staff-edu-dev/pdf/development-of-student-skills-in-reflective-writing-terryking.pdf http://www.tcd.ie/nursing_midwifery/assets/director-staff-edu-dev/pdf/development-of-student-skills-in-reflective-writing-terryking.pdf http://nsse.iub.edu/pdf/commuter.pdf http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/+/http://www.ukces.org.uk/pdf/8080bernaschina and smith embedded writing instruction in the first year curriculum http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/+/http://www.ukces.org.uk/pdf/8080 ukces-employability challengefinal.pdf (accessed: 5 september 2012). yorke, m. and knight, p. (2006) embedding employability into the curriculum. york: higher education academy, pp.13-17. available at: http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/assets/documents/employability/id460_embedding_e mployability_into_the_curriculum_338.pdf (accessed: 28 october 2010). author details paula bernaschina is a senior lecturer and the academic writing and language coordinator in the learner development unit for the school of science and technology (s&t). serengul smith is a principal lecturer and the learning and teaching strategy leader in the school of science and technology (s&t). she is also programme leader of the information technology, multimedia computing, information technology and networking and interactive systems design programmes in s&t. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 10 http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/+/http://www.ukces.org.uk/pdf/8080http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/assets/documents/employability/id460_embedding_employability_into_the_curriculum_338.pdf http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/assets/documents/employability/id460_embedding_employability_into_the_curriculum_338.pdf embedded writing instruction in the first year curriculum abstract introduction rethinking the embedding the writing conclusion references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 27 april 2023 ________________________________________________________________________ ©2023 the author(s) (cc-by 4.0) editorial carina buckley solent university, uk lee fallin university of hull, uk nicola grayson university of salford, uk katharine jewitt open university, uk eleanor loughlin nottingham trent university, uk tom lowe university of portsmouth, uk cathy malone university of leeds, uk craig morley university of chester, uk gita sedghi university of liverpool, uk alicja syska university of plymouth, uk emerging from the depths of an unusually sunny and dry uk winter, ai’s appearance on the he landscape seemed as sudden as the first signs of prematurely re-awakened nature. and like the merciless wind and violent hails that welcomed the budding flowers and blossoming trees, we found ourselves shocked and awed by the overwhelming abilities of the new apparatus for knowledge creation with its seemingly boundless potential. the initial fascination with the market-leading chatgpt quickly gave way to a relentless sprouting of ever more sophisticated and specialised platforms offering some novel powerful tool for every need and fancy, from content creation to research evaluation, and any type and style of writing. from fear to enthusiastic adoption, the challenges, threats, opportunities, and joys of generative ai have already spawned a range of rich responses in he, including publications, training sessions and passionate debates, with educators far and wide producing materials aimed at understanding the implications of ai in terms of assessment, research, truth, and the production of knowledge. in this new digital transformation, it is still unclear whether what we are facing is merely a question of ethics or a wholesale and unstoppable epistemic revolution. like the covid-19 pandemic three years ago, this profound disruption of the world of ideas within and beyond higher education has already dominated our thinking and planning for the future. while we keep developing our understanding of this new reality alongside the intensifying apocalyptic discourses, life nonetheless seems to go on and pressing problems syska editorial journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27, april 2023 2 keep needing solutions. in this volume, we share eighteen creative analyses related to a phenomenal range of non-ai-related issues presenting in academia, from student diversity, technological opportunities and new modes of effective learning and teaching, to supporting student engagement and employability, with one opinion piece heralding the inevitable turn towards more ai-related research we expect to see in future editions. it is undeniable that in recent decades the diversity of university students has increased, and it has been observed that degree results vary between student groups. this degree awarding gap is particularly high between white students on the one hand and black, asian, and other ethnic minority students on the other. assessments are a key aspect of closing the degree awarding gap. in the first paper opening this issue, katrin bain makes a strong case for inclusive assessment as an alternative to reasonable adjustments. the demand that all assessment variants are offered to all students and that assessments enable all students to do well is simple and compelling. in the second paper, david busby and cathy malone explore research into a writing development used to support international students studying at master’s level. the authors examined the extent to which structured writing analysis and facilitated group feedback (through writing circles) influence the students’ perceptions of confidence in their academic writing. this was achieved through student interviews and preand post-intervention questionnaires. from these results, busby and malone argue that the intervention had a positive impact on overall confidence in academic writing, increased perception of agency and a decrease in anxiety. debbie holley and david biggins present the technology that institutions require students to use as a source of ‘technostress’ in the current post-pandemic context. the authors argue that there are ‘hidden learning spaces’ outside of the formal institutional virtual learning environment (vle), which its sophisticated learning analytics cannot fully access or capture, marking a schism between formal and informal spaces where students learn. the paper offers insights into accessing and interpreting data in ways that are more useful for academics, learning developers, and learning designers, and it suggests ways in which we can effectively frame student support by putting the ‘real’ student experience at the centre of our practice. syska editorial journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27, april 2023 3 daniel king’s paper investigates the impact of online formative assessments on students’ performance in an introductory accounting module using regression modelling to test the relationship between formative assessment usage and exam performance. accounting is acknowledged to be a technically difficult subject and in the context of an increased amount of online learning and the associated challenges with maintaining student engagement, this paper looks at the impact of formative assessment on non-accounting students undertaking an accounting module. the statistical analysis shows a significant correlation between formative assessment usage and examination performance, and the findings indicate that formative assessments can be useful tools to support students’ learning even in the current context and with the specific challenges this particular subject holds. ingrid potgieter, melinde coetzee and nadia ferreira’s research explores the importance of students’ levels of confidence in their readiness for the world of work. following a comprehensive discussion of the factors that shape the requirements of the rapidly evolving modern workplace, the authors focus on discussions around the apparent correlation between a proactive, confident and self-aware approach to career development and work readiness. taking a cross-sectional quantitative approach, the project utilised a self-administered questionnaire to capture students’ evaluations of their own business ingenuity and sociodigital agility and the extent to which their studies contributed to their work readiness. the paper concludes with a valuable discussion of the complexities around work readiness. drawing on the data, it highlights the importance of students having a growth mindset and universities responding to the requirements of the world of work, by providing the guidance and support to enable students to grow in confidence and develop relevant and timely career competencies. eva shackel’s study examines student preferences for written feedback in a uk university writing centre, with a focus on convenience and dyslexic students. data was collected through a questionnaire and semi-structured interviews. results show that students, especially those with dyslexia, appreciate written feedback for its convenience and ability to foster self-paced reflection. the detailed nature of written feedback also enhances students' perception of institutional care. these findings hold implications for accommodating dyslexic students during in-person writing centre appointments. syska editorial journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27, april 2023 4 susan smith et al. outline the findings of a small research project which examined the value of a staff associate scheme. in practice, this scheme draws staff from faculties and professional service who are seconded to a centre for teaching and learning weekly for one year to focus on pedagogic projects. this paper reflects on the findings drawn from reflective diaries and survey responses which examined practice experiences and learning journeys. findings showed a positive impact of the scheme on the associate participants and their practice; of particular note were the building of unusual cross institution partnerships, and the role of the scheme in supporting innovation. the paper concludes by drawing together themes from the research, lessons learnt, transferability of findings to other universities, and consideration of the requirements for a successful future scheme. in her paper, brianna vespone reports on a systematic review to examine the assumptions and practices taking place in co-constructed learning spaces within higher education research literature, with a specific focus on undergraduate students. the paper provides an overview of how co-constructed methods take shape in the university classroom and how those methods benefit student learning. the literature search was conducted via education-focused databases and the outcomes include four core themes, all holding significance to the learning development community to improve student engagement. implications for teaching and training staff are considered, where this paper is rooted in theories of constructivist, sociocultural, and third space learning. the paper rationalises exploring alternatives to traditional pedagogical methods, highlighting barriers, facilitators, and potential downfalls of co-constructed learning spaces, and discusses implications for student learning and for teachers. in the final paper, ‘choice matters: an investigation of students’ experiences selecting dissertation projects’, isabelle winder considers the implications of agency in students’ decisions around selecting appropriate dissertation projects. unsurprisingly, emotional and personal engagement with a topic seem to be the most motivating factors for students and lead to a more positive experience. however, agency in choosing one’s project does not necessarily lead to increased satisfaction, with factors such as a supportive supervisory relationship often overriding the importance of choice. the author concludes that the choice process must be carefully guided in order to enable students’ emotional engagement, motivation, and effective development of skills and knowledge. syska editorial journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27, april 2023 5 the case studies presented by daniel connolly, lliam dickinson and luke hellewell outline examples of authentic assessment used to develop undergraduate employability skills in a higher education in further education context (where undergraduate level courses are taught in local further education or community colleges). they reflect a trend towards embedding of skills development in the taught curriculum and are indicative of a wider move to explore more diverse, multimodal forms of assessment and the opportunities these present for learning. the examples are drawn from a range of subject areas: criminology, sport and exercise, health and technology, and present innovative forms of assessment designed in collaboration with external stakeholders. the examples are analysed using principles of authentic assessment (ashford-rowe, herrington and brown, 2014) and authors use this to make further recommendations for practice. at the heart of pamela donaghy, chris gillies and niall mccann’s case study is an initiative to support the academic literacies of nursing students, as part of a module on evidencebased practice (ebp), in the form of a digital escape room. ebp is essential to the formation of professional identity and competence in these students, and is founded on confidence and ability in academic literacies. a collaborative approach was chosen to frame the ways of ‘being, thinking and writing’ to develop a deep approach to reading, with gamified interactivity designed to promote engagement. student feedback confirmed that they found it enjoyable and motivating, along with recognition that they had learned to critically search for and evaluate information. despite the investment in time and resources to create a digital escape room, this case study suggests it was worth it. the challenges of encouraging student engagement in face-to-face lectures have been brought to the fore post-lockdown. in his case study, joe greenwood focuses on how education technology, in this instance vevox, can be used to engage students in what, for many, is an unfamiliar learning environment. following a detailed discussion of factors that contribute to students’ resistance to participating in lectures and approaches to building trust and encouraging engagement, the case study provides insights not only into students’ engagement with vevox but also the varied and creative ways it can be integrated into lectures. as acknowledged by the author, it is unfortunate that the study was impacted by external factors that led to a significant drop in attendance of the final two lectures, and although the encouraging conclusions are presented with an air of caution, the considered recommendations for further research provide a way forward. syska editorial journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27, april 2023 6 the case study conducted by rachael harding, robyn mcwilliams and tricia bingham focused on enhancing the teaching practice of tertiary liaison librarians in information literacy workshops through a professional development (pd) program. at auckland university of technology (aut), learning advisors with expertise in teaching and adaptability collaborated with liaison librarians to create bespoke workshops on workshop design, effective pedagogies, and lesson planning. the goal was to integrate relevant theory and learner advisor practices into the information literacy context. sessions were offered both face-to-face and online, enabling librarians to develop suitable learning outcomes, content, activities, and pedagogical approaches while assessing and evaluating their current knowledge and skills. the collaboration resulted in shared knowledge among liaison librarians and the co-development of workshop design principles, leading to more consistent, sustainable, and measurable content. the success of this approach suggests that further exploration of knowledge-sharing between learning advisors and liaison librarians could be beneficial. innovation with escape rooms in higher education as a mechanism to facilitate playful learning and gamification are explored in the last case study by stefano licchelli and laura barnett. with aspirations to enhanced students’ learning experiences, the analysis goes beyond engagement to assess the potential of escape rooms for formative assessment with postgraduate students. this innovation conducted within the school of psychology at the university of surrey invited students to complete an online escape room as a form of formative assessment and evaluate the experience through a qualitative feedback survey. the practice highlights a positive experience from students, the importance of peerinvolvement which the experience supported, and challenge in the activity. the authors encourage higher education professionals and academics to explore how such practices could enhance students’ learning experiences in their own teaching contexts. our first opinion piece deals with multiple choice quizzes, which are widely used in formative and summative online assessments. while research shows that these quizzes are effective assessment tools that promote student learning, conducting these assessments online raises questions about their validity and academic integrity. chahna gonsalves discusses the recent release of chatgpt, an artificial intelligence agent trained on a large language model that responds quickly and largely accurately to multiple choices. the opinion piece argues that there is still a place for multiple choice assessment and syska editorial journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27, april 2023 7 outlines how chatgpt’s limitations can inform effective question design with the provision of examples. at the heart of the opinion piece by ralitsa kantcheva, a learning development practitioner (ld) and kiu sum, a phd graduate teaching assistant (gtas), is a fascinating and thought-provoking dialogue; in essence, a valuable snapshot of the barriers to engagement between gtas and learning developers. although heartening to see how, for kiu sum, aldinhe served as a route to a deeper understanding of learning development, the piece explores the challenges and barriers, at programme, institutional and sector level, that can both diminish gta awareness of the role of learning developers as well as minimising opportunities for productive interaction. the piece concludes with a call for raising awareness through gta professional development and opening channels for direct communication between gtas and lds. reducing inequality in academic success has long been a concern in education, and in her opinion piece, frantzeska kolyda provides a compelling argument for the role of learning developers in creating learning environments that serve to foster a growth mindset. focussing on students from disadvantaged socioeconomic backgrounds and ethnic or other minorities, especially in stem, the piece discusses research supporting a correlation between the teacher’s mindset, the learning culture and environment, and the levels of achievement and motivation among their students. although recognising the need for further research into growth mindset interventions, the piece serves as a call for learning developer involvement in the cultivation of growth mindset through supporting teaching colleagues in the design and delivery of appropriate interventions and inclusive teaching practices. the last opinion piece by eileen pollard reflects on the journey of one practitioner’s move from academia to the third space with reference to the challenges and realisations experienced as a ‘recovering academic’. beginning with her work on an experimental module she taught as an academic and combining this with theories of ‘community learning’ the author shares her powerful story and lived experience within and without ‘communities’ presenting a conscious intervention into critical pedagogy and an unconscious one into the third space, beginning with learning development. syska editorial journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27, april 2023 8 our current volume closes with two book reviews. carina buckley explores voices from the digital classroom, a book that delves into the teaching and learning online network (talon), which emerged during the 2020 global pandemic lockdown to address the challenges of teaching and learning online. talon is a hub for sharing resources and knowledge to support the shift to online learning, compile ideas for approaches, and give updates and themed readings in monthly newsletters. each chapter of this remarkable book draws on the experiences of a total of 27 members of the dispersed talon community, interviewed via zoom in the first year of the pandemic. the book captures a snapshot of life shifted online for those already fully immersed and confident in the technology and those who were brand new to it. this is a positive book, recounting inspiring and creative ways for connection, presence and authenticity, and co-construction, all of which demonstrate how constraints can stimulate and support innovation and how online teaching can resolutely have community at its heart. finally, gary fisher’s review of chryssa themelis’s monograph pedagogy of teleproximity for elearning: bridging the distance with social physics, a significant contribution to e-learning and learning development within higher education. the book's focus on tele-proximity as a pedagogical approach recognises the importance of human-tohuman contact in online learning contexts. a valuable aspect of the book is linking these principles to lived reality, providing practical insight for e-learning practitioners on implementing tele-proximity pedagogy in their teaching. the book proposes a novel approach to online learning that emphasises the role of networked social interactions within e-learning and provides a robust theoretical framework for tele-proximity pedagogy. it is recommended for anyone interested in exploring new ways of approaching online learning contexts and willing to engage with the theoretical and conceptual principles underpinning e-learning pedagogy. we hope that this collection of papers, case studies, opinion pieces and book reviews will be a fitting response to our community’s need for intellectual stimulation and practical inspiration, and that it will open up new conversations around the issues that matter to all those invested in learning and teaching. we also want to take this opportunity to thank our magnificent reviewers whose critical reading of submissions and thoughtful feedback and recommendations have made syska editorial journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27, april 2023 9 invaluable contributions to the quality of the articles in this volume. our heartfelt appreciation for the time, expertise, and work it took to review articles in this issue goes to the following reviewers: alina congreve beyza ucar charlotte evans claire stocks clare kell colette mai daisy bao debra willison dustin hosseini grainne gordon ed bickle eliana elkhoury esther mary cummins eva shackel ian turner isobel gowers jackie oliver jennie blake jennifer cowell joel mills karen clinkard kathryna kwok lee fallin malgorzata drewniok nancy davies neil ford olivia yiqun sun patricia perlman-dee paul chin peter hartley rebecca hodgson rhod woodhouse robert ping-nan chang sunny dhillon tom lowe virna rossi wilfrid flanda with best wishes, the jldhe editorial board licence ©2023 the author(s). this is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (cc-by 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. see http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. journal of learning development in higher education (jldhe) is a peer-reviewed open access syska editorial journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27, april 2023 10 journal published by the association for learning development in higher education (aldinhe). editorial licence literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 3: march 2011 engaging students in and with good academic work david baume phd sfseda fhea abstract it is proposed that efforts to enhance student engagement should focus attention on student engagement with good academic/professional/vocational work; hereafter, for simplicity, ‘good work’. three main reasons are advanced for this proposition. first: engaging with good work can provide a strong and clear motivation and goal for students who want to become competent or expert in a discipline, profession or vocation. ‘engaging with’ here carries two hugely overlapping meanings; consuming (which includes, but is not limited to, reading, observing, critiquing, exploring, discussing and analyzing) and producing. second: any programme, any module, any suggested student learning activity, any proposed teaching method, can be tested by answering the question ‘will it clearly and directly help the student to engage with, to consume and/or produce, good work?’ and third: in engaging with good work, the student is always clear about the point and purpose of what they are doing – to identify the qualities of good work, to critique work against these qualities, and to produce good work. keywords: engagement; learning; course design; learning activities; learning outcomes; learning; skills. introduction – learning and doing ...not many years ago, i began to play the cello. i love the instrument, spend many hours a day playing at it, work hard at it, and mean someday to play it well. most people would say that what i am doing is ‘learning to play the cello’…but these words carry into our minds the strange idea that there exist two very different processes: (1) learning to play the cello; and (2) playing the cello. they imply that i will do the first until i have completed it, at which point i will stop the first process to baume engaging students in and with good academic work begin the second...of course this is nonsense. there are not two processes, but one. we learn to do something by doing it. there is no other way. (holt, 1976, p.13) john holt was clearly strongly motivated – intrinsically motivated – to play the cello well. he describes how he also attended concerts and rehearsals, listened to recorded music, read and thought about music, especially the cello. he thereby built his own account of what it meant to play the cello well. he consumed as well as produced cello playing. and, when he wanted help, he took help in playing the cello better. as well as having reservations about the concept of learning, and about the bad use educators sometimes make of the concept of learning, holt also has reservations about the concept of skills. he dislikes the idea that we first learn skills and then apply these skills to action. he also dislikes the idea that we best learn big skills by breaking them into smaller skills and learning each smaller skill, and then somehow putting them together into the big skill (although he did practise his cello scales). no, he says. we have a goal, however clearly or ill-formulated this goal is. then, towards this goal, we act and obtain feedback (from ourselves and others), and then make sense of what we have done and of the feedback, and then do better. and we repeat this cycle throughout life, or until we are doing whatever we are doing as well as we want to do it, for now. how does this relate to the design and operation of formal education? some relevant numbers gladwell (2008) (chapter 2, the 10,000 hour rule) quotes several studies which suggest that becoming a world-class expert in any of a wide range of areas takes around 10,000 hours of work, of practice. more precisely; consider a group of people who start out with a similar (high) level of ability. what best differentiates those who achieve greatness from those who don’t? those who achieve greatness do far far more work than those who don’t achieve greatness – around 10,000 hours as compared to perhaps 2,000 hours. what does this have to do with formal education? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 2 baume engaging students in and with good academic work a uk honours degree, currently requiring three years of full-time study or its part-time equivalent, requires students to gain 360 credits. one credit notionally represents ten study hours (including both contact time and private study) (qaa, 2008). an honours degree thus notionally requires some 3600 study hours. if gladwell’s account has any validity, this means that students with good initial ability can get a third of their way to greatness by the end of their degree. are most of your recent graduates a third of their way to greatness in their chosen field? problems with this account where may this analysis be wrong? 1. not all incoming students may have the high level of entry ability that the work reported by gladwell describes. we do not know enough about whether the 10,000 hour rule applies to people of lesser initial ability. but it would be startling, counterintuitive, if the strong positive relationship between quantity of work and achievement did not at least in part hold for most or all people. chickering and gamson (1987) list ‘time on task’ as one of seven principles for good practice in undergraduate education, saying that students should spend the maximum possible time doing the subject; by contrast with, for example, being taught the subject. 2. students may not do the amount of work this model suggests. bekhradnia (2009), based on responses from some 15,000 students in english universities, suggests that students on average are studying for 29 hours each week, of which half is spent in class and half in private study (there are wide variations both within and across subjects). brennan et al. (2009) show that this figure is the second lowest in europe. neither of these reports refers to the number of weeks in an academic year. however, assuming an academic year of 30 weeks, this suggests that uk students on average study for less than 900 hours per year rather than the notional 1200. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 3 baume engaging students in and with good academic work 3. what are students doing with the hours they are spending? on bekhradnia’s account, each week students are spending some 14.5 hours in class and the same amount of time working outside class. but, again – what are they doing? we know very little about this. handbooks typically refer to (depending on the discipline) lectures, seminars, tutorials, laboratory classes, studio sessions...these labels alone do not enable us to know what students will be doing, although we have some idea what they will be doing in laboratories and studios. ‘lecture’ and ‘seminar’ can hide a multitude both of sins and virtues. handbooks typically provide much less detail on what students are expected to do outside class beyond ‘private study'. where the hours associated with a module are specified, there will typically be good detail on how hours are allocated to lectures, seminars, etc. private study time will often clearly be a residual, making up the total learning hours to, for example, 200 hours for a 20 credit module. 4. who decides how the student's time is spent? holt describes playing the cello with the twin intentions of (a) enjoying making music and (b) playing the cello better and better. there is clearly a huge contrast between this and the typical experience of the student on a modular programme, who is shifting attention from subject to subject and topic to topic at the behest of the timetable, sometimes undertaking ill-defined private study, at other times undertaking assignments the point and purpose of which may or may not be clear. this is often a fragmented experience, mostly beyond the control of the student, not automatically conducive either to a high level of engagement or to a clear view of what is meant by good work. designing and running courses to help students to do good work ‘course’ is used in this article to mean either programme (a whole degree) or module (a defined section of a programme, typically involving a small number of hundreds of hours of study). where ‘module’ or ‘programme’ is specifically, meant, the appropriate word is used. imagine for a moment that the primary, perhaps even the sole, purposes of your course was to help students to engage with (produce and consume) good work. how might such a course look? how might such a course work? (bates et al. (2010) develop a course design and resource allocation methodology using this idea). journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 4 baume engaging students in and with good academic work the course would surely require some sense of goal or purpose. some students will bring to their studies a strong, even a passionate, goal. hopefully they have chosen the right course. in this context, this means a course that will, if a student works hard and well, lead them to their goal. this requires much more than that the course is in the right subject, as this true story suggests: charles (not his real name) had been fascinated, from a very early age, by the sea. so he decided to study oceanography. he was accepted onto an oceanography degree. he left the course midway through the second year. why? charles said: ‘they told us that oceanography uses a lot of physics, chemistry, biology. so, before we could do oceanography, we had to study physics, chemistry and biology. but, they told us, physics especially needs a lot of maths. so, before the physics, we needed to study maths. we weren’t going to get to do any oceanography until the third year. so i left.’ there may have been some subject-based logic to this course design. but it ignored something vital: charles’ motivation for taking the oceanography degree – his fascination with the sea. (adapted from baume, 2009a) accepting that oceanography involves lots of science and mathematics, how could a degree programme in oceanography have worked better for charles? at a minimum, he and his fellow students could, in the first week of their studies, have been taken to sea, where they could have collected samples, made measurements, done small oceanographic projects, perhaps talked with or even supported experienced oceanographers, failing which, second or third year or doctoral students. back (mostly) on land, there could have been an oceanography module in every semester of the programme. such a module would have enabled charles and his fellow students to continue to engage with oceanography. charles probably wasn't the only student who chose oceanography because of a passionate interest in the sea. but this programme-long succession of oceanography modules, carefully designed, could have enabled the students to pull together and integrate the necessary specialised studies of physics, chemistry, biology and maths. the students would integrate these other subjects into steadily more sophisticated and detailed accounts of oceanography. these evolving journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 5 baume engaging students in and with good academic work accounts of oceanography would of course be informed by their critical study of previous published work in oceanography. (a constructive approach to learning, which clearly informs the approach to course design suggested here, does not involve students ignoring previous work by scholars in the discipline. but it does involve students being guided to identify the good and less good qualities of previous work, and thus to develop and use criteria for good work). what more could have been done? these next suggestions may be more contentious. mathematics modules tend to be taught by mathematicians, biology modules by biologists, and so on. mathematicians and biologists tend to have a clear view of what comprises their subject, of what is essential knowledge in their subject. might it be possible for oceanographers to work with mathematicians to define a curriculum in mathematics for oceanography, and so on? in raising such a question we may collide with issues of professional/disciplinary identity, with notions of academic purity, also with academic politics. concentrating on playing the cello, and on playing it better and better, john holt did not take separate classes in ‘fingering’ and ‘instrument maintenance’ and ‘reading a score’. of course he learned to do all of these things, and many others besides. he learned them mainly by doing them, informed by guidance and by feedback, when he needed to; for example when he was unable to play a particular passage, or when a string broke. it is hard to imagine an effective modular course on playing the cello. perhaps all of charles’ oceanography degree should simply have been called ‘oceanography’. all of it could truly have been about oceanography. the maths and physics and biology could have been studied in the context of oceanography. these other subjects would of course still have been labelled ‘maths’ and ‘physics’ and ‘biology’. there is no intention to conceal from students the fact that they are studying these subjects, or that each of these subjects has an independent, substantial and important existence. but, it is suggested, these subjects should be put in their proper place. in this case their proper place is in support of the study of oceanography. these subjects could have been studied as and when the particular oceanographic project, problem or challenge in which charles and his fellow students were currently journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 6 baume engaging students in and with good academic work engaged required them. then, for three years, charles and his fellow students could truly have been doing oceanography, and at the same time becoming good, and still enthusiastic, oceanographers. in some ways, as charles’ story suggests, it is easy to make the case in an interdisciplinary programme for focusing on the work that students do. but the same approach can work in a single-discipline programme. the overall programme outcome will presumably be, however expressed, that the student can do the discipline; that is, can produce good work in the discipline and can both articulate and apply the qualities of good work in the discipline. even single-discipline courses are often designed and taught in modular form. defining, producing and consuming doing good work can unify the programme for the students. working within a course thus far it has been assumed that you are designing a complete programme, for example, a degree. if this is not so – if you are responsible for designing a module or part of a module, even if you are running rather than designing a module or part of a module – is there anything you can do? you can still focus, not on content or on teaching, but on the work students will do. you can design and run, for example, your three week section of a module around an assignment. if the assignment is appropriately designed and run, students will learn the necessary content. how should such an assignment work? it is useful to be clear what students need to be able to do by the end of your section of the module. in the sometimes unloved but nonetheless useful language of higher education, you and your students need to be clear about the intended learning outcome of this section of the module, within the module and then the whole programme. you and your students also need to be clear what this learning outcome means; that is, what kinds and examples of work show this outcome being achieved (the writing and use of intended learning outcomes is explored in some detail in baume 2009b). journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 7 baume engaging students in and with good academic work the intended learning outcome for your section of the module, and hence for your assignment, is likely to describe a type of question or problem your students need to be able to answer or solve, or a type of task they need to be able to undertake successfully. the intended learning outcome should embody or be accompanied by an account of what it means to achieve that outcome to an appropriate standard. the statement of intended learning outcomes should both describe and illustrate good work in response to that question or problem or task. the intended learning outcome is also likely to address how students should use existing published knowledge to inform their approach to the assignment. planning and running this section of the module, then, means ensuring that students have the necessary stimuli, support, access to resources (including you and each other), feedback and whatever else they affordably need in order to do the good work, to achieve the outcome well. it also means providing a suggested structure or process for answering the question or problem – as much or as little structure or process as your students need. hopefully they will need much less such structure from you in later years of their studies. hopefully in later years of the course they will also be able to play a greater role first in selecting, then later in designing, the assignments to help them achieve the outcome. they will be much more likely to develop this greater independence when 'solving problems' or 'undertaking assignments' – and, later in the course, 'designing assignments' – are explicit intended outcomes of their studies, and when students are helped to develop these capabilities, to pay attention to how they plan and do and review their work as well as to the content of the assignment. running this three-week section of the module round an assignment will involve some teaching, but teaching will not be at the heart of it. at the heart of it will be the work the students do. working around a course much support for learning development is provided from outside the course. how may those providing such support use this suggested concentration on engagement with activities? obvious suggestions include helping students dig into and interrogate the assignments that the students are set, to see what is being required of them; helping students to focus on doing the assignments; and exploring with students how they can use the assignments to extend and to show their knowledge and their capabilities. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 8 baume engaging students in and with good academic work a caution and a conclusion the concept of student engagement is based on the constructivist assumption that learning is influenced by how an individual participates in educationally purposeful activities. learning is seen as a 'joint proposition'...however, which also depends on institutions and staff providing students with the conditions, opportunities and expectations to become involved. however, individual learners are ultimately the agents in discussions of engagement. (coates 2005, cited trowler and trowler, 2010, p.9) as coates may be suggesting here, activity cannot safely be equated with engagement. nor can the production of work. a student may undertake an activity whilst engaging only superficially with the activity. coates speaks of 'educationally purposeful activities'. but whose purpose? active engagement with good academic, professional and/or vocational work surely requires students to care about the work that they are doing – to want to do it – to feel frustrated when the work does not go well, and to feel proud and satisfied when, in their view and in the view of peers and tutors, it does go well. active engagement also requires students to be able to articulate what 'good work' means, and in what ways a particular piece of work, whether of their own production or someone else's, is good, and how it could be better. what are the conditions for active engagement with good academic work? they surely include: • the student has, and has confidence in, a clear and explicit account of their own current goals and aspirations. • the student feels that they can change these goals and aspirations as they learn. • there is a good match between the students’ goals and aspirations and the intended outcomes of their programme of study, whether as written or as negotiated, varied and adapted between the student and their tutor. • students may well have major academic or professional aspirations and goals that cannot be met by their programme of study. students need to feel that can move journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 9 baume engaging students in and with good academic work towards any such aspirations and goals through extra-curricular activity and/or concurrent employment or voluntary work. • students feel supported, by peers and tutors and support staff, in consuming and producing good work. references bates, i., baume, d. and assinder, s. (2010) ‘focusing on student learning to guide the use of staff time’, innovations in education and teaching international, 47(4), pp. 357-367. baume, d. (2009a) course design for increased student satisfaction. leeds: leeds metropolitan university. available at: http://tinyurl.com/2d2b528 (accessed: 23 february 2011). baume, d. (2009b) writing and using good learning outcomes. leeds: leeds metropolitan university. available at: http://tinyurl.com/3a2whed (accessed: 23 february 2011). bekhradnia, b. (2009) the academic experience of students in english universities – 2009 report. oxford: higher education policy institute. available at: http://tinyurl.com/33asys2 (accessed: 23 february 2011). brennan, j., patel, k. and tang, w. (2009) diversity in the student learning experience and time devoted to study: a comparative analysis of the uk and european evidence. london: centre for higher education research and information, the open university. chickering, a.w. and gamson, z.f. (1987) ‘seven principles for good practice in undergraduate education’, aahe bulletin. washington dc. available at http://tinyurl.com/3aj3g8g (accessed: 23 february 2011). gladwell, m. (2008) outliers – the story of success. london: allen lane. holt, j. (1976) instead of education. canada: clarke, irwin. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 10 http://tinyurl.com/2d2b528 http://tinyurl.com/3a2whed http://tinyurl.com/33asys2 http://tinyurl.com/3aj3g8g baume engaging students in and with good academic work qaa (2008) higher education credit framework for england: guidance on academic credit arrangements in higher education in england. cheltenham: qaa. available at: http://tinyurl.com/2vwx4br (accessed: 23 february 2011). trowler, p. and v. trowler (2010) student engagement evidence summary. higher education academy. available at: http://tiny.cc/ka4uz (accessed: 23 february 2011). author details david baume phd sfseda fhea is an independent higher education researcher, evaluator, consultant, staff and educational developer and writer. he was founding chair of the staff and educational development association (seda); a founder of the heads of educational development group (hedg); and founding editor of the international journal for academic development (ijad). david was previously a director of the centre for higher education practice at the open university. he has co-edited three books on staff and educational development, and published some 60 papers, articles and reports on higher education teaching, assessment, evaluation, course design, portfolios and personal development planning. e-mail: adbaume@aol.com. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 11 http://tinyurl.com/2vwx4br http://tiny.cc/ka4uz mailto:adbaume@aol.com engaging students in and with good academic work abstract introduction – learning and doing some relevant numbers problems with this account 1. not all incoming students may have the high level of entry ability that the work reported by gladwell describes. 2. students may not do the amount of work this model suggests. 3. what are students doing with the hours they are spending? 4. who decides how the student's time is spent? designing and running courses to help students to do good work working within a course working around a course a caution and a conclusion references author details research symposium report journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 2: february 2010 using turnitin as a formative writing tool judy cohen university of kent, uk abstract turnitin plagiarism detection software was made available to all staff at the university of kent at the beginning of the 2006/7 academic year. to promote the potential positive aspects of turnitin, the unit for the enhancement of learning and teaching (uelt) prepared guidelines for staff on how to use turnitin formatively rather than as a plagiarism policing agent. in addition, extensive web resources on academic integrity and avoiding plagiarism were made available to staff and students. it was anticipated that the guidelines and web resources coupled with tutor support in class would facilitate student understandings of plagiarism, referencing and the development of writing skills. turnitin was specifically trialled in two classes of students, with interviews of staff and students on their experience of turnitin and how it influenced their academic writing. staff concluded that turnitin and specific in-class support significantly deterred plagiarism, while students supported the use of turnitin and felt that it helped them understand the actual process of integrating references into their own work. context while plagiarism itself is not a new phenomenon, there is increasing concern in academic circles that plagiarism, particularly from internet sources, is on the rise (chester, 2001; mcdowell and brown, 2001; johnston, 2003). this perceived rise in plagiarism in recent years has led to a substantial body of work concerned with defining, detecting and deterring plagiarism. a generally accepted principle in this work is that plagiarism should be tackled holistically, incorporating institutional policy, practice and culture; assessment design; cohen using turnitin as a formative writing tool education of and information for students; detection; and finally, appropriate application of penalties (carroll, 2002). while some of the blame for plagiarism is placed on the use of the internet and the corresponding rise in the ease with which students can access information online (chester, 2001), others have pointed out that changes to higher education practices are also significant. these changes include the increased access and ‘massification’ of higher education; increased use of coursework in assessment and the importance of grades and increased competition (mcdowell and brown, 2001). regardless of the root causes of either plagiarism or the worry over the increased ease that students can access ‘copiable’ material, the first step in dealing with this form of academic misconduct is to establish a common understanding of plagiarism (carroll, 2002; johnston, 2003). as johnston (2003) points out, improving students’ understanding of what is and is not acceptable practice when using sources is more beneficial than focusing on detection and penalties. however, he adds the caveat that developing a common understanding of plagiarism is complex in itself. in addition, a recent case study shows that developing an understanding of plagiarism does not necessarily mean that students can meet academic writing requirements of avoiding plagiarism in written work. instead, this understanding of plagiarism should be coupled with detailed formative workshops on developing these particular academic writing skills (sivasubramaniam, 2006). it is this aspect of linking the understanding of plagiarism in the students’ minds with the writing skills necessary to avoid plagiarism that concerns this case study and how turnitin was used to facilitate this process at the university of kent. turnitin was acquired in 2006 against the backdrop of concerns regarding plagiarism in the he sector, after a process of overhauling plagiarism-related policy documents and piloting the text matching software in 2005. the university adopted an educative and formative approach to the use of turnitin, including the holistic approach to deterring and detecting plagiarism as advocated by carroll (2002) and in line with peacock and sharp (2006). guidelines on using turnitin (http://www.kent.ac.uk/uelt/ai/students/guidelines.html)were developed and approved at the start of the academic year, and later piloted in two modules: economics (level 2) and journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 2 http://www.kent.ac.uk/uelt/ai/students/guidelines.html cohen using turnitin as a formative writing tool business (level 3). this case study explores the staff and student experiences of using turnitin as a formative writing tool in these two modules. research questions initially this study set out to investigate student understandings of: • what turnitin is and its implications for them; • how to interpret the originality report; and • using the originality report to improve their understanding of academic writing conventions. this study also aimed to informally discuss with staff the impact of using turnitin: • on incidences of plagiarism within the module; and • on workload issues in investigating cases of plagiarism. brief methodology surveys of staff along with case studies (including student surveys and interviews) of two modules were carried out to explore experiences of implementing turnitin in departments and specifically in using turnitin to develop academic writing skills: • staff were surveyed to ascertain their initial understanding of turnitin plagiarism detection software; the university’s approved guidelines on using turnitin; and their expectations for the software. for example, questions included ‘i am concerned that using turnitin will increase my workload’ and ‘i believe that using turnitin will be a useful aid in deterring plagiarism’. surveys also included departmental questions on existing information for students on plagiarism. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 3 cohen using turnitin as a formative writing tool • students were given two introductory sessions (one information and one practice session) about the software including how to log in to turnitin and upload work followed by how to interpret the originality report. the practice session on the originality report provided a chance for the students to discuss what the matching percentages meant and to see the extent to which their writing matched other source material. students were surveyed after the turnitin information and practice sessions and interviewed at the end of their module. the business group (41 third year undergraduate students) were allowed to upload a previously assessed piece of work and were allowed free access to turnitin, with the understanding that this was formative practice and that the work would not be re-examined or assessed regardless of the originality report results. referencing and citation advice was provided and the subsequent assessed work was later submitted once only with no opportunity to view the originality report (these settings were fixed in the turnitin assignment options). when submitting work to turnitin, tutors have the option to allow students to see their originality report or not, to allow single or multiple submissions (meaning students can edit their work and resubmit to turnitin), or to create draft/revision assignments where a single draft and final copy of the submission and the originality report are saved. the originality report is a colour coded version of the submission highlighting text which matches other sources, whether these are adequately referenced or not. in the economics module, the 35 level 2 students were allowed to upload any piece of work to turnitin in the first session with free access to turnitin provided for a limited time (around one week). their final assessed piece of work was submitted by a draft/revision assignment. in this format of assignment, the tutor has a copy of the draft essay and associated originality report plus the final submission and report. students can submit the draft and final copies once only. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 4 cohen using turnitin as a formative writing tool discussion of findings staff during the initial stages of implementing turnitin, a number of concerns were raised by staff and students with the turnitin administrator at the university. staff concerns included: • practicality of electronic submission: after initial training, most staff and students found that this was a relatively straightforward process; • printing assignments or how to match printed and electronic submissions: this remained a concern, particularly when it was realised that turnitin occasionally created an error between an uploaded word document and the associated image used by grademark. in terms of cross-checking print versions and turnitin reports, staff relied on random checks; • the validity of using turnitin as a sampling tool (random checks on individual students): this approach was not in line with the university guidelines on using turnitin and was not an accurate gauge of the standard of work for a class as a whole. students were concerned about being singled out; • confusion over the meaning of the originality report percentage: this was a concern to staff who were tempted to just check high percentage matches without considering the implications of plagiarism occurring with lower percentage matches. students were concerned about the fair reading of their work or the risk of being judged by a number on a report; • support when pursuing cases of plagiarism: staff imagined that if they found and reported more cases of plagiarism, they may not get administrative support while involved in dealing with the formal processes of each case. staff response to surveys indicated that although staff were generally keen to use turnitin, they were unsure how it may impact on their workload and also unsure of the university guidelines on implementing turnitin. interestingly, one staff member during interview reported a significant drop in the time taken to follow up cases of plagiarism as turnitin provided adequate evidence and further time spent searching for plagiarised sources was not required. in this way, turnitin had a positive effect on workload. it was also reported that turnitin reduced time spent marking, either for the reason above, or due to a significant drop in journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 5 cohen using turnitin as a formative writing tool instances of plagiarism. of the departments that responded to the survey, all had a definition of plagiarism available, and of those intending to implement turnitin, the anticipated benefits included detecting plagiarism and changing the student attitude towards cheating. one department noted that the use of turnitin had had the unexpected effect of dramatically increasing the amount of direct quotations used by students. students prior to receiving information on turnitin, students were anxious about using the system, particularly in terms of the fair application of the software and the risk of being unjustly accused of plagiarism (anecdotal evidence reported in conversations between the turnitin administrator and student union representatives). student concerns included: • insecurity about how the software worked: including the fear of being unjustly accused of plagiarism or of staff believing the originality report and not the student; • the possibility of the introduction of bias in marking if staff rely on the originality reports: more concerns about being treated as a number on a report and losing the personal aspect of a staff member marking their work, with concerns about bias if a report showed a certain matching percentage; • the setting of acceptable minimum/maximum percentages for matching text: students rightly were concerned about this as it is a meaningless exercise; and • the possibility of staff using the system without adequate training or understanding (raising concerns over fair treatment of students): anecdotal evidence from a range of students across the campuses showed that staff from different departments did not always have the same level of expertise with either the software or the university guidelines; • ownership of intellectual property rights when work is submitted to the turnitin database (a concern shared by staff): a concern not really affected by turnitin. students at the university can request to have any confidential material (that falls under data protection rules) removed from the turnitin database, and any work with journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 6 cohen using turnitin as a formative writing tool commercial potential is either covered by current university rules on intellectual property, or, if part of higher degree research, can also be removed from the database. student survey results after the information sessions on turnitin, 85% of the business students reported that they felt they had received enough information about turnitin (strongly agreed or agreed) while 90% were confident that they understood why turnitin was being used. in the economics group, 94% felt they had received enough information about turnitin, while the majority (77%) were neutral, disagreed or strongly disagreed with the statement ‘i feel anxious about my work being put through turnitin’ (in the business group, 73% were neutral or not anxious). this shows that the information sessions were effective at explaining turnitin to students and reducing their anxiety about putting their work through the software. while 20% of students felt that the practice session ‘helped with their writing’, 31% disagreed (43% neutral). this may indicate that students did not link the wording of the question i.e. ‘writing’ with the academic skills they acquired, as comments received from 54% of the group indicated that: • the originality report was useful; i was glad to use it; • this helped with quotes and referencing (several responses); • it’s a good way to encourage students to use their own words; • it helped significantly with proper referencing; • it showed me how to reference without plagiarism; • the level of plagiarism i had ; • it was useful to see how my work matched up with other texts. comments made during the video interviews further emphasised how the text-matching colours helped students to realise whether their paraphrasing was accurate or not, whether their work was ‘fine’ and that they may have plagiarised unknowingly. in this way, the colour coding is useful to highlight text but, as pointed out by davis (2007), using the actual percentage or the colour band is not beneficial. turnitin groups the percentage index of the journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 7 cohen using turnitin as a formative writing tool originality reports into five bands, for example, blue or green for low percentages. this does not actually reflect whether plagiarism has been found or not. interestingly, survey results indicated that students felt that turnitin should be used to discourage plagiarism (60%) rather than as a way to teach students about referencing (just over 20%), an attitude expressed in the follow up interviews which indicated that students felt that turnitin and reducing plagiarism enhanced the value of their degree, and that turnitin was a useful deterrent for students. this attitude was expressed in response to the interview question ‘what would you recommend to staff?’ where students indicated that it should be used on every student, in every module and that it should be a policing tool with only one copy to be handed in. a minority felt that turnitin should be available to students; however, anecdotal evidence from students showed that unlimited access to the originality report encouraged students to try to ‘beat the system’. in terms of advice for other students, responses encouraged others to ‘take the time to use it’ as turnitin is ‘a helpful way to avoid plagiarism’. interestingly, this question also raised the point that turnitin ‘is necessary to ensure university standards’ and that although it ‘seemed daunting at first… it’s beneficial’. on the whole, students appreciated the information sessions on turnitin and the originality report and the information both reduced their anxiety about using the software and improved their understanding of referencing and acceptable paraphrasing. staff in both courses reported reductions in cases of plagiarism and one staff member also reported significant reductions in the time taken to investigate possible matching text. see appendix 1 and appendix 2 for further detail of the student survey results. implications of research the sample sizes used in this study were not large as this was an evaluation of a pilot of software. results indicate that students benefit in several ways from the information sessions on turnitin, and that supervised time spent examining the originality reports is necessary to facilitate a student’s understanding of what it means to use academic sources in their own words, rather than relying on poor paraphrasing or direct quotations. it is also evident from journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 8 cohen using turnitin as a formative writing tool interview and survey comments that in addition to structured support in using the originality report, students should have the opportunity to check their draft essays on turnitin, but not have unlimited access to the software, to prevent the possibility of ‘fine-tuning’ their work to avoid plagiarism detection without due acknowledgement of sources, a concern voiced by both staff and students during interviews. using turnitin formatively necessitates a certain amount of class time devoted to discussing the originality reports rather than allowing students free (or even limited) access to the software without structured support. future investigations into how students use the report and whether their writing and referencing skills improve over time and transfer to different types of writing in different modules would be useful for staff who wish to use turnitin as an academic writing tool. students have shown that they are happy to work with turnitin and appreciate its use given sufficient information and support in using the software. therefore, it is felt that closer adherence to the university guidelines on using turnitin, in particular the aspects dealing with providing formative experiences of the system, would be beneficial. references carroll, j. (2002) a handbook for deterring plagiarism in higher education, oxford: oxford centre for staff and learning development. chester, g. (2001) plagiarism detection and prevention: final report on the jisc electronic plagiarism detection project. online: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/uploaded_documents/plagiarism_final.pdf (accessed: 5 october 2006]. davis, m. (2007) ‘the role of turnitin within the formative process of academic writing: a tool for learning and unlearning?’, brookes ejournal of learning and teaching 2(2). online: http://bejlt.brookes.ac.uk/article/the_role_of_turnitin_within_the_formative_process_of_ academic_writing (accessed: 30 october 2007). journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 9 http://www.jisc.ac.uk/uploaded_documents/plagiarism_final.pdf http://bejlt.brookes.ac.uk/article/the_role_of_turnitin_within_the_formative_process_of_academic_writing http://bejlt.brookes.ac.uk/article/the_role_of_turnitin_within_the_formative_process_of_academic_writing cohen using turnitin as a formative writing tool johnston, b. (2003) the concept of plagiarism. the higher education academy. online: http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/resources/detail/id428_concept_of_plagiarism (accessed: 18 october 2007). mcdowell, l. and brown, s. (2001) assessing students: cheating and plagiarism. the higher education academy. online: http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/resources/detail/id430_cheating_and_plagiarism (accessed: 22 august 2006). peacock, s. and sharp, j. (2006) ‘a holistic approach to deploying turnitinuk that encourages sustainable change in institutional plagiarism practice’, pp. 237-238, in duggan, f. (ed.) 2 international plagiarism conference 2006 proceedingsnd : 19-21 june, 2006. newcastle: northumbria learning press. sivasubramaniam, s.d. (2006) ‘assisting students to avoid plagiarism: the role of formative workshops’, pp. 211 – 219, in duggan, f. (ed.) 2 international plagiarism conference 2006 proceedings nd : 19-21 june, 2006. newcastle: northumbria learning press. author details judy cohen is a curriculum and educational development officer at uelt and joined the department in april 2006. she has taught english as a foreign/second language at undergraduate and graduate level in australia, sweden and hong kong. she has also taught business subjects at fe and undergraduate level. judy's recent academic background is in education, and she completed her m.ed. (tesol) in 2001. since then she has published in the areas of discourse analysis and plagiarism. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 10 http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/resources/detail/id428_concept_of_plagiarism http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/resources/detail/id430_cheating_and_plagiarism cohen using turnitin as a formative writing tool appendix 1 survey of business students the university is using the turnitin plagiarism detection software for the first time this term. as part of the evaluation of turnitin, students in courses which are using turnitin are being asked to complete the following questionnaire. the information you provide is important. please answer the following questions by placing a on the scale below. 1. i have received enough information about turnitin. strongly agree 22% agree 63% neutral 10% disagree 5% strongly disagree 0 2. i am confident that i understand why turnitin is being used. strongly agree 41% agree 49% neutral 7% disagree 2% strongly disagree 0 3. i am anxious about my work being put through the turnitin system. strongly agree 0 agree 27% neutral 29% disagree 32% strongly disagree 12% 4. i know how to get more information about turnitin. strongly agree 2% agree 61% neutral 22% disagree 10% strongly disagree 5% journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 11 cohen using turnitin as a formative writing tool 5. comments: summary of comments received turnitin: should be available to students. should be used in every subject. should only be used if it adds value to our academic standards. is necessary to ensure university standards (many similar comments). seemed daunting at first but now it has been explained i think it’s a good idea and beneficial to students. will help employers and the university take students more seriously. good idea to stop lazy students from cheating. good idea and helpful way to avoid plagiarism. adds value to students and lecturers. appendix 2 survey of economics students the university is using the turnitin plagiarism detection software for the first time this term. as part of the evaluation of turnitin, students in courses which are using turnitin are being asked to complete the following questionnaire. the information you provide is important. please answer the following questions by placing a on the scale below. 1. i have received enough information about turnitin. strongly agree 11% agree 83% neutral 3% disagree 3% strongly disagree journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 12 cohen using turnitin as a formative writing tool 2. i found it useful to have practice sessions in using turnitin. strongly agree 17% agree 54% neutral 26% disagree 3% strongly disagree 3. the practice session with turnitin helped me to improve my writing. strongly agree agree 20% neutral 43% disagree 31% strongly disagree 6% by looking at my originality report, i learned that (summary of responses): • i hadn’t plagiarised (7 responses). • surprisingly it was fine and no useful info coming back. • how many references i used. • there will be a certain amount of matching text. • turnitin is useful to see how my work matches other texts. • how i should be referencing / time management through earlier submission. • how to reference and quote properly (7 responses). • i could have plagiarised unknowingly. 4. i am anxious about my work being put through the turnitin system. strongly agree agree 23% neutral 51% disagree 23% strongly disagree 3% journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 13 cohen using turnitin as a formative writing tool 5. turnitin is best used as (please circle the most appropriate answer): 1) a way to discourage students from plagiarising 60% 2) a way to teach students about referencing 23% 3) a tool that can help students improve their academic writing 11% 4) other (responses) 6% • a tool for students to check their own references • reduces the deadline for submission comments (summary of comments received): the originality report was very useful. i’m glad i was able to see it. be specific about processing time for essays. helped significantly with proper referencing of quotes (several comments). it prevents students using sources without referencing. it’s ok but didn’t pick up references or quotes in my essay. didn’t make much difference and annoying that you have to finish the essay before the deadline (several similar comments). it’s sometimes accurate but people tell me it misses some quotes. it’s a weak plagiarism deterrent. some of the references it finds aren’t the ones i used (several responses). it improved my writing style and layout of my essay. it does improve academic writing in trying to integrate referencing in order to make essay more plausible to the argument. it’s a very useful tool and should be used often (several comments). good way to encourage students to use their own words. it should be available to students. it should be a policing tool only. it clarifies your mistakes. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 14 using turnitin as a formative writing tool abstract context research questions brief methodology discussion of findings staff students student survey results implications of research references author details appendix 1 survey of business students appendix 2 survey of economics students literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special edition: digital technologies, november 2014 the use of ipad technology to give multi-modal feedback to british sign language/english interpreting undergraduate students thaïsa whistance university of wolverhampton, uk abstract students undertaking the ba honours british sign language/english interpreting course at the university of wolverhampton regularly submit video clips to the vle to be commented on by their tutor and/or their peers. these clips are either of their practise interpretations or presentations delivered in british sign language (bsl). this kind of collaborative feedback is extremely valuable in helping students to develop their language skills. the feedback has, historically, been provided in written english. however, this presents a challenge because bsl is a visual language which does not have a standard written format. this case study focuses on the way digital technology has enabled the development of a method of feedback which uses ipad technology to allow tutors to use audio narration, video modelling and annotation tools to comment upon a student’s video clip. this annotated video is then returned to students for viewing. feedback was sought from students during the early stages of development of this method and this information has been used to make improvements to the feedback format. keywords: british sign language; interpreting; feedback; digital technology; ipad; multi modal feedback. introduction this case study focuses on the use of tablet technology to develop a multi-modal feedback mechanism in response to video clips uploaded by british sign language (bsl)/english interpreting undergraduate students which show them either presenting a piece in bsl or interpreting between english and bsl. for the purposes of this case study, ‘multi-modal’is whistance the use of ipad technology to give multi-modal feedback journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2014 2 used to describe the combination of the visual and auditory modes of english with the visual mode of sign language and pictorial/ graphic representations of sign language spatial features. students have traditionally received feedback on their video uploads to the vle (wolf wolverhampton online learning framework) in written english format (i.e. their first language – l1). there are, potentially, some issues with this written method of feedback though, as bsl does not have a standard written format and it can be challenging to describe sign language on paper. there have been attempts to establish a formal method of recording sign language in a written format, but at present there is no commonly used standard method. the complexity of writing bsl is demonstrated in the image below (figure 1) which shows a dictionary entry with both a photographic image of a sign and a written and coded explanation of the hand shape, location, orientation and movement of the sign, as well as the non-manual features that must accompany it. figure 1. british deaf association (brian, 1992, p.294). figure 2. hoffman-dilloway (2011, p.348). figure 2 shows an example of two different sign writing systems, stokoe notation (written by joe martin) appears on the left, while sutton signwriting (written by valerie sutton) appears on the right (mmc1.mpg). hoffman-dilloway (2011, p.348) whistance the use of ipad technology to give multi-modal feedback journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2014 3 the issues with attempting to write down sign language have been discussed by mann et al. (2014, p.4) who allude to the fact that the: …bodily movements (that is, enactment by the signer designed to represent actions of characters, for example, as part of a story) and affective information (for example, the emotions of characters) are meaningful aspects of signed languages that are common in (signed) discourse, yet there are no well-known and systematic ways of capturing them. the complexity of trying to describe sign language via written feedback in a clear and effective manner is what created the impetus to find an alternative way of delivering corrections, praise and suggestions for improvements. video feedback in physical skills-based disciplines video annotation software, such as elan, is in use in interpreter training programmes for student self-reflection purposes and for detailed linguistic analysis (goswell, 2012), but it would be unrealistic to expect tutors to have the time available to analyse footage at such a detailed level for every student. it is therefore necessary to look at how current and developing technologies can aid tutors in delivering effective feedback in the most efficient manner. mann et al. (2014) discuss the use of information and communication technologies in the teaching of signed languages and suggest that ‘video based feedback and its impact upon instruction is an interesting area for further research’ (2014, p.4). they briefly look at some of the computer software in use in germany, finland, and switzerland to enhance sign language interpreter training. other disciplines which require the development of physical skills, such as sports coaching (boyer et al., 2009; barter, 2012) are already using multi-modal feedback to enhance and develop skills. there are several mobile apps on the market which provide a mechanism to analyse video footage of, for example, a golf swing where ‘video analysis makes it possible to detect weaknesses in respect of the golf swing, which may lead to future injury; such injury can be corrected or prevented at an early stage’ (roos and suruijal, 2014, whistance the use of ipad technology to give multi-modal feedback journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2014 4 p.400). it is applications like coach’s eye (techsmith corporation, 2014) and ubersense coach (ubersense inc.), along with those providing interactive whiteboard facilities such as explain everything (morriscooke), doceri interactive whiteboard (sp controls inc., 2014) and educreations interactive whiteboard (educreations inc., 2014) which can be utilised in the training of sign language interpreters to correct errors and make suggestions for future skill development, which price et al. (2010) suggest are discrete potential outcomes of feedback. initial research an initial research project (whistance, 2013) explored the potential benefits of providing students with visual (signed) feedback rather than the traditional written feedback. to gather data, two separate tasks were set which involved students signing a piece to camera on a specific topic. this video clip was then uploaded to the vle in order for the tutor to view it and provide feedback to the students. whilst this feedback was given in written english for the first task, it was given in bsl for the second. at this point the tutor feedback was simply a video of the tutor using british sign language to give feedback. there was no audio or annotation provided and students could not view their own clip concurrently with the tutor feedback. a questionnaire was sent out to the students that had engaged in the two tasks to ascertain their views about the respective feedback methods. the participants all agreed to ethical release of the data collected. the questionnaire responses were anonymous, whilst the video clips uploaded by the students inevitably showed their identity. all of the participants were happy to proceed on this basis. there were 8 (57%) responses to the online questionnaire which was sent out following the task and two students were interviewed (14%). initial results whilst the questionnaire was delivered to a limited number of students (one class of 14 final year students 2012/13), the results from the online questionnaire showed a marked preference (87.5%) for feedback to be provided in the visual modality (signed). several of the respondents made reference to similar themes. firstly, the benefit of seeing the language modelled by the lecturer: whistance the use of ipad technology to give multi-modal feedback journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2014 5 i did prefer bsl feedback because i found it very useful to see a good clear example of how i can improve, e.g. ‘you signed this…however, signing it this way would be much clearer’. (respondent 3) secondly, some respondents recognised the fact that delivering the feedback in l2 (bsl) offered an opportunity for students to develop their receptive skills. thirdly, the anticipated issue with describing bsl actions in written english was highlighted: …when the feedback was in english it was sometimes difficult to understand what was being referred to and how exactly to improve it. (respondent 5) finally, it was noted that tutor signed feedback leads to extra language learning opportunities, as described by interviewee 1 who had ‘learnt vocab off you that i hadn’t seen before’. extension of methodology at the interview stage, the point was raised that one of the advantages of written feedback is that students can have it as a constant reference point while they watch their own video clip. the possibility of providing spoken feedback as an alternative method was also brought up during this interview, with a view to ensuring accessibility to those students who may find written feedback more difficult to access, but still prefer to have their feedback delivered in their first language (l1). therefore it seemed that a method of feedback that was blended and involved spoken, written and signed modalities would be a useful format. this led to further research and the early stages of developing such a mechanism (see figure 3). whistance the use of ipad technology to give multi-modal feedback journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2014 6 figure 3. the multi modal feedback mechanism shown in figure 3 is done using ipad technology and the interactive whiteboard application ‘explain everything’ (morriscooke, 2014) which allows the tutor to import a student video from either the ipad photo store or from various cloud storage apps (e.g. itunes; dropbox, 2014; google drive, 2014). then, whilst playing this video inside the application, the tutor can provide audio narration, pause and annotate the video and also provide video modelling of any corrections required. this feedback is recorded and captured as a video file which can then be exported back to the cloud storage facility or to youtube or saved back to the ipad photo store. the student is clearly able to see their own performance and the tutor can point out any errors; such as with hand-shape formation, visual spatial inconsistencies or incorrect use of non-manual features. areas where the student has performed well can also be highlighted in this way. students from the 2013/14 final year cohort who received this type of video file responded very favourably to this method of delivering feedback: if the feedback is not what is expected, i feel that watching it on a screen rather than face-to-face is more comforting, as you can watch it where you feel comfortable without having to justify or respond. i felt at ease and genuinely felt like i gained more confidence because the lecturer was able to understand what i was signing on most occasions by giving an auditory summary of what she had understood from my video clip. (respondent 2) this picture is taken from a video feedback clip (whistance, 2013) and is done using the application ‘explain everything’. (morriscooke, 2014) whistance the use of ipad technology to give multi-modal feedback journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2014 7 you are also able to see how something should have been done which is difficult to explain through spoken and written english. you are also able to; literally, highlight some idiosyncrasies in our bsl production and comment on how that affects the meaning of the message. it was always nerve-wracking getting video feedback but no more so than doing it in person! (respondent 3) …it is done in real time so negative comments and positive comments occur throughout the length of the clip, depending on the quality of the performance that is! i think video feedback is ace because it makes us put the effort into our clips because you are putting the effort into our feedback. (respondent 6) this seems to indicate that students had really thought about how the feedback had affected them, which may be because, as wilkinson (2013, p.3) describes, ‘…having a recording of the lecturer’s thoughts and ideas as they are marking the assignment adds a personal element, which may increase the level of engagement the student has with the feedback…’. further work whilst it is clear from the responses of the students that this method of providing feedback is popular and is perceived as useful, it is important to quantify the benefits of providing it, as well as examine the impact providing it has on the time tutors need to spend delivering it. therefore further research is now in progress to attempt to evaluate the efficacy of this method. this method of providing feedback will be used with a wider group of participants and also at varying stages in the programme (it has been used exclusively with students in the final year thus far) in order to better understand its impact. other applications for this type of technology are also being explored, including the use of slow motion video to pinpoint linguistic features of bsl and also the use of sports coaching apps to allow side by side video analysis of a student interpretation versus an interpretation rendered by a professional interpreter. this side by side analysis may also be useful in looking at the development of particular skill sets and allowing students to compare past and present performance. these methods of analysing an interpretation whistance the use of ipad technology to give multi-modal feedback journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2014 8 offer possibilities to give two distinct types of feedback to the student as voerman et al. (2014, p.96) describe here: on the one hand, there is progress feedback which compares the actual level of performance with the initial level highlighting the improvement, and on the other there is discrepancy feedback which compares the actual level of performance with the desired level of performance pointing out what is missing or what still has to be done. conclusion the development of this multimodal feedback mechanism has been possible because of the advances in tablet technology which have made using video analysis and annotation a much easier and user/tutor friendly task. for programmes like bsl/english interpreting, having technologies available that enable students to view their own performance alongside a modelled performance, or to receive a visual correction, is of great benefit, in the same way as has been shown in sports coaching. there are potentially many other subject areas that could make use of this type of feedback. it may, for example, be useful for those teaching on healthcare related courses or music and performing arts programmes when feeding back on student performance of practical techniques. another potential application is to use video analysis as a tool for examining student participation in role-plays on courses such as social work. many students engage with mobile technology on a daily basis and it seems likely that this engagement will continue to grow and therefore become even more important in the future of feedback in higher education. finding effective and efficient ways of providing feedback using the technology available is, therefore, vital. orsmond et al. (2011, p.249) discuss the ‘consistently low assessment/feedback scores within the nss’ as evidence that there needs to be a focus on feedback as a dialogic activity. they highlight the difference between what the tutor perceives as effective feedback, and the student perception of that same feedback. therefore, alongside using digital technology to deliver feedback, it is also important for tutor and student to consider the stage at which the feedback is delivered, as well as what specific type of feedback is most effective for, in this case, language learners, i.e. recasts, elicitations, explanation of grammar points (han and hyun kim, 2008; kaivanpanah et al., 2012). whistance the use of ipad technology to give multi-modal feedback journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2014 9 references barter, p. (2012) ‘using immediate video feedback’, middlesex journal of educational technology, 2(1), pp. 14-20 [online]. available at: http://elearningresearch.middlesex.wikispaces.net/volume+2%2c+number+1+dec ember+2012 (accessed: 11 august 2014). boyer, e., miltenberger, r.g., batsche, c. and fogel, v. (2009) ‘video modelling by experts with video feedback to enhance gymnastics skills’, journal of applied behaviour analysis, 42(4), pp. 855-860 [online]. available at: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/pmc2790943/ (accessed: 27 july 2014). brian, d. (ed.) (1992) dictionary of british sign language/english. london: faber and faber. dropbox (2014) dropbox (version 3.5.1) [mobile application software]. available at: https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/dropbox/id327630330?mt=8 (accessed: 4 november 2014). educreations inc. (2014) educreations interactive whiteboard (version 2.0.3) [mobile application software]. available at: https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/educreationsinteractive-whiteboard/id478617061?mt=8 (accessed: 4 november 2014). google, inc. (2014) google drive (version 3.2.2) [mobile application software]. available at: https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/google-drive-free-onlinestorage/id507874739?mt=8 (accessed: 4 november 2014). goswell, d. (2012) ‘do you see what i see? using elan for self-analysis and reflection’, international journal of interpreter education, 4(1), pp. 72-81 [online]. available at: http://www.cit-asl.org/new/ijie/volume-4-1/ (accessed: 10 september 2014). han, z. and hyun kim, j. (2008) ‘corrective recasts: what teachers might want to know’, the language learning journal, 3(1), pp. 35-44. http://elearningresearch.middlesex.wikispaces.net/volume+2%2c+number+1+december+2012 http://elearningresearch.middlesex.wikispaces.net/volume+2%2c+number+1+december+2012 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/pmc2790943/ https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/dropbox/id327630330?mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/educreations-interactive-whiteboard/id478617061?mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/educreations-interactive-whiteboard/id478617061?mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/google-drive-free-online-storage/id507874739?mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/google-drive-free-online-storage/id507874739?mt=8 http://www.cit-asl.org/new/ijie/volume-4-1/ whistance the use of ipad technology to give multi-modal feedback journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2014 10 hoffmann-dilloway, e. (2011) ‘writing the smile: language ideologies in, and through, sign language scripts’, language & communication, 31(4), pp. 345-355 [online]. available at: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/s0271530911000474 (accessed: 12 september 2014). kaivanpanah, s., alavi, s.m. and sepehrinia, s. (2012) ‘preferences for interactional feedback: differences between learners and teachers’, the language learning journal, ifirst article, pp. 1-20 [online]. available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09571736.2012.705571 (accessed: 11 june 2013). mann, m., haug, t., kollien, s. and quinto-pozos, d. (2014) ‘teaching signed languages’, in chappelle, c.a. (ed.) the encyclopedia of applied linguistics. blackwell publishing ltd., pp. 1-6 [online]. available at: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/9781405198431.wbeal1436/pdf (accessed: 10 september 2014). morriscooke (2014) explain everything (version 2.51) [mobile application software]. available at: https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/explain-everything/id431493086?mt=8 (accessed: 12 september 2014). orsmond, p., maw, s.j., park, j.r, gomez, s. and crook, a.c. (2011) ‘moving feedback forward: theory to practice’, assessment & evaluation in higher education, 38(2), pp. 240-252 [online]. available at: http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/caeh20/38/2#.vbaiqmoguni (accessed: 10 september 2014) price, m., handley, k., millar, j. and o'donovan, b. (2010) ‘feedback: all that effort, but what is the effect?’, assessment & evaluation in higher education, 35(3), pp. 277289 [online]. available at: http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/caeh20/35/3#.vbaijmoguni (accessed: 10 september 2014). http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/s0271530911000474 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09571736.2012.705571 http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/9781405198431.wbeal1436/pdf https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/explain-everything/id431493086?mt=8%20 http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/caeh20/38/2%23.vbaiqmoguni http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/caeh20/35/3#.vbaijmoguni whistance the use of ipad technology to give multi-modal feedback journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2014 11 roos, s. and suruijal, j. (2014) ‘video analysis in golf coaching: an insider perspective’, mediterranean journal of social sciences, 5(21), pp. 399-404 [online]. available at: http://www.mcser.org/journal/index.php/mjss/article/view/4214 (accessed: 4 november 2014). sp controls inc. (2014) doceri interactive whiteboard (version 2.1.4) [mobile application software]. available at: https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/doceri-interactivewhiteboard/id412443803?mt=8 (accessed: 4 november 2014). techsmith corporation (2014) coach’s eye – instant replay video analysis (version 4.5.2) [mobile application software]. available at: https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/coachs-eye-instant-replay/id472006138?mt=8 (accessed: 4 november 2014). ubersense inc. (2014) ubersense coach: slow motion video analysis (version 4.1.0) [mobile application software]. available at: https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/ubersense-coach-slow-motion/id470428362?mt=8 (accessed: 4 november 2014). voerman, l., korthagen, f.a.j., meijer, p.c. and simons, r.j. (2014) ‘feedback revisited: adding perspectives based on positive psychology. implications for theory and classroom practice’, teaching and teacher education, 43(october 2014), pp. 91-98 [online]. available at: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/s0742051x14000766 (accessed: 10 september 2014). whistance, t. (2013) which method of feedback (written english or videoed signed feedback) is the most accessible and easy to apply in response to students who have submitted a british sign language video clip via the vle? unpublished post graduate certificate in academic practice in higher education research project. university of wolverhampton. http://www.mcser.org/journal/index.php/mjss/article/view/4214 https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/doceri-interactive-whiteboard/id412443803?mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/doceri-interactive-whiteboard/id412443803?mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/coachs-eye-instant-replay/id472006138?mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/ubersense-coach-slow-motion/id470428362?mt=8%20 http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/s0742051x14000766 whistance the use of ipad technology to give multi-modal feedback journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2014 12 wilkinson, s. (2013) ‘incorporating audio feedback to enhance inclusivity of courses’, journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6, november, pp. 1-4 [online]. available at: http://www.aldinhe.ac.uk/ojs/index.php?journal=jldhe&page=article&op=view&path[] =218&path[]=143 (accessed: 10 september 2014). author details thaïsa whistance is a practising registered sign language interpreter (nrcpd) and she is a lecturer in bsl/english interpreting at the university of wolverhampton where she teaches consecutive and simultaneous interpreting. she is also a fellow of the higher education academy. http://www.aldinhe.ac.uk/ojs/index.php?journal=jldhe&page=article&op=view&path%5b%5d=218&path%5b%5d=143 http://www.aldinhe.ac.uk/ojs/index.php?journal=jldhe&page=article&op=view&path%5b%5d=218&path%5b%5d=143 the use of ipad technology to give multi-modal feedback to british sign language/english interpreting undergraduate students abstract keywords: british sign language; interpreting; feedback; digital technology; ipad; multi modal feedback. introduction video feedback in physical skills-based disciplines initial research initial results extension of methodology further work conclusion references author details journal of learning development in higher education journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 1: february 2009 mrs mop, mechanic and/or miracle worker: metaphors of study support celia bishop university of the arts, london, uk christine bowmaker university of the arts, london, uk terry finnigan university of the arts, london, uk abstract it is important to document and reflect on the work we do, to share knowledge and practices and to build up a series of case studies around our work. as study support tutors we are part of the academy, not separate from it, and we need to reflect on our own relationships within our own community and the institution we work in. as members of the aldinhe we are a specific academic discourse community who create themselves through talk, formal and informal; through shared use of metaphor as well as practices (blythman & orr 2006). in this paper we explore our own roles within the university, how we see ourselves and how we are perceived by others. increasingly we see our role as one of not only supporting students when writing or talking about their work but also helping to provide some of the expected cultural capital (bourdieu 1997) which large numbers of students may not have the same access to as traditional students. through sharing our own perceptions in a workshop at the last aldinhe conference we encouraged debate and reflection around metaphors to describe the work we do. we are interested to continue this discussion with more staff in our future exploration of metaphors of study support to develop a sharper, more refined perspective on the work we do with the students and staff across the various institutions we work in. keywords: learning development, study support, art & design bishop, bowmaker & finnigan mrs mop, mechanic and/or miracle worker: metaphors of study support introduction this paper explores the role of the study support or learning development tutor in higher education. it uses metaphors to reflect on what we do and is based on a workshop, delivered at the aldinhe conference in bradford in march 2008. as three study support tutors from an art & design university we feel that using metaphors as a medium to encourage debate and deep reflection around how we are seen and how we see ourselves is of key importance. thus we start to articulate our separate realities and differing positions. it is divided into four main sections. the introduction sets the context and outlines the main theorists who have influenced our thinking. section one documents the initial discussion that took place within the workshop. our three case studies are presented in section two. each is a personalised account of the work we do, focusing on a different aspect of study support. finally, we share the positive metaphors that emerged from our workshop plenary. more students with a greater cultural, social and linguistic diversity are studying in our institutions. this is following the implementation of widening access and life-long learning agendas. up until recently most widening participation interventions have mainly focused on outreach and access to the academy with school and college activities and pre-course/summer schools. although these developments are important, the focus is now shifting to student experiences on course. it is important not only to expect students to understand and change to fit in with academy practices, but to change the practices within the institution itself. as study support tutors we need to be part of that change. higher education is still constituted as maintaining present hierarchies that exclude ‘the other’. satterthwaite et al (2003 p.31) observed that: ‘rather than viewing the students as the problem, assumptions about what is defined as rational neutral knowledge within the academy, needs to be problematised’. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 1: february 2009 2 bishop, bowmaker & finnigan mrs mop, mechanic and/or miracle worker: metaphors of study support bowl (2007) also highlights this view, declaring that as academics we need to be at the forefront of changing educational practices. to encourage debate we chose three contested metaphors; mrs mop, mechanic and miracle worker that are often used to describe perceptions of what practitioners do when supporting students’ academic writing and research (orr and blythman 2006). these metaphors reflect the idea of literacy as a unitary concept and a set of cognitive skills that can be taught and used unproblematically. this view fits with the banking model of education, which freire (1972) discusses in his critique of education when he advocates a move to a more critical pedagogy that is based within students’ lived experiences. the academic literacies approach advocated by lea (2004) and street (2005) also challenges the skills-based paradigm and sees literacies as cultural and social practices that vary according to the context in which you are in. mitchell in lea & stierer (2000) in her work on writing in the disciplines expresses a desire for subject specific tutors where support is integrated within the students’ disciplinary study. working and studying in law and history is very different from working in dance or art. lillis (2001, p.53) talks about how essayist literacy is a privileged literacy practice in western society that constitutes considerable cultural/linguistic capital: ‘it is a socially valued and valuable practice conferring prestige on its users.’ she advocates the use of talk back not feedback with students and to move towards a more dialogic addressivity to writing where you work with students on the construction of meaning. this includes a shift away from a dominant monologic type of addressivity where there is just one answer and it must conform within certain parameters and includes a denial of the actual participants. lillis (2001, p.10) declares: journal of learning development in higher education, issue 1: february 2009 3 bishop, bowmaker & finnigan mrs mop, mechanic and/or miracle worker: metaphors of study support ‘collaborative talk between student-writer and tutors can facilitate greater individual control over meaning making’. our role needs to be further strengthened by increasing our links to mainstream course activities through staff development and embedded support. gorard (2007 p.106) also supports this view: ‘better collaboration between support and academic staff is needed to prevent students from slipping through the net.’ it is the nature of this collaboration that will be further discussed within this paper. section one: workshop discussion exploring metaphors the conference workshop opened with the participants discussing in small groups what the three contested metaphors often used to describe study support or learning development tutors meant to them. below are the responses. mrs mop mopping up worries and fears performing an essential role being seen as having low status clearing up the mess dealing with the individual mess of students feeding on demand being invisible having a gendered, caring role acting as disinfectant for academic failure this metaphor is a very negative one where practitioners are perceived as marginalised, gendered, of low status and not often seen, although essential. many people in the group identified with this metaphor as a description of their work as journal of learning development in higher education, issue 1: february 2009 4 bishop, bowmaker & finnigan mrs mop, mechanic and/or miracle worker: metaphors of study support perceived by other academics in their institutions and at times how they saw themselves. mechanic fixing things that are broken doing jobs as they arrive, remedial oiling the cogs tweaking things to make them work better making an efficient machine being stuck in a rut /one dimensional finding it difficult to get involved in dynamic initiatives performing a dirty job: someone has to do it reflections on this metaphor have richer, more positive connotations. practitioners are recognised as ‘skilled’ workers who know how to repair or fix individual students. however they are only consulted when things start to break down and apart from yearly service or mot (induction/initial assessments) they are forgotten. they are recognised as essential parts of the university but only in a reactive way. out of the cupboard and into the garage. miracle worker laying on of hands implying the person you are working with is passive being linked to power relations carving out space and students and staff feel as if a miracle has taken place being introduced to students as the miracle worker this metaphor is an interesting one as practitioners receive more positive regard from staff although their role may not be understood. practitioners perform amazing acts with students in laying hands on them and ‘curing’ them. the students have no active role to play. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 1: february 2009 5 bishop, bowmaker & finnigan mrs mop, mechanic and/or miracle worker: metaphors of study support section two: case studies three different perspectives of practice this section includes an account by each of the three authors of their recent experiences within one institution, made up of separate, but federated colleges within one university. these three different approaches to supporting students in one he institution are described using more powerful and pro-active metaphors as part of the re-positioning of the work within the wider context of the academy. case study one: embedded academic study support having worked in further education as a learning support co-ordinator for a number of years i recently took up a post at one of the traditional art colleges within the university. moving into an equivalent position i quickly realised that there were significant differences between my role in he compared to that in fe. in fe, where additional learning support is well established, support tutors are regarded as learning experts working with students, tutors and course teams to ensure the academic success of all. in addition to teaching qualifications the learning support tutors have specialist qualifications and staff training expertise. the provision of support is well developed with a range of models deployed to suit both the delivery of the course and the needs of the students. florence nightingale once in post at the university, i realised that academic support for students was regarded as separate from mainstream provision and principally focused on disability. i had expected to be at the heart of the curriculum but i found myself at the edge of it in a reactive rather than proactive role. i felt like florence nightingale tending the wounded while the tutors got on with the serious business of delivering the course/fighting the war. like florence i did feel very valued, venerated even, for doing what the tutors found time-consuming and difficult, but i was working within a role that had limitations. i knew that for academic support to be successful it had to be delivered close to the course with the support tutor fully aware of the curriculum and the expectations of the tutors. i also knew that many students who needed journal of learning development in higher education, issue 1: february 2009 6 bishop, bowmaker & finnigan mrs mop, mechanic and/or miracle worker: metaphors of study support support did not get it. as florence i was at the sidelines patiently awaiting the wounded. i could treat some of those who made it to me but for a few it was too late. it was clear to me that i had to get onto the front line. arctic fox the model of embedded support is widely used in fe colleges. course teams and support tutors develop programmes of learning that are jointly planned and, in some cases, jointly delivered. for example, at the beginning of a teaching session the support tutor might give some input to the whole group on relevant vocabulary to prepare the students for the subject specific content that followed. this embedded support allows tutors to develop a culture of inclusiveness within their classrooms and counters the notion of support as being remedial and separate. an additional benefit of this model is that the support tutor is recognised as having, on the one hand, equal status with the mainstream tutors but is also seen as being separate from the assessment process. students can approach support with confidence and without fear of exposure. furthermore those students with real need who are reluctant to seek support can be captured and worked with in situ. like an arctic fox the support tutor moves among students and staff adapting to the needs of individuals and curriculum. now in he i decided to set up embedded support on the art foundation course. with some 400 students it attracts those with a wide range of individual learning needs. each subject area within the course is assigned an academic support tutor who works for one day a week within the studios alongside the art tutors. each support tutor is both a practising artist and a qualified teacher. for example the academic support tutor working in the design group is a costume designer for film and television but also has a keen interest in learning development. the support tutors regard themselves as teachers first and foremost; however their additional roles as artists give them status with both staff and students and first hand knowledge of the context in which they are giving support. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 1: february 2009 7 bishop, bowmaker & finnigan mrs mop, mechanic and/or miracle worker: metaphors of study support embedded support contributes to improved retention and achievement and enables all students to achieve their full potential. in the end of year evaluation the following comments were received: ‘the subtlety in the language [of art and design] is supported and also the student is encouraged to think about art and design rather than focusing on being in a supported situation that separates written work from overall process.’ pathway leader, communication. ‘it has allowed me to write more freely because i knew that help was available.’ student, product/spatial pathway. animals such as the arctic fox or chameleon come to mind when trying to think of a metaphor for the embedded support tutor. their ability to blend with their surroundings and move with ease amongst everyone is non-threatening and productive. however, within this college, the support tutor is more like the glue that holds things together or the line that joins up the dots – altogether much more artistic metaphors. case study two: one-to-one support with students i work as a study support lecturer, providing ‘drop-in’ sessions in the study room that is attached to the library for a wide range of students from fe/ he and post graduate courses. these sessions are on average 15-minute slots over the lunchtime in the library. the students who attend the sessions are drawn from across the college and either choose to attend or are recommended to attend by their tutors. trojan horse when i now reflect on this, the students appear to follow the mechanic metaphor of quick fix, easy to solve, miracle-giving sessions! however during the very short journal of learning development in higher education, issue 1: february 2009 8 bishop, bowmaker & finnigan mrs mop, mechanic and/or miracle worker: metaphors of study support sessions they often share their fears and concerns, such as feeling unclear about what ‘academic writing’ should look like, what the project brief is about and how to start the reading. i work with them, questioning them about their ideas, discussing their own thoughts, getting them to consider their own identity and lived experience within their work. i start from a position of curiosity and engagement. my position as a study support tutor is itself a marginalised one within the overall organisation and in the first three years in this role this was aggravated by being parttime. however this space within one-to-one support provides a safe place for a student that is very powerful in terms of reflecting on practices and discussing fears in a non-threatening environment. it can at times appear to be subversive as it gives time and space to students to reflect and critique the university processes and bringing their emotions into the process, often with some implicit support from the tutor. for this reason i regard the metaphor the trojan horse as a key one to describe my work. the study support tutor may appear to be one thing, a gift, a token, that may soothe difficult times but actually the role is a strategic role and political one within the organisation. i regard myself as an active change agent and encourage students to be the same. examples of this are discussing strategies for planning work (using mind maps) and reading (active reading-questioning) and ways to discuss things with tutors and other students, encouraging students to question. i also encourage more of a dialogue around their work so that they have the choice about which words to use and order to plan work. so although it may appear that the work they do in a short period of time is skills-based and just focused on the language or task presented it is hopefully more transformative and more participatory. another key role is encouragement and positive comments on the students’ work as our role is not only to ‘sort out their problems’ but also to enable them to feel confident in their own abilities to complete their work. the space is also therefore an exploration of their emotional responses to their work; often there are few places within the academy for students to explore this. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 1: february 2009 9 bishop, bowmaker & finnigan mrs mop, mechanic and/or miracle worker: metaphors of study support case study three: working with subject staff i manage study support in the largest college in the university and have worked hard to establish and strengthen links with subject staff over the eleven years of our existence. in dealing with subject staff and students, study support practitioners have to become chameleon-like and present themselves in a range of ways, depending on the particular set of circumstances. here are three further metaphors that can be associated with working with subject staff. intelligence gatherer during my one-to-one sessions with students in ‘safe’ spaces on the margins away from the delivery of their courses i often glean intelligence as students recount their experiences and perceptions of what might be termed unsupportive practices. unfortunately there is a tradition of a robust, ‘macho’ approach to critiquing work, whether written or practical, in art and design. those giving feedback sometimes do not recognise its affective consequences on students. study support tutors are in a unique position to relay this to subject staff as we are often the people that students see most regularly on a one to one basis and are able to build a relationship of trust, which other teachers do not have the opportunity to develop. clearly dealings with subject staff have to be finely tempered. tact and understanding of their situation have to be deployed. diplomat the position of study support, its status and the respect and understanding within which it is held has to be built up over years. however this is fragile reputation and respect can be damaged, indeed destroyed, overnight. in talking to subject colleagues, particularly after having gleaned intelligence from students, i have to use all the diplomacy i can muster. to maintain relationships and respect i have to choose my strategies and words carefully. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 1: february 2009 10 bishop, bowmaker & finnigan mrs mop, mechanic and/or miracle worker: metaphors of study support i have to be aware of issues of management of change although i am not the manager of subject colleagues and the changes i may advocate may meet with resistance. ‘slowly, slowly catchee monkey’ is often more appropriate than radical change and direct confrontation and like a diplomat i must sometimes be content with small steps. intelligence gathered needs to be checked and used and alliances formed. subject colleagues will often understand (un)consciously the role i play in retaining their students and helping their progression although the evidence for this is often anecdotal. study support professionals therefore need to gather as much intelligence as they can in the form of student evaluation and feedback. as well as collecting statistics they also need to employ a strategic approach and make alliances where they can. as a diplomat and the representative of study support it is important to be visible – walk the corridors, be seen, eat in the staff canteen; do not hide away in your safe marginal space. another task of the diplomat is to attend meetings, so go to the board of studies, college academic committee and cross-institution groups. volunteer for things as it facilitates networking. you will be seen as capable of representing the institution. finally use any other of your talents if possible to contribute to staff development, support research and so on. the diplomat is also called upon to attend social occasions. in my case these are often the shows of students’ work. go to these; make sure you are seen by the right people. work the room/gallery. this is undoubtedly one of the most pleasurable parts of the job. in study support i often see students when they are struggling with their written tasks. however, they often excel in their practical work and being able to see this work is illuminating and often a surprise. the show is frequently a good situation in which to network with all levels of subject staff from top managers to parttime staff and both staff and students appreciate the fact that i have bothered to attend. partner/donor journal of learning development in higher education, issue 1: february 2009 11 bishop, bowmaker & finnigan mrs mop, mechanic and/or miracle worker: metaphors of study support the third set of metaphors stems from the use of collaboration between study support and subject staff. where possible joint projects should be planned and bid for. clearly there may not always be funds available and colleagues may be glad to co-operate without them, but money talks and strong relationships have been built up with colleagues and courses with whom i had little prior contact. this sort of collaboration can bring concrete results. relations with subject staff, some of whom are part-time and previously unaware of the existence of study support, have been strengthened resulting in a better understanding of what we do. referrals particularly for help with third-year dissertations, have increased, with both staff suggesting that students could benefit and students, who have met the study support professional during the project, self-referring. equally importantly projects such as these get study support professionals out of the safe margins and into the subject teaching space and widen our knowledge and understanding of specific subject areas. collaboration tends to be seen as positive by the institution. more staff and students can see the benefits of study support. successful collaboration encourages further project bids with other subject colleagues and, octopus-like, study support can extend its influence into further curriculum areas to the benefit of all concerned: students, subject staff and study support professionals. section three: workshop feedback towards new and more powerful metaphors after sharing the three different perspectives with the participants they were asked in small groups to consider any other positive metaphors they felt could inform the discussion. these metaphors were then fed back to the whole group and included: tightrope walker sink plunger gardener journal of learning development in higher education, issue 1: february 2009 12 bishop, bowmaker & finnigan mrs mop, mechanic and/or miracle worker: metaphors of study support wonder woman guide across the mountain(sherpa /donkey/horse) comedian window cleaner “tiramisu” (pick me up) agony aunt the workshop was very successful and produced some lively debate. the activity of articulating our roles by creating positive metaphors was empowering and energising for both the workshop participants and leaders. this model of talking about our ideas in a workshop is one used by freire (1992, p.43) who believes in the importance of talking about ideas to clarify and enrich emerging concepts. ‘speaking of ideas before writing about them, in conversations with friends, in seminars, in talks was also a way not only of testing them but re-creating them, of giving them second birth.’ metaphors can be helpful in reflecting on the work and explaining it to others, whether staff or students, or the outside world. indeed, metaphors are often used within education and are particularly appropriate in the visual field the authors work in. as the work of study support expands in he and becomes better understood and more widely acknowledged it is to be hoped that any metaphors employed reflect a more positive attitude to the field. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 1: february 2009 13 bishop, bowmaker & finnigan mrs mop, mechanic and/or miracle worker: metaphors of study support references bourdieu, p. (1992) language and symbolic power. cambridge: polity press. bourdieu, p. (1997) the love of art. cambridge: polity press. bowl, m. (2003) non traditional entrants to higher education: they talk about people like me. stoke on trent: trentham. freire, p. (1972) pedagogy of the oppressed. london: penguin books. freire, p. (1997) pedagogy of hope. london: continuum press. gorard, s. et al (2007) overcoming the barriers to higher education. stoke on trent, trentham. lea, m. and stierer, b. (2000) student writing in higher education: new contexts. london: oup. lillis, t. (2001) student writing: access, regulation, desire. london: routledge. orr, s. and blythman, m. (2006): mrs mop does magic www.zeitschrift-schreiben.eu (accessed: 8 july 2008). satterthwaite, j. atkinson, e. and gale, k. (2005) discourse, power and resistance. stoke on trent: trentham . street, b. (2005) literacies across educational contexts: mediating learning and teaching. philadephia: caslon publishing. author details celia bishop is the head of study support, london college of communication, university of the arts, london, uk christine bowmaker is the academic support co-ordinator for camberwell, chelsea and wimbledon colleges, university of the arts, london, uk terry finnigan is the creative learning in practice cetl co-ordinator, london college of fashion, university of the arts, london, uk journal of learning development in higher education, issue 1: february 2009 14 http://www.zeitschrift-schreiben.eu/ mrs mop, mechanic and/or miracle worker: metaphors of study support abstract introduction section one: workshop discussion exploring metaphors section two: case studies three different perspectives of practice case study one: embedded academic study support case study two: one-to-one support with students case study three: working with subject staff section three: workshop feedback towards new and more powerful metaphors references author details literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 6: november 2013 making a case for behaviour based learning strategies in supporting students’ academic performance maeve gallagher trinity college dublin, ireland dr niamh flynn dublin business school, ireland abstract the aim of this article is to raise the profile of time and resource management interventions, not just as part of the delivery of student learning development services but as a core strategy, supported with interventions and resources that can be systematically evaluated, to help students (both undergraduate and postgraduate) maximise academic and employment potential. this opinion piece puts forward a case for student learning development practitioners to design and deliver interventions aimed at improving students’ self-regulated learning skills. the case is illustrated by examples from research on self-regulated learning (e.g. pintrich, 2004) and from reports on graduate employment figures (e.g. oecd – heckmann, 2013) and employers’ perceptions of graduates’ employability skills (e.g. council for industry and higher education – archer and davison, 2008). there are also examples of interventions delivered by the student learning development service, trinity college dublin ireland to help students improve self-efficacy and time management skills. the aim of this opinion piece is to stimulate discussion and ideas as to how educationalists and, in particular, professionals working in student learning development services in third level environments, can help students to develop these behavioural skills to enhance both their academic and employment potential. keywords: self-regulated learning; behavioural strategies; time-management; selfmanagement; employability; academic achievement; student learning development services.  gallagher and flynn making a case for behaviour based learning strategies introduction  the number of individuals across the european union who are entering third level or tertiary education has increased in recent years. a summary from the oecd (heckmann, 2013) on trends in education across the european union reported that many countries can expect a significant increase in the number of their population that attain a tertiary education. in fact the report (based on results from 21 eu countries) noted that a number of countries, including ireland and the united kingdom, have already met or exceeded the benchmark set (in the target for europe 2020 strategy (europe 2020 targets, 2013)) to have at least 40% of 30-34 year olds completing third level education. the report identified that there is a strong relationship between high levels of education, employability and earning potential. adults (25-64 age range) with a tertiary education earned 58% more in 2011 than adults in the same age group with second level education. in a paper examining how universities can enhance graduate employability to meet the needs of a flexible and rapidly changing knowledge intensive economy, bridgstock (2009) recommends a review of how terms such as employability and generic skills are understood and defined. a report on graduate employability produced by the council for industry and higher education uk (archer and davison, 2008) found that employers were not satisfied with the level of generic skills that graduates brought to the workplace. the report was based on the results of a pilot survey of 233 companies (including large, medium and small organisations) conducted by the confederation of british industry (2006). the research found that 30% of employers had problems with graduate skills, including team-working, communication, and problem solving, and 33% were dissatisfied with graduate self-management skills. although the sample size is quite small, the results have implications for employers, students and universities. indeed, authors of the report (archer and davison, 2008) recommend that there is a need for action by stakeholders to address the real or perceived skills deficit in graduates. in contrast, bridgstock (2009) states that narrow definitions of employability have often been adopted by employers’ organisations and also by joint university and business publications which focus on generic and discipline specific skills and initial employment outcomes. she notes that there is a tendency, in particular in the uk and australia, to define graduate employability based on first destination employment statistics, which measure success primarily based on graduates’ abilities to secure and retain full time and journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 2 gallagher and flynn making a case for behaviour based learning strategies permanent employment. the author recommends a model of employability in which higher education providers play a more active role in helping students to acquire and develop the lifelong learning and self-management skills to respond proactively and adapt to the needs of a rapidly changing knowledge based economy which has less of a focus on job security and long-term employment than in previous decades. the next section will look at the research on self-regulated learning, and how this model and framework can be utilised by providers of learning services in third level environments to help students to become actively engaged in their own learning processes and outcomes.  self-regulated learning  self-regulated learning is a complex construct that is positioned at the junction of many different research traditions (boekaerts, 1999) but, at a fundamental level, it can be understood as the process of systematically activating and sustaining cognitions, behaviours and emotions in order to achieve learning goals (pintrich, 2004). evidence has shown that academically successful students are self-regulated learners (e.g. mcmillan, 2010) and that self-regulated learners and high achievers engage in time management activities (e.g. zimmerman and martinez-pons, 1986). pintrich (2004) identified four assumptions underpinning most models of self-regulated learning; 1) that the process is dynamic; 2) the process involves goal setting and active engagement on the part of the learner; 3) the learner can monitor, control and regulate some aspects of behaviour, cognition and motivation and the external environment; 4) self-regulation activities can mediate between personal and context specific attributes to impact on actual performance and achievement. therefore, it seems that the use of self-regulation strategies may help learners to override personal or situational factors to enhance performance and academic outcomes, which is very encouraging for both students and educationalists and learning practitioners alike. skill, will and self-management aspects of self-regulated learning in her study investigating how academically successful students learn, mcmillan (2010) summarises the main aspects underpinning pintrich’s (2000; 2004) model of self-regulated journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 3 gallagher and flynn making a case for behaviour based learning strategies learning, namely ‘skills’ (e.g. cognitive strategies, such as learning, memorising and understanding, and metacognitive strategies such as planning, monitoring and adjusting cognitive strategies in line with their appraised effectiveness) and ‘will’ (e.g. factors that influence motivation such as goal setting). in addition to cognitive, metacognitive and motivational factors, self-regulated learning involves behaviour or self-management strategies including time-management, support-seeking and managing the study environment (pintrich, 2004). research on students’ approaches to studying (e.g. task-orientated, performance oriented, socially orientated or avoiders) found that systematic and consistent management of time and planning of studies has been associated with rapid progress (mäkinen and olkinuoro, 2004). the researchers concluded that the ability to plan and regulate study may become a generalised skill that is used on an on-going basis rather than just as a coping strategy for a specific stressful situation. this suggests that planning and regulating study could be a strategy that students can develop over time which may become a habitual strategy for managing stress and improving academic achievement. pintrich (2004) notes that students in postsecondary settings have more autonomy in terms of structuring their study environment to enhance learning, which is important as much of the learning takes place outside of the college setting. monitoring and removing distractions, as well as having an environment which is conducive to studying, are important means of applying selfregulation strategies to facilitate learning (zimmerman, 1998). the next section will look in more detail at the relationship between behavioural selfregulated learning and achievement, with a particular focus on a research study by flynn, kinsella and o’connor (2012). exploring the relationship between behavioural self-regulated learning and academic achievement  a cross-sectional study (n=598) on self-regulated learning and academic achievement in third level students (flynn et al., 2012) found that behavioural self-regulation strategies, rather than cognitive self-regulation strategies, were a stronger predictor of academic achievement in high performing students. in addition, the findings in relation to stress showed that behavioural self-regulation was also a predictor of self-reported stress among journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 4 gallagher and flynn making a case for behaviour based learning strategies students, with students higher in behavioural self-regulated learning reporting lower stress levels. flynn et al.’s (2012) research suggests behavioural strategies (such as managing time, study environment and seeking support) may be more general in nature (e.g. used by students in a consistent way regardless of course or study discipline) than cognitive strategies, (which may be more specific to context, course or individual differences). therefore, interventions focusing on behavioural change in terms of management of time, effort and environment and help seeking may be beneficial to all students in terms of enhancing academic achievement. flynn et al. (2012) reported that behavioural self-regulation strategies most strongly correlated with academic achievement, indexed in terms of self-reported current grade, were management of time and study environment. self-regulated learning strategies were measured using the motivated strategies for learning questionnaire (mslq; pintrich et al., 1991). the study also found that certain groups within the sample reported a higher use of cognitive and behavioural strategies, namely mature students (over the age of 23 on entry to college) relative to non-mature students, and postgraduate students relative to undergraduate students. although the findings must be interpreted in the light of limited sample representativeness (that is the majority of participants reported grades of 2.1 and above), they suggest that interventions involving the direct teaching of skills including management of time and study environment and effort regulation should begin as early as possible at undergraduate level to ease the transition and adjustment into the third level environment, and to help bridge the gap between students’ actual and expected academic performance. self-regulated learning; from theory to practice  according to boekaerts (1999), the concept of self-regulated learning has been embraced by policy makers, teachers, educators and parents as key to successful learning in school and beyond. in her article boekaerts notes that policy makers have devoted attention and funding to reorganising schools to incorporate powerful new learning environments that provide students with new opportunities to learn according to basic principles of selfjournal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 5 gallagher and flynn making a case for behaviour based learning strategies regulated learning. however, she identifies the need to make a clear distinction between learning activities that are student-initiated versus learning activities that are teacher led. boekaerts (1999) defines self-directed learning activities as spontaneous and driven by personal goals, whereas teacher initiated goals are driven by the wishes, needs and expectations of others. the researcher (boekaerts, 1997) notes that in general, teachers tend to guide the learning process towards a specific learning outcome and she recommends that in order for self-regulated learning to develop, teachers must create powerful learning environments (in both formal settings and within every day learning) that enable the student to actively participate and reflect on the learning process. the author differentiates between ‘external regulation’, which leaves the learner with little responsibility for the learning process, and an alternative approach called ‘scaffolding’, in which the teacher provides an adaptable and temporary support system (to allow the student to develop expertise), eventually reverting to the role of coach, and finally receding support as the student gains confidence and experience (boekaerts, 1997). boekaerts also advocates that in order to become self-regulated learners, students should be allowed autonomy in choice of task, time management and learning strategies, with the opportunity to reflect on strategies used and effort allocation. in summary, the literature on self-regulated learning supports the view that students can actively and proactively manage and develop their own cognitive, motivational and selfmanagement behaviours to enhance academic performance. although evidence in the literature and in practice (e.g. learning development provision ) endorses interventions aimed at enhancing students’ management of resources, time and study environment, it has been reported (vrugt and oort, 2008) that there is very little data available regarding the relationship between achieving goals and resource management strategies. undoubtedly, systematic evaluations of interventions are needed to clarify, firstly, whether interventions can lead to changes in behavioural self-regulation at third level, and secondly, whether changes in behavioural self-regulation are predictive of increase in academic performance. pintrich (2004) states that the main goal of self-regulated learning models should be used to build conceptual, scientific models which can be tested empirically both in the laboratory and in the classroom, and through practical applications to help guide and inspire research in the field of student motivation and learning. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 6 gallagher and flynn making a case for behaviour based learning strategies behavioural self-regulated learning and student learning development services boekaerts (1997) recommends that self-regulated learning should be 1) student rather than teacher led in terms of choice of task, learning strategy and management of time and 2) include opportunities for informal everyday learning, as well as learning in a formal environment. therefore, this paper puts forward the opinion that student learning development services in higher education institutes are in a key position to provide students with the scaffolding to become self-regulated learners who can manage their own time and resources to improve employability skills and academic performance. providing students with support in terms of time management, self-management and resource allocation is already a core part of the services offered by many student learning development services. however, this article suggests that more concentrated interventions focused on helping students to develop the tools to regulate behaviour, will not only help improve academic performance, but will also help students to develop the employability skills required to adapt to an ever changing and challenging employment market. also, student learning development services can provide an informal learning environment where the student decides on the personal or academic goals and behaviours they wish to focus on (as recommended by boekaerts, 1999), whereas academic departments are focused on students achieving specific academic tasks and learning outcomes. in addition, student learning development services are concerned with both the academic and personal development of students, whereas other student support services may have a more specific brief, e.g. the student counselling service is concerned primarily with the personal and emotional development of the student and the careers advisory service is concerned with helping students to develop and utilise employability skills to gain employment. also, student learning development services activities include engagement of the student in the learning process, including goal setting, planning, time management and reflection on outcomes, which are core principles within self-regulated learning models (e.g. pintrich, 2004). therefore, student learning development services are in a strong position to provide students with the opportunities to develop behavioural self-regulation skills with the aim of enhancing academic performance and employability skills. the next section will look at specific examples of interventions from trinity college dublin learning development services which were designed and implemented to help students improve time and resource management and academic performance. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 7 gallagher and flynn making a case for behaviour based learning strategies practical examples of interventions from student learning development services, trinity college dublin, to help students to develop time, study and resource management skills  student learning development services in trinity college dublin, ireland, provide individual, group and online support to help students to become active, proactive and selfregulated learners. the service provides individual consultations and a drop in service, as well as delivering generic skills workshops and customised workshops, to groups of students and departments. student learning development services are based on the principles of self-regulated learning theory, namely to help students to develop and utilise ‘skill’ ‘will’ and ‘self-management’ strategies to maximise academic achievement. examples include interventions aimed at helping students to set, monitor and review learning goals, to develop critical thinking and problem solving skills, writing skills, and time and self-management skills. a core aim of the service is to help students to gain practical experience and knowledge of their behaviour and how it impacts on academic performance. these types of interventions may be familiar to other providers of student learning development services within different universities. however, these examples illustrate how student learning development services can provide the scaffolding, learning opportunities, and practical experience to help students direct, reflect on and amend their own behaviours to enhance academic outcomes. the examples given here focus on helping students 1) to improve time management within an exam setting 2) address procrastination behaviour, and 3) enhance employability by gaining experience of training other students (e.g. through the peer mentorship programme). exam simulation  an example of an intervention aimed at helping students to monitor, review and improve time and self-management skills is an exam simulation, where students can practise answering questions or writing notes under timed (2 hours) and simulated (exam hall) conditions prior to sitting the actual exam, as a way of practicing and improving time and study management strategies prior to the actual exam. the feedback from this event shows that students find it very helpful in terms of ironing out any poor study habits, such as poor use of time and study environment, and students develop a clear idea of their academic performance under realistic exam conditions. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 8 gallagher and flynn making a case for behaviour based learning strategies addressing procrastination and time management issues (pilot project)  another project aimed at helping students to address issues relating to time management and procrastination was a project piloted in 2012 and 2013, aimed at helping students to gain a better understanding of the reasons why they procrastinate and to help them to implement strategies to overcome this behaviour. research on behavioural interventions for university students (tuckman and schouwenburg, 2004) found that behavioural interventions, such as restructuring the study environment, social or group influence, and task and time management resources, such as weekly schedules, can reduce, if not eliminate, procrastination behaviours. the series of sessions run by the student learning development service at trinity college dublin were designed and delivered by dr tamara o’connor (2013), educational psychologist and student learning advisor. the workshops consisted of information provision, exercises, assessment, discussion, case studies, and homework, in particular looking at how the act of procrastinating impacted on participants’ feelings and behaviours. qualitative feedback from those who attended the sessions indicated that students found the intervention both helpful and reassuring in tackling and addressing procrastination issues. these anecdotal findings seem to suggest that behavioural self-regulation is responsive to intervention at third-level, however, in order to implement these interventions on a more formal and on-going basis, student learning development services would need to look at more systematic methods of evaluating the interventions, in addition to qualitative feedback and comments from students. ‘train the trainer’ sessions for student peer mentors  student learning development services in trinity college dublin work closely with academic departments and student groups concerned with enhancing the student experience and easing the transition into the third level environment. these include the undergraduate and postgraduate students’ union bodies, the mature students officer, and the peer mentor and peer support programme – (an initiative where students help fellow students with the challenges of the third level environment through social, personal and academic interventions). student learning development services provides ‘train the ‘trainer’ sessions to peer mentors on a range of topics such as time and self-management and exam preparation, which the peer mentors then deliver via workshops to groups of fellow students. this activity helps the student mentors to gain experience in teaching and journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 9 gallagher and flynn making a case for behaviour based learning strategies presenting to student groups, as well as helping to disseminate student learning development interventions to a wider group of students. seeking support has been identified as an important aspect of self-regulated learning models (e.g. pintrich, 2004) and a strong predictor of academic achievement (e.g. flynn et al., 2012). by training student mentors to review and improve their own time-management and exam preparation skills, as well as supporting other students who need to improve these skills, student learning development services are encouraging students to develop self-regulated learning behaviours to enhance academic achievement and employability. in summary, a key feature of student learning development services, trinity college dublin, is to provide students with practical opportunities to experience, evaluate and enhance their time and self-management skills (e.g. the exam simulation event and procrastination support group). although the procrastination support group was conducted as a pilot study, a potential next stage in development would be to collaborate with students, and if possible, learning development services in other universities to design, deliver and systematically evaluate interventions aimed at helping students to develop the time and self-management skills to enhance academic performance and employability skills. conclusion  the case for helping students to develop behavioural self-management skills is compelling both from an industry and academic perspective. the ‘education at a glance report’ (heckmann, 2013) produced by the oecd shows an increase in the number of individuals across the european union participating in third level education. the report also demonstrates that individuals with third level education have higher earning potential than their peers who do not have the same level of educational attainment. there are a number of examples from research that advocate interventions to help students to improve the use of behavioural self-regulation strategies, such as time management, restructuring the study environment in order to enhance academic achievement (e.g. tuckman et al., 2004; mcmillan, 2010; flynn et al., 2012). however, researchers (e.g. vrugt and oort, 2008) observe that there is a lack of data on the journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 10 gallagher and flynn making a case for behaviour based learning strategies relationship between resource management and achieving goals, and pintrich (2004) recommends the need for systematic evaluation of interventions. in conclusion, research suggests that there is a lack of evidence on the relationship between the development of resource management behaviour and improved performance in students. this author recommends that student learning development practitioners work collaboratively to design, deliver and evaluate interventions to build up a body of evidence and support for behavioural interventions aimed at enhancing students’ selfregulated learning behaviour. references  archer, w. and davison, j. (2008) graduate employability: what do employers think and want? london: the council for industry and higher education [online]. available at: http://ec.europa.eu/education/higher-education/doc/business/graduate_en.pdf (accessed: 30 july 2013). boekaerts, m. (1997) ‘self-regulated learning: a new concept embraced by researchers, policy makers, educators, teachers and students’, learning and instruction, 7(2), pp. 161-186. boekaerts, m. (1999) ‘self-regulated learning: where are we today?’, international journal of educational research, 31(6), pp. 445-457. bridgstock, r. (2009) ‘the graduate attributes we’ve overlooked: enhancing employability through career management skills’, higher education research and development, 28(1), pp. 31-44. confederation of british industry (2006) cbi/pertemps employment trends survey 2006. london: cbi publications. europe 2020 targets (2013) the 5 targets for the eu in 2020 [online]. available at: http://ec.europa.eu/europe2020/targets/eu-targets/index_en.htm (accessed: 1 august 2013). journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 11 http://ec.europa.eu/education/higher-education/doc/business/graduate_en.pdf http://ec.europa.eu/europe2020/targets/eu-targets/index_en.htm gallagher and flynn making a case for behaviour based learning strategies flynn, n., kinsella, w. and o’connor, t. (2012) self-regulated learning as a predictor of academic achievement and stress in third-level students. unpublished dissertation. university college dublin. heckmann, c. (2013) ‘european union country note’, education at a glance 2013: oecd indicators [online]. available at: http://www.oecd.org/edu/ (accessed: 1 august 2013). mäkinen, j. and olkinuora, e. (2004) ‘university students’ situational reaction tendencies: reflections on general study orientations, learning strategies and study success’, scandinavian journal of educational research, 48(5), pp. 477-491. mcmillan, w.j. (2010) ‘‘your thrust is to understand’ – how academically successful students learn’, teaching in higher education, 15(1), pp. 1-13. o’connor, t. (2013) procrastination group report. evaluation report. student learning development services trinity college dublin. pintrich, p.r., smith, d., garcia, t., and mckeachie, w. (1991) a manual for the use of the motivated strategies for learning questionnaire (mslq). ann arbour, mi: the university of michigan. pintrich, p.r. (2000) ‘the role of goal orientation in self-regulated learning’, in boekaerts, m., pintrich, p.r. and zeidner, m. (eds.) handbook of self-regulation. san diego, ca: academic press, pp. 451-502. pintrich, p.r. (2004) ‘a conceptual framework for assessing motivation and self-regulated learning in college students’, educational psychology review, 16(4), pp. 385-407. tuckman, b.w. and schouwenberg, h.c. (2004) ‘behavioural interventions for reducing procrastination among university students’, in schouwenburg, h.c., lay, c.h., pychyl, t.a. and ferrari, j.r. (eds.) counselling the procrastinator in academic settings. washington dc: american psychological association, pp. 91-103. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 12 http://www.oecd.org/edu/ gallagher and flynn making a case for behaviour based learning strategies vrugt, a. and oort, f.j. (2008) ‘metacognition, achievement goals, study strategies and academic achievement: pathways to achievement’, metacognition and learning, 3(2), pp. 123-146. zimmerman, b.j. and martinez-pons, m. (1986) ‘development of a structured interview for assessing student use of self-regulated learning strategies’, american educational research journal, 23(4), pp. 614-628. zimmerman, b.j. (1998) ‘academic studying and the development of personal skill: a selfregulatory perspective’, educational psychology, 33(2/3), pp. 73-86. author details maeve gallagher is a student learning advisor with the student learning development services at trinity college dublin. maeve is a chartered occupational psychologist (british psychological society). she has previously worked as a careers advisor (dublin city university) and as a researcher in the area of continuous improvement and innovation (centre for research in innovation management, university of brighton). dr niamh flynn is an educational psychologist and lecturer of psychology in dublin business school. her research interests lie in self-regulated learning, procrastination and stress in third-level students. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 13 making a case for behaviour based learning strategies in supporting students’ academic performance abstract introduction self-regulated learning skill, will and self-management aspects of self-regulated learning exploring the relationship between behavioural self-regulated learning and academic achievement self-regulated learning; from theory to practice behavioural self-regulated learning and student learning development services practical examples of interventions from student learning development services, trinity college dublin, to help students to develop time, study and resource management skills exam simulation addressing procrastination and time management issues (pilot project) ‘train the trainer’ sessions for student peer mentors conclusion references author details literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special edition: researching pdp practice: november 2010 useful or just another fad? staff perceptions of personal development planning jo powell birmingham city university, uk abstract the quality assurance agency (qaa, 2001) suggests that all higher education institutions must offer every student the opportunity to consider their own personal development and promoted personal development planning (pdp) as an important part of supporting and engaging students in their own development whilst within higher education and beyond. the term personal development planning means many things to many people and institutions often appear to adopt their own definition of it. this can be complicated further when faculties or departments within an institution each create their own meaning. research indicates that staff perceptions of the material they are teaching has a direct link with students’ opinions of these activities, so in order to promote and resource pdp effectively it is essential to consider what staff actually think of pdp. this paper considers the difference between the perceived usefulness of pdp and its elements (reflection, self awareness, action planning and employability), and what it is that impacts upon that view of pdp. the data collected offers the opportunity for both qualitative and quantitative analysis, using free text and ranks of usefulness through an online questionnaire across different faculties within birmingham city university. the research suggests that both pdp as a process and its elements are perceived as useful by academic staff and it also indicates that the elements are seen as significantly more useful in isolation. it further suggests the rationale for the ranking of pdp as a process was directly linked to perception rather than experience. key words: personal development planning; pdp; staff perceptions. powell useful or just another fad? staff perceptions of personal development planning introduction at birmingham city university (bcu) an interest in personal development planning (pdp) stemmed from the progress files working group which was formed as a sub group of the learning and teaching committee in 2001. the focus of that group changed during its existence, and after two years was almost wholly concerned with pdp. membership of the group gradually changed, leaving a self selected group of dedicated and enthusiastic champions. the view this group held of pdp was holistic, spanning the whole life of a student as opposed to being purely about academic development. the group encouraged and supported faculties to embed or integrate pdp in a way that met theirs and their students’ needs. this led to one faculty deciding upon a one size fits all plan of pdp, using a top down approach, with others devolving power to courses and modules to embed where appropriate. the integration of pdp across the organisation has continued to vary from faculty to faculty, with the responsibility for how it is done still decided locally rather than following a fixed university wide strategy. to support staff to understand and integrate both pdp and employability resources were created (lawton, 2004). the purpose of these was to outline and explain the rationale and importance of both pdp and employability, offering examples and activities for academic staff to embed or use, appropriate for their own courses. broadly, within bcu the elements that are considered to be the pdp process are reflection, self awareness, action planning and employability. these elements are both used in isolation or blended as part of modules. how pdp is delivered also varies – in some cases it is peripheral to subject content, in others it is wholly embedded and central to the programme of study. i suspect that the way pdp is delivered leads to a value being associated with it. this varying perception of value of pdp will be explored in this article. the research has focussed on gaining a clearer understanding of perceived usefulness of pdp as a whole in comparison with the constituent elements of the pdp process. this article will not only explore staff perceptions of pdp and its elements, but also the rationale underlying these perceptions. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 2 powell useful or just another fad? staff perceptions of personal development planning literature review the concept of a progress file was recommended to the sector through the dearing report (1997). dearing (1997, p.3) suggested that higher education institutions (heis) should develop a progress file that offered students the opportunity to ‘monitor, build and reflect upon their personal development’. the progress file was intended to be an active document, developing and changing with the student, offering far more than just a record of achievements. the qaa (2001) stated that students should have the opportunity to consider their own personal development within the higher education (he) environment and therefore the opportunity for students to consider their own personal development should be mandatory and operational across the whole he system for all awards by 2005/06. fallows and steven (2000, p.76) suggested that ‘higher education in particular must provide graduates with the skills to be able to operate professionally within the environment required for the ‘learning age’ or ‘learning society’. the importance of recognition and recording of skills had been mooted for some time (harvey et al., 1997) and pdp was a process which could support this. the definition offered by the qaa (2001, p.2) was ‘a structured and supported process undertaken by an individual to reflect upon their own learning, performance and/or achievement and to plan for their personal, educational and career development’. the dearing report and the qaa guidelines outlined pdp type activities that had been in use in he for many years (slight and bloxham, 2005). in particular the idea of the reflective practitioner (schön, 1983) had been used widely in vocational subjects and integrated into professional training such as nursing and teaching. as well as the qaa guidelines, further support for pdp was offered by the higher education academy (hea, 2005) who outlined characteristics of effective pdp practice in universities. hea suggested that for pdp to be effective, integration with mainstream academic activities as well as links to learning and programme outcomes was an important aspect. also support and endorsement by both the academic staff and the institution as a whole was advocated. difficulties with integrating pdp into the curriculum have been highlighted by various authors. davis and mannion (2005, p.3) suggested from their research that ‘pdp was not seen as knowledge development nor was it discipline specific, so, it was not an easy task to convince the academics of its value’. while slight and bloxham (2005, p.11) suggest ‘current political regimes provide active encouragement for degrees that demonstrate journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 3 powell useful or just another fad? staff perceptions of personal development planning relevance to the labour market while critics lament the devaluing of knowledge for knowledge’s sake’. what may complicate matters further is the links between pdp and employability (ward, 2006; 2009). pdp sits uncomfortably with some academic staff who have concerns for their competence to deliver material outside of their area of expertise (clegg and bradley, 2006b), and other fears over the pedagogic value of pdp and it not being seen as part of their role (clegg and bradley, 2006b). these views may be shaped by their discipline and organisational culture (henkel, 2000) and are sometimes entrenched in tradition (clegg and bradley, 2006a) the majority of published studies examine student experiences of pdp (gough et al., 2003), using the student body as the research sample. this supported the notion that the experience students have of pdp derived from the academic staff that teach them (qaa, 2009). for staff and students to benefit from personal development planning as a concept both the diverse student body and the large numbers of teaching staff need to develop an understanding of both the purpose of pdp and how it can affect their practice and learning (clegg and bradley, 2006a). ‘the success of a pdp framework depends on the engagement of and the essential value brought to the process by academic staff combined with management support’ (qaa scotland, 2009, p.28). in their report, qaa scotland further suggested that for student engagement with pdp, staff must be completely aware of, informed and engaged with both the process and the underlying concept and principles of pdp. without this clarity students are likely to receive conflicting messages about the value and importance of pdp, and thus not give it sufficient attention or value. varnava and james (2005) investigated the lack of engagement of tutors and students in the implementation of a paper-based progress file as part of the personal tutoring system at the law school at glamorgan university. lack of time and belief in the core values of pdp by tutors, and a lack of understanding by students were the main reasons given for the poor involvement and belief in pdp. both of these areas are considered to be integral in the embedding of pdp at institutional level by qaa (2009) which outlined key actions for the effective implementation of pdp within heis. key actions were 1) ensuring the ‘views of stakeholders (such as students, staff and employers)’ were sought to ‘inform the journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 4 powell useful or just another fad? staff perceptions of personal development planning continuous enhancement of pdp practice’ and 2) ‘senior management commitment and support for pdp’ (qaa, 2009, p.10). quinton and smallbone (2008, p.107) gave consideration to what makes the implementation of pdp successful or not. they suggested that: …successful implementation requires a blend of the following five areas of good practice: the effective and appropriate use of technology; internal staff champions; support for all staff involved in delivering pdp; clear and meaningful communication with students; and the capture of the institution's cumulative experience over time. good practice within the conceptual aspects of pdp would include a clear vision of where responsibility lies for pdp within a university, a shared understanding of the purpose of pdp and the promotion of a pdp culture which engages both students and staff. ward (2001) discussed the need to get the right balance between overarching institutional policy and getting what he described as psychological engagement with pdp by both staff and students. therefore the way in which pdp is introduced or embedded within an institution is of utmost importance. when the balance is not gained, a clear understanding and a dedication to pdp cannot be achieved. method the literature review outlines how important staff are in the successful implementation of pdp. this research considers the perception staff have of the usefulness of pdp and its core elements at bcu (reflection, self awareness, action planning and employability); and any underlying rationale that informed opinions. ethical approval was sought through the bcu education faculty ethics committee and a research questionnaire was designed to gather both qualitative and quantitative data from participants to gain an insight into how useful staff perceive pdp to be and what they think it actually is. the questionnaire was available online in february and march 2009 and open to all 1560 academic staff at bcu from all disciplines. awareness of the research was raised through journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 5 powell useful or just another fad? staff perceptions of personal development planning learning and teaching fellows in each faculty, e-mails to all staff and message board postings on the university intranet to which all staff have access, however it is impossible to state that all staff were aware of the opportunity to participate. the questionnaire took approximately 15 minutes to complete if all questions were answered fully. the questionnaire was externally hosted, which secured participant anonymity, offering staff the opportunity to be honest and open without fear of identification. staff were asked to rate their perceptions of how useful they thought pdp was to their students on a likert scale from 1 (useless) to 4 (very useful). they were further asked to explain why that rating was given. staff were also asked how useful they thought it was to provide students with the opportunity to: reflect on their own skills; to become self aware; to plan to develop their skills; and to enhance their employability. this was based purely on a likert scale rating. the data gained from the questionnaire was split into qualitative and quantitative responses and then analysed. the quantitative data was examined using the computer software spss to check for any significance, leaving the qualitative free text data to be explored and considered to see if any themes emerged. results and discussion 125 responses were received from academic and learning support staff from across the institution. from the data two main areas were investigated – a statistical analysis of the difference in perceived usefulness of pdp and its elements and a qualitative consideration of the reasons for pdp being ranked as it was. the responses from the questionnaire fell into four categories outlining staff perceptions of usefulness from useless to very useful. figure 1 outlines the number of ratings of how pdp and each of the elements were ranked. figure 1. pdp reflection self awareness action planning employability useless 2.8% 1.9% 2.8% 3.7% 2.8% not very useful 15.0% 4.6% 4.6% 5.5% 4.6% useful 38.3% 29.6% 26.6% 33.0% 28.7% very useful 43.9% 63.9% 66.1% 57.8% 63.9% journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 6 powell useful or just another fad? staff perceptions of personal development planning figure 1 shows that both pdp and its elements are seen as useful; with only 17.8% of participants considering pdp to be useless or not very useful. when ranking the elements, the percentage of participants who perceived them to be useless or not very useful drops to: 6.5% for reflection, 7.4% for self awareness, 9.2% for action planning and 7.4% for employability. the data indicated that pdp was seen as less useful than the elements of the pdp process. to consider this further a wilcoxon signed ranks non-parametric test was carried out on the data set. the results from this indicated that pdp was seen as significantly less useful than its elements (p≤0.001).the research data also offered the opportunity to consider if there were any differences in perception using faculty as a variable. when the data was considered looking at the 6 faculties within the institution it demonstrated lower significance levels than the overall data set. the data was again analysed using wilcoxon signed ranks with the data split by faculties. in the birmingham institute of art and design both reflection and action planning were seen as significantly more useful than pdp (p≤0.05); and in the health faculty both self awareness and action planning were seen as significantly more useful (p≤0.05). the results from the other four faculties showed no significant difference in perceived usefulness of pdp and its elements. these differences are intriguing and an interesting subject for further consideration, they are however very difficult to comment on based upon the current data. from a starting point that pdp as a process is seen as useful, the data was then unpicked and interpreted to understand why its elements were seen as even more useful. one explanation could be due to the understanding of the terminology or concept being muddled or uncertain. another factor is that pdp is seen by some people as an inconvenient and irrelevant interruption into delivering subject content. this is something that would benefit from further investigation to gain a clearer understanding. the qualitative analysis below however, does go some way to clarifying the underlying rationale for their perception of the pdp process. the second area considered by the research was the rationale given for how they ranked the usefulness of pdp. in order to complete the analysis the data was explored to see if any themes emerged; these were then pooled together and split into clusters of interlinked themes. from this process the responses fell into two categories; one in which the opinion appeared to be based in or linked to their own or their students’ experience; and the journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 7 powell useful or just another fad? staff perceptions of personal development planning second grouping that appeared to be unsubstantiated perception. figure 2 outlines the percentage of responses falling into each category. in both categories it was perception that influenced ratings the most. figure 2. perception personal experience useless or not very useful 72.2% 27.8% useful or very useful 70.7% 29.3% when pdp was ranked as useless or not very useful, the perception offered appeared to be based around a view that pdp was a concept or fixed structure imposed upon the curriculum by the institution. it was also claimed that the attitude that staff hold is also mirrored by students or vice versa. examples of reasoning include: we continually get barraged with new 'concepts'. (participant 35) they regard it as an imposition, i agree. (participant 75) students do not grasp the significance of it. however, this may be because most staff do not engage with the process. (participant 62) often comments from this group showed judgements and a resistance to integrate or engage in pdp. the reason given for this is that pdp is perceived as ‘an imposition’ or often because of the perception that students are not able, or not willing, to engage within the pdp process. there are also links with the work of clegg and bradley (2006b) in relation to the pedagogic value of pdp. staff commented that they failed to see the value of such work and that it took time away from subject delivery and the quality and commitment to learning and teaching. one participant stated: most have little pedagogical value and take time away from the valuable commitment to learning and teaching that many of us have. (participant 35) journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 8 powell useful or just another fad? staff perceptions of personal development planning looking at the reasons participants gave when they rated pdp as useful or better, their experiences were often based on feedback or experience of students. the comments below indicate that staff often saw or experienced change in student perceptions after some time, and not always immediately: we've had students come back to us after graduation saying ‘now i get it’. (participant 47) i sometimes hear students in final year remark how they now appreciate the value of what has been included in this field. (participant 87) because i would like it! (participant 124) this indicates not only is the experience of their students important and influential, but also their own personal experience informs staff perceptions of the value of pdp. the split between experience and perception is a considerable one. this may indicate that for many staff there is a lack of experience of pdp, leaving only the negative opinions that they shared within this data set. this lack of experience may be due to the responsibilities staff have over curriculum design or the perception of what their teaching role is. this gives backing to the findings of the qaa scotland (2009) in that for pdp to be effective staff must be engaged, and for them to be engaged they must understand and see the purpose of pdp. when pdp was seen as useful or very useful it is clear that participants have a belief in the process. the belief they hold is that pdp is necessary for the future development of students both within education and beyond. this is indicated by comments such as: developing themselves to become useful within their chosen specialism equips them for the real world. (participant 103) i think that the experience of compiling the profile will be an empowering and enabling experience for students. (participant 41) journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 9 powell useful or just another fad? staff perceptions of personal development planning there is clearly a link to current literature in relation to the connectedness of staff and student perceptions (varnava and james, 2005) with one participant suggesting: it is dependent on how they engage with the concept; which in turn is dependent on how it is put across. (participant 12) there were some comments from participants outlining that sufficient resources or support is not available: too many students and not enough staff to implement it. (participant 97) we use tools inappropriate for the task. (participant 62) some staff have a fixed perception of what pdp is e.g. an externally assessed thing rather than a process that can be used personally to develop oneself: students are being asked to internalise the logic of new managerialism by reproducing the assumptions of presenting an apparently reflexive self subject to external scrutiny. (participant 35) this suggests that often academic staff do not see pdp as a personal exploration. instead it is seen as 'a module that has to be passed' (participant 52) or 'death by reflection' (participant 62). conclusion the aim of this article was to report on and interpret the perceptions of staff at bcu in relation to pdp and its elements. the findings were based on a relatively small sample drawn from one institution and offering a broadly representative sample from each faculty. the respondents generally regarded pdp as positive, this could be as participants were more willing to share positive opinions rather than negative. due to the methods adopted in recruiting participants those who took part chose to do so. in maintaining their anonymity it has not been possible to draw any conclusions about their reasons for taking journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 10 powell useful or just another fad? staff perceptions of personal development planning part. however, is it possible to infer that those that participated genuinely see pdp as a useful concept. although pdp was seen as a useful process by many, some staff held a view that pdp is a political inconvenience; an intrusion to the academic culture; and an undesirable addition to their current workload, which reflects other research (quinton and smallbone, 2008). often this same group of academic staff saw it as a fixed procedure rather than a holistic process. these perceptions outlined may have been impacted upon by a lack of understanding or a particular interpretation of what pdp is. this certainly appeared in the data and would be at odds with the overarching holistic interpretation the original progress files working group at bcu had in relation to pdp. what is also interesting is that there is a significant difference between how pdp and its elements are regarded by academic staff with each of the elements being seen as significantly more useful than pdp as a whole. my inclination based on my experience and the longstanding use of the elements (schön, 1983; slight and bloxham, 2005) is to believe the elements offer more clarity in what they actually are and how they can be used to support student learning. it is clear that there are many academic staff within the institution that believe in, and value the pdp process. from these it is anticipated that clear communication is taking place with students about the purpose and value of pdp. further investigation into this area may support the premise that staff communicate that value to students (qaa, 2009). what the research has demonstrated very clearly is that at bcu over 82% of the participants saw pdp as either useful or very useful, this number increases even further in relation to each of the elements of pdp. this would indicate that there are a number of staff who speak highly of this process, this bodes well with the suggestions of quinton and smallbone (2008) in relation to internal staff champions being required to successfully implement pdp. the data indicated that there is clear and meaningful communication with students. one possible avenue for future research is the consideration of student perception and experience of pdp at bcu to see if there is a comparison with that of staff. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 11 powell useful or just another fad? staff perceptions of personal development planning this research offers a snap shot of the views of some bcu staff and how they view pdp in one given moment. it does not claim to offer transferability across the sector, rather proposes some interesting data and interpretations that may be worth looking into at different institutions and further and deeper exploration at bcu. the next stage here at bcu is to start to untangle individual definitions to understand what staff think pdp is. this may offer further clarification on their ratings, and also outline some of the preconceptions and misunderstandings that exist. this will then allow a clear direction institutionally to develop greater knowledge and understanding of what we mean by pdp. acknowledgement this paper is an outcome of the national action research network on researching and evaluating personal development planning and e-portfolio practice project (2007-2010). the project was led by the university of bolton in association with the university of worcester and centre for recording achievement, and in national collaboration with the university of bedfordshire, bournemouth university and university of bradford. the project was funded by the higher education academy, national teaching fellowship project strand. more details about the project can be found at: http://www.recordingachievement.org/research/narn-tree.html. references clegg, s. and bradley, s. (2006a) ‘models of personal development planning: practice and processes’, british educational research journal, 32(1), pp. 57–76. clegg, s. and bradley, s. (2006b) ‘the implementation of progress files in higher education:  reflection as national policy’, higher education, 51, pp. 465–486. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 12 http://www.recordingachievement.org/research/narn-tree.html powell useful or just another fad? staff perceptions of personal development planning davis, m. and mannion, m. (2005) ‘integrating personal development planning into the curriculum’, enhancing student employability: higher education and workforce development: 9th quality in higher education international seminar. birmingham 27-28 january. dearing, r. (1997) higher education in the learning society: report of the national committee of inquiry in higher education. london: stationery office. fallows, s. and steven, c. (2000) ‘building employability skills into the higher education curriculum: a university wide initiative’, education and training, 42(2), pp. 75-82. gough, d., kiwan, d., sutcliffe, k., simpson, d. and houghton, n. (2003) a systematic map and synthesis review of the effectiveness of personal development planning for improving student learning. london: eppi-centre, social science research unit. available at: http://eppi.ioe.ac.uk/cms/linkclick.aspx?fileticket=xslhvsvxa10%3d&tabid=309&m id=1188&language=en-us (accessed: 23 april 2010). harvey, l., moon, s. and geall, v. (1997) graduates’ work: organisational change and students’ attributes. birmingham: centre for research into quality. henkel, m. (2000) academic identities and policy change in higher education. london: jessica kingsley. higher education academy (hea) (2005) guide for busy academics no.1: personal development planning. york: hea. available at: http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/resources/detail/resource_database/id66_guide_for_b usy_academics_no1 (accessed: 27 may 2010). lawton, r. (2004) embedding pdp and employability. available at: http://www.bcu.ac.uk/docs/downloads/studentservices/employability/embedding%2 0pdp%20and%20employability%20-%20complete%20file%202008.pdf (accessed: 26 feb 2010). journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 13 http://eppi.ioe.ac.uk/cms/linkclick.aspx?fileticket=xslhvsvxa10%3d&tabid=309&mid=1188&language=en-us http://eppi.ioe.ac.uk/cms/linkclick.aspx?fileticket=xslhvsvxa10%3d&tabid=309&mid=1188&language=en-us http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/resources/detail/resource_database/id66_guide_for_busy_academics_no1 http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/resources/detail/resource_database/id66_guide_for_busy_academics_no1 http://www.bcu.ac.uk/docs/downloads/studentservices/employability/embedding%20pdp%20and%20employability%20-%20complete%20file%202008.pdf http://www.bcu.ac.uk/docs/downloads/studentservices/employability/embedding%20pdp%20and%20employability%20-%20complete%20file%202008.pdf powell useful or just another fad? staff perceptions of personal development planning quality assurance agency (qaa) (2001) guidelines for he progress files. available at: http://www.qaa.ac.uk/academicinfrastructure/progressfiles/guidelines/progfile2001. asp (accessed: 11 may 2010). quality assurance agency (2009) personal development planning: guidance for institutional policy and practice in higher education. gloucester: qaa. available at: http://www.qaa.ac.uk/academicinfrastructure/progressfiles/guidelines/pdp/pdpgui de.pdf (accessed: 14 april 2010). quality assurance agency scotland (2009) a toolkit for enhancing personal development planning strategy, policy and practice in higher education institutions. available at: http://www.qaa.ac.uk/scotland/pdp/pdp_toolkit_final.pdf (accessed: 12 may 2010). quinton, s. and smallbone, t. (2008) ‘pdp implementation at english universities: what are the issues?’, journal of further and higher education, 32(2), pp. 99-109. schön, d. (1983) the reflective practitioner: how professionals think in action. new york: basic books. slight, a. and bloxham, s. (2005) ‘embedding personal development planning into the social sciences’, learning and teaching in the social science, 2(3), pp. 191-206. varnava, t. and james, h. (2005) ‘reflections on pdp in law’, socio-legal studies association annual conference. university of liverpool 30th march – 1st april. ward, r. (2001) ‘developing and implementing institutional policy on pdp: setting the scene’, in jackson, n. and ward, r. (eds.) personal development planning: institutional case studies. york: learning and teaching support network, p.2-6. ward, r. (2006) personal development planning and employability: learning and employability series 2. york: the higher education academy. ward, r. (2009) personal development planning and employability (revised edn): learning and employability series 2. york: the higher education academy. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 14 http://www.qaa.ac.uk/academicinfrastructure/progressfiles/guidelines/progfile2001.asp http://www.qaa.ac.uk/academicinfrastructure/progressfiles/guidelines/progfile2001.asp http://www.qaa.ac.uk/academicinfrastructure/progressfiles/guidelines/pdp/pdpguide.pdf http://www.qaa.ac.uk/academicinfrastructure/progressfiles/guidelines/pdp/pdpguide.pdf http://www.qaa.ac.uk/scotland/pdp/pdp_toolkit_final.pdf powell useful or just another fad? staff perceptions of personal development planning author details jo powell is the tutor for pdp and employability at birmingham city university. her role is to support and develop personal development planning and employability within and outside of the curriculum through supporting staff, developing resources and championing good practice. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 15 useful or just another fad? staff perceptions of personal development planning abstract introduction literature review method results and discussion conclusion acknowledgement references author details literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 10: november 2016 active learning in higher education as a restorative practice: a lecturer’s reflections dr emma roberts leeds trinity university, uk abstract the critique of the ‘sage on the stage’ approach to university teaching is particularly relevant for applied fields such as business management where a ‘guide on the side’ approach can instead encourage more active participation from students. a module on people management for second year degree students was modified to involve a greater proportion of student-centred, active learning activities relative to lectures and supported by the participatory mechanisms offered by restorative practice. this paper offers a reflection on how developing higher education (he) pedagogy towards reducing reliance on lecturer defined content shifts both students and lecturers out of their comfort zone. the process of students moving towards greater responsibility seems to require points of abandonment in which a hiatus occurs between student expectation of tutor support and the realisation that self-responsibility is required. in the current context of greater measurement of student satisfaction in he, this poses a challenge for individual academics as well as universities. disruptive and transformational learning experiences require relational support if they are to be successful and academic staff deserve appropriate development opportunities to become more aware and familiar with the new discomfort of the he classroom. keywords: pedagogy; restorative practice; university learning and teaching; active learning; higher education. roberts active learning in higher education as a restorative practice: a lecturer’s reflections journal of learning development in higher education, issue 10: november 2016 2 introduction higher education has seen a shift away from the dominance of the lecture/tutorial and essay/exam style of teaching and assessment, the so-called ‘sage on the stage’ (king, 1993) towards active, cooperative or experiential learning (cavanagh, 2011; hermann, 2013). external pressures such as greater student numbers, prevalence of technology in the classroom, and the employability agenda have all driven an emphasis towards workrelated tasks and professional development of students alongside academic content (leedham, 2009). hagopian (2013, p.10) suggests that we need to rethink the structural architecture of learning and teaching within higher education (he) when the ‘millennial’ students we are now facing increasingly question the ‘structures of generational and intellectual authority’. this is perhaps especially relevant for business and management courses or other vocational courses where team work, cooperation and interpersonal skills are called for. one of the challenges facing he is to design learning environments in which students are actively involved in creating and constructing knowledge. redesigning learning experiences to move towards student-centred learning is therefore likely to involve a broad range of tasks such as group work, short writing tasks, discussions, role-plays, simulations and games which are aimed at decreasing the role and prominence of teacher-centred activity and increasing student participation. furthermore, this shift in emphasis from teacher to student is aimed at a higher level of engagement from the student and is also likely to be disturbing and uncomfortable. zepke (2013) describes the transformations that occurs when students ‘grapple with troublesome knowledge’ as a result of being more actively engaged and emotionally committed to their learning: transformations though are unpredictable, neither teachers nor learners can know what spaces transformations will lead to. this provides an opening to question the current fashions of prescribing what students should have learnt by the end of a course. such prescriptions could place unnecessary limits on learning. (zepke, 2013, p.105) such a movement that challenges students in this way, but also reduces the reliance on the knowledge base of the academic, produces a far less comfortable experience. indeed, the social-cultural model seems to necessitate discomfort on the part of both student and roberts active learning in higher education as a restorative practice: a lecturer’s reflections journal of learning development in higher education, issue 10: november 2016 3 lecturer, as we move beyond the cosiness and self-esteem of our existing expertise. cocreating knowledge alongside students’ demands a preparedness to be uncomfortable and ignorant’ (mcwilliam, 2008, p.268). the shift to a new form of teaching and learning style is likely to present challenges to both students and academic staff in coping with the new demands. the teacher vacating central stage creates a vacuum for all involved and we might ask various questions about what students do, how they manage social interaction, how they manage quality, as well as what new demands are made of the teacher. creating such a space within a learning experience may well facilitate vygotsky’s (1978) ‘zone of proximal development’ i.e. what does the student need to learn next? students can usefully occupy this learning space as the teachers, facilitators, researchers for each other and thereby learn more than they could learn on their own (quay, 2003). nonetheless, as a course leader introducing these practices to a student group, such underlying mechanisms are not clearly visible and need supporting and explaining. lange (2004) reports on a study of adult learners and their learning experience through the lens of transformational learning. she notes the disorientating experience of transformation depends on some stability and restoration to occur in order for the learner to ‘survive’ this disequilibrium. she conceptualises this as the ‘dialectical nature of transformative and restorative learning’ (2004, p.135). this is a very useful way of understanding the role of specific group support practices in the learning process. if the intention is to change students, not just provide them with knowledge, then such disruption needs the guidance of relational support: the dialectic of transformational and restorative learning is vital, for it affirms that transformation is not just an epistemological process involving a change in the worldview and habits of thinking; it is also an ontological process where participants experience a change in their being in the world including their forms of relatedness. (lange, 2004, p.137) in sum, university learning and teaching strategies that promote ‘decentering the teacher’ [sic], encouraging students to take greater responsibility, and ‘destabilising student assumptions about one-way intellectual power’ (hagopian, 2013, p.13), needs to also consider how support and guidance is provided systemically and structurally. in seeking practical tools to address some of these issues, the approach and language of restorative roberts active learning in higher education as a restorative practice: a lecturer’s reflections journal of learning development in higher education, issue 10: november 2016 4 practice was explored as a framework for the student-centred element of learning and assessment. in this paper, i reflect on the process of designing and implementing various changes to typical assessment and learning methods in line with ideas of the ‘flipped classroom’ and social learning through group activities (quay, 2003; biggs and tang, 2009) which involved the use of screen-casting (udell, 2005) to free up class time for student-centred group work rather than teacher-centred lectures. given the shift in emphasis from tutor to student, there are attendant challenges for both parties in re-negotiating this new learning landscape. therefore, i introduced a restorative practices approach as an underpinning framework that offers some practical techniques for facilitating communication, dealing with conflict, and as a way of involving all participants in an inclusive and engaged learning environment. restorative practices (rp) framework restorative practice (rp) has its roots in restorative justice that aims to repair relationships between victim and offender (braithwaite, 1989) rather than simply be a punitive and punishment-based response. more recently, the inclusiveness of the approach has seen restorative practice develop strongly in school settings where teachers are encouraged to learn new ways of responding to students which actively engages them rather than simply punishing bad behaviour. it has hitherto been little recognised as a useful approach within higher education. one of the most useful conceptualisations this approach offers is to focus on the reengagement of learners, suggesting that this might be achieved by changing the actions of those in power: restorative practices support specific androgogical philosophies, both at an organizational level and in the classroom, in a manner that seeks to engage and empower learners while de-emphasizing the expert model of education centred on authority figures. restorative practices offer participatory mechanisms to engage adults who have been conditioned to be passive learners. (adamson and bailie, 2012, p.150) roberts active learning in higher education as a restorative practice: a lecturer’s reflections journal of learning development in higher education, issue 10: november 2016 5 this has been referred to as doing things with students rather than to them or for them based on the terminology of the social discipline window (costello et al., 2009). while this model refers to discipline within a younger education environment, the language remains a powerful descriptor of certain elements of he practice. figure 1. social discipline window (wachtel and mccold, 2004). the ‘restorative’ element of this practice has now become a way of approaching a variety of fields: restorative practices in the workplace (davey, 2007); restorative rhetoric of politics (griffin-padgett and allison, 2010); restorative design (yudelson, 2008); as well in the criminal justice arena e.g. circles of support and accountability (hanvey et al., 2011); and schools (macready, 2009), to the extent that entire cities such as leeds are aiming to become a restorative city (finnis, 2014). however, this movement has not appeared to make much impact on he, with relatively little attention being paid to the potential benefits in engaging under-graduates and other mature learners in restorative learning environments. there is significant discussion of the use of restorative justice to address misconduct issues (kara and macalister, 2010) and yet little specifically assessing the use of restorative practice within the learning environment. adamson and bailie (2012) argue that restorative practice could have a significant impact on how students and academics view learning and growth, and that more research is needed into the impact of restorative practice on adult students and classroom environments. roberts active learning in higher education as a restorative practice: a lecturer’s reflections journal of learning development in higher education, issue 10: november 2016 6 what is provided by this framework is a series of concrete practices that can be used as and when the group feel they need it. in the context of challenging and complex tasks set for groups studying business and management disciplines, this is not designed to be further support that is directed and driven by the tutor but initiated and conducted by the groups of students themselves. restorative practice as a model refers to a spectrum of possible actions from the formal to the informal such that small issues can be dealt with spontaneously, while larger issues can be resolved with the required time and diligence (wachtel and mccold, 2004). a crucial aspect of the whole spectrum of techniques is the need to express one’s own affect and feelings such that the other person understands the impact that their behaviour is having on others. towards the formal end is the group or ‘circle’ and this is the specific restorative practice embedded into the learning experience examined in this paper: circles are a more formal restorative process… a class, a group of students or a group of adults meet in a circle to discuss, answer questions, solve problems, play a game or offer feedback. a circle has a structure, purpose, and focus. it may be proactive or responsive. the topic may be personal, academic or workrelated. circles may be the most adaptable form of restorative practices on the continuum. (costello et al., 2010, p.13) two key elements of the circle process are focused on here: the ‘talking stick’ approach of listening to each person in turn, and the ‘restorative questions’ which focus attention on what is happening and what needs to be done next. the basic premise of the circle format is its egalitarian nature and the ability for all to be seen and heard. this basic feature is enhanced by encouraging opening questions which help people to get to know each other and to hear the quiet ones and dominating ones equally. additionally, when things go wrong, the set of restorative questions from the international institute for restorative practices (www.iirp.edu) help to focus on what has happened and how it has affected each person. it concludes with specific actions that should happen next in order to resolve the issue. the focus of this study was to explore the take-up and use of restorative practices among a second year student group in approaching their group assignment. the research questions were: how does the student group use restorative practices in their independent http://www.iirp.edu/ roberts active learning in higher education as a restorative practice: a lecturer’s reflections journal of learning development in higher education, issue 10: november 2016 7 group assignment? what are student perceptions of the efficacy of the restorative practices adopted? student experience this is a reflection of a second year core module on people management for students on under-graduate business and management programmes into which restorative practices were introduced as a possible group process. the 30 students on the course were allocated to five mixed-ability groups by the tutor and these groups formed the seating arrangements for each classroom session for the duration of the course. the subject content aimed to cover both general line management competencies as well as an overview of the human resource management function and its processes and techniques. students were informed that restorative practices was one way dealing with people management and that therefore the experience of the group-work element of the course was as relevant as the ‘book-knowledge’ they may read about. the two key processes of circle-time and restorative questions were introduced to the group early in the semester and initial group tasks structured by the tutor such that each group felt reasonably experienced in the process before being set the assessed work. nonetheless, the time spent on instruction and guidance on this approach was fairly limited to the following two slides and two, half-hour sessions of circle-time. figure 2. © 2010 international institute for restorative practices: wachtel, t. (2013) defining restorative. retrieved from http://www.iirp.edu/what-is-restorativepractices.php http://www.iirp.edu/what-is-restorative-practices.php http://www.iirp.edu/what-is-restorative-practices.php roberts active learning in higher education as a restorative practice: a lecturer’s reflections journal of learning development in higher education, issue 10: november 2016 8 the groups were then given contemporary issues to explore in which they should design and conduct a primary research data collection project, and produce a group presentation. this was the first time the students were exposed to primary research design and was a deliberately challenging task to be completed over three weeks. following the assessed presentation, students were asked to write reflective reports on two critical incidents that occurred during the group experience, recounting their reflections on people management. this student experience of the module was developed in line with the learning and teaching strategy that sought to encourage student centred-learning. further to this, departmental ethical approval was given to invite all students in the group, after the assessment stage, to participate in a short questionnaire of open questions on the impact of restorative practice on their group, and to take part in an independently facilitated focus group. ten students responded to the questionnaire and seven students volunteered to be in the focus group. the actual usage of restorative practices techniques in managing the group process was mixed but some students clearly felt empowered to use the techniques of restorative practice to resolve specific difficulties. it has also been noticeable that some students have reflected on the process as having longer term benefits, beyond resolving the actual incident or dispute: this was a good experience in learning how to deal with people and to figure out a reasonable solution before firing them, which is what could have easily happened in a real business. (reflection, 13) nonetheless, while the restorative practice techniques were seeking to develop a peer-topeer process, there were significant preferences for leadership from either the elected team leader (who was then expected to use their authority) or from myself as tutor: i felt as though it wasn't as useful as it could have been… the group found it difficult. maybe because it was due to the fact nobody wanted to upset one another. i think this wouldn't have been the case in a workplace as normally a manager or team leader sets up this type of meeting, heads it and is paid to do this particular job, to manage. (reflection, 1) roberts active learning in higher education as a restorative practice: a lecturer’s reflections journal of learning development in higher education, issue 10: november 2016 9 in the event of trying to implement such changes on the group, students also experienced futility and impotence when attempted leadership or group management failed to make the desired impact on other students: i mean, i arranged a team meeting and no-one turned up. so what can i do? you can’t say right all of you have lost five marks, what can you do? (focus group, 8) here it is clear that the use of restorative practice techniques to express the impact on the group and agree outcomes has not always worked and some students wish to have clear cut authority within the team. the sense of ‘what can you do?’ seems to be a resignation and resistance to actively judging others’ contributions and a willingness to agree sanctions and consequences. enforcement and authority seemed to be the fall-back preference for issues of under-performance and was especially evident in the focus group discussion. lecturer’s experience from the tutor perspective, the student dissatisfaction with the lack of authority being provided was distinctly uncomfortable. while there was some recognition from students that this was a ‘real world’ type assignment that was realistic for future employability, there were plenty of very specific suggestions about what the tutor should have done differently: the type of assessment; the grading system; the group allocation; and the marking criteria. the specific feedback was therefore focused not on the effectiveness of peer-to-peer support but framed as a failure of the tutor. it appeared that the preferred solution was not for a better peer system but for more authority being used or delegated by the tutor. there was discernible pressure on me to take more of an active, even authoritarian, role and it continued to be uncomfortable to resist this pressure throughout the process. individual students came to me for advice, asked for suggestions on how to deal with a peer, and made plaintive requests for more input into their group. was this abandoning my role as teacher if i turned their question around and placed responsibility back on them? i was also very aware of the current political climate of student satisfaction being of key importance. i was acutely aware of competing pressures to deliver transformative learning roberts active learning in higher education as a restorative practice: a lecturer’s reflections journal of learning development in higher education, issue 10: november 2016 10 environments and yet protect student satisfaction at the same time. i was left with questions around the comfort and discomfort of learning environments and whether student ‘comfort’ is a necessary feature of he in an era of marketisation of university education. one aspect of this restorative practices framework is the social discipline window which focuses on the varying levels of support and control provided to students. certain aspects were firmly under control of the tutor such as allocating students to groups, setting the brief, grading judgements and failing students for non-attendance, all of which can be seen as forms of control. other aspects, also firmly under the control of the tutor, were about providing support to students such as delivery of lectures, activities and guided reading. it can be seen that these elements were satisfying, routine and comfortable for students. traditional tutor-centred activities could be characterised as ‘doing things to and for’ students and it appears that these are essentially satisfying and in accordance with student expectations that the tutor will take ultimate responsibility. both authoritarian and paternalistic approaches seem to be accepted by students as the norm within the he learning context. the content and structure of what student groups did in their own time in preparing for assignments were not overseen by the tutor and were entirely under student control, and they seemed willing to use the suggested techniques of restorative practice. while not all groups reported its use, it seems that some students were willing to take on board the structure and guidance of tutor-led content (such as restorative practice techniques) and seek to institute it into their own independent practices with mixed results. the restorative practice frame suggests that students were able to model the practices introduced by the tutor under supportive situations such as initial supervised tasks, perhaps an instance of ‘doing things with students’ again a positive experience characterised by an ‘authoritative’ tutor. the question i am left with is whether these were independently managed by students without tutor control or support – framed in the ‘not’ quadrant of the social discipline window – and characterised as the tutor being perceived as ‘neglectful’ or ‘irresponsible’. the reflections on this learning experience suggest that the difficulty for some students arises when peer-to-peer processes are not immediately successful and where peers fail to respond to student-led structure. this waiting period in which the group seeks to ‘figure roberts active learning in higher education as a restorative practice: a lecturer’s reflections journal of learning development in higher education, issue 10: november 2016 11 out a solution’ appears to be anxiety provoking for some even though it is also stimulating. on reflection, this point of hiatus, when perhaps student satisfaction in the process hits an all-time low, is possibly the crucial cross-over point of student responsibility. it may be that such times of assessment focused anxiety are the crucibles in which the very skills of graduate-ness and employability are forged. and yet, this may come at a cost. is there perhaps some loss of faith in the very academic who has structured this learning experience which some students in the group perceive as ‘abandonment’? restorative practice does not operate free of context, and where students are educated into relying on the judgement of the tutor then there is bound to be tension at the juncture between two systems. the process recommended by hagopian (2013) that students develop their own authority includes a suggestion to accept student discomfort and a degree of anxious self-consciousness, but this leaves the question of how academic staff both provide the structure and cope with this discomfort themselves. the most surprising revelation as a tutor experimenting with this type of learning and teaching is the levels of student discomfort that the tutor needs to manage. furthermore, ‘this uncomfortableness must be honoured, and then usefully folded back into learning’ (hagopian, 2013, p.15). there are two specific points of tension that this experience highlights. firstly, in the political context of students being treated as consumers and continually asked for feedback and satisfaction ratings, any activities perceived as offering low support and low tutor control are perhaps likely to receive poor ratings for student satisfaction. secondly, in an education system where students are sometimes passive recipients of a transmissive style of delivery, the openness and discomfort of the classroom without authority poses epistemological challenges for students. what is knowledge if i have to make it all up myself? nonetheless, despite the issues and tensions, students in the short, ten-week module did learn to use and experiment with restorative practice techniques with training and experience. it has been seen that they used it spontaneously to resolve specific issues and found some success. this was a new and unexpected active learning experience that these students were exposed to and the fact that it was found to be challenging and generated dissatisfaction from students is not to be unexpected. rather, it has raised questions of how we prepare students to negotiate such uncomfortable learning environments and diminish their reliance on the relative safety of tutor authority. it also roberts active learning in higher education as a restorative practice: a lecturer’s reflections journal of learning development in higher education, issue 10: november 2016 12 raises the tensions between grading and classification systems on which students rely for their employability prospects. yeah the learning is really going to help me in the actual work, my only point is that your grade is your foot in the door, once you get to work then all the skills you learn at university come into place then and that’s where this specific exercise will become really advantageous. (focus group, 14) this reminds us that students are keenly aware of what ‘real’ learning is and how useful it is for their future employability but are nonetheless caught up in the system of chasing grades and degree classification. again wider, structural questions are posed by the fitness of the academic system for preparing students adequately beyond a mere intellectual grading system. concluding remarks this module delivered an active, student-centred learning experience in which knowledge has been created in participation with others. one of the aims for these business students is to generate authentic experiences of management-related communities of practice. the idea is to provide challenging experiences which literally changes the individual’s approach to a typical management situation. the hope then is that the individual would face the next challenge in a qualitatively different way: perhaps more empowered and active. the final interjection as the focus group closed illustrated this precise point: i do think if we had to do this again, we’d all do it so much better – group laughter (focus group, 10) my reflections on this experience have also asked what does it demand of the academic whose career has been built upon milestones of knowledge and expertise? there are numerous issues to be faced in dealing with a shift away from a system that privileges a knowledge base and towards a more liquid concept of learning. one of the problems suggested here is that the individual academic must also face that moment of perceived abandonment in which students realise that they must grapple with this knowledge alone. roberts active learning in higher education as a restorative practice: a lecturer’s reflections journal of learning development in higher education, issue 10: november 2016 13 in these moments, some students reach out for further support, cling to familiar strategies, and are perhaps understandably resentful of the ‘neglectful’ teacher. this suggests that he must build in greater structures of support for both students and lecturing staff. disruptive and transformational learning experiences require relational support if they are to be successful and academic staff deserve appropriate development opportunities to become more aware and familiar with the new discomfort of the he classroom. for learning practices such as these to be restorative then both students and staff need ways of dealing with the shift in responsibility that has occurred. then there is a possibility opened up for academic staff to become learners themselves through this encounter and for students to accept and embrace responsibility for their learning. references adamson, c.w. and bailie, j.w. (2012) 'education versus learning: restorative practices in higher education', journal of transformative education, 10(3), pp. 139-156. biggs, j. and tang, c. (2009) teaching for quality learning at university. london: open university press. braithwaite, j. (1989) crime, shame and reintegration. new york: cambridge university press. cavanagh, m. (2011) 'students' experiences of active engagement through cooperative learning activities in lectures', active learning in higher education, 12(1), pp. 23-33. costello, b., wachtel, j. and wachtel, t. (2009) the restorative practices handbook for teachers, disciplinarians and administrators. pennsylvania, usa: international institute for restorative practices. costello, b., wachtel, j. and wachtel, t. (2010) restorative circles in schools: building community and enhancing learning. pennsylvania, usa: international institute for restorative practices. roberts active learning in higher education as a restorative practice: a lecturer’s reflections journal of learning development in higher education, issue 10: november 2016 14 davey, l. (2007) restorative practices in the workplace. international institute for restorative practices. available at: http://www.iirp.edu/ (accessed: 28 february 2016). finnis, m. (2014) towards a restorative city, county, authority or community. available at: http://www.restorativejustice.org.uk (accessed: 28 february 2016). griffin-padgett, d.r. and allison, d. (2010) 'making a case for restorative rhetoric: mayor rudolph giuliani and mayor ray nagin's response to disaster', communication monographs, 77(3), pp. 376-392. hagopian, k.j. (2013) 'rethinking the structural architecture of the college classroom', new directions for teaching & learning, 2013(135), pp. 7-18. hanvey, s., philpot, t. and wilson, c. (2011) a community based approach to the reduction of sexual reoffending: circles of support and accountability. london: jessica kingsley. hermann, k. (2013) 'the impact of cooperative learning on student engagement: results from an intervention', active learning in higher education, 14(3), pp. 175-187. kara, f. and macalister, d. (2010) 'responding to academic dishonesty in universities: a restorative justice approach', contemporary justice review, 13(4), pp. 443-453. king, a. (1993) 'from sage on the stage to guide on the side', college teaching, 41(1), pp. 30-35. lange, e.a. (2004) 'transformative and restorative learning: a vital dialectic for sustainable societies', adult education quarterly: a journal of research and theory, 54(2), pp. 121-139. leedham, m. (2009) 'from traditional essay to 'ready steady cook' presentation: reasons for innovative changes in assignments', active learning in higher education, 10(3), pp. 191-206. http://www.iirp.edu/ http://www.restorativejustice.org.uk/ roberts active learning in higher education as a restorative practice: a lecturer’s reflections journal of learning development in higher education, issue 10: november 2016 15 macready, t. (2009) 'learning social responsibility in schools: a restorative practice', educational psychology in practice, 25(3), pp. 211-220. mcwilliam, e. (2008) 'unlearning how to teach', innovations in education and teaching international, 45(3), pp. 263-269. quay, j. (2003) 'experience and participation: relating theories of learning', the journal of experiential education, 26(2), pp. 105-116. udell, j. (2005) 'secrets of screencasting', infoworld, 27(20), pp. 34-34. vygotsky, l. (1978) mind in society. cambridge, usa: harvard university press. wachtel, t. (2013) defining restorative. available at: http://www.iirp.edu/what-isrestorative-practices.php (accessed: 28 february 2016) wachtel, t. and mccold, p. (2004) 'from restorative justice to restorative practices: expanding the paradigm', iirp's fifth international conference on conferencing, circles and other restorative practices. vancouver, british columbia, canada 5-7 august. yudelson, j. (2008) the green building revolution. washington: island press. zepke, n. (2013) 'threshold concepts and student engagement: revisiting pedagogical content knowledge', active learning in higher education 14(2), pp. 97-107. author details emma roberts (phd, fhea) is an associate principal lecturer at leeds trinity university and programme leader for ba business and management. she is the learning and teaching lead for the subject group and has research interests in innovative pedagogy in higher education, especially in the field of business and enterprise education. http://www.iirp.edu/what-is-restorative-practices.php http://www.iirp.edu/what-is-restorative-practices.php active learning in higher education as a restorative practice: a lecturer’s reflections abstract introduction restorative practices (rp) framework student experience lecturer’s experience concluding remarks references author details literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 5: march 2013 integrating learning development into the student experience pat hill university of huddersfield, uk amanda tinker university of huddersfield, uk abstract ‘embedding skills’ has become an educational buzz word which evokes many different responses. whilst acknowledging this diversity, this article focuses on the promotion of the integration of skills development into the subject curriculum as theory is put into practice. a range of attitudes towards integrated learning development are discussed and there is an attempt to define the generic principles associated with integration. different models of embedding are provided through case studies available on a new website developed as part of a university funded teaching and learning project. the journey towards a more strategic level of integration though the course validation process is outlined along with ideas for continued progress. keywords: embedding skills; integrated learning development; curriculum design; student experience; institutional change. introduction changes to the funding of higher education present new challenges; meeting these challenges requires innovative approaches to enhancing the quality of the student experience. there is strong evidence that students benefit from the integration of learning development strategies into the core curriculum, and one of the key motivators for embedding skills is ‘the principle that students and staff place more value on activities where they form a seamless part of their programmes’ (bloxham, 2004, p.2). tamsin hill and tinker integrating learning development into the student experience haggis (2006, p525) contributes another important perspective to the debate when she suggests that the question we ask should be altered from ‘‘what is wrong with this student?’ to ‘what are the features of the curriculum, or of processes of interaction around the curriculum, which are preventing some students from being able to access this subject?’’. this is important to learning developers as a whole as it moves the impetus away from the individual student to the realm of curriculum design, thus removing some of the notion of student deficit. it is also important to note that although embedding strategies do not replace the proven value of one-to-one contact, they can reach the majority of students who, for various reasons, do not have the advantage of, or take the opportunity provided, by such provision (hill et al., 2010). putting the theory of embedding or integrating skills development into practice is one of the key themes of this paper. ursula wingate, a lecturer in the department of education and professional studies at king’s college, london, although she deals exclusively with writing skills, provides a useful model for moving integration from theory to practice. her widely cited article ‘doing away with ‘study skills’’written in 2006, clearly resonated with the higher education community (wingate, 2006). she subsequently obtained funding to pilot the embedding of writing skills into modules at her institution and 100% of the academics involved agreed on the effectiveness of the embedded approach for the teaching of writing (wingate et al., 2011). the current paper details how a student-centred perspective has developed into a more strategic, institutional one; it is also important to note that from an institutional perspective, proponents such as manalo et al. (executive summary, 2010) illustrate the advantages of such integration to institutions such as ‘better retention and completion rates’. this is particularly relevant in light of current changes in higher education and the new challenges it brings. these challenges include increased institutional competition and higher fees, which make the nss survey on student satisfaction more prominent and raise student expectations in terms of value for money. employability has also become a more important focus both for students and institutions. in the current economic climate, institutions also need to increase efficiency in reaching a larger number of students with fewer resources. craig mahoney, chief executive of the higher education academy, suggests: cuts in resource and changes to student finance will increase the challenge of sustaining and improving student satisfaction...heis will need to concentrate on journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 2 hill and tinker integrating learning development into the student experience support for learning and teaching as prospective students, parents and sponsors expect outstanding learning across the sector (mahoney, 2011). as the quality of the student learning experience becomes a focal point, institutions need to promote a philosophy of learning which is not simply based on a transfer of knowledge but which encourages students to develop the ‘skills to allow them to fully participate in the university learning experience, to develop a sense of ‘graduateness’ and to enhance employability’ (gerrard et al., 2005). embedding the teaching of such skills into the curriculum, however, requires an institution-wide understanding of the complexities involved in developing skills where context, dialogue, reflection and motivation are key elements; relevance and timeliness being other major factors (drew, 2004). this institution-wide approach was strongly advocated by lisa ganobcsik-williams in a report on the teaching of academic writing commissioned by the royal literary fund (ganobcsikwilliams, 2004). in response to a university wide call for teaching and learning projects in 2009, learning developers (lds) and a senior academic at the university of huddersfield were successful in gaining funding to examine existing institutional strategies for integrating learning development into the curriculum in order to enhance the student experience (at the time, the majority of the lds were named ‘academic skills tutors’ (asts) but some have now opted for the term ‘learning developer’ and this has been used throughout this article as a more generic term). this paper details the process and key findings of the project along with future directions. method as the investigation across the university began, one pertinent aim was to achieve some understanding of academic staff perceptions and attitudes towards embedding skills development within the curriculum. to this end, a one question, anonymous, crossuniversity email was sent, asking: ‘what does embedding skills in the curriculum mean to you?’. following analysis of this survey, the project leaders at huddersfield took a decision to ‘work with the converted’. the idea was to create a resource that would allow us to showcase successful examples of embedding in order to convince others of its positive benefits and illustrate different ways in which it could be achieved. the main team behind the project were two lds, one principal lecturer and one technician, but all lds across the various schools collaborated in sourcing information. the rationale (see appendix 1) was journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 3 hill and tinker integrating learning development into the student experience distributed to all lds and library staff with a request to provide examples of good practice within the schools to which they were attached. sent along with this rationale was a skills list of undergraduate and graduate attributes compiled from various sources such as yorke (2006). a ‘mapping template’ was also produced which asked subject departments to illustrate where specific skills were practised and, if they were taught, who taught them (see appendix 2). not all schools completed the template, but it was made obvious from the returned templates that some of the skills listed were being required and assessed but not being explicitly taught. based on the feedback from the templates and lds, individuals were contacted for details of case study modules where skills have been successfully integrated into the curriculum and it is these case studies that form the basis of the project’s newly developed website: http://embeddingskills.hud.ac.uk/. the website was created using an open source tool, drupal (http://drupal.org/). this choice was made after research showed that this tool is freely available, reliable and is successfully used within the university (http://ipark.hud.ac.uk/). drupal supports a multidimensional, faceted search that is invaluable in dealing with complex case studies, and allows the user to access information from a variety of perspectives. through an analysis of these case studies a classification scheme was developed based on four facets: course level; delivery method; skill; student task. through this faceted search, the reader can explore a variety of practices within the university and have access to relevant resources on a whole range of skills. these include all levels from pre-foundation to post-graduate. project outcomes the move towards embedding or integrating skills development is not without opposition as some subject staff still believe that their job is to impart only subject specific skills and content, and that generic skills are a separate entity that should already be known by students or taught remedially. the one question survey referred to earlier resulted in 90 responses. these were analysed to generate themes and the following table illustrates the diverse range of opinion. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 4 http://embeddingskills.hud.ac.uk/ http://drupal.org/ http://ipark.hud.ac.uk/ hill and tinker integrating learning development into the student experience table 1. academic perceptions of what ‘embedding skills’ means. integrated ‘it can mean different things according to context…but the word 'embedding' implies that something is to be integrated, not added on at the end or done separately’. ‘teaching skills as part of academic modules in a particular subject area rather than teaching them in a generic skills module or through additional support mechanisms such as academic skills tutors’. ‘this would mean to me that skills are integrated into a curriculum from start to finish so they have core value and presence in all individual modules that make up the curriculum’. progressive ‘…the integration of critical thinking, to inform study and critical writing, to inform the demonstration of understanding and application of knowledge, into each stage of a student’s journey through their degree. each year stage is different requiring incrementally different skills’. ‘…the teaching, learning (hopefully!), practice and assessment of core practical skills. the assessment must be through practical assignments designed to show proficiency in such core skills, building them incrementally’. ‘it would seem that generic skills/transferable skills relating to communication, analysis, interpretation and synthesis for example are important factors in any discipline at an early stage of the course. in relation to the area of art and design these need to be developed in tandem with skills of practice, judgement and critique with the notion of 'progression'. quite often 'skills' remain remote if given as an 'introductory' stage – they should be part of the diagnostic process in developing the learner and the dialogue that happens in teaching and learning. the 'curriculum' becomes more flexible and holistic if 'skills' are related to the innate processes of the discipline and re-introduced at key stages and as part of the continuing development of the individual's profile’. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 5 hill and tinker integrating learning development into the student experience implicit or explicit? ‘…the skills component is not, in general, learnt separately to the content but is an implicit part of the content. the skills component might be more explicitly drawn out at various stages, but certainly wouldn't be learnt on its own to start with, and wouldn't be given extra space in the curriculum (e.g. a study skills module)’. ‘to me it means providing transferable skills invisibly within the curriculum. it means ensuring they are there. but it may be implicit rather than explicit’. ‘if skills are truly embedded students shouldn’t be aware that they are learning them, as opposed to the subject material, and the delivery should be by the core academic staff’. ‘…the coursework and exercises in the curriculum would act as incubation and development of specific skills, not necessarily explicitly’. ‘it means that the curriculum is written in such a way that the skills needed to achieve the overall learning outcomes/specific standards are identified and made transparent’. remedial ‘it means cutting back on genuine academic content. it also means patronising our 18-21 year old students with mickey mouse bullshit they’ve already learned in school and patronising our mature students by treating them like school kids’. ‘either they should be taught and assessed explicitly (and hence be part of the curriculum) – and that might be true of chemistry lab skills – or they should be assumed as part of what any undergrad should already know – and this applies to most study skills. of course some students may lack the latter skills, in which case they need remedial work – but that is what it is, remedial, not a core content of the curriculum at university’. ‘for undergrads that come straight from formal education, it means that their formal education has been insufficient. students with a solid set of a levels or equivalent (ucas entry for my course is 280) should, in my opinion, be able to write in grammatically correct english, have a good understanding of syntax and be able to structure written work coherently. the fact that many students do not journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 6 hill and tinker integrating learning development into the student experience have these skills means they miss out on subject content and higher academic skills whilst academics teach them the difference between ‘weather’ and ‘whether’’. putting theory into practice ‘simulation is a core process that to me allows me as a professional to identify that my students are able to link theory to their practice and are fit for purpose when out in the practical environment...’ ‘ensuring that where related skills are required by the student who may also be a practitioner, that they are built in with supporting theory and practice at the appropriate point in the programme’. ‘in professional or practice discipline curricula, it means the integration of ‘practice with theory’ (‘practice (skills) to theory’) and the linkage of ‘theory to practice’ -bridging the theory-practice and practice-theory gap’. transferable ‘it means, to me, that whatever items of coursework, projects, presentations etc. that we ask students to do (in relation to specific learning outcomes or assessment criteria) they will also help develop key/transferable skills, ideally as a consciously designed element of pedagogy in relation to previous, adjacent and subsequent tasks’. ‘it refers to a path towards cultural change where the ‘skills’ are eventually ‘taken for granted’ by the students after applying them as part of academic study. as an example, use of computers to search for information is taught to students as part of their course but is not the prime focus. this is a transferable skill that may be invoked during any subsequent part of their study’. ‘it means identifying skills such as using the library and internet, seeking material on a topic, using it in academic work, quoting from it appropriately and using the harvard referencing system within a module which is compulsory but not specifically called 'study skills'. so they learn the skill in context such as studying social policy. the challenge is to repeat the skill in another context’. ‘the word ‘skills’ to me, always makes me think of something that can be used at a later date in employment, after the student has graduated…we should, (but in many cases don’t) highlight the need for cross-transferable skills in our modules and record what they are journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 7 hill and tinker integrating learning development into the student experience (for pdp purposes). things like critical thinking, problem solving, initiative, planning, collaboration etc.’. ‘knowledge – learning – application – confidence – your skills allow you to build on forming an identity to enable you to form broader career prospects with confidence’. assessed ‘clear alignment within the assessment criteria, learning outcomes and assessment task of activity which evidences the skills you’re trying to embed, together with clear direction on supporting information within teaching’. ‘using the core/generic skills, use of appropriate language/nomenclature, referencing, research skills, appropriate data analysis, use of it etc., in a range of activities across a range of different subjects. i assess them in many of the assignments which i set (they are part of the marking scheme) however i feel a number of colleagues pay lip-service to them. i set some challenging assignments which draw on these core skills, i know exactly what they have been taught and want to see it used hence doing assignments like writing up in a journal format etc.’. these responses show how complex the concept of embedding is, let alone the use of the term ‘skills’. for some, the term evoked a very positive response aligned with professional development, but even these differ in that some colleagues saw it as integrating the development of graduate qualities seamlessly, and even ‘invisibly’ into the programme, whilst others felt it important to identify and record these skills explicitly. the more negative responses perceived a patronising and remedial approach in the move to embed skills. the challenge for lds is to offer a range of strategies from which different colleagues can choose those which are appropriate and acceptable. another interesting and important theme coming from the survey was the need for progression as the students move through their degree programme and this became more apparent on scrutinising the returned ‘mapping templates’. the mapping template was developed to provide a framework to assess a course holistically and objectively in order to identify where the necessary skills are practised and taught. some very detailed work has been done on this by tariq et al. (2004) but our aim was to keep this as simple as possible in order to engage staff and add as little as possible journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 8 hill and tinker integrating learning development into the student experience to workloads. the completed template can highlight any omission or repetition and signpost opportunities to embed learning development into the curriculum, providing a more seamless student experience, with skills input from the most appropriate source at the most appropriate time. in analysing the templates, it was apparent that input on skills development was heavily frontloaded with most of the teaching being done in the first year. there was some input in the third year as students approached a major piece of work, such as a dissertation, but in the second year it was clear that although skills were assessed, they were rarely taught. this finding links to research done by grump (2007) and schreiner (2010) who found that second year students often experienced particular problems of stress and lack of engagement. using the templates appeared to highlight gaps and areas of repetition and inefficiency, and the project leaders are now working to promote a more holistic approach to curriculum design. case studies the project discovered many examples of innovative practice which integrate the teaching and learning of skills within the curriculum and it is these case studies that form the basis of the project’s newly developed website http://embeddingskills.hud.ac.uk (see figure 1). figure 1. home page. although the funding for the original project has finished, the team has taken on the responsibility to add to it as other modules come to light and to update it where possible as modules evolve; the possibility of expanding this website as a national resource is being actively explored via the association for learning development in higher education’s (aldinhe) continuing professional development group. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 9 http://embeddingskills.hud.ac.uk/ hill and tinker integrating learning development into the student experience for each chosen case study a template was completed. this template includes a rationale, details of the module, ideas for adaptation, details of the innovators and usable resources. this template is also available on the website for users to contribute new case studies to add to the database. case study resources include lecture notes, powerpoint presentations, student activities, assignment briefs, tutor notes and links to valuable websites. the information includes all levels from pre-foundation to post-graduate (see figure 2 below). figure 2. case study faceted search. the website also includes a repository of current research on embedding skills which will be updated annually. a set of generic principles for integrating learning development into the curriculum was extrapolated from research and case studies and these have been included on the website: collaborative integrated learning development requires collaboration of all those who are involved in the teaching and learning. this might include course leaders, module tutors, lecturers, learning developers, librarians, technicians, careers advisors and the students themselves, anyone who can contribute in providing the most effective learning experience for the student. holistic it is important to consider the whole course rather than individual modules and levels of study when integrating learning development. this ensures that development takes place at an appropriate stage, eliminates unnecessary repetition and that all relevant areas are covered. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 10 hill and tinker integrating learning development into the student experience inclusive learning development should be incorporated at all levels of study progressively; it should also cater for different learning styles and needs. reflective reflection is a crucial element in integrated learning development as it makes the development of skills explicit. it allows students to discover and articulate different aspects of their own learning process. it encourages them to acknowledge strengths but also to recognise areas for development and set short and long terms goals. interactive learning takes place when students are actively engaged. integrating learning development requires an innovative, activity-led approach to delivery that allows students not only to practise and develop skills but also the opportunity to develop as independent learners and critical thinkers. relevant integrated learning development means providing students with the opportunity to develop abilities within the curriculum that are not only relevant to their academic work but also to their future careers. timely students should be given resources to develop their learning at the appropriate time. this means making space within the curriculum and acknowledging that it might be more beneficial to teach the student how to find facts rather than simply giving the facts. table 2. a set of generic principles for integrating learning development into the curriculum. based on these principles, the project leaders are working to achieve the implementation of a progressive, multi-strategy approach for the timely and efficient integration of learning development within the curriculum at all course levels. in order to do this we recommended a change to university validation procedures through the university teaching and learning committee (utlc). we strongly suggested that the use of the website resources, for example the mapping template and the examples of good practice, become a necessary step in the curriculum design and validation process. this was accepted so that the committee reported that they: journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 11 hill and tinker integrating learning development into the student experience …felt that the outcomes of the project emphasised the need to view the development of a course as a whole rather than being applied on a module basis. this approach would allow teams to capture the overall progression of a student across all taught years whilst identifying any gaps in delivery or duplication assessment. (8 november, 2011,minute ref.5.3) they required that in future ‘[course] teams should reflect their incorporation of skills development in the teaching and learning section of the programme specification document’. this is a significant step forward in encouraging all staff to consider how important it is to give students the opportunity within the curriculum to develop and reflect on the graduate skills that they need. it has also given lds strategic recognition and support from senior management in their continued efforts to enhance the student experience. conclusion and future directions this article supports the need to integrate skills development within the curriculum. a recent qaa draft for consultation document on the ‘uk quality code for higher education’ (may, 2012, p.6) promotes ‘the planning and design of learning and teaching activities [which]…provide effective teaching of subject-specific, transferable, practical and professional skills’. although this has not yet been finalised, it shows a clear direction toward integration. the present article illustrates some of the complexity involved in this by outlining diverse attitudes and also attempts to move forward by bringing together a set of generic principles. although the article outlines a successful project, it is important to acknowledge the many challenges faced in providing students with the opportunity to develop necessary and relevant skills within the curriculum. we have recently acquired internal funding through the university of huddersfield teaching and learning innovation projects 2013 scheme which we feel will build on the findings from the initial project. ‘second year blues: developing interactive resources for progressive curriculum design’ is a new project which aims to develop strategies that might better embed progressive learning across the curriculum and, in particular, at intermediate level. the objectives include providing guidance, resources and ideas to promote innovative delivery of skills development. one of the key aims of the bid is also to journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 12 hill and tinker integrating learning development into the student experience gather evaluative data through staff and student interviews and focus groups. the results will be made available through the embedding skills website which is also to be further developed as part of a national resource through collaboration with aldinhe. acknowledgements we particularly need to acknowledge the invaluable technical contribution of vidya kanara and the management and guidance of paul squires (principal lecturer and subject leader in textiles). references bloxham, s. (2004) embedding skills and employability in higher education: an institutional curriculum framework approach. higher education academy [online]. available at: http://www.qualityresearchinternational.com/esecttools/esectpubs/bloxhamembeddi ng.pdf (accessed: 15 november 2011). drew, s. (2004) ‘how do you encourage usage of a computer based writing resource?’, writing development in higher education conference. sheffield hallam university, sheffield, . 11-12 may. ganobcsik,-williams, l. (2004) a report on the teaching of academic writing in uk higher education [online]. available at: http://www.rlf.org.uk/fellowshipscheme/documents/teachingwritingukhe.pdf (accessed: 18 january 2012). gerrard, c., tweedie, s. and mcvey, d. (2005) embedding effective learning skills in the curriculum: case studies and interventions. scotland: university of paisley. grump, s. (2007) ‘classroom research in a general education course: exploring implications through an investigation of the sophomore slump’ the journal of general education, 56(2), pp. 105-125. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 13 http://www.qualityresearchinternational.com/esecttools/esectpubs/bloxhamembedding.pdf http://www.qualityresearchinternational.com/esecttools/esectpubs/bloxhamembedding.pdf http://www.rlf.org.uk/fellowshipscheme/documents/teachingwritingukhe.pdf hill and tinker integrating learning development into the student experience haggis, t. (2006) ‘pedagogies for diversity: retaining critical challenge amidst fears of 'dumbing down'’, studies in higher education, 31(5) pp. 521-535. hill, p., tinker, a. and catterall, s. (2010) ‘from deficiency to development: the evolution of academic skills provision at one uk university’, journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2, february, pp. 1-19 [online]. available at: http://www.aldinhe.ac.uk/ojs/index.php?journal=jldhe&page=article&op=view&path %5b%5d=54&path%5b%5d=38 (accessed: 21 may 2012). mahoney, c. (2011) hea response to 2011 national student survey [online]. available at: http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/news/detail/2011/nss_results_2011_comment_craig _mahoney (accessed: 18 january 2012). manalo, e., marshall, j. and fraser, c. (eds.) (2010) student learning support programmes that demonstrate tangible impact on retention, pass rates and completion. aotearoa (n.z.): ako aotearoa northern regional hub. qaa (2012) uk quality code for higher education. chapter b3: learning and teaching. draft for consultation, may 2012. available at: http://www.qaa.ac.uk/publications/informationandguidance/pages/learningteaching-consultation.aspx (accessed: 25 june 2012). schreiner, l. (2010) ‘factors that contribute to sophomore success and satisfaction’, in hunter, m., tobolansky, b., gardner, j., evenbeck, s., pattensgale, j., schaller, m. and schriver, l. (eds.), helping sophomores succeed: understanding and improving second-year experiences. san francisco: john wiley and sons, pp. 4365. tariq, v., scott, e.m., cochrane, a.c., lee, m. and ryles, l. (2004) 'auditing and mapping key skills within university curricula', quality assurance in education, 12(2), pp. 70-81. university teaching and learning committee (utlc) reference? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 14 http://www.aldinhe.ac.uk/ojs/index.php?journal=jldhe&page=article&op=view&path%5b%5d=54&path%5b%5d=38 http://www.aldinhe.ac.uk/ojs/index.php?journal=jldhe&page=article&op=view&path%5b%5d=54&path%5b%5d=38 http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/news/detail/2011/nss_results_2011_comment_craig_mahoney http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/news/detail/2011/nss_results_2011_comment_craig_mahoney http://www.qaa.ac.uk/publications/informationandguidance/pages/learning-teaching-consultation.aspx http://www.qaa.ac.uk/publications/informationandguidance/pages/learning-teaching-consultation.aspx hill and tinker integrating learning development into the student experience wingate, u. (2006) ‘doing away with ‘study skills’’, teaching in higher education, 11(4), pp. 457-469. wingate, u., andon, n. and cogo, a. (2011) 'embedding academic writing instruction into subject teaching: a case study', active learning in higher education, 12(1), pp. 6981. yorke, m. (2006) ‘employability in higher education: what it is –what it is not’. learning and employability series one. york: higher education academy [online] available at: http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/assets/documents/tla/employability/id116_employabilit y_in_higher_education_336.pdf (accessed: 10 february 2012). author details dr pat hill is a senior lecturer and academic skills tutor in the school of music, humanities and media at the university of huddersfield. she chairs a task and finish group on embedding skills that is part of the aldinhe continuing professional development working group. dr amanda tinker is a senior lecturer and academic skills tutor in the school of art, design and architecture at the university of huddersfield. she is learning development team leader for the school. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 15 http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/assets/documents/tla/employability/id116_employability_in_higher_education_336.pdf http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/assets/documents/tla/employability/id116_employability_in_higher_education_336.pdf hill and tinker integrating learning development into the student experience appendix 1 initial survey via lds promoting the integration of learning development into the student experience. what we hope to achieve: to inform, encourage and support academic staff in embedding learning development within the curricula. to produce a repository of good practice. the first step is gathering information asts – what is happening in your school? library staff – what are you involved in? survey of academic staff rationale: this project is underpinned by the idea of a student experience which develops attributes which will enable students at all levels to make the most of their study and prepare them for future employment. whilst valuing interventions and opportunities offered to students in such forms as academic skills provision; pdp; personal tutoring; and pal, this project is exploring ways that learning development can be embedded within the curriculum. this embedding is designed to eliminate problems associated with engaging students in learning development by incorporating activities into their mainstream activities. embedding does not mean simply including these abilities in learning outcomes but specifically designing opportunities for development within a module and providing the necessary input or guidance to enable such development. learning development in this instance includes academic, information literacy and employability skills. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 16 hill and tinker integrating learning development into the student experience the survey is designed to elicit examples of good practice which can be used to develop a framework and toolkit to encourage and enable colleagues to include learning development within modules. the following is a list of undergraduate and graduate skills and attributes; it has been compiled from various sources but is not exhaustive so feel free to add to the list if necessary. identify where these skills are taught and how; this may be already fully or partly embedded or bolt-on: critical thinking self-reflection note-making skills information literacy oral communication formal writing skills interpersonal skills, identifying and solving problems leadership computer literacy producing an argument referencing teamwork organisation journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 17 hill and tinker integrating learning development into the student experience appendix 2 mapping template tt = taught by module tutor tas = taught by academic skills staff p = practised ls = input from library staff (the current version also includes a =assessed) level: module titles module module module module module module critical thinking self-reflection note-making skills oral communication formal writing skills interpersonal skills identifying and solving problems leadership teamwork organisation producing an argument referencing information literacy computer literacy journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 18 integrating learning development into the student experience abstract introduction method project outcomes conclusion and future directions acknowledgements references author details appendix 1 initial survey via lds appendix 2 mapping template literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 4: march 2012 telling tales: students’ learning stories dr karen fitzgibbon university of glamorgan, uk dr jacqueline harrett university of glamorgan, uk abstract this paper outlines research conducted with undergraduate students. by listening to students’ learning experiences the authors were able to support them and develop ways to enable them to become more effective learners. sharing their learning stories helped students establish a sense of community as they realised the commonality of many experiences. reflection on learning also helped them to resolve issues from the past and move forward in a more positive spirit. through talking and telling, thinking and reflecting, the student voice becomes more audible and the tutor/student relationship more conducive to successful learning. keywords: learning; reflection; sharing; stories; experiences. introduction the literature concerning the use of storytelling for learning is rich and diverse. the influences in this area include egan (1989), zipes (1996), winston (1997) grugeon and garder (2000), and cremin (2009), among others, who believe in the power of story to engage children in meaningful learning. the use of storytelling in higher education is given specific attention by alterio and mcdrury (2003), barrett (2006) and moon (2010). the research described in this paper was prompted by discussions between the authors during a sandpit research event. by having an opportunity to converse with others we discovered that we had both been investigating the same topic, albeit from different fitzgibbon and harrett telling tales: students’ learning stories angles. the common thread was student narratives of their learning experiences and, by pooling knowledge and interest, we decided to further investigate the nature of student learning narratives and how those past experiences affect and influence future development. the context for this research is a post-92 university located in the south wales valleys with a population of approximately 23,000 students, 70% of who are studying for undergraduate degrees. many students are the first in their families to experience higher education and as such are drawn from non-academic backgrounds where university life may be outside their experiences and those of friends and family. student life can be challenging in many respects and affected by previous learning experiences. support for students may be practical, or pastoral, but listening actively to student learning experiences requires what maguire (1998, p.18) describes as the ‘ongoing consideration of the listener’. in other words, listening and responding appropriately. this active listening may be the role of the peer group or individuals, such as a tutor. maguire insists that personal storytelling helps others to engage with those experiences. this research had a focus on student learning narratives and how sharing these stories may lead to reflection and understanding, both personal and in the wider community. sharing learning journeys provides students with many benefits: they are able to relate to each other in more open ways; they develop more confidence in articulating perceived successes and failures; they may help to place experiences into a wider perspective; and they provide the tutor with additional knowledge about the needs and expectations of the students in their care. this research considered how tutor knowledge of their students, as well as the student experience, was enhanced by the sharing of learning stories. by sharing stories, both tutors and students were able to identify common experiences and understand how, despite changes in society and the rise in the use of technology, the human condition remains much the same. this mutual understanding allowed both students and tutors to have more insight into the personalities and personal lives of others. for example, tutors realised that although the students in the classes were classed as adults, they were perhaps not as ‘grown up’ or sophisticated as they seemed. one eighteen year old recalled how going on holiday with friends, not parents, just before university had been difficult, and many students expressed apprehension about leaving home and the security of family life. this reminded tutors of maslow’s (1954) hierarchy of journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 2 fitzgibbon and harrett telling tales: students’ learning stories needs and the importance of the pastoral role. it enabled tutors to provide guidance and support and perhaps to be more sensitive to the needs of these young adults. methods as a pilot intervention, first year students studying early years education were introduced to the idea of telling their stories by the concept of a memory box, where articles symbolising experiences were placed in a box. memory boxes usually contain keepsakes of some sort, possibly insignificant articles which hold some sentimental value. some museums also provide memory boxes as learning resources for schools so that children may see, through the handling of objects, what life may have been like for people in other centuries. the students were shown a photograph of a child’s memory box and how the items in the box were significant to the child’s self-esteem, relationships, and also learning about life. the students were then provided with a simple grid on which to note their learning stories. tutors shared their own learning memories with the group, emphasising learning in wider contexts than school or university and quoting a variety of experiences which were ‘learning experiences’. this openness was designed to give the students confidence and provide what garnett (2005, p.153) described as a ‘collaborative exercise’ to build positive relationships. tutors described which objects they would include in a memory box to demonstrate the connection between objects and memories of learning experiences. students were then given the opportunity to talk in small groups and share thoughts and ideas before telling their stories to a larger group if they wished. it should be noted that the first year cohort on this particular course is a large group with over 120 students. the students we worked with were in two groups of 43 and 36 respectively – the students present at the lecture times we had designated for the data gathering. ‘fresher’s flu’ and other seasonal illnesses at the time resulted in poor attendance at some sessions so the students ‘chosen’ were those who were present at the time. students could easily be intimidated by the large group setting so it was imperative that they felt comfortable in talking to friends and then to the whole class, if they felt confident enough. it was noted at the time that one group was more lively and talkative than the other so the dynamics of the personalities involved may have had an effect on the journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 3 fitzgibbon and harrett telling tales: students’ learning stories overall variables of the discussions. we have observed that often when some students are willing to start discussions, others will follow the lead and become involved. some groups are naturally more vivacious and loquacious which could have led to more animated and revealing narratives. it is also possible that hearing other students respond to the tutors’ stories increased the confidence of the quieter members of the group such that they felt enabled to participate. following talking and telling, thinking and reflecting, students were asked to record significant events in their learning journeys on a simple grid. they identified an object which they associated with a learning event, such as car keys to signify passing the driving test, and wrote a short description noting whether it was a negative or positive learning experience. a small number of students from the cohort then volunteered to be interviewed, using a semi-structured interview schedule. this was a mixture of self-selected students and others who were asked if they would mind being interviewed as they had shared stories which demonstrated personal learning. we thought this mixture of participants should provide an interesting and eclectic source of information. they were questioned about a positive learning experience and a negative one and asked to elaborate and reflect on these experiences. grainger (2005) deliberates on this dialogic process as a means of cognition and inter-thinking, believing that making connections in this way provides more motivation for learners. the interviews provided a rich data source which requires further analysis and will be presented in future work. the results discussed in this paper are from the analysis of the learning grids used with each group. initial tentative data analysis from the pilot group enabled us to reflect on the themes which appeared to be emerging. as silverman (2009) suggested this early data analysis was a useful process in enabling us to see the possible direction of the research. we modified the grid to contain an easily identifiable column for the students to indicate whether the experience was positive or negative and we then proceeded to use the modified grid to gather data from the second and third year students. a maximum number of five experiences could be entered into the grid. some students recorded just one, while others filled all five boxes. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 4 fitzgibbon and harrett telling tales: students’ learning stories figure 1. modified grid used to record student experiences. learning boxes item positive or negative learning experience reason for choice (story) results and analysis data from the pilot phase – year one students students had been introduced to claxton’s 4rs (2002) theory in the discussions prior to completing the grid. claxton believes that certain aspects are essential to effective learning. the 4rs refer to resilience, the ability to keep on trying even when learning is difficult; resourcefulness, knowing of different ways to approach learning; reflection, an ability to evaluate learning; and relationships, where learning in groups or individually may be important. we also discussed the importance of the teacher/pupil relationship as most adults had experience of a teacher that they either loathed or loved. some students made choices of subjects to study on the basis of those relationships. these themes of resilience, resourcefulness, reflection and relationships were mirrored to some extent in responses. responses were categorised into negative, positive or mixed experiences as shown in table 1. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 5 fitzgibbon and harrett telling tales: students’ learning stories table 1. summary of positive, negative and mixed experiences for year one students – the pilot group. age group positive negative mixed 18-21 197 23 49 21-30 23 12 12 30-40 9 0 1 mixed responses were positive experiences which had later become negative or negative experiences which became positive and some of the aspects of claxton’s theory were apparent. these mixed responses depended on student reflection on the nature of the learning experience and what they had learnt overall from that experience. for example, for a negative experience to have changed to positive usually required reflection, resilience and possibly resourcefulness in the face of adversity. a number of the responses also mentioned a significant person who had been a strong influence, either negative or positive, on their attitude to learning, indicating that relationships were important in the learning process and in developing attitudes to learning. other themes became apparent in identifying what types of learning experiences were common to the groups. these were broadly placed in three streams: academic, recreational and life experiences. as may be expected, there was a commonality of experience, and things like exam results, learning to drive and achieving independence through moving to university had predominance. following from this pilot we continued the research with both year two and year three groups. our aims were to discover if building these positive and open relationships had any impact on retention of students, as we had a significant ‘drop-out’ rate between years. we hoped that by learning and reflecting together on shared learning experiences we could produce a more collegial environment where students could feel less isolated. an atmosphere of mutual respect where both tutor and student voices could be heard and recognised as valued was regarded as important. we had no formal method of measuring the impact of this exercise, although we charted the common threads and themes as may be seen later in this paper. the theory of ‘communities of practice’ put forward by lave and wenger in 1991 has been expanded in wenger et al.’s (2011) research. he has developed the theory of social learning encompassing both communities and networks of learners, which are regarded as journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 6 fitzgibbon and harrett telling tales: students’ learning stories complementary. the interplay between communities and networks of learners is possibly blurred in university groups as students access their learning from different sources. the ability to utilise blended learning, through lectures, seminars and from the virtual learning environment may have positive and negative effects. with more and more use of technology to communicate there may be less opportunity for students to participate in face-to-face social learning and sharing of experiences. our research aimed to enable students to form a sense of mutual trust and respect through their shared narratives. data from the main phase – year two students after piloting the learning grids with the year one students, the topic was introduced with year two students as part of the session on writing across the curriculum. we explained about memory boxes and the work of claxton in this context and took a box with personal items which we used as metaphors for learning in our own experiences. the second year group consists of 29 students and represented a mix of ages but all the students were female. in total, the group generated 122 learning experiences which they shared on their grids as table 2 shows. table 2. summary of positive, negative and mixed experiences for year two students. age group positive negative mixed 18-21 38 12 19 21-30 20 4 16 30-40 10 2 1 the second year group was very responsive and immediately began to discuss in small groups their chosen learning stories. there was much excited and animated discussion and also some thoughtful reflection. whilst students had worked together for some time, it became apparent that the sharing of stories about happy, funny and sometimes quite painful and difficult events, was something they willingly participated in. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 7 fitzgibbon and harrett telling tales: students’ learning stories year three the introduction to the topic was slightly different with year three students as they had been exposed to the idea of memory boxes the previous year so just needed a brief reminder. this particular session began with a questionnaire about learning which was used as a basis for discussion on what was needed in the curriculum in the 21st century. they discussed topics like: ‘where does learning take place?’; ‘how do you learn best?’; and ‘what is successful learning?’. reference to robinson’s (2006) celebrated speech on ted was made and also to prior work on learning and their own memories about learning. this was as a precursor to completing the grids with their positive and negative learning experiences. students then had time to discuss their thoughts and experiences in small groups before whole class sharing. this was a small group of 28 students, with only one male in the group, who were familiar with each other and the tutor, so it was relaxed and open. it was interesting to note that these students were equally positive when compared with the second year group in their discussions. with their university study near to its conclusion, and the stress of numerous assignments and examinations looming, our expectations for this group were that they would record more negative thoughts and emotions in their learning journeys. as may be seen in table 3 below, the 21-30 year group seems to be the most positive about their learning, in comparison with the year two cohort where the most positive learners were in the 18-21 age group. a total of 104 learning experiences were recorded on the grids for this third year cohort. table 3. summary of positive, negative and mixed experiences for year three students. age group positive negative mixed 18-21 19 15 1 21-30 46 12 8 30-40 3 0 0 experiences shared by year two and three students students were very open in their disclosures. one mature student spoke quite openly about her trauma when she discovered she was pregnant at eighteen: journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 8 fitzgibbon and harrett telling tales: students’ learning stories there i was about to sit my a levels and all ready to go to university and i had this little baby and i just freaked. i thought, ‘oh my god!’. he was so small and dependent on me but he’s just great now and i wouldn’t be without him and i’ve learnt so much from that. the first trawl of the data revealed a commonality of experience which we grouped into three strands – academic experiences, recreational experience and general life experiences. academic life included experiences, such as tests, examinations or other memories related to school or university learning. table 4 shows the numbers in each of the second and third year groups who chose to share learning experiences of an academic nature. table 4. academic theme. age group positive negative negative into positive positive into negative year 2 year 3 year 2 year 3 year 2 year 3 year 2 year 3 18-21 10 9 2 3 5 1 0 0 21-30 4 14 1 6 5 0 0 0 30-40 2 2 2 0 1 0 0 0 examples of students’ comments included reflecting on early school years, such as this student who wrote: i won a writing competition in school and it was a big deal in my school. the trophy always reminds me of the excitement, pride and top of the world feeling of that moment and it always makes me smile. another student wrote about her exchange year to a university in florida, demonstrating some of the complexity involved in the reflections: this experience made me improve my independence as a person and i have learned different techniques from a different culture. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 9 fitzgibbon and harrett telling tales: students’ learning stories the second strand was recreation – sports, music, and driving featured strongly. we also included socialising and duke of edinburgh award which featured in a few responses. table 5. recreational theme. age group positive negative negative into positive positive into negative year 2 year 3 year 2 year 3 year 2 year 3 year 2 year 3 18-21 14 13 6 3 5 1 2 0 21-30 6 15 1 2 5 3 1 1 30-40 2 1 2 0 1 0 0 0 some unexpectedly dramatic stories emerged from recreational learning, such as this example from a year two student: i learned to swim when i was about 5 years old and i am glad my mum took me for lessons, not only because i enjoyed it but because i’ve helped save someone who was drowning. other recreational activities led to developing strength of character as this student showed: duke of edinburgh gold award. completed 50 mile walk. went to hospital half way through, was told i couldn’t carry on but with determination i did it. the last strand, life experiences, encompassed a number of varying topics such as independence, travel, relationships, births and deaths, and work. it was quite surprising that life experiences did not feature in the responses of the most mature students in the third year group. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 10 fitzgibbon and harrett telling tales: students’ learning stories table 6. life theme. age group positive negative negative into positive positive into negative year 2 year 3 year 2 year 3 year 2 year 3 year 2 year 3 18-21 14 7 4 0 7 0 1 0 21-30 10 11 2 4 3 4 2 2 30-40 6 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 the student narratives in the life theme included some reflections about very difficult experiences: domestic violence from my ex made me very unconfident and nervous around men. now realize it was a bad experience but i am a different person now! the sharing of such powerful experiences demonstrates the extent to which the students felt comfortable in the safe space created by the tutors, perhaps even more surprising when considering that one of the tutors had not previously met the groups. it was felt that the students responded to the openness and honesty with which the tutors shared their own learning stories. such reflection clearly helped to achieve one of the aims of the sessions – enabling students to learn and reflect together on shared learning experiences. this provided a supportive and relaxed environment where mutual respect was evident by the active listening patterns of the group and was regarded as valuable to the student learning experience. as wenger et al. (2011, p.21) comment, ‘not all the value produced by a community or a network is immediately realised. activities and interactions can produce knowledge capital whose value lies in its potential to be realised later’. they maintain that this knowledge capital has an intrinsic value even if it is never realised and that sometimes the knowledge capital may be transferred to ‘learning capital’. mcdrury and alterio (2003, p.8) acknowledge the power of storytelling as a learning tool in higher education, particularly the ease with which it can be transferred across disciplines ‘to stimulate students’ critical thinking skills, encourage self-review and convey practice realities’. although some of the comments were insightful it was often the negative into positive experiences which were most interesting. after a car crash one student wrote: journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 11 fitzgibbon and harrett telling tales: students’ learning stories i am now a very nervous passenger. i have reduced my speed by a lot. i am now aware how quickly and how serious a car crash can be. life is too short so i think a lot more now. she has displayed both reflection and resilience in these comments, as did another student with a similar experience: someone crashed in to me and wrote off my car. i had trouble with my insurance company and had to get a solicitor so this taught me independence and to stand my ground. in addition to investigating these strands of common experiences we also explored the nature of the relationships that were accounted for in student narratives. half the students (14 in total) in the third year cohort mentioned people who were influential in their learning journeys, thus highlighting the importance of relationships. of these particular experiences nearly half (10 out of 21) were dependent on a close family member such as parent or grandparent. twenty-one out of 29 second year students mentioned other people as influential in their learning. one student learnt of her grandmother’s illness on her 21st birthday and had to learn resilience in being able to come to terms with her emotions: i found out that my grandmother had cancer that was terminal and she was the first close person to me that i had to deal with dying. another student with a two year old described how this experience had been a totally different and positive influence on her life: having a child has been the biggest and best learning experience i will ever go through. it was life changing and even though it’s hard work with uni and work i can’t imagine life without him. everything i’m doing is for him and it makes me more determined. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 12 fitzgibbon and harrett telling tales: students’ learning stories through reflection she has learnt resilience, resourcefulness and the importance of relationships is central to her world. the importance of the teacher/pupil relationship was highlighted by being mentioned seven times as fundamental in a learning experience. four of these experiences were negative and student learning narratives recorded residual feelings relating to them: i’ve hated maths since primary school and was told i was useless at it which has totally put me off. even now i dread adding up and would be happy never to do maths again. it is quite startling to acknowledge that a teacher could have such a negative influence on a young person’s life over ten years later. conclusions contact for young people these days is often through technology where social networking sites provide a ‘changed communication paradigm’ (walsh, 2008, p.102). giving them the chance to interact and ‘recognising that learners are in a social context creating knowledge as part of doing things with others’ (watkins, 2003, p.38) provided them with the opportunity to think more deeply about their learning journeys. they were able to reflect on their experiences and expectations and evaluate these retrospectively. as a result of this collaboration and communication with students we were able to perceive many benefits. in large student cohorts there was often anonymity. friends formed small social groups within the larger group and did not even know the names of those outside their social framework. communicating learning stories, especially those which represented difficulty or failure, enabled students to see the commonality of learning experiences, both from tutors and fellow students. listening actively to personal stories provided empathy in the group as many of these stories were bound in emotions. we learnt more about each other as people and so were able to create a more supportive and less anonymous learning environment. holmes (2005) asserts that it is usually emotional aspects of well-being which can limit attitudes towards learning. we found that enabling students to tell their tales provided an emotional and cognitive experience on which to journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 13 fitzgibbon and harrett telling tales: students’ learning stories build future learning and teaching. we have been able to share this research data with colleagues across the university and some of these ideas have been incorporated into cohort group sessions designed to retain students and provide them with a secure pastoral network, both from fellow students and members of the academic staff. the first year group involved in the pilot study is now in the final year of study and these students are open and honest in their evaluations of the course and their requirements. they are vocal in discussions and able to voice opinions, as well as listen attentively to others and respond appropriately. they have more engagement in their learning which hargreaves (2004) regards as important and they have developed a more reflective attitude towards their work. this may be due to maturity but we hope that our telling of tales and setting the foundations early in their student lives accelerated the process. references alterio, m. and mcdrury, j. (2003) learning through storytelling in higher education: using reflection and experience to improve learning. london: routledge. barrett, h. (2006) ‘researching and evaluating digital storytelling as a deep learning tool’, society for information technology and teacher education conference. orlando, fl 20-24 march [online]. available at: http://electronicportfolios.org/portfolios/sitestorytelling2006.pdf (accessed: 12 december 2011). claxton, g (2002) building learning power: helping young people become better learners bristol: tlo ltd cremin, t. (2009) teaching english creatively. london: routledge. egan, k. (1989) teaching as storytelling. usa: university of chicago press. garnett, s. (2005) using brainpower in the classroom. london: routledge. grainger, t. (2005) ‘oral artistry: storytelling and drama’, in wilson, a. (ed.) creativity in primary education. exeter: learning matters, pp. 33-43 journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 14 http://electronicportfolios.org/portfolios/sitestorytelling2006.pdf fitzgibbon and harrett telling tales: students’ learning stories grugeon, e. and garder, p. (2000) the art of storytelling for teachers and pupils: using stories to develop literacy in primary classrooms. london: david fulton publishers. holmes, e. (2005) teacher well-being: looking after yourself and your career in the classroom. london: routledge. hargreaves d. h. (2004) learning for life: the foundations of lifelong learning london: policy press lave, j. and wenger, e. (1991) communities of practice: learning, meaning and identity. cambridge: cambridge university press. maguire, j. (1998) the power of personal storytelling. new york: jeremy p.tarcher/putnam. maslow, a. (1954) motivation and personality. harper and row: new york. moon, j.a. (2010) using story: in higher education and professional development. london: routledge. robinson (2006) ‘schools kill creativity’ online at http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.html last accessed (8/3/2012) silverman d.(2009) doing qualitative research (3rd edition) london: sage publications walsh, m. (2008) ‘worlds have collided and modes have merged: classroom evidence of changed literacy practices’, literacy, 42(2), pp. 101-108. watkins, c. (2003) learning: a sense-makers guide. london: atl. wenger, e., traynor, b. and de laat, m. (2011) promoting and assessing value creation in communities and networks; a conceptual framework. netherlands: ruud de moor centrum. available at: http://wengerjournal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 15 http://wenger-trayner.com/documents/wenger_trayner_delaat_value_creation.pdf fitzgibbon and harrett telling tales: students’ learning stories trayner.com/documents/wenger_trayner_delaat_value_creation.pdf (accessed: 4 january 2012). winston, j. (1997) drama, narrative and moral education. london: routledge. zipes, j (1996) creative storytelling: building communities/changing lives. london: routledge. author details dr karen fitzgibbon is head of educational development in the centre for excellence in learning and teaching at the university of glamorgan. she has worked in the university for many years in both business and education disciplines. her research interests are the student experience, student retention, online learning, and reflective practice. dr jacqueline harrett is a senior lecturer at the university of glamorgan. she teaches on the education courses within the faculty of humanities and social sciences. she has extensive and varied experience of teaching both in schools and in higher education. her research interests are in early years and literacy (particularly storytelling). journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 16 http://wenger-trayner.com/documents/wenger_trayner_delaat_value_creation.pdf telling tales: students’ learning stories abstract introduction methods results and analysis data from the pilot phase – year one students data from the main phase – year two students year three experiences shared by year two and three students conclusions references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 27 april 2023 ________________________________________________________________________ ©2023 the author(s) (cc-by 4.0) the development of undergraduate employability skills through authentic assessment in college-based higher education dan connolly barnsley college, uk; leeds trinity university, uk lliam dickinson barnsley college, uk luke hellewell barnsley college, uk abstract this paper explores how authentic assessment can be implemented to enhance opportunities to develop employability skills through problem-solving tasks. based on the eight key tenets of authentic assessment (ashford-rowe, herrington and brown, 2014), this paper presents formative and summative assessment case studies which were created in partnership with external stakeholders on three separate degree programmes at an undergraduate college-based higher education provider. the case studies report on the development of employability skills through authentic learning design on courses ranging from level 4 to level 6 of the framework for higher education qualifications. the cases add weight to the argument for embedding employability within the curriculum wherein the core skills/intended outcomes are delivered as part of the taught curriculum rather than as paralleled approaches which aim to develop employability as an add-on. each of the case studies are individually distinct, however they each share commonalities that collectively produce an effective framework for authentic assessment design. these key components include effective collaboration with external stakeholders (employers) from within the respective sectors, the joint formulation of a ‘problem’ that allows students to apply real world skillsets to overcome, and lastly the opportunity for external stakeholders to contribute towards feedback that students receive in respect to the assessment carried out. learning developers in higher education should look to utilise the conclusions of this paper to inform learning design in their contexts. connolly, dickinson and hellewell the development of undergraduate employability skills through authentic assessment in college-based higher education journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 2 keywords: authentic assessment; employability skills; employability-focused assessment design; problem-solving; college-based higher education. introduction in the last 20 years higher education (he) assessment has undergone something of a paradigm shift, moving from traditional, standardised tests that measure knowledge towards authentic assessments that offer a more complex and comprehensive assessment of higher order skills (villarroel et al., 2018). this shift presents a wider opportunity to enhance assessment strategies within he to reflect real world applications within professional settings, making the assessments, and thus the learning and development experiences, truly authentic. in this context, this article introduces examples of authentic assessment developed in a college-based higher education institution across three undergraduate pathways. a common theme across these courses is the holistic development of students, both in line with the strategic objectives of the institution and reflected in the validation process of the respective programmes. the case studies demonstrate the acquisition of complex skillsets that go beyond understanding the subject matter to the application of technical skills. examining these three cases allows us to consider how higher education institutions (heis) effectively embed authentic assessment: what are the key considerations for educators in enhancing technical skills acquisition? how can those opportunities be designed into the curriculum through formative and summative assessment? this paper will address these questions by first examining the importance of employability before analysing the role that assessment plays in providing an effective conduit through which authentic employability skills can be developed. three case studies are presented that consider how learning designers have implemented three different forms of authentic assessment in undergraduate curricula. importantly the cases have received excellent feedback from students and employers that may be of interest and provide guidance to colleagues exploring more authentic assessment design. the importance of employability skills in the higher education sector while graduate employability has been of interest for several years, it has recently become the focus of greater attention (damoah, peprah and brefo, 2021), with a bachelor’s degree connolly, dickinson and hellewell the development of undergraduate employability skills through authentic assessment in college-based higher education journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 3 no longer being sufficient to meet employers’ expectations (scott and willison, 2021). instead, graduates are required to demonstrate competence in further areas and possess wider skills (pavlin and svetlik, 2014; scott and willison, 2021). in 2018, a uk government review of post-18 education prioritised employer access to a skilled workforce. the subsequent review of the teaching and excellence and student outcomes framework (pearce, 2019) has resulted in heis now being measured specifically on student experience and student outcomes (including postgraduate employment). one important implication of the introduction of student outcomes evaluations has been the renewed interest in approaches to authentic assessment. whilst it is common for universities to employ various initiatives to enhance employability, the most common method is a paralleled approach (cranmer, 2006), whereby ‘employability is delivered outside the course via careers and employability services’ (bradley, priego-hernández and quigley, 2022, p.2162). it is an approach criticised as having limited impact on student learning and development. an alternative is the embedded approach wherein the core skills and intended employability outcomes are delivered as part of the taught curriculum. bradley, priego-hernández and quigley (2022) argue that this provides more equitable access for students. in the case studies presented, employability is embedded within the curricula and designed into the assessment. this requires students to present outcomes to external stakeholders and they receive immediate developmental feedback from external stakeholders. in this way the voice of the external employer is brought into the curricula. the role of assessment in facilitating learning and student development assessment has traditionally been used to evaluate end point summative academic achievement according to particular academic standards. sokhanvar, salehi and sokhanvar suggest that he assessment practice is often ‘impertinent to students’ professional careers and separated from what employers will tackle in their workplace’ (2021, p.3). this could be in part because heis have traditionally focused on knowledge transmission and learning/memorising facts, to be tested through unseen time-constrained examinations and essays (james and casidy, 2018). however, well designed assessment provides a significant opportunity for practitioners to support learning progression. where an assessment is well-designed, students’ holistic development is prevalent (elkington, connolly, dickinson and hellewell the development of undergraduate employability skills through authentic assessment in college-based higher education journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 4 2020). more specifically, contemporary research has suggested that authentic assessment methods increase engagement in learning and furnish students with vital professional skills (sokhanvar, salehi and sokhanvar, 2021). the term ‘authentic assessment’ was coined initially by wiggins (1989). it refers to tasks that students are required to perform or engage in and activities that integrate skill developments that they may require in the workplace environment (ashford-rowe, herrington and brown, 2014; murphy et al., 2017; sambell, brown and race, 2019; sambell and brown, 2021). the concept is associated with resolving complex real-world issues through problem-solving approaches (sokhanvar, salehi and sokhanvar, 2021) in authentic contexts (murphy et al., 2017; villarroel et al., 2018; manoharan, 2021). this is significant for students’ learning in he because it gives them hands-on experience of responding to the challenges of graduate employment and offers an alternative to traditional forms of assessment. authentic assessment is not, however, without its critics. murphy et al. (2017) assert that the uncertainty in determining what students are required to demonstrate can be a barrier to its implementation. moreover, villarroel et al. (2018) cite the time, energy, and intellectual resources it takes educators to prepare authentic assessments as factors that can discourage such approaches. furthermore, they suggest that its implementation might be hindered by a lack of conceptualisation of what authenticity refers to. mcarthur (2022), a critical theorist, presents a pertinent philosophical analysis of authenticity in assessment. for mcarthur, the dominant discourse surrounding authentic assessment holds the risk of it becoming merely a buzzword – something conducted without critical thought concerning its rationale. opposed to dominant discourse, which describes authentic assessment as that which mirrors the ‘real-world’ or ‘world of work’, she instead argues that authentic assessment should be directed towards broader social and/or political significance. additionally, she proposes that educators be clear about the reasons why the assessment is being undertaken and shift towards thinking of authentic assessment as a sociallysituated achievement that is powerful and transformative for the individuals and actors involved (mcarthur, 2022). the case studies presented below are underpinned by ashford-rowe, herrington and brown’s (2014) eight key tenets of authentic assessment (see table 1) and mcarthur’s connolly, dickinson and hellewell the development of undergraduate employability skills through authentic assessment in college-based higher education journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 5 salient appreciation of the notion of authenticity holding wider significant meaning for the society in which each case is situated. the eight tenets were used to inform how learning was designed in each case and acted as a guide for tutors planning the assessment and learning experiences. table 1: the key tenets of authentic assessment (drawn from ashford-rowe, herrington and brown, 2014). tenet of authentic assessment recommendations for practice challenge assessments should require students to demonstrate higherorder abilities such as analysis and evaluation to solve a problem. outcome students should produce a product or performance (i.e., outcome) which demonstrates specific skills and knowledge. transferable knowledge and skills assessments should support the notion that knowledge and skills learnt in one area or module can be applied elsewhere. metacognition active critical reflection through self-evaluation should occur. accuracy assessments should simulate and test real-world abilities and students should understand how their assessment reflects realworld employment scenarios/demands. environment and tools authenticity of the environment and tools should be maximised to reflect real-world contexts, but it is acknowledged that will differ in educational environments. formal feedback opportunities feedback is critical to performance as it enables continual development of skills and behaviours. formalising feedback opportunities (through peers, tutors, and other key stakeholders) should encourage assessments to have value and meaning beyond the classroom. collaboration assessments should engage students’ teamwork and communication skills to collaboratively address a problem. connolly, dickinson and hellewell the development of undergraduate employability skills through authentic assessment in college-based higher education journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 6 context he in england is mostly situated within universities, however a considerable proportion of he takes place in further education colleges and is termed college-based higher education (cbhe) or higher education within further education (he in fe). nearly 8% of undergraduate students in the uk study in cbhe settings (hesa, 2021a). this usually involves university-validated or franchised degrees at or below bachelor’s level (including two-year foundation degrees at level 5, one-year top-up degrees at level 6 or three-year bachelor’s programmes), or level 4/5 higher national certificates/diplomas. level 4 programmes equate to the first year of a bachelor’s programme, whilst levels 5 and 6 are equivalent to years two and three of bachelor’s programmes. the case studies were generated from three degree programmes at barnsley college in the 2021/22 academic year. at the time, the college had 304 he students with the majority studying on a full-time basis (n = 291) with the majority aged 18 to 23 (n = 215). the case studies were selected based on specific criteria. first and foremost, the assessment had to involve problem-solving. additionally, the case studies had to demonstrate effective academic practice by allowing students to integrate scholarship into their solutions. case studies were selected by reviewing past external examiner reports, student voice meeting notes, and student module review data. on completion of the review, three case studies were selected that met the inclusion criteria and demonstrated application at different levels of study. authentic assessment: the case studies case study 1: criminology level 4: summative assessment through immersive de-escalation activities the context of this case study is a level four module ‘conflict management’, which exists on the criminology, communities and criminal justice foundation degree. the assessments in this module are designed to replicate the core skills demonstrated by professionals within the criminal justice sector. the module was cross-examined by a senior professional in (at the time) her majesty’s prison service as part of the validation process to strengthen the legitimacy of relevant knowledge and skills transfer. the feedback was reviewed and applied accordingly to reflect current practices and expectations that correspond to the contemporary frameworks within the sector. connolly, dickinson and hellewell the development of undergraduate employability skills through authentic assessment in college-based higher education journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 7 first, students were provided with an ‘offender profile’ that was developed in collaboration with the intelligence lead for her majesty’s prison and probation service. the profile details crucial intelligence pertaining to an offender, for example, index offences, recent behaviour and attitudes, and history of mental health challenges. students were encouraged to utilise this intelligence in informing the practical, immersive role-play deescalation assessment (assessment one) that replicates a commonplace scenario within a prison establishment. the assessments focused on students’ ability under pressure to make dynamic risk assessments within an unscripted exercise and demonstrate cognitive agility and problem-solving. students incorporated theory, communication, and crisis negotiation strategies, alongside trauma-informed practice techniques to integrate primary interventions to successfully de-escalate and overcome the simulated scenario. the second assessment component comprised a ‘post incident report’ to document, thoroughly and accurately, details in relation to the incident for the record. students were required to remain within the confines of policy expectations and produce a report to a professional standard which adhered to confidentiality guidelines and detailed all significant occurrences of the practical role-play assessment. the final element of the second assessment required students to provide a reflection and evaluation of their performance within the simulated assessment. students demonstrated metacognition through critical reflection strategies that aided learning and development. students undertaking this module were able to clearly articulate the importance and relevance of skills development through the authentic methods via internal quality monitoring and module evaluations as detailed below: the module was fun, enjoyable and opened opportunities to learn new skills and develop confidence in dealing with hostile and challenging situations. i would say i enjoyed the practical assessment the most as this is where we could put our knowledge into practice. the innovative and authentic approaches to assessment were also recognised in the external examiner report: the combination of these two assessments for conflict management are an example of innovative work within higher education, they bring together strong connolly, dickinson and hellewell the development of undergraduate employability skills through authentic assessment in college-based higher education journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 8 theoretical and practical knowledge in a style that is realistic and immersive. the assessment deals with real conflict, allowing students to show skills in dealing and handling the harsh realities seen within these environments. the temporal aspect of the summative assessments detailed above lends itself well to a short timeframe, where simulated role play exercises are facilitated for students in groups of no more than three and last approximately 20 minutes per group. potential limiting factors with regards to the investment of time and energy were mitigated in this instance through the nature of smaller cohort sizes within cbhe (bullock and henry, 2022), with the level 4 cohort consisting of 26 students. in context, these assessments at level 4 link to that of further authentic assessment practices at levels 5 and 6 on this programme, whereby students are expected to apply skills directly within industry through the applied industry experience module (level 5), integrate professional context projects to enhance a service, and take part in a full-scale hostage negotiation scenario facilitated by industry professionals at level 6. case study 2: sport level 5: formative assessment through problem-solving in ‘community action projects’ this case study is part of a level 5 module ‘employability, enterprise and creativity’ which exists on degree programmes in sport, physical activity and health. the module adopts a year-long structure with two summative assessments. one of its learning outcomes requires students to ‘illustrate own personal and professional readiness against employment opportunities’ and is assessed through a self-development mock interview. using seminars and asynchronous learning, students undertook activities which promoted reflection and provided formative feedback opportunities to aid their employability readiness; one of which, was a six-week group task termed ‘community action project (cap)’. the purpose of the cap was to provide students with the opportunities to work on a live brief that would offer benefits to themselves as key actors (in terms of skills development) and the local community. to design the cap, meetings took place with key community stakeholders (managers of a charity organisation) to co-design a project brief comprising an authentic problem for students to solve. appreciation of, and being responsive to, the charity’s needs influenced connolly, dickinson and hellewell the development of undergraduate employability skills through authentic assessment in college-based higher education journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 9 how learning was designed in this formative assessment. for the 2021/22 academic year, students were tasked with exploring how the local charity could make better use of an under-utilised community facility. establishing parameters and gaining an understanding of the charity’s vision and key performance indicators allowed for the creation of a brief which would holistically develop and unlock the key features of authentic assessment. students were divided into three small groups (4-5 students per group) based upon aspired careers in health or sport/physical activity. prior to the cap, students were presented with the co-designed brief including a portfolio of the facility (for example, its location, size, amenities, and inventory). students were given six weeks (including four dedicated seminars) to design a solution for improving its usage before delivering their ideas in an oral presentation to the charity manager. in formulating their solutions, students worked collaboratively, agreeing roles and setting/reviewing weekly targets (in response to peer and tutor feedback) to ensure accountability and task completion. a central tenet of the cap relied upon students understanding the brief and the community in which it was designed to serve. to do this, each group conducted primary and/or secondary data research to investigate the local community and propose a solution that not only made use of the facility but one that would have clear outcomes that would benefit all stakeholders. the three solutions proposed were: 1. a multi-faceted project including sports participation and life skills workshops where young people would develop financial and time-management skills, learn first-aid, and explore cooking healthy nutritious meals. 2. coupling short, fundamental exercise sessions with social opportunities for older adults to positively impact on physical and mental wellbeing. 3. delivering ‘bingocise’ events for the community’s ageing population to address high levels of physical inactivity and loneliness. in terms of learning design, a key priority was to design a formative assessment opportunity for development that motivated students to attend and engage. to accomplish this, students had to appreciate the holistic development they would gain as a result. the caps achieved this by establishing a live brief, which students recognised the local benefit connolly, dickinson and hellewell the development of undergraduate employability skills through authentic assessment in college-based higher education journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 10 of, and through establishing clear weekly accountability measures that echoed project work in their hopeful career sectors. the caps were successful in meeting the tenets of authentic assessment (identified above) and creating opportunities for students to develop real-world problem-solving skills. this was identified as a key aim for student development within the module as at level 6 students are required to facilitate an independent ‘professional context project’ that involves them working independently with a community group/organisation to address a local issue/problem. case study 3: exercise, health and technology level 6: authentic formative assessment through problem-solving to ‘develop a technological resource to improve users’ health’ the context of this case study is part of a level 6 module ‘exercise, health, and technology’, which is offered on degree programmes in sport, physical activity and health. the assessment in question is the second of two module assessments and requires students to create and justify the need for a technological resource. this resource must solve a current health problem, for example, the increase in depressive symptoms reported by students. examples of technological resources created by students include: wearable technologies to improve physical activity adherence, emotional health podcasts, an online gaming befriending scheme, and a safety application for female runners to make them feel protected. the rationale behind the design is not only to promote problemsolving skills but to develop entrepreneurial skills. solopress (2017) suggested that 56% of students considered setting up a business. however, in the 2018/19 graduate outcomes survey, only 15% of graduates reported being self-employed, running their own businesses or developing a portfolio (hesa, 2021b). the delivery and design of the module is shared between the module leader, the enterprise team at the institution, and a new business support programme. in the forming stages, meetings were organised with the organisations mentioned above to discuss the delivery plan. moving forward, this has progressed to a more organic, dynamic, and informal process where delivery plans are changed based on industry developments. all organisations access the delivery plan and collaboratively make and approve changes using the review function in office 365. the module was reflected upon by the students and the feedback suggests that students found the module purposeful. most pertinently, over 95% of the students felt that the module connolly, dickinson and hellewell the development of undergraduate employability skills through authentic assessment in college-based higher education journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 11 improved their skills, knowledge, and understanding. in addition, it has generated numerous success stories. an example is shown in the figure below which comes from linkedin (cited with permission). figure 1: graduate post-module appreciation as figure 1 demonstrates, students continue their learning after the module has concluded. for example, this student continued developing promotional/instructional videos for their resource (exercise application). similarly, learning continues to be facilitated through the industry-specific mentors that students were allocated. the assessment differed from the typical modules on their degree programme. not only did it offer students the chance to solve a problem, but it challenged them to develop skills and subject knowledge that they perceived they had not developed in other modules. most importantly, the assessment allowed students to create resources and develop entrepreneurial and digital skills. furthermore, the assessment required students to utilise skills they had developed earlier in their undergraduate programme, for example, undertaking primary data collection with local populations, to address the contemporary problem. the case study is delivered at level 6, and because of this, it has a direct impact on graduate outcomes. recently, employers have noted that the graduates' digital and creative skills have helped them to develop new provisions or initiatives in their organisations. most importantly, the number of graduates attempting to run their own businesses either as a full-time occupation or alongside a part-time role has increased. connolly, dickinson and hellewell the development of undergraduate employability skills through authentic assessment in college-based higher education journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 12 conclusion to conclude, the three case studies presented in the paper enhanced the employability skills of he students. the case studies demonstrate a number of key tenets of authentic assessment (outlined in table 1). each case utilised problem-solving as a hook for the learning through which students responded to authentic employment scenarios. the cbhe context in which the cases are situated appears to be an arena in which students’ problem-solving skills can flourish. the case studies offer examples of how undergraduate curricula can be designed to enhance student learning and development. it is clear from student and external stakeholder feedback that learning and development are closely linked to vital professional skills. in these case studies student learning is more intensely focused on critical thinking and the application of practical skills is precisely targeted at the challenges of very specific working environments. the recommendations for learning developers seeking to design authentic assessment experiences are: 1) allocate significant time for the co-design of the brief with employers, ensuring that the outcome of student assessment aligns with graduate skills needed in industry. 2) in developing scenarios, base learning design on the key tenets of authentic assessment (ashford-rowe, herrington and brown, 2014); doing so will unlock students’ potential to develop problem-solving attributes. 3) ensure that the assessment provides opportunities for students to present their outcomes to key stakeholders beyond the academic context (for example, employers) and receive feedback from these individuals to increase their readiness for graduate employment. the case studies provide further evidence of authentic curricula’s potential in enhancing problem-solving skills. the case studies demonstrate the potential of authentic assessment within an he context (cbhe) and he subject areas that are not typically associated with authentic assessment and add to the case for authentic assessment’s use as a vehicle for effective learning and development. connolly, dickinson and hellewell the development of undergraduate employability skills through authentic assessment in college-based higher education journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 13 references ashford-rowe, k., herrington, j. and brown, c. (2014) ‘establishing the critical elements that determine authentic assessment’, assessment & evaluation in higher education, 39(2), pp.205-222. https://doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2013.819566. bradley, a., priego-hernández, j. and quigley, m. (2022) ‘evaluating the efficacy of embedding employability into a second-year undergraduate module’, studies in higher education, 47(11), pp.2161-2173. https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2021.2020748. bullock, j. and henry, g. (2022) ‘quality, community and access: an examination of student decision-making to study undergraduate degrees in two further education colleges’, journal of further and higher education, pp.1-17. https://doi.org/10.1080/0309877x.2022.2108692. cranmer, s. (2006) ‘enhancing graduate employability: best intentions and mixed outcomes’, studies in higher education, 31(2), pp.169-184. https://doi.org/10.1080/03075070600572041 damoah, o. b. o., peprah, a. a. and brefo, k. o. (2021) ‘does higher education equip graduate students with the employability skills employers require? the perceptions of employers in ghana’, journal of further and higher education, 45(10), pp.13111324. https://doi.org/10.1080/0309877x.2020.1860204. elkington, d. s. (2020) essential frameworks for enhancing student success: transforming assessment, advance he. available at: https://www.advance-he.ac.uk/knowledgehub/essential-frameworks-enhancing-student-success-transforming-assessment (accessed: 14 december 2022). hesa (2021a) he student enrolments at he and fe providers by level of study and he provider type 2015/16 to 2019/20. available at: https://www.hesa.ac.uk/data-andanalysis/sb258/figure-4#notes (accessed: 28 june 2022). https://doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2013.819566 https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2021.2020748 https://doi.org/10.1080/0309877x.2022.2108692 https://doi.org/10.1080/03075070600572041 https://doi.org/10.1080/0309877x.2020.1860204 https://www.advance-he.ac.uk/knowledge-hub/essential-frameworks-enhancing-student-success-transforming-assessment https://www.advance-he.ac.uk/knowledge-hub/essential-frameworks-enhancing-student-success-transforming-assessment https://www.hesa.ac.uk/data-and-analysis/sb258/figure-4#notes https://www.hesa.ac.uk/data-and-analysis/sb258/figure-4#notes connolly, dickinson and hellewell the development of undergraduate employability skills through authentic assessment in college-based higher education journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 14 hesa (2021b) survey results: graduate outcomes 2019/2020: infographic. available at: https://www.graduateoutcomes.ac.uk/why-take-survey/survey-results (accessed: 14 november 2022). james, l. t. and casidy, r. (2018) ‘authentic assessment in business education: its effects on student satisfaction and promoting behaviour’, studies in higher education, 43(3), pp.401-415. https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2016.1165659. manoharan, a. (2021) ‘bridging inclusion and employability: creating significant real-world experiences in the curriculum’, in baughan, p. (2021) assessment and feedback in post-pandemic era: a time for learning and inclusion. available at: https://www.advance-he.ac.uk/news-and-views/assessment-and-feedback-postpandemic-era-time-learning-and-inclusion (accessed: 14 april 2023). mcarthur, j. (2023) ‘rethinking authentic assessment: work, well-being, and society’, higher education, 85(1), pp.85-101. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-022-00822-y. murphy, v., fox, j., freeman, s. and hughes, n. (2017) ‘“keeping it real”: a review of the benefits, challenges and steps towards implementing authentic assessment’, all ireland journal of higher education, 9(3), pp.1-13. pavlin, s. and svetlik, i. (2014) ‘employability of higher education graduates in europe’, international journal of manpower, 35(4), pp.418-424. https://doi.org/10.1108/ijm05-2013-0104. pearce, s. (2019) independent review of the teaching excellence and student outcomes framework (tef): report to the secretary of state for education. available at: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attach ment_data/file/952754/tef_independent_review_report.pdf (accessed: 29 september 2022). sambell, k., and brown, s. (2021) ‘changing assessment for good: building on the emergency switch to promote future-oriented assessment and feedback designs’, in baughan, p. (ed.) assessment and feedback in post-pandemic era: a time for learning and inclusion. available at: https://www.advance-he.ac.uk/news-andhttps://www.graduateoutcomes.ac.uk/why-take-survey/survey-results https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2016.1165659 https://www.advance-he.ac.uk/news-and-views/assessment-and-feedback-post-pandemic-era-time-learning-and-inclusion https://www.advance-he.ac.uk/news-and-views/assessment-and-feedback-post-pandemic-era-time-learning-and-inclusion https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-022-00822-y https://www-emerald-com.libaccess.hud.ac.uk/insight/search?q=samo%20pavlin https://www-emerald-com.libaccess.hud.ac.uk/insight/search?q=ivan%20svetlik https://www-emerald-com.libaccess.hud.ac.uk/insight/publication/issn/0143-7720 https://doi.org/10.1108/ijm-05-2013-0104 https://doi.org/10.1108/ijm-05-2013-0104 https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/952754/tef_independent_review_report.pdf https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/952754/tef_independent_review_report.pdf https://www.advance-he.ac.uk/news-and-views/assessment-and-feedback-post-pandemic-era-time-learning-and-inclusion connolly, dickinson and hellewell the development of undergraduate employability skills through authentic assessment in college-based higher education journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 15 views/assessment-and-feedback-post-pandemic-era-time-learning-and-inclusion (accessed: 14 april 2023). sambell, k., brown, s. and race, p. (2019) ‘assessment as a locus for engagement: priorities and practicalities’, italian journal of educational research, xii (special issue), pp.45-62. scott, f. j. and willison, d. (2021) ‘students’ reflections on an employability skills provision’, journal of further and higher education, 45(8), pp.1118-1133. https://doi.org/10.1080/0309877x.2021.1928025. sokhanvar, z., salehi, k. and sokhanvar, f. (2021) ‘advantages of authentic assessment for improving the learning experience and employability skills of higher education students: a systematic literature review’, studies in educational evaluation, 70, pp.1-10. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.stueduc.2021.101030. solopress (2017) ‘modern student business: the new co-worker’, solopress. available at: https://www.solopress.com/blog/solopress-news/modern-student-business-the-newco-worker/ (accessed: 14 november 2022). villarroel, v., bloxham, s., bruna, d., bruna, c. and herrera-seda, c. (2018) ‘authentic assessment: creating a blueprint for course design’, assessment and evaluation in higher education, 43(5), pp.840-854. https://doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2017.1412396. wiggins, g. (1989) ‘teaching to the (authentic) test’, educational leadership, 46(7), pp.4147. author details dan connolly is a teaching and learning coach at barnsley college and phd student at leeds trinity university exploring teaching methods, strategies, and tools used in collegebased higher education. he is a senior fellow of advance he and has a msc in sport and physical education. he has over ten years’ experience teaching further and higher https://www.advance-he.ac.uk/news-and-views/assessment-and-feedback-post-pandemic-era-time-learning-and-inclusion https://doi.org/10.1080/0309877x.2021.1928025 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.stueduc.2021.101030 https://www.solopress.com/blog/solopress-news/modern-student-business-the-new-co-worker/ https://www.solopress.com/blog/solopress-news/modern-student-business-the-new-co-worker/ https://doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2017.1412396 connolly, dickinson and hellewell the development of undergraduate employability skills through authentic assessment in college-based higher education journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 16 education and is now the module leader for various modules on the level 6 professional graduate certificate in education (pgce). in his role, he is also responsible for planning and implementing continuous professional development and undertaking professional practice observations of higher education teaching staff. lliam dickinson is a higher education pathway leader at barnsley college higher education. he has an msc in health and wellbeing and is a former advanced practitioner and wellbeing lead. his current research, teaching, and vocational interests include student experiences and wellbeing, the role of the environment on health, and physical activity.   luke hellewell is a higher education pathway leader within the subject areas of criminology and criminal justice at barnsley college higher education. he has an msc in criminology and international security and has research interests in the areas of authentic assessment, employability, and online/hybrid learning, alongside subject specific interests in transnational organised crime and southern criminology perspectives. luke has many years of experience working directly within the criminal justice sector, which he utilises to integrate innovative and contemporary he teaching and learning pedagogies into the curricula. licence ©2023 the author(s). this is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (cc-by 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. see http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. journal of learning development in higher education (jldhe) is a peer-reviewed open access journal published by the association for learning development in higher education (aldinhe). the development of undergraduate employability skills through authentic assessment in college-based higher education abstract introduction the role of assessment in facilitating learning and student development context authentic assessment: the case studies case study 1: criminology level 4: summative assessment through immersive de-escalation activities case study 2: sport level 5: formative assessment through problem-solving in ‘community action projects’ case study 3: exercise, health and technology level 6: authentic formative assessment through problem-solving to ‘develop a technological resource to improve users’ health’ conclusion references author details licence literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 4: march 2012 connectivity gráinne conole university of leicester, uk keywords: digital technologies; digital literacy; networks. a fundamental characteristic of digital technologies is that they are networked and connected, providing users, tools and resources with a plethora of ways to interact. this connectivity is immense, forming in a sense a global neural network of information, dialogue and exchange; arguably we now have the capacity on a global scale to achieve salomon’s notion of distributed cognition (salomon, 1993). the potential of such a vast, intelligent network for learning is clear, offering a plethora of ways in which learners and teachers can access and interact with information, and to communicate and collaborate. nonetheless, the sheer complexity of the network also brings challenges. despite the fact that arguably anything an individual wants to learn is available somewhere on the net, accessing a particular resource of relevance may be challenging to say the least. furthermore, developing an appropriate digital identity online is a particular digital literacy skill learners and teachers need to develop. being part of this network of others means information can travel globally instantaneously. learners and teachers need to make informed choices about how they communicate and need to recognise that what they are saying may go beyond their known bounded community. think for example of the power of the twitter network. one tweet sent to 3,000 followers, may then be retweeted beyond that community to thousands of others. table 1 lists some of the benefits and disadvantages of connectivity in terms of the implications for learning. conole connectivity table 1. the implications of learning in a connected environment. benefits disadvantages global loss of individual identity multiple forms of communication loss of individual voice multiple forms of representation need for new sense making skills interconnected, horizontal, no hierarchical structure complex, no clear simple or correct route through instantaneous danger of superficiality rich mechanisms for shared discourse danger of convergent memes dominating cultural diverse danger of cultural hegemony diversity of offerings, the ‘long tail’ fragmentation the recent experience and evaluation of massive open online courses (moocs) gives us some insights into the implications of learning in a global, connected environment. the number of learners who sign up for these courses is impressive (many thousands), the numbers who complete are much less so and indeed there is a marked downturn in participation as the courses progress. the ‘course organisers’ state that learners can participate with the course in a range of ways and that there is no standard learning pathway through. therefore they can contribute to discussion forums or wikis, post comments on social networks, publish blog posts and comment on the blog posts of others. the organisers argue that this is a truly emancipatory style of learning, enabling each individual to create their own personal learning environment. there is no single route through a mooc, they are horizontal, distributed and evolving by nature, offering a mechanism for supporting rhizomatic learning (cormier, 2008; cormier, 2011). the scale of the course means that participants can communicate with learners on a global scale. the design of moocs is learner centred, with no central teaching role. evaluation of participants’ experience of these courses is mixed. whilst many value the concept and joined partly out of curiosity to see what interaction in such an open and connected learning network would be like, many quickly became disillusioned, finding it difficult to keep up. the sheer scale of moocs (which arguably have no beginning and no end) was bewildering for many, and it was all too easy to get lost or confused by the plethora of resources and communication channels. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 2 conole connectivity recognising that learning now takes place in this rich dynamic ecology of technologies is a fundamental challenge facing educators and in particular has implications for how learning is designed for in this context. how can we take account of the affordances of technologies in terms of their connectivity? how can we design to take account of the fact that the learning context is constantly changing and evolving, with new connections being made, and certain learning pathways being foreground over others? how do we minimise the risks associated with a connected environment? how do we avoid some of the pitfalls outlined above, such as loss of individuality or voice, fragmentation, superficiality, convergence of thought, and cultural hegemony? finally, how can we design given the sheer complexity? is design in any meaningful way possible? connectivity – a scenario for the future of learning what would a scenario of the future look like where the potential benefits and affordances of connectivity were fully exploited for learning? essentially we would be in a position of an evolving ecology of learners co-constructing and applying their understanding to address complex and tricky real-life challenges. at a meta-level, the collective understanding of the network would be greater than the sum of the individual parts. residues of learning would reside in the network, leaving a digital learning trail of evolved understanding. a truly rhizomatic learning network (cormier, 2011), horizontal, evolving, networked and intelligent; constantly adapting to its environment and capitalising on the expertise of both actants and non-actants in the network (latour, 2005), i.e. learning would distributed between humans and tools, forming a meta-distributed cognition (salomon, 1993). by its nature it would be adaptive, able to respond to changing contexts. learners could tap into the network as and when they needed. formal educational roles (such as teacher and student) would no longer have resonance. each individual would adopt different roles in different scenarios, asking for help as a learner in one context, providing expertise as a teacher in another. participation would be as important as acquisition (sfard, 1998). participants in the network would also be co-designers, helping to evolve and shape the network. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 3 conole connectivity references cormier, d. (2008) ‘rhizomatic education: community as curriculum’, dave's educational blog: education, post structuralism and the rise of the machines. available at: http://davecormier.com/edblog/2008/06/03/rhizomatic-education-community-ascurriculum/ (accessed: 30 march 2012). cormier, d. (2011) 'rhizomatic learning why we teach?', dave's education blog: education, post-structuralism and the rise of the machines. available at: http://davecormier.com/edblog/2011/11/05/rhizomatic-learning-why-learn/ (accessed: 30 march 2012). latour, b. (2005) reassembling the social: an introduction to actor-network-theory. usa: oxford university press. salomon, g. (ed.) (1993) distributed cognitions psychological and educational considerations. cambridge: cambridge university press. sfard, a. (1998) 'on two metaphors for learning and the dangers of choosing just one', educational researcher, 27(2), pp.4-13. author details gráinne conole is professor of learning innovation and director of the beyond distance research alliance, university of leicester. gráinne joined leicester in september 2011, before that she held posts at the open university, southampton university, and bristol university. she has research interests across e-learning, including learning design, open educational resources, social and participatory media, learning theories and strategic change. she has recently submitted a book to springer entitled 'designing for learning in an open world'. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 4 http://davecormier.com/edblog/2008/06/03/rhizomatic-education-community-as-curriculum/ http://davecormier.com/edblog/2008/06/03/rhizomatic-education-community-as-curriculum/ http://davecormier.com/edblog/2011/11/05/rhizomatic-learning-why-learn/ connectivity connectivity – a scenario for the future of learning references author details literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 8: march 2015 breathing life into information literacy skills: results of a faculty-librarian collaboration divonna m. stebick gettysburg college, usa janelle wertzberger gettysburg college, usa margaret flora west holmes high school, usa joseph miller kipp philadelphia charter school, usa abstract when an education professor and a reference librarian sought to improve the quality of undergraduate student research, their partnership led to a new focus on assessing the research process in addition to the product. in this study, we reflect on our collaborative experience introducing information literacy as the foundation for undergraduate teacher education research. we examine the outcomes of this collaboration, focusing on the assessment of the process. using a mixed methods approach, we found that direct instruction supporting effective research strategies positively impacted student projects. our data also suggest that undergraduate students benefit from not only sound research strategies, but also organization strategies. keywords: information literacy; undergraduate research strategies; library instruction; teacher education; direct instruction; organization strategies; student reflections. stebick et al. breathing life into information literacy skills journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 2 introduction today’s students face a variety of new factors impacting the quality of the information to which they are exposed. this study examines how a new collaboration between a professor and librarian impacted students’ information literacy skills in a 300-level course. (this 300-level course includes an expectation of deep synthesis in order for students to apply education theory to practice through a pedagogical lens.) project information literacy (pil) research reveals that young adults feel overwhelmed by the amount of information available to them, and that they struggle especially with the beginning stages of reviewing literature. almost all young adults return to familiar, ‘tried and true’ information sources and information seeking strategies without tailoring their approach to address a particular information need (head and eisenberg, 2009a, 2009b, 2010a, 2010b, 2011). consequently, undergraduate students do not always find research assignments to be the invigorating investigations that faculty intend them to be, and their performance suffers. the association of college and research libraries (acrl) defines information literacy as: a set of abilities requiring individuals to recognize when information is needed and have the ability to locate, evaluate, and use effectively the needed information. (acrl, 2015). focusing on improving student information literacy can positively impact literature review quality and, as a result, overall student learning at the undergraduate level. since global information is available by just a click at the computer, our information landscape is quite dynamic and has prompted changes in student learning goals. consequently, our undergraduate pedagogical methods must also change if we are to continue to support innovative, reflective thinkers within and beyond a liberal arts community where student and faculty research blend (trilling and fadel, 2012; jastram et al., 2011). according to ‘project information literacy’, information literacy skills greatly impact the success of our current undergraduates as well as their ability to succeed following graduation (head and eisenberg 2012). if course assignments, projects, and readings are designed to help students improve their information literacy, our graduates will have a more successful opportunity to re-engage in the digital society within their postgraduate workforce with these newfound skills, including but not limited to initiating research; analyzing information and synthesizing information in order to develop stebick et al. breathing life into information literacy skills journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 3 innovative ideas to share within their field and beyond (wolf, 2008; small and vorgan, 2009; and scharf et al., 2007). research shows that integration of information literacy within an authentic context appropriately challenges students to think and reflect in order to shape and explain their world (oakleaf, 2009; trilling and fadel, 2012); undergraduate coursework serves as a platform for each of us to provide students with such an intellectual challenge. however, current pedagogical practices do not always ensure that students reflectively meet this challenge effectively or efficiently. information professionals assert that students who are asked to explain the thought process behind their researching skills and who are assessed on that process are more likely to create original work (gilchrist and oakleaf, 2012), yet there are few studies that have explored library research as a process rather than a product. the present study analysed one 300-level teacher education course as the students prepared for two separate assignments; a 75-minute interactive oral presentation and a poster to be presented to various community stakeholders. this paper will discuss the importance of being reflective consumers of information in order to be effective practitioners in the field. we will also report the results from an examination of our students’ literature review strategies. for the purposes of this paper, our initial research focused on one overarching research question, ‘what were the outcomes of collaborative efforts between a reference librarian and undergraduate professor to build a strong foundation of research skills for pre-service teachers?’ we also asked two related sub-questions: 1. how did the information seeking process develop over time? 2. how did students’ information seeking practices change over time? while our initial questions focused on students researching, our later reflections also prompted us to consider elements of our collaboration, such as the design of our teaching environment and how we hoped to impact student learning. framing a research process inquiry we used cochran-smith and lytle’s notion of an inquiry stance (cochran-smith and lytle, 1993, 1999a, 2009) as an organizing theoretical and pedagogical framework. in this approach, teachers are empowered to work together to co-construct knowledge-of-practice stebick et al. breathing life into information literacy skills journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 4 and serve as agents of change in their classrooms. action research, or systematic inquiry into problems of practice, serves as the primary tool for guiding teachers toward ownership of knowledge and skills for critical reflection (dana and yendol-hoppey, 2009; mills, 2010). action research has been highlighted across the literature as a powerful teacher education practice (grossman, 2005), noted for its ability to illustrate candidate’s understandings about teaching and learning (darling-hammond, 2006), foster social justice (zeichner, 2009), and facilitate professional growth (ball and cohen, 1999). self-studies of action research abound in the teacher education literature and typically examine its affordances and constraints in context. some prominent examples of selfstudies have explored the outcomes of action research on teacher educators, teachers, and pre-service teachers’ learning (cochran-smith et al., 2009), teacher reflexivity et al., 2010), and personal and institutional development (valli, 2000; valli and price, 2005). additional analyses look at action research as a tool for fostering emancipatory practice (gore and zeichner, 1991) and the process of thinking like a researcher (christenson et al., 2002). mode of inquiry one 300-level teacher education class with a total of twelve students participated in this project. the students’ information seeking skills were analyzed at the beginning of the study and again at the end of the study using a rubric (figure 1). the researchers for this study included the professor who taught the course, a reference librarian, and two education students. prior to the project, the reference librarian and the professor discussed how the project would be structured and executed, in hopes of avoiding the poor assignment quality seen in previous semesters. the two began with a discussion of the final project and how this project focused on assessing a product, a review of literature, rather than the process of researching. realizing that a better research process would lead to a better literature review, the two agreed that a closer examination of how students actually conduct research was in order. they asked the students to create fifteenminute recordings of their current research practices using an online tool, ‘screencast-omatic’; this tool captures the audio and screen movements employed by the user and was chosen because it is free, web-based, and platform neutral (see http://www.screencast-omatic.com ). students used a ‘think-aloud’ process to share their thoughts as they made http://www.screencast-o-matic.com/ http://www.screencast-o-matic.com/ stebick et al. breathing life into information literacy skills journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 5 decisions during their individual online review of literature. this initial video log (recorded between the first and second day of classes) served as a baseline (see appendix 1). our first intervention took place on the second-class day, just after the students created their first video research logs. the reference librarian led the class through a series of active learning exercises designed to improve their search skills. students began by reporting on their typical information gathering tools and strategies; these were used to create a collective concept map of research tips. the librarian then introduced a database of reference books to use for background information. next, students explored various disciplinary databases in pairs and shared with the entire class. the concept map was referenced during the reports to reinforce the use of various tools and highlight their context within a universe of research options. this class session was intended to give the students a stronger foundation for their individual research skills than they would have had otherwise. the next intervention occurred when the students were in the midst of their individual research. students were asked to schedule individual appointments with the librarian about a week before their in-class presentations. students were to bring the sources they had found so far, as well as questions regarding sources they still had not found. the librarian used the research process rubric (figure 1) during this conference in order to provide feedback to the students about their research skills. eight out of the twelve students participated in this conference. using quality sources, students were able to create innovative, interactive, and informative lessons. classmates eagerly took notes on the shared information. after students shared their findings via an engaging lesson, the instructor evaluated it with a rubric and provided constructive feedback regarding both content and delivery. the instructor concluded that there was improvement in presentation content compared to previous semesters’ work. students then began finding information for their poster presentations. they were asked to create another fifteen-minute video research diary for the researchers to examine later. the poster assignment was designed to hone existing research skills, further extend the students’ application of research skills, and provide a platform to share the results of their literature review in a public forum. the posters were shared with various community stebick et al. breathing life into information literacy skills journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 6 stakeholders at the end of the semester, and the instructor evaluated these literature review posters with a rubric. data sources in action research studies, data collection is a result of systematic and intentional study of one’s own practice with the goal of improving that practice (dana and yendol-hoppey, 2009). a related methodological goal of the present inquiry was to base documentation upon evidence taken from the daily life within the college classroom (the in-class instructional sessions and poster presentations) and beyond it (the video research diaries). different types of data collection techniques were used throughout the course of this study, so that the multiple data sources could be used to validate the findings (maxwell, 2013). the different methods of data collection identified possible findings for the three research questions discussed in this paper. the instruments included (a) transcriptions of both sets of video research diaries; (b) instructor’s notes; (c) librarian’s lessons; (d) librarian’s conference notes and (e) completed projects (instructional session and posters). results our initial analysis suggested that this new focus on improving information seeking strategies helped students improve their overall information literacy and class performance. the baseline video research logs collected at the beginning of the semester showed that students relied most heavily on various search engines (such as google) to limit and prioritize search results. consequently, some of the research results did not include the most appropriate sources to be included in an instructional session. students did not select the best sources because they had not used the most appropriate tools to find their sources, such as disciplinary databases and streaming video databases from the library. analysis of the second batch of video research logs (collected near the end of the semester) showed new use of scholarly information-seeking tools such as eric (http://eric.ed.gov/); the library catalogue and the library discovery platform. video clips were more likely to come from published documentaries rather than youtube. the researchers were pleased that the new interventions had a positive impact on student http://eric.ed.gov/ stebick et al. breathing life into information literacy skills journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 7 performance. next, they turned attention to the new research process rubric, hoping to better codify desired student research behaviors. recall that the librarian and instructor constructed a rubric to capture the literature review process prior to the start of the semester (figure 1). as we used this rubric to evaluate student information-seeking skills we soon realized that it did not measure the process as well as we had hoped. the librarian, instructor, and student researchers discussed and revised the rubric as well as the implementation of the rubric, and used the new version to score the video logs (figure 2). the revised rubric can now be used as more than a formative assessment tool – it can be shared with incoming students as an instructional tool. the instructor and librarian can use the rubric when planning future lessons. we anticipate that the improved rubric will lead to improved learning to be generated from future students, rather than a summary evaluation of what had been learned. we began the semester hoping to support students’ learning by assessing their information seeking process – and we did. by establishing a collaborative practice of inquiry within our classrooms, we also improved our own teaching of the information seeking process. here is an example of how this collaborative inquiry generated pedagogic change. because the video research logs recorded authentic student information seeking behaviors, we were able to identify a critical skill gap we had not noticed before: students still need help organizing their found information. the videos showed that most students utilized haphazard techniques to save or organize the results of their review of literature, and many attempts failed. only one of the students implemented a systematic method for securing citations, downloading copies of texts, and saving secure web links (we later determined that the student had unusually high research skills thanks in part to a mellon summer scholar fellowship). the researchers found it very disheartening that so many students relied on the first few pages of results from one search engine and that so many students failed to successfully save the sources they intended to. in response to this finding, we introduced an additional instruction period devoted to information organization during the next semester in which the course was taught. the librarian covered topics like saving source citations, formatting citations, downloading articles, and using databases to make the organization process more efficient, and the instructor provided further support and accountability in order to positively influence student information seeking habits. stebick et al. breathing life into information literacy skills journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 8 we made a few more changes in the fall 2012 class design, as well. we decided to show some of the spring 2012 videos during the library visit, particularly ones that demonstrate how a student may organize ideas during a review of literature. we made the literature review process rubric more ‘public’ by sharing it in the fall 2012 syllabus. finally, we allowed students to make individual appointments with any reference librarian, not just the one who conducted the research instruction sessions with the entire class. figure 1. initial research process rubric exemplary satisfactory needs improvement search strategies how did you discover these sources? when you meet with the librarian, be prepared to share evidence that demonstrates your research process. brainstormed many keywords, categories, and related terms that opened the research topic. brainstormed some keywords, categories, and related terms that began to open the research topic. brainstormed limited keywords, categories, and related terms that began to open the research topic. expanded and refined list(s) of relevant search terms by evaluating and refining initial search results. began to refine relevant search terms by evaluating and refining initial search results. began to refine search terms by evaluating and refining initial search results. searched different types of tools (catalogues, article databases, websites, curricula). searched different types of tools (catalogues, article databases, websites, curricula). searched few types of tools (catalogues, article databases, websites, curricula). employed boolean operators, truncation, and other advanced search strategies to broaden or narrow searches as appropriate. employed boolean operators, truncation, and other advanced search strategies to broaden or narrow searches as appropriate. began to employ boolean operators, truncation, and other advanced search strategies to broaden or narrow searches as appropriate. followed references/citations listed in in-hand sources. followed some references/citations listed in in-hand sources. followed limited references/citations listed in in-hand sources. identification and selection of sources what sources have you gathered? hint: gather far more than you expect to identified a range of highly appropriate sources. demonstrated consideration of sources that vary by:  publication format (reference books, books, articles, websites, films, lesson plans, other media  identified some appropriate sources but made limited attempts to balance some of the following format types: publication format (reference books, books, articles, websites, films, lesson plans, other media etc.)  author (scholars from identified few appropriate sources and made little attempt to balance few of the following format types:  publication format (reference books, books, articles, websites, films, lesson plans, other media stebick et al. breathing life into information literacy skills journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 9 use! etc.)  author (scholars from relevant disciplines, journalists, laypersons, other).  audience (scholars, students, parents, laypersons, other stakeholders).  source type (primary, secondary, and even tertiary).  perspective. context (including historical) relevant disciplines, journalists, laypersons, other).  audience (scholars, students, parents, laypersons, other stakeholders).  source type (primary, secondary, and even tertiary).  perspective. context (including historical). etc.)  author (scholars from relevant disciplines, journalists, laypersons, other).  audience (scholars, students, parents, laypersons, other stakeholders).  source type (primary, secondary, and even tertiary).  perspective. context (including historical). quality / evaluation how well did you edit your initial research results? cited only high quality sources that strongly supported the thesis or claim.. cited some quality sources that supported the thesis. cited few quality sources that provided limited support for the thesis sources represent intellectual choices made in service of a thesis or claim. some sources represent intellectual choices made in service of a thesis or claim. some sources represent intellectual choices made in service of a thesis or claim. final bibliography exhibits no gaps in background research. final bibliography exhibits some gaps in background research. final bibliography exhibits some gaps in background research. research gaps identified earlier in the process have been filled or otherwise adequately addressed. attempts have been made to fill the identified research gaps. research gaps identified earlier in the process have not been filled or otherwise adequately addressed. stebick et al. breathing life into information literacy skills journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 10 figure 2. revised research process rubric exemplary satisfactory needs improvement search strategies how did you discover these sources? when you meet with librarian, be prepared to share evidence that demonstrates your research process. brainstormed many keywords, categories, and related terms that opened the research topic. expanded and refined list(s) of relevant search terms by evaluating and refining initial search results. searched many different types of tools (catalogues, article databases, websites, curricula). employed boolean operators (other than and), truncation, and other advanced search strategies to broaden or narrow searches as appropriate. followed references/citations listed in in-hand sources. brainstormed some keywords, categories, and related terms that began to open the research topic. began to refine relevant search terms by evaluating and refining initial search results. searched a few different types of tools (catalogues, article databases, websites, curricula). began to employ boolean operators (other than and), truncation, and other advanced search strategies to broaden or narrow searches as appropriate. followed some references/citations listed in in-hand sources. brainstormed limited keywords, categories, and related terms that began to open the research topic. did not refine search terms by evaluating and refining initial search results. searched 1-2 types of tools (catalogues, article databases, websites, curricula). did not employ boolean operators (other than and), truncation, or other advanced search strategies to broaden or narrow searches as appropriate. did not follow references/citations listed in in-hand sources. identification, selection and organisation of sources what sources have you gathered? how did you organise and keep track of them? hint: gather far more than you identified a sufficient number of appropriate sources sources were balanced by:  publication format (reference books, books, articles, websites, films, lesson plans, other media etc.)  author (scholars from relevant disciplines, journalists, laypersons, other).  audience (scholars, students, parents, laypersons, other stakeholders). identified some appropriate sources made limited attempts to balance sources by:  publication format (reference books, books, articles, websites, films, lesson plans, identified few appropriate sources did not balance sources by:  publication format (reference books, books, articles, websites, films, lesson plans, other media stebick et al. breathing life into information literacy skills journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 11 expect to use!  publication date (as appropriate for topic). always saved/ copied/ emailed/exported relevant source citations found during research. always saved/copied/emailed/exported or otherwise obtained relevant full text sources found during research. other media etc.)  author (scholars from relevant disciplines, journalists, laypersons, other).  audience (scholars, students, parents, laypersons, other stakeholders). publication date (as appropriate for topic). sometimes saved/copied/ emailed/exported relevant source citations found during research. sometimes saved/copied/ emailed/exported or otherwise obtained relevant full text sources found during research. etc.)  author (scholars from relevant disciplines, journalists, laypersons, other).  0 audience (scholars, students, parents, laypersons, other stakeholders).  publication date (as appropriate). did not save/copy/ email/ export any source citations. did not save/copy/ email/export or otherwise obtain any full text sources, or copied part of a source without saving citation. stebick et al. breathing life into information literacy skills journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 12 scholarly significance of the study the findings of this research support the theoretical rationale presented earlier in this paper. the suggested implications for teaching, while being grounded in the inquiry framework, drew from the theorists that influenced the current study. the present study highlights the complexity of literature review implications that are found in teacher education undergraduate courses. each semester, instructors inherit a group of multidisciplinary students with very different and numerous information seeking experiences that influence how they gather information. it is thus important for educators to provide venues in order to share their newly found knowledge and experiences. as instructors it is our professional commitment to work toward creating such experiences for each of our students. although educational institutions and instructors: talk about and teach separate interpretive activities… [such as reading, viewing, listening, speaking, thinking, and writing; our students] ..actually live in whole cultures and bring insights from one medium into their approach to another. (mackey, 2002, p. 50). it is very difficult to teach students to try a new research method until you show them that their “tried and true” methods often limit and / or negatively impact their results (head and eisenberg, 2009b). today’s students: actually read within the framework of a sophisticated context that includes numerous forms of media, multimedia, and cross-media engagement. (mackey, 2002, p. 51). against such backdrops, this study generated six implications for teaching that will be of relevance to future research: (a) use of rubrics to guide the process and instruction of literature reviews, (b) teaching information-seeking skills prior to and during authentic projects, (c) bringing multidisciplinary experiences and knowledge to the review of literature, (d) transferring information seeking skills to other contexts, (e) teaching students how to organize gathered information, and (f) orally sharing thinking and reasoning while stebick et al. breathing life into information literacy skills journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 13 reviewing literature to publicize the private research techniques of individuals for the benefit of other students. next steps in action research studies, data collection is a result of systematic and intentional study of one’s own practice with the goal of improving that practice (dana and yendol-hoppey, 2009). a related methodological goal of the present inquiry was to base documentation upon evidence taken from the daily life within the college classroom (the in-class instructional sessions and poster presentations) and beyond it (the video research diaries). different types of data collection techniques were used throughout the course of this study, so that the multiple data sources could be used to validate the findings (maxwell, 2013). the different methods of data collection identified possible findings for the three research questions discussed in this paper. the instruments included (a) transcriptions of both sets of video research diaries, (b) instructor’s notes, (c) librarian’s lessons, (d) librarian’s conference notes, and (e) completed projects (instructional session and posters). references association of college and research libraries (2015) standards and guidelines. available at: http://www.ala.org/acrl/resources/policies/chapter14. (accessed: 23 march 2015). ball, d. l., and cohen, d. k. (1999) ‘developing practice, developing practitioners: toward a practice-based theory of professional education’ in l. darling-hammond and g. sykes (eds.) teaching as the learning profession: handbook of policy and practice. san francisco: jossey-bass, pp. 3-32. christenson, m., slutsky, r., bendau, s., covert, j., dyer, j., risko, g., johnston m. (2002) ‘the rocky road of teachers becoming action researchers’, teaching and teacher education, 18(3), pp. 259-272. http://www.ala.org/acrl/resources/policies/chapter14 stebick et al. breathing life into information literacy skills journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 14 cochran-smith, m., barnatt, j., friedman, a., and pine, g. (2009) ‘inquiry on inquiry: practitioner research and student learning’, action in teacher education, 31(2), pp. 17-32. cochran-smith, m. and lytle, s.l. (1993) inside/ outside: teacher research and knowledge. new york: teachers college press. cochran-smith, m. and lytle, s.l. (1999a) ‘relationships of knowledge and practice: teacher learning in communities’, review of research in education, 24(1), pp. 249305). cochran-smith, m. and lytle, s.l. (2009) inquiry as stance: practitioner research for the next generation. new york: teachers college press. dana, n. f. and yendol-hoppey, d. (2009) the reflective educator's guide to classroom research: learning to teach and teaching to learn through practitioner inquiry. 2 nd edn. california: corwin press. darling-hammond, l. (2006) powerful teacher education: lessons from exemplary programs. san francisco: jossey-bass. degago, a. t. (2007) ‘a first-timer's impressions of engaging in action research: a case in ethiopian preservice teacher education’, action in teacher education, 29(1), pp. 7180. gilchrist, d. and oakleaf, m. (2012) an essential partner: the librarian’s role in student learning assessment. available at: http://www.learningoutcomeassessment.org/documents/librarylo_000.pdf (accessed 23 march 2015). gore, j. m. and zeichner, k.m. (1991) ‘action research and reflective teaching in preservice teacher education: a case study from the united states’, teaching and teacher education, 7(2), pp. 119-136. http://www.learningoutcomeassessment.org/documents/librarylo_000.pdf stebick et al. breathing life into information literacy skills journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 15 grossman, p. (2005) ‘research on pedagogical approaches in teacher education’ in cochran-smith, m. and zeichner, k. (eds.) studying teacher education. new jersey: lawrence erlbaum, pp. 425-476. head, a. j. (2012) learning curve: how college graduates solve information problems once they join the workplace, project information literacy research report, october. available at: http://projectinfolit.org/images/pdfs/pil_fall2012_workplacestudy_fullreport_revised.p df (accessed: 23 march 2015). head, a. j. and eisenberg, m. b. (2011) balancing act: how college students manage technology while in the library during crunch time, project information literacy research report, october. available at: http://projectinfolit.org/images/pdfs/pil_fall2011_techstudy_fullreport1.2.pdf (accessed: 23 march 2015). head, a. j. and eisenberg, m. b. (2010a) assigning inquiry: how handouts for research assignments guide today's college students, project information literacy research report, july. available at: http://projectinfolit.org/images/pdfs/pil_handout_study_finalvjuly_2010.pdf (accessed: 23 march 2015). head, a. j. and eisenberg, m. b. (2010b) truth be told: how college students evaluate and use information in the digital age, project information literacy research report, november. available at: http://projectinfolit.org/images/pdfs/pil_fall2010_survey_fullreport1.pdf (accessed: 23 march 2015). head, a. j. and eisenberg, m. b. (2009a) finding context: what today's college students say about conducting research in the digital age, project information literacy research report, february. available at: http://projectinfolit.org/images/pdfs/pil_progressreport_2_2009.pdf (accessed: 23 march 2015). http://projectinfolit.org/images/pdfs/pil_fall2012_workplacestudy_fullreport_revised.pdf http://projectinfolit.org/images/pdfs/pil_fall2012_workplacestudy_fullreport_revised.pdf http://projectinfolit.org/images/pdfs/pil_fall2011_techstudy_fullreport1.2.pdf http://projectinfolit.org/images/pdfs/pil_handout_study_finalvjuly_2010.pdf http://projectinfolit.org/images/pdfs/pil_fall2010_survey_fullreport1.pdf http://projectinfolit.org/images/pdfs/pil_progressreport_2_2009.pdf stebick et al. breathing life into information literacy skills journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 16 head, a. j. and eisenberg, m. b. (2009b) lessons learned: how college students seek information in the digital age, project information literacy research report, december. available at: http://projectinfolit.org/images/pdfs/pil_fall2009_finalv_yr1_12_2009v2.pdf (accessed: 23 march 2015). jastram, i., leebaw, d., and tompkins, h. (2011) csi (l) carleton: forensic librarians and reflective practices. available at: http://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2011/csil-carleton-forensic-librarians-andreflective-practices/ (accessed: 23 march 2015). mackey, m. (2002) literacies across media. new york: routledgefalmer. maxwell, j.a. (2013) qualitative research design: an interactive approach. 3 rd edn. california: sage publications inc. mills, k.a. (2010) ‘a review of the digital turn in the new literacy studies’, review of educational research, 80(2), pp. 246-271. oakleaf, m. (2009) ‘using rubrics to assess information literacy: an examination of methodology and interrater reliability’, journal of the american society for information science and technology, 60(5), pp. 80-99. scharf, d., elliot, n., huey, h.a, briller, v. and joshi, k. (2007) ‘direct assessment of information literacy using writing portfolios’, journal of academic librarianship, 33(4), pp. 462-477. small, g. w. and vorgan, g. (2009) ibrain: surviving the technological alteration of the modern mind. new york: harper collins. smith, j.j., yendol-hoppey, d., and milam-sukop, r. (2010) ‘reflection through action research by preservice teachers’ in pultorak, e.g. (ed.) the purposes, practices, and professionalism of teacher reflectivity: insights for twenty-first century teachers and students. new york: rowman and littlefield. http://projectinfolit.org/images/pdfs/pil_fall2009_finalv_yr1_12_2009v2.pdf stebick et al. breathing life into information literacy skills journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 17 trilling, b. and fadel, c. (2012) 21 st century skills: learning for life in our times. san francisco: jossey-bass. valli, l. (2000) ‘connecting teacher development and school improvement: ironic consequences of a preservice action research course’, teaching and teacher education, 16(7), pp. 715-730. valli, l., and price, j. (2005) ‘preservice teachers becoming agents of change: pedagogical implications for action research’, journal of teacher education, 56(1), pp. 57-72. valli, l., van zee, e. h., rennert-ariev, p., mikeska, j., catlett-muhammad, s. and roy, p. (2006) ‘initiating and sustaining a culture of inquiry in a teacher leadership program’, teacher education quarterly, 33(3), pp. 97-114. wolf, m. (2008) proust and the squid: the story and science of the reading brain. new york: harper collins. zeichner, k. m. (2009) teacher education and the struggle for social justice. new york: routledge. author details divonna m. stebick has an academic background in teacher preparation, literacy, and special education and is an associate professor in the education department at gettysburg college, gettysburg, pennsylvania. divonna’s research interests extend beyond information literacy to include effective learning practices for all learners. she also pursues research in the implications of digital literacy, comprehension and teacher preparation. janelle wetzberger is director of reference & instruction at gettysburg college’s musselman library, where she supports the research of undergraduate students and faculty and participates in an active information literacy instruction program. she manages the institutional repository, the cupola: scholarship at gettysburg college, and stebick et al. breathing life into information literacy skills journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 18 coordinates campus outreach and education regarding open access. she is also involved in the design and implementation of library programs and learning series which support the curriculum, encourage critical thinking, and enliven the imagination. margaret flora has an academic background in mathematics and secondary education and is currently a high school mathematics teacher at west holmes high school in ohio. as a high school teacher, she maintains a working knowledge of new philosophies and practices in education and tries to incorporate these into her daily teaching. joseph miller has an academic background in sociology and elementary education. currently, he coordinates the math curriculum for sixth grade at kipp philadelphia charter school, where he teaches all subjects in his self-contained classroom. some of joe's other research interests are the impact of gender in k-12 school settings and the perceived meritocracy of high-stakes standardized tests stebick et al. breathing life into information literacy skills journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 19 appendix i creating a video research diary you will use screencast-o-matic to create a 15-minute video research diary. the diary will include screen capture and an audiorecording of your voice. please verbalize your thoughts as you do your research – understanding why you do what you do will help us! what is screencast-o-matic?  see http://www.screencast-omatic.com/  online screen recorder  one-click recording from your browser on windows, mac, or linux  no install, no account registration or setup  free before you begin  make sure you know how to access your h: drive. this is a network drive that stores up to 750 mb (you’ll need about 75 mb of free space to complete this assignment). when you log in to lab machines on campus, you automatically see your h: drive. if you haven’t already mapped your h: drive to your personal computer, see the instructions provided by it at http://www.gettysburg.edu/about/offices/it/io/cs/tech/accessing_your_h_drive.dot.  make sure your java is working and updated (you need java 1.5 or later). http://java.com/en/download/testjava.jsp  make sure you have a microphone. (if you are using your laptop, you probably have one built in. if you are using a desktop machine without a microphone, you may borrow one at the library. ask at the circulation desk.)  make sure you have a thumb drive with about 75 mb of free space. (if you don’t have a thumb drive handy, you may purchase one in the office supply vending machine on the library’s main floor.)  if prompted, you need to allow the java plugin.  watch the quick demo online: http://www.screencast-omatic.com/watch/cxhbbqb9c http://www.screencast-o-matic.com/ http://www.screencast-o-matic.com/ http://www.gettysburg.edu/about/offices/it/io/cs/tech/accessing_your_h_drive.dot http://java.com/en/download/testjava.jsp http://www.screencast-o-matic.com/watch/cxhbbqb9c http://www.screencast-o-matic.com/watch/cxhbbqb9c http://www.screencast-o-matic.com/ stebick et al. breathing life into information literacy skills journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 20  make a very short test video to make sure you can capture both your screencast and your voice. one tester recording at a computer lab had to change a setting so the computer recognized the microphone – so don’t skip the test step! make sure you are capturing as much of your screen as possible – but i suggest leaving a small space at the bottom so that the s-o-m controls don’t obscure your taskbar. the s-o-m control box isn’t resizeable.  then proceed with your assignment. your assignment: record a 15-minute video research diary  spend only 15 minutes beginning to research and find materials for your presentation (see syllabus for details about this assignment). record the first 15 minutes you spend on this project. there are no right or wrong answers. we want an honest peek at how you begin to tackle a research assignment.  remember that if you need to pause your recording, use alt-p (though i had best results when i never paused).  when you are done: o choose the save to video file option. (you needn’t preview the video – it will take time and you’re not going to revise it anyway!) o save as quicktime (mp4). o name your file researchlog1stebick (but use your own last name, not mine!). o save it to your h: drive. this will take a few minutes – be patient. my 15minute video file is 62.1 mb in size. o then copy the file to a thumb drive and bring this to class to “turn it in.” files will be transferred to the education department’s network drive. your video will not be publically available.  you must complete your video research diary before class on 8/30/2013. bring your thumb drive to class on 8/30. literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 4: march 2012 plagiarism and attribution: an academic literacies approach? anna magyar university of east anglia, uk abstract in many higher education courses in the uk, the ability to write extended academic prose is central to assessment and therefore to student success. one aspect of academic writing which students find a particular challenge, is incorporating the work and ideas of others, using appropriate attribution conventions. this can lead them to fall foul of their university’s plagiarism policies. advice on plagiarism often focuses on plagiaristic behaviour in the process of collection and use of sources or on the mechanics of referencing within the writing up of an assignment. this paper discusses a small-scale action-oriented study which explored international postgraduate students' understandings of, and questions about, plagiarism. it argues that a culturally sensitive approach to plagiarism education needs to take into account the role of linguistic strategies, rhetorical practices, disciplinary knowledge and epistemology in academic writing. keywords: international students; academic literacies; academic writing; writing development; plagiarism; referencing; learning development; academic skills development. introduction with increasingly diverse student cohorts, the academy's implicit expectations and assumptions need to be understood and articulated. attribution practices, central to academic writing, are an example of this. attribution refers to the complex socio-linguistic practice (chanock, 2008; mcgowan, 2006) of using other written texts in the construction of one’s own. this is distinct from referencing, used in this paper to refer to what has been called the mechanics of referencing and citation (gourlay and greig, 2007). it has been argued that efforts to familiarise students with attribution practices have been overshadowed by the increased emphasis on plagiarism detection (mcgowan, 2006; magyar plagiarism and attribution: an academic literacies approach? magyar, 2009). shifting the focus from detection to pedagogy creates opportunities for learning and even empowerment (burns et al., 2010; hendricks and quinn, 2000; klitgard, 2010). the increase of international students studying in the uk has been accompanied by a perception that such students are the most likely to plagiarise (hayes and introna, 2005, p.213). these authors argue that this perception can undermine the ability of educators to ‘[respond] to issues of plagiarism among international students…in an ethical manner’. as a writing developer working with international students, my interest in attribution came out of witnessing the different perspectives that lecturers and students brought to a shared concern about plagiarism. lecturers appeared worried about the threat the (perceived) rise in plagiarism posed to the integrity of the courses they taught, perceiving international students as most likely to plagiarise. international students, intimidated by the ‘plagiarism’ talks at the beginning of the year, were meanwhile tied up with anxieties about plagiarising. what seemed to be causing confusion was a lack of distinction being made between ‘evidence of an intention to defraud’ and ‘inappropriate textual borrowing’ (abasi and graves, 2008, p.221); in other words, between intentional and unintentional plagiarism. student anxieties seemed to rarely stem from a misunderstanding of plagiarism itself. their questions and confusions, i would argue, indicated not a deficiency on their part but rather, the complexity of attribution practices in the context of extended written assignments. to understand these complexities as experienced by international students, a number of individual interviews and focus groups were conducted. insights from the research were then used in designing a resource aimed at helping students to understand, and successfully use, attribution in their writing. the key research questions were: 1. what does ‘avoiding plagiarism’ involve for students in the context of writing extended assignments? 2. what barriers do students face in implementing the plagiarism advice they receive? (in induction lectures or skills workshops, for example). 3. does feedback regarding plagiarism that students receive in their assignments help them to avoid plagiarising in subsequent assignments? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 2 magyar plagiarism and attribution: an academic literacies approach? the next section gives details of the methodology of the research and the participants. the findings are then presented and discussed thematically. to illustrate how research of this kind can inform the work of learning developers, a resource which was designed using these research insights is then described using as a framework the three approaches to student writing (study skills, socialisation and academic literacies) as elaborated by lea and street (1998). i conclude by arguing that in discussing plagiarism with students, the cultural, linguistic and epistemological dimensions of attribution need to be included and that such discussions are most effective when embedded within the teaching and learning of the academic content which students are studying. methodology and participants data collection for the study described in this paper (funded by a hefce teaching fellowship in 2008) and analysis of the data was informed by an academic literacies approach to writing. by ‘academic literacies’ i do not mean simply the ‘acquisition of required linguistic, rhetorical or cognitive structures’ (lillis and scott, 2007, p.6) but i refer to a pedagogical approach and a field of enquiry ‘with a specific epistemological and ideological stance’ which asks ‘what does it mean to participants to ‘do’ academic writing?’ and ‘what is involved and at stake in student writing’ (lillis and scott, 2007, pp.7-9). central to this field of inquiry are participants’ perspectives on the processes and practices pertaining to academic writing, along with ‘observation of the practices surrounding the production of texts’ (lillis and scott, 2007, p.11). lillis and scott argue that the field is therefore inherently ethnographic and in this sense, the study described in this paper adopted an ethnographic approach. participants participants were recruited by distributing an information sheet in masters programme seminars. masters students were the focus for two reasons: firstly, because the proportion of international students is far more significant in postgraduate programmes; secondly, because the relative brevity of masters programmes highlights the significant transition students have to make to an entirely different academic and institutional culture in such a short space of time. participants were recruited from different countries, cultures journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 3 magyar plagiarism and attribution: an academic literacies approach? and disciplines (see figure 1) more or less representative of the profile of the international masters student body at university of east anglia (uea). for example, circa 70% of students studying international development were international students in 2008 and mexican students at uea tend to choose international development. thus the study benefitted from both cultural and disciplinary diversity, reflecting some of the ‘peculiar ways of knowing, selecting, evaluating, reporting, concluding and arguing that define the discourse of the community’ (bartholomae, 1986, p.4) and how these peculiarities shape understandings about, and use of, attribution. figure 1. participants: countries and disciplines. countries china (4), france (1), india (1), iraq (1), japan (3), jordan (1), malaysia (2), mexico (5), poland (1), portugal (1), syria (1) thailand (3) disciplines american studies (2), biological sciences (1), business studies (3), computing (1), economics (2), education (2), environmental sciences (2), international development (5), law (1), nursing and midwifery (3), social work (2) not all international students were strictly speaking second language users of english, certainly in an academic context. the malaysian and indian students, for example, had been educated in english from secondary school onwards, and the student from jordan had studied their first degree using english as a medium of instruction. data collection to generate a range of student perspectives, i conducted 16 semi-structured individual interviews and three focus groups, two of which were cross-disciplinary and one where all participants were from the same discipline. as an example, the first group interview comprised students from international development (syria), environmental sciences (portugal), law (malaysia) and social work (india). decisions about composition of focus journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 4 magyar plagiarism and attribution: an academic literacies approach? groups, and whether or not a participant was interviewed individually, were made for pragmatic rather than methodological reasons. for example, student availability and whether a student was happy to participate in a focus group. the focus groups (four students in each) and interviews took place between march and may 2008. they were conducted in parallel but in four cases, students who had participated in the focus groups were then interviewed individually. this provided an opportunity to follow-up and discuss in more depth issues they had raised in the group. focus groups can be an effective way of accessing the opinions and feelings of participants, as individuals respond to and are stimulated by each other (barbour and kitzinger, 1998). the individual interviews provided a space to discuss in more depth the experiences and difficulties participants had encountered in writing assignments. the cross-disciplinary focus groups worked well in gaining insights into students’ understandings. participants shared their experiences and collaborated in articulating and reflecting on their difficulties with, and questions about, plagiarism. participants knew what the general topic was, but the group controlled the direction of the discussion, with the researcher acting as facilitator (stewart and shamdasani, 1990). confidentiality and consent participants were sent a consent form with information about confidentiality. this was particularly important given the anxieties students displayed regarding unintentional plagiarism. further information about the interview itself was also given (see figure 2) students were then asked for oral consent to tape record the interviews and discussions. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 5 magyar plagiarism and attribution: an academic literacies approach? figure 2. info sheet for participants. . you do not need to ‘prepare’ anything for this discussion. i am simply interested in your experiences. by ‘your experiences’, i mean: your thoughts about what plagiarism means. your opinion about the guides and advice that we provide to help you. your experience of avoiding plagiarism in written assignments. your strategies for developing your writing. your thoughts about the feedback you get. what available resources you use and how you use them. data analysis transcripts from the focus groups and individual interviews were analysed to determine overarching themes and then were analysed a second time using these four emerging themes – language, rhetoric, epistemology and cultural practices. the findings: four dimensions of attribution analysis of the data indicated that student concerns and perspectives about the complexities of attribution fell into four loose but nonetheless distinct categories: linguistic practices, rhetorical practices, epistemological issues and cultural practices and values. these are discussed in turn using quotes from the transcripts. pseudonyms are used and countries have been left out for the sake of anonymity but the disciplines the students were studying have been kept. the discussion draws on research from the fields of second journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 6 magyar plagiarism and attribution: an academic literacies approach? language learning and student writing in higher education, as well as my experience as a learning developer in higher education. attribution as linguistic manipulation i thought plagiarism was nothing to do with me because i would not copy other people’s work, because i respect ancient knowledge. i did not understand the plagiarism rules here. i did not understand that even if you reference, you are still plagiarising if your words are too close to the words in the text you are referencing. (ayesha , studying law) if avoiding plagiarising was simply a matter of referencing, ayesha had followed the rules as she understood them. she also understood the moral and ethical dimensions involved and was all the more upset when told she had plagiarised. ayesha had attributed the text she used but she had not transformed it sufficiently. she had not, to reuse that ubiquitous and problematic piece of advice often given to students ‘said it in [enough of] her own words’ to make it different enough from the source text. in other words, the difficulty was with paraphrasing. to some extent, the emphasis on paraphrasing in plagiarism education can be seen to privilege native speakers, since paraphrasing is predicated on having sufficient linguistic resources to manipulate language, and in the case of academic writing, generic academic and disciplinary specific uses of language. however, it creates tension for every student, as they mediate between relying on their existing linguistic resources and extending their repertoire as they learn the terminology of the discipline (gourlay and greig, 2007). nuk, studying nursing, explains her dilemma succinctly: ‘my english vocabulary is simple and limited. if i use my own words, it will not be academic’. thus for a writer to be able to take a chunk of language and transform it to fit the purposes of a particular piece of writing requires considerable linguistic resources, including familiarity with discipline-specific terminology and general vocabulary with specific meanings and uses within the discipline. if one views language as a ‘culturally shaped resource for making meaning’ (coffin at al., 2003, p.11) and writing as sets of practices which differ according to context and purpose, rather than a discreet and transferable skill, then university is a place where international journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 7 magyar plagiarism and attribution: an academic literacies approach? students can develop both their second language repertoire and their academic writing. indeed, a legitimate language learning strategy (swales and feak, 2000) is viewed as students developing their writing by picking up generic academic phrases and language chunks and using them in their writing. in this sense, what has been referred to as ‘patchwriting’ (pecorari, 2003) and carroll (2006) calls ‘plagiphrasing’ can be seen as part of the developmental process of learning to write in an academic context. attribution as rhetorical practice students attend courses to learn new ideas, and ways of thinking, and this involves language. however, linguistic proficiency is just one element of the business of transforming language. it cannot be done without both a conceptual understanding of the topic being discussed and an understanding of particular disciplines and their preferred rhetorical practices. at masters level, students may be familiar with the discipline to varying degrees and so their challenge may be one of translating their conceptual understanding into english. on the other hand, they may be quite unfamiliar with the discipline or come across concepts and ideas that have no equivalent in their own language. being told that of course they don’t have to find synonyms for ‘technical’ or ‘disciplinary specific’ words is not always helpful, especially if students are travelling across significant cultural, philosophical and epistemological distances. as one student put it ‘i will have to put quotation marks around everything – it is all new to me’ (jing ma, studying education). beyond the specific terminology of the discipline there are also the rhetorical devices and patterns preferred by different disciplines and academic contexts. another question is what to reference: ‘so how do we know what to reference? do we have to reference every sentence?’. i ran a workshop in which i trialled some discipline specific materials i had produced in collaboration with a lecturer from that discipline. using a section of a research article, we had worked out which sentences needed and did not need referencing, and were able to justify the reasons why to our mutual satisfaction. however, when i asked a multi-disciplinary group of lecturers to do the activity, there was an uproar: ‘it depends’ i was told again and again. it depends on many things: the purpose of the text, the topic of the text, the audience, what has gone before and what comes after. and yet, what is clearly a complex textual practice (attribution) is often presented to journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 8 magyar plagiarism and attribution: an academic literacies approach? students as a matter of applying one or other among a number of citation styles (e.g. harvard referencing). attribution and epistemology attribution in academic writing is not only about acknowledging other people’s work that one has used and knowing when to do so. it is also used to strengthen or lend authority to one’s own arguments. in other words, other people’s work becomes evidence for our own, and there is an assumption here that such work must be published (canagarajah, 2002). attributable knowledge is also often contrasted with ‘common knowledge’ (magyar and robinson-pant, 2011) and with personal experience or practice. questions about the status and value of different forms of evidence in specific disciplines can be seen as an epistemological issue. prior to coming to the uk, nitya, a social worker, had been encouraged to use observation and her practitioner experience as primary sources for her writing, rather than relying on what could be seen as ‘second hand’ accounts. she considered herself a good writer who had enjoyed writing about her work: my ideas have gone out the window…i feel bad about that. if a culture has taught you to be strong in something and then you come to a different country, you are told that it doesn’t work like that and you have to deviate now and, get something that is already existing and back it up and then on top of that, you get nailed for plagiarising! so it’s very disheartening for international students who want to do well. indeed, the emphasis on referencing can lead students to hear mixed messages concerning having one’s own ideas: i was told that you have to back up everything that you say so no original ideas. so i always struggle with the fact that, do i put in my point at all? if i have to back it up with references, maybe i won’t find a reference. maybe no one on earth has ever had that thought. but my professor says ‘no, someone must have said it’. so that becomes a struggle. (maria, studying international development) journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 9 magyar plagiarism and attribution: an academic literacies approach? one student claimed that ‘good’ assignments on his course were ones where students had identified a number of good quotes and then built a text around them. he saw this as a mechanical exercise which undermined critical thinking: if everyone is constantly saying you have to be critical and you have to have ideas and so on and then in an essay i cannot express those ideas, then what am i, a collecting machine of other people’s ideas? i can’t have a new idea? why not? (martin, environmental sciences) attribution as culturally situated practice at the heart of the notion of plagiarism is the view that ideas belong to someone and whoever first formulated the idea has to then be acknowledged in future texts. layla, studying law, explains how acknowledgment works in a very different context, that of the koran: when we quote something from the koran we acknowledge who said this, there is a chain of people who quote the thing. but the purpose is not in order to say the quote is from him but merely to see whether this person is reliable or not, whether we can trust him or not, not that this knowledge is from him. (layla, school of law) this aspect of attribution as conferring authority and reliability works in a similar way in academic writing. it is in the notion of ownership that a very different perspective is brought to bear by this same student: in my culture knowledge is for everybody. we share knowledge. knowledge is from god. so ‘this idea is mine, this idea is his’ does not fit with our values. i understand that we have to acknowledge. god may give you knowledge and god may give others knowledge but you may simply be the first person to write it, to work on that idea. others may have the knowledge but they haven’t done anything about it. so you can’t say the knowledge is yours or ‘you have to quote me’. in this new context, for me if someone is using my work, i do not feel that they are taking my work. i feel glad that he is benefiting from something i did. i will get my reward from god. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 10 magyar plagiarism and attribution: an academic literacies approach? thus it can be seen that attribution is not a straightforward value-free academic convention involving referencing the work and ideas of others. rather, it is a complex practice predicated on culturally and historically situated ideas about texts, knowledge and ownership (pennycook, 1996). the process and practice of attribution is multi-dimensional. it involves linguistic strategies, namely paraphrasing and referencing, our ability to paraphrase and our ability to manipulate the language of in-text referencing. rhetorical issues are involved such as knowing how to incorporate, build on and critique others’ work. disciplinary knowledge is needed, in other words, knowing what is ‘general’ knowledge and therefore does not need to be referenced. attribution is also to some extent an epistemological practice, since it is about the value attributed to various potential sources of evidence in different disciplines. attribution practices are predicated on ideas about the ownership of knowledge in general and the production of academic knowledge in particular. furthermore, through attribution, particular relationships and roles are forged for and between individuals. finally, mastering attribution practices involves developing an academic ‘identity’, finding or simulating an authoritative voice with which to critique others. from theory to practice: an academic literacies approach to learning about attribution? the three approaches to student writing outlined by lea and street (1998) (the skills approach, the socialisation approach and the academic literacies approach) have tended to be described in terms of their differences. recently however, lea and street (2007) have emphasised the extent to which these can be seen as complementary approaches to writing pedagogy. in the context of plagiarism education, they can be seen as distinct approaches which each contribute to helping students attribute in their writing in accordance with the expectations of the academy. the skills approach is based on a view of language as a transparent/autonomous system. skills and behaviours are discrete and transferable and this can be seen in the generic games and quizzes presented to students to help clarify plagiaristic behaviours, as well as a focus on referencing as a decontextualised skill to be mastered. from an institutional point of view, and from the point of view of the learning developer, the benefits are that journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 11 magyar plagiarism and attribution: an academic literacies approach? materials can be developed and administered centrally, online or on paper, regardless of discipline. the socialisation approach regards language as discourse and focuses on the genres and linguistic features that are used in particular contexts. it identifies differences in language use between disciplines and genres (e.g. research writing, reflective writing). socialisation is associated with the notion of induction into the discipline, and with describing the conventions and rhetorical patterns of the genre (hyland, 2004). the socialisation approach is particularly helpful to second language writers since it focuses on expanding a student’s linguistic repertoire. in terms of attribution, this might involve drawing students’ attention to the different ways of in-text referencing characteristic of the discipline. for example, scientific referencing tends not to make reference in the sentence itself to the writer or the research, whereas in social science, one is more likely to find the author or the study itself as part of the sentence. a socialisation approach will also pay attention to linguistic resources associated with specific disciplines, for example, whether and when to use ‘argues that’ or ‘claims that’ (swales and feak, 2000). an academic literacies approach would view plagiarism and attribution in the context of textual and institutional practices. implicit assumptions and conventions underpinning these practices would be made explicit. attention might be paid to associated practices, such as notemaking and reading (for example, burns et al., 2010, in issue 2 of this journal). academic writing involves ‘learning not only to communicate in particular ways, but…learning to ‘be’ particular kinds of people, thus emphasizing writing as involving personal and social identity’ (coffin et al., 2003, p.10). therefore, a strong element of discussion and reflection are likely to feature. care will be taken to highlight the contested and provisional nature of academic conventions. students might be invited to question why we reference and to explore in depth how it works in specific disciplines, making the connection between language and the epistemology of the discipline. i will now describe a discipline-specific online resource bearing in mind the four dimensions of attribution discussed above and the academic literacies approach to developing academic writing. firstly, despite making a careful distinction in this paper between ‘referencing’ and ‘attribution’, in designing the resource, i chose to use ‘referencing’ as a short hand for attribution. students instantly recognise the term ‘referencing’. using ‘attribution’ would potentially create confusion, alienating students and journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 12 magyar plagiarism and attribution: an academic literacies approach? leading to the resource not being used. lecturers were found in three departments (business, international development, and nursing and midwifery), who were interested in collaborating to create a resource. they provided the disciplinary texts, student assignments and comments for the activities. they also reviewed the final storyboard in the light of the aims and learning outcomes of their course and their perspective as disciplinary ‘insiders’. to create a dialogue around the assumptions underpinning attribution, the first activity lists reasons why both academics and students might reference and invites students to comment on them. students use a ‘drag and drop’ feature which gives them instant feedback and provides further comments on how this applies to their particular discipline (see appendix 1). since attention to the technicalities of referencing does not help students in working out when and what to reference (chanock, 2008; mcgowan, 2006), in the second activity students are given a paragraph from a well-used discipline-specific text from which the references have been removed. students are asked to identify which sentences need referencing. guidelines are provided to help students decide when referencing is necessary or appropriate, drawing on discipline-specific attribution practices and the learning outcomes of the department the tutorial is designed for. after each answer, the feedback provided underlines the fact that there are no hard and fast rules (see appendix 2). the focus of the third activity is paraphrasing. using an extract from a core course specific text, a number of alternative paraphrases are provided. students have to decide whether the paraphrase is okay or not. the feedback underlines that there are a number of possibilities, depending upon the assignment, and illustrates different ways in which a text might be used, from close paraphrasing to a brief reference to the key idea (see appendix 3). lastly, to provide structured practice in integrating the work of others in one’s own writing, students paraphrase an extract from a core text. the feedback comprises possible paraphrases which students can then compare theirs with. this was more difficult in a virtual environment where individual feedback is not provided. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 13 magyar plagiarism and attribution: an academic literacies approach? the question remains as to the extent to which the resource created goes beyond a normalising (albeit more nuanced) model of socialisation. as lea asks (2004, p.745) in relation to designing an online course based on an ‘academic literacies’ model, ‘how do designers provide pedagogic spaces for exploration of all the different and contrasting textual practices that are involved?’. time constraint is a primary, but not sole, factor. a resource that is time consuming is unlikely to be used and students have assignment deadlines to meet. they also work with their own meanings and towards their own goal. moreover, with a resource which does not accommodate two -way discussion it is difficult to convey complexity whilst meeting the student’s need for certainties. nonetheless, it is hoped that these discipline-specific tutorials will contribute, alongside other more generic resources, to plagiarism education and to supporting international students in particular who may be less familiar with (uk) higher education practices. however, despite the flexibility and possibilities of virtual learning, i believe face-to-face subject seminars still provide a unique space within which to explore the relationship between attribution, writing, the construction of knowledge and the epistemologies of particular disciplines.   conclusion the study discussed in this paper set out to understand how international masters students negotiate and grapple with attribution, given the central role of extended pieces of writing in assessment, which require the use and attribution of other texts. the challenges of attribution faced by international students were found to be only partly language-based; nor were they solely attributable to cultural difference. it can be argued that the questions and views of students quoted in this paper identify issues of relevance and importance to all learners and teachers in higher education. they also point to some of the ‘practices of mystery’ (lillis, 1999) that are unwittingly maintained in higher education, which can undermine student participation and confidence. the study shows that listening to the perspectives of international students, who inhabit what has been called a ‘transnational space’ (rizvi, 2010), helps us as learning developers in thinking critically about uk academic practices. i hope the resources described contribute to demystifying attribution, thereby helping students to participate in the practices of their discipline. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 14 magyar plagiarism and attribution: an academic literacies approach? references abasi, a. and graves, b. (2008) ‘academic literacy and plagiarism: conversations with international graduate students and disciplinary professors’, journal of english for academic purposes, 7(4), pp. 221-233. barbour, r. and kitzinger, j. (1998) developing focus group research. london: sage. bartholomae, d. (1986) ‘inventing the university’, journal of basic writing, 5(1), pp.4-23. burns, t., sinfield,s f., holley, d. and hoskins, k. (2010) ‘‘very urgent, very difficult and quite possible’: changing students’ attitudes to notemaking by encouraging user generated content’, journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2, february, pp. 1-13. canagarajah, a.s. (2002) a geopolitics of academic writing. pittsburgh, pa: university of pittsburgh press. carroll, j. (2006) ‘plagiarism’, eighth learning and teaching conference. university of nottingham. january. http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/pesl/resources/moduledesign/judecarr898/ the university of nottingham last updated: september 1st 2010 chanock, k. (2008) ‘when students reference plagiarised material – what can we learn (and what can we do) about their understanding of attribution?’, international journal for educational integrity, 4(1), pp.3-16. coffin, c., curry, m.j., goodman, s., hewings, a., lillis, t. and swann, j. (2003) teaching academic writing: a toolkit for higher education. london: routledge. gourlay l. and greig, j. (2007) avoiding plagiarism, developing identities: responsibility, academic literacies and the curriculum. jisc-pas funded final report and case studies. university of northumbria. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 15 http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/pesl/resources/moduledesign/judecarr898/ magyar plagiarism and attribution: an academic literacies approach? hayes, n. and introna, l.d. (2005) ‘cultural values, plagiarism and fairness: when plagiarism gets in the way of learning’, ethics and behaviour, 15(3), pp. 213-231. hendricks, m. and quinn, l. (2000) ‘teaching referencing as an introduction to epistemological empowerment’, teaching in higher education, 5(4), pp. 448-457. hyland, k. (2004) genre and second language writing. ann arbor, mi: university of michigan press. klitgard, i. (2010) ‘plagiarism in the international university: from kidnapping and theft to translation and hybridity’, writing development in higher education conference. london 28-30 june. lea, m.r (2004) ‘academic literacies: a pedagogy for course design. studies in higher education, 29(6), pp. 739–756. lea, m.r., and street, b.v. (1998) ‘student writing in higher education: an academic literacies approach’, studies in higher education, 23(2), pp. 157-172. lea, m.r. and street, b.v. (2007) ‘the ‘academic literacies’ model: theory and applications’, theory into practice, 45(4), pp. 368-377. lillis, t. (1999) ‘whose ‘common sense’? essayist literacy and the institutional practice of mystery’, in jones, c., turner, j. and street, b. (eds.) students writing in the university: cultural and epistemological issues. amsterdam: john benjamins, pp. 127–147. lillis, t. and scott, m. (2007) ‘defining academic literacies research: issues of epistemology, ideology and strategy’, journal of applied linguistics, 4(1), pp. 5-32. magyar, a. (2009) ‘’how can we use our own words and at the same time use the terminology of the discipline?’: a qualitative study of international postgraduate student understandings of plagiarism’, european association for the teaching of academic writing conference. coventry university, coventry 30 june-2 july. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 16 magyar plagiarism and attribution: an academic literacies approach? magyar, a. and robinson-pant, a. (2011) ‘internationalising doctoral research: developing theoretical perspectives on practice’, teachers and teaching: theory and practice, 17(6), pp. 663-676. mcgowan, u. (2006) ‘does educational integrity mean teaching students not to ‘use their own words’?’, international journal for educational integrity, 2(2), pp. 29-42. pecorari, d. (2003) ‘good and original: plagiarising and patchwriting in second language writing’, journal of second language writing, 12(4), pp. 317-345. pennycook, a. (1996) ‘borrowing others’ words: text, ownership, memory and plagiarism’, tesol quarterly, 30(2), pp. 201-229. rizvi, f. (2010) ‘international students and doctoral studies in transnational spaces’, in walker, m. and thompson, p. (eds.) the routledge doctoral supervisor’s companion: supporting effective research in education and the social sciences. london: routledge, pp. 158-170. stewart and shamdasani (1990) focus groups: theory and practice. newbury park, ca: sage publications. swales, j. and feak, c. (2000) english in today’s research world: a writing guide. ann arbor, mi: university of michigan press. author details   anna magyar works as a part time lecturer and supervisor in the school of education at the university of east anglia. she teaches and researches in the areas of english as a second, additional and international language, writing development and academic writing. she also co-facilitates a writing programme for educational research scholars, funded by the british association for international and comparative education.  journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 17 magyar plagiarism and attribution: an academic literacies approach? appendix 1: reasons for referencing from the business studies resource marketing assignments are often about applying theory to case studies and organisation. so you will be referencing to show your lecturer: • the theories you have used. • that you are aware of the different schools of thought in marketing plans (e.g. planned strategy versus emerging strategy). • that you are able to apply theories to practice. • that you can discuss the strengths and weaknesses of those theories when applied to particular cases/situations/companies (you may find others have similar views and you can refer to these to support your view). appendix 2: deciding what to reference from the international development resource three guiding principles to help you decide whether or not you need to reference: 1. you must reference when you have directly quoted someone else’s work. 2. you need to reference ‘truth statements’, specific ‘facts’ and ‘generalisations’, unless they are considered general knowledge. 3. you need to reference other people’s opinions and arguments, whether paraphrased or summarised by you. from the nursing and midwifery resource theories and concepts have authors, as in the example above. once a theory has been developed, other researchers and academics will apply and discuss that theory, and evaluate it in terms of its usefulness to their area of practice or research. in fact, you are asked to do the same thing as part of learning about the theories which relate to nursing and midwifery. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 18 magyar plagiarism and attribution: an academic literacies approach? appendix 3: paraphrasing and summarising criteria for paraphrasing: 1. is it more or less saying the same thing or is there a big change in meaning? 2. is it far enough from the source to be called a paraphrase or is it more of a quotation? 3. is it correctly referenced? from the nursing and midwifery resource comment: the student has not simply paraphrased what is said in the nmc code but has related it to the aims of her assignment, one of which is to ‘discuss how the midwife may respond to the parents who may present this article to the midwife’. in doing this, she is demonstrating that she knows how to apply ‘general’ guidelines to the specific everyday situations she finds herself in as a midwife. from the business studies resource comment: here the student has summarised a key finding from porter’s article and applied it to their case study – they have borrowed key words such as ‘neutralize’ and ‘buyer power’. comment: the student has referenced and has rephrased the source text, so this is not plagiarism. this paraphrase has changed the meaning of the original and so should not be attributed to mcdonald, as it does not discuss the consequences of separating operational and strategic planning for the firm's longer term success. from the international development resource the writer has used a direct quote from escobar, which is okay. they have introduced it with a sentence that summarises one of the key ideas from the source text but is not copying the source text. so, the meaning has not been changed and it is not plagiarised. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 19 magyar plagiarism and attribution: an academic literacies approach? however, they have forgotten to reference. inserting (1995:22) after escobar’s name or at the end of the quote will make this an acceptable use of the source text. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 20 plagiarism and attribution: an academic literacies approach? abstract introduction methodology and participants participants data collection confidentiality and consent data analysis the findings: four dimensions of attribution attribution as linguistic manipulation attribution as rhetorical practice attribution and epistemology attribution as culturally situated practice from theory to practice: an academic literacies approach to learning about attribution? conclusion references author details appendix 1: reasons for referencing from the business studies resource marketing assignments are often about applying theory to case studies and organisation. so you will be referencing to show your lecturer:  the theories you have used.  that you are aware of the different schools of thought in marketing plans (e.g. planned strategy versus emerging strategy).  that you are able to apply theories to practice.  that you can discuss the strengths and weaknesses of those theories when applied to particular cases/situations/companies (you may find others have similar views and you can refer to these to support your view). appendix 2: deciding what to reference from the international development resource from the nursing and midwifery resource appendix 3: paraphrasing and summarising criteria for paraphrasing: 1. is it more or less saying the same thing or is there a big change in meaning? 2. is it far enough from the source to be called a paraphrase or is it more of a quotation? 3. is it correctly referenced? from the nursing and midwifery resource from the business studies resource from the international development resource literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 6: november 2013 negotiating feedback: lecturer perceptions of feedback dissatisfaction adam d. burns university of leicester, uk abstract this study analyses lecturers’ perceptions of feedback provided to university undergraduates and why in many cases it appears to prove so unsatisfactory to students. recent research into the issue of feedback in higher education (he) suggests that most existing studies on the subject have focused on students, whereas there is far less work on teachers in relation to formative learning (bailey, 2008; bailey and garner, 2010). indeed, evans (2013) notes that only 7.1% of research articles she explored in her wideranging review of existing assessment and feedback literature focused exclusively on lecturer perspectives. therefore, in addition to considering the findings of existing literature, this study explores the results of five interviews with he history lecturers to explore their understanding of the issue of student dissatisfaction with feedback. keywords: higher education; feedback; assessment; lecturers; national student survey. introduction this study analyses lecturers’ perceptions of feedback provided to university undergraduates and why in many cases it appears to prove so unsatisfactory to students. recent research into the issue of feedback in higher education (he) suggests that most existing studies on the subject have focused on students, whereas there is far less work on teachers in relation to formative learning (bailey, 2008; bailey and garner, 2010). indeed, evans (2013) notes that only 7.1% of research articles she explored in her wideranging review of existing assessment and feedback literature focused exclusively on lecturer perspectives. therefore, in addition to considering the findings of existing literature, this study explores the results of five interviews with he history lecturers to burns negotiating feedback: lecturer perceptions of feedback dissatisfaction explore their understanding of the issue of student dissatisfaction with feedback. in 2005, with the introduction of the national student survey (nss) to most of the uk’s higher education institutions (heis), the ‘realities’ of student satisfaction were brought an unprecedented national platform. of the main thematic sections in the nss questionnaire, five statements fall into the section entitled ‘assessment and feedback’: q5. the criteria used in marking have been clear in advance. q6. assessment arrangements and marking have been fair. q7. feedback on my work has been prompt. q8. i have received detailed comments on my work. q9. feedback on my work has helped me clarify things i did not understand. with the exception of a newer section on student unions added in 2012, the section on ‘assessment and feedback’ has consistently ranked bottom overall in student perceptions (hefce, 2013). the university at the heart of this study ranked in the bottom 10% of universities for the section ‘assessment and feedback’ during the period in which this study was undertaken and had initiated various awareness measures to try and remedy this situation. of course, in recent years the nss has had an increasingly direct impact on heis via the main university rankings lists. the guardian, the complete university guide, the times university guide and the sunday times good university guide all incorporate data from the nss in order to take into consideration student satisfaction when ranking institutions. universities with impressive research impact, infrastructure spending, staff-student ratios and demanding entry tariffs cannot rely entirely upon these factors to keep their national ranking high: student satisfaction counts. in reaction to this impact on university rankings, some doubt has been cast over whether the nss can be a true reflection of student feelings and it has been argued that some institutions, or at least some faculty members, have been instructing students to answer positively in the nss to influence their hei’s ranking in the league tables (swain, 2009). indeed, universities and their staff are becoming increasingly aware of (and concerned about) student perceptions of feedback and the need to improve satisfaction, both as a matter of education and as a matter of selfinterest. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 2 burns negotiating feedback: lecturer perceptions of feedback dissatisfaction existing literature feedback as a subject in existing higher education literature is frequently divided into two broad categories: formative and summative. what is immediately clear is that formative feedback is held up as the golden standard in the modern higher education environment and seen as the area where greater emphasis is needed (sadler, 1998; yorke, 2003; deeprose and armitage, 2004). lilly et al. (2010) argue that, in the main, staff and students share a sense of what constitutes good quality feedback, especially that it should be formative in nature (whether serving a formative or summative purpose), a finding echoed in drew (2001). conversely, summative feedback is regarded as something that has always been a ‘vexed business’ and is still in disarray (knight, 2002). knight (2002, p.278) argues that summative assessment is being ‘stretched to cover learning goals that resist robust, reliable and affordable summation’, as well as being fraught with contradictions. however, despite the recognition of the preference for formative feedback within the academe, one wonders whether all practitioners and – even more so – consumers of feedback understand the difference. in spite of recognition of the importance of feedback among both students and academics, the matter too often causes frustration for both (orrell, 2006). one recent study posits that the purpose of feedback can be divided into roughly five areas: corrections, reinforcement, forensic diagnosis, bench-marking and longitudinal development/feed-forward (price et al., 2010). however, it is marks, grades and classifications – often cited as a student’s main concern – which seem to be both the least effective and most sought after form of feedback (knight, 2002). here, from the start, we see the beginnings of a problem that this piece seeks to address – the gap between expectations and reality when it comes to feedback for both the provider and the consumer. bailey and garner (2010, p. 196) contend that there is indeed a ‘common ground’ in the higher education experience: students and teachers alike share a ‘sense of disengagement with higher education practices ostensibly designed to support pedagogical and communicative interactions’. they conclude that both parties might be left wondering ‘if feedback is worth the paper it is written on’ (bailey and garner, 2010, p.196). journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 3 burns negotiating feedback: lecturer perceptions of feedback dissatisfaction glover and brown (2006) suggest that one key concern for teaching staff is that providing written feedback is a time-consuming process. with departments across universities looking for ever more comprehensive written feedback as quickly as possible in order to address student dissatisfaction concerns, educators are beginning to feel the strain. despite the time-consuming nature of the process, many educators feel as though the time spent on feedback is somewhat wasted, as there is a perception that students are only interested in marks and pay little – if any – attention to written feedback (glover and brown, 2006; weaver, 2006). bailey (2008) found that teachers experienced a ‘conflict between their conceptions of the purpose of feedback, their intentions and the requirements of the system’. due to this conflict, bailey suggests that educators might become more indifferent to the feedback they provide, other than as it relates to ‘their performance in assessments and to comply with university standards and regulations’ (bailey, 2008, p.5). educators’ understanding of the role and utility of feedback becomes all the more challenging when they take into consideration not only their own ideas of its purpose, but also the ideas of their employers and their students. orrell (2006) suggests that many academics see feedback as a postscript activity and formative feedback as an add-on to teaching and learning responsibilities. orrell argues that for staff to be fully committed to feedback they require the support and guidance of their institution. however, as teaching staff across the educational spectrum often note, time – or lack thereof – is a decisive factor in the quality and quantity of feedback provided. finally, one must also consider that many higher education practitioners have little – if any – formal pedagogical training and therefore institutional support is even more integral to the success of feedback provision. as weaver (2006) suggests, though many educators try to provide effective feedback, many also lack the knowledge of how to provide it. however, she feels this is a weak argument since there are plenty of resources available to staff to rectify this deficit (weaver, 2006). in this instance perhaps the question mark remains over whether teaching staff make use of the resources and support that are already out there. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 4 burns negotiating feedback: lecturer perceptions of feedback dissatisfaction methodology and ethics to collect data for this study, i carried out separate interviews of five history lecturers at jones university (name changed for purposes of anonymity). these interviews were conducted in each interviewee’s own office at a time of their choosing and took place intermittently over several weeks (as was convenient for those involved). my main aim was for the interviewees to give as much information as they could without feeling overly restricted by my questions, but at the same time trying to assure that the necessary key themes were covered in sufficient depth. each interview lasted no more than one hour, and was based around thematic concerns that arose from the existing literature (and an earlier questionnaire that i had distributed to students in the department that is not explored here for lack of space), much like the ‘shopping list of topics’ suggested by robson (2002). having explained the nature of the investigation, i proceeded to ask the lecturers to discuss their thoughts and feelings about the following issues: timing of feedback; the role of feedback; students’ perceptions of feedback; the gaps between staff and student perceptions of feedback; and finally, solutions to the problem. this was based on the idea of an ‘interview schedule’ where the interview would not be restricted by the list but instead the list merely acted as a reminder of my research priorities (thomas, 2009). the interviews are best described as semistructured, in that the area of interest was chosen and identified, and the questions were open-ended but allowed for modification of format and wording in relation to each individual interview (ary et al., 2010). i assured each staff member their comments would remain anonymous, for the value of the study and for their own reassurance. in terms of recording the interviews, i felt that taking written notes allowed for a more informal atmosphere and would lead to less concern among participants about the nature of their comments, despite the obvious benefits offered by recording equipment. each participant was able to independently consent to partaking (or not) to the extent they felt comfortable, was made aware that this information was being used for university research into feedback that would be written up and read by other academics. therefore, my research adheres to all of the conditions expected of informed consent: competence, voluntarism, full information and comprehension (cohen et al., 2011). in addition, the research topic is not of a particularly personal, intrusive or intimate nature and i felt that it was unlikely that any major ethical dilemmas were likely to arise as a result of my journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 5 burns negotiating feedback: lecturer perceptions of feedback dissatisfaction questions. results of investigation for the purposes of anonymity, the interview participants are identified here by the letters a-e and are referred to in gender-neutral terms. they were asked a number of broad questions on feedback in order to elicit wide-ranging responses, as noted above. given the variety of the discourse, and the tangential directions of some of the interviews, the specific questions varied as sometimes they had already been partially answered. timing of feedback the issue of timing of feedback is a subject addressed directly by the nss and one that seemed to elicit strong views in these interviews. lecturer c suggested that one of the key reasons for dissatisfaction with timing – for both marker and student – was that of bureaucratisation. students hand essays in to the course secretary, they are then processed, marked, moderated (in some cases externally), handed back to the secretaries and then reprocessed: given the number of steps involved, the process takes a long time. the relatively recent departmental guidelines affecting all five lecturers involved in these interviews mandated a turnaround period of three weeks from hand-in to return of work. lecturer e noted that although ‘the three-week period is tight…students always underestimate our processes’. lecturer b was less concerned with time, suggesting that – new regulations aside – they were able to give a similar amount of feedback to that which they had always provided. lecturer a stated that ‘feedback absorbs a lot of my time’, as there are often ‘a lot of pieces to mark in a relatively short space of time’ and there are ‘no incentives, no rewards to spend another 45 minutes on something’. lecturer d was also concerned, noting also that despite the tighter deadlines, class sizes and workloads continued to increase. lecturer e commented that, since feedback on written work has ‘got to be fast’, there was no time to become ‘excessively devoted to it’. here the lecturers raised concerns relating to both motivation and financial remuneration when considering the time spent on feedback. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 6 burns negotiating feedback: lecturer perceptions of feedback dissatisfaction lecturer a identified that engaging in a dialogue with students was an important facet of the feedback process but also stressed that this process was time consuming, and that one had to rely to some extent on ‘not too much student uptake’ in this regard. unlike lecturer a, when first questioned on the idea of feedback in relation to time issues, the other lecturers made the connection to written feedback to start with and then went on to note other types of feedback given more time to consider the issue. the role of feedback lecturer a saw the primary function of feedback as ‘helping students to identify what they need to do in order to improve’. lecturer d put it a little differently, saying that firstly students should be made aware of ‘what they are doing right’ (summative assessment) and that secondly they should be told ‘how to get better’ (formative assessment). however, what became clear was a firm adherence among all lecturers interviewed as to the formative role of feedback being a primary function, at least in theory. lecturer c mentioned a different issue first of all – the issue of ‘explaining the mark that they got’, before noting the aim of future improvement. lecturer c then went on to argue that these ‘quite different aims can make feedback quite disjointed’. the interviewees were united in noting that there was some conflict between the roles feedback is expected to play. lecturer a argued that feedback should not be used to ‘rationalise’ the grade given to students, although they conceded that good feedback should suggest why the resulting grade had been awarded, adding, ‘we can all become a little mark obsessed’. though lecturer a hinted at the role of summative feedback, lecturer b went much further in their outright acknowledgement of the other roles of feedback. lecturer b stated clearly that one of the less acknowledged roles of feedback was its summative purpose: ‘to protect ourselves in the event of an appeal and to justify the mark you’ve given’. in this sense, they felt one needed more often to focus on what was wrong with a piece of work and this would not necessarily help a student to improve in the future. they concluded that the two aims of developmental feedback and justification of a grade were often at odds, but almost always present to some extent. perceptions of student views on feedback given that feedback should ideally be a dialogic process, it was important to establish not journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 7 burns negotiating feedback: lecturer perceptions of feedback dissatisfaction only what the interviewees thought of feedback as a process but also to ask more specifically how they thought students viewed the feedback they received. lecturer a argued that, particularly on a single-semester course, students might view feedback as useless because they would not have that lecturer again. in this sense, they suggested, students often tailored an essay to a particular teacher and when it came to feedback they might no longer be interested unless they were to have the same teacher again the following semester/year. lecturer a suggested that often what a student sought was feedback that might ‘transform their mark’, or some ‘secret to doing well’. the issue of grades as the primary focus of student concerns was one that united the lecturers. lecturer b felt that students’ main expectations were linked to justifying grades and that (if they were to be cynical) they might say: if they all had first class grades ‘they wouldn’t care if they had feedback’. indeed, lecturer b went on to suggest that no matter how quickly comments were delivered – or how detailed the comments were – students were rarely satisfied with feedback unless it said ‘good things’. lecturer e agreed that ‘unfortunately students focus more and more on the mark’ and echoed lecturer b when they noted that for some students ‘the feedback is only good if the mark is good’. this factor of ‘markfixation’ is pointed to prominently in both he literature and school-targeted assessment for learning (afl) literature and it is no surprise that lecturers singled it out as a key issue (knight, 2002; black et al., 2005; glover and brown, 2006; weaver, 2006). interestingly, lecturer e felt that it was high performing students who were most likely ‘to seek additional oral feedback’ and that one of the main things they tried to stress to all students was the importance of ‘seeking’ feedback. in a related comment, lecturer d said that they feared that it was often those who query their written feedback that ‘least need the oral feedback’. in this sense, a number of the interviewees were worried that only a small group of high achieving students read, considered and then sought further clarification on their written feedback, but that the majority – who might benefit most from oral feedback – did not seek it. the answer to this particular conundrum seems to lie in setting aside specific tutorial time for oral feedback – though the drawbacks of time restrictions are once again paramount. the ‘disconnect’ between the providers and consumers of feedback, potentially leading to dissatisfaction, was an important focus in this investigation and therefore it was important to establish what the five interviewees felt caused this disconnect. lecturer d started out journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 8 burns negotiating feedback: lecturer perceptions of feedback dissatisfaction by suggesting that, when it comes to the question of why feedback scores so badly on the nss: ‘nobody seems to know’. most of the lecturers pointed to the most basic of disconnections: communication. lecturer c argued that students ‘don’t necessarily understand what feedback means’, but that markers can avoid this problem by fleshing out their feedback with examples. lecturer a suggested that a ‘communication gap’ often occurred, but that this was often because ‘students rarely came to take advantage’ of one-to-one feedback. this same lecturer felt that the ‘fixation with anonymity’ when it comes to assessment led to a disconnection with students, regarding how one can measure their individual progress and problems. indeed, they felt that anonymous marking served to alienate students, making them feel that feedback was less targeted and less useful. another way this anonymity manifested was that, as lecturer c noted, in changing tutors frequently across years and semesters, students began to see developmental feedback as less feasible – as, to a different lecturer, they were a new student. lecturer d also felt that anonymous marking broke the ‘links’ with the student and stopped people being able to ‘track progress’. connected to this idea of anonymity of students, lecturer d also noted that with increasing class sizes, lecturers found it more and more difficult to gain a sense of ‘connectedness’ with their students. here communication as an issue broadens out to anonymity and lack of continuity in the teacher-student relationship. finally, some of the lecturers looked more specifically to the nss as playing a role in dissatisfaction, directly or indirectly. lecturer b suggested that one of the main reasons jones university scored badly in the nss when it comes to feedback is because the students have such a ‘high opinion of their ability’ and that the nss results reflect their ‘disappointment in attainment’. lecturer e felt that in many cases students do not seek feedback or take it seriously and therefore one should perhaps be asking ‘why take the rubric in the national student survey seriously? how do we know [students] have a problem if [they] don’t tell us?’ they suggested students did not seek feedback when they wanted it and then vented this frustration at the end of their studies through the nss. solutions? moving on to the issue of solving the many problems that had been flagged up, the journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 9 burns negotiating feedback: lecturer perceptions of feedback dissatisfaction interviewees tackled the potential solutions often with a degree of scepticism: there was certainly a suggestion that the university’s attempts to address feedback dissatisfaction in the nss had led to at least a small amount of wariness when it came to ‘solutions’. lecturer a warned of the pitfalls of tackling the problem of student dissatisfaction with feedback by providing a ‘common format for feedback’, as they felt this would ‘stifle creativity and innovation’ and promote a feeling of ‘increasing bureaucratisation’, leading to students feeling they ‘were being taught by a machine’. lecturer c saw the best solution to the problem as more feedback throughout the semester, even if it did not come with a grade attached. in line with their concerns over time, lecturer c also felt that quicker turnaround across the board and a one-to-one hand-back to students would help. finally, they felt that anonymous marking should end, as it does not allow for ‘personalised’ feedback. lecturer e felt that explaining the nature of feedback was a key factor that needed to be addressed. they suggested that if time was an issue, lecturers should make it clear why time was needed and help students to understand the nature of the processes marking goes through. they also felt that the students should be made aware that the onus was on them to seek feedback and use it. lecturer e saw the primary cause of dissatisfaction with feedback as the ‘disparity’ in quality across different markers. however, they also pointed to the difficulties that one faces in trying to achieve uniformity in feedback. they felt it impeded the relative independence of tutors and that if it became too uniform, everyone would become dissatisfied. the idea of a ‘feedback tsar’ to oversee feedback continuity was also fraught with the same difficulties in the eyes of lecturer e, and they argued that the problem was that the content and quality of feedback would always be subjective. conclusion what the results of this study seem to indicate is that, as the existing literature suggests, there are a multitude of reasons for problems encountered in the feedback process. a recent study by adams and mcnab (2013) suggest four main areas that learning developers might look to focus upon to improve assessment and feedback: that goals and standards are clearly communicated; that feedback is useful and meaningful (and formative); that students receive feedback in time for application to their next similar assignment; and that assessments encourage a deep approach to learning (intellectual journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 10 burns negotiating feedback: lecturer perceptions of feedback dissatisfaction engagement). the interviews discussed above show clearly that the lecturers interviewed were aware of many, if not all, of these suggestions. however, perhaps the primary causes of concern here were: students’ understanding of the purpose and meaning of feedback, and time restraints on lecturers in the provision of feedback. considering the issue of ‘understanding’, those questioned felt that feedback was most effective if students sought verbal feedback, rather than relying entirely on written comments, in line with the findings of numerous educationalists (drew, 2001; anderson and hounsell, 2007; duncan, 2007; bloxham and campell, 2010). though this study has revealed much of what the existing literature has already found, it has also highlighted the fact that university lecturers felt that there is often more discussion of problems than production of practicable solutions. carless (2006) posits that a solution to the differences in student expectations of feedback could be found through ‘assessment dialogues’, where staff would be more explicit about assessment procedures and more open to questions from students in this regard. the author feels that such ‘assessment dialogues’ could help students clarify ‘the assumptions known to lecturers but less transparent to students’ (carless, 2006, p.230). in terms of the timing of feedback, the interviewees raised important points regarding institutional bureaucracy, and in relation to optimal timing for feedback in terms of its usefulness to students. however, the interviews also raised the idea that students were often uninterested in the feedback beyond the mark awarded, especially if they were not likely to be taught by the same lecturer again. here the issue of subjectivity – in the (perceived) eyes of the student – is apparent, and suggests that for some of those interviewed, their feedback might be viewed as overly-subjective (or to a lecturer’s personal-taste) by the student and therefore less useful. on this matter, sadler (2009) provides a compelling argument for increased grade integrity, whereby a mark awarded is a truer reflection of wider student performance. although raised less often in the interviews, the issue of consistency across different teachers/lecturers is, perhaps, one of the most troublesome of all the issues that was mentioned, and is highlighted in a number of existing studies (read et al., 2005; hounsell et al., 2008). whereas the idea of better communication could be remedied through oneto-one meetings for feedback provision, or various other methods, there seems to be little in the way of concrete suggestions as to how one combats inconsistency among staff journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 11 burns negotiating feedback: lecturer perceptions of feedback dissatisfaction providing feedback. price et al. (2011, p.490) identify inconsistency as a key challenge, which ‘exacerbates tensions within the assessment process producing varying expectations among the stakeholders’. this, above all, seems to be an area that needs further investigation. price et al. (2011, p.480) suggest that the development of ‘pedagogic literacy among staff and students’ would allow for the debate to move towards establishing long-term, sustainable improvements in assessment. overall, though this study is limited in scope, it brings to light some avenues that need to be addressed not only through nss-driven institutional initiatives, but also through a more circumspect discussion of the nature of university teaching itself. the improvement and consistency of feedback certainly needs to be considered in more practicable terms, but one also needs to bear in mind the fact that lecturers are feeling increasingly distanced from their students as a consequence not of one, but of a variety of factors. references adams, j. and mcnab, n. (2013) ‘understanding arts and humanities students’ experiences of assessment and feedback’, arts and humanities in higher education, 12(1), pp. 36-52 anderson, c. and hounsell, d. (2007) ‘knowledge practices: ‘doing the subject’ in undergraduate courses’, curriculum journal, 18(4), pp. 463–478. ary, d., jacobs, l., sorensen, c. and razavieh, a. (2010) introduction to research in education. 8th edn. belmont, ca: wadsworth. bailey, r. (2008) ‘academic staff perceptions of the role and utility of written feedback on students’ written work’, zeitschrift schreiben [online]. available at: http://www.zeitschrift-schreiben.eu/beitraege/bailey_academic_staff.pdf (accessed: 30 december 2011). bailey, r. and garner, m. (2010) ‘is feedback in higher education assessment worth the paper it is written on? teachers’ reflections on their practices’, teaching in higher education, 15(2), pp. 187-198. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 12 http://www.zeitschrift-schreiben.eu/beitraege/bailey_academic_staff.pdf burns negotiating feedback: lecturer perceptions of feedback dissatisfaction black, p., harrison, c., hodgen, j., marshall, b. and wiliam, d. (2005) ‘the dissemination of formative assessment: a lesson from, or about, evaluation’, research intelligence, 92, pp. 14-15. bloxham, s. and campbell, l. (2010) ‘generating dialogue in assessment feedback: exploring the use of interactive cover sheets’, assessment and evaluation in higher education, 35(3), pp. 291-300. carless, d. (2006) ‘differing perceptions in the feedback process’, studies in higher education, 31(2), pp. 219-233. cohen, l., manion, l. and morrison, k. (2011) research methods in education. 7th edn. london and new york: routledge. deeprose, c. and armitage, c. (2004) ‘giving formative feedback in higher education’, psychology learning and teaching, 4(1), pp. 43-46. drew, s. (2001) ‘perceptions of what helps learn and develop in education’, teaching in higher education, 6(3), pp. 309–331. duncan, n. (2007) ‘‘feed-forward’: improving students’ use of tutors’ comments’, assessment and evaluation in higher education, 32(3), pp. 271-283. evans, c. (2013) ‘making sense of assessment feedback in higher education’, review of educational research, 83(1), pp. 70-120. glover, c. and brown, e. (2006) ‘written feedback for students: too much, too detailed or too incomprehensible to be effective?’, bioscience education, 7 [online]. available at: http://www.bioscience.heacademy.ac.uk/journal/vol7/beej-7-3.aspx (accessed: 30 december 2011). hefce (2013) national student survey. available at: http://www.hefce.ac.uk/whatwedo/lt/publicinfo/nationalstudentsurvey/ (accessed: 2 august 2013). journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 13 http://www.bioscience.heacademy.ac.uk/journal/vol7/beej-7-3.aspx http://www.hefce.ac.uk/whatwedo/lt/publicinfo/nationalstudentsurvey/ burns negotiating feedback: lecturer perceptions of feedback dissatisfaction hounsell, d., mccune, v., hounsell, j. and litjens, j. (2008) ‘the quality of guidance and feedback to students’, higher education research and development, 27(1), pp. 5567. knight, p.t. (2002) ‘summative assessment in higher education: practices in disarray’, studies in higher education, 27(3), pp. 275-286. lilly, j., richter, u.m. and rivera-macias, b. (2010) ‘using feedback to promote learning: student and tutor perspectives’, practitioner research in higher education, 4(1), pp. 30-40. orrell, j. (2006) ‘feedback on learning achievement: rhetoric and reality’, teaching in higher education, 11(4), pp. 441-456. price, m., handley, k., millar j. and o’donovan, b. (2010) ‘feedback: all that effort, but what is the effect?’, assessment & evaluation in higher education, 35(3), pp. 277289. price, m., carroll, j., o’donovan, b. and rust, c. (2011) ‘if i was going there i wouldn’t start from here: a critical commentary on current assessment practice’, assessment & evaluation in higher education, 36(4), pp. 479-492. read, b., francis, b. and robson, j. (2005) ‘gender, ‘bias’, assessment and feedback: analyzing the written assessment of undergraduate history essays’, assessment & higher education, 30(3), pp. 241-260. robson, c. (2002) real world research. oxford: blackwell publishing. sadler, d.r. (1998) ‘formative assessment: revisiting the territory’, assessment in education: principles, policy and practice, 5(1), pp. 77-84. sadler, d.r. (2009) ‘grade integrity and the representation of academic achievement’, studies in higher education, 34(7), pp. 807-826. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 14 burns negotiating feedback: lecturer perceptions of feedback dissatisfaction swain, h. (2009) ‘a hotchpotch of subjectivity’, the guardian, 19 may. thomas, g. (2009) how to do your research project: a guide for students in education and applied social sciences. london: sage. weaver, m.r. (2006) ‘do students value feedback? student perceptions of tutors’ written responses’, assessment & evaluation in higher education, 31(3), pp. 379-394. yorke, m. (2003) ‘formative assessment in higher education: moves towards theory and the enhancement of pedagogic practice’, higher education, 45(4), pp. 477–501. author details adam burns currently teaches history and politics at marlborough college in wiltshire. he studied for his pgce and med at the university of birmingham and is currently studying part-time for an edd at the university of leicester. his doctoral research aims to explore the ways in which secondary school history lessons affect students’ understanding of the history of the british empire. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 15 negotiating feedback: lecturer perceptions of feedback dissatisfaction abstract introduction existing literature methodology and ethics results of investigation timing of feedback the role of feedback perceptions of student views on feedback solutions? conclusion references author details literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special edition: digital technologies, november 2014 a university conversation: using cloud technology to generate collaborative institutional policy for the enhancement of learning and teaching nick almond liverpool hope university, uk abstract this paper discusses a cloud technology supported methodology for the creation of university policy through mass collaboration. the ‘university conversation’ methodology was deployed to facilitate the creation of a university learning, teaching and enhancement strategy that was ultimately authored by over 200 academic staff and had direct input from over 300 students. the methodology utilises the affordances (gibson, 1986) of cloud technology to capture a large number of simultaneous conversations and to then mediate the iterative editing of the document through a sequence of synchronous and asynchronous collaborative events. the methodology demonstrates the potential of cloud technology to open communicative pathways between the ‘significant networks’ (roxå and mårtensson, 2009) where learning development often takes place and the institutional machinery that converts localised innovative practice into institutional policy. keywords: cloud technology; policy creation; mass collaboration; learning and teaching; quality assurance; university conversation. introduction creating meaningful and responsive change in institutional approaches to learning and teaching is a notoriously difficult and complex process (fullan, 1999). a process made more complex by the robust and well-defined governance structures that are designed to support institutional quality assurance (qa). these structures are necessarily rigid and are often closed to many stakeholders within the university, particularly students (dearlove, 2002). this leads to organisations where change is slow (hannan and almond using cloud technology to generate collaborative institutional policy journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2014 2 freeman, 1984), localised (roxå and mårtensson, 2009) or inefficient (roxå et al., 2011). university governance structures are consequently useful for audit-based quality assurance purposes but are far less suited to fostering innovation in learning development where more nuanced narratives of learning are needed (hartley et al., 2011). generating effective institutional approaches to learning development occurs through a complex network of processes that are underpinned by the relationships between teaching staff, who support student learning at the classroom level, and the policy-making machinery that facilitates coordinated institutional change (hartley et al., 2011). the development of co-ordinated institutional academic practices that support student learning are particularly difficult to establish in institutions where learning development is decentralised, as is the case at liverpool hope university. this work explores the potential for using cloud technology to open up communicative pathways between the university stakeholders that are directly engaged in student-facing learning development activities and the internal processes that create policy level institutional change, thus creating 'open institutional policy'. theoretical framework the reflective institution the auditing mechanisms, which are now interwoven into many institutional processes, are instrumental in what biggs (2001) calls ‘retrospective qa’, which is fundamentally focused on accountability and conformity to external standards. these processes are essential for the modern university but they generally do not contain features that drive towards the improvement of quality. if institutions are to move towards improving current practice then they must move towards the pursuit of ‘prospective qa’, which is driven by processes that not only determine how fit-for-purpose current practices are, but demonstrate a clear coordinated drive towards transformation (harvey and askling, 2003). here transformation is linked not only to the creation of transformative learning scenarios for the students, but it is present throughout the institution as a whole, where tangible changes in the institutional culture of learning and teaching are present. biggs’ (2001) notion of the reflective institution, a spin on the popular concept of the reflective practitioner (schön, 1983), is a useful framework for examining institutional approaches to learning development. biggs unpacks the notion of quality assurance (qa) almond using cloud technology to generate collaborative institutional policy journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2014 3 into a three-stage model of institutional reflective practice. the first stage, the quality model (qm), describes an institutionally defined ‘espoused theory’ of learning and teaching which acts as a driver for learning and teaching oriented decisions. the second stage, quality enhancement (qe), describes processes which review learning and teaching in light of this quality model and then facilitate the review and enhancement of practice through built-in mechanisms. finally, quality feasibility (qf) describes institutional interventions which, as far as possible, remove all impediments to quality teaching. these interventions, which allow the reflective practice that occurs in classrooms to transition unimpeded into institutional learning and teaching discourse, fall into the third tier of biggs’ model, quality feasibility (qf). discovering mechanisms that improve ‘qf’ is, as biggs describes, ‘the question that institutions rarely ask’ (biggs, 2001, p.223). this paper focuses on asking that question. institutional learning and teaching policy creation conventionally, university policy is generated through committee structures that are designed, through their targeted membership, to respond to the needs of the institution as they arise; for example, formulating amendments or creating new university policy as and when it is needed. this process occurs in a context where measures of institutional performance are becoming increasingly prominent. performative measures such as the national student survey (nss) and standardisation entities such as the quality assurance agency (qaa) are dominant in university narratives both on a local and national scale (ball, 2012). consequently, the structural features of universities as organisations continue to drift towards the bureaucratic, requiring extensive tracking and regulation (brown, 2004). the result of increasing bureaucracy in any organisation is increasingly impoverished communities of people who can actuality elicit policy change at an institutional level, thus decreasing the reflexivity of the institution as a whole. this imposes stabilising forces on operational issues within the university at the expense of flexibility and situated control (quinn and rohrbaugh, 1983). with increasing control and structure, the institution drifts towards consolidation and continuity, ideal for biggs’ (2001) ‘retrospective qa’, but further away from the open system approach, which fosters adaptability and innovation. in order for the more enhancement focused ‘prospective qa’ to take place within in an institution, innovation must not only be encouraged but also incorporated into practice at an almond using cloud technology to generate collaborative institutional policy journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2014 4 organisational level. achieving success in all three stages of biggs' model is a difficult task, particularly in large institutions which are often fractured into a large number of small to medium sized departmental entities. in large fractured organisations practitioners enhance their practice in 'significant networks’ (roxå and mårtensson, 2009). roxå and mårtensson (2009) highlight this phenomena using empirical evidence from their own institution. they describe hidden structures within faculties or departments, where critical discourse related to learning development occurs informally around departmental or even geographical loci. in these localised structures academic staff utilise high levels of situated control to engage in innovative practice and reflective dialogue. the innovation that occurs in these academic ‘microcultures’ is vital for the creation of discipline specific learning development, however this activity generally remains disconnected from the institution as a whole (roxå and mårtensson, 2011). academic microcultures tend not to follow an institutional quality model (qm), since the formal university processes are largely ‘invisible’ (roxå and mårtensson, 2011, p.5) to them, but they do often remain committed to quality enhancement (qe), albeit on a local scale. the fundamental issue with learning development that occurs within significant networks is that their innovative practice is not easily disseminated to the institution as a whole. there is a disconnect between these localised ‘significant networks’ and the institutional processes needed to create coordinated university wide change. this is largely due to failings in quality feasibility (qf) as the majority of stakeholders, with sufficient situated control to adapt, develop and implement quality enhancements, are not supported in the dissemination of their innovation. it appears there is a need for more connective pathways between academic microcultures, or individual academics, and the formal structures of the institutions they exist within, in order to convert localised innovation into university policy. there are a few major barriers to this kind of conversion. firstly, to gain a real cross-sectional insight into issues related to teaching as it happens in the classroom, a far greater membership to committees is required than what could be feasibly accommodated in any one meeting, which are conventionally dominated by the professoriate (lapworth, 2004). secondly, far greater connectivity to the student voice is required. conventional student-staff liaison structures suffer from the same issues as committee meetings, as often only engaged students almond using cloud technology to generate collaborative institutional policy journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2014 5 participate, whilst formalised meetings arguably stifle genuine critical discourse (becher and trowler, 2001). finally, the policy chain itself is formal, slow and bureaucratic and is not conducive to the kind of reflective narratives which help real issues from the classroom to emerge (wenger, 2006). cloud technology can therefore be used as a platform to provide some of these pathways, linking cross-faculty spaces for reflective dialogue to a shortened and less bureaucratic university policy chain. cloud technology and mass collaboration cloud technology is a significant new emerging technological paradigm, which builds on the affordances of web 2.0 technologies to shift computational processes away from the user whilst maintaining functional proximity. there remains some degree of ambiguity in these terms, principally due to significant overlap in where the terms are applied, however it is useful to delineate these terms by considering web 2.0 as a trend in technology, particularly related to bidirectional communication, whereas cloud computing or cloud technology represents the technology itself (unesco, 2010). higher education institutions have for a long time used the lowest level of cloud computing, or ‘infrastructure as a service’ (iaas), by providing access to server space or remote access to institutional drives or file stores. more recently many institutions have progressed further up the cloud computing ‘stack’ to the ‘platform as a service’ (paas) model, utilising the google app ecosystem or equivalent, to run their email and file storage. the highest level, as utilised in this project, is the software as a service (saas) model, where the software itself is executed on a platform and then accessed remotely using a web browser. this important abstraction away from running software at one’s own personal computer creates a subtle but important leap in technological potential. cloud technology has a number of definable characteristics (mell and grance, 2011) however, the affordances which have most impact on the methodology outlined here are virtualisation and elasticity (leymann, 2009). the process of virtualisation can be thought of as creating distance between the user and the physical manifestation of the technology, in this case, the computer that is running the software. the power and quantity of google’s server capabilities far outweigh those found in a conventional university, providing near limitless extension of resources. that is, the technology has elasticity; its resources grow almond using cloud technology to generate collaborative institutional policy journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2014 6 or shrink on request and are not necessarily limited by the computational power of the machine the user has access to. elasticity affords the opportunity to explore mass collaboration, such as synchronous collaborative writing, in ways that have previously not been possible. this work uses the popular implementation of cloud technology googledrive to virtualise the document creation process to facilitate mass-collaboration. this is achieved through simple technological extensions to existing and well-understood software, which ensures that the methodology requires very little user instruction upon deployment. from a user perspective, there appears to be very little difference between a virtual document and a traditionally editable document found in conventional desktop publishing software, such as microsoft word. the alignment of this technology with the very familiar affordances of desktop publishing software and conventional web technology generates short learning curves, high degrees of perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use and consequently very high levels of user acceptance (davis, 1989). this remains one the of methodologies strongest features. a university conversation the ‘university conversation’ took place over two university-wide learning and teaching days. the learning and teaching days at liverpool hope university are distributed throughout the year and aim to act as a space for the dissemination of good practice and the sharing of innovative approaches to learning and teaching. the goals of the university conversation, as decided by the university learning and teaching committee (ltc), were as follows: 1. to engage all staff in reflective dialogue related to their learning development practice. 2. to capture the dialogue as best possible, to inform the creation of policy. 3. to consult with all university stakeholders, including students. 4. to create a university learning, teaching and enhancement strategy that will act as a quality (qm) to guide reflection and enhancement of practice across the university. 5. to use the strategy to generate action plans that will support learning development. almond using cloud technology to generate collaborative institutional policy journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2014 7 figure 1. the university conversation methodology. in order to meet the goals put forward by the institution for the university conversation, a network of documents hosted and shared using the googledrive platform were utilised and a methodology was created (figure 1) that was driven by sequential discussion and analysis of dialogue. academics present on the day (n=215) were split into groups of ten, to mirror the institution’s tutorial model, and facilitators were guided to run the sessions as a community of practice (wenger, 2006), where reflective dialogue and practice-focused narratives were encouraged and driven by a shared enterprise; in this case the development of a shared learning, teaching and enhancement strategy. building on other work that utilised googledrive as a collaborative writing platform almond using cloud technology to generate collaborative institutional policy journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2014 8 (almond, 2014), the university conversation methodology was designed to use a combination of collaborative writing strategies, including ‘group single author’ and ‘horizontal division writing’, as outlined by lowry et al. (2004). this new model for mass collaborative writing was designed to firstly capture the dialogue of the participants in each group within a single document (figure 2) and then to stream these sub-documents into a meta-document for the purposes of group editing (figure 3). figure 2. a satellite group. group single author a collaborative writing strategy, lowry et al. (2004). solid circle represents the group facilitator figure 3. mass collaboration. an adapted form of horizontal division writing a collaborative writing strategy, lowry et al. (2004). almond using cloud technology to generate collaborative institutional policy journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2014 9 the result of this initial phase of the university conversation (discussion 1) was over 20,000 words of raw ‘conversation’ between academics, generated from 24 separate groups (figure 4). using standard qualitative data analysis procedures (thomas, 2006) a series of statements were generated from this dialogue and grouped into the themes (e.g. curriculum, assessment, technology). this more streamlined meta-document was opened up for consultation to academic staff in their respective departments (discussion 2) where they used the commenting feature of googledrive to engage directly with the statements related to learning and teaching practice (figure 5). this consultation event was mirrored for the entire student body (discussion 3) by sharing the document through the university email system. following this final consultation phase, the document was converted to university policy at the university learning and teaching committee (ltc). the final document centres on ten ‘principles of learning, teaching and enhancement’, which are each aligned with a series of ‘underpinning expectations,’ which as closely as possible reflect the dialogue that occurred in each of the early stages of the university conversation (see figure 6 for an excerpt of the learning, teaching and enhancement strategy, the full strategy can be found at: http://tinyurl.com/lthstrategy). figure 4. an example of the collaborative dialogue capture in each group. http://tinyurl.com/lthstrategy almond using cloud technology to generate collaborative institutional policy journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2014 10 figure 5. an example of the threaded dialogue used to iteratively edit the document. almond using cloud technology to generate collaborative institutional policy journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2014 11 figure 6. an excerpt from the final learning, teaching and enhancement strategy. the university conversation and learning development in line with hill and tinker's (2013) thoughts on the need for integration of learning development activities at an institutional level, the university conversation was designed to move learning development activities away from individual student needs to a strategic institutional focus. building on surowiecki's (2005) notion of the ‘wisdom of crowds’ we have used cloud technology to harness the collective intelligence of an institution with the belief that the shared narratives of those who are directly engaged in student-facing learning development activities are critical to the development of effective institutional approaches to embedding learning development into curriculum and departmental practices. the data arising from the methodology are vast and rich, with the potential to influence the strategic decisions of heads of departments, university committees and curriculum developers. these data represent the university more holistically than would normally be possible through conventional modes of governance and consultation. although more advanced analytical techniques are required to fully realise the potential of this rich data set, even with rudimentary analytical techniques, it is possible to follow chains of dialogue, which expose the power of this kind of consultative activity. two of these chains are presented in table 1 and table 2. almond using cloud technology to generate collaborative institutional policy journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2014 12 table 1. a dialogue chain through the university conversation related to the enjoyment and challenge of learning experiences. phase of the methodology comments comments from the university conversation learning should be fun and related to focused, individual and collaborative learning activities. learning should be an enjoyable experience. comments from asynchronous discussion (academic and student) i'm concerned about the idea that this (commenting on enjoyable experience) is a primary driver in how we teach. cf. threshold concepts and troublesome knowledge and the productive role of discomfort. (academic a) academic f once used the phrase 'healthy bewilderment' as a component of the research project and we need to push students outside their comfort zones. learning needs to be meaningful more than fun. (academic b, replying to academic a) yes. all this 'fun' and 'focused' stuff might often rather miss the point that understanding and learning is often a really hard struggle. i often want to teach people things that are intellectually rewarding but not much fun, i also like to tackle conceptual issues in a deliberately unfocused way in order to encourage students (and me) to really think for themselves. (academic c, replying to academic b) we need to develop our learning scenarios recognising that these students are not (yet) academics. it could be easy for us to pitch the almond using cloud technology to generate collaborative institutional policy journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2014 13 conceptual content too high because we are over the ‘threshold’ of understanding. (academic d, replying to academic c) is 'resilience' the word we are after here? (academic e, replying to academic d) i’m just getting to the end of three years and will never recover from the written tasks. i enjoyed the rest [of the course] as an art student; creative work is what i wished to do. i think the tutors assumed i was an academic. (student a) related expectations in the learning, teaching and enhancement strategy students will be encouraged to develop resilience to academic challenge. tutors will recognise that students are in the early stages of their academic career and both parties will work together to understand the distance between their own knowledge. student confidence will be nurtured through reassurance and encouragement, with the goal of creating high quality scholars. learning development recommendations students and staff should engage in dialogue at waypoints through the year to evaluate student expectations of the course and use these discussions to reach a consensus on what can be successfully achieved and to find the right level of academic challenge. table 2. a dialogue chain through the university conversation related to feedback practice. phase of the methodology comments comments from the students should expect high quality feedback in a almond using cloud technology to generate collaborative institutional policy journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2014 14 university conversation timely fashion. comments from asynchronous discussion (academic and student) when i receive an essay back, i can't possibly improve if the criticisms given to me look like they were written by a three-year old with a biro. (student b) use of the portal would be useful in this. being able to submit, and then review coursework (inc. tutor marks and comments) online would be useful for backup and seeing progress. (student c) an important thing here is how students can move from one grade boundary into the next e.g. if somebody consistently gets 67/68 they need to be provided with the information about how they can push into the 70s. (student d) students need to be encouraged to understand what feedback is and when they are receiving it. this is something we frequently score low on in nss when i know it is a particular strength. (academic g) related expectations in the learning, teaching and enhancement strategy students will be given clear, high-quality feedback in a timely fashion. students will be encouraged to use and understand their feedback through clearly established student and tutor dialogue. learning development recommendations ask students to evaluate their own feedback opportunities, to encourage reflection and facilitate our own development as practitioners. move towards electronic feedback. the chains of dialogue represented in table 1 and table 2, exemplify the narratives that arise from this mode of consultation and how it was used to inform the creation of the almond using cloud technology to generate collaborative institutional policy journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2014 15 policy document and subsequent action. in an asynchronous discussion, the academic staff use meyer and land's (2005) work on threshold concepts to challenge the nature of learning and whether it should be ‘fun’ or ‘enjoyable’. the academic staff’s values and ontological viewpoints related to the teaching of their subject demonstrate reflection on their teaching with references to other academic discourse (academic b) and reflections on their approaches to building academic skills in the classroom (academic c). the complexity of this narrative is expanded as student a (from the tangential student consultation event) provides their perspective, and describes how they will ‘never recover’ from their writing work, exposing the ‘unsettling nature of higher level learning’ (cottrell, 2013, p.14). it is clear from this example that both the students and academic staff used this consultation event as a platform to reflect on their learning and teaching experiences, creating visible critical academic discourse related to learning that far transcends the localised and invisible discourse that happens in their significant networks (roxå and mårtensson, 2009). in another example (table 2), staff and students discuss the issue of feedback on assessments. in response to a statement referring to high-quality feedback, student b candidly refers to the well known issues of legibility of tutor comments (denton et al., 2008), but also surfaces his misconceptions of the nature of feedback by referring to the comments as ‘criticisms’. the need for student and tutor dialogue relating to feedback is exemplified by students (c and d) and academic staff (academic g) as they make useful developmental comments related to the use of university electronic resources and the need for clarity on closing the gap between current and goal attainment (nicol and macfarlane-dick, 2006). these valuable insights and others like them, allow us to tap into the collective consciousness of the academic and student body to build the ‘underpinning expectations’ section of the strategy. it is within these statements that the collective voice of the academic and student body can be heard. these example chains of dialogue (table 1 and 2) highlight that all university stakeholders, including students, have the potential to contribute towards institutional narratives that can influence institutional approaches to learning development. by tapping into these narratives directly, it is possible to build a more nuanced, affective perspective of learning into university policy. building on these narratives, the ‘underpinning expectations’ section of the strategy (figure 6) makes frequent reference to the act of nurturing students and the role of dialogue in understanding where the students are almond using cloud technology to generate collaborative institutional policy journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2014 16 situated in their academic development, along with the need to develop broader academic skills such as confidence and resilience to academic challenge. the inclusion of these more personalised and relationship-oriented expectations into university policy represents a strong move towards embedding learning development into the student experience. it also recognises at an institutional level the important role of intra-personal factors in supporting student learning development (cottrell, 2013). the early impact of this more nuanced policy can be seen from the first attempts at formulating practices using these expectations as a tool for reflection on current practice (figure 1 – ‘action planning’ section). the proposed recommendations generated from the examples above, are underpinned by dialogue, reflection and mutual understanding. it is now the role of the departments to use these recommendations to stimulate learning development activity within their significant networks. it remains to be seen whether tangible institutional-wide change around learning development will arise from this activity. however, localised practice is beginning to emerge and there is now a shared platform for reflection on practice that can be used to mediate the conversation about learning development on a wider institutional scale. conclusions this work describes a methodology for orchestrating a mass collaborative writing event, or ‘university conversation’, designed to channel multi-stakeholder dialogue into the conventionally closed university policy chain. from a technological perspective the methodology is not ‘state-of-the-art’, rather it aims to use the affordances of cloud technology to incrementally build on very traditional and widely used learning development technologies. this work is therefore in greater alignment with neil selwyn’s notion of developing uses of technology as it is practically focused on what practitioners already use, that is ‘state-of-the-actual’ (selwyn, 2010, p.69). although subtle in its abstractions away from conventional non-technologically mediated collaborative activities, it uses the affordances of virtualisation and elasticity unique to cloud technology to mediate the kind of scaled collaboration that would otherwise be very difficult with offline tools. this methodology opens channels into university governance structures by using technology to capture genuine learning development discourse in community of practice almond using cloud technology to generate collaborative institutional policy journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2014 17 style contexts (wenger, 2006). using a multistage approach, dialogue was captured from the whole institution (discussion 1); from departmental networks (discussion 2); and from the students (discussion 3); before being delivered directly to the top of the university policy chain (policy creation, ratification) and then used as a reflective tool to promote the development of practice (action planning). biggs’ model of the reflective institution (biggs, 2001) was used to guide the development of the methodology and through the construction of a ‘learning, teaching and enhancement’ strategy we have attempted to construct a collaborative institutional quality model (qm). we have created a space in which academic staff and students can contribute their voice towards current and desired learning development practice. by creating a common set of institutional goals to aim for we have created a substrate upon which quality enhancement (qe) can take place. perhaps most importantly, by utilising the affordances of cloud technology, we have created pathways into policy creation mechanisms for a huge number of university stakeholders whose voices would not otherwise have been heard. the university conversation methodology shows great potential for reducing the barriers that prevent innovation in learning and teaching from becoming institutional policy and demonstrates the potential for modern communicative technologies to create new machinery for linking the collegial and audit driven components of the modern university. reference list almond, n. (2014, in press) ‘teaching in the cloud: a virtualised collaborative writing methodology for the development of postgraduate academic literacy’, in badenhorst.c. and guerin, c. (eds.) postgraduate writing pedagogies and research literacies in the 21st century. leiden: brill. ball, s.j. (2012) 'performativity, commodification and commitment: an i-spy guide to the neoliberal university', british journal of educational studies, 60(1), pp. 17-28 [online]. available at: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00071005.2011.650940 (accessed: 18 september 2014). becher, t. and trowler, p. (2001) academic tribes and territories: intellectual enquiry and the culture of disciplines. buckingham: srhe and open university press. almond using cloud technology to generate collaborative institutional policy journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2014 18 biggs, j. (2001) 'the reflective institution: assuring and enhancing the quality of teaching and learning', the international journal of higher education research, 41(3), pp. 221-238 [online]. available at: http://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/a:1004181331049 (accessed: 15 september 2014). brown, r. (2004) quality assurance in higher education: the uk experience since 1992. psychology press. cottrell, s. (2013) 'revolution by stealth: the impact of learning development on democratising intelligence through constructive approaches to student support' journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6, november, pp. 1-21. davis, f.d. (1989) 'perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, and user acceptance of information technology', mis quarterly, 13(3), pp. 319-340 [online]. available at: http://www.jstor.org/stable/249008 (accessed: 28 november 2014). dearlove, j. (2002) 'a continuing role for academics: the governance of uk universities in the post-dearing era', higher education quarterly, 56(3), pp. 257-275. denton, p., madden, j., roberts, m. and rowe, p. (2008) 'students’ response to traditional and computer-assisted formative feedback: a comparative case study', british journal of educational technology, 39(3), pp. 486-500 [online]. available at: http://doi.wiley.com/10.1111/j.1467-8535.2007.00745.x (accessed: 17 april 2014). fullan, m. (1999) 'change forces: the sequel', journal of educational change, 1(2), pp. 205-209. gibson, j.j. (1986) the ecological approach to visual perception. london: lawrence erlbaum associates. hannan, m. and freeman, j. (1984) 'structural inertia and organizational change', american sociological review, 49(2), pp. 149-164 [online]. available at: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2095567 (accessed: 15 september 2014). hartley, p., hilsdon, j., keenan, c., sinfield, s. and verity, m. (eds.) (2011) learning development in higher education (universities into the 21st century). basingstoke: palgrave macmillan. harvey, l. and askling, b. (2003) 'quality in higher education', in begg, r. (ed.) the dialogue between higher education research and practice. netherlands: springer science pp. 69-83. hill, p. and tinker, a. (2013) 'integrating learning development into the student experience', journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5, march, pp. 1-12. almond using cloud technology to generate collaborative institutional policy journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2014 19 lapworth, s. (2004) 'arresting decline in shared governance: towards a flexible model for academic participation', higher education quarterly, 58(4), pp. 299-314. leymann, f. (2009) 'cloud computing: the next revolution in it', in fritsch, d. (ed.) photogrammetric week 2009. university of stuttgart, institute for photogrammetry, germany, pp. 3-12 [online]. available at: http://www.ifp.unistuttgart.de/publications/phowo09/index.en.html (accessed: 28 november 2014). lowry, p.b., curtis, a. and lowry, m.r. (2004) 'building a taxonomy and nomenclature of collaborative writing to improve interdisciplinary research and practice', international journal of business communication, 41(1), pp. 66–99 [online]. available at: http://job.sagepub.com/cgi/doi/10.1177/0021943603259363 (accessed: 3 september 2014). mell, p. and grance, t. (2011) the nist definition of cloud computing: recommendations of the national institute of standards and technology, national institute of standards and technology, special publication 800-145, september. available at: http://csrc.nist.gov/publications/nistpubs/800-145/sp800-145.pdf (accessed: 28 november 2014). meyer, j.h.f. and land, r. (2005) 'threshold concepts and troublesome knowledge (2): epistemological considerations and a conceptual framework for teaching and learning' the international journal of higher education research, 49(3), pp. 373388. nicol, d.j. and macfarlane-dick, d. (2006) 'formative assessment and self-regulated learning: a model and seven principles of good feedback practice', studies in higher education, 31(2), pp. 199-218 [online]. available at: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/03075070600572090 (accessed: 9 january 2014). quinn, r.e. and rohrbaugh, j. (1983) 'a spatial model of effectiveness criteria: towards a competing values approach to organizational analysis', management science, 29(3), pp. 363-377. roxå, t. and mårtensson, k. (2009) 'significant conversations and significant networks – exploring the backstage of the teaching arena', studies in higher education, 34(5), pp. 547-559 [online]. available at: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/03075070802597200 (accessed: 15 september 2014). roxå, t. and mårtensson, k. (2011) understanding strong academic microcultures – an exploratory study. available at: almond using cloud technology to generate collaborative institutional policy journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2014 20 http://www.ced.lu.se/documents/userfiles/pages/153_microcultures_ever.pdf (accessed: 18 september 2014). roxå, t., mårtensson, k. and alveteg, m. (2011) 'understanding and influencing teaching and learning cultures at university: a network approach', higher education, 62(1), pp. 99-111. schön, d.a. (1983) the reflective practitioner: how professionals think in action. united states of america: basic books inc. selwyn, n. (2010) 'looking beyond learning: notes towards the critical study of educational technology', journal of computer assisted learning, 26(1), pp. 65-73 [online]. available at: http://doi.wiley.com/10.1111/j.1365-2729.2009.00338.x (accessed: 11 january 2014). surowiecki, j. (2005) the wisdom of crowds. new york: knopf doubleday publishing group. thomas, d.r. (2006) 'a general inductive approach for analyzing qualitative evaluation data', american journal of evaluation, 27(2), pp. 237-246 [online]. available at: http://aje.sagepub.com/cgi/doi/10.1177/1098214005283748 (accessed: 10 july 2014). unesco (2010) cloud computing in education, unesco institute for information technologies in education, policy brief, september. available at: http://iite.unesco.org/files/policy_briefs/pdf/en/cloud_computing.pdf (accessed: 1 june 2014). wenger, e. (2006) communities of practice in and across 21st-century organizations. available at: http://sitios.itesm.mx/va/dide2/enc_innov/doctos/article21_century_organizations.pd f (accessed: 30 november 2014). author details nick almond is the director of masters courses and chair of the faculty quality learning and teaching committee in the faculty of education at liverpool hope university. his background is in physics but in recent years his research has focused on education, with a particular focus on learning and teaching and educational technology. he is a fellow of the higher education academy and is currently director of the pgcert learning and teaching in higher education http://sitios.itesm.mx/va/dide2/enc_innov/doctos/article21_century_organizations.pdf http://sitios.itesm.mx/va/dide2/enc_innov/doctos/article21_century_organizations.pdf almond using cloud technology to generate collaborative institutional policy journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2014 21 course, which is dedicated to the development of academic practice in early career academics at liverpool hope university. a university conversation: using cloud technology to generate collaborative institutional policy for the enhancement of learning and teaching abstract theoretical framework the reflective institution institutional learning and teaching policy creation cloud technology and mass collaboration a university conversation the university conversation and learning development conclusions reference list almond, n. (2014, in press) ‘teaching in the cloud: a virtualised collaborative writing methodology for the development of postgraduate academic literacy’, in badenhorst.c. and guerin, c. (eds.) postgraduate writing pedagogies and research literacies ... author details nick almond is the director of masters courses and chair of the faculty quality learning and teaching committee in the faculty of education at liverpool hope university. his background is in physics but in recent years his research has focused on educ... journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 5: march 2013 ‘multisensory holistic immersion’: a method of insider inquiry skills as a threshold concept david coghlan trinity college dublin, ireland anne graham cagney waterford institute of technology, ireland abstract insider inquiry involves being immersed in local situations and generating contextually embedded knowledge which emerges from direct experience. it requires a method that facilitates attending to observable data, envisaging possible explanations of that data and selecting as probable or certain the explanations which provide the best account for the data. this article describes how a method for engaging with insider inquiry in an undergraduate course, that transformed students’ thinking and learning beyond their disciplinary boundaries, emerged to be a threshold concept. it seeks to contribute to the field of workplace learning through the exploration of how insider inquiry might be taught as a threshold that is central to the transition from university to working life. keywords: insider inquiry; threshold concepts; bernard lonergan; general empirical method. introduction developing an inquiring attentiveness to organisational processes sets up a life skill for workplace learning and is arguably a core skill for undergraduate business students to learn as they move from university into the world of work. in university, students gain many indirect insights into organisations, i.e. through case studies and their reading. in strategy courses, for example, students typically study a case and are conditioned to perceive it in terms of a strategy issue, bringing a priori frameworks, such as competitive analysis, to coghlan and graham cagney ‘multisensory holistic immersion’ journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 2 bear on their review of the case. most courses in our students’ experience utilise this approach. having direct experience of organisations, however, provides access to the reality of organisations with all their paradoxes and problems, and a challenge to adopt a method of inquiry that works from experience rather than from a textbook. it might be expected that efforts to develop a perspective on inquiring into organisational experience would be difficult and troublesome in educational environments where students are encouraged to analyse organisations from a distance and in terms of a priori categories. accordingly, such efforts in fact challenge students to think differently, not only about their external environment and but also about themselves. such challenges may be understood as troublesome knowledge (perkins, 2006) and may even have the characteristics of a threshold concept (meyer and land, 2003; 2006). this paper engages with this challenge and explores how an undergraduate business course was delivered in order to enable students to learn insider inquiry skills. the focus was on students’ own direct experience of organisational dynamics, coupled with teaching them a method appropriate to this approach. the settings which students drew on for their direct organisational experience were their part-time, out-of-college jobs. while not the direct focus of this paper, it also feeds into exploration of other workplace settings, such as work placements (costly and armsby, 2007; workman, 2007). the paper is structured as follows. first, the notion of threshold concepts is introduced. second, insider inquiry is described and a method for engaging in insider inquiry, grounded in the operations of human knowing, is presented. third, the aims, design and delivery of the course are outlined. fourth, reflections from teaching the method are explored in the light of threshold concepts. the aim of the paper is to contribute insights on how it emerged that a method for engaging with insider inquiry exhibited the attributes of a threshold concept. threshold concepts in exploring this challenge, we draw on the notion of threshold concepts (meyer and land, 2003; 2006; coughlan and graham, 2009; cousins, 2010). meyer and land propose that within each discipline, field or profession there are what they call ‘threshold concepts’. threshold concepts are distinct from what might be described typically as ‘core concepts’, which are the building blocks that progress understanding of a subject. core concepts have to be understood but they do not necessarily lead to a different or transformed way of coghlan and graham cagney ‘multisensory holistic immersion’ journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 3 viewing the subject matter. some core concepts are difficult to understand, but not everything that is difficult is a threshold concept. threshold concepts can be 'considered akin to passing through a portal, or conceptual gateway, thus opening up a new and previously inaccessible way of thinking about something' (meyer and land, 2006, p.3). these concepts lead to a transformed way of understanding, or represent how people 'think' in a particular discipline, or how they perceive, apprehend or experience particular phenomena within a discipline. in summary, threshold concepts focus on the difficulty in learning a subject (cousins, 2010). in the context of this paper, we reflect that it is not just teaching students to learn from experience that is difficult; there is also a theory about why and how it is difficult and threshold concepts provides a perspective on this kind of learning experience. threshold concepts usually have five attributes: they are transformative, irreversible, integrative, bounded and troublesome.  threshold concepts are transformative in how they reflect the way in which students’ perception of themselves and the subject are transformed. when students master a threshold concept, they experience an ontological and epistemological shift that creates a new internal landscape within which new understandings are assimilated into what they know; how they understand things; and sometimes, fundamentally who they are.  given their transformative potential, threshold concepts are likely to be irreversible (davies, 2006). threshold concepts are difficult to unlearn, which does not imply that they are fixed or that they won’t be modified. students may modify or change their mind about accepting a concept at a later stage but this will happen from a standpoint of understanding it and from making a conscious choice to reject or modify it.  threshold concepts are integrative in that they expose ‘the previously hidden interrelatedness of something’ (meyer and land 2006, p.7). the ideas and procedures of a subject make sense and are connected in a way that was not previously understood or perceived.  threshold concepts help define how subject areas are bounded, as they clarify the scope of a subject community. coghlan and graham cagney ‘multisensory holistic immersion’ journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 4  threshold concepts are likely to be troublesome knowledge; tacit and unexamined, they can represent much of the knowledge we rely on every day in our ordinary and professional activities (perkins, 2006). research on threshold concepts has focused largely on concepts within a wide range of disciplines; economics, mathematics, engineering, accountancy and science (davies and mangan, 2007; ucl, 2013). what has received much less attention to date is the notion that a learning process may be a threshold concept. we now introduce a learning and reflective process-focused course within which we purport the method emerged to exemplify the attributes of a threshold concept. insider inquiry ‘inquiry from the inside’ and ‘inquiry from the outside’ are two modes of inquiry presented by evered and louis (1981). they juxtapose the two approaches. ‘inquiry from the outside’ refers to traditional science where the researchers’ relationship to the setting is detached and neutral. the basis for validity is argued to be measurement and logic. typically researchers act as onlookers, and they apply a priori categories to create theoretically universal, context free knowledge. in contrast, ‘inquiry from the inside’ involves researchers as actors, immersed in local situations generating contextually embedded knowledge which emerges from direct experience (brannick and coghlan, 2007). it is what goffman (1959) refers to as being ‘backstage’. schon (1995) contrasts how researchers can view practice from the ‘high ground’, where they can study issues from a distance, for example, because they are not organisational members or because their data are based on pre-constructed surveys or interviews. or they can be immersed in the ‘swampy lowlands’ where problems are messy, confusing and incapable of a technical solution, because they are either organisational members whose actions influence the reality they see, or are outsiders who are contracted to influence what they see. for attentive students, attention to what goes on around them can evoke questions about how organisations function and set the foundations for learning. experience and inquiry as from the perspective of being insiders can create the potential of developing skills that students can draw on in their future careers, especially those who become managers in later life. coghlan and graham cagney ‘multisensory holistic immersion’ journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 5 insider inquiry begins and works from direct personal experience. evered and louis (1981, p.387) refer to their method of insider inquiry as ‘multisensory holistic immersion’ and as ‘messy, iterative groping’ which they contrast with procedures of forming and testing explicit hypotheses associated with the scientific method. as insiders listen to what people say, observe what people do and question the outcomes of both deliberate and spontaneous action, intended and unintended, they learn to ‘decipher the blooming, buzzing confusion’ around them (evered and louis, 1981, p.386). without a prescribed set of formulae and frameworks that can be applied in a uniform and predictable manner, students struggle to learn the method. it requires a different kind of learning. no matter which way one approaches it, undergraduate students may find insider inquiry difficult and troublesome for several reasons. one reason is that their academic learning prior to this will tend to have been primarily propositional rather than practical. they will have studied theories, concepts and frameworks and applied them to paper-based cases, which typically tend to be constructed on a single discipline basis. engaging with how these theories are enacted in practice involves an ability to integrate fields of study, which hitherto in the students’ experience may not have been integrated. moreover, learning from the closeness of direct experience where meanings are socially constructed, requires students to be skilled both in understanding what is taking place in the environment around them and in grasping their own meaning-making processes (campbell, 2000). this is learning that starts with students’ experience and is different in that, unlike a case study that is finite and fixed, students have to conduct the application and analysis of the appropriateness of frameworks within that live and messy situation in which they find themselves. in addition, students are challenged to reflect upon and learn about their own learning processes, in other words, the meta-cognitive moment that is occurring within a dynamic and fluid situation. accordingly, it is paramount to have a method which students can learn and that enables them to practice this ‘multisensory holistic immersion’ and ‘messy iterative groping’ within course constraints. this leads us to introduce and to discuss an empirical method that is appropriate to insider inquiry. coghlan and graham cagney ‘multisensory holistic immersion’ journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 6 a general empirical method for insider inquiry what differentiates us humans from other forms of living organisms is our ability to be selfaware. this self-awareness is central to learning and to learning-in-action because it means that we can be aware of our experience, ask questions about it, come to judgements, make decisions and take action (dewey, 2007). the philosopher-theologian bernard lonergan describes the structure of human knowing as a three-step process: experience, understanding and judgement (lonergan, 1992; flanagan, 1997; king, 2011) (see table 1). first, we attend to our concrete experience. then we ask questions about our experience and receive an insight (understanding) and we follow that up by reflecting and weighing up the evidence to determine whether our insight is correct or not (judgement). experience is the empirical level of consciousness and is an interaction of inner and outer events. not only can we see, hear, smell, taste and touch, imagine, remember, feel, and think, but we can also experience ourselves as seeing, hearing, thinking, feeling, remembering and imagining. sensory data are what we experience but do not yet understand. so we ask questions, ‘what does this mean?’. answers to such questions come in the form of insights, which are creative acts of understanding, of grasping and formulating patterns, unities, relationships and explanations, in response to questions posed to our experience. deliberating, valuing, deciding, choosing, taking action, behaving… decision/action marshaling evidence, testing, judging judgment inquiring, understanding, formulating what is being understood understanding seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching, remembering, imagining, feeling… experience table 1. the operations of human knowing and doing insights are common; we get thousands of them every day. they are not always accurate or true. the question then is, does the insight fit the evidence? this opens up a question for reflection. is it so? yes or no? maybe? we don’t know. the shift in attention turns to an inquiry for accuracy, sureness and certainty of understanding. so we move to a new level of the cognitional process, where we marshal and weigh evidence and assess its sufficiency. we set the judgement up conditionally – if the conditions have been fulfilled, coghlan and graham cagney ‘multisensory holistic immersion’ journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 7 then it must be true or accurate. there may be conflicting judgements and we may have to weigh the evidence and choose between them. through judgement we can use terms like accurate, correct and true. we need to distinguish judgements of fact and judgements of value. a judgement of fact affirms that something is true/not true, or is correct/not correct. a judgement of value affirms that something is good/bad, important/unimportant and so on. lonergan (1992) argues that human knowing is not any of these operations on their own. for him, all knowing involves experience, understanding and judgement. he acknowledges that we are not always attentive to experience, that understanding may not spontaneously flow from experience, that many insights may be wrong, that interpretations of data may be superficial, inaccurate, biased and that judgements may be flawed. he refers to these as flights from understanding and oversights. he argues that we can gain insight into these negative manifestations of knowing by the same three-fold process of knowing. the pattern of the three operations is invariant in that it applies to all settings of cognitional activity, whether solving a crossword clue, solving an everyday problem or engaging in scientific research. to reject or dismiss this pattern involves experience, understanding and judgement and, paradoxically, confirms it. we have provided a detailed account of the operations of human knowing, which while invariant and recognisable in human experience, nevertheless are difficult to identify and distinguish in concrete situations. later in this article we will discuss the theoretical frameworks that were taught which provided constructs to help frame insights from their concrete experiences. what is central to the dynamic of the course under exploration here is the emphasis on the learning process of the students. lonergan’s work in this regard is valuable as he adopts a personal approach to grasping the operations of knowing, which he calls self-appropriation. appropriating our intellectual activities means to become aware of them, be able to identify and distinguish them, to grasp how they are related, and to be able to make the process explicit. accordingly, we not only experience, understand and judge the world around us but we experience, understand and judge our own process of knowing and learning. the cognitional operations of experience, understanding and judgement form a general empirical method, which requires: coghlan and graham cagney ‘multisensory holistic immersion’ journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 8  attention to observable data.  envisaging possible explanations of those data.  preferring as probable or certain the explanations which provide the best account for the data (see table 2). for actionbe responsible preferring as probable or certain the explanations which provide the best account for the data be reasonable envisaging possible explanations of that databe intelligent to data of sense & consciousnessbe attentive table 2 the general empirical method appropriation of our own knowing process does not happen in one single leap; it is a slow painstaking developmental process that is founded on our attention to the operations of knowing in the unfolding of our own experience. although his ideas are not necessarily new, lonergan’s method possesses clarity of thought and provides us with tools that enable us to get a firm grasp on the process of learning that students can exploit in their ‘multisensory holistic immersion’ as insiders in their particular organisational settings. critical thinking the general empirical method provides a method for engaging in critical thinking (king, 2011). it challenges learners to pose questions to themselves, not only about what is going on around them, but also how they are framing their interpretations. in other words, the general empirical method works with both data of sense and data of consciousness and does not treat external situations without taking into account the corresponding operations of the person, and does not treat a person’s cognitive operations without taking account of the corresponding specific situation in which a person finds themselves and the questions that arise from being in these settings. moon (2008, p.126) argues that the notion of judgement is central to critical thinking, whereby a person can make an effective provision of evidence to justify a reasonable judgement: ‘critical thinking can be seen as a form of learning, in that new knowledge, in the form of judgement, is formed in the process’. in this coghlan and graham cagney ‘multisensory holistic immersion’ journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 9 regard, the general empirical method has close affinities to evidence-based practice (rousseau, 2006). insider inquiry of its nature requires a method that accommodates direct experience, closeness, and a framework to work with the ‘blooming, buzzing confusion’ in the swampy lowlands. accordingly, lonergan’s articulation of the cognitive structure acted as an empirical method for the course participants challenging them to perform the operations of attentiveness, intelligence and reasonableness. the ‘exploring organisational experiences’ course the ‘exploring organisational experiences’ course (15 ects, equivalent to 30 uk credits) was a final-year option for students who were within months of graduation, and who had studied a broad range of business and organisational subjects over their four year programme. the learning outcomes were framed that participants would: 1. learn how to inquire critically into organisational dynamics from the perspective of being an insider-participant. 2. have practised a general empirical method that would enable them to learn critical thinking skills. 3. have constructs for reflecting on organisational dynamics. the course outline stated that the core ingredient of the course was to be curiosity and inquiry into organisational processes which would be supported by conceptual frameworks aimed to guide students’ understanding. they would be required to show how they would learn to observe and inquire into organisational processes, drawing on their direct experience and insider familiarity from part-time jobs, summer jobs, family business, voluntary work and participation in university student societies. the content of the course was grounded in coghlan and rashford’s (2006) book which discusses organisational issues such as interlevel dynamics, change and strategy, and which works from a reflective approach. evered and louis’ (1981) seminal article was circulated and discussed and supplemented with material from goffman’s (1959) notion of frontand back-staging. in the first semester, lectures were given on the individual, team, coghlan and graham cagney ‘multisensory holistic immersion’ journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 10 interdepartmental group and organisational levels respectively, and interlevel dynamics (how each level affects and is affected by each of the others). in the second semester, broad themes in the processes of organisation development and strategy were introduced and reviewed in terms of interlevel dynamics. while these frameworks were introduced in the course, it was expected that students would draw also on relevant frameworks from other courses. in doing so they would have to demonstrate how the use of any particular framework was relevant in articulating an insight from an experience and be able to verify how that insight was confirmed. the somewhat subversive aim of the course was to transform students’ ways of learning from the traditional didactic model that works from the textbook to cases, to engaging in a process of reflection on experience. as it was a final year course and sought to facilitate the transition from class-room learning of university life to work-based learning in organisations, the image of a portal or a threshold applies to both the students’ stage of life stage transition, and to the transformation of their way of learning and making sense of their experiences. co ns ci ou sn es s competence conscious incompetence figure 1 the process of learning to appropriate the general empirical method conscious incompetence conscious competence unconscious competence unconscious incompetence figure 1 outlines the process of learning to appropriate the general empirical method. quadrant 1, unconscious incompetence, captures the place in which students do not know that they do not know that they do not have critical thinking skills. as they engage in the course they realise that they do not have these skills and become conscious of their incompetence and make the commitment associated with deep learning to engage with the concepts and the method and the required learning process, thereby moving to coghlan and graham cagney ‘multisensory holistic immersion’ journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 11 quadrant 2. they practice the skills of insider inquiry and the general empirical method both within their chosen organisations and through the reflection required by the course assignments and gradually mastering both content and process. the intention was that by the end of the course they have learned some skills in applying them consciously, and the overall goal is that as they move through life they internalise them, consolidate the learning, and continue to enhance these skills to become in effect reflective practitioners (quadrant 4). we are arguing that engaging with insider inquiry is difficult because it requires the students to expand their ways of thinking and practicing beyond their chosen disciplinary boundaries (donald, 2002). furthermore, the nature of this difficulty is compounded because the method of inquiry from the inside is drawn from a different discipline i.e. philosophy. therefore, commitment to insider inquiry becomes a commitment to the method. it was anticipated that students would experience learning anxiety, as their learned competence of how to write assignments, complete courses and get good grades, would not necessarily apply. additionally, the students’ ‘taken-for-granted’ nature of their own experienced ways of learning would be challenged. the hope was that in the process students would understand what is taking place in their chosen organisational settings and grasp their own meaning making processes. accordingly, there was an initial focus on attending to cognitional processes in order to unfreeze assumptions by disconfirming traditional expectations of what learning on this course would involve (schein, 1996). the structure of the course the course was structured around a weekly lecture for all the participants and a weekly seminar conducted in two separate sessions to facilitate smaller numbers and deeper discussion. course assessment consisted of two major papers (4000 words), three short hand-in assignments (a two-page pensee), keeping a reflective journal, and a three-hour final examination. the two major papers were due at the end of first semester and at the end of the course respectively. the three pensees were scheduled after each theory block and they invited students, using the general empirical method, to reflect on the questions that the theory block was evoking in them about their case (table 3). students were required to keep a reflective journal in which they explored their experiences, insights and judgements of events in their chosen organisations, in other courses, and in their lives. coghlan and graham cagney ‘multisensory holistic immersion’ journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 12 these were inspected on several occasions during the course. at intervals throughout the course, classes were devoted to engaging in the general empirical method through, for example, a series of arithmetic puzzles and crossword clues. these exercises reinforced students’ awareness of the distinctive cognitive operations of experience, understanding and judgement, so that they would gain confidence in using the method. this learning in respect of the method was further enhanced by a formal and informal formative structure of providing both written and face-to-face feedback and support to each student on receipt of the pensees and the essays. table 3. questions for reflection. pensee question pensee 1 from the experience as an insider of your case organization what insights are emerging about relationship between the individual and the organization? pensee 2 from the experience as an insider of your case organization what insights are emerging about how the change is managed? pensee 3 from the experience as an insider of your case organization what insights are emerging about how the strategic process operates? over several years of this course, the work of the students has covered a wide range of organisational settings. examples included a small supermarket moving to a new premises, a major re-orientation to customer service by an international renowned retail chain, the restructuring of a law firm, a move to an electronic order system by a family trucking firm, the rescue of a student university society which was in danger of losing its corporate sponsorship, and several accounts of experiences in fashion boutiques. the general empirical method of insider inquiry as a threshold concept the focus of the course was on the process of learning to attend to insider inquiry and on developing the skill of employing the general empirical method, rather than on any coghlan and graham cagney ‘multisensory holistic immersion’ journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 13 particular organisational issues that students may have discussed. the structure of human knowing acted as an empirical method for the course participants and was integral to enabling the students to engage in insider inquiry. our experience is that the students on the course struggled with what was a reversal of their well-embedded learning process and thereby struggled with learning to think differently. our insight is that the course required double-loop learning on the part of the students; double loop learning involves changing the frame by which questions are asked (argyris, 1982). students were challenged to create a new mental model for themselves for how they would engage in and learn in the course and achieve good grades. attending to cognitional processes is difficult for undergraduate students to grasp. while not everything that is difficult to learn is a threshold concept, attending to the method of inquiry from the inside meets most of the characteristics of a threshold concept. as meyer and land (2006) discuss, engagement with a threshold concept involves liminality, that is, being in an unstable space of not-knowing, where students oscillate between old and emergent understanding in a transition state. additionally, the impact of engagement with the concept involves disjuncture, described by jarvis (2006) as a tension that develops between the self and our world view creating a sensation of lack of ‘fit’ between the situation in which one finds oneself and one’s world view. jarvis (2006, p.16) describes this as ‘the point when our biographical repertoire is no longer sufficient to cope with our situation, causing our unthinking harmony to be disturbed leaving us with a feeling of unease’. the experience of learning during disjuncture is discussed by meyer and land (2006) and described as being in an unstable space of knowing/not knowing, of oscillating between old and emergent understandings. a sense of psychological safety was created through a supportive teaching-learning environment based on small group seminars, where personal experiences and learning were shared (graham and coghlan, 2009). coghlan and graham cagney ‘multisensory holistic immersion’ journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 14 cognitional process is something we take for granted. we just do it. therefore, attending to cognitional processes is troublesome because it is taken for granted and rarely made explicit. as a reversal of well-embedded learning process, beginning from ‘multisensory holistic immersion’ and learning to engage in ‘messy iterative groping’ is troublesome. troublesome insight into boundedness of thinking within organizational disciplines and functions. process as boundedness requires futher workbounded working from a general empirical method performs an integrative function as it crosses all areas of human activity and can be used in scientific inquiry and in every day living. as life does not deliver in terms of neatly packaged disciplinary insider inquiry integrates academic disciplinary fields through experience integrative developing a critical thinking stance on life, where experience is subjected to inquiry, insight, testing and judgement is an irreversible process. difficult to asses in short term for students learning to stand back from what one is close to is irreversible. difficult to asses in short term for students irreversible using the general empirical method defined in terms of attending to own cognitional operations changes student’s perception of themselves and the subject area. learning to attend to experience and to stand back from it by questioning, both the outer experience of what took place and the inner experience of how one constructs interpretations. transformative general empirical methodinsider inquiryattributes of threshold concepts table 4 insider inquiry and the general empirical method as threshold conceptstable 4 insider inquiry and the general empirical method as threshold concepts the insight that emerged for us is that the method for engaging with insider inquiry exhibits the attributes of a threshold concept (table 4). both insider inquiry and using the general empirical method, defined in terms of attending to their own cognitional operations, changes students’ perception of themselves and the subject area. learning to attend to experience and to attend to how to move from experience, through understanding to judgement, is transformative in that they learn how to assess the value of expert statements and to know when to accept opinions and when to doubt. learning to attend to experience and to stand back from it by questioning, involves both the outer experience of what took place and the inner experience of how one constructs interpretations. irreversibility is difficult to affirm as students were still in the educational system and so the potential to revert to learned patterns of thinking remained, particularly at examination time when they are embedded in that pattern for other examinations. however, it may be noted that a former course participant has returned several times to speak to the class and has spontaneously narrated how he is using the general empirical method in his current role as a financial auditor. coghlan and graham cagney ‘multisensory holistic immersion’ journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 15 threshold concepts are integrative in that they expose ‘the previously hidden interrelatedness of something’ (meyer and land, 2006, p.7). the ideas and procedures of a subject make sense and are connected in a way that was not previously understood or perceived. as life does not deliver experience in terms of neatly packaged disciplinary concepts, insider inquiry provides the opportunity to integrate academic disciplinary fields through experience. working from a general empirical method performs an integrative function as it crosses all areas of human activity and can be used in scientific inquiry and in everyday living. as insider inquiry crosses the boundaries of discrete disciplines and the work on threshold concepts to date has focused on content concepts rather than process, the boundedness of the empirical method in insider inquiry remains open for discussion. finally, as a reversal of learning processes in which students have been socialised all their educational lives, the shift to ‘multisensory holistic immersion’ and learning how to engage in ‘messy iterative groping’ is troublesome. cognitional process is something we take for granted. we just do it. therefore, attending to cognitional processes is also troublesome because it is taken for granted and rarely made explicit. conclusions in this paper we explore how for undergraduate business students, insider inquiry skills, engaged in through a general empirical method, act as a threshold concept. the foundation of this course is that insider inquiry is an important area of learning for students who are in transition from university life to the world of working in organisations. in evered and louis’s (1981)terms such inquiry is engaged by ‘multisensory holistic immersion’ and ‘messy, iterative groping’ in what schon (1995) termed the ‘swampy lowlands’. the insider inquiry approach contrasts with the outsider observer approach of the case study method. engaging in insider inquiry demands a reversal of academic learning approaches, whereby the students begin with an informed engagement with experience rather than an engagement solely with theory. learning from the closeness of direct experience, where meanings are socially constructed, requires students to be skilled in both understanding what is taking place in the environment around them and in grasping their own meaningmaking processes. this is learning that is not amenable to frameworks and simple rules, but rather by direct engagement. coghlan and graham cagney ‘multisensory holistic immersion’ journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 16 learning to bring an attitude of inquiry to experience is at the heart of the educational process and we sought to make this explicit in this course development with our business students. as we experience processes in organisations, we see things happening and we hear what is said – and we wanted our students to consider: how do we understand them?; and then what judgements do we make about them? we wanted our students to realise that we need to learn to be attentive to what is happening, ask to ask ourselves relevant questions, questions that are based on wanting to understand what is going on. we encouraged students to try to keep an open mind as to what events might mean until they had gathered evidence and verified it by judgement. learning to develop an inquiring attentiveness to organisational processes which occur around them is a core skill for business students to learn. we wanted our students to realise that they can learn to observe themselves being an observer and learn to understand themselves as questioners. while our hope is that long after they have left university and have forgotten the multiplicity of specific theories they learned during the course of the studies, they will have internalised the general empirical method, this is not assured. when students explored experiences in their home and social life in their journals, as some did, they demonstrated an internalisation. nevertheless, because learning a method of attending to cognitional processes, a method that is grounded not in any thesis or grand theory but in the recognisable operations of human inquiry, is accessible, this hope is not unrealisable, especially for those who crossed the learning threshold. the threshold concept itself is an emerging construct that is contributing significantly to understanding the learning process. it provides a framework for engaging with concepts that are transformative, irreversible, integrative, bounded and troublesome. this paper has described how a method for engaging with insider inquiry in a course which transformed students’ thinking and learning beyond their disciplinary boundaries emerged to be a threshold concept. during the delivery of a course, students developed their metaawareness using the theories and concepts of their subject but within a messy life situation rather than a finite and safe (case study) one. it has sought to contribute to the field of workplace learning through the exploration how insider inquiry might be taught, a threshold that is central to the transition from university to working life. it also seeks to contribute to the literature on threshold concepts and to the application of lonergan’s (1992) method to a hitherto unexplored context. coghlan and graham cagney ‘multisensory holistic immersion’ journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 17 references argyris, c. (1982) reasoning, learning and action. san francisco: jossey-bass. brannick, t. and coghlan, d. (2007) ‘in defense of being ‘native’: the case for insider academic research’, organizational research methods, 10(1), pp. 59-74. campbell, d. (2000) the social construction of organizations. london: karnac. coghlan, d. and brannick, t. (2010) doing action research in your own organization. 3rd edn. london: sage. coghlan, d. and rashford n.s. (2006) organization change and strategy. an interlevel dynamics approach. abingdon: routledge. costly, c. and armsby, p. (2007) ‘methodologies for undergraduates doing practitioner investigations at work’, journal of workplace learning, 19(3), pp. 131-145. coughlan, p. and graham, a. (2009) ‘embedding a threshold concept in teaching and learning of product development management’, creativity and innovation management, 18(3), pp. 190-198. cousins, g. (2010) ‘neither student-centred nor teacher-centred: threshold concept and research partnerships’, journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2, february, pp. 1-9. davies, p. (2006) ‘threshold concepts: how can we recognize them?’, in meyer, j. and land, r. (eds.) overcoming barriers to student understanding: threshold concepts and troublesome knowledge. abingdon: routledge, pp. 70-84. davies, p. and mangan, j. (2007) ‘threshold concepts and the integration of understanding in economics’, studies in higher education, 32(6), pp. 711-726. dewey, j. (2007) how we think. stilwell, ks: digiread.com publishing. coghlan and graham cagney ‘multisensory holistic immersion’ journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 18 donald, j.g. (2002) learning to think: disciplinary perspectives. san francisco: josseybass. evered, r. and louis, m.r. (1981) ‘alternative perspectives in the organizational sciences: ‘inquiry from the inside’ and ‘inquiry from the outside’’, academy of management review, 6(3), pp. 385-395. flanagan, j. (1997) quest for self-knowledge. toronto: toronto university press. goffman, e. (1959) the presentation of self in everyday life. new york: doubleday. graham, a. and coghlan, d. (2009) ‘creating the learning space for insider inquiry: threshold concepts in observing organisations’, in rust, c. (ed.) improving student learning through the curriculum. proceedings of the 16th international symposium improving student learning. university of durham, durham 1-3 september 2008. oxford: oxford brookes university, pp. 221-232. jarvis, p. (2006) towards a comprehensive understanding of human learning. abingdon: routledge. king c.b. (2011) finding the mind: pedagogy for verifying cognitional theory. lanham, md: university press of america. lonergan, b.j. (1992) ‘insight: an essay in human understanding’, in crowe, f. and doran, r. (eds.) the collected works of bernard lonergan, vol. 3. toronto: university of toronto press. (original publication, london: longmans, 1957) meyer, j. and land, r. (2003) ‘threshold concepts and troublesome knowledge (1): linkages to ways of thinking and practising within the disciplines’, in rust, c. (ed.) improving student learning ten years on. oxford: ocsld, pp. 412-424. meyer, j. and land, r. (2006) overcoming barriers to student understanding: threshold concepts and troublesome knowledge. abingdon: routledge. moon, j. (2008) critical thinking: an exploration for theory and practice. abingdon: routledge. coghlan and graham cagney ‘multisensory holistic immersion’ journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 19 perkins, d. (2006) ‘constructivism and troublesome knowledge’, in meyer, j. and land, r. (eds.) overcoming barriers to student understanding: threshold concepts and troublesome knowledge. abingdon: routledge, pp. 33-47. rousseau, d.m. (2006) ‘is there such a thing as ‘evidence-based management?’’ academy of management review, 31(2), pp. 256-269. schein, e.h. (1996) ‘kurt lewin’s change theory in the field and in the classroom: notes toward a model of managed learning’, systems practice, 9(1), pp. 27-47. schon, d.a. (1995) ‘knowing-in-action: the new scholarship requires a new epistemology’, change, november/december, pp. 27-34. ucl (2013) threshold concepts: undergraduate teaching, postgraduate training and professional development – a short introduction and bibliography. available at: http://www.ee.ucl.ac.uk/~mflanaga/thresholds.html (accessed: 22 february 2013). workman, b. (2007) ‘’casing the joint’: explorations by insider-researcher preparing for work-based projects’, journal of workplace learning, 19,(3), pp. 146-160. author details anne graham cagney is a lecturer in the school of lifelong learning & education, at waterford institute of technology. her research interests are in enhancing teachinglearning environments particularly in professional development programmes in higher education. she is currently exploring the links between useable knowledge, transformative learning, and organisational development that support educational, business and organisational success. anne is research fellow, business school, trinity college dublin and hetl (international higher education teaching and learning association) liaison for ireland. david coghlan is professor of organization development at the school of business, trinity college dublin, ireland and is a fellow of the college. he is author of eight coghlan and graham cagney ‘multisensory holistic immersion’ journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 20 books, including doing action research in your own organization (3rd. sage, 2010) and over seventy articles and book chapters. literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special edition: academic peer learning, november 2015 from students to leaders: evaluating the impact on academic performance, satisfaction and student empowerment of a pilot pal programme among first year students and second year leaders stacey scriver national university of ireland galway, republic of ireland amber walsh olesen national university of ireland galway students’ union, republic of ireland eoghan clifford national university of ireland galway, republic of ireland abstract this paper evaluates the pilot year of the céim pal initiative at the national university of ireland galway through analysis of examination results, student surveys and the reflections of two students who participated as first year students in the pilot year and subsequently as student leaders in year two. the paper considers the impact of attendance at sessions on academic performance, student satisfaction with the programme, and evaluates the extent to which the initiative has assisted students to become more empowered learners as expressed through the development of self-directed learning, growth in educational self-efficacy, and confidence in navigating the learning environment. recommendations are also made for developing the céim initiative, which may be relevant to other pal programmes and for determining the direction of future research. keywords: pal programme; academic performance; student empowerment; satisfaction. scriver et al. from students to leaders journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 2 introduction at the beginning of my first year i was struggling with homesickness, a lack of friends and trying to acclimatise myself to college life…i wasn’t sure if i was supposed to learn it all; how was i supposed to complete assignments – what standard did my lecturers expect from me? i didn’t feel brave enough to voice my concerns. (eniola, student participant and student leader) on starting the degree i was quite shocked at the workload and the high standard of work expected. [i hadn’t been prepared] for the volume of work required on a full time course. (steven, student participant and student leader) the experiences outlined by steven and eniola above are common for first year students entering university. students often express uncertainty about how to handle workloads, approach study, and manage their fears and inhibitions in tackling assignments, projects and exams (van der meer and scott, 2008; haggis, 2006). how these issues are handled impacts on student results, retention rates and on individual educational development. students or learners who are ‘empowered’ have been found to not only achieve ‘greater content learning, but are also thought to better demonstrate competencies such as communication, teamwork, and problem-solving’ (zraa et al., 2013, p.148). learner empowerment is thus an important element in initiatives such as peer assisted learning (pal) schemes that aim to improve academic performance, student retention and overall student satisfaction. at the college of engineering and informatics at the national university of ireland galway (nui galway), a pal initiative was introduced in the 2013/14 academic year in collaboration with the students’ union. the programme aimed to assist first year engineering students to adapt to third level education. this paper presents findings from a study of the pilot year of the céim initiative relating to first year attendance at céim sessions and academic performance, student satisfaction with the programme, and learner empowerment. scriver et al. from students to leaders journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 3 background to céim in mid-2012, nui galway students’ union, in collaboration with the college of engineering and informatics at nui galway, decided to take a more active role in supporting successful student transitions to university. student and lecturer feedback and assessment of results led to the identification of the following key areas where students required additional support: (i) adapting to university life, (ii) planning and managing workloads, (iii) asking questions, (iv) working together, and (v) self-learning. after conducting desk-based research, it was decided to focus on student led-support within the academic sphere (thomas, 2012) and pal was selected as the preferred model to pilot. céim (which means ‘step’ or ‘degree’ in the gaelic/irish language) was piloted in the 2013/14 academic year and was made available to all first year engineering students on an opt-out basis, facilitated by 23 leaders drawn from second year engineering students. groups of first year students met weekly for one hour with two or three trained student leaders throughout the 2013/14 academic year (a total of ten weeks in semester 1 and ten weeks in semester 2). student leaders also attended debriefing meetings with the céim coordinators on a weekly basis. student empowerment as an objective of a pal scheme empowerment is an important, although often under-considered, concept for educators and educational programmers. as houser and frymier (2009, p.36) describe ‘to be an empowered learner means to be motivated to perform tasks, and more specifically an empowered person finds the tasks meaningful, feels competent to perform them, and feels his/her efforts have an impact on the scheme of things’. students who meet such a description are more likely to seek help when needed, understand the processes of learning, navigate the third level system to find support, and are less likely to drop-out due to frustrations or fears of failure. however, helping students to become empowered requires the development of certain skills and competencies, including self-directed learning, educational self-efficacy and confidence in negotiating the educational system. these elements have particular value as outcomes of pal schemes. self-directed learning refers to learners taking the initiative in planning, implementing, and evaluating their own scriver et al. from students to leaders journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 4 learning needs and outcomes, individually or within groups (knowles, 1975). ultimately, it is about taking responsibility for their own learning rather than simply responding to instruction (boud, 1981). a meta-analysis of research on self-directed learning found that higher levels of self-directed learning was associated with academic performance, future aspiration, creativity, curiosity, and life satisfaction for students (edmondson et al., 2012, p.45). additionally, self-efficacy, referring to an individual’s belief in their capacity to organise and execute courses of action in order to reach certain goals or specific performance attainments (bandura, 1977; 1986; 1997), has been positively associated with academic motivation (zimmerman, 2000, p.86). finally, confidence in negotiating the system, while related to self-efficacy, also includes having practical knowledge of educational processes and procedures (haggis, 2006). for some students, lack of such knowledge increases anxiety around asking questions, accessing services and facilities, and managing examinations and projects. as student bodies diversify, knowledge of academic processes becomes a more significant issue within third level organisations (haggis, 2006). a basic assumption of pal and related schemes is that peer or supplemental learning are not just particular methods, but rather represent an outlook on learning where inner motivation and curiosity are the driving forces and where the main emphasis is on selfgoverning and collective learning (olstedt 2005, cited malm et al., 2011a, p.282). pal schemes are thus implicitly, if not explicitly, concerned with learner empowerment. while a considerable number of studies have evaluated pal-type schemes by examining academic performance among attendees, non-attendees or by intensity of attendance (e.g. malm et al., 2011b; malm et al., 2010; ogden et al., 2003), fewer studies have focused on changes to learner empowerment as a result of participation. also underexamined is the impact of student leadership in pal schemes, with some exceptions such as malm et al. (2012). to address these gaps, this study considers the impact of participation in the nui galway pal initiative on academic performance among first year students, and assesses student satisfaction with the programme and the contribution of participation on learner empowerment among both first year participants and second year leaders. scriver et al. from students to leaders journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 5 methodology design this article draws from the results of the pilot year (2013/14) of a multi-year evaluative research study on the céim initiative at nui galway. the study uses a mixed-methods approach with quantitative and qualitative aspects. result outcomes for end-of-year final marks and module results were examined to assess the extent to which participation impacts academic performance. student surveys were adapted from malm et al. (2010), with the addition of open-ended questions, designed to capture student satisfaction with céim and the extent to which leaders and first year students are empowered as learners through participation. students and leaders were surveyed online at the end of semester 1 (september – december) and semester 2 (january – april). reflections from two students who participated as first year students in the pilot year and as student leaders in the second year were also solicited. participants and procedures the first year programme in engineering has 266 students. the analysis of academic performance reflected the outcomes of this cohort. in total 197 first year students in semester 1 (73% of all first year students) and 70 (30% of all first year students) in semester 2 completed the survey. among the 23 leaders involved in céim in 2013/14, 16 completed the survey in semester 1 and 11 completed the survey in semester 2. completion of surveys was voluntary and students and leaders were fully informed through the written introduction of the purpose of the surveys. participants consented to participate through their completion and submission of the survey. not all students responded to all questions, resulting in different sample sizes for questions. the reflections were provided by two students who participated in first year and subsequently as second year leaders (eniola and steven). they were contacted by the students’ union in april 2015 and asked to reflect on their experience with céim over their two years of participation. reflections were provided to the students’ union before being made available for this study. steven and eniola consented to the use of their reflections in this paper. scriver et al. from students to leaders journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 6 quantitative analysis of examination results and survey responses took the form of descriptives, analysis of variance, and correlations using spss v. 21. significance was set at a confidence level of 95% (sig. = 0.05). reflections were analysed through thematic content analysis. measures to assess the impact of céim participation on academic performance, the results outcome data of both end-of-year final results and individual module results were compared to attendance data. in order to assess the impact of participation on student empowerment, a selection of questions from the student survey (table 1) and the leader survey (table 2) were examined as indicators of self-directed learning and self-efficacy. comments indicating the development of confidence in navigating the system emerged spontaneously through the question, ‘what is the benefit of céim sessions?’ among first year students. the reflective narratives from the two student participants who participated as first year students in the pilot year and subsequently as student leaders in year two were assessed via thematic content analysis under the themes of self-directed learning, self-efficacy, and confidence in navigating the system. table 1. student survey questions used for analysis of student empowerment. question self-directed learning self-efficacy closed survey questions: to what extent do you agree with the following statement: i have improved my own way of studying i gained a considerably deeper understanding of course content i have developed my ability to work with others i found it easy to ask questions in céim sessions i have improved my skills in problem-solving i have improved my self-confidence i have trained my ability to discuss tasks in the subject i have developed my ability to work with others open questions: what are the benefits of attending céim? name and explain three skills that you developed through participation in céim scriver et al. from students to leaders journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 7 table 2. leader survey questions used for analysis of student empowerment. question self-directed learning self-efficacy closed survey questions: to what extent do you agree with the following statement: i improved the planning of my own work i have developed my ability to make a group of individuals enthusiastic about performing a task i improved my own way of studying i gained a considerably deeper understanding of the course content i have developed my ability to get students to help each other open questions: name and explain three skills that you have improved as a result of participation in céim name and explain three skills that you have improved as a result of participation in céim findings and discussion in the following section, findings from the pilot year of céim are presented in three parts. first, the analysis of the impact of céim attendance on academic performance is presented. second, the analysis of student satisfaction of céim from the first year student survey is presented and the development of student empowerment, as expressed through the perceived development of self-directed learning and self-efficacy, and confidence in navigating the system, is considered. in the third part, findings from the leaders’ survey are presented and responses are evaluated from the perspective of student empowerment through the development of self-directed learning and self-efficacy. narrative contributions drawn from the reflections of the two students who participated as both first year student participants and second year leaders provide additional material to contextualise the survey, and examination results and are used to introduce the various sections. scriver et al. from students to leaders journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 8 impact on academic performance among first year students in semester 2 i was having some trouble with the subject of physics and i expressed my concerns with [sic] the céim leaders...i subsequently received an ‘a’ in physics which i don’t think i would have achieved without the help of céim. (steven) overall first year examination results were compared to céim attendance to determine if a positive association between examination results and attendance existed. all first year engineering students took the same set of compulsory modules regardless of their discipline. to exclude the possibility that a positive relationship between attendance and results could be the outcome of a particular cohort of students attending céim sessions more often, rather than céim itself influencing the results, analysis using pearson’s correlation included the factors of examination results, attendance at céim and central applications office (cao) entry points. (cao entry points refer to the points achieved in final examinations in secondary school (second-level) in the irish educational system. the cao entry points are used to set minimum requirements by courses and for students to gain entry into third level education). a positive association of attendance at céim sessions with overall results was found (r=0.178, p<0.05), while, as expected, cao entry points were also positively correlated with result outcomes (r=0.676, p<0.000). attendance at céim and cao entry points did not have a significant relationship. thus while cao entry points was a stronger predictor of result outcomes, with those with higher entry points more likely to achieve higher results, attendance at céim nevertheless was associated with higher result outcomes, regardless of entry points. indeed, as no significant association was found between cao entry points and attendance at céim, entry points to university did not appear to influence whether a student would attend céim sessions or the benefit of céim attendance on academic performance. although the relationship between attendance and performance was not very strong, it is likely that the numbers attending céim sessions often in the first year of the pilot (35% attended sessions once per month or more often) impacted the strength of the association. further evidence of the value of céim to student outcomes was found when splitting the group between regular attendees at céim sessions (three or more sessions in semester scriver et al. from students to leaders journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 9 1) and those who attended irregularly or not at all, and comparing the mean (average) result outcomes of these two groups using the anova test of variance. it was found that, on average, regular attendees achieved 7% higher grades than irregular attendees, with regular attendees achieving an average result at the end of first year of 61% (a second class honours level one), in comparison to 54% (a second class honours level two) for non/irregular attendees (see table 3). furthermore, when céim attendance was assessed against specific module outcomes (mean results), statistically significant relationships were again found, with improved results among regular céim attendees in seven out of nine core modules taken in first year engineering. results are presented in table 3. the findings in table 3 indicate an association between result outcomes and regular attendance at céim. in order to validate and provide context to these results, the student surveys were examined to gain insight into students’ own views of céim and the benefits which they perceived having derived from the programme. we present these findings in the following sections. first year students: benefits of participation and influence of céim on student empowerment satisfaction and self-perceived benefits of participation having experienced the value of group study sessions, i now arrange to meet with my peers to revise for exams, to supplement studying by myself. i also feel my confidence to work in a group and self-esteem has improved dramatically. (steven) in the relaxed environment of the small classroom...i found it much easier to talk to my céim student leaders about my concerns. (eniola) reflecting steven and eniola’s experience, students generally reported positively on their participation in céim in the surveys in both semesters 1 and 2. (in the analysis of survey results, students who reported never having attended a céim session were excluded from analysis of questions relating directly to the programme). a particularly high positive rate of satisfaction was found among those who attended sessions regularly, with over 90% expressing satisfaction with the sessions and their leaders and 100% stating that they scriver et al. from students to leaders journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 10 table 3. anova (analysis of variance) for result outcomes by subject and attendance at céim sessions. course n mean df f sig. mathematical methods regular attendance 46 49 1 5.323 .022* no/irregular attendance 210 42 254 total 256 43 255 chemistry regular attendance 46 49 1 1.969 .162 no/irregular attendance 210 45 254 total 256 46. 255 computing regular attendance 46 62 1 7.241 .008* no/irregular attendance 209 54 253 total 255 55. 254 fundamentals of engineering regular attendance 46 58. 1 6.720 .010* no/irregular attendance 209 52 253 total 255 53 254 engineering design regular attendance 46 63 1 4.413 .037* no/irregular attendance 210 59 254 total 256 60 255 engineering graphics regular attendance 46 80 1 16.748 .000** no/irregular attendance 219 71 263 total 265 72 264 engineering calculus regular attendance 46 56 1 5.957 .015* no/irregular attendance 210 49 254 total 256 50 255 engineering mechanics regular attendance 46 66 1 3.781 .053 no/irregular attendance 210 60 254 total 256 61 255 physics regular attendance 46 57 1 4.241 .040* no/irregular attendance 209 51 253 total 255 52 254 overall average result regular attendance 46 61 1 8.018 .005* no/irregular attendance 220 54 264 total 266 56 265 *denotes a significant relationship at the 0.05 level **denotes a significant relationship at the 0.001 level scriver et al. from students to leaders journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 11 found it easy to ask questions during sessions in the end-of-year survey. in contrast, those who attended less often had lower satisfaction with sessions (39%), although the majority of these were still positive about the ability to ask questions, the role of leaders, and agreed that they would encourage others to participate in the sessions (table 4). table 4. satisfaction: first year students (semester 2 survey). agree with statement below* statement: all (n=66) attended more than once/mont h (n=24) attended monthly or less (n=33) i found it easy to ask questions in céim sessions 74% 100% 70% overall, i am satisfied with the céim sessions 56% 92% 39% i found the leaders helpful in facilitating the sessions 70% 96% 64% i would encourage others to participate in céim sessions 65% 88% 59 % * data is not included here about neutral responses to the statements or disagreement with the statements. responses relating to self-perceived skills development also noted distinctions between those who attended regularly and those that did not, with regular attendees noting high rates of agreement with the development of a range of skills and competencies as shown in table 5. scriver et al. from students to leaders journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 12 table 5. skills development through céim (semester 2 survey) – first year participants. agree with statement below* statement: all (n=66) attended more than once/ month (n=24) attended monthly or less (n=33) i have developed my ability to communicate with others 47% 75% 36% i feel more secure in being part of a group 55% 79% 48% i gained a considerably deeper understanding of course content 51% 79% 45% i have developed my ability to work with others 44% 63% 39% i have improved my skills in problem-solving 36% 46% 36% i have trained my ability to discuss tasks in the subject 55% 79% 48% i have improved my self confidence 48% 75% 39% i have improved my ability to talk in front of others 47% 71% 39% i have improved my own way of studying 35% 58% 24% * data is not included here about neutral responses to the statements or disagreement with the statements. overall, the survey suggests that those who attended céim regularly perceived benefits in relation to a range of skills and competencies. however, it does not clarify whether students who attended less often were less positive about the benefits of céim because of their irregular attendance, or whether they attended less often because they perceived few benefits. given the view that student empowerment acts as a bridge to learner development and has significant benefits not only within academia but across the lives of students, it was deemed important to review the narrative responses in conjunction with scriver et al. from students to leaders journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 13 the closed questions of the survey to better understand the ways in which céim participation may contribute to student empowerment. influence of céim on student empowerment: development of self-directed learning, self-efficacy and confidence in navigating the system to understand the influence of céim on student empowerment, responses to questions on the first year student survey relating to the areas of self-directed learning, self-efficacy, and confidence in navigating the system, as well as relevant open-ended questions, were assessed. the findings of the analysis are presented below under the relevant theme. self-directed learning while first year students rated the development of skills in problem-solving and the development of ‘my own way of studying’ resulting from attendance at céim least positively of the skills listed overall, differences were nevertheless noted: those with regular céim attendance reported more positively on these skills compared to irregular attendees. (n.b. the terminology of ‘my own way of studying’ may have been unclear to some students and consequently may have contributed to low positive responses). as shown in table 5 above, just over a third of all students agreed that these skills had improved by the end of semester 2, while approximately half of regular céim attendees agreed that these skills had improved. the majority of students also indicated that they had (i) improved their ability to work with others, and (ii) trained their ability to ask questions and discuss tasks in a subject, with regular céim attendees responding very positively to these statements (table 5). among the open-ended questions, a large number of students mentioned the benefits of working through problems with peers and particular techniques they found helpful. it is possible that students may under-rate how skills such as group work contribute to problem-solving. of note, leaders reflected positively on the first year students’ developing capacity for selfdirected learning, noting, ‘you see a real improvement in the first years’ understanding of course material, [it is] very rewarding to see them teach and help each other with little involvement of leaders’. results suggest that attendance at céim sessions positively impacted self-directed learning, with those who attend regularly indicating greater benefits in this area. scriver et al. from students to leaders journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 14 self-efficacy across all questions relating to skills, those who attended céim sessions regularly expressed a greater level of agreement, suggesting a stronger belief in their developing learning abilities, thus indicating self-efficacy, compared to irregular attendees. first year students were also asked to briefly name and explain three skills they improved upon by participating in céim. the most common skill that students felt they had gained was in relation to communication skills. this was mentioned specifically and spontaneously by 16 students or 44% of respondents (n=36). team work was identified by 14 respondents; problem-solving skills were mentioned by nine, confidence by nine, and public speaking by nine. the results indicate that students who participated in céim regularly felt that they had developed a range of skills throughout the year through participation. céim thus appears to have contributed to participating students’ self-efficacy. confidence in navigating the system first year students are often intimidated by the apparent complexities of the university system. empowered students have confidence in their ability to face challenges and feel secure in negotiating experiences such as examinations, projects, class participation, and other elements of their course. when first year students who attended céim sessions were asked about the benefits of céim, a common response was to state that it helped them feel ‘more settled’ and that they had benefitted from the practical guidance provided by the second year leaders. for instance, two students explained that: i had the opportunity to talk to someone who had been through first year themselves and get their advice on exams, assignments and certain modules. (first year student, semester 1) [i] felt more prepared for exams and had a better idea what to expect [due to céim participation]. (first year student, semester 2) these spontaneous responses highlight the important role of student leaders in helping first year students navigate the university system and better understand academic processes. attendance at céim sessions, particularly the interaction between leaders and scriver et al. from students to leaders journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 15 first year students, thus appears to have assisted in the development of confidence in navigating the system for first year student participants. second year leaders: satisfaction with céim and influence of céim on student empowerment i found the benefits of céim didn’t stop for me just because i was a student but rather they continued and advanced [as a leader]. seeing collaborative learning in action…highlighted the importance of group study to me and i even set up my own group study session with some friends! (eniola) being a céim leader really helped to develop my organisational and time management skills which i was then able to apply on a personal level, managing my own workload. (steven) both eniola and steven indicated that participation in second year as a student leader reenforced the skills they had gained as first year céim participants and enabled this learning to be applied in practice; for eniola through the development of her own group study session and for steven through workload management. in the following sections leaders’ perceptions of céim are examined and the influence of céim on student empowerment for second year leaders is considered. satisfaction and self-perceived benefits of céim: leaders like steven and eniola, leaders who participated in the surveys during the pilot year (n=16 in semester 1, n=11 in semester 2) noted that leadership improved their study skills and their confidence in their ability to lead others, although unlike steven and eniola, they did not have the opportunity to benefit from being both first year student participants and student leaders as this was the pilot year. nevertheless, analysis of the semester 2 leader survey questions relating to confidence and leadership demonstrated highly positive responses, as shown in table 4. scriver et al. from students to leaders journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 16 in semester 2, leaders were also asked to identify three skills which they had improved through participation in céim (n=11). nine leaders stated that they had improved their leadership skills, while eight respondents noted improvements to their communication skills. a further eight noted an improvement in organisation or time-management. one leader details the impact of céim on their own educational career as having changed ‘my approach to studying in that i can see there's a lot more to be gained from studying in a group. more ideas mean a better overall understanding’. these findings provide support to other studies that similarly found self-identified improvements in leadership, communication and confidence (malm et al., 2012; lockie and van lanen, 2008). influence of céim on student empowerment of leaders: development of self-directed learning and self-efficacy in relation to self-directed learning, second year leaders were more positive about the improvement of the planning of their own work and developing their own way of studying by the end of the year (see table 6) in comparison to first year students (see table 5). given eniola and steven’s positive experience, and their view that skills were developed through both first and second year involvement in céim, it is likely that self-directed learning is a more complex skill that requires more intensive involvement in such schemes, and may be realised more frequently in the second year of involvement. the experience of leading céim sessions appears to improve self-efficacy among leaders, however, confidence in navigating the system did not emerge from leader responses, as it did with first year students. this may be because second year students are likely to have already acquired confidence in this area during their first year, or it may be that those who are confident in navigating the system are those who are most likely to take up the role of leader. overall, evidence suggests that student empowerment is improved through participation as a student leader. as indicated by eniola and steven’s experience, participation as both a first year student and a second year leader is likely to intensify the beneficial effects of céim. scriver et al. from students to leaders journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 17 table 6. perception of skills development – student leaders, semester 2. statement: agree (n=11) i have developed my ability to communicate with others 100% i feel more secure in being a leader of a group 100% i have improved in organising the work for a group 91% i have developed my ability to listen to other people’s thoughts and reasoning 91% i feel more secure in leading a discussion 100% i have developed my ability to make a group of individuals enthusiastic about performing a task 91% i gained a considerably deeper understanding of the course content 73% i have developed my ability to get students to help each other 91% i have improved my self-confidence 91% i improved my ability to talk in front of others 100% i improved my ability to meet and inspire different individuals 73% i improved the planning of my own work 64% i improved my own way of studying 45% i would encourage others to become a céim leader 100% discussion and conclusions this study suggests that pal schemes, such as the céim shared learning initiative at nui galway, can positively contribute towards improved academic performance and student empowerment. first year students who attended céim sessions regularly demonstrated, on average, an overall result outcome 7% higher than those who did not attend regularly. they also demonstrated greater levels of educational self-efficacy and confidence in navigating the educational system. the perceived development of self-directed learning scriver et al. from students to leaders journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 18 skills was not as high as the aforementioned skills; nevertheless, those who participated regularly in céim were more than twice as likely to state they had improved their own way of studying. while it cannot be ruled out that students with greater empowerment are more likely to participate in céim, rather than céim leading to improved empowerment, the narrative responses by students and the student reflections substantiate the view that céim participation contributes towards student empowerment. these findings echo results from other studies that have evaluated similar programmes in relation to academic performance (e.g. malm et al., 2011b) and development of skills associated with learner empowerment (e.g. ginty and harding, 2014; zraa et al., 2013; malm et al., 2010). participating in céim as a student leader also demonstrated benefits. céim second year leaders noted increased skills in leadership, communication and confidence. although less than half felt they had improved their ‘own way of studying’, almost two thirds stated that they had improved the planning of their work. the reflective contributions provide evidence that benefits accrue across multiple years of involvement and further suggest that selfdirected learning develops over time, and potentially following the development of selfefficacy. the evidence thus suggests that student empowerment is an ongoing process that is most likely to be achieved through participation across multiple years of education, as both student participants and student leaders. for schools and institutions currently running pal schemes, and those considering their roll-out, it may therefore be important to examine the possibilities of extending student involvement beyond second year into third and potentially fourth year, for instance in coordination roles, to ensure that students, and programmes, reap the full benefits of such initiatives. further research on the benefits of pal schemes across multiple years is needed to determine the benefits versus costs of extending programmes. it is clear that students placed value on learning about academic processes from student leaders. this finding corroborates the view that ‘integrated and coordinated peer mentoring and peer learning activities may increase the capacity of universities to meet the specific needs of their student cohorts’ (townsend et al., 2011, p.74). placing more emphasis during leader training on methods of sharing knowledge about academic processes/navigating the system within sessions may have benefits for all involved. scriver et al. from students to leaders journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 19 lessons and recommendations for improvements while significant benefits have been found in the pilot year of céim, some changes have been identified to maximise these benefits in subsequent years. for example, greater emphasis was placed on marketing the benefits of attendance in year two of the programme, and emphasising that céim is not a remedial support. from 2015/16 onwards, leaders will be provided with pastoral training in health and wellbeing in addition to their facilitator training, and student leader coordinators (third year students who participated in céim in their first year and acted as leaders in their second year) will coach the leaders. conclusions the findings of this study support the view that pal programmes contribute towards improved academic performance among those who attend and further suggest that such programmes may contribute more broadly to learner empowerment within third level institutions. regular attendance at céim was associated with better examination result outcomes, a growth in confidence in navigating the educational system, self-efficacy, and, to a somewhat lesser extent, the development of self-directed learning among first year students. participation as a student leader was associated with improved leadership skills and further development of independent learning skills. these findings suggest that céim and other pal programmes have much to offer university programmes and are likely to help address issues of satisfaction and retention among participating students and student leaders. references bandura, a. (1977) ‘self-efficacy: toward a unifying theory of behavioral change’, psychological review, 84(2), pp. 191-215. bandura, a. (1986). social foundations of thought and action: a social cognitive theory. englewood cliffs, nj: prentice-hall. bandura, a. (1997) self-efficacy: the exercise of control. new york, ny: w.h. freeman. scriver et al. from students to leaders journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 20 boud, f. (1981) developing student autonomy in learning. london: kogan. edmondson, d.r., boyer, s.l., and artis, a.b. (2012) ‘self-directed learning: a metaanalytic review of adult learning constructs’, international journal of education research, 7(1), pp. 40-48. ginty, c. and harding, n.m. (2014) ‘the first year experience of a peer assisted learning program in two institutes of technology in ireland’, journal of peer learning, 7(2014), pp. 36-56. available at: http://ro.uow.edu.au/ajpl/vol7/iss1/5 (accessed: 15 november 2015). haggis, t. (2006) ‘pedagogies for diversity: retaining critical challenge amidst fears of ‘dumbing down’, studies in higher education, 31(5), pp. 521-535. houser, m.l. and frymier, a.b. (2009) ‘the role of student characteristics and teacher behaviors in students’ learner empowerment’, communication education, 58(1), pp. 35-53. knowles, m.s. (1975) self-directed learning: a guide for learners and teachers. englewood cliffs, nj: prentice hall. lockie, n.m. and van lanen, r.j. (2008) ‘impact of the supplemental instruction experience on science si leaders’, journal of developmental education, 31(3), pp. 2-14. malm, j., bryngfors, l. and mörner, l. (2010) ‘supplemental instruction (si) at the faculty of engineering (lth), lund university, sweden: an evaluation of the si program at five lth engineering programs, autumn 2008’, australian journal of peer learning, 3(1), pp. 38-50. malm, j., bryngfors, l. and mörner, l. (2011a) ‘supplemental instruction: whom does it serve?’, international journal of teaching and learning in higher education, 23(3), pp. 282-291. http://ro.uow.edu.au/ajpl/vol7/iss1/5 scriver et al. from students to leaders journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 21 malm, j., bryngfors, l. and mörner, l. (2011b) ‘improving student success in difficult engineering education courses through supplemental instruction (si) – what is the impact of the degree of si attendance?’, journal of peer learning, 4(1), pp. 16-23. malm, j., bryngfors, l. and mörner, l. (2012) ‘benefits of guiding supplemental instruction sessions for si leaders: a case study for engineering education at a swedish university’, journal of peer learning, 5(1), pp. 32-41. ogden, p., thompson, d., russell, a. and simons, c. (2003) ‘supplemental instruction: shortand long-term impact’, journal of developmental education, 26(3), pp. 2-8. thomas, l. (2012) building student engagement and belonging in higher education at a time of change: final report from the what works? student retention & success programme. available at: https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/sites/default/files/what_works_final_report.pdf (accessed: 15 november 2015). townsend, r.a., delves, m., kidd, t. and figg, b. (2011) ‘undergraduate student peer mentoring in a multi-faculty, multi-campus university context’, journal of peer learning, 4(1), pp. 37-49 [online]. available at: http://ro.uow.edu.au/ajpl/vol4/iss1/6 (accessed: 15 november 2015). van der meer, j. and scott, c. (2008) ‘shifting the balance in first-year learning support: from staff instruction to peer-learning primacy’, journal of peer learning, 1(1), pp. 70-79. available at: http://ro.uow.edu.au/ajpl/vol1/iss1/9 (accessed: 15 november 2015). zimmerman, b.j. (2000) ‘self-efficacy: an essential motive to learn’, contemporary educational psychology, 25(1), pp. 82–91. zraa, w., kavanagh, w. and johnson morgan, m. (2013) ‘the impact of cooperative learning and empowerment on the performance of first-year accounting students’, journal of modern accounting and auditing, 9(3), march, pp. 348-355. https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/sites/default/files/what_works_final_report.pdf http://ro.uow.edu.au/ajpl/vol4/iss1/6 http://ro.uow.edu.au/ajpl/vol1/iss1/9 scriver et al. from students to leaders journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 22 author details stacey scriver, phd, is a post-doctoral researcher in the school of political science and sociology, nui galway and an independent social and educational researcher. key research interests include impact evaluation of community based interventions on health, gender and education in a variety of contexts. she is the lead researcher in the evaluation of céim at nui galway. amber walsh olesen coordinates the céim initiative and is based at nui galway students’ union. she has a background in programme management and marketing, with specific experience in supporting start-ups and process design. her current key interests include student-led innovation and supporting successful transitions in higher education. eoghan clifford, phd, is a lecturer at the college of engineering & informatics at nui galway. he is the academic director of the first year engineering programme at nui galway and, with amber walsh olesen, coordinates céim. he teaches both undergraduate and postgraduate modules. his main areas of research include environmental and transport engineering. from students to leaders: evaluating the impact on academic performance, satisfaction and student empowerment of a pilot pal programme among first year students and second year leaders abstract introduction background to céim student empowerment as an objective of a pal scheme methodology design participants and procedures measures findings and discussion impact on academic performance among first year students first year students: benefits of participation and influence of céim on student empowerment satisfaction and self-perceived benefits of participation second year leaders: satisfaction with céim and influence of céim on student empowerment discussion and conclusions lessons and recommendations for improvements conclusions references author details literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 5: march 2013 ‘re-formative’: assessing the value of digitally recording formative feedback elizabeth gaston university of leeds, uk abstract this project investigates the value of digitally recording weekly formative feedback tutorials and then e-mailing the recording to the student. it aims to address differences in perception between the students’ and the lecturers’ interpretation of feedback, and improve the students’ understanding of formative feedback delivered during weekly tutorials. keywords: formative feedback; digital recording; student tutorials; art and design; added value. introduction this project investigates the value of digitally recording weekly formative feedback tutorials and then e-mailing the recording to the student. formative feedback is ‘information communicated to the learner that is intended to modify his or her thinking or behaviour to improve learning…if delivered correctly’ (shute, 2008, p.154). detailed and developmental formative feedback is one of the most useful things we do for our students (brown, 2007). there is much evidence to support the use of providing audio summative feedback after assessment (rotherham, 2009; chiang, 2010), however, there has been less investigation into the impact of providing weekly formative feedback in this format. gaston ‘re-formative’: assessing the value of digitally recording formative feedback journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 2 rationale the project involved level two students on the knitted fabric design pathway of the ba (hons.) textile design programme at the university of leeds. a feature of textile design programmes nationally is active learning through project based enquiry (kennedy and welch, 2008), supported by verbal tutor feedback delivered during individual and group tutorials. this nationally accepted model is labour-intensive, however, devas found that small regular formative feedback is more useful than summative feedback reports (devas, 2001). textile design students at the university of leeds receive weekly verbal feedback on their practical work. despite this investment of time, many students complain that they do not receive enough feedback on their work as evidenced by the national student survey (bright, 2010; gladstone, 2010). brooks found that there was a discrepancy between the students’ and the lecturers’ interpretation of feedback (brooks, 2008), and students fail to recognise feedback that is not written (bright, 2010). it has been noted (informally) that most students do not record the feedback they are given. tutors feel that they often repeat the information given during weekly tutorials several times before it is acted upon, as students can only recall a small proportion of the tutorial content. it was hoped that recording tutorials and e-mailing the recording to students with the subject ‘feedback’ would signpost the support that they already receive and eliminate the need for either tutor or student to take notes, so that both could concentrate fully on the conversation. a negative aspect of classroom tutorials is the anxiety that they can cause to students which may reduce their effectiveness (blair, 2007). one-to-one tutorials can cause less emotional vulnerability; however, normative feedback is important as students need to learn critical awareness of their own and their peers’ work (shute, 2008). feedback delivered during group tutorials helps students to develop the same evaluative skills as their teachers and peers (juwah et al., 2004). digital audio feedback allows control over how, when and where re-listening to feedback takes place, which enables students to receive feedback in an emotionally ready state (hepplestone et al., 2010). this could increase the effectiveness of the feedback and negate the negative aspects of group tutorials caused through stress. positive feedback can reduce anxiety about a student’s own performance and reduce the cognitive load of the student (shute, 2008); however, verbal feedback is not always gaston ‘re-formative’: assessing the value of digitally recording formative feedback journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 3 retained unless it confirms the students’ views on their performance (brown, 2007). it was anticipated that allowing the students to review their feedback in detail would reduce the effect of glossing over any negative comments, and produce a more honest selfassessment of achievements. complexity of feedback is inversely related to learning efficiency (juwah et al., 2004; shute, 2008). as audio feedback can be more detailed than written feedback (merry and orsmond, 2007; chiang, 2010) it is important to specify a limited number of aspects for students to work towards and not every imperfection (hugh-jones et al., 2008; beverley, 2010). allowing students to listen to their feedback again could overcome the problem of feedback overload. methodology in the first class of the semester, the aims and methodology of the feedback project was explained to the students. they were then given a short questionnaire to determine their current views on feedback and tutorials. the questionnaire was designed mainly using scaled responses to allow ease of answering, but also to give wider, meaningful variance. weekly group and individual tutorials were recorded on a digital dictaphone in mp3 format so that they could be e-mailed easily to students and listened to on a variety of devices (chiang, 2010). the recordings were made on the highest quality setting to counteract background noise; this however resulted in large file sizes. each student’s feedback was recorded as a separate file and then e-mailed to the student as an attachment. during the trial, students were not reminded to listen to their feedback and were allowed to make their own decisions on the use of the recorded information, as they had already received their feedback during the classroom tutorial. at the end of the trial, a second questionnaire was delivered that concentrated on whether the recording was used and if it was useful. gaston ‘re-formative’: assessing the value of digitally recording formative feedback journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 4 results and analysis survey one contrary to information gathered during module reviews, all students recognised their traditional tutorials as feedback and 86% of students agreed that they received enough feedback. contrary to tutor experience, all of the students claimed to make notes during their weekly feedback tutorials; however, 57% of students indicated that they did not always act on their feedback. this could signify that the student did not remember every aspect of the feedback given to them or the feedback given was not useful. survey two pleasingly all students responded very positively about the effects of listening to their feedback again. however, the lack of any negative feedback could have been due to students wanting to give the right answers in the project evaluation questionnaire. all of the students found it very helpful to listen to their feedback again and stated that it improved their understanding of the feedback. they all stated that when listening to their feedback again, they had noticed ideas that they had missed during their class tutorial and that they had changed aspects of their project due to listening to feedback again. one student said: i find the recordings really useful, as it is a great way to listen to feedback, and remember what i had expressed and wanted to achieve from the last lesson. another stated: it is so useful and helped me enormously when trying to recall the stages that i took in my work. all students stated that they had listened to some of the recordings more than once. despite initial reservations about being recorded, which were allayed by reassurances that no one else would hear the recording, all students wanted to continue to receive a digital copy of their class tutorial feedback. student comments include: gaston ‘re-formative’: assessing the value of digitally recording formative feedback journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 5 i felt more engaged with this module and found the feedback really helpful. …found it much easier getting feedback in this way, rather than trying to make written notes during feedback in class. in a comparison of the results from both surveys a change in behaviour was indicated. whilst only 29% of students always made notes during traditional tutorials and revisited them at a later date, 83% of students always listened to their feedback again, showing a marked improvement in the number of students who review their feedback after the tutorial. the second major positive impact of the project was whilst only 43% of students always acted on the feedback given in their tutorial during traditional tutorials, 100% of students stated that re-listening to their feedback improved understanding of feedback and improved the detail recalled from the tutorial, which resulted in their project developing positively. one student said: i sometimes feel slightly lost or stuck with an idea and find listening to the recording again re-focuses me and leads me onto another idea. all students found that the technology used was appropriate and that it was either very easy or quite easy to use. the recording was audible in all cases and no students complained of background noise. the main technical problem stated was that file sizes were large. colleagues have commented informally that the students involved in the trial have discussed the trial with them and have been very positive about the benefits. initial tutor reservations regarding added workload were assuaged through the production of a practical guide to best practice in sending the recordings using the university’s administration system, and practical training demonstrating ease and speed. gaston ‘re-formative’: assessing the value of digitally recording formative feedback journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 6 further work to improve access to recordings it would be beneficial for students to arrive at a file size that could be accessed from a mobile phone. the sounds good project found that when students had to take more than one step to access files, they didn’t bother (rotherham, 2009). however, there needs to be a balance between file size and recording quality (rotherham, 2009). additional benefits students have difficulty articulating the concepts and influences of their work in writing, however, during their tutorials many students speak fluently and intelligently about their work. the recordings allowed students to use this commentary to form the basis of their critical journal. conclusion the success of the project exceeded expectations. freeing students from the responsibility of recording tutorials and facilitating re-listening to tutorials has been shown to enrich feedback and improve effectiveness. it has also been shown to improve student engagement with their learning. the use of audio recording of tutorials enhances student experience and offers added value to the students with little investment of either financial costs or staff time. students also value extra staff efforts. the final student comment sums up the project…‘just fab!!!’. gaston ‘re-formative’: assessing the value of digitally recording formative feedback journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 7 references beverley, k. (2010) school of design feedback reminders. internal memorandum. leeds: university of leeds. blair, b. (2007) ‘perception/interpretation/impact’, networks (art design media subject centre), 1, pp. 10-13. available at: http://www.adm.heacademy.ac.uk/resources/publications/networks-magazine (accessed: 14 march 2013). bright, k. (2010) providing individual written feedback on formative and summative assessments. the centre for legal education. available at: www.ukcle.ac.uk/resources/assessment-and-feedback/effectivefeedback (accessed: 14 march 2013). brooks, k. (2008) ‘could do better? students’ critique of written feedback’, networks (art design media subject centre), 5, p.28 available at: http://www.adm.heacademy.ac.uk/resources/features/could-do-better-studentscritique-of-written-feedback (accessed: 14 march 2013). brown, s. (2007) feedback and feed-forward. centre for bioscience, the higher education academy. available at: http://www.bioscience.heacademy.ac.uk/ftp/newsletters/bulletin22.pdf (accessed: 24 january 2013). chiang, i. (2010) optimising audio feedback assisted learning for student and staff experience (afal final report). available at: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/elearning/ltig/afal.aspx (accessed: 14 march 2013). devas, a. (2001) using formative assessment in the delivery of a level one module for a media arts degree. available at: http://www.adm.heacademy.ac.uk/resources/casestudies/using-formative-assessment-in-the-delivery-of-a-level-one-module-for-amedia-arts-degree (accessed: 14 march 2013). http://www.adm.heacademy.ac.uk/resources/publications/networks-magazine http://www.ukcle.ac.uk/resources/assessment-and-feedback/effectivefeedback http://www.adm.heacademy.ac.uk/resources/features/could-do-better-students-critique-of-written-feedback http://www.adm.heacademy.ac.uk/resources/features/could-do-better-students-critique-of-written-feedback http://www.bioscience.heacademy.ac.uk/ftp/newsletters/bulletin22.pdf http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/elearning/ltig/afal.aspx http://www.adm.heacademy.ac.uk/resources/case-studies/using-formative-assessment-in-the-delivery-of-a-level-one-module-for-a-media-arts-degree http://www.adm.heacademy.ac.uk/resources/case-studies/using-formative-assessment-in-the-delivery-of-a-level-one-module-for-a-media-arts-degree http://www.adm.heacademy.ac.uk/resources/case-studies/using-formative-assessment-in-the-delivery-of-a-level-one-module-for-a-media-arts-degree gaston ‘re-formative’: assessing the value of digitally recording formative feedback journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 8 gladstone, m. (2010) student expectations on academic feedback. internal document. leeds: leeds university union. hepplestone, s., parkin, h., irwin, b., holden g., thorpe, l., and burn, c. (2010) a best practice guide for academic staff, sheffield hallam university. sheffield: sheffield hallam university. available at: http://www.enhancingfeedback.ed.ac.uk/documents/guide+for+academic+staff+fin al.pdf (accessed: 14 march 2013). hugh-jones, s. and waterman, m. (2008) ‘assessment and feedback priorities: focus on effective feedback’, making assessment relationships known (m.a.r.k.) project. leeds: university of leeds. juwah, c., macfarlane-dick, d., matthew, b.,nicol, d., ross, d., and smith, b., (2004) enhancing student learning through effective formative feedback. the higher education academy. available at: http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/assets/documents/resources/database/id353_senlef_ guide.pdf (accessed: 14 march 2013). kennedy, g and welch, e. (2008) subject benchmark statement: art and design. gloucester: quality assurance agency for higher education. available at: http://www.qaa.ac.uk/publications/informationandguidance/documents/adha08.p df (accessed: 14 march 2013). merry, s. and orsmond, p. (2007) feedback via mp3 audio files. centre for bioscience, the higher education academy. available at: http://www.bioscience.heacademy.ac.uk/ftp/newsletters/bulletin22.pdf (accessed: 14 march 2013). rotherham, b. (2009) sounds good: quicker, better assessment using audio feedback final report. leeds: leeds metropolitan university/jisc. shute, v. (2008) ‘focus on formative feedback’, review of educational research, 78(1), pp. 153-189. http://www.enhancingfeedback.ed.ac.uk/documents/guide+for+academic+staff+final.pdf http://www.enhancingfeedback.ed.ac.uk/documents/guide+for+academic+staff+final.pdf http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/assets/documents/resources/database/id353_senlef_guide.pdf http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/assets/documents/resources/database/id353_senlef_guide.pdf http://www.qaa.ac.uk/publications/informationandguidance/documents/adha08.pdf http://www.qaa.ac.uk/publications/informationandguidance/documents/adha08.pdf http://www.bioscience.heacademy.ac.uk/ftp/newsletters/bulletin22.pdf gaston ‘re-formative’: assessing the value of digitally recording formative feedback journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 9 author details elizabeth gaston is a senior teaching fellow in the school of design at the university of leeds, specialising in structured textile design. literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 7: june 2014 implementation of a student learning assistant (sla) scheme on a new higher education campus b.k. ashley hoolash middlesex university, mauritius branch campus, uk adeelah kodabux middlesex university, mauritius branch campus, uk abstract middlesex university, mauritius branch campus, was setup in 2010 and, as any credible british higher education institution, its aim has been to improve students’ learning as well as students’ experience. one such venture has been the creation of the student learning assistant (sla) scheme. the pilot project was run from january 2013 to may 2013 and the scheme is ongoing for the new academic year, which started in september 2013. the purpose of this reflective paper is to explain thoroughly the implementation process of the sla scheme and to recommend any improvements that can be instigated to overcome the challenges that the authors (sla coordinators) faced when overseeing the running of the sla scheme. keywords: sla; higher education; peer learning; students; lecturers. introduction the student learning assistant (sla) scheme is a new project at middlesex university, mauritius branch campus (mumbc). mumbc is a mirror image of the mother campus in london (hendon campus) in terms of the quality of education provided. one of its priorities is to offer the same services to the students on the mauritius campus as in london. as a result of this objective, the authors of this paper have taken the responsibility to ensure the provision and sustainability of the sla support. hoolash and kodabux implementation of a student learning assistant (sla) scheme journal of learning development in higher education, issue 7: june 2014 2 the sla venture is comparable to initiatives at other universities where it is generally dubbed as peer assisted learning (pal) in the united states (us) or as peer assisted study sessions (pass) in australia and new zealand. it draws from the supplemental instruction (si) model, which was introduced in 1973 at the university of missouri-kansas city as an academic assistance mechanism to improve first year students’ performance (arendale, 1994). the si programme has been widely implemented in higher education institutions, notably in the us where the department of education has acknowledged its success (van der meer and scott, 2009) and in australia and new zealand where it has been comprehensively expanded since the 1970s (loh, 1993; barrett et al., 1994; ahrens et al., 1996; beasley, 1997). similar to the process of pal, whereby ‘people from similar social groupings who are not professional teachers help each other to learn and learn themselves by teaching’ (ibrahim and aaijaz, 2011, p.93), the sla scheme at mumbc constitutes a framework of studentto-student support to motivate student engagement and ultimately create an effective learning environment within the classroom. the slas are either second or third year undergraduate students who have already successfully completed a module in their previous academic year. they are identified by academics as ideal candidates who can provide an additional support during non-teaching classroom settings. the slas’ candidacy is gauged upon their educational achievements and other remarkable study or transferable skills, which they have showcased as students. following their selection, they are then trained to work with groups of students and also mentored on how to cope with different scenarios that they may come across in a class setting. this paper is a reflection of the experiment of the sla scheme on a new higher education campus. it begins with a rationale explaining its importance and reasons behind its implementation. to gauge the benefits and challenges of the pilot venture at mumbc, an action research design was conducted. the subsequent sections elaborate thoroughly on the sla’s implementation structure and finally make recommendations to avoid the obstacles the sla coordinators initially faced when overseeing the smooth running of the project. hoolash and kodabux implementation of a student learning assistant (sla) scheme journal of learning development in higher education, issue 7: june 2014 3 rationale for the sla scheme’s implementation on a new higher education campus in higher education, and especially on a new international campus such as mumbc, the importance of the sla scheme is becoming increasingly tangible both for the students receiving the support and the slas themselves, as is evidenced by research on peertutoring (stout and mcdaniel, 2006; galbraith and winterbottom, 2011). boud et al. (2001) argue that the academic transition from secondary education to higher education, which is less structured and involves independent learning, often tends to be a challenge for some new students and even more so in larger classes. as an international campus, which welcomes students from diverse educational backgrounds, mumbc has to take into consideration the different schools of thought of the joining students, especially if for some disciplines top-up students are able to join in the second or third year (top-up students are those students joining in either year two or year three, having previous academic qualifications which entitled them to exemptions of modules taught in year one or year two). in fact, lillis (2001) highlights that for many students especially those from nontraditional contexts – that is, those from different educational, cultural and socio-economic backgrounds – the academic practices of higher education disciplines may appear alienating. the academic transition for such students involves some socio-cultural factors that would affect the successful implementation of learning development strategies. in his book leaving college (1987), tinto establishes a clear relationship between students’ retention over different periods of time and the environment they are operating in. the environment, in this case, refers to the institution’s academic and social organisations and the individuals responsible for shaping those organisations. tinto’s argument highlights the key importance played by the interaction between members of the institution and new students going through the stages of transition that mark their first year. a review of learning and teaching methods, which attempts to overcome the challenges in boosting student engagement with learning, is encouraged (boud et al., 2001). in order to support the transition to first year of university, the strategy of simply adding programmes ‘around the curriculum, or in aid of it’ (kift, 2009, p.1) is not sufficient. student engagement must be embedded in the first year curriculum so as to make students realise their sense of belonging to the university and to the programme they are studying. according to kift (2009, p.3), the obvious way to sustain increased participation and diversity is ‘through coherent, intentional, supportive and inclusive first year curriculum hoolash and kodabux implementation of a student learning assistant (sla) scheme journal of learning development in higher education, issue 7: june 2014 4 design’. to this effect, the australasian survey of student engagement (ausse) provides an effective means of measuring students’ participation in higher education. such crossnational perspectives drawing from australia, new zealand and the us are highly valuable to mumbc particularly because they mirror the global context in which the higher education industry operates. the cross-national collection of data provides an incentive for guiding new thinking about good student engagement practice. for example, a key lesson for mumbc to retain from ausse (2010) and to use as a justification for its sla implementation is that, albeit students are seen to be responsible for constructing their knowledge, learning equally depends on the institution and staff responsible for creating conditions that promote student engagement (kuh, 2003; kuh, 2008). the rationale for the implementation of the sla scheme is further strengthened by the feedback received from students who benefited from the sla support. the feedback analysis demonstrates that the implementation of the sla scheme has been received as a positive contribution to learning development strategies at mumbc. as a point of illustration, the comments recorded from the students on the questionnaire reported the following testimonials and indicated a growing correlation between the sla’s role and students’ incentive and their comfort to engage in the classroom: the sla makes me feel comfortable to ask any questions or queries. as the sla is also a student, she is in a better place to know where the particular problem is and also give her experience on how she solved it to have better grades. the sla helps us being more at ease with the subject because we feel more comfortable asking about the things that we haven’t understood rather than the lecturer to whom we might hesitate to ask questions. the sla facilitates the learning process and gives useful advice as to how to approach the course. hoolash and kodabux implementation of a student learning assistant (sla) scheme journal of learning development in higher education, issue 7: june 2014 5 whenever she is being asked a question, she makes her best to answer it and the wonderful thing is that she shares her experience with us, which will enable us to prevent making mistakes and approach the module in a positive way. judging from the above comments on students’ experience of the sla’s role, the sla scheme can be viewed as a useful strategy to improve student learning, experience and support. the common experiences shared by the students can be summarised in terms of the sla’s familiarity with the topic, enabling a clarity of thought for the modules and facilitating their comprehension of the topic. in this context, slas act as powerful role models who assist in developing a ‘safe’ learning environment. in addition to the skills they share with the students, the latter feel comfortable to consult slas because they share their recently acquired knowledge and personal experience of having studied the same module. hence, the benefits gained from consulting the slas are in lowering personal distress they may face when going through unfamiliar concepts from the course, and increasing the feeling of satisfaction with the overall module owing to a mutual support system which has been developed in the class by the slas (parr and townsend, 2002; glynn et al., 2006). the following sections proceed to elaborate on the sla support organisation structure in place at mumbc, which is concisely illustrated in figure 1. hoolash and kodabux implementation of a student learning assistant (sla) scheme journal of learning development in higher education, issue 7: june 2014 6 figure 1. sla scheme implementation structure. phase 1 phase 2 methodology in this paper, the main method used to collect data is based on action research design, primarily because this strategy’s purpose is to solve a particular problem and to produce or improve guidelines for best practice (denscombe, 2010, p.6). to this effect, surveys in the form of questionnaires have been used as the primary method of collecting data. the surveys were carried out at the end of the training workshops and also administered at the end of each semester to collect feedback from slas as well as students and lecturers who benefited from the sla support. all four surveys have been designed by the sla coordinators. the first survey provided the slas with the opportunity to offer feedback on the workshops organised for their training and to make suggestions for improving future training sessions. the second survey, administered at the end of the semester, sought to collect the slas’ sla coordinators contact the academic staff and organise workshops to inform them of the sla scheme academic staff send their rationale to the sla coordinators for selection of slas sla coordinators review the rationale and contact the selected slas sla coordinators organise workshops to train the slas slas are now formed to assist the subject coordinators (lecturers) in non-teaching class settings hoolash and kodabux implementation of a student learning assistant (sla) scheme journal of learning development in higher education, issue 7: june 2014 7 views on their experience in their role. it was composed mainly of open-ended questions and focused on their preparedness for each seminar/lab/workshop they participated (in the presence of the lecturer), personal achievement in comparison with their experience before their new role, and any additional support required. the third survey intended to analyse the perception of students receiving sla support and covered participant responses to five main criteria: namely, overall satisfaction with the sla; clarity of the sla’s purpose in the class; consolidation of module’s knowledge; study skills gained; and opinion of the sla scheme in relation to their performance. this has been the most critical survey because it enabled the sla coordinators to deduce whether slas behaved as facilitators or engaged in covert teaching. the first section of this particular survey comprised closed-ended questions while the remaining sections looked at open-ended questions. the final survey was designed for the lecturers who benefited from sla support. this survey’s aim was to investigate on a comparative level whether the lecturers viewed the slas as being prepared for the session and having achieved the skills required to earn the sla certificate. the survey responses were then analysed by the sla coordinators to summarise the main characteristics derived from the set of data collected. a deductive approach was also used to group the data and look for similarities and limitations which are discussed in later sections of this paper. this approach was chosen because the research was small in scale at this point of the sla project. while conducting the survey research, participants were informed of the purpose of the research so that they could make an informed judgment, and anonymity was preserved. at this early stage of the scheme, questionnaire surveys were a convenient method of data collection due to the manageable number of staff and students taking part in the scheme. in the future, as the number of participants grows, other methods such as online surveys or focus groups can be considered as means of collecting and sharing feedback. focus groups would offer the possibility of collecting a large amount of data from one session and to obtain a range of opinions in detail (mansell et al., 2004). spss (statistical package for the social sciences) as a research strategy can be potentially explored in the future. hoolash and kodabux implementation of a student learning assistant (sla) scheme journal of learning development in higher education, issue 7: june 2014 8 implementation process phase one the implementation process of the sla scheme comprises different phases. the first stage consists of making the academic staff aware of the project and the sla support they can use to enhance students’ engagement in their classes. a mass e-mail is sent including the date of the scheduled workshop. during the workshop, members of the academic staff are informed of what an sla scheme is and is not – i.e. namely it is not an initiative aimed at students with learning difficulties; teaching by students; a chance to cut down the lecturer-student contact; a means of creating dependency on slas; or an opportunity for students to chat about topics unrelated to their subject. these principles and aims are in alignment with the guidelines already in place since 2009 at middlesex university hendon campus. the advantages of the sla scheme to the academic staff are elaborated during the workshop. whilst ‘the responsibility for supporting learners rests ultimately with teachers in the disciplines’ (bailey, 2010, p.1), the lecturers are encouraged to use sla support to help enhance the independent learning approach of students in their class. according to donelan (1999), a research into student-to-student support reveals that there are benefits gained from encouraging cooperative and participative learning through discussion. independent reasoning and thinking skills are further enhanced (capstick and fleming, 2001) and the ability to apply abstract ideas are positively influenced within peer-led sessions (lundeburg and moch, 1995). the student experience is improved with sla support and drop-outs are potentially reduced as evidenced by previous studies on student-to-student support schemes, which report the positive influence of pal sessions on assessment marks (coe et al., 1999). moreover, the sla scheme trains students in the basics of group work, which is a proven effect of student-to-student support schemes on the development of transferable skills (price and rust, 1995). an additional argument which can potentially appeal to lecturers is how slas can alleviate the number of minor requests from students on the workload of lecturers. the minor requests consist of checking the attendance or answering a seminar question again, amongst other queries. another key aspect of the sla scheme is the opportunity it creates for lecturers to collect regular feedback on how the course content is being received by students within the class. hoolash and kodabux implementation of a student learning assistant (sla) scheme journal of learning development in higher education, issue 7: june 2014 9 following the workshop, the lecturers interested in using an sla’s support in their classes are requested to send a brief rationale containing the names of two or three students who they consider to be ideal candidates for the role and to explain their choice(s). owing to a limited budget for the sla programme, the lecturers are also informed that not all members of the academic staff would be provided with an sla. hence, their rationale would be crucial in deciding the sla allocation. the sla coordinators and the campus director, who acted as an independent consultant, finalised the choice of the slas. phase two the second phase of the sla scheme consists of contacting the selected slas and organising workshops to train them. prior to organising the workshops, the following issues are considered:  what should the training encompass?  who would do the training?  would other academic staff be willing to assist?  when will the training take place?  how would the training be evaluated? once the above demands were identified, different solutions were proposed. the selected solutions are explained in table 2. hoolash and kodabux implementation of a student learning assistant (sla) scheme journal of learning development in higher education, issue 7: june 2014 10 table 2: steps considered prior to phase 2 proposed solutions rationale conflicting issues what should the training encompass? training on ‘what is an sla?’ to clearly explain the role of the sla as being a facilitator and to clear any assumptions slas may have as being teachers. training on ‘learning styles’ to enlighten slas on the numerous approaches to learning they may encounter in the classroom and how to adapt to the varying class dynamics. training on ‘teaching styles’ to make sense of what is taught by the subject coordinator and develop appropriate strategies to link the module contents’ within relevant context for the new students. a workshop on ‘how does it feel to be a new lecturer?’ to share the fresh experience of a lecturer who has to develop effective classroom management strategies. the aim was to inspire the slas in their new role despite the challenges they may encounter. training on ‘diversity at university: how to deal with it?’ to familiarise students with not just cultural diversity but also the different schools of thought students will bring in the classroom and how the preconceived knowledge they carry can either positively or negatively affect their studies. an activities workshop to make students familiar with different group work settings and how to facilitate learning in case scenarios where some students take a laid back attitude, whilst others are a step ahead. who would do the training? sla coordinators with at least a pgcerthe their experience with teaching and their understanding of the sla scheme. involvement of other academic staff a few volunteers to relieve the workload of the sla coordinators who are also additionally involved in teaching. timetable clashes meant accommodating their schedule with that of the slas was complex. when? ideally before the first learning week to familiarise slas with their role in due time prior to their first sla sessions. timetable clashes. evaluation of training questionnaires to obtain feedback from both lecturers and slas to improve future schemes. to evaluate the usefulness of the sessions, the impact on slas’ formation and their confidence level as well as identify whether they would recommend the scheme to others. the feedback also included the scope for individual comments and suggestions. hoolash and kodabux implementation of a student learning assistant (sla) scheme journal of learning development in higher education, issue 7: june 2014 11 the basis behind training slas on learning and teaching styles draws on the logic that students’ learning is highly influenced by their previous learning experiences. slas ought to be familiar with the different case scenarios they are likely to come across in a class setting. learning style is described as a consistent way in which individuals perceive, conceptualise, organise and recall information (ellis, 1985). this conceptualisation of learning suggests that students’ approach to acquiring knowledge is a subjective experience. therefore, when facilitating seminars/labs/workshops, slas will most likely come across a range of learning styles which they may not necessarily be familiar with but which they are expected to be aware of in order to be effectively prepared to undertake their role. hence, the aim of mentoring slas on learning styles through these workshops is to help them understand and internalise abstract educational ideas on a practical level. however, it is important to highlight that slas do not receive any formal pedagogical or instructional training per se; rather, they are trained to act as facilitators and to motivate students to help each other learn while learning themselves (mackey et al., 2010). bandura’s social learning theory encourages the practice of student-to-student support: learning occurs when an individual acquires knowledge by observing another person doing it (bandura, 1977). there is abundant research literature available showing that peers can play an important role in enhancing a student’s learning (kuh et al., 2005; pascarella and terenzini, 2005). more relevantly, students can observe an individual’s behaviour, recollect information regarding that individual’s performance, and then guide their own future behaviours accordingly. mackey et al. (2010, p.13) argue that ‘while vicarious learning has been found to increase observing students’ self-efficacy, the person modelling the behaviour is also affected by the same experience’. feedback from one of the slas on the mumbc campus, as a matter of fact, reveals that the sla ‘started using the same method [used during sla sessions] to help [him/her] understand [his/her] own modules better’. further research by braaksma et al. (2002) on observational learning and the effects of model-observer similarity, suggests that students who observed peer models were both more independent and effective at learning and in performing better in comparison to those who observed teacher models. using the social learning theory as a point of illustration, the slas are informed of all the benefits to their own learning and the positive influence of their role on other students’ learning. vygotsky (1978) argues that students hoolash and kodabux implementation of a student learning assistant (sla) scheme journal of learning development in higher education, issue 7: june 2014 12 are more likely to learn when they are in an environment that facilitates thinking and discussing ideas together, and they are also more likely to analytically solve problems without a teacher’s constant intervention. in order to limit the dependence of students upon teachers in their engagement with the curriculum, especially at the entry level, more opportunities ought to be available for them to learn with and from their peers. ‘providing a structured environment for students to collaborate on a given task with sufficient facilitation […] allow[s] learning to happen’ (sultan et al., 2013, p.61). according to vygotsky (1978), this forms the basis of the peer collaborative learning strategy, embedded in social constructivist values. it facilitates ‘the cognitive development of students’ where ‘learning is constructed in an interactive social context’ (jacobs et al., 2008, p.6). limitations of the sla implementation structure although the overall feedback on the organised training workshops collected from both the academic staff and the slas revealed an enjoyable and productive experience as outcome, the sla coordinators faced numerous challenges in the planning and running of the sla scheme. the timetable clashes meant it was complex to reach ideal slots which would be convenient for the training of slas and which did not coincide with their own respective learning timetable. this resulted in the duplication of some workshops. a student who was selected for the sla role had to drop out because he could not assist the lecturer’s class as it was in conflict with his own timetable. the six different workshops were run by the two sla coordinators who were also lecturers and engaged in teaching. the lecturers therefore already had a busy timetable which caused further delay in organising the workshops. another limitation of the scheme was the failure of the students who used an sla’s support within a class to distinguish between the sla’s role and that of the lecturer. the feedback from the class students who experienced and benefited from the sla support revealed that the students were still unclear about the role of the sla as being a facilitator and not a teacher. for example, for the general comment section on the questionnaire, a considerable proportion requested one-to-one sessions with the sla. the authors of this paper consider this as a limitation because it appears that the role of the sla within the class may have gone beyond the conditions initially set when forming them. slas are not hoolash and kodabux implementation of a student learning assistant (sla) scheme journal of learning development in higher education, issue 7: june 2014 13 formally trained instructors. their role, therefore, ought to be limited to facilitating student engagement within a class rather than trying to take an overly proactive initiative to covertly imitate the lecturer’s role. another notable challenge once the sla scheme was operational has been the timetable clashes of the lecturers who had to meet the slas to coordinate their role prior to the seminar sessions. one lecturer noted that although the sla initiative has been helpful to his teaching, ‘meeting the sla prior to the seminar session was not always easy due to sla timetable constraints and [his/her] own availability. but somehow we managed’. recommendations for future implementation measures should be taken to advertise the sla scheme to the members of academic staff prior to the semester break. in this way, the workshops for academic staff can be organised before the end of the semester. lecturers need to be encouraged to send their rationale before the term ends so that the selection of slas is carried out early. the aim is to ultimately train the slas ideally before the first learning week of each term so as not to delay their first session. from what is observed in figure 1, if the hierarchy of the phases is not respected or one step is delayed, the final outcome, which is the effectiveness of an sla’s role in facilitating the lecturer’s class, is affected. moreover, the sla coordinators advise lecturers to take into consideration any changes in the syllabus before using an sla’s support in their class. the sla is a student who is familiar with the module and who is able to share his/her experience so as to enhance the academic development of the students in the class. nonetheless, if the syllabus is modified, slas would not be acquainted with all the content of the module. to the question addressed to lecturers on the questionnaire about the additional support which could be provided to an sla, one lecturer recommended to ‘allow [the sla] in lectures so that they will have better coordination during seminars’. as an action to this feedback, the sla coordinators would suggest to lecturers that before they consider delegating more responsibilities to the slas, who are facilitators in non-teaching classroom settings, they need to methodically learn the ropes of the sla scheme, as well as the hierarchy of steps involved in implementing the process, and thoroughly understand the role of the sla. the hoolash and kodabux implementation of a student learning assistant (sla) scheme journal of learning development in higher education, issue 7: june 2014 14 downside as reported by a lecturer who widely uses sla support is that ‘you can’t complain when the burden becomes quite heavy’ (fletcher, cited university of glasgow – peer assisted learning, 2005, p.10). academic staff who benefited from the sla support range from the departments of law, information technology and business school. one response suggests that it has been a ‘very positive experience. the sla scheme has proven to be very beneficial especially in the […] department where there are many […] students’. another lecturer further commented on how the sla ‘initiative has benefited [his/her] teaching. [he/she] felt that the presence of the sla in [his/her] class had a positive impact on [the] students as they would see the sla as someone who ‘has been there and done that’. the sla’s mere presence was a motivating factor to the student’. based on the positive responses of the lecturers who benefited from the sla support, the sla coordinators seek to expand the project further to other faculties in the future. the authors of this paper additionally support continuing research aiming to examine ‘how to maximise the accessibility of [student-to-student support schemes] to teachers who struggle to find ways to implement evidence-based instruction amidst all of the other challenges they face’ (mcmaster et al., 2007, p.98). upon reflection of the sla scheme’s implementation on the new campus and acknowledging the need to overcome the limitations identified, this reflective paper also recognises that the slas’ experiences may be different from other peer learning assistants at other higher education institutions. future research should extend the current study. conclusion this paper is a reflection of the sla scheme’s implementation at mumbc. the sla initiative is based upon a structured approach whose ultimate goal is to create an effective and productive learning environment, whereby slas are formed to act successfully as facilitators who motivate student engagement and encourage independent thinking among their peers. the venture follows a hierarchy of steps. proceeding in such an organised way has helped the authors of this paper to identify the lacunas of the scheme. upon detecting these gaps in the sla’s operational mechanism, the sla coordinators have proposed hoolash and kodabux implementation of a student learning assistant (sla) scheme journal of learning development in higher education, issue 7: june 2014 15 suggestions to overcome the obstacles and improve future schemes on the new higher education campus. with appropriate as well as structured administration and support of all the departments, the sla scheme can eventually have a far-reaching impact on the strategy we adopt to support the students at mumbc, and can effectively facilitate their learning experience and engagement with their studies. the sla coordinators intend to expand the sla scheme to other departments, namely to the international foundation programme, business management, psychology, accounting and finance, and mathematics and statistics. one module, business law, which is part of the accounting and finance programme, has been identified as a unit where accounting students are facing difficulties in coping with the unexpected legal component of the programme. the new law content of the module has come across as intimidating to the accounting students. the authors of this paper seek to elaborate on how the sla scheme can benefit students of these types of unconventional modules of particular programmes in their next publications. references ahrens, r., george, b., henderson, a., marhinin, n., power, d., rae, m., watters, j.j. and ginns, i.s. (1996) ‘students helping students: peer assisted study sessions for students enrolled in a science content subject’, paper presented at the 2nd state conference of herdsa inc. university of southern queensland, toowoomba, queensland, australia 13-14 april. arendale, d. (1994) ‘understanding the supplemental instruction model’, in martin, d.c. and arendale, d. (eds.), supplemental instruction: increasing achievement and retention. san francisco, ca: jossey-bass publishers, pp. 11-21. ausse (2010) ‘international students’ engagement with effective educational practices: a cross-national comparison’, australasian survey of student engagement; research briefing, volume 5, january 2010 [online]. available at: http://www.acer.edu.au/ausse/reports (accessed: 22 april 2014). http://www.acer.edu.au/ausse/reports hoolash and kodabux implementation of a student learning assistant (sla) scheme journal of learning development in higher education, issue 7: june 2014 16 bailey, r. (2010) ‘the role and efficacy of generic learning and study support: what is the experience and perspective of academic staff?’, journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2, february, pp. 1-14. bandura, a. (1977) ‘self-efficacy: toward a unifying theory of behavioral change’, psychological review, 84(2), pp. 191-215. barrett, m., sutcliffe, p. and smith, b. (1994) ‘students as mentors: the case of management education’, proceedings of the conference of the australian and new zealand academy of management. wellington, australia: australian and new zealand academy of management. beasley, c.j. (1997) ‘students as teachers: the benefits of peer tutoring’, in pospisil, r. and willcoxson, l. (eds.) proceedings of the 6th annual teaching learning forum. perth, australia, february. perth: murdoch university, pp. 21-30. braaksma, m.a.h, rijlaarsdam g. and van den bergh, h. (2002) ‘observational learning and the effects of model-observer similarity’, journal of educational psychology, 94(2), pp. 405-415. boud, d., cohen, j. and sampson, j. (2001) peer learning in higher education. london: kogan page. capstick, s. and fleming, h. (2001) ‘peer assisted learning in an undergraduate hospitality course: second year students supporting first year students in group learning’, journal of hospitality, leisure, sport and tourism education, 1(1), pp. 6975. coe, e., mcdougall, a. and mckeown, n. (1999) ‘is peer-assisted learning of benefit to undergraduate chemists?’, university chemistry education, 3(2), pp. 72-75 [online]. available at: http://www.rsc.org/pdf/uchemed/papers/1999/32_coe.pdf (accessed: 11 december 2013). http://www.rsc.org/pdf/uchemed/papers/1999/32_coe.pdf hoolash and kodabux implementation of a student learning assistant (sla) scheme journal of learning development in higher education, issue 7: june 2014 17 denscombe m. (2010) good research guide: for small-scale social research projects. 4 th edn. berkshire, gbr: open university press. donelan, m. (1999) ‘si mentors: the real winners’, national conference on supplemental instruction. university of missouri kansas city, usa 20-22 may. ellis, r. (1985) understanding second language acquisition. oxford: oxford university press. galbraith, j. and winterbottom, m. (2011) ‘peer-tutoring: what’s in it for the tutor?’, educational studies, 37(3), pp. 321–332. glynn, l.g., macfarlane, a., kelly, m., cantillon, p. and murphy, a.w. (2006) ‘helping each other to learn – a process evaluation of peer assisted learning’, bmc medical education, 6(18) [online]. available at: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/pmc1458341/ (accessed: 25 april 2014). ibrahim, m.d.b. and aaijaz, n. (2011) ‘dynamics of peer-assisted learning and teaching at an entrepreneurial university: an experience to share’, international journal of humanities and social science, 1(12), pp. 93-99. jacobs, g., hurley, m. and unite, c. (2008) ‘how learning theory creates a foundation for si leader training’, australasian journal of peer learning, 1(1), pp. 6-12. kift, s. (2009) ‘articulating a transition pedagogy to scaffold and to enhance the first year learning experience in australian higher education; final report for altc senior fellowship program’, australian learning and teaching council [online]. available at: http://www.olt.gov.au/resource-first-year-learning-experience-kift-2009 (accessed: 22 april 2014). kuh, g.d. (2003) ‘what we’re learning about student engagement from nsse’, change, 35(2), pp. 24-32. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/pmc1458341/ http://www.olt.gov.au/resource-first-year-learning-experience-kift-2009 hoolash and kodabux implementation of a student learning assistant (sla) scheme journal of learning development in higher education, issue 7: june 2014 18 kuh, g.d. (2008) high-impact educational practices: what they are, who has access to them, and why they matter. washington: association of american colleges and universities. kuh, g.d., kinzie, j., schuh, j.h., whitt, e.j. and associates (2005) student success in college: creating conditions that matter. san francisco, ca: jossey-bass. lillis, t. (2001) student writing: access, regulation and desire. london: routledge. loh, h. (1993) ‘peer assisted study sessions in anatomy for nursing students’, proceedings of the conference peer tutoring: learning by teaching. auckland, new zealand 19-21 august. new zealand: the university of auckland, pp. 193201. lundeburg, m. and moch, s. (1995) ‘influence of social interaction on cognition in science’, journal of higher education, 60(3), pp. 312-335. mackay, t., kamphoff, c. and armstrong, j. (2010) ‘perceptions of participants involved in peer assisted learning in a professional athletic training education program’, athletic training educational journal, 5(1), pp. 12-21. mansell, i., bennett, g., northway, r., mead, d. and moseley, l. (2004) ‘the learning curve: the advantages and disadvantages in the use of focus groups as a method of data collection’, nurse researcher, 11(4), pp. 79-88. mcmaster, k., fuchs, d. and fuchs, l.s. (2007) ‘promises and limitations of peer-assisted learning strategies in reading’, learning disabilities: a contemporary journal, 5(2), pp. 97-112. parr, j.m. and townsend, m.a.r. (2002) ‘environments, processes and mechanisms in peer learning’, international journal of educational research, 37(5), pp. 403-423. pascarella, e.t. and terenzini, p.t. (2005) how college affects students: a third decade of research. san francisco, ca: jossey-bass. hoolash and kodabux implementation of a student learning assistant (sla) scheme journal of learning development in higher education, issue 7: june 2014 19 price, m. and rust c. (1995) ‘laying firm foundation: the long term benefits of supplemental instruction for students in large introductory courses’, innovations in education and training international, 32(2), pp. 123-130. sultan, f.k.p.d., narayansany, k.s., kee, h.l., kuan, c.h. and manickam, m.k.p. (2013) ‘helping students with difficult first year subjects through the pass program’, journal of peer learning, 6(1), pp. 59-75. stout, m.l. and mcdaniel, a. (2006) ‘benefits to supplemental instruction leaders’, new directions for teaching and learning, 106, pp. 55-62. tinto, v. (1987) leaving college: rethinking the causes and cures of student attrition. chicago: university of chicago press. university of glasgow (2005) peer assisted learning (pal) co-ordinators pack. university of glasgow [online]. available at: http://www.gla.ac.uk/media/media_9269_en.pdf (accessed: 25 june 2014). van der meer, j. and scott, c. (2009) ‘students’ experiences and perceptions of peer assisted study sessions: towards ongoing improvement’, journal of peer learning, 2(1), pp. 3-22. vygotsky, l.s. (1978) mind in society: the development of higher mental processes. cambridge, ma: harvard university. author details b.k. ashley hoolash (b.hoolash@mdx.ac.mu) is a lecturer in mathematics and statistics at middlesex university, mauritius branch campus. he holds a pgcerthe and is a fellow at the higher education academy (fhea), as well as a fellow at the institute of mathematics and its applications (fima). he is also a chartered mathematician (cmath). http://www.gla.ac.uk/media/media_9269_en.pdf hoolash and kodabux implementation of a student learning assistant (sla) scheme journal of learning development in higher education, issue 7: june 2014 20 adeelah kodabux (a.kodabux@mdx.ac.mu) is the head of the learner development unit and an associate lecturer at middlesex university, mauritius branch campus. she is one of the academic staff responsible for overseeing the running of the student learning assistant (sla) and graduate teaching assistant (gta) schemes. national action research network on journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special edition: researching pdp practice, november 2010 student experience with e-portfolio: exploring the roles of trust and creativity rachel moule birmingham city university, uk ethan rhemahn birmingham city university, uk abstract research and pedagogic design for e-portfolios has tended to focus on optimising the environmental conditions and supportive structures for learners to benefit from more meaningful personal development planning (pdp). yet engaging students with e-portfolio for pdp remains difficult. an action research project was undertaken to investigate our learners’ experiences with using their e-portfolio for pdp and to identify what we could learn to inform future design. as part of the project, a focus group interview was undertaken with 8 members of a first year undergraduate cohort who were new to both e-portfolio and to pdp. whilst thematic analysis confirmed other widely reported findings, two strong themes emerged from the focus groups that appear to be less well documented. although students clearly enjoyed engaging with opportunities for creativity and play, they also expressed uncertainty over the purpose of, and audience, for their e-portfolio, and thus its academic relevance. the emotional dimension of trust in relation to intended audience, ownership of content, and online space security and accessibility, also emerged as an important student concern and this appeared to act as a barrier to engagement with e-portfolio. these findings suggest that engagement with e-portfolio be reframed to consider more explicit inclusion of the affective dimensions of trust and play as important elements that may encourage a deeper approach to personal learning, and to pdp, through this moule and rhemahn student experience with e-portfolio: exploring the roles of trust and creativity electronic medium. ways are suggested for tutors to afford opportunities for students to be creative as part of initiation into their e-portfolio space, and help them to cross an ‘affective trust threshold’. key words: e-portfolio; pdp; trust; creativity; engagement. introduction e-portfolio literature positions the value of a digital platform as a vehicle for encouraging learners to take control over their own learning, in particular personal development planning (pdp) (coffey, 2005; orland-barak, 2005; butler, 2006; mcmullan, 2006; haig et al., 2007; joyce 2005, cited shepers et al., 2008). control in this context means enabling them to manage their work in terms of selecting and organising multimedia evidence of learning, and reflecting on and articulating how this amassed evidence demonstrates their personal, academic, professional and ethical development (barret and carney, 2005; hartnell-young et al., 2007; buckley et al., 2009). for all the attendant benefits of e-portfolio reported in the literature above, the higher education (he) sector is also being informed by a rapidly growing body of literature cataloguing student perceptions of e-portfolio and in particular potential barriers to the uptake of e-portfolio (barrett and carney, 2005; tosh et al., 2005; murray and smith, 2006; barrett, 2007). the recurring theme of engagement has emerged as one of the most challenging and potentially problematic issues involved in e-portfolio curriculum design: studies have tended to focus on optimising the environmental conditions, the balance between ownership and assessment and the implementation of supportive structures (and removal or minimisation of perceived barriers) for learners to engage with their learning in more useful, meaningful ways. yet studies referenced above still indicate that engaging students with e-portfolio remains difficult. portfolios are based on a constructivist philosophy (abrami and barrett, 2005; klenowski et al., 2006) whereby ‘learners construct their own schema for internalizing information and organizing it so that it becomes their own' (klenowski et al., 2006, p.278). using this pedagogical model students are not 'merely users of the system; they are, or should be, the authors of it' (kimball, 2005, p. 442). while the potential for facilitating this kind of journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 2 moule and rhemahn student experience with e-portfolio: exploring the roles of trust and creativity democratisation is clearly desirable, this pedagogical approach comes with a caveat for its facilitators: shifting the locus of control from the institution to the learner (acosta and liu, 2006; barrett, 2007) may not occur without some degree of (initially at least) uncertainty and potential insecurity/confusion on behalf of the students. brown et al. (2008) speculated from their findings that self-directed learning places high cognitive demands on undergraduates not found in didactic teaching, in which case care needs to be exercised in the amount of responsibility asked of the student. whilst some may get educational benefit, others may suffer as a result of being handed such control. perhaps, therefore, we should be careful not to presume that the adult learning principles driving e-portfolio are appropriate for all. overall, however, in contrast to the wide range of literature now available on environmental and design factors, cambridge and hartley (2010) highlighted that far less appears to be established in regard to such underlying psychosocial factors and processes which may impede (or support) e-portfolio take up. shepers et al. (2008) raise a number of potentially salient points in a study focusing on 'groupware' such as discussion forums and shared repositories. while such groupware is admittedly not the same as the personalised and potentially private (to greater or lesser degree) platform of e-portfolio (in which the capacity for facilitating group dialogue may still be embedded) the following issues bear examination. interestingly shepers et. al. (2008) note that every individual constructs their own psychological climate, as perceptions vary according to personal belief paradigms. psychological safety they conclude, even when using 'groupware' platforms, functions at the individual level of personal perception. given the potential multiple audiences for their work (for example, personal tutor, course tutor, peers, work-based mentor, potential employer(s), and even family and friends), it is reasonable to assume students would tend to view e-portfolio technologies in the same way. drawing on the work of dabholkar and bagozzi (2002) they further posit that a key factor in the formation of this personal psychological climate is the concept of self-consciousness ('a person's view of himself or herself as a social object with an acute awareness of other people's perspectives about him or her' (dabholkar and bagozzi, 2002, p.182) and that it comes dominantly into play in any situation characterised by social risk (such as a learning environment which may be either physical or virtual)). journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 3 moule and rhemahn student experience with e-portfolio: exploring the roles of trust and creativity these concepts would appear to be highly relevant to learners who are engaging with eportfolio in terms of developing trust as an internalised platform for reflection on and expression of personal, academic and professional identity. khan (1990) noted that students who feel self-conscious will be fearful of being judged and consequently will be preoccupied with 'managing' how they are perceived in interactions; if e-portfolio platforms are intended to be a digital projection of identity there is potential for this fear to play itself out in the online arena too. bearing this in mind the concepts of trust and ownership seem potentially linked and therefore may be important for learner engagement with e-portfolio. to get and then keep students engaged with e-portfolio, meeus et al. (2006) emphasise the importance of maximising opportunities for individual creativity and self expression, and this is also implied by kift et al. (2007). however, whilst the importance of one’s emotional response to the learning opportunity is established as significant for learning success, evidence to substantiate a link between creativity and engagement with elearning is unclear. through this study our research objective was to investigate our learners’ early experiences with their e-portfolio, to see what we could learn for future design. once we better understood how our students experience their e-portfolio, then we could design for optimising early engagement and subsequently to work with the students to help deepen their learning through the pdp process. introducing e-portfolio within the degree programme in 2003 a new programme, bsc health and well being, was developed and validated within a very short period. a decision was made at senior level to use this programme as a vehicle to introduce e-portfolio, confined to discrete credit bearing pdp modules which would be delivered and assessed in each of three years. e-portfolio was instigated for the first and second iterations of the semester one, year 1 undergraduate module. students were drawn from a diverse demographic, congruent with the explicit widening participation agenda followed at birmingham city university (bcu). moodle was deployed as a platform for e-pdp as at the time bcu had not adopted an institutional e-portfolio. this was not an ideal e-learning situation. whilst importantly it enabled each student to have design and editorial control over the look, feel and content of their own e-space, technically it was not possible to exclude the two authors from also journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 4 moule and rhemahn student experience with e-portfolio: exploring the roles of trust and creativity having access to their e-space. moreover, moodle was also their designated institutional elearning platform. student control is congruent with both constructivist pedagogy and our shared philosophical belief in the value of student centred and active learning, for facilitating personally effective pdp, regardless of the medium. however, we recognised from the outset that the platform itself may have to some extent undermined this intent. following completion of our study, bcu adopted mahara which, common with other eportfolios does offer users the necessary level of privacy required for full editorial control. early in the module students had dedicated and well supported time to develop their espace, to customise it to their own preferences, which moodle supports well. they were then encouraged to maintain a reflective learning journal of their personal development progress and to amass evidence of their progress in their other modules. the formative assessment component for e-pdp was a peer-reviewed class-based showcase event of each student’s best evidence of their self-identified personal development on the course, together with a short commentary explaining why the evidence was chosen. peer and tutor feedback on the e-component could then inform the summative assessment task of a 1,000 word progress report on the two personal development needs. following an unsuccessful first iteration, for the second iteration we placed more emphasis on the potential value of e-pdp and of effective showcasing to their future employability. we made formative peer review of the showcase a compulsory element but strongly promoted this to the cohort as both a review and a celebration of their achievements on the course to date. the second iteration with 25 students was much more successful in that the majority of students did attempt to develop their e-portfolio space, did engage with their e-pdp through a structured process and they all passed the module at the first attempt. it is these students’ experiences of developing their e-portfolio which provides the focus for this study. study design an action research (ar) approach was adopted for this project, as the process is driven by the interplay between ours and our learners’ actions, and the intentions behind those actions. moreover we thought that to adopt a critical approach to our teaching practice we wanted a process that would enable us to try and critically address the values behind our journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 5 moule and rhemahn student experience with e-portfolio: exploring the roles of trust and creativity practice (whitehead, 1985). ar within he has been described by zuber-skerritt (1992, p.8) as collaborative critical enquiry by academics themselves into their own teaching practice. typically within ar as applied to education, educational practices are viewed as social practices to be changed more effectively through collaborative action (elliot, 1991). we were tasked with implementing, for the context of our institution, a new technology within a new course. as such, and coming to e-portfolio and e-pdp as novices, we were attracted to mcniff’s assertion (2002, p.5) that ar may be especially applicable to enquiring into problems of student learning and into curriculum problems that deal with uncertain, unpredictable and multiple realities. this project extended over two full academic years and hence two full ar cycles. method of data collection and sampling a focus group interview was undertaken with year one students from ar cycle two by one of the authors and forms the focus of this research paper. the method was chosen in order to maximise data capture in a short period of time. minimising inconvenience to busy students was very important as many have additional work, social and family responsibilities outside of the course. bera guidelines (2004) were closely followed and ethical approval was obtained through the university’s educational research ethics process. a purposive sampling strategy was deployed. all students were briefed about the reason for the investigation and were approached for permission to participate during an early class session. participant research information and consent forms were distributed at that point and participants were recruited two weeks later. students were informed that they were free to withdraw at any point in the research process. eight students volunteered to participate in a focus group and were broadly representative of the cohort in terms of age, gender and ethnic groupings. the focus group was conducted in a classroom setting immediately following the showcase event just past the mid point of the module, at which the cohort had shared their progress on e-portfolio and e-pdp with their peers and their tutors (who are the authors). refreshments were provided as an incentive as this was a lunchtime period. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 6 moule and rhemahn student experience with e-portfolio: exploring the roles of trust and creativity data analysis the audiotape was transcribed by the primary researcher and the text was subject to thematic analysis over a period of several weeks. data was analysed by both authors first separately to identify initial emergent themes and then following a period of reflection on our teaching practice (van manen 1977, cited carlgren et al., 1994) and re-engagement with key literature, together for confirmation of themes and further coding. this approach was adopted to seek to enhance the trustworthiness of the emergent themes (silverman 2000). we sought to address our potential ‘taken for granted’ assumptions and loss of objectivity, challenges inherent in insider research where the authors are firmly situated within the world that we study (denzin, 1997). our analytic approach was also influenced by van manen (1977, cited carlgren et al., 1994) who emphasised the need for deep reflection and sensitive and repeated reading of the transcript in order to hear and understand the meaning of text for people in a given circumstance, prior to writing an interpretive commentary. findings thematic analysis confirmed other widely reported findings regarding the importance of motivating engagement through full integration of e-portfolio across the curriculum assessment design; striking a suitable balance between formative and summative assessment; and the expectation for tutors to be fully involved and engaged with e-pdp right across the curriculum. barriers were identified in terms of prerequisite it skills to enable participation; the imbalance between e-portfolio interface or design and structure and freedom; the need for adequate time allowance in the curriculum; and one-to-one or small group support to develop those skills in the early stage of the course. there was also a consensus that the e-portfolio was helping their learning in terms of identifying development needs, enabling them to better focus, (e.g. to identify where more effort was needed), and improving their it skills. two themes also emerged that we were not expecting and which are the focus of this section. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 7 moule and rhemahn student experience with e-portfolio: exploring the roles of trust and creativity perceived value of creativity and play in response to being asked to describe how they had used their e-portfolio so far, and what was it like using moodle to design their e-portfolio, participants reported engaging with, and very much enjoying, opportunities for creativity in their e-portfolio space, and this seemed to be linked to exploration of the digital platform. examples included embellishing their space with favourite pictures, personal musings and hyperlinks to favourite sites for social use, including shopping. perceived boundaries between creativity, play and academic work were generally fluid. at the moment i’ve put a poem on there that i’ve written previously just to make the page a little bit lighter and i changed some images on there. (student 6) i kind of personalised it as well, so even though i’ve added like academic work and things i think i’ve improved on and things i need to work on and so forth as well, i’ve added like all my favourite bits, like i had like a peacock feather background that i absolutely love, and it’s just little things to sort of make it personalbut i still go with the academic side. (student 4) i tried to kind of mix it as much as could, but i haven’t really done too much with it , i’m still kind of getting the hang of it i still don’t know how it works fully, so i’m still tweaking, trying to put a picture in, trying to sort of extend it, make it smaller. (student 2) it is actually quite fun, it’s something that once you get into it, you just don’t want to put it away, as there’s just so much you can do with it! (student 5) in particular several respondents volunteered a sense of getting ‘lost in time’ on their eportfolio, and were turning to it to relax from their academic studies. the following quote was from a student who, from tutor review of her e-portfolio and her subsequent summative assessment, appeared to engage well with e-pdp, so it seems fair to interpret her ‘two hours writing rubbish’ as a reference to her e-pdp process: to me yesterday i had a low day, this week has been stressful but going on, um, the e-portfolio yesterday like after coll – after university, i went back on it and started playing with it. i found that relaxing [sounds surprised] i was like…ok that’s journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 8 moule and rhemahn student experience with e-portfolio: exploring the roles of trust and creativity that’s…like going on facebook’…i don’t even need to open a book! [much laughter] so i spend about two hours on it absolute writing rubbish on it! (student 7) the majority reported that they were beginning to engage in the e-pdp process, although participants seem to struggle with separating out their broadly enjoyable early experience of engaging with their e-portfolio from the competing course demands and their own expectations of what it means to be a student in he: ‘cause it’s you know, sort of like, the creative side of our academic side and you can’t sit down and spend that much time on it. even though it’s you know a bit of fun, but we’ve had all these assignments… and that’s where you get the academic credit. you just think ‘let me get this out of the way and then i can focus on this later’. that’s why the creative side has taken more a back step, that for me personally that’s how it is – for all of us i think. (student 4) for me, it’s, um, putting it more bluntly, it’s not so serious for me, so putting that in the middle of seriousness, it’s just, i can’t…i can’t do it…i just can’t…i need to focus on the more serious things [module assessments]. (student 5) mistrust in the e-portfolio a clear theme that emerged was that students expressed uncertainty regarding ownership of the e-portfolio and this was related to a lack of trust in the potential multiple natures and purposes of their e-portfolio: there’s a limit to what you would put on e-portfolio because it’s open to your tutors so…whereas on facebook you could be more personal with people that you know, you would be guarded with what you put on e-portfolio because its you know, academically open [chuckles] to you guys [tutors] so better not put that on…whereas on facebook you’re open ‘cause you’re talking to people you know on a personal level. (student 6) i feel it’s your space, ‘rachel’s still there’. (student 8) i put all my stuff in there…oh, i thought it was all mine! (student 6) journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 9 moule and rhemahn student experience with e-portfolio: exploring the roles of trust and creativity [there are] possibilities of where it can go – but it’s too scary! (student 1) additionally they expressed uncertainty, in the boundaries, permissions and purposes for their e-portfolio and ultimately, therefore, its academic relevance. uncertainties over ownership and purpose, particularly linked to uncertainty over which audience their eportfolio was for, appeared to feed a sense of mistrust and may have caused perceived barriers to engagement with e-portfolio: i’m not so sure how good this whole personalising thing is to be honest, because you’re trying to…develop something for multiple audiences, one audience is your family and personal, one’s the academic, one’s the employer, but i’m saying, i don’t like that idea, it’s like, which audience are you designing it for?...i’d prefer if we are talking academic, it just be that way. (student 5) but i don’t like the e-portfolio because everything is so electronically based nowadays, at the touch of a button your whole life is there you know. (student 6) discussion through moodle many of our students were able to exercise some choices for creatively building and editing their e-portfolios. some participants took opportunities for individual expression and expressed clear enjoyment in doing so. students in the main did speak with great enthusiasm about their positive experiences with, and hopes for, e-portfolio and what these meant to them (in a way, we have noted in our experience, that typically they tend not to with pdp per se). the mix of enthusiasm and self conscious pride in their early accomplishments on their e-portfolio, despite the usual barriers and difficulties, and bearing in mind they were not using an e-portfolio platform as such, is not fully possible to convey in print (due to the role played by verbal emphasis and intonation in their responses), but was independently noted during data analysis by the authors. the findings suggest that there may be an important relationship between the learner establishing a sense of trust for their ownership of e-portfolio and their engagement with eportfolio. this tension may affect students’ confidence and ability to engage in e-pdp, journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 10 moule and rhemahn student experience with e-portfolio: exploring the roles of trust and creativity although we note from buckley et al.’s (2009) review that users can be simultaneously sceptical about a portfolio’s intended purposes and appreciative of what it can deliver for them personally. in our context, the concept of psychological safety may be usefully mobilised to help resolve tensions between private and public space and self expression in an online environment. coupled to this (and potentially compounding it) is whether students are trustful of the software itself – of its reliability, security/confidentiality (joyce 2005, cited shepers et al., 2008) – and of the intentions for its use – not in just terms of assessment or audience focus but in terms of the aims of the institution who effectively own (corporately) the espace on which their personal portfolios reside (kimball, 2005). in this sense therefore, applying the cognitive notion of threshold concepts here, the emotion of trust may be helpfully reconceptualised for the users of e-portfolio as a key affective ‘threshold concept’ for deep engagement with e-portfolio. given the highly personal and individual nature of pdp it is plausible that a sense of trust is also needed for subsequent deep engagement with e-pdp. further studies could investigate if the effect that we observed using our modified and limited online platform is also an influential factor for student engagement with purpose-built e-portfolio systems that incorporate learner privacy. students (still) need induction to e-portfolios in a psychologically safe and supported way, both to develop and manage their own online identity for multiple audiences, and to develop both the technical skills and the judgements needed to make the most appropriate uses of the tool/platform to support and record their own learning journey. it may be that this factor has been a little neglected as a topic for e-portfolio engagement research and practice, in favour of an understandable focus on the central tension of assessment of and for learning and the implications for control and ownership (tosh et al., 2005, kift et al., 2007). we argue that increasingly in the modern workplace this is a key skill for employment, and that this may be a growing employability skill, especially in terms of preparing students for self managing their careers, which will for increasing numbers of graduates, in all probability, feature self employment with a series of short term contracts. when contextualising students’ engagement with their e-portfolio, csikszentmihalyi’s (2002, p.3) conceptualisation of flow may be helpful: journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 11 moule and rhemahn student experience with e-portfolio: exploring the roles of trust and creativity the state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience itself is so enjoyable that people will do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it. csikszentmihalyi (2002) concluded from his studies that the actuality of being in control is not as important as the subjective sense of exercising control in difficult situations. this might explain why our participants reported sometimes experiencing a sense of focussed motivation over their e-space despite also presumably being concurrently aware at a less conscious level, that their institutional e-portfolio in some way ‘belonged’ to the university, and was perhaps therefore to be mistrusted – this apparently did not necessarily deter them. getting into the ‘flow’ of their e-portfolio through experiencing the motivational pleasure of creatively playing with the design and other personalisation features also seems to resonate with biggs’ (2003) definition of a deep approach to learning. although for biggs, the constructive alignment required to draw the learner in more deeply is implicitly a cognitive experience, we suggest that the affective dimension of human learning also plays a significant role in deepening the learner’s approach to e-portfolio and to e-pdp. limitations of the study our use of moodle had to be significantly modified in order to have some functionality as an e-portfolio platform; therefore it can be expected that technical and design factors influenced the student experience, and hence their evaluations, more negatively than would have been the case with a dedicated tool. in particular, its perception as an institutional as well as a personal space, and the fact that tutors could see what students can put in, may be anticipated to influence the emergent theme of trust. we acknowledge that this will appreciably reduce the generalisability of our findings from our specific use of a particular e-portfolio technology. our research into student engagement would be richer for being able to continue to collaborate with the students, which may have yielded longitudinal data on their continued engagement with e-portfolio and experiences of engaging with e-pdp. unfortunately it was not possible to continue this study due to structural changes within the programme and a change in programme director. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 12 moule and rhemahn student experience with e-portfolio: exploring the roles of trust and creativity implications and recommendations when engaging with their e-portfolio it is reasonable to assume that some students will spontaneously use higher cognitive level processes, and will therefore be primed to engage in meaningful personal development. so, we understand that appropriate scaffolding for active learning becomes critical to try to engage as many students as possible in a deep approach to their e-portfolio, meaning that pedagogic design would be critical. teaching and learning activities must be closely aligned with course and module outcomes (biggs, 2003); the challenge for e-portfolio is essentially no different to paper based or other learning media, which is to strike the right balance between offering supported opportunities for exploration, creativity and individual expression, and supported and structured opportunities for thinking and reflection, in addition to balancing the educational requirements for accountability (i.e. assessment reviewers, summative marks and feedback). drawing upon our findings, and from our reflections on our own teaching experiences, we have taken the liberty of adapting biggs’ words (2003, p.3); what would a technology of e-portfolio teaching look like, that maximises the chances of engaging students’ learning processes in this way? echoing the conclusion of shepers et al. (2008), our findings suggest that for some, engagement in learning through e-portfolio involves an element of initial personal risk taking. where an institutionally hosted platform is used they may be asked to reveal a personal part of themselves, make themselves vulnerable in a potentially public arena. therefore, extra support may need to be offered to learners to take a leap of faith and cross a threshold of trust to invest themselves. in such situations, we recommend delaying the introduction of more formal processes to facilitate undergraduate e-pdp, in favour of affording supported opportunities for early online exploratory and creative activity. when designing for induction into e-portfolio and e-pdp, we suggest practitioners give consideration to creating a clearly signposted structure for learners that helps them to cross a ‘trust threshold’, at their own place. this places the design emphasis on the sequencing exploration in advance of activities such as reflection on learning experiences, peer and tutor assessment and such like, and perhaps even embracing exploration and play as valid learning experiences in their own right. practitioner actions to establish a sense of psychological safety should, in theory, support learners to develop a sense of trust when working online. we suggest it is worth journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 13 moule and rhemahn student experience with e-portfolio: exploring the roles of trust and creativity translating salmon’s (2003) emphasis on the importance of early online socialisation for subsequent learning through asynchronous conferencing to the e-portfolio platform. a sense of trust could be encouraged through such practitioner behaviours as role modelling, through regular and prompt tutor feedback, through structured and early opportunities for peer feedback, through articulating values, expressed through choice of language verbal and non-verbal communication in the classroom at e-portfolio launch and training. clearly these are good practices in the class environment; we simply suggest that when introducing learners to their e-portfolios extra care can be taken to deliberately reinforce face-to-face expression of these messages in this online environment. we also recommend that practitioners allow for more time than would be thought for students to simply play with e-portfolio and explore what they can do with it. it is possible that this could facilitate learners to experience ‘flow’ in their e-pdp. clear boundaries for online behaviour, with structured and sequentially increasingly ‘risky’ activities, in terms of self disclosure, focussed on self-expression online, might encourage longer term and deeper engagement with e-pdp over the duration of the course and beyond. offer, encourage and celebrate activities that promote creativity (thus signposting academic credibility) but with a clear focus on their ultimate academic purpose(s) and goal(s), and that they have liberty to do this, as a valuable, early and intrinsic part of the pdp process. one action that can be taken to encourage the essential early student buy-in (tosh et al., 2005), is to emphasise the future value of their e-portfolio, and indeed using e-portfolios, for their careers, as well as clearly communicating to students for which audience they are producing specific content. acknowledgement this paper is an outcome of the national action research network on researching and evaluating personal development planning and e-portfolio practice project (2007-2010). the project was led by the university of bolton in association with the university of worcester and centre for recording achievement, and in national collaboration with the university of bedfordshire, bournemouth university and university of bradford. the project was funded by the higher education academy, national teaching fellowship project strand. more details about the project can be found at: http://www.recordingachievement.org/research/narn-tree.html. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 14 http://www.recordingachievement.org/research/narn-tree.html moule and rhemahn student experience with e-portfolio: exploring the roles of trust and creativity references abrami, p.b. and barrett, h. (2005) ‘directions for research and development on electronic portfolios’, canadian journal of learning and technology, 31(3) [online]. available at:http://www.cjlt.ca/index.php/cjlt/article/viewarticle/92/86 (accessed: 23 august 2010). acosta t. and liu y. (2006) ‘e-portfolios: beyond assessment’, in jafari, a. and kaufman, c. (eds.) handbook of research on e-portfolios. indianapolis, usa: indiana university, pp. 15-23. barrett, h. and carney, j. (2005) conflicting paradigms and competing purposes in electronic portfolio development. available at: http://electronicportfolios.org/portfolios/leajournal-barrettcarney.pdf (accessed: 23 august 2010). barrett, h. (2007) ‘researching electronic portfolios and learner engagement: the reflect initiative’, journal of adolescent and adult literacy, 50(6), pp. 436-449. bera (2004) revised ethical guidelines for educational research. nottingham: bera. available at: http://www.bera.ac.uk/files/guidelines/ethica1.pdf (accessed: 23 august 2010). biggs, j. (2003) ‘what the student does: teaching for enhanced learning’, higher education research and development, 18(1), pp. 57-75. brown, c.a., dickson, r., humphreys, a., mcquillan, v. and smears, e. (2008) ‘promoting academic writing/referencing skills: outcome of an undergraduate e-learning pilot project’, british journal of educational technology, 39(1), pp. 140-156. buckley, s., coleman, j., davison, i., khan, k., zamora, j., malick, s., morely, d., pollard, d., ashcroft, t., popovic, c. and sayers, j. (2009) the educational effects of portfolios on undergraduate student learning: a best evidence medical education (beme) systematic review. beme guide no.11. dundee: amee. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 15 http://www.cjlt.ca/index.php/cjlt/article/viewarticle/92/86 http://electronicportfolios.org/portfolios/leajournal-barrettcarney.pdf http://www.bera.ac.uk/files/guidelines/ethica1.pdf moule and rhemahn student experience with e-portfolio: exploring the roles of trust and creativity butler, p. (2006) a review of the literature on portfolios and electronic portfolios. palmerston north: massey university. available at: http://akoaotearoa.ac.nz/community/eportfolios-newzealand/resources/pages/review-literature-portfolios-and-electronic-portfo (accessed: 28 september 2010). cambridge, d. and hartley, p. (2010) ‘keynote presentation’, second international residential seminar: researching and evaluating personal development planning and e-portfolio: cra/hea. nottingham leadership centre, nottingham 25-27 april. carlgren, i., handal, g. and vaag, s. (eds.) (1994) teachers’ minds and actions: research on teachers’ thinking and practice. london: falmer press. coffey, a. (2005) ‘the clinical learning portfolio: a practice development experience in gerontological nursing’, journal of clinical nursing, 14, pp. 75–83. csikszentmihalyi, m. (2002) flow: the classic work on how to achieve happiness. london: rider. dabholkar, p.a. and bagozzi, r.p. (2002) ‘an attitudinal model of technology-based selfservice: moderating effects of consumer traits and situational factors’, journal of the academy of marketing science, 30(3), pp. 184-204. denzin, n. (1997) interpretive ethnography: ethnographic practices for the 21st century. london: sage. elliott, j. (1991) action research for educational change. buckingham: open university press. haig, a., beggs, k., cadzow, a., colthart, i., hesketh, a., peacock, h. and tochel, c. (2007) ‘efficacy of e-portfolios: a systematic review of the evidence’, proceedings from e-portfolio 2007 conference. maastricht 18-19 october. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 16 https://taw.bournemouth.ac.uk/owa/redir.aspx?c=00ee0d0f36954234998759a05262abc3&url=http%3a%2f%2fakoaotearoa.ac.nz%2fcommunity%2feportfolios-new-zealand%2fresources%2fpages%2freview-literature-portfolios-and-electronic-portfo https://taw.bournemouth.ac.uk/owa/redir.aspx?c=00ee0d0f36954234998759a05262abc3&url=http%3a%2f%2fakoaotearoa.ac.nz%2fcommunity%2feportfolios-new-zealand%2fresources%2fpages%2freview-literature-portfolios-and-electronic-portfo moule and rhemahn student experience with e-portfolio: exploring the roles of trust and creativity hartnell-young, e., harrison, c., crook, c., pemberton, r., joyce, g., fisher, t. and davies, l. (2007) impact study of e-portfolios on learning, becta evidence and research directorate. available at: http://partners.becta.org.uk/uploaddir/downloads/page_documents/research/impact_study_eportfolios.pdf (accessed: 23 august 2010). kahn, w. (1990) ‘psychological conditions of personal engagement and disengagement at work’, academy of management journal, 33(4), pp. 692-724. kift, s., harper, w., creagh, t., hauville, k., mccowan, c. and emmett, d. (2007) ‘eportfolios: mediating the minefield of inherent risks and tensions’, proceedings eportfolio australia: imagining new literacies. rmit university, melbourne. kimball, m. (2005) ‘database e-portfolio systems: a critical appraisal’, computers and composition, 22(4), pp. 434-458. klenowski, v., askew, s. and carnell e. (2006) ‘portfolios for learning, assessment and professional education in higher education’, assessment and evaluation in higher education, 31(3) pp. 267-286. mcmullan, m. (2006) ‘students' perceptions on the use of portfolios in pre-registration nursing education: a questionnaire survey’, international journal of nursing studies, 43(3), pp. 333-43. mcniff, j. and whitehead, j. (2002) action research principles and practice. new york: routledgefalmer. meeus, w., questier, f. and derks, t. (2006) ‘open source e-portfolio development and implementation of an institution-wide electronic portfolio platform for students’, journal of educational media international, 43(2), pp. 133145. murray, c. and smith, a. (2006) ‘from application to graduation and beyond: user engagement in the e-portfolio process’, eden conference proceedings, pp. 211216. available at: http://www.elp.ac.uk/downloads/eden%20elp%20paper.pdf (accessed: 23 august 2010). journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 17 http://partners.becta.org.uk/upload-dir/downloads/page_documents/research/impact_study_eportfolios.pdf http://partners.becta.org.uk/upload-dir/downloads/page_documents/research/impact_study_eportfolios.pdf http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/87554615 http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/87554615 http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=publicationurl&_tockey=%23toc%236537%232005%23999779995%23610761%23fla%23&_cdi=6537&_pubtype=j&view=c&_auth=y&_acct=c000031258&_version=1&_urlversion=0&_userid=605157&md5=42abfc7bba11b61490684e500b25f986 http://www.elp.ac.uk/downloads/eden%20elp%20paper.pdf moule and rhemahn student experience with e-portfolio: exploring the roles of trust and creativity orland-barak, l. (2005) ‘portfolios as evidence of reflective practice: what remains untold’, educational research, 47(1), pp. 25-44. salmon, g. (2003) e-moderating: the key to learning and teaching online. 2nd edn. london: taylor francis. shepers, j., de jong, a., wetzels, m. and de ruyter, k. (2008) ‘psychological safety and social support in groupware adoption: a multi level assessment in education’, computers in education, 51(2), pp. 747-775. silverman, d. (2000) doing qualitative research: a practical handbook. london: sage. tosh, d., light, t.p., fleming, k. and haywood, j. (2005) ‘engagement with electronic portfolios: challenges from the student perspective’, canadian journal of learning and technology, 31(3) [online]. available at: http://homepages.ed.ac.uk/jhaywood/papers/engagement%20with%20electronic%2 0portfolios.pdf (accessed: 23 august 2010). whitehead, j. (1985) ‘an analysis of an individual’s educational development: the basis for personally orientated action research’, in shipman, m. (ed.) educational research: principles, policies and practices. contemporary analysis in education: series 8. london: falmer, pp. 97-108. woodward, h. and nanholy, p. (2004) ‘digital portfolios, fact or fiction?’, assessment and evaluation in higher education, 29(2), pp. 227-238. zuber-skerritt, o. (1992) action research in higher education: examples and reflections. london: kogan page. author details rachel moule is a senior academic (learning and teaching) in the centre for health and social care research, faculty of health, birmingham city university. rachel journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 18 http://homepages.ed.ac.uk/jhaywood/papers/engagement%20with%20electronic%20portfolios.pdf http://homepages.ed.ac.uk/jhaywood/papers/engagement%20with%20electronic%20portfolios.pdf moule and rhemahn student experience with e-portfolio: exploring the roles of trust and creativity provided e-portfolio design and technical support for learners on the module in her capacity as e-portfolio project lead for the bcu cetl: centre for learning partnerships. the focus group research reported in this paper was undertaken by rachel for a ma higher education module of study. ethan rhemahn is an education facilitator in the personal development centre, faculty of health, birmingham city university. ethan is experienced in teaching and facilitating personal development planning and was the module lead on this project. both are members of the national action research network on researching and evaluating personal development planning and e-portfolio practice, and as such, this action research project was undertaken within the auspices and support infrastructure of the network. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 19 student experience with e-portfolio: exploring the roles of trust and creativity abstract introducing e-portfolio within the degree programme study design method of data collection and sampling data analysis findings perceived value of creativity and play mistrust in the e-portfolio discussion limitations of the study implications and recommendations acknowledgement references mcmullan, m. (2006) ‘students' perceptions on the use of portfolios in pre-registration nursing education: a questionnaire survey’, international journal of nursing studies, 43(3), pp. 333-43. author details literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 6: november 2013 variation in students’ experience of learning in an accelerated, residential, study abroad setting in comparison to their traditional he experience jane mackenzie university of glasgow, uk jane pritchard university of bristol, uk abstract this study explores the variation in students’ learning experiences of studying accelerated, residential courses during a four week study abroad option at an international study centre in the uk, compared with their experiences of learning at their home institution. in focusing on qualitative aspects of students’ learning experiences in these settings, this study fills a gap in the accelerated course literature. analysis of a series of semi-structured interviews with students during their studies during the four week option revealed four distinctively different but related ways they described their experiences of the accelerated courses, compared with their home university learning experiences. these were: student sees the opportunity to learn; student feels safe; student takes learning risks; and student reconsiders learning. in traditional university settings there may be little variation in the forms and modes of teaching, learning and assessment in the student experience. one of the outcomes of this study is to suggest that in traditional university settings there is a place to explore increased opportunities for students to learn in different ways e.g. project and enquiry-based courses, innovative assessment using technology, group assessment as well as service learning courses, study abroad or work placement opportunities, and field-work across the disciplines. we believe that reviewing the academic year around different learning formats and duration of courses offers students (and teachers) opportunities to become increasingly aware of their own development and their own learning (and teaching). mackenzie and pritchard students’ experience of learning in an accelerated, residential, study abroad setting keywords: student engagement; residential courses; awareness of learning; accelerated courses; study abroad. introduction the purpose of this study is to explore the learning experience of students studying at a residential study centre in the uk during an intensive four-week term, in comparison to their experiences at the their home institutions. the four week summer term at herstmonceux castle in sussex, home of queen’s university, canada’s international study centre, is unusual in higher education, and to the students in our sample, in that the courses are taught in an intensive or accelerated format, the study centre is residential, and they have opted to study abroad. it is this distinctiveness of learning experience which led us to explore the summer term using a phenomenographic methodology to look at the variation in our sample students’ experiences. the outcomes of a parallel study exploring the experiences of staff teaching during the summer term is reported elsewhere (pritchard and mackenzie, 2011). we start here by looking at the three distinct aspects of the summer term: accelerated course delivery, residential learning and studying abroad. accelerated formats a number of terms exist for what we call here accelerated courses; terms include compressed formats, time-shortened courses, intensive courses, january courses and one-at-a-time courses. these are courses which are nominally equivalent to semesterlong courses but are taught in a fraction of the time from 3-4 days, to as little as a single week. whilst increasing numbers of colleges and universities are offering such accelerated courses (daniel 2000), there has been little systematic research on the impact on students’ learning in accelerated formats. much of the research consists of quantitative, pseudo-experimental studies aimed at comparing the ‘same’ course delivered in a conventional format as opposed to an accelerated format. the consensus from this research would seem to be that students learn as much, or more, in an accelerated setting (van scyoc and gleadon, 1993; scott, 1995; daniel, 2000). however, none of these studies involved random allocation of students to a specific format; thus the question remains whether those who choose to study the accelerated format are better motivated or academically prepared. certainly, some staff involved in teaching these courses have journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 2 mackenzie and pritchard students’ experience of learning in an accelerated, residential, study abroad setting reservations believing such courses are offered for the convenience of students but sacrifice academic rigour (daniel, 2000; scott, 2003). it has been argued that the required reflection is not possible where student-teacher contact time is reduced and that content must be sacrificed (wolfe, cited wlodkowski 2003). conversely, other studies show that although teachers believe that learning is different in accelerated formats, it is still of high quality (pritchard and mackenzie, 2011). scott (2003) concurs with this latter view arguing that while students do experience accelerated courses differently from traditional formats, the quality of the course is dependent on attributes other than time, including the teaching and assessment methods, the environment, and the quality of teaching. students in this study report that when these attributes are present, accelerated courses can be ‘powerful learning experiences’ (scott, 2003, p.34). it has been suggested that students who opt for accelerated courses are likely to be more highly motivated and academically prepared than students opting for a more traditional format. this was not the case in a study by seamon (2004). his quantitative comparison of outcomes of the same course taught in a traditional versus accelerated format took students’ age, motivation and grade point average into consideration: students performed significantly better in the accelerated format regardless of these other factors. there was also evidence that students in the accelerated format performed better in terms of ‘higher order’ learning. however, the results of a follow-up evaluation indicated that the accelerated format was no better in terms of information retention in the long term (seamon, 2004). wlodkowski (2008, p.3) states that the time students spend on learning is ‘only a modest predictor of achievement’. he argues that other factors have an equal or greater impact; these include students’ own motivation, their ability, and the quality of teaching. successful learning on accelerated courses depends on the endeavour and diligence of the students (wlodkowski and ginsberg, 2010) but the curriculum must change to respond to the challenges of accelerated study. scott’s (2003) research indicates that students favour accelerated courses which emphasise depth over breadth; this is echoed by the students in this study and the staff in the parallel study (pritchard and mackenzie, 2011). she also reported that students favoured activities and assessments which enabled students to link classroom activities to their personal experiences. this issue of the personal or affective elements of learning can also be seen in the research on residential learning. scholars have argued that ‘the process of intense ‘immersion’ in the culture of learning and teaching journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 3 mackenzie and pritchard students’ experience of learning in an accelerated, residential, study abroad setting in a residential setting provides a major learning experience for any course’ (morgan and thorpe, 1993, p.74). similarly, study abroad is often described as an immersive process (wilkinson, 1998). residential study there is a limited literature on learning in residential contexts and what does exist focuses mainly on adult and professional learning, rather than the higher education experiences of traditional university students like those in our study. it is believed that the curriculum, including course design and teaching and learning activities, have important roles to play in the success of residential courses, however, bersch and fleming (1997, p.52) maintain that for a high quality learning experience, it is also essential for learners to be able to ‘detach themselves from daily realities and relax in an uninterrupted continuum of experience’. these two aspects: i) detachment from normal routines and responsibilities and ii) continuity of the learning experience, are what appears to ensure high quality learning and what makes residential learning distinct from more traditional, non-residential learning. residential study encourages students to form close bonds and often results in a more ‘intense’ learning experience, where students are more likely to value their peers’ experiences and opinions (bersch and fleming, 1997). the issue of detachment is echoed elsewhere (schacht, 1960; fleming, 1998). it has been suggested that when students are detached from the responsibilities of their normal lives they are better able to focus on their studies and are freer to be self-reflective (bersch and fleming, 1997; cohen and piper, 2000). residential students living in situ have the opportunity to interact informally with staff and other students along with time for self-reflection over and above the planned-for curriculum; class is followed by discussion outside the classroom (bersch and fleming, 1997). study abroad in addition to study at the castle being in an accelerated, residential format, it is also an example of study abroad. the students at the castle come mainly from canada, though increasingly from other parts of the world, in order to study in the uk. with the current prioritisation of internationalising higher education, more students than ever are opting to study abroad, although kitsantas writing in 2004 found that most us students who opt for study abroad choose to do so for only short periods of time, like the castle summer term. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 4 mackenzie and pritchard students’ experience of learning in an accelerated, residential, study abroad setting kitsantas (2004) reports that the reasons students give for studying abroad are to enhance their social lives as well as their understanding of the subject of study; in addition they also report the desire to improve their cross-cultural skills and awareness. opting to study abroad has been reported to increase students’ motivation towards learning and aid their intellectual development (kuh and kaufman, 1984). rationale for current study one of the authors (jp) had first-hand experience of the castle having previously taught the summer term; the other author (jm) had experience of accelerated, residential courses both as a student and teacher at a number of open university summer schools, but had not taught or studied at the castle. we both recognised the quality and intensity of the learning experience of our students in these two contexts appeared different to traditional university settings. studying at the castle during the summer term represents, for most of the students, a different way of engaging with higher education in terms of its accelerated, residential and study abroad context, and it is the contrast of this with their home studies that we wanted to explore further. after reviewing the literature in the area of intensive courses we identified a niche that the students learning within the castle set-up could fit into. there was also a niche identified in a parallel study examining the castle teachers’ experiences relative to their home institution (pritchard and mackenzie, 2011). this study explores the learning experiences of students attending the summer term at an accelerated, residential, study abroad setting, specifically, the international study centre at herstmonceux castle in sussex (owned by queen’s university, canada). situated in and around a 15th century castle, the study centre provides predominantly liberal artsbased courses for students from all years of the undergraduate degree. students obtain credits recognised by their home institution. most academic staff visit for one or more terms, although some are permanent. most teach courses similar to those they teach at their home institutions, although some are unique to the centre. most students are from canada, however increasingly other nationalities are represented, including the usa, mexico and china. summer term at the castle is four weeks in duration with many of the staff and students coming only for that term. students normally study two half-credit courses (the credit rating of an undergraduate degree from a canadian university is 15-20 credits). fees have been associated with these courses and for many their home journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 5 mackenzie and pritchard students’ experience of learning in an accelerated, residential, study abroad setting university education. whilst living quarters are located on campus close to the castle, classes take place in the castle itself. students and staff eat in the same dining hall and socialise alongside each other in the on-site pub. many of the courses have a british or european focus (e.g. the english country house, british landscape art, jacobean shakespeare) and every course has associated field studies, trips to local museums, galleries and historic sites. whilst most of the literature on accelerated and residential courses deals with courses taken by adults (over 25), the majority of students at the castle summer term are traditional students, i.e. under 25. methodology given the dearth of research regarding the student learning experience in such contexts, we undertook the project with the explicit aim of examining: the variation in students’ learning experiences in an accelerated, residential, study abroad context in comparison to their learning experiences in a traditional university setting. in order to explore this variation we have undertaken a phenomenographic study. phenomenography is a qualitative research methodology within the interpretivist perspective (crotty, 2003). it has at its core the aim of exploring the variation in the way a phenomenon is experienced and described; it assumes that there are a finite number of ways in which a phenomenon can be experienced and therefore described (categories of description) and through uncovering those ways the researcher can provide insights about the phenomenon (marton and booth, 1997). categories of description are interrelated and this relationship, which emerges from the research process, is the outcome space. the phenomenon being investigated here is the experience of learning in an accelerated, residential, study abroad setting relative to learning in a traditional setting. in total, 12 informed, consenting adult students studying at the castle in the summer term of 2005 were interviewed; interviews were 45-60 minutes duration. trigwell (2000) recommends a sample size of between 15 and 20 in phenomenographical research, however, given that the entire student population at the castle at that time was approximately 50, the 12 participants represent a sizeable proportion of that population and we believe were sufficient to capture the full variation of experience. each interview consisted of questions aimed at allowing students to describe their experiences of the journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 6 mackenzie and pritchard students’ experience of learning in an accelerated, residential, study abroad setting castle in relation to their home institution. the interviews were digitally recorded and transcribed verbatim, and the participant identities were anonymised. the interview transcripts represent a pool of ways in which interviewees describe their experience; the descriptions are not ascribed to the individual. the authors carried out an initial reading and analysis of the interview transcripts independently and then met to discuss the categories of description and the students’ words ascribed to each category. each category of description has a process aspect (‘how’ the students describe aspects of the castle relative to their home institutions) and an outcome aspect (‘what’ the students ascribe this process means). the analysis was an iterative process; the analysis of transcripts followed by discussions of categories of description occurred several times until the hierarchical relationship between categories (outcome space) was revealed. the analysis was an iterative process; the analysis of transcripts followed by discussions of categories of description occurred several times until the hierarchical relationship between categories (outcome space) was revealed. the categories were formalised by using illustrative quotes from the interview transcripts – again this was an iterative process where quotes are trialled in other categories to ensure they cannot appear in two places – this would render the categories not discrete. after several attempts at this process both individually and together, a coherent and complete analysis of the interviews is arrived at with discrete categories of description that are supported by illustrative quotes from the interviews. these two steps of coding and discussion, termed as coder checking and dialogic checking by akerlind (2005), have been recommended to enhance the reliability of the outcome space. we start by describing the outcome space of this research and then present the categories of description of students’ learning at the castle summer term, supported by illustrative quotes. results the outcome space is shown in table 1. there are four categories of description within the outcome space arranged in a hierarchical relationship. these are: student sees the opportunity to learn; student feels safe; student takes learning risks; student reconsiders learning. each category is a prerequisite to experiencing a category higher in the journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 7 mackenzie and pritchard students’ experience of learning in an accelerated, residential, study abroad setting hierarchy, with the last category being highest in the hierarchy. for instance, a student will not experience ‘student takes learning risks’ without experiencing ‘student feels safe’, and so on. table 1. outcome space for whole study. category of experience how (the process) aspects what (the outcome) aspects a student sees opportunity to learn attributes of new environment space to learn b student feels safe student knows teacher being part of something c student takes learning risks safe-risk taking student as explorer d student reconsiders learning the process of learning the purpose of learning category a: student sees opportunity to learn in this category, students describe the castle as an opportunity to learn in a new and distinct way (see table 2 for quotes from the interviews that illustrate this category). ‘how’ the students recognise and describe this is in terms of attributes of the castle itself, which diverge from the students’ normal learning experience. first, the study centre is unusual in that it is set in a 15th century castle; for the students that in itself is an attraction: ‘i mean how often do you get to come to a castle?’ the summer term also represents an opportunity to study in europe and students identified with the idea of a european holiday. however, students recognised other benefits. since all courses include field studies, students have an opportunity to visit parts of britain that are closely linked to their chosen subject(s) of study. the summer term also requires a relatively low investment in terms of time away from their normal studies and/or home commitments. students had certain expectations about the summer term – that it would be more focused and that classes would be small. all of these elements contribute to the students experiencing the castle as a distinctive experience. overall, ‘what’ this represents for the students is a space to learn in a new and intense way. the experience was often described metaphorically, for example, as a summer camp, retreat or orientation week. the students recognised that journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 8 mackenzie and pritchard students’ experience of learning in an accelerated, residential, study abroad setting they were engaged in a new type of experience; it was described as relaxed or laid back and, despite the fact that this was an accelerated term, students described having ‘time’ to engage with their studies. table 2. student sees opportunity to learn (category a) – quotes from students. how (the process) aspect physical attributes of new environment what (the outcome) aspect space to learn we get to see a real physical example about what’s being talked about, and for so often, we’re, we’re, at my home university, we read about people and places and things and we have to kind of imagine what that would be like. i thought it would be an interesting experience…the summer programme is only four weeks long, so you get, it’s a very concentrated, and it’s nice weather, nice time to come. it doesn’t seem as em, staid or stuffy as some university classes can seem, so it’s eh, it’s just a good atmosphere, a good sort of laid back, easy to learn kind of place… it gave me time to just look at two things specifically…in a very concentrated way and…i’ve been at time…i took six courses the whole year, so at times my focus was split up in so many different ways. but this way, well like concentrate on it, and i think i learn a lot more about it, since it was so concentrated i could…um, i didn’t have more time to think about it, but i had more focus. category b: student feels safe the second category of description in the outcome space is that the student feels safe (see table 3 for quotes from the interviews that illustrate this category). the way in which students describe ‘how’ they feel safe is that they ‘know their teacher’ in contrast with their experiences at their home institutions. students expressed surprise at the close proximity of staff and students both in and out of the classroom. students described how they’d ‘never talked to their professor’ at home in contrast to their castle experience. there was also recognition that their teachers had chosen to teach at the castle and were therefore highly engaged and motivated with regards to their teaching. teachers were also described as caring about their students and building relationships with them. this journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 9 mackenzie and pritchard students’ experience of learning in an accelerated, residential, study abroad setting translates into ‘what’ the students describe: that they are valued as individuals and, with each other and their teachers, they are engaged in a shared endeavour. students described feeling obligated to get to know people and the value of ‘living and doing’ with the same small group of people. the castle is experienced as a more level, less hierarchical structure than their home institutions. table 3. student feels safe (category b) – quotes from students. how (the process) aspect student knows teacher what (the outcome) aspect feeling part of something i have an expert who is accessible and i think that’s probably one of the most important things…my professor is accessible at breakfast, at coffee break, at lunch, at dinner, on field studies and during classes is available to explain as much explanation as i need about a particular topic…that’s not always possible when there’s two, three or four hundred people in your class… maybe it’s because the professor chose to come here, and to teach here…but they seem to be very interested and they are very involved in what they are doing. because i think that you get to like build a relationship like outside of the classroom, and i don’t know, i think that’s more important, because then it’s not like such, as like a student…like teacher relationship. there isn’t necessarily such a big divide between … you know professor and students you know. everything is more equal, more level, just generally more relaxed, and comfortable. category c: student takes learning risk/s the third category of description is that at the castle the student takes learning risks (see table 4 for quotes from the interviews that illustrate this category). the castle was seen as a place where it was acceptable to take risks. the short term and the extra-curricular nature of the experience were liberating for most students. in terms of how the students ascribed meaning to this category of description, they described how the location of the castle encouraged them to undertake courses related to the geographical area that they would not normally have studied. some students had the option of taking elective courses journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 10 mackenzie and pritchard students’ experience of learning in an accelerated, residential, study abroad setting in their degree programme and often opted to undertake courses far from their major area of study; some were studying for no credits. the meaning ascribed to this was the ‘student as explorer’. students were learning for learning’s sake, taking risks in new areas and having ‘fun’. they were stepping up to the challenge of the new in this supportive environment. table 4. student takes learning risks (category c) – quotes from students. how (the process) aspect safe-risk taking what (the outcome) aspect student as explorer i had to learn…most of the commonly used sociology terms over a short period of time and become proficient with them…which is fine, because you challenge yourself to be able to do so. um, i chose shakespeare, actually just because i’m really interested, i took a course on it at school last year, so i’m actually not getting credit for it. i want to just kind of like get away from that and try like new things here. they would be fun and interesting and something i would probably never take back at home, so i thought i’d give it a try. category d: student reconsiders learning the fourth and highest category in the outcome space is student reconsiders learning (see table 5 for quotes from the interviews that illustrate this category). there were many descriptions by students of the impact the castle had on the way they considered their learning. the ‘how’ aspect of this category included descriptions of field studies; these were seen as encouraging a more exploratory approach. the design of curricula and the small classes afforded more discussion or ‘conversation’ in learning and this was believed to enhance the quality of learning. students also recognised the intensity that studying in this accelerated format achieved. meeting several times a week brought a ‘freshness’ to the way they approached their learning. the ‘what’ outcome of this category of description is that the students reconsidered the purpose of learning. students described rediscovering the ‘joy of learning’ or having their interest in a past area of study rekindled. students described being more open to new learning experiences, of discovering, through journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 11 mackenzie and pritchard students’ experience of learning in an accelerated, residential, study abroad setting their engagement with learning at the castle, a new found independence, of taking back to their own disciplines what they’d learned. they valued the interdisciplinary experience and expressed views relating to the purposes of learning itself – self-fulfilment. table 5. student reconsiders learning (category d) – quotes from students. how (the process) aspect the process of learning what (the outcome) aspects the purpose of learning the level of debate rises…considerably, because…we’re fairly well versed in our own disciplines, but we have to get our head around somebody else’s discipline, i think that’s maybe an intentional challenge. it meant that it was more you know sort of learning all the way instead of just sort of listening and soaking up a little bit here and there and trying to learn everything the night before the exam. i cannot go and research an entirely new discipline, so i have to take the information and apply it to what i know, so that also forces me to become more deeply engaged in my own discipline, because i have to go back and say what did i learn about this? learning for pleasure rather than learning with the, with the view to the fact that i have to write a final. what i am learning will be associated with the personal experience and just thinking about my personal experience will make me think about what i learned here…it’s by association and the way my brain is working. it was a lot of fun here, a really different experience that made it…i don’t know, a lot more intriguing to learn. maybe go back to some of the interests…i had in high school and before that even, and that i just didn’t have, haven’t had time to think about. the four categories in context it is logical to presume that the environment and context in which students learn have an impact on how they experience that learning, and we postulate that any students engaged in study at the castle will arrive at least at the first category of description: the castle as an journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 12 mackenzie and pritchard students’ experience of learning in an accelerated, residential, study abroad setting opportunity to learn even if they do not arrive at the conceptions further up the hierarchy. bersch and fleming (1997) also contend that locale impacts on learners’ experiences. in their study of a residential course for adult education faculty held on yukon island, alaska, they report that the beautiful rural setting provides ‘a multisensory experience that seems to heighten learning and magnify feelings’ (bersch and fleming, 1997, p.54). herstmonceux castle also provides a visually pleasing setting. it is surrounded by elizabethan gardens and parklands and comes complete with moat and drawbridge. alongside this unique locale, the students at the castle summer term are studying in an accelerated format, investing only four weeks of their time, and the castle represents an opportunity to study abroad in a structured setting. therefore study at the castle is distinct from their home studies in many ways and this offers students a new and distinct learning opportunity. our second category of description is student feels safe. central to the feelings of safety is what is described as ‘student knows teacher’. the participants in this study expressed this in a number of ways; they reported that their teacher knew their name and that the teacher was constantly accessible, available to talk with enthusiasm about the topic of study. students also recognised and valued the commitment of their teachers. they were aware that, like them, their teachers had chosen to teach at the castle, to leave their daily responsibilities (research, family) behind; this increased feelings of being engaged in a joint endeavour with other students and teachers. certainly the literature supports the view that students value commitment from teachers (andrews et al., 1996; jenkins and speck, 2007). as morgan and thorpe (1993, p.75) writing of residential learning state, it: brings together people whose only ostensible purpose for being together is their wish to learn the subject, and thus ‘the subject’ in some shape of form in never far from being the overt topic of all the dialogues taking place throughout the period of residence. these feelings of safety and being engaged in a joint endeavour leads to our third category: student takes learning risks. the students have already made an investment when they opt to study at the summer term, both financially and in terms of their time. many students expressed the challenge of studying accelerated courses, in many cases of delving into a brand new area of study. we argue that this risk taking is only possible and only recognised if students feel safe and part of something. yorke and knight (2004, p.36) journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 13 mackenzie and pritchard students’ experience of learning in an accelerated, residential, study abroad setting make a case for the value of risk taking in learning ‘in a society in which complex learning and employability are officially desired outcomes of the educational process, a higher education should surely not prompt students to avoid complexity and the taking of risks in their learning’. we agree; students should be encouraged and supported to be exploratory in their learning and take risks, although encouraging such approaches would be unethical if students are not appropriately supported. as walker et al. (2006, p.257) put it: ‘exposing learners to situations that favour risk and uncertainty without the trust and security of a well-managed classroom may have the adverse effect, and lead to disengagement and ultimate withdrawal for some learners’. we believe that the castle summer term does expose students to some uncertainty and risk but our data suggests that the students trust their teachers sufficiently to feel supported in taking these risks. further, we would argue that exposing learners to these ‘risky situations’ or novel ways of learning in an exciting yet safe environment is essential if we wish our learners to consider their learning differently, leading to our fourth category of description: student reconsiders learning. it is hardly surprising that learning at the castle was experienced by the students in this study as different to their home experiences, however, our findings indicate that the opportunities afforded by the castle summer term, with its accelerated, residential and study abroad context, enabled at least some of the students in our study to go beyond recognising it as a different experience and to consider their own approach to learning and even the purposes of learning at university. the students described learning for its own sake rather than to pass assessments, to rediscover the pleasure afforded by learning and to see learning as part of their lived experience; the students’ awareness of learning was changed. there has been much debate about the quality of learning experienced in accelerated formats; our results indicate that study at the castle summer term is experienced as a different but high quality experience. this is echoed by the experiences of those that teach the summer term (pritchard and mackenzie, 2011); this parallel study found that teachers also recognised the distinctiveness of the castle context as offering them space to consider their teaching in depth and more, to reconsider the purpose of, and their role in, higher education. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 14 mackenzie and pritchard students’ experience of learning in an accelerated, residential, study abroad setting implications in the wider he context we are cautious of over-interpreting our findings. our study involves a small number of students during a single term in an accelerated, residential, study abroad setting. it is possible that the students who participated in this study are not wholly representative of the students who study during the summer term; we do not believe this is the case. certainly, the students who chose to study there are a self-selected group. the majority of students were from the study centre’s home institution, queen’s university, but these represent only a small proportion of those studying back home in canada. travelling to europe to study for the equivalent of one credit is expensive and therefore not accessible to all students. however, paying fees for their higher education is commonplace for the north american students attending the summer school, although full or partial scholarships are available to some students for their home studies and towards this study abroad option. it may be that those who choose to do so, in addition to having the financial (and family commitment) freedom to attend, are also highly motivated and self-aware which might lead to a skewing of our data set. certainly many expressed the view that they were coming to learn at the castle for a different experience; perhaps not all students wish to have a ‘different’ experience. the castle is an uncommon learning context in its immersive qualities brought about by the three co-existing aspects of: accelerated, residential and study abroad learning. our findings show that the students’ castle experience brings their perceptions of and approaches to learning to the fore. implicit in this discussion is that this enhanced awareness of learning is by definition a ‘good thing’ and we make no apology for that. too often in higher education today students equate learning with passing exams, getting the grades and getting the job. learning for the sake of learning or for the pleasure it endows is at the forefront of much of the lifelong learning debate. we believe that becoming more aware of one’s own learning will make one a better and more successful learner; whatever successful might mean. also, in order for students to become the critical and ethical citizens we often claim is what characterises graduates, surely it is important for students to be aware of not only their own learning, but also the purpose of higher education. if so, we need to give students appropriate opportunities within our educational processes to develop such awareness about their own learning and to discern the purposes of higher education for themselves; how could this be brought about? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 15 mackenzie and pritchard students’ experience of learning in an accelerated, residential, study abroad setting kuh and kaufman (1984, p.2) state that ‘student development occurs in response to novel situations and ideas which are difficult to assimilate given the student’s present ‘world view’’. students must learn to develop new responses to the situation. marton and trigwell (2000, p.387) state that there can be ‘no learning without discernment and there is no discernment without variation’. central to their thesis is that only through experiencing a phenomenon in a variety of ways can that phenomenon be discerned and understood (marton and trigwell, 2000, p.386): the discernment or experience is always the discernment of variation or the experience of difference. darkness can only be experienced as a contrast to experienced (or imagined) light. you cannot experience greenness without the experience of other colours; without variation in colours, the very idea of colour cannot exist. if the level of happiness, or sorrow, never varied within individuals, nor differed between individuals, then happiness, and sorrow, would cease to exist. currently in higher education, many of our learning and teaching practices can be formulaic. our courses are increasingly modularised and our responses to larger class sizes is to teaching ‘efficiently’ through lecture based courses, prescribed small group activities and standardised assessment methods. it is possible for students to experience very little variation in the ways of learning and methods of teaching throughout the three or four years of their degree, and we argue that this must result in obstructing awareness of their own learning. we believe our study demonstrates that the students at the castle have experienced learning in a different and distinct context relative to their home studies and have thus experienced a meaningful variation in their own experiences of learning, leading to greater awareness of how and why they learn. without such variation that awareness would be diminished. marton and trigwell (2000) argue that the experience of variation must occur regardless of the educational processes evoked and the subject of study; students must be given opportunities to see things in different ways. what is crucial is that students experience variation in learning by learning in different contexts. conclusions we have argued that since awareness of variation is necessary for learning to occur, then variation in learning experiences is necessary for students to be aware of their own journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 16 mackenzie and pritchard students’ experience of learning in an accelerated, residential, study abroad setting approach and conceptions of learning. we do not suggest that for this awareness to take place it is essential that students are immersed in accelerated or residential or study abroad experiences; not all students can spend four weeks studying in a 15th century castle. perhaps only one of these elements would be sufficient for variation in learning to be discerned and perhaps other experiences could substitute for these. we would propose that experiencing learning in a sufficiently distinct context to their ‘normal’ context will result in students recognising the opportunities for learning that experience offers – i.e. the first category in our outcome space. ultimately, we would wish to see our students having opportunities to enable them to reach the fourth category: to reconsider learning itself. however, to reach the fourth category of description in our outcome space requires the middle two categories: students need to feel safe in their learning and must be supported to taking learning risks. only then will they acquire what we believe should be an essential feature of higher education: greater awareness of their own learning and the purpose of higher education itself. currently, there may be little variation in the forms and modes of teaching, learning and assessment in the student experience. there is a current push within higher education to innovate. one of the outcomes of this may be increased opportunities for students to learn in different ways e.g. project and enquiry-based courses, innovative assessment using technology, group assessment as well as service learning courses, study abroad or work placement opportunities. these opportunities, we believe, offer students opportunities to become increasingly aware of their own development and their own learning. acknowledgements the authors would like to thank all the staff at the castle for their contribution to this work. we would also like to thank professor bob matthew for his encouragement and welcome comments and lucinda dempsie for transcribing all the interviews. references åkerlind, g.s. (2005) ‘variation and commonality in phenomenographic research methods’, higher education research and development, 24(4), pp. 321-334. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 17 mackenzie and pritchard students’ experience of learning in an accelerated, residential, study abroad setting andrews, j., garriso, d.r. and magnusson, k. (1996) ‘the teaching and learning transaction in higher education: a study of excellent professors and their students’, teaching in higher education, 1(1), pp. 81-103. bersch, g. and fleming, j.a. (1997) ‘residential workshops’, new directions for adult and continuing education, 76, pp. 51-58. cohen, j.b. and piper, d. (2000) ‘transformation in a residential adult learning community’, in mezirow, j. and associates (ed.) learning as transformation: critical perspectives on a theory in progress. san francisco: josey-bass, pp. 205-228. crotty, m. (2003) the foundations of social research: meaning and perspective in the research process. london: sage. daniel, e.l. (2000) ‘a review of time-shortened courses across disciplines’, college student journal, 34(2), pp. 298–308. fleming, j.a. (1998) ‘understanding residential learning: the power of detachment and continuity’, adult education quarterly, 48(4), pp. 260-271. jenkins, c.r. and speck, b.w. (2007) ‘‘i’m in their corner’: caring as foundational to effective teaching’, journal on excellence in college teaching, 18(2), pp. 41-60. kitsantas, a. (2004) ‘studying abroad: the role of college students’ goals on the development of cross-cultural skills and global understanding’, college student journal, 38(3), pp. 441-452. kuh, g.k., and kauffman, n.f. (1984) the impact of study abroad on personal development of college students. bloomington, in: indiana university school of education. marton, f. and booth, s. (1997) learning and awareness. new jersey: lawrence erlbaum. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 18 mackenzie and pritchard students’ experience of learning in an accelerated, residential, study abroad setting marton, f. and trigwell, k. (2000) ‘variatio est mater studioru’, higher education research and development, 19(3), pp. 381-395. morgan, a. and thorpe, m. (1993) ‘residential schools in open and distance education: quality time for quality learning?’, in evans, t. and nation, d. (eds.) reforming open and distance education. london: kogan-page, pp. 72-87. pritchard, j. and mackenzie, j. (2011) ‘the variation in academics’ experiences of teaching in an intense study centre compared with their traditional university settings’, journal of further and higher education, 35(3), pp. 339-352. schacht, r.h. (1960) weekend learning in the united states. brookline, mass: center for the study of liberal education for adults. scott, p.a. (1995) ‘learning experiences in intensive and semester-length classes: student voices and experiences’, college student journal, 29(2), pp. 207–213. scott, p.a. (2003) ‘attributes of high-quality intensive courses’, new directions for adult and continuing education, 97, pp. 29-39. seamon, m. (2004) ‘shortand long-term differences in instructional effectiveness between intensive and semester-length courses’, teachers college record, 106(4), pp. 852–874. trigwell, k. (2000) ‘phenomenography: discernment and variation’, improving student learning, 7, pp. 75–85. van scyoc, l. and gleason, j. (1993) ‘traditional or intensive course lengths? a comparison of outcomes in economics learning’, journal of economics education, 24(1), pp. 15-22. walker, c., gleaves, a. and grey, j. (2006) ‘can students within higher education learn to be resilient and, educationally speaking, does it matter?’, educational studies, 32(3), pp. 251-264. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 19 mackenzie and pritchard students’ experience of learning in an accelerated, residential, study abroad setting wilkinson, s. (1998) ‘on the nature of immersion during study abroad: some participants’ perspectives’, frontiers: the interdisciplinary journal of study abroad, 4, pp. 121138. wlodkowski, r.j. (2003) ‘accelerated learning in colleges and universities’, new directions for adult and continuing education, 97, pp. 5-15. wlodkowski, r.j. (2008) enhancing adult motivation to learn: a comprehensive guide for teaching all adults. 3rd edn. san francisco: jossey-bass. wlodkowski, r.j. and ginsberg, m.b. (2010)teaching intensive and accelerated courses: instruction that motivates learning. 1st edn. san francisco: jossey-bass. yorke, m. and knight, p. (2004) ‘self-theories: some implications for teaching and learning in higher education’, studies in higher education, 29(1), pp. 25-37. author details dr jane mackenzie is head of academic practice at the learning and teaching centre, university of glasgow. as well as contributing to a postgraduate certificate in academic practice, which is a required qualification for all new lecturers and teachers at the university, she works in collaboration with academics around campus to design new curricula, implement changes in assessment practices and encourage student retention initiatives. her research focuses on the role of community and collaboration in staff and student engagement with learning and teaching, and the definition, understanding, implementation, recognition and reward of the scholarship of teaching and learning. dr jane pritchard has worked in academic development for over 12 years, both in the uk and canada. jane is currently working for the university of bristol as an academic staff developer with teaching and learning remit across the university. currently she has been charged with redesigning the teaching and learning programmes to include a cpd framework for academic practice across the range of academic and support services profiles. her research interests range from engaging and journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 20 mackenzie and pritchard students’ experience of learning in an accelerated, residential, study abroad setting supporting the scholarship of teaching and learning and unpacking its meaning in practice, to engaging students in enquiry-based learning opportunities through their studies. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 21 variation in students’ experience of learning in an accelerated, residential, study abroad setting in comparison to their traditional he experience abstract introduction accelerated formats residential study study abroad rationale for current study methodology results category a: student sees opportunity to learn category b: student feels safe category c: student takes learning risk/s category d: student reconsiders learning the four categories in context implications in the wider he context conclusions acknowledgements references author details literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 6: november 2013 editorial andrew doig southampton solent university, uk amanda french birmingham city university, uk andy hagyard university of lincoln, uk john hilsdon plymouth university, uk stephanie mckendry glasgow caledonian university, uk moira maguire dundalk institute of technology, ireland this latest edition of jldhe provides further evidence of the extent to which learning development as a field of practice has evolved during more than a decade of scholarly and practical investigation which has established a firm evidence base for our work. issue five in march 2013 reflected on ‘learning development 10 years on’, and the tenth anniversary conference held in plymouth confirmed the sense of growing maturity within our community. as stella cottrell remarks in her guest editorial, the concept ‘has come of age, or at least new ways of thinking are becoming established in the collective psyche’. confirmation of this continued growth comes in the significant expansion of our editorial capacity, and we are delighted to welcome amanda french, andrew doig and moira maguire to the team. each has brought fresh perspectives, experience and expertise to the group, and as a result we are now able to increase our output to two regular issues per year. this issue begins with a guest editorial by stella cottrell, building on the themes developed in her inspiring keynote address at the plymouth conference. stella charts the development of learning development over the last four decades against a backdrop of editorial significant change in the he sector, providing clear evidence of how our work is relevant to all students at all levels of study and not simply confined to ‘weaker’ students or those from a ‘widening participation’ background. turning to the future, she speculates about the possible impact of technology, and how advances in our understanding of neuroscience may allow us to shape students’ intelligence through the design of educational inputs. as a further output from the plymouth conference, and in a departure from the traditional paper, we have published an interview by helen bowstead with ken gale. ken’s masterclass on ‘deleuze and collaborative writing as method of enquiry’ was particularly well received at the conference, and in this interview he talks about how deleuzian concepts have informed his practice. helen then reflects on how these concepts, such as nomads, rhizomes and lines of flight, can provide alternative lenses through which to explore the rich and complex landscapes of learning development practices. lyn farrell’s paper addresses what many may argue is a neglected branch of learning development: support for the development of academic it skills. in particular she challenges the enduring myth of the ‘digital native’ first described by marc prensky, arguing that students should not be treated as a homogeneous mass, and that social uses of it do not automatically translate into effective academic usage. the paper calls for enhanced support for it skills and the development of a coherent approach to digital literacy as part of he programmes of study. the topic of assessment feedback has received a great deal of attention in recent years, largely due to the national student survey highlighting extensive student dissatisfaction in this area. adam burns’ paper provides a comprehensive review of existing literature and issues, and then explores lecturers’ perceptions of feedback based on interviews with a number of history lecturers. related to this theme is sue wilkinson’s opinion piece which calls for greater use of audio feedback as an example of inclusive design which would not only benefit students with disabilities but could also bring benefits to all students and staff. the jldhe welcomes accounts of original and innovative practice in learning development. kirsten jack’s case study describes the use of story-telling as an original way of encouraging student nurses to reflect on the topic of ageing. with reflective practice a professional requirement for nurses, its overuse as a learning method has reportedly led to cases of ‘reflection fatigue’ and the need to explore less formal ways to reflect. an journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 2 editorial alternative way to stimulate reflection is presented by alison james, who offers a fascinating account of the use of lego serious play as a thinking tool with creative arts students. both papers conclude that the approach could be equally effective in other disciplines. a further example of innovative practice comes from peggy murphy and colleagues, who describe two collaborative projects between learning developers and nursing lecturers, aimed at promoting writing and numerical skills. their paper offers a useful reminder of two key principles: the value of collaborative approaches to learning development embedded in subject delivery, and the importance of providing students with early opportunities for formative feedback. jane mackenzie and jane pritchard investigate the variations in students’ learning experiences in contexts different from their normal environment. their phenomenographic study related to students on an accelerated, residential, study abroad setting, and identified four distinct but related ways to describe their learning. while recognising that not all students can take advantage of an intensive study period abroad, the paper concludes that there are still lessons to be learnt in terms of offering different learning formats that take students out of their normal environment. sheila cunningham and deeba gallacher describe a project to assess the impact of volunteering on the development of employability skills among biomedical science students. while work experience is widely recognised as having a positive impact on employability, volunteering may offer a viable alternative, especially in areas where placement opportunities may be limited. kate chanock describes the process within one australian university of developing criteria to assess ‘graduate attributes’ in a way that recognised the specific and different meanings they can have in different discipline areas. maeve ann gallagher and niamh flynn are also concerned with graduate attributes. they contribute an interesting piece that makes a case for a greater focus on self-regulated learning, illustrated with examples from an irish university journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 3 editorial finally, carla solvason and geoffrey elliott ask why research remains invisible in further education, identifying the continuing marginalisation of research in the fe sector through interviews with lecturers in a further and higher education partnership. in a further expansion of the journal, we also include book reviews by helena beeson and craig whittaker. we would welcome suggestions and contributions for our review section in future issues. reviews of books, websites, blogs, conferences, apps and tech tools of interest to the learning development community would all be considered. we feel proud of the broad scope of material in this issue of our journal, the originality of approaches described and the depth of thinking represented by the more theoretical items overall it is an impressive collection and a tribute to our community. we hope readers will find this issue a valuable addition to the growing body of literature on learning development and that it may stimulate others to write for the jldhe. remember that we can accept material at any time as there are no fixed deadlines for the journal we will always consider material for inclusion in the next edition, space allowing. we are also willing to discuss ideas for articles in draft form. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 4 editorial literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special edition: digital technologies, november 2014 using phenomenography to inform curriculum development in the areas of digital curation and digital sustainability tony reeves university for the creative arts, surrey, uk abstract a british university is proposing to introduce two new postgraduate certificate qualifications in digital curation and digital sustainability. the proposed courses are intended to formalise this knowledge into a curriculum that enables professional practitioners working in related areas to develop their knowledge of how to manage digital assets in a sustainable manner. this case study sought to investigate the knowledge and skills required by digital professionals working in the areas of digital curation and digital sustainability at the university. the roles and responsibilities of these professionals were diverse, and the sample included specialists in the areas of digitisation and preservation of archive film and photography, copyright for digital assets, database and web development, bid writing, and managing digitisation projects. a phenomenographic methodology was used to identify the variations in how these professionals understood their work, and the categories of description emerging from the study identified them as researchers, specialist advisors, technical specialists, service providers, and perpetual students. the data analysis and resulting outcome space suggested that a problem-based learning curriculum would provide an effective way of preparing students to succeed as professionals in the areas of digital curation and digital sustainability. keywords: phenomenography; professional practice; curriculum development; problembased learning; digital sustainability. reeves using phenomenography to inform curriculum development journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2014 2 introduction the concept and practice of digital curation has evolved in response to the need for organisations and individuals to be able to store and retrieve digital assets such as web pages, images, documents and videos (pennock, 2007; yakel, 2007). new technologies make it possible for organisations and managers to access the tacit knowledge residing in their employees and groups (cook and brown, 1999), but the need for employees to use these technologies effectively has given rise to a corresponding increase in the demand for knowledge management skills (jarche, 2010; hart, 2013). by making it possible for employees to ‘curate’ and access tacit knowledge, digital curation tools can be used to shape the identity and performance of an organisation. the rapid growth in the range of tools used to create and curate digital assets has also brought about a subsequent need to understand how these assets should be managed in the longer term, evidenced through the small but growing body of research in the area of digital sustainability (bradley, 2007; maron et al., 2009). understanding the different roles of knowledge and knowing within organisations is increasingly viewed as a core competency (cook and brown, 1999), and some universities have responded to this need to prepare their graduates by either implementing programmes of digital literacy or by embedding the teaching of these literacies into existing curricula (duggan, 2013). the university in question is seeking to target employees working in relevant professions by providing courses that will enable them to develop their professional practice through better management of digital assets. this research paper used a phenomenographic methodology to investigate the work of digital professionals working in learning support roles at the university in the areas of digital curation and digital sustainability. the purpose was to analyse the variation in the way that these practitioners understood their work and identify a way to develop a suitable curriculum for future students in these areas. the findings suggested that a problem-based learning curriculum would provide appropriate opportunities for students to acquire the skills and knowledge needed to solve the complex problems that constitute a core aspect of the professional practice of digital curation and digital sustainability. reeves using phenomenography to inform curriculum development journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2014 3 literature review writing in 1987, the author donald schon described what he termed a ‘crisis in professional education’ (schon, 1987, p.8), due largely to the perception that ‘what aspiring practitioners need most to learn, professional schools seem least able to teach’ (schon, 1987, p.8). this problem is understood as being a symptom of the technicalrational approach to professional education in which the latter is viewed predominantly as the application of technical or specialist knowledge (cheetham and chivers, 2000), and numerous subsequent studies have questioned whether this traditional approach produces knowledge which accurately reflects human activities (bennner, 1984; dreyfus and dreyfus, 1986; giorgi, 1990; dall’alba and sandberg, 1996). schon (1987) argues that the de-contextualised, research-informed knowledge acquired in such an approach does not reflect the context-specific problems encountered in the ‘real’ world beyond the classroom, and that in reality practitioners adopt a more reflective approach. however, subsequent research by cheetham and chivers (2000) intended to test schon’s hypothesis and revealed that practitioners regularly drew on a combination of both epistemologies, with decision-making reliant on a mixture of intuition, specialist and tacit knowledge (hatsopoulos and hatsopoulos, 2009). this suggests that neither the technical-rational epistemology, nor that of the ‘knowing-in-action’ of schon’s reflective practitioner, explain conclusively the reality of professional practice. if the aim of a professional practice programme is to prepare students to function effectively within a given profession, accessing and understanding this tacit knowledge can help educators design suitable learning activities to help students acquire relevant expertise (sternberg and horvath, 2009). the ‘practice’ of a profession has been likened to an objective ‘container’ for the social activity and conventions which constitute that profession (lave, 1993, p.22). such interpretations present the container as separate from its content (mcdermott, 1993), and as such the latter can be decontextualised and formalised into a programme of professional education (dall’alba and sandberg, 1996). once students have internalised this content they will be able to operate effectively within the profession (dall’alba and sandberg, 1996). however, critics of this interpretation argue that ‘practitioners cannot meaningfully be separated from their activities and the situations in which they practice’ (dall’alba and sandberg, 1996, p.413), and hence there is a need for an alternative interpretation of knowledge and competence to help higher education develop effective professional practice programmes (barnett, 1994). reeves using phenomenography to inform curriculum development journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2014 4 the implication that complex, real-world problems are best solved by someone who is able to draw on both specialist knowledge and wealth of experience therefore presents a challenge for professional development curricula: how can ‘experience’ be taught? to address this problem, lave (1996) examines the fundamental concepts of teaching and learning and challenges the assumption that the former must be present for the latter to occur. arguing against the accepted belief that the de-contextualised, classroom model of learning is in some way better than other models, such as apprenticeships, lave and wenger (1991) propose that learning should be reconceptualised as a ‘situated’ activity. investigating the way in which apprentice tailors learned their craft, lave concludes that ‘the subjects and the world within which they were engaged mutually constituted each other’ (lave, 1996, p.157), implying that learning cannot be divorced from the context in which it occurs. taking the position that humans shape their identity through social encounters, lave reasons that as humans learn they are participating in social practice. from this perspective, ‘who you are’ is fundamentally determined by ‘what you know’, and ‘what you know’ might be better understood as an ability to do something, rather than as something which is possessed (lave, 1996, p.157). by focusing predominantly on learning rather than teaching, lave proposes that experience can be learned through contextualised, situated activity. prior to the work of lave, wenger, and schon, educators at the medical school of mcmaster university had faced the challenge of how to provide opportunities for medical students to work on the sort of complex problems they would encounter as professionals. in the 1960s the idea of problem-based learning was developed at mcmaster university medical school (savin-baden and major, 2004) and has subsequently been adopted in disciplines including economics, law and business administration (barrows, 1996). problem-based learning requires students to work collaboratively in small groups to discuss and solve meaningful problems (schmidt, 1983). loyens et al. (2008) highlight that a key element of problem-based learning is that students discuss the problem before they have received other curriculum inputs. based on their initial discussion, students then identify what it required in terms of their own self-directed learning before their next meeting where they share and critically evaluate their findings (schmidt, 1983). the role of the tutor in this process is to facilitate the discussion, provide additional, relevant context where necessary, and monitor the contribution of each group member. problem-based learning can therefore be seen as helping students to learn through contextualised activity rather than through teaching (lave, 1996). reeves using phenomenography to inform curriculum development journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2014 5 research question this case study aimed to investigate the roles and responsibilities of professionals working in the areas of digital curation and sustainability. the following research question formed the basis of the research:  what knowledge and skills would students on courses in digital curation and digital sustainability need to acquire to become successful practitioners in the field? methodology as this research focused on a specific example of the practice of digital professionals, a case study approach was used as it would allow the situated nature of their work to be taken into account (cohen et al., 2007). although the qualitative nature of a case study has led to it being traditionally considered as a ‘soft’ form of research when compared with ‘hard’, quantitative methods (yin, 2009), statistical and numerical approaches do not often permit as thorough an exploration of a given situation as a case study (cohen et al., 2007). a qualitative approach also permits the researcher to arrive at an understanding of a situation from the perspective of those experiencing it – the ‘emic’ or insider’s perspective – rather than from the outsider’s ‘etic’ perspective of the researcher (hancock and algozzine, 2011). as the aim of this research was to understand the nature of the work undertaken by the practitioners, rather than to test a pre-existing hypothesis, it was felt that a descriptive case study using narrative accounts would enable a comprehensive understanding of their professional roles (yin, 1984; merriam, 1988). methodology and data collection a phenomenographic methodology using semi-structured interviews was used to gather and analyse the data. phenomenography is a qualitative methodology developed by ference marton (1981; 1986) which permits a researcher to study the variation in how people understand or experience a phenomenon (larsson and holmstrom, 2007). such an approach aims to identify the variations in descriptions of the phenomenon under investigation (marton and booth, 1997), enabling the researcher to understand the different ways in which individuals interpret their reality (marton, 1986). these variations reeves using phenomenography to inform curriculum development journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2014 6 are named ‘categories of description’ and their subsequent comparison permits the construction of an ‘outcome space’, the purpose of which is to illustrate the non-dominant ways of understanding the phenomenon under investigation. this is achieved by seeking statements made by interviewees which describe different ways of understanding the phenomenon (larsson et al., 2010). the subsequent outcome space therefore represents the full extent of this understanding in which no single interpretation dominates another. there are several variations on the ‘classic’ phenomenographic methodology as proposed by marton (1986; 1994). the current study followed the seven stage variation used by larsson and holmstrom (2007) to investigate the professional work of anaestheologists. once interview data has been collected and transcribed, this process involves: 1) reading each transcription; 2) re-reading the transcriptions, then marking up the passages of text where an interviewee has provided a direct response to a key question; 3) identifying in these passages the focus of the interviewee’s attention, then writing a short summary of how the interviewee describes their work; 4) grouping these descriptions into categories to form categories of description; 5) establishing non-dominant ways of understanding the categories; 6) constructing an outcome space to reflect the hierarchical relationship between the categories; 7) formulating a metaphor for each group of categories. in the final step, a metaphor is assigned to each group of categories in order to improve understanding of the data analysis (miles and huberman, 1984). this practice is a method of displaying in data in qualitative analysis that can be understood as ‘using one object to create a new perspective on another’ (smith, 1988, p.4) to aid comprehension. for the current study, purposive sampling was used to identify six practitioners with suitable knowledge and experience of digital curation and digital sustainability. the professional work of these practitioners was known to the researcher through previous collaborations and projects, and this knowledge was considered a suitable basis for asking them to participate in the study. their work was often project-based and included the digitisation and preservation of special collections such as dresses and films, advising the university on copyright risk for digital assets, developing image databases and websites, reeves using phenomenography to inform curriculum development journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2014 7 writing bids for digitisation projects, and developing and managing the institutional repository of staff research outputs. a project information sheet explaining the rationale and scope of the research was given to each practitioner to enable them to make an informed decision as to whether they wished to participate. all six practitioners agreed to be interviewed, and semi-structured interviews were then used to elicit responses regarding their professional work. during these interviews, participants were asked the three questions used by larsson and holmstrom (2007) in their investigation into the professional practice of anaestheologists to discover how they experienced their work. these questions were themselves derived from previous phenomenographic studies into how undergraduate students experience medical practice (dall’alba, 1998) and the experience of healthcare professionals caring for patients with diabetes (holmstrom et al., 2003). the open-ended questions aim to provide interviewees with sufficient opportunities to reflect on and describe their experiences of the phenomenon under investigation: 1. what is the core of your professional work? 2. when do you feel you have been successful in your work? 3. what is difficult or what hinders you in your work? interviews were recorded using a zoom hd digital recorder and were transcribed verbatim, making the transcripts the focus of the data analysis (akerlind, 2012). creating transcripts of all six interviews enabled the researcher to become familiar with the data through repeated readings in order to permit the emergence of categories of description. researcher bias and reliability in qualitative studies there is an inevitable risk that the researcher’s prior knowledge could influence the collection and analysis of data (cohen et al., 2007). in phenomenographic research, the researcher is advised to ‘bracket’ this prior knowledge by striving to remain conscious of their own thoughts and preconceived ideas (crabtree and miller, 1999). in the present study, the researcher consciously identified his personal views and held them in mind during both the data collection and analysis so as to minimise their influence and permit the emergence of authentic categories of description. reeves using phenomenography to inform curriculum development journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2014 8 to achieve reliability in phenomenographic research it is also desirable that the data is analysed by a second researcher, thus allowing an independent interpretation which can be compared against the primary researcher’s findings (larsson and holmstrom, 2007). however, the time constraints of the current study meant that it was not possible for a second analysis to be conducted. ethical issues the research proposal was reviewed by a senior member of the educational research department and, as it was deemed to present minimal ethical risk to the participants, it was not submitted to the university ethics committee. however, a potential issue was identified regarding interviewee confidentiality, for although interviewees were assured that their identities would not be revealed in the research, the use of face-to-face interviews meant that it was not possible to guarantee the anonymity of responses (cohen et al., 2007). by describing the work of specialist teams at the university it was also possible that their identities could be inferred through the research. the interviewees were informed of this risk both orally and by way of a project information sheet, and were offered the right to withdraw from the study at any time. interviewees signed a consent form to provide written consent for their participation in the research. although the researcher knew the interviewees and had worked alongside them in previous projects, it was not felt that this would significantly alter the way in which they understood and described their professional work. data analysis and findings in table 1 below, column 1 provides examples of the foci that emerged from the analysis of each transcript. column 2 indicates how interviewees described their professional activities in each area. reeves using phenomenography to inform curriculum development journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2014 9 table 1. examples of the foci of interviewees’ activity and descriptions of their work. focus description researching digital artifacts developing and conducting research projects e.g. doing interviews, surveys, creating research outputs. understanding how digital artifacts are used in teaching and learning. managing research projects writing, following and updating project plans. managing budgets. disseminating new knowledge presenting research findings at conferences, workshops and in journals. participating in communities of practice. providing online systems providing, developing and maintaining online platforms to enable users to access digital artifacts. keeping systems online by backing up and testing backups. strategic direction aligning service provision with university strategies to help them achieve their objectives. articulating the value and risks of digitisation for the university. in total thirteen distinct foci emerged from the data analysis, and these descriptions were then grouped into categories. in larsson and holmstrom’s (2007) example, the researchers apply metaphors to each category of description prior to the attempted construction of the outcome space, and it is these metaphors that in fact make it possible to establish the non-dominant ways of understanding. following their example, metaphors were assigned to each group of categories and these are presented in table 2 below: table 2. grouped categories of description and assigned metaphors. grouped categories of description metaphor researching the use of digital artifacts managing research projects creating and disseminating new knowledge securing research funding a: digital professional as researcher creating digital artifacts providing, maintaining and updating online platforms and interfaces managing digital and analogue artifacts b: digital professional as technical expert reeves using phenomenography to inform curriculum development journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2014 10 providing strategic direction for digitisation marketing and monetising service evaluating service provision c: digital professional as service provider keeping professional knowledge up to date learning on the job being multi-skilled d: digital professional as perpetual student providing mentoring and governance supporting learning writing policies and procedures advising on copyright diligence and ipr e: digital professional as specialist advisor in some phenomenographic studies a short summary of the assigned metaphors is provided to explain how a practitioner operating in each paradigm relates to their work (dall’alba and sandberg, 1996; dall’alba, 1998; sjostrom and dahlgren, 2002; larsson and holmstrom, 2007). a summary of the metaphors in the current study can be found below along with quotations from the transcripts to support the metaphors: a. digital professional as researcher: in this paradigm the focus was on research as a core element of professional work. the job of the digital professional was to engage with existing research projects, either through doing research or managing projects. these projects aimed to identify new research questions in the areas of digital curation and digital sustainability that aligned with the strategic aims of the university. responsibilities included managing budgets, coordinating external project partners, completing written reports for the funders, and disseminating outputs at national and international conferences and via peer-reviewed journals: we’ve got this research remit as well in that we’re not just creating, managing, digital data… but we’re also trying to be proactive in actually researching how that’s done. my prime objective is really bid writing, is writing that funding bid that actually secures you the funding to pursue a particular area of research in the field. and then carrying on that piece of work. b. digital professional as technical expert: this metaphor highlighted the focus of professional work on the creation and post-production of digital artifacts using an array of specialist equipment and software. this required knowledge of both the equipment and the reeves using phenomenography to inform curriculum development journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2014 11 legal implications of digitising artifacts to ensure compliance with current copyright laws. artifacts needed to be curated and catalogued using relevant metadata and encoding procedures to ensure that they were discoverable by search engines. storing artifacts required both an ability to work with databases and the skills to design and update interfaces to make the artifacts discoverable and sustainable: we set out the basic things like file formats, metadata, and all those kind of technical hands-on things, provide policies and guidelines around that. ipr advice and guidance. we are also in charge of the technical side of the preservation of high resolution images that we’ve been acquiring over the last thirteen years, and there is a policy that we have to preserve them indefinitely. c. digital professional as service provider: this metaphor reflected the ‘public-facing’ nature of activity, whether internally to students and academics or to external clients paying for services. those leading the teams were responsible for establishing key performance indicators and measuring progress against them in order to demonstrate demand and impact. this required the teams to implement tools and methods of monitoring and evaluating the usage of their services in order to justify their existence. increasing usage required the teams to develop physical and online marketing materials to promote their services both within and outside the institution: you have to market yourself in a way that a commercial business would. we have this remit or objective that all our databases need to be up and running… so we need to make sure that they are properly backed up and looked after. d. digital professional as perpetual student: the need for continual training and development was highlighted as an essential factor in providing an effective service, and reflected the literature emphasising the importance of lifelong learning (evers et al., 1998; field, 2006; blaschke, 2012). remaining informed of changes to copyright law was a key area of concern, as was the need to monitor how file formats are changing and the implications for sustaining access to digital artifacts. the data also indicated that interviewees often found themselves operating at the boundaries of their professional reeves using phenomenography to inform curriculum development journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2014 12 knowledge, in what schon (1987, p.6) describes as ‘indeterminate zones of practice’. completing a given task often involved having to improvise based on accumulated knowledge and experience, resulting in ‘learning on the job’. you’ve got to be up-to-date really, more than anything else. so from my perspective that’s one of the most important things. i’m always very conscious of keeping up to speed. e. digital professional as specialist advisor: providing specialist advice to students, academics and senior management was a regular activity. this advice ranged from the practicalities of using digitisation equipment to ensuring that students and academics understood the implications of digitising their work, and required an understanding of their specific context at the university. providing specialist advice on both the strategic role of digital services and the need to manage risk copyright took place through the writing of policies, technical specifications and workflows, and through face-to-face meetings with key stakeholders. if [students and staff] need any help, they want to digitise something and they’re not sure how to go about it, what’s the correct format, the right procedure? so we’d help advise on that. we also have a remit to provide a strategic direction for digitisation across the university. these metaphors were then used to establish the hierarchical relationships between categories, and these are discussed in the following section. discussion of findings the data indicated that maintaining currency of professional knowledge was fundamental to the activities of all the interviewees, regardless of their specialism, and category d (perpetual student) therefore constitutes the bottom of the hierarchy. given the rapidly changing nature of knowledge in the digital professions (choi and rasmussen, 2006; reeves using phenomenography to inform curriculum development journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2014 13 kennan et al., 2006), it can be assumed that remaining informed of new developments is of growing importance to professionals. entering the paradigm of the technical expert (b) can only be achieved by maintaining currency of knowledge of new systems, processes and ways of working, and category b is therefore dependent on category d. to be a specialist advisor (e) capable of supporting learning and providing strategic guidance, a practitioner needs to be both a technical expert and be at the forefront of new developments in their field. category e is therefore dependent on categories b and d. inhabiting the role of the service provider (c) is only possible if a practitioner is able to provide specialist advice (e) based on their specialist technical ability (b) which is informed by current knowledge and thinking (d). category c is therefore dependent on e, b, and d respectively. central to the researcher paradigm (a) is the creation and dissemination of new knowledge, and it is this interpretation of research that differentiates it from the more general interpretation of researching existing knowledge that might occur in category d (perpetual student). writing up and disseminating research can be viewed as providing specialist advice as its purpose is to enable others to change their practice in light of the research, and category a (researcher) is therefore dependent on category e (specialist advisor). if it is not possible to be a specialist advisor without being a technical expert who is informed by current knowledge, then a is also dependent on b (technical expert) and d (perpetual student). researching often seeks to investigate issues encountered by online service providers in order to identify possible causes and potential solutions and help them improve their service (wu and wang, 2005; jøsang et al., 2007). however, it is still possible to be a service provider without creating new knowledge, and the converse is also true in that it is possible to engage in research and the creation of new knowledge without providing a service. categories a and c can therefore be seen as being neither dominated by, nor dependent on, each other. the hierarchical relationships between the categories of description are presented in figure 1 below: reeves using phenomenography to inform curriculum development journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2014 14 figure 1. outcome space indicating hierarchical relationships between categories. developing appropriate curricula the research revealed that the digital professionals possessed significant tacit knowledge which would be difficult to teach if divorced from its context. this suggests that problembased learning would be a suitable approach to designing appropriate curricula as it would require students to develop knowledge and skills through problem solving (schmidt, 1983; loyens et al., 2008). it is likely that the digital professionals who would be teaching on the course would also feel more comfortable with a problem-based curriculum as it would enable them to use their expertise to design problems which would be familiar to them and facilitate student-centred discussion, rather than trying to distil their knowledge and skills into decontextualised lectures and presentations. it is likely that their experience of the many problems that arise during project-based work would enable the digital professionals to develop the ill-structured problems that form the basis of a problem-based learning curriculum (allen et al., 1996; gallagher, 1997). the data revealed that much of the practice of the digital professionals who participated in the study was highly situated. although participants did attend developmental events to acquire new knowledge, for example around copyright law, they made sense of this new information largely through applying it to real problems and projects within their own institution. if ‘what you know’ might be better understood as an ability to do something reeves using phenomenography to inform curriculum development journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2014 15 (lave, 1996), then the findings suggest that a course in digital curation and sustainability should aim to assess students based on their ability to solve problems by drawing on their experience. a suitable curriculum would therefore need to provide regular opportunities for students to work on real or simulated problems so that they can acquire the contextspecific knowledge and skills to operate effectively in what schon (1987, p.3) terms the ‘swampy lowlands’ of professional practice. loyens et al. (2008) state that a key aim of a problem-based learning curriculum is to enable students to develop their self-directed learning skills, and highlight candy’s (1991) four dimensions of self-directed learning: personal autonomy, self-management in learning, the independent pursuit of learning, and the learner control of instruction. in view of the finding that identified digital professionals as ‘perpetual students’, a problem-based learning approach would therefore be appropriate as it would encourage students to develop a strong aptitude for self-directed learning. in describing the complex nature of the projects they often worked on, the participants revealed that an essential aspect of their role was the need to learn new skills to complete a project. encouraging students to develop a self-directed approach to their learning is therefore a key objective of a curriculum in digital curation and sustainability, as it would aim to make students aware that they often need to act autonomously in order to seek out and acquire the knowledge and skills necessary to solve a problem. group work also plays an essential role in problem-based learning, with the instructor facilitating group discussions and teaching students how to work effectively in a group (bridges and hallinger, 1996). the data revealed that much of the participants’ expertise had been acquired and developed through project-based work, and so providing opportunities for group work in the curriculum would enable students to develop their ability to work collaboratively. conclusion this research aimed to uncover the skills and competencies that students would need to acquire while undertaking a course in digital curation and digital sustainability. the categories of description that emerged during the data analysis have uncovered the core of the professional work undertaken by digital professionals at the university and the main reeves using phenomenography to inform curriculum development journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2014 16 foci of their activity. the category of the perpetual student and its position as the foundational layer of the outcome space highlights schon’s (1987) position that ‘knowingin-action’ is central to professional practice, and that much of this knowledge is acquired through situated learning. the observation that the participants were consistently operating in ‘zones of indeterminate practice’ (schon, 1987, p.6) supports the view that professionals are more than just people applying specialist knowledge (cheetham and chivers, 2000). the outcome space itself indicates the dependency of each specific area of expertise and could be interpreted as representing a form of progression through the disciplines of digital curation and digital sustainability, although further research is required to confirm this hypothesis. the findings of this research illustrate the diverse nature of the work undertaken by digital professionals operating in the areas of digital curation and digital sustainability. having identified the complex nature of their work, it is proposed that introducing a problem-based learning curriculum would enable students in the areas of digital curation and sustainability to acquire the skills and knowledge required to succeed in these professional areas. although the findings suggest that much of the knowledge acquired by the digital professionals has occurred through situated learning, there is still a risk that the categories of description could be used to decontextualise this knowledge and package it into a programme of learning that students acquire before entering the ‘container’ of professional practice (lave, 1993). further research would explore the development of suitable problem-based learning activities to facilitate the acquisition of the knowledge and skills identified in the study. references akerlind, g. (2012) ‘variation and commonality in phenomenographic research methods’, higher education research and development, 31(1), pp. 115-127. allen, d.e., duch, b.j. and groh, s.e. (1996) ‘the power of problem-based learning in teaching introductory science courses’, in wilkerson, l. and gijselaers, w.h. (eds.) bringing problem-based learning to higher education: theory and practice. san francisco: jossey-bass, pp. 43-52. reeves using phenomenography to inform curriculum development journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2014 17 barnett, r. (1994) the limits of competence: knowledge, higher education and society. buckingham: shre and open university press. barrows, h.s. (1996) ‘problem-based learning in medicine and beyond: a brief overview’, in gijselaers, w.h. (ed.) new directions for teaching and learning, no. 68. san francisco: jossey-bass, pp. 3-11. benner, p. (1984) from novice to expert: excellence and power in clinical nursing practice. san francisco: addison-wesley. blaschke, l.m. (2012) ‘heutagogy and lifelong learning: a review of heutagogical practice and self-determined learning’, international review of research in open and distance learning, 13(1) [online]. available at: http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/1076/2087 (accessed: 18 november 2014). bradley, k. (2007) ‘defining digital sustainability’, library trends, 56(1), pp. 148-163. bridges, e.m. and hallinger, p. (1996) ‘problem-based learning in leadership education’, in wilkerson, l. and gijselaers, w.h. (eds.) bringing problem-based learning to higher education: theory and practice. san francisco: jossey-bass, pp. 53-61. candy, p.c. (1991) self-direction for lifelong learning. san francisco: jossey-bass. cheetham, g. and chivers, g. (2000) ‘a new look at competent professional practice’, journal of european industrial training, 27(7), pp. 374-383. choi, y. and rasmussen, e. (2006) ‘what is needed to educate future digital librarians: a study of current practice and staffing patterns in academic and research libraries’, d-lib magazine, 12(9) [online]. available at: http://www.dlib.org/dlib/september06/choi/09choi.html (accessed: 18 november 2014). cohen, l., manion, l. and morrison, k. (2007) research methods in education. oxon: routledge. http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/1076/2087 http://www.dlib.org/dlib/september06/choi/09choi.html reeves using phenomenography to inform curriculum development journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2014 18 cook, s.d.n. and brown, j.s. (1999) ‘bridging epistemologies: the generative dance between organizational knowledge and organizational knowing’, organization science, 10(4), pp. 381-400. crabtree, b. and miller, w. (1999) doing qualitative research. 2 nd edn. london: sage. dall’alba, g. (1998) ‘medical practice as characterised by beginning medical students’, advances in health sciences education, 3(2), pp. 101-118. dall’alba, g. and sandberg, j. (1996) ‘educating for competence in professional practice’, instructional science, 24(6), pp. 411-437. dreyfus, h. and dreyfus, s. (1986) mind over machine: the power of human intuition and expertise in the era of the computer. new york: free press. duggan, f. (2013) ‘why universities should acquire – and teach – digital literacy’, the guardian, blog, 23 april [online]. available at: http://www.theguardian.com/education/2013/apr/23/universities-should-teachdigital-literacy (accessed: 12 november 2013). evers, f., rush, j. and berdrow, i. (1998) the bases of competence: skills for lifelong learning and employability. ontario: jossey-bass. field, j. (2006) lifelong learning and the new educational order. london: trentham books. gallagher, s.a. (1997) ‘problem-based learning: where did it come from, what does it do, and where is it going?’, journal for the education of the gifted, 20(4), pp. 332-362. giorgi, a. (1990) ‘phenomenology, psychological science and common sense’, in semin, g.r. and gergen, k.j. (eds.) everyday understanding: social and scientific implications. london: sage, pp. 64-82. hancock, d. and algozzine, b. (2011) doing case study research: a practical guide for beginning researchers. 2 nd edn. new york: teachers college. http://www.theguardian.com/education/2013/apr/23/universities-should-teach-digital-literacy http://www.theguardian.com/education/2013/apr/23/universities-should-teach-digital-literacy reeves using phenomenography to inform curriculum development journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2014 19 hart, j. (2013, 25 june) ‘from creating content to building new connected workplace skills – this is the new work for learning professionals’, learning in the social workplace [online]. available at: http://www.c4lpt.co.uk/blog/2013/06/25/connected-workplace/ (accessed: 12 november 2013). hatsopoulos, g. and hatsopoulos, m. (2009) ‘the role of tacit knowledge in management’, in sternberg, r. and horvath, j. (eds.) tacit knowledge in professional practice: researcher and practitioner perspectives. london: lawrence erlbaum associates, pp. 141-152. holmstrom, i., halford, c. and rosenqvist, u. (2003) ‘swedish health care professionals’ diverse understandings of diabetes care’, patient education and counselling, 5(1), pp. 53-58. jarche, h. (2010, october 22). network learning: working smarter. life in perpetual beta [online]. available at: http://www.jarche.com/2010/10/network-learning-workingsmarter/ (accessed: 12 november 2013). jøsang, a., ismail, r. and boyd, c. (2007) ‘a survey of trust and reputation systems for online service provision’, decision support systems, 43(2), pp. 618-644. kennan, m.a., willard, p. and wilson, c.s. (2006) ‘what do they want? a study of changing employer expectations of information professionals’, australian academic and research libraries, 37(1), pp. 17-37. larsson, j. and holmstrom, i. (2007) ‘phenomenographic or phenomenological analysis: does it matter? examples from a study on aneastheologists’ work’, international journal of qualitative studies on health and well-being, 2(1), pp. 55-64. larsson, i., bergman, s., fridlund, b. and arvidsson, b. (2010) ‘patients’ independence of a nurse for the administration of subcutaneous anti-tnf therapy: a phenomenographic study’, international journal of qualitative studies on health and well-being, 5(2), pp. 5146-5155. http://www.c4lpt.co.uk/blog/2013/06/25/connected-workplace/ http://www.jarche.com/2010/10/network-learning-working-smarter/ http://www.jarche.com/2010/10/network-learning-working-smarter/ reeves using phenomenography to inform curriculum development journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2014 20 lave, j. (1993) ‘the practice of learning’, in chaikin, s. and lave, j. (eds.) understanding practice: perspectives on activity and context. cambridge: cambridge university press, pp. 3-32. lave, j. (1996) ‘teaching, as learning, in practice’, mind, culture, and activity, 3(3), pp. 149-164. lave, j. and wenger, e. (1991) situated learning: legitimate peripheral participation. new york: cambridge university press. loyens, s.m., magda, j. and rikers, r.m. (2008) ‘self-directed learning in problem-based learning and its relationships with self-regulated learning’, educational psychology review, 20(4), pp. 411-427. maron, n., kirby smith, k. and loy, m. (2009) sustaining digital resources: an on-theground view of projects today. london: jisc. marton, f. (1981) ‘phenomenography – describing conceptions of the world around us’, instructional science, 10(2), pp. 177-200. marton, f. (1986) ‘phenomenography – a research approach investigating different understandings of reality’, journal of thought, 21(2), pp. 28-49. marton, f. (1994) ‘phenomenography’, in husen, t. and postlethwaite, t.n. (eds.) the international encyclopedia of education. 2 nd edn. vol. 8. oxford: pergamon, pp. 4424-4429. marton, f. and booth, s. (1997) learning and awareness. hillsdale, nj: lawrence eribaum. mcdermott, r. (1993) ‘the acquisition of a child by a learning disability’, in chaikin, s. and lave, j. (eds.) understanding practice: perspectives on activity and context. cambridge: cambridge university press, pp. 269-305. merriam, s. (1988) case study research in education. san francisco, c.a: jossey bass. reeves using phenomenography to inform curriculum development journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2014 21 miles, m. and huberman, a. (1984) qualitative data analysis: a sourcebook of new methods. newbury park: ca: sage. pennock, m. (2007) ‘digital curation: a life-cycle approach to managing and preserving usable digital information’, library and archives journal, 1 [online]. available at: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ukoln/staff/m.pennock/publications/docs/libarch_curation.pdf (accessed: 18 november 2014). savin-baden, m. and major, c.h. (2004) foundations of problem-based learning. berkshire: srhe and open university press. schmidt, h.g. (1983) ‘problem-based learning: rationale and description’, medical education, 17(1), pp. 11-16. schon, d.a. (1987) ‘preparing professionals for the demands of practice’, in schon, d.a. (ed.) educating the reflective practitioner. san francisco: jossey-bass, pp. 3-21. sjostrom, b. and dahlgren, l.o. (2002) ‘applying phenomenography in nursing research’, journal of advanced nursing, 40(3), pp. 339-345. smith, n. (1988) ‘mining metaphors for methods of practice’, in fetterman, d.m. (ed.) qualitative approaches to evaluation education: the silent scientific revolution. new york: praeger, pp. 153-175. sternberg, r.j. and horvath, j.a. (eds.) (2009) tacit knowledge in professional practice: researcher and practitioner perspectives. london: lawrence erlbaum associates. wu, j.-h. and wang, s.-c. (2005) ‘what drives mobile commerce? an empirical evaluation of the revised technology acceptance model’, information and management, 42(5), pp. 719-729. yakel, e. (2007) ‘digital curation’, oclc systems and services, 23(4), pp. 335-340. yin, r. (1984) case study research: design and methods. beverley hills: sage. http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ukoln/staff/m.pennock/publications/docs/lib-arch_curation.pdf http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ukoln/staff/m.pennock/publications/docs/lib-arch_curation.pdf reeves using phenomenography to inform curriculum development journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2014 22 yin, r. (2009) case study research: design and methods. 4 th edn. london: sage. author details tony reeves is a programme manager in digital pedagogy in the centre for digital scholarship at the university for the creative arts. currently a doctoral student in technology enhanced learning at the university of lancaster, his research focuses on the impact of online communities on student learning in higher education. using phenomenography to inform curriculum development in the areas of digital curation and digital sustainability abstract introduction literature review research question methodology methodology and data collection researcher bias and reliability ethical issues data analysis and findings a. digital professional as researcher: in this paradigm the focus was on research as a core element of professional work. the job of the digital professional was to engage with existing research projects, either through doing research or managing proj... we’ve got this research remit as well in that we’re not just creating, managing, digital data… but we’re also trying to be proactive in actually researching how that’s done. my prime objective is really bid writing, is writing that funding bid that actually secures you the funding to pursue a particular area of research in the field. and then carrying on that piece of work. discussion of findings developing appropriate curricula conclusion references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special edition: academic peer learning, part two, april 2016 student academic mentoring (sam): peer support and undergraduate study gillian pye edge hill university, uk susan williams edge hill university, uk linda dunne edge hill university, uk abstract university mentoring programmes are increasingly being used to assist and support undergraduate students. mentoring can take various forms, it may be one to one; face to face; small group or online. it may be between student peers or students and tutors. there is no homogeneous approach and differing mentoring schemes emerge from particular contexts. the purpose of the case study research presented in this paper was to critically evaluate an academic mentoring project that involved year 2 undergraduate students mentoring year 1 students on an education-based degree. the tripartite structural approach involved individual, small group and in-class mentoring. research data was collected via semi-structured interviews, focus groups, questionnaires and student, mentor and tutor evaluations. the main themes that emerged, following analysis, relate to academic support, socialisation and attrition. findings also highlight the benefits of a mentoring project that took various forms rather than a singular approach. scaffolded, collaborative learning, in co-caring communities of practice, appeared to positively affect year 1 student confidence, self-efficacy and motivation. other benefits included easing the transition from school to university and engendering a sense of belonging. keywords: peer mentoring; academic support; socialisation; communities of practice. pye et al. student academic mentoring (sam): peer support and undergraduate study journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 2 introduction mentoring and coaching has become a growing phenomenon across the world. the uk government has invested in mentoring in education, health and prison services and this expenditure suggests that it is positive in terms of the results it produces. mentoring programmes are assumed to be of value to students (crisp and cruz, 2009), although the specifics of how, and what structures, features or characteristics can be successfully replicated to benefit others, seem to be less well defined. the aim of the case study research presented in this paper was to evaluate a pilot student academic mentoring (sam) project that involved two year 2 undergraduate students each mentoring five year 1 students from a cohort of 25 on an undergraduate degree in teaching, learning and mentoring (tlm) at a post-1992 university in the northwest of england. we have worked as lecturers, researchers and personal tutors on the tlm degree for a number of years. our research was conducted over the course of an academic year and addressed the question ‘what are the benefits and challenges of undergraduate student academic peer mentoring?’ the tlm degree originated as part of the uk’s higher education widening participation (dbis, 2013) policy agenda and offers pathways into teaching or to employment working with children and young people. there is a greater tendency for working-class students in the uk to go to post-1992 universities, which tend to have more open access, encourage diverse applicants and increase chances of belonging in an academic culture (reay et al., 2010). the impetus for the student academic mentoring (sam) project initially arose from an institutional-wide focus on student induction and retention. in a climate of increased competition and league tables (where further and higher education establishments are judged and ranked on student attainment, satisfaction and degree completion) various strategies, such as student mentoring, are being implemented and evaluated. as duckworth and maxwell (2015) indicate, mentoring, like other care-driven aspects of education, is now in danger of being co-opted into a neoliberal regime characterised by judgements driven by a standards agenda. one of the main aims and purposes of the sam project, in addition to addressing issues relating to student engagement, retention and attrition, was to veer away from judgements or the reinforcement of particular ways of being, and to primarily address fears that new students may have relating to the process of pye et al. student academic mentoring (sam): peer support and undergraduate study journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 3 academic study through the creation of a co-caring, supportive learning community of practice. mentoring a generic definition of academic mentoring does not exist and much of the data generated from studies about mentoring is situational in nature and specifically relates to individual settings (e.g. fox et al., 2010; mee lee and bush, 2003; leidenfrost et al., 2011). given the contextualised nature of mentoring activity, definitions which do exist are equally diverse in nature (terrion and leonard, 2007; darwin and palmer, 2009). jacobi (1991, p. 505) laments the lack of an accepted definition and muses that these activities have little in common to define them other than a ‘sincere desire to help students succeed’; although loots (2009, p.214) counters that there is no ‘meta-paradigm’ into which mentoring fits and the diversity of mentoring activity should be celebrated. for the purpose of our case study, drawing on experience, wider definitions and common themes found in the literature, an academic mentor is understood to be a more experienced individual willing to share knowledge, skills and experiences with someone less experienced in a relationship of mutual trust, predicated on care (pye, 2013). kerry and mayes (1995) offer three basic conceptual models of mentoring; the apprenticeship model (learning by emulating a skilled practitioner); the competency model (undergoing practical training) and the reflective practitioner model (taking an active role in demonstrating and practicing skills). within the context of higher education, a variety of approaches utilising aspects of these three models have been adopted, including dyadic mentoring and peer-tutoring (garvey et al., 2009; mee lee and bush 2003; smailes and gannon-leary, 2011; smith, 2013). these are variously referred to as pal (peer assisted learning), pass (peer assisted study sessions), spam (student peer assisted mentoring) and si (supplemental instruction). one of the three approaches used in sam was similar to darwin and palmer’s (2009) mentoring circles, where small group discussion was facilitated by a mentor, and student experiences and ideas were shared to co-create learning. more formalised models of mentoring in higher education serve a number of purposes, such as student retention, readiness for university, and academic support. these models pye et al. student academic mentoring (sam): peer support and undergraduate study journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 4 are often characterised by mentors and mentees being carefully matched in terms of dispositions and personality and although the power dynamics involved in this kind of relationship can be problematic (christie, 2014; colvin and ashman, 2010), this process does appear to increase mentee motivation, engagement and participation (saich, 2008). even more prevalent in formalised mentoring is the matching of students and mentors in terms of academic modules studied, whereby mentors are more able to offer support in work which they have already undertaken and have an understanding of the assessment requirements (saich, 2008). mentors have been through the process that their mentees are now participating in, and this appears to lead to greater commitment from mentor and mentee (mee lee and bush, 2003). the sam case study was formalised to some extent, but participation as a mentor and mentee was purely voluntary. when mentoring is voluntary, participation is likely to increase; when it is made compulsory or integrated into formal academic study and assessment, difficulties may arise in terms of time and student choice of mentor (mee lee and bush, 2003). the voluntary mentor-mentee relationship is critical (garvey et al., 2009; weinberg and lankau, 2010) and there is a need to build rapport, trust, collaboration and openness in such relationships for them to be productive and impact upon learning (megginson and clutterbuck, 2005). mentors may benefit from the experience of participating in mentoring activities as much as a mentee and may experience reinforced self-esteem and confidence; exhibit a feel-good factor from being able to help another student (something that they may have appreciated themselves in their own studies); deepen their own knowledge by revisiting topics already studied; develop their interpersonal skills and increase their own employability; although there are no widely substantiated claims that mentors benefit academically from the process (kirkham and ringelstein, 2008; mladenovic, 2012; page and hanna, 2008; smith, 2013). when mentoring is structured in a way that is beneficial it may have positive effects on undergraduate socialisation, confidence, self-esteem, perseverance, academic attainment and completion of studies (carnell et al., 2006; saich, 2008; crisp and cruz, 2009; smith, 2013). such support, when resulting in collegiate working mentor-mentee relationships, can ease the transition from school to university life, increase socialisation and engender a sense of belonging (cook and rushton, 2009; loots, 2009; thomas, 2012; collings et al., 2014). pye et al. student academic mentoring (sam): peer support and undergraduate study journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 5 the sam project lave and wenger (1991) place learning in social relationships and in situations of coparticipation where social engagements provide the context and structure for learning to take place. learning involves participation in a community of practice that provides an encompassing process of being active participants in ‘the practices of social communities and constructing identities in relation to these communities’ (wenger, 1999, p.4). the sam project was underpinned by this notion of learner communities of practice and one of the aims was to demystify learning in higher education through peer interaction and support. the nature of sam was in many ways aligned with the nurturing and caring aspects of anderson and shannon’s (1988) model of mentoring that encompasses reflective practice. prior to the project, a job description outlining the mentor role and person specification was issued to year 2 students inviting applications from those wishing to act as academic mentors to year 1 students. from the six applicants, two successful candidates were chosen because of their passion, commitment, caring disposition and desire to offer support and guidance to others. interestingly, the two students had experienced mentoring themselves and both recognised and valued the benefits. the two student academic mentors followed a training and induction programme before the mentoring process began, which focussed on communication skills, support strategies, building rapport, trust and an ethic of care (noddings, 1996). the mentors were then each matched as closely as possible in relation to personality, background, aptitude and so on, with 5 year 1 students who had agreed to be mentored at the start of a new academic year. the programme leader drew on existing knowledge of the year 2 mentors, and on information gained at interview and student profiling of year 1 students to match the mentors with their mentees. it is worth noting that all students were of white british ethnicity, from a working-class background and most of them had part-time employment in order to help finance their undergraduate studies. in attempting to foster a supportive learning culture (bruffee, 1984), the year 2 mentors operated in a variety of ways to support year 1 students. the tripartite structural approach of sam involved individual, small group and in-class mentoring. individual mentoring involved one-to-one contact, with mentors voluntarily engaging with their mentees, both face to face and electronically, to answer questions relating to, amongst other things, academic support, assignment writing and preparation for school-based placement. pye et al. student academic mentoring (sam): peer support and undergraduate study journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 6 mentors were available for small group meetings at the request of their mentees. these group meetings could be regarded as study groups, facilitated and led by the mentor. inclass mentoring involved the mentors participating in tutor-facilitated academic support sessions designed to scaffold the academic writing process for year 1 groups, with the tutor and the academic mentor working jointly on the writing process in a co-construction of learning. this aspect of sam enabled the two mentors to interact with a greater number of students, aside from those having an assigned mentor, and become ‘recognisable’ to the first year student cohort as a whole. this interaction and visibility was encouraged as it was felt that it would consolidate trust, rapport and enable all year 1 students to witness, and to some extent experience, the mentor role. research approach the ontological and epistemological position of this paper is an interpretivist one, within a qualitative paradigm. a value of qualitative interpretivist research is that it is set within naturalistic and holistic confines and as a result can offer a variety of interpretations and explanations utilising naturally occurring data (mcewan-adkins and mcewan 2003; taber, 2013). punch (2006, p.49) maintains that qualitative studies can often be an ‘unfolding study’ and a case study approach was an appropriate way to illuminate the characteristics of the mentoring project. bassey (1999, p.65) defines case study research as: an empirical enquiry into interesting aspects of educational activity…to inform judgements or decisions…with data…to explore the significant features for the work, create plausible interpretations…to test for trustworthiness and construct an argument or story. a case study approach allowed for an in-depth exploration of the sam project over a sustained period of time and an evaluation of its impact from within its natural setting (burton and bartlett, 2005). all those who participated in sam, (students and tutors) were informed of the projects aims and purposes. ethical permission to conduct the research was obtained from the university and those involved in data collection signed consent forms and understood they could withdraw from the project at any time. pye et al. student academic mentoring (sam): peer support and undergraduate study journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 7 a pre and post-mentoring anonymised questionnaire, designed to ascertain feelings and perceptions (denscombe, 2010) was given to all students within the year 1 cohort asking about their attitudes towards, and experiences of, academic study at the start and end of the project. the ten mentored students, the two mentors and three module tutors were interviewed towards the end of the academic year in order to gain their perspectives. interviews were regarded as conversations with a purpose (denscombe, 2010) and they provided an opportunity to explore in some depth the complexities of the project. openended questions allowed for personal accounts and adaptations of experiences and access to the ‘main road to multiple realities’ (stake, 1995, p.64). the research sample size was relatively small, yet setting out to understand students’ attitudes and perceptions of sam, allowed us, as researchers, to ‘mine the richness and depth’ (silverman, 2013, p.66) of this particular unfolding case study story. follow-up focus groups were conducted that allowed the ten mentored students an arena for feedback that was supportive and non-threatening (menter et al., 2011). focus groups involve a blend of observation and interviewing (morgan, 1997), facilitate group discussion and put multiple perspectives on the table. kamberelis and dimitriadis (2005) suggest that they allow researchers to explore the nature and effects of ongoing social discourse in ways that are not possible through individual interviews and observations. the 45-minute focus group sessions were held in a convivial setting and were audio-recorded and later transcribed. they were conducted by the mentors, based on a desire to acknowledge the power dynamic between researcher(s) and students. we felt that the students’ would show greater openness in discussing with the mentors rather than with the tutor/research team and may have helped to reduce researcher bias. observation, as a method of collecting rich qualitative data in naturalistic settings, reveals information not seen in interviews and focus groups. behaviours, interactions and activities were observed where students and mentors were operating in their ‘real’ environment (silverman, 2013), that is, in the classroom. participant observation gave access to, and a greater awareness of, the more salient issues which assisted in analysis and subsequent interpretation of analysed data (menter et al., 2011). analysis is the researcher’s equivalent of alchemy; the elusive process by which raw data is turned into ‘nuggets of pure gold’ (briggs and coleman, 2007, p.68). the first stage of analysis was ‘data management and data reduction’ (elton-chalcraft et al., 2008, p.132) and the creation of an ‘audit trail’, whereby steps were re-traced through the whole process. content analysis pye et al. student academic mentoring (sam): peer support and undergraduate study journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 8 involved coding and cross referencing of the data sets (gibbs, 2008), with the aid of thematic mind maps to elicit emergent themes which are discussed in the following section. findings as indicated earlier, a particular and possibly unique feature of the sam project was the tripartite structural approach that comprised of individual mentoring, small group mentoring akin to mentoring circles (darwin and palmer, 2009), and also mentoring of the same small groups in tutor-led academic support sessions that involved the whole cohort of year 1 students and in-class support. the three approaches appeared to work very well and were evaluated positively. the themes that emerged from analysis relate to academic support, socialisation and attrition. academic support from responses to the pre-mentoring questionnaire, it was clear that year 1 students who had opted to be mentored had felt anxious or concerned about academic writing at the start of term; did not feel particularly confident about approaching academic study generally and needed extra re-assurance that they ‘were doing things right’. students signified that they wanted assurance that the academic support being offered by mentors was of a similar quality as that offered by a tutor. some peer-mentoring programmes that have focused on a dyadic model of mentoring have reported success in raising attainment of students (kirkham and ringelstein, 2008; loots, 2009; fox et al., 2010; leidenfrost et al., 2011). in focus group discussions, students who had had regular one to one mentoring responded positively when discussing academic support, asserting that they felt much more assured and confident about planning, writing and referencing. the mentored students encapsulated their feelings towards the three approaches by stating: i liked the way it was set up … you could go on your own but the group sessions were really useful too. pye et al. student academic mentoring (sam): peer support and undergraduate study journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 9 i would feel better about approaching the mentor if it was part of a small group session. i’d like the mentors to be able to spend more time with small groups in the academic support sessions. when discussing the student benefits associated with taking part in the one to one, as well as the small and wider group mentoring, students appreciated talking about assignments, assessment and study skills. it was great to hear mentors talk about the assessment they had done before. they helped to explain the referencing system to me and improved the quality of my work by asking me questions about it. they could recommend certain books or journals for certain lectures or topics and enhanced study skills. all mentored students unanimously identified the whole-class academic support sessions, where collaborative working between tutors, mentors and students occurred, as being a particularly helpful support mechanism for reflection and sharing of ideas. they appreciated the opportunity to work on their assignment drafts in academic communities of practice (lave and wenger, 1991) that were akin to mentoring circles (darwin and palmer, 2009). where mentored students were encouraged to work collaboratively in a wider group, under the guidance of the mentor, positive effects seemed to follow, reflecting other research around mentoring, collaboration and feedback (elder, 2012; hattie, 2012). within tutor-led academic support sessions mentors and mentees worked together in small groups, sharing and exploring questions and ideas collectively. tutors commented that a more systematic and analytical approach to writing had developed: students have developed strengths in how to tackle a particular question…they now have a sense of which direction to go in approaching a question. i’ve noticed a huge difference...their level of engagement and their confidence levels seems to have gone up considerably. pye et al. student academic mentoring (sam): peer support and undergraduate study journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 10 collaborative learning was valued as a way of working and a learning culture (bruffee, 1984) was beginning to develop. the domain of this community was the classroom and learning conversations were centred on what the students were writing and why they were writing in a particular way. during observations, it was noted that students asked questions of themselves and their writing, demonstrating a developing understanding of the academic process. for example, ‘i’ve linked two authors like this...would this be accurate?’ and ‘can i reference these authors to talk about this…?’ the nature of these learning conversations became more reflective via gentle but in-depth questioning by the mentors when supporting and scaffolding the learning of their mentees. this was corroborated by a tutor interview where it was remarked that: there were lots of really interesting conversations going on…the mentors were really challenging the students. mentors and students appeared to become more resilient in their approach to more challenging aspects of study and less reliant solely on tutors for continuous support and guidance (kirkham and ringelstein, 2008; smith, 2013). interestingly, the students who had not opted to participate in mentoring had arranged themselves into self-selecting, friendship-based support groups, which seemed to provide the same support mechanism as offered by the mentors, suggesting that students benefit from a multitude of mentors. this particular group of students were more academically able (based on ucas entry point scores) and possibly more confident about academic writing. the support and care they offered to each other mirrored the way the mentors supported their mentees, in a similar way that mentoring circles have seen a move away from the traditional dyadic model of mentoring to a more collaborative approach (smith, 2013). this collaboration, and the ethos of the classroom, signalled, for us, a ‘lack of isolation felt by students, an increase in confidence, greater knowledge acquisition and a demystification of academia’ (darwin and palmer, 2009, p.127). being able to talk about school professional placement, and how the degree relates to schooling and education, was a real positive for the mentees and appeared to allay anxieties. at the earliest point in an undergraduate career the most useful support for a student can come from someone who has experienced what they are experiencing now pye et al. student academic mentoring (sam): peer support and undergraduate study journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 11 (saich, 2008) and this appeared to be the case during the sam project. several mentees commented that talking through the approaches to lesson planning was extremely valuable as preparation for school placement. a mentor’s own learning improves as they learn to teach others, thus developing key employability skills for the future (thomas, 2012). the mentors derived unforeseen benefits from the process of mentoring, stating: i have gained more confidence in completing my own assignments after doing this…i have learned a lot about how to offer others help and support. the mentor programme has helped confirm for me my future career direction...mentoring is what i want to do. in terms of the kinds of teaching and learning related activities undertaken, as with other studies, the mentors felt mostly confident in supporting in areas that they had previously studied themselves (saich, 2008; mee lee and bush, 2003), although there were initial fears stemming from the unexpected and unfamiliar: i was apprehensive at first because i didn’t know what to expect…after the first few sessions i felt i knew what i was offering in terms of support. at first it was a daunting prospect to be trusted to work with other students…i wasn’t sure i knew what to do…but when i started i knew i had the skills to do this. tutor interviews substantiated the benefits of the mentoring role: when asked if they felt it had an impact on the mentors they commented: definitely i think particularly for one of them who wants to follow mentoring as a career. it has enabled her to grow enormously. it has built her confidence…and to believe in her own abilities…and helped in realising she really wants to do this. i noticed a level of professionalism has grown: they [mentors] were coming in with resources after the first week, with suggestions, or had been and looked at something. alex said “you know they got back to me the same day” so there was a pye et al. student academic mentoring (sam): peer support and undergraduate study journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 12 level of engagement between them. they responded like you would with a class, responding to peoples’ needs. so i think in terms of growth for the second year mentors...certainly. what i saw was a degree of professionalism growing. socialisation and attrition the sam project manifested additional benefits in that students suggested that they had become more socialised to the university and to their course of study. mentoring schemes have been adopted as a means of preventing student attrition (saich, 2008; smith, 2013) and whilst sam did not have this singularly explicit aim, there seems to be some evidence that it did encourage students to stay on board with their studies. a student in perceived danger of withdrawing from the degree due to mental health difficulties seemed to have renewed commitment to study in response to the ethos and spirit of the project. tutors commented that: one student in particular who was quite worrying, in that he could have dropped out...i think the mentoring process with its ethos…that made that group of students who were befriending him, brought him on and encouraged him to write his assignment and to be more focussed. so i think this student, who we could have potentially lost, stayed. the students themselves were taking on this mentoring culture, and perhaps gathered him in and encouraged and motivated him…whereas, maybe you know…perhaps tutors and lecturers were a little too remote? i think the help they got, helped them to bond a little better...because there was a potential divide in that group and strangely enough the mentors helped create a bond...in the academic writing session there was lots of dialogue drawing the two groups together. students commented that they felt comfortable in approaching the mentors if they needed help and mentors reported on the positive impact of the matching of the students to mentors. a mentor commented that: i got on with the students and this made it easier to work with them on the academic stuff. pye et al. student academic mentoring (sam): peer support and undergraduate study journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 13 this was further exemplified by a tutor comment: i think there was a deep level of trust developing there between the students and mentors. socialisation appeared to be predicated on mutual trust: there was trust and mutual respect between the students and mentors and the students certainly were taking on board what the mentors were saying to them. bernier et al. (2005) suggest that the greater correlation in deliberately attempting to match mentor and students, the greater the outcome of success. along with openness and the development of friendships, came the narrow line between friendship and what may be termed ‘professionalism’, and some students questioned the nature of the mentor-student relationship in terms of over-familiarity. some students, not participating in the one to one aspect of the project, felt that some individuals took over and dominated the mentor’s time and, as one commented: ‘it seems like the mentors worked with small groups and became friends with them’. mentees appeared to benefit from exposure to mentoring in academic as well psychosocial ways (mladonevic, 2012) and knowledge acquisition appeared to accelerate by opportunities to discuss lecture and assessment work with others, which increased confidence to tackle other aspects of study. the psychosocial benefits to the students may have engendered a sense of belonging to the institution and aided transition from school to university (thomas, 2012), although this was not an aspect explored in great depth. the mentors and mentees did signify that they felt they ‘belonged’ to the university and this sense of belonging appeared to have been nurtured by socialisation, care and dialogue. in relation to mentees, tutors remarked that: i think the transition into higher education has become a little smoother because they have had someone they can talk to about university life as well as academic study. pye et al. student academic mentoring (sam): peer support and undergraduate study journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 14 i think the year 1 group is acting as a more cohesive group than the previous group of students the year before at the same stage. there was a real bond developing within this group as a result of the way in which they were working. there was good, healthy dialogue. discussion our research set out to address the question ‘what are the benefits and challenges of undergraduate student academic mentoring?’ a number of significant benefits emerged from sam that included an apparent strengthening of student engagement with university life, sense of belonging to the institution and the fostering of a community of practice. sam formed a key role within an intervention strategy, feeding into student academic support sessions, as well as the students drawing on the skills of the mentors on a one to one or small group basis. by collaborating in academic support sessions and by participating in one to one mentoring, students’ confidence levels appeared to increase and their self-efficacy was enhanced by their involvement in the project. those students participating more fully in the one to one mentoring would seem to have benefitted from the individualised guidance and support on aspects of writing, but what also appears to have been revealed is the mutual benefit for all students within the wider cohort. students have been exposed to learning conversations between peers and mentors adding some intellectual richness to student learning opportunities (o’shea and vincent, 2011; elder, 2012; smith, 2013). socialisation of students has been a contributory feature to the success of sam and the collaborative nature of much of the mentoring activity allowed both socialisation and academic activities to exist simultaneously (smith, 2013). although student retention was not an overriding reason for investigation at the beginning of the project, there are signs that sam has had an impact, not necessarily directly through the mentoring activity, but through the peer-supported group of students, who mirrored the work of the mentors in their own friendship-based study group. matching students as far as possible, alongside the voluntary nature of the project, did appear to foster a more productive and collegiate working relationship and is more likely to help to retain students who may otherwise have given up on their studies (weinberg and lankau, 2010). pye et al. student academic mentoring (sam): peer support and undergraduate study journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 15 universities often state their reasons for engaging with mentoring are to recruit and retain students on their degree programmes (saich, 2008), yet few institutions appear to use the prevalence of a mentoring scheme as a marketing tool, or a means of highlighting peer support to prospective students (cook and rushton, 2009). the mentors signified that they wished they had a mentor in their first year to support them and this suggests that the relative success of sam ought to be included in marketing materials that focus on the recruitment of students who may be reticent or fearful about studying at university. the perception of the students themselves is that they believe participating in the mentoring process has developed them as learners. this has made them more likely to act as mentors themselves in the future and has, for some, consolidated career choices. one challenge that emerged was largely related to relationships and mentor – mentee relationship boundaries. it is perhaps inevitable that mentors and mentees may become emotionally attached, given the nature of the relationship (collings et al., 2014). ‘mentor’ as ‘friend’ is fine as a mentor-mentee outcome, but the focus of mentoring may become distorted by ‘becoming friends’ from the start (christie, 2014). as zier-vogel and barry (2013) suggest, the ethics of the mentoring relationship is crucial and they cannot be left to chance. issues that arose, such as the blurred boundaries between what may be termed ‘professionalism’ and friendship, will be addressed in future mentor training via scenarios and role play. that students signified they wanted assurance that the academic support being offered by mentors was of the same quality as that offered by a tutor suggested that the mentor role needs to be more strongly clarified for the whole student cohort. this has implications for the training of mentors in that they perhaps need to feel secure in their own subject knowledge and have the cognitive scaffolding (millar, 2002) and support strategies to give that guidance to other students (zier-vogel and barry, 2013). the integrity of the mentor’s position in supporting other students cannot be compromised, and the trust and openness that can develop within these relationships is complimented by willingness and a capacity to genuinely support and guide students rather than completing work on their behalf. hence, students and mentors need a shared understanding that mentoring is not a substitute for tutor support and that the nature of the student-mentor relationship is different to a student-tutor one. pye et al. student academic mentoring (sam): peer support and undergraduate study journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 16 conclusion evaluative findings from the sam case study contribute to the work already undertaken in the area of creating learning communities, or communities of practice (lave and wenger, 1991), where students can explore and collaborate on their work and share experiences within that practice (tinto, 1997; cook and rushton, 2009; darwin and palmer, 2009; smailes and gannon-leary, 2011; smith, 2013). our research has provided an insight into the ways in which students’ motivation, through cooperation and co-construction, can foster a collegiate commitment to a programme of study that is particularly valuable for students from working class backgrounds who may, for whatever reason, feel that they do not fit in or ‘belong’ at university (reay et al., 2010). the tripartite mentoring model, which comprised of individual, small group and also mentoring of the same small groups in tutor-led in-class academic support sessions, was more beneficial, overall, than a singular model. the in-class academic support demonstrates some uniqueness in sam’s approach and potentially changes the nature of future tutor-led or learning services academic sessions at the university. sam has been welcomed by students and mentors who expressed a desire for the project to continue and a willingness to participate in the project, as mentors, in future years. in the meantime, we will continue to implement and research sam as it develops and evolves. the intention is to widen and extend the tripartite academic mentoring model and to further incorporate a mentoring circles model (darwin and palmer, 2009) for finding solutions to challenges that may arise during student professional placement experience in schools. there is much possibility for development (for example, incorporating sam into the undergraduate curriculum) and for further research on aspects of the project. at the time of writing, in-depth case study research is being undertaken exploring the learning experiences of two students, one of whom was considering leaving university prior to his involvement with sam. further research is also being planned on the quantitative impact of sam and the raising in attainment of academic scores, via a longitudinal study that may establish a relationship between peer mentoring and academic success. pye et al. student academic mentoring (sam): peer support and undergraduate study journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 17 references anderson, e. and shannon, a. (1988) ‘towards a conceptualization of mentoring’, journal of teacher education, 39(1), pp. 38-42. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/002248718803900109 bassey, m. (1999) case study research in educational settings. buckingham: open university press. bernier, a., larose, s. and soucy, n. (2005) ‘academic mentoring in college: the interactive role of student’s and mentor’s dispositions’, research in higher education, 46(1), pp. 29-51. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11162-004-6288-5 briggs, a. and coleman, m. (eds.) (2007) research methods in educational leadership and management. 2nd edn. london: sage publications. bruffee k. a. (1984) ‘collaborative learning and the “conversation of mankind”’, college english, 46(7), pp. 635-652. burton, d. and bartlett, s. (2005) practitioner research for teachers. london: sage publications. carnell, e., macdonald, j. and askew, s. (2006) coaching and mentoring in higher education: a learning-centred approach. london: institute of education. christie, h. (2014) ‘peer mentoring in higher education: issues of power and control’, teaching in higher education, 19(8), pp. 955-965. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2014.934355 collings, r., swanson, v. and watkins, r. (2014) ‘the impact of peer mentoring on levels of student wellbeing, integration and retention: a controlled comparative evaluation of residential students in uk higher education’, higher education, 68(6), pp. 927942. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10734-014-9752-y http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/002248718803900109 http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11162-004-6288-5 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2014.934355 mailto:%20r. javascript:__dolinkpostback('','ss~~ar%20%22swanson%2c%20v.%22%7c%7csl~~rl',''); javascript:__dolinkpostback('','ss~~ar%20%22watkins%2c%20r.%22%7c%7csl~~rl',''); http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10734-014-9752-y pye et al. student academic mentoring (sam): peer support and undergraduate study journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 18 colvin, j. w. and ashman, m. (2010) ‘roles, risks, and benefits of peer mentoring relationships in higher education’, mentoring and tutoring: partnership in learning, 18(2), pp. 121–134. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13611261003678879 cook, a. and rushton, b. (2009) how to recruit and retain higher education students: a handbook of good practice. oxon: routledge. crisp, g. and cruz, i. (2009) ‘mentoring college students: a critical review of the literature between 1990 and 2007’, research in higher education, 50(6), pp. 525-545. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11162-009-9130-2 darwin, a. and palmer, e. (2009) ‘mentoring circles in higher education’, higher education research and development, 28(2), pp. 125-136. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07294360902725017 denscombe, m. (2010) the good research guide: for small-scale social research projects. berkshire: open university press. department for business, innovation and skills (dbis) (2013) widening participation in higher education. available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/widening-participation-in-highereducation (accessed: 19 april 2016). duckworth, v. and maxwell, b. (2015) ‘extending the mentor role in initial teacher education: embracing social justice’, international journal of mentoring and coaching in education, 4(1), pp. 4-20. http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/ijmce-08-20140032 elder, z. (2012) full on learning: involve me and i’ll understand. carmarthen: crown house publishing. elton-chalcraft, s., hansen, a. and twistleton, s. (2008) doing classroom research: a step-by-step guide for student teachers. berkshire: open university press. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13611261003678879 http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11162-009-9130-2 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07294360902725017 https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/widening-participation-in-higher-education https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/widening-participation-in-higher-education http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/ijmce-08-2014-0032 http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/ijmce-08-2014-0032 pye et al. student academic mentoring (sam): peer support and undergraduate study journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 19 fox, a., stevenson, l., connelly, p., duff, a. and dunlop, a. (2010) ‘peer-mentoring undergraduate accounting students: the influence on approaches to learning and academic performance’, active learning in higher education, 11(2), pp.145-156. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1469787410365650 garvey, b., stokes, p. and megginson, d. (2009) coaching and mentoring: theory and practice. london: sage publications. gibbs, g. (2008) analysing qualitative data. london: sage. hattie, j. (2012) visible learning for teachers: maximising impact for learning. oxon: routledge. jacobi, m. (1991) ‘mentoring and undergraduate academic success: a literature review’. review of educational research, 61(4), pp. 503-532. http://dx.doi.org/10.3102/00346543061004505 kamberelis, g. and dimitriadis, g. (2005) ‘focus groups: strategic articulations of pedagogy, politics and inquiry’, in denzin n. and lincoln y. (eds.) the sage handbook of qualitative research. 3rd edn. london: sage publications, pp. 887-914. kerry, t. and mayes, a. (eds.) (1995) issues in mentoring. london: routledge. kirkham, r. and ringelstein, d. (2008) ‘student peer assisted mentoring (spam): a conceptual framework’, e-journal of business education and scholarship of teaching, 2(2), pp. 39-49. lave, j. and wenger, e. (1991) situated learning: legitimate peripheral participation. cambridge: cambridge university press. leidenfrost, b., strassnig, b., schabmann, a., speil, c. and carbon, c. (2011) ‘peer mentoring styles and their contribution to academic success among mentees: a person-oriented study in higher education’, mentoring and tutoring: partnership in learning, 19(3), pp. 347-364. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13611267.2011.597122 http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1469787410365650 http://dx.doi.org/10.3102/00346543061004505 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13611267.2011.597122 pye et al. student academic mentoring (sam): peer support and undergraduate study journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 20 loots, a. (2009) ‘student involvement and retention in higher education: the case for academic peer mentoring programmes for first years’, education as change, 13(1), pp. 211-235. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/16823200902945077 mcewan-adkins, e. and mcewan, p. (2003) making sense of research: what’s good, what’s not and how to tell the difference. london: sage publications. mee lee, l. and bush, t. (2003) ‘student mentoring in higher education: hong kong baptist university’, mentoring and tutoring: partnership in learning, 11(3), pp. 263271. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1361126032000138319 megginson, d. and clutterbuck, d. (2005) techniques for coaching and mentoring. oxford: butterworth-heinemann. menter, i., elliot, d., hulme, m., lewin, j. and lowden, k. (2011) a guide to practitioner research in education. london: sage publications. millar, a. (2002) mentoring students and young people: a handbook of effective practice. london: kogan-page limited. mladonevic, m. (2012) mentoring in higher education, virginia polytechnic institute and state university, fall issue. available at: http://milosnmladenovic.info/professor%20milos%20mladenovic%20publications/m entoring%20in%20higher%20education%20-%20mladenovic.pdf (accessed: 19 april 2016). morgan, d. (1997) focus groups as qualitative research. 2nd edn. london: sage publications. noddings, n. (1996) ‘the cared-for’, in gordon, s., benner, p. and noddings, n. (eds). caregiving: readings in knowledge, practice, ethics, and politics. philadelphia: university of pennsylvania press, pp. 21-39. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/16823200902945077 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1361126032000138319 http://milosnmladenovic.info/professor%20milos%20mladenovic%20publications/mentoring%20in%20higher%20education%20-%20mladenovic.pdf http://milosnmladenovic.info/professor%20milos%20mladenovic%20publications/mentoring%20in%20higher%20education%20-%20mladenovic.pdf pye et al. student academic mentoring (sam): peer support and undergraduate study journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 21 o’shea, s. and vincent, m. (2011) ‘uni-start: a peer-led orientation activity for the early and timely engagement of commencing university students’, the journal of continuing higher education, 59(3), pp. 152-160. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07377363.2011.614885 page, d. and hanna, d. (2008) ‘peer mentoring: the students’ perspective’, psychology learning and teaching, 7(2), pp. 34-37. http://dx.doi.org/10.2304/plat.2008.7.2.34 punch, k. (2006) developing effective research proposals. 2nd edn. london: sage publications. pye, g. (2013) student academic mentoring. unpublished thesis. edge hill university. reay, d., crozier, g. and clayton, j. (2010) '‘fitting in' or 'standing out': working-class students in uk higher education’, british educational research journal, 36(1), pp. 107-124. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01411920902878925 saich, g. (2008) ‘explicit first year support through university student mentoring’ international journal of learning, 15(10), pp. 1-10. silverman, d. (2013) doing qualitative research: a practical handbook. 4th edn. london: sage publications. smailes, j. and gannon-leary, p. (2011) ‘peer-mentoring: is a virtual form of support a viable alternative?’, research in learning technology, 19(2), pp. 129-142. smith, t. (ed.) (2013) undergraduate curricular peer mentoring programs: perspectives on innovation by faculty, staff and students. maryland: rowan and littlefield publishing group inc. stake, r. (1995) the art of case study research. london: sage publications. taber, k. (2013) classroom-based research and evidence-based practice. 2nd edn. london: sage publications. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07377363.2011.614885 http://dx.doi.org/10.2304/plat.2008.7.2.34 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01411920902878925 pye et al. student academic mentoring (sam): peer support and undergraduate study journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 22 terrion, j. and leonard, d. (2007) ‘a taxonomy of the characteristics of student peer mentors in higher education: findings from a literature review’, mentoring and tutoring: partnership in learning, 15(2), pp. 149-164. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13611260601086311 thomas, l. (2012) building student engagement and belonging in higher education at a time of change: final report from the ‘what works? student retention & success programme’. available at: https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/sites/default/files/what_works_final_report.pdf (accessed: 27 april 2016). tinto, v. (1997) ‘classrooms as communities: exploring the educational character of student persistence’, journal of higher education, 68(6), pp. 599-623. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/2959965 weinberg, f. and lankau, m. (2010) ‘formal mentoring programmes: a mentor-centric and longitudinal analysis’, the journal of management, 37(6), pp. 1527-1557. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0149206309349310 wenger, e. (1999) communities of practice: learning, meaning and identity. cambridge: cambridge university press. zier-vogel, k. and barry, a. (2013) ‘supporting peer mentors: recruiting, educating and rewarding peer mentors’, in smith, t. (ed.) undergraduate curricular peer mentoring programs: perspectives on innovation by faculty, staff and students. maryland: the rowman and littlefield publishing group inc., pp. 151-156. author details gillian pye is programme leader for several undergraduate ba honours degrees and her areas of expertise include pedagogies and mentoring. susan williams is a lecturer on undergraduate professional education programmes in the areas of teaching, learning and peer mentoring. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13611260601086311 https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/sites/default/files/what_works_final_report.pdf http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/2959965 http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0149206309349310 pye et al. student academic mentoring (sam): peer support and undergraduate study journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 23 linda dunne is a lecturer and research fellow. she teaches on undergraduate and postgraduate programmes in education. literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 8: march 2015 learning development and education for sustainability: what are the links? jennie winter plymouth university, uk graham barton, fhea university of the arts london, uk joseph allison plymouth university, uk debby cotton plymouth university, uk abstract learning development (ld) is an emerging discipline developing a unique disciplinary identity. in common with many other new fields, it considers its position and relevance to other disciplines and bodies of thought, and in particular, educational development, applied linguistics and the sociology and philosophy of education. this paper considers one such area of debate: the link between learning development and education for sustainability (efs). efs is an area of pedagogic practice and a field of enquiry of considerable and growing importance in higher education (he) and universities. its underpinning systemic and epistemic philosophies suggest the need for integration across all facets of university activity, including ld. in this paper, we argue that there are identifiable links between ld and efs that extend these philosophies, practices and fields of enquiry, characterised by the following: 1) commonalities surrounding the foci of their pedagogic practices, 2) shared methodologies for undertaking their practices, and 3) ways in which these methodologies are helping to situate both professions and disciplines within organisational contexts. the commonalities and possible distinctions between ld and efs form a starting point for discussion, and raise the possibility that explicit identification of the links may encourage increased collaboration between the respective communities of practice, and the development of new ideas and innovative practices. winter et al. learning development and education for sustainability: what are the links? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 2 keywords: sustainability literacy; academic fluency; systemic thinking; transformation; application to practice. introduction overview – learning development the emergence of learning development (ld) has come about as a result of competing agendas and turbulent times. the considerable expansion of the higher education (he) sector in the early 1990s, a corresponding increase in participation rates, and a relative decline in public funding resulted in students being drawn from an increasingly diverse ‘range of educational, cultural and linguistic backgrounds’ (lea and stierer, 2000, p. 2), with seemingly less time afforded to tutor contact. it was in response to this, recognising the need to support these students in their academic studies, that ld was first conceptualised (hilsdon, 2011). as it has developed its range of pedagogic practices, philosophies and fields of enquiry, ld is notable in its student-facing work practices that perhaps distinguish it from other educational development practices: while educational developers work predominantly with academic staff and departments (for example through validation, teacher development and curriculum enhancement), ld is concerned with bringing these developmental perspectives to the student experience directly, not only for the benefit of student learning but also as feedback loops into institutional processes and contexts such as assessment design. ld is therefore focused on exploring with students how they learn, how they make sense of academic conventions, and how they can increase levels of enquiry into, and critical participation in, such conventions and practices. further, it supports students in holistic development and in acquiring the generic underpinning skills appropriate to the environment in which they are working (aldinhe, 2013). ld promotes the development of students’ academic ‘voice’ through enhancing their understanding of academic conventions, developing critical thinking and reflection strategies, written and verbal communication skills, writing and creativity. it is oriented towards creating conditions for learners to increase awareness of learning processes, purposes and conditions, in turn giving them the ability to accomplish various academic practices, and to extend possibilities for situating themselves meaningfully, personally and professionally. whilst this is, of course, also the domain of formal curricula, ld emphasises the value for learners of viewing disciplinary contexts from a different, reflective perspective in order for an individual to become more aware of the development winter et al. learning development and education for sustainability: what are the links? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 3 of his or her capacities, capabilities and competences. ld is as much about developing awareness and criticality as it is about developing a pre-determined set of skills, literacies or capabilities. overview – education for sustainability the world is facing many issues including economic austerity, social and economic inequality, threats to food security, increased health risks, climate change, shrinking biodiversity, and declining water and fossil fuel resources. this has led to increasing support for ‘sustainable development’; development that recognises the interlinked nature of society, economy and environment and that can ‘meet the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’ (wced, 1987, p.16). this involves changes in the way we think to develop more sustainable ways of living and working and education for sustainability (efs) has been developed to help facilitate this. sterling (2012, p. 9) defines efs as ‘about the kinds of education, teaching and learning that appear to be required if we are concerned about ensuring social, economic and ecological wellbeing, now and into the future. it helps people to cope with, manage and shape social and ecological conditions characterised by change, uncertainty, risk and complexity. within the education sector, he has been identified through a series of united nations and international university agreements as uniquely placed to take a leading role in implementing efs – talloires declaration, 1990 (unesco, 1990); halifax declaration, 1991 (lester pearson institute for international development, 1992); copernicus charter, 1993 (cre-copernicus, 1994); bonn declaration (unesco, 2009). in reality, however, progress has been variable because of the conceptual and logistical challenges efs poses. efs has developed from philosophical underpinnings in technorationalism; the belief that technology is the rational and scientific means to solve sustainability issues and has typically focused on information provision and technological developments as ways to foster pro-environmental and pro-sustainable behaviour change. however, regardless of growing scientific consensus around the impeding impacts of climate change, peak oil and associated sustainability issues, individuals, organisations and industry have resisted changes which impact on their lifestyles, culture and prosperity (harich, 2010). greater understanding of the cultural implications of sustainability change has led educators to explore and foster interpretivist and socially critical approaches (robottom and hart, 1993) winter et al. learning development and education for sustainability: what are the links? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 4 which emphasise metacognitive competency, self-reflection and awareness of the interconnectedness of human and natural systems (sterling, 2004). in an he context, this involves the development of systemic and epistemic thinking skills within individual learners, within and beyond curricula; responses that transcend discipline and other models of institutional organisation and call for institutional and organisational transformation. efs is challenging for an he sector which is rooted in disciplinary traditions (becher and trowler, 2001) and has traditionally objectified learning (bekir and wiley, 2007), through prioritising the transmissive delivery of content-based curricula rather than focusing on developing student understanding and practices however, and conversely, ‘enormous potential exists for universities to be leaders in challenging the status quo, challenging paradigms and openly practising new ways of living, teaching and learning’ (moore, 2005 p.78). universities are ideal sites in which to present and debate the ideological struggles of society (castells, 2001) and there is increasing political, scholarly and student support for this agenda (bone and agombar, 2011; drayson et al., 2012). discussion already, in the brief descriptions of efs and ld above, some common themes emerge which indicate the existence of commonalities between these two fields of work. in the context of he, the focus of work has tended to rest on the development of relevant literacies and cognition, with both areas moving in recent years towards support for metacognition and, particularly in the case of sustainability, to developing systemic understanding alongside sustainability literacies such as self-reflection and resilience (sterling, 2010-11). similarly, the pedagogic practices used to develop such literacies share similarities, as well as many of the constraints (discussed further below). both ld and efs pedagogies are underpinned by a philosophical stance that encourages a focus on interpreting and influencing the conditions of learning and the learning ecology or eco-system under which understandings are developed and emerge. this systemic viewpoint leads us to propose that within the context of he, both fields have emerged as organisational responses to a changing environment, associated with increasing levels of complexity in learning contexts, and are continuing to evolve within this system. in recognition of these similarities, this paper sets out suggestions for building a symbiotic relationship between ld and efs in terms of: winter et al. learning development and education for sustainability: what are the links? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 5 1) commonalities surrounding the foci of their pedagogic practices. 2) shared methodologies for undertaking practices. 3) ways in which these methodologies are helping to situate both professions and disciplines within organisational contexts. these are now considered in turn. 1) commonalities surrounding the foci of pedagogic practices commonalities exist between some aspects of sustainability literacy and literacies associated with academic study practices, not least in shared approaches and understandings of the underpinning conditions required for individual development. the focus of work in ld has evolved via models of information deficit to current conceptions around developing appropriate literacies and discourses, as well as learner meta-cognition (burgess et al., 1998; skillen et al., 1998). efs is similarly concerned with the emergence of different discourses and systemic ways of thinking (sterling, 2003). key to this process is the development of holistic understanding which underpins capacity to learn, to influence, to inspire, to communicate, to assimilate, to evaluate; to innovate, to implement and to organise within a whole systems-based world view. this whole-systems view, as conceived by sterling (2003), is, we argue, central to the links between efs and ld practice. however, the vocationalisation and rationalisation of he has popularised discourses around generic skills, competencies and literacies, perhaps limiting wider recognition of the potential of whole-systems-based views for deep learning; these patterns are echoed within both ld and efs. as in ld, there has been much debate about content versus competencies in efs (forum for the future, 2008; hesselbarth and schaltegger, 2014), particularly in he where knowledge is often atomised within disciplines. sterling (2012) argues that sustainabilityrelated content in the curriculum should be seen as a contributory part of broader pedagogical processes that encourage the sustainability-literate and competent graduate to develop. the sustainability-literate graduate may have declarative specialist knowledge, but in order to contribute to more sustainable ways of working and living they must be competent change agents to put to good use the knowledge they have. research winter et al. learning development and education for sustainability: what are the links? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 6 demonstrates exactly this; for example, terenzini et al. (1995) highlighted the way in which factual knowledge obtained at university becomes outdated or forgotten, thus making critical thinking an essential and longer-lasting outcome of he. hesselbath and schaltegger (2014) report that out of the top 15 competencies as perceived by mba qualified sustainability practitioners, only two are subject specific. the others included selfinitiative, analytical skills, communication skills, self-management, presentation techniques, ‘self-learning skills’ (meta-cognitive skills), the ability to handle criticism, and project management. tapper (2004) and the scottish executive (2003) report that students’ capacity to engage in reflexive lifelong learning and adopt a sustainable approach is fundamental for graduates’ personal and professional futures, and ryan and cotton (2013) and sterling (2001) emphasise the integral role of critical thinking in facilitating this. through developing skills such as critical thinking, there is the potential to strengthen student engagement in aspects of sustainability literacy and broader understanding of ld. this moves us to broader conceptions of learning and development towards the work of villiers-stuart and stibbe (2009), who identify a range of sustainability literacies. of note in these literacies, and echoing sterling’s (2003) perspectives, is the emphasis on the need to encourage learners to deepen awareness of values, systems thinking and complexity. although ld is beginning to extend its attention to these literacies alongside its focus on skills for learning, we suggest that these are not foregrounded in the ld literature. however, increased focus on these literacies could have significant impact on the ability of a student to perceive the underlying structures and nature of their discipline, and in turn, such awareness can help students perceive the forms and structures underlying disciplinary ways of thinking and practising. therefore, as noted by perkins (2006, p.43) in relation to student epistemic development: ‘…many students never get the hang of it, or only slowly, because the epistemes receive little attention. surfacing the game through analytic discussion and deliberative practice could make a big difference’. we argue that this orientation to surfacing ‘the game’ (of he practice) aligns with the current ethos and approaches of ld work. there appears to be broad agreement that the primary focus of ld in he is student learning, not through a technical-instrumentalist curriculum of ‘skills’ but by taking into account the social and experiential factors involved in learning, and thus empowering students in interpreting and making sense of he practices (hilsdon, 2011). in doing so, winter et al. learning development and education for sustainability: what are the links? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 7 this approach is intended to not view students from a deficit perspective, where the focus is remedial and defined by their needs, but as ‘transformative’ with students actively analysing and assessing their own development (hilsdon, 2011). underpinning these transformational aspects lie theoretical and philosophical positions found in both ldrelated literature and in the sustainability literature. in ld, pedagogic approaches are informed by ethnographic, linguistic and socio-cultural fields of enquiry, and associated analytical approaches (lea and street, 1998; 2006; lillis and scott, 2007; coffin and donahue, 2012). in sustainability, such underpinnings are explored by sterling (2010-11) and bawden (2005), via gregory bateson’s (1972) learning levels and sterling’s (2010) notion of learning as sustainability. transformational learning requires not only learning to learn and learning about learning, but ultimately, learning how to learn about learning (bawden, 2005; sterling, 2010-11), a far deeper level of self-awareness and resilience that emerges from systemic perspectives; indeed, systems views have been identified by sandri (2013) as threshold in nature (meyer and land, 2003). the associated transformational perspective could provide a mutually reinforcing point of commonality for the respective practices of ld and efs. the consideration of this transformational or transforming, systemic, perspective moves us beyond a discussion of skills development to examine other links between these disciplines. 2) shared methodologies for undertaking practice having sketched out similarities in pedagogic foci in the context of literacies, there is further congruence in the methodologies behind the work carried out by ld and sustainability practitioners. continuing with a whole-systems perspective, both disciplines are engaged within organisational contexts in systemic ways, as a complement to the shared foci on interand trans-disciplinary contexts and deep learning. at a theoretical level, both efs and ld are guided by and promote similar approaches to, and virtues of, learning, such as interactive, experiential, active, critical, interpretive and uncertain (cotton and winter, 2010; foster, 2011). indeed, numerous models and theories that underpin both fields share many similar qualities, for example: academic literacies; taking account of the social and experiential elements of learning (lea and street, 1998; 2006), systems thinking (sterling, 2012); holistic/cross-disciplinary approaches and the inter-connected nature of thinking (wwf, 2005), reading, writing, studying, critical thinking or critical beings; communities of practice (lave and wenger, 1991); becoming legitimate winter et al. learning development and education for sustainability: what are the links? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 8 participants in he; and social and collaborative approaches to learning, all of which indicate less atomised skills development and a much more deeper connection. however, as this field of practice has grown over the past decades, so too has the dependency of academic tutors on its role in addressing key academic tasks, such as writing and critical analysis. in reality this relationship is often exercised through additional lectures aimed at addressing specific areas or ‘skills’ with little context, or through direct referral of ‘struggling’ students to gain additional support, again without reference to the academic context. in response, learning developers are continually improving ways in which to situate ld work within curricula, for example, through building on writing in the disciplines approaches (deane and o’neill, 2011) in order to offer assistance at the time of greatest motivation to engage with disciplinary discourses. however, without emphasising the systemic influence of ld work on institutional (primarily educational) practices, processes and operations, this evolving practice of ld could slip away from its underpinning philosophy that seeks to enhance generative conditions for learning. seeing both fields as trans-disciplinary and ‘additional’ to existing (‘core’) curricula denies the potential for increasing the range of investigative approaches to which a student has access in order to engage with academic study practices. as a result, ld work is becoming increasingly embedded within the disciplines, both within and alongside the curriculum. this embedded approach offers opportunities for the development of methodologies that incorporate ways to develop students’ relational analytical skills and systemic thinking, required for epistemic cognition and orientations towards sustainability. to encourage greater emphasis on epistemic investigation, we propose that the focus of efs and ld therefore extends towards the ‘processes that help learners engage with and internalise a systems view of the world’ (sandri, 2013, p.820), or rather to a systems view of their discipline. this shift echoes the views of perkins noted above, and by sandri, that ‘deep learning is particularly crucial in the case of sustainability education, where holistic insight and an ability to organise and structure disparate types of information into a coherent whole is central to the whole exercise’ (warburton, 2003, p.45). we argue that this holistic insight is also central to the whole exercise of ld. the convergence of efs and ld lenses towards exploring the holistic nature of disciplines with, for and by learners is echoed in fields similar to ld; there are parallels with other fields of study into academic study practice, language and disciplinarity, such as academic literacies, english for academic purposes (eap) and increasing the focus of applied winter et al. learning development and education for sustainability: what are the links? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 9 linguistics on disciplinarity and learning (christie and maton, 2011). this is arguably a natural outcome of orientations towards the holistic: both ld and sustainability disciplines operate within a complex social eco-system or learning ecology, and while acknowledging the fluidity of social systems, it seems that ld and efs have become stable forms within he institutions. this institutional context is now explored below. 3) ways in which these methodologies are helping to situate both professions and disciplines within organisational contexts pedagogic practices in ld and efs are both underpinned by a philosophical stance that encourages a focus on influencing the conditions under which learning and sustainability are developed and/or emerge. ld continues to operate within a supporting and developmental role, thereby contributing to sustainability education through developing similar literacies and abilities. alongside this philosophical stance, there is a strong connection in the ways that both ld and efs are often perceived in the wider sector. through helping develop skills for learning in particular contexts, ld and sustainability are vying for space in curricula that are already thought of as over-crowded (sterling, 2004), and when looked at in this way they have in the past been perceived as nothing more than simple add-, or bolt-ons (wingate, 2006). ironically, to view such activities as bolt-on might indicate a mechanistic, instrumentalist perspective borne out of the market-oriented social paradigm; in whole systems thinking terms, there would perhaps be no such thing as bolt-on. accordingly, despite greater recognition of the role and influence of ld and efs on students’ learning, recognising and supporting links between these two fields may help to strengthen their place in universities, particularly given their potential for contributing to a generative learning ecology that encourages deep learning approaches outlined in this paper. going further, though, we argue that ld could be positioned to co-develop as a discipline and practice within interand trans-disciplinary contexts informed by sustainability. ld departments can help further develop the mechanisms and processes designed to support sustainability agendas at an institutional level, particularly through encouraging so-called ‘sustainability pedagogies’ such as problemand scenario-based learning, contextual studies workshops, workshops for deepening reflective practice, and cross-disciplinary, collaborative, courses and projects. such positioning could reinforce both ld research and winter et al. learning development and education for sustainability: what are the links? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 10 practice, as ld's multi-, crossand trans-disciplinary roles result in ld both working with students and as an institutional enabler for sustainability, alongside its support for curricula aims. as a point of focus for analysis, identification and criticality, this extra-curricular space offers meaningful material to engage students with ld and efs methodologies. the position adopted in this paper points to the potential for ld and efs to undertake collaborative educational research to enhance the methodologies and practices adopted within this shared extra-curricula space. in parallel, both ld and efs promote the inclusion of the student voice and the democratisation of learning in he; as such their perspective is of primary importance as a feedback loop into the curriculum, its content and delivery. in this article, we propose that ld itself is exhibiting pedagogic practice and themes characteristic of whole systems thinking, such as a focus on conditions, increasing clarity of purpose and the recognition of the role of emergence in learning. through working with learners directly, ld practitioners recognise the influence of systemic conditions, moving their work beyond a deficit approach towards helping students understand learning. as a result, there is a sense that although ld has been operating within the constraints of the pervading paradigm, it also offers a challenge to the status quo and provides momentum towards an emergent systems view. learning developers create feedback loops into organisational understanding and processes through engagement in co-teaching and co-delivery to embed support and a quasi-educational development role. in so doing, learning developers recognise that many of the issues and challenges for students are a result of conditions that are not solely in the domain or control of such learners. this awareness of complexity and associated systemic awareness appears to be emerging in the ld community and could be developed further in its practice. notwithstanding the tensions between transformative learning approaches and instrumentalism noted earlier, there might be potential in acknowledging the ‘triumvirate’ of efs, ld and employability agendas in he. efs and ld contribute to fostering ‘twenty-first century graduate attributes’ which are responsive to the requirements of a knowledge economy and super-complexity. in this scenario the emphasis is on what students can do rather than what students know, highlighting metacognition as a priority (barnett, 2000). employers have long been interested in recruiting students with good academic literacy and there is emerging evidence that employers are also seeking sustainability and ‘green economy’ skills (bis, 2008-9; 2010; hmgov, 2011). this is echoed by the student body: bone and agombar (2011) and drayson et al. (2012) found that he students believed that winter et al. learning development and education for sustainability: what are the links? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 11 possession of sustainable development skills was significant for their degree course and for future employment. arguably employability and enterprise cultures dominate contemporary he (robertson, 2000), therefore developing mutual links between these and other agendas can help to foster and consolidate institutional and academic support for students. however, there are issues with portraying either efs or ld as reducible to a list or skill-set only which we must acknowledge. efs requires that skills are embedded within assumptions and values that cultivate dispositions to challenge the political-economic status quo and that support change for sustainability: knowing ‘how to’ is not enough, as there has to be autonomous motivation to engage with change processes, critically or otherwise. although these debates are not the main focus of this paper, they are noted here for their influence on both efs and ld communities of practice. recommendations for practice making actual and potential links between efs and ld explicit is one of the purposes of this paper, but what is perhaps more challenging is thinking about how these links are communicated; both between ourselves as practitioners and to the student population. it is likely that when considering how efs sits within practice, learning developers experience similar barriers to embedding sustainability as do other he professionals. these include the lack of shared understanding and language; ‘definition dementia’ (reid and petocz, 2006), the discipline focused nature of academic work (wals and jickling, 2002), the perceived irrelevance of esd and lack of time and space in the curriculum (dawe et al., 2005; velazquez et al., 2005) and the impact of lecturers’ attitudes towards sustainable development (cotton et al., 2009, p.730). seeking out those who are involved with delivering efs can help to mitigate these issues and there are numerous toolkit resources available online (stibbe, 2009; cotton et al., 2012; sterling, 2012; pu, 2014). similarly, those tasked with delivering efs can struggle with its complexity and may welcome sharing ideas and support from learning developers about how to embed the meta-cognitive and academic literacy component into their work. being aware of the basic principles and practices of efs opens up opportunities for learning developers to use sustainability-related examples in practice, for example, critical thinking and communication as a shared core competency. similarly, methodologies to develop relational, lateral, and systemic cognition run through creative arts, media, and winter et al. learning development and education for sustainability: what are the links? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 12 performance education, and can be drawn upon by both ld and efs pedagogic communities: contextual studies and collaborative units are common, and the use of object-based learning (paris, 2002) is notable for the development of lateral and holistic awareness in learners through its focus on encouraging learners to ‘read’ material culture (prown, 1982) and to engage with the learning potential of haptics (willcocks, 2015). in terms of selecting texts for writing and ld work, sustainability-themed material could be used, in the first instance, to introduce and debate controversial issues (cotton and winter 2010; oulton et al., 2004) to help students distinguish between forms of reasoning (sound and unsound), to develop a respect for evidence and open-mindedness, to develop understanding that true balance is incommensurable, and to help students develop a critical awareness of bias. indeed, the growing literature on sustainability in multiple and diverse disciplines provides the very thread of continuity and fruitful sources of written text needed by learning developers working with any group of learners from multiple disciplines. many learning developers and linguists/eap practitioners invest much energy selecting inclusive texts intended to be meaningful to all students within a multi-disciplinary session, a widespread dilemma in such pedagogic settings where student writing is developed in multi-disciplinary classes, for example (swales, 2009). in these contexts, the common thread of sustainability might provide a first port of call to help learning developers select meaningful texts, as well as to surface any potential commonalities between disciplines. this draws attention to a distinction as to how the budgets of efs and ld departments tend to be allocated: a significant proportion of ld budget is often spent offering direct support to students on particular discipline-specific assignments through one-to-one tutorials and embedded sessions. alongside this, ld teams offer open workshops on academic study topics that are relevant to multi-disciplinary groups. these latter settings are where the convergence of topics could be generative, such as the focus on sustainability discourses of particular disciplines, and in bringing ld lenses to the problem-based and scenario-based learning approaches in use by efs practitioners. linking efs with ld also offers ld practitioners an excellent position from which to collaborate with academic partners, an area where tensions can exist. despite the principles described above, in practice, academic support is often requested as a ‘bolt-on’, to address an apparent student deficit, with repeat requests coming year after year. reframing ld work through directing attention to epistemic cognition, through engagement with sustainability issues and associated cognition or knowledge practices of a given discipline, may ensure a resilient response to critiques of ld as ‘bolt-on’ work, and winter et al. learning development and education for sustainability: what are the links? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 13 encourage co-teaching with discipline-based academics. as noted above, embedded approaches have evolved as a reaction to previously instrumental approaches to writing development and study skills and through a desire to respond to student experiences in anticipatory ways. embedding ld into curricula and focusing work on particular troublesome knowledge has itself emerged from learning developers’ recognition of the intrinsic inter-connectedness of language and thought, context and purpose, process and production; sustainability is a mindset that has arguably arisen from a similar awareness of interconnectedness. by foregrounding epistemes with students, learning developers are not only helping to 'surface the game' (perkins, 2006), but arguably helping to develop the transdisciplinary, interconnected awareness necessary for sustainable futures. conclusions the argument put forward here is that both efs and ld share an emphasis on critical thinking and development of student skills, a focus on understanding individual values, beliefs and disciplinary ways of thinking and knowing, and a belief that holistic and embedded approaches have greater effect on student and staff development. helping learners become aware of the purposes and processes of learning in varied ways is essential for sustaining through-life learning and thus engaging in appropriate responses to unpredictable future sustainability issues. the shared purposes of ld and efs – on both staff and student development – provide a natural context for symbiotic relationships to emerge. through developing shared understanding between the two areas, students may become more effective learners and be encouraged to navigate complexity, including that inherent within disciplinary knowledge. focusing on the bounded social contexts within an academic discipline may also help efs research to frame such enquiries in a more defined manner. overall, these emerging fields underpin the development of an individual in terms central to the concerns of he and, seen systemically, resonate with a deeper question of the purposes of he. notes this paper was originally conceived of and presented at the association for learning development in higher education (aldinhe) conference held at plymouth university in 2013, where there was keen interest in developing and making explicit the links between winter et al. learning development and education for sustainability: what are the links? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 14 sustainability and learning development (winter and cotton, 2013). that these two fields crossed paths at plymouth university is no surprise, given the university’s excellent track record both on sustainability, featuring regularly in the top places for the green gown awards, and the people and planet green league, and that the university was one of the founding institutions of aldinhe more than ten years ago. discussions that have been taking place at and beyond the conference, and with practitioners beyond plymouth, suggest an emerging consensus around the identity of these links and how they might best be communicated, forming the basis of this paper. we offer the ideas in this paper in the hope of continuing this discussion, but also to open up the debate beyond current interest to the wider community of practice. the educational development and learning development teams both at plymouth university and at the university of the arts london (ual) work closely together and the authors would welcome feedback on any aspect of this paper and ideas for how to take this work forward. acknowledgements many thanks to julia dawson of the learning development team at plymouth university for inspiring ideas which have helped to inform this paper (j.dawson@plymouth.ac.uk). many thanks also to alex lumley and pat christie of ual for providing the context for these explorations through the strategy for academic support at ual, and for supporting the development of the learning awareness strand within the strategy. references aldinhe (2013) welcome to aldinhe. available at: www.aldinhe.ac.uk (accessed: 8 august 2013). bateson, g. (1972) steps to an ecology of mind. san francisco: chandler. barnett, r. (1990) the idea of higher education. london: society for research into higher education. http://www.aldinhe.ac.uk/ winter et al. learning development and education for sustainability: what are the links? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 15 barnett. r. (2000) realizing the university in an age of super-complexity. london: society for research into higher education and open university press. bawden, r. (2005) ‘systemic development at hawkesbury: some personal lessons from experience’, systems research and behavioural science, 22(2), pp. 151-164. becher, t. and trowler, p. (2001) academic tribes and territories: intellectual enquiry and the cultures of disciplines. 2 nd edn. london: the society for research into higher education. bekir s.g. and. wiley, d.a. (2007) ‘instructional technology and objectification’, canadian journal of learning and technology, 33(3) [online]. available at: http://www.cjlt.ca/index.php/cjlt/article/view/159/151 (accessed: 8 june 2014). bis (2008-9) low carbon and environmental goods and services: an industry analysis update for 2008/09. available at: http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20120823131012/http://www.bis.gov.uk/a ssets/biscore/corporate/docs/l/10-795-low-carbon-goods-analysis-update-200809.pdf (accessed: 8 june 2014). bis (2010) skills for sustainable growth strategy document. available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/3236 8/10-1274-skills-for-sustainable-growth-strategy.pdf (accessed: 25 january 2015). bone, e. and agombar, j. (2011) first-year attitudes towards, and skills in, sustainable development. commissioned by the hea and nus [online]. available at: http://efsandquality.glos.ac.uk/toolkit/nus_hea_2011.pdf (accessed: 8 june 2014). burgess j., harrisson, c. and filius, p. (1998) ‘environmental communication and the cultural politics of environmental citizenship’, environment and planning a, 30(1), pp. 1445-1460. castells, m. (2001) ‘universities as dynamic systems of contradictory functions’, in muller, j., cloete, n. and badat, s. (eds.) challenges of globalisation. south african debates with manuel castells. cape town: maskew miller longman, pp. 206-223. http://www.cjlt.ca/index.php/cjlt/article/view/159/151 http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20120823131012/http:/www.bis.gov.uk/assets/biscore/corporate/docs/l/10-795-low-carbon-goods-analysis-update-2008-09.pdf http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20120823131012/http:/www.bis.gov.uk/assets/biscore/corporate/docs/l/10-795-low-carbon-goods-analysis-update-2008-09.pdf http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20120823131012/http:/www.bis.gov.uk/assets/biscore/corporate/docs/l/10-795-low-carbon-goods-analysis-update-2008-09.pdf https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/32368/10-1274-skills-for-sustainable-growth-strategy.pdf https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/32368/10-1274-skills-for-sustainable-growth-strategy.pdf http://efsandquality.glos.ac.uk/toolkit/nus_hea_2011.pdf winter et al. learning development and education for sustainability: what are the links? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 16 christie, f. and maton, k. (2011) ‘why disciplinarity?’ in christie, f. and maton, k. (eds.) disciplinarity: systemic functional and sociological perspectives. london: continuum, pp. 1-9. coffin, c. and donohue, j. (2012) ‘academic literacies and systemic functional linguistics: how do they relate?’, journal of english for academic purposes, 11(1), pp. 64-75. cotton, d.r.e. and winter, j. (2010) ‘‘it’s not just bits of paper and light bulbs’: a review of sustainability pedagogies and their potential for use in higher education’, in jones, p., selby, d. and sterling, s. (eds.) sustainability education: perspectives and practice across higher education. london: earthscan, pp. 39-54. cotton, d., bailey, i., warren, m. and bissell, s. (2009) ‘revolutions and second-best solutions: education for sustainable development in higher education’, studies in higher education, 34(7), pp. 719-733. cre-copernicus (1994) cre-copernicus declaration. geneva: cre-copernicus secretariat. dawe, g., jucker, r. and martin, s. (2005) sustainable development in higher education: current practice and future developments. a report for the higher education academy. york: hea [online]. available at: http://thesite.eu/sustdevinhefinalreport.pdf (accessed: 8 june 2014). deane, m. and o’neill, p. (2011) ‘writing in the disciplines: beyond remediality’, in deane, m. and o’neill, p. (eds.) writing in the disciplines. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan, pp. 3-11. drayson, r., bone, e. and agombar, j. (2012) student attitudes towards, and skills in, sustainable development. commissioned by the hea and nus. york: hea. available at: http://efsandquality.glos.ac.uk/toolkit/nus_hea_2012.pdf (accessed: 28 jan 2015). http://thesite.eu/sustdevinhefinalreport.pdf http://efsandquality.glos.ac.uk/toolkit/nus_hea_2012.pdf winter et al. learning development and education for sustainability: what are the links? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 17 escotet, m.e. (2012) what is the purpose of higher education: knowledge or utility? available at: http://miguelescotet.com/2012/what-is-the-purpose-of-highereducation-knowledge-or-utility/ (accessed: 26 february 2013). forum for the future/ucas (2008) future leaders survey 2007-8. london: forum for the future/ucas [online]. available at: http://www.forumforthefuture.org/sites/default/files/project/downloads/futureleaders0 708.pdf (accessed: 26 february 2014). foster, j. (2011) ‘sustainability and the learning virtues’, journal of curriculum studies, 43(3), pp. 383-402. harich, j. (2010) ‘change resistance as the crux of the environmental sustainability problem’, system dynamics review, 26(1), pp. 35-72 [online]. available at: http://www.thwink.org/sustain/articles/009/changeresistanceascrux.htm (accessed: 26 february 2014). hesselbarth, c. and schaltegger, s. (2014) ‘educating change agents for sustainability – learning from the first sustainability management master of business administration’, journal of cleaner production, 62, pp. 1-13. hilsdon, j. (2011) ‘what is learning development?’, in hartley, p., hilsdon, j., keenan, c., sinfield, s. and verity, m. (eds.) learning development in higher education. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan, pp. 13-27. hm government (2011) enabling the transition to a green economy [online]. available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1834 17/enabling_the_transition_to_a_green_economy__main_d.pdf (accessed: 8 june 2014). lave, j. and wenger, e. (1991) situated learning: legitimate peripheral participation. cambridge: cambridge university press. lea, m. and stierer, b. (2000) ‘editors introduction’, in lea, m. and stierer, b. (eds.) student writing in higher education. buckingham: open university press, pp. 1-14. http://miguelescotet.com/2012/what-is-the-purpose-of-higher-education-knowledge-or-utility/ http://miguelescotet.com/2012/what-is-the-purpose-of-higher-education-knowledge-or-utility/ http://www.forumforthefuture.org/sites/default/files/project/downloads/futureleaders0708.pdf http://www.forumforthefuture.org/sites/default/files/project/downloads/futureleaders0708.pdf http://www.thwink.org/sustain/articles/009/changeresistanceascrux.htm https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/183417/enabling_the_transition_to_a_green_economy__main_d.pdf https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/183417/enabling_the_transition_to_a_green_economy__main_d.pdf winter et al. learning development and education for sustainability: what are the links? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 18 lea, m. and street, b. (1998) ‘student writing in higher education: an academic literacies approach’, studies in higher education, 23(2), pp.157-172. lea, m.r. and street, b. (2006) ‘the ‘academic literacies’ model: theory and applications’, theory into practice, 45(4), pp. 368-377. lester pearson institute for international development (1992) creating a common future: proceedings of the conference on university action for sustainable development. halifax: atlantic nova print. lillis, t. and scott, m. (2007) ‘defining academic literacies research: issues of epistemology, ideology and strategy’, journal of applied linguistics, 4(1), pp. 5-32. meyer, j. and land, r. (2003) ‘threshold concepts and troublesome knowledge: linkages to ways of thinking and practising’, enhancing teaching-learning environments in undergraduate courses, occasional report 4, may 2003. edinburgh: etl project. moore, j. (2005) ‘is higher education ready for transformative learning? a question explored in the study of sustainability’, journal of transformative education, 3(1), pp. 76-91. oulton, c., dillon, j. and grace, m. (2004) ‘reconceptualising the teaching of controversial issues’, international journal of science education, 26(4), pp. 411-423. paris, s. (2002) perspectives on object-centred learning in museums. mahwah, nj: routledge. perkins, d. (2006) ‘constructivism and troublesome knowledge’, in land, r. (ed.) overcoming barriers to student understanding: threshold concepts and troublesome knowledge. abingdon: routledge, pp. 33-47. plymouth university (pu) (2014) seven steps to embedding sustainability in your teaching. available at: https://www.plymouth.ac.uk/uploads/production/document/path/2/2396/7_steps_to_ embedding_sustainability.pdf (accessed: 26 february 2014). http://oro.open.ac.uk/17057/ http://oro.open.ac.uk/17057/ http://www.ee.ucl.ac.uk/~mflanaga/thresholds_authors.html#emeyer http://www.ee.ucl.ac.uk/~mflanaga/thresholds_authors.html#land winter et al. learning development and education for sustainability: what are the links? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 19 prown, j. (1982) ‘mind in matter: an introduction to material culture, theory and method’, winterthur portfolio, 17(1), pp. 1-19. chicago: university of chicago press. reid, a. and petocz, p. (2006) ‘university lecturers’ understanding of sustainability’, higher education, 51(1), pp. 105-123. ryan, a. and cotton, d. (2013) ‘times of change: shifting pedagogy and curricula for future sustainability’, in sterling, s., maxey, l. and luna, h. (eds.) the sustainable university: progress and prospects. abingdon: routledge, pp. 151-167. robertson, d. (2000) ‘students as consumers: the individualization of competitive change’, in scott, p. (ed.) higher education re-formed. london and new york: falmer press, pp. 78-94. robottom, i. and hart, p. (1993) research in environmental education: engaging the debate. the deakin-griffith environmental education project. australia: deakin university. sandri, o.j. (2013) ‘threshold concepts, systems and learning for sustainability’, environmental education research, 19(6), pp. 810-822. scottish executive (2003) life through learning; learning through life [online]. available at: http://www.scotland.gov.uk/publications/2003/02/16308/17750 (accessed: 6 july 2014). skillen, j., merten, m., trivett, n. and percy, a. (1998) the ideall approach to learning development: a model for fostering improved literacy and learning outcomes for students. australia: university of wollongong, research online. [online]. available at: http://ro.uow.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1149&context=asdpapers (accessed: 6 july 2014). sterling, s. (2001) sustainable education: revisioning learning and change. totnes: green books ltd. http://www.scotland.gov.uk/publications/2003/02/16308/17750 http://ro.uow.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1149&context=asdpapers winter et al. learning development and education for sustainability: what are the links? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 20 sterling, s. (2003) whole systems thinking as a basis for paradigm change in education: explorations in the context of sustainability (phd thesis). bath: centre for research in education and the environment, university of bath. sterling, s. (2004) ‘higher education, sustainability and the role of systemic learning’, in blaze conran, p. and wals, a. (eds.) higher education and the challenge of sustainability: problematics, promise and practice. london: kluwer academic publishers, pp. 347-348. sterling, s. (2010) ‘learning for resilience or the resilient learner? towards a necessary reconciliation in a paradigm of sustainable education’, environmental education research, 16(5-6), pp. 511-528. sterling, s. (2010-11) ‘transformative learning and sustainability: sketching the conceptual ground', learning and teaching in higher education, 5(2010-11), pp. 17-33. sterling, s. (2012) the future fit framework: an introductory guide to teaching and learning for sustainability in he. york: higher education academy [online]. available at: http://www.eauc.org.uk/the_future_fit_framework_an_introductory_guide_1 (accessed: 25 january 2015). stibbe, a. (ed.) (2009) the handbook of sustainability literacy skills for a changing world. totnes: green books ltd. swales, j.m. (2009) ‘when there is no perfect text: approaches to the eap practitioner’s dilemma’, journal of english for academic purposes, 8(1), pp. 5-13. tapper, j. (2004) ’student perceptions of how critical thinking is embedded in a degree program’, higher education research and development, 23(2), pp. 199-222. terenzini, p.t., springer, l., pascarella, e.t. and nora, a. (1995) ‘influences affecting the development of students’ critical thinking skills’, research in higher education, 36(1), pp. 23-39. unesco (1990) the talloires declaration. gland: unesco. http://www.eauc.org.uk/the_future_fit_framework_an_introductory_guide_1 winter et al. learning development and education for sustainability: what are the links? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 21 unesco (2009) bonn declaration. germany: unesco. available at: http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0018/001887/188799e.pdf (accessed: 24 february 2015). velazquez, l., munguia, n. and sanchez, m. (2005) ‘deterring sustainability in higher education institutions: an appraisal of the factors which influence sustainability in higher education institutions’, international journal of sustainability in higher education, 6(4), pp. 383-391. villiers-stuart, p. and stibbe, a. (eds.) the handbook of sustainability literacy: skills for a changing world. brighton: university of brighton faculty of arts, sustainability network [online]. available at: http://arts.brighton.ac.uk/stibbe-handbook-ofsustainability/chapters (accessed: 6 july 2014). wals, a. and jickling, b. (2002) ‘sustainability in higher education: from doublethink and newspeak to critical thinking and meaningful learning’, international journal of sustainability in higher education, 3(3), pp. 221-232. warburton, k. (2003) ‘deep learning and education for sustainability’, international journal of sustainability in higher education, 4(1), pp. 44-56. wced (world commission for sustainable development) (1987) our common future, from one earth to one world. oxford: oxford university press. available at: http://www.un-documents.net/wced-ocf.htm (accessed: 25 january 2015). willcocks, j. (2015, in press) ‘the power of concrete experience: museum collections, touch and meaning-making in art and design pedagogy’, in chatterjee, h. and hannan, l. (eds.) object-based learning in higher education. surrey: ashgate. wingate, u. (2006) ‘doing away with ‘study skills’, teaching in higher education, 11(4), pp. 457-469. http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0018/001887/188799e.pdf http://arts.brighton.ac.uk/stibbe-handbook-of-sustainability/chapters http://arts.brighton.ac.uk/stibbe-handbook-of-sustainability/chapters http://www.un-documents.net/wced-ocf.htm winter et al. learning development and education for sustainability: what are the links? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 22 winter, j. and cotton, d. (2013) 'learning development and sustainability: what are the links and how are they communicated?', tenth annual conference of the association for learning development in higher education. plymouth university, plymouth 26-27 march. wwf (2005) linking thinking: new perspectives on thinking and learning for sustainability [online]. available at: http://www.eauc.org.uk/wwf_linking_thinking_new_perspectives_on_thinking_ (accessed: 6 july 2014). author details jennie winter is an educational developer in the pedagogic research institute and observatory (pedrio), plymouth university, uk. jennie teaches in a range of educational areas but specialises in education for sustainability. find out more about jennie’s work at https://www.plymouth.ac.uk/staff/jennie-winter. graham barton, fhea, is an academic support coordinator at the university of the arts london. following an early career in commercial real estate as a chartered surveyor, graham changed to parallel careers in performing arts (as a musician/producer) and in higher education (english for academic purposes, learning development). his educational interests have emerged from these personal transformations, and areas of pedagogic research interest include academic study as practice, self-enquiry for learning, and creative methodologies for developing student systemic and epistemic cognition. joseph allison, team leader for learning development at plymouth university, has been working with students in he for the past seven years, supporting them in understanding the expectations of university, and encouraging them in exploring different approaches to studying and learning in order to get the most out of their studies. areas of specific interest include student voice, criticality and its role in academia, the student experience, and education for sustainable development. debby cotton is professor of higher education pedagogy and head of educational development in the pedagogic research institute and observatory (pedrio), plymouth http://www.eauc.org.uk/wwf_linking_thinking_new_perspectives_on_thinking_ https://www.plymouth.ac.uk/staff/jennie-winter winter et al. learning development and education for sustainability: what are the links? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 23 university, uk. she is a principal fellow of the higher education academy, and sits on the editorial board of five journals. debby has a doctorate in environmental education from oxford university, and has published widely on a range of he topics. she has recently edited a seda special on education for sustainable development in educational development, and contributed to a book on the sustainable university (edited by sterling, maxey and luna). for a full profile, please see: http://www.plymouth.ac.uk/staff/dcotton# http://www.plymouth.ac.uk/staff/dcotton learning development and education for sustainability: what are the links? abstract introduction overview – learning development overview – education for sustainability discussion 1) commonalities surrounding the foci of pedagogic practices 2) shared methodologies for undertaking practice 3) ways in which these methodologies are helping to situate both professions and disciplines within organisational contexts recommendations for practice conclusions notes acknowledgements references author details literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 6: november 2013 revolution by stealth: the impact of learning development on democratising intelligence through constructive approaches to student support dr stella cottrell university of leeds, uk abstract learning development has played a key role in shaping learning and teaching in higher education over the last few decades. in the face of increasing student numbers, academic skills tutors have extended their roles such that, as well as supporting students to develop their individual skills, they now also contribute to areas such as curriculum development, staff training, and learning and teaching strategy. where, initially, institutions offered support only for a small number of ‘mechanical’ study skills, there is greater recognition of the wide range of skills, habits, qualities and understandings that are required for students to perform at their best. this has been accompanied by more holistic approaches to students and their learning. an emergent property of such changes has been the ‘democratising’ of intelligence in higher education: we now have much greater appreciation for the role of educational ‘inputs’ on student performance and the effects of ‘nurture’ on what students can achieve. this raises challenges about what higher education institutions should address through learning development into the future. keywords: learning development; student support; student performance; digital student; student engagement; study skills; skills framework. introduction when an organisation celebrates its tenth anniversary and has a large and growing membership, it feels as if a notable milestone has been reached. often, this is an indicator that a concept has come of age or, at least, that new ways of thinking are becoming established in the collective psyche. 2013 marks the tenth anniversary for the formal cottrell revolution by stealth organisation of learning development through aldinhe. that is no mean feat in itself, and a tribute to the efforts not just of volunteers, but of pioneers and innovators in terrains that, 30-40 years ago, had been generally inhospitable and frequently impenetrable. looking back over that longer time span, this anniversary for aldinhe can be regarded as one important step in a larger movement focused on a fundamental repositioning of learning and teaching within higher education (he). i was asked to speak at the anniversary conference about learning development to date, and to look ahead to potential future directions. here, i will outline just some of the many changes that have taken place over the last few decades which formed the backdrop and context for the introduction and evolution of learning development within higher education. in that time, learning development has made a significant difference to the lives of many students and helped to shape our thinking about student achievement. in particular, it has helped us to appreciate that those who have under-achieved in the past can be supported to achieve well at later stages of their education. this owes, in part, to daily practice in the field, but also to research in other fields. i will consider some current trends and what these might mean for those working in higher education and learning development in the future. as a historian, the latter task feels highly unnatural – and as i am still awaiting the arrival of the life of ease and leisure promised by yesteryear’s tv programme tomorrow’s world, i wouldn’t ascribe a high level of confidence to any predictions of the future, including my own. however, i hope that these do provide some food for thought about the kinds of issues that we might need to address as learning developers of the future. context ‘learning development’, as a concept within higher education, arose within the particular context of sharply rising numbers. in 1970, 51,189 students gained first degrees in the uk. this was an elite group, although the numbers in higher education were already many times greater than they had been at the start of the century. by 1990, the number of those graduating each year had risen only as far as 77, 163 (bolton, 2012), but with increasing numbers of entrants, this was already perceived as a major shift in higher education. patrick ainley’s degrees of difference (1994) attests to the magnitude of the changes as experienced at the beginning of the decade of 1990s: ‘in the last few years there has been a sea change in higher education. student numbers have expanded overwhelmingly and journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 2 cottrell revolution by stealth the language of competition, privatization and the market has now arrived on campus, and no one knows quite what will happen next’ (ainley, 1994, p.1). yet, in retrospect, the change had barely begun. by 2000, with additional growth and the inclusion of graduates from former polytechnics, numbers of graduates had risen to 243, 256 students, and by 2011 to over 350,000 (bolton, 2012). the challenges posed by larger numbers were not simply those of class sizes and accommodation. there was a growing sense that entrants were, at best, more diverse and, at worst, not of the same calibre as those of the past. in 2003, an article was published in the times higher education entitled: ‘entry grades are getting worse, so we’ve got to get better’. a poll of 500 uk academics found that 67% felt that students were leaving school less prepared for higher education, 58% felt that easier university entry ‘encouraged dumbing down’, and 76% felt that they had needed to adapt their teaching in response to increasing student diversity (jobbins and leon, 2003). growing numbers of participants in higher education challenged the concept of an education for the elite by the elite. thus, it was not surprising to see debate, such as was presented by gombrich (2000), furedi (2004) and others, about the ‘dumbing down’ of higher education and the threat to a purer form of intellectual ‘truth’. this wasn’t restricted to higher education. the challenge was felt in related sectors such as museums, where the politics of wider access to education, staunchly defended by ellis (2002) and barr (2005), was seen by others as a threat to scholarship (appleton, 2001). the division of opinion about the threat to intellectual life sometimes aligned with left/right politics but, as barr pointed out, not necessarily so. sink or swim to some extent, the lament about rising numbers and loss of a golden age of intellectual life was a simple reflection of fundamental and understandable reactions to such things as change itself, loss of the familiar, increased workload, and competing demands on time. for these reasons, some kickback could have been expected, irrespective of whether or not staff were in favour of widening access for its own sake. as resources didn’t rise in line with growth in student numbers, self-preservation may have influenced perceptions. moreover, the very concept of widening access was a threat to some academics’ sense of journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 3 cottrell revolution by stealth identity: traditionally, the academic was regarded as part of a relatively small elite, generally assumed to be more intelligent. with larger numbers participating in higher education as teachers and as students, relatively less kudos attached to the role of the academic. this implied that intelligence was more broadly distributed than was believed. if this were not the case, and if standards were to be maintained, then many new entrants would fail. it was widely believed that increased access must mean either widespread student failure or an erosion of standards. the prevailing assumption wasn’t simply that students would arrive ‘oven-ready’ for higher education, but that they should. the culture was one of ‘sink or swim’: those with inherent ability would survive without orientation, direction, explanation, expert teaching, feedback, guidance or support. the rest didn’t have the right to a place. indeed, it was a matter of pride to be associated with a course with a high drop-out rate, this being taken to signify its level of difficulty. when student support was developing in the 1980s and 1990s, there was a grudging acceptance that a certain amount of catch-up on study skills might be acceptable for adults who might have become ‘rusty’, but many academics argued that for other students, any support was tantamount to spoon-feeding. the same view was held about accepting students who hadn’t gained all their a levels in a single year. it was rarely long before discussions about struggling students reverted to references to ability, aptitude, ‘iq’, ‘bell curves’ and even ‘will power’: these provided a rationale for not providing support. in the bell curve (1994), herrnstein and murray appeared to have demonstrated that iq wasn’t amenable to inputs from education and training. as most people didn’t know their own iq, it was broadly understood that individuals who did well in life had high iqs and others did not. as a low iq was assumed to be (largely) inherent, such students who found their way into he were doomed to ultimate failure and so there wasn’t much point in higher education institutions (heis) doing anything about it. for nascent learning development units, there was a steep mountain to climb, not just conceptually but also in terms of systems, infrastructure, expertise, capacity and resources. it was apparent that learning development, if it was to be meaningful for students and staff, couldn’t just chip away at the edges. fundamental and large-scale change would be needed, involving ‘whole institution’ and ‘whole student’ approaches (cottrell, 2001). today, there is much greater investment in learning development – not just in terms of larger teams dedicated to developing students’ academic skills, but also in terms of broader infrastructure. many of the elements that early learning developers journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 4 cottrell revolution by stealth lobbied for are often now routinely established in heis. it may seem unconceivable that there could once have been powerful objections to many of the practices that would be taken for granted today. these include such factors as teaching being taken seriously as part of job descriptions, with associated training and reward; leadership and management of the area such as through designated staff up to the highest levels of senior management, and specialist departments to spearhead pedagogic developments. it is now expected that students would receive clear guidance about such matters as learning outcomes, assessment criteria and feedback, as well as structured learning activities between taught sessions and direction on how to make creative use of taught time rather than regurgitate their lecture notes. formative assessment is now used as a matter of course. the development of academic thinking and other study skills are, increasingly, being integrated into the curriculum. there is a plethora of materials for both students and staff to support study, learning and teaching. most heis provide additional support opportunities to help students to understand concepts that prove problematic. with the advent of league tables and student satisfaction surveys, there is growing interest in ensuring that all students are helped to improve their performance – and can recognise this for themselves. many courses provide structured approaches to helping students to reflect upon how they learn and how to improve. from such a list, which is far from exhaustive, we can see how far the sector has travelled. it is curious, though, how little prominence is still given through heis’ websites to provision that is available to students for improving their learning. this is especially so, since changes to fees and funding mean that students have a much greater vested interest in this and because support to improve students’ performance can create real ‘value-added’. rather, such support is often hidden away, as if to admit that a need for it would reflect poorly on an hei’s intake. as it is a specialist area, and hard to get right both in terms of delivery and timing, study skills provision hasn’t always been well received by students. it can be tempting to ‘disappear’ study skills behind other activities such as academic writing (wingate, 2006) which appear more palatable, rather like concealing children’s vegetables in mashed potato. whilst there are all kinds of advantages to embedding support within curriculum delivery, it is rather more problematic to reduce a broad range of study skills down to just one area of skills, such as writing-related skills. it seems we still have some way to go, as a sector, in getting study skills provision right, taking pride in that, and giving it a higher profile. until we are in a position to do this, and have confidence in our offer, it is likely to remain difficult to persuade students that study skills are a good thing. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 5 cottrell revolution by stealth improving performance one reason why heis are, perhaps, too coy about learning support is that study skills provision is often assumed to be solely for those from ‘widening participation’ backgrounds or only for those who are struggling. support is sometimes described in negative terms, as if it automatically ‘pathologises’ students as ‘needy’ (haggis, 2006). however, this may be because there hasn’t been as much interest in recording the support offered to other kinds of student. certainly, learning development was founded upon the core concept that everyone could improve performance, including gifted students and staff. in practice, students of all backgrounds make use of study skills resources, even at doctoral level at the most elite universities. in the mid-1980s, i taught adult returners on pre-access courses run by the workers education association (wea) in oxford, on courses specially designed to develop skills, habits, and confidence through the way we worked with subject material. however, i also taught final year history undergraduates at oxford university, at somerville college, for an exam paper designed to draw together their understandings of historical methods and themes. i knew from discussions with my own peer group when i was a student that many students struggled with this paper. when teaching it, i found that students’ difficulties arose from a multitude of misunderstandings about what was expected of them, as well as ineffective study habits. some were using strategies that had worked at school without adapting these to the requirements of the course and context. students described a variety of mechanisms they had adopted to help them cope, from excessive learning by rote, ‘borrowing’ other people’s work and deciding tutors were wrong if their marks were low, through to alcoholism, eating disorders and self-harming. although there were differences in the level at which the study skills issues were pitched, and i didn’t use the term ‘study skills’, there was much common ground in what i covered with both sets of students. this included such themes as being more organised for study, reading critically, building a reasoned argument, synthesising material, drawing links across different kinds of subject material, organising their thoughts and structuring their writing, listening when others were talking, and giving critical feedback. in recent years, i know of others who have used study skills materials with students at oxford, both undergraduate and postgraduate; hill et al. (2010) have referred to learning development at oriel college (2008). the university of cambridge’s (2013) website has a webpage headed: ‘support: looking after our students that tells students not to worry if they ‘need a bit of extra support while at the university’’. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 6 cottrell revolution by stealth even back in the 1950s at harvard, when researching an elite group of students, perry (1959) found that students turned up in unexpectedly large numbers when sessions in effective reading skills were offered. students on all kinds of courses, at all levels, can improve their performance through changing their study strategies, habits and beliefs. in other words, study skills provision is not just about widening participation or weaker students. anxiety about study and doubts about personal capability are also found amongst different kinds of students, and not just those who are more obviously struggling. the access students, without a history of academic success, often believed they were ‘not clever’, as did many of the students i taught at the university of east london. however, so too did many of the oxford college students. despite their previous history of educational success, they often lacked confidence in their intelligence. this was especially the case if they had been closely tutored at home or at school or if they had been ‘best in class’ when at school but were no longer so once at university. rather than recognising that the latter was a logical and expected outcome of being at a selective university, they internalised this as a failure of their own intelligence. it was noticeable that students’ self-confidence was more brittle than it appeared, and often crumbled very quickly if they didn’t do as well as they expected. the debate about ‘iq’ had seeped into the mentality such that it blocked students from keeping occasional academic setbacks in perspective and identifying strategies that would help them to do better. fortunately, it has become more widely appreciated that iq isn’t just about inherent ability and so can be manipulated, although when and to what extent is still being debated. it is some time since research indicated that there was an independent effect of early years schooling on iq, and that iq was about more than just genes (ceci, 1991; winship and korenman, 1997). however, it was only as recently as 2012 that researchers in oslo identified that the effects of schooling as late as the mid teenage years could have an impact on iq scores in later life (brinch and galloway, 2012). it is harder, as yet, to establish that ‘iq’ can be further developed beyond the mid-teens and in adults. however, research on cognitive development in older adults does suggest that ‘the potential for positive change, or plasticity, is maintained in adult cognition’ and, interestingly, that this is sensitive to lifestyle and physical activity (hertzog et al., 2008, p.1). that, in turn, suggests that the brains of adults between mid-teen and senior citizenship are likely to have similar ‘plasticity’ and be susceptible to educational inputs that improve learning. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 7 cottrell revolution by stealth this was, indeed, our experience when we set up the learning development at uel in 1991: even relatively small amounts of support had significant impacts on student achievement. it was evident from students’ life and educational histories that there were a great many reasons other than iq that could account for underachievement. poor experiences of school, untimely illness, bereavement, pregnancy, peer hostility to learning, limited access to books, taking a job to support the family rather than doing homework, bullying, truancy, racism, disability, position in the family and myriad other factors (often experienced as multiple barriers) created blocks to academic success. the barriers that students encountered reflected inequalities in gender, age, disability, ethnicity and social class, and were generally also reflected in the performance of their schools and the quality of life in their neighbourhoods. the impacts of such barriers have been well documented (swain et al., 1993; bird, 1996; hefce, 1997; bamber and tett, 2001; reay et al., 2002; national audit office, 2002; leathwood and o’connell, 2003). in the face of such factors, notions of inherent ability as the key rationale for academic achievement became more problematic. it was evident that students’ performance could be improved, and to a significant degree, through addressing these issues and through students gaining a better understanding of what they needed to do in order to achieve well. democratising intelligence the democratising of intelligence is, perhaps, the greatest legacy of the twentieth century, although the task isn’t quite accomplished yet. this owes much to the work of educationalists such as bruner (1966; 1975) and vygotsky (1988), and to work undertaken in statutory and further education. it has taken us somewhat longer in higher education. for example, even if there are questions raised in the academic world about the empirical evidence to support theories of multiple intelligence (gardner, 1993), there is at least much more widespread everyday acknowledgement now that people who have not excelled in a particular area can achieve well in others. we are much more aware of the differential roles of ‘nature’ and ‘nurture’ on individual achievement. we also know more about the impact of experience on brain functioning, including the development of domain specialisation. it is interesting to speculate on whether this might influence the work and thinking of learning developers in the future. research already suggests that domain specialisation in the brain is a result of the activities that people undertake (or ‘nurture’), not the cause of it (‘nature’): the kind of learning experiences to which people are exposed journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 8 cottrell revolution by stealth shapes their brain. musical training, at least in childhood, is associated with structural brain changes in motor and auditory areas and on related behaviours (hyde et al., 2009). both exercise and musical training appear to have broader impacts in areas such as ‘auditory fitness’, that then impact on a wide range of behaviours and capacities to learn (kraus and chandrasekaran, 2010). trained musicians are better able to identify sound patterns in new languages (wong and perrachione, 2007), track for sound regularities and irregularities in the environment (winkler et al., 2009), and have greater sensitivity to linguistic pitch contours (kraus and chandrasekaran, 2010). they have better second language acquisition (strait et al., 2013) but also better vocabulary in their native tongue (foregeard et al., 2008), as well as enhanced reading abilities (overy, 2003; tallal and gaab, 2006) and even perception of emotion in speech (strait et al., 2009). although the benefits of music training appear greatest when training starts in early childhood, the impact of practice effects on neuroplasticity suggest that there could be cognitive benefits to those who start training and practice music when they are older (musacchia et al., 2007; parbery-clark et al., 2009; strait et al., 2009). furthermore, developing skills in one area may facilitate or inhibit learning in other areas. research into london cab drivers suggests that the particular skills in the representation of spatial relations, gained through years of navigating a large city and using a rules-bound approach, are accompanied by a greater volume of grey matter volume in the posterior hippocampus but reduced grey matter in other parts of the hippocampus (maguire et al., 2006, p.1099). their skill in one area appeared to lead to ‘a compromised ability to acquire or retrieve new visuo-spatial information’. there can be a cost to what we learn. this means that the way that the curriculum is structured, such as whether it is more broadbased or more specialist, could be having unrecognised impacts on domain development, for better or ill. on the other hand, bio-cultural research further suggests that, from early adulthood onwards, ‘cognitive pragmatics’ come into play that enable adults to make more effective use of context and experience. baltes and singer (2001, p.59) argue that ‘professional expertise, artistic competence, social–emotional intelligence and wisdom are examples of late-life potentials in the cognitive pragmatics’. depending on the outcome of further research in areas such as neuropsychology and bio-cultural sciences, learning development of the future may be directed to structuring student experiences such that these optimise the development of particular domains, using curricula and teaching methods relevant to the age, interests and ambitions of the students. perhaps, alongside journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 9 cottrell revolution by stealth battles on genetic engineering, we may be drawing lines in the sand on ‘cognitive engineering’. the digital generation if domain development is affected by practice effects, this raises questions about a whole host of other experiences that could be shaping students’ aptitudes for learning under different conditions. for example, we hear much about ‘the digital student’ as if students were extensions of the technology they use. some, such as prensky (2001) and oblinger et al. (2005), have gone so far as to argue that pedagogies should shift to accommodate the learning styles, behaviours and changed expectations of ‘digital natives’. prensky (2001, p.4) recommended that academics needed to devise ways of ‘going faster, less step-by step, more in parallel, with more random access’. others, though, have challenged the empirical evidence for changed learning styles and behaviours amongst the ‘digital’ generation (bennett et al., 2008) – or even that it makes as much use of web technologies as is assumed. although students may be familiar with a wider range of technologies and adept at using them in particular contexts, there hasn’t been automatic and widespread transfer of such usage to enhance their learning. research findings from the us, uk and australasia have challenged the assumption that students’ internet skills are as prevalent as was believed (palfrey and gasser, 2008; kennedy et al., 2008; jones and cross, 2009; hargittai, 2010) and that students are ‘net-savvy’ (lorenzo and dziuban, 2006; oblinger and hawkins, 2006.) jisc reported in 2008 (ipsos mori on behalf of jisc, 2008) that the ‘internet generation’ – that is, those born after 1993 – was not generally very skilled at online research beyond the use of wikipedia, and that students made little use of their everyday technologies in their studies unless prompted to do so. whilst students’ use of technologies is, as yet, too heterogeneous to merit the radical overhaul of pedagogies prensky advocates, the increased use of technologies, not least by new generations of academic staff, is likely to mean that methods of teaching will look very different in 10-20 years’ time. this is likely to have consequences for the kind of orientation to study that our students will need, as well as what we provide to develop skills which support their learning. meanwhile, the net impact of students’ recurrent use of technologies may well affect their neural development in ways that are not yet clear. the daily recurrence of search journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 10 cottrell revolution by stealth activities, in rapid, open-ended, associative, non-linear pathways, may lead to different kinds of neural development than that which arises from the sequential, logical, analytical thinking more typical of a level and for he courses. the way we interact with information for everyday and, increasingly, for academic purposes, using phones and tablets and social networking tools, gives a sense of endless plurality, collaboration and flexible interconnectedness. it is not unreasonable to assume that this will impact on how our brains develop and, therefore, on how we think. it is also possible that this may come at a cost to other kinds of thinking processes: it may mean that, as for cab drivers, students develop new areas of strength but also some potential restrictions in their abilities to acquire, recall, make sense of, and apply new information. the most obvious, though as yet unestablished outcomes, would be that when students first enter higher education, they would find it more problematic to maintain logical, sequential thinking or to work in a sustained manner over long periods in order to master complex problems. this may raise some interesting dilemmas for learning developers about how best to play to students’ learning strengths, and when and how to nurture thinking skills and learning behaviours that may be less developed. study skills – here and now that is for the future, but what about now? whilst it is an especially volatile time in higher education, and therefore hard to predict what may rise to the top of the learning development agenda, it is probable that many heis will be even more at pains to help their students to achieve well, gain good degree classifications and improve their own league table positions. where they are competing for students, or where students are self-funding, heis will be keen to demonstrate to students that they have done everything they can to help them to achieve their potential. this raises the importance of manifestly good teaching and of demonstrating ‘value-added’. the likelihood is that we will see an increased emphasis on more carefully constructed learning experiences. we have already seen significant movement away from the concept of teaching as ‘delivery’ of information to students and greater, although not universal, recognition that the issue is no longer one of limited access to information. we are still establishing expertise in helping students to make sense of information, and in understanding what can be done when they don’t – apart from failing them. we are still journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 11 cottrell revolution by stealth prone to slippage in this area. as a sector, whenever new media appear, we have a tendency to revert to using these as new means for providing information, rather than as tools for developing cognitive processes and promoting better understanding. nonetheless, there are exciting developments in collaborative online learning, creative use of meaningful student research projects, use of hand held voting devices to encourage interactivity and discussion in class, and increased use of structured reflection, all of which place the emphasis on students having greater agency in their own learning. for decades, there have been voices raised against the use of lectures simply for ‘transmitting’ information and arguments for using the time for meaningful discussion of the issues instead. the recent rebranding of that basic concept as the ‘flipped classroom’ is capturing the imagination of more lecturers. all of these create new learning experiences, providing fertile ground for learning developers to support both staff and students. just as changes in use of technology may have an impact on the kinds of thinking skills that heis might need to develop within their students, so changes in the way we construct and deliver the curriculum will shape the pattern of skills and support that students will need if they are to perform well. where the first academic skills tutors, or their equivalents, needed to focus almost exclusively on the ‘mechanics’ of study skills (such as making notes, organising information, preparing for exams), learning developers now address a much broader range of issues, working closely with academics or as academics themselves, and operating more strategically. they are also addressing a much broader range of skills. one emergent feature of higher education in recent decades is an ever longer list of skills, attributes and qualities that we expect students to have as graduates (cottrell, 2010). this is driven partly by the increased focus on employability and the desire to give graduates the edge in gaining good jobs. it is also the result of an increased awareness of how complex an activity it is to ‘learn’ and to develop independent learning of challenging material in a time bound, assessment-based context. we are much more conscious of the range of skills, behaviours, attitudes and personal qualities that can contribute to a student completing a course and achieving well. as a result, there are now long and often rather daunting lists of required skills either on institutional websites or specified as required outcomes for programmes. it takes particular sets of skills in students to be able to make sense of the ever growing demands that are made of them and to maintain confidence that journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 12 cottrell revolution by stealth they can deliver on these. sometimes, these lists are so long that it must be a challenge for students simply to remember them. where previous study skills provision focused on mechanical skills for learning, students today generally need to develop skills in four overarching areas: cognitive, interpersonal, operational and intra-personal. in the student vernacular, these translate to academic skills, people skills, task-management skills and self-management skills, as outlined in the apt-s study skills framework (cottrell, 2013). there are strong continuities in the kinds of cognitive skills required past and present, such as critical analysis, synthesis, information processing or use of memory and recall. these are not likely to go away as requirements, although we are now more aware that we can influence how these develop and are likely to change in the ways that we go about developing them. in the last twenty years, we have become increasingly aware of the importance of developing the other three skills areas and these are starting to become much more integrated into curricular and co-curricular arrangements. people skills, long demanded by employers, are now recognised as important to managing the academic environment, whether contributing in class, working with research participants, managing relationships with supervisors or taking part in collaborative online learning activities. good task management skills help students to organise their studies, reducing the demands on personal tutors: skills in planning meaning they are more likely to hand in assignments on time; project management skills help them with research projects at college and are relevant to employment. perhaps the most interesting addition to the quartet of skills areas is that related to intrapersonal development, or ‘self-management skills’. this is the latest to enter the arena and the one where we are likely to see capacity-building in future years. although heis have long wanted to see self-reliant students who can ‘take responsibility for their own learning’, the emotional demands of moving from dependent to independent modes of learning is only slowly being acknowledged. that this might fall to heis themselves to address is an even more recent phenomenon. further, despite piaget’s work (1975) on the ‘disequilibration’ that arises within the learning process, and the difficulties that students have in managing ambiguities that arise when they have to move away from familiar concepts (cottrell, 2001), it is only recently that this has started to be addressed within the context of ‘threshold concepts’ for discipline-based knowledge. whilst the notion of threshold concepts (meyer and land, 2006; land et al., 2008) helps academics to make sense of students’ difficulties with learning material within the discipline, there are also journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 13 cottrell revolution by stealth generic issues about the unsettling nature of higher level learning. these could be addressed either within a discipline or across disciplines. for students, what is most unsettling is that perceived fundamental ‘truths’ or ‘facts’ might be challenged at all. they are not, then, always sure how to hold ambiguity in ways that enable them to keep functioning well as students. we are also more aware, now, of the affective issues associated with starting in higher education, such as leaving home or juggling study with family responsibilities, and the impact these have on learning. at schools level and in higher education, we are seeing an increased interest in skills in self-management, clustered under headings such as resilience, mindfulness and emotional literacy. this is an area that is likely to grow. conclusion there are opportunities for learning development to continue to play an important role in higher education, not just in supporting students, but also staff and whole institutions. the work of learning developers can play a key role in attracting students, preparing them at entry, ensuring they stay on to complete their courses and that they achieve well. good support for learning, both integrated into course delivery and through additional opportunities for individuals, can help to raise student and institutional performance. where social and psychological factors have predominance now, it may be that, in the longer term, we come to look more to areas such as neuroscience to help us to understand how our students are thinking and how we could support, if not ‘engineer’, their learning. if so, this might bring some profound changes to learning development of the future. as we become more aware of the role of ‘nurture’, or educational inputs, in shaping not just intelligence but even brain development, and as we gain greater recognition of the mediating role of intra-personal factors, then the scope and importance of learning development should increase. hopefully, heis will come to feel that this area is one that they should not ‘hide away’ and is, indeed, one that it is in their interests to promote. references ainley, p. (1994) degrees of difference: higher education in the 1990s. london: lawrence and wishart. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 14 cottrell revolution by stealth appleton, j. (2001) museums for ‘the people’. conversations in print. london: institute of ideas. baltes, p.b. and singer, t. (2001) ‘plasticity and the ageing mind: an exemplar of the biocultural orchestration of brain and behaviour’, european review, 9(1), pp. 59-76. bamber, j. and tett, l. (2001) ‘ensuring integrative learning experiences for nontraditional students in higher education’, widening participation and lifelong learning, 3(1), pp. 8-16. barr, j. (2005) ‘dumbing down intellectual culture: frank furedi, lifelong learning and museums’, museum and society, 3 (2), pp. 98-114 [online]. available at: http://www2.le.ac.uk/departments/museumstudies/museumsociety/documents/volu mes/barr.pdf (accessed: 26 july 2013). bennett, s., maton, k. and kervin, l. (2008) ‘the ‘digital natives’ debate: a critical review of the evidence’, british journal of educational technology, 39(5), pp., 775-786. bird, j. (1996) black students and higher education: rhetorics and realities. buckingham: srhe and open university press. bolton, p. (2012) education: historical statistics. standard note sn/sg/4252. house of commons library. brinch, c.n. and galloway, t.a. (2012) ‘schooling in adolescence raises iq scores’, proceedings of the national academy of sciences of the united states of america, 109(2), pp. 425-430. bruner, j. (1966) towards a theory of instruction. new york: w.w. norton. bruner, j. (1975) ‘the ontogenesis of speech acts’, journal of child language, 2(1), pp. 119. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 15 http://www2.le.ac.uk/departments/museumstudies/museumsociety/documents/volumes/barr.pdf http://www2.le.ac.uk/departments/museumstudies/museumsociety/documents/volumes/barr.pdf cottrell revolution by stealth ceci, s.j. (1991) ‘how much does schooling influence general intelligence and its cognitive components? a reassessment of the evidence’, developmental psychology, 27, pp. 703-722. chandrasekaran, b. and kraus, n. (2010) ‘the scalp-recorded brainstem response to speech: neural origins and plasticity’, psychophysiology, 47(2), pp. 236–246. cottrell, s.m. (2001) teaching study skills and supporting learning. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan. cottrell, s.m. (2010) skills for success. personal development planning and employability. 2nd edn. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan. cottrell, s.m. (2013) the study skills handbook. 4th edn. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan. ellis, l. (2002) ‘the backlash to access’, engage, 11, pp. 40-2. forgeard, m., winner, e., norton, a. and schlaug, g. (2008) ‘practicing a musical instrument in childhood is associated with enhanced verbal ability and nonverbal reasoning’, plos one, 3(10), e3566. furedi, f. (2004) where have all the intellectuals gone? confronting twentieth century philistinism. london and new york: continuum. gardner, h. (1993) frames of mind: the theory of multiple intelligences. 2nd edn. london: fontana. gombrich, r.f. (2000) british higher education policy in the last twenty years: the murder of a profession. lecture in tokyo at the graduate institute of policy studies (grips), 7 january. available at: http://www.atm.damtp.cam.ac.uk/mcintyre/papers/lhce/uk-higher-education.html (accessed: 14 july 2013). journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 16 http://www.atm.damtp.cam.ac.uk/mcintyre/papers/lhce/uk-higher-education.html cottrell revolution by stealth haggis, t. (2006) ‘pedagogies for diversity: retaining critical challenge amidst fears of ‘dumbing down’, studies in higher education, 31(5), pp. 521-535, society for research into higher education. hargittai, e. (2010) ‘digital na(t)ives? variation in internet skills and uses among members of the ‘net generation’’, sociological inquiry, 80(1), pp. 92-113. herrnstein, r.j. and murray, c. (1994) the bell curve: intelligence and class structure in american life. new york: free press. hertzog, c., kramer, a.f., wilson, r.s. and lindenberger, u. (2008) ‘enrichment effects on adult cognitive development can the functional capacity of older adults be preserved and enhanced?’, psychological science in the public interest, 9(1), pp. 165. higher education funding council for england (1997) the participation of non-traditional students in higher education. bristol: higher education funding council for england. hill, p., tinker, k. and catterall, s. (2010) ‘from deficiency to development: the evolution of academic skills provision at one uk university’, journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2 february, pp. 1-19. hyde, k.l., lerch, j., norton, a., forgeard, m., winner, e., evans, a.c. and schlaug, g. (2009) ‘musical training shapes structural brain development’, the journal of neuroscience, 29(10), pp. 3019-3025. ipsos mori on behalf of jisc (2008) great expectations of ict: how higher education institutions are measuring up. available at: www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/publications/jiscgreatexpectationsfinalreportjune0 8.pdf (accessed: 25 august 2013). jobbins, d. and leon, p. (2003) ‘teaching poll: ‘entry grades are worse, so we’ve got to get better’’, times higher education, 23 may. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 17 http://psi.sagepub.com/search?author1=christopher+hertzog&sortspec=date&submit=submit http://psi.sagepub.com/search?author1=arthur+f.+kramer&sortspec=date&submit=submit http://www.jneurosci.org/search?author1=krista+l.+hyde&sortspec=date&submit=submit http://www.jneurosci.org/search?author1=jason+lerch&sortspec=date&submit=submit http://www.jneurosci.org/search?author1=andrea+norton&sortspec=date&submit=submit http://www.jneurosci.org/search?author1=marie+forgeard&sortspec=date&submit=submit http://www.jneurosci.org/search?author1=ellen+winner&sortspec=date&submit=submit http://www.jneurosci.org/search?author1=alan+c.+evans&sortspec=date&submit=submit http://www.jneurosci.org/content/29/10/3019.short#aff-1 http://www.jneurosci.org/search?author1=gottfried+schlaug&sortspec=date&submit=submit http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/publications/jiscgreatexpectationsfinalreportjune08.pdf http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/publications/jiscgreatexpectationsfinalreportjune08.pdf cottrell revolution by stealth jones, c. and cross, s. (2009) ‘is there a net generation coming to university?’, ‘in dreams begins responsibility’: choice, evidence and change: alt-c 2009. manchester, uk 8-10 september. kennedy, g.e., judd, t.s., churchward, a., gray, k. and krause, k. (2008) ‘first year students' experiences with technology: are they really digital natives?’, australasian journal of educational technology, 24(1), pp. 108-122. kraus, n. and chandrasekaran, b. (2010) ‘music training for the development of auditory skills’, nature reviews neuroscience, 11, pp. 599-605. land, r., meyer, j.h.f. and smith, j. (2008) threshold concepts within the disciplines. rotterdam: sense publications. leathwood, c. and o'connell, p. (2003) ‘it's a struggle’: the construction of the ‘new student’ in higher education’, journal of education policy, 18(6), pp. 597-615. lorenzo, g. and dziuban, c. (2006) ‘ensuring the net generation is net savvy’, educause learning initiative paper 2. boulder, co: educause. available at: http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/eli3006.pdf (accessed: 15 august 2013). maguire, e.a., woollett, k. and spiers, h.j. (2006) ‘london taxi drivers and bus drivers: a structural mri and neuropsychological analysis’, hippocampus, 16(12), pp. 10911101. meyer, j.h.f. and land, r. (eds.) (2006) overcoming barriers to student understanding: threshold concepts and troublesome knowledge. abingdon: routledge. musacchia, g., sams, m., skoe, e. and kraus, n. (2007) ‘musicians have enhanced subcortical auditory and audiovisual processing of speech and music’, proc. natl acad. sci. usa, 104, pp. 15894-15898. national audit office (2002) widening participation in higher education in england. london: the stationery office. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 18 http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/eli3006.pdf cottrell revolution by stealth oblinger, d., oblinger, j.l. and lippincott, j.k. (2005) ‘educating the net generation’. brockport bookshelf. book 272. available at: http://digitalcommons.brockport.edu/bookshelf/272 (accessed: 22 august 2013). oblinger, d.g. and hawkins, b.l. (2006, march/april) ‘the myth about student competency’, educause review, 41(2), pp. 12-13. oriel college, university of oxford (2008) learnsmart: getting the most out of oxford. oxford: oxford university. overy, k. (2003) ‘from timing deficits to musical intervention’, ann. ny acad. sci, 999, pp. 497-505. palfrey, j. and gasser, u. (2008) born digital: understanding the first generation of digital natives. new york: basic books. parbery-clark, a., skoe, e. and kraus, n. (2009) ‘musical experience limits the degradative effects of background noise on the neural processing of sound’, journal of neuroscience, 29(45), pp. 14100-14107. perry, w.g. (1959) ‘students’ uses and misuses of reading skills, a report to the faculty’, harvard educational review, 29, pp. 193-200. piaget, j. (1975) the development of thought: equilibration of cognitive structures. oxford: blackwell. prensky, m. (2001) ‘digital natives, digital immigrants part 1’, on the horizon, 9(5), pp. 1 6). reay, d., balls, s. and david, m. (2002) ‘‘it’s taking me a long time but i’ll get there in the end’: mature students on access courses and higher education choice’, british education research journal, 28(1), pp. 5-19. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 19 http://digitalcommons.brockport.edu/bookshelf/272 cottrell revolution by stealth strait, d.l., kraus, n., skoe, e. and ashley, r. (2009) ‘musical experience and neural efficiency: effects of training on subcortical processing of vocal expressions of emotion’, european journal of neuroscience, 29(3), pp. 661–668. strait, d.l., o'connell, s., parbery-clark, a. and kraus, n. (2013) ‘musicians' enhanced neural differentiation of speech sounds arises early in life: developmental evidence from ages 3 to 30’, cerebral cortex, first published online 18 april 2013. swain, j., finkelstein, v., french, s. and oliver, m. (eds.) (1993) disabling barriers – enabling environments. london: sage. tallal, p. and gaab, n. (2006) ‘dynamic auditory processing, musical experience and language development’, trends in neuroscience, 29(7), pp. 382-390. university of cambridge (2013) support: looking after our students. available at: http://www.study.cam.ac.uk/undergraduate/support/ (accessed: 20 august 2013). vygotsky, l.s. (1988) ‘the genesis of higher mental functions’, in richardson, k. and sheldon, s. (eds.) cognitive development to adolescence. hove: erlbaum, pp. 6179. wingate, u. (2006) ‘doing away with ‘study skills’, teaching in higher education, 11(4), pp. 457-469. winkler, i., denham, s.l. and nelken, i. (2009) ‘modeling the auditory scene: predictive regularity representations and perceptual objects’, trends in cognitive sciences, 13(12), pp. 532-540. winship, c. and korenman, s. (1997) ‘does staying in school make you smarter?’, in devlin, b., fienberg, s.e., resnick, d.p. and roeder, k. (eds.) intelligence, genes, and success. scientists respond to the bell curve. springer: new york, pp. 215– 234. wong, p.c.m. and perrachione, t.k. (2007) ‘learning pitch patterns in lexical identification by native english speaking adults’, appl. psycholinguist, 28(4), pp. 565-585. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 20 http://www.study.cam.ac.uk/undergraduate/support/ cottrell revolution by stealth author details dr stella cottrell is director for lifelong learning at the university of leeds, deputy chair of governors at leeds college of art, chair of the yorkshire and humber access to he committee, and a trustee for ocnyhr. she was a co-founder of one of the earliest learning development departments in higher education, at uel in 1991. she has been a lifelong advocate of improving student achievement through the way that learning opportunities are designed and supported. her best known works are the study skills handbook (palgrave 2013, 4th edn.), teaching study skills and supporting learning (palgrave, 2001) and other texts that support independent study in higher education. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 21 revolution by stealth: the impact of learning development on democratising intelligence through constructive approaches to student support abstract introduction context sink or swim improving performance democratising intelligence the digital generation study skills – here and now conclusion references author details literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 9: july 2015 promoting self-efficacy through affective feedback and feedforward john cowan the open university, uk abstract research in the past 25 years has established a relationship between self-efficacy and attendant academic performance. these findings are critically summarised. their implications for possible enhancement of current tutorial practice, in the form of feedback or feedforward or both, are considered. particular attention is devoted to learners’ affective needs and to learner/tutor relationships. keywords: self-efficacy; affective needs; performance; feedback; feedforward; tutoring. cowan promoting self-efficacy through affective feedback and feedforward journal of learning development in higher education, issue 9: july 2015 2 1. introduction sometimes scots, disdainful of the hospitality offered to them, may describe their meal as ‘cauld kail het’ meaning yesterday’s soup reheated: i am concerned lest the title of this article and a quick inspection of the bibliography may provoke a similar reaction. i hope that, in this brief introduction, i can persuade tutors who are already committed to offering feedback and feedforward to their students to revisit that practice with me, in the light of relatively recent research into self-efficacy and its relationship with academic performance. hence this brief opening tale: i had been providing online tutoring to taiwanese undergraduate students of english as a foreign language. my remit was to develop their critical thinking abilities, and my experiences had varied in effectiveness. i worked with three similar class groups. in year 1, i had concentrated on identifying for the group the strengths of the better postings, and explaining what was admirable about them; this feedback had had only slight discernable impact on the students' reasoned thinking, judged by pertinent outcomes. in year 2, i had concentrated on individual postings with potential, and suggested how the writer or a peer could enhance them on the public discussion board; this feedforward was only somewhat more effective than the previous year's feedback. finally, in year 3, i contacted individual students directly, encouraging them to overcome their reservations and fears, to take risks, and to try to be the best they could be in their postings. deducing and responding to affective needs had occasioned a striking improvement (chen et al., 2014). while writing up these experiences, i chanced on bandura's work on self-efficacy (bandura, 1977; 1993; 1997) and its relationship with performance. it dawned on me that, somewhat like molière's m. jourdain, i had been nurturing self-efficacy in taiwan and previously (cowan, 2013) without knowing that i had been doing so. the findings in the literature of the past 30 years about how to promote self-efficacy effectively overlapped with much tutorial literature regarding feedback and feedforward, with which i was familiar. in particular, i found noteworthy mention of the affect amidst the reports of the likely positive effect of supportive tutorial contact on both self-efficacy and performance. in what follows, i summarise and share the lessons that i have taken as an active tutor from these studies of self-efficacy, feedback and feedforward. cowan promoting self-efficacy through affective feedback and feedforward journal of learning development in higher education, issue 9: july 2015 3 2. what is known about self-efficacy? 2.1 definition self-efficacy is the strength of one's belief in one's ability to complete specific and designated tasks and reach attendant standards. it is generally held to be domain specific, context sensitive and task specific (bandura, 1986; schunk, 1989b). 2.2 educational relevance the core of self-efficacy is the sincere belief at the time that one has, or has not, the skills, knowledge and ability to succeed in a particular forthcoming task (bandura, 1997). researchers (margolis & mccabe, 2006) claim to have shown that subjects with such beliefs depend upon a self-system through which they exercise some internal control over their motivation, thoughts, feelings and their response to a current task. conversely, how people judge their performance can inform and hence alter their self-beliefs, through what bandura called reciprocal determinism (bandura, 1986), recognising that a person's behaviour both influences, and is influenced by, personal factors and the social environment. 2.3 relationship to performance research has established that self-efficacy and performance are at least correlated. there is less evidence to demonstrate causality, although there may well be some undefined causal factor that simultaneously boosts both self-efficacy and performance. whatever the relationship, the value of a learner's perception of self-efficacy, prior to engagement with a task, often predicts their level of performance in that task (pajares, 1997). significant correlations have been reported between prior identification of selfefficacy and subsequent problem-solving (schunk & hanson, 1985; schunk et al., 1987; mone et al., 1995; meier et al., 1984). collins (1982) reported that self-efficacy predicted achievement for various levels of student ability, without necessarily establishing a causal relationship. schunk (1991) reported that, where disabled children set their own goals, higher levels of both self-efficacy and skill ensued which at least indicated correlation. pintrich and schunk (1996) wrote, carefully, that school children 'who had stronger selfefficacy beliefs were able to master various math and reading tasks better than students with weaker efficacy beliefs.' the relationship has rarely been demonstrated as directly causal. even margolis (2005) only wrote reservedly of the 'probability' that increased self-efficacy will lead inter alia to cowan promoting self-efficacy through affective feedback and feedforward journal of learning development in higher education, issue 9: july 2015 4 meaningful academic gains. nevertheless pajares (1997) found it noteworthy that there had been a proliferation of reported findings in which self-efficacy beliefs were apparently predictive especially in regard to school pupils studying mathematical topics. bandura staunchly maintained that, even when the learning context features limited opportunities and powerful constraints, those with strong belief in their efficacy will ingeniously devise ways to gain some control (bandura, 1993). however schunk (1991) expressed the reasonable reservation that high levels of self-efficacy would not necessarily result in competent and adequate performance, should the requisite skills be lacking. moreover some reports suggest the existence of other relevant factors also affecting performance. 2.4 factors related to self-efficacy self-efficacy is a generative and multi-faceted capability over which a reflective individual can exercise some control and influence (bandura, 1993). at any given time, an individual's level of self-efficacy is determined by an inferential process wherein they identify and balance the combined influences of personal and situational factors. levels of self-efficacy prior to their undertaking of a particular task will thus vary with their aptitude and prior experience (schunk, 1991); the learners' perceptions of their ability and of the difficulty of the imminent task; the effort they have recently had to expend on similar tasks and the assistance that they then received; their consequent successes and failures (margolis, 2005); and the credibility of anyone who has offered them feedback or feedforward (schunk, 1989b). 2.5 influence of models understandably, individuals will attune their judgement of self-efficacy by reflectively comparing themselves with others (models), choice of whom will influence their consequent self-efficacy rating (bandura, 1993). schunk and hanson (1985) compared children's observation of peer coping, peer mastery, and teacher models with noobservation of models. observing peer models generally but not always led to more increase in self-efficacy and skill than did observing teacher models. the same researchers reported later (schunk & hanson, 1989) that listening to protocol tapes of selfmodelling (self-recorded commentaries describing thought processes as they are happening) highlighted progress in skills development, and so enhanced self-efficacy. cowan promoting self-efficacy through affective feedback and feedforward journal of learning development in higher education, issue 9: july 2015 5 2.6 emotional self-efficacy emotional self-efficacy is a person's judgement of their capacity to process emotional matters accurately and effectively. using three established instruments in their preliminary study of student teachers, goroshit and hen (2014) found significant correlations between empathy, teacher self-efficacy and emotional self-efficacy. saarni (1999) for example, reported that emotional self-efficacy is important for the individual's self-confidence, ability to set challenging goals and perseverance on the way to realise these goals (saarni, 1999). 2.7 characteristics of learners with high self-efficacy bandura (1993) summarised the association of extreme levels of perceived self-efficacy with aspects of cognitive development and functioning, and outlined ways in which efficacy impacts on personal accomplishment. others have supported some of his findings, as noted below. learners with a strong sense of self-efficacy generally: • direct themselves effectively. • use cognitive and metacognitive strategies (pintrich & garcia, 1991). • maintain strong motivation to increasingly challenging goals (pajares, 1997). • sustain effort when they perceive the prospect of failure. • persist longer and achieve more (schunk, 1991; margolis, 2005). • regard difficult tasks as challenges, not as threats (pajares, 1997). • quickly recover positive efficacy after setbacks. • are confident of their ability to control threatening situations. • attribute failure to insufficient effort, or to deficiencies in knowledge or skills that can be acquired. 2.8 characteristics of learners with low self-efficacy in contrast, bandura (1993), and others as noted, found that those with a low sense of self-efficacy will often: • formulate self-fulfilling prophecies of failure (margolis & mccabe, 2006). • struggle to establish motivation (margolis & mccabe, 2006). • have low aspirations and weak commitment. cowan promoting self-efficacy through affective feedback and feedforward journal of learning development in higher education, issue 9: july 2015 6 • avoid difficult tasks (margolis, 2005), perceived as threats. • fail to persist in tasks which they fear (bandura, 1986). • focus on self-diagnosis rather than on successful performance. • dwell on their personal deficiencies. • slacken off effort or give up in face of difficulties (margolis, 2005). • ascribe inadequate performance to low ability. • only recover efficacy slowly (if at all) after a setback. • lose faith in their capabilities after failure, shutting down emotionally. • experience stress and depression. the incidence of matters of the affect in the above items is thought pertinent to the current inquiry. goleman (1995) wrote tellingly of how temperament can be tempered by experience, and of how optimism and hope, like helplessness and despair, can be developed in the sense of self-efficacy. lehman et al. (2008) found that, 'with the exception of happiness, it is not the basic emotions that are prominent during learning, but the affective states of confusion, frustration and anxiety." they stressed the need to research students' affective states during learning, to inform and enhance pedagogy. 2.9 what should course designers and tutors take from this? judgements of self-efficacy relate to specific and imminent tasks; there is certainly a relationship between self-efficacy and performance, although whether or not this is causal is debatable. nevertheless enhanced self-efficacy has generally been found in association with enhanced performance, which can then further strengthen self-efficacy. furthermore, such self-efficacy has generally been determined before the performances with which it has been correlated, which renders it unlikely to be the fruit of wisdom by hindsight. additionally some relevant behavioural needs and influences appear to be affective in nature. however, much of the research into the relationship between self-efficacy and performance has been undertaken with subjects of school age and with multiple areas of research interest. and there are some grounds for suspecting that enhanced self-efficacy is not the only factor associated with performance changes. the quality or absence of remedial tuition, and in some cultures parental influence, are only two such factors. nevertheless the next section concentrates on practical measures suggested by this research to enhance self-efficacy. cowan promoting self-efficacy through affective feedback and feedforward journal of learning development in higher education, issue 9: july 2015 7 3. how can learners' self-efficacy be promoted? 3.1 first hand experiences of mastery personal experience of mastery, or lack of it, will usually have a direct effect on selfefficacy (bandura, 1986). learners will perceive their successes (or failures) as a consequence of such factors as ability, effort, task difficulty, and luck (weiner, 1985). such self-evaluations consequently influence their formulation or re-formulation of their judgements of self-efficacy. naturally success on a task which the learner rated was easy will not enhance their self-efficacy as strongly as would success on one they judge to have been difficult (schunk, 1991). margolis (2005) therefore suggested: • arranging a progression of study demands for struggling learners. • coordinating supportive tutoring with the in-class curriculum. • frequently and promptly providing academic feedback. • severally commending and rewarding effort, progress and success. • reviewing, and even graphing, of progress. • helping learners to credit successes to some such factors as effort, persistence, modifiable abilities and appropriate use of suitable strategies. • avoiding direct reference to abilities that struggling learners believe are immutable and incapable of improvement. kline et al. (1991) summarised this advice as telling learners what they have done that was satisfactory, why it was so, what was unsatisfactory and in what ways, and suggesting how they might improve performance. 3.2 vicarious experiences of performance acquaintance with a significant behavioural model, to whom the learner can relate, can promote influential self-beliefs (brown, 1978; schunk, 1983). knowledge and appreciation of how their peers perform can help learners to develop appreciation of their own capabilities (schunk, 1989b). cowan promoting self-efficacy through affective feedback and feedforward journal of learning development in higher education, issue 9: july 2015 8 margolis (2005) suggested: • modelling targeted skills and concepts. • making self-modelling and comparison videos. • using similar others to provide an effective basis for comparisons (schunk, 1991). • developing trust and respect, so that persuasive comments by models or others are believed. 3.3 persuasion by others pajares (1997) found that feedback giving reasoned credit to ability has a strong effect on self-efficacy and performance. exposure to judgements of one's performance by tutors or others will admittedly nurture self-efficacy less strongly than experience of mastery, at first hand or even vicariously. nonetheless comment from tutor or peer can also influence the development of self-beliefs provided it does not take the form described precisely by many writers (including pajares and bandura) as ‘knee-jerk praise or empty inspirational homilies’ (bandura, 1997). the judgements and advice from others must be credible as well as relevant. shallow assurances may lead to a loss of self-esteem (sutton & gill, 2010), by being taken as indirect commentary on the learner's failings, and hence compromising their 'ontological security' (giddens, 1991). margolis (2005) suggested feedback: • giving immediate attention to errors. • relating current activities to past successes and to strategies that learners have demonstrably mastered. • developing high credibility and influence with struggling learners. • avoiding ‘stroking’ that is transparently shallow and lacking authenticity. 3.4 physiological considerations anxiety, stress, arousal, fatigue, and mood states can powerfully influence physiological states that are primarily of the learner's own making (bandura, 1997; pajares, 1997) and so intrude upon intellectual functioning and self-efficacy judgements (zimmerman, 1995). beliefs about efficacy reciprocally influence stress, anxiety and depression. those who impose upon themselves unattainable standards of self-worth, or who are unable to control their ruminative thoughts, can even induce depression (bandura, 1993). cowan promoting self-efficacy through affective feedback and feedforward journal of learning development in higher education, issue 9: july 2015 9 margolis (2005) explicitly suggested that teachers should: • consciously design instruction to reduce undue anxiety. • encourage in all learners a sense of personal control. • offer relaxation training. 3.5 what should course designers and tutors take from this? margolis and mccabe (2006) distinguish between teachers' deciding what they should do, and what they should say. 'what to do?' centres upon arranging enactive mastery through gaining relevant experience of, and confidence from, doing a task or job successfully, or observing vicarious experiences of someone of similar ability. 'what to say?' concentrates on verbal interaction and persuasion. if both are combined, the pairing becomes yet more powerful. in considering what to do, course designers should: • avoid overly demanding tasks, as excessive effort causes fatigue, may provoke fear of failure, and be taken as a sign of personal inadequacy (pintrich & schunk, 2002). • plan that demand and support progress throughout the course, so that planned and actual progress resonate. • suggest when and why to use both new and previously learned strategies, and encourage their correct use in forthcoming tasks. • offer students acceptable and meaningful choice of content and method, as a major motivator for consequent learning (pintrich & schunk, 2002). • arrange opportunities for learners with low self-efficacy to observe peer models working successfully on targeted tasks, especially if these models attribute any failure to controllable factors and modifiable abilities. in considering what to say, tutors should: • give frequent, immediate, focused, and task-specific feedback, mapping what struggling learners did successfully and what they can do next time to improve. • initially provide extrinsic reinforcers, and then gradually phase them out. cowan promoting self-efficacy through affective feedback and feedforward journal of learning development in higher education, issue 9: july 2015 10 • use and differentiate between five types and purposes of teacher-directed feedback (salend, 2001). these are corrective feedback (showing how to correct mistakes); prompting feedback (to help in the correction of mistakes); process feedback (when most of an answer is correct); instructive feedback (providing additional information); and praising (when legitimately earned). • optimistically but sincerely tell learners when success is possible if they make the effort and use an appropriate strategy. • reinforce both effort and correct use of strategy in their on-going contacts with learners. stress recent successes, comparing them with previous work, and even recording progress on a chart (alberto & troutman, 2003). 4. feedback and feedforward for self-efficacy both feedback and feedforward are directly relevant to the formulation of self-efficacy. these interactions between tutors and students cover individual or mutual analysis and evaluation of recent performance, and can point forward to potential enhancement in forthcoming tasks. 4.1 feedback 4.1.1 what is generally known about effective feedback? academic feedback is the reporting to learners of the strengths and weaknesses of their completed work or performance. sadler summarised the potential of feedback for learning and development: students use it to monitor the strengths and weaknesses of their performance, so that aspects associated with success or high quality can be recognised and reinforced, and unsatisfactory aspects modified or improved. sadler (1989). salend (2001) has highlighted the need for different forms and styles of feedback to accommodate various tutorial purposes (subsection 3.5). whatever the purpose, if feedback is to be effective, it must be given soon after the work has been completed (gibbs, 1988). learners who then possess and exercise a sound concept of the desired standard can have and take an opportunity through appropriate reflective action to judge their work and the corresponding feedback against this standard (sadler, 1989). they can cowan promoting self-efficacy through affective feedback and feedforward journal of learning development in higher education, issue 9: july 2015 11 then respond to the feedback as they have interpreted it (higgins, hartley, & skelton, 2001). some findings cast doubt on the impact of receipt of feedback on subsequent performance. researchers have reported that some students are only concerned with their mark or grade, and not with the accompanying feedback (wotjas, 1998; duncan, 2007; burns & foo, 2014; falchikov, 1995; gibbs & simpson, 2002). crisp (2007) found 'only limited support for the idea that students respond to feedback by making changes' consistent with the feedback. taras (2003) found it effective to arrange learners' joint discussions with their tutor of their feedback comments, before grading was declared. black et al (2003) reported that, as a result of comment-only marking followed by personal dialogue with the marker, students put more effort into their work. murtagh and baker (2009) described how students were asked to respond to their tutors' written comments on assignments in a tightly structured one-to-one tutorial, centred on discussion of the feedback. sutton and gill (2010) further stressed the desirability of communicating individual feedback through a tutor/student relationship in which the tutor expresses care through the provision of bespoke responses, which are personalised yet not personal (murphy & cornell, 2010). however such arrangements can create tension for tutors between their roles as instructor and as academic developer, within which asymmetrical power/knowledge relationship there is always significant struggle for identity in a wider unequal world order (sutton & gill, 2010). with this in mind, higgins et al. (2001) strongly advocated that tutor and student need to directly address issues of discourse, identity, power, control and social relationships. alternatively social persuasion can be nurtured online by involving students in reading peers' postings and writing quality responses to them, as is done nowadays in many massive open online courses (moocs). thus a sense of community within which focused praise and pertinent questioning can encourage higher level thinking can be established. 4.1.2 emotional needs and feedback burns and foo (2014) asked students about their immediate feelings regarding feedback. like carless (2007), they encountered a range of emotional responses including sadness, disappointment and increased confidence. having one-to-one dialogue between student and tutor at such times is highly valued by students (murtagh & baker, 2009; arkoudis & tran, 2010; taras, 2003; higgins et al., 2001) as a key to unlock development of their cowan promoting self-efficacy through affective feedback and feedforward journal of learning development in higher education, issue 9: july 2015 12 feelings and perceptions, and consequently enhance their utilisation of the feedback (murphy & cornell, 2010). allocating time to reassurance and follow-up questions is likely to respond to the emotional needs of the student (burns & foo, 2014). however such a relationship can prove inherently difficult for both parties, in several respects (murphy & cornell, 2010). for even the provision of frank and objective feedback can be ‘obscured by emotional static’ (chanock, 2000), which render desirable and tempered conditions unduly and unhelpfully tense. 4.1.3 feedback and self-efficacy the principal contribution of feedback towards enhanced self-efficacy and performance is in objectively establishing the desired standards and the scope for enhancement if driven by positive self-efficacy. receiving formative feedback can increase students' confidence. certainly feedback on early successes in a programme can enhance learning efficacy (schunk, 1991), for students can develop their self-efficacy by appreciating how they learn best. feedback on ability has more effect at this time than feedback on effort or on combined ability and effort (schunk, 1983a). but if feedback is delayed and disappointing, it can have a destructive effect on self-efficacy (nicol & macfarlane-dick, 2006). 4.2 feedforward academic feedforward (sadler, 1989) comprises constructive advice that is formulated and communicated by a credible message-giver, and offered with intention to strengthen what the learner will next undertake. current usage commonly locates feedforward as the closing stage in a guidance and feedforward loop (hounsell et al., 2008). they describe this loop as jointly dependent on judgements made by marking tutors, on students’ understanding of these, and on students’ effective assimilation of the advice they are offered. 4.2.1 what is generally known about effective feedforward? the concept and value of feedforward are fairly widely acknowledged (bloxham & boyd, 2007) and advocated by reasoned rationale (higgins et al., 2001). it has long been claimed to have significant and consistently positive effects on student learning (black & wiliam, 1998), so that it nominally features nowadays as a declared priority for many tutors. it need not preclude explicit feedback, as it can incorporate the judgment on which both feedback and feedforward are based. indeed the additional reporting of recent grades can be a helpful supplementary component of feedforward provided care is taken to cowan promoting self-efficacy through affective feedback and feedforward journal of learning development in higher education, issue 9: july 2015 13 highlight what students can do to improve their work (black & wiliam, 1998; sutton & gill, 2010), no doubt partly through clarifying and emphasising standards. ten years ago rushton (2005) deplored the fact that the paradigm shift which claims to recognise the value of feedforward in formative assessments is unaccompanied by evidence that the shift in practice has featured in reality, and has been shown to be effective. more recent literature and conference presentations are certainly rich in enthusiastic but vaguely detailed mentions of feedforward. while these generally offer earnest practitioners' testimony endorsing its value, they are seldom in this writer's experience accompanied by evidence from student evaluations and comparative studies of learning. 4.2.2 emotional needs and feedforward part of the focus in constructive feedforward can profitably be devoted to addressing learners' affective needs. as already reported, these can include lack of self-confidence, frustration, apprehension, fatigue and uncertainty. yet this aspect of feedforward has received little attention in the literature. admittedly george et al. (2004) dealt with it specifically in the case of access students, stressing how important it had been found to address the affective agendas carried by such students. additionally chiu (chiu, 2009; chiu & cowan, 2009) has written about her concentration on 'shepherd leadership' (mccormick & davenport, 2004) as an effective feedforward approach for engaging with her asian students' affective needs. a western approach to the same situation and its affective needs was described by chen, chou and cowan (2014). overall, however, affective themes feature sparsely in the literature dealing with feedback and feedforward. one noteworthy exception to that was gibbs (1988), who made a strong case for an account of feelings at the time to feature in personal debriefing of reflections on action 4.2.3 feedforward and self-efficacy self-efficacy is a belief, founded on feelings about expected or hoped for performance. while partly informed by objective reasoning, it clearly has a strong affective component in which confidence, fears, hopes, risk taking and uncertainty will feature. it thus seems evident that these should feature significantly and explicitly in comprehensive feedforward, although cowan's decision (chen et al., 2014) to concentrate his feedforward on perceived affective needs may have accorded them undue emphasis. of course, one problem in dealing with affective needs is the reluctance of students to declare them, cowan promoting self-efficacy through affective feedback and feedforward journal of learning development in higher education, issue 9: july 2015 14 although they are often ready to confirm a tutor's perception, once it is privately declared to them. addressing self-efficacy was (and still is) featured in the uk open university’s (ou) arrangements for commenting on a marked assignment. the advice long given to ou tutors has been to provide feedback through their initial comments on the body of the tutormarked assignment (tma) itself, and in the covering form. they should thus use that form to 'begin with positive comments on the strong points of the tma indicating, emphasising and building upon the strengths' and giving an explanation of the score awarded. this should be followed by 'constructive criticism if required, giving examples of weaknesses and how to overcome them'. these final four words encapsulate the expectation that the tutor will provide helpful suggestions (feedforward) about how the next assignment might be approached to produce work of a higher standard. this advice is to be sandwiched between the opening feedback and the recommended and transparently affective 'high note and encouragement' that should be offered in conclusion. the widespread and highly regarded ou model, providing combined feedback and feedforward for all students, is current practice in that university. yet research into student reactions, reported over 25 years ago by gibbs (1988), suggests that little attention is devoted by recipients to anything other than the grade and associated affective reassurance and encouragement. notice, additionally, that the recommended feedforward implicitly and in practice usually concentrates on responding to the cognitive demands of the task in hand. the affective needs and possibilities emerging from the self-efficacy research are not specifically identified as matters for tutorial attention. 4.3 what should course designers and tutors take from this? 4.3.1 programme and task design programme designers are excellently placed to enhance the self-efficacy of struggling learners. they can arrange for positive experience of mastery (enactive mastery) in a context of moderately demanding standards by setting clear tasks with positive instructions for students, and providing for positive feedback responses thereafter. students should thus find themselves able to understand the content of their learning, to identify the results of their actions, and to build upon these results to further develop their capability and ongoing self-efficacy (bandura, 1977). perceived failure in one's direct, personal accomplishments will weaken self-efficacy, just as success will strengthen it (pintrich & cowan promoting self-efficacy through affective feedback and feedforward journal of learning development in higher education, issue 9: july 2015 15 schunk, 2002; margolis, 2005). planning for learners to have a progression of successful and valued mastery experiences should therefore be a priority for designers and tutors. the choice of goals is important in regard to the promotion of self-efficacy. an attractive goal, linked to the belief that it is attainable, motivates learners to respond (schunk, 1991). explicit and moderately challenging goals enhance and sustain motivation (locke & latham, 1990). to a great extent, levels of self-efficacy will depend on learners' interpretations of their recent successes and the extent to which they take credit for them (pintrich & schunk, 2002). in this respect, forthcoming goals that embody specifically stated performance standards will promote on-going self-efficacy and motivation better than distant goals (schunk, 1991). learners will be sooner and better able to discern progress, and to set themselves feasible future goals, thus leading to enhancement of their self-efficacy and skills (schunk, 1985). if a programme successfully commends proven strategies to learners, this can enhance their motivation and self-efficacy, according to the extent to which the strategy use improves performance on task. (corno, 1983; pintrich & de groot, 1990; zimmerman & martinez-pons, 1990). planning provision to provide cues signalling how well the learner is doing will also enhance motivation, provided the learner does well. 4.3.2 tutorial relationships the tutor/student relationship in which the facilitative tutor seeks to ‘nudge’ (bruner, 1986) the learner forward into their zone of proximal development (vygotsky, 1986) has been adopted and found effective at every level in education (rogers, 1983). in a recent paper, o'dwyer (2012) has pointedly reminded her readers of the three features of supportive tuition advocated by rogers in his person-centred approach. according to rogers, the necessary qualities of the helping or caring person in such a relationship are unconditional acceptance, empathy and realness. these seem particularly pertinent to the concern of this paper with the pro-active promotion of positive self-efficacy and its attendant capacity for growth enhancement. rogers claimed that self-acceptance is the key to personal change and development, since once we accept ourselves as we are, then we can change. being unconditionally accepted by another facilitates the emergence and strengthening of the real self, and hence raises levels of self-efficacy. this can emerge through experiencing attentive cowan promoting self-efficacy through affective feedback and feedforward journal of learning development in higher education, issue 9: july 2015 16 empathic listening that embodies care and solicitude, sensing and giving attention to the learner's inner thoughts and feelings and to the personal meanings that are being expressed. when the learner has been listened to and heard, matters that seemed to be insoluble become soluble. as such a relationship develops, a tutor may even find themselves willing to be ‘real’, exposing their own vulnerabilities as well as their strengths, and so creating ‘a hitherto suppressed freedom of genuine expression and being in another.’ within all such empathic and congruent relationships, trust in both directions is vital: unconditional positive regard then ensures that self-efficacy can receive helpful and appropriate attention. the recommendations in the present paper seem to presume this type of tutor/student relationship and envisage its extension into facilitative relationships between peers, as for example in francis and cowan (2008) and chen, chiu and cowan (2014). for it is advantageous for learners to be in an environment where they engage closely with positive and encouraging role models, thereby learning what high efficacy beliefs look and feel like (schunk & hanson, 1985; relich, 1986). 4.4 needed research the general self-efficacy scale (schwarzer & jerusalem, 1995) was created to assess perceived self-efficacy. it is usually self-administered and comprises 10 items rated on a 4point scale. it has been used internationally for more than two decades. initiatives now could well use this instrument in projects where tertiary learners become action researchers of their own processes of learning development, ascertaining the contribution of self-efficacy to that progression. a range of research questions has emerged almost naturally from this review and is somewhat urgent in view of the desirability of generalising findings and advice. in particular: • to what extent are findings obtained for school-age students replicated in studies of self-efficacy and performance for undergraduates? • what is the effect of learners' awareness of the relationship between self-efficacy and performance on the enhancement of both? • and, finally and most important here, to what extent are findings from self-efficacy research generalisable and transferable? cowan promoting self-efficacy through affective feedback and feedforward journal of learning development in higher education, issue 9: july 2015 17 5. overall conclusions this review has concentrated on self-efficacy, affective needs and tutor/student relationships around feedback and feedforward. it has generated some new and valuable insights on the effective enhancement of academic performance, which are that: • a relationship has frequently been found between self-efficacy and level of academic performance; • whether or not this is a directly causal relationship, tutors can expect that efforts which consciously plan to raise self-efficacy are likely to be accompanied by enhancement of academic performance; • effective promotion of self-efficacy and performance will originate from timely and objective feedback, if it is considered by tutors and learners with deliberately constructive intent; • promotion of self-efficacy and performance will be nurtured by appropriately planned and expressed feedforward; • such feedforward should take full account and give attention to learners' affective needs, by building relationships with tutors and peers in which affective needs receive due individual attention. references alberto, p. and troutman, a. (2003) applied behavior analysis for teachers. 6th edn. upper saddle river, nj: merrill/ prentice hall. arkoudis, s. and tran, l. (2010) 'writing blah, blah, blah: lecturers' approaches and challenges in supporting international students', international journal of teaching and learning in higher education, 22(2), pp. 169-178 [online]. available at: http://www.isetl.org/ijtlhe/pdf/ijtlhe816.pdf (accessed: 6 august 2015). http://www.isetl.org/ijtlhe/pdf/ijtlhe816.pdf cowan promoting self-efficacy through affective feedback and feedforward journal of learning development in higher education, issue 9: july 2015 18 bandura, a. (1977) 'self-efficacy: toward a unifying theory of behavioral change', psychological review, 84(2), pp. 191-215. bandura, a. (1986) social foundations of thought and action: a social cognitive theory. englewood cliffs, nj: prentice-hall. bandura, a. (1993) 'perceived self-efficacy in cognitive development and functioning', educational psychologist, 28(2), pp. 117-148. bandura, a. (1997) self-efficacy: the exercise of control. new york: freeman. black, p. and wiliam, d. (1998) 'assessment and classroom learning', assessment in education: principles, policy and practice, 5(1), pp. 7-74. black, p., harrison, c., lee, c., marshall, b. and wiliam, d. (2003) assessment for learning: putting it into practice. maidenhead, uk: open university press. bloxham, s. and boyd, p. (2007) developing effective assessment in higher education: a practical guide. maidenhead, uk: open university press. brown, i. j. and inouye, d. k. (1978) 'learned helplessness through modeling: the role of perceived similarity in competence', journal of personality and social psychology, 36(8), pp. 900-908. bruner, j. (1986) actual minds, possible worlds. cambridge, ma, usa: harvard university press. burns, c. and foo, m. (2014) 'what are our international students telling us? further explorations of a formative feedback intervention, to support academic literacy', practitioner research in higher education, 8(1), pp. 7488 [online]. available at: http://194.81.189.19/ojs/index.php/prhe/article/viewfile/169/280 (accessed: 6 august 2015). http://194.81.189.19/ojs/index.php/prhe/article/viewfile/169/280 cowan promoting self-efficacy through affective feedback and feedforward journal of learning development in higher education, issue 9: july 2015 19 carless, d. (2007) 'differing perceptions in the feedback process', studies in higher education, 31(2), pp. 219-233. chanock, k. (2000) 'comments on essays: do students understand what tutors write?', teaching in higher education, 5(1), pp. 95-105. chen, y., chou, y. and cowan, j. (2014) 'concentrating on affective feedforward in online tutoring', british journal of educational technology, 45(4), pp. 694706. chiu, y. (2009) 'facilitating asian students' critical thinking in online discussions', british journal of educational technology, 40(1), pp. 42-57. chiu, y. and cowan, j. (2009) 'dealing with affective needs in e-learning; contrasting two case studies in two cultures', in olaniran, b. (ed.) cases in successful e-learning practices in the developed and developing world: methods for the global information economy. hershey, ny, usa: igi global publications, pp. 42-57. collins, j. (1982) 'self-efficacy and ability in achievement behavior', paper presented at a meeting of the american educational research association, new york, march. corno, l. and mandinach, e. b. (1983) 'the role of cognitive engagement in classroom learning and motivation', educational psychologist, 18(2), pp. 88108. cowan, j (2013). facilitating reflective journalling personal reflections on three decades of practice. journal of learning development in higher education. issue 5, march. crisp, b. (2007) 'is it worth the effort? how feedback influences students' subsequent submission of assessable work', assessment and evaluation in higher education, 32(5), pp. 571-581. cowan promoting self-efficacy through affective feedback and feedforward journal of learning development in higher education, issue 9: july 2015 20 duncan, n. (2007) 'feed forward: improving students' use of tutors' comments', assessment and evaluation in higher education, 32(3), pp. 271-283. falchikov, n. (1995) 'improving feedback to and from students', in knight, p. (ed.), assessment for learning in higher education. london, uk: kogan page, pp. 157-166. francis, h. and cowan, j. (2008) 'fostering an action-reflection dynamic amongst student practitioners', journal of european industrial training, 32(5), pp. 336346. george, j., cowan, j., hewitt, l. and cannell, p. (2004) 'failure dances to the tune of insecurity: affective issues in the assessment and evaluation of access learning', journal of access policy and practice, 1(2), pp. 119-133. gibbs, g. (1988) learning by doing: a guide to teaching and learning methods. london, uk: further education unit. available at: http://www2.glos.ac.uk/gdn/gibbs/ (accessed: 6 august 2015). gibbs, g. and simpson, c. (2002) how assessment influences student learning a literature review. open university, student support research group. milton keynes: open university. (internal publication) giddens, a. (1991) modernity and self-identity: self and society in the late modern age. cambridge, uk: polity. goleman, d (!996) emotional intelligence. london; bloomsbury publishing. goroshit, m. and hen, m. (2014) 'does emotional self-efficacy predict teachers' selfefficacy and empathy?', journal of education and training studies, 2(3), pp. 26-32. higgins, r., hartley, p. and skelton, a. (2001) 'getting the message across: the problem of communicating assessment feedback', teaching in higher education, 6(2), pp. 269-274. http://www2.glos.ac.uk/gdn/gibbs/ cowan promoting self-efficacy through affective feedback and feedforward journal of learning development in higher education, issue 9: july 2015 21 hounsell, d., mccune, v., hounsell, j. and litjens, j. (2008) 'the quality of guidance and feedback to students', higher education research and development, 27(1), pp. 55-67. kline, f. m., schumaker, j. b. and deshler, d. d. (1991) 'development and validation of feedback routines for instructing students with learning disabilities', learning disability quarterly, 14(3), pp. 191-207. lehman, b. a., matthews, m., d'mello, s. k. and person, n. (2008) ‘what are you feeling? investigating student affective states during expert human tutoring sessions’, in woolf, b. et al. (eds.), intelligent tutoring systems ninth international conference, its 2008, montreal, canada, june 2008 proceedings, lncs 5091. springer-verlag, pp. 50-59. locke, e. and latham, g. (1990) 'a theory of goal setting and task performance', englewood cliffs, nj: prentice-hall. margolis, h. (2005) 'increasing struggling learners' self-efficacy: what tutors can do and say', mentoring and tutoring: partnership in learning, 13(2), pp. 221238. margolis, h. and mccabe, p. (2006) 'improving self-efficacy and motivation: what to do, what to say', intervention in school and clinic, 41(4), pp. 218-227. mccormick, b. and davenport, d. (2004) shepherd leadership: wisdom for leaders from psalm 23. (y.c.geh, trans.) taipei, taiwan: apocalypse press. meier, s. m., (1984) 'validity of self-efficacy as a predictor of writing performance', cognitive therapy and research, 8, pp. 107-120. mone, m., baker, d. and jeffries, f. (1995) 'predictive validity and time dependency of self-efficacy, self-esteem, personal goals and academic performance', educational and psychological measurement, 55, pp. 716-722. cowan promoting self-efficacy through affective feedback and feedforward journal of learning development in higher education, issue 9: july 2015 22 murphy, c. and cornell, j. (2010) 'student perceptions of feedback; seeking a coherent flow', practitioner research in higher education, 4(1), pp. 41-51. murtagh, l. and baker, n. (2009) 'feedback to feed forward: students' response to tutors' written comments on assignments', practitioner research in higher education, 3(1), pp. 20-28. nicol, d. j. and macfarlane-dick, d. (2006) 'formative assessment and self regulated learning: a model and seven principles of good feedback practice', studies in higher education, 31(2), pp. 199-218. o'dwyer, k. (2012) 'the quiet revolutionary: a timely revisiting of carl rogers' visionary contribution to human understanding', international journal of existential psychology and psychotherapy, 4(1), pp. 67-78. pajares, f. (1997) 'current directions in self-efficacy research’, in maehr, m. p. and pintrich, p. r. (eds.) advances in motivation and achievement, vol. 10. greenwich, ct: jai press, pp. 1-49. pintrich, p. and de groot, e. (1990) 'motivational and self-regulated learning components of classroom academic performance', journal of educational psychology, 82(1), pp. 33-40. pintrich, p. and garcia, t. (1991) 'student goal orientation and self-regulation in the college classroom', in maehr, m. and pintrich, p. (eds.), advances in motivation and achievement: goals and self-regulatory processes, vol. 7. greenwich, ct: jai press, pp. 371-402. pintrich, p.r, and schunk, d.h. (1996) motivation in education. englewood cliffs, n.j.; prentice-hall. pintrich, p. and schunk, d. (2002) motivation in education: theory, research and applications. 2 nd edn. englewood cliffs, nj: prentice hall merrill. cowan promoting self-efficacy through affective feedback and feedforward journal of learning development in higher education, issue 9: july 2015 23 relich, j. d., debus, r. l. and walker, r. (1986) 'the mediating role of attribution and self-efficacy variables for treatment effects on achievement outcomes', contemporary educational psychology, 11(3), pp. 195-216. rogers, c. (1983) freedom to learn for the 80's. columbus, ohio, us: merrill. rushton, a. (2005) 'formative assessment: a key to deep learning?', medical teacher, 27(6), pp. 509-513. sadler, d. (1989) 'formative assessment and the design of instructional systems'. instructional science, 18(2), pp. 119-144. saarni, c. (1999) the development of emotional competence. new york: guilford. salend, s. (2001) creating inclusive classrooms: effective and reflective practice. 4th edn. upper saddle river, nj: merrill. schunk, d. (1983a) 'developing children's self-efficacy and skills: the roles of social comparative information and goal setting', contemporary educational psychology, 8(1), pp. 76-86. schunk, d. (1983b) 'ability versus effort attributional feedback: differential effects on self-efficacy and achievement', journal of educational psychology, 75(6), pp. 848-856. schunk, d. (1985) 'participation in goal setting: effects of self-efficacy and skills of learning disabled children', journal of special education, 19(3), pp. 307-317. schunk, d. (1989a) 'self-efficacy and achievement behaviors', educational psychology review, 1(3), pp. 173-208. schunk, d. (1989b) 'self efficacy and cognitive skill learning', in ames, c. and ames r. (eds.), research on motivation in education: vol 3. goals and cognitions. san diego: academic, pp. 13-44. cowan promoting self-efficacy through affective feedback and feedforward journal of learning development in higher education, issue 9: july 2015 24 schunk, d. (1991) 'self-efficacy and academic motivation', educational psychologist, 26(3-4), pp. 207-231. schunk, d. and hanson, a. (1985) 'peer models; influence on children's selfefficacy and achievement', journal of educational psychology, 77, pp. 313322. schunk, d. and hanson, a. (1989) 'self-modeling and children's self-efficacy and achievement', journal of educational psychology, 81, pp. 155-163. schunk, d., hanson, a. and cox, p. (1987) 'peer-model attributes and children's achievement behaviors', journal of educational psychology, 79(1), pp. 5461. obtained at libres.uncg.edu/ir/uncg/f/d_schunk_peer_1985_pdf schwarzer, r. and jerusalem, m. (1995) 'generalized self-efficacy scale’, in weinman, j., wright, s. and johnson, m., measures in health psychology: a user's portfolio. causal and control beliefs. windsor, uk: nfer-nelson, pp. 35-37. sutton, p. and gill, w. (2010) 'engaging feedback: meaning, identity and power', practitioner research in higher education, 4(1), pp. 3-13. taras, m. (2003) 'to feedback or not to feedback in student self-assessment', assessment and evaluation in higher education, 28(5), pp. 549-565. vygotsky, l. (1986) thought and language (trans. rev and ed. a. kuzulin). cambridge, ma, usa: mit press. weiner, b. (1985) human motivation. new york: springer verlag. wotjas, o. (1998) feedback? no, just give us the answers. times higher education supplement, 25 september [online]. available at: cowan promoting self-efficacy through affective feedback and feedforward journal of learning development in higher education, issue 9: july 2015 25 https://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/news/feedback-no-just-give-us-theanswers/109162.article. zimmerman, b. (1995) 'self-efficacy and educational development', in bandura, a. (ed.), self-efficacy in changing societies. new york: cambridge university press, pp. 202-231. zimmerman, b. and martinez-pons, m. (1990) 'student differences in self-regulated learning: relating grade, sex and giftedness to self-efficacy and strategy use', journal of educational psychology, 82(1), pp. 51-59. author details john cowan is emeritus professor of learning development of the uk open university. in his advancing years, his tutoring and teaching are mainly online, with his current research interest concentrating on the particular demands of student-centred learning and autonomy within the community of inquiry (coi) framework. he has long been an advocate of constructive feedforward, with considerable emphasis on affective learning needs. https://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/news/feedback-no-just-give-us-the-answers/109162.article https://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/news/feedback-no-just-give-us-the-answers/109162.article promoting self-efficacy through affective feedback and feedforward abstract 1. introduction 2. what is known about self-efficacy? 2.1 definition 3. how can learners' self-efficacy be promoted? references author details literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special edition: academic peer learning, november 2015 peer assisted learning as a tool for facilitating social and academic integration emmeline byl vrije universiteit brussel, uk katrien struyven vrije universiteit brussel, uk pieter meurs vrije universiteit brussel, uk bieke abelshausen vrije universiteit brussel, uk koen lombaerts vrije universiteit brussel, uk nadine engels vrije universiteit brussel, uk tom vanwing vrije universiteit brussel, uk abstract research into first-year students entering higher education shows that student integration into the academic community is a primary condition for student success. peer support helps students settle into university life. this research explores the value of peer assisted learning (pal) as a tool in an out-of-classroom context to increase the social and academic integration of first-year university students. focus group interviews (n=16) were conducted with first-year students (n=93). using appreciative inquiry, as an innovative qualitative, participative research method, participants suggested that during the first semester of the academic year, peer mentoring and peer modelling especially are important tools. informally organised peer tutoring stimulates students to participate and is shown to be helpful. this paper aims to prompt further discussion on the implications for byl et al. peer assisted learning as a tool for facilitating social and academic integration journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 2 practice, policy and future research of peer assisted learning programmes for student integration. keywords: peer support; peer learning; social integration; academic integration; transition into higher education; appreciative inquiry; first-year students. introduction initiatives to support university students in learning and personal development are expanding, as universities seek to improve retention and achievement rates (brown et al., 2014). research into first-year students entering higher education confirms that both social and academic integration are primary conditions for success (borglum and kubala, 2000; tinto and pusser, 2006). while the theoretical framework and terminology could benefit from an update, the seminal work of tinto still remains a benchmark for understanding social and academic integration (davidson and wilson, 2013; tinto, 1993). social integration explains the degree of students sharing the attitudes and beliefs with their peers, faculty and staff at the institution (pascarella and terenzini, 2005; tinto, 1993; wolf-wendel et al., 2009). it refers to the students’ perceptions of these interactions, as well as involvement in extraand co-curricular activities (tinto, 1993; wolf-wendel et al., 2009). academic integration is used partly to explain the level of adherence to the structural rules and requirements of the institution, i.e. the institutional culture (pascarella and terenzini, 2005; tinto, 1993; wolf-wendel et al., 2009). it also refers to perceptions of the experiences in the formal and informal academic system: interactions with staff and students inside and outside the classroom settings that enhance the intellectual development of the student (tinto, 1993; wolf-wendel et al., 2009). studies show that a higher degree of social and academic integration leads to a higher level of intellectual development, greater quality of effort, enhanced learning, and improved student success (astin, 1993; bitzer, 2009; lacante et al., 2001; tinto, 1993; tinto and pusser, 2006). since it serves as the foundation of subsequent affiliations and engagements (tinto and pusser, 2006), integration is most important for students in their first year at an institution (wolf-wendel et al., 2009). byl et al. peer assisted learning as a tool for facilitating social and academic integration journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 3 models of pal: peer tutoring versus peer mentoring research shows that pal provides important opportunities to help new students cope in the first year of university and beyond (callcott et al., 2014; lehmann, 2014), as well as providing an important role model for student success (e.g. pagan and edwards-wilson, 2003; santos and reigadas, 2002; goff, 2011; story, 2013; makura et al., 2011; tangwe and rembe, 2014). pal can be understood as an umbrella term for various strategies to facilitate learning through active and interactive social engagement among peers (topping, 2005; topping and ehly, 2001). the general trend to implement pal in higher education was inspired by the social-constructivism learning theory. in this sense, learning is understood as a process that is constructivist, cumulative, self-regulated, purposeful, situated, collaborative and individually different. collaborative learning, or learning in groups, is justified and stimulated as an effective and efficient learning method. pal is a classic example of these learning methods of people from a single group helping each other and learning by doing so (byl et al., 2011). although pal emerged as a model based on active learning (duron et al., 2006) and focused on peer collaborative work (ning and downing, 2010), it has now adopted a variety of methods (roscoe and chi, 2007), and the role played by peers in the learning process can vary significantly (loots, 2009). each pal format has its own strengths and weaknesses (maheady et al., 2006; maheady and gard, 2010). the most commonly used pal methodologies are peer tutoring and peer mentoring (byl et al., 2011). according to topping (2015, p.2) ‘peer tutoring (pt) is characterised by specific role taking as tutor or tutee, with high focus on curriculum content and usually also on clear procedures for interaction, in which participants receive generic and/or specific training’. peer mentoring (pm) on the other hand can be described as a supportive one-toone relationship with a more experienced student in a common area of interest (topping and ehly, 2001; topping, 2015). pm is mainly organised as cross-age pm and focuses on a group of students at risk (topping and ehly, 2001). a large number of pal methods are institutionally organised and/or academic staff-led and used inside classroom environments with the aim of making students become more active and attached to their peers and their learning tasks. byl et al. peer assisted learning as a tool for facilitating social and academic integration journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 4 appreciative inquiry so far, pal has been mainly explored by means of quantitative research focusing on learning and academic achievement (e.g. topping, 2005; maheady and gard, 2010; field et al., 2007). this paper builds upon the significance of pal to provide opportunities to enhance student integration. however, the goal of our study was to explain the design of the pal programme which was implemented in 2014 at the free university of brussels in order to enhance the effectiveness of support for social and academic integration. as such, a qualitative approach was necessary (denzin and lincoln, 2013). we chose the method of appreciative inquiry (ai) to identify positive organisational attributes that best supported students’ integration. this alternative approach to traditional organizational development models examines organisational issues by discovering what is working particularly well in an organisation, rather than focusing on needs and gaps. in addition, individuals may be more willing to reflect upon what has worked well in their past (reed, 2006). we believed that ai was more appropriate than other approaches as it enabled students to give direct feedback on the central research topics of this study. furthermore, it immediately connects negative student experiences to points for improvement. ai is a qualitative, participative and interpretive research approach that was developed by cooperrider and srivastva (1987), and it challenges the basic assumption that research must be problem-based. in educational sciences, ai is a relatively innovative asset-based approach (coghlan et al., 2003; kung et al., 2014). ai is an evaluative mind-set, and is specifically useful in educational evaluative research (coghlan et al., 2003; grant and humphries, 2006; fergy et al., 2011). as a form of social constructivist evaluation, ai aims to enable people involved in evaluation to make sense of an educational change through dialogue, reflection and interaction. there are four main stages within ai (figure 1): discovery, dream, design and destiny (barrett, 1995; lavender and chapple, 2004). byl et al. peer assisted learning as a tool for facilitating social and academic integration journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 5 figure 1. four main stages within ai. ai is a strengths-based research approach that focuses on identifying and replicating successes, rather than on identifying and solving problems. in other words, using ai as the framework for evaluation, the first questions to be posed (‘discovery’) would ask the participants to focus on stories of best practice, positive moments, greatest learning, successful processes and so on, and then to ‘dream’ about how the system under study could be even better (watkins and mohr, 2001). the intention, therefore, is to create an upward, as opposed to downward, spiral. ai differs from other approaches in that it recognises the power of positive language (czarniawska-joerges, 1996). ai aspires to capture what is working well in an educational experience, why this is the case, for whom, and how we might translate success in one aspect of an educational endeavour to other aspects of that endeavour (fergy et al., 2011). in this way, we believed that the data collected using appreciatively oriented questions contributed to a more comprehensive understanding of supportive activities; how these were prioritised as well as how they were perceived by students. in addition, we supposed that ai was more appropriate than other approaches as it affords participants an appreciative lens as a means of understanding the enduring power of educational experiences and energises them to reach for higher ideals in future practices (giles and kung, 2010; kung et al., 2014). byl et al. peer assisted learning as a tool for facilitating social and academic integration journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 6 research aim and questions we opted for an ai method to explore students’ views on peer support for social and academic integration. exploring the experiences, needs and wishes of students may hold the key to discovering and reducing student deficits in satisfaction, adjustment and performance (rubin and wright, 2014). the central research question we addressed is the way in which pal should be designed to optimise the social and academic integration of students. hence, we will focus on the following research questions:  what experiences do students consider successful with regards to peer support in relation to their social and academic integration?  what are the wishes and needs of students for support from peers regarding social and academic integration?  what actions need to be taken accordingly, in order for students to promote success socially and academically? methodology for this study, qualitative data was collected by using the ai method between the spring and autumn of 2013. focus group interviews were conducted and were considered more appropriate than one-to-one interviews: they have the advantage of generating dialogue around the subject and allow for the identification of variety and difference within ‘ordinary opinions’ (lunt and livingstone, 1996; lavender and chapple, 2004). the research was part of a broader project within the university and was set up to inform the design of the pal programme which was implemented in 2014. for this purpose, only three of the four main stages of ai were used and contributed to answers or research questions. once students had made decisions regarding appropriate actions, it was hoped that implementation of them, within the faculty, would be achieved in the pal programme and the fourth step could then be used. byl et al. peer assisted learning as a tool for facilitating social and academic integration journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 7 sample the sampling strategy and size were determined by the duration and location of the study. all the students who enrolled in the faculty of psychology (psy) and educational science (edwe) in 2012-2013 were asked to participate in focus groups. only the new students who had no earlier experiences at university and had come directly from secondary school could participate in these focus groups (in belgium, secondary school takes place after primary education and may be followed by higher education. it provides education for ages 11 to 18). recruitment was via email and face-to-face in classes. students could write their names on papers or fill out the online form. in total, 16 separate focus-group interviews were conducted with 93 first-year students and took place on the campus. participants were informed in advance and confidentiality was guaranteed. baseline details of participating first-year students were obtained (table 1). table 1. baseline details of participating first-year students. data collection and analysis using the ai method, facilitators invited participants to think about a successful peer support method for integration. at one moment in time, various focus group interviews were conducted, each time taking the participants through the three phases of ai. in a first phase, the interviewer asked for positive memories and experiences of peer support for social and academic integration. in a second phase, participants were asked to be as creative as possible and to think about an ideal image of support for social and academic byl et al. peer assisted learning as a tool for facilitating social and academic integration journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 8 integration. the third phase examined participants’ ideas for necessary actions and recommendations about support for social and academic integration. during all phases, the participants were asked to differentiate between three moments in the academic year (first weeks of arrival, one month after arrival, during examination period). in order to counter the limitations of ai – to encourage constructive criticism and foster an unwillingness to address weaknesses (dick, 2004) – and in order to maintain the balance between strengths and weaknesses in the research (patton, 2003), the questions addressed to the focus groups were open-ended (figure 2). in each focus-group interview, both social integration and academic integration were discussed. starting with a one-minute individual preparation, each phase lasted around ten minutes. after circa 40 minutes, participants got a 15-minute break before starting the second theme. figure 2. interview questions based on the first three stages within ai. the students made notes before the focus group and verbatim quotes of frequently occurring issues were documented throughout the process. in this way, everyone had a foothold during the interview and the interviewer could dig deeper into the judgements of students. byl et al. peer assisted learning as a tool for facilitating social and academic integration journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 9 focus group interviews lasted between 120 and 200 minutes, driven by the students, and were tape-recorded. complete verbatim transcripts were made by three researchers. focus group data were all conjointly analysed by two researchers. the phases were analysed separately. inter-rate reliability exceeded 90% and discussions took place to ensure a consensus was reached in all cases. results the results will be presented according to the various themes identified in this research and related to the support and timeframe in which they appear: first four weeks after arrival, after one month, and during the last four weeks (figure 3). focus groups were conducted in the second semester and participants were questioned on their first semester experiences. following the principles of ai, the results are related to good examples of support from peers and to the needs and wishes of students for support in social and academic integration. these needs and wishes will be presented in relation to the timeframe in which they existed in the form of the action design, which is the third phase of ai. a summary of the main themes that emerged in phase 1 is presented in figure 3. these themes refer to the various peer support schemes available to students. figure 3. identified themes related to the timeframe and support for integration. student ambassadors: support for social integration during the first weeks during their first weeks at university, all the participants were questioned about their appreciation of the support they experienced. 64% of the participants (n=60) stated their satisfaction with their experiences with student ambassadors in relation to social integration. university student ambassadors are current students who help ‘the university recruiting unit’ to promote university life and student life to prospective students and their byl et al. peer assisted learning as a tool for facilitating social and academic integration journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 10 families. student ambassadors mainly help with campus tours at the main open days in june, september and october. they indicated that student ambassadors specifically helped them with finding their way on campus and stated that they were more likely to discuss problems with these students because they were in the same position. they also referred to the characteristics of the role of the student ambassador. 16% of the participants (n=15) believed that they felt confident to ask questions because of the meet and greet with student ambassadors during their visit to one of the university open campus days before they arrived. the student ambassadors’ (as a type of facilitator) ‘open minded’ attitude when guiding students on campus was considered significantly welcome: i went to them with the dumbest questions…at the university’s open day it was also the same; you could ask them about really everything. (student 7: first-year student – edwe) facilitators became a familiar face. consequently, this helped to reduce barriers of personal anxiety and allowed students not to feel shy. most students felt that student ambassadors were considered as a good source of personal informational support, because of their enthusiasm, their friendly faces and their support and open-mindedness: i think it might be easier to ask questions if you already know each other. as such, the threshold is even lower. (student 9: first-year student – edwe) according to 27% of the participants (n=25), the strongest features were providing information and answering queries in terms of academic and non-academic problems. moreover, the fact that student ambassadors answer questions, both face-to-face and through facebook, and are always available to help someone, contributed significantly to a sense of belonging from the beginning: actually it’s very convenient that you can have contact with her (student ambassador) through facebook. you don’t know her, but you can just send messages and she answers very quickly. she really does take her time. (student 7: first year student – edwe) byl et al. peer assisted learning as a tool for facilitating social and academic integration journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 11 the frequency with which student ambassadors were present on campus and, how they set up a help desk (online facebook group) for new students of the faculty, was considered very valuable. some students reported that this encouraged them to be more engaged and to participate in activities: in the beginning i had asked many questions to our student ambassadors. and then, actually i felt very involved. (student 8: first-year student – edwe) following on from the experiences of support during the first weeks of arrival, we can conclude that 64% of the participants (n=60) indicated a satisfaction about support with regards to social integration. furthermore, 73% of the participants (n=68) expressed many needs and wishes that pointed to the importance of combining social support with academic support initiatives. a summary of main action points that emerged in phase 2 and phase 3 is presented in the following box: student action design:  organising official student advocate schemes, including needed personal, social and academic support.  supported by training.  ensuring opportunities to ask questions face-to-face and on a virtual level.  ensuring guidance in the system, organisation and environment of the university, faculty and department. buddy scheme: support for social and academic integration after one month all participants were questioned about their satisfaction regarding the support from peers after the first weeks at the university. positive experiences with peers mainly related to forms of social and personal support and were linked mostly to their social integration. these experiences were generally expressed in terms of making friends and feeling connected with fellow university students and students feeling more at home at the university: byl et al. peer assisted learning as a tool for facilitating social and academic integration journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 12 she helped me to know the area and have some friends. i felt more at ease. i was not stressed anymore. yes, slowly…she made me feel at home. (student 83: firstyear student – psy) the buddy scheme is organised by the faculty student organisation (informal) and can be described as a supportive one-to-one relationship between a first year student and an experienced student. buddies are enthusiastic volunteering members of the faculty student organisation who help first year students to settle into the university. during the first semester, 31% of the participants (n=29) reported to have a buddy provided by the faculty student organisation. they were satisfied with the buddy scheme organised by the student organisation. in this regard, 16% of the participants (n=15) talked about their trip to the centre of the city and were pleased with the outcome of various games to enable them to get to know different buddy candidates. it ‘facilitated the choice of a buddy’ (higher-year student). they showed great appreciation for activities, which made the buddy choice easier. some of them claimed that these meet and greet activities, as well as meetings outside the university context, increase personal contact and understanding with the mentor: we have also agreed to go out in the evening or to do an activity together outside the university context. this is important to actually get to know people, without social media. (student 8: first-year student – edwe) the impact of the buddy scheme is generally expressed in terms of help in settling in, dealing with a new environment and city, and making friends with other fellow students and buddies, i.e. bonding/bridging and getting involved with student communities. students really appreciated other students asking them to participate in activities. this kind of companionship is considered to be the best feature of the buddy scheme: the idea that you have someone provides a context in which you do not have to feel lonely. someone who takes care of people and introduces you to new people and networks. in the beginning you simply do not reach out to others. (student 8: first-year – edwe) the strongest feature, according to 78% of the participants (n=73), was the one-to-one relationship with a more experienced student, who answers questions and shares byl et al. peer assisted learning as a tool for facilitating social and academic integration journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 13 knowledge and experiences. moreover, the idea that these experienced students are almost always available to help with academic and non-academic problems, face-to-face as well as by virtual communication (sms or call or social media), is considered very valuable: when you encounter them on campus, knowing them and being able to ask questions. you can always request information, but it does give a better feeling when you know each other. (student 9: first-year – edwe) student action design:  organising a mentoring scheme, which is voluntary but requires a commitment.  guarantee initiatives, which are open to all students, and combine personal, social and academic support during the entire year. student organisations: support for academic integration during the last four weeks 25% of the participants (n=23) believed the student organisation is similar to the buddy scheme and experienced this as a good way of personal mentoring support; including engagement in both a formal and informal way, learning support, learning study skills, and answering questions. during the exams, 17% of the participants (n=16) referred to the importance of the faculty student organisation in terms of encouragement, reducing stress and reducing personal anxiety. they took heart from this, so they didn’t lose courage: during the exams, if i had a stressful moment, i could always call her or send text messages on that subject, and ask for example ‘what is important?’. because i was stressed for time. [student 52: first-year – psy] 53% of the participants (n=50) reported their appreciation for the initiative offered by two members of the faculty student organisation who worked together in one class. it increased their feeling of academic integration. the impact of this group tutoring initiative is generally expressed as examination support, which created confidence about exams or gave faith in exams again: byl et al. peer assisted learning as a tool for facilitating social and academic integration journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 14 you’ll feel much more confident then, when you know what to do and exactly how to do it. otherwise, you are on your own. [student 55: first-year – psy] positive experiences with peers in the last weeks of lectures were linked mostly to their academic integration. 78% of the participants (n=73) believed that experienced higheryear students, who provide tips and tricks about coursework or exams, share their knowledge and experiences about the best practices to prepare and learn for exams, or provide notes and summaries, are good examples of the instrumental support (examination support and content specific support). indeed, a lot of them also seem to benefit from studying together with classmates. student action design:  organising cross-age two-to-one group tutoring schemes for examination support (e.g. difficult subject matter) and one-to-one counselling for last minute help.  organising same-age/year tutoring schemes in public places, such as the library, to study for exams in peer groups. discussion the present study explored the potential of pal as a tool for student integration in the first semester at university. we used the method of ai to address our research question: how should pal be designed to optimise the social and academic integration of students? it can be concluded that spontaneous support initiatives in an informal learning environment are highly desirable (e.g. student ambassadors, buddy scheme, membership in student organisations) and that integration can be improved by providing formal and structural support. participants suggested that peer support needs to be independent of individual differences in providing support and should be organised by neutral institutional management in order to increase accessibility and equal support for the whole group of students (e.g. not every student holds a student organisation membership). in this respect, when addressing some specific criteria related to the objectives and form and design, this paper suggests that pal is particularly useful during the first semester in increasing integration among students. byl et al. peer assisted learning as a tool for facilitating social and academic integration journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 15 defining pal objectives for student integration participants expressed their ideas about pal as a tool to enhance and support social and academic integration. results show the importance of peer learning schemes, which take into account one-to-one relationships. zacharopoulou and turner (2013, p.49) and van der meulen et al. (2005) state that individual peer assistance is crucial to support first-year students. first-year students feel relieved because there is always someone with knowledge and experience close by (austin and hatt, 2005). indeed, richardson and tate (2013) argue that it is important for students to be able to approach these higher-year students to ask formal and informal questions. although both knowledge and experience is important, our study clearly shows that students need someone who takes responsibility on the one hand for informational (formal) support and on the other hand someone for emotional and mental (informal) support. participants emphasised the importance of the attitude of higher-year students and their relationship with them. higher-year students were friendly and provided one-on-one consultation (tangwe and rembe, 2014). frequent encounters, visibility and pro-activity were highly valued, including both face-to-face and online communication (leck and wood, 2013). furthermore, ‘recognisability’ as well as ‘good and open behaviour’ were claimed to be important. people should come from the same disciplines or departments (tangwe and rembe, 2014) and should be introduced as early as possible and be presented to the people who can support their learning (court and molesworth, 2008). our study suggests that peer facilitators from the same discipline or departments gain more credibility in offering informational support and instructional support than peer facilitators from other disciplines. the more specific the informational or instructional support, the more credibility is needed. for emotional or companion support, trust and friendship is more important. in this way, our study shows that the interpersonal qualities are key to peer relationships and experiencing the benefits of peer support in an informal context. students particularly value a setting that facilitates the choice of a mentor. they need time to know if there is friendship possible. participants claimed the need for a peer facilitator, in which each initiative combines an academic as well as a social dimension. the importance of developing the capacity of students to engage effectively in their higher education experiences across all spheres of institutional activity is also highlighted by thomas (2011; 2012). the social and academic dimension is considered to be an indispensable factor, in respect to student satisfaction on byl et al. peer assisted learning as a tool for facilitating social and academic integration journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 16 the one hand and learning anxiety on the other (shim and ryan, 2012; longden and yorke, 2009). as in lamb et al. (2013) and also highlighted by risquez and sanchezgarcia (2012), they found that peer facilitators created an intimate atmosphere and space for first-year students that generated a place for reflection and feedback within this relationship. moreels (2005) and van der meulen et al. (2005) show that peer facilitators also encouraged making new friends and networking, which is consistent with our results. our results can contribute to this literature by showing the expectations of each of the facilitators concerning support for social integration. peer facilitators providing information support or instruction support can enhance social integration by organising this in small face-to-face and online groups. peer facilitators providing emotional support or esteem support can enhance this by slowly introducing individuals to other individuals and groups to build a network in both the virtual and the real world. our study showed multiple arguments for prolonged and continuous support during the whole semester and the first year. obviously, participants point out that the effectiveness of supportive activities is related to various timeframes: the period of arrival, the period of learning and the period of examination (figure 4). figure 4. integration-pal support model. participants claimed that initially, peer facilitators should have a larger focus on the social dimension, and then, during the second half of the semester, they should focus more strongly on the academic dimension. our study suggests that if pal were to be conceived as a tool for integration, it would need to adopt a broader timeline than a traditional pal: ideally, it should commence before the academic year starts and should continue during the examination period. byl et al. peer assisted learning as a tool for facilitating social and academic integration journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 17 form and design of pal for student integration participants indicated the importance of an adequate form and design of activities and initiatives. they needed to include academic and social, as well as personal support. each peer-role had its own value, also related to various timeframes. in the results section, participants referred on the one hand to the value of the buddy system as a form of mentoring during the learning period (loots, 2009). they referred to the importance of a personal guide, who initially brought more emotional, mental and personal support, and secondly more social and academic support. they brought companionship and esteem support first of all (miller et al., 2010; hamshire et al., 2015), then informational and instructional support. on the other hand, participants also refer to the value of student ambassadors (with the campus tour and helpdesk) as a form of mentoring during the period of arrival and the period of examination (potter and hampton, 2009; hilsdon, 2014) – see figure 4. they refer to the importance of a personal guide, who primarily brought academic and social support, and additional personal support. they brought mainly informational support (callcott et al., 2014; parkes, 2014). in general, the impact of these student ambassadors was strong because they provided ‘hot knowledge’, providing students with the opportunity to experience the campus and university (walker et al., 2004; parkes, 2014). they had gained enough experience on campus to be a role model and there was not much age difference with first-year students (austin and hatt, 2005). this is confirmed by donche et al. (2010), who affirm that more experienced students can assess what learning methods should be adopted more adequately. it has been suggested that student ambassadors must be student advocates and have specific experiences related to the knowledge students need (e.g. gorard and smith, 2007; parkes, 2014). concerning this, it was important that the same accessibility exists as with mentors (fox and stevenson, 2006). concerning tutoring, participants suggested that the period of learning initiatives should be focused on awareness and mental support (informally addressed), and should have less focus on learning, as the understanding of what studying entails and what students need is not yet recognised by them (callcott et al., 2014). for example, regarding difficult courses, in the first semester cross-age tutoring is more important in providing last minute help when students notice their own boundaries, instead of providing preventative measures, as awareness of the need for these measures does not exist yet. for example, awareness only exists when the students start planning for assessments or start studying for byl et al. peer assisted learning as a tool for facilitating social and academic integration journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 18 challenging courses, such as statistics, based on an underlying performance anxiety. however, this research suggests that emphasis should be placed on modelling, instead of on tutoring. according to topping and ehly (2001), [peer modelling] should provide an example of desired learning behaviour by someone in the peer group, with the aim that the others in the group would follow suit and comply. according to the participants, this would encourage success stories, for example, about a student’s study schedule. where modelling focuses on success stories, tutoring focuses on problem solving (topping, 2015). limitations and further research there are several limitations to the present study. firstly, it should be noted that this study explores student experiences with peer-learning schemes (e.g. tutoring and mentoring) in an informal educational context. future research should explore other forms of peerlearning approaches to promote social and academic integration. secondly, this study focused on new students coming directly from secondary school. if we are to meet the challenges of the increasingly diverse student population and improve the quality of all students’ learning experience, particularly in the first year of study, we need to explore the experiences of other types of students (e.g. transfer students, working students) (altbach et al., 2009). additionally, it would be beneficial to agree on the definitions and specific features of peer support and peer learning, in such a way that there is a common language for scholars, institutional researchers and practitioners (davidson and wilson, 2013). for instance, participants in this study preferred to form peer groups (i.e. same age tutoring) and study their exams in public places, such as a library. investigating why this enhances their integration and how this occurs would be interesting for the further development and validation of pal. in conclusion, we recommend future research on forms of peer learning to include both qualitative inquiries and quantitative research studies. it is important to devise meaningful, qualitative questions that will complement a quantitative survey evaluation instrument. we believe ai can be a valuable and promising tool for the further development of pal programmes, as a means to improve its value for the social and academic integration of byl et al. peer assisted learning as a tool for facilitating social and academic integration journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 19 students. however, in order to counter the disadvantages of focus group interviews – the lack of in depth individual replies – further understanding of peer learning programmes for social and academic integration needs to be addressed by individual interviews. conclusion this qualitative research has contributed to the literature by showing that during the first semester of the academic year, both face-to-face and online pal methods are important for the development of integration among students. peer mentoring and peer modelling are specifically important and have their own value and function. peer modelling primarily functions as an informant (they know) and a peer mentor primarily functions as a companion (they will). as our results suggested, the better the relationship in terms of friendship, the more emotional and esteem support they perceive themselves to receive. this paper suggested that the interpersonal qualities and the creation of a setting which facilitates the choice of a mentor are key to peer relationships and to experiencing the benefits of peer support in an informal context. however, peer tutoring that is spontaneous and informally organised with friends or classmates is more likely to increase the participation of students. in this sense, the peer tutor can be considered as an instructor (they can). this research indicates that combining pal with the promotion of social integration as early as possible only requires a small investment, while generating a large additional value for their academic integration. in this sense, this article hopes to have demonstrated the merits of pal for promoting academic as well as social integration. references altbach, p., reisberg, l. and rumbley, l. (2009) trends in global higher education: tracking an academic revolution. a report prepared for the unesco 2009 world conference on higher education. paris: the united nations educational, scientific and cultural organisation. astin, a.w. (1993) what matters in college? four critical years revisited. san francisco: calif jossey-bass byl et al. peer assisted learning as a tool for facilitating social and academic integration journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 20 austin, m. and hatt, s. (2005) ‘the messengers are the message: a study of the effects of employing higher education student ambassadors to work with school students’, widening participation and lifelong learning, 7(1), pp. 1-8. barrett, f.j. (1995) ‘creating appreciative learning cultures’, organizational dynamics, 24(2), pp. 36-49. bitzer, e.m. (2009) ‘academic and social integration in three first-year groups : a holistic perspective’, south african journal of higher education, 23(2), pp. 225-245. borglum, k. and kubala, t. (2000) ‘academic and social integration of community college students: a case study’, community college journal of research and practice, 24(7), pp. 567-576. brown, k., nairn, k., van der meer, j. and scott, c. (2014) ‘we were told we’re not teachers…it gets difficult to draw the line: negotiating roles in peer-assisted study sessions (pass)’, mentoring & tutoring: partnership in learning, 22(2), pp. 146-161. byl, e., struyven, k., van roosmalen, g., berghmans, i., vierendeels, r., brants, l. and lombaerts, k. (2011) ‘peer assisted learning implementeren in het hoger onderwijs’, tijdschrift voor hoger onderwijs, 32(4), pp. 205-223. callcott, d., knaus, m., warren, j. and wenban, a. (2014) ‘network teach: how a student led organisation supports the transition to university’, australian journal of teacher education, 39(8), pp. 1-13. coghlan, a.t., preskill, h. and tzavaras catsambas, t. (2003) ‘an overview of appreciative inquiry in evaluation’, new directions for evaluation, 2003(100), pp. 522. cooperrider, d.l. and srivastva, s. (1987) ‘appreciative inquiry in organizational life’, research in organizational change and development, vol. 1, pp. 129-169. byl et al. peer assisted learning as a tool for facilitating social and academic integration journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 21 court, s. and molesworth, m. (2008) ‘course-specific learning in peer assisted learning schemes: a case study of creative media production courses’, research in postcompulsory education, 13(1), pp. 123-134. czarniawska-joerges, b. (1996) ‘realities and relationships’, in gergen, j. (eds.) soundings in social construction. cambridge, ma: harvard university press, p. 356. davidson, c. and wilson, k. (2013) ‘reassessing tinto’s concepts of social and academic integration in student retention’, journal of college student retention: research, theory & practice, 15(3), pp. 329-346. denzin, n.k. and lincoln, y.s. (2013) strategies of qualitative inquiry. usa: thousand oaks sage. dick, b. (2004) ‘action research literature’, action research, 2(4), pp. 425-444. donche, v., coertjens, l. and van petegem, p. (2010) ‘learning pattern development throughout higher education: a longitudinal study’, learning and individual differences, 20(3), pp. 256-259. duron, r., limbach, b. and waugh, w. (2006) ‘critical thinking framework for any discipline’, international journal of teaching and learning in higher education, 17(2), pp. 160-166. fergy, s., marks‐maran, d., ooms, a., shapcott, j. and burke, l. (2011) ‘promoting social and academic integration into higher education by first‐year student nurses: the appl project’, journal of further and higher education, 35(1), pp. 107-130. field, m., burke, j.m., mcallister, d. and lloyd, d.m. (2007) ‘peer-assisted learning: a novel approach to clinical skills learning for medical students’, medical education, 41(4), pp. 411-418. fox, a. and stevenson, l. (2006) ‘exploring the effectiveness of peer mentoring of accounting and finance students in higher education’, accounting education, 15(2), pp. 189-202. byl et al. peer assisted learning as a tool for facilitating social and academic integration journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 22 giles, d. and kung, s. (2010) ‘using appreciative inquiry to explore the professional practice of a lecturer in higher education: moving towards life-centric practice’, australian journal of adult learning, 50(2), pp. 308-322. goff, l. (2011) ‘evaluating the outcomes of a peer-mentoring program for students transitioning to postsecondary education’, the canadian journal for the scholarship of teaching and learning, 2(2), pp. 1-13. gorard, s. and smith, e. (2007) ‘beyond the ‘learning society’: what have we learnt from widening participation research?’, international journal of lifelong education, 25(6), pp. 575-594. grant, s. and humphries, m. (2006) ‘critical evaluation of appreciative inquiry: bridging an apparent paradox’, action research, 4(4), pp. 401-418. hamshire, c., jack, k., prowse, a. and wibberley, c. (2015) ‘maria’s story – the narrative of a mature international student’, journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8, march, pp. 1-14. [online]. available at: http://www.aldinhe.ac.uk/ojs/index.php?journal=jldhe&page=article&op=view&path %5b%5d=219 (accessed: 26 june 2015). hilsdon, j. (2014) ‘peer learning for change in higher education’, innovations in education and teaching international, 51(3), pp. 244-254. kung, s., giles, d. and hagan, b. (2014) ‘applying an appreciative inquiry process to a course evaluation in higher education’, international journal of teaching and learning in higher education, 25(1), pp. 29-37. lacante, m., de metsenaere, m., lens, w., van esbroeck, r., de jaeger, k., de coninck, t. and santy, l. (2001) drop-out in hoger onderwijs: onderzoek naar achtergronden en motieven van drop-out in het eerste jaar hoger onderwijs. leuven: kuldepartement psychologie. http://www.aldinhe.ac.uk/ojs/index.php?journal=jldhe&page=article&op=view&path%5b%5d=219 http://www.aldinhe.ac.uk/ojs/index.php?journal=jldhe&page=article&op=view&path%5b%5d=219 byl et al. peer assisted learning as a tool for facilitating social and academic integration journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 23 lamb, p., lane, k. and aldous, d. (2013) ‘enhancing the spaces of reflection: a buddy peer-review process within physical education initial teacher education’, european physical education review, 19(1), pp. 21-38. lavender, t. and chapple, j. (2004) ‘an exploration of midwives’ views of the current system of maternity care in england’, midwifery, 20(4), pp. 324-334. leck, j. and wood, p. (2013) ‘forming trust in e-mentoring: a research agenda’, american journal of industrial and business management, 3(1), pp. 101-109. lehmann, w. (2014) ‘habitus transformation and hidden injuries: successful working-class university students’, sociology of education, 87(1), pp. 1-15. longden, b. and yorke, m. (2009) ‘institutional research: what problems are we trying to solve?’, perspectives: policy and practice in higher education, 13(3), pp. 66-70. loots, d.a. (2009) ‘student involvement and retention in higher education: the case for academic peer mentoring programmes for first-years’, education as change, 13(1), pp. 211-235. lunt, p. and livingstone, s. (1996) rethinking the focus group in media and communications research. london: lse research online. available at: http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/archive/00000409. (accessed: 1 july 2015). maheady, l. and gard, j. (2010) ‘classwide peer tutoring: practice, theory, research, and personal narrative’, intervention in school and clinic, 46(2), pp. 71-78. maheady, l., mallette, b. and harper, g.f. (2006) ‘four classwide peer tutoring models: similarities, differences, and implications for research and practice’, reading & writing quarterly, 22(1), pp. 65-89. makura, a., skead, m. and nhundu, k. (2011) ‘academic development practices at fort hare university: an epitome of university access’, research in higher education journal, vol. 12, pp. 13-22. http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/archive/00000409 byl et al. peer assisted learning as a tool for facilitating social and academic integration journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 24 miller, d., topping, k. and thurston, a. (2010) ‘peer tutoring in reading: the effects of role and organization on two dimensions of self-esteem’, british journal of educational psychology, 80(3), pp. 417-433. moreels, a. (2005) welkom: het onthaal van nieuwe medewerkers. mechelen: kluwer uitgevers. ning, h.k. and downing, k. (2010) ‘the impact of supplemental instruction on learning competence and academic performance’, studies in higher education, 35(8), pp. 921-939. pagan, r. and edwards-wilson, r. (2003) ‘a mentoring program for remedial students’, journal of college student retention, 4(3), pp. 207-226. parkes, s. (2014) ‘fostering a sense of belonging: supporting the early formation of student identity as successful learners in higher education’, journal of learning development in higher education, issue 7, june, pp. 1-22. [online]. available at: http://www.aldinhe.ac.uk/ojs/index.php?journal=jldhe&page=article&op=view&path %5b%5d=229 (accessed: 26 june 2015). pascarella, e.t. and terenzini, p.t. (2005) ‘how college affects students (vol. 2): a third decade of research (review)’, journal of college student development, 47(5), pp. 589-592. patton, m.q. (2003) ‘inquiry into appreciative evaluation’, new directions for evaluation, 100(2003), pp. 85-99. potter, j., and hampton, d. (and staff and education development association) (2009) students supporting students. available at: http://capitadiscovery.co.uk/northumbria-ac/items/1505341 (accessed: 30 june 2015). reed, j. (2006) appreciative inquiry: research for change. thousand oaks, ca: sage publications. http://www.aldinhe.ac.uk/ojs/index.php?journal=jldhe&page=article&op=view&path%5b%5d=229 http://www.aldinhe.ac.uk/ojs/index.php?journal=jldhe&page=article&op=view&path%5b%5d=229 http://capitadiscovery.co.uk/northumbria-ac/items/1505341 byl et al. peer assisted learning as a tool for facilitating social and academic integration journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 25 richardson, m.j. and tate, s. (2013) ‘improving the transition to university: introducing student voices into the formal induction process for new geography undergraduates’, journal of geography in higher education, 37(4), pp. 611-618. risquez, a. and sanchez-garcia, m. (2012) ‘the jury is still out: psychoemotional support in peer e-mentoring for transition to university’, the internet and higher education, 15(3), pp. 213-221. roscoe, r.d. and chi, m.t.h. (2007) ‘understanding tutor learning: knowledge-building and knowledge-telling in peer tutors’ explanations and questions’, review of educational research, 77(4), pp. 534-574. rubin, m. and wright, c.l. (2014) ‘age differences explain social class differences in students’ friendship at university: implications for transition and retention’, higher education, pp. 1-13. santos, s.j. and reigadas, e.t. (2002) ‘latinos in higher education: an evaluation of a university faculty mentoring program’, journal of hispanic higher education, 1(1), pp. 40-50. shim, s.s. and ryan, a.m. (2012) ‘what do students want socially when they arrive at college? implications of social achievement goals for social behaviors and adjustment during the first semester of college’, motivation and emotion, 36(4), pp. 504-515. story, c.n. (2013) the relationship of undergraduate first-time-in-college students’ expectations of interactions with faculty and four-year college degree completion. florida: scholar commons. tangwe, m.n. and rembe, m.n. (2014) ‘the perceptions of students on the implementation of peer academic support programmes at one university in south africa’, mediterranean journal of social sciences, 5(4), pp. 378-389. byl et al. peer assisted learning as a tool for facilitating social and academic integration journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 26 thomas, l. (2011) ‘do pre-entry interventions such as ‘aimhigher’ impact on student retention and success?’, a review of the literature. higher education quarterly, 65(3), pp. 230-250. thomas, l. (2012) building student engagement and belonging in higher education at a time of change: final report from the ‘what works? student retention & success programme’. london: paul hamlyn foundation [online]. available at: https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/sites/default/files/what_works_final_report_0.pdf (accessed: 26 june 2015). tinto, v. (1993) leaving college: rethinking the causes and cures of student attrition. 2nd edn. chicago: university of chicago press. tinto, v. and pusser, b. (2006) ‘moving from theory to action: building a model of institutional action for student success’, in seidman, a. (eds.) college student retention: formula for student success. westport, ct: ace/praeger, pp. 1-51. topping, k. (2005) ‘trends in peer learning’, educational psychology, 25(6), pp. 631-645. topping, k. (2015) ‘peer tutoring: old method, new developments/tutoría entre iguales: método antiguo, nuevos avances’, infancia y aprendizaje, 38(1), pp. 1-29. topping, k.j. and ehly, s.w. (2001) ‘peer assisted learning: a framework for consultation’, journal of educational and psychological consultation, 12(2), pp. 113-132. van der meulen, b.f., vlaskamp, c. and van den bos, k.p. (2005) interventies in de orthopedagogiek. rotterdam: lemniscaat. walker, l., matthew, b. and black, f. (2004) ‘widening access and student non‐completion: an inevitable link? evaluating the effects of the top‐up programme on student completion’, international journal of lifelong education, 23(1), pp. 4359. watkins, j.m. and mohr, b.j. (2001) appreciative inquiry: change at the speed of imagination. san francisco: jossey-bass/pfeiffer. https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/sites/default/files/what_works_final_report_0.pdf byl et al. peer assisted learning as a tool for facilitating social and academic integration journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 27 wolf-wendel, l., ward, k. and kinzie, j. (2009) ‘a tangled web of terms: the overlap and unique contribution of involvement, engagement, and integration to understanding college student success’, journal of college student development, 50(4), pp. 407428. zacharopoulou, a. and turner, c. (2013) ‘peer assisted learning and the creation of a learning community for first year law students’, the law teacher, 47(2), pp. 192214. author details emmeline byl is a phd researcher in the department of educational sciences at vrije universiteit brussel. she is project coordinator for a peer assisted learning programme (pal) in the faculty of psychology and educational sciences. her research interests include social integration, academic integration, peer assisted learning, institutional commitment, and student success in higher education. katrien struyven is assistant professor at brussels' vub (vrije universiteit brussel) in the educational sciences department. her research focuses on student-activating and cooperative teaching methods and new modes of assessment in higher education, and teacher education in particular. she teaches introductory and advanced courses on teaching and assessment within the bachelor-master programme of (adult) educational sciences and within the academic teacher training programme. pieter meurs holds an ma in educational sciences and an ma and phd in philosophy and moral sciences (free university brussels). he has presented and published papers on (post-) phenomenology, critical theory and contemporary political philosophy. he has written extensively on maurice merleau-ponty and jean-luc nancy. his current research focuses on the philosophy of globalisation, myth and worldviews, and he has a specific interest in peer assisted learning. bieke abelshausen is a phd student in educational sciences of the vrije universiteit brussel in belgium. her research interests are framed within informal learning with stakeholders from different settings and backgrounds in the frame of community byl et al. peer assisted learning as a tool for facilitating social and academic integration journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 28 development. her research and teaching experiences focus on sustainable educational practices. koen lombaerts is head of the department of educational sciences of the vrije universiteit brussel (vub) and chairman of the alliance research group vub-ughent ‘innovation, diversity and educational approaches’ (idea). his teaching and research focus on change and innovation in education and lifelong learning with a specific interest in self-regulated learning environments. nadine engels is professor of educational sciences and teacher education at the vrije universiteit brussel. her main domains of research are social affective components of learning and teaching, and professional development of teachers in teacher education and throughout their careers. recently the focus has been on inquiry-based collaborative learning and on (cultural and structural) conditions for professional learning in the organisational environment. tom vanwing is a full time professor at the university of brussels, department of (adult) educational sciences. he teaches (amongst others): management for educational change; sustainable development; community development; technology innovations and transfer in third world countries. his research concerns adult education: synergies of combining formal and informal learning; professionalisation and professional roles; and innovative approaches. peer assisted learning as a tool for facilitating social and academic integration abstract introduction models of pal: peer tutoring versus peer mentoring appreciative inquiry research aim and questions methodology sample data collection and analysis results student ambassadors: support for social integration during the first weeks buddy scheme: support for social and academic integration after one month student organisations: support for academic integration during the last four weeks discussion defining pal objectives for student integration form and design of pal for student integration limitations and further research conclusion references author details literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special edition: researching pdp practice, november 2010 an overview of the development of personal development planning (pdp) and e-portfolio practice in uk higher education janet strivens centre for recording achievement and university of liverpool, uk rob ward centre for recording achievement, uk abstract this article presents an overview of the origins of personal development planning (pdp) in uk higher education and the development of the concept into a range of practices, rooted in the processes of recording achievement, reflection, review and planning. it reviews the various theoretical underpinnings that have been proposed for pdp and charts how the developing evidence base has become an increasing focus of interest to practitioners and policymakers alike. the role of technology in supporting pdp processes is acknowledged and in particular the close association between pdp and e-portfolio practices is examined. the article concludes with a look at current initiatives which draw on pdp concepts, the continuing importance of these concepts to educational practice and the size of the research task which still lies ahead. keywords: personal development planning (pdp); e-portfolio; evidence-based practice. introduction the origin of the current policy on personal development planning (pdp) is the report by the national committee of inquiry in higher education, otherwise known as the dearing report (ncihe, 1997). recommendation 20 concerned progress files, a term that had recently been introduced in the 14-19 sector to replace the national record of achievement. it suggested that progress files should consist of two elements: strivens and ward an overview of the development of pdp and e-portfolio practice in uk higher education • a transcript recording student achievement which should follow a common format devised by institutions collectively through their representative bodies. • a means by which students can monitor, build and reflect upon their personal development (ncihe, 1997). responsibility for the first element appeared to rest firmly with student records offices and registries, but this was less clear for the second element. following acceptance by government of this recommendation, alongside the ‘steer’ that this should be taken forward by the sector itself, the further elucidation of this element was taken on by norman jackson of the higher education quality assurance agency (qaa), who instigated a national consultation, drawing largely on networks already established by the centre for recording achievement (cra). as an educational charity originally established as a project in 1991, whose purpose is ‘to promote awareness and understanding of recording achievement processes as an important element in improving learning and progression throughout the world of education, training and employment’ (see http://www.recordingachievement.org/), cra was a natural partner in the consultation process. what emerged from the consultation was, firstly, a term to describe dearing’s second element which has become widely accepted – personal development planning. secondly, a set of guidelines was published by the qaa, incorporating a definition of pdp which has become equally widely accepted: a structured and supported process undertaken by an individual to reflect upon their own learning, performance and/or achievement and to plan for their personal, educational and career development. (qaa, 2001, 2009) in the 2001 publication, formally published by the qaa, a set of minimum expectations for institutional pdp policies was set out. students would be explicitly introduced to the rationale and opportunities for pdp at the start of the programme and provided with these opportunities at each stage of their programme. by the end of the programme they would have created their own learning records containing information on the qualities and skills which could be drawn upon as evidence when applying for a job or further study. they should be able to integrate extra-curricular experiences (voluntary service, part-time employment or work placements, study abroad, fieldwork and working as a student journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 2 http://www.recordingachievement.org/ strivens and ward an overview of the development of pdp and e-portfolio practice in uk higher education representative or student union officer) into their own pdp process. institutions could offer accreditation and any such formal opportunities for pdp should be identified in the student transcript. finally, institutions were expected to have mechanisms to assure themselves that pdp was being implemented effectively. target dates for implementation were set: institutions should aim to have transcripts available for students for the academic session 2002-3 and to have provided pdp opportunities for all students by 2005-6. this guidance was not intended to constrain existing practice or local initiatives, indeed qaa expected that institutional or local policies would exceed these minimum requirements. however, crucially the nature and scope of opportunities for pdp and the strategies for recording and support were left to be determined by each institution. this was in line with existing realities – evidence suggested that much practice pre-dated dearing and was essentially local and ‘bottom-up’ in origin (see for example ward and jackson, 2001). subsequently other policy initiatives have also emphasised the role of pdp-style practice. in 2005 the higher education funding council for england (hefce) in its e-learning strategy encouraged ‘e-based systems of describing learning achievement and personal development planning’ (hefce, 2005, p.13), and the department for education and skills in its e-strategy supported the greater ‘personalisation’ of learning across all educational sectors: we will encourage every institution to offer a personal online learning space to store coursework, course resources, results and achievements. we will work towards developing a personal identifier for each learner, so that organisations can support an individual’s progression more effectively. together, these facilities will become an electronic portfolio, making it simpler for learners to build their record of achievement throughout their lifelong learning. (dfes, 2005, p. 5, para10) what is meant by pdp? notwithstanding the definition provided within the guidelines and cited above, the emphasis upon ‘situated practice’ sensitive to local meaning and realities inevitably runs a journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 3 strivens and ward an overview of the development of pdp and e-portfolio practice in uk higher education risk: confusion can be created by using the term personal development planning without qualification because such a broad range of aims and activities are encompassed by the term. recognising this problem, grant and richardson (nd) collected information from over thirty institutions on typical activities and outputs associated with the pdp processes. this yielded two lists, of thirty-three activities recognised by the sector as relevant to pdp, and forty-nine types of record (including the learner’s personal details) which might be generated as a result of these activities. these can be grouped into the following areas (with some overlap): • recording experiences and achievements. • thinking about skills. • thinking about values, attitudes, motivations, reasons. • goal-setting and planning. • summarising (for presentation to a third party). • understanding oneself as a learner. the activities associated with recording experiences and achievements are compiling, describing and reviewing. records include learning logs and reflective writing about past experiences – narrative, descriptive writing and also analysis. thinking about skills includes audits, self-assessments, recognising skills in experiences, associating evidence with skills and planning for skill development. thinking about values, attitudes, motivations and reasons is somewhat similar, but instead of a skills framework, activities might include sets of questions intended to help the learner clarify values, preferences and goals. these could range from highly structured inventories such as careers guidance questionnaires to much broader questions aimed at increasing self-awareness. goalsetting and planning might need to draw on previously identified preferences and provide advice on pathways. the learner would be engaged in setting targets and a timeframe. summarising for presentation includes the activities of cv writing and developing e-portfolios for showcasing. it involves the learner in selection of evidence (and therefore judgements about the quality of evidence) and may call upon design skills. it may also involve researching careers and other opportunities for progression, and matching requirements to previously identified preferences, values, skills and achievements. understanding oneself as a learner might consist of a series of prompts to help the learner think about their learning preferences. some practitioners use learning styles journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 4 strivens and ward an overview of the development of pdp and e-portfolio practice in uk higher education questionnaires although these need to be selected with caution, as a major report on the evidence base for different models of learning styles makes clear (lsrc, 2004). in their 2005 survey on progress towards full implementation (see below), ward et al. report a similar list of activities identified by the almost three hundred staff who took part in the consultation: • thinking ahead and planning, using both critical rational thinking and imagination. • doing something and being more aware of what is being done. • recording these observations and perceptions. • reviewing/reflecting on actions and their effects. • evaluating and making judgements about self and the effects of own actions. • engaging in conversation with a teacher/tutor and/or peers in order to discuss/challenge experiences, perceptions and judgements. • using this personal knowledge as a resource to inform future actions (ward et al., 2005, p.3). most recently peters and tymms (2010) have further unpacked the concept of pdp, returning to the ‘structured and supported’ definition cited above and analysing each word or phrase thus: • process: pdp is a verb not a noun. it is an ongoing educational process not a document or file. • individual: the focus is upon, and the responsibility lies with, the learner her/himself. • structured: it is a process that involves a number of stages that build upon each other. • supported: though the focus is on the individual learner it is not undertaken alone but with help from tutors, colleagues and institutional systems. • reflect upon their own learning, performance and/or achievement, and to plan: suggests a number of elements of the pdp process and relates to the eppi-centre systematic literature review’s chosen definition of pdp, for the purposes of their search, as ‘processes that connect reflection, recording and action planning’ (gough et al., 2003, cited peters and tymms, 2010). journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 5 strivens and ward an overview of the development of pdp and e-portfolio practice in uk higher education • personal, educational and career development: emphasises the three spheres of learning that pdp draws together, helping to make connections between the development of the individual, their educational experiences and life choices. (peters and tymms, 2010, p.10) how far have we come with pdp implementation? in november 2003, the centre for higher education research and information (cheri) published an interim report on progress towards implementation (brennan and shah, 2003). the cheri survey highlighted the range of approaches taken by higher education institutions (heis) in implementing the qaa guidelines. their main findings were that: • pdp policies were often varied in approach, and such policies had been introduced by fewer than half the institutions that responded. • progress in implementation was slow and uneven, and there was a lack of common understanding about pdp. • perhaps because of this and the difference in institutional mission and ethos, pdp was related to a range of institutional policies. employability was identified as the most frequently perceived driver to adoption (61 out of 73 respondents) followed by inclusion within quality assurance reference points (55), retention (39), and widening participation (39). subsequently, ward et al. (2005) carried out a consultation through a workshop programme to assess progress towards implementation. this also found that, at institutional level, pdp policies were predominantly permissive in nature and based upon broad frameworks with opportunities for local interpretation. this reflected the qaa policy position that the ‘application of personal development planning should be based on institutionally determined policies within a national guidance framework’ (qaa, 2000). the legitimisation of locally derived and developed practice provided the predominant strategy for implementation, with centrally derived/developed approaches often intended to serve as a default or minimum expectation within an institution. links between the twin elements of the progress file (transcript and pdp) were limited. the prevailing view was that, while there may be connections at the level of institutional journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 6 strivens and ward an overview of the development of pdp and e-portfolio practice in uk higher education policy, the picture ‘on the ground’ was that transcript and pdp development work were running relatively independently (a minority of institutions suggested that, where it-based systems were in place or under development, the potential to integrate the two aspects of policy was stronger). there was also little evidence of policy refinement based upon evaluation evidence. for the practitioners, pdp was seen as a holistic and integrated set of processes, with a consistent emphasis on the role of pdp processes in the development of student selfidentity, broadly conceived. pdp outputs were seen as records of this process, and as raw material on which students could draw when presenting/ representing themselves to others. however, in programmes where pdp-style activities were required for professional recognition or progression, the records themselves assumed a primary public (or at least shared) purpose. connecting higher education practice with that taking place elsewhere (pre-higher education experience in schools/colleges, requirements of employers and professional bodies) was seen as important. practitioners also felt that the definition of pdp contained within the policy guidelines remained broadly fit for purpose. in 2008, cra carried out a further survey to try to establish the different modes of pdp and their prevalence in higher education provision. of eighty-five respondents, around three-quarters stated that their institutions had a written policy on pdp and that pdp was referred to in the institution’s learning andteaching strategy documentation. over half the institutions represented had a special team with a pdp remit. at undergraduate level 43% claimed that pdp was ‘mostly established’, 16% that it was ‘very well established’. the percentage was higher at postgraduate level (above 60%) which was not surprising in the light of the roberts funding for postgraduate skills training (roberts, 2002). this survey indicated that few institutions required a single mode of pdp provision across the whole institution. in relation to the degree of compulsion on students to become involved in pdp, over two-thirds of respondents claimed that pdp activities were assessed in their institution. over 80% of respondents said that pdp was embedded in creditbearing modules in at least some curriculum areas, however, 70% said that pdp was also delivered outside the curriculum for some students, typically through personal tutors. there was strong support (over 80% agreement) for the notion that pdp should be adapted to different curriculum areas rather than reflecting a single imposed model. 60% of respondents also said that their institution offered some form of programme outside the journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 7 strivens and ward an overview of the development of pdp and e-portfolio practice in uk higher education formal curriculum, such as a skills award – a percentage which is likely to have increased since the survey was carried out (see for example 94 group, 2009). while the survey suggested that pdp was increasingly accepted as a part of the student experience which the institution was responsible for providing, a note of caution was struck by the finding that two-thirds of respondents thought that staff still saw pdp as an increase in workload. more recently there appear to have been moves towards more structured institutional frameworks and support for pdp, whether in respect of policy or on staff support (see university of bolton (2005) for an example of policy and university of bristol (2009) for examples of a range of staff guides). supporting pdp with e-portfolio (and other) technology a further survey carried out by cra for the higher education academy found that from sixty-one uk heis responding, over half were using some form of technology (other than an e-portfolio) to support pdp institutionally (strivens, 2007). in response to another question, the same proportion claimed to have access to an e-portfolio system, often as a pilot, and the main reason given for acquiring an e-portfolio tool (again by over half of respondents) was to support pdp. these findings illustrate the strong tendency in uk higher education to associate e-portfolio (technology and practices) with pdp practices (see also strivens et al., 2010). this is understandable. pdp calls for reflection; eportfolios claim to support it. pdp highlights the explicit acknowledgement and recording of personal achievement; e-portfolios provide a means of storing and displaying the evidence. so what is an e-portfolio? most writers on e-portfolios acknowledge that attempts at definition are fraught with difficulty (see for example stefani et al., 2007; grant, 2009). the jisc infokit on eportfolios comments ‘ideas of what an e-portfolio 'is' are complex and to an extent the definition and purpose will vary depending on the perspective from which a particular person is approaching the concept’ (jisc, 2009). there are a number of reasons for this. firstly, the target is moving as the technology itself develops continually. e-portfolios are still, in 2010, a relatively new technology (the first european conference devoted to eportfolios was held in 2003, although us practice somewhat pre-dates this). different systems which are referred to as e-portfolio systems may offer a different range of journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 8 strivens and ward an overview of the development of pdp and e-portfolio practice in uk higher education functionalities. more confusingly, some use the term ‘e-portfolio practices’ loosely to describe pedagogies designed around reflection, underpinned by different tools with a more restricted functionality such as a blogging tool. as the jisc publication ‘effective practice with e-portfolios’ (jisc, 2008) points out, the term is increasingly used to refer to both product and process. the product is a ‘purposeful aggregation of digital items’ (jisc, 2008, p.6) in some form of repository. multiple e-portfolios might be created from the same repository or set of repositories for presentation to different audiences. behind this lie ‘ rich and complex processes of planning, synthesising, sharing, discussing, reflecting, giving, receiving and responding to feedback’ which may be referred to generically as ‘e-portfoliobased learning’ (jisc, 2008, p.6). secondly, e-portfolios have developed more or less simultaneously within different cultural and educational traditions. the emphasis on personal celebration in the us tradition can seem alien to some uk practitioners: conversely assessment in us heis seems less driven and constrained by an externally imposed quality regime than with their uk and australian counterparts. the practice which is presented to showcase what e-portfolios can offer thus varies somewhat in its emphasis between countries. if a single agreed definition remains problematic, there is certainly mutual understanding of the common features of e-portfolio systems. grant (2009) introduces e-portfolio technology as being suitable for analysis along the three dimensions of purpose, information and functionality. he notes that common functionality seen in e-portfolio tools includes input of and storing information both from the learner and from others; managing and organising artefacts and information, including tagging and constructing linked narratives; and setting varied permissions to several people or groups for viewing and giving feedback. in the assessment context, any of this information could potentially be seen as useful evidence of the learner's abilities. the concept of a portfolio as the holder for an individual’s collection of artefacts has a long-established history, especially in art and design disciplines. the large majority of eportfolio tools are capable of holding electronic artefacts authored by the learner, including office tool files, photos and graphics, and possibly audio and video files – though sometimes it is expected that these are stored by a third party service provider such as youtube – as well as the reflections and narratives that are increasingly recognised as relevant to assessment. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 9 strivens and ward an overview of the development of pdp and e-portfolio practice in uk higher education in 2007, a jisc overview paper identified a generally accepted range of purposes: application (to employment or further study); supporting transitions; for learning, teaching and assessment through supporting reflection, discussion and formative assessment, and providing evidence for summative assessment; personal development planning (pdp) and continuing professional development (cpd) (jisc, 2007). this range is also recognised in the ‘effective practice with e-portfolios’ (jisc, 2008) publication. as noted above, e-portfolios have been closely identified with pdp policy in uk higher education as the tool of choice to support pdp processes. however, there may be some drawbacks to this tight association. the use of e-portfolios as a vehicle for more innovative and imaginative forms of assessment has much potential, still largely unexplored (see strivens et al., 2010). where there is institutional apathy or cynicism about the value of pdp, this may transfer to the technology most associated with it and inhibit more widespread adoption. using technology to support pdp: benefits and drawbacks as the ‘structured and supported’ emphasis within the pdp definition makes clear, learners will need varying degrees of help with all types of pdp activities, depending on their experience and maturity. help and guidance can be provided by tutors, mentors and careers advisers but these are expensive and scarce resources in most heis. rather than using an integrated e-portfolio system, some institutions have developed electronic resources on websites to provide at least some of this support, coupled in some cases with a secure means of storing the records generated throughout the process. indeed there are a range of technologies which can play an important role in supporting pdp processes. insofar as pdp activities are learning activities, technologies which are explicitly designed to support a series of these would appear to be of value. it is noticeable that in uk higher education, one development of e-portfolio systems has been in the direction of providing templates to guide the learner into producing a reflective statement, record or commentary. the templates are arguably not part of the e-portfolio itself, they function more as a set of guidelines or rubrics to make sure that the learner produces what is required. this is perfectly reasonable thinking in terms of curriculum design and also when e-portfolios are used as a vehicle for assessment, as in many professional areas. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 10 strivens and ward an overview of the development of pdp and e-portfolio practice in uk higher education however, it is somewhat at odds with the concept of the e-portfolio (which features strongly in some definitions) as owned by its user, containing artefacts chosen by the user and displayed selectively according to that user’s permission. linked to the question of ownership, another important issue which institutions need to address is what happens when the student leaves the institution. where e-portfolio systems store evidence of achievements, helpful information about preferences and abilities and practice cvs, learners will need and wish to access this material beyond the boundaries of a specific programme. it must either be stored by the institution with continuing access rights for the learner, transferred into another institution’s system or downloaded in a usable form. some of the problems around this are technical but more are to do with the institution’s own policy. electronic systems have some distinct advantages over paper-based recording systems. the records are harder to misplace and the administrative burden for staff members is likely to be eased. links to online help and guidance (for both students and staff) can be easily incorporated. the structure of an online system can help students through different aspects of the pdp process, presenting helpful questions and prompts for reflection, providing reminders and timelines for planning and reviewing. disadvantages include differential access to technology outside the academic environment and differences in it skills themselves which can discriminate against and even exclude some groups of students. within institutions information systems may not communicate with each other, leading to the need to re-enter the same information several times in different systems which causes confusion and rapid de-motivation. more seriously, when students are work-based or participate in extensive work placements, institutional firewalls or issues of confidentiality may prevent access from outside, effectively preventing the integration of learning across contexts (see below). developing our understanding of e-portfolio practice given the uncertainties and varying strands of development outlined above, research into the impact and effective use of e-portfolios faces particular challenges. in 2010, at an international seminar bringing together practitioners from the us, the uk, europe and journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 11 strivens and ward an overview of the development of pdp and e-portfolio practice in uk higher education australasia, cambridge and hartley (2010) suggested a list of twelve ‘things we think we know’ about e-portfolios. the list actually included a number of ‘don’t knows’ which echo the above uncertainties: • different e-portfolios offer very different underlying assumptions/approach and organisation. • e-portfolios need ongoing (and long-term) support from staff and the institution (including an appropriate degree of training and familiarisation. • we do not have a shared or absolutely coherent definition of what an e-portfolio actually is. • there are different ‘cultural traditions’ which affect both the adoption and uptake of pdp and e-portfolios. • some students on some courses benefit significantly from pdp activities which are managed through e-portfolio. • e-portfolio authors must have control over the construction and visual design of their portfolios. • the e-portfolio genre is especially valuable for synthesising experiences across contexts, both academic and otherwise, and for cultivating professional and disciplinary identities. • e-portfolios can/may have impact on student engagement and retention; • the role of the academic tutor is absolutely critical to the successful adoption of both pdp and e-portfolios by students. • tutors use e-portfolios in very different ways. • e-portfolios have varying efficacy for certain types of assessment. • e-portfolios must have an articulated and coherent educational philosophy to guide practice. in putting together this list, cambridge and hartley acknowledge the real challenges of the e-portfolio research agenda, ‘what we need to know’: • the long-term impact of e-portfolio adoption/use (how should this be evaluated?). • whether we can expect one e-portfolio to suit every student (or even the majority of students). journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 12 strivens and ward an overview of the development of pdp and e-portfolio practice in uk higher education • the underlying psychological processes that support or impede the take-up of eportfolios, for both staff and students. • the importance of it skill and confidence. • how reluctant tutors can be persuaded or encouraged. • the most significant institutional barriers and enablers. • a better understanding of the multiple audiences for e-portfolios (not just students and tutors). cambridge and hartley speculate that meeting these challenges will require a broader range of methods and approaches (crucially involving more observation of behaviour and less self-report), but methods and approaches shared across the e-portfolio community of practice so that data can be compared across institutions. it may be an indication of the accuracy of cambridge and hartley’s analysis that many of their key issues are addressed in recent and current research. a current jisc project (joyes and smallwood, 2010) is studying large-scale implementations of e-portfolios within institutions, looking at barriers and enablers. a recent jisc project (coolin et al., 2010) offered institutions and learners a range of different products, noting their preferences and purposes for use. globally the ‘community of practice’ is developing a sense of identity and constantly improving opportunities and methods for pooling and exchanging their developing knowledge and experience. evidence for the effectiveness of pdp in achieving its aims in the 2005 consultation already described, the development of an evidence base for the benefits of pdp was identified as one of four key priorities for practitioners. this reflected the continuing recognition that studies have often been highly context-specific evaluations, focusing on acceptability to staff and students of local procedures and tools. in such cases it has been difficult to generalise from the variety of methods and instruments used and there has been little focus on outcomes, perhaps because this is still a relatively recent innovation in most institutions. the work of the narn, as reported upon in this special edition, goes some way toward addressing this. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 13 strivens and ward an overview of the development of pdp and e-portfolio practice in uk higher education there are at least three major challenges around evaluation of pdp processes and portfolio systems in the support for learners. firstly, in a conventional educational setting it would normally be unethical to design an educational empirical study with groups of learners, some of whom were exposed to the support intervention (experimental groups), and others who were denied it (control groups). instead, most studies rely on observation of naturally occurring data. secondly, it is generally not possible with such naturally occurring data to attribute changes to a particular intervention, rather than to a general effect of ‘any’ intervention. thirdly, where studies demonstrate a correlation between two factors this does not of itself imply a causal direction. thus, outcomes from peters’ (2006) study, carried out as part of his national teaching fellowship, showed that across the six very different institutions which took part in the research, there was a statistically significant relationship between students’ willingness to engage in pdp processes and their ultimate degree classification. similarly clark et al. (2010) reported that comparison of ‘scores’ on the effective lifelong learning inventory (elli) (see http://www.ellionline.co.uk/) achieved during the first year of the degree course with those of the same students at the end of the second year module, with reference to reflective writing ability, indicated that those who engaged with the pdp/e-portfolio process (that is, those whose reflective writing showed deeper thought) showed most positive change. those who did not engage, however, showed a decrease in learning ‘power’ in those three elli dimensions identified as having a significant correlation with high achievement (critical curiosity, changing and learning and strategic awareness). while such outcomes as these do not of themselves provide support for a causal relationship, they do merit further investigation. notwithstanding these caveats, the international research synthesis undertaken by gough et al. (2003) provided evidence for positive effects of processes linking reflection, recording and planning on improving students’ learning. the study which undertook a systematic mapping and synthesis of pdp-related research screened 14,000 studies for review, of which 157 met the inclusion criteria for the review. these were keyworded to produce a systematic map of research activity in the field, and twenty-five selected for indepth review on the basis of researcher intervention and independent outcome measures, such as knowledge, approaches to learning styles or self-review. the papers were judged on the quality of research and weight of evidence and the outcome assessment was that pdp had a generally positive influence on improving student learning. although this journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 14 http://www.ellionline.co.uk/ strivens and ward an overview of the development of pdp and e-portfolio practice in uk higher education judgement was based on a small number of studies, the authors concluded there was good evidence of a strong association. building on this prior work, and as a continued recognition of the importance of the evidence base for pdp and e-portfolio policy and practices, over the past three years two research networks have been in existence, each devoted to furthering research in these areas. cohort 5 of the inter/national coalition for eportfolio research was the first cohort of this us-based initiative to be primarily uk-based, with seven of its nine institutional members from the uk. research outputs from all cohorts to have completed their work so far are available on the i/ncepr website (see http://ncepr.org/). over approximately the same period of time, the work of the national action research network on researching pdp and e-portfolio practice has brought together seventeen institutions in england, building research capacity amongst practitioners and exploring a range of issues in pdp practice in uk higher education. whilst the emphasis has remained substantially, and appropriately, upon seeing pdp practice as highly situated and responsive to local circumstances, the emphasis here has been upon more considered and rigorous approaches to such investigation, carried out within a community of practitioner-researchers who have been able to support and challenge one another in the development of more systematic approaches to research and evaluation, and in the processes of analysis and interpretation of results. looking to the future the qaa’s revised guidelines to support personal development planning identified a range of developments in the uk higher education sector since the formulation of the original guidelines in 2001 (qaa, 2009, para.14). an increased reference to pdp approaches in subject benchmark statements was noted, as documented by atlay (2008). here we emphasise three further developments which focus upon the extension of pdp practices – in two cases – and the potential for further mainstreaming in the third. in relation to postgraduates, the 2008 survey carried out by cra reported substantial progress in this area. this was facilitated by the roberts' review, set for success (roberts, 2002). subsequently the qaa code of practice (2004, p.12) related to journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 15 http://ncepr.org/ strivens and ward an overview of the development of pdp and e-portfolio practice in uk higher education postgraduate research programmes set out the expectation that learners will take 'responsibility for their own personal and professional development'. most recently a consultation on the researcher development framework identified the production of ‘a tool for planning, promoting and supporting personal, professional and career development’ as a key project aim (vitae, 2009, slide 3). work is currently (november 2010) proceeding to develop this initiative. elsewhere pdp practice appears ever more central to the developing employer engagement agenda (leitch, 2006). flexibility in when and where learning is taking place, including increased work-based learning, underlines the importance of electronic delivery. specifically, while the leitch agenda was well sketched out at the macro level, to work in practice it requires the development of effective and worthwhile learning practices within distributed learning environments (the workplace) which are simultaneously personalised to the learner and appropriately connected to organisations and organisational needs and requirements (richardson and ward, 2007). the role of e-portfolio technologies in support of this agenda is explored in the major policy project undertaken by cra for the hefce in 2009-2010 (see the higher education employer and employee engagement through eportfolios (he5p) project at http://www.recordingachievement.org/employerscpd/he5p.html). finally, a key current policy initiative is the development of the higher education achievement report (hear). in october 2003 the measuring and recording student achievement scoping group was established by universities uk and the standing conference of principals (scop), with the support of hefce, to review the recommendations from the uk government white paper, the future of higher education, relating specifically to recording student achievement, value added, degree classifications and credit systems. the final report from the burgess steering group recommended that: • by 2010/11 a higher education achievement report (hear) will be the central vehicle for recording all university-level undergraduate higher education student achievement in all uk higher education institutions. • the hear will contain information which the institution is prepared to verify. further work should be done on how to measure and record skills and achievements gained through non-formal learning but this, along with journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 16 http://www.recordingachievement.org/employers-cpd/he5p.html http://www.recordingachievement.org/employers-cpd/he5p.html strivens and ward an overview of the development of pdp and e-portfolio practice in uk higher education other student-generated/driven information, should be part of personal development planning (pdp). (burgess, 2007, p.9) whilst the 2007 report explicitly emphasised that pdp and the hear should be seen as distinct though complementary, subsequent work has served to emphasise the potential for interrelationship and synergy. thus, amongst institutions piloting the hear the conception has served to invite reconsideration of learning and teaching including more holistic appreciations of learning and achievement (revisiting the graduate attributes agenda – see heqc 1997a, 1997b). the emphasis upon a richer record of graduate achievement inevitably promotes consideration of aspects of life-wide learning and how achievements in this wider terrain may be verified and accredited. the hear further invites renewed consideration of the relationship between institutionally-managed and learner-managed information, the latter as held in e-portfolio systems for example. one perspective, expressed within the hear trial, has represented this in terms of the hear sitting behind the presentational portfolio or application made by any graduate, as a means of verifying the claims/attestations made. such a relationship would imply a direct link from any application or presentational portfolio into the individual’s summative hear. from this perspective also, hears initiated at entry to the institution and developed through the student’s career may provide a context for recognising learning and informing choices. where pdp opportunities are offered through a personal tutoring system, such processes are deeply familiar. as another institution in the hear pilot reports: the university of manchester is exploring formative hears to be produced annually for students in order to inform their academic and extra-curricular choices. the ‘hearing student voices’ project will focus on the formative, development aspects of the hear initiative and will run alongside the development of graduate hears (university of manchester, 2009). in summary, the concept and vision of pdp appears to have become embedded in thinking about higher education policy in the uk. associated practices have developed internationally, with a range of aims from the full development of individual potential or the lifelong upskilling of the national workforce. e-portfolio technologies continue to spread, with many institutions seeing e-portfolio provision for all students, and staff, as a strong journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 17 strivens and ward an overview of the development of pdp and e-portfolio practice in uk higher education marketing tool. still, many questions remain, particularly around achieving the widest possible learner engagement with both processes and supporting technologies. the field remains one with enticing visions and possibilities alongside many frustrations in implementation; rich in opportunities but with much work still to be done before they are fully realised. references 94 group (2009) beyond the curriculum: opportunities to enhance employability and future life choices. available at: http://www.1994group.ac.uk/documents/public/091106_beyondthecurriculum.pdf (accessed: 3 november 2010). atlay, m. (2008) subject benchmarks and pdp: a review. available at: http://www.recordingachievement.org/higher-education/articles/item/highereducation-articles/subject-benchmark-statements-and-pdp-a-review.html (accessed 3.12.10). brennan, j. and shah, t. (2003) report on the implementation of progress files (cheri review). available at: http://oro.open.ac.uk/324/1/progressfiles.pdf (accessed: 3 november 2010). burgess, r. (2007) beyond the honours degree classification: final report of the burgess group. available at: http://www.universitiesuk.ac.uk/publications/documents/burgess_final.pdf (accessed: 3 november 2010). cambridge, d. and hartley, p. (2010) ‘e-portfolios: what do we know and what do we need to know?’, 2nd international residential seminar 26th 28th april 2010. nottingham. available at http://www.recordingachievement.org/images/pdfs/case_studies/post_event/darrenp eter.pdf (accessed: 3 november 2010). journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 18 http://www.1994group.ac.uk/documents/public/091106_beyondthecurriculum.pdf http://www.recordingachievement.org/higher-education/articles/item/higher-education-articles/subject-benchmark-statements-and-pdp-a-review.html http://www.recordingachievement.org/higher-education/articles/item/higher-education-articles/subject-benchmark-statements-and-pdp-a-review.html http://oro.open.ac.uk/324/1/progressfiles.pdf http://www.universitiesuk.ac.uk/publications/documents/burgess_final.pdf http://www.recordingachievement.org/news-and-events/events/post-event-resources/item/root/2nd-international-residential-seminar.html http://www.recordingachievement.org/images/pdfs/case_studies/post_event/darrenpeter.pdf http://www.recordingachievement.org/images/pdfs/case_studies/post_event/darrenpeter.pdf strivens and ward an overview of the development of pdp and e-portfolio practice in uk higher education clark, w., adamson, j., thompson, j., and white, a. (2010) ‘illuminating and measuring personal development: the impact of this work on learning and teaching’, pdp and e-portfolio uk newsletter issue 20, september 2010. available at: http://www.recordingachievement.org/news-and-events/publications/pdpuk.html (accessed: 3 november 2010). coolin, k., harley, p., smallwood, a. and wood, s. (2010) eportfolios and lifelong learners: report of the leap ahead lifelong learning network eportfolio/esystems strand, centre for international eportfolio development. nottingham: university of nottingham. dfes (2005) harnessing technology: transforming learning and children’s services. available at: http://www.dfes.gov.uk/publications/e-strategy (accessed: 3 november 2010). gough, d.a., kiwan, d., sutcliffe, k. and simpson, d. (2003) a systematic map and synthesis review of the effectiveness of personal development planning for improving student learning. london: eppi-centre, social science research unit. available at: http://eppi.ioe.ac.uk/eppiwebcontent/reel/review_groups/eppi/ltsn/ltsn_june0 3.pdf (accessed: 3 november 2010). grant, s. (2009) electronic portfolios: personal information, personal development and personal values. oxford: chandos publishing. grant, s. and richardson, h. (nd) personal development planning practice and systems. available at: http://www.cetis.ac.uk/members/pdpcontent/viewactivitytypes (for activities) and http://www.cetis.ac.uk/members/pdpcontent/viewparttypes (for outputs/records) (accessed: 3 november 2010). hefce (2005) strategy for e-learning. available at: http://www.hefce.ac.uk/pubs/hefce/2005/05_12/05_12.doc (accessed: 3 november 2010). journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 19 http://www.recordingachievement.org/news-and-events/publications/pdpuk.html http://www.dfes.gov.uk/publications/e-strategy http://eppi.ioe.ac.uk/eppiwebcontent/reel/review_groups/eppi/ltsn/ltsn_june03.pdf http://eppi.ioe.ac.uk/eppiwebcontent/reel/review_groups/eppi/ltsn/ltsn_june03.pdf http://www.cetis.ac.uk/members/pdpcontent/viewactivitytypes http://www.cetis.ac.uk/members/pdpcontent/viewparttypes http://www.hefce.ac.uk/pubs/hefce/2005/05_12/05_12.doc strivens and ward an overview of the development of pdp and e-portfolio practice in uk higher education heqc (1997a) assessment in higher education and the role of ‘graduateness’. london: higher education quality council. heqc (1997b) graduate standards programme final report: volume 2. london: higher education quality council. jisc (2007) e-portfolios: an overview of jisc activities. available at: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/publications/documents/pub_eportfolio_overview.aspx (accessed: 3 november 2010). jisc (2008) effective practice with e-portfolios. available at: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/publications/publications/effectivepracticeeportfolios.aspx (accessed: 3 november 2010). jisc (2009) e-portfolios. (jisc infonet). available at: http://www.jiscinfonet.ac.uk/infokits/e-portfolios (accessed: 3 november 2010). joyes, g. and smallwood, a. (2010) e-portfolio implementations study (epi). available at: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/elearning/epi.aspx (accessed: 3 november 2010). leitch, s. (2006) prosperity for all in the global economy – world class skills (the leitch report). available at: http://www.hmtreasury.gov.uk/media/6/4/leitch_finalreport051206.pdf (accessed: 3 november 10). lsrc (2004) learning styles and pedagogy in post-16 learning: a systematic and critical review. available at: https://www.lsneducation.org.uk/user/order.aspx?code=041543&src=xoweb (accessed: 3 november 2010). ncihe (1997) higher education in the learning society (report of the dearing committee). available at: http://www.leeds.ac.uk/educol/ncihe/ (accessed: 3 november 2010). peters, j. (2006) ‘researching student attitudes towards personal development planning (pdp)’, pdp and e-portfolio uk newsletter, issue 7, march 2006. available at: journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 20 http://www.jisc.ac.uk/publications/documents/pub_eportfolio_overview.aspx http://www.jisc.ac.uk/publications/publications/effectivepracticeeportfolios.aspx http://www.jiscinfonet.ac.uk/infokits/e-portfolios http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/elearning/epi.aspx http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/media/6/4/leitch_finalreport051206.pdf http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/media/6/4/leitch_finalreport051206.pdf https://www.lsneducation.org.uk/user/order.aspx?code=041543&src=xoweb http://www.leeds.ac.uk/educol/ncihe/ strivens and ward an overview of the development of pdp and e-portfolio practice in uk higher education http://www.recordingachievement.org/news-and-events/publications/pdpuk.html (accessed: 3 november 2010). peters, j. and tymms, m. (2010) ‘defining personal development planning: putting the personal in pdp?’, pdp and e-portfolio uk newsletter, issue 20, september 2010. available at: http://www.recordingachievement.org/news-andevents/publications/pdpuk/item/pdp-uk-newsletters/issue-20.html (accessed: 3 november 2010). qaa (2000) policy statement on a progress file for higher education. available at: http://www.qaa.ac.uk/academicinfrastructure/progressfiles/archive/policystatement/ default.asp (accessed: 3 november 2010). qaa (2001) guidelines for he progress files. available at: http://www.qaa.ac.uk/academicinfrastructure/progressfiles/guidelines/progfile2001. asp (accessed: 3 november 2010). qaa (2004) postgraduate research programmes: section 1 of the code of practice for the assurance of academic quality and standards in higher education. available at: r http://www.qaa.ac.uk/academicinfrastructure/codeofpractice/section1/postgrad2004 .pdf (accessed: 3 november 2010). qaa (2009) personal development planning: guidance for institutional policy and practice in higher education. available at: http://www.qaa.ac.uk/academicinfrastructure/progressfiles/guidelines/pdp/pdpguide. pdf (accessed: 3 november 2010). richardson, h. and ward, r. (2007) personalised learning plans in lifelong learning networks. available at: http://www.hefce.ac.uk/pubs/rdreports/2007/rd11_07/rd11_07.pdf (accessed: 3 november 2010). roberts, g. (2002) set for success (final report of the roberts review). available at: http://www.vitae.ac.uk/policy-practice/1393-3083/set-for-success-final-report-ofsir-gareth-roberts-review.html (accessed: 3 november 2010). journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 21 http://www.recordingachievement.org/news-and-events/publications/pdpuk.html http://www.recordingachievement.org/news-and-events/publications/pdpuk/item/pdp-uk-newsletters/issue-20.html http://www.recordingachievement.org/news-and-events/publications/pdpuk/item/pdp-uk-newsletters/issue-20.html http://www.qaa.ac.uk/academicinfrastructure/progressfiles/archive/policystatement/default.asp http://www.qaa.ac.uk/academicinfrastructure/progressfiles/archive/policystatement/default.asp http://www.qaa.ac.uk/academicinfrastructure/progressfiles/guidelines/progfile2001.asp http://www.qaa.ac.uk/academicinfrastructure/progressfiles/guidelines/progfile2001.asp http://www.qaa.ac.uk/academicinfrastructure/codeofpractice/section1/postgrad2004.pdf http://www.qaa.ac.uk/academicinfrastructure/codeofpractice/section1/postgrad2004.pdf http://www.qaa.ac.uk/academicinfrastructure/progressfiles/guidelines/pdp/pdpguide.pdf http://www.qaa.ac.uk/academicinfrastructure/progressfiles/guidelines/pdp/pdpguide.pdf http://www.hefce.ac.uk/pubs/rdreports/2007/rd11_07/rd11_07.pdf http://www.vitae.ac.uk/policy-practice/1393-3083/set-for-success-final-report-of-sir-gareth-roberts-review.html http://www.vitae.ac.uk/policy-practice/1393-3083/set-for-success-final-report-of-sir-gareth-roberts-review.html strivens and ward an overview of the development of pdp and e-portfolio practice in uk higher education stefani, l., mason, r. and pegler, c. (2007) the educational potential of e-portfolios: supporting personal development and reflective learning. abingdon: routledge. strivens, j. (2007) a survey of e-pdp and e-portfolio practice in uk higher education. available at: http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/assets/york/documents/ourwork/tla/personal_develop ment_plan/survey_of_epdp_and_eportfolio_practice_in_uk_higher_education.pdf (accessed: 3 november 2010). strivens, j., baume, d., grant, s., owen c., ward, r. and nicol, d. (2010) the role of eportfolios in formative and summative assessment practices: report of the jiscfunded study. available at: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/elearning/eportfolios/studyontheroleof eportfolios.aspx#downloads (accessed: 3 november 2010). university of bolton (2005) personal development planning (pdp) for all students studying at the university of bolton: the university framework. available at: http://www.bolton.ac.uk/lepdu/documents/pdpframework.pdf (accessed: 3 november 2010). university of bristol (2009) personal development planning (pdp) guidance and resources for academic staff website. available at: http://www.bris.ac.uk/esu/studentlearning/pdp/ (accessed: 3 november 2010). university of manchester (2010) hearing student voices website. available at: http://www.campus.manchester.ac.uk/tlso/hearingstudentvoices/ (accessed: 3 november 2010). vitae (2009) uk researcher development framework (rdf). available at: http://www.vitae.ac.uk/cms/files/upload/vitae-researcher-development-frameworkpresentation-oct-2009.ppt#258 slide 3 (accessed: 3 november 2010). ward, r. and jackson, n. (2001) personal development planning: institutional case studies. york: ltsn generic centre. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 22 http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/assets/york/documents/ourwork/tla/personal_development_plan/survey_of_epdp_and_eportfolio_practice_in_uk_higher_education.pdf http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/assets/york/documents/ourwork/tla/personal_development_plan/survey_of_epdp_and_eportfolio_practice_in_uk_higher_education.pdf http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/elearning/eportfolios/studyontheroleofeportfolios.aspx#downloads http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/elearning/eportfolios/studyontheroleofeportfolios.aspx#downloads http://www.bolton.ac.uk/lepdu/documents/pdpframework.pdf http://www.bris.ac.uk/esu/studentlearning/pdp/ http://www.campus.manchester.ac.uk/tlso/hearingstudentvoices/ http://www.vitae.ac.uk/cms/files/upload/vitae-researcher-development-framework-presentation-oct-2009.ppt#258 http://www.vitae.ac.uk/cms/files/upload/vitae-researcher-development-framework-presentation-oct-2009.ppt#258 strivens and ward an overview of the development of pdp and e-portfolio practice in uk higher education ward r., jackson, n. and strivens, j. (2005) progress files: are we achieving our goal? available at: http://www.recordingachievement.org/research/narn.html?view=item&item_id=397 (accessed: 3 november 2010). author details rob ward is the director of the centre for recording achievement (cra) in the uk. rob was a member of the scoping group on measuring and recording student achievement (2004-6) and is currently a core member of the group charged to support the trial and anticipated implementation of the hear across uk higher education. he led the cra contribution to the ‘national action research network on researching and evaluating personal development planning and e-portfolio’. he is a visiting professor at the university of bolton. janet strivens is an educational developer at the university of liverpool and also senior associate director of the cra. her interests include assessment, the development of the autonomous learner, collaborative learning and the uses of technology to support all these processes. a registered educational charity and network organisation, cra (http://www.recordingachievement.org) exists to ‘promote awareness and understanding of the processes of recording achievement as an important element in improving learning and progression throughout the world of education, training and employment’. cra is the only associate partner of the higher education academy (uk), with a brief to support the implementation of high quality personal development planning and e-portfolio practice throughout higher education. it took a leading role in the revision of the sectoral guidelines on personal development planning (qaa, 2009). journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 23 http://www.recordingachievement.org/research/narn.html?view=item&item_id=397 https://owa.liv.ac.uk/owa/redir.aspx?c=7aad0d0c2ee14977ad84092e42050241&url=http%3a%2f%2fwww.recordingachievement.org%2f an overview of the development of personal development planning (pdp) and e-portfolio practice in uk higher education abstract introduction what is meant by pdp? how far have we come with pdp implementation? supporting pdp with e-portfolio (and other) technology using technology to support pdp: benefits and drawbacks developing our understanding of e-portfolio practice evidence for the effectiveness of pdp in achieving its aims looking to the future references author details literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 3: march 2011 learning development in higher education marianne cole university of cambridge, uk key words: learning development; institutional change; student transitions; student experience; academic practices; study support. this book is published at a crucial time for the learning development community as it is threatened by the funding cuts sweeping the higher education (he) sector. in the closing weeks of 2010, the learning development in higher education network (ldhen) discussion forum reported redundancies, departmental closures and, generally, a need to justify the continued existence of the range of roles that constitute the learning development (ld) community. with so many contributors and chapters, it might be tempting to take a pickand-mix approach to reading this book. however, there is much to be gained from reading from a variety of perspectives since theories, methodologies and evaluation strategies are transferable. indeed, this is encouraged as part of the book’s call for greater collaboration and ‘joined-up thinking’ (hilsdon, chapter 1) between all stakeholders. it is useful to understand the range of factors that influence the motivations and decisions of individuals and institutions as the he sector is forced to re-think its funding priorities. audience for those working in ld, this book offers not only examples of practice but also serves as an articulate justification for the continued existence and further development of their field. for those who are looking to increase their strategic influence, it offers strategies for demonstrating impact with senior management. the book also offers a broader picture of the sector as a whole. cole learning development in higher education for course leaders, lecturers and tutors, on one level, this book raises awareness of practice through a series of case studies outlining the range of ‘support’ available to today’s student cohorts. however, it is also a reminder that it is easy to generalise and make assumptions about incoming students that impact negatively on both teaching and learning experiences. it is an appeal to work more closely with experts in academic and social development/transition; an evidence-based justification for wider acceptance of learning developers as professionals working alongside course tutors and students. for university managers concerned with strategic decision-making and under pressure to rationalise provision, this entire book states the case for the continued existence of and greater recognition for ld professionals and offers useful frameworks for evaluation and improvement. there are 33 contributors to 19 chapters representing 18 uk he institutions, significantly only two of which are russell group universities. the book is divided into five sections covering the aims and objectives outlined in the introduction: defining learning development; supporting students in transition; developing effective academic practice; students and technology, and looking into the future. section a: defining learning development hilsdon opens with a discussion of learning development, its origins in widening participation and skills support, typically within post-92 universities where practices that suited the ‘elite’ model were less appropriate for the new diverse cohort. he argues for a move away from the skills deficit model that pathologises the student, towards a more collaborative, holistic approach to ld, rooted in theories of academic literacies, social identities and pedagogy. this framework reflects the views presented by the editors in the closing chapters of the book, but would appear to be an emergent one based on the continued use of the skills deficit discourse in subsequent chapters. murray and glass present an illuminating evidence-informed picture of the ld community with its broad range of job titles, funding, recognition and institutional bases. they call for ld to build on its current status as a community of practice to establish itself as a journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 2 cole learning development in higher education profession in the eyes of the wider academic community, with whom it seeks to collaborate more effectively. barlow et al. argue that a better understanding of the history and philosophy of he and specific institutional contexts will enable a more reflective approach to ld. the ld community will be better able to respond to the changing nature of he if it questions what underpins perceptions of learning and teaching. this is an important point. in attempts to persuade sceptics that ld should be given professional status, it is essential to consider that people’s aims, values and goals, both pedagogic and personal, will influence the position they take. drawing on the theories outlined in chapter 1, sinfield et al. argue for ld to ‘be embodied in practice that puts the students at the centre of the work’ in order to support development of ‘the’ student voice. this chapter outlines a range of initiatives led by three centres for excellence in teaching and learning (cetl) that create ‘emancipatory space’ for ‘the’ student voice to develop, including a student-led conference. section b: supporting students in transition keenan outlines the role of personal development planning (pdp) in student retention and developing effective academic practice. she argues for student involvement in the design of pdp programmes as a useful engagement strategy. the chapter presents three example interventions, outlining the value of surveying students on their prior learning experiences at the pre-induction stage, thereby informing the tutorial process from the outset. it would be interesting to know more about the administration and practicalities of these initiatives, and their effect on retention beyond the first term. foster et al. focus on early student transition, arguing that it is essential to apply contextual research and theories of student transition to understand, rather than make assumptions, about their prior learning experiences. importantly, the authors stress the role of academics in this process and how learning developers are well-placed to contrast the expectations of both perspectives. this emphasis is an encouraging move away from ‘quick-fix’ models that appear to overlook or make assumptions about the teaching perspective. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 3 cole learning development in higher education turner argues the value of one-to-one tuition and stresses the importance of the professional ‘academic advisor’ as a crucial intermediary between feedback from tutors and the student’s development. as turner acknowledges, this level of provision is under threat in the current economic climate. however, might there be room for ld practitioners to work with teaching staff and students to improve feedback processes at a departmental level? this might reduce the pressure on face-to-face provision. the academic success programme, outlined by sedgley, was aimed at international msc students, but is transferable as a model of practice and evaluation. its grounding in theories of academic literacies and socialisation result in thorough evaluation and interesting outcomes, most notably, reflection by staff on their own literacy practices and how these influence their teaching. acknowledging differences in disciplinary discourses and encouraging dialogue between departments is a strength of this project and such methodology is invaluable in the attempt to engage academic staff with ld. chapman closes by looking in detail at key transition points for disabled students for the duration of their courses and presents models of inclusion that are relevant to all contexts. section c: developing effective academic practice this section presents five projects that aimed to improve academic practice in a range of areas. collectively they raise some important considerations for any institution or department seeking to improve provision and the methodologies are transferable to a range of contexts. gill and greenhow’s mathematics case studies reveal the difficulty of evaluating the impact of resources on students’ development. for instance, when useful resources cannot be withheld from particular students simply because the evaluators need a control group. if students, as part of their development as independent learners, should themselves make the decision to access resources, then the focus needs to be on finding ways in which to encourage self-reflection in a constructive way. evaluation of the projects revealed that those who need support are not necessarily those who are pro-active in accessing it, posing the question of how to prove impact in an optional programme. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 4 cole learning development in higher education two initiatives presented by bell emphasise the need to take a holistic approach to the teaching and learning of academic writing, which the learning developer is in a unique position to advise on. both projects sought to strengthen relationships with academic staff by investigating ways of developing writing within subject-specific contexts. this chapter offers useful questions to prompt reflection on academic writing provision at an institutional level in other contexts. elston et al. outline an award-winning learnhigher web-based resource in support of groupand teamwork. they make the crucial point that ‘however good the resources, they will have little impact unless embraced by the educator’. the authors are refreshingly honest about the challenges they faced in leading this project, encouraging others to learn from their experiences and more easily apply the process to their own contexts. amid the frequent depictions of students as ‘consumers’, it is also refreshing to read of the student as ‘producer’ in hagyard’s and watling’s research bursary scheme for undergraduate students. they argue for the mainstreaming of undergraduate research, placing students in control of their own projects and breaking down barriers between teaching, learning and research. offering students opportunities to present their research for review makes this a more meaningful learning experience than the traditional dissertation, with the agency firmly placed with the student. finally, ridley argues that the visual learning approach adopted by learnhigher projects can be effectively applied to all subject disciplines in he. these case studies demonstrate how the concept of visual knowledge was introduced to clinical and laboratory settings and those working in the field. it would be interesting to see the effect of this approach within less vocational disciplines. section d: students and technology holley et al. argue for e-learning in the 21st century to be viewed as a ‘new and emergent pedagogy’ that is informed by all stakeholders rather than a convenient quick-fix, deficit response to financial cuts. this chapter offers characteristics of ‘good’ resources based on a range of case studies and argues for such resources to be public rather than hidden behind institutional vles. the question remains as to how difficult it can be to reach journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 5 cole learning development in higher education agreement within a particular context on what constitutes a ‘good,’ appropriately-pitched resource. currant et al. urge caution in making assumptions about the technical capabilities of what has become known as ‘the digital generation’. although its typology of digital learners might be viewed as reductive, this chapter raises important questions about whose job it should be to investigate the assumptions made about technology by both students and staff, and to support even the most technologically able of students as they adapt to using technology within a new academic context. the case studies presented by shahabudin in chapter 17 reflect the wide range of variables affecting the issue of time management for students. it is certainly an issue that all parties seem to agree impacts greatly on the transition to university study, and yet is too frequently addressed generically, with web resources that can be both a help and a hindrance. section e: looking into the future this section reflects on issues raised in this book and calls for a move away from a view of ld as ‘institutional first aid’ and sees its future in ‘situationally contingent’ contexts on a global scale. drawing on learnhigher cetl experiences, it emphasises the importance of ‘persuading the right people through good data and reasoned argument’ rather than pursuing blanket coverage. this is arguably the biggest challenge for the sector: determining what kinds of data will best illustrate impact and identifying ways in which it can fund such evaluation and analysis. although the editors distance themselves from the skills deficit model and from pathologising the student, it is clear that this has still to filter down to institutions as its discourse is still apparent within case studies. words and phrasing such as ‘diagnose’, intervene’, ‘modular skills’, ‘to teach a skill’ and ‘bridging skills gaps’ in their various forms all imply that the agency is still not with the student, which undermines the notion of the independent learner. the time has now come to think carefully about such terminology as the sector seeks to collaborate more widely. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 6 cole learning development in higher education the closing paragraph calls for a ld approach that is ‘relevant to all with the ability to benefit’, that is ‘applicable to all students, not just groups seen as vulnerable’. there is frequent reference throughout the book to support for the non-traditional student as part of the retention agenda, to the danger of making assumptions about any cohort, even with regard to perceived differences between generations. the ‘unique and individual’ (keenan, chapter 5) nature of each student needs to be considered. this book progresses both debate and practice within the ld community but is perhaps not as representative as it could be. it would be good to see evidence of greater collaboration and ‘joined-up thinking’ reflected in contributions from a wider range of institutions. for learning development to be ‘transformative’ (hilsdon, chapter 1), the ld community needs to do more to challenge assumptions made about learning and teaching on a wider scale. one such assumption is that there is less demand or need amongst high-achieving students from ‘traditional’ backgrounds for the kinds of initiatives outlined in this book. the motivation for research-intensive universities to engage with this agenda might be different but there is nevertheless justification for them to do so. references hartley, p., hilsdon, j., keenan, c., sinfield, s. and verity, m. (eds.) (2011) learning development in higher education. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan. author details marianne cole is a research associate for the transkills project at the centre for research in educational technologies (caret) at the university of cambridge. the transkills project facilitates first year student transitions to academic practices in higher education through an integrated, discipline-specific approach to both student and staff development. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 7 learning development in higher education audience section a: defining learning development section b: supporting students in transition section c: developing effective academic practice section d: students and technology section e: looking into the future references author details reaping the fruits of collaboration: an overview of learning development research from the learnhigher cetl journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 1: february 2009 reaping the fruits of collaboration learning development research in the learnhigher cetl network kim shahabudin university of reading, uk the learnhigher cetl is now in its fourth year of operation, investigating bestpractice resources to support and enhance student learning development. learnhigher is the largest collaborative cetl, pooling research and resources from learning and educational development professionals in 16 higher education institutions in england. [1] through research into twenty core ‘learning areas’, learnhigher partners have amassed a large quantity of data from students and staff. in 2008-09, a project was conducted to produce an overview of learnhigher research so far, gathering insights on student preferences, needs and practices in learning areas including academic writing, critical thinking, doing research, group work and time management; on the use and design of learning spaces; and on the role of learning developers.[2] the rich picture produced by this review confirms the benefits of the network’s collaborations between institutions, drawing together research conducted with diverse academic communities to reveal overarching trends and areas of interest in student learning development. the strength of the learnhigher network rests in its capacity to record and investigate a diversity of student experiences from a variety of institutional viewpoints, while retaining a single focus on learning development resources. this is made possible by the positioning of learnhigher partners as learning and educational developers in a variety of staff and student facing roles, which enables them to interact with a wide cross-section of their university populations. through this, learnhigher is uniquely placed to obtain insights from a broadly constituted student community in higher education institutions across england. collecting insights confirmed the importance of issues well known to and discussed among learning developers: for example, acculturation to academic practice, difficulties with structuring work, the preference for subject-embedded support. however, it also revealed new concerns including problems with synchronous and asynchronous shahabudin case study: reaping the fruits of collaboration learning development research in the learnhigher cetl network chat, increasing demand for independent learning spaces, using and referencing new types of e-resources in research. partners collected research data using various methods. a number of formal research projects have been conducted on topics associated with the learning areas. however, the network is also committed to using practice-led enquiry, taking an action research approach to investigate interventions. this reflective approach to learning development practice has been especially fruitful, producing a wealth of information on student needs and preferences. it has also facilitated the valuing and incorporation of incidental insights, which have sometimes proved as significant as deliberately sought research data. the overview project aimed to capture the results of both formal research, and this more informally obtained data. pooling such diverse types of evidence means that interpretations can be no more than indicative. however, the multi-faceted picture they build recommends this methodology as a fruitful way of accessing a broadly conceptualised student learning experience. it also offers a timely reminder that the embodied knowledge and expertise of learning and educational developers makes them invaluable resources in themselves. one example of this cross-curricular viewpoint is found in data collected on referencing: one of the 20 learning areas used to structure research and resource development in the cetl. the referencing learning area is co-ordinated at the university of bradford; research-informed outputs from this lead institution include a comprehensive web resource, a book aimed at a student readership (neville, 2007) and a research project (currently underway) on student ideas about the relationship between referencing and academic writing. [3] however, partners working on other learning areas have also collected data related to referencing. in the assessment learning area, for instance, research has been undertaken on the use of plagiarism detection software in formative assessment tasks. student self-development as independent thinkers is crucial in the learning area of critical thinking, and was observed to be related to understanding of referencing practices and the ability to use references as evidence to support arguments, rather than replace them. many comments related to difficulties with practice that arise from incorrect expectations (students believing, for instance, that journal of learning development in higher education, issue 1: february 2009 2 shahabudin case study: reaping the fruits of collaboration learning development research in the learnhigher cetl network they ‘know’ how to use references at university because they have used them at school). this, in particular, reinforces the importance of the ‘development’, rather than the more finite ‘skills’, model in learning support. another example can be found in comments on the roles that different formats play in the effectiveness of resources. the cetl aims to make resources freely available through online dissemination via the learnhigher website. however, subsequent delivery of these resources may be in electronic, paper or inter-personal format. learnhigher research has already informed the development of a number of wellused e-resources for students: making group-work work, for instance, uses multiple media including short videos, audio commentaries and reflective exercises. [4] the obvious advantage of online dissemination is accessibility, while using electronic formats promotes the use of innovative approaches. however, there were a number of issues raised here in relation to effectiveness. partners working with distance-learning and mature students noted difficulties with access (using dial-up connections, for instance, or lack of technical experience). in some areas students claimed to find it easier to understand and remember information in a printed format. at the same time, there were comments on the expense of printing off paper copies of online resources: the consequent concern was that this might make financially-pressed students less likely to use resources directly disseminated in this way. there were also implications for staff. while electronic resources can utilise technological innovations, these may be time-consuming and expensive to develop and require regular updating. consequently, there is a need for staff to train in new technologies and to have the time to maintain resources once produced. online dissemination remains an easy and effective way to maximise accessibility and innovation in support resources, and e–resources are certainly popular with the majority of students. however learnhigher’s collaborative approach to research was able to illuminate some of the less-often heard corners of the student community, offering a useful reminder that learning development is never a ‘one-size-fits-all’ enterprise. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 1: february 2009 3 shahabudin case study: reaping the fruits of collaboration learning development research in the learnhigher cetl network the examples above represent a small sample of the issues discussed in the full report which also describes insights on the use of learning spaces funded by the cetl, on the role of learning developers generally, and on the interactions of subject academics with learning development. the learnhigher network thus offers a microcosm of preferred practice in the learning development community: eschewing a narrow focus in favour of a more inclusive understanding, and valuing the professional expertise generated through the fruitful generosity of collaboration. notes 1. for more information on learnhigher, including a list of partner institutions and learning areas, and free access to a wide range of research-informed learning development resources, see the website at www.learnhigher.ac.uk. 2. a full report on this project titled taking an overview of learnhigher research will be published in spring 2009, and will be available to order or download via the learnhigher website (www.learnhigher.ac.uk). 3. the learnhigher referencing website can be found at http://www.learnhigher.org.uk/. 4. making group-work work was developed collaboratively by learnhigher partners at the universities of bradford and leeds, and brunel university and can be found at www.learnhighergroupwork.com/. other electronic resources include notemaker, developed at london metropolitan university (http://learning.londonmet.ac.uk/tltc/learnhigher/notemaker/). all of the resources developed so far can be accessed through the learnhigher website (see n.1). references neville, c. (2007) the complete guide to referencing and avoiding plagiarism. maidenhead: open university press. kim shahabudin is a member of the university study advice team and learnhigher research officer at the university of reading. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 1: february 2009 4 http://www.learnhigher.ac.uk/ http://www.learnhigher.ac.uk/ http://www.learnhigher.org.uk/ reaping the fruits of collaboration learning development research in the learnhigher cetl network notes references journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 26: special edi issue february 2023 ________________________________________________________________________ ©2023 the author(s) (cc-by 4.0) introduction to the special edition karen lipsedge kingston university, uk hilda mulrooney kingston university, uk historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. this one is no different. it is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. we can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. and ready to fight for it. (roy, 2020). this timely compilation thoughtfully highlights key themes in the equality, diversity & inclusion (edi) arena in general and in reference to learning development in particular. while it may seem absurd that in 2023 we remain in a position where a special edifocused edition is needed, academia is not always fast to change, with a tendency to identify rather than address institutional and sectoral barriers for minoritised groups. the papers in this special issue range from case studies to book reviews, providing a relatively broad overview of edi in learning development in higher education (he). some of the papers focus on equity rather than equality, specifically to highlight that inclusion does not necessarily mean equal treatment but enabling access to the same opportunities for all. in this special issue the value of an equity-based approach is highlighted by those papers that show how embedding employability skills within the curriculum enables accessibility for all groups. lowe, for instance, underscores his call to embed employability with five recommendations to improve graduate employability using the curriculum, including summative assessments and feedback. by doing so, the author argues that students from atypical backgrounds who lack the experience, family and social capital to take advantage of opportunities offered outside the curriculum, will benefit. this includes those who are first-in-family, have caring responsibilities, commuter students, those who do paid work alongside their studies, mature students and members of minority ethnic groups, all of whom may be disadvantaged by a requirement for independent learning. lipsedge and mulrooney introduction to the special edition journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 2 similarly, such groups may feel less able to share their writing with tutors. as baer and kearney note, for instance, the writing café project, operating since 2014, offers students the opportunities to share their writing with a trained student partner who acts as a mentor. sharing their knowledge with a peer outside their specialist area allows students to explain their field in their own words, deconstructing the topic-specific jargon which may be a barrier to non-traditional students, empowering them in the process. although offered outside of the academic curriculum, the covid-19 pandemic required the project to offer additional online options, which increased student uptake, particularly from atypical groups. this peer-working in partnership is an example of offering inclusive spaces, both virtual and physical, to students, going beyond simply providing access to he to all groups. in relation to inclusivity, a passionate call for the he sector to continue to offer and enhance the hybrid model of teaching and learning is made by compton, standen and watson. using the example of students with disabilities, they argue that the shift online necessitated by the pandemic benefitted some groups, who would be disadvantaged by a wholesale move back to physical delivery of teaching and learning. hybrid teaching, with simultaneous delivery in-person and online, would offer students choice and, they argue, could be offered relatively quickly and inexpensively. this would not only demonstrate institutional priorities in relation to inclusive teaching and learning but would also align with the education for sustainable development (esd) agenda (advance he, 2021). the benefits of hybrid delivery in relation to one-to-one tutorials were also argued as the ‘logical next step’ in he by kantcheva and bickle. nonetheless, they highlight the need for careful planning to ensure that the disadvantages of online delivery are minimised, particularly those related to equitable access to equipment and facilities for disadvantaged groups. they also discuss issues such as loss of informal social contact online, the physical demands of online provision and potential impacts on health and reduced nonverbal communications online. all of these important considerations are potentially of more import for some groups than others. belonging and its importance in enhancing the inclusivity of traditionally marginalised groups is also a key theme. welton cites the value of a regular community of practice (cop) for students with dyslexia. the opportunity to share experiences enhanced confidence, facilitating interdisciplinary collaborations and the establishment of a new student union society. the cop started online and no concerns are raised by welton about this in relation to students’ sense of belonging. however, others do raise concerns lipsedge and mulrooney introduction to the special edition journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 3 about the impact of online teaching on opportunities for students to develop a sense of connection and belonging to their institutions. ohadomere for instance, discusses the interventions introduced to mitigate against the disadvantages faced by international students from lowerand middle-income countries during the pandemic when teaching and learning moved online. by contrast, todd used the online space to create a support group for parent-students, a group usually unrecognised and unsupported in he. working with them to identify what this group needs, two things emerged – the need for flexibility and the importance of belonging. utilising both the online space and the personal tutor scheme, the sense of belonging among this marginalised group was enhanced. interestingly, bao, kilmister and caldwell remind us of some of the learning opportunities afforded by the pandemic, which helped to identify more effective strategies for supporting persons of colour (poc) students and addressing the bame awarding gap. by adopting a pedagogy of race-consciousness to enhance students’ critical thinking skills, bao, kilmister and caldwell show how this approach also enabled the authors to demonstrate the value of students’ own culture as a resource for enhancing learning. implicit in this thoughtprovoking article, is how centring students’ culture helps learning developers to begin to decolonise the curriculum. even before the covid-19 pandemic, well-documented awarding gaps between different groups suggested there was a need to re-examine what belonging is and what it means in practice. a toolkit developed for academic staff to address the bame awarding gap focused on inclusion, since that requires action on the part of staff. the toolkit, described by mccabe and pollard comprised three webpages, focusing on addressing awarding gaps, inclusive curriculum and internationalisation. their development was from a largely homogenous, white and therefore limited perspective; to address this, they encourage dialogue between staff and students in order to understand the role of privilege. several papers discuss diverse approaches to encouraging open dialogue, whilst acknowledging that this is difficult. prompted conversations among different groups of minoritised staff and students identified common themes among disparate groups (friends, stakeholders) in the listening rooms project. these included the importance of role models for minority groups, as well as training to address negative behaviours. devoting attention to the lived experience of those often marginalised was also fundamental to the work of sillence and colleagues, who developed a set of cards and related activities to lipsedge and mulrooney introduction to the special edition journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 4 enable discussions about edi issues using a ‘serious play’ approach (rieber, smith and noah, 1998). the edi cards allowed individual stories to emerge, so that edi moved from the abstract to the personal, resonating with listeners. both case studies suggest that research-informed approaches and resources allow respectful dialogue to take place, with potential for positive change to occur. they also emphasise the importance of listening, as does another case study by clay et al. in the compendium, focusing on the creation of a professional framework for coaching and mentoring within a student support service. by using an equity perspective, a variety of existing national and international frameworks informed the process, but institutional commitment to meaningful change as well as listening to the stories of marginalised groups were identified as key. this paper, like others in the special issue, stresses the importance of reflecting on privilege. the need to acknowledge and address the potential impact of power dynamics in staffstudent collaborations is reflected on by martin and lusted, specifically in relation to race. their paper raises an important and often overlooked aspect of pedagogy and highlights the need to decolonise staff-student relationships to minimise the risk that the ultimate beneficiary of such collaborations can be the white staff member. in addition to original case studies, this issue includes a number of book reviews. they also highlight the importance of challenging ‘benign’ assumptions about who our students are; that the dominant theories may not relate to the realities of their day-to-day lives, and that there is a need to understand their realities as well as challenge predominant thinking in he. challenging assumptions using tools such as concept mapping and conversational research is advocated in the book by kinchin and gravett (2022), as reviewed by mottershaw and scott. meanwhile, gundry and collins in their respective book reviews of tran (2021) highlight the author’s emphasis of the adoption of specific theories to prompt discussion about the decolonisation of university learning and teaching. the use of student voices to articulate their own experience is an underlying theme throughout, adding authenticity and realism to what might otherwise risk remaining theoretical. this was previously captured in a series of interviews by abegglen, neuhaus and wilson (2022), in relation to teaching and learning online. notable here are explorations of belonging and how this may be facilitated. similar themes arise in this special issue, building on this and other previous work. although it is worth exploring what belonging means for different groups, nonetheless, working to facilitate connections and partnerships within and between staff and student groups enables empowerment and co-construction. the covidlipsedge and mulrooney introduction to the special edition journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 5 19 pandemic, whilst imposing necessary physical barriers to contact, simultaneously enabled innovation at pace within a sector not always fast to respond. what does a special issue on edi in learning development in 2023 tell us? several salient points made by the papers help to answer that question. first, that notions of edi are being challenged, in particular assumptions about who our students and their realities are. without a clear understanding of students’ experience gained by actively listening to them, equity cannot be truly achieved since the barriers will remain obscured, especially when intersectionality of disadvantage occurs. second, a number of the case studies included describe approaches to listening and using prompts to facilitate discussions about edi topics. third, that using theories to challenge entrenched notions is important. while progress in access to he for disadvantaged groups has been made, now work must focus on challenging the he structures, including the curriculum, to ensure equity of opportunity and employability for all our students. the importance of safe spaces, including online and outside the academic structure, as well as the importance of suitable role models is emphasised. as such, this work focuses not just on minoritised student groups, but also the staff who provide opportunities to challenge the curriculum, facilitate difficult conversations and who themselves act as role models, but many of whom are also minoritised. finally, in addition to providing specific approaches and tools for action, this collection also offers much food for thought from a theoretical perspective. so, what have we as a sector learnt from this special issue? as bao, kilmister and caldwell observe, at the very least one would hope that the special issue will generate meaningful and courageous conversations about those areas that have been largely absent from learning development theory and practice, such as, for instance, race, disability and the consequences of an imbalance of power and privilege. we look forward to continuing those conversations and reflecting on some potential solutions that may emanate from a future special issue on the lessons learnt. we also hope that this special issue has reminded us all of the positive impact that comes when we take brave steps to effect change, as well as the sobering consequences that result from either not recognising the need for, or being unwilling to, change. as rosa parks, often known as the ‘mother of the civil rights movement’, observed, ‘to bring about change, you must not be afraid to take the first step. we will fail when we fail to try’ (reed and parks, 1997). lipsedge and mulrooney introduction to the special edition journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 6 references abegglen s., neuhaus, f. and wilson, k. (eds.) (2022) voices from the digital classroom: 25 interviews about teaching and learning in the face of a global pandemic. calgary: university of calgary press. advance he (2021) education for sustainable development guidance. available at: https://www.advance-he.ac.uk/knowledge-hub/education-sustainable-developmentguidance (accessed: 14 january 2023). kinchen, i. m. and gravett, k. (2022) dominant discourses in higher education: critical perspectives, cartographies and practice. london: bloomsbury. reed, g and parks, r. (1997) dear mrs. parks: a dialogue with today's youth: new york: lee & low books. rieber, l. p., smith, l. and noah, d. (1998) ‘the value of serious play’, educational technology, 8(6), pp.29-37. roy, a. (2020) ‘the pandemic is a portal’, financial times, 3 april. available at: https://www.ft.com/content/10d8f5e8-74eb-11ea-95fe-fcd274e920ca (accessed: 14 february 2023). tran, d. (2021) decolonizing university teaching and learning: an entry model for grappling with its complexities. london: bloomsbury academic. author details karen lipsedge is an associate professor in english literature at kingston university, and her research focuses on eighteenth-century domestic space, interiors, the relationship between objects and people, and the novel. she is the access and inclusion co-lead for the british eighteenth-century society. karen is also part of the directorate for access, participation & inclusion, students, at ku, where she works as a senior adviser for teaching and learning. she is an academic contact for ku’s harassment scheme, the about:blank about:blank https://www.ft.com/content/10d8f5e8-74eb-11ea-95fe-fcd274e920ca lipsedge and mulrooney introduction to the special edition journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 7 chair of the neon diverse learners’ group and helped to set up the ku/poc bame staff network in july 2020. hilda mulrooney is a nutritionist and dietitian with primary care and public health experience. she is currently associate professor in nutrition at kingston university london. she is a member of the network of equality champions and the faculty edi action group. she is interested in exploring how difference is perceived: within her profession working to help ensure that those with excess weight are not discriminated against and, pedagogically, looking at the impact of demographic characteristics on aspects of teaching and learning. licence ©2023 the author(s). this is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (cc-by 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. see http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. journal of learning development in higher education (jldhe) is a peer-reviewed open access journal published by the association for learning development in higher education (aldinhe). mapping the territory: a new direction for information literacy in the digital age journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 1: february 2009 mapping the territory: a new direction for information literacy in the digital age annamarie mckie university college for the creative arts, uk abstract we can no longer assume that students arrive at university knowing what to read and knowing what standards are required of the material they do read (brabazon,2008). evidence increasingly suggests that the information behaviours of students entering further and higher education have changed dramatically as a consequence of the internet. as learning developers in an he art and design context, we are seeing many new students who exhibit an unfocused approach to research, bouncing from link to link with little analytical or critical thought. such behaviour is leading to a growing lack of understanding concerning plagiarism and issues surrounding academic integrity. this in turn is having a significant effect on the quality of students’ academic writing and is challenging the role academic libraries have traditionally played in the student experience. this paper reflects on a research project called mapping the territory at the university for the creative arts. the project, which began in 2006, seeks to investigate a new pedagogy for information literacy. the project team has been looking at an integrated approach between librarians, study advisors and key academic staff in order to develop workshops that actively engage learners and help them to develop transferable skills in information literacy and information behaviour. our research so far has focused on an extensive literature review exploring areas such as inquiry based learning, information behaviour, cognitivist theories and the nature of research in art and design. we have also conducted a series of focus groups at the maidstone and canterbury campuses, asking students about their experience of research and how such skills could relate to employability. a workshop mckie mapping the territory: a new direction for information literacy in the digital age model is being piloted where students have the opportunity to search for, select and begin to make use of information which is relevant to their field of enquiry. this model can be adapted to suit a range of disciplines and aims to start to embed research skills at an early stage with the hope of having a positive impact on student retention and employability. keywords: information behaviour; digital literacy skills; information literacy; academic integrity; google generation; employability; research synthesis; inquiry based learning; critical analysis; lifelong learning; student retention key competencies information seeking is a key competency which any university student should acquire during undergraduate study and will be needed by young professionals as they embark on their careers (debowski, 2003). increasingly students, including those in the non traditional disciplines of art and design, are treating their education as an investment. research by harbour (2005) suggests this may be due to the knock on effects of increased fees forcing students to work to support their studies. there is also increasing pressure from central government: in a recent interview for the times higher education supplement, attwood (2008), reports john denham (secretary of state for innovation, universities and skills) as saying ‘the uk is ‘not yet anywhere near’ a position where employers believe that the university system is producing graduates with the skills they want. denham suggests employers are looking for graduates who can solve problems, communicate, apply critical analysis to evidence and think for themselves. such skills may well be ‘taught’ as part of a students’ course, but they are often not documented in the course literature, with the result that the student may not perceive they are receiving this support; this is an area that could be greatly improved, particularly if he institutions want to improve student retention. essentially, though, a new paradigm is forming and with it a new breed of learner. behaviours exhibited by this group include increased selectivity in the lectures and workshops they attend, a need to know what skill they are going to acquire from the journal of learning development in higher education, issue 1: february 2009 2 mckie mapping the territory: a new direction for information literacy in the digital age experience offered and more particularly, how relevant this may be to their course of study. the quality and accessibility of this information seems to be a key factor in student retention. the more relevant the students thought support was and the easier they found access to it, the less likely they were to consider dropping out. in the context of information literacy, this throws up many challenges, but shows the importance of contextualising sessions and collaborating with teaching staff and students to embed information literacy and behaviour as transferable skills. as shenton and jackson (2007) argue, ‘if information literacy is not seen by learners as meaningful to them, they will not be motivated and are unlikely to make the effort to develop necessary concepts and skills’. researchers of the future at the university for the creative arts, library and learning services have traditionally offered information literacy workshops that teach students how to ‘ source, navigate, select , retrieve, manipulate and manage information from a variety of sources’ (hea employability profile for art and design, 2007). because of timetable constraints these sessions often focus on equipping students with a core set of library ‘tools’ at critical points in their course. these tools, which include key electronic resources, guides on referencing, plagiarism and lists of resources by subject area, are usually explored by the students during the session and are all located within a library web site. attendance at these sessions varies by subject, but evaluations reveal that many students perceive themselves as expert searchers already, so may see little relevance in attending, especially when google offers more instant satisfaction. there is an appreciation in the library sector that there are a specific set of information behaviours needed by the researcher of the future and that today’s students think and process information fundamentally differently from their predecessors. a recent study commissioned by the british library and jisc reveals young scholars who are ‘horizontal’ in their information seeking; bouncing, skimming, cutting and pasting their way through the internet: journal of learning development in higher education, issue 1: february 2009 3 mckie mapping the territory: a new direction for information literacy in the digital age ‘students usually approach their research without regard to the library’s structure or the way that library segments different resources into different areas of its website’ (ciber/ucl,2008). digital dissenters one could argue that many time-deprived students are more interested in ‘quick wins’ over the more considered and planned routes advocated in library sessions . students may be proficient users of facebook and wikipedia, but do they know how to validate sources or how to formulate appropriate search terms. there is evidence from the mapping the territory project, that the internet can be quite confusing. one canterbury student remarked: ‘i waste a lot of time not knowing where to go…’. these sort of questions are engaging a new school of ‘digital dissenters’, tired of the increasing plagiarism and the poor writing skills of their students. tara brabazon, professor of media studies at the university of brighton is currently leading this debate. in a recent inaugural lecture, she referred to google as ‘white bread for the mind’ (filling,but not nutritious) and that it has ‘dulled students’ sense of curiosity and is stifling debate’ (frean,2008). brabazon proposes a controversial new pedagogy for her first year students; she will not mark anything that does not come from a prescribed source she herself has checked. it seems that she is not interested in creating independent learners in the first year, but rather in what she refers to as an ‘information scaffold’; guiding them through complicated ideas and introducing them to high quality materials. this would seem to follow kolb’s experiential cycle (kolb & fry, 1975), that ideas are formed and re-formed through a cycle of experience. interestingly brabazon is not against internet sites, some of which she includes in the course reading. as she remarks: ‘….if they don’t know the names of the primary theorists, what are they going to put in the search engine?’ (2008). journal of learning development in higher education, issue 1: february 2009 4 mckie mapping the territory: a new direction for information literacy in the digital age the nature of ‘research’ in art and design to add to this picture, there is the nature of ‘research’ in art and design itself. north (2005) suggests that there is a difference between studying subjects that deal with facts (hard) and those subjects that deal with concepts and opinions (soft). students majoring in soft fields (art and design) are perhaps less likely to subscribe to beliefs in absolute knowledge. she cites research by biglan (1973) in which he suggests ‘the humanities…in contrast, tend to be…encouraging a view of knowledge as a matter of interpretation..’. this offers a new set of challenges for libraries, institutions founded after all to archive definitive, absolute content. it also has implications for the way we teach ‘research’ in the context of information literacy; we need to be less didactic and offer a more active, experiential style of workshop that perhaps mirrors a students’ course learning experience. north (2005) goes on to say that: ‘ ... arts students viewed essay writing (and getting supporting research) as problematic and time consuming ...’. however, qualitative research at uca reveals students who may well be happy to undergo a similar sort of research process to support their studio practice. as one student at canterbury remarked: ‘i surf the net and click and save any pictures that appeal to me. these influence my work ... ’ library and learning services may be viewed as only offering support for essays and dissertations, and largely overlooked for studio research. this may well be because many students on art and design courses perceive themselves as ‘makers’ rather than ‘academics’ and do not always realise that the same research skills will also support their studio practice. if library workshops are perceived as only supporting an essay or dissertation, this of course has a direct impact on the use students make of the library services. collaborative workshops a new style of information literacy workshop is beginning to emerge at the university for the creative arts which draws on some of the research outlined in this paper. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 1: february 2009 5 mckie mapping the territory: a new direction for information literacy in the digital age using theories of cognitivist and experiential learning, academic liaison librarians have linked up with key academic tutors and study advisors, to devise a more collaborative (rather than didactic) style of research workshop, specific to art and design. the 90 minute sessions, which are facilitated by an academic liaison librarian and a study advisor, can accommodate a variety of learning styles including collective working, modelling and hands on experience, even a blend of all three. for example, the workshop at the maidstone campus offers students the opportunity to ‘research’ in a group and then present their findings to their tutor in the style of the ’studio crit‘ thus receiving feedback on their research sources. one of the key outcomes (taken from the cilip definition of information literacy) is to engage students in the ‘importance of knowing when and why you need information, where to find it and how to evaluate, use and communicate it…’ in this flexible model, students work through a set of ‘information scaffolds’ in research including being able to identify a topic of interest, information searching and retrieval, evaluation, critical analysis, interpretation and research synthesis. these concepts could also be contextualised in their course lectures and seminars. we propose that the skills taught here could be viewed as a transferable skill in information literacy, as defined by cilip (above). the workshops are ‘mapped’ into year one and year two of a ba course, so that by their final year, a student could have developed a ‘portfolio’ of information behaviours that considerably enhance their potential as an active researcher in art and design. the ‘information scaffolds’ in more detail are as follows: being able to identify a topic of interest this involves students developing skills in using the library catalogue to locate sources and receiving study advice on analysing the essay question, note taking and generating key words. carefully mirroring the interpretative nature of ‘research’ in art and design, students are encouraged to brainstorm and ‘mind map’, initially getting down on paper what they already know about a subject and using this as a starting point for an initial search. they then ask questions of the sources they encounter, such as ‘who, why, what, where, when or how?’ (e.g. ‘who are the key contributors to this discussion?). there is strong emphasis on keeping this interactive overview journal of learning development in higher education, issue 1: february 2009 6 mckie mapping the territory: a new direction for information literacy in the digital age active throughout their research and using a variety of sources including books and journal articles. information searching and retrieval this is an activity-focused session on locating and evaluating academic sources in art and design (comparisons are made between using library electronic sources and google). guidance and activities are centred around constructing online search queries using key words (formed from their initial engagement with key theorists and locating their field of enquiry. there is strong emphasis on retrieving relevant and focused information and in particular the possibility of downloading journal articles in pdf format from locations off campus. however, students are also encouraged to access books and journal articles held in the library and to use indexes and bibliographies to build up a research portfolio. evaluation sometimes an academic tutor joins the session and there are group discussions on evaluating sources. most importantly here, new students begin to learn good information habits, such as questioning the source and asking whether the authors are respected or whether the information is biased. library guides are given out on validating your sources including warnings about over reliance on internet sources. critical analysis skills in sifting through research to select the information that will be most useful for an essay or dissertation are modelled. students ask themselves how does this new information fit in with what i already know? how can i link together all this information in a new and original way? can i now identify things i do not know and ways to find them out? study guides are given out to support this. interpretation this part of the session is focused on the importance of finding your own voice, writing in your own words and developing an argument. an activity is centred round plagiarism and how to use evidence to support an argument and how to cite journal of learning development in higher education, issue 1: february 2009 7 mckie mapping the territory: a new direction for information literacy in the digital age references and format a bibliography using the harvard referencing system as recommended by uca. accompanying handouts may be given on reading and notetaking . the importance of organising your research material and keeping track of its provenance is stressed. research synthesis study advice tips are given via handouts and demonstrations. this part of the session concentrates on structuring and writing the essay or dissertation. emphasis is placed on developing an argument and the importance of organising your notes to try and locate evidence to support each step in your argument. information on academic writing styles and methodology may be introduced and advice is given on the time management and organisational skills necessary to support in the production of a piece of academic writing. conclusions our research at the university for the creative arts has revealed significant skills gaps in students new to he, particularly regarding their online information behaviours. our surveys reveal that ‘google generation’ students may well perceive themselves to be expert searchers when in reality, they are unable to construct focused search queries and spend very little time in evaluating information, for relevance, accuracy or authority. this has far reaching implications not only for the standard of written work handed in, but also for the ways that students access and use information in libraries. many academics are concerned with the cut and paste mentality of their students and the rise of plagiarism. the academic library should be the hub of learning in any higher education institution. its main purpose is to support the teaching, learning and research functions of a university, but librarians and study advisors also offer vital expertise in educating researchers to be information literate and independent learners. since this is a transferable skill that can be linked to employability, we need to work on promoting these skills to students and academic staff so that they can see the relevance to learning and teaching. evidence from employers themselves, suggests that they are not seeing very well equipped journal of learning development in higher education, issue 1: february 2009 8 mckie mapping the territory: a new direction for information literacy in the digital age graduates; many lack the skills employers need, such as being able to think for themselves and apply critical analysis to evidence. the challenge we face is being able to offer these skills in a format that fits in with the busy lifestyles of students in higher education (a recent lifestyle survey for the thes (sodexo, 2008) reveals 33% of full time students are in part time work and 48% of students study outside lectures and seminars for 2-3 hours per day. we also need to be more in tune with students’ digital habits and behaviours. according to the same lifestyle survey (above), 88% of students use social networking sites like bebo and facebook every week . based on this picture, library services need to provide more flexible, customisable, innovative information skills units, that can also be offered online and which are embedded into course learning units such as vles. this is a key deliverable of the inhale informs project at the university of huddersfield (inhale, 2008). one way of doing this is to develop learning objects (podcasts, videos, interactive tutorials, etc) that students can dip in and out of, on key aspects of the information environment. at the university for the creative arts, the information literacy sub group is currently developing such a learning object on managing and citing references. there are also some comparable learning objects in the sector, such as imperial college’s ‘olivia’ module (imperial, 2007) and birkbeck’s libloil (birkbeck, 2008). our recommendations from the research so far are as follows: • information literacy workshops should incorporate a variety of active learning techniques in order to engage the learner. • these workshops should be complemented by learning objects on key aspects of information literacy (i.e. referencing, using secondary sources, writing literature reviews). • all information skills resources should be embedded within course modules (i.e. vles). • the link between information literacy and employability should be defined in course documentation. • librarians need to develop and promote their expertise in information literacy. • libraries need to consider the motivations of their users and make information literacy both timely and relevant to learners. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 1: february 2009 9 mckie mapping the territory: a new direction for information literacy in the digital age • librarians need to take advantage of the exciting opportunities e-learning offers; the key to success is to get out of the library and build partnerships with learning technologists, teachers and study advisers. it is hoped that the next stages of the research will be to link up with key practitioners in this area and explore further links with employability and student retention. if you would like to find out more about this project, or make some suggestions, please contact annamarie mckie at amckie@ucreative.ac.uk references attwood, rebecca. (2008) skills gap still a concern, uuk told. http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=4 03495 (21 september 2008) biglan, a. (1973) ‘the characteristics of subject matter in different academic areas’. journal of applied psychology, 57 (3), pp 195-203. brabazon, tara. (2006) ‘the google effect: googling,blogging, wikis and the flattening of expertise’. libri, 56 (3), pp167-167 brabazon, tara. (2008) the university of google; education in the post information age. london: ashgate publishing. birkbeck, university of london. (2008) libloil (library learning objects for information literacy) online: http://www.bbk.ac.uk/lib/life/skills/ (accessed 28 october 2008). chartered instititute of library and information professionals. (2008) information literacy group. definition of information literacy. online: http://www.cilip.org.uk/policyadvocacy/informationliteracy/definition/default.htm (accessed 5 october 2008) journal of learning development in higher education, issue 1: february 2009 10 mailto:amckie@ucreative.ac.uk http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=403495 http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=403495 http://www.bbk.ac.uk/lib/life/skills/ http://www.cilip.org.uk/policyadvocacy/informationliteracy/definition/default.htm mckie mapping the territory: a new direction for information literacy in the digital age debowski, shelda. (2003) ‘information seeking: building effective information users in tertiary settings’. in partners in learning. proceedings of the 12th annual teaching learning forum. 11-12 february 2003.perth: edith cowan university. frean, alexandra. (2008). white bread for young minds, says university of brighton professor. online : http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/the_web/article3182 091.ece (accessed 15th march 2008) griffiths, linda. (2007) student focus group at canterbury campus. university for the creative arts. 10 october 2007. harbour, sophie. (2005) ‘employability issues for fine art educators’. art design & communication in higher education. vol 4, number 2, pp 121.134 higher education academy. (2007) student employability profile for art and design. online: http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/assets/york/documents/ourwork/tla/employability/ student_employability_profiles_art_and_design.pdf (accessed 31st october 2008) information for nursing and health in an information environment. (2007). aims and objectives of the inhale project team online: http://inhale.hud.ac.uk/inhale/ (accessed 5 october 2008) university of huddersfield kitchen, rachel. (2008). student focus group at maidstone campus, university for the creative arts. 5 march 2008. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 1: february 2009 11 http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/the_web/article3182091.ece http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/the_web/article3182091.ece http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/assets/york/documents/ourwork/tla/employability/student_employability_profiles_art_and_design.pdf http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/assets/york/documents/ourwork/tla/employability/student_employability_profiles_art_and_design.pdf http://inhale.hud.ac.uk/inhale/ mckie mapping the territory: a new direction for information literacy in the digital age kolb. d. a. and fry, r. (1975) 'toward an applied theory of experiential learning;, in c. cooper (ed.) theories of group process, london: john wiley. north, sally. (2005) ‘different values, different skills? a comparison of essay writing by students from arts and science backgrounds’. studies in higher education, vol 30(6), pp 85-102 prensky, marc. (2001) ‘digital natives, digital immigrants’. on the horizon,(mcb university press) vol 9, no 5, pp 1-6 shenton, a.k and jackson, m. (2007) ‘information literacy teaching and information behaviour’. library and information update, chartered institute of library and information professionals. sodexo. (2008) university lifestyle survey. http://www.uk.sodexo.com/uken/images/uls%20summary%202008_tcm15185165.pdf> (published in thes 21 september 2008) university college london (ucl) ciber group.(2008) information behaviour of the researcher of the future. london: university college london. ciber briefing paper; 9. author details annamarie mckie is college librarian/assistant director of library and learning centres (kent) at the university for the creative arts. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 1: february 2009 12 https://webmail.ucreative.ac.uk/exchweb/bin/redir.asp?url=http://www.uk.sodexo.com/uken/images/uls%2520summary%25202008_tcm15-185165.p https://webmail.ucreative.ac.uk/exchweb/bin/redir.asp?url=http://www.uk.sodexo.com/uken/images/uls%2520summary%25202008_tcm15-185165.p mapping the territory: a new direction for information literacy in the digital age abstract key competencies researchers of the future digital dissenters the nature of ‘research’ in art and design collaborative workshops being able to identify a topic of interest information searching and retrieval evaluation critical analysis interpretation research synthesis conclusions references author details literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 7: june 2014 thinking outside the book: a point of departure for reflecting on learning a book review of james, a. and brookfield, s.d. (2014) engaging imagination: helping students become creative and reflective learners. san francisco: jossey-bass. carina buckley southampton solent university, uk play is a serious business, but it is most definitely not just for children. championed as ‘a fundamental and lifelong activity’, james and brookfield (2014, p.61) make the case for its positive role in education. yet whilst play in the adult world continues to be most often defined by competition (or a self-conscious rejection of such; yet it continues to lurk), true, serious play, defined by dewey (1933, p.218) as ‘the ideal mental condition’, is a meaningful way to ‘[understand] motivation and learning in a holistic way’ (rieber, 2001, p.1). part of the rise of play’s appeal in education is its emphasis on exploration and experimentation, its outlet for curiosity, its satisfying relationship to intrinsic motivation, and possibly above all, its requirement for active participation (mann, 1996). although james and brookfield (2014) have concentrated their attention in engaging imagination on creativity and reflection, there is a clear overlap with all of these precepts. play, and specifically the attitude of playfulness, is held by james and brookfield to be at the heart of learning, and together they have produced a thought-provoking and engagingly written volume that aims to give educators the tools and the confidence to introduce a ‘multisensory’ approach into their classrooms by asking, ‘what if we are playful in our approach to learning?’ (p.xii). so how do they do this? for them, the goal of good teaching is to ‘temporarily estrange’ (p.xiii) the students from what is familiar and encourage them to approach themselves and their studies from new perspectives, by jolting them into untrodden pathways. they believe that reflection can be a part of a whole range of events or learning situations, and argue that the common strategy of the reflective essay is unnecessarily restrictive. as such, the book as a whole is divided into three main parts, the first setting out the theoretical standpoint and discussing what reflection actually is, and how to recognise it in students. carina buckley thinking outside the book: a point of departure for reflecting on learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 7: june 2014 2 by linking imagination – one of their three planks of reflective thinking, along with creativity and play – to engagement, the authors make a robust case for ‘[increasing] the number of imaginative moments that students encounter in contemporary classrooms’ (p.4), although claim that there is ‘a false dichotomy…between engagement and ‘real learning’’ (p.5). the idea that this dichotomy might exist, that engagement is perceived by some educators as being at odds with learning, may be disputed by more than a few, but anything that works to increase student engagement generally can only be considered constructive. less constructive might be rather a favouring of the old trope that the left side of the brain is analytical and the right side is creative, with the resulting belief that the right side of the brain must be stimulated in order to tap into creativity. unfortunately for these authors, and no doubt plenty of others, the brain doesn’t work like this (nielsen et al., 2013). even as a metaphor, it is not useful for advancing students’ understanding of the way they work. however, james and brookfield go on to make the important point, adequate without the need to delve into the inner functions of the brain, that creative teaching (by which they mean good teaching) involves ‘using many pedagogic models’ as educators will have asked themselves ‘what different kinds of students they are dealing with’ (p.51). this is really the core of the book and its most valuable message: that creativity in learning does not require the educator or the educated to be inherently ‘creative’, but that creativity in learning is anything that helps a student to connect with the material and make it meaningful in a personal way; one of their three pedagogic axioms (p.6). part two of the book aims to support that goal. headed engaging imagination tips and techniques, it sets out a range of activities and ideas to help encourage reflective (or imaginative, creative or playful) responses in students. each of the six chapters it contains is devoted to a particular area of activity: visual methods, story and metaphor, lego and labyrinths, using space well, questioning techniques, and community-orientated strategies (learning communities, rather than the community outside the university walls). although in the preface the authors stress that the book can be used as a resource to dip into or skim through, the chapters do work best when read as a whole, as activities are not presented in isolation. indeed, the writing is coherent and well-structured, and buoyed up well by indepth research and discussion around the benefits of each approach, so the reader can understand the activities in context. the authors themselves have used these activities and so can speak with personality and authority on their efficacy, and have the effect of lending the book an air of collegial dialogue that can be missing and missed from many carina buckley thinking outside the book: a point of departure for reflecting on learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 7: june 2014 3 other educational texts. in addition, rather than simply listing the task, and how to implement it, as a ‘how-to’ book might, james and brookfield relate their own experiences in the classroom, presenting each activity or strategy anecdotally and allowing the reader to take from it what chimes with them and their own teaching situation. activities vary from the technologically simple to the specialist; from individual or small group-based, to lecture-sized cohorts; from online to offline and the spectrum of blended learning techniques in between. the authors emphasise repeatedly that these are not just for the ‘creative’ subjects but could potentially be introduced to any course, at any level; the tutor is free to decide what would work best for their students, and what they feel most comfortable with as a teacher. and that is an important point: while some people ‘welcome the unusual’ (james describes herself this way, p.242), others, like brookfield, can feel much more ambivalent about using creative techniques in class. readers from both camps, and any position in the middle, will find themselves reassured and encouraged by the authors’ tone. chapter 4, looking at visual learning, opens with the argument that where reflection is concerned, less is more; specifically with regards to guidance and instructions. the trick is in the student learning to see what is important. techniques underlining this idea range from paper folding and tearing to taking an urban walk, all bolstered by a review of the literature around visual intelligence, visual literacy and the power of visualisation. they also underpin a belief of james and brookfield’s that one of the best ways to get students to engage with a task is for the tutor to model the behaviour and demonstrate the desired outcomes. students certainly benefit from having models to scaffold their own work, what wittgenstein (1967, p.60) refers to as criteria and symptoms, arguing that ‘if [the process of understanding] is hidden – then how do i know what i have to look for?’. the problem with framing reflection in terms of imagination and creativity, though, is that it is very difficult to model those kinds of personal and internally-meaningful behaviours. it is acknowledged by the authors that sometimes any diagrams, collages or images will not serve on their own, as the viewer may not share the same worldview or semiotic codes as the creator. yet equally, how does an educator show a student what imagination looks like, and then get that student to reproduce their own version? however carefully defined terms like creativity and play are, the common thread running throughout the whole book is essentially helping students take a new perspective and see things in a different way. performing a beach boys song for students, as brookfield did (p.10), may be entertaining (or dreadful!), but perhaps could get in the way of this simple message. carina buckley thinking outside the book: a point of departure for reflecting on learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 7: june 2014 4 metaphor is invoked as a vital and powerful learning strategy, and is the subject of chapter 5. the authors highlight that metaphor is everywhere – indeed, this review has already made use of several (‘the heart of learning’; ‘the core of the book’) – and narrative can be a useful way to structure a concept or a process, for both teacher and student. although this chapter is more discursive around the benefits of metaphor, or examples of their use seen in student writing, it can still give the practitioner pause for thought in terms of how they might introduce a task or assignment. again, the aim is to help the student to see something familiar in an unfamiliar way, and metaphor can be ideal for that, even one that might appear frequently such as ‘rollercoaster’, as everyone will have their own interpretation. a more physical example of metaphor is represented by lego serious play, a now-open source official training programme developed by lego (james and brookfield, 2014, p.116), fitted rather awkwardly by the authors into chapter 6 alongside labyrinth walking. as a method of ‘metaphorical meaning making’ (p.121) it appears to be highly effective, although as a means of reflection, by any standard definition, it might perhaps struggle. engaging imagination takes us on from metaphor and into chapter 7 on space, and specifically the use of the reflective pod, a large inflatable ‘beehive’ (p.142) that offers students room, literally, to talk through their feelings and impressions. given the specialist nature of this equipment it is hard to imagine that it could be directly applied in other institutions, but the principle holds true. similarly, the university of kent’s ‘quercus genius’ (p.153) is not something that many learning developers will be able to organise themselves, but the principle behind it – that of having a space, and an unusual one at that, to facilitate reflection, is valuable. and what to do in that space? chapter 8 deals in powerful questions, introducing ideas from psychology and configuring them in a creative way, which can be asked of students by a facilitator, or offered as prompts to thought. while some of these techniques need more expertise than is offered by the text, they are a worthy contribution to the field of reflection. this chapter particularly exemplifies well why it works best to read this book through, in full and in order, as it draws usefully on some of the ideas around metaphor introduced earlier. while it is argued by the authors (p.xiv) that this linkage ‘permeates’ the chapters via ‘recurrent issues, approaches and theories’, it feels much more cumulative than a simple commonality, so a standard and non-creative way of reading a book still applies. carina buckley thinking outside the book: a point of departure for reflecting on learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 7: june 2014 5 as emphasised in the preface, identity is also one of those commonalities, which is appropriate for a text on imagination and creativity, inherently personal qualities. however, its foundation for reflection passes without question. can reflection be about more than personal identity? is it generally understood as such in academic contexts? james and brookfield concentrate here exclusively on reflection as a means for students to develop their identity as a learner and understand better how they learn. this is useful, to be sure, but reflection can be more: seeing from new perspectives can encompass more than the individual; what they term creative reflection, ‘the process by which we help students to look behind the doors, and under the stones, of their usual ways of learning, thinking and acting’ (p.55) can be about more than the person doing the thinking. even the well-trodden ground of wenger’s communities of practice in chapter 9 is directed towards guiding students in mapping out their membership of different communities, since ‘creative and reflective thinking rarely happens entirely alone’, but does community membership equate to reflection? and does reflection necessarily equate to emotion? part 3 is dedicated to ‘the emotional realities of engaging imagination’ and, as before, include some useful resources (with more to be found in the many web addresses peppering the text and in the reference list), but the appearance of identity and emotion throughout the whole text makes this section seem almost redundant. the sticking point raised above – what could be considered rather a narrow definition of reflection – might undermine what is otherwise a stimulating and thoughtful book, by trying to do a little too much and make more of a case that could otherwise be warranted. nevertheless, learning developers have much to gain from this book, despite many activities relying on more time with classes than perhaps many of us get to spend. the inclusion of some exercises for developing creative solutions would have been welcomed, but it is easy to see how many of the activities and techniques discussed could be adapted for a range of settings and levels of tutor confidence. we all need shaking out of our habitual paths and usual comfort zones from time to time, and there is likely to be something in here to suit everyone in doing just that. references dewey, j. (1933) how we think. new york: dover. carina buckley thinking outside the book: a point of departure for reflecting on learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 7: june 2014 6 mann, d. (1996) ‘serious play’, teachers college record, 97(3), pp. 446-469. nielsen, j.a., zielinski, b.a., ferguson, m.a., lainhart, j.e. and anderson, j.s. (2013) ‘an evaluation of the left-brain vs. right-brain hypothesis with resting state functional connectivity magnetic resonance imaging’, plos one, 8(8), e71275, doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0071275. rieber, l.p. (2001) ‘designing learning environments that excite serious play’, australasian society for computers in learning in tertiary education. melbourne, australia 9-12 december. wittgenstein, l. (1967) philosophical investigations. translated by g.e.m. anscombe. oxford: blackwell. author details dr carina buckley fhea is a learning skills tutor at mountbatten library, southampton solent university . journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 5: march 2013 editorial: learning development 10 years on andy hagyard university of lincoln, uk john hilsdon plymouth university, uk stephanie mckendry glasgow caledonian university, uk with the 10th aldinhe conference about to take place in plymouth, it seems timely to take stock of learning development (ld) in the uk. in our opinion, there is a lot to be optimistic about. scholarly and research-based evaluation of activities is becoming the norm in the field, and discussion of the epistemological and pedagogical foundations of practice is increasingly necessary and visible. a quick glance at the contributions to this issue of the journal certainly supports this view. case studies do more than share ideas and practice; they evaluate impact and consider implications. many of the papers engage with profound theoretical questions or disseminate the outcomes of well-founded research. some were commissioned by their institutions to investigate the subject matter or were established after successful funding bids to conduct their research. this evident progress of research-based approaches in learning development offers opportunities for well-informed consideration of the nature and scope of the field. is it a distinct academic discipline the subject of one of the papers in this issue? has learning development joined the academy in its own right or is it a minor offshoot of a wider or multidisciplinary approach such as educational research or educational development? is it a profession, with a unique set of practices and an evidence-base to support them? how is it viewed from the outside? do we need to work collectively to enhance both the visibility and the reputation of ld – whatever it may be? the fact that we are beginning to discuss these questions suggests a potential shift in our own consciousness at least; one that may be increasingly necessary given the wider political and socio-economic circumstances in which higher education finds itself. hagyard, hilsdon and mckendry editorial: learning development 10 years on journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 3 helen avery and monne wihlborg engage with even broader questions in their paper, examining the purpose or aims of higher education in general. they argue that the scandinavian university sector is subject to contradictory objectives: higher education aims to promote a learner-centred, holistic, bildung approach enabling learners to become independent, critical thinkers. yet obligations towards instrumentalism, standardisation and the measurement of achievement against fixed standards, can result in purely procedural learning and the risk of alienated or disempowered learners. their research suggests that academic staff are nonetheless able to create a space for learning and the negotiation of meaning and goals; an essential practice if education is to be framed in a wider discourse than that of 'productivity'. pat hill and amanda tinker ask similar questions about the role of higher education and, more specifically, where learning development should sit within it. whilst building a website to disseminate case studies of effective integration of learning development within curricula, they were able to investigate academic staff perceptions of skills development. results were mixed, with some staff regarding such activity as an integral aspect of their programme and role, and others expressing more negative attitudes, perceiving ld rather narrowly as attempts to embed skills, and seeing such activity as patronising, unnecessary or ‘remedial’. the development of the case study resource attempts to inform and, ultimately, persuade staff of the benefits and range of ways in which learning development can be successfully embedded. rhona sharpe, frances deepwell and patsy clarke continue the exploration of the most effective location for support within an institution. their developmental evaluation of the role of student support coordinators (ssc) at oxford brookes university provides evidence of the value of embedded, faculty-based support. sscs are increasingly able to participate within the broader learning and teaching community of their faculty. their location has provided them with visibility, insight, stronger relationships with staff and, perhaps, increased legitimacy to students. whilst the authors point to concerns about the ‘firefighting’ nature of the role, they argue for the potential to engage in proactive support interventions to facilitate retention. two other contributions make a strong case for the integration of skills development into core learning and teaching. in addition they highlight the need to facilitate that integration hagyard, hilsdon and mckendry editorial: learning development 10 years on journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 4 via technologies and the development of a range of resources and approaches to embedding skills. the embedding of skills is an aspect of learning development long acknowledged within the field; one that sits alongside other aspects of our practice, such as 'identity work', raising the confidence of learners so they can perceive themselves as legitimate participants within the academy. helen howard and michelle schneider report on a skills strategy that aims to support academic staff in incorporating skills development into teaching. the award winning skills@library lecturer webpages are an online portfolio of teaching resources designed to provide blended learning materials, lesson plans and workshops for use by academic staff. neil ford and melissa bowden discuss the opportunities presented by institutional change to embed information and academic literacies development and harness digital media. the co-location of librarians, learning technologists and language support specialists allow for greater collaboration and the creation of shared resources and a single, online presence for student support. our guest editorial by andrea raiker and david mathew also discusses the need to battle silo mentalities. the editors of the journal of pedagogic development believe that significant progress has yet to be made in understanding student learning in spite of the large body of research and discussion developed over the last two decades. they point to one particular finding however, that pedagogical development is as important a transformational shift for new academic staff as the development of graduate attributes is for learners. peter samuels’ contribution discusses one of our original questions – to what extent ld can be considered an academic discipline – using the case study of educational development, amongst others, for comparative purposes. tackling the thorny issue of defining disciplinarity, samuels argues that were ld to be perceived as a discipline rather than a movement, it might enable further development, collaboration with related fields and greater recognition as a conversational partner in the discourse of academia. most interestingly, from an editorial perspective, is the conclusion that ld should begin to formalise the nature of research to strengthen validity and promote greater understanding of learning, rather than simply evaluating interventions with a necessarily self-selecting group of participants. clarifying learning development’s relationship to the more established field of educational development appears necessary and is hopefully beginning, not least with the cross fertilisation facilitated by our developing relationships hagyard, hilsdon and mckendry editorial: learning development 10 years on journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 5 with organisations such as seda and publications such as the journal of pedagogic development. three of the contributions deal with issues relating to the uses of feedback in academic work. although each examines feedback in a different context, in all three the role of affect and engagement are key themes. john cowan’s paper, ‘facilitating reflective journaling’ offers an insight into wisdom accrued over three decades of practice in a wide range of he roles. john’s focus as an academic, a creator of learning resources and as a highly respected author has always been on the experience of students as learners and emphasises the powerful part played by affect and relationship in any learning context. moreover, it is the development of students’ capacity and confidence to self-assess that john’s mode of facilitated self-reflection through journaling illustrates. he presents practical examples of how such reflective work can be promoted when acting as facilitator, especially through ‘nudging’ and the use of strategic ‘feedforward’ comments in emails accompanying responses to student journals. peter day develops ideas associated with the power of feedback in student groups in a fascinating study of the ‘art group crit’. he finds that widespread perceptions of the group crit are charged with emotion and fear, so that the ‘supportive and bespoke dynamic intentions’ of the activity are often undermined or lost. how then can we reduce such fears and make best use of the powerful potential for learning that is represented by the giving and receiving of peer feedback in groups settings? day’s conclusions stress the need to develop positive, respectful practices genuine learning development activities for making the most of both feedback and participation in a group. continuing the theme of exploring feedback is elizabeth gaston’s case study describing another highly innovative learning development approach. in her project formative feedback was given verbally, digitally recorded and then posted to the student in question. she followed the findings of an earlier study suggesting that brief, regular, formative feedback is more useful to students than summative reports. addressing students’ calls for more feedback, as expressed in the nss returns, gaston’s approach also offers flexibility and control to students in that they own the recordings and can play and repeat them in their own time and in the comfort of their own environment. hagyard, hilsdon and mckendry editorial: learning development 10 years on journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 6 our final two contributions demonstrate the value of student-centred approaches, whether that is through the development of learning videos, as in caroline cash and john sumpter’s case study, or in david coghlan and anne graham cagney’s attention to learning processes via insider inquiry. cash and sumpter detail and evaluate the intuitive resources project: the development of a series of learning resources embedded within the curriculum of design courses. videos were developed to complement face-to-face technical support with the provision of intuitive, non text-based instructional material accessible at the time, and on the platform preferred by individual students. ‘insider inquiry’ is an approach to learning that focuses on direct experience of participation in activities in their real-world context. according to coghlan and cagney, developing skills associated with this mode of inquiry – i.e. individuals’ awareness of their own learning processes can be seen in terms of the notion of a threshold concept. in their paper, ‘multisensory holistic immersion’, these authors argue that engagement by business students in the ‘swampy lowlands’ of their own part-time employment experiences can yield fruitful learning about how organisations work. this, they argue is important in ‘transition from university life to the world of working in organisations’. drawing upon work by evered and louis (1981) they take the view that iterative, practical, reflective learning – which they contrast with academic, propositional learning – is necessary for making sense of practice, and fosters an internalised self-awareness and an inquiring approach generally. the contents of this edition of the jldhe the accounts of practice, the research and theorising confirm our optimism that after ten years in existence, the learning development community and its association, aldinhe, are both still growing and the field of practice is developing. learning developers know the potential for transformation that successful participation in he can afford to individuals and to society as a whole. we also know that the work of ld contributes significantly to students' persistence and success at university, whether via one-to-one tutorials, peer learning or group sessions or use of ld materials. we hope that university decision makers will heed the evidence so that universities, fulfilling their duty to widen participation in he, invest appropriately in this area. when we look back in ten years time, we are confident that ld will have further established itself as a creative and productive force in higher education. microsoft word jldhe narduzzo and day 31.10.12.doc journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special edition: developing writing in stem disciplines, november 2012 less is more in physics: a small-scale writing in the disciplines (wid) intervention alessandro narduzzo university of bath, uk trevor day university of bath, uk abstract this article reports on a writing in the disciplines (wid) intervention for first year undergraduate physics (and joint honours) students. a short (200-250 word) assignment was designed to maximise students’ learning of specific scientific writing practices, including writing with appropriate clarity and academic style for a target audience, incorporating mathematical expressions in text, creating diagrams and referring to them in text, and appropriately using citing and referencing. peer marking was employed to offer students formative feedback before they completed the assignment. the success of the assignment as a vehicle for student learning was evaluated by reviewing the students’ submissions and marks awarded, and through ten students’ reported focus group responses to the experience of carrying out the assignment, their reaction to peer marking, and their responses to the assessor’s written and verbal feedback. the effectiveness of the assignment’s content and process, and the peer marking, are briefly discussed, and suggestions made as to how to improve this or similar assignments in future years. keywords: writing in the disciplines; physics education; peer assessment. introduction i have made this [letter] longer than usual, because i have not had time to make it shorter. (blaise pascal (1623-62), lettres provinciales, 16) narduzzo and day less is more in physics: a small-scale writing in the disciplines (wid) intervention the assignment reported in this case study is based on two premises: that writing with brevity and precision is challenging, and that a short undergraduate assignment, and accompanying small scale research into teaching/learning practice, can be designed to maximise the learning for all those involved – students and staff. in our experience, based on undergraduate student interviews and focus groups conducted at our university, at least some students on undergraduate science and engineering programmes lack confidence in academic forms of writing. for many in programmes where physics, mathematics and/or computer science are a major component, the avoidance of extended writing was an element influencing their choice of a-levels and subsequently their choice of degree. when they find in their degree programme that they will need to engage in extended writing, this is a challenge to their confidence and expertise. at the research-intensive university where this assignment was carried out, students on physics, mathematics and computer science programmes may experience comparatively little extended writing in their first and second years, other than in writing various practical reports. in physics, for example, the writing of an extended dissertation (up to 40 pages in length) in their final year comes as a marked challenge, not only when it comes to formulating an extended argument, but in adopting appropriate technical conventions for the discipline. this study arose from the observation of one of us (an), a teaching fellow in physics, that some students in their final year, when about to embark on their dissertation writing, had yet to fully master some of the basic conventions of the discipline. an approached a writing consultant (td) prior to designing a first-year writing assignment that would engage students in disciplinary writing, with assessment criteria focusing on writing issues of greatest concern, including inserting algebraic expressions in text, designing illustrations and referring to them in text, and citing and referencing. the small-scale intervention that resulted draws upon a writing in the disciplines (wid) pedagogical approach (monroe, 2003; deane and o’neill, 2011) in which disciplinary academics collaborate with writing specialists to fine-tune assignments and shape the curriculum. this approach, already well embedded in undergraduate programmes among many leading higher education institutions (heis) in the united states, is gathering journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 2 narduzzo and day less is more in physics: a small-scale writing in the disciplines (wid) intervention ground in the uk (see ganobcsik-williams, 2006, and deane and o’neill, 2011, for reviews). in addition, the intervention design drew upon established principles of engaging students in peer assessment, coupled with students giving formative feedback and feedforward to each other, to deepen students’ learning and to help them improve on a task before its completion (race, 2005; 2007). in a recent survey of heis in the united states, fewer than one-third of physics faculties reported using student peer assessment in their undergraduate degree programmes (goubeaud, 2010); this is similar to the authors' experience of uk practice. while a few writing-related, student-assessed interventions in physics or physical sciences are reported in peer-reviewed journals (e.g. see literature cited in cho and cho, 2011), none appear to originate specifically from the uk experience and forms of communication other than the writing of practical reports or technical reviews, thus making the current study unusual. in the intervention reported here, one of us (an) sought to draw upon facets of good peer assessment practice as promoted in orsmond (2011). given that students were in their first few weeks at university, engaged in the transition to he academic culture and as yet unfamiliar with university assessment practices, students were given set assessment criteria rather than the opportunity to negotiate ones. the writing assignment was designed to engage students’ intrinsic motivation (ryan and deci, 2000) by enabling them to choose a science topic relevant to the first year introductory physics module on quantum physics. the assignment was short, requiring just 200–250 words of written text, but had to meet specific technical criteria (see appendix 1). while the assignment carried only 10% of the final marks for the module (or 5% depending on course programme options) it nevertheless focused on developing students’ capabilities that were directly relevant to project reports that students would complete within weeks or months and that would carry substantial marks towards their first year final marks (up to 40% of their laboratory units, or 8% of their first year final mark). this short writing assignment was optional, insofar as students could choose not to do it and so lose 5 or 10% of the marks for that module. of 130 students, 122 (94%) chose to complete the assignment. this case study reports on the methodology associated with the setting of the assignment, and its associated small-scale research, and reports on the study’s findings, to inform further incorporation of writing assignments within the physics undergraduate curriculum. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 3 narduzzo and day less is more in physics: a small-scale writing in the disciplines (wid) intervention the writing of this case study has encouraged the researcher-practitioners to engage in a more rigorous reflection on practice than might have otherwise occurred. the writing challenges experienced by undergraduate physics students at our university are likely to have resonance for students on other undergraduate science, engineering and technology programmes. our findings should hold interest for teaching staff, learning developers and writing specialists working with stem (science, technology, engineering and maths) undergraduate students. the assignment the writing task, originally inspired by the explain it in 60 seconds brief articles in the particle physics magazine symmetry (fermilab/slac, 2012), had three main aims (identifiable from the coursework guidelines, appendix 1): 1. to give students freedom to choose a topic of their own interest as long as it was related to quantum physics; 2. to offer students clear criteria to guide them through the task and against which to assess others and to be assessed; 3. to enable students to apply some conventions of scientific writing and become more proficient in their use. the main conventions of scientific writing that were assessed were (see appendix 1): • formatting, inserting and referring to an equation or symbolic expression; • formatting, describing and referring to a figure; • appropriately citing and listing 3-5 references; • to consider the target audience (a year 1 student in a stem discipline) and pitch the level of explanation accordingly. additionally, students were encouraged to strive for clarity and effectiveness in their explanations. appendix 1 gives the handout of assignment instructions given to students. the task was presented to the students in week 3 of the first semester, and an started teaching his half of the quantum physics unit in week 6. in week 8 there was an optional coursework development session and in week 10, an optional peer feedback and marking journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 4 narduzzo and day less is more in physics: a small-scale writing in the disciplines (wid) intervention session during a problems class when a peer feedback sheet (appendix 2) was used. friday of week 11, the last week of teaching in semester 1, was the deadline for electronic and paper submission. a staff member checked each script for plagiarism using turnitin (turnitin, 2012), and annotated and assessed the script against the specified criteria. it was decided to return the marked coursework in a dedicated session within the study skills module early in the second semester, in order to provide additional verbal feedback to the whole cohort on the most common errors. for those students who did not attend this session, the scripts were passed on to their tutors. table 1 summarises the chronology of main activities. table 1. sequence of activities for quantum physics writing assignment week 3 single session introduction to coursework (handout, appendix 1) week 6 single session an begins teaching – reminder of assignment week 8 single session assignment development session (with teaching assistant) early week 11 single session peer feedback plus q & a with an (handout, appendix 2) semester 1 end of week 11 assignment submission week 2 single session marked scripts with written feedback returned to students. additional oral feedback on common problems given. semester 2 week 4 two student focus groups run with td (schedule in appendix 3) focus group methodology to explore the student experience of carrying out the assignment and its associated peer marking, two focus groups were run. opportunistic sampling led to 10 students each attending one of two 45-minute focus groups. eight of the attendees had taken part in the peer marking process; two had not. the gender balance (8 male, 2 female) was similar to that for the two main undergraduate programmes overall (75% male, 25% female). the focus groups were carried out under british educational research association (bera) guidelines, with students not being coerced to attend, having the opportunity to opt out at any stage, and with their confidentiality and anonymity assured in any reporting. the journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 5 narduzzo and day less is more in physics: a small-scale writing in the disciplines (wid) intervention groups were led by one of us (td), with the sessions digitally audio-recorded, and the recordings and accompanying notes subsequently analysed by td and reported to an. appendix 3 gives the schedule for the guidance questions used in the focus group sessions. the focus of the questions was on three areas: • the students’ experience of carrying out the assignment; • their reaction to peer marking (or if they had not taken part in peer marking, why they had chosen not to); • their response to the written and verbal feedback on final performance given by the assessor (an). students were encouraged to offer comment on anything else associated with the assignment and its marking beyond the questions in the schedule. a response to each of the schedule questions was encouraged for every member of the two focus groups. findings an analysed the students’ choices and performance quantitatively, while td analysed students’ experiences qualitatively, as reported by them in the two focus groups. figure 1 displays the histogram for marks awarded (n = 122). mode and median are both 75%; the mean is 73%. no mark was awarded below 45%, an indication that all students had put in at least a minimum effort to achieve a pass mark (40%). the graph is visibly skewed (skewness = -0.58) in part because the distribution is curtailed at the upper end. the shape of the distribution is similar to that for the students’ major first semester exam results and for second semester coursework. means and medians are slightly higher than for other elements of the first year programme, and the assignment is unusual in that all students passed. this outcome was as intended, serving to maintain or boost students’ confidence in their work at an early stage in their university studies. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 6 narduzzo and day less is more in physics: a small-scale writing in the disciplines (wid) intervention figure 1. histogram for the distribution of marks for the quantum physics assignment. a large majority (73%) of students chose topics that were closely linked to material presented to them during the teaching of the unit. the most popular themes were: the standard model for elementary particles (16); de broglie waves and wave-particle duality (14); the photoelectric effect (12); the heisenberg’s uncertainty principle (10); and the bohr model (10). a significant number of these students did not make this choice out of convenience but because of genuine interest, as the content they presented was original and interesting, closely related to a syllabus topic but going beyond the lecture content. among the other chosen topics related to the module’s syllabus but less popular were compton scattering, millikan’s experiment, the rutherford model, and instrumentation and measurement techniques. among the topics not immediately linked with the material presented in lectures were: schroedinger’s cat (3); the casimir effect (2); solar sails (2); aurora borealis (1); quantum dots (1); cherenkov radiation (1); cosmic rays (1); and laser cooling (1). the positive outcome from the marking was that the majority of students had clearly put in an effort to achieve clarity and effectiveness, with an overall good level of success, and with a large proportion of really excellent descriptions or explanations; some students already appeared to possess their own individual and confident voice in describing physics, for example: journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 7 narduzzo and day less is more in physics: a small-scale writing in the disciplines (wid) intervention a student on laser cooling: though initially non-intuitive, cooling atoms by laser excitation effectively reduces temperatures of atoms to the order of micro-kelvin [ref]. consider an atom (velocity ω) moving in the +x direction defined in fig. 1(a) with laser photons moving towards the atom with wavelength λ. another on fusion and the tunnelling effect: the fact that proton fusion takes place in an environment with a relatively low temperature is not possible within the classical view. if two protons are going to collide, the potential energy rises rapidly and forms a potential barrier. if the potential barrier is greater than the kinetic energy of the protons, it is very unlikely that fusion will take place. because of the uncertainty of the energy as predicted by heisenberg, the protons can tunnel this barrier. to understand this, the wave nature of particles has to be considered. and a student writing about the rutherford model as a preamble to the bohr model of the atom: in 1911 rutherford, with the help of geiger and marsden, performed an experiment using [a] gold leaf and alpha particles to explore the structure of the atom. their results showed that the atom consisted of a dense, positively charged, central area, the nucleus, surrounded by a very light, negatively charged electron cloud [ref]. this is rutherford’s model. surprisingly, the most common errors students made were in the insertion of equations within text, including inadequate punctuation and equation formatting; next most troublesome was formatting, citing and listing of references, followed by the quality of figures presented and their link to text, both in the figure caption and the main text. these shortcomings were despite the students having attended a seminar on literature searching and referencing and one on scientific writing, as well as being directed by an to a comprehensive guide to citing and referencing available on the university library website. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 8 narduzzo and day less is more in physics: a small-scale writing in the disciplines (wid) intervention a relatively small number of students – about 20% – took part in the peer marking activity. the feedback they gave one another identified some of the major weaknesses in drafts. students commented on narrative clarity, structure, and appropriateness of figures and equations. aspects that students did not consider with precision were the insertion and formatting of equations, citations and references. students’ experiences of completing the assignment when questioned in focus groups as to why they were set the assignment, students responded with a wide range of explanations, with only two reporting on the original impulse for the assignment, which was the concern over writing standards in the final year of the degree programme. almost all valued the chance to choose their own topic and almost all claimed to enjoy the opportunity to pitch their article at a level appropriate to their student peers. that the assignment accrued relatively few marks was seen, by most, as beneficial, since this was the first substantial writing assignment they were to undertake on the degree programme. it was emphasised that what they learnt from this task they could then apply to more substantial writing tasks within the next few weeks or months. despite the assignment’s product being short (200-250 words), almost all students reported finding some aspect of the assignment challenging. several had rarely used a library and they found they lacked skills in finding appropriate books and rapidly extracting information from them (they were much more familiar with doing so from web-based material). several found difficulty choosing a topic that they felt could be readily condensed to the assignment format. as one student put it, ‘it’s a compromise between what you find most interesting and what you can present the best.’ for some, researching the article’s content was a longer process than the writing itself. for many, it was the combination of requirements – few words, formatting the article, correct use of equations and illustrations, being pitched at the right level for the audience – that combined to create the challenge. many students, although introduced to a guidebook for practical report writing some weeks before the assignment was set, failed to recognise that some of the assignment’s formatting requirements were illustrated in the guidebook. this lack of tight connection between one element of the course programme and another was a recurring feature journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 9 narduzzo and day less is more in physics: a small-scale writing in the disciplines (wid) intervention reported by students and is addressed in the discussion and moving forward sections of this article. peer marking the eight of ten focus group students who had engaged in peer marking reported seeing the value in critiquing and assigning marks to other people’s work. it enabled them to see how their own work compared with others’ and they could be influenced by the good practice and ideas they saw in others’ work. students also valued other people’s comments on their own work but they felt they had been given insufficient guidance for the task. for example, they had not seen an exemplar for the assignment, and so did not appreciate the high standard required. as one student put it, ‘we read [the work] quite casually, rather than looking scrupulously at what was wrong with it’. and another, ‘had we known how to mark, that session would have been really important’. they reported not appreciating, until they had completed the assignment and received feedback from the assessor, the precision with which the different criteria needed to be met. also, they could not be confident that the marks given by themselves and others for the same piece of work were consistent. most students agreed that reviewing more than one example of a similar completed assignment, of varying standards and showing the marks awarded in each case for different criteria, would be helpful were the assignment to be set in future years. they suggested that students should view such examples before engaging in the peer marking exercise. interestingly, the two female students would have liked more marks to be allocated for clarity of expression compared to the other assessment criteria, and they wanted more opportunities to develop such skills. during the focus groups, td explained to students that a key value in peer marking was putting oneself in the place of the formal assessor (and therefore more deeply appreciating what was needed to convince the reader that the work was of high quality). students agreed that had that been emphasised before the peer marking, it would have helped convince them of the value of the exercise. the two students who had opted not to engage in peer marking claimed they would have found such an argument persuasive. those two students also suggested running the peer marking in a tutorial group, rather than in the much larger and more impersonal class where the activity had taken place. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 10 narduzzo and day less is more in physics: a small-scale writing in the disciplines (wid) intervention assessor’s feedback the assignment assessor (an) invested considerable time in marking the students’ work, by providing detailed annotations on their submitted assignment and on the mark sheet that accompanied it. the majority of students acknowledged the invaluable nature of the class session where an gave back their work, explained the most common weaknesses (for example, failure to correctly punctuate the insertion of algebraic expressions in text), and interpreted the meaning of some of the annotations (for example, i for incorrect ‘insertion’ of an equation within text, f for incorrect ‘formatting’ of an equation or a reference). the focus groups recommended that in future an should provide coding for the different assessment criteria elements, give the coding on a mark sheet, and then use the coding in annotating the assignment. this would save time for the assessor and would give students a clear connection between marks, assessment criteria and annotated comments, which they could readily review at a later date, perhaps when they were working on their next major writing assignment. discussion taken together, the students’ submitted work, observations of students discussing and asking questions about the task, and their experience of the task as reported in focus groups, all suggest that the assignment was successful in focusing students’ attention in writing in a scientific manner for a specified target audience. peer marking, as an element of peer tutoring (topping, 1996), has potentially many benefits for students, not least because it offers the opportunity for students to work within their zones of proximal development (zpds) as articulated by lev vygotsky (vygotsky, 1978; moll, 1990) with one student being guided by a more capable peer, to the benefit of both. in the current assignment, the benefits of peer marking had not been maximised, and only a fraction of students had taken part in it. even among those students that did, they had not been convinced beforehand of the intent and value of peer marking and did not have sufficient confidence in knowing the standard of work required for the assignment, and the precise meaning of the assessment criteria. focus group members who had taken part in the peer marking valued other students’ comments on what was wrong with their work, and benefited from seeing other students’ journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 11 narduzzo and day less is more in physics: a small-scale writing in the disciplines (wid) intervention work. because the process was formative, it allowed students to make improvements before they submitted their work for formal assessment later in the same week. it also encouraged students to complete their work (or at least craft it to an advanced stage) earlier than they might otherwise have done. as indicated above, they could, nevertheless, suggest several areas for improvement in how the peer marking exercise was carried out, including using exemplars or examples of different standards. the complexity of timetabling (constrained by having two physics undergraduate programmes and limited by availability of laboratory space) means that at least three cohorts of students complete major elements of their first year programme at different times. so, providing guidance to the entire year cohort on matters such as citing, referencing and scientific writing style is challenging, because some students have the opportunity to apply their newfound guidance within days of exposure, while others have to wait many weeks. curriculum timetabling is being reviewed to see whether tighter linkage between skill development and application can be orchestrated. moving forward reflecting on the findings from using the assignment and peer marking with this year’s cohort, for the first year of the programme next year an intends to: 1. have two writing assignments instead of one. students would choose a topic as before but then write two short assignments: one aimed at a general audience ‘in 150 words explain the chosen concept to a person with no scientific background’; the other a technical task with student peers as the target audience, ‘explain an equation and clarify its origin and meaning using words and images and at most 100 words’. 2. give pedagogical justification for the writing assignments, and any associated peer marking to students at the outset, and refer to research evidence from the relevant literature. 3. provide at least one exemplar for both kinds of assignment, but on a different topic to the ones students can choose. given time constraints, and the commitment to modelling good practice, it is not seen as appropriate to show students a range of journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 12 narduzzo and day less is more in physics: a small-scale writing in the disciplines (wid) intervention examples of different quality. however, students will be shown examples of some of the commonest errors exhibited in students’ work from previous years. 4. arrange with other staff for peer marking to take place in tutorial groups and support tutors for the task by providing them with easy access to last year’s completed coursework along with the guidance that students will be receiving this year. 5. provide a key on feedback forms explaining the coding used in marking. 6. explain more explicitly the meaning of ‘clear’ and ‘effective’ in relation to the title and content of submitted work. the exercise has demonstrated the value in fine-tuning the various components of an assignment so that the ‘best learning value’ is achieved from even a small assignment. having a writing specialist working with a subject specialist was valuable because through knowledge transfer and combining their different perspectives, this widened and deepened their appreciation of the students’ learning experience, which then informed their further work in their respective disciplines. in terms of differing perspectives, the physics specialist tended to focus more on the quality and appropriateness of figures, and the exactness of formatting of equations and symbols. the writing specialist paid more attention to the quality and appropriateness of sources, and the precision of citing and referencing. the physics specialist was more relaxed about the use of wikipedia, whereas the writing specialist was concerned that only high quality sources should be used, and that whereas wikipedia might be useful for an initial overview of a topic, and a pointer to reliable sources, it could not be relied upon for accuracy and should not be cited. both were in close agreement, however, over which submissions communicated most clearly with the intended readership and which were most well rounded and engaging. having a critical friend, in the form of the writing specialist who ran the focus groups, enabled the gathering of students’ views by someone independent of the assignment creator and work assessor. the synergy between the writing and subject specialist helped develop the changes that are due to be implemented next year. the collaboration has influenced the writing development and peer assessment agenda in the department’s first year programme and beyond. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 13 narduzzo and day less is more in physics: a small-scale writing in the disciplines (wid) intervention acknowledgements the authors would like to thank karina bradshaw and justin hodds for their help in searching the grey and peer-reviewed literature around the themes ‘physics’, ‘physical sciences’, ‘peer assessment’ and ‘writing’. references cho, y.h. and cho, k. (2011) ‘peer reviewers learn from giving comments’, instructional science, 39(5), pp. 629-643. deane, m. and o’neill, p. (eds.) (2011) writing in the disciplines. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan. fermilab/slac (2012) symmetry: dimensions of particle physics. [online] batavia, illinois: fermilab/slac. available at: http://www.symmetrymagazine.org/cms/ (accessed: 20 april 2012). ganobcsik-williams, l. (ed.) (2006) teaching academic writing in uk higher education: theories, practices and models. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan. goubeaud, k. (2010) ‘how is science learning assessed at the postsecondary level? assessment and grading practices in college biology, chemistry and physics’, journal of science education and technology, 19(3), pp. 237-245. moll, c. (ed.) (1990) vygotsky and education: instructional implications and applications of sociohistorical psychology. cambridge: cambridge university press. monroe, j. (ed) (2003) local knowledges, local practices: writing in the disciplines at cornell. pittsburgh, usa: university of pittsburgh press. orsmond, p. (2011) selfand peer-assessment: guidance on practice in the biosciences. 2nd edn. leeds: uk centre for bioscience, the higher education academy. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 14 http://www.symmetrymagazine.org/cms/ narduzzo and day less is more in physics: a small-scale writing in the disciplines (wid) intervention race, p. (2005) making learning happen: a guide for post-compulsory education. london: sage. race, p. (2007) the lecturer’s toolkit: a practical guide to assessment, learning and teaching. 3rd edn. london: routledge. ryan, r.m. and deci, e.l. (2000) ‘intrinsic and extrinsic motivations: classic definitions and new directions’, contemporary educational psychology, 25(1), pp. 54-67. topping, k.j. (1996) ‘the effectiveness of peer tutoring in further and higher education: a typology and review of the literature’, higher education, 32(3), pp. 321-345. turnitin (2012) plagiarism detection software. newcastle upon tyne: turnitin uk. available at: http://submit.ac.uk/en_gb/home (accessed: 30 april 2012). vygotsky, l.s. (1978) mind in society. cambridge, usa: harvard university press. author details dr alessandro narduzzo is a teaching fellow in the physics department, university of bath, uk. his research interests include the pedagogy of physical sciences and maths in higher education. his background is as a solid state experimentalist working with unconventional metals and superconductors. dr trevor day is a writing consultant at the university of bath where he runs various writing-related courses and workshops for undergraduates, postgraduates and staff. his research interests include developing undergraduates’ scientific writing to meet both academic and employability imperatives. he heads the uk’s national he stem programme ‘writing and communicating in stem disciplines’ special interest group. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 15 http://submit.ac.uk/en_gb/home narduzzo and day less is more in physics: a small-scale writing in the disciplines (wid) intervention appendices appendix 1. the assignment guidelines the task • identify a science topic relevant or related to this unit (a fundamental concept or principle, a recent discovery or claim) that interests you; • research it by consulting books and reading articles on it (e.g. scientific american, physics world, physics today, new scientist); • present a clear and effective explanation of the chosen concept/idea in a word or pdf document (to be uploaded onto the unit’s moodle page) following these requirements: • use a title; • use between 200 and 250 words, including all text except references; • use at least one equation or symbolic expression (e.g. chemical/nuclear reaction), adequately formatted, inserted and referred to within the text; • use at least one figure (image or computer generated diagram or sketch) or table, with caption, adequately referred to in the text and, if necessary, referenced; • use between 3 and 5 references to books, articles or websites, adequately formatted and referred to in the text; • your explanation should be appropriate for a year 1 university student in a stem (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) subject. the marking scheme is the content clearly communicated? 3 are title and overall presentation effective? 2 word count 1 equation(s)/symbolic expression(s) 1 figure(s) 2 references 1 we will have one surgery/discussion session on this in week 9, a peer feedback and assessment session in week 10 or 11, with final moodle submission by 5pm on friday 16th december. a severe penalty will be applied for late submission. your coursework will be submitted to turnitin (the antiplagiarism software). journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 16 narduzzo and day less is more in physics: a small-scale writing in the disciplines (wid) intervention appendix 2. the peer feedback and marking guidelines the task • identify a science topic relevant or related to this unit (a fundamental concept or principle, a recent discovery or claim) that interests you; • research it by consulting books and reading articles on it (e.g. scientific american, physics world, physics today, new scientist); • present a clear and effective explanation of the chosen concept/idea in a word or pdf document (to be uploaded onto the unit’s moodle page) following these requirements: • use a title; • use between 200 and 250 words, including all text except references; • use at least one equation or symbolic expression (e.g. chemical/nuclear reaction), adequately formatted, inserted and referred to within the text; • use at least one figure (image or computer generated diagram or sketch) or table, with caption, adequately referred to in the text and, if necessary, referenced; • use between 3 and 5 references to books, articles or websites, adequately formatted and referred to in the text; • your explanation should be appropriate for a year 1 university student in a stem (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) subject. the feedback scheme comments mark is the content clearly communicated? /3 are title and overall presentation effective? /2 word count /1 equation(s)/symbolic expression(s) /1 figure(s) /2 references /1 we will have one surgery/discussion session on this in week 9, a peer feedback and assessment session in week 10 or 11, with final moodle submission by 5pm on friday 16th december. a severe penalty will be applied for late submission. your coursework will be submitted to turnitin (the antiplagiarism software). journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 17 narduzzo and day less is more in physics: a small-scale writing in the disciplines (wid) intervention appendix 3. focus group: guidance schedule 1. completing the 200-250 word assignment: (a) why do you think you were set this assignment? (b) how challenging did you consider the assignment to be? (c) what did you like/value most about the assignment? (d) what did you like/value least? (e) any other issues you’d like to raise about completing the assignment? 2i. for those who did not do the peer marking: (a) you chose not to do the peer marking. why was that? (b) what did you do while others were peer marking? (c) anything else you wish to add? 2ii. for those who did peer marking: (a) what was your experience of the peer marking? was the guidance provided sufficient? (b) what, if anything, did you find most challenging about the experience of doing peer marking? (c) how might your experience/the value of this process been improved? (d) overall, how useful do you rate your experience of peer marking in terms of : i marking the work of others ii having your own work marked (e) anything else you wish to add? 3. feedback on the 200-250 word assignment by your tutor: (a) were the marks you gained more than/less than/or similar to what you expected? (b) was the on-paper feedback/comments/guidance appropriate for you? (c) was the in-class (verbal) feedback/comments/guidance appropriate for you? (d) in what way(s), if any, might the on-paper or in-class feedback have been made more appropriate for you? 4. is there anything else you wish to add? journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 18 less is more in physics: a small-scale writing in the disciplines (wid) intervention abstract introduction the assignment focus group methodology findings students’ experiences of completing the assignment peer marking assessor’s feedback discussion moving forward acknowledgements references author details appendices appendix 1. the assignment guidelines appendix 2. the peer feedback and marking guidelines appendix 3. focus group: guidance schedule journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special edition: academic peer learning, part two, april 2016 intercultural peer tutoring competences as a part of learning development in an international higher education context jannike hille european university viadrina, germany gundula gwenn hiller european university viadrina, germany stefanie vogler-lipp european university viadrina, germany abstract in the framework of the internationalisation of higher education (he), this case study exposes the innovative concept of training intercultural peer tutors, and its implications. we will argue which skills are considered as specific intercultural peer tutoring competences and why these are important for the learning development in internationalised learning contexts. after a short description of the intercultural peer tutoring training at the european university viadrina (euv) and its theoretical basis, we will present the findings of a study accompanying the beginning phase of the training, which will demonstrate what kind of competences intercultural peer tutors develop in addition to those associated to classical peer tutoring. the paper will show that this specific training, focusing on intercultural peer tutoring, has a considerable impact on students’ own intercultural learning progress and also substantially prepares them to support the learning development of fellow international students. keywords: international students; intercultural peer tutoring; intercultural competences; learning support. hille et al. intercultural peer tutoring competences journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 2 introduction peer tutoring is not a new concept but has particularly gained traction in germany since 2011 with the 200 million euro funded ‘teaching quality pact’ programme of the federal government: this programme aims to improve study conditions and the quality of teaching and mentoring for students in he. within this framework, a peer tutoring training has been initiated by euv, exceptional in its dimensions and differentiation. in this paper we will present one training specialisation of the peer-tutoring programme at the euv relating to intercultural peer tutoring, which, as far as we know, is unique and innovative in germany. we will explain why we focused on intercultural peer tutoring competences, what competences students developed, how we defined these competences and how we trained peer tutors. with the internationalisation of he comes a strong increase in student and teacher mobility, but this also brings new diversity, which has its own set of challenges for teaching and learning. recent research has shown that there are significant differences in academic practices in general (ryan, 2013) and that studying in germany is especially complex for international students because of the very specific german academic system, particularly in the humanities (e.g. hiller, 2013; schumann, 2012; ricken, 2011). with 25% of its student body comprised of international students, the euv is one of the most multicultural universities in germany. it has therefore been very concerned with the questions related to diversity in learning (hiller, 2007). the euv is situated at the germanpolish border and students find themselves in an international surrounding, with many challenges including: different learning practices, teaching styles and academic communication (both oral and written), language barriers, unknown roles and hierarchy patterns, the different grading system, etc. (hiller, 2014; knapp and schumann, 2008). study programmes with significant international orientation and student composition have resulted in a highly intercultural internal structure of the university. this has resulted in all parties having to develop specific competences to deal with this diversity. the training of students in intercultural competences has been recommended by both practitioners and researchers (hiller, 2007; knapp and schumann, 2008; bosse, 2010). hille et al. intercultural peer tutoring competences journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 3 otten et al. (2013, p.243) argue that the international teaching context requires a new dimension of intercultural understanding which includes the reflection of one’s own and others’ teaching and learning practices. the viadrina centre for intercultural learning has therefore been developing various programmes with the aim of enhancing intercultural awareness within the institution. the ‘viadrina peertutoring’ training enabled euv to establish a specific intercultural training specialisation for peer tutors, which augments students’ intercultural competence and trains them to support their fellow students in intercultural learning development. in the following, we will point to the potential and importance of development and training of intercultural competence within ‘viadrina peertutoring’ and, in this context, will argue which competences are included and why they are extremely supportive for learning development in an international institution. we consider the multi-layered ‘viadrina peertutoring’ programme to be a classical activity of learning development, as it involves students by teaching them how to deal with the multiple challenges found in teaching and learning and by training them how to tutor their peers in the beginning phase of their studies. the training programme aims to improve study conditions within the context of internationalisation and the quality of teaching and mentoring for students in he. students learn to reflect on their practices and how to professionally accompany and support fellow students’ learning processes and how to manage peer-facilitated learning arrangements. we will particularly focus on the intercultural peer tutoring specialisation, its training programme, its learning targets and its developed intercultural peer tutoring competences which have not yet been, in our opinion, clearly demonstrated before. thus, the study explains what specific intercultural peer tutoring competences are meant to be accomplished and how students evaluate their skill acquisition. background in 2012, the ‘viadrina peertutoring’ training programme was established to operate across disciplines and spread into different areas of key competences, such as intercultural hille et al. intercultural peer tutoring competences journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 4 competence, writing, learning and presentational skills. it is integrated in the curriculum of all faculties at the euv (including business administration and economics, faculty of law as well as social and cultural science), therefore all bachelor and masters students may voluntarily attend the training. students receive credit points as well as an official certificate that documents the personal as well as the professional development gained in the programme. the training programme consists of four modules which may be attended independently from each other. figure 1. ‘viadrina peertutoring’ training at the european university viadrina students participating on the ‘viadrina peertutoring’ training will need at least one semester either summer (april-july) or winter (october-february) to complete the training. it is also possible to complete it in two separate semesters, e.g. summer and winter. the training programme is based on peer learning theory. boud defines the basic concept of peer learning as: students learning from and with each other in both formal and informal ways. (boud, 2001, p.4). hille et al. intercultural peer tutoring competences journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 5 peers learn, interact and create new knowledge with and from each other. they also work on an eye-to-eye-level with hardly any hierarchy (boud, 2001; falchikov, 2001; bruffee, 1984). as far as we know, there is no established model of intercultural peer tutoring. that being said, we were convinced from the very beginning that peer tutoring and intercultural learning would operate very well and could be established at the euv, as it is such an international university. we believed the existence of intercultural peer tutors to be important as they actively create and contribute to a welcoming culture within this university. it is our opinion that the high percentage of international students coupled with the euv’s close location to poland, as well as the overall internationalisation process of universities, makes the training of intercultural peer tutors highly relevant and necessary. furthermore, we believe that particularly within an international university, the exchange between students and peer tutors may be productive for both sides. on the one hand, international students are accompanied by peer tutors who are experts in intercultural learning and intercultural methods with the aim of supporting them and their studies and, on the other hand, intercultural peer tutors learn from their peer tutoring activities to take responsibility for their own actions, reflect and organise their own learning process, and learn from other cultures. within ‘viadrina peertutoring’, intercultural peer tutors are trained in intercultural awareness, knowledge of different teaching and learning cultures, and how to sensitise international students to develop their intercultural competence to be prepared for studying in the german academic system. furthermore, intercultural peer tutors learn how to interpret and react in difficult and challenging interactions, how to cope with the cultural specificities of the german university system and how to analyse and use intercultural training methods and tools. they learn how to design and conduct workshops, for example one-day workshops or two-day excursions with eight to twenty participants. they also offer counselling hours and summer school programmes or support faculty seminars through the delivery of short practical intercultural units. during their employment peer tutors attend methodological and intercultural supervision training. there are also team meetings with other peer tutors, to consult and discuss specific challenges or to talk through and reflect upon critical incidents that they may have experienced. hille et al. intercultural peer tutoring competences journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 6 we train intercultural peer tutors to develop and strengthen their intercultural competence, seen as: …the ability to interact effectively and appropriately in intercultural situations; it is supported by specific attitudes and affective features, (inter)cultural knowledge, skills and reflection. (boecker and ulama, 2008, p.4). we are convinced that these areas may be used within the ‘viadrina peertutoring’ with the appropriate tools and methods. we are confident that these skills can be developed through the ‘viadrina peertutoring’ programme, with the appropriate tools and methods. within the training programme the most important tool is reflection, based on an eportfolio. according to deseco (2005) reflection during academic studies is the core of the key competences and needs to be considered very carefully. during their training, students reflect on their theoretical knowledge as well as their practices. through fink's (2013) learning taxonomy we determined the learning outcome of the eportfolios as follows:  students know how and why they reflect.  they know how they may apply reflection as a learning device in and outside the classroom.  they are aware of what media competence they have developed.  they know how to design their individual eportfolio.  they know how to give peer feedback. one best practice example, showcasing that eportfolios are appropriate to use in a he learning context especially in the area of intercultural competence, is a field report by kilian-yasin (2013). in this report, eportfolios were used to improve the integration of foreign as well as international students and the internationalisation in everyday study life. kilian-yasin’s field report encouraged us to use eportfolios within the intercultural peer tutoring training, which may be used to help intercultural peer tutors to learn and reflect on their learning process. the above mentioned and listed learning outcomes may strengthen the frame for learning development and make learning in an international context more transparent and effective. hille et al. intercultural peer tutoring competences journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 7 in order to improve and show the relevance of the concept of intercultural peer tutoring at the viadrina and strengthen its existence the following study was conducted. evaluation of the training programme one of the authors of this article examined the intercultural peer tutoring specialisation within her master’s thesis: this survey identified which aspects of intercultural competence the peer tutors achieved during their training. the study and its results will be outlined in the following. participants in total, eight eportfolios written by euv students who took part in the ‘viadrina peertutoring’ training programme were examined. the participating students were from all faculties of the euv. they consisted of first-year students and undergraduates. each participant signed a consent form to allow the academic team to use his or her eportfolio for research and evaluation purposes. the programme creators guaranteed that the eportfolio was anonymised. the participants were asked to sign the consent form voluntarily. data the training programme participants conducted eportfolios, which reveal their learning development of intercultural peer competence in a highly reflective way. these eportfolios served as a basis for the evaluation. the study therefore analyses and examines the students’ self-evaluation. (for purposes of simplification the term ‘eportfolio ‘covers both electronic portfolios and non-electronic portfolios. the numbering system refers to the original numbering assigned within the master’s thesis.) the data includes a total of eight eportfolios (including four paper portfolios: p1-p4; and four electronic portfolios: ep1-ep4), presented to some extent on the elearning platform ‘mahara’ by participants in the ‘viadrina peertutoring’ training programme. hille et al. intercultural peer tutoring competences journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 8 method the theoretical frame and research method is built on a combined method, i.e. the data was analysed with qualitative content analysis (schreier, 2012) by using an encoding technique. the codes refer to the categories of the intercultural competence model defined by the ‘intercultural competence assessment (inca) project’ (prechtl and davidson-lund, 2007) as well as on categories referring to specific learning targets defined by the programme creators. the qualitative content analysis requires a coding grid, in order to find codes corresponding to the pre-defined categories. this grid was developed on the basis of:  five intercultural competences, according to the inca project.  four specific intercultural peer tutoring competences which, according to viadrina peertutoring (based on the learning targets of the intercultural peer tutoring specialisation), have been shown to be relevant (see table 1). table 1 below shows the categories that served as a grid for the encoding process. table 1. definitions of intercultural (peer tutoring) competences. intercultural competences (based on prechtl and davidson-lund, 2007) knowledge discovery intellectual curiosity about other cultures and motivation to gather information to discover culture related-knowledge, in order to interact better with people. behavioural flexibility adapting behaviour to a specific situation and presenting a broad knowledge of one’s repertoire. communicative awareness willingness to modify existing conventions and having appropriate negotiation conventions for intercultural communication. respect for others equal treatment of different behaviour, value and convention systems, due to the willingness to respect diversity and coherence. empathy willingness to take the other’s perspective and awareness of diverse perspectives. intercultural peer tutoring competences (based on peer learning targets) methodological expert knowledge competence to understand and analyse features of intercultural encounters and to apply learned expertise, e.g. essential theories and concepts. cooperation willingness for collaborative learning and working with peers. peer learning support ability to support and accompany peers in intercultural learning hille et al. intercultural peer tutoring competences journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 9 settings. the application of methodological knowledge to empower peers in order to improve their intercultural competence. intercultural peer awareness awareness that helps to handle and be responsive in situations of intercultural interaction and understanding how to support peers to develop intercultural competence. the overall aim of the survey was to analyse eportfolios with regard to the gain of intercultural competence perceived by peer tutors during their training. all of the above codes (definitions) were analysed in-depth in the participants’ eportfolios. incisive points concerning intercultural development were observed, highlighted, categorised and allocated in accordance with the specific intercultural categories outlined in table 1. in addition, the intercultural competence categories were quantified (i.e. it was noted which categories were mentioned very often, if they could be put together in a possible correlation, or if they were only rarely or once mentioned). the definitions of intercultural competence categories were based on those identified within the inca model and those identified by euv: these collectively formed the basis for this altered empirical method of evaluation. thus a detailed picture of students’ individually experienced acquirement of intercultural peer tutoring competences within the ‘viadrina peertutoring’ programme and their learning development could be drawn. results the evaluation of the eportfolios (regarding intercultural competence in the field of peer tutoring in he) indicates that, on the one hand, all competences considered by the programme developers were mentioned but, on the other hand, a huge variety in viewpoints concerning the students’ learning process were revealed. due to limited space, we have summarised representative statements in the following table. they are sorted according to the pre-defined codes (definitions) previously outlined in table 1 as ‘intercultural (peer tutoring) competences’. the following exemplary statements expose the student’s reflection of their own development within the learning process of intercultural competence. (all citations are taken from the original data and were translated by the authors from german into english.) hille et al. intercultural peer tutoring competences journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 10 table 2. statements presenting intercultural competences in the eportfolios by participants in the ‘viadrina peertutoring’ training programme. intercultural competences knowledge discovery i generally see my intercultural learning process as a spiral because the theoretical and practical examination with a topic stimulates again and again new influences and new thinking processes, and through changes and dynamics of cultures never develops a permanent picture. […] the conscious and written examination with a newly learned topic motivates continued thought and the learning process is by no means stagnated. (p4: p.3) behavioural flexibility for my learning process i definitely also take along flexibility which is connected to teamwork. (p2: p.2) communicative awareness inquiry practices in particular as well as active listening and paraphrasing are aspects i would like to further practice and develop. i am convinced that a successful consultation depends on conversation techniques [...] in the future i would like to give more attention to ask my counterpart where the problem or issue lies. in case of misunderstandings there cannot occur a good consultation. (p4: p.7) respect for otherness peer learning [...] indeed facilitates the personality development, because you learn to respond to other team colleagues and to debate with them [...]. (p1: p.2) empathy during the analysis the participants are invited to put themselves into all involved person’s (or parties) positions. through looking at a conflict from different perspectives, they can learn to develop appreciation and empathy for diverse ways of thinking and acting. furthermore, a change of perspectives can lead to visualising the reason behind a conflict –which can be attributed for instance to the different cultural norms and values of the participants [...]. (ep4.1) intercultural peer tutoring competences methodological expert knowledge [...] triggered me to be engaged with the theory of peer tutoring within the intercultural context. the interaction with my colleagues motivated me to test a new dimension for peer tutoring work, bringing me new knowledge and leaving enough space for creativity and fantasy. (p2: p.5) cooperation more and more it showed that we interact very thoughtfully, although we did not necessarily consort with each other outside the lecture/ small group or have the same interests. i’m tracing it back to the fact that we all engaged with the peer learning situation, that we experienced the tension and dissymmetry with respect and benefit from it. we encourage, broaden and mutually support each other. (p3: p.16) peer learning support through our collective experiences and shared thirst for knowledge, we grew together as a group during the time of the lecture. therefore it has been established that a huge mutual trust would not have been possible without such a hille et al. intercultural peer tutoring competences journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 11 successful learning. (p1: p.16) intercultural peer awareness the participants shall be alerted to their own ‘cultural spectacles’ and perception structures. this sensitisation generates awareness of ‘other’ interpretation possibilities and explanatory approaches of actions, which are seemingly suggested, due to one’s own cultural imprint. at best the participants experience/learn a certain competence and how to interact in future intercultural situations. (p3: p.9) these examples are representative of the students’ reflections and self-evaluation. each statement (table 2) presents the diverse ways in which the participating students experienced and reflected upon their intercultural learning development led by the ‘viadrina peertutoring’. the findings give the programme developers important insights into the demands, notions, conclusions and conditions of intercultural learning in he. being aware that these results reflect only students’ self-evaluation, which is subjective, we can nevertheless conclude the strengths and potential for improvement of our programme. one important result of the study was that empathy and respect for others are frequently mentioned competences in the eportfolios and have a visible correlation. through this we see that these two competences have been especially crucial for the students’ learning experience. other competences such as communicative awareness, which we also consider to be highly important in this context, should have more emphasis put on them in the future. the study identified which intercultural peer tutoring competences can be developed within our training programme, with empathy and respect for others being highlighted by the peer tutors themselves. yet, the findings of our study give only a glimpse into the students' learning process. students’ eportfolios are written reflections of their own learning development and lack assessment by others. all reflection processes point to selfevaluation and self-centred motivation. further studies should be broader and include, for example, empirical examinations of students’ peer guidance work. hille et al. intercultural peer tutoring competences journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 12 conclusion the study showed that ‘viadrina peertutoring’ is a precious contribution to learning development in international contexts: the university’s institutional setting, the proximity to the polish border, the amount of international students and the increasing process of internationalisation in universities overall, justifies and demands the action of intercultural peer tutors supporting their international fellow students in learning development. ‘viadrina peertutoring’ is unique in germany with its interplay between quality, length, and supervision of the intercultural peer tutors. the intercultural peer tutors have a wide range of duties: they conduct intercultural workshops, counselling hours and summer school programmes and contribute to faculty seminars through the delivery of short practical intercultural units targeting new international students, to prepare and support them for their study in germany. to do this, they require specific training which raises their own intercultural competence. moreover, they must be trained to design and conduct workshops, which help fellow international students accommodate themselves to the german academic culture. we therefore established an important contribution to learning development in interculturalism and diversity, by developing and implementing a training programme, the success of which has been demonstrated in the here-presented study. there has been a benefit and advancement of intercultural competence within the duration of the ‘viadrina peertutoring’ training programme as observed in the eportfolios. the participants valued a positive and impressive development success during the training programme. thus, this first evaluation confirms what our experience has shown so far, that the existence of intercultural peer tutors is important, because they may actively create and contribute to a welcoming culture within the german university, and that the training programme is a win-win-situation, since both tutors as well as the supported students learn and increase their intercultural and learning competences. finally, we consider that intercultural competences are an important aspect of peer tutoring in the international context, and the specific competences of peer learning support have an exceptional role to play in the frame of learning development. hille et al. intercultural peer tutoring competences journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 13 references bosse, e. (2010) ‘vielfalt erkunden – ein konzept für interkulturelles training an hochschulen’, in hiller, g.g. and vogler-lipp, s. (eds.) schlüsselqualifikation interkulturelle kompetenz an hochschulen: grundlagen, konzepte, methoden. wiesbaden: vs verlag für sozialwissenschaften, pp. 109-133. boud, d. (2001) ‘introduction: making the move to peer learning’, in boud, d., cohen, r. and sampson, j. (eds.) peer learning in higher education: learning from and with each other. london: koganpage, pp. 1-20. bruffee, k. a. (1984) ‘collaborative learning and the conversation of mankind’, college english, 46(7), pp. 635-652. boecker, m.c. and ulama, l. (2008) intercultural competence – the key competence in the 21st century?, theses by the bertelsmann stiftung and the fondazione cariplo (based on the models of intercultural competence by dr. d. k. deardorff). available at: http://www.ngobg.info/bg/documents/49/726bertelsmanninterculturalcompetences.p df (accessed: 5 july 2015). definition and selection of competencies: theoretical and conceptual foundations (deseco) (2005) definition und auswahl von schlüsselkompetenzen: zusammenfassung, pp.1-12. available at: http://www.deseco.admin.ch/bfs/deseco/en/index/03/04.parsys.97111.downloadlist. 89603.downloadfile.tmp/2005.dskcexecutivesummary.ge.pdf (accessed: 18 december 2015). falchikov, n. (2001) learning together: peer tutoring in higher education. london: routledgefalmer. fink, l.d. (2013) creating significant learning experiences: an integrated approach to designing college courses 2nd edn. san francisco: jossey-bass. http://www.ngobg.info/bg/documents/49/726bertelsmanninterculturalcompetences.pdf http://www.ngobg.info/bg/documents/49/726bertelsmanninterculturalcompetences.pdf http://www.deseco.admin.ch/bfs/deseco/en/index/03/04.parsys.97111.downloadlist.89603.downloadfile.tmp/2005.dskcexecutivesummary.ge.pdf http://www.deseco.admin.ch/bfs/deseco/en/index/03/04.parsys.97111.downloadlist.89603.downloadfile.tmp/2005.dskcexecutivesummary.ge.pdf hille et al. intercultural peer tutoring competences journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 14 hiller, g.g. (2007) interkulturelle kommunikation zwischen deutschen und polen an der europa-universität viadrina. eine empirische analyse von critical incidents. frankfurt: iko-verlag hiller, g.g. (2013) ‘internationalität und grenzlage als lernressource’, in von helmolt, k., berkenbusch, g. and jia, w. (eds.) interkulturelle lernsettings: konzepte – formate – verfahren. stuttgart: ibidem-verlag, pp. 109-136. hiller, g.g. (2014) ‘kulturelle und sprachliche diversität in der hochschule – am beispiel von e-mail-kommunikation’, in moosmüller, a. and möller-kiero, j. (eds.) interkulturalität und kulturelle diversität: münchner beiträge zur interkulturellen kommunikation. münster: waxmann, pp. 233-258. kilian-yasin, k. (2013) portfolio international studieren: internationalisierung des curriculums durch interkulturelle kompetenz und integration. available at: https://publikationen.unituebingen.de/xmlui/bitstream/handle/10900/43956/pdf/tbhd_kilianyasin_iv_13032 1_korr7_enddruck.pdf?sequence=1&isallowed=y (accessed: 23 september 2015). knapp, a. and schumann, a. (eds.) (2008) mehrsprachigkeit und multikulturalität im studium. frankfurt: peter lang. otten, m., hertlein, s. and teekens, h. (2013) ‘hochschullehre als interkulturelles lernsetting’, in von helmolt, k., berkenbusch, g. and jia, w. (eds.) interkulturelle lernsettings: konzepte – formate – verfahren. stuttgart: ibidem-verlag, pp. 243266. prechtl, e. and davidson-lund, a. d. (2007) ‘intercultural competence and assessment: perspectives from the inca project’, in kotthoff, h. and spencer-oatey, h. (eds.) handbook of intercultural communication. berlin: mouton de gruyter, pp. 467-490. ricken, j. (2011) universitäre lernkultur: fallstudien aus deutschland und schweden. wiesbaden: vs verlag für sozialwissenschaften. https://publikationen.uni-tuebingen.de/xmlui/bitstream/handle/10900/43956/pdf/tbhd_kilianyasin_iv_130321_korr7_enddruck.pdf?sequence=1&isallowed=y https://publikationen.uni-tuebingen.de/xmlui/bitstream/handle/10900/43956/pdf/tbhd_kilianyasin_iv_130321_korr7_enddruck.pdf?sequence=1&isallowed=y https://publikationen.uni-tuebingen.de/xmlui/bitstream/handle/10900/43956/pdf/tbhd_kilianyasin_iv_130321_korr7_enddruck.pdf?sequence=1&isallowed=y hille et al. intercultural peer tutoring competences journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 15 ryan, j. (2013) ‘introduction’, in ryan j. (ed.) cross-cultural teaching and learning for home and international students: internationalisation of pedagogy and curriculum in higher education. london: routledge, pp.1-12. schreier, m. (2012) qualitative content analysis in practice. london: sage publications. schumann, a. (ed.) (2012) interkulturelle kommunikation in der hochschule: zur integration internationaler studierender und förderung interkultureller kompetenz. bielefeld: transcript verlag. author details jannike hille is a family assistant and care supervisor for people with learning difficulties and works in the field of accompanied parenthood. in 2014 jannike graduated from the european university viadrina, frankfurt (oder) in intercultural communication studies. her master’s thesis, entitled ‘about the purchase of intercultural competence at the university: can intercultural competence be obtained from peer tutoring? based on the peer tutoring training at the european university viadrina, frankfurt (oder)’, investigates the ‘viadrina peertutoring’ programme initiated by the centre for intercultural learning. in her empirical study she was interested in analysing the student’s learning development and self-assessed acquirement of intercultural competences within this peer programme. gundula gwenn hiller, phd, is the director of the centre for intercultural learning at the european university viadrina in frankfurt (oder), where she has designed different programmes concerned with the students’ development of intercultural competence. her research and teaching area is intercultural communication and competence acquisition in the context of internationalisation of higher education and cultural divergences in teaching and learning practices. due to her knowledge of different languages and her interest in other cultures, she has a wide experience in teaching in international contexts and abroad (e.g. usa, poland, turkey, italy, france). stefanie vogler-lipp is a scientific researcher at the centre for intercultural learning at the european university viadrina in frankfurt (oder). she is currently working in the ‘viadrina hille et al. intercultural peer tutoring competences journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 16 peertutoring’ programme. she is teaching and supervising the intercultural peer tutors. she is working on her dissertation on the improvement and development of the reflection competence concerning the individual learning process within the intercultural peer tutoring training. her teaching and research focus is on intercultural competence in higher education, peer learning and diversity. intercultural peer tutoring competences as a part of learning development in an international higher education context abstract introduction background evaluation of the training programme participants data method results conclusion references author details literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 6: november 2013 only connect: discovery pathways, library explorations and the information adventure book review walsh, a. and coonan, e. (2013) only connect: discovery pathways, library explorations and the information adventure. huddersfield: innovative libraries, pp.239, 978-099576652-1-7. overview a novel concept for the world of publishing in this field, only connect has been produced primarily as an electronic book to incorporate multimedia resources. initial viewing of the printed version proved somewhat disconcerting due to the lack of an index and the ‘chapter chooser’ which encourages a non-linear engagement with the book. however, after reading the introduction, this becomes completely logical as there is no sense of a clear progression between chapters. this book has been designed around a range of interpretations and experiences of information literacy (il) from a number of perspectives. the chapter chooser recommends starting to read at any point and navigating in any order. in fact, the only theme that links these chapters is that of a form of information literacy. the first part of the book ‘mapmakers’ explores tried and tested methods of teaching and learning il with discussions of the role of the library and librarians. the second part of the book, a section called ‘travellers’, appears more abstract. it looks at some creative and reflective journeys where the authors happen upon an element of il on their travels. these examples draw on external media to illustrate their creative discoveries, so the printed book alone does not do justice to the essence of the collection of chapters. the frequent use of the incorporated pertinent online sources makes it clear that a poor written imitation or mere description within the text would not be appropriate. walsh and coonan only connect: discovery pathways, library explorations and the information adventure the intended audience is anyone who teaches anything to do with il as there are suggested strategies, but also anyone attempting to learn the key principles. examples of students going through the process offer reassurances that any difficulties they may face are shared with others. in addition to this more academic readership, the publication is likely to be appreciated by people in creative fields across the arts to get a sense of how their work can be applied to il. from simple strategies which are usable in the classroom using creatures and games, to complex theories, such as psychoanalysis and vygotsky’s scaffolding, applied to a range of settings, this book will provide something for everyone. what sets this book apart from many others written about il is that it does not offer a precise definition, in fact it discourages this by developing the idea that il is contextual, offering ‘complementary yet deeply contrasting visions of the information journeys’. it validates the multiple definitions and brings together applications embracing very different perspectives. in contrast with many texts on the market, this one can certainly not be accused of offering il for a specific purpose. although the chapters are very different from each other, a number of recurring themes emerge from the publication which are summarised briefly below in no particular order. technology engaging with students through the use of mobile voting systems is touched upon within a prezi presentation, and online this comes with the freedom of navigating to more information outside of the il concept if desired. the incorporation of youtube, audio files and prezi materials throughout provides an additional perspective to many authors’ assertions, whilst amado and alarcónis focus on how technology itself has helped their research and art. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 2 walsh and coonan only connect: discovery pathways, library explorations and the information adventure identity how information builds our identities and understanding of the world is a recurring topic throughout the text. burkhardt and carbery explore how information can construct one’s own image from students’ use of information to construct an identity, but also how an identity can be reflected back at them from a social media perspective. a sense of changing identity is also discussed by osborne who focuses on the growing amount and range of supporting and educational information available to young homosexuals over the years. he also raises the question of whether information reflects society’s attitudes or creates them. librarians and library spaces different views of librarians and library spaces are given. there is the librarian as a partner in the learning process (cullen and delasalle), reflections of experiences and struggles library users may have in finding information in such an established system as a library (norton and ramsden), plus the sorceress librarian as a mentor in the quest for information. tried and tested methods exercises to evaluate (walton) and synthesise sources (gröppel-wegener) are offered as a different way to engage students in these tasks. there is also an account of a specific step by step worked example of research from cullen and delasalle which raises important considerations for keyword searching on a database from the student’s viewpoint. analogies in order to make some concepts new and exciting and approach them from a different angle, as well as possibly to make a point inoffensively, an interesting collection of analogies is presented. examples of these range from the hero’s journey to classic fairy tales, and it is difficult to forget the librarian as a sorceress or masquerading as a bear. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 3 walsh and coonan only connect: discovery pathways, library explorations and the information adventure students the importance of engaging students in critical conversations, exploring their assumptions and guiding them through a process of il is discussed, alongside academics learning the process and linking it to their own discipline (dimmock, hoon and maclellan, and johnson and walsh). the student voice is also acknowledged. disability observations from individuals with additional needs are explored from multiple perspectives. in addition to ‘solutions’ for the world to implement to make their lives easier, documented examples of how they have navigated il themselves are offered (andrews and soulsby-kermode, norton). reflection and personal discovery personal discoveries and journeys feature in most sections of walsh and coonan’s collected works. these include disability diagnoses, literature searching and a ‘reflection of a reflection’ observation in a practice based setting (mathew). final thoughts in terms of the aims of the book – only one is provided overtly. that is, to bring together a range of interpretations and perspectives on the idea of information literacy, and this was achieved well. far more limitations and notions of what will not be offered throughout the book were given. there has been much debate in recent years about what il actually constitutes, and this collection of experiences and observations can change your opinion with every section. as an 18 year old entering university for the first time (many years ago), this would have confused me and not helped me to understand what was expected of me when engaging with the library and research processes. through this text (or anarcho-narrative unbook as described in the introduction) readers can discover that there is no right way to ‘do’ information literacy and it also acknowledges journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 4 walsh and coonan only connect: discovery pathways, library explorations and the information adventure that students do not fit into pigeon holes we may devise for their learning. having said that, and despite first impressions, it is not actually solely for librarians, students and tutors in higher education; there are plenty of examples of how il can operate outside of universities. publishing primarily as an electronic book is ideal for this as it reflects the nature of the technology used by the contributing authors, no doubt alongside other impressive research projects. the process of accessing the book online is in itself an exercise in il for the reader/browser. the content within the printed text is of course valuable, but it is clearly limited in scope. it summarises and extends new debates on the topic well. however, material comes from a range of disciplines which interpret and present il so differently from each other in style and approach that it is not always easy to navigate from one to the next. if you are prepared for this challenge and interested in how others approach it, it is easy to take yourself out of your traditional comfort zones with some of the interpretations of the subject. reviewer helena beeson worked for over ten years as an academic librarian at the university of northampton and for the last two years has since been working as an academic practice tutor based in the library. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 5 only connect: discovery pathways, library explorations and the information adventure book review overview technology identity librarians and library spaces tried and tested methods analogies students disability reflection and personal discovery final thoughts reviewer literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special edition: academic peer learning, november 2015 mentoring in the writing café: identity, belonging and ownership christie pritchard plymouth university, uk abstract the historical legacy of the coffeehouse, the predecessor to the café, is rooted in a culture of community, collaboration and social activity (ellis, 2004). in january 2014, the learning development team at plymouth university opened the writing café; a developmental, creative space that offers the potential to reframe their work outside of the traditional library walls and provides the opportunity to work in partnership with students. alongside serving great coffee and locally sourced food, the writing café is a space for students and staff to meet and discuss writing practices and gain support from the learning development team and student writing mentors. this paper reports on a small-scale action research project undertaken to investigate to what extent the writing mentors benefitted from being partners in this project; as co-designers, advisors, writing mentors, peer supporters and more. keywords: identity; writing centres; academic literacies; writing cafe; peer mentoring; students as partners; belonging; third space. pritchard mentoring in the writing café: identity, belonging and ownership journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 2 introduction the rise in the number of writing centres in higher education (he) partly emerged in response to the rapid growth of the sector during the 1990s, and concerns about retention and achievement levels of the new diverse student population (national committee of inquiry into higher education, 1997; yeats et al., 2010). the number of students from nontraditional backgrounds, including overseas and mature students increased, bringing with them a much wider range of writing and language abilities (russell, 2003; learnhigher, 2009). writing centres were set up to help address the issue that: large numbers of contemporary british undergraduates lack the basic ability to express themselves in writing. (murray and kirton, 2006, p.7). academic writing is a central feature of he and undergraduate and postgraduate students are required to communicate and articulate their thoughts clearly, whilst meeting the objectives of their assignment. having a solid understanding of the rules and conventions of subject-specific writing also enables students to grow intellectually as they are able to absorb and critically analyse other literature in their discipline (yeats et al., 2010). as well as standing them in good stead for their time at university, brauer (2003) also claims that an individual’s approach to academic writing has a direct impact on their career opportunities, as good written communication is central to employability with graduate employers increasingly expecting these specialised skills (avery and bryan, 2001; russell, 2003). writing centres provide students with the opportunity to develop these skills, whilst giving them the confidence to maximise their potential and transition in to university life. the majority of writing centres are centrally located within institutions, either within learning development departments or study skills teams, as opposed to within specific faculties. this brings its own challenges as the field of learning development is often mistaken for a remedial solution to academic progress (wingate, 2006; hill et al., 2010), only beneficial to those who are struggling with the demands of he and require additional support. this misconception in part comes from the study skills approach, which defines academic progress, including literacy, as a set of skills which need to be taught in order to fix the deficiencies (wingate, 2006). however, the majority of writing centres, including the writing café, take a much broader view of student support in relation to literacy and are in pritchard mentoring in the writing café: identity, belonging and ownership journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 3 a unique position to create a productive, or ‘third space’ for learning (bhabha, 1994; moje et al., 2004; hilsdon, 2014. here, students’ own cultures and family lives, or their ‘first space’, can be used to explore and question the practices of their discipline and the institution; the ‘second space’ (bhabha, 1994). by operating outside of their faculty, students are encouraged to explore, critique and question the practices of both their discipline and the institution in general, allowing them to develop their sense of identity, both as a learner and a writer. for moje, literacies-focused work in the ‘third space’ offers potential for: the development of ability to produce and represent knowledge in multiple forms, the ability to analyse how others have represented knowledge and therefore to assess truth claims…to challenge long-standing – even mainstream – claims to knowledge and ultimately, to produce new knowledge that will benefit society. (moje, 2007, p.33). educational research into student writing can be categorised into three main perspectives; study skills, academic socialisation and academic literacies (lea and street, 1997). although they are not mutually exclusive, by adopting the academic literacies approach the writing café takes in to account the cultural and contextual components of writing practices, rather than solely focusing on ‘good and bad’ educational judgements about writing. this approach sees literacies as social practices, where discourses and power are intertwined within the institution and students’ learning is ‘at the level of epistemology and identities’ (lea and street, 1997, p.159). ivanic (1998) argues that writing in he is not solely concerned with communicating content, but rather a way of aligning ones beliefs and socio-culturally shaped positions, thus students’ values and interests and the representation of their self is communicated though the words they write. students are often required to adapt their active, first person voices, to passive and impersonal forms of writing, which challenge their personal identities (lea, 1994; ivanic, 1998). providing students with a safe space to question these practices, develop their identities and become a student, allows them to make their own meaning and become part of a community of practice (lave and wenger, 1991), which is at the heart of the writing café’s mission. pritchard mentoring in the writing café: identity, belonging and ownership journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 4 developing a sense of identity as a student is central to an individual’s engagement and thus academic success (wenger, 1998; jackson, 2003). engagement is an important notion that enables students to develop a: sense of connectedness, affiliation, and belonging, while simultaneously offering rich opportunities for learning and development. (bensimon, 2009, xxii-xxiii). due to this, student engagement agendas are the focus of many institutions nationally (healey et al., 2014), and plymouth university has its own commitment with a jointly developed agreement, known as ‘students as partners’ (plymouth university, 2012). central to this agreement is the commitment to work and learn together by encouraging and recognising the value of an inclusive community (plymouth university, 2012). in line with this, and to provide opportunities for engagement with university life, students have been involved with the writing café from the beginning of the project. rather than making individuals ‘fit’ in to a he culture, students should have their identity affirmed, honoured and incorporated into the organisations culture (gallacher et al., 2002; crossan et al., 2003) which is why the learning development team worked with students in the early design stages, facilitating focus groups to ensure the physical design of the space reflected the requirements of their preferred writing areas, and inviting students to become part of a working group to put these designs in to action. the opening of the writing café, and its establishment throughout the term, was truly a collaborative achievement. the writing mentors were given the freedom and support to initiate and run a number of activities and events which were of interest and benefit to them, including co-presenting at national conferences and organising events to encourage the local community to attend the writing café. the study the research was undertaken at plymouth university by a member of the learning development team who jointly co-ordinated the opening and running of the writing café. the space attracts both novice and expert writers and provides them with the opportunity to ‘overcome the challenges and obstacles in their efforts to write effectively and productively’ (moore, 2003, pg. 333) and aims to reframe the traditional notion that academic writing is a ‘solitary, isolated, solely competitive activity’ (grant and knowles, pritchard mentoring in the writing café: identity, belonging and ownership journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 5 cited in moore, 2003, pg. 334). in addition to the daily drop-in peer advice available from the writing mentors, a number of activities and writing events were facilitated during the first term of its opening in partnership with the learning development team. the writing mentors are a group of 12 undergraduate and postgraduate students who undertake paid shifts in the writing café on a weekly basis to provide peer support to fellow students. they come from a broad range of academic disciplines and levels of study, from level 4 to doctoral level, and were given a day’s initial training in peer mentoring by a member of the learning development unit at aston university before beginning their post. throughout the first term they engaged with a structured programme of on-going training and development activities, including: shadowing members of the learning development team and the english language centre, when consent was given; dyslexia awareness training; support and signposting; cultural awareness training and supporting students with revision and exam strategies. all of the students involved in this research were partners in the project, and therefore caution must be taken in regards to wider claims of writing mentors who are not considered as stakeholders in initiatives. methodology the primary aim of the research was to investigate whether or not the writing mentors at the writing café benefited from participating in their role over the course of one academic term (6 th january 2014 to 28 th march 2014). the objectives of the research were to:  understand what benefits and challenges the writing mentors faced in their role.  understand how working in partnership with the learning development team impacted the writing mentors, if at all. in line with the ethical approval obtained, purposive sampling was used as all of the writing mentors, a total of 12, were invited to take part in the study. of the 12, 9 took part. the study adopted the action research philosophy in order to implement changes in the learning development team’s practice, and a multi-methodology was employed to enable triangulation and data analysis as advocated by bryman (2004). this included gathering a weekly reflective journal written by each of the writing mentors throughout the academic term, and conducting semi-structured interviews with 8 participants on 24 th april 2014 (one participant was unavailable for interview). nominal data was also collected to establish if pritchard mentoring in the writing café: identity, belonging and ownership journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 6 the writing mentors could be classified as students from widening participation backgrounds in accordance with the office of fair access’s definitions (offa, 2014). the writing mentors were asked to complete reflective journal entries once a week, but the focus of those entries was not prescribed. reflective journals were chosen as they can provide clues as to the importance of events for the participants and their attitudes about those events (jacelon and imperio, 2005). another intention of the reflective journals was to understand the students’ perspective with the researcher’s influence being minimised as much as possible (jacelon and imperio, 2005). maintaining a journal encouraged the participants to focus on activities and reflections that they valued (jacelon and imperio, 2005) whilst providing the researcher with the opportunity to explore these perspectives during the subsequent interview (elliot, 1997; zimmerman and wieder, 1977). semistructured interviews were also used as the standardisation of a number of questions increases data reliability whilst providing the opportunity to ask spontaneous questions (drever, 1995). a total of seven structured questions were developed and asked to each participant. the stages of data analysis included fully transcribing the audio-recorded interviews and reflective journals and conducting content driven thematic analysis on all of the texts (braun and clarke, 2006). this allowed for the identification and categorisation of relevant themes and patterns, thus allowing interpretation in a meaningful way. initially, the audiorecorded interviews and reflective journals were reviewed several times to get an overall sense of the data. no pre-existing coding systems were used and an inductive approach to content analysis was undertaken. initial themes or codes were identified and all data reviewed again. themes were grouped together and checked for emerging patterns. after reading and re-reading the data and reviewing the interviews multiple times, five themes emerged: personal; teamwork, role boundaries, events and university awareness. discussion the definitions of the themes that emerged from the thematic content analysis are as follows: pritchard mentoring in the writing café: identity, belonging and ownership journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 7  personal – this refers to the perceived benefits reported by the writing mentors, including feeling happy, more confident and developing friendships.  teamwork – this is concerned with the benefits of working as a team of writing mentors, and in partnership with the learning development team.  role boundaries – this refers to the negative or difficult experiences writing mentors faced when supporting fellow students in a new role.  events this refers to a positive experience either running and organising an event or workshop, or participating in the event or training opportunity.  university awareness – this represents the writing mentors having more awareness of plymouth university’s culture, diversity, policy and ambition. personal all participants discussed their perceived personal benefits of undertaking the role, including feeling happy and being more confident after having worked as a writing mentor. although the findings might be constrained by the sample, as the writing mentors come from different backgrounds and may hold different expectations or have different levels of confidence, all participants described positive benefits to their self directly due to the role: it’s definitely given me confidence, something i haven’t had for a very long time. i’ve absolutely loved it…it’s generally made me happier and confident, i’ve made a lot of friends and it’s been a really good experience. seeing people come to these workshops quite sceptical and then having a really positive experience is great. it’s often emotional, and for me it’s made me happy and that is really rewarding. a particular positive is the confidence i…[have] now. i’ve felt more secure in myself as a person [since undertaking work as a writing mentor]. that role gives you confidence when you can help someone. it sounds a bit cheesy but it literally has changed my life. it’s made me so much happier and taught me so much, and i’ve grown so much as a person. it’s made me feel a lot more confident in myself. pritchard mentoring in the writing café: identity, belonging and ownership journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 8 all of the participants in the study are from widening participation (wp) backgrounds, as identified through the gathering of nominal data, and although they can be classified as one group in this sense, as discussed above they all have different expectations and levels of confidence. this perception of personal achievement and increasing confidence is all the more beneficial as the writing café advertised its vacancies for writing mentors across the student body, and perhaps due to plymouth university’s large wp student body, all of those that undertook the role can be categorised in one or more of offa’s definitions of under-represented groups in he (2014); minority ethnic groups, disabled students, students from lower socio-economic groups and mature students. for kennedy, a common characteristic in these students is a lack of confidence and he advocates for staff in he institutions to find ways to engage and support these students (1997). it is possible that the writing café became a way to make contact with these students, supporting them to engage with he through its partnership approach. by working in partnership with students there is the potential to support a greater sense of belonging and community (healey et al., 2014), something specifically reported by one of the participants: i’m a person that has been through a lot of hardship in my life and has made a lot of mistakes and for someone to give you a second chance and to believe in you makes you feel good about yourself…so personally it has given me the confidence to associate with other students and other mentors, something i haven’t done up until working at the cafe… i haven’t really felt part of the university until now and now i do that really should benefit all of us. teamwork the students as partners approach respects students as co-creators of their learning experiences and has the potential to increase student engagement (healey et al., 2014). whilst engagement benefits all students, it can have a particularly positive effect on students from wp backgrounds (pascarella and terenzini, 2005) and can empower traditionally marginalised students to develop the authority and responsibility to co-develop a culturally sustainable pedagogy (cook-sather and agu, 2013). eight of the participants involved in the study discussed benefits of working in partnership with the learning development team, and the data suggests that the shared enthusiasm across the team encouraged and supported them to learn together: pritchard mentoring in the writing café: identity, belonging and ownership journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 9 learning development is so encouraging and supportive. by shadowing them we are all learning together. working as part of the team has been the most positive thing as we are all working together on the same outcome. we all have the same goals and the same passion…and that’s good. it’s so great to come together with likeminded people…it’s also quite refreshing to be involved with younger people. as a mature student throughout my ba i never really associated with the younger crowds, yes in seminars we shared ideas, however i have had the opportunity to get to know these younger folk. this diversity is one of the great things about the writing café. shadowing xxxx was most educative: the approach to students’ work was one of enquiring rather than telling. once again, the relation to the student was very relaxed and dynamic so that, by the end of it, the students were amiably chatting as if you were not their mentor but a trusted friend. that’s how we all feel about working with the learning development team, they listen, they question, we learn together. by facilitating me, and the other mentors, to work as a really strong team the writing café has scurried its way to the peak of my favourite places in plymouth. what this week has shown me is that we are what we portray. to be aware of where we are, how we speak to and treat people. we are all important people…it is crucial to be student focused. we all work together as a team supporting students and each other. the writing café needs to be inviting so the students will want to come back and seek us mentors out again. it does have a positive vibe, a freshness, a newness and an excitement, of which i am pleased to be part of. i feel our first social has had a tremendous impact on the growth and understanding and bonds between the team. i really appreciate being given the freedom to run with my ideas. bonds have been formed between the team…this has led to us working together more effectively as a team due to a greater understanding and pritchard mentoring in the writing café: identity, belonging and ownership journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 10 respect for each other’s strengths and weaknesses. i hope that as the project grows i am presented with more of these responsibilities. role boundaries working together in partnership may have allowed the writing mentors to become involved in areas they would have traditionally been excluded from. by providing them with the freedom to initiate and run with their ideas, such as implementing social events and leading workshops, it was hoped they would actively engage in their learning and develop their identity as individual learners as well as part of a learning community (healey et al., 2014). instead of listening to the students’ voice and responding accordingly, the learning development team gave the writing mentors the opportunity to explore areas they believed to be significant and supported them to recommend solutions and bring about change. in doing this it was hoped that the students could act as ‘change agents’ and ‘active collaborators’ rather than consumers (dunne and zandstra, 2011, pg. 4 – foreword). the extracts overleaf suggest that the participants in this study were grateful for these opportunities and overall felt that the learning development team were also learning alongside themselves. one participant reported that: it feels like we are a member of a community and we can make the changes we want to, rather than just the normal student body. this participant perceived the ‘normal student body’ as those who were not engaged with questioning and having voice in institutional initiatives such as teaching and learning, assessment, research and inquiry and curriculum design, and were the ‘consumers’, instead of co-designers. therefore, to this participant, the normal student body is unable to become part of any direct change. the partnership approach may have supported this student to feel they were responsible, and able to influence areas they believed to be significant, but had traditionally been excluded from. whilst working in partnership appears to have been beneficial in relation to the team dynamics and power balances, the writing mentors also reported the frustrations they faced in undertaking the role. partnership approaches can present ‘challenges to existing ways of being, doing and thinking’ (healey et al., 2014, pg. 9) and four of the writing mentors discussed difficulties in defining their role boundaries on a number of occasions: pritchard mentoring in the writing café: identity, belonging and ownership journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 11 trying to understand and grasp what a mentor is, and how they [writing mentors] can help students to make [the experience with a student] the best they can has been difficult. one of my first experiences mentoring was with an international student, it was challenging in that whilst there was a language barrier, there was also a difficulty in that the student just wanted a proof reader. the main thing has been when international students come and ask about grammar and english. it’s obviously quite hard when you have to tell someone no, especially when they’ve come to you for help so that’s sometimes a tricky situation to deal with but it’s quite a rare one. signposting is crucial. there have been some challenges. i had one girl come in with a piece of creative writing…she wanted me to tell her the plot of her story…i had to guide her to think of ideas without saying ‘do this, do that’. trying to explain critical thinking to international students is hard…i had problems with it when i was writing reports in my first year. they just wanted the answers. my student was an international pupil and the main challenge imposed on our session was a resultant language barrier and consequential misunderstanding during communication. that and they wanted a proof reader. this highlights the importance of supporting the writing mentors with cultural diversity by sharing the practices of learning development more explicitly. as previously discussed, learning development at plymouth university is often viewed as a skills team, mistaken for grammar experts or staff who can fix problems for failing students. our learning developers often have to ensure they do not give answers, but rather support and encourage students to figure out what they would like to say, and act as a critical friend, or sounding board. this occurs with both home and international students, and the ability to navigate conversations that begin with a seemingly simple issue often lead to a much more valuable and constructive discussion. in a sense this can be seen as a ‘threshold concept’ of the profession (meyer and land, 2003) and the extracts above demonstrate how the writing mentors confronted their assumptions of others and their self to navigate pritchard mentoring in the writing café: identity, belonging and ownership journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 12 through this threshold. while the comments suggest that the writing mentors are comfortable defining their boundaries, it is an area that has been challenging for them and additional support and dialogue is required. to ensure a successful partnership in this area, it is important that sensitivity to these tensions is adopted because out of the four writing mentors, only one seemed to be confident in navigating these discussions with students: it began ostensibly with a request for referencing advice, specifically the issue of how to cite when paraphrasing. this resolved, i broadened the discussion…and began talking about how the student might want to develop their own voice. they came to the café with the impression a writing mentor will proofread their work for grammar and language checks. they weren’t confident in their writing so i had to explain in detail my role…and afterwards i helped them go through the argument in their report. it was a good session in the end. events the writing mentors always work in pairs when they are on duty in the writing café, although they may individually peer support fellow students. despite having another student around to discuss any problems with, the data suggests that four of the writing mentors faced difficulties in communicating their role to the students they were supporting. whilst this occurred when dealing with peers on a one to one basis, there is no evidence that the same difficulties arose when running and organising events and workshops attended by a number of people: this week has been quite a successful one. it has been decided that on the 1 st march three writing groups shall come together and have a collaborative writing night whereby people do readings and the mentors run the night. i think this will be great as it builds bridges in the community and gives people a chance to showcase their work. it was an amazing experience [a 24 hour writing marathon], to organise and be a part of, that i might not otherwise have been able to have. it was such a good pritchard mentoring in the writing café: identity, belonging and ownership journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 13 bonding experience for all of the mentors and was really nice to be able to extend our impact to the wider community by the fundraising that we did. the 24 hour writing was a standout moment for me. being part of it and having members of the community come in and encourage us. listening to readers read their own work and seeing vulnerable people go out of their comfort zones to share their writing is amazing. it is possible that because the number of events has exceeded the number of one to one sessions that took place in the writing café, and that the writing mentors were the initiators of many of these events, they were more invested in their success and confident in dealing with them. in addition to this, the data also demonstrates that the writing mentors worked as a team when setting up these events, perhaps offering each other support and social integration into the role. perhaps the identity of the writing mentors as a cohesive group is currently stronger than that of each individual member, which is not surprising given the difficulty in identity formation in he today (scanlon et al., 2007). university awareness the final theme, which emerged from the data analysis, was university awareness. four participants demonstrated a stronger awareness of the university, particularly in the field of learning development: it’s been fantastic as you are professionally supported and have opportunities to shadow either learning development advisors or dyslexia advisors and mentors so you get to see more than you would if you were just a student. the conference was great. it was really interesting to see that learning development isn’t really just a little room… it’s a whole network. it’s a whole culture of people that are out there that are very intelligent and dedicated to what they do. they genuinely care about the student experience and about learning. that was powerful, seeing that connection with the wider academic world. pritchard mentoring in the writing café: identity, belonging and ownership journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 14 i think that seeing what learning development is all about, the fact that it feels absolutely integrated with the student experience…it’s about bettering yourself and that’s exactly what university is about. that’s been quite powerful for me. i didn’t know how many international students there are. and they have it hard. really hard. sitting down next to one who had fled from war really makes you think. of these 4 participants, 2 of them were provided with the opportunity to co-deliver academic papers with the learning development team at a national conference. this undoubtedly gave them a greater insight into the current practices and issues regarding learning development today, and provided them with the opportunity to gain a wider view of the he system and the challenges it faces. additionally, the data suggests that 3 of the writing mentors have started to understand the culture of british he through the eyes of international students, something that may provide the platform for them to question practices, continue to develop their identities as students, and act as change agents. conclusion this study set out to investigate the writing mentor’s perception of the benefits and challenges associated with their role during one term at the writing café. the findings suggest that working with students as partners had a number of benefits including:  students felt able to make changes and run events they deemed important.  their perceived self-confidence increased and they became happier as a result of the work.  some were able to make connections between the work at the writing café and the institutions objectives as well as the aims of the wider academic community. whilst the findings were largely positive, it is also clear that future support should focus on role boundaries, continuing to support changing individual identities and peer supporting international students. it has also become apparent that integrating new writing mentors into the existing team will require attention and considerable thought to ensure they too feel like partners and are able to implement change. recognition also needs to be made to the fact that being involved in the design of the project and forming the original community pritchard mentoring in the writing café: identity, belonging and ownership journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 15 of practice may have helped some students feel a sense of ownership of the project, thus careful consideration of how the new writing mentors are introduced to the existing team is needed, to ensure they are supported in their role and valued as individuals, as well as part of the team. the approach of working with students as partners and re-addressing power balances appears to have been a beneficial way of co-ordinating the project and supporting the writing mentors throughout their first term, and it could act as a case study for other institutions looking to initiate student-led activities as: engaging students and staff effectively as partners in learning and teaching is arguably one of the most important issues facing higher education in the 21 st century (healey et al., 2014, pg. 7). as the writing café moves from a pilot project to the next stage of its development, it will be crucial to reflect on the findings from this action research project and ensure the writing mentors are fully supported when working in partnership with the learning development team, particularly due to the ever increasing number of students accessing support there. further research is needed to investigate to what extent the writing mentors support helps students visiting the café, for workshops, events and individual sessions. additionally, research is currently being undertaken to investigate whether or not the physical space impacts the way students access support, and whether or not this has an effect on the nature of the conversations which take place in the alternative learning space that is the writing café. references avery, s. and bryan, c. (2001) ‘improving spoken and written english: from research to practice’, teaching in higher education, 6(2), pp. 169-182. bensimon, e. m. (2009) ‘foreword’, in harper, s. r. and quaye, s. j. (eds.), student engagement in higher education. new york and london: routledge, pp. xxi-xxvi. bhabha, h. (1994) the location of culture. new york: routledge. pritchard mentoring in the writing café: identity, belonging and ownership journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 16 brauer, g. (2003) ‘centres for writing and reading – bridging the gap between university and school education’, in bjork, l., brauer, g., rienecker, l. and jorgensen, p.s. (eds), teaching academic writing in european higher education. london: kluwer academic, pp. 135-50. braun, v. and clarke, v. (2006) ‘using thematic analysis in psychology’, qualitative research in psychology, 3(2), pp. 77-101. bryman, a. (2004) social research methods. 2 nd edn. oxford: oxford university press. cook-sather, a. and agu, p. (2013) ‘student consultants of colour and faculty members working together toward culturally sustaining pedagogy’, in groccia, j. e and cruz, l. (eds.) to improve the academy: resources for faculty, instructional, and organisational development, volume 32, pp. 271-285. crossan, b., field, j., gallacher, j. and merrill, b. (2003) ‘understanding participation in learning for non-traditional adult learners: learning careers and the construction of learning identities’, british journal of sociology of education, 24(1), pp. 55-67. drever, e (1995) using semi-structured interviews in small-scale research: a teacher's guide. edinburgh: scottish council for research in education. dunne, e. and zandstra, r. (2011) students as change agents: new ways of engaging with learning and teaching in higher education. bristol: a joint university of exeter/escalate/higher education academy publication. available from: http://escalate.ac.uk/8064 (accessed: 8 june 2014). elliot, h. (1997) ‘the use of diary methods in sociological research on health experience’, sociological research online, 2(2), pp. 33-38 [online]. available at: http://www.socresonline.org.uk/2/2/7.html (accessed: 18 november 2015). ellis, m. (2004) the coffee-house: a cultural history. london: weidenfeld & nicolson. http://escalate.ac.uk/8064 http://www.socresonline.org.uk/2/2/7.html pritchard mentoring in the writing café: identity, belonging and ownership journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 17 gallacher, j., crossan, b., field, j. and merrill, b. (2002) ‘learning careers and the social space: exploring the fragile identities of adult returners in the new further education’, international journal of lifelong learning, 21(6), pp. 493-509. healey, m., flint, a. and harrington, k. (2014) ‘engagement through partnership: students as partners in learning and teaching in higher education, the higher education academy, july 2014. available at: https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/sites/default/files/resources/engagement_through_pa rtnership.pdf (accessed: 18 november 2015). hill, p., tinker, a. and catterall, s. (2010) ‘from deficiency to development: the evolution of academic skills provision at one uk university’, journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2, february, pp. 1-19. hilsdon, j. (2014) ‘peer learning for change in higher education’, innovations in education and teaching international, 51(3), pp. 244-254. doi: 10.1080/14703297.2013.796709. ivanic, r. (1998) writing and identity: the discoursal construction of identity in academic writing. amsterdam: john benjamins publishing company. jacelon, c. and imperio, k. (2005) ‘participant diaries as a source of data in research with older adults’, qualitative health research, 15(7), pp. 991-997. jackson, c. (2003) ‘transitions into higher education: gendered implications for academic self-concept’, oxford review of education, 29(3), pp. 331-346. kennedy, h. (1997) learning works: widening participation in further education. the further education funding council (fefc). available at: http://dera.ioe.ac.uk/15073/ (accessed: 18 november 2015). lave, j. and wenger, e. (1991) situated learning: legitimate peripheral participation, cambridge: cambridge university press. https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/sites/default/files/resources/engagement_through_partnership.pdf https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/sites/default/files/resources/engagement_through_partnership.pdf http://dera.ioe.ac.uk/15073/ pritchard mentoring in the writing café: identity, belonging and ownership journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 18 lea, m. (1994) ‘“i thought i could write till i came here”: student writing in higher education’, in gibbs, g. (ed.) improving student learning: theory and practice. oxford: oxford centre for staff development, pp. 216-226. lea, m., street, b. (1997) perspectives on academic literacies: an institutional approach. swindon: economic and social research council (esrc). learnhigher (2009) learning to write: writing to learn. academic writing: a literature review. available at: http://new.learnhigher.ac.uk/resources/files/academic_writing_literature.pdf (accessed: 20 june 2014). meyer, j. h. f. and land r. (2003) threshold concepts and troublesome knowledge: linkages to ways of thinking and practising within the disciplines. available at: http://www.etl.tla.ed.ac.uk/docs/etlreport4.pdf moje, e. b. (2007) ‘developing socially just subject-matter instruction: a review of the literature on disciplinary literacy teaching’, review of research in education, 31(1), pp. 1-44. moje, e. b., mcintosh-ciechanowski, k., kramer, k., ellis, l., carrillo, r. and collazo, t. (2004). ‘working toward third space in content area literacy: an examination of everyday funds of knowledge and discourse’, reading research quarterly, 39(1), pp. 38–70. moore, s. (2003) ‘writers’ retreats for academics: exploring and increasing the motivation to write’, journal of further and higher education, 27(3) pp. 333-342. murray, n. and kirton, b. (2006), ‘an analysis of the current situation’, in davies, s., swinburne, d. and williams, g. (eds.) writing matters: the royal literary fund report on student writing in higher education. london: the royal literary fund, pp. 7-13. http://new.learnhigher.ac.uk/resources/files/academic_writing_literature.pdf http://www.etl.tla.ed.ac.uk/docs/etlreport4.pdf pritchard mentoring in the writing café: identity, belonging and ownership journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 19 national committee of inquiry into higher education (1997) higher education in the learning society (the dearing report). london: national committee of inquiry into higher education. available at: http://www.educationengland.org.uk/documents/dearing1997/dearing1997.html (accessed: 18 november 2015). office for fair access (offa) (2014) promoting fair access to higher education. available at: https://www.offa.org.uk/press/frequently-asked-questions/#groups (accessed: 12 august 2014). pascarella, e. t. and terenzini, p.t (2005) how college affects students: a third decade of research, volume 2. san francisco, ca: jossey-bass plymouth university (2012) strategy 2020. plymouth, uk: plymouth university. available at: https://www.plymouth.ac.uk/uploads/production/document/path/1/1667/plymouth _university_strategy_2020.pdf. (accessed: 18 november 2015). russell, d.r. (2003) ‘preface’, in bjork, l., brauer, g., reinecker, l., and jorgensen, p.s. (eds) teaching academic writing in european higher education. london: kluwer academic publishers. scanlon, l., rowling, l., weber, z. (2007) ‘you don’t have an identity…you are just lost in a crowd: forming a student identity in the first-year transition to university’, journal of youth studies, 10(2), pp. 223-241. wenger, e. (1998) communities of practice: learning, meaning and identity. cambridge: cambridge university press. wingate, u. (2006) ‘doing away with ‘study skills’’, teaching in higher education, 11(4), pp. 457-469. yeats, r., reddy, p., wheeler, a., senior, c., and murray, j. (2010) ‘what a difference a writing centre makes: a small scale study’, education + training, 52(6/7), pp. 499507. http://www.educationengland.org.uk/documents/dearing1997/dearing1997.html https://www.offa.org.uk/press/frequently-asked-questions/#groups https://www.plymouth.ac.uk/uploads/production/document/path/1/1667/plymouth_university_strategy_2020.pdf https://www.plymouth.ac.uk/uploads/production/document/path/1/1667/plymouth_university_strategy_2020.pdf pritchard mentoring in the writing café: identity, belonging and ownership journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 20 zimmerman, d. h. and wieder, d. l. (1977) ‘the diary: diary interview method‘, urban life, 5(4), pp. 479-498. author details christie has worked in higher education for the past 5 years, and is a full time learning development advisor at plymouth university. she works with students across all disciplines and levels of study, with the aim of empowering them to achieve their best at university, both academically and personally. she teaches on a wide variety of undergraduate and postgraduate programmes and supports academics to design engaging and interactive sessions embedding the values of learning development into the disciplines. she is the co-founder and coordinator of an alternative learning space on the university’s campus, the writing café, and is particularly interested in the complex relationship between space, learning and identity. she has carried out collaborative research and pedagogic work in the areas of curriculum development, learning space and policy, students’ belonging and identity, and peer support. she is currently undertaking a professional doctorate in education (edd) and uses this as a vehicle to interrogate her own practice and the changing practices of higher education institutions. mentoring in the writing café: identity, belonging and ownership abstract introduction the study methodology discussion personal teamwork role boundaries events university awareness conclusion references author details journal of learning development in higher education journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 1: february 2009 undergraduate students’ perceptions of the role and utility of written assessment feedback richard bailey northumbria university, uk abstract student dissatisfaction in higher education with written feedback on their assessed work is a topical issue given the publicised findings of the national student survey. this paper presents excerpts from interviews with students about their experience with written feedback together with analytical and interpretive commentary. the context of the research was a post-92 university with a wide range of higher education provision and a commitment to widening participation and student retention. the paper begins with an overview of feedback studies in higher education and a summary of current agendas. the data and analysis are presented in three sections. a final discussion section outlines some salient findings from the research keywords: written feedback; student learning and academic literacy; institutional practices written feedback: new practices and new concerns hounsell (2003) comments that the provision of feedback on students’ written work is in steep decline and enumerates the following causes: the semesterisation of the teaching year; modularisation of courses to facilitate flexibility in curricula but with the condensation of taught components into semesters; the consequent end-loading of assessment; formal procedures around quality assurance (marking procedures and external adjudication); the impact of large class sizes and increased marking loads. there are two major consequences: teachers have less time to write comments on students’ work and there are fewer opportunities for tutorial interactions. in these conditions it is difficult for feedback to work optimally. for one thing tutors are often bailey undergraduate students’ perceptions of the role and utility of written assessment feedback sceptical students will read and value their comments because in a high turnover and assessment focused system students are increasingly perceived as instrumentally motivated – focused on marks rather than the educational value of written comments (higgins, et al, 2002). furthermore, assessment feedback in the written form may be the only feedback students receive and consequently they get little clear input from tutors on developing their overall academic literacy (catt and gregory, 2006): a responsibility that often devolves on non-embedded support staff (orr and blythman, 2003). in the current climate of change and reform the institutional response has been to standardise and systematise the teaching and learning context by introducing quality assurance measures in greater number. structured feedback forms or ‘pro-formas’ especially in large undergraduate (semesterised and modularised) courses are increasingly used in the delivery of written feedback. the following factors have motivated this shift: a concern with greater transparency and equity in assessing students; achieving greater consistency across (and within) departments; qaa requirements emphasising formal articulation of criteria and learning outcomes (hounsell, 2003). critics point to a pervasive techno-rationalism in the processes and procedures of the academy, regulating and sanitising teaching and learning interactions (orr, 2005) and enforcing uniformity with the replacement of ‘trust’ by documentation as ‘contract’ (morley, 2003). lillis (2006) points out that this state of affairs sustains and reinforces the monologic nature of pedagogical and communicative practices in teacher-student interactions: conformity and control is emphasised over contestation and negotiation. the growing formative assessment literature in higher education espouses a constructivist paradigm of teaching and learning which is promoted as studentcentred. for example, hounsell (2003) distinguishes between ‘extrinsic’ and ‘intrinsic’ feedback. the former is transmitted to the student after a task is completed and would include written feedback. the latter is part of the learning experience of students while engaged in academic work and is therefore embedded and continuous. nicol and macfarlane-dick (2006) outline seven principles of good feedback in accordance with this notion to empower students as ‘self-regulated learners’. hounsell (2007) advocates ‘enhancing the congruence’ (biggs, 1999, journal of learning development in higher education, issue 1: february 2009 2 bailey undergraduate students’ perceptions of the role and utility of written assessment feedback 2003) of feedback with curriculum goals and teaching, learning and assessment strategies. as haggis (2003) points out this is the sort of reasoning that is valued and rewarded in higher education largely because it is backed up by a long standing research tradition and literature and claims that both teaching-learning contexts and the capabilities of students can be moulded to achieve and fulfil higher education goals. the academic literacies approach (lea and street, 1998) on the other hand, focuses on student academic literacy development as situated and contextualised social practice. this notion challenges the assumption that language is a transparent medium and that meanings are uncomplicatedly transmitted from teacher to learner in feedback interactions (lea and street, 2000). given that it is concerns over written feedback in both its quality and substantive nature that persistently arise in consultations with the student body, academic literacies theorising adds an important dimension to researching and understanding the student experience. however, in the present climate of higher education critical perspectives are marginalised in favour of the constructivism underpinning the research on formative learning and assessment. the current situation raises a few questions about the role and capabilities of learning and study developers, especially those working directly with students in the capacity of study skills advisers. learning developers are often cast in the role of demystifying the practices of higher education and mediating between course requirements and learning support needs. this extends to (at least in the perception of many students) the meanings associated with assessment criteria and the language of feedback, both of which have become increasingly intertwined. on the other hand, learning developers are not privy to tacit and less tangible practices that are part of pedagogical interactions in the disciplines. the research data the research comprised semi-structured interviews with student respondents who came from a cross-section of disciplinary areas. interviews were conducted with individuals and small groups of up to three students. some students were journal of learning development in higher education, issue 1: february 2009 3 bailey undergraduate students’ perceptions of the role and utility of written assessment feedback approached directly through contact with their subject teachers while others were approached through the study skills centres. participants were traditional and ‘nontraditional’ (the latter often being mature-age and returnees to education in applied and vocational subject areas). all student participants were undergraduates and some studying one or two year diploma (represented by teaching staff in those curricular areas as equivalent to at least advanced degree level) courses in nursing and social work. many of the sample were students following joint degrees or on modularised courses in applied and vocational areas. the departmental and disciplinary background of students is given in parenthesis following each of the data excerpts. additional information is also included in some instances using square ([ ]) brackets. questions asked by the interviewer are italicised in the excerpts. initially the following questions were asked: what do you like/dislike about written feedback? what do find useful/less useful about written feedback? the emphasis was on open and exploratory talk to allow respondents to consider their experience and perceptions more reflectively and in depth. in the course of the interviews reference was made to the form and delivery of feedback. in some cases students were able to produce documentation in the form of structured feedback sheets and assessment guides. the data are presented under three headings: • students’ attitudes and responses to feedback in general • demystifying the language of feedback • dealing with forms and feedback instruments (1) students’ attitudes and responses to feedback in general students often said they attach importance to receiving and reading feedback and are willing to take notice as the following excerpt illustrates. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 1: february 2009 4 bailey undergraduate students’ perceptions of the role and utility of written assessment feedback for me it is important to work on the feedback. the best feedback is that which highlights the flaws in an essay. when it is critical it is most positive. (second year, joint-honours, humanities) advice is also valued where it is linked to tangible improvements such as better grades; in other words students value feed-forward. what i find most useful is advice on specific ways i can improve. i prefer comments like ‘if you change this you can get x%’ and so on (second year, applied sciences) in general students were more vocal on the shortcomings of feedback on their assessed work. unsurprisingly the brevity and generality of comments, for example, all too often leave students in the dark. ‘the essay doesn’t flow’ is a comment i get frequently. i still don’t know what they mean. red pen on your work or just exclamation marks; what’s the message? if there is no more explanation students just leave it and move on (second year, nursing degree) the next excerpt indicates a perennial concern for students over the utility of written feedback. it is not feedback or feed-forward they value but actual contact time with tutors to follow up. i like meeting with the tutor to talk about my written work. it is all very well getting feedback comments such as ‘you should have developed this more’. the question is: well how? (first year, humanities) for others, there is a further concern associated with their interactions with teaching staff. students are reluctant to talk to tutors [before writing] because they feel they might look foolish but you have to make the effort to talk to journal of learning development in higher education, issue 1: february 2009 5 bailey undergraduate students’ perceptions of the role and utility of written assessment feedback teachers if you are in doubt (mature-age, second year, social sciences) the following is a mature-age student’s account of why he sought the assistance of the learning and study support specialist. i came [to the study skills centre] to get some feedback on my assignment. i got 50%. the marker had put question marks on much of the work. i had to guess what half of them meant. this is always a grey area. i put it down to me not coming from an academic background (mature-age, second year [direct entrant], social work degree) the clear implication is that students such as the ones in the last two excerpts assume that it is a deficiency within them that is the basis of the problem. they have different inclinations: the first would like to be proactive and is aware that her interests are best served through direct contact with the academic member(s) of staff who set the assessed work but is inhibited about doing so; the second seeks diagnostic help after the event and assumes that the learning and support specialist can provide it. (2) demystifying the language of feedback it is not just feedback per se but the register and discourse of academic life for nontraditional students. all these big words! you would like it in layman’s terms but i suppose that wouldn’t be academic. no one wants to admit they are not sure what things mean; no one wants to stand out. (matureage, first year, nursing diploma) the following is an example of uncertainty about the meanings and register of feedback that occurred on numerous occasions with students in applied and journal of learning development in higher education, issue 1: february 2009 6 bailey undergraduate students’ perceptions of the role and utility of written assessment feedback vocational areas. it indicates that there is a dissonance between what teachers write and intend and what students know and understand. c) we get smarmy comments like ‘you’re not at level 5 now’. we have to work out what she wants by passing on her comments. h) we’ve got the nursing skills but it is just the academic writing what do other classmates think? c) everyone would generally like more information on what they mean. they use terms like level 5 but they don’t explain what they mean. h) i want to know what level 1, 2 3 and 4 are! [both laugh] (third year, undergraduate nurses) a nursing student points out another complication that students face with the language of feedback: teachers don’t mean the same thing when they use the terms associated with assessment of and commentary on students’ work. when tutors use words like ‘critical evaluation’ nobody challenges them. teachers when they try to explain words like ‘analyse’ don’t do it in the same way. ‘analyse’ and ‘discuss’ – they don’t really mean different things do they? feedback is very useful but if you ask for extra tutorial time you simply get directed to the study skills centre (mature-age, first year, diploma) the second comment indicates why students sometimes seek learning and study support and the messages that are given to them, albeit implicitly about what this provision is there to do. the following excerpt is from an interview with traditional alevel entrants in the second year of a single honours sociology degree. is the word ‘structure’ clear to you? s) yeah, clear a) an essay structure is clear, yeah has anybody ever really explained words like this to you? s) in the first year we had a ‘skills’ module. there was some help with essay writing and understanding titles in that [semester one, journal of learning development in higher education, issue 1: february 2009 7 bailey undergraduate students’ perceptions of the role and utility of written assessment feedback first year]. but really at a-level you get a feeling for these words; ‘discuss’ and ‘explain’ for example on two occasions interviewees produced front sheets with tutor comments on them. a second year student studying a joint degree who could make no sense of the following comments on his essay: …it lacks proper academic subtlety, …there is an endemic vagueness throughout …writing skills will make or break a piece of work of this length an international student (from china), and a direct entrant to the third year of study, was left guessing when confronted with the following praise “it does so in a systematic and logical way”. when asked to explain the phrase “well structured and argued” the student pondered “is this telling me i have done well in the essay or is it suggesting to argue and structure more?” asked why she hadn’t consulted her tutor directly she replied “i would like to ask my teacher but he is too busy”. in such instances students have few options, carry on regardless, try to work with peers (and risk accusations of copying and collusion) or book a session with a study skills adviser in the learning development unit. (3) dealing with forms and feedback instruments the following excerpt is from a small group session with students in the third year of study who were asked to comment on a structured feedback form used in their subject area. e) the stuff on the left hand side [the pro-forma categories] has been crossed out as if the comments [global] have been written to cover all those areas do you understand these statements clearly, for example ‘appropriate depth of analysis’ [feedback comment on the form]? h) yes journal of learning development in higher education, issue 1: february 2009 8 bailey undergraduate students’ perceptions of the role and utility of written assessment feedback did you always know what a comment like this meant? h) not in the first year. i didn’t have a clue what they were about. i didn’t know what the things on the left hand side meant until i got a mark for it. but with a mark in the high 70s what else can they say? what if you had got a low mark, say in the 40s? h) i’d be knocking on the door for an explanation e) there’s no analysis here, just very general comments h) normally mind, we do get the essay back with comments in the margins as well. e) that’s better. i spoke to a student in our year who got a high mark and usually does well in his work. everything on the left-hand side of the form was crossed out. the comments on the right next to each category just read ‘as usual’! i think they [tutors] have a sense of humour too! [both laugh] (third year undergraduates, social sciences, mature-age) the teacher crossed out the categories on the left which atomise the feedback (categories included words like ‘structure’, argument’, ‘use of evidence’ for example) and wrote global comments. the assumption seems to be that in the third year of study students have attained a performance level that renders the form superfluous. the students are nonetheless critical and point out that they used to receive comments on their scripts. quality assurance measures are restricting the extent tutors are able to do this. the students are unequivocal about how they would have reacted had they received low marks for their work in their first or second year and only had structured feedback to rely on. the excerpt also reveals the tacit and social practice nature of tutor-student interactions in which, in this case at least, neither teacher nor student sees the form as central in the feedback process the following excerpt from a traditional student indicates some generic problems that all students are likely to experience with forms. tutors often leave out the ticky box stuff. in our study group students don’t bother because if something is ‘partially achieved’ there is no elaboration on it. i’ve never had a tutor write a comment journal of learning development in higher education, issue 1: february 2009 9 bailey undergraduate students’ perceptions of the role and utility of written assessment feedback that relates to a ticky box. they possibly use them as a guide. they don’t make it explicit and they expect you to sort it out. students want explanation. you can get an essay where all the ‘partly achieved’ boxes are ticked. but if the mark is good i won’t look any further. (second year undergraduate, joint honours, humanities) tutors do not always write comments that relate to the tick-boxes, and they can be indistinct about what they intend. another student felt that the pro-forma categories were vague and concluded that the tutor obviously felt the same: s/he had consistently ticked on the line between two of the boxes all the way through! students want explanation and are left frustrated by the cursory and oblique nature of what they get. a humanities student has his own ideas about how to change the form and what improvement could be made. what would you change about this feedback form? i’d get rid of ‘partly achieved’. it’s the most vaguest thing i’ve ever seen. there should be a line or some space for the tutor to qualify what he has written and why he has chosen one or the other. it seems that the form is based on administration. i think students read the mark but otherwise they don’t take that much notice. (third year, joint honours, humanities) in the following instance a detailed and unmodified form is presented to students in an applied and vocational area without any clarification. they use a pro-forma. there are boxes with 0-10 and criteria next to each one. in the lower box it is ‘describe’, in the middle it is ‘describe and compare’ and in the higher boxes it is things like ‘analyse’ and ‘evaluate’. people don’t really get it. if you asked students what these words mean i can guarantee 90% of them wouldn’t really understand them (mature-age, second year undergraduate, health and nursing) journal of learning development in higher education, issue 1: february 2009 10 bailey undergraduate students’ perceptions of the role and utility of written assessment feedback the interviewee was disorientated and she feels she is speaking for other students. it is as if the teacher sees the proforma as a simple check-list: a set of self-evident components in the assessment process. in a constructively aligned teaching context where meanings are not given but created in the learning activities and learning is incremental (biggs, 1999, 2003) it may not seem surprising that a student is confused by big words such as ‘critically analyse’ or ‘evaluate’ even in the second year of degree study. what appears interesting in the above excerpt is that neither teacher nor student seems to understand the contents of the form or how to use it. discussion the evidence of this research suggests that students, at all levels, frequently find the language of feedback comment inconsistent and vague and are confused about the meanings of assessment criteria. students want explanation and are left frustrated by the cursory and oblique nature of the feedback they get. students who have performed well in their written assessments find that ‘general comments’ lack substance. they would prefer more detail for formative development but they, too, are caught in what hounsell (1987) refers to as the ‘cycle of deprivation’. this research also suggests that this confusion extends to other areas of the discourse of higher education. students are meant to acquire an understanding of this through the documentation (module guides, etc) they receive as they progress through their studies. they are exhorted to write in order to demonstrate their learning, meet criteria and satisfy outcomes at the appropriate level (’you are not in level 5 now!’) but they have difficulty connecting with this formal and remote discourse and this continues to be the experience of some students well into the advanced stages of study. it is not their language. the evidence also suggests that practices around structured feedback instruments have deleterious effects on the teaching and learning interface. firstly, standardisation restricts writing on scripts and reduces teacher comments on forms to a minimum. secondly, pro-formas which embody assessment criteria do not recognise that words such as ‘structure’ or ‘argument’, which routinely appear are likely to be contextually discipline and even module specific (lea and street, journal of learning development in higher education, issue 1: february 2009 11 bailey undergraduate students’ perceptions of the role and utility of written assessment feedback 1998). this is a potential problem for students on joint degrees and those on modularised courses in applied and practice-based areas (as most in this sample were). the forms assume a transmission model of teaching and sustain monologic practices (lillis, 2006) arguably widening rather than narrowing the comprehension gap for many, especially non-traditional, students. furthermore, the use of forms is leading to routinisation in the provision of (written) feedback compounding the negative effects of the preceding points. finally the data reveal that teaching staff can be inconsistent in their use of these instruments. they may ignore the protocol of the form altogether crossing out or writing over the categories. students are sceptical and assume forms are based on administration rather than supporting them with their learning and academic literacy development. students want more than comment and criticism, or to be left to compute through logical deduction or inference what is intended; they want to know ‘how’. when this is missing there are limited options: carry on regardless or ‘book a tutorial’. the latter is not always available. feedback should be linked into the tutorial system but this is happening less and less because teachers have fewer opportunities to meet with students outside timetabled sessions. students may work together in order to decipher the written feedback they receive (they want things in ‘layman’s terms’). a problem with this strategy is that students are more likely to use an informal register in order to decipher feedback. either way the situation arguably works against the internalisation of the language of outcomes and assessment criteria, negatively affects the presumed benefits of constructivism/alignment and accentuates the dissonance between students and the institution and its practices. what are the implications of these findings for the role and capabilities of learning developers? learning developers are differently positioned and have varying remits according to particular institutional arrangements and requirements. however, an emerging question is in what ways are the boundaries between academic and learning support roles shifting and changing? what factors are, or will, determine this? it is an area of enquiry learning developers are exploring in their own contexts and collectively in order to engage in discussion and debate regarding the nature and demands of their role and consider the wider implications for institutional practices, development and change. the higher education academy draft strategic plan for journal of learning development in higher education, issue 1: february 2009 12 bailey undergraduate students’ perceptions of the role and utility of written assessment feedback 2008 – 2013 states that a core strategic aim is to disseminate evidence-informed approaches to enhance the student learning experience. a question relevant to critical debate about higher education practices in general and around the current and future role of learning development is not just ‘what’, but ‘whose’ evidence is valued. references biggs, j, (2003) teaching for quality learning at the university. (2nd ed) buckingham: open university press biggs, j, (1999) ‘what the student does: teaching for enhanced learning’. higher education research and development, 18, (1): pp.55-75 catt, r. and gregory, g, (2006) ‘the point of writing: is student writing in higher education developed or merely assessed?’ pp. 16-29 in: ganobscik-williams (ed.), teaching academic writing in uk higher education: theories, practices and models. universities in the 21st century series. palgrave. macmillan haggis, t, (2003) ‘constructing images of ourselves? a critical investigation into ‘approaches to learning’ research in higher education’. british educational research journal, 29, 1: pp.89-104 higgins, r., hartley, p. and skelton, a, (2002) ‘the conscientious consumer: reconsidering the role of assessment feedback in student learning’. studies in higher education, 27, 1: pp.53-64 hounsell, d, (2007) ‘towards more sustainable feedback to students’, pp. 101-113 in: boud, d. & n. falchikov, (eds.) rethinking assessment in higher education: learning for the longer term. london: routledge. hounsell, d, (2003) ‘student feedback, learning and development’, pp. 67-78 in: m. slowey & d. watson, (eds.) higher education and the lifecourse. open university press hounsell, d, (1987) ‘essay writing and the quality of feedback’, pp. 109-119 in: j. t. e. richardson, m. w. eysenck & d. w. piper, (eds.) student learning: research in educational and cognitive psychology. milton keynes: society for research in higher education and open university press journal of learning development in higher education, issue 1: february 2009 13 bailey undergraduate students’ perceptions of the role and utility of written assessment feedback lea, m. and street, b, (2000) ‘staff feedback: an academic literacies approach’, pp. 62-81 in: lea. m. and stierer, b, (eds.) student writing in higher education: new contexts. open university press. lea, m. and street, b, (1998) ‘student writing in higher education: an academic literacies approach’. studies in higher education, 23, 2, pp. 157-172. lillis, t, (2006) ‘moving towards an ‘academic literacies’ pedagogy: dialogues of participation’, pp. 30-45 in: ganobscik-williams (ed.), teaching academic writing in uk higher education: theories, practices and models. universities in the 21st century series. palgrave. macmillan morley, l, (2003) quality and power in higher education. the society for research into higher education. open university press. nicol, d. and macfarlane-dick, d, (2006) ‘formative assessment and self-regulated learning: a model and seven principles of good feedback’. studies in higher education, 31, 2: pp.199-218 orr, s. (2005) ‘transparent opacity: assessment in the inclusive academy’, pp. 175187 in: c. rust (ed.) improving student learning: diversity and inclusivity. the oxford centre for staff and learning development orr, s. and blythman, m. (2003) ‘an analysis of the discourse of study support at the london institute’, pp. 175-184 in: g. rijlarsdam (series ed.) & l.björk, g. bräuer, l. rienecker & p. stray jörgensen (volume eds.), studies in writing, volume 12, teaching academic writing in european higher education. kluwer academic publishers: netherlands author details richard bailey is a former senior lecturer in the school of arts and social sciences at northumbria university. he is currently completing his full-time doctoral study in the areas of teaching, learning and student academic literacy development in the contemporary context of higher education journal of learning development in higher education, issue 1: february 2009 14 undergraduate students’ perceptions of the role and utility of written assessment feedback abstract written feedback: new practices and new concerns the research data (1) students’ attitudes and responses to feedback in general (2) demystifying the language of feedback (3) dealing with forms and feedback instruments discussion references author details literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 5: march 2013 facing the future: the changing shape of academic skills support at bournemouth university neil ford bournemouth university, uk melissa bowden bournemouth university, uk abstract this paper explores the potential impact of changes to higher education in england on student expectations, engagement, lifestyles and diversity, and outlines implications for the development of digital literacy within academic skills support at bournemouth university (bu). we will investigate how tackling resource constraints with organisational change can also enable efficient, centralised provision of support materials that utilise networks to overcome the risk of fragmented support for digital literacy. we will also look at how changing delivery modes for support can accommodate changing student lifestyles whilst tackling a weakness of centralised support for digital literacy: that it can become detached from the student’s subject-focused academic practice. finally we will explore how involving students in developing support can help us to face changes to student expectations and engagement whilst ensuring that materials are authentic and speak to learners in their own voice. keywords: digital literacy; social media; organisational change; higher education; learning support; academic skills. organisational change for efficiency and silo busting! ‘the browne report’ (independent review of higher education and student finance in england, 2010) and ‘higher education: students at the heart of the system’ (department for business innovation and skills, 2011) both herald an age where learners will pay more ford and bowden facing the future: the changing shape of academic skills support at bournemouth university directly for their education than ever before. there are no certainties about how this will affect change, but it is safe to assume that organisational change will be a feature in how universities cope with financial uncertainty. we should see these changes as opportunities to look at how our organisational structures support digital literacy. the organisational position of learning support varies greatly across the sector and has been subject to a great deal of change over the past twenty years. some institutions locate support within academic departments, whilst for others it sits within centralised, professional services. in some cases, support comes from a combination of professional and academic departments (hanson, 2005). perhaps particularly relevant to support for digital literacy is the concept of ‘convergence’ – the bringing together of services such as it and computing, libraries and information resources, and learning support (biddiscombe, 1999). this has led to a blurring of roles, for example with librarians increasingly taking on support for it and pedagogic support (biddiscombe, 2002). this is coincident with the emergence of learning technology as a discipline, and again there is great variation in roles supporting blended and e-learning and where these roles sit within the organisation (ooms et al., 2008). goodfellow (2011) provides interesting commentary on the evolution of the plural term ‘digital literacies’ as incorporating a range of other literacies ‘including information and communications technology (ict) literacy, technology literacy, information literacy, media literacy, visual literacy and communications literacy’ (goodfellow, 2011, p.133). it is not uncommon for these skills and practices to be supported by separate departments within universities (beetham et al., 2010). to a student, such centralised support can become compartmentalised: requiring them to contact various different departments, different communities of practice with different approaches to skills development (goodfellow, 2011). an example of this used to be found in the online skills support communities within the virtual learning environment (vle) at bu. previously, there was an information skills community managed by the library and an academic skills community managed by learning support. this was an artificial division based on our organisational structure rather than the way students wanted to access support. why should they go to one place for guidance on essay writing, but another for help with referencing? in 2010, this division was remedied by integrating support materials into a single, new academic skills community journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 2 ford and bowden facing the future: the changing shape of academic skills support at bournemouth university on the vle. this was made possible by organisational change, which brought together librarians, learning technologists and languages support into a single section called library and learning support (lls) with a remit for academic skills. the new community benefitted from the professional skills of librarians in selecting and organising the materials and the technical skills of learning technologists in designing the interface and integrating the community within the vle. it also benefitted from the educational experience of the extended group, which includes practitioners with teaching qualifications, fellows of the hea, postgraduate researchers, and an expert on languages and academic writing. support for referencing and plagiarism at bu provides another example of how organisational change has helped to avoid a ‘systemic’ problem of centralised support: that individual competencies can become divorced from each other in the overall development of academic practice (beetham et al., 2010, p.4). whilst introducing online assignment handling, we have seen cross-over between the academic practice of avoiding plagiarism, which has traditionally been supported by librarians in partnership with academics, and the digital practice of producing and submitting a piece of work for use with plagiarism and submission software, supported by learning technologists. by working as a team, we have been able to integrate support for these practices. before submitting assignments, bu students are now encouraged to produce a formative plagiarism report using our anti-plagiarism software (turnitin). subject librarians have embedded instructions on how to use the software (based on guidance from learning technologists) into referencing sessions with students. they have also made changes to referencing support (student and academic services, 2010) to encourage students to reference in a way that enables the plagiarism software to detect legitimate quotes, rather than misinterpret them as plagiarism. on the other hand, learning technologists have closely embedded support from subject librarians into online submission guidance, which directs any students who are concerned about their plagiarism report to contact their subject librarian for help. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 3 ford and bowden facing the future: the changing shape of academic skills support at bournemouth university figure 1. library and learning support structure. organisationally, library and learning support are well placed to promote the embedding of digital literacy support into curricula. librarians and learning technologists work closely with academic departments, which can offer us opportunities to deeply embed our support for skills development into unit learning outcomes, activities and assessment through involvement in curriculum development. for example, all of our subject librarians and academic support librarians deliver support for ‘skills’ units on the programmes that they work with. moving forwards our aim is to increase this distributed support whilst our academic skills community provides access to both online and face-to-face support for students who choose to develop their skills independently. we are also well placed to integrate support for digital literacy with personal growth and professional development opportunities being coordinated by other central departments in response to increased emphasis on employability (jameson et al., 2012). in light of changing student lifestyles, there is increasing need to look to flexible ways to promote and deliver these types of support. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 4 ford and bowden facing the future: the changing shape of academic skills support at bournemouth university changing delivery modes efforts to widen participation (department for education and skills, 2003) combined with social change have already altered student demographics and lifestyles. it remains to be seen whether offsetting payment until graduates are employed will actually achieve the stated aim of further widening participation (independent review of higher education and student finance in england, 2010) or whether the prospect of leaving university with much greater debt may deter low income students (callender and jackson, 2005) or those with external financial commitments. regardless, the trend of students spending increasing time on paid work is set to continue (sodexo, 2012), part-time or distance learning may also become more common if more students choose to earn-while-they-learn to minimise the debt that they leave university with. also, in a more competitive environment, universities are likely to look to increase their share of diverse markets such as international students. students from increasingly diverse educational backgrounds with family or work commitments will require increasingly flexible learning opportunities and support. although the development of digital literacy is best enabled as situated practice (beetham et al., 2010), there are vast differences in opportunities for students to engage with digital technologies in this way (selwyn, 2010). for those students who do not have embedded opportunities to develop their digital literacy, we need to provide alternative forms of support. according to the most recent sodexo university lifestyle survey, ‘half of all students [say] that they spend seven or more hours a week logged onto sites such as facebook and twitter’ (sodexo, 2012, p.11). this contrasts with the finding that ‘the majority [of students] spent three hours or less [in the university library] in a typical week’ (sodexo, 2012, p.32). to promote our academic skills community, we have developed a facebook page (bournemouth university, 2012), which is promoted at induction sessions, on digital signage, in the vle and via email notifications. posts on the page raise awareness about both online and face-to-face support that is tailored to the seasonal demands for study skills guidance. at the time of writing, the page has been liked by 1,099 facebook users. we should remember that the page’s ‘reach’ goes beyond this as students who do not journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 5 ford and bowden facing the future: the changing shape of academic skills support at bournemouth university follow the page are exposed to the posts that their friends (who do follow the page) interact with. facebook insights data reveals that the majority of likes are from uk-based facebook users in the 18-24 age bracket. this data should not be taken as evidence that students outside of this age bracket are being excluded. the facebook page is one of the many methods we use to communicate with students about support for study skills. encouragingly, the page has also received likes from facebook users in other countries (such as the usa, thailand and lithuania) reflecting bu’s international profile. however, interaction with the facebook page goes beyond ‘likes’. we have received queries from current and prospective students through the facebook page on varied topics such as where to find marking guidelines and the university’s ielts criteria. if we were not able to respond to a query ourselves, we gave the enquirer the relevant contact details. our posts have been shared by other facebook users, for example, a post promoting a workshop on finding information was shared by the students’ union on their facebook page with a tagline encouraging students to sign up. finally, evaluation surveys of taught academic skills sessions suggested that some students had found out about the workshops via the facebook page. this use of social media sites is enabled by ‘the pervasive nature of technology in learners’ lives’ (beetham et al., 2009, p.61). familiar technologies such as smart phones, tablets, laptops and social media offer us the opportunity to construct learning on social technology skills that students may already have (trinder et al., 2008, p.51). although ‘even learners with their own laptop, smartphone and other devices may have no idea how best to use them to support their learning’ (beetham et al., 2009, p.15). for example, a discussion between two students on the facebook page where one helped the other to access a referencing guide illustrates the potential of learners to support each other in developing digital literacy. by enabling peer-to-peer interaction, we can transcend our staff resources and opening times to capitalise on community support. can we extend this concept of students supporting each other to one where they are actively involved in developing learning materials? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 6 ford and bowden facing the future: the changing shape of academic skills support at bournemouth university student-focused materials one of the big questions we face is how paying more directly than ever for their education will change student expectations and engagement (jones, 2010). it is possible that paying up to £9,000 per year will lead students to engage more to get the most from their university experience. however, it may be that they will expect to receive a qualification in return for their fees rather than for the effort that they put into their studies. the recent student lifestyle survey found 51% of respondents answering that they would demand more from their lecturers if they were paying £9,000 per annum, whereas just 25% said that they would spend more time studying (sodexo, 2012, p.69). there is increasing reference to students as ‘customers’ (molesworth, 2009) but this kind of relationship exposes universities to increased scrutiny under consumer law (philips, 2004). recent legal cases (hirsch, 2010) may lead institutions to consider whether seeing students as partners rather than customers may help to avoid the financial and reputational risk of customer-service style relationships. alongside changes to student expectations we are also seeing changes to the ways that students are expected to engage with learning. the use of technology in delivering education is widespread (selwyn, 2010) and is often heralded as a potential solution to the challenges that universities face (bradwell, 2009). however, a central irony is that it can also lead to resentment from students who do not necessarily see digital literacy as an enabling factor in their lives. experience from bu library’s online and face-to-face enquiry services, which support students accessing electronic books and journals, tells us that students do not always expect to develop digital literacy as part of their academic practice. talking to library staff and reviewing enquiry transcripts reveals evidence of anger and resentment from students who do not always understand the need to develop the it skills in order to access information in the modern world. to address this conundrum, our strategy at bu is to involve students in the co-creation of learning materials and support: going beyond the passive consumption of content to take a more active role in creating and sharing knowledge with their peers. this is a paradigm shift from the traditional educational practice of ‘[w]e know, we teach you’ to a situation where ‘[l]earners’ digital skills [are] being recognised, rewarded and used as a resource for the learning community’ (beetham et al., 2009, p.67). by relating to students as partners journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 7 ford and bowden facing the future: the changing shape of academic skills support at bournemouth university (rather than customers) and involving them in every level of decision making we can ensure that they are aware of the limitations that we work within and they are true stakeholders, fully involved in deciding how their fees contribute towards their learning. in a recent example, bu media school students were commissioned to produce a short video highlighting key aspects of library and learning support (bournemouth university, 2011). aside from the production quality being far better than anything we (as staff) could produce, the video very succinctly illustrates accessing our e-resources and support in the way the students who produced the video access them, rather than the way we (as information professionals) might try and show students. bu were an early innovator of peer assisted learning (parton and fleming, 2007) and our programme (pal) is now used universally across the institution. we also make good use of student assistants, employed by the library, to help other students to access systems and information. with all of these examples, we find a major benefit is that those students employed to develop the learning of others are also developed. we will increasingly look to involve students in learning development, for example, next year we plan to enable students to post on our facebook page. conclusion increasing drivers for efficiency in higher education are likely to yield a period of organisational change, however, for supporting digital literacy we should embrace change as an opportunity to ensure that our organisational structures do not fragment support between different departments. departments that have close working relations with academic colleagues (such as the library) can enable support that is embedded within curricula but can also provide a point of access linked to resource use for independent learners where this is not possible. increasingly diverse students and lifestyles are likely to lead to increasing demand for flexible, 24x7 support for skills development. whilst technology can offer us efficient ways to deliver support (for example online chat services) we should not ignore the potential of social media as an efficient enabler for peer support. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 8 ford and bowden facing the future: the changing shape of academic skills support at bournemouth university this concept of involving students as partners in their learning can be extended to engage students in co-creating learning objects. this represents a game-changing shift of the power dynamic of higher education, with university staff moving from being experts, to being enablers of learning. this paradigm shift has interesting potential for the development of learning in higher education but may also offer solutions to changing student expectations through involving students as partners in owning their educational opportunities. references beetham, h., littlejohn, a. and mcgill, l. (2010) ‘beyond competence: digital literacies as knowledge practices, and implications for learner development’, esrc seminar series literacies for the digital university, seminar two. glasgow caledonian university, glasgow 1 march. glasgow: glasgow caledonian university: literacy in the digital university. beetham, h., mcgill, l. and littlejohn, a. (2009) thriving in the 21st century: learning literacies for the digital age (llida project). glasgow, uk: caledonian academy, glasgow caledonian university. biddiscombe, r. (1999) ‘managing the new learning agenda in a converged service environment’, in the future of libraries in human communication: proceedings of the 20th iatul conference. chania, greece 17-21 may. gothenburg : iatul, paper 3. biddiscombe, r. (2002) ‘learning support professionals: the changing role of subject specialists in uk academic libraries’, program: electronic library and information systems, 36(4), pp. 228-235. bournemouth university (2011) new! bu library in 60 seconds. available at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xm06rdjvedi (accessed: 21 june 2012). bournemouth university (2012) bournemouth university academic skills. available at: http://www.facebook.com/buacademicskills (accessed: 26 june 2012). journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 9 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xm06rdjvedi http://www.facebook.com/buacademicskills ford and bowden facing the future: the changing shape of academic skills support at bournemouth university bradwell, p. (2009) the edgeless university: why higher education must embrace technology. london: demos. callender, c. and jackson, j. (2005) 'does the fear of debt deter students from higher education?', journal of social policy, 34(4), pp. 509-540. department for business innovation and skills (2011) higher education: students at the heart of the system. london: department for business information and skills. department for education and skills (2003) widening participation in higher education. london: department for education and skills. goodfellow, r. (2011) 'literacy, literacies and the digital in higher education', teaching in higher education, 16(1), pp. 131-144. hanson, t. (2005) managing academic support services in universities: the convergence experience. london: facet, 2005. hirsch, a. (2010) it's not just law students who are learning how to sue. afua hirsch's law blog. london: the guardian. independent review of higher education and student finance in england (2010) securing a sustainable future for higher education. london: independent review of higher education and student finance in england. jameson, j., strudwick, k., bond-taylor, s. and jones, m. (2012) 'academic principles versus employability pressures: a modern power struggle or a creative opportunity?', teaching in higher education, 17(1), pp. 25-37. jones, g. (2010) 'managing student expectations', perspectives: policy and practice in higher education, 14(2), pp. 44-48. molesworth, m.e.r. (2009) 'having, being and higher education: the marketisation of the university and the transformation of the student into consumer', teaching in higher education, 14(3), pp. 277-287. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 10 ford and bowden facing the future: the changing shape of academic skills support at bournemouth university ooms, a., burke, l., linsey, t. and heaton-shrestha, c. (2008) ‘introducing e-developers to support a university's blended learning developments’, alt-j: research in learning technology, 16(2), pp. 111-122. parton, s. and fleming, h. (2007) 'academic libraries and learning support in collaboration', new review of academic librarianship, 13(1/2), pp. 79-89. philips, a.f. (2004) 'some legal aspects of the student as a ‘consumer’: specialisms for generalists’, perspectives london policy and practice in higher education, 8(2), pp. 41-44. selwyn, n. (2010) 'degrees of digital dvision: reconsidering digital inequalities and contemporary higher education' ('grados de la división digital: reconsideración de las desigualdades digitales y educación superior contemporánea'), revista de universidad y sociedad del conocimiento, 7(1), p. 33. sodexo (2012) sodexo uni lifestyle survey. southampton: sodexo in association with times higher education. student and academic services (2010) bu guide to citation in the harvard style. bournemouth: bournemouth university. trinder, k., guiller, j., margaryan, a., littlejohn, a. and nicol, d. (2008) learning from digital natives: bridging formal and informal learning. glasgow: glasgow caledonian university, the higher education academy. author details neil ford is academic liaison development manager at bournemouth university. melissa bowden is academic support librarian (law) at bournemouth university. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 11 facing the future: the changing shape of academic skills support at bournemouth university abstract organisational change for efficiency and silo busting! changing delivery modes student-focused materials conclusion references author details literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special edition: digital technologies, november 2014 implementing and evaluating a set of online virtual experimental scenarios for teaching developmental biology daniel levin university of manchester, uk keith brennan university of manchester, uk adam hurlstone university of manchester, uk kathryn e. hentges university of manchester, uk abstract teaching developmental biology to undergraduates can be complicated because it is a discipline most undergraduate students have never experienced before their first in-depth developmental biology course. this case study presents a set of online scenarios created to aid our students in learning developmental biology concepts, in which the student assumes the role of a postgraduate research student. these scenarios complement the course unit principles of developmental biology taught to second-year undergraduate students. in each scenario students must work through experimental simulations and predict their results, answering a series of questions related to concepts taught in accompanying lectures or interpretations of data presented in the scenario. the scenarios focus on concepts common to developmental processes in animals. additionally, one scenario is solely based on plant development. student evaluations of these scenarios are very positive. additionally, students report that working through the scenarios improves their knowledge of experimental techniques. extending student knowledge of experimental protocols and data interpretation through elearning approaches is an important addition to the course unit, as the unit is not supplemented by any specific laboratory work. keywords: developmental biology; scenario; scenario-based learning; virtual experiments; elearning. levin et al. implementing and evaluating a set of online virtual experimental scenarios journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2014 2 background in biology education, learning can be facilitated by incorporating experimental work into lecture-based courses, which gives students an opportunity to test concepts presented in lectures in a hands-on fashion. it is often through this practical application of basic principles that students achieve a true understanding of the lecture material. the use of practical approaches can be especially useful for disciplines that are introduced primarily at the undergraduate level, such as developmental biology. indeed, prior assessments of student engagement with developmental biology laboratory exercises has shown that students who find laboratory exercises interesting also report plans to take additional courses in the subject area (d’costa and shepherd, 2009). however, adding experimental sections to a course has limitations in terms of financial resources, time, and safety considerations. for these reasons, we created a series of virtual laboratory experiments to accompany a second-year undergraduate course entitled ‘principles of developmental biology’. these scenarios are accessed by students online, and allow students to play the role of a graduate level researcher performing developmental biology experiments. while there are web resources for visualising embryos during development (nieder and nagy, 2002; silva-lopes and monteiro-leal, 2003; hotta et al., 2007; marsh et al., 2008; yamada et al., 2010), many of these resources are designed to allow an inspection of anatomical structures throughout gestation. our online scenarios differ from other resources in that they incorporate role-play to allow mock experiments to be performed by the user. in a manner similar to problem-based learning, these scenarios engage students in active learning that supplements lecture-based delivery of course material. the diversification of content delivery, especially incorporating active learning approaches, has been shown to be beneficial for the teaching of developmental biology (knight and wood, 2005; douglas 2008). rather than basing our scenarios on specific model organisms, we have invented a new model organism, the chocolate monster. the use of a novel organism requires students to apply concepts from lectures to new situations, and also allows a variety of experimental techniques to be simulated in the virtual model organism without the limitations posed by biological differences in actual model systems. after running these scenarios alongside lectures for a period of 6 years, we sought to evaluate student response to the scenarios. every year we examined student assessment of the utility and learning benefits delivered from the scenarios using a lickert scale for set levin et al. implementing and evaluating a set of online virtual experimental scenarios journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2014 3 questions and free text responses on a paper survey. we found that overall students’ responses to the scenarios have been extremely positive, with the majority of students reporting an improved understanding of experimental approaches used in developmental biology research. materials used scenario creation initially, concepts amenable to virtual experimentation were identified. a storyline for each scenario was developed and written to include quiz questions. feedback for incorrect answers on each question was also written to help students work their way through the scenario correctly. images needed for the scenario were constructed in powerpoint or paint. additionally, photos of laboratory equipment, as well as general laboratory and office locations, were taken. the scenarios were assembled using scenario builder interactive (sbli) software (jinks et al., 2011) and hosted locally using sbli server software, which allowed student progress to be tracked. scenario delivery three lecturers teaching the principles of developmental biology course (kb, ah, and keh) worked alongside an elearning technologist (dl) to create a series of five scenarios for students to access during the principles of developmental biology course unit. a new scenario was available every two weeks throughout the semester and all scenarios were made available again at the end of the course for students to review prior to exams. the scenario interface has four windows (figure 1) which show possible locations (top left), actions and collections (bottom left), the current location (top right), and text associated with the current location (bottom right). students were directed to read the initial text describing the premise of the scenario. students then chose between various actions or locations to progress throughout the scenario. we introduced dead end points when the wrong experiment or incorrect interpretation of data was chosen. although we incorporated a limited degree of branching within the scenarios, complex branching was difficult to achieve using the sbli software. instead we relied on incorporating end points that sent the students back to an earlier point in the scenario so that they could choose alternative experiments to return to the correct path through the scenario. we predicted each scenario levin et al. implementing and evaluating a set of online virtual experimental scenarios journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2014 4 would take approximately 1.5 hours for students to complete. scenarios were accessed through the virtual learning environment blackboard and hosted on our in house server. figure 1. the scenario interface. this shows part of scenario 1 where students must collect the reagents required to synthesise a probe for an in situ hybridisation experiment. the top left panel shows locations available, the top right panel shows the current location, the bottom left panel shows items the student has collected (eggs for analysis), and the bottom right panel shows the text associated with the location (instructions to collect reagents to generate an in situ hybridisation probe). to progress from this stage of the scenario students must collect the reagents they require for generating an in situ hybridisation probe by choosing one of the highlighted items in the location panel and dragging it into the lower right corner of the panel. the scenarios had quiz questions incorporated within the scenarios (figure 2). students received feedback on the quiz questions and needed to answer each question correctly to continue the scenario. students were able to attempt each quiz question multiple times until a correct answer was achieved. after the end of new lecture material, students took an additional in-class scenario under exam conditions. this exam scenario differed from the prior scenarios in that each question was marked and students received a percentage score based on the number of questions answers correctly during the scenario. students did not receive feedback on their answer choices and did not need to enter the correct answer to progress through the exam scenario. levin et al. implementing and evaluating a set of online virtual experimental scenarios journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2014 5 figure 2. the use of quiz questions within the scenario. students answer questions shown in the bottom right panel, based on experimental results given in the scenario in the top right panel. scenario evaluation students were asked to complete a survey on the scenarios after completing scenario 5. there were no marks associated with completing the survey and no penalties for failing to complete it. we collected anonymous data from students taking the unit over a 6-year period and analysed these data to determine students’ impressions of the scenarios. this study was approved by the faculty of life sciences ethics review committee; the committee determined that full ethics approval through the university research ethics committee was not necessary for this study, given that the data were collected anonymously. the study followed general good practice as set out by the university for the conduct of student surveys. using a lickert scale students ranked their agreement with the following statements:  working through the scenarios improved my understanding of the subject area. levin et al. implementing and evaluating a set of online virtual experimental scenarios journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2014 6  working through the scenarios required me to apply concepts taught in lectures to new situations.  the content of the scenarios was interesting.  the content of the scenarios was aimed at an appropriate level.  i found the scenarios easy to navigate. students were also asked to give the set of scenarios an overall rating of excellent, good, average, poor or very poor. students overwhelmingly gave the scenarios positive ratings (table 1). table 1. student evaluation of scenarios accompanying principles of developmental biology. student response to scenario survey. year total responses % rating scenarios good or excellent % rating scenario poor or very poor 2008/09 50 88 4 2009/10 93 87 5 2010/11 87 82 7 2011/12 148 89 3 2012/13 152 88 2 2013/14 95 89 3 in addition to responding to survey questions students were asked to enter any free text comments they had on the scenarios. in years 2008/09 and 2009/10, these comments were collected in the online survey after the completion of the final scenario. from 2010/11 onwards, free text comments were collected on a paper survey used for the evaluation of the entire course. some of the positive comments included phrases such as: the fact that they were interactive really helped. i really enjoyed these [scenarios] and they did further my knowledge of the lecture material. complemented the course unit very well. wished that they had these for all course units! i thoroughly enjoyed these scenarios. levin et al. implementing and evaluating a set of online virtual experimental scenarios journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2014 7 the feedback when an answer was wrong was really useful. generally an excellent accompaniment to lectures. i think the scenarios provide a good study aid helping pool information learnt in lectures. most negative comments on the student evaluation forms have focused on technical aspects of the scenario builder interface, such as the difficulty of collecting and uncollecting objects in different locations in the scenarios. some students felt the interface was simplistic and clunky. each year a few students commented that they would have rather just had a standard quiz rather than a story to follow in the scenarios. however, the majority of students find the online scenarios a valuable addition to the course unit. overall, 81% of student free text comments contain positive statements about the addition of the scenarios to the course. implications getting students to engage with course material is a priority within university level education (harper and quaye, 2009). in science subjects in particular, students can feel that lecture material alone is insufficient to allow them a deep understanding of the subject matter. the incorporation of new educational tools that students can access in their own time outside of lectures provides a diversification of content delivery that appeals to students with a variety of learning styles, including kinaesthetic learning (fleming, 2001). a recent study suggests that modern students prefer bodily-kinaesthetic learning styles, concluding that the incorporation of digital storytelling will motivate and engage current students (sandars and homer, 2008). although students’ responses to the scenarios have been overwhelmingly positive, there are some drawbacks associated with the use of scripted scenarios in teaching developmental biology. we have designed the scenarios to require students to make choices about the experiments they would perform and the reagents they would require. however, the scenarios cannot account for every independent choice students would make on their own. also, the degree of branching within the scenarios is limited, so that levin et al. implementing and evaluating a set of online virtual experimental scenarios journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2014 8 students are sent back to a specific point in the scenarios following an incorrect choice. allowing students to choose a different approach at a dead end point does not completely accurately replicate an experimental setting where using incorrect reagents or the wrong technique would prevent the student from obtaining meaningful results. the quiz questions in each scenario were designed to examine the application of concepts by asking students to interpret mock data generated in virtual experiments. the quiz questions also informed students of gaps in their own knowledge by providing feedback for incorrect answers. teaching developmental biology through the application of concepts rather than factual recall has been encouraged (wood, 2008), and we have attempted to allow students to actively apply developmental biology concepts within virtual experiments, which students report has improved their understanding of the topics introduced in lectures. although we have developed these scenarios for teaching developmental biology, similar scenarios could be developed for a variety of subjects to facilitate active learning and application of conceptual information. accessing materials the scenarios described in this article can be accessed at: http://sbli.ls.manchester.ac.uk/demo (username: ‘developmental’ password: ‘biology’). acknowledgements we would like to thank geoff norton and the sbli team for helpful suggestions on using sbli builder software. we thank the university of manchester principles of developmental biology students for their feedback on using the scenarios. we thank dr. m. danilchik, oregon health sciences university, for providing xenopus images for use in scenarios. http://sbli.ls.manchester.ac.uk/demo levin et al. implementing and evaluating a set of online virtual experimental scenarios journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2014 9 references d’costa, a. and shepherd i.t. (2009) ‘zebrafish development and genetics: introducing undergraduates to developmental biology and genetics in a large introductory laboratory class’, zebrafish, 6(2), pp. 169-177. douglas, k.r. (2008) ‘a kinesthetic model demonstrating molecular interactions involved in anterior-posterior pattern formation in drosophila’, cbe life sciences education, 7(1), pp. 74-81. fleming, n.d. (2001) teaching and learning styles: vark strategies. christchurch, new zealand: n.d. fleming. harper, s.r. and quaye, s. (2009) ‘beyond sameness with engagement and outcomes for all’, in harper, s.r. and quaye, s. (eds.) student engagement in higher education. abingdon: routledge, pp. 1-16. hotta, k., mitsuhara, k., takahashi, h., inaba, k., oka, k., gojobori, t. and ikeo, k. (2007) a web-based interactive developmental table for the ascidian ciona intestinalis, including 3d real-image embryo reconstructions: i. from fertilized egg to hatching larva’, developmental dynamics, 236(7), pp. 1790-1805. jinks, a., norton, g., taylor, m. and stewart, t. (2011) ‘scenario-based learning: experiences in the development and application of a generic teaching software tool’, in holt, d., segrave, s. and cybulski, j. (eds.) professional education using esimulations: benefits of blended learning design. usa: igi global, pp. 346-369. knight, j.k. and wood, w.b. (2005) ‘teaching more by lecturing less’, cell biology education, 4(4), pp. 298-310. marsh, k.r., giffin, b.f. and lowrie d.j. jr. (2008) ‘medical student retention of embryonic development: impact of the dimensions added by multimedia tutorials’, anatomical science education, 1(6), pp. 252-257. levin et al. implementing and evaluating a set of online virtual experimental scenarios journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2014 10 nieder g.l. and nagy f. (2002) ‘analysis of medical students' use of web-based resources for a gross anatomy and embryology course’, clinical anatomy, 15(6), pp. 409-418. sandars j. and homer m. (2008) ‘reflective learning and the net generation’, med teach. 30(9-10), pp. 877-879. silva-lopes v.w. and monteiro-leal l.h. (2003) ‘creating a histology-embryology free digital image database using high-end microscopy and computer techniques for online biomedical education’, the anatomical record part b: the new anatomist, 273b(1), pp. 126-131. wood, w.b. (2008) ‘teaching concepts versus facts in developmental biology’, cbe life science education, 7(1), pp. 10-11. yamada, s., samtani, r.r., lee, e.s., lockett, e., uwabe, c., shiota, k., anderson, s.a. and lo, c.w. (2010) ‘developmental atlas of the early first trimester human embryo’, developmental dynamics, 239(6), pp. 1585-1595. author details daniel levin is an elearning technologist at the university of manchester. he holds a bsc in genetics from the university of manchester. keith brennan is a professor of developmental biology at the university of manchester and a deputy associate dean for education. adam hurlstone is a senior lecturer at the university of manchester. kathryn e. hentges is a senior lecturer at the university of manchester. implementing and evaluating a set of online virtual experimental scenarios for teaching developmental biology abstract background materials used scenario creation scenario delivery scenario evaluation implications accessing materials acknowledgements references author details microsoft word riddell_and_bates[1].doc journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special edition: researching pdp practice, november 2010 the role of the personal tutor in a curricular approach to personal development planning sue riddell canterbury christ church university, uk natalie bates bournemouth university, uk abstract this paper describes some outcomes from the introduction of a curricular approach to personal development planning (pdp) within an interprofessional learning programme, in particular within the adult nursing pathway. this approach provided some substantial changes to the way academics had previously functioned in the role of personal tutor and sought to address concerns that had been raised about the perceived constraints in facilitating holistic student development posed by the existing curriculum. the context for change is outlined, including results of a local survey of personal tutors. the curricular changes, the new role for the personal tutor and the design of the necessary staff development programme are explained. having begun to implement the new role, personal tutors’ views are explored through interview data. a key theme to emerge is the significance of relationship building in this new curriculum structure and, following identification of the challenges, the paper concludes with recommendations in light of this experience. key words: personal tutor; curricular approach; personal development planning. introduction whilst academic and personal support strategies are frequently assigned to different sections of a university, at an operational level the personal tutor may be the first person a student comes to for help of any nature. the key characteristics of people in the helping riddell and bates the role of the personal tutor in a curricular approach to personal development planning journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 2 professions of health and social care are often rooted in a desire to care, to provide both practical and emotional support to others. given these circumstances it is not surprising that personal tutors in these disciplines can spend a lot of time providing personal support, often at the expense of academic guidance. canterbury christ church university decided to implement personal development planning (pdp) via the personal tutor system. that is, the personal tutor is the person with responsibility for enabling the student to engage in the process of pdp. clegg and bradley (2006) suggest that there are three models of pdp – academic, employment and professional. clearly in the education of health and social care professionals it is the final category of professional pdp that is relevant. the study described here aims to provide evidence to support the facilitation of pdp firmly within the role of the personal tutor. context personal tutoring originated from the need to provide support to young people living away from home for the first time when they started university (grant, 2006). within nursing programmes, the role of the personal tutor incorporated a substantial monitoring function in terms of the completion of practice hours, attendance at lectures and the achievement of competencies – requirements all set by the professional body (nmc, 2004). at least two meetings each year with personal tutors were required where documents would be checked and forms signed. above this, if a student had a problem in practice, with academic work or personal difficulties, it was likely that he/she would turn to the personal tutor for support in the first instance who might then refer them on to central services when appropriate. this wide range of responsibilities for personal tutors in nursing education, without formal requirements, has led to role ambiguity in some cases and there have been recommendations for clearer boundaries of support given by personal tutors (por and barriball, 2008). the government agenda to increase participation in higher education (he) (dearing, 1997) has resulted in a student body that is no longer a homogenous group but is one with wide and varied life situations and educational backgrounds. in particular, in nursing there are a large number of mature students, predominantly female, who have raised their families to a point of relative independence. at selection interview they often say it is now riddell and bates the role of the personal tutor in a curricular approach to personal development planning journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 3 their turn to pursue a career. to address such increases in student diversity, there is a demand to provide effective personal tutoring systems to meet the needs of individual students (thomas and hixenbaugh, 2006). in the past, the role of the personal tutor in the adult nursing pathway at canterbury christ church university had evolved into one that necessitated a wide variety of skills, almost none of which were to do with academic or professional development but were more likely to include giving financial guidance, personal counselling, health advice or ensuring documents had been signed. to explore the staff perspective of the personal tutor role in the department at that time, a questionnaire was administered to twenty four personal tutors revealing four key areas of concern and dissatisfaction with the role. firstly they felt unable to carry out the role effectively because there was no allocated time for it and, subsumed within this, was the dissatisfaction of not being engaged with the academic side of a student’s development. due to time constraints, many felt that their limited efforts were focussed on the students with problems at the expense of those who were apparently managing their learning effectively. secondly, there was concern that existing structures did not provide the personal tutor with enough information to facilitate a meaningful relationship within which they could enable a student to address concerns and become successful in all aspects of the programme. thirdly, the system allowed students to not engage with their personal tutor beyond the signing off of necessary documentation and, whilst this was acceptable from the perspective of adult learning, it meant that vulnerable students who may be struggling might not be benefiting from the support of their personal tutor. the fourth and final category of concern was that the widening participation agenda led to a greater number of students who seemed to require a higher level of support for many complex difficulties relating to both their personal situations and their learning contexts. a curriculum review and revalidation provided the opportunity to consider these issues and make changes for the future. curriculum development a professional development theme was introduced to the interprofessional learning programme to address the concerns raised, as well as provide a strong vehicle to support the pdp of students. the interprofessional learning programme is undertaken by students from eight different professions in discrete profession-specific groups and a professional riddell and bates the role of the personal tutor in a curricular approach to personal development planning journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 4 development module has been created for each year of the programme. the professional development modules seek to address some of the key factors which will influence a student’s success, in particular the transition into he and progression year on year; the development of graduate skills; and the process of pdp. it comprises two weeks (18 hours academic direction each week) at the beginning of years 1 and 2 with five workshops, each comprising four hours of academic direction distributed throughout the year as fits with each pathway’s programme. in the third year the initial period of learning is reduced to one week and there are ten workshops throughout the year. this will support the writing of the extended piece of work to complete the degree. yorke and longden (2008) identified that the first year of a programme is key in determining student success. supporting students during this time is an important factor in retaining them and is particularly crucial for the student who is under-prepared. therefore it is important that the programme facilitates regular contact with a member of academic staff, who will provide continuity of support. during curriculum review, it was decided that the personal tutor would be the obvious choice to provide this support and by delivering the professional development modules the personal tutor would also have dedicated hours for it.. research has shown that timetabling personal tutoring through a curriculum module for students can help to generate better relationships between staff and students, as well as between students and their peers (owen, 2002). continuity of contact with a member of academic staff should provide a safe environment in which the students can reflect on their progress, identify areas for improvement and plan how to address these. being involved in the delivery of these modules will provide the personal tutor with the opportunity to monitor the students’ development and recommend early intervention of appropriate support as required. by meeting regularly with a personal tutor, students may also feel more comfortable in approaching tutors for help and guidance (stevenson, 2006). earwaker (1992) describes three models of student support – pastoral; professional and curriculum. the pastoral model places responsibility on a designated member of staff to provide pastoral care and guidance to students throughout their course, whilst in the professional model, students are directed to specialist members of staff within heis for support, for example, counselling or student services. the curriculum model integrates student support within programmes/modules where: riddell and bates the role of the personal tutor in a curricular approach to personal development planning journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 5 helping and supporting students then appears not as some extra-curricular activity for which time has to be found, but as a normal part of the course. (earwaker, 1992, p.115) combining student support with the teaching of subject knowledge and academic skills in the curriculum has been considered more valuable for students than separating pastoral and academic support (elander, 2003; laycock, 2009; warren, 2002). whilst providing students with specialist knowledge and skills, the programme seeks also to facilitate the development of the university’s graduate skills. in particular through the professional development modules, the students will be enabled to develop their skills in an integrated way whilst engaging with other components of the programme. this context is of particular importance in an interprofessional learning programme where the same modules will be delivered within eight different professional pathways. central to the philosophy of the professional development modules is the provision of a learning environment for a student to engage in pdp: a structured and supported process undertaken by an individual to reflect upon their own learning, performance and/or achievement and to plan for their personal, educational and career development. (qaa, 2001, p.1) the graduate skills provide a framework for reviewing development and in accordance with university policy, interaction with a personal tutor will be the vehicle by which this review will be undertaken. involving personal tutors in the delivery of pdp can have many advantages, including the opportunity for student and tutor to review progress and learning, and enabling the design of standardised pdp monitoring and recording systems where appropriate (strivens, 2006). however, engaging academic staff in the delivery of pdp is not always easy, particularly when some structures are not assessed or creditbearing, such as mandatory pdp group tutorials (dunne, 2005), or when staff are not confident that they have the skills to fulfil the personal tutor role (strivens, 2006). this paper will proceed to look at the successes and challenges of implementing a curricular approach to pdp at canterbury christ church university delivered by personal riddell and bates the role of the personal tutor in a curricular approach to personal development planning journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 6 tutors. the personal tutor perspective of this approach will be examined and areas for improvement suggested. methodology nurse lecturers teach to their strengths and areas of speciality, for example, acute nursing, rehabilitation or clinical science. those lecturers with a particular interest in learning and teaching may also teach study skills and those with an expertise in research might also teach research awareness or methodology. the delivery of the professional development modules required all adult nurse lecturers to facilitate students in learning development and academic skills such as information searching and the critiquing of evidence sources. some staff welcomed being involved in supporting learning in these areas, whilst others were more reluctant to take on teaching these topics. as part of the new validated programme it became a requirement rather than an option that the personal tutor took on this teaching, therefore staff development was necessary. two groups of personal tutors were involved initially. one group was involved in delivering the pd1 module to first year students, helping them to orientate into he, the requirements of the programme and begin their learning development; whilst the other group of tutors delivered the pd2 module, working with students that they had already known through their first year as they made the transition into year two of the new curriculum. to evaluate the new personal tutor role and curricular approach to pdp, seventeen telephone interviews were conducted with adult nursing lecturers at canterbury christ church university a few weeks into the new term and following the delivery of the initial two weeks of pd1 and pd2. this method of data collection was chosen as the most practical way to access the staff because it could be organised around their teaching commitments. participation was voluntary and an information sheet was given in advance. the sample consisted of five male and twelve female lecturers, all of whom were personal tutors and therefore delivering the professional development modules. some had a first year personal tutor group, others had second years, and certain tutors had more than one tutor group. some lecturers had previous experience as a personal tutor, whilst others were new to the role. the majority were senior lecturers in adult nursing and some also riddell and bates the role of the personal tutor in a curricular approach to personal development planning journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 7 had additional responsibilities such as year leader, or involvement with recruitment or practice placements. findings relationship building one of the key themes to emerge from the interviews was the impact that the extended contact time had on relationship development between the personal tutor and their students. the personal tutors described a greater investment in the relationship and an increased closeness. whilst this may lead some to become more involved in the students’ lives, other personal tutors believed that time spent on supporting individual students has decreased as students are more likely to raise concerns during the timetabled activities instead. the two weeks of timetabled delivery at the start of pd1 allowed personal tutors to get to know their students earlier in comparison to the previous structure where they may have only met once or twice a year. leading the students in classroom activities enabled the personal tutors to gauge their students’ academic ability, detect their strengths and weaknesses, whilst also getting to know them as individuals: i think for me it’s been good because i’ve been able to pick out… quite early the students that i know are going to struggle and the students i know are going to be ok, so i suppose it gives you that overview of that as well which is going to possibly help throughout the year and the transition to year two. (lecturer no.13) by forming a relationship with their students, the personal tutors found that they were in a better position to tailor academic support to individual students’ needs, including quick identification of students requiring support for dyslexia. interestingly, personal tutors involved in the delivery of the pd2 module highlighted that they got to know their students better in the first two weeks of the second year than they had in the whole of the students’ first year of the previous curriculum. another commented that they were seeing their students grow more quickly than they had in the past. as well as noticing advantages in relation to learning development, the personal tutors anticipated that the time spent getting to know their students would also enable them to bring forward pastoral needs. whilst most did not favour a ‘mothering’ role, the personal riddell and bates the role of the personal tutor in a curricular approach to personal development planning journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 8 tutors took an element of responsibility in supporting and guiding students with personal issues: i don’t believe that everybody should be spoon-fed but i think sometimes if you don’t help them through some of their pastoral and their health related issues, you’re setting them up to fail. (lecturer no.10) some personal tutors noticed that students seemed to build trust in the relationship quickly and seemed to find it easy to approach their tutors. knowing all of their students’ names was regarded as a positive outcome of the professional development modules which made students feel valued. in addition to enhancing the relationship, the professional development modules seemed to have a positive impact on peer support and student bonding, enabling students to form a group identity earlier in their nursing programme than had been noticed in previous years: i think the group identity formed very quickly because they spent so much time together. really by the end of the first week they were all getting to know each other, understand each other, be aware of the different personalities within the group and they’ve actually commented on it whereas in the outgoing curriculum…they only actually spent one module in the first semester together. (lecturer no.15) they’ve put themselves into a network called ning.com…i had this feeling the second week that this group is just going beyond me. they had an identity that wasn’t dependent on me…what’s my role? in many ways it’s like you create something and it floats off without you and i feel you’ve got to make sure it floats in the right direction. (lecturer no.1) whilst seeing themselves as distinct from the group identity, personal tutors viewed the group relationship as an important support network for the students and also recognised its role in enhancing engagement with pdp through social learning. one tutor highlighted that students need to feel safe and secure in their class and within their social group to be riddell and bates the role of the personal tutor in a curricular approach to personal development planning journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 9 able to explore ideas and concepts relating to their nursing practice and academic development. perceptions of the personal tutor role personal tutors described their role as offering support and guidance to students and signposting them or referring them to other services where necessary. they aimed to facilitate at a distance and help students to problem-solve rather than provide the answers, therefore, encouraging independence. they had also embraced the changes to the personal tutor role in terms of facilitating academic development and saw it as their role to help give students the confidence to develop their previous learning and skills and increase students’ self-efficacy. some considered themselves to be the ‘lynchpin’ or ‘life line’ for their students but recognised it was important to work in partnership with them: i want to be able to share a walk with somebody in which they’re transformed and i think that’s what he can do, but its up to the student how much time they want to stay in the chrysalis and if they want to emerge. (lecturer no.4) so the personal tutor and student relationship was seen as a two way process. staff were willing to support the development of their students through the professional development modules but required the students to take responsibility for their progress as well. the majority appreciated the value of moving away from a purely pastoral and surveillance role as personal tutor to engaging with their students academically, and the influence of the personal tutor role was valued by most: i think it is a really privileged position…such a powerful support for somebody in a period when they’re actually doing something that’s quite life changing. (lecturer no.17) the new personal tutor role had an impact on job satisfaction among staff as they no longer felt they were processing numbers. instead they knew the students and their abilities individually. however, whilst those interviewed were enthusiastic about being personal tutors, it was made clear that the personal tutor role may not be favoured by others who opt to do the minimum requirement. to a certain extent, engagement in the role was down to the individual. riddell and bates the role of the personal tutor in a curricular approach to personal development planning journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 10 although the initial two weeks of the modules were considered intensive and tiring for both the staff and students involved, the benefits appeared to counterbalance this. the personal tutors liked the opportunity that the continuity brought for seeing students develop and the emphasis on supporting the transition between the years was considered valuable: i think it’s a very good idea because you’re starting them off thinking academically and it’s a continual theme isn’t it, a thread right through year one, two and three and i should be with them all the way through…i think it’s consistency for them and for me. (lecturer no.12) the module gives personal tutors the opportunity to convey academic expectations to students at each transition stage in year one, two and three and it was felt that the modules would have a positive impact on supporting the development of students’ graduate skills. one personal tutor felt that the continuity of their role with students would not only enable them to support those who were struggling but help to identify and nurture individuals who were excelling, looking at where they can go next and how they can improve on their skills. this begins to address one of the concerns from the original personal tutor survey regarding time constraints, where personal tutors had focussed their attention on students with problems at the expense of those who were managing their learning effectively. with regard to their identity as a personal tutor, some perceived that they were seen as ‘the soft guys’ by students in comparison to other lecturers. this image may have arisen from the previous association of personal tutors with pastoral support. it will be interesting to note whether this perception will change as a result of delivering the professional development modules, particularly in marking the students’ summative work. the involvement of the personal tutors in student assessment is a change that also brings new relationship boundaries. the individual investment of time is much greater and may therefore expose feelings of vulnerability as a student’s assessment performance may be seen as a measure of the tutor’s success (or failure). although personal tutors will promote the student’s own responsibility for their learning, many may feel exposed by this apparently transparent measure of their abilities as a teacher. those who recognised this riddell and bates the role of the personal tutor in a curricular approach to personal development planning journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 11 very quickly may have compromised their normal boundaries in order to ensure their students’ success e.g. by reading complete drafts of essays instead of outlines, or by reading more than one draft. it is of interest, although not for discussion in this paper, that these individuals do not appear to feel the same sense of vulnerability with regard to their students’ achievement in other learning relationships. whilst support from a personal tutor was in theory considered valuable, some felt that students should have the option of being given a different personal tutor if the relationship was not effective. introducing an opt out clause was one suggestion for resolving situations where students do not engage with their assigned personal tutor due to differences in personality or teaching style: unfortunately for the students, if they don’t like you, they’ve got you a lot haven’t they, and for you, actually, if you’ve got a student you don’t engage with very well, you’re spending a lot of time with them. so i’m not sure whether there should be some opt out clauses there along the way for the student and for the personal tutor, just sometimes, because we’ve all got different personalities…i think we should make it ok to at least express that the relationship is not working for you. (lecturer no.2) in contrast, others believed that the university experience, including receiving critical feedback, should help develop students’ resilience for working in the nhs where they will have to engage in professional relationships with colleagues and patients. on the wards there may not be the opportunity to opt out of working with a particular patient. staff professional development needs for the personal tutors, the change in curriculum design entailed developing new teaching material and a responsibility shift. these personal tutors needed to understand the reasons for the changes and the underpinning philosophy. they also wanted to know what needed to be learned by the students and there was an expectation amongst them that lesson plans and materials would be provided for them to deliver. however, whilst session topics and delivery methods were explained, prescriptive material was not provided. instead the lecturers were actively encouraged to share ideas, materials and lesson plans and a virtual learning environment was provided as a place to do this. riddell and bates the role of the personal tutor in a curricular approach to personal development planning journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 12 the reason for this is based in the philosophy of interprofessional learning and the evaluation of the way the previous curriculum was designed and delivered. interprofessional learning is of paramount importance in today’s health and social care environment. inquiries into tragedies such as the deaths of victoria climbié (laming, 2003) and baby p (healthcare commission, 2009) showed that a better understanding of professional roles will facilitate improved communication which will in turn enhance the delivery of services to the public. however, it is true that there are skills and knowledge required by all health and social care professionals, such as the ability to critique evidence for practice and to write reflectively and critically. whilst the topic may be shared, contextualising it to enable the student to assimilate it with existing knowledge is essential. evaluation of the previous curriculum had identified that the delivery of generic material did not support the individual student’s learning, so the material for the professional development modules needed to be contextualised for delivery by each of the health and social care pathways. within the two groups of personal tutors there were those who had previously taught these topics in the outgoing curriculum and were therefore equipped with knowledge and skills to share. the knock-on effect of this was that a defined group of tutors evolved where one had not previously existed; one where collaboration and shared support appeared and was encouraged through referring colleagues to each other when challenges arose. most personal tutors felt that the changes made to their role provided them with more ownership of helping their students to learn, and they enjoyed the freedom involved in delivering the module. for others, however, the changes generated feelings of vulnerability and anxiety. not all personal tutors were experienced in teaching academic graduate skills to students and lacked confidence in delivering certain aspects of the professional development modules: pd2 was more terrifying because i hadn’t generally taught on a module like that in the past…pd1 was fine because i’d done stuff on educational studies before so i was quite relaxed about that one. (lecturer no.16) i’m sure for the experienced lecturers, they’re going to have a pretty good idea what their personal students are going to know, but for me i felt i wasn’t sure. am i meant riddell and bates the role of the personal tutor in a curricular approach to personal development planning journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 13 to be teaching them about reflective skills, writing, referencing, you know, or what? (lecturer no.13) such insecurities led to fear that they may be disadvantaging students and concerns that different student groups may feel they are getting ‘less of a deal’ if other tutors can teach subjects more appropriately. in some respects a defensive mechanism was adopted by staff, resulting in a comparison of experience and teaching ability. inexperience, for example, was a factor used to defend some tutors’ unsettled feelings towards delivering graduate skills sessions, highlighting the impact of the module on staff self-esteem. a significant challenge for many tutors was the necessity to use a wiki. students are required to use a wiki as a pseudo-portfolio for recording their development and personal tutors are required to use the same wiki to give feedback on this process. the faculty’s learning technologist provided both taught sessions and printed guidance for the personal tutors. some tutors were already confident with wikis; some had no prior knowledge but were able to acquire the fundamental skills relatively easily. there were those who doubted their own skills but were comfortable to be guided by the students within their group who knew how to do it. a few tutors struggled to learn but were determined to stay one step ahead of the students. there was also a minority who were likely to have chosen not to participate if there had been an option. a positive outcome of the development of this theme which was not anticipated is that it has brought together personal tutors as a group which would not normally occur. there were initial meetings which introduced the theme and modules, and these meetings have continued throughout the year. this time together is considered a productive opportunity for the collaborative development or sharing of resources for their teaching. regardless of apprehension, the personal tutors interviewed held a positive view of the professional development theme and were willing to engage in further staff development to increase their confidence in the new role. with the personal tutor role now at the centre of the curriculum it was acknowledged that time needed to be invested in developing the required skills: i think people underestimate the value of the personal tutor role and i think it’s something we’re all expected to do but it’s almost assumed that you know how to riddell and bates the role of the personal tutor in a curricular approach to personal development planning journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 14 do it and i think sometimes we forget that we’ll probably all get rusty in that and that personal tutoring moves on as well. so i suppose that’s about staff development isn’t it and highlighting what research is coming about that helps students in the personal tutor role. (lecturer no.11) one personal tutor in particular valued the time set aside for their interview for this study as it provided them with the opportunity to reflect on their role and educational practice. student evaluation although this paper has taken the personal tutor perspective of a curricular approach as its key theme, module evaluations from students at the end of the year echoed the positive view of the relationship that they had developed with their personal tutor and with each other. the first year students expressed that it had set them off on the right path for the development of their learning skills and understanding what is required for a university course. the second year students reinforced the value of getting to know each other and their tutor much better than they had during their first year. whilst some students had difficulty understanding the importance of considering their development from an holistic perspective (‘i’m training to be a nurse, why do i have to write a summary of everything i’ve done this year?’), others appreciated the value of ‘taking stock’ and looking forward with an action plan for how to develop. this particularly applied to the second year students who undertook activities during the first two weeks which required them to review their performance in year one and identify their learning development needs for the coming year. conclusion amidst the challenges it is important to acknowledge the enthusiasm with which some lecturers have embraced change. it is recognised by staff that the professional development theme attempts to address those areas of concern identified in the original personal tutor survey. time is now provided for the personal tutor role through the delivery of these modules, as is engagement with academic aspects of the students’ development. the modules now facilitate the development of both those who find it more difficult as well as those who benefit from being challenged and stretched. this engagement also provides riddell and bates the role of the personal tutor in a curricular approach to personal development planning journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 15 the personal tutor with much more information regarding the students’ development and it is virtually impossible for the students not to engage with their personal tutor. for all these reasons there is more opportunity within the learning activities to provide the support needed, particularly by those students who enter he as a result of the widening participation agenda. as with most new initiatives, the curriculum change faced practical issues during implementation that will need to be considered for the future. for example, there is a timetabling issue with the personal tutor being required to facilitate eighteen hours of learning (3 x 6 hour days) in each of the first two weeks of years one and two. it is very likely that these weeks may overlap and it is also likely that at least one personal tutor will have a group in both years. in future, more structure will be provided to develop key aims and some learning materials for sharing which individual tutors can contextualise within subject specific learning activities. tutors will be encouraged to engage in reflective discussions as part of their professional development which may help to identify possible areas for improvement, create new ideas and enhance the role. in turn these will help to refine the personal tutor role as the professional development theme rolls out in the future. this project set out to examine the role of the personal tutor in facilitating the development of students through a curricular model. after one year, feedback from staff and students is generally very positive. it is hoped that continued review and development will provide a model of pdp delivery which is an example for other programmes. acknowledgement this paper is an outcome of the national action research network on researching and evaluating personal development planning and e-portfolio practice project (2007-2010). the project was led by the university of bolton in association with the university of worcester and centre for recording achievement, and in national collaboration with the university of bedfordshire, bournemouth university and university of bradford. the project was funded by the higher education academy, national teaching fellowship project riddell and bates the role of the personal tutor in a curricular approach to personal development planning journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 16 strand. more details about the project can be found at: htuhttp://www.recordingachievement.org/research/narn-tree.htmluth. references clegg, s. and bradley, s. (2006) ‘models of pdp: practice and processes’, british educational research journal, 32(1), pp. 57-76. dearing, r. (1997) report of the national committee of inquiry into higher education. london: hmso. dunne, l. (2005) ‘structured personal tutorials for personal development planning’, perspective on personal tutoring in mass higher education: supporting diverse students. university of westminster, london 26 may. earwaker (1992) helping and supporting students. buckingham: srhe and oup. elander, j. (2003) ‘a discipline-based undergraduate skills module’, psychology learning and teaching, 3(1), pp.48-55. grant, a. (2006) ‘personal tutoring: a system in crisis?’ in thomas, l. and hixenbaugh, p. (eds.) personal tutoring in higher education. stoke on trent: trentham books, pp. 11-31. healthcare commission (2009) review of the involvement and action taken by health bodies in relation to the case of baby p. london: care quality commission. laming, w.h. (2003) the victoria climbié inquiry: report of an inquiry by lord laming. cm 5730. london: the stationery office. available at: htuhttp://www.dh.gov.uk/prod_consum_dh/groups/dh_digitalassets/documents/digitalas set/dh_110711.pdf uth (accessed: 18 august 2010). laycock, m. (2009) personal tutoring in higher education – where now and where next? a literature review and recommendations. seda special 25. london: seda. riddell and bates the role of the personal tutor in a curricular approach to personal development planning journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 17 nmc (2004) standards of proficiency for pre-registration nursing education. london: nmc. available at: htuhttp://www.nmcuk.org/documents/standards/nmcstandardsofproficiencyforpre_registrationnursi ngeducation.pdf uth (accessed: 18 august 2010). owen, m. (2002) ‘sometimes you feel you’re in niche time: the personal tutor system, a case study’, active learning in higher education, 3(1), pp. 7-23. porr, j. and barriball, l. (2008) ‘the personal tutor’s role in pre-registration nursing education’, british journal of nursing, 17(2), pp. 99-103. qaa (2001) guidelines for he progress files. available at: htuhttp://www.qaa.ac.uk/academicinfrastructure/progressfiles/guidelines/progfile2001.p df uth (accessed: 23.8.10). stevenson, n. (2006) integrating personal tutoring with personal development planning. york: hea. available at: htuhttp://www.heacademy.ac.uk/assets/york/documents/ourwork/tla/personal_tutoring/ web0150_ecasebook_intergrating_personal_tutoring_with_personal_development_ planning.pdf uth (accessed: 18 august 2010). strivens, j. (2006) transforming personal tutors into personal development tutors at the university of liverpool. york: hea. available at: htuhttp://www.heacademy.ac.uk/assets/york/documents/ourwork/tla/personal_tutoring/ web0151_ecasebook_transforming_personal_tutors_into_personal_development_t utors.pdfuth (accessed: 18 august 2010). warren (2002) ‘curriculum design in a context of widening participation in higher education’, arts and humanities in higher education, 1(1), pp. 85-99. thomas, l. and hixenbaugh, p. (eds.) (2006) personal tutoring in higher education. stoke on trent: trentham books. riddell and bates the role of the personal tutor in a curricular approach to personal development planning journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 18 yorke, m. and longden, b. (2008) the first-year experience of higher education in the uk: final report. york: hea. available at: htuhttp://www.heacademy.ac.uk/assets/york/documents/resources/publications/fyefi nalreport.pdf uth (accessed: 18 august 2010). author details sue riddell is a principal lecturer in the department of nursing and applied clinical studies at canterbury christ church university. natalie bates is a research assistant in the school of design, engineering and computing at bournemouth university. literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 4: march 2012 public feedback – but personal feedforward? john cowan edinburgh napier university, uk yi-ching jean chiu wenzao ursuline college of languages, taiwan abstract academic feedback is taken here as the reporting to student writers of the strengths and weaknesses of their submitted draft work, while academic feedforward refers to constructive advice regarding possible strengthening of students’ next work. both originate from a tutor’s initial judgement of a student’s work. feedback and feedforward on work showing need for improvement are problematic in a confucian heritage culture. even gently constructive advice within a programme seeking evidence for assessment of critical thinking may lead to perception of hurtful criticism by taiwanese students. some could withdraw from class activity accordingly. so the writers adjusted their response style. they now choose between different approaches featuring tutorial feedback or feedforward, depending on the standard of work being judged. when individual postings feature poor critical thinking, the writers opt for private messages concentrating on constructive feedforward. for better postings, they provide positive feedback with reasons for their judgements, and summarise to the class these exemplars of generic strengths in critical thinking. they also offer private prompting when they see scope for further enrichment of an able student’s critical thinking. this might also be a useful practice when tutoring solely in the west. keywords: confucian heritage culture; public feedback; private feedforward; assessment. cowan and chiu public feedback – but personal feedforward? definitions of key terms academic feedback is taken here to be the reporting to a student writer of the strengths and weaknesses of their submitted or draft work. academic feedforward is taken as the provision of constructive advice about possible strengthening of a student’s next submitted work. both originate from the tutor’s initial and judgemental consideration of a student’s work. they are radically different in purpose and content. feedback is an expanded judgement of completed work. feedforward is a detailed suggestion about how to tackle the next piece of work more effectively than the present one. introduction much traditional teaching has deliberately followed a ‘rule-eg-rule’ sequence, where examples are sandwiched between rules (bligh, 1998). skemp (1971, p.32) pointed out that new topics are thus often introduced by descriptions ‘of the most admirable brevity and exactitude for the teacher (who already has the concepts to which they refer) but [which are] unintelligible to the student’. accordingly he advocated that: concepts of a higher order than those which a person already has cannot be communicated to him [sic] by a definition, but only by arranging for him to encounter a suitable collection of examples. (skemp, 1971, p.32) the importance of starting learning from consideration of pertinent examples (cowan, 2006) was the subject of research by skemp (1971) and sadler (1989). they concluded that understanding a meaning or concept begins from an opportunity to discern meaning by perceiving the similarities between positive examples. thereafter understanding may be further developed reflectively. the same principle, including the importance of later using non-examples (skemp, 1971), has been re-iterated by others (markle, 1978; brookfield, 1990). a non-example in this context is something which might seem to be an example, yet lies outwith the border-line of the defined class; and so consideration of it can clarify the characteristics of the class. skemp illustrates this by using non-examples such as settees and stools to clarify the concept of chair. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 2 cowan and chiu public feedback – but personal feedforward? when feedback and feedforward focus on examples produced by the learners themselves, and with which they will already be familiar, they can better understand the generic strengths and weaknesses of the examples. thus their own examples can be an effective way to help students identify strengths and areas for improvement. nevertheless, in a confucian heritage culture (chc) background, where social harmony is highly revered, publicising critical feedback and feedforward based on weak examples written by students can be problematic and socially disruptive, even if potentially beneficial. the loss of face can be hurtful, and students may even withdraw from further activities accordingly. therefore the purpose of this action-research study was to devise and validate culturally acceptable means of more effectively communicating feedback and feedforward to chc learners, using their own discussion board postings as examples. this enquiry was located within the wider context of chiu’s funded research into education for critical thinking, which will be reported elsewhere in due course. the impact of the initiatives in the present enquiry has been judged by the quality of the critical thinking postings and interactions on the discussion boards, and by student evaluation of the facilitative support they received. literature relevant to the writers’ practices nurturing critical thinking skills has proved challenging for european facilitators (astleitner, 2002). they have found it difficult to teach their learners to ‘transform source texts into well-reasoned claims that address a specific issue’ (higgins, 1993). many students are unaccustomed to being objective, cannot generate counter-arguments (stein and bernas, 1999), and progress with difficulty from personal opinions to evidence-based judgements (brem and rips, 2000). they do not easily move from dualist to relativist epistemologies (perry, 1970), or to considering, questioning and evaluating possible options. chiu (2006; 2007; 2009) had found these problems in taiwan and has summarised additional difficulties for those teaching critical thinking in a chc context. chc students are reluctant to declare contrary views or to disagree directly in public (carless, 2007). this reticence inhibits communications with peers (other than close friends), with teachers, and with published works. chc students readily identify grounds for reasoned journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 3 cowan and chiu public feedback – but personal feedforward? disagreement. however, in most settings and more so than their western counterparts, they find it awkward to express that disagreement. their inhibitions can be lessened through the exercise of face-to-face ‘shepherd leadership’ (chiu, 2009). hence chiu follows mccormick and davenport’s (2004) model (chiu, 2009), and mainly does so face-to-face. this shepherd leader/teacher knows every learner personally through affective personal relationships within the chinese educational context (chiu, 2009). she promotes socio-constructivist interactions, helping active learners to overcome cultural barriers to posting online (merryfield, 2003). she models thinking cognitively, as did yu and chou (2004). she encourages emerging student leaders to assist slower fellow learners, or when students communicate asynchronously online (kao and chen, 2003; wang and woo, 2007). the online discussions in her course complement face-to-face tutoring by allowing participants time to consider and carefully articulate their responses to tutors and to each other (kao and chen, 2003). with ‘the security veil’ over their online interactions (merryfield, 2003), it is easier to disagree with someone whom they need not meet face-to-face. cowan has long followed rogerian principles (rogers, 1980; 1983) of affective support, enabling learners from different backgrounds to confidently acquire learning and to develop abilities. he establishes congruence or frankness in his early and authentic relationships with learners (brookfield, 1990, p.164). he exhibits unconditional positive regard for cross-cultural differences and he shows empathy by developing ‘personcentred’ arrangements in online discussions, to offer freedom to learn throughout this study. methodology and methods setting and participants chiu is responsible for an efl course in the only foreign language college in taiwan. a major socio-cognitive course aim is the development of critical thinking. in 2009, she recruited cowan to voluntarily provide an interactive western input online. his rationale and approach was to be complementary to chiu’s. during the period 2008-12, approximately 35 junior-english major students have participated each year in online discussions. their english proficiency has varied from journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 4 cowan and chiu public feedback – but personal feedforward? higher-intermediate to lower-intermediate. during their two-semester programme, the students each week have attended a one-hour formal session led by chiu. this was followed by a class hour devoted to various planned events, leading into asynchronous online discussions. these featured controversial themes taken from diverse films, associated with recommended readings and materials obtained through students’ online searching. the combination of themes and activities was devised by chiu (2009), in accordance with the principles of critical thinking (erwing, 2000). design academic year 2009-10 was an induction experience for cowan. he had been briefed by reading chiu’s papers and by collaboration with her in writing a book chapter on the importance of affective support for learners (chiu and cowan, 2009). at first he responded directly on the discussion board to each student’s postings. he was supported in this by chiu’s face-to-face formal and informal interactions in class. his cautiously worded feedback on individual postings nonetheless generated mixed class reactions, ranging from claims of reading overload, to embarrassment or hurt occasioned by reservations expressed or perceived in cowan’s public responses. on chiu’s advice, he moved in academic year 2010-11 to posting anonymised and general responses to sets of 10-15 student postings. student complaints evaporated, but the teachers saw little discernible impact from this option on the quality of the student postings, judged against the characteristics of sound critical thinking. in 2010-11, cowan began to concentrate facilitatively on a selection of cost-effectively brief, direct, personal e-mail messages. where a student had made a sound discussion posting with little need or scope for feedforward, he simply provided reasoned feedback on the merits of that posting. where a posting was weak, he explained what was needed to bring about improvement and offered suitable feedforward. in both approaches, he ‘nudged’ students forward (bruner, 1986) towards their zones of proximal development (vygotsky, 1978). journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 5 cowan and chiu public feedback – but personal feedforward? emergent rationale and methodology cowan and chiu decided that, in 2011-12, the effective early teaching of critical thinking skills should be centred upon examples, which they predicted would be especially useful if drawn from a student’s own postings. where these examples are basically sound, facilitative comments should concentrate on providing feedback, commending the posting and explaining in what ways it is commendable; some such examples and their merits would be publicised to the class. where the posting from which examples can be drawn is weak, facilitative comments should concentrate on constructive feedforward, accompanied by the reasons for following it. this feedforward should be private to avoid embarrassment to the student author. methods of evaluation critical thinking pre-tests and post-tests were carried out each year and reported as part of the main project. they had already quantitatively shown tangible development on this project of students’ critical thinking abilities and attitudes (chiu, 2006; 2007; 2009). the hope of achieving further improvement in the quality of discussion board postings, through working on the effectiveness of the facilitation, called for a qualitative approach to evaluation. the writers opted for an illuminative approach (parlett and hamilton, 1972). the basic principle is for the investigator to associate with the participants (students, teachers, etc.) sufficiently to pick up how they think and feel about the situation, and detecting in an open-ended way what issues are important, avoiding asking the wrong questions or measuring the wrong things. cowan attempted to do this. to illuminatively evaluate the facilitation, the study first utilised a semi-structured questionnaire. this asked students whether the western online facilitation helped their critical thinking and, if so, how. then two focus groups were conducted – one with active students who had interacted with cowan, and one with a mixed group of active learners and infrequent contributors. next, cowan invited direct formative advice by e-mail, from students who had already volunteered their feedback to him on the nature of their experience. finally the postings in the second discussion of 2011-12 were analysed in terms of interaction and critical thinking content, and compared with a similar discussion in 2010-11. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 6 cowan and chiu public feedback – but personal feedforward? analysis of results postings the postings in academic year 2011-12 were of a different character to those of the two previous years. the following table illustrates key results. table 1. key statistics on comparative postings. analysis items 2010-11 forum 1 2011-12 forum 1 2011-12 forum 2 total number of students 32 34 34 total number of student postings 88 200 144 number of postings with insufficient inclusion of reasoning, examples or analysis 23 14 7 number of postings with minimal yet adequate reasoning, evidence or analysis – often echoing previous postings 55 41 26 number of postings making pertinent reference to content of a first posting by another, without simply repeating it 2 13 10 number of postings responding significantly to content of a first posting by another 7 54 55 number of postings responding to a first posting by another, with reasoned agreement or disagreement, or by posing a pertinent question 1 62 41 number of postings reporting a change of opinion 0 16 5 included in the above, the number of sustained exchanges in which b comments on a’s posting, and a responds, with at least one such a/b/a exchange, though some were a/b/a/b/a 0 49 15 total number of staff postings 11 21 15 journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 7 cowan and chiu public feedback – but personal feedforward? in 2009-11: • most postings were isolated answers to the initial questions or prompts declared by chiu. most were bland, superficial, and shared common content without showing evidence of direct plagiarism. • reasoned presentation of evidence or of relevant personal experience was rare. • there were very few postings in which the writer referred to or supplemented a previous posting, and disagreements between students were even more rare. • dialogue, in which b responded to a, and a commented further, did not occur. in the opening discussions of 2011-12, in contrast: • most postings presented significant and clearly individual statements of viewpoints, supported by examples, citations from sources or personal experience. • disagreements were not uncommon. they were usually presented in a courteous format in which the second writers first stated politely the aspects of the first posting with which they had agreed. they then frankly declared, explained and justified their disagreement. they might also sustain the discussion by posing a valid and searching question for the first writer (and others) to consider. • students readily responded to facilitative e-mail suggestions from cowan regarding ways in which they might extend their contribution to the class discussion. features of the student experience four strong themes emerged from the questionnaire, focus groups and informal feedback and formative advice. each was endorsed by more than 50% of the respondents. these themes were as follows, partly explained in typical and un-edited responses from student questionnaires or focus group reports: 1. the personal and private nature of the facilitative contact: he replied to every student's opinions one by one, which let us know directly the good part of our answer and the weak part which can improve. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 8 cowan and chiu public feedback – but personal feedforward? 2. the absence of hurtful criticism in the facilitation, and its emphasis on encouragement: the first reason is that he encourages us in every posting we made, no matter it was a good or poor one. that's very important! because without encouragement, we will lose our confidence and not like to post any new things any more. second, he tells us what we should further take insight rather than just agree what has been mentioned over and over again. from his emails, which are in a very friendly tone, we can learn a lot about critical thinking skills. 3. the development of questioning, seeking and examining reasons: i didn’t have the habit of questioning and challenging any statements i read. now i will hesitate to easily agree with others’ statements. i will question them first. 4. looking for, comparing and weighing up several viewpoints: i used to view an issue from the surface level, but this semester i start to reason an issue from different aspects. i have learned to consider the aspects that i have never had thought about before, like the third option in the economy-environment struggle. in my opinion, the most important and precious thing we learned on this online forum is not learning how to outstrip our rivals but learning how to think logically and organize our ideas well. discussion the quality of student postings and discussion changed completely in character. the only tutorial or other changes were as described above, under ‘emergent rationale and methodology’. it seems reasonable to presume causation. the willingness of some students to express disagreement with peers, even after first offering a courteous statement of points agreed upon, is at variance with the experience of chiu and the witness of eastern literature regarding chc students’ reluctance to disagree publicly, except with close friends. this suggests, but does not prove, the effectiveness of journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 9 cowan and chiu public feedback – but personal feedforward? the combined western and eastern approaches in establishing for students a feeling of partaking safely in a supportive community of enquiry. the cost-effectiveness of cowan’s activities naturally causes for concern. his support hours have been projected over a full academic year, on the basis of the steadily diminishing provision called for and provided during academic years 2009-11. the result still leaves the writers to wrestle with a level of student support approximating to twice the uk norm. cowan points to his work with francis (francis and cowan, 2008) in promoting facilitative peer interaction. this would appear to be the way ahead, both for reasons of cost-effectiveness and to exploit the potential of peer-facilitation and interaction. conclusion in an eastern context, the writers have responded to cultural factors in developing a combined facilitative style for discussion board activity. consequently they have differentiated in their handling of strong and weak postings by students, using two distinct channels and emphases for public feedback and private feedforward. the outcomes have been encouraging. although this pilot study took place in a particular setting in which chc sensitivities were particularly relevant, there seem grounds for considering that the findings might also apply in less sensitive situations, where student reactions to feedback and feedforward are not studied or compared. might this distinction and use of two channels of communication for feedback and feedforward be equally appropriate for western practice? the western component of the joint facilitation of the development of critical thinking set out to continue cowan’s commitment to embodying congruence, empathy and unconditional positive regard in his interactions with students. readers are invited to inform their own judgement of the impact of that transfer of western practice by considering a supportive and volunteered message which he received after concluding his commitment to the project, in november 2011: in my opinion, the most important and precious thing we learned on this online forum is not learning how to outstrip our rivals but learning how to think logically and organize our ideas well. moreover, i think your comments played a big role as well. they made me think it's worth to spend so much time on those numerous postings. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 10 cowan and chiu public feedback – but personal feedforward? what's more, all of the comments you gave are so useful, practical and inspiring. sometimes you gave me suggestions when i didn't do a good job, yet those words didn't hurt my feeling at all because i know they came out of you sincerely. you want to help us and make our skills of critical thinking better! that's why i do appreciate for what you've done. (chou youn-shin, 2011) references astleitner, h. (2002) ‘teaching critical thinking online’, journal of instructional psychology, 29(2), pp. 53-76. bligh, d.a. (1998) what’s the use of lectures? bristol: intellect. brem, s.h. and rips, l.j. (2000) ‘explanation and evidence in informed argument’, cognitive science, 24(4), pp. 573-604. brookfield, s.d. (1990) the skilful teacher. san francisco: jossey-bass. bruner, j. (1986) actual minds, possible worlds. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. carless, d. (2007) ‘the suitability of task-based approaches for secondary schools: perspectives from hong kong’, system, 35(4), pp. 595-608. chiu, y.c. (2006) exploring student and teacher interactions for critical thinking in face-toface and online environments in an efl course in taiwan. unpublished doctoral thesis, australian catholic university, melbourne. chiu, y.c. (2007) ‘using the shepherd metaphor in crossing cultural boundary online for chc students’, proceedings of the 2007 e-learning iadis conference, international association for the development of the information society. lisbon, portugal 6-8 july. chiu, y.c. (2009) ‘facilitating asian students' critical thinking in online discussions’, british journal of educational technology, 40(1), pp. 42-57. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 11 cowan and chiu public feedback – but personal feedforward? chiu, y.c. and cowan, j. (2009) ‘dealing with affective needs in e-learning: contrasting two cases in two cultures’, in olaniran, b. (ed.) cases on successful e-learning practices in the developed and developing world: methods for the global information economy. hershey, new york: igi global publications, pp. 42-57. chou youn-shin (2011) personal communication to cowan. cowan, j. (2006) on becoming an innovative university teacher. 2nd edn. maidenhead, uk: open university press. erwing, t.d. (2000) national postsecondary education cooperative sourcebook on assessment, vol.1: definitions and assessment methods for critical thinking, problem-solving and writing (no. npec2000195). francis, h.f. and cowan, j. (2008) ‘fostering an action-research dynamic amongst student practitioners’, journal of european industrial training, 32(5), pp. 336-346. higgins, l. (1993) ‘reading to argue: helping students transform source texts’, in penrose, a. and sitko, b. (eds.) hearing ourselves think: cognitive research in the college writing classroom. new york: oxford university press, pp. 70-101. kao, t.c. and chen, y.f. (2003) ‘group dynamics interactive skills in asynchronous small group discussion online’, international conference of distance education. national taiwan university, taipei, taiwan 10-11 december. markle, s.m. (1978) ‘teaching conceptual networks’, nspi journal, 17(1), pp. 4-7. mccormick, b. and davenport, d. (2004) shepherd leadership: wisdom for leaders from psalm 23 (y. c. geh, trans.). taipei: apocalypse press. merryfield, m. (2003) like a veil: cross-cultural experiential learning online. available at: http://citejournal.org/vol3/iss2/socialstudies/article1.cfm (accessed: 30 march 2012). parlett, m. and hamilton, d. (1972) evaluation as illumination. occasional paper, university of edinburgh. centre for research in the educational sciences. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 12 http://citejournal.org/vol3/iss2/socialstudies/article1.cfm cowan and chiu public feedback – but personal feedforward? perry, w.g. (1970) forms of intellectual and ethical development in the college years. new york: holt, rinehart and winston. rogers, c.r. (1980) a way of being. boston: houghton mifflin. rogers, c.r. (1983) freedom to learn – for the 80’s. columbus, ohio: charles e merrill. sadler, d. (1989) ‘formative assessment and the design of instructional systems’, instructional science, 18(2), pp.119-144. skemp, r. (1971) the psychology of teaching mathematics. london: penguin. stein, n.l. and bernas, r. (1999) ‚the early emergence of argumentative knowledge and skill’, in andriessen, j. and corrier, p. (eds.) foundations of argumentative text processing. amsterdam, amsterdam university press, pp. 97-116. vygotsky, l.s. (1978) mind in society. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. wang, q. and woo, h.l. (2007) ‘comparing asynchronous online discussions and face-toface discussions in a classroom setting’, british journal of educational technology, 38(2), pp. 272-286. yu, y.l. and chou, s.g. (2004) ‘integrating writing with reading in efl writing classroom with metacognitive approach’, selected papers from thirteenth international symposium and book fair on english teaching, 1, pp. 708-71. author details john cowan is professor emeritus of learning development of the open university. nowadays he is a part-time tutor on a range of face-to-face and distance learning courses, with a special interest in personal and professional development, and in self-assessment and formative assessment. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 13 cowan and chiu public feedback – but personal feedforward? dr. yi ching jean chiu is associate professor of english department, wenzao ursuline college of languages, taiwan. she has been involved in research pertinent to critical thinking in online discussions, and cross-cultural communications between chinese english learners and westerners. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 14 public feedback – but personal feedforward? abstract definitions of key terms introduction literature relevant to the writers’ practices methodology and methods setting and participants design emergent rationale and methodology methods of evaluation analysis of results postings features of the student experience discussion conclusion references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 27 april 2023 ________________________________________________________________________ ©2023 the author(s) (cc-by 4.0) developing librarians’ teaching practice: a case study of learning advisors sharing their knowledge rachael harding auckland university of technology, new zealand robyn mcwilliams auckland university of technology, new zealand tricia bingham auckland university of technology, new zealand abstract increasingly, tertiary librarians are required to teach as part of their role. there is recognition that ongoing professional development (pd) is required in teaching and learning as this is not generally provided as part of formal library qualifications. using an education design-based research approach, this collaboration aimed to enhance the teaching practice of liaison librarians to enable more consistent review, planning, and design of information literacy workshops. as part of a wider pd programme for liaison librarians at auckland university of technology (aut), learning advisors developed and taught three workshops. the learning advisors were chosen by the library leadership due to their teaching expertise and adaptability. they provide embedded, academic literacy support for students tailored to specific assessment guidelines and marking criteria. the aim was to share examples of learner advisor practice underpinned by relevant theory and applied directly to an information literacy context. liaison librarians were exposed to workshop strategies to develop appropriate learning outcomes, content, and pedagogical approaches for planning ongoing teaching. they had opportunities to assess and evaluate their current knowledge and skills and consider new approaches. these sessions enabled the team to go forward with shared knowledge to guide their workshop design to create more consistent, sustainable, and measurable content. another outcome was the codevelopment of workshop design principles which have been applied to the redevelopment of workshops. as this process is replicable, the value of sharing knowledge and expertise between teams such as learning advisors and liaison librarians is worth exploring further. harding, mcwilliams and bingham developing librarians’ teaching practice: a case study of learning advisors sharing their knowledge journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 2 keywords: information literacy; academic libraries; professional development; liaison librarians; learning advisors; teaching practice. introduction and methodology this case study outlines implementation of a pd initiative to develop librarians’ teaching practice. this initiative was framed by an education design research (edr) approach (mckenney and reeves, 2018) which involved analysis of a research issue, design of an intervention to address this issue, and implementation of the intervention. evaluation is a further stage in the edr process which is yet to be explored. identification of the research issue, analysis of potential interventions and their implementation is based on a series of claims, developed as a result of engagement with research literature on this topic. the initiative took place over an eight-week period as part of a wider workshop review and redevelopment programme. claims claim 1: library leadership need to facilitate professional development of teaching and learning from reviewing the literature, it is possible to see that librarians globally engage in pd in teaching and learning (hall, 2017; namaganda, 2020). this is achieved through continuing education, or specific postgraduate qualifications in teaching and learning or higher education. however, for the liaison librarian team at aut, ongoing and specific information literacy teaching and learning opportunities seem to be mostly external workshops, in house initiatives, and conferences. due to these inconsistencies in formal upskilling in combination with a response to the changing landscape of teaching and learning (osborn, 2017), such as increased online provision, more suitable pd intervention is required. library leaders need to foster excellent, instructional practice and empower librarians to develop confidence in teaching harding, mcwilliams and bingham developing librarians’ teaching practice: a case study of learning advisors sharing their knowledge journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 3 (standards and proficiencies for instruction librarians and coordinators revision task force, 2017). furthermore, library leaders are in a good position informally and formally to support their teams’ needs. through regular informal and formal discussion, and strategic plans, team leaders can analyse needs and direct learning individually and collectively. by engaging in pd as a group, teamwork can be strengthened, and change can be facilitated (wall, 2013). claim 2: librarians may not be best placed to deliver this professional development in assessing teaching and learning capability development, in the current information literacy context, it seems there is a need to design professional learning, either through individual development plans or learning on the job by teams or departments. increasingly, librarians want offerings that are tailored and flexible not just standard (corrall, 2010). the pd programme established by team leaders, based on feedback from the team, highlighted several areas which were beyond the scope of liaison librarians (hensley, 2015, wheeler and mckinney, 2015) and led to conversations around engaging suitable in-house, accessible, professional educators for some of the sessions. the objective was to find adaptive teacher educators, in this case learning advisors. sourcing in-house professionals can be complementary (appleton, 2018) and can add alternative perspectives, strategies, and knowledge. as members within the same institution, the liaison librarians and learning advisors are familiar with the work of each team and often work alongside each other. in supporting these connections and collegiality, the learning advisors had a willingness and flexibility to listen to the liaison librarians’ needs and customise learning specifically to the liaison librarian team requirements as research by bewick and corrall highlighted (2010). claim 3: learning advisors can work collaboratively to create teaching and learning initiatives with an understanding of specific information literacy needs with a focus on both teaching and learning and students’ specific academic and information literacy needs, learning advisors have knowledge and understanding of the harding, mcwilliams and bingham developing librarians’ teaching practice: a case study of learning advisors sharing their knowledge journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 4 trends in academic literacy teaching and learning approaches in tertiary education, and of the issues and technological challenges facing libraries and learning support services (gurney and grossi, 2019; wingate, 2019). further, the work of learning advisors has evolved into a community of practice contributing to the scholarship of teaching and learning, with a particular focus on using models and frameworks to teach academic literacies (chanock, 2007; charlton and marton, 2018). in recent years, at this institution, faculty lecturers, learning advisors and liaison librarians have begun to collaborate more closely to embed information and academic literacy support in faculty papers. this has led to a strengthening of relationships and a closer understanding of the different roles, and thus, highlighted opportunities for skill sharing across teams. a key feature of this collaborative pd initiative was the careful tailoring of teaching so that liaison librarians could review and refine their teaching practice. this included using both face-to-face and online teaching methodologies as well as provision of asynchronous digital resources. research suggests that the more carefully resources are tailored and relevant to specific student needs, the more useful and accessible they may be for students (dianati and collings, 2020). thus, the motivation to develop tailored teaching capabilities within the liaison librarian team, through this pd initiative, aimed to further develop existing practices. the process learning advisors designed these workshops, based on the need for a consistent, teambased approach that is easily understood and allows an easy measuring of workshop quality. the content used for the workshop were existing information literacy workshops and other resources were adapted and tailored accordingly. throughout the workshops, learning advisors explicitly modelled best practice for in person, online, and hybrid delivery. three core teaching elements were identified: workshop design, effective pedagogies, and lesson planning. it was decided to focus on these aspects as they are recognised as requisites for best teaching practice in higher education and are readily adaptable to information literacy scenarios (pasquinelli and strauss, 2018). harding, mcwilliams and bingham developing librarians’ teaching practice: a case study of learning advisors sharing their knowledge journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 5 workshop design (theory and principles) in planning the first face-to-face workshop design session, there was a considered balance between theory and practice, so learning could be applied to the liaison librarian’s actual teaching experiences. the rationale for the staging and use of specific pedagogical approaches was made explicit which modelled good practice. underpinned by learning theory and, in particular, a constructivist theoretical approach (fosnot, 2005), liaison librarians were guided through a learning process from understanding learning theory, and teaching and learning cycles to planning learning outcomes. emphasis on the constructive alignment of assessment, content, and outcomes enabled a clear framework for reference when reviewing existing workshop content (biggs and tang, 2007). from this perspective, liaison librarians could view the materials through the eyes of both teacher and student to see how activities could be edited and refined to be more constructively aligned. undertaking a review in groups enabled a collective approach to negotiating and decision making on sustainable, reusable, meaningful content. during the session, when reflecting on constructive alignment, it was possible to see liaison librarians identifying irrelevant or redundant tasks when relating them to content and outcomes. in reviewing backward design (wiggins and mctighe, 1998), student centredness and the facilitation of learning, the importance of learning outcomes was highlighted. in a guided task, using bloom’s (1956) taxonomy, liaison librarians were able to refine and justify the learning outcomes of an existing information literacy workshop. in turn, they were able to better refine and choose more appropriate taxonomic verbs for the outcomes. to ensure learning outcomes were achieved, at the end of the pd session, liaison librarians, as learners, were asked to revisit and evaluate the session’s outcomes to see if they had been met. this consolidated the teaching point that there are likely to be different perspectives when comparing what is taught and what is learnt. since co-created design principles were a desire from team leaders, a checklist of review criteria, focussing on structure and content, was a useful tool that could be adapted and applied to the liaison librarians’ workshops going forward (authors happy to supply on request). harding, mcwilliams and bingham developing librarians’ teaching practice: a case study of learning advisors sharing their knowledge journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 6 effective pedagogies (active learning) the second online workshop in the series focused on effective pedagogies supported by evidence-based practice for teaching and learning with a particular focus on active learning strategies (goodsett and schmillen, 2022; hunter, 2020). the key strategies that were relevant for liaison librarians were outlined, focusing on the importance of using a range of techniques, including whole-class and structured pair/group work activities, guided learning, and individual activities. the intention with these strategies is to develop higher order thinking and meta-cognition, chiefly through the use of dialogue and questioning (goodsett and schmillen, 2022). core guidelines for active learning techniques were described: • keep activity purpose and instructions clear and simple. • tailor and link to students achieving los. • design regular activities to foster peer learning and collaboration. • have a clear plan for active tasks in class and have a backup plan. • keep it simple; less is more. the benefits of using active learning pedagogical approaches in an information literacy context, as identified in the literature, were highlighted. these included providing increased opportunities to partner with lecturers to focus on key disciplinary related information literacy skills (osborn, 2017; schachter, 2020). also, students’ experience of active information literacy activities shows that they learn to use information with more complexity and versatility which is associated with more readily achievable learning outcomes (detlor et al., 2012). it was also found that active learning approaches contribute to increasing learners’ abilities to think critically and solve real-life problems supported with appropriate information literacy skills (goodsett and schmillen, 2022; hunter, 2020). to further cement the importance of active learning to information literacy teaching and learning, liaison librarians considered a cline of appropriate active learning activities and identified those that were familiar, and which could be applied to their own practice. liaison librarians were also asked if there could be challenges with adapting them for an il workshop. then, they were given an existing information literacy workshop activity and asked to choose a suitable active learning activity to enhance student learning. harding, mcwilliams and bingham developing librarians’ teaching practice: a case study of learning advisors sharing their knowledge journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 7 with the awareness that a lot of teaching takes place in a digital environment or a blended setting (shank and bell, 2011), it was important that liaison librarians also evaluated digital tools to promote active learning. careful consideration was given to the tools that were introduced to ensure these were easily accessible and readily applicable. lesson planning the focus of the third workshop (also online) centred on the importance of using lesson plans to meet students’ needs more appropriately. key planning elements to consider first were introduced, for example, student level, assignment task and opportunity for collaboration. gagné’s (1973) model of the nine events of instruction was then outlined, highlighting active learning opportunities in the plan. a sample lesson plan template was introduced and a workshop brief with an il context. the template highlighted the importance of achievable learning outcomes, active learning opportunities through coconstruction, and peer to peer learning with authentic tasks. to model an online learning environment, participants were put into breakout rooms to cocreate a lesson plan. this was followed by the opportunity to share their lesson plans with the wider group. participants were encouraged to add constructive comments as part of feedback and to foster engagement. as well as modelling good teaching practice, this demonstrated the challenges of using digital tools such as breakout rooms. a final reflective activity focused on key questions: • what considerations impacted on your choice of input and activities? • what challenges did you find in choosing appropriate al activities? • what do you think are the benefits of planning? the importance of including feedback in a lesson plan was emphasised in the learning process as a way to enhance learning and increase confidence. harding, mcwilliams and bingham developing librarians’ teaching practice: a case study of learning advisors sharing their knowledge journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 8 impact the use of a tailored and project specific approach to developing teaching competencies for librarians has not only allowed librarians to upskill or refresh their teaching practice, but it has also contributed to the creation of updated information literacy workshops and, hopefully, a more active learning experience for students attending them. in order to quantify the learning or improvement in teaching, as well as the perception of impact from the liaison librarians, further research would be required. however, anecdotal observation indicates that this initiative has had a positive impact. for example, the liaison librarian team has reflected on the content and modelled delivery from the three sessions on workshop design to develop a set of core principles which will be used to redesign the generic and research workshops offered. this has been a collaborative process, with the whole team considering how their acquired learning can be translated into specific workshop re/design principles. the adopted principles indicated in table 1 below, specifically align with the learning gained during the pd initiative. it is important to note that these principles were co-created, and terms used are based on the team’s shared understanding. table 1: table showing a selection of the principles created by the ll team and their alignment with pd workshops. selected principle pd workshop • all workshops have los with appropriate verbs. • all workshops are constructively aligned to los. • workshop builds content or knowledge in a logical and scaffolded way. workshop design. • workshops are student-centred. • all workshops use active learning techniques. • relevance or context of the tasks or activities is made explicit – i.e., how does this relate to study, practice, or real life. • an icebreaker is included – for example, checking for current level of understanding. effective pedagogies. harding, mcwilliams and bingham developing librarians’ teaching practice: a case study of learning advisors sharing their knowledge journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 9 • all workshops incorporate checking for understanding. • all activities have clear instructions. • content is ‘just enough’ and encourages further exploration. • students are given the opportunity to participate and engage with the facilitator and other students. • all workshops have a lesson plan and teaching notes. lesson planning. these will not only serve to foster best practice in workshop design and pedagogical approaches, but they will also foster a shared understanding and consistent approach to information literacy workshop development, moving forward. it is hoped this will improve both the quality of the offerings and the experience of students participating in these workshops. with the principles developed, the next step was for team leaders to redesign one existing workshop using these principles as an exemplar. the exemplar was presented as a lesson plan based on a template provided in the lesson planning workshop. after engaging with both the exemplar and the principles, liaison librarians will use the principles to redesign workshops assigned to them. it should be noted that a key weakness of the initiative was that not every liaison librarian could attend all live sessions. however, the learning resources and content from this pd initiative have been added as modules to a pd hub, housed on canvas, aut’s learning management system. this means that they can engage with the learning materials at any time, increasing the potential for them to be viewed, considered, adopted, and applied. conclusions the content and delivery of the three workshops resulted in a set of emergent design principles which can be practically applied to teaching practice and workshop design moving forward. a further advantage is that this initiative can be easily replicated or harding, mcwilliams and bingham developing librarians’ teaching practice: a case study of learning advisors sharing their knowledge journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 10 adapted for other contexts or for those wishing to develop teaching and learning practice and foster cross-team, collegial collaboration. moving forward, it is hoped that the workshop design sessions will encourage an innovative approach to workshop planning and development. by providing specific examples of pedagogical and active learning approaches, learning advisors have also provided a suite of readily available tools and approaches which liaison librarians should be able to easily employ or adopt for their workshops. it is hoped that this will make implementing effective teaching practice for novice teachers straightforward, while also serving as a refresher for those in the team who are more experienced teachers. there is also the potential benefit for onboarding new liaison librarians. it is also important to note that although this pd was specifically tailored to our generic workshop redesign project, the skills learned should be readily adaptable and applicable to all teaching undertaken by liaison librarians, either generic or embedded. future research following the edr approach could be undertaken to evaluate the potential impact of the initiative on student learning and experience as well as any demonstrable changes in teaching practice within the liaison librarian team. references appleton, l. (2018) ‘training and development for librarians: why bother?’, elsevier connect, 21 august. available at: https://www.elsevier.com/connect/libraryconnect/training-and-development-for-librarians-why-bother (accessed: 1 november 2018). bewick, l. and corrall, s. (2010) ‘developing librarians as teachers: a study of their pedagogical knowledge’, journal of librarianship and information science, 42(2). https://doi.org/10.1177/0961000610361419. biggs, j. and tang, c. (2007) teaching for quality learning at university. maidenhead: open university/mcgraw-hill education. https://www.elsevier.com/connect/library-connect/training-and-development-for-librarians-why-bother https://www.elsevier.com/connect/library-connect/training-and-development-for-librarians-why-bother https://doi.org/10.1177/0961000610361419 harding, mcwilliams and bingham developing librarians’ teaching practice: a case study of learning advisors sharing their knowledge journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 11 bloom, b. s. (1956) taxonomy of educational objectives: the classification of educational goals: handbook i: cognitive domain. new york: david mckay. chanock, k. (2007) ‘what academic language and learning advisers bring to the scholarship of teaching and learning: problems and possibilities for dialogue with the disciplines’, higher education research and development, 26(3), pp.269-80. https://doi.org/10.1080/07294360701494294. charlton, n. and martin, a. (2018) ‘making the invisible visible’, journal of academic language & learning, 12(1), pp.a286-a300. available at: https://journal.aall.org.au/index.php/jall/article/view/540/311 (accessed: 8 september 2022). corrall, s. (2010) ‘educating the academic librarian as a blended professional: a review and case study’, library management, 31(8), pp.567-593. https://doi.org/10.1108/01435121011093360. detlor, b., booker, l., serenko, a. and julien, h. (2012) ‘student perceptions of information literacy instruction: the importance of active learning’, education for information, 29(2), pp.147-161. https://doi.org/10.3233/efi-2012-0924. dianati, s. and collings, g. (2020) ‘using assessment submission data to provide timely and contextualised academic support’, journal of academic language & learning, 14(1), pp.1-14. fosnot, c. t. (ed.) (2005) constructivism: theory, perspective, and practice. new york: teachers college press. gagné, r. m. (1973) ‘learning and instructional sequence’, review of research in education, 1(1), pp.3-33. https://doi.org/10.3102/0091732x001001003. goodsett, m. and schmillen, h. (2022) ‘fostering critical thinking in first-year students through information literacy instruction’, college & research libraries, 83(1). https://doi.org/10.5860/crl.83.1.91. https://doi.org/10.1080/07294360701494294 https://journal.aall.org.au/index.php/jall/article/view/540/311 https://doi.org/10.1108/01435121011093360 https://doi.org/10.3233/efi-2012-0924 https://doi.org/10.3102/0091732x001001003 https://doi.org/10.5860/crl.83.1.91 harding, mcwilliams and bingham developing librarians’ teaching practice: a case study of learning advisors sharing their knowledge journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 12 gurney, l. and grossi, v. (2019) ‘performing support in higher education: negotiating conflicting agendas in academic language and learning advisory work’, higher education research & development, 38(5), pp.940-953. https://doi.org/10.1080/07294360.2019.1609916. hall, j. (2017) ‘developing teaching best practice: pedagogy, preferences, and professional development’, international information and library review, 49(1), pp.59-64. https://doi.org/10.1080/10572317.2017.1270692. hensley, m. k. (2015) ‘improving lis education in teaching librarians to teach’, acrl 2015: creating sustainable community. portland, oregon 25-28 march. hunter, r. (2020) ‘can you teach research in 10 minutes? embedding information literacy micro-sessions in module programmes’, journal of learning development in higher education, issue 19, december, pp.1-15. https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.vi19.606. mckenney, s. and reeves, t. c. (2018) conducting educational design research. taylor & francis group. namaganda, a. (2020) ‘continuing professional development as transformational learning: a case study’, journal of academic librarianship, 46(3), pp.1-5. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.acalib.2020.102152. osborn, j. (2017) ‘librarians as teachers: forming a learning and teaching community of practice’, journal of the australian library and information association, 66(2). https://doi.org/10.1080/24750158.2017.1328633. pasquinelli, e. and strauss, s. (2018) ‘introduction: teaching and its building blocks’, review of philosophy and psychology, 9, pp.719-749. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-018-0422-3. schachter, d. (2020) ‘theory into practice: challenges and implications for information literacy teaching’, ifla journal, 46(2), pp.133-142. https://doi.org/10.1177/0340035219886600. https://doi.org/10.1080/07294360.2019.1609916 https://doi.org/10.1080/10572317.2017.1270692 https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.vi19.606 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.acalib.2020.102152 https://doi.org/10.1080/24750158.2017.1328633 https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-018-0422-3 https://doi.org/10.1177/0340035219886600 harding, mcwilliams and bingham developing librarians’ teaching practice: a case study of learning advisors sharing their knowledge journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 13 shank, j. and bell, s. (2011) ‘blended librarianship: [re]envisioning the role of librarian as educator in the digital information age’, reference & user services quarterly, 51(2), pp.105-110. standards and proficiencies for instruction librarians and coordinators revision task force (2017) ‘roles and strengths of teaching librarians’, college & research libraries news, 78(7), p.365. https://doi.org/10.5860/crln.78.7.364. wall, j. (2013) ‘a framework for academic professional development in higher education’, 21 august. available at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/280230304_a_framework_for_academic _professional_development_in_higher_education (accessed: 2 november 2022). wheeler, e. and mckinney, p. (2015) ‘are librarians teachers? investigating academic librarians’ perceptions of their own teaching roles’, journal of information literacy, 9(2), pp.111-128. https://doi.org/10.11645/9.2.1985. wiggins, g. and mctighe, j. (1998) understanding by design. alexandria, virginia: association for supervision and curriculum development. wingate, u. (2019) ‘achieving transformation through collaboration: the role of academic literacies’, journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15, november, pp.1-9. https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.v0i15.566. author details rachael harding is a learning advisor in te mātāpuna library and learning services at auckland university of technology. she has been teaching, training, and designing learning experiences in a range of educational environments for almost twenty years in new zealand, and internationally. as a learning advisor her work focusses on identifying academic literacy needs, designing and embedding academic literacy support at paper level, and exploring teaching and learning approaches in tertiary education to facilitate learning success. https://doi.org/10.5860/crln.78.7.364 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/280230304_a_framework_for_academic_professional_development_in_higher_education https://www.researchgate.net/publication/280230304_a_framework_for_academic_professional_development_in_higher_education https://doi.org/10.11645/9.2.1985 https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.v0i15.566 harding, mcwilliams and bingham developing librarians’ teaching practice: a case study of learning advisors sharing their knowledge journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 14 robyn mcwilliams is a senior lecturer and learning advisor in te mātāpuna library and learning services at auckland university of technology. with a background in english language teaching, she has over 30 years’ teaching and training experience in a range of educational environments in new zealand and overseas. her recent research interests focus on the development and delivery of embedded academic literacies resources to facilitate learning in collaboration with faculty lecturers in both undergraduate and postgraduate programmes. tricia bingham is the team leader for information literacy in te mātāpuna library and learning services at auckland university of technology. in this position, she supports her team in the development of information literacy initiatives which enhance students’ academic journey and contribute to their overall academic success. the research idea came from her interest in working with her team to develop their learning and teaching capabilities. licence ©2023 the author(s). this is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (cc-by 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. see http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. journal of learning development in higher education (jldhe) is a peer-reviewed open access journal published by the association for learning development in higher education (aldinhe). developing librarians’ teaching practice: a case study of learning advisors sharing their knowledge abstract introduction and methodology claims claim 1: library leadership need to facilitate professional development of teaching and learning claim 2: librarians may not be best placed to deliver this professional development claim 3: learning advisors can work collaboratively to create teaching and learning initiatives with an understanding of specific information literacy needs the process workshop design (theory and principles) effective pedagogies (active learning) lesson planning impact conclusions references author details licence literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 4: march 2012 case study: engaging conceptual learning about threshold concepts with pots and pans yvon appleby university of central lancashire, uk alison barton university of central lancashire, uk abstract this case study discusses a recent session delivered to teachers on a masters (med) programme which has a strong emphasis on enhancing professional practice at a university in the north west of england. the aim of the session was to develop an understanding of threshold concepts, a significant element in our teaching on curriculum design within the programme. in response to some initial difficulties we developed a novel and practical approach to engage the teachers who deliver higher education (he) across a variety of vocational and subject areas in further education (fe) colleges. what was initially felt to be an unexpected and strange learning environment for the teachers (using a hands-on experiential approach with pots and pans) enabled a detailed focus on subject pedagogy (cousin, 2010) and awareness of metalearning about threshold concepts (ward and meyer, 2010). the session supported the teachers, as learners, to move from viewing threshold concepts simply as ‘troublesome knowledge’ for themselves (meyer and land, 2005; land et al., 2005) towards something that was transformative and that could usefully be integrated into their practice. the session, which presented threshold concepts as a threshold concept itself, challenged both our own and the teachers’ assumptions about what were core or borrowed concepts in subject teaching, encouraging a greater questioning of how to embed threshold concepts within subject pedagogy and learning activities (davies and mangan, 2006). keywords: threshold concepts; developing teacher professional practice; general and subject curriculum; pedagogy. appleby and barton case study: engaging conceptual learning about threshold concepts with pots and pans the setting and the challenges the masters in education (med) programme we teach has a strong emphasis on professional practice and development. as such, it is for many a unique space to critically reflect upon their practice delivering both fe and he programmes within further education settings. the teachers on the programme cover subjects from accounting to early years and represent a wide range of teaching experience, from novices to highly experienced practitioners. the programme provides a combination of pedagogical theories and perspectives, research methods and critical inquiry techniques enabling each teacher to critically reflect upon their practice as an fe/ he teacher. crossing many teaching areas and disciplinary boundaries it provides a rich mix for exploring both specific subject issues and general teaching insights within this context. theory and practice is contextualised into each teacher’s subject area; aligning both within the programme is an important but not always easy balance to achieve. for example, by including critical self reflection (brookfield 1995), practitioner research (cousin, 2009; somekh, 2006) and educational/professional development perspectives (eraut, 1994; stewart, 2009) we create a space for holistic teacher professional development. this is something often neglected for those who work in he who are frequently viewed only, or primarily, as subject specialists rather than teachers. on the other hand the programme has to recognise and address how the teachers apply their developing pedagogical insight within their individual specific subject areas; how, for example, construction or business management teachers work within their particular teaching and learning contexts. some of the tensions of how to work effectively across both ‘general’ pedagogically informed perspectives and the ‘particular’ subject specific areas was illustrated for us in the module which looked at curriculum design. in this each teacher critically reviews their curriculum assessing if it is up-to-date and fit for purpose; if it supports or impedes learning; and if the assessment strategies are varied and relevant to the learning outcomes and the learners. part of this process requires assessing how well the curriculum enables learners to understand the subject they are studying, whether this is construction or web-design. whilst general principles of curriculum are helpful (barnett, 2005; kelly, 2009), including those relating to particular disciplines (smith, 2002; hussey and smith, 2003; ogborn, 2002; english et al., 2004) there are conceptual gaps in being able to question how far each curriculum specifically enables learners to achieve ‘mastery’ journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 2 appleby and barton case study: engaging conceptual learning about threshold concepts with pots and pans in the subject. for us this is a real issue as we are potentially working across up to twenty different subject areas in any one group. for the teachers this is an issue, as what is defined as levels of mastery is prescribed within the framework for higher education qualifications (qaa, 2008) outlining the knowledge, skills and understanding required from level 4 (certificate of he) to level 8 (doctoral study) qualifications. it is noticeable that concepts and principles are required for the certificate in he and the foundation degree (qaa, 2008, pp.15-17) but are not mentioned, thereafter. for the ba qualification the language is more general requiring understanding complex bodies of knowledge, some at the ‘current boundaries of academic disciplines’ (qaa, 2008, p.19). it does not refer specifically to subject concepts and principles, perhaps viewing these as more applied. threshold concepts, however, provide a useful conceptual tool for questioning whether the curriculum, and the teaching that supports this, enables learning leading to mastery of a subject or a discipline across the different he qualification levels. threshold concepts was developed by erik meyer and ray land (2003; 2005; 2008) to understand what they termed as the different ‘conceptual gateways’ or ‘portals’ which economist undergraduates, the subjects of their study, needed to pass through to understand their discipline in a fundamental and irreversible way. in effect, students being able to master the core concepts and knowledge, becoming economists in their thinking and actions. meyer and land (2003) suggest five characteristics of a threshold concept, in brief: it is transformative as it requires a shift in thinking and in one’s world view (ontology); it is irreversible, once learned it cannot be forgotten; it is integrative, allowing deeper insight and connections to be made; it is bounded, but may rely upon other disciplinary knowledge; finally, it often contains ‘troublesome knowledge’ which is often experienced as counter-intuitive by the learner. this work has been added to by others exploring wider applications (land et al., 2005; davies and mangan, 2006), the implications of using this approach in teaching and learning (cousin, 2006; 2009; 2010), in generic learning development work (edwards, 2011) and in research education (kiley and wisker, 2009). we felt that what meyer and land (2003) identified as key subject ‘portals’, or ‘conceptual gateways’ provided useful analytical tools for the teachers to question if and how their curricula enabled students to achieve subject mastery, as well as the designated level of qualification. we explored the idea that threshold concept was itself a threshold concept journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 3 appleby and barton case study: engaging conceptual learning about threshold concepts with pots and pans within curriculum design, for us providing a process and evaluation for teaching it. if approached critically, in more than a simple instrumental or outcome focused way, understanding this concept had itself the possibility of becoming transformative, irreversible, integrative, bounded and troublesome in curriculum development. it provided a conceptual gateway or portal for the teachers to gain mastery of the concepts and knowledge of designing curriculum for learning within their own subject area. we wanted the teachers to fully engage and explore threshold concepts in a critical way, at a general pedagogical conceptual level rather than only in a narrow subject focused approach concerned with applying insights to their specific area. working at a metalearning capacity (ward and meyer, 2010) provides the possibility, as glynis cousin (2010) argues, for opening up discussion between subject specialists, students and educational researchers, creating transactional curriculum inquiry (cousins, 2010, p.7) challenging what she earlier calls ‘the stuffed curriculum’ (cousin, 2006). this fitted our own curriculum balancing act, our facilitative way of working and our range of teachers. our challenge was therefore whether we could enable the teachers on our programme to gain ‘mastery’ of the concept at a metalearning level, apply it within their curriculum area, and change their practice irreversibly. ‘getting stuck’ and using a practical approach for conceptual understanding our attempt at delivering threshold concepts for the first group did not work; the teachers were confused and did not see the relevance to their practice. after hasty mobile phone calls between ourselves we realised that we were in effect ‘stuck’ in our teaching, that what we were doing wasn’t working. in response we designed a session which was both experimental and experiential; the teachers became learners and the subject area purposively was unfamiliar. it was experimental in design, as it developed new teaching strategies, and it was experiential, as the conceptual learning and metalevel awareness that we wanted the teachers to achieve was delivered using practical hands-on methods. in discussions, prior to the unsuccessful threshold concept session, teachers described when being worried most about teaching, or felt unable to teach well, they used a didactic approach. this enabled them to take control of the teaching by remaining in their disciplinary comfort zone and moving quickly on to safer areas of curriculum expertise; journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 4 appleby and barton case study: engaging conceptual learning about threshold concepts with pots and pans things they described as ‘knowing more about’. this provided some insight into why the teachers found threshold concepts difficult to engage with; we had not clearly articulated, or applied, what we meant by subject portals and conceptual gateways. threshold concepts were therefore experienced by most as tricky, confusing and not clear, or in other words outside of their subject or pedagogical knowledge and to be avoided. we wanted to create a learning experience that would allow portals to emerge, providing a clear understanding of what threshold concepts were both conceptually and practically. the session our starting point came from meyer and land (2003) who use the example of heat transfer, from physics, to show how practical decisions about pots and pans is informed by this knowledge, once known it changes understanding specific to what goes on in the kitchen. they explain: so it could be said that, as a stand-alone example, heat transfer, or more precisely, controlling the rate of heat transfer, is a threshold concept in cookery because it alters the way you think about cooking. (meyer and land, 2003, p.2) the teachers arrived for the experimental three hour session with no prior indication of the content or method of delivery. they were met with a table with several pots and pans, receiving no information on the aim of the session or expected learning outcomes. the aims and objectives for the session with a detailed session ‘plan’, based around the activities that had been created, were held safely in an envelop to be revealed at the end of the process. without discussion the teachers were asked to look at and examine the pans on display and to record what they saw. they moved from simple description, such as small and round, to more analytically informed comments, represented in a chart, of characteristics and possible heat sources that would be suitable for the cooking with the pan. two pans were studied in detail questioning the shape, thickness and the most suitable heat source to use. most identified that the relationship of metals and the transfer of heat was related to the discipline of physics. to consolidate learning and indicate if transition to a more conceptualised level of understanding was occurring (kiley and wisker, 2009), the journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 5 appleby and barton case study: engaging conceptual learning about threshold concepts with pots and pans teachers were asked to identify a suitable pan for a recipe, for example a stir fry, explaining the reasons for their choice. the two key concepts that came out of this discussion were that heat and time influenced the final product. we established that the knowledge of physics (metals and heat transfer) and time were all threshold concepts that enabled a chef to develop mastery and create dishes to a required outcome and be consistently successful in the process. from understanding gained at a metalearning level within the session, the teachers were asked to transfer this by identifying similar key concepts within their own vocational areas or subjects. they were able to identify within their subject areas concepts and theories borrowed from sociology, philosophy, psychology, history, biology and chemistry. many of the concepts or knowledge from other disciplines could be identified as the ones they felt uncomfortable, inadequate or underprepared in teaching; the ones to be avoided, or taught in a didactic way. where knowledge or concepts were from other subjects or disciplines, most felt exposed and vulnerable – it undermined their own subject or discipline mastery. this discussion enabled many of the teachers to recognise the challenges threshold concepts present and where, particularly in vocational subjects, the focus is often on the skills which are taught and assessed at the expense of deep underpinning knowledge enabling subject mastery. many of the teachers recognised that they themselves lacked the breadth of underpinning knowledge; a result often of their own skills-based graduate learning in fe and he. using a visible practical approach enabled some teachers to immediately gain understanding of threshold concepts, itself as a threshold concept, and relate it to their practice. some were able to reflect this back giving examples of making learning visible in their own classes. for example, one sports teacher explained how when he taught blood flow (now clearly recognised as a borrowed concept from biology) he used rooms, corridors and doors to move learners around to show how clots formed. he explained that he now understood that this was a conceptual gateway or subject portal that his learners needed to pass through to master his subject, not a skill to be acquired. he also recognised that he needed to develop his understanding of biology to teach his own subject well, conceptually and critically, rather than skills-based or relying on didactic methods. another teacher working in functional skills discussed how numeracy was best taught when immersed in the students’ own subjects, so she taught percentages by helping learners to deduct tax from their earnings. to do this she recognised that she drew journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 6 appleby and barton case study: engaging conceptual learning about threshold concepts with pots and pans upon, or borrowed knowledge and concepts, from subject areas such as economics and mathematics to enable her students to learn. reviewing the session we asked the teachers to review the session by answering some simple questions. from the twenty two responses we received, when asked how they felt at the beginning of the session most described being interested, if a little confused, excited, and curious to know what pots and pans had to do with curriculum design. a couple reported being amused but sceptical and unsure what the purpose was. when asked if this way of working helped in understanding threshold concepts most replied it had, although for many it took a while in the session for the connections to be made. for one this was a surprise and another said ‘it was hard to identify with initially but it was a good way to learn’. one felt that it was too far removed from their subject to be helpful to them. in response to being asked if they had a better understanding of threshold concepts all but one reported they had, with most adding the qualifier that they had become interested and had done additional reading to support this learning. this general understanding enabled nearly all to recognise threshold concepts in their own subject area, ranging along a spectrum of being very confident to not confident at all. the more confident teachers replied positively that they could recognise threshold concepts in their area, giving replies such as, ‘yes, i have been able to highlight several’ and ‘i am definitely more confident that i can, but we will soon find out!’. middle confidence level teachers were more hesitant giving replies such as, ‘mostly’ and ‘yes i think so’. teachers who were less confident in recognising threshold concepts in their subject areas gave unsure replies such as ‘yes with notes’ and ‘some’. most of the teachers felt that threshold concepts were helpful in recognising the significant knowledge, understanding and conceptual building blocks in their subject area that students needed to know that the curriculum should support. for some this formalised their existing teacher understanding, described by one teacher as ‘something that you sort of know’, whilst for others it prompted deeper understanding and reflection about the learners and about how curriculum shapes learning. its usefulness to the teachers was expressed both generally, in terms of teaching and learning, and in terms of their own subject curriculum. general comments included: ‘it helps establish a starting point in journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 7 appleby and barton case study: engaging conceptual learning about threshold concepts with pots and pans mapping a curriculum’ and for others it enabled a connection between teaching and the curriculum as in the comment, ‘it will inform teaching style and course content’. subject focussed comments included: ‘it enables me to assess what’s important to get across in my curriculum’ to more specific curriculum areas such as ‘i think it is fundamental to teaching functional skills maths’. one teacher didn’t know if threshold concepts was useful to them and another wasn’t sure but felt it was helpful in thinking about their teaching. did it work? the feedback from the teachers showed that overall they enjoyed the session as the practical approach prompted curiosity and engagement. however, did using threshold concepts itself as a threshold concept, using a practical hands-on session, enable us to provide conceptual tools which could be applied by the teachers in their own subject areas? the two assignments for this module provide some insight into this question. the first assignment requires the teachers to work with a curriculum they use, have designed or developed, annotating the document critically with reference to curriculum theory, pedagogical perspectives, professional and sector requirements, as well as wider policy issues. the second assignment, a critical professional reflection, assesses strengths and weakness for teaching and learning within the curriculum documents, discussing recommendations for change or further development by the teacher. it is within these two pieces of work that evidence of a shift in thinking about threshold concepts became evident. drafts of the annotated subject specific curriculum documents viewed before the pots and pans session, whilst containing general comments about the curriculum, had almost nothing that was subject specific or addressed its effectiveness in delivering core knowledge or conceptual understanding for mastery in the subject. however, annotations after the session began to use threshold concepts as a critical lens for viewing curriculum effectiveness in enabling learning subject knowledge. the critical professional reflection, the second assessed piece of work, had many examples of teachers writing about the significance of understanding threshold concepts as a way of interrogating both the curriculum and their practice. this use of reflection shows levels of awareness and a narrative around transformation in teaching and learning (ward and meyer, 2010) developed from these insights. many teachers suggested this would determine future curriculum development, either in validation or in designing new courses journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 8 appleby and barton case study: engaging conceptual learning about threshold concepts with pots and pans and programmes. in this way it was transformative and did enable shifts in thinking about curriculum design and about the type of knowledge, concepts and understanding that learners needed for mastery of a subject. many also commented that this concept was powerful and could be communicated to others including subject specialists, students and researchers creating what cousin terms ‘transactional curriculum inquiry’ between them (cousin, 2010). the writing of many of the teachers showed confidence in both understanding and application suggesting that had become irreversible. in both assignments the concept began to be applied to specific subject areas whilst drawing upon and connecting with other more general or holistic theories of teaching and learning. it could be argued, in terms of meyer and land’s (2003) five characteristics of threshold concepts, this knowledge and these insights became integrative, leading to new practices. it is the remaining two characteristics, that of subject knowledge being bounded and this new knowledge as troublesome, which suggest that teaching threshold concepts using pots and pans may have enabled the teachers to see the wider conceptual value, more than simply the application to their own subject area. we asked the teachers to engage with these ideas by using neutral disciplinary knowledge (heat transfer within cooking) where understanding came by applying knowledge outside of the subject (physics) to show what needed to be known within it (cooking). in this way we asked the teachers to apply conceptual knowledge outside of their subject (threshold concepts itself) to understand how subject specific portals contain other disciplinary and conceptual knowledge. the pots and pans were a practical manifestation modelling this. most of the teachers were able to make the connections, through their own learning experience, between core subject knowledge and that of contributing disciplinary knowledge which is needed for mastery. for many the session, although enjoyable, produced troublesome knowledge at the beginning; it didn’t fit expectations, with some questioning why cooking had been chosen, suggesting it would be better if it was closer to the subjects the teachers actually taught. the written reflections showed that whilst many enjoyed the session, they also grappled with deeper understanding and the challenges of implementing this within their curriculum. this ‘new’ knowledge (about threshold concepts) was for some counter intuitive and challenged ways that they had taught their subject. for others it was like the ‘penny dropping’ or ‘the light being turned on’, as they saw and understood the meaning and the implications. this prompted thoughtful discussion about teacher autonomy within curriculum development as well as educational instrumentalism and student centred learning from experienced subject teachers. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 9 appleby and barton case study: engaging conceptual learning about threshold concepts with pots and pans the session was an attempt to find a way of teaching a general conceptual tool across a wide range of teachers, without relying on simple or overly reductionist concerns with specific subject issues – a ‘how to’ approach. as we developed and taught the session we felt that we were applying threshold concepts as a threshold concept itself which was, for us, a useful analytical device to construct the session and to assess it as a general learning perspective for subject specific teaching and learning, in this example through curriculum design. what emerged from the session, the following discussions and continued reflections was that many of the teachers understood where they ‘got stuck’ in their own subject teaching. this was often where core concepts or underpinning knowledge was borrowed from other disciplines, identified by them as information they were unsure of and which was therefore difficult to explain fully to students. although meyer and land (2003) suggest that conceptual knowledge required for mastery is bounded, so that ‘understanding’ allows ‘becoming’ (for example an economist), the difficulties of borrowing from other disciplines or subjects to achieve this needs to be acknowledged and explored. for some of our teachers this awareness prompted critical pedagogical insights about their current practice, questioning what this responded to, as well as future development as subject teachers. for others what emerged was the tension between the type and level of professional knowledge they felt was required for true mastery within their subject area and what was required to achieve an academic qualification. for example the appropriate professional knowledge and understanding so a construction worker was safe and competent, as well as what was required for external qualification validation. this was experienced as particularly difficult for those moving from hnd to foundation degree validation systems. whilst the framework for higher education qualifications (qaa, 2008) outlines the knowledge, skills, understanding and concepts for the foundation degree and certificate in higher education these were questioned by some of the teachers as requiring academic competency rather than subject mastery. threshold concepts allowed the teachers a more precise analytical tool to consider curriculum and validation documents, looking at the possibilities for integrating the knowledge, concepts and understanding to move through the subject portals and conceptual gateways for mastery of their subject. this examination allowed the teachers to consider not only where they got stuck in their teaching, particularly where borrowing from another discipline, but importantly where the curriculum itself produced tensions about what the content of learning should be and what constituted mastery of a subject. they questioned who, and how, the subject portals and conceptual journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 10 appleby and barton case study: engaging conceptual learning about threshold concepts with pots and pans gateways were defined for the subjects they taught. assessing why and how we were stuck, and our practical response to this, has supported some significant conceptual and critical thinking for us and the teachers, both for general teaching and learning and in applying these insights within teaching particular subject areas. acknowledgement we would like to thank our colleague mary osmaston for recognising that we were ‘stuck’ in our teaching and to her and all our students for supporting our efforts to find creative teaching and learning solutions. references barnett, r. (2005) engaging the curriculum in he. buckinghamshire: open university press. brookfield, s. d. (1995) becoming a critically reflective teacher, san francisco, ca, jossey bass cousin, g. (2006) ‘an introduction to threshold concepts’, planet, 17, pp. 4-5. cousin, g. (2009) researching learning in higher education: an introduction to contemporary methods and approaches, london: routledge. cousin, g. (2010) ‘neither teacher-centred not student-centred: threshold concepts and research partnerships’, journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2, february, pp. 1-9. davies, p. and mangan, j. (2006) ‘embedding threshold concepts: from theory to pedagogical principles to learning activities’, threshold concepts within the disciplines symposium. university of strathclyde, glasgow 30 august – 1 september. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 11 appleby and barton case study: engaging conceptual learning about threshold concepts with pots and pans edwards, c. (2011) ‘investigation of the relevance of the notion of a threshold concept within generic learning development work’, journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3, march, pp. 1-13. english, l., luckett, p., and mlandenovic, r. (2004) ‘encouraging a deep approach to learning through curriculum design’, accounting education, 13(4), pp. 461 -488. eraut, m. (1994) developing professional knowledge and competence, oxon: routledgefalmer. hussey, t. and smith, p. (2003) ‘the use of learning outcomes’ teaching in higher education, 8(3), pp. 357-368. kelly, v. (2009) the curriculum: theory and practice. london: sage. kiley, m. and wisker, g. (2009) ‘threshold concepts in research education and evidence of threshold crossing’, higher education research and development, 28(4), pp. 431-441. land, r., cousins, g., meyer, j., davies, p. (2005) threshold concepts and troublesome knowledge (3): implications for course design and evaluation, in improving student learning diversity and inclusivity, in rust, c (ed) oxford: oxford centre for staff and learning development. meyer, j. and land, r. (2003) ‘threshold concepts and troublesome knowledge: linkages to ways of thinking and practising within the disciplines’, enhancing teaching and learning environments, occasional report 4. meyer, j. and land, r. (2005) ‘threshold concepts and troublesome knowledge (2): epistemological considerations and a conceptual framework for teaching and learning’, higher education, 49(3), pp. 373388. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 12 appleby and barton case study: engaging conceptual learning about threshold concepts with pots and pans meyer, j. and land, r. (2008) ‘threshold concepts and troublesome knowledge (5): dynamics of assessment’, threshold concepts: from theory to practice: 2nd international conference on threshold concepts. kingston, ontario, canada 18-20 june. ogborn, j. (2002) ‘ownership and transformation: teachers using curriculum innovations’, physics education, 37(2), pp. 142-146. quality assurance agency for higher education (2008) the framework for higher education qualifications in england, wales and northern ireland. nottingham: qaa. available at: http://www.qaa.ac.uk/publications/informationandguidance/documents/fheq08.pd f (accessed: 13 october 2011). smith, j. (2002) ‘learning styles: fashion fad or lever for change? the application of learning style theory to inclusive curriculum delivery’, innovations in education and teaching international, 39(1), pp. 63-70. somekh, b. (2006) action research: a methodology for change and development. buckingham: open university press. stewart, a. (2009) continuing your professional development in lifelong learning. london: continuum. ward, s. and meyer, j. (2010) ‘metalearning capacity and threshold engagement’, innovations in education and teaching international, 47(4), pp. 369-378. author details dr yvon appleby teaches and researches in applied education within the centre for applied educational research (caer) at the university of central lancashire (uclan). she is programme manager for the pg diploma and teaches on the med and edd programmes. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 13 http://www.qaa.ac.uk/publications/informationandguidance/documents/fheq08.pdf http://www.qaa.ac.uk/publications/informationandguidance/documents/fheq08.pdf appleby and barton case study: engaging conceptual learning about threshold concepts with pots and pans alison barton is the programme manager for the initial teacher training partnership in the school of education and social science at uclan and teaches on the pg diploma. she was awarded a hea national teaching fellowship in 2011. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 14 case study: engaging conceptual learning about threshold concepts with pots and pans abstract the setting and the challenges ‘getting stuck’ and using a practical approach for conceptual understanding the session reviewing the session did it work? acknowledgement references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 26: special edi issue february 2023 ________________________________________________________________________ ©2023 the author(s) (cc-by 4.0) editorial lee fallin university of hull, uk nicola grayson university of salford, uk jenny hillman open university, uk katharine jewitt open university, uk eleanor loughlin nottingham trent university, uk craig morley university of chester, uk gita sedghi university of liverpool, uk alicja syska university of plymouth, uk edi. equality diversity inclusion. three words that have revolutionised the way we think about higher education. these words have a weight of history behind them. tumultuous revolutions have been fomented over equality, entire political systems toppled, and violent and non-violent protests are still held across the world to achieve it. and when the dust settles after each victory, the battle-hardened warriors sit down and realise how much more is left to do if we are ever to achieve true inclusion and benefit from the beauty of diversity. one of our current battlegrounds relates to language. many words carry burdens that our imaginations do not always allow us immediately to notice or even accept. we have long understood, for example, that ‘race’ is a construct and yet we keep using it because we have not figured out a better way of communicating the experience of minoritised people. we know that the b(a)me acronym (which stands for black (asian) and minority ethnic) is problematic (aspinall, 2020; gabriel, 2021) and even the uk government rejected it in 2021 in favour of ‘ethnic minorities’, but in learning and teaching scholarship we have not yet agreed on a better way of capturing the ineffable. and so we keep using it across the sector, albeit mostly in the context of the so-called ‘awarding gap’, which remains a ‘wicked problem’ (ugiagbe-green and ernsting, 2022) in he. thus, in this issue our readers will find a range of terms representing not just this lack of consensus but the diversity of contexts our authors work within. the irony often lies in the fact that we use terms that have traditionally excluded in our effort to achieve more inclusion. syska editorial journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 2 words have power. words are illusive. they change meaning according to context. they betray us when we most need them and keep putting us in situations of intense and productive discomfort. they stop us in our tracks, force us to rethink and re-evaluate. the author and activist bell hooks, much cited in this volume, embodied it particularly acutely by choosing to spell her adopted name in lowercase. the least she has achieved with her provocation is a sense of curiosity and the need to know more. and this is what we hope for in this special edition: to stimulate new questions, to open up new conversations, and to help us speak with what hooks called ‘the liberated voice’ (1989, p.9). and the ‘us’ in this mission refers not only to our entire ld community but also to the journal itself. we will be looking for better ways to thoughtfully and meaningfully commit to the principles of equality, diversity and inclusion in our own processes and publications. we begin by drawing on the knowledge of subject experts and sharing our platform to diversify our voices. we are honoured to have two accomplished scholars, drs karen lipsedge and hilda mulrooney of kingston university london, to introduce the volume for us. in their expert guest editorial, they provide a rich overview of the articles in the collection and invite our readers to use this special edition to start ‘meaningful and courageous conversations’ on issues that need greater attention from us as learning developers and which have the potential to effect real change. with this volume, we also say goodbye to jenny hillman who has been a member of our editorial board for over two years. her expertise was invaluable to advancing our publications and her commitment to the journal much valued by the entire team. we thank her for her service and wish her well on her new path. we also want to take this opportunity to thank our magnificent reviewers whose critical reading of submissions and thoughtful feedback and recommendations have made invaluable contributions to the quality of the articles in this volume. our heartfelt appreciation for the time, expertise, and work it took to review papers in this issue goes to the following reviewers: daisy bao suzy beck sara bird jennie rose steres blake annie bryan cath caldwell david clover vicky collins syska editorial journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 3 tracey coppins anika easy anne elizabeth davey lee fallin grainne gordon peter hartley siobhan hawke dustin hosseini joy igiebor ian johnson rhian mari kerton humaira khan michael kilmister tom lowe victoria mann sheryl mansfield heather mitchell leisa nichols-drew elliott spaeth claire stocks jayne taylor sarah wolfenden with best wishes, the jldhe editorial board references aspinall, p. j. (2020) ‘ethnic/racial terminology as a form of representation: a critical review of the lexicon of collective and specific terms in use in britain’, genealogy, 4(3), 87. https://doi.org/10.3390/genealogy4030087. gabriel, d. (2021) racial categorisation and terminology. black british academics. available at: https://blackbritishacademics.co.uk/about/racial-categorisation-andterminology/ (accessed: 22 february 2023). hooks, b. (1989) talking back: thinking feminist, thinking black. boston, ma: south end press. ugiagbe-green, i. and ernsting, f. (2022) ‘the wicked problem of b(a)me degree award gaps and systemic racism in our universities’, frontiers in sociology, 7, https://doi.org/10.3389/fsoc.2022.971923. uk government (2021) writing about ethnicity. available at https://www.ethnicity-factsfigures.service.gov.uk/style-guide/writing-about-ethnicity (accessed: 22 february 2023). https://doi.org/10.3390/genealogy4030087 https://blackbritishacademics.co.uk/about/racial-categorisation-and-terminology/ https://blackbritishacademics.co.uk/about/racial-categorisation-and-terminology/ https://doi.org/10.3389/fsoc.2022.971923 https://www.ethnicity-facts-figures.service.gov.uk/style-guide/writing-about-ethnicity https://www.ethnicity-facts-figures.service.gov.uk/style-guide/writing-about-ethnicity syska editorial journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 4 licence ©2023 the author(s). this is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (cc-by 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. see http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. journal of learning development in higher education (jldhe) is a peer-reviewed open access journal published by the association for learning development in higher education (aldinhe). literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 3: march 2011 cite them right – is it an essential referencing guide? elisabeth wilding university of reading overview this 2010 publication is the eighth edition of cite them right, now published by palgrave macmillan, the well-known producer of study skills handbooks for secondary and higher education. the book describes itself as a ‘guide to referencing and avoiding plagiarism’ and is designed for a wide range of users; from secondary to post-graduate levels and for students, researchers, and authors. this new edition contains many updates to reflect the ever expanding and changing world of electronic publishing, which means that most students now locate information via the internet. layout and structure visually, cite them right is clean and unfussy, with an attractive simplicity to the style. the boxed examples stand out from the text and the use of simple colour-coding makes them easy to read. in terms of overall layout, the book is easy to use and information can be located without difficulty. the organisation is clear, the sections are well-marked and there is a logical progression through from beginning to end, although it would rarely be read this way. content of the nine sections of cite them right, six of them focus on providing specific referencing examples – the main strength of this book – while the remaining three offer more general information. i will briefly review the main sections below (sections a to c) but with a stronger focus on the central reference section of the book (section d). wilding cite them right – is it an essential referencing guide? section a provides an introduction to referencing and how to avoid plagiarism. this brief section does present some information in a clear and very succinct manner. however, three pages cannot in any way do justice to this topic and it feels so cursory that it verges on being little more than lip-service. perhaps it could provide a review for a motivated and willing reader with prior knowledge. but for students/readers who either do not already know the essential principles of referencing, do not fully understand what they mean, or do not have the skills to implement them, this section would not help develop learning or understanding in any meaningful way. sections b and c are designed to cover the basics of author-date style referencing, which should be understood before going on to the examples in the following pages. section b provides basic information on the conventions for how to set out citations and quotations in-text. brief sub-sections on paraphrasing and summarising are included here, but without original texts to compare with the examples given, these are not particularly helpful. section c explains how to set out references at the end of a text. most relevant seems to be the sample text and reference list given at the end of the section, so students working through the book can see a model of good practice. there is a also a useful checklist of the information that is needed in order to compile a correct reference list – making it clear, for example, how different information is required for a book as opposed to an internet site. the authors have chosen to use the harvard system for their examples, something that is clearly stated in the foreword, although i wonder if some hurried and over-eager students might miss this detail and spend too much time in sections b and c unsure of which system is being used as this detail is not repeated again in these sections. no mention is made of why the harvard system has been chosen here. it is one of the more widely used systems, but it might have been interesting to hear why this was preferred over other author-date systems, such as apa. for readers, it is a definite advantage to have a book such as this which can function as a definitive model for harvard style referencing – a system that lacks a single authority to define it – and which therefore lacks common agreement on its exact format. there is a place for a definitive reference guide such as this towards which educators can direct their students (or can even use themselves). section d – how to cite and reference sources using harvard style – is really the core of cite them right. fifty pages (out of the book’s 98) are given over here to extensive guidance and examples on how to reference in the harvard style. these examples are, for journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 2 wilding cite them right – is it an essential referencing guide? me, the highlight of this book. the whole section is generally easy to use and clearly laid out. twenty-five different categories of sources are covered, starting with printed books and then progressing all the way through less commonly used sources to finish with manuscripts. for each source an example illustrates how to provide an in-text citation and a reference list. this section is comprehensive and will provide answers to most questions about how to reference correctly. as stated above, this new edition features a wide array of internet sources such as tv programmes viewed on the internet; social networking websites; messages from course discussion boards; or photos in online collections (to list just a few examples). access to the information is facilitated by the index at the back, so a user can dip in for specific help and find it quickly. the final five sections in the book cover some other commonly-used referencing styles: apa, mla, mhra, oscola, and vancouver. these other styles are treated in the main by reference to harvard style and how they may differ from this. for this reason, the book would work best for those who use the harvard system because it is much more comprehensive in this area. nevertheless, these final guides do once again provide clear examples as a model throughout and are a positive addition to the book. the book ends with an essential index (mentioned above), which, along with the section specifically on harvard referencing, will likely be the most-used part of cite them right. verdict how does it rate overall? as a referencing guide, this book is first rate. it might seem a little daunting at first, but if used the way it is designed to be handled it is actually very user-friendly. this is not a book to read from beginning to end, but rather one to be searched (via the contents or the index) for relevant information. the secondary task of how to avoid plagiarism is treated in a rather cursory manner and remains little more than a summary of best practice, so this part of the book seems to have less positive value. i would definitely recommend this book for libraries and self-access centres as an essential guide for students on how to reference correctly. given the speed at which our ways of finding information have been changing so quickly there is a danger that a print edition such as cite them right will become quickly out of journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 3 wilding cite them right – is it an essential referencing guide? date. the real competition for such books may well come from internet referencing guides provided online by organisations and institutions which can be updated more frequently than a book ever can. nevertheless, the comprehensive scope of this latest edition is more than enough for now to make it a valuable addition to any reference collection. references pears, r. and shields, g. (2010) cite them right: the essential referencing guide. 8th edn. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan. author details dr elisabeth wilding is senior academic tutor for the international foundation programme at the university of reading, where she teaches eap and academic skills to international students. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 4 cite them right – is it an essential referencing guide? overview layout and structure content verdict references author details literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special edition: digital technologies, november 2014 digital technology, human world making and the avoidance of learning alan bainbridge canterbury christ church university, uk disorder in the house there’s a flaw in the system and the fly in the ointment’s gonna bring the whole thing down (calderon and zevon, 2003) abstract despite the widespread application of digital technologies in higher education there is scant evidence to suggest that these have had a significant impact on student learning. a contemporary psychoanalytic model of teaching and learning is offered, which suggests this lack of impact may be the result of an unconscious avoidance with the difficult thinking human learning requires (kahn and hasbach, 2012). anxiety is a component inherent within the process of education, as it continually threatens what is known about the self (bainbridge and west, 2012). as such, effective human learning requires a ‘holding environment’, originating in the natural world, where anxieties can be managed (winnicott, 1964). paradoxically, digital technologies further separate humans from holding environments and possess an internal logic which leads to an ‘untenable violation’ (glendinning, 1995). consequently, to prevent teachers and learners being overwhelmed by anxiety, unconscious defences are mobilised to avoid difficult thinking. this results in the seductive influence for simplistic solutions to complex problems. digital technologies therefore become fetishes as they assume power and value beyond their objective state (berger, 1967; marx, 1867). the power of the fetish is to confuse and deceive, and in the context of learning, digital technologies continue to enforce the separation of teachers and learners from relational holding environments. the role of the learning developer is to acknowledge the complex nature and difficult nature of education and to not remove the anxiety this creates. bainbridge digital technology, human world making and the avoidance of learning journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2014 2 keywords: anxiety; unconscious avoidance; fetish; holding environment. introduction: disorder in the house it seems entirely appropriate to remove the ‘fourth wall’ (krasner, 2012) of academic convention and allow the reader a brief insight into how this paper has evolved. i do this as the forthcoming argument may, at times, be rather complex and possibly a little obtuse. also, as warren zevon warns us, it will indicate that there is disorder in the ‘house’ which may have unforeseen outcomes unless it is addressed. my aim is to highlight the premise that learning is a multi-faceted and messy process. then, within a novel contemporary psychoanalytic discourse, emphasise the impact of an unconscious anxiety on teaching and learning. after twenty years of secondary school teaching i took up a post in higher education (he). during this time i had attempted to find the ‘silver bullet’ that would provide me with an ‘excellent’ ofsted rating, create model pupils and more recently answer the question ’why do the adults i teach still behave in a similar manner to children?’. alongside these commendable strivings, i was becoming increasingly frustrated as to why the learning and teaching committees i attended so regularly avoided discussing learning and teaching. instead these were arenas for planning the implementation of virtual learning environments, e-submission and assessment of academic work, preventing plagiarism, monitoring attendance, creating e-portfolios and avatar life forms. such devices it was argued would bring the student experience (note: experience and not learning) into the 21 st century. it became increasingly apparent that the essentially human activity of teaching and learning was at risk of morphing into a pedagogically perverse application of digital commodities. i make the case that digital technologies are being imposed upon formal learning environments, particularly focused within he and often associated with the ‘student experience’ agenda (dfes, 2005; hefce, 2009). this imposition often reflects what amounts to a thoughtless approach to teaching and learning, in which pedagogy is sidelined by neo-liberal practices of efficiency and surveillance (hannon and bretag, 2010; holley et al., 2011). it will also be noted that as humans construct their physical and psychological world, they increase their separation with the ‘original’ site for learning; the bainbridge digital technology, human world making and the avoidance of learning journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2014 3 natural world. importantly, these products of human world-making may develop their own logic, which can confront human flourishing. i argue that formal education is effectively increasing the separation between the human and non-human world and that the unconscious anxiety related to learning represents this dilemma. it will be recommended that the rich complexity and anxiety inherent in teaching and learning is not removed but acknowledged. it is therefore incumbent on those who have a responsibility developing learning to engage with the difficulty of learning and not to be seduced away from difficult thinking by ‘digital fetishes’. applying the ointment: the imposition of digital technology in higher education digital technologies define the modern world and yet despite their ubiquity, the united kingdom government judge it necessary to provide policy and strategy documents to encourage their uptake in he (dfes, 2005; hefce, 2009). kirkwood and price (2014), in their review of technology-enhanced learning (tel), note that the £12 million government allocation represents a significant investment in schools and universities. it is surprising that in a profession that can often be heard bemoaning the lack of fiscal support, that the £12 million has not had the impact it was expected. this raises questions about the fundamental relationship between tel and the lived experience of teaching and learning in he. holley et al. (2011) make the case that the demands of government policy and strategy are in conflict with he staff and students, to such an extent, that teachers and learners have become silent voices within the dominant hegemony of neo-liberal managerialism. hannon and bretag (2010), from an australian perspective, also make the case that tel is a site of contested discourses with very little consensus as to the appropriate pedagogical application of tel. the silent voices lost within the confusion indicate discomfort, rather than clarity of purpose, which the tel agenda has unleashed. there is a ‘disorder in the house’ but what policy makers had hoped would be the ointment (namely tel), may now have become one of the ‘flies’ which metaphorically contaminate it. the imposition of the tel/e-learning agenda has its foundations neither in the principles nor the practices of pedagogy. kirkwood and price (2014) highlight the assumption that tel will ‘just happen’ and uncover how confusion over the term ‘enhanced’ leads to the bainbridge digital technology, human world making and the avoidance of learning journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2014 4 process of learning becoming marginalised. significant voices in the world of tel agree; baume (2013), beetham (2012), hannon and bretag (2010), and holley et al. (2011) all raise concerns that the technology is taking over from pedagogy and crucially the practices of efficiency, surveillance and an apparent ‘opening up’ of he, all detract from thinking about learning. it is telling that kirkwood and price (2014) conclude that the drive towards tel has brought little change in the practice of teaching and learning in he. i find this research, paradoxically, both comforting and uncomfortable. i am comforted that my subjective experience outlined above is mirrored elsewhere and not a feature of becoming ‘out of touch’; yet deeply saddened that education, in its widest sense, is albeit, unconsciously becoming side-lined. despite this potentially disturbing analysis it is wise to heed beetham and sharpe’s (2007) advice and to use the rise of tel to raise questions about pedagogical assumptions. considering the disorder: meaning making, human learning and seduction if there is ‘disorder in the house’ this is as it should be, for central to the following debate is the psychoanalytic understanding that human learning is complex, often illogical, and the site of anxiety. human learning can be distinguished from that of other animals as there is a curiosity and desire to know about the world driven by an ‘epistemophilic instinct’ (klein, 1931/1985), alongside the tension that exists between current and new knowledge. the understanding of learning offered here draws upon sociology, ecology and psychoanalysis. the model of human learning that will emerge is one that positions learning at the heart of being human and the concomitant struggle to make meaning in a world that is continually being (re)constructed by human activity. to continue with the metaphor of ‘the flies in the ointment’ there are a number of elements which need to be considered. fly no.1: the social construction of reality berger and luckmann (1966) posit that human societies are engaged in a process of ‘world building’. they argue that the human condition is biologically and anthropologically predicated on the need to build societies where interdependence on each other is fundamental. in doing so, a perceptive, although contentious, distinction between humans and other animals is proposed; they argue that unlike other animals, humans have no bainbridge digital technology, human world making and the avoidance of learning journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2014 5 species-specific environment ‘ready’ for them. for example, dogs and horses are biologically predisposed to inhabit, what berger and luckmann term the ‘closed-worlds’, of a dog-world or horse-world. the corollary for humans is an ‘open-world’ that reflects the anthropological incompleteness of early life. consequently, humans lack strong instincts and compared to other animals spend a disproportionate period of their early life being cared for by others. thus, the world they are destined to inhabit is not immediately ready and available. instead, this external world is ‘open’ to the possibility of being changed as a result of the dialectical interaction between humans and the features of human society, cultural activity and the non-human natural world. in this way, human activity constructs the external (and internal) world. importantly these products of human agency now become part of the experienced world and consequently, will in turn, influence how human life is experienced and constructed. the dialectical relationship between humans constructing their world and, in turn, this world having a direct influence on human subjectivity is not without problems. berger (1967) discusses how the human made world may put a fly in the ointment. in the context of this paper, berger’s ideas allow the role of a product, such as digital technology, to be thought about within the dialogical process of human world making. he argues that once constructed, material and non-material products develop their own logic. marx (1867) refers to this as commodities having their own ‘brain’. the example provided concerns the development of the plough (plow) and, although acknowledging that this does make agriculture easier, it also enforces its own being and logic on others. hence, the human made product of the plough has an impact on how tilling the soil takes place and wider agricultural activity necessarily develops around it. the warning berger provides is that the human products resulting from a dialogical relationship with external world(s) have a consequence and logic that was previously unforeseen, and this will often confront and powerfully control the human condition. there are resonances here with engeström’s (2000) activity theory and the social construction of knowledge where he draws attention to the role of objects creating contradictions as the site of learning. the argument to be developed here is that digital learning technologies can be viewed through the same lens as the plough. although the product of human learning, they may now, paradoxically, play a role in contradicting and confronting the process of learning they were designed to support. bainbridge digital technology, human world making and the avoidance of learning journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2014 6 fly no. 2: separation from the non-human world recent years have seen a considerable increase in what has now been termed ecopsychological or ecopsychoanalytic thinking (roszak et al., 1995; dodds, 2011; kahn and hasbach, 2012). the significance of combining ecological and psycho-logical/analytic thinking is that this potentially exposes the ontology of berger and luckmann’s (1966) dialogical human/non-human interactions. from an ecopsychological perspective the development of human thought processes need to be placed in geological time frames. the time spent on the planet by the ‘modern human’ represents only about 0.003% of its evolutionary lifespan. only five or six generations have passed since the industrial revolution. what is significant about these comparatively short time periods is that they indicate an imperceptibly small period of time that humans have been living a life that, to an increasingly greater extent, is separated from the non-human, natural world. ecopsycholoanalysts consider the recent separation of people from nature as the cause of many of the more negative aspects of modern human behaviour, such as childhood unhappiness (layard and dunn, 2009), the increase in mental health issues (searles, 1960; 1972), addictive behaviours (glendinning, 1995), detrimental consumerist behaviours (weintrobe, 2013) and behaviours that damage the ecosystem (roszak et al., 1995; dodds, 2011). for most of the evolutionary history, humans were born, in the language of berger and luckmann, into a ‘closed’ human world – one that the process of evolution had designed them to fit. but for whatever reasons, which are not part of this paper, the development of the ‘modern’ human no longer takes place in nature. instead there is a disconnect and the social and cultural world must be constructed from the products of human agency. within this context, a terrible paradox exists, as to a large extent the products of human activity, those created by the human interaction with the external world, do not make a world that is easier to fit into. rather, according to berger (1967), these products impose their own logic that ultimately confronts the status quo, thus creating the situation where humans must continually construct and re-construct their world. it is within this never ending dialogical cycle that the human psyche struggles to survive, since, due to the internal logic of constructed products confronting human actions, the external non-human world can never be constructed to suit the human world. for example, a dog, badger and hedgehog are born fitting into a world that exists relatively unchanged. not so the lot of humans. how humans deal with not fitting the world they are born into provides an bainbridge digital technology, human world making and the avoidance of learning journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2014 7 opportunity to consider more individually nuanced psychoanalytic perspectives and how learning and technology can become implicated in human meaning making and the motivation to learn. my contention is that the nature of learning may be the flaw in the system that is creating disorder. the flaw in the system: learning evokes anxiety two ‘flies in the ointment’ have been identified. the first exposes how the products of human world-making develop their own logic that may confront human flourishing, thus creating anxiety. the second, from an ecopsychological and ecopsychoanalytic perspective, suggests that negative aspects of human behaviour are the result of a continued separation from the non-human world, thus leading to dis/unease. the ‘flaw in the system’ that is alluded to here is the psychoanalytic principle that, despite an attempt to monitor and control, human learning is both complex and beset with anxiety. a psychoanalytic understanding of human learning is one that, although influenced by very early experiences, is life-long and life-wide. significantly, learning can be regarded as being situated within ‘holding environments’ and as the site of identity formation, where the role of a dynamic unconscious is implicated in alleviating anxiety. hence, to provide insight into the proliferation of digital technologies, a deeper exploration of why human learning can be linked to ‘holding environments’, and also instigate existential questioning, becomes essential. holding environments it is a fundamental omission of policy makers, learning developers, and indeed all those involved in teaching/learning relationships, to avoid thinking about where the site of learning may be. donald winnicott’s (1964/1991) psychoanalytic concept of a ‘holding environment’ is worth considering within this context, as winnicott acknowledges that early (and subsequent) learning is not easy, that it creates anxiety which has the potential to prevent subsequent learning from taking place. winnicott’s ideas represent an early form of ecopsychoanalytic thought (dodds, 2011) as he acknowledged, unlike his psychoanalytic contemporaries, that unconscious processes may have their origins in how an individual interacts with their external environment. the phrase ‘holding environment’ is used due to winnicott’s appreciation of the role of the external world to support an infant bainbridge digital technology, human world making and the avoidance of learning journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2014 8 who, although not fully cognizant of their world, is acutely aware of the sense of loss experienced when not being cared for. it is the role of the (m)other to physically and psychologically hold and contain the anxieties of the infant and to encourage exploration. winnicott’s ideas can be extended to he as his interest was in the process of learning about the world; infants and (m)others now become students and teachers, while the holding environment represents the places and spaces where learning is situated. anxiety britzman (2003) acknowledges the freudian assumption that learning inaugurates a crisis, as new knowledge threatens the comforting reality of existing knowledge and therefore what is known about the self. consequently during learning, the ego, whose role is to regulate adaptation to the external world, is placed under unreasonable pressure to deal with contrasting internal and external demands. this heightened level of anxiety increases the potential for the dynamic unconscious to mobilise its defences. schleifer (1987) sees this, in the context of lacan’s ‘passion for ignorance’ not as a passive ‘not knowing’ but the result of an active dynamic unconscious that seeks to defend against new knowledge. this passion for ignorance, or a desire to hold on to what is known, becomes a barrier to learning; the assimilation of new knowledge can only occur when psychic defences are sufficient to support the potential threat that this may represent. learning is therefore not a matter of simple adaptation as in the animal kingdom but involves intimate relationships with significant others who guide, over many years, the ‘new person’ towards the required social and cultural nuances. it is a process that takes place in ‘holding environments’ where, through the care of others, an individual can find personal meaning. the need for modern humans to continually engage in social and cultural world construction has resulted in their separation from the natural world and the relationships essential to a supportive holding environment. when the process of world construction is considered within a psychoanalytic pedagogical discourse, it can be seen that learning is a site of considerable anxiety, with the unconscious threat now centred on the process of self-construction (hinshelwood, 2009). therefore, the flaw in the system is to not pay sufficient attention to providing learning environments that can encourage caring relationships, which are capable of holding and containing the anxiety that is at the heart of teaching and learning. bainbridge digital technology, human world making and the avoidance of learning journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2014 9 discussion putting the house in order: why digital technologies detract from learning the seduction of digital technology as a fetish the increasingly widespread use of digital technologies within he learning environments represents a response to the anxiety associated with learning. it is not unreasonable to consider learning, particularly early on in the evolution of modern humans, as the development of thought processes and activities that enabled the immediate environment to be manipulated and managed. such practices involved simple technologies. subsequently, from this starting point, it is possible to contend that digital technology is an example of the current peak of human endeavour to construct a world fit for humans. paradoxically, it has been shown that the culmination of human world and meaning making further separates the human condition from the natural world. in the context of learning, this takes them further away from the caring relationships situated in holding environments where anxiety can be contained. glendinning (1995) refers to this as an ‘untenable violation’ which results in an increasing fragmentation of human functioning and disconnect from the natural world. she claims that since the natural world, the primary source of human well-being has become ever more distant and unavailable, so humans have increasingly turned to secondary sources as a site of satisfaction and comfort, including over reliant, fetish-like addictive behaviours related to alcohol, drugs, sex and technology. this gives rise to unconscious reactions which, within the context of he learning environments, may in turn inhibit suitable responses to teaching and learning situations. such responses could include behaviours where objects are attributed power and value beyond their immediate objective state, and can therefore become potential objects of fetishism (freud, 1927; marx, 1867). there is here, a terrible paradox. despite the history of human endeavour to make a world that satisfies deeply held unconscious desires, such efforts only cause the gap between the human and non-human world to become ever more distant. it is therefore possible to envisage, from within a discourse of desire and deeply held feelings of being left unfulfilled, that the reliance of humans on technology in learning environments can be considered a fetish. peter berger (1967) predicted such a situation, although not using quite the same psychological language. he recognised how products of human endeavour develop their own logic, incongruent of the human condition, which has the potential to confront human functioning. a positive feedback loop has been established whereby bainbridge digital technology, human world making and the avoidance of learning journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2014 10 human constructed objects now determine the physical and psychological activities of humans and the psyche. this leaves the psyche, that seeks communion with others and nature, left struggling to survive. hence, the case for what i now argue is an over-reliant, fetish-like, dependency on digital technologies, where the object has attained a value that no longer reflects the original purpose, namely to enhance teaching and learning. from a psychoanalytic perspective this situation does not mean that the world is now inhabited with endless millions of individuals paralysed by feelings of inadequacy, loneliness and a deep-seated fear of annihilation and unable to learn. what psychoanalysis does tell us is that the vast majority of people will be functioning perfectly adequately, and that an array of unconscious defences will be available to protect individuals from being overwhelmed by the potential realisation of this ‘untenable violation’. one such defence is of course to avoid the anxieties associated with learning, and to be seduced (unconsciously) by the assumption that a human-made digital device will salve the difficult problem of human learning. avoiding difficult knowledge: omnipotent delusions winnicott’s (1960/2007) notion of holding environments, and the role of caring relationships to manage difficult knowledge, involves the defence of omnipotent delusion. in this case the infant is protected from a full awareness of their own inadequacies and subsequent total reliance on the (m)other by the delusion that they are in control and that it is their omnipotent wishes that ‘magic-up’ the breast, a cuddle or soothing words. so, it is also, for digital technologies in the anxiety-ridden environment of lifelong learning. the reliance on and call for increased use of digital technologies defends against the realisation that learning is complex, deeply troubling and is potentially costly, as it involves developing relationships between lecturers and students. the delusion created is that learning can be controlled, indeed, that learning is logical and linear. from the perspective of psychoanalysis, informed by the principles of social constructionism and ecology, nothing could be further from the truth. the omnipotent delusion, represented by an increasing reliance on digital technologies, is a social defence that deceives by averting the gaze from what learning within caring relationships might actually involve. bainbridge digital technology, human world making and the avoidance of learning journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2014 11 avoiding difficult knowledge: splitting melanie klein was a colleague of winnicott who proposed that, throughout the lifespan, anxiety causes individuals to revert to paranoid-schizoid thinking which defends the self by the dichotomous splitting of ideas into good and bad, thereby holding onto good thoughts and feelings and projecting out the bad (klein, 1931/1985). the continual proliferation of learning technologies may be the result of such a split, where due to the seduction of technology, it unconsciously becomes ‘good’ and other forms of pedagogy are labelled as ‘bad’. the suggestion is that unconscious defences avoid the troubling nature of what learning may actually involve, and the simplistic digital technology response is readily accepted and complex pedagogy is rejected. klein also argued that as the infant develops they begin to realise the world is not as black and white as they first supposed and that others beside them have their own needs and wants. the change results in feelings of guilt towards the caregiver and the desire to repair any damage their behaviour may have inflicted. she also identified a more dysfunctional desire to repair known as a manic reparation. this defence protects the individual from guilt by belittling the situation and even carrying out behaviours that make matters worse. consequently, digital technologies can be considered as manic reparations, as the ability to think about learning and the anxiety it creates becomes subsumed by the pivotal and powerful discourse of strategy and functionality instead of pedagogy. for example, hannon and bretag (2013) identified contested discourses represented by three distinct repertoires. the first two are found within policy statements that present digital technologies as (un-problematically) providing cost-effective access to a global market. the third discourse, revealed from the language of learning developers and teachers, considers the role of digital technology as foregrounding a relational approach to pedagogy. what emerges are policy makers, and potentially learning developers, who seduced by the fetish of technology, sincerely believe that digital products are the solution to complex human learning. but it is a cruel seduction and, like all fetish behaviours, it detracts from the real work involved in human learning. this, of course, is too difficult and troubling even to be thought about (schleifer, 1987; britzman, 2003). bainbridge digital technology, human world making and the avoidance of learning journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2014 12 conclusion psychoanalysis teaches us that learning is a complex and difficult process, influenced by defence mechanisms that protect the individual from the anxiety inherent in confronting new knowledge. the use of technology in he can therefore be located within a discourse of psychological defences, where the teacher and learner, influenced by an unconscious ‘passion for ignorance’ and simplistic split thinking, are seduced to avoid engaging with the difficulties and anxieties associated with learning. instead, the seduction leads to fetish-like confused attempts to find satisfaction in learning mediated by digital technologies. unfortunately, this technological product of human world making, with its own logic, ultimately confronts and maintains the damaging disruption of the dialogical holding environment relationship. the responsible moral and pedagogical stance to take is to not simply accept that digital technologies are human products that have the potential to enhance learning. instead, those in he who have a role in thinking about and designing learning situations should be mindful of the seductive power and ‘fetish-like’ response to technology (kahn and hasbach, 2012). considerable research (holley et al., 2011; hannon and bretag, 2013; kirkwood and price, 2014) highlights the disjuncture between the discourse of teachers/lecturers from that provided in teaching and learning policy documents. the former espouse relationships and ‘deep learning’, while the latter are focused on managerial issues of strategy and function, where the language of efficiency, either glosses over or occludes, pedagogical thinking. the suggestion is not to avoid digital technology but to think care-fully about the role it may have in he teaching and learning programmes. finally, the fourth-wall must be pushed aside again. i was re-writing this paper at the same time as running tutorials for year three dissertations and a student came in all flustered, there may have been tears, but if so they were wiped away for me. the student sat with photocopied articles spilling from their knees to the floor, while desperately trying to find ‘the form you asked for – it’s got my ideas on’. i waited and said nothing giving them time to settle. sensing the chaos i asked the student to ‘just tell me what the idea was’. she looked anxious, continued to hunt for the elusive form and then sighed before spurting out enough information for a phd. i laughed and told them they had a life times’ work already. bainbridge digital technology, human world making and the avoidance of learning journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2014 13 we spent some time trying to identify what the research could be but i was continually pushed to suggest ‘how many articles should i read, what about books, do they all have to be in the 2000s?’. i decided to show them this paper and how i work. how my many notes were covered in scribbles and corrections and there were piles of articles and books on the floor. i mentioned how long this piece of writing had taken me. the student seemed astonished and i began to talk about how difficult reading and writing really is. she relaxed (a bit!) and then it became possible to think about the study and not the chaos of notes and articles. the search for the form was possibly a search for security, or a distraction to actually have to think about the chaos, and it seemed my job was to provide the answer. i imagined myself saying, ‘you are researching the impact that e-portfolios have on retention of first generation working-class female students in year one at a russell group university. i would expect three book chapters, ten journal articles…’ but this would not encourage learning. i also tried to re-imagine the scenario but carried out by e-mail or skype, and question whether the wiped away tears, chaos of notes, or my own story could have entered these spaces. there is a moral here and my recommendation is to approach teaching and learning honestly, respectfully and with humanity. we should acknowledge that learning, by definition, catches us off guard and makes us feel uneasy and that learning, or teaching, is complex. digital technologies are fine and wonderful things and do have a role. they offer, albeit anxiously, a richness of connectivity between the learner and a vast array of difficult knowledge; the potential of moocs to disrupt existing knowledge-based power structures; and hard to avoid access to the wonder of comet landings, while at the same time fraud in sport and the horror of man-eating tigers (bbc, 2014). decisions about the application of digital technologies in he must be informed by a critical understanding of pedagogy, and this is one that reflects the relational nature of how humans learn best and not by a discourse of managerialism and surveillance. acknowledgements i am much indebted to dr stephen scoffham and the reviewing editors for taking the time to follow the ideas in this paper and to offer much appreciated support and advice. bainbridge digital technology, human world making and the avoidance of learning journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2014 14 references bainbridge, a. and west, l. (2012) ‘introduction: minding the gap’, in bainbridge, a. and west, l. (eds.) psychoanalysis and education: minding a gap. london: karnac, pp. 11-38. baume, d. (2013) ‘technology in its place’, educational developments, 14(2), pp. 22-23. bbc (2014) bbc news homepage. available at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/ (accessed: 13 october 2014). beetham, h. (2012) ‘ten years of technology education: what have we really learned?’, educational developments, 13(2), pp. 1-5. beetham, h. and sharpe, r. (2007) rethinking pedagogy for a digital age: designing and delivering e-learning. oxford: routledge. berger, p.l. (1967) the sacred canopy: elements of a sociological theory of religion. new york: anchor books. berger, p.l. and luckmann, t. (1966) the social construction of reality: a treatise in the sociology of knowledge. london: penguin. britzman, d.p. (2003) after-education: anna freud, melanie klein and psychoanalytic histories of learning. albany: state university of new york press. calderon, j. and zevon, w. (2003) disorder in the house. london: universal music publishing group. department for education and skills (2005) harnessing technology: transforming learning and children’s services. nottingham: dfes publications -1296-2005. dodds, j. (2011) psychoanalysis and ecology at the edge of chaos: complexity theory, deleuze and psychoanalysis for a climate in crisis. east sussex: routledge. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/ bainbridge digital technology, human world making and the avoidance of learning journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2014 15 engeström, y. (2000) ‘comment on blackler et al. activity theory and the social construction of knowledge: a story of four umpires’, organization, 7(2), pp. 301-310. freud, s. (1927) ‘fetishism’ in the complete works of sigmund freud (vol. xxi), (j. strachey, trans). london: hogarth and the institute of psycho-analysis, pp. 147157. glendinning, c. (1995) ‘technology, trauma and the wild’, in roszak, t., gomes, m.e. and kanner, a.d. (eds.) ecopsychology: restoring the earth, healing the mind. san francisco: sierra club books, pp. 41-54. hannon, j. and bretag, t. (2010) ‘negotiating contested discourses of learning technologies in higher education’, educational technology and society, 13(1), pp. 106-120. hefce with jisc and the higher education academy (2009) enhancing learning and teaching through technology. available at: www.hefce.ac.uk/pubs/hefce/2009/09_12/ (accessed: 28 october 2014) hinshelwood, r.d. (2009) ‘do unconscious processes affect educational institutions?’, journal of clinical child psychology and psychiatry, 14(4), pp. 509-522. holley, d., burns, t., sinfield, s. and glass, b. (2011) ‘when worlds collide: the paradox of learning development, e-learning and the 21 st century university’, in hartley, p., hilsdon, j., keenan, c., sinfield, s. and verity, m. (eds.) learning development in higher education. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan, pp. 199-211. kahn, p.h. jr. and hasbach, p.h. (2012) ‘introduction to ecopsychology: science, totems, and the technological species’, in kahn, p.h. jr., and hasbach, p.h. (eds.) introduction to ecopsychology: science, totems, and the technological species. london: the mit press, pp. 1-21. kirkwood, a. and price, l. (2014) ‘technology-enhanced learning and teaching in higher education: what is ‘enhanced’ and how do we know? a critical literature review’, learning, media and technology, 39(1), pp. 6-36. http://www.hefce.ac.uk/pubs/hefce/2009/09_12/ bainbridge digital technology, human world making and the avoidance of learning journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2014 16 klein, m. (1931/1985) love, guilt and reparation and other works, 1921-1945 (1985 edn). new york: the free press. krasner, d. (2012) a history of modern drama. london: wiley. layard, r. and dunn, j. (2009) a good childhood. london: penguin. marx, k. (1867) ‘the fetishism of commodities and the secret thereof’, in marx, k. capital, volume one, commodities and money. available at: http://web.stanford.edu/~davies/symbsys100-spring0708/marx-commodityfetishism.pdf (accessed: 28 october 2014). roszak, t., gomes, m.e. and kanner, a.d. (eds.) (1995) ecopsychology: restoring the earth, healing the mind. san francisco: sierra club books. schleifer, r. (1987) ‘lacan’s enunciation of the cure of mortality: teaching, transference and desire’, college english, 49(7), pp. 801-815. searles, h. (1960) the nonhuman environment in normal development and in schizophrenia. new york: international university press. searles, h. (1972) ‘unconscious process in relation to the environmental crisis’, psychoanalytic review, 59(3), pp. 361-374. weintrobe, s. (2013) ‘on the love of nature and on human nature: restoring split internal landscapes’, in weintrobe, s. (ed.) engaging with climate change. east sussex: routledge, pp. 199-213. winnicott, d.w. (1960/2007) ‘the theory of the parent-infant relationship’, in winnicott, d.w. the maturational processes and the facilitating environment. (2007 edn) london: karnac. winnicott, d.w. (1964/1991) the child the family and the outside world. (1991 edn) london: penguin. http://web.stanford.edu/~davies/symbsys100-spring0708/marx-commodity-fetishism.pdf http://web.stanford.edu/~davies/symbsys100-spring0708/marx-commodity-fetishism.pdf bainbridge digital technology, human world making and the avoidance of learning journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2014 17 author details alan bainbridge is a chartered psychologist, doctor of clinical science and is interested in the contested space between psychoanalytic thought and the processes of education in its widest sense. he has written on how educational professionals develop their professional practice and also, the nature of academic understanding. together with linden west, alan has edited psychoanalysis and education: minding a gap (karnac). digital technology, human world making and the avoidance of learning abstract introduction: disorder in the house applying the ointment: the imposition of digital technology in higher education considering the disorder: meaning making, human learning and seduction fly no.1: the social construction of reality fly no. 2: separation from the non-human world the flaw in the system: learning evokes anxiety holding environments anxiety discussion putting the house in order: why digital technologies detract from learning the seduction of digital technology as a fetish avoiding difficult knowledge: omnipotent delusions avoiding difficult knowledge: splitting conclusion acknowledgements references author details literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 6: november 2013 challenging assumptions about it skills in higher education lyn farrell leeds metropolitan university, uk abstract this paper challenges the idea of 'the digital native' and the subsequent assumption of digital literacy skills amongst higher education (he) students. it discusses the debate around the digital native theory and illustrates how, despite the growing challenges to it, the theory is still regularly used to describe student populations. it also provides a case study that demonstrates the diverse student population at leeds metropolitan university and the varying levels of digital literacy amongst the younger age group students. it argues that treating students as a homogenous mass is problematic and that generic technology skills do not equate to academic it skills and that, therefore, the provision of it support is essential for a significant portion of the he student population. the paper concludes with a warning that we are letting down some of our students by the information technology (it) ‘barrier’ within higher education and that we should be focusing on identification of it needs and it skills acquisition support rather than assuming it is something students can ‘pick up as they go along’. this will only happen once it is given the status of a core academic skill along with maths, information literacy and academic communication. keywords: digital literacy; digital native; higher education; it skills. introduction the rapid rise in the use of technology has arguably changed the shape of education more than any other changes in the teaching or learning arena in recent history. although good teaching practices and educators' expertise are the undoubted foundation of successful student experiences with education, the permeation of technology as a tool for teaching farrell challenging assumptions about it skills in higher education and learning has given rise to the need for students to acquire it skills in order to interact fully with the education system today. it is now standard academic practice across the uk for student assignments to be word processed and most other assessed work (e.g. presentations, posters, leaflets and data sets) it processed in some form. access to lecture notes and supplementary teaching materials for the vast majority of departments is via an institution’s virtual learning environment (vle), which is also increasingly being used as the mode for submission of academic work. assessment, feedback and results are increasingly being managed online. a huge number of research journals are now hosted exclusively online and the number of academic e-books has greatly increased, meaning that a huge amount of academic information today is found via the web. the digital native theory   alongside the growth of technology in higher education, we are educating many students who have grown up in this technological era. a great number of them will have used technologies such as the internet to download music and movies, as well as mobile phones, iphones and ipads. many frequently interact with a wide range of digital and online games. tapscott (1998) predicted over a decade ago the rise of a new generation and emphasised that they would be the very first to grow up ‘surrounded by digital media’. he stated that this is a generation in touch via technology with the rest of the globe and that they learn by interacting with digital learning tools. prensky (2001) coined the term ‘digital natives’ to describe ‘today’s students’ who he says are immersed in technology and can learn about it simply by using it. he contrasted them to the ‘digital immigrants’ who have had to adapt to technology (some better than others) and whose learning of technology in later life, just as with language, uses a different (and by implication, inferior) part of the brain. he further claimed that this meant that technology learning for ‘digital immigrants’ will always be artificial, whereas for ‘digital natives’ it is natural, and that many ‘digital immigrants’ are getting left behind. he asserted that educators are now using outdated ‘step by step’ teaching methods because digital natives learn by exploration and experimentation. oblinger (2003) used the term ‘millennial’ for students born into the ‘information age’ who bring with them different attitudes to education, gravitating to group journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 2 farrell challenging assumptions about it skills in higher education work and exploration as a means of learning. she also stated that these students have distinct learning styles, heavy on the use of technology to aid their learning. the digital native theorists all make claims that educators are out of step with the digital natives and that a radical change in learning via technology has occurred, which calls for radical changes in teaching methods. assumptions about it skills in higher education students the widespread acceptance of the digital native theory has given rise to the dangerous assumption that students come into higher education already equipped with academic it skills, or that due to their immersion in social technologies, academic it skills are something that they can ‘pick up as they go along’ and the question must be raised as to how much the digital native theory continues to influence such beliefs. whenever the author presents at conferences about the need for it provision, a large portion of the audience reports that in their institution, there is little or no formal it support, and again, the influence of the digital native theory upon such support decisions needs investigation; we need to know how many current institutions do not offer it support and why they feel they do not need to. there are three specific assumptions in the digital native theory that need to be challenged: 1. not all students are from the digital native generation tapscott (1998), prensky (2001) and oblinger (2003) overlooked the significant portion of the higher education student population who do not fit the ‘net generation’ or ‘digital native’ category. these include mature students returning to education who previously studied before the increasing use of the internet, pc/laptop, online resources and the use of the vle. it also includes students who work and students for whom it at work is either specialised to the job role (e.g. nursing, building or programming) or not a core need for the role (e.g. sports). the digital native theory is not representative of the current higher education landscape and, therefore, fails at the first hurdle to adequately examine the diverse needs of a diverse student population. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 3 farrell challenging assumptions about it skills in higher education 2. students are not a homogenous mass   further, tapscott (1998), prensky (2001) and oblinger (2003) ignore the diversity within the ‘digital’ generation and treat them instead as a single homogenous mass simply due to birth date. they make assumptions largely from anecdotal evidence that is not borne out by subsequent research. there are big differences in the level of interest and engagement with it that they have failed to address. bennet et al. (2008, p.779) stated that making generalisations about a generation gives rise to: …the danger that those less interested and less able will be neglected and that the potential impact of socio-economic and cultural factors will be overlooked. it may be that there is as much variation within the digital native generation as between the generations. tapscott (1998) and prensky (2001) wrote their articles at a time when there was an ongoing shift towards use of technologies. when new teaching methods are first being adopted, there is inevitably a ‘switch over’ period where educators and students are getting used to the change. a decade on, i believe that prensky (2001) would find a great many ‘digital immigrants’ who are confident in using a range of technologies and whose interaction with technology differs little from that of the ‘natives’. by focusing on this false division, he has missed the emerging differences in levels of it skills and confidence with it within the ‘native’ and ‘immigrant’ populations. i believe that the evolving teaching skills of educators is a valid and valuable focus for research. authors like tapscott (1998), prensky (2001) and oblinger (2003), however, make dangerous demands about the need to overhaul teaching methods with little actual evidence of the paradigm shift in learning (via technology) that they claim. indeed, margaryan and littlejohn (2011) provided a recent and comprehensive challenge to this claim. in their survey of students studying engineering and social work they found little evidence that students learn in a significantly different way or use digital technologies in some ‘radically different way’. instead they found that both ‘natives’ and ‘immigrants’ used a similarly limited range of technology for (informal) learning that consisted mainly of journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 4 farrell challenging assumptions about it skills in higher education websites and their vle, and that both groups used social technologies. significantly they argued that ict skills levels vary in both student and staff populations and that this should be addressed before making sweeping changes to teaching and learning methods. bayne and ross (2007) refuted the argument that current students demand more technology within teaching. furthermore they stated that the current rush to adopt technologies without investigating the complexities of teaching practice in relation to it could be damaging. they also stated that the digital native/immigrant debate itself needed challenging as it was over-simplistic. oblinger (2003) asserted that the student body looks upon technology as a ‘natural part of the environment’. so do i though i am undoubtedly what prensky (2001) calls a digital immigrant as i studied ‘old school’ with printed books and journals and hand written assignments. both generalise that older generations within education can never feel truly ‘natural’ about the use of technology. helsper and eynon (2010) pointed out that most of the research to date was from studies of young people and lacked the necessary comparison with older age groups. they conducted an in-depth analysis of the 2007 oxford internet survey (oxis). they highlighted that interaction with technology (the internet in their analysis) is on a continuum of usage rather than a division between use/non-use. they found that education level and experience were far more reliable indicators of ‘digital/non-digital native’ status than age. the research by brown and czerniewicz (2010) added to the argument that the polarisation between digital ‘immigrants’ and ‘natives’ was negative and misleading. they conducted a study spanning six years into south african students’ access to and use of ict. they found huge variation in the it skills sets of the so-called millennial students (under 22 years): that only a quarter of those surveyed had grown up with technology and that a significant proportion had more limited experience. they also discovered that, as helsper and eynon (2010) predicted, a similar percentage of ‘millenials’ (under 25 years) and older students (26-42 years) reported ten years or more experience in using computers. significantly they reported that ‘digital native’ students spanned across age groups but that all students falling into the ‘digital native’ category had easy access to technology outside of higher education, including private sole or primary use of a computer in a quiet space. they concluded that the digital divide stemmed from advantage/lack of opportunity with technology and not from age. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 5 farrell challenging assumptions about it skills in higher education goode (2010) undertook a study of student access to technology at a us research university. she stated that students from poorer backgrounds usually only had public access to it and that students attributed their expertise in it to having access to it at home. those who relied on publicly available technologies lagged behind in skills levels throughout their education. their interactions with technology in higher education actually slowed down their learning rather than enhanced it, due to their lack of knowledge of how to use it effectively. i would argue that the reason i am confident and ‘good’ with it is because i have easy access to technology. it is a fact that access to technology is unequal across society. we have a lot of students who enter university from non-traditional routes and have less experience with it, as well as students from countries without easy access to it. their access to it is via the public, rather than private, sphere and they, therefore, need extra time and space to update their existing it skills. it support will be needed to ensure students from all backgrounds have equal opportunity to thrive in higher education. these students will be hindered if it skills acquisition is not built into their academic timetables. 3. social it skills do not equate to academic it skills   tapscott (1998), prensky (2001) and oblinger (2003) fail to recognise some of the specific academic it skills that students need to study at higher education level, including advanced document formatting, analysing data, e-journal searches, creating e-portfolios, critically evaluating websites for academic use, and creating a positive online presence for employability after graduation. as oliver and goerke (2007, p.180) stated: ...the fact that students own devices and use social software tools for social purposes does not mean that they will necessarily transfer those behaviours to the learning context. this is supported by the survey that corrin et al. (2010) carried out with first year undergraduates, all born in 1980 or later. they found that students used their vle, e-mail and the internet for academic use but that they did not integrate use of networking sites with study. also striking is that only around half of those surveyed rated themselves as expert, opting for intermediate level instead, evidence which goes against claims of a fully digitally immersed student population. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 6 farrell challenging assumptions about it skills in higher education the two year study across five universities by jones et al. (2010) also suggests a greater variance of it skills in higher education students than oblinger claimed. jones found that the differences in use of technology (including ‘web 2.0 technologies’ such as blogs, wikis and virtual worlds) varied equally within and across age groups. furthermore, the cross over between social and educational web 2.0 use for the ‘millennial’ students was surprisingly small. technology is dynamic and evolving and hence will continue to require support. over ten years ago nesi and studman-badillo (2000) called it the ‘fifth study skill’. they investigated the use of technology in education and reported that a large number of lecturers questioned were using it for a range of academic purposes: their students were required to use it to access online information such as newspapers and journals, to communicate with tutors and other students via e-mail and online discussion groups, and to format essays. they reported that the ‘world wide web’ was being increasingly used due to the wealth of information it housed. they also highlighted the resulting problems that students faced in identifying appropriate and accurate online information and the variance in support received to equip themselves with the requisite it skills. they proposed that students be instructed in effective it usage in order to minimise the pitfalls students faced. a decade on, goode (2010, p.584) also recognised this undoubted shift towards technology in teaching and learning as ‘an invisible academic prerequisite’. however, ferro et al. (2011) very recently highlighted that most debates on digital literacy divides still failed to focus on the different levels of interaction with digital literacy. they argued that the level of interaction will depend on the social and environmental factors driving it rather than the ability to do it; the stronger the driver, the more self-learning takes place. i have found this to be the case. students with less experience of it interact in a more fearful way and often comment at first that they ‘won’t be able to do it’, despite my assurances that in my experience, as beginners progress through supportive tutorials, they learn just as quickly as other students. i always challenge their misconceptions and point out that lack of experience does not equal lack of ability, because i consistently see it learning ‘take off’ when students find their confidence. helsper and eynon (2010) correctly pointed out that ignoring the breadth of usage and different levels of access to technology within the supposed ‘digital native’ group could lead to assumptions about the presence of technology skills and cause further journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 7 farrell challenging assumptions about it skills in higher education disadvantage to those most in need of additional support. there are certainly assumptions made that because students know how to use the technology in any shape or form, they know how to research, find and structure academic information effectively. oblinger (2003) quoted a study asserting 97% of 12-17 year olds included in the research were using the internet for school work. usage does not, however, equate to effective use. neither does social use of technology, such as the internet, guarantee knowledge of the specific it tasks they need to do at university. littlejohn et al. (2010) acknowledged that technology tools can only have a major impact once students gain understanding of how it underpins their learning and that the assumption that social use can be transferred to the academic arena is a problematic one. it is important to remember that students’ perceptions of their academic it skills may be flawed, especially given that they are not always aware of what will be expected of them at university. certainly grant et al. (2009) compared students’ perceptions of their it capabilities with set it tests consisting of commonly used tasks for university work. they tested for basic, intermediate and higher level skills and found discrepancies between perception and actual ability in word processing and spreadsheets, although this discrepancy was not found for powerpoint. identify, don’t assume many students come to my classes in response to recommendations from their peers about the structured classes that step students through each it task and allow them to practice what they see as they go along. feedback consistently reports that being ‘stepped through’ like this helped them gain confidence in using tools and functions in word and powerpoint that they had not used before. this goes directly against prensky’s (2001) claims that all of today’s students learn via exploration and that old classroom teaching methods are no longer viable in today’s higher education climate. rather, it supports margaryan and littlejohn’s (2011) claims that there is no evidence of radically different learning styles in today’s student population. littlejohn et al. (2010) and stepankova and engova (2006) stated students need to know how to use computers for a certain purpose. this is certainly true of the academic environment; i find that students faced with new academic tasks continue to ask for help. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 8 farrell challenging assumptions about it skills in higher education examples include creating posters, creating online questionnaires for project surveys, analysing data with excel tools, and creating decision ‘trees’ for work placement projects. two specific examples of current it teaching at the author’s institution, where the impact on academia comes from the increasing use of technology itself, are firstly ‘evaluation of websites for use in academic work’ and ‘social media and employability’. the need for such classes has grown alongside the increasing use of the internet and social media like facebook in everyday life. prensky (2001) claimed that ‘digital natives’ learn by exploration, yet there has been broad failure amongst students to see the consequences of an all too public online identity in terms of employability upon graduation. referencing of inappropriate websites as ‘evidence’ in academic work is also another problem in today’s technology-heavy higher education. students are failing to apply criteria for critical evaluation to internet sources and as such are citing poor quality websites as support for arguments. miliszewska et al. (2009) argued that in this technological age, appropriate it skills should be embedded. they further argued that universities have a pivotal role to play in equipping graduates with the level and range of it skills needed for their future employment. miliszewska (2008) noted, importantly, that it skills endured beyond graduation and pointed to universities to teach students the types of technologies key to finding employment. with graduate attributes and employability having such prominence in current higher education policy, it is important that we support students in attaining it proficiency. more recently prensky (2011) has defended his terminology ‘digital native/immigrant’, stating that it was intended as a metaphor to describe a phenomenon rather than a literal description. he acknowledged that all people journey towards ‘digital enhancement’ and that the way forward now is to think of ‘digital wisdom’ when we consider the role and impact of technology in education. his reconsideration is timely given the newest challenges to his old position. bennet and maton (2011) reiterated the redundancy of treating young people as a homogenous mass and that access to technologies is not the same as use. summarising their review of the research, they stated that young people have a commonality of usage around communication and information retrieval but other than that, there is greatly varying use of technologies. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 9 farrell challenging assumptions about it skills in higher education to summarise, the weight of evidence against the digital native theory is abundant and even prensky has significantly changed his position in relation to it. however, it would be wrong to conclude that the theory no longer holds sway in current higher education. bennet and maton (2011) acknowledged that, despite the evidence contrary to the original theory’s claim, ‘questionable assumptions’ within the theory have become widely accepted. they warned that educational institutions need to address the diverse student populations and the consequent differing levels of usage of technologies rather than let such assumptions of the ‘digital native’ student go unchallenged. in her keynote speech at the 2012 aldinhe conference, beetham repeatedly used the term ‘digital native’ and wrote in her address: as older professionals we will probably never ‘catch up’ with students’ digital know how…but we still have much to offer! this strongly suggests that the original claims of ‘digital native’ have had a much wider impact across higher education than the later challenges to it and that we still have a long way to go to undo some of the damage done by the enduring acceptance of the theory. skills for learning it sessions at leeds metropolitan university – a case study   i am the academic skills tutor for it in the skills for learning team at leeds metropolitan university. the team provides academic skills support in maths, academic communication and it via the skills for learning website, drop-in workshops, tutorials, and customised teaching. our model of academic skills support is a centrally based one, which means that we see a diverse range of students, drawn from all subject areas, across all departments and faculties, and at all levels of study, from undergraduates to phd students. attendance and evaluation statistics are recorded for these sessions in each academic year; an annual report on student feedback is produced to assess the service and to plan any needed changes for the following academic year. skills for learning has increasingly made use of technology to deliver support, including podcasts, facebook, twitter, screen capture, animation/quiz softwares, qr codes, and mobile technologies. skills for learning is, therefore, a team that embraces the potential benefits of technologies for teaching and learning. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 10 farrell challenging assumptions about it skills in higher education however, in over eight years of teaching it to students, the author’s own experience of student it skills is at odds with the assumptions of the digital native theorists. a calculation of the attendance figures for it classes, combined with traffic at the it helpdesk, as a percentage of the approximate total student population is around fifty nine percent. (this is a rather imprecise calculation. it can’t determine people attending multiple classes or asking multiple queries. however, it gives a glimpse into the number of basic it support queries over the past academic year). the numbers of students voluntarily attending it drop-in workshops has increased significantly year on year, as shown in chart 1. 136 344 362 0 50 100 150 200 250 300 350 400 2010 -11 2011 -12 2012 -13 n o o f s t u d e n t s chart 1. drop-in it sessions a large number of students every year need support to some level in word, powerpoint and excel. in the past academic year, many tutorials were given on beginner topics including microsoft office, file management, uploading and downloading files, navigating through the vle, using e-mail and adding e-mail attachments, and offer several ‘beyond the basics’ office classes also. new drop-in classes are added each academic year in response to requests from colleagues or students. from autumn 2012, for example, ‘online identity and employability’ and ‘introduction to pebblepad e-portfolio’ were newly introduced. the full list of classes currently on offer is shown in table 1. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 11 farrell challenging assumptions about it skills in higher education table 1. full list of class and tutorial topics from autumn 2012 logging in at leeds met posters with powerpoint introduction to google e-mail introduction to excel  introduction to it excel – beyond the basics  saving and storing computer files excel formula introduction to word excel pivot tables word – beyond the basics mind mapping with inspiration software word for dissertations and reports online identity and employability  images and tables in word and powerpoint introduction to pebblepad e-portfolios  presentations with powerpoint introduction to publisher firstly, given the widespread belief in digital native students, a surprising number of students who present themselves for support (via drop-in classes or tutorials) are from the younger age groups. our records of attendance for drop-in classes show that a clear majority of students (over 70%) are from the 21-30 age group (we do not collect feedback after tutorials as many tutorials are one-to-one and asking for feedback in this setting would not allow for confidentiality of that feedback). the significant growth of support has been in customised sessions. academic colleagues are increasingly reporting that their students lack academic it skills for tasks they need to do as part of their course. recent examples include word for dissertations or reports, excel for analysing sports data, powerpoint for creating e-posters, and inspiration for creating decision trees. as a result, they refer students from whole cohorts to us for ‘customised’ sessions. the increase in attendance is in a large part due to these customised sessions. a full list of the classes taught in response to requests from academic colleagues is shown in table 2 (note: some overlap with drop-in classes). journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 12 farrell challenging assumptions about it skills in higher education table 2. full list of customised classes taught introduction to excel presentations with powerpoint creating charts in excel drawing objects in powerpoint introductory excel for sports physiology posters with powerpoint film budgets with excel recording narration onto powerpoint introduction to word powerpoint slide master word beyond the basics mind mapping with inspiration software word for dissertations and reports decision trees with inspiration software in customised sessions, students often rate themselves as already understanding how to use particular software. however, after the session, the variation in skills amongst all ages of students is apparent. they often state that they ‘did not realise there were so many tips on working faster and avoiding formatting errors’. they commonly make basic level errors including using the space bar instead of tabs, using the enter key instead of control and enter for new pages. they also often do not know about paragraph formatting, and find keyboard shortcuts and function keys useful. approximately 40 percent of students seen were not aware of section breaks, advanced page numbering, heading styles, creating excel tables, using functions and formula, creating graphical effects from smart art among others. a great many still create a manual table of contents for dissertations and theses instead of using word’s automated tools. secondly, if the digital native theory was true, demand for classes would surely diminish year on year. instead, the opposite is true – students from the younger age groups continue to drop in or be referred to it classes. as charts 1, 2 and 4 illustrate, the number of sessions have risen year on year since the project started. this is true for drop-in classes and customised classes. tutorials have gone down from last year but there are several possible reasons for this. firstly, as students find support through the provision of customised teaching, the need for tutorial help might have diminished. secondly, the rise in teaching hours given to customised sessions has led to limits being set on one-to-one tutorials. students have been directed towards drop in workshops, or where demand was high enough, ad hoc group tutorial sessions arranged with academic colleagues.     journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 13 farrell challenging assumptions about it skills in higher education farrell challenging assumptions about it skills in higher education journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 14 journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 14 farrell challenging assumptions about it skills in higher education leeds metropolitan university also employs a team of it help assistants who staff the it counter of the help and information point in the library from 8am to 6pm, monday to saturday in term time. they deal with an average of fifty it queries per day at each campus, over two thousand queries on average per month, amounting to sixteen thousand queries on average per academic year. it was reported that a significant number of younger students who, just as with the wider student population, need varying levels of help with it. one assistant reported that it is not a matter of age but of previous interaction with the computer. as it can be observed from the list of questions dealt with in table 3, many students display gaps in their it knowledge at a basic level. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 15 farrell challenging assumptions about it skills in higher education table 3. common questions at the it helpdesk individual page pagination printing and scanning section breaks resetting passwords table of contents wireless setup/use of headings and other styles file locations advanced numbering file suffixes excel basics what ‘drive’ letters mean insert text boxes/shapes charts/graphs and data series using google e-mail inserting images/text e-mail attachments shape/image effects saving and downloading animations accessing vle and portal finally, despite the efforts of the skills for learning team to inform new students about available services during induction weeks, every year there are students who only find out about the service half way through the year or later. it is beyond the remit of this paper to consider the reasons for this in detail (for example induction ‘overload’ or academic staff who do not pass on information to their students) but it should be noted as the context in which teaching takes place. the growth in the number of classes year on year and the consistent requests for help with it tasks from basic to more advanced levels and, significantly, across the age groups, clearly indicates that students need it support. conclusion the belief in the ‘digital native’ student population has increasingly been challenged within research. despite such challenges from those that disagree, it has persevered in academic discourse and this has surely had some impact both on service provision and the student experience. in both student and staff bodies there is a mix of technology enthusiasts, technology users and technology novices. interaction or lack of interaction with technology has more to do with opportunity or interest than age. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 16 farrell challenging assumptions about it skills in higher education in direct negation of the belief by many that students will be teaching the educators in terms of technologies, the student population remains far more complex and diverse than such a position allows for. in my own experience as a university it tutor over the past eight years, the need for it support for a significant number of students remains very apparent. a comprehensive picture of it skills in current uk higher education students is lacking in current research. a survey of current uk student populations and their access to and use of it, similar to that in south africa by brown and czerniewicz (2010), and building on the research of margaryan and littlejohn (2011), is therefore crucial. i strongly believe such research would echo the results of the case study; that the uk student population is diverse with a huge variation in it skills. an evaluation of the impact of playing ‘catch up’ with it skills acquisition in students coming into higher education is also essential. if the experiences of this institution’s students are reflected across the uk, there are a substantial number of higher education students having to struggle daily with it systems without structured support. ‘picking it up as you go along’ has been at the great cost of personal academic study time for many students. rather than assuming it knowledge in today’s student populations and upholding misleading notions of native/immigrant, we need to focus on effective identification of different skills levels and sufficient support in higher education. this is done at most uk universities for academic communication, maths, statistics and information literacy, yet we neglect it skills in a way that creates barriers to learning and will undoubtedly impact upon student retention. it skills support has to be recognised as an integral part of academic success, not only because it is crucial to students who would otherwise struggle with it throughout their academic studies, but because there are gaps in students’ it knowledge which impacts on it processed work. this can only happen when it is awarded the status of academic skill, with it skills development embedded within all higher education courses. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 17 farrell challenging assumptions about it skills in higher education references bayne, s. and ross, j. (2007) ‘the 'digital native' and 'digital immigrant': a dangerous opposition’, annual conference of the society for research into higher education (srhe) brighton, sussex 11-13 december [online]. available at: http://www.academia.edu (accessed: 22 august 2012). beetham, h. (2012) ‘strange encounters: academic learning and digital know-how’, proceedings of the aldinhe conference. leeds 2-4 april [online]. available at: http://www.aldinhe.ac.uk/leeds12.htm (accessed: 10 october 2013). bennett, s., maton, k. and kervin, l. (2008) ‘the‘digital natives’ debate: a critical review of the evidence’, british journal of educational technology, 39(5), pp. 775–786. bennet, s. and maton, k. (2011) ‘intellectual field or faith based religion: moving on from the idea of digital natives’, in thomas, m. (ed.) deconstructing digital natives. new york and london: routledge, pp. 169-185. brown, c. and czerniewicz, l. (2010) ‘debunking the 'digital native': beyond digital apartheid, towards digital democracy’, journal of computer assisted learning, 26(5), pp. 357-369. corrin, l., bennett, s. and lockyer, l. (2010) ‘digital natives: everyday life versus academic study’, proceedings of the 7th international conference on networked learning 2010. denmark 3-4 may [online]. available at: http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/fss/organisations/netlc/past/nlc2010/index.htm (accessed: 22 october 2012). ferro, e., helbig, n. and gil-garcia, r. (2011) ‘the role of it literacy in defining digital divide policy needs’, government information quarterly, 28(1), pp. 3–10. grant, m., malloy, a. and murphy, m. (2009) ‘a comparison of student perceptions of their computer skills to their actual abilities’, journal of information technology education, 8, pp. 141-160. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 18 http://www.academia.edu/ http://www.aldinhe.ac.uk/leeds12.htm http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/fss/organisations/netlc/past/nlc2010/index.htm farrell challenging assumptions about it skills in higher education goode, j. (2010) ‘mind the gap: the digital dimension of college access’, the journal of higher education, 8(5), pp. 582-617. helsper, e. and eynon, r. (2010) ‘digital natives: where is the evidence?’, british educational research journal, 36 (3), pp. 503-520. jones, c., ramanau, r., cross, s. and healing, g. (2010) ‘net generation or digital natives: is there a distinct new generation entering university?’, computers and education, 54(3), pp. 722-732 [online]. available at: http://www.journals.elsevier.com/computers-and-education/ (accessed: 12 december 2012). littlejohn, a., margaryan, a. and vojt, g. (2010) ‘exploring students’ use of ict and expectations of learning methods’, electronic journal of e-learning, 8(1), pp.13-20 [online]. available at: www.ejel.org (accessed: 10 january 2013). margaryan, a. and littlejohn, a. (2011) ‘are digital natives a myth or reality?: students’ use of technologies for learning’, computers & education, 56(2), pp. 429-440. miliszewska, i. (2008) ‘ict skills: an essential graduate skill in today’s global economy?’, proceedings of the informing science & it education conference (insite) 2008. bulgaria 22-25 june [online]. available at: http://proceedings.informingscience.org/ (accessed: 16 august 2012). miliszewska, i., venables, a. and tan, g. (2009) ‘how generic is i(nformation) t(echnology)?’, issues in informing science and information technology, 6, pp. 193-199 [online]. available at: http://www.informingscience.us/icarus/journals/iisit/ (accessed: 24 august 2012). nesi, h. and studman-badillo, b. (2000) ‘the fifth study skill: assumptions and expectations regarding the role of the internet in british universities’, in howarth, p. and herington, r. (eds.) eap learning technologies. leeds: leeds university press, pp. 1-8. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 19 http://www.journals.elsevier.com/computers-and-education/ http://www.ejel.org/ http://proceedings.informingscience.org/ http://www.informingscience.us/icarus/journals/iisit/ farrell challenging assumptions about it skills in higher education oblinger, d. (2003) ‘boomers, gen-xers and millennials: understanding the new students’, educause review, 38(4), pp. 37-47 [online]. available at: http://www.educause.edu/ (accessed: 5 august 2012). oliver, b. and goerke, v. (2007) ‘australian undergraduates’ use and ownership of emerging technologies: implications and opportunities for creating engaging learning experiences for the net generation’, australasian journal of educational technology, 23(2), pp. 171-186 [online]. available at: http://www.ascilite.org.au/ (accessed: 22 august 2012). prensky, m. (2001) ‘digital natives, digital immigrants’, on the horizon, 9(5), pp. 1-6 [online]. available at: http://marcprensky.com/ (accessed: 5 august 2012). prensky, m. (2011) ‘digital wisdom and homo sapiens digital’, in thomas, m. (ed.) deconstructing digital natives. new york and london: routledge, pp. 15-29. štepánková, o. and engová, d. (2006) ‘professional competence and computer literacy in e-age: focus on healthcare’, methods of information in medicine, 45(3), pp. 300-304 [online]. available at: http://www.schattauer.de/en/magazine/subject-areas/journalsa-z/methods.html (accessed: 12 march 2013). tapscott, d. (1998) growing up digital: the rise of the net generation. new york: mcgrawhill. author details lyn farrell is an academic skills tutor (it) at leeds metropolitan university. her research interests are in students' it skills in current higher education, the perpetuation of the digital native myth, it toolkits for academic skills, social media and online identity and technology and education. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 20 http://www.educause.edu/ http://www.ascilite.org.au/ http://marcprensky.com/ http://www.schattauer.de/en/magazine/subject-areas/journals-a-z/methods.html http://www.schattauer.de/en/magazine/subject-areas/journals-a-z/methods.html challenging assumptions about it skills in higher education abstract introduction the digital native theory assumptions about it skills in higher education students identify, don’t assume skills for learning it sessions at leeds metropolitan university – a case study conclusion references author details literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special edition: developing writing in stem disciplines, november 2012 enhancing the quality of final year projects in computing through weekly written tasks marion bowman university of bradford, uk andrea cullen university of bradford, uk abstract writing can be used as a means of engaging students in their studies, leading to greater time spent on the subject, greater interest in the subject and ultimately better grades. the intervention discussed in this paper involved the setting of weekly written tasks embedded within the lecture strand of a computing final year project (fyp) module. the aims behind this ‘thinking through writing’ intervention were to enhance students’ ability to produce high quality projects and written project reports, as well as to improve students’ ability to manage their time while completing their projects. results from this study showed that there was a significant positive relationship between weekly task marks and project marks, however, only 57% of the cohort were classed as being ‘engaged’ in doing the written tasks (as they had completed seven or more of the ten tasks). in addition, tentative results showed that the weekly task intervention seemed to be associated with better quality written project reports. also, students generally seemed to regard the weekly written tasks as useful for time management, in terms of completing their written project reports. however, this collaborative intervention did raise questions about the link between learning and writing in this context. finally, a number of recommendations are made for ‘learning through writing’ interventions in fyp modules. keywords: writing to learn; technical writing; final year project; computing, engineering; time management; embedded writing development. bowman and cullen enhancing the quality of final year projects in computing through weekly written tasks introduction writing is perhaps the most powerful means we have with which to fully engage our students with their studies. (deane and o’neill, 2011b, p.268) the starting point for the collaborative project that will be described in this paper, is that writing is a manifestation of thinking, and the more practice students are given with writing in their discipline, the greater their engagement in the subject (light, 2001; bean, 2011; deane and o’neill, 2011b). engagement in this context is taken to encompass the time students spend on the course content, their perception of the intellectual stimulation presented by the course, and their interest in the subject material (english et al., 1999; light, 2001). it is argued then, that students who are more engaged in their studies, learn more and perform better, leading to better grades. the link between engagement and positive learning outcomes, such as critical thinking and better grades, is supported by the empirical findings of a number of studies (carini et al., 2006). thus, whilst students are ‘learning to write’ they are also ‘writing to learn’ (english et al., 1999, p.222). as ‘thinking and writing are integral’ (deane and o’neill, 2011a, p.4), it could be argued that disciplinary knowledge and its associated specific writing practices are also inseparable. writing is thus practiced more effectively as authentic tasks embedded within the subject material of a module, not as an additional ‘bolt on’ study skills course (wingate, 2006). the explicit teaching of genre-specific academic writing from within a discipline, with a subject specialist playing a key role, is consistent with the writing in the disciplines approach (wid) (deane and o’neill, 2011a; 2011b). wid interventions often involve the staging of assessed pieces of writing in order to maximize opportunities for formative feedback (deane and o’neill, 2011a; 2011b). giving feedback, or feedforward, is the most important aspect of assessment in terms of enhancing attainment, as it can promote critical thinking and improve writing quality (black and williams 1998, cited bloxham and boyd, 2007; dean and o’neill, 2011a; 2001b). however, not all feedback is equal. an advantage of formative feedback, over summative feedback, is that it has the potential to encourage student experimentation due to the fact that formative or staged assessment tasks represent a low stakes activity (irons, 2008). in order for formative feedback to be effective, it must be timely, be of an appropriate quality, be understandable and be valued by students. the aim of this kind of feedback is to show journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 2 bowman and cullen enhancing the quality of final year projects in computing through weekly written tasks the student the difference between their performance and the desired level of performance, as well as to point out areas for improvement and to make practical suggestions on how to change (irons, 2008). effective formative feedback should also invite two–way communication with the marker (irons, 2008). whilst the literature discussed above promotes the use of staged writing tasks with formative feedback as tools for increasing student engagement, learning and attainment, it must be borne in mind that computer science (cs) students are actually very reluctant writers. according to becker (2008, p.16) cs students are ‘famous for their unwillingness to write’. many students studying engineering (a close disciplinary cousin of computing) may not have done much writing since their gcse’s (ahearn, 2006). in the experience of this author, a similar situation exists for students doing cs. in addition, some computing students may actually have chosen this particular discipline in the hope of avoiding writing (becker, 2008). furthermore, this reluctance to write can become more entrenched, as it is rare for computing students to be given writing tasks in their courses (becker, 2008; cilliers, 2012). when written tasks are given, there tends to be very little explicit support or guidance (skinner and mort, 2009). most computing and engineering programmes require their third year students to undertake a final year project (fyp) or capstone project (term used in the usa) (jawitz et al., 2002; olsson et al., 2003; kilpatrick, 2007). these fyps are important as they are often used by external examiners as an indicator of the standard of the whole degree programme, (rasul et al., 2009). final year students doing their projects need to employ a wide range of abilities and competencies, including drawing on their writing skills in order to produce a lengthy project report. given that there are often very few written tasks in computing degree courses until the final year, students doing their fyps have to negotiate a rather steep learning curve in this area (kortarts et al., 2010). in addition, there is usually not much opportunity to improve the quality of an fyp report as it is usually summatively assessed with little feedback being given prior to completion (kortsarts et al., 2010). thus, fyps often represent a ‘leap in expectations of students’ and may also be a form of ‘curricular disconnect’ with the rest of the degree course (dym et al., 2005; rasul et al., 2009). to further complicate matters, fyp modules themselves are extremely complex units of learning. they exist in a variety of forms and aspire to meet a range of different aims. in a journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 3 bowman and cullen enhancing the quality of final year projects in computing through weekly written tasks survey of five different engineering departments in one institution, jawitz et al. (2002) identified three broad aims for fyps: i.e. to teach students research skills, professional skills or discipline-specific skills. these divergent aims are based on different assumptions, i.e. whether the project serves as a preparation for postgraduate research, as an apprenticeship for industry or as a way to deepen the students’ knowledge base (olsson et al., 2003). it is common for an fyp programme to attempt to address all these aims at once, leading to difficulties in designing and organizing the programme (olsson et al., 2003). in fact the ‘problematic nature’ (rasul et al., 2009, p.206) of fyp modules on a number of levels, is a theme that emerges from the limited amount of literature devoted to this topic (see table 1). issues identified in the fyp module: cm-0347k the intervention discussed in this paper came about as a result of a collaborative partnership between the module co-ordinator of the computing fyp module at the university of bradford (module code: cm-0347-k) and a learning developer from the central learning development unit at the same institution. the first issue identified by the module co-ordinator was that the fyp students had difficulty in producing written project reports and portfolios that were sufficiently rigorous and academic in style. this concern was echoed by external examiner comments (external examiner, 2009). external examiners also commented that in relation to the distribution of awards ‘we are seeing a very long tail’ (external examiner, 2010). this distribution may be linked with the unique student population at the university of bradford, the majority of whom have english as a second language. in addition, project supervisors felt that students had difficulty in managing their time whilst doing their projects (project supervisor a and b, 2010). other issues identified were that there seemed to be variability in the student experience of supervision, and that not all students paid attention to the formative comments made on their mid-term reports. these issues emerged from an in-depth module evaluation of cm0347-k undertaken by the first author of this paper. the module evaluation then led to the collaborative intervention that is discussed in this paper. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 4 bowman and cullen enhancing the quality of final year projects in computing through weekly written tasks table 1. a number of issues common to fyp modules across institutions. issues identified by rasul et al. (2009) pre-entry issues ‘student isolation’ i.e. whether students are adequately prepared to take on this project work. organisation need for agreement on most important aims and outcomes; what is a legitimate project? need for guidelines to guide student project choice. variation in resourcing and workload allocations for supervisors. need to clarify roles and expectations of students, project supervisors, moderators and industry partners. links to industry conflict between intellectual property issues and assessment requirements. increased complexity in grading industry linked projects. sourcing of appropriate and sufficient industry projects. assessment issues whether the assessment should focus on project outcomes or project report/presentations. ‘staff isolation’ i.e. the lack of a common understanding of the application assessment criteria. how to combine assessed elements into one final grade. dealing with conflict between supervisors, assessors and moderators. need for agreement on what levels of formative support/supervision are appropriate. need for standardisation of a range of types of projects: varying complexity/scope. the aims of the intervention the overarching aim of this intervention was to improve the quality of student projects and project reports through weekly written tasks accompanied by detailed formative feedback. by bringing these weekly tasks into the lecture strand of the module, it was also hoped that the regular and detailed feedback would help to ameliorate the variability of supervision and assist in engaging and supporting weaker students. the objectives of the intervention journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 5 bowman and cullen enhancing the quality of final year projects in computing through weekly written tasks were that at the end of the 2010/11 year, the computing fyp students would be better able to: 1. produce high quality projects as evidenced by improved student grades. 2. write a high quality academic project report. 3. manage their time effectively whilst completing a large project. the intervention there are essentially three spheres of activity within the computing fyp module cm-0347k, viz, the student’s independent project work, the supervision of this work by a large number of supervisors, and general support provided within the lecture strand of the module by the module co-ordinator. the module is assessed by means of a practical project demonstration, a presentation and a written project report. these modes of assessment together make up 75% of the module mark. in 2010/11 the lecture strand of the module was restructured to include weekly written tasks that matched the content covered in the lectures (see table 2). these weekly tasks counted for a small proportion of the project report mark and were largely formative in nature. in addition, students could use drafts of their weekly tasks and their feedback as evidence of learning in their portfolios. the assessed portfolios make up the remaining 25% of the module mark. the weekly tasks were run as follows: students brought in their task in paper form at the start of each lecture and then peer marked the tasks during the session. tasks were handed in at the end of the lecture and returned the following week having been marked and annotated with detailed individual comments. general feedback on task performance was also given during the following lecture. the aim of the individual, peer and general feedback was to try to promote the development of complex reasoning in writing, by focusing on the need to use evidence to justify design choices in a convincing way. these choices related to applications, programming languages, methodology and other design features. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 6 bowman and cullen enhancing the quality of final year projects in computing through weekly written tasks table 2. the lectures and weekly tasks for the 2010/11 academic year. lectures weekly tasks semester 1 1. general information about your project (no task) 2. assessment for this module: portfolio, reflection and selfassessment project choice form 3. project planning and supervisor allocation project specification 4. researching and referencing list of literature/resources relevant to project 5. writing your literature review first draft of literature review 6. project development methodologies first draft of system development methodology 7. time management and gantt charts first draft of gantt chart 8. doing a presentation about your project first draft of project presentation semester 2 1. writing your project report contents page of final report 2. data protection in your project first draft of summary of lecture on either data protection or ethics 3. ethical considerations in your project second draft of summary of lecture on either data protection or ethics and a reflective piece of writing to show the difference between the two drafts 4. external speaker: computing at morrisons (no task, work on implementation, report and portfolio) 5. preparing your cv (no task, ongoing work on project) 6. open session: questions (no task, ongoing work on project) 7. open session: questions (no task, ongoing work on project) journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 7 bowman and cullen enhancing the quality of final year projects in computing through weekly written tasks the lectures themselves actually took the form of activity-based sessions. in these sessions, students worked through text-based activities in pairs and analysed examples of good and poor student writing relating to fyps. the fact that there were 104 students in this cohort, each with a different individual project and following one of eight different degree paths, meant that there were some challenges associated with this intervention. there was a significant increase in the amount of marking due to the addition of weekly tasks, and also a large number of students typically stayed after the lectures to ask the module co-ordinator individual questions. during this intervention, the module co-ordinator and the learning developer shared the marking, teaching and collating of general feedback. it is interesting to note that weekly tasks were still being used in this module in the 2011/12 academic year, but with some modifications in the number and timing of tasks as suggested by student feedback. methods the intervention was evaluated in relation to the aims and objectives, stated earlier, by means of a pragmatic mixed methods approach (teddlie and tashakkori, 2009). both quantitative and narrative data were used sequentially as new issues in the data emerged. firstly, a questionnaire containing both open and closed questions was administered to all students during a lecture towards the end of the first semester, when students had completed seven weekly tasks. the aim of the questionnaire was to ascertain whether students perceived the weekly tasks as having had an impact on the quality of their projects and their management of time during the project. upon completion, the results of the closed questions in the questionnaire were quantified and the open questions were categorised and quantified. a number of unexpected findings emerged from the results of this questionnaire, and this led to a focus group interview being conducted in the second semester, in order to get a richer picture of students’ fyp experience. the focus group interview participants consisted of a self-selected sample of ten students. the interviews were conducted by three trained third year student interns who were doing other degree courses at the university. after the interview, the data was transcribed carefully by the first author of this paper in order to keep to the exact words of the participants, paying careful attention to overlapping speech, interruptions and murmured agreement or dissent. the gender and degree path of each participant was also noted. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 8 bowman and cullen enhancing the quality of final year projects in computing through weekly written tasks after transcription, the interview data was categorised and coded. each code was tabulated to show links to other coded themes (see example in table 9). this tabulated data was then used to produce a concept map to show the strength of the themes and the links between them (see figure 1). the transcript, concept map and tabulated results were later verified by the original student interviewer as an accurate reflection of what was discussed in the focus group. on completion of the 2010/11 academic year, students’ marks for the project itself, the project report, the portfolio and the weekly tasks were compared to determine if any correlation existed between these results. kendall’s tau is a non-parametric correlation statistic. this correlation statistic was selected for use here as it is suitable for small data sets that are not normally distributed, and is thought to be more accurate than the more popular spearman’s rho correlation statistic (field, 2009). test results can be considered as one-tailed or two-tailed. as the working hypothesis of this study suggests a direction for this difference (i.e. that participation and success in weekly tasks should suggest improved grades) a one-tailed test was conducted here. the three sources of data: the questionnaire from semester 1, the semester 2 focus group interview and the statistical analysis of final grades were then triangulated in order to evaluate the intervention against the original stated aims. results and discussion higher quality projects as evidenced by students’ project marks the principal aim of this intervention was to improve the quality of student projects through weekly written tasks, by taking a ‘learning through writing approach’ (english et al., 1999). in designing the intervention, it was assumed that writing could be used as a powerful way to increase engagement in the subject (deane and o’neill, 2011b). this was thought to be especially important in the context of this module which contained a large number of weaker students (external examiner, 2010). however, it is interesting to note that of the 104 students, 58 could be classed as ‘engaged’ in the weekly tasks (these students did seven out of ten weekly tasks or more), as compared to 46 students who were not engaged (these students handed in six or less weekly tasks out of a possible ten). so, bearing in mind the large number of ‘not engaged’ students, the question must be raised journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 9 bowman and cullen enhancing the quality of final year projects in computing through weekly written tasks as to whether using these kinds of written tasks is the best way of engaging cs students, as writing is often cs students’ least favourite activity. having said this, though, from the test results obtained, there was a significant positive relationship between the total written task marks and the project mark with kendall’s correlation coefficient being 0.278 with p=000 one-tailed. in addition, the students classified as engaged in the weekly tasks achieved an average project mark of 59.96% as compared to not engaged students, who scored an average of 48.13% for their projects. as would perhaps be expected, there was a significant positive relationship between the total weekly tasks marks and the portfolio marks, being 0.358 with p=000 one-tailed (the portfolio includes evidence from the weekly tasks). thus, as shown above, there were significant positive relationships between the results of the weekly tasks and the project and portfolio marks. however, it must be borne in mind that only 54% of the students fully engaged with the weekly tasks. so, does this result indicate that more engaged students are likely to do better anyway? it is the perception of the head of the computing department (ridley, 2012) that the weekly task intervention improved the quality of students’ projects for average to good students, but that this intervention did not make a significant difference to the ‘long tail’ of weaker students. once again, whilst the results described above did show a positive correlation between weekly task marks and project marks, this result may warrant closer scrutiny. it is interesting to note that the view of the module co-ordinator and a number of supervisors on this module was that students could get a good mark for the written components of their fyp if they had given a successful project demonstration, even if their writing was of a poor quality (supervisor a, 2010; supervisor b, 2010; cullen, 2012). this view is supported by ahern (2006) who noticed the same phenomenon in engineering, and by english et al. (1999) who noticed staff marking written work by looking only for ‘key words’ in accounting. the focus on content in technical subjects may mean that students can ‘get away’ with poor quality writing and that students may resent spending time on practising writing as they might not see the relevance of this to their degree (ahern, 2006). indeed, the findings of the questionnaire in this study tend to indicate that not all students saw the link between the written tasks and their project: ‘[the weekly tasks are] very useful, but still uncertain as to where the weekly tasks fit into the final year project’. however, other students had a different view: ‘the weekly tasks help us to develop own knowledge in all aspects of own project’. the results of the focus group interview (see figure 1) illustrate journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 10 bowman and cullen enhancing the quality of final year projects in computing through weekly written tasks that respondents did not specifically link the written component of their fyp with programming and their actual project. as fyp modules are enormously complex units of learning, there could have been a number of other issues that could have had an impact on the quality of student projects. in fact, two such unexpected issues emerged from the findings of the semester 1 questionnaire. in the open questions, students raised issues to do with supervision, and the term ‘prototype’ was mentioned a number of times in relation to requests for further support (see table 3). this is illustrated by the following quotation: ‘[i need more support with developing my] prototype. [i need] help classes with expert tutors in programming different languages’. table 3. students’ questionnaire responses to the open question ‘is there anything you would like further support with?’. category of comments number of comments more guidance with writing the report 7 more support with developing the prototype 7 supervisor issues 6 more guidance with the portfolio 4 general request for help (late arrivals to the module) 4 more examples of the portfolio/the report 3 time management skills 1 more professional speakers 1 feedback on weekly tasks in semester 2 1 more support with searching for information 1 when asked about possible areas for improvement in this module, a similar theme emerged. twenty two per cent of the respondents who commented on this question thought that the fyp lecture strand should have a closer link to software design or wanted more guidance relating to doing their ‘actual projects’ (see table 4). journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 11 bo jou wman and cullen enhancing the quality of final year projects in computing through weekly written tasks rnal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 12 table 4. students’ responses to the open question ‘areas for improvement in this module’ in the semester 1 questionnaire. category of comments number of comments the timing of the weekly tasks (have the lecture on the topic before doing the weekly task) 14 specific aspect, e.g. more details on doing a literature review 6 more guidance with the actual project/prototype 5 closer link to software design 4 more examples 4 ppt slides available on blackboard sooner 4 longer lecture slots 3 timetable must be accurate 1 no weekly tasks 1 more individual marking 1 project lists available earlier 1 the theme of wanting more specialised support with software and programming languages was further amplified in the focus group interview. in fact, this emerged as the dominant theme (see figure 1). this theme was discussed for longer than any other emergent theme. it became clear that the students interviewed had been searching for programming expertise within the body of academic staff that ‘matched’ their own project. they also suggested that programming should be given more emphasis in the first year of the degree, and that students should be mandated to take a particular programming module before starting their fyp’s. overall, it could be argued that the quality of a student’s programming would have the potential to affect the quality of the end product and thus the grade given for their project. wman and cullen enhancing the quality of final year projects in computing through weekly written tasks rnal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 13 figure 1. a thematic map of the themes emerging from the focus group interview. key: the larger the font size, the greater the strength of the theme or link between themes. the strength of the theme was determined by the number of times the issue was mentioned during the focus group interview. supervision unmatched skills of supervisors (the need for greater support with programming) workload the need for greater explicitness weekly written tasks other modules software / programming languages in project what i have learned fyp lecture programme time management writing degree course design bo jou bowman and cullen enhancing the quality of final year projects in computing through weekly written tasks students’ ability to write a high quality academic project report the second objective of this study was to better prepare students to be able to write a high quality academic project report containing rigorously justified design choices. to achieve this objective, the lecture strand of the module was re-structured to more closely align to the fyp, and associated weekly written tasks were set. the results of the semester 1 questionnaire, which 75 students out of a possible 104 students completed, showed that 92% of the respondents saw the fyp lecture sessions as useful, quite useful or very useful (see table 5). this could be regarded as a promising result as technical students are often reluctant writers (ahearn, 2006). table 5. student perceptions of the usefulness of the weekly tasks and associated feedback. data taken from the semester 1 questionnaire. very useful quite useful useful not useful did not attend fyp lecture sessions 18 40% 33% 19% 4% 4% general feedback on weekly tasks the following lecture 33% 33% 30% 2% 2% individual feedback on weekly tasks the following lecture 34% 31% 31% 0% 4% peer marked feedback in lectures 13% 35% 29% 16% 7% the majority of students answering the questionnaire also viewed the weekly tasks as useful (see table 6). it is also interesting to note that 26% of the respondents identified the weekly tasks as a key strength of the fyp module in the open comments section of the questionnaire. in addition, 22% of the sample linked the ‘usefulness’ of tasks and the rapid feedback to improving quality of their work (see table 7 for quotations). it is assumed here that students are meaning the quality of their written work as opposed to their project work (as noted earlier in the results section, many students seemed to view their written work and project work as separate). journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 14 bowman and cullen enhancing the quality of final year projects in computing through weekly written tasks table 6. an analysis of the open comments from the questionnaire. weekly tasks: positive comments (no. of comments) weekly tasks: mixed comments weekly tasks: negative comments useful: helps with time management (15) useful, but change timing (9) weekly tasks are an extra burden (4) useful: improves quality of work (11) useful, but need more support (7) haven’t done them (1) generally useful (6) useful, but time consuming (3) task instructions unclear (1) enjoy the tasks (3) useful, but need more examples (2) specific aspect of task not marked (1) useful: independent learning (1) other comments (2) useful, but what is link to project (1) 36 24 7 table 7. quotations from the questionnaire that show a link between the weekly tasks and the perceived quality of students’ (mostly written) work. quotations from students: • weekly tasks help to improve standard of the work by using feedback to enhance the work. • based on the feedback you can amend accordingly. • very useful and gives good ideas for the work. • really useful as it allows you to improve your work. • i feel the tasks have been useful, feedback particularly useful in improving them. • a very good idea which provides a good guideline on what is expected and how to achieve this. • helps us in making the project better. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 15 bowman and cullen enhancing the quality of final year projects in computing through weekly written tasks • [with the weekly tasks] you also get feedback so you can rewrite it if needs to be. • also help improve your understanding • literature review feedback, quite useful to develop it further • the weekly tasks help us to develop own knowledge in all aspects of own project. • the weekly tasks are quite useful as we get a chance to improve upon our drafts. the questionnaire data also indicates that respondents valued the feedback given as part of the weekly tasks (see table 5). the dominant perception here was that both the general feedback and the individual feedback on the tasks was more useful than the peer feedback (see table 5). whilst students seemed to generally perceive the weekly tasks and the associated feedback as useful, table 4 and 6 show that quite a number of students wanted to change the timing of the tasks. the design of this intervention was such that students came to the lecture sessions with a written draft relating to the topic being discussed during that session, the idea being that students would learn more after already having had an initial attempt at the task. only one student completing the questionnaire seemed to agree with this: ‘[i am] finding it useful doing the tasks before learning about them as it gives you an incentive to look it up yourself’. many other comments from the questionnaires indicated that students would have preferred the guidance on the task first, before making an attempt at doing a draft: ‘it would be better if we had the lecture on the weekly task before the task to get a better understanding’. this feedback from students was taken into account in the design of the weekly task schedule in 2011/12. the fact that the students in this study viewed the weekly tasks and feedback as generally useful, may be related to their relative lack of experience with academic writing; a common phenomenon in technical subjects (ahearn, 2006). an analysis of the initial literature review written tasks showed that there was quite a bit of scope for improvement in the quality of student writing, hence the perception that the tasks had been ‘useful’ (a more detailed analysis of the quality of writing in these literature review tasks will be the subject of another paper). journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 16 bowman and cullen enhancing the quality of final year projects in computing through weekly written tasks students’ ability to manage their time effectively fyps require students to be much more self-directed than in their first or second years of study. in order to successfully complete a fyp, students must draw upon significant organisational and time management skills (rasul et al., 2009) and many students underestimate the workload associated with an fyp (ras et al., 2007). in the initial module evaluation of the cm-0347k, supervisors raised concerns about students’ time management practices. it was felt that many students were leaving important aspects of their project, including implementation and writing their report, until the final stages. whilst the main aim behind the introduction of the weekly written tasks in this intervention was to improve learning through writing, a secondary objective was to assist students with time management. it seems that the weekly tasks may have assisted some students in managing the written work associated with their fyps (report and portfolio). forty two per cent of the students who viewed the weekly tasks as positive in the semester 1 questionnaire, linked the usefulness of the tasks to their role in assisting with time management (see table 6 above). this is further illustrated by the quotations in table 8 below. table 8. a selection of the comments on the questionnaire relating to students perceiving the weekly tasks as useful in terms of time management. • the weekly tasks reduce workload. • useful as allowed workload to be spread out. • they are good and keep you up-to-date. • good idea as they set the ball rolling on specific tasks, e.g. literature review. • helped to actually start thinking and working on the written tasks of the project. • good idea helps not to get behind. • good idea as it gets you to write something, without them i wouldn't have started/known what to do. • well structured and relevant to the completion of the project. • very good short task to get people thinking about portfolios and reports. • good thing they are there to push you to complete different sections by the deadline approaches. • keeps work up-to-date and follow deadlines to minimise the load of work. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 17 bowman and cullen enhancing the quality of final year projects in computing through weekly written tasks • this is very helpful as handing tasks every week pushes you to do the report, part of your project. • keeps us on track. • helps you do parts of the project as you go along. • i think weekly tasks really help to get work done on time. it is interesting to note, however, that the broadly positive perception of weekly tasks in semester 1 may have shifted slightly in semester 2 when the focus group interview was conducted. in fact, the first issue that respondents raised was workload: ‘it gets to the point where i think the workload is unhealthy’. figure 1 shows that the workload issue was linked to both work originating from other modules, as well as the weekly tasks. during the focus group interview there was a fairly heated discussion between a male and a female student relating the link between the weekly tasks and workload: male student no. 7: ‘in the first semester i asked [the module co-ordinator], look, why are you giving us these extra tasks?’ female student no. 6: ‘i think i wouldn’t have done anything if it wasn’t for the tasks in the first semester, seriously’ [interruption from other female students, murmuring (i agree, a lot of us wouldn’t have)]. ‘we had the tasks so that, even if you spend, like, one hour on it when you were supposed to spend five, you still have something written there, and then you have the feedback and…you can just put it somewhere until your report comes’. it was interesting to note that the same male student at a different point in the focus group interview stated: ‘i’ve pretty much done my report work and my portfolio’. the students in the focus group interview also reported time management and writing being important aspects of what they had learned from doing their fyps (see table 9). journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 18 bowman and cullen enhancing the quality of final year projects in computing through weekly written tasks table 9. answers to the question ‘what have you learned in doing your fyp?’ from the focus group interview. student no. student quote links to other themes female 8 ‘that my time management skills are nonexistent’. time management female 10 ‘i think a lot of us can relate to that’. time management female 6 ‘how to better organise my programmes…and researching’. time management research female 9 ‘different technologies to use…(java, jsb)’. software male 1 ‘i learned how to be organised – write things in advance – it’s a 50 page report, so you have to know exactly from a long time before you start what are you gonna do. also you learn how to learn by yourself’. time management writing independent study male 4 ‘i think my organisational skills are better as i am learning the hard way, because i’ve got a lot of work to do. i think it would have been better if i’d organised myself better in the earlier semesters. reflective writing as well – something that i wasn’t very good at. and programming as well’. time management writing software female 3 ‘for me just the reflective writing and the organisational skills. but i do think – i mean i am not trying to point fingers, but my organisational skills would have been better if the support [from my supervisor] was there. and if we were aware of what was expected early on in the stage. it’s so late on and i still feel lost, and it’s not a good feeling’. time management writing explicitness male 2 ‘i think i have learned about time management, you know, how to cope with pressure – but i am not really coping you know’. time management journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 19 bowman and cullen enhancing the quality of final year projects in computing through weekly written tasks the preceding discussion has concentrated on student perceptions of their time management ability in relation to their written project work. however, the strongest theme to emerge in the focus group interview was students’ perceived need for greater support in terms of developing their programming ability in different languages. there was a time management aspect to this theme. respondents were unanimous in their advice to future fyp students that they should start their fyps earlier and spend the summer learning a programming language. conclusion as a returning student, the set up and help in fyp is much better than when here previously. (student comment from questionnaire) in this study, computing students were set a series of weekly written tasks relating to their fyps in the lecture strand of this module. the aim of this intervention was to enhance the quality of students’ projects, project reports and time management skills, following a ‘learning through writing’ approach. the findings from this study seem to show that the students’ weekly task marks did have a positive relationship with their project grades. however, the weekly written tasks failed to engage a significant proportion of the cohort and concerns still exist in relation to the supervisors’ perceived high tolerance for poor quality writing due to a greater focus on the practical demonstration of the project. it emerged that not all students saw a direct link between the weekly written tasks and their projects. a more pressing issue for students was their perception of a need for greater support with the development of their programming skills. the weekly tasks intervention also failed to make an impact on the ‘long tail’ of students with lower grades for their projects and project reports. according to ahearn (2006), as writing is often a technical students’ weakest skill, working on writing may affect students’ self-esteem and motivation. this may be particularly relevant for students in the cohort who are having difficulty with their subject already. this said, the students who did engage with the weekly written tasks seemed to find the tasks useful for improving their written project report and for managing their time whilst completing a large project. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 20 bowman and cullen enhancing the quality of final year projects in computing through weekly written tasks recommendations weekly written tasks could be used in fyp modules the weekly tasks discussed in this study seemed useful for improving the quality of students’ written work and assisting students in managing their time in completing the written component of the project. in particular, it is recommended that students do the literature review weekly task. students taking technical courses have particular difficulty writing the literature review section of their project reports and generally receive very little guidance with this section (krishnan and kathpalia, 2002). it is recommended, though, that if weekly written tasks are employed, that they should be confined to the first semester of a year long project (to avoid student overload) and that tasks are set after detailed guidance on the tasks has been given. more emphasis should be placed on written communication and programming in the first and second years of study it is common for fyp students to feel overwhelmed as ‘…professional skills like communication and design are not included until the capstone design course, a point at which a host of skills must be applied simultaneously’ (williams, 2002, p.203). thus, the degree programme should be looked at as a whole and ‘backward design’ be employed to ensure that students are equipped to tackle their fyps without being overloaded. students could complete mini-projects that emphasise written communication and programming in their first or second year of their degrees (see daniels et al., 2002). according to the literature these first year ‘cornerstone’ projects are relatively uncommon at present (daniels et al., 2002; ahearn, 2006). more attention should be paid to exploring the perceived link between the project and its associated written work both students and lecturers in technical subjects may have a different view of the link between their subject and written communication, to learning developers. lecturers in technical subjects may see writing as a by-product of their work and not an end-product (ahearn, 2006). it is recommended that this link be explicitly explored with project supervisors (see english et al., 1999) and with students. in addition, students could be set writing tasks that are even more closely linked to their project work. for example, students could be grouped according to the programming languages they are using and could capture their written reflections on programming and implementation using an open-source wiki-based system (ras et al., 2007). journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 21 bowman and cullen enhancing the quality of final year projects in computing through weekly written tasks references ahearn, a. (2006) ‘replacing writing classes with a writing imperative’, in ganobcsikwilliams l. (ed.) teaching academic writing in uk higher education: theories, practices and models. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan, pp. 110-123. bean, j.c. (2011) engaging ideas: the professor’s guide to integrating writing, critical thinking and active learning in the classroom. 2 edn. san francisco: john wiley and sons. nd becker, k. (2008) ‘the use of unfamiliar words: writing and cs education’, journal of computing sciences in colleges, 24(2), pp. 13-19. bloxham, s. and boyd, p. (2007) developing effective assessment in higher education. maidenhead: mcgrawhill/open university press. carini, r.m., kuh, g.d. and klein, s.p. (2006) ‘student engagement and student learning: testing the linkages’, research in higher education, 47(1), pp. 1-25. cilliers, c.b. (2012) ‘student perception of academic writing skills activities in a traditional programming course’, computers and education, 58(4), pp. 1028-1041. cullen, a. (2012) module co-ordinator of the final year project module at the university of bradford. personal communication. daniels, m., faulkner, x. and newman, i. (2002) ‘open ended group projects, motivating students and preparing them for the real world’, ieee proceedings of the 15th conference on software engineering education and training. kentucky, usa 25-27 february, pp. 115-126. deane, m. and o’neill, p. (2011a) ‘writing in the disciplines: beyond remediality’, in deane, m. and o’neill p. (eds.) writing in the disciplines, pp. 3-11. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 22 bowman and cullen enhancing the quality of final year projects in computing through weekly written tasks deane, m. and o’neill, p. (2011b) ‘conclusions: ways forward for wid’, in deane m. and o’neill p. (eds.) writing in the disciplines, pp. 265 269. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan. dym, c.l. agogino, a.m. eirs, o. frey, d.d. and leifer, l.j. (2005) ‘engineering design thinking, teaching and learning’, journal of engineering education, january issue, pp. 103-20. english, l., bonanno, h., ihnatko, t., webb, c. and jones, j. (1999) ‘learning through writing in a first-year accounting course’, journal of accounting education, 17(2-3), pp. 221-254. external examiner (2009) internal report of the external examiner to the school of computing, informatics and media. university of bradford. external examiner (2010) internal report of the external examiner to school of computing, informatics and media. university of bradford. field a.p. (2009) discovering statistics using spss. 3rd edn. london: sage. irons, a. (2008) enhancing learning through formative assessment and feedback. london: routledge. jawitz, j., shay, s. and moore, r. (2002) ‘management and assessment of final year projects in engineering’, international journal of engineering education, 18(4), pp. 472-478. kilpatrick, a. (2007) ‘on addressing the variation in intellectual demand of engineering undergraduate research project’, international conference on engineering education. coimbra, portugal 3-7 september. kortsarts, y., fischbach, a., rufinus, j., utell, j.m. and yoon, s.k. (2010) ‘developing oral and written communication skills in undergraduate computer science and information systems curriculum’, information systems journal, 8(30), pp. 3-13. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 23 bowman and cullen enhancing the quality of final year projects in computing through weekly written tasks krishnan, l.a. and kathpalia, s.s. (2002) ‘literature reviews in student reports’, ieee transactions on professional communication, 45(3), pp. 187-197. light, r.j. (2001) making the most of college: students speak their minds. cambridge: harvard university press. olsson, b., berndtsson, m., lundell, b. and hansson, j. (2003) ‘running researchoriented final year projects for cs and is students’, acm sigcse bulletin, 35(1), pp. 79-83. project supervisor a (2010) email feedback on cm-0347k (july 2010), module evaluation of cm-0347k, university of bradford. project supervisor b (2010) email feedback on cm-0347k (july 2010), module evaluation of cm-0347k, university of bradford. ras, e., carbon, r., decker, b. and rech, j. (2007) ‘experience management wikis for reflective practice in software capstone projects’, ieee transactions on education, 50(4), pp. 312-320. rasul, m.g., nouwens, f., martin, f., greensill, c., singh, d., kestell, c.d. and hadgraft, r. (2009) ‘good practice guidelines for managing, supervising and assessing final year projects’, 20th australian association for engineering education conference. university of adelaide 6-9 december. ridley, m. (2012) head of the school of computing, information and media, university of bradford. personal communication. skinner, i. and mort, p. (2009) ‘embedding academic literacy support within the electrical engineering curriculum: a case study’, ieee transactions on education, 52(4), pp. 547-554. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 24 bowman and cullen enhancing the quality of final year projects in computing through weekly written tasks teddlie, c. and tashakkori, a. (2009) foundations of mixed methods research: integrating quantitative and qualitative approaches in the social and behavioural sciences. usa: sage. williams, j.m. (2002) ‘the engineering portfolio: communication, reflection and student learning outcomes assessment’, international journal of engineering education, 18(2), pp. 199-207. wingate, u. (2006) ‘doing away with ‘study skills’, teaching in higher education, 11(4), pp. 457-469. author details marion bowman is a learning developer in the learner development unit at the university of bradford. she has been a learning developer for the last five years. marion is also an experienced teacher of english as a foreign language and has lived and worked in a range of different educational environments in the uk, south africa and poland. andrea cullen is a senior lecturer and associate dean (employer engagement) in the school of computing and media at the university of bradford. she is the module coordinator for the final year project module and final year tutor. she has past commercial computer programming and systems analysis experience and now teaches computing at all levels of pg and ug study. she is interested in how students can be better prepared for life after university and works to improve their employment opportunities. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 25 enhancing the quality of final year projects in computing through weekly written tasks abstract introduction issues identified in the fyp module: cm-0347k the aims of the intervention the intervention methods results and discussion higher quality projects as evidenced by students’ project marks students’ ability to write a high quality academic project report students’ ability to manage their time effectively conclusion recommendations weekly written tasks could be used in fyp modules more emphasis should be placed on written communication and programming in the first and second years of study more attention should be paid to exploring the perceived link between the project and its associated written work references author details literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 6: november 2013 learning beyond the classroom: biomedical science students’ narratives of volunteering and developing employability skills sheila cunningham middlesex university, uk deeba gallacher middlesex university, uk abstract this case study focuses on a work that developed from a higher education academy (hea) teaching development grant which investigated biomedical science undergraduate students’ experiences of engaging with health related volunteering opportunities and the link with maximising employability skills in a north london university. biomedical students recognise theoretical knowledge and practical skills as essential to employability but have limited opportunity to apply these, with sparse placement opportunities, especially within hospital or laboratory environments. graduate employability skills are generally accepted as the knowledge, skills and attributes to be effective in the workplace. reports on graduate employability highlight communication skills, team-working, integrity, intellectual ability and self-confidence as the five most important attributes sought by employers (archer and davidson, 2008). nhs careers (2012) expands this (biomedicine profile) by including creativity, initiative and flexibility, and with what could also be argued as important: wisdom (schwartz, 2012). this is a tall order for any curriculum and in reality embraces more than classroom or laboratory learning environments, but the whole undergraduate experience. this particular work was a partnership endeavour with undergraduate students to seek science related volunteering opportunities and the potential for developing the skills for biomedical employability. the methodology in this case study was primarily action research with its iterative cycles. these were: identification and development of science or health volunteering opportunities, employers’ perceptions of the use and value of such volunteering, and cunningham and gallacher learning beyond the classroom articulation of the skills and qualities from such experiences. one key ‘data’ output was a record of students’ reflections and narratives as they contributed and drove the volunteering activity. students maintained diaries of their experiences, skill development, personal growth and achievements, and of working in partnership with staff and independently. students’ reflective blogs revealed several benefits and challenges and their approaches to address these illustrate their creativity, endurance and flexibility. this ‘snap-shot’ presents ‘voices’ or ‘narratives’ of partnerships which enhance the students’ learning (and teaching) experience. it also presents students’ attitudes to volunteering and how they feel this contributes to their employability potential. insights gained are invaluable to academic staff in appreciating the social construction of learning and the extension of formal academic provision into the third sector. keywords: volunteering; employability skills; biosciences. introduction gaining employment is a priority for the majority of students (cbi, 2009) so much that candidates have to find new ways to distinguish themselves to potential employers to help stand out from the crowd. whilst employers rate stem (science, technology, engineering and maths) subjects highly for their technical competency, analytical problem-solving, numeracy and intellectual rigour skills (toland, 2011), there still emerges a varied picture of employability and employment opportunities. the change in employer focus from a good degree to a good degree plus additional, softer skills and attributes, means that higher education institutions (heis) are having to review their provision to students. many heis have a diverse range of students from both the uk and overseas, with varying needs and looking for careers in a range of sectors. students recognise competition in the workplace and increasingly desire and seek to develop skills and gain practical experience in order to both develop and to be viewed more favourably by employers. therefore practice-based applications, such as placements, internships and volunteering, are ever more popular as a recognised way to help to develop practical work experience and gain a step on the career ladder. undergraduates are faced with a number of options but are frequently bemused or limited in what they can engage in and how, and also at times unclear about what gains and benefits could be accrued. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 2 cunningham and gallacher learning beyond the classroom this case study, developed from a higher education academy (hea) teaching development grant (tdg), aimed to explore extra-curricular volunteering opportunities as a means to maximise employability skills for health related students (initially biomedical science undergraduates). there are opportunities in existence which can be utilised or developed further which use subject specific knowledge and clinical skills, but these are currently not exploited or developed within this north london university. placement is integral in some health programmes for students (e.g. nursing, clinical physiology, etc.), however, locally for biomedicine it is restrictive and thus highly competitive. students recognise theoretical understanding and practical skills as essential to employability but hold frustrations at the placement limitations and the limited opportunity to apply these theoretical understandings in a practical way. the key questions which were the drivers were: • what opportunities for health related volunteering are there locally? • what are the benefits of undertaking volunteering activities? • how do biomedical students view the term ‘employability’ and how to develop this? this work was more extensive than intended and presented here. it addressed several wider questions than those above but, for the purpose of this paper, will focus only on those identified above. the aims of the wider project are to inform the university locally (and more widely) whether there are specific volunteering routes to enable health or biomedical students to use their specific knowledge and develop their skills. furthermore, it also aims to explore how this can be embedded within the programme or university volunteering system. context the current economic climate – effects on graduate recruitment work experience is one of the biggest drivers behind employability, with over half the employers surveyed in the high flyers’ graduate market report (2012) indicating that graduates with no work experience were unlikely to be offered graduate employment. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 3 cunningham and gallacher learning beyond the classroom the association of graduate recruiters (agr) annual summer survey shows that some leading uk employers are receiving on average 85 applications for each job. competition is fierce with some sectors increasing vacancies and others decreasing, with an overall decrease of approximately 4% (agr, 2013). because of the high volume of applications, employers are increasingly looking for additional ways to select the right applicants for their roles and this has led to the identification of ‘employability’ skills, such as commercial awareness, communication, problem solving, numeracy, literacy and it skills (see pegg et al., 2012). although there is an increase in students entering stem discipline subjects at heis, there is still a lack of graduates for the employment market. this, it seems, is compounded by concerns around ‘work readiness’ or perceptions or possession of the knowledge, skills attitudes and awareness to make contributions to a workplace (mason et al., 2006) which is already more challenging than that faced by their predecessors (toland, 2011). it is also identified that technical and generic skills – the so-called ‘t-shaped’ skill set, where the depth of disciplinary knowledge is enhanced by the horizontal ability to apply that knowledge across a variety of work situations, is a valuable asset. volunteering opportunities volunteering is any activity in which time is given freely to benefit another person, group or cause (wilson, 2000), though it is acknowledged that volunteering and volunteers are a heterogeneous group (bussell and forbes, 2002). there are multitudes of general volunteering opportunities within universities and the local community but not necessarily focused on health or bioscience. biomedical science degrees do not necessarily have automatic professional recognition requiring appropriate experience and submission of the required portfolio for registration with the health and care professions council (hcpc) (nhs careers, 2012). the opportunity to obtain employment to secure this is also highly competitive, with the potential for some students to seek other career routes. volunteering or community engagement has been embedded more so in the usa academic institutions than in the uk. in the main referred to as ‘service learning’, this aimed to harness civic engagement of students within the community, building a sense of ‘citizenship’ and arguably also providing an opportunity for ‘transformational potential’ within the individual (and the community itself (butin, 2006, p.474). in the uk it appears to lack the same journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 4 cunningham and gallacher learning beyond the classroom cohesion and structure which, as holdsworth (2010) identifies, results in a variety of assumptions about what it can achieve and who benefits. this work evolved from students’ frustrations at limited placement opportunities, informal conversations in class about volunteering experiences, and various applications of immunological and biotechnology techniques in healthcare research and treatment. this project was organic in that it grew from a perceived need and joint interest from students and academic staff to address that need. in essence, it focused on science (or health) related volunteering opportunities which could enable students to utilise their knowledge and laboratory skills to develop their employability skills. students’ recognised and engaged with health-related volunteering but were keen to use their scientific knowledge and skills; this indeed was a challenge. what emerged was a partnership endeavour which enabled students to take control of this and embed it within the university’s student union system to enhance sustainability. holdsworth and quinn (2010) identify that study or career related volunteering was more common among medical and social science students, and among ‘non-traditional’ students. whilst benefits for the individual are acknowledged, there are criticisms of whether benefits to communities are realised (heath, 2007) and if a more sinister side of volunteering is to replace or ‘fill-in’ paid employment or just accrue experience. the relationship between volunteering and employability reflects a growing emphasis on ‘economies of experience’ and the translation of cultural capital into personal capital (heath, 2007). however, motivations to volunteer are complex. whilst holdsworth and quinn (2010) suggest some motivations are instrumentalist and strategic, wilson (2000) earlier suggested altruism or ‘caring’ to be strong motivators. locally placements for biomedical students are sparse, reliant on local availability with a ratio of placements to applicants averaging 1:10. anecdotally students felt frustrated and lost, keen to gain experience but lacking realistic opportunities. this hei is a large post 1992 university with the characteristic diversity of its many counterparts: whites 22.1%, black 28.3%, asian 31%, chinese 0.9%, with females comprising 60.2%. many students do hold part-time jobs to sustain themselves financially. holdsworth’s (2011) research identified journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 5 cunningham and gallacher learning beyond the classroom that volunteering rates were higher among some minority groups, which could explain the enthusiasm of those from the case study institution. methodology the methodology was based on an action research approach which comprised three cycles of assessment, intervention/action and evaluation. characteristics of action research, as identified by reason and bradbury (2006, p.2-3), that are demonstrated in this research include; research undertaken in the community involved with participation from all stakeholders in the questioning, and sense-making informing the research and the actions undertaken. it uses feedback from data in an ongoing cyclical manner, focuses on problems that are of immediate concern to practitioners, frequently uses cases study, is formative in that it has a problem but aims and methodology may be adjusted during the process, and includes evaluation and reflection. the first cycle involved investigating the range of volunteering opportunities locally (within and outside of the university), relating to health disciplines. further cycles looked at students’ perception of employability, volunteering and employability skills (focus group and questionnaires). the work utilised focus groups, reflective diaries and questionnaires of the wider student body. data yielded both qualitative and quantitative data not all of which is reported here. stages a steering group of eight students and one lecturer was convened. this was not part of the curriculum and it was explained to students that they would not get credits or any other academic recognition for this, so participation was purely voluntary and in their own time on top of other demands. they readily agreed to this. following initial explorations, the students’ steering group found a charitable organisation which they wished to work with but was not set up within the university. they then devised a strategy to investigate the work and requirements further, and set this up themselves. this was an organisation the lecturer had some knowledge and involvement with but did not want to lead the students nor set it up for them. this was purposeful since it was journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 6 cunningham and gallacher learning beyond the classroom concluded that in order to feel ownership, students needed to both establish and develop it whilst the lecturer assisted. the relationship evolved to one where the students became increasingly independent and self-sufficient, requiring decreasing input from the lecturer as time passed. the steering group members kept diaries or blogs of their experiences which were kept confidentially and identity removed to ensure anonymity. this was in accordance with the local ethical procedures and with the full consent of the students. the biomedical students established contact with a national charity to establish volunteering work (fundraising and recruiting volunteers to the bone marrow register). students completed training from the parent charity and abided by their guidelines. the students held donor recruitment clinics, fundraising and awareness raising events within the hei and outside in the local community. the student diaries detailing these experiences were analysed textually, though this was challenging as they were rather brief at times and the levels of reflection varied. student narratives benefits of volunteering students were willing to be part of setting up volunteering but initially were reluctant to do this without support. the ‘partnership’ which initially emerged was one of being led by the lecturer and passivity on the part of the student. the role of the lecturer was geared to reflect the higher levels of engagement in the ladder model outlined by hart (1992) to avoid tokenism or ‘decoration’, effectively non-participation. this model of participation developed from arnstein’s seminal (1969, cited hart, 1992) theoretical work on community participation and citizen empowerment. hart focused on young people participation in relation to adults, with the highest level outlined as ‘shared decision making’ or full involvement and control (see figure 1), which was a key operational aim in this research. students developed a number of skills and attributes, particularly increasing independence, with more control and decision making as they developed confidence. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 7 cunningham and gallacher learning beyond the classroom figure 1. hart’s model: ladder of participation (1992). 8. shared decision making and control 7.young people lead and initiate action 6. partnership: shared decisions with young people degrees of participation 5. young people consulted and informed 4. youth assigned and informed (consulted) 3. tokenisation: informed of action degrees of tokenism 2. decoration: not active involvement adult led. 1. manipulation: appears youth inspired but feigned. non participation we have allocated roles amongst each other, xxx as treasurer and yyyy as secretary and i’m the president. this has been confirmed by all of us for the time being, if you suggest otherwise please inform us. (oriana) surprisingly, ‘employability skills’ featured relatively low as a motivation for volunteering but was mentioned, although students did see the added bonus of skills development. they identified with aspects of the enhancement and career functions but were primarily motivated by giving back and helping others, as expressed by these students: i do this because i was to make a difference and help people who cannot help themselves. (oriana) personally, volunteering enhances my confidence, my motivation to pursue my career within the health profession and enables me to aid people who are unable to help themselves. (terfera) journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 8 cunningham and gallacher learning beyond the classroom this is similar to holdsworth’s (2011) findings as she found the most common reason given was ‘volunteering to help someone or their community’. furthermore, employmentrelated reasons were more important for students from non-traditional backgrounds. students’ diaries (n=6) varied in level of reflection and detail. the key issues which emerged were recognising key achievements, approaching problems, personal gains and emotional investment. positive effects were evident: personal gains; altruism and community engagement; problem identification and solving; demonstrating resilience and, in some instances, creativity. moving on, perceived success by the group is evident in this successful bid for a local student union recognition award: alongside our lecturer we set up a, this [charity] society only a year ago and have beaten all our targets in recruitment and fundraising this year. marrow [charity] group is known for its large diversity of ethnic groups; and our student society has put this to good use, and has demonstrated to london universities, how we are determined to save lives. our society is the best in respect to giving the most opportunities for gaining skills and bringing students out their shells in public speaking, getting involved in group work, coordinating and developing organizing skills. (oriana) recognising achievements students reported a number of achievements including communication, confidence but also using their initiative. we have over 300 bone marrow donors signed up and 100 volunteers in the matter of 6 months!...[we are] connected to all our members, organizing [clinic] events, public speaking in primary schools and secondary schools. fundraising has also been key to this society and has taken place at many of the events over the year. (anna) journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 9 cunningham and gallacher learning beyond the classroom several other benefits are also identified and could be summarised as: • learning new skills. • building confidence and self-esteem. • establishing new friendships. • making personal networks. • feelings of worth (contributing to society). • developing a better understanding of themselves. • enriching other people’s lives. many of the skills expressed are reflective of those identified in the employability profile on the nhs careers (2012) site (biomedical science). this also echoes the perception of the ‘win: win’ benefit, even if from a limited perspective (holdsworth and quinn, 2010). as a biomedical science student, it would be useful to get some more experience and knowledge in the field. it’s also useful to put onto my cv as extra-curricular activities help to make an individual to stand out from the masses of graduates that compete for jobs… (chris) the [charity] agm really did bring home how important the work we were now involved in was. it also drove home the massive success… (tobe) personal gains and growth challenges emerged: parity of student engagement varied which led to tensions among the students. organisation structures and processes were fraught at times but did not deter from their task: …the fresher’s fair was full of hitches, room booking, our supplies did not arrive and people seemed confused...it seemed like it would be a disaster but somehow it turned out fine… (anna) the details and minutiae of the volunteering they were engaged with did not create a sense of panic or disengagement but of problem solving, demonstrating maturity and in some cases, leadership. there was a sense of the group coming together with the central journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 10 cunningham and gallacher learning beyond the classroom goal as a focus. students identify with ‘growth’ during this period, which in some ways are illustrative of holdsworth and quinn’s (2010) acknowledgment of a period of change or ‘liminality’ evident in volunteering among university students. …it is a self-satisfying experience that anyone would enjoy! (terfera) our course is quite segmented and everyone has their own friendship groups and they do their own things, we don’t do things together. marrow is one place where we have been able to come together which has worked out well. (chris) this reflects a sense of turner’s (1977) concept of liminality of passing through stages of maturation and developing their identity as students and adults. transition through university, especially year 1, heightens this. some students identify this journey and also the personal gains and confidence through volunteering. it was really difficult talking to new people and then having to talk to strangers knowing about the cells and donations helps…it gave me a focus initially...but i do feel better about doing it now i guess my confidence has grown… (oriana) as well as bonding with classmates and growing personally, the more complex skills of negotiation and motivation emerged. this was especially true in the earlier stages when roles were carved out and personalities were emerging, culminating in filling in key posts and generating support. …at the end of the meeting three of us continued to talk and decided that if we were going to set up this [charity] society, it was now or never! (chris) we were given the opportunity to introduce ourselves to the new biomedical science students. this took place before their opening lecture, in a lecture theatre. we were dressed up in our [charity] apparel and looked the part, but i was quite nervous, i do not find public speaking easy, but i wanted to do it, so i just made sure i wasn’t the first to speak. (chris) journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 11 cunningham and gallacher learning beyond the classroom is volunteering linked to employability? this small scale case study shows that students engage with volunteering for a variety of reasons and report multiple and varied achievements and benefits. however, it is unknown whether the science (or health) focused volunteering will lead to ‘employability’ over and above more generic volunteering. what is certain is that students frequently report confidence and acknowledgement of skills and some (if varied) recognition of the link to employability and employment. the sense of ‘growth’ and development implies an empowerment whereby they can take responsibility. as those nurturing learning, our role is to support them, especially with articulation of the relevant skills. haski-leventhal and cnaan (2009) found that participation in voluntary work during undergraduate years enhances students’ academic development, life skills development and sense of ‘civic responsibility’. in addition, they also report volunteering can help students choose the right vocation for them and improve their curriculum vitae (cvs) and opportunities as they leave university and seek jobs. student volunteering is also in the interest of academic institutes for building community links but also for developing the underexplored third sector route to employability. haski-leventhal et al. (2008) further explain that when students engage in a variety of voluntary activities, the social and cultural life on campus and in the community is enhanced, and overall one could argue the student experience is improved. articulating ‘employability’ the students developed and enthused peers to volunteer, recognising this was on top of other demands, both academic and otherwise. students reported similar understandings of ‘employability’ reflected in the wider literature base. the focus was on what they had to offer employers but also to demonstrate meeting expectations of employers, or what they thought was required of them: i personally think it’s putting yourself in the right place to be able to be, um, seen by employers who might potentially want you in the future. like getting yourself voluntary work…work experience, just doing something that will make you stand out and show that you’ve the good skills and qualities for that job. (anna) journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 12 cunningham and gallacher learning beyond the classroom the organisations, they want you to be experienced in some sort of fields of it, to have a feel of what it is and they actually prefer people to have some sort of skill in order to show that they’re determined to do that job. (naeem) when asked what they meant by this it was evident that this was conceptualised in a number of ways. students identified it as a sizeable assortment of skills but also complying to what employers wanted: i think it’s, like, showing yourself that you’re the one to have that job and the more skills you have, the more chance you have of being chosen. (naeem) students had trouble imagining their future careers but focused on laboratory based work, research, or further studies. however, the means to achieve that potential future was not clearly thought through. they did, however, acknowledge ‘generic’ skills and qualities which would fit a range of careers, identifying how they saw some of these, namely communication and team working, developing in the university classes at the same time as they acquired disciplinary knowledge. yes, i would agree. like, the last pbl [problem based learning] that we had to do, in groups, because it was a group effort, everyone had to do input and because it had questions everyone had to answer and things like that and put them together. so yeah, we are learning a lot about communication skills and being able to work with each other. (tobe) from these findings, students appeared to take ownership of their employability, acknowledging it as their responsibility, although they did see it as involving many within the curriculum, demonstrating the strong ties of curriculum and employability as demonstrated in literature (pegg et al., 2012). harvey (2003, p.1) suggested that employability was not merely ‘getting a job’. he proposed, ‘employability is more than about developing attributes, techniques or experience just to enable a student to get a job, or to progress within a current career. it is about learning and the emphasis is less on ‘employ’ and more on ‘ability’’, a sentiment echoed by yorke (2006) who suggests employability emphasises continuous development. ultimately the emphasis is on developing critical, reflective abilities, with a view to empowering and enhancing the learner. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 13 cunningham and gallacher learning beyond the classroom the range of skills and human capital uncovered from the small group of students reflects the wider skill set identified by employers. data collected by the biosciences subject centre (anderson and mitchelle, 2006) and from blackford et al. (2006) assert the skills and qualities for biosciences are: 1. self-management skills (self-promotion, self-awareness, networking, accepting responsibility, leadership). 2. people skills (team-working, communication, negotiating/persuading, customer service). 3. general skills (problem-solving, entrepreneurial, it skills, numeracy, commitment, creative thinking). 4. specialist skills (specific occupational skills, technical skills). 5. business and commercial awareness. data from students here demonstrates that volunteering has helped to develop all five strands of these skills and qualities, as well as ownership and control. stuart et al. (2009, p.5) assert that university lecturers ought to look to broaden experiences on their courses and place value on the ‘whole lives’ as beneficial to future employment. conclusions when considering what has been learned from this project thus far, a number of things can be identified. although students recognised the onus is on themselves to develop their employability skills, they also saw the importance of the support from the university and importance of the curriculum in developing employability. engagement with volunteering activities does foster these skills and the use of health or science related avenues enhances the use of disciplinary knowledge, if not directly, then indirectly in providing confidence to partake in events. students avidly undertook the challenge of volunteering and of setting up one specific charity society (group), and from the earliest stages demonstrated enthusiasm and independence. this extra-curricular work provided an opportunity for them to create a unique identity within the university and, as they were setting this up from nothing, could set their own expectations and targets. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 14 cunningham and gallacher learning beyond the classroom key benefits identified by students included gaining in confidence, presenting/ communicating effectively and appropriately to different audiences, and problem solving: ‘thinking on their feet’. what was noted is that these students formed social cohesion and independence fairly quickly and became a self-sustaining group, no longer requiring close guidance from the lecturer, instead taking direction from the parent charity. although there was no mention of their studies in their diaries, this was an issue frequently discussed at meetings and also at ‘clinic’ events. the disciplinary knowledge base gave them the sense of ‘authenticity’ for knowing some of the theory and of doing the practical work of the charity in raising awareness and recruiting donors. this reflects the findings of braime and ruohonem (2011) who found a large proportion of their students identified a close link with academic work and volunteering. this could be argued as functional or instrumental, but in this instance it appears to be a confidence booster to enable engagement. what the work fails to tell us so far is ‘difference’. what is gained from volunteering compared to what is gained from a formal structured work placement and how the two can be bridged. what is known is that with employability increasingly in focus, heis will have to consider additional routes to practice based work alongside that of the placement. references anderson, j. and mitchelle, h. (2006) employability for students. briston: hea and escalate. available at: http://www.cumbria.ac.uk/public/education/documents/research/escalatedocume nts/employabilityforstudents.pdf (accessed: 9 april 2013). archer, w. and davison, j. (2008) graduate employability: what do employers think and want? uk: the council for industry and higher education. association of graduate recruiters (agr) (2013) recruitment survey 2013: summer review. cfe and association of graduate recruiters. blackford, s., burdass, d. and assinder, s. (2006) ‘student employability – whose job is it?’, centre for bioscience bulletin 17, spring 2006, pp. 6-7 (from education committee, bioscience federation). journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 15 http://www.cumbria.ac.uk/public/education/documents/research/escalatedocuments/employabilityforstudents.pdf http://www.cumbria.ac.uk/public/education/documents/research/escalatedocuments/employabilityforstudents.pdf cunningham and gallacher learning beyond the classroom bradbury, p. and reason, h. (2006) handbook of action research. london: sage. braime, j. and ruohonem, m. (2011) exploring impacts of volunteering on university students in london. the national coordinating centre for public engagement & volunteering england. [online]. available at: https://www.publicengagement.ac.uk/sites/default/files/london%20student%20volu nteering%20survey.pdf (accessed: 15 august 2013). bussell, h. and forbes, d. (2002) ‘understanding the volunteer market: the what, where, who and why of volunteering', international journal of nonprofit and voluntary sector marketing, 7(3), pp. 244-257. butin, d. (2006) ‘the limits of service–learning in higher education’, the review of higher education, 29(4), pp. 473-498. cbi and universities uk (2009) future fit: preparing graduates for the world of work. available at: http://www.cbi.org.uk/media/1121435/cbi_uuk_future_fit.pdf (accessed: 15 may 2013). hart, r. (1992) children’s participation: from tokenism to citizenship. florence: unicef innocenti research centre [online]. available at: http://www.unicefirc.org/publications/pdf/childrens_participation.pdf (accessed: 12 august 2013). harvey, l. (2003) transitions to work. york: ltsn. [online]. available at: haski-leventhal, d., ben-arieh, a. and melton, g. (2008) ‘between neighbourliness and volunteerism: the participants in the strong communities initiative’, family and community health, 31(2): pp. 150-61. haski-leventhal, d. and cnaan, r.a. (2009) ‘group processes and volunteering: enhancing recruitment and retention’, administration in social work, 33(1), pp. 6180. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 16 https://www.publicengagement.ac.uk/sites/default/files/london%20student%20volunteering%20survey.pdf https://www.publicengagement.ac.uk/sites/default/files/london%20student%20volunteering%20survey.pdf http://www.cbi.org.uk/media/1121435/cbi_uuk_future_fit.pdf http://www.unicef-irc.org/publications/pdf/childrens_participation.pdf http://www.unicef-irc.org/publications/pdf/childrens_participation.pdf cunningham and gallacher learning beyond the classroom heath, s. (2007) ‘widening the gap: pre‐university gap years and the ‘economy of experience’’, british journal of sociology of education, 28(1), pp. 89-103. high fliers research (2012) the graduate market in 2012. available: http://www.highfliers.co.uk/download/gmreport12.pdf (accessed: 26 november 2013). holdsworth, c. (2011) win, win, win? a critical perspective on student volunteering. economic and social research council, institute for volunteering research and birkbeck, university of london policy seminar, thursday 17th march 2011. available at: http://www.esrc.ac.uk/_images/prof%20%20c%20holdsworth%20%20summary_tc m8-15079.pdf (accessed: 3 october 2013). holdsworth, c. and quinn, j. (2010) ‘student volunteering in english higher education’, studies in higher education, 35(1), pp. 113-127. mason, g., williams, g. and cranmer, s. (2006) ‘employability skills initiatives in higher education: what effects do they have on graduate labour market outcomes?’ education economics, 17(1), pp. 1-30 [online]. available at: http://aces.shu.ac.uk/employability/resources/061006_91251.pdf (accessed: 10 october 2013). nhs careers (2012) biomedical science. http://www.nhscareers.nhs.uk/explore-bycareer/healthcare-science/careers-in-healthcare-science/careers-in-lifesciences/biomedical-science/ (accessed: 20 march 2013). pegg, a., waldock, j., hendy-isaac, s. and lawton, r. (2012) pedagogy for employability. york: hea. available at: http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/assets/documents/employability/pedagogy_for_emplo yability_update_2012.pdf (accessed: 7 february 2013). journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 17 http://www.highfliers.co.uk/download/gmreport12.pdf http://www.esrc.ac.uk/_images/prof%20%20c%20holdsworth%20%20summary_tcm8-15079.pdf http://www.esrc.ac.uk/_images/prof%20%20c%20holdsworth%20%20summary_tcm8-15079.pdf http://aces.shu.ac.uk/employability/resources/061006_91251.pdf http://www.nhscareers.nhs.uk/explore-by-career/healthcare-science/careers-in-healthcare-science/careers-in-life-sciences/biomedical-science/ http://www.nhscareers.nhs.uk/explore-by-career/healthcare-science/careers-in-healthcare-science/careers-in-life-sciences/biomedical-science/ http://www.nhscareers.nhs.uk/explore-by-career/healthcare-science/careers-in-healthcare-science/careers-in-life-sciences/biomedical-science/ http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/assets/documents/employability/pedagogy_for_employability_update_2012.pdf http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/assets/documents/employability/pedagogy_for_employability_update_2012.pdf cunningham and gallacher learning beyond the classroom schwartz, s. (2012) ‘employability skills – where is wisdom?’, the guardian, higher education network, 2 may (online). available at: http://www.theguardian.com/higher-education-network/blog/2012/may/02/wisdomas-an-employability-skill (accessed: 28 november 2013). stuart, m., lido, c., morgan, j. and may, s. (2009) student diversity, extra-curricular activities and perceptions of graduate outcomes. higher education academy. available at: http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/assets/documents/resources/publications/stuart_eca _final.pdf (accessed: 13 october2013). toland, a. (2011) he stem employability skills review. national hea stem programme. available at: http://www.hestem.ac.uk/sites/default/files/employability_skills_review.pdf (accessed: 10 june 2013). turner, v. (1977) the ritual process. ithaca: cornell university press. wilson, j. (2000) ‘volunteering’, annual review of sociology, 26, pp. 215-240. yorke, m. (2006) ‘employability in higher education: what it is – what it is not’, learning and employability series 1 and 2. york: hea. author details sheila cunningham is a principal lecturer and senior teaching fellow in the school of health & education, at middlesex university. her research interests are in enhancing teaching-learning environments, particularly in health related professional development programmes in higher education. she is currently interested in student diversity and inclusivity and how this can be harnessed to expand the student experience and opportunities. sheila is also interested in enhancing the use of third sector experiences to expand skill development. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 18 http://www.theguardian.com/higher-education-network/blog/2012/may/02/wisdom-as-an-employability-skill http://www.theguardian.com/higher-education-network/blog/2012/may/02/wisdom-as-an-employability-skill http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/assets/documents/resources/publications/stuart_eca_final.pdf http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/assets/documents/resources/publications/stuart_eca_final.pdf http://www.hestem.ac.uk/sites/default/files/employability_skills_review.pdf cunningham and gallacher learning beyond the classroom deeba gallacher is a senior researcher in the centre for learning and teaching at middlesex university. her interests are the first year experience and the transition and retention of students. deeba is also interested in the student experience and researches various pedagogical issues of inclusivity and student achievement. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 19 learning beyond the classroom: biomedical science students’ narratives of volunteering and developing employability skills abstract introduction context the current economic climate – effects on graduate recruitment volunteering opportunities locally methodology stages student narratives benefits of volunteering recognising achievements personal gains and growth is volunteering linked to employability? articulating ‘employability’ conclusions references author details as an educational developer for over twenty years, i have watched with interest the relatively recent, rapid and successful gro journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 1: february 2009 opinion piece: a call to unite in a common cause chris rust oxford brookes university, uk abstract this opinion piece argues that despite the successes of the learning development network, and the learning development community, separate development of this community may also have some dangers. it further argues that now is an auspicious time to try and bring about a paradigm shift in the attitudes of academic staff towards their role as teachers in higher education. having presented the reasons why, it suggests that in order to increase the chances of bringing this about, the learning development and educational development communities should come together. keywords: change; graduate attributes; threshold concepts; research-based learning; assessment as an educational developer for over twenty years, i have watched with interest the relatively recent, rapid and successful growth of the ldhen. and while in some ways i think it is a shame that it was perceived necessary to set up a separate organisation for those involved in learning development, rather than feeling that there might already be a natural home within the educational development community in existing organisations like seda (staff and educational development association), i think i can also appreciate why it was. apart from the obvious attraction of working just with people in the same sort of jobs and roles, with the same issues and problems and talking the same language, i am sure that a lot also has to do with the way institutions tend to separate the learning development role, its organisational location, the career structures, relative status, etc. and given the success of the ldhen, i can see that when it comes rust opinion piece: a call to unite in a common cause to helping with those roles and the world of higher education as it exists now, it makes sense to have a separate, focused support network offering lots of practical ideas, developing communal resources and sharing good practice. but looking to the future, i have two linked concerns. one is that this success may actually help to reinforce, and possibly perpetuate, the current, predominant remedial, ‘sticking-plaster’ view of learning development as an activity outside the curriculum that enables (and arguably even encourages) some academics to abdicate from feeling they have any responsibility to help those of their students who have problems with their learning. my second concern is about the separation of our two development communities. a successful, separate learning development provision may also, paradoxically, encourage some of the worst cost-cutting intentions of some of our institutional managers – the ability to provide support ‘on the cheap’ (through support staff rather than academic staff), and the further possibilities of deskilling the support that is actually provided with an increased (over) reliance by management on the (even cheaper) promise of e-learning, 'independent' learning etc. in short, the “why don’t you just develop some support packages and put them on the web?” scenario. now i assume that our two communities are united in a belief that learning development should not be a separate, central activity but, ideally, should be an integrated and indistinguishable part of course design and teaching/course delivery, with the course tutor responsible for the facilitation of the students’ learning? i also believe that there has possibly never been a better time than now to bring about a paradigm shift in the attitudes of academic staff towards their role as teachers in higher education. and to increase our chances of bringing this about, i suggest it would be much better if we joined forces. so what are the factors that make this such a potentially auspicious time. in no particular order, they are: • graduate attributes – stimulated by developments in australia (see journal of learning development in higher education, issue 1: february 2009 2 rust opinion piece: a call to unite in a common cause http://www.itl.usyd.edu.au/graduateattributes, and http://tinyurl.com/5q9t62), and it may possibly be, at least partially, a reaction by academics against the recent growth of the ‘skills’ lobby, but whatever the cause we have a new opportunity to get academics thinking about what are the particular graduate attributes they are developing in their discipline. thinking about graduate attributes also has obvious potential links to the employability agenda and the question of what do graduate employers want in the 21st century, which is currently of major concern to all of our institutions. • threshold concepts and troublesome knowledge – the recent work of meyer and land (2006) and land, meyer and smith (2008) is stimulating growing interest because it seems to resonate with the experience of academics – and i know ray land spoke at the last ldhen symposium. for those who were not there, and unfamiliar with the work, the thesis, in a nutshell, is that all disciplines have these ‘threshold concepts’ which can be likened to portals in that they are essential for progression in disciplinary understanding, and that are troublesome in nature, often requiring a significant change in the student’s view of the discipline, and once achieved the change is probably irreversible. although not the same, when planning a course programme, any discussion of either graduate attributes or threshold concepts in a given discipline would clearly benefit from discussion of the other at the same time. • research–based learning – the work of the reinvention centre, and some other cetls, promoting a significant role for undergraduate research as part of the undergraduate curriculum, is stimulating a lot of interest and is starting to be implemented in a number of institutions. research-based learning requires a very different view of course design, and also should lead to an inevitable change in the relationship between the lecturer and the student. no longer is the relationship one between the giver of knowledge (expert) and the receiver of knowledge (novice) but it becomes one of colleagues (albeit senior and junior colleagues) engaged in a joint enterprise. in addition, and linking to the other factors already discussed, research journal of learning development in higher education, issue 1: february 2009 3 http://www.itl.usyd.edu.au/graduateattributes http://tinyurl.com/5q9t62 rust opinion piece: a call to unite in a common cause skills are clearly a major graduate attribute, and what better way of helping students grapple with threshold concepts than through getting them actively undertaking research in their discipline? (see www.warwick.ac.uk/go/reinvention and http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/assets/york/documents/linkingteachingandresearch_ april07.pdf. • rethinking assessment – 2007 was the year that both the qaa and burgess admitted that we have no adequate systems for ensuring standards, and that degree classifications are virtually meaningless. as part of a constructive response, the aske (assessment standards knowledge exchange) cetl sponsored the production of an assessment manifesto, with an agenda for change (see http://www.business.brookes.ac.uk/learningandteaching/aske/manifesto final.pdf). a significant thrust of that manifesto is that assessment practices need to focus more on assessment for learning (formative assessment) and the assessment of programme rather than module or unit outcomes. and programme outcomes should clearly relate to both threshold concepts and graduate attributes. as i have tried to intimate, these ideas link well, and arguably even overlap. there really is the opportunity for a considerable amount of ‘joined-up’ thinking if these ideas can be discussed and implemented together, and even the possibility of a paradigm shift in the thinking of academics across the sector. but where is the incentive for our academic colleagues to address these ideas? i believe there are two. the positive incentive is that, if presented well, these ideas can appeal intellectually to academic staff through their primary interest and allegiance to their discipline. the second, more negative but powerful incentive is the issue of competitiveness. with the declining demographic, and the possibility of the lid coming off fees, the competition for students is going to get increasingly fierce and important – hence growing concerns over retention, recruitment, widening participation and the national student survey (nss). having both distinguishable positives – high employability, a discernibly special student experience – and eradicating negatives – journal of learning development in higher education, issue 1: february 2009 4 http://www.warwick.ac.uk/go/reinvention http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/assets/york/documents/linkingteachingandresearch_april07.pdf http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/assets/york/documents/linkingteachingandresearch_april07.pdf http://www.business.brookes.ac.uk/learningandteaching/aske/manifesto%20final.pdf rust opinion piece: a call to unite in a common cause reducing drop-out, moving up the nss tables – are therefore going to be high on most deans’ agendas. now i acknowledge that probably nothing comes without also having a potential downside. to bring our two communities together may take some of us out of our comfort zone, may require some of our allegiances to loosen and be rebuilt, and may well require us to learn new skills. but these can all also be seen as opportunities, especially the potential benefit of learning from each other. so, to summarise, it is my opinion that there has never been a better time to be both the catalyst of change and the provider of possible solutions, and i believe we will stand far more chance of achieving this if our two communities can come and work together. we therefore need to look for every opportunity, at both a local level, within our institutions, and nationally through our respective organisations, as well as the hea and some of the cetls, to work together and promoting the paradigm shift identified above i believe is the cause around which we could and should unite. references land, r., meyer, j.h.f. & smith, j. (2008) threshold concepts within the disciplines. rotterdam and taipei: sense publishers. meyer, j.h.f. & land r. (2006) overcoming barriers to student understanding: threshold concepts and troublesome knowledge. routledgefalmer. author details chris rust is head of the oxford centre for staff and learning development, oxford brookes university journal of learning development in higher education, issue 1: february 2009 5 opinion piece: a call to unite in a common cause abstract references author details literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special edition: academic peer learning, november 2015 the attitudes and experiences of student-tutors to peer tutoring in higher education physics peter h. sneddon university of glasgow, uk abstract in the school of physics and astronomy at the university of glasgow a wide variety of teaching and learning methods are employed in undergraduate degree courses. included in this are a series of peer-led tutorials, known as the ‘peer to peer’ tutorial scheme, in which senior students in the third, fourth or fifth years of their degrees assist students in years one and two, acting as tutors and assisting the less experienced students with issues related to their coursework and student life. this paper discusses the scheme and looks in-depth at the experiences of the tutors that took part, as well as investigating why they volunteered to act as a tutor. using closed and open survey questions, their attitudes were collected and analysed. student-tutors reported a positive experience of the tutorials. they had taken part in the scheme to improve their own skills and to assist both younger students and the school. the scheme, whilst not perfect, improved the skills-base of the tutors, as well as boosting their own self-confidence. keywords: peer tutoring; physics; skills development. sneddon the attitudes and experiences of student-tutors to peer tutoring in higher education physics journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 2 introduction the use of peer-based teaching and tutoring has seen a recent increase across the uk in higher education institutions (collings et al., 2015). at the university of glasgow, its use by the school of physics and astronomy is a relatively new endeavour, and this was the first truly in-depth analysis of the tutor experience that was carried out. whilst there is extensive work in the literature relating to the wide range of peer-teaching schemes being employed, there is little looking at the evaluation of such schemes. collings et al. (2014) identified several, but highlighted that there were still many gaps in this area (see also nisbet et al. (2014)). this work strives to help fill this gap, focusing specifically on a peerled scheme that is embedded in a higher education physics school. a mix of quantitative and qualitative data was collected to create the best picture possible. defining ‘peer tutoring’ many authors have put forward definitions for ‘peer tutoring’. topping (1996, p.322), for example, suggested the term was best described as 'people from similar social groupings who are not professional teachers helping each other to learn and learning themselves by teaching', whilst colvin (2007, p.166) describes the process of peer tutoring as one that ‘involves those of the same societal group or social standing educating one another when one peer has more expertise or knowledge’. the definition put forth by boud et al. (2001, p.4), though, best matches the scheme that will be discussed in this paper. they describe a peer learning model involving an ‘instrumental strategy in which advanced students, or those in later years, take on a limited instructional role’. collings et al. (2014) describe a similar scheme, though they use the term ‘peer mentor’. the advantages of peer tutoring for the tutors and students many advantages have been identified in the literature for the student-tutors involved in peer-tutoring, including improved cognitive and communication skills (topping, 1996; annis, 1983; benware and deci, 1984; carroll, 1996; watters and ginns, 1997). rubin and hebert (1998) also found student-tutors improved their motivation to study and became more empathetic to their own teachers. in terms of the learning process, moust and schmidt (1994) put forward three ways in which student-tutors differ from staff-tutors to the benefit of the students. firstly, students communicate more freely in the absence of staff. sneddon the attitudes and experiences of student-tutors to peer tutoring in higher education physics journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 3 secondly, student-tutors think about the material the same way that the students do, which is fundamentally different to the way staff view the material. thirdly, students benefit more from learning guided by student-tutors because the student-tutors interact in a more direct and personal way with the students, creating a safer and more open learning environment. ‘peer to peer’ tutorials the peer tutoring scheme discussed in this paper is called ‘peer to peer tutoring’, and runs in the school of physics and astronomy at the university of glasgow. the peer to peer scheme was designed to support student learning and revision, alongside other schemes such as traditional, lecturer-led tutorials and small group supervision sessions. students in their honours years – i.e. years 3, 4 and 5 of their degrees – act as tutors for students in years 1 and 2. topping (2015) discusses a wide range of styles of peer tutoring. the scheme used at glasgow, though, most resembles the learning assistants scheme, created initially at the university of colorado (otero et al., 2010.), where experienced students are employed within mathematics and stem subjects. they work closely with less experienced students three times per week through every semester, working closely with course lecturers to reflect on student performance and make adjustments to courses as required. however, the glasgow scheme was deliberately created to be more of a ‘light touch’. specifically, the peer to peer tutorials at glasgow form part of the timetable for the physics 1 and physics 2 classes in the school of physics and astronomy. they run in the normal lecture slots for these courses. students participate in four tutorials through the academic year; each student-tutor is involved in around 6-8 tutorials. student-tutors are paid for two hours’ work per tutorial, at minimum wage rates. the rate is set on the assumption that for each one-hour tutorial they take part in, the tutor performs one hour’s preparation. the student-tutors are recruited on a voluntary basis, with around 30 recruited each year. tutorials are designed around set questions that are distributed ahead of each meeting. student-tutors also receive full worked solutions for the questions. the questions are chosen from each course being studied at the time of the tutorial. one lecture theatre and two classroom-style venues are used for the tutorials. the class is randomly split between each, with a minimum of two or three student-tutors per room. a typical tutorial would have between 50 and 100 students, spread across the three venues. sneddon the attitudes and experiences of student-tutors to peer tutoring in higher education physics journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 4 these tutorials have three main aims. the first is to assist with student learning/revision of physics. secondly, they aim to help integrate level 1 and 2 students into the school of physics and astronomy through communication with honours level students. it is hoped that this will help improve the school’s retention levels. at the university of glasgow, students do not register on a particular course. rather, they join a college. within that college, they then take three subjects in the first year and two in the second year. in theory, they can then go on to major in any one of those subjects. the end result is that a large number of students in level 1 and 2 physics classes have no intention of taking the subject beyond those years. many authors, including collings et al. (2014), crisp (2010) and jacobi (1991), have identified peer-based schemes as having a beneficial impact on encouraging students to remain with a particular subject. the third and final aim for the scheme is to give honours level 3/4/5 student-tutors an opportunity to develop/improve their teaching skills and their understanding of the basics of physics. the tutorials were, therefore, designed to be of value to both students and student-tutors. methods the ultimate goal of the research reported here was to explore the experiences of studenttutors in the peer to peer tutorials. within this broad goal were the following aims: a. identify the reasons the student-tutors had volunteered to be a tutor. b. identify what the student-tutors thought were the benefits to them in taking part, and explore their attitudes to the scheme, by requiring them to reflect on the tutorials as they took place. c. identify possible areas for improvement in the peer to peer scheme. as these experiences and attitudes were investigated, a clear picture of what happened during these tutorials was developed, which it was hoped would highlight whether any changes were needed to create a better educational environment for the student-tutors and the students they were working with. the work here was carried out as an intrinsic case study, as defined by cousin (2005). participants were volunteers from amongst the team of student-tutors. thirty-two studenttutors recruited, of whom 26 volunteered to take part in the research project. ultimately, no sneddon the attitudes and experiences of student-tutors to peer tutoring in higher education physics journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 5 more than 23 took part in any one stage of the work. nine students were female, 17 male, though the tutors were not asked to declare their gender when completing the surveys detailed below. sixteen students were in the penultimate year of their degree, with the remainder taking part in their final year. data was collected by means of online, anonymous surveys, using the survey monkey tool (http://www.surveymonkey.com). three different surveys were developed. survey 1 the first survey consisted of three questions and was issued after the first tutorial that the student-tutors had participated in. question 1 was designed specifically to explore the first aim of the study and as such, asked why the tutors had volunteered for the scheme that year. questions 2 and 3 were included to explore their attitudes and identify the perceived benefits, and required them to reflect on the specific tutorial that they had just completed. question 2 was a four-part likert (likert, 1932) scale question, asking participants to respond to the following statements on a five-choice scale from strongly agree through to strongly disagree: a) tutoring students in lower levels helps with my understanding of physics. b) acting as a tutor makes me feel more confident in my understanding of physics. c) i get a feeling of satisfaction from tutoring other students. d) acting as a tutor makes me feel more a part of the school of physics and astronomy. question 3 was an open-answer question. student-tutors were asked to reflect on their experiences in the tutorial, with guidance to aim for ~500 word responses. such an open question was chosen in order to explore the student-tutors’ experiences and attitude in depth, and to avoid pre-empting any views they might have. http://www.surveymonkey.com/ sneddon the attitudes and experiences of student-tutors to peer tutoring in higher education physics journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 6 survey 2 the second survey was designed to record student-tutors’ ongoing reflections and as such included questions 2 and 3 as described above, which were administered after each subsequent tutorial. survey 3 the final survey was conducted to identify possible areas for improvement. it contained two free-text questions. the first asked participants to reflect on the tutorials as a whole, and the second asked them to put themselves in the position of tutorial organiser and comment on what changes they would make to improve the system. ethical approval for the data collection methods was received from the faculty of education’s ethics board at the university of glasgow. results and discussion (a) rationale for acting as a student-tutor the first question student-tutors were asked to answer, after their first tutorial, was ‘why did you choose to be a peer tutor?’. this was a free-text question, the responses to which were analysed using a general inductive approach (thomas, 2006). this method, which was also used for the analysis of all free-text questions reported in this paper, involved careful reading of all responses, looking for common categories and themes in the data. those themes were found to fall within two broader ‘super-themes’. table 1 summarises these results. 23 student-tutors completed this question, generating 50 responses. sneddon the attitudes and experiences of student-tutors to peer tutoring in higher education physics journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 7 table 1. reasons for volunteering. super-theme theme % of responses self-improvement improving/developing skills of studenttutor 34 self-improvement improve knowledge of course work 26 self-improvement personal benefit of student-tutor 6 altruistic intentions want to help 18 altruistic intentions enjoy tasks associated with teaching/tutoring 16 the findings suggested that the student-tutors had volunteered either to improve themselves or to help others. example statements for ‘self-improvement’ included ‘gaining experience for a future career’ and the ‘chance to improve my teaching/tutoring abilities’. ‘altruistic’ examples included ‘i enjoy teaching’ and ‘enjoyed being a tutor before’. as such, it would seem that the student-tutors were either thinking about their future, and how to get the best out of their time at university to help that future, or they simply wanted to help their fellow students or the school as a whole, or indeed a mixture of both. whatever the reason, the student-tutors clearly had a vested interest in making the peer to peer tutorials work. (b) student-tutors’ reflections on the tutorial experience after the completion of each tutorial, student-tutors were presented with a series of fivechoice likert style questions, detailed in the methodology section above. table 2 summarises the responses. the questions were asked a total of 12 times, once per tutorial. the number of responses to the individual tutorials varied from 12 for some sessions to 4 for others. the average response was 6, and the mode 5. a total of 68 responses were generated through the year to the four questions. table 2 summarises these responses. here each numerical entry represents the percentage of the 68 responses that fell within a particular response (strongly agree, agree, etc.). sneddon the attitudes and experiences of student-tutors to peer tutoring in higher education physics journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 8 table 2. reflections on tutoring. % question sa* a n d sd tutoring students in lower levels helps with my understanding of physics. 50 44 4 1 0 acting as a tutor makes me feel more confident in my understanding of physics. 52 46 3 0 0 i get a feeling of satisfaction from tutoring other students. 69 29 1 0 0 acting as a tutor makes me feel more a part of the school of physics and astronomy. 58 36 6 0 0 *sa = strongly agree, a = agree, n = neutral, d = disagree, sd = strongly disagree student-tutors clearly felt that the tutoring was improving their understanding, and their confidence in that understanding. this tied in with one of their goals for taking part. they also found them satisfying and helped to integrate them with the school. the results were very consistent throughout the year. the next question was free-text: in 500 words or less, please describe what happened in this week's tutorial. how happy are you with how things went and why? what would you do differently next time? 500 words was an arbitrary length, chosen to encourage students to write more than a brief summary of what happened. responses varied from brief, single sentence comments, to longer, more discursive summaries. sneddon the attitudes and experiences of student-tutors to peer tutoring in higher education physics journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 9 two broad themes were identified in the data: student-tutors’ evaluative judgements about the tutorials and their thoughts on their experiences of what happened in the tutorials. within these themes, individual responses varied widely, and so specific examples are discussed here. the evaluations were often superficial, referred to by hatton and smith (1995) as descriptive writing. there were, though, some deeper examples, such as one student who stated that ‘i was fairly happy with how things went, because afterwards the students seemed to understand the question better than before’. hatton and smith (1995) would classify this as dialogic reflection. in terms of the student-tutor descriptions of the tutorial experience itself, the responses here provided a detailed look at what actually happened in the tutorials. the views focused on the behaviour of the tutors or the students. the student-tutors reported that they and their colleagues worked in two ways. some were proactive and would move amongst the students in their tutorial, actively seeking questions and offering help. others would wait to be called before going to the students. the general feeling from the student-tutors was that the more proactive approach was better. for instance, one student-tutor stated ‘all tutors wandered round the room…good technique rather than just standing at the front. you feel more involved and i think the students feel that too’. another student-tutor referred to the method of waiting for questions as ‘a somewhat less effective method’. one more student-tutor made a comparison between the two methods: ‘this week instead of walking around and asking if everything was ok i waited until someone put their hand up. although this worked, i felt that there wasn’t the same number of questions asked’. in terms of student behaviour, the student-tutors reported that for the most part the students had attempted the set work ahead of time, and that most of them worked steadily through the tutorials. one student-tutor reported that students were more at ease as the year unfolded, whilst another noted a difference in their behaviour depending on the venue of the tutorial: ‘i found the students less willing to raise questions in the large lecture theatre’. it would seem, from the student-tutors’ point of view, that the nature of these rooms does affect the behaviour of the students. sneddon the attitudes and experiences of student-tutors to peer tutoring in higher education physics journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 10 (c) areas for improvement in the peer to peer tutorial scheme in the final online survey, student-tutors were asked to consider the tutorial scheme overall. they were first asked the question ‘what could you, as a tutor, have done to improve your tutoring experience?’. they were given a range of options to pick and they could tick as many as they felt applied. they then had to comment on their responses. 12 participated, generating 20 responses. table 3 summarises the results. table 3. what could you as tutor have done to improve your tutoring experience? category % of responses i spent longer studying the questions and solutions. 45 ii moved amongst the students more. 25 iii been more approachable to the students. 20 iv tried to help the students understand the underlying content, rather than just give them the answers to their questions. 10 these statements fell into two broad themes: student-tutor preparation before the tutorials (i), and student-tutor performance at the tutorials (ii, iii, iv). the responses showed an approximately equal frequency for both themes, and many tutors’ explanations for how they responded inter-linked the categories. one example is particularly interesting, demonstrating critical reflection of the situation (hatton and smith, 1995). they stated that they needed to: spend more time studying the questions and thinking about how you would explain the answer and underlying physics to someone else. it's not enough to study the question so you know it, you need to know how to explain it. other responses drew attention to the fact that the student-tutors grew more comfortable in their role as the year progressed. ‘at first it was difficult to know when to ask if a student needed help, but as the year progressed it got somewhat easier’. it should be noted that this does not automatically mean that the student-tutors were illprepared or performed badly at the tutorials. indeed feedback from the students suggested that they felt the student-tutors were very good for the most part. rather, the responses sneddon the attitudes and experiences of student-tutors to peer tutoring in higher education physics journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 11 suggest a perceived failure on the student-tutors’ part of their own performance. this is indicative of a desire to do well in their role, suggesting they recognise the importance of being a tutor. the second question in the final survey given to the student-tutors said the following: imagine you have been asked to run the peer to peer tutorials for your year group next session. what changes might you introduce in order to make the peer to peer tutorial experience more helpful so that future students can be helped to understand and apply the ideas of physics? this was a free text question, resulting in a wide range of responses. these responses – 25 in all – were coded using a general inductive technique and table 4 lists the common themes found in the responses, together with the percentage of the occurrences of the categories that fell into those themes. table 4. student-tutor improvement themes. theme % administration of tutorials 57 support for tutors 19 content of tutorials 14 nothing 10 the most frequent categories in the ‘administration of tutorials’ theme were requests to run more tutorials. one student stated they ‘would run more of them; i think that the peer-topeer tutorials are useful, and running them more frequently would be beneficial’. others wanted the tutorials to use more rooms for them and to improve the student/tutor ratio by recruiting more student-tutors. ‘have more rooms and make the groups smaller, so that the students fell less intimidated to ask questions’. in terms of ‘support for tutors’, the student-tutors requested better solutions to the questions (‘typed questions and solutions’), and provide copies of the students’ lecture notes. they also suggested arranging a pre-tutorial meeting ‘5-10 mins before the tutorial starts to make sure everyone knows what they are doing’. sneddon the attitudes and experiences of student-tutors to peer tutoring in higher education physics journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 12 ‘content of tutorials’ referred to the questions being used – tutors requested a broader range of questions, designed in part to focus on key course concepts: ‘i would cover must know concepts, so that all students would definitely have a solid grounding’. in all of these areas, the student-tutors were demonstrating clear, sensible views on what would make the tutorials better – it was clear that they felt the tutorials were valuable to them and the students, and should be retained. conclusions peer-based approaches to learning take on a wide variety of styles. consistent with the approach of otero et al. (2010), where more advanced students teach less experienced colleagues (see also boud et al., 2010; collings et al., 2014), peer-led tutorials were introduced to the university of glasgow’s school of physics and astronomy. there were three goals for these tutorials: to provide additional revision opportunities for students; to provide greater integration for junior students; and to provide an opportunity for senior students to broaden and improve their skills, both in terms of core theoretical subject knowledge, and broader, transferrable skills. the work here looked at the evaluation of these goals, aiming to help address the lack of published evaluations of such schemes identified by various authors (e.g. collings et al., 2014; nisbet et al., 2014). this evaluation was carried out through an attitudinal investigation of the student-tutors’ motivations to taking part and their experiences of the tutorials themselves. findings suggest that the student-tutors volunteered to participate for their own benefit – they wished to improve their own understanding of coursework and broaden their skills base. this is consistent with previous studies (benware and deci, 1984; carrol, 1996; galbraith and winterbottom, 2011; nisbet et al., 2014; topping, 1996; watters and ginns, 1997). they also acknowledged a wish to help others, both in terms of the students they were tutoring and the school itself, a finding also reported by galbraith and winterbottom (2011). further, it is interesting to note that whilst student-tutors were paid for their efforts, the financial return was not acknowledged as a motivation to participate, which is a finding not generally reported by others (nisbet et al., 2014). perhaps this could be due to the relatively low payments offered in this context. sneddon the attitudes and experiences of student-tutors to peer tutoring in higher education physics journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 13 having participated in the tutorials, student-tutors reported that they had achieved their goals. they felt their skills and self-knowledge had improved which is again consistent with the findings of others (see e.g. nisbet et al., 2014). more specifically, they acknowledged that their confidence in their abilities had improved (galbraith and winterbottom, 2011). they also reported to find the work satisfying (see also rubin and hebert, 1998) and felt that the tutorials had helped them feel more a part of the school. overall then, from the student-tutors’ perspective, the peer to peer tutorial scheme appears to have met its objectives. against the positives, though, the student-tutors did feel that more support for them would have helped improve the tutorial scheme, and in turn would provide more opportunities for them to help the students. in light of this, formal training was introduced for all tutors. interestingly, berghmans et al. (2013) and nisbet et al. (2014) have also recommended that formal training would improve the effectiveness of peer-tutoring schemes. in the present context, the training is in the form of a creditcarrying elective module that forms part of the degree programme, with students no longer receiving payment for their efforts. more tutorials were also scheduled and where possible more rooms were provided to enable smaller group sizes to work with the tutors. this evaluation has confirmed that the peer to peer tutorials are an effective component of the undergraduate teaching at the school of physics and astronomy. even on a relatively small scale, it would seem that such schemes provide an environment in which students can develop their skills, both academic and transferrable. this is in line with the published literature and shows that such a scheme also works well in a physics environment acknowledgements the author would like to thank dr jane mackenzie of the learning and teaching centre at the university of glasgow. without her suggestions and support it would not have been possible to complete this work. sneddon the attitudes and experiences of student-tutors to peer tutoring in higher education physics journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 14 references annis, l.f. (1983) ‘the processes and effects of peer tutoring’, human learning, 2(1), pp. 39-47. benware, c.a. and deci, e.l. (1984) ‘quality of learning with an active versus passive motivational set’, american education research journal, 21(4), pp. 755-765. berghmans, i., neckebroeck, f., dochy, f. and struyven, k. (2013) ‘a typology of approaches to peer tutoring. unraveling peer tutors’ behavioural strategies’, european journal of psychology education, 28(3), pp. 703-723. boud, d., cohen, r. and sampson, j. (2001) peer learning in higher education. london: kogan page limited. carroll, m. (1996) ‘peer tutoring: can medical students teach biochemistry?’, biomedical education, 24(1), pp. 13-15. collings, r., swanson, v. and watkins, r. (2014) ‘the impact of peer mentoring on levels of student wellbeing, integration and retention: a controlled comparative evaluation of residential students in uk higher education’, the international journal of higher education research, 68(6), pp. 927-942. collings, r., swanson, v. and watkins, r. (2015) ‘peer mentoring during the transition to university: assessing the usage of a formal scheme within the uk’, studies in higher education, 3 [online]. available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2015.1007939 (accessed: 30 november 2015). colvin, j.w. (2007) ‘peer tutoring and social dynamics in higher education’, mentoring & tutoring, 15(2), pp. 165-181. cousin, g. (2005) ‘case study research’, journal of geography in higher education, 29(3), pp. 421-427. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2015.1007939 sneddon the attitudes and experiences of student-tutors to peer tutoring in higher education physics journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 15 crisp, g. (2010) ‘the impact of peer mentoring on success of community college students’, the review of higher education, 34(1), pp. 39-60. galbraith, j. and winterbottom, m. (2011) ‘peer-tutoring: what’s in it for the tutor?’, educational studies, 37(3), pp. 321-332. hatton, n. and smith, d. (1995) ‘reflecting in teacher education: towards definition and implementation’, teaching and teacher education, 11(1), pp. 33-49. jacobi, m. (1991) ‘mentoring and undergraduate academic success: a literature review’, review of educational research, 61(4), pp. 505-532. likert, r. (1932) ‘a technique for the measurement of attitudes’, archives of psychology, 140, pp. 5-53. moust, j.h.c. and schmidt, h.g. (1994) ‘facilitating small-group learning: a comparison of student and staff tutors’ behaviour’, instructional science, 22(4), pp. 287-301. nisbet, j.t., haw, m.d. and fletcher, a.j. (2014) ‘the role of tutors in peer led teaching’, education for chemical engineers, 9(1), pp. 15-19. otero, v., pollock, s. and finkelstein, n. (2010) ‘a physics department’s role in preparing physics teachers: the colorado learning assistant model’, american journal of physics, 78(11), pp. 1218-1224. rubin, l. and hebert, c. (1998) ‘model for active learning’, college teaching, 46(1), pp. 26-30. thomas, d.r. (2006) ‘a general inductive approach for analyzing qualitative evaluation data’, american journal of evaluation, 27(2), pp. 237-246. topping, k. (1996) ‘the effectiveness of peer tutoring in further and higher education: a typology and review of the literature’, higher education, 32(3), pp. 321-45. sneddon the attitudes and experiences of student-tutors to peer tutoring in higher education physics journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 16 topping, k. (2015) ‘peer tutoring: old method, new developments’, journal for the study of education and development, 38(1), pp.1-29. watters, j.l. and ginns, i.s. (1997) peer assisted learning: impact on self-efficacy and achievement. paper presented at annual meeting of the american educational research association, 2-28 march, chicago, il. available at: http://eric.ed.gov/ericwebportal/recorddetail?accno=ed409324 (accessed: 22 november 2015). author details peter sneddon is a senior university teacher in the school of physics and astronomy at the university of glasgow. he teaches physics, and physics education, courses to students at all levels of higher education. his scholarship interests cover areas including laboratory learning, peer learning, skills development, and staff-student co-development of teaching and learning resources. http://eric.ed.gov/ericwebportal/recorddetail?accno=ed409324 the attitudes and experiences of student-tutors to peer tutoring in higher education physics abstract introduction defining ‘peer tutoring’ the advantages of peer tutoring for the tutors and students ‘peer to peer’ tutorials methods survey 1 survey 2 survey 3 results and discussion (a) rationale for acting as a student-tutor (b) student-tutors’ reflections on the tutorial experience (c) areas for improvement in the peer to peer tutorial scheme conclusions acknowledgements references author details evaluating a new epdp tool and its relationship with personal tutoring journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special edition: researching pdp practice, november 2010 evaluating a new e-pdp tool and its relationship with personal tutoring jane rowe university of exeter, uk abstract the university of exeter has used electronic tools to support the pdp process for students since well before the 2005 implementation of progress files. however, in 2007 high priority was given to the launch of a new e-pdp system to all staff and students through the long-established mechanism of the university’s personal tutor system. this paper explores, in the context of one academic school, the attempted integration between face-to-face ‘developmental conversations’ between tutors and tutees, and online recording of experiences and action plans by students. whilst a fundamental change in the role of the personal tutor appears to have been accepted, the extent to which electronic tools are seen as an important part of the process is shown to be very much a live issue, centred on perceptions about ownership and responsibility. the paper concludes that staff support for, and positive engagement among students with the principles of personal development planning (pdp) do not necessarily translate into motivation to use online resources. moreover, the findings of our project seem to confirm richardson and ward’s (2005) observation that the terms ‘e-portfolio’ or ‘e-pdp’, ‘pdp’ and ‘progress files’ are often used interchangeably and that implementation of online tools, particularly in personal tutor-led pdp programmes, must be managed carefully to avoid confusion between process and output. key words: rowe evaluating a new e-pdp tool and its relationship with personal tutoring institutional context the university of exeter is a research-intensive, 1994-group institution, spread across three campuses: two in the city of exeter and one just over 100 miles away in cornwall. exeter has almost doubled in size over the past ten years with 17,210 ftes registered in 2009. at the time of writing, nine academic schools were in the process of re-structuring to become five large, cross-disciplinary colleges. the institution is highly focussed on becoming a ‘top 100’ university on the global stage by 2015. within the past five years there have been systematic reviews of schools’ assessment and feedback strategies, employability and personal tutoring. it is therefore against a backdrop of rapid change that this project came into existence. pdp and the link with personal tutoring by 2005, the year that saw the mandatory introduction of progress files, transcripts were already being recorded electronically at exeter. the university had also made significant steps towards articulation of pdp at an institutional level and most departments had responded in some way to the national requirement. led by the university’s learning and teaching support services (now education enhancement), a ‘framework for the management of skills’ and a number of other pdp-related resources had been designed to aid students’ reflection on their skills development (dunne, 2001), and had been disseminated across schools. at the same time, however, a university-wide skills mapping project attempted to identify pdp-related activities already being undertaken within the curriculum and it was found that, whilst in some programmes transferable skill development opportunities and pdp activities were already well embedded, in others opportunities for students to reflect on their learning were more limited. in these cases, the pdp process was implicit rather than clearly communicated to students and to staff, and by 2002 the focus shifted towards the need for a university-wide mechanism to conduct student self-appraisal. it was at this point that, as a means of encouraging students to review learning across their whole programme, and in order to make the pdp experience more explicit, the personal tutor system became implicated as the primary vehicle to encourage students to reflect not only on their academic progress but also, on a more holistic level, on their broader and longer-term aims. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 2 rowe evaluating a new e-pdp tool and its relationship with personal tutoring exeter had been one of the first universities to implement an electronic pdp system, and some schools were already beginning to trial it with students as a means of helping them prepare for meetings with their tutor. as strivens (2006) has pointed out, the personal tutoring model of pdp delivery is appealing to a research-driven university; however, ‘not all academics have the skills and aptitude for the tutoring role’ and the tendency towards inconsistency can undermine the perceived value of processes which, as fry et al. (2002) point out, already rest on concepts that are ‘ill-defined’, ‘under researched’ and dependent on a wide set of variables. some tutors, whilst enjoying the personal contact with students, felt – and in some cases continue to feel – that the time involved in tutoring was and is not properly accounted for in workload models, and as a consequence ignored the broader personal development dimension of their role, restricting the level of their support to pastoral care and/or academic mentoring. furthermore, some staff felt politically and ethically uncomfortable with what they perceived to be a change in the focus of the relationship with their tutees, signifying a move away from the traditional concept of academic guidance towards a relationship ‘nested within the employability framework’ (clegg and bradley, 2006). it is hardly surprising that at exeter, in common with many other institutions, the notion of pdp as a process by which students’ personal and academic skills might be ‘applied’ and somehow made relevant to the professionalised workplace (an external dimension of which tutors often have limited experience themselves) continues to be a contentious one in some departments. the ‘recording’ element of progress files: background to the exeter experience the university of exeter was an early adopter of technology to support the progress file agenda. in as far back as 1999, a web-based profiling system, ‘pesca’ (prince, 2001), had been introduced in a number of academic departments. not long afterwards a replacement system was launched, this time one that was specifically designed to link the student with their personal tutor. by 2005, pdp, as the system itself was known, was being used to some extent across all but one of the university’s schools, but negative feedback about the system, and difficulties in supporting it centrally, made the institution wary of developing it further. in 2005 it was decided to design yet another system, this time one that was built on the technical infrastructure of the university’s student record system journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 3 rowe evaluating a new e-pdp tool and its relationship with personal tutoring (srs). given the long-established link between pdp and the nature of the support offered by personal tutors, it was felt important to provide an automatic link between a student’s pdp and their personal tutor, and to build a system ‘on top’ of the university’s srs in order to facilitate that link. the expectation was also that, by using srs, students would be building a resource that could link automatically to their transcript, and – potentially – to an ongoing record of their marks from assessments. the intention was to complement face-to-face tutor reviews by encouraging students to prepare their ‘epdp’ in advance. the development of these systems to sit alongside the provision of face-to-face personal tutor support, and the accepted practice of using the pdp acronym to ‘name’ these systems, had however led to a historic conflation of ideas about process and output. whilst the majority of academic schools had, by the mid 2000s, made good progress in embedding aspects of personal development, skills and employability in the curriculum, the term pdp had largely become associated with the electronic system itself. in many cases this had become a hindrance rather than an enabling factor in terms of encouraging the embedding of the resource itself in programmes and modules. the starting place for our ntfs project was therefore an interesting one. whilst there was a need to evaluate usage of the new pdp tool (described in more detail in the following section), the project team also felt it necessary to deconstruct the complex assumptions around what students and staff interpreted as pdp and, in a sense, re-orient the institution’s thinking around the pdp conundrum. our project therefore sought to situate student and staff perceptions about the pdp (the process) in the broader framework of the personal tutor system. our aim was to ascertain the perceived benefits but also the potential pitfalls and limitations of using an electronic resource to support the ongoing development of dialogue between tutors and tutees. exeter’s e-pdp tool whilst still ‘branded’ with the pdp acronym, ‘e-pdp’ was radically different from the tool that had been used before. in response to student and staff feedback on the old system, it was decided to move away from asking students to reflect on a generic set of standard focussed learner questions about their progress. staff had long complained that the old pdp system was not flexible or subject-specific enough. moreover, students’ responses to the formal question set of the previous system were often formulaic and lacked depth. it journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 4 rowe evaluating a new e-pdp tool and its relationship with personal tutoring was hoped that e-pdp would give students much greater flexibility in articulating the experiences that were meaningful to them, whilst encouraging them to keep regular track of their learning beyond the minimum requirement for personal tutor meetings. through the more ‘free form’ design of the new system, it was hoped that students would conceptualise their learning experiences in more personal and creative ways, and be encouraged to see e-pdp as less of a once or twice a year form-filling exercise and more of a process that was designed to be ongoing – similar to a learning log or journal created and developed by themselves, albeit with the encouragement of their personal tutor. at the time the system was designed, there was already talk of the higher education achievement record (hear) being implemented, although the format of it was still unclear. by developing the new e-pdp system as an additional element of the university’s student record system, it was envisaged that e-pdp might be used with the student’s consent to provide evidence of active reflection and self-awareness, attributes that are well known to be important in graduate level employment, and that might therefore help to enrich a student’s hear on presentation to a potential employer. in addition to students’ ability to conceptualise for themselves what they wished to record, the new e-pdp system allowed students full editing functions to review or add to their records at any time. in addition a skills-picking option would prompt them to cite the evidence for having gained a skill, just as they would have to in the context of an interview with a potential employer. additional templates provided a structure, guidance and exemplars for smart action plans, and also for personal statements, which some schools had expressed interest in asking their students to complete at the end of each academic year. other features worthy of note were that students could flag the entries they wished to remain private, and also those they wished to include in a semi-formatted cv, which could be provided as a print option and/or copied and pasted into a word document for editing and polishing. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 5 rowe evaluating a new e-pdp tool and its relationship with personal tutoring figure 1. example of a student’s e-pdp home page. the design phase completed, the system was finally launched in the academic year 200708 and all but one academic school agreed to use it with their students. a range of workshops were offered to personal tutors and also to learning support staff and administrators who it was anticipated were also likely to be giving additional support to students and staff during the transition from the old e-pdp system to the next. sessions for students were also offered and some schools took advantage of these. in retrospect, it is clear that the implementation alone was an ambitious project. given that at exeter almost all academic staff have personal tutoring responsibilities, and that the personal tutor system was regarded as the principle vehicle for pdp across the university, the rollout was aimed at almost the entire academic population of the university – both students and staff. user guides were produced, and the university’s pdp web pages were overhauled. all of this was complicated by the fact that for a time two systems continued to be supported centrally whilst the old e-pdp system was phased out. despite the new system’s comparative sophistication compared to the previous one, it is easy to understand with the benefit of hindsight why the launch of yet another online progress file tool was far from plain sailing! it soon became clear that for many students and academic staff, the result of strong ‘systems-based’ development was that the term pdp had come to signify the electronic repository itself rather than the process of reflection. to many academic staff it appeared that the institution was giving more journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 6 rowe evaluating a new e-pdp tool and its relationship with personal tutoring importance to the record-creation element of the progress file agenda than the human, face-to-face dimension which students, and often staff, tended to regard as far more meaningful. others were still profoundly uncomfortable with the role of the personal tutor as anything more than a port of call for pastoral issues. the project this inter-connected bundle of tutor concerns around the progress file agenda, combined with a timely request to evaluate a new personal development tutorial scheme (pdt) in the school of engineering, computing and maths (secam), provided an opportunity to evaluate perceptions about the use of the new electronic pdp system. it also allowed investigation into possible linkages between the face-to-face practice of tutors talking with students about their development and the extent to which personal tutors felt comfortable with, what was for many of them, a rather different perception of the role than they had previously held. in 2008-09, secam overhauled its personal tutor system. for many years, almost every member of secam’s academic staff had held responsibility for anything from 10 to 30 personal tutees. however, one-to-one personal tutor meetings had been arranged on a relatively informal ‘as needed’ basis, and when they did take place (largely at the behest of the student rather than being proactively offered by staff) they were generally confined to academic content or pastoral matters. at the same time, a university-wide review of personal tutoring (2006-07) recommended further clarification of the developmental as well as pastoral role of personal tutors. the school decided to make changes accordingly, raising it to the top of its enhancement agenda for that year. education enhancement provided a series of staff development sessions; a school-specific personal tutor manual was produced; a structured plan of pdt meetings was scheduled to take place throughout a student’s degree programme, each with a clear purpose and agenda and initiated by the tutor; and tutorial meetings were formally recorded with the school office . the student’s responsibility was to prepare for these meetings using the e-pdp and to come to the meeting prepared to discuss it with their tutor. the strategic drive behind the pdt scheme was to clarify the scope and importance of pdp meetings as an important element of contact time, and to instigate some degree of journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 7 rowe evaluating a new e-pdp tool and its relationship with personal tutoring consistency in what students could expect from their personal tutor. a year later, after secam merged with physics and became the college of engineering, maths and physics (cemps), it was decided that there should be a thorough evaluation of the pdt scheme, whilst also comparing different tutoring practices with those of physics. in response to this re-structure, the focus of the project shifted from not only an evaluation of the e-pdp tool, but also its relationship to the student and staff experience of pdp in the different subject areas. methodology the link between e-pdp and the university’s student record system (srs) ensures that extracting quantitative data about students’ use of the system is relatively straightforward. our project was therefore able to draw on this to ascertain which functions of the e-pdp were used the most, how often students were on average using their e-pdps and generally how successful different schools within the college had been in encouraging students to prepare for their tutor meetings using the e-pdp resource. system-generated data has its limitations, however, so it was decided to also run an online survey and focus groups to provide a richer picture of the students’ experience of pdp. finally, a series of semi-structured interviews was arranged with personal tutors themselves, again to explore their perceptions of pdp, of their subsidiary role as pdp advisers and the effectiveness – or not, as they saw it – of their discipline’s particular approach to pdp and personal tutoring in general. project findings it was clear from the outset of this project that although the constituent schools within the college all had long established personal tutor systems and had established minimum requirements expected of tutors (including pdp guidance), the students themselves had very different approaches to pdp; expectations of their tutor; and the role and usefulness of the e-pdp system. despite these differences, and according to the online survey data and focus group discussions, the stated aim of the e-pdp resource ‘to help students prepare for their pdp tutorials’ did not appear to have been achieved in any of the discipline groups. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 8 rowe evaluating a new e-pdp tool and its relationship with personal tutoring however, as is borne out by the emerging literature on e-portfolios from jisc and other sources, misconceptions abound concerning the perceived ‘solution’ of electronic resources to the implemention and embedding of pdp. engaging students in the processes of pdp, let alone non-credit bearing work to prepare for tutorials, was never going to be something that a system on its own could miraculously achieve overnight, or for that matter, ever! also, it did not help that engineering and maths had no previous culture of using e-pdp or e-portfolio tools. in september 2007, when registrations on the old e-pdp system closed down after three years, only 10% of maths undergraduates had ever logged on to the system. in engineering, there had been a higher uptake of 32% – but this was largely the result of a specific initiative led by a pdp champion within the department who has since left the university. by comparison, when usage data from the new e-pdp system was extracted in a similar three-year period up to february 2010, there had been significantly higher uptake. arguably, any increase in use of the new system might have been due to a developing awareness of pdp and related resources over the total six year period since provision of an online tool, rather than the tool necessarily being any better designed or its purpose more effectively communicated by tutors. it is clearly difficult to establish causality other than through an extensive longitudinal study. emps 161 156 112 1 4 ug 1st yr 2nd yr 3rd yr pgt pgr 46.74 % students engaged with epdp (incl added content) figure 2. engagement of engineering and maths students with e-pdp. the results in figure 2 show that in feb 2010 a total of 46.7% of engineering and maths students had engaged with the e-pdp system, having not only logged on to the system but also added their own content. usage was slightly higher in years 1 and 2, which, given journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 9 rowe evaluating a new e-pdp tool and its relationship with personal tutoring that the third years would have had much longer to discover the resource without any prompting from personal tutors or others, indicates that the school’s pdt scheme had indeed helped to raise awareness of the resource among students exposed to this higher level of tutoring. however, whilst this represents a significant improvement on the level of engagement with the old system, it was clear from the online survey data that the quantitative data alone needed to be interrogated in more detail through interviews and focus groups with students. despite the apparently positive statistics, the majority of engineering and maths students who responded to the project’s online survey said they had never used the e-pdp. those who had used the e-pdp said they had only used it ‘when asked to do so’. when viewed as an activity that does not carry academic credit this is not surprising, but the transcripts from focus groups help to flesh out the ways in which students are instrumental about pdp in the context of a personal tutorial system. the engineering students, for example, whilst recognising the long term value they would gain from keeping ongoing records of their experiences, were forthright about the strategic way in which they had to manage their workload and cited their experience of eight-hour days in the lab: you’re just not going to get people to write for half a page every week on what they’ve been doing…you’ve got to have your carrot or your stick. one of the two! (engineering student) these same students were positive, however, about the notion of including pdp as a credit-bearing element in their degree programme, pointing out that whilst pdp-related activities were embedded in some engineering modules, they were somewhat constrained and did not necessarily enable them to reflect on their overall development at a deeper, more personal and holistic level: there’s professional studies and skills development 1 and 2. (engineering student) journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 10 rowe evaluating a new e-pdp tool and its relationship with personal tutoring yes, and we already use the weekly log thing with our tutors. but that’s just [in relation to] the particular project we’re working on and unrelated to your entire university career, and obviously those things are then not thought of again. (engineering student) whilst the students mentioned a range of skill development and cpd opportunities they were required to undertake as part of their academic programme (many of which were demanded by engineering professional bodies as a requirement for professional recognition), they clearly perceived a lack of connection between these more embedded (and often assessed) pdp activities, such as compilation of a log book, and the more holistic discussions the school had hoped to engage them in through pdp tutorials. they spoke of the need to: bring it all together… mix it all together. (engineering student) it’s like, assuming you’re doing this thing, you’re keeping the log book and doing the cpd throughout the entire degree and it’s accredited every year, then taking it to your [personal] tutor and the tutor reading it and advising based on the log book would work very easily. (engineering student) but whilst these students obviously recognised the value of pdp as a meaningful and useful activity in preparing them for employment, and wanted to see more attention paid to it at an earlier point in their academic career, they continued to see the most useful vehicle for reflection as the log book adopted by their module leaders, a familiar and assessed component of their degree programme: perhaps start it off in year 1, not so much the e-pdp but keeping the log book. (engineering student) these students clearly advocated the use of tools that were associated with atlay’s (2009) integrated model of pdp already familiar to them through their academic experiences – tools used that, for them, confirmed their academic and professional identity as engineers. the e-pdp vehicle for them was an irrelevance. that said, they strongly perceived the need for them to record their broader university experiences in some way, as well as the particular work required in their project-based modules, and acknowledged the need for journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 11 rowe evaluating a new e-pdp tool and its relationship with personal tutoring this to be an assessed component of their programme, marked by someone who had the overview of their development: at the moment log books are handed in to a single lecturer at the end of the year who marks them all. so maybe it should be an ongoing thing for the personal tutors. (third year engineering student) interviews with staff in both engineering and maths likewise suggested that whilst they did encourage students to engage with e-pdp, in doing so they were more than anything else ‘observing protocols’. they often commented that students were using other means of recording their development, mainly through writing their own cvs and seeking guidance on those from the tutor. far from the lack of engagement with e-pdp and lack of attention to the personal development of the students, it was very clear from these interviews that staff acknowledged the importance of the developmental relationship between tutors and tutees, but that the mechanisms through which this dialogue occurred, and the tangible outputs of the process, merely took a different form. as with the students, staff also often regarded the e-pdp as somewhat of an irrelevance. an engineering tutor commented, for example, that reading a student’s e-pdp either before or during a tutorial could even get in the way of more meaningful discussions with students: you will often find that the written information is not the same, less full or less honest, than what they would tell you in person. (engineering tutor) the data provided by physics students through the online survey presented a different but not entirely comparable view. in physics, pdp tutorials were a recognisably different experience for students from their academic tutorials, and there was a long history of them being rigorously supported and monitored by senior management in the school. personal tutors meet with their tutees on a weekly basis for academic tutorials in small groups, but have also for many years been encouraged to be proactive in setting dates for pdp tutorials and in following up incidences of non-attendance. pdp tutorials are intrinsically seen as part of the academic culture of the school and regarded as an important element of contact time. the pdp tutorials are also a mechanism to ensure student engagement with the employability agenda from early on in the student’s programme. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 12 rowe evaluating a new e-pdp tool and its relationship with personal tutoring such was the sense of ownership that physics had developed their own pdp record system. in 2009 this school also adopted use of the new e-pdp and their students’ engagement with it was cited by their director of education as being ‘pretty much 100%’. the online survey, however, combined with the results of the focus groups and staff interviews, again presented a more complex picture. whilst students from physics appeared to be by far the biggest users of the e-pdp system, all of the groups surveyed rated it as the least important element of the pdp process. use of epdp by main subject 0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 engineering maths physics subject r es po ns e haven't used epdp only when asked less than once every term once every term figure 3. use of e-pdp by main subject. perceived importance of epdp by main subject 0 5 10 15 20 25 engineering maths physics subject r es po ns e unimportant fairly unimportant neither important nor unimportant fairly important very important figure 4. perceived importance of e-pdp. it appeared that despite the long history of using an e-pdp tool within the physics department, the students did not appear to regard it as a useful learning aid. when asked journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 13 rowe evaluating a new e-pdp tool and its relationship with personal tutoring a number of more general questions about the usefulness of the relationship with their personal tutor, however, the responses were consistently positive (figure 5): my personal tutor encourages me to reflect on my academic, personal and career development 0 2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16 18 d is ag re e p ar tl y d is ag re e n o t su re p ar tl y ag re e a g re e d is ag re e p ar tl y d is ag re e n o t su re p ar tl y ag re e a g re e d is ag re e p ar tl y d is ag re e n o t su re p ar tl y ag re e a g re e engine e ring m aths physics figure 5. usefulness of relationship with personal tutor. when this was investigated in greater depth in the student focus group for physics, a somewhat cynical view about the purpose of the system was revealed: it’s just a bit of bureaucratic nonsense really, isn’t it? it’s some way of someone being able to tick a box somewhere, so they can say ‘yeah, tutors made a connection with their tutees’. it’s not a good way of trying to analyse how we’re getting along on a personal level with our development. (third year physics student) however, like the engineering students, the physics students were also keen to discuss ways in which face-to-face and online support for pdp could be improved. inevitably, key to this was the way in which students were being motivated to engage with the process and indeed the resources associated with it: make it so that it’s something that the student would do for their own sake, not because they have to. (physics student) because there is an impression from the staff that it is this mechanistic format…that’s immediately bestowed on all the students. (physics student) journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 14 rowe evaluating a new e-pdp tool and its relationship with personal tutoring they should make it seem more important to do it…there’s a common perception that this is something that just has to be done and then brushed under the carpet. (physics student) physics staff repeatedly commented on the ‘lack of structure’ provided by e-pdp. they argued that whilst they could see the rationale for enabling students to choose themselves the experiences they wished to record and reflect on, this ‘free form’ approach did not help students who found reflective practice difficult: physics students do not reflect, that’s not what we do. i’m sure that’s true of other science students as well. you need to ask specific questions on that form, and then i guess a third to a half of students take it seriously…the others don’t. generally speaking, most students are fairly apathetic about [pdp], but the system itself doesn’t help. i think it’s very…it’s way too touchy-feely! (physics tutor) whilst the focus group for physics in particular tended to dwell on the aspects of pdp and e-pdp that were not working effectively, it was clear from both these and the survey that, from the students’ perspective, it was the nature of the personal relationship with individual tutors that was key to the value they ascribed to the process. the complementary model of academic tutoring in physics, running alongside pdp tutorials, was certainly valued by students and there was a much clearer perception among students that their tutor has a developmental, as opposed to purely pastoral, role. however, it also seemed to be the case that where such roles were operating most successfully, it was more difficult to convince students of the merits of using the e-pdp resource – the process element of pdp aspect of pdp was clearly regarded as much more valuable and important than the output. the way in which the e-pdp was ‘sold’ to the students, i.e. as a strictly enforced, ‘output driven’ exercise with no credit attached to it, had therefore done little in terms of persuading them of the merits of using such a system. it might be construed that the richer the human relationships, the less meaningful will be the tools developed to support them. as wenger (1998) neatly puts it, ‘the tool can ossify activity around its inertness’. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 15 rowe evaluating a new e-pdp tool and its relationship with personal tutoring conclusion whilst the debate continues as to whether the university’s various e-pdp tools have been fit for purpose, our starting point has always been that simple usage statistics, based on the outputs are not in themselves adequate measures of engagement with the process that is pdp. indeed, over-emphasis by institutions on the requirement for tangible recordkeeping element of the progress files, and on the importance of using technology to support the pdp process, can result in the notion that somehow pdp is deliverable through a simple electronic system of input/output, rather than through development of a rich and often highly negotiated relationship between tutor and tutee. among maths, engineering and physical science students at least, our research seems to bear out that whilst they valued the pdp support provided by tutors, they do not always see written reflection as a necessary or useful accompaniment to the process. succinct, condensed formats such as cvs are recognised as more useful to their thinking process than more narrative, text-based accounts of the various experiences they’ve been exposed to. would it be the same in english or psychology? our data reveals that even where champions act as strong advocates for a centrally-provided system, and make a point of paying attention to students’ pdps before and during face-to-face tutorials, students will not necessarily perceive a benefit to using them. indeed, among students and staff, the provision of a one size fits all, technology-based solution is often regarded as counterintuitive to the tutoring process, limiting rather than supporting open, developmental conversations between tutors and students, and almost inevitably failing to support the personal dimension of pdp. in recent months, whilst the personal tutor system continues to be the insurance policy for ensuring engagement with pdp at all levels of the curriculum, there has been a significant move towards greater tailoring and embedding of pdp within modules – particularly in the first and final years. the need for further development of e-resources to support pdp, including the provision of fully-fledged e-portfolios, continues to be a live issue but at the time of writing at least one school was developing its own specially tailored materials and systems in the hope that these will secure greater engagement from students and staff. it journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 16 rowe evaluating a new e-pdp tool and its relationship with personal tutoring seems likely that over time others will follow, and in as much as ownership is essential for any successful adoption of pdp, such initiatives are undoubtedly being encouraged and supported. the extent to which locally-owned systems are seen by staff and students as relevant and useful, compared to previously used ones provided and maintained by the centre remains a question to be explored. acknowledgement this paper is an outcome of the national action research network on researching and evaluating personal development planning and e-portfolio practice project (2007-2010). the project was led by the university of bolton in association with the university of worcester and centre for recording achievement, and in national collaboration with the university of bedfordshire, bournemouth university and university of bradford. the project was funded by the higher education academy, national teaching fellowship project strand. more details about the project can be found at: http://www.recordingachievement.org/research/narn-tree.html. references atlay, m. (2009) ‘integrating pdp practice in the curriculum’, in yorke, m. (ed.) personal development planning and employability. revised edn. york: higher education academy. available at: http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/assets/york/documents/ourwork/employability/pdp_a nd_employability_jan_2009.pdf (accessed: 27 august 2010). clegg, s. and bradley, s. (2006) ‘models of personal development planning: practice and processes’, british educational research journal, 32 (1), pp. 57-76. dunne, e. (2001) ‘tracing the links, forging the patterns, or creating something from nothing: an account of policy, strategy, subject-led initiatives and research that have paved the way for pdp as a meaningful concept in the university of exeter’, personal development planning: institutional case studies. centre for recording achievement/learning and teaching support network generic centre. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 17 http://www.recordingachievement.org/research/narn-tree.html http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/assets/york/documents/ourwork/employability/pdp_and_employability_jan_2009.pdf http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/assets/york/documents/ourwork/employability/pdp_and_employability_jan_2009.pdf rowe evaluating a new e-pdp tool and its relationship with personal tutoring fry, h., davenport, e., woodman, t. and pee, b. (2002) ‘developing progress files: a case study’, teaching in higher education, 7(1), pp. 97-111. joint information systems committee (2009), eportfolios infokit. (accessed: 30 november 2010) prince, s.j. (2001) pesca: introducing personal development planning at exeter. available at: http://www.ukcle.ac.uk/resources/pdp/exeter.html (accessed: 7 july 2010). richardson, h.c. and ward, r. (2005) developing and implementing a methodology for reviewing e-portfolio products. the centre for recording achievement. available at: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/uploaded_documents/epfr.doc (accessed: 5 september 2005). strivens, j. (2006) transforming personal tutors into personal development tutors at the university of liverpool. york: hea. available at: http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/assets/york/documents/ourwork/tla/personal_tutoring/ web0151_ecasebook_transforming_personal_tutors_into_personal_development_t utors.pdf (accessed: 27 august 2010). wenger, e. (1998) communities of practice: learning, meaning and identity. cambridge: cambridge university press. author details jane rowe is a learning and teaching adviser at the university of exeter. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 18 https://owa.exeter.ac.uk/owa/jlr204@isad.isadroot.ex.ac.uk/redir.aspx?c=f7012416bea349cd8b5e9e842409d8e6&url=http%3a%2f%2fwww.ukcle.ac.uk%2fresources%2fpdp%2fexeter.html https://owa.exeter.ac.uk/owa/jlr204@isad.isadroot.ex.ac.uk/redir.aspx?c=f7012416bea349cd8b5e9e842409d8e6&url=http%3a%2f%2fwww.jisc.ac.uk%2fuploaded_documents%2fepfr.doc http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/assets/york/documents/ourwork/tla/personal_tutoring/web0151_ecasebook_transforming_personal_tutors_into_personal_development_tutors.pdf http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/assets/york/documents/ourwork/tla/personal_tutoring/web0151_ecasebook_transforming_personal_tutors_into_personal_development_tutors.pdf http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/assets/york/documents/ourwork/tla/personal_tutoring/web0151_ecasebook_transforming_personal_tutors_into_personal_development_tutors.pdf evaluating a new e-pdp tool and its relationship with personal tutoring abstract institutional context pdp and the link with personal tutoring the ‘recording’ element of progress files: background to the exeter experience exeter’s e-pdp tool the project methodology project findings conclusion acknowledgement references author details journal of learning development in higher education journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 1: february 2009 significant personal disclosure: exploring the support and development needs of he tutors engaged in the emotion work associated with supporting students jan huyton university of wales institute, cardiff, uk abstract this paper explores emotion work taking place in the private and personalised space of supportive encounters between individual students and tutors. an emotional labour framework is used to consider the effects on tutors of work intensification and performance requirements in learning relationships with students. the paper goes on to consider professional role boundaries and staff development, training and support. the paper concludes that institutions need to recognise the existence of emotion work as a pedagogy in the context of student support or learning development. failure to do so will have detrimental effects on tutors and the service they provide to students. keywords: emotion work; staff development; therapeutic turn introduction ‘emotion work’ is most likely understood by colleagues in the learning development community as working with students on recognising and managing their emotions in order to facilitate transformative learning. indeed whilst many emotional states exist outside the terms of pedagogic engagement, their impact on a student’s ability to learn can be significant (brockbank and mcgill, 2006; beard et al, 2007). ‘emotion work’ has been defined elsewhere as ‘work that transforms the emotional state of others’, thereby having a role in the development of areas such as commitment, enthusiasm and well-being (centre for research into emotion work [on-line]). hochschild (2003: 7) considers ‘emotion work’ to be largely synonymous with huyton significant personal disclosure ‘emotional labor’ [sic]: the latter occurring in a waged workplace context in which it has ‘exchange value’; the former occurring in private space wherein it has ‘use value’. most definitions of ‘emotion work’ include the concept of management of emotions, usually in face-to-face individual encounters. ‘emotional labour’ carries additional connotations that can be located in a critical theoretical framework, and problematises the commercialisation of human feeling and the exploitation of human emotion in a range of workplace contexts. a semantic debate would be helpful here, as any definition of terms is likely to be contestable, but that would be beyond the scope of this paper. mortiboys (2002: 28) comments that ‘significant personal disclosure in public on the part of students is rarely appropriate in courses in higher education’. my exploration in this paper concentrates on emotion work taking place in the private and personalised space of supportive encounters between individual students and tutors. the role of the tutor in this context can be to help students ‘develop a better understanding of the energies and challenges involved in coming to terms with studying’ (beard et al, 2007: 250). thus the student support interactions referred to in this paper are viewed as constituent features of learning development. i will focus specifically on the extent to which the management of emotions can shift from a positive force for enriching institutions and the lives of individuals (mortiboys, 2002) into emotional labour or unsupported emotion work which can have damaging effects on the well-being of practitioners and the ethos and quality of student support. i will refer to literature that considers the nature of emotion work or emotional labour in the context of supporting learners in he, and make brief reference to literature on counselling supervision. i will also draw on early data (the first 66 respondents to an electronic survey distributed to a range of he lecturers and tutors in the uk) from my ongoing research project on the experiences of lecturers engaged in student support, and feedback from participants at an aldinhe conference workshop where an earlier version of this paper was presented. the paper is divided into two sections. the first section uses emotional labour as a framework for analysis and considers the effects on tutors of work intensification and performance requirements in learning relationships with students. the second journal of learning development in higher education, issue 1: february 2009 2 huyton significant personal disclosure section is developed around professional role boundaries and staff development, training and support. the paper concludes that institutions need to recognise the existence of emotion work as a valid strand of pedagogical practice in the context of student support or learning development. failure to do so will have detrimental effects on tutors and the service they provide to students. account will be taken of recent debates prompted by ecclestone (2004); furedi (2004); ecclestone et al (2005); and ecclestone and hayes (2009) who have poured scorn on what they believe to be a therapeutic turn in education. ecclestone et al (2005) and ecclestone and hayes (2008) deride the idea of emotional well-being in learning and teaching, claiming it works with the assumption that students are diminished subjects, vulnerable and damaged by everyday experiences and unable to exercise agency and resilience. mortiboys has entered the debate by defending his position on teaching with emotional intelligence, explaining that the use of emotional intelligence should not be equated with a generalised assumption of vulnerability (newman, 2008). in a similar vein i take issue with ecclestone et al (2005) who caution against expressions of concern for the emotional well-being of tutors. the effects on tutors of work intensification and performance requirements in learning relationships with students it has been suggested that tutors tend to be viewed by students as role models, which places on them a responsibility to be enthusiastic, confident and happy people (lawrence, 2000). anecdotally, it seems likely that most tutors can recall having ‘offdays’, times of emotional depletion, tiredness, distress or anger. at such times professional display rules can be employed in order to give a good service to students. thus it is likely that practitioners will, on occasions, need to marshal the skills to communicate enthusiasm and confidence, when perhaps these are not genuinely felt. this could be regarded as managing one’s emotional display in order to influence others, and hints at the kind of emotional performance requirement or professional display rules that characterise hochschild’s definition of emotional labour. some participants at the aldinhe workshop suggested that if the result of an inauthentic but effective performance of enthusiasm and confidence is a positive journal of learning development in higher education, issue 1: february 2009 3 huyton significant personal disclosure outcome for the student and the tutor, then this should not necessarily be seen as problematic. i would agree that occasional recourse to potentially inauthentic performance of professional display rules could be viewed as a key factor in the consistent delivery of effective learning support. my concern relates to situations in the he workplace where inauthentic displays of enthusiasm, confidence or simply caring about the fate of students become the norm for tutors. hochschild (2003: 90) refers to ‘a principle of emotive dissonance’ whereby a separation of display and feeling is hard to sustain over a long period and can sometimes lead to estrangement from true feeling. a study of university lecturers (ogbonna and harris, 2004) found situations in which lecturers describe ‘faking it’ as a mechanism for coping with the emotional demands of the role: ‘i don’t think it’s feasible for us to care about every single student. ten years ago i knew their names and faces — today it’s a miracle if i can remember what degree they’re doing. pretending to remember their problems and faking concern is just a coping response.’ (lecturer, new university, aged 39). ‘it’s about image — creating a brand of “me”… i have no problem with faking concern about students if it gets me another increment [point].’ (lecturer, new university, aged 27) (ogbonna and harris, 2004: 1197). it seems that inauthentic performance had become normalised behaviour for a number of practitioners in the ogbonna and harris study. the causal factors are analysed in an emotional labour framework which places work intensification (resulting from the bureaucratisation and managerialisation of he) as the key causal factor. there is no suggestion that inauthenticity has become normalised as a deliberate student support technique, but the findings do suggest that general work intensification in a number of areas has left many lecturers feeling depleted to the extent that it becomes difficult to evoke a genuine caring response. ogbonna and harris set out to explore emotional labour in the context of work intensification. i am seeking more specifically to explore with tutors the nature and journal of learning development in higher education, issue 1: february 2009 4 huyton significant personal disclosure extent of emotion work in supportive encounters with individual students, and to identify associated implications for tutors and organisations. respondents to my electronic survey tended to be lecturers with considerable experience in emotion work and learning support. more than 77% had been in a student support role for 5 years or more, and 80% described their role as a combination of pastoral and study support. approximately 69% were able to recall particularly challenging student support encounters. these included dealing with student experiences of rape, domestic violence, bereavement, suicidal thoughts and a range of mental health scenarios. one respondent described such situations as: bigger and more significant events than my training had prepared me for. ecclestone et al (2005) comment from a more political perspective. they find there is pressure on tutors to intensify emotional labour to conform to enhanced expectations of a demonstration of care towards students. a focus on emotional well-being is, they suggest, a means of overcoming student disaffection from the curriculum and educational experience. this view concurs with crew [on-line] who define emotion work as a means of ensuring the ‘enthusiasm, commitment and compliance’ of ‘customers and clients’. a number of respondents to my electronic survey mentioned the role student support plays in delivering favourable retention and achievement rates for audit compliance. responses such as: it appears to be something you need to 'get on with' and there is an expectation that this will be carried out especially with pressures related to retention and achievement. in our institution we have a big widening participation push and … it seems an unwritten expectation that the support is given to ensure that retention and achievement is kept at what the institution thinks is a suitable level. indicate an institutional focus on retention and achievement as measures of the success of student support activity. this could be seen as having resonance with hochschild (2003) who found that a commercial organisation has expectations that its customer service staff will utilise emotional display rules in order to manage the journal of learning development in higher education, issue 1: february 2009 5 huyton significant personal disclosure feelings and behaviour of customers. it is perhaps evidence that managerialism and marketisation have been sufficiently powerful to displace notions of curriculum and pedagogy (walker, 2002: 43). many participants at the aldinhe workshop expressed the view that the intensification of workloads, combined with a lack of time, space and resources (for reflection on practice, debriefing, offloading or professional supervision), had resulted in some tutors feeling overwhelmed by the emotional content of student support work. some had managed to negotiate for themselves formal or informal support within the institution, but others had no support mechanisms in place. this is reflected in my survey responses; almost 70% reported having experienced occasions when they needed more support such as de-briefing or offloading after a difficult session with a student. respondents reported that they draw on support from colleagues (86%) and their own professional experience (70%). support from institutional resources was more limited (line manager, 38%; professional supervision, 21%). ogbonna and harris (2004) noted attempts by lecturers to retreat to their offices described as ‘havens’ or ‘refuges’ as a means of escaping from the emotional demands of the job, but the effectiveness of this technique was frequently undermined by interruptions. there appear to be consequences for the well-being of tutors engaged in emotional aspects of student support. certainly there are implications for higher education administration, leadership and staff development which relate to the way in which working environments encourage authenticity (kreber et al, 2007). ecclestone et al (2005) take issue with such expressions of concern about the emotional well-being of tutors. their objections are grounded on the risk that emotional ‘care’ will become more important than material support or radical professional change. my own early research findings indicate that it is not the nature of emotion work which some tutors find stressful and burdensome, but the volume of work and a lack of preparation for the role. this shifts the problem to an institutional rather than an individual level, and problematises excessive workloads and ineffectual staff development instead of pathologising students and tutors as excessively needy individuals. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 1: february 2009 6 huyton significant personal disclosure in the next section i will argue that institutions and practice communities have both a professional and an ethical duty to ensure tutors are appropriately supported in emotion work that is integral to developing supportive learning relationships with students. whilst i accept a concern that emotional care might displace more radical responses, i will argue from a more emancipatory perspective that as practitioners we can and should exercise individual and collective agency to achieve the fundamental professional and practice change required to ensure working conditions respond appropriately to the nature of contemporary learning relationships. professional role boundaries and staff development, training and support earwaker (1992) is frequently cited in scholarly work on the topic of supporting students. his work highlights the extent to which tutors may straddle ‘a most interesting divide’ (1992: vii) between student support and other academic roles. these observations remain pertinent despite the passage of more than fifteen years since they were made. whilst being clear that ‘tutors do not have to move into a counselling role in order to help their students’ (1992: 131), earwaker emphasises that learning support must encompass a form of pedagogy that recognizes and takes account of the effects of personal change on learners. earwaker’s proposal (1992: 134) is that we develop ‘a shared sense of purpose which binds together all our teaching, learning and helping into a coherent educational philosophy’. this resonates with rogers’ idea of unified learning (1980) which melds the cognitive, experiential and affective. earwaker was clear that learning support, whilst encompassing support for students undergoing personal change, should remain distinct from counselling and other forms of professional emotional support. in 1995, however, easton and van laar reported on a survey conducted in a post 1992 university in which 97% of a sample of 231 tutors reported having ‘counselled’ one or more distressed students in the year preceding the survey. approximately three-quarters said that they had ‘counselled’ students experiencing examination, career or financial problems, and more than half journal of learning development in higher education, issue 1: february 2009 7 huyton significant personal disclosure had dealt with health, accommodation or self-confidence problems. more than 30% said that they had ‘counselled’ students about depression, relationships or homesickness, and approximately one in five had ‘counselled’ students about loneliness. whilst acknowledging they have no reference point for respondents’ use of the term ‘counselling’, easton and van laar note that professionals working with client problems such as loneliness or depression would usually, according to professional and ethical guidelines, have in place appropriate training, support and supervision. these are considered essential requirements in the avoidance of stress, dissatisfaction or ‘burnout’, yet very few survey respondents had received training in these areas. this led easton and van laar to highlight the importance of formalised training and support for higher education practitioners in order to help avoid tutor distress or dissatisfaction when working with distressed students. easton and van laar cautioned that their results could not be generalisable. their response rate of 41% is perhaps an indication that those minded to respond were likely to have an interest in supporting students, which is also likely to be a characteristic of my electronic survey sample. whilst neither study can claim that the data indicate levels of engagement with student support amongst he tutors in the uk, we are given a useful insight into the experiences of those tutors who are actively engaged in supporting individual students. as crossman (2007: 325) points out, the issue is not related to expectations of professional behaviour in which we externalise the emotional content of interactions with students. it is about how we learn to view the significance of emotions and relationships in making professional and ethical decisions about our supportive interactions. ‘higher education institutions would do well to consider further how teaching and learning occurs in a particular context in which individuals interact, conduct relationships and experience feelings about those relationships’. habley (2000) notes from research on universities in the usa that only one third of campuses provided training in academic advising, and less than one quarter required staff to undergo such training. the majority of training programmes focused only on the communication of factual information and little time was devoted to relationship journal of learning development in higher education, issue 1: february 2009 8 huyton significant personal disclosure skills. similarly, grant (2006) notes that a student’s declining academic performance may be a symptom of personal concerns or mental health difficulties, which some practitioners may not be sufficiently skilled or experienced to recognise. this resonates with my electronic survey findings which identified only 10% of respondents who felt they had received comprehensive and adequate training for the student support role. the most frequent experience was limited training with needs largely met (38%). 30% had received no training at all, or extremely limited and inadequate training. ironically earwaker (1992: 46) was reporting similar findings in the early 1990s. tutors were dealing with ‘acute personal distress’ relating to student difficulties including family violence, sexual harassment, divorce, illhealth and unplanned pregnancy, many tutors feeling overwhelmed or out of their depth at times. it is claimed that the ‘widening access agenda’ has brought us new learners, often from non-traditional backgrounds, for whom learning support will encompass a range of areas including confidence-building, finance, lack of personal or family support, and academic difficulties (tholstrup, 1999; simon frank, 2000; wootton, 2006). claims that ‘widening access’ has resulted in a significant change in the nature and volume of student support needs implies a deficit model for some students and indicates a largely remedial approach (earwaker, 1992; marr and aynsleysmith,2006). although i cannot concur fully with the notion of a therapeutic turn in learning and teaching (ecclestone, 2004; furedi, 2004; ecclestone et al, 2005; ecclestone and hayes, 2009) i feel there is some merit in the argument that an overemphasis on the individual runs the risk of overlooking social and interpersonal dimensions of identifying and addressing emotional needs of both tutors and students as part of the learning and development process. ecclestone (2004: 118) is concerned about the effects of ‘therapeutic pedagogy’ which can mean that students and educators will come to believe students from ‘marginalised’ or ‘disaffected’ groups in society will be ‘unable to cope without support’. ecclestone’s message has received a mixed reaction from practitioners who work in student support roles. there is merit in the view that students from ‘marginalised’ or ‘disaffected’ backgrounds should not be singled out as being unable to cope, and it would be better to argue that all students might potentially be in need journal of learning development in higher education, issue 1: february 2009 9 huyton significant personal disclosure of support (marr and aynsley-smith, 2006). indeed earwaker (1992: 45) reminds us that the concept of personal tutoring has its origins in the elite institutions of medieval oxford and cambridge where undergraduates would be allocated a tutor to monitor and address their pastoral needs. thus an over-emphasis on ‘widening access’ as the origin of an increase in the pastoral work of tutors, thereby labelling some social groups as particularly needy, is not only damaging but is potentially incorrect. it is likely that a perceived intensification of student support needs can be linked with the fact that the continued increase in student numbers has not been accompanied by a commensurate increase in resources to maintain teaching and tutoring relationships (macfarlane, 2004). earwaker’s position on the need for a distinct boundary between the rogerian notion of learning support that encompasses both the emotional and the cognitive, and the act of counselling as a specific activity to be undertaken by trained professionals, indicates the suitability of a referral model. such an approach appears to have been accepted by the number of he institutions that increasingly offer counselling, mental health and other professional services via a centralised student support facility. this can be risky in that institutions may assume they have effectively externalised emotion work out of learning and teaching interactions, thereby removing the need to build in support for tutors engaged in emotion work. owen’s research (2002) into the effectiveness of this model found that it posed difficulties in that students would probably be deep into explaining their problems before the need for referral became apparent, and it is often difficult to disentangle a learning support issue from a personal problem in any case. so the ‘professional model’ does not mean that tutors no longer listen to students’ emotional problems. there can be institutional expectations, however, that those who feel emotionally exhausted from listening to students’ problems should work harder at their role boundaries and make more referrals. this may well be true in some cases, but failure to make an appropriate referral often arises out of institutional failure to offer staff development that would enhance tutors’ skills in this area of practice. there is strong evidence from my electronic survey that tutors from occupational backgrounds such as professions allied to medicine, social work, youth work and journal of learning development in higher education, issue 1: february 2009 10 huyton significant personal disclosure counselling have drawn on their previous skills and experience to recognise role boundaries and make appropriate and sensitive referrals. tutors with little or no experience in emotion work may be without a frame of reference to recognise the boundary between a therapeutic and a pedagogic intervention, the nature of which can be nebulous even for the most experienced practitioners. it should also be acknowledged that professional supervision for counsellors and others in similar professions includes the encouragement to reflect on and evaluate practice, and to remain in a learning zone rather than a panic or comfort zone (hawkins and shohet, 2007). the literature on counselling supervision highlights the importance of facilitated space for reflection and exploration of professional boundaries (for example: brady et al, 1985; hawkins and shohet, 2007). wilkins (1997) purports that personal and professional development is about much more than meeting organisational requirements (which in the case of learning support might mean meeting performance targets for retention and academic achievement). developing and maintaining good practice should include rest and relaxation as well as making efforts to improve and deepen knowledge of practice. he goes on to emphasise a professional obligation to take measures to manage stress and ‘burnout’ caused by our own personal experiences, the demands of our organisations, and the behaviour of some of our ‘clients’. the introduction of professional supervision for tutors engaged in student support work would enhance the quality and effectiveness of practice, facilitating appropriate consideration of role boundaries and the ability to work on avoiding ‘burnout’. i have already indicated that the majority of respondents to my survey drew on informal support from colleagues when dealing with particularly challenging emotion work scenarios. concerns were also expressed about the fact that space to meet with colleagues was being eroded by workload pressures. this resonates with ogbonna and harris’s findings where many lecturers felt their own needs had become overlooked in the race to achieve organisational imperatives, meaning the level of supportive interaction between colleagues had diminished over time: ‘years ago this was a dynamic place — everybody in and out of everybody else’s office. if you had a problem you talked about it, worked the problem journal of learning development in higher education, issue 1: february 2009 11 huyton significant personal disclosure through. today everybody’s out for themselves — nobody wants to show weakness. we’re all individuals within a partitioned box!’ (lecturer, new university, aged 42) (ogbonna and harris, 2004: 1192). carroll and walton (1997: 2) describe the importance of context in determining acceptable behaviour rules. the literature on emotional labour refers to attitudes or standards towards basic emotional responses, the appropriateness of which are defined by society or groups within society. forms of emotional expression can be either legitimised or overlooked, depending on the institutional, group or individual context (stearns and stearns, 1985; stearns, 1989; morris and feldman, 1996; fisher and ashkanasy, 2000). fineman (2003: 138) writes: ‘it is a particular irony that those who deal professionally with other people’s stresses…often find it difficult to voice their own stresses.’ he describes this as ‘the stress trap of professionalism, where professional mystique is to be preserved, regardless of personal cost’ (2003: 139). this resonates with crossman (2007) who advocates creating spaces for reflection and rethinking teaching and learning practices as a basis for training and professional development planning. this might help create a change to an organisational culture in which practitioners feel more comfortable with using reflective practice as an opportunity to explore their own support needs arising out of emotional interactions with students. hawkins and shohet (2007: 3) suggest there is a tendency to ‘get on with it’, or ‘keep one’s head down’, an attitude with which organisations and individuals often collude ‘for a variety of reasons, including external pressures and internal fears of exposing one’s own inadequacies’. whilst ecclestone’s emphasis on the dangers of overlooking the radical and the political should be welcomed, the manner in which the ‘therapeutic turn’ is expressed brings its own dangers for it risks creating a culture whereby appropriate articulation of the supervision and development needs of tutors becomes silenced by fears of being exposed as unable to cope with the demands of the job. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 1: february 2009 12 huyton significant personal disclosure gleeson and knights (2006) see the potential for a shift from professionalism (structure) to professionality (agency), which would enable practitioners to move from managerial accountability towards an ethic of responsibility. hoyle and john (1995) define professionality as a quality, which embodies skill, knowledge and competences required to make effective pedagogical judgements, which practitioners should be free to make based on the needs of students. key components in developing professionality are the processes of individual and collaborative reflection, both in and on practice, in order to inform effective judgements, and the development of a set of professional ethics. it is difficult to see how ideas for collective personal and professional development could be taken forward without an institutional commitment to releasing time and resources, and a recognition that such development is essential for tutors’ safe and effective working as they undertake a variety of roles including learning and teaching activity, bureaucratic and management tasks, and supporting students. summary and conclusions research has demonstrated the essence of emotion work in learning and teaching in higher education, and the fact that such work is not a recent phenomenon. this indicates a professional and ethical requirement on the part of institutions to consider how tutors can be supported to develop skills in this area. it could be argued that the ‘widening access’ agenda has encouraged more explicit engagement with the support needs of students, and it is to be hoped that post-dearing engagement with the scholarship of learning and teaching in higher education will incorporate ethical and emotional themes. in recognising and acknowledging the existence of emotion work in student support, we can look to the literature on supervision and training in the helping professions for models of professional support and development. whilst reflective practice features strongly in professional development frameworks such as the post graduate certificate in learning and teaching in higher education, there remains a need to encourage a cultural shift in what is recognised and articulated through the reflective process. the literature on professional display rules highlights that managerialism journal of learning development in higher education, issue 1: february 2009 13 huyton significant personal disclosure and bureaucratic monitoring might discourage practitioners from openly acknowledging emotional vulnerability and ‘burnout’ for fear that this might reflect badly on their professional capabilities. this is likely to have been exacerbated by reference to therapeutic pedagogy, underpinned by the idea of a therapeutic turn whereby students and tutors are caricatured as emotionally dependent individuals. the contemporary climate of work intensification has had implications for the emotional well-being of higher education practitioners which are, in part, explained by the lack of discursive space available for collective reflection on practice issues. the literature from the helping professions emphasises the need to debrief and discuss ethical and emotional issues. whilst institutions might consider incorporating the more technical skills of emotion work into models of staff development, the need to make available time and space for discussion in communities of practice, within a professionality model, should also be viewed as an essential staff development resource. the concept of the therapeutic turn suggests that tutors have a propensity to become therapists rather than educators, and risks portraying tutors as hapless individuals who consider themselves in need of therapy in order to cope with the emotional demands of their inappropriate therapeutic role. in contrast, my research findings indicate awareness amongst many tutors that there are role boundaries with which they struggle because they have not been appropriately prepared for their roles. there is also awareness amongst many tutors that they are not appropriately supported in undertaking the emotion work associated with developing appropriate learning relationships with students. there is a clear indication that tutors make use of relationships with colleagues as a means of support for the more challenging aspects of emotion work. there is also an expressed need for staff development and, in some cases, professional supervision to ensure safe and appropriate working and establishment of professional boundaries. the emphasis is on professional agency and the need to address skills and knowledge deficits rather than a need for therapeutic intervention. my survey respondents have offered valuable evidence of the need for reform. the emphasis on dialogue with colleagues indicates the appropriateness of a journal of learning development in higher education, issue 1: february 2009 14 huyton significant personal disclosure professionality model of professional and ethical development, rather than a managerial model. it would appear that work intensification is affecting the availability of collective discursive space, however. if institutional change is to be achieved, tutors need to find a collective voice to make institutions take notice of their legitimate concerns, for as clegg (2004: 323) points out, the achievement of radical change ‘depends on recognising the possibility that as collective agents we can do something to change the conditions which continue to generate profound injustices and inequalities’. we must act, not only to make gains in staff development and support of tutors, but also to ensure that emotion work is located as an essential element of unified learning, rather than a marketing tool to ensure the management of student retention and satisfaction with the curriculum and the institution. references beard, c; clegg, s and smith, k (2007) ‘acknowledging the affective in higher education’ british educational research journal 33 (2): 235 252 brady, j; healy, f; norcross, j and guy, j (1985) ‘stress in counsellors: an integrative research review’ service’ in dryden, w (ed) the stresses of counselling in action london: sage brockbank, a and mcgill, i (2006) facilitating reflective learning through mentoring and coaching london: kogan page carroll, m and walton, m (1997) ‘introduction’ in carroll, m and walton, m (eds) handbook of counselling in organizations london: sage centre for research in to emotion work (online) ‘about crew’ available at http://www.brunel.ac.uk/about/acad/bbs/research/centres/crew/about accessed 28/12/07 clegg, s (2006) ‘the problem of agency in feminism’ in gender and education 18 (3): 309-324 journal of learning development in higher education, issue 1: february 2009 15 http://www.brunel.ac.uk/about/acad/bbs/research/centres/crew/about huyton significant personal disclosure crossman, j (2007)’ the role of relationships and emotions in student perceptions of learning and assessment’ higher education research and development 26(3): 313-327 earwaker, j (1992) helping and supporting students buckingham: srhe and open university press easton, s and van laar, d (1995) ‘experiences of lecturers helping distressed students in higher education’ british journal of guidance and counselling 23 (2): 173-178 ecclestone, k (2004) ‘learning or therapy? the demoralization of higher education’ british journal of educational studies 52 (2) ecclestone, k; hayes, d and furedi, f (2004) ‘knowing me, knowing you: the rise of therapeutic professionalism in the education of adults’ in studies in the education of adults 37 (2) ecclestone, k and hayes, d (2009) the dangerous rise of therapeutic education london: routledge fineman, s (2003) understanding emotion at work london: sage fisher, c and ashkanasy, n (2000) ‘the emerging role of emotions in work life: an introduction’ journal of organizational behavior 21(2) : 123-129 furedi, f (2004) therapy culture: cultivating vulnerability in an uncertain age london: routledge gleeson, d and knights, d (2006) ‘challenging dualism: public professionalism in ‘troubles’ times sociology 40 (2) : 277-295 grant, a (2006) ‘personal tutoring: a system in crisis?’ in thomas, l and hixenbaugh, p (eds) personal tutoring in higher education stoke on trent: trentham books habley, w (2000) ‘current practices in academic advising’ in gordon, v; habley, w and associates academic advising: a comprehensive handbook san francisco: jossey bass hawkins, p and shohet, r (2007) supervision in the helping professions (third edition) maidenhead: open university press journal of learning development in higher education, issue 1: february 2009 16 huyton significant personal disclosure hochschild, a (2003) the managed heart (twentieth anniversary edition) london: university of california press hoyle, e and john, p (1995) professional knowledge and professional practice london: cassell kreber, c; klampfleitner, m; mccune, v; bayne, s and kottenbelt, m (2007) ‘what do you mean by authentic? a comparative review of the literature on conceptions of authenticity in teaching’ adult education quarterly 58 (22) : 2243 lawrence, d (2000) building self-esteem with adult learners london: paul chapman publishing macfarlane, b (2004) teaching with integrity: the ethics of higher education practice london: routledge marr and aynsley-smith (2006) ‘putting students first: developing accessible and integrated support’ in thomas, l and hixenbaugh, p (eds) personal tutoring in higher education stoke on trent: trentham books morris, j and feldman, d (1996) ‘the dimensions, antecedents, and consequences of emotional labor’ the academy of management review 21(4): 986-1010 mortiboys a (2002) the emotionally intelligent lecturer london: seda newman, m (2008) ‘infantalised students and staff rapped’ in times higher education 12/6/2008 ogbonna, e and harris, l (2004) ‘work intensification and emotional labour amongst uk university lecturers: an exploratory study’ organization studies 25(7): 1185–1203 owen, m (2002) ‘ ‘sometimes you feel you’re in niche time’ : the personal tutor system, a case study’ active learning in higher education 3(1) 7-23 rogers, c (1980) a way of being new york: houghton mifflin simon frank, k (2000) ‘ethical considerations and obligations’ in gordon, v; habley, w and associates academic advising: a comprehensive handbook san francisco: jossey bass journal of learning development in higher education, issue 1: february 2009 17 huyton significant personal disclosure stearns, p and stearns, c (1985) ‘emotionology: clarifying the history of emotions and emotional standards’ the american historical review, 90, (4): 813-836 stearns, p (1989) ‘social history update: sociology of emotion’ journal of social history 22 (3): 592-599 tholstrup, m (1999) ‘supervision in educational settings’ in carroll, m and holloway, e (eds) counselling supervision in context london: sage walker, m (2002) ‘pedagogy and the politics and purposes of higher education’ arts and humanities in higher education 1 (1) : 43-58 wilkins, p (1997) personal and professional development for counsellors london: sage wootton, s (2006) ‘changing practice in tutorial provision within post-compulsory education’ in thomas, l and hixenbaugh, p (eds) personal tutoring in higher education stoke on trent: trentham books journal of learning development in higher education, issue 1: february 2009 18 significant personal disclosure: exploring the support and development needs of he tutors engaged in the emotion work associated with supporting students abstract introduction the effects on tutors of work intensification and performance requirements in learning relationships with students professional role boundaries and staff development, training and support summary and conclusions references journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special edition: academic peer learning, part two, april 2016 using social media to enhance the peer mentoring experience at the university of southampton dr eleanor quince university of southampton, uk charlotte medland university of southampton, uk abstract this case study explains how social media was used in the pilot year of a student-led peer mentoring initiative. the university of southampton, faculty of humanities, peer mentoring scheme was launched in september 2014 with a cohort of 750 undergraduate students across seven subject areas. the scheme is part of the wider, student-led, careers activity across all year groups within the faculty, otherwise known as the ‘mission employable’ project. social media, including facebook and twitter, was used to engage mentors and mentees and to communicate with students throughout the scheme. facebook groups were introduced to help maintain contact, initially between the student peer mentoring coordinator and the student mentors, then between the mentors and their mentees. the familiarity of facebook was a deciding factor in the selection of appropriate media for use within the scheme. at the midand endpoint evaluation reviews, mentors praised the inclusion of social media platforms and asked that greater use be made of them in future. the case study concludes that social media led to an increase in student engagement and an enhanced student experience within the faculty. keywords: peer mentoring; employability; social media; student partnership. quince and medland using social media to enhance the peer mentoring experience journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 2 introduction peer mentoring schemes aim to facilitate the swift integration of first year students into university life (hill and reddy, 2007). in recent years uk higher education institutions (heis) have been keen to establish schemes as a means of providing a friendly supportive environment for new starters while giving current students an opportunity to develop skills (collings et al., 2015). the university of liverpool (lunt, 2014), for example, defines their peer mentoring scheme as aiming to: build up the confidence of the mentee and encourage independence. it is very much a two-way process and the benefits for … [the] mentor include developing transferable skills, such as communication and empathy. [the mentor] role is not to counsel a mentee, nor is it to coach them. the role is to [act as a facilitator of knowledge about the course and the university, perhaps even] the city [...] and local resources (doctors, shops, clubs…etc.). (lunt, 2014, p.3). this aim of 'facilitation' is supported by research which indicates that the first 6-8 weeks of a new students’ time at university are the most crucial (wilcox et al., 2005, p.715). during this period the new student is at a much higher risk of dropping out of university, due to the shock of a new cultural, social and academic environment, and/or as a result of the higher education workload (smith and naylor, 2001, p.391). fear of the unknown, concern that they won’t make friends, not knowing their way around are all things which can be eased through the mechanism of peer support. literature focussing specifically on peer mentoring is scarce (andrews and clarke, 2011, p.16). work undertaken through the higher education academy (hea) by a group of 22 uk heis to examine ‘what works’ for student retention explored a range of material on peer support from a variety of fields, identifying peer mentoring within higher education as: the creation of a true ‘win-win-win’ situation in which new students belong, existing students develop new skills and institutions experience minimal student attrition. peer mentoring offers an approach whereby students help students discover the new world of university life through the formation of safe and supportive peer relationships. (andrew and clarke, 2011, p.5). quince and medland using social media to enhance the peer mentoring experience journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 3 the research undertaken through the hea ‘what works’ project highlighted that the creation of these schemes needs to be considered from the student perspective (andrews and clarke, 2011, p.12), holding a relevancy for both mentees and those students acting as mentors. the use of an established and relevant means of communication aligned with the pre-university environment, such as facebook or twitter, can act as a bridge between home and higher education (haeger et al., 2014, p.3). during 2013/14 my own hei embarked on a review of its ‘peer support’ offer with the intention of ascertaining what schemes were running, where they were rooted at departmental, school or faculty level and if there were any gaps. the faculty of humanities was identified as having little to no peer-support provision across its seven subject areas (archaeology, english, film, history, modern languages, music and philosophy). as the faculty’s director of employability, i was tasked with deciding what kind of peer-support scheme would work for humanities and how we might implement it. this case study details the establishment of our faculty-wide, student-led peer mentoring scheme, piloted during the academic year 2014/15, and, in particular, how we made use of social media to ensure the scheme’s success. methodology in july 2014 a student ‘peer mentoring coordinator’ was hired on a three-month internship. the intern’s role was to research existing peer mentoring schemes in heis across the uk1 and to work with the faculty director of employability to establish a suitable scheme for humanities. the identified six key indicators of success within existing schemes: • engagement within the first 6-8 weeks of a new students’ time at university. • clear expectations established for, and agreed with, mentors at the outset of the scheme. • provision of training for mentors which is clearly aligned to the expectations of the scheme. 1 the coordinator considered schemes already established at southampton university, in the management and engineering schools, alongside schemes run at the universities of aston, edinburgh, exeter, leeds, liverpool, manchester, newcastle, sussex and york st. john. quince and medland using social media to enhance the peer mentoring experience journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 4 • management of mentees’ expectations from the outset including a definition of what a mentor is and is not. • a clear structure to frame activity, but with flexibility in order to promote relaxed and friendly relationships. • continuous support provision for mentors and mentees. the coordinator highlighted the use of social media within a peer mentoring scheme at the university of newcastle. newcastle had established a wordpress blog site (https://newcastlementors.wordpress.com/) which was maintained as a support structure for mentors and coordinators, ensuring that essential information was shared and enabling student access across all devices. the view of the coordinator was that this site went partway to establishing the key success indicators identified through her research. however, the site was designed to connect only with mentors, not with mentees, thus creating a barrier between these two groups. based on her findings, the coordinator proposed a scheme: led by a student coordinator; running during semester one only and kick-started at induction, the week new students arrive; mentor and mentee handbooks outlining responsibilities which both groups needed to agree to; training for all mentors prior to the start of the semester; informal group meetings to support new students in a relaxed and friendly atmosphere; the involvement of humanities subject societies to support mentor recruitment and encourage mentee integration; use of social media to facilitate such integration, and encourage mentee interaction with other university activities; rewards for mentors; readily available key support contacts at both faculty and university levels; and close collaboration with personal academic tutors. the coordinator presented her findings and proposal to her peers and university staff, showcasing the newcastle wordpress site as a means of utilising social media within a peer mentoring scheme. she collected student views via email and social media on different social media platforms and their suitability for use within peer mentoring (table 1). https://newcastlementors.wordpress.com/ quince and medland using social media to enhance the peer mentoring experience journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 5 table 1. outcomes of research into social media for peer mentoring in higher education. social media platform positives of use within he peer mentoring negatives of use within he peer mentoring outcome facebook  most widely-used social media platform amongst our student cohort.  students already spend time on facebook for social reasons so easy to expand this use to mentoring.  student societies use facebook for publicity, recruitment and information – we could harness this.  some mentors were already contacting the peer mentoring coordinator unofficially using facebook if they were off campus or abroad.  some students do not like to mix their social and academic media.  not all students have facebook.  mentoring colleagues/mentees would be able to see private information.  quite difficult to walk away from – mentees would be able to access mentors at all times, using mobile apps, and would be able to see if a mentor had read a message. first choice of social media platform for current students, due to the amount of university presence already there. however, for the purposes of peer mentoring, students must be trained in online etiquette and ensure that mentors and mentees are in control of what they share online. instagram  fast-growing platform among undergraduate students.  many students already have an account.  allows presentation in a highly visual way – useful for recruitment and publicity.  allows you to share posts to other platforms like twitter and facebook.  current coordinator does not use the platform.  students do not tend to use it for browsing or chatting, but to upload photos.  difficult to use for information without ‘spamming’ other users. an excellent way of reaching current students, but not as many privacy settings as some of the other platforms. pinterest  up and coming platform.  allows a mix of information and images.  creative and youthful format.  already have an account for our central careers service, so it is being adopted more widely within higher education.  current coordinator does not use the platform, which means they would have to spend valuable time learning.  not as popular as some other platforms.  not as useful for information as it is for media clippings. it would take too long to learn this platform considering the current number of university students who use it regularly. however, we will ensure we stay up to date with developments in case pinterest could be useful in the future. twitter  many faculty members and departments already have twitter accounts: easy to share information and raise awareness.  useful for keeping updated with best practice in other heis through hashtags,  not currently the most widely-used platform for students.  cannot give out detailed information due to the 140 character limit on tweets. agree that this is a useful platform, but that it would be best utilised as a complement to facebook, to ensure that we are reaching quince and medland using social media to enhance the peer mentoring experience journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 6 accounts and academic lists.  easy to see a reaction to the scheme in real time using hashtags.  an increasing number of undergraduate students are using twitter.  we teach students about the power of twitter for professional development in our employability module: this could encourage further engagement.  quite difficult to walk away from – mentees would be able to access mentors at all times using mobile apps.  cannot control who sees your tweets, unless you have a completely private account. both staff and students. wordpress  precedent at another hei (newcastle).  university already has a license.  student training available.  ‘one-stop’ information point.  current coordinator does not use the platform.  not currently the most widely-used platform for students.  open forum, so the public could access all information. it would take too long to learn this platform considering the current number of university students who use it regularly. however, we will ensure we stay up to date with developments in case blogging could be useful in the future. facebook was identified as the form of social media most in use. students noted that facebook groups were often established around modules and student societies, successfully facilitating communication and effective group working. students admitted to spending a considerable amount of time on facebook, staying in touch with family and friends, so keeping up with activity within the groups was easy. it was reported that, in contrast to the technologies available to new students through their university course, facebook was familiar. the group and network structure would encourage the ‘sense of belonging’ in mentees identified in the hea project (andrews and clarke, 2011, p.5) as being central to feeling part of the university (cashmore et al., 2012). the additional online interaction facebook promotes would also encourage mentors to demonstrate their digital literacy skills while simultaneously creating new personal partnerships. based on this positive feedback, the coordinator presented a case for utilising facebook pages and groups to establish the peer mentoring scheme and support mentors and mentees. the use of facebook would be supported by other social media platforms, as a means of raising awareness of the scheme and ensuring maximum reach during the recruitment phase. quince and medland using social media to enhance the peer mentoring experience journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 7 process the coordinator’s proposals were agreed and the identification of mentors began in midjuly. an online application form was created for mentors using the university’s i-survey (a secure questionnaire portal). this was publicised by via email, facebook, twitter and wordpress so that as many students as possible could be reached during the summer vacation period. the application portal remained open for one month. on closure, the coordinator chose the successful mentor candidates based on their motivation and enthusiasm for the role, then notified new mentors and matched them into pairs. the matching process ensured that mentor pairs were from the same discipline, but – wherever possible – at different levels of study, so that incoming students would get insight into as much of the university experience as possible. once the incoming student numbers had been confirmed in early september, mentor pairs were allocated a group of up to 15 mentees. mentors sent their mentees an electronic ‘welcome letter’ and a photograph of themselves, so that mentees could easily identify them during induction week. the mentors received their handbooks on the training day in late september. facebook, as our primary social media platform, was incorporated at all levels of the scheme. initially humanities’ subject ‘student society’ and ‘mission employable’ facebook pages were utilised to recruit mentor applicants and to relay queries to the coordinator through facebook messenger. these same facebook pages were used to reach out to incoming students in the run up to the start of the academic year and during induction week. a private facebook group for mentors was set up by the coordinator. this group was used to share concerns, ask for advice and showcase bespoke resources. through this mechanism mentors were placed at the centre of the developing pilot, enabling them to interact with one another and the coordinator to raise issues and share best practice. at key points throughout the pilot year – during recruitment, at launch and at the mid-and end-point reviews – peer mentoring was also publicised through the official ‘mission employable’ blog, hosted by the university’s wordpress server. wordpress was used to explain the rationale behind the scheme in an accessible way, as well as showcasing mentor and mentee case studies and encouraging wider engagement on a local and national scale. quince and medland using social media to enhance the peer mentoring experience journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 8 social media training on appropriate online etiquette was incorporated into the mentor training day in order to highlight the importance of maintaining safety and privacy during online interactions between students. the training: • raised awareness that, should mentors wish to connect with their mentees over social media, their mentees would have access to their personal information. • asked mentors not to share mobile phone numbers with mentees, particularly in an online forum. • stated that social media contact should be followed up with an email, so that students who are not contactable in other ways do not miss out on essential information. • made it clear that social media should be used to enhance the peer mentoring process, but not to replace face-to-face contact. • asked that, when using facebook to contact the coordinator, mentors act with due consideration. at the training day mentors were encouraged to set up specific facebook groups for their mentees and, at least initially, not to connect with them through their personal accounts. during induction week, mentors held face-to-face meetings with their mentees for the first time, continuing with fortnightly meetings throughout the semester. the facebook groups were used to support these meetings on both a logistical and personal level: students could send apologies; ask for advice and share guidance; as well as get to know each other outside of the more formal meetings. potential ethical issues associated with humanities peer mentoring we identified four main ethical challenges present within the scheme. these were: 1. mentor and mentee confidentiality, both within the scheme and at faculty/university level. 2. ensuring that student feedback on the scheme remains anonymous. 3. using students’ images in promotional/published materials, both in print and online. 4. ensuring that students were ‘culture-friendly’ at all times. quince and medland using social media to enhance the peer mentoring experience journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 9 we addressed these challenges by: 1. adding confidentiality agreements to the mentor and mentee handbooks, and explaining their importance at the training day. 2. at both the midand end-point reviews, mentors and mentees were told in advance that their comments, ideas and feedback might be used at both faculty and university levels, but that this information would always be anonymised, only ever being identified by subject if required. no names were used in email correspondence or reports shared by the coordinator with other members of staff. 3. at all mentor meetings, trainings and reviews, students were advised when photos might be taken and could opt out of their image being used if they wished. no one did, believing that the use of ‘real’ promotional material would encourage further engagement with the scheme in the future. 4. mentors were trained on the differences in culture that may arise among mentees (e.g. students who do not consume alcohol) and further guidance was provided in the mentor handbook. to ensure student privacy, at the start of the scheme it was important to make clear to both mentors and mentees when information should be shared and should remain confidential. prospective mentors had to agree to the following statement before beginning their role: in accordance with the data protection act 1998 the information provided on this form will be used to assess my suitability for the post and, if accepted, this information will form the basis of my volunteer personnel file. i understand that the information provided on this form may be entered onto a computerised database. i agree that if i am matched with other students, the information given on this form may be shared with them. handbooks for mentors and mentees clearly outlined respective rights and responsibilities. these ensured that the mentor-mentee relationship was clearly defined and respected from the start of the scheme (table 2). quince and medland using social media to enhance the peer mentoring experience journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 10 table 2. responsibilities of the mentor and mentee. mentors  discussing and agreeing boundaries  listening – 100% attention should be given to mentees  attendance  being honest  wanting to be there  being realistic  giving constructive feedback  supporting the mentee  enabling the mentee to achieve their aims  respecting the confidentiality of the mentee  being respectful to others views and beliefs  following any policies/procedures within the scheme  behaving responsibly  knowing when to ask for help mentees  discussing and agreeing boundaries  attendance  respecting the mentor  listening  wanting to be there  being honest  making the most of the opportunity  following through on any action points agreed  taking part in the feedback process  taking part in the evaluation process (source: university of southampton, 2014, pp. 6-7). review and outcomes as part of the pilot year process for 2014/15 we held midand end-point reviews with all mentors in weeks 7 and 12 of semester one. this enabled mentors to raise any concerns they had, or challenges they were facing, in a supportive and confidential setting. the results of these reviews have helped us to identify the extent to which social media support had worked, and what we wished to change for future iterations of the scheme. digital literacy can be a challenge for students entering higher education, as they are introduced to new software and media platforms without the detailed training they might have been used to at school. we discovered at our mid-point review that new students were nervous about approaching staff for help on this issue, but happy to discuss it with their mentors. digital literacy queries were often raised through the facebook support quince and medland using social media to enhance the peer mentoring experience journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 11 groups that had been set up for mentees. mentors used this platform alongside face-toface meetings to successfully train their mentees in using the university’s digital services, taking the time to show them step-by-step demonstrations and sharing ‘how to’ documents and web links. the feedback from mentees who experienced such training was universally positive. as a result, we have made the recommendation that dedicated academic digital platform sessions are run by 2015/16 mentors during the first month of the scheme. mentees reported that they struggled to remember the information on ‘support services’ and resources given to them during induction. to help resolve this issue, an e-copy of the mentee handbook was posted to the ‘mission employable’ facebook page for ease of access. as mentees responded well to this, for 2015/16 we will be introducing a dedicated humanities peer mentoring website which will act as a ‘one-stop shop’ for first-year students settling into university life. the site will bring together existing resources, actively signposting rather than repeating information hosted elsewhere. mentors raised positive outcomes from using social media at both reviews. many new students were not used to using email for academic or professional purposes and did not check it regularly enough in the first few weeks. mentors reported that it was quicker and easier to contact mentees using social media during this period. facebook quickly became the favoured means of communication for urgent contact as more mentors had easy access to this platform on their phone and could see whether the coordinator was online, making it easy to message queries during a meeting. some of the mentor-mentee groups continued after the scheme had officially ended, maintained by mentors who said they were happy to stay in touch with their mentees on a less formal basis. although the primary platform used was facebook, the use of twitter increased over the course of the year. as a result, a dedicated humanities peer mentoring twitter account for 2015/16 and a #humstoptips will be introduced to encourage incoming students to engage with mentors through this medium before they arrive. at the end-point review meeting in january 2015, mentors praised the availability of the coordinator through social media, and highlighted it as an essential factor in the continuance of the scheme for 2015/16. quince and medland using social media to enhance the peer mentoring experience journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 12 conclusions the use of social media within humanities peer mentoring was a key factor in the success of the scheme. well received by mentors and mentees alike, the use of facebook meant that all the students involved knew they could access help whenever they needed it. any concerns that the coordinator may be bombarded with questions were unfounded: all students used social media in a respectful and supportive manner. harnessing familiar social media networks to link new and current students gives both parties the confidence to interact with their peers, and gave mentees an additional support option outside of their face-to-face meetings. mentors also gained a sense of ownership over the scheme by creating their own subject-level online communities for their mentees, and by sharing advice and resources with other mentors through the private peer mentors facebook group. students who participated in the scheme viewed social media as a clear indicator of the student-led nature of the project. for the future we aim to increase our engagement with social media, working with our student partners to introduce: • a youtube channel to distribute advice and guidance in a more visually-dynamic and approachable format. • storify to document events and activities. • linkedin as a means of staying in touch with past mentors and connect them with current students. • a social media links page on the humanities peer mentoring website. the page would include links related to the mentoring scheme; support services; university resources; subject societies; local information and a list of student discounts available. references andrews, j. and clark, r. (2011) peer mentoring works! how peer mentoring enhances student success in higher education. available at: http://eprints.aston.ac.uk/17968/1/peer_mentoring_works.pdf (accessed: 3 may 2016). http://eprints.aston.ac.uk/17968/1/peer_mentoring_works.pdf quince and medland using social media to enhance the peer mentoring experience journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 13 cashmore, a., cane, c. and scott, j. (2012) “belonging” and “intimacy” factors in the retention of students – an investigation into the student perceptions of effective practice and how that practice can be replicated, university of leicester. available at: https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/resources/detail/what-works-studentretention/leicester_what_works_final_report (accessed: 11 august 2014). collings, r., swanson, v. and watkins, r. (2015) ‘peer mentoring during the transition to university: assessing the usage of a formal scheme within the uk’, studies in higher education, march. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2015.1007939 haeger, h., wang, r. and brckalorenz, a. (2014) ‘bridge or barrier: the impact of social media on engagement for first-generation college students’, the power of education research for innovation in practice and policy: american educational research association annual meeting. pennsylvania convention center, philadelphia, pennsylvania, usa 3–7 april 2014. available at: http://www.aera.net/publications/onlinepaperrepository/aeraonlinepaperreposit ory/tabid/12720/owner/743469/default.aspx (accessed: 20 april 2016). hill, r. and reddy, p. (2007) ‘undergraduate peer mentoring: an investigation into processes, activities and outcomes’, psychology learning and teaching, 6(2), pp. 98-103. http://dx.doi.org/10.2304/plat.2007.6.2.98 lunt, p. (2015) handbook for peer mentors (2015-16). available at: http://www.liv.ac.uk/eddev/supporting-students/peer-mentoring/ (accessed: 3 may 2016). medland, c., tribe, j., dudley, a., smith, v. and quince, e. (2015) ‘mission employable: creating a student-led employability strategy for the faculty of humanities, university of southampton’, the journal of educational innovation, partnership and change, 1(1) [online]. available at: https://journals.gre.ac.uk/index.php/studentchangeagents/article/view/207 (accessed: 17 march 2015). quince, e. m. (2015) tel conference 2015 eleanor quince [video file]. harnessing technology for employability: digital literacy skills development in student-led career https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/resources/detail/what-works-student-retention/leicester_what_works_final_report https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/resources/detail/what-works-student-retention/leicester_what_works_final_report http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2015.1007939 http://www.aera.net/publications/onlinepaperrepository/aeraonlinepaperrepository/tabid/12720/owner/743469/default.aspx http://www.aera.net/publications/onlinepaperrepository/aeraonlinepaperrepository/tabid/12720/owner/743469/default.aspx http://dx.doi.org/10.2304/plat.2007.6.2.98 http://www.liv.ac.uk/eddev/supporting-students/peer-mentoring/ https://journals.gre.ac.uk/index.php/studentchangeagents/article/view/207 quince and medland using social media to enhance the peer mentoring experience journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 14 activity, technology enhanced learning (tel) conference 2015, university of southampton. youtube video, 23:31, posted by iliad uos, 15 may 2015. content: retrieved from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zsjfhvmhqwy smith, j.p. and naylor, r.a. (2001) ‘dropping out of university: a statistical analysis of the probability of withdrawal for uk university students’, journal of the royal statistical society: series a (statistics in society), 164(2), pp. 389–405. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/1467-985x.00209 university of southampton (2014) mentor handbook: university of southampton humanities undergraduate peer mentoring handbook. available at: http://www.southampton.ac.uk/assets/imported/transforms/contentblock/usefuldownloads_download/552200c4484c441b8c12ac0a957218ba/ment or%20handbook%20v2.pdf (accessed: 12 february 2015). wilcox, p., winn, s. and fyvie‐gauld, m. (2005) ‘‘it was nothing to do with the university, it was just the people’: the role of social support in the first‐year experience of higher education’, studies in higher education, 30(6), pp. 707-722. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03075070500340036 author details dr eleanor quince, director of employability, faculty of humanities, university of southampton. charlotte medland, employability coordinator, faculty of humanities, university of southampton. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zsjfhvmhqwy http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/1467-985x.00209 http://www.southampton.ac.uk/assets/imported/transforms/content-block/usefuldownloads_download/552200c4484c441b8c12ac0a957218ba/mentor%20handbook%20v2.pdf http://www.southampton.ac.uk/assets/imported/transforms/content-block/usefuldownloads_download/552200c4484c441b8c12ac0a957218ba/mentor%20handbook%20v2.pdf http://www.southampton.ac.uk/assets/imported/transforms/content-block/usefuldownloads_download/552200c4484c441b8c12ac0a957218ba/mentor%20handbook%20v2.pdf http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03075070500340036 literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 6: november 2013 student engagement: identity, motivation and community book review nygaard, c., brand, s., bartholomew, p. and millard, l. (2013) student engagement: identity, motivation and community. faringdon, oxfordshire, uk: libri publishing, pp.310, £42.00, isbn 978-1-90747165-0. this book is remarkable for a number of reasons. firstly, unlike many edited collections, it is not a loosely constructed arrangement consisting of research conducted in widely varied contexts, but it instead appears to be the embodiment of a commonly held vision of a university as a site where student engagement is encouraged and made possible via structured opportunities for students and staff to work together in the pursuit of learning. the book is also remarkable because it represents such a rapid process from conception to production – some 14 months from initial meeting to publication. the book was the result of collaboration between the international academic association for the enhancement of learning and teaching (lihe), the centre for enhancement of learning and teaching (celt) at birmingham city university, the student’s union at birmingham city university and libri publishing. this goes to show what is possible when organisations work closely together, and may form a model for others to emulate. the book aims to present an account of the early stages of birmingham city university’s initiative to promote a partnership model for higher education, rather than a consumerist one. the manner in which the book was created and produced certainly acts as an object lesson in how a dedicated group of staff and students can work together to create something worth-while, and at this level the book delivers in both form and content. the book contains a series of sixteen chapters: an initial chapter which addresses the general issue of ‘why student engagement matters’ and fifteen subsequent chapters, each of which outlines and discusses various initiatives carried out at birmingham city university in the name of promoting student engagement. nygaard et al. student engagement: identity, motivation and community the title of the book suggests that student engagement is a major theme, and whilst this is certainly a key theme in the articles it contains, the perspective it offers on engagement is ultimately disappointing. there is a lack of clarity on the question of what students are engaging with, where some of the articles in the collection seem to confuse engagement of students with their tutors and the university with engagement of students with the process of education. the book will appeal to anyone who is interested in ways to promote engagement of students and staff in higher education. in particular the book should appeal to learning developers, those with management roles, such as faculty deans, and others responsible for the student experience. however, despite the interesting and worthy nature of the volume, it is not a book for those seeking definitive answers, instead providing a selection of interesting examples of attempts to enhance student engagement. these examples may be useful in suggesting lines of enquiry and action, although, as will be argued below, not all of those within this volume are as promising as the authors suggest. each chapter is written by a different team which means that the style and content of each chapter is necessarily varied; however, each chapter is well-written and easy to understand. the applied nature of the initiatives reported upon helps to make sure that the emphasis is upon practical matters, yet each chapter is set within an appropriate theoretical context. the book is roughly divided into three key themes: identity, motivation and community, and these are presented in chapter order, although without any markers between sections. the key strength of the book lies in the variety of the projects it describes and the ability that this variety and the style of writing affords the reader to dip in and out, rather like sampling a box of chocolates. as might be expected, not all initiatives were complete successes, and this in itself provides useful context, with each contribution providing a platform from which to assess others and to consider and guide one’s own initiatives. the main weakness of the book is the lack of a clear theoretical framework. the introductory chapter: ‘why student engagement matters’ leads one to believe that freire’s (2005) pedagogy of the oppressed might provide a framework, and some of the chapters which follow also share this framework; however, several chapters rely instead upon kuh’s (2009, p.683) definition of student engagement as: ‘…the time and efforts students devote journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 2 nygaard et al. student engagement: identity, motivation and community to activities that are empirically linked to desired outcomes’ is used in several articles as a key part of the theoretical justification of the activities described, yet this seems rather too broad, and perhaps greater specificity would be useful. such broad definitions allow a wide range of activities to be classed as student engagement in this volume. these activities seem to come under perhaps three general headings which might be described as employment, involvement in governance and involvement in knowledge creation. chapter three describes how students were hired on a one-year placement basis as studio manager and laboratory manager in the school of digital media technologies. in this chapter, employment is proposed as an example of student engagement via their use as storekeepers and other forms of technical and administrative support. this, it is proposed, helps those students chosen to better understand their lecturers and to be able to provide their fellow students with a fresh perspective upon the challenges faced by higher education. however, ultimately this form of employment seems little different from other forms of cheap labour. benefits from such a scheme appear to include improved student engagement via the placement student ‘bridging the gap between staff and students’, placement students can inspire and engage other students as a role model, and ‘real world vocational experience’ can be gained by the placement student, or student partner, as they have become known. this employment-related theme is highlighted elsewhere, for example, chapter seven argues that employing students within the university leads to a number of benefits, including increased student motivation, and as ‘a cost-effective method of providing vibrant new ideas and staff for the university’ (p.122), and the authors go on to surmise that, although current levels of engagement-related student employment are around ten percent, they believe that the challenge is to move toward a situation where between 50 and 75% of students are employed in such a way. this logic is, i believe, flawed in three ways: first, it assumes that there are sufficient suitable roles for students to fill; second, that there will be enough students willing and able to fill those roles; and perhaps most importantly, that it is the business of a university to be employing the majority of its students in running the institution they have enrolled in to get an education. i believe that this is vocationalism gone too far. in the current economic climate, with intense competition for relatively small numbers of opportunities, it seems entirely right that universities should do what they can to provide professional level opportunities for their students, but this should not be seen as more than a ‘sticking journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 3 nygaard et al. student engagement: identity, motivation and community plaster’ and it is important to remember that universities are not simply seeking to reproduce themselves, but instead to prepare students to contribute to wider society. the second heading under which student engagement is discussed is that of academic governance, and chapter six relates how student advisory boards, in which students take a much more active role in the governance of their university than they had previously been able to achieve via participation in boards of studies. this chapter outlines a number of positive outcomes from such student advisory boards, and seems to be a superior way of promoting student engagement than does employment; however, this approach shares a weakness with the employment approach, namely that there may be a limited number of students willing and able to take up the opportunity. the authors acknowledge that those students who become involved tend to be among the most positive and confident, and they acknowledge the desire to increase involvement among other groups. in reading the book it became apparent that any achievable and sustainable approach to promoting student engagement must occur via the essential educational purpose of the university. that is, students must be encouraged to engage with the process of education, and if necessary this may require the process to change, rather than co-opting students to shore up the existing process. one example where larger scale engagement may be possible lies on the example of problem-based learning, where many students began to engage with the learning process in new and more intense ways; however, as noted in the article, many students did not enjoy the uncertainty associated with finding problem-owners and taking greater responsibility for their own education. as the authors pointed out, ‘problem – based learning does not appear to be for everyone’ (p.163), and it may be that engagement, of the kind sought by educators, is not for every student. this is perhaps the essential paradox: that true engagement is currently experienced by far fewer students than we would like, yet up-scaling to include all students may not be possible via the means currently employed. although this review has highlighted some weaknesses, this is still a very valuable contribution to the debate around what student engagement is and how to achieve it. reading the chapters within the book has prompted me to reflect upon my own practice journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 4 nygaard et al. student engagement: identity, motivation and community and the initiatives that i am part of, and i believe that other learning developers will also find much to reflect upon in this volume. reviewer craig whittaker is lead academic support tutor in the faculty of business and law at the university of the west of england. e-mail: craig.whittaker@uwe.ac.uk references freire, p. (2005) pedagogy of the oppressed. new york: continuum. kuh, g.d. (2009) ‘what student affairs professionals need to know about student engagement’, journal of college student development, 50(6), pp. 683-706. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 5 student engagement: identity, motivation and community book review reviewer references journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 5: march 2013 teachers’ interpretation of bildung in practice: examples from higher education in sweden and denmark helen avery jӧnkӧping university, sweden monne wihlborg lund university, sweden abstract while higher education is expected to prepare students so they can reflect and act in relation with a changing world, many structural forces instead favour procedural learning. there are fundamental contradictions between the aim of independent thinking and using standardised assessment, as well as between reasoning/speaking as an emancipatory force, and teaching as explanation. other contradictions exist between holistic and fragmented learning. an important dimension of these contradictions is how we determine who can become a speaker. what are the terms for negotiating meaning? in this article, ways in which university teachers interpret bildung are investigated through qualitative interviews. three teachers were asked how they implement their aims in practice. the three cases are presented as an illustration of practices that may enhance in-depth reflection, holistic understanding and personal development. the teachers’ perceptions of student learning and other outcomes of a bildung approach are discussed. in particular, the article stresses the importance of a space for negotiation and giving students the opportunity to become speakers. keywords: higher education; bildung; reflection; holistic; teaching and learning practice; speaker; negotiation. avery and wihlborg teachers’ interpretation of bildung in practice journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 2 background introduction historically, the ideals of humboldt and other foreground figures of the bildung tradition arose as a reaction to totalitarianism, in an attempt to balance freedom of thought and civic responsibility (klafki, 2000; westbury et al., 2000). these ideals were also associated with the emergence of modern notions of democracy. although society has evolved in certain respects since the days of humboldt, issues of democracy and critical thinking remain. in the meantime, new challenges have arisen that again bring bildung to the fore. more than ever, we need the responsible engagement of educated citizens. in a rapidly changing society, the capacity to be creative, to solve problems and apply knowledge to new situations becomes indispensable. this has been highlighted in several documents, such as the european framework of key competences (united nations educational, scientific and cultural organization, 2005; european commission 2007; european parliament, 2010). it is no longer sufficient to prepare young people for a particular professional context. education must additionally provide the foundation and impetus for lifelong learning. not only is technology evolving, but societies and value systems are witnessing fundamental transformations, at an unprecedented pace. there is an ensuing need to widen interaction between cultures in positive ways. creativity and intercultural skills have become a necessity (national advisory committee on creative and cultural education, 1999; florida and tinagli, 2004). the capacity to adapt to changing circumstances, and find solutions in new situations, builds on a number of abilities, which all need to be developed and trained. these include the capacity to decide on relevant and adequate action in a particular situation, as well as reflecting independently, accurately judging one’s own capacity for action, managing one’s own learning, and assessing further needs for knowledge. other key capabilities include engaging in constructive dialogue with others from a variety of cultures, considering values and ethical implications, handling complex or uncertain situations and, above all, relating elements of a situation to a larger context (svensson and wihlborg, 2010). intrinsically, acquiring such capabilities supposes an approach of continuous self-development and the kind of holistic reasoning advocated in bildung approaches. avery and wihlborg teachers’ interpretation of bildung in practice journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 3 there is thus a certain consensus concerning a number of vital qualities of knowledge and reflection that should be developed through education. at the same time, education systems in europe are subject to competition and the pressure of constant evaluation, in the wake of new public management (leisyte, 2006). this produces dynamics that frequently go in the direction of standardisation and procedural learning, rather than nurturing critical thinking. when resources are allocated as a function of efficiency in achieving learning goals, no space is left for reflection based on the learners’ own engagement in the construction of knowledge and meaning-making. this is not only a question of cutting costs. fundamentally, it is the consequence of a linear conception of excellence, where diversity and independent thinking are not valued as such. outcomes are generally assessed based on values that can be ‘objectively’ compared, preferably through quantitative analysis. the definition of standards of excellence is thus alienated, and placed outside the aims that any particular university might have (cf. hansen, 2011; trow, 1994). the bologna process has contributed in certain respects to pressures in this direction (teelken and wihlborg, 2010). programmes, progression and course content are expected to be compatible, so that students can freely move between universities. this favours a ‘modularisation’ of knowledge, in which objectives can be achieved within the space of single modules. formalisation of learning objectives thus reduces the extent to which teachers or students can influence content, forms and purposes of learning. today, certain important aspects of learning which were formerly seen as bildung ideals, might seem to be covered by the notion of ‘generic skills’, and therefore assumed to be included within the framework of goal-directed education. however, since such skills are formulated as discrete learning aims, the need to separately evaluate and document whether a particular skill has been acquired by the individual student tends to favour fragmented learning, rather than integration. in a study of doctoral education, mowbray and halse (2010) showed the futility of analysing students’ competences in terms of disconnected skills. moreover, externally defined aims tend to disempower learners and teachers. learning becomes instrumental, rather than intrinsically meaningful for the individuals who are involved in the activity (see engeström’s (1987; 1991) discussion of use value and exchange value). the present study examines how three university teachers attempted to apply bildung ideals in their teaching practice. clearly, focusing on teachers’ own perceptions of their practice has several limitations. the students’ perspective is missing. also, there may be avery and wihlborg teachers’ interpretation of bildung in practice journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 4 important aspects that the teachers are not aware of, or do not think of mentioning. at the same time, we wish to argue that teachers’ understanding of learning and their intention to shape suitable practices have important implications for the learning environment and the affordances it offers. theoretical framing bildung has been a strong and constant force in scandinavian and swedish education for most of the past century (lawson, 1991; vestlund, 1996). the swedish form of bildung (bildning) emphasises democratic participation, lifelong learning and the learner’s role in actively managing her individual development. scandinavian bildung has been linked to a vigorous tradition of popular education. however, policy changes during recent decades in higher education (leisyte, 2006) have led in the direction of increasingly tightly managed external steering. for instance, in denmark, a series of reforms has successively disempowered higher education institutions, reducing teacher engagement and producing a sentiment of alienation (hansen, 2011). state funding is shrinking, and education is governed by considerations of ‘efficiency’ and commodification. if curriculum and learning objectives simply serve as a general frame for learning processes, goal-directed education can still leave certain margins open for negotiation of meaning. however, when combined with tightening budgets and systematic evaluation of performance, these margins for action are lost. funding is allocated as a function of how well institutions and students conform to externally defined goals, and no space is left for pursuing other objectives. the requirement to conform has effects on a macro-level, reducing the freedom to define learning aims. on a micro-level, the need to pass standardised exams reduces opportunities to critically examine course content or search for alternative ways of understanding. engeström (1987) has pointed to contradictions arising from tensions between the use value and exchange value of human activity. use value is the value that participants in an activity see in what they are doing, while exchange value involves gaining some form of external benefit, such as educational qualifications. in the latter case, value and purpose are defined by agents outside the activity, and the meaning of the activity is thus alienated from the participants themselves. avery and wihlborg teachers’ interpretation of bildung in practice journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 5 in terms of theoretically defining the scope for development and learning, it must be stressed that critical reflection in the bildung tradition has several dimensions. one of these is self-development. biesta (2010) has elaborated on the term ‘speaker’ in education. he distinguishes between speaking in the sense of ‘taking up an existing identity, an existing place within the existing order’ (biesta, 2010, p. 547), and the option of challenging this order and being creative. we wish to argue that the opportunity to develop, individually and collectively, beyond a predefined set of identities or positions, can be seen as the most open form for self-development. matusov et al. (forthcoming) have outlined possible forms which expansive learning could take, talking of an ontological community of learners. they see learning as a communal concept, which includes the opportunity to transform target practices, so that learners ‘become competent participants in these practices and discourses, through transformation of their subjectivities and through shaping/reshaping their knowledge’ (nilsson and wihlborg, 2011, p.106). according to this line of reasoning, a minimal condition for bildung in teaching and learning practice would be that students are given opportunities to express themselves and discuss ideas with others. other conditions would be that such discussions enjoy some measure of freedom, and that engaging in open-ended reflection or discussion does not become a ‘waste of time’ with respect to completing compulsory coursework. the concept of ontological community of learners emphasises active approaches to learning. according to matusov et al. (2013, p.55), two complementary aspects characterise the active learner: 1. being puzzled and perplexed by something…having a point of wonder…raising an authentic question that seeks for information, and recognizing his or her own ignorance…; and 2. the person’s desire to address himor herself, other people, and the inquiry itself. matusov’s reasoning addresses other central aspects of the bildung tradition: the need to contextualise knowledge, and the learner’s engagement in society. we do not merely learn something; we must question our own position in relation to the state of the world. in any learning and teaching activity, we contend that tensions will necessarily exist between the agendas of various participants. other tensions will appear between the avery and wihlborg teachers’ interpretation of bildung in practice journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 6 processes taking place in the individual classroom, and agendas set by the educational institution or curricula. ideally, such tensions can contribute to widening perspectives and deepening insights. beyond a certain point, however, strong contradictions will lead to rupture and disengagement. to maintain positive dynamics, margins for action are needed, where meaning can be negotiated. clearly, conditions for negotiation will also be affected by other factors, such as power, cultures and the relative compatibility of underlying value systems. goal-defined curricula preclude open questions and genuine curiosity, since outcomes are defined in advance, and learners have little opportunity to invest the activity with personal meaning. the quest for ‘efficiency’ in terms of goal-attainment leaves no margins for negotiation. on the other hand, it is not enough to have ample resources or time; the crucial question is how this space for negotiation is used. in the following, we will see some examples from teachers’ accounts of their teaching practice for bildung in swedish and danish higher education. the teachers’ strategies are related to their perceptions of student learning and the varying spaces for learning which they open. teaching for bildung in practice the concept of bildung is very wide and it is far from clear how it should be put into practice. emphasis may be placed on democracy, humanism, reflection, or freedom of thought and speech. in some cases, bildung ideals have been associated with traditional universities, restricted to a narrow class of academics. in the scandinavian countries, popular education, lifelong learning and integrating theoretical and practical forms of knowledge have been important themes (lawson, 1991; vestlund, 1996; boström et al., 2001). different aspects of the bildung approach can be found in other traditions. however, while self-directed learning (mezirow, 1985) similarly emphasises the learner’s ability to manage her learning processes, in the more cognitive approaches self-development is not framed in the wider social perspective of democracy. parts of the lifelong learning movement and popular education have been historically connected to bildung. social constructivism (vygotsky, 1978; burr, 2003) shares several features found in bildung, as well as different approaches aiming at empowerment (freire, 1970/2000). learning is fundamentally viewed as a collaborative process. typical of the bildung approach is also that learning is avery and wihlborg teachers’ interpretation of bildung in practice journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 7 seen as developing and empowering the person. the ethical implications of practice are seen as important. at the same time, the perspective is one of shaping inclusive, democratic and creative societies. in this study, we will particularly look into the dimension of teaching and learning from the perspective of the teachers. the focus thus concerns how teachers interpret bildung and how this understanding relates to the ways in which they construct students’ learning activities in their courses. we have chosen to illustrate bildung in practice by three cases. the data for these example cases is drawn from qualitative individual interviews with three teachers in different learning and educational contexts. an overall description of the three cases and the interview questions is followed by a more thorough description, in particular of case a, since the context here is less frequently associated with bildung practices. method and data framing the cases the interviews the data for these example cases comprises qualitative individual interviews (approximately ten hours in all), with three teachers in different higher education learning and educational contexts. in order to collect rich data, interactive dialogue techniques were used. in the course of the interviews, inconsistencies and contradictions were identified and further discussed with the teachers (sapsford and jupp, 1996). framing the main issue and areas in the interviews in the interview guide with open-ended questions, the teachers were asked to talk about their interpretation of bildung in practice (see attached interview guide). our approach in the interviews was to explore the teachers’ initial answers and in particular any vague and contradictory statements. this was achieved by follow-up questions which asked for examples of practice and other ways to understand what had been mentioned, as well as clarifications and confirmations. avery and wihlborg teachers’ interpretation of bildung in practice journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 8 analysing the data a thematic analysis approach was employed (silverman, 2000). as is generally the case in thematic analysis (strauss, 1987; sapsford and jupp, 1996; silverman, 2000), the data was worked through in several steps. the interviews were transcribed verbatim; the transcriptions were first read individually, identifying central statements, in order to grasp the overall meaning. we then compared differences and similarities in our respective readings. as a next step, meaning units were identified more systematically. the cases were compared with each other, and some of the similarities across the cases were highlighted. institutional contexts of the cases and bildung case a: at the danish university where this teacher taught courses of mathematics to students who majored in subjects other than theoretical mathematics, failure rates on the modules were alarming. the teacher was therefore allocated supplementary hours to place the subject matter in the wider context of history of science. students quickly showed greater motivation and understanding of mathematical applications, and failure rates dropped. the teacher was therefore allowed to further expand the approach with seminars under the label of study skills training. the institutional aim was improving student achievement in core subjects, and bildung was seen as something ‘over and above’ the actual course as such. cases b and c: at the swedish university where teachers b and c teach, the decision was taken at policy level to implement a bildung approach in all courses. bildung was thus a general aim at institutional level. however, relatively few institutional measures were taken to support teachers’ efforts in this direction. case b: this teacher taught literature and history classes to student teachers. she had the advantage of following the same students over several years, allowing her to pursue and deepen the bildung approach. also, she had considerable freedom to organise both content and form of instruction. learning aims for the courses included both subject content and reflection. bildung could therefore be said to constitute a necessary element of the courses, while still remaining external to what was considered to be the actual subjects. avery and wihlborg teachers’ interpretation of bildung in practice journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 9 case c: this teacher gave teacher training classes to students who were already active as vocational teachers. students were invited to relate theory to their own teaching practice and experience. reflection and working with their individual attitudes were central learning aims in the courses, which strived for integration of the students’ prior knowledge. bildung could therefore be seen as a core dimension of the courses. results teachers’ accounts of their teaching practice and their perceptions of student learning below, the findings are described in relation to the teachers’ perceptions of (i) teachers’ practices, (ii) learning outcomes, and (iii) students’ and teachers’ own development. (i) teachers’ practices: in the descriptions of how they introduced bildung into their teaching practices, the teachers mentioned a wide range of approaches:  practices that provide rich contextual material and scope for contextualising knowledge.  using the seminar as a fundamental form for instruction.  practices that put the student in charge of his or her own learning process.  practices that involve reflecting on problems without ready answers.  allowing students time to mature both as individuals and in the way they deal with course content. in all the cases, the student’s voice was given space to develop to some extent. in case a, teaching had previously taken the form of lectures only. study skills groups were created, where students were encouraged to discuss how they had reached conclusions and why they had chosen a particular method, rather than simply presenting solutions to the assignments. in case b, the form of the seminar became a central issue. students organised the seminars independently and the form of the seminar required that each student express herself on each occasion. finally, in case c, the core content of the course involved working on the student’s own attitudes and work experience. here, personal transformation was not a by-product but the central aim. avery and wihlborg teachers’ interpretation of bildung in practice journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 10 (ii) learning outcomes: the teachers brought up a variety of effects which they considered to result from the introduction of a bildung perspective on their courses. these descriptions cannot be taken as directly mirroring the extent to which learning took place, since the teachers’ ambitions made them particularly sensitive to certain qualities in the students’ development. on the other hand, it is not unreasonable to suppose that adjusting teaching practices and the teachers’ attention to certain qualities also supported student learning in these directions. according to the teachers, students developed their ability to:  relate to a wider context.  negotiate meaning.  reflect on practices.  develop as individuals.  deal with problems in creative ways. looking more specifically at case a, we can see how these various aspects presented themselves concretely. teacher a commented that through the bildung approach, students learned to start from the problem, by approaching mathematical questions as problems that arise in specific historical contexts (‘relate to a wider context’), not as solutions that are already there and simply have to be learned by heart. they came to identify with the scientists/mathematicians who invented various theorems, by learning about their lives, and the historical context in which they worked; this was a step towards seeing themselves as competent and independent researchers (‘develop as individuals’). an important point was that they learned to start from a real-life context in solving problems (‘deal with problems in creative ways’). this means that the problem is not already formally defined and expressed as a problem in mathematical terms. the formulation of the problem, the choice or invention of method to solve it, and evaluating the relevance of solutions in practical terms, all had to be based in authentic complex situations, rather than derive from simplified and artificially constructed hypotheses. here, the bildung approach stimulated the students to see mathematics as something outside the classroom (‘relate to a wider context’). students further acquired valuable study skills, such as finding the drive for study in themselves, learning to evaluate their own progress, avery and wihlborg teachers’ interpretation of bildung in practice journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 11 and learning to define study goals themselves (‘develop as individuals’), as well as in dialogue with other students, mentors and teachers. (iii) students’ and teachers’ own development: besides the specific capabilities that they perceive to have been supported by introducing a bildung approach, teachers felt that the changes had an effect on the participants as individuals.  gaining self-insight.  gaining pedagogical insight. the observed changes were perceived by all teachers as a process which may take considerable time. teacher c further stressed that it was difficult for students to reach the same kind of self-insight when they did not have personal practical experience on which to base their reflection. teachers observed that students gained self-insight, practiced selfreflection, changed as individuals, and developed in new directions. teachers also expressed that they themselves developed in these processes, becoming more skilled in their capacity to consciously modify their own teaching practices, and becoming more sensitive to the processes their students were going through. teachers a and b had previously engaged in teacher-centred practices and had to learn to face their own insecurities when they no longer controlled the interaction in the same way. all teachers needed to reflect on the new practices, so they could argue for them and motivate the changes. discussion interpreting the characteristics in all three cases, teachers expressed that introducing a dimension of bildung had a number of beneficial effects. for instance, teacher a found that introducing lectures based on a bildung perspective increased students’ motivation. instead of letting external requirements drive studies, the studies became self-generating, motivated by the students’ own curiosity and interest (a ‘learning mood’, see nilsson and wihlborg, 2011; matusov et avery and wihlborg teachers’ interpretation of bildung in practice journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 12 al., 2013). having the intention to understand ideas for yourself is also the central feature of what marton et al. (1997) have called a ‘deep’ approach to learning. focus was shifted from passively acquiring existing mathematical tools, to looking for ways to apply mathematical reasoning to real-life problems. students started creative mathematical reasoning. however, the teacher stressed that the path to creativity and independent problem-solving strategies was a very slow process. when students started their studies, they were not able to reflect independently. they were used to passively receiving information from the lectures, without investing themselves. at the same time, the changes in teaching practice were implemented within an educational paradigm above all concerned with efficiency and tangible results. to collaboratively solve urgent problems in society, knowledge needs to be related to wider contexts, shared across borders, and continuously renegotiated. but structural forces instead produce fragmentation, disconnecting higher education from the issues it is supposed to address. these dynamics are largely connected to evaluations, competition and economic steering mechanisms (wihlborg, 2009; nilsson and wihlborg, 2011). in case a, despite the teacher’s strong personal engagement, bildung could not initially be implemented as a central dimension of the course. to introduce a bildung perspective, additional teaching hours were instead added onto the regular course. in the institutional context, covering the subject matter set down in the curriculum was seen as a priority. the introduction of bildung therefore needed to be justified by improved results in the students’ exams. the positive effect on student performance subsequently allowed teacher a to argue for extra hours. we can note that, in practice, this means that learning to reproduce subject matter at exams was prioritised higher than the issue of whether students actually learn to do anything that may serve society or their personal development later in life. teacher a stressed that it takes a long time before the full effect of a bildung perspective becomes apparent. added motivation among the students had immediate effects and students did in fact achieve better marks. but developing a more creative approach, the ability to conceive real-life problems in mathematical terms, or independently formulate problem-solving strategies, were all aspects that appeared gradually over time in the course of the students’ studies. these effects would not have shown up in short-term evaluations of an individual module. avery and wihlborg teachers’ interpretation of bildung in practice journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 13 the teacher in case c had one group of students who were already professionally active. this meant that the wider context did not have to be supplied by the course itself, or other modules on the programme. a richer context, personal engagement, practical needs which could drive the application of theory, and value conflicts, were all elements that the students themselves brought into the class. the questions of the individual students’ attitudes and positions could therefore easily be developed against the backdrop of their professional experience. resources in terms of experience which the students themselves brought into the classroom, and which were used as a central element in teaching and learning practice, thus expanded the space for development within the otherwise limited time available. the teacher in case b achieved similar aims as teacher c, by letting students reflect on diverse forms of experience recorded in literary texts. introducing such ‘condensed’, rich, narrated experience allowed her to widen the scope for reflection and the variety of perspectives available in the classroom. identification was favoured by the literary forms, rather than by direct personal experience. working to develop clearly structured seminar forms, where everyone was expected to contribute and giving students most of the responsibility for the seminars, provided considerable scope for self-development (cf. biesta, 2010). according to this teacher, meeting the same students in more than one module over a period of years made it possible to qualitatively deepen the development. although the teachers used different means to introduce aspects of bildung in their courses, a common point was that they opened up a space for negotiation of meaning, rather than drilling students to reproduce an externally defined set of subject content. such negotiation supposes that both teachers and students see the educational process as something intrinsically meaningful and worth investing in. conclusions in scandinavia, as in other parts of europe, framing education in a discourse of economic productivity tends to lead to alienation (hansen, 2011), depriving both teachers and students of the dimension of personal meaning. quantitative methods of evaluating quality encourage mechanistic reproduction, where knowledge is conceptualised as a set of ‘facts’ or discrete procedural skills, to be acquired by the students as quickly as possible. as a avery and wihlborg teachers’ interpretation of bildung in practice journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 14 consequence, critical reflection, creativity and independent thinking tend to be neglected (barrling hermansson, 2005). the contradictory objectives and forces outlined in the introduction form the backdrop for higher education in scandinavia. we can note the tension between the desire to foster independent reasoning on the one hand, and the obligation to measure achievements against fixed standards that are defined outside the teaching and learning relationship itself. secondly, there is the tension between the aim of placing knowledge and skills in a wider context, and the actual format of courses, modules or learning aims, which tends towards fragmentation into discrete measurable units. thirdly, differences can be observed in the meaning-making process students and teachers are involved in, depending on how voices are heard and the space that is opened for negotiation or alternative constructions. to what extent can the student engage personally in the questions that are studied? to what extent can they be linked to actual problems and practices in society? to foster a kind of learning that can actually be applied to real-life problems in society, space for discussions and flexibility concerning outcomes are both necessary. up to a point, pre-defining the content of a course in the syllabus may have positive effects, since the efforts and attention of teachers and students can thereby be coordinated and focused (see engeström, 1987; 1991). but when what is seen as the ‘efficiency’ of instruction is pushed to the limits, no space is left for holistic integration, questioning, inquiry or further development. in the logic of ‘efficiency’ and performance, focus is placed on immediate and tangible achievements. there is little scope for experimentation and the learning process. bildung fundamentally introduces another view of time and personal growth. ‘friction’ caused by engaging with issues that cannot be quickly resolved is seen as positive and contributing to development, rather than as constituting an obstacle. focus is placed on the process, the quality of insights, and the depth of personal engagement, rather than on performance in quantitative terms. the goal is to promote a gradual life-long process of inner transformation, rather than produce immediate and outward results. the logic of measurement and evaluations is today based on externally defined standardised values and criteria. learning is thus ultimately conceptualised as conformity: perfectly reproducing meaning defined by others. we are concerned with the development avery and wihlborg teachers’ interpretation of bildung in practice journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 15 of higher education and believe that it is important to counteract trends that preclude independent thinking. holistic approaches to learning are needed, that place knowledge and skills in a wider context. it would be regrettable, if the exchange-value aspect were permitted to dominate pedagogical practice, leading to forms of practice where the main goal is that the students’ learning is achieved in an atomistic and instrumentalist way (nilsson and wihlborg, 2011). a different scenario for higher education is desirable, in coherence with bildung ideals, which assumes that students and teachers can engage in negotiating meanings and goals (see engeström, 1987; 1991). it is crucial that students and teachers take part in intrinsically meaningful activities, placed in a wider context that supports students’ self-insight, personal journey and individual responsibility for learning (see also matusov et al., 2013; cole et al., 2006; matusov, 2009). in the cases that we have studied, the teachers found very different ways to create a space of learning and negotiation of meaning. in the course of this process, the teachers themselves simultaneously reached new insights concerning their own practice and awareness, and thereby made their own journeys of bildung as well. acknowledgements this work was supported in part by a grant from the gyllenstierna krapperup’s foundation, sweden. references barrling hermansson, k. (2005) akademisk frihet i praktiken. en rapport om tillståndet i den högre utbildningen. (academic freedom in practice. a report on the state of higher education). stockholm: högskoleverket (the swedish national agency for higher education). biesta, g.j.j. (2010) ‘learner, student, speaker: why it matters how we call those we teach’, educational philosophy and theory, 42(4), pp. 540-552. avery and wihlborg teachers’ interpretation of bildung in practice journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 16 boström, a.k., boudard, e. and siminou, p. (2001) lifelong learning in sweden: the extent to which vocational education and training policy is nurturing lifelong learning in sweden. luxembourg: cedefop, office for official publications of the european communities. burr, v. (2003) social constructionism. 2nd edn. london: routledge. cole, m. and the distributed literacy consortium (2006) the fifth dimension: an afterschool program built on diversity. new york: russell sage. engeström, y. (1987) learning by expanding. helsinki: orienta – konsultit oy. engeström, y. (1991) ‘non scolae sed vitae discimus: toward overcoming the encapsulation of school learning’, learning and instruction, 1(3), pp. 243-259. european commission (2007) key competences for lifelong learning: european reference framework. european commission, luxembourg: office for official publications of the european communities. european parliament (2010) european parliament resolution of 18 may 2010 on key competences for a changing world. available at: http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getdoc.do?pubref=-//ep//text+ta+p7-ta2010-0164+0+doc+xml+v0//en (accessed: 3 march 2013). florida, r. and tinagli, i. (2004) europe in the creative age. london: demos. freire, p. (1970/ 2000) pedagogy of the oppressed. new york: the continuum international publishing group. hansen, h.f. (2011) ‘university reforms in denmark and the challenges for political science’, european political science, 10(2), pp. 235-247. avery and wihlborg teachers’ interpretation of bildung in practice journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 17 klafki, w. (2000) ‘the significance of classical theories of bildung for a contemporary concept of allgemeinbildung’, in westbury, i., hopmann, s. and riquarts, k. (eds.) teaching as a reflective practice. the german didaktik tradition. mahwah, new jersey: lawrence erlbaum associates, pp. 85-107. lawson, m. (ed.) (1991) n.f.s. grundtvig: selected educational writings. elsinore: international people's college/the association of folk high schools. leisyte, l. (2006) ‘npm effects on research practices in english and dutch universities’, presentation at unesco forum on higher education, research and knowledge, paris 29 november – 1 december. available at: http://portal.unesco.org/education/en/files/51662/11691151295leisyte_updatednov 2006.pdf/leisyte_updatednov2006.pdf (accessed: 3 march 2013). marton, f., hounsell, d. and entwistle, n.j. (1997) the experience of learning. 2nd edn. edinburgh: scottish academic press. matusov, e., von duyke, k. and han, s. (2013) ‘community of learners: ontological and non-ontological projects’. outlines – critical practice studies, 14(1), 41-72 (2013) available at: http://ojs.statsbiblioteket.dk/index.php/outlines (accessed: 11 march 2013). matusov, e. (2009) journey into dialogic pedagogy. hauppauge, ny: nova publishers. mezirow, j. (1985) ‘a critical theory of self-directed learning’, in brookfield, s. (ed.) selfdirected learning: from theory to practice. new directions for continuing education, 25. san francisco: jossey-bass, pp. 17-29 mowbray, s. and halse, c. (2010) ‘the purpose of the phd: theorizing the skills acquired by students’, higher education research and development, 29(6), pp. 653-664. national advisory committee on creative and cultural education (1999) all our futures: creativity, culture and education. london: dfee. avery and wihlborg teachers’ interpretation of bildung in practice journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 18 nilsson, l. and wihlborg, m. (2011) ‘higher education as commodity or space for learning: modelling contradictions in educational practices’, power and education 3(2), pp. 104-116. sapsford, r. and jupp, v. (eds.) (1996) data collection and analysis. london: sage. silverman, d. (2000) doing qualitative research: a practice handbook. london: sage. strauss, a.l. (1987) qualitative analysis for social scientists. new york: cambridge university press. svensson, l. and wihlborg, m. (2010) ‘internationalising the content of higher education: the need for a curriculum perspective’, higher education, 60(6), pp. 595-613. teelken, c. and wihlborg, m. (2010) ‘higher education as commodity or space for learning: modelling contradictions in educational practices’, power and education, 3(2), pp. 104-116. trow, m. (1994) academic reviews and the culture of excellence. stockholm: universitetskanslern. united nations educational, scientific and cultural organization (2005) towards knowledge societies. paris: unesco world reports. vestlund, g. (1996) folkuppfostran, folkupplysning, folkbilding: det svenska folkets bildningshistoria – en översikt. (education, enlightenment and bildung of the people: the bildung history of the swedish people – an overview). stockholm: brevskolan. vygotsky, l. (1978) mind in society. london: harvard university press. westbury, i., hopmann, s. and riquarts, k. (2000) teaching as a reflective practice. the german didaktik tradition. mahwah, new jersey: lawrence erlbaum associates. wihlborg, m. (2009) ‘internationalising higher education – a challenging pedagogical and didactical issue for the 21st century’, european educational research journal, 8(1), pp. 117-132. avery and wihlborg teachers’ interpretation of bildung in practice journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 19 author details monne wihlborg, phd, is associate professor in education at the institution of health and social sciences, and elected member of the teaching academy at the faculty of medicine at lund university, sweden. monne wihlborg is a co-convener of the european educational research associations in the network research in higher education. her current research interest involves bildung, knowledge development and internationalisation in higher education. helen avery works for the centre for languages and literature, university of lund and school of education and communication, jönköping university, sweden. helen has a background in arabic and applied linguistics from the universities of neuchâtel and geneva, switzerland. her current research interests include the bilingual learner, teaching and learning in multicultural settings, and knowledge development in transdisciplinary environments. avery and wihlborg teachers’ interpretation of bildung in practice journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 20 appendix 1 interview guide what is bildung according to you, in general? what does it signify in particular – in relation to the course syllabus, activities, and educational objectives? please give examples and clarify how you teach in your course. how is learning achieved in relation to bildung? what is the nature of learning? in relation to bildung aims, what are the most important/central aspects in teaching and learning situations according to you? please give examples. what are the most important changes that you have conducted in your own teaching and learning practice? please give examples. how do these changes relate to bildung? how could you see that the changes made a difference? what are the obstacles for implementing bildung into teaching and learning situations/contexts according to your experiences? literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 9: july 2015 peer-led academic learning: a global network chris keenan bournemouth university, uk abstract there is a great deal of evidence to support the view that there are a significant number of benefits to be gained when more experienced students are trained to guide and facilitate less experienced learners. peer-led academic learning is an increasingly global phenomenon and some uk schemes have been in existence since the early 1990s. in view of this, it was timely for the uk higher education academy (hea) to commission a report to explore the range and scope of uk schemes, reflect on progress so far, and identify opportunities for future developments. this opinion piece will provide a brief overview of the report findings, and will describe the development of a new world-wide network for practitioners to share their ideas/practice. the new network will also offer opportunities for collaborative research in this exciting area of student experience. keywords: peer-led learning; student-led peer learning; student retention; student experience. introduction the ‘mapping student-led peer learning in the uk’ report (keenan, 2014) was commissioned and published by the hea. written in partnership with marcia ody of the university of manchester, the report aimed to provide a picture of the scope and range of peer-led learning activity in the uk, offer examples of innovative practice, provide a global perspective of peer-led learning activity, and make recommendations for future developments in the field. the data for the report were gathered through a survey and participants were encouraged to offer examples of their innovative and creative practice for short case studies. this article will provide some of the key findings of the report. it will also highlight two key outputs of the work. firstly, participants and others in the sector keenan peer-led academic learning: a global network journal of learning development in higher education, issue 9: july 2015 2 were invited to contribute to a special edition of jldhe (to be published in november 2015) in order to develop their small case studies, research and experiences in publications secondly, a new network has been established for everyone interested in all forms of student-led academic learning and this will be expanded upon later in this piece. overview of the ‘mapping student-led peer learning in the uk’ report there are a growing number of recent studies that demonstrate and provide evidence for the benefits of peer-led academic learning that build on the early work of seminar authors such as vygotsky. more recent studies (keenan, 2011; 2012; baldry currens and coyle, 2013) explore the value of schemes within practice, for example in stem and health sciences, and as approaches for improving retention and progression (foster et al., 2011). other recent studies set out to explore peer-led academic learning through the lens of social and cognitive theories (hilsdon, 2013) and within the broad context of peer education (ody, 2013) in order to develop better understandings of the phenomenon taking place. the ‘mapping student-led peer learning in the uk’ report (keenan, 2014, p.8) had broad aims which were to explore through a survey the scope and range of peer-led learning activity in the uk, invite examples of innovative practice, place the uk activity within the global context, and make recommendations for future developments. the working definition of peer-led learning for this purpose was ‘the practice of more experienced students being trained to guide and facilitate the learning of less experienced students in an organised and supported way’ (keenan, 2014, p.5). data were gathered through a survey distributed in the spring of 2014. analysis of the data made it increasingly apparent that there was an appetite to develop this area as a field of research and practice, and some examples of innovation in practice and research were included within the final report. it was important to place the uk activity within the global peer learning context and short reports from australia, south africa, canada, sweden and the usa were also included. four of the key findings of the report state:  the prevalence of peer-led learning schemes is increasing across disciplines and institutions in the uk and internationally. keenan peer-led academic learning: a global network journal of learning development in higher education, issue 9: july 2015 3  partnership is built between students, peer leaders, tutors and the wider community.  institutions gain substantial reputational advantage from demonstrating commitment to building student engagement, community partnerships, progression and retention.  participation in national networks, collaborative practice and research is invaluable. the report identified a wide range of approaches to the organisation and operation of schemes, however, they tended to follow similar basic principles. for example, they:  support student learning.  foster cross year support for students.  enhance students' experience of university life.  create a safe environment where students are encouraged to ask questions. it was reported that students who engage in peer-led learning sessions experience less anxiety around their transition to university, feel a greater sense of belonging, and outcomes suggest there is improved academic confidence. leaders acquire higher level skills that underpin their personal and professional development, which in turn improves their employability prospects. they also develop a deeper understanding of their subject and enhanced social and inter-cultural awareness. schemes appear to help institutions meet their strategic goals relating to progression and retention of students and improved student satisfaction. in order to avoid a positive bias, the survey also asked respondents to identify challenges that might be encountered and advice about how to overcome those challenges. amongst the identified challenges respondents spoke of a need for robust data to support the implementation and embedding of schemes. it was felt that a lack of data and information could be an obstacle to gaining buy-in from other stakeholders. finally, the report offered a number of recommendations which included:  the importance of strategic leadership and support.  the importance of mainstreaming schemes within the curriculum. keenan peer-led academic learning: a global network journal of learning development in higher education, issue 9: july 2015 4  that a broad group of stakeholders, including employers, should be engaged in the activities. towards a new community of practice a further important recommendation of the 2014 report was that: the national and international peer-learning community should promote the sharing of practice, undertake pooling of data and collaborative research into the participative pedagogies, and build a bank of impact studies. (keenan, 2014, p.44) during the writing up of the report, it became increasingly apparent that there was a great deal of energy, enthusiasm and commitment amongst practitioners. it was felt that a new network for all practitioners working in the field of peer-led academic learning would be welcomed. this new network would embrace all approaches, whether formal or informal, whether or not based on the supplemental instruction model, and with any focus, for example, within science technology engineering and mathematics (stem) or the arts, including peer-led academic writing, peer-led academic learning support for students from diverse widening participation backgrounds, and for international students. it was felt that such a forum would be well placed to share advice and practical support, share practice, share and develop resources, and potentially collaborate on large scale world-wide impact studies that would offer an evidence base to support the benefits of schemes. it would also offer practitioners the opportunity to work together beyond international boundaries on developing important research in this field. in order to underpin this new network with a sustainable framework, marcia ody and i approached the association for learning development in higher education (www.aldinhe.ac.uk). aldinhe is an independent organisation with strong membership and international affiliations. many members of the learning development community are already engaged in peer-led learning activities and there is a clear alignment of interests between the association and this new network. it was also felt that a range of stakeholders should be involved in the setting up of the new network in order to ensure that all voices were represented, and an advisory group was therefore brought together to support the network development. this advisory group is representative of the international keenan peer-led academic learning: a global network journal of learning development in higher education, issue 9: july 2015 5 community, students' union, practitioners, researchers, disciplinary groupings, and those who have experience of embedding and sustaining schemes. it was with great excitement that the new network for academic peer learning was launched on 10 june 2015 during the peer education event held at the university of manchester. news of the new network was circulated via existing networks and word of mouth, and within four weeks of the launch we already have 189 subscribers, representing 122 different institutions/organisations from 11 countries worldwide. this extraordinary growth is heart-warming evidence of the desire for, and importance of, such a network and grouping of people who share a common passion for this most interesting and exciting aspect of student learning and development. new subscribers to the network are introducing themselves and generously sharing their interests, experiences and findings with the wider group. already there have been powerful and interesting discussions taking place across a variety of themes: socio-cultural  overcoming discipline-based stereotypes and gender barriers.  building community.  staff/student perspectives of schemes. peer leader development  training and evidencing leader development. broad approaches  asynchronous discussion forums.  academic writing, discourse and class.  overview of individual schemes and approaches.  transition support for international students > effective study practices.  chemistry, health professions.  pre-arrival widening participation.  disability and mental health embracing diversity workshop. keenan peer-led academic learning: a global network journal of learning development in higher education, issue 9: july 2015 6 sharing experiences of setting up schemes  introducing new schemes.  managing large programmes. research  links to critical literacies, participative pedagogies, etc.  practices to facilitate critical literacies. evaluation of schemes  measure and impact of schemes.  leader employability.  sharing of survey data and powerpoint presentations.  success factors. a lack of robust data had been cited in the mapping peer-led academic learning report as a potential obstacle in persuading policy makers of the benefits of introducing new schemes or continuing existing ones, and this new network, or community of practice, has potential to address this through collaborative ventures. in order to move the evaluation/research agenda forward, an impact/research special interest group (sig) has been set up within the new academic peer learning network. the broad aims of this sig are to determine key impact measures, share evaluation practices and coordinate collaborative research. a specific priority of the group will be to develop a large impact study aligned to the recommendations of the ‘mapping student-led peer learning in the uk’ (keenan, 2014) report. already network members from 26 institutions including the uk, canada, australia, the usa and south africa have expressed interest in collaborating on this. the methodology for the initial study is still under discussion but early thinking is to find out what data institutions are already collecting to evaluate their peer-led learning schemes. the sig will also hope to analyse existing surveys to ascertain if there is any data that is close enough to evidence impact across the sig institutions. it is anticipated that some of this initial analysis will be carried out at bournemouth university in the uk during august 2015. the new academic peer learning network is already developing into a friendly, supportive community of practice where practitioners can share practice, share ideas, and collaborate keenan peer-led academic learning: a global network journal of learning development in higher education, issue 9: july 2015 7 on creating an evidence-based, research informed field of practice, and it is exciting to see one of the recommendations of the ‘mapping student-led peer learning in the uk’ report coming to life. it is anticipated that the new community will not only provide a source of mutual advice and support, particularly around implementing, embedding and sustaining schemes, but that it will contribute to the development of resources for learnhigher and provide a strong basis for collaborative international research. finally, the special edition due to be published in november 2015 will include a broad and international picture of academic peer-led learning practice and is expected to be a bumper edition given the overwhelming expression of interest. references baldry currens, j.a. and coyle, j. (2013) ‘practice-based learning: multiple dimensions and the importance of ‘others’’, in higgs, j., sheehan, d., baldry currens, j., letts, w. and jensen, g.m. (eds.) realising exemplary practice-based education. rotterdam: sense publishers, pp. 81-90. foster, e., keenan, c. and colley, b. (2011) the here project 2008-2011 final report 2011. available at: https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/resources/detail/what-worksstudent-retention/here_project_what_works_final_report (accessed: 19 july 2015). hilsdon, j. (2013) ‘peer learning for change in higher education’, innovations in education and teaching international, 51(3), pp. 244-54 [online]. available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14703297.2013.796709 (accessed: 19 july 2015). keenan, c. (2011) peer assisted learning: in and beyond the classroom. available at: http://www.hestem.ac.uk/activity/peer-assisted-learning-and-beyond-classroom (accessed: 19 july 2015). keenan, c. (2012) the role of peer assisted learning in supporting student transition to he stem programmes: from a pal leader’s perspective. available at: http://hestemsw.org.uk/project?id=13&pp=531 (accessed: 19 july 2015). https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/resources/detail/what-works-student-retention/here_project_what_works_final_report https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/resources/detail/what-works-student-retention/here_project_what_works_final_report http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14703297.2013.796709 http://www.hestem.ac.uk/activity/peer-assisted-learning-and-beyond-classroom http://hestem-sw.org.uk/project?id=13&pp=531 http://hestem-sw.org.uk/project?id=13&pp=531 keenan peer-led academic learning: a global network journal of learning development in higher education, issue 9: july 2015 8 keenan, c. (2014) mapping student-led peer learning in the uk. available at: https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/node/10208 (accessed: 19 july 2015). ody, m. and carey. w. (2013) ‘peer education’, in morgan, m. (ed.) the student engagement handbook practice in higher education. bingley: emerald group publishing ltd., pp. 291-312. author details chris keenan is a learning and teaching fellow in the faculty of applied science and technology, bournemouth university. https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/node/10208 peer-led academic learning: a global network abstract introduction overview of the ‘mapping student-led peer learning in the uk’ report towards a new community of practice references author details literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 6: november 2013 why is research still invisible in further education? carla solvason university of worcester, uk geoffrey elliott university of worcester, uk abstract this article takes as its starting point earlier research reported by geoffrey elliott in 1996. that study found that research was consistently marginalised in the fe sector, and identified a number of structural factors that contributed to this ‘invisibility’. this new study draws upon a small sample of lecturers who belong to a further and higher education early years partnership. through the participants’ voices and perspectives, the authors identify continuing dissonance and issues of research marginalisation. the discussion also highlights contemporary educational discourse, with its predominant focus upon measurable value at the expense of values, as a key factor in sustaining a culture that is antithetic to thoughtful reflection and research. the authors identify the development of a ‘collaborative centralised’ research community as critical to an alternative possibility for research in further education. keywords: research; further education; lecturer; tutor; culture. education should begin in research and end in research…an education which does not begin by evoking initiative and end by encouraging it must be wrong. for its whole aim is the production of active wisdom. (whitehead, 1962, pp.57-8) seventeen years ago elliott (1996) opened his article which investigated the scarcity of research in further education (fe) citing these words, which are, despite the passage of some considerable time, no less relevant today. in 1996, elliott explored literature that discussed the marginalisation of research in the fe sector. today we would like to re-open solvason and elliott why is research still invisible in further education? this debate, but adding one important feature that was missing previously: the voice of the fe lecturer (hereafter ‘tutor’). this article represents the voices of the two authors and five colleagues. the first author is a university lecturer without direct experience of working within colleges, though having worked closely with them, whilst the second has worked in both sectors. of the contributors, three of these are currently teaching within the fe environment, one has moved from fe to higher education (he) and one is an early years practitioner who has moved into he. therefore this piece represents a variety of perspectives, but predominantly that of the fe tutor. our intention and method, following carr and kemmis (1986, p.198), has been to involve these colleagues ‘directly in theorizing their own practice and revising their theories self-critically in the light of their practical consequences’. over the past two years the first author has been part of a university early years partnership management team that works very closely and very successfully with eight partner colleges and their staff, all members of course teams teaching a university foundation degree in early years. the most notable disparity in this relationship is the high volume of teaching and assessment that fe tutors have to deal with. the ‘heavy teaching loads, shortage of money and…complex character of the further education sector’ (cantor and roberts, 1972/1986, p.256) that elliott cited remain unchanged. elliott’s article extensively explored funding issues related to this, but funding is not something that was recognised as being of importance to the college partners, or only indirectly insomuch as time costs money, and investment in research is not considered a relevant use of time. their perspectives have led us to focus instead upon the cultures (practices, traditions and beliefs) and resulting ethos of the fe colleges that they work within. in the context of the current government drive to place increased higher education student numbers into fe colleges (hefce, 2012), it is crucial to ask why is research still invisible in further education? or, more specifically, why are intelligent, articulate and reflective colleagues in fe not contributing to the ever growing canon of educational research? there is still no academic journal dedicated to research in and on further education. of articles published in the last 10 years by the journal sponsored by the further education research association, research in post-compulsory education, under a quarter (23%) are written by fe practitioners (57 articles out of a total of 248). yet it is clear that many colleagues in fe do carry out research and advanced scholarship, overwhelmingly in their own time. the pg cert fe/cert ed fe contained modules on research and a research report as mandatory (now removed) which demonstrated that journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 2 solvason and elliott why is research still invisible in further education? many fe tutors could and did produce valuable research. we asked colleagues in fe to reflect on doing research in their sector and those who are named managed to find time in their busy schedules to offer some reflections, for which we are grateful. elliott (1996) explored a number of very practical barriers to doing research that colleagues within fe face, some of which we shall also explore within this article, but through a contemporary lens. the discourse of education has changed over recent years, and this is an important new dimension that has greatly influenced our thinking on the position and status of research in the colleges and universities that we are familiar with. the lexicon that we possess, or that we currently utilise, will impact upon the decisions that we make. what words are we using in order to make decisions about the purpose and practice of education? how are we describing ourselves as educators? pring (2007, p.326) asks us to consider the language through which ‘educational and training provision is described and evaluated’. we may not be aware of the impact that the dominant discourse has upon our thinking, but pring (2007, p.328) suggests that ‘it is language which shapes our consciousness’ and which has led educationalists into uncritical acceptance of the ‘trite’, influenced by the ‘impoverished metaphors which govern our language and thought’. language is our means of thinking, of making decisions. so just how do the reflections of fe colleagues compare to the problems posed by elliott 17 years ago? elliott (1996, p.104) argued that for there to be a research culture college managers ‘would need to develop an institution-wide research policy and ensure that its organisational and management structures supported its implementation’. this would then be reflected in the processes of establishing research roles and incorporating research activity into institute statements and plans. so why does this not happen? elliott suggested a number of reasons for this in 1996: that compared to the he sector fewer staff hold research degrees, staff development and training is underfunded, contracts are filled with teaching and administration and are inflexible. we found current evidence of research and scholarly activity being squeezed in fe, as colleagues reflect on a number of issues: planning for and marking he work isn’t seen as any different to any other planning and marking for any other course and there is no appreciation of difference between research for lesson planning and research for writing...there is no mention of academic writing in staff development in college and there is no help available… research and writing for publication do not appear to be an important aspect of fe colleges at all. to my knowledge there is no writing for publication going on in any journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 3 solvason and elliott why is research still invisible in further education? department in my own setting. i am only aware of research going on as part of individuals’ ma study… (tutor a) i was invited to write with a number of people who have gone on to publish widely and very successfully. however, by that time i had begun lecturing at an fe college. my new job consumed all of my time and energy and indeed it continues to do so…i was told that all staff have time on their timetables to research – that’ll be the 10 minutes between lessons when you have to fit in a toilet stop and your lunch break then! (tutor b) …time allocation could be given for increasing qualifications but not for pure research…the research i needed to complete to gain additional qualifications was seen to be secondary to the actual qualification, it was a means to an end. no time allocation requests were ever given for ‘stand-alone’ research that did not result in actual qualifications. (tutor c) …although [managers in fe]…may appreciate the particular need of higher level teaching staff to extend their own learning in line with colleagues in the he sector, they have not made provision for the pursuit of ‘scholarly activities’… (tutor d) there persists the view that a college tutor gaining a qualification which results in a box ticked will, somehow, add to value. references to the marginal nature of research within fe were laced throughout colleague’s responses. it appears that, still, ‘research is not regarded as a core activity for lecturers in fe’ (elliott, 1996, p.106). as elliott goes on to discuss, colleges are yet another victim of this country’s ‘quick fix’ approach to education. student numbers and performance indicators are what count, and research does not comfortably align with these necessities. pring (2007, p.319) laments how ‘politicians are in a hurry for results, and are understandably impatient of those who answer questions with yet more questions’. such an approach seems to us to have infused the whole education system such that ‘deep research’, which attempts to create more questions, is secondary to answers that will improve results. we discuss this shift in the purpose of research later. within our sample of fe tutors, elliott’s words still ring true that ‘tired staff may find that research becomes a daunting prospect’ (elliott, 1996, p.105) but that tiredness seems to journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 4 solvason and elliott why is research still invisible in further education? be a permanent feature of all teaching currently, whether based within the further or higher education arena. added to the pressure of teaching hours is the requirement to mark hundreds of scripts in a limited number of working days (always creeping into evenings and weekends), annual evaluation reports, reviews, action plans, revalidations, the writing of new modules. all teaching staff, whether he or fe, experience these pressures. what is more significant is why he staff feel an obligation beyond, an intrinsic motivation to research, whereas fe staff do not appear to. elliott (1996, p.106) claimed that research was prioritised above teaching in he, but we now wish to question this assumption. it is, we believe, a consequence of the intensification of he work, particularly during the continued expansion of the sector over the last period, that he priorities have become more functional than they were. student experience surveys and key information sets now decide whether our university courses are 'value for money'. the notion that a university might be valued upon the rigour of the research taking place seems rather antiquated and irrelevant within our current climate. there is neither time nor space within post-compulsory education to explore philosophical issues for their own sake. research is not recognised as relating to quality purely of itself, unless it is related to quality systems, quality of teaching, quality of student experience. we are now service-led. ball (2006, p.11), comments that, ‘ethical reflection is rendered obsolete in the process for goal attainment, performance improvement and budget maximisations’. he wryly adds that ‘value replaces values, except where it can be shown that values add value’ (ball, 2006, p.11). pring (2007, p.318) also bemoans this approach when he discusses how “there is deep suspicion of theory of any kind unless its relevance to improvement is clear and unmistaken” underlining the need for measurable results, or, as pring (2007, p.318) describes it, ‘obvious practical pay-off’. odden and kelley (1997; see pring, 2007) were key players in aligning education more with the parameters of business and in creating a new language of education which discussed ‘productivity targets’, or as harris and ranson (2005, p.573) refer to it, ‘the twin pillars of accountability (inspection, test scores, league tables) and standards (target setting, monitoring, raising achievement plans)’. although elliott (1996) described an fe system wherein virtually all research was fuelled by the evaluation of systems, the language of education has mutated still further since then, ‘gradually enlisting the language of the business world… performance indicators…efficiency gains and investment’ (pring, 2007, p.325). and this change in language presages a change in our values and our thinking about education. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 5 solvason and elliott why is research still invisible in further education? research in he has now become just one other product on the production line, albeit one with a higher value than within the fe environment. and there is increasingly encouragement (through funding streams) to work on research that will improve the outputs of the university: student engagement, student achievement, student satisfaction. increasingly universities, like colleges, are moving towards the ‘‘means/end’ model of educational improvement’ (pring, 2007, p.323). research is being used to justify and approve processes. but healey et al. (2010, p.241) add another facet to this argument, that in the fe/he emphasis upon ‘value added’ ‘student perceptions of staff research as cutting edge and industry-linked may become increasingly significant’. as fees make degrees more career-based, and student expectations are raised, the ‘pound of flesh’ mentality will impact upon tutors more than ever. students will expect their tutors to be both learned and current. the foundation degree in early years places a very strong emphasis on the students’ need to reflect, and there is positive encouragement of the students to become the type of reflective practitioners advocated by schon (1983). however, a serious dilemma is being created by the pressures on tutors’ time and the demands of course teaching. how will the students be able effectively to discern the difference between ‘a piece of disguised nonsense’ and ‘something that is patent nonsense’ (wittgenstein, 1958, p.1.464) if their teachers are not given space to muse? the depth of thoughtful reflection needed for study within he, whilst being squeezed out by marketisation in universities, has never really been recognised within colleges. yet it has been shown that a ‘research-based approach to the curriculum’, where students actively research for themselves, is highly effective (healey et al., 2010, p.243). many college tutors do not feel confident with a researchbased approach to teaching, as they, themselves, are not confident researchers. however, fe tutors clearly recognise and mourn the absence of space and time for research and reflection; and they clearly feel that this impacts upon the quality of experience being offered to their students: i questioned the position of fe institutions in being able to deliver an experience of he to students where parity of experiences would be so different within a university. the devaluing of research skills over a period of time, i felt ensured negativity and a lack of self-recognition and value. (tutor c) journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 6 solvason and elliott why is research still invisible in further education? it seemed that it [fda early years] was a progression route from level 3 and that it was something that just ‘happened’an extension of what occurred at level 3 and that anyone teaching he in fe supported students to be able to ‘do it’. (tutor c) within our sample most of the college tutors felt that research, in the eyes of their managers at least, played no part in their fe careers and that it was certainly not on their teaching agenda. this was despite the obvious gains to be derived from it, one of which was a greater ability to empathise with the students that they were teaching. …my research journey not only furnished me with essential skills and knowledge, but also brought me closer to my students because, whilst recognising that we all have very different stories, i knew what it was like to juggle work and family and study…there was certainly no encouragement to take the research further or to even know the details of my research findings, which were especially pertinent to the delivery of higher education within further education colleges. (tutor d) there exists an unhelpful disjuncture between research that generates knowledge that can inform teaching and research as a means of personal development. there remains a cultural 'jar' in the definition of teachers as technician/demonstrators or as reflective academics, whereby the concept of research is something separate from (and not integral to) teaching. a chasm persists between teaching and research, unless research is happening in order to justify ‘teaching approaches’. as tutors we need to model the production of new knowledge. teaching and research should be entwined, just as we support students on their learning journeys it is important to recognise and celebrate the fact that we are also on our own. the extent to which research is integral to teaching will not be recognised until managers within he truly embrace the concepts of lifelong learning as opposed to productivity. it must be recognised that tutors are developing alongside their students, and that the tutor’s own learning is not solely for the purpose of knowledge transmission to students, but for their own development as academics. comments made suggested that the desire to learn, develop and challenge ourselves is integral to our role as evolving academics: …i felt that the research journey had had a profound effect on both my personal and professional development, not only from the increase in confidence that accompanies achievement, but from the opportunities to develop knowledge and journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 7 solvason and elliott why is research still invisible in further education? understanding, to have my ideas challenged and to have my understanding challenged… (tutor d) the reggio emilia approach to learning and development sees research as ‘the stance, the attitude with which teachers approach the sense and meaning of life’ (rinaldi, 2005, p.148), it is vital for personal development. giudici et al. (2001, p.150) also discuss the importance of documenting that search, that it is through language that the ‘emotionally moving sense of the search for the meaning of life’ obtains ‘holistic fullness’. research needs to be recorded; tutors need to write. because fe does not have its own research model, it follows on from, but also competes with, he research in terms of publication. just as fe research was hugely underrepresented when elliott searched in 1996, it remains the case today. and even when he does engage with research in fe, then it tends to be ‘research on’ rather than supporting research by or with fe institutions. there remains the issue that the language of this text talks about 'us and them', despite us working in close partnership. but the fact is that universities and colleges do have different cultures. and that has nothing to do with the qualifications or experience of those working there. it is the culture that they are working within which shapes the discourse. let us be frank. the discourse of university is not one of 'expanding horizons through creative research'. it, just like fe colleges, prioritises numbers, profits, results. the key difference is that there is also recognition of the value of research outputs. it may be that this 'recognition' equates to ref scores, and there is still the view that 'real' research has to be empirical research, that this is 'worth' more. writing and research which is simply thinking through ideas, or reflecting on literature is a less worthwhile enterprise in the 'rating' process, but it is reluctantly endured and even supported. the difference between the vast majority of fe and he institutes is the expectation that in he research, of some form, will be produced. the growing trend towards partnerships between fe and he institutions has proved to be an important feature in promoting a research culture (elliott, 1996, p.109). although the many hurdles faced by fe tutors makes the pursuit of research projects seem almost impossible, the desire of colleagues in fe to engage with the research process is clear, as is the support that they feel from their he partner/s. in fact, the comments made by fe colleagues below make the research partnership between college and university seem less of a luxury and more of a necessity. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 8 solvason and elliott why is research still invisible in further education? i feel that in order to build more of a relationship with the university, i do need to be given time to write/research as i feel that we will not be able to develop any further in the he partnership without doing so…i do not feel confident as a researcher/writer, but i tend to lack confidence in my own ability in general… however, working closely with the university team is really helping me personally to understand that i am more capable than i realise…my support network in this area is through my links with university. i have personally never written collaboratively, but i see it as a good way to begin writing for the first time. (tutor a) there has been, for some time, a clear pattern within the college that those in managerial positions, are encouraged to undertake masters’ programmes, and i believe that now, within my institution, there is, at last, a growing recognition that those of us who deliver higher education need to undertake relevant cpd and higher courses of study. however, the question remains, will staff pursuing higher degrees be given time for this study, and will those of us who are encouraged to undertake study and scholarly activity be given more than a few days a year in which to undertake a task which, currently, does not appear to merit any ‘reward’… in the meantime, the promise of working collaboratively with our uw partnership team is providing the inspiration needed to write again! (tutor d) i am at the beginning of my research career…the freedom that this environment [the university] and my colleagues who i work with have been the critical catalyst. even though i question my ability to research, i feel that this is residue from the fe environment…it is for this reason that i feel it is critical to develop the relationship with fe partners in order to ensure that either collaborative, or self-directed research is given the opportunity to be developed and sustained. (tutor c) it seems somewhat ironic that colleagues joining university from other backgrounds (in the case below an early years setting) felt more freedom and encouragement to research than those from an fe college. in this particular case the colleague felt ‘supported by an imaginative and inspiring local authority mentor, interested parents, and the experience of undertaking the eyps qualification’ (tutor e). although direct support from the local authority in terms of time out of the setting only amounted to a few days, she says: journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 9 solvason and elliott why is research still invisible in further education? i felt happy to give up time to work on this project as it was extremely satisfying to investigate the setting and our practice, and it started many interesting conversations with staff, and one or two of the parents. it was also an opportunity to develop the work of the nursery in a way that would not have been possible otherwise, and this helped me to feel that the roof had been raised and the walls pushed back – so to speak! – so that we could make new discoveries within a larger intellectual space. (tutor e) is the issue that tutors in fe (just like many tutors in he) need to start to see research differently? do we need to focus more upon opening up intellectual ‘space’, continuing our own learning journeys, and less upon producing measurable results? just as we as tutors need to re-imagine the way that we approach research with student-practitioners (solvason, 2012), so it may be helpful for college tutors to re-think the purpose of their own research. much of this has to do with confidence and empowerment. there is an element of risk of opening oneself to criticism that exists when research is put into the public sphere. many feel that to avoid this one has to follow the ‘rules’, or as one college tutor described the process, ‘research by sat-nav’. those who are less confident seek the reassurance that they are doing it ‘right’. mcniff’s (2011) likening research to ‘stepping off a cliff, who knows what might happen’ can be debilitating rather than enabling. exploratory, reflexive research represents a loss of power and opens oneself up to question, which is a position some teachers may find both unfamiliar and uncomfortable. just as our students need to claim research for their own development, so do we, as teachers and as academics. one college tutor referred to research as a ‘wonderfully empowering and somewhat indulgent activity’. it is such a shame that many tutors do not feel empowered at all, but rather intimidated by research. perhaps it would be different if tutors felt reassured that research is not about rigidly abiding by strict methodological parameters, but about ‘enabl[ing] new, valid understandings to develop; understandings that empower practitioners to improve their work for the beneficiaries in their care’ (dadds and hart, 2001, p.169). it is important that we are not lulled into seeing research as a detached collation of information and analysis, but as a method of exploring our own ideologies, our own practice. it is important that research does not become another means of ticking a quality improvement box, but that it is used to inform understanding, and, as a direct or indirect result to improve practice. dadds and hart (2001, p.169) stress that ‘professional intention should be informing research processes, not pre-set ideas about journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 10 solvason and elliott why is research still invisible in further education? methods of techniques’. research can be the means by which we develop both personally and professionally and as such should be dictated by us, it is not a process by which we learn to conform to a set of systems and mechanisms. it would appear that college tutors, and particularly those involved with the delivery of he level courses, need to start to be a little more selfish and demand time for their own professional improvement. shamai and kfir (2002, p.398) discuss how involvement in the analytical processes of research and the production of findings for peer review will ‘clearly help to sustain college teachers on the appropriate academic level’. where did the recognition of the intrinsically entwined nature of teaching and research become lost? how did those two things become so clearly separated upon our academic production line? when discussing some of the barriers to research activity shamai and kfir (2002) refer to the loss of a long term vision of development for institutions. this appears to be the case in the uk, where we are so bound up with ‘day-to-day, short-term struggles for existence’ (shamai and kfir, 2002, p.401), that we have lost the image of our institutions as seats of academic exploration. if, as remmik et al. (2011, p.189) claim ‘professional identity is an ongoing process of interpretation and re-interpretation of experiences’, how will, what essentially seem to be viewed as incomplete or stifled experiences, impact upon academics who are denied the time or the space to be ‘academic’? that sense of suffocation is clear in the following comments: my new job consumed all of my time and energy and indeed it continues to do so…i feel that much of my energy and enthusiasm for research and writing has ebbed away. i’m not in a place where this is even on the agenda. maybe i need to change my place? (tutor b) teachers work on average 750 teaching hours per year and there are other duties, such as covering lessons, admin duties, meetings, compulsory weekly training, marking, exam invigilation, interviews and enrolment duties, etc. (tutor a) the many pressures placed upon tutors’ time results in the transmission method of teaching and learning being prioritised most often at fe level. fe retains an ‘expediency’ culture of learning where there is little time or leisure to develop biggs’ (2003) ‘deep’ journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 11 solvason and elliott why is research still invisible in further education? approach to learning. viewed in this way the necessity for tutors to research in order to deepen their own understanding is obvious. what is also obvious is college tutors’ desire to engage in lifelong learning. this is not an external pressure, it is an innate need. so how do we move on? how do we, as collaborating colleagues, embed research within our own personal practice, despite the diverse research cultures from which we originate? it may be that we carry on precisely as we have begun. shamai and kfir (2002) describe models of research activity. in their case this supposes its establishment within one college, but there is no reason why their ‘collaborative centralised’ model cannot be extended across partnerships. ‘this model is based on a core of skilled personnel’ (shamai and kfir, 2002, p.404), with the aim that wider colleagues are drawn in. in this way, fledgling researchers are supported and empowered, and the greater the number of researchers that become involved, the more noteworthy the research culture becomes. hopefully this is just the beginning of our research community. perhaps as we all grow and develop in confidence this may expand into a multi-core model, but to start with one research active group will suffice. but what about a tutor’s own identity formation? if tutors in fe are continually being stifled in what they see as an important area of their development, how will this affect their professional identity? if, as remmik et al. (2011, p.189) suggest, ‘professional identity can be viewed as a form of argument the individual uses to justify, explain, and provide meaning to their activity, situations and values’, then how does it affect them when that argument is unbalanced? what happens when the real and the desired self are vastly different with little chance of that being reconciled? what often happens in reality is a dissatisfaction, where academics are driven to work ridiculous hours which eat in to their personal and family time to enable their own academic and professional development. one tutor said: i carry out research in my own time to try and ensure subject currency. this is motivated by my own values and beliefs about being ‘a professional’ rather than any messages i am given by the college. (tutor b) what is clear is that the desire for college tutors to research and deepen their own understanding is neither simply a superficial means to an end, or a response to an external pressure, it is an innate need. their desire to engage in lifelong learning is patent: journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 12 solvason and elliott why is research still invisible in further education? now, a year on, the opportunity to be part of the university has, i feel, given me back my sense of self back, in belonging to a research community…it is for this reason that i feel it is critical to develop the relationship with fe partners in order to ensure that either collaborative, or self-directed research is given the opportunity to be developed and sustained. looking back i feel that the research journey has been an emotional one and reflecting upon this i hope this emotion is clear. the frustrated researcher has grown wings! (tutor c) the need for tutors to engage with research is a need that conflicts with the ‘quick fix’ approach prevalent throughout fe/he. ‘scholarly activity’ is not seen as necessary in order to do the job role in fe. (tutor a) it is both difficult and inappropriate for us to prescribe a quick fix solution to the problem of the marginalisation of research in fe – indeed, we positively reject such a prescription. however, our experience of working with the colleagues whose views are represented in this article leads us to offer an organic solution that, crucially, does not depend upon formal institutional structures, management arrangements, extrinsic reward or external funding. with our partners we are building a participant research community along the lines of the collaborative centralised model described earlier. we are finding that this community is purposeful, creative, democratic, supportive, productive, and sustainable. most importantly, as the need for evidence-based practice and the trend for governmental organisations, communities and individuals to use research to bring about change become more prevalent (elliott et al., 2010, p.293), we believe that our community of research practice has the potential to make an impact upon the character and organisation of educational research in our institution and beyond. it embraces perspectives from across post-compulsory education and more widely. it is a network to support practitioner research and, we would suggest, has the potential to enhance practice by up-skilling and giving confidence to tutors and their students alike. the model has, importantly, also informed our own teaching, such that we now fully recognise the serious barriers to understanding research faced by our students, who often start with the feeling that research is outside of their domain rather than something innate and personal to them. we feel that if, truly, ‘education should begin and end in research’ journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 13 solvason and elliott why is research still invisible in further education? (whitehead, 1962, p.58), then our research community can offer the means to progress towards whitehead’s laudable goal of ‘the production of creative wisdom’ (whitehead, 1962, p.58), and an antidote to the more impoverished notions of education that we have described above. acknowledgement the authors gratefully acknowledge the insightful comments on a draft version of this article made by the tutors cited in the study: frances brett, jodie davies, angela hodgkins, carole pannell and michelle rogers. we have their permission to cite their names and, where appropriate, we have incorporated their suggestions into the final text. references ball, s. (2006) education policy and social class: the selected works of stephen j. ball. london: routledge. biggs, j. (2003) teaching for quality learning at university. buckingham: the society for research into higher education and open university press. cantor, l. and roberts, i. (1972/1986) further education in england and wales. 3rd edn. london: routledge and kegan paul. carr, w. and kemmis, s. (1986) becoming critical. lewes, east sussex: falmer press. dadds, m. and hart, s. (2001) doing practitioner research differently. london: routledge falmer. elliott, g. (1996) ‘why is research invisible in further education?’, british educational research journal, 22(1), pp. 101-111. elliott, g., fourali, c. and issler, s. (2010) education and social change: connecting local and global perspectives. london: continuum. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 14 solvason and elliott why is research still invisible in further education? giudici, c., rinaldi, c. and krechevsky, m. (eds.) (2001) making learning visible: children as individual and group learners. italy: reggio children, reggio emilia. harris, a. and ranson, s. (2005) ‘the contradictions of education policy: disadvantage and achievement’, british educational research journal, 31(5), pp. 571-587. healey, m., jordan, f., pell, b. and short, c. (2010) ‘the research-teaching nexus: a case study of students’ awareness, experiences and perceptions of research’, innovations in education and teaching international, 47(2), pp. 235-246. higher education funding council for england (2012) student number controls for 201314. news briefing, bristol, hefce. available at: http://www.hefce.ac.uk/news/newsarchive/2012/name,72760,en.html (accessed: 10 may 2012). mcniff, j. (2011) ‘exploring practice based research’, becera annual conference. birmingham 23-24 february. odden, a. and kelley, c. (1997) paying teachers for what they know and do: new and smarter compensation strategies to improve schools. thousand oaks, ca: corwin press. pring, r. (2007) ‘reclaiming philosophy for educational research’, educational review, 59(3), pp. 315-330. remmik, m., karm, m., haamer, a. and lepp, l. (2011) ‘early-career academics’ learning in academic communities’, international journal for academic development, 16(3), pp. 187-199. rinaldi, c. (2005) in dialogue with reggio emilia. london, routledgefalmer. schon, d. (1983) the reflective practitioner – how professionals think in action. new york: basic books. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 15 http://www.hefce.ac.uk/news/newsarchive/2012/name,72760,en.html solvason and elliott why is research still invisible in further education? shamai, s. and kfir, d. (2002) ‘research activity and research culture in academic teachers’ colleges in israel’, teaching in higher education, 7(4), pp. 397-410. solvason, c. (2012) ‘research and the early years practitioner-researcher’, early years: an international journal of research and development, 33(1), pp. 90-97. available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09575146.2012.665360 (accessed: 23 may 2012). whitehead, a. (1962) the aims of education and other essays. 2nd edn. london: ernest benn. wittgenstein, l. (1958) philosophical investigations. 2nd edn. london: basil blackwell. author details in carla’s current role as senior lecturer at the university of worcester her key area of responsibility is around the area of research. this involves ensuring that student practitioners are given the support that they need to carry out worthwhile research projects, but also encouraging colleagues to reach their full research potential. her most recent publications and presentations have explored the topic of ethicality and how we can embed this within professional development. with her colleague, rosie walker, she has co-authored a book to support early years practitioners in their research projects, which is due to be published in the summer. she is currently involved in a longitudinal research project (that will span over three years) which explores ways of supporting children’s speech and language development within a primary school. the majority of carla’s working life was spent as a primary school teacher. during that time she completed a masters in gender, literature and modernity (classic literature remains a passion of hers) and a phd in education, specifically looking at concepts of inclusion. before starting work at worcester, in 2009, she spent a year as a consultant for the children’s communication charity, i can. geoffrey is professor of lifelong learning and director of strategic partnerships at the university of worcester. he has worked in school, further and adult education, and journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 16 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09575146.2012.665360 solvason and elliott why is research still invisible in further education? has previously held posts with the university of east london and the open university. geoffrey chairs the research degrees board at the university of worcester, and is himself an active researcher specialising in lifelong learning and educational leadership. he is chair of the further education research association, and editor in chief of the international peer refereed journal research in postcompulsory education since its launch in 1995. geoffrey is an accredited mediator and currently serves as a board member of the office of the independent adjudicator. his most recent book is an edited collection in collaboration with dr chahid fourali and dr sally issler, education and social change: connecting local and global perspectives, published by continuum press. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 17 why is research still invisible in further education? abstract acknowledgement references author details literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 6: november 2013 deleuze and collaborative writing as method of inquiry dr ken gale university of plymouth, uk helen bowstead university of plymouth, uk abstract this paper is based on an interview with ken gale in which he talks about his experiences of collaborative writing and the ways in which deleuzian concepts such as the ‘rhizome’, ‘lines of flight’, the ‘nomad’, the ‘fold’ and the ‘body without organs’ have informed and inspired his research and practice. the potential for how these concepts could help in offering a new cartography for learning development is also explored. keywords: learning development; deleuze; lines of flight; the nomad; collaborative writing. introduction in april 2013, ken ran a masterclass entitled ‘deleuze and collaborative writing as method of inquiry’ at the 10th aldinhe conference held at plymouth university. participants were given the opportunity to engage in a range of writing activities and to critically reflect upon the use of collaborative writing as method of inquiry. through the activities and subsequent discussions, ken encouraged delegates to consider the potential of deleuzian creative principles of conceptualisation and contextualisation to inform scholarly activity and pedagogic practice. h: yesterday i bought a copy of ‘a thousand plateaus’ (deleuze and guattari, 1988) – i’ve dipped in and out of it over the years but i felt that the only way i was really gale and bowstead deleuze and collaborative writing as method of inquiry going to engage finally with some of the more difficult concepts was if i owned a copy. so i thought we might just start by talking a little bit about some of the deleuzian concepts that obviously have had such an impact on your own research and pedagogic practices. i thought we might start with ‘lines of flight’ because that’s been a particularly liberating concept for me in my own professional writing. k: i think it’s a brilliant starting point because [a thousand plateaus] is such a fantastic compendium of ideas; literally you can take a ‘line of flight’ from one plateau to the next. i mean it’s a book that doesn’t really have linearity, so that makes it really exciting. it’s the first book by deleuze, or deleuze and guattari, which i bought; i’ve had it for over 10 years. i still go back to it and i’m blown away by bits in it that i never discovered before, or i go back to it and find something that i’ve heavily annotated and i see something different in it: i think it’s a phenomenal book, i really think it would be my desert island book. i thought about how we would start this discussion and as you know, there are so many people, when they start talking about deleuze, say they’ve got to start in the middle, because it’s just so hard to know where to start. but in some respects it’s so easy because you can start wherever you like. elizabeth st pierre talks about plugging in the ideas, which is great, it’s just a simple idea, but i think from a learning point of view it is so emancipatory because for me the whole process of creating concepts, which [deleuze] talks with guattari (1994) about in ‘what is philosophy’, is so much about student-centred learning, you can say to students, well what do you think, how do you conceptualise it? h: i remember it being the point at which i felt confident enough to deal with deleuze because i felt that if somebody like elizabeth st pierre could just say ‘i don’t really get it but i get something from it’, then i could do the same. k: yeah absolutely, i’ve got something so therefore, let’s do something with what i’ve got. and i think that’s really powerful from a philosophical point of view but also in a pedagogical sense. i’m a really strong advocate of using deleuze, as you know, in my teaching and learning, i just think it’s so important because each concept is a new event…and so therefore, in a sense you can argue that the creation of concepts in that respect is about ‘lines of flight’. if you’re in some group, some assemblage, where you’re engaged in discussion, you’re considering the way journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 2 gale and bowstead deleuze and collaborative writing as method of inquiry forward, offering a concept, or a conceptualisation, is likely to be some kind of ‘line of flight’, it’s a movement from one place to another, it’s taking thinking in another direction, it’s exploring the possibility that thought doesn’t have to be trapped or enclosed within a particular concept or setting, it’s linked to the figure of the ‘rhizome’ because, as you know, rhizomes exist in a subterranean sense but [they] pop nodes up all over the place and those nodes can be seen to represent new ideas, new ways of thinking, new affects, new ethical sensitivities or whatever. so i suppose thinking about it, initially ‘lines of flight’ was probably one of the figures that captivated me early on. in some of the translations of it ‘lines of flight’ also are described as ‘lines of escape’…i don’t think that means a running away from, but in the context of nomadic enquiry there’s a sense in which i don’t have to stay on the same track, i can transgress. h: i think that was something that elizabeth st pierre talked about at a conference i was at [summer institute of qualitative research 2013], something about this kind of ability to choose not to follow the same patterns, and again, there’s something very simple in that but also really powerful, you don’t have to keep following the same paths or be constrained by the same modes of thinking. k: right, and thinking about learning development and professional development, i think that’s really exciting, it’s challenging and it’s really exciting, and it ties in with a lot of things. earlier, you were talking about karen barad and donna haraway, it ties in with their work which is kind of scientifically orientated to do with diffraction and interference patterns, and the idea that if you engage in working with diffractive possibilities rather than the given of reflective practice – which purports to be a mirror on reality and therefore replicates – diffractive practices offer the potential for interfering with and going off in different directions. so i think that kind of thinking is also congruent with, for example, the way in which you can think about nomadic enquiry as a kind of de or re-territorialisation, of saying well okay, you’ve got a choice to go over the territory in a different kind of way, and through going over it in a different kind of way you re-territorialise it. so that’s to do with power, that’s to do with affect, that’s to do with ethics, and it’s about a reconfiguring that as a form of transgression, which changes things you know. so i think ‘lines of flight’ can relate to those kind of things, you know, i mean i don’t know if that’s how you see it, you’re probably as familiar with it now as i am. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 3 gale and bowstead deleuze and collaborative writing as method of inquiry h: it does feel that there’s a emancipatory aspect to that concept that i found really exciting; i think it allows, or it allowed me in my own writing, not to feel that i had to follow this linear style of academic writing, it allowed me to follow the way the writing was taking me rather than me imposing a sort of linearity upon my writing… and i think in some of the work i’ve read by you, i particularly liked…the way the collaborative writing you and jonathan did allowed you to explore ‘lines of flight’ in response to each other’s writing. k: i think that’s important because maybe that collaborative work…talked not only about the, if you like, the line as an escape, like a centrifugal force where it’s kind of throwing off at a tangent, which is what centrifugal forces do, we tend to think of centrifugal forces as going off at a tangent, but as a centripetal force, which is an equal and opposite force inward. i think one of the things we found in our writing, was the ‘between the twoness’ that deleuze talks about it in relation to guattari in dialogues ii (2002), for example. there is a kind of intensity there, and i think that the notion of intensity draws on and begins to animate the idea of assemblage, that it’s not just like now, one person talking to another, but somehow or another there’s an intensity there, there are molecular forces at play, these post-human possibilities that barad (2007) and other people talk about, which kind of make the space of enquiry something more than it was before that coming together. so i think ‘lines of flight’ are about potentialities in a multi-directional sense, there’s lots of crossover with these deleuzian figures, because what comes into play here is the idea of multiplicity as well, there are multiple directions, it’s not just a tangent that goes off from the edge of the circle, it’s the possibility of forces within as well. h: again, i think that sense of multiplicity and potentiality is quite empowering, perhaps in particular in the learning development area where often we feel that we’re being required to reduce things down to simple skill-sets and ways of doing things that are not to be questioned. k: yeah, i suppose the danger in that approach, and i think i know what you’re talking about, is that development implies so much linearity doesn’t it? it implies that kind of hegelian idea of thesis and antithesis which will produce a new synthesis, you know that whole ‘march of progress’ theorising that hegel (1956) and people have used. i know that we’ve got to come up with the word, but i think that there is an inference journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 4 gale and bowstead deleuze and collaborative writing as method of inquiry or implication in the use of the word ‘development’ which suggests that we can go in a straight line, step by step by step by step, and i think that whilst in some sense we do do that, such an approach overlooks the possibilities of digressing on the way, of taking a line of flight, taking a detour, making an enquiry which is about intensity or something of that kind rather than simply thinking, well, what’s the next stage, what skills do i need to get from a to b? h: we’re so often reduced to that, education feels like it’s so often reduced to moving through stages, we even label them stage one, stage two don’t we? and there’s a sense i think in which a lot of people working in learning development are very aware that that’s not how it works, but also feel quite constrained by the demands and expectations on them to make it seem as if that’s how it works. k: yeah, and i suppose it’s a challenge, if you’re using developmental frameworks, it’s a real challenge to know how to, if you like, create diagrams as a means of constructing your practice, what do you make it look like, what happens next? we’ve talked about the deleuzian idea of the ‘fold’, i mean it’s a wonderful figure for talking about how you can fold in new experiences, new ideas, new words, new anything, into your consciousness, your learning, your knowledge, whatever. but equally it’s so powerful in terms of what you can then learn, how you can express yourself. but those irruptions and eruptions; irruptions going in and eruptions going out, are, in many respects, so unpredictable, so that the potentiality that’s obviously there and the intensities that are obviously there, offer a real challenge to curricula and lesson plans and programmes and schemes of work and so on, which are very much part and parcel of so many teaching and learning set-ups aren’t they? so it’s a challenge i think to manage it because, in a sense, as soon as you start to manage it, you make it something other than what it is meant to be. h: in your own practice, in your own approach to teaching and learning, how do you bring those tensions to some kind of meaningful resolution? k: you’ll know the influence of, say, laurel richardson [and elizabeth st. pierre’s] (1994) work ‘writing as a method of inquiry’ and i’ve certainly found this working with jonathan wyatt. as you know we’ve written together lots and lots and we’ve had tensions, we’ve had issues, of a professional, of an academic, of a scholarly, of journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 5 gale and bowstead deleuze and collaborative writing as method of inquiry a personal nature, a whole range of natures, and we’ve worked to the idea of writing to it. okay, we’ve got an issue here, we’ve got a problem, we can’t work something out, well let’s write to it, let’s see what comes out? and i think that in that, what i’ve just described there, are the seeds of using collaborative writing as a method of inquiry, we’ve taken on richardson’s idea that writing is a method of inquiry and what we’ve tried to argue is that, through the collaborative process, you do get ‘lines of flight’, you do get intensities, you find that you’re not simply being conceptual but there is an evaluative dimension to what you’re doing, there’s an ethical dimension to it, there’s a lot to do with affect and so on. so i think the collaborative process, or collaborative processes, are often a way of being pedagogical, of enhancing inquiry into it, actually engaging in research, i mean i don’t feel that i would have learned so much about deleuze, i don’t think i would have been able to apply so much of his work and his ideas to pedagogy and research if i hadn’t worked with it collaboratively. i’ve looked back at some of our, my early writings with jonathan, and some of it, in one sense was quite immature, but in another sense it was very exploratory, i mean we were trying to do something new. and in that collaborative space which we were nurturing there was a sense in which we were able, through affect, to try things out; i mean i knew that if i wrote to something that i was unsure of and shared it with him, he would respond in a way which honoured the writing perhaps, which maybe didn’t get what i was trying to say but got something, so it became this very complex assemblage between us; we’ve called our writing ‘becoming ken and jonathan’ as you know. so, i think that maybe that’s the way i would think about collaborative practices; there’s a kind of nascent fertility in there, there’s the potential for escape, there’s a possibility of change that’s always there, and it’s also acknowledging, i think, as i’ve already said, that it’s not just about forming concepts, which obviously is really, really important, but it’s also, it is strongly to do with, as they say in the book, (what is philosophy?) it’s about concept, affect and percept. h: yes, and i think that there does seem to be something quite powerful about opening up your writing to another in that way; allowing somebody to respond and then that whole kind of energy that’s created in that writing to someone but also like some sense of what’s happening between the two, as the book’s called. at the workshop you ran for us in april, there was a sense in which you tried to introduce us a little bit to how that might work with the zigzag introduction and writing. i don’t know if journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 6 gale and bowstead deleuze and collaborative writing as method of inquiry you want to explain a little bit about that as a method and what you were hoping to achieve. k: i can’t remember the name now, but there’s an abc of deleuze and the z is ‘zigzag’ and that was where we got the idea, and there’s somewhere, i think it’s at the beginning of dialogues, where they talk about this idea of the zigzag. jonathan and i have used it in various workshops that we’ve done on collaborative writing, deleuze and collaborative writing, and i think the idea of it is not to, and again i want to borrow here from barad (2007) because she’s got this lovely reworking of interaction, and uses this idea, that there’s something within the moment, within the space, which is more than the inter, which is the space between; the intraaction. so i think that why we’ve used zigzag as a mode of intra-action is to encourage people to talk into the space, to direct their talking about themselves to another person, to allow that to work in concept, affect, percept, whatever, and then to encourage the person in response, not simply to respond exactly to what the person was saying, but to respond in whatever way they feel is appropriate for them. so it might be through taking a line of flight; it might be focusing in on a particular word or an expression or whatever. so the idea is to promote and acknowledge ‘assemblage’ rather than some specific associational connection between two separate people. so because a workshop is essentially about space, it’s a space where people work and get along together and engage in practical tasks and so on, we tried to use the zigzag in that kind of way, not as i say, to literally introduce ‘me’ in terms of the particularities of ‘me’, but to use it as a means of generating some sort of spatial dimension in which people can work together through a period of time. so i think that’s kind of how we’ve tried to use it, i don’t know if that makes sense. h: yes kind of, and i do remember the moment when the space for me changed was when john hilsdon looked out of the window and talked to the space beyond the room that we were in…there was a tangible shift in what was happening within the room. and i found that quite exciting, that the energy could change so significantly. k: yeah, i mean, i think that appreciation of spatiality is really, really important, that there is something beyond the window, that there is something on the other side of the door that i’ve just walked through, that space isn’t just an empty vessel to be journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 7 gale and bowstead deleuze and collaborative writing as method of inquiry filled. there’s a guy called nigel thrift (2006) who talks about ‘processual sensualism’; that we’re always in a process where our senses are alert, so our senses have alertness in terms of the political nature of space or the social nature of space, the cultural nature of space and so on and so on and so forth. in deleuze’s book on francis bacon he offers some wonderful descriptions of bacon, how bacon is always changing things and scraping layers of paint away and then building up new layers, and it’s just wonderful that there’s a strong spatial reference to his work and i think you can, maybe you can borrow from that sensualism in the context of space and kind of link to it. i don’t want to use the word ‘development’, but let’s say learning, i think it’s a form of learning which is not just based upon structured a to b type thinking but is actually cognisant of the space out the window, of how i felt when i turned up this morning, or how this coffee is affecting me now, because it’s all kind of relevant i think really. you’ve attended a few writing workshops, i mean you went to bronwyn (davies) collective biography writing workshop, and i think there’s a sense in which the writing can often open something up that may not be in terms of the concepts that might be written down, but it could be in terms of the feeling that you have about space, that you can feel easier about opening up, you can feel closer to the person sitting next to you, that it becomes a kind of multidimensional thing that moves away from what deleuze and guattari called the molar, which is the sense of self as a category of difference, that i’m a bloke, you’re a woman, whatever, and therefore we’re categories of difference, and moving the molar into the molecular, which is far more particular, which is far more about frisson and substance and perfume and touch, much more to do with sense and i have a feeling that collaborative writing, which can be promoted through the facility of say zigzag, and whatever subsequent iterations or whatever. it kind of taps into, or releases, those energies, because you know deleuzian philosophy is about vitalism really, it’s about energy, it’s about seeing selves in relational space, it’s about, what is it donna haraway (1991) said, our bodies don’t end with our skin, it’s a lovely simple thing, we’ve got so used to it now but it’s really important, so if our bodies don’t end with our skin, how do we tap into that? my feeling is that collaborative writing as a method of inquiry can begin to acknowledge those posthuman possibilities that are in deleuze and others. i was also thinking about how you were talking about reductionalism in terms of learning development. i mean, i think what relates to that is the idea of the ‘bodyjournal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 8 gale and bowstead deleuze and collaborative writing as method of inquiry without-organs’ because i think in a sense what they’re saying about ‘body-withoutorgans’ is that actually bodies are structured in particular ways. of course bodies have organs, and they’re not saying that they don’t but what they’re trying to say is that we have to be aware of the fact that bodies are organised in particular ways so that actually when we think of our heart, and we kind of think of our heart in a variety of different ways, you know we can think of our heart as a mechanical pump, we can think about our heart as the source of all our affect, we can think of our heart as a thing that energises and so on. so i think it’s worth thinking about that notion of ‘body-without-organs’ in terms of the way in which we organise things and i wonder if we can think about learning in that kind of way. i mean, most models of learning are based upon behaviourist principles or cognitive principles really aren’t they? okay, they’re modified by social constructivism, facilitative learning and so on, but it’s a kind of tweaking you know, whereas i think there’s a kind of fundamentalism, almost a kind of essentialism paradoxically in deleuze and guattari. their ontology is very realist, they try to challenge the representational approaches, and what they’re really trying to ask us to consider is if a body is organised in a particular way, that is based upon particular representations, as foucault might ask, what are the conditions of possibility for that representation, what has allowed us discursively to accept those representations, to accept the way in which the body is organised? so it feels to me, in terms of working with learners, that i want to destabilise that, i don’t want to say that it’s wrong because it might be very good, very helpful, but i want to destabilise it and i want to encourage people to think about the ‘body-without-organs’, to think about how the organs, if you like, could be organised in different kinds of ways. h: yeah. i think it’s perhaps one of the concepts that i find more difficult to engage with because…i always find it difficult to kind of get beyond that sense of the physical organs being organised [in that particular way] because that’s the way the body works, does that make sense? which just seems to then feed into a ‘that’s the way it’s got to be’ kind of discourse. k: you know we’ve only got to look at the maps of neolithic man and so on and so forth to see that our bodies, albeit over a long period of time, have changed. i’m quite interested at the moment in things about molecularity, you know how geckoes can hang off the ceiling, apparently it’s not to do with glue, it’s to do with molecular journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 9 gale and bowstead deleuze and collaborative writing as method of inquiry exchange; you know things like pheromones, perfume, all of those kinds of things suggest reorganisation, they’re possibly very subtle and nuanced and full of affect and stuff, but i think that maybe if we want to make our approach to learning and teaching a bit more sophisticated, we’ve at least got to draw down those kinds of thinking at some time. h: yes i think this sense of the post-human is an idea that i find very exciting in terms of encouraging you to kind of engage with the world differently and that’s always something that’s attractive because it shifts, something shifts... k: yeah, so i think in terms of what you’re interested in me commenting on, the use of writing and collaborative writing, i have a feeling that when i encourage, or when jonathan and i collaboratively encourage people, students, participants, in workshops whatever, to write, a shift happens, and it’s not irrespective of, but it doesn’t matter so much what is written, it’s the fact that writing has been done, and i think the fact that writing has been done shifts the space, there’s a ‘processual sensualism’ there, there is the kind of nurturing of moments where the ‘assemblage’ shifts where the notion of group becomes redundant and the notion of ‘assemblage’ becomes much more meaningful in relation to the space. somehow or other the writing does something and as i’ve said, it’s less significant what the writing says, more what it animates. what it animates in terms of the space. h: i think that there was a really powerful sense of that happening at the collaborative writing workshop that bronwyn davies ran, that it was just…tangible. and when you talk about the kind of molecular connections, it was in the air, it was like a tangible energy that was released. k: and i think it shifts one into that space of possibility where you can begin to talk in quite valid and reasonable ways about energy, about force, about vitalism. i mean bronwyn’s written a really interesting paper comparing deleuze and guattari with zen buddhism, and it’s really interesting how those crossovers are very evident, which is very much about acknowledgement but also an animation of space. so, whether there’s a space for what we’re talking about here in terms of learning development…? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 10 gale and bowstead deleuze and collaborative writing as method of inquiry h: i think the notion of space is very relevant to learning development and there has been quite a lot written on the jiscmail about the kind of spaces that learning developers occupy within the university… k: …or maybe spaces that they create. afterword i began my interview with ken by admitting that i had only recently bought deleuze and guattari’s (1988) seminal ‘a thousand plateaus’. it is a book which i have taken out of the university library many, many times, though i have rarely got beyond reading and rereading the first chapter. every time i encounter those same lines of fizzing, dazzling prose, i find it as challenging and as difficult as ever. i often have a sensation akin to seasickness as i read but, like ken, i always ‘get’ something different. i went back to that first chapter again while attempting to write this piece, and this time i was struck by deleuze and guattari’s refusal from the very outset to define a book as a place where meaning can be found: we will never ask what a book means as signified or signifier; we will not look for anything to understand in it. we will ask what it functions with, in connection to what other things it does or does not transmit intensities, in which other multiplicities its own are inserted and metamorphosed, and with what bodies without organs it makes its own converge. (deleuze and guattari, 1988, p.2). ‘rhizome’, ‘intensities’, ‘multiplicities’, ‘body without organs’, deleuzian concepts are troubling and troublesome, but they are not meant to be ‘explained’ or even ‘understood’: as deleuze and guattari themselves write, ‘concepts are not waiting for us ready-made, like heavenly bodies. there is no heaven for concepts’ (1994, p.2). however, deleuzian concepts are meant to be practical too. they can provide a ‘toolbox’ which can help us to think differently and, as elizabeth st. pierre argues, finding ways to think differently is imperative in these challenging times: journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 11 gale and bowstead deleuze and collaborative writing as method of inquiry we are in desperate need of new concepts, deleuzian or otherwise, in this new educational environment that privileges a single positivist research model with its transcendent rationality and objectivity and accompanying concepts such as randomization, replicability, generalizability, bias and so forth – one that has marginalized subjugated knowledges and done material harm at all levels of education. (st. pierre, 2004, p.286) so how can we apply deleuze to the learning development context? while concepts such as the ‘nomad’, the ‘rhizome’ and ‘lines of flight’ may defy rigid or fixed definition, i think they can still offer exciting and challenging lenses with which we can problematize the complex and often contradictory ways in which learning developers are positioned. for example, when i ‘plug into’ deleuze’s ‘circuits’, i find that the concept of the ‘nomad’ helps me consider what it means to wander, as learning developers often do, across the (higher education) landscape, sometimes on the margins, sometimes welcomed (albeit temporarily) into the heart of institutional ‘territory’. deleuze and guattari theorise the spaces we occupy as ‘striated’ and ‘smooth’, striated spaces being those that are ‘hierarchical, rule-intensive, strictly bounded and confining’ (tamboukou, 2012, p.276), spaces which have already been ‘territorialized’ and where the pathways are deeply furrowed. and while in a professional context we may feel compelled and constrained by particular ‘striations’, that is the kind of ‘well-trodden’ discourses that insist on framing higher education in particular ways, deleuze and guattari (1988, p.474) argue that ‘there are always forces of deterritorialisation, lines of flight, that shatter segmentarities and open up smooth spaces that are unmarked, dynamic and create conditions of possibility for transformations to occur’. st. pierre suggests that it is the ‘nomad’ who has the ability also to ‘deterritorialize space that has been territorialized, charted, ordered, and then shut down’ (1997, p.412) and i think this is also what the learning developer has the potential to do. for me, learning development is all about opening up new spaces in which learning can happen better, or at least differently. it is about creating the kinds of ‘smooth’ spaces where students and academics can explore their interconnectedness, and where notions of what constitutes knowledge and knowledge transfer can be troubled, challenged and transformed. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 12 gale and bowstead deleuze and collaborative writing as method of inquiry references barad, k. (2007) meeting the universe halfway: quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. london: duke university press. deleuze, g. and guattari, f. (1988) a thousand plateaus. london: athlone press ltd. deleuze, g. and guattari, f. (1994) what is philosophy? translated by graham burchell and hugh tomlinson, london: verso. deleuze, g. and parnet, c. (2002) dialogues ii. london: continuum. gale and wyatt (2009) between the two: a nomadic inquiry into collaborative writing and subjectivity. cambridge: scholars publishing. haraway, d. (1991) ‘a cyborg manifesto: science, technology, and socialist-feminism in the late twentieth century’, in haraway, d. (ed.) simians, cyborgs and women: the reinvention of nature. london: free association books, chapter eight, pp. 149-181. hegel, g. (1956) lectures on the philosophy of world history. translated by john sibree. new york: dover. richardson, l. and st. pierre e. (1994) ‘writing: a method of inquiry’ in denzin, n. and lincoln, s. (eds.) the handbook of qualitative research. sage. pp. 959-978 st. pierre (2004) ‘deleuzian concepts for education: the subject undone’, educational philosophy and theory, 36(3), pp. 283-296. st. pierre, e. (1997) ‘circling the text: nomadic writing practices’, qualitative inquiry, 3(4), pp.403-417. tamboukou, m. (2012) ‘heterotopic and holey spaces as tents for the nomad: rereading gwen john’s letters’, gender, place and culture, 19(3), pp. 275-290. thrift, n. (2006) ‘space’, theory, culture and society, 23(2-3), pp. 139-155. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 13 gale and bowstead deleuze and collaborative writing as method of inquiry author details ken gale is a lecturer in post-16 education. ken works in the institute of education at plymouth university. his main teaching and research interests can broadly be contextualised within the philosophy of education. more specifically, he is interested in the spaces of inquiry that open up when the work of post structural theorists, in particular deleuze, and deleuze and guattari, but also foucault, derrida, butler and irigaray. ken’s collaborative and performative teaching and research practices connect with narrative and autoethnographic forms of inquiry and he works to apply these to theory/practice or conceptual/contextual relations as a means of exploring and inquiring into a number of areas of interest, including subjectivity, friendship, gender, teaching and learning, and professional identity and practice style. ken has published widely and presented at a number of international conferences. he was part of a funded project to develop online resources on collaborative writing for early career researchers and faculty: www.writeinquiry.org . with bronwyn davies, susanne gannon and jonathan wyatt he co-authored the book, deleuze and collaborative writing: an immanent plane of composition (peter lang, 2011) and, recently, with friends and colleagues jonathan wyatt, tami spry, ron pelias and larry russell, he has co-authored the book how writing touches: an intimate scholarly collaboration which has recently been published by cambridge scholars publishing. more recently, with jonathan wyatt, he has edited a special edition on collaborative writing for the journal international review of qualitative research, published in early 2013. he is an associate member of the higher education academy, a member of the international association of qualitative inquiry and the narrative inquiry centre at the university of bristol, where he is also a visiting fellow. ken has three children, katy, reuben and phoebe, has recently become a grandfather to rohan james and lives, nurtures and sustains his soul in cornwall in the uk. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 14 http://www.writeinquiry.org/ gale and bowstead deleuze and collaborative writing as method of inquiry helen bowstead is a learning development advisor and member of the learning development team at plymouth university. she also works part-time as an efl lecturer. helen is interested in narrative approaches to educational research and writing as a method of inquiry. her most recent research project was an auto/ethnographical exploration of the impact of the internationalisation agenda and she has presented at a number of conferences on this theme including discourse power resistance 2013. she has previously published two articles in the journal of learning development in higher education (teaching english as a foreign language and coming to writing) and she has recently contributed a chapter to a forthcoming collected edition entitled ‘working with academic literacies: research, theory, design’ edited by theresa lillis, kathy harrington, mary lea and sally mitchell. helen is particularly interested in exploring barriers to effective student writing and developing pedagogical approaches that encourage written confidence and fluency. she is currently working on a project with ld colleagues to open an on campus ‘writing café’. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 15 deleuze and collaborative writing as method of inquiry abstract introduction afterword references author details literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 9: july 2015 student views of using e-learning tools to facilitate independent learning of anatomy and physiology fiona roberts robert gordon university, uk abstract the ability to undertake life-long learning is essential in the world today and this requires independent learning skills. a growing body of evidence suggests integration of computer assisted learning could potentially replace face-to-face teaching entirely with no detriment to students. case study methodology was therefore utilised to investigate students’ perceptions of the use of online resources to replace face-to-face teaching and the impact of this approach on student outcomes when learning anatomy and physiology. concurrent mixed methods, incorporating pragmatic comparison of summative assessment scores with a questionnaire gathering student opinion of this learning method, were used. students had access to typical anatomy and physiology computer aided learning resources. additional adaptive learning activities (ala) and homework quizzes were provided. directed study was given for every topic. all but four topics were supported by interactive workshops; these four were supported by additional ala and an optional ‘drop in’ session. the results indicated no difference in student outcome for topics taught with and without workshop support. however, although students understood the rationale for the change and sufficient guidance was given, they found the independent learning challenging due to lack of intrinsic motivation and confidence. engagement with ala and homework quizzes was limited. students do not want more independent learning and like the confidence provided by attending workshops. using more selective online resources may be beneficial and ensuring that materials addressed online are used in other classes may be a way forwards, thus ensuring a constructivist approach to learning while encouraging more independent learning. roberts student views of using e-learning tools to facilitate independent learning of anatomy and physiology journal of learning development in higher education, issue 9: july 2015 2 keywords: computer aided learning; adaptive learning activities; constructivist learning; motivation; perceptions. introduction in 2007 the european community (2007) recommended that individuals must achieve key knowledge, skills and attitudinal competencies appropriate to their context if they are to be successful in the world today. they indicated that fundamental to this is learning to learn to enable life-long learning, a requirement of many professional regulatory bodies (hcpc, 2011; gmc, 2012; nmc, 2015) to ensure continuing professional development and competency to practice. this suggests that during university-based foundation training, health professional students must develop strong skills in learning to learn. learning opportunities must enable students to actively engage in the learning process, thus enabling deeper learning (freeman et al., 2014). anatomy and physiology (a & p) teaching has traditionally been lecture-based, yet evidence has shown that attention levels fluctuate throughout lecture periods (bunce et al., 2010) – superficial learning is encouraged as is dependence on others for the acquisition of knowledge (bligh, 2000). consequently learning to learn is not facilitated. in recent years the school of health sciences, robert gordon university, aberdeen, scotland, has taken a more active approach to help students learn a & p, a foundation area of knowledge for all our professions. students have been provided with directed reading to complete before attendance at a workshop on each of the a & p topics. during workshops students actively engage in activities that clarify and consolidate directed study, with the aim of helping students gain real meaning about how the body is structured and functions: a constructivist approach to learning (fry et al., 2014) that utilises principles of andragogy (taylor and laros, 2014), aiming at deeper learning. examples of activities are acting out physiological processes and building accurate, functional representations of body parts from craft materials. this delivery method has seen an improvement in module outcomes, with the student failure rate in the assessment reducing from approximately 8/140 to 2/140 students per year. roberts student views of using e-learning tools to facilitate independent learning of anatomy and physiology journal of learning development in higher education, issue 9: july 2015 3 the integration of computer assisted learning (cal) with face-to-face teaching has been reported to have a positive impact on student learning (elizondo-omana et al., 2004; gopal et al., 2010; faleye, 2011) with the following specific benefits reported:  improved retention of information (gopal et al., 2010).  repeated access enables more gradual assimilation of knowledge (coffee and hillier, 2008).  deeper learning (mayer, 2003).  improved understanding of three-dimensional structures and their function and relationships (hilbelink, 2009).  flexible access to learning to suit the student and therefore encouragement of a student-centred approach to learning (coffee and hillier, 2008).  greater interaction in class when online revision has been undertaken in advance (raynor and iggulden, 2008). in some areas of nursing and physiotherapy, for example, cal has progressed to replace face-to-face teaching with no detriment to student achievement (castilho-weinert and lopes, 2009; bloomfield et al., 2010). this may facilitate the development of an independent approach to learning as desired by the european parliament and professional regulatory bodies. consequently, the a & p team in the school of health sciences proposed to investigate student perceptions of a more independent way of learning a & p using e-learning resources. the impact on student achievement would also be investigated since any enhancement must not be detrimental to student outcomes and should improve outcomes. method a concurrent mixed methods case study methodology was utilised. the focus was on allowing all students the opportunity to provide their views of the new learning method: achievable via individual interview, focus group or questionnaire. however, strong individuals could influence the reliability of data collected in a focus group (sparks and smith, 2014), while students may feel inhibited by the direct and personal nature of an roberts student views of using e-learning tools to facilitate independent learning of anatomy and physiology journal of learning development in higher education, issue 9: july 2015 4 interview (cohen et al., 2000). additionally both focus groups and interviews would have been time and labour intensive while producing a potentially overwhelming amount of data. consequently, although depth of information is sacrificed when questionnaires are used, this was the preferred method of data collection (cohen et al., 2000). students could anonymously give their opinions and the quantity of information would be manageable. the focus of enhancement is to not, however, focus solely on the student experience. it also aims to improve outcomes for students (qaa, no date) which necessitates comparison of grades to show the impact, if any, of the enhancement. although student cohorts differ year on year, similar trends in student achievement have been identified in the a & p module: average grades for each subject group have been similar each year and consequently a retrospective comparison of student grades was utilised. the a & p module is delivered to all students in year 1 (scottish credit and qualifications framework (scqf) level 7)(scqf, no date) of the bsc (hons) applied sports and exercise science (ases), diagnostic radiography (dr), occupational therapy (ot) and physiotherapy (pt) courses in the school of health sciences. the module is delivered over the first 12 weeks of year 1 and, since 2011, has utilised interactive workshops for which the students are required to prepare directed study. consultation with the school ethics review group indicated that ethical approval was not required as this project was considered a service evaluation. students were advised that new resources were being evaluated with a view to establishing if they could reshape module delivery and facilitate their learning. consequently their views of these, and the drop in sessions that would replace some workshops, were important to inform future module delivery. they were assured of confidentiality relating to any data utilised in any reports or publications. recruitment all 155 students undertaking a & p took part in the project as this was the only way the module was delivered. this also avoided contamination of results from friends sharing resources if they were in different arms of a study. roberts student views of using e-learning tools to facilitate independent learning of anatomy and physiology journal of learning development in higher education, issue 9: july 2015 5 learning materials a review of possible core texts and supporting online resources was undertaken for 2013 delivery. anatomy and physiology textbooks are all very similar in content but level of detail differs. online resources are also very similar but one resource incorporated adaptive learning activities (ala). ala establishes what each student knows and does not know, and adjusts the learning content provided to each individual based on this (griff and matter, 2013). it was considered that this had the potential to enable students to learn the required material independently and that it may suit some individuals’ learning styles, for example, those who prefer to learn visually and/or on their own. consequently a change in textbook and online resources was implemented to allow incorporation of ala. the usual online resources of podcasts, quizzes, animations and cadaver dissection were available and enabled students to choose their preferred learning tools dependent on their preferred learning styles (al-qahtani and higgins, 2013). module delivery an introduction to the ethos of independent learning has been part of the module since 2011. this interactive lecture emphasises that the whole module is delivered without lectures to encourage independent but guided active learning. students were informed that new and extensive online resources were being trialled. this was to establish their ability to facilitate student learning and help the development of independent learning skills. for every topic a directed study sheet was available to students via the virtual learning environment. this detailed the required reading in addition to the animations and videos to be reviewed for the topic prior to class. ala to complete before class, and homework quizzes to complete after, were introduced for 2013. as with previous years a ‘what you need to know sheet’ was available to enable students to check if they had learnt the necessary content for each topic. a workshop was provided to support student learning and required students to undertake different activities, utilising their directed study, to help them understand the content more clearly with the aim of achieving deeper learning. students were required to attend these sessions but only one course (applied sport and exercise science) actually had an attendance requirement. roberts student views of using e-learning tools to facilitate independent learning of anatomy and physiology journal of learning development in higher education, issue 9: july 2015 6 four of the 18 topics were randomly selected to have a greater focus on independent learning supported by e-learning resources. two anatomy and two physiology topics were selected from topics placed in a hat. directed study sheets and ‘what you need to know’ sheets were also provided for these topics. however, there was a greater focus in the directed study to ala and online resources. these four topics (skeleton bones and joints; cardiovascular system; respiratory system; and the knee) were supported by a ‘drop in’ session where staff could answer questions and provide clarification about any areas individuals were struggling with relating to the topic. these were entirely optional for all students. responsibility for undertaking learning, checking understanding and accessing support was firmly placed with the students. students were guided to find the various online resources in a class session held in a computer room. they were also provided with a document detailing the different resources. this document provided written descriptions of each resource and directions on how to access them, supported by ‘screen dumps’ to aid online navigation. although not mandatory, students were strongly advised to complete homework quizzes and ala to monitor their own progress and to facilitate their learning. although 18 topics were taught, only 16 were included in the summative examination. the two initial topics (cells and tissues and terminology) were incorporated into other topics. outcome measures scores for each homework quiz were gathered along with data on each student’s interaction with the ala. summative assessment results were also collated for comparison with 2012 and 2013 results (the two previous cohorts who had undertaken the module with the directed study focus). comparison with these cohorts was thought to enable greater consideration of the possible impact of individual cohort differences on results. a questionnaire was developed to gather student views of the different resources they had access to and the use of ‘drop-in’ sessions. a copy of the questionnaire is provided in appendix 1. the questionnaire asked about the student views on the usefulness of the various online resources through use of a likert scale. opportunity for qualitative roberts student views of using e-learning tools to facilitate independent learning of anatomy and physiology journal of learning development in higher education, issue 9: july 2015 7 comment via open questions was also provided relating to the ‘drop-in’ sessions. the questionnaire was piloted with three students undertaking the module as an admission requirement for another course. feedback indicated minor amendments were required which were undertaken. students were asked to complete the questionnaire after they had submitted their mock exam attempt. this meant that they were not influenced by summative assessment scores but the recent teaching, and therefore their views would be current and less influenced by memory, which could be altered through discussion with others. data analysis descriptive analysis of data from the questionnaire, and thematic analysis of questions providing qualitative data relating to student perceptions, was undertaken. summative assessment results were analysed using spss v21. comparison of summative assessment scores of cohorts from 2011/12, 2012/13 and 2013/14 was undertaken. after testing for normality of distribution, anova and post hoc analysis using bonferroni’s test was completed. analysis by subject group across the three years, and a comparison of student achievement in topics taught with and without workshops, was also undertaken. statistical significance was considered if p<0.05. data regarding student engagement with homework (hw) and ala was collated from excel spread sheets and included homework scores and ala attempts. results 155 students undertook the module with 146 students submitting questionnaires. questionnaire completion was variable across questions however. only 55% completed the question about the frequency of use of the various resources and results are shown in table 1, with their perception of the usefulness of the various resources reported in table 2. roberts student views of using e-learning tools to facilitate independent learning of anatomy and physiology journal of learning development in higher education, issue 9: july 2015 8 table 1. self-reported use of e-learning tools (percentages reported). resource once/week or less twice/week or more never not completed dissection tool 27 6 15 46 dissection quiz 24 15 10 52 dissection animations 32 4 8 57 ala 13 38 1 45 other animations 27 2 21 49 pod casts 12 3 38 47 other resources 11 6 34 49 qualitative responses to why resources were not used indicated that students most often did not use the podcasts, other learning resources and dissection quiz because they did not know they were there or could not find them. students also commented that they were deterred from using the animations and podcasts as they did not like the voice on the audio. table 2. perceived usefulness of e-learning tools (percentage). poor 1-2 3 good 4-5 not completed dissection tool 12 16 50 21 dissection quiz 7 23 41 32 dissection animations 8 27 34 31 ala 4 12 78 6 homework quiz 5 21 64 10 other animations 14 15 13 58 podcasts 11 7 6 75 other learning resources – crosswords, labelling exercises, flashcards 7 14 11 67 roberts student views of using e-learning tools to facilitate independent learning of anatomy and physiology journal of learning development in higher education, issue 9: july 2015 9 responses to the questions relating to the independent learning style are shown in table 3. all students responded to these statements and the numbers by subject group are: ases 47, dr 26, ot 34 and pt 38. they indicate ases and ot students found it difficult to adjust to the independent learning required but sufficient guidance was provided. students also appear to have found the homework quizzes useful (table 3 vii and viii). qualitative comments gathered from the open question asking for student views on the more independent learning required form four main themes: depth of knowledge gained from the topic (18 comments), autonomy of the learning process (13 comments), confidence in their own learning (10 comments), and motivation to learn (28 comments). typical examples of comments relating to each of these themes are provided in box 1. box 1. examples of comments made by students. depth of knowledge  i felt i didn’t have as good a depth of knowledge nor did i retain it for as long a time period.  was easy enough to note take but not as well remembered. autonomy of learning process  i didn’t like not having the tutorial because the tutorial helped me learn the topic so when there was a drop-in i never went but not because i didn’t have any questions. i had too many and too much i didn’t understand so wouldn’t know where to start asking.  they were harder to learn because you were completely on your own without anyone going over the topics with you.  …if they [drop-ins] became mandatory then i think i would have benefitted a lot more from doing more classes with a teacher.  i understand that it is productive learning – however far too little guidance and independent study – felt a bit drowned and unsupported. confidence in own learning  less confidence in knowing content but learning experience and outcome was similar to other topics. roberts student views of using e-learning tools to facilitate independent learning of anatomy and physiology journal of learning development in higher education, issue 9: july 2015 10 motivation to learn  the drop ins were not a good idea because there was no motivation to go to them and i didn’t. they should be mandatory. dr student  because they sessions were optional it was very difficult to find the motivation to come in when we have our online resources at home. i suppose they could be useful for any major questions but i did not have any. table 3. questions relating to independent learning style. agree don’t know disagree i i found it difficult to get to grips with the independent learning style used ases 59 8 32 dr 35 8 58 ot 68 6 26 pt 31 15 54 ii i understood why the independent learning style was used ases 72 21 7 dr 92 4 4 ot 91 9 0 pt 97 3 0 iii insufficient direction was given to what i needed to learn ases 19 19 62 dr 15 15 70 ot 15 3 82 pt 16.5 16.5 69 iv it was more difficult to learn the topics not supported with workshops ases 62 8 30 dr 42 15 42 ot 76 9 15 pt 59 8 33 v ala helped me learn more topics ases 70 19 11 dr 81 7 12 ot 79 12 9 pt 78 8 14 vi i would like more teaching online ases 23 17 60 dr 12 4 84 ot 12 3 85 pt 10 20 69 vii it was not useful having homework quizzes for every topic ases 19 13 68 dr 12 0 88 ot 24 6 71 pt 8 21 74 viii homework quizzes helped students check understanding and ongoing learning needs ases 77 9 15 dr 92 4 4 ot 91 0 9 pt 92 5 3 results are in % roberts student views of using e-learning tools to facilitate independent learning of anatomy and physiology journal of learning development in higher education, issue 9: july 2015 11 the online system only enabled collection of data relating to student access of hw and ala. student interaction with the hw and ala is shown in figure 1. ases student engagement is the lowest across the subject groups. figure 1. engagement with homework and ala by subject group. all 155 students completed the summative assessment – a computer assisted multiple choice examination. mean scores for the assessment from 2011/12, 2012/13 and 2013/14 were 63%, 61% and 57% respectively with only scores for 2013/14 showing a statistically significant drop (12/13 p=0.0137, 12/14 p=<0.000 13/14 p=0.008). analysis by course (figure 2) indicates that only the ases results demonstrate a significant difference across the years with a reduction in mean score of 9% between 2012/13 and 2013/14 (p=<0.000). there was no significant difference in the other subject groups across the years (dr p=0.614, ot p=0.673 and pt p= 0.168 respectively). results of a comparison of workshop topics and those supported only by ‘drop in’ are shown in table 4 and show no significant difference between methods (p=0.882). figure 2. comparison of scores by subject group. roberts student views of using e-learning tools to facilitate independent learning of anatomy and physiology journal of learning development in higher education, issue 9: july 2015 12 table 4. comparison of session type. mean (sd) p online 55 (21) 0.882 workshop 56 (22) online ases 55 (21) 0.646 online dr/ot/pt 55 (21) workshop ases 57 (22) 0.391 workshop dr/ot/pt 57 (22) discussion over 90% of dr, ot and pt students and 72% of ases reported they understood why more independent learning methods were being used, and the majority of students in all subject groups reported they felt sufficient direction to self-study was provided. despite this, however, more than 50% of pt, ot and ases agreed it was more difficult to learn the online topics, although this dropped to 42% for dr. additionally, 68% of ot students and 59% ases agreed that it was difficult to get to grips with the independent learning style. interestingly, however, the dr and pt students disagreed with this, indicating the majority of these student groups found it easy to adapt to the independent requirements. qualitative data suggests that a major challenge for students was a lack of motivation when there was no class. these findings concur with those of wilson and solheim (2008) who investigated promoting independent skill acquisition and found that students did not complete independent learning tasks unless a staff member was present. an interesting statement from one student was ‘the lecturers don’t want to spoon feed us but we want spoon fed’. andragogy, as indicated in taylor and laros (2014), suggests that adults are more selfdirected in their learning, more ready to learn, keen to apply learning, and have intrinsic motivation, all traits required for independent learning. however, the data presented here, and in wilson and solheim (2008), suggests that many first year students are not yet working within these principles and that the level of independence imposed during the a & p module was too much for many of the students. since the majority of students in roberts student views of using e-learning tools to facilitate independent learning of anatomy and physiology journal of learning development in higher education, issue 9: july 2015 13 year 1 are only 17 or 18 years of age this should not be surprising: they have yet to gain a context for the material being learnt, or to perceive its relevance to their profession, and were not being required to apply it. consequently they may lack the motivation to engage with the independent learning required. jezegou (2013) found that, even with adult learners, predetermined requirements were perceived positively as a motivator forcing them to work. several studies have reported that undertaking formative online quizzes improves summative outcomes (upton, 2005; kibble, 2007; coffee and hillier, 2008). however, kibble (2007) supports the ‘predetermined requirement’ of jezegou (2013) by suggesting the improvement is most noticeable when engagement is enforced, for example, by attaching course credit. this suggests that undergraduate students require extrinsic motivation and may not be academically ready for the responsibility that this independent learning approach required. workshops, an extrinsic motivator, may have acted to encourage students to undertake directed study (box 1) as class activities would expose their level of preparedness while also providing reassurance relating to topic understanding. noncompletion of quizzes and ala accrued no penalty and completion no reward, therefore no motivation was provided. in addition to motivation problems, confidence in learning was an issue; student comments indicated they found it easier to learn when staff reviewed topics with them (box 1) as it gave them confidence in their learning. this concurs with steele et al. (2002) who reported that students found the lecturer’s ability to highlight key aspects, and emphasise important points, improved their confidence in their learning. certainly workshop tasks were directed at ensuring students had grasped key areas of knowledge and clarifying misconceptions. other comments (box 1) suggest that students may have felt overwhelmed by the quantity of knowledge required, with the variety of resources provided, and quantity of information contained within them, adding to this feeling. steele et al. (2002) reported similar problems and johnson et al. (2013) found that students did not have confidence to determine what constituted an appropriate learning resource. although the learning resources used here were pre-screened by staff, students may not have investigated the full variety of potential learning tools due to this lack of confidence. roberts student views of using e-learning tools to facilitate independent learning of anatomy and physiology journal of learning development in higher education, issue 9: july 2015 14 this is supported by the data presented in table 1. this lack of exploration could lead to a self-perpetuating cycle, as wen-yu lee and tsai (2011) suggest that if students are not forced to use online resources they do not give themselves enough exposure to feel comfortable using them and, therefore, the resources will be less useful in self-regulated learning as students avoid using them. one session was provided to guide the students to the resources. however, further sessions, which include tasks to encourage students to find and explore the various different resources, may have helped encourage this exposure, and therefore confidence, in using the various resources. additionally, the ‘what you need to know’ sheets used in the module had very specific content that the students needed to know. this often omitted sections of a chapter in the core text. most of the online resources were designed to address the whole book chapter, however, only the homework quizzes could be fully customised to our content. consequently students had to navigate the online content independently to find the sections of resources relevant to them. although there are views in the literature indicating it is advantageous for students to have access to a wide range of information (marc 2002, cited al-qahtani and higgins, 2013) this is contradicted by johnson et al. (2013) who found that students preferred resources that were directly focused on their module content. johnson et al. (2013) indicate this enabled the students to be confident they were addressing the module learning requirement. it also meant they did not have to make independent judgements about the quality of a resource or waste time finding the relevant content. the lack of use of a wide range of available resources found here would suggest support for this view rather than that of marc (2002, cited al-qahtani and higgins, 2013). consequently other online resources which had fewer learning tools, but which could be more selectively allocated to map to the module content, may have been more beneficial and future research should investigate this. lack of confidence in the online topics may also relate to the method of learning however. mcnulty et al. (2012) demonstrated a positive correlation between constructive learning and course performance and a negative correlation when rote learning was used, indicating that students adjust their learning strategies depending on the tasks required of them. similar findings were reported by subramanian et al. (2012). roberts student views of using e-learning tools to facilitate independent learning of anatomy and physiology journal of learning development in higher education, issue 9: july 2015 15 workshops encouraged a more active learning approach and encourage constructive learning, while ala may encourage rote learning through memorising information. interestingly, galy et al. (2011) suggest that the perceived usefulness of resources, and ease of use, relate to final course grade. although students perceived the homework quizzes and ala to be most useful, their actual use of them did not mirror this perception, particularly in relation to ala (table 2 and figure 1). this may link to irrelevant content (johnson et al., 2013) as ala could not be made entirely specific to the course syllabus, the time it could take to complete ala activities, or simply to ease of access. results shown in table 3 suggest there may be a stronger link between summative achievement and completion of homework quizzes rather than ala, since all subject groups had poor completion of ala activities but dr and pt, the two strongest performing groups, had better homework completion. the benefit of homework quizzes is supported by kibble (2007) and wilson and solheim (2008). however, a recent study by griff and matter (2013) questions the benefit of incorporating ala as they found no difference in student achievement in those using ala compared to those using simple online quizzes. a lack of randomisation to groups and huge variability in how ala was used across different institutions does put some doubt on these findings, however, their findings are replicated in this case report. if, as mcnulty et al. (2012) suggest, constructive learning improves summative outcome in comparison to rote learning, this questions why scores in summative assessment topics did not differ between workshop and online topics. the answer may lie in the content of the module and its method of assessment, as the multiple choice assessment only required rote learning. the aim of using more constructive learning strategies was to facilitate greater retention of knowledge for subsequent years, something that was not measured in this project. the overall drop in student achievement for the 2013/14 cohort may be due to the cohort involved but this could only be established if the module were delivered in the same way for another year. interestingly, while over 80% of dr and ot students indicated they do not want more independent online learning, this dropped to 60% of ases students and 69% of pt students. this is difficult to reconcile with the lack of engagement with the homework quizzes and ala and the self-reported use of other resources. these percentages do, however, indicate that the majority of students do not want to increase the amount of online teaching. it may be possible that developing learning opportunities that engage the roberts student views of using e-learning tools to facilitate independent learning of anatomy and physiology journal of learning development in higher education, issue 9: july 2015 16 students with the basic a & p more constructively, however, could allow an increased opportunity for teaching this aspect online. for example, if a & p were taught with pathology, the students would have to engage with the basic physiology or anatomy to be able to explain how pathology alters it. classes could focus on this integration while online activities address the core knowledge base. this would be fitting with several other studies who found that adding e-learning resources to face-to-face teaching produced better summative achievements than replacing face to face teaching (elizondo-omana et al., 2004; castilho-weinert and lopes, 2009; al-qahtani and higgins, 2012). the likelihood is that this is due to an emphasis on constructive learning as advocated by mcnulty et al. (2012). it would have been interesting to have investigated in more depth why students found more independent learning more challenging. analysis of this, in conjunction with the student’s academic background, may have provided greater insights into the challenges students faced: also whether some groups of students may benefit more from this approach from the beginning while others require a more gentle introduction. conclusion the results of this case study indicate that students found it challenging to move straight into independent learning, although it was not detrimental to their overall summative achievement. this may relate to lack of intrinsic motivation and/or lack of confidence. students may also have failed to gain benefit from potentially engaging and useful independent learning tools due to the challenge of negotiating the resources and lack of confidence in using them. however, this data relates to only one cohort of students and cannot therefore be widely generalised. data also suggests that methods to encourage constructive learning and avoid rote learning are desirable. it may therefore be beneficial to investigate if students engage more with online learning of a & p using specific, but more limited, learning resources. also if this, in addition to workshops that use this knowledge in relation to pathologies linked to their chosen profession, improves results. roberts student views of using e-learning tools to facilitate independent learning of anatomy and physiology journal of learning development in higher education, issue 9: july 2015 17 motivation to complete online quizzes to focus a & p learning could be provided by allocating a proportion of the summative grade from quiz completion and linking it to the grade achieved on each task. this would provide extrinsic motivation while still encouraging the development of independent learning skills and providing reassurance relating to the learning achieved. further research should investigate if this provides any benefit to student outcome. acknowledgements thanks to the department of the enhancement of teaching learning and assessment for supporting this project with a teaching and learning development grant. i would also like to thank the head of the school of health sciences for supporting the project by purchasing access to the online resources and the module team who helped pull the resources together for teaching. references al-qahtani, a.a.y. and higgins, s.e. (2013) ‘effects of traditional, blended and e-learning on student’s achievement in higher education’, journal of computer assisted learning, 29(3), pp. 220-234 [online]. available at: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1365-2729.2012.00490.x/epdf (accessed: 24 february 2015). bligh, d. (2000) what’s the use of lectures? san francisco: jossey-bass publishers. available at: http://isites.harvard.edu/fs/docs/icb.topic38998.files/bligh_ch1_and_ch3.pdf (accessed: 10 july 2015). bloomfield, j., roberts, j., and while, a. (2010) ‘the effect of computer assisted learning v’s conventional teaching methods’, international journal of nursing studies, 47(3), pp. 287-94. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1365-2729.2012.00490.x/epdf http://isites.harvard.edu/fs/docs/icb.topic38998.files/bligh_ch1_and_ch3.pdf roberts student views of using e-learning tools to facilitate independent learning of anatomy and physiology journal of learning development in higher education, issue 9: july 2015 18 bunce, d.m., flens, e.a. and neiles, k.y. (2010) ‘how long can students pay attention in class: a study of student attention decline using clickers’, journal of chemical education, 87(12), pp. 1438-1443 [online]. available at: http://pubs.acs.org/doi/pdf/10.1021/ed100409p (accessed: 10 july 2015). castilho-weinert, l.v. and lopes, h.s. (2009) ‘computers in physical therapy education: interactive multimedia learning with mustret’, informatics in education, 8(2), pp. 157-172 [online]. available at: http://www.mii.lt/informatics_in_education/pdf/infe149.pdf (accessed: 10 july 2015). coffee, j. and hillier, s. (2008) ‘teaching pre-cursor clinical skills using an on-line audiovisual tool: an evaluation using student responses’, merlot journal of online learning and teaching, 4(4), pp. 469-476 [online]. available at: http://jolt.merlot.org/vol4no4/coffee_1208.htm (accessed: 10 july 2015). cohen, l., manion, l. and morrison, k. (2000) research methods in education. 5 th edn. london: routledge and falmer. elizondo-omana, r.e., morales-gomez, j.a., guzman, s.l., hernandez, i.l., ibarra, r.p. and vilchez, f.c. (2004) ‘traditional teaching supported by computerassisted learning for macroscopic anatomy’, the anatomical record (part b: new anatomy), 278b(1), pp. 18-22 [online]. available at: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ar.b.20019/pdf (accessed: 10 july 2015). european community (2007) key competencies for lifelong learning: a european reference framework. available at: http://europa.eu/legislation_summaries/education_training_youth/lifelong_learning/ c11090_en.htm (accessed: 28 february 2015). faleye, s. (2011) ‘the ccailm learning model: an instructional model for teaching and learning of engineering modules’, us-china education review, a7, pp. 626-635. http://pubs.acs.org/doi/pdf/10.1021/ed100409p http://www.mii.lt/informatics_in_education/pdf/infe149.pdf http://jolt.merlot.org/vol4no4/coffee_1208.htm http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ar.b.20019/pdf http://europa.eu/legislation_summaries/education_training_youth/lifelong_learning/c11090_en.htm http://europa.eu/legislation_summaries/education_training_youth/lifelong_learning/c11090_en.htm roberts student views of using e-learning tools to facilitate independent learning of anatomy and physiology journal of learning development in higher education, issue 9: july 2015 19 freeman, s., eddy, s.l., mcdonough, m., smith, m.k., okoroafor, n., jordt, h. and wendworth, m.p. (2014) ‘active learning increases student performance in science, engineering and mathematics’, proceedings of the national academy of sciences of the united states of america, 111(23), pp. 8410-8415 [online]. available at: http://www.pnas.org/content/111/23/8410.full.pdf (accessed: 10 july 2015). fry, h., ketteridge, s. and marshall, s. (2014) a handbook for teaching and learning in higher education: enhancing academic practice. hoboken: taylor and francis. galy, e., downe, c. and johnson, j. (2011) ‘the effect of using e-learning tolls in online and campus based classrooms on student performance’, journal of information technology education, 10(1), pp. 209-230 [online]. available at: http://www.editlib.org/p/111519/ (accessed: 10 july 2015). general medical council (2012) continuing professional development. guidance for all doctors. london: gmc. available at: http://www.gmcuk.org/continuing_professional_development___guidance_for_all_doctors_1114.p df_56438625.pdf (accessed: 10 july 2015). gopal, t., herron s. and mohn, r. (2010) ‘effect of an interactive web based instruction in the performance of undergraduate anatomy and physiology lab students’, computers and education, 55(2), pp. 500-512 [online]. available at: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/s0360131510000473 (accessed: 10 july 2015). griff, e.r. and matter, s.f. (2013) ‘evaluation of an adaptive online learning system’, british journal of educational technology, 44(1) pp. 170-176 [online]. available at: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-8535.2012.01300.x/full (accessed: 10 july 2015). health and care professions council (2011) your guide to our standards for cpd. london: hcpc. available at: http://www.hpcuk.org/assets/documents/10003b70yourguidetoourstandardsofcontinuingprofessi onaldevelopment.pdf (accessed: 10 july 2015). http://www.pnas.org/content/111/23/8410.full.pdf http://www.editlib.org/p/111519/ http://www.gmc-uk.org/continuing_professional_development___guidance_for_all_doctors_1114.pdf_56438625.pdf http://www.gmc-uk.org/continuing_professional_development___guidance_for_all_doctors_1114.pdf_56438625.pdf http://www.gmc-uk.org/continuing_professional_development___guidance_for_all_doctors_1114.pdf_56438625.pdf http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/s0360131510000473 http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-8535.2012.01300.x/full http://www.hpc-uk.org/assets/documents/10003b70yourguidetoourstandardsofcontinuingprofessionaldevelopment.pdf http://www.hpc-uk.org/assets/documents/10003b70yourguidetoourstandardsofcontinuingprofessionaldevelopment.pdf http://www.hpc-uk.org/assets/documents/10003b70yourguidetoourstandardsofcontinuingprofessionaldevelopment.pdf roberts student views of using e-learning tools to facilitate independent learning of anatomy and physiology journal of learning development in higher education, issue 9: july 2015 20 hilbelink, a.j. (2009) ‘a measure of the effectiveness of incorporating 3d human anatomy into an online undergraduate laboratory’, british journal of educational technology, 40(4), pp. 664-672 [online]. available at: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-8535.2008.00886.x/epdf (accessed: 10 july 2015). jezegou, a. (2013) ‘the influence of the openness of an e-learning situation on adult students’ self-regulation’, international review of research in open and distance learning, 14(3), pp. 182-201 [online]. available at: http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/1450/2525 (accessed: 10 july 2015). johnson, i.p., palmer, e., burton, j. and brockhouse, m. (2013) ‘online learning resources in anatomy: what do students think?’, clinical anatomy, 26(5), pp. 556563. kibble, j. (2007) ‘use of unsupervised online quizzes as formative assessment in a medical physiology course: effects of incentives on student participation and performance’, advances in physiology education, 31(3), pp. 253-260 [online]. available at: http://advan.physiology.org/content/31/3/253 (accessed: 10 july 2015). mayer, r.e. (2003) ‘the promise of multimedia learning: using the same instructional design methods across different media’, learning and instruction, 13(2), pp. 125139 [online]. available at: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/s0959475202000166 (accessed: 10 july 2015). mcnulty, j.a., ensminger, d.c., hoyt, a.e., chandrasekhar, a.j., gruener, g. and espiritu, b. (2012) ‘study strategies are associated with performance in basic science courses in the medical curriculum’, journal of education and learning, 1(1), pp. 1-12. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-8535.2008.00886.x/epdf http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/1450/2525 http://advan.physiology.org/content/31/3/253 http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/s0959475202000166 roberts student views of using e-learning tools to facilitate independent learning of anatomy and physiology journal of learning development in higher education, issue 9: july 2015 21 nursing and midwifery council (2015) the code. professional standards of practice and behaviour for nurses and midwives. london: nmc. available at: http://www.nmc.org.uk/globalassets/sitedocuments/nmc-publications/revisednew-nmc-code.pdf (accessed: 10 july 2015). quality assurance agency ( no date) students. available at: www.qaa.ac.uk/partners/students (accessed: 28 february 2015). raynor, m. and iggulden, h. (2008) ‘online anatomy and physiology: piloting the use of an anatomy and physiology e-book-vle hybrid in pre-registration and post qualifying nursing programmes at the university of salford’, health information and libraries journal, 25(2), pp. 98-105. scottish credit and qualifications framework (no date) the framework. available at: http://scqf.org.uk/the-framework/scqf-levels/ (accessed: 28 february 2015). sparks, a.c. and smith, b. (2014) qualitative research methods in sport, exercise and health. abingdon: routledge. steele d.j., palensky, j.e.j., lynch, t.g., lacy, n.l. and duffy, s.w. (2002) ‘learning preferences, computer attitudes and student evaluation of computerised instruction’, medical education, 36(3), pp. 225-232. subramanian, a., timberlake, m., mittakanti, h., lara, m. and brandt, m.l. (2012) ‘novel educational approach for medical students: improved retention rates using interactive medical software compared with traditional lecture based format’, journal of surgical education, 69(2), pp. 253-256 [online]. available at: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/s1931720411003588 (accessed: 10 july 2015). taylor, e.w. and laros, a. (2014) ‘researching the practice of fostering transformative learning: lessons learned from the study of andragogy’, journal of transformative education, 12(2), pp. 134-147. http://www.nmc.org.uk/globalassets/sitedocuments/nmc-publications/revised-new-nmc-code.pdf http://www.nmc.org.uk/globalassets/sitedocuments/nmc-publications/revised-new-nmc-code.pdf http://www.qaa.ac.uk/partners/students http://scqf.org.uk/the-framework/scqf-levels/ http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/s1931720411003588 roberts student views of using e-learning tools to facilitate independent learning of anatomy and physiology journal of learning development in higher education, issue 9: july 2015 22 upton, d. (2005) ‘on-line learning in nutrition and dietetics: student performance and attitudes’, the internet journal of allied health sciences and practice, 3(1), pp. 18 [online]. available at: http://ijahsp.nova.edu/articles/vol3num1/upton.pdf (accessed: 10 july 2015). wen-yu lee, s. and tsai, c.c. (2011) ‘student perceptions of collaboration, selfregulated learning and information seeking in the context of internet based learning and traditional learning’, computers in human behaviour, 27(2), pp. 905914 [online]. available at: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/s0747563210003614 (accessed: 10 july 2015). wilson, n. and solheim, h. (2008) promoting independent skill acquisition in practical allied health education. york: hea. available at: http://www.health.heacademy.ac.uk/lenses/mp/m10172.html (accessed: 10 july 2015). author details fiona roberts is a senior lecturer in the school of health sciences, robert gordon university, aberdeen. after training as a physiotherapist fiona decided to become involved in teaching physiotherapy instead. her special interest areas are enhancing the teaching and learning experience, as well as key areas of respiratory physiotherapy practice. http://ijahsp.nova.edu/articles/vol3num1/upton.pdf http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/s0747563210003614 http://www.health.heacademy.ac.uk/lenses/mp/m10172.html student views of using e-learning tools to facilitate independent learning of anatomy and physiology abstract introduction method recruitment learning materials module delivery outcome measures data analysis results discussion conclusion acknowledgements references author details literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 10: november 2016 perception of academic learning environments and perceived impact on articulation of employability skills: a mixed methods study dr catherine hayes john fulton siobhan devlin diane westwood iain garfield phil beardmore david archer michael collins lewis bingle university of sunderland, uk abstract this study reports on the findings of a mixed methods study that was undertaken to establish student perceptions of academic learning environments and the perceived impact of these on their articulation of employability skills. this was so student perspectives on employability could be used to inform reflection on pedagogic practices for their educators in higher education. using a purposive sample of 250 students based in a recently modernised sciences complex building in a higher education institution (hei), the study was cross sectional and descriptive by design. the social learning spaces researched were perceived by participants to provide optimal academic learning environments for their development of knowledge, skills and professionalism through certain signature pedagogies as they progressed through their programmes of study. students also expressed the view that their acquisition of functional skills were significantly more important than any personal attributes/characteristics that they brought to programmes. what also mattered was whether the importance of certain graduate skills to the workplace had been made explicit to them so that they could see the relevance of their studies to practice. in defining ‘graduateness’, in employability terms the research hayes et al. perception of academic learning environments and perceived impact on articulation of employability skills journal of learning development in higher education, issue 10: november 2016 2 concluded that it was necessary to consider how it was shaped by the context of delivery of subject disciplines, stages of academic progression, and the use of social learning spaces, as they all had a significant impact on the perceptions students held about their potential employability upon completion of their academic programmes. keywords: learning environments; employability; signature pedagogies; situated cognition; problem based learning. introduction situated cognition is the theory that proposes knowledge can be framed by practical applications to practice (wellington, 2015). it can be argued that situated cognition is pivotal to understanding not only how students acquire knowledge and skills, but also how they then perceive them and articulate those skills to potential employers – this has been termed ‘vocational credibility’ (dacre pool et al., 2014). physical academic learning environments are of direct relevance therefore to situated cognition because they help organise not just how students learn, but how they might transfer their knowledge to the workplace (senior et al., 2014). student perceptions of the impact of physical learning environments are relevant in three respects: 1. how they link the context of their learning to the workplace will determine how they view its relevance to practice. 2. how students articulate their ‘graduateness’ or employability to an employer will impact on how equipped they are for work. 3. preparing students to articulate their employability will impact on their ability to impress potential employees if they are shortlisted for job interviews (mahmood et al., 2014). the aim of this research was to give educational providers in the research setting a means of reflecting on the extent to which students felt that their learning environment (the recently modernised ‘sciences complex building’) helped develop or foster generic employability skills. this was to ensure that the institution could use the information gathered to better equip students to understand not only the relevance of what they learned and how they learned it, but how it might be relevant to their future employability. hayes et al. perception of academic learning environments and perceived impact on articulation of employability skills journal of learning development in higher education, issue 10: november 2016 3 more importantly, the research asked how students could be equipped to articulate this understanding to potential employers through changes in the curricula and pedagogies they were exposed to (freeman et al., 2014). the sciences complex at the university has been designed and developed to accommodate social constructivist approaches to learning (vygotsky, 1978). moves towards problem based learning (pbl) / inquiry based learning (ibl) have necessitated consideration of learning spaces and how best student participation, in terms of active involvement in the creation of knowledge, can best be facilitated. in small enough cohorts, purist pbl has been delivered successfully, with various initiatives to incorporate hybrid models of pbl in practice (hayes and davies, 2014). with much larger cohorts, where it would be a physical impossibility to engage groups of 8-10 in purist pbl, there has still been an emphasis from academic development initiatives across the faculty of applied science to use inquiry based approaches which afford students more than traditional didactic teaching methodologies. articulating employability through the acknowledgement of authentic learning environments the consideration of how students articulate their potential employability is not a new phenomenon. a plethora of studies have considered the need of higher education institutions (heis) to address the capacity of students to focus on their potential employability, and explore how they might enact their employability, for example, in job interviews (pegg et al., 2012; herrington et al., 2014). in addition, the question of whether undergraduate students acknowledge how physical learning environments facilitate the acquisition of these employment skills has been the source of some contention and debate (sharples et al., 2014). ensuring that teaching methodologies and all pedagogic practice is framed within an authentic learning environment is one mechanism of providing students with an insight into the world of work. however, the notion of situated cognition, discussed above, is not often acknowledged beyond the context of placement provision, unless the prospect of modernising buildings’ infrastructure becomes an issue for heis (salmon and wright, 2014). the phrase ‘the missing perspective’, coined by tymon (2013) , points to the hayes et al. perception of academic learning environments and perceived impact on articulation of employability skills journal of learning development in higher education, issue 10: november 2016 4 relatively blinkered attitude most students take towards not only what knowledge is, but how it works in practice and, more specifically in the context of this paper, how the infrastructure of buildings, fixtures and fittings can contextualise and frame teaching methodologies (thomas and anderson, 2014). taking this into account means that one can begin to visualise how learning environments might shape educational experience and influence future potential employability skills. the seminal work of entwistle and ramsden (2015), now revived for the 21st century, framed how academic learning environments could provide a means of shaping the characteristics of graduates in educational institutions over thirty years ago. in the current political climate of workforce development, as employability is one of the key focal points of higher education pedagogy and innovation, it remains important to ask if this is still the case (hordern, 2014). methods the study was acknowledged and designed as a relatively small scale study at a post1992 university. from this perspective, no claim of generalisability is made from the study to a wider context. the methodological approach adopted was selected for two main reasons: 1. the approach offered the highest degrees of procedural trustworthiness and authenticity in relation to the data collected in both phases of the research. 2. in comparison to observational and longitudinal studies, it offered a very practical and straightforward means of data collection and analysis in the context of a busy sciences complex building. the research had two distinct phases, in keeping with the mixed methods approach adopted; each is outlined below. research phase one following formal institutional ethical approval for both phases of the research study, students of the faculty of applied sciences in the departments of pharmacy health and wellbeing and sport and exercise sciences were recruited purposively to the investigation. this sampling technique was adopted on the basis that students undertaking hayes et al. perception of academic learning environments and perceived impact on articulation of employability skills journal of learning development in higher education, issue 10: november 2016 5 programmes delivered by the faculty of applied sciences were most able to answer questions about the learning environment that the sciences complex building offered. the process of participation was voluntary and students were invited to participate via posters and the availability of questionnaires, which led to a high response rate. the sample was made up of 250 students entering semester two of their studies in the academic year 2014-2015. no specific numbers of students from each specific stage of their studies were selected as the researchers had to be opportunistic in being able to access subjects. the study was cross sectional and descriptive in design, with data collected via a specifically adapted version of the clinical learning environment inventory (clei), which was originally designed to capture student perceptions of their psychosocial learning environments (chan, 2003; pololi and price, 2000). the adaptations captured student perceptions about the extent to which learning environments prepared students in terms of graduate employability, regardless of their disciplinary background in the faculty. the questionnaire consisted of 15 questions which asked students to respond with an opinion as to whether they agreed with the level to which the physical learning environments in the sciences complex building had impacted on the quality of their student experience, either less than expected, as expected, more than expected, or consistently more than expected. these values were correlated with the dimensions seminally outlined by moos (1980) and mapped against 15 core skills in relation to:  individualisation – the degree of autonomy that students are afforded in relation to their decision-making skills.  innovation – the degree to which new approaches to teaching methodologies can be implemented.  involvement – how much students actually contribute to activity in the learning environment.  personalisation – how much of an opportunity each student is afforded in interacting with their teacher or facilitator of learning.  task orientation – how clear and well organised organisational activities are.  satisfaction – the degree to which personal and professional development are taking place. the 15 core skills, which were developed from and overarched moos’ dimensions, became the focus of the study. student perceptions of each were gathered to illuminate the extent hayes et al. perception of academic learning environments and perceived impact on articulation of employability skills journal of learning development in higher education, issue 10: november 2016 6 to which students felt that their learning environments, namely the sciences complex, had impacted on the development of their:  communication skills  confidence  independence / capacity to learn autonomously  research skills  teamwork  leadership  reflection  active listening skills  creativity  clinical decision-making  initiative  i.t. skills  professionalism  classroom management  self-esteem a total of 212 usable responses (response rate 85%) were obtained, comprising 74 sport and exercise degree students (35%), 89 (42%) pharmacy degree students, 27 (13%) biomedical sciences degree students, and 22 (10%) were nursing top-up degree students. research phase two semi-structured interviewing of 10 voluntary respondents from the students who had taken part in the questionnaire was conducted to further explore the individual experiences students had of academic learning environments at the university. in order to ensure completely random representation of students from across the faculty, a poster inviting student participation in the study was displayed in the main entrance hall of the university. all participants were given pseudonyms to minimise the potential for their identification, (lahman et al., 2015), however, pen portraits (biographical narratives provided by the students) were constructed to facilitate meaning-making of their perceptions (la placa et hayes et al. perception of academic learning environments and perceived impact on articulation of employability skills journal of learning development in higher education, issue 10: november 2016 7 al., 2014). this was incorporated as giving a higher degree of contextual significance to the commentaries of students in terms of the representation of their perceptions. it aided the researchers in framing meaning in context and culture, not just through a series of decontextualised transcriptions. data analysis braun and clarke’s (2006) six phase approach to thematic analysis was adopted as a systematic, yet recursive, approach to inductive qualitative analysis. in accordance with recommendations of the process, data was not viewed in a linear fashion and ideas were extracted as they emerged during the process of interpretation (often after visiting and revisiting particular transcripts), and the researchers proceeded to the next phase where appropriate. phase one this entailed familiarisation with the data set where the researchers immersed themselves in the data collected via extensive reading and re-reading of the transcribed information from the data collection. this was a process undertaken by two researchers where a consensus could be reached between those themes independently found to be most commonly occurring. phase two data was coded: this involved creating and identifying themes that came from analysis of the data sets. this subsequently guided analysis and provided a systematic approach at a semantic and conceptual level, which could be mapped against extant published literature. this was achieved by manually coding every data item and completed by the two researchers involved, collating every element together so that it could be independently checked for inclusion in the overall findings by both. hayes et al. perception of academic learning environments and perceived impact on articulation of employability skills journal of learning development in higher education, issue 10: november 2016 8 phase three this entailed exploring the data for the specific themes identified in phase two of the data analysis, defined in accordance with braun and clark (2006, pp. 57-59) as ‘coherent and meaningful patterns in the data’ of direct relevance to the research aim. if a theme emerged from more than 10% of respondents, it was deemed to be meaningful to the study. its coherence was judged on the basis of non-ambiguous articulation of student perceptions. since there was a degree of diversity in the questions asked, this meant that 100% of respondents contributed to at least four themes. phase four this stage involved reviewing the emergent themes. it provides a means of checking that these were relevant to the data extracts when they are taken in abstraction from the complete data set. phase five providing a definitive theme for each one that has emerged from the study entails defining the overall findings so that each can be individually examined. phase six analysing the themes relative to one another in terms of their rate of occurrence and writing up the findings in relation to this. this involved merging analytical narratives and examining this in relation to the existing published evidence base. findings and discussion the research with faculty of applied sciences students provided some useful insights from a range of students who commented on how the research setting’s learning environments had facilitated their acquisition of generic and transferrable employability skills. the three most salient findings of the study of their perceptions revealed: hayes et al. perception of academic learning environments and perceived impact on articulation of employability skills journal of learning development in higher education, issue 10: november 2016 9 1. signature pedagogies across the faculty of applied sciences have an impact on the perceived development of employability skills the designation of space at the setting is not overly prescriptive in terms of availability and staff can easily adapt rooms, as furniture has not been fixed in position, to accommodate a wide variety of teaching and learning methodologies. in terms of the diversity of programmes offered across the faculty, one of the greatest challenges is to provide generic teaching and learning environments that are not specifically owned or characterised by one subject discipline. the obvious exception to this is where space has been designated for very specific purposes, like chemistry laboratories, and in areas for subject specific instrumentation, such as the gait analysis equipment used in the department of sport and exercise science. what also became apparent through the analysis of findings was the clear development of personal learning identities and the shaping of these into the social identities that distinguished individual professional disciplines. the distinction made by the students between personal attributes (such as self-esteem, confidence, professionalism and initiative), and the functional attributes of it skills, classroom management, clinical decision-making, teamwork, and leadership, was significant. it was evident that there were instances where students appeared to value functional skill over professional capability. for example, students in core laboratory sciences were less concerned about notions of professionalism than the psychomotor skills required to undertake their roles effectively. the following quotes illustrate this clearly: i’m a pretty sociable person but i’m not that bothered about the soft side of things but i need to know things are bang on for accuracy, so i look for great labs and the best equipment to get the job done – beyond that i’m not too bothered. (student a) i’m about ‘doing’ which is hands on, get it done and no flannel sort of person – i don’t need to learn much more than the hands on mechanics of being able to do the job properly – the rooms here let me do that and i’m not much of a socialiser anyway. (student b) this was a stark contrast to students who will be working at the front line of health care provision in the nhs, who valued their ability to be professional above almost everything they did: hayes et al. perception of academic learning environments and perceived impact on articulation of employability skills journal of learning development in higher education, issue 10: november 2016 10 these buildings, well you can tell they’re newly renovated because they look so modern – they make it seem real for me because i can really stretch myself in terms of preparing for practice and i can feel secure knowing that i’m not going to hurt people as i’m learning but reassured that i’m learning enough so that when i get out onto placement in the real world, i really know what i’m doing. (student c) it’s not just about the buildings it’s about the fact that if we can use them then people we work with (the patients, i mean) will still be benefiting from that 20, 30 or 40 years down the line – that’s why it matters… people forget that sometimes. (student d) this is an interesting finding considering that from the published evidence base, employers place these skills of professionalism in exactly the polar opposite order of significance (prendergast, 2015; evetts, 2013). since there is obviously a disconnect between what employers value and what the students in the study perceive to be most valued in the skills they leave university with, this finding is important. it emphasises the need for students to reflect on the expectations of potential employers so that they can value being able to demonstrate a balanced and objective consideration of how characteristics connected to employability might be articulated in future job interviews/applications etc. additional support with this can also be provided within the institution with adjunct careers advice and support in relation to job interview preparations. 2. stage of student progression through programmes is significant in relation to the shaping of perceptions about the development of employability skills the research also showed that students’ perceptions about employability clearly changed as students progressed through the stages of their respective programmes. in the earlier stages of study, students paid little or no attention to the notion of employability. this could be partly explained by the fact that a high proportion of participants were studying on vocational degree pathways, for example, qualifications like the mpharm or bsc (hons) nursing top-up degree, so they already knew what jobs they were going to be doing. the findings indicate that as educators we need to place significant emphasis on the need for students to articulate and express their experience and skills well to potential employers. exactly how the influence of the perceived relationship that exists between academic learning environments and the concept of employability impacts on a student’s capacity to articulate their available skills set at the point of a job interview is not addressed in this hayes et al. perception of academic learning environments and perceived impact on articulation of employability skills journal of learning development in higher education, issue 10: november 2016 11 study. those students who had a less clear future potential career pathway, for example the bsc (hons) public health student cohort, needed support with being able to articulate how a generic degree pathway had sufficiently prepared them with the levels of critical thinking characterised by jobs in the public sector (nagarajan and edwards, 2015). their comments on the perception of how they would use their degree to gain employment also highlighted their perceptions and their fears about where they would work and how they could best present themselves in an interview: i’ve been here three years and i’m still not sure what i’ll be doing at the end of the degree, there’s like so many things i could do and it’s hard to try and thing about how things in the modules will actually matter when it comes to getting a job… but i suppose they do when you think about it, just i think we don’t think about it enough. (student e) i must admit i’m dreading the end of the course, not just in case i don’t pass but in case i can’t get a job because with this degree it’s not like it leads to anything and the whole uni has been geared to people who know what they’re going to be doing at the end of their three years, so at least they’ve got a clue what an employer would want. (student f) this place is great but you’ve got to make the most of the opportunities you’re given, some people don’t use chances to volunteer or go along to anything beyond anything they absolutely have to… maybe they should be putting it all in the actual modules so that people see how relevant what their learning is. (student g) the seminal findings of biggs (1985) and ramsden (1991) are of significance to this study. both contend that the articulation, or praxis orientation, of theoretical knowledge is shaped by learning environments and framed by students’ individual levels of intrinsic motivation and basic expectations of the curricula with which they engaged thus leading to ‘deeper’ forms of learning. deep learning leads to the capacity to use higher order thinking skills and is founded in process-based learning outcomes that afford students the opportunity to negotiate the complexities of the outcomes-based assessment methods which often characterise the kinds of inquiry-based learning provided by heis (jackson, 2015). for example, deep learning lies at the heart of the healthcare education agenda to engage healthcare professional students with higher order thinking skills and a capacity for critical hayes et al. perception of academic learning environments and perceived impact on articulation of employability skills journal of learning development in higher education, issue 10: november 2016 12 reflexivity on practice (mirghani et al., 2014). in relation to the linkage of learning to employability, deep learning can be regarded as important, particularly in relation to the capability of students’ effective decision-making, communication and resilience. 3. social learning spaces are much appreciated as an adjunct to formal learning environments in the development of employability skills participants who were interviewed admitted that until they were asked to comment on how academic learning environments impacted on the development of their employability skills, they had never consciously sought to look at the relationship between them. however, the sciences complex at the university has been designed and developed to accommodate social constructivist approaches to learning (vygotsky, 1978). this approach ostensibly encourages students to use their interaction with one another and their external environment to construct meaning and then to develop that meaning into learning so that they can learn much from each other beyond the constraints of the academic curriculum. there was clear evidence that students related their capacity to perform functionally in higher education in relation to any prospective new role as a key indicator of whether they would be successful in their future job applications. in the setting the majority of students valued the opportunity of having ‘real world’ experience in terms of work placement in order to develop these professional skills: the sciences complex is great but however great it is it isn’t the real world and so it can only give you so much that is real… but because that’s put together with experience out there, well it’s just been fantastic. (student h) the academic learning environments within which students worked were seen as pivotal to the development of notions of professionalism as this is what determined which teaching methodologies could be put into practice. some key quotes on this issue included: we’ve done a lot of pbl and it really gets you thinking. (student i) most significantly, the space provided room for group-breakout sessions, social learning space, and the opportunity for flexible and adaptable rooms that could be adapted to fit the hayes et al. perception of academic learning environments and perceived impact on articulation of employability skills journal of learning development in higher education, issue 10: november 2016 13 learning taking place. this is perhaps best illustrated by one student, who in the opportunity to provide qualitative feedback commentary wrote: just having the space to be and to know that being matters in relation to what you learn has been a real ‘game changer’ for me. it means that what you’re learning has a context and it’s alive. (student j) how inquiry-based learning was facilitated was seen as being greatly enhanced by the learning environments offered at the university, since they reflected not only a professional environment but also gave students the social space to reflect on learning in the affective domain. several student commentaries reflected this: the cases we did really opened my eyes; sometimes when you just look at the theory side of stuff it doesn’t do you any favours because you lose sight of the real relevance of it… it’s much better when you can apply it to something practical. (student k) i like the different rooms, it’s really different to sixth form because there are specialist areas actually designed to fit around how you learn not just a bog standard classroom. (student l) working in my module i did lego and a metaphors project, and that sounds ridiculous really, which had nothing to do with the module title and i’d never have thought that could have relevance to the real world but it has changed my whole outlook on how i learn and how i will eventually teach – the surroundings here played a big part in making that happen. (student m) conclusion as acknowledged in the methodology section, this study also has limitations; it is a relatively small scale study at a post-1992 university. whilst no allusion of generalisability is made from the study to a wider context, it does highlight the perceptions of a group of students who have considered, through their participant in this study, the learning environments on their employability skills. the study outlines the potential for more hayes et al. perception of academic learning environments and perceived impact on articulation of employability skills journal of learning development in higher education, issue 10: november 2016 14 exploratory research to identify whether making clear to students the significance of their learning environments is actually important in terms of the perception of their student experience and their potential future employability. the outcome of this study suggests that where generic employability skills are embedded in programmes, this ought to be clearly communicated to students. this will ensure that students can recognise a) the contextual relevance of their learning to future employment settings and b) how the environment can support the development of desirable characteristics. students ought to be made aware that learning spaces define and structure both their individual, professional and social identity, perhaps by incorporating an overview of this into their induction phase at the university. perhaps the most salient of the findings of this study is the interrelationship of vocational credibility, signature pedagogy and generic skill. this overlap in the findings of the study provides the basis for an employability articulation model (figure a) which affords higher education the opportunity of contextually situating the acquisition of core skills, functionality and personal attributes in the culture and context of their individual institutions. figure a. visual representation of the interrelationship between generic skill / vocational credibility and signature pedagogies: the employability articulation model (e= employability). generic skill personal attributes functionality signature pedagogy vocational credibility core skill e hayes et al. perception of academic learning environments and perceived impact on articulation of employability skills journal of learning development in higher education, issue 10: november 2016 15 this model permits a shared understanding of what the core term ‘graduateness’ might mean and how the articulation of ‘employability’ to students might be shared and disseminated across academic curricula by lecturers. the need for heis to address the supply to the global economy of a new raft of employees on an annual basis is counterbalanced by the very great privilege they have in being transformative change agents. their contribution to society generally, and the embedded contribution to shaping individual lives in particular, is one which transcends generations, raises aspiration and epitomises the philosophical essence of western education. acknowledgements the authors would like to thank all of the staff and students from the university of sunderland who directly participated in this study and offered practical help in the organisation of the project. references biggs, j.b. (1985) ‘the role of metalearning in study processes’, british journal of educational psychology, 55(3), pp. 185-212. braun, v. and clarke, v. (2006) ‘using thematic analysis in psychology’, qualitative research in psychology, 3(2), pp. 77-101. chan d.s.k. (2003) ‘validation of clinical learning inventory’, west j nurs res, 25(5), pp. 519-532. dacre pool, l., qualter, p. and sewell, p.j. (2014) ‘exploring the factor structure of the careeredge employability development profile’, education+ training, 56(4), pp. 303-313. entwistle, n. and ramsden, p. (2015) understanding student learning (routledge revivals). oxon: routledge. hayes et al. perception of academic learning environments and perceived impact on articulation of employability skills journal of learning development in higher education, issue 10: november 2016 16 evetts, j. (2013) ‘professionalism: value and ideology’, current sociology, 61(5-6), pp. 778-796. freeman, r., millard, l., brand, s. and chapman, p. (2014) ‘student academic partners: student employment for collaborative learning and teaching development’, innovations in education and teaching international, 51(3), pp. 233-243. hayes, c. and davies, m.s. (2014) ‘a phenomenological evaluation of a hybrid model of problem based learning for multidisciplinary healthcare practitioners’, journal of learning development in higher education, issue 7, june, pp. 1-21. herrington, j., reeves, t.c. and oliver, r. (2014) ‘authentic learning environments’, in spector, j.m., merrill, m.d., elen, j. and bishop, m.j. (eds.) handbook of research on educational communications and technology. 4th edn. new york: springer, pp. 401-412. hordern, j. (2014) ‘workforce development, higher education and productive systems’, journal of education and work, 27(4), pp. 409-431. jackson, d. (2015) ‘employability skill development in work-integrated learning: barriers and best practice’, studies in higher education, 40(2), pp. 350-367. lahman, m.k., rodriguez, k.l., moses, l., griffin, k.m., mendoza, b.m. and yacoub, w. (2015) ‘a rose by any other name is still a rose? problematizing pseudonyms in research’. qualitative inquiry, 21(5), pp. 445-453, doi: 1077800415572391. la placa, v., mcvey, d., macgregor, e., smith, a. and scott, m. (2014) ‘the contribution of qualitative research to the healthy foundations life-stage segmentation’, critical public health, 24(3), pp. 266-282. mahmood, l., slabu, l., randsley de moura, g. and hopthrow, t. (2014) ‘employability in the first degree: the role of work placements on students’ perceptions of graduate employability’, psychology teaching review, 20(2), pp. 126-136. hayes et al. perception of academic learning environments and perceived impact on articulation of employability skills journal of learning development in higher education, issue 10: november 2016 17 mirghani, h.m., ezimokhai, m., shaban, s. and van berkel, h.j. (2014) ‘superficial and deep learning approaches among medical students in an interdisciplinary integrated curriculum’, education for health, 27(1), pp. 10-14. moos, r.h. (1980) ‘evaluating classroom learning environments’, studies in educational evaluation, 6(3), pp. 239-252. nagarajan, s.v. and edwards, j. (2015) ‘the role of universities, employers, graduates and professional associations in the development of professional skills of new graduates’, journal of perspectives in applied academic practice, 3(2), pp. 26-37. pegg, a., waldock, j., hendy-isaac, s. and lawton, r. (2012) pedagogy for employability. york: the higher education academy. pololi, l. and price, j. (2000) ‘validation and use of an instrument to measure the learning environment as perceived by medical students’, teach learn med, 12(4), pp. 201207. prendergast, c. (2015) ‘professionalism and contracts in organizations’, journal of labor economics, 33(3 part 1), pp. 591-621. ramsden, p. (1991) ‘a performance indicator of teaching quality in higher education: the course experience questionnaire’, studies in higher education, 16(2), pp. 129-150. salmon, g. and wright, p. (2014) ‘transforming future teaching through ‘carpe diem’ learning design’, education sciences, 4(1), pp. 52-63. senior, c., reddy, p. and senior, r. (2014) ‘the relationship between student employability and student engagement: working toward a more unified theory’, frontiers in psychology, 5(march), p. 238. sharples, m., adams, a., ferguson, r., gaved, m., mcandrew, p., rienties, b. and whitelock, d. (2014) innovating pedagogy 2014. milton keynes: the open university. hayes et al. perception of academic learning environments and perceived impact on articulation of employability skills journal of learning development in higher education, issue 10: november 2016 18 thomas, g.p. and anderson, d. (2014) ‘changing the metacognitive orientation of a classroom environment to enhance students’ metacognition regarding chemistry learning’, learning environments research, 17(1), pp. 139-155. tymon, a. (2013) ‘the student perspective on employability’, studies in higher education, 38(6), pp. 841-856. vygotsky, l.s. (1978) mind in society: the development of higher psychological processes. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. wellington, j. (2015) educational research: contemporary issues and practical approaches. london: bloomsbury publishing. author details dr catherine hayes, principal lecturer in learning and teaching, faculty of applied sciences, university of sunderland. dr john fulton, principal lecturer in nursing, faculty of applied sciences, university of sunderland. dr siobhan devlin, principal lecturer in learning and teaching, faculty of applied sciences, university of sunderland. dr diane westwood, principal lecturer in learning and teaching, faculty of applied sciences, university of sunderland. iain garfield, head of estate planning and development, newcastle university management, estates department (formerly university of sunderland). phil beardmore, accommodation planner, estates department, university of sunderland. dr david archer, senior lecturer in sport and exercise science, faculty of applied sciences, university of sunderland. hayes et al. perception of academic learning environments and perceived impact on articulation of employability skills journal of learning development in higher education, issue 10: november 2016 19 dr lewis bingle, senior lecturer in microbiology, university of sunderland. michael collins, senior lecturer in clinical skills, university of sunderland. perception of academic learning environments and perceived impact on articulation of employability skills: a mixed methods study john fulton siobhan devlin diane westwood iain garfield phil beardmore david archer michael collins lewis bingle abstract introduction articulating employability through the acknowledgement of authentic learning environments methods research phase one research phase two data analysis phase one phase two phase three phase four phase five phase six findings and discussion conclusion acknowledgements references author details literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special edition: researching pdp practice, november 2010 building research capacity in a practitioner community: framing and evaluating the ‘national action research network on researching and evaluating personal development planning and e-portfolio practice’ dr john peters, ntf, fhea university of worcester, uk abstract this paper evaluates key aspects of the national action research network on researching and evaluating personal development planning and e-portfolio practice (narn). this was a national teaching fellowship scheme funded project which ran from 2007-1010 and involved sixteen english higher education institutions (heis). the context, purposes, theoretical underpinnings and framework for the narn are briefly explained before the experience of members is explored through an analysis of their own accounts. the narn was proposed in response to widespread calls for more research evidence to underpin our understanding and implementation of personal development planning (pdp) and e-portfolio practices, taking its lead from clegg’s (2004) invitation to produce more researched examples of situated pdp and e-portfolio practice. the narn was primarily a capacity-building project aimed at developing a community of pdp and e-portfolio practitioners into practitioner researchers. borrowing heavily on ideas of community and participative inquiry as well as concepts about developing communities of practice, the project placed an emphasis on promoting collegiality, a sense of belonging and the establishment of the project as a safe space in which to discuss research work. it is evaluated here through the thematic analysis of a particular data set of twelve anonymous accounts provided by project members. the narn project’s emphasis on process rather than product or output, mark it apart from most higher education (he) learning and teaching funded projects. its success carries an important lesson for fundholders, educational developers and he managers about the funding of more process-based learning and teaching development in he. it also provides a possible framework for similar capacity-building projects across other communities. peters building research capacity in a practitioner community key words: communities of practice; capacity-building; project management; personal development planning; national action research network. introduction the national action research network on researching and evaluating personal development planning and e-portfolio practice (narn) was established through funding from the uk higher education academy national teaching fellowship scheme projects (hea, 2010). the narn project was conceived and exists on a number of levels; it is clearly about personal development planning (pdp) and e-portfolios, it is equally about research practice, but it is also a piece of action research on research capacity-building within a practitioner community. at this overarching level the narn project is a capacitybuilding project with a group of educational practitioners. as such it has important lessons for other capacity-building projects and for any change management programme, whether the target community are pdp practitioners, learning developers or any other group and whatever the focus of their work. this paper sets out the context and theoretical basis of the overarching narn model and explores its value as evidenced through the stories provided by participants. the context of the narn there have been repeated calls for more robust evaluation of pdp in the uk (qaa et al., 2001; gough et al., 2003; burgess, 2004; clegg, 2004). initial enquiries, from systematic literature review (gough et al., 2003) through to more practitioner-focused enquiry (clegg, 2004; clegg and bradley, 2006; peters, 2006), have suggested positive impacts on student learning but also raised issues about the complexities involved in evaluating situated pdp practice. the call by gough et al. (2003), for more experimental studies in experimenter controlled conditions and/or using control groups, has rightly been criticised as failing to address the complexities of any real-world educational intervention (clegg, 2005). however, much practitioner evaluation of situated practice has so far lacked the necessary rigour to stand serious scrutiny; being largely descriptive case studies. nevertheless consultation work by the centre for recording achievement (cra) for the uk higher education academy served to confirm the importance of developing an journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 2 peters building research capacity in a practitioner community enhanced evidence base for their practice to those charged with promoting pdp and eportfolio in higher education institutions (heis); the pdp practitioners (ward et al., 2005). while the range of purposes and claimed benefits of pdp are clearly defined in policy documents (qaa et al., 2001; qaa, 2009), heis have been free to develop their own pdp systems using different models and emphasising varying objectives. the student experience of pdp is therefore very different at different heis and in different subjects and settings within those heis. while it may be going too far to suggest that pdp is a chaotic collection of concepts (fry et al., 2002) it is reasonable to suggest that it embraces a multiplicity of approaches and practices which ensure the experience of pdp is diverse and context specific (clegg, 2005). for the practitioner, then, there is obvious logic and appeal to situated research which aims at revealing a rich picture of the experience of pdp. it might usefully answer questions about effective approaches to implementation within different higher education (he) situations and with different groups of learners. such rich pictures could also illuminate whether or how engagement with different pdp practices and processes are enhancing the student learning experience. framing the narn project the narn project, then, was framed as a way of building the capacity of the pdp and eportfolio practitioner community to develop, undertake and share situated, rich, authentic and robust research and evaluation of pdp practice. it was important that members, though they were not necessarily known to each other, were drawn from the pre-existing practitioner community of the cra. concepts about the nature and growth of communities of practice greatly influenced the project (lave and wenger, 1991; wenger, 1998). however, the model used was not one of legitimate peripheral participation in the research community (lave and wenger, 1991) but of capacity-building and ‘leading-edge learning’ from within an existing well-functioning community of practice (wenger, 1998, p.214). as wenger puts it: ‘the solidity of a shared history of practice is a social resource for further learning that must be put to work rather than dismissed’ (wenger, 1998, p.216). capacity-building was defined in this context as ‘enhancing people’s awareness and capabilities, individually and collectively, to produce results they truly care about’ (senge and scharmer, 2001, p.240). the combination of individual and collective elements in this journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 3 peters building research capacity in a practitioner community definition was helpful to the community, furthermore its emphasis on affective elements of capacity-building was particularly important to the practitioner group and to the way in which the narn was designed. it mattered to pdp practitioners that our definition included acknowledgement that they cared about what they do. considerable time was invested in building an inclusive, mutual community in the early stages of the narn project which addressed wenger’s ‘modes of belonging’ (wenger, 1998, p.173). the means of achieving capacity-building was participant/community action research at the meta-level of sharing, developing and undertaking research design and outcomes. this is informed by the approaches championed by reason and bradbury (2001) and owes much to senge and scharmer and their arguments that such an approach operates by, and results in, ‘fostering relationships and collaboration amongst diverse organizations…creating settings for collective reflection that enable people…to ‘see themselves in another’ [and] leveraging progress…through cross institutional links’ (senge and scharmer, 2001, p.238). within the overall model for capacity-building the formal action research interventions came in the shape of the project structure itself and the meetings at national and regional level which were built into that structure. these provided the framework for the development of a practitioner-researcher community and for ongoing mutual support in developing and implementing the individual, situated research projects at institutional level. the narn project is therefore best understood as operating at three levels each with their own form of intervention, participation and output. at the national, meta-level this was an action research project seeking to implement interventions to build research capacity and evaluate this particular approach. at regional level it was about the development of those practitioner-researcher communities and their sharing of research ideas and practices. at the individual level it was about participants designing and implementing one piece of research on their situated pdp and e-portfolio practice. we consciously chose to deviate from community action research in one vital regard. while the overall project was conceived as action research the leadership team felt it was too restricting to require the individual participants to limit themselves to an action research approach. therefore individual members were encouraged to develop research approaches with which they felt comfortable and which best suited the aspect of pdp or e-portfolio practice they wished to examine. this led some to adopt more exploratory, illuminative approaches (cousin, 2009) whilst also giving others permission to examine staff and student attitudes to the changes journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 4 peters building research capacity in a practitioner community they were championing. this freedom did cause some uncertainty but ultimately was important to the success of the individual pieces of research and, therefore, the overall project. figure 1. national action research project structure. level year one year two year three key output national facilitated discussion on project and research question design facilitated discussion on data collection and analysis facilitated discussion on writing for publication evaluation of this capacitybuilding model regional community building and sharing ideas sharing proposals sharing data and drafts a new research community individual research question data gathering reporting publishable pieces of research from each participant the meetings at national level were intentionally more structured than those at regional level. while the national level meetings included inputs on particular aspects of research practice and facilitated discussion around these, the regional meetings merely had a thematic title (see figure 1) beyond which it was up to the regional lead and group to establish their own agenda and bring their own ideas for discussion. this clearly passed responsibility to the regional groups to design and use these meetings as they saw fit. it also emphasised the important role of individual participants in driving the agenda and discussion at meetings and using the meetings to help them achieve their commitment to produce one piece of publishable research each by the end of the three year project (for further discussion of the project structure see burkinshaw, 2010). journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 5 peters building research capacity in a practitioner community evaluating the narn: the data set the narn has produced a huge amount of evaluation data in its three years. the data corpus includes: • participant observation notes of the principal investigator at national and regional meetings. • extensive formal project documentation: o materials from project workshops and meetings. o regular reports from individual institutional leads. o regular reports from regional leads. o formal reports to the fund holders. • formal project outputs: o publications. o presentations. however, this paper is based on a particular data set which sought to get behind the formal written accounts and materials of the project. the data set in question aimed to provide an indication of the personal stories of participants in the project. it consists of anonymous responses, via survey monkey, of project participants, provided through a single piece of free writing in response to a request for reflection of the journey of their participation in the narn and requesting feedback on whether they felt the project aim had been addressed. this data was gathered in the final year of the project but before the contributions to this journal had been produced. of the sixteen participating institutional leads, responses were received from thirteen. of these, one quickly developed into a fuller piece which is presented as an individual chapter in this special edition (kumar, 2010). the following analysis is therefore based on the remaining twelve responses. the twelve responses were subject to thematic analysis using the approaches outlined by braun and clarke (2006). braun and clarke warn that the presentation of analysis should be shaped by the themes rather than being shaped by the question asked. however, in this case, the question clearly did shape the responses and the themes follow the same shape of the life-cycle of the project; from initial expectations, through the experiences of becoming part of the project, the challenges of undertaking the research, learning from the project and hopes for the future. clearly, as braun and clarke suggest, the themes do not journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 6 peters building research capacity in a practitioner community ‘emerge’ from the data but are formed by the researcher’s analysis through immersion in the data. to avoid too idiosyncratic an analysis being imposed on the data it is therefore vital that the results are checked by sharing the data with another researcher or presenting the findings back to the respondents. in this case the latter approach was used and the results were shared, discussed and honed with the project participants at the final national meeting of the narn project held on 14th july 2010 at goodenough college, london. initial hopes, fears and expectations for the project most project participants described themselves as neophyte researchers: at the beginning of this project i felt quite overwhelmed and out of my depth as a researcher. at the start of the project i felt very apprehensive about the prospect of carrying out research and writing up results. this was an alien concept for me. this open self-acceptance as novice educational researchers may strike an academic audience as dangerous candour but it should be noted that, while some pdp and eportfolio practitioners may have come from academic backgrounds, many others come to the role through support services such as learning development, careers and even administrative functions. there is, therefore, no expectation of a research background or necessarily of research being part of the pdp practitioner’s role. furthermore, those who have come to the role from an academic career might well have research experience in a tradition very different from educational research: ‘the methodology was challenging. this was not something i was used to from my tradition (science)’. so feelings of being overwhelmed, apprehensive and anxious, as neophyte educational researchers, were very strong: i felt under-prepared for what was likely to be involved in ‘being a researcher’, not helped by the fact that in my institution the principle that i should be personally ‘research active’ is itself somewhat contentious. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 7 peters building research capacity in a practitioner community there was a clear sense of boundary between the categories of practitioner and researcher, largely felt personally by practitioners but in this particular case reinforced by his institutional position. this meant joining the project and thus committing to the production of a piece of research, constituted a challenging piece of personal and professional risk-taking. for some it was about moving from one academic territory to another and for others this really was another country (becher and trowler, 2001). furthermore there were hints that this alien research environment may be tough and uncaring when compared to the security and comfort of the practitioner community: i felt quite overwhelmed and out of my depth as a researcher although i was confident in my role as a practitioner. i was hopeful that i would be able to complete the project and produce a piece of work for publication although i was concerned that this may not be ‘good enough’ and was worried about criticism and rejection. a small number of respondents felt more confident than this, they had at least made some small incursions into educational research territory and were noticeably less fearful: prior to getting involved in this project i had already started to write and research in this area...i felt that being involved in the narn project would enable me to build on this. given, though, the general level of apprehension it is worth exploring why colleagues were willing to consider stepping across the practitioner/researcher boundary and face the risks it was felt to involve. three examples illustrate the feeling here: i had big hopes of great collaborations – something that gets us out of our silos...big hopes that this collaboration could keep the spirit of many cra seminars going. i felt very at home with the goals of the project, both in terms of developing the capacity of researchers, and with its focus on pdp. both of these issues were things that i was grappling with in my own institution, so i thought i had a lot to draw from the project, and also hopefully something to contribute...i think that being engaged in this project would provide a space to formalise some work around pdp. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 8 peters building research capacity in a practitioner community my transition into the project was eased by there being some familiar faces. although i hadn’t been involved in the development of the project, i hadn’t felt such an outsider. given the territory we were occupying, this was probably quite important – it made it somewhat easier to talk about your own personal development. on the basis of these and similar comments it is clear that the narn was building on a pre-existing community which was felt to be constructive, supportive, collaborative and collegial. the opportunity to work across institutions was greeted positively. the project had clearly chimed with a desire amongst participating practitioners to build upon their evaluation work. colleagues spoke of the opportunity the project provided to engage in work which would be of institutional, professional and personal value and which provided an opportunity to contribute to the national picture. there were also, however some statements including implied criticism of the project. its underlying philosophy of situated research on situated practice clearly had not been grasped by all participants and there is an inference of dashed hopes and implied disappointment that the proposed collaboration over research planning and design did not lead to a big collaborative research project. in this regard the project’s research paradigm frustrated a few members by providing what they saw as a golden opportunity for large scale quantitative research yet simultaneously setting its face against such approaches. the project, despite setting out not to limit the approaches adopted by colleagues, was clearly not inclusive of all research cultures. while the project leadership felt this point was clear from the bid document, it proved to be important that the early project meetings included time to [re]present, discuss and debate the nature of the project and individual roles and commitments within it. becoming a (regional) practitioner research community what is clearly conveyed by the participants’ stories of the project is the value of the regional groups. the organisation and nature of the regional groups is discussed in more depth elsewhere (keenan et al., 2010) but they figure so strongly in this data set that it would be unbalanced not to consider them here. the power of these groups in supporting journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 9 peters building research capacity in a practitioner community the forward momentum of the project and the individual’s personal and professional development cannot be overstated given the feedback received: most importantly i have gained some really good and very valuable colleagues, and i hope very much that our friendships will continue beyond the life of the project. being able to draw on the knowledge perspectives and experiences of these people has been for me the best thing to have come out of this project, and i know for a fact my research has benefitted and improved as a result. i’ve learnt so much as a researcher...i think the idea of the regional groups has been the crucial factor with narn in building those relationships and keeping people linked together. collegiality and friendship are sorely underrated both as the helpful requisites for a successful project or as outputs from a project. yet the message from colleagues in the project was clearly that the communities of practice formed by the project were crucial to its success and that the collegial culture, which the project planning and project leadership put a great deal of effort into fostering, was the vital heart of the project. serious consideration of the affective domain clearly ‘paid-off’ across the wider project and wenger’s ‘modes of belonging’ to a community of practice through engagement, imagination and alignment are apparent (wenger, 1998, p.173). within the regional groups i did get a sense of common purpose, and of the benefits to be gained from peers working through problems together. the environment that we established was the opposite of the traditional academic research seminar – which tend to be competitive and posturing. people were genuinely trying to help each other progress. as the project moved forward, i think the groups have developed more of a critical edge, but that is now based on an atmosphere of trust and therefore is not dealt with defensively. again here the practitioner community is described in contrast to a traditional academic culture which is perceived as being more individualistic and aggressive. it is revealing of the practitioner community that this sense of ‘the academic’ should be present and that there should be such relief that it was possible to become researchers without adopting what were seen to be destructive elements of academic culture. the importance placed in the project planning on building trusting communities in the regional groupings was clearly justified. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 10 peters building research capacity in a practitioner community facing challenges it should not be implied from the highly positive remarks about the researcher-practitioner communities that were growing up within the project that everything went entirely according to plan or that the experience of project members was always positive. the individual institutional project proved challenging in many cases, as one colleague pithily put it: ‘within my own institution the initial project has proved to be a disaster’. the problems mentioned include changing roles and shifting relationships within institutions. also a number of projects formed local research teams, in some cases this was very successful but sometimes this reliance on others meant there were aspects of the research which were beyond the individual control of members and were prone to difficulty in changing circumstances. some learnt the hard way that institutional colleagues who had seemed supportive proved less reliable when the implications of the research became apparent. this experience can be heard in the following: one of the learning highlights for me has been the extent to which pedagogic research into the student experience is by its very nature a highly politicised activity. such difficulties were perhaps to be expected across sixteen three-year research projects. what is remarkable is that they all came good and produced something. this is testament to the peer support provided on the project and the commitment colleagues developed towards it. every project member had made a personal and professional commitment to produce a piece of research and the regional groups had committed to supporting project members in achieving this. rather than giving in when faced with local difficulties, these difficulties were taken to meetings, discussed and either solutions formulated or new plans constructed. the combination of commitment to the project goal and a supportive environment made all the difference. finding time to undertake the research, time which was not funded by the project, also proved problematic: it has been very difficult to find time to spend on the research project. it was clear from the start that although the narn project was a three-year initiative, this was not going to be long enough. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 11 peters building research capacity in a practitioner community such statements are not just about priorities; members were taking on an additional burden in committing to the project. in some cases it proved possible to negotiate some time to produce the research, being able to argue they were involved in a prestigious national project helped these negotiations in some cases. however, others did face doing the research on top of their existing role and perhaps this provided another hard lesson about the challenges of becoming a researcher. the value of the narn approach colleagues in the cra have long believed that there is a great deal of power in networks of practitioners. the narn project was predicated on that belief. the project does seem to have delivered on its aims of producing not just the pieces of work contained in this journal special edition but also a new community of practitioner-researchers. individuals in the community clearly feel they have made important personal and professional gains just from being part of it: on a personal level i have gained a lot from being in a regional group. i have made stronger relationships with colleagues and i feel supported in the pdp work. professionally it has helped because i think it has raised my profile nationally. it has also enabled me to network with colleagues nationally that wouldn’t have happened any other way. there have also clearly been shifts and improvements in research confidence and various aspects of research practice. the meetings were variously credited with ‘stimulating ideas,’ providing ‘constructive criticism’, ‘assisting reflection’ and ‘helping me recognise i have made progress’: the research process itself is no longer the mystical process i once thought it was. it has made me consider at a deeper level what the issues with involvement and embedding pdp are. this will prove very useful to the organisation and hopefully to other heis across the country. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 12 peters building research capacity in a practitioner community a particularly useful focus has been to define a methodological research paradigm as the practical project was already in hand when we were invited into the narn. over the last couple of years my research has developed, and become more focused, and all the threads are now coming together. but, more than that, i have gained immeasurable confidence as a pdp researcher, and i feel i have earned authority and a sense of belonging. looking forward for many on the narn project this first excursion into research territory is just the beginning. with a supportive community in place and confidence growing, more can be expected from this group of practitioner-researchers: i now care so much more deeply about my ‘research question’, and have been able to meet with colleagues working in similar areas (which has itself broadened the area of interest) this has been both exciting a[nd] frustrating. i’ve sometimes felt as though a door in front of me is slightly ajar...over the past few months, i’ve been inching forward and i’m now just touching the threshold. with a little more dedicated time, though, i do think i might just be able to push through. for me it is definitely a start rather than an end to research, which i consider a positive move. conclusions there were a number of key success factors for the narn project which were based on models of participative inquiry and communities of practice. these models and the narn experience provide a template for other capacity-building and change management programmes. the project design and leadership offered a structure which provided a trajectory and clear stages but also left plenty of scope for members’ creative engagement and for meetings to be built around their concerns. it was a great help that the project built on the existing community of practice provided by the cra; this meant there was already a journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 13 peters building research capacity in a practitioner community shared outlook and language which could then be extended into new territory. the challenge of moving into research territory for this practitioner community should not be underestimated and comes out strongly from the accounts here. real anxiety about the dangers was expressed and the project had to establish that it was possible to make this transition without meeting or adopting what were seen to be negative critical, competitive and destructive aspects of traditional academic research culture. colleagues overcame the challenges they faced because they had made a shared public commitment to the project and through strong peer support. the narn project, unlike so many he funded enhancement projects, placed huge emphasis on the people involved and saw the key output as being the community it developed. this meant a great deal of effort went into establishing a culture of trust, openness, mutuality and respect which then allowed safe space for the operation of colleagues as true critical friends. the mutual commitment and support of the members of this new community of practice made it possible. fundholders should take note that such projects, which make space for the development of communities of practice, establish a trajectory of capacity-building and involve large numbers from the outset may well prove more cost effective and achieve more lasting impact than those which are designed primarily for small teams to produce outputs and deliverables. perhaps project proposals which emphasise the learning process, journey and trajectory over the product – and the community over the artefacts – should be encouraged. throughout the project, and in this paper, i have been at pains to emphasise that at its top level the narn project was not about pdp and e-portfolio. it was about community and capacity-building for researching our practice. however, what have been striking throughout these stories of engagement with the narn are the ways the project functioned to support the development of research capacity through community building around pdp-type activities. colleagues went through the processes of selfassessment of their research capability, goal setting in terms of committing to produce some research, planning their engagement and projects, recording progress, reflecting on that progress and presenting what they have learnt. the community of practitioner-researchers grew through mutual engagement in these well-established pdp processes, and engagement in these processes fed into achievement of wenger’s (1998) ‘modes of belonging’ to a community of practice. so, while the learning was perforce personal (peters and tymms, 2010), the social aspects of engaging and committing as part of a community mattered. it journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 14 peters building research capacity in a practitioner community was this combination of pdp approaches and the culture of a collegial learning community that made the difference. references becher, t. and trowler, p. (2001) academic tribes and territories. oxford: oup. braun, v. and clarke, v. (2006) ‘using thematic analysis in psychology’, qualitative research in psychology, 3(2), pp. 77-101. burgess, r. (2004) measuring and recording student achievement: report of the scoping group. universities uk. available at: http://www.universitiesuk.ac.uk/publications/documents/measuringachievement.pdf (accessed: 8 november 2010). burkinshaw (2010) ‘interaction and passion in a pdp community’, journal of learning development in higher education, special edition, november 2010 [in this volume]. clegg, s. (2004) ‘critical readings: progress files and the production of the autonomous learner’, teaching in higher education, 9(3), pp. 287-298. clegg, s. (2005) ‘evidence‐based practice in educational research: a critical realist critique of systematic review’, british journal of sociology of education, 26(3), pp. 415-428. clegg, s. and bradley, s. (2006) ‘the implementation of progress files in higher education: reflection as national policy’, higher education, 51(4), pp.465–486. cousin, g. (2009) researching learning in higher education. abingdon, uk: routledge. fry, h., davenport, e., woodman, t. and pee, b. (2002) ‘developing progress files: a case study’, teaching in higher education, 7(1), pp .97–111. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 15 http://www.universitiesuk.ac.uk/publications/documents/measuringachievement.pdf peters building research capacity in a practitioner community gough, d.a., kiwan, d., sutcliffe, k., simpson, d. and houghton, n. (2003) a systematic map and synthesis review of the effectiveness of personal development planning for improving student learning. london: eppi-centre, social science research unit, institute of education, university of london. available at: http://eppi.ioe.ac.uk/cms/default.aspx?tabid=309 (accessed: 8 november 2010). higher education academy (2010) national teaching fellowship scheme projects. available at: http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/ourwork/supportingindividuals/ntfs/ntfsprojects (accessed: 8 november 2010). keenan, c., kumar, a. and hughes, p. (2010) ‘forming communities of practice’, journal of learning development in higher education, special edition, november 2010 [in this volume]. kumar, a. (2010) ‘turning the narn into an arc at the university of bedfordshire – some reflections and comparisons’, journal of learning development in higher education, special edition, november 2010 [in this volume]. lave, j. and wenger, e. (1991) situated learning. cambridge: cup. peters, j. (2006) researching student attitudes to pdp, pdp-uk newsletter 7. available at: http://www.recordingachievement.org/news-andevents/publications/pdpuk/callelement/pdp-issue07/pdf_download/download.raw peters, j. and tymms, m. (2010) ‘defining personal development planning: putting the personal in pdp?’, pdp and e-portfolio uk newsletter, 20, september 2010. at: http://www.recordingachievement.org/news-andevents/publications/pdpuk/item/pdp-uk-newsletters/issue-20.html (accessed: 8 november 2010). journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 16 http://eppi.ioe.ac.uk/cms/default.aspx?tabid=309 http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/ourwork/supportingindividuals/ntfs/ntfsprojects http://www.recordingachievement.org/news-and-events/publications/pdpuk/callelement/pdp-issue07/pdf_download/download.raw http://www.recordingachievement.org/news-and-events/publications/pdpuk/callelement/pdp-issue07/pdf_download/download.raw http://www.recordingachievement.org/news-and-events/publications/pdpuk/item/pdp-uk-newsletters/issue-20.html http://www.recordingachievement.org/news-and-events/publications/pdpuk/item/pdp-uk-newsletters/issue-20.html peters building research capacity in a practitioner community qaa, uuk, scop and coshep (2001) guidelines for he progress files. available at: http://www.qaa.ac.uk/academicinfrastructure/progressfiles/guidelines/progfile2001. asp (accessed: 3 november 2010). qaa, (2009) personal development planning: guidance for institutional policy and practice in higher education. available at: http://www.qaa.ac.uk/academicinfrastructure/progressfiles/guidelines/pdp/pdpgui de.pdf (accessed: 8 november 2010). reason, p. and bradbury, h. (2001) handbook of action research. london: sage. senge, p. and scharmer, o. (2001) ‘community action research: learning as a community of practitioners, consultants and researchers’, in reason, p. and bradbury, h. (eds.) handbook of action research. london: sage, pp. 238-49. ward, r., jackson, n. and strivens, j. (2005) progress files: are we achieving our goal? available at: http://www.recordingachievement.org/research/narn/callelement/pfilesare-we-achieving-our-goal-/pdf_download/download.raw (accessed: 8 november 2010). wenger, e. (1998) communities of practice: learning, meaning, and identity. cambridge: cup. author details dr john peters is deputy head of academic development and practice and principal lecturer in higher education at the university of worcester. he is associate director for research with the centre for recording achievement and was principal investigator for the national action research network on researching and evaluating pdp and e-portfolio practice. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 17 http://www.qaa.ac.uk/academicinfrastructure/progressfiles/guidelines/progfile2001.asp http://www.qaa.ac.uk/academicinfrastructure/progressfiles/guidelines/progfile2001.asp http://www.qaa.ac.uk/academicinfrastructure/progressfiles/guidelines/pdp/pdpguide.pdf http://www.qaa.ac.uk/academicinfrastructure/progressfiles/guidelines/pdp/pdpguide.pdf http://www.recordingachievement.org/research/narn/callelement/pfiles-are-we-achieving-our-goal-/pdf_download/download.raw http://www.recordingachievement.org/research/narn/callelement/pfiles-are-we-achieving-our-goal-/pdf_download/download.raw building research capacity in a practitioner community: framing and evaluating the ‘national action research network on researching and evaluating personal development planning and e-portfolio practice’ abstract introduction the context of the narn framing the narn project evaluating the narn: the data set initial hopes, fears and expectations for the project becoming a (regional) practitioner research community facing challenges the value of the narn approach looking forward conclusions references burgess, r. (2004) measuring and recording student achievement: report of the scoping group. universities uk. available at: http://www.universitiesuk.ac.uk/publications/documents/measuringachievement.pdf (accessed: 8 november 2010). author details literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 7: june 2014 improving the quality of academic reflective writing in nursing: a comparison of three different interventions marion bowman university of leeds, uk berni addyman university of bradford, uk abstract students are rarely explicitly taught how to develop their writing within a subject discipline, as there is usually a focus on teaching content. however, academic writing, and in particular academic reflective writing (arw), is very challenging for most students. in this study, a series of three embedded writing development interventions were trialled with successive cohorts of postgraduate nursing students writing a summative 4000 word piece of arw. the interventions included the use of example texts to make task requirements more explicit, formative peer feedback on draft texts and facilitating increased dialogue between staff and students regarding expectations of this task. overall, the interventions represented a shift towards assessment for learning. quantitative results showed a decrease in the number of students investigated for plagiarism, a rise in pass rates and mean grades, and an increased uptake of academic supervision over the three cohorts. in addition, complementary findings from a self-selected focus group interview indicated that respondents perceived the writing development activities to be very useful. in particular, the formative peer and tutor review of written drafts, was valued. however, a limitation of this pragmatic mixed method study was that the three cohorts were non-equivalent. despite this, it is argued that, as arw is so complex, disciplinary academics should embed explicit guidance and scaffolding in their teaching in order to enhance written reflection and learning. failure to do so may lead arw to become an exclusive educational practice leading to unintentional plagiarism and poor written reflection on practice. keywords: academic reflective writing (arw); nursing and midwifery; plagiarism; formative assessment; peer review of written work. bowman and addyman improving the quality of academic reflective writing in nursing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 7: june 2014 2 introduction in common with academic writing in general, the key features of academic reflective writing (arw) are usually not explicitly taught by disciplinary academics (rai, 2006; kember et al., 2008). this may be due to the fact that there is often an assumption by staff across disciplines that students are already accustomed to academic writing on entry or will pick up the skill required relatively quickly (gimenez, 2008; skinner and mort, 2009; dyment and o’connell, 2011). unfortunately, this runs counter to research on students’ experiences which shows that academic writing is amongst the most challenging and confusing tasks they face at university (gimenez, 2008; skinner and mort, 2009). research shows that the ability to express ideas in writing develops iteratively over time through scaffolded practice accompanied by detailed, constructive feedback (english et al., 1999). giving students explicit guidance and support for writing development within their courses is especially important when students are doing arw for the first time. arw, is a type of assessment which is associated with students’ placement experiences in nursing, health, education and social work (gimenez, 2008; ryan, 2011). the aim of arw is to assess students’ ability to reflect on their strengths, weaknesses and areas for improvement from their experiences on placement, in the light of published literature, professional standards, and a mentor’s observation reports. thus arw is neither pure personal diary/journal writing, nor traditional formal academic writing, but has elements of both types, and is one of the most challenging genres of student writing (gimenez, 2008; ryan, 2011; ryan, 2013). students completing arw assignments must thus move between textual types, from informal personal reflection of an aspect of experience using ‘i’ or ‘my’, to formal descriptions of the chosen phenomenon from the literature, to explanations of the reasons for the practice-theory divide, and a discussion of implications for future practice (ryan, 2011). due to its hybrid nature, arw is a particularly difficult genre of writing to structure, (gimenez, 2008) and to compound this, arw is often summatively assessed and is therefore high stakes (ryan, 2011; ryan, 2013). unfortunately, there is currently very little literature on this genre, with ryan (2011) and ryan (2013) being key papers specifically focussing on arw. there is also very little practical guidance available for students attempting arw (rai, 2006). as a result, students may follow the guidance set out in the practical literature on how to write traditional academic essays, and this could result in unsuccessful arw, as the genres are significantly different (rai, 2006). bowman and addyman improving the quality of academic reflective writing in nursing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 7: june 2014 3 the slip course support for learning in practice (slip) is a one-semester 30-credit course which aims to equip nurses and allied health professionals to lead and mentor other professionals in the workplace. completing the slip course is often a pre-condition for promotion. at the time of this study, the slip course was assessed by means of a summative 4000 word piece of arw which accounted for 100% of the module marks (see table 1). table 1. the assignment brief for the summative piece of arw in slip. you are required to write a 4000 word assignment in which you must: write an account of the quality of the learning and teaching experience. this must incorporate your experience of teaching students in a clinical area in addition to consideration of how mentorship can influence the quality of the learning environment. you must also consider your experiences related to the assessment event undertaken in the clinical environment. this should also include consideration of how mentorship and supervision influence the assessment process. you are required to undertake a minimum of 1 formal and 1 informal teaching session. these must be observed by your mentor (in practice) or lecturer on the course (in the case of midwifery) that must provide comments and feedback on the appropriate documentation. these must be handed in as well as the written assignment in which you should reflect (critical reflection for level 6) on:  the strengths and areas for development within each session  the theoretical underpinnings for method, approach and delivery of each session  the extent to which you were able to (critical at level 6) meet students’ needs  the environment and teaching strategy used and appropriateness  ethical issues around teaching students/patient involvement consent teaching materials and teaching plans can be used to augment your work and included as an appendix. bowman and addyman improving the quality of academic reflective writing in nursing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 7: june 2014 4 slip students are typically a mixed intake with many of the students having been out of education for a long time. prior to the start of the collaborative intervention that will be described in this study, students doing the slip module had limited access to supervisors for the review of their written work (supervisors generally only commented once on 500 word extracts), and little explicit guidance was given in the course relating to the textual features of the writing. the academic staff member leading the slip module at the time approached a learner developer from the central learner development unit as she had a number of concerns. these concerns included: the quality of students’ arw, the number of investigations for plagiarism, the pass rates and the initial non-submission rate for assignments. a collaborative partnership then developed to address these concerns and this led to the interventions discussed below. the objectives of the collaborative intervention the objectives of the resulting collaborative intervention were as follows: 1. to embed an assessment for learning approach in the module and to explore students’ perceptions of this initiative. 2. to reduce the number of students who needed to be investigated for possible plagiarism. 3. to reduce the non-submission rate for assignments. 4. to improve the pass rate for first attempts at the assignment. 5. to improve the quality of students’ arw (as assessed by improvements in the mean grades for arw assignments). the collaborative intervention there were a number of influences that shaped the design of this collaboration. the first was an awareness that integrated discipline-specific writing development is more effective than designing an additional generic writing skills programme outside a course (wingate, 2006). the second set of guiding principles was the desire to use an assessment for bowman and addyman improving the quality of academic reflective writing in nursing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 7: june 2014 5 learning approach by including more opportunities for formative assessment to provide feedforward towards the completion of the summative task (sambell, 2011). in addition, the importance of viewing feedback as a situated social practice, rather than a product, was taken as a starting point for the search for ways to increase the dialogue between students, and between students and staff, about writing (price et al., 2011). through dialogue, it is extremely important to explicitly foreground what is expected of students when they are producing assessed writing. this includes being explicit about the kinds of outcomes that need to be met, the length and type of assignment, the expected style and language required, and the required level of reflection (ryan, 2011; ryan, 2013). being explicit and articulating expectations about written assignments is key to improving student performance (nicol, 2010), particularly for non-traditional students, who may be very unclear about what is expected (lea and street, 1998). finally, moon’s (2001) framework of pedagogical practices for guiding reflection, e.g. using example texts, maximising feedback and dialogue, discussing the use of ‘i’ in reflective writing, were also used in the design of the intervention with three consecutive cohorts. for the purposes of simplicity, the three occurrences of the collaborative intervention will be represented as cohort 1 (c1), cohort 2 (c2) and cohort (c3). the three cohorts prior to the collaborative intervention will be referred to as c-1, c-2 and c-3 respectively, with c-3 being the earliest data set. three slightly different kinds of intervention were trialled with the three cohorts (c1, 2 and 3). the intervention with c1 was in the form of a one hour interactive session, during which students analysed good and poor student essay examples. the rationale for this was that students often do not share their lecturer’s understanding of an assignment brief or marking criteria (nicol, 2010). thus, it is important that requirements are made explicit when the assignment is first set, and using example student essays is a very efficient way to clarify expectations (sadler, 1989). as this was the start of the collaboration, the session was led by the learner developer and the example essays were from a different subject area, as there had not yet been time to gain access to slip example arw assignments from consenting students. the nursing lecturer was present at this session and answered students’ questions relating to their own assignment. in addition, students were given general guidance regarding time management and using sources when writing assignments. bowman and addyman improving the quality of academic reflective writing in nursing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 7: june 2014 6 the interactive writing session with c2 was more closely aligned to needs of slip students. permission had been gained from students from the previous cohort to use their arw assignments for teaching purposes. the learner developer then ‘engineered’ these examples to focus students’ attention on the common errors seen throughout the writing of the previous cohort. ‘engineering in’ common errors into adapted student exemplars is a form of pre-emptive formative feedback (carless 2007, cited sambell, 2011). the types of errors included in the reconstructed weak examples of arw written for student analysis, included: the incorrect use of ‘i’, mismatches between reflection and the literature, inappropriate source use, and poor text structure. understanding the exact requirements of a written assessment task is an ongoing process as a student’s understanding of the task becomes more refined as work on the assignment proceeds (nicol, 2010). cohort 2 were therefore offered a second writing development session halfway through the slip module, during which students brought in drafts for formative peer feedback and tutor comment. the peer review session started with a discussion of how to give feedback in a supportive way and then students commented on each other’s drafts, with some making use of the generic peer review checklist in table 2. table 2. the peer marking checklist used by pairs of students from cohort 2 in the second writing development session. marking criteria marks introduction: general to specific?  follows general to specific pattern  starts with a general statement  states topic / argument in essay clearly  defines topic (optional – could be in first paragraph)  ensures confidentiality of those mentioned  {in long essay: states structure of essay – order of ideas} / 5 citations (references in brackets in the text)  after every statement that doesn’t come from own head  at least one source has been cited  citations are in the correct format (surname, date). bowman and addyman improving the quality of academic reflective writing in nursing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 7: june 2014 7  the idea from the literature matches the topic of the idea from personal reflection.  all citations are from quality sources / 5 paragraphs  all paragraphs are related to the essay title, no irrelevant information  all paragraphs start with a clear topic sentence  all stay on topic – one theme per paragraph  there is a good flow of ideas from paragraph to paragraph  the conclusion is clearly linked to rest of text and to essay title / 5 other  the conclusion follows the specific to general pattern  there is a strong argument in this text, points are well supported – strong believable conclusion  there is a list of references at end of essay  the list of references is arranged alphabetically  the end reference list is in the correct format / 5 the intervention with c3 was similar to the intervention with c2, in that it consisted of one early interactive session using re-engineered slip example texts, followed by a peer review session half way through the module. however, with c3 the second writing development session was more closely linked to the expectations and requirements of the slip assignment (compare the peer review checklist in table 2 to the one in table 3). in addition, more discussion on how to structure arw was elicited from students in the second intervention session with c3, as structuring the written task had emerged as a key challenge in c2. thus the interventions became both more embedded in the course and more explicit through time, from c1 to c3. another key factor was that the disciplinary lecturer played a progressively greater role in the sessions (answering student questions, giving explicit guidance on the task and taking feedback from text-based activities), as the collaboration progressed from c1 to c2 to c3. bowman and addyman improving the quality of academic reflective writing in nursing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 7: june 2014 8 table 3. the peer review checklist used by pairs of students from cohort 3 in the second writing development session. marking criteria check introduction: general to specific?:  follows general to specific pattern; starts with a general statement, ends with the structure of this essay.  states topic / argument clearly  defines topic (optional – could be in first paragraph)  ensures confidentiality of those mentioned  states the structure of the essay clearly (order of ideas to follow) / 5 citations (references in brackets in the text):  after every statement that doesn’t come from own head  citations are in the correct format (surname, year).  all citations are from quality sources  a range of evidence has been used, including: personal evidence, evidence from the mentor, evidence from the literature, evidence from regulatory bodies. / 4 paragraphs:  each paragraph stays on one topic / aspect and in each paragraph, all the evidence (personal experience, the literature, mentors comments, the nmc code / regulations) matches the one aspect being discussed in the paragraph.  all paragraphs start with a clear topic sentence. paragraphs are analytical and evaluative; interpreting the teaching / assessment event, rather than just describing it. / 3 marking criteria marks content:  both the strengths and weaknesses of the teaching or assessment event have been discussed (with evidence).  the observations notes and other documents relating to the teaching and assessment events will be included in an bowman and addyman improving the quality of academic reflective writing in nursing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 7: june 2014 9 appendix and are referred to in the paragraphs e.g. (see appendix 1).  the extent to which your partner was able to meet their students’ needs has been evaluated.  your partner has discussed the theoretical justification for the teaching / assessment approach they have chosen.  your partner has considered the appropriateness of the teaching environment and strategy.  your partner has considered the ethical issues around teaching students / patient involvement and consent. / 6 at the end of the essay:  there is a strong argument in this text. the points are well supported and lead to a strong and believable conclusion.  there is a list of references at end of essay and it is arranged alphabetically and is in the correct format. / 2 method a pragmatic mixed methods approach (teddlie and tashakkori, 2009) was used to evaluate whether the five objectives of the collaborative intervention were met or not. descriptive quantitative data on contrasting pass rates, nonsubmission rates, the number of student visits to supervisors and overall grades, for c1, c2 and c3 (as well as for c-1, c-2 and c-3), were compared. the distributions of grades for c1, c2 and c3 were also tested for normality using the kolmogorov and smirnov and shapiro-wilk tests, which are powerful tests of normality (razali and wah, 2011). the means of all six cohorts were compared using a two-tailed independent samples t-test to test for any significant differences between means. as can be seen in table 4, the different iterations of the course occurred at contrasting times of the year with differing numbers of students in each cohort. thus, these comparisons represent a post-test only non-experimental design (gravetter and forzano, 2009). however, the academic regulations, entry requirements, academic supervisors and markers for c1, 2 and 3 remained the same. ethical approval was granted prior to the commencement of this study. bowman and addyman improving the quality of academic reflective writing in nursing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 7: june 2014 10 table 4. characteristics of the six cohorts (with c1, 2 and 3 being during the period of the collaborative intervention and c-1 -2 and -3 being prior to the intervention). the semester in which the course was run number of students in cohort cohort 1 semester 1 89 cohort 2 semester 2 45 cohort 3 semester 1 43 cohort -1 semester 1 108 cohort -2 semester 2 118 cohort -3 semester 1 39 the quantitative data comparisons discussed above were complemented by qualitative data from a focus group interview with a consenting self-selected group of eight students from c3. the eight participants consisted of six females and two males from the full range of ages within the cohort, as well as three students who had english as a second language, and at least two who had been out of education for a long time, out of a cohort of 39. this group of students was representative of the diversity of students in the cohort, however, it is possible there was a slight bias towards students who had greater difficulty doing arw. the interview was conducted by an independent researcher in a nearby teaching room just after the students had finished the peer review intervention session. the researcher started the interview with an open question about how students were finding the course, and then moved the discussion along to explore students’ perspectives of the assessment for learning approach following in this module. it was thought that this qualitative data might bring a richer understanding of students’ opinions and responses to the interventions (kitzinger, 1995; kitzinger and barbour, 1999). the focus group interview was transcribed verbatim by the first author of this paper. during transcription, features such as overlapping speech, inaudible sections, stuttering, murmured agreement, pauses, interruptions and laughter, were noted, as any of these features could carry further meaning as they could be linked to consensus or disagreement (kitzinger and barbour, 1999). the final transcript was then sent to the independent researcher who originally conducted the focus group interview for verification as an accurate record of what transpired. later the raw quotations were tabulated in bowman and addyman improving the quality of academic reflective writing in nursing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 7: june 2014 11 emergent categories and then a concept map showing the links between categories and the strength of different responses was drawn up (see figure 1). the original quotations that were thought to best represent particular categories of response have been used in the discussion section of this paper. figure 1. a concept map showing the major themes emerging from the focus group interview with c3. useful: reassurance (2) useful: clear explanations / pitched at right level (2) online links to key readings on vle (1) useful: peer review of drafts in session (2) useful: referencing (1) useful: structuring writing (4) scaffolding and support: usefulness the writing development sessions very useful generally (3) useful: consolidation / way forward (1) bowman and addyman improving the quality of academic reflective writing in nursing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 7: june 2014 12 results and discussion aim 1: to embed an assessment for learning approach in the module and to explore students’ perceptions of this as has been discussed above, arw is a particularly challenging genre of writing. this challenge is further heightened if students are unfamiliar with academic writing, e.g. postgraduate students or first year students, and if they are operating in a context that involves significant time pressure, e.g. writing arw assignments whilst on work placement. thus, an important aim of the collaborative intervention was to embed an assessment for learning approach in the module by using the writing development sessions to: clarify task expectations using student example assignments, provide opportunities for formative peer review, and to increase dialogue between students and the tutor regarding the task. in the focus group interview, there was consensus amongst participants that the writing development sessions had been really useful. a discussion about the usefulness of these sessions emerged spontaneously in the interview, not in direct answer to a question from the interviewer. participants expressed their perceptions of usefulness in a number of ways (see figure 1), starting with a general discussion: …sessions have been, really, really good (murmured agreement), really, really useful… (sound of hand hitting table) bang on the mark, hitting the nail on the head, almost like ‘ah’, almost like a little eureka moment. (female 1) (where ( ) = audible sounds) when asked to explain what, in particular, participants found useful about the sessions, the discussion turned first to how the sessions helped respondents to structure their arw, with four of the eight respondents making this link: for me, [what was useful about the sessions] it’s definitely structuring my essay (mmm murmured agreement) and flow. she [the tutor] said well, ‘how about you think about talking about one element and then drawing in bits?’ and we were like ‘oh, no, no, i don’t like that’, and then when she explained it we were like ‘oh, that makes more sense’, like, ‘it makes much more sense’, so she’s opened your eyes to different ways… [of structuring the piece]. (female 1) (where [ ] = text added for clarity) bowman and addyman improving the quality of academic reflective writing in nursing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 7: june 2014 13 and where i’ve gone off on a tangent, she’s [tutor] gone – ‘what’s this bit here…?’ (female 2) during the plenary section of the second intervention session for c3, students had asked a lot of questions about how to link their ideas and structure their arw piece, and a lively discussion had ensued. the lecturer and learning developer had also responded to students’ individual queries about ordering their ideas whilst monitoring the peer review activity. there is research to show that such dialogue between tutors and students has the potential to lead to significant improvements in the quality of resulting written assignments (nicol, 2010; ryan, 2011), with the corollary that better quality writing represents a greater clarity of thinking. the focus group respondents also linked the perceived usefulness of the intervention to the clarity of explanations and the level at which the writing development sessions were pitched. …there are a lot of us that haven’t [been in academia recently], and it’s pitching it at that level that everybody understands, and i really did think that today was really, really good. (female 4) the quotation above illustrates the respondent’s desire for explicitness and clarity. it is crucial that disciplinary staff are explicit about what is required of students for each assessed task (nicol, 2010). this is particularly the case for arw as students are often very unfamiliar with systematic written reflection (rai, 2006; hamilton and druva, 2010). one focus group respondent linked the usefulness of the focus group interview to guidance on how to reference and use sources, and two students mentioned the peer review of draft reflective essays as a useful feature. i haven’t massively brought something really good, but it’s… encouraging that you’re on the same path as your friends (agreement: yeah yeah). (female 1) bowman and addyman improving the quality of academic reflective writing in nursing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 7: june 2014 14 the quote above also seems to indicate that this respondent found the session reassuring. this was echoed by two other respondents, one of whom expressed that the session had consolidated what she knew and set out the way forward. it may be the case that even students who have had recent academic experience could gain some reassurance from having someone read and comment on their draft assignment. i thought it [the draft] were horrendous really, but now i just feel a bit more positive today, after having this session. (female 2) aim 2: to reduce the number of students who had to be investigated for possible plagiarism one of the aims of the collaborative intervention discussed in this study was to reduce the number of students that had to be investigated for plagiarism, through integrating opportunities for explicitness, dialogue and formative feedback into the module. the assumption underlying this aim was that some or all of the plagiarism was unintentional, as the concept of plagiarism is often a novel one, especially for novice academic writers and non-traditional students (ashworth et al., 1997; pecorari, 2003). in learning how to use sources effectively in writing, students may not be able to visualise how to avoid plagiarising (ashworth et al., 1997) and may either lean too heavily on sources, not attribute ideas to authors accurately or engage in incomplete paraphrasing (pecorari, 2003). the results in table 5 show that plagiarism rates did reduce during the period of the collaborative intervention (c1, c2 and c3 as compared to c-1, c-2 and c-3 prior to the intervention). the following comment from a student who had been out of education for some time, illustrates the point that non-traditional students may face significant challenges when it comes to attributing sources: …and with me [what’s been useful] it’s the referencing, ‘cos i’m not good, you know, i know they’ve to be there but i think i’d put those brackets anywhere i felt like it (laughter) or didn’t as the case may be, you know, it were a just a jumble…and now [after the second writing session] i can order the references a bit more. hopefully it will be much better. (female 2) bowman and addyman improving the quality of academic reflective writing in nursing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 7: june 2014 15 table 5. the number of students given a mark of zero and investigated for possible plagiarism, both prior to the collaborative intervention (c-1, c-2 c-3) and during the intervention (c1, c2, c3). cohort number of students investigated % of investigations per cohort explanation/details c-1 3 investigations 3% collaborative intervention not yet begun c-2 5 investigations 4% collaborative intervention not yet begun c-3 1 investigation 3% collaborative intervention not yet begun c 1 2 investigations 2% both students attended the one initial writing development session. c 2 0 investigations 0% the collaborative intervention consisted of the initial session and the second session in which drafts were peer marked. c 3 1 investigation 2% this student was absent for both the initial development session and the peer marking session. it is interesting to note that the number of plagiarism cases for cohorts c2 and c3 was lower than the rate for c1. it is possible that existence of the second writing development session during which students were able to receive informal advice on their drafts from peers and tutors, may have made a difference to the plagiarism rates. there is support for this in the literature. according to wheeler (2009) and pecorari (2003) it is extremely important for novice academic writers to be given the opportunity to practise using sources in writing and to receive detailed and constructive feedback on their attempts. bowman and addyman improving the quality of academic reflective writing in nursing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 7: june 2014 16 in addition, two focus group respondents, in discussing which aspect of the writing development intervention they found useful (see figure 1), specifically singled out the peer review session as being useful for their writing development: …the split sessions as well, i honestly didn’t think i’d bring anything to session and… i think if we had just one [session] at the beginning… we could have quite easily forgotten (agreement: yeah yeah). (female1) it has been really helpful when we had the draft copies, last time we came and we read other people’s work. (female 5) aim 3: to reduce the initial non-submission rate for assignments it was hoped that the increased explicitness and dialogue put in place as part of these interventions would help to reduce initial non-submission rates for this assignment. (a number of students had not been handing in their assignments on time, but instead chose to absorb a financial penalty and hand in a bit later instead; their assignments were still awarded a mark). figure 2. the initial non-submission rates for the assignment (c1-3). figure 2 above shows an interesting pattern that may be linked to the ten week nature of the slip course. cohort 2 (who attended the course in semester 2 rather than semester 1) showed the lowest non-submission rate. a similar pattern can be seen in the three cohorts bowman and addyman improving the quality of academic reflective writing in nursing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 7: june 2014 17 prior to the intervention discussed in this study, with c-2 (a semester 2 cohort) having a much lower initial non-submission rate (c-2=6% as compared to c-1=18%, and c-3 = 12%). in addition, whilst c-1, c-2 and c-3 did show higher non-submission rates than c1, c2 and c3, this pattern varied according to when the course was run. the semester 1 or christmas term occurrences of the course generally had higher initial non-submission rates. aim 4: to improve the pass rate for first attempts at the assignment a further aim of the intervention in this study was to improve the pass rate for first attempts at doing this assignment. it was thought that the increased explicitness about the task, the facilitation of dialogue about the task once the students had produced a draft, and the peer review opportunity, might lead to greater number of students passing first time around. figure 3 shows that pass rates did improve progressively over the three cohorts, however as these are non-equivalent cohorts, it is not possible to definitively say that this was the direct result of the writing intervention. figure 3. the % of students passing their assignments on the first attempt. in addition, prior to this intervention, the first submission pass rates had been 49% cohort -3, 52% for cohort -2 and 55% for cohort -1. thus there seems to be a general trend towards improvement over time. it must be borne in mind that each cohort was distinct and comprised different numbers of students (see table 3). it is also interesting to note that the number of students taking the opportunity to visit their supervisor also showed an bowman and addyman improving the quality of academic reflective writing in nursing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 7: june 2014 18 increasing trend over time (see figure 4) and it is possible that these supervisor visits may also have been a factor contributing to the increased pass rates. (at the time of this study, students were allowed to visit their supervisor once with a 500 word section of their draft. not that many students had been taking the opportunity to make an appointment with their supervisors). it is possible, though, that the writing development sessions played a role in giving the students the confidence and encouragement to seek supervision. the following quotation illustrates the uncertainty that two of the focus group participants felt towards approaching their supervisor. i purposely haven’t booked my appointment with my academic supervisor yet, ‘cos i don’t feel that i’m at a stage yet where i can gain enough benefit from their input (murmured agreement: female student), plus the fact that they are only allowed to look at five hundred words… well somebody’s already done that for me today [second writing development session] …and i‘ve gained some changes that need to be done about style, format and everything else, so the fact is that i’m quite pleased that i’ve not wasted me session with me academic supervisor… yet. (female 6) the quotation above also seems to illustrate that the student felt more confident about visiting their supervisor and that the increased dialogue with fellow students and a tutor in the writing session had been useful. figure 4. the % of students visiting their supervisors (c1-c3). bowman and addyman improving the quality of academic reflective writing in nursing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 7: june 2014 19 in contrast, only a relatively small proportion of students took the opportunity to visit the university’s central learner development unit (ldu) with drafts of their written work (this offer of additional advice was promoted during the intervention sessions). only 6% of c1 visited the ldu for advice, in contrast to c2, where 9% of students accessed this central unit. a very small percentage (2%) of students in c3 visited the ldu. given the small number of students taking up the offer of additional advice on their writing, it is hard to determine the degree to which these visits to the centralised unit may have influenced pass rates. aim 5: to improve the quality of students’ arw (as assessed by improvements in the mean grades for arw assignments) figure 5 shows the spread of grades for students in cohorts 1, 2 and 3. as illustrated in this graph, the mean grades (shown by the bar in the centre of the box) increased with each successive intervention. in addition, the median scores also surpassed the mean grade in c2 and c3 (see table 6), which indicates the general trend towards higher grades. in addition, the spread of results decreased from c1, to c3, which may be an indicator of a greater consensus of understanding on the expectations of the assessed task. the outlying points linked to c1 and c3 show the number codes for individual students who either were investigated for plagiarism or got very low results for their assignments. the spread of grades for cohorts 1, 2 and 3 represented in figure 5 were tested for normality using the kolmogorov-smirnov and shapiro wilk tests. cohorts 1 and 2 were normally distributed, however cohort 3 was not normally distributed at the 0.05 significance level. cohort 3 does represent a smaller student group than the previous two cohorts. bowman and addyman improving the quality of academic reflective writing in nursing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 7: june 2014 20 figure 5. box plots showing the spread of results for c1, c2 and c3. the horizontal line in the centre of the box indicates the mean grades and the vertical lines showing the extent of the spread of grades. table 6. the mean and median grades for the three cohorts prior to the intervention (c-3, c-2, c-1) and during the intervention (c1, c2, c3). it was found that cohorts 1 and 2 were not significantly different from each other, with a p value of 0.831 for a two-tailed independent samples t-test where equal variances are assumed (as illustrated in the box plots in figure 8). however, c2 was found to be significantly different from c3 (p= 0.22) and c1 was also found to be also significantly cohort mean median cohort 3 51% 59% cohort 2 51% 54% cohort 1 48% 48% cohort -1 39% 43% cohort -2 41% 43% cohort -3 49% 45% bowman and addyman improving the quality of academic reflective writing in nursing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 7: june 2014 21 different from c3 (0.08). in terms of the three cohorts prior to the intervention; c -1, c-2 and c-3 were not significantly different to each other at the p=0.05 significance level. there was also no significant difference between the cohort immediately prior to the intervention (c-1) and the first cohort of the intervention: c1 (p=0.401). this data seems to indicate that there was something a bit different about the spread of grades in c3. it is difficult to determine whether this was due to the smaller size of the cohort or the effect of the intervention. conclusion in conclusion, in this paper, three slightly different embedded writing development interventions were evaluated. the interventions, with three successive cohorts of students doing a post-graduate nursing course, were designed in order to try to improve the quality of the summative arw assignment associated with this course, and hence the quality of reflection and learning. results showed that pass rates for this assignment, mean grades and student visits to supervisors followed an increasing trend from the first to the third cohorts, whilst plagiarism rates declined. the non-submission rate for assignments, however seemed to vary according to whether the course was run during the christmas or summer terms. a limitation of this study is its non-empirical design, with different cohorts of students being compared, as is often the case in educational research. thus, it is not possible to definitively attribute the quantitative gains in this study to the incremental adoption of an assessment for learning approach, but it is likely that the intervention played a role. the focus group interview showed that the self-selected group of respondents found the intervention sessions to be very useful, in particular for the discussions on how to structure arw. respondents also found the peer review and tutor comments on drafts of their work very useful. in addition, the explicit explanations of how to successfully reflect critically in writing in this context, were perceived as helpful. the interventions trialled in this study follow an assessment for learning approach (sambell, 2011), due to the emphasis on formative, low-stakes and informal feedforward prior to the formal summative assessment. in this study, feedforward was conceptualised as a two way dialogic process (nicol, 2010) with the writing development sessions bowman and addyman improving the quality of academic reflective writing in nursing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 7: june 2014 22 providing a space for increased dialogue between students, and between staff and students about the assignment. research shows that the greater the degree of overlap between student and disciplinary staff conceptions of writing tasks, the greater the quality of student writing (hounsell 1997, cited nicol, 2010). in fact, many students cannot produce the level of disciplinary writing often expected by academic staff without explicit guidance and formative feedback (hamilton and druva, 2010). not providing guidance and opportunities for development could be thought of as an ‘exclusive educational practice’, especially where non-traditional students are concerned (rai, 2006), which may result in unintentional plagiarism and poor quality writing and learning, in an atmosphere where students may feel alienated from their tutors (ashworth et al., 1997). this sense of alienation from tutors while students are working on assessed tasks may be a contributing factor to the consistently low nss scores that students assigned to feedback (ashworth et al., 1997). according to ryan (2013), unless pedagogic scaffolding is provided for students at every level of reflection, (reporting an important aspect of experience [using ‘i’], relating this to the literature or professional standards, exploring reasons for any differences, and reframing future professional practice), gaps in students’ reflection may result. this may mean that students are not able to move to the highest aim of academic reflection on practice, i.e. that their learning and professional practice are reframed and transformed. it is possible that the interventions in our study did not go far enough in providing scaffolding for the highest level of transformative reflection and learning. many of the students on the slip course were at the stage where they were grappling with how to link their experiences to the literature without plagiarising. providing scaffolding for all the levels of reflection may be challenging to achieve in a content-heavy ten-week course taken by students, many of whom have been out of academia for quite some time. it is proposed that more research on arw, as a very challenging (rai, 2006; ryan, 2011: ryan, 2013) vehicle for assessing reflection on work placement, is sorely needed. bowman and addyman improving the quality of academic reflective writing in nursing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 7: june 2014 23 references ashworth, p., bannister, p. and thorne, p. (1997) ‘guilty in whose eyes? university students’ perceptions of cheating and plagiarism in academic work and assessment’, studies in higher education, 22(2), pp. 187-203. dyment, j.e. and o’connell, t.s. (2011) ‘assessing the quality of reflection in student journals: a review of the research’, teaching in higher education, 16(1), pp. 81-97. english, l., bonanno, h., ihnatko, t., webb, c. and jones, j. (1999) ‘learning through writing in a first-year accounting course’, journal of accounting education, 17(2), pp. 221-254. gimenez, j. (2008) ‘beyond the academic essay: discipline-specific writing in nursing and midwifery’, journal of english for academic purposes, 7(3), pp. 151-164. gravetter, f.j. and forzano, l-a.b. (2009) research methods for the behavioural sciences, 4 th edn. canada: wadsworth cengage learning. hamilton, j. and druva, r. (2010) ‘fostering appropriate reflective learning in an undergraduate radiography course’, radiography, 16(4), pp. 339-345. kember, d., mckay, j., sinclair, k. and wong, f.k.y. (2008) ‘a four-category scheme for coding and assessing the level of reflection in written work’, assessment & evaluation in higher education. 33(4), pp. 369-379. kitzinger, j. (1995) ‘qualitative research: introducing focus groups’, british medical journal, 311, pp. 299-302. kitzinger, j. and barbour, r.s. (1999) developing focus group research: politics, theory and practice. london: sage. lea m. and street b. (1998) ‘student writing in higher education: an academic literacies approach’, studies in higher education, 23(2), pp. 157-172. bowman and addyman improving the quality of academic reflective writing in nursing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 7: june 2014 24 moon, j. (2001) pdp working paper 4: reflection in higher education learning. exeter: ltsn generic centre, university of exeter. available at https://www.york.ac.uk/admin/hr/researcherdevelopment/students/resources/pgwt/reflectivepractice.pdf (accessed: 23 april 2012). nicol, d. (2010) ‘from monologue to dialogue: improving written feedback processes in mass higher education’, assessment and evaluation in higher education, 35(5), pp. 501-517. pecorari, d. (2003) ‘good and original: plagiarism and patchwriting in academic secondlanguage writing’, journal of second language writing, 12(4), pp. 317-345. price, m., handley, k. and millar, j. (2011) ‘feedback: focussing attention on engagement’, studies in higher education, 36(8), pp. 879-896. rai, l. (2006) ‘owning (up to) reflective writing in social work education’, social work education: the international journal, 25(8), pp. 785-797. razali, n. and wah, y.b. (2011) ‘power comparisons of shapiro-wilk, kolmogorovsmirnov, lilliefors and anderson-darling tests’, journal of statistical modeling and analytics. 2(1), pp. 21-33. ryan, m. (2011) ‘improving reflective writing in higher education: a social semiotic perspective’, teaching in higher education, 16(1), pp. 99-111. ryan, m. (2013) ‘the pedagogical balancing act: teaching reflection in higher education’, teaching in higher education, 18(2), pp. 144-155. sadler, d.r. (1989) ‘formative assessment and the design of instructional systems’, instructional science, 18(2), pp. 119-144. sambell, k. (2011) rethinking feedback in higher education: an assessment for learning perspective. bristol: escalate, higher education academy. available at: http://dera.ioe.ac.uk/14776/1/8410.pdf (accessed: 10 february 2014). https://www.york.ac.uk/admin/hr/researcher-development/students/resources/pgwt/reflectivepractice.pdf https://www.york.ac.uk/admin/hr/researcher-development/students/resources/pgwt/reflectivepractice.pdf https://www.york.ac.uk/admin/hr/researcher-development/students/resources/pgwt/reflectivepractice.pdf http://dera.ioe.ac.uk/14776/1/8410.pdf bowman and addyman improving the quality of academic reflective writing in nursing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 7: june 2014 25 skinner, i. and mort, p. (2009) ‘embedding academic literacy support within the electrical engineering curriculum: a case study’, ieee transactions on education, 52(4), pp. 547-554. teddlie, c. and tashakkori, a. (2009) foundations of mixed methods research: integrating quantitative and qualitative approaches in the social and behavioural sciences. usa: sage. wheeler, g. (2009) ‘plagiarism in japanese universities: truly a cultural matter?’, journal of second language writing, 18(1), pp. 17-29. wingate, u. (2006) ‘doing away with study skills’, teaching in higher education, 11(4), pp. 457-469. author details marion bowman is currently working as a dental education adviser in the school of dentistry at the university of leeds. marion used to work in the central learner development unit at the university of bradford, which is where she met berni. berni addyman is a mental health nursing lecturer in the school of health studies at the university of bradford. improving the quality of academic reflective writing in nursing: a comparison of three different interventions abstract introduction the slip course the objectives of the collaborative intervention the collaborative intervention method results and discussion aim 1: to embed an assessment for learning approach in the module and to explore students’ perceptions of this aim 2: to reduce the number of students who had to be investigated for possible plagiarism aim 3: to reduce the initial non-submission rate for assignments aim 4: to improve the pass rate for first attempts at the assignment aim 5: to improve the quality of students’ arw (as assessed by improvements in the mean grades for arw assignments) conclusion references moon, j. (2001) pdp working paper 4: reflection in higher education learning. exeter: ltsn generic centre, university of exeter. available at https://www.york.ac.uk/admin/hr/researcher-development/students/resources/pgwt/reflectivepractice.pdf (access... teddlie, c. and tashakkori, a. (2009) foundations of mixed methods research: integrating quantitative and qualitative approaches in the social and behavioural sciences. usa: sage. wingate, u. (2006) ‘doing away with study skills’, teaching in higher education, 11(4), pp. 457-469. author details literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 5: march 2013 intuitive resources: ‘it’s like having you at home helping us’ john sumpter bath spa university, uk caroline cash falmouth university, uk abstract a recent report from the educause centre for applied research highlights that students are integrating smart technologies and web-based tools into their academic experience (ecar, 2011). with this in mind, the intuitive resources project at falmouth university created and evaluated the use of high definition (hd) learning videos. these videos may be accessed by mobile/smartphone technologies and have been designed with close consideration of curriculum delivery and assessment in studio-based projects. key to students’ experience and successful learning in studio-based courses is the input by skilled technical instructors (tis). tis provide thorough induction and on-going support on complex equipment and techniques. in many instances there may be a significant lapse between induction sessions and students’ application of the technical skills, resulting in a high level of individual follow-up support. this on-going support is necessarily situated within the studio context and is reliant on the availability of staff and equipment and may sumpter and cash intuitive resources: ‘it’s like having you at home helping us’ cause students to falter in their projects until technical support becomes available. this case study shares the development of the intuitive resources project to use the affordances of technology in offering greater access to technical instruction. the case study reviews evaluative feedback from staff and students that demonstrates how improved technical competence impacts on students’ learning development in a studiobased environment. url: http://goo.gl/skpyt keywords: technical development; visual learning; studio-based learning; video resources; dyslexia. the intuitive resources project the intuitive resources project was devised to provide non-textual, visual learning resources to embed within the curriculum. the project focused on developing a series of high definition (hd) videos that could be accessed by mobile/smart-phone technologies. the curriculum content was designed around key technical aspects that were necessary to the successful completion of projects. the videos played when the users selected an appropriate piece of equipment from a project menu or workshop image. each video provided a step-by-step guide of how to use equipment or review essential techniques. the project was created with a focus on learner accessibility, with all resources accessible from either a desktop computer or a mobile/smart-phone device. in accordance with the bauhaus influence on studio-based learning and teaching, key to the process-oriented nature of studio-based projects is the practical workshop facilitated by skilled technical instructors (tis) (droste, 1998). tis provide thorough induction and on-going support on complex equipment and techniques. they assist students in realising their creative visions and help turn concepts into artefacts through ensuring that students have technical competence at the appropriate level, understanding of health and safety requirements, and access to the required tools and resources. an embedded curricular approach ensures that the introduction to technical equipment and processes is linked to particular projects in the first year of undergraduate study. the negotiated project-based journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 2 http://goo.gl/skpyt sumpter and cash intuitive resources: ‘it’s like having you at home helping us’ learning in subsequent years provides students with the opportunity to combine foundational techniques with greater conceptual sophistication, culminating in their final year projects, exhibitions and performances. this approach, based on an understanding of threshold concepts, provides students with a platform from which they may develop in technical and conceptual confidence (land and meyer, 2006). theoretical approaches are assimilated through practical application, and assessment is often through extended projects that take students from concept and design, through production to final user testing and application. students demonstrate their professional approaches to project management, which may include time management, resource organisation, groupworking, problem solving and visual, verbal and written communication skills (shreeve et al., 2008). at falmouth university 24% of undergraduate students are identified as dyslexic, with 28% in the department of design in 2011-12. the intuitive resources project aims to supplement studio-based technical instruction with learning resources that facilitate a multi-modal approach to engaging learners, offering learners ownership of their learning in terms of location, time and access. whilst this is beneficial for all learners, it has particular accessibility impact for learners with dyslexia who indicate preferences for visual and kinaesthetic modes of information exchange. the visuo-spatial capabilities of those with dyslexia is acknowledged in both the medical and educational literature (kiziewicz and biggs, 2001; von károlyi et al., 2003). many dyslexic students choose higher education courses of study that use these capabilities, and studies indicate the higher prevalence of dyslexia among students of art and design (wolff and lundberg, 2002). falmouth university, as a specialist arts-based institution recognises the importance of raising awareness of inclusive practices in teaching and supporting students’ learning, and seeks to expand the range of ‘accessible resources and accessible delivery’ (jisctechdis, n.d.). the intuitive resources project at falmouth university is designed with a number of outcomes in mind: • to provide learning resources that are non-linear technical sequences are re-presented so that they may be applied to a project in a way that is responsive to the individual needs of the student and their particular project. this allows the student to manage their own learning through the project, providing opportunity for experimentation, revision and re-conceptualisation, and journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 3 sumpter and cash intuitive resources: ‘it’s like having you at home helping us’ consolidated application within students’ own project contexts. • visually stimulating many technical instructions are given through demonstration and supplemented with text-based and diagrammatic hand-outs. the intuitive resources project provides multi-modal platforms of technical information that combines audio, video and demonstration to support the institution’s high number of dyslexic learners. working with the falmouth university accessibility service, the project addresses some of the key recommendations that are found within the dyslexia learning plans offered to students, with accompanying guidance for staff. guidance such as: • tutors should be encouraged in the use of all modes of teaching i.e. auditory; visual; and kinaesthetic. • tutors should be encouraged in the use of videos and demonstrations. • easy to navigate and use (intuitive) the project resources are accessible from a range of platforms within the institution and beyond; embedded within course-based virtual learning environments, and also as stand-alone technical elements hosted on vimeo. a key emphasis of the project has been on ease of access to, and navigation of, the information. this ensures that the resources are accessible in terms of time and location, providing students with access to technical support when and where they need it. figure 1. the design centre plaster room, ba contemporary crafts. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 4 sumpter and cash intuitive resources: ‘it’s like having you at home helping us’ the first stage of the project worked with the design centre, exploring technical processes that are shared by a number of courses within the common space of falmouth university’s design centre. the initial focus was to support ba contemporary crafts curriculum that introduces students to a high number of technical and workshop processes, encouraging students to explore a range of materials and media. the total number of students in 20112012 on ba contemporary crafts was 112, of whom 44 were dyslexic. the second phase of the project was by request of the award leader of ba fashion design, and which focused on technical processes specific to level 1 assessment projects. the total number of students on this course in 2011-12 was 99 students, of whom 30 indicated dyslexia. at no point were the resources conceived as replacing face-to-face technical support available in the studio, but supplemental to that support, allowing students to repeat, follow-through and revise the technical instruction. figure 2. jacket construction, ba fashion design. evaluation student focus groups and semi-structured interviews with lecturers and technical instructors were conducted to explore the user experiences of accessing and viewing the video resources. the primary exercise was to revisit the material and make improvements journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 5 sumpter and cash intuitive resources: ‘it’s like having you at home helping us’ where appropriate. project evaluation focused on level 1 students, as much of the technical and studio induction takes place in the first year in order to equip students with skills and techniques to apply in future projects. with this in mind, focus groups with level 1 students took place during semester one, before the summative assessment period in february. there were separate focus groups for each course, 7 students for ba fashion (66 students in the first year cohort) and 12 students for ba contemporary crafts (43 students in the first year cohort). three students in the ba fashion focus group and four students in ba contemporary crafts indicated dyslexia. each focus group took place in the respective course studio space. three tis were interviewed (one in ba contemporary crafts and two in ba fashion) and one lecturer in ba fashion. figure 3. ceramics workshop, design centre. students found the ability to access these materials from any location with an internet connection invaluable. students also positively commented on the ability to watch and revisit the instructional videos on their phones and laptops. models of access included reviewing the technical videos before initial induction so that students were able to concentrate and comprehend the content of the face-to-face session more thoroughly. students chose to review the technical videos after the induction session so that they could make their own process notes, rather than try and take notes during the studio induction. students would revisit the technical information via the videos during project journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 6 sumpter and cash intuitive resources: ‘it’s like having you at home helping us’ creation so that they could check and revise techniques. the video resources allowed students to revise studio and technical practices out of studio opening times so that they could maximise their useful working time when in the studio. this meant that when working alone on projects, they could remind themselves of essential techniques without having to continually (and repeatedly) ask for ti help. reading notes doesn’t do it for me, looking at pictures, much easier! so those videos are fabulous, i watched those videos at least twice before we started, so that when they were telling us i knew what they were talking about. (l1 student, ba contemporary crafts) for the tis the project allowed them to develop and deliver a range of follow-up materials to initial induction sessions. they recognise that level 1 technical inductions provide a large amount of complex information in a short time span. although supported by handouts and other instructional material, much of this information will not be applied until later in the academic year, by which time students have forgotten the introductory information. in addition, the studios are noisy environments and often students may have to listen carefully to follow the procedures, but miss out on the actions. the technical competence is demonstrated through embodied knowledge and the non-verbal aspects of communication are crucial. prior to the introduction of the instruction videos, demonstrations did not always have their intended impact. during inductions students are looking at my face because i am speaking, not looking at my hands, which is the most important part of the demonstration. (ti, design) . a lot of people won’t read the paperwork, they will look at the video, or the photographs. given the choice i think people would opt for the video…2d doesn’t work for them. (ti, ba fashion) for tis themselves, the videos have provided a shared understanding of approaches to techniques. whilst there may be a range of ways of demonstrating a technique, this can confuse students. the project has allowed tis to develop a standard approach from which they can explore variations. allowing students to revisit the basic technical procedures gives tis the time to focus on more complex situations during face-to-face sessions. in journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 7 sumpter and cash intuitive resources: ‘it’s like having you at home helping us’ addition, tis have observed greater effectiveness in technical capabilities through peer learning grounded in a shared viewing of the videos. most important for tis is the ability to reach students as and when needed: i think, for [students] to go away and watch, actually problem solve on their own way it’s a much better learning experience for them. they get a bit more independent about what they are trying to achieve. yes. because normally i’ll say yes i’ll try and see you in a minute, and i’ll take 45 minutes, they’ll just sit and wait, whereas now, 5 minutes, they can quickly watch [the video], and if they’re really stuck i can catch up with them when i get chance. yes that’s nice, and i notice that they’re asking each other as well. (ti, design centre) lecturers have indicated a greater level of technical competence for completed projects (particularly relating to the fashion projects) and the embracing of more sophisticated experimentation. with greater technical confidence, students are more likely to move on to greater challenges: with the workshop the students are more conformist about their projects, whereas with the videos they felt that they could bounce off, they felt they could push their projects because they had the foundation there. (lecturer, ba fashion) the learning technologists felt that it was important to have the video resources embedded both within the institution’s vle as well as available on open platforms, creating a falmouth design channel on vimeo. this allows students search options and has also engaged interest from beyond the institution. the intuitive resources project has been so well received by staff and students that the project team received an institutional learning and teaching excellence award. other courses are now embracing the opportunities afforded by creating further video resources. transferability if you wish to adopt this model of intuitive resources to support learning, you may wish to journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 8 sumpter and cash intuitive resources: ‘it’s like having you at home helping us’ consider these factors: • strategic departmental support to ensure coherent articulation to the course curriculum and identification of threshold concepts linked to project processes and assessment requirements. the tis were crucial to the development and production of the intuitive resources project. they worked closely with the course teams to ensure relevance to the curriculum and project assignments. • that the video resources are supplemental to, and scaffold, studio-based technical instruction. this acknowledges that video resources do not replace the embodied knowledge of studio interaction and guidance. • minimum technology – ensuring ease of use of equipment. we used flip cameras as these ensured that tis could take ownership of the process. it was the tis who undertook the filming in order that the camera focused on the most essential technical aspects and panned in on the appropriate actions and parts of the equipment. • emphasis on clarity of bite-size technical processes rather than perfection of video presentation. the recordings were limited to a maximum of three minutes with little editing. • dedicated time for tis to film, edit and upload resources, supported by line managers and integrated in departmental planning. this project was initially supported by a learning and teaching enhancement grant but, by the end of the project, it was felt that the benefits to students warrants an approach that embeds the development of video resources within the normal resource planning for courses. • technical support from the e-learning team to create the vle architecture to ensure ease of navigation. learning technologists uploaded these to the vle and designed the ‘gallery’ that ensured that students could easily find and navigate through the resources. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 9 sumpter and cash intuitive resources: ‘it’s like having you at home helping us’ acknowledgements with thanks to the project team: jane gottelier – award leader, ba fashion jill weekes – senior technical instructor, ba fashion jo julian – technical instructor, ba fashion mark lea – technical instructor, design centre emma rippon – technical instructor, design centre jane nevin – learning information designer, tel damien hogan – learning technologist, tel oliver scott – learning technologist, tel references droste, m. (1998) bauhaus: 1919-1933. cologne: taschen. ecar (2011) study of undergraduate students and information technology, 2010. available at: http://www.educause.edu/resources/ecarstudyofundergraduatestuden/217333 (accessed: 28 may 2011). jisctechdis (n.d.) user needs. available at: http://www.jisctechdis.ac.uk/techdis/userneeds (accessed: september 2011). kiziewicz, m. and biggs, i. (eds.) (2001) cascade: creativity across science, art, dyslexia and education. bath: university of bath. available at: http://www.bath.ac.uk/cascade/pdf/cascadefullbook.pdf (accessed: 10 march 2013). land, r. and meyer, j. (2006) overcoming barriers to student understanding: threshold concepts and troublesome knowledge (vol. 1). london: routledge. shreeve, a., wareing, s. and drew, l. (2008) ‘key aspects of teaching and learning in the visual arts’, in fry, h., ketteridge, s. and marshall, s. (eds.) a handbook for learning and teaching in higher education. 3rd edn. london: routledge, p. 345-362 journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 10 http://www.educause.edu/resources/ecarstudyofundergraduatestuden/217333 http://www.jisctechdis.ac.uk/techdis/userneeds http://www.bath.ac.uk/cascade/pdf/cascadefullbook.pdf sumpter and cash intuitive resources: ‘it’s like having you at home helping us’ von károlyi, c., winner, e., gray, w. and sherman, g.f. (2003) 'dyslexia linked to talent: global visual-spatial ability', brain and language, 85(3), pp. 427–431. wolff, u. and lundberg, i. (2002) 'the prevalence of dyslexia among art students', dyslexia chichester england, 8(1), pp. 34–42. contacts please contact us if you wish to follow up on any aspect of this project. we are willing to offer consultancy to support the development of an intuitive resources model in your course, department or institution. author details caroline cash is award leader for the ma in creative education at falmouth university and also supporting colleagues to engage with pedagogic research through the institution's learning and teaching enhancement scheme. she is undertaking an edd exploring the educational experiences and career trajectories of academics with dyslexia, which has led to an interest in non-linear approaches to learning. (caroline.cash@falmouth.ac.uk). john sumpter is the learning technologist for humanities and cultural industries at bath spa university. he is currently studying for a masters in online and distance education which has informed the development of the intuitive resources project. (j.sumpter@bathspa.ac.uk). url: http://goo.gl/skpyt journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 11 mailto:caroline.cash@falmouth.ac.uk mailto:j.sumpter@bathspa.ac.uk http://goo.gl/skpyt intuitive resources: ‘it’s like having you at home helping us’ abstract the intuitive resources project evaluation transferability acknowledgements references contacts author details literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 3: march 2011 editorial: learning development as ‘engagement’ andy hagyard university of lincoln, uk john hilsdon university of plymouth, uk the association for learning development in higher education (aldinhe) was founded on a values-based approach: a commitment to the widest possible access to he, and pedagogies informed by the student experience, with the aim of demystifying academic language and practices where possible. our constitution stresses the notion of working with students as partners in knowledge creation. these themes are prominent in the uk in the light of the browne review and, as phil race points out in his article in this edition, increasing concerns about who will foot the bill for university education under the new fees regime mean that “ ... the spotlight continues to focus ever more sharply on student satisfaction.” at least in this respect, a learning development approach might be seen to be coming of age. issue 3 of the jldhe offers some powerful signs that this is indeed the case – and for reasons that go beyond instrumentalist or consumerist views of he. race argues that diminishing budgets for teaching will mean that further pressure on class sizes and on tutorial provision is likely; his response to the challenge of engagement advises learning developers to take account systematically of key aspects of learning, including motivation, ownership, active involvement, feedback and using evidence of achievement. david baume’s article also urges us to treat engagement systematically and to look beyond mere ‘activity’ to ensure that issues of motivation, and notions of what it means to produce ‘good’ work, are given greater attention. he argues that intended learning outcomes should not only be made explicit to students, but that they should “ … embody or be accompanied by an account of what it means to achieve that outcome to an appropriate standard”. glynis cousin and paul brett from the university of wolverhampton call for “ ... a paradigm shift in the shaping of student learning to take account of peer-peer and teacher-peer partnerships beyond those owned, supervised and instigated by institutions”. they remind hagyard and hilsdon editorial: learning development as engagement us that the hugely popular and pervasive technologies used by students, such as ‘smart’ phones, set new challenges and offer new opportunities for the academy to offer relevant ‘blended’ learning for effective participation in modern social and economic contexts. carol edwards (university of leicester) asks if the work of meyer and land on ‘threshold concepts and troublesome knowledge’ (2003) can be utilised by learning developers in working with students to learn about learning generically. she finds the model useful but identifies some important differences in working beyond the level of the discipline. she raises questions that may extend the relevance of the threshold concepts model by problematising the notion of consensus about disciplinary knowledge, implying questions about what is troubling, for whom, and for what reasons. helen bussell and lesley mulcahy of teesside university business school show the importance of collaborative partnerships between he and fe institutions, involving students at all stages not only to improve access to he to put ‘bums on seats’ but to ensure that the quality of the students’ experience is as high for those whose he journey begins in an fe setting as for those from more traditional routes. anna magyar, daniel mcavoy and kathrin forstner’s article describes learning development (and more specifically a writing development) approach that engages students in the development of a module. their work shows that harnessing the disciplinespecific insights of postgraduate students leads to discernible improvements in teaching and learning. jamie wood, sabine little, louise goldring and laura jenkins present research from two centres for excellence in teaching and learning (cetls) based at the universities of sheffield and manchester, involved in developing inquiry-based learning. they explore the under-researched area of skills development through extra-curricular inquiry, providing insight into the potential benefits of inquiry-based approaches within and outside the curriculum, in terms of student engagement and personal development. monika foster of edinburgh napier university offers a case study that illustrates the value of online resources dealing specifically with pre-arrival induction as a way to prepare students, especially those from international backgrounds, for effective engagement with journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 3 hagyard and hilsdon editorial: learning development as engagement university. the implication of this extended view of transition adds further weight to the argument that universities should be valued for the cultural and social learning opportunities they afford as well as for purely academic endeavours. susan wilkinson (university of wales institute cardiff) continues this theme, discussing how socially constructed technologies (e.g. wikis and blogs) can enhance learning, provided their collaborative aspects are given precedence over their more technologically determined features. karen murrell’s case study from thames valley university also demonstrates the value of preparing students for higher education, in this case using simulation to introduce btec students to the demands of studying on a practice-based professional programme at he level. in the first of two opinion pieces he has written especially for the jldhe, gavin fairbairn of leeds metropolitan university describes the process of ‘shared live editing’ in academic writing groups. the supportive and nurturing environment created in such groups also helps underpin a partnerships approach and stresses the value of collaboration in learning. dave burnapp of the university of northampton develops a fascinating analogy with the notion of ‘cargo cults’ to offer a view of the importance of staff and students engaging with knowledge actively through research. this acts to counter the strong tendency to see knowledge as fixed or consisting only of ‘skills’, in an increasingly marketised context for he. in a similarly challenging vein, helen bowstead (university of plymouth) in her insightful and innovative paper, ‘coming to writing’, encourages us to consider the ways certain forms of discourse are privileged, and how this can act to exclude important and relevant aspects of students’ voices and identities from their academic writing – especially ‘voices from the margins’. this paper challenges us as learning developers to keep up our questioning of how students can make sense of and participate legitimately in academic thought and knowledge production – asking again what criteria are being used to judge in questions of validity, truth, power, rationality, and objectivity. a further fanning of the ‘flames of non-conformity’ comes from james derounian (university of gloucestershire) who argues that we should encourage students to explore and construct their own meanings in the interests of developing self-reliance. drawing upon ron barnett’s notion of ‘supercomplexity’ (1998), derounian believes that fostering creative and positive non-conformity is appropriate for life and work in a “messy, disordered, rapid, ever-changing and complicated world”. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 4 hagyard and hilsdon editorial: learning development as engagement this brief overview of some of the key themes that readers will encounter in this edition of the jldhe illustrates that ‘engagement’ is a multidimensional notion. the papers, case studies and opinion pieces in issue 3 range in character from the more pragmatic to the more critical; and from those focussing on new possibilities for engagement via our increasingly rich technologies for communication, to those drilling down, through discourse, to reveal the complexities of student identities, and the need for a university education to promote the questioning of orthodoxies. there is ample evidence here that the learning development community continues to produce innovative and challenging academic work of relevance to everyone interested in the student experience and the significance of university education. producing an issue of a journal obviously involves a great deal of work on the part of all concerned. the writers' and editors' names are visible, which is part of their reward but there are many others who contribute whose names do not appear. we would like to take this opportunity to thank all the peer reviewers of material published in this issue. their work makes a huge difference in ensuring that the published material is of a good standard. we would also like to say a huge thank you to natalie bates from the university of bournemouth, who put in many hours of proofreading and formatting for this and our previous two issues. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 5 editorial: learning development as ‘engagement’ journal of learning development in higher education journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 1: february 2009 developing students as learners – varied phenomena, varied contexts and a developmental trajectory for the whole endeavour. graham gibbs oxford brookes university abstract this paper is offered as a conceptual map to help ‘learning development’ to distinguish its various activities and to locate these activities and approaches in relation to pedagogic theory and empirical evidence. it highlights variations in context that have profound implications for what ‘learning development’ might realistically focus on. the paper also examines parallel developments in ‘educational development’ over the past 30 years to see if that offers pointers to how ‘learning development’ might evolve. keywords: educational development; learning development varied contexts when i started working on ‘study skills’ over 30 years ago the students that i worked with were often adults returning to education with no experience of higher education (at the open university) or school leavers of limited educational attainment who found themselves, somewhat unexpectedly, in higher education (in polytechnics and colleges). neither could make much sense of what they were asked to do and neither had even basic skills. they could not easily put sentences together to form coherent arguments or even explanations. they did not understand what the subject was that they had signed up to study and had almost no subject matter knowledge that could help them to get going. it was not easy to know where to begin as they were practically starting from scratch, but it was relatively easy to be helpful as almost anything was better than nothing. when i moved to oxford polytechnic i gibbs developing students as learners undertook ‘study counselling’. when the counsellors based in student services decided that a student’s problem was not primarily emotional but technical the students were packed off to see me and i had a case load of the confused and the failing to see every week, one to one. these students sat in lectures bemused about what they should be doing, got nothing out of their reading, and rapidly lost heart. this year i have been applying for a grant to undertake a project to develop students at the university of oxford and kings college london as learners. both institutions have students with strong educational backgrounds and high levels of motivation and academic aptitude. most are intimidatingly clever and knowledgeable. they do not suffer from significant problems of drop-out or failure. nevertheless in both institutions it has become clear, through qaa audit and through internal reviews and feedback from students, that there is scope for providing more support to develop students’ ability to cope with the challenging intellectual and academic demands they face, and to develop their sophistication as learners within their academic disciplines. both institutions have funded extensive internal reviews in recent years (oxford university students’ union, 2005; gibbs, 2005; yudkin, 2008; kings college, 2008) that have identified the problems students experience, have collated examples of existing ‘study skills’ practices, and have identified this area as a priority for quality enhancement. oxford has already funded a full time post for a year to undertake a detailed review of current practice and kings currently has a working group focussing on this topic, feeding in to its ‘kings graduate’ project which will become kings’ learning and teaching strategy. varied phenomena to understand what is going on in these entirely different contexts, and what problems and gaps in provision consist of, it has proved necessary to distinguish different sub-categories of ‘study skills’, each of which involve different phenomena that require different interventions. table 1 below is based on a policy paper to the educational policy and standards committee at oxford, and illustrates the difference between the focus of learning development efforts in different contexts. oxford is journal of learning development in higher education, issue 1: february 2009 2 gibbs developing students as learners currently interested primarily in 3, 5, 6, 7 and 8 where my early study skills work focussed on 1, 2, 4 and 8. table 1 domains of learning and associated processes designed to impact on these domains distinct domains of learning to be an effective learner in higher education appropriate pedagogical process to develop students 1 basic and generic skills, e.g. written and oral use of english, numeracy, how to organise one’s time and organise complex tasks, information and library skills. for some sub-groups of students: use of english as a second language, overcoming dyslexia. making rules, procedures and ‘tactics’ explicit and students practicing these with detailed and immediate feedback. 2 meeting conventions and requirements in relation to intellectual property, referencing and plagiarism. making conventions explicit, providing exemplars of good (and bad) practice, discussion of practices. 3 acquiring subject matter competence that is a pre-requisite for advanced study (e.g. mathematics for bioscience, statistics for epidemiology) teaching of subject matter, assignments and feedback on the assignments, within the subject area. 4 learning to negotiate assessment systems (snyder, 1971; miller & parlett, 1974) e.g. revision tactics, examination tactics. discussion of the ‘hidden curriculum’ in relation to examination questions and criteria; discussion with more experienced students. 5 developing a more sophisticated understanding of what learning consists of, and adopting a deep approach to learning (saljo, 1979; gibbs, 1983, 1984; lindblom-ylanne, 2004) the assessment system making deep level demands and refusing to reward a surface approach and reproduction. discussion of exemplars of the learning outcomes of a surface and deep approach. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 1: february 2009 3 gibbs developing students as learners 6 developing a more sophisticated understanding of what knowledge consists of and adopting a relativistic epistemological stance (perry, 1970) confronting students with subject matter where there is no one right answer, repeatedly, even when this is confusing, and providing safety and support amidst the disorientation that inevitably follows. 7 becoming a member of a disciplinary community of practice, and able to use the discourse of that community and its forms of argumentation (northedge, 2003) close contact with members of the community – academics, research students, senior undergraduates and their scholarly products, and seeing how they think, argue, speak and write. practicing use of the discourse with feedback from members of the community. 8 being able to recognise task requirements and respond flexibly to different demands (gibbs, 1981); internalising standards and criteria (price et al, 2001); supervising oneself in relation to these standards (nicol & mcfarlane-dick, 2006); self-awareness as a learner and ‘meta-learning’ (biggs, 1995; jackson, 2004). reflection on varied learning experiences, highlighting differences between tasks and between students, experimenting with alternative tactics and developing a repertoire. a general focus on process components of learning. the importance of disciplinary context meta-analysis of educational interventions of all kinds has identified that it is in the domain of changing learners that there is most scope for increasing learning outcomes (hattie, 1992). but meta-analysis of ‘study skills’ interventions (hattie et al, 1996) highlights that these interventions need to be well embedded in the learning contexts that learners are currently facing, as there is little evidence that skills can transfer across contexts, even from a study skills course focussing on learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 1: february 2009 4 gibbs developing students as learners process to a parallel course in the same subject focussing on subject content. it is also clear that a focus on technical components can leave the vital underlying approach of students unchanged (ramsden et al, 1996) whilst interventions embedded in disciplinary contexts and their features do have the capability of changing students’ approaches (norton & crowley, 1995). most of what oxford is currently interested in has to be conducted within disciplines and most of it is undertaken by members of disciplinary communities, ideally students’ own tutors. oxford have completely rejected the idea of a centralised learning development service, and rightly so. i funded students from the students’ union at oxford to visit harvard to look at their bureau of study council, and princeton, to look at their writing centre, and they came back convinced that such generic approaches could not help at oxford where the place with most scope for development is the tutorial. princeton have since moved away from generic approaches to writing and instead have training programmes for teaching assistants to change the kind of feedback they write on students’ assignments so that this changes students’ writing. similarly kings college have articulated strong arguments for embedding ‘study skills’ efforts within disciplines, undertaken by disciplinary experts (wingate, 2006; wingate, 2007). so the first message here is that what ‘learning development’ encompasses a very wide range of activities and objectives and what it might sensibly consist of is extraordinarily context-dependent. it makes little sense to generalise too widely about what learning development should consist of. the relationship of teaching development to learning development the list in table 2 was developed at an international meeting organised by the university of lund, in 2008, to discuss the question ‘how do you change a whole university’s teaching and learning?’ lund invited a range of people – some like me had been involved in institutional efforts for many years, some were members of senior management with responsibility for teaching from prestigious universities, some were individuals with specific responsibilities for development of one kind or another, such as learning development for international students, within a particular journal of learning development in higher education, issue 1: february 2009 5 gibbs developing students as learners university, some were involved with national or international efforts to develop teaching. what came out of this event, for me, was an awareness that most educational development staff tend to focus on just one or two of all the possible levers for change and are not involved at all in most of the others. i suspect this is why many educational development units come and go, gaining and losing political support, funding and staff, and being recombined repeatedly with various other functions or even entirely disbanded. they tend to develop rather narrow preoccupations to the exclusion of all others, and see themselves as the centre of the universe where in fact they are one of many planets circling the phenomena they are dealing with. this egocentrism and narrow preoccupation is often their undoing. you will see in this list that ‘developing learning skills’ is just one component of one item on the list. institutions cannot afford to have a separate centre or unit, each with its own staff, for every item on the list. table 2 how to develop a university’s teaching and learning 1. develop individual teachers’ practice (training, with a focus on competence). 2. develop teacher thinking, hod thinking, pvc thinking, about teaching and learning (education with a focus on understanding) 3. develop teacher motivation for teaching (appointment criteria, career structures, reward and recognition, engineering more engaging teaching experiences, with a focus on values and orientations) 4. develop (local) communities of practice (creating facilitative environments for teachers with a focus on the social context). 5. develop 1-4 in locally varied, disciplecontextand organisational culture-relevant ways, oriented to addressing local issues and problems 6. identify successful emergent change and spread best practice across the university 7. develop learning environments (at the level of programmes) focussing on curricula, in the widest sense, assessment environments, co-ordination between courses, progression, the affective and social environment of learning etc. 8. develop learning resources (libraries, e-learning, learning spaces, access to digital resources, laboratories, studios) journal of learning development in higher education, issue 1: february 2009 6 gibbs developing students as learners 9. develop students (attracting better students, developing learning skills, enhancing student engagement, developing clearer career or educational orientations) 10. develop quality assurance (course approval, course review, appraisal of teachers, review of support services) so as to have positive influences on teaching development, with a focus on accountability) 11. undertake evaluation and obtain and interpret evidence, including benchmarking, scholarship of teaching and educational and institutional research, in order to recognise institutional progress and steer future development 12. develop leadership of teaching (for course directors, directors of undergraduate study, pvcs teaching) 13. identify and remove (infrastructure) obstacles to development and change (such as unhelpful or unnecessarily constraining resource allocation methods, workload allocation methods, promotion criteria, library policy, assessment policy, room allocation systems, quality assurance rules etc) 14. integrate and align several of the above in a co-ordinated institutional strategy, and link this to parallel strategies (estates, research, student support etc) with a focus on strategic planning and orient all these towards a common goal, with a focus on corporatism. 15. influence the external environment (e.g. national quality assurance a funding policies) that frame what is possible and institutional priorities, with a focus on politics. the evolving nature of educational development – and learning development in my career in educational development i have spent time on every single one of these domains of activity, but my preoccupations have changed over time, and in particular from a micro focus on individual teachers and their practice to an increasingly macro focus on programme design, institutional strategy and national policy. the world of ‘educational development’ that i entered over 30 years ago has been transformed beyond recognition. there were then perhaps 30 people in the uk that had the development of teaching as at least a part of their role and there were no journal of learning development in higher education, issue 1: february 2009 7 gibbs developing students as learners national or institutional funding mechanisms, or organisations. today there are literally thousands of people hired full time to work on this issue. every institution has a funded and staffed centre and everybody trains teachers to national professional standards. there are 24 disciplinary ‘subject centres’, and there is about £100m a year in national funding through one route or another. institutions that paid no attention to teaching development whatsoever now have comprehensive learning and teaching strategies that affect every department, every degree programme and every teacher. networks, journals and conferences have proliferated and the ‘scholarship of teaching’ has increased enormously (though not always the level of knowledge of what is already known). while all this change was going on, educational development transformed itself, gradually going about its business in quite different ways with different preoccupations. table 3 lists some shifts over time in what educational development has focussed on. these trends appear to be evident in very different higher educations systems in different countries. each country, institution, and even department, might be at a quite different stage but whatever the local variations, the direction of change seems to be somewhat predictable. table 3 trends over time in efforts to develop teaching and learning focus on teaching focus on learning focus on the classroom focus on learning environment especially assessment and social characteristics focus on individual teachers focus on leadership, teams, programmes, departments, whole institution small, simple, single component large, complex, multiple interlinked components operating at multiple levels separate, isolated efforts integrated, aligned efforts change tactics change strategies quality assurance quality enhancement journal of learning development in higher education, issue 1: february 2009 8 gibbs developing students as learners atheoretical conceptualised, theorised experiential empirical/evidence based psychological underpinnings social and cultural underpinnings unscholarly scholarly amateur professional organisationally peripheral and implementing others’ initiatives part of central team and involved in planning of change quality focus, improving practice oriented in new directions involving new practices context neutral/blind context sensitive/dependent learning development and educational development the issue for ‘learning development’ here is whether there are, already, clear signs of what might shift over time in terms of foci of attention and approaches to the whole endeavour. my guess is that, over time, efforts will have to change from working with individual students to working with teachers, courses, degree programmes and the whole institution, in ways that are aligned with other institutional efforts, as part of a broad strategy, and that these efforts will need to be well conceptualised and backed up with convincing empirical evidence of impact. for me the big question is whether it would be best for learning development to ‘piggy-back’ on the existing much larger and more well-embedded ‘educational development’ enterprise, and piggy-back on its decades of development and institutional integration, or try to carve itself out a separate niche. the former risks losing its distinct identities, preoccupations, and contributions. the latter risks the howling gales of political whim and expediency. good luck to you! journal of learning development in higher education, issue 1: february 2009 9 gibbs developing students as learners references biggs, j. (1995) ‘the role of metalearning in study processes’ british journal of educational psychology 55 pp185-212 bullimore, d.w. (1998) study skills and tomorrow’s doctors university of edinburgh carrel, s. & feltham, m. (2007) ‘knowledge or skills – the way to a meaningful degree? an investigation into the importance of key skills within an undergraduate degree and the effect this has on student success’ bioscience education e-journal gibbs (1981) teaching students to learn buckingham: open university press gibbs (1983) ‘changing students’ approaches to study through classroom exercises’ in r.m. smith (ed.) helping adults learn how to learn new directions in continuing education 19 san francisco: jossey-bass gibbs (1984) ‘learning to learn: the student-centred approach’ in e. henderson & m. nathenson (eds.) independent learning in higher education new jersey: educational technology publications gibbs (2005) how students develop as learners. institute for the advancement of university learning, university of oxford hattie, j. a. (1992) ‘towards a model of schooling: a synthesis of meta-analyses’ australian journal of education 36 pp5-13 hattie, j., biggs, j. & purdie, n. (1996) ‘effects of learning skills interventions on student learning: a meta-analysis’ review of educational research 66 2 pp99136 jackson, n. (2004) ‘developing the concept of metalearning’. innovations in education and teaching international 41 4 pp391-404 journal of learning development in higher education, issue 1: february 2009 10 gibbs developing students as learners kings college (2008) academic literacies development in the curriculum king’s graduate project skills / employability working group lea, m. & street, b. (1998) ‘student writing in higher education: an academic literacies approach’ studies in higher education 23 2 pp157-172 lindblom-ylanne, s. (2004) ‘raising students’ awareness of their approaches to study’ innovations in education and teaching international 41 4, pp 405-422 miller, c.m.i. & parlett, m. (1974) up to the mark: a study of the examination game guildford: society for research into higher education nicol, d. & mcfarlane-dick, d. (2006) ‘formative assessment and self-regulated learning:a model and seven principles of good feedback practice’. studies in higher education 31 2 pp199-218 northedge, a. (2003) ‘enabling participation in academic discourse’ teaching in higher education 8 2 pp169-180 norton, l.s. & crowley, c.m. (1995) ‘can students be helped to learn how to learn? an evaluation of an approaches to learning programme for first year degree students’ higher education 29 3 pp307-328 oxford university students’ union (2005) study skills provision at the university of oxford. perry, w.g. (1970) forms of intellectual and ethical development in the college years new york: holt, rinehart and winston price, m., o’donovan, b. & rust, c. (2001) ‘strategies to develop students’ understanding of assessment criteria and processes’ in rust, c. (ed) improving student learning 8 improving student learning strategically oxford oxford centre for staff and learning development, pp206-219 journal of learning development in higher education, issue 1: february 2009 11 gibbs developing students as learners ramsden,p., beswick, d.g. & bowden, j.a. (1996) effects of learning skills interventions on first year university students’ learning human learning säljo, r. (1979) learning in the learners’ perspective. some common-sense conceptions department of education university of göteborg snyder, b.r. (1971) the hidden curriculum. cambridge ma: mit press wingate, u. (2007) ‘a framework for transition: supporting learning to learn in higher education’ higher education quarterly 61 3 pp391-405. wingate, u. (2006) ‘doing away with ‘study skills’’ teaching in higher education 11 4 pp457-469 yudkin, b. (2008) provision for learning development in the collegiate university oxford learning institute university of oxford author details graham gibbs is a visiting professor in the assessment standards knowledge exchange centre for excellence in teaching and learning at oxford brookes university. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 1: february 2009 12 developing students as learners – varied phenomena, varied contexts and a developmental trajectory for the whole endeavour. abstract varied contexts varied phenomena table 1 domains of learning and associated processes designed to impact on these domains the importance of disciplinary context the relationship of teaching development to learning development table 2 how to develop a university’s teaching and learning the evolving nature of educational development – and learning development table 3 trends over time in efforts to develop teaching and learning learning development and educational development references author details literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special edition: academic peer learning, part two, april 2016 the evaluation of an undergraduate peer assisted learning scheme at sheffield hallam university claire cornock sheffield hallam university, uk abstract the peer assisted learning (pal) scheme in the mathematics degree at sheffield hallam university consists of final year pal leaders guiding groups of first year students through an assessment task. evaluation of the scheme in 2014-15 took place through a number of methods, including questionnaires, reflective log book comments and group contribution sheets. the scheme was found to help to ease the transition into university, help develop a mathematics community through the creation of support groups, and encourage inter-year interactions, developing skills, and increasing confidence of all involved. engagement and enjoyment was very high and success extended far beyond the duration of the scheme. despite the overall success, improvements will be made following on from comments and suggestions made by students. keywords: peer assisted learning; mathematics community; peer support; inter-year interactions; skills development. introduction the mathematics degree at sheffield hallam university has included a peer assisted learning (pal) scheme since 2008, in which first year, first semester students are supported by final year pal leaders. further details of this scheme have been presented elsewhere (waldock, 2011). this paper will examine the benefits of the scheme in more depth and provide a thorough evaluation from the 2014-15 academic year. typically a pal scheme involves students in the latter stages of study supporting students in the initial years at university. pal aims to help in the difficult phase of starting university cornock the evaluation of an undergraduate peer assisted learning scheme at sheffield hallam university journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 2 by creating peer support groups (hill and reddy, 2007, p.98), with benefits including raising retention rates, helping the transition into university and improving skills (hammond et al., 2010, p.202). new students at university face a large number of changes, including being in a new city and living away from home for the first time. this initial time at university is of particular interest as it has an effect on the rest of their programme (lawson, 2015, p.39). course level differences include the contrast between mathematics in a level and higher education, particularly regarding rote learning (hoyles et al., 2010, p.830). in addition, students are expected to have less dependence on staff and be more responsible for their own learning, whilst getting used to new teaching and learning styles, with fewer opportunities for support, especially from family and friends (hill and reddy, 2007, p.98). the creation of pal support groups also has implications past the initial transition stage and, as pointed out by luk (2007, p.172), encouraging discussions amongst students makes a course more ‘worthwhile and enjoyable’. challis (2015, p.87) says that group work fosters ‘feelings of belonging to a community of learners of mathematics’ in general. development of a learning community holds great value and significantly improves the university experience. zhao and kuh (2004, p.132) say a learning community is an ‘effective educational practice’, with benefits including improving students' success and increasing satisfaction. the primary aims of the pal scheme at sheffield hallam university are to help ease the transition into university, to help students settle and increase retention rates, and to aid in the development of a mathematics course community. set up of the scheme within the scheme at sheffield hallam university it is compulsory for all mathematics degree students to take part and produce a presentation, report and poster within a group, which accounts a very small amount towards the assessment for one module. one or two final year students act as facilitators for each group of around six to eight first year students. the scheme, beginning in induction week, is based around the development of skills instead of subject content. they are provided with suggestions, but are encouraged to pick their own titles for their pal project, with the only condition that there is some cornock the evaluation of an undergraduate peer assisted learning scheme at sheffield hallam university journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 3 mathematics included. recent examples have included smarties, beer pong and the olympics. final year pal leaders the final year students are there to facilitate the process and guide the first year students in their work. as mentioned by hill and reddy (2007, p.98), final year students are not intended to replace other forms of university support, but to be an additional support to help the students in the project and beyond. the pal leaders at sheffield hallam university arrange meetings and help them set targets, but they are not there as teachers and do not do any of the work for the students. at the start of the academic year the pal leaders undertake a day of training. as mentioned about the pass scheme at the university of manchester and umist, the importance of the training cannot be stressed enough as it sets the ‘right ‘tone’’ for the entire duration of the scheme (coe et al., 1999, p.73). in the training at sheffield hallam university, pal leaders explore their role with the aim that they develop confidence to fulfil it successfully, particularly surrounding effective group management and facilitation skills. at the end of the day the students meet their pal group in a relaxed and informal atmosphere. introduction to the scheme the first year students meet their pal leader at the maths arcade session in the induction week programme as an ice breaker. following on from the success of the maths arcade at the university of greenwich (bradshaw, 2011), one was created for the students doing the mathematics degree at sheffield hallam university as part of the project that established arcades at several universities (bradshaw and rowlett, 2012). a maths arcade is a collection of strategy games, usually run as a weekly session. it features in the induction week programme where the first year students meet their pal leader straight after the pal leader training has taken place. cornock the evaluation of an undergraduate peer assisted learning scheme at sheffield hallam university journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 4 staff involvement staff involvement is kept to a minimum during the scheme. wadoodi and crosby (2002, p.241) present the advantages of restricting direct staff involvement. at sheffield hallam university, a pal coordinator oversees the full process and provides help and support throughout to pal leaders and first year students. in addition to having a pal coordinator, each pal group has a member of staff attached to it who is on hand to offer support and guidance where appropriate. staff are given guidelines which include recommendations for minimal contact within the pal sessions. even though the involvement from staff in pal sessions is kept to a minimum, the level of support is very high. the support and encouragement from staff is described ‘imperative’ in a nursing peer-mentoring case study (li et al., 2010) following on from the review of wilkes (2006, p.46). the pal leaders at sheffield hallam university are expected to have regular contact with the member of staff to report on progress and address any issues. in addition to the support from staff, peer support is encouraged through regular lunchtime support sessions with the pal leaders. methodology the scheme was evaluated with the intention of finding out whether any improvements could be made. this included looking at whether aspects such as the training, the way students are introduced to the scheme, and the level of staff involvement, were appropriate. in addition to this, it was investigated whether the scheme helps students both in their transition into university life and beyond the scheme's duration, as well as contributing to the development of a mathematics community. themes that emerged from the results that contributed towards these factors were support groups, inter-year communication, development of skills and confidence levels. there are a number of ways the pal scheme was evaluated in the 2014-15 academic year. as well as conducting questionnaires with first year students and final year pal leaders regarding the scheme, all final year students have filled in a general survey and one has been carried out relating to the maths arcade. in addition to this, information has been gathered from peer assessment forms and log book entries. ethics were considered when using these forms of evaluation. in particular, responses made in questionnaires cornock the evaluation of an undergraduate peer assisted learning scheme at sheffield hallam university journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 5 were made confidentially and no personal information was requested. the students were also informed of how the information would be used in the evaluation. first year questionnaire a questionnaire was carried out with all the first year students who were present at the presentations at the end of the scheme. the main aims of this questionnaire were to look at how the scheme could be improved, find out about their experience of it, and how the scheme had helped them. the survey was carried out by 87.9% of the year group (94 out of 107). they were invited to give open responses to the following questions:  how did you find the pal scheme?  what did you like about the pal scheme?  how could the scheme be improved? in addition to these questions, they were asked whether they thought they would continue to work with their pal group, their opinions on the level of staff involvement, and whether they asked their pal leader questions about other parts of the course such as placements, management of workloads and electives. they were provided with a list of factors such as the pal scheme and were asked to indicate which made their transition into university easier. in addition, they gave separate scores out of ten on how easy they found it to approach and talk to a member of staff at the start of the year and how they found it at the time they carried out the questionnaire. they were also asked the same question regarding approaching other students in their year and other year groups. pal leaders questionnaires questionnaires were carried out at two points in the process by the final year pal leaders to find out about their experience and for suggestions of how the scheme could be improved. the first questionnaire was carried out at the end of the training and was filled in by 73.9% of the pal leaders (17 out of 23). as well as being asked whether they enjoyed the training, about its usefulness and whether they felt well equipped to start being a pal leader, they were asked for suggestions of how to improve the scheme. cornock the evaluation of an undergraduate peer assisted learning scheme at sheffield hallam university journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 6 in the questionnaire filled out by 87.0% of pal leaders (20 out of 23) at the end of the scheme, they were asked the same three open questions as the first year students. in addition, they were asked what support they took advantage of, whether they would have liked more direct staff involvement in the scheme and whether the training had included everything they had needed. final year questionnaire a questionnaire was carried out at the start of the second semester with 65.4% of the final year students (53 out of 81) in one of their lectures, which included a mixture of students who had been pal leaders and those who had not. they were asked whether they felt like they were part of a mathematics community and which factors made their transition into university easier. maths arcade questionnaire evaluation of the maths arcade in general took place at the end of 2014-15 through a questionnaire that was sent to all students; a total of 13 students responded. as part of it, they were asked whether they enjoyed the maths arcade during induction week and whether it was a good place to meet their pal leader. relevant comments from amongst the responses have been included in this paper to address whether the introduction to the scheme was appropriate. the disadvantage of this survey was the low response rate and its usefulness in representing the views of all the students was limited. peer assessment forms the first year students had to fill in peer assessment forms to indicate the level of input from the members of their group. they were asked to rate each group member’s contribution and were asked to provide reasons whether all group members should receive the same mark for their work. these forms have been used to give an indication of engagement. cornock the evaluation of an undergraduate peer assisted learning scheme at sheffield hallam university journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 7 log book comments throughout the first year, students are required to fill in online reflective log books on a weekly basis. the students made comments about the pal scheme throughout its duration, which included reports of progress, any problems they faced, and their opinions of the scheme. as mentioned by moore (2011, p.9), reflective logs ‘can provide rich data and personal insights whilst also benefitting from broad student coverage’. a disadvantage of this form of evaluation is that the comments can be unstructured. results and discussion the overall response from the pal leaders and the first year students about the scheme was generally very positive. several of the pal leaders and first year students mentioned that they had found the scheme ‘very enjoyable’. engagement in the process was very high, with many of the students putting a great deal of effort into the work. following from the peer assessment sheets, only 3.7% of students (4 out of 107) received zero marks and 6.5% (7 students) had their marks reduced. many of the first year students made comments in their log books about ‘looking forward to the next meeting’. one student commented in their log book at the end of the scheme that the pal scheme ‘really shows how much [we] care about [our] students’. the pal leaders found the process ‘very rewarding’ with one student saying that this was because ‘[their] help [was] benefitting [the students’] degree’. easing the transition into university the scheme is very successful at helping to ease the students into university life. when asked about what they liked about the scheme and how they found it, many of them mentioned that it helped in this way. comments from the first year students included that the pal scheme ‘helped [them] settle’ and ‘it makes the transition easier’. pal leaders commented that ‘it’s a good way for students to meet and integrate’ and that they liked ‘helping a group settle into university life’. the first year students (94 students) and the final year students (53 students) who were surveyed were asked what factors made their transition into university easier. the responses are displayed in figure 1: cornock the evaluation of an undergraduate peer assisted learning scheme at sheffield hallam university journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 8 figure 1. questionnaire results on factors making transition easier. there were a mixture of responses, but a significant number of them mentioned the pal scheme. development of a mathematics community out of the final year students who were surveyed, 86.8% of them (46 students) said that they felt part of a mathematics community, whereas 13.2% did not (7 students). there are a number of aspects that contribute to this, but the pal scheme plays a part towards this as it helps with the formation of support groups. when asked about the pal scheme and what they liked, many of the first year students mentioned meeting people. comments included that it was a ‘good way to get to know people on the course’ and that ‘it made it easier to make friends’. in the survey, several of the students mentioned that they liked that the pal scheme helped them get to know people when they first arrived. comments included that the scheme allowed them to make ‘instant friends’. one student commented in their log book that ‘the pal group scheme really helped [them] to break the ice and make friends early on in the year’. they said ‘it especially helped people who might have been too shy to initiate conversation and [they] feel the whole year has benefited from it as people are able to talk to each other easily’. cornock the evaluation of an undergraduate peer assisted learning scheme at sheffield hallam university journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 9 a few students made comments about the difference between meeting people on the scheme and within classes. one student commented that ‘it gave [them] chance to meet some people in a small group which is easier than meeting them in a class’. it allowed them to create support networks for other areas, with one student commenting that it ‘was easy to get to know people for help on the course’. they found that it was ‘good to get a group of people who [they] know for seminar classes at the start of the year when [they] don’t know anybody’. one student mentioned in their log book towards the start of the year that ‘the whole idea of a pal group has been brilliant as [they] wouldn't have [had] a clue who [they had] be sitting next to in any lecture if [they] hadn't of made [those] friends’. the friendships tend to extend far beyond the end of the scheme, with comments including that it ‘allowed [them] to make new friends whom [they] hope to remain friends with’. comments from logbooks included that they ‘spend time as a group in and out of the university’, they ‘socialise in lessons and outside’ and that they ‘hang out almost all the time’. it can often be observed that many of the students continue to work with members of their pal groups throughout the remaining time on the degree programme. in the final year survey, a student mentioned that they have ‘stuck to [their] pal group’. one student mentioned that ‘speaking to other students would always be the first port of call when needing help’. observations of the students throughout the degree programme suggest that there is a great deal of peer support that takes place between the students. when the first year students were asked whether they think they would continue to work with their pal group, they made the responses presented in figure 2: cornock the evaluation of an undergraduate peer assisted learning scheme at sheffield hallam university journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 10 figure 2. questionnaire results on whether students would continue to work with their pal group. the vast majority of the first year students (98.9%, 93 students) said they thought they would continue to work with at least a few of their pal group, with a large proportion (87.2%, 82 students) stating that they thought they would work with either all or most of them. the pal scheme promotes discussion between the different year groups and these students enjoy the inter-year interactions. the pal leader comments included that the scheme was a ‘good opportunity to interact with students earlier on the course’ and that they liked that they ‘got to meet students from other years’. the first year students liked ‘working with a student who had experienced [the scheme] before’ and that it ‘was nice to work with the pal leaders’. several comments in the log books after the maths arcade session had included that the pal leaders were ‘friendly’ and ‘helpful’. a first year student recognised that the pal leaders would be ‘very beneficial towards [their] group as [they] work on [their] project’. the students appreciated the opportunity to discuss other aspects of the course, such as placements and the degree structure. when asked what they liked about the scheme, comments from the pal leaders included that they ‘liked the chance to inform the students on placements and their final two years of study’. one of the first year students commented in their log book at the start of the year that they could ‘see it being very cornock the evaluation of an undergraduate peer assisted learning scheme at sheffield hallam university journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 11 helpful for understanding the experiences that the 3rd year students have been through’. when surveyed at the end of the scheme, the first year students said they liked, ‘the fact the leaders would help [them] about uni life’, that they ‘were able to help [them] with [their] questions’, and they gave them ‘good advice’. when surveyed, 88.3% of the first year students (83 students) said that they had asked their pal leaders questions about other parts of the course and 10.6% (10 students) said that they had not. development of skills and confidence the first year students recognised and appreciated the chance to develop their own skills. as a pal leader mentioned, it was a ‘good opportunity for first years to boost their group work skills and presentation skills’. when asked what they liked about the scheme, many of the first year students also mentioned the development of skills such as group work and communication. one student mentioned that they ‘[improved] skills which haven’t really been covered before’ and another said that the scheme ‘encouraged collaboration in a way [they] had not really studied at a level’. one student commented in their logbook that ‘pal overall has helped with a range of skills’ and mentioned organisational skills explicitly. other comments included that they ‘gained confidence with [their] presentation skills’ and those skills had ‘increased dramatically’. regarding team work, the students ‘had a great experience learning to work as a team’. they also found ‘the work [they] did collectively was helpful with the report writing because [they] had not done that before’. the pal scheme also has added benefits such as pal leaders developing employability and personal skills. several of the final year students said that they developed skills including leadership, interpersonal, organisational and group work skills. as one student said, it gave them ‘good experience of chairing a team’. the pal leaders gain valuable experience that they can use when making job applications. one student mentioned that they could ‘use [the scheme] as an example in applications and interviews’ and another said that it ‘helped want to be teachers gain experience’. a first year student commented in their log book that having ‘pal leaders [is] a great thing’ as ‘this would be a great thing to put on [their] cv for leadership skills’. soloman and crowe (2001, p.181) came to similar conclusions regarding skills developed and future careers in a peer tutoring scheme. as mentioned by several of the first year students, the scheme was ‘also good for confidence building’. the first year students were asked to give a score from zero to ten to cornock the evaluation of an undergraduate peer assisted learning scheme at sheffield hallam university journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 12 indicate how easy they found approaching and talking to a member of staff at the start of the year and at the end of the pal scheme, with zero being the lowest score. they were also asked to do this regarding talking to students in the same year group and other year groups. the average scores are presented in figure 3: figure 3. questionnaire results on the ease of approaching others. first it is noted that there is only a slight difference in the average scores provided for the ease of talking to staff and other students in the same year group. there have been increases of 22.9%, 28.6% and 35.7% for the average scores for the three groups. when students were asked why there had been an increase, 19.1% of them (18 students) said it was because they had got to know people, 13.8% of them (13 students) said it was because they had got ‘more used to the uni environment’ or that they had ‘had time to settle in’. a general increase in confidence was mentioned by 14.9% of them (14 students) and 9.6% (9 students) said they felt ‘more comfortable’ or ‘more relaxed’. the pal scheme or the pal leaders were explicitly mentioned by 4.3% of the students (4 students). one student mentioned that the increase in scores was ‘because [they] made friends with people in [their] pal group’. cornock the evaluation of an undergraduate peer assisted learning scheme at sheffield hallam university journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 13 improvements that could be made there was mainly a positive response from the students about the scheme. when the first year students were asked how they found the scheme, 15 students (16.0%) made a neutral comment. some said they found the scheme challenging, hard, frustrating or difficult (5 students, 5.3%). a couple of the students did not like how it took time away from other modules and another couple did not like how little the project counted towards their marks. the amount the project counts towards their first year marks is currently being reviewed with the anticipation that it will increase. other comments from the students included that the scheme was boring, stressful, draining and that they ‘didn’t like it at all’. one student in particular did not like the group work. when asked how we could improve the scheme, there were a number of common responses, including the timing of the assessment (9 students, 9.6%) which is currently being reviewed. some students suggested having no presentation or presenting to a small audience (6 students, 6.4%). next year, the students will have to present to fewer students. other comments included that they would have liked more guidance and information (10 students, 10.6%). there were also comments about having more support from pal leaders or a better pal leader (6 students, 6.4%). as there will always be a variation in the support offered by the pal leaders, this can only be improved to a certain degree. this will be attempted through developing the training further, ensuring that the pal leaders have clear instructions and giving the first year students all the vital information about the scheme directly. when the pal leaders had been asked how they had found the scheme, all of them had something positive to say. one student mentioned that ‘it got a little stressful’ and another said it was ‘very tough sometimes’, but these students were very positive otherwise. when asked how the scheme could be improved, the pal leaders suggested that more emphasis should be put onto the importance of attendance, how the students can get the most out of their pal leaders, and engagement between meetings. this can be addressed when introducing the scheme to the students. all pal leaders surveyed at the end of the training said that they had enjoyed it and had found it useful. all of them said they felt well equipped to start being a pal leader, with one student commenting that they had ‘been equipped with plenty of information’. there were a few suggestions of how to improve the training which have been taken into cornock the evaluation of an undergraduate peer assisted learning scheme at sheffield hallam university journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 14 consideration in the preparation for the next year. in the questionnaire filled in by the pal leaders at the end of their training, suggestions to improve the training were to condense it and to include more activities. the training has been re-developed and is now based around more activities. positive comments from first year students about the maths arcade in induction week included that they did enjoy it because it allowed them to ‘bond with [their] pal group’ and that it was a good place to meet their pal leader because ‘it was [a] laid back environment and didn't feel awkward’. a placement year student said it had ‘allowed [them] to get know [their] fellow students a little better’ and a final year student described it as a ‘good ice breaker’. it was clear that some of the students did not enjoy the maths arcade. one student commented that the session had been too long and the session will now be shortened in response to this. the first year students saw very little staff involvement in the scheme with the main form of communication with the first year students being through their log books. when surveyed, 76.6% of them (72 students) said there was the right amount of support from staff, 23.4% of them (22 students) said they would have liked to have seen more, and none of them said there was too much. one first year student commented that they had ‘easy access to staff if help was required’. out of the 20 questionnaires from pal leaders, the methods of support used are displayed in figure 4: figure 4. support used by pal leaders. cornock the evaluation of an undergraduate peer assisted learning scheme at sheffield hallam university journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 15 the majority of the pal leaders (70.0%, 14 of them) said there was the right amount of support. some of them (30.0%, 6 of them) said they would have liked to have seen more support from staff, and none of them said there was too much. looking at the reasons for wanting more, there seemed to be a variety in the support offered by the members of staff involved. the pal leaders found that ‘the support network [was] brilliant’ and that there was a ‘good level of support’. overall they liked that they ‘were able to just get on with it’, that they could ‘choose [their] own method for helping the group’ and that ‘there was a lot of freedom and responsibility’. one student commented that they found that the ‘support sessions kept everything on track’. there was one suggestion that there should be more contact from the staff assigned to each group. this is currently being reviewed and final year pal supervisors are being considered to ensure a more consistent experience for the pal leaders. conclusions the pal scheme within the first year of the mathematics degree at sheffield hallam university is generally very successful at easing the transition into university and helping develop a mathematics community. the creation of groups encourages peer support throughout the degree programme as most of the students continue to work with at least some of their group beyond the end of the scheme. having the scheme begin on their first day helps the students make instant friends and they appreciate being in the same tutorial groups together. inter-year communication is currently quite limited, but the pal scheme gives the first year students the opportunity to consult final year students on aspects of the course such as placement years. using the maths arcade as an ice breaker activity works well for when the pal leaders meet their pal groups at the end of their training. the amount of direct staff involvement is kept to a minimal, but an extensive support system is in place to ensure the smooth running of the scheme. in addition, both the first year students and the final year pal leaders develop employability skills and an increase in confidence. in particular, the first year students develop their presentation and group working skills, whilst the final year students practise leadership skills. cornock the evaluation of an undergraduate peer assisted learning scheme at sheffield hallam university journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 16 suggestions for improvement will be taken into consideration and changes will be made where necessary, but overall the response to the scheme is generally very positive. enjoyment of the scheme can be observed through the high engagement levels and comments made by the students. the benefits of the scheme, which continue far beyond its duration, are recognised by the different students involved. references bradshaw, n. (2011) ‘the university of greenwich maths arcade’, msor connections, 11(3), pp. 26-29. doi: 10.11120/msor.2011.11030026. bradshaw, n. and rowlett, p. (eds.) (2012) maths arcade: stretching and supporting mathematical thinking. msor network. available at: http://www.mathcentre.ac.uk/resources/uploaded/mathsarcade.pdf (accessed: 10 april 2016). challis, n. (2015) ‘group work within undergraduate mathematics’, in grove, m., croft, t., kyle, j. and lawson, d. (eds.) transitions in undergraduate mathematics education. birmingham: university of birmingham, pp. 85-95 coe, m.c., mcdougall, a.o. and mckeown, n.b. (1999) ‘is peer assisted learning of benefit to undergraduate chemists?’, university chemistry education, 3(2), p. 7275. hammond, j.a., bithell, c.p., jones, l. and bidgood, p. (2010) ‘a first year experience of student-directed peer-assisted learning’, active learning in higher education, 11(3), pp. 201-212. hill, r. and reddy, p. (2007) ‘undergraduate peer mentoring: an investigation into processes, activities and outcomes’, psychology learning and teaching, 6(2), pp. 98-103. http://www.mathcentre.ac.uk/resources/uploaded/mathsarcade.pdf cornock the evaluation of an undergraduate peer assisted learning scheme at sheffield hallam university journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 17 hoyles, c., newman, k. and noss, r. (2010) ‘changing patterns of transition from school to university mathematics’, int journal of mathematical education in science and technology, 32(6), pp. 829-845. lawson, d. (2015) ‘mathematics support at the transition to university’, in grove, m., croft, t., kyle, j. and lawson, d. (eds.) transitions in undergraduate mathematics education. birmingham: university of birmingham, pp. 39-56 li, h-c., wang, l.s., lin, y-h. and lee, i. (2010) ‘the effect of a peer-mentoring strategy on student nurse stress reduction in clinical practice’, international nursing review, 58(2), pp. 203-210. luk, h.s. (2007) ‘the gap between secondary school and university mathematics’, international journal of mathematical education in science and technology, 36(23), pp. 161-174. moore, i. (2011) evaluating your teaching innovation. birmingham, u.k.: national he stem programme. available at: http://www.hestem.ac.uk/sites/default/files/evaluating_your_teaching_innovation.pdf (accessed: 10 april 2016). soloman, p. and crowe, j. (2001) ‘perceptions of student peer tutors in a problem-based learning programme’, medical teacher, 23(2), pp. 181-186. wadoodi, a. and crosby, j.r. (2002) ‘twelve tips for peer-assisted learning: a classic concept revisited’, medical teacher, 24(3), pp. 241-244. waldock, j. (2011) ‘peer assisted learning’, in waldock, j.. (ed.) developing graduate skills in he mathematics programmes. national he stem programme, pp. 22-23 [online]. available at: http://www.mathcentre.ac.uk/resources/uploaded/gradskills.pdf (accessed: 10 april 2016). wilkes, z. (2006) ‘the student-mentor relationship: a review of the literature’, nursing standard, 20(37), pp. 42-47. http://www.hestem.ac.uk/sites/default/files/evaluating_your_teaching_innovation.pdf http://www.mathcentre.ac.uk/resources/uploaded/gradskills.pdf cornock the evaluation of an undergraduate peer assisted learning scheme at sheffield hallam university journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 18 zhao, c-m. and kuh, g.d. (2004) ‘adding value: learning communities and student engagement’, research in higher education, 45(2), pp. 115-138. author details claire cornock is the course leader for bsc mathematics at sheffield hallam university. she has been the coordinator of the group's peer assisted learning scheme since 2013 and has implemented a number of changes. her use of group work extends beyond first year peer support, especially within tasks where learning and assessment are integrated. she is interested in improving the university experience for students through developing activities and support mechanisms outside formal teaching sessions. she is active in researching teaching and learning pedagogy, with innovative approaches including the use of rubik's cubes in teaching algebra topics. the evaluation of an undergraduate peer assisted learning scheme at sheffield hallam university abstract introduction set up of the scheme final year pal leaders introduction to the scheme staff involvement methodology first year questionnaire pal leaders questionnaires final year questionnaire maths arcade questionnaire peer assessment forms log book comments results and discussion easing the transition into university development of a mathematics community development of skills and confidence improvements that could be made conclusions references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 27 april 2023 ________________________________________________________________________ ©2023 the author(s) (cc-by 4.0) networked learning: the centrality of human-to-human networks in online learning environments. a book review of: themelis, c. (2023) pedagogy of teleproximity for elearning: bridging the distance with social physics (routledge: new york). gary frazer fisher university of derby, uk keywords: online learning; classical education; educational technology; scholarship of teaching and learning chryssa themelis' monograph, "pedagogy of tele-proximity for elearning: bridging the distance with social physics" is a significant contribution to the field of e-learning and learning development within higher education. the book aims to integrate information technology, multimedia competency, and pedagogical theories of e-learning to foster human-to-human contact within online learning contexts. this review will provide an overview of the book, evaluate its strengths and weaknesses, and outline its relevance to learning developers. the title and chapter titles of the book use technical and conceptual language, which may be challenging for some readers, particularly those who have a more practical or professional, rather than academic, relationship with the field of e-learning. however, themelis’ preface clearly articulates the relevance and importance of these ideas to all who work within the field of e-learning. she argues that tele-proximity (a state in which individuals are brought into human-to-human proximity despite geographic distance) is a necessary response to the social alienation that is sometimes concomitant with elearning, and that social physics (the mathematical modelling of groups of individuals’ behaviour) can provide the ‘knowledgeable actions and actionable knowledge’ and the necessary finesse, and develop communications and networks within e-learning spaces in order to facilitate this proximity (p. x). this is a compelling and persuasive argument of frazer fisher networked learning: the centrality of human-to-human networks in online learning environments. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 the importance of this book to both generalist learning developers and academic specialists in the field. the book’s first section lays the foundation by outlining the theories of networked learning and social physics, the transformative nature of technology within online contexts, and the meaning of pedagogy from an e-learning perspective. the subsequent four chapters are the core of the monograph, where themelis outlines the theories and practices of tele-proximity pedagogy, breaking it down into its component parts of tele-teacher presence, tele-cognitive presence, and tele-social presence before articulating how these combine to construct her concept of tele-proximity as pedagogy. themelis builds on almost a decade of research in this field (themelis, 2013; themelis & bougia, 2016; sime & themelis, 2020) to deliver a comprehensive exposition of the theories, principles, and practice underlying tele-proximity in e-learning settings. the final section of the book looks beyond the academy and explores e-learning's growing capacity to positively alter the world outside of higher education. the book provides a valuable contribution to the field of e-learning, and its ideas are relevant for those interested in exploring new ways to approach e-learning and, in doing so, enhance student engagement and performance in both their programme of study and their relationship with wider society. the book's focus on tele-proximity as a pedagogical approach is particularly valuable, as it recognises the importance of human-to-human contact in online learning contexts. by prioritising this interaction, tele-proximity pedagogy as an approach can help to create a more supportive and engaging online learning environment that supports students’ holistic development. one of the strengths of the book is the wide breadth of literature outside the traditional boundaries of education research with which it engages. integrating research in the fields of social networks, connectedness, and psychology, themelis emphasises the extent to which e-learning can be envisioned as a network of social interactions between students and educators. linking this to online educational practice, she convincingly argues the benefits of situating human-to-human interactions within the centre of e-learning pedagogy. as a result of this, the book transcends being simply an exposition on effective frazer fisher networked learning: the centrality of human-to-human networks in online learning environments. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 e-learning practice. instead, it serves as a manifesto for an innovative and novel way of approaching digital and online pedagogy. this is not to say that themelis’ book is wholly conceptual though. another valuable aspect of the book is that it links these principles into lived reality, providing practical insight for e-learning practitioners on how to implement tele-proximity pedagogy in their teaching. for instance, in her discussion of the impact of teacher presence within videoconferencing contexts, themelis builds on her earlier research in the field (themelis, 2013) to present some of the key qualities demonstrated by charismatic and effective tele-teachers (p. 70), as well as explaining the techniques that might be used to embody those qualities. this regular linking of principle to practice ensures that her conceptual discussions never become so abstract as to become disconnected from learning development practice. in addition, the book highlights the potential of e-learning to transform education beyond the academy by creating opportunities for lifelong learning and community engagement. for example, she discusses how, by mirroring democratic ideals within the praxis of elearning communities, academic institutions can provide a democratic apprenticeship to their students that can help prepare them for the new threats and challenges of an increasingly connected world. in this, she again draws on literature not only from the world of e-learning, but from the broader world of social network and social influence analysis (pp. 157-9). one potential limitation of the book is that it may appear too abstract and conceptual for some readers, particularly those who are looking for more practical guidance on how to implement tele-proximity pedagogy in their teaching. the author acknowledges this issue and provides examples and case studies throughout the book to illustrate how teleproximity can be applied in different contexts. this is arguably the greatest challenge of a monograph of this sort. by ensuring that her conceptual and abstract discussion is firmly linked to a foundation of authentic, e-learning practice, themelis ensures that her monograph will hold broad relevance. nonetheless, some readers who are more narrowly interested in immediate techniques for improving e-learning practice may find the book's frazer fisher networked learning: the centrality of human-to-human networks in online learning environments. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 focus on theoretical concepts and academic literature overwhelming and be deterred from investigating it further. overall, themelis' monograph provides a valuable contribution to the field of e-learning and learning development. she proposes a novel approach to online learning that emphasizes role of networked social interactions within e-learning and provides a robust theoretical framework for tele-proximity pedagogy. the book is recommended for anyone who is interested in exploring new ways of approaching online learning contexts and who is willing to engage with the theoretical and conceptual principles underpinning e-learning pedagogy. references sime, j.-a. & themelis, c. (2020) 'educators' perspectives on transmedia identity management: redefining tele-teacher presence', distance education, vol. 41, no. 1, pp. 70-85. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/01587919.2020.1727292 themelis, c. (2013) 'tele-proximity: the experienced educators’ perspective of human to human communication in distance education', phd, lancaster university, lancaster. themelis, c. & bougia, a. (2016) 'tele-proximity: tele-community of inquiry model. facial cues for social, cognitive, and teacher presence in distance education', the international review of research in open and distributed learning, vol. 17, no. 6, pp. 145-163. available at: https://doi.org/10.19173/irrodl.v17i6.2453 author details gary f. fisher is the university of derby’s senior learning designer, where he manages a team of teaching and learning specialists who work to improve the quality of education offered across the university. prior to this, he has worked and taught in a variety of further, higher, rehabilitative, and heritage education contexts. he completed his https://doi.org/10.1080/01587919.2020.1727292 https://doi.org/10.19173/irrodl.v17i6.2453 frazer fisher networked learning: the centrality of human-to-human networks in online learning environments. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 doctorate in classics at the university of nottingham in 2020 and actively researches and publishes on a variety of subjects, ranging from the history of classical education to blended learning and the philosophy of educational technology in modern higher and further education. licence ©2023 the author(s). this is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (cc-by 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. see http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. journal of learning development in higher education (jldhe) is a peer-reviewed open access journal published by the association for learning development in higher education (aldinhe). references author details licence literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 7: june 2014 editorial andrew doig southampton solent university, uk amanda french birmingham city university, uk andy hagyard university of lincoln, uk john hilsdon plymouth university, uk stephanie mckendry strathclyde university, uk for anyone who attended the workshops and presentations at the 11th aldinhe conference held in huddersfield in april, it would have been apparent that the learning development community is engaged in an extremely wide range of interests and activities. this variety is driven by the different contexts that we each work in, and the diverse groups of students that we meet and support. what was also manifest at the conference was that underpinning the work of everybody in attendance, and the key characteristic that brings us all together (in a very convivial gathering) is a desire to help students to learn. with each successive conference, it is highly encouraging to see how the group identifying themselves as learning developers continues to grow, and to hear about the ways in which they are striving to improve the learning experience for students in he. at the same time, it is clear that while we work in our own spheres of activity, similar challenges come up time and again for all of us, meaning that the experiences and approaches of our colleagues from different institutions, disciplines and countries can inspire us and provide insights into how we might respond to our own challenges. editorial journal of learning development in higher education, issue 7: june 2014 2 similarly, in the process of selecting and reviewing papers for each edition of the jldhe, the diversity of contexts for ld becomes very apparent. learning developers are working with very different groups of students, each facing their own challenges and needing support to meet their own specific needs. in the papers included in issue 7, you will read about lders striving to support students with their transition into he; or working with student nurses; part-time mature students; and learners on an overseas campus of a uk university. the value of sharing these studies is that, invariably, the results and conclusions drawn by the authors provide examples and insights that are potentially of use to us all, and which contribute to the growing body of knowledge underpinning the field of ld. marion bowman and berni addyman’s paper examines work done with student nurses, and particularly on improving the quality of academic reflective writing in nursing. addressing concerns such as staff perceptions of poor writing by student nurses and issues of plagiarism, it is a comparative study of three different initiatives: the use of example texts to make task requirements more explicit; the provision of formative peer feedback on draft texts; and facilitating increased dialogue between staff and students regarding expectations of the task. bowman and addyman report that there are indications that pass rates and grades improved in the three cohorts studied, and that there was an increase in uptake of academic supervision. they conclude that providing scaffolding learning activities for academic reflective writing remains a key need for students on programmes of study related to professions such as nursing. louise frith and allia wilson from the university of kent take on quite a different group of students in ‘returning to learning: what are the academic development needs of mature and part-time students?’ they ask “what works to support and retain these students?” they describe the development of a programme offering self-assessment, one-to-one advice and targeted study skills sessions. drawing upon ideas from social learning theory and appreciative inquiry, the authors conclude that, although successful in its own terms, the programme could be improved with greater attention given to students’ prior knowledge and a stronger emphasis on building social learning networks, including via uses of web technology. this paper offers valuable insights and ideas that will be useful for those working with this expanding group of students. editorial journal of learning development in higher education, issue 7: june 2014 3 using a phenomenological approach to explore the lived experience of healthcare students in a multi-disciplinary masters programme, catherine hayes and mark davies' paper explores the use of a hybrid model of problem based learning. with data gathered from questionnaires and interviews, findings suggest that there is indeed value in such an approach to learning and teaching, particularly in promoting interdisciplinary learning. this has obvious implications for multidisciplinary working and for cross-disciplinary learning in general, with the cohort noting that it afforded them a means of feeling valued in their contribution to sessions. hargreaves, bond, dagg, dawson, kendrick and potter present a case study of a process of collaboration on the development of an online self-assessment tool. rather than analysing the tool itself, or its implementation, at this stage, the authors have analysed the process of development, focussing on the factors that made for a successful collaboration, and particularly 'the positive impact that involvement in the project had on the team members, particularly those who were students'. we can look forward to a future paper from the same team evaluating the impact that the implementation of their tool has had. a different kind of collaborative process is described by hoolash and kodabux in their paper which evaluates the implementation of a student learning assistant scheme in the mauritius campus of middlesex university. this work, which recruits students to work as facilitators to assist others in learning sessions, clearly has advantages on both sides, but the authors do describe significant challenges that this arrangement generates. the solutions they suggest will be helpful for academics or learning developers considering introducing similar schemes in any context. in ‘fostering a sense of belonging: supporting the early formation of student identity as successful learners in higher education', sarah parkes discusses the recent experiences of students participating in headstart: a two week pre-entry blended learning course at newman university, birmingham. this case study explores the extent to which a sense of belonging in he, a key element to successful student progression and success, can be successfully fostered in students before even they start university. finally, simon brownhill examines the tutorial as a means of learning, with an investigation of students' perceptions of an innovative ‘tutorial stations’ system. students in the second year of their practice-based foundation degree were provided with tutorial support in the editorial journal of learning development in higher education, issue 7: june 2014 4 form of ‘stations’ including: face-to-face support from the tutor; a station containing examples of literature; and a discussion area. results suggest students were positive about these changes and it is clear that it would be useful to conduct further research to ascertain the impact on attainment. the range of topics and activities examined in these papers makes for very interesting and enlightening reading, and we hope you enjoy taking some time to explore the work of your learning development colleagues. whether examining strategies for effective reflective writing, or considering how to provide better tutorials, these papers, like the presentations at the huddersfield conference all address in some way the fundamental learning development issues of how to engage learners, and how to help them to achieve their goals as learners. in the last issue, we reported that the editorial team of the journal expanded, and in january 2014 we were able to have our first full editorial team meeting in one location. this gave us the opportunity to plan for the future development of the journal. we will shortly release a call for a special edition to be published in november, which will take a particular look at ways in which learning development can be supported by the use of learning technologies. however, we accept papers at any time, and if you have work that you wish to report on that is not a fit for the special edition, you should still submit as we aim to publish three issues each year from now on. literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special edition: developing writing in stem disciplines, november 2012 developing student writing in science and engineering: the write reports in science and engineering (wrise) project helen drury university of sydney, australia pam mort university of new south wales, australia abstract this paper reports on the design, development, implementation and evaluation of a discipline-specific online report writing resource for undergraduate science and engineering students, known as ‘write reports in science and engineering’ (wrise). wrise was developed by a cross-institutional and cross-discipline collaborative team made up of subject specialists, learning advisors and elearning specialists. its conceptual design is based on research and pedagogy in ‘learning to write’ and ‘writing to learn’. genre analysis and genre pedagogy in the sydney school tradition underpin the ‘learning to write’ resources. wrise contains nine modules from eight disciplines. each module brings together resources to support student learning of both report writing and discipline content relevant to reporting experimental or field work. the site addresses student learning about the product of writing, namely the report genre, as well as the writing process. evaluations post-project have shown that wrise users attained higher marks than non-users in their report assignments. users also rated wrise highly for: developing understanding of the report writing requirements in their discipline; increasing awareness of strengths and weaknesses in their report writing; and, for deciding what changes to make to their report. wrise works best when integrated into the curriculum and when it is regularly promoted and demonstrated by lecturers, tutors and learning advisors. keywords: engineering education; genre pedagogy; online learning; report writing; science education. drury and mort developing student writing in science and engineering: the wrise project introduction and background in australia, as in the uk, there have been ongoing concerns about the writing skills of students studying in science and engineering disciplines. both employers and government have frequently referred to graduates who do not possess the necessary communication skills for professional practice (department of education, science and training (dest), 2007; accreditation board for education and technology (abet), 2011). although this issue is not new (ac nielson research services, 2000), it has been compounded in recent years by an increasingly diverse student population. commencing students in science and engineering vary in terms of language and cultural background as well as prior educational experience which may mean that they have had little practice in extended writing. this situation is exacerbated by other factors, namely a curriculum where writing is seen as a low priority and faculty staff who feel challenged to teach writing in their discipline, articulate how they assess student writing or address issues of plagiarism and feedback. collaborative approaches to address these issues have been pursued over the last ten years between discipline staff and staff with expertise in language and learning at the universities of sydney and new south wales. this has resulted in a number of learning programs for writing development, both paper based and online as well as research initiatives to analyse the writing tasks or genres of the science and engineering disciplines (see for example, drury et al., 2006; skinner and mort, 2009). despite the success of these programs, the insights gained about the writing process and the writing product have mostly remained within the particular unit of study and with the particular discipline staff member. this means that these programs cannot support the transitions students need to make in their written communication of disciplinary knowledge as they move through the undergraduate years. furthermore, students need to understand the similarities and differences in written communication within and across disciplinary boundaries. clearly a more systematic co-ordinated and comprehensive approach was needed to provide more effective development of students’ writing. the opportunity for such an approach arose with the advent of the australian learning and teaching council (altc), a commonwealth government funded institution to support teaching and learning developments in higher education (now known as the office for learning and teaching (olt) located within the department for education, employment and workplace relations – http://www.deewr.gov.au/highereducation/programs/quality/pages/olt.aspx). a successful grant from the altc supported the creation of an ‘integrated student-centred journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 2 http://www.deewr.gov.au/highereducation/programs/quality/pages/olt.aspx drury and mort developing student writing in science and engineering: the wrise project online learning environment for report writing in the sciences and engineering’ now known as wrise (write reports in science and engineering http://learningcentre.usyd.edu.au/wrise/). this paper will report on the wrise project. it will discuss the choice of an online discipline-based approach and the focus on the report genre and then elaborate the principles and theory underpinning the design. further sections will report on the development, implementation and evaluation of wrise. the discussion will highlight the challenges experienced and ongoing issues. online learning and the report genre the advantages of online learning in the area of flexibility and accessibility, especially in asynchronous online formats, have been widely acknowledged (see for example, cole, 2000; hiltz and shea, 2005; hirschheim, 2005; goodyear, 2006; ally, 2008; daymont et al., 2011). however, there is ongoing debate on the learning outcomes achieved and their evaluation (alexander, 2001; swan, 2003; thompson, 2004; reeves et al., 2005; means et al., 2009) students can access online learning resources in a self-paced manner and create their own learning pathway through the materials. an online environment also provides multiple modes of learning to engage students in different ways. this approach is also a way to overcome the challenge of embedding face-to face learning activities to address writing in crowded science and engineering curricula. however, there are constraints in an online environment, as students have to monitor their own learning with only the computer as teacher. in particular, when teaching writing, computer feedback alone is limited. therefore, wrise is not only a resource for individual self-paced learning but also one which can be used for blended learning in face-to-face interactions in lectures and tutorial and lab sessions. although there have been a number of successful approaches to teaching writing online, many of them focus on the generic aspects of a report or essay genre (see for example, http://www.writing.engr.psu.edu/) and may also be fairly limited in the degree of interactivity they include in the design (see for example https://academicskills.anu.edu.au/resources/listing/114). wrise is a unique resource providing a discipline-specific online learning environment across eight discipline areas journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 3 http://learningcentre.usyd.edu.au/wrise/ http://www.writing.engr.psu.edu/ https://academicskills.anu.edu.au/resources/listing/114 drury and mort developing student writing in science and engineering: the wrise project and from year one to three of the undergraduate degree program (figure 1). it presents the report genres in the way that students experience these as they move across discipline boundaries in their degree program. it combines information on both the product and process of report writing as well as the discipline content of reports students are writing. in this way it aims to overcome the separation of language choices from the communication of discipline knowledge. figure 1. home page of the wrise site. figure 2. chemical engineering entry screen. this focus on the report genre in wrise was partly because a repository of effective materials already existed in this area but also because the report genre, whether based on laboratory or fieldwork, is one of the most commonly assessed writing tasks in the sciences and engineering throughout the undergraduate years. this means that it is a highly relevant genre for students to learn and differentiate across disciplines. also students struggle with report writing, especially in interpreting and commenting on their results and developing an argument in the discussion section. however, students also struggle with the concepts behind the reports they are required to write and often do not understand the purpose of documenting their experimental or field findings in journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 4 drury and mort developing student writing in science and engineering: the wrise project a report. for this reason, each discipline module in wrise brings together learning materials not only to support report writing (help with report writing) but also to support understanding of the content behind reports or to understand general concepts connected with experimental work in the discipline (help with understanding content) (figure 2). providing support for understanding the content of assessment tasks is an incentive for students to access wrise and engage with the learning materials. design principles although designing learning resources to motivate and engage students is critical in all teaching situations, it is particularly important in online learning where students are largely free to use the learning environment as they choose. our aim was to create a rich resource with relevant and realistic materials which would encourage students to reflect on both the writing process and product. these three principles – rich, relevant and realistic – are the ‘3 rs’ of the wrise design which together support a fourth, a reflective approach to writing. wrise is a rich resource which uses multimodal and interactive elements to present explanations, examples and exercises on writing from a number of perspectives. it includes a range of authentic examples of discipline-based reports, a frequent request in student feedback. however, these are realistic examples for student writers to aim for since they have been drawn from a corpus of student report writing rather than the writing of experts in the disciplines, for example, ‘example reports showing what to do and what not to do were most helpful’ (student comment, wrise questionnaire, 2009). since the report examples are discipline based they are also relevant to the kinds of discipline knowledge students are engaging with. in addition, each discipline module brings together resources to help students with understanding both writing and content, once again making it highly relevant for students to engage with. it’s good it uses chem eng content as gives practical examples of what we have to write. (student comment, wrise questionnaire, 2009) journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 5 drury and mort developing student writing in science and engineering: the wrise project he ples the wrise interface presents learning figure 3. menu design. resources in a structured and coherent way. each module is identified through a distinctive colour and visual which is continued throughout the module so that students know immediately where they are in the site and can easily make comparisons among disciplines (see figure 1). in addition, the menu items within the help with report writing modules follow the logical structure of a report, thus reinforcing the macro structure of the genre that students are required to write. sub menu items guide students to explore the structure and language features of each section of a report. this approach is repeated in each discipline module giving coherence to the whole site (figure 3). figure 4. discussion structure. the multimodal possibilities of the computer are used to make the structure and language features of the example reports explicit. for example, graphics, colour and animation are used to reveal the structure of each section of a report and the stages in t structure are linked to report exam (figure 4). students can check their understanding through a range of interactive exercises, such as multiple choice or drag and drop and receive immediate feedback. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 6 drury and mort developing student writing in science and engineering: the wrise project it had a sample introduction and then it had a highlighted each component of each part of the introduction that you needed, which was really good. seeing those different colours is what helped me the most and, yep, i did change it. i wrote mine and then went to this site and looked at it and then went back and changed it. (student comments wrise questionnaire, 2009) as well as deconstructing the report as a text product, wrise also helps students learn about the process of report writing and the expectations of lecturers through audio recordings of student and staff interviews. students talk about how they went about writing their report and the challenges they experienced and how they overcame these, while discipline staff talk about their expectations of student writing and the typical problems students experience. good to hear from people we knew, more real. (student comment, wrise questionnaire, 2009) theoretical underpinnings the design and development of wrise is influenced by research and pedagogy in ‘learning to write’ and ‘writing to learn’ (for discussions about these approaches and their interrelationships at tertiary level, see for example, ackerman, 1993; mcleod et al., 2001; carter, 2007; carter et al., 2007). the resources in wrise which support students ‘learning to write’ in the disciplines are based on genre analysis and genre-based pedagogy. these applied linguistic approaches draw on a number of traditions (for example, swales, 1990; bhatia, 1993; berkenkotter and huckin, 1995; hyland, 2003) but the main tradition used in wrise is the sydney school approach to genre and genre pedagogy (martin, 1999; martin and rose, 2008). in this tradition, the choice of structures and language in report genres become meaningful in terms of their social context and purpose, the discipline culture they are embedded in and the communication act they fulfil. genre pedagogy aims to make genres and their social purpose explicit to students through a teaching/learning cycle where structure and language in example texts are first deconstructed in the context of their field. then students are apprenticed through writing practice and feedback into the genres of their disciplines, a ‘genre-based literacy journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 7 drury and mort developing student writing in science and engineering: the wrise project pedagogy’ (martin and rose, 2008). this approach to teaching academic writing is well established in both face-to-face and online learning environments (drury, 2004; jones, 2004). in the wrise environment, students can choose their own teaching/learning cycle depending on their needs; they can check their initial understandings of the structure and language of each section of a report genre though an entry quiz and then engage with examples and exercises to improve their understanding. in a blended approach, lecturers can scaffold report assignments by referring students to different parts of wrise to prepare their draft reports and also use wrise in the feedback process by recommending students to use specific sections of wrise to improve their performance. ‘writing to learn’ approaches, although generally acknowledged to be more generic and informal approaches to writing development, also occur in the context of students’ studying in the disciplines and contribute to their mastery of the formal genres of the discipline (mcleod and maimon, 2000; petrucci, 2002). these approaches also help students build their knowledge in the discipline and support deep learning, reflection and critical thinking (scardamalia and bereiter, 2006). this approach is seen in writing across the curriculum (wac) pedagogy, especially in science and engineering education (jones, 2004; reynolds et al., 2012). wrise aims to develop students’ understanding of disciplinary concepts and knowledge and how these are expressed in language through the cooccurrence of the help with report writing and help with understanding content modules. in addition, wrise contains report genres from different disciplines and across different degree stages, and in this way, students can more easily make comparisons across the discipline boundaries in which they are studying and gain insights into how the communication of knowledge varies. in this way, wrise supports a ‘writing to learn’ approach where students can become more aware of disciplinary differences and adopt a more metacognitive approach to the writing process and product. both ‘learning to write’ and ‘writing to learn’ approaches need to be informed by students’ experiences of learning such as their prior learning, their motivation and their current perceptions of and approaches to virtual teaching and learning experiences (prosser and trigwell, 1999; ellis and goodyear, 2010). the ‘conversational framework’ approach (laurillard, 2002) has influenced the design of the report modules as it begins with prior student understandings and through ‘dialogue’ (computer/student interaction) shifts students’ understandings towards shared concepts of subject matter. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 8 drury and mort developing student writing in science and engineering: the wrise project development since the project encompassed eight disciplines, ranging across two institutions and involved the staff of two learning centres and an elearning centre, it was essential to build a team approach for the success of this project. team members brought expertise in their disciplines and most importantly insights into how writing is used to convey disciplinary knowledge. language and learning specialists were able to analyse the genres of the different reports across the disciplines and elearning specialists brought their knowledge of online learning to the design of the site. this collaborative approach created a community of practice around academic writing in science and engineering as a basis for beginning to map the genres of the undergraduate years across these disciplines. the development of wrise continued over an 18-month period, including staged trialling and feedback. during this time, a corpus of student writing in each new discipline area was collected and examples chosen as the basis for the development of learning materials. these examples were analysed for generic structure and language and used to develop the explanations and exercises in the help with understanding report writing part of the site. at the same time, the earlier report writing materials were redesigned and integrated into the site so that a coherent approach to design was achieved. discipline staff attended workshops on using question tools software to develop materials for the help with understanding content part of the site. the materials for report writing were circulated to discipline staff for feedback and comments before the next stage of development into online materials. audio recordings were made with staff and student and extracts integrated into the site at appropriate places. overall this process comprised a spiral/feedback approach to design and development with designated milestones to be achieved along the way to ensure the delivery of the project. implementation and evaluation wrise was implemented and extensively evaluated in 2009. implementation activities varied across the disciplines. in some cases, students were introduced to the site via lectures and in others during lab sessions or tutorials. if time allowed, students would work in pairs on part of a relevant module and engage in exercises. however for the most part, the site was displayed either by faculty or language and learning specialists in lecture time. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 9 drury and mort developing student writing in science and engineering: the wrise project the evaluations consisted of software tracking of site usage, questionnaires and focus groups/interviews with both students and staff. student report marks were also recorded and comparisons made between users (n=242) and non-users (n=175) of the site. ongoing evaluation is currently carried out via software tracking. in semester 1, 2009, approximately 1000 unique visitors used the site during the implementation period (about half of the targeted cohort). more recent tracking data over the same period in 2011 has shown a doubling of site usage in terms of new visitors as well as a wider national and international site usage and this trend has continued into 2012. during implementation in 2009, evaluation questionnaires were distributed to a random sample of tutorial groups across seven of the discipline areas. the survey was conducted after students had submitted their report but before it had been assessed. approximately 500 students (about 25% of the cohort) were invited to complete the questionnaires. overall, the response (n=417) confirmed the usefulness of wrise by users (n=242). the majority of non-users (n=175) reported that they did not know about the site, despite the fact that it was strongly promoted in lectures and tutorials. student users rated wrise highly, reporting improved understanding of the structure and language of reports through their interactions with the site and increased confidence in their report writing skills. in addition, their understanding of content in their discipline improved as well as their confidence in knowing what content to put in their report. a summary of the questionnaire data is presented in figure 5. the data consists of the average of students’ level of agreement with 13 statements on how aspects of the modules improved their understanding. ratings were based on a likert scale that ranged from strongly agree to strongly disagree with the statements. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 10 drury and mort developing student writing in science and engineering: the wrise project figure 5. the average of respondents’ (n=242) overall rating of their improved understanding from interacting with various aspects of the wrise modules where ratings range from strongly agree to strongly disagree. open-ended comments from the student questionnaires and focus group data (n= 4x5 students per group) supported these findings. example extracts are included below: wrise helped me to think more clearly and concisely about what a scientific report should be like. wrise gave me the basic structure of what reports are accepted at uni as opposed to high school. the things i wrote were more relevant, more succinct and less junk. in terms of performance, we were able to conclude that wrise did make a difference to students’ report marks. in general, users gained better marks than non-users, and when marks were pooled across disciplines, the report marks of those who used the website (m = 0 .13, sd = 0.97, n = 204) were significantly higher than those who did not use the website (m = -0.19, sd = 0 .98, n = 144; t (306) = -3.02, p = 0.01). that is, those who used the website scored, on average, 0.13 standard deviations above the mean for all students while those who did not use the website scored, on average, 0.19 standard deviations below the mean for all students. thus interacting with wrise positively influenced report marks across disciplines and this remained the case even when controlling for the greater experience of writing reported by the user group. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 11 drury and mort developing student writing in science and engineering: the wrise project discipline staff (n=14) who were involved in the project were also invited to provide feedback through open-ended responses on an anonymous questionnaire. those who responded (n=4) reported improvements in student writing and positive experiences of being involved in the project. some examples of responses are shown below: ...strongly encouraged to use the site. quite an improvement. i feel we definitely have a well-designed pedagogically sound website. new working relationships and collaborative links with colleagues across the university. wrise is a freely available resource and software tracking has shown the ongoing use of the site. lecturing and tutoring staff in the disciplines are committed to promoting wrise as they can experience the benefits in terms of a reduced marking burden. although new students at both universities have reported how helpful the site has been in developing their report writing, many continue to request resources to help them with specific report assignments. thus, even a discipline-specific site like wrise seems to pose a challenge for students to transfer what they have learned to new report writing contexts. tracking data shows that, as expected, most visitors come from within australia. however a substantial proportion come from other countries (30% in 2011 with approximately 20,000 visitors in total to the site up to december 2011) and we have received positive commendations via email correspondence from europe, latin america and japan, such as: we are two lecturers at chalmers university of technology (goteborg) who work at the centre for language and communication. we are in the process of designing an owl for our students (mainly engineering students) to help them with their writing of reports. we are very impressed by your website and have recommended it for many of our students! (unsolicited email 31 march 2011) conclusion: challenges and issues the ongoing sustainability of an online learning environment for the development of written communication is critically dependent on discipline staff promoting and using it as part of their curriculum. this means that the laboratory or field activities as well as other curriculum content is aligned with the written assignments and the online resources that journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 12 drury and mort developing student writing in science and engineering: the wrise project scaffold this writing. wrise is one example of how students can be supported in the development of their report writing. wrise helps students to deconstruct the product and process of writing across disciplines in science and engineering, and furthers their understanding of how language is used to communicate discipline knowledge. however, only in a blended approach can this kind of environment be used to foster the social aspects of learning in face-to-face interactions. online social elements could also be added through discussion boards and blogs as well as through peer feedback and group writing. these activities offer the opportunity for further collaborations among discipline staff and language and learning specialists and the opportunity for an ongoing community of practice for writing development in science and engineering. references ac nielson research services (2000) employer satisfaction with graduate skills: research report. commonwealth of australia: evaluations and investigations programme, higher education division. accreditation board for education and technology (abet) (2011) criteria for accrediting engineering programs, 2011-2012. available at: http://www.abet.org/ (accessed: 27 april 2012). ackerman, j.m. (1993) ‘the promise of writing to learn’, written communication, 10(3), pp. 344-370. alexander, s. (2001) ‘e-learning developments and experiences’, education and training, 43(4), pp. 240-248. ally, m. (2008) ‘foundations of educational theory for online learning’, in anderson, t. (ed.) the theory and practice of online learning. 2nd edn. athabasca university: athabasca university press, pp.15-44. berkenkotter, c. and huckin, t. (1995) genre knowledge in disciplinary communities. mahwah, nj: lawrence erlbaum. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 13 http://www.abet.org/ drury and mort developing student writing in science and engineering: the wrise project bhatia, v.j. (1993) analysing genre. london: longman. carter, m. (2007) ‘ways of knowing, doing and writing in the disciplines’, college composition and communication, 58(3), pp. 385-418 carter, m., ferzli, m. and wiebe, e. (2007) ‘writing to learn by learning to write in the disciplines’, journal of business and technical communication, 21(3), pp. 278-302. cole, r.a. (ed.) (2000) issues in web-based pedagogy: a critical primer. westport, conn: greenwood press. daymont, t., blau, g. and campbell, d. (2011) ‘deciding between traditional and online formats: exploring the role of learning advantages, flexibility, and compensatory adaptation’, journal of behavioral and applied management, 12(2), pp.156-175. department of education, science and training (dest) (2007) graduate employability skills final report prepared for business, industry and higher education collaboration council precision consultancy. available at: http://www.dest.gov.au/highered/bihecc (accessed: 27 april 2012). drury h. (2004) ‘teaching academic writing on-screen: a search for best practice’, in ravelli, l. and ellis, r. (eds.) analysing academic writing: contextualised frameworks. london: continuum, pp. 233-253. drury, h., langrish, t. and o’carroll, p. (2006) ‘online approach to teaching report writing in chemical engineering: implementation and evaluation’, international journal of engineering education, 22(4), pp. 858-867. ellis, r. and goodyear, p. (2010) students’ experiences of e-learning in higher education: the ecology of sustainable innovation. new york and london: routledge. goodyear, p. (2006) ‘technology and the articulation of vocational and academic interests: reflections on time, space and e-learning’, studies in continuing education, 28(2), pp. 83-98. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 14 http://www.dest.gov.au/highered/bihecc drury and mort developing student writing in science and engineering: the wrise project hiltz, s.r and shea, p. (2005) ‘the student in the online classroom’, in hiltz, s.r. and goldman, r. (eds.) learning together online: research on asynchronous learning networks. mahwah, nj: lawrence erlbaum associates, pp. 145-168. hirschheim, r. (2005) ‘the internet-based education bandwagon: look before you leap’, communications of the acm, 48 (7), pp. 97-101. hyland, k. (2003) ‘genre-based pedagogies: a social response to process’, journal of second language writing, 12(1), pp.17-29. jones, j. (2004) ‘learning to write in the disciplines: the application of systemic functional linguistic theory to the teaching and research of student writing', in ravelli, l. and ellis, r. (eds.) analysing academic writing: contextualised frameworks. london: continuum, pp. 254-273. laurillard, d. (2002) rethinking university teaching. 2nd edn. london and new york: routledge/falmer. martin, j. r. (1999) ‘mentoring semogenesis: ‘genre-based’ literacy pedagogy’, in christie, f. (ed.) pedagogy and the shaping of consciousness: linguistic and social processes. london: cassell, pp. 123-155. martin, j.r. and rose, d. (2008) genre relations: mapping culture. equinox: london. mcleod, s. and maimon, e. (2000) ‘clearing the air: wac myths and realities’, college english, 62(5), pp. 573-583. mcleod, s.h., miraglia, e., soven m. and thaiss, c. (2001) wac for the new millennium: strategies for continuing writing-across-the curriculum programs. urbana, il: national council of teachers of english. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 15 drury and mort developing student writing in science and engineering: the wrise project means, b., toyama, y., murphy, r., bakia, m. and jones, k. (2009) ‘evaluation of evidence-based practices in online learning: a meta-analysis and review of online learning studies’, u.s. department of education office of planning, evaluation, and policy development, policy and program studies service. available at: http://www2.ed.gov/rschstat/eval/tech/evidence-based-practices/finalreport.pdf (accessed: 18 september 2012). petrucci, p. (2002) ‘a writing to learn approach to writing in the discipline in the introductory linguistics classroom’, the wac journal, 13, pp.133-143. prosser, m. and trigwell, k. (1999) understanding learning and teaching. buckingham: srhe and open university press. reeves, t., herrington, j. and oliver, r. (2005) ‘design research: a socially responsible approach to instructional technology research in higher education’, journal of computing in higher education, 16(2), pp. 96-115. reynolds, j., thaiss, c., katkin, w. and thompson, jr. r.j. (2012) ‘writing-to-learn in undergraduate science education: a community-based, conceptually driven approach’, cbe-life sciences education 11(1), pp. 17-25. scardamalia m. and bereiter c. (2006) ‘knowledge building: theory, pedagogy, and technology’, in sawyer, k. (ed.) cambridge handbook of the learning sciences. new york: cambridge university press, pp. 97-118. skinner, i. and mort, p. (2009) ‘embedding academic literacy support within the electrical engineering curriculum: a case study’, ieee transactions on education, 52(4), pp. 547-554. swales, j. (1990) genre analysis. cambridge: cambridge university press. swan, k. (2003) ‘learning effectiveness: what the research tells us’, in bourne, j. and moore, j.c. (eds.) elements of quality online education, practice and direction. needham, ma: sloan center for online education, pp.13-45. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 16 http://www2.ed.gov/rschstat/eval/tech/evidence-based-practices/finalreport.pdf drury and mort developing student writing in science and engineering: the wrise project thompson, m. (2004) ‘evaluating online courses and programs’, journal of computing in higher education, 15(2), pp. 63-84. author details ms helen drury is a senior lecturer and head of the learning centre, the university of sydney. she has worked in the area of academic literacy and learning for more than 20 years in australia, the uk and indonesia. she has developed and taught generic programs in academic literacy and worked collaboratively to integrate academic literacy into subject area curricula. she has been manager and project leader on two australian government award-winning projects to develop discipline specific online programs for supporting students in writing scientific and engineering genres. she has published and presented widely in the areas of scientific and technical writing, genre analysis and online learning of academic literacy. ms pamela mort is an experienced learning advisor at the learning centre, university of south wales (unsw). she has collaborated with the faculties of science and engineering at unsw for the past 14 years to develop courses, diagnostic tools and resources to improve the learning and communication skills of students. her work has been recognised institutionally and nationally. since 2009 pam has been a project member on two australian government funded cross-institutional projects to develop online resources for technical writing. her research interests include genre pedagogy, systemic functional grammar, and writing across the curriculum. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 17 developing student writing in science and engineering: the write reports in science and engineering (wrise) project abstract introduction and background online learning and the report genre design principles theoretical underpinnings development implementation and evaluation conclusion: challenges and issues references author details literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 9: july 2015 anecdotal to actual: identifying users of learning development to inform future practice avril buchanan de montfort university, uk abstract with increasing pressure on universities to ensure their students are graduating with a good honours degree, understanding where learning development sits in the university and its impact is arguably becoming more important. the centre for learning and study support (class) at de montfort university, leicester, has investigated data, collected since 2010, on student engagement with our learning development service. the study aimed to discover the diversity of students availing of learning development, with regards to characteristics such as: gender, ethnicity, disability, age, parental education and module marks. the data presented shows how class can justifiably engage in university wide discussions about retention and achievement, as well as widening participation agendas. it compares, where possible, who is using class to the diversity of students within the university. initial findings are presented, with discussion about how findings have impacted practice, with a particular focus on the attainment gap. from close analysis of the findings which demonstrate a lack of engagement by males with learning development, the paper proposes why this may be the case and offers insight into recent activities to try and reduce the gender gap. overall, the paper recognises how interpretation of and greater awareness of our user diversity has informed our team strategy and future direction. keywords: learning development; impact; engagement; attainment gap; diversity; retention; achievement; gender; disability; ethnicity; parental education; age. buchanan anecdotal to actual: identifying users of learning development to inform future practice journal of learning development in higher education, issue 9: july 2015 2 introduction there is no shame in going to class and asking for help, they are amazing and will boost your grade even at a 2:1 (student feedback, 2015). if the discipline of learning development emerged as a result of restructuring between traditional universities, polytechnics, and other higher education institutes (hei), and in response to widening participation programmes in the 1990s (hartley, 2011), it is pertinent to understand its user, to help qualify learning developments’ potential impact on the learning experience. this need to understand who avails of learning development, defined as including study skills, academic advice, lifelong learning and support (hartley, 2011), is perhaps more important in recent years with the changing landscape of higher education (he), including the introduction of higher tuition fees (molesworth et al., 2009). for learning development to progress, and assert itself as an academic discipline (samuels, 2013), it must be able to converse about its role and contribution to the university’s commitments, as laid out through government and wider recognised bodies such as the higher education authority (hea). at the ‘conference of european ministers responsible for higher education’, it was presented that: access into higher education should be widened by fostering the potential of students from underrepresented groups and by providing adequate conditions for the completion of their studies (european commission, 2009). this proposal incites two clear aims; firstly, to widen university participation, and secondly, to provide conditions to ensure those attending from underrepresented groups are able to complete their studies. moreover, the focus of the hea in 2012 was on the: obligation [of the he institute to] take reasonable steps to enable [all students] to be successful (hea, 2012). both concepts acknowledge the diversification of the student body and impose the responsibility of ensuring student success to the institute itself. consequently, it can be buchanan anecdotal to actual: identifying users of learning development to inform future practice journal of learning development in higher education, issue 9: july 2015 3 inferred that understanding the impact of learning development, and the diversity of its user, is a key factor to assist the institution’s assessment of their proffered support and the subsequent attainment of students. recognising this need to formally enter into discussions, rather than relying on anecdotal experiences, the centre for learning and study support (class), a centralised service based within the library and learning services at de montfort university (dmu), commenced an investigation into ‘who uses class?’. 1 established in 2001, and relocated to the library and learning services in 2006, class had a limited understanding about who used learning development provision; the only documented information was: overall number of bookings, year of study, course and faculty. this impacted on class’ ability to critically assess its potential contribution to widening participation, and retention and achievement strategies. the aim of “who uses class?” was to investigate the representation and diversity of the students who self-selected to utilise class provision, namely: tutorials, workshops and drop-ins, over a four year period (2010-2014). these provisions were identified at the outset as they are not compulsory to the students’ course, therefore the results would provide a unique insight into the student learning experience. such an understanding would help class to recognise the diversity of students accessing our services, but also identify non-engaging student groups, the results of which would impact on future direction. fields examined, included: faculty and programme division; level of study; age; gender; ethnicity; domicile; disability; parental education and participation of local area rates polar3 (hefce, 2015). processes and methodology to carry out the investigation it was necessary to draw on the expertise of other teams within the university, as such a collaborative approach was adopted with the content systems team within the library and the university’s strategic planning services (sps). class is a confidential service and therefore, a concern about collecting and analysing data was the risk of identifying individual students. to avoid this and to ensure confidentiality was maintained, class sought ethical approval to only use the unique 1 the centre for learning and study support (class) works with students in a number of ways, including: distance learners, research students, embedded teaching, dyslexia tutorials and workshops, and peer mentoring. for more information about class provision visit: www.library.dmu.ac.uk/link/class http://www.library.dmu.ac.uk/link/class buchanan anecdotal to actual: identifying users of learning development to inform future practice journal of learning development in higher education, issue 9: july 2015 4 student number to gather set information, which excluded the student name, ensuring any analysis would not identify individual students. once the fields of interest had been decided by the class team, the outlined method of delivery at the inception of the project was to transfer the unique student number to sps, who would then run a query through multiple centrally housed databases within the institution to extract the relevant information. however, previous booking processes employed by class had evolved over time, which meant an ad-hoc booking system was in place: self-selecting students signed up to workshops online, tutorials through a centralised service desk, and drop-ins recorded on arrival to the session. this meant that the unique identifying student number was recorded in three different mediums and consequently, initial steps to collate and clean the data to provide to sps proved problematic due to issues with compatibility. moreover, the cleaning of the data was more time consuming than expected and relied heavily on a volunteer within the library to undertake administrative tasks, such as checking the correct number of characters within a field. similar issues around compatibility of data when exporting from different databases were encountered by sps when trying to present the data on the spreadsheet in the first instance. this meant the data went through multiple edits to ensure complete clarity and accuracy before being deemed suitable for dissemination. initially the data was to be presented on an excel spreadsheet as this allowed for testing and to trial different multilayered queries. the data would later be transferred to the software tableau, which offers visual analysis of the data, permitting high levels of interaction, enabling different queries to be run. overall, the project took in excess of 24 months to reach a state of completion, whereby class are now able to view a complete 4 year trend of data. findings outlined below are some of the initial findings about the diversity of those who utilised selfselecting class provision over a four-year trend pattern (2010-2014). the data is compared, where possible, to university data in order to contextualise the figures. buchanan anecdotal to actual: identifying users of learning development to inform future practice journal of learning development in higher education, issue 9: july 2015 5 the findings presented below begin by offering an overview of the data, followed by focussed analysis on the widening participation remit, and retention and achievement strategies in relation to gender. gender has been selected as the finding highlighted this as an area where class presented a deficit in proportion of users in comparison to university wide data. broader findings demonstrate the breadth of students class work with, in regards to level and year of study. they also show the gradual increase in students accessing provision. this is evident in both the number of bookings and the unique students (figure 1). although attendance figures increased so too did missed or cancelled figures, which is an issue currently under review. further examination into the timing of assistance demonstrated that generally the level of engagement increased by an average of 16% between term 1 and term 2. in 2013/14 however, students appeared to front end support during term 1, with a 22% decrease in engagement between the two terms. a potential cause of this shift could be connected to the structural change to dmus academic calendar in 2013/14. during this year, two weeks (one either term) became dedicated student enrichment weeks 2 , the first of which corresponded to initial deadlines of the academic year. it will be of interest to monitor this pattern over the next period to see if the results remain the same for 2014/15. figure 1. student interaction with self-selecting provision. 2 enrichment weeks are periods away from the students’ academic timetable, during which courses put on sessions to help students. these sessions can be meetings with personal tutors; workshops on assignments; independent study etc. buchanan anecdotal to actual: identifying users of learning development to inform future practice journal of learning development in higher education, issue 9: july 2015 6 figure 2 depicts the average faculty representation over the four years; of those who selfselect to attend class provision, the majority come from the faculty of health and life sciences (42.8%). within the institute in 2013/14 this faculty had the largest proportion of students, representing 33% of all students enrolled that year (figure 2). this alone however, does not explain the potential reason for class’ high percentage of users coming from this faculty. closer inspection shows that those students who access class from within this faculty are more likely to either be mature students or have a specific learning difference (50% proportion of students who use class) or fall into both categories. figure 2. faculty distribution of self-selecting students. further findings demonstrate class exceeds the university’s representative data for its level of engagement with students under such characteristics as: ethnicity; registered disability; mature student engagement and domicile (figures 3-6), this only differs on the characteristic of gender (figure 7). these findings help to validate the inclusive teaching practice that class adopt, and also the wider reaching projects the team engages with (statistics for which were not included in this assessment so as to prevent skewing of the data). our portfolio of work includes:  running workshops specifically for students who are recently diagnosed with a specific learning difference, to help draw out the positives from the diagnosis rather than focussing on a disability deficit model. buchanan anecdotal to actual: identifying users of learning development to inform future practice journal of learning development in higher education, issue 9: july 2015 7  creating a series of workshops entitled ‘responding to your tutors’ feedback’, which targeted students whose first language is not english.  transitional work pre-entry to dmu, which involves delivering summer school sessions to incoming students from a widening participation background, and work with local colleges and further education institutes.  establishing alternative focussed ways of teaching through the use of student conference days, which assist mature students, distance learners and professional courses. all of these sessions signpost students to our self-selecting services and so a next step in developing the research is to map the migration of students from such work to selfselecting provision. figure 3. ethnicity distribution. buchanan anecdotal to actual: identifying users of learning development to inform future practice journal of learning development in higher education, issue 9: july 2015 8 figure 4. disability distribution: the majority of those with a disability are registered as having a specific learning difficulty. figure 5. age distribution calculated on age at commencement of study. buchanan anecdotal to actual: identifying users of learning development to inform future practice journal of learning development in higher education, issue 9: july 2015 9 figure 6. domicile distribution. figure 7. gender distribution. the findings have also brought to light information that is not available about the university as a whole, but helps further validate the transitional work carried out in the form of year10 campus days and summer schools. analysis of who self-selects to use class identifies that a higher percentage of students (45%) over the four year period have not had a parent attend he in comparison to 36% who have (the remaining 19% either provided no response or did not know). further to this, a higher proportion of students (39%) who access our services have entered university from areas deemed to have low participation rates (areas 1 and 2; polar). when this is cross examined to consider faculty distribution, the results go a step further to explaining the high usage class buchanan anecdotal to actual: identifying users of learning development to inform future practice journal of learning development in higher education, issue 9: july 2015 10 receives from the faculty of health and life sciences, as they have a far higher proportion of students from the first two lower quintiles of polar than the other three faculties, representing 57% of these two areas. a further element that this project has shed light on is the module marks of students who use learning development. in 2012/13 the average mark was 54.65, with a standard deviation of 16.98. this indicates that the average range of marks was 37.67 up to 71.63. these findings demonstrate that class work across the board for achievement rates, and at this early stage of analysis the data also suggests that continued access of class provision contributes to an improvement in marks. discussion the findings of the study have revealed far more than was initially anticipated and raised lots of different issues for how class responds to the changing needs of its students. as the project evolved it became possible to understand dynamics and relationships that were previously only reflected upon anecdotally. furthermore the demonstrated diversity within our findings has validated the importance of continuing our inclusive teaching practice and wider reaching work. a particular focus is how the findings, including results from multilayered questions surrounding module marks, has increased our understanding of and ability to enter into discussions about the gap in attainment of a good honours degree. the attainment gap a key focus within heis is on the attainment gap between different groups, notably white and bme students, students with and without a disability, and gender differences. an early study, which highlighted the complexity of the problem concerning the attainment gap and ethnicity, was carried out by broecke and nicholls in 2007. their work for the department for education and skills demonstrated that even when controlling for a wide range of factors thought to contribute to this gap, being from a minority ethnic community had a significant and negative effect on degree attainment. in response to this study and ongoing investigations, the discussion of attainment gaps has continued to take place within heis. prior to this study, despite the attainment gap between white ethnic background qualifiers and bme qualifiers reducing year on year at dmu (dmu, 2014), class were unable to buchanan anecdotal to actual: identifying users of learning development to inform future practice journal of learning development in higher education, issue 9: july 2015 11 confidently state how our student engagement mapped onto such agendas. due to this study however, it has become apparent that a high proportion of self-selecting students who use class identify with those key groups; this has enabled more active engagement in university discussions in which class are able to provide critical commentary on our potential contribution. nevertheless, a previous speculation that this study has confirmed is the lack of males who self-select to avail of class services. this is reflected not only in terms of direct gender distribution, but also faculty usage whereby the faculty of technology, who have the highest proportion of male students (74%) of all four faculties, have the lowest level of self-selecting engagement with class. research to date has demonstrated that while males tend to achieve more first class degree certifications than females, overall fewer number of males will graduate with a good honours degree and those males with marks outside of the first class honours are typically at the lower end of the grade boundary (hesa, 2014), findings that are mirrored at dmu (2014). investigation into potential reasons for this gender division results in the suggestion that a contributing factor is the gender difference in help-seeking behaviour, whereby it has been identified that males, particularly young males, at the very least delay seeking help (pillai, 2010; galdas et al 2005). these findings correspond to the emerging class data where investigation into the gender divide between student levels decreases the higher the level of study. for example, over the four year trend at undergraduate level males only account for 25% of class’ unique users. this female dominance changes however, at postgraduate taught and research level where there is a more even distribution, with males accounting on average for 49% of unique users. moreover, the notion of a correlation between help-seeking behaviour and patterns of gender distribution within class are supported by examination of average marks of those students seeking assistance. of particular interest is the average mark at which the different genders sought help; for females the average mark was 54.9, whereas the average mark was 51.8 for males. closer analysis of the data indicates a further decline in marks for males when one-to-one help, as opposed to group help, is sought in the form of attending drop-in or tutorials; the average mark is 44.06 and 47.53 respectively. in contrast the average female mark is consistently within a 2:2 classification. these statistics can be considered in light of help-seeking as complexly related to perceived notions of buchanan anecdotal to actual: identifying users of learning development to inform future practice journal of learning development in higher education, issue 9: july 2015 12 acceptability in asking for help (pillai, 2010). the findings begin to indicate that males are predominantly identifying the need for one-to-one help as a last resort, whereas the female engagement mark is suggestive of a view of actively seeking how to develop for developments sake. it is necessary therefore, to consider how the role of learning development can be presented as development and non-threatening. nadler (1990) identified that individuals are more likely to seek help if the problem is not considered to be related to qualities they deem as highly important in defining their character, such as intelligence or success. it could subsequently be inferred that males are less likely to seek help because it negatively impacts on their understanding of self and it is only when there is a risk of individual failure that help is finally sought. failure being more broadly defined as the student not achieving their desired marks, which can be anything from the pass mark of 40 up to a first classification. it is it therefore crucial to reinforce the notion of accessing learning development as a normalised notion within the he context. if seeking help is considered to be common practice, research has indicated males are more likely to partake in the future (nadler, 1990). to this end, and in recognition of this divide, class has launched a new advertising strategy in conjunction with staff in the faculty of technology to try and engage male students, and concurrently those from faculties who do not engage with class. after examination of current methods for promoting class activities, we identified a very textdominated dissemination method (i.e. posters and powerpoint slides). there was a need therefore, for greater acknowledgement of learner diversity across the institution to reconsider methods for raising student awareness of, and then potentially increasing engagement with, the support available. it was decided that as part of our promotional material class and a member of staff within the faculty of technology would create series of videos (c.27 seconds in length) that could be shown in lectures, across the campus and on our website to advertise our services. this strategy for creating the video adopted an individual learner bottom-up approach, rather than a top-down curriculum approach to accessing study support; focussing on the flipped classroom notion of increasing student autonomy, heightening opportunities for peer and deeper level learning (doolittle, 2014). it utilised the concept of peer-learning by not only having students appear in the videos to assist with normalising the concept of accessing learning development buchanan anecdotal to actual: identifying users of learning development to inform future practice journal of learning development in higher education, issue 9: july 2015 13 opportunities, but also had a student direct and edit the videos. as such, it pushes a stage further to normalise the concept of seeking help. results of this initiative are still in the early stages of being analysed, having been trialled in the academic year of 2014/15. initial findings however, indicate a significant increase in the engagement of students from the previously underrepresented faculty of technology, which has a higher proportion of male students (74%), a correlation is therefore expected between this finding and a potential increase in engagement by males (gender analysis is pending at time of publication). future plans for the project it is apparent that this work is still under-development and there is more to be done for this project to reach its full potential. on a practical level the system needs to continue to be tested for functionality to reach our end objective of updating about users once a month. in order to achieve this, class implemented a new online booking system for tutorials and workshops, which ensures the data is collected in a manner that corresponds to sps’ systems, while currently drop-in data continues to require manual entry. this transformation of our booking system will enable sight of timely information as opposed to a lag between the student engagement and understanding who is using class. the new booking system also generates a confirmation email, sent on booking a workshop or tutorial; contained within this email is a link to cancel the booking without needing to come to the library or phone. a small term aim for the development of this project will be to assess how this change impacts on the number of students who miss or cancel sessions to further understand how the needs and responses of the students are changing. other future directions for this study need to assess the bigger picture of who engages with class. this will entail:  qualitative research to further understand the student perspective of learning development, this aspect has commenced in light of findings from this study.  incorporate analysis of students who attend embedded teaching sessions.  examine how academics promote and subsequently engage with our service. buchanan anecdotal to actual: identifying users of learning development to inform future practice journal of learning development in higher education, issue 9: july 2015 14 in widening the remit of the project to consider such aspects as embedded teaching, it will be possible to begin to map and understand the impact of future engagement with learning development by examining the extent to which embedded teaching encourages students to migrate to use self-selecting provision. this is an important next step as it will not only validate how learning development can be confident in voicing the positive impact its work is having on the wider he agenda, but will provide a more in-depth picture of precisely who and how class is being used. by recognising who is engaging with learning development within de montfort university it has been possible to raise awareness with colleagues about our role and give them confidence in recommending our service to students. a key goal, therefore, is to ensure this project can continue to respond to current discussions within he, while ensuring the diversity of students using class upholds our belief that all students should feel confident and able to access learning development. references broecke, s and nicholls, t. (2007) ethnicity and degree attainment. department for education and skills, research report rw92. available at: http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20130403150653/https://www.education. gov.uk/publications/rsg/highereducationanduniversities/page3/rw92 (accessed: 9 july 2015). de montfort university (2014) student diversity at dmu 2012/13. leicester: strategic planning services, de montfort university. available at: http://www.dmu.ac.uk/documents/about-dmu-documents/equality-anddiversity/equality-information-january-2012/student-diversity-report-2012-13-(webversion).pdf (accessed: 9 july 2015). doolittle, p.e. (2014) flipping your class to foster deep learning part 2. center for teaching and learning at the university of georgia, ctl speaker series, 10 december [video]. available at: http://www.ctl.uga.edu/pages/archive/flipping-yourclass-to-foster-deep-learning-part-2 (accessed: 2 march 2015). http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20130403150653/https:/www.education.gov.uk/publications/rsg/highereducationanduniversities/page3/rw92 http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20130403150653/https:/www.education.gov.uk/publications/rsg/highereducationanduniversities/page3/rw92 http://www.dmu.ac.uk/documents/about-dmu-documents/equality-and-diversity/equality-information-january-2012/student-diversity-report-2012-13-(web-version).pdf http://www.dmu.ac.uk/documents/about-dmu-documents/equality-and-diversity/equality-information-january-2012/student-diversity-report-2012-13-(web-version).pdf http://www.dmu.ac.uk/documents/about-dmu-documents/equality-and-diversity/equality-information-january-2012/student-diversity-report-2012-13-(web-version).pdf http://www.ctl.uga.edu/pages/archive/flipping-your-class-to-foster-deep-learning-part-2 http://www.ctl.uga.edu/pages/archive/flipping-your-class-to-foster-deep-learning-part-2 buchanan anecdotal to actual: identifying users of learning development to inform future practice journal of learning development in higher education, issue 9: july 2015 15 european commission (2009) press release of the conference of european ministers responsible for higher education: leuven and louvain-la-neuve, 28-29 april 2009. available at: http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_ip-09-675_en.htm (accessed: 9 july 2015). galdas, p.m., cheater, f. and marshall, p. (2005) ‘men and health help-seeking behaviour: literature review’ journal of advanced nursing, 49(6), pp. 616-623. hartley, p., hilsdon, j., keenan, c., sinfield, s., and verity, m. (eds.) (2011) learning development in higher education. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan. higher education academy (2012) building student engagement and belonging in higher education at a time of change: final report from the ‘what works? student retention and success programme’. available at: https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/sites/default/files/what_works_final_report.pdf (accessed: 29 july 2015). higher education funding council for england (hefce) (2015) polar participation of local areas. available at: http://www.hefce.ac.uk/analysis/yp/polar/ (accessed: 29 july 2015). higher education statistics agency (2014) students and qualifiers: qualifications obtained. available at: https://www.hesa.ac.uk/stats (accessed: 12 february 2014). molesworth, m., nixon, e. and scullion, r. (2009) ‘having, being and higher education: the marketisation of the university and the transformation of the student into consumer’, teaching in higher education, 14(3), pp. 277-287. nadler, a. (1990) ‘help-seeking behaviour as a coping resource’, in rosenbaum, m. (ed.) learned resourcefulness on coping skills, self-control, and adaptive behaviour. new york: springer, pp. 127-162. http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_ip-09-675_en.htm https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/sites/default/files/what_works_final_report.pdf http://www.hefce.ac.uk/analysis/yp/polar/ https://www.hesa.ac.uk/stats buchanan anecdotal to actual: identifying users of learning development to inform future practice journal of learning development in higher education, issue 9: july 2015 16 pillai, m. (2010) ‘locating learning development in a university library: promoting effective academic help seeking’, new review of academic librarianship, 16(2), pp. 121144. samuels, p. (2013) ‘promoting learning development as an academic discipline’, journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5, march, pp. 1-22. author details avril buchanan (phd) is a senior lecturer in learning development at the centre for learning and study support (class), de montfort university. her main research focus is on transition both to university and within university year groups, with a particular emphasis on retention and achievement, and widening participation. anecdotal to actual: identifying users of learning development to inform future practice abstract introduction processes and methodology findings discussion the attainment gap future plans for the project references author details literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special edition: researching pdp practice, november 2010 evaluating an e-portfolio implementation with early adopters using appreciative inquiry elizabeth symonds university of worcester, uk abstract the benefits of using e-portfolio tools to enhance the student learning experience have been widely reported. these benefits include opportunities for reflection, flexibility, connectivity and integrated learning. in recognition of these potential benefits to students, the university of worcester adopted an institution-wide e-portfolio system which is available to all staff and students at the university. in order to maximise the potential of this system, a study was carried out to elicit staff and student views as to what the benefits of using an e-portfolio were. it is all too easy to focus on the negative aspects when struggling to implement a new initiative, particularly involving technology. with this in mind a conscious effort was made in the evaluation to value and learn from the positive experience of users. feedback was sought from early adopters of the system in an appreciative inquiry framework in order to ascertain the benefits of using such a system, to both staff and students, and to inform future practice and recommendations. findings of the inquiry indicated that there are three significant factors which can influence effective practice with e-portfolios: tutor engagement, support and embeddedness. whilst both staff and student users found the use of e-portfolio beneficial for the teaching and learning process, the issues that were raised by each group were subtly different. this paper will discuss how staff and students perceive the benefits of using an e-portfolio and the factors that can influence engagement. it will also consider the implications of using an appreciative inquiry approach in institutional research. key words: e-portfolio; evaluation; learning technology; staff and student views. symonds evaluating an e-portfolio implementation with early adopters using appreciative inquiry background and rationale e-portfolios have become increasingly popular in higher education over the last decade (jisc, 2008) as they offer a means of supporting students in a lifelong and life-wide capacity for recording formal, non-formal and informal learning (chen, 2009). they also provide a flexible, personalised, student-centred electronic environment where learners can record, reflect on, and present their own learning stories to a variety of audiences. definitions of e-portfolios can be problematic as there are a number of ways of approaching the issue. according to stefani et al. (2007), the term ‘e-portfolio’ can be used to reference the tool, a particular presentation of material, or all of the content of a portfolio. cambridge (2009) goes further in suggesting the concept of ‘portfolio learning’ which is concerned more about the process involved in constructing a portfolio than the tool or the output. at the university of worcester the pebblepad e-portfolio had already been chosen as the preferred tool. in addition, the groups of staff and students participating in the study had pre-defined outputs that were required to be produced to fulfil the learning outcomes of the modules. this study therefore addresses this process approach to e-portfolio development by looking at the ways in which staff and students engaged with the tool, how this experience affected their learning, and what the factors are that influence successful eportfolio learning. the university of worcester adopted the pebblepad e-portfolio system in october 2008 and it was implemented and rolled out to staff and students in a phased project which aimed to provide a thorough introduction and grounding in the use of e-portfolios through structured training workshops and supported pilot projects. in phase one staff were invited to take part in the initial implementation by using the e-portfolio for their own continuing professional development as individuals. the aim of this phase was to allow staff to become familiar with the software in order to better equip them to using it with their students at a later stage. it was also intended to build a community of users who could support each other and share ideas for best practice. phase two invited those members of staff who had taken part in phase one to then use the e-portfolio with their students in a structured and supported way. support was offered by journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 2 symonds evaluating an e-portfolio implementation with early adopters using appreciative inquiry the learning and teaching technology unit in terms of advice and guidance on using pebblepad to address some or all of the learning outcomes of the individual courses of study. in addition, practical workshops were provided for students to introduce them to the e-portfolio tool and guide them through the process of producing the required output to meet the learning outcomes, and these were followed up by ongoing support and drop-in sessions throughout the period of study. in phase three of the roll-out, the e-portfolio tool was made available to all staff and students through web-links and support materials, and generic workshops were offered throughout the year. this study focuses on the staff and student users who took part in phase two of the project. methods it was recognised that there was a need to evaluate the use of the e-portfolio at an early stage in the pilot in order to inform future developments. as the university had committed to using pebblepad for an initial three year period, there was a desire to avoid the traditional deficit model of evaluation often associated with academic research (cousin, 2009) and new technologies in particular. quantitative measures can be acquired from an institutional perspective, for example, number of active users or tools usage, and are often useful as a snapshot to the extent of usage of a particular tool. lawton and purnell (2010), however, point out that this data is relatively meaningless in the context of pdp and e-portfolio development. in order to attain a richer, deeper understanding of e-portfolio use, the types of quantitative measures we could use rely on the researchers recording data such as time spent and number of reflections/experiences recorded. the very nature of e-portfolios as a personal learning system means that the information recorded in it is private unless the user chooses to share it with someone else. to request access to an individual’s personal e-portfolio will inevitably affect the way in which the user engages with it knowing that they are being observed (the hawthorne effect – roethlisberger and dickson, 1939) and therefore not yield a true reflection of engagement. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 3 symonds evaluating an e-portfolio implementation with early adopters using appreciative inquiry appreciative inquiry is a solution oriented research method which seeks to uncover what brings life to a project or initiative with a view to changing it or making evaluative judgements. historically it has been associated with organisational change, however it is being increasingly adopted in higher education research projects (cousin, 2009). in its pure form, appreciative inquiry involves four stages – the four ds – as illustrated below. figure 1. adapted from http://www.appreciative-inquiry.org/. appreciative inquiry can be regarded more as a spirit of inquiry rather than a pure methodology and as such can be adapted to suit the requirements of the individual investigation (cousin, 2009). in this context, it was decided to use appreciative inquiry as the overall approach but focusing on the discovery phase only, to elicit the views of staff and students and use that as a departure point for future research. interviews were conducted with four members of academic staff who had used the system both personally, and with groups of students for learning and teaching. a focus group with fifteen students who had used the system for assessment was also held to gather feedback from the student perspective. a thematic evaluation of the transcripts was undertaken to elicit common threads. in addition, naturally occurring data such as system statistics and anecdotal evidence were used to triangulate the information. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 4 http://www.appreciative-inquiry.org/ symonds evaluating an e-portfolio implementation with early adopters using appreciative inquiry as a practitioner/researcher i was very aware that my role may well influence the outcomes of the research having been involved in both the implementation and the evaluation of the e-portfolio. in order to minimise any bias in the interpretation of the data, i returned to the original staff participants in order to present my initial interpretation to ascertain some common understanding of the discussion. in doing this, i was co-creating meaning from the interviews with the interviewees and as cousin (2009, p.171) points out, appreciative inquiry is not necessarily a truth yielding process but more a generative one. i was also mindful that the sample of people i spoke to were by necessity pilot users who were championing the new system and therefore likely to have a more positive outlook than someone who had chosen not to use it. it may therefore be useful in future investigations to speak to non-users about their reasons for not engaging with the tool. findings and discussion the thematic analysis identified three major factors which influenced the success of eportfolio learning: tutor engagement; support; and embeddedness. these factors have some similarity to the findings of tosh et al. (2005) who looked at student perspectives on e-portfolio usage at four different universities and found that buy-in, motivation, assessment and technology were key factors from the student perspective. tutor engagement jisc (2009, online) states that staff engagement is a key factor in e-portfolio implementation: staff engagement is key – role, support and attitude of learner support staff is critical. staff who use an e-portfolio for their pdp have a higher learner engagement. each of the staff interviewed had experience of using the e-portfolio for their own professional development and understood how the tool worked and the importance of making its use relevant to the learning outcomes. as such, they believed that the use of ejournal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 5 symonds evaluating an e-portfolio implementation with early adopters using appreciative inquiry portfolio had the potential to enhance the student learning experience and were motivated to encourage full student participation: i think the single most important thing is to use pebblepad as i would expect the course participants to use it, so in the first instance i have been developing my own personal portfolio. what that has provided is the opportunity to use and utilise all the facilities within pebblepad first hand so i have had the opportunity to experiment with a range of facilities. staff who had used the e-portfolio themselves were familiar with the possibilities and limitations of the system and were in a position to offer support to their students in addition to the support provided by the central service. three of the tutors interviewed had also used their own e-portfolio to develop module resources which they then shared with the students. this had the dual benefit of both delivering information to the students but also providing a working exemplar of the kind of output they were intended to produce: a facility where all the sessional information is held, particular dates when the module is delivered and a course blogging facility. one tutor went a step further in creating a template for their students as a basis for their assessed work: well i gave them a template and the very first part of the template was just a very open reflection on how they used ict, both in their personal lives and what they have seen in school. in addition to using their own portfolios for producing resources and exemplars, all the staff interviewed also encouraged students to submit their assessments through the e-portfolio system and marked online. this was considered to be a huge benefit from the staff perspective: journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 6 symonds evaluating an e-portfolio implementation with early adopters using appreciative inquiry from my point of view i could look at what they have done anywhere and i don’t have to carry around 125 a4 ring binders. i felt it was very flexible and it was very quick and easy to mark the assignment because i just went on the computer, logged in, scrolled through and marked each one, made a few comments and i think that’s a far better way for the student because they can go back to them. students were however a little more reticent about the online submission and felt quite insecure about sharing their work. many felt that they needed more confirmation when something had been submitted: the only thing that i found was that when you got to the actual gateway and you have to submit, it just went and you are sat there going did it go? did it not go? …so a bit of confirmation just so you know that it’s there would be good. i think you have to be very careful when you are sending stuff as well because i noticed on the very first summative we did i had to ring dot because she had sent the whole summative to the whole gateway without realising. i just feel a bit paranoid. these comments highlight the fact that whilst tutor engagement is a key factor in securing student involvement, attention should be paid to students’ concerns, particularly where summative assessment is involved. one of the students summed it up as follows: because we have used it for actual assignments, to me things are more relevant and more important whereas if you’re just using it as a guide or whatever then a lot of these issues wouldn’t even matter. so with engagement comes a responsibility for ensuring that sufficient support and guidance is built into the programme so that student fears are addressed and alleviated. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 7 symonds evaluating an e-portfolio implementation with early adopters using appreciative inquiry support support was a critical issue for both the staff and students in this study although, unsurprisingly, students were more concerned about the technicalities of the system and being able to use the tool effectively, whereas staff were more focused on the outcomes and processes involved in the students’ learning. this reflects the findings of fitch et al. (2008) who found that students in their study were particularly concerned about various technical aspects of the e-portfolio. in order to address potential student concerns about operation and functionality of the eportfolio tool, a structured support system was built into the modules that took part in the study. to this end the support team were heavily involved in the module delivery by running in-class workshops for all students at the outset of the module which focused particularly on the required learning outcomes. practice outputs were developed during the workshops which then provided the scaffolding to allow the students to work more independently on their assessed work. further drop-in sessions were offered and attention was drawn to the online help available within the system. one tutor also developed their own support materials: …and i have been making those camtasia videos about how to do different steps which i think has been quite helpful. in general, the students were very happy with the level of support provided: if it hadn’t been for all your support i think i would have thrown my toys out of the pram. i think the support that was given was really good. however, the fact that the work was assessed and formed part of their overall grade was a concern for some: i think it was worse for us because we are in level three and it was used for assignments and not something there to just help you, whereas in level one they have got time to learn. if i was doing this in level one i wouldn’t have felt as stressed about it as i was doing it now. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 8 symonds evaluating an e-portfolio implementation with early adopters using appreciative inquiry the staff involved were already confident users of the system so were less concerned about the technical issues, however, they were mindful of the fact that their students were concerned about the use of a new technology: initially some have that hesitation when they first come across a new tool but a lot of them, once we had gone through it, they have come back and said it is much easier than their initial impression and it was actually quite simple to use, so i think generally they are quite positive about it. ...initial stage of reticence, the usual references to not being ‘techie’,having an under-familiarity with technology, feeling a bit disadvantaged…the interesting thing is as soon as they find that the pebblepad system is very round edged, that it has a consistency of reliability…as they work incrementally through each of these outcomes and looking at prospective evidence, i think what starts to open up is that they are reminded of their own personal assets, not the assets within pebblepad but their own personal assets and particularly their prior learning and experience and how that seeks to inform these negotiated learning outcomes, so i think it is quite a remarkable experience and i am talking from a course tutor perspective where the penny starts dropping, that the learning didn’t begin at the start of this module and won’t end at its completion. despite the apprehension and concern in the early stages of use, as students began to feel more comfortable with the tool, the benefits of using the e-portfolio became more apparent: i think it helped in a sense because when i did the webfolio it helped put a mental image in my head... like the different approaches to learning that we went over – it kind of structured it in my head. yes it was nice to learn in different ways. one of the key benefits identified by the students was the ability to be creative and work in different ways which they found liberating and motivating: journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 9 symonds evaluating an e-portfolio implementation with early adopters using appreciative inquiry ...it just enabled you to set up something that looked really professional with all your information and i actually really liked it. i like the concept of doing something different rather than doing just written work that we do all the time. it made it more fun doing the web page, i was excited about putting pictures up really. using pebblepad, the quality of work you do produce in the web portfolio, you have much more of a sense of accomplishment than you do when you do an essay. overall, the structured approach to supporting students seemed to be successful and the commitment and engagement of the tutors involved served to reinforce the benefits of using the e-portfolio: …by the end of it they recognise just how much it is enhancing their learning experience although to begin with i think it was hidden by something that was new and different and there was an element of ‘oh how do we do this?’ but there are very positive comments that people have said that they felt they had done something really good at the end of it which i think they have, and they showed me that they really understood. embeddedness embedding the use of e-portfolios involves making the use of the tool explicit and mandatory. this was achieved by using the tool not only for students to post their own work, but also by providing resources and a means for communication both peer to peer and student to tutor. the creation of course resources within the system was discussed earlier and serves to both provide students with information and act as an exemplar. further, by using the tool in this way, students have to engage with the system in the first instance in order to access these resources, and this was usually carried out in the workshop provided at the beginning of each module: journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 10 symonds evaluating an e-portfolio implementation with early adopters using appreciative inquiry we built it into the module so when to do things is all planned out in the module outline and we give them some support in the sessions in making it, and the case study materials are there to do in school so it’s all very much embedded and linked together because i’m not sure it would have worked that well if it wasn’t that way! the utilisation of pebblepad was deeply embedded, obviously embedded in the documentation which was a very intentional strategy in that we specified that pebblepad would be utilised in terms of webfolio development and utilising and regulating its facilities to create an evidentially driven work-based webfolio, so it was clear and mandatory. in each case there was also the provision of a module or course gateway within the system. gateways act as a community area where users can share work with each other and with their tutors. this facility was used in different ways in different modules, however, one of the key benefits of gateways is that they allow students to post their items, which can then be viewed by the whole group, and feedback provided to each other. the tutors found this facility particularly useful in building a learning community amongst the students and for peer assessment: i think the thing i found really useful was the gateway and them being able to look at each others’ work. the opportunity to communicate with the participants regularly. this community element allowed the students to work in a more open and collaborative way, particularly on the formative assessments: the first case study they peer assess, they just look at someone else’s in the group just to give them some early sort of formative feedback on what they are doing and how they are doing it, and hopefully as well to sort of cross fertilise ideas with each other. using pebblepad it’s easy to get them that instant feedback so it can be fed into that next piece of work which hopefully did happen. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 11 symonds evaluating an e-portfolio implementation with early adopters using appreciative inquiry these comments also indicate the level of tutor commitment to the process of e-portfolio development within their own courses of study. gateway activity in courses where the use of the e-portfolio was not embedded and peripheral to the main learning outcomes for the module attracted a much lower level of student engagement, with many not participating at all. the students also found the gateway a useful tool and seemed to like the community aspect this provided: with the gateway i liked how it was our own little area for this module and it’s different from blackboard as it has a better feeling about it, i don’t know how to describe it, i think it’s a warmer feel than blackboard. i didn’t comment on other people’s assignments as much as i should have but i did like the fact that i could have if that makes sense, but i thought it was nice how it was much more interactive and on a more personal scale. it is interesting to note at this point that in phase three of the roll-out of pebblepad which allowed all students access to their own e-portfolio account, spontaneous, self-directed engagement was almost non-existent. this was evidenced by the poor attendance at generic workshops offered to all students where only three students took part. conclusion this study has highlighted some of the factors that influence effective e-portfolio learning, including the importance of tutor engagement, the need for rigorous support mechanisms for both technical and pedagogical support, and the necessity of embedding the use of the e-portfolio in the curriculum. it is recognised that this is a small scale study which was carried out within an appreciative inquiry framework so although the findings reflect much of what is in the literature around e-portfolio practice, further work needs to be done to explore these findings more thoroughly across a wider sample of both staff and students. as a pilot study, however, these outcomes have proved invaluable in advising staff on how to utilise the e-portfolio most effectively for learning and teaching, and a fully supported structure is now in place to provide users with the guidance they need. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 12 symonds evaluating an e-portfolio implementation with early adopters using appreciative inquiry acknowledgement this paper is an outcome of the national action research network on researching and evaluating personal development planning and e-portfolio practice project (2007-2010). the project was led by the university of bolton in association with the university of worcester and centre for recording achievement, and in national collaboration with the university of bedfordshire, bournemouth university and university of bradford. the project was funded by the higher education academy, national teaching fellowship project strand. more details about the project can be found at: http://www.recordingachievement.org/research/narn-tree.html. references cambridge, d. (2009) ‘two faces of integrative learning online’, in cambridge, d., cambridge, b. and yancey, k. (eds.) electronic portfolios 2.0: emergent research on implementation and impact. sterling: stylus publishing, pp. 41-49. chen, h. (2009) ‘using e-portfolios to support lifelong and life-wide learning’, in cambridge, d., cambridge, b. and yancey, k. (eds.) electronic portfolios 2.0: emergent research on implementation and impact. sterling: stylus publishing, pp. 29-35. cousin, g. (2009) researching learning in higher education: an introduction to contemporary methods and approaches. abingdon: routledge. fitch, d., peet, m., reed, b.g. and tolman, r. (2008) ‘the use of e-portfolios in evaluating the curriculum and student learning’, journal of social work education, 44(3), pp. 37-53. jisc (2008) effective practice with e-portfolios: supporting 21st century learning. jisc/hefce. available at: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/publications/programmerelated/2008/effectivepracticeeportfolio s.aspx (accessed: 1 june 2010). journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 13 http://www.recordingachievement.org/research/narn-tree.html http://www.jisc.ac.uk/publications/programmerelated/2008/effectivepracticeeportfolios.aspx http://www.jisc.ac.uk/publications/programmerelated/2008/effectivepracticeeportfolios.aspx symonds evaluating an e-portfolio implementation with early adopters using appreciative inquiry jisc infonet (2009) e-portfolios: emerging lessons. available at: http://www.jiscinfonet.ac.uk/infokits/e-portfolios/emerging-lessons (accessed: 1 june 2010). lawton, m. and purnell, e. (2010) ‘what evidence for which audience?’, researching and evaluating personal development planning and e-portfolio: 2nd international residential seminar. nottingham 26-28 april. roethlisberger, f.j. and dickson,w.j. (1939) management and the worker. cambridge, mass: harvard university press. stefani, l., pegler, c. and mason, r. (2007) the educational potential of e-portfolios: supporting personal development and reflective learning. abingdon: routledge. tosh, d., light, t.p., fleming, k. and haywood, j. (2005) ‘engagement with electronic portfolios: challenges from the student perspective’, canadian journal of learning and technology, 31(3) [online]. available at: http://homepages.ed.ac.uk/jhaywood/papers/engagement%20with%20electronic%2 0portfolios.pdf (accessed: 1 june 2010) author details elizabeth symonds is the team leader for the learning and teaching technology unit at the university of worcester and has participated in the national action research network on researching and evaluation pdp and e-portfolio practice. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 14 http://www.jiscinfonet.ac.uk/infokits/e-portfolios/emerging-lessons http://homepages.ed.ac.uk/jhaywood/papers/engagement%20with%20electronic%20portfolios.pdf http://homepages.ed.ac.uk/jhaywood/papers/engagement%20with%20electronic%20portfolios.pdf evaluating an e-portfolio implementation with early adopters using appreciative inquiry abstract background and rationale methods figure 1. adapted from http://www.appreciative-inquiry.org/. findings and discussion tutor engagement support embeddedness conclusion acknowledgement references author details literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 11: april 2017 using two languages to inform and inspire: a case study using bilingual digital technology to educate healthcare students demonstrating the importance of language choice in enhancing communication and patient care in wales beryl cooledge bangor university, uk peggy murphy bangor university, uk abstract welsh is the indigenous language of wales, the welsh language (wales) measure (2011) means that english and welsh have equal parity in wales. many nursing students are now embarking on their studies having completed their formal education throughout the medium of welsh and thus feel more comfortable studying in their mother tongue. therefore, bangor university aims to teach welsh speakers alongside english speakers and offers a choice to their students so they can study in their preferred language. this case study examines how a bilingual ethos can be incorporated to provide a dynamic approach to teaching using pre-recorded lectures and innovative group work. presentations are recorded in two different languages and are supported by a gapped handbook, ensuring that students focus on the most important aspects of the lecture. the pre-recorded lecture capture is available for students to access after the lecture to reinforce the learning. crossover group work (mortiboys, 2010) was included to ensure that each member of the class contributed to discussions and fully understood the topic of managing pain in various scenarios. this resulted in a stimulating session which increased students’ motivation and fostered ownership and interest in digital technology, but at the same time met the language and educational needs of a diverse population of students. keywords: active offer; inclusive practice; innovative approaches in nurse education; teaching bilingually; blended learning. cooledge and murphy using two languages to inform and inspire journal of learning development in higher education, issue 11: april 2017 2 introduction in recognition that welsh is the indigenous language of wales, the welsh language (wales) measure (2011) protects the language and ensures that english and welsh have equal status in wales. in order to support all higher education provision in the medium of welsh, the coleg cymraeg cenedlaethol (ccc) (http://www.colegcymraeg.ac.uk) was established. this is a centrally governed body which promotes, maintains, and develops welsh higher education provision in wales. the ccc aims to enrich, deepen and broaden welsh provision, alongside stimulating and responding to the needs of students studying through the medium of welsh. in order to provide inclusive education and to recognise that some students feel more comfortable engaging with their studies through the medium of welsh, universities operating in wales have an obligation to meet welsh speaking students’ needs. the university in this case study has a bilingual ethos, giving students the opportunity to study in their language of choice. this approach is in line with the bangor university’s school of healthcare science's ethos which aims to ensure that programmes of study are cultural and linguistically sensitive. in practice this means that welsh and nonwelsh speakers are taught side by side (roberts et al., 2010). teaching bilingually has unique challenges, in order to meet these an innovative approach was designed to increase student interaction and address language diversity. this approach recognised how learning development could be stimulated using digital technologies. this is a case study of a session on pain management that was designed for english and welsh speaking level 5, second year undergraduate pre-registration adult nursing students. background inclusive approaches in higher education are encouraged by the higher education academy (hea, 2011). the uk professional standards framework for higher education (hea, 2011) advocates that effective teaching and learning needs to be student centred. nursing students have diverse learning styles and often have to juggle the demands of work, life and family in addition to their studies (bednarz et al., 2010). this highlights the need for a more flexible approach to teaching which is required when teaching in one language but is further complicated in wales with two official languages. welsh is the indigenous (albeit minority) language spoken in wales (thomas, 1994). for nursing students studying in wales it is important that they can access learning resources in their http://www.colegcymraeg.ac.uk/ cooledge and murphy using two languages to inform and inspire journal of learning development in higher education, issue 11: april 2017 3 preferred language (welsh government, 2016). in nursing, communication is an essential skill so it is vitally important that student nurses are aware of the language needs of the population they aim to serve (welsh government, 2016). the need for communicating in one’s first language is heightened in times of stress; when people become ill they often find it easier to express themselves in their mother tongue and healthcare practitioners need to understand this (thomas, 1994). previously, as most welsh speakers are bilingual, it was assumed that it was acceptable to offer care in the medium of english. the publication of the welsh government (wg) policy more than words (2016) highlighted that for many welsh speakers, being able to use their own language is central to their needs and a core component of care (wg, 2016). this philosophy underpins the need for the ‘active offer’ (wg, 2016) principle. the ‘active offer’ in wales puts the onus on the healthcare practitioner to ask patients their preferred language rather than leaving it to vulnerable patients to request. there is therefore a need for healthcare practitioners to adopt sensitivity and conscious awareness of how language (irvine et al., 2006) impacts upon the quality of patients’ care. this is also a statutory requirement of the welsh language (wales) measure (2011) and any healthcare professionals who choose to work in wales are required to provide an active offer to patients they care for. welsh language schemes involve the provision of services to the public in wales (wg, 2016) to ensure that organisations such as nhs wales are committed to providing culturally and linguistically sensitive person-centred care. the rationale and description of the case study will now be discussed. methodology the design was based upon race’s (2007) ‘ripples on a pond’ model of learning which suggests that experiential learning is an interactive whole rather than sequential cycle. race (2007) advocates that ‘needing and wanting’ to learn is at the centre of learning, causing ripples of motivation to send the student through doing, digesting and feedback stages. the case study used a blended approach including lecture capture (panopto), in english and welsh. lecture capture is a voice recording of the lecture alongside the power point slides that students can access at a suitable time from any mobile device or computer. cooledge and murphy using two languages to inform and inspire journal of learning development in higher education, issue 11: april 2017 4 the students were directed to watch the recorded lecture in their chosen language prior to attending the session. recording the lectures in english and welsh role modelled respect for individual language needs. this part of the case study was in keeping with a blended approach which is defined by smith (2001, cited ireland et al., 2009, p.124) as ‘a method of educating at a distance that uses technology (high tech such as the internet combined with the traditional ‘stand up education’)’. as the students accessed the lecture capture via the visual learning environment (blackboard), this enabled the tutor to monitor whether students had accessed the recorded lecture; although knowing that a student has accessed a resource does not necessarily mean that they have interacted with it, or understood it (jokinen and mikkonen, 2013), just as recording students attending lectures does not equate to measuring whether they have absorbed the content (race, 2016). what petrides (2002) found was that when educators designed learning experiences using a blended approach, it encouraged deeper learning due to increased learner engagement. the contact time was designed so that when students arrived in the classroom an interactive workbook was used as a resource to promote discussion and evaluate students’ learning of the pre-recorded lecture. it consisted of a series of questions which focused on the key elements about pain, as hughes and quinn (2013) state traditional lectures over rely on simply the transmission of information. offering a combination of recorded lecture and interactive workbook (in the students’ preferred language) addressed the ‘comprehension’ level of bloom’s taxonomy which encouraged deeper learning (bloom 1956, cited wilkie and burns, 2003, p.34). in nurse education, 50% of the programme is set in clinical practice; student nurses are encouraged to learn by doing (nursing and midwifery council, 2011). students are constantly being challenged to apply evidence-based theory to practice. learning by doing was mirrored in the interactive workbook. students learn in both in university and in practice as part of a team as it is a professional requirement that nurses work collaboratively (nursing and midwifery council, 2015). the students were asked to work in groups to complete the workbook, thereby promoting a team approach to problem-solving. the constructivist approach to learning advocates that learning should be placed in a rich context, reflecting the real world of nursing. students learn more effectively if the information is presented through concrete hands-on examples and this was incorporated in the session described here. in the second half of the three hour session, the students cooledge and murphy using two languages to inform and inspire journal of learning development in higher education, issue 11: april 2017 5 were involved in group work examining a range of real life scenarios that they might encounter in clinical practice and asked to discuss the nursing care and pain relief management in each case. for example, one scenario involved a woman suffering pain after an operation; another involved a young man sustaining a sporting injury. the crossover or jigsaw method of grouping students was implemented as devised by mortiboys (2010). this involved the learners being divided into groups of five and each group given a different scenario to discuss. students were required to apply the information obtained from the pre-recorded lecture to plan nursing care and pain relief under supervision from the lecturer. each member of the group needed to understand and write down a summary of the care they had discussed. the task had two stages; in the second stage new groups were formed with one person from each of the original groups making up the new group. in the new group, each member had to feedback the scenario and conclusions from their first group. this activity was chosen as it ensured that every student participated. it meant that the learner was required to ‘read, discuss, teach and listen en route to learning about six case studies’ (mortiboys, 2010, no pagination). evaluation meeting the language requirements of the students along with the growth in information and communication technology led to designing engaging materials to promote active learning. additionally it improved students’ experience with digital technology. this was delivered in a way that was learner-centred, flexible and accessible for the diverse student nurse of today. inclusivity and widening participation were somewhat addressed by prerecording lectures in welsh and english. the session plan required students to access the recorded lecture beforehand, not all students participated in this activity. this led to those students being more dependent upon the peers that had engaged. answers to the gapped handbook were discussed on completion, which provided students with immediate feedback. the pre-recorded version of the lecture was available for students to refer to after the session and many of them reported later that they had found these useful to review and revise the lecture at their leisure, thereby achieving the goal of guiding the students and increasing their confidence to use digital technology. cooledge and murphy using two languages to inform and inspire journal of learning development in higher education, issue 11: april 2017 6 the welsh assembly government (2009) recognises that higher education should equip individuals, whatever their background, with the knowledge, skills and attributes to achieve maximum intellectual and personal fulfilment. inclusive practice requires lecturers to minimise any barriers that students face with accessing the curriculum (craig and zinkiewicz, 2010). designing this session was time consuming, but the benefits to the students’ learning outweighed this because they appreciated an interactive, dynamic session. the learning experience was evaluated extremely well using a likert scale. mckimm and jollie (2007) proposed that educators need to reflect upon their own teaching and learning practice and design resources that encourage collaborative practice and lifelong learning. the interactive workbook used alongside the recorded lecture enabled students to assess and evaluate their own learning with their peers. radical social constructivism identifies learning as a social activity and this was the philosophy behind the idea of working in groups. another use of the interactive workbook as a learning resource was that using a workbook reduced the need for note taking. it helped students to focus on the important information and avoided the wasteful process employed in many traditional lectures when students write down what is on the screen (race, 2007). the information technology was used as a facilitative tool, encouraging the student to be an active learner rather than a passive recipient (petty, 2013). the session was evaluated using a five point likert scale questionnaire. the questions were written to measure whether the session had met ‘the areas of activity’ and ‘core knowledge’ of the uk professional standards framework (hea, 2011). the session itself was designed to incorporate the professional values from the uk professional standards framework (hea, 2011), particularly focusing on value two, which is promoting participation in higher education and equality of opportunity for learners. in addition, informal comments from the students reflected the likert scale, stating how much they had enjoyed the group work; and many reported that they had found the session interesting, enjoyable and that it stimulated their desire to learn more about the subject. a few had mentioned that they would like a longer session. cooledge and murphy using two languages to inform and inspire journal of learning development in higher education, issue 11: april 2017 7 figure 1. the following is a graph representing the responses to a likert questionnaire. 0 2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16 18 i actively participated in the session the session has extended my knowledge the session has not changed my attitude towards the subject activities were not explained clearly my knowledge has stayed the same this session has made me more of an independent learner my interest in the subject has been raised i felt engaged with the tutor i felt unsupported during the tasks i had access to the materials used in the lecture the subject was at the appropriate level there was too much work in the session i was given appropriate feedback students' response to session strongly disagree disagree neither agree strongly agree discussion the rationale for using digital technology to meet the language and educational needs of diverse students included the use of lecture capture. lecture capture has now been used to digitally record information for some time, as freed et al. (2014) report that it addresses limited resources, decreases lecturer workload and improves students’ study. however, freed et al. (2014) observed that there are mixed opinions regarding this. many members of a nursing faculty in their qualitative study felt that lecture capture caused technostress, which is overload from technology, and in addition might encourage students’ absence cooledge and murphy using two languages to inform and inspire journal of learning development in higher education, issue 11: april 2017 8 from class. race (2016) advocates that lecture capture should be used sparingly as many lectures are less than dynamic, stating only some sections of some of his lectures are worthy of recording. freed et al. (2014) suggest information technology skills and innovations in pedagogy should take different learning styles into account. the design of this case study used both high tech and low tech learning resources to address this. the design of this session followed vygotsky’s (1962) notion that learning happens when there is an intersection between teachers designing structured activities that guide students’ spontaneous learning through exploration. some students required more guidance and support to overcome possible anxiety regarding accessing technology. the authors propose that more coaching is needed for some to gain gradual independence in order to ensure that all students can access online directed study. reeves and reeves (2013) report that there is a need to consider how older participants learn with technology. it is also noted that not all school leavers are confident with accessing technology either. gulati (2006) recommended that information skills can be best developed when embedded in the learners’ contexts and discipline. a major reason for the use of the interactive workbook was to assess student understanding and to emphasise the key points from the pre-recorded lecture. using both of these approaches created more of a ‘flipped classroom’. this was further developed by incorporating the findings of strayer (2012) who established that in a flipped classroom, students were more likely to support each other but were more confused about what learning was expected of them. the authors advocate that as long as the students feel safe in the learning environment, some degree of confusion is often a part of the learning process. using vygotsky’s (1962) principles, the workbook deliberately guided the students individually towards learning goals from the pre-recorded lecture. the session was designed so that students completed the workbook with peer support. the rationale for using the crossover group work (mortiboys, 2010) was that this activity ensured full participation and teamwork, not one person could opt out as everyone had to contribute and recall the discussions in the re-grouping. the design acknowledged that learner confidence is increased when activities endeavour that every member of the group learns (may and thomas, 2010). scenarios were set for students to resolve and were used to help students apply theoretical concepts to real life nursing practice, in order to bridge the theory to practice gap. as wilkie and burns (2003) note, students develop many skills through collaborative working. these skills include: interpersonal skills, tolerance, cooledge and murphy using two languages to inform and inspire journal of learning development in higher education, issue 11: april 2017 9 and respect for others’ beliefs. all of these skills help to increase the employability of nursing students. this element of the design comes under the fourth and fifth level of bloom’s taxonomy of analysis and synthesis (bloom 1956, cited wilkie and burns, 2003, p.34). conclusion planning lectures in a way that encouraged participation, by directing students to view the bilingual recorded lectures, embedded good practice in a number of ways. firstly it encouraged the students to prepare their knowledge beforehand in order to treat this as a learning opportunity and to assess their own learning throughout the session. secondly, nursing is a profession that has at its core the values of fairness, justice and respect for others. promoting the dignity of others, and particularly their language choice, is paramount to the profession (nmc, 2015). this was integral to the session alongside teaching about pain. thirdly, reports have observed that students are reluctant to engage with online environments (jokinen and mikkonen, 2013), therefore, using a blended learning approach encourages engagement with technology. fourthly, nurses are required to keep up-to-date with their knowledge and skills (nmc, 2010): this was encouraged by increasing students’ motivation and fostering ownership of knowledge rather than possessing information (race, 2007). lastly, as petty (2013) remarks, the focus should be on guided learning rather than simply giving information for the learner to assimilate passively. references bednarz, h., schim, s. and doorenbos, a. (2010) ‘cultural diversity in nursing education: perils, pitfalls and pearls’, journal of nursing education, 49(5), pp. 253-260. craig n. and zinkiewicz, l. (2010) inclusive practice within psychology. york: higher education academy. cooledge and murphy using two languages to inform and inspire journal of learning development in higher education, issue 11: april 2017 10 freed, p.e., bertram, j.e. and mclaughlin, d.e. (2014) ‘using lecture capture: a qualitative study of nursing faculty’s experience’, nurse education today, 34(4), p. 598-602. gulati, s. (2006) ‘application of new technologies: nurse education’, in glen, s. and moule, p. (eds.) e-learning in nursing. nurse education in practice. hampshire: palgrave macmillan basingstoke, pp.20-38. higher education academy (2011) united kingdom professional standards framework: for teaching and supporting learning in higher education. available at: https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/sites/default/files/downloads/ukpsf_2011_english.pdf (accessed: 3 march 2017). hughes, s.j. and quinn, f.m. (2013) quinn’s principles and practice of nurse education. 6th edn. london: cengage learning. ireland, j., martindale, s., johnson, n., adams, d., eboh, w. and mowatt, e. (2009) ‘blended learning in education: effects on knowledge and attitude’, british journal of nursing, 18(2), pp. 124-130. irvine, f., roberts, g., jones, p., spencer, l., baker, c. and williams, c. (2006) ‘communicative sensitivity in the bilingual healthcare setting: a qualitative study of language awareness’, journal of advanced nursing, 53(4), pp. 422-434. jokinen, p. and mikkonen, i. (2013) ‘teachers’ experience of teaching in a blended learning environment’, nurse education in practice, 13(6), pp. 524-528. mckimm, j. and jollie, c. (2007) facilitating learning and teaching methods london: deanery project. may, h. and thomas, l. (2010) ‘promoting success for all through inclusive learning and teaching’, shaping the future: higher education academy annual conference 2010. university of hertfordshire, 22-23 june. https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/sites/default/files/downloads/ukpsf_2011_english.pdf cooledge and murphy using two languages to inform and inspire journal of learning development in higher education, issue 11: april 2017 11 mortiboys a. (2010) how to be an effective teacher in higher education. berkshire: open university press. nursing and midwifery council (nmc) (2010) standards for pre-registration nursing education. available at: https://www.nmc.org.uk/globalassets/sitedocuments/standards/nmc-standards-forpre-registration-nursing-education.pdf (accessed: 30 march 2017). nursing and midwifery council (nmc) (2015) the code: standards of conduct, performance and ethics for nurses and midwives. london: nmc. petrides, l.a. (2002) ‘web-based technologies for distributed (or distance) learning. creating learner centred educational experience in the higher education classroom’, international journal of instructional media, 29(1), pp. 69-77. petty, j. (2013) ‘interactive, technology-enhanced self-regulated learning tools in healthcare education: a literature review’, nurse education today, 33(1), pp. 53-59. race, p. (2007) the lecturer’s toolkit: a practical guide to assessment, learning and teaching. 3rd edn. abingdon: routledge. race, p. (2016) lecture capture versus lecture napture? assessment, learning and teaching in higher education. available at: http://phil-race.co.uk/lecture-captureversus-lecture-napture/ (accessed: 3 march 2017). reeves, t.c and reeves, p.m. (2013) ‘designing online and blended learning’, in hunt, l. and chalmers, d. (eds.) university teaching in focus: a learning-centred approach. oxon: routledge, chapter 7, pp. 112-127. roberts, g.w., irvine, f.e., tranter, s. and spencer, l.h. (2010) ‘identifying priorities for establishing bilingual provision in nurse education: a scoping study’, nurse education today, 30(7), pp. 623-630. https://www.nmc.org.uk/globalassets/sitedocuments/standards/nmc-standards-for-pre-registration-nursing-education.pdf https://www.nmc.org.uk/globalassets/sitedocuments/standards/nmc-standards-for-pre-registration-nursing-education.pdf http://phil-race.co.uk/lecture-capture-versus-lecture-napture/ http://phil-race.co.uk/lecture-capture-versus-lecture-napture/ cooledge and murphy using two languages to inform and inspire journal of learning development in higher education, issue 11: april 2017 12 strayer, j.f. (2012) ‘how learning in an inverted classroom influences cooperation, innovation and task orientation’, learning environments research, 15(2), pp. 171193. thomas, n. (1994) ‘welsh-speakers as a territorial linguistic minority in the european union’, in williams, r.h., williams, h. and davies, e. (eds.) social work and the welsh language. cardiff: university of wales press, pp. 155-171. vygotsky, l. (1962) thought and language. cambridge ma: massachusetts institute of technology. welsh assembly government (2009) for our future – the 21st century higher education strategy and plan for wales. available at: http://gov.wales/topics/educationandskills/publications/guidance/forourfuture/?lang= en (accessed: 3 march 2017). welsh government (2016) more than words: strategic framework for welsh language services in health, social services and social care. cardiff: welsh government. welsh language (wales) measure (2011) nawm1. available at: www.legislation.gov.uk/mwa/2011/1/contents/enacted (accessed: 28 march 2017). wilkie, k. and burns, i. (2003) problem-based learning: a handbook for nurses. hampshire: palgrave macmillan basingstoke. author details beryl cooledge ma, rgn, fhea, pgcert(he), pgcert(fe), adult nurse lecturer. employed by the coleg cymraeg cenedlaethol, with the primary role of supporting students studying through the medium of welsh. interested in improving person centred care through the education of future registered nurses. peggy murphy rgn ntf 2014 sfhea ba (hons) pgcel msc, nurse lecturer and educational developer. interested in helping student nurses learn how to learn and gain http://gov.wales/topics/educationandskills/publications/guidance/forourfuture/?lang=en http://gov.wales/topics/educationandskills/publications/guidance/forourfuture/?lang=en http://www.legislation.gov.uk/mwa/2011/1/contents/enacted cooledge and murphy using two languages to inform and inspire journal of learning development in higher education, issue 11: april 2017 13 confidence in their own ability; peer learning self and peer assessment and how feedback and feedforward impact upon student learning. literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 6: november 2013 incorporating audio feedback to enhance inclusivity of courses sue wilkinson cardiff metropolitan university, uk abstract higher education institutions (heis) are under increasing pressure to provide inclusive courses that are accessible to all students, and with the percentage of disabled learners in higher education increasing each year, this has become a key factor in institutional strategies and teaching and learning agendas. this paper briefly highlights the issues that have led to the need for alternative methods of feedback, and offers support for why audio feedback is one way of bridging the gap between learner engagement and tutor feedback. audio feedback is an alternative method of communicating advice to students that not only benefits disabled learners, but also non-disabled learners, as well as tutors. keywords: inclusivity; learning development. recent statistics reveal that the percentage of disabled learners in higher education is increasing (62,865 full time undergraduate in 2010/11 compared to 56,580 in 2009/10 and 52,815 in 2008/09, hesa, n.d., table t7). with this in mind, the need for courses to be accessible and inclusive has never been so crucial. not only will an inclusive course reduce the need for adjustments to be made for disabled learners, it will also reduce the observable differences between disabled and non-disabled students in terms of their learning environment and involvement in their courses. traditional educational structures and approaches still largely prevail, and it is believed by some that this is influential in preventing higher education institutions (heis) achieving social inclusion (scott, 2006). changes need to be made for heis to fully involve themselves in the widening participation and social inclusion agenda, and these changes must occur in all areas, including teaching, learning, assessment and student support (george and hicks, 2000; cuthbert, 2006). sue wilkinson incorporating audio feedback to enhance inclusivity of courses in an attempt to increase student retention and success in the light of student diversity, inclusive learning and teaching should be a priority for heis. guidance shows that the way in which institutions engage with disabled students makes a difference not only to the student learning experience but also to the institution as a whole. engaging disabled students is particularly key in shaping curriculum and assessment design, as well as the services provided by institutions (ecu and hea, 2010). furthermore, if student needs are recognised and anticipated through offering a choice of assessment and feedback methods as standard practice, this may reduce the need for individual case-by-case adjustments (ecu, 2010). when designing inclusive courses, it may be useful to draw on the constructivist view of learning in order to develop materials that have the best chance of engaging as many students (disabled and non-disabled) as possible. for example, it is helpful to put the material to be learnt into context so that students can relate the new knowledge to their existing knowledge and to their own personal reality. it is also important to assist the students in developing an awareness of their own learning needs so that they are able to recognise the conditions under which they are most likely to learn efficiently. current research and advancements in assistive technology should inform the development and enhancement of academic courses and teaching and learning methods. for example, digital and mobile technologies have not traditionally been used for assessment methods. however, research shows that using digital technologies in education not only brings inclusion benefits but also helps with student retention as it offers flexible and innovative ways to learn (jisc, 2012). mobile learning can enhance opportunities for all, but by enabling students to access content wherever and whenever they want using a device they are happy operating, it also helps to remove the additional barriers that are faced by learners with specific needs (jisc, 2012). disabled learners have highly individualised learning needs. as a result, self-regulation and learner autonomy are important aspects of their academic development, and should be facilitated through their learning environment. assessment feedback strategies can help to encourage learner autonomy, and due to the varying needs of disabled learners, these strategies must be put in place as early as possible. feedback helps students learn how to improve their work and this in turn will have an impact on their motivation. the learning benefits of feedback are not always brought to fruition, and this may be due to the fact that journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 2 sue wilkinson incorporating audio feedback to enhance inclusivity of courses many students are not fully processing the feedback they are given and therefore not learning from it (hefce, 2007). furthermore, feedback from tutors has a direct impact on student satisfaction (hefce, 2007). price et al. (2010) state that in order for students to benefit from feedback as a ‘feed forward’ process, they need to be able to understand and engage with it. if students cannot access the feedback in a manner in which they are able to absorb it, then they will not be able to benefit from it. dyslexic students being provided with written feedback is a prime example, as many (though not all) have difficulties with absorption of information, reading accuracy and word recognition. if they struggle to engage with the feedback then they will be less able to use this to consolidate and enhance their learning. providing feedback through audio channels may overcome this barrier. providing feedback as an audio file of the tutor’s spoken comments has several advantages over providing written feedback, and asking the student to use text-to-speech software to access it. hearing the intonation and inflection in the lecturer’s voice may help the student understand the feedback and get a better idea of the key messages to be taken from the comments. written and spoken comments will differ in style and having a recording of the lecturer’s thoughts and ideas as they are marking the assignment adds a personal element, which may increase the level of engagement the student has with the feedback, thus impacting positively on their understanding and learning. ice et al. (2007) compared embedded asynchronous audio feedback with asynchronous text only feedback, and found that audio feedback was more effective in several areas. it was found to be more effective for conveying nuance, it was associated with increased feelings of student involvement, it increased retention of content, and it gave the students the perception that the tutor cared more. furthermore, data revealed that students were three times more likely to apply content from audio feedback than they were for text based feedback (ice et al., 2007). the authors also found that the time it took tutors to provide audio feedback was 75% less than when providing text based feedback, a fact likely to encourage academic tutors to adopt the strategy. furthermore ‘this reduction in time was coupled with a 255% increase in the quantity of feedback provided’ (ice et al., 2007, p.19). bunyan et al. (2008) also found that audio feedback increased both the quantity and the quality of feedback provided to students. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 3 sue wilkinson incorporating audio feedback to enhance inclusivity of courses merry and orsmond (2008) carried out a study into the effectiveness of providing students with audio feedback and they found that students not only perceive but also put into practice the feedback in more meaningful ways than written feedback. other research has examined how audio feedback is an improvement on written feedback (jisc) and has revealed that benefits include communicating on a more personal level with the student, motivating students, informing students how to improve, the ability to use tone, encouraging students to listen to all of the feedback rather than selecting sections they wish to engage with, and providing an alternative to what is often illegible handwriting (jisc, 2013). the benefits of audio feedback can be understood in relation to mayer’s multimedia theory of learning. ‘people learn more deeply from words and pictures than from words alone’ (mayer, 2001, p.47) but humans can only process a finite amount of information through the two information processing channels (auditory and visual) at a time (sweller’s theory of cognitive load; sweller, 1988). mayer’s theory works on the basis that the brain interprets multimedia elements dynamically by selecting and organising to produce logical mental schema. audio feedback can help learning by reducing the load on a single processing channel and allowing active filtering and integrating of information based on prior knowledge. it therefore follows that this method of feedback would be beneficial to all students, and will increase access for some disabled students. providing audio feedback is just one approach to make courses more inclusive and accessible to students, and it is our responsibility as educators to adapt and mold our approaches to teaching and learning in line with changing student needs. although this area would benefit from further research, there is strong evidence supporting the educational benefits of audio feedback for students in terms of engaging the student, increasing their learning, and improving accessibility to tutor comments. audio feedback is an adaptive and highly effective way of delivering tutor comments to students, as the more input channels that are used (e.g. written, audio, visual) the better the student engages with the information. this has an impact on success and retention, as well as quality of learning and improvement. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 4 sue wilkinson incorporating audio feedback to enhance inclusivity of courses references bunyan, n., king, d. and mcgugan, s. (2008) ‘does it make a difference? replacing text with audio feedback’, practice and evidence of scholarship of teaching and learning in higher education, 3(2), pp. 125-163. cuthbert, r. (2006) ‘widening participation in higher education through the scholarship of teaching and learning’, 6th scholarship of teaching and learning conference. london 18-19 may. equality challenge unit (ecu) (2010) managing reasonable adjustments in higher education. available at: http://www.ecu.ac.uk/publications/files/managingreasonable-adjustments-in-higher-education.pdf/view (accessed: 13 july 2012). equality challenge unit (ecu) and higher education academy (hea) (2010) strategic approaches to disabled student engagement. available at: http://www.ecu.ac.uk/publications/strategic-approaches-to-disabled-studentengagement (accessed: 31 july 2012). george, r. and hicks, m. (2000) ‘changing context, changing practice: managing change in student support services’, aset herdsa conference. university of southern queensland, toowoomba 2-5 july [online]. available at: http://www.ascilite.org.au/aset-archives/confs/aset-herdsa2000/procs/george1.html (accessed: 16 july 2012). hefce (2007) the national student survey 2005-2007 findings and trends. available at: https://www.hefce.ac.uk/data/year/2008/thenationalstudentsurvey20052007findingsandtrends/ (accessed: 1 july 2013). hesa (n.d.) pis: widening participation of students in receipt of dsa (table t7). available at: http://www.hesa.ac.uk/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=2062&itemid =141 (accessed: 1 july 2013). journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 5 http://www.ecu.ac.uk/publications/files/managing-reasonable-adjustments-in-higher-education.pdf/view http://www.ecu.ac.uk/publications/files/managing-reasonable-adjustments-in-higher-education.pdf/view http://www.ecu.ac.uk/publications/strategic-approaches-to-disabled-student-engagement http://www.ecu.ac.uk/publications/strategic-approaches-to-disabled-student-engagement http://www.ascilite.org.au/aset-archives/confs/aset-herdsa2000/procs/george1.html https://www.hefce.ac.uk/data/year/2008/thenationalstudentsurvey2005-2007findingsandtrends/ https://www.hefce.ac.uk/data/year/2008/thenationalstudentsurvey2005-2007findingsandtrends/ http://www.hesa.ac.uk/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=2062&itemid=141 http://www.hesa.ac.uk/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=2062&itemid=141 sue wilkinson incorporating audio feedback to enhance inclusivity of courses ice, p., curtis, r., phillips, p. and wells, j. (2007) ‘using asynchronous audio feedback to enhance teaching presence and students’ sense of community’, journal of asynchronous learning networks, 11(2), pp. 3-25. jisc (2012) how can digital technologies help my institution recruit a wider mix of students? available at: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/supportingyourinstitution/studentjourney/wideningparticipation. aspx (accessed: 17 july 2013). jisc (2013) using audio feedback for assessment. available at: http://www.jiscdigitalmedia.ac.uk/guide/audio-feedback (accessed: 1 august 2013). mayer, r.e. (2001) multimedia learning. new york: cambridge university press. merry, s. and orsmond, p. (2008) ‘students' attitudes to and usage of academic feedback provided via audio files’, bioscience education, 11, pp. 1-11. price, m., handley, k., millar, j. and o’donovan, b. (2010) ‘feedback: all that effort, but what is the effect?’ assessment and evaluation in higher education, 35(3), pp. 277–289. scott, i. (2006) ‘sotl in practice in a developing country: how practical can sotl be in improving the graduate output of higher education?’, 6th scholarship of teaching and learning conference. london 18-19 may. sweller, j. (1988) ‘cognitive load during problem solving: effects on learning’, cognitive science, 12(2), pp. 257-285. author details sue is currently working as a senior needs assessor in cardiff metropolitan university assessment centre. her role involves assessing students in receipt of disabled students allowance and making recommendations for study skills and technology support. prior to this sue has worked in e-learning, developing online learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 6 http://www.jisc.ac.uk/supportingyourinstitution/studentjourney/wideningparticipation.aspx http://www.jisc.ac.uk/supportingyourinstitution/studentjourney/wideningparticipation.aspx http://www.jiscdigitalmedia.ac.uk/guide/audio-feedback sue wilkinson incorporating audio feedback to enhance inclusivity of courses modules, and also taught academic skills and carried out research in teaching and learning in higher education. sue has a phd in cognitive psychology and has extensive experience of teaching psychology at many levels. her research interests include the psychological processes involved in learning, learner engagement, and e-learning. sue is currently developing interests in needs assessment and how assistive technologies can enhance learning for students with disability. sue is also a fellow of the higher education academy. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 7 incorporating audio feedback to enhance inclusivity of courses abstract references author details literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 6: november 2013 developing criteria to assess graduate attributes in students’ work for their disciplines kate chanock la trobe university, australia abstract after two decades, efforts to integrate the development and assessment of ‘graduate attributes’ into discipline curricula remain slow, uneven, and fraught with difficulties. scholars have identified political, cultural and practical reasons for academics’ resistance to this requirement, including ‘lack of ownership and shared understanding of how to teach and assess graduate attributes’ (radloff et al., 2008). along with barrie (2007) and de la harpe and david (2012), radloff et al. (2008) have argued that ‘academic staff beliefs are critical and fundamental to any attempts at developing students’ graduate attributes’. this article suggests that, rather than trying to change these beliefs via top-down mandates to adopt institutional attributes, it may make sense instead to start from academics’ beliefs and see what attributes they suggest are actually integral to their cultures of enquiry. i reflect on such a process in the context of developing criteria and standards for assessing graduate ‘capabilities’ across the three years of a ba degree, in which a faculty working party tried to tease out what we meant by ‘good writing’ into easily applicable criteria with authentic meaning(s) across our varied disciplines. critical thinking proved fundamental to the meanings identified. keywords: graduate attributes; generic skills; integrated; assessment; criteria; standards; critical thinking. chanock developing criteria to assess graduate attributes in students’ work for their disciplines introduction more than two decades after universities in australia were persuaded to add the development of ‘graduate attributes’ (or ‘skills’ or ‘capabilities’) to their educational mission, scholars who monitor this process continue to find that it is slow, uneven, and fraught with difficulties (crebert, 2002; radloff et al., 2008; green et al., 2009; jones, 2009a; hughes and barrie, 2010). although graduate attributes have been defined as ‘the qualities, skills and understandings a university community agrees its students should develop during their time with the institution’ (bowden et al., 2000), the creation of policies and regimes of compliance needed to secure that agreement suggest scepticism rather than consensus among the ‘university community’. scholars have identified political, cultural and practical reasons for academics’ resistance to teaching and assessing graduate attributes, including ‘lack of ownership and shared understanding of how to teach and assess graduate attributes’ (radloff et al., 2008). in concert with barrie (2007) and de la harpe and david (2012), radloff et al. (2008) argue that ‘academic staff beliefs are critical and fundamental to any attempts at developing students’ graduate attributes, since academic staff are the custodians of the curriculum and the ones who determine what is taught and assessed’. i would like to suggest that, rather than trying to change these beliefs by integrating attributes designated by ‘institutional senior leaders, government and industry’ (de la harpe and david, 2012, p.494), it may make sense instead to start from academics’ beliefs and see what attributes they suggest are actually integral to their cultures of enquiry. in this article, i will reflect on such a process in a faculty of humanities and social sciences in the context of developing criteria and standards for assessing graduate ‘capabilities’ across the three years of the ba degree. for this purpose, a working group was formed including lecturers from different disciplines, an academic developer, and an academic language and learning adviser (myself), to try to tease out what we meant by ‘good writing’ into easily applicable criteria with ‘authenticity to the practices of a discourse community’ (hughes and barrie, 2010, p.331). this article will consider what authenticity may mean in this regard, and how general such criteria can be without sacrificing authenticity. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 2 chanock developing criteria to assess graduate attributes in students’ work for their disciplines ownership and authenticity the problem of ‘ownership’ to which scholars have alluded has both political and intellectual dimensions. jones (2009a, p.186) suggests that ‘one explanation for the degree of resistance to the notion of generic attributes is that they have become associated with a managerialist culture of audit and control’, and this seems to have been a factor also in crebert’s (2002) experience at griffith university and that of lowe and marshall (2004) at murdoch. similarly, james et al. (2004, online) observed of the university of wollongong that ‘for some, the concept of graduate attributes has been taken on reluctantly and suspiciously as the unwanted child of a union among business, government, and education sectors’. moreover, because graduate attributes come from outside the discipline communities, ‘they can be viewed as…generalised statements without substance’; jones (2009a, p. 186) was told that ‘lists of generic attributes were added to subject outlines by some academic staff in response to departmental policy rather than because they were seen as having intrinsic value’. this seems to chime with the findings of the national graduate attributes project (gap, 2013), that compliance was often confined to mapping where graduate attributes were taught and assessed in the course of a degree, rather than seeking to develop these further (hughes and barrie, 2010, p.329). academic developers, nonetheless, seem optimistic that this is a problem of clarity rather than substance (crebert, 2002, p.4; de la harpe and david, 2012). ‘most important’, in de la harpe and david’s (2012, p.505) view, ‘is the need to provide opportunities for academic staff to unpack graduate attributes so that they can better understand them’ (c.f. lowe and marshall, 2004). understanding, it is generally thought, would bridge the gap between lecturers’ beliefs that graduate attributes are important, and their neglect of these in their teaching (jones, 2009a; de la harpe and david, 2012, p.493). differences in meaning however, it seems that the terminology of graduate attributes is not just unclear but polysemous. since the 1980s, investigations into the cultures of enquiry of a range of disciplines, looking at the assumptions and values underlying their work, have revealed journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 3 chanock developing criteria to assess graduate attributes in students’ work for their disciplines significant (but often tacit) differences in their epistemologies (e.g. bazerman, 1981; jones, 2009a; 2009b; moore, 2011). although they share a common set of terms such as ‘problem’, ‘argument’, ‘evidence’, and ‘critical thinking’, whose meanings overlap from discipline to discipline, this commonality can conceal differences in their beliefs about the status of knowledge (given or constructed, certain or contested); the scope of criticism (confined to issues of logic, or extending to issues of ethics and even, possibly, taste); what qualifies a point as relevant; what counts as evidence; and what ought to be included in ‘context’. anna jones, whose doctoral research was focused on such differences, has found that ‘generic skills or attributes’ are not ‘a set of discrete, measurable, technical skills that transcend disciplines’ (2009b, p.93), but instead ‘are highly context-dependent, and are shaped by the disciplinary epistemology in which they are conceptualised and taught’ (2009b, pp.85–6). jones found, in particular, that the meaning of ‘problem solving’ or ‘critical thinking’ varied across disciplines she studied. law lecturers understood critical thinking as ‘the examination of an argument, its evidence and logic; the examination of assumptions; a discussion of the social context of an issue, an awareness of ethical issues; and a questioning of received wisdom’ and for them, ‘problem solving is the practical application of critical thinking, often to ‘real world’ problems and so is particularly concerned with outcomes’ (jones, 2009a, p.181). in medicine, though lecturers thought that critical thinking was important, they worried that it could ‘destroy students’ idealism or their sense of agency’ in clinical situations and expose students to ‘nasty’ rebukes for challenging a supervisor (jones, 2009a, p.185). in physics, lecturers saw the content taught to undergraduates as ‘fairly incontestable’, so students were not required to be critical until fourth year or later (jones, 2009a, p.181-182). by contrast, for lecturers in history, ‘critical thinking, analysis and communication…are an integral and central part of the epistemology of the discipline…and mastering them is much of what it means to be a historian’; in this discipline, ‘critical thinking is understood as an examination of evidence, the ability to understand complexity and ambiguity, an awareness of political and ideological dimensions and a questioning of received wisdom’ (jones, 2009a, p.179). at the same time, however, when their institution introduced critical thinking and communication as generic attributes, historians resisted the pressure to teach them explicitly. ‘they are given rather cursory attention’, jones (2009a, p.179) tells us, ‘since they are viewed as bolted on to subject outlines in a way that demonstrates lip service journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 4 chanock developing criteria to assess graduate attributes in students’ work for their disciplines rather than involving any substantive acknowledgement that these attributes are part of the discipline itself’. across the disciplines she studied, in fact, jones (2009a, p.186) found that ‘when academic staff consider the nature of their discipline and their own research practices, they consider attributes such as critical thinking, analysis, problem solving and communication to be central. however, in their teaching, generic attributes are often viewed as separate from the central business of the discipline’. although this discrepancy seems bizarre, it may be understandable in light of the artificiality that characterises uncontextualised ‘practice’ of generic skills. for example, critical thinking may be presented generically in terms of syllogisms and/or common logical fallacies. these have little relevance for history, say, or english literature, but this is not because these disciplines do not practise critical thinking. lecturers in humanities and social sciences are already assessing critical thinking every time they mark a substantial assignment, for many assignments are set for the purpose of engaging students in thinking critically: about themselves, their textual practices, their professional practices, the world, or all of these. in addressing these assignments, students must use critical thinking to identify what the question is about, what problems are entailed in answering it, what sources are relevant and reliable, what evidence is most compelling, and how it can be shaped into a reasoned text. the students’ decisions about all these things are embodied in the work they submit, and are always evaluated, whether the marker thinks of them as critical thinking, or good writing, or sound research, or (most accurately) all three. most assessment that goes beyond testing recall or recognition, therefore, includes some evaluation of critical thinking – most often, of a holistic and impressionistic kind recorded in a global comment or a tick against a term like ‘critical analysis’ or ‘relevance’. such marking, however, can conceal considerable variation in the meaning and weighting that different lecturers give to this component (as well as confusion in students’ minds about what it might mean). it seems desirable, therefore, to try to identify what critical thinking (or any other ‘attribute’) means in the in the contexts in which it is assessed most often. implications for development of criteria and standards however, as green et al. (2009, p.18) have noted, while universities ‘need to provide evidence of…outcomes through the application of appropriate criteria and standards’, at the same time ‘there appears to be considerable confusion over how graduate attributes journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 5 chanock developing criteria to assess graduate attributes in students’ work for their disciplines should be defined, what these attributes look like within each discipline, [and] how they should be taught, assessed and evaluated’. they point to the gulf between the apparent simplicity of the attributes listed on universities’ websites (interested readers will find a wealth of examples at http://www.itl.usyd.edu.au/projects/nationalgap/resources/gamap/introduction.htm on the gap project’s website), and the reality of the ways of thinking they purport to describe. from a policy and planning perspective, it makes sense to deal with each identified attribute as a separate component. yet…different attributes tend to develop in relation to one another…[and in] accord with the conventions and norms of each discipline…consequently, those charged with implementation must balance policydriven concerns of quantification and categorisation with the awareness that for graduate attributes to be truly ‘embedded’ in curricula, knowledge and literacy need to be seen as inextricably linked. (green et al., 2009, p.21) this is the challenge of developing assessment criteria and standards of a kind that enable transparency and consistency in marking and can guide teachers and students alike as to what must be demonstrated in a particular piece of work. ‘i know it when i see it’ is a timehonoured but unsatisfactory approach to marking aspects of performance that are (for good reasons) difficult to separate from the whole. criteria must articulate what we see, in language that is comprehensible to students and staff. moreover, these criteria should accommodate the range of ways that critical thinking is used in the relevant disciplines, for it is this discipline-specific way of thinking that markers hope to see in students’ work for their subjects (hammer and green, 2011; moore, 2011). finally, the criteria must reflect what can reasonably be expected at each level of students’ apprenticeship in the discipline, as they develop the subject knowledge that enables them to take an increasingly critical approach to their material (hammer and green, 2011). the context la trobe university has opted to assess its ‘graduate capabilities’ at the level of its faculties (in the australian sense of organisational units, rather than teaching staff), thus aiming at a level between generic and discipline-specific. the decision to assess graduate capabilities as demonstrated in students’ work for the disciplines, rather than outside their journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 6 http://www.itl.usyd.edu.au/projects/nationalgap/resources/gamap/introduction.htm chanock developing criteria to assess graduate attributes in students’ work for their disciplines discipline subjects, accords with conceptions of graduate attributes that barrie (2007, pp.441-445) has characterised as facilitating ‘translation’ (application of disciplinary knowledge to unfamiliar problems) and/or ‘enabling’, that is, ‘abilities that infuse university learning and knowledge’; it also accords with beliefs that students develop these attributes through the content and process of disciplinary teaching and engagement with the learning experiences in their courses. the decision was made in the context of an institutional program of curriculum reform known as the design for learning (la trobe university, 2009). along with a process of ensuring constructive alignment of teaching and assessment of subject content with intended learning outcomes (biggs, 1996), the university nominated six graduate capabilities to be developed over the course of every degree. at the institutional level, the capabilities were stated in starkly generic terms: writing, speaking, teamwork, research/enquiry, critical thinking, and creative problemsolving (in the last few months, a somewhat more elaborate framework has been promulgated, at http://www.latrobe.edu.au/teaching/la-trobe-framework/graduatecapabilities). from there, it was the responsibility of each faculty to articulate what the capabilities meant in the constellation of disciplines for which it was responsible, and to embed the learning, practice, and assessment of each capability in designated subjects at each stage of the course: ‘cornerstone’ (first year), ‘mid-point’ (second year), and ‘capstone’, shortly before graduation at the end of third year (la trobe university, 2012). this process was consistent with barrie’s (2004) view that graduate capabilities ‘are not a set of additional outcomes requiring an additional curriculum – rather, they are outcomes that can be reasonably expected from the usual higher education experience’ (p.263). as such, it ought to be possible to derive an assessment of them from the assignments already set in the disciplines. it was accepted that the meaning and practice of the capabilities might well vary across the faculties – science, technology and engineering; health sciences; education; law and management; and humanities and social sciences – and that discipline lecturers were the people with the appropriate expertise to discern those meanings and describe those practices. if the criteria were to adequately reflect their contexts of use, the perspectives of staff from different disciplines were needed. in addition, in the working party tasked with this effort in the faculty of humanities and social sciences, representatives from some of the faculty’s disciplines (media, philosophy, politics, history, and visual arts and design) were joined by an academic developer with an institutional perspective and a knowledge of assessment, and an academic language and learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 7 http://www.latrobe.edu.au/teaching/la-trobe-framework/graduate-capabilities http://www.latrobe.edu.au/teaching/la-trobe-framework/graduate-capabilities chanock developing criteria to assess graduate attributes in students’ work for their disciplines adviser (me). my perspective was needed as my work across all of the faculty’s disciplines highlights commonalities and differences in the requirements of assignments across the faculty, and involves efforts to render the tacit knowledge of discipline lecturers explicit and comprehensible to students. in the literature on graduate attributes, staff in this role are usually mentioned in connection with remedial or add-on teaching outside the disciplines (e.g. barrie, 2007, p.455), but our work with individual students, in particular, gives us insights into what they find unexplained or confusing, which can usefully inform discussions in the disciplines. the process in constructing a format for our criteria, we adopted a grid model similar to those used in the research skill development for curriculum design and assessment (rsd, 2009) or the association of american colleges and universities (aacu, 2012). this structure accommodates descriptors organised by levels (down the side) and standards (across the top). thus, users can see how each capability is supposed to be manifested in assignments, and how performance is differentiated as either falling short, or meeting, or exceeding expectations at each level of study. we produced a table for each capability, but as ‘speaking’ and ‘teamwork’ were easily separated from the rest, i will not discuss those here. summary description standard and level exceeded met not met cornerstone . midpoint capstone this template is simple, but the process of arriving at descriptors was not. it revealed a gulf between the commonplace belief in distinct and context-independent skills, and the holistic thinking of discipline academics, for whom writing, critical thinking, inquiry and research, and problem solving were inseparable. this was apparent in the working party’s journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 8 chanock developing criteria to assess graduate attributes in students’ work for their disciplines first attempt at a summary description of writing, where the mechanical aspects (italicised below) received short shrift: writing in humanities and social science disciplines requires you to engage with other people’s arguments in order to develop, test and communicate your own. in doing so, you will learn about the writing conventions that structure the different ways disciplines organise and communicate knowledge. you will learn how to acknowledge, use and reference different kinds of texts and sources of knowledge. you will learn how to read, assess and work with arguments and evidence in order to apply those skills to your own writing. to write well in the humanities and social sciences, you will need to ensure that you respond to the question with a clear and coherent argument, that the writing is free of grammar and spelling errors, that you have used sources and evidence appropriately and that it is accurately referenced. every sentence in that description is imbued with critical thinking, and it became clear that, for lecturers in this faculty at least, writing is argument. good writing is good because it presents a cogent, informed argument, and however the nature of argument might differ across the disciplines, it was the touchstone for all. however, we could hardly produce standards that would require markers to evaluate the same thing under four different capabilities, so we had to ask the question: if we take information and argument out of writing, what is left? we teased out descriptors for writing that ‘met’ the faculty’s standards at cornerstone level, focusing on clarity, structure, correctness, and integration: • most ideas are expressed clearly. • the writing is mostly coherently structured. • the work contains a few errors in grammar, punctuation, and/or spelling, but these do not obscure the meaning. • the sources and evidence are mostly integrated with the writing. the use of sources was then separated out from our description of writing, and assigned to ‘inquiry/research’, yielding the following descriptors: journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 9 chanock developing criteria to assess graduate attributes in students’ work for their disciplines • the work shows adequate understanding of what the question/topic is asking. • the minimum required reading has informed the response to this task. • ideas/information necessary to the task have been considered. • information used is mostly credible and relevant. • an attempt has been made to formulate a relevant argument/position. • the piece includes most elements of the task. • most sources are accurately attributed and appropriately referenced. problem-solving was particularly difficult to differentiate from critical thinking, as they are virtually identical in humanities and social sciences. perhaps in more vocationally-oriented fields, problem-solving would foreground the practical application of critical thinking to decide what action should be taken, or perhaps the focus would be on the selection of ‘tools’, such as mathematical operations, legal precedents, or protocols for patient care, to deal with any particular case. in humanities and social sciences, however, the problems are largely questions of interpretation, and solutions take the form of insights that bear upon those questions. perhaps it would work to reserve problem solving for questions that ask ‘what should be done?’ however, in some disciplines, such as history, that question makes no sense (similarly, jones [2009a, p.179], was told that problem solving was not important in teaching history ‘unless it is in the form of ‘discuss the causes of the french revolution’). our goal was to produce standards that work for any discipline, so we corralled the elements of critical thinking that had most to do with the application of tools, in this case conceptual ones as well as methods, and assigned these to problem-solving: • given a problem, the piece of work shows some grasp of what needs to be understood. • it identifies some of the difficulties with understanding the problem. • it applies some relevant concepts/methods from the discipline or other relevant context of discussion. • it suggests a plausible solution to the problem. again, these describe what is needed for the standard to be ‘met’ at cornerstone level. higher level standards were created by repeating the ‘exceeded’ criteria from the previous level and adding (in bold) appropriate new ones. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 10 chanock developing criteria to assess graduate attributes in students’ work for their disciplines this, then, enabled us to formulate a description of critical thinking and a set of descriptors that was no longer bound up with the other three capabilities (although, of course, in any text they remain inextricably bound up in practice). once shorn of its expression and its application, critical thinking emerged as a combination of relevance, reasoning, an open but sceptical disposition, consideration of context, and some degree of awareness about subjectivity, as outlined in the brief defining paragraph that introduced the table: critical thinking in humanities and social science disciplines is a habit of mind: an awareness that knowledge is constructed through a process of asking questions, considering relevant information, and articulating a reasoned explanation. you will learn to consider the ideas you encounter with an open mind; to continually question how they are applied; to appreciate explanations that have been arrived at carefully and thoroughly, and to identify any problems or limitations they may have. you will learn to apply the same care and critical evaluation to your own work. this will be shown in: (i) your selection and presentation of evidence; (ii) your awareness of your own assumptions and those of others; (iii) your recognition of how context shapes people’s different perspectives; and (iv) your evaluation of the strengths and limitations of competing explanations, including your own. for the table, we began (at ‘cornerstone: met’) with four basic requirements shared by all our disciplines (as far as we could tell), leaving it up to each to know what they would consider to be ‘relevant’, ‘coherent’, ‘appropriate’, and ‘sufficient’. then we added descriptors for the most salient ways that critical thinking could be expected to develop in sophistication and rigour over the course of a degree, prefacing these with ‘(where applicable)’ in recognition of the likelihood that different disciplines place differing emphasis on one or another of these, and/or expect them to develop at different stages over the course of study. standard and level exceeded met not met cornerstone • all points are relevant. • all evidence is appropriate. • the reasoning is coherent. most points are relevant. • most evidence is appropriate. • the reasoning is most points are not relevant. • most evidence is inappropriate. • the reasoning lacks journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 11 chanock developing criteria to assess graduate attributes in students’ work for their disciplines • and sufficient to arrive at the conclusion. • (where applicable) the work questions assumptions of others. • (where applicable) the work recognises how context shapes perspectives. coherent. • and sufficient to arrive at the conclusion. coherence. • and is insufficient to arrive at the conclusion. at ‘midpoint’, where we specified the work to be in a task requiring somewhat complex reasoning, we added ‘(where applicable) the work questions own assumptions’, and at ‘capstone’, for ‘a task requiring complex reasoning’, we added ‘the work acknowledges the limits of its own position’ and ‘the work considers alternatives beyond those suggested by the assignment’. our inclusion of context and subjectivity here (as distinct from objectivity) underlines, for me, the context-specific character of ostensibly generic ways of thinking that has been brought out by scholars such as jones (2009a; 2009b). while we were not in a position to produce standards for each discipline, our faculty-level descriptors do attest to an orientation to knowledge that is characteristic of disciplines across the humanities and social sciences. these tend to share a view of knowledge as constructed and contingent, situated and social, and best understood, therefore, by recovering the contexts of time, place, and culture that have produced it. (‘constructed’, here, should not be taken to mean ‘invented’; rather than suggesting that nothing can be known about the world, it means that what we know depends on what we ask and where we go for answers, and that those things occur within a social context.) conclusion the development of standards for assessing capabilities at the faculty level was intended to make marking more consistent and feedback more informative. at the same time, however, it revealed something about the meaning of critical thinking for humanities and social sciences. as we tried to separate the capabilities for purposes of description, it was clear that lecturers in these fields evaluate a piece of work as an informed argument rather than an array of skills and information. ‘problem solving’ may be the motivation, ‘teamwork’ journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 12 chanock developing criteria to assess graduate attributes in students’ work for their disciplines the process, ‘writing’ or ‘speaking’ the mode of expression, and ‘inquiry/research’ the means of substantiation, while ‘critical thinking’ suffuses all of these; but the resulting artefact is apprehended and appreciated as a whole: as argument. when our graduates disperse into the workplace, it seems likely that they will approach their work with an expectation, common to the fields of enquiry in which they have been learning, that knowledge is socially constructed, variable across time, place, and culture, and thus contingent and subject to change. if so, this is a valuable preparation for ‘an unknown future’ (barnett, 2004); whether it will ‘fit’ our graduates for particular workplace cultures is another question, given that brevity, simplicity, and decisiveness can be virtues at work, if not in essays. what can this reflection add to recent efforts to elucidate the slow pace and uneven extent of integration of graduate attributes into discipline curricula? i think we have found a level at which graduate attributes can be described in ways that are internally persuasive for their users. we achieved ownership, in organisational terms, at the faculty level, and in intellectual terms, at a level of specificity partway between the disciplines that make up the faculty and the more generic level at which the capabilities were originally designated. our experience bears out the view that capabilities have specific, and different, meanings for different discipline areas. at the same time, it suggests that commonalities may be seen by staff who work across a cluster of disciplines, who can help find a form of words that is meaningful to all of them. references association of american colleges and universities (2012) value: valid assessment of learning in undergraduate education. critical thinking. available at: http://www.aacu.org/value/rubrics/index.cfm (accessed: 5 july 2013). barnett, r. (2004) ‘learning for an unknown future’, higher education research and development, 23(3), pp. 247-260. barrie, s. (2004) ‘a research-based approach to generic graduate attributes policy’, higher education research and development, 23(3), pp. 262-275. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 13 http://www.aacu.org/value/rubrics/index.cfm chanock developing criteria to assess graduate attributes in students’ work for their disciplines barrie, s. (2007) ‘a conceptual framework for the teaching and learning of generic graduate attributes’, studies in higher education, 32(4), pp. 439-458. bazerman, c. (1981) ‘what written knowledge does: three examples of academic discourse’, philosophy of the social sciences, 11, pp. 361-87. biggs, j. (1996) ‘enhancing teaching through constructive alignment’, higher education, 32, pp. 347-64. bowden, j., hart, g., king, b., trigwell, k. and watts, o. (2000) generic capabilities of atn university graduates, canberra: australian government department of education, training and youth affairs. crebert, g. (2002) ‘institutional research into generic skills and graduate attributes: constraints and dilemmas’, 2nd international lifelong learning conference. yeppoon, queensland 16-19 june. central queensland university press, pp. 135142. de la harpe, b. and david, c. (2012) ‘major influences on the teaching and assessment of graduate attributes’, higher education research and development, 31(4), pp. 493510. gap (2013) the national graduate attributes project: integration and assessment of graduate attributes in curriculum. the university of sydney institute for teaching and learning. available at: http://www.itl.usyd.edu.au/projects/nationalgap/introduction.htm (accessed: 5 july 2013). green, w., hammer, s. and star, c. (2009) ‘facing up to the challenge: why is it so hard to develop graduate attributes?’, higher education research and development, 28(1), pp. 17-29. hammer, s. and green, w. (2011) ‘critical thinking in a first year management unit: the relationship between disciplinary learning, academic literacy and learning progression’, higher education research and development, 30(3), pp. 303-315. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 14 http://www.itl.usyd.edu.au/projects/nationalgap/introduction.htm chanock developing criteria to assess graduate attributes in students’ work for their disciplines hughes, c. and barrie, s. (2010) ‘influences on the assessment of graduate attributes in higher education’, assessment and evaluation in higher education, 35(3), pp. 325334. james, b., lefoe, g. and hadi, m. (2004) ‘working ‘through’ graduate attributes: a bottomup approach’, 27th herdsa annual conference. miri, sarawak 4-7 july. available at: http://ro.uow.edu.au/asdpapers/7 (accessed: 5 july 2013). jones, a. (2009a) ‘generic attributes as espoused theory: the importance of context’, higher education, 58(2), pp. 175-191. jones, a. (2009b) ‘redisciplining generic attributes: the disciplinary context in focus’, studies in higher education, 34(1), pp. 85-100. la trobe university (2009) design for learning: curriculum review and renewal at la trobe university. available at: http://www.latrobe.edu.au/ctlc/assets/downloads/dfl/dflbooklet.pdf . (accessed: 5 july 2013). la trobe university (2012) graduate capabilities for undergraduate students policy. available at: http://www.latrobe.edu.au/policy/documents/graduate-capabilitiespolicy.pdf (accessed: 5 july 2013). lowe, k. and marshall, l. (2004) ‘plotting renewal: pushing curriculum boundaries using a web based graduate attribute mapping tool’, in atkinson, r., mcbeath, c., jonasdwyer, d. and phillips, r. (eds.) beyond the comfort zone: proceedings of the 21st ascilite conference. perth, 5-8 december, pp. 548-557. available at: http://www.ascilite.org.au/conferences/perth04/procs/lowe-k.html (accessed: 5 july 2013). moore, t. (2011) ‘critical thinking and disciplinary thinking: a continuing debate’, higher education research and development, 30(3), pp. 261-274. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 15 http://ro.uow.edu.au/asdpapers/7 http://www.latrobe.edu.au/ctlc/assets/downloads/dfl/dfl-booklet.pdf http://www.latrobe.edu.au/ctlc/assets/downloads/dfl/dfl-booklet.pdf http://www.latrobe.edu.au/policy/documents/graduate-capabilities-policy.pdf http://www.latrobe.edu.au/policy/documents/graduate-capabilities-policy.pdf http://www.ascilite.org.au/conferences/perth04/procs/lowe-k.html chanock developing criteria to assess graduate attributes in students’ work for their disciplines radloff, a., de la harpe, b., dalton, h., thomas, j., and lawson, a. (2008) ‘assessing graduate attributes: engaging academic staff and their students’, in duff, a., quinn, d., green, m., andre, k., ferris, t. and copeland, s. (eds.) engaging students in assessment. refereed proceedings of the 2009 atn assessment conference. adelaide, australia 20-21 november. available at: http://www.ojs.unisa.edu.au/index.php/atna/issue/ (accessed: 5 july 2013). research skill development (rsd) (2009) research skill development for curriculum design and assessment. available at: http://www.adelaide.edu.au/rsd/ (accessed: 5 july 2013). author details associate professor kate chanock is an academic language and learning lecturer at la trobe university in melbourne, australia. her interests include teaching and learning disciplinary discourses; efficacy of individual consultations; and studying with a disability. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 16 http://www.ojs.unisa.edu.au/index.php/atna/issue/ http://www.adelaide.edu.au/rsd/ developing criteria to assess graduate attributes in students’ work for their disciplines abstract introduction ownership and authenticity differences in meaning implications for development of criteria and standards the context the process conclusion references author details literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special edition: researching pdp practice, november 2010 1, 2, 3 – a journey of pdp at the university of wolverhampton megan lawton university of wolverhampton, uk emma purnell university of wolverhampton, uk abstract this paper is a synthesis of the findings of three research projects to identify personal development planning (pdp) progress at the university of wolverhampton. the three projects look at pdp from a number of perspectives. firstly, a university-wide e-portfolio evaluation that explored e-portfolio practice through the measure of pdp objectives evident in practice – the objectives used within this provide the structure for the discussion within this paper. secondly, the paper is informed by the inter/national coalition for eportfolio research incepr) project, which involved looking at the facilitating and inhibiting factors affecting the scalability and sustainability of e-portfolio and e-portfolio based pdp across the institution. finally, a doctoral research project that looked at factors that contribute to engagement with pdp. aspects of three of these pieces of research were pulled together as part of the higher education academy/national teaching fellowship scheme national action research network on researching and evaluating personal development planning and eportfolio practice project (the ntfs narn project). key words: pdp and e-pdp; e-portfolio; pedagogy; evaluation, strategy. institutional context since the start of the academic year 2005/06, the e-portfolio system pebblepad was made available to all staff and students within the university of wolverhampton. the system was introduced as an institutional tool to support personal development planning (pdp) lawton and purnell 1, 2, 3 – a journey of pdp at the university of wolverhampton processes. primarily, pdp activities were offered within the taught curriculum. the institutional context, including such issues as, what the pdp framework is at the university and our concept of an e-portfolio system, have been previously published (lawton and felce, 2008; lawton and purnell, 2009; lawton and purnell, 2010). the responsibility for implementing, evaluating and developing pdp practice within the university has been strategically placed within the university’s learning and teaching strategies since 2000. this is brokered through the institute for learning enhancement (ile). as members of this department we, the authors of this paper, have approached the research from an educational development perspective. we are not neutral to the research as we have both been at the forefront of pdp and e-portfolio initiatives both internally and externally in the uk and overseas. in the academic year 2008/09 the university’s quality enhancement committee (uqec) requested that a university-wide evaluation of the impact of pedagogic processes for pdp and e-portfolio development (lawton and purnell, 2009) was conducted. a follow-on study to this evaluation was carried out to identify what the facilitating and inhibiting factors were for building capacity and capability in staff in the area of e-portfolio based learning (challen et al., 2009). running simultaneously to both these projects is a doctoral research project in the area of pdp. the institutional evaluation, the staff development investigation, and the doctoral project findings and methodological frameworks form the core activity of the university of wolverhampton’s membership to the national teaching fellowship scheme (ntfs) national action research network (narn) project for researching and evaluating pdp and e-portfolios (2007-2010). our narn project involves bringing together the findings and experiences of the three separate research projects already mentioned to provide a synthesis of the journey and developments of pdp in the university of wolverhampton. two of the projects focussed on pdp development from staff perspectives, and the third provided insight into pdp as measured against set objectives affecting the student experience. one of the most significant findings of this synthesis project has been that having objectives set at the beginning of the pdp journey provides a framework against which you can measure engagement and identify progress over a period of time. the structure of the paper uses the objectives set in our 2003 pdp framework to explore the pdp distance travelled and the lessons learned along the way, based on findings from the three research projects. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 2 lawton and purnell 1, 2, 3 – a journey of pdp at the university of wolverhampton the objectives set in 2003 were that pdp should: • be a formative student-centred process. • provide a product that documented a student's achievement and experience at the university. • be integrated throughout the whole of the student experience at the university. • be developmental. • be used by students with tutor guidance. (lawton and felce, 2008) pdp should be a formative student-centred process the university of wolverhampton designed its pdp framework through consultation with all its academic schools. accommodations were made to establish the principle that pdp is a student-centred process that is supported by staff. point 11 in the qaa guidelines (2009) states that ‘these [a transcript and an individual’s personal records] would be supplemented by structured and supported processes…the term personal development planning was used to denote this process’. the e-portfolio system that the university helped develop, pebblepad, is seen as providing an institution-wide tool that can be used by individuals to support the pdp process. in all the examples within this article, pebblepad has been the software in use. at present there exist many different definitions of an e-portfolio (lawton and purnell, 2010), for example, a presentational tool, a reflective journal, or a competency profiling tool for a specific career or a professional body. as educational developers within the university of wolverhampton we have observed more use of our e-portfolio system to help students make sense of their learning experiences by the selection of and ‘stitching’ together of various elements, such as reflective accounts, assessment tasks, peer and tutor formative feedback, as in the concept of ‘patchwork’ texts (winter, 2003). a key element of this is a reflective narrative written for different audiences and providing a rationale for the various elements selected. by using an electronic system there is immediacy and dialogue taking place which have not seemed to happen in the same way using paper-based systems. within our institution we have changed our language from ejournal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 3 lawton and purnell 1, 2, 3 – a journey of pdp at the university of wolverhampton portfolio to e-pdp, which we are defining as pdp processes mediated and supported through the university’s e-portfolio system. the qaa (2009, point 29) guidelines identify five different models of pdp implementation as follows: • discrete: where pdp is separate from or additional to the curriculum. • linked: where practices run in parallel to the curriculum but have links to it. • embedded: pdp embedded in particular parts of the program. • integrated: where all tutors are responsible and there is a whole curriculum approach. • extended: integrating learning and teaching activities with informal learning such as volunteering and extra curricular activities. we are aiming to move from an embedded to integrated model through our university curriculum refocusing project, ‘learning works’. this project has redesigned the academic year structure. instead of having eight modules per year in two blocks (four modules each semester), the new framework now has six modules in each academic year. the six modules will be delivered in two year-long ‘thin’ modules at each level, and two short ‘fat’ modules in each of the two semesters. the majority of new courses have utilised these year-long modules to embed contextualised e-pdp, significantly reducing the risk of epdp being a bolted on activity. the qaa (2009, point 16) highlight that: pdp has an important role to play in making the outcomes or results of learning in he more explicit. when learners are clear about what is expected of them and what they, in turn, might expect of he, the quality of learning improves. the aim of the year-long modules is to develop connectivity across ‘content’ modules and between levels. this will give students the ability to look holistically at their learning, rather than them seeing their learning in unrelated chunks. this is also particularly important to a widening participation institution such as ourselves, with many first-generation learners with little or no experience of he. students found that by using an e-portfolio for pdp they had the ability to go backwards and look at their previous work, as well as plan forwards. 75% of the 606 students who responded to one of the research projects said they enjoyed participating in e-pdp activities and found them useful (lawton and purnell, 2009). journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 4 lawton and purnell 1, 2, 3 – a journey of pdp at the university of wolverhampton pdp to provide a product that documented a student's achievement and experience at the university since identifying the range of e-pdp and e-portfolio practices that exist through the evaluation (lawton and purnell, 2009), there have been a number of conversations between key stakeholders (including our registry department, the institute for learning enhancement and the office of the dean of students) as to how e-pdp could support a future sector-wide higher education achievement records (hear) initiative (burgess, 2007). there is considerable debate both internally and externally as to how an individual’s rich personal journey through he could be verified and in what way pdp can be used to be included in a hear transcript: the hear will contain information which the institution is prepared to verify. further work should be done on how to measure and record skills and achievements gained through non-formal learning but this, along with other studentgenerated/driven information, should be part of personal development planning (pdp). (burgess, 2007, p.9) within our institution, e-pdp and e-portfolio-based learning is increasingly being used for both formative and summative assessment. an unintended outcome identified (lawton and purnell, 2010) is the increased submission of work when the e-portfolio system is used for this purpose. this has been a significant event which has led to both changes in the software and to institutional practice. what started as a tool to support individual pdp processes has evolved into a collaborative tool to support other areas of teaching and learning, such as delivery of learning materials and internal and external moderation. an unanticipated outcome of submitting e-pdp activities online for formative feedback has been that staff are able to identify students at risk. the electronic submission has encouraged an early stage dialogue between students and teachers, and identified nonsubmission and non-engagement with tasks. teachers have been able to provide ‘just in time’ support and thus increase retention and attainment (lawton and purnell, 2009). with the evolution of the tool and innovative pedagogic use, there is an increase in the capability and willingness of teaching teams to see e-pdp as another learning and teaching option. the new learning works structure to the academic year (referred to above) has provided an opportunity to ‘design-in’ e-pdp activities in discipline curriculum. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 5 lawton and purnell 1, 2, 3 – a journey of pdp at the university of wolverhampton pdp to be integrated throughout the whole of the student experience at the university in the qaa (2009) guidelines, point 3 states: effective pdp improves the capacity of individuals to review, plan and take responsibility for their own learning and to understand what and how they learn. pdp helps learners articulate their learning and the achievements and outcomes of he more explicitly, and supports the concept that learning is a lifelong and life-wide activity. it is important to bridge the transitions between these levels. in the majority of new courses, the year-long modules are designed to give prominence to different skills and experiences depending on their level. for example, at level 4 the emphasis is primarily on understanding the expectations of studying in he and on students identifying and developing their own learning skills. at level 5 there is a greater emphasis on transferable employability skills, and at level 6 on helping students reflect on, articulate and evidence their he learning experience to external others, such as future employers. in addition to designing-in opportunities which support pdp processes, the university is developing and implementing the concept of graduate attributes. we want to help our students to reflect on, evidence, articulate and apply what they have learnt while studying at the university. currently our statement is that ‘we aim to produce wolverhampton graduates who are digitally literate, knowledgeable and enterprising, and are global citizens’ (university of wolverhampton, 2008, online). in addition, there are continued discussions to develop the alumni provision to include continued access to the e-portfolio system. this will be a positive move towards university support of lifelong learning provision. the university is currently researching the expansion of e-pdp into work-based learning through a jisc funded project, ‘e-portfolio-based pedagogy for small to medium enterprises’ (eppsme). this is exploring the potential e-pdp to further the opportunities for lifelong learning. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 6 lawton and purnell 1, 2, 3 – a journey of pdp at the university of wolverhampton pdp to be developmental the institutional framework for pdp processes was aimed at the student experience, though the tool to support this process was made available to both staff and students. there are multiple cases of staff using pebblepad to work collaboratively across campuses on research and development projects. this has included collaborative webfolios for the cohort iv engagement with incepr, the eppsme project and the graduate attributes project. there has been a significant growth in the use of e-portfolio system for continuing professional development (cpd) as well as pdp, and it is now embedded within the institutions in-service post-graduate certificate in learning and teaching in higher education. in addition, members of staff are using the e-portfolio system for professional accreditation, such as for certified membership of the association for learning technology (cmalt) and professional accreditation in the institute for further learning (ifl). pdp to be used by students with tutor guidance the institutional framework clearly states that pdp processes should be used by students with tutor guidance. at present this tends to refer to module tutors within a specific taught module. however, qaa (2009, point 22) offer examples of ‘others’ who could support pdp processes such as, ‘tutors, peers or 'significant others' (for example, workplace or placement supervisors or careers advisers)’. the majority of e-pdp activities which have taken place to date have happened in the taught curriculum though tutor-driven activities. examples of these activities can be found at: www.wlv.ac.uk/pathfinder. these are predominantly aimed at developing personal and professional attributes in students, but also include the development of study skills, reflection, self-analysis, confidence, self-esteem, a sense of belonging, subject knowledge, collaboration, critical thinking and meta-cognition, and learning how to learn. though tutors generally see the value and benefit in e-pdp activities, these can also be perceived as being overly burdensome (particularly with large groups) when the perception of the function of pdp is as an ‘add on’ to discipline content. this perception can also be observed in some students. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 7 http://www.wlv.ac.uk/pathfinder lawton and purnell 1, 2, 3 – a journey of pdp at the university of wolverhampton unintended outcomes since 2005 the use of pebble pad for pdp at wolverhampton has led to the need for new software skills among staff and students. this issue formed the basis of the inter/national coalition for eportfolio research (incepr) project. the question posed was: ‘what are the facilitating and inhibiting factors in building capability and capacity of staff in supporting the use of e-portfolio?’. the project outcomes are due to be published during the academic year 2010/2011. the project highlighted the need for staff development time and support to engage with the principles and capabilities needed to deliver e-pdp activities. in general, two different kinds of need were encountered among staff: firstly those who wanted to know how the software worked, and secondly those who weren’t so interested in the software but wanted to engage their students in a particular way and thought that there was potential for the software to support what they wanted to do. there was some concern expressed in trying new methods of both delivery and content because of the potential effect on internal and external quality measures, such as module evaluation questionnaires (meqs) and the national student survey (nss). to reduce this fear and the risk of things going wrong, research was conducted into the use of developmental mentoring as part of a doctoral project and the higher education academy pathfinders project. an outcome of both of these pieces of research was the development of a new role within the university – that of blended learning adviser – who can mentor and support staff in any aspects of blended learning including the use of e-pdp and pebblepad. the blended learning advisers will not directly work with students but will support tutors to support students. this is deemed very important so that the capabilities are gained and owned by the member of staff within their discipline context. over the last year there are more cases of students using the system for pdp without tutor prompts or support. from discussions with students they say that they are using peers and external social networks, such as family and friends, to offer support, share their work with and give formative feedback. as the e-portfolio system does not record individual statistics, it is impossible to see where the system is being used or how many students are engaging in e-pdp as a self-directed activity. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 8 lawton and purnell 1, 2, 3 – a journey of pdp at the university of wolverhampton over the years within the university, the terms e-portfolio and pdp have become interchangeable; now it would be difficult to find and extract the process without reference to the tool. an unintended outcome of this has been the development of pedagogy that is informing the wider he sector both in the uk and overseas. in 2010, the university gained international recognition for this work by gaining the platinum learning impact award. the research conducted on e-pdp – including the internal evaluation, the incepr project and the doctoral project, all aspects that were brought together as part of the ntfs narn project – provided a substantial amount of evidence for the award submission. the learning impact awards (lias) recognise use of technology to improve learning across all industry segments and in all regions of the world. staff from the university of wolverhampton teamed up with pebble learning, the company behind the e-portfolio tool pebblepad, to present a submission entitled ‘pebblepad: from project, to pilot, to personalised learning for all’. one of the five impact areas identified in the award was that of wider impact. further details of these can be found at www.tinyurl.com/uow-widerimpact. conclusion what have we learnt? the pdp objectives set in the institutional framework in 2003 are still relevant to current practice. however, there have been significant changes to the delivery of pdp with the introduction of pebblepad software. this has had an impact on pedagogic practice and educational development at the university. pdp has become linked with the implementation and use of an e-portfolio system. it is important not to assume that pdp processes are easy to do, for either staff or student. an institutional driver, such as the university of wolverhampton’s blended learning strategy (2008) can give direction to and encourage engagement with pdp – although both staff and students need to see the inherent value and benefit of the process, rather than seeing it simply as an ‘add-on’. where pdp may have been on the periphery in the past, the curriculum refocus project has meant all courses could be looked at holistically and without having to refer to past discipline narratives. pdp has been able to be contextualised within new course structures and into content with relevant activities at different levels. the journey we are on has created new opportunities for pedagogic development within different discipline contexts supported by new models for educational development. when pdp is designed for and supported within a particular frame of reference, whether a shared journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 9 http://www.tinyurl.com/uow-wider-impact http://www.tinyurl.com/uow-wider-impact lawton and purnell 1, 2, 3 – a journey of pdp at the university of wolverhampton discipline, community or similar, the meaning and benefit to engagement becomes clearer to those within the context. one size does not fit all. acknowledgement this paper is an outcome of the national action research network on researching and evaluating personal development planning and e-portfolio practice project (2007-2010). the project was led by the university of bolton in association with the university of worcester and centre for recording achievement, and in national collaboration with the university of bedfordshire, bournemouth university and university of bradford. the project was funded by the higher education academy, national teaching fellowship project strand. more details about the project can be found at: http://www.recordingachievement.org/research/narn-tree.html. references burgess, r. (2007) beyond the honours classification. london: universities uk. available at: http://www.universitiesuk.ac.uk/publications/documents/burgess_final.pdf (accessed: 10 july 2010). challen, r., lawton, m., penfold, b. and purnell, e. (2009) what are the facilitating and inhibiting factors in building capability and capacity in staff to support the use of an eportfolio across the wider university? available at: http://ncepr.org/finalreports/cohort4/university%20of%20wolverhampton%20final% 20report.pdf (accessed: 10 july 2010). lawton, m. and felce, a. (2008) ‘personal development planning (pdp) using e-portfolio for cpd’, international conference in building education and research – bear 2008. kandalama, sri lanka 10-15 february. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 10 http://www.recordingachievement.org/research/narn-tree.html http://www.universitiesuk.ac.uk/publications/documents/burgess_final.pdf http://ncepr.org/finalreports/cohort4/university%20of%20wolverhampton%20final%20report.pdf http://ncepr.org/finalreports/cohort4/university%20of%20wolverhampton%20final%20report.pdf lawton and purnell 1, 2, 3 – a journey of pdp at the university of wolverhampton lawton, m. and purnell, e. (2009) an evaluation of the impact of pedagogic processes for personal development planning (pdp) and e-portfolio development at the university of wolverhampton. available at: http://www.wlv.ac.uk/default.aspx?page=18495 (accessed: 16 october 2010). lawton, m. and purnell, e. (2010) ‘a little and often: unanticipated outcomes from an eportfolio evaluation impacting on early identification of risk and non submission of work’, the journal of learning development in higher education, 2 [online] available at: http://www.aldinhe.ac.uk/ojs/index.php?journal=jldhe&page=article&op=view&path %5b%5d=42&path%5b%5d=43 (accessed: 30 may 2010). qaa (2009) personal development planning: guidance for institutional policy and practice in higher education. available at: http://www.qaa.ac.uk/academicinfrastructure/progressfiles/guidelines/pdp/pdpgui de.pdf (accessed: 24 july 2010). university of wolverhampton (2008) university of wolverhampton blended learning strategy. available at: http://www.wlv.ac.uk/blu (accessed: 16 february 2010). winter, r. (2003) ‘contextualizing the patchwork text: addressing problems of coursework assessment in higher education’, innovations in education and teaching international, 40(2), pp. 112-122. author details megan lawton is principal lecturer at the institute for learning enhancement at the university of wolverhampton. megan has presented on staff development, pedagogy and institutional implementation relating to the use of an e-portfolio system, both nationally and internationally, and is currently institutional lead for the jisc digitally enhancement patchwork text assessment (depta) project. she is also leading the university's initiative relating to graduate attributes. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 11 https://taw.bournemouth.ac.uk/owa/redir.aspx?c=c2d2abe2d58e40ad9c154ab0c1f00a99&url=http%3a%2f%2fwww.wlv.ac.uk%2fdefault.aspx%3fpage%3d18495 http://www.aldinhe.ac.uk/ojs/index.php?journal=jldhe&page=article&op=view&path%5b%5d=42&path%5b%5d=43 http://www.aldinhe.ac.uk/ojs/index.php?journal=jldhe&page=article&op=view&path%5b%5d=42&path%5b%5d=43 http://www.qaa.ac.uk/academicinfrastructure/progressfiles/guidelines/pdp/pdpguide.pdf http://www.qaa.ac.uk/academicinfrastructure/progressfiles/guidelines/pdp/pdpguide.pdf http://www.wlv.ac.uk/blu lawton and purnell 1, 2, 3 – a journey of pdp at the university of wolverhampton emma purnell is a blended learning advisor in the institute for learning enhancement at the university of wolverhampton. emma has presented on e-portfolio pedagogy and the learner experience both nationally and internationally. she is currently involved in two jisc e-portfolio projects related to work-based learning. her work is featured in the jisc 'effective practice with e-portfolios' booklet and the jisc eportfolio info kit. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 12 1, 2, 3 – a journey of pdp at the university of wolverhampton abstract this paper is a synthesis of the findings of three research projects to identify personal development planning (pdp) progress at the university of wolverhampton. the three projects look at pdp from a number of perspectives. firstly, a university-wide e-portfolio evaluation that explored e-portfolio practice through the measure of pdp objectives evident in practice – the objectives used within this provide the structure for the discussion within this paper. secondly, the paper is informed by the inter/national coalition for eportfolio research incepr) project, which involved looking at the facilitating and inhibiting factors affecting the scalability and sustainability of e-portfolio and e-portfolio based pdp across the institution. finally, a doctoral research project that looked at factors that contribute to engagement with pdp. aspects of three of these pieces of research were pulled together as part of the higher education academy/national teaching fellowship scheme national action research network on researching and evaluating personal development planning and eportfolio practice project (the ntfs narn project). institutional context pdp should be a formative student-centred process pdp to provide a product that documented a student's achievement and experience at the university pdp to be integrated throughout the whole of the student experience at the university pdp to be developmental pdp to be used by students with tutor guidance unintended outcomes conclusion acknowledgement references author details literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 4: march 2012 reducing academic isolation in favour of learning relationships through a virtual classroom dr michael goldrick national college of ireland, ireland dr james o’higgins norman dublin city university, ireland abstract due to geographical distances and sporadic contact with peers and faculty members, many off-campus or distance learners experience feelings of inadequacy, reduced selfconfidence and other social anxieties. as a means to reduce and avoid these consequences of academic isolation, higher education institutes have traditionally used asynchronous forms of communication in order to bridge these geographical gaps. however, due to advances in technology it is now possible to offer distance learners the opportunity to communicate synchronously with their peers and their teachers, as they would in a real classroom. in accordance with these developments, this research examines the development of a virtual learning support service in national college of ireland. using survey results, online student feedback and semester results, this research will present how the problem of academic isolation was reduced in national college of ireland by incorporating the use of a virtual classroom. presenting screen shots and a review of online teaching, the research will illustrate how a learning support service can become more flexible and student centred. keywords: academic isolation; virtual classrooms; student-centred; learning support. goldrick and o’higgins norman reducing academic isolation introduction although much of ‘the idea of a university’ put forward by newman in the 19th century has been set aside and even deemed irrelevant to the context of higher education today (roberts, 1990; reddings, 1996), others have argued for a renewed and more balanced analysis of newman’s ideas as an antidote to a sometimes overly mechanistic view of higher education today (macintyre, 2009). newman (1909, p.74) himself warned that an: academical system without the personal influence of teachers upon pupils, is an arctic system; it will create an ice-bound, petrified, cast-iron university, and nothing else. core to newman’s idea was his assumption that higher education should be experienced as a community in which students were supported to learn a number of disciplines in an integrated fashion. for newman, education was not merely about learning but also about a concern and care for the person. if we allow a modicum of acceptance of these ideas today we are faced with a significant challenge, particularly when we consider the thousands of students who are increasingly registering on part time or distance programmes of study. while the idea of the university as a warm and caring environment in which students thrive may be somewhat achievable when both lecturers and students are on campus together, it is far more likely that distance and part-time students will experience social and academic isolation due to the nature of their programmes of study. social and academic isolation has been shown to be detrimental for the learning process, ultimately hindering the socialisation process within education (ryan and glenn, 2004), or what lee and chan (2007) call the acculturation into institutional life. this lost opportunity can often lead off-campus students or distance learners to use their time ineffectively and can ultimately induce feelings of inadequacy, reduced self-confidence and other social anxieties (rowntree, 1992; smyth, 2005; wood, 1995). the problem of social and academic isolation can be considerably accentuated when learners are located off campus and are engaged in distance and blended learning. as a means to reduce and avoid the consequences of isolation for distance learners, higher education institutions have continually aimed to bridge geographical gaps using technology (harper et al., 2000; collis and moonen, 2001). arising from our concern to journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 2 goldrick and o’higgins norman reducing academic isolation increase connectivity, this paper reports on how we used an action research approach in order to overcome the problem of social and academic isolation (becker and watts, 2006) in national college of ireland. utilising screen-shots and a review of recorded sessions, we will demonstrate how a virtual classroom (wiziq, 2010) was utilised to offer individual support and workshop support to first year undergraduate distance learners. to begin, we will present the theoretical approach taken to the research and the context in which the research took place. following this, a review of current synchronous and asynchronous strategies to reduce academic isolation will be offered. from here, we will present our own search for a virtual class that matched our program objectives (myers et al., 2004). presenting then the initial trial of a virtual learning support service, we will describe how qualitative and quantitative methods were used to evaluate the initiative and will provide some insight into our findings and experiences. theoretical framework in so far as our intention was to address an identified problem, academic isolation for distance learners within a specific educational context, it was clear to us that our research could be classified as an action research project (carl and kemmis, 1986; stenhouse, 1975; lewin, 1946). context the research was carried out in national college of ireland from late 2008 to 2010, when feedback about the learning support service highlighted that distance learning students felt isolated from their peers, faculty and support staff. feedback was gathered by way of an online survey to which 44 out of 112 students responded. students had been specifically asked to comment on their experience of learning support. results from the survey indicated that 87% of students were satisfied with both the content and delivery of support workshops. however, additional comments from respondents raised particular issues in relation to geographic isolation and infrequency of contact with staff at the main campus: journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 3 goldrick and o’higgins norman reducing academic isolation maybe specific workshops course related? part time courses (day released in my case) can feel quite fast paced and extra support would be appreciated. (nci student, 2009) not at this time, but one to one support next term does seem appealing. (nci student, 2009) we are out in tallaght and at times feel at bit out of the college but i don’t have any suggestions as how this could be overcome. (nci student, 2009) from these comments, the learning support service identified an established theme of academic isolation (becker and watts, 2006) and a need to adapt our existing on-campus service to be more supportive and flexible in order to meet the needs of distance learners. having then a purpose to utilise technology in order to meet the wider needs of students, we began exploring possible avenues for virtual support. reviewing current strategies to reduce academic isolation taking a collaborative and student-centred approach (brooks, 2003; hardy et al., 2009) to this exploration, we felt it necessary to firstly review the types of online supports that were available to students and to consider how these services could be expanded. to do this, it was important to consider the types of supports that institutes can presently utilise, namely asynchronous and synchronous communication. asynchronous communication as an established form of education, distance learning can be traced back to the late 18th century, when caleb phillips began offering home study courses on how to learn shorthand through the boston gazette (holmberg, 2005). this asynchronous delivery of materials would become the basis for subsequent distance learning courses and was first embraced by the university of london (2009), who began offering distance learning degrees as early as 1858. these mail-based mechanisms are still an intricate part of many distance learning programmes today, allowing learners to receive hard copies of text and other materials mirroring those provided to on-campus students. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 4 goldrick and o’higgins norman reducing academic isolation building on this initial structure, the role of technology has further increased the levels of asynchronous communication that can occur between students and colleges. most notable of these advancements has been the use of e-mail, moodle, audio cassettes, videos and most recently web-based courses, which allow multiple users to work at their own pace and contribute to online forums and discussions at staggered intervals (fusco and ketcham, 2002). in national college of ireland, asynchronous learning support was delivered through e-mail communication, the postage of support materials and downloadable presentations through the student intranet. through these communicative tools, one can argue that distance learners were receiving a considerable amount of learning support which equated, in quantity at least, to that of their on-campus full time counterparts. shearer (2003) claims that distance and off-campus learning is just as complex as face-toface interaction and suggests that educators should be concerned with how best to engage students studying through distance learning. essentially, shearer (2003) considered whether educators can really relate to students through asynchronous communication alone. barnes (1995) does not think so, highlighting that asynchronous tools do not capture non-verbal communications, the posture, sense of attention and perhaps most importantly the ‘light bulb’ effect, which identifies the grasp of an idea. similarly, power (1990) concludes that it is through the spoken word and synchronous discourse that content is personalised, through subtle nuances and emphasis. from a constructivist perspective, this synchronous communication (fusco and ketcham, 2002) is perhaps the most valuable tool an educator can possess and one which is even more important when trying to scaffold a person’s understanding of their learning potential or learning difference. synchronous communication bearing in mind the critiques of barnes (1995) and power (1990), it is possible to create three prerequisites for effective synchronous communication for distance learners: 1. students can see each other and the tutor in real time. 2. students can hear, or read instructions from the tutor in real time. 3. the relational dynamics of interpersonal synchronous learning can be used to motivate students. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 5 goldrick and o’higgins norman reducing academic isolation these prerequisites are not, however, easily accomplished with distance learners in a virtual learning environment and as such the conceptual boundaries of educational technology are continuously being expanded. it is not surprising that many of the educational technologies available today were first imagined by science fiction writers such as forster (1909). predating the invention of asynchronous e-mail (what he calls pneumatic post) and synchronous videoconferencing, forster (1909) introduced the immediate benefits and potential danger of over relying on technology, such as the replacing of clinical judgement with computer-based systems (campbell et al., 2007). other forms of synchronous communication that are available in higher education include instant messaging systems and videoconferencing (fusco and ketcham, 2002), which has evolved as a result of computer systems (bitzer et al., 1965), teletext/videotext (muter, et al., 1980) and the internet (abbate, 2000). yet whilst phone, facsimile and internet usage became popular across all sectors of education in the twentieth century, the cost and quality of early videoconferencing packages seemed to hinder their incorporation into distance education (smyth, 2005). in more recent years, these initial difficulties have seemed to be adequately dealt with through broadband technology which, being faster and cheaper, has allowed universities and schools to more fully explore the benefits of using videoconferencing as a means to decrease isolation and create the relational dynamics (bates, 1997) similar to those experienced by teachers and students on campus. much like forster’s (1909) vision, the videoconferencing system has been most commonly used to connect main campus centres with more remote centres, as well as to facilitate virtual or electronic field trips (newman et al., 2008). despite, however, the benefits of such systems, the cost of installation and maintaining the needed hardware and software as well as a degree of unreliability with broadband led us to continue our search for a more economically viable way to create a virtual support service. to aid the development of our initiative we adopted a methodology similar to myers et al.’s (2004, p.124) in order to identify six program objectives that would help guide our eventual decision: 1. the program should not require complicated downloads or operations. 2. students could have the option of seeing the tutor. 3. students could talk to the tutor. 4. students could message the tutor. 5. materials could be presented and corrected online. 6. online classes could be recorded and used for revision. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 6 goldrick and o’higgins norman reducing academic isolation using these criteria, several programmes for virtual classrooms were identified – wiziq (www.wiziq.com); dimdim (http://www.dimdim.com/); and elluminate (http://www.elluminate.com/). not to be confused with a learning management system, or a virtual learning environment such as moodle (http://moodle.com/) or blackboard (http://www.blackboard.com), a virtual classroom is used to facilitate live interaction between peers and/or tutors, who can collaborate as they would in a live classroom (fusco and ketcham, 2002; roxanne hiltz, 2006). this specific interaction is achieved through text, speech and visual communication which can, depending on the provider, be recorded for wider distribution or revision. as a way to help us choose between wiziq, dimdim and elluminate, we firstly compared each classroom using the following screening criteria: 1. is there a download necessary? 2. is there a virtual whiteboard? 3. can sessions be recorded? 4. is the tool free to use? based on these four key areas, we believed that wiziq was the strongest of the three models as it did not require a download, it had a virtual whiteboard, sessions could be recorded and it was free to use. table 1. comparison of virtual classrooms. classroom download necessary virtual whiteboard recording of sessions free wiziq no yes yes yes dimdim yes yes no yes elluminate yes yes yes no to supplement our initial findings, we later participated in an online moodle discussion which debated the strengths of the three virtual classrooms (gates, 2008). in light of our insights gleaned from these discussions, we chose to test the virtual classroom wiziq, as it had received the most positive replies with regard to moodle integration, its low cost and ease of use. building on this moodle evaluation, we sought the help of a critical friend in university college dublin who helped to acceptance test (myers et al., 2004) the journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 7 http://www.wiziq.com/ http://www.dimdim.com/ http://www.elluminate.com/ http://moodle.com/ http://www.blackboard.com/ goldrick and o’higgins norman reducing academic isolation classroom in terms of accessibility and quality. as part of this testing, the following areas were discussed: question 1: is the layout easy to understand? question 2: how is the sound and picture? are you experiencing any delays? question 3: would you find it helpful to have virtual lectures? question 4: are there any features that you think are missing or that you would like? from this process, we established that wiziq was easy to use and could be a real alternative to a live teaching environment. however, beyond the technology element, this initial discussion also allowed us to consider whether there were any pedagogic differences between an online and live teacher or tutor. the online tutor agreeing with mcmann (1994), gerrard (2002; 2005) claims that face-to-face teaching and online teaching have many similar traits. gerrard (2002; 2005) does however make the point that there remains a significant set of differences which should not be ignored or avoided. in particular, gerrard (2002; 2005) and mcpherson and nunes (2004) argue that online learning generates multiple discourses and multiple starting points for individual students and argue that an online tutor must be prepared to work collaboratively with students, scaffolding their knowledge appropriately and non-linearly. this is perhaps the most interesting facet of online teaching, where teacher-centred pedagogy is not only unfashionable but is plainly ineffective as students need to be stimulated and guided using appropriate learning strategies. to help with this development of student-centred teaching, we looked to the works of gagne (1985) and illeris (2001; 2003; 2006). using gagne’s first event of instruction, we began to think about how we could induce interest in each learning support workshop, through introducing humour, a provocative opening statement, or asking an intriguing question. from here, it could be then possible to induce a self-directed or collaborative form of problem solving (problem-based learning) (de graaff and kolmos, 2007), where the online tutor could facilitate a journey of active learning. through this experimental process, we believed that we in some small way had begun to create what illeris (2001; 2003) described as a unified concept of learning and teaching. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 8 goldrick and o’higgins norman reducing academic isolation piloting the virtual learning support service as a first step in this pilot, two first-year undergraduate courses, (higher cert a and higher cert b) were identified as needing additional learning support in the areas of exam preparation and assignment writing. the decision to use on-campus groups for the initial pilot was taken as a precautionary measure, as any technical or user-related difficulties could be followed up by a live alternate class. meeting the groups separately with their lecturer, thirty eight students were introduced to the idea of virtual support (group workshops and individual sessions) and provided with a sign-up sheet if they wished to participate. from these sign-up sheets, twenty four students identified as wanting to take part in the pilot and were given instructions on how to set up an online account needed to participate. in order to control participation in the pilot a decision was made to exclude wiziq from the wider moodle environment thus ensuring that only those students who were part of the pilot could participate. this precautionary isolation offered the benefits of a later dissemination and further championing if the pilot proved to be successful or, if unsuccessful, would avoid technology contamination within both faculty and students. in terms of providing equitable supports to all students on the higher cert a and higher cert b courses, supplementary live sessions were made available for those students who did not wish to participate in the online sessions. having earlier tested the program successfully from a technical and navigation perspective, the virtual learning support service was piloted in mid-december 2009, when we began offering virtual workshops and virtual individual support sessions using wiziq. virtual workshops for organisational behaviour and business communications learning support workshops allow tutors to present learning strategies and technologies to small or large groups of students in national college of ireland. these workshops generally relate to core academic skills such as learning styles, study skills, presentation skills, academic writing, and exam revision. in this particular case, the tutor was attempting to reinforce exam skills by catering workshops around a specific theme or subject. this was achieved using slides provided to the support tutor by the course lecturer (hurley, 2009a; hurley, 2009b). journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 9 goldrick and o’higgins norman reducing academic isolation these sessions catered for twenty-two full-time students who signed up for group support (three traditional sessions, mirrored by three virtual). for continuous assessments, two workshops were created that married lecture material and sample questions from the lecturer. both of these workshops incorporated an in-class mock examination using a simplified voting system of hand raising or letter calling to signal their choice of answer. this method sought to infuse a ‘gaming culture’ within the tutorial, a method becoming increasingly popular as a format to increase attention and aid recall (dror, 2008). figure 1. screenshot of online exam. using this method, a question with three possible answers was firstly posed to the group. following this, each attendant in both live and virtual sessions were then asked to raise their hand, call out, or type a, b, c (in a virtual setting), for whichever option they felt was the correct answer. correct answers were then presented and followed by a virtual applause using powerpoint sounds, which in many cases added an element of fun and a ‘game show’ type construction to the support session. the final two workshops (one live and one virtual) focused on how to plan and write out exam answers effectively, offering example introductions, paragraph building advice and time-keeping techniques. for any student who could not attend either live or virtual sessions, a pre-recorded version of the class was sent to their e-mail accounts. these recordings were also e-mailed to part-time students who could not attend live or virtual support lectures due to work commitments. it is important to note, however, that the journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 10 goldrick and o’higgins norman reducing academic isolation recording facility motivated many full-time and part-time students to directly request a link to a pre-recorded version of tutorials, which were then used in connection with traditional sessions. this is perhaps evidence that virtual classrooms are not only useful for reducing academic isolation but can be used to increase student convenience (picciano, 2006). quantitative effect of support tutorials in order to examine the effect of the learning support service’s blended intervention, we firstly used the group’s semester one results as a baseline of performance (wiezel, 1998; kaufman et al., 2000; zywno, 2002). bearing in mind that the pre-intervention group average was 42%, the post-intervention scores of 56% indicate an overall improvement in semester two of 14%, within both the continuous assessments and exam results. this improvement is gathered from the scores of the twenty-two students who utilised three exam revision workshops in semester two (either live, virtual or both versions). in order to critically assess whether this improvement was due to the impact of the service or merely through chance, we chose to use a chi-square, non-parametric test (greenwood and nikulin, 1996), to examine pre-intervention pass rates and post intervention pass rates. the result of this particular chi-square test (lambert, 2009) as seen below (11.45833333, where the rate of probability was calculated at 10%) offers a statistically successful acceptance of the idea that learning support workshops can positively affect exam performance. figure 2. chi square. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 11 goldrick and o’higgins norman reducing academic isolation furthermore, whilst it cannot be claimed that such a significant result was solely due to the virtual/live intervention, it can be argued that the consistency of improved scores indicates that those students who attended both the live and/or virtual sessions received the same quality of support. what has perhaps been a testament to this theory, are the consistent requests from students who have asked for a link to a virtual session when work or illness prevented their attendance. virtual individual support for business communications individual support sessions allow tutors to reinforce support materials and strategies with a single student, giving them the opportunity to ask questions and develop their own understandings. this was an important next step in the research cycle as it allowed us to explore whether wiziq would be a suitable tool to replicate live individual support sessions. in this particular case (semester two of 2009), we attempted to reinforce elements of critical thinking and exam revision with a student who was studying for a business communications exam (the student had previously signed a declaration of consent regarding the wiziq trial). having missed the relevant lecture (assertiveness and influence), the student in question had made an attempt to study from home but had encountered difficulties in understanding the various topics. encountering then a situation where a face-to-face meeting with the student would not be possible (as he remained absent from college), we offered the student the opportunity to engage with the support service online. this session was broken up into two sections: 1. a review of the in-class lecture slides. 2. a set of sample exam questions. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 12 goldrick and o’higgins norman reducing academic isolation a review of the in-class lecture slides the first stage of this process worked very well where, after some initial voice delay, the experience of the virtual environment proved to be both novel and plainly advantageous for the student who could not come to campus. adapting well to the interaction process, the student felt comfortable in asking questions throughout the presentation phase and was receptive to both encouragement and self-evaluation. figure 3. screenshot of virtual class. as can be seen above in figure 3, the content of the lecture slides focused around a number of contemporary communication theories that the students were expected to both know and understand. with this task in mind, the student agreed to explore the differences between aggressive and assertive behaviour, in a mock exam scenario which would determine his own understanding of the presented material. after going through the powerpoint presentation, the student and tutor began to formulate example exam questions based on the information at hand. as the test itself was scheduled as a ca (continuous assessment) class test (worth 25%), the potential questions asked would require concise answers. one example of these questions was: mike: what are the four components of assertiveness? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 13 goldrick and o’higgins norman reducing academic isolation in attempting to answer this question, the student had some trouble in organising the material into his own words effectively, which in turn required the student and tutor to talk about assertiveness as a concept: mike: alright liam (pseudo name), let’s think about this for a moment. what does it mean to be assertive? [pause] i think being assertive means being honest with a person about what you want, without being aggressive or ignoring another person’s own desire. through this dyadic, the student began to internally process the concept of assertive behaviour in a professional context and ultimately began to form his own understanding of the material. in order to test this understanding, the student was then asked to write out his answer to the following question as he would in a real exam situation: mike: give a scenario of an aggressive, passive and assertive response in a person? in the next screenshot this very process can be seen, where both the student and tutor utilised the communal whiteboard: figure 4. screenshot of online interaction. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 14 goldrick and o’higgins norman reducing academic isolation taking the writing controls, the student then wrote out what he believed to be an aggressive, passive and assertive response: student: an aggressive example would be, john tell mary to “go away after she starts complaining about her today problems”. passive response: “john would listening to mary harp on all day about her little problems and not say anything”. assertive response: “john would say to mary, that he feels awfully worried for her problems but can’t talk about them now but maybe will talk them over with her later”. as can be seen from figure 4, the whiteboard area is a vital component of the virtual classroom’s unique benefit, where the tutor and student can potentially use the same space to both pose questions and construct answers in real time. continuing with this, the next question the tutor asked the student was in relation to the four components of assertiveness. in this particular example, the student had some difficulty in organising the question into a concise answer and felt that the required statements were hard to recall: student: the last one is kind of hard isn’t it? having explained to him that in a short-question based exam the need for short and accurate sentences was vital for high marks, the tutor instructed the student to practise this style of answering on his own and to get comfortable with composing short answers without the aid of the presentation slides. shortly after this, the student was thanked for attending the virtual class and a follow-up appointment in college was scheduled. the feedback from this student about his virtual session was very positive and addressed some operational and accessibility concerns that the program might bear: student: yeah it is helpful, yeah, it’s pretty good, i enjoy it. as an added feedback measure, the wiziq program allows students to rate their experience from 1-5 and also allows a text box area for qualitative comments. this journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 15 goldrick and o’higgins norman reducing academic isolation particular student’s feedback page can be seen below (for security reasons, we have blanked out the student’s name). figure 5. feedback from virtual support. when provided in a constructive manner, this feedback device can help online teachers with the further development of pedagogy, clarity of presentation, pacing, or indeed the tweaking of any materials used in a session (fry, 2009). similarly, we feel that this type of feedback would be equally useful for peer review in any teacher training environment or blended learning context. beyond these qualitative measures, we felt it important to reflect upon the wider effectiveness of the program itself. to do this, we again adopted a quantitative methodology similar to wiezel (1998), kaufman et al. (2000) and zywno (2002), who suggests that previous results can be used as a benchmark or predictor of future academic performance. in order to carry out this level of analysis, the students’ ca scores for the communications course were collected (from the lecturer) and compared with the average mark of the higher cert a class. this comparison illustrates that the student’s individual result of 54.00% was marginally lower than that of the overall class average of 58.50%. based on this, it could be argued that the virtual workshop, as the only form of support, provided the student with enough structure and guidance to help him reach a grade that was just short of the average class score. however, we cannot be certain that the student would not have achieved this score without extra support, only that his reaction to the technology was positive. the student’s progress was further evaluated during the end of year exams in communications, where availing of three traditional and two virtual support sessions, he journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 16 goldrick and o’higgins norman reducing academic isolation achieved a module grade of 45.5%, which was an increase of 5% from his semester one result of 40.50%. these individual results however, were lower than the module class average of 56% which indicates that further support strategies should be explored as a way to help each student to maximise their own potential. also, when considering the role of virtual support for both on-campus and distance learners, it is crucial to question not only the benefits of increased convenience (picciano, 2006), but consider the role of introversion and extroversion in the development of learning relationships. is it possible, as palloff and pratt (2007) suggest, that an introverted student will be more attracted to online meetings where social pressures that exist in live scenarios are reduced? if so, we must be careful to create online relations that fully support introverted students, yet simultaneously provide an online experience that does not hinder the development of students who are more comfortable with face-to-face relations. establishing the virtual learning support service in light of these initial experiences of virtual learning support, we believed that wiziq could reduce academic isolation and facilitate the development of meaningful online learning relationships. based on this belief, the next phase of our research was to more broadly offer virtual support to the whole community in national college of ireland. this was accomplished in 2010 when we launched the virtual learning support service, providing all national college ireland students with the opportunity to engage with their peers and support staff both in a live and online environment. since its establishment, the virtual learning support service has been identified as an example of innovation and good practice at trinity college dublin (doyle, 2010) and has been presented both nationally and internationally. through this dissemination, we have identified new challenges to online support for distance learners. more specifically, our new research in this area will focus on how to improve the online learning experience for distance learning students with sensory disabilities. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 17 goldrick and o’higgins norman reducing academic isolation conclusion this paper has documented the construction of a virtual learning support service that overcomes geographical parameters and provides a practical service that can be accessed both on and off-campus. furthermore, our initiative has shown how using an action research approach can be used to identify and address problems within the specific context of higher education. finally, while many challenges still exist in terms of how to address the pastoral dimensions of distance learning, the use of synchronous virtual classrooms has been shown here to go some way towards providing the relational dynamics frequently present among staff and students in on-campus classrooms and as such can be seen to enhance learner motivation in the achievement of learning outcomes. references abbate, j. (2000) inventing the internet. cambridge: mit press. barnes, j.m. (1995). ‘embodiment, hermeneutic, alterity, and background relations on the internet’, paper presented at the annual meeting of the american educational research association. san francisco, 18-22 april. bates, t. (1997) ‘the impact of technological change on open and distance learning’, distance education, 18(1), pp. 93-109. becker, s.r and watts, m.w. (2006) teaching economics: more alternatives to chalk and talk. cheltenham: edward elgar publishing. bitzer, d., lyman, e. and easley, j. (1965) the uses of plato: a computer controlled teaching system. urbana ill., coordinated science laboratory, university of illinois, report r-268. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 18 goldrick and o’higgins norman reducing academic isolation brooks, l. (2003) ‘how the attitudes of instructors, students, course administrators and course designers affects the quality of an online learning environment’, online journal of distance learning administration, 6(4). available at: http://www.westga.edu/~distance/ojdla/winter64/brooks64.htm (accessed: 10 april 2009). campbell, e.m., sittig, d.f., guappone, k.p., dykstra, r.h. and ash, j.s. (2007) ‘overdependence on technology: an unintended adverse consequence of computerized provider order entry’, american medical informatics association: annual symposium proceedings. chicago, illinois, usa10-14 november. curran associates inc., pp. 94-98. carl, w. and kemmis, s. (1986) becoming critical: education, knowledge and action research. basingstoke: falmer press. collis, b. and moonen, j. (2001) flexible learning in a digital world. london: kogan page. de graaff, e., & kolmos, a. (2007). history of problem-based and project-based learning. in e. de graaff & a. kolmos (eds.), management of change: implementation of problem based and project-based learning in engineering (pp. 1-8). rotterdam: sense publishers. doyle, a. (2010) disability service 10th anniversary symposium: a review of academic support services. planning for the future. dublin: trinity college dublin. dror, i.e. (2008) ‘technology enhanced learning: the good, the bad, and the ugly’, pragmatics and cognition, 16(2), pp. 215-223. forster, e.m. (1909) the machine stops. oxford and cambridge review. available at: http://manybooks.net/titles/forstereother07machine_stops.html (accessed: 18 march 2012). fry, h. (2009) a handbook for teaching and learning in higher education: enhancing academic practice. 3rd edn. new york: routledge. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 19 http://www.westga.edu/%7edistance/ojdla/winter64/brooks64.htm http://manybooks.net/titles/forstereother07machine_stops.html goldrick and o’higgins norman reducing academic isolation fusco, m. and ketcham, s.e. (2002) distance learning for higher education: an annotated bibliography. greenwood village, co: libraries unlimited co. gagne, r. (1985) the conditions of learning. 4th edn. new york: holt, rinehart and winston. gates, k. (2008) elluminate vs. dimdim vs. wiziq vs. adobe acrobat connect. available at: http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=93340 (accessed: 8 may 2009). gerrard, c. (2002) 'promoting best practice for e-tutoring through staff development', proceedings of networked learning 2002: third international conference. lancaster university and university of sheffield 26-28 march. gerrard, c. (2005) ‘realising the full potential of e-learning: the search for a staff development model to support the repurposing of existing learning materials for effective online learning at the university of paisley’, proceedings of the university of paisley research conference. university of paisley 1 december. greenwood, p.e. and nikulin, m.s. (1996) a guide to chi-squared testing. new york: wiley. hardy, j., haywood, d., haywood, j., bates, s., paterson, j., rhind, s. and macleod, h. (2009) ict & the student first year experience: a report from the lead project. available at: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/programmes/elearningpedagogy/leadfinalre port.pdf (accessed: 11 june 2009) harper, b., hedberg, j., bennett, s. and lockyer, l. (2000) review of research. the online experience: the state of australian on-line education and practices. south australia: australian national training authority. holmberg, b. (2005) the evolution, principles and practices of distance education. oldenburg, germany: bibliotheks-und informationssystem der universitat oldenburg. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 20 http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=93340 http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/programmes/elearningpedagogy/leadfinalreport.pdf http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/programmes/elearningpedagogy/leadfinalreport.pdf goldrick and o’higgins norman reducing academic isolation hurley, t. (2009a) assertiveness and influencing skills in the business environment .lecture notes. dublin: national college of ireland. hurley, t. (2009b) lecture two. dublin: national college of ireland. illeris, k. (2001) the three dimensions of learning. denmark: roskilde university press. illeris, k. (2003) ‘towards a contemporary and comprehensive theory of learning’, international journal of lifelong education, 22(4), pp. 411-421. illeris, k. (2006) ‘lifelong learning and the low-skilled’, international journal of lifelong education, 25(1), pp. 15-28. kaufman, d.b., felder, r.m. and fuller, h. (2000) ‘accounting for individual effort in cooperative learning teams’, journal of engineering education, 89(2), pp. 133-140. lambert, j. (2009) chi-square test. dublin: national college of ireland. lee, m.j.w. and chan, a. (2007) ‘reducing the effects of isolation and promoting inclusivity for distance learners through podcasting’, turkish online journal of distance education, 8(1), pp. 85104. lewin, k. (1946) 'action research and minority problems', in lewin, g.w. (ed) (1948) resolving social conflict. london: harper and row, pp. 201-216. macintyre, a. (2009) ‘the very idea of a university: aristotle, newman and us’, british journal of educational studies, 57(4), pp. 347-362. mcmann, g.w. (1994) ‘the changing role of moderation in computer mediated conferencing’, proceedings of the distance learning research conference. san antonio, tx, 27-29 april, pp.159-166. mcpherson, m. and nunes, m.b. (2004) the role of tutors as an integral part of online learning support. available at: journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 21 goldrick and o’higgins norman reducing academic isolation http://www.eurodl.org/materials/contrib/2004/maggie_msp.html (accessed: 12 january 2009). myers, g.j., badgett, t., thomas, t.m. and sandler, c. (2004) the art of software testing. new jersey: wiley and sons. muter, p., treurniet, w.c. and phillips, d. (1980) ‘computer-aided learning and videotex’, proceedings of the third canadian symposium on instructional technology. vancouver, canada 27 february. ottawa: national research council, pp. 319-325. newman, d.l., falco, j., silverman, s. and barbanell, p. (2008) videoconferencing technology in k-12 instruction: best practices and trends. london: information science reference. newman, h. (1909) historical sketches vol. iii. (revised 2002). london: longmans, green and co. palloff, r.m. and pratt, k. (2007) building online learning communities: effective strategies for the virtual classroom. 2nd edn of building learning communities in cyberspace. new jersey: wiley and sons. picciano, a.g. (2006) ‘online learning: implications for higher education pedagogy and policy’, journal of thought, 41(1), pp. 75-94. power, d.j. (1990) ‘the use of audio in distance education’, in timmers, s. (ed.) training needs in the use of media for distance education. singapore: asian mass communication research and information centre, pp.43-60. reddings, b. (1996) the university in ruins. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. roberts, j.m. (1990) ‘the idea of a university revisited’, in kerr, i. and hill, a.g. (eds.) newman after a hundred years. oxford: clarendon press. (pp 193-223) rowntree, d. (1992) exploring open and distance learning. london: kogan page. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 22 http://www.eurodl.org/materials/contrib/2004/maggie_msp.html goldrick and o’higgins norman reducing academic isolation roxanne hiltz, s. (2006) ‘the ‘virtual classroom’: using computer-mediated communication for university teaching’, journal of communication, 36(2), pp. 95104. ryan, m.p. and glenn, p.a. (2004) ‘what do first-year students need most: learning strategies instruction or academic socialization?, journal of college reading and learning, 34(2), pp. 4-28. shearer, l. (2003) interaction in distance education. special report 2(1). madison wi: distance educator.com and atwood. smyth, r. (2005) ‘broadband videoconferencing as a tool for learner-centred distance learning in higher education’, british journal of educational technology, 36(5), pp. 805-820. stenhouse, l. (1975) an introduction to curriculum research and development. london, heinemann. the university of london (2009) key facts. available at: http://www.londonexternal.ac.uk/about_us/facts.shtml accessed: 2 january 2010). wiezel, a. (1998) ‘measuring the success of virtual tutoring’, proceedings of frontiers in education '98, asu november 4-7 november, pp. 987-991. wood, h. (1995) designing study materials for distance students. occasional papers in distance learning, 17. [microfiche]. (eric document reproduction service no. ed 385 222). zywno, m.s. (2002) ‘instructional technology, learning styles and academic achievement’, proceedings of the 2002 american society for engineering education annual conference and exposition. montreal, canada 23-26 june. available at: http://dissertation.readinesstechnology.com/papers/2002-best-overall-paper-andpic-v-best-paper.pdf (accessed: 12 october 2009). journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 23 http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/119489218/issue http://www.londonexternal.ac.uk/about_us/facts.shtml http://dissertation.readinesstechnology.com/papers/2002-best-overall-paper-and-pic-v-best-paper.pdf http://dissertation.readinesstechnology.com/papers/2002-best-overall-paper-and-pic-v-best-paper.pdf goldrick and o’higgins norman reducing academic isolation dr. michael goldrick has an honours degree in psychology and a phd in education. he has worked in higher education for seven years and currently manages the learning support unit in national college of ireland. michael’s research interests include learning development, blended learning, bullying and collaborative learning. correspondence to: michael.goldrick@ncirl.ie dr. james o’higgins norman is a lecturer and researcher in education at dublin city university, ireland. he is the author of a number papers and books on bullying and pastoral care in education. his research interests include student support, bullying in schools and equality in education. correspondence to: james.ohigginsnorman@dcu.ie journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 24 mailto:michael.goldrick@ncirl.ie mailto:james.ohigginsnorman@dcu.ie reducing academic isolation in favour of learning relationships through a virtual classroom abstract introduction theoretical framework context reviewing current strategies to reduce academic isolation asynchronous communication synchronous communication the online tutor piloting the virtual learning support service virtual workshops for organisational behaviour and business communications quantitative effect of support tutorials virtual individual support for business communications a review of the in-class lecture slides establishing the virtual learning support service conclusion references literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 4: march 2012 engaging blended learning students: an evolving approach to engaging students through the vle steve hogg southampton solent university, uk andrew doig southampton solent university, uk abstract students taking part-time, distance or blended learning units who are also in employment face high commitment demands of work, life and family in addition to their study. they do not have time to face the additional challenge of making sense of difficult to access learning materials. these students are also often highly discerning and will talk with their feet – failing to complete units that don’t engage. at southampton solent university (ssu), we recognise the need to make online or blended units accessible and supportive. in order to engage students on these, we have developed a set of institutional standards for online course development that aim to make materials intuitive, easy to access, clearly introduced and well signposted. the standards also identify minimum levels of support and collaboration required in order for students to feel both engaged in and to gain maximum benefit from the learning processes. at the same time we have established a flexible delivery development and support team which collaborates with academic staff in course planning, writing and delivery. this team works with tutors to achieve the standards while aligning learning outcomes and assessment with online and blended learning activity. this paper was presented in draft form as an interactive workshop at the aldhe 2011 conference in belfast. keywords: online; distance; blended learning; engagement; students in employment; virtual learning environment; quality standards. hogg and doig engaging blended learning students the discerning adult learner as an institution, southampton solent university (ssu), like many other providers in the sector, is increasing provision of courses aimed at part-time, mature, often professional learners delivered through distance and blended learning. in regard to blended learning, according to macdonald (2008, p.2), ‘the term is commonly associated with the introduction of online media into a course or programme, while at the same time recognising that there is merit in retaining face-to-face contact and other traditional approaches to supporting students. it is also used where asynchronous media such as email, forums, blogs or wikis are deployed in conjunction with synchronous technologies, commonly text or audio’. blended learning at ssu is characterised by the balanced application of learning technology building on sound pedagogic practice with the purpose of enhancing the learning experience of the student and offering increased flexibility in how, when and where they study. the online aspects of this blended learning are enabled through the use of the university’s moodle-based virtual learning environment (vle). blended learning courses are not entirely new to the university. doig (2011) conducted a survey of academic staff delivering existing blended learning courses at ssu, from which some recurring characteristics of this new constituency of student were identified. these students: ● are in work. ● are in a variety of industries. ● have reached a ‘peak’ level in their profession and so require further qualification to move up or on. ● have a very specific first degree. ● often have young families. ● have limited available time. ● have not been in formal education for some time. he institutions are undoubtedly going to need to find effective ways of providing learning opportunities to adult learners meeting these characteristics. in 2008, bill rammell, then minister of state for higher education, speaking to the open university’s student’s journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 2 hogg and doig engaging blended learning students association conference said, ‘we're going to need to get many more mature people into higher education over the next decade...for most of the 171 higher education institutions in this country, the consequences of all that are going to be very challenging. they're going to have to enter what is, for most, very unfamiliar territory: dealing with older, possibly more demanding and certainly more discerning students’ (rammell, 2008, online). when presenting on their experience of running a masters-level degree via blended learning at ssu, patrick and newell (2009) shared an impactful quotation from one of their students, ‘one point about mycourse [the vle] is, that’s effectively our university, that’s our lives’. the vle is central to the learning experience of the blended and distance learner, and they will demand that the vle is put to effective use to enable their learning. one student on an ssu blended learning masters commented, ‘the needs and study patterns of mature students – and those who are distance learning – are, i would suggest, very different from traditional undergraduates. time is a precious commodity and therefore systems/portals etc. must be quick and easy to use’. the vle is central to the learning experience of the blended and distance learner, and it can be anticipated that they will demand that the vle is put to effective use to enable their learning. further, as universities strive to find new and more efficient income streams and to attract new learner constituencies it is likely that the balance between blended and distance learning will move more towards distance. this is already occurring at ssu, where we have seen demand for entirely distance provision increase against blended delivery because of students’ inability to take on the commitment of the face-to-face hours. as liu, (2008), points out distance learning, ‘is not bounded by space and time’, which suggests that it becomes more accessible for those who are limited in their availability to be in place at a fixed time. liu also suggests that in modern contexts, while it allows teaching to come out of the classroom, ‘distance learning also needs to use technology’. it is important to bear in mind that the application of this technology must keep at its heart the student experience. as one ssu blended learning student says, ‘because you aren’t on campus all the time, you have to have very clear information about what you are required to learn. you also have to have a very good environment where you can still communicate with your peers, so that the on campus environment is essentially replicated virtually’. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 3 hogg and doig engaging blended learning students this student’s words strike on one particular issue that impacts the student experience when institutions move towards increased distance learning as stated by croft et al. (2010, p.1), ‘the physical and temporal separation of tutor and student, and between students themselves, can lead to feelings of isolation’. with this in mind, it is imperative to strive to find ways to create a sense of community and a supportive environment through the online platform, moving towards communities of practice. wenger (1998) criticised established attitudes to learning: learning viewed as an individual process taking place in a structured traditional learning environment (classroom) that ignores the social aspect of learning that takes place in communities which he calls 'communities of practice'. for wenger, the social aspect is of critical importance in the whole learning process and his work is focused on highlighting the need for more emphasis to be placed on learning as social participation rather than an activity done in isolation. wenger's ideas if applied in online environments can provide opportunities for online networks to be created; these networks can be both formal, such as in the case of a moderated group discussion, or informal and non-moderated, created organically among participants. this effort to create networks is clearly appreciated by our students. two current distance learners at ssu have said, ‘there’s definitely camaraderie between all the different students on the course, and it sort of encourages people. everyone encourages each other’, and, ‘i’ve found it quite refreshing to think that you’re not this lone individual, you’ve actually got the resources not only of the university but of your cohort’. however, there are many challenges in making e-learning engaging and a true learning experience. this is reflected in the attrition rates commonly experienced in online distance courses. betts (2009, online) reflects the recent state of online attendance in the usa: ‘while online enrolments are predicted to increase, attrition still remains higher for online programs than on-campus programs. online attrition rates are often cited within the literature as 20% to 50%’. through consideration of these factors, we have been led to ask the questions: how do you create a learning experience within the vle that is every bit as good as attending a great lecture or seminar? how is engagement maintained while bringing the student to feel ‘i really learned something there’? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 4 hogg and doig engaging blended learning students a cycle of reflection and improvement towards better e-learning as a university lecturer it is a requirement nowadays to use the institutional vle to support undergraduate and postgraduate student learning. at ssu the students recognise the value and convenience of having materials available that they can access at any time. for example, one student commented on the online content from steve hogg’s unit on online media, ‘i can honestly say that without steve's tutorials that he has posted onto mycourse i would have never of [sic] worked out where to start’. conversely, it is our experience that when there are limited vle materials for a given unit students will not be slow to complain. recent blended learning course feedback has highlighted that students are very conscious when some units provide clearly structured study, while others have barely anything. one described the effect of this as, ‘it’s all just a little disjointed and annoying’. it is important for us to recognise the student voice and allow it, at least in part, to lead on the spread of the vle and its place in the student learning experience. however, it is still the case that the majority of materials contained within the institutional vle are powerpoint slides and text documents. it is used regularly and effectively as a notice board, and often with some level of forums and discussion threads. to go beyond this standard use of the vle takes commitment from the course developer, as well as some knowledge of how to make best use of the tools provided through the platform. a process of reflection and change for improvement greatly benefits the academic and concurrently the students in their experience of teaching and learning via the vle. the importance of reflection and its role in professional life has been highlighted by schön (1995). for schön, reflection-in-action is critical for the practitioner to develop their competency in their profession. placing reflection in the context of teaching practice, biggs (1999, p.6) says, ‘a reflection in a mirror is an exact replica of what is in front of it. reflection in professional practice, however, gives back not what it is, but what might be, an improvement on the original’. extending this reflection-in-action to use of the vle and other learning technologies, academics are presented with a great opportunity to enhance the student experience by making the best of both environments, the classroom and the online environment (garrison, 2001). steve hogg, while head of learning technologies at ssu, also teaches for the faculty of creative industries and society. his technical expertise is able to inform his teaching. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 5 hogg and doig engaging blended learning students however, it is also very much the case that through his teaching, steve has been able to develop his understanding of effective online and blended course delivery. his unit development and the development of his online teaching provision have benefited from a cycle of reflection that he now describes: as a tutor i have evolved my own unit in the vle. i have been constantly reviewing and improving over the past four years. a large part of this has been my evolving understanding of how to best use the moodle pages of our mycourse vle to best engage my students. this reflective and progressive development of e-learning materials and practice is commented on by almpanis et al. (2010), as most online tutors begin at a minimum requirements level of engagement, developing, through successive iterations towards more fully developed and engaging online learning resources. similarly, salmon (2011) presents her five stage model as a set of steps or levels that the online tutor (or ‘emoderator’) should aim to lead their students through, while acknowledging that ‘each stage calls for different e-moderating skills’ (p.32), and hence tutors will need to take time to gain the skills and be able to moderate to this level. again, from steve hogg: in the first iteration, i used moodle as seems first and most easily usable. the disadvantage was that i ended up with a great long list of resources running down my home page. another challenge was that moodle generates numbered boxes. a logical first approach was to have a box for each week in the semester, ending up with 12 boxes, each with its own list of items. a list of great materials for the students to find and explore is very useful when you are in the classroom to point them in the direction of the relevant item and explain, ‘what are we clicking on?’, but this may not work so well for students who either don’t turn up for class so often or don’t have so many scheduled classes. on reflection i wished to make things much more intuitive. in this concern for the intuitive comprehensibility of the online course content, steve would seem to be hoping to ‘scaffold’ his students’ introduction to their online learning in much journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 6 hogg and doig engaging blended learning students the way that salmon uses the term in her book on e-moderating (2011, p.33 initially and then later giving a whole chapter to techniques to scaffold students e-learning, pp.193197). at the next stage, i replaced the 12 week list with a box each for the big topics and a box for everything else; so down to three boxes but maintaining the same size list. following this, i discovered the moodle book format. adopting this lets me have a narrative voice in the vle, putting activities and resources into context. in the onscreen text, i can say why something is important and relevant. the book format has certainly had impact in the moodle user community. the open university’s extensive, and freely available, open learn resources are presented in the book format (or a version of it at least), its structure of indexed content pages allowing for presentation of extensive, textual, narrative content suited to the standalone nature of these resources. one moodle developer shares the following list of advantages of the book format: ‘chunk content, simplify delivery, ease of access, ease of editing’ (moore, 2011, online). steve continues: with further reflection, i realised that, as a teacher of online media, i wanted to use it to support my students’ learning. this came in the form of short video tutorials that i created using cheaply available screen recording software. this was a big success with the students and had several advantages: 1. as a substitute teaching for absent students. 2. as review materials for struggling students. 3. as preparation for students pushing ahead. what was interesting about the video tutorials was that i was putting myself into the learning object. it was acting as an extension of the classroom contact and i also felt that having a context and a narrative in the online material was important. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 7 hogg and doig engaging blended learning students further, the combination of the narrative text and video content means that students with different preferences or approaches to learning have equal learning experiences. the impact of video content on tutor presence in online materials has been noted by jones et al. (2008, online): ‘we evaluated student perceptions relating to the significance of producing an introductory video to introduce the instructor to students in both a fully online course and a hybrid course. from the results of this study, we concluded that introductory videos can help to establish the instructor’s teaching presence with the students, regardless of the method of delivery of the course’. steve concludes: the process described above has seen a consistent rise in levels of student satisfaction with my unit: ● 81.6% student unit evaluation survey 2008 ● 90.6% student unit evaluation survey 2009 ● 96.8% student unit evaluation survey 2010 it has also led to extremely positive student comments, such as: ‘the online tutorials have been priceless and i have recommended them to so many people who felt stuck like i did and they have had the same helpful effect every time so now even i am passing on knowledge i have learnt which is a great feeling’. the key to the process that steve describes above is that it is a developmental one that has achieved success through reflection over an extended period of time and experimentation in order to achieve best results. variations of this process are undergone by active and considerate academics and support staff across the university. examples of this are particularly found among staff taking the university’s postgraduate certificate in blended learning. one student of this course comments, ‘the reflection that is core to the activity of the pg cert allowed me to identify major elements of my online curriculum that i could revise and greatly improve through experimentation, evaluation and choices informed by theory’. similarly, in his work helping academic staff to develop online content for distance and blended learning courses, andrew doig observes that conscientious staff journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 8 hogg and doig engaging blended learning students are always eager to revisit and improve their online units with each successive iteration, rather than resting on their laurels of extant and returnable unit content. building a concept of high-quality course content in 2009, ssu was awarded funding from the higher education funding council for england (hefce) and created a strategic development fund to run across three years. under this funding and the strategic development programme (sdp) that resulted from it, ssu’s e-development centre successfully proposed the creation of a flexible delivery development and support team (fddst). the objective of this team is to bring together learning technologists, instructional and media developers along with academic staff to work on the development of high-quality course content for online blended and distance learning courses (and build on the good work to date carried out in providing technologyenhanced learning and blended learning within the university). one of the first activities of the fddst was to conduct an informal survey of the e-learning landscape within, and beyond, the higher education (he) sector in order to build a concept of what we mean by high-quality in relation to online courses. individual team members reviewed the provision of other institutions to find exemplars of components that they felt contributed positively to a student’s ability to engage and learn through the online teaching content, while also reflecting on successful projects they had been involved in. this survey was unstructured, as in it did not depend on fixed criteria of what defines highquality but rather was based on the received knowledge of our internal team of e-learning experts drawing comparisons and conclusions on what would be achievable through our available human and technical resources. the survey of external providers was advantaged by the move towards open education resources among institutions such as the open university (ou) and the university of nottingham in the uk, mit and stanford in the usa, as well as the wealth of other elearning provision openly available, such as the bbc academy. a variety of impactful features were identified, for instance: journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 9 hogg and doig engaging blended learning students • the ou makes excellent use of the moodle book, providing extended narrative delivery of content and enabling a tutor presence, while also embedding various kinds of learning activities aimed at student engagement within the materials. as previously mentioned, this also concurs with steve hogg’s introduction of the moodle book into his own unit development. the resulting standalone accessibility of these resources mean that students can use and reuse them as they move towards mastery of the skills presented. • stanford university has gone to great lengths to provide a series of video lectures that appear in all of their oer, thus giving a strong sense of university identity, as well as putting faces to the expertise held within the institution. examples of similar use of online video content within ssu again come from steve hogg’s teaching resources, as well the project into providing video training resources provided via hand-held devices carried out at ssu by dr stewart bruce-low and reported in the jisc booklet ‘effective practice in a digital age’ (2009). • nearly all providers used a consistent presentation of content within the courses or units that they deliver; various features such as learning or communication tools as well as navigation features are presented consistently within the same frames of the web page. this style of consistent content presentation has been experimented with and improved based on user feedback in the ssu project, succeed@solent – an academic skills resource available to students from http://mycourse.solent.ac.uk/succeed. • commercial providers such as lynda.com and adobe tv present very clear introductions to each set of learning materials through high-quality video; highly engaging as well as clarifying the purpose of the resources. again, introductory videos have been used with positive response from students throughout the succeed@solent materials, and also in all of steve hogg’s online units. arriving at a recipe for success the solent online learning standard the two processes described above (the improved practice and deeper understanding gained through a continuing process of reflection for improvement, together with the recognition of preferred practice in he and beyond) have allowed the fddst to arrive at a recipe for what we consider to be successful online course delivery. this recipe is a collation of standards and strategies that we believe improve the learning experience for journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 10 hogg and doig engaging blended learning students students participating in online blended or distance learning courses. it has been the work of the fddst to collaborate with academic course teams in the attempt to develop courses that meet these standards. we have also carried out a variety of student feedback surveys and usability tests to evaluate the application of these standards and modify the way in which we implement them. this practice is not unique as other institutions strive to arrive at similar conclusions in order to provide guidance for academic staff. at the inted 2011 conference, professor gordon suddaby of massey university presented in his plenary speech on the crossuniversity project in new zealand ‘developing a toolkit to facilitate student engagement through effective blended approaches to teaching and learning’ (suddaby, 2011, online). one of the key outcomes of this project is a ‘blended learning course review rubric’ (suddaby, 2011, online) that describes components of baseline, effective and exemplary practice across a range of areas relating to the delivery of blended learning courses. similarly, california state university (2011) publishes via its website a ‘rubric for online instruction’ that also categorises course design components under the same three standards across areas such as ‘learner support & resources’ and ‘online organisation & design’. it is undoubtedly the case that a number of other institutions are looking to establish similar standards in order to assure the quality and effectiveness of online distance and blended learning courses. in november 2011 we attended a workshop run by the jisc-funded projects susteach and virtually sustainable which looked at ‘best practice criteria for sustainable elearning’. this workshop was very much aimed at opinion sharing and gathering, rather than dissemination, and through this we have become involved in the process of establishing criteria which can be used at an institutional level to try to establish best practice for e-learning in the categories of economic sustainability, pedagogic sustainability and environmental sustainability. the outcomes of this process will have direct impact in our own work. we have chosen to call our collation of elements the ‘solent online learning standard’. this term has been applied usefully at an institutional level to suggest a set of standards or principles that all course developers and facilitators can aim to achieve. these standards are also currently in the hands of ssu’s academic services department with the intention of establishing them as ssu policy as regards to provision of online distance and blended journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 11 hogg and doig engaging blended learning students learning resources via the university’s new, professional learner-orientated vle, solent online learning (sol). the current elements of the solent online learning standard are illustrated below: figure 1. southampton solent university ‘solent online learning standard’ for online and blended learning. while elements of the initial application of our standards within sol led to some negative response (for instance students reacted negatively to the use of the book format until we began providing them with task checklists on the first page of each book), recent feedback from students participating on courses delivered via this platform has been extremely positive. one student stated: ‘solent online learning has definitely been a very important tool to help me study while i work’, while another student commented: ‘i like the fact that it is simple. i like the fact that it’s not too complicated, and i think that whoever developed it, developed it with people in mind, knowing that not everyone will have a higher knowledge in computing’. one other encouraging comment was: ‘the visual aspects of the online unit are very clear. you can find everything really easy and all the information needed is provided in the right areas. my first impressions on the online unit were very surprising. it's journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 12 hogg and doig engaging blended learning students interesting how there is a welcoming video which will help the students realise who the unit leader is and who to contact with any questions’. the success of the sol approach has been evidenced in extremely good retention rates in the initial courses run within the environment (accepting that a variety of other factors will be in play for this effect, not least of which has been the very high level of support provided by academic staff to the students). the first course run in sol was the ma in business studies. for the initial period of this course, september to december 2010, the first year cohort had no withdrawals, the first time this had occurred in the several years the course has been running. the msc in shipping operations, which began in june 2011 with a cohort of 26 students, has to the date of writing (november 2011) seen only one suspension. the solent online learning standard has to be flexible as it evolves. it is understood that new components will be recognised as new courses are delivered and feedback received, as well as that not all components will be applicable to all teaching contexts. we are assisted in this by the work conducted by almpanis et al. (2010) in developing their blended and flexible learning framework, which identifies four different designs for blended learning that include varying levels of engagement with learning materials and peers, moving from minimum requirements at design 1 through to mixed individual and group study in design 4. it is our hope that a washback effect will occur, where learning and understanding gained in the application of the solent online learning standard in the heavily resourced professional learner orientated solent online learning environment can be applied more broadly in the mycourse vle which is used across the rest of the university’s, mainly full time, face-to-face courses. the four designs of the blended and flexible learning framework should help us to provide design templates aimed at allowing tutors to more easily apply different levels of learner engagement through their online course materials. a consistent approach the intention in developing the solent online learning standard has not been so much to create any startlingly new practice, but instead it has been the desire to create a more consistent institutional approach on how effective online and blended learning may be journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 13 hogg and doig engaging blended learning students delivered to our students. it allows us to agree on and endeavour to apply standards across a range of courses in different disciplines and contexts. in order to achieve this, we have needed to implement a new model of support within ssu. in the past, as is common with support of technology enhanced learning within a large institution, the learning technologist works in a capacity of enabling academic staff members to deliver their vle content independent of continuous support. figure 2. model of support from learning technologists. learning technologist academic staff students enable deliver this model has several advantages, but most especially it means that the expert knowledge held by the learning technologists can be shared effectively with a large number of academic staff, who are then able to deliver to an even larger number of students, hopefully creating great impact within the institution. one drawback, however, is that the enabled academics may go on to deliver with varying degrees of success, as the relationship does not necessarily include continued support. however, with the fddst, the model works slightly differently, and is very much about the members of the team working collaboratively and continuously with the academics who develop and deliver the technology-enhanced learning experiences via the vle. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 14 hogg and doig engaging blended learning students journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 15 figure 3. model of support from the flexible delivery development and support team. fddst students collaborate deliver academic staff the huge advantage here is that the academic staff, individually or (more usually) as a course team, are continuously enabled and supported by a cross-disciplinary team in order to deliver their vle content. this means that the output in terms of online course content is maintained at a much more consistent standard, and the provision of online learning is enabled by a much more consistent approach to delivery. the collaboration is conducted with all parties keeping the principles of the solent online learning standard as the target for development and delivery. the varied input into this collaboration allows opportunity for the recognition of areas of flexibility within the application of the standards. it also means that each course development process can contribute back into the continuing development of the standards. this model certainly seems to be having positive impact. georgina andrews, head of the business school at ssu said, ‘the support of the flexible delivery team is absolutely vital. it’s really important that we have a professional virtual learning environment. we are actually delivering courses to professionals and they expect a very high-quality experience. without the team, we wouldn’t be able to deliver that’. one challenge to this model which must be considered is that this level of support is resource hungry in terms of the time spent by the members of the support team. at the moment, this is maintained through funding available from the strategic development programme. it is important that the fddst, during the duration of the available funding, establish a costing model that weighs the effectiveness of this support against the efficiency of the provision, and hopefully establishes a strategic demand for its longevity. the team is striving to ensure that the quality and scope of the supported courses are such that ssu senior management recognise that the continuance of the fddst’s hogg and doig engaging blended learning students activities is vital for the university’s broadening teaching provision and develops policy to ensure the team’s sustainability. acknowledgement thanks for their support and advice on the writing of this paper need to be extended to timos almpanis and jenny watson. references almpanis, t., patrick, s., mclellan, r., dinsmore, c., faustino, a. and basuki, w. (2010) ‘proposing a framework for blended and flexible course design’, in kinshuk, sampson, d.g., spector, j.m., isaias, p., ifenthaler, d. and vasiu, r. (eds.) proceedings of the iadis international conference of cognition and exploratory learning in digital age celda2010. timisoara, romania 15-17 october. organised by iadis international association for the development of the information society, pp. 263-267. betts, k. (2009) ‘online human touch (oht) training and support: a conceptual framework to increase faculty engagement, connectivity, and retention in online education, part 2’, merlot journal of online learning and teaching, 5(1), march [online]. available at: http://jolt.merlot.org/vol5no1/betts_0309.htm (accessed: 26 october 2011). biggs, j. (1999) teaching for quality learning at university: what the student does. buckingham: open university press. california state university (2011) rubric for online instruction. available at: http://www.csuchico.edu/celt/roi/ (accessed: 22 july 2011). journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 16 http://jolt.merlot.org/vol5no1/betts_0309.htm http://www.csuchico.edu/celt/roi/ hogg and doig engaging blended learning students croft, n., dalton, a. and grant, m. (2010) ‘overcoming isolation in distance learning: building a learning community through time and space’, journal for education in the built environment, 5(1), pp. 27-64 [online]. available at: http://ctiweb.cf.ac.uk/jebe/pdf/nicholascroft5%281%29.pdf (accessed: 26 october 2011). doig, a. (2011) ‘online usability for students in employment’, inted conference 2011. valencia 8 march. garrison, d.r. (2001) e-learning in the 21st century. 2nd edn. abingdon: routledge. jisc (2009) effective practice in a digital age. bristol: jisc. jones p., naugle, k. and kolloff, m. (2008) ‘teacher presence: using introductory videos in online and hybrid courses’, learning solutions magazine, march 31st [online]. available at: http://www.learningsolutionsmag.com/articles/107/teacher-presence-us (accessed: 16 february 2012). liu, s. (2008) ‘student interaction experiences in distance learning courses: a phenomenological study’, online journal of distance learning administration, 11(1) [online]. available at: http://www.westga.edu/~distance/ojdla/spring111/liu111.html (accessed: 26 october 2011). macdonald, j. (2008) blended learning and online tutoring. 2nd edn. aldershot: gower publishing ltd. moore, m. (2011) the best moodle tools you’ve never used [online slide share]. available at: http://www.slideshare.net/michelledmoore/the-best-moodle-tools-youve-neverused (accessed: 31 october 2011). patrick, s. and newell, j. (2009) transition into or back into he by flexible learning. conference presentation, solent event. southampton solent university, september. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 17 http://ctiweb.cf.ac.uk/jebe/pdf/nicholascroft5%281%29.pdf http://www.learningsolutionsmag.com/articles/107/teacher-presence-us http://www.westga.edu/%7edistance/ojdla/spring111/liu111.html http://www.slideshare.net/michelledmoore/the-best-moodle-tools-youve-never-used http://www.slideshare.net/michelledmoore/the-best-moodle-tools-youve-never-used hogg and doig engaging blended learning students rammell, b. (2008) ministerial speech to ou students' association conference. open university, milton keynes 26 april. available at: http://www.dius.gov.uk/speeches/rammell_ou_280408.html (accessed: 21 october 2011). salmon, g. (2011) e-moderating: the key to teaching and learning online. 3rd edn. abingdon: routledge. schön, d.a. (1995) the reflective practitioner: how professionals think in action. aldershot: arena. suddaby, g. (2011) blending in: exploring blended approaches to student engagement. available at: http://mro.massey.ac.nz/handle/10179/2180 (accessed: 22 july 2011). under creative commons license: attribution non-commercial no derivatives. wenger, e. (1998) communities of practice: learning meaning and identity. cambridge: cambridge university press. author details steve hogg is the head of learning technologies at southampton solent university. steve also teaches online media to undergraduate students and digital streaming to professional blended learning students for the faculty of media, arts and society. andrew doig is an instructional developer for the flexible delivery development and support team at southampton solent university. this team collaborates with academic faculty in the development and delivery of online distance and blended learning courses. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 18 http://www.dius.gov.uk/speeches/rammell_ou_280408.html http://mro.massey.ac.nz/handle/10179/2180 engaging blended learning students: an evolving approach to engaging students through the vle abstract the discerning adult learner a cycle of reflection and improvement towards better e-learning building a concept of high-quality course content arriving at a recipe for success the solent online learning standard a consistent approach acknowledgement references author details literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 8: march 2015 editorial andrew doig southampton solent university, uk amanda french birmingham city university, uk andy hagyard university of lincoln, uk john hilsdon plymouth university, uk stephanie mckendry strathclyde university, uk moira maguire dundalk institute of technology, ireland issue 8 of the journal of learning development in higher education offers a selection of papers, case studies and reviews that represent a wide range of topics and approaches, indicating a growing depth and breadth to ld as a field of study and practice. adopting methodological stances of both quantitative and qualitative character, and with focuses on student, academic and professional practices, as well as on the environment in both the global and local senses, our authors offer an insight into how learning development is permeating higher education at all levels. in this edition, alongside material on 'traditional' ld topics such as how students learn, employability and digital literacies, readers will also find accounts involving narrative analysis and autoethnography, and promoting interprofessional collaborations, where the emphasis is on the formation and development of identity in academic and professional settings. editorial journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 2 in his paper ‘assessments and the self: academic practice and character attributes’ stuart hanscomb (university of glasgow) argues for learning developers to give attention to the notion of “character attributes such as open-mindedness, enthusiasm and perseverance” in relation to students’ “academic practice and outputs. he suggests use of narrative analysis to explore this relationship, and proposes case study activities to develop students’ reflective capacity as a route to enhancing their learning. in 'maria's story', claire hamshire, kirsten jack, alicia prowse and christopher wibberley (manchester metropolitan university) also adopt a narrative exploratory approach to investigate the experiences of a mature, international student during her first year of study. their paper reinforces the critical importance of integration into the academic community, combined with peer support, while highlighting the wide-ranging challenges facing students and the need for transition to be seen as lasting well beyond the the formal induction period. maria's narrative offers a fascinating and powerful insight into the complex nature of transition into higher education, especially for mature and international student. a broad perspective on “students as researchers and experiential learning” is given in ’the social hubs project’ by carin tunåker, ian bride and daniela peluso from the university of kent. their case study describes practice whose goal is to engage students across disciplines in academic and practical activities to contribute “meaningful positive changes to the university’s physical environment”, gaining research skills and work experience whilst co-creating the university community. jennie winter, graham barton, joseph allison and debbie cotton (university of plymouth) introduce the emerging discipline of education for sustainability (efs) as well as its intersection and potential commonalities with learning development in their paper 'learning development and education for sustainability: what are the links'? from the starting point that both are relatively new disciplines, the authors argue that conscious discussion of the links between the two may result in the development of innovative ideas and practice. the two fields share a pedagogic focus, with emphasis on critical thinking and students' development of skills, and a commitment to holistic and embedded approaches within higher education. according to the authors, it should be possible for both to learn from one another and, indeed, together. editorial journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 3 in their case study, conducted in a “typical uk hei biosciences department”, julie furnell and graham scott from the university of hull compare how teachers, current students and recent graduates perceive the importance of skills for employability. they argue that heis, employers and students are “partners in the development of a skilled workforce”. using a quantitative approach, scott and furnell compare the likert scale rankings of a range of skills by representatives of the target groups. from the differences in perception identified, the authors conclude that the importance of certain skills only become apparent once they are being applied in the workplace. as a consequence, they argue, it is vital to ensure the understandings developed by those who have now joined the world of work are more communicated effectively to existing students, and to those designing programmes of study. arguing more specifically for use of quantitative methods, jaime hunt and erika spray (university of newcastle, australia) present an argument for such an approach to “gauge research students’ academic literacies beliefs and sense of researcher identity.” their paper reports on a study into these issues involving 48 postgraduates. their results show a link between the two concepts, confirming that “academic literacies beliefs and researcher identity were significantly but weakly correlated”. spray and hunt discuss the importance of creating opportunities for postgraduates students, for whom no clear curriculum exists, to develop their researcher identity as a way to navigate the transition from undergraduate level work, and to face the challenges of adapting to the norms and conventions associated with their communities of practice, in order to gain effective membership. their paper also offers interesting claims about the use of “quantitative instruments to measure individual beliefs and attitudes such as epistemic beliefs”. ‘breathing life into information literacy skills’ reports the results of a faculty-librarian collaboration undertaken in us colleges. divonna stebick, janelle wertzberger, margaret flora and joseph miller describe the development of a joint approach by the reference librarian and a professor who agreed that a “better research process would lead to a better literature review”. they asked students to create fifteen-minute online audio-visual recordings of their research practices, including audio and screen movements. these gave a critical baseline on existing information seeking strategies. they report that their subsequent structured inputs, including use of rubrics and critical reflection on individual reflective practices, helped students improve their overall information literacy. editorial journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 4 heather conboy, sukhtinder kaur, julie lowe, ian pettit and rob weale report on work done to develop digital literacies at de montfort university. their case study describes practices and strategic approaches to supporting both staff and students. they descibe the successes they have achieved in applying a co-operative, connected and distributed model for development. in doing so, they share strategies that will undoubtedly be of interest and use to colleagues in other institutions seeking to carry out similar digital literacies work. however, in examining the outcomes of their work they advise that the difficulty, as always, is in reaching those who need support most: the staff and students who most lack confidence in their uptake and use of digital technologies. two, very different, papers are united by the fact that they deal with the educational potential of techniques and methodologies that are not widely used in the field of learning development: dawne gurbutt and russell gurbutt (university of central lancashire and university of leeds respectively), report on an initiative that used coaching skills with healthcare students. while coaching is well established in fields such as management, it is less widely used in education. they authors argue that, given coaching’s focus on learning and development, it offers a valuable means to promote ownership of learning. this was a small-scale initiative but the evaluation suggests that coaching has the potential to add educational value. gurbutt and gurbutt conclude that ‘coaching has the potential to deliver real benefit in educational context, as it does in management contexts, fusing successful goal achievement with growth, learning and development’ (p. 14). catherine hayes and john fulton (university of sunderland) explore the use of autoethnography in the professional doctorate as a means of ‘…linking theory to the practical situation’ (p. 1). they begin by outlining the growth of professional doctorates that are focused on work-based practice and identifying the challenges sometimes faced in selecting appropriate methodological frameworks for this kind of work. they argue that autoethnography is particularly relevant to this kind of work and has a legitimacy that is rooted in its capacity to theorise process and outcome, facilitating critical reflexivity. the authors offer a thoughtful exploration of the conventional and post-modern approaches to autoethnography. they highlight the potential contribution of this methodology in providing a rigorous framework for professional doctorates while acknowledging that it is not universally accepted. editorial journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 5 issue 8 also contains two reviews of recent books of interest to learning developers: marie nadia jasim (st george’s, university of london) reviews helen owton’s recent book ‘studying as a parent: a handbook for success’. a parent and mature student herself, jasim offers a very thorough and constructively critical review of a book she judges accessible and upliftingly optimistic. the review summarises the book’s practical content and offers some suggestions for improved use of testimony and experience from a range of student parents; she also indicates where updated information would be needed for a 2015 readership – which, she suggests, should include academics and support staff in he as well as student parents. ronan bree (dundalk institute of technology) reviews 'the lazy teacher's handbook' edited by ian gilbert. he makes clear that this is a specific use of the term 'lazy', not one concerned with deliberately lessening workload but, instead, with adopting a smart approach to learning and teaching and thus facilitating independent learning amongst students. he recommends the text for anyone involved in teaching in higher education arguing that its content can help educators introduce metacognition, critical and reflective thinking. the review then describes ten specific concepts and activities in the book before discussing how these could be introduced within teaching. as issue 8 goes to print, we are already working on our forthcoming special edition on peer learning, and making plans for a jldhe student special consisting of writing by and for a predominantly student audience. as always, the editors would be very pleased to hear views about this and other editions of the journal from readers, potential authors and reviewers; we welcome thoughts about our content, layout and design. or suggestions for future special editions. finally, we'd like to thank the authors of this edition, all our hardworking reviewers, and our dedicated and meticulous copy-editors, natalie bates and susie powell. literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 5: march 2013 the art group crit. how do you make a firing squad less scary? dr peter day university of wolverhampton, uk abstract the relationship between achievement and feedback, and the fact that effective feedback improves achievement, is well documented (taylor and mccormack, 2004; hattie and timperley, 2007). this is especially true of written feedback. however, in art and design education, feedback will take place in an often emotionally charged face-to-face meeting where verbal criticism, both negative and positive, takes place in front of an audience. the forum for this feedback in art education is the group crit (crit, art crit, or group critique) at which students are expected to present and perform. it is the students’ reception and perception of this oral feedback in today’s quality-focused context, which is at the heart of this study. this article presents a study into the impact of verbal feedback on achievement in art and design education via a survey taken amongst 60 undergraduate art and design students at the university of wolverhampton in 2009/10. the survey collected both quantitative and qualitative responses and identified a fundamentally emotional and fear-focused perception of the group crit, one opposed to its supportive and bespoke dynamic intentions. a stress factor (anthony, 1991; pope, 2005) is created when personalised feedback is perceived as a negative (critical) reflection on the student’s performance (at the crit); their self-worth and esteem receiving the criticism, not the work presented. criticism, and by implication feedback, is perceived as negative, personal and subjective, fraught with contradiction and loss of ‘respect’ – in opposition to the students’ previous prescriptive and ‘objective’ educational experiences. keywords: art crit; verbal feedback; assessment; emotion; audience. day the art group crit. how do you make a firing squad less scary? aim the aim of my research, undertaken at university of wolverhampton during 2009/10, was to understand some of the pressures felt by students whilst receiving and making verbal commentary on their own art works and those of others during the crit. this paper draws upon my survey, e-mail exchanges with colleagues and q&a discussions following presentations of this survey at conferences (higher education academy teaching and learning conferences at the university of sunderland, 2010, and ravensbourne, 2011). this research sought anonymous student opinion through the qualitative element of the survey. the majority of these students had little experience of the group crit model prior to higher education and my research shows that students are often ‘intimidated, scared and frightened’ by the crit type of feedback and of being ‘made’ to contribute vocally to group sessions. these same students, unfamiliar with the crit method, are defining themselves as separate; often alienated and differentiated from others and their peers. rationale the purpose of the survey was to explore the effectiveness of feedback and focus upon the student experience. this investigation took place in the light of the nss (national student survey) data on feedback that showed satisfaction levels of 57% and 58% for 2009 and 2010 surveys for all uk higher education institutions (heis) (hefce, 2010). student satisfaction surveys have key elements that relate to assessment and feedback, however, the nss is data specific and does not ask the students to express or state an opinion on their satisfaction or dissatisfaction levels. this paper draws upon my previous research, analysing student experiences regarding the effectiveness of verbal feedback, for the learning and teaching research network at the university of wolverhampton in 2009. the premise of this research paper is that, if effective (verbal) feedback creates accurate, positive perceptions of learning (objectives), self-reflective internalised standards, and improves students’ autonomous decision making, why is it so poorly rated in the nss? much broader and complex issues, such as the students’ perceptions of self-worth, status and esteem, require consideration, as ‘students can feel diminished, discouraged and dejected by the feedback they receive’ (taylor and mccormack, 2004:2). a student’s journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 2 day the art group crit. how do you make a firing squad less scary? ability to receive and process (verbal) feedback is essential to learning. the student’s progression and the value of their achievement will be measured by the impact of this feedback. their ability and need to understand, relate, review, respond and take ownership of this feedback is central to learning (hattie and timperley, 2007). this lack of ownership and credibility of the crit amongst students forms the rationale set out in this paper. the ambition of the crit is complex, its functions misunderstood (horton, 2007). however, it puts sharing, peer-to-peer feedback, interactivity and an experience of learning that encourages autonomy at its centre (taylor, and mccormack, 2004; deanna and martin, 2008). at the crit, the group working on the same theme and project will discuss similar references, problems (technical and conceptual) and knowledge about the topic and subject. the design of the crit is not consensual (percy, 2004), however, its broad aim, from my personal experience and research, is for a formative and immediate view of students’ work to be shared and good and bad practice disseminated amongst the group. it is immediate, dynamic, spontaneous and an opportunity for students to benchmark visually. by definition, a ‘group crit' – a critical review by peers – is aspirational; where the group itself is supporting and sharing views with each of the individual(s) it contains. a crit is dynamic, spontaneous and immediate where everyone gets a chance to view each other’s work (blythman et al., 2008). the crit is where the community supports the individual to create, make and achieve. it is the place where judgements, perceptions and analysis deliver sublime insights, understanding, comprehension and success. the group is where the individual becomes subservient to the whole, where the material incentive is: the improvement of each other’s work and the final grade and outcome, an educational standing, awarded as a community at a time of transition and discovery. the student shifts their position from being dependent on these others (the group) to semi-independent as they pass from project assignment and a contextual fledgling, to becoming a fully independent thinker (deanna and martin, 2008). however, feedback on work is often perceived as criticism of the students’ self. it is delivered in front of an audience (usually of peers) and as such heightens the pressure and tension (taylor and mccormack, 2004). the crit, whilst representing a place where people can flourish and create the invisible bonds that make often-disparate practices and journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 3 day the art group crit. how do you make a firing squad less scary? methods seem connected, is also difficult as it pits students’ internal standards against the group and the lecturer, and can be seen as an affirmation of their perceived low ability (blumenfeld, 1992) and more specifically low self-esteem. methodology the research consisted of the distribution of a questionnaire and collation of quantitative and qualitative feedback from 60 first and second year students on an undergraduate art and design programme. the survey asked students to comment on their experience of the art group crit and the effectiveness of the feedback they had received. questions were designed to allow personal and open commentary on specific aspects of the crit and the questionnaires were submitted anonymously to enable free responses. there were 60 responses from a total of approximately 100 students from the questionnaires, which were disseminated at contextual studies lectures, one for each level. each group and each level reflected a balance of abilities in a widening participation institution. some questionnaires were returned blank and about a third wrote little (or no personal) commentary in the qualitative feedback space (but answered the set questions). each questionnaire was transcribed and these transcripts were lettered according to individual student responses. common themes were then identified relating to perceptions of the learning experience and its objectives. each cluster of comments could then be read as themes and high degrees of consistency in responses identified. the questionnaire addressed several key areas of feedback at the group crit and included responses to feedback received, performance, and motivation in response to formative verbal feedback and impact on student learning. there was a high degree of consistency in responses to certain themes, specifically relating to: linking feedback to improving work; time allocated for each crit and it being the same for each student; increasing one-to-one tutorials; and lecturers offering contradictory and mixed messages towards learning goals. these findings reflect those of research undertaken by blythman et al. (2008) and taylor and mccormack (2004). differing responses were received relating to: the structure of crits in identifying learning goals; the pressures of feedback with an audience; and the performance at the crit in terms of self-worth, status and esteem. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 4 day the art group crit. how do you make a firing squad less scary? setting the context – the crit the key findings were that whilst students value and see the need for feedback and information on how to improve their work, they dislike the format and type of feedback received in the crit. my research showed: a) deep concerns amongst students towards being criticised; they expressed emotional and fear-focused responses towards feedback, amplified by the public nature of the crit. indeed one respondent wrote in response to a question on how to improve the crit – ‘how do you make a firing squad less scary?’. b) the crit model is the opposite of the prescriptive teaching style students have previously encountered and whilst, on the whole, students value the crit and (verbal) feedback, it appears to be the least successful model for those who are struggling the most. these students have nothing or little to present and feel ignored. the process is at least divisive, splitting those students for whom the process works and those for whom it does not. key points from the research what do i need to do to pass? the collective views of peers, professionals, lecturers gives a small view of how the professional world might be and how demanding it is. (student a) the crit takes place in an environment where its success is measured not just by those students who are paying to pass and achieve a good pass, but also in a ‘quality assurance’ environment, where the methods of feedback, and therefore success, are also being scrutinised. group critique gives an opportunity to put my work into context. it gives an opportunity to compare your own way of working to other students and see other areas (contexts) of photography (art). you find new ideas towards your work. (student c) journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 5 day the art group crit. how do you make a firing squad less scary? the crit is a shared experience and an opportunity to (visually) compare: it has allowed me to explore other practitioners and their work and have a more levelled understanding. (fine art student b) this immediacy is powerful, illuminating and shocking. the shared visual experience can cut through confusion and difficult language, as an image, a set of outcomes, and works in progress are presented. the crit provides immediate feedback, debate and review that are dynamic, unique and direct. they break you down and leave you to put the pieces back together. (finkel, 2006:2) at the centre of this powerful emotional environment is a hierarchy consisting of the lecturer (director), peer group (audience), and the individual student (performer) that is unequal in its power relations (horton, 2007). additionally, all aspects of this performance, from the mode of presentation to the pitch and description of the work produced, are being reviewed in relation to each other and each learning objective. more and most regularly students, in the wolverhampton research, seem to be asking ‘what do i need to do to pass?’ and ‘i am unsure as to how this crit model helps me achieve this aim’. however, much of the language used at a crit can be asserting aspirational pedagogic practice, creating wide ranging reflective and contextual possibilities (bourdieu and passeron, 1977), whilst stressing the potential for personal development. this runs counter to a quantitative grade-led, objective criterion and the prescriptive methodology where simplistic and generic requests, such as ‘more or add’, are the descriptive significant feedback required by students; specifically feedback such as, ‘more research’, ‘more development’ or ‘more analysis’. changed one or two things after attending a crit – even if it’s something i have not liked. to get a decent grade. (student d) the crit and its discursive practice appear to be unconnected to grades and grade awarding, as the lecturer (the subjective connoisseur – typified by the phrase ‘i cannot describe it, but i know a good piece of work when i see it’ (o’donovan et al., 2004:328) journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 6 day the art group crit. how do you make a firing squad less scary? and the group will award their approval, not grade, as the most significant voice. the language of the crit is often subjective, philosophical, aspirational and exclusive, not objective and literal. having a main tutor figure is stressful. it is easier to talk just to peers. it feels like you are trying to impress a teacher. (student f) the aspiration to pass by objective and incremental process criteria, through the ‘more or add’ feedback, circumvents the interactive, spontaneous and digressive feedback aspects of crit. listing things to be completed within a specific time frame to improve a grade drives many of the prescriptive educational curricula that students have previously experienced. the crit runs counter to these objectivesand criteria-led art course specifications and requirements, which seem to service very different needs; the first attempts to encourage independence by offering personal, cultural and developmental feedback, the second focuses on dependency and passing the course aspirations. students are simply refusing to engage with the crit, by not attending or refusing to take part. it is something i cannot and will not do. (student e) criticism is personal there are arguments during group critiques, some people liking and others disliking it. (fine art student g) critical awareness is an awakening which takes place at the same time as a growing personal awareness of public criticism. students’ negative response to ‘being criticised’ and being given feedback can obscure the constructive and important detail made in the feedback itself. the wolverhampton research found that, whilst students realised the importance of the event and appreciated that feedback was important to their academic development, there were many negative emotions generated by the practice of the crit. students placed their emotions and feelings, specifically a fear-focused response, at the heart of describing their experiences of the crit. students feel like they are being judged and exposed, and that they themselves are placed at the heart of the crit; a criticism of the journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 7 day the art group crit. how do you make a firing squad less scary? work is a criticism ‘of me’, their self-esteem, and emotion. it makes me feel like i am being judged and i just can't do it, i start to get really panicked and shaky. (student h) students become adept at very effective and partial listening, quickly discerning those contributions and individuals worth listening to and ignoring others. at the same time students are quick to separate, distance themselves from, and ‘out’ or ‘other’ individuals in the group. here individuals are positioned and ranked in terms of their worth by the quality of commentary received and feedback given. if they turn up!!! people seem scared of crits. although they do feel (some) feedback is critical and critical to their work. (student g) a discourse on the context, practice and meaning of a work requires a complex vocabulary. publicly sharing this and being in a community with peers leads to other less obvious and more surprising issues. these include micro-changes in relationships between group members and value assigned to individuals, the development of bonds with those achieving a similar standard, and disassociations from those who are not, or do not, share similar subject views. personalised associations reflect a divergence between the work and the performance, their value and that of the outcome. i don’t think that students who struggle the most get the help they require and are almost pushed to one side because they are not achieving at the same level. (student j) the audience amplifies student concerns that they are ‘intimidated, scared and frightened’ by this type of feedback and of being ‘made’ to contribute vocally or ‘perform’ to groups. the learning experience and its value, from an art and design student perspective, are inextricably tied to the performance and audience response. students may not feel prepared and equipped to deal with these presenting, performing and contextual skills, and state that they have had little previous experience or preparation for the crit. in my survey the majority of students said that they were unfamiliar with the crit prior to university. students therefore attempt to opt out of the crit by limiting their exposure and involvement. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 8 day the art group crit. how do you make a firing squad less scary? they express a preference for an alternative format, although what that alternative is, is not clear, but defined by a dislike of the crit model. most people in class don't give themselves in to the crit and others’ work…so generally i think it would help me a lot to listen to something about my work from another perspective. (student k) a great deal of the pressure comes from the loaded psychodynamics of the crit. students are exposing themselves in public to negative (critical) comments about their art (finkel, 2006). negative outcomes can include fear of personal exposure, feelings of ridicule and shame, the destruction of self-esteem, and lack of power in the feedback process itself. additionally, the notion of being ‘respected’ or more powerfully the sense of being disrespected, in addition to these predictable feelings, is at the heart of the feedback issue for the crit. criticism is stressful i find them (crits) very stressful because you start to worry about whether fellow students will like it or not and i hate receiving bad feedback because it tends to knock me back and i’m not entirely confident in myself anyway. (student d) the audience at a crit is made up from an observing group (more often than not a group of peers and usually the presenting student’s cohort) and at least one lecturer whom is also the assessor. each member of the group is ‘equal’ and has the option to comment on this work as they see fit and upon any element of the work produced. by being selfreflective and critical of their own work, students seek to convince their audience (and themselves) of the validity of their position (percy, 2004). here the commentary is verbal, spontaneous, unrecorded and temporary (given at that time). it is not recorded unless the student takes notes. the crit environment can be gladiatorial, combative and unforgiving, with few places to hide, and yet we expect students to prosper and survive this with little instruction. students are quite literally defending (their work) themselves. this is feedback, which is up close and personal, being delivered by peers who a student may simultaneously respect or journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 9 day the art group crit. how do you make a firing squad less scary? mistrust, and value. by the nature of a shared community students will have created friendships and relationships, and also enemies. the crit is, therefore, loaded emotionally before any work is shown and its combative, performative, and theatrical qualities increase the need for trust and compassion. those who cannot find a way of participating become isolated and alienated from the discourse (percy, 2004). it’s important to put your work into context...comparing it to work your peers are producing. people need to have a level of maturity to respond appropriately. i don’t think people should be forced to contribute if they don’t understand enough. (student e) for the best outcome at the crit it is vital that the student selects (from all aspects of the work produced) the key area of their work that they need feedback upon – so preproduction skills including preview, editing and selection are important preparations for defending it (horton, 2007). the notion of ‘respect’ and ‘respecting the work’ is crucial to the emotional well-being of each student at the crit. it is here that the presenting student discovers that intimate, personal and emotionally charged pieces of work are seen as derivative, misconceived, poorly presented, ‘crap’, a pastiche – or quite simply misunderstood. it is often the case that even when positive comments are made, that students hear the negative ones most. it depends on the people who are in the crit with you, many people are constructive while some people are cruel – whether they mean to be or not i don’t know. (student l). the x factor the first few minutes tend to be a bit tense. i dread going first. (student g) in creative subjects the need to understand a complex set of production and assessment objectives is paramount to achievement. the move towards learning and assessment objectives that reward both product and process criteria means that reflective, and specifically self-reflective, qualities are significant and important skills. as art works are personalised, therapeutic and about their producer (the presenting student), it is they, the journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 10 day the art group crit. how do you make a firing squad less scary? students themselves, who are subjected to interrogation. there is a need to trust and be able to confide in this group. unsurprisingly students can and do get emotionally involved in these sessions. there is a point where the success or failure of the crit is about the performance – how well did i do? did i do justice to the work? there is the illusive potential of a positive and self-affirming quality to the crit and ‘my performance’, an x factor. being seen, performing, and receiving the praise which this might attract, is flattering in terms of status and may confirm the student’s self-concept. just as avoiding failure or looking incompetent in front of others drives other students to avoid the crit. tasks with objective criteria that instruct are less threatening because personal exposure through performance is limited and diminished; less of ‘me’ is engaged and therefore ego is not tied up in the success of the task. presenting in front of a group is a good way to boost your confidence, although i – myself – sometimes get anxious about what others have to say. (student m) this psychodynamic of being looked at and observed whilst being critiqued – praised or criticized – is dramatic. in commentary on their personal feelings, students reveal the potential for the crit to become a ‘performance review’ by an audience about them, rather than a review about their work. at the same time, students become hyper sensitive and selective towards whom their audience is. quickly identifying those worth listening to and ‘othering’ those students not deemed worthy of a voice. in this combative arena the crit becomes exclusive and not inclusive. yes, feedback can improve projects because it brings up other things to consider that you may not have thought of, however, you can get feedback from students who don’t have the intellectual understanding required. (student n) in statements such as these, students are not reflecting on the crit itself, but on the people feeding back, who are ‘outed’ as lesser members of the group. there is pressure at the crit to ‘have something to say’ and it is necessary to get a response (even a poor or bad response), as silence is the enemy of the crit structure. some people get really stressed and hate talking about their work. produce a good piece of work and you shouldn’t get stressed. (student o) journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 11 day the art group crit. how do you make a firing squad less scary? the ability to be self-reflective is not necessarily innate amongst students nor is the ability to be original or innovative, nor have students necessarily achieved these skills prior to university. it is also true that students have not necessarily had a great deal of experience in activities such as group critiques or of making presentations of ideas and practical works. however, as art educators in heis, we believe that through evaluation and feedback, these key decision-making processes can at least be made transparent, and we can create an environment within which judgements on student achievement can be made. the role of the academic needs to embrace the requirement to prepare students for their engagement with the critique. (percy, 2004:6) conclusion several key areas regarding esteem emerged from the wolverhampton study, relating to both the nature of criticism and the experience and impact of being criticised, specifically feelings of a lack of respect. this impact, because the artwork presented is often personal, is in itself personalised (‘it’s about me’), internalised (‘i am being criticised’), and not the work. this illustrates the potential for a deep sense of injustice and embarrassment at the heart of the student experience of the crit. whilst crits are undeniably relevant, essential and a part of the performance monitoring of student works throughout undergraduate and postgraduate education, they are not necessarily a process which students might choose, given an option. students recognise the need for feedback and value feedback upon their work. feedback which will improve the quality of their work is recognised by students as that which best enables them to achieve the grade. the crit is at best unfamiliar to students and at worst too esoteric and providing too little direction to improve their work. students ‘achieve’ by engaging in assessment tasks that are central to learning. it is the case that skills in self-reflection and evaluation are neither pre-learned nor innate, nor do they bear a clear relation to grades defined by simplistic objective terms such as ‘limited’, ‘basic’, or ‘competent’. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 12 day the art group crit. how do you make a firing squad less scary? provisional conclusions regarding the improvement of feedback, suggested by students, would include: greater contact and individualised support; smaller groups (seminar model); more peer-to-peer feedback opportunities and more one-to-one tutorials. feedback can be improved by explaining the crit, timing the crit, exploring the student role and voice, as well as by providing clear guidelines relating to the role of subjective feedback and how that feedback relates to the grade awarded. it is important to guide participants in highlighting the ‘more positive’ elements of the work produced and in being constructive with feedback that shares best practice and listens to students. there is also a need for transitional skills into higher education and an exposition of the teaching and learning styles, not prescriptive education but self-efficacy, independent and innovative learning. further research into crit-induced stress and its relationship to student performance, through a longitudinal study, would provide a more sensitised insight into its impacts. always worrying no matter how much or how little you do. (student p) references anthony, k.h. (1991) design juries on trial: the renaissance of the design studio. new york: van nostrand reinhold. blumenfeld, p.c. (1992) ‘classroom learning and motivation: clarifying and expanding goal theory’, journal of educational psychology, 84(3), pp. 272–281. blythman, m., orr, s. and blair, b. (2008) critiquing the crit. adm-hea. available at: http://www.adm.heacademy.ac.uk/news/subject-centre-news/critiquing-the-crit (accessed: 28 february 2013) bourdieu, p. and passeron, j.c. (1977) ‘reproduction in education, society, and culture’, british educational research journal, 27(4), pp. 433-442. deanna, p and martin, k.n. (2008) ‘critiquing critiques. a genre analysis of feedback across novice to expert design studios’, journal of business and technical communication, 22(2), pp. 135-159. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 13 http://www.adm.heacademy.ac.uk/news/subject-centre-news/critiquing-the-crit day the art group crit. how do you make a firing squad less scary? finkel j. (2006) ‘tales from the crit: for art students, may is the cruelest month’, the new york times, 30 april. hattie, j. and timperley, h. (2007) ‘the power of feedback’, review of educational research, 77(1) pp. 81-112. higher education funding council for england (hefce) (2008-2010) the national student survey. available at: http://www.hefce.ac.uk/whatwedo/lt/publicinfo/nationalstudentsurvey/nationalstudent surveydata/. (accessed: 4 june 2011). horton, i. (2007) ‘the relationship between creativity and the group crit in art and design education’, creativity or conformity? building cultures of creativity in higher education. cardiff 8-10 january. university of wales institute, cardiff and the higher education academy. o’donovan, b., price, m. and rust, c. (2004) ‘know what i mean? enhancing student understanding of assessment standards and criteria’, teaching in higher education, 9(3), pp. 325-335. percy, c. (2004) ‘critical absence versus critical engagement: problematics of the crit in design learning and teaching’, art, design and communication in higher education, 2(3) pp. 143-54. pope, n.k. (2005) ‘the impact of stress in self and peer assessment’, assessment and evaluation in higher education, 30(1), pp. 51-63. smith, c. (2011) ‘understanding students’ views of the crit assessment’, journal for education in the built environment, 6(1), pp. 44-67.  taylor, m.j. and mccormack, c. (2004) ‘juggling cats: investigating effective verbal feedback in graphic design critiques’, new policies new opportunities; australian council of university art and design schools annual conference. canberra, australia 23-25 september. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 14 http://www.hefce.ac.uk/whatwedo/lt/publicinfo/nationalstudentsurvey/nationalstudentsurveydata/ http://www.hefce.ac.uk/whatwedo/lt/publicinfo/nationalstudentsurvey/nationalstudentsurveydata/ day the art group crit. how do you make a firing squad less scary? author details dr peter day is a senior lecturer in art and design at the university of wolverhampton. he is currently an external examiner for ba art, design, and media programmes at several heis. previously dr peter day held senior examiner posts for general certificate of education (chief examiner) fda’s, and foundation art and design. currently working on sustainable models for therapeutic arts in healthcare settings; walking as an art form at www.peteday.co.uk and the use of assignment writing as affective learning tools. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 15 http://www.peteday.co.uk/ the art group crit. how do you make a firing squad less scary? abstract aim rationale methodology setting the context – the crit key points from the research what do i need to do to pass? criticism is personal criticism is stressful the x factor conclusion references author details literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 8: march 2015 are we all on the same page? teacher, graduate and student perceptions of the importance of skills thought to enhance employability julie furnell university of hull, uk graham scott university of hull, uk abstract graduate employability is a key issue for higher education institutions (heis), academic faculty and of course for students themselves. it is recognised that to be employable graduates require both discipline specific skills/knowledge and more generic skills for employment. a key step to the development of the latter is an understanding of their significance on the part of those designing courses and the students who take them. here we compare the perceived importance of key skills from the perspective of teachers, current students and recent graduates. we find that the three groups differ in the relative importance they ascribe to several key skills. staff rated all skills as being important and saw many as being more important than did their students. with hindsight, graduates prioritized skills that were not seen as being very important by current students. as a result of our synthesising of the views of current undergraduates, employed graduates and lecturing staff, we recommend that proper signposting of the significance of key skills to students is vital. keywords: employability; key skills; graduate skills; biology students; bioscience students; biology faculty. introduction there is a general consensus that becoming employable is an important goal for graduates (brown et al., 2005; saunders and zuzel, 2010) and so it could be said that it is furnell and scott are we all on the same page? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 2 incumbent upon universities to assist students to become ‘work-ready’ or ‘career-ready’ (raybould and sheedy, 2005). as a result graduate employability has become an hei performance indicator (morley, 2001). however, some academics feel that the employability agenda is driven by government policy and employer pressure to the extent that their freedom to teach is challenged, and there is a an alternate view (perhaps a minority one) that students graduate as discipline specialists and it is the responsibility of employers to develop the skills of their employees (hughes et al., 1997). some employers believe that university courses do not prepare graduates for the work place (de la harpe et al., 2000); others acknowledge that some skills are employer specific and best acquired in the workplace (cranmer, 2006). we personally feel that heis, employers and students themselves are partners in the development of a skilled workforce and that a mixed model is most appropriate. we agree that students need to be equipped with an understanding of the world of work (mason et al., 2003), and that graduates require complimentary discipline specific skills and personal/transferable skills (wickramasinghe and perera, 2010). the employability/skills agenda is not as some may think a new issue. for example, in a uk context, in 1963 the robbins report identified ‘instruction in skills suitable to play a part in the general division of labour’ as a key role for heis (committee on higher education, 1963, p.6). in 1997 the dearing report emphasised the importance of employability within education and of the teaching and development of transferrable skills for the workplace. identifying a set of key skills that were ‘relevant throughout life, not simply in employment’ (communication, numeracy, it and learning how to learn at a higher level) (dearing, 1997, p.133). more recently in ‘robbins revisited’, david willetts, mp (uk minister of state for universities and science), sets out the need for universities to provide opportunities for their students to graduate with a broad range of competencies beyond those traditionally seen as being core to their degree (willets, 2013). there is a significant body of work examining the skills required by employers and the ways in which those skills are taught to/developed by students (e.g. hanson and overton (2010) in the context of chemistry students; haigh and kilmartin (1999) in the context of geography students; hughes et al. (1997) in the context of pharmacology students). similarly there is a body of work examining the possibility that educators, employers and students might differ in their views (e.g. legget et al., 2004; leveson, 2000; lowden et al., 2011). however, less has been written about the potentially differing perceptions of the file:///e:/jldhe/issue%208/furnell%20and%20scott%20234-1119-1-rv%20(gs).doc%23enref_16 file:///e:/jldhe/issue%208/furnell%20and%20scott%20234-1119-1-rv%20(gs).doc%23enref_17 file:///e:/jldhe/issue%208/furnell%20and%20scott%20234-1119-1-rv%20(gs).doc%23enref_17 file:///e:/jldhe/issue%208/furnell%20and%20scott%20234-1119-1-rv%20(gs).doc%23enref_4 furnell and scott are we all on the same page? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 3 importance of skills on the part of teachers, students and graduates in the biosciences (but see brown et al., 2005; saunders and zuzel, 2010). here we use the case study of a typical uk hei biosciences department to compare and synthesise the perceptions of current students, their teachers and recent employed graduates of the relative importance of key skills presumed to enhance employability. our aim is to compare the perceptions of these three groups of people in order that we might test the hypothesis that with hindsight graduates (and perhaps tutors) see specific key skills as being more or less important than do students. to achieve our aim we collected data via a questionnaire, via semi-structured interviews (involving 15 students, nine graduates and 10 teachers), and through an analysis of the discussion strands of a facebook group which brought together 26 current students and 35 employed recent graduates. in this short communication we present data derived from our questionnaire and inform our interpretation of those data by drawing upon our wider discussions/ interviews. methods and quantitative analysis the list of key skills we have considered is presented in table 1. it is derived from a literature review (and notably from fraser, 2006; hanson and overton, 2010; and saunders and zuzel, 2010). all of the project participants were volunteers. ethical approval for the work was granted by the relevant university committee and participants had the right to withdraw (and to withdraw their data) from the project at any time. all data were made anonymous prior to analysis. table 1. descending rank order of arithmetic mean of likert scores (±s.d.). numbers prefaced r (e.g. r1, r2 etc) indicate ranked mean level of importance for each group of respondents (undergraduates, graduates and academic teaching staff) (r1 is ranked most importance, r2 second etc). skills were scored on scale of 1=very low, 2=low, 3=average, 4=high, 5=very high. arrows show shift in rank order between each group of respondents. skills * indicates a statistically significant difference in ranks comparing students, graduates and teachers (* p ≤ 0.05, ** p ≤ 0.01, ** p ≤ 0.001); change in rank † indicates a statistically significant pair-wise difference in ranks (p ≤ 0.016; after bonferroni correction). furnell and scott are we all on the same page? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 4 table 1. descending rank order of arithmetic mean of likert scores (±s.d.). skills student (n=117) mean (± s.d.) change in rank (student to graduate) graduate (n=10) mean (± s.d.) change in rank (graduate to teacher) teacher (n=16) mean (±s.d.) change in rank (student to teacher) punctuality 4.14 (±0.74) r1 ↓ 3.9 (±1.1) r13.5 ↑ 4.31 (±0.60) r11 ↓ working as a team member 4.09 (±0.79) r2 ↑ 4.5 (±0.70) r1 ↓ 4.38 (±0.61) r7 ↓ ability to work without supervision ** 4.03 (±0.76) r3 ↓ 4.3 (±0.67) r4 ↑ 4.62 (±0.61) r1 ↑ † planning/organisation 3.97 (±0.79) r4 ↑ 4.4 (±0.69) r2 ↓ 4.31 (±0.60) r11 ↓ basic numeracy ** 3.89 (±0.85) r5 ↓ 3.8 (±0.91) r15 ↑ 4.56 (±0.62) r3.5 ↑ † time management ** 3.84 (±0.99) r6 ↑ 4.3 (±0.94) r4 ↓ 4.50 (±0.63) r5 ↑ † decision making 3.83 (±0.64) r7 ↔ 4.1 (±0.99) r7 ↓ 4.06 (±0.68) r14 ↓ it skills * 3.79 (±0.88) r8 ↓ 4.0 (±1.05) r10.5 ↑ 4.37 (±0.50) r8.5 ↓ † oral communication *** 3.78 (±0.87) r9 ↑ 4.1 (±0.87) r7 ↑ 4.56 (±0.51) r3.5 ↑ † written communication *** 3.76 (±0.82) r10 ↑ 4.3 (±0.94) r4 ↓ 4.37 (±0.50) r8.5 ↑ † self-confidence 3.74 (±0.89) r11 ↓ 3.6 (±1.17) r16.5 ↑ 3.94 (±0.85) r16 ↓ creative and innovative thinking 3.72 (±0.73) r12 ↑ 4.0 (±0.81) r10.5 ↓ 4.13 (±0.71) r13 ↓ critical thinking/analysis *** 3.71 (±0.74) r13.5 ↑ 4.0 (±0.81) r10.5 ↑ 4.44 (±0.62) r6 ↑ † information retrieval/data analysis ** 3.71 (±0.81) r13.5 ↑ 4.0 (±0.81) r10.5 ↓ 4.35 (±0.47) r11 ↑ † lab techniques 3.66 (±0.98) r15 ↓ 3.3 (±1.63) r18 ↑ 4.00(±0.96) r15 ↔ problem solving *** 3.60 (±0.79) r16 ↑ 4.1 (±0.56) r7 ↑ 4.56 (±0.51) r3.5 ↑ † fieldwork techniques 3.56 (±1.02) r17.5 ↓ 3.2 (±1.31) r19 ↑ 3.81 (±1.22) r17.5 ↓ scientific communication 3.56 (±0.85) r17.5 ↑ 3.9 (±1.19) r13.5 ↓ 3.81 (±0.75) r17.5 ↓ ethical issues 3.47 (±0.86) r19 ↓ 2.67 (±1.0) r21 ↔ 3.25 (±0.68) r21 ↓ self-reflection 3.41 (±0.74) r20 ↔ 2.8 (±1.13) r20 ↔ 3.38 (±0.88) r20 ↔ taxonomic skills 3.39 (±0.86) r21 ↑ 3.6 (±1.26) r16.5 ↓ 3.56 (±1.45) r19 ↑ furnell and scott are we all on the same page? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 5 our questionnaire was distributed via the university’s vle to all bioscience undergraduates at the hull and scarborough campuses of the university of hull (794 students in total). a reminder email was circulated a month later and then printed questionnaires were handed out in lectures/tutorials to maximise the response rate. in total, 117 questionnaires were returned, (a 14% response rate). although this is a low response rate, it is adequate for a class size of over 700 (nulty, 2008). all 35 academic teaching staff in the department were asked to complete the questionnaire (16 did so), and 10 out of 35 recent graduates we asked to complete the questionnaire did so. the questionnaire simply presented the list of skills and asked respondents to indicate the importance of each in terms of graduate employability on a 5 point likert scale (5 = very important, 4 = important, 3 = neutral, 2 = low importance, 1 = very low importance). it is clear that teachers, students and graduates do not all see the skills listed in table 1 as being similarly important. to formally test the hypothesis that students, graduates and academic staff agree/disagree in their perception of the relative importance of the skills, we used a non-parametric kruskal-wallis test to compare median likert scores attributed to each skill (table 1). where significant test results were found, mann whitney tests were used to identify pair-wise differences. in the case of the latter, bonferroni corrections were applied to minimise the likelihood of type ii error, all effects are reported at a p< 0.0167 level of significance. between group significant differences in mean rank, the importance of nine skills were found (kruskal wallis p<0.05). further statistical analysis indicated that staff ranked these nine skills as being significantly more important than did students (table 1). there was no significant difference in rank importance of these skills between staff and graduates or between graduates and undergraduates (table 1). discussion of results and conclusions with two exceptions, all skills were rated as being on average of neutral importance or importance on the part of all respondents (self-reflection and ethical issues were rated as having low importance by graduates). the students only rated three of the skills (punctuality, working as a team member and ability to work without supervision) as being important (a mean score of ≥ 4) (table 1). in contrast, graduates and teachers both rated more of the skills as being important (12 and 15 of them respectively). it is not a surprise to us that the teachers who completed our questionnaire believed most of the skills that we furnell and scott are we all on the same page? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 6 listed to be important and made little, if any, distinction between them – after all, they have all been involved in building opportunities for students to develop these skills into their teaching practice to some extent (this was confirmed by them during their discussions with us). it is less easy to explain the differences between students and staff and between students and graduates. to attempt to do so we will draw upon the conversations we had with teachers, students and graduates (interviews and via facebook). our belief is that graduates come to recognise the importance of skills as they begin to apply them in an employment context. for example, staff and graduates ranked oral communication (which it was clear both they and students thought of as making presentations) as being important whilst students rated it, on average, in a neutral way (neither important nor unimportant). during our discussions (during interviews and through facebook) it became apparent that teachers understood a high level of ability in all forms of communication to be essential if students were to do well at the job application stage and at interview, and that employers would require employees to communicate effectively in all areas of work. graduates had come to recognise the importance of speaking with hindsight, one of them for example stated ‘everyone hates presentations but they are a part of your job and interview’. others talked about having had to speak at an interview and talked about speaking as part of effective customer service in general or as a key part of their job. during our discussions some students did see the value of presentations, but most of them added that they hated doing them. it is possible that dislike became neutrality during questionnaire completion – students may find less value in those tasks they least enjoy? on the other hand students saw punctuality (as distinct from time management) as being an important skill, but both teachers and graduates ranked it in a relatively low position compared to other skills (although the mean scores were high for all groups). this is possibly a reflection of the fact that as teachers we often impress upon students the importance of punctuality to the extent that most students perceive themselves to be lacking in this area, but that for an employed person punctuality may be a behaviour that is taken for granted and not therefore identified as a key skill. one graduate did explain that although he now took punctuality and time management for granted (in the context of being self-employed) it had been something that he found very difficult as a student. numeracy was recognised as being important by teachers but in discussion it was apparent that many of them felt that students had lower than expected/required abilities in this area. for example one teacher stated ‘mathematical skills are essential yet weak in furnell and scott are we all on the same page? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 7 our students’, another explained that this was a particular issue when poor numeracy skills meant that students were unable to identify simple flaws in their data. this is not an issue specific to our university, it is sector wide (willets, 2013). many heis do not require a minimum level of maths when recruiting biosciences students and a decline in numeracy amongst biology students has been documented (tariq, 2002). numeracy is seen as being important by employers (lowden et al., 2011). our students saw numeracy as being relatively important (rank 5) but our graduates did not (rank 15). it is possible that the graduates involved in this study did not have skills in numeracy and so have found employment in areas where it is not required, but we think that this is unlikely given the jobs that we know they have. conclusion we have confirmed our perception that students, teachers and employed graduates do not regard all key skills as being similarly important. clearly the opinions of teachers are influenced by their belief that all of the components of their provision are important to all of their students. students on the other hand value some skills more than they do others. this may be linked to their perceived ease or to the level of like/dislike they have for skills performance. graduates appear to take some skills for granted and to focus upon the skills that they have realised they need in daily employment; through an application of hindsight graduates may revise their views. we suggest that providing opportunities for graduates to share their hindsight with current students and with teachers is likely to be a powerful tool for ongoing programme development. acknowledgements this research was supported by a departmental teaching enhancement scheme awarded by the higher education academy uk centre for bioscience. we thank the staff, students and graduates who gave their time to this project. furnell and scott are we all on the same page? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 8 references brown, c.a., calvert, j., charman, p., newton, c., wiles, k. and hughes, i. (2005) ‘skills and knowledge needs among bioscience graduates – how do our courses measure up?, bioscience education, 6, november, pp. 1-18. committee on higher education (1963) higher education: report of the committee appointed by the prime minister under the chairmanship of lord robbins, 1961–63: ‘the robbins report’. london: her majesty’s stationery office. cranmer, s. (2006) ‘enhancing graduate employability: best intentions and mixed outcomes’, studies in higher education, 31(2), pp. 169-184. dearing, r. (1997) higher education in the learning society: report of the national committee of inquiry into higher education. norwich: hmso. de la harpe, b., radloff, a. and wyber, j. (2000) ‘quality and generic (professional) skills’, quality in higher education, 6(3), pp. 231-243. fraser, g. (2006) ‘student skills’, centre for bioscience, bulletin 18 (summer 2006), p. 3 [online]. available at: http://www.bioscience.heacademy.ac.uk/ftp/newsletters/bulletin18.pdf (accessed: 1 march 2015). haigh, m.j. and kilmartin m.p. (1999) ‘student perceptions of the development of personal transferable skills’, journal of geography in higher education, 23(2), pp. 195-206. hanson, s. and overton, t. (2010) skills required by new chemistry graduates and their development in degree programmes. university of hull : higher education academy uk physical sciences centre. hughes, i., hollingsworth, m., jones, s.j. and markham, t. (1997) ‘knowledge and skills needs of pharmacology graduates in first employment: how do pharmacology courses measure up?’, trends in pharmacological sciences, 18(4), pp. 111-116. http://www.bioscience.heacademy.ac.uk/ftp/newsletters/bulletin18.pdf furnell and scott are we all on the same page? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 9 leggett, m., kinnear, a., boyce, m. and bennett, i. (2004) ‘student and staff perceptions of the importance of generic skills in science’, higher education research and development 23(3), pp. 295-312. leveson, l. (2000) ‘disparities in perceptions of generic skills: academics and employers’, industry and higher education, 14(3), pp. 157-164. lowden, k., hall, s., elliot, d. and lewin, j. (2011) employers' perceptions of the employability skills of new graduates. edge foundation/university of glasgow: the scre centre research in education. mason, g., williams, g., cranmer, s. and guile, d. (2003) how much does higher education enhance the employability of graduates? london: institute of education and niesr for hefce. morley, l. (2001) ‘producing new workers: quality, equality and employability in higher education’, quality in higher education, 7(2), pp. 131-138. nulty, d. (2008) ‘the adequacy of response rates to online and paper surveys: what can be done?’, assessment and evaluation in higher education, 33(3), pp. 301-314. raybould, j. and sheedy, v. (2005) ‘are graduates equipped with the right skills in the employability stakes?’, industry and commercial training, 37(5), pp. 259-263. saunders, v. and zuzel, k. (2010) ‘evaluating employability skills: employer and student perceptions’, bioscience education, 15(2), june, pp. 1-15. tariq, v.n. (2002) ‘a decline in numeracy skills among bioscience undergraduates’, journal of biological education, 36(2), pp. 76-83. wickramasinghe, v. and perera, l. (2010) ‘graduates', university lecturers' and employers' perceptions towards employability skills’, education and training, 52(3), pp. 226244. furnell and scott are we all on the same page? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 10 willets, d. (2013) robbins revisited. bigger and better higher education. london: social market foundation. author details julie furnell is a research student in the bioscience education research group in the school of biological, biomedical and environmental sciences of the university of hull. her current research centers on the employability enhancing effects of learning through fieldwork. graham scott is professor of bioscience education and associate dean of learning and teaching in the faculty of science and engineering at the university of hull. he is a principle fellow of the higher education academy. are we all on the same page? teacher, graduate and student perceptions of the importance of skills thought to enhance employability abstract introduction methods and quantitative analysis discussion of results and conclusions conclusion acknowledgements references brown, c.a., calvert, j., charman, p., newton, c., wiles, k. and hughes, i. (2005) ‘skills and knowledge needs among bioscience graduates – how do our courses measure up?, bioscience education, 6, november, pp. 1-18. committee on higher education (1963) higher education: report of the committee appointed by the prime minister under the chairmanship of lord robbins, 1961–63: ‘the robbins report’. london: her majesty’s stationery office. dearing, r. (1997) higher education in the learning society: report of the national committee of inquiry into higher education. norwich: hmso. fraser, g. (2006) ‘student skills’, centre for bioscience, bulletin 18 (summer 2006), p. 3 [online]. available at: http://www.bioscience.heacademy.ac.uk/ftp/newsletters/bulletin18.pdf (accessed: 1 march 2015). haigh, m.j. and kilmartin m.p. (1999) ‘student perceptions of the development of personal transferable skills’, journal of geography in higher education, 23(2), pp. 195-206. hanson, s. and overton, t. (2010) skills required by new chemistry graduates and their development in degree programmes. university of hull : higher education academy uk physical sciences centre. hughes, i., hollingsworth, m., jones, s.j. and markham, t. (1997) ‘knowledge and skills needs of pharmacology graduates in first employment: how do pharmacology courses measure up?’, trends in pharmacological sciences, 18(4), pp. 111-116. leveson, l. (2000) ‘disparities in perceptions of generic skills: academics and employers’, industry and higher education, 14(3), pp. 157-164. lowden, k., hall, s., elliot, d. and lewin, j. (2011) employers' perceptions of the employability skills of new graduates. edge foundation/university of glasgow: the scre centre research in education. mason, g., williams, g., cranmer, s. and guile, d. (2003) how much does higher education enhance the employability of graduates? london: institute of education and niesr for hefce. saunders, v. and zuzel, k. (2010) ‘evaluating employability skills: employer and student perceptions’, bioscience education, 15(2), june, pp. 1-15. tariq, v.n. (2002) ‘a decline in numeracy skills among bioscience undergraduates’, journal of biological education, 36(2), pp. 76-83. wickramasinghe, v. and perera, l. (2010) ‘graduates', university lecturers' and employers' perceptions towards employability skills’, education and training, 52(3), pp. 226-244. willets, d. (2013) robbins revisited. bigger and better higher education. london: social market foundation. author details julie furnell is a research student in the bioscience education research group in the school of biological, biomedical and environmental sciences of the university of hull. her current research centers on the employability enhancing effects of learnin... literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 5: march 2013 promoting learning development as an academic discipline peter samuels birmingham city university, uk abstract over the past ten years, learning development has become an established practice in many uk universities. whilst this practice is generally understood and valued by students, its associated epistemology and community of practice is generally not perceived as an academic discipline in its own right by other academics, managers or policy makers. recently, there has been a move within the learning development community to address the challenge of enabling it to discover its ‘voice’ as a discipline within the conversation of disciplines. in addition, the current economic climate makes it desirable for the learning development community to organise and promote itself as a research-informed discipline so that its professional practice will not be over-embedded or absorbed within faculties to the detriment of students. firstly, the current level of maturity of the practice of learning development in the uk is considered. secondly, ways in which the learning development community might move forward are explored by considering three case studies of disciplinarity: two external to learning development, namely communications theory and educational development; and one internal to it, namely mathematics support. thirdly, with reference to data provided at a workshop on this subject, relevant approaches identified in these case studies are applied to learning development. finally, learning development’s progress towards the status of a discipline is discussed in comparison with the other case studies. keywords: learning development; educational development; mathematics support; communications theory; theory of disciplines. samuels promoting learning development as an academic discipline introduction over the past ten years learning development (ld) has become an established practice in many uk universities (hartley et al., 2011). this can be seen partly as a response to the challenges of widening participation (hefce, 2006), internationalisation (luxon and peelo, 2009) and the massification of higher education (he) (guri-rosenblit et al., 2007) which have had a major impact on uk he policies and practices. whilst the practice of ld is generally understood and valued by students who use its services, its associated epistemology and community of practice is generally not perceived as an academic discipline in its own right (becher, 1989) by other academics or by managers or policy makers. recently, the ld community has been seeking to address the challenge of discovering its ‘voice’ as a discipline within the conversation of disciplines. in addition, the current economic climate makes it desirable for the ld community to organise and promote itself as a research-informed discipline so that its professional practice will not be over-embedded and potentially absorbed to the detriment of students. the purpose of this article is to address the following questions: • what is meant by a discipline and the current position of ld within the conversation of disciplines? • where is ld now, both at an individual and a community level? • how have other emerging disciplines addressed similar challenges? • in the light of this, what can ld professionals take forward for their personal development and the ld community take forward for the development of its disciplinarity? • how might this strengthen ld’s voice amidst the conversation of disciplines? this article begins by exploring the need for ld to be promoted as a discipline within the conversation of disciplines. this is followed by the case studies evaluating the nature and current level of disciplinarity of communications theory, educational development and mathematics support. the penultimate section provides an evaluation of the nature and current level of maturity of ld as a discipline. the final section provides a discussion on the current level of progress of ld towards discipline status with reference to these other case studies. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 2 samuels promoting learning development as an academic discipline promoting learning development amongst the conversation of disciplines definitions of disciplines the practice of identifying and using disciplines in academia can be traced back at least to the university of paris the 13th century (encyclopaedia britannica, 2009). becher (1989) promotes the viewing of academic disciplines as tribes with their own territories: tribes imply both social organisation and an individual academic subculture; territories imply epistemological organisation leading to disciplinary coherence with clear boundaries, leading to the use of terms such as foundations, fields, areas and turf wars. according to craig (2008b), over-reliance on the epistemological perspective leads to the foundationalist fallacy, where every discipline is only perceived in terms of a specific branch on a large tree of knowledge. this model does not allow the emergence of new interdisciplinary disciplines, such as nanotechnologies. however, over-rejection of this perspective leads to the administrative convenience fallacy, where discipline boundaries are applied purely for the purposes of administration and bear no relationship with their epistemological areas. apart from this traditional model, shotter (1997, p.42) provides an alternative definition of a discipline as ‘a conversational community with a tradition of argumentation’. furthermore, craig (2008a, p.8) defines disciplines as ‘discursive formations that emerge, evolve, transform and dissipate in the on-going conversation of disciplines’. he also defines the term practical discipline to describe a discipline which ‘recursively cultivates the very social practices that constitute the discipline’s specific subject matter’ (craig, 2008a, p.3). abbott (2001, p.4) emphasises the social power struggle between disciplines. he observed that ‘most current views of intellectual succession are externalist; knowledge is somehow wed to power and power propels change’. alternative perspectives for evaluating disciplines disciplines can also be viewed from: • an intellectual perspective in terms of classic and current texts, theories, problems, methods and modes of analysis (craig, 2008b). journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 3 samuels promoting learning development as an academic discipline • an institutional perspective in terms of the existence of universities, departments, professional organisations, funding agencies, publishers, libraries, and databases (craig, 2008b). • a sociocultural perspective in terms of the ordinary concepts more or less deeply ingrained in cultural belief systems and habits of the general society (craig, 2008b). this is particularly important for practical disciplines (see above). • a socioeconomic perspective in terms of their relevance to the knowledge economy (becher and trowler, 2001). some important factors for this perceptive are managerialism, internationalisation, and viewing students as consumers or customers with their increased fees, increased expectations and increased concerns about employability. • a scholarship of teaching and learning perspective (boyer, 1990) by evaluating the level of research into educational scholarship within the discipline. perceiving learning development as a discipline most academics that are aware of the existence of ld would probably agree that it is a subset of, or closely associated with, educational development and also that it is, in some sense, a movement. perceiving ld as a discipline provides an additional perspective, both for the ld community to perceive themselves and for those outside the community to perceive them. it provides a model for potential areas of development based on the evaluation criteria described below. it also has the potential to encourage greater networking in that it requires ld practitioners to consider how they should participate in the ‘conversation of the disciplines’ and who they should ‘talk’ to. disciplinarity is also a recognisable discourse for academics and senior management which might encourage a greater valuing and rewarding of ld staff. as rust (2009, p.4) suggests, the key is to bring about ‘a paradigm shift in the thinking of academics across the sector’. perceiving ld as a discipline could also increase its credibility by promoting it as an area of specialist expertise, although this potential credibility is limited by the current lack of nationally established entry route into posts of learning developer in uk he such as an academic qualification or a professional accreditation (cash and hilsdon, 2008). one major issue concerning this perception is the need to develop an agreed tradition of argumentation within the ld community. an analysis of discussions on the learning development in higher education network (ldhen) jiscmail list (http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/ldhen; accessed 23 november 2012) (cash and hilsdon, 2008) journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 4 http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/ldhen samuels promoting learning development as an academic discipline and legacy outputs from the learnhigher centre for excellence in teaching and learning (cetl) (http://www.learnhigher.ac.uk/; accessed 23 november 2012), such as (hartley et al., 2011), provide a starting point for establishing this tradition. in particular, shahabudin (2009) collated an overview of learnhigher research into effective learning resources. her report begins to identify the basis of a research methodology for ld and an associated theoretical standpoint predicated on the need to accommodate 'complexity' in social science methodologies, as described by haggis (2008). however, one potential issue with this is the ability of ld staff to carry out and publish research to promote ld in an appropriately complex way, as they may naturally overemphasise qualitative and interpretive research. some of these issues have been identified with the mathematics support sub-area of ld in an initiative to measure and improve its effectiveness, as mentioned in its case study section below. combined list of perspectives for perceiving disciplines based on the above definitions and perceptions, the following perspectives for evaluating the nature and current level of disciplinarity are proposed and have been used in the case studies and the evaluation of ld below: • intellectual, in terms of created artefacts, including surveys. • sociocultural: relevance to society, including the student perspective. • economic. • institutional entrenchment (physical). • research community of practice (social). • professional development/scholarship of teaching and learning. • international capital – the extent to which the discipline is recognised internationally. case study one: communications theory introduction this summary is based closely on communication as a field and discipline (craig, 2008a), which is concerned with the historical development and academic-professional institutionalization of communication studies, and communication in the conversation of disciplines (craig, 2008b), which explores the nature of communication theory from a journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 5 http://www.learnhigher.ac.uk/ samuels promoting learning development as an academic discipline theory of disciplinarity in which every discipline derives its identity and coherence from its participation in the conversation of disciplines. communications theory has been chosen because of craig’s work to develop an evaluation framework of disciplinarity and apply it to this field. it also acts, in a loose sense, as a control as it has little relationship with ld. in terms of its nature, craig (2008a, p.675) described the field of communication as ‘highly diverse in methods, theories, and objects of study’. in terms of the etymology of the english word communication he continues by stating that it ‘originally referred to acts of sharing or making common but without the distinctively modern emphasis on communication as a process of sharing symbols, information and meaning’ (craig, 2008a, pp.675-676). communication’s status as a discipline and/or an interdisciplinary field has been debated internationally at least since the 1980s (gerbner, 1983). sociocultural relevance craig (2008b, pp.16-17) describes the sociocultural relevance of communications theory as follows: common sense ideas and practices of communication have evolved in historically specific circumstances. this has been intensely the case in the usa, where the communication discipline first took root. fears, hopes, and practical opportunities arising from the on-going development of mass media and communication technology certainly have had a large role in this process. the idea of communication also resonates strongly with themes in american culture such as individualism and the drive toward self-improvement, faith in technology and progress, and the chronically expressed need for stronger bonds of social community under conditions of sociocultural diversity and rapid change. the eruption of the communication idea around the world in globalized forms and in culturally adapted localized forms needs to be understood within the general process of economic and cultural globalization with all its attendant puzzles and controversies. the rapid international growth of the academic communication field is bound up in ways we have yet to understand with the emergence of ‘communication’ as a keyword in global culture. understanding this relationship is an urgent research problem at the discipline’s foundation. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 6 samuels promoting learning development as an academic discipline he continues by summarising deetz’s (1994) argument: the fundamental social problems that both explain and call for the emergence of a communication discipline are not simply found in the world but are constituted by particular ways of engaging with the world…disciplinary coherence will be found only in our engagement with this problematization of communication both globally and locally. (craig, 2008b, p.17) institutional entrenchment in terms of institutional entrenchment craig (2008b, p.16) explains that ‘communication is not yet well entrenched…and its intellectual contributions, while hardly negligible, are not yet of such weight as to explain its apparent emergence toward disciplinary status’. international capital in terms of international representations of communications theory, craig (2008a, p.678) states that ‘academic communication and media studies programs in the usa are numerous, well established, and often include a broader range of subfields than programs in other countries’ and ‘journalism schools were founded in latin america beginning in the 1930s and ‘40s’. in general terms, craig (2008a, p.678) describes the emergence of the research dimension of communications theory as developing ‘slowly beginning in the 1960s but more quickly in recent years’. more specifically, he observes that ‘communication research did not really take off as an organized academic field in western europe until the 1970s and in eastern europe and russia until the post-soviet period in the 1990s’ (craig, 2008a, p.679). in sub-saharan africa, craig (2008a, p.680) continues, ‘communication education and media studies are beginning to develop…despite the post-colonial legacy of economic and political problems that continues to affect academic and media institutions across much of the continent’. in terms of the arab world, craig (2008a, p.680) states, ‘having grown rapidly since the 1980s, the communication field is more densely developed…, where at least 70 academic programs currently exist in universities across the region’. in terms of israel he relates, ‘the field…has developed differently from other countries of the region since the founding in 1966 of the communication institute of the hebrew university of jerusalem as the first israeli institution for communication studies’ (craig, 2008a, p.680). journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 7 samuels promoting learning development as an academic discipline for south asian countries (india, pakistan and nearby countries) craig (2008a, p.681) observes, ‘the field of communication grew from university based journalism education, and from research projects sponsored by international foundations and agencies primarily concerned with the functions of media and communication in national development’. in terms of east asia he continues, ‘the communication field is burgeoning…and shows promise of important theoretical contributions spurred by efforts to adapt the discipline to asian cultural traditions’ (craig, 2008a, p.680). finally, in terms of the southeast asian and pacific region, he states, ‘communication, journalism, and media studies programs are developing…, most prominently in hong kong, singapore, australia and new zealand, but also in other countries such as the philippines, indonesia, malaysia, and thailand’ (craig, 2008a, p.680). the field of communication theory and studies is served by two international academic associations of worldwide scope: the international communication association (http://www.icahdq.org/; accessed 23 november 2012) and the international association for media and communication research (http://iamcr.org/; accessed 23 november 2012). case study two: educational development this case study is based closely on that presented at a workshop on this subject (samuels and reid, 2011). introduction as gosling’s (2008) report on education development (ed) in the uk shows, ed has now become well established in uk higher education institutions, with the majority of universities having an ed unit. these units are primarily responsible for the professional development of staff relating to teaching and learning, and also for enhancing teaching quality within the institution. sociocultural relevance the emergence of ed can be linked to changes in pedagogy from an emphasis on ‘teaching’ to an emphasis on ‘learning’, and also a greater focus on widening participation. government initiatives to ensure quality in teaching were more direct influence. gosling’s data shows that spikes in the numbers and profile of ed units follow government policies journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 8 http://www.icahdq.org/ http://iamcr.org/ samuels promoting learning development as an academic discipline and funding: firstly, the dearing report (1997) recommendation that every institution requires professional development for all new teaching staff; secondly, the teaching quality enhancement fund (http://www.hefce.ac.uk/whatwedo/lt/howfund/archive/teachingqualityenhancementfund/; accessed 23 november 2012) funding between 1999 and 2009; and thirdly, the higher education funding council (1999) requirement for institutions to have a learning and teaching strategy. it is likely this influence will continue with the browne review’s (2010) recommendation to make public the proportions of teaching-active staff holding teaching qualifications for each subject in each institution. gosling (2008, p.3) observes that such increased involvement in implementing institutional and governmental policies has led to a potential tension between the ‘managerial functions required of ed staff and their own allegiances to academic values’. intellectual artefacts although numbers of ed units increased primarily as an institutional response to the needs for staff development, ed has developed a growing body of research. gosling (2008, p.1) reports that ‘72.5% of ed units now see undertaking or contributing to pedagogic research as part of their function’. bath and smith (2004) identify 14 different academic journals related to higher education in which ed scholars have published their work. seda (http://www.seda.ac.uk/; accessed 23 november 2012) also has a range of academic publications including: a journal (innovations in education and teaching international); papers and short monographs; a magazine (education developments); and a book imprint with routledge. the most significant survey of ed to date has been gosling’s 2008 report ‘educational development in the united kingdom’, written for the heads of educational development group and based on research into the ed units at 43 he institutions. although gosling (2008, p.3) found that ‘educational development is an accepted part of most uk he institutions, and its central purposes are now well established’, he goes on to conclude that the institutional location and sources of funding for ed still varies greatly depending on institutional context, and it is still a very much contested role. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 9 http://www.hefce.ac.uk/whatwedo/lt/howfund/archive/teachingqualityenhancementfund/ http://www.seda.ac.uk/ samuels promoting learning development as an academic discipline research community of practice to some extent, ed has been able to link itself with the broader academic community surrounding education research. historically, in some he institutions, ed units started within departments of education in order to enable accreditation of their postgraduate certificates in education. this connection to this wider discipline has been maintained through similar areas of research and interest. bath and smith (2004) make the case for ed to claim its ‘tribal territory’ as an academic discipline. they emphasise that of all the areas of academic work (research, teaching, service), research is the key to being able to make this claim: educational developers ‘must acknowledge that their work is defensible by reference to a high quality research in the discipline, and that it is academic work by its very nature’ (bath and smith, 2004, p.25). professional development the staff and educational development association (seda) was formed in 1993 and is the professional association for ed in the uk. it has a comprehensive, unified approach to professional development through its accreditation framework, fellowships scheme, national events, and summer school. international capital ed has an international organisation – the international consortium for educational development (http://icedonline.net/; accessed 23 november 2012) which was formed in 1993 and meets annually. there are strong traditions of educational development in australia, canada, ireland, sweden, norway, usa and new zealand. bath and smith (2004) identify 8 different professional bodies for ed worldwide. case study three: mathematics support introduction mathematics support is ‘any extra, optional, non-compulsory programme or facility that assists students in developing mathematical and/or statistical confidence and skills during their enrolled study in a degree course, whether undergraduate or postgraduate, but with no credit associated with the learning support programme’ (macgillivray and croft, 2011, p.189). the existence of mathematics support centres in uk he can be traced back to 1990, and possibly earlier in uk further education. the mathematics support community journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 10 http://icedonline.net/ samuels promoting learning development as an academic discipline of practice in uk he came into existence through the first national conference on mathematics support hosted by the university of luton in 1993. the status of mathematics support as a practical discipline is discussed by samuels (2007) and samuels and patel (2010). sociocultural relevance lawson and others (2003, p.5) argue that the main reason for the emergence of mathematics support provisions is the ‘mismatch between students’ mathematical confidence, knowledge and skills at university entry and those required in order to commence their degree courses’. they also suggest a second reason for its emergence is ‘the increasing breadth of variation of mathematical and statistical competences of students entering the same university courses’ (lawson et al., 2003, p.5). professional development in 2003, a booklet of guidelines on good practice in the provision of mathematics support centres was produced based on the expertise of experienced practitioners (lawson et al., 2003). in 2005, the university of minnesota produced a peer tutor handbook for its undergraduate peer math tutors (general college math center, 2005). there is no general certified qualification in mathematics support in the uk. however, loughborough university runs a postgraduate certificate in mathematics support and dyslexia and dyscalculia in further and higher education (http://pgcert.lboro.ac.uk/; accessed 23 november 2012). the sigma network recently ran workshops for postgraduate students on how to tutor in a maths support centre. the content of these workshops has now been turned into a guide for postgraduate students (croft and grove, 2011). intellectual artefacts the initial conference at the university of luton in 1993 led to the establishment of the mathematics support association which produced eight newsletters (http://www.sigmacetl.ac.uk/index.php?section=80; accessed 23 november 2012). after it was disbanded in 1999, publications by community members mainly switched to the higher education academy’s subject centre for mathematics statistics and operations research newsletter: connections (http://mathstore.ac.uk/?q=node/58; accessed 23 november 2012) and the cetl-msor annual conference proceedings (http://www.mathstore.ac.uk/?q=node/2049; accessed 23 november 2012). the sigma centre for excellence in teaching and journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 11 http://pgcert.lboro.ac.uk/ http://www.sigma-cetl.ac.uk/index.php?section=80 http://www.sigma-cetl.ac.uk/index.php?section=80 http://mathstore.ac.uk/?q=node/58 http://www.mathstore.ac.uk/?q=node/2049 samuels promoting learning development as an academic discipline learning (http://www.sigma-cetl.ac.uk/; accessed 23 november 2012) was able to build on this body and publish peer reviewed articles. the uk mathematics support community of practice has so far carried out and reported on four surveys into the extent of provision in the uk. of these, the surveys by beveridge (1997) and perkin and croft (2004) were the most thorough in terms of using several forms of inquiry and attempting to approach several people at each institution. from these two surveys it is concluded that at least 50% of all uk he institutions had a mathematics support drop-in workshop or drop-in centre at the time they were questioned. research community of practice research into mathematics support can be considered to have begun with beveridge’s (1993) description of the minnesota model of developmental maths. however, little research was carried out by the community until the establishment of the sigma cetl in 2005 which, in the period up until 2010, employed several research staff and phd students (samuels, 2006). it has also organised an annual conference since 2005 (http://www.mathstore.ac.uk/?q=node/2049; accessed 23 november 2012). this research community has since shrunk after the end of the cetl funding. however, interest was recently shown into a systematic research programme to measure and evaluate the effectiveness of mathematics support centres (http://www.mathcentre.ac.uk/courses/mathematics-support-centre/measuring-effectivess/; accessed 23 november 2012) culminating in a publication by macgillivray and croft (2011) and a workshop organised by the sigma network (http://sigmanetwork.ac.uk/resources/evaluating-and-measuring-effectiveness-in-mathematics-supportprovision; accessed 23 november 2012). international capital the communities of practice in australia and the republic of ireland have reached a sufficient level of maturity to carry out and publish surveys into their levels of provision. macgillivray (2008) reports that 32 of the 39 universities in australia have some form of mathematics learning support. gill and others (2008) report there were 13 tertiary mathematics support centres in the republic of ireland. there is also a provision in many universities in the usa, commonly referred to as zero credit courses, but there is not such a level of inter-state coordination as in these countries. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 12 http://www.sigma-cetl.ac.uk/ http://www.mathstore.ac.uk/?q=node/2049 http://www.mathcentre.ac.uk/courses/mathematics-support-centre/measuring-effectivess/ http://sigma-network.ac.uk/resources/evaluating-and-measuring-effectiveness-in-mathematics-support-provision http://sigma-network.ac.uk/resources/evaluating-and-measuring-effectiveness-in-mathematics-support-provision http://sigma-network.ac.uk/resources/evaluating-and-measuring-effectiveness-in-mathematics-support-provision samuels promoting learning development as an academic discipline evaluation of learning development as a discipline in this section the nature and current level of disciplinarity of learning development is explored from a variety of perspectives. the unattributed views expressed here are summarised from those provided at a workshop on the subject at the aldinhe 2011 conference (samuels and reid, 2011). economic perspective most ld units are funded centrally. unlike other disciplines, ld may benefit from the 2012 uk tuition fees increase because of increased pressure on universities to deliver a quality student experience with the office for fair access (http://www.offa.org.uk/; accessed 23 november 2012) potentially providing a lever. ld centres also have other income generating potential, including research funding, national teaching fellowships, university teaching awards and developing resources, courses and services for external clients. the value for money of ld centres is quite closely linked to their influence on retention. this puts these centres in a precarious position if this should change. they also provide economic value to their institutions when they are able to initiate advances in or changes to learning methods. sociocultural relevance from a positive perspective, ld fosters and nurtures participation, crosses multiple boundaries, and attempts to demystify learning. from an uncertain or neutral perspective: ld is a necessary service in order to fortify students’ purposes, roles and functions in the context of their holistic development; and it has developed in a particular set of social, cultural and historical circumstances. from a negative perspective, ld can be seen to only promote mediocrity and is only as relevant as students perceive it to be. according to bell (2011), students perceive ld as being a separate provision independent from their course and assessment regimes. however, for ld centres also providing english language assessment and teaching, this view may be blurred, especially following the recent changes to uk border agency (ukba, 2011) regulations on english proficiency for international students. notwithstanding this, ld staff can act as intermediaries between tutor feedback and their academic development (turner, 2011). students often find ld staff to be informative; in particular, they see them as providers of learning resources. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 13 http://www.offa.org.uk/ samuels promoting learning development as an academic discipline because of their neutral role, students can find ld staff to be more interested in them as individuals who care about their learning. however, some find them to be irrelevant. according to foster and others (2011) this view might demonstrate their overconfidence in how transferable their post 16-education is to their university study. other students find them to be too generic and therefore not having the same ‘authority’ as their subject tutors. others view them as support staff and would therefore only consider approaching them for ‘remedial’ help. however, it is probably the case that, despite the best efforts of ld centres to advertise themselves, the majority of students are still unaware that they exist. intellectual resources ld’s intellectual resources can be described in terms of their intended audience: • internal facing resources: ld now has its own journal (the journal of learning development in higher education, http://www.aldinhe.ac.uk/ojs/index.php?journal=jldhe; accessed 23 november 2012). it also has reports from the learnhigher centre for excellence in teaching and learning and resources from the association for learning development in higher education (aldinhe) conferences. • external facing resources: there are many good websites and text books on academic writing, study skills and other areas of ld. • research resources: ld’s body of research literature is still emerging. there is a need to formalise the nature of research in the field in order to give it greater validity. the outcome of some ld research should be to identify issues in learning. research into students’ perception of ld often lacks generalizability due to proportionately less unsatisfied students tending to reply to feedback requests. the self-selecting nature of most ld interventions means it is normally impossible to establish control groups to evaluate the effectiveness of ld interventions. the ld community needs to reflect on its learnhigher cetl legacy and consider ways in which to take it forward. institutional entrenchment although no formal survey has been carried out into the extent and position of ld centres in uk he, it is considered that most he institutions have some form of ld centre, with the majority being situated as a centralised provision, as is also the case in american journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 14 http://www.aldinhe.ac.uk/ojs/index.php?journal=jldhe samuels promoting learning development as an academic discipline universities. there are opposing views over their relationship with educational development with some universities running a merged provision for staff and students and others providing separate services. some ld provisions are also embedded within academic departments and faculties. professional development/scholarship of teaching and learning ld draws on a wide range of professional and intellectual traditions. experience often plays an important role in becoming an ld practitioner. the higher education academy’s uk professional standards framework (http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/ukpsf; accessed 23 november 2012) may threaten this. there is a growing awareness of the need for professional development and a move towards more certification. one drawback is the general lack of links between ld and education departments. international capital there is currently no international organisation for ld. however, nacada (the national academic advising association – see http://www.nacada.ksu.edu/; accessed 23 november 2012) is an organisation representing the international community of academic advisors. on a regional level, in the usa, the main model of ld is that of writing centres. this provides a possible direction for uk-based ld centres to emulate. there is a tension with the usa descriptive model of prescription. california state university runs a website called merlot, standing for (multimedia educational resources for learning and online teaching, http://www.merlot.org/merlot; accessed 23 november 2012). there are similar movements in australasia. ld does not yet have a high profile in europe. however, organisations such as the european first year experience conference (http://www.efye.eu/; accessed 23 november 2012) are beginning to address ld-related concerns across the continent. discussion since its inception, learning development has clearly made progress towards being recognised as a discipline in its own right. its resonance and identification with student learning means it is, to some extent, a practical discipline, according to craig’s (2008a) journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 15 http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/ukpsf http://www.nacada.ksu.edu/ http://www.merlot.org/merlot http://www.efye.eu/ samuels promoting learning development as an academic discipline definition. in terms of its current overall status as a discipline, ld is clearly far behind communications theory and is also behind ed in many areas. however, the association for learning development in higher education provide it with the infrastructure for a strong community of practice in the uk and beyond, and some ld practitioners are developing excellent external facing resources in many ld subject areas. at the international level, ld is recognised in some other countries, as might be expected when comparing it with ed and mathematics support. the ld research community and its associated intellectual resources are still emerging, although it has clearly benefitted from the influence of the learnhigher cetl and the establishment of its own journal. insufficient research has so far been carried out into the status of ld to provide a detailed and nuanced picture for the field, similar to those drawn by craig (2008a; 2008b) for communications theory and gosling (2009) for ed. the ld community could also learn lessons from the progress made by the mathematics support community, especially in terms of its systematic surveys into the current level of provision of mathematics support (both in the uk and further afield) and its efforts to establish a research programme into measuring and improving effectiveness of mathematics support provisions. such an emphasis, with a more firmly established tradition of argumentation, would assist ld to become recognised and respected by he managers and policy makers. in terms of finding its voice within the conversation of disciplines, ld’s relationship with ed could benefit from being clarified. in addition, its relationship with education needs to be improved in terms of the academic and professional recognition of ld staff. this might lead to an increase in the recognition of its staff as teachers and reflective practitioners, not just as tutors or advisors. it could be accomplished, in part, through the ld community adopting a greater emphasis on a scholarship of teaching and learning approach to its own practices. acknowledgement i acknowledge the contribution from dr michelle reid, my co-presenter of a workshop at the aldinhe 2011 conference on this subject, in developing many of the ideas in this paper, and the feedback and encouragement from the workshop participants, especially from dr sam bamkin. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 16 samuels promoting learning development as an academic discipline references abbott, a. (2001) the chaos of disciplines. chicago: the university of chicago press. bath, d. and smith, c. (2004) ‘academic developers: an academic tribe claiming their territory in higher education’, international journal for academic development, 9(1), pp. 9-27. becher, t. (1989) academic tribes and territories: intellectual enquiry into the cultures and disciplines. milton keynes: open university press. becher, t. and trowler, p.r. (2001) academic tribes and territories: intellectual enquiry into the cultures and disciplines. 2nd edn. milton keynes: open university press. bell, r. (2011) ‘negotiating and nurturing: challenging staff and student perspectives of academic writing’, in hartley, p., hilsdon, j., keenan, c., sinfield, s. and verity, m. (eds.) learning development in higher education. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan, pp. 143-154. beveridge, i. (1993) the minnesota model of developmental maths. available at: http://www.sigmacetl.ac.uk/index.php?action=download_resource&id=322&module =resourcesmodule (accessed: 23 november 2012). beveridge, i. (1997) ‘survey: learning support for mathematics in fe and he’, mathematics support association newsletter, 6, pp. 20-23 [online]. available at: http://www.sigma-cetl.ac.uk/index.php?section=85 (accessed: 23 november 2012). boyer, e.l. (1990) scholarship reconsidered: priorities of the professoriate. new york: the carnegie foundation for the advancement of teaching. browne, j. (2010) browne review: securing a sustainable future for higher education. available at: www.bis.gov.uk/assets/biscore/corporate/docs/s/10-1208-securingsustainable-higher-education-browne-report.pdf (accessed: 23 november 2012). journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 17 http://www.sigmacetl.ac.uk/index.php?action=download_resource&id=322&module=resourcesmodule http://www.sigmacetl.ac.uk/index.php?action=download_resource&id=322&module=resourcesmodule http://www.sigma-cetl.ac.uk/index.php?section=85 http://www.bis.gov.uk/assets/biscore/corporate/docs/s/10-1208-securing-sustainable-higher-education-browne-report.pdf http://www.bis.gov.uk/assets/biscore/corporate/docs/s/10-1208-securing-sustainable-higher-education-browne-report.pdf samuels promoting learning development as an academic discipline cash, c. and hilsdon, j. (2008) ‘buried treasures in a virtual community chest’, society for research into higher education annual conference. liverpool 9-11 december [online]. available at: www.srhe.ac.uk/conference2008/papers/0292-johnhilsdon_caroline-cash.doc (accessed: 23 november 2012). craig, r.t. (2008a) ‘communication as a field and discipline’, in donsbach, w. (ed.) international encyclopaedia of communication. oxford: blackwell, pp. 675-688. craig, r.t. (2008b) ‘communication in the conversation of disciplines’, russian journal of communication, 1(1), pp. 7-23. croft, a.c. and grove, m.j. (eds.) (2011) tutoring in a mathematics support centre – a guide for postgraduate students. birmingham: the national he stem programme [online]. available at: http://www.mathcentre.ac.uk/resources/uploaded/46836tutoring-in-msc-web.pdf (accessed: 23 november 2012). dearing, r. (1997) dearing report: national committee of inquiry into higher education. available at: www.leeds.ac.uk/educol/ncihe/ (accessed: 23 november 2012). deetz, s.a. (1994) ‘future of the discipline: the challenges, the research, and the social contribution’, in deetz, s.a. (ed.) communication yearbook 17. thousand oaks, ca: sage, pp. 565-600. encyclopaedia britannica (2009) encyclopaedia britannica 2010. london: encyclopaedia britannica (uk) ltd. foster, e., lawther, s. and mcneil, j. (2011) ‘learning developers supporting early student transition’, in hartley, p., hilsdon, j., keenan, c., sinfield, s. and verity, m. (eds.) learning development in higher education. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan, pp. 79-90. general college math center (2005) peer tutor handbook: 2005-2006. minnesota: university of minnesota. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 18 http://www.srhe.ac.uk/conference2008/papers/0292-john-hilsdon_caroline-cash.doc http://www.srhe.ac.uk/conference2008/papers/0292-john-hilsdon_caroline-cash.doc http://www.mathcentre.ac.uk/resources/uploaded/46836-tutoring-in-msc-web.pdf http://www.mathcentre.ac.uk/resources/uploaded/46836-tutoring-in-msc-web.pdf http://www.leeds.ac.uk/educol/ncihe/ samuels promoting learning development as an academic discipline gerbner, g. (ed.) (1983) ‘ferment in the field (special issue)’, journal of communication, 33(3), pp. 1-368. gill, o., o’donoghue, j. and johnson, p. (2008) an audit of mathematical support provision in irish third level institutions. limerick: cemtl, university of limerick. available at http://www.ul.ie/cemtl/pdf%20files/fullaudit.pdf (accessed: 23 november 2012). gosling, d. (2008) educational development in the united kingdom. heads of educational development group. available at: http://www.hedg.ac.uk/documents/hedg_report_final.pdf (accessed: 23 november 2012). gosling, d. (2009) ‘educational development in the uk: a complex and contradictory reality’, international journal for academic development, 14(1), pp. 5-18. guri-rosenblit, s., sebkova, h. and teichler, u. (2007) ‘massification and diversity of higher education systems: interplay of complex dimensions’, higher education policy, 20(4), pp. 373-390. haggis, t. (2008) ‘‘knowledge must be contextual’: some possible implications of complexity and dynamic systems theories for educational research’, educational philosophy and theory, 40(1), pp. 158-176. hartley, p., hilsdon, j., keenan, c., sinfield, s. and verity, m. (eds.) (2011) learning development in higher education. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan. hefce (1999) learning and teaching: strategy and funding. report 99/26. bristol: higher education funding council for england. hefce (2006) widening participation: a review. bristol: higher education funding council for england. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 19 http://www.ul.ie/cemtl/pdf%20files/fullaudit.pdf http://www.hedg.ac.uk/documents/hedg_report_final.pdf samuels promoting learning development as an academic discipline lawson, d.a., croft, a.c. and halpin, m. (2003) good practice in the provision of mathematics support centres. 2nd edn. birmingham: ltsn maths, stats and or network. available at: http://mathstore.gla.ac.uk/repository/3-01mathssupport_2.pdf (accessed: 23 november 2012). luxon, a. and peelo, m. (2009) ‘internationalisation: its implications for curriculum design and course development in uk higher education’, innovations in education and teaching international, 46(1), pp. 51–60. macgillivray, h. (2008) learning support in mathematics and statistics in australian universities – a guide for the university sector. strawberry hills: the australian learning and teaching council. macgillivray, h. and croft, a.c. (2011) ‘understanding evaluation of learning support in mathematics and statistics’, international journal of mathematical education in science and technology, 42(2), pp. 189–212. perkin, g. and croft, a.c. (2004) ‘mathematics support centres – the extent of current provision’, msor connections, 4(2), pp. 14-18 [online]. available at: http://mathstore.gla.ac.uk/headocs/42supportcentres.pdf (accessed: 23 november 2012). rust, c. (2009) ‘opinion piece: a call to unite in a common cause’, journal of learning development in higher education, issue 1, february, pp. 1-5 [online]. available at: http://www.aldinhe.ac.uk/ojs/index.php?journal=jldhe&page=article&op=view&path %5b%5d=24&path%5b%5d=11 (accessed: 23 november 2012). samuels, p.c. (2006) ‘introducing the sigma mathematics support research programme’, msor connections, 6(4), pp. 12-13 [online]. available at: http://www.mathstore.ac.uk/headocs/6412_sigmamaths.pdf (accessed: 23 november 2012). journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 20 http://mathstore.gla.ac.uk/repository/3-01mathssupport_2.pdf http://mathstore.gla.ac.uk/headocs/42supportcentres.pdf http://www.aldinhe.ac.uk/ojs/index.php?journal=jldhe&page=article&op=view&path%5b%5d=24&path%5b%5d=11 http://www.aldinhe.ac.uk/ojs/index.php?journal=jldhe&page=article&op=view&path%5b%5d=24&path%5b%5d=11 http://www.mathstore.ac.uk/headocs/6412_sigmamaths.pdf samuels promoting learning development as an academic discipline samuels, p.c. (2007) ‘mathematics support as a practical discipline’, in green, d. (ed.) cetl-msor conference: conference proceedings. university of birmingham 1011 september. birmingham: hea msor network, pp. 107-112 [online]. available at: http://www.mathstore.ac.uk/repository/cetlmsor2007_proceedings.pdf (accessed: 23 november 2012). samuels, p.c. and patel, c. (2010) ‘scholarship in mathematics support services’, journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2, february, pp. 1-21 [online]. available online at: http://www.aldinhe.ac.uk/ojs/index.php?journal=jldhe&page=article&op=view&path %5b%5d=44&path%5b%5d=31 (accessed: 23 november 2012). samuels, p.c. and reid, m. (2011) ‘promoting learning development as an academic discipline’, 8th aldinhe conference. session 6.6. queen’s university belfast 18-20 april [online]. available at: http://www.aldinhe.ac.uk/symposium11 (accessed: 23 november 2012). shahabudin, k. (2009) investigating effective sources to enhance student learning: an overview of learnhigher research. liverpool hope university: learnhigher cetl. shotter, j. (1997) ‘textual violence in academe: on writing with respect for one’s others’, in huspek, m. and radford g.p. (eds.) transgressing discourses: communication and the voice of other. albany, ny: state university of new york press, pp. 17-46. turner, j. (2011) ‘the case for one-to-one academic advice for students’, in hartley, p., hilsdon, j., keenan, c., sinfield, s., and verity, m. (eds.) learning development in higher education, basingstoke: palgrave macmillan, pp. 91-101. ukba (2011) summary of the new student policy. available at: http://www.ukba.homeoffice.gov.uk/sitecontent/documents/news/summary-studentpolicy.pdf (accessed: 23 november 2012). journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 21 http://www.mathstore.ac.uk/repository/cetlmsor2007_proceedings.pdf http://www.aldinhe.ac.uk/ojs/index.php?journal=jldhe&page=article&op=view&path%5b%5d=44&path%5b%5d=31 http://www.aldinhe.ac.uk/ojs/index.php?journal=jldhe&page=article&op=view&path%5b%5d=44&path%5b%5d=31 http://www.aldinhe.ac.uk/symposium11 http://www.ukba.homeoffice.gov.uk/sitecontent/documents/news/summary-student-policy.pdf http://www.ukba.homeoffice.gov.uk/sitecontent/documents/news/summary-student-policy.pdf samuels promoting learning development as an academic discipline author details dr peter samuels is an academic skills tutor in mathematics, statistics, ict and dissertation writing at the centre for academic success in birmingham city university. his main research interests are: mathematics support; academic writing; mathematics education; and learning development. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 22 promoting learning development as an academic discipline abstract introduction promoting learning development amongst the conversation of disciplines definitions of disciplines alternative perspectives for evaluating disciplines combined list of perspectives for perceiving disciplines case study one: communications theory introduction sociocultural relevance institutional entrenchment international capital case study two: educational development introduction sociocultural relevance intellectual artefacts research community of practice professional development international capital case study three: mathematics support introduction sociocultural relevance professional development intellectual artefacts research community of practice international capital evaluation of learning development as a discipline economic perspective sociocultural relevance intellectual resources institutional entrenchment professional development/scholarship of teaching and learning international capital discussion acknowledgement references author details literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special edition: researching pdp practice, november 2010 how do different models of pdp influence the embedding of eportfolios? louise frith university of kent, uk abstract this paper examines how e-portfolios have been used in relation to three different models of personal development planning (pdp). it begins with a brief description of the context of the study at the university of kent. then, using clegg and bradley’s (2006) models of pdp, it identifies three case studies to review: social work (the professional model), sports studies (the employability model) and physics (the academic model). the discussion centres on what has been learned from these case studies in relation to pdp practice and embedding of e-portfolios. the paper will be of interest to academics and curriculum developers introducing e-portfolios to support various models of pdp. key words: assessment; models of pdp; reflective learning; staff development. introduction the university of kent’s pdp practice was reviewed in 2006 (frith, 2006). this reported existing pdp practice in departments. the review noted that rich and diverse pdp practice was present in all programmes of study but was sometimes so embedded that it was difficult for students to discern. this lack of discernment was interpreted by the university as a potential vulnerability because the national student survey asks students three pdp questions relating to self-efficacy, communication skills and problem-solving. therefore, in 2006 the university’s learning and teaching board (ltb) agreed to make pdp more visible whilst retaining a discipline-specific approach. kent’s pdp support in 2006 involved a series of online, generic questionnaires and template word documents on subjects such as skills audits and swot analysis. part of frith how do different models of pdp influence the embedding of e-portfolios? the drive towards e-portfolios was to get away from this bolt-on and generic approach to pdp. currently the university of kent’s approach to pdp is delivered by departments using subject specific resources with support from the unit for the enhancement of learning and teaching (uelt). the author is the pdp co-ordinator, based in uelt. in recent years, heavier emphasis is being put on equipping students with employability skills. the proposed introduction of the hear (higher education achievement record) will require universities to verify some of the activities which students have been involved in outside their academic studies. therefore, it is more important now than it was at the beginning of this pilot project (in 2006) that the university finds ways of helping students to make sense of all their university experiences. it is no longer enough for a student just to list the things that they have done at university. they also need to construct a convincing narrative about the transferability of those experiences for employment purposes. students will increasingly need help with this process. the university’s learning and teaching board agreed that introducing e-portfolios would help facilitate elements of pdp such as gathering and showcasing evidence, reviewing and ordering, reflective writing, social learning and action planning. e-portfolios have the potential to provide a truer picture of the student’s skills and their capacity to capture and learn from their ‘learning journey’. e-portfolios also appear to allow an individual approach so that each discipline, and within that each student, can use it differently. the university chose to pilot pebblepad e-portfolio software. this provides students with a private, personal, online space to record and reflect on their development. initially 1000 licences were bought so that the software could be piloted. to date the software has been used in 13 academic departments. this study focuses on three because they represent one from each of the three models of pdp identified below. the three models of pdp which clegg and bradley (2006) identify are helpful in understanding why some academic departments have been quick to embed e-portfolios and are comfortable with the software, whereas others have found embedding e-portfolios a much longer and more problematic process. for their analysis, clegg and bradley draw on the work of barnett (2000) and moore (2001) who identified two directions which courses can face; either projectional, outward facing to employers and the economy, or introjectional, facing inwards to the discipline and the academy. clegg and bradley journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 2 frith how do different models of pdp influence the embedding of e-portfolios? position the professional and employability models in the outward facing group whereas the academic model tends to face in. the professional model is defined as programmes of study which teach the development of specific professional competencies; for example, teacher training, health care and social work. professions have strong boundaries and a tradition of reflective practice. they have also used professional competency portfolios in assessment for many years. the employability model describes programmes which do not necessarily lead to a specific professional career but which are strongly projectional (outward facing) (see barnett, 2000; moore, 2001). they are more generic and have looser boundaries than professional courses. examples of this model include sports studies, business studies and computer science. students on these types of programmes often need their degree to gain specific employment but reflective practice may be absent. the academic model refers mainly to humanities subjects and pure sciences, for example, history, english and physics. here the focus is introjectional based on the needs of the discipline rather than the needs of future employers. in these subjects staff generally do not see employment as the focus for the degree as students follow varied career paths; staff aim to create a graduate rather than a professional. in these subjects, pdp focuses on enabling students to recognise their learning process and practice skills necessary for development in the discipline. moore (2001), barnett (2000) identify two directions in which programmes of study can face introjectional facing inwards projectional facing outwards clegg & bradley (2006) identify three models of pdp which can be placed either into the introjectional or the projectional category. academic: physics, history, english professional: social work, teaching, health care employability: sports studies, business studies figure 1. clegg and bradley’s three models of pdp based on earlier work of moore and barnett. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 3 frith how do different models of pdp influence the embedding of e-portfolios? this paper outlines the methodology for the study at kent. it then describes three case studies, one from each of the models: the professional model (social work), the employability model (sports studies), the academic model (physics). discussion of four points of learning emerges. the first is the strength of the discipline specific approach. the second is the debate about whether to award credit for students’ pdp. the third is the importance of creating authentic student experiences for meaningful reflection to occur. finally, this work has exposed a staff development need to learn how to set and mark reflective tasks. methodology this paper is part of a wider review of the use of e-portfolios at kent. all the departments which used the software were asked to provide feedback on their experiences. data has been gathered through a variety of ways: statistical data that is generated by the software, such as how often students use the software and which tools they use the most; staff views sought through questionnaires and structured interviews; and students’ views gathered through questionnaires, focus groups and structured interviews with students. this paper focuses on the qualitative data gathered through interviews, focus groups and questionnaires. the subjects chosen to investigate for this paper were selected on the basis that they represent one of each of the models identified by clegg and bradley. all these departments requested the support of uelt’s pdp co-ordinator to embed pdp or eportfolios. her role is to support the department in embedding e-portfolio technology or pdp activities and to evaluate this process. case study 1: social work social work, as with many other professional programmes of study, makes close connections with the professional requirements. for example, the social work programme at kent complies with the requirements of the department of health, topss (the training organisation for the personal social services) and the gscc (general social care council). these bodies set out how many days of practice students must complete in order to qualify, and they also write the guidance on the assessment of practice. these requirements link with students’ process of pdp. the social work programme has large journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 4 frith how do different models of pdp influence the embedding of e-portfolios? elements of practice-based learning. in year 1 students do a ten day placement which they write up for reflection and integration of knowledge and practice. in year 2 and 3 students must complete two 100 day placements which are required for registration as a social worker. this experience is written up by students in a document called ‘assessment of practice’. this is a collaborative piece of reflective writing by the student with input and feedback by the practice assessor and the academic tutor. the social work department was one of the first to use e-portfolios at kent. they quickly went from piloting the use of e-portfolios on a voluntary basis in year 1 to requiring all students to use the e-portfolio and awarding significant credit for the e-portfolio in year 2. e-portfolios are now completely embedded in the school of social work. all students and their practice assessors are given training in how to use e-portfolios and all students are expected to submit a collaborative e-portfolio of their competencies in social work. students cannot share their webfolio outside of their programme of study because much of their work is confidential. the screen shot below (figure 2) shows an empty webfolio template which the students populate with their experiences and reflections. figure 2. screen shot of social work assessment of practice e-portfolio template. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 5 frith how do different models of pdp influence the embedding of e-portfolios? feedback from lecturers, students and practice assessors on this programme has been positive as it has solved a previous practical problem of version control, i.e. the problem of three stakeholders working from three slightly different versions of the same document. the only issues that have caused minor difficulties have been technical. some students and some practice assessors were initially resistant to learning and using a new technology. some of the students’ negative comments were recorded through questionnaires: i find it difficult to use because the font is smaller than i am used to… i have experienced difficulties signing in to the software…it’s a bit slow…it takes ages to upload information. these issues have been easy to resolve and the technology is now fully integrated into the social work programme. there have been no issues about what pdp is, or what to assess. the feedback that students receive is both formative and summative assessment of practice. the e-portfolio was applied to an existing assessment of practice and it was generally deemed to be an improvement to practice. the director of studies commented: this is an interesting addition to our work and has attracted the attention of other social work departments nationally. case study 2: sports science in sports studies programmes pdp is located within modules. study skills are introduced throughout year 1 modules and then in years 2 and 3 there are practical modules in which students design and implement a project. this is assessed by a written report of their experience. however, reflection on the process of skills development or the experiences of practical work was absent. a sports studies lecturer said: previously there was no requirement for formal reflection. the e-portfolio gives students the facility to record their experiences and learning from practical work. therefore the sports studies department were initially keen to try to use e-portfolio software and it was offered to students as a way of reporting their work on one module. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 6 frith how do different models of pdp influence the embedding of e-portfolios? students used the module to show how they would organise a sports event for a special population. the students had to show evidence of a variety of competences such as project planning, budgeting, health and safety awareness. although students were encouraged to use the software it was not compulsory and no extra marks were awarded for use of an e-portfolio. this meant that usage was patchy but those students who used the software liked it: it helped me to reflect because it made me organise and order my work. i think it helps people who are not naturally organised to order their work so it also helps to form good study habits. students said that they would welcome the e-portfolio being made compulsory because then it would be better supported: pebblepad is useful for reflecting on work and presenting it, but we need more support from the department on how to use the software. a student who did not use the e-portfolio said in a focus group session: if we had been able to get extra marks for it i would have used it but i was really busy with the project and it wasn’t worth it. lecturers noted that it was particularly useful for the recording of practical work. lecturers also see the potential that it has for raising the profile of students’ reflections on the process of their learning. when staff were asked if they would use e-portfolio software again, they responded positively: yes, particularly to record experiences of practical work and to help students see their own development resulting from practical experience. case study 3: physics the physics department has been enthusiastic to engage with pdp but fitting it into the curriculum has been difficult. students’ experience of pdp is through a generic online journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 7 frith how do different models of pdp influence the embedding of e-portfolios? resource called keynote which uses a series of word documents to prompt students to record their generic skills development. the department is small so there is the opportunity for face-to-face tutor support on students’ progression but this is not a formal process so it usually responds to crisis rather than supports students’ learning development. in an initiative to make pdp more discipline-focused the department looked first at the requirements of the discipline through ascertaining the threshold concepts (meyer and land, 2003) in the discipline. threshold concepts are the parts of the curriculum that are most memorable, transformative, interrogative, or troublesome. in focus groups, physics students noted the importance of applied and practical science for their motivation and memory, as well as to help them to make links with the real world. they said: physics modules are more memorable because they are applied to something real that we can relate to…applications of what we have learnt such as electromagnetics, forensic science, medical physics, space craft design and rocket science, build a bridge between concepts and real life examples. the threshold concepts approach encourages students to reflect on the most troublesome and potentially transformative parts of learning. there are similarities between a focus on the threshold concepts on a subject and the critical incidents (brookfield, 1987) in a person’s learning. the difference is the first focuses on the difficulties of the subject and the second focuses on the experiences of the learner. the threshold concepts identified are now being used to ‘scaffold-in’ a series of reflective questions after threshold learning has taken place. the questions below are an example. they require students to reflect on their development as a result of studying quantum mechanics. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 8 frith how do different models of pdp influence the embedding of e-portfolios? studying this module may have altered your ideas about quantum mechanics. 1. has your understanding of matter changed after studying quantum mechanics? 2. has your understanding of energy changed after studying quantum mechanics? 3. which theorems of quantum mechanics do you think are most helpful for solving problems? 4. which applications of quantum mechanics do you think are most interesting? 5. which concepts of quantum mechanics do you think are most difficult to understand? figure 3. reflective questions for quantum mechanics module. these questions are aimed at supporting students’ awareness of their own personal and academic development through engagement with their subject. the intention is for this to be completed by students in an e-portfolio in the academic year 2010/11. e-portfolios in physics have not yet been introduced; however, a lot of preliminary work has been done in the department about supporting students’ reflection on their studies. lecturers in the department are aware that reflective learning is not currently part of their repertoire, as a professor of physics commented: before we began this process [pdp] students did not reflect on their academic development at all. the intention is to introduce a portfolio and blog tool to support this work and to give the students’ reflection a vehicle for feedback and assessment. although marking students’ reflections on learning is acknowledged by lecturers as problematic, they are realistic that without some credit students will not engage with the process at all. the assessment of students’ reflective portfolios is planned to be formative with the aim of encouraging students’ meta-cognitive processes. this is information which is currently not made known by other assessment methods (murphy, 1997). journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 9 frith how do different models of pdp influence the embedding of e-portfolios? advantages of a discipline specific approach the cra (2005) recommend in their guidance for busy academics that pdp is likely to be most effective when it is embedded into a programme of study. this approach is supported in clegg and bradley’s (2006) work in which they recommend that (pdp) initiatives are more likely to succeed if they engage positively with teacher beliefs. the university of kent has instinctively taken a discipline-specific approach to pdp so practice is varied. from the three case studies outlined above the arguments for a discipline-focussed approach to pdp are clear. each example shows a very different academic culture, from social work in which pdp is driven by external professional requirements, sports studies which is beginning to use pdp to encourage students’ reflection on practical projects, to physics which interprets pdp as a way to help students understand the most difficult aspects of their learning. this experience again chimes with clegg and bradley’s position in which they say that pdp support and development should aim to understand the views of different stakeholders about the place of pdp in the curriculum. they also warn that pdp may ‘disturb’ academic practices in some disciplines more than others. from the perspective of educational development the discipline-specific approach has a clear advantage because it means that conversations about pdp start with the demands of the discipline rather than the demands of pdp. the discipline-specific approach allows pdp activities to be embedded in the curriculum at points when they will have most relevance to the students’ learning. commitment to discipline-specific pdp was a significant factor in choosing the threshold concepts (meyer and land, 2003) approach to implementing pdp in the school of physics. allowing each department to find their own approach to pdp and the use of e-portfolios takes longer than imposing a university-wide approach to pdp. however, it is more likely to keep the disciplines intact, which may result in pdp being a much more integrated process. assessment of pdp awarding credit for pdp has been much debated (clegg, 2004; edwards, 2005, p.6; brennan and shah, 2003, p.7). arguments for the assessment of e-portfolios are made by van sickle et al. (2005) who state that assessment of e-portfolios will be beneficial because it will increase student reflection and make reflection on experiences gained as journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 10 frith how do different models of pdp influence the embedding of e-portfolios? part of their programme of study more visible. in addition, race (2001) says assessment is a fundamental element of learning and that students and staff pay most attention to assessment. this point is confirmed in the research, for example, a lecturer from the school of physical sciences said: i have learnt a lot about how students engage with pdp. there must be a concrete incentive such as credits to ensure student engagement. therefore, if pdp is to be adequately supported it has to be assessed both formatively, to promote students’ learning from the process, and summatively, to ensure engagement of staff and students. this may also have the effect of getting departments to clarify what they mean by pdp, because in order to assess something it needs to be made explicit. murphy (1997) claims that by encouraging students’ meta-cognitive processes, information which is currently not made known by other assessment methods becomes clearer. eportfolios can help in this process due to their multiple levels. there are some things which a student can keep behind the scenes, for example, peer-blogging which may be useful for formative and peer feedback, and there are other aspects such as the presentational portfolio which lend themselves to showcasing skills and can be summatively assessed. creating authentic experiences all the models of pdp require staff to provide students with concrete, authentic experiences on which to base their reflection. this is an essential starting point for reflection. the social work placement is rich with concrete experiences and plenty of challenges for students to reflect upon, and they are supported in this by their tutor and practice assessor. reflection is an essential element of learning to be a social worker. the sports studies module is also practical; students are given a list of competencies which they have to provide evidence for their engagement with during their project. students are expected to identify critical incidents (brookfield, 1987) and reflect upon these. for physics students practical experiences mainly come from lab work or from applying theory to practical situations such as space craft technology or medical equipment. an emphasis on the authentic concrete experiences which students have during their programme of study will help academics to identify opportunities to promote and support students’ pdp. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 11 frith how do different models of pdp influence the embedding of e-portfolios? staff development in reflective learning finally, introducing a new piece of software to three very different programmes of study has exposed some interesting staff development issues. the practical issues of training staff and students to use e-portfolio software have been relatively straightforward. the main areas for staff concern have been creating varied authentic assessments to give students concrete experiences to reflect on, and setting and marking of reflective activities. for social work this has not been an issue as the programme is very practical and academics are already used to supporting reflective learning. sports studies provides students with authentic concrete experiences but staff are unfamiliar with the use of reflection for academic purposes. whereas the school of physics really needs to address the first issue of creating authentic experiential assessment before it can start to support students’ reflective learning. the issue of supporting reflective learning was raised in one of the structured telephone interviews with sports studies staff: we would value more support on getting students to understand the concept of pdp and on asking reflective questions of them. therefore this has required significant staff development for lecturers on these programmes of study. there is now guidance on the university’s pdp website for academics on many issues related to implementing pdp, experiential learning and reflective learning, such as creating authentic practical assessment tasks, setting reflective questions, assessing e-portfolios, setting up collaborative e-portfolios and using blogs to support students’ reflection. this was an unforeseen outcome of implementing e-portfolios and more work needs to be done in this area. conclusion it has been clear from analysing these three disciplines, and the embedding of pdp/eportfolios in them, that different models of pdp definitely have an impact on the success and ease of the process. in a professional model of pdp, such as social work, the process was quick and easy because issues such as assessment of reflective practice, authentic tasks for reflection and staff expertise in reflective practice were well established. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 12 frith how do different models of pdp influence the embedding of e-portfolios? the e-portfolio simply replaced a previous similar system. apart from some initial issues with learning about and using new technology, the embedding was a smooth process. in sports studies the process was slower because initially no credit was given to students for engagement in the reflective process and staff were not confident in how to set and mark reflective tasks. however, both staff and students saw the benefits of using the eportfolio software to support students’ pdp in terms of capturing an aspect of their learning that was previously lost. students noted that it helped them to develop good habits associated with study, such as recording experiences and reflecting on them. they also said that they would welcome more support in using the software, and acknowledged that this would probably come if use of the software and pdp tasks such as reflection and blogging were made compulsory. lecturers on the module recognised that the e-portfolio was making aspects of learning on the module which had previously been tacit become more explicit. they welcomed this development because it helps students to recognise their learning process. physics staff were not confident with elements of pdp such as reflective learning. in addition to this barrier, there were issues about the lesser emphasis given to practical and applied approaches to learning as opposed to theoretical, knowledge-based approaches. through discipline-focussed discourse, enabled by the threshold concepts approach, a way of supporting pdp in the study of physics is being established. the process of change is ongoing, and it remains to be seen whether an e-portfolio will be a useful addition to the department’s response to pdp. however, the acceptance of more practical approaches to learning physics has been established. this study indicates that embedding pdp and e-portfolios into all programmes of study requires a change in pedagogy. it also supports clegg and bradley’s (2006) observation that pdp may disturb the academic practices in some disciplines more than others. however, it is clear that disciplines can provide bespoke pdp opportunities by designing authentic, experiential assessment tasks which are assessed both formatively and summatively to ensure student engagement and learning. reflective learning supports this and helps students to recognise the transferability of some of the skills they are developing. the role of educational developers in this is to support academic departments to change assessment practices and understand reflective learning. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 13 frith how do different models of pdp influence the embedding of e-portfolios? acknowledgement this paper is an outcome of the national action research network on researching and evaluating personal development planning and e-portfolio practice project (2007-2010). the project was led by the university of bolton in association with the university of worcester and centre for recording achievement, and in national collaboration with the university of bedfordshire, bournemouth university and university of bradford. the project was funded by the higher education academy, national teaching fellowship project strand. more details about the project can be found at: http://www.recordingachievement.org/research/narn-tree.html. references barnett, r. (2000) ‘supercomplexity and the curriculum’, studies in higher education, 25(3), pp. 255-265. brennan, j and shah, t. (2003) report on the implementation of progress files. london: centre for higher education research and information. brookfield, s. (1987) developing critical thinkers. san francisco, ca, us: jossey-bass. clegg, s. (2004) ‘critical readings: progress files and the production of the autonomous learner’, teaching in higher education, 9, pp. 287-298. clegg, s. and bradley, s. (2006) ‘models of pdp: practice and processes’, british educational research journal, 32(1), pp. 57-76. cra (2005) guide for busy academics no. 1: personal development planning. available at: http://www.business.salford.ac.uk/intranet/pdp/creativity/download.php?id=60 (accessed: 20 april 2010). edwards, g. (2005) connecting pdp to employer needs and the world of work. york: hea. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 14 http://www.recordingachievement.org/research/narn-tree.html http://www.business.salford.ac.uk/intranet/pdp/creativity/download.php?id=60 frith how do different models of pdp influence the embedding of e-portfolios? frith, l. (2006) pdp university of kent internal review. available at: http://www.kent.ac.uk/uelt/ced/themes/personal-development/ (accessed: 21 september 2010). meyer, j. and land, r. (2003) ‘threshold concepts and troublesome knowledge (1): linkages to ways of thinking and practising within the disciplines’, in rust, c. (ed.) improving student learning theory and practice – ten years on. oxford: ocsld, pp. 412-424. moore, r. (2001) ‘policy-driven curriculum restructuring: academic identities in transition?’, higher education close up conference 2. lancaster university 16-18 july. available at: http://www.leeds.ac.uk/educol/documents/00001803.htm (accessed: 27 august 2010). murphy, s.m. (1997) ‘who should taste the soup and when? designing portfolio assessment programs to enhance learning’, clearing house, 71(2), pp. 81-85. race, p. (2001) the lecturer’s toolkit: a practical guide to learning teaching and assessment. london: routledgefalmer. van sickle, m., bogman, m.b., kaman, m., baird, w. and butcher, c. (2005) college student journal, 39(3), p.497. author details louise frith is the pdp co-ordinator in the unit for the enhancement of learning and teaching (uelt) at the university of kent. her role is to support the department in embedding e-portfolio technology or pdp activities and to evaluate this process. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 15 http://www.kent.ac.uk/uelt/ced/themes/personal-development/ http://www.leeds.ac.uk/educol/documents/00001803.htm how do different models of pdp influence the embedding of e-portfolios? abstract introduction methodology case study 1: social work case study 2: sports science case study 3: physics advantages of a discipline specific approach assessment of pdp creating authentic experiences staff development in reflective learning conclusion acknowledgement references author details literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 8: march 2015 measuring the academic literacies beliefs and researcher identity of research students erika spray university of newcastle, australia jaime w. hunt university of newcastle, australia abstract it is increasingly accepted that academic literacies form an integral part of undergraduate learning, yet the field is dominated by qualitative research and too little attention has been paid to the postgraduate level. this paper contributes a quantitative analysis of students at the postgraduate research level. the survey investigated forty-eight postgraduate research students’ academic literacies beliefs and researcher identity. the quantitative method employed here proved to be effective. further, research students’ researcher identity and academic literacies beliefs appeared to be related. this study validates the use of quantitative instruments in academic literacies research. it is therefore suggested that similar quantitative instruments may prove valuable in future research. keywords: postgraduate students; academic literacies; researcher identity; quantitative methodology spray and hunt measuring the academic literacies beliefs and researcher identity of research students journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 2 introduction the concept of ‘academic literacies’ incorporates ‘skills’ for learning in a context of deeper understanding of their functioning and application. this is based on the principle that learning involves ‘participation in complex ‘social learning systems’’ (wenger, 2000, p.226), ‘social practices embedded in context’ (jacobs, 2005, p.476), and ‘social, situated practice’ (aitchison and lee, 2006, p.265). academic literacies therefore are more than isolated skills; rather, the term recognises situated conventions of meaning-making (gourlay, 2009). although much of the literature in this field remains focused at the undergraduate level, developing strong academic literacies is essential for students at all levels, including those enrolled in research degrees. for research students, academic literacies development forms a vital part of their growing identities as professional researchers. it is important to consider that, although research students are studying at an elite level, they are still affected by many elements of transition relevant to all levels of university study (cantwell et al., 2013). along this intellectual transition, there is a shift in identity, which is discussed in discourse theory which suggests that understanding of socially accepted discourse can help: identify oneself as a member of a socially meaningful group (gee, 2011, p.158). explicit teaching of academic literacies within a research degree can therefore become part of students’ enculturation into a community of practice (dysthe et al., 2006), supporting the construction of positive identities and helping to mitigate the challenges that confront students attempting to adapt to the norms and expectations of their degrees. it may also contribute to research degrees that prepare doctoral students for life as an active researcher (sinclair et al., 2014). an alternative pathway is that of the professional doctorate. research in this area has also suggested a need to develop ‘new academic cultural practices’ (boud and tennant, 2006, p. 293). evidence therefore exists for the importance of academic literacies development for students’ identity, enculturation and professional training. however, these issues might never be explicitly addressed in doctoral programs. this may be exacerbated by the common absence of a doctoral ‘curriculum’ (green, 2012), and in some cases by a complete lack of structure or support (baker and pifer, 2011). it is therefore important that doctoral students’ academic literacies spray and hunt measuring the academic literacies beliefs and researcher identity of research students journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 3 development is better understood and addressed. academic literacies research has been, and continues to be, largely qualitative, typically involving case studies, interviews, or action research (e.g. jacobs, 2005; christie et al., 2008; cameron et al., 2009; fergie et al., 2011; green and agosti, 2011). however, other fields, such as educational psychology, commonly use quantitative instruments to measure individual beliefs and attitudes such as epistemic beliefs (schraw et al., 2002) or self-efficacy (schwarzer and jerusalem, 1995). well-designed quantitative instruments retain conceptual clarity whilst also allowing efficient collection and analysis of large data sets. established instruments have been translated and validated in different languages facilitating international comparison and collaboration (scholz et al., 2002). such large-scale comparison is arguably more difficult when drawing results from different qualitative studies. of course, quantitative methodology also has its weaknesses. however, it is argued here that academic literacies research stands to benefit from the strengths of both quantitative and qualitative methods. therefore this study was designed to test the hypothesis that quantitative instruments can be used to gauge research students’ academic literacies beliefs and sense of researcher identity. context a core assumption of our work is the understanding that both student and staff communication, learning and teaching extend beyond the university. this study focused on research students who had accessed support from learning advisers in a centre for teaching and learning at a large regional university in australia. these research students were at various stages of traditional doctoral degree programs. learning advisers are employed to promote academic literacies development for students at all levels and across disciplines, typically through consultations or workshops, and in collaboration with faculty staff where possible. specific support is provided for research students, including workshops such as ‘writing literature reviews’ or ‘presenting research’, as well as english-language classes. a number of multidisciplinary writing circles are also available (see mckeowen, 2011 for details). research students who access these opportunities offer positive feedback in two categories: development of writing skills, and increased confidence from peer-interaction within a supportive environment. students who had participated in any of these forms of support were eligible to participate in this study. spray and hunt measuring the academic literacies beliefs and researcher identity of research students journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 4 methodology two instruments were designed for this study to measure academic literacies beliefs and researcher identity. for each instrument, a pool of initial items was generated, each of which was intended to describe a certain aspect of academic literacies beliefs or researcher identity. these items were based on themes common in the academic literacies literature, as previously reviewed. to a certain extent, therefore, the concepts were defined ‘a priori’ according to theory rather than in a less pre-determined, more interpretivist manner (walsham, 2006). most of the items described positive beliefs, such as ‘i am involved in the broader research culture’, however, some were phrased negatively, and these were later reverse-scored, e.g. ‘sometimes i don't know if i have the academic literacies required to complete my research degree’. the initial pools of items were reviewed and refined by colleagues with expertise in the field of academic literacies’ development. from this process, sixteen items for academic literacies beliefs and twelve items from researcher identity were retained for inclusion in the survey, to be rated by participants on a six point likert-type scale (from completely disagree to completely agree). the first stage of data analysis involved statistical validation of these scales, and during that stage the number of items was reduced further to maximise internal reliability (see ‘validation of scales’, below). the final lists of items retained are provided in appendices a and b. the academic literacies items were prefaced by a short definition of the term ‘academic literacies’, in an attempt to achieve at least a degree of common understanding among participants of this complex notion. the definition provided was: ‘academic literacies’ means the skills and understanding you need to be able to study successfully. this can include note making; writing skills; presentation skills, etc. these skills can be taught formally (e.g. in courses) or informally (e.g. from friends) or you may develop them without teaching. a definition was not provided for researcher identity, as none of the items included this term: instead, these items described specific examples that related to a sense of identity, for example ‘i feel i am part of my department’s research community’. in addition, the survey included a number of items to gather basic demographic information (e.g. age, spray and hunt measuring the academic literacies beliefs and researcher identity of research students journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 5 gender, international or domestic enrolment status). participants were also asked to report how frequently they had accessed various forms of academic literacies support, such as workshops, consultations and online or printed resources. the survey was designed for online participation. this was recognised to have some disadvantages, such as reliance on written communication and lack of opportunities for clarification (see opdenakker, 2006). in this case, however, the advantages outweighed the limitations. the asynchronous nature of an online survey allowed flexibility in participation and the inclusion of students who might have been unable to attend interviews or discussions. furthermore, it has been suggested that the absence of face-toface communication may permit some participants to respond more openly and honestly, particularly if they are culturally averse to expressing criticism or negative opinions (hughes, 2004). on balance, an online survey was the most appropriate means of data collection. a link to the online survey was included in an email invitation which was sent to potential participants. these were the 305 research students who had accessed support from learning advisers during the previous eighteen months. the survey remained open for one month, after which the data was downloaded for analysis. results and analysis of the 305 potential participants, 57 responded giving a 19% response rate, which can be deemed ‘considerable’ (deutskens et al., 2004). the data set was visually inspected, and 9 cases were removed prior to analysis: 7 were substantially incomplete, and 2 were highly inconsistent (with clear response sets). of the 48 remaining respondents, 83% were enrolled full-time (35 hours per week), 67% were female, and 58% were domestic students. of the domestic students, 96% were native speakers of english, and 100% of the international students were non-native speakers of english. half were aged 18-30 and half over 30 years old. the majority (77%) were enrolled in a doctor of philosophy (phd), and a much smaller proportion (23%) in a master of philosophy (mphil). the proportions of participants representing different groups (e.g. discipline, degree, domestic/international enrolment) were broadly similar to the institutional research student cohort (university of newcastle, 2012), and to a lesser extent nationally (department of education, 2014). international students were slightly over-represented, which could indicate a greater awareness or use of support. an overview of the sample is shown in table 1. spray and hunt measuring the academic literacies beliefs and researcher identity of research students journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 6 table 1. overview of survey participants sample institution australia discipline* business and law 15% 7% 8% education and arts 25% 24% 36% engineering 21% 20% 15% health 17% 25% 14% science and it 23% 23% 23% degree master of philosophy (mphil) 23% 13% not available doctor of philosophy (phd) 77% 87% not available enrolment domestic 58% 64% 69% international 42% 36% 31% notes: percentages may not total 100 due to rounding. *these disciplines groups are based on the faculties at university of newcastle, australia. data from other sources were grouped as required to match the faculty groups as closely as possible, e.g. education, arts, and social sciences were combined to compare against the faculty of education and arts. validation of scales because this was a newly created instrument, exploratory factor analysis (efa) was conducted to investigate the possibility of sub-dimensions within the academic literacies beliefs items, but none were identifiable. a single-factor confirmatory analysis was therefore conducted, which revealed that six items were loading weakly (<.5). these were therefore dropped, and the analysis was repeated. all items then loaded >.5, and collectively they showed strong internal consistency (α = .871). therefore, these items were treated as one scale measuring the single construct ‘academic literacies beliefs’, which explained 48% of variance in the sample. (see appendix a for the full list of items retained in this scale). the researcher identity items were checked the same way. again, efa showed a single dimension. five items loaded <.5 and were removed, leaving eleven items which showed good internal consistency (α = .816). this seven-item ‘researcher identity’ scale explained 49% of variation in the sample. (see appendix b for the full list of items retained in this scale). spray and hunt measuring the academic literacies beliefs and researcher identity of research students journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 7 to test the validity of academic literacies beliefs and researcher identity as separate constructs, all retained items were analysed together to test the possibility that a different factor structure might better describe the data. efa identified only weak factor structures, the strongest of which was a two-factor solution that very closely replicated the original two scales. this indicates that the academic literacies beliefs and researcher identity scales do represent two separate, but related, constructs. bivariate correlation confirmed that academic literacies beliefs and researcher identity were significantly but weakly correlated (r = .373, p = .009). having established the validity of these two scales, subsequent analysis was based on participants’ mean scores for the twelve-item academic literacies beliefs scale and seven-item researcher identity scale. comparison of groups a key advantage of working with quantitative data is that it is relatively simple to identify statistical relationships between variables and to compare results of different subgroups within a sample. independent sample t-tests and one-way anova analyses were used to explore variation in participants’ results according to a range of demographic variables. no differences in academic literacies beliefs or researcher identity were found for age, gender, research degree, study load or duration of enrolment. this may simply be due to the small sample sizes involved. however, between-group differences were identified, by a one-way anova, for academic literacies beliefs according to faculty [f(4,43) = 2.72, p = .042]. education and arts students had a significantly higher mean score than students in two other faculties: business and law [t(17) = 2.80, p = .012], and engineering [t(20) = 2.58, p = .018). given that the faculty of education and arts includes a large number of education students, it is possible that these students have greater awareness of literacies development, which may result in a more adaptive approach to their own studies. alternatively, these differences may reflect varying proportions of native and non-native speakers in different faculties. however, given the small sample sizes, it is difficult to draw meaningful conclusions within the current data set. significant differences in academic literacies beliefs were also found for enrolment status (i.e. international or domestic), [t(46) = 2.58, p = .013] and native-speaker status [t(46) = 2.72, p = .009). in the majority of cases, these two statuses aligned; all domestic students were native speakers, and most international students were non-native speakers of english. however, closer inspection of the data revealed that one participant was enrolled as a domestic student yet was a non-native english speaker. thus, subsequent spray and hunt measuring the academic literacies beliefs and researcher identity of research students journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 8 comparisons were made based on only native-speaker status. item-level differences between native and non-native speakers were investigated using one-way anova. table 2: item-level differences in academic literacies beliefs for native speakers (ns) and non-native speakers (nns) item number item description t(46) p ns mean (n.27) nns mean (n.21) 2 my academic literacies are strong enough 2.53 .02 4.59 3.90 3* i want to strengthen my academic literacies 2.23 .03 1.93 1.38 5 i can argue academically 2.53 .02 4.26 3.43 11* the university should help develop my academic literacies 2.05 .05 2.30 1.71 15 i can critically read 2.11 .04 4.70 4.05 * items 3 and 11 were reverse scored, so that a high score represented greater confidence. differences were found for five academic literacies beliefs items (2, 3, 5, 11, and 15), as shown in table 2. these items cover issues of competence (e.g. 15: i can critically read other researchers’ work) and confidence in independence (e.g. 11: the university should help me develop academic literacies). because native-speaker status was relevant to academic literacies beliefs, relationships between other variables were re-investigated to compare native and non-native speakers. academic literacies beliefs, researcher identity and use of support correlated differently for native and non-native speakers (see table 3). for native speakers, a moderately strong correlation existed between academic literacies beliefs and researcher identity (r = .659, p = .000) and a weaker correlation between academic literacies beliefs and use of support (r = .432, p = .024). use of support was measured by participants reporting how frequently they accessed various forms of academic literacies support. a mean score was then calculated for each participant, representing their overall use of support. for non-native speakers the only significant relationship was a moderate correlation between researcher identity and use of support (r = .436, p = .048). this indicates a stronger relationship between academic literacies beliefs and researcher identity for native than for non-native speakers. for non-native speakers, researcher identity relates more to use of support than academic literacies beliefs. given that most non-native speakers are also international students, their researcher identity might be bolstered by past successes in their home country. the spray and hunt measuring the academic literacies beliefs and researcher identity of research students journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 9 challenge to continue performing highly in an unfamiliar environment may make them more likely to seek support. this is congruent with theory, which suggests that academic literacies are highly context-dependent (wingate, 2006; lillis and scott, 2007; chanock, 2010; fergie et al., 2011). international students may therefore exhibit confident researcher identity alongside weaker academic literacies. this may be problematic for at least two reasons. firstly, confident behaviour could mask underlying weaknesses, inhibiting their identification. secondly, dissonance between past success and present difficulty is likely to present coping challenges for individuals. timely and targeted academic literacies teaching might therefore play a key role in students’ successful adaptation to an unfamiliar environment. table 3: correlations between academic literacies beliefs, researcher identity, and use of support, by native speaker status type of beliefs researcher identity use of support nativespeaker (n.27) academic literacies beliefs pearson correlation .659 .432 sig. (2-tailed) .000 .024 researcher identity pearson correlation .364 sig. (2-tailed) .062 non nativespeaker (n.21) academic literacies beliefs pearson correlation .382 -.118 sig. (2-tailed) .087 .612 researcher identity pearson correlation .436 sig. (2-tailed) .048 discussion and conclusion the hypothesis that quantitative instruments can gauge research students’ academic literacies beliefs and sense of researcher identity was supported by results from the present study. the instruments validated here demonstrate that it is possible to create reliable scales to measure constructs such as academic literacies beliefs and researcher identity. this was demonstrated by the good internal consistencies of present scales. of course, these statistical measures can only reflect conceptual reliability in the terms defined ‘a priori’ in the instrument’s design, as geertz (1973) describes: what we call our data are really our own constructions of other people’s constructions of what they and their compatriots are up to. (geertz, 1973, p.9). spray and hunt measuring the academic literacies beliefs and researcher identity of research students journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 10 the specific items trialled here may or may not accurately reflect students’ own perceptions of academic literacies. however, the results may be considered ‘proof of concept’ that future academic literacies research may benefit from the use of robust quantitative instruments. this would also enable potentially fruitful mixed methods research. the use of easily administered scales, such as those described here, would allow for larger sample sizes and direct comparison of results from different contexts. such between-groups analysis of larger cohorts could better our understanding of variation between individuals and groups. for example, preliminary comparative analysis reported here indicates that some non-native speaker students may have weak academic literacies alongside a strong sense of researcher identity. such variation requires further investigation. this paper contributes to the growing evidence-base supporting and informing academic literacies teaching for research students. such teaching is likely to become increasingly relevant in the context of expanding research enrolments (department of education, 2014), growing student diversity, and the imminence of national graduate attributes in australia (chanock et al., 2004; australian qualifications framework council, 2013). methodologically, this research demonstrates the potential of quantitative methods in a hitherto largely qualitative field. a relationship between academic literacies beliefs and researcher identity is evident, although may not hold constant across all groups of students, and this merits more attention. continued study of the complex relationship between research students’ academic literacies and identity is required, and quantitative methodology should form part of this future research. references aitchison, c. and lee, a. (2006). 'research writing: problems and pedagogies', teaching in higher education, 11(3), pp. 265-278. australian qualifications framework council (2013) australian qualifications framework. available at: http://www.aqf.edu.au. (accessed: 29 january 2014). http://www.aqf.edu.au/ spray and hunt measuring the academic literacies beliefs and researcher identity of research students journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 11 baker, v. and pifer, m. (2011) 'the role of relationships in the transition from doctoral student to independent scholar', studies in continuing education, 33(1), pp. 5-17. boud, d. and tennant, m. (2006) ‘putting doctoral education to work: challenges to academic practice’, higher education research and development, 25(3), pp. 293306. cameron, j., nairn, k. and higgin, j. (2009) 'demystifying academic writing: reflections on emotions, know-how and academic identity', journal of geography in higher education, 33(2), pp. 269-284. cantwell, r., scevak, j. and spray, e. (2013) '”i thought i knew this stuff, but apparently i don't": understanding transition into university-level thinking' in murray, n. and klinger, c.m. (eds.) aspirations, access and attainment: international perspectives on widening participation and an agenda for change. oxford: routledge, pp. 287310. chanock, k. (2010) 'the right to reticence', teaching in higher education, 15(5), pp. 543552. chanock, k., clerehan, r., moore, t. and prince, a. (2004) 'shaping university teaching towards measurement for accountability: problems of the graduate skills assessment test', australian universities review, 47(1), pp. 22-29. christie, h., tett, l., cree, v. e., hounsell, j. and mccune, v. (2008) ‘’a real rollercoaster of confidence and emotions': learning to be a university student', studies in higher education, 33(5), pp. 567-581. department of education (2014) higher education statistics. available at: www.highereducationstatistics.deewr.gov.au (accessed: 29 january 2014). deutskens, e., de ruyter, k., wetzels, m. and oosterveld, p. (2004) 'response rate and response quality of internet-based surveys: an experimental study', marketing letters, 15(1), pp. 21-36. http://www.highereducationstatistics.deewr.gov.au/ spray and hunt measuring the academic literacies beliefs and researcher identity of research students journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 12 dysthe, o., samara, a. and westrheim, k. (2006) 'multivoiced supervision of master’s students: a case study of alternative supervision practices in higher education'. studies in higher education, 31(3), pp. 299-318. fergie, g., beeke, s., mckenna, c. and creme, p. (2011) ‘“it's a lonely walk": supporting postgraduate researchers through writing'. international journal of teaching and learning in higher education, 23(2), pp. 236-245. gee, j. p. (2011) social linguistics and literacies: ideology in discourses. 4 th edn. hoboken: taylor and francis. geertz, c. (1973) the interpretation of cultures. new york: basic books. gourlay, l. (2009) 'threshold practices: becoming a student through academic literacies', london review of education, 7(2), pp. 181-192. green, b. (2012) 'addressing the curriculum problem in doctoral education', australian universities’ review, 54(1), pp. 10-18. green, t. and agosti, c. (2011) 'apprenticing students to academic discourse: using student and teacher feedback to analyse the extent to which a discipline-specific academic literacies program works'. journal of academic language and learning, 5(1), pp. 18-35. hughes, h. (2004) 'researching the experiences of international students', lifelong learning: whose responsibility and what is your contribution?: 3rd international lifelong learning conference. central queensland university, yeppoon, central queensland, australia, 13-16 june. rockhampton: central queensland university press. jacobs, c. (2005) 'on being an insider on the outside: new spaces for integrating academic literacies', teaching in higher education, 10(4), pp. 475-487. lillis, t. and scott, m. (2007) 'defining academic literacies research: issues of epistemology, ideology and strategy', journal of applied linguistics, 4(1), pp. 5-32. spray and hunt measuring the academic literacies beliefs and researcher identity of research students journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 13 mckeowen, j. (2011) 'writing circles for research students: the positive impact of new partnerships'. the tenth biennial conference of the association for academic language and learning. university of south australia, adelaide, australia, 24-25 november. adelaide: university of south australia. opdenakker, r. (2006) ‘advantages and disadvantages of four interview techniques in qualitative research’, forum: qualitative social research, 7(4), art.11 (online). available at: http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:0114-fqs0604118. scholz, u., dona, b.g., sud, s. and schwarzer, r. (2002) 'is general self-efficacy a universal construct? psychometric findings from 25 countries', european journal of psychological assessment, 18(3), pp. 242-251. schraw, g., bendixen, l. and dunkle, m. (2002) 'development and evaluation of the epistemic belief inventory (ebi)', in hofer, b. and pintrich, p. (eds.) personal epistemology: the psychology of beliefs about knowledge and knowing. new jersey: erlbaum, pp. 261-275. schwarzer, r. and jerusalem, m. (1995) 'generalized self-efficacy scale', in weinmann, j., wright, s. and johnston, m. (eds.) measures in health psychology: a user’s portfolio. causal and control beliefs. windsor: nfer-nelson, pp. 35-37. sinclair, j., barnacle, r. and cuthbert, d. (2014) 'how the doctorate contributes to the formation of active researchers: what the research tells us', studies in higher education, 39(10), pp. 1972-1986. university of newcastle (2012) annual report 2011. available at: http://www.newcastle.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0010/116884/2012-uon-arvolume_1-.pdf (accessed: 29 june 2012). walsham, g. (2006) ‘doing interpretive research’, european journal of information systems, 15(1), pp. 320-330. http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:0114-fqs0604118 http://www.newcastle.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0010/116884/2012-uon-ar-volume_1-.pdf http://www.newcastle.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0010/116884/2012-uon-ar-volume_1-.pdf spray and hunt measuring the academic literacies beliefs and researcher identity of research students journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 14 wenger, e. (2000) 'communities of practice and social learning systems', organization, 7(2), pp. 225-246. wingate, u. (2006) 'doing away with ‘study skills’', teaching in higher education, 11(4), pp. 457-469. author details erika spray is a phd candidate in the school of education at the university of newcastle, australia. her thesis investigates students’ metacognitive and epistemic beliefs, with a focus on cross-cultural comparison. she also works as a learning adviser, and has a particular interest in postgraduate students’ academic literacies development. dr jaime w. hunt is a linguistics lecturer within the english language and foundation studies centre at the university of newcastle, australia. his research interests include english-german language contact, student engagement, enabling education, and widening participation. spray and hunt measuring the academic literacies beliefs and researcher identity of research students journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 15 appendix a items in the academic literacies beliefs scale 1. at this stage i feel confident that my academic literacies are strong enough to cope well with my research degree. 2. i would like to strengthen my academic literacies to succeed with my research degree in the future.* 3. i am happy to develop my academic literacies without anybody teaching me. 4. i can construct an argument and write it clearly using academic language. 5. sometimes i don't know if i have the academic literacies required to complete my research degree.* 6. i am uncertain how to appropriately use other researchers' ideas in my own writing.* 7. the university should help me develop the academic literacies that i need to succeed in my research degree.* 8. i am struggling with my research degree right now.* 9. i can critically read researchers' work and extract the ideas that are useful for me. 10. i'm not really confident that i can present my work clearly to other researchers.* * these items were reverse scored. spray and hunt measuring the academic literacies beliefs and researcher identity of research students journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 16 appendix b items in the researcher identity scale 1. i have opportunities for social contact with other research higher degree (rhd) students. 2. i am involved in the broader research culture. 3. i am not really part of a research community.* 4. i have my own network of research colleagues and peers. 5. i take part in research events (e.g. seminars, symposia, conferences). 6. i feel i am part of my department's research community. 7. i can see myself mentoring new researchers in the future. * this item was reverse scored. literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 8: march 2015 studying as a parent: a handbook for success a book review of owton, h. (2014) studying as a parent: a handbook for success. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan. marie nadia jasim st george’s, university of london, uk overview as more establishments charge the top tuition fee of £9000, we have seen an increased drive to widen participation into higher education. the office for fair access (offa) reports that 172 universities and colleges have received approval to charge the top fee in academic year 2015/16 (offa, 2014a). offa requires all establishments charging this amount to have an access agreement (offa, 2014b), and are now requesting that universities research and evaluate the support they provide (offa, 2014c). with rapidlygrowing, evidence-based support services on hand, how useful is a handbook for student parents? the higher education statistics agency (hesa) does not currently collect data regarding the number of students who balance their studies alongside raising a family (equality challenge unit, 2010). despite a growing mature student body, equating to approximately a third of all first-degree undergraduates (national union of students, 2012), there has been no real incentive for universities to document the number of student parents at their establishment, nor provide targeted support to assist them in their studies. this easy-toread handbook aims to encourage student parents to enter higher education, and points to where they can access support. it consists of accurate and up-to-date information intertwined with honest personal advice. true understanding comes from the writer having completed an undergraduate degree, a masters, and later a phd, whilst being a single mother to her young daughter ellie. now a university lecturer, owton appears passionate jasim studying as a parent: a handbook for success journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 2 about ensuring that student parents are equipped with the necessary knowledge to flourish at university. layout and structure the book is logically divided into four main sections with information on access courses; the support available to student parents; managing a balanced lifestyle and finally advice on points to consider after graduation. information can be easily located with help of the index. owton blends relevant factual information with her own personal stories, creating a conversational tone throughout. in separate boxes, she also includes quotes from other student parents regarding their individual experiences. these aid to break up the main body of text, but frustratingly have not been used to great effect. in most instances, the main text repeats the quote beside it. a strength of using multiple insights should be that they reflect the diversity of student parent experiences. additionally, the excerpts are occasionally used again in later chapters, which can be unsatisfying when reading the handbook from start to end. incorporating the views of twenty-three student parents should have been an asset to the book, and it is unfortunate that it has not been used successfully. the text is otherwise carefully researched and well-referenced throughout, with an excellent bibliography directing the reader to further available articles and resources. content the prologue consists of a typical diary entry of a student parent: a day in the life of the author as an undergraduate at the university of winchester. from the start we are met with a very honest and personal account of what it is like to be a studying parent. for readers yet to embark on this journey, it very accurately details the typical ups and downs, the realities of raising children on a tight budget, and the immense background preparation involved. these pages would also be beneficial for staff involved in supporting student parents. it is so well-described and all-encompassing that it would assist any reader to empathise and understand the typical day-to-day experiences of student parents. jasim studying as a parent: a handbook for success journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 3 the handbook begins by addressing access courses for parents considering university despite having left school without the necessary qualifications. the section details the application process, course structure, funding issues and the reality of balancing family commitments with this type of course. the information is thorough and covers many of the questions a potential student parent may not have considered asking. particularly useful is the advice on what to consider when choosing a university (the cost of relocating with a family, the travel time involved in commuting between the university and local schools, and how childcare will work around placements). such questions are seldom answered in university prospectuses, and so the book provides checklists to assist the reader in making wise choices. again, this awareness would be invaluable for university staff in addition to the target audience. owton is encouraging, addressing a common concern that many mature students have that they may not be ‘clever enough’ to return to education. although this initially comes across as reassuring, for some readers it may come across as patronising if they did not need consistent urging to ‘be confident in [their] abilities’. the student quotes used in this section are taken entirely from parents in northampton, giving the impression that the interviewees may have attended the same access course. again, this is a disappointing use of the student parent interviews. geographically varied sources would have created a more rounded impression of how access courses are for those with families. a more inclusive approach is achieved in the second section of the book, which looks at some of the difficulties faced by parents passing through the higher education ‘system’. owton successfully identifies different types of student parent and the various challenges each may face. she should be commended for her recognition of student parents covering a wide spectrum of people, and makes a point to include advice for the minority subgroups of: younger parents, lone parents, lgbt parents and disabled parents. such acknowledgement is often lacking in student support services, and is a valuable part of the book. the second and third sections of the book comprise the most essential information regarding the support available to student parents. it is excellently written and forms the book’s vital core. the information is relevant and concise, covering university support provisions; financial assistance; childcare provider options and all relevant and up-to-date legislation. the strength of the writing comes not only from its comprehensiveness, but the tone in which it is delivered. it does not disguise the ‘disempowering’ nature of the benefits system, the ‘lack of expertise’ of student finance advisors, nor the ‘lack of support from tutors’. it is frank, truthful, and equips the reader with an awareness of what to expect jasim studying as a parent: a handbook for success journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 4 during their course. in doing so, owton has provided precisely the information a student parent needs; which support systems are reliable and where they will need to remain independently driven and strong. she remains positive throughout, reminding the reader to be ‘assertive’ and to keep their ‘chin up’. owton has attempted to be as comprehensive as possible, with advice extending to cover the importance of a social circle, healthy eating, and even maintaining good posture! although attempts have evidently been made to include relevant information for all types of student parent, overall the text seems geared towards those from the same background as herself, namely single parents on a low income. although the book recognises that pregnancy is a ‘vulnerable time for relationships’, it fails to mention how family bonds can become strained when there is only one breadwinner left to support the family plus their partner’s studies. a large proportion of student parents leave their lives as a full-time parent or employee to return to education and recognition of the colossal changes in their household dynamics is absent from the book. it is regrettable that the text focuses on the childcare element of being a student parent, but overlooks that many parents are raising children in a partnership. a key theme for the author is ‘managing identities’, and the conflicts in being a driven student as well as a committed mother. studying alongside non-parents, it can be isolating if no one understands the blend of pride and guilt that comes with the journey. in acknowledging these anxieties, the handbook serves not only as an information guide but an empathetic friend. owton particularly describes and promotes the setting up of student parent groups; an incredibly effective way of establishing an understanding social circle. this is illustrious of how the information in the book is mostly sourced from personal experience, and is currently not found in any other publication. conclusion ‘studying as a parent a handbook for success’ is an accessible paperback containing a wealth of information and honest advice, delivered with uplifting optimism. it is targeted at parents considering higher education as well as those already in attendance. it is very current, with up-to-date material on existing guidelines and legislation. to continue to be relevant, the content will need to be regularly updated. despite publication in september jasim studying as a parent: a handbook for success journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 5 2014, it already requires revision to include the new changes related to shared parental leave that take effect from april 2015. beyond the target audience, this book is recommended to all staff working with student parents. it successfully details the challenges that this group of students face and broadly covers the avenues of available support. the author should be applauded for her efforts to compile and simplify the maze of laws and financial systems that are necessary for this group of students to be aware of. it is the only available publication to cover these topics and this is a good reason for it to be made available to students. future editions could be improved through better use of multiple student parent insights to reflect the diversity of student parent experience. at present, it is written from the heart of a woman who knows the struggles of being a studying parent, battling unaware of the available support. indeed: knowing support is there, even if you don’t access it, can be enough sometimes. it is regrettable that this book is so necessary but this will remain the case until universities address more comprehensively the issues it raises, and ensure that the students who need it have access to this information. references bis (2011) higher education: students at the heart of the system, department for business innovation and skills (bis) white paper, june. available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/3138 4/11-944-higher-education-students-at-heart-of-system.pdf. (accessed: 2 october 2014). equality challenge unit (2010) ‘student pregnancy and maternity: implications for higher education institutions’. available at: http://www.ecu.ac.uk/publications/studentpregnancy-and-maternity (accessed: 15 december 2014). https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/31384/11-944-higher-education-students-at-heart-of-system.pdf https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/31384/11-944-higher-education-students-at-heart-of-system.pdf http://www.ecu.ac.uk/publications/student-pregnancy-and-maternity http://www.ecu.ac.uk/publications/student-pregnancy-and-maternity jasim studying as a parent: a handbook for success journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 6 national union of students (2012) never too late to learn. available at: http://www.nus.org.uk/pagefiles/12238/2012_nus_millionplus_never_too_late_t o_learn.pdf (accessed: 15 december 2014). office for fair access (2014a) access agreements for 2015-16: key statistics and analysis. available at: http://www.offa.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/accessagreements-for-2015-16-key-statistics-and-analysis.pdf (accessed: 15 december 2014). the office for fair access (2014b) how to produce an access agreement for 2015-16. available at: http://www.offa.org.uk/guidance-notes/how-to-produce-an-accessagreement-for-2015-16 (accessed: 15 december 2014). the office for fair access (2014c) call for evidence: impact of financial support. available at: http://www.offa.org.uk/publications/call-for-evidence-impact-of-financial-support (accessed: 15 december 2014). author details marie nadia jasim is a mature student studying medicine at st george’s, university of london. she is in her second year as president of the university’s student parent association. http://www.nus.org.uk/pagefiles/12238/2012_nus_millionplus_never_too_late_to_learn.pdf http://www.nus.org.uk/pagefiles/12238/2012_nus_millionplus_never_too_late_to_learn.pdf http://www.offa.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/access-agreements-for-2015-16-key-statistics-and-analysis.pdf http://www.offa.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/access-agreements-for-2015-16-key-statistics-and-analysis.pdf http://www.offa.org.uk/guidance-notes/how-to-produce-an-access-agreement-for-2015-16 http://www.offa.org.uk/guidance-notes/how-to-produce-an-access-agreement-for-2015-16 http://www.offa.org.uk/publications/call-for-evidence-impact-of-financial-support literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special edition: researching pdp practice, november 2010 interaction and passion in a pdp community sue burkinshaw, project lead university of bolton, uk communities of practice are groups of people who share a concern, a set of problems, or a passion about a topic, and who deepen their knowledge and expertise in this area by interacting on an ongoing basis. (wenger et al., 2002, p.4) background the national action research network on researching and evaluating personal development planning and e-portfolio practice was one of eight successful national project bids to be awarded funding for a three year period, through the newly launched higher education academy national teaching fellowship project strand in july 2007 (hea, 2010). the project was relatively ambitious and wide-reaching in that it was a collaborative project involving sixteen higher education uk institutions (representative of pre 1992 and post 1992 universities) and the national educational charity the centre for recording of achievement (cra, 2010). the sixteen project members were drawn from the membership base of the cra. the cra has provided a national practitioner network community since the early 1990’s, supporting members in the development and implementation of personal development planning (pdp) initiatives and institutional frameworks across the higher education (he) sector. in general, the project members of the national action research network (narn) tended to be pdp practitioners who were institutional leaders for pdp at their university and/or pdp champion(s) within their own institution/faculty/department. each institutional member of the collaborative project undertook situated research within their own institution, with the aim to evaluate practice and to offer a contribution to the existing knowledge/research and pedagogies underpinning pdp. the initial outcomes of our members’ research is published in this special edition of the journal of learning development in higher education ‘researching pdp practice’. burkinshaw editorial: interaction and passion in a pdp community alongside developing a body of scholarly knowledge capable of informing effective implementation of pdp for students, the project sought to develop a community of pdp practitioners who were capable of developing, implementing and learning from ongoing, robust research and evaluation of practice. the key aims of the project were therefore twofold: • to advance the understanding of factors that lead to enhanced student learning through the pdp process, and to provide transferable outputs. • to build the capability and capacity of pdp practitioners as researchers to produce their own research base in relation to pdp and e-portfolio for students. communities of practice: the narn model in building research capability and capacity at the heart of the project was the development of a community of practice (lave and wenger, 1991) where a group of people come together to share common interests and goals, with the aim of sharing information, developing knowledge and developing themselves both personally and professionally. the first paper in this special edition of the jldhe is ‘building research capacity in a practitioner community: framing and evaluating the national action research network on researching and evaluating personal development planning (pdp) and e-portfolio practice’ by john peters (principal investigator). he explores the meta-level of the narn project as a piece of action research on research capacity building within a practitioner community. the research captures and documents the reflective personal developmental journeys of the participants whilst being engaged in the narn project. with a national collaborative project of this nature involving sixteen institutions, we adopted a multi-layered and structured approach to organisation, with a leadership team and the formation of three geographical, regional groups (north, midlands and south). the regional groups were key to the success of the project and the development of the narn community, thanks to the commitment, contribution and guidance provided by each regional lead. the latter made a significant contribution in the building of a supportive community, where members felt they could openly discuss and share their ideas and journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 2 burkinshaw editorial: interaction and passion in a pdp community concerns throughout the research journey. they also fostered and developed a community whereby members were able to act as ‘critical friends’ to each other’s research projects. the regional leads’ joint paper (see keenan, kumar and hughes in this volume) ‘forming communities of practice’ describes the experiences of the three regional groups and how each group developed a unique sense of identity and ways of working. this paper offers an insight into developing communities of practice, identifies a number of characteristics that contribute to their success, and evaluates how the model we adopted served to support our members in undertaking their pdp research journey. as the project developed over time, one unanticipated outcome was that some member institutions created ‘institutional research teams’ to support the narn project. the university of bedfordshire project, led by arti kumar (midlands regional lead), adopted and implemented the full narn project model and applied this across the institution to support academics and practitioners to develop their capacity and capability as researchers. this ‘mini’ narn was established as the action research consortium (arc) which saw twelve staff successfully complete action research projects. in her paper, ‘turning the narn into an arc at the university of bedfordshire – some reflections and comparisons’ arti kumar provides an honest and critical account in which she explores from a management perspective how the arc framework supported practitioners engaged in action research. it is through the strength of the community of practice model that all narn members have: • remained fully committed to the aims and objectives of the project throughout its life. • felt confident and capable of undertaking research related to pdp. • taken up opportunities to present their research at a number of national and international conferences. • taken up the opportunity to publish their research in a refereed journal of international standing. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 3 burkinshaw editorial: interaction and passion in a pdp community personal development planning (pdp) personal development planning is defined as: a structured and supported process undertaken by an individual to reflect upon their own learning, performance and/or achievement and to plan for their personal, educational and career development. (qaa, 2009, p.1) the ntfs narn project aimed to address sector-wide issues concerned with the effective implementation of pdp practice and to respond to repeated calls for more robust evaluation of pdp in the uk (qaa, 2001; gough et al., 2003; burgess, 2004; clegg, 2004). the paper authored by strivens and ward provides context for this special edition, exploring what is meant by pdp and tracing how far the sector has come in its implementation, including the introduction of new technologies to support the pdp process over the last five years. hughes et al., in ‘situated personal development planning’ examine local pdp practices across four academic programmes of study. their paper explores how diverse forms of pdp curriculum have evolved and been developed within an institutional framework. they reassert the importance of local contexts and cultures and their influence in shaping pdp practices. they argue that we should worry less about identifying best practice pedagogy of pdp and pay greater attention to the range of social influences on curriculum design to develop a greater understanding of pdp, its effectiveness and contribution to learner development. early research around the implementation of pdp, suggested an emergence of a multiplicity of meaning and function(s) with a variety of distinct practices and interpretations being adopted across the he sector (clegg, 2004). hughes et al. point to the value of diversity and of the situated nature of pdp practices. a number of our members’ papers in the journal, relate to research and findings around student perceptions of the meaning and value of pdp processes and practices. davey and lumsden in ‘from cats to roller-coasters: creative use of posters to explore students’ perceptions of pdp’ explore students’ perceptions of pdp through textual analysis and the use of posters in a longitudinal two year study. the paper by jankowska, ‘taking concept mapping (cm) forward with socially mediated structured approaches’, also explored journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 4 burkinshaw editorial: interaction and passion in a pdp community meaning by asking postgraduate students the question: what does personal development planning mean to you? the perceptions and engagement of staff in the success of pdp approaches and practices is a prevalent theme throughout papers in this journal. powell explores staff perceptions of the value of pdp in ‘useful or just another fad? staff perceptions of personal development planning’. her research found that many staff valued the pdp process but that many viewed the individual elements or component parts of pdp more positively than pdp itself. this resonates with other papers where there is a suggestion that the terminology of pdp is not helpful (davey and lumsden; rowe; hughes et al.). ‘how do different models of pdp influence the embedding of e–portfolios?’ asks frith. she investigated a number of programmes and disciplines in relation to pdp practices and how these relate to characteristics of pdp which focus upon a model defined by clegg and bradley (2006), describing its use in three contexts: professional, academic and employment. this paper acts as a useful introduction to clegg and bradley’s model which is cited in a number of other papers in this collection e.g. professional (riddell and bates); employment (rowe; wilson-medhurst and turner) and academic (davey and lumsden). wilson-medhurst and turner in ‘an evaluation of the impact of e-portfolio supported pedagogic processes on students’ reflective capacity’ explore undergraduate modules which have an explicit focus on employability. the paper explores how an e-portfolio tool can support students in their learning development and asks the question: what are the elements that support and encourage the reflective capacity of students? savory et al. in ‘the role of personal development planning (pdp) for employer sponsored students – an exploration of how pdp learning activities can support cpd and workforce development requirements’ build on work by clegg and bradley (2006) and develop the employability model further. they discuss and highlight how pdp learning activities can support the appraisal processes within the workplace to support workforce development and organisational performance. in ‘what role can pdp play in identity development and confidence building in non-traditional students?’ buckley explores how an online pdp module can serve to support the work-based learner through transition, engagement and achievement. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 5 burkinshaw editorial: interaction and passion in a pdp community the role of the personal tutor in pdp is a theme shared by three of the papers in this journal. rowe, in ‘evaluating a new e-pdp tool and its relationship with personal tutoring’, states that the nature of the relationship between the student and the individual tutor is key to the pdp process. this is supported in ‘the role of the personal tutor in a curricula approach to personal development planning’ by riddell and bates, which gives evidence that ‘relationship-building’ between the personal tutor and the student is critical to enabling effective support and learning development. finally, raiker’s paper, ‘an investigation into the undergraduate dissertation tutorial as a personal development planning (pdp) process to support learner development’ demonstrates that the tutorial appears to be effective as a pdp process in enabling learner development in meeting the needs of some students if not all. all three of these papers evidence the positive impact that the curriculum model of student support (earwaker, 1992) can have in relation to pdp and learner development. they suggest that the personal tutor system is a primary vehicle by which to encourage students to reflect not only on academic progress but also more holistically about their learning in context. in their overview of the development of pdp at the beginning of this journal, strivens and ward point to a need to further our understanding of e-portfolio practice. over half of the ntfs narn members in their research studies review pdp which is linked to e-portfolio practice and/or technology. in this we offer a contribution and additional insight into the impact and effective use of e-portfolios to support a new generation of learners. symonds presents us with a study ‘evaluating an e-portfolio implementation with early adopters using appreciative inquiry’ which sought staff and student perceptions of an institution-wide e–portfolio system. these research findings highlight factors which influence effective e-portfolio learning, relating to tutor engagement; the need for technical and pedagogical support; and the embedding of the e–portfolio in the curriculum. lawton and purnell also undertook an institution-wide study from a number of perspectives: the evaluation of a university-wide e-portfolio; the facilitating and inhibiting factors affecting the sustainability and scale of e-portfolio based pdp across an institution; and factors that contribute to engagement with pdp. ‘blogs and e-portfolios: can they support reflection, evidencing and dialogue in teacher training?’ by cotterill et al. offers us a debate on the level of structure required in eportfolios and blogs for vocational subjects, and factors relating to engagement and journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 6 burkinshaw editorial: interaction and passion in a pdp community concurrent use of formal/institutional social networking sites. moule and rhemahn in ‘student experience with e-portfolio: exploring the roles of trust and creativity’ explore the perceived added value of creativity and play that e-portfolios can potentially offer. they also raise the emotional dimension of’ trust with respect to the use of e-portfolios and potential barriers to the engagement with e–portfolio. the range, variety and complexity of pdp is evident across all of these papers by the ntfs narn members. this reflects clegg’s (2004) research where pdp processes were seen to have relevance for improving students’ understanding of how they are learning; enabling students to reflect critically; helping students become independent learners; encouraging students to build upon their academic work; extra-curricula activities; career opportunities and general employability. although our members’ selection of their research areas in itself evidences a trend towards the ‘employability‘ model of pdp (clegg and bradley, 2006), it is nonetheless clear that there is support for the utilisation of e-portfolio and other electronic tools to support a broader interpretation of learning development. strivens and ward suggest that further research into the impact and effective use of eportfolios for such purposes would be welcome. the ntfs narn set out to develop a body of scholarly knowledge capable of informing more effective implementation of pdp for students. each member’s research contribution reveals a rich picture of the experience of pdp within different he situations and with different groups of learners. these pictures serve to illuminate how engagement with varying pdp practices and processes can enhance the overall student learning experience. this special edition of the journal of learning development in higher education has provided us with a welcome and valuable opportunity to share our journey in the development of the hea ntfs project; share the approaches we have taken to building a research community; and to proudly present our members’ research in pdp. we are grateful to john hilsdon and andy hagyard, jldhe editors, for providing us with this opportunity, and for their support and guidance to our membership community in the final leg of the research journey – writing for publication. throughout the research project journey, it has been evident that the motivation and commitment of all our members is in their endeavour to make a positive difference to learning development and the learning environment. we hope that the research that we have presented in this journal will stimulate discussion and debate, serve to inform and journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 7 burkinshaw editorial: interaction and passion in a pdp community enhance pdp processes, and encourage others to participate in and/or develop new research communities of practice. on a personal note, it has been a pleasure and a privilege to lead on this national project, to share the project research journey with all the narn members and to have the opportunity to work with and be inspired by such enthusiastic individuals! their passion and their interaction through the broader learning development community (including through the pages of the jldhe) shows real dedication and commitment to improving students’ experiences of learning through pdp in he. finally, we are all indebted to dr. john peters (university of worcester) who conceived of the idea to create the narn in pdp and e-portfolio practice, without which none of this would have happened. references burgess, r. (2004) measuring and recording student achievement: report of the scoping group. universities uk. available at: http://www.universitiesuk.ac.uk/publications/documents/measuringachievement.pdf (accessed: 8 november 2010). clegg, s. (2004) ‘critical readings: progress files and the production of the autonomous learner’, teaching in higher education, 9(3), pp. 287-298. clegg, s. and bradley, s. (2006) ‘the implementation of progress files in higher education: reflection as national policy’, higher education, 51(4), pp.465–486. cra (2010) the centre for recording achievement. available at: http://www.recordingachievement.org/ (accessed: 07 november 2010). earwaker, j. (1992) helping and supporting students. milton keynes: open university press. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 8 http://www.universitiesuk.ac.uk/publications/documents/measuringachievement.pdf http://www.recordingachievement.org/ burkinshaw editorial: interaction and passion in a pdp community gough, d.a., kiwan, d., sutcliffe, k., simpson, d. and houghton, n. (2003) a systematic map and synthesis review of the effectiveness of personal development planning for improving student learning. london: eppi-centre, social science research unit, institute of education, university of london. available at: http://eppi.ioe.ac.uk/cms/default.aspx?tabid=309 (accessed: 8 november 2010). higher education academy (2010) national teaching fellowship scheme projects. available at: http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/ourwork/supportingindividuals/ntfs/ntfsprojects (accessed: 8 november 2010). lave, j. and wenger, e. (1991) situated learning: legitimate peripheral participation (learning in doing: social, cognitive and computational perspectives). cambridge: cambridge university press. qaa (2001) guidelines for he progress files. available at: http://www.qaa.ac.uk/academicinfrastructure/progressfiles/guidelines/progfile2001. asp (accessed: 3 november 2010). qaa, (2009) personal development planning: guidance for institutional policy and practice in higher education. available at: http://www.qaa.ac.uk/academicinfrastructure/progressfiles/guidelines/pdp/pdpgui de.pdf (accessed: 8 november 2010). wenger, e., mcdermott, r. and snyder, w.m. (2002) cultivating communities of practice. boston: harvard business school press. author details sue burkinshaw is head of learning enhancement and professional development and a university learning and teaching fellow at the university of bolton. she was the project leader for the higher education academy (hea), national teaching fellowships, ‘national action research network on researching and evaluating personal development planning and e-portfolio practice’ project. sue also led the journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 9 http://eppi.ioe.ac.uk/cms/default.aspx?tabid=309 http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/ourwork/supportingindividuals/ntfs/ntfsprojects http://www.qaa.ac.uk/academicinfrastructure/progressfiles/guidelines/progfile2001.asp http://www.qaa.ac.uk/academicinfrastructure/progressfiles/guidelines/progfile2001.asp http://www.qaa.ac.uk/academicinfrastructure/progressfiles/guidelines/pdp/pdpguide.pdf http://www.qaa.ac.uk/academicinfrastructure/progressfiles/guidelines/pdp/pdpguide.pdf burkinshaw editorial: interaction and passion in a pdp community strategic development and implementation of the personal development planning for students framework at the university of bolton. she is a fellow of the higher education academy and a chartered member of the chartered institute of personnel and development. sue is also a member of the board of trustees for the centre for recording achievement. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 10 interaction and passion in a pdp community background communities of practice: the narn model in building research capability and capacity personal development planning (pdp) savory et al. in ‘the role of personal development planning (pdp) for employer sponsored students – an exploration of how pdp learning activities can support cpd and workforce development requirements’ build on work by clegg and bradley (2006) and develop the employability model further. they discuss and highlight how pdp learning activities can support the appraisal processes within the workplace to support workforce development and organisational performance. in ‘what role can pdp play in identity development and confidence building in non-traditional students?’ buckley explores how an online pdp module can serve to support the work-based learner through transition, engagement and achievement. references burgess, r. (2004) measuring and recording student achievement: report of the scoping group. universities uk. available at: http://www.universitiesuk.ac.uk/publications/documents/measuringachievement.pdf (accessed: 8 november 2010). author details literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 5: march 2013 sharing resources to support the teaching of academic skills across the curriculum helen howard skills@library, university of leeds, uk michelle schneider skills@library, university of leeds, uk abstract in 2010, leeds university library introduced an academic skills strategy with the ambition of embedding academic skills into the curriculum across all faculties for all students. this case study outlines one of the approaches taken by skills@library to support the implementation of the strategy. an online portfolio of teaching resources designed to encourage and support academic staff to embed skills teaching in the curriculum was developed. the case study describes the way in which the resource was designed and developed. feedback received thus far and plans for the future are also discussed. keywords: academic skills; curriculum; embedding; teaching resources; learning development, open educational resources. supporting academic staff to embed academic skills into the curriculum the need for students to develop generic and transferable skills alongside subject knowledge has become an integral part of their university experience. this is highlighted by both the quality assurance agency for higher education (qaa) and graduate employers. the qaa’s uk quality code for higher education (2011) emphasises that students graduating with a bachelor’s degree with honours will not just demonstrate extensive knowledge of their subject area, but will be equipped with a range of academic and professional skills, including critical evaluation, problem-solving and communication. employers are also keen for graduates to have a range of skills and for these to be embedded in all degree programmes: howard and schneider sharing resources to support the teaching of academic skills across the curriculum employers need graduates who are equipped with a range of core work skills as well as academic ability. it is these competencies, such as interpersonal skills, communication skills, team-working and customer awareness which, in the final analysis, make graduates employable (association of graduate recruiters, 2010, p.5). like many units supporting student academic skills development, skills@library at the university of leeds provides a range of online resources for student use, alongside faceto-face support through teaching in the curriculum, workshops and one-to-one sessions. over 1000 students a year self-select or are recommended by their lecturers to attend our programme of free, bookable, academic skills workshops. in addition, the online studentfacing resources are well-used in different ways: self-directed by students, as part of blended learning approaches or following recommendation by library and academic staff. these workshops and online resources allow large numbers of students to access skills support. however, evidence has shown that ‘learning how to study effectively cannot be separated from subject content and the process of learning’ (wingate, 2006). indeed cottrell (2001, p.3) argues that for skills teaching to be effective it must be linked to assessment and ‘well anchored and contextualized within the subject specialism’. it is therefore essential to work closely with academic staff to achieve this. however, star and hammer (2008, p.238) identify potential difficulties with this, such as the need to resolve where the responsibility for skills teaching lies, financial and training implications, and possible negative student attitudes to skills teaching. careful consideration must therefore be given to how best to collaborate with academic staff and improve support for them, to enable them to integrate and deliver skills teaching within the curriculum. in 2010, leeds university library developed an academic skills strategy which has at its heart the ambition to see academic skills embedded within the curriculum across all faculties for all students. this follows on from an information literacy strategy developed in 2003 which was successful in embedding information skills support into numerous modules across the university. the academic skills strategy aims to build on the teaching that subject librarians and academic skills advisors already undertake in modules across schools and faculties, as well as the support provided directly by academic staff. to ensure this model is both sustainable and scalable, skills@library must collaborate journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 2 howard and schneider sharing resources to support the teaching of academic skills across the curriculum effectively with academic staff and find innovative ways to encourage and support them to embed skills teaching within the curriculum. the lecturer webpages concept: an online portfolio of teaching resources skills@library has made available a set of teaching resources aimed at academic staff to download, adapt and embed within their teaching. these lecturer webpages provide a bank of ready-made workshops, complete with lesson plans, slides and hand-outs, as well as short standalone activities. the resources cover topics such as finding and evaluating information, presentation and writing skills. all resources on the lecturer webpages are generic and designed to be reused and tailored to any discipline. the content is freely available and staff can use as much (a whole workshop) or as little (a single activity) as they wish to. as well as face-to-face teaching materials, online options are also provided for use in blended learning. there are different options for working with this material: staff can take a whole workshop and run it off the shelf; alternatively, they can take part of a workshop or a single activity and adapt it for their needs; or they can work with skills@library staff to devise tailored support for a particular group of students, designing and delivering support collaboratively. development of the lecturer webpages the skills@library team worked collaboratively, but with clear roles, to produce the resource. the team considered how best to present the materials and it was agreed to develop a new set of webpages which would mirror the topic areas covered on our existing student webpages (for example, writing skills, referencing, presentation skills etc.). a template for the matching lecturer webpages, as well as templates for presenting the content that would sit within the pages, were developed by the e-learning staff. the actual content was provided by academic skills advisors who looked at the workshops they had run in the previous year and developed detailed lesson plans for each, as well as updating presentations and hand-outs, ensuring that these were generic and adaptable. all the content was proofread by the team leader, and then uploaded to the webpages by the elearning staff. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 3 howard and schneider sharing resources to support the teaching of academic skills across the curriculum each topic page is laid out in a consistent way to help users become quickly familiar with the navigation and the way the content is packaged together. the topic pages are split into five sections, so that users are not overwhelmed by all the teaching materials at once, but can select which section to explore first. the five sections are: 1. workshops: lesson plans, slides and hand-outs. 2. individual face-to-face activities. 3. online activities for independent or blended learning. 4. supporting resources: books, journals and websites. 5. related topics. figure 1. lecturer page. figure 2. lesson plan. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 4 howard and schneider sharing resources to support the teaching of academic skills across the curriculum within the workshops section, users will find complete workshops with detailed lesson plans containing links to all relevant material including slides and hand-outs. for users who do not need a complete session focusing on one topic, or who just require some new ideas for sessions they already teach, we provide shorter stand-alone activities with accompanying teaching notes, suggesting how these activities could be used, as well as any other material needed to run the activity. these can be incorporated into existing workshops, curriculum sessions or used as part of new teaching sessions. all the material can be downloaded and saved, then used or adapted with acknowledgement to skills@library. developing students as independent learners and providing blended learning opportunities are also important at the university of leeds, so the third section provides lecturers with online activities, again with accompanying teaching notes, which offer suggestions of how the resources can best be used with students. academic staff can refer their students directly to the online resources or integrate them within their modules, for example, in a vle area. the final two sections give lecturers links to further resources (books, journals and websites), related lecturer topic pages and links to learnhigher resources in the area. after discussion, the team decided to share the resources under a creative commons licence, allowing anyone to use them for non-commercial purposes and modify them, providing skills@library is attributed as the source of the work (cc by-nc 3.0: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/). information on using the resources and how they should be attributed is also provided on the website. this model could be adopted by other institutions wishing to share teaching materials, as it takes a simple web-based approach to presenting and making available related resources. teaching staff need to provide up-to-date, preferably tried and tested, teaching and learning materials, including detailed lesson plans which provide sufficient guidance for others to run the sessions. some expertise in webpage creation, maintenance and the uploading of documents is required, and consideration should be given to the time commitment needed to keep materials up-to-date, thus administrative and e-learning support is useful. depending on the institution, the use of an in-house or national repository for housing open educational resources may be more appropriate. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 5 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/ howard and schneider sharing resources to support the teaching of academic skills across the curriculum feedback and evaluation the lecturer webpages were launched at an event organised by skills@library in december 2010 which was attended by academics and the pro vice chancellor for student education. each attendee at the launch was given a chance to explore the resource on a pc and asked to record their comments, feedback or observations on a blank postcard. the resources received many positive comments, including: excellent, lots of good ideas/materials to support development of research skills…can see ways this material can be integrated into existing modules through level 1 – 2. (participant, launch event, 2010) since the launch, the resource has been presented to academic staff at the internal student education conference at the university (howard and schneider, 2012a), as well as the association for learning development in higher education (aldinhe) (howard and schneider, 2012b) conference and the librarians’ information literacy annual conference (lilac) (schneider, 2012). again, every participant was given a chance to explore the lecturer webpages and asked to record their thoughts on the blank postcard. the resource was well received, with comments including: i am amazed at the resources that are available to be used for teaching and supporting students...i will definitely use materials for referencing and writing skills, especially the face-to-face ones. (participant, university of leeds student education conference, 2012) well-structured with well thought out resources and activities. (participant, aldinhe conference, 2012) the layout is really good, very professional looking! good to see that the resources are consistently presented too, with the same process – lesson plans etc. (participant, lilac conference, 2012) participants could certainly see the value in having these types of resources openly available: journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 6 howard and schneider sharing resources to support the teaching of academic skills across the curriculum i liked the visual nature of much of your material, and the use of examples. i am especially interested in the sections on academic writing, because this is the topic (in all aspects) which students most often consult me about 1-to-1. (participant, aldinhe conference, 2012) there is a really good range of resources available that could be useful for lecturers looking for ideas in how to get started in teaching a topic. potentially saving time in developing their own resources. (participant, university of leeds student education conference, 2012) in the six months from january to june 2012, the resource has received 6,193 visits with 3,882 unique visitors. both librarians and academics have used the teaching materials; below are just two comments we received after seeking some informal feedback from two users about their experience of the lecturer pages: using the materials cut down my preparation time a great deal and gave the students more support in that they got a variety of materials to look at; so i found it very useful. (lecturer, school of law, university of leeds) the skills@library lecturer pages have been really useful in providing me with material that i can just pick up and use or adapt in my teaching. (faculty team librarian, leeds university library) the impact of the lecturer webpages has also spread beyond the university of leeds. the skills@library team were honoured to receive the credo reference digital award for information literacy for the resource, presented at lilac in april 2012. the award recognises an individual librarian or group of librarians who develop the best new digital resource for promoting information literacy. statistics also show that the pages have been accessed both nationally and internationally.   whilst the lecturer webpages have been well received, we have also gathered useful feedback from staff, and at the conferences, about how the resources can be developed and improved. many comments suggested that users would benefit from case studies explaining how others had used, adapted and integrated the resources into their teaching. in addition, there are topic areas that could be expanded, such as writing skills, to provide journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 7 howard and schneider sharing resources to support the teaching of academic skills across the curriculum a broader range of examples in a variety of disciplines and assignment types, such as literature reviews and report writing. future plans the lecturer webpages are not a finite, static resource; they will always be in development. over the coming year, we will be expanding some of our topic areas such as writing, as well as developing resources in other key skills areas such as time management. in response to a number of comments received, we will be gathering case studies from academics and other staff involved in student support who have used the resources. in addition, we will continue to monitor usage, look into new ways to publicise the resource and investigate more robust ways to evaluate the impact of this resource on students’ academic skills development. conclusion the lecturer webpages provide an innovative way of supporting academic staff in the delivery of academic skills teaching. they reflect our belief that academic skills development in students is a shared responsibility between academic staff and central learning development staff. far from being prescriptive, staff can decide to what extent they wish to use the materials independently or collaboratively with skills@library. it is hoped that the lecturer webpages will not only help academic staff to teach academic skills, but will encourage them to embed skills within the curriculum, thus supporting the central aim of our academic skills strategy. furthermore, the resource provides an opportunity to showcase the creative and interactive approaches to teaching that leeds university library has developed. finally, as the webpages are publicly available, this is a resource that academics and librarians can use across institutions both nationally and internationally; they demonstrate the potential to share best practice and avoid reinventing the wheel. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 8 howard and schneider sharing resources to support the teaching of academic skills across the curriculum references association of graduate recruiters (2010) talent, opportunity, prosperity. a manifesto for graduate recruitment [online]. available at: http://www.agr.org.uk/content/agr-amanifesto-for-graduaterecruitment (accessed: 26 october 2011). cottrell, s. (2001) teaching study skills and supporting learning. basingstoke: palgrave. howard, h. and schneider, m. (2012a) ‘don’t reinvent the wheel: resources to support the teaching of information literacy and academic skills across the curriculum’, excellence: student education conference. university of leeds, 6 january. howard, h. and schneider, m. (2012b) ‘don’t reinvent the wheel: resources to support the teaching of information literacy and academic skills across the curriculum’, learning development in a digital age: emerging literacies and learning spaces: 9th aldinhe conference. university of leeds, 2-4 april. leeds university library (2010) academic skills strategy [online]. available at: http://library.leeds.ac.uk/library-academic-skills-strategy (accessed: 28 february 2012). the quality assurance agency for higher education (2011) uk quality code for higher education [online]. available at: http://www.qaa.ac.uk/publications/informationandguidance/documents/qualitycode-chapter-a1.pdf (accessed: 27 june 2012). schneider, m. (2012) ‘don’t reinvent the wheel: resources to support the teaching of information literacy and academic skills across the curriculum’, lilac. glasgow caledonian university, 11-13 april. star, c. and hammer, s. (2008) ‘teaching generic skills: eroding the higher purpose of universities, or an opportunity for renewal?’, oxford review of education, 34(1), pp. 237-251. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 9 http://www.agr.org.uk/content/agr-a-manifesto-for-graduaterecruitment http://www.agr.org.uk/content/agr-a-manifesto-for-graduaterecruitment http://library.leeds.ac.uk/library-academic-skills-strategy http://www.qaa.ac.uk/publications/informationandguidance/documents/quality-code-chapter-a1.pdf http://www.qaa.ac.uk/publications/informationandguidance/documents/quality-code-chapter-a1.pdf howard and schneider sharing resources to support the teaching of academic skills across the curriculum wingate, u. (2006) ‘doing away with ‘study skills’’, teaching in higher education, 11(4), pp. 457-469. author details helen howard has led the skills@library team at the university of leeds since 2009. as team leader, her role involves co-ordinating skills@library activities within the university, particularly workshops, teaching and online learning resources, to promote academic skills development in students. michelle schneider is academic skills development officer at skills@library, university of leeds. she supports students' academic skills development through the delivery of face-to-face workshops and one-to-one advice, as well as developing online resources. her role also involves working with the faculty team librarians to deliver academic skills within the curriculum. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 10 sharing resources to support the teaching of academic skills across the curriculum abstract supporting academic staff to embed academic skills into the curriculum the lecturer webpages concept: an online portfolio of teaching resources development of the lecturer webpages feedback and evaluation future plans conclusion references author details literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special edition: academic peer learning, part two, april 2016 peer feedback: moving from assessment of learning to assessment for learning sigrun m. wagner school of management, royal holloway, university of london, uk abstract the following case study showcases a model of academic peer learning that has demonstrated clear links to learning development in final year students. the paper discusses the introduction of a new assessment structure for a 15 credit course unit usually taken by 90 students in the form of a short discursive essay (500 words) due early in the first teaching term. this essay is peer assessed in groups of four students. the peer feedback and tutor mark then serve as formative feedback (feed forward) for the main, longer essay (2-2,500 words) due in the second teaching term. following the outline of the case background, details of the peer assessment are provided, including its development and structure. the new assessment structure has resulted in deeper learning, positive student feedback, fewer student complaints with regard to grades received for the main essay, and better preparation for the final exam. reflections are offered in the conclusion. keywords: peer assessment; assessment for learning; peer learning; peer feedback. introduction in recent years, increased attention has been paid to the use of peer-assisted learning in higher education (van den berg et al., 2006; lladó et al., 2014). its importance was, for example, highlighted by the chief executive of the uk’s higher education academy during a visit to the author’s institution in 2014. the course for which peer assessment was pioneered is a 15 credit unit run over one term in the international business subject area for final year students in the institution’s school wagner peer feedback: moving from assessment of learning to assessment for learning journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 2 of management. it is an optional course for bsc management students and compulsory for students studying for a bsc management with international business. until the author’s introduction of it, peer feedback had rarely been used in the school. the following table gives an overview of the assessment before and after the introduction of peer assessment. table 1. comparison of assessment structures. previous assessment structure new assessment structure  30% coursework essay – 2,500 words, due in the final week of term 1 (november/december).  70% written examination, 2 hours (summer term – term 3)  10% discursive essay – 500 words, due after the third week of term 1 (october).  5% verbal participation in workshops and lectures  25% coursework essay – 2,0002,500 word essay, due at start of term 2 (january).  60% written examination, 2 hours (summer term – term 3) the piece of assessment used for peer feedback was a short 500 word discursive essay that students had to submit in the early part of term 1 (in week 4), worth 10% of the final course grade (a discursive essay in this context encourages students to engage with a discourse of a certain topic, taking into account various perspectives in the process). whilst the author, as lecturer and course coordinator, was still responsible for the numeric mark (summative feedback), students were responsible for providing online written (formative) feedback to each other in groups of four, facilitated by the virtual learning environment (moodle). students then had to use the feedback as feedforward for their main essay by ‘reflecting and explaining’ in a paragraph (outside the word count) how they acted on the peer feedback received. wagner peer feedback: moving from assessment of learning to assessment for learning journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 3 why did the assessment change? the rationale behind the change of assessment in introducing peer feedback was to move from assessment of learning to assessment for learning. such learning-oriented assessment is one important goal of peer assessment (gielen et al., 2011). the revised structure thus provides more opportunity for feedback and learning. it also constitutes a shift from a teacher-centred approach towards a more student-centred approach to learning (entwistle et al., 2000), which is part of a wider movement to focus more on the student experience (bis, 2011). taking a student-centred approach is a significant characteristic of good teaching (bhatti, 2012). furthermore, good practice in undergraduate education emphasises prompt feedback, and encourages and develops reciprocity and cooperation among students (chickering and gamson, 1987). the use of peer feedback also addresses the desire of students to develop peer relationships and to benefit from peer support (qaa nus student experience research report, 2012). it thus builds student independence where students take responsibility for their own learning by actively managing it (liu and carless, 2006; lladó et al., 2014) rather than solely relying on their tutor. the new assessment structure aimed to incorporate the principles and values outlined here. among these principles of effective assessment, transparency of criteria is key. this underpinned the exercise, therefore attempting to bridge the gap between student uncertainty and expectations of lecturers (magyar et al., 2011). the students were able to gain greater insight into what was required of them in order to meet the assessment criteria. well ahead of the main essay they actively engaged with the criteria in order to give valid and useful feedback to their peers. dochy et al. (1999) point out the importance of clear marking criteria, while jones and alcock (2014) provide an alternative view where no criteria are provided in a piece of peer assessment. see also, for example, the work of aske at oxford brookes university for engaging students with assessment criteria (https://www.brookes.ac.uk/aske/documents/2576_123-improve90mins.pdf, assessment standards knowledge exchange, accessed 11 november 2015, based on rust et al., 2003). the introduction of a second essay with peer feedback on the course contributes to the development of writing skills (bowman and addyman, 2014). furthermore, peer feedback https://www.brookes.ac.uk/aske/documents/2576_123-improve90mins.pdf wagner peer feedback: moving from assessment of learning to assessment for learning journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 4 also actively strengthens employability skills as it is used in work contexts as well (lladó et al., 2014): professionals are subject to criticism by others of the same rank and, as responsible employees, are expected to judge fairly other peers’ work (lladó et al., 2014). how was the new assessment structure introduced? the author as the course coordinator and assessor introduced peer feedback in consultation with the university’s educational development department. the change was prompted partly as a result of a previous piece of pedagogical research on good practice in teaching conducted by the author, and partly as a result of experiencing student questions, complaints and queries following the release of coursework marks within the original assessment structure. in discussions with the educational development officers, the assessment took shape and it was decided to introduce peer feedback as a formative element and to make the lecturer responsible for the summative element (numerical mark). it was important for students to give only online written, formative feedback and for the tutor to give summative marks. some students dislike awarding a grade to their peers (falchikov, 1995) whilst others do not have confidence in peer assessors (swanson et al., 1997). topping (1998) and hughes (2001), however, present evidence that indicates that peer assessment can be effective, although students tend to mark more generously than academics (ferguson et al., 2008). whilst providing quantitative assessment in the form of a numerical mark might place peers in too much of a teacher-like role, giving formative and qualitative feedback is also more cognitively demanding (topping, 2005) and thus more appropriate and suitable for learning development. scardamalia (2001) emphasises such higher order skills as characteristic twenty-first century skills in modern education (van zundert et al., 2012). furthermore, receiving feedback from more than one peer is more useful than feedback from a single peer or tutor (luxton-reilly, 2009; cho and schunn, 2007). the following timeline gives an overview of the assessment and feedback process. a similar table was also given to students on the course. wagner peer feedback: moving from assessment of learning to assessment for learning journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 5 table 1. time line of peer assessment in case study course. term 1 activity week 2  explanation in lecture of the assignment and peer feedback process  homework – assessment exercise with 3 model essay extracts (made available on moodle)  assignment of peer feedback groups (groups of four) week 3  assessment exercise in class week 4  deadline for essay submission on turnitin and to peer feedback group via moodle forum week 5  essays are read and peer reviewed by three other group members (every student peer reviews three essays and receives feedback from three fellow students) week 6  deadline for peer feedback submission to peer group and to tutor via moodle forum  tutor starts grading week 8/9  tutor returns graded essays term 2 week 1  main essay due with reflective paragraph (outside word count) on how student acted on feedback given for discursive essay ( feedforward) in order to prepare students for the provision of peer feedback, an assessment exercise in the form of three essay extracts was devised, in line with luxton-reilly’s (2009) emphasis on the use of exemplars to help students identify the merits of a given assignment. the extracts demonstrated the quality (and the limitations) of each piece according to the marking/feedback criteria. the following list gives an overview of the peer feedback checklist that was given to students for the assessment exercise and for the peer assessed discursive essay:  has your peer used and listed at least seven sources, two of which should be from academic journals, two from news sources (e.g. ft, economist, other broadsheets etc.) and at least one textbook source, one digital media source (e.g. blog, tweet) and one public speech? wagner peer feedback: moving from assessment of learning to assessment for learning journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 6  are the references used effectively (e.g. not just quotations but is there interpretation as well)? is the referencing consistent? – i.e. are all references listed used and are all references used listed? are the references written up correctly, by surname/organisation?  is the essay well written? has it been proofread or was it possibly submitted in haste? are all words written out in full, i.e. by not using contractions (e.g. ‘is not’ rather than ‘isn’t’)? are all abbreviations explained when first used? is the formatting consistent (e.g. colour, font type, font size, line spacing…)? is the word count stated?  has your peer answered the question?  list three recommendations how the essay could be improved.  you should also use the assessment grid for undergraduate essays to guide your feedback and to make comments in the following areas: intellectual qualities expressed, structure and organisation, level of reading, quality of referencing, and writing style. in addition to the checklist, students were provided with clear rules for feedback: it should be constructive and positive, whilst also aiming to be honest and balanced. they were reminded in the instructions that ‘giving feedback is an important skill in the workplace where you might be asked to appraise peers, line managers or subordinates; it is a tool for development and improvement’, thereby clearly stressing the developmental aspects of this kind of learning activity. all students had to answer the same essay topic and as the nature of the question allowed for wide interpretation with no right or wrong answers, model answers were not provided, encouraging students to develop critical thinking skills. the checklist and rules for feedback were judged to provide sufficient material for the students to work with. feedback groups of four were assigned randomly across the course of 90 students in the first year of the intervention. following student feedback about not knowing whom they were peer assessing (the students are part of a larger cohort of over 350 management students who might not all know each other), students were assigned randomly within the four workshops of the course (each attended by 20-25 students) in the second year of the new assessment structure. this ensured a higher likelihood of students knowing their assessors and assessees. wagner peer feedback: moving from assessment of learning to assessment for learning journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 7 the timing of the essay and the feedback guaranteed that students ended the taught part of the course having received feedback and a grade. this marked a change from the previous assessment structure where they only handed in their coursework towards the end of the course and did not receive feedback until the following term. in a further step, as part of the main essay assessment due four weeks after the end of term one, students had to reflect on the feedback they had received on their discursive essay. the peer assessment thus acts as feedforward for self-reflection and selfevaluation, thereby enhancing students’ meta-cognitive competencies (topping, 2005; dochy et al., 1999; see also reinholz, 2016 on the relationship between peer and selfassessment; for more information on how feed forward can be used to look ahead to the next assignment, see ferrell and gray’s (2013) guide to feedback and feed forward, https://www.jisc.ac.uk/guides/feedback-and-feed-forward, accessed 8 september 2015). peer feedback also improved their writing skills as supported by the scaffolding process introduced (yang, 2010). the importance of feedback is emphasised by orsmond et al. (2004, p.274): ‘fundamental to a formative learning process is the use of feedback’. outcomes of the assessment change for the tutor, the overall workload has been marginally higher – e.g. overall the coursework word count to mark has gone from 2,500 to a range of 2,500-3,000 words. marking time for the discursive essay is minimal compared to other assignments as online written feedback is provided by students rather than by the tutor who provides a numerical mark, and because all students have the same essay assignment. furthermore, following the release of marks for the main essay, there have been fewer questions and queries (or complaints) from students: a significant improvement to the previous assessment structure. for the students, clear learning developments have been demonstrated. the evidence can be seen in several ways. in both years, all students registered on the course submitted a discursive essay (non-submission would result in a mark of 0%), whereas not all students submitted the longer essay, indicating a very high level of student engagement for the peer assessed essay. in the first year of the new assessment structure, a post-it-note exercise (similar to one of the classroom assessment techniques advocated by angelo https://www.jisc.ac.uk/guides/feedback-and-feed-forward wagner peer feedback: moving from assessment of learning to assessment for learning journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 8 and cross, 1993) was conducted, shortly after the marks had been released. students were asked whether they had engaged in peer assessment before, how they found the exercise, whether it should be repeated and how it could be improved. more than 80% of the students surveyed (n=36 out of a cohort of 90 students, i.e. over a third of registered students – this level of attendance and engagement is common for lectures during this part of the course where workshops are attended more fully) were positive about the peer feedback, finding it useful, helpful, and informative. students clearly appreciated the reciprocal benefits for them from both reading other students’ essays and receiving feedback from their peers. this was also evident in the general student feedback for the course, of which two extracts read as follows:  the peer assessment feedback process was a fun, useful exercise – was good to hear what other students thought.  two essays to write is really good, raises awareness of the course from october onwards. similarly, the benefits as perceived by students were demonstrated in the main essay. students were asked to provide an additional paragraph (outside the word count) to ‘reflect and explain’ how they acted on the feedback given for the discursive essay, using it as feedforward. the following quotations are a selection from these paragraphs of reflection:  the peer assessment that we had in our first essay was very helpful to me… this activity is indeed very helpful for students as opinions for [sic] different people with different perspectives truly matters.  i found the assessment exercise more useful when assessing than when being assessed… as both assessee and assessor, it made me realise how many mistakes, confusions, or even imprecisions we constantly leave in our essays. so when quoting my sources this time i kept asking myself whether what i was saying was really what the source said, or whether i was making it up. it also drew my attention on points that i formerly found less relevant, such as the layout which actually determines whether the essay is pleasant to read or not.  the peer assessment was very useful to me because it showed me different ways of approaching the question and i was able to learn from other students’ mistakes. i also find that getting feedback from your peers is different than comments of tutors wagner peer feedback: moving from assessment of learning to assessment for learning journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 9 and it showed me more clearly how we get assessed. all in all i thought it was very successful and in my eyes it is a useful tool and would recommend other tutors use this technique as well.  … moreover, when i was correcting my peer’s work i was put in the position of the professor who marks the work, therefore, i was able to gain an insight into what you expect from an essay and how the written information is perceived by that person. the last quotation points to a development of empathy with lecturers which is also a theme that hanrahan and isaacs (2001) found in their study of how students view peer assessment. interestingly, weaker essays often did not include the reflective paragraph, reinforcing the notion that reflecting on peer feedback leads to improvements in writing. in terms of numerical marks, the average grade of the second essay for the 90 students on the course increased by 1.5% percentage points from 58.0% for the first essay to 59.5% in the first year of the changed assessment, with a significant 45% increase in students gaining a first class mark (from 11 students to 16, with stable student numbers overall). in the higher education context for undergraduate students in england, a first class mark is obtained with a grade above 70%. a pass mark is above 40% (third class), whereas grades above 50% and 60% constitute second class marks (lower and upper second). marks above 85% or 90% are rare in the social sciences. exam results in the two years since introducing the peer assessment have both been higher by two to three percentage points compared to the final year of the previous assessment structure. furthermore, in both years, exam results have been higher than essay results which also marks a shift from the previous assessment structure, indicating the development of learning from the two essays to the examination. as there are other factors influencing grades, numeric marks can of course only serve as an indicator of the benefits to students’ learning development by introducing peer assessment. ferguson et al. (2008) for example highlight the varied reliability of marking, drawing on newstead and dennis (1994), as well as falchikov and boud (1989), emphasising the difficulties of marking essay-style assessments in the social sciences. whilst a couple of students reported back that ‘the only feedback that counts is the tutor’s’ (see also liu and carless, 2006, for similar concerns), perhaps indicating a lack of reflection, most students valued the experience. although other studies debate rewarding the quality of feedback (davies, 2009), the feedback given was not marked itself. wagner peer feedback: moving from assessment of learning to assessment for learning journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 10 however, the names of students who had given particularly constructive and/or detailed feedback in line with the checklist were read out in class as an informal reward. for future cohorts, these written online comments could be used as anonymous examples of effective feedback practices, provided students have given permission to use their comments as resources for incoming students. the engagement of students with peer feedback is also demonstrated in the fact that the peer assessment forum is the most accessed feature on the moodle site of the course along with the instructions for the peer assessed discursive essay. timely feedback had been an issue previously on the course and in the school more widely. the introduction of an early piece of coursework with peer feedback has not only led to enhanced student learning but also contributed to improved scores on ‘assessment & feedback’ for this unit in the anonymous student feedback surveyed at the end of each taught course. concluding reflections in the student feedback on the peer assessment, several students commented that they would have liked to have anonymous feedback as they did not like giving feedback to their friends. at the same time, as referred to above, some students disliked giving and receiving feedback to and from students whom they did not know. although anonymous feedback could lead to more honest feedback in that assessors might be less critical when identities are known (cho and schunn, 2007; cramton, 2001), the rationale for known identities was two-fold: practical reasons (the university’s virtual learning environment does not currently support such peer assessment) and developmental reasons. in the workplace, feedback and appraisal are rarely anonymous, and as such, giving nonanonymous feedback to peers may prepare students for employment by practising an important professional skill (van zundert et al., 2012; lladó et al., 2014). anonymous marking is more appropriate in contexts where peer assessment also includes grading rather than only giving feedback (see luxton-reilly, 2009, as well as yu and wu, 2011, for a discussion on identity revelation in peer assessment). for reasons discussed above, the tutor provided the numerical mark as the summative element, and students the written feedback as formative assessment. wagner peer feedback: moving from assessment of learning to assessment for learning journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 11 in the first two years of the new assessment structure, the tutor did provide some online written feedback to students in addition to a numerical mark, in anticipation of some students not providing feedback. in the first year this was more widespread and in the second year, measures were taken to penalise students not providing feedback by deducting 5% percentage points from their mark – this affected two out of 90 students. in future, the tutor plans to revert to the original plan and only give a numerical mark, whilst at the same time offering verbal feedback to students who (feel they) have not received sufficient peer feedback, once the grades have been released, thus contributing to student independence to manage their own learning (lladó et al., 2014). furthermore, the somewhat unwieldy checklist for peer feedback has been changed and restructured, e.g. by including subheadings, for more clarity. the innovative nature within the author’s institution of the introduction of this peer assessment was recognised by the award of a university-wide teaching prize to the tutor. the case study was shared as good practice in the institution’s annual teaching and learning symposium in 2015 under the theme ‘valuing teaching and sharing approaches’. the comments and questions raised as a result of sharing good practice in this forum provided further opportunities for reflection on how to enhance learning and empower learners through peer assessment. acknowledgments the author would like to acknowledge the generous help and advice of the team in educational development, particularly lynne francis, with regard to peer assessment, its preparation, implementation and technical support, all of which is much appreciated. references angelo, t.a. and cross, k.p. (1993) classroom assessment techniques: a handbook for college teachers. 2nd edn. san francisco: jossey-bass. wagner peer feedback: moving from assessment of learning to assessment for learning journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 12 bhatti, m.t. (2012) ‘dimensions of good university teaching: faculty and department chairs’ perspectives’, design and technology education: an international journal, 17(1), pp. 44-53. bis (2011) higher education: students at the heart of the system, department for business innovation and skills (bis) white paper, june. available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/3138 4/11-944-higher-education-students-at-heart-of-system.pdf (accessed: 26 may 2015). bowman, m. and addyman, b. (2014) ‘improving the quality of academic reflective writing in nursing: a comparison of three different interventions’, journal of learning development in higher education, issue 7, june, pp. 1-25. chickering, a.w. and gamson, z.f. (1987) ‘seven principles for good practice in undergraduate education’, aahe (american association for higher education) bulletin, march, pp. 3-7. cho, k. and schunn, c.d. (2007) ‘scaffolded writing and rewriting in the discipline: a webbased reciprocal peer review system’, computers & education, 48(3), pp. 409-426. cramton, c.d. (2001) ‘the mutual knowledge problem and its consequences for dispersed collaboration’, organization science, 12(3), pp. 346-371. davies, p. (2009) ‘review and reward within the computerised peer-assessment of essays’, assessment & evaluation in higher education, 34(3), pp. 321-333. dochy f., segers, m. and sluijsmans, d. (1999) ‘the use of self-, peer and co-assessment in higher education: a review’, studies in higher education, 24(3), pp. 331-350. entwistle, n., skinner, d., entwistle, d. and orr, s. (2000) ‘conceptions and beliefs about ‘good teaching’: an integration of contrasting research areas’, higher education research & development, 19(1), pp. 5-26. https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/31384/11-944-higher-education-students-at-heart-of-system.pdf https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/31384/11-944-higher-education-students-at-heart-of-system.pdf wagner peer feedback: moving from assessment of learning to assessment for learning journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 13 falchikov, n. (1995) ‘peer feedback marking: developing peer assessment’, innovations in education & training international, 32(2), pp. 175-187. falchikov, n. and boud, d. (1989) ‘student self-assessment in higher education: a metaanalysis’, review of educational research, 59(4), pp. 395-430. ferguson, g., sheader, e. and grady, r. (2008) ‘computer-assisted and peer assessment: a combined approach to assessing first year laboratory practical classes for large numbers of students’, bioscience education, 11(1), pp. 1-16 [online]. available at: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.3108/beej.11.4 (accessed: 12 april 2016). ferrell, g. and gray, l. (2013) feedback and feed forward, guide. available at: https://www.jisc.ac.uk/guides/feedback-and-feed-forward (accessed: 8 september 2015). gielen, s., dochy, f., onghena, p., struyven, k. and smeets, s. (2011) ‘goals of peer assessment and their associated quality concepts’, studies in higher education, 36(6), pp. 719-735. hanrahan, s.j. and isaacs, g. (2001) ‘assessing selfand peer-assessment: the students’ views’, higher education research & development, 20(10), pp. 53-70. hughes, i. (2001) ‘but isn’t this what you’re paid for? the pros and cons of peerand selfassessment’, planet, national subject centre for geography, earth and environmental sciences, learning and teaching support network, issue 2, pp. 2023. jones, i. and alcock, l. (2014) ‘peer assessment without assessment criteria’, studies in higher education, 39(10), pp. 1774-1787. liu, n-f. and carless, d. (2006) ‘peer feedback: the learning element of peer assessment’, teaching in higher education, 11(3), pp. 279-290. http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.3108/beej.11.4 https://www.jisc.ac.uk/guides/feedback-and-feed-forward wagner peer feedback: moving from assessment of learning to assessment for learning journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 14 lladó, a.p., soley, l.f., sansbelló, r.m.f, pujolras, g.a., planella, j.p., roura-pascual, n., suñol, j.j. and moreno, l.m. (2014) ‘student perceptions of peer assessment: an interdisciplinary study’, assessment & evaluation in higher education, 39(5), pp. 592-610. luxton-reilly, a. (2009) ‘a systematic review of tools that support peer assessment’, computer science education, 19(4), pp. 209-232. magyar, a., mcavoy, d. and forstner, k. (2011) ‘‘if only we knew what they wanted’: bridging the gap between student uncertainty and lecturers’ expectations’, journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3, march, pp. 1-18. newstead, s.e. and dennis, i. (1994) ‘examiners examined: the reliability of exam marking in psychology’, the psychologist, 7(5), pp. 216-219. orsmond, p., merry, s. and callaghan, a. (2004) ‘implementation of a formative assessment model incorporating peer and self-assessment’, innovations in education and teaching, 41(3), pp. 273-290. qaa nus student experience research report (2012) quality assurance agency for higher education, national union of students, report. available at: http://www.qaa.ac.uk/publications/information-andguidance/publication?pubid=225#.vwvggoi1jiu (accessed: 6 april 2016). reinholz, d. (2016) ‘the assessment cycle: a model for learning through peer assessment’, assessment & evaluation in higher education, 41(2), pp. 301-315. rust, c., price, m. and o’donovan, b. (2003) ‘improving students’ learning by developing their understanding of assessment criteria and processes’, assessment and evaluation in higher education, 28(2), pp. 147-164. scardamalia, m. (2001) ‘big change questions: will educational institutions, within their present structures, be able to adapt sufficiently to meet the needs of the information age?’, journal of educational change, 2(2), pp. 171-176. http://www.qaa.ac.uk/publications/information-and-guidance/publication?pubid=225#.vwvggoi1jiu http://www.qaa.ac.uk/publications/information-and-guidance/publication?pubid=225#.vwvggoi1jiu wagner peer feedback: moving from assessment of learning to assessment for learning journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 15 swanson, d.b., case, s.m. and van der vleuten, c.p.m. (1997) ‘strategies for student assessment’, boud, d. and felettti, g. (eds.) the challenge of problem-based learning. 2nd ed. london: kogan page, pp. 269-282. topping, k.j. (1998) ‘peer assessment between students in colleges and universities’, review of educational research, 68(3), pp. 249-276. topping, k.j. (2005) ‘trends in peer learning’, educational psychology: an international journal of experimental educational psychology, 25(6), pp. 631-345. van den berg, i., admirall, w. and pilot, a. (2006) ‘design principles and outcomes of peer assessment in higher education’, studies in higher education, 31(3), pp. 341-356. van zundert, m.j., sluijsmans, d.m.a., könings, k.d. and van merriënboer, j.j.g. (2012) ‘the differential effects of task complexity on domain-specific and peer assessment skills’, educational psychology, 32(1), pp. 127-145. yang, y-f. (2010) ‘students’ reflection on online self-correction and peer review to improve writing’, computers & education, 55(3), pp. 1202-1210. yu, f.y. and wu, c.p. (2011) ‘different identity revelation modes in an online peerassessment learning environment: effects on perceptions toward assessors, classroom climate and learning activities’, computers & education, 57(3), pp. 21672177. author details dr sigrun m. wagner is a senior lecturer in international business and sustainability in the school of management at royal holloway, university of london, uk. following her undergraduate degree in european studies at the university of osnabrück in germany, she moved to loughborough university, uk, for her postgraduate degrees in international management and research in corporate political activities before joining royal holloway in 2009. she has won teaching prizes and is interested in using peer assessment, as well as games and simulations, to stimulate student learning. literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 4: march 2012 report on postgraduate training event in science education writing peter samuels coventry university, uk mary deane oxford brookes university, uk jeanne griffin università di torino, italy abstract this article reports on a case study of a writing in the disciplines intervention for doctoral students in science education held at coventry university in may 2010. differences between this event and previous ones are described, including the use of an online writing peer review system. issues that emerged during discussions on the day and the performance of the online writing review system are presented. an evaluation of the event is described. a discussion is provided on the importance of developing social communities in writing, the effectiveness of supporting them with an online writing peer review system and the tensions created by the provision of subject specialist feedback alongside generic writing specialist feedback. conclusions are drawn for the design of future writing training events. keywords: writing in the disciplines, mathematics education, postgraduate research, online writing peer review systems introduction the aim of writing in the disciplines (wid) interventions is to support writers’ development within the context of their disciplinary studies by cultivating their confidence, know-how, and productivity as authors (kennedy and kennedy, 2007). the culture and conventions of publication writing are distinctive in each discipline, so it can be beneficial samuels, deane and griffin report on postgraduate training event in science education writing to teach novice writers in a specific discipline how to succeed and offer them opportunities to practice writing journal articles in a safe, supportive environment. the one-day wid event reported on here was organised at coventry university, under the aegis of sigma, formerly the hefce-funded centre for excellence in university-wide mathematics and statistics support (www.sigma-cetl.ac.uk), in collaboration with the centre for academic writing at coventry university (www.coventry.ac.uk/caw; see samuels and deane, 2008; 2011). this event was the fourth in a series of workshops on the same theme of discipline-based writing development (see table 1). it concentrated on capacity building within a cohort of postgraduate research students who were writing for publication for the first time. these students received training on planning, drafting, and revising journal articles, as well as tips on how to undertake peer review to support each other and develop confidence as authors. there were eleven participating students who were supported by six facilitators in order to ensure that they received both a range and depth of feedback and support. the majority of the participants travelled from limerick in ireland to coventry in england due to a partnership between sigma and the irish national centre for excellence in mathematics and science teaching and learning (http://www.nce-mstl.ie/) which is based there. whereas at previous events the only discipline covered was mathematics education, at this workshop there were also participants from the field of engineering education through a collaboration with the engineering centre for excellence in teaching and learning (engcetl – see http://www.engcetl.ac.uk/). journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 2 http://www.sigma-cetl.ac.uk/ http://www.coventry.ac.uk/caw http://www.nce-mstl.ie/ http://www.engcetl.ac.uk/ samuels, deane and griffin report on postgraduate training event in science education writing table 1. summary of the ‘sigma’ academic writing training events. date length content and its motivation no. students attending june 2007 1 day introduction to writing for publication 5 december 2007 1 day emphasis on critical evaluation and individual feedback (based on student feedback from the first event) 10 june 2008 0.5 day writing and reviewing abstracts motivated by the students organising their own conference 5 may 2010 1 day more applied training on writing for publication with peer review via sword, free writing time, and individual feedback 11 (plus 2 virtually) the main aim of this fourth workshop was to promote the students’ confidence and independence in writing. this was facilitated through the use of an online peer review tool called ‘scaffolded writing and rewriting in the discipline’ (sword) (cho and schunn, 2007; see also https://sites.google.com/site/swordlrdc/). this tool enabled the students to submit and view drafts and give their assigned partner feedback based on pre-defined criteria. it was chosen on an experimental basis because it appeared to have the potential of combining peer reviews with specialist reviews, as was planned in the training event. structure of the event twelve students originally committed themselves to attending the event and to providing draft papers beforehand. they were organised into pairs and also groups of four. they were given a deadline to provide drafts and a second deadline to write a review of the writing partner’s paper. they were also given access to the other two papers in their group of four and encouraged to read these as well. the morning training session on the day was divided into the following subjects: journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 3 https://sites.google.com/site/swordlrdc/ samuels, deane and griffin report on postgraduate training event in science education writing • an introduction to the academic writing process – this exposed the students to a five stage model of the writing process and also involved a group task based around reading a journal article and reporting on its structure. • journal selection – the journal webpage, author instructions and a sample article were provided for education, mathematics education and engineering education journals that were both accessible and relevant. the students were encouraged to select a suitable journal for their papers. • peer review feedback – this was mainly a practical task in which students were given an opportunity to talk through their peer reviews with their writing partners and then to discuss these reviews in their groups of four. the peer reviews were based on seven categories as shown in table 2. these were designed to expose the students to typical criteria for a peer review from a journal submission. they were also encouraged to appreciate the multi-faceted nature of critical thinking in order to value receiving two or more opinions on their own work. this activity led students into preparation for the micro level goal setting for the free writing session in the afternoon. the afternoon session was a combination of free writing time and individual feedback appointments with subject specialists. the purpose of this was to expose the students to an experience similar to a mini writing retreat (moore, 2003). the session was initiated and summarised by the writing specialist using public goal setting: firstly, at the micro level, in relation to what the students intended to achieve during the afternoon’s free writing time; and secondly, at the macro level, through the agreed target dates for the submission of the completed papers to journals. this approach was based on hayes et al.’s (1985) research findings which indicate that public goal setting can improve performance. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 4 samuels, deane and griffin report on postgraduate training event in science education writing table 2. categories used in peer review. category description 1 summary of main points of the paper 2 quality and value of research 3 demonstration of scholarship and critical thinking 4 clarity of argument 5 structure and organisation of paper 6 presentation and grammar 7 overall assessment description of the event the event was attended by ten of the original twelve students who had enlisted, plus an additional late-comer. the original twelve students all provided their drafts beforehand which were also reviewed by the other students before the event. the eleven who attended were each provided with a 15-20 minute review from a subject specialist. emergent issues a number of issues emerged during the training, both through the sessions and the subsequent discussions. these are summarised below: • possible results of a peer review – these are normally: ‘accept with minor corrections’; ‘major corrections’ (subject to a second review); and ‘reject’. the major corrections peer review is the hardest to write but also the most valuable as it is the opportunity of the reviewer to advise the author(s) on how to improve their writing style to bring it up to an acceptable standard for publication. • handling a negative peer review – upon receiving a negative peer review it is wise to wait (perhaps a few days) until emotions have subsided and re-read the feedback, trying to think about it objectively. it is best to see this experience as a valuable opportunity to improve writing skills. • submitting articles to international journals – in academic writing, authors need to be sensitive towards their readers’ needs. therefore they should bear in mind newcomers to their subject and scholars investigating from other fields who may journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 5 samuels, deane and griffin report on postgraduate training event in science education writing need to grasp unfamiliar concepts and terminology. moreover, the internationalisation of higher education and the universal accessibility of online journals (sharifian, 2009) imply that papers written in english are also consulted more often nowadays by non-native english language readers. authors therefore need to provide clear definitions, appropriate word choice and clear sentence structure in order to facilitate a wider scope of readability. • understanding reader psychology – readers do not usually read papers in a linear sequence: if their interest is not aroused early on by giving them a way to understand the main aim or result of the paper and evaluate its significance without a great deal of effort, then the paper is almost useless, however important the research may be and however well it may have been carried out. • the importance of developing an ‘anti-real’ writing style – students need to understand the genre of academic articles, where the flow of content often bears little relationship to the ‘real’ process of doing research (and is thus sometimes described as ‘anti-real’), and acquire this style themselves. • searching back issues of the selected journal – once a target journal has been selected it is good practice to search it for related articles in the last 10 years’ issues as reviewers often look to see how a submitted article relates to previously published work within the journal. this is often made much easier with the use of an online keyword search facility. performance of the sword system the sword online peer review system performed well as a repository because all the students registered with relative ease, were allocated peer review partners, and successfully uploaded their papers for review. the evaluation criteria in table 2 were created as comment prompts rather than ratings (see figure 1). although sword is structured more for summative ratings rather than formative feedback, the students benefitted from this formative feedback opportunity. some participants used the comment prompts within sword to create their peer reviews. however, some participants were unable to access their peer reviews before the event. the articles for peer review were also sent to the students by e-mail before the event as a precaution. this did not cause a problem because the event was small and the students were going to meet face-to-face to explain their reviews in person later. indeed, the face-to-face peer reviews appeared to be the most engaging part of the whole day and extra time was given to this activity. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 6 samuels, deane and griffin report on postgraduate training event in science education writing figure 1. the peer review assignment in the sword system. most of the participants provided goals for the afternoon free writing session and were able to give an account of their progress at the end of the day. their feedback on these micro level goals then provided strong motivation for the macro goal-setting for the planned submission dates of their revised drafts. evaluation to evaluate this event, both the students and the facilitators were asked to provide feedback on four questions: • what have you achieved today? • what have you learnt from today? • what did you like about today? • what would you have changed? most of the feedback received was extremely positive. several students stated that they had gained a greater understanding of the overall process of writing a paper and learnt journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 7 samuels, deane and griffin report on postgraduate training event in science education writing more about the importance of planning their writing. they also appreciated the social environment and the objective feedback they had received on their own work. several students specifically expressed their appreciation for the opportunity to receive face-toface peer reviews from other students and suggested that more time could be spent on this in a future event. some participants indicated that they found it difficult to concentrate in the free writing session in the afternoon. this may have been due to their having to get up very early to fly to the event from ireland. however, similar feedback had been received at other events appearing to indicate that, despite explicit communication beforehand, some students still did not have the expectation of spending time writing at the event itself, indicating that this still remains an unfamiliar experience for many students. in addition to the participants’ feedback, it was noted that the workload for one of the subject specialists was extremely heavy as they had to provide feedback on eight papers plus take the lead in facilitating the event, according to the principles of wid interventions. on reflection, it would have been better to have split the roles of specialist writing tutoring and event facilitation between two different people. this experience will hopefully lead to better planning of future events. discussion this experience supports the view that writing is inherently a social process (ede, 1989). this kind of training, and the writing community that can form around such an event, can take some of the ‘sting’ out of the negative emotions students may experience when submitting articles for publication and receiving feedback from journal reviewers. the sword online peer review system performed adequately in helping to organise the peer reviews and facilitate the virtual community functioning to provide and share feedback before and after the event. sword appears to be more appropriate for combining peer and teacher ratings in summative assessment rather than formative comments, yet this tool was more effective than using email and a traditional website, but possibly less effective than a social networking repository, such as a private group in facebook. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 8 samuels, deane and griffin report on postgraduate training event in science education writing however, sword’s file structure, permissions protocols, and the inbuilt requirement to formulate evaluation criteria were a useful framework for organising the online peer review. the feedback given by the subject specialists was generally well received and complemented the peer reviews, as indicated by the evaluation feedback. however, subject expert feedback raised an ethical issue concerning the provision of content specific feedback on poor drafts by subject specialists without either professional training in writing tutoring and its associated need for a holistic sensitivity (mcgahey and szumko, 2006) or a working relationship with the students. this concurs with the point already made on the difficulty of providing peer review on drafts requiring major revisions. this is especially difficult in a face-to-face context and could potentially lead to conflict. conclusions this one-day writing for publication training event was productive for the participants in terms of enhancing their confidence and competence as academic writers in their chosen disciplines. the feedback obtained suggested that the majority were engaged in the activities and considered their own investment of time and effort to be worthwhile. on reflection, six key lessons were learnt by the facilitators of this wid event: 1. writing for publication with a practical emphasis on students’ work is an excellent subject for a writing training event. 2. it is important to view such training events in the context of the creation of a community of practice – students should be encouraged to participate as much as possible both before and after the event in order that they can get the most out of the experience and so that the sense of community can grow. 3. online review systems for student writers have the potential to structure and organise feedback on drafts but maybe sword is not the right system (at least in its current state) for handling an event with formative feedback. 4. face-to-face peer reviews appear to be particularly effective in this kind of training context. 5. it is probably most effective to combine subject specialist feedback with writing specialist feedback in order to get the best of both worlds in terms of content and generic feedback and also avoid possible conflict. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 9 samuels, deane and griffin report on postgraduate training event in science education writing 6. many postgraduate students are unfamiliar with the concept of community-based writing, and prefer to write in a private space; therefore, perhaps a variety of different possible activities should be given during the free time when individual feedback is being provided. references cho, k. and schunn, c.d. (2007) ‘scaffolded writing and rewriting in the discipline: a webbased reciprocal peer review system’, computers and education, 48(3), pp. 409426 [online]. available at: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/b6vcj4g0493g-1/2/8399c1d42c1f0bae4a850d02e97a6b6a (accessed: 28 april 2011). ede, l. (1989) ‘writing as a social process: a theoretical foundation for writing centers?’, the writing center journal, 9(2), pp. 3-13. hayes, s.c., rosenfarb, i., wulfert, e., munt, e.d., korn, z. and zettle, r.d. (1985) ‘selfreinforcement effects: an artifact of social standard setting’, journal of applied behavior analysis, 18(3), pp. 201-214. kennedy, m. and kennedy, w. (2007) writing in the disciplines: a reader and rhetoric for academic writers. 6thedn. needham heights, ma: allyn and bacon. mcgahey, p. and szumko, j. (2006) ‘relationship at the heart of helping’, brainhe 2006 conference. de montfort university, leicester 15 september. available at: http://www.brainhe.com/staff/types/documents/relationshipattheheartofsupportwor k.doc (accessed: 28 april 2011). moore, s. (2003) ‘writers’ retreats for academics: exploring and increasing the motivation to write’, journal of further and higher education, 27(3), pp. 333-342. samuels, p.c. and deane, m. (2008) ‘academic writing training for mathematics education phd students’, msor connections, 8(3), pp. 41-44 [online]. available at: http://mathstore.gla.ac.uk/headocs/8341_samuels_p_academicwriting.pdf (accessed: 28 april 2011). journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 10 http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/b6vcj-4g0493g-1/2/8399c1d42c1f0bae4a850d02e97a6b6a http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/b6vcj-4g0493g-1/2/8399c1d42c1f0bae4a850d02e97a6b6a http://www.brainhe.com/staff/types/documents/relationshipattheheartofsupportwork.doc http://www.brainhe.com/staff/types/documents/relationshipattheheartofsupportwork.doc http://mathstore.gla.ac.uk/headocs/8341_samuels_p_academicwriting.pdf samuels, deane and griffin report on postgraduate training event in science education writing samuels, p.c. and deane, m. (2011) ‘writing for mathematics education at doctoral level’, in deane, m. and o’neill, p. (eds.) writing in the disciplines. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan, pp. 140-154 sharifian, f. (ed.) (2009) english as an international language: perspectives and pedagogical issues. new perspectives on language and education. bristol: multilingual matters. author details dr peter samuels is visiting research fellow at the serious games institute at coventry university, uk, and an academic skills tutor at birmingham city university, uk. his research interests include university-level mathematics education (especially the use of new technologies and serious games) and learning development. dr mary deane is a consultant with the oxford centre for staff and learning development and oxford brookes university, uk. her specialisms include teaching writing in disciplinary contexts, promoting research and publication, enhancing curricula, and internationalisation in higher education. jeanne griffin is an english for speakers of other languages teacher in the faculty of mathematical, physical and natural sciences at the university of torino, italy. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 11 report on postgraduate training event in science education writing abstract introduction structure of the event description of the event emergent issues performance of the sword system evaluation discussion conclusions references author details literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special edition: academic peer learning, november 2015 institutional management of peer-led learning: a framework for holistic integration jason eyre de montfort university, leicester, uk abstract if we are to accept that peer-led learning (peer mentoring, peer tutoring and related approaches) are of benefit to students, how are we to approach the implementation of such approaches at the institutional level in a way that is resource efficient and effective? this paper presents the holistic framework for the institution-wide coordination and support of a wide variety of peer-led learning initiatives developed at de montfort university. the framework presented sidesteps the thorny issues of categorisation that dominate the discourse of peer-led learning by devolving issues of definition to the site of implementation. a simplified typology is presented that characterises an initiative based on its level of formality and its overarching purpose with respect to transformational ‘transition points’ through the student lifecycle. this ‘mixed economy’ approach accommodates highly idiosyncratic and locally-defined approaches to peer-led learning coordinated and supported by the university’s learning development unit (the centre for learning and study support). keywords: peer-led learning; peer mentoring; institutional management (higher education); disciplinarity. introduction peer-led learning (incorporating peer mentoring, peer assessment, peer tutoring and other forms of student-to-student learning activity) is becoming ubiquitous in uk higher education as approaches to enhancing student learning, with numerous studies and reports attesting to their efficacy (e.g. andrews and clark, 2011; andreanoff, 2013; fox eyre institutional management of peer-led learning: a framework for holistic integration journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 2 and stevenson, 2006; dawson et al., 2014; keenan, 2014). the purpose of this paper is not to add to the burgeoning literature with another case study, but rather to consider the following question: if we accept that peer-led learning can be of benefit to university students, how are we to approach its implementation from an institutional perspective? this is a question of particular relevance to institutional managers, learning developers, educational developers and others concerned primarily with providing coordination and support across a wide range of courses and programmes in a resource-efficient way. building on the work of jacobi (1991), which reviewed the literature on mentoring and undergraduate academic success in the united states from the 1970s to the late 1980s, two more recent papers by crisp and cruz (2008) and gershenfeld (2014) reviewed 62 empirical and theoretical studies between them on mentoring in a higher education setting between 1990-2012, including a number of international (non-us) studies. while many of the studies reviewed looked at mentoring more broadly (often between a faculty member and a student), it is clear that peer mentoring (mentoring between students) has become increasingly prevalent. a common theme across all three review papers is the absence of a clear definition of ‘mentoring’ (crisp and cruz found over 50 definitions – in a review of 42 studies). combined with a lack of a coherent underpinning theory, the concern of these researchers is that the potential benefits of mentoring for undergraduate students cannot be fully realised until there is some degree of clarity as to what we actually mean by it. it is apparent from a number of the papers reviewed by these authors that some of the activities described more closely resemble ‘peer learning’ or ‘peer tutoring’ than they do mentoring (terms are often used interchangeably, which is part of the problem). definitions of course vary greatly but, generally speaking, ‘peer tutoring’ (or ‘peer learning’) tends to focus on discipline-based content knowledge and skills, while ‘peer mentoring’ focuses more on personal development (settling in, approaches to study, and so on). at best the boundaries between the two concepts are blurred. topping and ehly (1998, p.9) are adamant that peer tutoring and peer mentoring ‘are not to be confused with one another’, while falchikov (2001) is more ambivalent, seeing mentoring as complementary to peer tutoring. andrews and clark’s 2011 hefce/hea report ‘peer mentoring works!’, which takes peer mentoring in higher education as its clear focus, recognise this ambiguity. the approach to peer mentoring that the report’s authors advocate is effectively a synthesis of elements of peer mentoring and peer tutoring. the numerous approaches based on the proprietary supplemental instruction model (pass, pal) tend to focus primarily on the eyre institutional management of peer-led learning: a framework for holistic integration journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 3 tutoring aspect, although there are elements of mentoring in some initiatives (keenan, 2014). as andrews and clark (2011) recognise, the difficulty lies in where more general support ends and academic support begins. this paper will use the collective term ‘peerled learning’ employed by keenan (2014) unless referring to one or another manifestation. this apparent confusion of terminology and approaches represents a potential barrier to the coherent and systematic implementation of peer mentoring and/or peer learning at the institutional level: it may be unclear which of the myriad definitions is appropriate to a given institutional setting, and which of the evidence to be found in the published literature can therefore be appropriately applied. it is consequently unclear which approach or approaches to peer mentoring or peer learning ought to be pursued, an issue compounded by the sheer number of apparently synonymous terms (buddying, coaching, guiding etc., see andrews and clark, 2011, p.16) and a range of competing taxonomies and frameworks (e.g. terrion and leonard, 2007; falchikov, 2001). much of the literature is concerned with untangling these knots in order to gain some sort of clarity. the approach outlined in the present paper sidesteps this conundrum. rather than attempting to clarify the definitions and appraise the competing theories, this paper will instead argue that being definitive in this way is not necessary in order to effectively coordinate and support peer mentoring and peer learning at an institutional level. this does not mean we ought to be resigned to a piecemeal, ad hoc approach characterised by a panoply of disconnected initiatives and schemes. it is possible to have a coordinated approach to peer-led learning that leaves the problems of definition to those who are running the schemes at a local level. for the academics based in particular subject disciplines, it is only necessary to define their own particular approach to peer-led learning, and in so doing the issue of definition instead becomes one of specific application. although not without its own challenges, this leaves the task of coordination and support to stand outside and alongside individual initiatives, with the potential to allow diversity and innovation to flourish. such is the nature of the ‘mixed economy’ approach developed at de montfort university to be outlined below. the present paper represents a reflexive account of the development of peer-led learning at one british university. the particular circumstances that have led to this development may of course not be applicable to all higher education institutions. however, given the burgeoning popularity of peer-led learning in higher education, the framework presented eyre institutional management of peer-led learning: a framework for holistic integration journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 4 here should at least foster debate and critical reflection on how peer-led learning could be considered holistically at the institutional level. a short précis of the development of peerled learning will be sketched in the first part of this paper to provide the necessary contextual background. this will be followed by the presentation of a functional typology of peer-led learning developed through an analysis of the diverse offerings that have emerged across the institution. the final section presents a brief discussion of the resulting institutional framework and the role of learning developers in developing and supporting it. historical development of peer mentoring and peer learning at de montfort university in order to understand and appreciate the approach to peer-led learning that de montfort university has taken, it is instructive to first outline the way that it has developed. formal institution-wide support for peer-led learning commenced in the 2007/8 academic session when the centre for learning and study support (class), de montfort’s centre for learning development, organised a series of pilot projects across four subject areas. each peer mentoring initiative in this pilot phase was different in format and focus, reflecting the different discipline-professional requirements and the particular programme needs of each course of study (see for example buckingham and newsham, 2012). from 2008 to 2012, the number of new peer mentoring schemes supported by class increased steadily. by 2012 it was recognised that the number of active schemes had appeared to plateau, so new impetus was put into advocacy work. this took the form of both ‘bottom-up’ and ‘top-down’ approaches, each complementing the other. the former derived primarily from the testimonials of students themselves alongside those academics and programme leaders who have implemented a successful scheme. much of this form of advocacy was informal and word-of-mouth, and while slow and incremental, represented an authentic voice with a great deal of credibility. the top-down approach derived primarily from the orchestrated advocacy undertaken by class itself, presenting to various committees and forums across the university on the potential benefits of peer mentoring. a range of university committees (often attended by quite senior managers) and working groups relating to retention, teaching and learning, and subject-specific pedagogic eyre institutional management of peer-led learning: a framework for holistic integration journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 5 development, were all approached with a view to raising the profile of ‘peer mentoring’. through both bottom-up and top-down advocacy, the profile of peer mentoring was raised considerably, culminating in a university-wide symposium on peer mentoring in 2013. this raised profile enabled peer mentoring to be ‘mainstreamed’ and integrated into a range of university-wide agendas ranging from initiatives by the student’s union, the quality enhancement and improvement committee, and working groups focused on student retention and student diversity. ‘peer mentoring champions’ were appointed in each faculty in order to oversee development more locally (a recommendation from the student’s union). peer mentoring, in this light, became recognised as a form of ‘good pedagogic practice’, and something that ought to be available to all students. this was articulated as the ‘parity issue’ – if peer mentoring is a good thing, why is it not open and available to all students who want to engage with it?). concerns over the ‘parity issue’ led directly to class successfully advocating for the funding of a ‘catch all’ scheme (run by the student’s union) to cater for students whose programme of study did not currently offer an opportunity to engage in peer mentoring. peer mentoring’s rise to prominence also led to the ‘discovery’ of a range of peer mentoring and mentoring-related activities in areas that were hitherto unknown to class or our associated network of peer mentoring enthusiasts. the more we looked, the more we found out about schemes and initiatives that had arisen independently of any input from class, typically at programme level, and which ranged from buddy schemes to forms of peer assessment. this process of discovery was significantly aided by the facultybased ‘peer mentoring champions’ through their engagement with local faculty networks, and the mapping of such activity is seen as an ongoing task as initiatives are prone to arise spontaneously. the range of activities broadly labelled ‘peer mentoring’ were clearly more diverse in their focus than the label suggested. in consultation with our network of academic champions and enthusiasts, class opted to take a broad view of peer mentoring and peer learning which led directly to the development of the peer-led learning typology outlined in the following section. the term ‘mixed economy’ began to be used as a way to articulate the diverse approaches being taken in different subject areas. in addition to programme-based peer-led learning activities, a number of centrally-based schemes were added to the overall institutional picture (for example: employability mentoring; a scheme for international students; faculty-level schemes around work-based eyre institutional management of peer-led learning: a framework for holistic integration journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 6 learning). considered together, this array of peer-led learning activities resulted in a significant increase in known initiatives, from the four peer mentoring schemes initiated in the 2007/8 pilots to over 30 active and proposed peer-led learning initiatives in 2014/15. the foregoing sketch traces how a series of self-contained pilots has expanded in scope to form a pedagogic approach that is now being applied across the whole university. it shows that in addition to the centrally-led advocacy for peer-led learning, it is just as likely to grow independently out of a programme of study on the back of the initiative and enthusiasm of academic colleagues. it also demonstrates that each and every instance of peer-led learning is different, based on the particular needs and requirements of the discipline or course of study. a typology of peer mentoring and peer learning the historical development of peer-led learning at de montfort university presented in the previous section documented what can appear at face value to represent a rather haphazard and piecemeal approach to its management and coordination. after all, peerled learning was not planned and implemented at de montfort from the top down; rather, it has evolved organically over a period of many years – from the ground up, as well as in a semi-coordinated fashion. but this organic origin should not be confused with a chaotic state of affairs, and the purpose of what follows is to set out de montfort’s approach to peer-led learning in a more systematic fashion. a diversity of needs leads to a diversity of approaches from the outset, the ethos of the pilot projects was based on the principle that each initiative would be ‘discipline-owned, student led, and supported by class’. this formulation set the tone of the pilots and the initiatives that followed. it was made clear to colleagues early on that class was not in a position to run any of the schemes on a dayto-day basis. that responsibility must rest with the programme and its students, based on principles of localism and volunteerism. what is best for the programme is best determined by the programme itself (that is, co-created by academics and students alike), and not determined centrally and imposed upon them from without; and furthermore, any such initiative would only be effective if it was voluntary rather than compulsory. once a eyre institutional management of peer-led learning: a framework for holistic integration journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 7 scheme was in place, class would step back and allow the programme to run the scheme, academics and students in partnership, with support provided from class whenever it was sought. as a result, no two peer-led learning initiatives are exactly alike. there is consequently no benefit in seeking to clearly define what constitutes ‘best practice’ in peer led-learning with a view to implementing that singular approach across all courses; ‘good practice’, on the other hand, could be collated and shared. a ‘discipline-owned, student led’ foundation means that a principle of localism prevails, with each programme/discipline setting out what it feels to be the appropriate focus and level of formality for its own students. once implemented, there is no reason why this cannot also undergo change as the needs of the programme and its students change. transition points while the needs of different programmes represent a colourful array of possibilities, they can all be seen as constituting definable ‘transition points’ for their students. following hilsdon’s (2013) formulation of peer learning and identity, peer-led learning can be conceptualised as a series of shifting identifications, the transition into each of which can conceivably be supported by those who have recently undergone similar transitions in a similar context. in a uk higher education setting, such transition points may include the following:  transition to the uk.  transition into university-level study.  transition into the institution itself.  transition to independent living.  transition into a particular course of study.  transition to higher academic expectations (e.g. into year 2 of an undergraduate course).  transition to new embodied practices (e.g. lab or studio work).  transition to independent researching (e.g. towards the end of year 2.  transition to placement practice.  transition into a professional identity. eyre institutional management of peer-led learning: a framework for holistic integration journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 8  transition out into the professions.  transition into uncertain employability.  transition into entrepreneurship. this is by no means an exhaustive list and represents a broadening out of traditional views of ‘transitions’ when applied to peer mentoring and peer-led learning. in seeking to find a focus for a new initiative, class will work with academic colleagues to consider which transition points are most salient to their students, and these form the basis for any discussions that follow in terms of the composition and logistics of the resulting scheme. formality and focus given the diversity of need for peer-led learning activities, and given the range of potential focal points within a particular scheme, it is unsurprising that rigid definitions of ‘peer learning’ or ‘peer mentoring’ fail to capture the sheer diversity of what happens on the ground. it is our view that attempting to define schemes in these terms may provide muchneeded clarity for some, but ultimately is not necessary in terms of providing support and building a network of practitioners. instead, we contend that all peer-led learning activities can be plotted as a ‘typology’ along two axes that represent the informality/formality of a scheme along one continuum, and the area of focus from the pastoral/social through the academic and professional domains of transition on the other (see figure 1). informal approaches are those that are undertaken with a minimal level of control over the activities that students undertake. at one extreme, ‘mentors’ are not trained (and could not realistically be considered ‘mentors’), participants are not selected or registered, and little or no attempt is made to evaluate the success or otherwise of the endeavour. consequently, informal approaches tend to have fewer costs attached to them. formal approaches, by contrast, are more rigidly controlled, with selection, training, monitoring and evaluation during and after a scheme’s operation. these approaches are naturally more resource-intensive. on the other axis, pastoral/social focused activities comprise one end of the scale – peerled learning that revolves around aspects of socialisation and integration such as that eyre institutional management of peer-led learning: a framework for holistic integration journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 9 which takes place in ‘buddy’ schemes focused on inward transitions to study; at the other end of the scale the focus is on academic work, and traditional forms of peer learning and supplemental instruction lie at this end of the spectrum. professional/discipline identity forms an interesting category that doesn’t neatly fit into such a simplified typology and which could in fact be given equal expression at either the socialisation end of the spectrum (introducing professional values in the first year of study) or the academic end (application of specialist professional knowledge), depending on the degree of complexity of the knowledge. as developed, the typology typically places the professional alongside the academic as specialist ‘content’ knowledge that requires input (and supervision) from academic staff or highly experienced students in order to be properly conveyed. figure 1. peer-led learning typology. putting the two axes together produces four quadrants. in the top right sits the formalacademic/professional quadrant, home to formalised peer learning (including peer tutoring and peer assessment) and some forms of peer mentoring where academic and professional activities are engaged with by the mentor/mentee. at the bottom right sits the formal-pastoral/social quadrant where various ‘buddy’ schemes and inward-transition initiatives are clustered, along with other forms of peer mentoring where academic and eyre institutional management of peer-led learning: a framework for holistic integration journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 10 professional issues are considered less important than socialisation and enculturation. both of these quadrants are associated with a degree of organisation that requires some on-going provision of resources. in the top left corner lies the informal-academic/professional quadrant. this may at first appear counter-intuitive, as the academic/professional domain has already been characterised as requiring some degree of intercession on behalf of academics – which in turn implies a degree of formality. however, this particular quadrant is where a number of spatially-constructed approaches to peer-led learning can be located, which includes initiatives such as book groups and reading clubs, and even less formalised approaches such as ‘peer spaces’, which constitutes a recognition of the observation that if you mix students at different year levels in a common space, a degree of informal learning will occur as they intermingle – an insight common to many studio based disciplines and librarians (see powis, 2010). the final quadrant at the bottom left is perhaps easily overlooked when considering peer working. this constitutes the informal-pastoral/social quadrant, which at de montfort includes the various sports clubs, student union-led societies, faculty-sponsored clubs, and regular or occasional social events designed to help students integrate into a particular aspect of university life. granted, many of the clubs and societies will have a formal element (membership registration, for example) and at de montfort, as at many other universities, a number of the sporting clubs also incorporate semi-formalised mentoring initiatives as well, but the peer working within them will often be a side-line to the group’s main activities (such as playing sport), not the primary reason for its inception, hence ‘informal’ within the scope of the typology. the informal half of the typology may not represent what many in higher education understand as ‘peer-led learning’, and it is the case at de montfort that sporting clubs and union-run student societies, for example, are not ‘counted’ as peer-led learning initiatives; but they do represent instances where students interact with other students in situations where they are likely to learn things and develop certain skills, competencies and – importantly – their confidence, all of which make a broad contribution to their overall academic development. as such, they provide useful polarities against which it is possible to plot the various ‘peer’ activities on offer across the university. eyre institutional management of peer-led learning: a framework for holistic integration journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 11 deciding exactly where on the graph a particular peer-to-peer activity sits is not the point, however; the typology has been developed primarily as a tool for communication, to demonstrate that all forms of peer-led learning can be considered holistically and understood in relation to the other forms. in mapping peer-led learning across the institution, such a tool has formed the basis for a shared understanding and allows contested terms such as ‘mentoring’ and ‘tutoring’ to be put to one side in order to allow a focus on the practicalities of planning, implementing and evaluating individual initiatives. institutional management of peer-led learning the array of formal and semi-formal peer-led learning activities undertaken at de montfort, alongside the many informal offerings (which by definition, are not ‘formally’ supported by class), represent what one academic colleague characterised as the ‘mixed economy’ approach to peer-led learning. as discussed, the primary benefit of this approach is that each individual initiative is closely tailored to the needs of a particular programme of study or subject area, which in turn leads to greater relevance for the students and improved prospects for sustainability and embedding. at de montfort, these localised or devolved initiatives are supplemented by more universal or centralised ones. the result is an institution-wide framework for peer-led learning (figure 2). eyre institutional management of peer-led learning: a framework for holistic integration journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 12 figure 2. institution-wide framework for peer-led learning at de montfort university. the broadening out of the concept of ‘transition’ from narrow associations with institutional entry to incorporate transitional transformation throughout the student lifecycle, has ensured that this ‘mixed economy’ is even more closely aligned with programme and student needs, and not constrained by prescriptive definitions of what constitutes appropriate ‘peer mentoring’ or ‘peer tutoring’ activities. it also provides the necessary framework for the scaling-up of peer-led learning initiatives institution-wide. given the highly devolved nature of these initiatives, what role, if any, is there for central coordination and support? class retains its coordinating and supportive function, even as it became clear that not all initiatives across the institution would require direct input from us, and has positioned itself as a hub for peer-led learning activity across the university. without some kind of information aggregation there is a risk that those involved in supporting isolated initiatives will not be able to benefit from the extensive cross-pollination opportunities that come with being part of a community of interest (slavin-baden et al., 2008, p.224). there is a further risk that, left to their own devices, isolated initiatives may flounder when key staff members move on, or may fall short of their potential by not being aware of good practice elsewhere. class fulfills such a connective function through its advocacy, liaison, and mapping activities, alongside its continued direct input into a number of the more formal schemes (those that occupy the upper right quadrant of our typology). class are also actively working with colleagues to pilot more academically eyre institutional management of peer-led learning: a framework for holistic integration journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 13 focused peer learning and peer tutoring initiatives where there has been an interest, so those long-standing initiatives are not viewed as static but are continuously evolving. furthermore, class is now able to use this holistic framework to attempt to construct a common approach to the evaluation of peer-led learning initiatives. this sets out a common baseline shared by all initiatives (based on broad values) which then allows the exponents of each initiative to set their own criteria for success within the overarching structure. each initiative is thereby free to pursue its own distinctive approach, while assuring the wider institution that it is being appropriately appraised in terms of quality. while it is often reported that peer mentoring and peer learning is effective (see christie, 2014, for a valuable corrective to this apparent orthodoxy), we retain our critical stance and will seek to challenge our academic colleagues to show us how their particular schemes are able to benefit their students. this is done in a spirit of supportive collegiality, hence the insistence that we retain no control over individual schemes, although we are acutely aware of the coercive and surveillance overtones of centralised reporting structures (ball, 2003). the development of the framework as described, with its underpinning principles of localism and volunteerism, goes a long way to cultivating the trust of our academic colleagues in this respect. the issue of trust is important here. tensions between subject disciplines and higher education institutions are widely acknowledged, particularly in the domain of teaching and learning (see kreber, 2009). in her review of recent literature on peer mentoring, gershenfeld (2014, p.387) highlights a need for institutional administrators to be aware of the function or role of mentors, and advocates the use of internal data to drive the continuous improvement of operations. while improvement is a worthy aim, the case of de montfort shows that within a single institution there can be a multitude of different functions and roles for mentors (and roles in student-to-student learning that are distinct from mentoring). a mixed economy does not easily lend itself to a uniform approach to measurement, and any evaluative framework has to be designed in such a way as to take into account the diversity inherent to the system on the one hand, alongside the need of the institution to ensure the ongoing quality of provision overall. there is a risk that in seeking an efficient way to measure effectiveness, an institution may attempt to impose a uniform approach to peer-led learning that is not responsive to local needs and requirements (including a discipline’s culture) and which in turn stifles diversity and innovation, and ultimately adversely impacts on the student experience. eyre institutional management of peer-led learning: a framework for holistic integration journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 14 the role of class, a learning development unit, as the central hub of peer-led learning is important in this regard. learning developers have long navigated the space between discipline-contextual student learning and its link with strategic-institutional imperatives (see for example gibson and myers, 2010). in taking into account both the particular needs of students within their subject disciplines alongside the over-arching role of institutions, learning developers are well positioned to provide the perspective required to foster the so-called ‘mixed economy’ of peer-led learning in a co-ordinated and consistent fashion. conclusion this paper has presented a framework for the institutional management of peer-led learning that has emerged from the organic development of a range of initiatives over a number of years. this framework is holistic in the sense that it allows for the consideration of diverse iterations of peer-led learning across the entire institution without recourse to inflexible definitions or a uniformity of approach. the framework is based on an understanding of the diverse needs and perspectives of each subject area, alongside a broad interpretation of important transition points within each student’s learning journey. a typology for peer-led learning has been developed to aid in understanding how these diverse approaches relate to one another, taking the degree of formality and the focus of each initiative as its basis. what has emerged is an institution-wide approach to peer-led learning that is scalable, sustainable and sensitive to the needs of students, disciplines and institutions alike. references andreanoff, j. (2013) ‘supporting your peers: a pilot study of a robust peer mentoring scheme’, widening participation and lifelong learning, 15(2), pp. 43-55. andrews, j. and clark, r. (2011) peer mentoring works! birmingham: aston university. available at: https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/resources/detail/what-works-studentretention/aston-what_works_final_reports-dec_11 (accessed: 14 november 2015). https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/resources/detail/what-works-student-retention/aston-what_works_final_reports-dec_11 https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/resources/detail/what-works-student-retention/aston-what_works_final_reports-dec_11 eyre institutional management of peer-led learning: a framework for holistic integration journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 15 ball, s. (2003) ‘the teacher's soul and the terrors of performativity’, journal of education policy, 18(2), pp. 215-228. buckingham, l. and newsham, i. (2012) ‘graphics guru and grasshopper scheme: the added value of peer learning’, gateway papers: a journal of pedagogic research in education, vol. 2, pp. 12-32. christie, h. (2014) ‘peer mentoring in higher education: issues of power and control’, teaching in higher education, 19(8), pp. 955-964. crisp, g. and cruz, i. (2008) ‘mentoring college students: a critical review of the literature between 1990 and 2007’, research in higher education, 50(6), pp. 525-545. dawson, p., van der meer, j., skalicky, j. and cowley, k. (2014) ‘on the effectiveness of supplemental instruction: a systematic review of supplemental instruction and peer-assisted study sessions literature between 2001 and 2010’, review of educational research, 84(4), pp. 609-639. falchikov, n. (2001) learning together: peer tutoring in higher education. abingdon, oxon: routledge. fox, a. and stevenson, l. (2006) ‘exploring the effectiveness of peer mentoring of accounting and finance students in higher education’, accounting education, 15(2), pp. 189-202. gershenfeld, s. (2014) ‘a review of undergraduate mentoring programs’, review of educational research, 20(10), pp. 1-27. gibson, f.m. and myers, j. (2010) ‘the fragmented route to a whole institution approach to integrating learning development. reporting on a work in progress’, journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2, february, pp. 1-10. hilsdon, j. (2013) ‘peer learning for change in higher education’, innovations in education and teaching international, 51(3), pp. 244-254. eyre institutional management of peer-led learning: a framework for holistic integration journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 16 jacobi, m. (1991) ‘mentoring and undergraduate academic success: a literature review’, review of educational research, 61(4), pp. 505-532. keenan, c. (2014) mapping student-led peer learning in the uk. york: higher education academy. kreber, c. (ed.) (2009) the university and its disciplines: teaching and learning within and beyond disciplinary boundaries. abingdon, oxon: routledge. powis, c. (2010) ‘‘we always come here’: investigating the social in social learning’, enhancing the learner experience in higher education, 2(1), pp. 3-11. slavin-baden, m., mcfarland, l. and slavin-baden, j. (2008) ‘learning spaces, agency and notions of improvement: what influences thinking and practices about teaching and learning in higher education? an interpretive meta-ethnography’, london review of education, 6(3), pp. 211-227. terrion, j.l. and leonard, d. (2007) ‘a taxonomy of the characteristics of student peer mentors in higher education: findings from a literature review’, mentoring & tutoring: partnership in learning, 15(2), pp. 149-164. topping, k. and ehly, s. (eds.) (1998) peer-assisted learning. mahwah, new jersey: lawrence erlbaum associates. author details jason eyre is a senior lecturer in learning development at de montfort university leicester, uk, and a fellow of the higher education academy. his interest in peer-led learning stems from a broader engagement with the idea of context in adult learning. he is currently completing a doctorate at the ucl institute of education examining the intersection between learners in higher education, the institution of the university, and the academic and professional disciplines. institutional management of peer-led learning: a framework for holistic integration abstract introduction historical development of peer mentoring and peer learning at de montfort university a typology of peer mentoring and peer learning a diversity of needs leads to a diversity of approaches transition points formality and focus figure 1. peer-led learning typology. institutional management of peer-led learning conclusion this paper has presented a framework for the institutional management of peer-led learning that has emerged from the organic development of a range of initiatives over a number of years. this framework is holistic in the sense that it allows for the c... references author details literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special edition: developing writing in stem disciplines, november 2012 who wants to be able to do references properly and be unemployed? stem student writing and employer needs yvon appleby university of central lancashire, uk sian roberts university of central lancashire, uk lynne barnes university of central lancashire, uk pam qualter university of central lancashire, uk vicki tariq university of central lancashire, uk abstract the issue of graduate writing is one that has attracted much focus and debate in higher education, particularly around maintaining ‘academic standards’ at a time of expansion in this sector. the need to develop academic skills, including writing, for higher education study has increasingly been linked to the skills that graduates need to gain employment (davies et al., 2006). this raises the question of whether the type and purpose of writing within university programmes is different to, and possibly in tension with, writing required for employment after university. this is a point raised by recent research (day, 2011) which shows that students studying stem (science, technology, engineering, and maths) subjects are more confident with oral rather than writing skills. the material discussed in this article is part of a two-year mixed method study looking at literacies, including writing, which undergraduate students develop at university, and the relationship of these literacies to employability. this article focuses on six first-year stem students studying forensic science and computing science within the larger study. the qualitative data, gathered through repeat interviews, is discussed in relation to a small sample of employers and alumni working in science-based industries describing writing for transition into work and for on-going employment. the project therefore provides a useful appleby et al. who wants to be able to do references properly and be unemployed? student insight into writing, comparing this with employer expectations and the experience of alumni who have made the transition into work. what emerges from our study is the need to see writing at university as part of a wider communicative repertoire supported by a social and cultural approach to situated writing. this approach is more than simply skills based and is one that encourages and develops social as well as academic learning. we argue that such an approach, added to by technical skills support, enables greater engagement and success with learning in addition to enhancing employability. keywords: student writing; stem subjects; employability; social practices; literacies. introduction the standard of undergraduate writing has caused widespread concern across the higher education sector, with some authors reporting it being regarded by the media as a ‘literary crisis’ in the uk (ganobcsik-williams, 2004, p.5). others working in the field of student or academic writing describe the shortcomings of students’ writing as impacting directly upon the ability to learn, where inadequate writing skills act to ‘disable’ students (davies, et al., 2006). the significance of writing as an academic vehicle to communicate, express and explicate ideas is described by kotzee and johnson (2008) as a ‘threshold skill’; for them a skill central to the intellectual development and core identity of being a student. writing is a central activity whilst at university, and in other institutions offering higher education, as it is often core to teaching and assessment in most subjects. it is what students do, it is what is required of them, and is therefore an integral part of how students make sense of the world of university and higher education. as such it is a significant part of the material embodiment of the student identity, where individuals develop a sense of ‘being’ (clughen and hardy, 2012) within the identity process of ‘becoming’ (gourlay, 2009) a university student. pedagogical responses to general concerns about what is seen as a decline in undergraduate writing standards have varied. some, for example, focus on working with curricula and technical workshops to support and embed writing skills at an institutional level using academic writing templates (fallows and steven, 2000; cox and king, 2006). for others, the focus is in recognising the significance of external partnerships and experiential and social learning, rather than a focus on technical skill, as part of academic journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 2 appleby et al. who wants to be able to do references properly and be unemployed? writing development (leckey and mcguigan, 1997; davies, 2000). these examples illustrate different responses: in the first the emphasis is on technical ability or competence in academic writing within university programmes; the second is on purpose and meaning of situated writing tasks. a distinction is apparent, here and in the literature, between a focus on technical remedial solutions, in the first, as opposed to engaging with wider social and cultural purpose and meaning in the second. whilst there are general concerns with the standard of undergraduate writing there are also specific issues within particular disciplines or areas of study. for example, in a study of accounting and engineering students it was found that employers demand high levels of communication skills with the expectation that university should teach these skills. however, it was found that there were significant differences between accounting and engineering students as the latter displayed writing apprehension in written reports; their main method of written communication. the outcome of this insight was not to focus on generic communication skills, which some universities have done, but to concentrate on focused writing skills for specific areas of study and future employment (hassall et al., 2005). others have developed discipline-specific student writing programmes in, for example, psychology (fallahi et al., 2006), information technology (armarego, 2008) and radiography (gonzaga et al., 2011). a specific subject area was also the focus of recent research, part of the higher education curriculum project ‘developing writing in stem disciplines’ (day, 2011). this project studied the requirements, concerns and expectations of engineering employers with regard to student placements and graduate employees. the research found a general agreement by employers and university staff that the university should support placement students, including in a range of written tasks perceived to be different to academic skills but those required of graduate employees in the workplace. findings from the project showed that faculty staff, students and industrial supervisors in the study tended towards an instrumental view of writing development. this was apparent in a more competencybased approach to the skills needed to successfully complete a task or operation in the work environment. this instrumental approach has a different emphasis to the critical and analytical skills required by the undergraduates at university requiring metacognition and independent thinking. these different approaches were experienced as particularly difficult where students crossed from academic writing at university to industrial writing in their placement, and then back to academic writing at university. recommendations from the journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 3 appleby et al. who wants to be able to do references properly and be unemployed? project include, amongst others, reinforcing the benefits of strong communication skills for employability to students, mapping activities between university study and employment, and extending the repertoire of students’ writing to bridge the gaps between university and placement using development frameworks such as ipace (identity, purpose, audience, code and experience). our research project, discussed next, also focused on aspects of written communication developed by first-year university students and explored how their skills and knowledge related to what was required by employers. the study the two-year mixed method study, funded by the higher education academy, called ‘literacies supporting learning and enhancing employability in a diverse undergraduate population’ was based at the university of central lancashire, a large post-1992 university in the north west of england (the term ‘post-1992 university’ describes higher education institutions, often polytechnics, that were given university status including degreeawarding powers in 1992). the multidisciplinary study focused on communication literacy, mathematical literacy, information literacy and emotional literacy, and generated data from four schools within the university. these schools represented a range of stem and humanities subjects including psychology, forensic science, computing science, education and history. the four schools were targeted specifically to provide a range of experiences and views of science and humanities undergraduates, employers and alumni. firstyear entrants in these schools were approached directly by the research team, who attended lectures and seminars to explain about the project, with accompanying information sheets, and asked for volunteers to take part in the study. the quantitative data for the study was gathered using phased online survey questions, in addition to literacy and mathematics tests, with the 116 first-year students who responded to our request. the employers, likely to recruit graduates from these schools, were contacted with a request for volunteers through university networks, employer forums and personal contact with 50 employers taking part in the project’s online employer survey. past graduates were contacted through the university alumni office, by targeting graduates from the four schools who had graduated in the last four years and who had found graduate-level employment, often in their fields of study. from those contacted, 60 individuals completed the project’s online alumni survey. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 4 appleby et al. who wants to be able to do references properly and be unemployed? students who completed the surveys and tests were invited to participate in two follow-up interviews in order for the research team to gain more detailed qualitative information about these students’ adjustments to university and their uses and development of information literacy, mathematical literacy and communication literacies at university. communication literacy included both writing and oral skills and practices. twenty students who volunteered were invited for interview twice, once at the beginning of their first year, representing their transition into he, and again at the end of the first year when they reflected on progress and the future. the in-depth, semi–structured interviews were recorded and transcribed. as part of the qualitative data set we also interviewed nine employers and nine alumni who had taken part respectively in the online employer and alumni surveys. in these recorded telephone interviews we focused on the literacies within our study that were needed for employment. additionally we asked both employers and alumni if they thought that students leaving university had the necessary understanding and skills, including writing, for graduate employment. the data used for this article are derived from interviews with six students from forensic science and from computing science, as they most closely match the stem subject areas. as a small self-selected sample they are not necessarily representative of all students in these subject areas or across all universities, but they do provide a valuable and often missing voice in the debates about students’ writing and learning. as there is a concern that writing at university, in any subject, should not be seen purely as academic skills acquisition, we will consider this concern in light of what employers and alumni say, particularly as employers often do not appoint on subject knowledge when communication, including writing, may be considered more important than the degree subject or classification. in the first set of interviews we asked about the students’ experience of learning at a level and adjustments to coming to university to study. although most said they had enjoyed developing knowledge of the subject, there were descriptions of being ‘spoon fed’ by teachers at school, college and sixth form. several reflected that in this environment they had not learned to write for understanding; it was more to exhibit knowledge to pass exams, using what was described as a formulaic approach to writing which did not encourage independence. for example bradley (pseudonyms are used throughout), a forensic science student, recalled writing in the sixth form pre-university where his teachers ‘would just write out and you would copy’. lucy, also a forensic science student, journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 5 appleby et al. who wants to be able to do references properly and be unemployed? felt although she had anticipated the adjustment to a more independent way of working at university, she still struggled to keep pace with note taking and reading. she felt unprepared and that high school should be, in her words, less ‘caring and patting you along’. computer science student daniel also felt unprepared in dealing with referencing and plagiarism at the beginning of his course: ‘they are very strict about plagiarism which is something i wasn’t expecting. it is difficult the academic writing’. he felt this emphasis was often in tension with his technical and subject knowledge as an advanced computer user, creating frustration and lower marks on his assignments. the students’ reflection about their writing skills, in their first interview and at the point of transition into higher education study, echoes findings from a previous study researching students’ expectations on entering higher education (cook and leckey, 1999). cook and leckey’s study found that many entrants had previously not taken responsibility for their own learning as parents and school had provided both support and external motivation. they suggest that teaching and assessment styles in many schools lend themselves to developing study skills that may be appropriate at that level but are not appropriate for higher education. they conclude that many students are therefore unrealistic in what they expect university to be in terms of class size, degree of independence and time required to study. although cook and leckey’s study is somewhat dated, this point is also made in recent writing by clughen and hardy (2011) suggesting it is a persistent problem. in a similar way to the students in cook and leckey’s (1999) study, part of this transition concerned developing more independent study skills where the students valued critical tutor feedback to help them develop written work. the comments from our interviewees above suggest that they are reviewing their study skills, assessing what is positive and less so, as part of their move towards independent learning. junaid, a computing science student, particularly valued written assignments such as reports and essays as he felt that he could receive more detailed feedback. this was also mentioned by lucy who used writing assignments to test her own level of skill and knowledge. whilst she was confident in giving presentations using powerpoint, she explained that she ‘just wanted to test the essay more and make sure i was getting all that right and the references’. three of the six students also reported similar views of essays and written assignments which provided formal structure for feedback, clearly identifying areas for improvement and development. in the three interviews, although described in slightly different ways, the students felt they were able to distinguish between feedback comments about content, including the need journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 6 appleby et al. who wants to be able to do references properly and be unemployed? for additional information, and academic writing skills including structure, spelling and references. this layer of individual support for academic development the six students described was provided by their module tutors, who were regarded variously as ‘brilliant’ and ‘open and willing to communicate’. the tutors provided general information about academic writing, helping to translate what was required for specific projects and assignments, and responded with clear feedback. where feedback was not clear the individual students felt able to contact the tutor for clarification, either through e-mail or catching him or her after a lecture or seminar. the feedback process was described as more interactive and mutually responsible in contrast to their previous learning experiences. this was an aspect of higher education learning also highly valued by students in cook and leckey’s (1999) study of first-year students’ expectation of university. in a similar way to the various approaches to support student writing mentioned above, including both technical skills-based and social, cultural and situated approaches (fallows and steven, 2000; cox and king, 2006; davies, 2000), the university where the study was carried out offers various kinds of support which the students we interviewed used to help develop their writing skills. peter used wiser (advertised as ‘don’t be none the wiser’) the university academic writing support team. for most students this is an additional and individual service to support writing development in specific areas. peter explained that he used it to learn about referencing, which he described as ‘an alien concept’ not having covered it at a level. even those who had not used these services were aware of their existence and felt secure that they could receive additional writing support if needed. in addition to these more formal mechanisms, an interesting finding emerged from our interview data which showed that a great deal of informal learning and peer support was occurring, especially for the computer science students. these fellow computing students were in ben’s words ‘geeks’ who he felt often liked to work on their own. such informal and collaborative learning was in contrast to what had been described by some as a mainly teacher-pupil focused experience before university. activities which showed adjustments in study techniques in this transition period included online support, individual coaching sessions, extended collaboration of ideas and editing. peter, studying computer science, described his informal writing network: journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 7 appleby et al. who wants to be able to do references properly and be unemployed? everyone’s got a good work ethic and they all start their essays early…we spend all day together, we’ll be chatting for particular assignments on how we approached it, we’ll even share notes…it’s been fantastic for all of us working at this level, we’ve just collected the best of our knowledge and applied it to the things we have done. ben provided another example, explaining that he would see if someone had a problem even if he did not need help himself. whilst bradley, studying forensic science, described his informal writing support network: i’ve shown [my assignment] to a couple of people on my course, like a kind of peer review thing and they were fine…i mean we all tend to proof read and stuff for each other…it’s like ‘i’m not sure how to do this’ so pop around and show someone, it’s informal. lucy, studying forensic science, developed a more one-to-one coaching arrangement in chemistry with another student who lived at some distance from the university: ‘[it is great] she will just stay that extra hour just to explain something to me which is excellent’. if learning academic writing is part of the transition and a sign of success at university, what of writing skills needed at the point of exit and transition into employment? to explore the relationship of academic writing skills developed by undergraduates to those required for graduate employment we interviewed a small number of employers and alumni. we interviewed nine employers who between them covered a range of employment sectors and sizes; from a large city law firm, a scottish risk management firm, to a multinational technical manufacturing firm. there were several significant threads that emerged across the employer interviews which can be summarised as: the high value placed upon work experience (both general and through placements); the subject area of the degree was not the most significant factor for employability; good communication and team work skills were highly valued; a strong work ethic with the ability to work independently and responsibly was valued; and lastly, for most although not all, there was a concern with falling standards of writing. the two employers who recruited stem graduates in our study were a multinational technical manufacturing company and a medium-sized materials technology manufacturing firm in the north west of england. we focus on their interviews in this article. harold was technical recruitment and training manager in the multinational firm and richard was head of materials in the medium-sized technology firm. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 8 appleby et al. who wants to be able to do references properly and be unemployed? richard described looking for what he termed ‘raw material’ when recruiting and employing graduates. he explained this was because employees needed a broad-based technical degree but also needed to be able to operate in what he called a commercial ‘hard-nosed’ environment something he felt was different to an academic institution. he described looking for candidates who used their initiative, often to get relevant work experience in, for example, a lab. a similar approach, looking for broad rather than tightly-defined, subjectbased experience or qualifications, was echoed by harold. in his role as graduate recruitment and training manager he accepted graduates in related subjects like mechanical engineering but prioritised practical and manufacturing experience. he described wanting people with relevant understanding from the shop floor or engineering works. harold contrasted the pressure of working in industry with that of academic work, where students had, in his opinion, little sense of the reality of deadlines, what he described as the luxury of ‘weeks and weeks to complete a dissertation’. both employers pointed to wanting people with life skills and life experience. richard described this as looking for maturity in a graduate applicant; someone, in his words, who was sensible, enthusiastic and right for the environment. harold said he looked for self-confidence and the ability to make decisions – he contrasted this with a recent well-qualified applicant from a prestigious university whom, he felt, was ‘almost too intelligent for his own good really’. when asked about the writing practices within their working environment there was greater contrast between the two employers. richard explained that in his work environment 90% of communication was by e-mail and texting using smart phones which he described resulted in ‘shorter, sharper, communication…virtually no letter writing goes on anymore’. he accepted that many of the graduates whom he interviewed and recruited did not have good levels of writing; however, for his work this was less important than working quickly and flexibly in a team using multimodal and digital methods of communication. on the other hand, harold, although agreeing that numeracy was more significant for his work environment, was disappointed by what he saw as a decline of graduate writing standards. he commented that ‘…if they can’t be bothered to spell check something, that is disappointing’. he explained that the recruitment process had been adapted to respond to this decline in standards, and whereas previously his company had only allowed four spelling mistakes in the job application it had meant they were refusing so many applicants that the acceptable number of spelling errors had been raised to ten. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 9 appleby et al. who wants to be able to do references properly and be unemployed? when they were asked as employers what university could do to prepare graduates for work and develop the skills they needed, both richard and harold felt that students should know about the ‘real’ world of work. richard described how he felt university was different to work in standards of discipline or punctuality, commenting that ‘i think preparing them for the real world of work is not particularly high on either school or universities’ agenda’. harold described a lack of understanding of the real world and looked for candidates who demonstrated what he called ‘a bit of get up and go’ rather than what he described as ‘being expected to be led everywhere’. he also felt that graduates misunderstood the relevance of their degree to their employability: they probably need to appreciate that educationally they are in excess of what we need. yes we need them to have an engineering-related degree but they probably won’t use 90% of that degree. but what we are looking for is that they can grasp things quickly and make a decision and stick to it and see it through to completion…they might be ok on the technical side but in terms of the practical side, some of them have never been to a factory before. richard and harold, as stem subject employers, are echoing what other employer studies have found: that subject knowledge, specific technical skills or university ranking are not the primary factors for selection and employment. in a survey of 100 employers in east anglia, hinchcliffe and jolly (2011) asked participants to rank employability skills in order of importance for recruiting graduate employees. out of a possible seven categories, interpersonal skills was seen as most important, with written communication seen as number three and information technology fourth. this is similar to findings from previous studies (morley, 2007) that found across eight categories, interpersonal/team skills were the most highly rated, with what were referred to as core skills, for example communication (which included writing), being rated third. interestingly degree classification and subject knowledge were rated much lower, at sixth place. morley’s (2007) and hinchcliffe and jolly’s (2011) findings endorse what an alumni forensic science graduate, now working as a lab technologist, told us in her interview. she reported that she got the job in the aerospace industry, not in her area of expertise or graduate knowledge, as her employer ‘knew he could trust me...it doesn’t matter what your degree is in, what matters is the skills you learn’. this graduate had worked for this company on several short-term contracts and maternity cover in chemical analysis, in areas not specifically related to her graduate subject. she felt that she had gained her journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 10 appleby et al. who wants to be able to do references properly and be unemployed? permanent job with this firm by showing her capacity to learn new skills and to be able to apply general critical and analytical skills learned at university within the work environment. discussion our findings suggest that stem employers in the study are looking for graduates with broad communication skills, including writing, but more importantly are looking for qualities such as maturity, the ability to work with others and to work with complex problems within their specific work environments. these findings raise questions of how skills required in the workplace relate to academic writing required at university. the findings show the importance of aligning two strands of discussion about student writing mentioned in this article, where technical skills-based learning can underpin a social and cultural approach to situated writing. a technical skills-based approach to student writing may improve competency but does not on its own provide sufficient understanding of how writing may be used and developed within new contexts. if writing skills are not accompanied by understanding at a metacognitive level of purpose, audience and situation, they may remain significant for academic purpose only. the potentially academically bounded nature of some of the writing development at university was a concern expressed, albeit differently, by both students and employers. the employers in our study wanted graduates that could adapt existing writing and communication skills as well as develop new ones that fitted the working environment. the students wanted to develop writing and communication skills to enable them to gain a degree, but they wanted more than proficiency in tasks such as being able to reference appropriately. they expressed a need to achieve understanding which was transportable and could be applied to work. in both cases writing and communication was expressed as more than a technical skill. although acquiring greater writing and communication competence was seen as an important learning development at university, understanding and developing writing as social, cultural and situated practice was also significant. the debate between technical skills-based and social practice approaches has been significant in discussion of student writing in higher and further education. ursula wingate (2006) argues that in the uk, the notion of writing as a skill prevails where any problem is recognised as textual, with technical solutions leading to an improvement of skill. she observes that skills such as referencing are taught but the more difficult aspects of journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 11 appleby et al. who wants to be able to do references properly and be unemployed? understanding sources and how knowledge is constructed and debated are not. therefore students, especially those in technical subjects, may be encouraged to view academic writing as instrumental and based on technical competency. wingate, in a later publication (2007), suggests that what is required is an epistemological shift, as understanding the conception of knowledge in one’s discipline is a fundamental aspect of effective learning in higher education. as part of this shift, away from a simple skill view of writing, students also need to understand their role as learners in higher education, becoming independent learners who understand knowledge and are competent in constructing knowledge in a discipline. a technical or instrumental skills approach, concentrating on the ‘how to’ of writing fails to address the more important critical and metacognitive ‘what’ of the content and meaning that is being communicated. the connection of learning, knowledge construction and critical thinking as a basis for developing undergraduate writing appears to relate to what kotzee and johnson (2008) refer to as a ‘threshold concept’. work by meyer and land (2003), and subsequently developed (land et al., 2005; davies and mangan, 2006), explains threshold concepts as the key concepts and knowledge students need to ‘master’ their subject. what is difficult to see is how the notion of threshold concepts, applied to university study, relates to employability and the qualities employers expect from graduates suggested in previous research (morley et al., 2006; hinchcliffe and jolly, 2011) and in our data. mastery of the particular subject through higher education study appears at odds with the more general personal experience and attributes, such as work ethic and maturity, required by stem and other employers. if, however, we include the concept of learning itself, it is possible to see how undergraduate skills, including writing, can be used and developed in higher education and in the workplace. the dearing report (dearing, 1997) was significant in defining key skills for employment, emphasising the notion of employability within education across all sectors including school, further and higher education, and lifelong learning. the key skills in the report were defined as communication (including oral and written), numeracy, it and ‘learning how to learn’. many working in higher education have been critical of a simple skills approach designed to support graduate employability (for example, knight and yorke, 2004). what is less mentioned but is significant within this debate is the fourth key skill mentioned by dearing (1997); learning how to learn. moving this to a more central position in the discussion encourages concentration on the processes rather than the products of journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 12 appleby et al. who wants to be able to do references properly and be unemployed? learning. the distinction between the product and process of learning was illustrated by the students in the example of being able to cite and reference appropriately. it is possible to see that learning how to reference correctly, a difficulty expressed in the first interviews by the students themselves, relates to their previous described learning experiences of being ‘spoon-fed’. the latter approach they explained didn’t give them the skills or a significantly deeper understanding of what the knowledge was or how it was constructed; success was viewed as more product-based. by the second interview when the students described learning to do references, essays or reports as part of their academic writing, they were largely describing this not just as developing technical skill but as part of a wider communicative repertoire and part of understanding how they learned. in these accounts the students were describing a process of learning rather than learning that was focused primarily on a product. some of the awareness of learning was self-generated and linked to specific tasks while much was social and informal. in constructing their academic identity through writing (ivanic, 1998) they were engaging with many social practices: as a student, a colleague, a mentor and employee, all of which impacted upon their learning. this included formal, informal, academic and social sites of learning. the students used different sources and resources to support this learning including tutor support, specific academic writing support, immediate friends and online groups. they were learning technical aspects of writing, such as referencing, but saw this as part of their overall learning how to learn, distinctly different to their previous experiences, and not simply as an end in itself. acknowledging that the students were aware of, and in some cases proactive in, learning how to learn suggests the possibility of relating this understanding more closely to what employers’ value in graduate employees. employers in our study also indicated they did not want spoon-fed graduate employees. being able to use references may not be seen by many employers as a straightforwardly useful transferable technical skill; however, understanding how to learn the new skill and the knowledge that underpins it is. developing this new skill, particularly when underpinned by an awareness of the learning processes involved, may rely upon, and can provide evidence of, team work, independent thinking, problem solving and wider communication. the six students in various ways described working with others to plan and give presentations, supporting friends and colleagues in essay planning and in editing each other’s work. some of these writing skills supporting writing and communication proficiency, although linked to university study, journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 13 appleby et al. who wants to be able to do references properly and be unemployed? would lead to increased chances of employment as it illustrates general skills and competencies that employers value. it is important therefore to view writing in educational settings, at whatever age, as dynamic and potentially responsive to wider socio-cultural contexts (fisher, 2012). a social practices approach to literacy, including reading and writing, takes account of purpose, history, culture and situation (barton et al., 2000), enabling recognition of both motivation and learning processes. a social practice approach to learning (lave and wenger, 2005; lave, 2009) also illustrates the need to distinguish between intentional instruction and learning; observing that learning is not always an outcome of instruction. therefore writing instruction (which may be technical and skills oriented) may be less effective than developing an understanding of learning processes; an understanding which is recognised and valued by employers. understanding the learning processes involved in writing, through collaboration, using facebook and informal meetings was something the students drew upon themselves in developing their social and collaborative networks. conclusion rather than offer a simple solution suggesting that stem students need more practice in report writing, or even in giving presentations, which was highly valued by our student interviewees for developing skills used at work, it is at least as important to comprehend how students learn and to support their understanding of learning processes. interventions such as skills sessions have a part to play in that process but cannot simply be ends in themselves. developing writing, as the students in our study showed in their independent and collaborative activities, can also take place outside of the classroom or the formal curriculum. acknowledging social learning, inside and outside of university, begins to align developing communicative repertoires that support learning to learn as well as the group work skills and independence that employers value. this may mean changing assessment practices within university teaching to encourage or recognise this development, and to acknowledge interaction between social, emotional and cognitive dimensions in learning (illeris, 2002). it may be through building virtual communities of practice (hargreaves and gibels, 2011) or by linking a workplace curriculum (billett, 2011) to what is learned at university, recognising the significance of what stephen billett calls participatory practices (billett, 2004). the above suggestions would benefit from a supportive cultures approach journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 14 appleby et al. who wants to be able to do references properly and be unemployed? (clughen and hardy, 2012) that uses writing spaces to explore and develop writing as a social practice, producing writing that is individually distinct rather than simply what is required. learning, of course, does not stop when a student exits university. indeed, the employers we interviewed indicated they wanted what they described as ‘raw material’ to work with. this was explained as a graduate with an appropriate general level of skill in the core literacies we investigated (communication literacy, mathematical literacy, information literacy and emotional literacy) but who is open to learning new skills and knowledge for the job. understanding better the relationship between processes of learning at university and those in work may help to address student and employer fears, that academic practices such as being able to cite and reference appropriately indicate a critical understanding of knowledge construction rather than a university-bound, technical skill, which may not be valued once the student graduates. doing so requires a focus on learning to learn rather than on students’ skill acquisition or subject competency. references armarego, j. (2008) engaging it students in enhancing writing skills. murdoch, australia: murdoch university. barton, d., hamilton, m. and ivanic, r. (2000) situated literacies. london: routledge. billett, s. (2004) ‘learning through work: workplace participatory practices’, in rainbird, h., fuller a. and munro a. (eds.) workplace learning in context. london: routledge, pp. 109-126. billett, s. (2011) ‘workplace curriculum: practice and propositions’ in dochy, f., gibels, d., segers, d. and van den bossche, p. (eds.) theories of learning for the workplace. london: routledge, pp. 17-37. clughen, l. and hardy, c. (2011) ‘creating participatory writing cultures in uk higher education’, journal of academic writing, 1(1), pp. 71-78. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 15 appleby et al. who wants to be able to do references properly and be unemployed? clughen, l. and hardy, c. (2012) writing in the disciplines: building supportive cultures for student writing in uk higher education. bingley: emerald publishing. cook, a. and leckey, j. (1999) ‘do expectations meet reality? a survey of changes in firstyear student opinion’, journal of further and higher education, 23(2), pp. 157-171. cox, s. and king, d. (2006) ‘skills set: an approach to embed employability in course design’, education and training, 48(4), pp. 262 -274. davies, l. (2000) ‘’why kick the ‘l’ out of learning?’ the development of students’ employability skills through part-time working’, education and training, 42(8), pp. 436-444. davies, p. and mangan, j. (2006) ‘embedding threshold concepts: from theory to pedagogical principles to learning activities’: threshold concepts within the disciplines symposium. university of strathclyde, glasgow 30 august – 1 september. davies, s., swinburne, d. and williams, g. (2006) writing matters. london: the royal literary fund. day, t. (2011) ’developing writing in stem disciplines’: sw conference for developing writing in stem disciplines. university of bath 12 september. available at: http://www.hestem-sw.org.uk/project?id=5&pp=125 (accessed: 2 november 2012). dearing (1997) higher education in the learning society: the report of the national committee of inquiry into higher education. london: hmso. fallahi, c., wood, r. and auatad, c. (2006) ‘a program for improving undergraduate psychology students’ basic writing skills’, teaching of psychology, 33(3), pp. 171177. fallows, s. and steven, c. (2000) ‘building employability skills into higher education curriculum: a university wide initiative’, education and training, 42(2), pp. 75-82. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 16 http://www.hestem-sw.org.uk/project?id=5&pp=125 appleby et al. who wants to be able to do references properly and be unemployed? fisher, r. (2012) ‘teaching writing: a situated dynamic’, british educational research journal, 38(2), pp. 299-319. ganobcsik-williams, l. (2004) a report on the teaching of academic writing in uk higher education. london: the royal literary fund. gonzaga, m., elsie, k. and francis, b. (2011) ‘faculty and students’ perspectives and opinions regarding the use of case reports to develop scientific writing skills among undergraduate students’, south african radiographer, 49(2), pp. 18-22. gourlay, l. (2009) ‘threshold practices: becoming a student through academic literacies’, london review of education, 7(2), pp. 181-192. hargreaves, s. and gibels, d. (2011) ‘from the theory of situated cognition to communities of practice: j. lave and e wenger’, in dochy, f., gibels, d., segers, m. and van den bossche, p. (eds.) theories of learning for the workplace. london: routledge, pp. 66-79. hassall, t., joyce, j., bramhall, m., robinson, i. and augero, j. (2005) ‘the sound of silence? a comparative study of the barriers to communication skills development in accounting and engineering students’, industry and higher education, october 2005, pp. 392-398. hinchcliffe, g. and jolly, a. (2011) ‘graduate identity and employability’, british educational research journal, 37(4), pp. 563-584. illeris, k. (2002) the three dimensions of learning. roskilde: roskilde university press. ivanic, r. (1998) writing and identity: the discoursal construction of identity in academic writing. amsterdam: john benjamins. knight, p. and yorke, m. (2004) learning curriculum and employability in higher education. london: routlege falmer. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 17 appleby et al. who wants to be able to do references properly and be unemployed? kotzee, b. and johnson, r. (2008) stringing a simple sentence together: business graduates’ writing skills and employability. bmaf research and development grant final report. london: queen mary university of london. land, r., cousin, g., meyer, j. and davies, p. (2005) ‘threshold concepts and troublesome knowledge (3): implications for course design and evaluation’, in rust, c. (ed.) improving student learning, diversity and inclusion. oxford: oxford centre for staff and learning development, pp. 53-64. lave, j. (2009) ‘the practice of learning’, in illeris, k. (ed.) contemporary theories of learning. london: routledge, pp. 200-209. lave, j. and wenger, e. (2005) situated learning: legitimate peripheral participation. cambridge: cambridge university press. leckey, j. and mcguigan, m. (1997) ‘right tracks – wrong roads: the development of generic skills in higher education’, research in higher education, 38(3), pp. 365378. meyer, j. and land, r. (2003) ‘threshold concepts and troublesome knowledge: linkages to ways of thinking and practising within the disciplines’, enhancing teaching and learning environments, occasional report 4. morley, l. (2007) ‘the x factor: employability, elitism and equity in graduate recruitment’, contemporary social science, 2(2), pp. 191-207. morley, l., eraut, m., aynsley, s., macdonald, d. and shepherd, j. (2006) needs of employers and related organisations for information about quality and standards of higher education: a report to hefce by the university of sussex school of education. east sussex: university of sussex. wingate, u. (2006) ‘doing away with ‘study skills’, teaching in higher education, 11(4), pp. 457-469. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 18 appleby et al. who wants to be able to do references properly and be unemployed? wingate, u. (2007) ‘a framework for transition: supporting ‘learning to learn’’, higher education quarterly, 61(3), pp. 391-405. author details all authors were members of the uk higher education academy (hea) research project ‘literacies supporting learning and enhancing employability in a diverse undergraduate population’ based at the university of central lancashire. corresponding author yvon appleby can be contacted at yappleby@uclan.ac.uk. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 19 mailto:yappleby@uclan.ac.uk who wants to be able to do references properly and be unemployed? stem student writing and employer needs abstract introduction the study discussion references author details microsoft word hood%20et.%20al%20%28final%29-3.doc journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special edition: digital technologies, november 2014 case study: the 24/7 study advice workshop michelle reid university of reading, uk kim shahabudin university of reading, uk sonia hood university of reading, uk abstract with a rise in demand for learning development services, coupled with an increasingly divergent cohort of students (part-time; international; distance learners and students with extra commitments), there is a clear need to look for creative ways to meet the challenges of this growing and changing need. to meet this challenge the study advice team at the university of reading embarked on a project using screencasting to create a suite of video tutorials that focused on key aspects of study. this paper discusses the inspiration for the project, the development process undertaken and the impact and effectiveness of the resources created. the content was developed through a process of experimentation and extensive team reviewing and refinement, through which we (the study advice team) learnt how to effectively create, record and disseminate our resources. the benefits were far wider reaching than the initial project scope, with implications for capacity building; recognition; profile-raising and student engagement. keywords: screencasts; online tutorials; flipped learning; technology enhanced learning. introduction learning development teams are often small in relation to the cohort they are expected to support, short of hours and space, and in high demand (mckinney et al., 2009). while oneto-one sessions are recognised as the most effective way to provide support (turner, 2011), workshop sessions are widely used to deliver teaching to small groups as a means hood et al. the 24/7 study advice workshop journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2014 2 to ensuring that scarce staffing resources are used efficiently. however timetabling these teaching sessions can be a problem, especially as students are encouraged to undertake extra-curricular activities through initiatives such as the higher education achievement report (hear) (universities uk, 2012). whilst attending extra-curricular training can be a problem for all students, it is especially difficult for part-time students; distance learners; students with family or work commitments and those living away from campus (frith and wilson, 2014). at the university of reading, learning development services are provided by a small team of three study advisers (one full-time and two part-time, a total of 2.4 fte). we are based in the library and are a central service, with a focus on academic skills, who work with students at all levels (from foundation to phd) and across all subject disciplines. we interact with students through individual advice sessions; small and large group teaching sessions and also remotely through a comprehensive set of online self-help resources. whilst the service has always been busy, a pro-active approach to liaison and collaboration with academic faculties over recent years has resulted in a steady rise in demand for individual advice sessions together with a sharp increase in demand (250% between 2011 and 2013) for study skills teaching delivered within modules. a key part of our response to this increase in demand has been to use screencasting to produce new self-help resources which incorporate engaging, evaluated, expert teaching, remotely accessible at any time and in any place. screencasts are short simple videos, created by compiling a succession of screencaptures (usually presentation slides) and accompanying them with a soundtrack, either spoken or musical. they are easily created with a minimum of technical expertise and employ verbal and visual communication to engage a wide range of students. unlike a lecture they can be paused and rewound to help build understanding, which is especially helpful for non-native english speakers and students without easy access to a tutor to ask questions (hea, 2014). we initially envisaged the screencasts would offer an alternative option for those students who could not access face-to-face generic teaching through our workshops. however we soon realised that screencasts could also be used to supplement teaching, not only as part of our teaching sessions but also via subject tutors who could incorporate study skills instruction either within their subject teaching or as part of a ‘flipped learning’ model (where students receive instruction via electronic teaching before the class so that face-tohood et al. the 24/7 study advice workshop journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2014 3 face teaching can focus on putting it into practice for deeper learning, see for example lage et al., 2000). in august 2012 we received funding from the university’s annual fund for a one year project which we called ‘the 24/7 study advice workshop’. the aim of the project was to develop a set of screencasts each focusing on an aspect of essay writing. it was envisaged this set of screencasts would act as the model for future sets on other topics. this case study describes the project from its initial inspiration through to its development, application and evaluation. it concludes with our thoughts about the benefits and possible difficulties involved in producing self-help resources in this format. inspiration: the ideas behind the project we were first inspired by a library staff development session where library staff shared their experience of using camtasia software to produce short videos. videos seemed a good solution to the problems of demand we were facing and the session demonstrated accessible and easy to learn software and identified people who could share their expertise whilst we built our own capacity. the resources produced by the library were mostly introductory and used video sequences accompanied by a background music track. we wanted to incorporate a greater amount of text and narration but felt that ‘talking head’ videos might date too quickly. we were introduced to screencasting as a tool for learning development in a post, circulated to the ldhen mailing list, by stuart johnson (then at the university of leicester) headed “who wants to make some oers?” (johnson, 2010). johnson, via a linked blog post (no longer available), went on to explain the processes that were used to produce a brief screencast titled ‘what it means to be a critical student’ (http://www2.le.ac.uk/offices/ld/resources/study/critical-student). these processes included employing animation functions on powerpoint to make presentation slides more dynamic and presenting the slides sequentially and augmenting them with a spoken voicetrack to make a simple video. given our familiarity with powerpoint, the technique offered a norisk, simple solution to our need to produce engaging learning resources. the impetus to put our ideas into practice came in november 2011 when the ‘learnhigher animation challenge’ was launched (http://learnhigher.wordpress.com/animationchallenge/). the initiative challenged learning developers to produce brief animated hood et al. the 24/7 study advice workshop journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2014 4 learning development resources, using methods of their choice. our interest in screencasts as a format for self-help resources, prompted two members of our team to produce entries for the challenge. we were delighted when a team member won second place for her screencast titled ‘structuring a report: a piece of cake?’ (reid, 2011): it was also pleasing to receive confirmation that screencasting had real potential for producing self-help resources that were accessible and easy to use. we were also motivated by articles describing the success of the flipped classroom in universities and schools in the us (for example lage et al. (2000); leckhart and cheshire (2012) and hamdan et al. (2013)). this made us consider the way we provided small group teaching and raised questions as to whether it would be more effective to concentrate on hands-on example-led teaching in our workshop sessions and ask students to view teaching resources on key principles in their own time. it was envisaged this could be particularly beneficial for non-native english speakers who might struggle to keep up with lecture-style presentations. getting started: technical and stylistic choices our initial project aimed to develop and evaluate a set of screencasts on essay writing to act as a model for future sets on other study topics. given the relative novelty of the format as a tool for learning development, the development process was necessarily one of trial and error as we learned the capabilities of the software and developed a strong visual identity for the resources. our choice of software was determined by our purpose. we considered using jing (http://www.techsmith.com/jing.html), which we had seen demonstrated by members of the learning development team at the university of plymouth as a tool to respond to student email enquiries. jing is a free screencasting program which allows the user to record their screen, complete with actions like moving the cursor, and to add a spoken narration. however jing videos are limited to five minutes in length and there is no editing functionality or control over where the videos are hosted. we decided that while jing was perfect for a one-off instructional video in answer to a student query, or a single, simple resource, it would not work for the more complex resources we envisaged. instead we chose to use camtasia (http://www.techsmith.com/camtasia.html), the software we had hood et al. the 24/7 study advice workshop journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2014 5 originally seen demonstrated by library staff. this had the same recording capacities as jing but also enabled longer length videos and editing functions for a more professional result. there was a cost involved but our project funding covered this. another choice we soon realised we would have to make concerned the hosting software. we underestimated the popularity of our early video tutorials and soon reached the monthly bandwidth limits with techsmith’s free hosting site, preventing other students viewing the resources that month. the early success of the tutorials on the free site gave us the evidence to argue for a paid for hosting account. sharing this with our library colleagues spread the (relatively small) cost and meant that we could host all our resources in one place avoiding multiple fragmented accounts. we wanted our resources to have a strong visual identity and to look significantly different to the bullet-pointed lists typical of many powerpoint slides. our experience of creating successful learning resources during our involvement with the ‘learnhigher cetl’ (20052010) (www.learnhigher.ac.uk) had taught us about good visual design, including easy navigation and signposting, and the importance of consistency. we developed a template for opening, closing and content slides to guarantee cohesion across tutorials produced by different authors. working directly with students has shown us the effectiveness of strong visual metaphors such as a river for an essay structure or a rapidly growing plant for a dissertation. using these simple metaphors made a striking visual impact and was achievable within the limitations of powerpoint animations. methodology: developing the model our starting point for content was to consider the gap we thought the tutorials would fill, which was namely the face-to-face example-led teaching that we provide through workshops. so our first attempts replicated workshop teaching; we created slides to illustrate and reinforce the messages we wanted to convey and then recorded ourselves talking through them. this created a natural feel to the narration. however we soon realised that what we gained in style was lost in efficiency, with many of our first draft screencasts lasting longer than our ideal five-minute limit and missing key points. we adjusted the process, talking through our ideas to capture the key natural-sounding hood et al. the 24/7 study advice workshop journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2014 6 messages first then using this as the basis for writing a tighter script. this had the added bonus of providing ready-made transcripts for accessibility purposes. creating the animated slides in powerpoint often involved compromises between the ambitious visions in our heads and the reality of what we could achieve with the tools available. there were plenty of online ‘how-to’ guides and videos so, if we could not work out how to achieve an effect that we wanted, we were often able to find a video telling us how. regular project team meetings enabled us to continually review work-in-progress and also to share knowledge and tips. media-savvy students might be discouraged by an amateurish production, so recording the narration to a high standard took some practice (bowles-terry et al., 2010). the occasional small stumble or pause in speech might be acceptable, however sound quality was important. we expected a headset microphone would provide high quality sound recording but instead found that it often picked up our breathing, which would be distracting for the audience. we found that a simple laptop microphone provided a clearer and less distracting recording. our creation process was honed by team review and evaluation. each tutorial was reviewed in draft form by each member of the team who provided editorial feedback on content, delivery, layout, visual communication and technical issues. after revision it was reviewed again by all team members before publication and dissemination. this process meant we could all produce and comment on resources simultaneously, ensuring that the series was consistent and coherent despite being produced by a variety of authors. it also allowed us to identify any slides that seemed too ‘powerpointy’ in appearance. like all new practices this process was lengthy to begin with but we have been able to speed it up with experience. in the early stages a thorough approach was vital to identify underlying principles and common practices. student feedback was sought through a trial workshop, which utilised a ‘flipped learning’ approach as previously described. 24 students were recruited from across the university via an email sent out by the department’s administrative staff. the email stated that we were seeking ‘volunteers to take part in a new essay writing workshop followed by a brief focus group’ and explained that we would be asking volunteers to watch the videos before putting their knowledge into practice in the workshop. students were not offered payment hood et al. the 24/7 study advice workshop journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2014 7 to undertake the workshop although we did provide that great student reward – free cake. the purpose of the session and the overall project were explained to the volunteer participants. they were asked for consent to record the discussions and to have photographs taken in the session. they also gave permission for anonymised quotes to be used in our report and any subsequent papers. the session was taught by one member of the team, while a different member ran the focus group to try to avoid any barriers to honest responses. feedback on the tutorials was positive; some of the quotations were as follows: helpful and concise. the use of colours, simple visual sentences and images, and moving images, along with the auditory commentary made them easy to follow and useful. i was happy to discover the tutorials were short and concise and covered everything i was worried about! our concern before the workshop was that students might not watch the videos beforehand. within our research and our institution, we found that practitioners of flipped learning were teaching subject courses where there is a greater motivation to complete set work outside of class (for example lage et al., 2000). in the event all except one watched the videos, suggesting that the flipped learning model could work in stand-alone sessions. we are conscious, however, that the workshop attendees were self-selecting and probably self-motivated to improve their study practices. dissemination: sharing our experiences as one of the first teams at the university to use screencasting for learning resources, we decided to share our experiences through a launch event in june 2013. feedback comments from the event showed how colleagues planned to adopt our ideas to create more engaging resources for students: hood et al. the 24/7 study advice workshop journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2014 8 i am from the careers centre so will prove v.useful to refer students to these who come to see us. also looking at doing something similar for cv writing, application letters etc… i thought this looked like a very student-friendly resource. i’m thinking about whether we could create a screencast to de-mystify peer support and maybe also about homesickness. we were fortunate to have had project time to use a trial and error approach and it was reassuring to colleagues hoping to try the techniques to know that they could draw on our developed expertise. since our project, colleagues in academic departments have produced their own successful sets of screencasts, consulting with us on our experience, and the university has initiated a university-wide project on using video for teaching and learning. we have also shared our approach with the wider learning development community, via the ldhen mailing list (which was established by aldinhe: the association of learning development in higher education) and gained valuable feedback from a poster presentation at the aldinhe annual conference in 2013. possible future ideas gained from discussions at the aldinhe 2014 conference include the use of other animation software such as powtoon; collaborating with students to create resources and launching a student screencasting competition. we alert academics in our teaching and learning communities when we publish new sets of tutorials and have been delighted with their excellent reception. the tutorials have been publicised directly to students through social media, such as twitter and facebook, and have been included on the school portals on our vle (virtual learning environment). while they were first sited within our own section of the vle, we have now removed any barriers to accessing the video tutorials by siting them more openly on our public website. since then, their popularity has grown exponentially. in august 2014 we had received over 11,700 hits across 27 tutorials and by the end of october 2014 this had increased to 21,724 hits across 32 tutorials. ‘structuring your essay’ proved to be the most popular topic. this increase illustrates the success of the format with both students and academic staff. hood et al. the 24/7 study advice workshop journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2014 9 conclusion: what’s next? as learning development resources that can be viewed by students whenever and wherever they choose, the video tutorials have clearly fulfilled our original purpose of offering ‘24/7 study advice workshops’. however we are now also using them in seminars and workshops to introduce a topic and start discussion, or for a change of pace and mode of delivery to re-engage students and break up longer teaching sessions. feedback from academic staff on the video tutorials has been enthusiastic and we know that many tutors have recommended them to their students, both individually as part of feedback and to whole teaching groups to inform their study practices. however we also believe that they offer a potential solution to the increasing demands on our service to provide study skills teaching embedded in subject modules by supporting academic staff and postgraduate teaching assistants to deliver such teaching themselves. to promote this use, we are currently producing brief teaching notes and activities to accompany the videos. since the initial suite of essay writing screencasts were produced, we have gone on to create further suites on referencing; exams; dissertations; one-off introductory resources on marking criteria and academic reading; with a suite of screencasts on research currently in the pipeline. the success of the project has provided us with recognition as experts in this e-learning technology in our institution, thus raising our profile and adding to the ways we provide consultancy on learning and teaching across the university. the contribution we have made to the university has been formally recognised with the team winning a collaborative award for excellence in teaching and learning. there have been challenges in being able to sustain the momentum since the project funding ended. although we are more efficient at creating the resources, it still takes blocks of time and quiet space to think creatively and to record the screencasts, which can be difficult to find during the course of a typical working week. it can also be frustrating when the ideas in our heads are not possible with the tools we have. being one of the early adopters at our institution meant we did not have a local peer network to support us when we wanted to try new things with the medium (jisc infonet, 2014). our strong contacts with the wider learning development community have proved invaluable here. hood et al. the 24/7 study advice workshop journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2014 10 often learning developers are concerned that their technical skills and expertise are not sufficiently advanced to try out new processes and produce their own digital resources. however we hope that sharing our experiences of starting from scratch will have shown that producing your own video resources is both achievable and, as they are more institution-specific and personal than commercial packages, can improve student engagement (rice et al., 2014; bowles-terry et al., 2010). from our initial small experimentation with screencasting, the benefits for the team and our students in terms of capacity-building, recognition, profile-raising and student engagement have gone far beyond the original scope of the project. references bowles-terry, m., hensley, m., and hinchliffe, l. (2010) ‘best practices for online video tutorials in academic libraries: a study of student preferences and understanding’, communications in information literacy, 4(1), pp. 17-28. frith, l. and wilson, a. (2014) ‘returning to learning: what are the academic development needs of mature and part-time students? what works to support and retain these students?’, journal of learning development in higher education, issue 7, june, pp. 1-18. hamdan, n., mcknight, p., mcknight, k. and arfstrom, k. (2013) a review of flipped learning. available at: http://flippedlearning.org/cms/lib07/va01923112/centricity/domain/41/litreview_fli ppedlearning.pdf (accessed: 21 october 2014). the higher education academy (2014) lecturing. available at: https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/sites/default/files/resources/lecturing.pdf (accessed 29 october 2014). jisc infonet (2014) support and development. available at: http://www.jiscinfonet.ac.uk/infokits/digital-literacies/strategic-perspectives/supportdevelopment/ (accessed 29 october 2014). johnson, s. (2010) ‘who wants to make some oers?’ ldhen jiscmail list, 21 april [online]. available at: https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgihood et al. the 24/7 study advice workshop journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2014 11 bin/webadmin?a2=ind1004&l=ldhen&f=&s=&p=12353 (accessed: 21 october 2014). lage, m.j., platt, g.j. and treglia, m. (2000) ‘inverting the classroom: a gateway to creating an inclusive learning environment’, journal of economic education, 31(1), pp. 30-43. leckhart, s. and cheshire, t. (2012) ‘university just got flipped: how online video is opening up knowledge to the world’, wired, 16 april [online]. available at: http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2012/05/features/university-just-gotflipped?page=all (accessed: 24 july 2014). mckinney, p., wood, j. and little, s. (2009) ‘a learning development team: three developers, one pedagogy’, journal of learning development in higher education, issue 1, february, pp. 1-16. nutt, d. (2013) ‘piloting the ‘flipped classroom’’, teaching and learning showcase on use of technology in teaching and learning. university of reading, reading 22 january [online]. available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdqb2ey9nby (accessed 15 august 2014). parslow, p. (2013) ‘scaffolded learning: students as teachers and video enhanced teaching’, faculty of sciences and life sciences teaching and learning showcase. university of reading, reading 29 november. reid, m. (2011) structuring your report: a piece of cake?. available at: http://prezi.com/cvh2rnnlqknl/structuring-your-report-a-piece-ofcake/?auth_key=68128cdd98ad0c60fbddf21a09da39bda480fcda (accessible with prezi login). rice, p., farmer, r. and musungo, n. (2014) ‘open educational resources: tell me what you want, what you really, really want’, aldinhe conference. university of huddersfield, huddersfield 14-16 april. strayer, j. (2012) ‘how learning in an inverted classroom influences cooperation, innovation and task orientation’, learning environments research, 15(2), pp. 171193. turner, j. (2011) ‘the case for one-to-one academic advice for students’, in hartley, p., hilsdon, j., keenan, c., sinfield, s., and verity, m. (eds.) learning development in higher education, basingstoke: palgrave macmillan, pp. 91-101. universities uk (2012). bringing it all together: introducing the hear, burgess implementation steering group, universities uk. hood et al. the 24/7 study advice workshop journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2014 12 author details michelle reid is a study adviser at the university of reading. she is a university teaching fellow and a senior fellow of the higher education academy. kim shahabudin is a study adviser at the university of reading, supporting students of all academic levels. she is a fellow of the higher education academy. sonia hood is a study adviser at the university of reading, a fellow of the higher education academy and a steering group member of aldinhe. literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special edition: developing writing in stem disciplines, november 2012 an assignment based on data driven journalism: a case study vanessa simonite oxford brookes university, uk abstract in a module designed to develop skills in presenting and evaluating statistics, students of mathematics and statistics were given an assignment asking them to research and write a piece of data driven journalism. data driven journalism is a new phenomenon which has expanded rapidly due to the growth in open data, new visualisation tools and online reporting in newspapers, periodicals and blogs. the assignment provided students with a writing assignment that was individual, small-scale, research-based and embedded within their discipline. the students were asked to formulate a research question that could be investigated using survey data available from an electronic data archive. the result of the investigation was to be written up as a piece of data driven journalism for online publication, including a data visualisation. in addition to using discipline-based skills and written communication, the assignment required students to use research skills and digital literacy. an assignment set in the context of writing for the public extends students’ writing experience beyond the domains of discipline-based professional reports and academic writing. data driven journalism provides opportunities to develop students’ writing alongside other skills for employment and can be used to design assessments for a wide range of disciplines. keywords: data driven journalism; data visualisation; graduate attributes; assessment. introduction the development of undergraduates’ writing has largely been discussed in terms of simonite an assignment based on data driven journalism: a case study enabling students to participate in academic discourse within their particular discipline (green et al., 2009) and for developing the skills and attributes needed for employment (bridgstock, 2009; litchfield et al., 2010), but the nature of stem subjects and their impact on society mean that their discussion goes beyond academic and professional circles into the public domain. this case study describes an assignment in which students act as journalists, writing for an informed, though not necessarily professional, readership. designed for students of mathematics and statistics, the disciplinary element of the assignment was achieved by making the journalism data driven, that is, based on the presentation and interpretation of data. data driven journalism is a rapidly growing area within both print and online media. the first conference on data driven journalism took place in august 2010 in the netherlands (european journalism centre, n.d.). the guardian newspaper’s datablog (rogers, 2012) is widely acknowledged as having been at the forefront of this new form of reporting. visualisations providing functional, interactive and sometimes beautiful presentations of data have played an important part in the popularity and effectiveness of data driven news reports. as the open data movement has gained momentum (berners-lee, 2010), data visualisations play an essential role in presenting complex data to the public. a data driven journalist needs to combine skills in writing, research and analysis with digital literacy and numeracy. there is a striking overlap between these qualities and those viewed as desirable for graduate employment (yorke and harvey, 2005). the assignment described here addresses the questions of how to embed graduate attributes within the curriculum and how to measure the extent to which students achieve them (green et al., 2009; hughes and barrie, 2010). the following sections describe the assignment and how it can be adapted for use in other disciplines. context the data driven assignment was piloted in a module entitled communicating statistics. the module covers topics including the presentation of statistical tables and graphs and the writing and critical evaluation of statistical reports and research papers. the module is taken by second and third year undergraduates studying mathematics or statistics, journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 2 simonite an assignment based on data driven journalism: a case study sometimes in degree programmes combining statistics with business or computer science. in this module, four equally weighted pieces of work were assessed: an exercise using official statistics, a written assignment, a group video project and an oral presentation, all concerned with reporting, presenting or evaluating some aspect of statistics. in the 2011/12 academic year the module was taken by 22 students and the written work consisted of the data driven journalism assignment. the new assignment drew on material covered in lectures and computer practical classes and replaced a conventional, academic report-writing assignment. the students had learned to access data from large scale surveys held by the economic and social data service (esds, 2012) and had spent time discussing, creating and evaluating graphical presentations of data. the assignment the students were given a general topic and the names of two large datasets held by esds which could be accessed online. for the assignment, each student needed to identify a specific research question within the given topic and to find and use relevant data within the selected surveys to explore his or her research question. the findings were to be written up as an article of up to 450 words, suitable for publication in the form of a datablog, and including an element of data visualisation. students were referred to the guardian newspaper’s datablog (rogers, 2012) and encouraged to find a number of articles that they could use as exemplars. the topic that students were asked to research was ‘graduate attributes’. this concept was introduced to students by presenting the following quotation from bowden et al. (2000): graduate attributes are the qualities, skills and understandings a university community agrees its students should develop during their time with the institution. these attributes include but go beyond the disciplinary expertise or technical knowledge that has traditionally formed the core of most university courses. they are qualities that also prepare graduates as agents of social good in an unknown future. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 3 simonite an assignment based on data driven journalism: a case study this was followed by a list of the graduate attributes as adopted by oxford brookes university (ocsld, 2011): academic literacy, research literacy, critical self-awareness and personal literacy, digital and information literacy and global citizenship. further discussion encouraged students to think about what, in addition to subject knowledge and understanding, they expected to be the benefits of higher education, including influences on the kind of citizens they might become. the surveys selected for students to use were the british social attitudes survey 2009 (national centre for social research, 2011) and the citizenship survey 2009-10 (department for communities and local government, 2011). the students had to use the survey data to look for evidence of the impact of higher education on respondents’ attitudes, opinions, employment status or lifestyle by making comparisons either between graduates and non-graduates or between students and recent graduates. the use of statistics to investigate such topics meant that these students of mathematics and statistics were using disciplinary skills. the main output was a piece of writing, to be accompanied by a suitable graph or interactive data visualisation. to evaluate the assignment, students were asked to keep a record of the resources they accessed for the assignment and how they used them. these records were submitted to the module leader for information but were not assessed. students also completed a brief online feedback form. student activity during the assignment the students’ records of how they used resources showed that six stages were involved in completing the assignment. 1. researching graduate attributes/research question. 2. reading examples of datablogs. 3. using online data archive to understand and access data. 4. data analysis, extraction and manipulation of tables. 5. data visualisation. 6. writing. the students’ records showed that stages 1-5 all involved using digital resources. almost all the students had looked at university websites or electronic journals to research journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 4 simonite an assignment based on data driven journalism: a case study graduate attributes. the electronic data archive was used to access survey documentation and to analyse data. the students then used online visualisation tools or statistical software to represent the data graphically. stages 2 and 6 are concerned exclusively with written communication. writing an article for an online newspaper was a new task for all the students, and none were familiar with data driven journalism. for the assignment, all students read examples from the guardian datablog and, in some cases, other online publications. journalists’ writing tends to be clear and concise, setting a good example and allowing students to read several articles within the time it would take to read a single academic paper. most students cited four or five articles. the articles that students submitted were less formal and more fluent than their usual academic writing. most were well written and gave a sound interpretation of the data. the data visualisations varied, as students chose different tools or different kinds of diagrams, as appropriate for their chosen data. student evaluation and feedback students were asked to record, on a scale from 1(a little) to 5 (a great deal), the extent to which the assignment required them to carry out different activities related to researching the topic, accessing data, producing visualisations and writing the blog. ‘using electronic resources to access and analyse data’ was rated 4 or 5 by 77% of students. this was the activity rated as difficult by the highest percentage of students, perhaps because there were technical difficulties associated with using a particular browser. activities related to writing received the next highest ratings: ‘researching how datablogs are written’ was rated as 4 or 5 by 73% of students and ‘reviewing my draft article’ was rated as 4 or 5 by 68% of students. students were also asked to say what they found to be the biggest challenge in completing the assignment and their answers are summarised in table 1. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 5 simonite an assignment based on data driven journalism: a case study table 1. biggest challenge faced in working on the assignment: percentage of students (n = 21 students). accessing/analysing data online 29% creating the data visualisation 19% writing the article 19% finding research questions/data 14% time management 10% understanding open ended assignment/assessment criteria 10% four students mentioned writing as the biggest challenge, making the following comments: ‘writing up the data in an interesting way’, ‘writing the article was not as easy as i thought. i didn’t want it to be too formal’, ‘sticking to the word limit’ and ‘thinking about how to write a suitable blog’. benefits of the assignment the assignment provided a useful opportunity for mathematics and statistics students to practice written communication. litchfield et al. (2010) argue that being able to communicate with different audiences is crucial for graduates and by writing for a public readership students gained experience of a new audience. beer (2002) explains that often an aversion towards writing is part of a student’s attraction to studying technical, scientific or mathematical subjects. student feedback on the assignment recognised that writing was a key activity in the assignment but did not indicate negative reactions to the task, perhaps because of the many examples available and the relatively low word limit. the design of the assignment means that while multiple skills are developed and assessed, the assignment itself is small-scale. for the assessor, the short length of the final piece of work means that the assessment is efficient, particularly as a variety of skills are developed and tested. while the blog format limited the volume of students’ output, the depth of their research and the quality of their writing and data visualisation allowed for differentiation between individuals. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 6 simonite an assignment based on data driven journalism: a case study adapting to other stem subjects and other potential developments for the students of mathematics and statistics who took part in the case study, the discipline-based element consisted of the analysis of data and the interpretation and visualisation of results. many degree programmes in stem disciplines require skills in presenting data or knowledge of statistics. adapting the assignment for use in one of these subjects simply requires the selection of an alternative, discipline-based, topic and the provision of access to relevant data. in this way the assignment remains small-scale, with a genuine connection to the student’s discipline. further adaptations are possible: students’ work could be published online, creating exemplars for future students or forming a bridge between conventional written assignment and students’ dissertations or research publications. alternative sources of data could be used: students could make visualisations of data from a research paper or technical report, interview researchers about their work or write up one of their own laboratory or workshop projects as data driven journalism. conclusion the data driven journalism assignment gave students an opportunity to develop their writing skills in a discipline-based context and has huge potential for further development. the example described here incorporated a wide range of valuable learning activities for students, but, as the articles were short, was relatively efficient for the assessor and can be adapted for assessment within a wide range of stem disciplines. references beer, d.f. (2002) ‘reflections on why engineering students don’t like to write – and what we can do about it’, ieee international professional communication conference. portland, oregon, usa september 17-20, 2002; pp. 364 – 368. berners-lee, t. (2010) the year open data went world-wide. [video] available at: http://www.ted.com/talks/tim_berners_lee_the_year_open_data_went_worldwide.ht ml (accessed: 4 april 2012). journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 7 http://www.ted.com/talks/tim_berners_lee_the_year_open_data_went_worldwide.html http://www.ted.com/talks/tim_berners_lee_the_year_open_data_went_worldwide.html simonite an assignment based on data driven journalism: a case study bowden, j., hart, g., king, b., trigwell, k. and watts, o. (2000) generic capabilities of atn university graduates. available at: http://www.clt.uts.edu.au/atn.grad.cap.project.index.html (accessed: 3 april 2012). bridgstock, r. (2009) ‘the graduate attributes we’ve overlooked: enhancing graduate employability through career management skills’, higher education research and development, 28(1), pp. 31-44. department for communities and local government, ipsos mori (2011) citizenship survey, 2009-2010 [computer file]. colchester, essex: uk data archive [distributor], 2011. sn: 6733. available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.5255/ukda-sn-6733-1 (accessed: 27 october 2012). economic and social data service (esds) (2012) introduction to esds. available at: http://www.esds.ac.uk/ (accessed: 4 april 2012). european journalism centre (n.d) what is ddj? available at: http://datadrivenjournalism.net/ (accessed: 3 april 2012). green, w., hammer, s. and star, c. (2009) ‘facing up to the challenge: why is it so hard to develop graduate attributes?’, higher education research and development, 28(1), pp. 17-29. hughes, c. and barrie, s. (2010) ‘influences on the assessment of graduate attributes in higher education’, assessment and evaluation in higher education, 35(3), pp. 325334. litchfield, a., fawley, j. and nettleton, s. (2010) ‘contextualising and integrating into the curriculum the learning and teaching of work-ready professional graduate attributes’, higher education research and development, 29(5), pp. 519-534. national centre for social research (2011) british social attitudes survey, 2009 [computer file]. colchester, essex: uk data archive [distributor], 2011. sn: 6695, available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.5255/ukda-sn-6695-1 (accessed: 27 october 2012). journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 8 http://www.clt.uts.edu.au/atn.grad.cap.project.index.html http://dx.doi.org/10.5255/ukda-sn-6733-1 http://www.esds.ac.uk/ http://datadrivenjournalism.net/ http://dx.doi.org/10.5255/ukda-sn-6695-1 simonite an assignment based on data driven journalism: a case study oxford centre for staff and learning development (2011) brookes graduate attributes. available at: http://www.brookes.ac.uk/services/ocsld/sese/graduate_attributes.pdf (accessed: 4 april 2012). rogers, s. (ed.) (2012) guardian datablog. available at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog (accessed: 5 april 2012). yorke, m. and harvey, l. (2005) ‘graduate attributes and their development’, new directions for institutional research, 2005(128), pp. 41-58. author details dr vanessa simonite is an experienced lecturer in statistics. she has been involved in university and hea sponsored projects in statistics education and applied multilevel modelling techniques to analyse undergraduate achievement. vanessa has an additional role contributing to enhancing the student experience within the faculty of technology, design and environment at oxford brookes university. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 9 http://www.brookes.ac.uk/services/ocsld/sese/graduate_attributes.pdf http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog an assignment based on data driven journalism: a case study abstract introduction context the assignment student activity during the assignment student evaluation and feedback benefits of the assignment adapting to other stem subjects and other potential developments conclusion references author details literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 5: march 2013 facilitating reflective journaling – personal reflections on three decades of practice john cowan edinburgh napier university, uk abstract in what is frankly a first person account, i expand reflectively on my personal rationale and practice in the facilitation of students’ reflective journaling. i have taken such journaling to entail constructive self-questioning of the demands of past or future experience, written in a personal journal which is open confidentially to the facilitator and to none other. i emphasise the need in this process for a frank or congruent relationship with the learner, and for a facilitator isolated from tutorial activity, instruction or assessment – other than perhaps in facilitating self-assessment. i expand on nudging in this context, discuss assessment of reflection, report the apparent effectiveness of the suggested type of facilitation, and consider the demands which it makes on the facilitator’s time. i refer to the advice of other writers on this type of mentoring, where that is available and i have found it helpful. keywords: reflective journaling; facilitation; nudging; assessment; congruence; empathy; trust. background some thirty years ago, i was struggling to find ways to help first year students of civil engineering to develop the moderately transferable skills on which their higher level professional abilities should depend. together with a colleague, i planned to offer developmental activities once a week. i cannot recall what brought ‘the new diary’ by tristine rainer to my attention (rainer, 1980). but it suggested an additional learning activity. almost by chance, then, i conceived the notion to require my somewhat inarticulate first year engineering students to keep a weekly journal in which they would cowan facilitating reflective journaling: personal reflections on three decades of practice mull over their answers to the question: ‘what have i learnt about learning, or thought about thinking, which should make me more effective next week than i was last week?’. my colleague and i committed ourselves to facilitating that thinking within these journals confidentially – and speedily. the tale of these harrowing early days is reported elsewhere (cowan, 2006). by the middle of the second term, however, the value of the activity had been established for both students and facilitators. in the ensuing years, i have facilitated compulsory and voluntary journal writing, in hard copy and online, by undergraduate and postgraduate students, and by mature members of academic staff; in subject areas from engineering to social sciences, education and business studies. it is that accrued experience on which i have drawn to compile what follows. introduction i expect learners’ reflective journaling to centre on metacognitive thinking (which is thinking about one’s own thinking) by learners ruminating constructively on their thinking and feeling and doing. since this activity essentially entails dialogue with self (o'connell and dyment, 2011), it is by definition intrapersonal. it may sometimes extend to an overlying meta-metacognitive layer (which is thinking about the metacognitive thinking) in which the journal writer questions, probes and prompts their own metacognitive processes, seeking refinement and enhancement. i take the facilitation of reflective journaling to be an activity to prompt enhancement of a learner’s cognitive thinking skills and their engagement with affective matters such as values, principles and feelings. this facilitation depends upon the intimate use of interpersonal abilities (moon, 1999a, p.23), such as the ability to sense what matters to the journal writer, and how to ‘listen’ as well as to explain effectively. facilitative exchanges are thus essentially interpersonal and depend on intimate exchanges in which both pay attention to what the other says, writes or feels. reflective journaling may look backwards to what can be learnt from a compendium of recent experiences (moon, 2006). this reflection-on-action (brockbank and mcgill, 1998, pp.91-96) is carried out with hindsight after, and usually away from, the events concerned journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 2 cowan facilitating reflective journaling: personal reflections on three decades of practice (cox, 2005, p.460; zhu, 2011, p.769). it is a more general activity than critical incident analysis (ghaye and lillyman, 1997; moon, 1999a, p.209), which is a reflective analysis of the useful significance of one particular event (tripp, 1993). alternatively, reflection may look forward to challenges which lie ahead. this reflection-foraction (cowan, 2006, pp.50-55) anticipates forthcoming activity and identifies possible challenges and options, deliberating between possibilities and exploring plans for forthcoming experiences (van manen, 1991, p.101). it can be equated with clinical forethought (benner et al., 1999). there are relatively few publications containing detailed accounts of how facilitators promote the development of reflective ability (moon, 1999a, p.167; grossman, 2008). hence supportive citations are sparse in the main part of this paper. i have taken the risk of offering this personal account because it is generally agreed that journal writers benefit from reviews and constructive feedback from another (brockbank and mcgill, 1998; moon, 1999b, p.82). i write here as a facilitator of both types of reflective journaling, in terms of what i myself do, and why i do it, when i am seeking to promote what is primarily intrapersonal dialogue. i do not suggest what you, the reader, should do, or what anyone else should do when facilitating. i leave it to you and other readers to work that out for yourselves. congruence my starting point in facilitating reflective intrapersonal dialogue is to establish a frank and trusting interpersonal relationship. by exhibiting what rogers called congruence (rogers, 1980), i attempt to be in touch with each student before they expect to hear from me. i try to get our relationship under way in advance of their expectations, in a form which is unexpectedly outwith academic norms as they usually know them, and distinct from the tutorial approach with which they are probably familiar. i try to establish briefly, implicitly, and without formality, that i am simply going to be a supportive person. this may be a paradigm shift for them (brockbank and mcgill, 1998, p.62), as i will not provide helpful instruction and direction as an effective tutor would do. i hope that our contact will lead naturally into a collegial or avuncular relationship, featuring trust and authenticity (brookfield, 1990, pp.164-176), and again distinct from a typical tutor/student relationship journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 3 cowan facilitating reflective journaling: personal reflections on three decades of practice in which the tutor provides formative and summative judgements of the student’s work. i am aware, of course, that there are other views on the desirable contact style for facilitators, preferring critical reflective comments to the provision of facilitative support (moon, 1999a, pp.167-168). why do i pursue congruence, then? i want to empower each learner supportively and without exercising authority, within a ring-fenced area of activity where their self-directed learning and development will be self-assessed. i try to help them to be the best that they can be – but always leave them to decide what to do and how to do it. often they may already have known me previously as an active instructor. but past relationships should be set aside when the facilitated reflection begins. my sole role and engagement is now merely to do what bruner (1986) called nudging. i nudge the learners forward into vygotsky’s zone of proximal development (vygotsky, 1978) – where they can make more progress though prompting than they could manage on their own. i do no more than that. i certainly do not instruct or tutor. ring-fencing our relationship ring-fencing the area for facilitated learning and development is an important principle (vlachopoulos and cowan, 2010). why do i wish to operate in a limited ring-fenced role? i need to find ways to encourage the students to relate to me simply as their facilitator; i should put any involvement in prior activity behind me. if they wish to have their work judged, or to receive supplementary instruction, then they should find someone else to do that. my role is simply to help them directly to be effective in whatever they do. so my facilitating should keep me within the ring-fenced personal area of the learner’s reflective learning and development. introducing myself and the task i do not bombard new face-to-face acquaintances with information about me; we simply grow into knowing each other. i hope my virtual student and i will grow into knowing each other similarly. i let them discover me naturally, as our relationship develops. several students have volunteered that ‘it’s so much easier to be frank with you about my journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 4 cowan facilitating reflective journaling: personal reflections on three decades of practice difficulties when you’re just a name at the foot of a screen’ (cowan, 2010b). so i would rather not describe myself or send a bio or a photograph at the outset. i’m happy to let information emerge naturally as our relationship develops. the students should have an early opportunity to talk freely and frankly to former student journal writers about what reflective writing has meant for them. someone should arrange for them to learn what ‘stream of consciousness’ writing (cowan, 2009) entails. they should then join in groups to read and discuss the qualities of two or three reflective journal entries of above and below reasonable standard. they will be prompted to identify in their own terms the strengths and weaknesses of these examples (weedon and cowan, 2002; cowan, 2002). questioning for reflection when journal writers begin their reflective task, i ask them to remind themselves what reflective question they are addressing. reflective writing, i suggest, should be focused. at any point in the written conversation with themselves, they should know what question they are trying to answer. perhaps they will even find it helpful to write or key that question, before they begin. they should certainly feel free to change their question as they proceed. but, at any stage in reflection, they should be clear about the question whose answer they are then seeking. in academic and professional reflection, there can be two main types of question. a student working for the first time on an investigation project can usefully reflect each week: ‘what is the next challenge i have to tackle, and how should i cope with it?’. answering such questions calls for reflection-for-action. equally valuable is a question which looks back analytically on a recent experience. the student may enquire ‘which of my advice to myself last week proved effective, what did i have to change and why, and what did i introduce? what have i learnt from that for next week, then?’. such questions call for reflection-on-action. there are many possible questions and purposes for reflection (moon, 1999a, pp. 155158; van manen, 1991), just as there are many possible contexts for reflection. what is important is that the question in hand is clear at the time to the journal writer; and that it journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 5 cowan facilitating reflective journaling: personal reflections on three decades of practice relates to the development with which they hope and expect reflection should be able to assist them. drawing on my own experience of reflecting early on, i will briefly share with learners (using examples) three practices which have become important to me, when i myself write reflectively. the first, already mentioned, is that reflection becomes worthwhile when i specifically address a relevant question for which i do not yet have an answer, and whose answer or part answer should be useful to me. the second is that, like others (brockbank and mcgill, 1998; moon, 1999a, p.95), i have found that my reflection is opened up if i think about my immediate feelings about the question or situation before i begin to seek an answer. the third is that the most effective facilitation has occurred for me in a relationship in which journal writer and facilitator are frank and open with one another. this last practice accords with brookfield’s emphasis on ‘practising what you preach’ to establish a trusting relationship (brookfield, 1993). so, when learners send me their reflection for my facilitative comments, i send them my own reflection for the same week. this enhances my current experience of being reflective, with constructive development of my own abilities (moon, 1999a, p.188). responding to an incoming journal nowadays i ask that journals be sent to me as a word attachment. i acknowledge this with a brief message thanking the writer, promising to be back soon with comments, and sending them my current journal in exchange, and inviting their comments in return. i read and comment on what the student journal writer has written, using the ‘comment’ facility in word. usually i only read once, and comment as i go along. this is cost-effective use of my time. i also suspect that a student’s ‘stream of consciousness’ writing is entitled to stream of consciousness commenting! some early journals will be extensive diary entries containing only a factual record (o'connell and dyment, 2011). in such cases i might gently comment that ‘i notice that you’ve not written anything about the feelings which seem to lie beneath the surface of journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 6 cowan facilitating reflective journaling: personal reflections on three decades of practice your account so far. would it maybe be helpful to think briefly about these and the questions they raise for you?’ nudging i regularly encounter five common weaknesses in reflective journaling calling for me to nudge. these are: • disregard of underlying assumptions. • neglect of the implications, conclusions. • going straight for the ‘obvious’ choice, and failing to consider other possible (and difficult) options (king and kitchener, 1994, p.201). • confident assertions with no justification or reason considered. • disregard of facts or aspects of the experience inconsistent with the on-going reflection. when i notice any of these, i do not correct; nor do i offer specific suggestions; i just nudge the writer to explore their possibly weak thinking in more depth. disregarded assumptions may lead me to comment: ‘sometimes it helps to declare your assumptions, to yourself at least, and then to check that you can substantiate them’. if implications have been disregarded, i may comment: ‘when we make plans, it’s useful to explore the various possible outcomes. do you feel that you did that sufficiently here?’. when i see a fact or feature which does not seem to fit, i may comment: ‘john wonders how that fits in with the other facts you have’. i resist the temptation to hint at the detail of missing options: ‘here you make a straight decision about what to do. most decision making involves thoughtful consideration of possibilities. how did you do that?’. unjustified assertions perhaps call for a subtle approach: ‘would it help to explain to yourself a little more about how you got from these facts to that conclusion?’ (the question journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 7 cowan facilitating reflective journaling: personal reflections on three decades of practice mark protects me here). only seldom, bluntly and maybe too bluntly: ‘how would you justify this conclusion?’. i ask for, expect, and usually receive, no explicit response to my nudging. using the cover note for specific feedforward i find it helpful to use the return e-mail cover note sparingly for feedforward, offering constructive advice in general terms about what to do next time (sadler, 1998). ‘you have described your experience; next time, try to go on to ask constructive questions of that experience’, or ‘it may help next time to concentrate your descriptions only on those aspects of the situation which are relevant in your reflection’. or, when a risk is mentioned (brookfield, 1994; moon, 1999a, p.169): ‘yes, there is indeed a risk in what you suggest; not many advances are risk free. how have you decided if this one is worth taking?’. or, constructively: ‘i notice that you are asking yourself questions that i might have been asking you six weeks ago. now you are demanding answers to your own questions. well done!’. as a facilitating relationship develops, i occasionally find it appropriate to congruently share an experience of my own. this may be helpful for the journal writer. for example, i might empathise with someone struggling with that remarkably common student experience of having clearly and persuasively presented to her group what she is still sure was a better plan for action – only to see it rejected. she may well be asking: ‘what did i do wrong? how could i tackle this kind of thing next time?’. i might comment: join the club! only last month i made the case for reading/preparation time in certain exams, only to have it rejected by the exam board chair because ‘it’s too unconventional’. i asked ‘what degree of unconventionality are you prepared to accept?’. i got nowhere, of course. like you, i was left asking myself what i did wrong, and how i could tackle this kind of disappointment next time. notice i offered no advice; i simply shared a similar experience. i was hoping that this would encourage further thoughtful self-questioning about what to do next time – which in fact it did do. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 8 cowan facilitating reflective journaling: personal reflections on three decades of practice time demands there may seem to be an inordinate amount of effort involved in my facilitation. is it feasible within a normal workload? i will answer this important question briefly in a few factual statements: • when i first facilitated in this way, i was committed to 18 hours per week of class contact time, three research students, my own research, a wife, three young children and a dog. i believe all had adequate attention from me. • the workload i describe is most intense at the initial stages. it tails off steadily, or even rapidly, as the journal writers learn to self-facilitate. • terse, clearly worded facilitative comments are valued by journal writers for their clarity, and save the facilitator’s time, too. • during the facilitated part of learner-directed learning, there is no need to allocate resources for online tutoring. • feeding-forward facilitation (black and wiliam, 1998) earns attractively high ratings in the national student survey returns under feedback. • the overall hours i have devoted to student support are compatible with national expectations – provided i am well organised in the way i handle postings! effectiveness i hope that three examples will inform about the effectiveness of facilitating in this way: example 1: it was as a very naïve facilitator, working with a colleague who was equally naïve, that i introduced reflective journaling centred on transferable abilities for first year students of civil engineering. our students were taught first year maths, physics and chemistry together with mechanical and electrical engineers. those who did well in our arrangements for their reflective reviewing of the development of their abilities, moved up the ranking order in the overall first year class in these three common subjects, and they tended to retain their improved positions in later years (cowan, 1987). example 2: after example 1 had been in place for a few years, graham gibbs invited himself to interview second year students about their unusual experience in their first year. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 9 cowan facilitating reflective journaling: personal reflections on three decades of practice to my surprise, he reported confidentially having met a number, perhaps 25%, who went on keeping reflective journals in their second year – although these were not required of them, and were not facilitated. they found it useful, they told him. i cannot think of any other coursework which students do without being so required. example 3: i recently tutored a part-time post-graduate student of business studies who was required in a project module to keep a weekly reflective journal. she struggled with her first couple of submissions. she has subsequently published her strong conviction that the journaling was her most important academic experience in that particular module. so much is this so that she keeps a journal whenever asked to tackle a new challenge at work, and has been encouraging several of her colleagues to do likewise (cowan and cherry, 2012). inappropriate reflections a student who has found reflection helpful might write a journal entry agonising about how to repair a fractured friendship, or how to cope with the onset of acute depression, or whether or not to have an abortion. these are not academic matters, and should not concern an academic facilitator. i have been confronted only once with each of these three examples of non-academic reflection. i have found that a simple facilitative nudge to consider who best to consult has led to the concern being referred to the appropriate professional. this took the matter outwith the ring-fence. confidentiality and privacy i resist the emotive argument in defence of a journal writer’s right to absolute privacy (biggs, 1999, p.262; moon, 1999a, p.196). that privacy may be valid in the case of a personal diary. but the journaling which i facilitate is explicitly and formatively concerned with the development of abilities which are professional priorities for the journal writer and intended learning outcomes for the course team. it thus seems to me appropriate and desirable that the student should have access to formative academic facilitation, to support their self-managed development of these relevant abilities. so i see no problem, nor apparently do my students, in my having access to what they are writing, thinking and journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 10 cowan facilitating reflective journaling: personal reflections on three decades of practice planning – provided our relationship is such that my function is constructive and confidential and trustworthy. teacher-assessment of reflection but should this reflecting be assessed and, if so, how? if you wish to pursue this complex issue and the debate around it, you will find a useful starting point in moon (moon, 1999b, pp.91-93). she sets out the reasons for assessment (moon, 2004, pp.155-156) and those against (moon, 2004, p.150). the distinction, for her and for me, lies in whether the reflection is a process or a product (moon, 1999b, p.94). assessing on the evidence of competency in reflective practice features in moon (1999a, p.198; with other examples in moon, 1999b, pp.98-104). there is also rich coverage of assessment of reflection in brockbank and mcgill (1998, pp.193-205), and more recently in bourner (2003) and leijen et al. (2011). these feature deep issues which have been discussed at length elsewhere – but which, fortunately, lie outwith the ring-fence within which my style of facilitator operates. in that detached position, i see three problems with teacher-assessment of reflection. the first is the natural inclination of cue-conscious and cue-seeking reflective learners (miller and parlett, 1974) to concentrate on the hidden curriculum of assessment (snyder, 1973; sambell and mcdowell, 1998), and to deliberately mould their reflective behaviour in that direction. sadly they then write for others and not for themselves. my second problem is the usual limitation of any scheme involving predetermined criteria and objectives; intended learning outcomes leave no flexibility to cater for the variable and valuable unintended learning outcomes (biggs, 1999) which should be a notable feature of individualised learning and development. my third problem is that the content of assessed reflective journals passes into the semi-public domain, and is likely to be discussed by more than the journal writer and the facilitator. even where the journal content is purely academic, this semi-public scrutiny may embarrass, and constrain, both parties. a common hazard in this respect is reflection on difficulties allegedly generated by a colleague of the assessor. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 11 cowan facilitating reflective journaling: personal reflections on three decades of practice self-assessment of reflection i have reported elsewhere, mainly in partnership with student writers (boyd and cowan, 1986; cowan et al., 1999), regarding the impact of self-assessment on student learning and development. all my ventures in this area have assumed a first tentative and commitment-free experience in which students test the authenticity of the offer to selfassess (cowan, 1988). the literature on this approach is now strongly persuasive (boud and falchikov, 2006; boud, 2009). the key finding seems to be that the students take responsibility for choosing and formulating aims and criteria. consequently they become constructively involved in monitoring, reviewing and (in the fullness of time) assembling a summative self-assessment (cowan, 2010a). that rationale certainly commends full selfassessment to me, if assessment of reflective activity is desired. is facilitation worth the effort? i constantly experience great joy from seeing students of all levels of ability reflecting and hence maturing, becoming self-sufficient, and thinking critically as adults. as our relationship proceeds, the need for my facilitation drops off. sometimes my only comment to them is that ‘i found nothing on which to make a facilitative comment, which is a comment in itself’. around this stage, students may tell me in their covering note that ‘i do not think i need you any more, john. i’ve been anticipating your comments and responding to them as i went along’. when this redundancy emerges, i joyfully discover once again what carl rogers envisaged in his first edition of ‘freedom to learn’ (rogers, 1969), which was tellingly sub-titled ‘a view of what education might become’. and when it is all over? as a facilitator, i often feel a fleeting empathy with parent birds that have cared for and raised their chicks from before the moment when they broke out of their shells. the parents have hunted for food and brought it back to the nest to feed their constantly hungry offspring. they have protected their young in their formative years. they have judged the moment to urge them to spread their wings and fly in a safe environment. and so one day the chicks take off confidently, and fly away – without a backward look or journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 12 cowan facilitating reflective journaling: personal reflections on three decades of practice acknowledgement, knowing that they are doing this in their own strength and will be selfsufficient in the exciting life ahead of them. it must be a somewhat sad time for the parent birds, just as it is for a facilitator of academic development. but i would not for a moment have it otherwise. second thoughts has this just been a review of one practice repeated on thirty consecutive occasions? i hope not, and believe not. fairly authoritarian commenting was soon replaced by nonjudgemental facilitation; increasingly sensitivity to affective needs emerged, and featured in the facilitation; the dialogue between facilitative tutor and learner developed, and became a valued feature for both. my account does not do justice to this learning on my part, but it has surely been there. acknowledgements i am deeply grateful to pauline ridley, whose enthusiasm and encouragement led me to engage in the pleasant task of reminiscing in order to bring these thoughts together. i am also grateful to john hilsdon and the jldhe reviewers for assisting me to get them into a form suitable for publication. references benner, p., hooper-kyriakidis, p. and stannard, d. (1999) clinical wisdom and interventions in clinical care: a thinking-in-action approach. philadelphia, pa: saunders. biggs, j. (1999) teaching for quality learning at university. buckingham: open university press. black, p and wiliam, d. "assessment and classroom learning," assessment in education, march 1998, pp. 7-74 journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 13 cowan facilitating reflective journaling: personal reflections on three decades of practice boud, d. (2009) assessment futures. available at: www.assessmentfutures.com (accessed: 5 march 2013). boud, d. and falchikov, n. (2006) rethinking assessment in higher education. learning for the longer term. london: routledge. bourner, t. (2003) ‘assessing reflective learning’, education and training, 45(5), pp. 267272. boyd, h.r. and cowan, j. (1986) ‘the case for self-assessment based on recent studies of student learning’, assessment and evaluation in higher education, 10(3), pp. 225-235. brockbank, a. and mcgill, i. (1998) facilitating reflective learning in higher education. buckingham: open university press. brookfield, s.d. (1990) the skilful teacher. san francisco: jossey-bass. brookfield, s.d. (1993) ‘through the lens of learning: how the visceral experience of learning reframes teaching’, in boud, d., cohen, r. and walker, d. (eds.) using experience for learning. buckingham: open university press, pp. 21-32. brookfield, s.d. (1994) ‘tales from the dark side; a phenomenography of adult critical reflection’, international journal of lifelong education, 13(5), pp. 203-216. bruner, j. (1986) actual minds, possible worlds. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. cowan, j. (1987) education for capability in engineering education. unpublished deng thesis. edinburgh: heriot-watt university. cowan, j. (1988) ‘struggling with self-assessment’, in boud, d. (ed.) student autonomy in learning. london: kogan page, pp. 192-210. cowan, j. (2002) plus/minus marking: a method of assessment worth considering. york: higher education academy. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 14 http://www.assessmentfutures.com/ cowan facilitating reflective journaling: personal reflections on three decades of practice cowan, j. (2006) on becoming an innovative university teacher. 2nd edn. maidenhead: open university press. cowan, j. (2009) ‘breaking the rules: writing reflectively for yourself’, in mertens, n.l. (ed.) writing, processes, tools and techniques. new york: nova science publishers, ch. 8.1-5. cowan, j. (2010a) ‘developing the ability for making evaluative judgements’, teaching in higher education, 15(3), pp. 323-334. cowan, j. (2010b) ‘virtual relationships – behind a veil?’, academic identities for the 21st century. university of strathclyde, glasgow 16-18 june. glasgow: university of strathclyde, pp. 53-59. cowan, j. and cherry, d. (2012) ‘the learner’s role in assessing higher level abilities’, practitioner research in higher education, 6(1), pp. 12-22. cowan, j., joyce, j., mcpherson, d. and weedon, e.m. (1999) ‘self-assessment of reflective journaling – and its effect on the learning outcomes’, 4th northumbria assessment conference. northumbria university, newcastle 1-3 september. cox, e. (2005) ‘adult learners learning from experience: using a reflective practice model to support work-based learning’, reflective practice, 6(4), pp. 459-472. ghaye, a. and lillyman, s. (1997) learning journals and critical incidents. dinton: quay books. grossman, r. (2008) ‘structures for facilitating student reflection’, college teaching, 57(1), pp. 15-22. king, p.m. and kitchener, k.s. (1994) developing reflective judgment. san francisco: jossey-bass publishers. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 15 cowan facilitating reflective journaling: personal reflections on three decades of practice leijen, a., valtna, k., leijen, d.a. and pedaste, m. (2011) ‘how to determine the quality of students' reflections?’, studies in higher education, 37(2), pp. 203-217. miller, c.m. and parlett, c. (1974) up to the mark: a study of the examination game. london: society for research into higher education. moon, j. (1999a) reflection in learning and professional development. london: kogan page. moon, j. (1999b) learning journals. london: kogan page. moon, j. (2004) a handbook of reflective and experiential learning. london: routledgefalmer. moon, j. (2006) learning journals: a handbook for reflective practice and professional development. london: routledge. o'connell, t.s. and dyment, j.e. (2011) ‘the case of reflective journals: is the jury still out?’, reflective practice, 12(1), pp. 47-59. rainer, t. (1980) the new diary. london: angus and robertson. rogers, c.r. (1969) freedom to learn – a view of what education might become. columbus, ohio: merrill. rogers, c.r. (1980) a way of being. boston, ma: houghton mifflin. sadler, d. (1998) ‘formative assessment: revisiting the territory’, assessment in education, 5(1), pp. 77-84. sambell, k. and mcdowell, l. (1998) ‘the construction of the hidden curriculum: messages and meanings in the assessment of student learning’, assessment and evaluation in higher education, 23(4), pp. 391-402. snyder, b. (1973) the hidden curriculum. cambridge: mit press. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 16 cowan facilitating reflective journaling: personal reflections on three decades of practice tripp, d. (1993) critical incidents in teaching: developing professional judgement. london: routledge. van manen, m. (1991) the tact of teaching: the meaning of pedagogical thoughtfulness. new york: suny press. vlachopoulos, p. and cowan, j. (2010) ‘reconceptualising moderation in asynchronous online discussions using grounded theory’, distance education, 31(1), pp. 23–36. vygotsky, l. (1978) mind in society. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. weedon, e.m. and cowan, j. (2002) ‘the kolb cycle, reflection and all that.... what is new?. in improving student learning, theory and practice 10 years on. oxford: oxford centre for staff and learning development. zhu, x. (2011) ‘student teachers' reflection during practicum: plenty on action, few in action’, reflective practice, 12(6), pp. 763-775. author details in 1971 john cowan created what was to become the largest departmental unit for resource-based learning in the uk. he innovated by enabling his students to learn in their own ways, and with objectives chosen by themselves. he was a pioneer of accredited self-assessment, the first professor of engineering education in the uk, a signatory to the education for capability manifesto, and open university scottish director and professor of learning development until 1997. he has facilitated reflective journaling since 1982, and is still so facilitating. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 17 facilitating reflective journaling – personal reflections on three decades of practice abstract background introduction congruence ring-fencing our relationship introducing myself and the task questioning for reflection drawing on my own experience of reflecting responding to an incoming journal nudging using the cover note for specific feedforward time demands effectiveness inappropriate reflections confidentiality and privacy teacher-assessment of reflection self-assessment of reflection is facilitation worth the effort? and when it is all over? second thoughts acknowledgements references author details literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 6: november 2013 ‘i am just so delighted – now i know i can do it!’ – how collaboration between nurse lecturers and academic skills tutors promotes students’ confidence celia butters glyndŵr university, uk sheila kerfoot glyndŵr university, uk peggy murphy bangor university, uk alison williams glyndŵr university, uk abstract this paper showcases two collaborative projects between academic skills tutors and nurse lecturers aimed at increasing students’ writing and numerical skills. both projects work proactively with students to increase their potential to succeed. feedforward works on developing students’ academic writing skills and the numerate project develops their confidence with numbers. the collaboration has had a positive effect on student retention within the university’s pre-registration nursing course. the feedback from students suggests that these interventions have helped to increase their confidence in their ability to learn. keywords: proactive; collaboration; development; confidence; feedforward; feedback; retention; assessment; numeracy; numerate; drug calculations; student engagement and student success. butters et al. ‘i am just so delighted – now i know i can do it!’ introduction any projects that are directed towards promoting student success need to be inclusive of the entire student population. glyndŵr university (2011/12 2013/14) has a high proportion of students with a disclosed disability, 19.8% of the entire student body. in nursing, however, this figure is much higher. the pre-registration nursing periodic review (glyndwr, 2011) records that 35% of pre-registration nursing students receive disabled student allowance (dsa) with most of them reporting dyslexia. these two projects were designed not only to identify learning needs early on, in the case of feedforward, but each project also acknowledged diversity within the student population. any teaching and learning strategy aiming to address the needs of student diversity helps to enhance the learning of all students. both feedforward and numerate were designed to help all students to feel more confident about the transition from one level of study to another. in the case of feedforward it was from level 3 to level 4. academic skills and numeracy support is also available for all students via the academic skills centre which is based in the university library in an area which is highly visible. the academic skills tutors (asts) hope that visiting the centre will be seen by students as normal behaviour when visiting the library. staff work with students in full view, thereby seeking to normalise the process and to dispel any idea of its activities having a remedial focus (although semi-private screened areas are available if students prefer this or are distressed). the main reasons cited by students for their attendance at the academic skills centre are for support in the structure of work, help with the referencing of sources and for reassurance. confidence-building is often a large part of any interaction with students who attend the university’s academic skills centre. students often seek reassurance that they ‘are on the right lines’ or have ‘got the right idea’. asts introduce an element of mentoring or coaching to many students who seem to lack confidence in their abilities. they are well placed to offer this since they stand outside the subject area and can be seen by students as a ‘safe’ person to whom they can express their worries. as an illustration of the academic skills team’s work, we offer the following vignette: a despairing student was considering giving up her studies. she had not achieved a mark higher than 42% in semester 1 due to her inability to express herself clearly and to organise the structure of her work. after fortnightly meetings with an ast over semester 2, she telephoned to inform journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 2 butters et al. ‘i am just so delighted – now i know i can do it!’ us she had received marks for her three assignments: 63%, 65% and 66%. she said ‘i am just so delighted – now i know i can do it!’. literature review being under-prepared for tertiary level study is nothing new. tinto (1975) identified it as a reason for students dropping out of their studies more than 35 years ago. more recently, lack of preparedness for study was still one of several reasons given by students for noncompletion of their programmes (national audit office, 2007). one of the factors cited by students was not having the study skills in place for success (national audit office, 2007). some recent studies have concluded that while the ability to write well at university may be assumed by lecturers, the reality can be somewhat different (inter alia coffin et al., 2003; moon, 2005; ganobcsik-williams, 2006; crabtree et al., 2007; groves et al., 2010; johnston, 2010; wingate and andon, 2011). some studies acknowledge that, while an assumption of competent written ability may have been understandable at one time, the changing nature of the student body (increased numbers, increasing diversity, widening participation) has led to its no longer being justified. the national union of students (nus) has recognised the need for its members to develop effective study skills and has launched a charter with recommendations for the provision of study skills support (nus, 2012). it states that academic support is vital to give students confidence to continue their studies. the charter incorporates recommendations for students to be given information about the academic support provision available so that key messages about study skills are received at various points throughout a student’s programme of study. it is recognised that student success is dependent upon early engagement with higher education (he) (thomas, 2012). working with the students early on is essential but it is also crucial that students who require support establish early engagement with all of the services that the university offers. inherent within this though, is students’ perception of their need for study skills support. some may consider that their academic writing is perfectly adequate and may consider the lecturer who gives them a low mark to be a ‘hard marker’ (it is perceived that the low mark is the fault of the lecturer, not the student). journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 3 butters et al. ‘i am just so delighted – now i know i can do it!’ others may be crushed by the low mark and feel too embarrassed or ashamed to seek help. as knowles et al. (1998) assert, where adults feel that their experiences are devalued, for example, in the low mark for what a student may consider to be a wellwritten essay, then adults will perceive this as a rejection of themselves as persons. this may account (at least in part) for the student who decides that university is not for them and drops out of their course. it is an important point; yorke (2003) found that students may lose confidence if the distinction between product and person is not made. therefore, it is good practice to ensure that the language used in feedback makes it clear that the comments refer to the work and not to the student. boone (2010) identifies the student ‘wounded writer’ who has not experienced adequacy in writing and argues that outcomes for basic writers are powerfully contingent on how they are introduced to academic writing. the authors agree, and would add that if the basics of academic writing are not introduced at an early stage then it would not be surprising if students flounder when they write their first assignments. what is being asked of students is quite complex. they are required to plan their assignments, read effectively, analyse evidence, write well, use appropriate citation and referencing, structure their work and demonstrate their content knowledge. perhaps in recognition of this, moon (2005) declares that an input at the beginning of a programme alone is hardly likely to be adequate. while expounding the view that the teaching of writing should be seen principally as a developmental and not a remedial process, she cites the need for multiple inputs, including some for postgraduate students who may need support with writing theses. cottrell (2001, p.9), makes the distinction between subject knowledge and study skills thus: ‘study skills development is not an alternative to the knowledge base but a way of enhancing learning potential so that the knowledge is more accessible and better understood’. this elegant explanation of the role of study skills could help students to realise the importance of developing their skills and to appreciate the link between the acquisition of study skills and the successful completion of a programme of study. students are increasingly anxious about maths testing within nurse education and this anxiety has been further compounded by the need to achieve a 100% pass rate in drug calculations prior to registration (nursing and midwifery council (nmc), 2010). anxiety journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 4 butters et al. ‘i am just so delighted – now i know i can do it!’ surrounding maths can begin early in school life (roykenes and larson, 2010). studies by walsh (2008) acknowledge the link between nursing students and maths anxiety, and glaister (2007) contends that the fear of maths can often have a negative impact on the students’ ability to learn. by working collaboratively, asts and lecturers can help to allay some of the fears surrounding maths by way of building the students’ confidence on commencement of the nursing programme. the students’ anxiety about mathematical ability is shared by the regulatory body for nursing, the nursing and midwifery council (nmc). the nmc have responded to concerns about the numerical impact surrounding safe administration of medications by introducing gateways that must be achieved at certain points within the nurse education three year programme (nmc, 2010). accordingly, the nmc (2010) recommend that higher educational institutions (heis) incorporate numeracy testing within the pre-registration nursing programme. furthermore, at the point of entry onto the professional register, a 100% pass mark must be achieved in medication related calculations. in response to these requirements the newly validated bsc nursing programme, which commenced september 2012, incorporates summative numeracy assessment at the end of all three years. at the end of year one the mark required is 80%, rising to 90% at the end of year two with 100% required at the end of year three. moreover, once they have been admitted to the professional nursing register students now have to undertake a numeracy assessment prior to interview for nursing posts within the local health board. it was as a result of student anxiety surrounding mathematics that the authors decided to introduce additional sessions, known as numerate, which were jointly facilitated by the academic lecturer and the ast. team teaching these sessions proved particularly effective, providing the students with the underpinning mathematical knowledge whilst linking the theory behind the mathematical formula to a ‘real’ nursing scenario. focus of collaboration in the university’s nursing department we understand that asts as well as academic staff are essential in helping students to develop essay writing and numeracy skills, and we work in partnership to support students. the asts are invited to address the new cohorts of students during their first week in university to inform them of the support available to all journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 5 butters et al. ‘i am just so delighted – now i know i can do it!’ students with both numeracy for drug calculations and academic writing. during this first week, students are also provided with a tour of the library facilities and are shown the resources (such as study skills books and study skills resources on the virtual learning environment (moodle) provided at the academic skills centre. facilitating the students to work with asts in the first module is a way to proactively manage student transition from further education (fe) to he. first year students are in an unfamiliar environment, working with difficult new material and surrounded by strangers. falling into familiar study habits may provide some comforting semblance of a known routine. however, if those study habits are ineffective or counter-productive, a discussion with a lecturer or ast may help the under-confident student to achieve more by working differently. of course, this presupposes that a student will have the confidence and motivation to seek out someone with whom to discuss their study methods. where students choose not to take this route, they may continue with ineffective study methods which could impact upon their academic achievement and their levels of confidence in their academic ability. this is where lecturers in specific subject areas can help by signposting their students to the support available from asts. the feedforward project encourages students to make the connection between assessment, feedback and learning. it also gives students the opportunity to reflect upon early formative feedback and think about designing their own strategy for succeeding. the project was initially offered to new students on the university pre-registration nursing programme but feedforward is now also offered at levels five, six and seven. support is therefore available to students for both subject knowledge and study skills development. with regard to numeracy support, asts and nursing lecturers work closely together during the first year of the pre-registration nursing programme to provide the underpinning numerical knowledge required to calculate drug dosages safely, whilst second year nursing students were alerted to the opportunity to update their numerical skills via the numerate project. this project aimed to improve student numerical confidence and skills in line with the new nmc (2010) requirements of 100% competency in dosage calculations at the point of registration. it also encouraged independent learning whilst developing a deeper understanding and appreciation of the skills required for accurate drug calculation. moreover it addressed potential issues of retention in light of the new nmc (2010) requirements which required 100% pass in medication related calculations at the point of point of entry to the register. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 6 butters et al. ‘i am just so delighted – now i know i can do it!’ description of feedforward intervention pre-registration nursing students are required to start writing their first assignment in the first couple of weeks of commencing their university course. this can be a critical time for students and some struggle to cope with the transition from fe to he. if we can help students to produce at least a reasonable first assignment they can use this as a platform to build their confidence. the feedback offered (as feedforward) not only helps develop subject knowledge, but also their writing ability. if the first assignment contains too much critical feedback and a low mark without advising the student how to put things right, new students can become discouraged and may start to think about withdrawing from their studies. figure 1. timetable of feedforward. the feedforward project keeps to a tight time frame to ensure that the students engage from the first week of the programme (see figure 1). students are informed about the project on their first day and the assignment brief is launched later that week. feedforward promotes learning through a collaborative process involving the student, the academic tutor and, for a number of students, the asts (see figure 2. cycle of feedforward to promote student engagement and learning). the time frame is structured to allow the journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 7 butters et al. ‘i am just so delighted – now i know i can do it!’ students time to reflect on their own and the tutor’s comments and act upon suggestions prior to their submission date. figure 2. cycle of feedforward to promote student engagement and learning. students are given a structured timeline of when to submit their draft so they can receive practical written feedback on how to improve their work. they are given an ‘edit your own draft’ checklist (see figure 3) to encourage them into the habit of assessing their own work. they also receive a projected mark, together with detailed written feedback, to give them information on how to close the gap between their actual and their required (or desired) performance. another important proactive element of this work is that it gives the academic tutor the opportunity to assess whether students need signposting to any of the support services.   journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 8 butters et al. ‘i am just so delighted – now i know i can do it!’ figure 3. edit your own draft. question yes/no comments have i interpreted the assignment brief? does the introduction clearly state the intention and structure of my essay? is the answer well-structured and written in a logical sequence? does the essay move fluidly from one paragraph to the next? are the arguments clear and based upon evidence from the literature? have i supported each argument with references and examples from the literature? have i answered all of the main points? have i covered each point in sufficient depth to demonstrate learning? have i provided references throughout the essay and a list at the end? have i removed any less significant descriptive writing that was not essential? have i avoided including any new information in my conclusion? does the conclusion tie in with my introduction and main body? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 9 butters et al. ‘i am just so delighted – now i know i can do it!’ if any student receives a projected score of 45% or below they are advised to book a tutorial with one of the asts who can tailor academic skills support specifically for individual learning needs. burke (2011) noted that it was the more academic students who would collect their annotated assessments. she established that out of the pile of assessments that were not collected by her students most were failed assignments. this suggests that students who need feedback most are the least likely to access it. feedforward aims to proactively engage all students, regardless of ability, to see that they can affect their own marks. it enables students to plot their own learning trajectory by collaborating with academic and asts and using feedback constructively. how feedforward engages students the project aims to help students make sense of their feedback. every draft was annotated by the tutor with practical advice on how to improve their assignment before submission. weaver (2006) found that despite knowing how crucial feedback is to learning, educationalists spend little time explaining what the feedback means to students. she found that 75% of students receive no guidance on how to apply feedback before entering he, and hattie and timperley (2007) found that 50% of students in he receive no guidance about what to do with their feedback. this is where working with asts can help students make sense of what is required of them. asts can help to unpack the ‘educational speak’ and develop students’ understanding of feedback by explaining how they can improve their work. feedforward gives students an opportunity to reflect on written feedback to improve their work prior to the final submission. students also receive a projected mark so that they can measure their progress from draft to actual submission. students learn that working with asts can improve their projected mark. they also begin to understand the importance of engaging with feedback for learning. when feedback is only offered summatively students can feel passive as it highlights mistakes at a time when they cannot rectify them. this project offers sound advice on what parts they did well, as well as how to address the weaker elements prior to final submission. feedforward is provided in sufficient time for journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 10 butters et al. ‘i am just so delighted – now i know i can do it!’ the student to reflect upon advice and increase their chance of success. students can therefore move from being passive to active participants in the feedback cycle. evidence of impact most students who engaged with feedfoward improved their work. this was measured by plotting their projected mark and comparing it to the actual mark (see figure 4). this graph below shows that out of one cohort of nursing students, 15 of the 21 participants improved their marks between 5-10 per cent. from the other 6 participants, 4 students’ marks did not alter throughout the project and 2 scored less in their actual mark than the projected feedforward mark. figure 4. projected feedforward mark and actual mark achieved. the most significant impact of the introduction of the project from our perspective has been confirmed by the students themselves. they stated the following in response to the question, ‘what have you learned from the feedforward project?’ i found that the feedback emphasised the good and not so good parts of the work so that adjustments to the work are made with confidence. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 11 butters et al. ‘i am just so delighted – now i know i can do it!’ how to set my references out and how to write in the correct manner, and it also put me at ease that i wasn’t doing it wrong. it was very useful to get an appreciation of how our work would be marked, especially as it was our first assignment. by submitting a draft the feedback helped me to go into more depth with my assignment. that i hadn’t read around the subject enough and needed to work on referencing. students evaluated feedforward positively and the attrition rate has reduced from 21% in 2007 (which was the highest in wales) to 13% in 2012 (the lowest in wales). the university pre-registration nursing programme now has the highest retention rate in wales. the nursing subject area has scored higher than any other nursing school in wales over the last two years for student satisfaction in the national student survey and, although feedforward is only one of a number of interventions aimed at promoting retention, it is undoubtedly significant in retaining student nurses on the pre-registration programme. description of numerate project all pre-registration nursing students have access to the interactive software programme ‘safemedicate’ for all three years of their programme of study. ‘safemedicate’ is an elearning package which enables students to develop, and heis to assess, competence in drug calculations. while the students are aware that their drug calculation skills are assessed within their personal development plan (pdp) portfolio, the knowledge that there will be a maths/numeracy assessment at their job interview was causing our students some concerns. in order to address that issue, additional numeracy support for drug calculations were offered to the relatively small cohort (n = 19) of second year nursing students who were returning to university after placement. it was necessary to assess the students’ present ability regarding dosage calculations to be able to identify whether the students had improved with the intervention. for consistency of learning, all assessments were undertaken using ‘safemedicate’. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 12 butters et al. ‘i am just so delighted – now i know i can do it!’ methodology all numerate sessions took place at the end of the university day during november and december and were in addition to the taught modular sessions of numeracy within the nursing curriculum. attendance was voluntary and was open to all students in the cohort. the initial assessment via ‘safemedicate’ took place at the start of the project, during session 1. questions within ‘safemedicate’ were not set by the project team but were downloaded to the student from a central bank of questions, thus eliminating any bias by way of the types of questions chosen. details of the students’ initial results were noted by the project team. following the initial assessment to identify the base-line numerical knowledge of the group, the subsequent numerate sessions were tailored to address these skills gaps, as well as any numerical deficits self-identified by any student. five face-to-face sessions were taught using an instructive approach combined with a collaborative, inclusive learning environment. screencasts were produced, using a freeware computer programme ‘jing’, which demonstrated a step-by-step approach to calculations (see figure 5 for a screenshot of screencast no. 9), together with accompanying worksheets (see figure 6) for students to master specific techniques delivered within our project. figure 5. screencast 9. metric system and conversions between metric units. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 13 butters et al. ‘i am just so delighted – now i know i can do it!’ figure 6. worksheet for screencast 9. metric system and conversions between metric units. additionally, access was freely available to the interactive software programme ‘safemedicate’, which allowed students to practice their drug calculation skills as frequently as they needed. the sessions were all linked to the nmc essential skills clusters (nmc, 2007; 2010) in relation to numeracy which ensured the sessions were relevant and linked to the requirements expected nationally of a 2nd/3rd year nursing student. on average the attendance rate was 70% and above. in the final week, students were retested via ‘safe medicate’ and the results of the pre and post assessments are detailed in figures 7 and 8 below. maximum possible marks = 50. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 14 butters et al. ‘i am just so delighted – now i know i can do it!’ figure 7. assessment results: pre and post numerate sessions. figure 8. assessment results: pre and post numerate sessions. in addition to the taught sessions, focus groups were conducted on commencement and completion of the numerate project to assess the impact. these sessions were conducted by a professor of nursing who had no input within the taught sessions, thus reducing bias within the questioning and enabling the students to contribute openly to the group sessions without fear of saying the ‘wrong’ things in front of their tutors. five students attended each focus group. questions posed during the first focus group related to students’ confidence with their mathematical ability at the start of the project. for example: journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 15 butters et al. ‘i am just so delighted – now i know i can do it!’ 1. how do you feel about your maths ability right now as you’ve had your first assessment? 2. how does that make you feel now about going out onto the wards and having to do something like iv calculations? 3. in terms of confidence [with drug calculations] it’s learning the formulas really that you need to know about? 4. do you feel confident that you could trust the [i/v] machine to do it for you? questions posed during the second focus group interview related to student confidence after the ‘numerate’ sessions. for example: 1. tell me about your experience with doing this new routine. 2. do you think you’re going to remember what you’ve learned when you go onto placement? 3. do you think the actual numeracy sessions you’ve had with alison and celia have made a difference then? evidence of impact of the numerate project 18 students undertook pre numerate session assessments and 12 (of the 18) completed post ‘numerate’ session assessments, which took place the week prior to the christmas vacation. the six who did not complete the second assessment already had prior commitments. one student chose not to take either assessment. as can be seen from figure 7, all students who undertook post ‘numerate’ session assessments showed improvement on their pre session results: the lowest improved by 6% and the highest improved by 36%. unfortunately, it has not been possible to compare the statistical significance of these improved marks as this is the first year of testing within ‘safemedicate’ for second year students. previously the testing of students had been confined to first year students. when examining just the assessment results for iv transfusion calculations (see figure 8), which were highlighted as a major concern for participants, all students in the first focus group showed improvement on pre session results: the lowest improved by 15% and the highest improved by 90%. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 16 butters et al. ‘i am just so delighted – now i know i can do it!’ all students who attended a minimum of four numerate sessions were issued with a university certificate of attendance. the certificate can be added to the student’s portfolio which is shared with prospective employers at interview, thus increasing the possibility of employment. the comments from the students who attended the initial focus group indicated that many of them had not used the ‘safemedicate’ programme since their first year of study and were therefore ‘scared’ of using the formulae for intravenous infusions. they wanted to keep their skills up-to-date but their lives were busy with placements, assignments and the concerns of family life. comments from the students who attended the final focus group indicated that they felt more confident with their drug calculation skills and that the additional numeracy support from the project made a big difference. additionally the students found the mix of tutor skills beneficial as we were able to highlight both the mathematical and nursing perspective of drug calculations, as comments from the focus groups indicate: i think it’s good to have celia who has a maths degree or whatever, then you’ve got alison who is a nurse so she understands it from our point of view. alison can bring the nursing side into it so i think it’s good to have that mixture. conclusion working collaboratively, the asts and nursing tutors provide developmental support for both study skills and numeracy to students to enable them to use feedback to facilitate success and therefore promote learning. student attrition has reduced during the time period both projects have been offered to students. feedforward promotes retention by engaging students in study from the start of the programme. as a proactive measure it aims to create links for the students between active engagement with the assessment process and the benefits of the student support services (particularly academic skills tutors) in order to succeed in learning. when students understand the importance of working with nursing tutors and asts to develop their ability, it has an impact on their engagement with the educational process. both projects were evaluated positively by students and they often ask for this type of exercise when they move from one level to journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 17 butters et al. ‘i am just so delighted – now i know i can do it!’ another. enabling students to see what is being asked of them in the assignment brief and what each level ‘looks like’ appears to be achieved better if academics and study skills tutors work together. the numerate project improved the confidence and competence with drug calculations of those students who took part in the focus groups, particularly around intravenous infusions, and reduced their anxiety when working in clinical practice. references boone, s. (2010) ‘thin skin, deep damage: addressing the wounded writer in the basic writing course’, arts and humanities in higher education, 9,(2) pp. 227-242. available at : http://ahh.sagepub.com/content/9/2/227 (accessed: 2 march 2013). burke, d. (2011) ‘‘now i've got the feedback, what do i do with it?’, strategies for students to get more out of tutor feedback’, practice and evidence of scholarship of teaching and learning in higher education, 6(1), pp. 43-60. coffin, c., curry, m., goodman, s., hewings, a., lillis, t. and swann, j. (2003) teaching academic writing. abingdon: routledge. cottrell, s. (2001) teaching study skills and supported learning. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan. crabtree, h., roberts, c. and tyler, c. (2007) understanding the problems of transition into higher education. available at: http://www.ece.salford.ac.uk/proceedings/papers/35_07.pdf. (accessed: 7 february 2013). ganobcsik-williams, l. (ed.) (2006) teaching academic writing in u.k higher education: theories, practices and models. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan. glaister, k. (2007) ‘the presence of mathematics and computer anxiety in nursing students and their efforts on medication dosage calculations’, nurse education today, 27(4), pp. 341-347. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 18 http://ahh.sagepub.com/content/9/2/227 http://www.ece.salford.ac.uk/proceedings/papers/35_07.pdf butters et al. ‘i am just so delighted – now i know i can do it!’ glyndŵr university (2011) periodic review of pre-registration student nursing. wrexham: glyndwr university. glyndŵr university (2011/12 – 2013/14) learning and teaching strategy 2011/12-2013/14. wrexham: glyndŵr university. available at: http://glynfo.glyndwr.ac.uk/file.php/51/strategies/glyndwrlearningandteachingstrategypublic.pdf (accessed: 24 november 2013). groves, m., bowd, b. and smith, j. (2010) ‘facilitating experiential learning of study skills in sports students’, journal of further and higher education, 34(1), pp. 11-22. hattie, j. and timperley, h. (2007) ‘the power of feedback’, review of educational research, 77(1), pp. 81-112. american educational research association and sage. available at: http://rer.sagepub.com/content/77/1/81.full.pdf+html (accessed: 16 july 2013). johnston, b. (2010) the first year at university: teaching students in transition. maidenhead: open university press. knowles, m.s., holton, e.f. and swanson, r.a. (1998) the adult learner. 5th edn. woburn, mass: butterworth-heinemann. moon, j. (2005) ‘putting writing at the centre’, escalate bulletin, issue 2. available at: http://escalate.ac.uk/2067 (accessed: 10 january 2012). national audit office (2007) staying the course: the retention of students in higher education. london: the stationery office. national union of students (2012) nus charter on academic support. available at: http://www.nusconnect.org.uk/campaigns/highereducation/learning-and-teachinghub/academicsupport/ (accessed: 30 january 2012). nursing and midwifery council (2007) guidance for the introduction of the essential skills clusters for pre-registration nursing and midwifery programmes. london: nmc. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 19 http://glynfo.glyndwr.ac.uk/file.php/51/strategies/glyndwr-learningandteachingstrategypublic.pdf http://glynfo.glyndwr.ac.uk/file.php/51/strategies/glyndwr-learningandteachingstrategypublic.pdf http://rer.sagepub.com/content/77/1/81.full.pdf+html http://escalate.ac.uk/2067 http://www.nusconnect.org.uk/campaigns/highereducation/learning-and-teaching-hub/academicsupport/ http://www.nusconnect.org.uk/campaigns/highereducation/learning-and-teaching-hub/academicsupport/ butters et al. ‘i am just so delighted – now i know i can do it!’ nursing and midwifery council (2010) standards for pre-registration nursing and education, essential skills clusters and guidance for their use (guidance g7.1.5b), pp. 141, london: nmc roykenes, k. and larsen, t. (2010) ‘the relationship between nursing students’ mathematics ability and their performance in a drug calculation test’, nurse education today, 30(7), pp. 697-701. thomas, l. (2012) building student engagement and belonging in higher education at a time of change: final report from the what works? student retention and success programme york: higher education academy. tinto, v. (1975) ‘dropout from higher education: a theoretical synthesis of recent research’, review of educational research, 45(1), pp. 89-125. walsh, k.a. (2008) ‘the relationship among mathematics anxiety, belief about mathematics, mathematics self-efficacy and mathematics performance in associate degree nursing students’, nursing education perspectives, 29(4), p. 226-229. weaver, m.r. (2006) ‘do students value feedback? student perceptions of tutors’ written response’, assessment and evaluation in higher education, 31(3), pp. 379-394. wingate, u. and andon, n. (2011) ‘embedding academic writing instruction into subject teaching: a case study’, active learning in higher education, 12(1), pp. 69-81. yorke, m. (2003) ‘formative assessment in higher education’, higher education, 45(4), pp. 477-501. author details celia butters is an academic skills tutor at glyndŵr university and a fellow of the higher education academy. she and colleagues were instrumental in establishing the university’s academic study skills centre and celia is passionate about journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 20 butters et al. ‘i am just so delighted – now i know i can do it!’ empowering students to develop their academic and mathematical ability. her research areas of interest are maths and drug calculation skills. sheila kerfoot is a lecturer in early childhood and family studies at glyndŵr university. she and colleagues were instrumental in establishing the university’s academic study skills centre. she is a fellow of the higher education academy, and her research interests lie in students’ acquisition of academic writing skills. peggy murphy is an adult nurse lecturer in the school of health sciences at bangor university. her research interests include the higher education academy themes of retention and success and assessment and feedback. she is particularly interested in designing learning experiences that utilise assessment and feedback for learning. she is currently collaborating with colleagues from bangor university and whitirea college new zealand in order to create online bilingual and bicultural learning support packages for welsh and new zealand student nurses. peggy is a fellow and an academic associate with the higher education academy. alison williams ma ed, bsc(hons), dn, rn (adult), dipn, pgcpd, fhea is a senior nurse lecturer at glyndŵr university. alison has a background in community nursing and has worked as a district nurse in north wales, she is also programme leader for community specialist practice at glyndŵr university. alison teaches on both the pre and post registration nursing programmes and has a keen interest in research around the teaching of drug calculations to pre registration nursing students. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 21 ‘i am just so delighted – now i know i can do it!’ – how collaboration between nurse lecturers and academic skills tutors promotes students’ confidence abstract introduction literature review focus of collaboration description of feedforward intervention how feedforward engages students evidence of impact description of numerate project methodology evidence of impact of the numerate project conclusion references author details literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 8: march 2015 empowering students to promote independent learning: a project utilising coaching approaches to support learning and personal development. dawne gurbutt university of central lancashire, uk russell gurbutt university of leeds, uk abstract with the publication of the uk white paper (bis, 2011) focusing on student experience, together with the increase in tuition fees and the changing landscape of higher education, there is an interest within the sector to explore initiatives that enhance the learning process. coaching, as already used in management and some nhs settings, offers an approach which seeks to enable and empower learners and has the potential to contribute to their personal development, facilitating solution-focused approaches which are transferable to the workplace. teaching staff in a higher education institution were offered training in coaching techniques and formed a peer support coaching network. they were subsequently encouraged to use coaching skills in a range of student settings. this paper focuses on an evaluation of a teaching and learning initiative that used coaching approaches with two groups of healthcare students (totalling 19) over 2 semesters in the 2012-2013 academic year. the aim was to enhance the student experience in relation to self-motivation, personal development planning and the development of solution-focused approaches. the evaluation drew upon student feedback and conversations with staff in the coaching network. gurbutt and gurbutt coaching approaches to support learning and personal development journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 2 the evaluation highlighted the benefits of coaching; student preferences and expectations; new learning experiences of staff and the relevance of coaching approaches in other specific educational settings. the evaluation demonstrated how coaching adds value; providing students with the opportunity to develop workplace skills; and offering staff a solution-focused tool which may be particularly useful when facing change in workplace settings. importantly it gives participants a creative space to engage with contemporary challenges and educators a ‘new’ tool to facilitate participation and nurture engagement in a non-directive way. keywords: coaching; student experience; empowerment; learning engagement. introduction the changing landscape of higher education has placed renewed emphasis on enhancing the student experience. indeed this has been articulated as a requirement: institutions must deliver a better student experience; improving teaching, assessment, feedback and preparation for the world of work. (bis uk white paper, 2011, p.4). this has particular relevance when undertaking educational initiatives for healthcare sector roles that require students to be self-reliant and solution-focused. a lack of such learning can be detected in practice, for example in the reported failings of an nhs trust: there are places where unhealthy cultures, poor leadership, and an acceptance of poor standards are too prevalent. (frances, 2013, p.25). failures in learning how to perform to acceptable standards are also noted in the nursing and midwifery council’s ‘fitness to practise report’ (nmc, 2013): issues included misconduct (63%) and lack of competence (17%). this performance deficit also highlights clear implications for service providers, regarding continuing personal development in problem solving and goal attainment, with a consequential impact on service users. gurbutt and gurbutt coaching approaches to support learning and personal development journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 3 given this context and the promotion of lifelong learning in practice, where individuals own their professional development rather than act as mere consumers of discrete ‘packets’ of education, a requirement remains to continually explore ways of facilitating a better student experience across a diverse learning population. whilst reflective practice, inservice training and accredited post registration courses all have their place, a coaching approach has something new to offer. it has a role to play in developing individualised learning (so having direct real world relevance) and also promotes learning ownership so strengthening the potential for engagement in learning contracts. teachers in health and social care disciplines already draw on a range of strategies to transfer their practice-based skills into education (such as problem based learning) whilst maintaining a real world focus. this can also include coaching approaches already used in management, organisational and life coaching settings over recent years (parker et al., 2008). it is appropriate therefore, to briefly define coaching. what is coaching? coaching is defined in different ways but the european coaching and mentoring council states: coaching and mentoring are developmental activities within relationships based on trust and established through conversations [which] aim to develop the personal or professional competencies of the client. (european coaching and mentoring council, 2013, p.1). different models exist to represent exactly how the activity is undertaken and some commonality exists as to essential elements of coaching. its purpose varies. downey describes effective coaching as: a pre-dominantly ‘non-directive’ approach, an approach that evokes excellence, in which learning is intrinsic and satisfaction derives from the pursuit and achievement of meaningful goals. (downey, 2003, p.19) gurbutt and gurbutt coaching approaches to support learning and personal development journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 4 others highlight need, ‘focusing on what clients want’ (whitworth et al., 1998, p.8) or ‘making changes’ and moving from ‘imagination to reality’ (o’connor and lages, 2004, p.4), as well as personal enrichment, ‘building awareness’ and ‘unlocking potential’ (whitmore, 2002, p.8). overall learner-centric, development and goal attainment elements resonate clearly with the aims of personal development planning within higher education and health and social care. coaching and counselling can sometimes be viewed as similar, sharing many skills in particular listening and asking questions. however there are distinctions. coaching entails consideration of the individual, the task and the context, whereas counselling focuses therapeutically on the individual and their context and is often remedial, in pursuit of ‘wholeness’. the emphasis of coaching by contrast is on learning and development (downey, 2003, p.200). stevens (2008, p.8) goes onto contrast counselling and coaching via central underpinning questions: ‘therapy asks ‘why me / why this?’ whereas coaching focuses on ‘what next/ what now?’’ the role of the coach is therefore to move the coachee forward, helping them to find solutions and identify ways to achieve goals. appreciating these differences aids awareness of which approach is more appropriate in a given setting. settings in which coaching skills are used include management situations when focusing on tasks achievement. in a similar way it is used in education to support personal development planning and individual formulation of personal learning goals. additionally within learning development it is used to compliment lectures and other forms of educational provision. coaching approaches there are different theories and models of coaching, the simple and grow models will be discussed and are summarised in figure 1. the simple model is a solution-focused, client–centred approach, which outlines the principles of coaching (jackson and mckergow, 2007, p.10). gurbutt and gurbutt coaching approaches to support learning and personal development journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 5 figure 1. two coaching models. the simple model (jackson & mckergow, 2007) s solutions in the coaching context, the solution is what the client wants. the coaching conversation focuses on solutions rather than problems, whilst not ignoring or dismissing problems. coaching works on the client’s agenda rather than the coach’s agenda. i in between when coaching, the coach works with what is being said by the client, as opposed to his/her interpretation of what is being said. the action comes from the interaction between the coach and the client. the role of the coach is non-judgmental. m making use of what is there when working with a client towards their solution, find out what is already working and what has worked in the past (or in other situations) and build on it. part of the solution may be happening already and the role of the coach would therefore be to ask questions that reveal and ‘illuminate’ the client’s own solution. p possibilities when coaching, help the client look for possibilities in the past, present or future. generating possibilities helps the client to find the next step. coaches believe clients are resourceful and the role of the coach is to draw out the answers. l language keep language clear and as simple as possible: break down the words used to ensure clarity e.g. delegation – what will be happening if your delegation improves? how will you know? as a coach, ensure you understand what the client means by the words they are using. e every case is different every coaching situation will be different; therefore helping clients generate the right actions for them is of more value than suggestions. there is a place for the coach’s ideas but ask for the client’s ideas first, adding yours afterwards if requested by the client. gurbutt and gurbutt coaching approaches to support learning and personal development journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 6 the grow model (whitmore, 1992) g goal a discussion of what the desired outcome is and articulating the goal in a specific and measurable way so that the coachee can tell when it has been achieved. additionally it is owned as a goal by the coachee. r reality an exploration of the current position and where the coachee wants to be. at this stage the coach encourages the coachee to be specific by asking questions to challenge them to really review their situation. o options once the destination is clear, discussion moves to an examination of the options available. time spent exploring all avenues is valuable, weighing up the pros and cons of each. w way forward at this stage the coachee is asked to identify the specific actions required to move forward with the chosen option in order to achieve the goal. this is a choice that the coachee can commit to and own the progression process. implicit in the ‘simple model’ is the notion of ‘in–between’; i.e. working with what is said by the client and not on the interpretation of what is being said, or the prior ‘knowledge’ of the coach this is a challenge when working with coachees within a familiar context or who are known to the coach. there are similarities to be drawn with the practice of phenomenology in qualitative research which suggests that ‘bracketing out’ (holloway, 1997) the self is possible in research contexts, though it could be argued that this is never fully achievable. an awareness of the need to focus entirely and exclusively on what is being said, and not on existing knowledge, helps to identify prior knowledge and assumptions that affect the discussion and so consciously avoid this ‘interference’. the concise grow model focuses on goal, reality, options and way forward (whitmore, 1992). downey (2003, p.25) includes a ‘topic’ element, based on initial understanding as a precursor to the grow process. the grow model was considered as more appropriate for education and health settings, as ‘problem solving’ and ‘goal oriented work’ characterises aspects of care management and client interaction. gurbutt and gurbutt coaching approaches to support learning and personal development journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 7 consideration can be given to other models and approaches, such as the coaches training institute’s ‘co-active’ coaching model (stevens, 2008, p.108) which focuses upon ‘who? what? why?’. alternatively, neuro linguistic programming (nlp) approaches focus on a ‘journey’ that begins with goal setting and progresses through to an action plan (o’connor and lages, 2004, p.28-31). there are many resources that cultivate skills development within a coaching framework. the co-active coaching approach proved a useful source from which some skills and approaches could be ‘borrowed’ as resources for coaching practice. whitworth et al. identify four cornerstones; viewing the client as naturally creative and resourceful, addressing the client’s whole life, the agenda coming from the client and the relationship as a designed alliance. [the] designed alliance is customised to meet the exclusive needs of the client…and both players are involved in making it work. (whitworth et al., 1998, p.3;13). this approach, in common with many others, aims to develop particular skills in the coach which include listening (described as ‘a striking experience partly because it is so rare’) (whitworth et al., 1998, p.31); intuition; curiosity; action learning and self-management. these can be contrasted with other skills identified as core to coaching such as; rapport…questioning, communication etc. (stevens, 2008, p.25-42). a coaching evaluation following a postgraduate course in ‘coaching within management settings’ sponsored by the employer, personal interest turned to considering possible wider applications in educational settings. this was encouraged across the university through peer discussion via a new in-house coaching network that enabled staff from different disciplines to develop their coaching skills and identify new coaching applications. gurbutt and gurbutt coaching approaches to support learning and personal development journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 8 a small-scale evaluation of a coaching activity, used as a teaching and learning approach in two different modules, was undertaken over two semesters during the 2012-13 academic year. the university’s’ academic quality assurance framework, section 14.1, allowed for module learning evaluations ‘through a variety of methods’ to analyse areas where high standards exist and to help identify those areas indicating a need for quality improvement (university of central lancashire, 2013, p.17). this process included qualitative feedback collection at a module level, including verbal feedback to module tutors. the provision of anonymised evaluation feedback was thus authorised for use in published reports and governed under the local research ethics regulations. the coaching learning and development evaluation involved participants on two different undergraduate health studies modules (i) group 1: four students completing a supervised self-directed study module which would lend itself to enhance their learning experience via promoting individual engagement, learning goal creation and ownership and (ii) group 2: fifteen top-up degree students used action learning approaches in monthly meetings relating to engagement with course management issues within a coaching framework. the process for both groups involved four steps; introduction; coaching; reflection and group discussion. initially the students were introduced to the models and the ways in which coaching approaches could be used and were then given some experience of being coached. given that all module delivery is routinely evaluated by students the idea of reflecting on their learning experience at the end of each session as part of the supervision process would also include their reflections on reactions to using coaching approaches. they were also asked to evaluate the process at the end of the semester when assignments had been submitted. at that time a participant discussion group was held to evaluate their responses to the approach and particular coaching elements that had been used. this feedback contributed to considering how elements of coaching could be used in other settings that involved solution-based approaches to problem solving, behaviour change and personal development. qualitative comments were recorded during the evaluation by notes made during action learning set conversations, ‘post-it’ note activities where students recorded and clustered their feedback onto a board and also the university module feedback forms. gurbutt and gurbutt coaching approaches to support learning and personal development journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 9 learning from the evaluation a range of points emerged from the evaluation including helpful outcomes; preferences when using the grow and simple models; dislike for coaching; and staff perspectives on the relevance of coaching to their work. several outcomes were seen as helpful including the goal setting focus; identifying resources and steps to take as a way of moving forward (all of which were implicit in the grow model). likewise ‘being in the moment’ and a ‘solution-focus’ were complemented via the simple approach which supported affirmation. scaling was another coaching element used, in which the coach asked the individual to gauge the importance of an issue or action on a 1-10 scale and then determine where they would like to be on the scale. in this way the coachee could focus on how to move to the next step and make progress towards identified goals. instrumental in this approach was a sense of getting the coachee to identify ‘what success looks like’ for them. the grow model was primarily used with group 1 (self-directed study group) on a one-toone basis. they found the ‘goal’ setting element quite useful. one participant commented: at first i thought it was quite obvious – the goal was to get my dissertation done, but then the coaching questions kept pushing me to be more specific and i began to focus on how the dissertations would help my future career (which influenced my choice of topic) and also identified interim goals. whilst another participant commented positively: i don’t ever think in goals, so it seemed really good to really think about what i was aiming at…it made more sense of the timeline. however more students commented on the ‘reality’ part of the coaching: i am used to compartmentalising my life – this approach made me realise just how much my part-time job, social life and living away from home impact on the reality of how i study. gurbutt and gurbutt coaching approaches to support learning and personal development journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 10 another stated: we got into a coaching conversation about motivation and self-motivation: i realised that the things that motivated me at school are absent at university, [which] maybe explains some of the issues i have been having. some learning benefits exist here for educators; appreciating the value of focus and nurture over prescription concerning learning goals, and for students; adopting a holistic approach to their life, of which learning is a part. in this way there might be a more sustainable route into life-long learning. other comments related to the ‘options’ stage of the grow model. it is implicit in the coaching process that the coach does not suggest options, but that these exclusively arise from the coachee. therefore a useful tool when coaching is to ask the ‘what else?’ question, as illustrated in the following student’s comments: she just kept asking – what else? what else? and i was annoyed at first and kept thinking ‘that’s it’, but actually the further we went on the more stuff i kept thinking of and i felt i went from no options (in solving a problem which had emerged in the research) to feeling that there were actually things i could do. another stated: we were talking about where i could get support and i suddenly became aware of all sorts of places in the uni; old friends; roommates; even my mum. it opened up all sorts of possibilities. others commented on ‘the importance of thinking about the resources available’. the final step of the grow model, the ‘way forward’, involves identifying one action. a participant commented on their sense of obligation: i felt i had to do it before i went back to my next supervision because i had suggested it (as an action). gurbutt and gurbutt coaching approaches to support learning and personal development journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 11 another remarked on changing expectations that required them to take ownership: i was annoyed at first. i went for tutorial because i wanted her to tell me what to do and she didn’t, she made me work it out myself. once i had got over being annoyed, i felt quite good about it all. whilst another commented on their transition from passivity: i realised i was happy talking ideas, but i didn’t want to be pinned down to actually doing stuff. in the end i pinned myself down. whilst another said: it was so helpful that i found myself having imaginary conversations with myself between supervision sessions in which i thought about the stages and the questions. this transition from theory to practise was captured in the following comment: written down it all seems obvious and simple, but it is really empowering. in line with earlier remarks favouring nurture over prescription, probing questions serve to facilitate engagement that ultimately helps the individual make a transition from passivity, as a consumer of information sufficient to complete an assignment, to identifying what they need to integrate into personal learning to achieve the intended outcomes. the simple model was used in personal tutorial settings where, as a personal tutor, the topics raised were often familiar and repeated, as students were confronted with similar issues. although as the simple model highlights, in reality ‘every case is different’ and that is true as far as each student finds their own response to these issues. participants reported benefits of a solutions focus that: ‘helped me to move it on’; and helped people ‘to get unstuck’; ‘it stopped me from keep telling my story and beating around the bush to moving to the next stage – right it has happened, now what am i going to do?’ gurbutt and gurbutt coaching approaches to support learning and personal development journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 12 group 2 used action-learning approaches in which each person in the group has individual ‘air time’ (a meeting where each person has individual uninterrupted space to speak in a group meeting). in the following comments, during a staff/student liaison meeting that utilised a solutions-focused approach to address the difficulties in being situated ‘off-site’ from the main campus, points of engagement emerged. one student commented: i was sitting in the circle and i really didn’t want it to come around to me, but when i shared my idea people liked it and it actually felt great. another said: people really listened to me, i am quite shy so it was a new experience, and it wasn’t half bad. a further comment was: it made me contribute and i don’t usually do that and i found i had something to say. reflection on engagement gave rise to comments about a lack of self-confidence, not seeing oneself as a contributor or just enjoying being heard. being heard was valued as part of the process with one participant commenting: it was ultra-polite, no one was shouted down or drowned out. in one way or another most participants commented on the benefits of listening and focusing on the individual or coachee in a solution-based session: this benefit is in its impact on learning development and its ability to unlock potential and growth in a seemingly short condensed activity that engenders learning momentum. there are times when coaching is not the best tool and when other approaches, which are either more directive or more therapeutic, might be more appropriate. sometimes individuals are just resistant to being coached. however stevens (2008, p.98;125) suggests that sometimes it can help for people to identify their ‘gremlins’, i.e. the things that make them resistant to being coached. gurbutt and gurbutt coaching approaches to support learning and personal development journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 13 those who didn’t like coaching commented that: ‘it just feels like it is taking too long to get anywhere’ and: ‘i just didn’t like it. i felt it was all moving too slowly’. another participant said: i didn’t feel comfortable, but maybe it was actually one to one supervision sessions i don’t like, i felt exposed somehow. resistance in itself is a learning point for educators too, as it highlights the need for an intervention that can manoeuvre learning beyond an impasse. conversations with the university coaching network staff who were trialling coaching with students felt that it enhanced their work as it was: centred on listening and communication skills in one way or another. some commented that coaching rekindled enthusiasm for reflecting on and evaluating communication skills. others commented positively how coaching and an awareness of coaching models had expanded their existing skills and increased their knowledge of different techniques. some noted how their level of creativity released through coaching was ‘sometimes surprising’. there appeared to be a range of different applications and responses to coaching emerging from the coaching network group including immediate and longer-term feedback from people who were known to the coach. health care staff within the network reported that they felt comfortable with the grow model from the outset. the process stages were easy to learn and internalise and the model had an internal progression to it, which was reported as feeling ‘very natural and unforced’. they also liked the term ‘grow’ as it was a reminder of the underpinning values of coaching to grow and develop the coachee, in this case the student. when thinking about whether coaching would be beneficial in other contexts, some saw advantages: a solutions focus cannot be a bad thing and identifying a range of resources can only be positive. gurbutt and gurbutt coaching approaches to support learning and personal development journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 14 others expressed doubt including: i think it would take too long to explain to larger groups of students what coaching is about. it would be too time consuming and i don’t think you could get them to engage enough to consent to being coached. however, there was some agreement that the types of questions used in coaching are helpful: focusing on the present rather than the past and getting the person to a place where they acknowledge where they actually are, rather than where they would like to be. overall these comments indicate that coaching can add value regarding communication skills development (especially relevant on professional registration courses), and offer learning opportunities for educators who can perhaps experience refreshing insights into what might have become familiar patterns in student encounters. conclusion whilst being a small-scale, module-based evaluation, the learning suggests that there is merit in undertaking a larger evaluation study and to consider measurable impacts on achievement and student satisfaction if implemented as a consistent strategy across a programme. such a move could allow students to become adept at being coached beyond a single module experience and consider how to develop elements of coaching in their own practise such as with goal related patient interactions. coaching has the potential to deliver real benefit in educational contexts, as it does in management contexts, fusing successful goal achievement with growth, learning and development. although there may be occasions when it may not be directly applicable, the repertoire of coaching skills are relevant to good management and support, offering tangible benefits at a personal level for students and also teaching teams. gurbutt and gurbutt coaching approaches to support learning and personal development journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 15 coaching adds value; providing students with the opportunity to develop workplace skills; and offering staff a solution-focused tool which may be particularly useful when facing change in workplace settings. importantly it gives participants a creative space to engage with contemporary challenges and educators a ‘new’ tool to facilitate participation and nurture engagement in a non-directive way. overall the experience of implementing ‘personal learning’ to enhance the student experience is a reciprocal process that engenders thought about its appropriateness to student preferences and different tasks. it also has broader implications for the provision of institutional support to draw staff in to using coaching approaches as a means of enhancing student experience. references bis (2011) higher education: students at the heart of the system, department for business innovation and skills (bis) white paper, june. available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/3138 4/11-944-higher-education-students-at-heart-of-system.pdf. (accessed: 2 october 2014). downey, m. (2003) effective coaching: lessons from the coach’s coach. 2 nd edn. london: texere. european mentoring and coaching council (2013) definitions for coaching and mentoring. available at: http://www.emccouncil.org/webimages/ch/aldo/glossary_coaching_mentoring__e mcc_switzerland_en_20.05.13.pdf (accessed: 2 october 2014). frances, r. (2013) report of the mid staffordshire nhs foundation trust public inquiry, executive summary, february. available at: http://www.midstaffspublicinquiry.com/sites/default/files/report/executive%20summa ry.pdf (accessed: 2 october 2014). https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/31384/11-944-higher-education-students-at-heart-of-system.pdf https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/31384/11-944-higher-education-students-at-heart-of-system.pdf http://www.emccouncil.org/webimages/ch/aldo/glossary_coaching_mentoring__emcc_switzerland_en_20.05.13.pdf http://www.emccouncil.org/webimages/ch/aldo/glossary_coaching_mentoring__emcc_switzerland_en_20.05.13.pdf http://www.midstaffspublicinquiry.com/sites/default/files/report/executive%20summary.pdf http://www.midstaffspublicinquiry.com/sites/default/files/report/executive%20summary.pdf gurbutt and gurbutt coaching approaches to support learning and personal development journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 16 holloway, i. (1997) basic concepts for qualitative research. london: blackwell. jackson, p.z. and mckergow, m. (2007) the solutions focus. making coaching and change simple. boston: nicholas brealey publishing. nursing and midwifery council (2013) annual fitness to practise report 2012-2013, october. available at: http://www.nmcuk.org/documents/annual_reports_and_accounts/annual%20fitness%20to%20pra ctise%20report%202012%20-%202013.pdf (accessed: 2 october 2014). o’connor, j. and lages, a. (2004) coaching with nlp. london: element. stevens, n. (2008) learning to coach: the skills you need to coach for personal and professional development. 2 nd edn. oxford: how to books. parker, p., hall, d.t. and kram, k.e. (2008) ‘peer coaching: a relational process for accelerating career learning’, academy of management learning and education, 7(4), pp. 487–503. university of central lancashire (2013) academic quality assurance manual. available at: https://www.uclan.ac.uk/students/research/files/aqa_manual_2013_14.pdf (accessed: 2 october 2014). whitmore, j. (1992) coaching for performance: a practical guide to growing your own skills (people skills for professionals). boston: nicholas brealey publishing. whitmore, j. (2002) coaching for performance: growing people, performance and purpose. 3 rd edn. boston: nicholas brealey publishing. whitworth, l, kimsey-house, h., sandahl, p. (1998) co-active coaching: new skills for coaching people toward success in work and life. alto, ca: davies black publishing. http://www.nmc-uk.org/documents/annual_reports_and_accounts/annual%20fitness%20to%20practise%20report%202012%20-%202013.pdf http://www.nmc-uk.org/documents/annual_reports_and_accounts/annual%20fitness%20to%20practise%20report%202012%20-%202013.pdf http://www.nmc-uk.org/documents/annual_reports_and_accounts/annual%20fitness%20to%20practise%20report%202012%20-%202013.pdf https://www.uclan.ac.uk/students/research/files/aqa_manual_2013_14.pdf gurbutt and gurbutt coaching approaches to support learning and personal development journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 17 author details dawne gurbutt has a phd from lancaster university (2004). she is a principal lecturer in the school of health at the university of central lancashire. russell gurbutt has a phd from the university of central lancashire and is a lecturer in the school of healthcare at leeds university. empowering students to promote independent learning: a project utilising coaching approaches to support learning and personal development. abstract introduction what is coaching? coaching approaches a coaching evaluation learning from the evaluation conclusion references author details literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 8: march 2015 autoethnography as a method of facilitating critical reflexivity for professional doctorate students dr catherine hayes university of sunderland, uk dr john anthony fulton university of sunderland, uk abstract this paper explores autoethnography within the context of the professional doctorate and argues that it is an excellent way of linking theory to the practical situation. the paper commences by defining the ‘second generation’ of professional doctorates (maxwell, 2003) where the focus is directed primarily to work-based learning and the development of work-based practice. candidates are expected to demonstrate the development of practice and their contribution to this in a fundamentally original approach. the researcher is central in the practical or work-based situation and the process of autoethnography can structure and guide the research process, by providing structure to the process of reflexivity. the paper considers two broad approaches to autoethnography: the traditional approach and the post-modernist approach. the post-modernist approach presents challenges in the ways in which the work is presented: a central argument of the paper is that despite the novel ways of presentation, the work should have a strong theoretical base. the paper concludes by summarising the role of autoethnography in the professional doctorate: autoethnography provides a factually accurate and comprehensive overview of the professional doctorate candidate’s career trajectory. it should act as a driver of self-explication for the professional doctorate student thus providing a degree of both catalytic and educative authenticity, and provide an insight for the reader of the professional doctoral thesis. keywords: autoethnography; professional doctorate; reflective process. hayes and fulton autoethnography as a method of facilitating critical reflexivity journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 2 introduction the concept of the professional doctorate (prof doc) has gained momentum in recent years in the uk, and the popularity of this approach to postgraduate research has increased exponentially since the mid-1990s. maxwell (2003) introduced the term ‘second generation’ of professional doctorates where the focus was directed primarily to workbased learning and the development of work-based practice; candidates are expected to demonstrate the development of practice and their contribution to this in a fundamentally original approach. it is geared towards (although, not exclusively) the mid-career professional who wishes to develop their practice to doctoral academic level and further develop their professional practice to a level commensurate with the most unique and innovative contribution to their professional discipline (costley and lester, 2012). in much the same way as the novice researcher will develop their research skills through the ph.d., the professional doctorate candidate is expected to submit a portfolio of evidence of this strategic development of professional practice and an associated academic and theoretically underpinned commentary. in this second generation, prof doc students are permitted to begin their project from the development of an entirely new piece of work, which they then wish to develop. one of the challenges here is to provide a methodological framework which unifies and directs their work and allows them to develop in a systematic and rigorous manner. there are a variety of methodological approaches which can be used and this paper will highlight autoethnography. autoethnography has a clear relevance to vocational learning and the practical skills required to devise a portfolio of evidence, linking prior achievement to current researcher status, and how these act as dynamic drivers of change for professional practice and future career progression. the doctoral candidate needs to demonstrate critical reflection which is associated with the process of practice development. within doctoral level study – particularly doctor of philosophy programmes – much emphasis has been placed upon the implementation of relatively traditional approaches to question-led research. autoethnography has, in professional doctorates particularly, a legitimacy where contribution to a field of practice can both be articulated and rooted philosophically. this legitimacy stems from the need to move beyond theory which is hayes and fulton autoethnography as a method of facilitating critical reflexivity journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 3 primarily explanatory, to one which can also focus on process and outcome within the context of employment and the recollection of career trajectories. many of the professional doctorate students encountered in practice conceptualise and produce their stories or accounts of previous experience in the form of a chronological timeline which is marked with focal points of key achievements, critical incidents and major personal life events, which have influenced and shaped their particular career trajectories. it is in this context where autoethnography arguably has greatest significance in facilitating students as they seek to emphasise a deeply personal journey the destination of which is their current position and contribution to practice to date. with their director of studies and the critical feedback gained as a result of interaction with them, the student undertakes a process of co-construction of their journey, not necessarily rooted in a process of storytelling but in a directed and recursive narrative of personal and professional achievement. there can be accompanying issues with inter-subjectivity at this point and it is here that a rigorous approach to the use of autoethnography can provide valuable frameworks which transcend the dialogue of the director of studies with the professional doctorate student. perhaps one of the greatest issues of contention regarding whether a doctorate in philosophy and a professional doctorate equate to one another in terms of an evidence base, can be addressed through the use of a method which lifts the student’s account of their professional career trajectory from the anecdotal and which places it firmly in the category of a valid methodological framework. most significantly it roots the person within the context of personal and professional growth and the discourse which accompanies these processes (barresi and juckes, 1997; singer, 2004). professional doctorate students need to provide evidence of their career trajectories through a structured portfolio – this is another incidence of the programme of study where autoethnography encompasses collecting artefacts such as evidence of publications, films and video clip contributions to practice, supporting letters from previous managers, or even reflective logs or memoires. often triangulation of evidence is executed through the collation of other sources of evidence which corroborates initial claims of professional contribution to an area. this is of particular significance to the scientific rigour of the professional doctorate, where issues of trustworthiness and authenticity might be raised as an integral part of educational quality management in the academic assessment process. hayes and fulton autoethnography as a method of facilitating critical reflexivity journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 4 this paper provides an insight into how autoethnography can be used as a qualitative method of facilitating critical reflexivity for students undertaking a programme of study leading to the award of professional doctorate. autoethnography is a therapeutic and reflexive means through which professional doctorate students can deliberately and consciously embed themselves within theoretical perspectives and perhaps more significantly the application of these perspectives to practice. additionally autoethnography can facilitate a critical reflexivity where the candidate can position themselves against the relevant theoretical underpinnings. as students become critically reflexive about their contribution to practice, autoethnography provides a valuable mechanism for developing autobiographical accounts of personal experience, practical interventions and personal perceptions of what their contribution to a professional field of practice actually is. autoethnography frayling (1993) in discussing design research discusses research into design, by which he means a theoretical investigation into design; research for design or the production of artefacts and research through design which is concerned with design practice, and the researcher communicates both the process and the product. although frayling (1993) was writing about a very specific area of practice, this can be translated to more general practice development issues and it is the development of research though practice which in many ways is the essence of the professional doctorate. while not using the term research through practice, costley and lester (2010) discuss approaches to professional doctorates and suggest that there are three broad approaches which can be taken: some candidates follow a conventional approach and undertake a systematic research study, using ‘practice friendly’ methodologies such as action research, appropriate to the development of practice. the other extreme are those at the end of their career who pull their work together and demonstrate through evidence and a reflective account their impact on practice. perhaps more commonly are a group of mid-career professionals who come with a body of work usually comprising a number of studies or innovations and wish to develop the work to the standard of the professional doctorate. what is common to all approaches is that an element of reflection is essential; this reflection draws out the thought processes, ways in which things have changed in expediency, how difficulties and problems are considered. hayes and fulton autoethnography as a method of facilitating critical reflexivity journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 5 the key is perhaps reflection, or reflexivity which is a more accurate term: it is the presence of the researcher in the research process from conception of the idea through to the choice of the methodology, to the impact of the researcher in the setting and the writing up process of the findings. in qualitative research, and particularly in ethnography, it is now seen as an essential part of the research process and in methods such as action research it is actually built into the methodology. one way of ensuring rigour is through autoethnography; autoethnography is a methodological approach which acknowledges the centrality of the researcher in the process of the research and provides an excellent means of structuring the reflection. autoethnography is an extension of the autoethnographic tradition and the researcher’s presence is paramount to the research. the researcher is writing about his or her experience and in doing so makes the process transparent to the reader of the study. the term autoethnography originates linguistically as a merge of auto-biography and ethnography (ellis et al., 2011) – the autobiography element is concerned with the self and ethnography with cultures. the ethnographic tradition focuses on the natural world and the researcher studies the world in the natural setting. the usual approach is to enter in the world or go native, whereby the researcher may live with those being studied or at least he or she will spend a significant amount of time in the research setting. the aim is to make the world intelligible and to explain to the reader what is happening and why things are done in a particular manner. the anthropologist clifford geertz (1973) called this ‘thick description’, in which the situating is described in such manner than explanations are also considered. the auto-biographical element presents a greater challenge. autoethnography has a long tradition and its central feature is the central position of the researcher – their experiences, feelings and views are a central part of the process of autoethnography. anderson (2006) outlines the key features of ethnography: the researcher should be part of the area of investigation, he or she should employ a degree of analytical reflexivity, there should be an engagement with the informants, the researcher should be visible in any accounts and should have a commitment to theoretical analysis. autoethnographers and professional doctorate candidates are certainly part of their setting and their presence is central to the development of practice, whilst ‘informant’ might not be the most accurate term, they do interact and engage with people in their setting. analytical reflexivity and a commitment to theoretical analysis are a little more problematic but should, or rather must, be explicit in professional doctorates. hayes and fulton autoethnography as a method of facilitating critical reflexivity journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 6 butler (2005) discusses the self in relation to knowledge and argues that we are opaque to the self, and any accounts which are concerned with an exploration of self-identity can only really be done by an exploration of the social world. in many ways this is the key to autoethnography. it is the consideration of the self within a socio-cultural context. this is particularly relevant to the professional doctorate where the focus is an exploration of the development of an aspect of practice and the wider aspects of practice are therefore essential. autoethnography can, therefore, be thought to be about the self in the context of a specific culture, and unlike many ethnographic studies were the research studies a foreign or unfamiliar culture, the autoethnographer is writing about his or her own culture, be it the culture of their work or of their everyday life. in the case of the professional doctorate candidate, they are writing about their workplace and themselves within that particular culture. there are many similarities and dissimilarities between conventional ethnography and autoethnography. the reflexivity in which the ethnographer considers their position, and the ways in which the research involves him or herself in the research process and the impact this presence can have on the respondents, is fully reported in most ethnographic accounts. it is also central to all autoethnographic reports. the main difference is the centrality of the researcher to the process, they are right there in the centre, shaping and guiding the process. in traditional ethnography, whilst it is recognised that the researcher can influence the process, they tend to be on the side lines looking in, whereas the autoethnographer is central and often is the one directing the process. using story and reflection accounting as both data and method so while autoethnography can be an appropriate approach in the professional doctorate, and this does bring out the centrality of the experience of the candidate, the decision as to what approach to take is perhaps more difficult. does the individual candidate go for an approach which makes the theoretical issues and analytic reflexivity transparent? or does he or she go for an approach which is less conventional and draws on less conventional presentation styles? the first approach can be very easily assessed, the theory and methodology is explicit, and it fits anderson’s criteria. the second approach is much less conventional but can lead to insights and views in a unique and novel manner. hayes and fulton autoethnography as a method of facilitating critical reflexivity journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 7 since the concept of history and recalled discourse plays such a central role in the development of the portfolio of evidence which students submit as an integral part of their assessment for the award of professional doctorate, it is necessary to frame these within an appropriate model for practical application. the three of greatest relevance are the contextual-action theory of career (young and valach, 2004; young et al., 2002), the theory of career construction (savickas, 2005) and the systems theory framework (patton and mcmahon, 2006). autoethnography as a discipline has long been acknowledged as a mechanism of comprehensively articulating elements of critical reflexivity relevant to different contexts and academic disciplines, but the case can be presented for its implementation in a doctoral programme which places value on the priori knowledge of doctoral students and the communities of practice to which they belong and contribute to. autoethnography transcends particular disciplines, however central to all disciplinary approaches. since it permits a true ontological and epistemological background to the generation of emergent theory, the participant can be clearly understood as being socially constructed and in a constant flux regarding their personal image. this is entirely attributable to the person underpinning the professional, which is significant in relation to the development of professional doctorate portfolios of evidence, which are arguably a reflection of the personal as well as the professional. in essence, autoethnography bridges the gap between theory and practice through the development of a critical discourse and the reflexivity which develops as a natural consequence of it. narrative and storytelling can be regarded as being equivalent since both contribute to this discourse in terms of their contribution to the autoethnography of the student. in terms of underpinning ontological and epistemological approaches, it permits a clear acknowledgement of the essence of being a person and being a professional, which is a valuable addition to the student’s academic course of study and their own personal progression and transferable skill development as a reflexive practitioner. positioning autoethnography as a trustworthy and authentic means of reflexive enquiry necessitates a consideration of the notion of personhood. personhood transcends the professional doctorate student’s professional identity, regardless of where that might be situated, and permits their identity to be in the person rather than the professional. it is in the person that thoughts, feelings and value judgements can be legitimised and hayes and fulton autoethnography as a method of facilitating critical reflexivity journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 8 rationalised in terms of the personal decision making and critical introspection which often necessarily underpins professional practice. ultimately it can define and frame the person and not just their professional identity. the development of critical consciousness which permits the professional doctorate student to be a systematic and logical constructor of narrative discourse has been the focus of debate in educational disciplines for several years. the theoretical framework supporting and guiding the processes of reflection, praxis, and subsequently autoethnography, ultimately underpin the notion of reflexivity. whether professional doctorate students need training in the development of critical consciousness remains an issue in curriculum development and curriculum justification across professional doctorate programmes. approaches to autoethnography the idea of post modernism is central to the development of autoethnographical approaches. this is not to say that autoethnography and post modernism are synonymous, although many autoethnographic accounts sit firmly within this tradition. post-modernism is notoriously difficult to define, but one prominent feature of postmodernism is the lack of grand narrative (lyotard, 1984), that is, there is no explanation at the macro level. what is of concern is a consideration of people’s stories and their experience and the ways in which particular realities are constructed. another key characteristic is the mixture of genres, as is evident in architecture, films and literature, very different styles are mixed in an eclectic and often haphazard manner. the thinking of foucault is particularly relevant and his idea of discourses is central. discourses are concerned with the ways in which people, things and concepts are represented in the written and the verbal form: they both reflect and shape how people think (georgakopoulou and goutsos, 2004). the justification for use of autoethnography in pedagogic practice calls for an identification of what the core characteristics of narrative enquiry actually are. hoshmand (2005) defined three distinct types of reporting accounts of practice that fit with the narrative approach adopted for professional doctorate students, which distinguishes the nature of their hayes and fulton autoethnography as a method of facilitating critical reflexivity journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 9 educational journey as different but equal to students undertaking more traditional doctorate of philosophy programmes: a) a purely descriptive write up of a reflective diary in its original form. b) an account in the form of extended narrative which gives an account of personal and professional experience which is made up of interview transcripts, written reports, observational fieldwork and anecdotal evidence or artefacts. c) a recounting of dialogue which has been generated in the form of narratives in essentially a storytelling fashion. one of the major challenges in autoethnography is how to capture the essence of the self within a cultural context; at the risk of oversimplifying things there are two broad approaches which can be taken which can be entitled the traditional approach (equating with a and b) and the post-modernist approach (equating with c). the traditional approach is along very similar lines as a conventional ethnographic study, and the post-modernist approach allows for a mixture of styles and focuses very much on the expression and the medium of communication to convey the experience. two examples of the conventional approach are defined by chang (2008) and duncan (2004). chang (2008) outlines an approach in which whilst there is a consideration of individual experience, it examines the individual experience against a culture or subculture, and how that culture has influenced the individual and how the individual has been influenced by that culture. it has perhaps a greater focus on auto-biography than ethnographic accounts but follows a conventional recognisable approach. duncan (2004) outlines a slightly different take on autoethnography in which the research is focused on the individual’s practice, and is usually fairly specific, or a specific project. the research collects data in much the same way as in (conventional) qualitative research studies; data is collected in a systematic manner and is analysed, which allows themes to emerge which are then discussed. the ‘evocative’ approach is more controversial and is by no means universally accepted. here the expression is central, and less conventional styles (and mediums) than the traditional academic styles are employed. it is perhaps typified by its key exponents (ellis and bochner, 2000), and it is sometimes called evocative autoethnography (anderson, 2006), where the idea is to write in such a way that emotions are evoked in the reader. hayes and fulton autoethnography as a method of facilitating critical reflexivity journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 10 the researcher reflects on, and writes an account of, an area of experience and considers their experience in some detail. less conventional research approaches are followed and data is presented in a variety of ways; through poetry, painting, or more commonly a story, an account written with high literary quality in which the message is more important than the literal truth. this is not to say that the research is falsified but the findings or the issues are more important than what literary happened. an example of this is in ellis’ (2004) ‘the autoethnographic i’ (subtitled an autoethnographic novel) whereby she makes up a character representing at least two people and saying the type of things commonly said in the particular setting. sparkes (2007) also writes in this tradition and he writes a semiautobiographical account of the day in the life of an academic in a narrative or story form. in his account there are no explicit theoretical concerns and the reader is left to relate it to broader theoretical concerns for themselves. however, maclure (2006) compares post-modernist approaches in research to art and links them to the surreal and baroque styles, maintaining that these rather off beat styles can give rise to many insights. to continue the comparison with art, the first approach (as typified by chang (2008) and duncan (2004)) is similar to conventional painting in which the artist seeks to represent a particular scene in a recognisable manner, people familiar with say the landscape could recognise it easily. the second approach (as typified by ellis and sparkes) is like an abstract painter who is expressing him or herself and attempting to engage the viewer to evoke an emotional response. the viewer might not fully understand it but engages at some level with the picture. in the case of autoethnography many valuable insights can be gained through this process. focusing on the second approach it raises the question that what then is the difference than say autoethnographic accounts? indeed many valuable insights can be gained from accounts of people’s experiences of a particular situation or experience. ellis and bochner (2000) consider breast cancer within an autoethnographic account, and while this work does provide some insights, so it can be argued do more standard autobiographical accounts. to return to anderson’s criteria for ethnography (anderson, 2006) and the importance of analytical reflexivity and a commitment to theoretical analysis, these are less evident in autoethnography, and certainly in the post-modernist accounts. maclure (2006), while not writing explicitly about autoethnography, discusses post-modernist approaches to educational research and, whilst far from conventional, provides many insights which could not be gained from more traditional forms of research. to return to the metaphor of hayes and fulton autoethnography as a method of facilitating critical reflexivity journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 11 painting, the abstract painter is trained in conventional methods and uses these techniques in his or her work. similarly the autoethnographer is classically trained (so to speak) and uses these techniques, and whilst accounts may not explicitly discuss theoretical issues, it is implicit in their work and the reader can therefore engage at different levels. what is also significant is the role of the reader in autoethnography, since it is the reader who establishes the inherent value of the narrative in terms of assessing its underpinning theoretical basis, and the potential transferability of concepts from the narrative to their own area of expertise. for the purposes of autoethnography in the professional doctorate pathways this can be termed transgressive validity (ellis and bochner, 2000). aligning the philosophical basis of autoethnography with the professional doctorate programme the professional doctorate would certainly encourage students to develop a conceptual framework within which they can best express their personal realities through the power of written and, in the case of the viva voce examination, verbal discourse. the student would philosophically assume ‘personal reality’ to be a psychosocial construction, with a correspondingly expected degree of emphasis placed upon internal issues, the context and external factors involved, and the degree of personal agency evident between the social constructionism and constructivism divide. it could even be suggested that autoethnography sits epistemologically within the context of phenomenology, since authors of both seek to demonstrate transparency in presenting discourse which reveals personal experience. in terms of transparency, autoethnography provides the professional doctorate students with a means of expressing their embedded stance as researchers of their own personal journey. it also provides a mechanism of ensuring that its axiology has a clear conceptual origin. in terms of rhetorical structure, autoethnography varies widely, which is another significant reason for incorporating it as an integral part of a professional doctorate programme. this degree of rhetoric cannot be unravelled from method since the approach adopted necessitates a degree of rhetorical expression in how it is reported and further developed. hayes and fulton autoethnography as a method of facilitating critical reflexivity journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 12 in summary, the central role of autoethnography in the professional doctorate ought to: a) provide a factually accurate and comprehensive overview of the professional doctorate student’s career trajectory, which encompasses ontological authenticity and meaningfulness. b) act as a driver of self-explication for the professional doctorate student, thus providing a degree of both catalytic and educative authenticity. c) provide an insight for the reader of the professional doctoral thesis, which describes phenomena they might never have before experienced or might never anticipate experiencing again in the future, or perhaps where a sense of meaningfulness in sharing the experience with others from the same community of practice has not yet happened. conclusion whilst autoethnography has been presented in this article as a virtual panacea for the development of extended discourse, which informs the reader of the critical consciousness of the professional doctorate student, it still nevertheless has limitations which need to be acknowledged. it is certainly not universally accepted. wacquant (2014), for example, warns us against the ‘glamorous seductions of post-modernist story telling’. autoethnography is by no means universally accepted in academic circles, with holt (2003) providing an interesting account of the difficulties of getting autoethnographical accounts published in the academic press. in common with any other autoethnographic accounts of personal and professional experience, there are no guarantees in inspiring interest in the reader of the professional doctoral thesis. in this it is important to differentiate between the concept of the ‘knower’ and the ‘potential knower’. acknowledging limits in ‘self-knowing’ is an issue of much contention (wilson and dunn, 2004), but the nature of all qualitative research means that it only has context specificity at the particular point in time of the experience being reported upon. this means that the ability to generalise from the narrative account of experience is either claimed or alluded to, and that in terms of assessing scientific rigour and quality, in comparison to empirically based doctorate of philosophy programmes, is not an issue. in the context of professional doctorate programmes, autoethnography is a methodological tool which permits a critical understanding for professionals from a whole array of working contexts and environments hayes and fulton autoethnography as a method of facilitating critical reflexivity journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 13 to illuminate a critical view of their own selves, and to bring a degree of intellectual objectivity into what can then become a shared interdisciplinary perspective. references anderson, l. (2006) ‘analytic autoethnography’, journal of contemporary ethnography, 35(4), pp. 373-395. barresi, j. and juckes, t.j. (1997) ‘personology and the narrative interpretation of lives’, journal of personality, 65(3), pp. 693-719. butler, j. (2005) giving an account of oneself. new york: fordham university press. chang, h. (2008) autoethnography as method. walnut creek, ca: left coast press. costley, c. and lester, s. (2012) ‘work-based doctorates: professional extension at the highest levels’, studies in higher education, 37(3), pp. 257-269. duncan, m. (2004) ‘autoethnography: critical appreciation of an emerging art’, international journal of qualitative methods, 3(4), pp. 1-4. ellis, c. (2004) the ethnographic i: a methodological novel about autoethnography. ca: rowman altamira. ellis, c. and bochner, a.p. (2000) ‘autoethnography, personal narrative, reflexivity: researcher as subject’, in denzin, n.k. and lincoln, y.s. (eds.) the handbook of qualitative research. 2nd edn. newbury park, ca: sage, pp. 733-768. ellis, c., adams, t. and bochner, a.p. (2011) ‘autoethnography: an overview’, forum qualitative sozialforschung, forum: qualitative social research, 12(1) [online]. available at: http://www.qualitativeresearch.net/index.php/fqs/ article/view/ 1589/3 096 (accessed: 14 january 2015). frayling, c. (1993) research in art and design. london: royal college of art. hayes and fulton autoethnography as a method of facilitating critical reflexivity journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 14 geertz, c. (1973) ‘thick description: toward an interpretive theory of culture’, in geertz, c. (ed.) the interpretation of cultures: selected essays. new york: basic books, pp. 330. georgakopoulou, a. and goutsos, d. (2004) discourse analysis: an introduction. edinburgh: edinburgh university press. holt, n.l. (2003) ‘representation, legitimation, and autoethnography: an autoethnographic writing story’, international journal of qualitative methods, 2(1), pp. 1-21. hoshmand, l.t. (2005) ‘narratology, cultural psychology, and counselling research’, journal of counseling psychology, 52(2), pp. 178-186. lyotard, j.f. (1984) the postmodern condition: a report on knowledge, vol. 10. minnesota: university of minnesota press. maclure, m. (2006) ‘a demented form of the familiar’: postmodernism and educational research’, journal of philosophy of education, 40(2), pp. 223-239. maxwell, t. (2003) ‘from first to second generation professional doctorate’, studies in higher education, 28(3), pp. 279-291. patton, w. and mcmahon, m. (2006) career development and systems theory: connecting theory and practice. rotterdam: sense publishers. savickas, m. (2005) ‘the theory and practice of career construction’, in brown, s.d. and lent, r.w. (eds.) career development and counseling: putting theory and research to work. hoboken, nj: john wiley and sons, pp. 42-70. singer, j.a. (2004) ‘narrative identity and meaning making across the adult lifespan: an introduction’, journal of personality, 72(3), pp. 437-459. sparkes, a.c. (2007) ‘embodiment, academics, and the audit culture: a story seeking consideration’, qualitative research, 7(4), pp. 521-550. hayes and fulton autoethnography as a method of facilitating critical reflexivity journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 15 wacquant, l. (2014) ‘für eine soziologie aus fleisch und blut. sub\urban’, zeitschrift für kritische stadtforschung, 2(3), pp. 93-106. available at: http://zeitschriftsuburban.de/sys/index.php/suburban/article/view/151/252 (accessed: 19 january 2015). wilson, t.d. and dunn, e.w. (2004) ‘self-knowledge: its limits, value and potential for improvement’, annual review of psychology, 55(1), pp. 493-518. young, r.a. and valach, l. (2004) ‘the construction of career through goal-directed action’, journal of vocational behavior, 64(3), pp. 499-514. young, r.a., valach, l. and collin, a. (2002) ‘a contextualist explanation of career’, in brown, d.a. (ed.) career choice and development. 4th edn. san francisco, ca: jossey-bass, pp. 206-252. author details dr catherine hayes is principal lecturer in the faculty of applied sciences, department of pharmacy health and wellbeing, university of sunderland. dr john anthony fulton is principal lecturer in the faculty of applied sciences, department of pharmacy health and wellbeing, university of sunderland. http://zeitschrift-suburban.de/sys/index.php/suburban/article/view/151/252 http://zeitschrift-suburban.de/sys/index.php/suburban/article/view/151/252 literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 9: july 2015 e-assessment for learning (eafl) in higher education: is it a wolf in sheep’s clothing? jennifer charteris university of new england, australia frances quinn university of new england, australia mitchell parkes university of new england, australia peter fletcher university of new england, australia vicente reyes university of new england, australia abstract as an extensive body of research demonstrates, assessment for learning (afl) practices can have a significant impact on student achievement in the schooling sector and over the last decade these practices have gained currency in higher education settings. digital technologies are increasingly being embedded into university programmes, therefore it is important that the issue of quality learning as socio-political engagement in online higher education settings be carefully examined. in this article the authors, a group of pre-service teacher educators who work with students undertaking initial teacher training, explore key discourses that underpin the application of afl in higher education digital contexts – eafl (e-assessment for learning). in particular, we critique discourses of ‘learnification’, ‘responsibilisation’ and ‘performativity’ in relation to eafl. we pose possibilities to be considered for the development of robust practices that promote agency and engage with students’ funds of knowledge, as the socially and culturally located knowledge, skills and dispositions that learners bring to higher education contexts. charteris et al. e-assessment for learning (eafl) in higher education: is it a wolf in sheep’s clothing? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 9: july 2015 2 keywords: eafl; ict; pre-service teachers; higher education; e-learning; e-pedagogy; assessment; formative assessment; assessment for learning. introduction much has been written about assessment for learning (afl) in the schooling sector, and there is a growing body of literature on afl in higher education (bloxham and boyd, 2007; sambell et al., 2012; boud and malloy, 2013). however, e-assessment for learning (eafl), as afl practices in digital contexts, is an emerging but as yet under theorised field of scholarship in higher education. the purposes underpinning assessment and the practices that we adopt need to be carefully considered. hall and burke (2004) highlight the determinism of assessment practices by way of a marine metaphor. they suggest that our nets determine what we catch, what we assess is what we get and what we value is what we assess. in this article we examine our ‘nets’ in reference to eafl practices. the authors are a group of pre-service teacher educators (lecturers) who provide initial teacher training in a regional australian university, the university of new england. our courses are predominantly accessed online and as teachers firmly situated in a suite of interrelated digital contexts, we are interested in exploring and critiquing eafl practices. we aim for e-pedagogies that are commensurate with the wider socio-political goals envisaged for higher education, such as enhanced opportunities and equity, and personal and social transformation. hence we seek to effectively leverage e-learning environments to produce opportunities for eafl, where our learners can take ownership of their learning in ways that effectively connect and engage with their personal knowledge. digital environments, as evolving spaces, are rich in that they enable learners to take up opportunities to do new things in new ways. online learning can be a generative process that is responsive to students’ funds of knowledge (moll et al., 1992; gale and parker, 2014) and promotes their active participation as political citizens. funds of knowledge are more than a transactional resource of cultural capital in that they comprise the wide and varied resources that are possessed by learners and pertain to the understandings and practices that adult learners bring to learning contexts (oughton, 2010). charteris et al. e-assessment for learning (eafl) in higher education: is it a wolf in sheep’s clothing? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 9: july 2015 3 as educators, we also acknowledge the important role universities play in developing citizens who can think critically and exercise agency. agency is conceptualised in this paper as dynamic and dispositional, especially evident when learners make moves to initiate learning as active decision makers. we view that biesta’s (2013) emphasis on action and responsibility, or agency, is embedded in an interpretation of assessment for learning that encompasses the ‘spirit of assessment for learning’ (marshall and drummond, 2006, p.137) and engages with learners’ funds of knowledge. this is a fluid and responsive approach to assessment practices where educators engage learners as active, agentic participants rather than take up a set of formulaic practices to provide mechanistic feedback. nevertheless, teachers in higher education also (to varying extents, inadvertently and purposively) deploy technicist practices that sometimes constrain our students to narrow subject positions as ‘objects to be moulded’ (biesta, 2013, p. 1). we observe that the implementation of afl through digital technologies (eafl) has been embraced and enacted in current higher education as a discourse of performativity (ball, 2003). in this paper we critique a technicist deployment of afl through digital technologies in higher education online environments. we argue that eafl can support epistemological plurality and diversity but, like a potential wolf in sheep’s clothing, it can also be a key tool for massification; a process that prioritises quantity over quality and contributes to the ongoing commodification of higher education. the paper commences with an outline of literature on afl and eafl, which we then discuss in the specific context of online higher education. we then critique the discourses of learnification, performativity and power surrounding eafl in higher education. assessment for learning and formative assessment in navigating assessment literature, it is vital to acknowledge a range of different conceptions of assessment for learning (afl). while formative assessment includes the formal and informal processes that both teachers and students use to gather evidence for the improvement of learning (stiggins and chappuis, 2006; chappuis, 2009), afl also comprises the explicit purpose of students’ active participation in the learning process. we deploy the term afl, preferring it over ‘formative assessment’, as it evokes the centrality of the learner in the learning process. as some authors use the two terms interchangeably, charteris et al. e-assessment for learning (eafl) in higher education: is it a wolf in sheep’s clothing? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 9: july 2015 4 and as the concepts are interrelated, we have included formative assessment in our examination of relevant literature in this section. the term formative assessment originates from the work of michael scriven (1967). for scriven, formative evaluation was intended to provide information, for both teacher and student, about the progress (or lack of progress) of a student, so that corrective action, if needed, could be taken to help achieve the desired learning outcome. formative practices have come to the fore in recent years, epitomised by a suite of detailed high profile metaanalyses. the first of these was terry crooks’ (1988) exploration of 241 articles on ‘classroom evaluation’. this seminal study first cast light on the relationships between classroom evaluation practices and student achievement, with particular attention to outcomes involving learning strategies, motivation, and achievement. ten years later, black and william (1998) conducted their meta-analysis of 250 research studies to conclude that formative assessment has a large and consistently positive effect on students’ learning. hattie’s (2009) influential publication ‘visible learning; a synthesis of over 800 meta-analyses relating to achievement’ supported previous findings, pinpointing the importance of deploying practices that develop ‘assessment-competent’ learners. these influential studies have served to place afl in common parlance as an important research-based process that can raise student achievement and engage learners in a knowledge transaction. redecker and johannessen (2013) contextualise formative assessment within ‘knowledge economy’ literature that centres on the notions of change and continuous improvement, pointing out that: […] formative assessment is a central feature of the learning environment of the 21st century. learners need substantial, regular and meaningful feedback; teachers need it in order to understand who is learning and how to orchestrate the learning process. (redecker and johannessen, 2013, p.79) sambell et al. (2012) observe that when feedback processes are embedded within the process of learning and teaching itself, they are often seen as almost a by-product of the students’ engagement with the formal delivery of a course. for those who associate feedback with a formal process, these powerful learning-oriented interactions do not seem like feedback at all (sambell et al., 2012). stiggins et al. (2004) describe assessment for charteris et al. e-assessment for learning (eafl) in higher education: is it a wolf in sheep’s clothing? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 9: july 2015 5 learning as a range of practices that are designed to address students’ information needs to maximise both motivation and achievement, by involving students from the start in their own learning. in relation to (eafl), pachelor et al. (2009) frame approaches to formative e-assessment more widely by including a view of learners as initiators of learning who can both engage with, and transcend, the material mandated within a course structure. we define formative e-assessment as the use of ict to support the iterative process of gathering and analysing information about student learning by teachers as well as learners and of evaluating it in relation to prior achievement and attainment of intended, as well as unintended learning outcomes, in a way that allows the teacher or student to adjust the learning trajectory. (pachelor et al., 2009, p.1) thus, the assessment for learning afforded by icts can be viewed, both theoretically and in practice, as an important and emerging area of scholarship in higher education. for example, in her review of formative assessment literature in higher education, evans (2013, p.107) recommends scope for further research into: the nature of feedback networks, communication flows, and consideration of the attributes of effective feedback seekers [and] the nature and role of specific tools in assisting the development of coand self-regulation. this is clearly signalled as a growth area in the academy (boud et al., 2010). eafl in higher education digital technologies have afforded a range of formative assessment tools and practices, currently predominantly facilitated by learning management systems (lmss) in online or blended higher education environments. these include short answer quizzes, electronic marking, grading and rubrics, which are routine examples of eafl that are often deployed mechanistically in a transmissive approach from teacher to student in online environments. in contrast, tools such as asynchronous discussions, and embedded blogs and wikis, charteris et al. e-assessment for learning (eafl) in higher education: is it a wolf in sheep’s clothing? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 9: july 2015 6 afford teacher-to student, student-to-teacher and student-to student multidirectional eafl, through facilitating engagement with content and ideas, discussion, and sharing of meaning. social media such as twitter, youtube and facebook are also emerging as an alternative, or complement, to traditional lmss, with potential for students to generate their own self-regulated learning spaces (personal learning environments) which potentially afford meaningful eafl through connections to peers and sharing of learning (dabbagh and kitsantas, 2012). game-supported learning and virtual worlds can feature inbuilt feedback triggered by player decisions and actions, representing another dimension of eafl in higher education. accompanying these technologies is the emerging field of learning analytics. in learning analytics, the ‘big data’ generated within lmss are captured and analysed and then can be used to generate formative feedback for students or trigger interventions for those students deemed to be ‘at risk’. there are many key advantages to the use of digital technologies for formative assessment (pachelor et al., 2009) which have contributed to their widespread adoption in higher education. there is a rapid iteration of learning as a result of speedy feedback. the learner can potentially reflect on and implement digitally facilitated feedback quickly. there is an increased storage capacity in digital learning environments, as both teachers and learners have access to large amounts of data. automated systems can automatically analyse responses and provide feedback promptly. these digital systems are adaptable in that they generate responses based on student input. furthermore, communication can be rapid across varied audiences. these forms of communication are semi-permanent and can be shared with other learners to enhance learning. learners represent their ideas through digital technology use and in doing so shape their own thinking, and potentially positively impact the learning of others. the use of digital artefacts can open up a ‘window’ (pachelor et al., 2009, p.37) on the learners’ thinking that provides information for both the learners and their teachers. in an e-learning setting, eafl includes having the skills to extract feedback information from the internet, the learning environment, the lecturer, and peers. as an example of ‘opening a window’, one of the authors encourages his students to provide accompanying podcasts to their written assignments. during these podcasts students ‘talk to’ their assignments, providing descriptions and justifications on their choices made when completing the assignment. such a conversation would be difficult to write but as a podcast it becomes an activity in reflection. students are also invited to charteris et al. e-assessment for learning (eafl) in higher education: is it a wolf in sheep’s clothing? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 9: july 2015 7 discuss any insights that they may have gained as a result of having completed the assessment task. they can also suggest possible improvements and identify aspects of the assignment that they could address differently were they to repeat it. the podcasts also provide students with opportunities to identify issues for specific commentary when the tasks are marked. this allows learners to request the sort of feedback that they believe will best meet their needs. this interactive process assists to reposition the student in the centre of the feedback dynamic. rather than being a passive receiver of feedback, students can demonstrate agency through navigating the feedback process. in this way, eafl can be seen as a means of learner empowerment and agency, creating an online learning environment replete with affordances for student-centred design. in our context of primarily distance education, lecturers can facilitate learning through digital technologies that enable them to increase student numbers and raise productivity. the afl practices we describe in this paper are predominantly mediated electronically, therefore we are continually educating our pre-service teachers by way of the eafl discourses and practices that we adopt. we additionally acknowledge eafl as a ‘window on thinking’ that can be aligned with metacognitive processes. our students continually make judgments about where they are in relation to benchmarks and criteria. in this respect, sadler’s (1989) widely-acknowledged notion of ‘closing the gap’ can be represented as a cumulative spiral process, where repeated attempts at assignments are necessary for student proficiency to be developed. notwithstanding the value of this process, we are mindful of running the risk of losing the rich, dynamic and unstable dimensions of knowledge construction that can accompany a technicist conception of ‘gap closing’, where knowledge is seen as stable and linear. we believe that divergent and dialogic approaches to assessment have implications for how eafl can be characterised in digital settings. there are divergent and dialogic forms of feedback (askew and lodge, 2000; carless et al., 2011) where learners draw from their lifeworld experiences as funds of knowledge to share with their peers. divergent assessment practices can be characterised by on-going dialogue between, and amongst, learners and teachers. this dialogue can be electronically mediated synchronously, via chat or virtual meeting software, and/or asynchronously via discussion forums, where learners can initiate, respond and ask questions, as well as reply to others (pryor and crossouard, 2005). carless et al. (2011) from a co-constructivist perspective emphasise a dynamic nature of learning, where the lecturer also learns from the student through charteris et al. e-assessment for learning (eafl) in higher education: is it a wolf in sheep’s clothing? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 9: july 2015 8 dialogue and participation in shared experiences. taking this kind of a co-constructivist perspective, learning can be seen as a process where the lecturer also learns from the student through dialogic interaction (carless et al., 2011). despite these advantages and affordances, there are some problematic aspects to eafl in higher education as embodied by a range of discourses, such as responsibilisation, learnification, performativity and power. we discuss these in the following sections. learnification and responsibilisation ‘learnification’ denotes how, in a neoliberal discourse, the term ‘learning’ has been commandeered conceptually as primarily an economic transaction. biesta (2009) critiques the rise of the ‘new language of learning’ that he refers to as the concerning trend of ‘learnification’ of education. in 2005, he problematised the ‘new language of learning’ arguing that: […] it allows for a redescription of the process of education in terms of an economic transaction, that is, a transaction in which (i) the learner is the (potential) consumer, the one who has certain needs, in which (ii) the teacher, the educator, or the educational institution becomes the provider, that is, the one who is there to meet the needs of the learner, and where (iii) education itself becomes a commodity to be provided or delivered by the teacher or educational institution and to be consumed by the learner. (biesta, 2005, p.58) biesta (2013, p.583) points out how the language of teaching reflects these changes in that there are ‘learning environments, students are called learners’… [furthermore] ‘adult education has been rebranded as lifelong learning, and the process of education is described as that of teaching-and-learning’. rather than adopting a commodified view of learning as the development of human capital, biesta (2011, p.201) argues for a robust conception on learning as a process embedded in a learning culture where ‘dispositions, actions, histories and trajectories of individual students [are] constitutive parts of a learning culture [and] student learning is not simply… an ‘outcome’ or ‘product’… but … something that shapes and forms the culture’. while biesta (2012, p.4) acknowledges the place of technical skills, with regard to say driving a car, drilling for oil or learning to fly, he posits that education should resist practices that are strongly oriented toward ‘reduction, charteris et al. e-assessment for learning (eafl) in higher education: is it a wolf in sheep’s clothing? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 9: july 2015 9 reproduction and closure’. instead, he argues for a more generative approach, not least because assessment-driven practices can impoverish pedagogy. ‘[i]t is perhaps not without significance that teaching and pedagogy are increasingly being replaced by and redefined as assessment, thus running the risk of driving the event out of education’ (biesta, 2012, p.4) lack of information is not an issue in a ‘knowledge-driven economy’ as the emphasis is on deploying the skills to define, locate, evaluate, organise and use relevant information to inform one's progress and achievement. nevertheless, what constitutes valued knowledge can become commodified and narrowly defined through educational transactions. as suggested by the findings of pachelor et al. (2009), eafl practices, with their foci on the mechanics of student achievement, and their link with the subject position of ‘learner as consumer’, are imbued with the potential to streamline and enhance learning. eafl can therefore be critically construed as an embodiment of learnification discourse. like learnification, the discourse of ‘responsibilisation’ also has problematic overtones in relation to eafl. implementation of eafl practices, such as social media-facilitated personal learning environments (dabbagh and kitsantas, 2012), is appealing in that they can enable students to take ownership of their own learning (hodgson and pang, 2012) and foster self-regulation. however, there are caveats. the emphasis on self could be seen as ‘responsibilisation’, namely an increased focus on individual student responsibility, over responsibility for others, with the exception of participation in acts of surveillance and control (rose, 2003; davies, 2006). as a neoliberal form of accountability, ‘responsibilisation’ holds individuals responsible for their learning and deflects the gaze from other elements of the system such as shortcomings of curriculum and summative assessment processes. performativity both afl, and the increasingly prevalent eafl practices in online higher education contexts, can be construed as performative in that they are situated as a transactional exchange of knowledge in higher education educational economy. performativity can be regarded as a ‘grand narrative’ associated with modern capitalist societies where knowledge is a commodity to be produced, exchanged in a buyer-seller market, and charteris et al. e-assessment for learning (eafl) in higher education: is it a wolf in sheep’s clothing? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 9: july 2015 10 consumed (lyotard, 1984; ball, 2003). researchers in this scenario are the producers of knowledge, whilst teachers disseminate it. lyotard (1984, p.51) identified competing purposes for knowledge production in the following way: the question (overt or implied) now asked by the professional student, the state, or institutions of higher education, is no longer ‘is it true?’, but ‘what use is it?’. in the context of the mercantilisation of knowledge, more often than not this question is equivalent to: ‘is it saleable?’ and in the context of power-growth: ‘is it efficient?’. the development of more sophisticated educational tools has enhanced the power for increased and improved knowledge production in higher education, so that: ‘[t]he acceleration of knowledge production and revolutions in information technology’ have contributed to ‘knowledge capitalism’ as a key driver that underpins the notion of a ‘knowledge-driven economy’. (kauppinen, 2014, p.1) learning as performance is an uncomfortable discourse for us. as has been argued elsewhere (nicol and macfarlane-dick, 2006), in many cases higher education courses can be designed in such a way that learning is a performance and ‘deep learning’ is sidelined as courses progress to simply cover more content with engagement with pedagogical process. this focus on content is exacerbated by pressure to cover prescribed criteria by accrediting agencies, as is common for professional degrees such as education, health and engineering. nicol and macfarlane-dick (2006) suggest that most students therefore have little opportunity to directly use the feedback they receive, especially in the case of planned assignments. invariably, the students are required to move on to the next assessment task soon after feedback is received. there is also inherent ‘performance’ tension when students are positioned as consumers through assessment practices in courses. as educators, the performances and pedagogy of teachers in higher education are assessed by their students, paradoxically by those who are in the throes of transformation themselves. student evaluations are increasingly used as evidence to ensure that lecturers are performing effectively. professionally and ethically we are charged with the process of engaging students to experience the deep process of transformational learning, often through pathways that support dissonance and confusion, where students engage with and challenge their beliefs as they think critically. such charteris et al. e-assessment for learning (eafl) in higher education: is it a wolf in sheep’s clothing? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 9: july 2015 11 pedagogy requires deep learning strategies where students often explore, look for hidden and nuanced meanings, and make connections between ideas within and beyond disciplinary boundaries (quinn, 2011). this is not always comfortable for some students who themselves are pushed by their impending employment prospects to perform in ways measured by institutional grading systems. often these students want electronic answers to enable them to achieve the next distinction or high distinction. however, learning in its fullest sense, can sometimes be facilitated by holding back on ‘the answers’ to promote more thinking and discussion. this requires students to accommodate a degree of discomfort and frustration that may threaten how lecturers’ performance is measured. we thus recognise that there are tensions when education is read as a commodified product, and it can be too easy to assume that familiar consumer mantra that ‘the customer is always right’. performativity and power it has been argued (e.g. hodkinson et al., 2008) that learning theory often fails to fully incorporate the significance of power, and for this reason we propose that afl practices need to be explored in light of the power relationships embedded within discourses as ‘regimes of truth’ (foucault, 2007). as a concept, ‘the gaze’ was first coined by psychoanalyst jacques lacan to describe how becoming visible to others can make one feel hyper aware (krips, 2010). drawing on bentham’s penitentiary concept, foucault (1977) adapted the idea of the ‘panoptic gaze’ as a commentary on surveillance. in the push for massification, and concomitant use of easy access online learning, higher education can be seen increasingly as a digitalised panopticon. it allows students to surveil themselves and teachers to surveil students, whilst at the same time they are subject to a performative gaze from both students and managers. some technological practices, for instance, the emerging field of learning analytics, can be seen as elaborate surveillance devices that can provide data on student and teacher performance. a panopticon consists of a tower situated at the centre of a large central space and is surrounded by a series of buildings, each cell of which has a window that is clearly visible to the surveillant in the tower. the cells can be seen as ‘small theatres in which each actor is alone, perfectly individualised and constantly visible’ (foucault, 1977, p.200). although the comparison between the modern university and bentham’s panopticon as a charteris et al. e-assessment for learning (eafl) in higher education: is it a wolf in sheep’s clothing? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 9: july 2015 12 disciplinary technology (foucault, 1977) is not new, it is apt in that it is a technique deployed to exercise power at minimal cost or effort. the comparison between market driven approaches to teaching and learning in universities and foucault’s conception of the panopticon is also not new (shore and roberts, 1993; miller and sabapathy, 2011). shore and roberts (1993) writing about higher education almost 20 years ago could be describing the modern university today with its advanced use of ‘disciplinary technologies.’ ‘by inducing a state of conscious and permanent visibility the panopticon' transforms the inmate into the instrument of his own subjugation, and thereby guarantees the automatic functioning of power’ (shore and roberts, p.199; p.3). deploying the notion of the ‘panoptical gaze’, the authors observe that processes of performativity in higher education have become increasingly prevalent through assessment practices that are enhanced through digital media. the technology of learning analytics was originally used to collect data to assess the efficacy of marketing efforts (mattingly et al., 2012). similar to its marketing applications, in higher education contexts, the type of data collected through learning analytics is often restricted to records of mouse-clicks; times and durations of access; and navigation paths (friesen, 2013). this type of data, although extensive and freely available through learning management systems, is typically not data about learning itself (friesen, 2013). moreover, learning is a multidimensional phenomenon, and the complex interplay and interactions between students and content; students and their lecturers, and amongst the students themselves, become lost when reduced to the linear approaches typically associated with learning analytics. the output of learning analytics is often used to fuel data-driven decision making processes. using statistical software, mathematical models are generated and, based upon these predetermined values, particular actions may be triggered by the system (campbell et al., 2007). the most commonly discussed use for learning analytics in the literature provision is currently student feedback (friesen, 2013). this often means that the system used determines the type of feedback. such a process raises a number of issues. firstly, feedback delivered in such a fashion acts to de-centre students from the feedback process. secondly, it reduces the potential for learner agency, as students are prevented from taking agentic positions in their learning. thirdly, as a technicist practice, it constrains students to narrow subject positions, portraying them as ‘objects to be moulded’ (biesta, 2013, p.1). charteris et al. e-assessment for learning (eafl) in higher education: is it a wolf in sheep’s clothing? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 9: july 2015 13 despite the inability of learning analytics to adequately address student learning needs which are complex and can vary over time and context (friesen, 2013), the allure of automated instruction, based upon data generated through learning analytics, remains strong. as biesta (2010, p.13) observes, this is indicative of the rise of a culture of performativity in education and raises the question of: whether we are indeed measuring what we value, or whether we are measuring what we can easily measure and thus end up valuing what we (can) measure. these media developments enable practitioners to survey themselves and invite the gaze of others. teachers are evaluated through learning analytics and corporate intelligence is used to rate their performances. we have observed that educators can find themselves in a situation where they have to split ‘good practice’ and performance in the interest of ensuring student ‘consumer’ satisfaction levels are sustained at a high level. in such situations, educators may adopt reductionist approaches to teaching students, focusing on a linear approach to content. this, one can argue, prioritises compliance over education for positive social transformation. through performative evaluation teachers can get moulded in their teaching. e-pedagogy is therefore often mediated by balancing the inherent tension of ‘meeting the market’ and making informed pedagogical decisions. similarly, students can find themselves being increasingly surveyed by the digital panopticon. eafl can become blurred with the e-assessment of activity. for example, increasingly students are expected to make regular contributions online to discussions about formative feedback or peer reviewing. software may be deployed that monitors this online activity and triggers an alert that is sent to the student and their teachers if students fail to engage with the lms technology after a nominated period of time. this results in the quantity of interactions being measured to monitor attendance rather than their quality which can give an indication of the students’ engagement with learning. it follows that students’ learning is potentially moulded through inherent messages about what is measured and valued by such performative processes like this kind of electronic feedback. as an element of performativity, it is important to critique the individualism embedded in a predominately commodified view of learning. in higher education settings, students, as individuals, are self-regulating subjects positioned as consumers in a globally competitive education market. conceptualising eafl purely as a process that can improve learning charteris et al. e-assessment for learning (eafl) in higher education: is it a wolf in sheep’s clothing? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 9: july 2015 14 outcomes through the use of digital technologies, can miss an important aspect of ownership and the inclusion of different epistemologies and ontologies. when we adopt this stance we run the risk of locating knowledge as static and transmissible rather than dynamic and negotiated. this is evident in the way that learning and knowledge is conveyed as parcels of information in the following description of the purpose of formative assessment in higher education: formative assessment centres on activities by teachers and/or a learner or a group of learners who provide information that yields feedback suitable to make necessary modifications to teaching and learning activities, for example those that lead to the learner having a better understanding of what they are trying to learn, what is expected of them and how to make improvements. (daly et al., 2010, p.3) a performative perspective of eafl is based on meritocratic values and as such encompasses individualistic notions of learning. eafl can promote immediate and transmissive performance feedback from lecturer to student (gikandi, 2011). as a mechanistic and linear process, feedback from this perspective can be likened to a supermarket checkout. feedback itself becomes the proxy for educational quality. there is a focus on the processes involved with the measurement of quality rather than the richness of quality learning as a process. rubrics in online marking software such as ‘grademark’ (iparadigms, 2014) are a case in point. the use of rubrics can be viewed as a process of making the criteria for assessment transparent. rubrics can define the parameters for both teachers and students, before, during and after summative assessment tasks, hence enhancing the ‘for’ learning in assessment ‘of’ learning. however, marking rubrics can be deployed to transmit perceived requisite knowledge from active lecturer donor to passive student recipient. unless embedded in the teaching process, the language of rubrics can be ambiguous and students and teachers may therefore imbue them with different meanings. they can also be slavish in their linearity, reducing a complex performance into a quantifiable cage. of course, well-designed rubrics can act as instruments for eafl by indicating to students what needs to be done to move beyond their current levels of performance or understanding. they can also become effective mediated tools for eafl when students coconstruct meanings through exploring exemplars with a rubric as a learning tool. this dialogic approach evokes student agency and funds of knowledge. charteris et al. e-assessment for learning (eafl) in higher education: is it a wolf in sheep’s clothing? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 9: july 2015 15 by inviting learners to share their different perspectives through digital technologies, diverse funds of knowledge can be recognised. however, it is too easy to take a ‘business as usual’ approach to assessment practices in e-learning environments that precludes learners from taking agentic positions in their learning. thus we highlight the importance of fostering ‘action and responsibility’ (biesta, 2013, p.1) through reflexive development of eafl practice that is responsive to learners’ funds of knowledge. eafl practices can offer a means to create effective environments where learners are actively engaged with valuable experiences (gikandi, 2011, p.1). high-agency learning environments it is possible to develop agency both by de-centering the instructor in e-learning environments and troubling the neoliberal hegemony of learner-centred responsibilisation. we advocate practices that provide students with time and conceptual and temporal space to play, theorise and reflect their own experiences. this process potentially decentres the subject position of the omnipotent instructor. for instance, draft writing can be shared between students so that there is a range of models and peer feedback is visible to all. these written submissions can allow for students to reflect and consider them in relation to their own writing as a form of self-assessment. in addition, written peer feedback provides dialogic self-assessment if there is scope for further comment from the author. collaborative writing of this sort supports a continuous feedback loop that transcends ‘episodic [and] mechanistic practice’ (boud and molloy, 2013, p.699). collaborative writing can take the form of co-constructed mindmaps or shared writing on google docs. this form of collaboration can also take the form of jointly constructed annotated bibliographies where students critique sources to decide which references to include in their submission. as a negotiation task the learners become both ‘seekers and providers’ who give and receive feedback, thus orientating themselves and others to the dimensions of the target performance (boud and molloy, 2013). in asynchronous online discussions, dialogic feedback (yang and carless, 2013) occurs as learners collaboratively formulate their thoughts and theorise how their experiences link with course content. in this sense, every response in a dialogue is feedback (game and metcalfe, 2009). charteris et al. e-assessment for learning (eafl) in higher education: is it a wolf in sheep’s clothing? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 9: july 2015 16 ‘e-tone’ is an important feature of digital dialogic spaces. as carless (2009, p.82) observes, for formative feedback to flourish it ‘requires lecturers and students to enter into a relationship of trust in which the former try to provide helpful comments that the latter attempt to use’. we consider that a cornerstone of co-constructivist e-pedagogy is the establishment of a culture of relational trust. particular attention should be paid to e-tone as written text is inherently slippery and open to interpretation. e-tone is a rich area for further research. we envisage that it is situationally constituted, mediated by content, epedagogy and student cohort characteristics. for example, audio feedback allows for an engagement with e-tone with information that can be framed in a discursive way that can make it more accessible and engaging for students (parkes and fletcher, 2014). although audio feedback can be seen as an expedient way to support massification in higher education through a reduced emphasis on the time consuming production of written feedback, it has been found to increase a sense of connectedness, enhance the social presence of the teacher and afford an opportunity to provide a greater level of detail than written feedback (parkes and fletcher, 2014). it has been our experience that audio feedback as a vehicle for e-tone promotes a supportive ethos, in particular when the student is underachieving. digital tools lend themselves to different e-pedagogies and ways of framing eafl. they can provide for diagnostics, analytics and provide opportunities for student agency. this is a ‘learning oriented’ approach to assessment (keppell et al., 2015). focusing on learning oriented practices, boud and molloy (2013) highlight (with particular reference to feedback) how active dialogic learning requires a collective orientation. they note that these practices require a reorientation in higher education: ● from an act of teachers to an act of students in which teachers are part (from unilateral to co-constructed; from monologue to dialogue). ● from the almost exclusive use of teachers to that of many others (from single source to multiple sources). ● from an act of students as individuals to one that necessarily implicates peers (from individualistic to collectivist). (boud and molloy, 2013, p.710) charteris et al. e-assessment for learning (eafl) in higher education: is it a wolf in sheep’s clothing? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 9: july 2015 17 through eafl pathways learners can gain electronic feedback from learning objects and assessment artefacts, peers and teachers to determine their next steps. monitoring systems, like a progress dashboard, can provide information on performance for students and lecturers. thus eafl might be seen as a more sophisticated form of learner empowerment. as we have pointed out in our exploration of ‘learnification’, ‘responsibilisation’ and ‘performativity’ discourses, the sheep and wolf can appear to be one and the same. it can be difficult to tell at a distance whether assessment practices are engendering learner agency or serving learners in a mechanistic way. it requires scrutiny from e-pedagogues to critically examine whom the e-assessment is best serving. to this end we have posed possibilities for the development of robust practices that promote agency and engage with students’ funds of knowledge. conclusion digital technologies can afford a mechanised process of knowledge transmission. a transmissive approach to eafl can align with higher education’s neoliberal shift to massification and its associated commodified conception of learning. we problematise engagement with practices that on the surface can appear ‘common sense’ as effective eafl processes, yet are underpinned by a narrow view of learning and economic rationalism. although we critique discourses of ‘learnification’, ‘responsibilisation’ and ‘performativity’ when linked with assessment practices, we are mindful of the potential of eafl to also support student agency. even though ‘responsibilisation’ and ‘learnification’ are powerful discourses for promoting active learner participation in e-learning environments, we argue that linear forms of eafl, albeit student-centred, do not necessarily address or even acknowledge learner diversity and funds of knowledge. through responsive eafl practices, learners can be repositioned so that they are neither passive respondents nor carefully scripted learning subjects who contribute to a purely transactional eafl process. education is a social good and should not be reduced to a mechanism deployed in the production of subjects to be ‘moulded’ in the interest of economic rationalism. it is in the interests of learners that practitioners engage in professional dialogue to inform and critique e-assessment. there is a challenge to balance the tension between ‘good practice’ and ‘consumer’ education, provide effective eafl and charteris et al. e-assessment for learning (eafl) in higher education: is it a wolf in sheep’s clothing? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 9: july 2015 18 evaluate teaching practices that on the surface seem democratic but may in fact be to the detriment of learner agency and epistemological plurality. references askew, s. and lodge, c. (2000) ‘gifts, ping-pong and loops – linking feedback and learning’, in askew, s. (ed.) feedback for learning. london: routledge falmer, pp. 1-19. ball, s. (2003) ‘the teacher's soul and the terrors of performativity’, journal of education policy, 18(2), pp. 215-228. biesta, g. (2005) ‘against learning. reclaiming a language for education in an age of learning’, nordisk pedagogik, 25(1), pp. 54-66. biesta, g. (2009) ‘good education in an age of measurement’, educational assessment, evaluation and accountability, 21(1), pp. 33-46. biesta, g. (2011) ‘from learning cultures to educational cultures: values and judgements in educational research and educational improvement’, international journal of early childhood, 43(3), pp. 199-210. biesta, g. (2012) ‘no education without hesitation: exploring the limits of educational relations’, philosophy of education, issue 2012, pp. 1-13. biesta, g. (2013) the beautiful risk of education. london: paradigm. black, p. and wiliam, d. (1998) ‘inside the black box: raising standards through classroom assessment’, phi delta kappan, 80(2), pp. 139-144. bloxham, s. and boyd, p. (2007) developing effective assessment in higher education: a practical guide. milton keynes, uk: open university press. charteris et al. e-assessment for learning (eafl) in higher education: is it a wolf in sheep’s clothing? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 9: july 2015 19 boud, d. and associates (2010) assessment 2020: seven propositions for assessment reform in higher education. sydney: australian learning and teaching council. available at: http://www.uts.edu.au/sites/default/files/assessment2020_propositions_final.pdf (accessed: 25 july 2014). boud, d. and molloy, e. (2013) ‘rethinking models of feedback for learning: the challenge of design’, assessment & evaluation in higher education, 38(6), pp. 698-712. campbell, j.p., deblois, p.b. and oblinger, d.g. (2007) ‘academic analytics: a new tool for a new era’, educause review, 42(4), pp. 41-57. carless, d. (2009) ‘trust, distrust and their impact on assessment reform’, assessment & evaluation in higher education, 34(1), pp. 79-89. carless, d., salter, d., yang, m. and lam, j. (2011) ‘developing sustainable feedback practices’, studies in higher education, 36(4), pp. 395-407. chappuis, j. (2009) assessment for learning: classroom practices that maximize student success. available at: http://d43fweuh3sg51.cloudfront.net/media/media_files/sevenstrategies.pdf (accessed: 25 july 2014). crooks, t. (1988) ‘the impact of classroom evaluation practices on students’, review of educational research 58(4), pp. 438-481. dabbagh, n. and kitsantas, a. (2012) ‘personal learning environments, social media, and self-regulated learning: a natural formula for connecting formal and informal learning,’ the internet and higher education, 15(1), pp. 3-8. daly, d., pachelor, n., mor, y. and mellar, h. (2010) ‘exploring formative e-assessment: using case stories and design patterns’, assessment & evaluation in higher education, 35(5), pp.619-636. davies, b. (2006) ‘subjectification: the relevance of butler's analysis for education’, british journal of sociology of education, 27(4), pp. 425-438. http://www.uts.edu.au/sites/default/files/assessment-2020_propositions_final.pdf http://www.uts.edu.au/sites/default/files/assessment-2020_propositions_final.pdf http://d43fweuh3sg51.cloudfront.net/media/media_files/sevenstrategies.pdf charteris et al. e-assessment for learning (eafl) in higher education: is it a wolf in sheep’s clothing? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 9: july 2015 20 evans, c. (2013) ‘making sense of assessment feedback in higher education’, review of educational research, 83(1), pp. 70-120. friesen, n. (2013) ‘learning analytics: readiness and rewards’, canadian journal of learning and technology, 39(4), pp. 1-12. foucault, m. (1977) discipline and punish: the birth of the prison. london: penguin books. foucault, m. (2007) security, territory, population: lectures at the collège de france. 1977–1978 (g. burchell, trans.). basingstoke, uk: palgrave macmillan. gale, t. and parker, s. (2014) ‘navigating change: a typology of student transition in higher education’, studies in higher education, 39(5), pp. 734-753. game, a. and metcalfe, a. (2009) ‘dialogue and team teaching’, higher education research and development, 28(1), pp. 45-57. gikandi, j. (2011) ‘achieving meaningful online learning through effective formative assessment’, in williams, g., statham, p., brown, n. and cleland, b. (eds.) changing demands, changing directions: proceedings of ascilite hobart 2011. hobart, tasmania, australia 4-7 december, pp. 452-454 [online]. available at: http://www.ascilite.org/conferences/hobart11/downloads/papers/gikandi-poster.pdf (accessed: 7 july 2015). hall, k. and burke, w. (2004). making formative assessment work: effective practice in the primary classroom. maidenhead, uk: open university press. hattie, j. (2009) visible learning: a synthesis of over 800 meta-analyses relating to achievement. london: routledge. hodgson, p. and pang, m. (2012) ‘effective formative e-assessment of student learning: a study on a statistics course’, assessment & evaluation in higher education, 37(2), pp. 215-225. http://www.ascilite.org/conferences/hobart11/downloads/papers/gikandi-poster.pdf charteris et al. e-assessment for learning (eafl) in higher education: is it a wolf in sheep’s clothing? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 9: july 2015 21 hodkinson, p., biesta, g. and james, d. (2008) ‘understanding learning culturally: overcoming the dualism between social and individual views of learning’, vocations and learning, 1(1), pp. 27-47. iparadigms (2014) smarter grading. five types of rich feedback on any type of assignment. available at: http://turnitin.com/en_us/features/grademark (accessed: 25 july 2014). kauppinen, i. (2014) ‘different meanings of 'knowledge as commodity' in the context of higher education’, critical sociology, 40(3), pp. 1-17. keppell, m., suddaby, g. and hard, n. (2015) ‘assuring best practice in technologyenhanced learning environments’, research in learning technology, 23 [online]. available at: http://www.researchinlearningtechnology.net/index.php/rlt/article/view/25728 (accessed: 27 march 2015). krips, h. (2010) ‘the politics of the gaze: foucault, lacan and žižek’, culture unbound: journal of current cultural research, 2(6), pp. 91-102. available at: http://www.cultureunbound.ep.liu.se/v2/a06/cu10v2a6.pdf (accessed: 25 july 2014). lyotard, j-f. (1984) the postmodern condition: a report on knowledge. geoff bennington and brian massumi (trans.). minneapolis, mn: university of minnesota press. marshall, b. and drummond, m. (2006) ‘how teachers engage with assessment for learning: lessons from the classroom’, research papers in education, 21(2), pp. 133-149. mattingly, k.d., rice, m.c. and berge, z.l. (2012) ‘learning analytics as a tool for closing the assessment loop in higher education’, knowledge management & e-learning: an international journal, 4(3), pp. 236-247. http://turnitin.com/en_us/features/grademark http://www.researchinlearningtechnology.net/index.php/rlt/article/view/25728 http://www.cultureunbound.ep.liu.se/v2/a06/cu10v2a6.pdf charteris et al. e-assessment for learning (eafl) in higher education: is it a wolf in sheep’s clothing? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 9: july 2015 22 miller, n. and sabapathy, j. (2011) ‘open universities: a vision for the public university in the twenty-first century’, in holmwood, j. (ed.) a manifesto for the public university. london, uk: bloomsbury, pp. 42-55. moll, l., amanti, c., neff, d. and gonzález, n. (1992) ‘funds of knowledge for teaching: using a qualitative approach to connect homes and classrooms’, theory into practice, 31(2), pp. 132-141. nicol, d. and macfarlane-dick, d. (2006) ‘formative assessment and self-regulated learning: a model and seven principles of good feedback practice’, studies in higher education, 31(2), pp. 199-218. oughton, h. (2010) ‘funds of knowledge – a conceptual critique’, studies in the education of adults, 42(1), pp. 63-78. pachelor, n., mellar, h., daly, d., mor, y., wiliam, d. and laurillard, d. (2009) scoping a vision for formative e-assessment: a project report for jisc. available at: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/projects/scopingfinalreport.pdf (accessed: 25 july 2014). parkes, m. and fletcher, p.r. (2014) 'talking the talk: audio feedback as a tool for student assessment', in proceedings of the world conference on educational multimedia, hypermedia and telecommunications, (1), pp. 1606-1615. tampere, finland 23-26 june. pryor, j. and crossouard, b. (2005) ‘a sociocultural theorization of formative assessment’, sociocultural theory in educational research and practice conference. university of manchester, manchester 8-9 september. quinn, f. (2011) ‘learning in first-year biology: approaches of distance and on-campus students’, research in science education, 41(1), pp. 99-121. redecker, c. and johannessen, ø. (2013) ‘changing assessment -towards a new assessment paradigm using ict’, european journal of education, 48(1), pp. 79-92. http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/projects/scopingfinalreport.pdf charteris et al. e-assessment for learning (eafl) in higher education: is it a wolf in sheep’s clothing? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 9: july 2015 23 rose, n. (2003) powers of freedom: reframing political thought. cambridge uk: cambridge university press. sadler, d. (1989) ‘formative assessment and the design of instructional systems’, instructional science, 18(2), pp. 119-144. sambell, k., mcdowell, l. and montgomery, c. (2012) assessment for learning in higher education. london: routledge. scriven, m. (1967) ‘the methodology of evaluation’, in tyler, r.w., gagné, r.m. and scriven, m. (eds.) perspectives of curriculum evaluation. chicago, il: rand mcnally, pp. 39-83. shore, c. and roberts, s. (1993) ‘higher education and the panopticon paradigm: quality assessment as ‘disciplinary technology’’, society for research into higher education conference. brighton, england, 14-16 december [online]. available at: http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ed368243.pdf (accessed: 31 july 2014). stiggins, r., arter, j., chappuis, j. and chappuis, s. (2004) classroom assessment for student learning: doing it right—using it well. portland, or: assessment training institute. stiggins, r. and chappuis, j. (2006) ‘what a difference a word makes: assessment for learning rather than assessment of learning helps students succeed’, journal of staff development, 27(1), pp. 10-14. yang, m. and carless, d. (2013) ‘the feedback triangle and the enhancement of dialogic feedback processes’, teaching in higher education, 18(3), pp. 285-297. author details dr jennifer charteris is a lecturer in pedagogy within the school of education. she teaches research methods at masters level and learning theories in the b.ed primary course. jennifer's main research interests are in the area of teacher and student learning/e-learning, identity, agency and critical, postcolonial and poststructural theories. http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ed368243.pdf charteris et al. e-assessment for learning (eafl) in higher education: is it a wolf in sheep’s clothing? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 9: july 2015 24 dr frances quinn is a member of the science education teaching team in the university of new england, school of education. she teaches science and sustainability, primary and secondary science education, and biology. her research interests comprise: science education (particularly biology); distance/blended science learning and teaching; students' perceptions of learning science; and education for sustainability. dr mitchell parkes is lecturer in ict education with the university of new england. he teaches into both undergraduate and postgraduate programmes in the school of education. prior to working at une, mitch was a secondary teacher with a teaching background in computing studies, science and mathematics. he is also a qualified teacher librarian. dr peter fletcher is a lecturer in ict education with the university of new england. his career experience includes 16 years in industry based ict; 15 months post-doctoral experience at kansas state university in physics education; three years full–time secondary teaching; and five years university teaching, as well as nine years part–time teaching across technical and further education (tafe nsw), private tuition, adult community education (ace), secondary school and university settings. dr. vicente chua reyes, jr. is a lecturer with the school of education, university of new england. he is co-editor of the policy and leadership studies working papers series of the national institute of education (singapore) and a fellow of the centre for chinese studies of the republic of china (taiwan), the national taiwan normal university. trained as a political scientist, his current research interests are in young people’s conceptions of political interest and civic participation. he also pursues research inquiries into educational leadership, issues of corruption and governance, and educational reform. e-assessment for learning (eafl) in higher education: is it a wolf in sheep’s clothing? abstract introduction assessment for learning and formative assessment eafl in higher education learnification and responsibilisation performativity performativity and power high-agency learning environments conclusion references author details literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 9: july 2015 the impact of business school students’ extracurricular activities on learning approach and academic performance yiu kong chan university of hong kong, hong kong abstract the relationship of learning approach and extracurricular activities to students’ academic performance is examined in a sample of business school’s students in hong kong. the theoretical model is based on biggs’ 3p theory of learning. 247 full-time university students completed the revised two-factor study processes questionnaire (r-spq-2f) to measure their learning approach. results show that students with a high level of involvement in extracurricular activities are associated with a deep learning approach. deep approach and academic performance is interrelated. implications of these findings are discussed in relation to teaching and learning. keywords: learning approach; extracurricular activities; academic performance. introduction there has been a steady increase in research on the impact of learning approach on academic performance over the past two decades (watkins, 2001; zeegers, 2001; diseth, 2003; hay, 2007; trigwell et al., 2013; chan, 2014). gibbs (2010) examines the literature along three aspects of the interaction of our learning system: (1) presage – personal or situational variable before the learning takes place (learning environment, personality), (2) process – learning approach (ability to engage students, feedback quality), (3) product – learning outcomes (academic performance, employability). the presage and process variables are influenced by external conditions which may affect student learning performance. chan the impact of business school students’ extracurricular activities on learning approach and academic performance journal of learning development in higher education, issue 9: july 2015 2 biggs’ presage-process-product (3p) model (1993) suggested that students undertake deep or surface learning approaches which are influenced by the corresponding motive and strategy at tertiary level. the model, developed originally by dunkin and biddle (1974), showed classroom learning as a multivariate integrated system of a mixture of presage, process and product. the model proposes that personal and situational factors (presage) affect students’ learning approach (process) which influences the learning outcomes (product). presage components consist of two kinds of factors. student individual characteristics presage factors brought to the learning situation include prior knowledge, gender, age, academic standard and personality. teaching presage factors include the teacher’s personal characteristics and institutional factors such as teaching methods, course assessment, workload and curriculum content. learning approaches are the process factors. the difference between deep and surface learning approach has long been debated in the literature (marton and saljo, 1976; biggs, 1993; watkins, 2001). the characteristics of deep approach include the ability to study different perspectives of the learning material, to relate knowledge to prior acquired information, to search for a meaning and a connecting point between the material and personal, to adopt metacognitive skills and to develop other solutions from an inquisitive critical view. the characteristics of surface approach describe students’ tendency to acquire the material without asking in-depth questions, to focus on rote-learning and reproduction of knowledge with little attempt to integrate information, to relate to minimal aspects of material, and to be concerned with the time required to finish the learning task (biggs, 1993). the learning outcomes which students achieve from the learning process are the product factors. prior studies have documented a positive relationship between deep approach and academic performance (zeegers, 2001; diseth, 2003; fenollar et al., 2007; phan, 2010; chan, 2014). however, empirical results are inconclusive. a number of studies do not support a link between learning approach and academic performance (dupeyrat and marine, 2005; diseth and kobbeltvedt, 2010; trigwell et al., 2013). participation of extracurricular activities is one of the presage variables in the 3p model. feldman and matjasko (2005) suggest that participation of extracurricular activities can enhance students’ personal development, social capital, self-esteem and bonding with the school. hunt (2005) and zhang (2000) argue that a positive relationship between extracurricular activities and academic performance occurs because students’ intrinsic chan the impact of business school students’ extracurricular activities on learning approach and academic performance journal of learning development in higher education, issue 9: july 2015 3 motivation in learning can be enhanced through hands-on experience. however, the empirical results are inconclusive. gilman et al. (2003) and wood et al. (2011) suggest a positive influence of peer-group association through participation of extracurricular activities on academic performance. studies by huang and chang (2004) and leung et al. (2011) do not support a positive link between extracurricular activities and academic performance. the purpose of this study is to investigate the relationships between extracurricular activities, learning approach and academic outcomes among hong kong chinese university students. the theoretical framework is based on biggs’ 3p model which proposes that student characteristics (presage) have an impact on the learning approaches (process) (biggs, 1994). involvement in extracurricular activities generates an impact on learning approach and academic performance (watkins, 1998; zhang, 2000). research objectives the aim of this research is to investigate the relationship of extracurricular activities (presage), learning approach (process) and their effect on academic performance (product) by using biggs’ 3p model among hong kong students. the study will focus on hong kong chinese degree students to extend biggs’ findings to a different population, whereby the presage variable, the process variable and the product variable are interrelated. there has been less written about the empirical test of the 3p model on hong kong chinese business degree students. the present study tries to fill that gap at a time of rapid development of higher education in hong kong. it is hypothesised that differences in extracurricular activities affect learning approaches which in turn influence learning outcomes. the main research questions examined may be expressed as follows: 1. does deep learning approach associate with greater involvement in extracurricular activities? 2. is there a relationship between extracurricular activities and academic performance? chan the impact of business school students’ extracurricular activities on learning approach and academic performance journal of learning development in higher education, issue 9: july 2015 4 3. is there a relationship between deep learning approach and academic performance? research method participants participants in this study are 247 business degree students (58% females and 42% males) from a university in hong kong. ages range from 20 to 26 years with an average of 23. all students finished their secondary school in hong kong with chinese as their mother tongue. measures the present study employed the revised two-factor study process questionnaire (rspq-2f) to measure surface and deep learning approach. confirmatory factor analysis illustrated a reliable measurement by using hong kong tertiary students (biggs et al., 2001). the r-spq-2f contained 20 questions to measure deep and surface approach scales each with ten items. a five-point likert scale from ‘always true of me’ which was reflected by 5 and ‘only rarely true of me’ which was anchored by 1. for example, statements of surface approach include: ‘i learn some things by rote, going over and over them until i know them by heart even though i do not understand them’; ‘i find it is not helpful to study topics in depth. it confuses and wastes time, when all you need is a passing acquaintance with topics’; and ‘i find the best way to pass examinations is to try to remember answers to likely questions’. deep approach is examined by the following statements: ‘i find that i have to do enough work on a topic so that i can form my own conclusions before i am satisfied’; ‘i work hard at my studies because i find the material interesting’; and ‘i make a point of looking at most of the suggested readings that go with the lectures’. two measures of surface and deep approach were extracted within a range of grades from 1 to 5. the higher the grade, the more use is made of the approach for each student. an extracurricular activity scale was used to rate how often students took part in ten sports and 12 school-based student clubs by assigning a score for each item using a 5-point scale ranging from 1 (not at all) to 5 (very often). the extracurricular activity was grouped chan the impact of business school students’ extracurricular activities on learning approach and academic performance journal of learning development in higher education, issue 9: july 2015 5 into three categories including sports, performance in music or dance and student clubs, such as chess, debate or community services. a weighted average of these three items of each student was calculated by assigning a 5-point scale ranging from 1 (not at all) to 5 (very active) in involvement of extracurricular activities. grade point average (gpa) was used to measure academic outcomes. the course gpa is a weighted average of the gpas for all compulsory subjects, which is measured on a scale from a (excellent) to f (fail). the gpas were transformed to numbers for data analysis with higher numbers pointing to better grades (a = 5, b = 4, c = 3, d = 2, f = 1). procedure a convenience sampling method was used. the questionnaires, instructions and assurances regarding the confidentiality of all data collected were given to students after class time. all students volunteered to participate in the survey. questionnaires were administered at the end of the academic year and students’ academic results were obtained from professors with the school’s approval. results hypothesis one proposes that there is a relationship between extracurricular activities and learning approach of students (deep learning approach (dla) and surface learning approach (sla)). cross-tabs with chi-squared tests were adopted to examine differences in learning approaches and extracurricular activities. students were identified as two groups based on their involvement in extracurricular activities (high or low level). the rspq-2f score was examined to classify deep learning approach and surface learning approach. the results of the chi-square analysis are presented in the following table. chan the impact of business school students’ extracurricular activities on learning approach and academic performance journal of learning development in higher education, issue 9: july 2015 6 table 1. differences in learning approaches of students and extracurricular activities. learning approach dla sla row totals high 137 21 158 low 53 36 89 column totals 190 57 247 the results showed that the number of students who are active in extracurricular activities are significantly higher than students who are not active in extracurricular activities on the deep learning approach, χ 2 (1, n = 130) = 12.481, p < 0.001. this suggests that hong kong chinese students with a high level of extracurricular activity involvement are more likely to use the deep approach. table 2. table of coefficients (dependent variable: grade point average). variables beta se t extracurricular activities .058 .131 .67 learning approach .41** .162 3.91 f (2, 129) = 5.524** r 2 = .13 adjusted r 2 = .12 ** p < 0.05 hypothesis two suggests a positive relationship between extracurricular activities and academic performance. hypothesis three proposes a positive relationship between deep learning approach and academic performance. regression analysis was performed in which the r-spq-2f score (learning approaches) and extracurricular activities are served as the dependent variables, and the gpa score (academic performance) as the independent variable. the results are presented in table 2. the results of the regression analysis indicated that learning approaches were positively related to academic performance at p < 0.05 or beyond which explained 12% of the variance (measured by r 2 ). it supported the hypothesised role of learning approaches in influencing academic performance. however, the results did not support a positive relationship between chan the impact of business school students’ extracurricular activities on learning approach and academic performance journal of learning development in higher education, issue 9: july 2015 7 extracurricular activities and academic performance in this study. discussion by using the 3p framework, the study explored the relationship among extracurricular activities, learning approach and academic performance of hong kong business degree students. three research questions were examined: first, the impact of extracurricular activities on learning approach; second, the influence of extracurricular activities on academic performance; third, the relationship between deep learning approach and academic performance. the findings of this study show a positive link between extracurricular activities and deep learning approach. they also indicate a positive impact of deep learning approach on academic performance. the results support prior studies (zhang, 2000; fenollar et al., 2007; diseth, 2011; trigwell et al., 2013; chan, 2014). a link between extracurricular activities and deep learning approach is found. it is common for higher education institutions to encourage students to participate in various types of extracurricular activities in hong kong. it is recognised that extracurricular activities play a key role in whole-person education. higher education institutions should put more resources in place to encourage participation of school-based extracurricular activities and offer recognition to active participants. questions remain as to how higher institutions might enhance students’ learning from the formalisation of extracurricular activity and which types of extracurricular activities are useful for students. further studies are required to explore the relationship between various types of extracurricular activities and deep approach. the positive relationship between deep approach and academic outcomes may be caused by a variety of factors. first, the assessments of finance students appear to reward the deep approach. students who use the deep approach may not match the specific demands of the assessment in other disciplines. byrne and willis (1997) argue that public school examinations in ireland promote the surface approach. biggs (1994) and sternberg (1997) argue that the assessment format has a strong impact on how students approach their study. second, learning approaches can be affected by variables such as heavy course work, didactic teaching method, or over-lecturing in hong kong (gow et al., 1996). chan the impact of business school students’ extracurricular activities on learning approach and academic performance journal of learning development in higher education, issue 9: july 2015 8 from a practical perspective, the present study shows that lecturers should be aware of the impact of learning approach on academic performance. the present findings revealed that it is needed to teach students some basic learning strategies to enable them to perform better academically. this enhancement in learning strategies is only a necessary condition, not a sufficient condition, for improving students’ academic performance. raising students’ awareness of learning approaches is an integral part of effective teaching. conclusion there are two major limitations to this study that construed its results indicative rather than conclusive. first, this study is bounded by the sample size. more studies could be taken in different countries and comparison could be considered with different learning contexts and major studies with larger sample sizes. in the light of inconclusive previous findings, the generalisation of the relationship between deep approach and academic performance is in need of further studies for sub-degree students. second, it would be useful to adopt qualitative research to reveal insights into the relationship between extracurricular activities, deep learning approach and academic outcomes in higher education. this study contributed to the enrichment of the empirical research in the relationship between extracurricular activities, learning approach and academic outcomes in hong kong students. although the findings do not generalise a causal relationship between extracurricular activities and deep learning approach, lecturers and school counsellors should encourage students to join school-based extracurricular activities. future studies could include other presage variables such as personality and socio-economic status. in light of inconsistent prior findings, the generalisability of the relationship between extracurricular activities and learning approach is in need of further research. references biggs, j.b. (1993) ‘from theory to practice: a cognitive systems approach’, higher education research and development, 12(1), pp. 73-86. chan the impact of business school students’ extracurricular activities on learning approach and academic performance journal of learning development in higher education, issue 9: july 2015 9 biggs, j.b. (1994) ‘what are effective schools. lessons from east and west’, australian educational research, 21(1), pp. 19-39. biggs, j.b., kember, d. and leung, d.y.p. (2001) ‘the revised two-factor study process questionnaire: r-spq-2f’, british journal of educational psychology, 71(1), pp. 133-149. byrne, m. and willis, p. (1997) ‘an analysis of accounting at second level’, irish accounting review, 4(1), pp. 1-26. chan, y.k. (2014) ‘learning approaches and academic achievement in full-time and parttime sub-degree hong kong chinese students’, international journal of continuing education and lifelong learning, 6(2), pp. 75-86. diseth, a. (2003) ‘personality and approaches to learning as predictors of academic achievement’, european journal of personality, 17(2), pp. 143-155. diseth, a. and kobbeltvedt, t. (2010) ‘a mediation analysis of achievement motives, goals, learning strategies, and academic achievement’, british journal of educational psychology, 80(4), pp. 671-687. dunkin, m.j. and biddle, b.j. (1974) the study of teaching. new york: holt, rinehart and winston. dupeyrat, c. and marine, c. (2005) ‘implicit theories of intelligence, goal orientation, cognitive engagement and achievement: a test of dweck’s model with returning to school adults’, contemporary educational psychology, 30(1), pp. 43-59. feldman, a. and matjasko, j. (2005) ‘the role of school-based extracurricular activities in adolescent development: a comprehensive review and future directions’, review of educational research, 75(2), pp. 159-210. fenollar, p., roman, s. and cuestas, p.j. (2007) ‘university students’ academic performance: an integrative conceptual framework and empirical analysis’, british journal of educational psychology, 77(4), pp. 873-891. chan the impact of business school students’ extracurricular activities on learning approach and academic performance journal of learning development in higher education, issue 9: july 2015 10 gibbs, g. (2010) dimensions of quality. york: the higher education academy. gilman, r., meryers, j. and perez, l. (2003) ‘structured extracurricular activities among adolescents; findings and implications for school psychologists’, psychology in the schools, 41(1), pp. 31-41. gow, l., balla, j., kember, d. and hau, k.t. (1996) ‘the learning approaches of chinese people: a function of socialization processes and the context of learning?’, in bond, m. (ed.) the handbook of chinese psychology. hong kong: oxford university press, pp.109-123. hay, d.b. (2007) ‘using concept maps to measure deep, surface and non-learning outcomes’, studies in higher education, 32(1), pp. 39-57. huang, y.r. and chang, s.m. (2004) ‘academic and co-curricular involvement: their relationship and the best combinations for student growth’, journal of college student development, 45(4), pp. 391-406. hunt, d.h. (2005) ‘the effect of extracurricular activities in the educational process: influence on academic outcomes’, sociological spectrum, 25(4), pp. 417-445. leung, c.h., ng, c.w.r. and chan, p.o.e. (2011) ‘can co-curricular activities enhance the learning effectiveness of students?: an application to the sub-degree students in hong kong’, international journal of teaching and learning in higher education, 23(3), pp. 329-341. marton, f. and saljo, r. (1976) ‘on qualitative differences in learning: i – outcome and process’, british journal of educational psychology, 46(1), pp. 4-11. phan, h.p. (2010) ‘students’ academic performance and various cognitive processes of learning: an integrative framework and empirical analysis’, educational psychology, 30(3), pp. 297-322. sternberg, r.j. (1997) thinking styles. new york: cambridge university press. chan the impact of business school students’ extracurricular activities on learning approach and academic performance journal of learning development in higher education, issue 9: july 2015 11 trigwell, k, ashwin, p. and millan, e.s. (2013) ‘evoked prior learning experience and approach to learning as predictors of academic achievement’, british journal of educational psychology, 83(3), pp. 363-378. watkins, d. (1998) ‘assessing approaches to learning: a cross-cultural perspective on the study process questionnaire’, in dart, b. and boulton-lewis, g. (eds.) teaching and learning in higher education. melbourne: australian council for educational research, pp. 124-144. watkins, d. (2001) ‘correlates of approaches to learning: a cross-cultural meta-analysis’, in sternberg, r.j. and zhang, l.f. (eds.) perspective on thinking, learning, and cognitive styles. mahwah, nj: lawrence erlbaum associates, pp.165-195. wood, j., little, s., goldring, l. and jenkins, l. (2011) ‘the confidence to do things that i know nothing about – skills development through extracurricular inquiry activity’, journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3, march, pp. 2-21. zeegers, p. (2001) ‘approaches to learning in science: a longitudinal study’, british journal of educational psychology, 71(1), pp. 115-132. zhang, l.f. (2000) ‘university students’ learning approaches in three cultures: an investigation of biggs’ 3p model’, journal of psychology, 134(1), pp. 37-55. author details yiu kong chan is senior programme director of the college of business and finance in the university of hong kong school of professional and continuing education. his research interest is in the area of lifelong education and educational psychology. the impact of business school students’ extracurricular activities on learning approach and academic performance abstract introduction research objectives research method participants measures procedure results discussion conclusion references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 27 april 2023 ________________________________________________________________________ ©2023 the author(s) (cc-by 4.0) getting connected: establishing direct communication between learning developers and phd students with teaching responsibilities ralitsa kantcheva bangor university, uk kiu sum solent university, southampton, uk; westminster university, uk abstract many phd researchers have the opportunity to take up teaching responsibilities during their doctoral studies to enhance their employability and interest in academia. aside from their formal teaching training, little is known about the types of resources and support from professional services that phd students (phds) use to fulfil their teaching responsibilities. on the other hand, learning development is a relatively new profession within higher education. as such, there are varied perceptions on the necessity for phds with teaching responsibilities to engage with learning development support. this opinion piece shares the experience of a stem uk phd student with teaching responsibilities and a learning development practitioner when establishing support for modules taught by phds. through a dialogue, the authors explore the challenges faced in the interaction between learning developers (lds) and phds, in two different uk universities, and recommend how to further develop the relationship. through this dialogue possible solutions like increasing the visibility of available ld support for phds with teaching responsibilities within higher education institutions (heis) and including ld support in phds teaching training were identified. keywords: learning development; doctoral researcher; teaching; higher education; professional services. kantcheva and sum getting connected: establishing direct communication between learning developers and phd students with teaching responsibilities journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 2 introduction traditionally, doctoral researchers have learned to teach through observing or mentorship within their discipline (von hoene and mintz, 2002). nowadays, phds have opportunities to take up graduate teaching assistant (or similar) positions to gain access to pedagogical training. thus, the training enhances their employability and interest in an academic career while they receive recognition for their teaching from the higher education academy (hea) (barr and wright, 2019; shum, lau and fryer, 2020; rao, hosein, and raaper, 2021; smallwood et al., 2022). aside from the teaching training programmes available through such roles within the disciplines, little is known about the type of resources and, more specifically, support from professional services that doctoral researchers use to fulfil their teaching responsibilities. learning development (ld) is a relatively new profession in he, and its boundaries are still unclear. many consider ld as a tool to ensure that students from widening participation backgrounds succeed and complete their studies (stapleford, 2019). others view ld as a way to enhance and develop lifelong learning strategies to help students become flexible and resilient in an ever-changing job market (jackson, 2015; ruge and mccormack, 2017). due to these variable definitions of the role ld has in a he institution, the reach of ld practitioners’ knowledge and support is uneven across the uk he sector (johnson, 2018). moreover, institutional structures and power-related relationships result in a variable perception of the necessity of engaging with ld services (ali et al., 2018; hadisaputra et al., 2020) and embedding such support in the curriculum (hill and tinker, 2018; minogue, murphy and salmons, 2018) in uk he. this opinion piece shares the experience of a stem uk phd student with teaching responsibilities and an ld practitioner when establishing ld support for modules taught by phds. the conversational approach of this written dialogue between the two authors uncovers the perceptions and interactions between lds and phds with teaching responsibilities in two different uk heis. these two heis are situated in different british nations and have very different educational profiles. while one of the heis is a wellestablished research-focused institution the other is a former polytechnic and a current provider of professional degrees. kantcheva and sum getting connected: establishing direct communication between learning developers and phd students with teaching responsibilities journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 3 the presented dialogue reveals unique challenges and identifies a common problem for both sides – having to communicate through layers of hierarchical structures such as through managers and supervisors. using a written dialogue developed specifically for this publication the authors discuss possible solutions to this common challenge with the aim for ld practitioners to enhance university students’ learning experience. dialogue what is our experience of working with lds/ phds with teaching responsibilities? doctoral student (ds): i’m currently a doctoral researcher in nutrition at an uk university. if i’m honest, i have to say i didn’t know exactly what or who lds were when i was doing my undergraduate or master's degree. i always viewed them as people who helped staff run their teaching classes effectively. when i started my doctorate, i took on some teaching responsibilities within two modules. having completed the required teaching training module for the associate fellowship of the hea, i was still somewhat nervous about meeting students’ expectations in my modules. i was worried about delivering the subject content, ensuring there was a high level of student engagement, and being able to answer students’ questions about the modules. as a result, i explored other roles, besides traditional academic ones, including those of librarians, career consultants, and administrative staff in my immediate academic school. i wanted to find new ways to develop my teaching methods to address my nervousness about these modules. therefore, i joined the association for learning development in higher education (aldinhe) research virtual community of practice (vcop) when it was first established in spring 2020. i probably didn’t think much of it when i pressed the ‘join’ button. perhaps it was me being naïve, just to find out who and what ‘learning development’ is all about, but upon reflection i have never yet regretted having been part of this vcop. now, back to my experience of working with lds. well, you could say i am still a beginner. but through the aldinhe research vcop, i have learned that not only are lds a pretty friendly community, but they are also more than just technicians (perhaps a completely kantcheva and sum getting connected: establishing direct communication between learning developers and phd students with teaching responsibilities journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 4 wrong definition in my mind!). now i see them as practitioners within the institution. they are there to provide advice, to facilitate teaching, and to empower students’ learning. overall, lds work to support students transitioning from one level to another and can support teaching staff to understand how learners learn in order to best guide their students. learning developer (ld): as a study skills adviser at a uk hei, i have worked directly with three phd students with teaching responsibilities over the past six years. i have indirectly contributed to many conferences and training opportunities for phds at a uk hei through its centre for excellence in teaching and learning (cetl). there was a distinct difference in working with each individual phd student, although all of them were involved in stem disciplines. two of the students who approached me were doing professional doctorates in education and were already established lecturers in the school of education. the third individual was suddenly given a module to run by himself, where my support sessions were already embedded, and he is a subject matter specialist. the approach each individual took to supporting their students was significantly affected by their prior teaching practice and personal student experience. the two lecturers in the school of education were solely focused on national policy and requirements in their teaching approach. on the other hand, the subject matter specialist was more interested in supporting the students and how confusion can be avoided in the following years of their studies rather than in the requirements of the related subject matter funding council. what challenges did you face while working with lds/ phds with teaching responsibilities? ds: for me, one challenge when working with lds could be the expectation and understanding of each other’s role within the institution. in relation my engagement with lds directly related to my phd teaching was very little, in fact, none. perhaps because i am not a fulltime staff member or as i did not carry any heavy teaching responsibilities where i was tasked to design the curriculum but was just delivering the materials to the students, and thus, never thought of working with any lds as part of my teaching practices. however, kantcheva and sum getting connected: establishing direct communication between learning developers and phd students with teaching responsibilities journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 5 after i joined aldinhe, i understood the role of lds, and i got to hear and converse about these roles within heis. on the flip side and upon reflection, knowing who the lds are during my teaching training course earlier in my doctoral journey would have been helpful, so that i could have been equipped with the resources and contacts available within the institution to enhance my confidence when teaching. ld: that’s interesting to hear. for me, a challenge was that established lecturers just ‘requested’ the support sessions without discussing how these sessions integrate with the rest of the module or the other modules in that academic year. the communication was more about the need for a service to be provided. thus, lds were seen as a way to fill in teaching hours rather than a source of strategies to resolve a teaching challenge. another challenge to all three collaborations with the phds was the layers of hierarchical structures that our discussion needed to go through. this made the interaction lengthy and cumbersome. the process was characterised by long spells of no communication followed by sudden illogical replies a couple of days before an ld session was scheduled to take place. it would be more helpful for both sides if they communicated directly while informing the related hierarchical structures about their final decision. what do you think might be the benefits of such direct communication? ds: i think having direct communication between lds and phds with teaching responsibilities would create knowledge on the resources available for those who want to start a career in academia. but also having the confidence and knowing that lds (perhaps underused or not as visible as they could be) can help prepare effective sessions in content delivery and engaging with students. how about your perspective? ld: i think communicating directly will help to demystify for phds with teaching responsibilities the essence of ld support and the benefits of having integrated ld support in a teaching kantcheva and sum getting connected: establishing direct communication between learning developers and phd students with teaching responsibilities journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 6 programme. furthermore, it will support the development of the pedagogical knowledge and understanding of future subject matter specialists. thus, ensuring those future lecturers will include both subject content and strategies to support their students' learning. what more can the wider he community do to make lds more visible for phds with teaching responsibilities to encourage direct communication with one another? ds: first and foremost, raising awareness and introducing what lds do within the institution would be a good start for any conversation, especially for those new to teaching – whether new colleagues are joining, or doctoral students are taking on teaching responsibilities. knowing where to find the lds would be beneficial, too, as i now know that ld specialists are there to help facilitate students’ learning experience. simply put, why reinvent the resources when we (hypothetically) should know that there are these resources within an institution that can help to enhance students’ learning? perhaps embedding the awareness of lds in learning and teaching courses (for example, for hea fellowships) would be a starting point to ensure that we can sow the seeds of developing a broader awareness of the variety of colleagues supporting teaching and learning, and their roles within an institution. ld: yes. i also think having a clear explanation of what ld support can offer to phds with teaching responsibilities, possibly through centralised graduate school events, will be helpful. furthermore, ld practitioners could meet phds with teaching responsibilities through such events, and valuable contacts could be developed. moreover, sharing scenarios and case studies of ld support and its impact on the development of the teaching practice of phds and the students in these modules will be helpful. finally, ensuring that phds with teaching responsibilities can directly communicate with ld practitioners about any teaching-related challenges before making any changes to the approved teaching programme will foster a stronger relationship. kantcheva and sum getting connected: establishing direct communication between learning developers and phd students with teaching responsibilities journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 7 conclusion this short dialogue reveals that experiences vary between the phd student and the ld practitioner and their two respective heis. for example, phd students’ expectations of being a lecturer may contradict the reality of teaching in uk heis. the lack of understanding and exposure to the existing ld support in relation to learning and teaching leads to challenges for phds with teaching responsibilities and the inability to overcome their teaching-related challenges efficiently. furthermore, the current ineffective interactions between phds with teaching responsibilities and lds in many existing hierarchical structures could be a barrier to effective communication. direct communication between lds and phds with teaching responsibilities was identified as a solution to develop those professional relationships supporting colleagues new to teaching in uk heis. as a result, this support can help break the hierarchical layers related to barriers to assist the development of pedagogical knowledge and applications in learning and teaching. more specifically, increasing the visibility of available ld support within the institution could facilitate simple and direct communication with part-time phds and teaching staff. other recommendations could include ld support in teaching training offered by each uk hei or hea’s training portfolio for a more standardised and consistent approach. furthermore, embracing the opportunity to support phds’ and part-time staff’s professional development will ensure they have the core competencies needed to become confident future subject lecturers. thus, we suggest developing a dialogue between ld practitioners and all aspiring educators, especially phds with teaching responsibilities, to address the challenges they face when teaching in uk heis. this dialogue should be established through multiple venues like formal hei-specific events as part of internal teaching training programmes, annual teaching and learning conferences, and doctoral school seminars. references ali s, m., supriyatno, asiah, m. d., saputri, m., mursawal, a. and zulfikar (2018) ‘the development of learning resources through benthic species study in mangrove kantcheva and sum getting connected: establishing direct communication between learning developers and phd students with teaching responsibilities journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 8 ecosystem: reuleung leupung for invertebrate zoology learning’, journal of physics: conference series, 1088(1), p.12046. https://doi.org/10.1088/1742-6596/1088/1/012046. barr, m. and wright, p. (2019) ‘training graduate teaching assistants: what can the discipline offer?’, european political science, 18, pp.143-156. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41304-018-0175-6. hadisaputra, s., ihsan, m. s., gunawan, and ramdani, a. (2020) ‘the development of chemistry learning devices based blended learning model to promote students’ critical thinking skills’, journal of physics: conference series, 1521(4), p.42083. https://doi.org/10.1088/1742-6596/1521/4/042083. hill, p. and tinker, a. (2018) ‘making the second year count: embedding learning development in a progressive student journey’, journal of learning development in higher education, issue 14, october, pp.1-25. https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.v0i0.482. jackson, d. (2015) ‘employability skill development in work-integrated learning: barriers and best practice’, studies in higher education, 40(2), pp.350-367. https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2013.842221. johnson, i. p. (2018) ‘driving learning development professionalism forward from within’, journal of learning development in higher education, special edition, october, pp.1-29. https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.v0i0.470. minogue, l., murphy, c. and salmons, k. (2018) ‘embedding learning development; a model for collaborative practice’, journal of learning development in higher education, issue 13, april, pp.1-11. https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.v0i13.443. rao, n., hosein, a. and raaper, r. (2021) ‘doctoral students navigating the borderlands of academic teaching in an era of precarity’, teaching in higher education, 26(3), pp.454-470. https://doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2021.1892058. https://doi.org/10.1088/1742-6596/1088/1/012046 https://doi.org/10.1057/s41304-018-0175-6 https://doi.org/10.1088/1742-6596/1521/4/042083 https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.v0i0.482 https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2013.842221 https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.v0i0.470 https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.v0i13.443 https://doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2021.1892058 kantcheva and sum getting connected: establishing direct communication between learning developers and phd students with teaching responsibilities journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 9 ruge, g. and mccormack, c. (2017) ‘building and construction students’ skills development for employability: reframing assessment for learning in disciplinespecific contexts’, architectural engineering and design management, 13(5), pp.365-383. https://doi.org/10.1080/17452007.2017.1328351. shum, a., lau, p. and fryer, l. (2021) ‘from learner to teacher:(re) training graduate teaching assistants’ teaching approaches and developing self-efficacy for and interest in teaching’, higher education research & development, 40(7), pp.15461563. https://doi.org/10.1080/07294360.2020.1818063 . smallwood, z. m., spencer-briggs, j. l., xia sean, x., ward, m. d. and hyde, j. (2022) ‘design and delivery of a graduate teaching assistant (gta) program in a uk university: experiences and perspectives’, journal of chemical education, 99(2), pp.592-602. https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.jchemed.1c00453. stapleford, k. (2019) ‘the ldhen hive mind: learning development in uk higher education as a professional culture’, journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16, december, pp.1-23. https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.v0i16.510. von hoene, l. and mintz, j. (2002) ‘research on faculty as teaching mentors: lessons learned from a study of participants in uc berkeley’s seminar for faculty who teach with graduate students instructors’, to improve the academy, 20(1), pp.77-93. https://doi.org/10.1002/j.2334-4822.2002.tb00575.x. author details ralitsa kantcheva has been a study skills adviser at bangor university (wales) since 2016. she has experience supporting students both through subject specific and generic provision of academic literacy skills. her primary research interest is students’ understanding of threshold concepts embedded in academic writing and in scientific research procedures. kiu sum is a doctoral researcher in nutrition at the university of westminster, london. her research interest focuses on workplace nutrition, public health nutrition, and https://doi.org/10.1080/17452007.2017.1328351 https://doi.org/10.1080/07294360.2020.1818063 https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.jchemed.1c00453 https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.v0i16.510 https://doi.org/10.1002/j.2334-4822.2002.tb00575.x kantcheva and sum getting connected: establishing direct communication between learning developers and phd students with teaching responsibilities journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 10 behavioural sciences. kiu is also a lecturer in nutrition at solent university, southampton. she has a broad interest in pedagogy research and student engagement and is a registered nutritionist with the association for nutrition. kiu also currently co-convenes the engagement assessment and the early career researchers special interest groups at the raise network. licence ©2023 the author(s). this is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (cc-by 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. see http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. journal of learning development in higher education (jldhe) is a peer-reviewed open access journal published by the association for learning development in higher education (aldinhe). getting connected: establishing direct communication between learning developers and phd students with teaching responsibilities abstract introduction dialogue what is our experience of working with lds/ phds with teaching responsibilities? doctoral student (ds): learning developer (ld): what challenges did you face while working with lds/ phds with teaching responsibilities? ds: ld: what do you think might be the benefits of such direct communication? ds: ld: what more can the wider he community do to make lds more visible for phds with teaching responsibilities to encourage direct communication with one another? ds: ld: conclusion references author details licence literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 6: november 2013 using the exploration of a story to consider the meaning of becoming older kirsten jack manchester metropolitan university, uk abstract the aim of this study was to explore the use of a creative teaching method to facilitate learning about becoming older. an excerpt from a story was shared with a group of first year undergraduate student nurses. this was followed by a discussion of the holistic aspects of ageing. use of this method encouraged a more critical discussion of ageing when compared to didactic teaching methods, and this approach is not restricted to nursing practice. this method can guide similar work in any subject in which assumptions can be challenged, and where meaningful discourse needs to be encouraged. keywords: education; creativity; literature; nurse; older people. introduction this study explores the use of a story excerpt to support learning about what it means to become older. it is important to consider meaningful ways to learn about what it feels like and means to become old. in the united kingdom (uk), over 14 million people are aged sixty and above (ons, 2011). nearly two thirds of hospital admissions involve the over 65 year old age group (cornwell et al., 2012), and as a group older adults are the main users of health services. however, the needs of the older person are not always met. reports from the care quality commission (2011), a uk body responsible for the checking and monitoring of hospitals, suggest that there are inadequacies in care provision, in areas such as interpersonal communication and the respect of dignity. nurse lecturers are challenged to consider effective ways to facilitate effective learning about this area of practice. jack using the exploration of a story to consider the meaning of becoming older background in the developed world, the chronological age of sixty five years has been accepted as a definition of an older person (who, 2013) although for many, age is merely a state of mind and considering the individuality of older people is key to genuine care (davies, 2011). however, whilst the ethos of individualised care may be encouraged within the higher education setting, it may not be the reality in practice (alabaster, 2007). student nurses might be faced with emotional incongruence, making their work with the older person less meaningful, and the reality of nursing practice might be very different to their vision on entering the profession. reflective practice is a way for nurses to reflect on their professional development (rolfe et al., 2011). it might support the development of critical thinking skills, help reduce the theory/practice gap (burton, 2000), and change future practice in a positive way (bulman, 2008). reflective practice has been used to learn from experiences relating to communication, ethics and confidentiality (keen, 2000) and is an educational and professional requirement for nurses (nmc, 2008). it is a way to ‘disperse the emotional load’ created when caring for others (rees, 2013, p.51), and assists in the understanding of ourselves (johns, 2009). this form of experiential learning is not restricted to health care students and has been used in the training of other professionals, such as legal and education (le brun et al., 2005; hume, 2009). however, its overuse as a learning method has been suggested, with nurses showing signs of suffering ‘reflection fatigue’ (coward, 2011, p.883). there are concerns about the ways in which the concept is defined and has been communicated to others (glaze, 2001). self-reflection might be stifled particularly if reflective accounts are assessed as part of the undergraduate curriculum outcomes. less ‘formal’ ways to reflect, such as sharing feelings through collage (jack, 2012), and story sharing (coward, 2011), can support deeper levels of learning about practice, and there is growing interest among nurse educators to consider creative ways to reflect and learn about practice. creativity in teaching fleming et al. (2011) suggest that student nurses do not use a dominant learning style and advocate use of a range of teaching and learning methods to maximise learning potential. when exploring emotions and self-development, traditional didactic teaching methods can journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 2 jack using the exploration of a story to consider the meaning of becoming older fall short. freshwater and stickley (2004) advocate a transformatory learning process, which includes reflective learning and use of the arts, such as poetry, drama, music and film. story extracts can be used to explore understanding of what it is to be human, as part of the education of health professionals (gallagher and mckie, 2010), and can assist not only in our understanding of others, but also of ourselves (price et al., 2007). creative learning methods support a deeper level of learning (ramsden, 1992) and creativity in teaching can support the development of analytical and problem solving skills (sternberg, 2008). literature, such as stories, can enhance ‘moral sensitivity’ in the novice learner (begley, 2006, p.264) and can encourage the reader to become involved in the experience rather than feel like they are watching from the side-lines. stories encourage students to explore personal issues and can support a sense making process in relation to their own lives (koenig and zorn, 2002). crawley et al. (2012, p.45) describe books as a ‘rich resource’ for educators when encouraging the development of emotional awareness, for example, when exploring issues such as death and dying. stories are processed more fully than other stimuli (newman, 2003) and provide a way for students to rehearse reactions and feelings about sensitive topics in a safe environment, before being exposed to the reality of the clinical area (hargrave, 1985). challenges in common with other teaching methods, the use of stories in the classroom is not without its challenges. the fact that this method can support deeper levels of reflection and thinking, on the one hand beneficial, can lead to challenging classroom situations which might be difficult for educators to manage. the multiple meanings located within stories can lead to an unpredictable learning environment which not only challenges students theoretically but also emotionally and in relation to their sense of self. gallagher and mckie (2010) suggest that educators need to be patient and sensitive to the needs of students whilst at the same time, remaining prepared for the unexpected. they suggest that educators adopt a friendly and informal approach to the process and explore reading sources which appeal to a range of students’ reading habits. however, when exploring emotions through the arts, care must be paid, not only to the students’ wellbeing, but to ways in which educators can be supported to facilitate such learning (freshwater and stickley, 2004). lillyman et al. (2011) suggest that all student centred teaching methods require careful planning and skilled facilitation, as educators need to incorporate their journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 3 jack using the exploration of a story to consider the meaning of becoming older pastoral role into their formal teaching. ultimately, educators might find creative teaching methods too draining if not adequately supported themselves. methodology at the beginning of the class the aims of the teaching approach were discussed with a group of ten first year student nurses. i read aloud the following excerpt from the classic tale of the velveteen rabbit (williams, 1922/1991) and then asked the students to read it again and write down their related thoughts and feelings. the story involves two nursery toys, a velveteen rabbit and a skin horse. the skin horse is the oldest toy in the nursery and the rabbit perceives that he is wise and has experience. to the rabbit, this makes him a reliable toy to answer questions about what it takes to become ‘real’: “what is real?” asked the rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side near the nursery fender, before nana came to tidy the room. “does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?” “real isn’t how you are made”, said the skin horse. “it’s a thing that happens to you. when a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but really loves you, then you become real.” “does it hurt?” asked the rabbit. “sometimes,” said the skin horse, for he was always truthful. “when you are real you don’t mind being hurt.” “does it happen all at once, like being wound up,” he asked, “or bit by bit?” “it doesn’t happen all at once,” said the skin horse. “you become. it takes a long time. that’s why it doesn’t often happen to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. generally, by the time you are real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. but these things don’t matter at all, because once you are real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.” (williams, 1922/1991, p.10 – 11) journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 4 jack using the exploration of a story to consider the meaning of becoming older i used mcdrury and alterio’s (2002) model to encourage reflective thinking about the meaning of becoming older. their ‘reflective learning through storytelling’ process includes five stages; finding, telling, expanding, processing and reconstructing. story finding crawley et al. (2012) suggest that educators need to find a book to which they have an emotional response and which relates to the nursing curriculum. i chose this excerpt for two reasons. first, my interpretation, as facilitator of the class, was that it encourages a shift away from a focus on the physical to the emotional aspects of care. second, i suggest that there are multiple meanings within it and i hoped that it might encourage a wide-ranging discussion. however, i acknowledge that although the excerpt had emotional and theoretical significance for me, it may not appeal to the students. some students might not even consider the piece to relate to ageing at all. the nature of interpretation means that each individual may view the world in a different way. however, this difference is advantageous and can promote discussion, disclosure and analytical skills within a group. at the start of the class i briefly disclosed my own feelings in relation to the piece, although i wanted the participants to discover their own meanings within it. story telling i consider myself a novice in using children’s stories in my teaching. i lacked confidence in reading out the whole story to the students and did not want to take up too much time, being concerned that i might lose the attention of some of the group. i read the excerpt aloud to the students, using the original book so that they could see the pictures which accompanied the text. i also distributed typed copies of the excerpt and gave the students time to re-read the piece at their own pace. i requested that the students documented their thoughts and feelings on paper, to support their contribution to the discussion and add to my evaluation of the exercise. i planned a break following the reading of the excerpt, so the students could buy drinks and have further time before starting the discussion. this gave the students an additional opportunity to consider and reflect on the piece. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 5 jack using the exploration of a story to consider the meaning of becoming older story expanding the student nurses involved in this study were unfamiliar with this style of teaching. they were eight months into a three year programme and, due to their early stage, much of the teaching they had been exposed to was didactic and theory based. the bsc (hons) adult nursing curriculum becomes more enquiry based during years two and three. therefore i expected that some of the students might struggle with the exercise and be unable to explore and reflect on possible meanings. story expanding requires the students to explore beliefs and assumptions whilst reflecting on the various meanings within the story. some students described how the excerpt had encouraged them to reflect on their own values in relation to older people, and had reinforced the need to respect the older person. all of the students contributed to the discussion, and the overwhelming theme related to the value, or lack thereof, of the older person. anonymous identifiers are used during a thematic data presentation: theme one: value of older people one student said: age shouldn’t matter really, although it does, but you are still a person, and you get more valuable as you get older. (jill) another stated: experiences make people valuable; it’s not just about being young and fit. (sue) some students considered the learning gained through engagement with the older person, and acknowledged that the worth of the older person is related to their physical functioning. the older person was viewed as knowledgeable and instrumental in giving us the life we lead today. one student made direct reference to the excerpt: “…you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand”; it’s like people who lack respect for those older and wiser. the elderly of today fought in wars…they helped build the economy…they fought for our freedom. they died to give us what we have. what does it cost us to have a bit of respect and patience in return? (fiona) journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 6 jack using the exploration of a story to consider the meaning of becoming older theme two: needing to look ‘beyond the physical’ the second major theme for discussion was about the need to look beyond the ‘physical’ when treating patients, and to consider their emotional needs. this was particularly pleasing as when using traditional teaching approaches, my experience was that students tended to focus on the physical needs and a medical approach to care. indeed williams (2013) suggests that in comparison to the physical aspects of care delivery, the emotional nature of nursing has received little attention and a task-orientated approach to care prevails. one student said: people who are old look tired due to how they have lived, but they are still a person and should be treated like one. (debra) positive aspects of ageing emerged, such as the issue of developing experience as people become older: looking older shows life’s experience, it shouldn’t be seen as a bad thing. (sue) theme three: emotional needs emotional need was highlighted as something that was still important to the older person: older people still have feelings and still want to be loved, just as much as younger people, but this can be ignored i think, especially when they get ill. (carol) the potential for conflict within families was something to consider: older people suffer emotional pain like loss, grief, arguments and fallouts or harsh words with families. (fiona) story processing my move away from a didactic to a more exploratory teaching style was in an attempt to encourage more meaningful and deeper levels of learning and discussion in the classroom. novice reflectors often describe events, drawing conclusions often in an journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 7 jack using the exploration of a story to consider the meaning of becoming older unconscious manner and without knowing whether the conclusions are appropriate (williams, 2000). group reflection on practice, facilitated in this case through use of the story excerpt, provides the space needed for thinking which enables deeper levels of reflection (regan, 2008). through the processing stage, the students were able to unpack feelings about their own mortality and their values and beliefs about how it feels to become older. we related our reflection to communication theory, particularly the work of rogers (1961), and explored issues such as empathising with others and the importance of remaining self-aware. the excerpt relies heavily on metaphorical language, which can deepen our understanding of the human condition (foster and freeman, 2008). barker (2000, p.98) describes its use: the careful and, in some cases, clever use of language can help us to get close to experiences, by approaching them indirectly. we can lose ourselves in an experience, when metaphor – whether verbal or visual – helps us ‘see’ something for what it really is, by using a phrase or image which clearly belongs to something else… in this exercise, metaphor was a powerful medium to uncover hidden aspects of what it means to become older and encouraged a holistic discussion of ageing. it encouraged empathy for the older person, as the participants related the metaphors to their own experiences and assertions. metaphor engages the reader, as they are required to think about the multiple meanings within a text, in contrast to literal information, which may at times require little thought, or mindful investigation. paradoxically, we may only consider the reality of the issue as we investigate the ‘unreal’, and move away from factual informative text. story reconstructing use of the excerpt provided an effective way to promote critical reflection and thinking about what it means to get older. it was a helpful way to explore students’ personal and practical experiences and provided a way to discuss some communication theory. the aim of story reconstructing is to support students in exploring how their practice might change and although this might be difficult to measure, written comments from the students in the journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 8 jack using the exploration of a story to consider the meaning of becoming older classroom suggested that the experience was educationally valuable and encouraged thinking about practice: this does have some meaning about how people perceive other people. (sue) this is like seeing the world through a child’s eyes, which is good sometimes. (debra) implications i found that the use of this method supported an exploration of the human aspects of nursing and encouraged a holistic discussion about the meaning of becoming older. previously, this teaching session had adopted a didactic and theory driven approach, using electronic slides to convey the information and encourage discussion. however, a focus on the theory might neglect other aspects of professional development. to broaden professional thinking, teaching needs to move beyond only delivering theoretical principles (begley, 2006) and be open to more creative methods of working. openness to others’ perspectives, found through the arts, enriches the imagination and context for understanding ourselves and others. being open to the uniqueness of another person is important in nursing practice. the older person has wide ranging needs which often go unmet when ‘current acute models of care’ are applied (flatley and bridges, 2008, p.333) and use of the excerpt encouraged open and honest discussion about the requirement to consider holistic needs. this is important, as admission to hospital can result in stereotyping and objectification of the older person, and a threat to their identity (coyle, 1999). this method can be replicated using other works and other contexts. i suggest that it is not restricted to teaching and learning about the older person and this philosophy can guide similar work in any subject in which assumptions can be challenged and discourse developed. the method could be developed by encouraging students to bring their own choice of literature to learning groups, although this might encourage a more unpredictable discussion, which may be more difficult for the lecturer to facilitate. this process may become lengthy and the approach itself might be perceived as increasing educator journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 9 jack using the exploration of a story to consider the meaning of becoming older workload (cho and forde, 2001). however, to broaden professional thinking, teaching needs to move beyond only the delivery of theoretical principles (begley, 2006). conclusion use of this method evaluated positively and exploration of the excerpt enriched discussion about what it is like to become older. the students were engaged with the discussion which was more analytical and autonomous when compared to previous methods of teaching in this subject area. references alabaster, e. (2007) ‘involving students in the challenges of caring for older people’, nursing older people, 19(6), pp. 23-28. barker, p. (2000) ‘working with the metaphor of life and death’, medical humanities, 26(2), pp. 97-102. begley, a.m. (2006) ‘facilitating the development of moral insight in practice: teaching ethics and teaching virtue’, nursing philosophy, 7(4), pp. 257-265. bulman, c. (2008) ‘an introduction to reflection’, in bulman, c. and schutz, s (eds.) reflective practice in nursing. 4th edn. oxford: blackwell science, pp. 1-24. burton, a.j. (2000) reflection: nursing’s practice and education panacea? journal of advanced nursing 31 (5), pp. 1009 – 1017 care quality commission (2011) dignity and nutrition inspection programme: national overview. newcastle: cqc. cho, m. and forde, e. (2001) ‘designing teaching and assessment methods for diverse student populations international’, journal of art and design education, 20(1), pp. 86-90. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 10 jack using the exploration of a story to consider the meaning of becoming older cornwell, j., levenson, r., sonola, l. and poteliakhoff, e. (2012) continuity of care for older hospital patients: a call for action. london: kings fund. coward, m. (2011) ‘does the use of reflective models restrict critical thinking and therefore learning in nurse education? what have we done?’, nurse education today, 31(8), pp. 883-886. coyle, j. (1999) ‘exploring the meaning of dissatisfaction with health care: the importance of personal identity threat’, sociology of health and illness, 21(1), pp. 95-123. crawley, j., ditzel, l., and walton, s. (2012) ‘using children’s picture books for reflective learning in nurse education’, contemporary nurse, 42(1), pp. 45-52. davies, n. (2011) ‘reducing inequalities in healthcare provision for older adults’, nursing standard, 25(41), pp. 49-55. flatley, m. and bridges, j. (2008) ‘promoting the art of caring for older people (editorial debate)’, international journal of nursing studies, 45(3), pp. 333-334. fleming, s., mckee, g. and huntley-moore, s. (2011) ‘undergraduate nursing students learning styles: a longitudinal study’, nurse education today, 31(5), pp.444-449. foster, w. and freeman, e. (2008) ‘poetry in general practice education: perceptions of learners’, family practice, 25(4), pp. 294-303. freshwater, d. and stickley, t. (2004) ‘the heart of the art: emotional intelligence in nurse education’, nursing inquiry, 11(2), pp. 91-98. gallagher, a. and mckie, a. (2010) ‘the potential of literature and poetry’, in warne, t. and mcandrew, s. (eds.) creative approaches to health and social care education. london: palgrave macmillan, pp. 113-128. glaze, j. (2001) ‘reflection as a transforming process: student advanced nurse practitioners’ experiences on developing reflective skills as part of an msc programme’, journal of advanced nursing, 34(5), pp. 639-647. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 11 jack using the exploration of a story to consider the meaning of becoming older hargrave, m.p. (1985) ‘new horizons: literary studies in the nursing classroom’, the australian journal of advanced nursing, 3(1), pp. 39-44. hume, a. (2009) ‘promoting higher levels of reflective writing in student journals’, higher education research and development, 28(3), pp. 247-260. jack, k. (2012) ‘‘putting the words “i am sad”, just doesn’t quite cut it sometimes!’: the use of art to promote emotional awareness in nursing students’, nurse education today, 32(7), pp. 811-817. johns, c. (2009) becoming a reflective practitioner. 3rd edn. oxford: blackwell publishing. keen, a. (2000) ‘critical incident: reflection on the process of terminal weaning’, british journal of nursing, 9(16), pp. 1059-1062. koenig, j.m. and zorn, c.r. (2002) ‘using story telling as an approach to teaching and learning with diverse students’, journal of nursing education, 41(9), pp. 393-399. le brun, m., macduff, a., vockovic, r. and catanzariti, d. (2005) ‘developing the reflective practitioner online’, the law teacher, 39(1), pp. 16-28. lillyman, s., gutteridge, r. and berridge, p. (2011) ‘using a storyboarding technique in the classroom to address end of life experiences in practice and engage students in deeper reflection’, nurse education in practice, 11(3), pp. 179-185. mcdrury, j. and alterio, m. (2002) learning through storytelling: using reflection and experience in a higher education context. new zealand: dunmore press. newman, t.b. (2003) ‘the power of stories over statistics’, british medical journal, 327, pp. 1424-1427. nursing and midwifery council (2008) the code: standards of conduct, performance and ethics for nurses and midwives. london: nmc. office for national statistics (2011) mid 2010 population estimates. london: ons. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 12 jack using the exploration of a story to consider the meaning of becoming older price, s., arbuthnot, e., benoit, r., landry, d., landry, m. and butler l. (2007) ‘the art of nursing: communication and self-expression’, nursing science quarterly, 20(2), p. 155-160. ramsden, p. (1992) learning to teaching in higher education. london: routledge. rees, k.l. (2013) ‘the role of reflective practices in enabling final year nursing students to respond to the distressing emotional challenges of nursing work’, nurse education in practice, 13(1), pp. 48-52. regan, p. (2008) ‘reflective practice: how far, how deep?’, reflective practice, 9(2), pp. 219-229. rogers, c.r. (1961) on becoming a person. london: constable. rolfe, g., jasper, m. and freshwater, d. (2011) critical reflection in practice. 2nd edn. houndmills: palgrave macmillan. sternberg, r. (2008) ‘applying psychological theories to educational practice’, american educational research journal, 45(1), pp. 150-165. williams m (1922/1991) the classic tale of the velveteen rabbit or, how toys become real. ontario running press. williams, b. (2000) ‘collage work as a medium for guided reflection in the clinical supervision relationship’, nurse education today, 20(4), pp. 273-278. williams, a. (2013). ‘hochschild (2003) – the managed heart: the recognition of emotional labour in public service work’, nurse education today, 33(1), pp. 5-7. world health organisation (2013) definition of an older or elderly person. available at: www.who.int/healthinfo/survey/ageingdefnolder/en/ (accessed: 10th july 2013). journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 13 http://www.who.int/healthinfo/survey/ageingdefnolder/en/ jack using the exploration of a story to consider the meaning of becoming older author details kirsten jack is a senior lecturer in the department of nursing, manchester metropolitan university. her current research interests include the use of creative teaching methodologies to support self-awareness development among student nurses. she has recently launched a website www.caringwords.mmu.ac.uk which aims to encourage health care students to use poetry as a way to reflect on their practice. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 14 https://staffmail.dkit.ie/owa/redir.aspx?c=3cd7a05ec61a4404b4029a4b8d5f0c7b&url=http%3a%2f%2fwww.caringwords.mmu.ac.uk using the exploration of a story to consider the meaning of becoming older abstract introduction background creativity in teaching challenges methodology story finding story telling story expanding story processing story reconstructing implications conclusion references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 10: november 2016 using stories to understand clinical placement learning: a pilot study kirsten jack manchester metropolitan university, uk claire hamshire manchester metropolitan university, uk abstract this pilot study explored the value of story writing to understand the learning needs of undergraduate nursing students during their first clinical placement. early findings suggest that story writing affords freedom to express ideas and feelings, and could be used as an additional method alongside the current placement evaluation questionnaire to understand students learning needs. keywords: clinical placement; stories; learning needs; student nurses. introduction this pilot study explored the value of using story writing to understand the learning needs of undergraduate nursing students during their first clinical placement. stories were chosen as we believed that listening to the students describe and construct their experiences would be key in enhancing our understanding. telling stories, in their own words, enabled students to detail whatever experiences were important to them as individuals. jack and hampshire using stories to understand clinical placement learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 10: november 2016 3 background/ rationale the pilot study involved first year undergraduate nursing students on the adult nursing branch of the bsc (hons) nursing programme at manchester metropolitan university. practice learning is integral to the educational development of pre-registration nursing students and contributes to fifty percent of the pre-registration programme hours in the uk (nmc, 2010) and thirty to fifty percent of undergraduate programmes europe wide (warne et al., 2010). the reality of the nursing programme can invoke anxiety (cheung and au, 2011) and the first clinical placement is particularly important for undergraduate nurses and one which can cause high levels of stress which negatively impacts on learning (khater et al, 2014). learning in the clinical context is not restricted to theoretical competence but to the development of a professional identity as a nurse. the first clinical placement is critical to the socialisation process and some students do not feel prepared and can be unsure about what is expected of them (andrew et al., 2009). perceived lack of competence can be extremely stressful for students (gorostidi et al., 2007) and they can often feel unwanted, with the desire to get through the placement day being greater than trying to learn anything (levett-jones et al., 2009). placement learning in england is facilitated by a named mentor, who is expected to work with a student nurse for forty percent of the week (nmc, 2010). hamshire et al., (2013) suggest that a supportive mentor is crucial to student progression although placement areas are frequently understaffed and mentors can be too busy to support students learning (mcgowan, 2006). a combination of lack of time and inadequate support can have a negative effect on students’ clinical learning experiences (anthony and yastick, 2011). currently we understand students’ clinical learning experiences using feedback from a placement evaluation form, completed online, on completion of the placement block. the form consists of twenty statements covering a range of aspects, for example: how welcome the student was made to feel on the placement; how much evidence was used to inform practice and an overall statement about enjoyment during the placement experience. evaluatory statements directly focussed on student learning include ‘i was actively encouraged to observe/undertake new activities relevant to my agreed learning needs’ and ‘my individual learning needs were recognised and help was given with my learning outcomes, action plans, goals and achievement’. students evaluate the jack and hampshire using stories to understand clinical placement learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 10: november 2016 4 placement using a five point likert scale and have a small amount of space at the end of the questionnaire in which to write some free text comments relating to the evaluatory statements. this method is viewed as an effective way to support quality-learning environments. however it does little to help educators understand students’ individual learning experiences and places a focus on what educators believe to be important, rather than trying to understand the individual learning needs of the student and the influences on these. when trying to understand the factors that support and impede student placement learning, a more holistic approach seems beneficial. students do not learn in a vacuum and are influenced by multiple factors which might not directly relate to the placement itself. for example: family problems, travelling difficulties and poor self-esteem can influence the ways students learn and the developmental opportunities they seek. we agree with killam and heerschap (2013, p.684) who advocate a more holistic approach to exploring this aspect of education, which is required to ‘capture the complex interplay of factors which may hinder student learning’. method to capture the multifaceted nature of student placement learning we used a method suggested by orland-barak and wilhelem (2005, p.458) who explored how novice nurses learn the practice of nursing, using story writing. the participants in the study were asked to ‘tell their stories of experience’ at the end of the placement experience. we wanted to replicate this method as it allowed the participants the freedom to write freely and would add another dimension to the current evaluation form. stories (or narratives) have been used as a means of communicating experience for centuries (koch, 1998) and as described by frank (2010, p.21): people have experiences – something happens – and then they tell stories that represent those experiences. people live stories and, through the telling of them, make sense of their lives (holstein and gubrium, 2000). using this method preserves the holistic nature of the experience and jack and hampshire using stories to understand clinical placement learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 10: november 2016 5 enables students to focus on key personal events, describing their experiences, rather than following an agenda set by educators. to provide an initial focus, the students were asked to describe a meaningful aspect of nursing practice or an incident that had occurred during their practice experience. we hoped that this would lead to a greater understanding of their learning needs during their first clinical placement. three weeks before the first clinical placement, the students were given a written information sheet outlining the nature of the pilot evaluation and the rationale behind it. the students were selected from one personal tutor group. we explained the nature of the study to the students and they were given two weeks to consider their involvement. eight completed stories were returned from an initial group of ten female students, with an age range of twenty to thirty six years. results informal verbal student feedback on the story writing process was positive. the stories revealed that there are many factors, which impede and support student learning and this method provided us with a helpful insight into the factors influencing clinical learning development. data analysis was undertaken, using a process similar to that of the framework analysis of spencer et al. (2013) and ritchie and spencer (1994), with a phase of familiarisation followed by indexing, mapping and interpretation of the data, leading to the development of a thematic framework. thus, the data was read and reread and emerging themes were noted. some of the data from this pilot study is presented below. lack of knowledge perceived lack of knowledge can have a negative impact on confidence and can be a cause of worry. one student said: i thought i was confident until i started my placement. i thought i have a very long way to go to catch up with the qualified nurses. even though i was in training and a novice, i felt useless and i thought to myself, i will never know what is going on in practice. jack and hampshire using stories to understand clinical placement learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 10: november 2016 6 another stated: i am worried about the right and wrong things to say to patients when talking to them, either about their illness or in general conversation. effective mentorship one student wrote about the value of having a supportive mentor to guide learning, although acknowledged that the busy environment could affect the amount of time spent with her: my main priority is to be a safe practitioner and my thoughts are in relation to nursing practice. as i began to feel confident and at ease with my mentor, i was able to think about situations and how i might approach new challenges…i have felt that my mentor has been a tremendous help to my immediate concerns and experiences. if i did get an opportunity to sit with her (a rare thing, as we were so busy) i found her knowledge and experience a positive influence in any new experience. senior students senior students can support novices in practice and can use their own placement learning experiences as a guide to the process. as one student noted: the year three students have helped me a lot in practice. i have learnt from them how they went about things themselves to get to where they are now. through their advice, i take some of the plain paperwork home, to familiarise myself with it. this has really helped my confidence. family members one student described how she used her mother, who was also a health professional, to support her placement learning. she stated: if it is something personal i don’t like sharing deep feelings because i like how i am on the surface and i don’t like looking weak. my mum is a nurse practitioner and jack and hampshire using stories to understand clinical placement learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 10: november 2016 7 speaking to her about situations puts things in perspective about nursing and what other people tell me to do, in regards to what i think is right. placement staff placement staff can have a negative impact on effective clinical learning and too much support and not enough challenge can be problematic. the following student seemed to be struggling with her role identity, which is an important part of learning development for a student nurse: the biggest threat to my development is the team i am in. many of them are endlessly supportive and encouraging and when working with them i feel too comfortable. however some members make me feel that i am expected to play a particular role in the team and i am struggling to find out what this is, and how to contribute. at times i feel that my lack of knowledge and experience is inconveniencing them. i very briefly aired some of my views in a conservative manner, and some supportive team members explained that, ‘i shouldn’t know that yet’....the responses of those with the most experience have been the most helpful. conclusion this small pilot study has shown that story writing might be a helpful way for nurse educators to understand the multiple factors which support or impede student placement learning. current placement learning evaluation methods are helpful for educators to understand students’ placement learning experiences. however the use of stories adds a further dimension and helps uncover the multifaceted nature of learning in the clinical setting. references andrew, n., mcguinness, c., reid, g. and corcoran, t. (2009) ‘greater than the sum of its parts: transition into the first year of undergraduate nursing’, nurse education in practice, 9(1), pp. 13-21. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.nepr.2008.03.009 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.nepr.2008.03.009 jack and hampshire using stories to understand clinical placement learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 10: november 2016 8 anthony, m. and yastick, j. (2011) ‘nursing students’ experiences with incivility in clinical education’, journal of nursing education, 50(3), pp. 140-144. http://dx.doi.org/10.3928/01484834-20110131-04 cheung, r.y.m. and au, t.k. (2011) ‘nursing students’ anxiety and clinical performance’, journal of nursing education, 50(5), pp. 286-289. http://dx.doi.org/10.3928/01484834-20110131-08 frank, a.w. (2010) letting stories breathe: a socio-narratology. chicago: university of chicago press. gorostidi, x.z., egilegor, x.h., erice, m.j.a., iturriotz, m.j.u., garate, i.e., lasa, m.b. and cascante, x.s. (2007) ‘stress sources in nursing practice. evolution during nursing training’, nurse education today, 27(7), pp. 777-787. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.nedt.2006.10.017 hamshire, c., willgoss, t.g. and wibberley, c. (2013) ‘what are reasonable expectations? healthcare student perceptions of their programmes in the north west of england’, nurse education today, 33(2), pp. 173-179. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.nedt.2012.02.014 holstein, j.a. and gubrium, j.f. (2000) the self we live by: narrative identity in a postmodern world. new york: oxford university press. khater, w.a., akhu-zaheya, l.m. and shaban, i.a. (2014) ‘sources of stress and coping behaviours in clinical practice among baccalaureate nursing students’, international journal of humanities and social science, 4(6), pp. 194-202. available at: http://www.ijhssnet.com/journals/vol_4_no_6_april_2014/20.pdf killam, l.a. and heerschap, c. (2013) ‘challenges to student learning in the clinical setting: a qualitative descriptive study’, nurse education today, 33(6), pp. 684-691. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.nedt.2012.10.008 http://dx.doi.org/10.3928/01484834-20110131-04 http://dx.doi.org/10.3928/01484834-20110131-08 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.nedt.2006.10.017 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.nedt.2012.02.014 http://www.ijhssnet.com/journals/vol_4_no_6_april_2014/20.pdf http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.nedt.2012.10.008 jack and hampshire using stories to understand clinical placement learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 10: november 2016 9 koch, t. (1998) ‘story telling: is it really research?’, journal of advanced nursing, 28(6), pp. 1182-1190. levett-jones, t., lathlean, j., higgins, i. and mcmillan, m. (2009) ‘staff-student relationships and their impact on nursing students’ belongingness and learning’, journal of advanced nursing, 65(2), pp. 316-324. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.13652648.2008.04865.x mcgowan, b. (2006) ‘who do they think they are? undergraduate perceptions of the definition of supernumerary status and how it works in practice’, journal of clinical nursing, 15(9), pp. 1099-1105. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2702.2005.01478.x nursing and midwifery council (nmc) (2010) standards for pre-registration nursing education. london: nmc. available at: https://www.nmc.org.uk/globalassets/sitedocuments/standards/nmc-standards-forpre-registration-nursing-education.pdf orland-barak, l. and wilhelem, d. (2005) novices in clinical practice settings: student nurses’ stories of learning the practice of nursing’, nurse education today, 25(6), pp. 455-464. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.nedt.2005.04.006 spencer, l., ritchie, j., ormston, r., o'connor, w. and barnard, m. (2013) ‘analysis: principles and processes’, in ritchie, j., lewis, j., mcnaughton-nicholls, c. and ormston, r. (eds.) qualitative research practice: a guide for social science students and researchers. 2nd edn. london: sage, pp. 269-93. ritchie, j. and spencer, l. (1994) ‘qualitative data analysis for applied policy research’, in: bryman, a. and burgess, b. (eds.) analyzing qualitative data. london: routledge, pp. 173-194. warne, t., johansson, u.b., papastavrou, e., tichelaar, e., tomietto, m., den bossche, k.v., moreno, m.f.v. and saarikoski, m. (2010) ‘an exploration of the clinical learning experience of nursing students in nine european countries’, nurse education today, 30(8), pp. 809-815. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.nedt.2010.03.003 http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2648.2008.04865.x http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2648.2008.04865.x https://www.nmc.org.uk/globalassets/sitedocuments/standards/nmc-standards-for-pre-registration-nursing-education.pdf https://www.nmc.org.uk/globalassets/sitedocuments/standards/nmc-standards-for-pre-registration-nursing-education.pdf http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.nedt.2005.04.006 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.nedt.2010.03.003 jack and hampshire using stories to understand clinical placement learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 10: november 2016 10 author details dr kirsten jackis a senior lecturer in adult nursing at manchester metropolitan university. her research interests lie in the emotional nature of nursing, and the ways in which educators can support nurses using innovative teaching and learning methods. dr claire hamshire is a senior learning and teaching fellow at manchester metropolitan university. her research interests include student engagement, student attrition and learning transitions . literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 8: march 2015 maria’s story – the narrative of a mature international student dr claire hamshire manchester metropolitan university, uk dr kirsten jack manchester metropolitan university, uk dr alicia prowse manchester metropolitan university, uk dr christopher wibberley manchester metropolitan university, uk abstract this study examines in-depth the experiences of a mature, international student during her first year at university in the uk, in order to explore the different dimensions of her learning transitions. the aim was to gain an in-depth understanding of the factors that influenced a student’s on-going development and transformation over their first year; therefore, we adopted a narrative exploratory approach to collecting data. maria’s narrative is complex and atypical of the majority of the students, yet it details the social and academic challenges that can constitute the first year in higher education (he), with personal history and expectations having a varying degree of influence on an individual’s transition. in line with other research, this narrative shows that students’ integration into the academic community, combined with peer support, is crucial if they are going to settle into university life and develop as learners. the transition to he is an ongoing process and lasts longer than the initial weeks of the formal induction offered by the university. keywords: learning; transition; first year; narrative. hamshire et al. maria’s story – the narrative of a mature international student journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 2 introduction student success in higher education (he) is described by nelson et al. (2012) as being determined by first year student experience, with the initial transition involving multiple factors which influence students’ development and transformation at this time. to investigate further how individual students experience this multi-faceted transition, this narrative study explored the experience of an undergraduate physiotherapy student during her first year at a higher education institution (hei) in england. drawing on the theories of tinto (1987; 1993) and yorke (1999; 2000) we examined the different dimensions of the transition, with the goal of gaining an in-depth understanding of the factors that influenced this student’s learning. our research focused on the student’s experiences and perspectives which were considered to be paramount to identify what we considered to be ‘tipping points’, where personal factors and experiences combined to lead to either a positive or negative encounter. the student (known as maria) who is described in this paper was an international, mature student and as such her narrative represents multiple overlapping transitions. these included her transition to he and her transition as a mature student back into education; set in the context of her transition to the united kingdom. naturally there is a loss of the familiar in all of these transitions and this is compounded by their overlap and impact upon one another. at times maria’s narrative betrays this sense of loss and her vulnerability as she makes the necessary adjustments required for her to negotiate her academic transition within the framework of the others. her story demonstrates that the transition to he is not simply a linear procedure, but a gradual process of ‘becoming’ over time, as she gained new skills and adapted. it is a challenging story of achievements and disappointments, detailing the emotional dimensions of learning that are on-going throughout the first year (see case et al., 2010). her story has an upward trajectory yet is interspersed with periods of anxiety as she negotiates her educational journey through the first year. background the transition into the he environment has been repeatedly identified as problematic for some students as there is a loss of continuity (see palmer et al., 2009; scanlon et al., hamshire et al. maria’s story – the narrative of a mature international student journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 3 2007; thomas, 2002; yorke, 1999), and the literature has identified that a wide variety of personal, social and academic factors can impact on students’ learning experiences, probability of academic success, and ultimately on attrition at this time (see thomas, 2002; tinto, 1998; yorke, 1999). thus the issue of first year student engagement has always been critically significant and has recently become a focus for international discussion (nelson et al., 2012). for some students the transition to he is a time of optimism and positive change, but for others it can be difficult and dispiriting (see field, 2010). recent uk research suggests that there are no direct links between a range of factors and a successful transition, however, numerous studies have found that students withdraw from the first year if they feel they are not integrated academically and/or socially (e.g. harvey et al., 2006). the way in which international students in particular contend with such issues has also been the subject of recent research (e.g. gu et al., 2010; zhou et al., 2008). making a simultaneous transition to a new country requires mastery of language, enculturation to new social norms, and personal development, with, for students, a potential shift in the educational culture for learning. the collective impact of unfamiliar experiences can lead to ‘culture-shock’ (zhou et al., 2008) and acculturative stress (yeh and inose, 2003) as students contend with language difficulties and social disconnect. thus maria epitomised the potential complex, multiple and overlapping nature of a student’s transition into he. her story hopefully ‘brings to life’ the factors involved in such a transition. methodology the purpose of this study was to explore how a first year student made meaning of her transition to he during the first year at a uk institution. we were interested in the different dimensions of this transition and how personal and external factors impacted upon the learning process. the research was guided by two central questions 1) how do students understand and experience their transition to he during the first year and 2) how do these experiences illuminate the influence of intrinsic and extrinsic factors? thus, it was intended to identify how students’ experiences and learning developed over time. ethics approval was granted by the faculty ethics committee at manchester metropolitan university (mmu); and maria attended for interview once every term throughout her first hamshire et al. maria’s story – the narrative of a mature international student journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 4 year at university. all of the interviews took place in a meeting room on campus and were arranged at times that were convenient for maria. in total she attended for three in-depth interviews, each lasting between 45 and 60 minutes in october, january and may. a narrative prompt question was used at the start of each interview to facilitate maria’s telling of her story, with a request for the story to be considered in chapters or episodes, beginning wherever and however she felt was most appropriate (gubrium, 1993). the prompt included a request for a detailed narration around the transition to he. maria was then allowed to continue her narratives uninterrupted, except for active listening signals from the researcher. when the narrative end was signalled by maria, with words such as ‘well that’s it’ or ‘that’s my story’, the researcher began a final questioning phase of the interview where clarification was sought of elements that were unclear. all the interviews were transcribed verbatim. the holistic nature of narrative inquiry gave maria an opportunity to focus on key personal events and describe her experiences, rather than following an agenda set by the researchers. once the data was collected it was then considered that both an inductive and deductive approach to analysis would be adopted. this allowed us to draw deductively on previous studies (such as those carried out by tinto, 1987; 1993; yorke, 1999; 2000; which suggested a range of factors that influenced students’ on-going development and transformation), whilst also allowing for inductive analysis, to identify emergent themes from the narrative data collected. the data was analysed using a framework approach (ritchie and spencer, 1994) following a phase of familiarisation, indexing and mapping, and interpretation of the data within the framework was carried out (see ritchie and spencer, 1994). during this thematic analysis of the interview transcripts, two dimensions were found to be dominant elements of her story – those relating to her social and academic transformation (which impacted upon one another and overlapped). these two dimensions of maria’s story are presented here using narrative fragments to detail her personal development. hamshire et al. maria’s story – the narrative of a mature international student journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 5 the social dimension as a mature, international student, with english as a second language and living off campus, it could be expected that maria might struggle with the transition into, and construction of, a new social space with the bulk of the cohort, as it was made up mostly of ‘school leavers’. she suggested that she was drawn towards the familiar and so started conversations with the other international and mature students, students that she described as ‘looking like they might have something in common with me’. she described this in depth: i initially started to have conversations with international students because then you look at each other and you want to know where they’re from…and the mature students because you can relate to them. as she noted in the third interview, it was these early friendships that were the ones that she still felt most comfortable with at the end of her first year of study. she spent virtually no time with the younger students and described the taught sessions as involving very little mixing, with ‘a breakdown of mature and young students, all of the mature students in the front row’. these friendships with the other international and mature students were the ones that helped her to ‘belong’ and feel part of the cohort. in talking of these friendships for the first time in the first interview, ‘generalised other’ terminology was dropped: ‘i’ had become ‘we’ and ‘us’ or ‘our’ when she talked about classes and study tasks. thus, maria had made what we believed were the first vital connections or ‘anchorage points’ (see holdsworth and morgan, 2005) that would be necessary for her to settle into university life. however, during the second interview (occurring shortly after her return from the christmas break) she barely mentioned friendships. it was apparent, that at this stage, she considered that friendship had not been a priority for her in the first term. in talking she focused on her academic experience and the grades that she had received for her first assessments. her husband had a major impact upon her personal development throughout the year and was supportive of her return to he. he helped her by correcting her grammar, syntax and spelling in her first assessment: hamshire et al. maria’s story – the narrative of a mature international student journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 6 he makes it more into uk english he says we don’t say this like this we say it like that and i think i have less mistakes now because of him being helpful. thus, the impression for maria was that social networking with the other students was very much a secondary benefit to being at he, with academic success being her real focus. when she alluded to her friendships at all during the second interview, it was in relation to an informal study group that she had formed with a small group of mature students on the programme: we used to work all the time together in the same group and we were studying, working and practising everything together…so we’re pretty much at the same level of understanding. thus it would appear from the second interview that the ‘social element’ of university life was as much, if not more, about peer support than about friendship per se. this view was reinforced during the third interview when she talked at length about the peer support group: ‘we had study groups with some of the mates. we used to sit down after class and just discuss and really talk, trying to understand it…so that was good’. the group consisted of mature and international students and were timed to prepare the students for assessment deadlines: we don’t study at all at the beginning of the unit; we wait until everyone has got a good understanding and then we can sit down and have a nice discussion about everything. if there is something that somebody else doesn’t know or the other person doesn’t know, there is always, another person that knows and is able to explain on our level, you know…student level. the network of students maria worked with was extended by necessity when one of her assignments during the spring term consisted of a group presentation on a set topic, followed by a reflective essay on the presentation. the whole cohort had been randomly divided into groups of three or four for the assignment and maria found that she was not with any of the mature students that she would normally choose to work and study with: hamshire et al. maria’s story – the narrative of a mature international student journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 7 we didn’t know each other very well at first almost like being very cautious with each other. we were setting out assignments for each other to be able to do by ourselves so that next time we met up…it’s all done. the advantage for maria of working with a group of students that she would not normally study with, for this assessment, was that she was expanding her social network to include direct entry students ‘it’s nice to know different people, and work with different people’. however, at her third interview maria only talked briefly about the group, in terms of her assessment results and how the group had had ‘good communication’ and been ‘respectful to each other’. the academic dimension in all three interviews maria spoke at length about how she was managing her transition back into education after a break of several years and developing as a learner: i was like i’m too old…i’m thirty years old i can’t possibly be you know…six years without reading a book and not self-learning…so i didn’t think i was capable of going back and studying again. although she was obviously motivated and prepared to work hard, it seemed she was unprepared for independent study and lacked confidence in her abilities. the pace of work was much faster than she had expected. she stated that: i had this rushing feeling and i got so stressed the first two weeks trying to keep up. it took a lot for me to keep up and i was right on it…but it took a lot out of me…a lot of time and a lot of effort…a lot of energy. initially maria also felt ‘disappointment’ with the programme’s philosophy of independent learning, which evidently did not match her expectations based on her personal history of didactic teaching. she had been expecting more support, or as she described it ‘pampering’, in line with her previous educational experiences: hamshire et al. maria’s story – the narrative of a mature international student journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 8 well university was exciting at first and then it got a bit overwhelming and then it went easy again. i think just getting used to the rhythm of studying and everything…i’ll talk about the course first. i found the course very structured, very good, fast paced a bit more than expected and a bit more self-learning than i expected. in a way i was a bit disappointed i’m the type of person that likes to find out for myself…but i was just expecting a bit more pampering. maria also described herself as ‘shocked’ when she received the brief for the first assessment, she declared that she was ‘a bit lost, very lost at first’, particularly because she had never written anything in what she called ‘british english’: i just want to make sure it’s british english. when i saw that written, we want british not american, i just went ahhhh what am i going to do now? she was disappointed with the result of her first two assessments but was philosophical that she had probably expected too much from herself in terms of academic achievement: i didn’t do as well as i would like to do. i think i put too much pressure on myself to do really well…and what i used to hear was it’s only the first year it doesn’t count…but for me if i got sixty or eighty it made a big difference. she continued to talk and gradually revealed that the most disappointing aspect of her assessment feedback were a number of comments about her use of english in her assignment: i don’t think i did well mostly because of my english…mainly just trying to get the information through and make it clear to the reader. it wasn’t very good in that way. a few times i found myself contradicting…only because of grammar really…just not using the proper grammar and putting the word not where it’s supposed to be and not being very clear. this feedback led to her lowest point during the first year, as it had a profound effect on her confidence in her ability to write and even speak in english: hamshire et al. maria’s story – the narrative of a mature international student journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 9 i just wished i had better writing skills to be able to express what i knew because i think i knew good enough to get good marks but i just didn’t express that. since i got the result i think i lost a tiny bit of my confidence and speaking and expressing myself even my english went a bit funny…like trying to speak and it’s not coming out. lack of confidence in her spoken english had also led to some difficulties with her second assessment, an oral viva exam. maria had revised hard for this exam and felt that her knowledge was good, but when it came to the actual exam she was extremely nervous and painted a very vivid picture of the scene: i was so nervous to the point i couldn’t stand on my feet. i was so nervous i had to sit down and pant a few times to catch myself because i was shaking, meanwhile i realised i was losing time and then getting more nervous and then i said a few things i knew were wrong, but i didn’t correct myself at the time. i didn’t even think i had passed to be honest because i didn’t think i did well. discussion the analysis of maria’s narrative outlines the social and academic challenges that students can experience as they develop as learners during their first year in he. a comment she made at the start of our second meeting, ‘university was exciting at first and then it got a bit overwhelming and then it went easy again’, probably sums up her experience as she conveys the roller-coaster ride of her transition. it was a statement indicative of some of the joys and successes but also of the difficulties that she had encountered, and gives us an insight into the multifaceted, individual transitions that maria made during her first year at university. mcgivney (2003) has suggested that non-academic reasons are the primary cause of withdrawal of mature students, and yeh and inose (2003) imply that lack of social support can lead to acculturative stress for international students. mature international students’ transitions can therefore be an emotional journey, as they manage both academic and social transformation during a time of considerable adjustment (yeh and inose, 2003; case et al., 2010; yorke, 2000). social integration and connectedness are key aspects of hamshire et al. maria’s story – the narrative of a mature international student journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 10 a successful transition to university and occur when students have developed good relationships and networks with their peers (yeh and inose, 2003; tinto, 1975). nontraditional students like maria, who are unfamiliar with the english educational system and out of step with the majority, can find it difficult to develop a social support network and can therefore be most at risk of withdrawal as they adapt to the culture shock (zhou et al., 2008; yorke, 1999). maria struggled to develop friendships initially and, in terms of social integration, it is apparent that maria’s transition was limited. although she worked with a peer support group on the lead up to each of her assessments, her main motivation for friendships amongst her peers was to support her academic progress. if her peers were unable to contribute to her academic development, she stopped spending time with them, choosing instead to study with those that could support her learning. however, the more she interacted with the other students in the cohort and developed relationships with staff and her peers, the more she engaged and the more likely she was to continue (see also bryson and hardy, 2012). the peer support network that maria joined within the cohort was pivotal as it gave her an opportunity to build relationships and also eventually a group of friends who supported her. as noted by yeh and inose (2003), international students who feel socially connected and satisfied with their social networks are less likely to experience distress. maria was also, initially, academically unprepared for the uk he system and had been out of formal education for some time, clearly articulating her struggle and stress as she adapted during her narrative. her ‘pedagogical adaptation’ to the new system was protracted and difficult at times as she struggled with english fluency in both written and oral assessments. as identified by zhou et al. (2008), this pedagogical adaptation was influenced by both academic cultural differences and different cultures of learning; and a process of adjustment was required during her cross-cultural transition. it is clear from maria’s narrative that the first year in he can be an educational journey of learning transitions, and at times students can feel both lost and disengaged from their learning experiences. they may find the material too challenging or too easy, and become distracted by other aspects of their transition. maria’s academic transition was clearly a difficult one. academic achievement was paramount to her successful transition into university life and it was more difficult to achieve than she had envisaged. her personal hamshire et al. maria’s story – the narrative of a mature international student journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 11 educational history was one of structured taught sessions, where she was provided with all the material required, and her initial expectation was that uk he would offer the same experience. interestingly she talked at length about course content and assessments but hardly mentioned the academic team or the campus environment, as she focused on gathering knowledge to pass assessments. the first year experience, it would seem, has been one of major adjustments and shifts in perception for maria in terms of academic expectations. conclusion to engage with and understand student learning in he, academic staff need to empathise with students’ experiences (case et al., 2010). individual narratives give a real insight into the different dimensions of student learning during their transitions and thus may facilitate such empathy. we need to set aside the notion of the ‘student learning experience’ and focus instead on the multitude of individual transitions that occur during the process of becoming a student. the purpose of this study was to explore how a student understood and experienced their transition to he during their first year; and to identify the influence of both intrinsic and extrinsic factors. this paper therefore builds on previous research by highlighting the reality that uk he institutions have to consider how they can best facilitate students’ ongoing transitions throughout the first year and on into subsequent years, particularly for mature international students. previously uk institutions have tended to confine induction to the first few weeks of the first year but for some students, as exemplified by maria, the transition will be on-going well after the induction events have finished. maria’s story demonstrates that the transition to he is not simply a linear procedure (as gu et al., 2010 also found) but a gradual process of ‘becoming’ over time, as an individual transforms, gains new skills, and adapts to multiple aspects of culture shock. hamshire et al. maria’s story – the narrative of a mature international student journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 12 references bryson, c. and hardy, c. (2012) ‘the nature of academic engagement: what the students tell us’, in solomonides, i., reid, a. and petocz, p. (eds.) engaging with learning. oxfordshire: libri publishing, pp. 25-46. case, j.e., marshall, d. and linder, c.j. (2010) ‘being a student again: a narrative study of a teachers’ experience’, teaching in higher education, 15(4), pp. 423-433. field, j. (2010) ‘preface’, in ecclestone, k., biesta, g. and hughes, m. (eds.) transitions and learning through the lifecourse. oxon: routledge, pp. xvii-xxiv. gu, q., schweisfurth, m. and day, c. (2010) ‘learning and growing in a ‘foreign’ context: intercultural experiences of international students’, compare: a journal of comparative and international education, 40(1), pp. 7-23. gubrium, j.f. (1993) speaking of life: horizons of meaning for nursing home residents. new york: aldine de gruyter. harvey, l. and drew, s., with smith, m. (2006) the first year experience: a literature review for the higher education academy. the higher education academy [online]. available at: https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/sites/default/files/first_year_experience_full_report.p df (accessed: 10 march 2015). holdsworth, c. and morgan, d. (2005) transitions in context: leaving home, independence and adulthood. maidenhead: oxford university press. mcgivney, v. (2003) staying or leaving the course. 2nd edn. leicester: national institute of adult continuing education. nelson, k., kift, s. and clarke, j. (2012) ‘a transition pedagogy for student engagement and first year learning, success and retention’ in solomonides, i., reid, a. and petocz, p. (eds.) engaging with learning. oxfordshire: libri publishing, pp. 17-144. https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/sites/default/files/first_year_experience_full_report.pdf https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/sites/default/files/first_year_experience_full_report.pdf hamshire et al. maria’s story – the narrative of a mature international student journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 13 palmer, m., o’kane, p. and owens, m. (2009) ‘betwixt spaces: student accounts of turning point experiences in the first year transition’, studies in higher education, 34(1), pp. 37-54. ritchie, j. and spencer, l. (1994) ‘analyzing qualitative data’, in bryman, a. and burgess, r.g. (eds.) qualitative data analysis for applied policy research. routledge: london, pp. 173-194. scanlon, l., rowling, l. and weber, z. (2007) ‘‘you don’t have like an identity…you are just lost in the crowd’: forming a student identity in the first-year transition to university’, journal of youth studies, 10(2), pp. 223-241. thomas, l. (2002) ‘student retention in higher education; the role of institutional habitus’, journal of education policy, 17(4), pp. 423-442. tinto, v. (1975) dropout from higher education: a theoretical synthesis of recent research. review of education research, 45(1), pp. 89-125. tinto, v. (1987) leaving college: rethinking the causes and cures of student attrition. chicago: university of chicago press. tinto, v. (1993) leaving college: rethinking the causes and cures of student attrition. 2 nd edn. chicago: university of chicago press. tinto, v. (1998) ‘education, education, education! the vision of lifelong learning in the kennedy, dearing and fryer reports’, oxford review of education, 24(4), pp. 89125. yeh, c.j. and inose, m. (2003) ‘international students’ reported english fluency, social support satisfaction, and social connectedness as predictors of acculturative stress’, counselling psychology quarterly, 16(1), pp. 15-28. yorke, m. (1999) leaving early: undergraduate non-completion in higher education. london: farmer press. hamshire et al. maria’s story – the narrative of a mature international student journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 14 yorke, m. (2000) ‘smoothing the transition into higher education: what can be learned from student non-completion’, journal of institutional research, 9(1), pp. 35-47. zhou, y., jindal-snape, d., topping, k. and todman, j. (2008) ‘theoretical models of culture shock and adaptation in international students in higher education’, studies in higher education, 33(1), pp. 63-75. author details dr claire hamshire is a senior learning and teaching fellow at manchester metropolitan university (mmu). her research interests include student engagement, attrition and learning transitions. dr kirsten jack is a senior lecturer in adult nursing at mmu. her research interests lie in the development of nurses’ emotional self-awareness and the creation of innovative educational methods. dr alicia prowse is a principal lecturer in the centre for excellence in learning and teaching at manchester metropolitan university. research interests include internationalising the curriculum and global citizenship education, interdisciplinary collaborative inquiry and student motivation. dr christopher wibberley is a principal lecturer in the faculty of health, psychology and social care at mmu. his research interests include the narrative explorations of experiences of those providing and receiving health and social care. maria’s story – the narrative of a mature international student abstract introduction background methodology the social dimension the academic dimension discussion conclusion references author details literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special edition: academic peer learning, november 2015 speech and language therapy students’ experience of peer assisted learning: undergraduates investigate pal as a means of enhancing academic and professional development anne guyon university of east anglia zoe butterfint university of east anglia andrea lacy university of east anglia aisha sanosi university of east anglia katie sheridan university of east anglia jessica unwin university of east anglia abstract the implementation of peer assisted learning (pal) on healthcare courses in higher education institutions has been explored in a number of studies. this paper presents research into the experience of pal on a bsc speech & language therapy (slt) programme. the research was conducted by final year undergraduate slt students to form the basis for their final dissertations. the focus for their research was on the effects of pal on academic and professional development for both mentees and mentors on the same course. data were generated from standard pal evaluations and focus groups. findings indicate that mentees benefit from pal in terms of their university experience and learning. mentors benefitted from opportunities to develop and practice skills for their future employment. engagement with pal is attributed to its structured yet informal nature and the enthusiasm of the mentors. however, the collaborative nature of pal takes time to develop, impacting on the behaviours of both mentees and mentors. overall pal offers mentees and mentors opportunities that enhance their academic learning and professional development. guyon et al. speech and language therapy students’ experience of peer assisted learning journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 2 keywords: peer assisted learning; speech and language therapy; student research; academic learning and professional development. introduction peer assisted learning (pal) is a support system by which first year students are provided with academic guidance by students studying at higher levels on the same course. learning is achieved through discussion and shifts the emphasis from individual to cooperative knowledge acquisition (capstick, 2004; capstick and fleming, 2004). this collaborative approach allows students to share knowledge and experience in order to achieve common learning goals (laal and ghodsi, 2012; laal and laal, 2012). universities are becoming increasingly aware of the benefits of peer collaboration (hammar-chirac, 2014; bannan-ritland, 2002). students learn to: inquire, share ideas, clarify differences, problem-solve and construct new understandings. (hammar-chirac, 2014, p.2). students often form informal study groups with friends. pal formalises the learning which occurs in these groups (boud et al, 2001) through a combination of constructivist and situated learning. constructivism is defined as ‘the idea that learners construct knowledge for themselves’ (hein, 1991, p.1) and is based on prior experience. individual constructions are socially and culturally contextualised and therefore likely to be subjective (hogan and tudge, 1999). social constructivism allows more objective meanings to be constructed through collective experience and knowledge (vygotsky, 1978; hogan and tudge, 1999). situated learning is based on the premise that most learning in everyday life is learned in situ (boud et al., 2001). this encourages the development of problem-solving skills and application of knowledge to real-world experiences (lave and wenger, 1991). in order to engage in pal participants need a clear understanding of its function and their roles within it. ‘peer’ is generally taken to mean students studying at the same level (lincoln and mcallister, 1993): however, in pal there is an inherent difference between guyon et al. speech and language therapy students’ experience of peer assisted learning journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 3 students with greater experience and knowledge, referred to as ‘mentors’ in this paper, and students with less experience and knowledge, referred to as ‘mentees’. ‘assisted’ suggests that help will be given, but implies that mentees are relatively passive. mentors may be seen as experts (falchikov, 2001) resulting in mentees expecting to be given answers (sultan et al., 2013). years of schooling could condition mentors and mentees into taking on traditional roles of teachers and students respectively (gillam, 1994). the term ‘learning’ is key, as it emphasises the need for mentees to be actively involved (lincoln and mcallister, 1993). pal on healthcare courses a number of studies have explored healthcare students’ experience of pal and the development of academic and professional skills (field et al., 2007; burke et al., 2007; sole et al., 2012). pal is usually tailored to the specific requirements of individual courses (cheng and walters, 2009) which provides the opportunity for mentees and mentors to develop the skills to construct and apply their learning within a specific context (wadoodi and crosby, 2002; sole et al., 2012; saleh et al., 2013). this is consistent with the move from concept-driven to concept-application approaches to health education (institute of medicine, 2011). mentors contribute to concept development and application by offering ‘expert scaffolding’ (falchikov, 2001, p.89), utilising a knowledge base similar to that of mentees (lockspeiser et al., 2008). by sharing their personal experience, mentors are seen as more approachable than lecturers (field et al., 2007), thereby providing a learning environment in which mentees feel safe to contribute (anderson et al., 1996; naqi, 2014). topping (2005) and capstick (2003) report the development of skills in listening, explaining, questioning and critical thinking which allow mentees to develop concept-application skills (duane and satre, 2014) and contextualise their clinical knowledge (burke et al., 2007). there is some debate as to whether this results in improved performance as claimed by sole et al. (2012) and santee and garavalia (2006). sevenhuysen et al. (2014) for example compared the outcomes from pal to those from traditional clinical education techniques and found students were comparable in their abilities to apply knowledge. donelan (1999) however, states that it is the mentors who benefit most from pal through the development of transferable skills for their future careers. sultan et al. (2013) and skalicky and caney (2010) cite team-work, planning and leadership skills as potential guyon et al. speech and language therapy students’ experience of peer assisted learning journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 4 benefits. this is particularly important given that there is increasing emphasis on collaborative working for healthcare professionals in the uk (chipchase et al., 2012; makino et al., 2013; hood et al., 2014; sevenhuysen et al., 2014). the expectation is that newly qualified practitioners will be equipped with the knowledge and skills to function as part of a wider multi-disciplinary team (stephenson et al., 2002; mulholland and derdall, 2004). the ability to take responsibility for their own learning, exchange ideas and engage in meaningful discussion is also critical to professional development (rogers et al., 2011). this requires confidence, communication and self-reflection skills which can be gained through pal (stout and mcdaniel, 2006; smith et al., 2007; naqi, 2014). pal at the university of east anglia pal was introduced at the university of east anglia (uea) in january 2013 with the aims of reducing attrition, improving performance and enhancing employability. in 2014-15 it was offered to students on thirteen programmes across the faculties of humanities, science, social science and health. the bsc speech and language therapy (slt) course is based in the faculty of health and has been participating in pal since september 2013. learning requirements for slt students qualified slts work with children and adults with a range of communication and swallowing difficulties. graduates are expected to become autonomous, lifelong learners with a wide-ranging knowledge base and the ability to apply theory to practice. they need to develop clinical and professional skills in order to work in teams within and across professions (rcslt, 2005). concerns have been raised by educators on professional degree courses that traditional instructional approaches do not equip students to meet these requirements (khosa and volet, 2013). students need to develop strategies to increase engagement, motivation and self-evaluation. this can be achieved through selfdirected (schunk, 2005; hammond et al., 2010) and peer-based activities (casey et al., 2011). the slt programme at uea is delivered using problem-based learning (pbl) in order to encourage concept development and application through active learning between students studying at the same level (mok et al., 2008). similarly to pbl, pal offers opportunities for guyon et al. speech and language therapy students’ experience of peer assisted learning journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 5 active engagement with concepts introduced through formal teaching (capstick et al., 2004). the differences are the interaction between students studying at different levels and the absence of a faculty tutor. in 2014-15, the year of this project, pal was offered to all first year slt students as a single group of mentees. two final year students and one second year were trained as mentors. the term mentor is used by a number of student support services at uea to signify students with a supportive or facilitative role. slt pal mentors share their experience and skills with mentees in order to support academic and professional development. mentees are defined as students who are new to uea and slt, although some may have previously studied in different disciplines at undergraduate level. mentees are encouraged by mentors to contribute to pal sessions by raising topics and queries as well as sharing their learning. twenty-three out of 25 students attended at least one pal session. weekly sessions were timetabled to support learning in the foundation module of the programme which introduces core concepts that underpin learning throughout the course. this module could be described as high-risk (costelloe, 2014), as students may be encountering concepts for the first time or may have greater strengths in one subject area over others. pal also gives the mentors the opportunity to revisit earlier learning. although a number of studies have explored pal on healthcare courses, there is a lack of literature relating to the slt student experience. this study aimed to investigate slt students’ experience of pal from the perspectives of mentees and mentors, in particular whether pal enhances academic and professional development. the paper also presents a novel perspective, namely an investigation by students studying on the same course as the participants. all final year slt undergraduate students undertake a dissertation project in order to fulfil the research requirements of their programme. four student researchers (srs) were selected to conduct this research. the study was designed and supervised by the lead author. each student pursued an individual focus for their final dissertation. three students focussed on the mentee experience and learning through pal. one student explored the mentor experience and opportunities for professional development. a synthesis of the four dissertations is presented. guyon et al. speech and language therapy students’ experience of peer assisted learning journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 6 methodology ethical approval for the project was gained from the uea school of education ethics committee. permission was sought to conduct a study involving students as both researchers and participants; to use anonymised student data and to ensure data protection requirements would be met. the study used a mixed methodology, drawing on data from standard pal evaluation, which generated a small amount of quantitative and qualitative data and provided an overview of slt students’ experience of pal. the main source of data was qualitative and generated through focus groups. roles of student researchers and supervisors the srs were selected on the basis of their interest in undergraduate education and qualitative research. none of the students had participated in pal as it was not available to them in their first year, nor had they been mentors. the primary supervisor had a dual role as a lecturer in slt and as pal champion for the university. in order to reduce the risk of these roles influencing the investigative process or participant responses, the srs were responsible for recruitment, conducting the focus groups and transcription of the audio data. all participants were assigned an identification code, to ensure confidentiality and anonymity. the supervisors only had access to anonymised transcription data. the srs received fortnightly group supervision during the autumn term to provide guidance for the project and training in project-specific research methods. the srs were given guidance on qualitative methods by the primary supervisor and quantitative methods by a second supervisor. towards the end of the project the primary supervisor met with srs individually to support development of an individual focus for each dissertation. data collection two sources of data were available to the srs: data from standard evaluations completed by students as part of the pal process and focus groups. separate focus groups were conducted with mentees and mentors undertaking pal in 2014-15. guyon et al. speech and language therapy students’ experience of peer assisted learning journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 7 evaluation forms: anonymised data from mentees in 2013-14 and 2014-15 evaluation cycles were made available to the srs. these forms offered quantitative data from responses to five questions using a five point likert scale. additional comments and questions provided qualitative data to further explore student responses. focus groups: all prospective participants were provided with information about the project and explicit consent was obtained prior to each focus group. in total nine mentees and all three mentors were recruited for the study. demographic data (appendix 1) were collected prior to conducting the focus groups. the data indicate that the participants have similar characteristics to the wider healthcare and slt student population. seven participants (78%) in the mentee group were aged 18-24 years and undertaking their first degree which corresponds to 82% of all healthcare students at uea (university of east anglia, 2014). one (8%) participant had taken a gap year. this correlates with government figures, which indicate that 7% of students take gap years (crawford and cribb, 2012). all participants were female which corresponds to the gender representation within the slt profession of 97.1% (centre for work intelligence, 2014). these data also enabled the srs to reflect on participants’ comments in relation to their characteristics (clarke and braun, 2013). in december 2014, the srs ran two mentee and one mentor focus groups. a semistructured script (appendix 2) was developed by the srs based on analysis of the 201314 pal evaluation forms (the only ones available prior to the focus groups). additional questions generated naturally during the first focus group were added to the script to ensure parity with subsequent focus groups. the groups were run by paired student researchers, one leading the questioning and the other making notes. sessions were audio-recorded and orthographically transcribed. analysis quantitative data were analysed using tools available in excel to describe numerical patterns of response from the evaluation forms, highlighting areas of particular benefit or not. thematic analysis was used to identify themes from the qualitative data which could be compared to the findings from the focus groups. guyon et al. speech and language therapy students’ experience of peer assisted learning journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 8 thematic analysis was also used to identify patterns of meaning across the transcriptions generated from the focus groups (clarke and braun, 2013). the data were read repeatedly, before coding (graneheim and lundman, 2003). the student researchers compared their coding at regular intervals as a means of ensuring validity. having analysed all the data obtained from this study each sr selected a particular individual focus for their dissertation. this allowed students to drill into areas of their own interest in relation to the student experience, and resulted in a greater wealth of data and interpretation of themes (clarke and braun, 2013). findings quantitative data the data presented in figure 1 provides an overview of mentee evaluations combining 2013-14 and 2014-15. the data have been combined as a similar pattern of response was found in both years. the majority of respondents indicated that pal had very definitely or definitely improved their experience at uea (n=26); benefitted their learning (n=27) and would help them in the future (n=24). twenty-five students indicated they would recommend pal to future students. figure 1. speech & language therapy mentee pal evaluations 2013-15 (2013-14 n=10; 2014-15 n=18) presenting total number of responses to each question. guyon et al. speech and language therapy students’ experience of peer assisted learning journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 9 mentees were asked to rate specific benefits of pal (figure 2). the majority felt pal had increased their confidence in starting university (n=21); understanding the requirements of university (n=22); confidence in getting good grades (n=21) and confidence in completing the degree (n=22). mentees also indicated that pal had helped with increasing knowledge, understanding and skills (n=27). areas where there was less agreement that pal helped with getting to know other students (n=20) and academic writing (n=10). the remaining responses to all questions ranged from ‘no effect yet’ to ‘definitely reduced’. figure 2. speech & language therapy mentee pal benefits 2013-15 (2013-14 n=10; 2014-15 n=18) presenting total number of responses to each question. qualitative data the main themes to emerge from the qualitative data were: engagement with pal; mentor-led to collaborative learning; and academic and professional outcomes. factors which encouraged engagement were described by some mentees as gaining a sense of satisfaction from attending voluntarily: you get quite a good feeling after you’ve been to an optional session. (me:a9) others commented that having a structure was reassuring and encouraged participation: guyon et al. speech and language therapy students’ experience of peer assisted learning journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 10 i was worried it would be awkward that we'd just sit there and think maybe we should do this but they have it all structured. (me:a8) others based engagement on their learning needs at the time: i’d already written the essay so i didn’t need to go to that one. (me:a1) the approachability of the mentors and their enthusiasm for the course were described as reasons for attending pal sessions and engaging with the course: i feel much more relaxed to ask questions […] because i don't have to worry about the lecturer judging me. (me:a9) you can tell [the mentors] really love the course and it’s what they really want to do so you think ‘that’s going to be us in two years’ time’. (me:a6). the mentors felt a responsibility to orientate and reassure the mentees as well as provide a purpose for attending: a lot of them haven’t been in this setting before so we talked about them finding their way around campus and that sort of thing. (mr:b3) if they don’t feel like they’re going to benefit from it or be able to share learning […] then nobody is going to gain from that. (mr:b1) mentees spoke about the positive aspects of interacting with students from the same and cross-year groups, both from social and academic perspectives: it’s quite nice to get to know other people on your cohort in a less formal environment. (me:a2) the lecturers obviously just give you an overview […] the students have already been through it and they know how much extra information you need. (me:a8) mentors expressed a sense of empathy and duty to share their learning: allowing them to gain from someone who has been there before. (mr:b1) [it’s] really important throughout the course to be generous with your learning. (mr:b2) guyon et al. speech and language therapy students’ experience of peer assisted learning journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 11 the interactive and less pressurised nature of pal compared to formal teaching allowed mentees to explore key aspects of course content: they’ll get us doing sort of tasks […] things which kind of make you pay attention. (me:a3) lecturers have a lot to fit into their slots sometimes […] it’s a bit overwhelming. (me:a1) the shift from mentor-led to collaborative learning took time to develop. the mentors were more aware of the need to work collaboratively and viewed their role as providing learning opportunities to meet the mentees’ learning needs: we are completely led by what they are wanting to do, we have no agenda in terms of what we want to do. (mr:b1) initially mentees took a passive role and were dependent on the mentors for structuring the sessions, resulting in the mentors adopting a more directive than facilitative style: we literally just tell them what we want to do. […] they have it all structured. (me:a8) we don’t really give them the answers necessarily, it’s more […] you might need to go and revise that bit. (mr:b2) over time there was a growing awareness among mentees that they should be taking a more active role. one mentee commented on the natural progression of group participation: i think it’s our responsibility to actively engage […] and meet our part of the deal. (me:a1) at the beginning we were quite held back, that's a very natural thing […] that'd occur in any group you had. (me:a1) mentors commented on the changes they had seen in mentees and how their contributions were changing the nature of the sessions: at the beginning we tried to encourage them that they needed to help each other’s learning […] so it’s good that they are doing that. (mr:b2) guyon et al. speech and language therapy students’ experience of peer assisted learning journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 12 by them expressing what they are finding hard or easy, they kind of end up learning through each other. (mr:b1) a shift towards collaborative learning became more evident once mentees realised the mentors were learning at the same time: even the pal mentors were confused […] and we all sort of worked together to work it out. (me:a8) mentors noted that pal was influencing mentees to form their own study groups: [mentees] have begun to meet up independently in smaller groups, to practice doing things themselves. (mr:b1) in terms of academic outcomes, data from the focus groups indicate that mentees felt pal was helping them develop knowledge and understanding. they were developing learning strategies and felt better prepared for lectures: reading up on the topic so i have the answer ready for the lecture like i kind of knew what the lecturer was talking about. (me:a5) consequently there was an increase in confidence among the mentees: everyone has got more confident to speak up within lectures. (me:a4) realising that actually i do get that, sort of like a self-confidence thing. (me:a1) among the mentees there was debate as to whether benefits were short or longer term: [pal] will help me with my exam […] but possibly not in the long-term. (me:eval) [pal provides] the building blocks for the rest of our degree [and], when you do placement, things become more relevant. (me:a2) pal was also benefitting the mentors’ learning: you can check that you understand it if you can explain it to someone else. you’re never really in the position where you’re so perfect that you don’t need to practice it. (mr:b1) guyon et al. speech and language therapy students’ experience of peer assisted learning journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 13 through first year you get to grips with it so that’s about keeping up your knowledge and then building on it. (mr:b3) both mentees and mentors recognised professional outcomes and the relevance of learning collaboratively to their future practice: pal […] prepares you for your career when you have to work in a team of people. (me:a5) mentors were able to articulate more specific aspects of teamwork such as delegation and reliability: we’ll divvy it up this way then for each person to go away and come back with their task because there’s never been the case where one of us has said we’d do something and then not done it. (mr:b1) mentors were gaining skills in planning sessions, providing resources and the ability to be flexible in response to changing needs: you have to use your initiative and be flexible with your plans and it is not necessarily going to go the way you planned. (mr:b2) mentees and mentors commented on interpersonal skills mentors used and developed in the sessions: it wasn’t dry because of the way they presented it to us and their personalities and they are easy to relate to. (me:a1) having empathy and being sensitive to certain situations and diplomatic and it’s all interpersonal skills which are really important in slt. (mr:b2) the mentors recognised the transferability of the facilitation skills they had gained through pal: as an slt you’ll have students on placement […] and you need to be able to facilitate that and be sensitive to any issues. (mr:eval) guyon et al. speech and language therapy students’ experience of peer assisted learning journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 14 discussion quantitative data on the whole the findings from the quantitative data were positive, in particular pal was perceived as benefitting mentees’ university experience and learning. the majority of respondents would recommend pal to future students. respondents indicated that pal would benefit them in the future, although the question does not specify in which respect and will be reviewed for future evaluation forms. in response to questions regarding more specific benefits the majority of mentees felt pal had increased their confidence in starting university, getting good grades and completing their degree. in particular mentees felt that pal had helped with increasing knowledge, understanding and skills. these benefits are also cited in the literature. field et al. (2007) report increased performance and confidence as gains from pal. areas where there was less agreement were in the social benefits of pal, which may be explained by the small slt cohort and multiple opportunities to socialise. academic writing was rated lower than other benefits, which is likely to be because of the practical and discussion-based nature of slt pal sessions. qualitative data the themes presented in the findings provide useful insight into both the benefits and potential challenges of pal. boud et al. (2001) discuss the importance of balancing informality with structure as a means of encouraging engagement. a safe and less pressurised learning environment than formal teaching allows the mentees to ask questions and express ideas (longfellow et al., 2008; hammond et al., 2010). these aspects were mentioned by the mentees. there are also clear benefits for mentors who often enjoy sharing their interest for their subject (burgess et al., 2014). however, recurring comments from the focus groups suggest that the mentors in this study were perhaps too helpful, which might have encouraged dependency in the mentees. the mentors saw their role as providing learning opportunities based on mentees’ learning needs as advocated by arendale (2002). however, initially they admitted to directing mentees. in turn the mentees described initially shifting responsibility for structuring and leading sessions onto the mentors, a risk outlined by capstick and fleming (2004). mentees’ comments suggest they understood that they should be actively involved in guyon et al. speech and language therapy students’ experience of peer assisted learning journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 15 planning sessions, but found it difficult. an egalitarian relationship is the ideal to encourage collaborative learning within pal (boud et al., 2001; topping, 2005). however, mentors are usually selected because they are able to model the behaviours required for success (longfellow et al., 2008). this results in potential tension between egalitarian and hierarchical relationships. seeing students from higher years as more knowledgeable may encourage mentees into passivity as was evident in this study (hammond et al., 2010). the srs were particularly aware of the shift from dependent to collaborative learning, possibly because of their own experience of developing similar skills in problem based learning. by the time of the focus groups the mentees were starting to take more active roles in the sessions. the shift towards collaborative learning occurred once mentees recognised mentors’ learning needs. this progression towards greater participation over time is described as typical by capstick and fleming (2004). there was also evidence of ongoing collaborative learning as reported by arendale (1993). mentors indicated that mentees were meeting independently in small groups for revision sessions, using the structure of pal as a guide. it is questionable whether mentees achieved ‘social construction of shared knowledge’ (roschelle, 1992, p.236) as an academic outcome of pal. there was some awareness of the value of their contributions to others’ learning, but the focus tended to be on immediate and individual needs as reflected by ashwin (2003). pal offers opportunities to apply knowledge to clinical practice through mentors sharing their experience (yang et al., 2012). there was little reference by the mentees to the clinical applicability of concepts they were learning. this may be because professional practice seems far in the future for first year students. mentors described benefitting from sharing their learning and revising subjects. topping (1996) states that mentors benefit because of the enhanced cognitive processing required for utilising their existing knowledge and skills. both mentees and mentors recognised professional outcomes from pal. the royal college of speech and language therapists (rcslt, 2014) list the ability to work in a team as a necessary quality for a career as a slt. the development of team-working skills is evidenced in a number of studies (moreland, 2005; green, 2007; chipchase et al., 2012 and keenan, 2014). the mentees recognised the value of pal experience as an guyon et al. speech and language therapy students’ experience of peer assisted learning journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 16 introduction to team-working even though they found it difficult in the early stages. morrison et al. (2011) noted that team-working needs to be learned and found the combination of experience and the help of a supervising slt were predominant factors. this could be equated to the cross-year bonding which occurs in pal (wadoodi and crosby, 2002), where mentors provide a team-working environment and act as role models. planning sessions and providing appropriate resources are key aspects of slt intervention (fourie, 2009). well-planned sessions are critical to the effectiveness of pal (green, 2007), as evidenced by the mentees who found planning and resources beneficial to their learning. mentors recognised the development of these skills, a finding supported by hartman (1990) and chipchase et al. (2012). flexibility is another key skill for slts (crane and cooper, 1983; fourie 2009). the mentors described adapting their plans in response to the changing needs of mentees. rossin and hyland (2003) and keenan (2014) found that mentors could match activities to required levels of difficulty. interpersonal skills are the tools of the trade for slts who interact with clients with a range of communication difficulties. these skills are also seen as one of the most important elements of a mentor’s role (knight and yorke, 2002; green, 2007). the mentors described the skills of empathy, sensitivity and diplomacy they had developed through the pal sessions. as qualified professionals slts use facilitation skills when working with clients, colleagues and students. pal offers mentors the opportunity to develop skills in facilitating learning and giving feedback (soloman and crowe, 2001; nestel and kidd, 2005; burgess et al., 2014). on occasion they felt they needed to be more directive indicating a fine line between facilitation and teaching. nevertheless the mentors recognised the transferability of the skills they used to aid the mentees’ learning to their future roles as placement educators. critique this was a small study of a particular group of healthcare students in a single setting and a larger study would be needed to confirm wider application of the findings. guyon et al. speech and language therapy students’ experience of peer assisted learning journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 17 an area of improvement for a future similar study would be to clearly delineate between data generated from standard evaluation and from the focus groups. the evaluation data in this study provided some insights which could have been explored more fully to form the basis of questions for the focus groups. when analysing the focus group data, there was some disagreement between the srs centring on whether the word ‘peer’ refers to mentees only or mentors and mentees. this resulted in differences in coding of some sections of the data. clarifying terms such as ‘mentee’, ‘mentor’ and ‘peer’ would have pre-empted this disagreement. conclusion previous research has mainly been conducted by academics with a specific interest in pal. although the findings from this study reflected those in the literature, the project provided a novel perspective in that the investigation was conducted by students. the srs had the advantage of having insider understanding of the slt course although they did not have direct experience of pal. student-led focus groups offer the same advantages as pal itself, in that discussion with fellow students may encourage mentees and mentors to be more open than they would be with an academic. this presents opportunities for future research in that students could explore the first year experience in greater depth to gain insight into their understanding of the requirements of higher education and challenges students may face on a professional course. the srs gained a number of research skills, such as recruiting participants, planning, organising and generating questions for the focus groups, transcribing and analysing the data. they were aware that, as novice researchers, their interviewing technique in the focus groups needed improvement. they sometimes asked leading questions and did not always follow up on responses. however they generated rich data which have given an insight into the slt students’ experience of pal and their findings demonstrate that pal does provide the opportunity for slt mentees and mentors to develop academic and professional skills. guyon et al. speech and language therapy students’ experience of peer assisted learning journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 18 acknowledgement we would like to thank dr kathleen lane, senior research associate, university of east anglia, for her guidance and support in structuring and writing this article. references anderson, r. robins, l.s. fitzgerald j.t., jultquist, d. and zweifler, a. (1996) 'fourth-year medical students as small-group leaders of first-year students', academic medicine, 71, pp. 793-4. arendale, d. (1993) ‘foundation and theoretical framework for supplemental instruction’ in martin, d.c. and arendale, d. (eds.) supplemental instruction: improving first-year student success in high-risk courses. monograph series, 7. 2 nd edn. columbia: university of south carolina. available at: http://eric.ed.gov/?id=ed354839 (accessed: 23 november 2015). arendale, d. (2002) ‘history of supplemental instruction (si): mainstreaming of developmental education’ in lundell, d. b. and higbee j. l. (eds.) histories of developmental education. minneapolis: university of minnesota. ashwin, p. (2003) ‘peer support: relations between the context, process and outcomes for the students who are supported’, instructional science, 31, pp. 159–173. doi: 10.1023/a:1023227532029. bannan-ritland, b. (2002) ‘computer-mediated communication, e-learning, and interactivity: a review of the research’, quarterly review of distance education, 3(2), pp. 161–169. boud, d., cohen, r. and sampson, j. (eds.) (2001) peer learning in higher education: learning from and with each other. london: kogan page. burgess, a., mcgregor, d. and mellis, c. (2014) ‘medical students as peer tutors: a systematic review’, bmc medical education, 14, pp. 115-140. doi: 10.1186/14726920-14-115. available at: http://www.biomedcentral.com/1472-6920/14/115. (accessed: 23 november 2015). http://eric.ed.gov/?id=ed354839 http://www.biomedcentral.com/1472-6920/14/115 guyon et al. speech and language therapy students’ experience of peer assisted learning journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 19 burke, j., fayaz, s., graham, k., matthew, r. and field, m. (2007) ‘peer-assisted learning in the acquisition of clinical skills: a supplementary approach to musculoskeletal system training’, medical teacher, 29(6), pp. 577-582. capstick, s. (2003) implementing peer assisted learning in higher education: the experience of a new university and a model for the achievement of a mainstream programme. available at: http://www.exeter.ac.uk/media/universityofexeter/academicservices/changeagents/p al/pal2003-approach-bournmth.pdf (accessed: 23 november 2015). capstick, s. (2004) benefits and shortcomings of peer assisted learning (pal) in higher education: an appraisal by students (pdf) available at: http://pal.bournemouth.ac.uk/ (accessed: 28 april 2015). capstick, s., fleming, h. and hurne, j. (2004) implementing peer assisted learning in higher education: the experience of a new university and a model for the achievement of a mainstream programme. available at: https://www1.bournemouth.ac.uk/sites/default/files/asset/document/capstickfleming-hurne.pdf (accessed: 14 may 2015). capstick, s. and fleming, h. (2004) ‘peer assisted learning in an undergraduate hospitality course: second year students supporting first year students in group learning’, journal of hospitality, leisure, sport and tourism education, 1(1), pp. 6975. casey, d., burke, e., houghton, c., mee, l., smith, r., van der putten, d., bradley, h. and folan, m. (2011) 'use of peer assessment as a student engagement strategy in nurse education', nursing and health sciences, 13(4), pp. 514-520. doi: 10.1111/j.1442-2018.2011.00637.x. centre for work intelligence (2014) securing the future workforce supply: speech and language therapy stocktake. available at: http://www.cfwi.org.uk/publications/securing-the-future-workforce-supply-speechand-language-therapy-stocktake/@@publication-detail (access: 23 november 2015). http://www.exeter.ac.uk/media/universityofexeter/academicservices/changeagents/pal/pal2003-approach-bournmth.pdf http://www.exeter.ac.uk/media/universityofexeter/academicservices/changeagents/pal/pal2003-approach-bournmth.pdf http://pal.bournemouth.ac.uk/ https://www1.bournemouth.ac.uk/sites/default/files/asset/document/capstick-fleming-hurne.pdf https://www1.bournemouth.ac.uk/sites/default/files/asset/document/capstick-fleming-hurne.pdf http://www.cfwi.org.uk/publications/securing-the-future-workforce-supply-speech-and-language-therapy-stocktake/@@publication-detail http://www.cfwi.org.uk/publications/securing-the-future-workforce-supply-speech-and-language-therapy-stocktake/@@publication-detail guyon et al. speech and language therapy students’ experience of peer assisted learning journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 20 cheng, d. and walters, m. (2009) ‘peer-assisted learning in mathematics: an observational study of student success’, journal of peer learning, 2, pp. 23-39. [online]. available at: http://ro.uow.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1012&context=ajpl (accessed: 23 november 2015). chipchase, l.s., buttrum, p.j., dunwoodie, r., hill, a.e., mandrusiak, a. and moran, m. (2012) ‘characteristics of student preparedness for clinical learning: clinical educator perspectives using the delphi approach’, bmc medical education, 12 (112), pp. 1-9. available at: http://www.biomedcentral.com/content/pdf/1472-692012-112.pdf (accessed: 23 november 2015). clarke, v. and braun, v. (2013) successful qualitative research: a practical guide for beginners. london: sage. isbn 9781847875815. available from: http://eprints.uwe.ac.uk/21156. (accessed: 23 november 2015). costelloe, l. (2014) documenting the experiences of student leaders in a peer-assisted learning scheme. available at: http://www.academia.edu/7429758/documenting_the_experiences_of_student_lea ders_in_a_peer-assisted_learning_scheme (accessed: 29 may 2015). crane, s.l. and cooper, e.b. (1983) ‘speech-language clinician personality variables and clinical effectiveness’, journal of speech and hearing disorders, 48, pp. 140-145. doi: 10.1044/jshd.4802.140. crawford, c. and cribb, j. (2012) gap year takers: uptake, trends and long-term outcomes, centre for analysis of youth transitions. available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/2196 37/dfe-rr252.pdf donelan, m. (1999) ‘si mentors: the real winners’, national conference on supplemental instruction, university of missouri, kansas city, usa, 20-22 may. duane, b.t. and satre, m.e. (2014) ‘utilizing constructivism learning theory in collaborative testing as a creative strategy to promote essential nursing skills’, nurse education today, 34(1), pp. 31–34. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.nedt.2013.03.005. http://ro.uow.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1012&context=ajpl http://www.biomedcentral.com/content/pdf/1472-6920-12-112.pdf http://www.biomedcentral.com/content/pdf/1472-6920-12-112.pdf http://eprints.uwe.ac.uk/21156 http://www.academia.edu/7429758/documenting_the_experiences_of_student_leaders_in_a_peer-assisted_learning_scheme http://www.academia.edu/7429758/documenting_the_experiences_of_student_leaders_in_a_peer-assisted_learning_scheme https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/219637/dfe-rr252.pdf https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/219637/dfe-rr252.pdf http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.nedt.2013.03.005 guyon et al. speech and language therapy students’ experience of peer assisted learning journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 21 falchikov, l. (2001) learning together: peer tutoring in higher education. london: routledge. field, m., burke, j., mcallister, d. and lloyd, d. (2007) 'peer assisted learning: a novel approach to clinical skills learning for medical students', medical education, 41, pp. 411-418. doi: 10.1111/j.1365-2929.2007.02713.x. fourie, r. j. (2009) ‘qualitative study of the therapeutic relationship in speech and language therapy: perspectives of adults with acquired communication and swallowing disorders’, international journal of language & communication disorders, 44(6), pp. 979-999. doi: 10.1080/13682820802535285. gillam, a.m. (1994) ‘collaborative learning theory and peer tutoring practice’, in mullin, j.a. and wallace, r. (eds.) intersections: theory-practice in the writing center. illinois: national council of teachers of english. graneheim, u.h. and lundman, b. (2003) ‘qualitative content analysis in nursing research: concepts, procedures and measures to achieve trustworthiness’, nurse education today, 24(2), pp. 105-112. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.nedt.2003.10.001. green, a. (2007) ‘peer assisted learning: empowering first year engagement with a formal curriculum through the educative’ [online]. available at: http://www.unibielefeld.de/universitaet/einrichtungen/slk/peer_learning/pal/pdf/palempowering-first-year-engagement-with-a-formal-curriculum-through-theeducative.pdf. (accessed: 23 november 2015). hammar-chirac, e. (2014) ‘group work as an incentive for learning: students’ experiences of group work’, frontiers in psychology, 5, pp. 1-18. hammond, j.a., bithell, c.p., jones, l. and bidgood, p. (2010) ‘a first year experience of student-directed peer-assisted learning’, active learning in higher education, 11(3), pp. 201-212. hartman, h.j. (1990) 'factors affecting the tutoring process', journal of educational development, 14(2), pp. 2-6. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.nedt.2003.10.001 http://www.uni-bielefeld.de/universitaet/einrichtungen/slk/peer_learning/pal/pdf/pal-empowering-first-year-engagement-with-a-formal-curriculum-through-the-educative.pdf http://www.uni-bielefeld.de/universitaet/einrichtungen/slk/peer_learning/pal/pdf/pal-empowering-first-year-engagement-with-a-formal-curriculum-through-the-educative.pdf http://www.uni-bielefeld.de/universitaet/einrichtungen/slk/peer_learning/pal/pdf/pal-empowering-first-year-engagement-with-a-formal-curriculum-through-the-educative.pdf http://www.uni-bielefeld.de/universitaet/einrichtungen/slk/peer_learning/pal/pdf/pal-empowering-first-year-engagement-with-a-formal-curriculum-through-the-educative.pdf guyon et al. speech and language therapy students’ experience of peer assisted learning journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 22 hein, g. (1991) ‘constructivist learning theory’ in the museum and the needs of people, 1 (1), 1. ceca conference, jerusalem, israel october 1991. available at: http://www.exploratorium.edu/ifi-archive/resources/constructivistlearning hogan, d.m. and tudge, j.r. (1999) ‘implications of vygotsky’s theory for peer learning’, in o’donnell, a.m. and king, a. (eds.) cognitive perspectives on peer learning. mahwah, nj, lawrence erlbaum publisher, pp. 39-66. hood, k., cant, r., baulch, j., gilbee, a., leech, m., anderson, a. and davies, k. (2014) ‘prior experience of inter-professional learning enhances undergraduate nursing and healthcare students’ professional identity and attitudes to teamwork’, nurse education in practice, 14(2), pp. 117-122. doi:10.1016/j.nepr.2013.07.013. institute of medicine (2011) ‘the future of nursing: leading change, advancing health’. washington dc: institute of medicine. available at: http://www.nap.edu/catalog/12956/the-future-of-nursing-leading-change-advancinghealth. (accessed: 23 november 2015). keenan, c. (2014) mapping student-led peer learning in the uk. york: the higher education academy. available at: https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/sites/default/files/resources/peer_led_learning_keen an_nov_14-final.pdf (accessed: 5 may 2010). khosa, d.k. and volet, s.e. (2013) 'promoting effective collaborative case-based learning at university: a metacognitive intervention', studies in higher education, 38(6), pp. 870-889. knight, p.t. and yorke, m. (2002) ‘employability through the curriculum’, tertiary education and management, 8(4), pp. 261-276. laal, m. and ghodsi, s.m. (2012) ‘benefits of collaborative learning’, procedia social and behavioural sciences, 31, pp. 486-490. laal, m. and laal, m. (2012) 'collaborative learning: what is it?', procedia: social and behavioural sciences, 31, pp. 491-495 [online]. available at: http://ac.elscdn.com/s1877042811030217/1-s2.0-s1877042811030217main.pdf?_tid=a06071de-96d1-11e5-8a07http://www.nap.edu/catalog/12956/the-future-of-nursing-leading-change-advancing-health http://www.nap.edu/catalog/12956/the-future-of-nursing-leading-change-advancing-health https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/sites/default/files/resources/peer_led_learning_keenan_nov_14-final.pdf https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/sites/default/files/resources/peer_led_learning_keenan_nov_14-final.pdf http://ac.els-cdn.com/s1877042811030217/1-s2.0-s1877042811030217-main.pdf?_tid=a06071de-96d1-11e5-8a07-00000aacb361&acdnat=1448826458_4d5d0f3f7192d7017a7dc2473ec17738 http://ac.els-cdn.com/s1877042811030217/1-s2.0-s1877042811030217-main.pdf?_tid=a06071de-96d1-11e5-8a07-00000aacb361&acdnat=1448826458_4d5d0f3f7192d7017a7dc2473ec17738 http://ac.els-cdn.com/s1877042811030217/1-s2.0-s1877042811030217-main.pdf?_tid=a06071de-96d1-11e5-8a07-00000aacb361&acdnat=1448826458_4d5d0f3f7192d7017a7dc2473ec17738 guyon et al. speech and language therapy students’ experience of peer assisted learning journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 23 00000aacb361&acdnat=1448826458_4d5d0f3f7192d7017a7dc2473ec17738 (accessed: 23 november 2015). lave, j. and wenger, e. (1991) situated learning: legitimate peripheral participation, cambridge: cambridge university press. lincoln, m.a. and mcallister, l.l. (1993) ‘peer learning in clinical education’, medical teacher, 15(1), pp. 17-26. lockspeiser, t. m., o’sullivan, p., teherani, a., and muller, j. (2008) ‘understanding the experience of being taught by peers: the value of social and cognitive congruence’, advances in health sciences education, 13(3), pp. 361-372. longfellow, e., may, s., burke, l. and marks-maran, d. (2008) ‘”they had a way of helping that actually helped”: a case study of a peer-assisted learning scheme’, teaching in higher education, 13(1), pp. 93-105. makino, t., shinozaki, h., hayashi, k., lee, b., matsui, h., kururi, n., kazama, h., ogawara, h., tozato, f., iwasaki, k., asakawa, y., abe, y., uchida, y., kanaizumi, s., sakou, k. and watanabe, h. (2013) ‘attitudes toward interprofessional healthcare teams: a comparison between undergraduate students and alumni’, journal of interprofessional care, 27(3), pp. 261-268. doi: 10.3109/13561820.2012.751901. mok, c.k.f., whitehill, t.l. and dodd, b.j. (2008) ‘problem-based learning, critical thinking and concept mapping in speech-language pathology education: a review’, international journal of speech-language pathology, 10(6), pp. 438-448. moreland, n. (2005) learning & employability, series two: work-related learning in higher education. york: the higher education academy. available at: http://www.qualityresearchinternational.com/esecttools/esectpubs/morelandwrl.pdf (accessed: 20 april 2015). morrison, s.c., lincoln, m.a. and reed, v.a. (2011) ‘how experienced speech-language pathologists learn to work on teams’, international journal of speech-language pathology, 13(4), pp. 369-377. http://ac.els-cdn.com/s1877042811030217/1-s2.0-s1877042811030217-main.pdf?_tid=a06071de-96d1-11e5-8a07-00000aacb361&acdnat=1448826458_4d5d0f3f7192d7017a7dc2473ec17738 http://www.qualityresearchinternational.com/esecttools/esectpubs/morelandwrl.pdf guyon et al. speech and language therapy students’ experience of peer assisted learning journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 24 mulholland, s. and derdall, m. (2004), ‘exploring what employers seek when hiring occupational therapists’, canadian journal of occupational therapy, 71(4), pp. 223229. doi: 10.1177/000841740407100407. naqi, s.a. (2014) 'peer assisted learning as a formal instructional tool', journal of the college of physicians and surgeons pakistan, 24(3), pp. 169-172. nestel, d. and kidd, j. (2005) ‘peer assisted learning in patient-centred interviewing: the impact on student tutors’, medical teacher, 27(5), pp. 439-444. rogers, l., mulholland, s., derdall, m. and hollis, v. (2011) 'from all perspectives: opinions of students and teaching staff regarding occupational therapy distance education', british journal of occupational therapy, 74(5), pp. 241-248. roschelle, j. (1992) ‘learning by collaborating: convergent conceptual change’, the journal of the learning sciences, 2(3), pp. 235-276. rossin, d. and hyland, t. (2003) ‘group work-based learning within higher education: an integral ingredient for the personal and social development of students’, mentoring and tutoring: partnership in learning, 11, pp. 153–162. royal college of speech and language therapists (rcslt) (2003) position paper the provision of clinical placements: stakeholder roles & responsibilities, rcslt. available at: http://www.rcslt.org/members/publications/publications2/provision_of_clinical_place ments (accessed: 30 april 2015). royal college of speech and language therapists (rcslt) (2014) a career in speech and language therapy, rcslt. available at: http://www.rcslt.org/speech_and_language_therapy/docs/undergraduate_guide_201 4_amended0715 (accessed: 23 november 2015). saleh, m., sinha, y. and weinberg, d. (2013) 'using peer-assisted learning to teach basic surgical skills: medical students’ experiences', medical education online, 18, pp. 13. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.3402/meo.v18i0.21065. available at: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/pmc3752041/pdf/meo-18-21065.pdf (accessed: 14 july 2015). http://www.rcslt.org/members/publications/publications2/provision_of_clinical_placements http://www.rcslt.org/members/publications/publications2/provision_of_clinical_placements http://www.rcslt.org/speech_and_language_therapy/docs/undergraduate_guide_2014_amended0715 http://www.rcslt.org/speech_and_language_therapy/docs/undergraduate_guide_2014_amended0715 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/pmc3752041/pdf/meo-18-21065.pdf guyon et al. speech and language therapy students’ experience of peer assisted learning journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 25 santee, j. and garavalia, l. (2006) 'peer tutoring programs in health professions schools', american journal of pharmaceutical education, 70(3), pp. 1-10. schunk, d.h. (2005) ‘self-regulated learning: the educational legacy of paul r. pintrich’, educational psychologist, 40(2), pp. 85–94. sevenhuysen, s., skinner, e.h., farlie, m.k., raitman, l., nickson, w., keating, j.l., maloney, s., molloy, e. and haines, t.p. (2014) ‘educators and students prefer traditional clinical education to a peer-assisted learning model, despite similar student performance outcomes: a randomised trial’. journal of physiotherapy, 60 (4), pp. 209-216. doi: 0.1016/j.jphys.2014.09.004. skalicky, j. and caney, a. (2010) ‘pass student leader and mentor roles: a tertiary leadership pathway’, journal of peer learning, 3(1), pp. 24-37. smith, j., may, s. and burke, l. (2007) ‘peer assisted learning: a case study into the value to student mentors and mentees’, practice and evidence of scholarship of teaching and learning in higher education, 2(2), pp. 80-109. sole, g., rose, a., bennett, t., jaques, k., rippon, z. and van de meer, j. (2012) ‘a student experience of peer assisted study sessions in physiotherapy’, journal of peer learning, 5(1), pp. 1-11. soloman, p. and crowe, j. (2001) ‘perceptions of student peer tutors in a problem-based learning programme’, medical teacher, 23(2), pp. 181-186. stephenson, k.s., peloquin, s.m., richmond, s.a., hinman, m.r. and christiansen, c.h. (2002) ‘changing educational paradigms to prepare allied health professionals for the 21st century’, education for health, 15(1), pp. 37-49. stout, m. l. and mcdaniel, a. j. (2006) ‘benefits to supplemental instruction leaders’, new directions for teaching and learning, 106, pp. 55-62. doi: 10.1002/tl.233. sultan, f.k.p.d., narayansany, k.s., kee, h.l., kuan, c.h., palaniappa manickam, m.k., and tee, m.y. (2013) ‘helping students with difficult first year subjects through the pass program’. journal of peer learning, 6, pp. 59-75 [online]. available at: http://ro.uow.edu.au/ajpl/vol6/iss1/6 (accessed: 23 november 2015). http://ro.uow.edu.au/ajpl/vol6/iss1/6 guyon et al. speech and language therapy students’ experience of peer assisted learning journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 26 topping, k. (1996) ‘the effectiveness of peer tutoring in further and higher education: a typology and review of the literature’, higher education, 32(3), pp. 321–45 [online]. available at: http://www.fau.edu/class/crla/level_three/the_effectiveness_of_peer_tutoring _in_further_and_higher_education-a_typology_and_review_of_the_literature.pdf (accessed: 23 november 2015). topping, k. (2005) ‘trends in peer learning’, educational psychology, 25(6), pp. 631645. university of east anglia business intelligence unit (2014) facts and figures. uea, 2014. university of east anglia (2014) ‘peer assisted learning at university of east anglia’. vygotsky, l. s. (1978) mind in society: the development of higher psychological processes. harvard university press: usa. wadoodi, a. and crosby, j.r. (2002) 'twelve tips for peer-assisted learning: a classic concept revisited', medical teacher, 24(3), pp. 241-244. doi: 10.1080/01421590220134060. yang, k., woomer, g.r. and matthews, j.t. (2012) ‘collaborative learning among undergraduate students in community health nursing’, nurse education in practice, 12(2), pp. 72-76. doi: 0.1016/j.nepr.2011.07.005. author details anne guyon is a lecturer in speech and language therapy at the university of east anglia. she has a particular interest in the student perspective on learning and peer learning. she holds a masters in clinical education for which her dissertation focussed on the student experience of problem based learning. since 2013 she has held the role of peer assisted learning champion for the university. this role involves promoting, developing and evaluating pal in schools from each faculty. dr zoe butterfint is senior lecturer in phonetics and director of teaching & learning quality in the school of health sciences at the university of east anglia. the main focus of her day-to-day work relates to student experience and the quality of the students’ learning experience. her research interests include: student experience and student http://www.fau.edu/class/crla/level_three/the_effectiveness_of_peer_tutoring_in_further_and_higher_education-a_typology_and_review_of_the_literature.pdf http://www.fau.edu/class/crla/level_three/the_effectiveness_of_peer_tutoring_in_further_and_higher_education-a_typology_and_review_of_the_literature.pdf guyon et al. speech and language therapy students’ experience of peer assisted learning journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 27 expectations of higher education; and areas related to variability in speech in individuals with acquired dysarthria and the associated impacts on intelligibility. andrea lacy, ma, qualified as a speech and language therapist in 2015. she currently works within a low secure setting for adults with learning disabilities who have a forensic history, mental health illnesses or personality disorders. prior to training as a speech and language therapist, andrea was a teacher in community education, fe and he with a teaching background in english language and linguistics. aisha sanosi qualified as a speech and language therapist in 2015. she is working as a teaching assistant at a mainstream school within a year 1 class as well as providing 1:1 support to a pupil with a severe hearing impairment. she is currently studying for a level 3 qualification in supporting pupils with sensory impairment from which she will further educate the staff at the school in developing strategies for specific pupils. katie sheridan qualified as a speech and language therapist in 2015. she works in a special school in london for children age 3-11 with severe learning difficulties and autism. katie liaises with the great ormond street hospital (gosh) augmentative and alternative communication hub for assessment and funding for high-tech devices. she hopes to run a small study looking at one child’s journey from being referred to gosh for a device through to using it in her everyday environment. jessica unwin is a speech and language therapist who works within the adult team at east coast community healthcare (ecch) based in norfolk, uk. jessica graduated from the university of east anglia in 2015 with a degree in speech and language therapy and has a background interest in counselling and is a strong supporter of peer support within the profession. guyon et al. speech and language therapy students’ experience of peer assisted learning journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 28 appendix 1. table showing demographic information for mentees (a1-a9) and mentors (b1-b3) who participated in focus groups. guyon et al. speech and language therapy students’ experience of peer assisted learning journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 29 appendix 2. pal project: focus group procedure.  refer to the 'script' to ensure all points are covered when taking consent and introducing participants to the focus group procedure.  try to cover all questions to ensure you have covered all topics: you need to be prepared to be flexible about the order of questions and the extent to which you can explore certain issues.  you will need spare copies of participant information sheets; a copy of the study proposal and background information; audio-recorders; questions.  decide which of you will be asking questions and which will be taking notes and whether you will be swapping roles during the focus group. arrange seating to make sure all of you are comfortable – in a circle round a table is probably best. close windows to block out background noise if possible. have the audiorecorders set up and ready to record. check that all students are happy with audiorecording. introduce yourself and your fellow student, explain your roles who will be asking questions and who will be taking notes. explain the notes are to provide background information for the transcripts. before recording: say: "thank you very much for taking the time to take part in this focus group. i just need to remind you that everything you say remains confidential to the research team, your name will not be used when the focus group is transcribed or in any future reports or writing to do with the project. please ensure you do not share any information from the focus group outside this room. if you have concerns you may leave the focus group at any time or we can pause the recording at any time.” if they ask you any questions you are unsure about check the proposal / background information / participant information sheet. if you still cannot answer their question/s tell them you will check with anne guyon and get back to them. ask if it is ok to proceed. guyon et al. speech and language therapy students’ experience of peer assisted learning journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 30 remind them about the overall aims of the study to gain an understanding of students’ experience of pal as a means of facilitating academic learning and professional development. when you're all ready, say: "i'm going to switch on now". start recording. say: "this is the pal project focus group for mentees / mentors taking place on date conducted by name + name. mentee questions:  background information: name, education / occupation before coming to university.  what made you want to attend pal sessions?  is it what you expected it to be?  what were your expectations?  what do you think are the similarities / differences between pal and formal teaching / learning?  how do you see the role of the mentors?  what do you feel mentors contribute to pal sessions?  how do you see your role?  what do you feel you contribute to pal sessions?  how do you decide what should be in the sessions?  have you found the sessions helpful?  yes / no: in what way?  are there aspects of the course you find challenging? has pal helped?  thinking about your future as an slt, do you think what you have gained from pal will be transferable to future years? guyon et al. speech and language therapy students’ experience of peer assisted learning journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 31  would you recommend pal to future 1 st years? why?  is there anything else you would like to add? mentor questions:  background information: name, education / occupation before coming to university.  what made you want to be a pal mentor?  is pal what you expected it to be?  what were your expectations?  what do you think are the similarities / differences between pal and formal teaching / learning?  how do you see your role?  what do you feel you contribute to pal sessions?  how do you see the role of the mentees?  what do you feel mentees contribute to pal sessions?  how do you decide what should be in the sessions?  do you think the sessions are helpful?  yes / no: in what way?  are there aspects of the course you find challenging? has pal helped?  thinking about your future as an slt, do you think what you have gained from pal will be transferable to future years?  would you recommend pal to future 1st years? why?  is there anything else you would like to add? speech and language therapy students’ experience of peer assisted learning: undergraduates investigate pal as a means of enhancing academic and professional development abstract introduction pal on healthcare courses learning requirements for slt students methodology roles of student researchers and supervisors data collection findings quantitative data qualitative data discussion quantitative data qualitative data critique conclusion acknowledgement references author details poster: design for inquiry-based learning case studies journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 1: january 2009 design for inquiry-based learning case studies jamie peter wood university of sheffield, uk abstract the past nine months have witnessed the development and dissemination of a number of case studies of inquiry-based learning (ibl) projects supported and developed by the centre for inquiry-based learning in the arts and social sciences (cilass), a centre for excellence in teaching and learning at the university of sheffield (www.shef.ac.uk/cilass/cases). the cases aim to provide practitioners with accessible, informative and inspiring resources that illustrate ways in which inquiry-based learning is conceptualised, designed and facilitated in different disciplinary contexts. they are intended to communicate something of the experiences of students and staff who have been involved in inquiry-based learning activities at sheffield. keywords: inquiry-based learning; case studies; cilass; arts; social sciences; cetl introduction inquiry-based learning facilitates student learning through a range of inquiry and research activities and approaches. tasks can include case scenarios and projects of different kinds which are designed to engage students with the questions and problems of their academic or professional disciplines, using the scholarly and research practices of those disciplines (brew, 2006; kahn & o’rourke, 2004). activities will be supported and directed to a greater or lesser extent depending upon the discipline in question, the level of the students, and the aims of the tutor. http://www.shef.ac.uk/cilass/cases wood case study: design for inquiry-based learning case studies the past nine months have witnessed the development and dissemination of a number of case studies of inquiry-based learning (ibl) projects supported and developed by the centre for inquiry-based learning in the arts and social sciences (cilass), a centre for excellence in teaching and learning (cetl) at the university of sheffield (www.shef.ac.uk/cilass/cases). the cases aim to provide practitioners with accessible, informative and inspiring resources that illustrate ways in which inquiry-based learning is conceptualised, designed and facilitated in different disciplinary contexts. they are intended to communicate something of the experiences of students and staff who have been involved in inquiry-based learning activities at sheffield. we adopted a web-based strategy in order to provide greater flexibility for searching and analysis than would be possible with paper-based cases, to share a range of resources, including multimedia materials, and to exploit the possibilities of on-line interaction. the architecture for accessing the cases consists of a web page per case, plus a series of additional materials in the form of downloads from a side-bar. an entry page enables cases to be searched by discipline, a keyword ‘tag cloud’ or a google-style search feature. they are linked to (and from) the university’s own case study/ good practice wiki (good.group.shef.ac.uk/wiki/index.php/main_page). rationale and context over recent years, an increasing amount of literature has begun describe and analyse different approaches to ibl. however, when undertaking their literature review of e/pbl sharpe and savin-baden (2007) commented that, “there seems to be relatively little understanding of how e/pbl might be constituted, how they might be mapped or seen differently, and the impact that such spaces are having on the nature of higher education”. it is within this context that cilass has developed its strategic commitment to disseminating the practice and theory of ibl more widely across the sector (levy et al, 2007; see levy & petrulis, 2007 for a concrete example). the interest in sharing the learning about the ibl pedagogies that have underpinned educational development projects led to the decision to develop an externally-facing set of resources that would journal of learning development in higher education, issue 1: february 2009 2 http://www.shef.ac.uk/cilass/cases http://good.group.shef.ac.uk/wiki/index.php/main_page wood case study: design for inquiry-based learning case studies summarise this information. as was noted above, these case study resources were intended to outline the key learning design principles that underpinned various curricular ibl innovations and participants’ perspectives on this, since: “for the most part, the cases of interest in education and social service are people and programs” (stake, 1995). each case study was intended to represent and aid understanding of an individual ibl curriculum innovation, not primarily to help to understand a range of cases (stake, 1995), although in the process of considering potential audiences for the case studies (yin, 2003), it became evident that it was important that they were comparable and easily understandable by non-subject specialists. the case studies were based upon the experiential knowledge (stake, 2006) of ibl practitioners and were meant primarily for consumption by an audience of other interested teaching and learning professionals. a balance had to be struck between the desire to capture the, often subjective, experiences of participants in a project and to facilitate transferability of practice without losing the richness of participants’ accounts (stake, 2006). it was therefore intended that the case studies would offer a holistic picture of the project, situating it in a particular context (stake, 2006), while maintaining a practitioner-focussed emphasis upon transferability and generalisation, since the ‘researcher [= case study writer] asks, “what can be learned here that the reader needs to know?”’ (stake, 2006; 1995). therefore, a general learning design template was developed, which allowed for comparability and generalisation. in addition, a member of the cilass team was given the task of coordinating production and dissemination and ensuring parity across cases; this process and how it fits into overall cilass educational development strategies is described in greater detail elsewhere in this journal (mckinney, wood and little, 2009). in order to allow for a degree of personalisation and specificity, as subjects of the case studies, project leaders reviewed all cases before online publication (yin, 2003). they could, for example, choose to leave out parts of the learning design template which they deemed inappropriate, add additional comments, or link the case to further materials giving a more holistic impression of their experiences. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 1: february 2009 3 wood case study: design for inquiry-based learning case studies inquiry-based learning design overview the central part of each case study is an ibl design overview, which gives give an informative guide to the context of the project, the inquiry activities in which students engaged, the support which they received from staff, and some feedback from staff and students about their experiences. each overview template is structured into the following sections, which are intended to be as accessible and user-friendly as possible in order to enable the transferral of good practice and to facilitate comparison and abstraction across cases: 1. the students and the curriculum (please indicate here student level (year), programme/module/ department, numbers etc) 2. the teaching and learning aims (briefly indicate here what the aims (learning outcomes) were) 3. the inquiry/ inquiries (briefly describe here the main inquiry task that students were engaged in, and any additional inquiry tasks. please explain how students carried out the inquiry task(s) – i.e. as individuals, in groups, etc.) 4. the assessment (describe what was assessed, and how the assessment was carried out) 5. the ‘process support’ (describe here the activities and/or materials that were designed to help students develop skills to carry out the inquiry effectively (e.g. information literacy activities/materials; team-work support, ict skills support)) 6. the information resources and strategies (describe here the approaches taken to providing students with access to subject information related to their inquiry, e.g. lectures, resource packs, library resource lists, tutor blog, etc.) 7. the tutoring/facilitation approach (describe here the approaches taken to teaching and tutoring (e.g. lecturing, seminars, workshops, tutorials)) 8. the learning technology (indicate any learning technologies used, and briefly indicate how they were used by staff and students (e.g. mole, blogs, wikis, podcasts)) 9. the learning spaces (describe where ‘contact hours’ took place (e.g. cilass collaboratories, lecture theatres, etc)) journal of learning development in higher education, issue 1: february 2009 4 wood case study: design for inquiry-based learning case studies 10. what really worked (summarising your evaluation data, please indicate what ‘worked’ in this design (i.e. the elements of the design described above). please include here what students said about the experience.) 11. things to build on and/or do differently next time around (indicate what you feel you have learned through running this activity and what you will do differently, or add to your design to develop it, next time around. refer to evaluation data where appropriate.) 12. advice to others doing a similar project (please highlight any key pointers for others embarking on a similar approach.) additional materials as the cases were to be presented via the web, this offered the exciting possibility of sharing a wider range of material than would have been possible in other formats. therefore, in addition to the ibl design overview, each case study is accompanied by a range of resources that have been created by project leaders, students or cilass staff members in the course of the project. these have been included in order to give a richer view of the project than a text-based description can offer. so far, the resources that we have included in case studies have included: • dissemination materials such as: journal articles; powerpoint and other presentations; hea subject centre materials; newsletter articles; blog postings; posters; • course materials, such as: course handouts, descriptions of inquiry activities, student work; • evaluation data, for example focus group transcripts and project leader reflections; • photos, podcasts and videos of project leaders and students. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 1: february 2009 5 wood case study: design for inquiry-based learning case studies external dissemination, storage and sharing many of the additional resources have been uploaded to external websites. this enables easier storing and sharing of materials and greater dissemination of the project. sites/ services that we are using include: • podcasts – the university of london podcast feed: podcast.ulcc.ac.uk/accounts/universityofsheffield/cilasscasestudies.xml • photos – the flickr photo sharing website: www.flickr.com/photos/cilass/ • presentations and posters – the slideshare presentation sharing website: www.slideshare.net/cilass.slideshare in addition, all case studies are ‘tagged’ via the delicious social bookmarking website to allow greater searchability and dissemination: delicious/cilass current case studies case studies currently online include the projects below. more are being added all the time, so please do check to see if there have been any updates. the full list of case studies can be viewed via: www.shef.ac.uk/cilass/cases • automatic control and systems engineering: induction of new undergraduates. a lecture-packed, information bombardment induction week was replaced with a robot challenge and a learning trail. this was intended to engage new students; to expose them to an inquiry-based learning approach; to give them a sense of identity with their new department; to let them meet their colleagues and develop friendships; to assist their transition from school to university; to manage their expectations of university study and introduce them to independent study approaches. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 1: february 2009 6 http://podcast.ulcc.ac.uk/accounts/universityofsheffield/cilasscasestudies.xml http://www.flickr.com/photos/cilass/ http://www.slideshare.net/cilass.slideshare http://del.icio.us/cilass http://www.shef.ac.uk/cilass/cases wood case study: design for inquiry-based learning case studies • english: history of english mentoring scheme. this project used secondand third-year students as group mentors on a first year core module, history of english. they facilitated the development of information literacy and key skills in historical approaches to language through an inquiry-based exercise and, in turn, themselves acquired coaching and mentoring skills. in order to accomplish this, students received support from the module convenors and a postgraduate student tasked with coordinating and supporting the mentors. students were encouraged to reflect on and plan how to transfer the knowledge used in their mentoring activities to their own learning practices and research skills in their degree programme. • english: roots routes: eight things to do with a text. the module roots routes asked students to participate actively in a series of seminars using eight modes of inquiry to examine alex haley´s novel roots and the popular tv-mini series. the course's virtual learning environment and cilass collaboratories were integral to the delivery of the module, allowing students to engage in collaborative researchled learning in real time. • human communication sciences: inquiry-based induction. intro week inquiry activities in human communication sciences were revamped in september 2006. students worked in groups on a variety of activities, including treasure hunts and poster presentations to familiarise themselves with their course and ibl, their department and their university. at the end of intro week, students showcased posters they had created to a wide variety of staff and students from across the university, giving students an opportunity to discuss their research and their first taste of university life. • information studies: inquiry in information management. this new module challenged level one undergraduates, working in small groups, to choose a worthwhile research question and then undertake and report an original investigation on that topic. understanding of the inquiry process was supported through workshops and online resources. one element of the assessment was research posters, shared with members of the department in a research conference. students participated in developing the assessment criteria for the journal of learning development in higher education, issue 1: february 2009 7 wood case study: design for inquiry-based learning case studies posters and also contributed to the marking of work. other assessment methods were group blogs and individual portfolios. • law: understanding law 2. during this core first year module 250 students worked on a diverse combination of individual and collaborative inquiry tasks in order to develop a more holistic appreciation of law in different contexts. staff from the law school collaborated with colleagues from the learning development and media unit to create a variety of resources to support this process. these included an online workbook that allowed the students to engage with and reflect upon the legal knowledge they were gaining in the course. additionally, the students worked collaboratively in 45 groups to research an aspect of the law that was of particular interest to them, and to create a multimedia resource to share with other students, staff, and visiting professionals at a 'celebration of learning'. • modern languages and linguistics (dutch): multicultural society in the netherlands. in 2003, a collaborative teaching project `the multicultural society in the netherlands´ was developed within the framework of the virtual department of dutch (vdd), an it-based collaboration between the dutch departments/sections in cambridge, sheffield and university college london. this particular project links sheffield students with university college london to pursue a collaborative inquiry into issues of migration and multiculturalism. crossinstitutional student groups use a virtual learning environment to prepare a joint report, including a number of statements for discussion. the project culminates in a video conference, where each group chairs a discussion based on their background reading, reports, and statements. • modern languages and linguistics (hispanic studies): torquemada en la hoguera. this project made innovative and effective use of ict by producing an electronic learning environment to support student inquiries and enhance their learning experience by stimulating them to engage confidently and critically with the electronic edition of benito pérez galdós's novel torquemada en la hoguera (1889). this project built upon previous teaching of the novel by directly involving the students in the challenges presented by the study of torquemada en la journal of learning development in higher education, issue 1: february 2009 8 wood case study: design for inquiry-based learning case studies hoguera. it was intended to maximize the opportunities offered by research-led teaching and the interactive electronic edition, stimulating students to develop new ways of reading the literary texts and to work like researchers. further, it aimed to improve their skills in information literacy and collaborative learning. evaluation as initial attention was focussed on the actual development and dissemination of the case studies themselves, their impact has yet to be fully evaluated. in terms of initial planning and evaluation, extensive consultation was carried out within the cilass team and with project leaders on how to structure the case studies and the process by which they would be generated. initial feedback from practitioners who have engaged with the resource has been positive and project leaders whose case studies are now online have expressed themselves pleased with the end product. where relevant, each individual case study summarises student and staff evaluation data from the ibl curriculum innovation itself. plans to enable further engagement with the case studies resource include extending links with the institutional good practice initiative and the setting up of an rss (really simple syndication) feed, allowing users to ‘subscribe’ to content updates as they happen. it is hoped that ongoing dialogue on the cases, and evaluation data, will be generated by the inclusion of a comments facility on the webpage and/or through a link to the cilass ibl blog (http://cilass.group.shef.ac.uk/). implications for learning development the ibl approach has some important implications for learning development itself. the self-directed and collaborative nature of many of the projects which have been supported means that academic and learning development staff have to be aware of the need to scaffold and support students’ through the inquiry process, focussing on the development of particular inquiry-related skills. importantly, the case studies themselves address the issue of what has been termed ‘process support’ in some detail, describing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 1: february 2009 9 http://cilass.group.shef.ac.uk/ wood case study: design for inquiry-based learning case studies the various ways in which students were supported through the process of each ibl innovation. for example, the need for students to carry out independent research might mean that attention has to be paid to the development of information literacy capabilities, such as the ability to search for, evaluate and synthesise information. likewise, the use of collaborative working in inquiry activities may mean that particular emphasis has to be placed on preparing students for and supporting them through the process of group working. the educational development approach taken to supporting and developing the cilass funded ibl modules is addressed in an article elsewhere in this journal, by mckinney, wood and little (2009). as with all cetls, the future after 2010, when hefce funding comes to a close, is somewhat uncertain, although positive impact has already been made on the institution. for example, ibl is a strong presence in the institution’s learning, teaching and assessment strategy. in the period between now and 2010 cilass will continue to support ibl curriculum development projects, to evaluate and research their impact and to disseminate findings. references brew, a. (2006) research and teaching: beyond the divide. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan. kahn, p. & o’rourke, k. (2004) guide to curriculum design: enquiry-based learning. york: higher education academy, imaginative curriculum network. online: http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/assets/york/documents/resources/resourcedatabase/ id359_guide_to_curriculum_design_ebl.rtf; accessed 25/11/2008; and: http://www.campus.manchester.ac.uk/ceebl/resources/general/kahn_2004.pdf; [accessed 25 november 2008]. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 1: february 2009 10 http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/assets/york/documents/resources/resourcedatabase/id359_guide_to_curriculum_design_ebl.rtf http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/assets/york/documents/resources/resourcedatabase/id359_guide_to_curriculum_design_ebl.rtf http://www.campus.manchester.ac.uk/ceebl/resources/general/kahn_2004.pdf wood case study: design for inquiry-based learning case studies levy, p. & petrulis, r. (2007) ‘towards transformation? first year students, inquirybased learning and the research/teaching nexus’. in: proceedings of the annual conference of the society for research into higher education (srhe), december 2007, brighton, uk. levy, p., reilly, n., oliver, m. & hart, d. (2007) cilass interim evaluation report. sheffield: cilass (centre for inquiry-based learning in the arts and social sciences), university of sheffield online: www.shef.ac.uk/content/1/c6/04/89/91/cilass%20interim%20evaluation%20rep ort%20july%202007.pdf; [accessed 14 november 08]. sharpe, r. & savin-baden, m. (2007) learning to learn through supported enquiry. literature review. guildford: university of surrey online: www.som.surrey.ac.uk/learningtolearn/documents/eblliteraturereview.pdf; [accessed 28 august 08]. stake, r. e. (2006) multiple case study analysis. london: the guilford press. stake, r. e. (1995) the art of case study research. thousand oaks: sage. mckinney, p., wood, j. & little, s. (2009) ‘a learning development team: three developers, one pedagogy’. journal of learning development in higher education, 1 (1). yin, r. k. (2003) case study research, 3rd edition. thousand oaks: sage. author details jamie wood is a learning development and research associate at the centre for inquiry-based learning in the arts and social sciences at the university of sheffield, uk journal of learning development in higher education, issue 1: february 2009 11 http://www.shef.ac.uk/content/1/c6/04/89/91/cilass%20interim%20evaluation%20report%20july%202007.pdf http://www.shef.ac.uk/content/1/c6/04/89/91/cilass%20interim%20evaluation%20report%20july%202007.pdf http://www.som.surrey.ac.uk/learningtolearn/documents/eblliteraturereview.pdf design for inquiry-based learning case studies abstract introduction rationale and context inquiry-based learning design overview additional materials external dissemination, storage and sharing current case studies evaluation implications for learning development references author details student and staff perceptions of personal development planning (pdp) processes designed to support undergraduate dissertations journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special edition: researching pdp practice, november 2010 an investigation into the undergraduate dissertation tutorial as a personal development planning (pdp) process to support learner development dr andrea raiker university of bedfordshire, uk abstract the investigation discussed in this paper was motivated by a finding revealed through analysis of the dissertation grades of final year undergraduates on an education honours degree. a third of dissertations received grades equating to third class honours or fails and this was viewed by the faculty as being unacceptable. as a fellow of the university’s centre for excellence in teaching and learning with a focus on personal development, i was asked by the course leader to identify possible causes and suggest changes. my critical reflection on the dissertation suggested that its creation is predicated upon personal development planning (pdp) processes practised through the mediation of the tutorial. i am investigating the effectiveness of the tutorial to support learner development over a two year period, contributing to an overarching action research project undertaken by the national action research network (narn). this paper presents the outcomes of the first cycle of my action research, involving the collection and analysis of quantitative and qualitative data from students and dissertation supervisors. at this stage it appears that the design of the dissertation meets the needs of some students but not all, particularly the lower third of the sample cohort. furthermore some students, including a number of thirds and fails, do not perceive tutorial support as essential for the successful completion of their dissertations. overall, it appears that the tutorial process requires review in order to support the autonomous and/or collaborative learning needed for effective learner development. keywords: action research; learner development; pdp; tutorial; dissertation. raiker an investigation into the undergraduate dissertation tutorial as a pdp process to support learner development introduction over the last decade various conceptions of personal development planning (pdp) have been discussed in the literature (qaa, 2001; brennan and shah, 2003; clegg and bradley, 2006; bush and bissell, 2008). in general, this debate has had a dual focus: pdp as product (the progress file); and pdp as a process (buckley, 2007). various practical applications have arisen from this debate on how students’ academic studies should contain preparation for employment and the form this should take (atlay, 2007). atlay et al.’s (2009, p.1) perception of pdp as being ‘…a process embedded within the curriculum [that] should support students in facing these challenges and improving their skills’ in both academic and work-related spheres resonates with the higher education academy’s definition: ‘…a structured and supported process undertaken by an individual to reflect upon their own learning, performance and or achievement and to plan for their personal, educational and career development’ (2009, p.1). both definitions can be applied to the purpose of the tutorial in the production of undergraduate dissertations. they confirm this research’s aims of identifying the ‘challenges’ and ‘skills’ related to students’ difficulties with their final assignments in which syntheses of their prior learning is presented prior to employment. the range of problems experienced by undergraduates in completing their dissertations has been substantially documented. for example, harrison and whalley (2006, p.18) state that ‘students have difficulty with time management, the enormity of the exercise, balancing dissertation work with other studies, self motivation and knowing what is expected’. from a differing perspective, hammick and acker (1998) suggest a key determinant affecting interaction between supervisors and students is their differing concepts of knowledge and power. rowley and slack (2006) emphasise the need for increased professional development for supervisors. they debate students’ needs to understand the importance of the dissertation to their learning, and see this as a fundamental aspect of the supervisory role. areas of potential difficulty are argued to be students’ management of theory-practice relationships, effective access/evaluation of online resources, and understanding of research methodologies and design. another perspective provided by stefani et al. (1997, p.271) focuses on the divergence of supervisor and student perceptions about issues surrounding the dissertation. they suggest that, to increase the learning that students gain from the dissertation process, ‘…a climate of open dialogue… to share learning conceptions and to ensure that the journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 2 raiker an investigation into the undergraduate dissertation tutorial as a pdp process to support learner development assessment of any learning task is commensurate with the aims, objectives and learning outcomes’ must be established. socio-cultural theory (for example, that represented by vygotsky, 1978) suggests that such a climate of collaboration is necessary to promote effective learner development. learning development is to be understood as a holistic concept, embracing conceptual change arising out of transformational experiences embedded in context and perceived from the learner’s perspective. transformational experiences occur when there is a paradigm shift from teaching to learning centrality (biggs and tang, 2007). meyer and land (2006) postulate that there are some aspects of learning that form portals, the passage through which provides access to landscapes of understanding critical for students’ progress. the effect of these aspects is so profound that students’ perceptions of their courses, their disciplines or even their world views are transformed. they argue that these learning landscapes are bounded but capable of expansion at any point or points on that boundary at any time depending on the stimulus. for mezirow (1997), such transformations result in increased autonomy of the individual. for those who see students’ self knowledge, understanding and problem-solving abilities as key to work and life (for example: stefani et al., 2007; kumar, 2008; atlay et al., 2009), autonomy is a principal objective of pdp and hence learning development. this investigation was stimulated through analysis of dissertation grades awarded to final year education undergraduates over the five year period ending august 2008. a growing tail of underachievement was identified with an increasing number of students not achieving expected grades in their dissertations. the production of a dissertation explicitly involves pdp processes leading to greater autonomy through the mediation of the tutorial. students are supervised, not taught. supervisors gradually cede control to the students so that they become increasingly autonomous through the structure of the tutorial system. the bedfordshire approach to the tutorial system is to make five hours of one-to-one supervisory time available at the students’ discretion. this can be face to face, or mediated electronically. two research questions emerged from reflection on this underachievement and the autonomy required by the tutorial: • how effective was the tutorial system as a pdp process leading to greater autonomy? journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 3 raiker an investigation into the undergraduate dissertation tutorial as a pdp process to support learner development • in which areas might pdp processes be developed to support the interface between the autonomous and collaborative learning required by the tutorial system? this paper presents the outcomes of the first cycle of collection and analysis of quantitative and qualitative data. the second cycle, occurring at the time of writing, will involve the evaluation of pdp interventions to support students in their dissertation work arising from, and compared with, the findings of the first cycle. this project was conceived as contributing to a larger action research project undertaken by the national action research network (narn, 2007). narn is researching and evaluating pdp and eportfolio practice at 17 higher education institutions (heis) in the uk. therefore the approach of my contribution to this research was predetermined. research design the approach of action research when applied to education is concerned with critical praxis, action informed by disciplined inquiry aimed at developing evidence-based knowledge and theory (habermas, 1984; elliott, 1991). it focuses on practical issues identified by practitioners as being problematic but capable of being changed (eliott, 1991: zuber-skerritt, 1996). action research involves ‘…changing individuals, on the one hand, and, on the other, the culture of the groups, institutions and societies to which they belong’ (kemmis and mctaggart, 1992, p.16). furthermore, action research is ‘…a form of collective self-reflective inquiry undertaken by participants in social situations in order to improve the rationality and justice of their own social or educational practices…’ (kemmis and mctaggart, 1992, p.5). although i, an individual, am undertaking the research in the spirit of ‘teacher-as-researcher’ as advocated by stenhouse (1975) and whitehead (1985), and ‘researcher-as-participator’ (weiskopf and laske, 1996), colleagues have been, and will be, included throughout the research process. altricher and gsettner’s (1993) model of action research was adopted as being appropriate for the context. their four steps of finding a starting point (the number of underachieving students), clarifying the situation (why they might be underachieving), developing action strategies (including pdp processes) and putting them into practice, and publicising the results, allows clarification and putting actions into practice to occur in parallel. this was ethically essential as, to maximise learner development, actions based on findings had to be put into practice when confirmed to increase effectiveness and hence student achievement. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 4 raiker an investigation into the undergraduate dissertation tutorial as a pdp process to support learner development the research presented in this paper is focused on the 2008/2009 and 2009/2010 cohorts of an education degree. there are two repeated cycles of data collection. the following refers to the first cycle. 157 tutorial records from 56 students submitted with their dissertations were collected. these provided information on the number of tutorials, when they occurred and what was discussed. therefore i was able to analyse the tutorial records contained as appendices of approximately half of the 106 dissertations submitted. the records were read several times to obtain an overall sense of the content. brenner et al.’s (1985) approach to content analysis was adopted. codes were assigned to all utterances in the records according to their perceived meaning. reliability was maximised by asking a colleague experienced in content analysis to moderate my perceptions. my colleague was provided with samples from the records and the related coded modules of meaning at various points in the process. this resulted in some codes and modules of meaning being amended or amalgamated with others as overlaps were identified. the categories were added to and amended following reflection on the data and the development of interpretations and meanings. they were eventually confirmed as valid by the same colleague involved in verifying the codes. the process was completed by categories being assigned to one of two themes, student-focused issues and supervisorfocused issues. this again was confirmed by the external scrutiny of the colleague involved in the content analysis moderation. rich data, subjected to discourse analysis (parker, 1992), was collected through structured interviews of 6 dissertation students in a focus group and 6 supervisors during the summer term 2009. also collected for discourse analysis were recordings from three sessions arranged as additional support to the tutorials. discourse analysis is a generic methodology for analysing the choices of words and actions that members of a group use to engage with each other within and across time, action and activity. difference between sub-methods can be determined by the type of analysis used. this research adopted the analytic approach advocated by parker (1992) and sfard (2001). they use no particular procedure of detailed analysis but look for patterns of language use that can be related to broader themes of social structure and ideological critical evaluation. the findings from content and discourse analysis were compared with and considered alongside in order to triangulate with quantitative data gathered from student grades, tutorial attendance and tutorial records. the outcomes of the analysed data were disseminated to colleagues in education and to the wider university community during the journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 5 raiker an investigation into the undergraduate dissertation tutorial as a pdp process to support learner development autumn of 2009. subsequently, recommendations based on the research findings were embedded into final year practice. these included changes to tutorial practice and the organisation of the dissertation module, and to the introduction of a four seminar series at the beginning of the final year to address issues revealed by data analysis. analysis, discussion and findings the tutorial records and their timings it is a requirement of the dissertation process that tutorial records are included as an appendix in the submitted dissertation. only 56 of the 106 dissertations under analysis contained tutorial records. however, the awarded grades of the sample of 56 dissertations containing tutorial records showed similar distribution to the total number of 106, though the sample showed a slightly higher percentage of a and b awards. a separate record was kept of dates when ethical approval was given. this data was added to that obtained from the tutorial records. analysis showed that for all bands but the <dband (fails), the average number of tutorials attended was three. the first of these tutorials would have been an informal introductory and scoping meeting, leaving an average of two tutorials per student available for supervisors to support the greater part of the dissertation process. for the <dband, the number of tutorial visits was one. however, as tutorial records of only four students from this group were available for analysis this finding must be taken with caution. also data from the interview analysis demonstrated that students may have collaborated with their supervisors by e-mail, msn, telephone or in unrecorded meetings. however, it must be noted from the data available that, as at least one tutorial would have been informal, these students appeared to have had little or no formal/informal support during the rest of their dissertations. therefore it appears that there is a possibility that some students do not perceive tutorial support as being essential for learning development in relation to their dissertations. as well as considering the number of tutorials attended by students, data on the time elapsing between tutorials in weeks was analysed. for all grade bands, the longest time was between first and second tutorials, being between 14 and 27 weeks. subsequent tutorials occurred at more frequent intervals as the date of submission approached, particularly in march and april 2009. these were concerned particularly with data analysis journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 6 raiker an investigation into the undergraduate dissertation tutorial as a pdp process to support learner development and writing up. discourse analysis indicated that unresolved early difficulties and errors had become embedded in projects. therefore this research strongly suggests that the time elapsing between first and subsequent tutorials is too long to maximise learner development. furthermore, i suggest that this mitigates against the establishment of stefani et al.’s (1997, p.271) ‘…climate of open dialogue’. student-focused issues there is clear evidence that students did not realise that a shift of responsibility for learner development from tutors to themselves comes with the dissertation. supervisor interview 1’s (sup/int.1) comment summarised this perception: what is different is to the dissertation as a project is that they have to work much more on their own, they have to plan their own time. there is guidance but a lot less of it, in a way, and some find it a lot easier than others. this is also evidenced by the lack of reading by some students prior to the first tutorial. these students come to the first tutorial with little idea of focus. ‘x has very broad ideas about what she wants to do’ (tutorial record 5: tr 5) and ‘brainstormed ideas’ (tr 15) are representative of this. data from the supervisor interviews confirmed this, ‘… they don't appreciate how much reading they have to do, particularly through the background’ (tr 1), and is representative of all supervisors’ perceptions on an overall lack of preparatory reading. interestingly, there is little difference in the incidence of students not reading, or not reading sufficiently at the time of the first tutorial, across all grade bands. all supervisors shared the view that more able students were able to catch up with the necessary reading during the course of their research but not the <c(third class honours and fails) group. a finding of this research is that some form of focused pdp on project management of reading and recording reflective evaluations during the easter year 3/october year 4 period could have been beneficial for learner development, reflecting and extending harrison and whalley’s (2006) identification of time management as an issue, the <cand a-< (first class honours) ranges showed a marked difference in the effectiveness of their project management. project management was identified by combining work needing to be done and the date of the tutorial record. for example, the record of a <cstudents dated 6th march 2009 (tr 7) reads ‘needs to collect the journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 7 raiker an investigation into the undergraduate dissertation tutorial as a pdp process to support learner development research’. another for the 23rd april states ‘first draft of analysis needs to be done’. it must be remembered that the dissertation submission date was 1st may 2009. significantly, nothing in the tutorial records of the a-< students suggested project management was an issue and there were few incidences in the records of the cto c+ (thirds) and bto b+ (second class honours) ranges. input on time but not project management was given by the module leader early in the students’ fourth year. a finding of this research is that more emphasis should be placed on developing project management skills. it is suggested that more sustained pdp support in this area is necessary, particularly for the potential <c students. one in five students across all grade bands completed one or more of their tutorial records themselves. tr 13 recorded things to do: ‘for next time think about the research in terms of length, audiences for questionnaires etc. and strategies’. tr 11 wrote about how she felt: ‘discussion into passion lost with p.e. class….was more confident and focused on changing topics, could list key literature and link to theorists straight away’. these recordings indicate reflection. they do not indicate high quality formative feedback. it could be argued that the tutorial as pdp process should stimulate reflection. it may be that good formative feedback was given verbally during the tutorial but was not recorded. pdp may have been encouraged by e-mail, as part of a telephone conversation or during informal meetings. analysis has raised the question of the purpose of the tutorial record. it appears to offer not structured, formative support but evidence that tutor and student have met. a finding of this research is that, resonating with stefani et al’s (1997) work, collaborative enhancement of shared understanding and agreement of the purpose and place of the tutorial record is essential to establishing realistic, meaningful pdp to support learner development within the dissertation process. it was clear from analysis that the sequencing of the dissertation process was an issue for all grade bands apart from a-<, reflecting rowley and slack’s (2006) findings. analysis suggested that supervisors advised students to begin their empirical research before their literature reviews. this is not effective academic practice as literature reviews inform choice of research questions, methods and analyses. an example is tr 5 whose supervisor writes on the 16th march, six weeks from the submission date, ‘future work: draft lit review for consideration by tutor’. this could be connected to the lack of reading prior to the first tutorial noted above. the priority appears to be for students to collect their data, whether or not they have read sufficiently to inform their choice of data collection and journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 8 raiker an investigation into the undergraduate dissertation tutorial as a pdp process to support learner development appropriate methods of analysis. content analysis suggests that this results in some students having no clear understanding of the sequencing of their research. this could impact on transition between chapters and the embedding of literature in the analysis chapter, issues that were identified in the student interview transcripts as mental blocks. more importantly, it impacts on learner development in understanding rigorous research practice, and deflates and devalues the relevance of the practitioner-as-researcher. this is not desirable at a time when teaching is being promoted as a masters’ profession (dcsf, 2008). when asked what their mental blocks were, focus interviewee 3 (foc/int.3) and foc/int.5 said in unison ‘panic!’ to which the other four students in the focus group quickly concurred. ‘panic’ in itself is not a mental block but is a state where mental blocks can arise. all students perceived the dissertation as being ‘scary’ (foc/int.3) in being 8,000 words long. these students reported anxiety, confusion and inaction caused by panic which placed them in liminal space. this is a term coined by meyer and land (2006) to describe a mental state where students are trapped and unable to proceed with their learning. analysis of focus group interview data demonstrated that these students had also personal mental blocks that were inhibiting learner development. blocks were sometimes experienced by individuals, others were shared. for example, foc/int.4 said that for her, data analysis was a mental block: ‘i’ve got lots of stuff from the interviews and children too, but what do i do with it now? the analysis, that’s just looking at the results of your data…isn’t it?’. she was the only one of the focus group who cited analysis as an issue. however, four of the supervisors reported that they thought that data analysis issues affected dissertation quality. a mental block shared by the whole group was not knowing how to start writing. foc/int.1 commented: ‘getting started, getting the literature review under way. i’ve got my research as well. it’s just getting started’. foc/int.6 provided more detail: ‘i don’t know where you go, to actually structure your writing. whenever i’ve carried out any sort of assignment task i know exactly what i’m doing at each stage, but here there are great areas’. other mental blocks identified by the focus group affecting learner development were principally concerned with inability to focus on a realistic research question, to organise the dissertation, to move from one chapter to another, a lack of understanding of the domain journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 9 raiker an investigation into the undergraduate dissertation tutorial as a pdp process to support learner development specific language and difficulties in adopting an academic writing style, issues that resonate with those identified by rowley and slack (2006). it is suggested that these can be regarded as threshold concepts because, once they were surmounted, most students passed through meyer and land’s (2006) portal and accessed the dissertation landscape. some students got over their mental blocks after collaboration with their tutors, evidence of stefani et al.’s (1997) ‘climate of open dialogue’ being established to some degree. as sup/int.1 stated: i like the question about mental blocks because i have some big mental blocks! just sitting here, doing something like this! so, it yes, students go through the same sort of process, but again, some of them cope with it more than others. i find that, overall, we chat about it on the phone, sometimes even an e-mail, and i give a suggestion, ‘have you thought about…’. it's usually something quite straightforward, it's not complicated, it helps them get over them, over the mental blocks. another finding significant in inhibiting learner development was students’ perceptions that they had not been given appropriate research skills earlier in the course. this contrasts with the supervisors’ perceptions, who maintained that skills had been taught, the issue being that students were not able to transfer their learning into the dissertation, reflecting a finding of stefani et al.’s (1997, p.271) work. furthermore, the inference is that students were unable to develop from being given research methods to use in a task by their tutors, to identifying for themselves which methods are applicable to their current research. in other words, they were unable to progress towards the independence and autonomy indicating transformational learning had occurred mezirow (1997). a finding of this research is that the embedding and progression of research skills in earlier years should be reviewed. however, the interview data suggests that supervisors believe that effective independence is linked to ability, the implicit message being that this is fixed and that little development is possible. two other categories of potential issues affecting learner development involved students who attended only one tutorial and students whose focus changed during year 4. more a< students dropped out of the tutorial system than any other grade band. any pdp support that they required appears to have been self-generated and addressed either autonomously or collaboratively with the support of their peers. however, supervisors gave mixed responses to the value of peer support. overall, the supervisors did not see the journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 10 raiker an investigation into the undergraduate dissertation tutorial as a pdp process to support learner development dissertation as being a collaborative activity. data collection and analysis of students’ perceptions on the relative value of tutor and peer support is being included in the second cycle of this research. approximately one in ten of the <cstudents switched foci. change of focus resulted from a variety of reasons including boredom, lack of support from schools for the original focus, and student perception that insufficient data would be generated from the original proposal. two supervisors emphasised the lack of support from schools as an issue influencing the quality of dissertations. a finding of this research is that greater emphasis should be placed on schools supporting dissertation students during school mentor training. the highest incidence of changing foci came from the bto b+ range with 1 in 5 students changing. one of these students (tr 36) changed her focus in february and achieved b-. so changing focus does not necessarily correlate with a low mark, but could affect students demonstrating their potential. it is suggested that more supervisor support and guidance early in the dissertation might help prevent students choosing inappropriate foci. greater emphasis on supervisor development per se could be beneficial according to rowley and slack’s (2006) research. supervisor-focused issues the principal issue revealed by content analysis affecting learner development was the varying engagement of supervisors with giving feedback and the generally poor quality of formative feedback. most feedback took the form of recording what had already been done, or procedures to be followed. examples of such feedback from the tutorial records are ‘good progress at this early stage. identified focus and drafted some key research questions’ (tr 18) and ‘continue your literature research, speak to school to finalise arrangements for placement and complete proposal ready for next meeting’ (tr 9). the amount of feedback given was not indicative of its quality, or the student’s eventual achievement. two <cstudents (tr 2 and tr 3) received excellent formative feedback during their first tutorials but did not return for further tutorials. content analysis revealed that the greatest incidence of poor formative feedback was given to students with grades above a-. excellent formative feedback was given to a <cstudent (tr 14) in three tutorials. with this structured support, a good example of pdp, this student achieved d+. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 11 raiker an investigation into the undergraduate dissertation tutorial as a pdp process to support learner development also helpful for learner development were incidences of weakness being identified, for example, the supervisor of tr 5 observed: ‘x has struggled to move forward re focus on enquiry’. this category only appeared in the tutorial records of the c-> group. supervisors were aware of the issue of differing supervisor input. all mentioned the anxiety this created during their interviews but sup/int.4’s thoughts most vividly convey the anxiety this created and also a possible solution: … you think ‘am i doing it right, am i being fair to the others, i just want them to do well’. but we don't talk about how we structure our tutorials. you just do it by habit. but there could be things that i am not asking them to do. and then i have this real worry that some tutors get their students to higher grades, and there's a hierarchy of key tutors. and then i think the students think ‘well i've got uh-uh-uh, never mind, i got so-and-so!’ but that really does affect their dissertation, doesn't it? the level of tutoring. so that's my worry. this supports rowley and slack’s (2006) assertion that greater supervisor development is needed, a finding of this research. it also raises questions on the extent of supervisors own empirical knowledge of research skills and methods. the two supervisors interviewed who had recently completed their masters, which included both literature review and empirical research, both commented on how much this learning experience and assignment outcomes had impacted on their practice. conclusion the tutorial as used in the final year of the education course chosen as this research focus appears to be effective as a pdp process enabling learner development in meeting the needs of some students but not all, particularly the lower achieving students. additionally, this research indicates that not all learners perceive tutorial support as being essential for the development necessary for successful completion of their dissertations. a major factor appears to be the lack of engagement of students with preliminary reading, resulting in students not being prepared for their first tutorial during which their ethics proposal form, containing their research design outline, is discussed. furthermore, the time elapsing between first and subsequent tutorials is too long. more organised, knowledgeable journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 12 raiker an investigation into the undergraduate dissertation tutorial as a pdp process to support learner development students appear to be able to cope and catch up; others cannot. taking into account that students have other assignments, school experience to complete and personal and social issues to deal with during the dissertation period, the ability to manage their dissertation is of crucial importance. although time management is taught during the dissertation period, this research has demonstrated that more emphasis needs to be placed on project management. ideally project management skills should be initiated in year 1 and developed in subsequent years. the dissertation is seen as an activity that demonstrates and encourages student independence and autonomy. this suggests that students need to be aware of the skills, particularly research skills they have already gained so that they can draw on them to support the making of informed choices on appropriate methodologies. this research has highlighted the fact that some students are unable to transfer the research skills they have obtained through tasks in earlier years to the dissertation. learner development is inhibited as this inability encourages the formation of mental blocks and throws students into meyer and land’s (2006) liminal space. their motivation to act independently is affected. as a consequence their tutorial time is not used effectively to develop collaborative learning. also, analysis suggests that some students are not secure in their knowledge of research methods and analysis techniques, particularly qualitative analysis. it is suggested that learner development could be enhanced through supervisor development. the university’s research communities of practice would be appropriate fora for this, being directed at encouraging and supporting activities to promote enquiry and evidence based pedagogies. it is proposed such pedagogies should include resources and activities, possibly hosted on e-portfolio software, related to the practice of and reflection on research skills acquired over the four years of the degree. these records and reflections would be a useful resource for informing methodological choices for the dissertation and as bases for discussion at tutorials. a finding of the research is that both supervisors and students regarded the dissertations a solitary activity, despite the fact that the tutorial is a collaborative practice. it is also evident that students talked with each other. therefore, it is proposed that effective supervisor and learner development could include encouragement of the use of wikis, blogs, e-mail, discussion fora within learning platforms, social networking websites, msn and the telephone/mobile as collaboration tools, as well as the tutorial, to extend the range of means of peer, student-supervisor and supervisor-supervisor support. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 13 raiker an investigation into the undergraduate dissertation tutorial as a pdp process to support learner development the number of students who complete their own tutorial records has called into question the purpose of the tutorial record and quality of supervision. whether the tutorial record is to be the principal vehicle of formative feedback completed by the supervisor, or to be a record of student reflection attracting credit, it needs to be of an agreed and shared standard and fit for purpose. this process could lead into activities with students that precede the tutorials, the aim being to match and build relationships between supervisor and students within a ‘climate of open dialogue’ to facilitate learner development. the design of the undergraduate dissertation demands that ensuring effective learner development is a responsibility of both student and supervisor, reflecting autonomous (mezirow, 1999) and collaborative (vygotsky, 1987) learning mediated through the tutorial. this research clearly demonstrates that for effective learner development for the dissertation, review was needed of its content and organisation, of the tutorial processes within it, and of the responsibilities of supervisor and student in their engagement. following the completion of the first cycle, some changes were made. the content of the module was increased in that four introductory sessions were timetabled at the beginning of the final year. these focused on revising ethics, research methods, searching for appropriate literature, dissertation structure and sequencing of its various parts. no changes were made to the tutorial itself, though students were encouraged to meet their supervisors on a monthly basis. supervisors were advised that they must complete the tutorial records themselves and give detailed feedback. however, no supervisor development was organised, neither has any guidance or support been given on establishing collaboration outside the tutorial, face-to-face or online. it is too early to be able to provide findings of the second cycle. the research reported here is small-scale and is not yet complete. at the moment its findings can only be applied with confidence to the cohort researched. the purpose of analysing the second cycle of data is to identify specific pdp interventions for supervisor and student consideration, aimed at improving learner development during the dissertation process. acknowledgement this paper is an outcome of the national action research network on researching and evaluating personal development planning and e-portfolio practice project (2007-2010). the project was led by the university of bolton in association with the university of journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 14 raiker an investigation into the undergraduate dissertation tutorial as a pdp process to support learner development worcester and centre for recording achievement, and in national collaboration with the university of bedfordshire, bournemouth university and university of bradford. the project was funded by the higher education academy, national teaching fellowship project strand. more details about the project can be found at: http://www.recordingachievement.org/research/narn-tree.html. references altricher, h. and gsettner, p. (1993) ‘action research: a closed chapter in the history of german social science?’, educational action research, 1(3), pp. 329-360. atlay, m. t. (2007) ‘embedding pdp practice in the curriculum’, in centre for recording achievement: personal development planning and employability. york: higher education academy. atlay, m.t., petrova, p. and ujma, d. (2009) to embed or not to embed? the embedding of pdp in the curriculum. available at: http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/assets/hlst/documents/case_studies/ujma.pdf (accessed: 14 september 2009). biggs, j. and tang, c. (2007) teaching for quality learning at university. 3rd edn. buckingham: open university press. brennan, j. and shah, t. (2003) report on the implementation of progress files. http://oro.open.ac.uk/324/1/progressfiles.pdf (accessed: 21 september 2010). brenner, m., brown, j. and canter, d. (eds.) (1985) the research interview: uses and approaches. london: academic press. buckley, c. (2007) ‘walking the pdp line: negotiating connections and boundaries in higher education’, on reflection, 14, pp. 4-6. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 15 http://www.recordingachievement.org/research/narn-tree.html http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/assets/hlst/documents/case_studies/ujma.pdf http://oro.open.ac.uk/324/1/progressfiles.pdf raiker an investigation into the undergraduate dissertation tutorial as a pdp process to support learner development bush, h. and bissell, v. (2008) ‘the evaluation of an approach to reflective learning in the undergraduate dental curriculum, european journal of dental education, 12, pp.103-110. clegg, s. and bradley, s. (2006) ‘the implementation of progress files in higher education: reflection as national policy’, higher education, 51, pp. 465-486. department for children, schools and families (2008) new masters qualification to boost teaching. available at: http://www.dcsf.gov.uk/pns/displaypn.cgi?pn_id=2008_0044 (accessed: 3 july 2010). elliott, j. (1991) action research for educational change. buckingham: open university press. habermas, j. (1984) the theory of communicative action. vol. 1: reason and the rationalisation of society. translated by t. mccarthy. boston: beacon press. hammick, m. and acker, s. (1998) ‘undergraduate research supervision: a gender analysis’, studies in higher education, 23(3), pp. 335 – 347. harrison, m.e. and whalley, w.b. (2006) combining student independent learning and peer advice to improve the quality of undergraduate dissertations. available at: http://www.gees.ac.uk/planet/p16/mh.pdf (accessed: 31 august 2009). higher education academy (2009) personal development planning. available at: http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/ourwork/learning/pdp (accessed: 26 february 2009). kemmis, s. and mctaggart, r. (eds.) (1992) the action research planner. 3rd edn). geelong, victoria, australia: deakin university press. kumar, a. (2008) personal, academic and career development in higher education. london: routledge. meyer, j. and land, r. (eds.) (2006) overcoming barriers to student understanding. london: routledge. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 16 http://www.dcsf.gov.uk/pns/displaypn.cgi?pn_id=2008_0044 http://www.gees.ac.uk/planet/p16/mh.pdf http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/ourwork/learning/pdp raiker an investigation into the undergraduate dissertation tutorial as a pdp process to support learner development mezirow, j. (1997) ‘transformative learning: from theory to practice’, new directions for adult and continuing education, 74, pp. 5–12. national action research network (2007) researching and evaluating personal development planning (pdp) and e-portfolio. available at: http://www.recordingachievement.org/research/narn-tree.html (accessed: 11 may 2010). parker, i. (1992) discourse dynamics: critical analysis for social and individual psychology. london: routledge. rowley, j. and slack, f. (2006) what is the future for undergraduate dissertations? http://digitalcommons.shu.ac.uk/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1003&context=ccrc_pa pers (accessed: 11 september 2009). qaa (2001) guidelines for he progress files. available at: www.qaa.ac.uk/academicinfrastructure/progressfiles/guidelines/progfile2001.pdf (accessed: 1 april 2009). sfard, a. (2001) ‘there is more to discourse than meets the ears: learning from mathematical things we have not known before’, education studies in mathematics, 46(1/3), pp. 13-57. stefani, l.a.j., tariq, v-n., heylings, d.j.a. and butcher, c. (1997) ’a comparison of tutor and student conceptions of undergraduate research project work’, assessment and evaluation in higher education, 22(3), pp. 271 – 288. stefani, l., mason, r. and pegler, c. (2007) the educational potential of e-portfolios. london: routledge. stenhouse, l. (1975) an introduction to curriculum research and development. london: heinemann. vygotsky, l.s. (1978). mind in society: development of higher psychological processes. harvard ma: harvard university press. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 17 http://www.recordingachievement.org/research/narn-tree.html http://digitalcommons.shu.ac.uk/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1003&context=ccrc_papers http://digitalcommons.shu.ac.uk/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1003&context=ccrc_papers http://www.qaa.ac.uk/academicinfrastructure/progressfiles/guidelines/progfile2001.pdf raiker an investigation into the undergraduate dissertation tutorial as a pdp process to support learner development weiskopf, r. and laske, s. (1996) ‘emancipatory action research: a critical alternative to personal development or a new way of patronising people?’, in zuber-skerritt, o. (ed.) new directions in action research. london: falmer, pp. 173-182. whitehead, j. (1985) ‘an analysis of an individual's educational development: the basis for personally orientated action research’, in shipman, m. (ed.) educational research: principles, policies and practices. lewes: falmer, pp. 97-108. zuber-skerritt, o. (1996) ‘introduction’, in zuber-skerritt, o. (ed.) new directions in action research. london: falmer, pp. 3-9. author details dr andrea raiker is based in the directorate of teaching and learning at the university of bedfordshire where she works on curriculum development. her research interests are focused on the exploration of processes affecting student achievement, in particular, the role of language and technology in these processes. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 18 an investigation into the undergraduate dissertation tutorial as a personal development planning (pdp) process to support learner development abstract introduction research design analysis, discussion and findings the tutorial records and their timings student-focused issues supervisor-focused issues conclusion acknowledgement references author details literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special edition: academic peer learning, november 2015 guest editorial melanie giles university of ulster, uk marcia ody university of manchester, uk this special edition of the journal of learning development in higher education focuses on academic peer learning. a focus on peer learning evolved from the higher education academy’s recent commissioned project and publication ‘mapping student-led peer learning in the uk’ (keenan, 2014). the survey and subsequent publication clearly identified a further boom period for academic peer learning, not only in the uk but internationally. indeed, there have been a phenomenal number of submissions for this journal and we are delighted that there will be a second part to this special published in the spring of 2016. as is evident from the survey, there is a plethora of different peer learning models and as ody and carey (2013) identified, there are different models of peer education often with different titles; terms like ‘peer tutoring’, ‘peer mentoring’ and ‘peer coaching’ are used frequently. however, they are normally based on the principle of ‘peer learning’ and as such generally involve ‘the practice of more experienced students being trained to guide and facilitate the learning of less experienced students in an organised and supported way’ (keenan, 2014, p.5). in this special edition, skoglund et al. discuss different approaches to peer academic mentoring and highlight that whilst there are common elements, models of practice may vary in their focus and structure depending on the context. additionally they highlight that models of academic peer learning can sit alongside each other for different purposes. within the uk, the two most prominently named schemes are peer-assisted learning (pal) and peer-assisted study sessions (pass). essentially they are one and the same thing but use different nomenclature; the approach derives from the supplemental instruction (si) model which originated in the us and has been adapted to work in the uk editorial journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 3 context. an overview of the pal/pass model is provided here in sedghi and lunt’s paper, which focuses on the implementation and organisation within one institution and some of the practical elements as well as identifying some benefits. whilst the management and coordination of schemes varies from one institution to the other (perhaps calling for a more holistic institutional approach to implementation as described in the paper reported here by eyre), most schemes operate across disciplines. they typically involve trained second year students (sometimes utilising online activities as described by hettrick and mosesallison) working in pairs to facilitate regular study groups with students in the year below. the purpose is to support the student experience through collaborative discussion and in so doing, improve academic performance and achievement and reduce anxiety, thereby aiding the transition process. indeed, as the findings reported by liou-mark et al. demonstrate, participating in peer led workshops has the potential not only to improve grades but also to reduce failure rates and thus support the transition into higher education. these findings are echoed by byl et al. who use an appreciative inquiry approach to highlight the potential of peer learning to facilitate social and academic integration of first year students. scriver et al. also report on the potential of pal to improve academic performance and its ability to empower learners. further, sneddon comments on the potential of peer tutoring to increase confidence. many other benefits to students have been reported. for example, the creation of a safe environment where students are encouraged to ask questions has been shown to improve the communication process between students and staff and enhance students’ sense of belonging which is particularly important in the context of retention and attrition (see e.g. trowler and trowler, 2010). thus as keenan (2014) points out, peer-led learning schemes have the potential to demonstrate commitment to building student engagement and creating multi-layered partnerships, which in turn creates opportunities for institutions to enhance their reputations for a relatively low investment. of course, the benefits of peer learning will to some extent be dependent on the nature of the relationships established. as garcia-melgar et al. highlight, the mentor-mentee relationship is critical to the success of peer learning. in their paper they define effective relationships as the balanced presence of social and cognitive congruence between mentor and mentee and suggest this relationship could be enhanced through training. regardless, evidence is also accumulating to suggest that the students who participate in peer-led learning sessions are not the only ones to benefit. as is evident from several of editorial journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 4 the papers reported here including those of zacharopoulou et al., guyon et al. and ford et al., those who assume the role of peer leader report improvements in a range of transferable personal and professional skills and experiences including better communication, organisation, leadership, decision-making and team work skills and increased confidence and empathy, which in turn should improve their employment prospects (see also, keenan, 2014). pritchard’s paper reports on the benefits to be gained from assuming the role of a writing mentor, particularly in terms of self-confidence. further, the case study by gentle et al explores the value of reflection as a tool for leaders to examine their relationships with the group as well as the skills they are developing as a way to increase their professional capability and personal development. yet as, zacharopoulou et al.’s paper highlights, it is possible that the increased focus on skills may serve to identify deficiencies in some areas, reinforcing the need to provide other opportunities for students to build on and further develop the skills and experiences provided by peer learning schemes. their paper also highlights the need for a more robust approach to the evaluation of these schemes. certainly, one of the challenges reported by keenan (2015) identified through the survey commissioned as part of the ‘mapping student-led peer learning in the uk’ project, was to provide robust data to support the implementation and sustainability of schemes. as is apparent in this special edition, evidence is accumulating to suggest that peer learning does have real value. however, the absence of both a consistent approach to evaluation and the identification of key impact measures present obstacles to achieving buy-in from key stakeholders and is thus preventing the introduction of new schemes and the development of existing ones. clearly what is needed is ‘the pooling of data and collaborative research into the participative pedagogies’ and the creation of ‘a bank of impact studies’ (keenan, 2014, p. 44). what was also apparent from the 2014 report was the need to establish a community of practice for the national and international peer learning community that would not only promote research but would also encourage the sharing of good practice, the enhancement of knowledge and the further development of existing schemes. with this in mind, a new academic peer learning network was launched in june 2015 during a peer education event at the university of manchester. already the network has 250 subscribers representing 145 institutions/organisations from 12 countries worldwide and is providing opportunities for international collaborations. for example, there is editorial journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 5 currently a great deal of interest in areas relating to stem such as gender, identity, confidence, and the role of peer led academic learning in transforming learning for stem students and leaders. additionally the network is working with graduate interns across the united kingdom to engage students in sharing practice between institutions. there is a jiscmail group for this network and subscribers are welcome from across the globe to seek advice and support or share their experiences, research and ideas. for more information about the network please contact: chris keenan (ckeenan@bournemouth.ac.uk) or marcia ody (m.j.ody@manchester.ac.uk). in light of the need to provide evidence to persuade policy-makers of the benefits reported here and drive the research and evaluation agenda forward, an impact/research special interest group (sig) has been established as part of the new academic peer learning network. broadly speaking, the aims of this group are to determine key impact measures, share evaluation practices and coordinate collaborative research. a specific priority of this group will be to develop a large impact study involving institutions within the uk and beyond. to this end, the sig has analysed existing surveys and reflected on the findings reported here and elsewhere. as a result, it is apparent that the variety of outcomes identified in evaluative research, the measures employed and the methods and designs adopted are limiting the conclusions that can be drawn in terms of impact. as such, the immediate task is to create and test an evaluation toolkit that can be used across institutions, thereby ensuring a more consistent approach to evaluation. the plan is to pilot this toolkit during 2016. training is a critical component in the success of academic peer learning, indeed the mapping student-led peer learning report recommends practitioners to: ‘participate in nationally recognised training and development, ensuring consistent and quality-assured approaches are adopted prior to implementing schemes’ (kennan, 2014 p. 6). currently pass/si training is offered in the uk through the national centre based at the university of lund, sweden. for more information please go to: http://www.simentor.lth.se/english/si-supervisor-training-in-the-uk/ marcia ody and melanie giles, guest editors for the special edition mailto:ckeenan@bournemouth.ac.uk mailto:m.j.ody@manchester.ac.uk http://www.si-mentor.lth.se/english/si-supervisor-training-in-the-uk/ http://www.si-mentor.lth.se/english/si-supervisor-training-in-the-uk/ editorial journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 6 references keenan, c. (2014). mapping student-led peer learning in the uk. york: higher education academy. keenan, c. (2015). peer-led academic learning: a global network. journal of learning development in higher education, 9. ody, m. and carey, w. (2013). peer education. in dunne and owen (ed.) the student engagement handbook: practice in higher education. bingley: emerald group publishing ltd. trowler, v. and trowler, p. (2010). student engagement evidence summary: york: higher education academy. a note from the editorial team we hope that readers will find the contents of this first part of our special edition on academic peer learning informative, useful and inspirational. we have certainly been energised and enthused by working in collaboration with marcia, melanie and the authors of these papers to produce this ‘bumper’ edition. it became quite clear early on in the process that we would have more material than could be included in one single edition. given the high quality of submissions and the importance of the content we quickly decided to split this special edition into two parts, with part two to be published early in 2016. this will allow all those who submitted relevant material the opportunity to have their peer-reviewed work published in the jldhe. the editorial team felt it important to make this possible given the huge contribution being made to the field of learning development by those involved in designing, delivering and evaluating academic peer learning schemes in higher education. we believe that peer learning processes and practices have a great deal to contribute to he and very much welcome the focus this brings to the role that students themselves play in how learning develops, its purposes and potential for both scholarship and community. we are now working with marcia and melanie on part two of the special and are very much looking forward to announcing publication in the near future. editorial journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 7 helen bowstead; andrew doig; amanda french; andy hagyard; john hilsdon; christina howell-richardson; moira maguire; stephanie mckendry guest editorial references literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special edition: academic peer learning, november 2015 hiding in plain sight: the ‘relationship’ in peer assisted learning in higher education ana garcia-melgar la trobe university, australia julianne east la trobe university, australia noel meyers la trobe university, australia abstract relationships underpin peer learning; however, they remain under-researched and under theorised. we propose a model to identify factors that contribute to relationships in peer assisted learning (pal). our model integrates three discrete bodies of knowledge: previous studies of pal affordances, a synthesis of understandings drawn from learning theories, and studies of peer relationships in business and education. our model features two components: social and cognitive congruence that deliver sustained pal improvements. to evaluate the contributions of social and cognitive congruence to successful pal outcomes, we evaluated four theoretical scenarios based on presence and/or absence of these factors. in each case, variations in social and cognitive congruence and mediating factors can potentially vary the quality of learning outcomes, student interactions, and engagement in pal. our scenarios can be employed to evaluate areas of targeted improvement in pal. we discuss the implications of our model for pal research and practice. keywords: peer assisted learning; peer learning relationships; social congruence; cognitive congruence. garcia-melgar et al. hiding in plain sight: the ‘relationship’ in peer assisted learning in higher education journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 2 introduction the ‘relationship’ in peer assisted learning (pal) has the potential to leverage and enrich learning outcomes in higher education. proposing a theoretically-based conceptual framework for pal relationships in higher education may guide the development, design, and implementation of programmes. to conceptualise pal relationships, we integrate theoretical considerations from diverse fields, including business and education. our work responds to jacobi (1991), budge (2006), and crisp’s (2009) calls for a unified conceptual framework and definition of pal. our model addresses these opportunities by identifying the central unifying theme in pal – the relationship. here we employ the terminology ‘mentor’ and ‘mentee’ to refer to the student who provides assistance and the student who receives support, respectively. to this end, we build on topping’s (1996, p.322) ubiquitous definition of pal: peers come from ‘similar social groupings’ and engage in mutually beneficial learning partnerships that build on ‘helping each other to learn and learning themselves by teaching’. in ideal circumstances, mentors will concurrently learn about themselves as learners (boud et al., 2000) and about how to facilitate others to achieve excellent educational outcomes (backer et al., 2012), and participation in pal will deliver positive academic and psychological gains for both mentor and mentee (topping and ehly, 2001). socio-cognitive learning theory provides the context for pal development (falchikov, 2001; ten cate and durning, 2007). in particular, vygotsky’s zone of proximal development explains how peers can scaffold less academically developed peers (cited o’donnell and king, 1999). the mentor, having successfully transitioned through the same learning experiences, can anticipate learning difficulties and understand mentees’ likely cognitive challenges (lockspeiser et al., 2008). this ability is defined as cognitive congruence and allows mentors to employ language that is cognitively appropriate to mentees’ level of development (ten cate and durning, 2007). in addition to the cognitive partnership established between peers, social congruence ensures the development of successful pal partnerships (moust and schmidt, 1994). social congruence represents the basis of a relationship where mentees feel comfortable to disclose learning gaps that the mentor helps to resolve (ten cate and durning, 2007, lockspeiser et al., 2008). previous evaluations of pal sought to identify contributing factors to learning outcomes (falchikov, 2001). that work demonstrates that pal produced improvements in academic garcia-melgar et al. hiding in plain sight: the ‘relationship’ in peer assisted learning in higher education journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 3 success, metacognitive strategies, and self-efficacy (hilsdon, 2014; hammond et al., 2010; fox et al., 2010; collings et al., 2014; arco-tirado et al., 2011; henning et al., 2006); however, elucidating the sustained benefit of these responses remains elusive. for example, some studies (capstick, 2004; ashwin, 2003) have identified an increase in strategic learning approaches (e.g. to complete an assignment), without the acquisition of transferable skills. furthermore, while the literature shows benefits for students, the effect size of many studies is usually modest (topping, 2005). we acknowledge the sustained influence on pal of the learning environment, assessment, curriculum design, and pedagogical initiatives. the other factor – hidden in plain sight – is the interaction between mentor and mentee which can profoundly influence pal. nora and crisp (2007) recognise the mentor-mentee relationship as the black box of pal. we join a growing community (e.g. budge, 2006; nora and crisp, 2007; holt and berwise, 2012) to suggest that pal relationships remain under-researched. we propose that the mentor-mentee relationship determines the success of the programme and quality of learning outcomes associated with peer learning. we argue, as do others (e.g. holt and berwise, 2012) that the peer relationship remains underexplored. instead, most researchers focus on identifying the product of the relationship – the learning outcomes (nora and crisp, 2007). an extensive consideration of the functioning of the relationship will provide the foundation for improving our understanding of how pal produces positive outcomes, how both parties in the relationship negotiate learning and, importantly, how we can engineer pal successes. this paper will first identify elements of the pal relationship that facilitate positive learning and psychological outcomes from past research. secondly, it will discuss personal and environmental factors that may negatively impact peer relationships. thirdly, a conceptual framework of peer relationships will be presented and it will be discussed in relation to four relationship scenarios. finally, we conclude with our consideration of the implications of peer relationships for the design, implementation and research of pal. previous research on peer assisted learning relationships for this review of pal relationships, we selected papers on peer learning based on their relevance to relationships. our review encompassed the disciplines of business and garcia-melgar et al. hiding in plain sight: the ‘relationship’ in peer assisted learning in higher education journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 4 education (jacobi, 1991). the focus of these studies revolves around the practices in which mentors engage in to elicit mentees’ development (ward et al., 2014; terrion and leonard, 2007). in business contexts, research has focused on mentoring relationships in the workplace and their evolution through four stages (kram and isabella, 1985). research on pal relationships in education has focused on mentor practices that participants perceived to produce positive learning outcomes. these studies show that mentors accomplish three key functions: academic support and goal setting, emotional and psychological support, and role modelling (nora and crisp, 2007). from these disciplines, we identified several emergent relationship themes. 1. relationships develop through defined stages kram and isabella’s (1985) seminal work on mentoring relationships in the workplace recognises that relationships mature through definable stages. each stage comprises specific functions accomplished by mentors to facilitate mentees’ development and, eventually, their independence. the presence of specific functions fulfilled by mentors, related to the provision of career development and psychosocial support, provide symptomatic representations of different relationship stages. pal relationships comprise four distinct phases: initiation, cultivation, separation, and redefinition (humberd and rouse, 2015; hadidi et al., 2013; mullen 1994). these phases correspond to levels of variation in certainty about the relationship, mentor-mentee interactions, and expectations about the relationship and roles. uncertainty characterises the initiation phase. roles and expectations become increasingly certain through this phase (humberd and rouse, 2015; hadidi et al., 2013; mullen 1994). the cultivation phase represents growth in trust, mutual respect, and shared aspirations that create the impetus for focused action. with the attainment of mutually agreed goals, an up-skilled mentee will become increasingly independent. during the redefinition phase, effective mentoring produces new aspirations and growth in the dyad (hartmann et al., 2014). 2. mentors provide academic and psychological/emotional support pal educational researchers focused on the social skills and interpersonal traits that produce tangible outcomes (ehrich et al., 2004). crisp and cruz (2009) summarise the implicit consensus of mentoring relationships: they are personal and reciprocal (i.e. exerts garcia-melgar et al. hiding in plain sight: the ‘relationship’ in peer assisted learning in higher education journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 5 benefits for both parties), and include the provision of educational development, emotional support, and role modelling. nora and crisp (2009), christie (2014), and ward et al. (2014) also recognise distinct functions for mentees: educational/career goal setting and appraisal, emotional and psychological support, academic subject knowledge support, and the presence of a role model. mentors achieve these functions by establishing frameworks to develop a caring and personal relationship (eller et al., 2014). to become a successful mentor, several traits remain central: academic knowledge and skills; motivation to become a mentor; communication skills; supportiveness; empathy, enthusiasm and flexibility; empowerment of the mentee; trustworthiness; and willingness to be continuous learners (terrion and leonard, 2007). a mentor’s ability to respond and adapt to mentees’ task-based and emotional requests for help define aspects of successful pal relationships (ward et al., 2014). this serves as an overarching construct that overcomes the dichotomy between instrumental (pragmatic, task-oriented) and psychosocial functions (social and emotional support). 3. social and cognitive congruence as factors that determine the success of pal programmes establishing caring, respectful, and personal relationships produces implicit cognitive and social psychological elements (crisp and cruz, 2009). ward et al. (2014) explicitly recognise the central role of a mentor in attending to mentees’ cognitive and psychological/emotional requests. longfellow et al. (2008) differentiate the value that mentees place on the relationship, which represents a qualitatively different interaction compared to other helping relationships in education (capstick, 2004). for mentors to provide cognitive/academic and psychological/emotional support, appropriate levels of cognitive and social congruence – respectively – are needed. mentees value mentors that are able to scaffold learning, identify learning gaps, and provide explanations that are suitable to their cognitive development (longfellow et al., 2008), and they value the mentor’s social and psychological support (mackey et al., 2010). even though both types of congruence are equally important (chng et al., 2011), mentors’ skills and attributes related to psychosocial support may be more important for mentees – especially for young and inexperienced students (terrion and leonard, 2007). garcia-melgar et al. hiding in plain sight: the ‘relationship’ in peer assisted learning in higher education journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 6 social and cognitive congruence as elements of effective pal relationships to more fully account for the complexity of pal, we have recognised the need to extend beyond cognitive transactions between peers, and we acknowledge that peer transactions at both the cognitive and social levels are important. for this purpose, we identify two domains – socio-psychological congruence and cognitive congruence (illustrated in figure 1). social congruence, defined as perceived social similarity between mentor and mentee, allows for the development of trust, empathy, and an open, non-judgemental learning experience (dioso-henson, 2012). cognitive congruence represents more than the provision of educational/academic support. it extends to modelling the sophisticated ways that more experienced thinkers conceptualise and solve problems (bulte et al., 2007). we hypothesise that successful mentoring programmes rely on the balanced presence of social and cognitive congruence because each congruence contributes to the development of psychosocial and cognitive/academic outcomes. we also propose that social congruence may represent a prerequisite for the development of the relationship in its early stages, while cognitive congruence commences after its establishment. finally, we predict that social and cognitive congruence vary over time, as external and internal factors influence the congruence of the pal partnership. we discuss these factors next. garcia-melgar et al. hiding in plain sight: the ‘relationship’ in peer assisted learning in higher education journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 7 figure 1. impact of social and cognitive congruence on mentoring functions, and learning and psychosocial outcomes of pal. factors that affect the nature and dynamics of pal relationships we have synthesised previous research on detrimental influences of pal in table 1, considering those external and internal (student-related) factors that influence the nature of the relationship, quality of learning outcomes, and success of the programme. a number of research studies have investigated mentor and mentee role expectations and motivation, and how these roles change over time in response to environmental pressures, mentees’ requests for directive assistance (brown et al., 2014), and unclear role boundaries (holt and berwise, 2012). a second group of research studies considered the influence of the metacognitive skills and language used by mentors. roscoe and chi (2007) demonstrated that mentors tend to engage mentees by explaining declarative knowledge, rather than employing questioning techniques to elicit deeper learning outcomes. finally, the impact of the learning environment in which pal programmes are contextualised cannot be overlooked (ashwin, 2003). these factors are likely to include garcia-melgar et al. hiding in plain sight: the ‘relationship’ in peer assisted learning in higher education journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 8 the university assessment environment (ashwin, 2003), design of the pal programme (ross and cameron, 2007), and mentor training (topping and ehly, 2001). accordingly, we can cluster potentially hindering factors into three groupings: 1) role expectations and motivation; 2) metacognitive skills and strategies employed by mentors; and 3) environmental factors (learning environment, design of pal programme and mentor training). the first two clusters correspond to intrapersonal or student-related factors, and the third group acknowledges the impact of external factors. integral to these groupings are three points: i) the complexity of mentoring relationships. ii) the impact on the degree of social and cognitive congruence present in the relationship. iii) the capacity to hinder or enhance the quality and effectiveness of the relationship before and during development. garcia-melgar et al. hiding in plain sight: the ‘relationship’ in peer assisted learning in higher education journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 9 table 1. summary of pal limitations and conceptualisation of potentially hindering factors. pal limitations underlying issue conceptualisation as hindering factor source limited size effects of pal limited transferability of skills, possibly due to poor cognitive scaffolding. intrapersonal variablesmetacognitive skills topping (1996) topping and ehly (2001) capstick (2004) students’ perceptions of pal as ineffective, low participation lack of programme structure, mentors’ limited knowledge, role misconceptions. environmental variablesprogramme structure intrapersonal variablesrole expectations and motivation ismail and alexander (2005) capstick (2004) topping (2005) brown et al. (2014) changes in mentors’ and mentees’ role towards directional and passive role, respectively conflicting expectations and misconceptions about their roles. intrapersonal variablesrole expectations and motivation capstick (2004) ashwin (2003) mackey et al. (2010) inconsistencies in mentors’ guidance lack of mentors’ metacognitive skills, poor training/preparation, role misconceptions. intrapersonal metacognitive skills intrapersonalrole expectations and motivation brown et al. (2014) holt and berwise (2012) quality of learning outcomes: correlation pal and strategic learning focus on assessment requirements, impact of assessmentoriented environment, inappropriate mentors’ metacognitive skills/facilitation skills, or role misconceptions. environmental assessment-oriented environmental assessment type and design intrapersonal metacognitive skills intrapersonalrole expectations and motivations ashwin (2003) ten cate and durning (2007) capstick (2004) mentors’ knowledgetelling bias mentors engage in reproducing knowledge rather than questioning/content elaboration. intrapersonal metacognitive skills roscoe and chi (2007) roscoe (2014) o'donnell and king (1999) garcia-melgar et al. hiding in plain sight: the ‘relationship’ in peer assisted learning in higher education journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 10 impact of external and internal factors on pal relationships: social congruence and cognitive congruence to examine the influence of cognitive and social congruence in pal relationships we propose four theoretical scenarios, based on the presence and absence of both types of congruence. we use these scenarios to illustrate how the interaction of role expectations and motivation, metacognitive skills and environmental aspects influence the dynamics and nature of pal relationships and, consequently, the presence or absence of social and cognitive congruence. furthermore, we propose outcomes based on social and cognitive congruence when these are: present/present, present/absent absent/present and absent/absent. scenario 1: social congruence and cognitive congruence are present the presence of social and cognitive congruence creates an environment where participants interact with trust (bouquillon et al., 2005), inclusiveness, emotional security, and shared learning aspirations (eller et al., 2014). mentees feel secure in nonjudgemental support so they can close learning gaps (chng et al., 2011). social congruence provides the foundation for other holistic aspects of the relationship: counselling, improved self-efficacy, and transition to academic life. psychological benefits – for example, decreased stress and anxiety – also accrue from social congruence between mentor and mentee (ginsburg-block et al., 2006). adding cognitive congruence to this environment will do more than allow the mentors to serve as role models for sophisticated learning and problem solving. the proximity of mentors’ and mentees’ developmental stages provides a unique perspective for mentors to identify learning gaps. since mentors scaffold the development and application of mentees’ academic skills within the context of addressing specific learning outcomes, there exists a greater likelihood that those skills will become transferrable to other contexts. mentors who move beyond strategic learning approaches and seek deeper learning outcomes will enable mentees to improve subject content knowledge and the ability to apply that understanding to new circumstances. however, the mentors’ metacognitive awareness is key to the enactment of positive outcomes ascribed to cognitive congruence. if mentors lack understanding of metacognitive language associated garcia-melgar et al. hiding in plain sight: the ‘relationship’ in peer assisted learning in higher education journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 11 to learning processes, their ability to elaborate explanations that elicit mentees’ metacognitive development may be limited (roscoe, 2014). figure 2 presents our conceptualisation of an effective mentoring relationship, in the presence of social and cognitive congruence. clearly established role expectations and motivations guide mentor and mentee interactions to create a mutually beneficial, nonhierarchical relationship (colvin and ashman, 2010), based on facilitation and development of mentees’ skills. this level of connection and mutual contribution requires trained mentors. figure 2. conceptual framework for effective mentoring relationships. in this scenario, mentors and mentees benefit from the programme, including academic and socio-psychological gains. the scene is set for mentees to improve their self-efficacy and reduce their levels of stress and anxiety. mentors also have the opportunity to build their knowledge as they reflect on their growing expertise, and they construct understandings through inferring and integrating ideas across topics and domains (longfellow et al., 2008). perhaps unsurprisingly, much of the literature highlights the gains for mentors in successful relationships (backer et al., 2012; topping, 1996; colvin garcia-melgar et al. hiding in plain sight: the ‘relationship’ in peer assisted learning in higher education journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 12 and ashman, 2010). in such cases, mentors have reported improved self-efficacy, leadership and communications skills, combined with a sense of accomplishment (malm et al., 2012). this scenario has focused on the outcomes and dynamics of effective relationships. in the remainder of the scenarios, we predict significant shifts that flow from interactions between congruence and dissonance in the social and cognitive realms. scenario 2: social congruence present in the absence of cognitive congruence in establishing social congruence, mentors build a trusting and supportive relationship with mentees (allen and eby, 2003). however, interactions involving the presence of social congruence and the absence of cognitive congruence will diminish previously identified benefits. without cognitive congruence, we predict that a mentor will fail to scaffold the mentee, in turn producing diminished learning. in this scenario, motivations and role expectations will play a critical role in the development of the relationship. if mentees exhibit strategic help-seeking styles (e.g. completion of assessment tasks) driven from external motivations, they may seek assistance to complete a particular task (brown et al., 2014). in the absence of cognitive congruence, mentors could adopt highly directive and didactic roles. information sharing, instead of knowledge building, might characterise the relationship. mentors may invest more time explaining concepts instead of building on mentees’ previous knowledge (roscoe and chi, 2007). mentors may disengage if their expectations clash with mentees’, or eventually readjust their expectations to fulfil mentees’ requests (brown et al., 2014). evaluations of pal programmes exhibiting the presence of social and absence of cognitive congruence may reveal positive evaluations from mentees – if mentors fulfil requests for strategic support. mentees may also place higher value on the social aspects of the programme (i.e. they will value the programme as a social experience rather than an academic intervention). if mentees manifest developmental help-seeking styles, and exhibit strong internal motivation, they are more likely to seek developmental advice from mentors (alexitch, 2002). when the mentors’ focus, and perhaps skill set, relies on didactic approaches, and garcia-melgar et al. hiding in plain sight: the ‘relationship’ in peer assisted learning in higher education journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 13 use of declarative knowledge, developmental advice may occur rarely. such disparate expectations and dispositions may produce among mentees disengagement and abandonment of the programme. mentees may likely apprehend that they will have achieved little, that the programme was ineffective, and failed to meet their needs (capstick, 2004). the type of assessment task, as well as the learning environment, will influence mentees’ requests of strategic learning rather than developmental advice. in an assessmentoriented environment, mentors are more likely to respond to mentees’ requests of help to complete and pass assessment tasks (ashwin, 2003). however, we predict mentees will develop fewer transferable skills. moreover, mentors may provide advice beyond their expertise and role boundaries – motivated by the social drive to help the mentee. scenario 3: cognitive congruence present in the absence of social congruence in the absence of social congruence, cognitive congruence may produce reduced engagement. the absence of a non-judgemental learning environment remains likely to detrimentally influence pal interactions. this scenario reflects how the presence of cognitive congruence per se represents no guarantee that students will develop metacognitive skills. both parties may focus on delivering the outcomes that address specific assessment tasks, but skills development will barely feature in the learning relationship (capstick, 2004). mentors and mentees may initially engage in meaningoriented learning activities to develop mentees’ self-regulated learning skills, however, the absence of social congruence will diminish trust in the relationship. mentees will be less likely to disclose learning gaps and ask questions, leading to a relationship with closer alignment to a master apprentice model. the possibility of positive metacognitive outcomes diminishes because mentees may be disinclined to question mentors’ explanations or seek further clarifications. cognitive congruence – in the absence of social congruence – may train mentees to focus predominantly on the completion of the assessment tasks. also, mentees remain unlikely to experience positive psychological outcomes, including decreased anxiety and stress. these outcomes derive from the social aspects of the relationship (ginsburg-block et al., 2006) – namely, trust, empathy, and the existence of an open learning environment (ward et al., 2014). garcia-melgar et al. hiding in plain sight: the ‘relationship’ in peer assisted learning in higher education journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 14 role expectations and motivations will also affect the outcomes of this scenario. mentees who expect direction may pressure mentors to employ didactic models of instruction (mackey et al., 2010). mentors may assume this role if it is consistent with their role expectations. alternatively, mentors may decline mentees’ requests if these fall outside mentors’ role expectations (in this case, the lack of social congruence may prevent the mentor from changing the nature of their role). mentees who expect mentors to assume a directive role may still value the benefits of the cognitive transaction and mentors’ ability to scaffold learning. however, in the absence of a trusting relationship, mentees remain unlikely to disclose learning gaps. we predict that mentees, in seeking social congruence, may pursue alternative sources of help (e.g. a friend or classmate) or abandon the peer learning programme earlier. scenario 4: no cognitive or social congruence without social and cognitive congruence, both pal partners remain likely to disengage from the pal programme. making pal attendance compulsory will limit students’ choices to disengage physically, although they remain likely to mentally abandon pal. if the relationship develops at all, mentors may dictate rather than guide learning. mentees are unlikely to feel sufficiently secure in the relationship to risk the shame or fear of disclosing learning gaps. mentees remain likely to hide the very developmental gaps that they would most benefit from addressing. mentors may remain distant and unapproachable, and their actions may actively discourage self-efficacy. such attitudes may undermine students’ belief that they can succeed in academic life. in the absence of empathy in the pal relationship, we anticipate few, if any, psychological benefits. this scenario would cause most damage for students because of the high risk that mentors may offer inappropriate or wrong advice. mentors fail to scaffold learning or connect with their mentees – in either the cognitive or social domains. mentees may seek help only as a last resort and their help-seeking may be limited to very specific questions on assessment tasks. evaluations of the programme may reflect mentees’ dissatisfaction with mentors (wrong advice, ineffective, not worth attending). if mentors offered wrong or inappropriate advice, mentees are more likely to negatively value the programme. garcia-melgar et al. hiding in plain sight: the ‘relationship’ in peer assisted learning in higher education journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 15 two levels of dissonance based on the discussion of the scenarios, we predict under some circumstances dissonance will occur: between mentor and mentee (i.e. lack of congruence), and between the dyad mentor-mentee and the objectives of the pal programme. when cognitive and/or social congruence are absent in pal, mentor and mentee operate from opposite ends of the cognitive/social congruence spectrum. in the absence of social congruence, mentees may perceive mentors as socially different. consequently, the learning relationship may become aligned to an expert tutor-student interaction instead of producing mutually beneficial outcomes. without cognitive congruence, the cognitive partnership is negatively affected by mentors’ limited ability to scaffold and address learning gaps from an expert student perspective. the relationship may shift towards an expert-student interaction if internal and external factors unduly influence the relationship. in both cases, the actual dynamics and outcomes of pal deviate from the intended objectives. moreover, mentor and mentee can be socially and/or cognitively congruent, yet still engage in learning interactions that result in limited learning and social outcomes for both parties (e.g. nontransferable skills). the dissonance between the mentor-mentee partnership and the intended outcomes of the pal programme may be caused by motivational factors, lack of appropriate mentor metacognitive knowledge, or external influences. for example, mentor and mentee may achieve cognitive congruence, but their motivational set and role expectations may contrast with pal objectives (i.e. mentors assume a directive role and mentees assume a passive role). similarly, mentors who lack appropriate metacognitive awareness and language may possess limited capability to enhance mentees’ metacognitive skills – despite their social and cognitive congruence. finally, even relationships characterised by social and cognitive congruence may become dissonant with intended outcomes if pressured by external factors, such as looming assignment due dates. effective relationships: implications for pal research and implementation we recognise that social and cognitive congruence enhance mentors’ and mentees’ learning outcomes. an effective relationship is characterised by the presence of both types of congruence and the mentors’ capacity to align role expectations and motivations with garcia-melgar et al. hiding in plain sight: the ‘relationship’ in peer assisted learning in higher education journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 16 pal objectives. however, the effect of internal and external factors to the relationship may influence congruence levels. we propose that imbalanced levels of congruence may result in asymmetrical relationships that derail the relationship from the original focus on mutual benefit. lack of cognitive congruence, paired with unrealistic expectations about the mentor’s role, may result in asymmetrical relationships where mentors tend to impart knowledge rather than guide learning. conversely, lack of social congruence may produce relationships where the learning needs of mentees remain poorly addressed. our model proposes that longitudinal research studies could identify variations in social and cognitive congruence that potentially risk the establishment of effective relationships. previous research shows that mentors and mentees may differ in their perceptions of learning and psychosocial support received – and provided (holt and berwise, 2012). mentors tend to positively evaluate the quality of support they provided to mentees, while mentees evaluate the quality of support at lower levels. eventually, mentees’ perceptions are critical to the success of the programme, and congruence needs to be positively perceived by mentees to enhance relationship outcomes. the importance of mentees’ perceptions raises the question of whether mentors need to be ‘real’ cognitive and social partners. perhaps a mentor’s ability to appear as socially and cognitively congruent may be more important than the actual level of cognitive development and social similarity with mentees. further research could investigate what skills are employed by mentors to be perceived by mentees as socially and cognitively congruent partners. mentor training could emphasise the importance of developing congruent partnerships. in particular, training could enhance mentors’ ability to employ social and metacognitive skills related to mentees’ perceptions of congruence. research on mentoring relationships could also investigate mentors’ and mentees’ discrepancies in their perceptions of congruence, and analyse potential mediating variables that affect mentees’ perceptions of congruence. ongoing evaluation of congruence – employing longitudinal research methodologies and measured at different stages of the relationship – will ultimately enable timely interventions to restore congruence levels. previous literature recognises the central role of developing trust between pal partners (mackey et al., 2010; eller et al., 2014; bouquillon et al., 2005). in our conceptual framework, we acknowledge trust as a defining characteristic of social congruence. garcia-melgar et al. hiding in plain sight: the ‘relationship’ in peer assisted learning in higher education journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 17 however, an excessive focus of mentors on developing trust may also carry potential negative consequences. mentees may become overly dependent, while mentors may cross role boundaries and provide support that exceeds role expectations. consequently, the focus on enhancement of mentees’ independent learning skills may be lost. our conceptual model provides a research framework to investigate the development of periodic and continuous social and cognitive congruence in pal relationships. without such developmental studies, deviation from intended outcomes over time might not be detected. furthermore, the causal factors that influence strong levels of congruence would remain undiscerned. in addition to research on varying congruence, there are practical applications for this framework. our model predicts that mentor selection and training to engage with varying levels of congruence could more effectively communicate the educational and psychosocial functions that define the mentor’s role. finally, the role of internal and external factors – presented in this conceptual framework – shows potentially mediating variables of relationship outcomes in pal. role expectations and motivations mediate mentors’ and mentees’ engagement, behaviour and, ultimately, pal outcomes. specific interactions of motivational variables, role expectations and congruence levels, however, remain unclear. similarly, environmental variables and mentors’ and mentees’ metacognitive skills hold promise as predictors and mediators of mentoring relationships and outcomes. moreover, the interaction of internal and environmental factors on mentoring could provide a comprehensive research framework to investigate the complexity of peer learning processes and outcomes. conclusion the mentor-mentee relationship is critical to the success of pal programmes. the nature and dynamics of the relationship influence the support mentors provide and quality of learning outcomes. we defined effective relationships as the balanced presence of social and cognitive congruence between mentor and mentee. mentors’ ability to connect cognitively and socially with mentees – and to be perceived as congruent – provides students with a learning partnership that is qualitatively different from other learning interactions. while balanced mentoring relationships provide mutual benefits, environmental and student-related factors may negatively affect congruence levels and, garcia-melgar et al. hiding in plain sight: the ‘relationship’ in peer assisted learning in higher education journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 18 consequently, learning and psychosocial outcomes. for pal programmes to effectively deliver beneficial outcomes for all parties, we require comprehensive support for mentormentee relationships. our conceptual framework provides a diagnostic tool that acknowledges internal/cognitive and environmental influences on pal. longitudinal research methodologies that collect data during various stages of the relationship will aid our understanding of the role of relationships and their impact on pal outcomes. factors that may hinder pal outcomes – like role expectations and motivation, metacognitive skills, and environmental factors – can be included in studies that examine the impact of mediating variables on pal processes and outcomes. the mentor-mentee relationship, hidden in plain sight within pal schemes, is critical to the theoretical and practical development of pal programmes. this paper provides a conceptual framework of effective relationships and hindering factors that can be employed to contribute to the advancement of pal research and practice. references alexitch, l.r. (2002) ‘the role of help-seeking attitudes and tendencies in students' preferences for academic advising’, journal of college student development, 43(1), pp. 5-19. allen, t. and eby, l. (2003) ‘relationship effectiveness for mentors: factors associated with learning and quality’, journal of management, 29(4), pp. 469-486. arco-tirado, j.l., fernández-martín, f.d. and fernández-balboa, j.-m. (2011) ‘the impact of a peer-tutoring program on quality standards in higher education’, higher education, 62(6), pp. 773-788. ashwin, p. (2003) ‘peer support: relations between the context, process and outcomes for the students who are supported’, instructional science, 31(3), pp. 159-173. backer, l., keer, h. and valcke, m. (2012) ‘exploring the potential impact of reciprocal peer tutoring on higher education students' metacognitive knowledge and regulation’, instructional science, 40(3), pp. 559-588. garcia-melgar et al. hiding in plain sight: the ‘relationship’ in peer assisted learning in higher education journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 19 boud, d., cohen, r. and sampson, j. (2000) peer learning in higher education: learning from and with each other. sterling, va: stylus publishing. bouquillon, e.a., sosik, j.j. and lee, d. (2005) ‘‘it’s only a phase’: examining trust, identification and mentoring functions received across the mentoring phases’, mentoring & tutoring: partnership in learning, 13(2), pp. 239-258. brown, k., nairn, k., van der meer, j. and scott, c. (2014) ‘‘we were told we’re not teachers…it gets difficult to draw the line’: negotiating roles in peer-assisted study sessions (pass)’, mentoring & tutoring: partnership in learning, 22(2), pp. 146161. budge, s. (2006) 'peer mentoring in postsecondary education: implications for research and practice', journal of college reading and learning, 37(1), pp. 71-85. bulte, c., betts, a., garner, k. and durning, s. (2007) ‘student teaching: views of student near-peer teachers and learners’, medical teacher, 29(6), pp. 583-590. capstick, s. (2004) ‘benefits and shortcomings of peer assisted learning (pal) in higher education: an appraisal by students', peer assisted learning conference. bournemouth university, bournemouth 21 january. available at: https://www1.bournemouth.ac.uk/sites/default/files/asset/document/stuartcapstick.pdf (accessed: 10 may 2015) chng, e., yew, e.h.j. and schmidt, h.g. (2011) ‘effects of tutor-related behaviours on the process of problem-based learning’, advances in health sciences education, 16(4), pp. 491-503. christie, h. (2014) 'peer mentoring in higher education: issues of power and control', teaching in higher education, 19(8), pp. 955-965. collings, r., swanson, v. and watkins, r. (2014) ‘the impact of peer mentoring on levels of student wellbeing, integration and retention: a controlled comparative evaluation of residential students in uk higher education’, higher education: the international journal of higher education and educational planning, 68(6), pp. 927-942 https://www1.bournemouth.ac.uk/sites/default/files/asset/document/stuart-capstick.pdf https://www1.bournemouth.ac.uk/sites/default/files/asset/document/stuart-capstick.pdf garcia-melgar et al. hiding in plain sight: the ‘relationship’ in peer assisted learning in higher education journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 20 colvin, j. and ashman, m. (2010) ‘roles, risks, and benefits of peer mentoring relationships in higher education’, mentoring & tutoring: partnership in learning, 18(2), pp. 121-134. crisp, g. and cruz, i. (2009) ‘mentoring college students: a critical review of the literature between 1990 and 2007’, research in higher education, 50(6), pp. 525-545. dioso-henson, l. (2012) ‘the effect of reciprocal peer tutoring and non-reciprocal peer tutoring on the performance of students in college physics’, research in education, 87(1), pp. 34-49. ehrich, l.c., hansford, b. and tennent, l. (2004) ‘'formal mentoring programs in education and other professions: a review of the literature’, educational administration quarterly, 40(4), pp. 518-540. eller, l.s., lev, e.l. and feurer, a. (2014) ‘key components of an effective mentoring relationship: a qualitative study’, nurse education today, 34(5), pp. 815-20. falchikov, n. (2001) learning together: peer tutoring in higher education. london; new york: routledgefalmer. fox, a., stevenson, l., connelly, p., duff, a. and dunlop, a. (2010) ‘peer-mentoring undergraduate accounting students: the influence on approaches to learning and academic performance’, active learning in higher education, 11(2), pp. 145-156. ginsburg-block, m.d., rohrbeck, c.a. and fantuzzo, j.w. (2006) ‘a meta-analytic review of social, self-concept, and behavioral outcomes of peer-assisted learning’, journal of educational psychology, 98(4), pp. 732-749. hadidi, n.n., lindquist, r. and buckwalter, k. (2013) ‘lighting the fire with mentoring relationships’, nurse educator, 38(4), pp. 157-163. hammond, j.a., bithell, c.p., jones, l. and bidgood, p. (2010) ‘a first year experience of student-directed peer-assisted learning’, active learning in higher education, 11(3), pp. 201-212. garcia-melgar et al. hiding in plain sight: the ‘relationship’ in peer assisted learning in higher education journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 21 hartmann, n.n., rutherford, b.n., feinberg, r. and anderson, j.g. (2014) ‘antecedents of mentoring: do multi-faceted job satisfaction and affective organizational commitment matter?’, journal of business research, 67(9), pp. 2039-2044. henning, j.m., weidner, t.g. and jones, j. (2006) ‘peer-assisted learning in the athletic training clinical setting’, journal of athletic training, 41(1), pp. 102-108 [online]. available at: http://www.nata.org/journal-of-athletic-training (accessed: 30 may 2015). hilsdon, j. (2014) ‘peer learning for change in higher education’, innovations in education and teaching international, 51(3), pp. 244-254. holt, l.j. and berwise, c.a. (2012) ‘illuminating the process of peer mentoring: an examination and comparison of peer mentors' and first-year students' experiences’, journal of the first-year experience & students in transition, 24(1), pp. 19-43. humberd, b. and rouse, e. (2015) ‘seeing you in me and me in you: personal identification in the phases of mentoring relationships’, academy of management review, 16 july 2015. ismail, h.n. and alexander, j.m. (2005) ‘learning within scripted and nonscripted peertutoring sessions: the malaysian context’, the journal of educational research, 99(2), pp. 67-77. jacobi, m. (1991) ‘mentoring and undergraduate academic success: a literature review’, review of educational research, 61(4), pp. 505-532. kram, k.e. and isabella, l.a. (1985) ‘mentoring alternatives: the role of peer relationships in career development’, academy of management journal, 28(1), pp. 110-132. lockspeiser, t.m., o'sullivan, p., teherani, a. and muller, j. (2008) ‘understanding the experience of being taught by peers: the value of social and cognitive congruence’, advances in health sciences education, 13(3), pp. 361-72. http://www.nata.org/journal-of-athletic-training garcia-melgar et al. hiding in plain sight: the ‘relationship’ in peer assisted learning in higher education journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 22 longfellow, e., may, s., burke, l. and marks-maran, d. (2008) ‘‘they had a way of helping that actually helped’: a case study of a peer-assisted learning scheme’, teaching in higher education, 13(1), pp. 93-105. mackey, t., kamphoff, c. and armstrong, j. (2010) ‘perceptions of participants involved in peer assisted learning in a professional athletic training education program’, athletic training education journal, 5(1), pp. 12-20. malm, j., bryngfors, l. and mörner, l.-l. (2012) ‘benefits of guiding supplemental instruction sessions for si leaders: a case study for engineering education at a swedish university’, journal of peer learning, 5(1), pp. 32-41. moust, j. and schmidt, h. (1994) ‘facilitating small-group learning: a comparison of student and staff tutors' behavior’, an international journal of learning and cognition, 22(4), pp. 287-301. mullen, e. (1994) ‘framing the mentoring relationship in an information exchange’, human resource management review, 4, pp. 257-281. nora, a. and crisp, g. (2007) ‘mentoring students: conceptualizing and validating the multi-dimensions of a support system’, journal of college student retention: research, theory and practice, 9(3), pp. 337-356. o'donnell, a.m. and king, a. (1999) cognitive perspectives on peer learning. mahwah, nj; london, uk: lawrence erlbaum associates. roscoe, r.d. (2014) ‘self-monitoring and knowledge-building in learning by teaching’, instructional science, 42(3), pp. 327-351. roscoe, r.d. and chi, m.t.h. (2007) ‘understanding tutor learning: knowledge-building and knowledge-telling in peer tutors' explanations and questions’, review of educational research, 77(4), pp. 534-574. ross, m. and cameron, h. (2007) ‘peer assisted learning: a planning and implementation framework: amee guide no. 30’, medical teacher, 29(6), pp. 527-527. garcia-melgar et al. hiding in plain sight: the ‘relationship’ in peer assisted learning in higher education journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 23 ten cate, o. and durning, s. (2007) ‘dimensions and psychology of peer teaching in medical education’, medical teacher, 29(6), pp. 546-552. terrion, j.l. and leonard, d. (2007) ‘a taxonomy of the characteristics of student peer mentors in higher education: findings from a literature review’, mentoring & tutoring: partnership in learning, 15(2), pp. 149-164. topping, k.j. (1996) ‘the effectiveness of peer tutoring in further and higher education: a typology and review of the literature', higher education, 32(3), pp. 321-45. topping, k.j. (2005) ‘trends in peer learning', educational psychology, 25(6), pp. 631645. topping, k.j. and ehly, s.w. (2001) ‘'peer assisted learning: a framework for consultation', journal of educational and psychological consultation, 12(2), pp. 113-132. ward, e.g., thomas, e.e. and disch, w.b. (2014) ‘mentor service themes emergent in a holistic, undergraduate peer-mentoring experience', journal of college student development, 55(6), pp. 563-579. author details ana garcia-melgar serves to support student learning and is part of the peer learning advisers programme at la trobe, an academic support programme that employs experienced students to provide academic assistance to all students. ana has developed and delivered training programmes for peer mentors and advisers. her main research interests include peer assisted learning programmes in higher education, mentor-mentee relationships, academic help-seeking behaviour and motivation to seek help from peers. associate professor julianne east is director of student learning and engagement at la trobe university, australia. this department is responsible for developing the peer leaning advisers programme, in which students work with other students to develop academic skills, library search skills and career readiness. julianne has contributed to the garcia-melgar et al. hiding in plain sight: the ‘relationship’ in peer assisted learning in higher education journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 24 literature on student autonomy, the roles of academic language and learning lecturers, and issues of plagiarism and academic integrity. professor noel meyers is the professor of education, outdoor, and environmental studies at la trobe university. his interests span science, science education, and improving the quality of learning for all. he enjoys the opportunity to raise aspiration and extend opportunity for those least fortunate among us. his contributions to student learning earned international, national, and institutional awards for teaching excellence. hiding in plain sight: the ‘relationship’ in peer assisted learning in higher education abstract introduction previous research on peer assisted learning relationships 1. relationships develop through defined stages 2. mentors provide academic and psychological/emotional support 3. social and cognitive congruence as factors that determine the success of pal programmes social and cognitive congruence as elements of effective pal relationships factors that affect the nature and dynamics of pal relationships impact of external and internal factors on pal relationships: social congruence and cognitive congruence scenario 1: social congruence and cognitive congruence are present scenario 2: social congruence present in the absence of cognitive congruence scenario 3: cognitive congruence present in the absence of social congruence scenario 4: no cognitive or social congruence two levels of dissonance effective relationships: implications for pal research and implementation conclusion references author details literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 4: march 2012 engaging biological science students in the development of employability skills through creative teaching and peer reviewed action plans ian j. turner university of derby, uk liz day university of derby, uk abstract in this article the authors describe how a creative teaching methodology can encourage students with a bioscience background to reflect on their understanding of employability. students were asked to construct personal action plans to show how they could demonstrate their achievement of two bioscience academic standards that related to employability skills from the higher education academy subject benchmarks. these action plans were then critiqued anonymously by their peers. keywords: employability; personal development planning; pdp; peer review. context successful career development to a certain extent depends on how an individual plans for this. personal development planning is a process of reflection on not only achievements in an individual’s academic, personal, or professional life but also on areas that need further development (quality assurance agency, 2001), so that plans can be made to enhance an individual’s employability (quality assurance agency, 2009; dearing, 1997). pdp is now a requirement within the uk curricula of higher education (dearing, 1997) and in this paper the development of employability skills is hinged to the learning experience within the discipline context (warren, 2002). turner and day engaging biological science students in the development of employability skills undergraduate bioscience courses in the uk are producing a high number of academically capable students but it appears these students according to david willetts mp, minister of state for universities and science, do not have the skills needed in the workplace. when he addressed the guardian he summit he said that: ‘we are producing large numbers of first degree graduates who study biological sciences, 10% of all first degree graduates, the number's going up, but i still get the life sciences industry saying graduates don't have skills they need, and that's because they haven't done enough practical lab work, or because they haven't done crucial specialisms like molecular biology or toxicology’ (willetts, 2011). although willetts highlighted the graduates’ lack of practical skills in this speech, when the society of biology (2009) initiated a consultation process prior to an accreditation scheme launch, a different picture emerged. they contacted over 612 current bioscience undergraduates from a range of institutions. in response to questions about the employability aspects of their degrees, 350 respondents (57%) thought that their degree should make them well or highly prepared for entering the workplace, but less than 200 (33%) thought that their degrees would actually achieve this aim. in the same consultation exercise recent graduates were asked to identify the three skills they most needed (but did not get) from their degree and current employers of bioscience students were asked to highlight the skills most required (but not found) in current bioscience graduates. the top three skills identified by both groups were the same: communication skills, interpersonal skills (working in a team), critical and analytical thinking. interestingly the skills identified are generic rather than specialised laboratory skills as highlighted by david willetts mp. with the skills gap highlighted by the society of biology in mind, the authors designed an employability session for a first year undergraduate module. employability was already a focus of the curriculum but previous student feedback had found such sessions ‘boring’ and ‘a waste of time’. this session worked on modifying the existing lesson template to engage students with themes relevant to their specific subject area that could be important for their personal development. the aims of this new session were to encourage first year undergraduate biological sciences and zoology students to discuss the concept of employability (and its importance) and to explore how personal perspectives and viewpoints may impact on their employability. the students were encouraged to engage with personal development planning through reflection and asked to write a personal development plan that would be peer reviewed. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 2 turner and day engaging biological science students in the development of employability skills approach activity one: concept of employability the session started by introducing the aims of all the activities to the students and by providing brief contextual information on the importance of developing a range of employability skills so as to be prepared for the competitive arena of the workplace. students were initially asked to write what they understood by the term ‘employability’ on a post-it note, and volunteers from the class were then invited to read out their definitions. there was a wide range of responses (51 in total, n=52) reflecting individual learners’ understanding of the term. the students’ individual definitions included ‘having determination and work experience’, ‘getting a range of skills to be an attractive prospect to employers’ and ‘selling yourself’. word cloud analysis (figure 1) of all the responses highlights that the most common terms used were ‘jobs’, ‘experience’, ‘skills’ and ‘qualifications’. figure 1. word cloud of first year biology and zoology undergraduates’ definitions of employability. the larger the words the more frequently it occurred in students’ responses. there were three common themes identifiable in the students’ responses. the first was the importance of nurturing and tailoring an individual’s skills and abilities to the employment of their choice: ‘having the right combination and experience and skills’ as well as ‘being right for the job’. the second theme was based around the competitiveness of the employment sector and making yourself more employable than a graduate from a similar journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 3 turner and day engaging biological science students in the development of employability skills programme ‘being different from others’ and ‘making yourself stand out from the crowd’. the third theme was centred on the personal nature of skills development ‘you! only you can make yourself employable and nobody else’. it would seem that the students saw the concept of employability as one that combines their academic qualification with extracurricular skills and experience, as all necessary prerequisites to secure employment. students then took part in an employability quiz adapted from a card sort game that encouraged them to think about the term employability in a broader sense (mortenson and butcher, 2003). the game lists 24 definitions of employability and challenged the students to think about which of the definitions are ‘very much about employability’, ‘partly about employability’, ‘maybe or maybe not about employability’, ‘definitely not about employability’ and ‘irrelevant to employability’. the students completed this exercise in small groups and then fed back to the whole class. the students reached consensus on some of the definitions, for example, being adept at key skills was seen as very much about employability. those definitions that were linked to or reflected their own key terms used to define employability (activity one) were much better recognised in the card sort exercise. some definitions in the exercise resulted in a clear split in students’ agreement, for example, ‘employability is part of the contract between the university and the student’ was ranked as ‘definitely not about employability’ by almost 50% of the students taking part. activity two: bridging the gap – employability skills and academic knowledge two subject bench mark statements from the qaa biosciences academic standards were identified that were significant to the students in terms of their personal development and that would help then see the link between their academic curriculum and employability skills. the bench mark statements that were selected related to the construction of scientific arguments, the understanding of ethical and social impacts of biological research and also maintaining and enhancing scientific knowledge to better support arguments (quality assurance agency, 2007, standard 5.8). two weeks prior to this session students had attended a lecture that examined the evolution versus creationism debate; a recap was presented to the students in this session. the recap lecture briefly outlined the fundamental concepts of the debate and posed several social considerations. students were asked to consider how a bioscientist journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 4 turner and day engaging biological science students in the development of employability skills would deliver the material to a range of audiences e.g. scientists, the general public and children who went to a church of england school. the students were then asked in pairs to debate the following statement: ‘teachers should put their beliefs and values to one side and present a variety of different perspectives on a theme even if this contradicts their own value system’. during the debate some students exhibited firm views about what they would teach and why they would choose particular theories. they appeared to be unable to recognise or acknowledge any constraints that would impact on what they believed should be taught. other students took cognisance of the different cultures they might be exposed to and reflected on the impact of what they had to say on others. students were also asked to consider how their personal response to the statement might be perceived from different perspectives, for example, that of a parent, legal representative, religious leader and an employer. students debated this topic in earnest and the majority of students were able to reflect on their initial response. although this often did not change their opinion it did lead them to realisation they must be able to defend their views with a reasoned argument or their views would not be heard at all. activity three: action planning and critique after the debate students were given time to reflect in pairs on the question: ‘what do i need to do (personally, academically or practically) to develop or enhance my ability to appreciate other people’s views and their different perspectives on life?’. to help them achieve this we asked the students to generate a personal development plan that included their personal goals, an action plan to achieve these goals and to identify any support needed to realise their goals. the students were asked to submit their personal development plan via an electronic submission and retrieval system which was organised with timelines that were given to the students in advance (figure 2). the system was designed so that once all the plans had been submitted they could be retrieved electronically and anonymously by a peer from the same student group. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 5 turner and day engaging biological science students in the development of employability skills students were then asked to critique the action plans by reference to prescribed questions: 1. does the statement identify personal, academic and practical aims? (goals) 2. is there a clear indication of how these aims are to be achieved? (action and resources) 3. would you like to make any comments regarding the action plan? (support) critiques were uploaded via the same system and at the end of the time scale (figure 2) students could retrieve their personal critique. the entire system was anonymous and student privacy was assured in the briefing notes given to the students explaining the activity. the teaching team were able to identify the students’ work so that additional support and praise could be offered appropriately. students were required to participate in this activity (part of a summative assessment) and a pass/fail grade was awarded for completing an action plan and a critique. figure 2. a flow diagram illustrating the timescales of activities students were required to undertake following the employability session. submit personal action plan employability session collect anonymous action plan submit critique collect personal critique produce action plan produce critique 1 week 3 days 1 week 3 days journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 6 turner and day engaging biological science students in the development of employability skills summary of action plans and critiques there were 52 students in the module and of these 50 submitted an action plan. the range of structures to the plans was wide, for example, essay format, charts that identified columns for personal and academic aims with a column asking how and when these would be achieved, some included an extra column for practical aims (see example of typical action plans in the appendix ). several students identified the steps they needed to take to progress; the task to be undertaken, how to achieve the task and the end goal. they organised this by devising columns for long term goals and short term goals, how to achieve my long term goal, actions, how and when. not all of the students followed the instructions and a small number produced an action plan that was very generic, for example, a personal statement about their extra-curricular activity or modified version of their curriculum vitae. clearer instruction and exemplar action plans may have helped the students to produce a more considered action plan. whilst the instructions must include structural guidance it is important that they do not hinder the student’s creativity. of the 50 students who submitted action plans, 34 submitted a critique. the critiques ranged from comments relating to suggestions on how to produce a timetable to highlight free time (to encourage time management), to very positive comments that clearly indicated that the peer reviewer was impressed with the format of the plan and was going to incorporate some of the ideas into their own at a later date. some reviewers asked many questions in a supportive manner and gave constructive feedback. the most common words (see figure 3) in the critiques were ‘action’ and ‘plan’ which is to be expected as students were directly commenting on what they saw before them. other common words include ‘academic’ and ‘personal’ which reflects the two main areas in which the students grouped their personal targets, ‘achieve(d)’ and ‘practical’ also occur frequently which may relate to the realisation of these targets (see example critique in appendix). sixteen students did not complete the critique element of the exercise. to ensure all students received feedback on their action plans the teaching team critiqued the remaining students’ work. as this work was linked to a formative assessment students had to resubmit work. this took the form of a personal reflection on the action plan and critique process. it appears many of the non-submissions were due to students being unsure ‘what to say’. in future lessons the guidance on providing critiques (and possibly exemplar critiques) would be provided to students at the onset of the activity. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 7 turner and day engaging biological science students in the development of employability skills figure 3. word cloud of first year biology and zoology undergraduates’ critiques of peers’ action plans. the larger the words the more frequently it occurred in students’ responses. conclusion students need to recognise that through their academic university experience new skills and attributes can be acquired that will make an important contribution to their employability. furthermore, the exercise shows that employability is not just about having subject knowledge. the content of the lecture was chosen to highlight to students that lectures in addition to other academic material can contribute to the development of a wide range of employability skills. in addition it shows that employability skills are part of the student’s on-going development as scientists. creative teaching approaches encourage students to link their generic and disciplinary skills and highlight the importance of the students’ role in developing these skills. based on student uptake and engagement of the action plan/critique exercise and informal communication with students, it is clear that this new exercise was well received by the majority of students. the full impact of such activities can only be truly assessed by a continuing theme of employability in subsequent stages of their degree and continually revisiting their action plans. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 8 turner and day engaging biological science students in the development of employability skills acknowledgments the authors would like to thank elizabeth claridge for help with the session and all the students in the class who allowed us to use their action plans. references dearing, r. (1997) the dearing report – national committee of inquiry into higher education. hayes: ncihe. mortenson, r. and butcher, v. (2003) enhancing student employability coordination team (esect). available at: http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/resources/detail/resource_database/snas/enhancing _student_employability_coordination_team_esect (accessed: 26 march 2012). quality assurance agency (2001) guidelines for he progress files. london: qaa. http://www.qaa.ac.uk/publications/informationandguidance/pages/guidelines-forhe-progress-files.aspx (accessed: 26 march 2012). quality assurance agency (2007) bioscience subject benchmark statements. gloucester: qaa. http://www.qaa.ac.uk/publications/informationandguidance/pages/subjectbenchmark-statement-biosciences.aspx (accessed: 26 march 2012). quality assurance agency (2009) personal development planning: guidance for institutional policy and practice in higher education. gloucester: qaa. http://www.qaa.ac.uk/publications/informationandguidance/pages/personaldevelopment-planning-guidance-for-institutional-policy-and-practice-in-highereducation.aspx (accessed: 26 march 2012). society of biology (2009) launch and consultation: framework for the accreditation of uk biosciences degrees. available at: http://www.societyofbiology.org/education/hei/accreditation/accreditationlaunch (accessed: 6 february 2012). journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 9 http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/resources/detail/resource_database/snas/enhancing_student_employability_coordination_team_esect http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/resources/detail/resource_database/snas/enhancing_student_employability_coordination_team_esect http://www.qaa.ac.uk/publications/informationandguidance/pages/guidelines-for-he-progress-files.aspx http://www.qaa.ac.uk/publications/informationandguidance/pages/guidelines-for-he-progress-files.aspx http://www.qaa.ac.uk/publications/informationandguidance/pages/subject-benchmark-statement-biosciences.aspx http://www.qaa.ac.uk/publications/informationandguidance/pages/subject-benchmark-statement-biosciences.aspx http://www.qaa.ac.uk/publications/informationandguidance/pages/personal-development-planning-guidance-for-institutional-policy-and-practice-in-higher-education.aspx http://www.qaa.ac.uk/publications/informationandguidance/pages/personal-development-planning-guidance-for-institutional-policy-and-practice-in-higher-education.aspx http://www.qaa.ac.uk/publications/informationandguidance/pages/personal-development-planning-guidance-for-institutional-policy-and-practice-in-higher-education.aspx http://www.societyofbiology.org/education/hei/accreditation/accreditationlaunch turner and day engaging biological science students in the development of employability skills warren, d. (2002) ‘curriculum design in a context of widening participation in higher education’, arts and humanities in higher education, 1(1), pp. 85-89. willetts mp, d. (2011) public address speech, guardian he summit. america square conference centre, london 16 march 2011. author details dr ian turner is a senior lecturer in biology and forensic science and the learning and teaching fellow for the school of science at the university of derby. he is also the chairman of the derbyshire branch of the british science association. liz day was a senior lecturer in nursing and teaching fellow for employability skills and personal development planning at the university of derby. she is currently academic lead for institutional strategy and internationalisation at the higher education academy, york. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 10 turner and day engaging biological science students in the development of employability skills appendix example unmodified action plan and critique 1 action plan as a person, i find myself already quite capable at accepting and/or judging other people’s views and perspectives. i can maintain objective in situations where two or more views are given on a subject, and i am able to conclude on my own an unbiased view of the subject. there is always room for improvement however, so i have come up with a list of ways in which i can improve on the matter. personally, i think i could attend more social meetings amongst people whose views on things differ from my own. by listening to and trying to understand all sides to any particular story, i would be able to grow mentally and expand my own views. to achieve this, i plan to visit social meetings amongst other people on my course and listen to their views on different subject matter. academically, i could improve by attending scientific meetings and perform research into topics that are relevant to my course. by doing this, i can gain a better knowledge of my subject area and be more capable in lectures and practical work. practically, i could go to catch up seminars on monday afternoons and learn more about subject areas i do not fully understand. critique i think that personal, academic and practical aims are clearly separated, although each one of these is still heavily linked to just university work and academic studies. for instance going to seminars and attending meetings will help with academic studies not personal and practical development. researching into and attending relevant meetings would aid academic and possibly social development although socialising with other people and joining other extra-curricular groups would broaden both social and general skills. expanding work experience will help with employability and again with general skills such as time management and people-skills. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 11 turner and day engaging biological science students in the development of employability skills example unmodified action plan and critique 2 action plan to develop and enhance my ability to appreciate other views and perspectives in my studies, i need to research a large number of resources in order to obtain as much information and as many viewpoints as possible. this can be done by not just relying on notes and facts given to me in lectures and on core text books, but by reading around on subjects – for instance researching journals, books in the library, internet resources and also sharing views with my peers. by having a wide range of opinions available, i will be able to consider them and appreciate their validity even if i don’t agree with them myself. in order to achieve this, i need to research around the given subjects after each lecture, making use of the wide range of resources available to me, and discuss my opinions with my peers and listen to and consider their views. this will enable me to develop both academically and practically and will benefit my studies over the forthcoming years and in my chosen career path after my academic studies. critique this action plan clearly identifies both personal and academic aims which will be pursued throughout the academic year. how these targets will be achieved has been successfully identified and clearly set out. i personally like the way your action plan blends individual and academic development (how you intend to include your peers in research). example of unmodified action plan and critique 3 action plan personally i will have to motivate myself to work in a structured and effective fashion. personal motivation is an important factor of academic achievement. for motivation i will have to look for aspects which i find interesting in the subject, as points of interest will lead to personal motivation. topics of interest can be found through research of the subject, such as reading of textbooks, scientific magazines, and journals. through this research i will not only be motivating myself personally, but also increasing my knowledge and understanding, thus i will gain appreciation for new areas and different views of the journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 12 turner and day engaging biological science students in the development of employability skills subject. other methods of gaining knowledge can be obtained through practical exercises; such methods may include experiments, discussions with classmates, study groups. social interaction through discussion and study can also act as motivational factor for me personally. the key aspect of gaining appreciation for other views and perspectives is knowledge. by gaining knowledge of a subject one discovers new information/perspectives and through critical observation, which is primarily a personal process, one can accept or open up to potential new ways of thinking. personal academic practical increase of knowledge textbooks study groups increase of understanding scientific magazines discussions effectiveness journals experiments motivation documentary’s an increase in knowledge through practical and academic exercises will lead to an increase in appreciation of other views and perspectives critique 1. shows personal, academic and practical methods to achieve the ability to appreciate other views and perspectives. 2. a clear and ordered account of how to achieve their aims. 3. personal comments: • good grammar. • shows thorough knowledge and understanding of the task set. • has a clear and structured plan that will help them succeed in the long run. • will most likely benefit from using this action plan. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 13 engaging biological science students in the development of employability skills through creative teaching and peer reviewed action plans abstract context approach activity one: concept of employability activity two: bridging the gap – employability skills and academic knowledge activity three: action planning and critique summary of action plans and critiques conclusion acknowledgments references author details appendix example unmodified action plan and critique 1 example unmodified action plan and critique 2 example of unmodified action plan and critique 3 literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 10: november 2016 educational videos – tell me what you want, what you really, really want paul rice university of northampton, uk robert farmer university of northampton, uk abstract given the current popularity of educational videos, and given the time, effort and expense academics and institutions are investing to provide educational videos to students, it was thought worthwhile to evaluate whether students at the university of northampton (uon) actually want and use these resources. moreover, if it was found they do use educational videos, investigation was required to determine if they are in a format that students want. the study was carried out in two distinct stages. the first stage was a questionnaire which was followed by a focus group. it was found that students at northampton do overwhelmingly use educational videos. furthermore, the research found that students prefer videos to any other resource and that videos can increase motivation. additionally, high-risk production strategies, such as seeing the presenter on screen, and the use of animation, humour and quizzes were identified, and it was found that the use of music in an educational video was considered a negative component of a video. the optimum length of the video is less clear, however, it is recommended they are kept to less than 10 minutes (although this is dependent upon the level of study of the student). the key recommendation when producing videos is to ensure they have been designed taking cognitive research into account. the key strength of a well-designed educational video, it is concluded, is to give the students something additional they cannot find in another resource, in a way which encourages effective learning. keywords: educational video, multimedia principles, student experience rice and farmer educational videos – tell me what you want, what you really, really want journal of learning development in higher education, issue 10: november 2016 2 introduction in my role as an academic tutor for maths at the centre for achievement and performance (the learning development centre at the uon), i support any student on any course with any mathematics or statistics related query. it is well documented (by, for example, macgillivray and croft, 2011) that the provision of learning development centres increase students’ motivation, confidence, grades, and, ultimately, retention. however, due to the very small size of our mathematics and statistics team (i.e. one full-time member of staff), it is not possible that face-to-face support can be given to all students. therefore it is necessary to complement and augment the face-to-face interactions with an online offering which would still retain important human features, such as being motivational, building confidence, empathising and, importantly, having a sense of humour. to meet these objectives, educational videos were created, as these are generally considered to be the most personal type of educational resource (moreno and ortegano-layne, 2008). therefore we wanted to identify from a student’s perspective which aspects of educational videos are engaging, increase confidence, promote motivation, and enhance knowledge. the purpose of this paper is to disseminate the results of research undertaken on what students at the uon actually want from, and think about, educational videos. essentially, the primary goal was to determine what makes educational videos appealing to students within the context of supporting their learning and academic development. specific questions that we wanted to answer included:  do students at northampton engage with educational videos?  do educational videos impact on the learning and confidence of students?  what are the key features (e.g. content, presentation, humour, music, production quality etc.) of ‘good’ educational videos? examining what made videos appealing to students (and investigating what disengaged students) provided an insight for us to improve our current offering, and gave us clear ideas about what should and should not be included in the production of future mathematics, statistics and spss videos. rice and farmer educational videos – tell me what you want, what you really, really want journal of learning development in higher education, issue 10: november 2016 3 literature review a review of the literature showed that there are four kinds of educational videos namely: lecture based; enhanced; supplementary; and worked examples. lecture based videos are a complete recording of a lecture. enhanced videos are essentially powerpoint presentations with an audio narrative. a supplementary video provides additional background information to broaden and deepen a student’s understanding. finally, a worked example video provides a visual explanation of a specific area demonstrating a sequential process (kay, 2012). regarding teaching approaches, educational videos can be further classified, as per kay and kletskin (2012), as either receptive viewing or problem-based. receptive viewing refers to a passive approach, where the student views a video without any direct involvement, whereas problem-based videos will require the student to participate in some way. this research investigates worked examples of educational videos, however, with the increasing development of educational videos being made available to students, this section will adopt a general overview of educational videos. millions of pounds are being invested in higher education to enhance the quality of resources (nikoi et al., 2011). according to hilton iii et al., (2013), using educational videos will save money in the long term as they may encourage the reduction in price of textbooks in order to compete. bliss et al. (2013) agrees that educational resources are beneficial in terms of cost, but then goes beyond cost in isolation and examines the impact of educational resources using the ‘coup framework’ (cost, outcome, use, perceptions) and advocates the use of educational videos. however, critics question if the time and expense incurred to produce educational videos is money well spent (littlejohn et al., 2008). it takes time for academics to learn the necessary skills to produce educational videos, but it could be argued some are not fit for purpose from a students’ perspective. as with any other teaching material, videos need to be subject to a continuous quality assurance process (williams et al., 2011). therefore content (accuracy and relevance), pedagogy (learning outcome, design and assessment), accessibility and fitness for purpose all need to be monitored. however, it has been argued that although educational videos provide content, they do not necessarily encourage for deep understanding, context, and environmental components that are essential for effective learning (bates, 2011). furthermore, as argued by panke and seufert (2013, p.116), ‘if we focus solely on rice and farmer educational videos – tell me what you want, what you really, really want journal of learning development in higher education, issue 10: november 2016 4 access, we cannot differentiate between processes of mere information foraging and deep sense making activities’. therefore caution is required so as not to confuse download and registration rates as a measure of quality of materials or of the amount of actual learning taking place. in a comprehensive review of the literature (53 peer reviewed articles), kay (2012, p.825) found ‘in terms of affective attitudes toward video podcasts, the current literature review revealed only positive responses’. however, he did go on to state ‘with respect to cognitive attitudes several concerns were noted’. one such concern that has been raised regarding educational videos are that they are sometimes viewed in a sequential, linear and passive manner, which prevents long term learning (ibrahim et al., 2014; hegarty et al., 2003). one possible explanation for this point of view is that successful learning from videos requires a high level of cognitive processing (ibrahim et al., 2012). furthermore, for effective learning to take place, mayer (2009) argues grounding in cognitive theory and production qualities are necessary elements of an educational video. however, due to the rapid proliferation of educational videos, (cooper and higgins, 2014; kannan and baker, 2014) this will not always be the case. many students turn to youtube for support to fill gaps in their learning. worldwide, youtube claim to have over 1 billion users. every day people watch hundreds of millions of hours on youtube and every day over 400,000 hours of video are uploaded (youtube, 2015). in addition, many educational institutions produce in-house video content, and organisations offering open learning systems, such as coursera, ted, and khan academy, are growing in popularity. an additional challenge found for not using educational videos is associated with technical issues such as file size, download speed, and students not having a mobile device (kay, 2012). however, with advances in technology and greater availability of devices, it is expected these issues will diminish and educational videos will be used even more in the coming years (vieira et al., 2014). clark and mayer (2011) state the aim of effective learning is to engage the student in active cognitive processing. thus learning works as people are active sense makers and not passive recipients of information. this knowledge construction view is based on three principles of mayer’s (2009) cognitive theory of multimedia learning (ctml) that explains how students learn from multimedia resources. those principles are; dual channels (people have different channels for processing audio and visual content); limited capacity (people can only process limited information at any given time); and active processing (organise information and integrate with what they already know). therefore there are three important stages for the learner. first, they must select words and images. second, rice and farmer educational videos – tell me what you want, what you really, really want journal of learning development in higher education, issue 10: november 2016 5 they need to organise the words and images, (this is done in working memory). finally, the learner needs to integrate incoming material with existing knowledge (from long term memory) in order to construct a new meaning. the difficulty facing learners is to carry out these processes within the limitations of working memory. cognitive load theory (paas et al., 2010) suggests the working memory can only hold and process a finite amount of information at any one time, and learners can only process information if it is supplied in such a way not to overload the working memory. there are three types of cognitive load which are especially applicable to educational videos. they are to reduce extraneous cognitive load (information not related to objective), manage essential cognitive load (reduce complexity of essential material) and increase germane load (provide deeper learning by including relevant interactions). designing videos for effective learning should therefore take account of these conclusions from cognitive theory to combat the arguments made against educational videos. although there is not a one model fits all style of video, there are a number of simple features that designers of educational videos can implement to support learners, namely: cues to highlight essential information (morrain and swarts, 2011; clark and mayer, 2011); user paced segments (kay and kletskin, 2012; clark and mayer, 2011); conversational style (kay and kletskin, 2012; clark and mayer, 2011); corresponding words and pictures presented simultaneously (mayer, 2009; clark and mayer, 2011), and the exclusion of extraneous information (mayer, 2009; clark and mayer, 2011). if these are implemented in an educational video, it is argued that learners will be more easily able to process key information, resulting in better understanding and learning (wiley, 2010). although there is plenty of literature about the design of educational videos, there is very little research about what students want from an educational video. the synthesis report (mcgill et al., 2013, online) claims that ‘most subject strand projects expressed frustration that they did not have the time or funding to research what learners actually want from open educational materials’. furthermore, in his comprehensive review of the literature, kay (2012) found no research that had been carried out on the components of an educational video. therefore it is imperative to gain feedback from students to ensure that they are appropriate, and are designed to encourage a student-centred approach and to enhance learning. rice and farmer educational videos – tell me what you want, what you really, really want journal of learning development in higher education, issue 10: november 2016 6 methodology the population of the study was defined as all students at the university of northampton. a sequential, mixed-method design, as outlined by creswell (2009), consisting of two distinct stages was implemented. this initially provided exploratory quantitative data which was followed up with a deeper analysis using qualitative data. quantitative data generated numerical data which was used to make generalisable conclusions, whereas the qualitative data was used to give in-depth understanding of individuals’ perceptions. hence the research benefitted from both quantitative and qualitative analysis, providing some degree of both objectivity and subjectivity. the first stage of the research was to compile a questionnaire which was distributed using a probability sampling method to reduce bias by ensuring that everyone in the population had an equal chance of being included in the sample (see, for example, mcmillan and weyers, 2007). due to the fact no previous studies of this type have been undertaken, no formal sample size calculations were made, however, the convenience sample, which was taken over a four week period prior to the easter vacation, aimed to capture over 80 responses. the questionnaire link was available via the home page of the students’ virtual learning environment (known as nile, northampton’s integrated learning environment), thus all students had an equal chance of responding. the questionnaire consisted of a combination of five point likert rating scale questions (1 being very important and 5 being not very important), and single response multiple choice questions to capture demographical data. students were asked questions on how often they watch educational videos, the purpose of them watching the video, the impact of the video, how important individual components of a video are, and the optimum length of the video. the online survey was administered using bristol online surveys (bos) and data was exported directly into a statistical package (spss v.20) for analysis. the questionnaire was analysed first, with the goal of testing hypotheses for significant differences. the results were then used to inform the direction of the focus groups. data was captured from 89 students, however, after cleaning the data from the online survey, there were 87 responses remaining (males = 35, females =52). for a breakdown by gender and year of study, see table 1 below. a chi-square test was applied to the data (six students had not specified year or gender), which showed there were no significant differences between gender and year of study (χ2=2.24, df=3, p>0.05), and therefore due rice and farmer educational videos – tell me what you want, what you really, really want journal of learning development in higher education, issue 10: november 2016 7 to the independence, any subsequent differences found for gender or year of study would be attributed correctly. year 1st 2nd 3rd postgrad total male 10 15 7 1 33 female 8 12 22 6 48 total 18 27 29 7 81 table 1. gender of respondents broken down by level of study. respondents who completed stage one were asked to participate in stage two. in this second stage a qualitative approach was used to collect text data through a focus group. this group was to help explain why variables tested in the first phase may or may not be significant. semi-structured interview questions were used to develop a conversational approach amongst the group and the interviewer. during the focus groups students were asked to give their opinions on four educational videos. each of the four videos was regarding referencing and all four followed a worked example format. the focus group was recorded and transcribed verbatim. initial codes were applied to the transcript, which were followed by more focused coding (as discussed by lofland and lofland, 1995). this approach allowed for themes to be developed which examined the connections between different codes. the rationale for a deductive followed by inductive approach is that the quantitative data and results provided a general overview, while the qualitative aspect provided a refined and detailed analysis (see johnson and christian, 2008). each stage was given equal priority and the results of both stages are integrated in the discussion section. all the students who completed the questionnaire were invited to attend a focus group. out of the 87 completed questionnaires, seven students volunteered to take part. no incentive was provided to complete the questionnaire or attend the focus group. see table 2 for breakdown of gender and level of study. rice and farmer educational videos – tell me what you want, what you really, really want journal of learning development in higher education, issue 10: november 2016 8 year 1st 2nd 3rd postgrad total male 1 0 2 0 3 female 0 1 3 0 4 total 1 1 5 0 7 table 2. breakdown of gender by level of study for focus groups. limitations because of the convenience sampling used in the quantitative phase of the study, it is not possible to say with confidence whether the sample is representative of the population. moreover, due to the nature of the qualitative stage, small numbers in the focus group did not represent all areas of the target population. for example, international and postgraduate students were not adequately represented. furthermore, the data obtained in the second phase of the study may be subject to different interpretations by different readers, and because of the interpretative nature of the second phase the investigator may have also introduced their bias into the analysis of the findings. finally, the study relies upon students’ personal perceptions, which might not match reality, and thus the study does not measure actual impact of educational videos on learning outcomes results quantitative the initial objective of the project was to find out whether students are actually using open educational videos and how these compare with other resources. it was found that 94.3% (82 out of 87) students do watch educational videos. furthermore, out of those 82 students who do watch educational videos, 96.8% of those watch educational videos which are directly related to their course. rice and farmer educational videos – tell me what you want, what you really, really want journal of learning development in higher education, issue 10: november 2016 9 (1 = positive, 5 = negative) importance confidence knowledge resource mean std dev mean std dev mean std dev podcast 2.62 1.22 2.41 1.04 2.28 1.03 powerpoint 1.74 0.89 1.82 0.80 1.61 0.76 video 1.62 0.89 1.84 0.97 1.65 0.94 word document 1.91 0.97 1.82 0.81 1.61 0.75 table 3. students' perceptions of the importance, confidence and knowledge gained of resource. when we compare educational videos to other resources, it was found that videos are the preferred choice of resources for students, followed by powerpoint presentations, word documents and, finally, podcasts (see table 3). examining the data for perceived preference, confidence and knowledge, it was found there were outliers, as assessed by inspection of each boxplot, therefore a friedman test was used to determine if there were differences in the ratings in terms of perceived preference, confidence gained and knowledge gained. for each of these, pairwise comparisons were performed with a bonferroni correction for multiple comparisons. identical results were found for preference, confidence gained and knowledge gained. for preference, the resources were statistically significant x2 (3) = 43.918, p<0.001. for confidence x2 (3) = 28.31, p<0.001. for knowledge, x2 (3) = 32.438, p<0.001. again for each preference, confidence, and knowledge, post hoc analysis revealed exact same results. for preference, statistically significant differences were found for video (mdn = 1) compared to podcast (mdn = 3) (p<0.001), from powerpoint (mdn = 2) to podcast (p<0.001) and word (mdn = 2) to podcast (p<0.002). for perceived confidence, statistically significant differences were found for video (mdn = 2) compared to podcast (mdn = 2) (p=0.001), from powerpoint (mdn = 2) to podcast (p=0.005) and word (mdn = 2) to podcast (p<0.008). finally for perceived knowledge gained, statistically significant differences were also found for video (mdn = 1) compared to podcast (mdn = 2) (p<0.001), from powerpoint (mdn = 1) to podcast (p=0.001) and word (mdn = 1) to podcast (p=0.002). rice and farmer educational videos – tell me what you want, what you really, really want journal of learning development in higher education, issue 10: november 2016 10 it has also been established that the vast majority of students at northampton watch educational videos directly related to their course, and that educational videos are perceived to be the most important resource by students. therefore establishing the key components of an educational video became the focus of the investigation. the results were clustered into three distinct groups, which have been labelled most important, midrange, and least important (see table 4 below). components how important are each of the following components to you in educational videos (1=very important, 5 = not very important) mean std dev m o s t im p o rt a n c e content 1.49 0.73 visual examples 1.70 0.81 recommendations from lecturer 1.89 0.77 production quality 1.95 0.90 m id -r a n g e im p o rt a n c e quiz 2.21 0.94 seeing a presenter on screen 2.36 0.87 produced by university of northampton staff 2.38 0.86 animation 2.41 0.94 humour 2.41 1.08 l e a s t im p o rt a n c e do not see a presenter (voice over) 2.56 0.85 produced by an academic not at the university of northampton 2.74 0.62 music 2.78 1.12 produced by a non academic 2.82 0.87 table 4. importance to students of individual components of an educational video. rice and farmer educational videos – tell me what you want, what you really, really want journal of learning development in higher education, issue 10: november 2016 11 shapiro-wilk tests were carried out to test the normality of each component of the data in respect of gender and year of study. on all occasions the results were significant, so the data had to be treated as non-parametric. therefore, when looking for differences between the components, a mann-whitney test was carried out for gender and a kruskal-wallis test was carried out for level of study. in all instances, all results were not significant, thus there were no differences for any of the components by gender or level of study. moreover, as opposed to looking at each component in isolation, each individual component was correlated (using spearman’s rank correlation) with the overall importance of educational videos (see figure 1 below). figure 1. individual components correlated with overall importance. here it can be seen that only one of the most important components, 'visually see examples', has a significant correlation with overall importance (r=0.29, p<0.01). therefore this component illustrates the key strength of an educational video. individually it is perceived to be important by students, but it also demonstrates a significant correlation https://sites.google.com/site/pgcthepr/project-evaluation/results/picture1.png?attredirects=0 rice and farmer educational videos – tell me what you want, what you really, really want journal of learning development in higher education, issue 10: november 2016 12 with overall importance. as for the remaining most important components (content r=0.19, p>0.05, production quality r=0.14, p>0.05, and lecturer from university of northampton recommends r=0.08, p>0.05), none significantly correlate with overall importance: therefore, although they are perceived to be individually important, that alone is not enough to make an educational video important to students. an interesting result was found when examining the mid-range components (animation r=0.45, p<0.01, presenter on screen r=0.39, p<0.01, humour r=0.34, p<0.01, and quiz r= 0.29, p<0.01). although not individually important, they do correlate with overall importance and therefore, if attempted, should be completed to a high standard, as otherwise they risk having a negative impact on overall importance. this particular result will be expanded upon in the discussion section below. the next objective under consideration was the optimum length of the video, and in particular whether they should be less than five minutes or not. due to the fact that not all cells were represented sufficiently to carry out a chi-square test when looking for gender, a cross tabulation was produced which collapsed some of the options. a corresponding fisher's exact test was carried out (see table 5). there was no significant difference between optimum time and gender, with both groups perceiving five minutes plus to be better (85.9% overall) than the alternative options (p = 0.35) what is the optimum time for an educational video? less than 5 minutes n (% gender) 5 minutes plus n (% gender) total male 3 (8.8%) 31 (91.2%) 34 female 9 (17.6%) 42 (82.4%) 51 total 12 (14.1%) 73 (85.9%) 85 table 5. cross tabulation of gender by optimum time. for similar reasons, categories were collapsed for optimum time to less than five minutes and five minutes plus when looking at level of study. furthermore, the level of study was collapsed into undergraduate and postgraduate. see table 6 below for resulting cross tabulation. rice and farmer educational videos – tell me what you want, what you really, really want journal of learning development in higher education, issue 10: november 2016 13 what is the optimum time for an educational video? less than 5 minutes n (% level) 5 minutes plus n (% level) total undergraduate 7 (9.5%) 67 (90.5%) 74 postgraduate 4 (57.1%) 3 (42.9%) 7 total 11 (13.6%) 70 (86.4%) 81 table 6. cross tabulation of level of study by optimum time. here it can be seen that when fisher's exact test is carried out the two-sided exact test is significant (p value = 0.006). thus it can be concluded there is a significant difference in the optimum time of a video for undergraduates and postgraduates, with undergraduates preferring greater than five minutes and postgraduates preferring under five minutes. this will impact on the design of educational videos when targeting a particular audience and is discussed in more detail in the next section. qualitative from the focus group, five common themes emerged. they were, in no particular order: content; production; time; engagement; and added value. each of these sections will now be explored. a selection of quotes will be used to represent each section. all quotes used are taken directly from the focus groups. content it’s all about content. if video is not delivering content i will find it in a book or somewhere else. it was evident from the focus groups that content had to be the main contributor of an educational video. however, upon deeper analysis it was found that content on its own was not sufficient to make a good video. rice and farmer educational videos – tell me what you want, what you really, really want journal of learning development in higher education, issue 10: november 2016 14 production the speaker was not looking towards the camera. the background was quite distracting, i sort of drifted. to be honest the first minute of him talking i would have closed it, it was the presenting style as well, he had his script in front of him, and it was not rehearsed well. i think the animation was good but the way they were speaking, i don’t think i could listen to that any longer than 2 minutes. i find that when it’s just someone talking on screen, i find it boring. these comments have been grouped together and themed under the heading 'production'. however, this section also incorporates 'distraction', as there were elements of the production which caused immense distraction to the students. in particular they were noticing the backgrounds, accents, clothes and general appearance of the presenter in minute detail. furthermore, a lot of attention and comments were made on how the message was put across and very few comments on the message itself. time i was picking the videos based on their lengths, i don’t think i would sit for the whole 16 minutes. it says ‘part one’, so i wonder how many parts there are? (group laughs) from the results witnessed in the questionnaire, it was interesting to note that overall, students perceived that videos of 5-10 minutes length were considered to be of the optimum length for an educational video. moreover, videos of 10-30 minutes length were considered better than videos of less than 5 minutes. students said that they would watch videos for 10 minutes or more, but when it came to reality, that was not always the case. rice and farmer educational videos – tell me what you want, what you really, really want journal of learning development in higher education, issue 10: november 2016 15 without complete motivation and engagement it was found that videos should definitely be no longer than 10 minutes. engagement it is pointless of watching something if all i am doing is listening. he was just reading slides which i could have done at home if i wanted to – i can read. it didn’t engage me. the interactivity of video did work for me. again it was evident that unless a student is engaged in the video, it will be very difficult for them to learn effectively from the video. it was discovered that a video can be rich in content without being effective if the video did not also engage the student. the students considered that they needed to be actively involved to be fully engaged with the video and not just be a passive observer with no involvement. moreover, the video had a negative impact if the student felt patronised, which was often the case if they were just being read to. added value i will watch a video as i think it should be more beneficial to me...otherwise i will read a book (which is my preference). if a lecturer recommended a video, i would watch it, but it would depend if it addressed which it needed to (same as book list). i would look, but it would have to be of benefit to me to keep watching all of it. it showed you. it is better going through examples. rice and farmer educational videos – tell me what you want, what you really, really want journal of learning development in higher education, issue 10: november 2016 16 i would watch an educational video as long as i feel it is showing me something. as with the results from the questionnaire, it was found that students wanted something extra from a video that they could not get from another resource. in particular, students wanted a practical example (i.e. to be shown something) which would have a more lasting impact on them than would be the case if they were simply told something. the themes identified informed the simple model below which was derived from the focus groups (see figure 2 below). figure 2. model to demonstrate themes from focus groups. at the base of the model, content has to be underlying. a video, however it engages students, must be fit for purpose and, ultimately, to provide students with the information they require. however, as already discovered, a video rich in content is not sufficient on its own. the goal of an educational video is to give the student something extra that they cannot get elsewhere or in another form. the video must provide added value, although it is not necessarily an easy step from content to added value. for that to happen a student must be engaged, and the time of the video and the production (and distractions) of the video will have an impact upon this. https://sites.google.com/site/pgcthepr/project-evaluation/results/picture4.png?attredirects=0 rice and farmer educational videos – tell me what you want, what you really, really want journal of learning development in higher education, issue 10: november 2016 17 discussion and reflections these results have shown that students at northampton overwhelmingly use educational videos for their studies. therefore it is even more important that these resources are fit for purpose. although not significant, the findings support the results of tang and austin (2009) by concluding videos are the preferred choice of resource for students. educational videos engage students which leads to an increase in student motivation and, consequently, attention. furthermore, bliss et al. (2013) found that teachers also reported that students were more engaged and interested in educational videos. one possible reason for this is that students equated watching an educational video with watching a television programme, and that is why there is a higher interest and engagement, which leads to an increase in motivation. however, this is still unclear and needs to be investigated further, which was beyond the scope of this paper. it was found in this study that the key strength, as perceived by students, of an educational video was the ability of the medium to provide visual examples. this result emphasised the work of dale (1969, cited atherton, 2013), who concluded that people generally remembered 50% of what they hear and see, compared to only 10% of what they read, and only 20% of what they hear. in addition, our results were consistent with many, but not all, of mayer's (2009) multimedia principles. although the principles were not specifically with video in mind, this research concurs with the following multimedia principles outlined by mayer. in particular, the segmenting principle, as this allows for user paced segments; the signalling principle, which gives learners cues to highlight essential material; the multimedia principle, which argues people learn better from words and pictures than from words alone; the temporal principle, where corresponding words and pictures are presented simultaneously; the personalisation principle, where voices are delivered in a conversational style; finally the coherence principle, where extraneous information is excluded. one principle which this research disagreed with was the image principle which suggests learners do not necessarily learn better from seeing the presenter on screen as opposed to a voice over. this research is in favour of seeing the presenter on screen in preference of a voice over with the caveat that it is done well. all remaining principles were either not applicable to this research or there was no preference for or against. in conclusion, students want something extra from a video that they cannot get from another resource. although high quality content has to be underlying, content alone is not rice and farmer educational videos – tell me what you want, what you really, really want journal of learning development in higher education, issue 10: november 2016 18 enough. students need to be engaged and, in order for that to happen, time and production are influencing factors. while a student perceives they are benefiting from a video they will continue to watch. therefore, when producing further videos at the uon, it is recommended that videos will be segmented into organised clear steps. key elements will be highlighted and audio and visual will be presented at the same time. when appropriate, visuals will be used to illustrate key points. the context of the video should be explained and the expectations of the learner should be managed and fulfilled. finally, a conversational tone should be used to engage the listener and the length of the video should be kept to a minimum. it is clear from the research that students at northampton were found to have a positive attitude towards videos. furthermore, the perceived importance of videos was higher than any other resource. despite this result, perceived confidence and perceived knowledge gained from videos were not significantly different to powerpoint or word documents. however, it must be remembered this was dealing with students’ perceptions, therefore it remains to be seen if the reality is any different. this goes beyond the scope of this study, hence further investigation is required to see if there are any correlations between perceptions and reality, and ultimately perceptions and learning achievement. therefore, regardless of the medium adopted, materials need to be designed appropriately for the delivery method, and this is maybe more important than the medium it is delivered in. tang and austin (2009, p.1243) argue that: it is not the technology, but the instructional implementation of the technology that contributes to learning effectiveness. it is important to investigate students' opinions regarding the technologies and the effective implementation of these technologies. by investigating students’ thoughts and perceptions, as this project has done, it can be seen that educational videos can be useful tools for students. furthermore, having an open design process – supported by pedagogical theory, a working knowledge of cognitive load theory and cognitive theory of multimedia learning, and input from students – can reduce the barriers for learners using educational videos. in turn, this can lead to a more learner-centred and decentralised approach, but before this can truly happen we must first ask the students what they want... what they really, really want. rice and farmer educational videos – tell me what you want, what you really, really want journal of learning development in higher education, issue 10: november 2016 19 acknowledgement this research is an extension of the work undertaken as part of the undergraduate research bursaries at northampton (urb@n) scheme. special thanks to nadach musungu for her assistance in conducting and transcribing the focus group and to rachel maunder for making the urb@n grant available. references atherton, j. (2013) learning and teaching; enactive, iconic, and symbolic levels of representation [online]. available at: http://www.learningandteaching.info/learning/dale-bruner.htm (accessed: 18 july 2014). bates, t. (2011) oers: the good, the bad and the ugly [online]. available at: http://www.tonybates.ca/2011/02/06/oers-the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly/ (accessed: 20 july 2014). bliss, t.j., robinson, j., hilton, j. and wiley, d.a. (2013) ‘an oer coup: college teacher and student perceptions of open educational resources’, journal of interactive media in education, 2013(4) [online]. available at: http://jime.open.ac.uk/article/view/252 (accessed: 20 july 2014). clark, r.c. and mayer, r. (2011) e-learning: and the science of instruction. 2nd edn. london: john wiley & sons. cooper, d. and higgins, s. (2014) ‘the effectiveness of online instructional videos in the acquisition and demonstration of cognitive, affective and psychomotor rehabilitation skills’, british journal of education technology, 46(4), pp. 768-779. creswell, j.w. (2009) research design: qualitative, quantitative, and mixed method approaches. 3rd edn. london: sage. http://www.learningandteaching.info/learning/dale-bruner.htm http://www.tonybates.ca/2011/02/06/oers-the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly/ http://jime.open.ac.uk/article/view/252 rice and farmer educational videos – tell me what you want, what you really, really want journal of learning development in higher education, issue 10: november 2016 20 hegarty, m., kriz, s. and cate, c. (2003) ‘the roles of mental animations and external animations in understanding mechanical systems’, cognition and instruction, 21(4), pp. 209-249. hilton iii, j.l., gaudet, d., clark, p., robinson, j. and wiley, d. (2013) ‘the adoption of open educational resources by one community college math department’, the international review of research in open and distance learning, 14(4) [online]. available at: http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/1523/2652 (accessed: 20 july 2014). ibrahim, m., antonenko, p., greenwood, c. and wheeler, d. (2012) ‘effects of segmenting, signalling, and weeding on learning from educational video’, learning, media and technology, 37(3), pp. 220-235. ibrahim, m., callaway, r. and bell, d. (2014) ‘assessing the effect of instructional video design on students’ learning outcome in an online technology integration course’, society for information technology & teacher education international conference. jacksonville, florida, usa 17-24 march, pp. 349-356. johnson, b. and christian, l.b. (2008) educational research: quantitative, qualitative, and mixed approaches. 3rd edn. london: sage. kannan, a. and baker, s. (2014) identifying presentation styles in online educational videos [online]. available at: http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/231796/videostyles.pdf (accessed: 19 june 2015). kay, r. (2012) ‘exploring the use of video podcasts in education: a comprehensive review of the literature’, computers in human behavior, 28(3), pp. 820-831. kay, r. and kletskin, i. (2012) ‘evaluating the use of problem-based video podcasts to teach mathematics in higher education’, computers & education, 59(2), pp. 619627. http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/1523/2652 http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/231796/videostyles.pdf rice and farmer educational videos – tell me what you want, what you really, really want journal of learning development in higher education, issue 10: november 2016 21 littlejohn, a., falconer, i. and mcgill, l. (2008) ‘characterising effective elearning resources’, computers & education, 50(3), pp. 757-771. lofland, j. and lofland, l.h. (1995) analyzing social settings: a guide to qualitative observation and analysis. belmont: wadsworth. macgillivray, h. and croft, t. (2011) ‘understanding evaluation of learning support in mathematics and statistics’, international journal of mathematical education in science and technology, 42(2), pp. 189-212. mayer, r.e. (2009) multimedia learning. new york: cambridge university press. mcgill, l., falconer, i., littlejohn, a. and beetham, h. (2013) jisc/he academy oer programme: phase 3 synthesis and evaluation report [online]. available at: https://oersynth.pbworks.com/w/page/59707964/ukoer3finalsynthesisreport (accessed: 21 june 2014). mcmillan, k. and weyers, j. (2007) how to write dissertations and project reports. pearson: harlow. moreno, r. and ortegano-layne, l. (2008) ‘do classroom exemplars promote the application of principles in teacher education? a comparison of videos, animations, and narratives’, educational technology and research development, 56(4), pp. 449-465. morrain, m. and swarts, j. (2011) ‘yoututorial: a framework for assessing instructional online video’, technical communication quarterly, 21(1), pp. 6-24. nikoi, s.k., rowlett, t., armellini, a. and witthaus, g. (2011) ‘corre: a framework for evaluating and transforming teaching materials into open educational resources’, open learning, 26(3), pp. 191-207. paas, f., gog, t. and sweller, j. (2010) ‘cognitive load theory: new conceptualizations, specifications, and integrated research perspectives’, educational psychology review, 22(2), pp. 115-121. https://oersynth.pbworks.com/w/page/59707964/ukoer3finalsynthesisreport rice and farmer educational videos – tell me what you want, what you really, really want journal of learning development in higher education, issue 10: november 2016 22 panke, s. and seufert, t. (2013) ‘what’s educational about open educational resources? different theoretical lenses for conceptualising learning with oer’, e-learning and digital media, 10(2), pp. 116-134. tang, t.l.p. and austin, m.j. (2009) ‘students’ perceptions of teaching technologies, application of technologies, and academic performance’, computers & education, 53(4), pp. 1241-1255. vieira, i., lopes, a. and soares, f. (2014) the potential benefits of using videos in higher education [online]. available at: http://recipp.ipp.pt/handle/10400.22/4853 (accessed: 19 august 2015). wiley, d. (2010) ‘openness as catalyst for an educational reformation’, educause review, 45(4), pp. 14-20. williams, k., kear, k., rosewell, j. and fereira, g. (2011) ‘incorporating quality assurance criteria for oer and social networking in the e-xcellence qa methodology’, 24th icde world conference, ‘expanding horizons’ – new approaches to open and distance learning. bali, indonesia 2-5 october [online]. available at: http://oro.open.ac.uk/30392/1/kw_icde_sub_pdf.pdf (accessed: 20 july 2014). youtube (2015) youtube press statistics [online]. available at: https://www.youtube.com/yt/press/ (accessed: 19 august 2015). author details paul rice is an academic practice tutor at the university of northampton. he has been in this job role for six years and oversees the mathematics and statistics provision and support. robert farmer works as a learning designer and as an academic practice tutor at the university of northampton. http://recipp.ipp.pt/handle/10400.22/4853 http://oro.open.ac.uk/30392/1/kw_icde_sub_pdf.pdf https://www.youtube.com/yt/press/ educational videos – tell me what you want, what you really, really want abstract introduction literature review methodology limitations results quantitative qualitative content production time engagement added value discussion and reflections acknowledgement references author details foreword foreword it seems very appropriate that the journal for learning development in higher education should devote a special edition to the theme of personal development planning (pdp). this collection of papers and research reports from universities in many parts of england comes from the national action research network’s recent project on ‘researching and evaluating personal development planning and e-portfolio practice’. those already familiar with pdp will be aware of the closeness of its principles to those of learning development. a key focus of much ld work is the growing understanding among students, as a result of their learning experiences, of the value of self-awareness. the systematic study and harnessing of these ideas can lead to great progress and success for students and teachers in their various learning roles. at its best, pdp serves this purpose. perhaps it would be appropriate to see pdp as a kind of ‘technology’ for learning which also encompasses collaborative values, as students become members of disciplinary and professional communities. for the existence of this special edition, we must first thank chris keenan from bournemouth university, whose inspiration it was. chris is an aldinhe steering group member and one of the regional lead members of the ntfs narn project. for the association for learning development in he, our decision to support the proposal also came from a wish to consolidate the collaborative approach adopted by the project and its many participants. this kind of practitioner-led initiative aligns well with our values as an association, and helps further the links we are developing with groups such as the cra and the narn. as editors of the jldhe we are delighted to present this special edition. we are confident that it will provide a much-needed enhancement to the evidence base for pdp and make a significant contribution to the understanding of pdp and e-portfolio practices in the he sector. in addition, it tells informative and constructive stories of a collaborative and supportive network of committed professionals. we believe that these stories show how ways of working across institutions and regions can evolve, and can lead to an inspiring example of a community of practice. john hilsdon and andy hagyard jldhe editors in addition to ourselves, the editorial team responsible for this special edition was: natalie bates, research assistant in the school of design, engineering and computing at bournemouth university and editorial consultant to the association for learning development in higher education (aldinhe) sue burkinshaw, head of learning enhancement and professional development, university of bolton and project leader for the higher education academy (hea), national teaching fellowships, ‘national action research network on researching and evaluating personal development planning and e-portfolio practice’ project peter hughes, senior lecturer in learning development, centre for educational development at the university of bradford christine keenan, learning and teaching fellow at bournemouth university and steering group member of the association for learning development in higher education (aldinhe) arti kumar, associate director of the centre for excellence in teaching and learning (cetl), and honorary visiting research fellow at the university of bedfordshire john peters, deputy head of academic development and practice and principal lecturer in higher education at the university of worcester and associate director for research with the centre for recording achievement and principal investigator for the national action research network on researching and evaluating pdp and e-portfolio practice janet strivens, educational developer at the university of liverpool and senior associate director of the cra rob ward, director of the centre for recording achievement (cra)   literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special edition: researching pdp practice, november 2010 the role of personal development planning (pdp) for employer sponsored students – an exploration of how pdp learning activities can support cpd and workforce development requirements julie savory university of salford, uk carole conroy university of salford, uk donna berwick university of salford, uk abstract over the past decade government policy has emphasised the need for effective and active partnerships between employers and higher education providers (dfes, 2003; wedgewood, 2007; cbi, 2008; bis, 2009) to meet the requirements of a globalised knowledge economy. this paper discusses the findings from a research project undertaken at the university of salford which sought to explore how: • personal development planning (pdp) input can support the development of employability skills for part-time sponsored students. • employer engagement could be drawn upon to enhance such provision. informed by the appreciative inquiry approach (cooperrider 1986, cited reed, 2007), the methodology included a questionnaire survey of two student cohorts and thirteen semistructured interviews with organisational development managers from sponsoring organisations to explore perceptions of the value of pdp within day release provision and potential benefits to the organisation. a follow up focus group with employers explored further staff development needs and the potential for pdp processes within higher education (he) courses to complement their existing continuing professional development (cpd) and in-house staff and workforce development strategies. savory, conroy and berwick the role of personal development planning (pdp) for employer sponsored students the paper concludes that dialogue between academic staff, students and sponsoring employers is valuable in developing shared understandings of the role of pdp activities within he curriculum, the potential benefits for individual professional development and the workforce development requirements of organisations. employers participating in the research stressed the importance of ‘functioning knowledge’ (biggs 2003, cited walsh, 2008) and discussions highlighted the potential for pdp to provide a bridge between the discipline specific knowledge which forms the main focus of he courses and the transdisciplinary knowledge produced by the largely informal learning that occurs during the course of professional practice (gibbons et al., 1964). the joint dialogue enabled exploration of perceptions of the difference between cpd and pdp and identification of how links between pdp and appraisal processes in the workplace could be strengthened, including suggestions for practical activities which could be incorporated into he programmes and employers’ performance review processes. key words: personal development planning (pdp); continuous professional development (cpd); workforce development; functioning knowledge; mode 2 knowledge; appreciative inquiry. introduction traditionally higher education (he) provision has focused on the production and transmission of academic knowledge linked to specific subject disciplines. such knowledge was designated mode 1 knowledge by gibbons et al in 1994, who proposed that in a modern knowledge economy, a different but no less valid type of knowledge (mode 2) is produced outside universities when theoretical discipline specific (mode 1) knowledge is applied in the workplace. gibbons et al. (1994, p.33) proposed that this mode 2 knowledge supplements mode 1 knowledge but is also different in that it has the potential to be trans-disciplinary, being ‘produced in the context of application’. biggs (2003 cited walsh, 2008) argues that effective learning for the workplace requires the development of ‘functioning knowledge’, which consists of declarative knowledge (theoretical), procedural knowledge (the skills to apply knowledge) and conditional knowledge (awareness of appropriate circumstances in which to apply the declarative and procedural knowledge). similarly, knight and yorke (2004) and yorke and harvey (2005) suggest that employability is a complex construct consisting of a combination of journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 2 savory, conroy and berwick the role of personal development planning (pdp) for employer sponsored students understanding, skilful practices, efficacy beliefs and meta-cognition (usem). in a rapidly changing economy and society, trans-disciplinary knowledge (egan, 2004) and ‘generative learning’ to enhance creativity (senge,1990, p.14) are increasingly important to enable organisations to tackle complex, multi-dimensional and frequently unpredictable issues, and adapt swiftly to meet new challenges and opportunities to remain competitive with regard to both product provision and customer service (harrison, 2005). during the past decade, understandings of what a university education should entail have moved from a traditionalist approach of induction into an academic discipline, to a combination of enterprise and progressive understandings (trowler, 2006). these respectively emphasise preparation for work and the development of the individual (trowler, 2006). by 2005/6 a sector-wide agreement sought to encourage all higher education institutions (heis) to provide structured and supported opportunities for students to engage in personal development planning (pdp) (qaa, 2001).the main driver of this was the recommendation of the national committee of inquiry into higher education (dearing, 1997) that students need to be able to plan and review to continually enhance their learning and articulate the knowledge, skills and competencies they have gained from their he experience to convince future employers of their employability. discussion of the literature the main emphasis of existing literature on employers, pdp and employability skills is on the long reiterated concern that traditional undergraduates are not able to articulate the skills and attributes they have developed whilst studying for a degree and/or are unable to demonstrate capability in the key graduate attributes sought by employers (edwards, 2005; little et al., 2005; yorke, 2009). literature on employees undertaking higher level learning concentrates on the emerging trend towards work-based learning and the pedagogies required (hea, 2008). the literature has not yet explored the needs of sponsored students on day release programmes and their employers. workforce development consists of activities which increase the capacity of individuals to participate effectively in the workplace, thereby improving their productivity and employability (dfes, 2003). harrison (2005) contends that the emergence of a new knowledge economy in which the application of knowledge adds more value to the journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 3 savory, conroy and berwick the role of personal development planning (pdp) for employer sponsored students organisation than more traditional factors, for example, labour, has implications for organisational development. organisations wishing to succeed need to develop workforce capability so that learning enables the application of new knowledge to continuous improvement and innovation. research (cipd, 2001) suggests that people are motivated when they have the necessary knowledge and skills to perform well and when they are given the opportunity to use their skills in their jobs. furthermore, soltani et al. (2004) conclude that the main purpose of human resource (hr) performance evaluation in a quality-focused organisation should be to help employees to improve their performance rather than performance control. as part of the performance management cycle, a broad ranging appraisal discussion which aims to motivate appraisees should emphasise future oriented action planning and continuing development. this triggers a process of pdp, action and review (harrison 2005). increasingly importance is placed by professional bodies upon the need for their members to engage in reflective activities as part of their cpd (including the chartered institute of housing and the institution of occupational safety and health). in 2004, egan concluded that discrete professional and occupational technical skills and knowledge training would not be enough to generate the trans-disciplinary knowledge, understanding and skills required to create a joined up approach to tackling the complex, multi-dimensional and frequently unpredictable issues found in planning, maintaining and managing sustainable environments and communities. subsequently, the academy for sustainable communities (2007; 2008) asserted that professionals, in addition to being able to understand how their day-to-day activities contribute to the broader agenda and keeping abreast of new knowledge, need to be willing to try out new ways of working and to operate within a values framework which enables them to assess the implications of how they deploy their skills and knowledge, and to justify the decisions that they make. the research context the research project was undertaken at the university of salford as part of the national action research network on researching and evaluating personal development planning and e-portfolio practice (peters et al., 2009). in the academic year 2004/05, pdp learning activities had been embedded within an accredited academic learning skills module in the journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 4 savory, conroy and berwick the role of personal development planning (pdp) for employer sponsored students undergraduate housing practice course undertaken by part-time employer-sponsored students. the pdp provision includes a student pdp handbook with prompts to facilitate reflection on progress in academic skills and career development; progress reviews with a personal tutor; reflective commentaries on progress and development of academic and professional skills. in 2005/06, an evaluation was undertaken to establish if, when compared to extra-curricular approaches, embedding pdp within an accredited module resulted in better engagement with the process. fifteen housing practice students participated in two focus groups in which a recurring theme was that the pdp support materials need to be tailored to meet the needs of different types of student cohort. however, the majority had valued support provided by a personal tutor with thirteen positive comments on the value of such support for confidence building, discussing assignment feedback, and for planning and setting targets (savory, 2008). subsequent end of module evaluations have found over 50% of students continuing to question the relevance of the pdp learning activities for part-time mature employer-sponsored students. student concerns are that some elements ‘are irrelevant for students who already work in their chosen career’ and that it ‘duplicates reviews in the workplace’ and ‘takes up time that could be used on core subjects. in contrast, in july 2010 the professional practitioner external examiner for the foundation degree in housing practice commented in his annual report that ‘i consider the programme to be well designed, reflecting a diverse range of housing and housing-related material but also focusing, through group work and reflective assignments, the opportunity for self-development. this holistic approach to housing, within a wider social, regeneration and political context, is essential’. the research project sought to build upon existing positives in provision by engaging with sponsoring employers to establish their views on the value of the inclusion of pdp learning activities in helping to meet their staff development requirements. it is anticipated that increased recognition by sponsoring employers will increase the perceived value of such activities with students. methodology the framework for the research was informed by the appreciative inquiry (ai) methodology (cooperrider 1986, cited reed, 2007). rather than focusing on a problem-solving journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 5 savory, conroy and berwick the role of personal development planning (pdp) for employer sponsored students approach to what doesn’t work, the ai approach seeks to identify, from the perspective of different stakeholders, what aspects of a situation work well and to explore how these can be built upon to enhance existing approaches (cooperrider and whitney, 2005). hence it has an emphasis on developing positive relationships between different stakeholders (cousin, 2008). an ai approach involves working through the four ds of discovery, dream, design and delivery (cooperrider and whitney, 2005). this research project covered the first two stages. the discovery stage involved identifying what aspects of current activities and materials to support pdp were felt to be of value by students and their sponsoring employers. building on comments made by students in the discovery stage, the dream stage concentrated on seeking to develop a shared vision with sponsoring employers about how pdp activities could be effectively developed to help meet anticipated staff development outcomes (lewis et al., 2008). at the discovery stage, a structured questionnaire was administered to two 2008/09 cohorts of students. one cohort was in the second year of the foundation degree in housing practice, the other was studying for a msc in occupational safety and health (osh).the questionnaire sought to seek views on the links between their continuing professional development (cpd) needs and the pdp activities included within their course. seventeen out of thirty questionnaires were returned by the foundation degree in housing practice students and five out of thirteen questionnaires were returned by the msc in osh students. the questionnaire was administered towards the end of the academic year and response rates were affected by difficulties in following up nonresponses from students who had little physical contact with the university during the vacation period. response rates may also have been affected by a lack of engagement with the existing pdp provision. the questionnaire included a combination of questions which required a yes/no answer and open-ended questions to generate qualitative data, providing deeper insight into perceptions. in addition thirteen semi-structured interviews were undertaken with sponsoring employers with a view to finding out what staff development outcomes were sought, if they were aware of the pdp input on the programmes their employees were undertaking, and if they felt it was of value. ten were from sponsoring social housing organisations, of which four were line mangers with operational responsibility for delivery of housing services and six journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 6 savory, conroy and berwick the role of personal development planning (pdp) for employer sponsored students were organisational development managers with responsibility for ensuring appropriate staff development provision is in place to meet the requirements of the organisation. three representatives from organisations sponsoring students on the msc were interviewed. they were all operational managers responsible for health and safety issues in local government or the nhs. the student questionnaire and the semi-structured interview schedule for sponsoring employers were informed by findings from the literature review, from issues raised in a previous evaluation of pdp provision (savory, 2008), and insights into employer concerns drawn from the researchers’ experience of liaising with sponsoring employers as programme leaders. the interview schedule for sponsoring employers was piloted with an employer representative and minor adjustments to question phrasing made. the student questionnaire was piloted with a colleague in the student support service but timing constraints prohibited piloting it with students. deeper insights into student perceptions would have been gained through interviews or focus groups but this option was ruled out due to constraints of the academic year and practical difficulties of bringing together students from a large regional catchment area who only attended the university one day per week. to facilitate further exploration of employers’ views and to begin engaging in a process of ‘sense making’ and developing shared understandings, as well as starting to identify practical suggestions for developing current practice, a follow-up focus group session was held with five sponsoring employer representatives. the activities and discussion prompts used were informed by an initial review of the data collected from the employer interviews and student questionnaire. reflection in action within the focus group enabled discussion prompts to be adjusted to respond to points being raised. this resulted in participants being asked to brainstorm and rank the top six competencies they sought from employees, helping to focus discussion on how pdp activities could support the development of the competencies. following transcription, qualitative and quantitative responses from the questionnaire, interviews and focus group were analysed for themes. these are summarised in the following section. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 7 savory, conroy and berwick the role of personal development planning (pdp) for employer sponsored students findings to show the progression through the ai framework, the findings will be presented using the discovery and dream stages of the ai framework. discovery student views the analysis of the student questionnaires found that increased knowledge and confidence in dealing with service users, peers and managers, plus potential for career enhancement, were the main goals for students taking the courses. all respondents felt they had developed a greater understanding of subject knowledge which in turn had increased their confidence, with seven of the foundation degree students having changed their job role whilst on the course. fifteen commented that their understanding of their role within their organisation and the role of their organisation in a wider context had been increased. unexpected gains identified by students were building self-esteem and, for some, mapping where they are and planning for achievement of further ambitions. when asked about the overall value of the pdp process, on a likert scale of one to ten (one is very useful and ten useless), the majority of responses for both cohorts fell in the lower intervals between six and eight, with just one undergraduate student finding the process very useful. a common theme illustrated by this quote is that ‘it is not very useful as unable to implement the aims and objectives with my employment, as pdps are not regular and not linked…if it was, i would definitely benefit from this more’. another student commented ‘i currently don’t have a pdp action plan so unable to use a lot of skills from the course and put knowledge into practice’. five positive comments were made regarding the value of the process all of which indicated that for some students it had enabled them to make changes and transfer learning to other situations – ‘this has enabled me to reflect on my ways of working and how i can improve this…i apply experiences to other situations which has assisted my development’. there was limited identification of links between workplace cpd and appraisal processes and pdp undertaken as part of the university course. comments included ‘i’ve never been asked about it at work’ and ‘some issues are mirrored, some not’. pdp on the course was seen as focusing on transferable personal skills and competencies whereas cpd in the journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 8 savory, conroy and berwick the role of personal development planning (pdp) for employer sponsored students workplace was felt to have more of a focus on professional practice and training. where links were identified, they were more about practical issues such as not having to attend other courses, availability of study leave and payment of university expenses. a strong theme was that the process of developing applied practical skills, such as oral and written communication and ict, which could then be transferred to the workplace, was the best way of supporting their personal and professional development. one student commented that the practical approach suited her style of learning. with regard to the value of pdp activities and resources in supporting work related cpd requirements, the following feedback was received. twelve of the undergraduate students valued the support provided by a personal tutor which was felt to build confidence, provide reassurance and an opportunity to clarify issues about the course, and seek advice and guidance, in some cases about career development. one student felt such support could be enhanced by linking it to an action plan agreed by tutor, student and employer. only a very small minority of students (three of the undergraduate respondents) felt the student pdp diary supported their work-related cpd, commenting that it helped to develop reflective skills and was useful for recording achievements. the majority did not make use of it as it was not a formal course requirement. suggestions for making it more beneficial were closer content link with sponsoring employers’ pdp documents, making it paperless and accessible through the virtual learning environment (vle), and using it in meetings with a personal tutor to review progress. writing reflective commentaries was viewed as useful by four out of five of the postgraduate students and nine out of seventeen of the undergraduate students. the postgraduate students were fairly pragmatic, clearly identifying a link with the requirements of the professional body. positive statements from the undergraduate students included ‘makes me think back to what went well, what didn’t, what and how things could be improved’, with one student suggesting the potential for links with their workplace personal development review. sponsoring employers’ views the semi-structured interviews with employer representatives explored • the rationale for sponsoring students. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 9 savory, conroy and berwick the role of personal development planning (pdp) for employer sponsored students • whether the anticipated staff development outcomes were being achieved. • employer awareness of pdp input on courses. • employer views on its value. all thirteen employers interviewed identified the workplace appraisal or personal development review (pdr) process as the means by which decisions to send students on sponsored day release courses were made. the reasons for sponsoring students were varied with some interviewees emphasising the importance of subject and technical knowledge, others emphasising organisational needs such as reputation, staff retention and meeting business strategy to provide excellent services, and others more concerned with competencies and behaviours. a common theme was the need for organisational benefits as well as individual staff development. all employer respondents initially stressed the importance of subject and technical knowledge and the ability to ‘step back’ and see ‘the bigger picture’. this could be equated with the mode 1 knowledge which gibbons et al. (1964) proposed was the traditional form of knowledge created with he. however, when probed further, respondents commented on the need to meet the business strategy and provide continuously improving services, with seven noting that this in addition required a focus on competencies and behaviours and an ability to apply knowledge in a skilful way appropriate to the circumstances. one respondent commented it is ‘not just housing law, it’s how you deal with that difficult customer without creating more issues from it…they need to be able to think about what their impact would be in a real life situation’. another stated ‘for me, it is not just the technical knowledge…it’s the core fundamentals i’m interested in: how to work as a team, how to communicate within a team, how to respect everybody, are they creative, can they think of new ways of doing things’. similar comments included: it is important to be able to use knowledge to shape how they manage and perform on a day to day basis. advanced problem-solving and analytical skills were identified as important: they need to be able to think…to deal with ‘messy’ housing management issues. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 10 savory, conroy and berwick the role of personal development planning (pdp) for employer sponsored students [they need] confidence, self-awareness and enhanced knowledge to be able to respond appropriately in residents’ meetings or business meetings where they could be put on the spot by other agencies or senior managers. enhanced communication and interpersonal skills and an ability to transfer knowledge and learning to the workplace. [to be able] to think what am i doing, why am i doing it, what have i got from it, how am i going to use it? to be able to engage with the profession at a higher level than before. these comments link with the concept of mode 2 knowledge which, according to gibbons et al. (1994), is developed from the skilful application of mode 1 knowledge; the concept of ‘functioning knowledge’ put forward by biggs in 2003; and with knight and yorke’s (2004) usem framework for understanding the complexity of employability. generally all respondents felt that the staff development outcomes were being met, as the sponsored students were able to independently manage projects, take on more responsibility, engage at a different level, and progress within the organisation. the established reputation of the university for professionally accredited provision was identified, with eight of the respondents indicating scope for further development of the dialogue between the university and sponsoring employers to provide better connection between sponsored employees’ studies and the workplace. one organisational development manager commented ‘there can be a lack of knowledge on part of the employer about what sponsored students are studying…and this means that the line manager won’t utilise the knowledge and skills developed’. another commented ‘we are not very good internally at following up learning being undertaken by sponsored employees…we need to be thinking about asking them how they are going to do things differently’. none of the respondents were aware of the pdp element of the courses, however, all bar one respondent thought that activities supporting the pdp process had the potential to be useful or extremely useful. there was general agreement that there was scope for pdp provision to support appraisals and pdrs in the workplace and that it could support the journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 11 savory, conroy and berwick the role of personal development planning (pdp) for employer sponsored students good practice of a learning organisation (senge, 1990) and the achievement of organisational goals. comments included: useful for encouraging reflection and taking stock…a great way to embed learning into the workplace. if a career development plan could be agreed through their academic work it could provide a kind of bridge. two line managers felt that the pdp support materials provided by the university could be used by themselves as managers to provide more focused support for the students they sponsor and gain more insight into their ongoing progress on the course. focus group findings five employers from the social rented housing sector attended the two and a half hour focus group session (three operational managers and two organisational development managers). themes resulting from the interviews were reiterated. the first activity which required participants to define and differentiate between pdp and cpd revealed an initial lack of clarity about the difference. following discussion, a consensus was reached that pdp is about personal ownership of ones own learning and development with the focus on ‘how’ the employee works. in contrast, cpd focuses on ‘what’ role the employee has and the training, knowledge, and qualifications required to undertake the role and maintain professional currency. the ensuing discussion confirmed that sponsoring employers often have little knowledge of the learning activities their sponsored employees are engaged in. there was a perception that cpd provision is often rather ad hoc but with an increasing trend to link cpd with performance management. a further exercise encouraged participants to explore cpd from the perspective of a student being sponsored to undertake an he course. participants identified that to optimise the benefits there would need to be shared understanding and clarity about the roles and responsibilities of the employee and employer, and support to enable both parties to see the benefits for the organisation and personal development of the employee. in a discussion of how employers could facilitate staff optimising the benefits from cpd activities, it was felt that there needed to be discussion of cpd at regular performance journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 12 savory, conroy and berwick the role of personal development planning (pdp) for employer sponsored students reviews with a focus on ‘what have i learnt not what have i done’ – a discussion about how academic learning will impact on and influence working practices rather than a tick list of different topics studied. there was recognition that sponsored employees will want help to make the link between theory and practice and that reflection would help build confidence and a recognition of ‘distance travelled’ on the part of the employee by both employee and employer. dream stage to start to identify how to build upon existing practice in personal and professional development, the focus group participants identified and prioritised the top six core competencies they required in employees. these were: communication; influencing/negotiation; team working; assertiveness; sensitivity/emotional intelligence and an ability to self-manage and act autonomously. in addition to practical opportunities to develop competencies, such as participating in group work, debates, mock interviews and delivering oral presentations, a number of suggestions for enhancing reflective learning activities and assessments were suggested: • module assessment could include a section requiring students to identify what they will take back to the workplace to share with colleagues or to influence or change their own practice. • students could write a reflective report, as if for their sponsoring employer, as an assignment, or could be asked to identify points from their reflection which they would like to share with their employer. prompts for the reflective commentary would be: what have you learnt? how may you use it in the workplace and what support may you need to do so? • as an exercise students could be required to identify a workplace situation where they had to influence or negotiate or give a difficult message, and reflect on how they did it, what went well and what didn’t. • students examine the core competencies sought by their sponsoring organisation and reflect on their strengths and identify actions they could take to strengthen their performance in competencies in which they felt less strong. • students examine filmed scenarios and discuss ‘why has someone done this?’ to help develop an ability to see other dimensions and perspectives on an issue. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 13 savory, conroy and berwick the role of personal development planning (pdp) for employer sponsored students the focus group participants also identified that their own practices with regard to support and performance review processes could be enhanced to maximise the benefits for the organisation and sponsored students. there was discussion about providing more support over and above funding and time off work and of the need for strengthening of links between employer review processes and students’ reflection and engagement in a process of pdp. a key moment was when one participant stated that she would be changing practice in forthcoming pdrs to include a discussion, not just of what topics had been studied but also to ask ‘what have you learnt and how will it impact on your practice?’. amongst the employer participants in the focus group there was a general view that engaging in a dialogue with course tutors had been very valuable in helping develop a shared understanding of what outcomes were sought from sponsored study and how employers and the course team could work together to support students’ achievement. discussion and conclusion the research project sought to explore how pdp input can support sponsored students’ cpd and the staff development requirements of their employers. the findings indicate that sponsoring employers place considerable emphasis on subject and technical knowledge but at the same time refer to the need for students to be able to problem solve and act autonomously in unpredictable complex situations, in line with the concept of functioning knowledge (biggs, 2003). all the employers taking part in the study felt that employees undertaking sponsored study engaged at a higher level with the profession and undertook enhanced roles and responsibilities in the workplace. however, the findings suggest that little thought had previously been given by employers to how they could ensure that sponsoring employees on the chosen programme of study would help meet their workforce development requirements. prior to taking part in the research, there was a lack of awareness of the existence of pdp learning activities within the curriculum with a ‘knowledge transmission’ view of higher education prevailing. following discussion with programme leaders through the interviews and focus group activities, there was a general endorsement of the potential of pdp activities to be extremely useful and help provide a bridge between theory and practice. it was perceived that the greater self-awareness that engagement in reflection generates, especially when linked to a pdp process of review, journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 14 savory, conroy and berwick the role of personal development planning (pdp) for employer sponsored students reflect and identification of actions to enhance or adapt practice, can help to establish an approach to professional and work-based practice development that mutually benefits the individual employee and the sponsoring organisation. engagement in a dialogue between the programme leaders undertaking the research and sponsoring employers was catalytic in developing increased insight and suggestions for improving practice for both parties. for the employers taking part, increased understanding of the inclusion of pdp activities led to discussion and the generation of ideas of how aligning these activities with their own appraisal and pdr processes could result in added value for the organisation being gained from their investment in employees’ cpd. for the programme leaders, better understanding of sponsoring employers’ priorities, for example, with regard to the key competencies, will inform future curriculum development and strengthen the guidance they are able to provide to sponsored students about how engaging with pdp processes can lead to more effective use in the workplace of the knowledge and skills gained on the course. the joint discussion also helped to identify practical suggestions for learning activities which could facilitate better linkage between the he provider, the sponsoring employer and the employee. a future evaluation of the impact of introducing such activities would help to evidence the potential of pdp processes to provide a bridge between traditional mode 1 knowledge and the functioning knowledge required in the workplace. maintaining ongoing dialogue with sponsoring employers through the establishment of a regular liaison forum will help to develop and nurture the suggestions made for closer linkage between programme pdp and organisations’ cpd processes. opportunities for the student voice to feed into these discussions should be included. future developments could include development of e-portfolio resources accessible through a virtual learning environment which sponsored students could adapt to meet the requirements of their academic course and to feed into workplace appraisal and pdr processes. this would help to overcome the concern raised by students that there was little identification of links between their workplace cpd and pdp undertaken as part of the he studies. similarly, three-way learning agreements established at the start of a course between sponsored employee, employer and programme tutors could help to increase shared understandings and clarity about how each party can contribute to ensuring knowledge gained will enhance the functioning knowledge required for successful organisational performance. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 15 savory, conroy and berwick the role of personal development planning (pdp) for employer sponsored students an overarching conclusion is that providing opportunities for a joint dialogue between employers and he providers is very valuable in developing shared understandings of the outcomes sought by employers from sponsored study and in identifying opportunities for greater collaboration to ensure that the added value potential in terms of enhancing functional knowledge to improve organisational performance can be achieved. acknowledgement this paper is an outcome of the national action research network on researching and evaluating personal development planning and e-portfolio practice project (2007-2010). the project was led by the university of bolton in association with the university of worcester and centre for recording achievement, and in national collaboration with the university of bedfordshire, bournemouth university and university of bradford. the project was funded by the higher education academy, national teaching fellowship project strand. more details about the project can be found at: http://www.recordingachievement.org/research/narn-tree.html. references academy for sustainable communities (2007) mind the skills gap. available at: http://www.ascskills.org.uk/pages/research/mind-the-skills-gap (accessed: 11 may 2009). academy for sustainable communities (2008) a values framework for sustainable communities. leeds : academy for sustainable communities. biggs, j. (2003) teaching for quality learning at university. maidenhead: society for research into higher education and open university press. bis (2009) higher ambitions: the future of universities in a knowledge economy. available at: http://bis.gov.uk/wp-content/uploads/publications/higher-ambitions-summary.pdf (accessed: 7 january 2010). journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 16 http://www.recordingachievement.org/research/narn-tree.html http://www.ascskills.org.uk/pages/research/mind-the-skills-gap http://bis.gov.uk/wp-content/uploads/publications/higher-ambitions-summary.pdf savory, conroy and berwick the role of personal development planning (pdp) for employer sponsored students cbi (2008) stepping higher: workforce development through employer-higher education partnerships. available at: http://www.cbi.org.uk/pdf/cbi-steppinghigher.pdf (accessed: 12 may 2009). cipd (2001) the change agenda: performance through people – the new people management. london: cipd. cooperrider, d.l. and whitney, d. (2005) appreciative inquiry: a positive revolution in change. san francisco,ca: berrett-kohler publishers. cousin,g (2008) researching learning in higher education. london:routledge. dearing, r. (1997) national committee of inquiry into higher education. available at: http://www.leeds.ac.uk/educol/ncihe/ (accessed : 30 november 2008). department for education and skills (dfes) (2003) 21st century skills. realising our potential: individuals, employers, nation. london: hmso. available at: http://www.dcsf.gov.uk/skillsstrategy/uploads/documents/21st%20century%20skills .pdf (accessed: 20 january 2009). edwards, g. (2005) connecting pdp to employer need and the world of work. hea. available at: http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/assets/york/documents/resources/resourcedatabase/i d71_connecting_pdp_to_employer_needs.pdf (accessed: 9 april 2010). egan, j. (2004) skills for sustainable communities. available at: http://www.communities.gov.uk/publications/communities/eganreview (accessed: 30 november 2008). gibbons, m., limoges, c., nowotny, h.,schwartzman,s., scott,p.,trow,m. (1994) the new production of knowledge: the dynamics of science and research in contemporary societies. london: sage. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 17 http://www.cbi.org.uk/pdf/cbi-steppinghigher.pdf http://www.leeds.ac.uk/educol/ncihe/ http://www.dcsf.gov.uk/skillsstrategy/uploads/documents/21st%20century%20skills.pdf http://www.dcsf.gov.uk/skillsstrategy/uploads/documents/21st%20century%20skills.pdf http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/assets/york/documents/resources/resourcedatabase/id71_connecting_pdp_to_employer_needs.pdf http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/assets/york/documents/resources/resourcedatabase/id71_connecting_pdp_to_employer_needs.pdf http://www.communities.gov.uk/publications/communities/eganreview savory, conroy and berwick the role of personal development planning (pdp) for employer sponsored students harrison, r. (2005) learning and development. london: chartered institute of personnel and development. hea (2008) work-based learning. workforce development: connections, frameworks and processes. available at: http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/assets/york/documents/workforce_development.pdf (accessed: 9 april 2010). knight, p. and yorke, m. (2004) learning, curriculum and employability in higher education. london: routledgefalmer. lewis, s., passmore, j. and cantore, s. (2008) appreciative inquiry for change management. london: kogan page. little, b. and esect colleagues (2005) ‘employability and work-based learning’, learning and employability, series one, esect/hea [online]. available at: http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/assets/york/documents/ourwork/tla/employability/id11 4_employability_and_work-based_learning_591.pdf (accessed: 28 may 2009). peters, j., burkinshaw, s., hughes, p., keenan, c., kumar, a. and ward, r. (2009) ‘building research capacity in a practitioner network: the national action research network on researching and evaluating personal development planning and eportfolio’, assessment, learning and teaching journal (leeds metropolitan university), 5 (spring), pp. 23-25. quality assurance agency for higher education (qaa) (2001) guidelines for he progress files. available at: http://www.qaa.ac.uk/academicinfrastructure/progressfiles/guidelines/progfile2001.p df (accessed: 30 november 2008). reed, j. (2007) appreciative inquiry: research for change. london: sage. savory, j. (2008) ‘an evaluation of the impact of embedding personal development planning’, in o’doherty, e. (ed) papers from the fourth education in a changing journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 18 http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/assets/york/documents/workforce_development.pdf http://www.qaa.ac.uk/academicinfrastructure/progressfiles/guidelines/progfile2001.pdf http://www.qaa.ac.uk/academicinfrastructure/progressfiles/guidelines/progfile2001.pdf savory, conroy and berwick the role of personal development planning (pdp) for employer sponsored students environment international conference. california: informing science press,pp.263282. senge, p. (1990) the fifth discipline: the art and practice of the learning organisation. london: random house. soltani, e., van der meer, r.b., gennard, f. and williams, m.t. (2004) ‘have tqm organisations adjusted their performance management (appraisal) systems? a study of uk-based tqm-driven organisations’, the tqm magazine, 16(6), pp. 403417. trowler, p. (2006) ‘teaching and learning regimes in higher education: illuminating enhancement efforts’, education in a changing environment conference. university of salford 12-13 january. walsh, a. (2008) ‘what is distinctive about work-based knowledge and learning?’, in workbased learning. workforce development: connections, frameworks and processes. hea, p.8-17 [online]. available at: http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/assets/york/documents/workforce_development.pdf (accessed: 30 november 2009). wedgewood, m. (2007) employer engagement: higher education for theworkforce. barriers and facilitators the results of a survey for the dfes. london: department for education and skills. yorke, m. and harvey, l. (2005) ‘graduate attributes and their development’, new directions for institutional research, vol 2005 (128), pp. 41-58 [online]. available at: http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/112221264/issue (accessed: 30 june 2010). yorke, m. (ed.) (2009) personal development planning and employability (revised edition).york: hea [online]. available at: http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/assets/york/documents/ourwork/employability/pdp_a nd_employability_jan_2009.pdf (accessed: 27 may 2009). journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 19 http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/assets/york/documents/workforce_development.pdf http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/112221264/issue http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/assets/york/documents/ourwork/employability/pdp_and_employability_jan_2009.pdf http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/assets/york/documents/ourwork/employability/pdp_and_employability_jan_2009.pdf savory, conroy and berwick the role of personal development planning (pdp) for employer sponsored students author details julie savory is the research project leader and is a senior lecturer in housing and regeneration at the university of salford. julie is also the faculty pdp co-ordinator and is programme leader for the fdsc housing practice (j.savory@salford.ac.uk). carole conroy is a senior lecturer in occupational safety and health at the university of salford and is programme leader for the msc occupational safety and health. donna berwick is the skills and recognition team manager and student life directorate at the university of salford. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 20 mailto:j.savory@salford.ac.uk the role of personal development planning (pdp) for employer sponsored students – an exploration of how pdp learning activities can support cpd and workforce development requirements abstract introduction discussion of the literature the research context methodology findings   discovery student views sponsoring employers’ views focus group findings dream stage discussion and conclusion acknowledgement references author details microsoft word fulton & hayes v4 final.docx journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 11: april 2017 evaluating retrospective experiential learning as process in scholarship on a work based professional doctorate john fulton university of sunderland, uk catherine hayes university of sunderland, uk abstract acknowledging retrospective experiential learning as a unique contribution to knowledge in the context of the workplace is the fundamental focus of the work-based professional doctorate. this report details an evaluation of a ‘second generation’ professional doctorate programme. the programme provides a mechanism for both learning development and the acknowledgement and development of pre-existing, disciplinespecific, professional practice. evaluation was used as a means of highlighting how the theory-praxis gap might be bridged via translational knowledge construction. semistructured interviews were undertaken with eleven doctoral candidates to explore their experiences and perceptions of the programme. the interviews were then transcribed and thematically analysed during which a “base superstructure model” was identified. this model identified the underpinning skills of critical reflection, investigation and adaptive capacity necessary to inform and facilitate the research phase of the professional doctorate programme. the facilitation and upskilling of doctoral candidates in the use of emergent technology was identified as the basis for the development of professional and academic practice. the role of the doctoral supervisor, as a facilitator of the development of these skills, was also established as pivotal to learning development for doctoral candidates; in terms of developing their ‘base super-structure’ to become independent, reflective and adaptive learners. keywords: work-based learning; learning development; practice-based research; professional doctorate. fulton and hayes evaluating retrospective experiential learning as process in scholarship on a work based professional doctorate journal of learning development in higher education, issue 11: april 2017 2 introduction the work-based professional doctorate is a mechanism of acknowledging the proactive, and often longstanding, contribution to professional practice that mature doctoral candidates have made. the professional doctorate has an equivalency with the traditional doctor of philosophy (phd), which is more appropriately equipped to meet the requirements of everyday professional practice (lester, 2004). higher education institutions (heis) across the united kingdom (uk) have experienced a significant rise in demand for practice-based or professional doctorate programmes, with a particular and emphatic focus on work-based professional practice (costley and stephenson, 2007). this study represents the evaluation of initial student experience across a professional doctorate pathway. it was undertaken with the aim of identifying the key challenges candidates perceived in their learning journeys. background recognition that diverse arrays of doctoral programmes are available, both nationally and internationally, is well established (fulton et al., 2012; gill and hoppe, 2009). in the uk, the professional doctorate has gained increasing popularity since the mid-1990s. the title of professional doctorate encompasses a range of programmes, many of which are discipline or subject specific. these titles acknowledge professional identity in their title, for example: ‘doctor of engineering’, ‘doctor of education’ or ‘doctor of nursing’. a further classification of professional doctorate, which maxwell (2003) seminally termed ‘the second generation’ professional doctorate, integrates the acknowledgement of pre-existing experiential learning with the concept of professional practice (this now will be referred to as the ‘work-based professional doctorate’). the work-based professional doctorate essentially transcends professional boundaries by focusing on the context of professional practice; since, in the world of work, professional boundaries are often intangibly blurred. fulton and hayes evaluating retrospective experiential learning as process in scholarship on a work based professional doctorate journal of learning development in higher education, issue 11: april 2017 3 sustainable working relationships between higher education institutions (heis) and industry since the latter part of the 20th century there has been an increasing focus on the need for more definitive and sustainable links between the workplace and academic institutions. historically, this emanated from ‘the roberts report’ (roberts, 2002), which emphasised the need for the development of transferable skills in doctoral pathways. the most recent, ‘the dowling report’ (dowling, 2015), continued to emphasise the importance of embedded links between heis and industry. drucker (1999) had initially popularised this idea and proposed the concept of the ‘knowledge worker’; this could be operationally defined as those employees who were involved in the active creation, adaptation and application of knowledge to practice. knowledge as a commodity in the context of universities and also in terms of consumerism, knowledge is being increasingly regarded as a commodity, which can be packaged, marketed and sold (benlow, 2015). institutional strategies necessitate resilient collaborative links to be made with industry and key stakeholders and a willingness to translate theoretical knowledge into practice (hakkarainen et al., 2014). all of which adds complexity to the provision of taught doctoral learning pathways; to drive this agenda necessitates a needs-led approach to educational provision. associated with this is the requirement for knowledge generated from research to be strategically and directly related to employment and academic provision (fink, 2006). this necessitates a dialogic loop between heis and industry, most specifically in relation to knowledge transfer partnership working and the development of academic curricula that fully meet the workforce development needs of organisations. the challenges of using retrospective experiential learning in doctoral pathways gibbons et al. (1994) seminally proposed that there were typologies of knowledge, referred to as ‘mode 1’ knowledge and ‘mode 2’ knowledge: ‘mode 1’ was identified as being the uni-disciplinary or “purist” type and ‘mode 2’, as the knowledge underpinning and generated from applied practice. ‘mode 1’ knowledge is primarily generated in the context fulton and hayes evaluating retrospective experiential learning as process in scholarship on a work based professional doctorate journal of learning development in higher education, issue 11: april 2017 4 of formal academic institutions and is characterised by homogeneity and autonomy, alongside being subject to traditional forms of quality assurance that characterise the peerreview process. ‘mode 2’ knowledge is, by its very nature, focused on real world issues and problems and, as such, takes a multi-disciplinary approach, which emphasises the applied nature of knowledge production; it is heterogeneous and quality assurance stems from social accountability and processes of critical reflexivity. estimating the contextual significance of experiential learning in the integration and acknowledgement of prior learning has been defined as a pivotal consideration in both learning development and the academic credibility of doctoral pathways (herrington, reeves and oliver, 2014). academic requirements as part of academic requirements, work-based professional doctoral candidates must demonstrate innovation and original development in the context of their professional practice which has wider impact upon their professional discipline. as costley and lester (2012) clearly identify, the work based professional doctorate is aimed at mid-career professionals who usually have the positional authority to tangibly impact on practice. this capacity was originally outlined by doncaster and lester (2002) as: implying a capacity to move beyond competence to being able to work effectively in unpredictable and changing contents. (doncaster and lester, 2002, p.91) the capacity to articulate this competence is also presented as pivotal to evidencing impact in professional practice (kamler and thomson, 2014). the challenge of developing practice and professional activity the work-based professional doctorate is a relatively recent innovation and is traditionally designed to focus on the development of practice and professional activity. most programmes offer a taught component and candidates spend some time working up their proposal. however, as candidates are often experienced practitioners working at a senior level in their respective disciplines, this requirement can present challenges in terms of fulton and hayes evaluating retrospective experiential learning as process in scholarship on a work based professional doctorate journal of learning development in higher education, issue 11: april 2017 5 academic writing; information retrieval skills; and selecting an appropriate methodology by which to establish the focus of their work. learning development and the research process of the work-based professional doctorate stubb, pyhältö and lonka (2014) have extensively analysed core concepts of the research process in relation to learning development. their analysis can be directly aligned with the capacity of doctoral candidates to frame and contextualise their individual contribution to professional practice. how this learning development can be facilitated for established practitioners was an issue most recently engaged with by bimrose et al. (2014) who concluded that this level of innovation could not be sustained without the proven capacity for authentic and credible facilitation of doctoral level learning. it is here that discipline specificity is significant and differentiation between the ‘researching professional’ and the ‘professional researcher’ emerges as a means of definitively distinguishing between the phd, as a traditional learning pathway, and the equal, but parallel, pathway offered by the professional doctorate (schildkraut and stafford, 2015). structure and uptake of the professional doctorate pathway this evaluation makes specific reference to an established and successful professional doctorate programme, which has been validated and operational for six years. to date, over 25 candidates have completed the programme and a further 80 candidates are at various stages of progression through the programme. a range of professional backgrounds are represented through the annual cohorts core discipline representations being: allied healthcare professionals and managers; senior bankers; educationalists (from primary, secondary and tertiary educational sectors); and police and military services. despite the differences in professional background, there is a commonality amongst candidates which cannot necessarily be ascertained from their collective professional groupings. in practice, individuals’ collective understanding and experience often transcends professional boundaries, contributing significantly to the development of fundamentally new communities of practice within each specific cohort. fulton and hayes evaluating retrospective experiential learning as process in scholarship on a work based professional doctorate journal of learning development in higher education, issue 11: april 2017 6 the programme is iteratively evaluated, both formally and informally, as part of routine quality assurance processes. evaluations have been overwhelmingly positive with doctoral candidates emphasising that there is much appreciation for programmes with a high degree of relevance to practice. unlike candidates from other programmes, including many phd candidates, those doing professional doctorates have considerable experience, evidenced usually by them being acknowledged as being at the forefront of their professional disciplines or having already made a significant contribution to professional practice. particular challenges lie in articulating the inherent issues surrounding learning development and exploring how approaches can be individually tailored to meet the needs of established professionals. assumptions and pre-suppositions in terms of academic provision, academics have also to challenge assumption and presupposition about the capacity of doctoral candidates to engage with academic writing, information retrieval and the articulation of higher order thinking skills, particularly for those candidates from backgrounds dissociated from academia and immersed in pragmatism. professional doctoral candidates usually occupy positional authority at the fore of their professional discipline however this does not always necessitate specific skill sets such as those characterised by academic coursework submissions. for this reason it is imperative that the development and progression of these skills are embedded early into the doctoral learning journey. programme structure and design the current doctoral schema is structured into taught and work-based and/or research components. the taught component consists of three compulsory modules: ‘critical reflective practice’; ‘research methods’ and ‘planning and contextualisation’. ‘critical reflective practice’ requires the candidates to complete two reflective accounts using a recognised and theoretically integrated process of reflective practice, whereas ‘research methods’ requires them to identify fundamental methods of enquiry dominant in their recognised community of practice. as part of the process they identify the inherent fulton and hayes evaluating retrospective experiential learning as process in scholarship on a work based professional doctorate journal of learning development in higher education, issue 11: april 2017 7 methodological implications of the chosen methods of enquiry. in the ‘contextualisation and planning’ module, doctoral candidates develop a detailed research proposal which serves as the basis for developmental progression of their initial work. a professional masters option is available to candidates who may wish to leave the programme at an early threshold level of achievement, or in instances where their proposal is judged as being unlikely to fulfil doctoral threshold level requirements; although to date this option has never been utilised by any of the doctoral candidates. the taught component is delivered via designated study days, where deliberate emphasis is placed not on the acquisition of heavily theoretical knowledge but on the facilitation of those higher order thinking skills necessary to provide a positive and tangible trajectory for the development of their work. upon completion of the taught element of the doctoral programme (the first academic year), doctoral candidates then work in an interactive dialogue with their supervisor to shape and implement their research proposal in practice. the outcome of this is a report of 20,000 to 30,000 words, which contextualises and frames their (usually pragmatic and work-based) research idea in the extant published literature. this is then aligned with a question-led methodological approach. upon completion of these two stages, it is possible for candidates to demonstrate the tangible impact of their proposed research to their individual area of professional practice. the report is accompanied by the submission of a portfolio of evidence which demonstrates achievement in terms of the tangible impact of their project on professional practice in the workplace. the report, whilst shorter, bears similarity to a traditional phd thesis in terms of its anatomical structure. it encompasses a theoretically integrated literature review illustrating the contemporaneous aspects of practice that frame the study and an underpinning methodology which illustrates the particular theoretical framework of the research question or statement, results section and subsequent discussion of findings. it is important to mention here that both the portfolio and report are individually negotiated elements of assessment and, as such, there is no one prescribed formula for construction in order to encourage creative and innovative approaches to portfolio building. however the portfolio provides the findings of the study which are ultimately cross-referenced to the report. as such the portfolio demonstrates how each professional doctoral candidate contributes to practice in a fundamentally unique manner. fulton and hayes evaluating retrospective experiential learning as process in scholarship on a work based professional doctorate journal of learning development in higher education, issue 11: april 2017 8 methodology this study aimed to explore the specific learning needs of candidates on a work-based professional doctorate programme. a cross section of doctoral candidates, in representative numbers, were selected from the initial, middle and final stages of the professional doctorate programme. this study reflects the views of candidates in the middle category (i.e. 2-3 years into the programme), all of whom had completed the compulsory taught component and were at a substantially developed stage of their doctoral studies. semi-structured interviews were executed with the 11 candidates who were initially selected on a purposive basis so that, as the interviews progressed, the principles of theoretical sampling could be followed. in this context, theoretical sampling was defined as being the selection of the sample which would best facilitate the researcher’s emergent understanding of the phenomena (glaser and strauss, 1967). this necessitated a constant comparative process of data collection and thematic data analysis. subsequent respondents beyond the initial interviews were chosen as to how they could develop and inform the emergent categories. for example, several interviewees (particularly those working in the public sector) experienced changes in their professional role and functioning, which could mean a significant adaptation to their doctoral learning journey and were subsequently deliberately chosen. correspondents were interviewed on the basis of a predetermined schedule which served as a basic guide to give focus and structure to the conversation; unexpected issues and themes were also explored. interviews were taped and transcribed verbatim and subsequently thematically analysed via open coding (strauss and corbin, 1998). upon completion of open coding, narrative analysis was used to capture the evaluative aspects of the dialogue (labov and waletzky, 1967). matheson (2005) outlines a method based on lobov’s work: the basic premise is that in any account (or story) there are distinct components, and in telling a story, the individual phrases can be classified into scene setting (in which the scene is identified and outlined), details of action and evaluative aspects. researchers such as van dijk (2008) have used the same principle to identify the evaluative aspects and argue that this represents the “true” views of the participants. each category identified was then purposefully divided into “stories” or distinct narratives and the scene setting, details of action and evaluative comments were identified (of which there were relatively few). the evaluative comments were grouped into sub-categories, which informed the development trajectory of the research. fulton and hayes evaluating retrospective experiential learning as process in scholarship on a work based professional doctorate journal of learning development in higher education, issue 11: april 2017 9 results all candidates reported positive experiences of the professional doctorate programme, and perceived it as an excellent vehicle for the development of professional practice. they identified significant challenges in entering the programme both in terms of their particular learning needs and in selecting an appropriate methodological approach from which they could develop their work. in particular they determined they needed an underpinning structure or, as one respondent put it, ‘scaffolding’. this foundational underpinning framework was strategically aligned with the need for the development of transferable skills of information retrieval, a critical academic writing style and skills of critical reflective practice and reflexivity. having achieved these basic skills candidates could then go on and develop their work in credible manner. this can be represented (by borrowing a metaphor from marxist theory) as a ‘base superstructure’ model, the base being the underpinning which then facilities the development of practice, which then allows the candidate to develop their work to the doctoral level (figure 1). figure 1. base-superstructure model superstructure base integration of the core knowledge and skills for the doctoral study technical skills; reflective practice; research approaches. fulton and hayes evaluating retrospective experiential learning as process in scholarship on a work based professional doctorate journal of learning development in higher education, issue 11: april 2017 10 initial ideas could tangibly be mapped onto the doctoral programme structure; doctoral candidates needed to build a skills-base both in terms of advanced technical proficiency and their ability to critically reflect on practice. the support from supervisors was an integral part of this foundational base. this facilitated the doctoral candidate in combining the constituent elements in a fundamentally unique and creative manner. this provided a foundation for the creative element of practice, which allowed for the further development and integration of work-based practice. underpinning skills all candidates indicated they often came unprepared for sessions and found accessing and management of information challenging (both in terms of selectivity and retrieval skills). the amount of information available was perceived as ‘overwhelming’; the management of information also presented particular challenges, in terms of discerning quality and the subsequent management of reference registries. the initial stages of the programme consisted of the doctoral candidates liaising with academic librarians to gain necessary skills of information retrieval. whilst this may have appeared to academics to be a very basic intervention it was a clear area for concern to doctoral candidates and, via this structured induction, they perceived a distinct benefit from the time invested. a key example of this was when one doctoral candidate reported: i am self-taught and i wish more of the practical side was given at the beginning. in the initial stage of the programme, candidates undertook a series of taught modules, and the doctoral candidates all valued input from the teaching team, one saying: …they gave me a discipline… when you are putting stuff together you can lose your way a little. when they commenced their actual study the supervisory team were deemed to be very important and were an essential element perceived to underpin the programme, one candidate said: fulton and hayes evaluating retrospective experiential learning as process in scholarship on a work based professional doctorate journal of learning development in higher education, issue 11: april 2017 11 the supervisor is without a doubt the key player. candidates also valued peer support and the contribution to their learning development from their doctoral cohort peers, stating: we found it was quite supportive in that we would motivate each other. we have a good synergy in the classroom...a range of backgrounds. senior students could support novices in practice and use their own placement learning experiences as a guide to the process. as one student noted: the year three students have helped me a lot in practice. i have learnt from them how they went about things themselves to get to where they are now. through their advice, i take some of the plain paperwork home, to familiarise myself with it. this has really helped my confidence. reflective practice the reflective element was illuminating from a holistic perspective; it gave the doctoral candidates an opportunity to examine their individual practices and to provide justification for why they were involved in their particular signature disciplines, which shaped their professional identities. the candidates were required to undertake a critical reflective practice module and, while the thrust of the module was founded on professional practice and professional identity, many candidates stated that the process of the module delivery had facilitated them in critical introspection and processes of critical reflexivity. this integrated their perceptions and experiential learning from practice into the process of critical reflection: i found this very therapeutic…new community…the professional doctorate actually got you to stand outside of yourself and look at yourself from a distance. many found the process akin to therapy: fulton and hayes evaluating retrospective experiential learning as process in scholarship on a work based professional doctorate journal of learning development in higher education, issue 11: april 2017 12 …stand back and look at your career; what went well and what didn’t go so well and how you have evolved over the years you have spent in professional practice. …it was almost like having your own counsellor. strategies for development of work undertaking a professional doctorate necessitates approaching the academic workload in a logical and systematic manner, which emanates from structuring and theoretically integrating work and aligning it with identifiable methodological approaches. it is here that precision in relation to terminology and the need to differentiate between methodology and method is imperative to distinguish ‘doctoralness’. as a general finding, doctoral candidates were concerned with the methodological framework which could potentially underpin their work. methodologies are the framework in which the research study is framed and structured, deriving from an ontological and epistemological stance which is in turn linked specifically to theory or theoretical perspectives. for example, the grounded theory is methodologically linked to symbolic interactionism. here, research methods are the pragmatic processes undertaken to perform data collection and ought to be congruent with methodological origin. many candidates present initially with a retrospective body of work, which they wish to develop further and incorporate into their final doctoral submission. it is here that establishing an overarching framework can present the need to challenge traditional assumptions about professional practice, if methods-led rather than question-driven approaches to systematic inquiry are to be adopted. doctoral candidates found it challenging to establish an area of enquiry and to also develop the skills to drive this forward. in real terms this could mean time wasted, at least in the initial phases of the work: perhaps for others who hadn’t gone through that, a bit more scaffolding was required. for those doctoral candidates who came from a “scientific background”, the affective domain skills presented particular challenges, and an assumption could be made that fulton and hayes evaluating retrospective experiential learning as process in scholarship on a work based professional doctorate journal of learning development in higher education, issue 11: april 2017 13 qualitative approaches were an easy option, which, with exposure, was quickly contradicted: qualitative research is a completely different ball game …i made some big mistakes and wasted my time. the implementation of a methodological framework provided a degree of structure which harnessed and facilitated creativity: …i thought now there’s potential here. i tried ethnographic techniques on myself and found it so powerful it really, really challenged my patterned thinking. …auto-ethnography finding out about it was a pivotal moment. super-structure having established this skill base the candidates could develop their practice in a unique and creative manner, as described by one candidate who stated: creatively that time to think in a different way, just giving that different perspective. even getting them to challenge how they think is relatively easy, you know… but if the root cause of the thing that’s gone wrong is based on a wrong assumption they have held with them all of their lives (something that happened when they were a child perhaps) it’s really challenging for them to triple loop and challenge those assumptions in the first place. by engaging the creative mind a little bit more, it just breaks that pattern, even if it’s just for a moment, to give you that alternative perspective, in going through that challenge and thinking about that, that enables a different mind-set completely. interestingly, it was the integration of methodological frameworks and processes of critical introspection which facilitated this creativity: …seemed to bring us back to a time when we were all playful and creative in our approach…it seemed to engage that part of the mind. fulton and hayes evaluating retrospective experiential learning as process in scholarship on a work based professional doctorate journal of learning development in higher education, issue 11: april 2017 14 integral to the process, there was an evident structural support underpinning the creative process attributable to the chosen research methodology: …i think they need some structure: it’s like if you’re learning music, i think you do need to know the chord. i play guitar, i mean people like billy joel for instance recently he said that he regrets he actually can’t play, he actually can’t read music, so i think that, if you’ve trained classically, then that’s good because it makes you much stronger. those who achieved this degree of structure and learning development could adaptively and reflexively cope with a variety of situations and deal with contingency and the unexpected, which was termed their relative adaptive capacity. in the course of the professional doctorate, candidates often found themselves coping with unexpected changes. a prime example of this was in 2010, when the uk government changed from labour to a coalition led by the conservative party, which resulted in public spending cuts; several doctoral candidates found funding for their doctoral projects decreased or entirely withdrawn. interestingly, rather than seeing this as problematic, many saw this as a challenge and found that their work could transcend these particular constraints both in terms of the thrust of their work and their overarching ideas and also in terms of their methodological approaches. one candidate explicitly turned this to his advantage: of course we got the change of government and they scrapped the whole programme…i had a tough week or two thinking this is all going to be a complete waste of time but, then, it kind of shook out into the fact that, well, the schools have still got to do something. in fact without the government programme, schools are left high and dry, what are they going to do? so in actual fact….i am probably going to be able to have more impact as an individual than i would have done in the past…it’s going to be different. discussion burgess et al. (2013), in their discussion of the experience of professional doctoral candidates, posit that many of the attributes and skills of the workplace demonstrate a key fulton and hayes evaluating retrospective experiential learning as process in scholarship on a work based professional doctorate journal of learning development in higher education, issue 11: april 2017 15 tension with those of the academic world. for example, criticality is a skill valued across all academic study yet the workplace often requires responsive and rapid decisions to be made with a degree of immediacy and intuition. this can present challenges for the candidate who has already developed and established these skills and then enters a doctoral programme to discover they need to develop the capacity to use a new and different skill set. similarly, they need to develop the skill of academic writing and they often arrive at heis with several years experience of effective report writing in a bureaucratic environment with minimal scope for creativity in writing. the most salient finding of the study was that progressive development of a foundational solid base of transferable skills, underpinned by incorporating methodological approaches integrated with the skills of critical reflection, allowed doctoral candidates to develop their individual practice in a uniquely creative manner. although the term ‘doctoralness’ did not feature in the interviews; it was this very attribute that was fostered. trafford and leshem (2009) attempted to operationally define ‘doctoralness’ and, whilst they identified various attributes of the concept, they highlighted that it is the synergy of these attributes which provides resultant ‘doctoralness’. the integration of these skills is essential but, as a precursor, doctoral candidates must first develop this foundational capability, which is why the taught element of the programme is of fundamental significance to the student’s developmental learning trajectory. many of the candidates found the academic requirements of the programme, in tandem with the demands of work, challenging. prevalent discourses often differed between doctoral study and the workplace. for example scholarship and critical evaluation were often valued in the academic context of the university, whilst innovation and responsiveness were evidently more dominant in work-based settings. candidates developed a high degree of critical reflexivity, which became the cornerstone of their study and allowed an integration of the many emergent divergent themes. this critical reflexivity facilitated doctoral candidates in balancing the multiple perspectives of their studies and their capacity for negotiation of them. professional doctoral candidates, whilst often familiarised to a great extent with the compilation of work-based reports, can often find the additional requirements of academic writing both novel and challenging. jones’ (2013) work reveals that the significance of the fulton and hayes evaluating retrospective experiential learning as process in scholarship on a work based professional doctorate journal of learning development in higher education, issue 11: april 2017 16 development of skills demonstrating doctoral credibility in writing and research for phd candidates, is equally as transferrable to professional doctoral candidates. as long ago as 2002, fook acknowledged the advent of a post-modernist world and contended that professional practice and professional development ought also to be regarded in this context (fook, 2002). in keeping with this line of thought lester (2015) proposed models of professionalism of direct relevance to this discussion. the first is the “technocratic model” or techno-rational, a by-product of the industrial revolution, which purposefully seeks rational, standard and formal methods. his second model is reflective or creative-interpretative, where professionals are faced with a rapidly changing world where they must contend with dealing creatively and responsively to real life problems. this is the world, in which the work-based professional doctoral candidates find themselves immersed, where they need to dynamically develop their practice via the use of creative and fundamentally unique approaches. the process of reflection is also a significant and integral part of the development of the work-based professional doctoral programme. each student needs to explore and develop their practice, and part of this is to introspectively examine the process of their career in the context of their wider unique contribution to practice. however a common theme throughout the interviews, especially from those working in the public sector, was the dynamic nature and changing circumstances of what constituted work and the precarious nature of utilising funding from projects which could often be withdrawn with little or no prior warning. reflective practice needs to enable the candidate to move beyond the immediate and see the wider social forces which can inevitably impinge on practice. this has been referred to as ’critical reflection’ by many writers (fook, 2007). this potentially consolidates the work around authenticity that has become such a ready focus in the consideration of professional doctoral pathways in recent years (herrington, reeves and oliver, 2014). within reflection and reflective accounts, there was the need for an integration of reflection with methodological approach in a manner which would drive forward momentum of the work trajectory and at the same time demonstrate a tangible degree of logic and consistency. this was another major identifiable challenge. methodological approaches such as action research are useful, as reflection is integrated in this approach and the fulton and hayes evaluating retrospective experiential learning as process in scholarship on a work based professional doctorate journal of learning development in higher education, issue 11: april 2017 17 researchers can proactively guide and direct the process as it emerges. another, less common approach is autoethnography. practice-based research involves working in practice and describing, analysing and evaluating that practice and is, by definition, ethnographic. reflexivity is a major part of ethnography and ethnographic approaches and the part of the researcher in the research setting, the analysis of data and the writing and presentation of the data are considered central to the process (lichterman, 2015). these core characteristics frame autoethnography as an appropriate methodology for integration into the professional doctoral programme. the programme evaluated in this study, focuses on experiential learning and as such promotes reflection on practice and there is a strong emphasis on the shaping and development of the work-based project. there is recognition that to effectively develop the project there needs to be a framework or recognised methodology which fundamentally underpins this development. the candidates who were interviewed indicated how helpful these modules were in the development of their work. however, it must be acknowledged that they report these perceptions through the lens of hindsight and, to a certain extent, maturation of viewpoint may be evident. nonetheless the taught component was perceived to effectively facilitate the development of work-based projects. the development of practice, by its very definition, is focused on the relatively nebulous and complex world of work. yet, one of this study’s findings clearly demonstrated the need for a methodological framework to underpin the development of this potentially ambiguous work and this was one of the key challenges for address. it is a contradiction in terms to suggest that the work-based professional doctorate should be encapsulated in a specific methodological position rather than a philosophical stance. dealing with contingency and the unforeseen effectively and through the use of higher order critical thinking is a core characteristic of a highly functioning worker, regardless of context. even people working in highly technical or skills oriented working environments are expected to deal with ambiguity which necessitates adaptive flexibility. maclean et al. (2002) discuss methodological approaches to the development of ‘mode 2’ knowledge and suggest action research, clinical method, grounded theory and co-operative enquiry as appropriate means of addressing this challenge. in this study the candidates interviewed selected approaches such as action research, case study and mixed methods. bricolage (the use of a number of epistemological approaches within one study or project) is particularly relevant to the fulton and hayes evaluating retrospective experiential learning as process in scholarship on a work based professional doctorate journal of learning development in higher education, issue 11: april 2017 18 professional doctorate programme and in particular how the combination of training and development from multiple perspectives could be improved and developed in educational practice. much has been written about supervision in the context of the phd but not so much has been written around supervision within the context of the professional doctorate (or workbased professional doctorate). it is far too simplistic to polarise the phd and the professional doctorate since the reality of their differences is inherently more complex than it first seems. sinclair (2004) carried out a review of supervision within the context of the phd and found that the discipline could strongly influence the nature of the supervisory experience. natural science, where a more directive approach is involved, had better outcomes than those doctoral candidates in the humanities and social sciences. pearson and brew (2002) discuss supervision and suggest a training package for supervisors, which promotes both awareness of learning and reflection as key components. sambrook, stewart and roberts (2008) discuss the ways in which the supervisory process can facilitate the construction of knowledge and the need to create the atmosphere in which this can take place. translating these findings into the professional doctorate scenario is not straightforward but supervision does seem to be a key component and factors that promote a satisfactory supervisory relationship can be highlighted as a potential area of further research. conclusion the candidates being studied belong to a specific cohort of a work-based professional doctorate programme and, as such, develop their professional practice via intrinsic motivation to drive their professional contribution to practice forward, using the context of their studies as a vehicle. from our perspective as educators and facilitators of learning development, doctoral candidates needed individually tailored guidance and a clear focus on the underpinning skills. as they moved through the programme the supervisors increasingly became key figures in the doctoral journey. the sample size of this study was relatively small, however the three most salient areas for consideration from the study were clearly identifiable as: fulton and hayes evaluating retrospective experiential learning as process in scholarship on a work based professional doctorate journal of learning development in higher education, issue 11: april 2017 19 • the nature of the supervisory relationship and what constitutes good practice. • the capacity for criticality necessary to undertake reflection as a doctoral candidate. • the need for doctoral candidates to have enhanced levels of learning and teaching in relation to the establishment of focused overarching methodological frameworks. engagement with the entirety of the programme, incorporating both taught elements and supervision, is essential for doctoral candidates. the process of facilitation they are exposed to aids them in the development of the practical research skills they will subsequently use to refine and develop their professional practice. the work involved in the professional doctorate is indisputably of doctoral standard and is directly comparable with work submitted on alternative doctorate programmes and candidates demonstrate this by meeting the standards for doctoral work (qaa, 2011). reflections on both the process and product, combined and integrated with the methodological approach, framed practice development initiatives. this fostered and developed the students’ ability to position themselves beyond the immediate, so that when the (seminally described) ‘wicked’ problems of professional practice (rittel and webber 1973; lester 2004) come along, their work could be contextualised and thereby transcend the particularly difficult and problematic areas of practice. references benlow, s. (2015) ‘“have it your way”: consumerism invades education’, in mauk, j. and metz, j. (2015) the composition of everyday life. mason, oh: cengage learning inc, pp. 139. bimrose, j., brown, a., holocher-ertl, t., kieslinger, b., kunzmann, c., prilla, m., schmidt, a., wolf, c. (2014) ‘introducing learning innovation in public employment services: what role can facilitation play?’, international conference on e-learning in the workplace (icelw). columbia university, new york 11-13 june. available at: https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/81e7/6d3cedd40624dcd1c0b411451f6cd003fb8e.p df (accessed: 12 february 2017). fulton and hayes evaluating retrospective experiential learning as process in scholarship on a work based professional doctorate journal of learning development in higher education, issue 11: april 2017 20 burgess, h., weller, g. and wellington, j. (2013) ‘the connection between professional doctorates and the work place: symbiotic relationship or loose association’, work based learning e-journal international, 3(1), pp. 76-108. conn, v. s. (2014) ‘prepare to launch optimizing doctoral education to ensure career success. western journal of nursing research, 36(1), pp. 3-5. https://doi.org/10.1177/0193945913492652 costley, c. and lester, s. (2012) ‘work-based doctorates: professional extension at the highest levels’, studies in higher education, 37(3), pp. 257-269. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2010.503344 costley, c. and stephenson, j. (2007) ‘the impact of a professional doctorate centred on the candidates’ work‘, work based learning e-journal international, pp. 1–15. available at: http://www.wblearningejournal.com/costleystephensonfullpaper2forjournal.pdf (accessed: 5 march 2017). doncaster, k. and lester, s. (2002) ‘capacity and its development: experiences from a work-based doctorate’, studies in higher education, 27(1), pp. 91-101. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03075070120099395 dowling, d. a. (2015) the dowling review of business-university research collaborations (bis/15/352). available at https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/businessuniversity-research-collaborations-dowling-review-final-report (accessed: 13 february 2017). drucker, p.f. (1999) management challenges for the 21st century. oxford: butterworthheinemann. fink, d. (2006) ‘the professional doctorate: its relativity to the ph.d. and relevance for the knowledge economy’, international journal of doctoral studies, vol 1, pp. 35-44. available at: http://www.ijds.org/volume1/ijdsv1p035-044fink14.pdf (accessed: 13 february 2017). fulton and hayes evaluating retrospective experiential learning as process in scholarship on a work based professional doctorate journal of learning development in higher education, issue 11: april 2017 21 fook, j. and gardiner, f. (2007) practising critical reflection: a resource handbook. maidenhead: open university press. fook, j. (2002) ‘theorizing from practice: towards an inclusive approach for social work research’, qualitative social work, 1(1), pp. 79-95. https://doi.org/10.1177/147332500200100106 fulton, j., kuit, j., sanders, g. and smith, p. (2012) ‘the role of the professional doctorate in developing professional practice’, journal of nursing management, 20(1), pp. 130-139. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2834.2011.01345.x gibbons, m., limoges, c., nowotny, h., schwartzman, s. and scott, p. (1994) the new production of knowledge: the dynamics of science and research in contemporary societies. london: sage. gill, g.t. and hoppe, u. (2009) ‘the business professional doctorate as an informing channel: a survey and analysis’, international journal of doctoral studies, vol 4, pp. 27-57. available at: http://www.ijds.org/volume4/ijdsv4p027-057gill267.pdf (accessed: 13 february 2017). glaser, b. and strauss, a. l. (1967) the discovery of grounded theory: strategies for qualitative research. chicago: aldine publishing company. hakkarainen, k. p., wires, s., keskinen, j., paavola, s., pohjola, p., lonka, k. and pyhältö, k. (2014) ‘on personal and collective dimensions of agency in doctoral training: medicine and natural science programs’, studies in continuing education, 36(1), pp. 83-100. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0158037x.2013.787982 herrington, j., reeves, t. c. and oliver, r. (2014) authentic learning environments, in spector, j. m., meerrill, d. m., elen, j. and bishop, j. m. (eds.) handbook of research on educational communications and technology. new york: springer, pp. 401-412. fulton and hayes evaluating retrospective experiential learning as process in scholarship on a work based professional doctorate journal of learning development in higher education, issue 11: april 2017 22 jones, m. (2013) ‘issues in doctoral studies forty years of journal discussion: where have we been and where are we going?’, international journal of doctoral studies, vol 8, pp. 83-104. available at: http://ijds.org/volume8/ijdsv8p083-104jonesft129.pdf (accessed: 13 february 2017). kamler, b. and thomson, p. (2014) helping doctoral candidates write: pedagogies for supervision. 2nd edn. oxon: routledge. lester, s. (2004) ‘conceptualising the practitioner doctorate’, studies in higher education, 29(6), pp. 757-770. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0307507042000287249 lester, s. (2015) on professions and being professional available. available at: http://devmts.org.uk/profnal.pdf (accessed: 13 february 2017). lichterman, p. (2015) ‘interpretive reflexivity in ethnography’, ethnography, 0(00), pp.1-11. https://doi.org/10.1177/1466138115592418 labov, w. and waletzky, j. (1967) ‘narrative analysis: oral versions of personal experience’, in helm, j. (ed.) essays on the verbal and visual arts. seattle: university of washington press, pp. 12-44. maclean, d., macintosh, r. and grant s. (2002) ‘mode 2 management research’, british journal of management, 13(3), pp. 189–207. https://doi.org/10.1111/14678551.00237 matheson, d. (2005) media discourses: analysing media texts. maidenhead: ou press. maxwell, t. (2003) ‘from first to second generation professional doctorates’, studies in higher education, 28(3), pp. 279-291. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03075070309292 pearson, m. and brew, a. (2002) ‘research training and supervision development’, studies in higher education, 27(2), pp. 135-150. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03075070220119986c fulton and hayes evaluating retrospective experiential learning as process in scholarship on a work based professional doctorate journal of learning development in higher education, issue 11: april 2017 23 quality assurance agency for higher education (2011) doctoral degree characteristics. available at: http://www.qaa.ac.uk/en/publications/documents/doctoral_characteristics.pdf (accessed: 13 february 2017). rittel, h. and webber, m. (1973) ‘dilemmas in a general theory of planning’, policy sciences, 4(2), pp. 155-169. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/bf01405730 roberts, g. (2002) set for success. london: hm treasury. available at: http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/+/http:/www.hmtreasury.gov.uk/set_for_success.htm (accessed: 13 february 2017). scott, p. (1997) ‘the changing role of the university in the production of new knowledge’, tertiary education and management, 3(1), pp. 5-14. sambrook, s., stewart, j. and roberts, c. (2008) ‘doctoral supervision... a view from above, below and the middle!’, journal of further and higher education, 32(1), pp. 71-84. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03098770701781473 schildkraut, j. and stafford, m. c. (2015) ‘researching professionals or professional researchers? a comparison of professional doctorate and phd programs in criminology and criminal justice’, american journal of criminal justice, 40(1), pp. 183-198. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s12103-014-9240-z sinclair, m. (2004) the pedagogy of 'good' phd supervision: a national cross-disciplinary investigation of phd supervision. canberra: department of education, science and training, australian government. available at: http://w3.unisa.edu.au/researcheducation/supervisors/documents/phd_supervision. pdf (accessed: 13 february 2017). strauss, a. and corbin, j. (1998) basics of qualitative research: techniques and procedures for developing grounded theory. london: sage. fulton and hayes evaluating retrospective experiential learning as process in scholarship on a work based professional doctorate journal of learning development in higher education, issue 11: april 2017 24 stubb, j., pyhältö, k. and lonka, k. (2014) ‘conceptions of research: the doctoral student experience in three domains’, studies in higher education, 39(2), pp. 251-264. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2011.651449 trafford, v. and leshem, s. (2009) ‘doctorateness as a threshold concept’, innovations in education and teaching international, 46(3), pp. 305-316. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14703290903069027 van dijk, t. (2008) discourse and power. london: palgrave. author details dr john fulton is a reader in practice based research in the faculty of health sciences and wellbeing at the university of sunderland. dr catherine hayes is a reader in pedagogic practice in the faculty of health sciences and wellbeing at the university of sunderland. literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 4: march 2012 online peer assessment: helping to facilitate learning through participation jamie cleland staffordshire university, uk geoff walton staffordshire university, uk abstract the focus of this article is on the combination of enquiry-based learning, information literacy and e-learning and how they are embedded in an online peer assessment exercise. what it shall present is a structure and strategy that aids student learning in the short and long-term. ninety-eight students completed a questionnaire before and after a three-week online peer assessment exercise during a first year undergraduate research and study skills module. qualitatively, the results demonstrate that a significant number of students valued the design of the exercise and the benefits it can have on their future learning and development. quantitatively, a comparison between formative and summative assessment results indicates statistically significant differences in the grades obtained prior to and post the peer assessment learning intervention. the article concludes by suggesting that new and innovative ways of assessment are needed to keep engaging students and develop their learning in different ways. keywords: peer assessment; enquiry-based learning; inquiry-based learning; information literacy; e-learning; technology supported learning. introduction/context first year sport and exercise students at staffordshire university undertake a core study skills module research and professional development i in semester one of their undergraduate degree. this module develops learning skills in students and encourages cleland and walton online peer assessment them to think critically, reflect, communicate and collaborate through regular practice. the module consists of four main phases of learning and has been in operation for four years. firstly, during induction week, students answer a question and write a 500 word essay which they submit at the end of that week. the essay question for the 2010/11 cohort was ‘what defines success in sport?’. a deliberately open ended enquiry-based approach based on the ‘pedagogy of the question’ (see andretta, 2006) is provided, allowing students from any sport related award to engage with the question. for example, a sport therapy student might define success as rehabilitating an injured athlete back to fitness whereas a sport development student might see success in working with a disadvantaged group of people. the essay is formatively assessed by personal tutors and fed back face-to-face within one week. the second phase occurs during the early part of the module where key skills in effective learning in higher education (including essay writing, research, critical thinking, information literacy, plagiarism and referencing) are taught, all focusing on the enquirybased question already given to the students. the idea is to build up to the end of week 5 where the students have another opportunity to hand in an 800-word version of the same question; this time formatively peer assessed on blackboard (the virtual learning environment (vle) employed at staffordshire university). the third phase incorporates aspects of staffordshire university’s online assignment survival kit (ask) – an information literacy thinking skills framework for completing assignments (adam et al., 2008) – and concentrates on academic weeks 6-8 where the students participate in online peer assessment in their tutor group. each group consists of up to twenty students who provide reciprocal feedback on aspects of each other’s work on a weekly basis. the structure of this three-week programme is: • week 6 – essay introduction. • week 7 – essay main body. • week 8 – essay conclusion and referencing style. students are directed to the ask section on essay construction (introduction, main body and conclusion) and this forms the basis for feedback during each peer assessment workshop. despite some studies analysing how students quantitatively score a piece of journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 2 cleland and walton online peer assessment work (mackinnon, 2003), the approach taken in this module is for each student to provide a weekly qualitative written online analysis of each section of their peer’s formative submission. although no grade is given, the students are made aware of the grading criteria adopted and how a piece of work is assessed. here, students begin to learn the three stages of assessment adopted by biggs (2003, p.161) at an early stage of their degree programme: 1. setting the criteria for assessing work. 2. selecting the evidence that would be relevant to submit to judgement against those criteria. 3. making a judgement about the extent to which these criteria have been met. biggs (2003) suggests that students need to learn the assessment criteria and apply it to themselves. this, he argues, is beneficial as they learn whether a piece of work meets the given criteria. it has been suggested that this helps develop a student’s ability and provides them with an opportunity to authenticate and exploit data and information for their own educational benefit and that of their peers; in short, to become ‘students as scholars’ (hodge et al., 2008, p.5-6). once this iterative practice is completed, students then undertake the fourth phase (review and amend) and submit a summative 1500 word version of the same essay question in week 12. what we argue is that new and innovative ways of engaging students through assessment are needed (bostock and street, 2011). this article concentrates on the combination of enquiry-based learning, information literacy and e-learning and how they are built into an online peer assessment exercise. what we shall present is that this learning strategy has positive benefits to student learning. thus, and in contrast to topping’s (1998) scepticism regarding the actual benefits of self and peer assessment, this article suggests that a well embedded and structured online peer assessment learning intervention provides many long-term benefits to student learning. enquiry-based learning enquiry (inquiry)-based learning is an umbrella term that embraces a wide variety of approaches including problem-based learning, small scale investigations or context journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 3 cleland and walton online peer assessment specific projects (centre for enquiry based learning, ceebl, 2010). the approach puts the student at the centre of the process and specifies the need for learners to be able to use a wide range of information resources (hence the need to be information literate which is discussed below) as well as working in groups to solve problems. in enquiry-based approaches the lecturer is no longer seen as the traditional transmitter of knowledge but more of a facilitator who enables students to take responsibility for their own learning. it is envisaged that through this framework students start to formulate research questions and synthesise their work into new knowledge. in this way students not only engage in deep learning but also gain valuable transferrable skills for dealing with real-world problems (ceebl, 2010). given that the notion of enquiry-based learning is, by its very nature, context specific it is no surprise that it is implemented in many different ways depending upon the needs of the discipline. some approaches are heavily geared towards reflection (rigby et al., 2010) whereas others lean more towards analysis, evaluation and critical review skills (pocock and wakeford, 2010). other alternative approaches to enquiry can be seen in the ‘write now’ initiative which seeks to focus on the connection between students’ academic writing, thinking and learning as a means for promoting deep learning by embedding writing in the academic curriculum rather than viewing it as a study skills ‘add-on’ (write now, 2011). whilst the approach adopted by the centre for excellence in assessment for learning (ceal) (2009) has many similarities to the pedagogies mentioned above it differs in its promotion of informal as well as formal feedback as an essential part of the learning process. in particular, one case study showed how the pedagogical intervention focussed on elements of peer assessment as a means of promoting learning ‘through peer review of writing, placing value on students learning from one another’s approaches to writing in a low-stakes situation’ (ceal, 2009, p.12). in essence, with the addition of andretta’s approach, the framework deployed here reflects many of the facets of enquiry-based methods mentioned above. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 4 cleland and walton online peer assessment information literacy information literacy is a well understood concept which has generated its own field of research and upon which there have been many global pronouncements (leaning, 2009). it is not a subject per se but a thinking skills framework which empowers learners to engage with information of any kind. whilst there are many models of information literacy in existence they all exhibit a set of core similarities: similarities which focus on the complex set of skills learners need to find, evaluate and use information appropriately (walton, 2009). hepworth and walton (2009) note that it is not only an important set of skills to enable information to be gathered and used but also essential for effective participation in the ‘information society’. similarly, findings by hampton-reeves et al. (2009, p.47) concluded that, ‘many students [in he] have developed an imperfect sense of the research environment based on past experience, the occasional input from a tutor and the student rumour mill’. other studies (such as breivik and gee, 2006) have argued that even though the information landscape has become ever richer the workforce has a deficit in functional information literacy leading to a demonstrable lack of efficiency. it is also generally recognised that information literacy instruction requires a shift from teaching specific resources to a set of critical thinking skills involving the use of information. for levy and petrulis (2007), information literacy is a fundamental building block of enquiry-based approaches and this mode of delivering information literacy was adopted in the learning and teaching intervention discussed throughout this article. e-learning mayes and de freitas (2007) argue that implementing e-learning involves a mix of approaches which involves learning as behaviour, learning as construction of knowledge and meaning and learning as social practice. this nested viewpoint fits very well with information literacy in that there is a great deal of procedural knowledge to be learnt as well as higher order learning of meanings and ideas to be recognised, shared with others, discussed and recorded as part of the process of becoming skilled in writing assignments. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 5 cleland and walton online peer assessment in their overview of teaching and learning, mayes and de freitas (2007) note the particular usefulness of ‘scaffolding’ – a process by which skills, rules and knowledge involved in learning are internalised. this they argue then creates the cognitive tools to enable selfdirected learning. in essence, scaffolding allows the locus of control to pass from the tutor to increasingly competent learners where the learner becomes able to do alone what formerly s/he could only do in collaboration with the tutor. moreover, understanding how communities form, usually because they identify with something such as a need, a common shared goal and identity, and translating this to the e-learning context, is critical in constructing e-learning opportunities. goodyear (2001) gives practical guidance on how to achieve this online and bases his recommendations on mayes’ (1995) classification of courseware: ● ‘primary courseware’ is used to convey information, such as online lecture notes and reading lists (i.e. subject matter). ● ‘secondary courseware’ is used to question and encourage reflection in students. ● ‘tertiary courseware’ enables the production of materials by previous and current learners in the course of discussing and assessing their learning (i.e. peer discussion). in effect, tertiary courseware creates a ‘cognitive space’ (garrison et al., 2003) where students can give a far more considered reply online rather than in the immediacy of a face-to-face conversation. indeed, mcconnell (2006) regards this social dimension, embodied in online discussion and dialogue, as an essential pre-requisite for online learning. it should be noted that walton and hepworth (2011) in their empirical study found that a greater learning effect was found in those students who experienced tertiary courseware compared to those who experienced primary or secondary courseware only. in addition, recent case studies reported by jisc (2011, p.22) showed that online discussion promoted, ‘very rich exchanges and debate on topics from modules, relating the discussions to information from other sources and contemporary events’, indicating the added value of this approach. to maximise motivation and higher order learning the online peer assessment design evaluated here used all three levels of courseware and ‘scaffolding’. hence, the online learning and teaching segment of the intervention contained procedural information on journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 6 cleland and walton online peer assessment how to do the activities (primary courseware – a word document), online resources that students could interact with (secondary courseware – the online tool the assignment survival kit) and finally online discourse via the blackboard vle (tertiary courseware). together these three levels of courseware are required to create an effective online environment that encourages online discourse, on which the online peer assessment is based, to take place. peer assessment in trying to encourage a deeper approach to learning, there has been an increasing range of formative assessment opportunities for students to engage in. a reason for this is that traditional assessment methods often encourage surface learning. of particular interest has been the work on peer assessment in education and how it can help students form judgements about high quality work (see bostock, 2000; boud, 1995). to put this in context, brown et al. (2009) and orsmond and merry (1996) state how the learning environment has gradually changed from purely tutor assessment to one where students are frequently involved in the assessment of each other. acknowledging this change in assessment strategy, boud et al. (1999) state that education now encourages more selfdirected and collaborative learning and as such peer assessment fits perfectly with this type of approach. rather than focusing on conventional assessment per se, leach et al. (2001) argue that education and the assessment within it should be about empowering learners and peer assessment provides one such opportunity. it has been suggested that peer assessment begins to motivate students to collaborate with each other and to begin to develop themselves as autonomous learners. orsmond et al. (2004), for example, suggest that peer assessment provides students with an opportunity to demonstrate responsibility, collaborate, discuss and reflect; all of which are important skills which should be enhanced during an undergraduate programme. however, brown et al. (2009) suggest that students are often sceptical of being assessed by their peers and need convincing that it is a worthwhile activity in aiding their learning. as suggested by strijbos et al. (2010), the effectiveness of any form of assessment depends on its quality and how each student incorporates it in their learning. for peer journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 7 cleland and walton online peer assessment assessment to effectively enhance student learning, the quality of feedback given to each other is crucial. indeed, despite its perceived importance, feedback does not always lead to better results. orsmond and merry (1996) and tsui and ng (2000), for example, state that students will incorporate revisions from their peers which are specific but favour tutor feedback. how important the feedback received from peer assessment is in empowering students in future learning has received relatively little attention in academic research. several types of peer assessment exist, such as grading or providing feedback on a piece of work, but there is a lack of academic material which focuses on interactive, e-learning regarding peer assessment per se (bostock and street, 2011). those that have researched this area have demonstrated the positive benefits of using online discourse to foster deep learning (hepworth and walton, 2009; walton et al., 2007) and this is the approach taken in this article. method to assess the effectiveness of the module structure and three-week online peer assessment learning intervention, those students who voluntarily completed a consent form were provided with questionnaires pre and postpeer assessment (bera, 2011). the questions prior to the exercise focused on the students’ thoughts of peer assessment and what they expected to take away from it. the questions post-intervention concentrated on their overall thoughts of the exercise and how they felt it would benefit them throughout the remainder of their undergraduate degree. the intention was to only use those questionnaires completed by students before and after the exercise. thus, to recognise those who completed both questionnaires, the students were asked to write their first four digits of their student identification so that those who only completed one were discounted. 98 students completed this task (out of 129 enrolled on the module) and extracts before and after the exercise from the same students will be used in the analysis discussed later. after the learning intervention was completed, the questionnaires were inductively analysed through a manual form of content analysis. gratton and jones (2009) raise the potential disadvantage of subjectivity when analysing the meanings associated with the answers provided. to minimise this, both authors went through the data separately before journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 8 cleland and walton online peer assessment any categorisation took place and similar themes were raised. despite these concerns, wilkinson (2004) states that content analysis is a good method to adopt when assessing open-ended questions on a large-scale questionnaire as it allows both qualitative and quantitative data analysis. firstly, a quantitative analysis was carried out to obtain a statistical summary of the responses received. here, the frequency of responses in each category was recorded and converted to percentages. secondly, each subject’s response was qualitatively coded and categorised. as suggested by miles and huberman (1984, p.9), once all of the data had been themed into categories, the analysis began to identify ‘patterns and processes, commonalities and differences’ across the student cohort. the two main themes resulting from the pre-peer assessment questionnaire were the importance of feedback and the feeling of anxiety towards the learning intervention. the two main themes emanating from the post-peer assessment questionnaire were the importance of in-depth feedback and how the intervention had helped facilitate their learning. in testing the learning intervention, a t-test was also employed to assess the formative (first phase) and summative (fourth phase) grades. these were recorded and compared between two different groups picked at random to see if any statistical differences could be found between the phases of learning. finally, to assess the overall structure of the module and the value it can bring to student learning, the module evaluations completed by students at the end of their first year were also analysed as this presented an opportunity to see how the skills learnt would be utilised in the remaining part of their degree. results this section of the article analyses the students’ responses to the online peer assessment learning intervention and whether it had helped them develop the key critical skills necessary to become an effective learner (orsmond et al. 2004). it shall be split into four parts: the response by a sample of students before the exercise had taken place; their response immediately afterwards; a statistical analysis of the students’ grades pre and post the learning intervention; and the students’ evaluation of the module and its structure. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 9 cleland and walton online peer assessment pre peer assessment survey not surprisingly a number of students were apprehensive about the exercise as most had not engaged in such an activity before (echoing previous work by walton et al., 2007). however, when they were asked what it meant for them, a large number of students stressed that it had the potential to positively impact on their future learning (corroborating mcconnell, 2006). here are just a few examples of the feedback and anxiety themes to which students regularly referred in the initial survey: feedback: it’s a really good idea, hearing everyone’s different comments to improve. effective feedback will help me know where i went wrong. it is good as we’re all communicating with each other giving positive feedback and effective criticism to help improve. (student 15) it will be good as it is not only helping ourselves via feedback but it also helps others. i am looking to gain more knowledge and understanding of how to write in higher education. if the feedback is logical and fair i will take it on board, if not i’ll discard it. (student 54) i’m looking for a much wider range of constructive criticism to help improve my writing style and learning process (research, referencing etc.) for future modules. (student 91) anxiety: nervous that i won’t meet the standards of others and my assessment will be negative. i’ll be a bit defensive at first but will learn that we are all in the same situation. (student 33) don’t feel confident enough in my essay being shown to my peers although i feel it could help me. hope to get helpful feedback but feel quite nervous that i will not be up to the standard of my peers. (student 74) journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 10 cleland and walton online peer assessment slightly apprehensive but intrigued as to the different opinions that may occur through this exercise. (student 95) despite a large response on these two major themes, a small number of students felt that it was not a worthwhile activity for them. this could possibly be down to the large number of students who enter higher education immediately after finishing further education and have simply followed a more traditional assessment route. with similar findings to tsui and ng (2000), the results of the initial survey found that some students are sceptical of feedback from their peers and instead focus on tutor comments. for example: i don’t think it will be useful due to people not wanting to constructively criticise other work due to peer pressure. (student 17) interested to see what others think – however, don’t see it as useful for me. i’ll take it all in but the lecturer’s advice and feedback is more useful. (student 88) post peer assessment survey despite their initial apprehension to this exercise, 90 per cent of students that responded to the questionnaire, when asked about their thoughts regarding the online peer assessment learning intervention, indicated that it had been worthwhile and had aided their learning (supporting the conclusions of hepworth and walton, 2009; walton et al. 2007). this may be due to the scaffolded approach discussed earlier which enabled students to demonstrate greater independence in their feedback and reflection. indeed, despite their initial scepticism to the exercise some students seemed to change their opinion once it had been completed: at first i didn’t think it would be helpful but i changed my mind once it began. (student 33) at first i wasn’t 100 per cent comfortable but i then discovered that it was really beneficial to my learning. this whole process helped my understanding of essay writing and the ways in which i can improve. (student 74) journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 11 cleland and walton online peer assessment better than i thought. really helpful as i got a range of feedback from different people. it also benefitted me reading my peers work and seeing how they write. (student 95) during this survey, the most regularly used comments were ‘helpful’ and ‘useful’ and this indicated that it had been a beneficial exercise to expose the students to. here two major themes became apparent: the importance of feedback and the facilitating of learning. 1. the importance of feedback: as suggested by leach et al. (2001), education and assessment should be about enhancing learning and the strategy adopted in this module is supported through their conclusions: i found it a good exercise. it gave me a chance to get a range of feedback on my essay from both my tutor and my peers. it also gave me the opportunity to read through other essays and comment on their writing style. (student 15) it was a very good exercise. a lot of feedback was provided which enabled me to progress my work to a much higher standard. some comments were short but some were very good. it would be good to use this in all our assessments. it motivates you to get the work done so that you can get feedback. (student 54) the feedback gained will make my summative submission better because my peers helped me with their feedback and i found it good to read their work and gather similar ideas that had worked well for them. (student 91) however, not all students found the feedback a positive experience. a small number valued the feedback from their peers but stated that they preferred tutor feedback (as suggested by orsmond and merry, 1996; tsui and ng, 2000). it is clear that students look at the credibility of feedback, and feedback from an expert is received more favourably than a perceived non-expert. one of the limitations of a study like this is that constructive feedback is heavily reliant on the time and effort the students devote to it. for example: journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 12 cleland and walton online peer assessment i didn’t feel it was very productive as the comments from my peers were often short and not thought out very well. prefer tutor feedback 100 per cent more than my peers. (student 20) didn’t think it benefitted me at all. i think that people who are in the same situation as you can’t possibly comment on your work. would much prefer a normal marking system. (student 90) 2. facilitating learning: despite these views, an overwhelming majority of students felt that the exercise had enhanced their learning and welcomed its presence in their award. one of the advantages of embedding peer assessment into a programme of study is that it also helps students form judgements about high quality work (see boud, 1995). as suggested by orsmond et al. (2004), peer assessment encourages students to collaborate, discuss and reflect; all of which are important skills that should be developed at undergraduate level. indeed, 91 per cent of those that responded mentioned that they will take away improvements in their learning from this exercise. encouragingly, there was a range of different learning skills that each student said they would concentrate upon during the remainder of their degree: reference differently and the different ways people went about writing their essay. (student 33) can rely on my peers for constructive feedback; lecturers aren’t the only source of advice. (student 54) i will take quite a lot in respect to information and resources other people used and how there are different ways to approach the question. (student 74) through the online peer assessment exercise, it has been shown that students strongly identify with their information literacy skills as a focus for reflection. the process of referencing was a particular skill that many students mentioned for further improvement. this indicates that the online peer discourse may have journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 13 cleland and walton online peer assessment sensitised students to information literacy issues in a way that a straight forward face-to-face approach might not. statistical analysis in evaluating the intervention and its effect on student learning, below are the results for two groups of students (see table 1 and 2), each of which highlight the indicative grade they received from their 500-word submission during induction week and their 1500-word summative submission in week 12: table 1. group a grades for research and professional development i. student 500 word (%) 1500 word (%) a 35 57 b 40 52 c 35 52 d 32 52 e 34 53 f 37 50 g 35 45 h 33 55 i 30 53 j 41 63 k 30 61 l 35 60 m 36 74 n 36 45 p 34 57 q 40 56 r 40 54 s 53 71 journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 14 cleland and walton online peer assessment table 2. group e grades for research and professional development i. student 500 word (%) 1500 word (%) a 40 63 b 48 55 c 47 55 d 51 62 e 41 56 f 50 66 g 43 54 h 53 61 i 37 60 j 35 60 k 36 57 l 45 53 m 50 80 n 41 52 o 48 60 p 37 58 q 40 58 r 50 64 s 38 54 to test the statistical significance of these grades, an independent samples test was conducted. the test indicated a significant difference between students’ performance on the two assignments (t (1, 74) = 11.380, p<.001). for assignment one, the mean across both groups was 40.22 with a standard deviation of 6.50; for assignment two, the mean across both groups was 57.92 with a standard deviation of 7.05. students’ evaluations in evaluating the structure of this module and the importance of the four stages of learning discussed in the introduction, perhaps it is appropriate to finish the article with a demonstration of how effective students feel it is in facilitating their learning once the journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 15 cleland and walton online peer assessment module has been completed. below are a range of comments left by students on their module evaluation, each of which point to the key learning skills developed within the module: we were taught how to use the various online library aspects such as e-books and e-journals that we were bound to be using during other essays. this was copied in the workshops where we were given tasks to undertake which tested our understanding of using the online library to help with all aspects of assessed work. one of the best aspects of the module was the revisiting of basic concepts for higher education. even going back to sections such as referencing i find that i am still learning about the intricacies of what is required to be a successful student. the progression of the module made it easier as the work gradually built up. we were given three attempts at the essay which allowed us to gain good feedback and improve our work each time. the point about the importance of re-drafting work is one which firmly is embedded in my psyche now! summary overall, this article has indicated that the combination of enquiry-based learning, information literacy and e-learning had a positive impact on student views regarding their learning during a three-week peer assessment learning intervention. as suggested by strijbos et al. (2010), the effectiveness of any form of assessment depends on its quality and how each student incorporates it in their learning. over 90 per cent of students undertaking the exercise saw the value and the benefits of online peer feedback. importantly, the students also recognised the need to take the skills learned in this module with them in the remaining part of their degree programme. to meet the challenges posed by the changing ways in which students now work in a networked world, it is recommended that academic colleagues consider the learning potential afforded by the e-learning structure evaluated here. this study has indicated that by establishing a module that follows a clear and effective scaffolded structure, a positive student learning environment can be achieved. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 16 cleland and walton online peer assessment whilst there are a number of limitations to this study in that it examines a specific group of students and there is no control group with which to compare results, it is nevertheless a valid study from a real-life educational situation. it is suggested that future research should focus upon delivering the teaching and learning structure evaluated here to a cohort of students drawn from different subject areas to examine to what extent this intervention is transferable. another area which could be exploited in further research is to review the importance of a modular structure like this in a more longitudinal way with second and third year students to see how useful the skills learned are to them in their remaining period of study. references adams, j., pope, a. and walton, g. (2008) ‘using web 2.0 to enhance the staffordshire university assignment survival kit (ask)’, in parker, j.e. and godwin, p. (eds.) information literacy meets library 2.0. london: facet publishing, pp. 139-150. andretta, s. (2006) ‘information literacy: the new “pedagogy of the question”’, in walton, g. and pope, a. (eds.) information literacy: recognising the need. staffordshire university, stoke-on-trent 17 may. oxford: chandos, pp. 13-20. bera (2011) ethical guidelines for educational research. available at: http://www.bera.ac.uk/files/2011/08/bera-ethical-guidelines-2011.pdf (accessed: 15 september 2011). biggs, j. (2003) teaching for quality learning at university. 2nd edn. maidenhead: open university press. bostock, s. (2000) student peer assessment, keele university. available at: http://www.keele.org.uk/docs/bostock_peer_assessment.htm (accessed: 1 october 2011). journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 17 http://www.bera.ac.uk/files/2011/08/bera-ethical-guidelines-2011.pdf http://www.keele.org.uk/docs/bostock_peer_assessment.htm cleland and walton online peer assessment bostock, s. and street, m. (2011) modelling assessment processes across a university and introducing technology-based innovations, keele university. available at: http://www.keele.org.uk/docs/059%20sbmw%20icicte%20article%20march2011v6.pdf (accessed: 1 october 2011). boud, d. (1995) enhancing learning through self-assessment. london: kogan page. boud, d., cohen, r. and sampson, j. (1999) ‘peer learning and assessment’, assessment and evaluation in higher education, 24(4), pp. 413-426. breivik, p.s. and gee, e.g. (2006) higher education in the internet age: libraries creating a strategic edge. westport: praeger. brown, g.t.l., irving, s.e., peterson, e.r. and hirschfield, g.h.f. (2009) ‘use of interactive-informal assessment practices: new zealand secondary students’ conceptions of assessment’, learning and instruction, 19(2), pp. 97-111. ceal (centre for excellence in assessment for learning) (2009) introduction: assessment for learning in context. available at: http://www.northumbria.ac.uk/static/5007/cetlpdf/casestudies1.pdf (accessed: 27 february 2012) ceebl (centre for enquiry based learning) (2010) what is enquiry-based learning? available at: http://www.campus.manchester.ac.uk/ceebl/ebl/ (accessed: 11 november 2011). garrison, d.r., anderson, t. and garrison, r. (2003) e-learning in the 21st century: a framework for research and practice. london: routledge. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 18 http://www.keele.org.uk/docs/059%20sb-mw%20icicte%20paper%20march2011v6.pdf http://www.keele.org.uk/docs/059%20sb-mw%20icicte%20paper%20march2011v6.pdf http://www.northumbria.ac.uk/static/5007/cetlpdf/casestudies1.pdf http://www.campus.manchester.ac.uk/ceebl/ebl/ cleland and walton online peer assessment goodyear, p. (2001) ‘effective ne tworked learning in higher education: notes and guidelines’, networked learning in higher education project. jisc committee for awareness liaison and training (jcalt). volume 3 of the final report to jcalt. lancaster university: centre for studies in advanced learning technology. available at: http://usyd.academia.edu/petergoodyear/books/269593/effective_networked_learni ng_in_higher_education_notes_and_guidelines (accessed: 10 november 2011). gratton, c. and jones, i. (2009) research methods for sports studies. 2nd edn. london: routledge. hampton-reeves, s., mashiter, c., westaway, j., lumsden, p., day, h., hewertson, h. and hart, a. (2009) students’ use of research content in teaching and learning. a report for the joint information systems council (jisc). available at: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/aboutus/workinggroups/studentsuseresearc hcontent.pdf (accessed: 10 november 2011). hepworth, m. and walton, g. (2009) teaching information literacy for inquiry-based learning. oxford: chandos. hodge, d., haynes, c., le pore, p., pasquesi, k. and hirsh, m. (2008) ‘from inquiry to discovery: developing the student as scholar in a networked world’, inquiry in a networked world: learning through enquiry alliance (ltea) conference. university of sheffield, sheffield 25-27 june. joint information systems committee (jisc) (2011) emerging practice in a digital age: a guide to technology-enhanced institutional innovation. available at: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/programmes/elearning/digiemerge/emergin gpracticeaccessible.pdf (accessed: 10 november 2011). leach, l., neutze, g. and zepke, n. (2001) ‘assessment and empowerment: some critical questions’, assessment and education in higher education, 26(4), pp. 293-305. leaning, m. (ed.) (2009) issues in information and media literacy: criticism, history and policy. california: informing science press. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 19 http://usyd.academia.edu/petergoodyear/books/269593/effective_networked_learning_in_higher_education_notes_and_guidelines http://usyd.academia.edu/petergoodyear/books/269593/effective_networked_learning_in_higher_education_notes_and_guidelines http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/aboutus/workinggroups/studentsuseresearchcontent.pdf http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/aboutus/workinggroups/studentsuseresearchcontent.pdf http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/programmes/elearning/digiemerge/emergingpracticeaccessible.pdf http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/programmes/elearning/digiemerge/emergingpracticeaccessible.pdf cleland and walton online peer assessment levy, p. and petrulis, r. (2007) ‘towards transformation? first year students, inquirybased learning and the research/teaching nexus’, proceedings of the annual conference of the society for research into higher education (srhe). brighton, uk 11-13 december. mackinnon, g.r. (2003) ‘inter-rater reliability of an electronic discussion coding system’, technology, pedagogy and education, 12(2), pp. 219-230. mayes, j.t. (1995) ‘learning technology and groundhog day’, in strang, w., simpson, v.b. and slater, j. (eds.) hypermedia at work: practice and theory in higher education. canterbury: university of kent press, pp. 21-37. mayes, t. and de freitas, s. (2007) ‘learning and e-learning: the role of theory’, in beetham, h. and sharpe, r. (eds.) rethinking pedagogy for a digital age: designing and delivering e-learning. london: routledge, pp. 13-25. mcconnell, d. (2006) e-learning groups and communities. berkshire: mcgraw-hill education. miles, m.b. and huberman, m.a. (1984) qualitative data analysis. thousand oaks: sage. orsmond, p. and merry, s. (1996) ‘the importance of marking criteria in the use of peer assessment’, assessment and evaluation in higher education, 21(3), pp. 239-250. orsmond, p., merry, s. and callaghan, a. (2004) ‘implementation of a formative assessment model incorporating peer and self-assessment’, innovations in education and teaching international, 41(3), pp. 273-290. pocock, t. and wakeford, c. (2010) data-driven ebl: embedding research in life sciences and tutorials. available at: http://www.campus.manchester.ac.uk/ceebl/projects/casestudies/93.pdf (accessed: 11 november 2011). journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 20 http://www.campus.manchester.ac.uk/ceebl/projects/casestudies/93.pdf cleland and walton online peer assessment rigby, l., wilson, i., walton, t., baker, j., dunne, k. and keeley, p. (2010) bridging the gap: an experiential enquiry-based learning approach in mental health. case studies: centre for excellence in enquiry-based learning supported projects series 2008-9. manchester: manchester university press. strijbos, j.w., narciss, s. and dünnebier, k. (2010) ‘peer feedback content and sender’s competence level in academic writing revision tasks: are they critical for feedback perceptions and efficiency?’, learning and instruction, 20(4), pp. 291-303. topping, k.j. (1998) ‘peer assessment between students in colleges and universities’, review of educational research, 68(3), pp. 249-276. tsui, a.b.m. and ng, m. (2000) ‘do secondary l2 writers benefit from peer comments?’, journal of second language learning, 9(2), pp. 147-170. walton, g. (2009) developing a new blended approach to fostering information literacy. unpublished phd thesis. loughborough university. walton, g., barker, j., hepworth, m. and stephens, d. (2007) ‘facilitating information literacy teaching and learning in a level 1 sport and exercise module by means of collaborative online and reflective learning’, in andretta, s. (ed.) change and challenge: information literacy for the 21st century. adelaide: auslib press, pp.169202. walton, g. and hepworth, m. (2011) ‘a longitudinal study of changes in learners’ cognitive states during and following an information literacy teaching intervention’, journal of documentation, 67(3), pp. 449-479. wilkinson, s. (2004) ‘focus groups’, in smith, j.a. (ed.) qualitative psychology: a practical guide to research methods. london: sage, pp. 184-204. write now (2011) writing and assessment in the disciplines. available at: http://www.writenow.ac.uk/core-work/curriculum-assessment-design/ (accessed: 11 november 2011). journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 21 http://www.writenow.ac.uk/core-work/curriculum-assessment-design/ cleland and walton online peer assessment author details jamie cleland is a senior lecturer and learning and teaching excellence fellow in the faculty of health at staffordshire university. his work focuses on research-informed teaching and has been published in a number of international journals. geoff walton is senior researcher in the faculty of arts, media and design, and academic skills tutor librarian: business (information services) at staffordshire university. he was sla europe information professional 2010. as senior researcher he is interested in: the cognitive processes involved in becoming information literate; developing the assignment survival kit (ask) and exploring online peer assessment. geoff is also extending his research interests into a number of areas such as bibliometrics, webometrics, social media and the emerging concept of digital literacy. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 22 online peer assessment: helping to facilitate learning through participation abstract introduction/context enquiry-based learning information literacy e-learning peer assessment method results pre peer assessment survey post peer assessment survey statistical analysis students’ evaluations summary references author details literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special edition: academic peer learning, part two, april 2016 postgraduate peer tutors supporting academic skills in online programmes sharon boyd the royal (dick) school of veterinary studies, the university of edinburgh, uk jessie paterson the royal (dick) school of veterinary studies, the university of edinburgh, uk abstract this case study presents an evaluation of an online, distance-learning, postgraduate peer tutor project, covering the pilot and post-pilot years 2013-15. the project has two core aims: first, to develop student academic skills in group facilitation and learning support; second, to enhance support for increasing numbers of online, distance-learning students by facilitating more live sessions and providing postgraduate study advice. feedback from staff, peer tutors and the students involved suggests that peer tutoring is successful in improving distance learners’ experience through enhanced support and fostering a sense of community; for the peer tutors, the opportunities to develop graduate skills in tutoring and collaborating as part of the academic community. keywords: peer support; online learning; distance learning; postgraduate; student experience. introduction working online at distance can be isolating due to the perceived separation between student and teacher (falloon, 2011). delahunty et al. (2014) outline the ‘socio-emotional challenges’ inherent in engaging online distance learning (odl) students, such as a sense of isolation and reduced confidence. key to this is the recognition of the diversity of online learners and therefore the need to facilitate a variety of opportunities for them to interact and build a sense of community and connectedness. increasing odl student numbers boyd and paterson postgraduate peer tutors supporting academic skills in online programmes journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 2 places a strain on student support services (reid et al., 2014), potentially increasing the sense of isolation due to delays in response and reduced tutor ‘presence’. watts et al. (2015) report that online peer-assisted learning (pal) or peer-supported learning activities may assist in dealing with these issues. peer support and group assessment activities are core within postgraduate taught (pgt) odl courses at the royal (dick) school of veterinary studies [r(d)svs], university of edinburgh. when students start, they are encouraged to take an active role in asynchronous discussion boards and synchronous seminars as part of course content and delivery. this allows students to develop core graduate attribute skills in group facilitation, debate and dialogic feedback. guidance is provided and students are shown how these activities enhance the social and ‘collegial’ networks (mcluckie and topping, 2004) constructed as part of their participation on a chosen programme of study. this social constructivist model follows weller (2007), seeking a ‘balance of people, process, and technology’ (p.157), building the learning community by providing clear guidance, accessible systems, and encouraging ongoing dialogue. the same pedagogical approach is extended to peer tutor (pt) training, allowing pts to further develop skills in discussion with the academic training team. the pt role is key in building this community of practice, as pts support the learning of others within the community, what ashwin (2003) calls a ‘peer supporter’. as pts have progressed further in their programme, they can share a wider range of experience than peers on the same course. since they come from outside the course, students view them as occupying a separate role, or higher level, from their own, situated between the role of ‘student’ and ‘teacher’. pts assist with community development by providing a relaxed supportive environment and safe space to ask questions without the concern of appearing ‘stupid’ in front of an academic specialist (mcluckie and topping, 2004). the pt role is seen as motivating, both in supporting peers’ development and in inspiring students to undertake the pt role themselves. purpose of the work the aims of the project are two-fold: first, to develop pts’ tutoring skills as part of their portfolio of academic skills; and second, to provide additional support to odl students. to boyd and paterson postgraduate peer tutors supporting academic skills in online programmes journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 3 achieve the first aim, guidance focuses on online facilitation in both asynchronous (discussion board) and synchronous (real-time study group) activities. pts have access to information on academic skills support, including critical reading, writing, information skills, basic data handling, and presentation skills. additional support and advice on time management and session planning are also given. the second aim focuses on shared peer experience and increased connectedness through providing additional live group sessions across time zones facilitated by peers. feedback is gathered from a number of sources including course surveys, pt focus groups and staff-student meetings. this data is reviewed by the authors to gain an overview of the project, highlight benefits to students and programme teams, and identify areas requiring improvement as part of the postgraduate teaching review process. participants approximately 350 students are registered for flexible, part-time, pgt odl programmes at the r(d)svs. the part-time programmes last between two and six years. most students opt for the three years; two years of taught materials and a one-year dissertation project. most students, including pts, are in fullor part-time employment. these programmes cover a range of specialist areas, including conservation medicine, international animal welfare, equine science and one health. students have biological and veterinary science undergraduate degrees, and network within a global peer group from locations including the uk, us, central and south america, canada, europe, australia, and the middle and far east. an invitation was sent to all odl pgt students in the summer of 2013 and 2014. it is a pre-requisite to have successfully completed either the scientific methodology course which is offered as part of some msc programmes, or the academic skills course which is optional for all pgt students. both courses provide guidance on academic skills development. the assessments require students to critically reflect on their own learning development. unlike beaumont et al. (2012), pt familiarity with online communication tools was not a selection criterion, as all pgt odl students are familiar with a range of standard tools used as part of their studies. boyd and paterson postgraduate peer tutors supporting academic skills in online programmes journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 4 in both pilot and post-pilot phase, pts are made aware that active input through de-brief and focus group sessions is an essential element of the role. these group discussions and feedback provide benefits both to the pt in the forms of autonomy and motivation, and the training team in developing a student-led initiative. pts can withdraw at any point and are reminded that the role should not conflict with their studies. pilot phase (2013-14) six pts underwent training in 2013-14 from a range of programmes. two had completed and were awaiting graduation in november 2013, two were in second year, and two were in third (dissertation) year. post-pilot phase (2014-15) eight pts underwent training in 2014-15, four new and four returning, again from a range of programmes. of the new pts, one had completed was awaiting graduation in november 2014, two were in second year, and one was in third (dissertation) year. of the returning pts (trained the previous year), two had completed and were awaiting graduation, and two were in third (dissertation) year. role of pt pts can tutor a maximum of three courses per year, with most opting for two. taking a similar approach to baran and correia (2009), pts are required to:  complete the training course (~15 hours).  attend debriefing sessions (4 hours).  liaise with course teams on logistics (such as synchronous session timings, identification of skills required for assessment topic) (~2 hours).  facilitate asynchronous discussions sharing experiences and skills (2 hours per course at peak pre-assessment times).  run synchronous sessions focusing on a particular academic skill topic, for example, critical writing (two 1-hour group sessions per course, 3 hours preparation time per session). boyd and paterson postgraduate peer tutors supporting academic skills in online programmes journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 5  reflect on practice (~7 hours), demonstrated through critical consideration of what worked well or what required refinement in preparation for next tutoring session. this is facilitated through discussion with the training team via discussion board and de-brief sessions, and through student application for associate fellowship of the higher education academy. pts are advised that the role involves tutoring core academic skills (mcluckie and topping, 2004; baran and correia, 2009) rather than subject-specific teaching, in part to deflect concerns about having sufficient experience to ‘teach’ their peers (lachman et al., 2013). pts appreciate how the process of facilitation invites group discussion and sharing of experience leading to ‘reflective knowledge building’ (roscoe and chi, 2007), rather than expectation of mastery in a given area. pt training pts have access to a peer-tutor training course on the university’s virtual learning environment (blackboard learn). the structure models the university of manchester (2014) pass (peer-assisted study session) format that is used successfully with our undergraduate on-campus groups. pts work in pairs to support each other and share preparation work for live sessions. the training facilitates partnership building in advance of tutoring. the training course has three components:  key skills such as group facilitation techniques, confidentiality, support.  guidance for tutoring online (course materials for self-study, discussion and training in facilitating online group communication).  practice sessions (~20 minutes with training staff and other pts acting as students). the aim is to provide multimodal training as per de smet et al. (2010). pts are trained in online moderating following salmon’s (2012; 2013) five-stage model through live sessions with the training staff and asynchronous discussions on topics such as ice-breakers, ‘lurkers’ and community building. they are provided with examples and guidance on the communication tools commonly used with the student group, which are skype (text chat) boyd and paterson postgraduate peer tutors supporting academic skills in online programmes journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 6 or blackboard collaborate (virtual classroom). having selected their preferred tool for synchronous group meetings, they run mock sessions to practice and gain feedback from the group, also proposed in galbraith and winterbottom (2011). in response to pt request, further detail on assessment types are provided with an outline of core skills expected of students. in the pilot, pts tutored on the academic skills course, which acts as a support ‘centre’ for postgraduate study skills, similar to reid et al. (2014). all odl pgt students are registered. this course was selected as it matches the core aim of the pt role and the authors are also the course team. this ensured closer monitoring and support during the pilot. students self-register for live sessions at times chosen by pts; a member of the training team monitors e-mail in case of technical difficulty. while not often required, this acts as a safety net; pts know help is available should they or the attendees encounter problems. in the post-pilot, the pt role has been integrated within core pgt courses. the role remains the same – synchronous and asynchronous sessions at times agreed by course teams and pts. due to the small number of pts relative to courses, pts are invited to select their preferred course(s) to tutor. the training team assist pts with any queries on running live sessions or additional study skills guidance. this minimises impact on course teams whilst ensuring pts feel supported. methodology data were collected using a mixture of focus group (pts and course staff) and surveys (students). data triangulation is achieved through consideration of the views of pts, staff and students, and the mixed methods approach of feedback via multiple routes. to date, four pt focus groups have been facilitated via skype by a member of staff not involved with pt training or online teaching. a minimum of two and a maximum of four pts attended each focus group. the facilitator anonymised the skype transcripts before sharing with the authors, and all three analysed the transcripts in isolation before comparing themes identified. the authors also reviewed transcripts and recordings of live boyd and paterson postgraduate peer tutors supporting academic skills in online programmes journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 7 sessions, providing feedback in de-briefings with pts and via e-mail to further develop teaching skills. low response to course surveys (<12%, 2-6 students per course) made statistical analysis unfeasible. further input was gathered through the staff-student liaison committee meetings. the college educational research ethics committee granted approval to carry out this research. findings and impact pilot year (2013-14) there were positive responses from pts and students attending sessions in the academic skills course. in the focus group, all six pts said they trained in order to make a contribution/give something back: having spent 3 years as a distance learning student i wanted to contribute something that would help other students in the future by sharing own experiences. this was achieved through shared experience with students and staff: it was satisfying hearing that the students had learned something that would help them to improve their academic skills and hopefully improve their grades… i enjoyed liasing [sic] with the course lecturers in order to work out how best to support them. pts also recognised the importance of supporting new and/or mature students: i've also been out of academia for a long time myself, so think i can empathise easily with anyone struggling with academic study skills. there was also the added benefit of improving personal skills: i also wanted to improve my own skills and keep myself updated. boyd and paterson postgraduate peer tutors supporting academic skills in online programmes journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 8 pts all agreed working in pairs guaranteed smoother facilitation, as both live session methods needed more than one person to monitor fast-moving text chat and ensure all questions were answered. issues reported:  timing of sessions (conflict with core courses).  high number of pts in one course (conflict with pt preferred times).  low attendance (again due to conflict with core courses). these issues were resolved in the post-pilot by embedding pts in core courses. post-pilot year (2014-15) positive responses were received from pts and students. pt reasons for taking on the role matched the previous year, as four of the eight pts were tutoring for their second time. students report that having pts on their courses is very encouraging, as pts understand the constraints of studying part-time at distance. pt sessions were: very helpful. nice and informal. comforting to be able to share experience, opinions, thoughts with students who have been through it before. (student feedback via staff student liaison committee meeting) in course feedback, students agree or strongly agree that having pt-run study sessions is helpful (11% response rate, 39 of 353). the provision of recordings/transcripts and asynchronous discussion board monitoring ensures that students who cannot attend are not excluded. course teams agree that pt presence enhances the student learning experience by providing an increased sense of support and community. while it is not possible to say if pt presence has a significantly positive effect on results, extra support is viewed as beneficial. no difference is observed in support provided by pts tutoring on courses different from their programme specialism. boyd and paterson postgraduate peer tutors supporting academic skills in online programmes journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 9 an approval system will be put in place following the recommendation that pt applicants have official approval of their programme team when applying. the primary method of student volunteering for training will be maintained to ensure students are self-motivated and have sufficient time to meet role requirements. programme leaders will also recommend dissertation students consider this voluntary role to combat feelings of isolation reported while working on research. discussion positive feedback from staff, pts and students involved indicates the scheme is successful. due to the structure of the programmes, there is no method to accurately determine if pt presence improves grades. however, staff and students indicate improved student experience through enhanced support. live-session attendance increased in the post-pilot phase due to the change in the mode of delivery. although attendance was still low (<5) for some sessions, pts and students reported benefits from discussion. as reported by watts et al. (2015), low attendance rates can be caused by a number of factors. some can be resolved, for example, live session scheduling to avoid timetable clashes. a key factor appears to be lack of student recognition of the need for peer support. staff report that some assessment feedback touches on topics which have been covered in pt sessions which the student in question chose not to attend. the choice of live-session tool appears to influence the pt tutoring style in this case. those using text-chat demonstrate a more social-constructivist approach, facilitating open group discussion with guiding questions. those using the virtual classroom take a marginally more instructivist, ‘knowledge-telling’ (berghmans et al., 2013) approach – giving a presentation and inviting questions at the end. it could be argued that confidence influences the activity. pts choosing to use skype do so as there are potentially less technical difficulties (technical confidence). of those choosing collaborate, some use the method they are familiar with through giving presentations on their research as part of their assessed work (method confidence). those with more technical and pedagogical confidence (tutoring their second year and/or drawing on professional teaching experience) choose to ‘flip’ the classroom with recorded presentations and questions on boyd and paterson postgraduate peer tutors supporting academic skills in online programmes journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 10 the discussion board, or create more interactive sessions by making more active use of questions and the whiteboard facility. further research is required, particularly into role perceptions (roscoe and chi, 2007), as this can influence tutoring behaviours. pt pairs may facilitate peer monitoring as per berghmans et al. (2013), encouraging pts to enhance their approach by adopting strategies demonstrated successfully by their partners, or other pts. due to small numbers involved in the project to date, it has not been possible to carry out the linguistic analysis methods suggested by watts et al. (2015). this may be an option going forward to assist in researching the process in more depth. conclusion as recognised in delahunty et al. (2014), students appreciate a variety of opportunities to connect with the course team. pts can play a key role in enhancing student experience, reducing feelings of isolation (baran and correia, 2009) through social learning practices (ashwin, 2003). students respond positively to support provided by pts, finding peer-led sessions a relaxed space to ask questions. in this, we see the ‘trusting relationship’ described by mcluckie and topping (2004), where students discuss items they find confusing with a peer, i.e. someone not in a position of authority. pts report that the training course provides opportunities to develop their understanding, confidence and skills in facilitating online. it acts as a support area to raise issues, ask questions and connect with pt and academic colleagues separate from the students being peer-tutored – another aspect of the trusting relationship essential for sharing concerns. as reported by watts et al. (2015), it can be difficult to identify what elements constitute a successful peer project. a positive outcome is seen in the increased numbers of students actively requesting the role of peer tutor this year having been inspired by the example of their tutors in previous years. boyd and paterson postgraduate peer tutors supporting academic skills in online programmes journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 11 acknowledgements the postgraduate peer tutor project was supported by funding from the institute for academic development, the college of medicine and veterinary medicine and the royal (dick) school of veterinary studies, university of edinburgh. the authors would like to thank the peer tutors, colleagues from the veterinary medical education section, and the institute for academic development for their participation and guidance in the project. references ashwin, p. (2003) ‘peer facilitation and how it contributes to the development of a more social view of learning’, research in post-compulsory education, 8(1), pp. 5-18. doi: 10.1080/13596740300200137. baran, e. and correia, a.p. (2009) ‘student‐led facilitation strategies in online discussions’, distance education, 30(3), pp. 339-361. doi: 10.1080/01587910903236510. beaumont, t.j., mannion, a.p. and shen, b.o. (2012) ‘from the campus to the cloud: the online peer assisted learning scheme’, journal of peer learning, 5(1), pp. 1-15 [online]. available at: http://ro.uow.edu.au/ajpl/vol5/iss1/6/ (accessed: 8 june 2015). berghmans, i., neckebroeck, f., dochy, f. and struyven, k. (2013) ‘a typology of approaches to peer tutoring. unraveling peer tutors’ behavioural strategies’, european journal of psychology of education, 28(3), pp. 703-723. doi: 10.1007/s10212-012-0136-3. delahunty, j., verenikina, i. and jones, p. (2014) ‘socio-emotional connections: identity, belonging and learning in online interactions. a literature review’, technology, pedagogy and education, 23(2), pp. 243-265. doi: 10.1080/1475939x.2013.813405. http://ro.uow.edu.au/ajpl/vol5/iss1/6/ boyd and paterson postgraduate peer tutors supporting academic skills in online programmes journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 12 de smet, m., van keer, h., de wever, b. and valcke, m. (2010) ‘cross-age peer tutors in asynchronous discussion groups: exploring the impact of three types of tutor training on patterns in tutor support and on tutor characteristics’, computers & education, 54(4), pp. 1167-1181. doi: 10.1016/j.compedu.2009.11.002. falloon, g. (2011) ‘making the connection’, journal of research on technology in education, 43(3), pp. 187-209, doi: 10.1080/15391523.2011.10782569. galbraith, j. and winterbottom, m. (2011) ‘peer‐tutoring: what’s in it for the tutor?’, educational studies, 37(3), pp. 321-332. doi: 10.1080/03055698.2010.506330 lachman, n., christensen, k.n. and pawlina, w. (2013) ‘anatomy teaching assistants: facilitating teaching skills for medical students through apprenticeship and mentoring’, medical teacher, 35(1), e919-e925. doi: 10.3109/0142159x.2012.714880. mcluckie, j. and topping, k.j. (2004) ‘transferable skills for online peer learning’, assessment & evaluation in higher education, 29(5), 563-584. doi: 10.1080/02602930410001689144. reid, m., shahabudin, k. and hood, s. (2014) ‘case study: the 24/7 study advice workshop’, journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: digital technologies in learning development, november, pp. 1-12 [online]. available at: http://www.aldinhe.ac.uk/ojs/index.php?journal=jldhe&page=article&op=view&pat h%5b%5d=270 (accessed: 8 june 2015). roscoe, r.d. and chi, m.t. (2007) ‘understanding tutor learning: knowledge-building and knowledge-telling in peer tutors’ explanations and questions’, review of educational research, 77(4), pp. 534-574. doi: 10.3102/0034654307309920. salmon, g. (2012) e-moderating: the key to online teaching and learning. new york: routledge. http://www.aldinhe.ac.uk/ojs/index.php?journal=jldhe&page=article&op=view&path%5b%5d=270 http://www.aldinhe.ac.uk/ojs/index.php?journal=jldhe&page=article&op=view&path%5b%5d=270 boyd and paterson postgraduate peer tutors supporting academic skills in online programmes journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 13 salmon, g. (2013) e-tivities: the key to active online learning. new york: routledge. university of manchester (2014) about pass. available at: http://www.pass.manchester.ac.uk/about-pass/ (accessed: 8 may 2015) watts, h., malliris, m. and billingham, o. (2015) ‘online peer assisted learning: reporting on practice’, journal of peer learning, 8, pp. 85-104 [online]. available at: http://ro.uow.edu.au/ajpl/vol8/iss1/8 (accessed: 6 october 2015) weller, m. (2007) ‘the distance from isolation: why communities are the logical conclusion in e-learning’, computers & education, 49(2), pp. 148-159. doi: 10.1016/j.compedu.2005.04.015. author details sharon boyd is a lecturer in distance student learning at the royal (dick) school of veterinary studies. she joined the r(d)svs in 2007 as programme coordinator of online postgraduate and continuing professional development (cpd) courses. in 2013, she took on the role of director of the postgraduate certificate in advanced veterinary practice programme, and is programme coordinator for a new veterinary msc programme in advanced clinical practice. her remit includes study skills support for postgraduate students working online at distance, and her research areas of interest include distance and sustainable education. she is course leader for the postgraduate academic study skills course and co-lead on the online postgraduate peer tutor scheme, based on the undergraduate vetpals model. jessie paterson is a lecturer in student learning at the royal (dick) school of veterinary studies. as well as teaching on the school’s professional skills course, she is an active member of the school’s student undergraduate support team. her particular remit is study skills and she leads the school team dedicated to providing study skills support to the vet students. in 2013, she led and piloted a successful undergraduate peer assisted learning scheme, vetpals, and this has become a key component of the first year undergraduate student experience. she was also a co-lead in a scheme for online distance students based on this model. http://www.pass.manchester.ac.uk/about-pass/ http://ro.uow.edu.au/ajpl/vol8/iss1/8 postgraduate peer tutors supporting academic skills in online programmes abstract introduction purpose of the work participants pilot phase (2013-14) post-pilot phase (2014-15) role of pt pt training methodology findings and impact pilot year (2013-14) post-pilot year (2014-15) discussion conclusion acknowledgements references author details literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 5: march 2013 a developmental evaluation of the role of faculty-based student support coordinator rhona sharpe oxford brookes university, uk frances deepwell oxford brookes university, uk patsy clarke oxford brookes university, uk abstract this paper evaluates the role of the faculty-based student support coordinator (ssc) in a uk university. this paper asks how this new role is working in practice, what are the realities and tensions of the role, and what has been the impact to students? one of the challenges of implementing this new system was expected to be ensuring that all those involved understand their roles and help students to make use of them appropriately. data were collected both from the student support coordinators themselves and staff they worked alongside via interview and attendance at meetings. data were also collected from students via interviews and surveys. the feedback from students showed an increasing awareness of the service offered by sscs over time and a high level of satisfaction. this developmental evaluation has clarified and protected the role of the sscs and uncovered aspects of their role that had not been foreseen. keywords: student support; developmental evaluation; roles; boundaries; accessibility; visibility. introduction recent years have seen quite a shift in the recognition of the need for effective student support systems and the affective dimension of the student experience. we have moved sharpe et al. a developmental evaluation of the role of faculty-based student support coordinator from a position where universities were considered ‘emotion free zones’ where emotions were ‘inappropriate territory’ (mortiboys, 2002, p.7) to one where emotions, and particularly feelings of ‘belonging’, are understood to be key factors in student retention and achievement, with an emphasis on supporting students through induction, encouraging peer support and friendships, and personal tutoring (thomas, 2012). for example, in a study of first year dental students, burk and bender (2005) found that problems perceived as serious by students are of an emotional nature relating to academic performance, and students use both formal and informal peer support systems. the growing evidence of the links between student support and retention and attainment (yorke, 2004; yorke and thomas, 2003) has led to an increase in the provision of student support services and the reconsideration of the role of the personal tutor. support services are often located centrally and it is assumed that students will access the appropriate service as and when they need it. however, we know that even where there is high need for support, some students don’t seek support at all (malik, 2000) or seek but do not find it (thomas, 2012). there have been attempts to relate satisfaction to the types/approaches of support that are offered, and with student demographic and personality characteristics (mottarella et al., 2004). overall they show that what students value is ‘a good relationship’ with their adviser, however that might be expressed (malik, 2000; stephen et al., 2008). this evidence is strikingly similar to that from psychotherapy where the nature of relationship between therapist and client contributes more to satisfaction than the therapeutic approach adopted by the therapist (beutler et al., 1994). indeed mcgahey and szumko (2006) made explicit links between psychotherapy and academic tutoring, using the principles of person-centred counselling to identify key factors in academic tutoring relationships. it is also clear that regular and frequent meetings are important in establishing such a relationship (malik, 2000). there is a need then for universities to take stock of the arrangements for support within their institutions, in particular to ensure that services are accessible to and used appropriately by students. this is a highly complex situation, with many players involved and a constantly evolving institutional and political backdrop to student learning support and academic development. consequently, it seemed fitting to embark on a developmental evaluation (patton, 2011) since this provided us with a cross-institutional journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 2 sharpe et al. a developmental evaluation of the role of faculty-based student support coordinator approach that would enable what is learned from the evaluation to be incorporated into decision-making in a timely manner. developmental evaluation ’tracks and attempts to make sense of what emerges under conditions of complexity, documenting and interpreting the dynamics, interactions and interdependencies that occur as innovations unfold’ (patton, 2011, p.7). developmental evaluation brings the evaluators into close partnership with decision-makers. as with many evaluation studies, we draw on a range of enquiry methods, as indicated in the methods section of this paper, however the developmental approach keeps us mindful of what patton (2008) terms ‘process use’, that is, a sensitivity to how engagement in the evaluation is affecting those involved and their relationships within the organisation. in some respects, developmental evaluation is akin to action research, with its emphasis on cycles of engagement, critical reflection and action, or development. in contrast to much action research, however, developmental evaluation provides a clear distinction between an enquiry role and a co-ordination or decision-making role, and in our case, rather than being problem-focused, the initiative we are evaluating is a programme of student support with a set of outcomes that has largely shaped the inquiry (patton, 2011, p.281). context oxford brookes university is a modern uk university of 18,000 students with a high reputation for teaching quality. the institution is spread over four campuses, and most faculties have students on at least two different campuses. in 2009, the university commissioned a review of undergraduate student support conducted by an external consultant (laycock, 2008), with the key recommendations that: the university adopts a consistent, whole-institutional, strategic student support framework which clearly signals its commitment to a ‘supportive learning community’. the university re-conceives personal tutoring and moves from a reactive, deficit model to a more proactive, structured approach and associated student support journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 3 sharpe et al. a developmental evaluation of the role of faculty-based student support coordinator two roles were created in line with these recommendations and thus started the transition from a model of support based around the personal tutor as the primary source of local student support, to a model based around student support coordinators (sscs) and academic advisers. the notion of the ssc was in part based on a system which was already well established in one academic faculty. each faculty began implementing their own variation on this model. in essence, the role of the ssc is to provide a one-stop shop for students in a convenient location for each faculty, handling enquiries on a broad range of issues, answering them where they can, offering support and acting as a referral service. the sscs are dedicated staff (often recent graduates) whose role is providing accessible and timely advice to students within their faculty. this should free up academic advisers (who are academics from the discipline) to be the students’ main point of contact for academic guidance throughout their study. the role of the academic adviser is to monitor, promote and facilitate the academic development and progress of students assigned to them. this model of support is interesting to learning developers in a number of ways. first, it moves away from a deficiency model of student support towards a system which offers students proactive support, structured into their programme of study through their connection with a named academic adviser, and through the availability of locally based sscs. second, it moves learning development and support closer to the students’ study of the discipline by locating it within the academic space with which students associate themselves. this two-part support model complements a central student support service, including an academic skills centre, and is supplementary to other learning development that is fully embedded in the curriculum. this builds on earlier work showing the benefits of integrating learning development into the curriculum (hill et al., 2010; hill et al., 2011). whilst the location of student support within faculties is not new, the present study provides an insight into how students experience advice and guidance in such a model, and in particular explores their decision-making process when seeking such support. of particular interest is the creation of short vignettes to tell student stories, which allow the complex and on-going nature of support issues to show through, and to provide meaningful narrative to prompt discussion (hall and peat, 2012). where this new system works, the benefits to students should be an easily accessible and responsive source of faculty-based advice and information (through the sscs) and a journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 4 sharpe et al. a developmental evaluation of the role of faculty-based student support coordinator longer-term relationship with a member of academic staff for academic advice and guidance (through the academic advisers). the current evaluation study asks. 1. how are the sscs’ roles working in practice? 2. how accessible are sources of faculty based support? 3. what is the impact of the new model of student support for students? this study was commissioned by the main teaching and learning committee of the university, and designed, undertaken and disseminated in ways that were intended to have the most impact. the work needed to be participative, highly visible, and presented in a way that engages the reader with the evidence. this paper focuses on the role of sscs. a similar examination of the roles of academic advisers, who are subject-based academic staff, will be reported in a subsequent paper. method this paper draws on data from the larger evaluation, which took place over two years. the project had full approval from the university ethics committee. in line with the developmental approach of the evaluation, sscs have been engaged in all stages of the research project, including commenting on and piloting the surveys, and sharing their perspectives on student support. the developmental evaluation approach also meant that data were collected in ways which would produce outputs which we could use to engage our audience of university decision-makers in order to improve the impact of the study. online survey the survey had three sections: • about you: age, gender, faculty, uk residency, first language, level of study. • where do you prefer to go for advice and information? • about faculty based support received from sscs or academic advisers in terms of ease of accessibility and satisfaction. in 2010, the survey was made available via survey monkey for three weeks in semester two. invitations to complete the survey were distributed by e-mail to undergraduate journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 5 sharpe et al. a developmental evaluation of the role of faculty-based student support coordinator students by their senior academics. prizes of high street shopping vouchers were offered as an incentive. the survey was accessed by 253 students and completed by 228. in 2011, the survey was again made available via survey monkey for three weeks in semester one. in an attempt to increase the number of completed surveys, in addition to distribution by senior academics, the survey was also advertised on the message of the day which students see when logging in to university computers, and on the student’s union facebook site. prizes of high street shopping vouchers were offered as an incentive. as shown in table 1, in 2011, the survey was attempted by 309 students with 250 usable submissions. table 1. demographic characteristics of survey respondents. time of data collection may 2010 (n=228) nov 2011 (n=250) level of study undergraduate 228 214 postgraduate 0 36 age 18-20 139 116 21-30 62 94 31+ 27 40 gender female 175 188 male 53 62 comments cards in 2011, comments cards were created in paper and online. sscs gave these cards to students that they saw during weeks 8-9 of semester one 2011/12 and added the link to the online form to their e-mail footers. there were 187 comments cards received, around half of which were from one faculty. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 6 sharpe et al. a developmental evaluation of the role of faculty-based student support coordinator student interviews students who completed the online surveys were asked to indicate if they were willing to be interviewed. ten interviews were conducted during may-june 2010 and a further ten in january-february 2012. interviews were audio recorded and in 2012 were also transcribed. students who attended the interviews were given a £5 meal voucher. the interviews and their transcripts were used to create short vignettes, which capture the support needs and experience of gaining support of each student during their time at brookes. the full text of each anonymised story was agreed by each student prior to publication. staff interviews semi-structured interviews were conducted with sscs individually or in groups in may 2010 (n=6) and again in february 2012 (n=5). interviews were audio recorded. interviews were held in sscs’ usual office space and photographs were taken of the spaces in which sscs work. the interviews were also an opportunity to collect documentation. interviews were conducted with academic advisers (n=18): five in june 2010, four in november 2010 and nine in march 2012. all faculties were represented in the interviews. the interviews lasted around 45 minutes and were audio recorded. the evaluation team attended several ssc network meetings to discuss the purposes and findings of the evaluation, and hear collectively from sscs about their experiences. attendance at these meetings, chaired by a senior manager, facilitated short-term actions, such as training or clarification of job role, to be progressed efficiently. findings and discussion the intention was that sscs would provide a one-stop shop in each faculty for students, handling enquiries on a broad range of issues, answering them where they can, offering support, and acting as a referral service. one of the challenges of implementing this new system was expected to be ensuring that all those involved understand their roles and help students to make use of them appropriately. the benefits to students should be an accessible and responsive source of faculty-based advice and information. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 7 sharpe et al. a developmental evaluation of the role of faculty-based student support coordinator how are the sscs’ roles operating in practice? in year 1, sscs were found to be taking on a very wide range of other roles in addition to dealing with individual queries. placing sscs within faculties, rather than centrally, had led to sscs taking on additional duties from within their faculties. we noted at the time that the challenge for sscs was going to be to decide which roles contribute to their ability to perform their individual support and referral service. by year 2, a generic job description had been created for all sscs and at interview sscs were clear about the boundaries of their role and familiar with the job description. sscs gave similar descriptions of their role at interview and were able to quickly explain it, for example: provide advice, guidance, support and information. we signpost to other services and provide encouragement and motivation. (ssc interview 2) we are the first port of call for students who have questions about anything really about their programme, personal, external things to uni. (ssc interview 4). a full breakdown of the descriptions sscs gave of their roles is given in table 2. these are not presented in any particular order. the sscs noted the broad scope of their role: ‘whatever’s needed – whenever it’s needed’ or ‘the faculty’s answer to google’. table 2. summary of activities reported by student support coordinators as part of their role. all sscs were undertaking the following core duties: in addition, some sscs had responsibility for: being available for visits, drop-ins, being the first port of call for queries, practical advice, or pastoral support. making assessments of students’ needs and referrals as appropriate, e.g. to subject academics, academic management offices, counselling, disability, medical centre, student skills advisors, student union advisory services. student forums (regular student feedback sessions): range from organising it, running it, minute taking, just attending. faculty based academic and cultural orientation programme. careers events and weekly ejournal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 8 sharpe et al. a developmental evaluation of the role of faculty-based student support coordinator complex query solving. sscs often take on problems that students have been unable to solve through visits to other services, and see them through to resolution. providing timely advice for groups of students e.g. running scheduled advice sessions for particular groups of students, sometimes negotiated through programme teams. activities to increase their visibility e.g. presentations to students on visit days and during induction, and to staff in staff development week, making up posters, leaflets, maintaining notice boards. providing information to students in accessible ways e.g. leaflets, newsletters, regular e-mail updates. attending meetings: faculty learning and teaching committee, admissions, subject committees, exam committees and programme meetings. building links within and outside the university e.g. services which support careers, international students services, mental health issues. mail updates. recruiting and supporting open day guiders. coordinating arrangements for student induction. tier 4 attendance monitoring. hill et al. (2010, p.5) reflect on the location of support services, noting that those based in academic departments value ‘the inclusiveness and collaboration that is engendered’. we found a number of examples of this. some sscs found themselves part of the departmental community to such an extent that they were advising and supporting staff as well as students. in some cases this may be related to student support, but in others it was direct support for staff: staff come in and tell us about their problems, and their students. we get both sides. we get the staff and the student perspective. we mediate. (ssc interview 1) being included in the community also allows sscs to take active steps to make contact with and offer support to students who are hard to reach or may be disengaging, such as those who are failing modules, not-attending, or not submitted assessed work. where hill et al. (2010) promote the use of an individual learning profile, sscs were using existing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 9 sharpe et al. a developmental evaluation of the role of faculty-based student support coordinator data in the student records system and contacting those students with errors displayed on their record pages, or e-mailing all students who have received notification of failure letters from the exams office. in one faculty, module leaders have started to monitor attendance at seminars. they send the names of students who have missed more than two seminars to the year tutors, who pass them on to the ssc. the sscs e-mail these students to offer support. one ssc describes this as a lot of work but worth it for the students it does pick up. being located closer to the departments also gives the potential for support and learning development to be targeted. sscs were asked how they operated within the context of their faculty. all were able to talk knowledgeably about what mattered to the students they were responsible for, whether that was law students’ concern with passing professional modules and achieving a good final classification, or healthcare students’ concern with staff assessing their competence to practice. some sscs also gave examples of adapting their work for students in their discipline. for example, in built environment, the sscs were deliberately using a lot of graphics in their materials to appeal to their students. in another example, sscs in healthcare adapted their introductory presentations to new students to the programmes that they were going to see, e.g. students taking the adult nursing programme are mainly school leavers away from home for the first time, so the presentation focuses on how they can help students sort out practical problems as well as dealing with homesickness and feeling lonely. as one ssc explained: part of working with people is understanding what is going on for them, and having a part in their department’s life. (ssc interview 3) there were challenges to the role operating effectively in practice. firefighting was a recurrent issue raised by sscs who reported that problems were caused by systems (notably student records and mitigating circumstances systems) and the ssc was needed to explain, interpret and fix problems caused by these systems. for the sscs, this means that they don’t have the time to do as much proactive work as they would like. they are frequently torn between wanting to undertake proactive support work and wanting to be available to students who may be in crisis. one ssc, who thought the proportion of their time they spent ‘firefighting’ was about 40%, described this as: journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 10 sharpe et al. a developmental evaluation of the role of faculty-based student support coordinator dealing with problems that shouldn’t be problems, so for instance students will go to academic management or exams and will receive a really bad response from these departments in relation to their query. they’ll come to us and then we’ll have to call up those departments and liaise with them, and i spend a lot of my day doing that, trying to get answers to solve whatever the issue is. (ssc interview 1) another challenge is defining the boundaries of the role. previous studies have emphasised the affective dimensions of being a student and the interaction between emotion and academic performance (beard et al., 2007; burk and bender, 2005). sscs are on the sharp end of this and talked about the boundaries of their role being between personal support and counselling. sscs were clear to state their position, that they were not counsellors, for example: we are careful not to unpack anything in too much detail because we are not here as counsellors, more as a signposting and advisory service. (ssc interview 1) however, sscs also recognised, as mcgahey and szumko (2006, p.1) have done, that ‘it is impossible to separate a person from their feelings’. some sscs are seeing counselling as a potential career development route and some already use counselling skills in other roles outside work. all were appreciative of being offered a ‘counselling for noncounsellors course’, and most have created physical spaces which are designed to be warm, welcoming, safe, and private. consequently, although sscs are clear to answer the question about their boundaries with care, there may be a need to make this boundary between pastoral support and counselling clearer to students. the sscs at interview were also clear to distinguish their roles from other sources of support within the faculties. the model of faculty-based student support distinguishes clearly between the roles of ssc and academic adviser. however, distinct roles do not imply separate ones. indeed the sscs thought the sscs and academic adviser roles worked best when they communicated well, giving an example of collaborating when a student is in trouble: we’ll phone them and they’ll phone us to say ‘have you seen so and so’? i’ve seen them and this is what’s happening so you can keep your eye on them. (ssc interview 4) journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 11 sharpe et al. a developmental evaluation of the role of faculty-based student support coordinator the vignette created from ben’s interview describes how the system works, when it is working as intended: towards the end of his first year ben consulted his academic adviser when he had become stressed from an overload of academic work. ben knew to consult the academic adviser as there were compulsory group or individual sessions to introduce the academic adviser right from the start. he found it useful to have someone to bounce ideas off and help form a plan to carry him through the next two years, continuing with a broad-based set of subjects while reducing the number of modules. as ben needed help to set up the planned modules, he was then referred to a student support coordinator who ’knew her stuff’ and was able to sort that out for him within a half hour. how accessible are sscs as a source of faculty based support? hill et al. (2010) recognise the importance of visibility and accessibility to devolved support services and our interviews with sscs also highlighted efforts the sscs have made to improve their visibility. for example, in health and life sciences, the sscs have promoted a specific visual identity, associated with a bright yellow colour, which they use on all their publications from their t-shirts on induction days to flyers and posters around the site. sscs engage students from pre-arrival with a flyer in pre-arrival packs, going into every class in orientation week and again 3-5 weeks later as part of an extended student induction. students who responded to the survey were asked if they knew where to find the ssc in their faculty. in may 2010, towards the end of the first year of the new system, 32.0% of undergraduate survey respondents knew where to find their ssc. by the time of the second survey in november 2011, awareness of sscs had increased to 50.5% of students, an 18.5% improvement. such an improvement is welcomed and reflects the efforts sscs have made to improve their visibility. in the open comments, survey respondents reported that they had found out about their faculty sscs from a range of information sources or events. mentioned frequently were the presentations and introductions by sscs during orientation weeks, attendance by sscs at student-staff meetings, and regular e-mails. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 12 sharpe et al. a developmental evaluation of the role of faculty-based student support coordinator in the interviews with sscs, it was noticeable that in year 1 they were focusing on establishing their visibility, whereas in year 2 they were also concerned with improving access to their services. the most obvious improvement to access has been the relocation of many sscs to more visible locations within their faculties. other things that sscs are doing to make their services more accessible include a joint faculty-wide e-mail inbox, consistent and established drop-in hours, and appointments bookable by e-mail. the comments cards given to students who had seen an ssc asked ‘how easy was it to meet with your student support coordinator?’ table 3 shows that for students who had been to see their ssc, they considered it very easy to meet with them. table 3. comments cards. how easy did you find it to meet with the ssc? very quite not very not at all total 164 (87.7%) 19 (10.2%) 3 (1.6%) 1 (0.5%) 187 thinking of the issue which took you to see your student support coordinator, were you able to resolve it during your meeting? completely mostly a little not at all total 109 (58.3%) 63 (33.7%) 12 (6.4%) 3 (1.6%) 187 if your student support coordinator directed or referred you to another source of support, how useful was this recommendation? very quite not very not at all total 105 (71.9%) 33 (22.6%) 6 (4.1%) 2 (1.4%) 146 journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 13 sharpe et al. a developmental evaluation of the role of faculty-based student support coordinator what do students say about the support coordinators? the evaluation of students’ experiences drew on evidence from comments cards, the online survey and in-depth interviews with students. it is worth noting that all these data collection methods involved students self-selecting to take part. in evaluating the value of the sscs role, we were particularly interested in their ability to refer and/or resolve issues to avoid students being passed around different services. students were also asked about the usefulness of information received and the impact that meeting with an ssc had for them. the comments cards asked about the extent to which the ssc was able to resolve the issue presented and the quality of any referral. table 3 shows that more than half of the issues are being resolved completely and, where sscs cannot resolve the issue, they offer high quality referrals. the following example is taken from the open comments provided by a student in the online survey: the problems i went to see my student support coordinator couldn't be fixed on the spot, but she helped me think about what i had to do to sort them out and she pointed me in the right direction and gave me very helpful advice. in 2010, of the 228 survey respondents, 37 (16.2%) had been to see a ssc. table 4 shows that the sscs were rated very highly by this group with 93% of students finding the advice and information received quite or very useful. by 2011, with the increase of awareness of students concerning their faculty sscs, a total of 67 (31.3%) of the undergraduate survey respondents had been to see their ssc. slightly more than this, a total of 80 students, answered the questions about the usefulness of information that they had received from sscs, presumably referring to contact with sscs other than visits. of these, 76 (95%) responded that they found the advice from ssc(s) ‘very useful’ or ‘quite useful’. table 4. how useful is the advice and information from sscs? n very quite not very not at all 2010 survey 37/228 24 (64.9%) 9 (24.3%) 4 (10.8%) 0 (0%) 2011 survey 80/214 47 (58.8%) 29 (36.3%) 3 (3.7%) 1 (1.2%) 2011 comments cards 187 161 (86.1%) 25 (13.4%) 1 (0.5%) 0 journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 14 sharpe et al. a developmental evaluation of the role of faculty-based student support coordinator the open comments left on the comments cards are overwhelmingly positive, of which the following is typical: the student support coordinator really does offer great advice and help to the students. i had a lot of problems, and really didn't know what to do with them, but after seeing the student support coordinator, things became so much clearer. to be quite frank, if this service was not available, i'm not sure i would have got certain issues sorted out, at all! they are very friendly and caring, and will always have time for you. i can now relax more, and concentrate on my studies. student support coordinator service is one of the best services of the university. any time i come, i get the answers to all my questions, i am really pleased with the service. the open comments show that students particularly value that ssc are: • well informed, offer good advice. • prompt and timely responses to e-mails. • follows up when says is going to. • listen well. • friendly. • approachable. • refer on appropriately. • have good dialogue with students. • always available, never too busy. • making proactive contact. • managing student issues sensitively. in some cases the students responding to the survey left no doubt as to the effect of their access to an ssc: i probably would have left university a long time ago if it wasn't for my ssc. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 15 sharpe et al. a developmental evaluation of the role of faculty-based student support coordinator this role is so important to students. we had no one before student support coordinators. however, it is the stories from individual students gained through interview which demonstrate the complexity of support needs, the many interactions students have with a number of different support services, and the long-term impact to them of finding the support they need. these highly engaging outputs prompted debate within the institution and gave life to the project reports. table 5 gives a flavour of these stories. table 5. summary of some of the vignettes created through interviews with students. janice is a mature age student whose most recent motivation for seeking help was as she felt she was not doing as well as she could in her essays. janice had a good chat with one of the student support coordinators and also discussed a personal matter concerning her responsibilities. lizbeth is a second year international student who began her first semester one january when other students were entering their second semester. marion. in her third year of study, feedback from lecturers that referred to her work’s ‘sloppiness’, ‘carelessness’ and ‘poor spelling’ provoked marion’s decision to formally register her dyslexia. naomi is an international student who arrived in oxford with others from her home region to study at brookes, without any pre-arrival information. sheera, an international student in her second year of study, has developed good relationships with both her field chair and her academic adviser. sonya sought advice from a lecturer on arrival. having always received good advice and support over the intervening three years, sonya has continued to make her senior lecturer her first port of call. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 16 sharpe et al. a developmental evaluation of the role of faculty-based student support coordinator wayne realised within two weeks of arriving at university that the subject he had registered for did not meet his expectations. conrad is a mature age student who is the first in the family to study at university. he applied to brookes after he was made redundant from his job. conrad has sought support in choosing and registering for modules, and from the careers centre in supporting his change of career direction. julia is a third year student from the eu, who discusses her support needs with regard to accommodation, employment and use of academic english. penny is a mature student in her first year, who has been supported by the mature student society. she describes her frustrations with communicating poor learning experiences to staff in her school. note: these stories make use of pseudonyms. each student has confirmed the contents of their story for use in the project. what use has been made of this developmental evaluation? the oxford brookes strategy for enhancing the student experience (oxford brookes university, 2010) includes a commitment to evidence based policy development, stating that: making use of our internationally recognised in-house expertise in educational development, we commit to routinely carrying out impact assessment, review and revision of all significant academic development initiatives and of measures taken forward in the sese and the consequent strategy maps. impact assessments will be sustained and iterative. they will assess the process as well as the end product of developments. [sese 4.4.3] the evaluation of faculty based student support was one of the first academic development projects to be commissioned by the main university teaching and learning committee under this new commitment. it demonstrates an institutional approach to developmental evaluations that are iterative and ongoing, which inform our community’s journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 17 sharpe et al. a developmental evaluation of the role of faculty-based student support coordinator activities, and are a tool for positive change. coming back to ‘process use’ as identified at the start of this paper, we can identify that the sscs and faculty colleagues have become far more confident in the purpose and function of the role and in navigating the boundary areas with other support professionals, for example, academic advisers, counselling, careers or study skills specialists. the project and its findings have also been used to inform the following institutional decisions: • the integration of sscs into faculty processes, including giving them a place on each faculty’s learning and teaching committee. • the creation of a generic job description for sscs, which clarified and protected the important parts of their role. • the move to more visible offices within faculties for a number of sscs. • the creation of a working group to further define the role of the academic adviser and how it interacts with the sscs. the project confirmed the decision to place sscs within faculties, finding evidence that being based locally is considered to be important by both sscs and students. the advantages are that sscs can be more visible to students and other staff, aiding communications and referrals between sscs and academic staff. sscs are now formally members of each faculty’s learning and teaching committee and contribute actively based on their interactions with a wide diversity of students. importantly, it was found that faculty based sscs can understand and be part of the students’ experiences, enabling them to offer useful advice and information and, where necessary, referrals. from within the faculties they can also initiate and maintain the regular contacts with students, thereby making real our notion of proactive support. in an earlier article in this journal, bishop et al. (2009, p.1) typify their role as learning developers through metaphors, including ‘mrs mop, mechanic and/or miracle worker’. it may help to understand more deeply the role of faculty-based sscs in our study where we found metaphors emerging such as ‘firefighters’, ‘sign-posts’ and ‘first port-of-call’. there is still work to be done, and the evaluation work continues, but it is now embedded in annual processes and institutional networks. sscs and students still need to find the boundaries around dealing with the emotional aspects of being a student. there is journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 18 sharpe et al. a developmental evaluation of the role of faculty-based student support coordinator potential to use the sscs to collect data which could be a powerful source of information on how best to support students and to assess the impact of different types of interventions. there is still potential for the sscs’ role to have more impact if they were able to contain the firefighting aspects of the role to devote more time to what we have found to be highly valued, and effective activities such as proactive and preventative support work in contacting students at risk of disengaging. references beard, c., clegg, s. and smith, k. (2007) ‘acknowledging the affective in higher education’, british education research journal, 33(2), pp. 235-252. beutller, l.e., machado, p.p. and neufeldt, s.a. (1994) ‘therapist variables’, in bergin, a.e. and garfield, s.l. (eds.) handbook of psychotherapy and behavioural change. new york: wiley, pp. 229-69. bishop, c., bowmaker, c. and finnigan, t.j. (2009) ‘mrs mop, mechanic and /or miracle worker: metaphors of study support’, journal of learning development in higher education, issue 1, february, pp. 1-14. burk, d. and bender, m.a. (2005) 'use and perceived effectiveness of student support services in a first year dental student population', journal of dental education, 69(10), pp. 1148-1160. hall, j. and peat, j. (2012) 'using student conversations about learning and teaching to surface troublesome knowledge about the he classroom', educational developments, 13(3), pp. 15-17. hill, p., tinker, a. and catterall, s. (2010) ‘from deficiency to development: the evolution of academic skills provision at one uk university’, journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2, february, pp. 1-19. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 19 sharpe et al. a developmental evaluation of the role of faculty-based student support coordinator hill, p., tinker, a., squires, p. and kannara, v. (2011) the integration of learning development into the student experience. a university of huddersfield teaching and learning project. july 2011. available at: http://www.hud.ac.uk/media/universityofhuddersfield/content/tlinstitute/documents/pr ojects/projects10/embedding%20skills%20pat%20hill%20final%20report.doc (accessed: 3 march 2013). laycock, m. (2008) a ‘supportive learning community’: recommendations for an institutional framework for student support. internal document. oxford: oxford brookes university. malik, s. (2000) 'students, tutors and relationships: the ingredients of a successful academic support scheme', medical education, 34(8), pp. 635-641. mcgahey, p. and szumko, j. (2006) ‘relationship at the heart of support work’, brainhe 2006 conference. de montford university, leicester 15 september. mortiboys, a. (2002) the emotionally intelligent lecturer. birmingham: seda. mottarella, k.e., fitzsche, b.a. and cerabino, k.c. (2004) 'what do students want in advising? a policy capturing study', nacada journal, 24(1 & 2), spring and fall, pp. 48-61. oxford brookes university (2010) strategy for enhancing the student experience. oxford brookes university. oxford. available at http://www.brookes.ac.uk/services/ocsld/sese/ (accessed 20 march 2013) patton, m.q. (2008) utilization-focused evaluation. 4th edn. thousand oaks, ca: sage. patton, m.q. (2011) developmental evaluation, applying complexity concepts to enhance innovation and use. new york: guildford press. stephen, d., o'connell, p. and hall, m. (2008) ‘‘going the extra mile', 'fire-fighting', or laissez-faire? re-evaluating personal tutoring relationships within mass higher education', teaching in higher education, 13(4), pp. 449-460. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 20 http://www.hud.ac.uk/media/universityofhuddersfield/content/tlinstitute/documents/projects/projects10/embedding%20skills%20pat%20hill%20final%20report.doc http://www.hud.ac.uk/media/universityofhuddersfield/content/tlinstitute/documents/projects/projects10/embedding%20skills%20pat%20hill%20final%20report.doc http://www.brookes.ac.uk/services/ocsld/sese/ sharpe et al. a developmental evaluation of the role of faculty-based student support coordinator thomas, l. (2012) building student engagement and belonging in higher education at a time of change: final report from the what works? student retention & success programme. london: paul hamlyn foundation. yorke, m. (2004) 'retention, persistence and success in on-campus higher education, and their enhancement in open and distance learning', open learning, 19(1), pp. 19-32. yorke, m. and thomas, l. (2003) 'improving student retention from lower socio-economic groups', journal of higher education policy and management, 25(1), pp. 63-74. author details dr. rhona sharpe is head of the oxford centre for staff and learning development at oxford brookes university. she is the editor of the brookes ejournal of learning and teaching, and chair of elesig (evaluation of learners' experiences of elearning special interest group). she is a senior fellow of the staff and educational development association, a fellow of the higher education academy and a national teaching fellow. dr. frances deepwell is an educational developer in the oxford centre for staff and learning development at oxford brookes university. her main interests lie in the areas of programme and project evaluation; continuing professional development for learning and teaching beyond initial training; institutional innovation and change. she is senior fellow of the higher education academy and senior fellow of the staff and educational development association. patsy clarke spent four years as an educational developer in the oxford centre for staff and learning development at oxford brookes university, where she supported a number of research projects including an appreciative inquiry for the jisc-funded users and innovation research programme. since her retirement, patsy freelances as a researcher and nvivo software trainer. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5: march 2013 21 a developmental evaluation of the role of faculty-based student support coordinator abstract introduction context method online survey comments cards student interviews staff interviews findings and discussion how are the sscs’ roles operating in practice? how accessible are sscs as a source of faculty based support? what do students say about the support coordinators? what use has been made of this developmental evaluation? references author details literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special edition: digital technologies, november 2014 open badges: exploring the potential and practicalities of a new way of recognising skills in higher education anne hole university of sussex, uk abstract this case study reports an ongoing project at the university of sussex seeking to introduce the idea of open badges to the institution while exploring some of the practical issues and limiting factors associated with this method of recognising learning. the focus is on piloting open badges in workshops and events for staff in order to develop understanding of the advantages and challenges of this form of micro-credentialing. it is hoped that the knowledge gained from this project can be used to identify and support appropriate future staff and student-facing badging initiatives. the project aims to:  develop understanding of open badges and their potential in higher education amongst professional service colleagues and academics.  evaluate tools and processes.  build capacity to support future projects. the project has begun to meet its aims, there is now an operational badging scheme for technology enhanced learning (tel) staff development workshops; colleagues in student-facing professional services have developed their knowledge and understanding of open badges and been supported in the development of plans for badging learner skills and there is increased awareness of open badges amongst teaching staff who have attended ‘badged’ workshops. keywords: open badges; digital badges; staff development; technology enhanced learning; skills. hole open badges: exploring the potential and practicalities journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2014 2 open badges badges, which have long been symbols of achievement and learning, have been reimagined for the digital age. mozilla define open badges and clarify the distinction between digital and open badges as follows: a digital badge is an online representation of a skill you’ve earned. open badges take that concept one step further, and allows [sic] you to verify your skills, interests and achievements through credible organizations and attaches that information to the badge image file, hard-coding the metadata for future access and review. because the system is based on an open standard, earners can combine multiple badges from different issuers to tell the complete story of their achievements — both online and off. badges can be displayed wherever earners want them on the web, and share them for employment, education or lifelong learning. (mozilla, 2014) these features of open badges make them particularly suitable for accrediting skills and learning which are important on a cv but might not be recognised within formal cpd accreditation or the curriculum. the fact that open badges can be issued by anyone, however, raises concerns about their credibility and reliability. if open badges are to realise their potential as an alternative form of accreditation then careful consideration needs to be given to establishing and maintaining standards. the open badges project technology enhanced learning (tel) initiated an open badges pilot project in february 2014 with a view to introducing the concept of micro-credentialing to the institution; to explore potential contexts within which badges might be used and evaluate some of the practicalities relating to their design, creation and issue. the online resources provided by mozilla (http://openbadges.org/) provided an international context and framed the initial thinking for the project. jisc (2014) and specifically the regional support centre for scotland, provided some really useful literature, for example reports of suzanne scott’s work with open badges at borders college, offered several points of similarity to the sussex project. scott’s experiences of hole open badges: exploring the potential and practicalities journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2014 3 introducing open badges for staff cpd activities (scott, 2013; 2014) served as a valuable example of exploring the advantages and challenges of badging staff development. the tel project commenced with a meeting to bring together tel staff and professional services colleagues, who work with students on study skills; information skills; personal development planning and employability, to facilitate consideration of the potential applications of open badges for learner development in these areas, to share experience and to establish outcomes for the various stages of the project. the project focussed on staff as this enabled tel to take forward its plans quickly and learn from the various pilots outlined here before planning student-focused badging projects. the open education week (oew 2014) badge the first open badges were created for open education week (oew) at sussex in march 2014. the only criterion for receiving a badge was attendance (physical or online) at one of the events. the organisers were aware of the risk of devaluing badges by awarding them just for turning up but decided that it was worth doing for a number of reasons:  to link the concept of open badges to the wider open education agenda.  to raise awareness of open badges amongst participants at the oew events.  to provide a low-stakes pilot of creating, claiming and issuing badges. when choosing a badge issuing system it was important to find one that would create truly open badges and not just digital images of badges that were either locked into a particular platform or lacked the metadata to make them meaningful. after comparing a few options credly.com was chosen because it provided badge issuers with:  free, easy to use badge design, creation and issuing tools.  the ability to add criteria and evidence as metadata. hole open badges: exploring the potential and practicalities journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2014 4 badge earners could:  collect badges from multiple email addresses.  share and embed badges across a range of online spaces.  organise, categorise, hide or display badges within credly.  transfer badges to a mozilla backpack. the main disadvantage of using credly was that people earning badges had to register for a credly account in order to receive their badge. this was a potential hurdle to people completing the badge claiming process but tel found that sending an email just before issuing the badge, explaining the process and the advantages of a free credly account, largely overcame this issue. claiming of badges was handled manually by means of a google form which was emailed to participants and publicised on event materials. the form required claimants to provide their name, email address and indicate from a drop-down list which event(s) they had attended. this worked well as it was easy for tel to see who wanted a badge and crossreference applications against event attendance lists. this first pilot showed a good level of interest in the badges. the focal point of sussex’s oew activities was a higher education academy sponsored event which attracted 32 participants, 22 of whom claimed badges. to support tel’s ongoing work in this area a dedicated set of webpages were created (see http://www.sussex.ac.uk/tel/help/badges) which outlined what open badges were, why staff might want to collect them and how they could earn and display them. in addition open badges resources were collected and shared with colleagues in a flipboard magazine (see http://flip.it/cxvfb). http://flip.it/cxvfb hole open badges: exploring the potential and practicalities journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2014 5 tel staff development badges the oew badges pilot enabled tel to experiment with badge design, claiming and issuing but it was never the intention to continue issuing badges merely for attending events. if open badges are to gain traction in higher education they need to be assessed against clear criteria and have meaningful evidence included in their metadata. the team progressed to developing a set of badges with value that could be earned by teaching staff attending some tel staff development workshops. these badges serve several purposes, they:  offer staff an open, transferrable, displayable record of their tel development activities (these are recorded on an internal staff development record but this is only accessible within the institution).  raise awareness of open badges.  may encourage, through gamification, increased uptake of tel staff development opportunities. initially five basic badges were planned with a tel champion badge offered to anyone who earned all five. four existing workshops were brought into the scheme and one session, run by colleagues in the library, was added. the badges were:  study direct badge (study direct is the moodle-based virtual learning environment (vle)).  quizzes badge.  reading lists badge.  lecture capture badge.  smartboard badge. these sessions were well suited to badging as they were interactive and participants produced evidence of their learning during the workshop which could be used as evidence to demonstrate they had met the criteria. there was a tight alignment between learning hole open badges: exploring the potential and practicalities journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2014 6 outcomes, what was done in the session and the assessment for the badge. for example, in relation to the study direct badge, the website stated: to earn this badge you need to attend the introduction to using study direct in your teaching workshop; upload 3 different types of resources to a study direct (moodle) site and create at least one activity or block in study direct. you can use the ‘sandbox’ site used in the workshop as evidence for this badge. (www.sussex.ac.uk/tel/help/badges/obtel/obcri) the badge criteria assessed the learning outcomes for the workshop which were themselves designed to represent a realistic and meaningful learning goal in terms of an entry-level use of the vle. participants could claim their badge via a google form. a member of tel would examine the site and, assuming that the criteria had been met, would create the screenshot, showing the required elements, to attach to the badge. figure 1. example of screenshot evidence for study direct badge. the tel badges pilot began in late spring 2014 so, at the time of writing, has been available to only a small number of staff. to date 13 badges have been issued from a potential 21 participants. three people attended more than one workshop and claimed badges for each, suggesting that they see value in collecting them. no one who came to multiple workshops stopped claiming badges after the first. http://www.sussex.ac.uk/tel/help/badges/obtel/obcri hole open badges: exploring the potential and practicalities journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2014 7 badging 10 days of twitter the use of open badges was extended in june 2014 when tel ran the ‘10 days of twitter’ cpd course (created by dr helen webster, http://10daysoftwitter.wordpress.com/) for teaching staff. three badges were devised, marking significant stages in the development of participants’ twitter skills. each badge required evidence of activity and achievement. tel wished to encourage participants to apply for the badges so the application process was as simple as possible – usually just an email or a tweet – and tel took on the task of collecting the evidence, thus ensuring that the correct evidence was obtained. however if there had been large numbers of badge applications the workload would have been significant. about 50 members of staff signed up for 10 days of twitter, half of whom progressed to a twitter profile and started to tweet, but not everyone wanted a badge. altogether five ‘hatched’ badges, four ‘flying’ badges and one ‘soaring’ badge were issued. implications and next steps the open badges project is still in its infancy but has already fulfilled many of its aims: introducing the idea of badging to the institution while exploring some of the practical issues and limiting factors. members of the project team and colleagues working with students on developing academic and employability skills have together developed a better understanding of how open badges might work in their contexts. this has paved the way for possible future use of open badges for learner development workshops around information literacy; employability and leadership skills; the researcher development framework etc. one example could be to offer interactive digital skills workshops to students using the badging model adopted for the tel workshops. clear criteria could be established and open badges awarded which embed the criteria and evidence based on work begun during the workshops. another possibility would be to use open badges to recognise and reward student involvement in projects within the institution, as london school of economics have done with their student ambassadors for digital literacy (sadl) project (http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsesadl/). tel now has the capacity and knowledge to advise and http://10daysoftwitter.wordpress.com/ http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsesadl/ hole open badges: exploring the potential and practicalities journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2014 8 support colleagues wishing to take forward such badging pilots with students, based on experience of managing badged workshops for staff. as more tel workshops are run and badges are issued, plans are being made to undertake a more rigorous evaluation of the project and to assess the extent to which it has achieved its broader aim of raising awareness of open badges. the question of whether use of badges can motivate participation in staff development workshops will also be considered. tel are also looking forward to exploring the potential of mozilla’s badgekit when it is released. if it can offer badge design, creation and issuing tools to match (or improve upon) those provided by credly then it may be a more desirable option. references jisc (2014) open badges secured for the future, jisc inform, issue 39, 6 march [online]. available at: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/inform/inform39/openbadgessecured.html#.vfzdopmsv8e (accessed: 7 november 2014). mozilla (2014) badges, mozilla wiki, march [online]. available at: https://wiki.mozilla.org/badges (accessed: 7 november 2014). scott, s. (2013) open badge adventure at borders college. jisc rsc scotland showcase, 1 may [online]. available at: http://www.rsc-scotland.org/?p=2454 (accessed: 7 november 2014). scott, s. (2014) replacing paper based certification of cpd activities with open badges at borders college. jisc rsc scotland showcase, 19 march [online]. available at: http://www.rsc-scotland.org/?p=3805 (accessed: 7 november 2014). http://www.jisc.ac.uk/inform/inform39/openbadgessecured.html#.vfzdopmsv8e https://wiki.mozilla.org/badges http://www.rsc-scotland.org/?p=2454 http://www.rsc-scotland.org/?p=3805 hole open badges: exploring the potential and practicalities journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2014 9 author details dr. anne hole is a learning technologist at the university of sussex. she holds a pgcerthe and is a fellow of the higher education academy (fhea) and certified member of the association for learning technology (cmalt). open badges: exploring the potential and practicalities of a new way of recognising skills in higher education abstract open badges the open badges project the open education week (oew 2014) badge tel staff development badges badging 10 days of twitter implications and next steps references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 26: special edi issue february 2023 ________________________________________________________________________ ©2023 the author(s) (cc-by 4.0) dominant discourses in higher education book review: kinchin, i. m. and gravett, k. (2022) dominant discourses in higher education: critical perspectives, cartographies and practice. london: bloomsbury. maggie scott university of salford, uk keywords: neoliberalism; posthumanism; critical theory; higher education (he). overview drawing on extensive scholarship that encompasses ideas from theorists including paulo freire (1970) and donna haraway (2016), the authors argue that posthumanist and poststructuralist approaches to pedagogical practice could offer a potent challenge to the neoliberalism and managerialism currently prevalent in global he. adopting the position that there are fundamental ethical flaws in the metric-driven performance evaluations by which he institutions (heis) are judged, the book aims to empower academics to reshape and rejuvenate the he environment for better social justice. structure and content the book begins with a short foreword (vii-xi) by catherine manathunga, whose research into educational development (2011) is used by the authors to support their view that he pedagogical practitioners are generally failing to engage imaginatively and constructively with social theory (p.22). manathunga’s two-volume collection, edited with dorothy bottrell, resisting neoliberalism in higher education (2019), is also foundational to kinchin and gravett’s approach, encouraging practitioners to rethink concepts currently underpinning the operation and governance of he (p.28). the ten chapters are organised into three parts. the first two chapters form part one: ‘considering the landscape’, which sets out the authors’ mission statement, and outlines scott dominant discourses in higher education journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 2 their critiques of prevalent neoliberal practice. in part two: ‘putting theory to work’, the next four chapters reconsider conceptualisations of the student, the he teaching context, and perceptions of expertise. further explorations of the key arguments are provided in the final section, part three: ‘emergent polyvalent lines of flight’, relating these to concept mapping approaches and dialogic analysis to provoke engagement in the final four chapters. in chapter one, ‘thinking beyond neoliberal discourses’, the authors contextualise their own positionality through their professional roles as educators and researchers. this is useful, although could have been further developed with some additional information about the geographies and cultures most influential in their own practice. given the emphasis on underlying beliefs and traditions underpinning the book, it is surprising that the first mention of a named country occurs in a discussion about ‘assumptions of prestige’ associated with older universities in the uk (p.7). readers will infer that the book focuses on english-speaking locations, but this point could have been explicitly made, to clearly articulate which environments are under review. the chapter outlines some of the key assumptions of the text. the authors are concerned about the limitations that may be imposed on thinking by the use of simple binary categorisations (p.7). they make the point that the uncertainty elicited by learning should be embraced as a necessary aspect of the process of education, creating a ‘desirable dislocation’ (p.11) capable of catalysing new understandings. chapter two, ‘thinking and doing with theory: a polyvalent perspective’, develops several themes introduced in chapter one. the critique of binary polarisations is applied to the notional bifurcation of theory and practice, the authors arguing instead that if ‘[t]o think is to experiment’, then ‘theory is practice’ (p.20). they discuss the extant and often limited application of theory in he research, and posit that postqualitative, poststructuralist and posthumanist theories offer new approaches ‘to work the ruins of a humanist and positivist legacy’ (p.25). the titular cartographies are explained in relation to the work of rosi braidotti, as ‘theoretical readings that enable us to understand how nomadic subjects experience the world’ (p.26). there are some repetitions between the first two chapters, indicating that a different structure may have been better here, perhaps amalgamating the two into one. these repetitions include the same quotation from elizabeth st. pierre scott dominant discourses in higher education journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 3 appearing twice, in support of very similar points; haste is suggested by conflicting citations, ‘2021’ and ‘2021a’, the latter being erroneous (p.10; p.18). chapter three opens the second part of the book with ‘positioning the student’, which it achieves through a consideration of prevailing narratives and definitions. terms now commonplace in he discourse such as ‘student engagement’ and ‘the student experience’ are open to criticism for the assumptions they encode, and particularly for their emphasis on ‘the individual as the primary locus for engagement within a humanist perspective’ (p.35). this may accord with the neoliberal premise of the student as customer, but its framing risks normalising typicalities of need as reflected in student surveys, rather than actually examining lived experience (p.36). chapter four, ‘the university environment’, provides a critique of the narratives that shape, or rather distort, the ‘imperatives of social justice’, and unhelpfully complicate student support (p.49). examples from the uk are used to argue that neoliberal statements by the conservative government about student choice in discourses allegedly promoting social mobility are ‘seductive’ and highly misleading (p.51). the authors argue that students are falsely encouraged to see themselves as powerful agents shaping their own destinies through the he market; the unspoken corollary being that any lack of achievement will also result directly from their choices (p.51). in bypassing the idea that he operates within a wider network of ‘socially unjust structures’, enabled by historical and prejudicial hierarchies, this neoliberal narrative can also obscure the political reasons behind existing social inequalities (p.56). in chapter five, ‘ecologies of learning and teaching’, the narrative critique developed in the preceding two chapters is expanded to include the construction of ‘teaching’ and ‘learning’, arguing that they are part of a larger ‘rhizomatic assemblage’, and not a consumerist production-line creating workers (p.65). the authors argue that lists of learning outcomes for a particular course also contribute to the idea that learning can be mapped as a linear playbook rather than a complex, non-linear journey with many twists and turns, highly subjective to the individual. drawing extensively on ecological metaphors, the chapter considers the hei as an organism subject to factors inherent to its own ecosystem, including ‘management support, workloads, [and] institutional culture’, that also requires the ‘capacity to absorb disturbances’ in order to continue to evolve (p.78). scott dominant discourses in higher education journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 4 ‘expertise in context’ is the title of chapter six, which again explores the use of language in discourses familiar within the he environment. the chapter introduces the application of the ‘concept map’ to models of expertise (pp.83-84), arguing that extant frameworks need to additionally articulate the ‘continual state of becoming’ necessary for ongoing development and learning as part of that expertise (p.85). the authors encourage a vantage point characterised as ‘post-abyssal’ thinking, wherein the binary oppositions of ‘true’ and ‘false’ may be disregarded as unhelpful and inaccurately limiting to ‘ecologies of knowledge’ (pp.86-87). student expertise might therefore be reconfigured to encompass ‘epistemological flexibility’ (p.88). there is a lot going on in this chapter and the reader may find themselves having to make some leaps of faith in order to maintain a consistent thread of argument. it is not clear who or what is apparently insisting on the binary oppositions under attack; the academic community is well aware of the existence of multiple epistemologies. what appears to be implicit here, rather, is that the metrical tools now so frequently used as instruments of he regulation, governance, evaluation, quality assurance, and so forth, are reliant on unspoken theories that have little or no relationship to social justice, and deserve to be identified so they can be analysed and challenged. the final four chapters form the conclusion of the volume, ‘emerging polyvalent lines of flight’, and it is here that the authors share examples of ‘critical debate [as a research method] for exploring [their] teaching and for challenging [their] thinking’ (p.99). the dialogues in chapter seven explore the concepts of ‘teaching excellence’, ‘student engagement’, and ‘resilience’, which encourage the questioning of ‘normative narratives’ (p.114). chapter eight provides a detailed discussion of concept mapping, introduced in chapter six, noting their key role in structuralist representations of learning (p.116), arguing that linear approaches have limited these visual models and in turn limited the thinking and application they can inform (p.118). instead, the authors embrace the more recent approaches to concept mapping that have moved ‘away from simplistic organization of agreed curriculum content towards the exploration of the more contested theories and values that underpin academic practice’ (p.120), and advocate the use of concept maps ‘in developing bridges between different concepts of knowing’ (p.132). chapter nine considers the view that ‘accepted methodological practices’ are themselves normative and normalising (pp.133). the dialogues in this chapter provide an interrogation scott dominant discourses in higher education journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 5 of postqualitative approaches, followed by an examination of hierarchies inherent within the academic peer review process that can also have normalising or silencing effects, for example through roles played by gatekeeping editors, or publishing contexts resistance to innovation (p.147). the authors hope that readers will ‘take up the baton’ to transform practice, for example by seeking out opportunities for authors and peer reviewers to work more collaboratively towards publication outputs (p.149), but given that many of the issues they criticise exist as a result of the underlying power structures supported by competitive and neoliberal practices built into academic systems, it is not clear how these may be dismantled. perhaps that is the main provocation here: the reader must find their own answers. chapter ten, ‘towards a relational pedagogy’, usefully sums up the authors’ main arguments, reiterating their desire to bring ‘unsettling ideas and unfamiliar connections to the higher education literature’ (p.152). however, this initially bold call to arms, ‘challenging central dogmas’ is overshadowed by cited warnings of other commentators such as stephen brookfield, who ‘advises colleagues to choose their battles carefully and to attend to their emotional survival’ (pp.152-153). the book focuses on the intellectual and theoretical critiques of neoliberal narratives, but the means by which the suitably provoked should then ‘take up the baton’ (p.149) remain subtle, potentially blunting the arms to which readers are apparently being called. if an individual moves away ‘from a monoculture of acceptable knowledge to a recognition of a rich ecology of knowledges’ (p.159), this undoubtedly affects their perceptions, much as decolonising oneself may prove similarly transformative, but while prevailing power structures continually enforce neoliberal narratives on the he environment, dissenting rebel academics may be easily outflanked and outgunned. in closing, kinchin and gravett encourage the pursuit of pedagogical research through the lenses they offer in the book, arguing that the ‘blurring of boundaries’ and the shift in perspective they offer will ‘support the reader in their own process of becoming’ (p.167). it is a gentle gauntlet that is thrown down to the reader, to see the book’s provocations as catalysts either for self-reflection, or as encouragement to engage in research that similarly writes back against neoliberal mythologies. scott dominant discourses in higher education journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 6 one disappointment of the volume is that the index is not detailed, and is a subject index only; the inclusion of a list of cited authors would have rendered it a much more useful tool, particularly because of the rich theoretical material in the book. summary the arguments made in the book draw from a variety of theories and perspectives which the authors state are linked together by overarching principles that include ‘disenchantment with the legacies of positivism, of humanism, of individualism’ and ‘contemporary performative and competitive educational cultures’ (p.29). they are not alone in taking that view, and here offer a range of perceptual strategies by which alternative theories, particularly poststructuralism and posthumanism, may provide some important counterpoints though which prevailing ideologies may be challenged. in taking in such a broad sweep of previous scholarship at pace, some points made quite briefly risk sounding trite, such as sara ahmed’s resistance to the conservative discourses promoting ‘resilience’ (pp.55-56). nevertheless, the authors present a comprehensive, wellresearched commentary on neoliberal he practice. the book is likely to be perceived positively by people who are similarly discomfited by the levels of managerialism and audit culture typical of many heis, especially those already engaging with or intellectually receptive to critical theory. there is a risk, however, that the book will not be sufficiently accessible to readers who adhere to alternative beliefs and perspectives to capture their interest and provide them with the intended provocations. some readers, inevitably, will not be excited by the prospect of positioning themselves as ‘rhizomatic researchers’, finding principles such as to ‘desire a life of becoming’ (p.15) discomfortingly vague, subjective, and unquantifiable. learning developers may find the book useful as a prompt to rethink where their own practices may be tacitly supporting dominant he discourses. for example, if it is assumed that students will follow a linear path through a course, that assumption, encoded in the paperwork, may reinforce ‘the idea of a curriculum as a set pathway’ (p.68). similarly, by placing an emphasis on learning outcomes in course design, the ‘personal route’ students take may be devalued and reduced to a more transactional process (p.68). the book certainly invites further debate over the future of education and the theories now dominating he performance, and scott dominant discourses in higher education journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 7 readers who are willing to engage with the text and its potentially destabilising challenge to previously-held ideas may find it gives them a new and enriching perspective. references bottrell, d. and manathunga, c. (eds.) (2019) resisting neoliberalism in higher education. cham, switzerland: palgrave macmillan. freire, p. (1970) pedagogy of the oppressed. harmondsworth: penguin. haraway, d. (2016) staying with the trouble: making kin in the chthulucene. durham, nc: duke university press. manathunga, c. (2011) ‘the field of educational development: histories and critical questions’, studies in continuing education, 33(3), pp.347-62. st. pierre, e. a. (2021) ‘post qualitative inquiry, the refusal of method, and the risk of the new’, qualitative inquiry, 27(1), pp.3-9. https://doi.org/10.1177/1077800419863005. author details maggie scott is associate dean academic (quality assurance and enhancement) in the school of arts, media and creative technology at the university of salford. she has worked in uk higher education for over twenty years. her research interests include academic leadership, language and power, and the cultural politics of the english and scots languages. licence ©2023 the author(s). this is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (cc-by 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. see http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. journal of learning development in higher education (jldhe) is a peer-reviewed open access https://doi.org/10.1177/1077800419863005 scott dominant discourses in higher education journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 8 journal published by the association for learning development in higher education (aldinhe). literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special edition: researching pdp practice, november 2010 taking concept mapping (cm) forward with socially mediated structured approaches maja jankowska university of bedfordshire, uk abstract there is substantial research evidence (e.g. nygaard and holtham, 2008, 2009) to indicate that students’ active engagement in co-constructing knowledge, and taking responsibility for their own learning, is key to their achievement and development. this chapter will explore concept mapping (cm) not only as one means of gathering research data but also – and most importantly – as a powerful technique to support reflection and offer space for internal dialogue about each student’s personal development. concept maps were gathered from a sample of students on a postgraduate business programme. in addition to the data from the concept maps themselves, semi-structured individual interviews were conducted with part of the sample to follow-up and illuminate the cm process, as they seemed to deepen the reflective capacity of those students through more structured and socially-mediated activity. findings from this research indicate that cm introduced within a socially supported and structured process can enable the shift from teacher reliance to student autonomy. it is also suggested that students do need structured and scaffolded activities in the area of personal development planning (pdp), especially in reflective tasks, as they are often not sure how to approach this area of learning. key words: concept mapping (cm); personal development planning (pdp); reflection; meaning making; socially mediated activity. jankowska taking concept mapping (cm) forward with socially mediated structured approaches introduction the central purpose of education is to empower learners to take charge of their own meaning making. (novak, 1998, p.9) this paper proposes a way of supporting students’ personal development with the use of a practical tool for concept mapping (cm) which lends itself well to the cyclical nature of personal development planning (pdp). the research reported here was part of a larger doctoral study by the author which used a range of research techniques including cm together with interviews, e-portfolios, blogs and cultural learning journals. a cm technique developed by novak and cañas (2006) was adopted as a research instrument in this study. cm is explored in more detail here as it proved to be not only one means of gathering research data but at the same time – and most importantly – a powerful technique in supporting students’ meaning-making (an unintended but significant outcome of this research). jankowska (2009) states that the individual cm task can be a good vehicle for gaining insight into students’ understanding of personal development. further analysis of the research data presented below drawn from follow-up interviews and student blogs casts more light on how cm can become even more effective when introduced as a socially mediated activity, especially when embedded within or followed by other pdp-related activities. this paper ends with an exploration of how a cm technique supported by socially mediated scaffolded activities can address the key elements of successful learner-centred education (discussed in the theoretical section). use of cm as both a teaching and research tool novak and cañas (2006) describe concept maps as graphical tools for organising and representing knowledge in the form of diagrams with hierarchical nodes that contain concepts. concepts are linked together with directional lines which are also labelled (indicating the relationship between concepts). two or more concepts linked with words or phrases can make a proposition (a meaningful statement). the fact that the concepts are linked with the arrows and labelled is a distinctive feature which does not appear in other journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 2 jankowska taking concept mapping (cm) forward with socially mediated structured approaches kinds of mind maps, but is an important step towards achieving fuller understanding of the knowledge that is available to a learner at a particular moment in time. the student may hold both valid and invalid ideas (misconceptions) about a given subject and concept maps can be useful in revealing the incorrect assumptions, which then can be changed. unless the learner is aware of the mistake, s/he cannot correct it. in order to investigate the learning in more detail it is important to show the concept maps made before and after the learning has taken place. this would make the changes in learning structures transparent and reveal the progress (or, unlikely but theoretically possible, regression or stagnation) in the students’ knowledge of the subject. according to novak (1998), hay (2007, 2008) and others, concept maps have the value of accessing students’ thinking or making learning visible as the teacher can actually ‘see’ what ideas the student has about a particular topic. cm is also described as a research tool that captures learners’ knowledge of a particular topic and has been used, especially in science, to picture students’ representations of particular topics, diagnose the gaps in knowledge, monitor learning progress or, in fact, measure the impact of specific interventions (hay, 2007, 2008; jankowska, 2009; jankowska et al., 2010; kinchin et al., 2000; kinchin et al., 2008a; hay and kinchin, 2006, 2008; kinchin et al., 2008b). cm can also be a useful reflective tool in pdp, making the process of acquiring the knowledge explicit. providing structured, supported and contextualised opportunities for self-discovery and reflection on personal development within the curriculum can form congruent and holistic processes that engage students in a meaningful analysis of their developmental needs, building on their prior experience, recognising strengths and weaknesses, and looking into the future (atlay et al., 2008). cm requires individual analytical efforts and shifts responsibility for learning from the teacher to the learner (peterson and snyder, 1998). moreover, there is a body of research evidence (nygaard and holtham, 2008, 2009) to show that students’ active engagement in co-constructing knowledge as well as taking responsibility for their own learning and development is crucial to their achievement of better and wider learning outcomes. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 3 jankowska taking concept mapping (cm) forward with socially mediated structured approaches the research the data presented in this paper come from a piece of research conducted on a postgraduate communication in business module (winter semester 2007/08). the research was ethically approved and all the students in this cohort were given a description of the study and consent forms. the sample the whole cohort was offered the opportunity to undertake cm on the topic of personal development. however, fewer than half of the students (53) completed concept maps at both the beginning and end of the module due to students’ absence (either at the beginning or at the end of the semester), drop-out and some requests to be excluded from the study. the research concentrated on 32 participants covering the four most representative cultural backgrounds at the university of bedfordshire (chinese, african, central eastern european and british). all these students sketched concept maps both at the beginning and the end of the module, giving 64 altogether. the volunteers for the interviews were recruited from those 32 participants and included 11 students. the research aimed to investigate cultural influences on experiences and representations of personal development as well as the value of concept maps in capturing these representations. this article concentrates on the latter only. the methodology the instruction on how to create a concept map was given to all the students simultaneously at a lecture and the researcher was available all the time to clarify any issues. the topic of cm was not informed by reference to the pdp agenda and its official definition – it was simply prompted with the question: what does personal development mean to you? (aimed at eliciting individual understandings). the students were given 30 minutes to complete this task. the concept maps obtained represent the general ideas students have on the topic of personal development. it is important to note that all the concepts came from the students – they were not elements given by the researcher for the participants to sort out. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 4 jankowska taking concept mapping (cm) forward with socially mediated structured approaches this research was conducted in a spirit of a qualitative, interpretive phenomenological enquiry (cohen et al., 2008) which was deemed suitable for investigation of subjective perspectives on a very personal topic. ontologically, interpretivism posits that reality is socially constructed, multiple and contextual (ozanne and hudson, 1989) and emphasises individual views and descriptions of how things are experienced first-hand by those involved. the discussion here predominantly concentrates on findings that refer to the use and value of concept maps. the concept maps were analysed in two specific ways: 1. content analysis of all 32 maps aimed at discovering more general inter-group tendencies (cultural comparisons). 2. the more detailed analysis of 11 pairs of maps (comparing the maps at the beginning and at the end of the module) aimed at gaining an insight into individual understandings and progression over time. outcomes from the concept mapping task some examples with interpretations are presented below. example 1 – student 3 (central eastern european): figure 1a. student 3: first map (at the beginning of the semester). journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 5 jankowska taking concept mapping (cm) forward with socially mediated structured approaches figure 1b. student 3: second map (at the end of the semester). student 3’s maps contain similar concepts although they are expressed in a slightly different way. the second map’s concepts are articulated in a more professional way (skills, goals, life values, passions instead of e.g. ‘knowing what i can and can’t do’, ‘head the right directions’) as if the student had acquired a new way of expressing pdp ideas (much more resembling the way academics express them). the second map highlights personal development being a continuous process (articulated in the form of a circle). it also underlines the student’s deeper understanding of the iterative nature of personal development processes and the need of continuous improvement (which was not so clearly formulated in her first map). although the concept of self-awareness is not directly expressed in the second map, its elements are present in other concepts and links in the second map as well. at first glance, it seems that there is no significant change in the structure and linkage of both maps but the second map represents a more developed, cohesive and clear vision of personal development as if the student has acquired both the knowledge to express her concepts and the ability to organise her conceptual vision in a more meaningful way. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 6 jankowska taking concept mapping (cm) forward with socially mediated structured approaches example 2 – student 4 (chinese): figure 2a. student 4: first map (beginning of the module). figure 2a. student 4: second map (end of the module). journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 7 jankowska taking concept mapping (cm) forward with socially mediated structured approaches this student’s maps are quite similar. there is no significant change in the structure and although she adds a few new concepts to her second map (e.g. ‘happiness’, ‘personal needs’, ‘study hard now’, ‘high income working position (career life)’), they did not really contribute to her overall understanding of personal development. this student made a clear division between ‘intangible’ and ‘tangible’ development. the concepts which can be classified as more ‘soft’ or personal are located on the left side of both maps, while the ‘hard’ ones career and outcome oriented – are located on the right hand side of both maps. the concepts related to goals are located in the centre of both maps (disconnected from the rest of concepts in the first map). the second map has more links, with the most important between education and career – she clearly expresses the view that career progression is interlinked with studying, while in her previous map these two spheres were disconnected. moreover, the centre of the map (goals) is connected with both left and right branches of the map. instead of using ‘intangible’ and ‘tangible’ development, in her second map, she presents these ‘soft’ ideas on the left as her dreams and personal needs and the ‘hard’ ones on the right as goals leading to improvement in the quality of life. she identifies studying (‘now’) as a way of achieving and linking her dreams with goals. although according to novak’s (1998) typology of learning, this example would most likely be associated with rote learning, it can be argued that by introducing the linkage between the world of education and career the student made a slight move towards a deeper understanding of personal development. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 8 jankowska taking concept mapping (cm) forward with socially mediated structured approaches example 3 – student 9 (tanzanian): figure 1a. student 9*: first map (beginning of the module). *student 9 drew both her maps by hand. in order to transfer them to an electronic version the researcher had to map the data onto ready made pictures. figure 3b: student 9 second map (end of the module). journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 9 jankowska taking concept mapping (cm) forward with socially mediated structured approaches this student’s maps pose a challenge for analysis as she did not follow the instructions. she used two different metaphors (drawings) for the two concept maps (hence some of the concepts differ) and came up with something in between a concept map and a drawing. therefore it is more difficult to look at a structure or linkage of the ‘maps’ and classify them according to novak’s (1998) typologies (chain/spoke/net, non-learning/rotelearning/meaningful learning). however, the overall feel of understanding of personal development that this student gives is similar in both maps. personal development is represented as a lengthy process, which starts metaphorically ‘at the bottom’ and leads to gathering personal fruit of satisfaction on completion of a cycle. her first map represents a mountain, where personal development is compared to the process of climbing. reaching the peak is associated with obtaining satisfaction and bringing some ‘fruit’ (‘career development’ and ‘social and culture satisfaction’). personal development is also equated with learning processes which are influenced by factors such as age, resources, coaching and technology. on the way up there are challenges, represented in this map by clouds, rain, thunderstorms and floods. reaching the top, however, is not the end of the journey and the whole process is seen by her as a cyclical one. therefore after reaching one mountain top a person needs to set off for another one, and in this way more and more experience is being gathered. the second map is a metaphor of growing a tree. personal development here is planted with a seed of personal desire and the journey up to the top (gathering fruit) is fuelled with determination to achieve and ambition in life. communication seems to be an important process facilitating the growth (both internal communication with self and with others) and on the way up one gathers knowledge, skills and experience (through exchange with others). the fruit are not only connected with a good career and social life and culture but also spiritual development and technological advancement. interestingly, a career in this map is also related to qualifications and may mean employment or self-employment (no other student in this study mentioned self-employment). technological advancement in her first map was one of the factors in the development, while in the second map it is a fruit of development (when one goes ‘with the pace of the world’). there is no explicit notion of cyclical development in the second map, but this may be due to the metaphor used. this student clearly has a vision and is open to opportunities, at the same time recognising the necessity to work hard in order to achieve. she also observes that ‘fruits are different journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 10 jankowska taking concept mapping (cm) forward with socially mediated structured approaches to different people according to their personal desire. both maps are rich and represent a cohesive vision of personal development. the second map brought about some more professional language (‘personal desire’, ‘ambition’, ‘communication’, ‘knowledge’, ‘skills’, and ‘experience’) but lacked some of the important concepts from the first map, especially the idea of development being cyclical, the challenges on the way and some factors which play an important role in the process. from a personal development point of view these maps indicate the student’s readiness to challenge instructions and come up with something that suits her better, while engaging her creativity and imagination. creating such a metaphor involves the student in thinking a concept through and presenting it graphically to get the story across – all factors important in meaningful learning. the qualitative content analysis of the sample casts some light on those aspects of personal development students concentrated on (some of which are neglected in the curricula). many of the students’ concept maps concentrated on particular areas of personal development (e.g. academic, career, social, etc.), omitting other aspects. it is possible that this happened because some students at this particular point in time were predominantly preoccupied with one area that needed to be developed. follow-up interviews eleven participants volunteered for individual in-depth, semi-structured, follow-up interviews. the aim of the interview was to elaborate on various aspects of personal development, approaches to learning and teaching, and career planning. the students were given an opportunity to talk about their personal constructs of personal development with reference to their concept maps. the interviews lasted on average 35 minutes and were conducted within the two weeks following the cm task. it was hoped that the data from the interviews would be illuminated with information obtained via blogs, cultural learning journals and e-portfolios. unfortunately not all of the eleven interviewees submitted the complementary data (not all the elements were compulsory and assessed within the module). all but one of the eleven interviewees were very positive about cm. the one exception claimed that her views of personal development were stable and would not be influenced by any pdp activities. most saw it as a valuable experience as the task itself engaged them cognitively and gave them an opportunity to stop, reflect and talk about things they journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 11 jankowska taking concept mapping (cm) forward with socially mediated structured approaches rarely focus on and verbalise in their daily life. many students expressed the feeling of being so submerged in the task of cm that they became unaware of the time and surroundings (which csikszentmihalyi (2000) refers to as the state of flow). they believed it would be a useful task in every student’s course. blog comments that came from the students interviewed further confirmed the relevance and value of the cm task: doing concepts maps has made me realise how i can better develop myself. () by writing everything down and interlinking them in anyway possible you get a bigger picture of what you have succeeded so far. () when doing it i found out that i had done many things and had many experiences which i had not realised until i did the concept map. () in the future i will definitely use a concept map in whatever it is. using it for personal development is better though makes you think a lot about yourself and it will definitely help me think about the way i plan my future. i believe it already has, i didn’t’ really have a goal before but now i have chosen it and plan to succeed it. (blogstudent7) i learned a lot from concept maps, i will implement it in my future as a part of creative process and problem solving. i am an artist and doing concept maps is a great way of finding out about the associations in our minds, and this is an important part of creative process in art. also doing concept maps can help to determine the important elements of any kind of decision in our lives… (). doing concept maps makes this so much better, it allows me to go much deeply into the problem, i have an opportunity to explore all the elements of a certain decision, and also make links between them, later on i can study my own thoughts that i have put on paper a day before. (blogstudent3) interviewees engaged in a two-step process. firstly maps helped them think through and externalise their ideas about personal development, and secondly, the interview helped them further clarify their ideas. the findings indicate that cm promotes more positive insights for students when it is linked to social interaction and scaffolding (via structured reflection). journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 12 jankowska taking concept mapping (cm) forward with socially mediated structured approaches moving cm forward through socially mediated structured approaches constructivist learning theory provides the most important underpinning for cm. it indicates that people learn not only by memorising material (which would be defined as rote learning in ausubel et al’s (1978) and novak’s (1998) terms) but also, and more importantly, by integrating and organising new information into a pre-existing framework of knowledge (phillips, 2000). ausubel et al. (1978) underlined that the most important factor that influences learning is prior knowledge. learners mediate and create their new comprehension of the subject matter on the basis of what they already know and believe, and internalise new material (resnick, 1989). however, learning cannot be viewed as an isolated activity. vygotsky claimed that ‘learning occurs through participation in social or culturally embedded experiences’ (cited raymond, 2000, p.176) and students need to be supported by more capable others – ‘scaffolds’ (raymond, 2000). the absence of guidance and social interaction leads to impediments in learning and development (bransford et al., 2000): students may struggle in traversing the zone of proximal development understood as ‘…the distance between the actual developmental level…and the level of potential development as determined through problem solving under adult guidance, or in collaboration with more capable others’ (vygotsky, 1978, p.86). reflection, understood as the learner’s conscious effort and active engagement in the processing of new information and its integration with what is already acquired, is an important prerequisite to meaningful learning (mezirow, 1990, 2000). the process of reflection is typically applied to relatively complicated or unstructured ideas for which there is not an obvious solution, and is largely based on the further processing of knowledge (moon, 1999). however, the research data commented on here as well as a growing body of research on difficulties around reflection and development of meta-cognitive skills (e.g. bleakley, 2000; clegg, 2004; clegg and bradley, 2006; eraut, 2000; tomlinson, 1999) indicate that there is a real need for structured reflective tools with clear instructions: ok, they say: reflect on your learning and understanding – but of what? of what i’ve learned? or what i gained for my future? or how i learned it??? or should i say journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 13 jankowska taking concept mapping (cm) forward with socially mediated structured approaches what i will do in the future? and if yes, what should i focus on? how could i do it? i don’t know! i would like to learn how can i improve my skills but i don’t know what are the tools to do it. (interview 3) reflection should not be seen as an irrelevant task introduced for a mere sake of doing it, but rather as a highly relevant activity linked to real life experiences and learning aims that is valued both by staff and students. according to mckenzie (2000, p.2) in scaffolding structure is the key component – ‘without clear structure and precisely stated expectations, many students are vulnerable to a kind of educational ‘wanderlust’ that pulls them afield’. this study seems to demonstrate that socially mediated cm followed by other related developmental activities provides a scaffold for students’ reflection. cm combined with relevant socially mediated activities, such as peer discussions framed by a set of reflective questions (as proposed below), can provide a structure and support for personalised learning, create a genuinely learner-centred approach, and promote meaningful and transformative learning. in a typically large classroom the opportunities for personalised dialogue with a tutor are scarce. therefore, a carefully structured group task could prompt students to think about elements currently missing from their concept maps as well as reinforce elements of strengths and address associated issues in order to derive the full benefits intended by the pdp agenda. in an ideal case scenario, the cm should be followed by group mediated discussions with other follow-up activities structured with students’ personal development in mind, running throughout a semester, module, year or course of studies, and summarised with another cm task. this would provide both a record of personal development (from the first to the last concept map) and reinforce the cyclical nature of pdp, providing students with an abundance of developmental opportunities on the way. the questions suggested here (modified but based on the questions from semi-structured interviews conducted for this research) are indicative examples that lend themselves to customisation and personalisation (tutors should be encouraged to apply them at different levels of granularity, adapting them to suit the specific needs of students within subject or practice areas, as not all of them may be relevant to each student). if these questions are asked in a spirit of appreciative inquiry (cooperrider, 1990; cooperrider and srivastva,1987) this has the effect of creating a psychologically safe and positive journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 14 jankowska taking concept mapping (cm) forward with socially mediated structured approaches environment for sharing concepts with a view to appreciating in value whatever is positive in students’ maps – i.e. identifying and critically appreciating strengths, and working from positions of self-efficacy beliefs to address development needs. it involves tutors stipulating that there are no right or wrong answers, simply an attempt to discover effective ways of moving forward from current concepts and practices. the questions listed below can elicit valuable responses: 1. what areas of personal development did you focus on? (which ones are the most important and why? what areas did your peers concentrate on?) 2. is there anything else missing from your map that might be important? 3. what are your strengths and weaknesses? 4. what are your interests, aspirations, priorities in life? (what motivates you?) 5. what goals are important for you to achieve? 6. how do you make sure that you stay on track and achieve what you have planned? 7. what opportunities (activities in learning, work, extra-curricular options, and support) could you engage with to achieve your goals? 8. what would enable you to achieve your best results? questions such as these act as prompts for students’ personalised learning and development, but in socially mediated situations they can be tailored to specific timely topics that need to be addressed. an integrated, cyclical process can instigate deeper reflection at appropriate stages (e.g. at the beginning and the end of semester, or year). as highlighted before there should be follow-up opportunities for cm and discussion of the outcomes and the process itself. kumar (2007, 2009) provides further examples of practical activities that are tried and tested with different groups of students, and help to generate, clarify or test out aspirations and achieve more effective results. these activities can be tailored and embedded in specific units but ideally should be allied in a way that creates a coherent, structured process which supports students’ development and improves reflective practice. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 15 jankowska taking concept mapping (cm) forward with socially mediated structured approaches conclusions learning is a process and as such requires conscious effort in making connections between existing (prior) knowledge, current experiences and future events (atlay et al., 2008). cm itself can be a useful reflective tool, which helps reveal students’ knowledge and understandings at a particular time. based on the presented research data, theory and the university experiences with pdp however, the author suggests that cm could serve as a basis for further socially mediated activities (be it peer discussions, student-tutor communications, career guidance or reflective narratives) that move students’ thinking towards deeper understanding and can be a driver for personal change. moreover, such discussion or group activity should be structured in a way that points students towards all important areas of personal development. the research suggests that effective teaching starts with understanding where the students are in their development (freire, 1998; bransford et al., 2000). this has become one feature of the revised curriculum at our university, together with its ‘soaring to success’ counterpoint – students understanding themselves: who they are and who they want to be (kumar, 2007, 2009, 2010). soar stands for self, opportunities, aspirations and results and is an integrated and cyclical process underpinning pdp with practical tasks designed to raise the awareness of self and opportunity, as well clarify or test out aspirations and achieve more effective results (kumar, 2007). as higher education faces the challenge of educating a larger and more diverse body of students with less resource (e.g. caroll and ryan, 2005; robinson-pant, 2005; trahar, 2007), it is even more important to provide both personal and social constructionist opportunities that equip students with tools that enhance self-awareness in the light of social and external frames of reference – tools such as self-audits that will further drive self-development and selfmanagement. this paper has presented a practical cm tool for personal development purposes. personal development planning in its own nature is cyclical and involves learning, doing, reflecting and recording. cm instigates reflection and allows for recording of its outcomes – it is a tangible representation of students’ understanding of a given subject at a particular point in time and can be stored (in e-portfolio for example) for future reference. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 16 jankowska taking concept mapping (cm) forward with socially mediated structured approaches the proposed process of combining cm with other socially mediated tasks (such as the suggested reflective questions) has been developed as a practical outcome of the conducted research combined with conceptual insights, and can be easily adjusted to the specific students’ needs and particular subjects. further research is needed to investigate the value of this approach and gain a better in-depth understanding of how the repeated task of cm supported by socially mediated, structured pdp activities, can enhance students’ development. acknowledgement this paper is an outcome of the national action research network on researching and evaluating personal development planning and e-portfolio practice project (2007-2010). the project was led by the university of bolton in association with the university of worcester and centre for recording achievement, and in national collaboration with the university of bedfordshire, bournemouth university and university of bradford. the project was funded by the higher education academy, national teaching fellowship project strand. more details about the project can be found at: http://www.recordingachievement.org/research/narn-tree.html. i am immensely grateful to tricia smart (senior lecturer in language and communication, business school, university of bedfordshire) who granted access to her students for the research purposes. a debt of gratitude is due to all those who participated in this study as well as colleagues with whom many debates about pdp, cm and cultural aspects of my research were held. special acknowledgements to arti kumar who is wholeheartedly passionate about making a difference to our students, dr alfredo gaitan and dr andrea raiker whose advice, support and encouragement has been invaluable. references atlay, m., gaitan, a. and kumar, a. (2008) 'stimulating learning creating cre8', in nygaard, c. and holtham c. (eds.). understanding learner-centred higher education. copenhagen: copenhagen business school press, pp. 231-250. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 17 http://www.recordingachievement.org/research/narn-tree.html jankowska taking concept mapping (cm) forward with socially mediated structured approaches ausubel, d.p., novak, j.d. and hanesian, h. (1978) educational psychology: a cognitive view. new york: holt, rinehart and winston. bleakley, a. (2000) ‘writing with invisible ink: narrative confessionalism and reflective practice’, reflective practice, 1(1), pp. 11-24. bransford, j., brown, a. and cocking, r. (2000) how people learn: brain, mind, experience and school. washington, dc: national academy press. carroll, j. and ryan, j. (eds.) (2005) teaching international students: improving learning for all. london: routledge. clegg, s. (2004) ‘critical readings: progress files and the production of the autonomous learner’, teaching in higher education, 9(3), pp. 287-298. clegg, s. and bradley, s. (2006) ‘the implementation of progress files in higher education: reflection as national policy’, higher education, 51(4), pp. 465-486. cohen, l., manion, l. and morrison, k. (2008) research methods in education. 6th edn. london and new york: routledge. cooperrider, d. (1990) ‘positive image, positive action: the affirmative basis of organizing’, in srivastva, s. and cooperrider, d.l. (eds.) appreciative management and leadership: the power of positive thought and action in organizations. san francisco: jossey-bass, pp. 91-125. cooperrider, d. and srivastva, s. (1987) ‘appreciative inquiry’, in woodman, r.w. and pasmore, w.a. (eds.) research in organizational change and development. vol. 1. greenwich, ct: jai, pp. 129-169. csikszentmihalyi, m. (2000) beyond boredom and anxiety: experiencing flow in work and play. san francisco: jossey-bass publishers. eraut, m. (2000) ‘non-formal learning and tacit knowledge in professional work’, british journal of educational psychology, 70(1), pp. 113-36. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 18 jankowska taking concept mapping (cm) forward with socially mediated structured approaches freire, p. (1998) ‘sixth letter: on the relationship between the educator and the learners’, in freire, p. (ed.) teachers as cultural workers: letters to those who dare teach. boulder, colorado: westview press. hay, d.b. (2007) ‘using concept maps to measure deep, surface and non-learning outcomes’, studies in higher education, 32(1), pp. 39–57. hay, d.b. (2008) ‘developing dialogical concept mapping as an e-learning technology’, british journal of educational technology, 39(6), pp. 1057-1060. hay, d.b. and kinchin, i.m. (2006) ‘using concept maps to reveal conceptual typologies’, emerald education and training, 48(2-3), pp. 127-142. hay, d.b. and kinchin, i.m. (2008) ‘using concept mapping to measure learning quality’, education and training, 50(2), pp. 167-182. jankowska, m. (2009) ‘cming technique as a vehicle for gaining insight into students’ understanding of personal development’, iceri 2009 international conference of education research and innovation. madrid, spain 16-18 november. iceri 2009 proceedings, isbn: 978-84-613-2953-3. jankowska, m., gaitan, a. and atlay, m. (2010) ‘who are you and what is your destination? evaluation of an entry point and the role of cultural differences in personal development planning’, problemy profesjologii, 2, zielona gora. kinchin, i.m., hay, d.b. and adams, a. (2000) ‘how a qualitative approach to concept map analysis can be used to aid learning by illustrating patterns of conceptual development’, educational research, 42(1), pp. 43–57. kinchin, i.m., cabot, l. b. and hay, d.b. (2008a) ‘visualising expertise: towards an authentic pedagogy for higher education’, teaching in higher education, 13(3), pp. 315-326. kinchin, i.m., lygo-baker, s. and hay, d.b. (2008b) ‘universities as centres of nonlearning’, studies in higher education, 33(1), pp. 89-103. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 19 jankowska taking concept mapping (cm) forward with socially mediated structured approaches kumar, a. (2007) personal, academic and career development in higher education – soaring to success. london and new york: routledge, taylor and francis. kumar, a. (2009) ‘using assessment centre approaches to improve students’ learning’, nygaard, c., holtham, c. and hawthorn, n. (eds.) improving students’ learning outcomes. frederiksberg, denmark: cbs press. kumar, a. (2010) ‘soaring for employability: can assessment centre approaches engage students?’ in atlay, m. (ed.) creating bridges: a collection of articles relating to implementing the curriculum review 2008 (cre8) from practitioners across the university of bedfordshire. university of bedfordshire internal publication, pp. 84103. mckenzie, j. (2000) scaffolding for success. available at: http://fno.org/dec99/scaffold.html (accessed: 7 may 2010). mezirow, j. (1990) fostering critical reflection in adulthood: a guide to transformative and emancipatory learning. san francisco: jossey-bass. mezirow, j. (2000) learning as transformation: critical perspectives on a theory in progress. san francisco: jossey-bass. moon, j.a. (1999) reflection in learning and professional development: theory and practice. london: kogan page. novak, j.d. (1998) learning, creating and using knowledge: concept maps as facilitative tools in schools and corporations. mahwah, nj: lawrence erlbaum associates. novak, j.d. and cañas, a.j. (2006) the theory underlying maps and how to construct them. technical report ihmc cmaptools 2006-01 rev 01-2008, florida institute for human and machine cognition, 2008. available at: http://cmap.ihmc.us/publications/researchpapers/theoryunderlyingconceptmaps. pdf (accessed: 6 november 2010). journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 20 http://fno.org/dec99/scaffold.html http://cmap.ihmc.us/publications/researchpapers/theoryunderlyingconceptmaps.pdf http://cmap.ihmc.us/publications/researchpapers/theoryunderlyingconceptmaps.pdf jankowska taking concept mapping (cm) forward with socially mediated structured approaches nygaard, c. and holtham, c. (eds.) (2008) understanding learning-centred higher education. copenhagen: copenhagen business school press. nygaard, c. and holtham, c. (eds.) (2009) improving students’ learning outcomes. copenhagen: copenhagen business school press. ozanne, j.l. and hudson, l.a. (1989) ’exploring diversity in consumer research’, in hirschman, e. (ed.) interpretive consumer research. provo, ut: association for consumer. peterson, a. and snyder, j. (1998) ‘using concept maps to teach social problem analysis’, annual meeting of the society for the study of social problems. columbus state community college, san francisco 20 august, pp. 5-28. phillips, d.c. (ed.) (2000) constructivism in education: opinions and second opinions on controversial issues. the national society for the study of education. chicago: university of chicago press. raymond, e. (2000) cognitive characteristics. learners with mild disabilities. needham heights, ma: allyn and bacon, a pearson education company, pp. 169-201. resnick, l.b. (ed.) (1989) knowing, learning and instruction. hillsdale nj: lawrence erlbaum associates. robinson-pant, a. (2005) cross-cultural perspectives on educational research. buckingham: open university press. tomlinson, p. (1999) ‘conscious reflection and implicit learning in teacher preparation. part 1: recent light on an old issue’, oxford review of education, 25(4), pp. 533-44. trahar, s. (2007) teaching and learning: the international higher education landscape – some theories and working practices. discussion paper in discussions in education series, subject centre for education escalate, the higher education academy. available at: http://escalate.ac.uk/downloads/3559.pdf (accessed: 22 december 2009). journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 21 http://escalate.ac.uk/downloads/3559.pdf jankowska taking concept mapping (cm) forward with socially mediated structured approaches vygotsky, l.s. (1978) mind in society: the development of higher psychological processes. cambridge: harvard university press. author details maja jankowska is a cetl research fellow and a member of the action research consortium (arc) established at the university of bedfordshire in 2008. she works with other staff to help and support the development of a pedagogic research culture across the university. maja is currently nearing completion of her phd. her interests are in pdp, cultural aspects of teaching and learning, internalisation of education, creativity, meaningful learning and social learning spaces. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 22 taking concept mapping (cm) forward with socially mediated structured approaches abstract introduction use of cm as both a teaching and research tool the research the sample the methodology outcomes from the concept mapping task follow-up interviews moving cm forward through socially mediated structured approaches conclusions acknowledgement references author details rationale journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 2: february 2010 bibliographical referencing: the sting in the tail roisin gwyer university of portsmouth, uk anne worden university of portsmouth, uk linda jones university of portsmouth, uk james matthews university of portsmouth, uk abstract bibliographical referencing is a technique which new undergraduate and other students returning to higher education can find difficult. this problem can recur throughout a student’s career as they meet new types of material, but it still impacts on their overall assessment. traditional handouts give guidance on the basics, but referencing generates plenty of enquiries to library desks. this project set out to offer a 24/7 online service to support students in their referencing and to aid library staff in dealing with referencing enquiries, by means of a decision-tree tool with search backup. the project was successful, widely adopted by academics at portsmouth and is now a permanent service migrated to two minority referencing styles. keywords: bibliographic referencing; online support service; case study. rationale the library at the university of portsmouth (uop) has for some years been providing advice on referencing across the institution, either at enquiry desks or through subject/faculty librarians. in addition, annually updated short guides to vancouver and harvard (apa variant) were produced by the library and distributed to new students in their thousands. this sufficed for a time but in the last three or four years the number of gwyer, worden, jones and matthews biographical referencing: the sting in the tail referencing enquiries being fielded by library staff has increased tremendously in response to a number of trends common across uk higher education, mainly issues concerning the increased possibilities for intentional and unintentional plagiarism that the web affords. enquiries about referencing new (usually web-based) sources of information which were not covered by the traditional referencing conventions – developed in a predominantly paper-based era – were also growing and staff were having to give ‘best guess’ solutions. locally, new courses were much more concerned with electronic and visual media than more traditional courses and law courses were being developed which had their own referencing conventions. the introduction of penalties for poor referencing meant that students were seeking advice from library staff, from academic tutors and from the university’s academic skills unit and there was a worry about consistency of advice. our first response was to collect our replies to referencing queries as a way of saving staff time and ensuring consistency both of advice and interpretation of the conventions. originally it was intended that these be mounted as faqs on the library website but it was soon realised that something more consistent, coherent and easily accessible was possible, so a group of interested people was convened and a bid for funding submitted and accepted by the university learning and teaching committee. the core team comprised a technical support person and some librarians closely involved with subject support work. in addition in the early days there were some academics, a member of the academic skills unit and a librarian from a local fe college who acted as a reference group when advice was needed. as the core team had extensive experience of the problems students were facing when trying to reference, they had a more practical and student-centred, rather than theoretical, approach. it was agreed that any online tool, to be successful, needed to have a familiar format so the design was based on online shopping websites. although the site was designed with a decision tool to give direct answers to specific questions – ‘how do i reference an edited book?’ – the sequence of decisions to be made at each stage modelled the type of analytical thinking needed to develop referencing skills. the student is given choice and control at every stage and can explore different choices easily with no time pressure. the ability to move around the site easily uses the potential of the web in a way not possible with a more linear paper format. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 2 gwyer, worden, jones and matthews biographical referencing: the sting in the tail the site explained a hierarchical approach was adopted to encourage students to think analytically about what they were referencing, and correctly identify the type of material they are using; a failure to do so had prevented many from using the correct referencing style. the first choice is the referencing style: figure 1. referencing@portsmouth home page. the selection tool adopted enables the student to make choices while other options are still visible, so they can easily backtrack, and it is an approach which they are likely to be familiar with from commercial sites. a guiding principle in the design was that the number of clicks should be minimized. the student has to first identify the medium (print, electronic, a/v, etc.), then identify the format (book, journal article, chapter in a book, etc.). if, for example, the student has chosen a whole book, there are other choices as to authorship, language, editors, etc. there must be a balance between coverage of most potential sources against the need to keep the range of options at each stage manageable. thus, at the selection page (figure 2) the remaining choices are made until there is no arrow pointing onwards, or until arriving at the fifth and final choice box. this done, the destination page (figure 3) is only one click further away. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 3 gwyer, worden, jones and matthews biographical referencing: the sting in the tail figure 2. the selection tool. figure 3. a typical destination page. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 4 gwyer, worden, jones and matthews biographical referencing: the sting in the tail a proprietary search tool was incorporated for those situations where the selection tool was less helpful, or for students who prefer that approach. it was important to have it available on the open web, so that students could access the site whether they were working at home or in the university. harvard apa style was covered initially, but a site revision has accommodated two other referencing styles: vancouver for students of pharmacy and biomedical sciences, and oscola for law students. common issues for each style are covered in faq, what if, and cite it in the text pages linked directly from the home page. testing for accessibility is an on-going process, and though the site seems to meet most criteria, a few remaining issues are being investigated. promotion of referencing@portsmouth a variety of approaches has been used to promote the site within uop. academic staff have been targeted via presentations at internal uop conferences, as well as via discussion of the site at internal academic committees and other meetings. subject librarians demonstrate the site to students as part of subject-specific information literacy sessions, with some also providing quick overviews during 10 minute "guest" slots at the beginning or end of normal lectures. enquiry desk staff show students how to use the site if students come to the desk with a referencing query. links to r@p are included on our library website, the skills@portsmouth study skills site, the university's vle and the library's facebook page. post-it notes and pens containing the r@p web address have proved extremely popular with students and staff alike. once we saw how popular r@p was becoming at portsmouth, we thought it important to share what we had developed with other librarians as answering referencing queries is a common activity. in 2007 presentations were made to the cofhe spring meeting held at portsmouth and to local nhs librarians, a conference paper about r@p was presented at lilac (librarians information literacy annual conference), whilst a poster about it was presented at umbrella (the largest annual gathering of uk librarians from all sectors). in july 2008 a presentation was given at the british business school librarians' conference. these presentations have in turn led to more interest in the site with several other universities requesting permission to use it. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 5 gwyer, worden, jones and matthews biographical referencing: the sting in the tail use of the site feedback told us that the site was proving popular and site statistics indicate just how much use of the site has grown during the time it has been available e.g. almost a five-fold increase in use if january 2007 is compared with january 2008. meanwhile total site access has grown from 78,607 for september 2006-june 2007, to 157,410 for september 2007-april 2008. 2007 2008 october 3706 10829 november 7938 25809 december 6146 20900 january 7761 35562 february 5030 12018 march 9915 18353 april 16153 20744 for each academic year, peaks in use correspond with assignment hand-in dates. meanwhile student and staff comments obtained via a survey in spring 2007, show just how useful r@p has become across campus and beyond: • very useful, found it invaluable when stuck on how to reference (politics yr 1); • very comprehensive and easy to use! (criminal justice distance learner); • it is a great help. i have recommended it to my fellow students when they have referencing problems (part-time education student); • i use it to check odd references and also during tutorials…i think it is brilliant, easy to use, simple and clear (european studies lecturer); • i advise students to have this link open in a second window whilst they are working on their essays (public administration lecturer). one student even told us that the only thing missing from the site was the essay itself! journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 6 gwyer, worden, jones and matthews biographical referencing: the sting in the tail information literacy aspects the project has given subject librarians and enquiry desk staff a different approach to their work with students on referencing, ‘working smarter’ rather than harder. from comments of the staff who support academic skills, this has been a general benefit across the university. instead of creating ad hoc replies to difficult student queries, staff are able to take a planned, strategic approach, which provides agreed answers to problems, with new sources in line with each referencing style’s basic philosophy. routine e-mail queries can be answered with a brief message and web reference rather than creating complex parallel examples or giving lengthy explanations of punctuation, capitalisation, etc. personal enquires can be handled with reference to the website: there is something to show the student and they see how to use the site for themselves. the site appears to appeal across the entire range of our diverse student body. it is much appreciated by distance learners, as it is available 24/7. the fact that it provides simple entry points to the information makes it particularly accessible for users who have english as a second language. in addition the menu option approach fits well with a focussed, justin-time approach to referencing, whilst the surrounding supporting material offers more discursive explanation, so the tool can be said to appeal to a variety of learning styles. anecdotally we have evidence that personal enquiries have decreased and are now confined to students checking that they have grasped the principles of the style they are using. statistically we can see that areas where we are still developing our coverage (oscola and vancouver) generate more individual e-mails. often these individual queries generate examples and solutions which are later fed into the main site. law in apa provides an example of how the site can help students with tricky sources. the apa style manual deals only with us law, but our students are referencing mainly uk and international law. therefore all the apa style guidance has to be devised in accordance with general apa principles. the law librarian has drawn on the expertise of lecturers in our institute of criminal justice studies for apa referencing, and of law lecturers, and from national experts on oscola referencing. teaching of referencing has been modified. instead of concentrating on the nitty-gritty of word order and punctuation, more emphasis can be placed on the underlying principles, journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 7 gwyer, worden, jones and matthews biographical referencing: the sting in the tail such as traceability, recoverability and consistency. key information literacy concepts for evaluating materials can be stressed: for example, if the student has no clear idea of authorship, the source may be less credible. students can be encouraged to evaluate the relative merits of a reference to a blog, a government website, or an actual act of parliament, and the whole idea of references appropriate to their discipline and purpose can be discussed with them at greater length because the mechanics of the system are clearly laid out in the examples. the one major problem which remains to be solved is the process of agreeing and disseminating style-appropriate policy across the university. with new sources we need to provide timely guidance which is not usually best sourced via the formal university committee structure. our initial authority group was slow to respond to requests for opinions, so now we have adopted the policy of providing best available guidance after informal e-mail consultation with appropriate individuals, but including the alert that ‘this source is not covered by the apa style manual. check with your lecturer before using this suggestion which is based on apa style.” a similar system will be adopted for our oscola pages. the 6th edition of the apa publication manual was released in the uk during the late summer 2009, after our printed guidance had gone to press. we decided to leave the website pointing to the 5th edition for the academic year 2009-10, as academics would probably not have seen, let alone taken on board, the implications of the revisions in the new edition. there is thus more time for consultation, consistency for students, while we have the new edition to hand to cope with material not covered in the 5th edition. maintenance and sustainability maintaining the information pages is much the same as creating them. to make this an easy task for librarians not used to web page creation, our web designer created a template in dreamweaver (javascript and perl were used to make the dynamic links). for a standard information page the editor only has to fill in predetermined fields. they can therefore concentrate on the punctuation and layout of the referencing style. updating a page is only a question of opening the off-line copy of the page, making the necessary changes, and uploading it to the web server when it is complete. a small change can be journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 8 gwyer, worden, jones and matthews biographical referencing: the sting in the tail made and go live in a couple of minutes. even the hierarchy of the selection tool can be easily and swiftly edited by anyone who has grasped the underlying rationale. the template gives the student user a consistent layout, whatever type of source they are considering. the first pages to be created focussed on the information sources which had been covered in the booklet which we still offer to students on the harvard apa style. when these were in place it was possible to make the site live – we couldn’t offer less in an active site than we were offering as a printed booklet or a pdf download. the site has been developed by adding pages on other information sources, partly by trawling the apa style manual, partly by responding to suggestions from academic colleagues, and partly in responses to questions raised by students. the ‘contact us’ feature which enables students to post queries to one of the project team, allows us to support them individually by e-mail, but it also alerts us to sources which we have not covered but which students are using. it prompts thinking about how the pages might be clearer, but we also use the site’s pages to answer queries, so as to encourage effective use of the site. from the beginning there was a recognition that the site had to be sustainable through changes of personnel. this meant using standard software products to build pages, etc., but also creation of shared documentation detailing all the processes involved in creating and maintaining the pages of the website. though there are lead-librarians for each of the referencing styles offered (we have now branched out from apa to oscola and vancouver, which are used by minorities in the university), deputies are or will be allocated to provide back up during leave or other absence. project to service: the future recently the service has been enhanced both by a new look which is in line with the revamped library website but also with the addition of the sections covering vancouver and oscola. this means that from october 2008 all major conventions in use at uop have been covered. the service is reasonably well embedded within the institution and it was gratifying that a recent review of the university learning, teaching and assessment strategy mentions the service. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 9 gwyer, worden, jones and matthews biographical referencing: the sting in the tail there are other referencing solutions appearing all the time, such as the facility within word 2007 to create a bibliography but none of them deal with those new and unusual types of information source. r@p was built using commonly available software and our own staff to create a customised solution to a problem. it requires minimal upkeep and has been put together relatively cheaply but has already significantly reduced staff time in answering referencing queries. as one student wrote: wow that website is so helpful! thanks. the site is available at: http://referencing.port.ac.uk. this is a revised and extended version of an article which appeared in sconul focus issue 47. author details roisin gwyer was referencing@portsmouth project leader in her role as associate university librarian (academic services). she is now university librarian. anne worden is faculty librarian for humanities and social sciences at the university of portsmouth. she has extensive experience of teaching referencing skills to both undergraduates and postgraduates and of helping to resolve individual referencing queries. she has compiled printed referencing guides and faqs which contributed to referencing@portsmouth and has promoted referencing@portsmouth at external conferences. linda jones is law and criminology librarian, university of portsmouth, and as such deals with students using both harvard apa and oscola referencing. she has written all the oscola pages on the website in line with portsmouth law school guidance with advice from sandra meredith, teaching and learning officer, faculty of law, oxford university and cathy jackson, senior consultant information literacy and subject librarian law, cardiff university. she also handles all oscola enquiries received. james matthews is floor manager for social sciences at the university of portsmouth library. he has extensive front-line experience of working with students and their journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 10 http://referencing.port.ac.uk/ gwyer, worden, jones and matthews biographical referencing: the sting in the tail referencing problems. he compiled most of the apa pages on the website and is responsible for the day-to-day maintenance of the site and handling the e-mail enquiries to the site. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 11 bibliographical referencing: the sting in the tail roisin gwyer anne worden linda jones james matthews abstract rationale the site explained promotion of referencing@portsmouth use of the site information literacy aspects maintenance and sustainability project to service: the future author details maximising student learning through minimising information search time; the role of satisficing and skimming journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 2: february 2010 maximising student learning through minimising information search time; the role of satisficing and skimming dr susan c wilkinson university of wales institute cardiff, uk abstract with the increase in the use of the internet for educational purposes, the problem is no longer how to find and access information on-line, but how to select the most appropriate sources of information. what strategies do students adopt in order to allocate time adaptively to the information they need to learn? how and when do they make decision judgements, and how can this enable educators to facilitate student learning? if we understand how students search and retrieve information from texts, then we can design our texts to facilitate this process and ultimately enhance learning through minimising the time it takes for students to search for information within a text, and maximise the time they have for learning that information. this paper will present a new and innovative model of adaptive allocation of time across on-line texts, based on the principles of satisficing and skimming. it will discuss how knowledge about students’ information search and retrieval processes can aid educational text designers in designing texts that will enhance student learning. keywords: information foraging; student learning; satisficing; skimming. introduction the world consists of information societies, that is, societies where modern day living centres around the creation, processing, communication, use, and evaluation of information (rice et al, 2001). information seeking behaviour is a topic which is much debated and researched (e.g. pirolli and card, 1999; sandstrom, 1994; o’connor, 1993) and efforts indicate a shift in emphasis onto the user in order to inform the design of information systems and on-line learning environments. wilkinson maximising student learning through minimising information search time journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 3 this paper aims to address a widespread problem concerning the increase in the use of the internet for educational purposes and how students are able to allocate their time and select the most appropriate sources of information. students are often under a great deal of time pressure when searching for information on-line, and are therefore under pressure to find adaptive strategies to ensure they allocate their time effectively. indeed, it has been a social aim for some time to improve people’s ability to access and make sense of available information and this aim has also been implicated in efforts to improve modern day productivity (see pirolli and card, 1999). the issue of time allocation to information sources has been argued by pirolli and card (1999) to be analogous to the problem of how animals forage for food. other research has shown that time allocation across tasks varies with factors such as difficulty and time (son and metcalfe, 2000; thiede and dunlosky, 1999). this paper discusses a model of time allocation that is based on the way in which students search for information amongst sources that are all potentially relevant (e.g. similar to the results one may encounter when using an internet search engine). when students are experiencing information overload, what strategies do they use to adaptively allocate their time? once the model has been explained, the paper will continue to explore how an understanding of the way in which students search and retrieve information from on-line texts can influence text design in a way that will facilitate student learning by minimising information search time. information foraging theory miller (1983) described humans as ‘informavores’, based on the observation that we actively seek, compile, digest, and share information to a spectacular degree. as humans surrounded with information richness, we are constantly forced to choose between multiple information sources according to our goals and aims. to deal with this overload, we have developed sophisticated strategies that enable us to gather information, interpret this information, and use it to make decisions or solve problems (dennett, 1991). pirolli and card (1999) view these information seeking strategies from an evolutionary ecological perspective. their theory of information foraging is based on the fact that, ‘when feasible, natural information systems evolve toward stable states that maximize gains of valuable wilkinson maximising student learning through minimising information search time journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 4 information per unit cost’ (pirolli and card, 1999: 642), people will adapt (e.g. their strategies) in order to maximise the gain they are able to achieve from a certain resource. in the real world, where maximising is not practical due to time and resource constraints, rational choice may lead people to satisfice (i.e. stop searching after meeting some minimal requirement or when they have found something which is ‘good enough’) when making decisions rather than continuing to search for the optimal result. simon (1976) points out that although people are adaptive in learning and choice situations, this adaptiveness still fails to result in maximising behaviour. he suggests that people adapt well enough by satisficing, so they do not tend to optimise. one of the primary problems for information foraging theory is to understand the mechanisms behind the way in which foragers allocate their time and attention to the most useful of the information sources available to them. there exist time, resource, and opportunity costs of different information foraging strategies, and these are influenced by the structure of the interface between people and information sources (i.e., the physical layout of the information, functionality, and accessibility of the information). in applying the theory of information foraging, pirolli and card (1999) make the assumption that in order to maximise their rate of valuable information gain, people will adapt their strategies (e.g. they may do this through use of a satisficing or an optimising strategy), or if possible, adapt the structure of the interface between them and the information repository (e.g. make the information more accessible by bringing it closer, or organising it more efficiently). they claim that one cognitive strategy will be used in preference to another if it produces more useful information per unit cost. in addition to expecting that information systems (such as internet search engines) will inevitably develop with the aim of improving the returns on information foraging, these authors also suggest that one would expect that, faced with these foraging tasks, cognitive structures and strategies will also gradually develop through learning and practice to maximise the gain per unit cost. it is also possible, however, that people switch between different strategies when foraging for information. in some cases, for example in completely new environments or when searching information for new and specific tasks which the seeker has not encountered before, new foraging strategies may even need to be explicitly taught in order for people to be able to use them. wilkinson maximising student learning through minimising information search time journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 5 much of the information in a given environment occurs in patches. a patch of information could be a website, different journal papers, pages within a book, etc. when students are allocating time across information sources, the information ‘patch’ is assumed to be the section of text/information source that the student will abandon when information gain has dropped below a certain threshold. for example, if a patch was a website, then when the student had extracted all the information they felt useful from that site, they would abandon it and move to the next website. if the patch was a page of a book, then the student would leave the page when information gain began to drop below a threshold, and they would move to the next page of that book. it is the job of the forager (in this case, the student) to direct themselves from one of these patches to another. the forager must also decide how to allocate their time to between-patch and within-patch foraging. one way of doing this would be through enrichment, which is when information foragers mould the task environment in order to suit the strategies available to them. examples of environmental enrichment include: reducing the average cost of switching information patches (i.e. minimising between-patch foraging costs); and making information patches that yield better returns (i.e. changing the environment in order to improve within-patch foraging outcomes) by, for example, refining keyword queries for a search engine so the list it returns is potentially more relevant. the environment can be modified to minimise between-patch costs and maximise with-in patch results. an important question that arises here is whether information foraging requires metacognition (i.e. does information foraging require a level of thinking that involves active control over the process of thinking?). planning how one should approach a learning task, monitoring how much is being understood, and evaluating the progress towards the completion of a task are all skills that are metacognitive in nature. it seems, therefore, due to time and resource limitations, that on-line information searching needs to be monitored in a strategic way, and therefore involves the consideration of these issues when proposing a theory for human behaviour. a new model of adaptive time allocation recent research (wilkinson, 2007) has explored the strategies that students use to search for information when learning. a series of experiments, involving eye trackers to follow accurately the eye movements of students, has revealed that students integrate the wilkinson maximising student learning through minimising information search time journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 6 process of quality judgement with their learning. that is, students judge the quality of the information source at the same time as learning from the source, and only leave the source if their learning is below what was expected or desired from that source. if reading to judge the value of information sources was treated as a separate process to reading in order to learn from the information source, then students may adopt a sampling strategy when searching for information. that is, students would sample a variety of sources to judge their quality (in terms of relevance and appropriateness for the current task) and then make the decision of which one to read/study. this ‘sampling’ strategy to search for the most appropriate information source was not widely used by the participants in the studies conducted by wilkinson (2007). instead, it was apparent that students would judge the appropriateness of the information source at the same time as reading the text to learn. in this manner, they used a strategy based on the principles of satisficing. satisficing is a decision-making strategy whereby a person ceases to search for alternatives when they find a resource whose expected utility meets or exceeds a previously determined threshold of what the person deems as satisfactory (byron, 2004). the evaluation process is integrated into the reading phase so that judgement and learning take place simultaneously. rather than searching for the ‘best’/optimal text the student will continue to read anything that is deemed to be satisfactory, that is to say, above a pre-set threshold level of information gain. a student will begin reading a text and continue to read if information gain is high enough, or abandon reading if the text is not seen as useful or informative for the task in hand. the primary aim using this strategy is to learn about the topic and not to pre-judge the texts for usefulness. it was important to establish when students were making these decision judgements about the information source/text, as this would determine at what level of text the students were making the decision as to whether the text was relevant/desirable or not. having an understanding of the level of text at which relevance judgements are made is important to the design of on-line texts/materials (discussed in more detail later). eye tracking studies (wilkinson, 2007) revealed that these decision judgements were being made on the basis of very small sections of text, which are referred to as patches (as discussed above). if a page of text consists of four paragraphs, then the students will begin reading the first paragraph, make a decision as to whether or not it was relevant, then either continue reading it (if it was relevant) or move/‘jump’ to the next paragraph (if it was deemed not wilkinson maximising student learning through minimising information search time journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 7 relevant). these decisions as to whether or not the sections of text were relevant were based on an arbitrary pre-set threshold of information gain that the reader subconsciously set prior to searching. the unit of text with which readers are prepared to satisfice is relatively small. they will not read the first paragraph of a page and decide that the rest of the page is not relevant without first skim-checking the remaining paragraphs. also, readers will not search the first page of a document and decide the rest of the pages are not relevant without first skimchecking the remaining pages. this suggests that the patch model of time allocation being proposed here operates at more than one level. this observation informs us that students are very specific in their behaviour when searching for information from on-line texts. they will not waste time judging the texts/sources before choosing one to study, and they will not judge an entire text/source on the basis of its first page/paragraph, without skim-checking the remainder before leaving. this has led to a nested model of adaptive time allocation called the ‘satisfice then skim-check strategy’, whereby students use paragraphs/sections as a patch with which they can satisfice, but then skim-check the remainder of the paragraphs/sections on the page before moving to the next page. this model explains the search strategies used by students when learning from on-line texts, and has implications for the way in which online education environments should be designed. facilitating student learning it was previously discussed that the existence of scent cues (pirolli and card, 1995) aids the reader in finding the information which s/he desires. however, what is evident from recent eye-tracking studies (wilkinson, 2007) is the tendency for readers to allocate time across texts when learning for a test by skimming the text and rejecting paragraphs which do not appear to contain the information required. it appears that readers are searching by rejecting, rather than (or in addition to) searching by following cues, and therefore after deciding to reject a certain section of text, they simply move onto the next section of text. in this way, design for skimmability need not only be a matter of clear headings and other scent like cues (neilsen 1997), but also a matter of making the various patches of a wilkinson maximising student learning through minimising information search time journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 8 document easily perceived and then allowing the moves from one patch to another to be readily made (reader and payne, 2007). if it is known that readers read the first paragraph, or section of a text normally, and then use the paragraph structures to skim read the remainder of the page, then this could inform text designers. it would make sense to put salient information in the first paragraph/section of a text, and then start subsequent paragraphs with important or essential information, since it seems as though it is the content at the start of a paragraph which is responsible for holding the readers’ interest, or not. indeed, it has been suggested in previous research that the first and last sentences of a paragraph are indicative of its content (masson, 1982). this type of research has implications for online text designers, whose interest may focus on the sections of a text to which readers initially direct their attention. it would be these areas of initial interest where essential or primary information should be placed. the research discussed in this paper has suggested that skimming a document may not necessarily involve the reader deliberately searching for specific sections of the text, as pirolli and card (1999) have termed ‘scent following’, but rather that skimming could arise from readers rejecting patches (sections of text) and jumping/moving to the next patch simply because it is next. in this way, a ‘skimmable’ document would be one in which the patches of a text are easily perceived by the reader and where the moves from one patch to the next can be readily made (i.e. a paragraph). readers ‘skim’ paragraphs of the text and reject those sections which are below their threshold level for information gain. this is evident from eye tracking data showing that irrelevant sections of text are left earlier than relevant sections of text. therefore, on the basis of this research, writers of on-line texts could be advised to put salient information at the top of the page, and then other information which they want people to read should be placed at the beginning of each subsequent paragraph, or section of page, since it is these areas of the page which are responsible for holding the readers’ attention. this design of on-line materials is already used and journalists base the content of their writing on an inverted pyramid, placing the salient information at the top, i.e. the base of the pyramid (ricketson, 2004). they work on the premise that the body of the text should merely amplify what the reader already knows is coming, as they write in such a way that they tell the reader what they want to know as quickly as possible. also, hotspot plots wilkinson maximising student learning through minimising information search time journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 9 (images indicating focus of attention) created from participants’ eye movements in studies conducted by wilkinson (2007) suggest that important information may be better placed at the left and at the top of the screen, as this is where most attention was directed. this is also illustrated by google’s golden triangle, the area shaped like a triangle at the top of the search results page which shows most eye-tracking activity. eye tools eye tracking research (2006) conducted a study whereby fifty participants were given five different scenarios that required the use of a search engine (google was used each time). results revealed that 100% of people looked at the listings in the top three positions, 85% of people looked at the fourth listing, 60% looked at the fifth listing, and only 50% looked at the sixth. research also showed that 72% of users clicked on the first link. this research confirms the importance of the location of information on a page. neilsen (2006) also showed that readers’ attention on a web page appeared to be an f-shaped pattern. however, the ability of a reader to skim a text may also depend on factors other than the layout of the patches of a text or how perceivable they may be. factors such as the reader’s reading level, their knowledge about the topic, the length of the text, and the cohesion of the text may also influence to what extent the reader is able to skim in their search for information. another potential design implication which arises from recent research involves the difficulty of the available texts, rather than the relevance of the texts. recent research (wilkinson, 2007) showed that when provided with texts that vary in difficulty, readers had a preference for the easiest text, therefore suggesting that they were sensitive to the level of difficulty of the texts as they read. the most obvious implication of this finding is the fact that people prefer to read easy texts, and so this may advise writers of on-line texts to keep their texts as simple as possible. a hyper-text structure on-line gives users an opportunity to see what the text/document is going to be like in terms of difficulty and style by providing the user with short summaries, headings, or text snippets as an indication of what to expect in the text/document. such guides not only reveal the content of the text but also other qualities that are relevant to the utility of the text, such as difficulty. this research reinforces the need to allow readers to experience the style and vocabulary of the text as well as the topic before they choose to read, since the preference for the easy text in studies by wilkinson (2007) suggests that readers would choose simple, easy to read texts over complex ones, especially when under time pressure. it has also been shown that readers will consult aids such as outlines when they are available in order to sample the style and difficulty of the texts (reader and payne, 2007). the findings of this wilkinson maximising student learning through minimising information search time journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 10 research may therefore recommend to website and digital library designers that they should perhaps include summaries and headings. the model discussed here is built upon the premise that people are programmed to strive for maximum benefit in return for minimum effort. making the search process easier is therefore key to the success of the on-line information source or text. an understanding of the strategies used when students are searching for information under time pressure will thus aid the development of these on-line sources and texts into ones which are easy to navigate and able to support a ‘satisficing then skim-checking’ model of observed behaviour. the information in on-line sources not only needs to be good, but also it needs to be easy to read and easy to find. when deliberating which on-line source to consult, users will make trade-offs based on two questions; what can i expect to gain from this, and what is the likely cost to discover and consume this information (in terms of time and effort)? (neilsen, 2003). based on this assumption that information foragers (e.g. students) will weigh up options in terms of maximum gain for minimum effort, it appears of paramount importance that on-line sources/texts are designed with this in mind. along with an increase in the numbers of students choosing to study on-line on distance learning courses and the increasing numbers of higher education institutions who choose to incorporate e-learning into their curricula, it is important to develop an understanding of the ways in which students interact with information on-line. this paper has discussed recent research which focussed on modelling information search behaviour so that on-line courses and materials could be constructed in a manner which facilitates student learning. minimising information search time by making on-line resources easier to navigate will ultimately facilitate learning. this innovative ‘nested’ model of adaptive time allocation – satisfice then skim-check strategy – gives educational and learning developers an insight into the strategies that students use when searching for information on-line and engaging with virtual learning environments. this model of students’ search behaviour can therefore help educators to enhance student learning by designing on-line information sources in such a way that supports this nested model of adaptive time allocation. as discussed above, designing for ‘skimmability’ by providing clear scent-like cues, small text patches with salient information placed at the beginning of the patch, and using outlines to increase the accuracy of text selection, will all contribute in facilitating the information search and retrieval process of students engaged in e-learning and distance learning courses. wilkinson maximising student learning through minimising information search time journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 11 references byron, m. (2004) satisficing and maximising: moral theorists on practical reason. cambridge: cambridge university press. dennett, d. (1991) consciousness explained. boston: little, brown. eye tools (2006) eye tools, enquiro, and did-it uncover search's golden triangle. online: www.eyetools.com/inpage/research_google_eyetracking_heatmap.htm (accessed: 12 april 2009). masson, m. e. (1982) ‘cognitive processes in skimming stories’, journal of experimental psychology: learning, memory and cognition 8(5) pp 400-417. miller, g. a. (1983) ‘informavores’, pp. 111-113, in machlup, f. and mansfield, u. (eds.) the study of information: interdisciplinary messages. new york: wiley. neilsen, j. (1997) alert box: be succinct! writing for the web. online: www.useit.com/alertbox/9703b.html (accessed: 12 april 2009). neilsen, j. (2003) alert box: information foraging: why google makes people leave your site faster. online: www.useit.com/alertbox/20030630.html (accessed: 1 may 2009). neilsen, j. (2006) alert box: f-shaped pattern for reading web content. online: www.useit.com/alertbox/reading_pattern.html (accessed: 06 june 2009). o'connor, b. (1993) ‘browsing: a framework for seeking functional information’, knowledge: creation, diffusion, utilization 15(2) pp 211-232. pirolli, p. and card, s. (1995) ‘information foraging in information access environments’, sigchi conference on human factors in computing systems, denver, colorado, usa, 7-11 may. ../../../../../../../anthony%20bates/local%20settings/temporary%20internet%20files/content.ie5/local%20settings/temporary%20internet%20files/content.outlook/b6edmacd/www.eyetools.com/inpage/research_google_eyetracking_heatmap.htm ../../../../../../../anthony%20bates/local%20settings/temporary%20internet%20files/content.ie5/local%20settings/temporary%20internet%20files/content.outlook/b6edmacd/www.useit.com/alertbox/9703b.html ../../../../../../../anthony%20bates/local%20settings/temporary%20internet%20files/content.ie5/local%20settings/temporary%20internet%20files/content.outlook/b6edmacd/www.useit.com/alertbox/20030630.html ../../../../../../../anthony%20bates/local%20settings/temporary%20internet%20files/content.ie5/local%20settings/temporary%20internet%20files/content.outlook/b6edmacd/www.useit.com/alertbox/reading_pattern.html wilkinson maximising student learning through minimising information search time journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 12 pirolli, p. and card, s. (1999) ‘information foraging’, psychological review 106(4) pp 643-675. reader, w. and payne, s. (2007) ‘allocating time across multiple texts’, journal of human computer interaction 22(3) pp 263-298. rice, r.e., mccreadie, m.m. and chang, s.j. (2001) accessing and browsing information and communication. cambridge, ma: mit press. ricketson, m. (2004) writing feature stories: how to research and write newspaper and magazine articles. sydney: allen and unwin. sandstrom, p. e. (1994) ‘an optimal foraging approach to information seeking and use’, library quarterly 64(4) pp 414-449. simon, h. a. (1976) administrative behaviour: a study of decision-making processes in administrative organization (3 rd edn). new york: free press. son, l. k. and metcalfe, j. (2000) ‘metacognitive and control strategies in study-time allocation’, journal of experimental psychology: learning, memory and cognition 26(1) pp 204-221. thiede, k.w. and dunlosky, j. (1999) ‘toward a general model of self-regulated study: an analysis of selection of items for study and self-paced study time’, journal of experimental psychology: learning, memory and cognition 25(4) pp 1024-1037. wilkinson, s.c. (2007) strategies for time allocation across multiple on-line texts. unpublished phd thesis. cardiff university. author details susan is currently working as an e-learning developer at the university of wales institute cardiff. prior to this she was a senior learning developer at a hefce-funded cetl based at portsmouth university, researching and developing online materials for wilkinson maximising student learning through minimising information search time journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 13 work-based distance learners. she has also taught psychology at portsmouth university and for the open university. her phd examined readers’ browsing strategies and information foraging theory, and current research interests include the psychological processes of learning, e-learning, and learner development. maximising student learning through minimising information search time; the role of satisficing and skimming abstract introduction information foraging theory a new model of adaptive time allocation facilitating student learning references author details literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 8: march 2015 the social hubs project: exploratory real-world research – students as researchers and experiential learning carin tunåker university of kent, uk ian bride university of kent, uk daniela peluso university of kent, uk abstract this case study describes an experiential approach to teaching and learning that has been successfully employed at the university of kent. it offers a way for engaging students across disciplines in real-world research and in situ learning experiences that allow them to build various skills sets and take on responsibilities whilst making a valuable contribution to their university community. the social hubs project, akin to approaches such as participatory action research (par) and including ‘students as researchers’, employed anthropological methods for gaining valuable insights about social space on a university campus while also providing key student learning experience and careerbuilding employment. keywords: real-world research; experiential learning; learning engagement; student experience; campus as classroom; applied anthropology. introduction the roots of experiential learning run deep, drawing on the ground breaking work of john dewey, kurt lewin, jean piaget, and subsequently, david kolb. there is now an impressive body of literature supporting the value of such learning initiatives, such as ‘inquiry based learning’ (healey, 2005) and also the ‘student as producer’ movement tunåker et al. the social hubs project: exploratory real-world research journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 2 (neary and winn, 2009). kolb (1984) describes experiential learning as the individual learner’s progression from apprehension to comprehension and provides considerable evidence for the value of extra-curricular inquiry activity in skills development (see also healey and jenkins, 2000). although substantial benefits often accrue to the students in terms of skills and knowledge, as wood et al. (2011, p.17) argue, the impact can transcend personal development to the advantage of the organisation as a whole, with students becoming more reliable, responsible and better motivated, so as to allow them ‘…to take on the role of full partners in the educational development enterprise’. the social hubs project was a research initiative conducted between 2008-2011 on the university of kent’s canterbury and medway campuses by members of the school of anthropology and conservation, in collaboration with the school of architecture. it was financed by the university and supported by the ‘creative campus’ initiative (see bride et al., 2013), an initiative that seed-funds learning and teaching innovations by students or staff. the overarching aim of the social hubs project was to develop an overview of existing and potential ‘social hubs’, which we defined as any indoor or outdoor space where people tend to gather. the principle objective was to identify and define such spaces and to generate guidelines and interventions that would maximise their benefits across the different campus communities. in sum, the project sought to provide data that would inform actual and proposed changes to spaces in the built and non-built environments on two of the university of kent’s campuses. however, in approaching it as an experiential learning and teaching opportunity, both the ‘hubs’ research, along with those projects subsequently informed by it, sought to set students at the heart of the design and implementation of research and creative activities focused on precipitating meaningful positive changes to the university’s physical environment. the expectation was that this would help develop valuable skills, improved motivations and a sense of belonging amongst the student researchers. the following case study provides a background to the ‘social hubs’ project, its planning, methodology, execution, results and subsequent outcomes, as well as insights into the student learning experience and the wider significance of this project. we briefly discuss the position of this research in relation to participatory action research and other relevant approaches to practice-based learning, although the primary intention of this case study is to outline the practical and learning outcomes of the social hubs project, rather than to provide in-depth analysis that relates to previous research. tunåker et al. the social hubs project: exploratory real-world research journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 3 methodology in the autumn of 2008, the head of the school of anthropology and conservation, sitting on a committee discussing proposed estate developments, posited the idea of conducting research to better understand campus spaces and thereby inform and enlighten future development plans. the university management supported the idea and provided funds that enabled the project to employ students from the school of anthropology and conservation and the school of architecture. the social hubs project employed anthropological research methods, including observations, mapping, semi-structured interviewing and field diaries – what a social anthropologist would use during ‘fieldwork’ (see for example watson, 1999; bernard, 2006; okely, 2012). the data collection and development of research methods in the duration of the project was a student-led process. it employed a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods at each stage of research, using conventional social science approaches. the findings then informed the subsequent research foci, such as the development of the targeted interviews. employing students as paid researchers enabled them to participate fully in the research process and be trained in formulating and applying a mixed methods approach that included ethnographic research, interviews, and other survey instruments, such as movement diaries and mapping. this onsite training allowed students to incorporate a valuable skillsbased training element within a context of a real-world, dynamic, experiential learning exercise. apart from privileging experiential learning, the adoption of an iterative approach in the research process, and the application of several established research methods and survey instruments, the project was not informed by a specific theoretical perspective. nor did it involve the application of an established framework for student engagement, but rather the framework for theory and engagement arose from the ongoing reflection over the project and its outcomes. the data analysis, however, was left for senior staff of the project – with the exception of carin tunåker, who took part in the data analysis and presentation of the results for the medway campus – as it would have required significant training and experience for the students to participate appropriately; a resource we unfortunately neither had the time nor funding to provide. in adopting an iterative approach, whereby findings from each stage informed subsequent research directions, the first activity was to observe behaviour in a broadly representative sample of hubs. for this purpose, fifteen undergraduate students tunåker et al. the social hubs project: exploratory real-world research journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 4 were recruited into five teams, each allocated a distinct area of the campus and each managed by a postgraduate team leader who also collated the data. the project survey methodology was partly framed by the staff team, but was formulated in collaboration with the student researchers in a series of workshops where students went through practical and brainstorming exercises to develop an appropriate research design. the student teams began their fieldwork by making general observations of currently busy hubs and less obvious spaces in non-busy areas, as well as identifying potential development ideas. they mapped the designated areas, recording movement patterns through them, and completed a field diary, whilst also developing ideas as to what the most appropriate methods and survey instruments would be for the second research stage. having compiled and reviewed the observations made in stage one, the teams undertook in-depth observations of the busiest hubs in their designated areas. they thoroughly mapped each area making direct observations of usage. depending on the general level of occupation, either one or two students made observations at different fixed time slots in the morning, lunchtime, afternoon and, in some cases, evening periods as well. utilisation patterns were mapped out noting gender, approximate age group and activities of users, as well as their physical location within the hub. photographs were used to back up written records, and circumstantial factors taken into consideration, such as weather conditions, campus events etc. throughout the process, students provided input as to how well the methods worked, which they thought to have yielded the most useful data, and they also formed and presented their own opinions. these latter data included student field diaries, where they had free rein to reflect and present their thoughts in whichever way they wished. the final stage of the canterbury research gathered a body of qualitative data, with team leaders and staff team members conducting semi-structured interviews with staff and students. some of these interviews were randomly selected within allocated buildings and hubs, whereas others targeted specific members of staff in several university buildings. in 2010, the research was replicated at the university’s medway campus. here, with rather fewer spaces to survey, just one team of four students was recruited, led by tunåker, who had been a team leader on the canterbury study and promoted to the role of project officer tunåker et al. the social hubs project: exploratory real-world research journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 5 for the medway study. although using the methodology we had established, these students also discussed survey methods and made changes to the subsequent data gathering process, thereby continuing the project’s student-learning focus. findings and impact: influencing changes to people and places the social hubs research generated a substantial amount of data, of both a quantitative and qualitative nature, which were explored both individually and in discussion by the project team. since the core aim of the social hubs research was to influence decisionmaking in regards to these spaces, pragmatic suggestions for improvements and new developments were the primary focus of analysis. the research clearly proved highly valuable in revealing ways in which people use and perceive existing hubs, and their needs and desires for improvements and additional provision. for example, issues regarding poor acoustics in some of the campus eateries were identified and subsequently adjusted, as well as a pressing need for external seating areas on the campus and updating of indoor areas that had appeared unwelcoming and out-dated. after the research data had been analysed, compiled, and presented to the appropriate planning and development committees, real-world outcomes became visible in the shape of significant changes to parts of the built and non-built environment. in response to the project findings, the university allocated quite substantial resources to a social spaces fund which, in its first two years of operation, was used to develop significant improvements on the canterbury campus (the medway research had yet to be carried out). this included an outdoor teaching space (dubbed ‘quercus genius’), and a café/flexible learning/teaching space that integrated into an ma architecture design module and used a student, pierluigi del renzio, as part of the construction team. del renzio commented that the result showed ‘…the true realisation of a student-based project which is now being built before our very eyes’. the other key objective of the project, to develop students’ research skills in a real-world situation, was also realised. students acquired valuable employability skills and increased their self-confidence in tackling solution-driven research by actually seeing the results of their thinking as outlined by their research and practice. this can also be seen as an important lesson that can enhance student employability. the practical heart of the project tunåker et al. the social hubs project: exploratory real-world research journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 6 enabled them to experience anthropological fieldwork first-hand and get an understanding of the importance of mixed research methods, the types of the data they produce, and the types of results they yield. moreover, the students were able to appreciate the real-world contributions they made to the broader university community, as well as the experiential learning that resulted in their having been given a say in the design of their own learning environment, both in regards to project methodologies and subsequent developments in ‘bricks and mortar’. as laura, one of the postgraduate team leaders reflected: the social hubs research was an invaluable experience for me, and something that i really enjoyed. i already knew that i loved doing interviews from my anthropology coursework, but this was a taste of how to put that love and skill in to the real world. knowing that the work i conducted would go towards research to benefit students was such a confidence boost, and i am so proud to have been a part of it. plus it looks great on my c.v. and is a real conversation piece! (laura, ma social anthropology, 2009) in regards to the projects that were precipitated by the social hubs research, grace, a 3 rd year bsc wildlife conservation and management student, who participated in the ‘quercus genius’ project, stated: i thought having a new, green-learning space was a wonderful idea! it will be great to encourage especially environmental classes to be taught outside, as well as creating a social area for people to congregate and enjoy more of the green-ness of campus. we could certainly replicate this elsewhere on campus. i enjoyed the teamwork, and learnt to remove bark with a chisel! + a lot of general problem solving skills, such as collectively moving a really heavy branch up a hill. it made me feel happy and proactive! (grace, bsc wildlife conservation and management, 2010) although a specific educational theoretical model was not articulated for the project, clearly the iterative approach we adopted for the design and the execution of the original project, as well as for some of the new developments it precipitated, had quite profound learning impacts on the student participants. in addition to the research design and data collection/organisation skills they acquired, student participants also boosted their teamtunåker et al. the social hubs project: exploratory real-world research journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 7 working skills, and for team leaders, further skills associated with managing groups were also attained. students as researchers the social hubs project was as experiential as it was experimental, encompassing methods and approaches drawn from across the disciplines of anthropology, conservation and architecture. a principal method adopted for the project and some of its progeny bears similarities to established ‘action research’ (ar) methods (see, for example, wadsworth, 1998; kemmis and mctaggart, 2000; cousin, 2009; cohen et al., 2011). action research is a paradigm of inquiry wherein the researcher’s primary objective is to improve the capacity and subsequent practices of the researcher, rather than simply produce and test theoretical knowledge (elliott, 1991). it is not unusual for action research not to have preset aims or objectives; its goals are aimed toward improving the skills of those involved in the process of the research rather than toward producing specific knowledge outcomes. since this research was oriented at the production of knowledge with specific outcomes in mind, it is perhaps more akin to a form of ‘participatory action research’ (par), where researcher and participants collaborate actively to study and change their social reality, and where the aim is for collective learning such that the researcher has less control over the research design (wadsworth, 1998). however, bona fide participatory action research would have entailed close monitoring of the results of the changes precipitated and the ensuing formulation, plus the application of new methods and objectives. unfortunately, our own resources and ability to follow-up were limited once the main project and its offspring had been completed. upon reflection, the social hubs project might be understood as approximating the idea of threshold concepts and research partnerships approach advocated by cousin (2010). a ‘threshold concept’ is characterised by being: transformative, in the sense that the learner assimilates new learning as part of who they are; irreversible, in that this learning is robustly internalised; and integrative, in that during the process the learner is able to make connections across the different understandings they bring to and develop in the learning space (cousin, 2010). in this instance, the professional and disciplinary development of tunåker who moved across thresholds from student team leader, through project officer, to co-author of this paper, might be seen to epitomise this approach. she tunåker et al. the social hubs project: exploratory real-world research journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 8 ‘became’ a social hubs researcher and project manager, and was able to bring together, consolidate, articulate, and build upon a wide range of knowledge and understandings she had developed during her undergraduate and postgraduate studies. whichever theoretical model best describes our approach, we firmly believe that what we have achieved in terms of precipitating changes to physical environments and enhancing learning experiences, understandings of research, and employability skill sets, was highly valuable to the students involved. as such, and in new iterations within and adjacent to the formal curriculum, the project approach offered opportunities for the non-conformist approach advocated by derounian (2011) and addressed the calls for student empowerment and participation made by kay et al. (2010). it also exhibited a close similarity to the three-dimensional approach to student engagement advocated by the he academy in its framework for ‘students as partners’, namely, to incorporate engaged learning and research, and involve students as change agents, both in respect to learning and teaching enhancement, and to the institution more widely (he academy, 2013, and see also neary and winn, 2009). indeed, it can not only be understood as having met most of the detailed principles this framework advocates, but also to correlate with the conceptual framework set out by trowler and trowler (2010), such that the impact of this student engagement was highly salient to the aspirations of our institution, very much in character (congruent) with the physical and intellectual spaces offered by the university, and of benefit to a range of groups representing different communities and groups (profitability). conclusion teaching and learning anthropology are cultural processes that dialogically share and produce knowledge (freire, 1997). this project has encouraged students to think widely and critically about their own position in the university, society and the world, thus preparing them for broader significant issues within anthropology, conservation, architecture and across disciplines. overall, this social hubs project demonstrates how, when students are given the means and opportunities to engage in practice-based learning related to their discipline and local challenges within their immediate university environment, this can benefit all parties tunåker et al. the social hubs project: exploratory real-world research journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 9 involved. the project itself advocates exploration and innovation in all pedagogical aspects; students developing individual approaches to different methodologies, testing them in real settings and learning from the process, as well as seeing actual results stem from their work and thereby achieving significant learning outcomes. this gave all participants a satisfying and real sense of achievement, and it provided a novel learning experience that was embedded through practice and will outlast their tenure as students. since completion of the social hubs project, the outcomes have been published in the student engagement handbook (bride et al., 2013), and the creative campus initiative continues to seek student consultation to improve and adapt social space at the university of kent. for instance, it is currently supporting bride and students in the creation of a coppice crafts production site within the campus woodland (spring 2015). acknowledgements the authors would like to thank the university of kent for funding and supporting the social hubs research, and for implementing some of its recommendations, as well as to the creative campus initiative and louise naylor. special thanks are also due to professor bill watson, former head of the school of anthropology and conservation, who championed and spearheaded the project’s initiation; with important help contributed by miles berkley. acknowledgement should also be made of the project advisory team of staff (ian bride, daniela peluso, melissa demian and chris gardner), and of ian bride and carin tunåker, who respectively managed the social hubs research at canterbury and at medway. we would also like to thank the ldhen article referees for their constructive feedback and bringing to our attention additional valuable reference materials. of course we are most indebted to the undergraduate and postgraduate students who so enthusiastically gave their time, energy and insights to this initiative. we hope that they all benefitted from and enjoyed the experience as much as we did. references bernard, h.r. (2006) research methods in anthropology: qualitative and quantitative approaches. lanham: alta mira press. tunåker et al. the social hubs project: exploratory real-world research journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 10 bride, i., naylor, l. and tunåker, c. (2013) ‘the creative campus: empowering the university community to change spaces’, in dunne, e. (ed.) the student engagement handbook: practice in higher education. bingley: emerald group publishing ltd, pp. 255-269. cohen, l., manion, l. and morrison, k. (2011) research methods in education. london: routledge. cousin, g. (2009) researching learning in higher education: an introduction to contemporary methods and approaches. london: routledge. cousin, g. (2010) ‘neither teacher-centred nor student-centred: threshold concepts and research’, journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2, february, pp. 1-9. derounian, j. (2011) ‘fanning the flames of non-conformity’, journal of learning and development in higher education, issue 3, pp. 1-6. elliot, j. (1991) action research for educational change. buckingham: open university press. freire, p. (1997) pedagogy of the oppressed. london: continuum international publishing group ltd. he academy (2013) students as partners work webpage. available at: http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/students-as-partners-work (accessed: 22 november 2013). healey, m. (2005) ‘linking research and teaching: exploring disciplinary spaces and the role of inquiry-based learning’, in barnett, r. (ed.) reshaping the university: new relationships between research, scholarship and teaching. mcgraw hill /open university press, pp. 67-78. http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/students-as-partners-work tunåker et al. the social hubs project: exploratory real-world research journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 11 healey, m. and jenkins, a. (2000) ‘learning cycles and learning styles: the application of kolb’s experiential learning model in higher education’, journal of geography, 99(5), pp. 185-95. kay, j., dunne, e. and hutchinson, j. (2010) rethinking the values of higher education – students as change agents? gloucester: qaa. available at: http://www.qaa.ac.uk/en/publications/documents/rethinking-the-values-of-highereducation---students-as-change-agents.pdf (accessed: 1 march 2015). kemmis, s. and mctaggart, r. (2000) ‘participatory action research’, in denzin, n.k. and lincoln, y.s. (eds.) handbook of qualitative research. 2nd edn. thousand oaks ca: sage, pp. 567-605. kolb, d. (1984) experiential learning: experience as the source of learning and development. new jersey: prentice hall. neary, m. and winn, j. (2009) ‘the student as producer: reinventing the student experience in higher education’, in bell, l., stevenson, h. and neary, m. (eds.) the future of higher education: policy, pedagogy and the student experience. london: continuum, pp. 192-210. okely, j. (2012) anthropological practice: fieldwork and the ehnographic method. london/new york: berghahn books. trowler, v. and trowler, p. (2010) framework for action: enhancing student engagement at the institutional level. available at: https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/sites/default/files/resources/frameworkforaction_insti tutional.pdf (accessed: 1 march 2015). wadsworth, y. (1998) ‘what is participatory action research?’, action research international, paper 2 [online]. available at: http://www.aral.com.au/ari/pywadsworth98.html (accessed: 6 june 2014). watson, b. (1999) being there: fieldwork in anthropology. london: pluto press. http://www.qaa.ac.uk/en/publications/documents/rethinking-the-values-of-higher-education---students-as-change-agents.pdf http://www.qaa.ac.uk/en/publications/documents/rethinking-the-values-of-higher-education---students-as-change-agents.pdf https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/sites/default/files/resources/frameworkforaction_institutional.pdf https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/sites/default/files/resources/frameworkforaction_institutional.pdf http://www.aral.com.au/ari/p-ywadsworth98.html http://www.aral.com.au/ari/p-ywadsworth98.html tunåker et al. the social hubs project: exploratory real-world research journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 12 wood. j. p., little, s., goldring, l. and jenkins, l. (2011) ‘the confidence to do things that i know nothing about’ – skills development through extra-curricular inquiry activity. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3, pp. 2-21. author details carin tunåker is currently progressing her doctoral research in social anthropology at the university of kent, where she aims to investigate the conditions and circumstances that contribute toward lgbt youth homelessness in kent through the use of in-depth ethnography. other research interests include gender, sexuality and home in different localities, with published work on cuba. she is also the co-founder and director of the home and sexuality research network. dr ian bride (corresponding author) is a senior lecturer in bodiversity management in the school of anthropology and conservation, university of kent, where he teaches undergraduate modules: guiding and interpretation; and creative conservation. he has been involved with the creative projects on the university campus for many years, collaborating closely with the unit for the enhancement of learning and teaching, and acted as project manager on the social hubs project. dr. daniela peluso is a sociocultural anthropologist whose research interests range from amazonian to corporate environments. her teaching brings together divergent and similar aspects of the 'exotic' and ordinary, global and local for a contemporary understanding of and approach toward social anthropology. she is a senior lecturer in social anthropology at the university of kent. the social hubs project: exploratory real-world research – students as researchers and experiential learning abstract introduction methodology findings and impact: influencing changes to people and places students as researchers conclusion acknowledgements references author details journal of learning development in higher education journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 1: february 2009 developing learning together learning development networks and learnhigher christine keenan bournemouth university, uk this article reflects on the potential of communities and networks, and on the relationship between the learning development in higher education network (ldhen), the association for learning development in higher education (aldinhe) and the learnhigher cetl. the ldhen email discussion group was first set up by john hilsdon in 2002. the following year, he and sandra sinfield established it as a jiscmail list which brought together people from higher education institutions across the uk who shared an interest in student learning (hilsdon, 2004). the development of the ldhen community provided a place for participants to engage in joint activities and discussions, help each other, and share information – a real ‘community of practice’ (wenger, 1998). the first ldhen symposium was held at london metropolitan university in 2003. the title of the conference "learning development what might it be?" provided plenty of food for thought. it also set off discussion and debate about the nature of learning development. there was another very happy outcome of the first symposium. bill miller, (then of liverpool university), came along with jill armstrong, (then of liverpool hope university and the ltsn generic centre, forerunner to the hea). they were concerned that there seemed to be a great number of practitioners often working on their own, developing ideas and resources to benefit their own students learning. they suggested setting up a "one stop swap shop" for the exchange of resources and shared practice. a number of people at the symposium agreed with this idea, and joined forces to find a way to bring the idea to reality. this new partnership of individuals from within the ldhen network, representing sixteen institutions, began exploring ideas for a collaborative venture to facilitate the keenan case study: developing learning together learning development networks sharing of learning materials and exchange of ideas. finding external funding was crucial to getting the idea off the ground. a great opportunity presented itself in 2004 with the announcement by the higher education funding council for england of the setting up of centres for excellence in teaching and learning. the funding available was significant and the proposed five year time scale offered an opportunity for the partnership to set about writing a bid which took the idea of a swap shop of learning resources and added the dimensions of peer-review, evaluation and underpinning research. a strength of the bid submitted to hefce was that it developed from an existing network of people within the uk learning development community. responsibility for writing and proof-reading the four sections of the phase one bid was shared between members of the group and the bid was submitted. a particular strength identified by the phase one reviewers was that the overall theme and development of learning resources would be underpinned by a research and evaluation base well-matched to the collaborative strengths of the partnership. reviewers recognised the considerable scope for further growth and impact and saw the potential for impact across the whole sector. importantly, the reviewers commented positively on the existing links with the growing national network of learning developers. in 2005 the learnhigher cetl was launched with liverpool hope as the lead institution. each of the 16 partners received an amount of capital money which has been spent on learning spaces in their institutions – examples of which are described on the website http://www.learnhigher.ac.uk under learnhigher spaces. annual recurrent funding allows each partner some flexibility in how their commitment to the development of learnhigher is managed, and provides for the development of resources in their learning area. a pot of money has also been made available to fund collaborative development projects which are also described in reports available from the website. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 1: february 2009 2 http://www.learnhigher.ac.uk/ keenan case study: developing learning together learning development networks learnhigher now offers a range of reviewed, excellent resources online to the learning development community and the sector as a whole. it is also working to raise the profile of learning development across the sector. learnhigher is developing practitioner-led inquiry into the key questions about how, when and why students use learning resources, and supports more specialised research, development and evaluation activities within the learning topic areas. meanwhile, the ldhen network has continued to grow and is one of the liveliest jiscmail discussion groups. with more than 360 subscribers currently and some 200 he institutions represented, the network continues to support a highly active community of practice for learning development. the strength of the community and the powerful support mechanisms that the list has provided since 2002 has enriched the practice and experience of many members who undoubtedly feel less as a result. in 2008 cash & hilsdon presented a paper to the srhe conference in liverpool, arguing that: “the network provides a medium through which the discourses and practices of ‘learning development’ (ld) are being described, argued, theorised and refined.” their findings were based on the content of 1527 e-mails under 565 subject headings posted on the ldhen list between january 2003 and december 2007. three overall themes were identified; mapping the staffing and provision of learning development in institutional contexts, debating issues related to ld principles and practice, and, sharing and commenting on resources related to teaching and student learning. the annual symposia also provide learning developers with the opportunity for scholarly reflection on learning development and practice and the new journal demonstrates growth, confidence and a legitimacy of our field of practice. the growing confidence of the community is ensuring that the role of learning developer has a higher profile within institutions and the community is increasingly influencing institutional policies. on this basis, at the 4th ldhen symposium in 2007, it was decided to establish the association for learning development in higher education. as stated on the association’s website, a key theme for members is “commitment to the development of student learning and the provision of opportunities for students to develop their skills for study and their awareness of journal of learning development in higher education, issue 1: february 2009 3 keenan case study: developing learning together learning development networks academic practices” (aldinhe, 2007). in an article announcing the launch in the times higher education supplement, it was proposed that a key aim would be to “ ... contribute to a renewal of interest in promoting learning at university in its contemporary, democratic contexts, and to aspirations for increasingly accessible higher education” (hilsdon 2007). membership of aldinhe offers the opportunity to strengthen our voice and contribute to the development of policies promoting learning development, and cpd opportunities for staff. learnhigher is now in the penultimate year of funding and thoughts are turning to continuation once the funding ceases. a working party drawn from the learnhigher and aldinhe steering groups has been tasked with looking into the feasibility of continuing the work of the cetl under the auspices of the association. proposals to achieve this will be presented to the membership of aldinhe at the next agm in april 2009. the idea that the uniquely collaborative concept of learnhigher should continue is, of course, appealing to those of us who have already been involved in it. furthermore, to re-launch learnhigher in future as part of the association, and to offer the possibility that new partnerships can develop within it, would be especially welcome. the continuing discussions supported by the ldhen network; the scholarly contributions developed through our symposia – and now here, via the journal of learning development in higher education combined with the resource development activities of learnhigher; all these related initiatives represent the flowering of a community who just want to continue developing and learning together. references cash, c. and hilsdon, j. (2008) buried treasures in a virtual community chest. paper presented to the srhe conference, liverpool 2008. online http://www.srhe.ac.uk/conference2008/papers/0292-john-hilsdon_carolinecash.doc journal of learning development in higher education, issue 1: february 2009 4 https://taw.bournemouth.ac.uk/owa/redir.aspx?c=87f172a8bc5b44529d6ee6ff6b637908&url=http%3a%2f%2fwww.srhe.ac.uk%2fconference2008%2fpapers%2f0292-john-hilsdon_caroline-cash.doc https://taw.bournemouth.ac.uk/owa/redir.aspx?c=87f172a8bc5b44529d6ee6ff6b637908&url=http%3a%2f%2fwww.srhe.ac.uk%2fconference2008%2fpapers%2f0292-john-hilsdon_caroline-cash.doc keenan case study: developing learning together learning development networks hilsdon, j. (2004) learning development in higher education network: an emerging community of practice? educational developments 5.3, birmingham: seda. hilsdon, j. (2007) a learning renaissance? times higher education supplement, 6th july 2007 wenger, e. (1998) communities of practice: learning, meaning, and identity. cambridge: cambridge university press. christine keenan is a learning and teaching fellow at bournemouth university journal of learning development in higher education, issue 1: february 2009 5 developing learning together learning development networks and learnhigher references literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special edition: academic peer learning, part two, april 2016 communities of practice for international students: an exploration of the role of peer assisted study sessions in supporting transition and learning in higher education lucy chilvers university of brighton, uk abstract there is growing interest in understanding how international students can best be enabled to adjust to, participate in and learn within higher education (he). this paper explores literature and examines findings from exploratory interviews in a uk institution in order to investigate the contribution the peer assisted study sessions (pass) scheme makes to this process. interviews with international students were analysed using lave and wenger’s (1991) social-learning model, communities of practice (cop), for exploring the role of pass in supporting international students’ transition and learning in he. using themes of community, practice and participation, findings illuminated the role of pass in providing international students with an intermediary cop, providing transition support into the cop on their course and university life. pass facilitated their social integration with students of other nationalities, developing relationships with peers and pass leaders, contributing to an increased sense of belonging to a community. through the mutual engagement of attendees and leaders, students developed shared language, values and practices relating to their discipline and studying in uk he. established pass leaders shared first year experiences with ‘newcomer’ international students, supporting their transition into uk he culture and enabling their legitimate peripheral participation to develop further. participation in pass fostered students’ engagement with learning activities and independent study habits. limitations to the study and suggestions for further research are discussed. keywords: communities of practice; international students; peer assisted learning; learning communities; participation; adjustment; transition. chilvers communities of practice for international students journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 2 introduction in the context of the growing internationalisation of higher education (he) (devita and case, 2003), research evidences a variety of challenges and potential barriers to international students’ transition into, and participation in, he abroad (krause, 2005). these can include homesickness, culture shock, loneliness and difficulties learning in english as a second language (esl) (jones and fleischer, 2012a; caruana and spurling, 2007; burns, 1991). these difficulties highlight the need for increased support for internationals, particularly in their first year (anderson et al., 2009; forland, 2006). this need for support is a common trend across uk heis (yorke and longden, 2008) and is reflected in the retention data for the host institution of this research (jones and fleischer, 2012b). between 2006/7 and 2010/11, international students’ non-continuation rates increased each year at a faster rate compared to home students. there has been a steady improvement in international student retention since then, although it is still above the uk national benchmark. the social learning concept communities of practice (cop) (lave and wenger, 1991) describes a community of people, joined together by shared interests and a mutual participation in a particular practice. research evidences the cultivating of student learning communities as an effective approach for supporting students in their academic, social and emotional adjustment to he (zhao and kuh, 2004; lenning and ebbers, 1999). this positively impacts students’ engagement, retention and overall satisfaction with their student experience (zhao and kuh, 2004; tinto et al., 1994). learning communities comprise of students who have regular contact with one another for the purpose of active, collaborative learning and socialising (zhao and kuh, 2004). peer assisted study sessions (pass) is a peer learning scheme aimed at fostering a course-based learning community, evidenced in helping students to develop confidence, friendships, study skills and their understanding of course material (fostier and carey, 2007; coe et al., 1999; arendale, 1994). student pass leaders from 2nd and 3rd year are trained and supervised to plan and facilitate regular, timetabled, small-group study sessions for 1st year students. pass is typically coordinated by centrally-based academic developers and school-based supervisors. this study aims to explore the role of pass as a cop in supporting international students in their transition and learning in uk he. chilvers communities of practice for international students journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 3 themes from both literature and cop concept will be used to explore international students’ experiences through some initial interviews at one uk he institution (hei). similarities and gaps identified between literature and student interviews will inform future research. for the purpose of this study international students are defined as any student who has moved to a different country to study (biggs, 2003). however, it is acknowledged that the term international student represents a diverse, heterogeneous student population, so whilst this study represents individual students, it addresses common issues faced by a variety of international students evidenced in literature. literature review communities of practice cop originated from lave and wenger’s (1991) situated learning theory, positing that learning is a social process occurring within a specific context. vygotsky’s (1978) zone of proximal development also heavily informed cop, highlighting the significant role of apprenticeship-type relationships between newcomers and more knowledgeable existing members who teach them a variety of values and practices (lave and wenger, 1991). this enables newcomers to develop from legitimate peripheral participation, to fuller participation and belonging to the community (wenger, 1998). wenger (1998, p.5) argues that learning as social participation consists of four aspects which are ‘deeply interconnected and mutually defining’, including practice; meaning; community and identity. to address the research question and explore themes considered by the author most relevant to international students’ experiences of pass, in-depth focus shall be restricted to themes of community, practice and participation. whilst these terms’ meanings within cop concept are complex, for the purpose of clarification they shall be defined. ‘community’ refers to a special type of community whereby ‘practice is the source of coherence’ (wenger, 1998, p.72). ‘practice’ is people’s mutual engagement in a joint enterprise consisting of shared repertoires (wenger, 1998). finally, ‘participation’ is defined as ‘a process of taking part and also… the relations with others that reflect this process’ (wenger, 1998, p.53). cop concept has been used for exploring a number of dimensions of he including adult education (merriam and caffarella, 1999); students’ transition into he (tobell and o’donnell, 2005); students’ shifting identity formation in he (o’donnell and tobell, 2007); chilvers communities of practice for international students journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 4 and pass as a cop (couchman, 2008). cop concept can be useful for informing educational practitioners’ understanding of the benefits of peer learning, thus enhancing the quality of learning and teaching. it is argued that cop are not cohesive homogenous units, but rather fluid and heterogeneous (handley et al., 2006; wenger, 1998). literature identifies a number of cop that international students could join on arrival at university, such as their course (o’donnell and tobell, 2007), wider subject discipline (parker, 2002), friendship groups with co-nationals (montgomery and mcdowell, 2009), pass (couchman, 2008) and interest groups (wenger, 1998). building on couchman’s (2008) findings likening pass to a cop, this research explores the role of pass in supporting international students in belonging to a pass cop, whilst also adjusting to additional cop intrinsically linked to pass on their course, discipline, and student life (figure 1). figure 1. multiple interconnecting cop for international students in this research. supporting international students’ transition and learning students’ varying levels of skills and preparedness from their educational backgrounds creates a need for support in developing uk he practices (haggis, 2006), which can be particularly challenging for international students (sovic, 2008; caruana and spurling, 2007).on arrival at university, international students have to adjust to ‘multiple cultural frameworks: the host nation culture, the multicultural student cohort, the institutional culture of university and the disciplinary culture’ (schmidt and miller, 2009, p.13).this process is described by lave and wenger (1991, p.95) as ‘both absorbing and being absorbed in – the culture of practice’. some students experience ‘learning shock’ (gu, 2005; krause, 2005) due to the host countries’ different pedagogic methods, resulting in chilvers communities of practice for international students journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 5 confusion and frustration (gu, 2005), negatively affecting students’ learning (forland, 2006) and sense of belonging to a community (lave and wenger, 1991). developing stable relationships with course peers can positively impact students’ social integration and belonging to their course community, consequently impacting retention (thomas, 2012). however, for some international students studying, and speaking esl, in front of peers can cause stress and anxiety, hindering social integration (kingston and forland, 2004; burns, 1991). for other international students their preference for friendships with co-nationals for receiving comfort and support prevents them integrating with native students, hindering them improving their english, making cultural adaptations (maundeni, 2001), and reducing the diversity of home students’ learning experiences (devita, 2002).this highlights the potential benefits of pass facilitating social integration. in light of these challenges, it is important to remember that international students may have previously been very successful members of a cop in their previous educational institution, so experiencing these potential barriers can be a relatively new experience. pass offers students an opportunity to join and belong to a cop on their course, involving the mutual engagement of attendees and leaders in a breadth of study practices. these practices range from collaborative and problem-based learning; reviewing course material; practicing study techniques, such as planning essays; and the social and universityspecific aspects of student life, such as using the library or living in student accommodation (couchman, 2008). the supportive pass environment facilitates students in practising shared languages, including a learning language regarding the practising of uk he academic skills, the subject-specific discourse, and specifically for international students, the added complexity of learning in esl, as summarised in figure 2. figure 2. multiple intersecting cop within pass. chilvers communities of practice for international students journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 6 pass leaders play a significant role in facilitating these pass cop using empathy, collaborative techniques, and an inclusive approach (list and miller, 2013; couchman, 2008). whilst pass leaders are more experienced members of the course’s cop, they are not ‘experts’ of their discipline. however, they do have an expertise of being a student on their course and studying at their university at a specific time – an expertise their lecturers do not have. pass leaders are encouraged to support students by sharing their experiences of their course, university life and overcoming challenges (couchman, 2008). whilst there is much research into international students’ learning (burns, 1991; caruana and spurling, 2007) and transition experiences (anderson et al., 2009; sovic, 2008), there appears to be little literature covering international students’ participation in pass. schmidt and miller (2009) investigated the impact pass had on the transitions of international masters students from asian backgrounds studying at an australian university. students reported improved english language skills, developing friendships and receiving support in their adjustment to the australian and university culture. zaccagnini and verenikina (2013) explored international students’ perceptions of pass, finding positive experiences of all surveyed. students valued opportunities for interacting and asking questions in small groups with native students and pass leaders. these studies suggest schemes dedicated to supporting students’ development in a learning-community context, such as pass, can help integrate international students into their course community. this research sought to contribute to this gap in literature by exploring international students’ experiences of pass as a cop in greater depth. chilvers communities of practice for international students journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 7 research methods methodology this research is informed by a social constructivist paradigm (guba and lincoln, 1994) in which knowledge is co-constructed through interaction between the active researcher and participant, and the researcher’s interpretations of these interactions (creswell, 2009). an interpretivist epistemological stance guided the study since the subjective lived experiences of individual students were being explored, and the researcher held an active role in shaping the data generation and analysis (mason, 2002). themes from cop provided a conceptual lens to guide the data analysis. interviews a small-scale qualitative approach was taken using semi-structured 45-minute interviews, exploring participants’ individual perceptions and experiences (ashley, 2012; mason, 2002). in 2013-14 a random sample of six interview participants (table 1) were recruited by e-mail and lecture announcements from second year international students in two departments with pass. this small sample was intentional as this study aimed to explore themes from literature through exploratory interviews, and identify areas for more in-depth further research. the interviews were designed in consideration of cultural differences in communication and language barriers (bera, 2011; kvale and brinkman, 2009; holstein and gubrium, 2003). levels of directness in conversation, modes of questioning and eye contact can all vary between cultures (holstein and gubrium, 2003). the furniture layout in the interview room intentionally avoided direct body language and eye contact, which can be perceived as uncomfortable and disrespectful (holstein and gubrium, 2003). the potential cultural differences were considered throughout the interviews, however, as all participants had previously spent time in uk institutions, there did not appear to be any major issues. at the start of the interviews, potential language barriers were addressed by inviting participants to draw a mind-map of their pass experience in their first language, aiming to trigger their memories, and some participants made reference to these (wheeldon and faubert, 2009). chilvers communities of practice for international students journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 8 table 1. participants’ backgrounds. participant country of origin esl? time in uk before university? course pass attendance? p1 portugal yes holidays and studying english accountancy and finance (af) most sessions p2 germany yes holidays af first few, stopped going, joined another group, attended last few p3 china yes studying english af most p4 india yes 1 year prior to university, studying english pharmaceutical and chemical sciences all p5 south africa no – first. school education in english none applied psychology and criminology all p6 nigeria yes none pharmacy most; changed group in semester 2 analysis the following research question informed the analysis: ‘drawing from cop concept, how do exploring themes of community, practice and participation enable a greater understanding of the role of pass in supporting international students’ transition and chilvers communities of practice for international students journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 9 learning in he?’. transcripts were thematically analysed using cop concept themes of community, practice and participation; key quotes interpreted as representative of emerging findings were selected for discussion. ethics ethical considerations were particularly important due to the implications of my dual role as an academic and an insider researcher at the host institution. it was considered that participants might have felt concerned about the potential disclosure of their responses to the pass supervisor, who was one of their course tutors and also my colleague. in accordance with the british educational research association (2011) and the host institution’s guidance, the confidentiality and anonymity of student participants’ identities and responses was guaranteed as much as possible, although limitations were made clear. a detailed information and consent form was developed to ensure participants understood the research process and reasons for it, how the data would be used, and their right to withdraw. further explanation was provided during recruitment and at the start of the interviews (bera, 2011). findings overall, findings suggest pass provides international students with an intermediary cop, supporting their transition and boundary crossing from their previous educational cop into the cop on their course, discipline and university student life. pass facilitates their social integration into their course community, from peripheral to fuller participation as they acquire and build confidence in the cultural and academic practices. findings shall be explained using the themes of community, practice and participation. 1. community the first theme of ‘community’ refers to people interacting and building relationships around specific shared activities and helping one another, thus creating a special type of community whereby ‘practice is the source of coherence’ (wenger, 1998, p.72). the following further themes arose relating to community: chilvers communities of practice for international students journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 10 peer relationships in support of wenger’s (1998) focus on interpersonal relationships being at the heart of cop, participants described pass facilitating relationships with course peers: my pass group was nice because we could all talk… it was really easy way to meet lots of people… everyone feels safe to contribute so you kind of get to know people quicker than just sitting next to a random person in a lecture. (p4) another participant observed how the formalities of the classroom can prevent students developing relationships: normally in lessons you wouldn’t really talk to people that much because you’re sitting there and the teacher doesn’t really like you talking to your neighbours all the time. (p3) pass provided additional chances to socialise and nurture a greater sense of belonging to their course community. learning from pass leaders supporting zaccagnini and verenikina’s (2013) findings that the relationships between leaders and attendees is pivotal to building the pass cop, participants valued their relationships with their leaders: it was mostly the idea of learning from your seniors, the ones who have already done first year… i liked the idea of learning from someone from their experience… [they] motivated me, they did well in exams, they worked hard, they got their placement. it gave me direction. (p4) transition into community reinforcing schmidt and miller’s (2009) research evidencing pass supporting postgraduate international students’ transition and learning, participants described how pass leaders shared their experience and advice, supporting their adjustment to life in the uk and university: chilvers communities of practice for international students journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 11 i think for an international student you feel misplaced, like you’ve been dropped in… no real close relationship with anyone here, like floating. pass made uni seem a bit more like home, you could attach yourself better, making the identity as a student. (p5) social integration participants’ experiences agreed with literature that pass facilitated their social integration (zaccagnini and verenikina, 2013; schmidt and miller, 2009). p1 and p4 observed how pass helped international students to overcome the temptation to avoid socially integrating with students of other nationalities: usually international students love to stick together… it's actually quite hard to get to know people or find new friends…pass helped you get along well with people that you don’t know, working in groups or a team. (p1) you go there [pass] and you feel better and part of something else like a community… it made me gain confidence and socialise with different people. (p4) p4 and p6 identified easier communication as their reason for being closer to other international students and co-nationals; for p6 pass was the only time she socialised with home students: they [other internationals] are in my situation so they understand me better than the national students. (p4) the students i know from my home country are those i really know, the other students are just people in my class… pass was the only time we would do anything more. (p6) however, p5 had a proactive attitude towards integrating with home students: i wanted to submerge myself in english culture and experience it. i wouldn’t push anyone away if they were international… but i was really into making a group of english friends. (p5) chilvers communities of practice for international students journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 12 2. practice the second theme of ‘practice’ refers to peoples’ mutual engagement as practitioners in a joint enterprise consisting of shared repertoires and resources which are developed over time (wenger, 1998). these themes emerged relating to practice: shared language participants referred to the variety of languages practiced in pass, including a learning language regarding uk he academic skills, subject-specific language, and the english language. participants referred to their peers translating complex terminology and concepts using student-friendly language, enabling shared understanding: someone might put a complicated concept very basically that you might not have considered… leaders would simplify it. (p5) your teacher has got this level… you be scared to talk to them, but if you talk to the same age then you have common language. (p2) p5 explained how her interdisciplinary pass group enriched her understanding of her discipline beyond her course: i noticed that their [joint-honours students] contributions… they would share a theory they had been given… we have this whole sense of interdisciplinary collaboration which i think is really good. (p5) whilst studying in esl can be challenging for some students (burns, 1991; kingston and forland, 2004), four participants had completed an english language qualification in the uk before university and felt relatively confident. although participants did acknowledge the benefit of practicing esl at pass: in pass i didn’t really speak to many at first… now i talk to everyone and never really stick to one person. you talk to people and that’s how you improve your language, listening and speaking skills… you can practice your english for free. (p4) however, some participants described language barriers within pass: chilvers communities of practice for international students journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 13 language is very difficult for us… sometimes they were talking about something i didn’t quite understand… if the leader doesn’t try talking to international students they will just stay there not talking. (p2) the reason why i didn’t speak in the beginning… is because people don’t understand me and then i have to repeat myself over and over. (p6) shared study practice participants described the value of revisiting course material, preparing for assignments and revising for exams in pass: we recapped on what we’ve been doing for each module… before the exams we were given practical help… with previous exam questions. (p1) if we had set reading and then we could all discuss the reading and just someone else saying their interpretation of it would give you confidence that i did understand. (p5) cultural practice regarding the adjustments to multiple new cultural frameworks for some international students (schmidt and miller, 2009, p.13), participants described the culture shock on arrival at university: students come here and probably they didn’t live here before so they feel strange, everything is strange here, everything is new. (p2) others described how pass helped adjust to student life and uk he: being new and international i felt that i could ask some questions. small things like how could you find a job? can you recommend how i use the library… if you hear it from… students in the pass group that is much better for international to adjust in a new community. (p4) chilvers communities of practice for international students journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 14 it had big effect on me when we started lectures because most times i’m thinking this is quite different… we spend up to seven hours of lectures a day in nigeria. here we just have ten hours of lecture per week and then you do the rest yourself… afterwards we [pass group] would meet at the library and talk about what we had done. (p6) 3. participation the theme ‘participation’ is defined as ‘a process of taking part and also…the relations with others that reflect this process’ (wenger, 1998, p.53), focusing less on individual acquisition of knowledge and more on social participation for learning. the following further themes emerged: motivating participation participants described attending pass motivating their independent study habits, and encouraging some to continue meeting with course peers to do pass-like studying in their second year: friends i made in pass helped me a lot because i’m just an average student… they work hard and knowing them motivates me to do something because i know they are out there at home doing something, and then maybe tomorrow we will discuss what we’ve done. (p6) in my second year we have lots of mini pass sessions in the library between lectures where we all discuss, so i think i subconsciously carried on doing it… it gave you the confidence to sit and ask. (p5) barriers to participation p3 stopped participating in pass after a couple of sessions due to awkward social dynamics and her misunderstanding of the role of leaders – expecting them to teach, she perceived the leaders to be unhelpful. however, after joining another group, realised she had missed out and became a pass leader: chilvers communities of practice for international students journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 15 she invited me to another group… i went to sessions and they were really good… i realised that i missed something that could have been good… it wasn’t like you walk in, get your class and walk out, because i felt like that was what ours was like, and i thought i don’t really need an extra lecture. (p3) other participants referred to barriers to their participation and suggested improvements: i didn’t really speak to many at first… in the beginning when we had to do ice breakers to get to know each other, that was a bit hard… i had to remember all their names… i couldn’t pronounce them right. (p4) for international students i think pass is very leader dependent, my leaders were a bit disorganised… they would just rock up and say ‘what do you want to do’ without a backup plan… as an international student especially if english wasn’t your first language you want a structure to follow… to feel a bit more secure. (p5) discussion the overarching findings and arising questions emerging for each theme shall be discussed. community handley et al.’s (2006) problematisation of wenger’s (1998) notion of community is reinforced by this research: the pass cop is not a homogenous group, but rather heterogeneous, with blurred, intersecting boundaries. pass provides international students with a cop, facilitating peer relationships on their course and across year groups. pass supports students’ transition from their previous educational institution cop, to joining the cop on their course, discipline and university. the intersecting nature of the multiple cop international students join on arrival at university raises questions about the differences between pass and course cop. the most distinguishing dimension seems to be the lack of the lecturer or discipline expert in pass. the disadvantage of this is that pass risks being unable to capture a full picture of the discipline, and the role of pass leaders could be misunderstood to be inadequate, cost-free teaching. the advantage of the lecturer’s absence is that pass leaders can share their expertise and experience of chilvers communities of practice for international students journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 16 student life and their degree at their institution. it also highlights the value of involving experienced students in providing new-student course inductions, which international students can particularly benefit from in their adjustments. practice pass supports international students in practicing a range of languages relating to studying in uk he, including esl, a shared language of learning in uk he, and the language of the discipline. pass provides opportunities for international students to better understand course material, make sense of cultural norms, and have an open space for dialogue with peers to practice their discourse (bohm, 1996). this study highlights the importance of educational practitioners, including pass leaders, taking an inclusive approach in the classroom, ensuring international students fully understand the reasons for pedagogical practices used in uk he and the expectations upon them (couchman, 2008). a significant feature of learning in uk he is students’ involvement in the generation of new knowledge, which is prompted through an enquiry-based curriculum (healey, 2005; brew, 2003). a critique of cop concept is that it focuses on how members acquire existing knowledge within a community, but doesn’t address the question of how new knowledge is generated (edwards, 2005). this questions whether students in pass are learning existing, or creating new, knowledge. amongst pass leaders and participants there will be varying levels of understanding and knowledge. through collaboration, students can gain clarification, consequently learning knowledge that is new to them, but which already exists amongst some members of the pass cop and more widely in the discipline/course cop. therefore pass seems to serve as an intermediary cop, supporting international students in understanding existing knowledge of their course, and transitioning into fuller participation in their course cop, where opportunities for generating new knowledge are facilitated through the curriculum. participation this research challenges lave and wenger’s (1991) assumptions that legitimate peripheral participation is a positive experience enabling learners to adopt the culture of practice. similar to o’donnell and tobbell’s (2007) observations about the challenges for mature students’ transition into he, for some international students their legitimate chilvers communities of practice for international students journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 17 peripheral participation is not necessarily a positive construction, but one of confinement, stress and isolation due to the challenges experienced (sovic, 2008; burns, 1991). this reinforces the benefit of pass providing an inclusive and supportive environment, and the importance for pass leaders to be equipped with cultural awareness, an understanding of the challenges experienced by international students, and facilitation techniques to address language barriers and social integration (chilvers, 2013). in light of the common problem of low participation in taught classes across he (moore et al., 2008; massingham and herrington, 2006), for students in this study pass was beneficial in motivating their participation in peer learning and independent study. cop concept identifies motivation as a by-product of participation in a cop (lave and wenger, 1991), suggesting the potential for pass to motivate, not just the motivated students (mcgee, 2005), but also the less enthused and engaged students, particularly internationals who might be unfamiliar with peer learning or group work. edwards (2005) argues that defining ‘participation’ is a weakness of cop concept as it only focuses on the social and collective dimensions of learning by participation, disregarding the cognitive and individual dimensions. this implies limitations to the use of the cop concept in this research, suggesting other conceptual frameworks could illuminate other dimensions to the learning and transition experiences of international students in pass. additionally, whilst cop identifies a number of different learning trajectories that a person can take in their participatory learning, it neglects to define the notion of ‘full participation’. however, this research illuminates the difficulty of defining ‘full participation’ in the context of studying in he, where participation might look differently for individual students depending on their circumstances or aspirations (handley et al., 2006), and particularly for international students due to the challenges that often restrict their participation. despite these limitations to cop concept, its explanatory power for understanding interrelationships for learning, and the interconnected, multidimensional aspects of learning, has been very useful for this research. conclusions using cop concept has been useful for building upon literature and further illuminating the role of pass in supporting international students’ transition and learning in he. findings chilvers communities of practice for international students journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 18 highlight pass providing international students with an intermediary cop, supporting their boundary crossing and transition experiences for joining, and more fully participating in, a uk university. pass can facilitate international students in adjusting to cultural norms and expectations; learning english, academic-specific, and discipline-specific languages and practices; encouraging social integration, and motivating participation; and independent study. international students receive a student-specialised induction to their course, student life and uk he academic skills, stretching beyond induction week, throughout the potentially vulnerable first year. limitations to cop concept have prompted questions about international students’ experiences on the periphery of university learning communities, highlighting the importance of inclusive practice and support for international students. questions remain concerning the investigation of international students’ cognitive and individual participation for learning in uk he. this exploratory research should now be developed, with larger scale investigations to elicit richer data. limitations to cop identified in this study could be explored, as could other dimensions to cop concept such as identity. for example, how does engaging in pass as a cop impact students’, and specifically international students’, constructions of their discipline identity? this could be helpful for informing the ongoing internationalisation of course curricula and development of learning support for international students. references anderson, g., carmichael, k.y., harper, t.j. and huang, t. (2009) ‘international students at four-year institutions: developmental needs, issues and strategies’, in harper, s.r. and quaye, s.j. (eds.) student engagement in higher education: theoretical perspectives and practical approaches for diverse populations. london, united kingdom: routledge, pp. 17-27. arendale, d. (1994) ‘understanding the supplemental instruction (si) model’, new directions for teaching and learning, 60(4), pp. 11-22. chilvers communities of practice for international students journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 19 ashley, l.d. (2012) ‘case study research’, in arthur, j., waring, m., coe, r. and hedges, l. (eds.) research methods & methodologies in education. london, united kingdom: sage, pp. 102-106. biggs, j. (2003) ‘teaching international students’, in biggs, j. (ed.) teaching for quality learning at university. 2nd edn. maidenhead, united kingdom: open university press, pp. 120-139. bohm, d. (1996) on dialogue. new york, ny: routledge. brew, a. (2003) ‘teaching and research: new relationships and their implications for inquiry-based teaching and learning in higher education’, higher education research and development, 22(1), pp. 3-18. british educational research association (bera) (2011) ethical guidelines for educational research. available at: http://www.bera.ac.uk/publications/ethical-guidelines (accessed: 6 may 2014). burns, r. (1991) ‘study and stress among first year overseas students in an australian university’, higher education research and development, 10(1), pp. 61-77. caruana, v. and spurling, n. (2007) ‘the internationalisation of uk higher education: a review of selected material [online]’, london, united kingdom: higher education academy. available at: https://www.sussex.ac.uk/webteam/gateway/file.php?name=lit-reviewinternationalisation-of-uk-he-v2&site=44 (accessed 27 april 2016). chilvers, l. (2013) factors influencing international students’ participation in the peer assisted study sessions (pass) programme: a small-scale study drawing on the theory of planned behaviour. unpublished master’s thesis. university of brighton, united kingdom. coe, e., mcdougall, a. and mckeown, n. (1999) ‘is peer assisted learning of benefit to undergraduate chemists?’, university chemistry education, 3(2), pp. 72-75. http://www.bera.ac.uk/publications/ethical-guidelines https://www.sussex.ac.uk/webteam/gateway/file.php?name=lit-review-internationalisation-of-uk-he-v2&site=44 https://www.sussex.ac.uk/webteam/gateway/file.php?name=lit-review-internationalisation-of-uk-he-v2&site=44 chilvers communities of practice for international students journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 20 couchman, j. (2008) ‘who am i now? accommodating new higher education diversity in supplemental instruction’, journal of peer learning, 1(1), pp. 80‐89 [online]. available at: http://ro.uow.edu.au/ajpl/vol1/iss1/10 (accessed: 16 may 2015). creswell, j. (2009) research design: qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods approaches. 3rd edn. london, united kingdom: sage. de vita, g. (2002) ‘cultural equivalence in the assessment of home and international business management students: a uk exploratory study’, studies in higher education, 27(2), pp. 221-231. de vita, g. and case, p. (2003) ‘rethinking the internationalisation agenda in uk higher education’, journal of further and higher education, 27(4), pp. 383-398. edwards, a. (2005) ‘let’s get beyond community and practice: the many meanings of learning by participating’, the curriculum journal, 16(1), pp. 49-65. forland, h. (2006) ‘the international student learning experience: bridging the gap between rhetoric and reality’, going global 2: the uk’s international education conference. edinburgh, scotland 6-8 december. fostier, m. and carey, w. (2007) ‘exploration, experience and evaluation; peer assisted study scheme (pass): sharing the experience of the university of manchester: 480 1st year bioscience students’, science, learning and teaching conference. keele university, united kingdom 19-20 june. gu, q. (2005) ‘enjoying loneliness: understanding chinese learners’ voices’, humanising language teaching, 7(6) [online]. available at: http://www.hltmag.co.uk/nov05/index.htm (accessed: 11 august 2015). guba, e. and lincoln, y. (1994) ‘competing paradigms in qualitative research’, in denzin, n. and lincoln, y. (eds.) handbook of qualitative research, pp. 105-117. london, united kingdom: sage. haggis, t. (2006) ‘pedagogies for diversity: retaining critical challenge amidst fears of ‘dumbing down’, studies in higher education, 31(5), pp. 521-535. http://ro.uow.edu.au/ajpl/vol1/iss1/10 http://www.hltmag.co.uk/nov05/index.htm chilvers communities of practice for international students journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 21 handley, k., sturdy, a., fincham, r. and clark, t. (2006) ‘within and beyond communities of practice: making sense of learning through participation, identity and practice’, journal of management studies, 43(3), pp. 641-653. healey, m. (2005) ‘linking research and teaching to benefit student learning’, journal of geography in higher education, 29(2), pp. 183-201. holstein, j.a. and gubrium, j.f. (2003) inside interviewing: new lenses, new concerns. london, united kingdom: sage. jones, j. and fleischer, s. (2012a) ‘should i stay or should i go? factors affecting first year international students’ decisions to leave or continue with degrees’, proceedings of the annual learning and teaching conference post conference publication: transitions: quality, adaptability and sustainability in times of change. university of brighton, united kingdom 15 july 2011, pp. 31-41. jones, j. and fleischer, s. (2012b) ‘staying on course: factors affecting first year international students’ decisions to persist or withdraw from degrees in a post-1992 uk university’, practice and evidence of scholarship of teaching and learning in higher education, 7(1), pp. 21-46. kingston, e. and forland, f. (2004) ‘bridging the gap in expectations between international students and academic staff’, european conference on educational research post graduate and new researcher pre-conference. university of crete, crete 20-21 september. available at: http://www.leeds.ac.uk/educol/documents/00003751.htm (accessed: 17 june 2014). krause, k. (2005) ‘engaged, inert or otherwise occupied?: deconstructing the 21st century undergraduate student’, sharing scholarship in learning and teaching: engaging students. james cook university symposium. james cook university, australia 2122 september. available at: http://www.griffith.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0005/53465/engaged,inert2005.pdf (accessed: 17 june 2014). http://www.leeds.ac.uk/educol/documents/00003751.htm http://www.griffith.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0005/53465/engaged,inert2005.pdf chilvers communities of practice for international students journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 22 kvale, s. and brinkman, a. (2009) interviews: learning the craft of qualitative research interviewing. 2nd edn. london, united kingdom: sage. lave, j. and wenger, e. (1991) situated learning: legitimate peripheral participation. cambridge, united kingdom: cambridge university press. lenning, o., and ebbers, l. (1999). the powerful potential of learning communities: improving education for the future. ashe-eric higher education report, 26 (6), eric document reproduction service no. ed 428606. list, s. and miller, j. (2013) ‘students supporting students, using undergraduate communities of practice and peer assisted study sessions (pass)’, higher education research group adelaide (unpublished seminar abstract). university of adelaide, australia 5 september. available at: http://blogs.adelaide.edu.au/pedagogy/files/2013/09/sept5-seminar22.pdf (accessed: 13 may 2014). mason, j. (2002) qualitative researching. 2nd edn. london, united kingdom: sage. massingham, p. and herrington, t. (2006) ‘does attendance matter? an examination of student attitudes, participation, performance and attendance’, journal of university teaching and learning practice, 3(2), pp. 82-103 [online]. available at: http://ro.uow.edu.au/jutlp/vol3/iss2/3 (accessed: 1 december 2014). maundeni, t. (2001) ‘the role of social networks in the adjustment of african students to british society: students' perceptions’, race, ethnicity and education, 4(3), pp. 253276. mcgee, j. (2005) cognitive, demographic, and motivational factors as indicators of helpseeking in supplemental instruction. unpublished doctoral dissertation. texas a and m university, college station, tx. merriam, s.b. and caffarella, r.s. (1999) learning in adulthood: a comprehensive guide. 2nd edn. san francisco, ca: jossey-bass. http://blogs.adelaide.edu.au/pedagogy/files/2013/09/sept5-seminar22.pdf http://ro.uow.edu.au/jutlp/vol3/iss2/3 chilvers communities of practice for international students journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 23 montgomery, c. and mcdowell, l. (2009). social networks and the international student experience: a community of practice to support learning? journal of studies in international education, 13 (4), pp 455-466. moore, s., armstrong, c. and pearson, j. (2008) ‘lecture absenteeism among students in higher education: a valuable route to understanding student motivation’, journal of higher education policy and management, 30(1), pp.15-24. o’donnell, v.l. and tobell, j. (2007) ‘peripheral participation in a community of practice? the transition of adult students to higher education: legitimate peripheral participation in a community of practice?’, adult education quarterly, 57(4), pp. 312328. parker, j. (2002) ‘a new disciplinarity: communities of knowledge, learning and practice’, teaching in higher education, 7(4), pp. 373-386. schmidt, l. and miller, j. (2009) ‘peer assisted study sessions to facilitate transition for international students’, the international journal of diversity in organisations, communities & nations, 9(5), pp. 13-29. sovic, s. (2008) lost in transition? the international students’ experience project. centre for excellence in teaching and learning: creative learning in practice: project report. london, united kingdom: university of the arts london. available at: https://www.sussex.ac.uk/webteam/gateway/file.php?name=art-and-designinternational-students-experience-project&site=44 (accessed: 4 june 2014). thomas, l. (2012) building student engagement and belonging in higher education at a time of change: final report from the what works? student retention & success programme: research report. london: paul hamlyn foundation. available at: https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/sites/default/files/what_works_summary_report_1.pdf (accessed: 13 may 2014). tinto, v., russo, p. and kadel, s. (1994) ‘constructing educational communities: increasing retention in challenging circumstances’, community college journal, 64(4), pp. 26-29. https://www.sussex.ac.uk/webteam/gateway/file.php?name=art-and-design-international-students-experience-project&site=44 https://www.sussex.ac.uk/webteam/gateway/file.php?name=art-and-design-international-students-experience-project&site=44 https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/sites/default/files/what_works_summary_report_1.pdf chilvers communities of practice for international students journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 24 tobbell, j. and o'donnell, v. (2005) ‘theorising educational transitions: communities, practice and participation’, conference on sociocultural theory in educational research and practice. university of manchester, united kingdom 8-9 september [online]. available at: http://eprints.hud.ac.uk/7743/ (accessed: 6 june 2014). vygotsky, l.s. (1978) mind in society: the development of higher psychological processes. london, united kingdom: harvard university press. wenger, e. (1998) communities of practice: learning, meaning and identity. cambridge, united kingdom: cambridge university press. wheeldon, j. and faubert, j. (2009) ‘framing experience: concept maps, mind maps, and data collection in qualitative research’, international journal of qualitative methods, 8(3), pp. 1-16 [online]. available at: http://wiganojs.library.ualberta.ca/index.php/ijqm/article/view/1765/5591 (accessed: 6 october 2015). yorke, m. and longden, b. (2008) the first-year experience of higher education in the uk – final report. york, united kingdom: higher education academy. zaccagnini, m. and verenikina, i. (2013) ‘peer assisted study sessions for postgraduate international students in australia’, journal of peer learning, 6(1), pp. 86-102. available at: http://ro.uow.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1052&context=ajpl (accessed: 13 august 2015). zhao, c. and kuh, g.d. (2004) ‘adding value: learning communities and student engagement’, research in higher education, 45(2), pp. 115-138. author details lucy chilvers is a senior lecturer in learning development based in the centre for learning and teaching at the university of brighton. through her role she is interested in enhancing students’ transition, academic engagement, progression and personal and professional development throughout higher education. lucy coordinates and co-develops http://eprints.hud.ac.uk/7743/ http://eprints.hud.ac.uk/7743/ http://eprints.hud.ac.uk/7743/ http://wigan-ojs.library.ualberta.ca/index.php/ijqm/article/view/1765/5591 http://wigan-ojs.library.ualberta.ca/index.php/ijqm/article/view/1765/5591 http://ro.uow.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1052&context=ajpl chilvers communities of practice for international students journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 25 resources and initiatives, including the pass programme, that support students in their learning. she conducts research into aspects of these various initiatives, seeking to further develop practice and understanding of how best to support and engage students in their learning and development. she also works with academic staff through consultation and teaching to enhance their own pedagogic practices. communities of practice for international students: an exploration of the role of peer assisted study sessions in supporting transition and learning in higher education abstract introduction literature review communities of practice supporting international students’ transition and learning students’ varying levels of skills and preparedness from their educational backgrounds creates a need for support in developing uk he practices (haggis, 2006), which can be particularly challenging for international students (sovic, 2008; caruana and ... research methods methodology interviews the interviews were designed in consideration of cultural differences in communication and language barriers (bera, 2011; kvale and brinkman, 2009; holstein and gubrium, 2003). levels of directness in conversation, modes of questioning and eye contact... analysis ethics findings 1. community peer relationships learning from pass leaders transition into community social integration 2. practice the second theme of ‘practice’ refers to peoples’ mutual engagement as practitioners in a joint enterprise consisting of shared repertoires and resources which are developed over time (wenger, 1998). these themes emerged relating to practice: 3. participation discussion community practice conclusions references anderson, g., carmichael, k.y., harper, t.j. and huang, t. (2009) ‘international students at four-year institutions: developmental needs, issues and strategies’, in harper, s.r. and quaye, s.j. (eds.) student engagement in higher education: theoretica... arendale, d. (1994) ‘understanding the supplemental instruction (si) model’, new directions for teaching and learning, 60(4), pp. 11-22. ashley, l.d. (2012) ‘case study research’, in arthur, j., waring, m., coe, r. and hedges, l. (eds.) research methods & methodologies in education. london, united kingdom: sage, pp. 102-106. bohm, d. (1996) on dialogue. new york, ny: routledge. british educational research association (bera) (2011) ethical guidelines for educational research. available at: http://www.bera.ac.uk/publications/ethical-guidelines (accessed: 6 may 2014). burns, r. (1991) ‘study and stress among first year overseas students in an australian university’, higher education research and development, 10(1), pp. 61-77. caruana, v. and spurling, n. (2007) ‘the internationalisation of uk higher education: a review of selected material [online]’, london, united kingdom: higher education academy. available at: https://www.sussex.ac.uk/webteam/gateway/file.php?name=lit-r... chilvers, l. (2013) factors influencing international students’ participation in the peer assisted study sessions (pass) programme: a small-scale study drawing on the theory of planned behaviour. unpublished master’s thesis. university of brighton, un... coe, e., mcdougall, a. and mckeown, n. (1999) ‘is peer assisted learning of benefit to undergraduate chemists?’, university chemistry education, 3(2), pp. 72-75. couchman, j. (2008) ‘who am i now? accommodating new higher education diversity in supplemental instruction’, journal of peer learning, 1(1), pp. 80‐89 [online]. available at: http://ro.uow.edu.au/ajpl/vol1/iss1/10 (accessed: 16 may 2015). creswell, j. (2009) research design: qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods approaches. 3rd edn. london, united kingdom: sage. fostier, m. and carey, w. (2007) ‘exploration, experience and evaluation; peer assisted study scheme (pass): sharing the experience of the university of manchester: 480 1st year bioscience students’, science, learning and teaching conference. keele un... gu, q. (2005) ‘enjoying loneliness: understanding chinese learners’ voices’, humanising language teaching, 7(6) [online]. available at: http://www.hltmag.co.uk/nov05/index.htm (accessed: 11 august 2015). guba, e. and lincoln, y. (1994) ‘competing paradigms in qualitative research’, in denzin, n. and lincoln, y. (eds.) handbook of qualitative research, pp. 105-117. london, united kingdom: sage. haggis, t. (2006) ‘pedagogies for diversity: retaining critical challenge amidst fears of ‘dumbing down’, studies in higher education, 31(5), pp. 521-535. handley, k., sturdy, a., fincham, r. and clark, t. (2006) ‘within and beyond communities of practice: making sense of learning through participation, identity and practice’, journal of management studies, 43(3), pp. 641-653. holstein, j.a. and gubrium, j.f. (2003) inside interviewing: new lenses, new concerns. london, united kingdom: sage. jones, j. and fleischer, s. (2012a) ‘should i stay or should i go? factors affecting first year international students’ decisions to leave or continue with degrees’, proceedings of the annual learning and teaching conference post conference publicatio... jones, j. and fleischer, s. (2012b) ‘staying on course: factors affecting first year international students’ decisions to persist or withdraw from degrees in a post-1992 uk university’, practice and evidence of scholarship of teaching and learning in ... kingston, e. and forland, f. (2004) ‘bridging the gap in expectations between international students and academic staff’, european conference on educational research post graduate and new researcher pre-conference. university of crete, crete 20-21 sep... krause, k. (2005) ‘engaged, inert or otherwise occupied?: deconstructing the 21st century undergraduate student’, sharing scholarship in learning and teaching: engaging students. james cook university symposium. james cook university, australia 21-22 ... kvale, s. and brinkman, a. (2009) interviews: learning the craft of qualitative research interviewing. 2nd edn. london, united kingdom: sage. lave, j. and wenger, e. (1991) situated learning: legitimate peripheral participation. cambridge, united kingdom: cambridge university press. lenning, o., and ebbers, l. (1999). the powerful potential of learning communities: improving education for the future. ashe-eric higher education report, 26 (6), eric document reproduction service no. ed 428606. list, s. and miller, j. (2013) ‘students supporting students, using undergraduate communities of practice and peer assisted study sessions (pass)’, higher education research group adelaide (unpublished seminar abstract). university of adelaide, austra... mason, j. (2002) qualitative researching. 2nd edn. london, united kingdom: sage. massingham, p. and herrington, t. (2006) ‘does attendance matter? an examination of student attitudes, participation, performance and attendance’, journal of university teaching and learning practice, 3(2), pp. 82-103 [online]. available at: http://ro... maundeni, t. (2001) ‘the role of social networks in the adjustment of african students to british society: students' perceptions’, race, ethnicity and education, 4(3), pp. 253-276. mcgee, j. (2005) cognitive, demographic, and motivational factors as indicators of help-seeking in supplemental instruction. unpublished doctoral dissertation. texas a and m university, college station, tx. merriam, s.b. and caffarella, r.s. (1999) learning in adulthood: a comprehensive guide. 2nd edn. san francisco, ca: jossey-bass. montgomery, c. and mcdowell, l. (2009). social networks and the international student experience: a community of practice to support learning? journal of studies in international education, 13 (4), pp 455-466. moore, s., armstrong, c. and pearson, j. (2008) ‘lecture absenteeism among students in higher education: a valuable route to understanding student motivation’, journal of higher education policy and management, 30(1), pp.15-24. o’donnell, v.l. and tobell, j. (2007) ‘peripheral participation in a community of practice? the transition of adult students to higher education: legitimate peripheral participation in a community of practice?’, adult education quarterly, 57(4), pp. 3... parker, j. (2002) ‘a new disciplinarity: communities of knowledge, learning and practice’, teaching in higher education, 7(4), pp. 373-386. schmidt, l. and miller, j. (2009) ‘peer assisted study sessions to facilitate transition for international students’, the international journal of diversity in organisations, communities & nations, 9(5), pp. 13-29. sovic, s. (2008) lost in transition? the international students’ experience project. centre for excellence in teaching and learning: creative learning in practice: project report. london, united kingdom: university of the arts london. available at: ht... thomas, l. (2012) building student engagement and belonging in higher education at a time of change: final report from the what works? student retention & success programme: research report. london: paul hamlyn foundation. available at: https://www.h... tinto, v., russo, p. and kadel, s. (1994) ‘constructing educational communities: increasing retention in challenging circumstances’, community college journal, 64(4), pp. 26-29. tobbell, j. and o'donnell, v. (2005) ‘theorising educational transitions: communities, practice and participation’, conference on sociocultural theory in educational research and practice. university of manchester, united kingdom 8-9 september [online... vygotsky, l.s. (1978) mind in society: the development of higher psychological processes. london, united kingdom: harvard university press. wenger, e. (1998) communities of practice: learning, meaning and identity. cambridge, united kingdom: cambridge university press. wheeldon, j. and faubert, j. (2009) ‘framing experience: concept maps, mind maps, and data collection in qualitative research’, international journal of qualitative methods, 8(3), pp. 1-16 [online]. available at: http://wigan-ojs.library.ualberta.ca/i... yorke, m. and longden, b. (2008) the first-year experience of higher education in the uk – final report. york, united kingdom: higher education academy. author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special edition: academic peer learning, november 2015 peer to peer academic mentoring: an international consideration of shared approaches and literature kirk skoglund northwest missouri state university, us luke millard birmingham city university, uk alisha francis northwest missouri state university, us luke nagle birmingham city university, uk stuart brand birmingham city university, uk abstract peer-to-peer academic mentoring has the potential to contribute to retention and progression goals as programmes benefit mentors, mentees and staff. although there are necessarily common elements, programmes that include academic mentoring vary in their focus and structure. each programme must also be deliberately designed to address the unique character of individual institutions and their students. from programmes at two very different institutions – one in a rural town in the united states and one in a major city in the united kingdom – the approaches to and outcomes from peer mentoring activities are considered and the literature surrounding mentoring models is discussed. keywords: academic mentoring; institutional collaboration; peer support; retention; success. skoglund et al. peer to peer academic mentoring journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 3 introduction retention and progression is of great interest to many higher education institutions given global political and economic climates. pressures are converging to highlight the value of effective and efficient strategies to increase progression and timely degree completion. volumes of research informing those strategies suggest institutions can leverage student engagement to meet institutional goals while benefitting students (astin, 1985; tinto, 2012). kinzie et al. (2008) emphasise the role of the institution in cultivating engagement, including the degree to which institutions actively facilitate programmes that foster learning. the national union of students (2012) reports feedback from students in the uk suggesting programming will be more effective if it includes interactive sessions and individual tutorials with sufficient contact time. this feedback is consistent with findings indicating students find value in interacting with staff and peers (crosling et al., 2008). increasing staff contact time creates an issue, however, when budgets are limited. peerbased academic mentoring programmes offer some resolution without compromising the value of the interactions. newton and ender (2010) note ‘peer educators are valuable for an academic institution because they are experienced with the campus, they are economical to the budget, they can relate to the situations of fellow students, and they are effective’ (p.3). engagement through peer academic mentoring peer-to-peer academic support offers a number of benefits by fostering engagement on the part of both the mentor and mentee. mentors are required to master course content, reinforcing understanding and contributing to skill proficiency (falchikov, 2001; pascarella and terenzini, 2005). many researchers (e.g. chen and liu, 2011; goldschmid and goldschmid, 1976; newton and ender, 2010) emphasise benefits to academic mentor confidence and self-esteem. collectively, the benefits for mentors can be transformative (nygaard et al., 2013). skoglund et al. peer to peer academic mentoring journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 4 partnerships between teaching staff and student academic mentors can facilitate learning for all students by making the content more accessible. students may be more likely to engage with academic mentoring because peers are less intimidating (latino and unite, 2012) and more relatable (goodlad and hirst, 1989; newton and ender, 2010). peer mentors can also present material in a way that is more accessible to other students, offering a bridge between the conscious incompetence of students and the unconscious competence of teaching staff (ambrose et al., 2010). peer academic mentoring in practice birmingham city university in the united kingdom and northwest missouri state university in the united states have invested in programming to promote engagement through peer academic mentoring. a partnership between the institutions developed out of a common interest in student employment, leading to a specific focus on academic mentoring and this created a focus that centred on the exchange of ideas between the two institutions. particular institutional challenges, however, forced representatives at both institutions to think critically about how mentoring could be effectively used in their context and about potential ramifications, impacts and benefits. northwest missouri state university is a public university in a small, rural town in the united states. it serves approximately 6,000 undergraduate students and 800 graduate students with 95% of first year students living on campus and 40% of final year students living on campus. northwest missouri state offers 135 undergraduate programmes and 36 master’s programmes. for an undergraduate degree, each student completes a liberal arts education called ‘general education’ along with specific degree requirements. northwest introduced academic mentoring programmes in the mid-1980s, partially centralising activities taking place in academic departments prior to that time. mentoring services are currently administered by a number of programmes, including the university’s talent development centre (tdc), the university seminar programme, and the federallyfunded student support services programme as well as by individual academic departments. the tdc is the largest of the mentoring initiatives, employing over 40 student mentors working with their peers 1-1 or in small groups. in 2012/2013, the tdc saw close to 2,000 individual students for almost 14,000 contact hours. skoglund et al. peer to peer academic mentoring journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 5 across programmes, northwest missouri state university employs over 110 student academic mentors who are compensated through a student employment programme administered by the office of human resources. selection processes and pay rates vary by programme, though all student employees are paid at or above minimum wage. training also varies across programmes, though some departments collaborate in those endeavours. birmingham city university is a large metropolitan university of 24,000 students spread over eight campuses located around the city. the university offers over 300 undergraduate and post-graduate programmes and a variety of foundation courses, short courses and top-up degrees. each programme has entry requirements pertaining to that particular degree. in 2010 birmingham city university developed a project-based, institution-wide mentoring initiative known as the student academic mentoring programme (stamp). it has engaged with 158 programmes and supported 81 mentoring projects in that time. a yearly output, such as that in 2012/13, saw the stamp programme employ 113 student mentors who worked with 2,750 mentees within 3,750 mentoring sessions across 3,600 mentoring hours. mentor selection includes an interview process and results in payment at a rate above the uk minimum wage to show the value of this work. students receive centralised training to support their roles, part of which stresses the need for students to act as a signpost to further services and advice, rather than to pretend they have all the answers. faculty at both institutions have come to recognise the merits of mentoring approaches. the argument that students are often happier to approach peers than faculty is well known and structured programmes help improve the quality of the peer response. participating faculty note an investment of time as guidelines and practices are formulated with decreasing demands as academic mentors take ownership of the initiatives. that process of transferring ownership also results in a dynamic shift in perspective for both faculty and mentors, including changing views on the nature of the learning process (nygaard et al., 2013). while the two institutions have a very different history with mentoring activities the partnership between birmingham city and northwest missouri state university has benefitted both institutions. as birmingham city staff developed the stamp program, skoglund et al. peer to peer academic mentoring journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 6 northwest staff offered valuable perspectives on possible pitfalls, logistics, data collection, methods of best practice, and models of mentoring. in return, birmingham city staff have challenged northwest staff to look at programmes in a critical light and adopt innovative approaches to foster broader student engagement. this partnership has resulted in the exchange of ideas and best practices, whilst allowing each institution to adapt those practices to their specific institutional and cultural context. therefore, we offer this paper, not as a shared research piece, but as an example of how two institutions can improve their peer mentoring approaches through a shared dialogue and arrive at similar conclusions. mentoring models both institutions have established a range of academic mentoring programmes in an effort to engage a broad demographic of students. collectively, the programmes reflect murray’s definition of mentoring as: a deliberate pairing of a more skilled or experienced person with a lesser skilled or experienced one, with the agreed-upon goal of having the lesser skilled person grow and develop specific competencies. (murray, 2001, p. xiii). the programmes vary in the degree to which they focus on a particular academic subject, the location in which mentoring takes place, and the mentor-mentee ratio. these contrasts are important to note. reducing mentoring models to a fixed set of procedures limits the likelihood programmes will adapt to suit the peculiarities of institutional context, programme or class discipline, and student demographic. as such, what follows is a review of the literature surrounding each mentoring model and particular case studies of that model at each institution. each mentoring model will consist of the review of literature, case studies of that mentoring model at each institution and lessons learned through discourse between the two institutions. these modes are offered in the spirit of the sentiment expressed by mandell and herman: academic mentoring cannot be reduced to a recipe, the commitment can be expressed as a set of practical principles that inform and guide behaviour and reflection. (mandell and herman, 2009, p. 80). skoglund et al. peer to peer academic mentoring journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 7 methodology and ethical considerations whilst this piece is more a review of the literature, there is some data presented within each case study. this is not meant to be taken as an in-depth analysis, but more to enhance the understanding of that particular model in the institutional context. most of the data and information from northwest missouri state university was collected via survey or was archival information freely available. at northwest, the university’s institutional review board reviewed the ethical considerations of using this information and found that it protected the privacy and information of any participants. birmingham city university accessed the evaluation data from each initiative to inform this paper. induction mentoring induction mentoring helps new students transition into the university or programme by helping them recognise or build the skills that will help them become successful. induction mentoring can include university-wide and/or course-specific programmes and can be in a large group or one-on-one. many students find it difficult to adjust to the different teaching styles at university (gorard et al., 2007; quinn et al., 2005). in addition, they frequently arrive at university without knowledge or insights of the learning process (ambrose et al., 2010). a peer academic mentor can help the student understand what is expected from them in their course, help them locate resources, clarify requirements, assist in structuring time for independent study, and provide general advice on how to become a successful student. the goal is to assist the student in becoming an independent learner. given that, support typically decreases over time, though the interactions between mentor and mentee can continue in a more informal capacity. many schools in the us have an integrated first year seminar that helps to provide orientation to the university as well as access to resources and academic skills. cuseo (1991) suggests that the first year seminar has an impact on a student’s persistence to a second year as well as a student’s academic achievement. pascarella and terenzini (2005) echo cuseo (1991) and suggest that there is a positive and significant relationship between participation in a first year seminar and graduation and persistence. in the skoglund et al. peer to peer academic mentoring journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 8 induction programmes at both universities, the student mentors provide a pivotal role in helping students’ transition to the university. northwest missouri state university, provides a first year seminar that offers an administrative structure for induction mentoring. northwest’s seminar includes a course requirement for all students and addresses academic skills topics such as effective note taking and critical reading. each section is facilitated by a teaching team consisting of an instructional staff member and an academic mentor – called a ‘peer advisor.’ a survey of first year students in fall of 2013 indicated students felt their peer advisor assisted in their transition to northwest missouri state university. when asked if the peer advisor was a valuable asset to the course, responses averaged 4.59 on a 5 points scale where 5 was strongly agree. similarly, when asked if their peer advisor helped create an atmosphere receptive to questions the average response was 4.65. at birmingham city university, stamp provides a number of innovative examples of student centred, skills-based induction mentoring. the most notable of these is the level up programme in the school of media which seeks to engage students in e-mentoring from the moment they confirm their acceptance. incoming students receive course information and ‘mini-assignments’ that are meant to be fun and engaging. the intent is to encourage students to start interacting with each other and ask questions about what they can expect. peer academic mentors facilitate online discussion and answer questions during online forums or over the phone. the level up programmed is credited with a 7% increase (19 additional students) in the first year student retention rate in that school in its first year. birmingham city university also includes peer academic mentoring as part of induction activities for international students. bilingual mentors assist in clarifying misunderstandings that can lead to a significant feeling of alienation and disengagement from the university. overall, the stamp programme has supported 16 induction related mentoring projects and employed 116 student mentors who have impacted upon over 1,100 first year students. on a strategic level this work, and other complementary work around student retention and success, has started to change the institution’s perspective and is a key part of new plans to transform transition and the first year experience across the entire university through institution wide processes. skoglund et al. peer to peer academic mentoring journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 9 evaluating the effectiveness of an induction programme can be difficult. firstly, the outcomes of the programme such as skills or cognitive outcomes should be assessed. some suggested methods include commercially available instruments, home-grown assessments or qualitative assessments such as focus groups or performance based assessments (skipper, 2005). secondly, skipper (2005) also suggests that these outcomes based assessments are powerful when combined with other measures such as retention rates or academic success of students. it seems that a multi-faceted approach should be used when evaluating the effectiveness of an induction programme. the following table highlights some of the lessons learned through the partnership regarding induction mentoring that could act as a guide when developing an induction programme. table 1. induction mentoring. particularly effective with new students to a course or programme, particularly first year students at the university. typical delivery with a course or in a series of seminars. focus content and skills: mentors help students with skills to be successful in their programme and course holistic: mentors assist students in adjusting and acclimating to university life. potential strength better prepared students: mentoring helps establish skills for success and develop a connection with the university. potential pitfalls lost message: some students are not ready to hear and embrace messages and skills. underutilisation: partnering staff members may not collaborate with mentors in a manner which utilises the programme to its full benefit. skoglund et al. peer to peer academic mentoring journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 10 workshop mentoring workshop mentoring is held outside the class and works with students one-on-one or in a group to build particular skills that will be helpful in their programme of study. the workshop model provides opportunities for students to put content from lectures into practice, though this type of academic mentoring is not necessarily attached to a specific class and focuses on developing skills that are generalisable within a programme of study. in a medical programme in the u.s., faculty members use workshops to teach clinical skills and students report increased confidence and desire to practice those skills (corbett et al., 2007). in a workshop model, summers et al. (2013) suggest students engage more readily with the workshop facilities and gain a broader experience when student mentors are running them/assisting in them. the evidence for peer-led workshop mentoring is continued in a scheme in chemistry that, while focused on chemistry content, also helped developed skills essential to the study of chemistry and produced significant results in student grades, retention, and satisfaction (gosser and roth, 1998). at birmingham city, workshop mentors frequently assist with technical skills in such diverse areas as architecture, nursing, engineering and media. workshop mentors may collaborate with instructional staff to develop projects or workshop sessions for students, offering an opportunity to develop partnerships. stamp has supported 17 of these projects and employed 117 students supporting over 1,200 mentees. five of those students are employed in the digi-lab project for the school of architecture. the mentors, a mix of undergraduate and post-graduate students, act as technicians in the workshop to help students produce work and advise students about the equipment. each mentor works at least two, three hour sessions a week with availability extended towards the busy assessment period at the end of the year. digi-lab is not intended to replace the main workshops, but offers students a chance to experiment with advanced technology in a space and time that allows them to make mistakes. this provides an informal introduction to the equipment before students progress to using more advanced machines in the workshops. skoglund et al. peer to peer academic mentoring journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 11 at northwest missouri state university, workshop mentoring is applied in two rather divergent contexts. one is focused on the academic skills and consists of group sessions offering an opportunity to practice and evaluate note-taking or specific certifying exam preparation. in 2013, northwest delivered eight teacher certification exam preparatory workshops to over 60 teacher candidates. in 2012 and 2013, the tdc also delivered four note-taking workshops to over 100 students. the other context is the university farm that includes workshop mentors in the day-to-day activities of the operations of the farm, which includes both livestock and crop production. evaluating the effectiveness of workshop mentoring should be focused on specific skills and outcomes. similar to skipper’s (2005) suggestions for first-year programmes, performance-based assessments could be used to evaluate skills learned from the mentoring. preand post-tests could also be used to measure the learning that occurred from the workshop (norton and agee, 2014). maxwell (1979) also suggests student satisfaction and grades in evaluation of learning services. in workshop mentoring, such an analysis could compare the grades and scores of students in different courses who utilised the workshop mentoring and those who did not in various courses. additionally, retention in a programme might help provide some assessment of a workshop mentoring programme’s effectiveness. the following table highlights some of the lessons learned through the partnership regarding workshop mentoring. table 2. workshop mentoring. particularly effective with practical and applied courses where a mentor can provide support without knowledge or experience from subsequent course work. typical delivery in addition to class. focus skills: mentees are encouraged to experiment in developing skills that further their own interests to engage them in shaping their own learning. potential strength student ownership: mentors develop activities to suit the needs of the mentees. mentees can work on their skoglund et al. peer to peer academic mentoring journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 12 own project or as a group with support from, and in collaboration with, mentors. faculty mentoring: mentors can demonstrate techniques and procedures, particularly for new equipment. potential pitfalls underutilisation: partnering staff members may not collaborate with mentors in a manner which utilises the programme to its full benefit. one-on-one mentoring this type of academic mentoring follows a more traditional model with one-on-one sessions delivered on a drop-in or appointment basis. the mentee often presents a specific reason for seeking assistance. the mentor provides individualised support for the specific reason and potential contributing factors. sessions may include help with structuring the work, remediation of the content, or showing the mentee where they can access the necessary resources. one-on-one academic mentoring can help students of all abilities and academic profiles develop their learning abilities. falchikov (2001) supports the view that one-on-one academic mentoring helps improve grades and that the interaction with peers helps students increase their knowledge and understanding. this type of mentoring has also been claimed to be motivating for students and increase student confidence and selfefficacy (falchikov, 2001; goldschmid and goldschmid, 1976). this style of academic mentoring can be arranged to provide consistent and progressive help throughout the academic term or targeted, intensive help when needed. recurring sessions also help build a collaborative, developmental relationship between mentor and mentee. students seeking assistance, however, can be narrowly focused on preparing for specific assessments (ashwin, 2003). that pattern is consistent with the spike in demand for targeted assistance in the days before busy assessment periods at both universities. skoglund et al. peer to peer academic mentoring journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 13 northwest missouri state university offers one-on-one mentoring through the tdc with appointment-based sessions for specific classes or academic skills, such as note-taking and time management. in 2013-2014, over 30 tdc peer academic mentors held almost 2,000 one-on-one sessions and worked with 715 students. between 2008 and 2012, 603 students responded to an anonymous, voluntary response survey regarding their experience with the services. a five-point likert scale question measuring increase in knowledge resulted in 48% selecting a 4 or 5 (agree/strongly agree). responses to a similar question, indicate that the mentor sessions also contributed to increased student confidence in their abilities. at birmingham city one-on-one mentoring activities are concentrated in the centre for academic success which operates independently of stamp. the mentoring activities focus on the development of core academic skills rather than offering assistance on specific classes or modules. staff note that the image of the centre for academic success has evolved from a place where students were embarrassed to go as it meant they were perceived to be struggling to one where students are present all the time, helping one another develop and succeed in getting higher grades. this progression suggests that the use of peers for service delivery helps reduce barriers to engagement as one-on-one tutoring is sometimes perceived as remedial, especially when combined with efforts to target specific populations of students. evaluation of one-on-one mentoring can be challenging, but there are some strategies that can be used. norton and agee (2014) suggest that satisfaction and changes of confidence could be used along with a change in student grades. in addition to these measures, maxwell (1979) suggests using retention measures, test scores in specific courses or standardised scores, and faculty attitudes regarding the mentoring to evaluate the learning service. these broad strategies can be adapted to the specific institutional context and programme. skoglund et al. peer to peer academic mentoring journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 14 from both of the institutional contexts, the following table highlights the lessons learned regarding one-on-one mentoring: table 3. one-on-one mentoring. particularly effective with courses with large class sizes: allows each student to have individual contact focused on their unique needs. students who are intimidated in group sessions: allows students to receive support in a more discreet setting. typical delivery in addition to class: frequently offered on a voluntary basis, but some courses may require students to meet with a mentor. focus content and/or skills: the mentee can lead the direction of the session. potential strength personalisation: mentees receive the assistance they feel they need. resource efficiency: focuses resource allocation on student who perceive a need for interventions. potential pitfalls mentor assuming a position of expert knowledge: interactions more like a tutorial with a faculty member than a collaboration where the mentor helps the mentee build capacity. does not foster more extensive peer network: whilst the mentee is collaborating with a peer they aren’t building wider networks of support with their other peers. creates dependency: if the mentor actively completes tasks the mentee will not learn the related content and skills and will continue to require support. skoglund et al. peer to peer academic mentoring journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 15 study group mentoring study group mentoring typically provides extra assistance with content for a specific class. at birmingham city and northwest the sessions take place outside of class time and can focus on a range of topics as defined by the mentor and mentees. study group mentors utilise collaborative learning techniques to help students develop greater understanding of the subject (blanc et al., 1983; blanc and martin, 1994; bowles et al., 2008). table 4 includes an overview of study group mentoring given experiences at both institutions as well as related research. at northwest missouri state university, study group mentoring is one of the principle forms of academic mentoring and is based on the supplemental instruction (si) model from university of missouri – kansas city (umkc). the si model focuses on traditionally difficult courses and, as such, the si programme is intentionally non-remedial (arendale, 1994; burmeister, 1996; martin and arendale, 1992). in the u.k., si is sometimes referred to as peer assisted study sessions (pass) or peer assisted learning (pal). the si programme has been credited with significant benefits for students who attend the sessions, including better grades than the students who do not attend (blanc and martin, 1994; gattis, 2000) even when accounting for prior academic performance (malm et al., 2011) and motivation (gattis, 2000). because of the focus on difficult courses, it makes the si programme intentionally non-remedial (martin and arendale, 1992; burmeister, 1996; arendale, 1994) and removes the stigma of extra support. at both universities study group mentors are typically more experienced students who were successful when they completed the class as a student, an approach that is consistent with the si model (arendale, 1994). this allows the academic mentor to guide students through particularly difficult parts of the class based on their prior experiences. at northwest missouri state university, average enrolment in si courses is 2,000 students per term and approximately 36% utilise the services of the academic mentor, known as an si leader. each si leader holds around forty-two sessions lasting close to an hour a piece. since the fall of 2008, the average grade point average (gpa) of students who attended two or more si sessions was 2.35, whilst the average gpa of non-si attendees was 1.74. this is a difference of 0.61 which roughly translates to a 5% increase in the student's grade if they attended si sessions. skoglund et al. peer to peer academic mentoring journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 16 the evaluation of study group mentoring will typically involve assessment of an impact on student grades and success. similar to the other models of academic mentoring, maxwell’s (1979) suggestions of incorporating student satisfaction, student usage, faculty attitudes, and grades also applies to this method of mentoring. specifically, mentoring programmes can compare the grades of the students who attended the mentoring sessions and those who did not to provide an evaluation of the effectiveness of the programme. additionally, retention figures and success in later courses could be used to assess the impact of this type of mentoring. congos and schoeps (1997) cautions that when a programme is voluntary, the evaluators need to control for self-selection bias and this is something that applies for all of the mentoring models detailed in this paper. however, even where there is compulsory mentoring participation on a programme there are other variables such as the mentees motivation to engage, the quality of the mentor and outside influences that may impact on student performance. the following table offers key lessons learned from the partners: table 4. study group mentoring. particularly effective with courses with heavy reading requirements and traditional lecture structure where the mentors can help facilitate active learning. typical delivery outside of class, but typically linked to a course and/or instructor. focus content: mentees are encouraged to review theory from lectures and discuss content to clarify misunderstandings. potential strength shared responsibility: mentors facilitate activities and encourage mentees to build networks of support non-remedial: the interactive nature of the sessions is not perceived as getting help, but as engaging in and taking an active role in learning. potential pitfalls settings not conducive to mentoring: sessions in classroom space can reduce the collaborative energy and may create a dynamic leading to a “re-lecture” skoglund et al. peer to peer academic mentoring journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 17 format. conclusions peer-to-peer academic mentoring programmes at both universities illustrate the ways peer academic mentoring can be applied to improve learning and engagement, providing a reference for considering the structure of the programmes as well as potential strengths and pitfalls. given the importance of applying peer mentoring in a manner that fits with the institutional culture it may be counterproductive to be too prescriptive. at the same time, it is beneficial to note that academic mentoring programmes that embed academic skills within the course or that are class specific have greater participation. similarly, academic mentoring that occurs within a group is more effective at gaining regular attendance than one-on-one mentoring programmes. experiences across the programmes and across the two institutions also highlight a number of considerations, including the importance of creating a culture that views academic mentoring as a developmental process that all students can benefit from rather than being a form of remedial support for struggling students. those benefits are more likely when programmes are designed to encourage skill development so mentees can become effective self-directed learners, reducing the potential for dependency on an academic mentor. utilising a broad range of mentoring models also helps meet the needs of a heterogeneous student population while contributing to a culture emphasising self-directed learning through skill development. across the institution the various models can have a synergistic effect, especially when coordinated through a single cohesive institutional programme. this centralised administration also facilitates programme evaluation. academic mentoring can be difficult to evaluate, so institutions should consider and formalise an evaluation plan including both qualitative and quantitative measures before the programmes begin. finally, in this consideration of models and abstractions around mentoring, we should not forget the individual, and the transformative effect that mentoring can have on the students skoglund et al. peer to peer academic mentoring journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 18 engaging. mentees are supported to build levels of confidence and understanding that ultimately may impact on their academic performance and personal development. mentors gain by increasing their understanding through explaining and see other skills develop that will support their own development and employability. institutional partnerships representatives at both universities have found that openly collaborating with another institution can be a mutually beneficial experience. each university gains inspiration and insights into best practice whilst benefitting from a reinvigoration of working practices. indeed, at birmingham city university, the institutional learning has led to the creation of a new university wide approach to transition and the first year experience. faculty that participate in these mentoring programmes benefit from engagement with others involved in the initiative from other schools. at northwest missouri state university, that engagement provided inspiration for innovation in the si leader role. the strength of the partnership is based on the willingness to freely share ideas and experiences. this allowed representatives to establish trust and deepen the collaboration. the dynamic nature of the relationship has been important for its longevity, which is notable given findings that 50 percent of partnerships dissolve within their first year (lasker et al., 2001). as the relationship continues, opportunities for creative collaboration have emerged that further strengthens the partnership. references ambrose, s. a., bridges, m. w., dipietro, m., lovett, m. c., and norman, m. k. (2010) how learning works: seven research-based principles for smart teaching. san francisco: jossey-bass. available at: http://c4ed.lib.kmutt.ac.th/sites/default/files/howlearningworks-ambrose.pdf (accessed: 23 november 2015). arendale, d. r. (1994) ‘understanding the supplemental instruction model’, new directions for teaching and learning, 1994(60), pp.11–21. doi: 10.1002/tl.37219946004. http://c4ed.lib.kmutt.ac.th/sites/default/files/howlearningworks-ambrose.pdf skoglund et al. peer to peer academic mentoring journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 19 ashwin, p. (2003) ‘peer support: relations between the context, process and outcomes for the students who are supported’, instructional science, 31, pp. 159–173. doi: 10.1023/a:1023227532029. astin, a. w. (1985) achieving educational excellence: a critical assessment of priorities and practices in higher education. san francisco: jossey-bass. blanc, r. a. and martin, d. c. (1994) ‘supplemental instruction: increasing student performance and persistence in difficult academic courses’, academic medicine: journal of the association of american medical colleges, 69(6), 452–454. doi: 10.1097/00001888-199406000-00004. blanc, r. a., debuhr, l. e. and martin, d. c. (1983) ‘breaking the attrition cycle: the effects of supplemental instruction on undergraduate performance and attrition’, journal of higher education, 54(1), pp. 80–90. doi: 10.2307/1981646. bowles, t., mccoy, a. and bates, s. (2008) ‘the effect of supplemental instruction on timely graduation’, college student journal, 42(30), 853–859. burmeister, s. (1996) ‘supplemental instruction: an interview with deanna martin’, journal of developmental education, 20(1), pp. 22–24,26. chen, c. and liu, c. (2011) ‘a case study of peer tutoring program in higher education’, research in higher education journal, 11, pp. 1–10. congos, d. h. and schoeps, n. (1997) ‘a model for evaluation retention programs’, journal of developmental education, 21(2), p. 2. corbett, e. c. jr., payne, n. j., bradley, e. b., maughan, k. l., heald, e. b., and wang, x. q. (2007) ‘enhancing clinical skills education: university of virginia school of medicine's clerkship clinical skills workshop program’, academic medicine: journal of the association of american medical colleges, 82(7), pp. 690-695. doi: 10.1097/acm.0b013e31806745b4. skoglund et al. peer to peer academic mentoring journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 20 crosling, g., thomas, l. and heagney, m. (eds.) (2008) improving student retention in higher education: the role of teaching and learning. oxon: routledge. cuseo, j. b. (1991) the freshman orientation seminar: a research-based rationale for its value, delivery and content. monograph (no. 4). columbia: university of south carolina. falchikov, n. (2001) learning together: peer tutoring in higher education. new york, ny: routledge/falmer. gattis, k. w. (2000) ‘long-term knowledge gains due to supplemental instruction in college chemistry courses’, journal of research and development in education, 33, pp. 118–126. goldschmid, b. and goldschmid, m. l. (1976) ‘peer teaching in higher education: a review’, higher education, 5, pp. 9–33. doi: 10.1007/bf01677204. goodlad, s. and hirst, b. (1989) peer tutoring: a guide to learning by teaching. new york, ny: nichols. gorard, s., adnett, n., may, h., slack, k., smith, e. and thomas, l. (2007) overcoming the barriers to higher education. stoke-on-trent: trentham books. gosser, d. k. and roth, v. (1998) ‘the workshop chemistry project: peer-led team learning’, journal of chemical education, 75(2), pp. 185-187. kinzie, j., gonyea, r., shoup, r. and kuh, g. (2008) ‘promoting persistence and success of underrepresented students: lessons for teaching and learning’, new directions for teaching and learning, 2008(115), pp. 21-38. doi: 10.1002/tl.323. lasker, r. d., weiss, e. s. and miller, r. (2001) ‘partnership synergy: a practical framework for studying and strengthening the collaborative advantage’, the milbank quarterly, 79(2), pp. 179–205. available at: http://cpcrn.org/wpcontent/uploads/2013/03/partnership-synergy.pdf (accessed: 23 november 2015). http://cpcrn.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/partnership-synergy.pdf http://cpcrn.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/partnership-synergy.pdf skoglund et al. peer to peer academic mentoring journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 21 latino, j. a. and unite, c. m. (2012) ‘providing academic support through peer education’, new directions for higher education, 2012(157), pp. 31–43. doi: 10.1002/he.20004. malm, j., bryngfors, l. and mörner, l. l. (2011) ‘supplemental instruction: whom does it serve?’, international journal of teaching and learning in higher education, 23(3), pp. 282–291. available at: http://www.cideronline.org/podcasts/pdf/18.pdf (accessed: 23 november 2015). mandell, a. and herman, l. (2009) ‘mentoring: when learners make the learning’, in mezirow, j. and taylor, e. w. (eds.) transformative learning in practice: insights from community, workplace, and higher education. san francisco, ca: josseybass, pp. 78–88. martin, d. c. and arendale, d. r. (1992) supplemental instruction: improving first-year student success in high-risk courses. the freshman year experience: monograph series, 7. columbia: university of south carolina. available at: http://eric.ed.gov/?id=ed354839. (accessed: 23 november 2015). maxwell, m. (1979) improving student learning skills: a comprehensive guide to successful practices and programs for increasing the performance of underprepared students. san francisco, ca: jossey-bass. murray, m. (2001) beyond the myths and magic of mentoring: how to facilitate an effective mentoring process. san francisco, ca: jossey-bass. national union of students (2012) ‘student experience research 2012: student experience research to gain insight into the quality of the learning experience. part 2: independent learning and contact hours’, london: nus. available at: http://tsep.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/1513-nus_qaafullreport_final.pdf. (accessed: 23 november 2015). newton, f. b. and ender, s. c. (2010) students helping students: a guide for peer educators on college campuses. 2 nd edn. san francisco, ca: jossey-bass. http://www.cideronline.org/podcasts/pdf/18.pdf http://eric.ed.gov/?id=ed354839 http://tsep.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/1513-nus_qaa-fullreport_final.pdf http://tsep.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/1513-nus_qaa-fullreport_final.pdf skoglund et al. peer to peer academic mentoring journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 22 norton, j. and agee, k. (2014) assessment of learning assistance programs: supporting professionals in the field, college reading and learning association (crla) white paper, december. available at: http://www.crla.net/images/whitepaper/assessmentoflearningassistanceprograms2 014.pdf (accessed: 20 august 2015). nygaard, c., brand, s., bartholomew, p. and millard, l. (2013) student engagement: identity, motivation and community. faringdon, oxfordshire: libri publishing. pascarella, e. t. and terenzini, p. t. (2005) how college affects students: a third decade of research. san francisco, ca: jossey-bass. quinn, j., thomas, l., slack, k., casey, l., thexton, w. and noble, j. (2005) from life crisis to lifelong learning: rethinking working-class ‘drop out’ from higher education. water end, york: joseph rowntree foundation. available at: https://www.jrf.org.uk/report/rethinking-working-class-drop-out-university. (accessed: 23 november 2015). skipper, t. l. (2005) student development in the first college year: a primer for college educators. columbia: university of south carolina. isbn: 978-1-889271-52-1 summers, p., pearson, d., gough, s. and siekierski, j. (2013) ‘the effects of student engagement of employing students in professional roles’, in nygaard, c., brand, s., bartholomew, p. and millard, l. (eds.) student engagement: identity, motivation and community (pp. 35-54). faringdon: libri publishing. tinto, v. (2012) completing college: rethinking institutional action. chicago: university of chicago press. http://www.crla.net/images/whitepaper/assessmentoflearningassistanceprograms2014.pdf http://www.crla.net/images/whitepaper/assessmentoflearningassistanceprograms2014.pdf https://www.jrf.org.uk/report/rethinking-working-class-drop-out-university skoglund et al. peer to peer academic mentoring journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 23 author details kirk skoglund is the academic engagement co-ordinator at the talent development center at northwest missouri state university and co-ordinates various learning assistance systems, including the peer tutoring and supplemental instruction (si) programmes. he was formally a student at northwest and worked in a variety of campus roles as a student employee. luke millard is an associate professor and head of student engagement at birmingham city university. his writing revolves around student engagement and student transitions. luke’s present area of research is student employment on campus and the impact on student learning. alisha francis is an associate professor of psychology at northwest missouri state university. as an organisational psychologist, her interests include the way systems influence learning and behaviour. she applies that interest in researching systems to support student learning and success. luke nagle was a successful architecture student at birmingham city and he co-ordinated the mentoring programme alongside his studies as part of the university’s student jobs on campus programme. luke led induction, monitoring and evaluation activities across the university and is now pursuing a career in his chosen field. stuart brand is director of learning experience at birmingham city university and was the instigator of the mentoring initiatives at the university and the partnership with northwest. his significant contribution to the partnership with northwest was recognised with the award of an honorary doctorate by northwest missouri state university. peer to peer academic mentoring: an international consideration of shared approaches and literature abstract introduction engagement through peer academic mentoring peer academic mentoring in practice mentoring models methodology and ethical considerations induction mentoring workshop mentoring one-on-one mentoring study group mentoring conclusions peer-to-peer academic mentoring institutional partnerships references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 10: november 2016 hacking assignment practice: finding creativity and power in the fissures and cracks of learning and teaching sandra abegglen london metropolitan university, uk tom burns london metropolitan university, uk sandra sinfield london metropolitan university, uk abstract this paper explores integrated peer mentoring in the context of offering students an element of choice in their assignments. we decided to undertake a pilot study with a group of first year undergraduate education-studies students who come from non-traditional backgrounds, but the concept is widely applicable. we argue that creative approaches to assignment practice can promote inclusion and give students, not traditionally welcome in the academy, ownership, voice and pride. keywords: non-traditional students; integrated peer mentoring; assignment practice. introduction working in a university that is proudly dedicated to widening participation, we have long wanted a paradigm shift in assignment practices not just because social inclusion is especially important in diverse classrooms, but rather because we want practices that excite and challenge all students. we argue that assignment practice should allow students to showcase their learning, rather than reward conformity, compliance and, arguably, already-existing cultural capital (bourdieu, 1984; lillis, 2001). hence, we wanted assignment practices that allow students to develop and demonstrate their learning in generative, discursive and meaningful ways; approaches that take account of the abegglen et al. hacking assignment practice journal of learning development in higher education, issue 10: november 2016 2 importance of issues of identity and institutional relationships of power and authority that surround, and are embedded within, traditional assignment practice. the question, however, as crème states, is: do we dare to allow our students to be more creative, or are we too afraid that it will upset our own categories and ways of thinking? (crème, 2003, p. 276) cheng and warren (2007) argue that students are more likely to be interested, and therefore motivated, if they are involved in the design of assignment tasks and/or if they can choose between different tasks. the present paper discusses the implications of ‘hacking’ traditional assignment practice in the context of a 30-week first year module (entitled ‘becoming an educationalist’) that we paired with a 15-week second-year peer mentoring module. we offered flexibility in the assignments with which students engaged, such that students could choose from and engage in a range of activities and miniprojects, allowing them space and time to follow their passions. we wanted assignments that created ‘fissures and cracks’1 (deleuze and guattari, 1987) in which our students could learn from and be with (nancy, 2000) each other. we will argue that creative approaches to assignment practice, when combined with embedded peer mentoring, fosters student achievement and well-being (keenan, 2014), allowing students the opportunity to be with and learn from each other. “being with” (nancy, 2000, p. 85) is particularly important for our students who come from non-traditional backgrounds and who often struggle with academic practices (abegglen et al., 2015). they need someone who they can rely on and refer to, because, as nancy states: there is no meaning if meaning is not shared, and not because there would be an ultimate or first signification that all beings have in common, but because meaning is itself the sharing of being. (nancy, 2000, p.1). 1 in their work, ‘a thousand plateau’s’, deleuze and guttari (1987) use the term “rhizome” to describe theory and research that allows for multiple, non-hierarchical entry and exit points in data representation and interpretation. as such, the ‘rhizome has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, intervening, intermezzo’ and through that allows the creation of new, although smooth, spaces – spaces that cut across boundaries imposed by vertical lines of hierarchies and order. abegglen et al. hacking assignment practice journal of learning development in higher education, issue 10: november 2016 3 don’t waste student work in higher education (he), it could be said that typically information is transferred from the lecturer to the students: the assignment then transfers the information back to the lecturer in a reductive, recursive cycle. whilst lectures may be good for transmitting information, arguably they are not effective in promoting thought or to change and develop attitudes (bligh, 1998). we argue, in line with mcinerney et al. (2009), that the regurgitative nature of the typical assignment fails to excite or engage the student. we therefore wanted to set assignments that truly engaged and challenged students, that allowed them to feel integrated and included (tinto, 1998), rather than outsiders looking in (sinfield, burns and holley, 2004). with crème (2003), we do not challenge the traditional academic essay per se as an assignment form, but its monolithic domination of university life. the essay can waste student work (davies, 2011) engaging them in an unequal struggle with a disempowering academic practice where they spend too much time and energy in getting it right (crème, 2003; lillis, 2001), rather than harnessing their interest and creativity to engage with that which they want to understand or learn. we argue that more emancipatory and creative approaches to assignment practice, especially when coupled with fully integrated peer support, can help to close the access gap that traditionally exists and is fostered in uk he. instead of privileging an already capitalised elite, all students, including those from nontraditional backgrounds, or those with learning difficulties or a disability (jamieson and morgan, 2008), should be able to develop and grow to reach their potential and career goals. this seems possible when promoting ownership and engagement by allowing students’ choice as to which assignment, or which assignment form, they wish to engage. peers, by definition, are close to each other in age, ability, status, ethnicity and other characteristics. (walberg, 1998, p.x). moreover, peer learning fosters dialogic (bakhtin, 1981) and social learning (wenger, 2009 and 2010), and promotes ‘students as partners’ (healey et al., 2014; higher education academy, 2014). abegglen et al. hacking assignment practice journal of learning development in higher education, issue 10: november 2016 4 hence, peer learning can help first-year undergraduate students with professional behaviours and practices (allan, 2010), while strengthening their emerging academic identities and selves and their self-efficacy (fox and stevenson, 2006) – all of which allows them to become successful learners and ‘educators’. the modules and students in question to enhance student learning and foster alternative and integrative practice, we paired a first-year academic literacies module (‘becoming an educationalist’) with a second-year peer mentoring module (‘peer mentoring in practice’), whereby the second-year students mentored the first-years as part of the module itself: both modules were situated within the ba hons education studies programme. students on the two modules met on a weekly basis over a period of fifteen weeks in the autumn semester. all sessions took place in it labs that gave all students access to e-resources. assignments for ‘becoming an educationalist’ included a small qualitative project on an aspect of studying at he (30%); a summative reflective essay where students are encouraged to develop meta-cognitive awareness through their writing (40%); and a portfolio providing evidence of engagement in creative projects chosen from a range that we offer: ‘blogging to learn’; ‘interactive performance’ and ‘develop a digital me’, or that they set themselves (30%) – submitting the three projects of which they are the most proud. the aim of these creative projects and the element of choice, was to foster students’ personal and professional development by giving them the freedom to explore and follow their passions, to re-territorialise academic space (deleuze and guattari, 1987) with engagement and creativity. peer mentor support of the first-years, fully integrated into both programmes, was both pastoral, facilitating belonging, and academic, facilitating first-year understanding of the academic milieu and the specific tasks with which they were wrestling. in the process both groups of students were co-learning (freire, 1993 and 1998) especially in terms of their digital practice, as both were asked to reflect on their personal and academic progress on personal, yet publicly shared, blogs. abegglen et al. hacking assignment practice journal of learning development in higher education, issue 10: november 2016 5 our students are proud of the outcomes of their projects and have contributed to this website in order to showcase and share some of their work, not only with their peers, but also a broader public: http://learning.londonmet.ac.uk/epacks/posters-digital/2. discussion when discussing alternative assignments that give options to students, one common critique is that this is an easy option for students in an over liberal-approach to learning and teaching. however, in practice, feedback from students reveals that they are more discomforted by the idea of social interaction and of producing a digital artefact than they are by having to produce an essay. our students are not academic or digital natives (prensky, 2001), they do not segue easily into using their creativity or their e-devices for assignments, nor are they used to being encouraged to voice their opinion publicly (tett, 2000). we argue that assignment-innovation forces students into zones of discomfort and of engagement. they cannot ‘cut and paste’, disengaging their selves from the assignment process. they have to think, engage, struggle: to develop an idea; to work with unfamiliar material or to use unfamiliar technology and to successfully work together with others to be able to finish and showcase their creative projects. project-based learning and multimodal meaning-making are not easy options; but, because of the meaningful discomfort and struggle, they can be transformative ones. the students fed back to us that these were the spaces and projects in which they felt themselves to “actively learn” and “become academic”, where they were allowed to be with each other (nancy, 2000) demonstrating their resilience, creativity and commitment. this is playful learning (winnicott, 1971), not ‘dumbed down’, but learning that creates opportunities for our students to be fiercely alive and fiercely themselves as they navigate the threats of the transitional space of their emergent academic selves. summary and recommendations we challenged our undergraduate students by setting a wider range of more difficult tasks than would normally be encountered within the first-year: they had to blog; to produce a 2 shared with the consent and permission of the students. http://learning.londonmet.ac.uk/epacks/posters-digital/ abegglen et al. hacking assignment practice journal of learning development in higher education, issue 10: november 2016 6 ‘digital me’ using unfamiliar technology; to devise and deliver projects of their own choosing and to demonstrate their engagement through exhibitions, performances and showcases. all of these tasks terrified the students, at first. however, the pairing of the first-year students with the second-year mentors meant that they were supported as they struggled with unfamiliar tasks that, hard as they were, opened up spaces for playful, generative learning. the students were frightened at times, yes, but they were challenged to struggle meaningfully and with meaning itself, and they rose to that challenge in ways that surprised themselves and delighted us. in this project our students demonstrated that assignment practice can be democratic (dewey, 1997) and emancipatory (freire, 1993 and 1998); but most of all they demonstrated the power of ‘we’. as nancy argues: being is always ‘being with’:…the essence of singularity: it is not individuality; it is … at one and the same time, infra-/individual and trans-individual, and always the two together. (nancy, 2000, p.85) hence, by allowing our students to work (and struggle) with each other, joyful things happened. our recommendation is that more courses should ‘hack’ traditional assignment practice and offer students choice in the assignments in which they engage and which they submit for assessment. students should have the opportunity to be with and learn from each other. if students are taken seriously and their strengths are fostered, university practice could become truly inclusive. references abegglen, s., burns, t. and sinfield, s. (2015) ‘voices from the margins: narratives of learning development in a digital age’, journal of educational innovation, partnership and change, 1(1), pp. 1-8. available at: https://193.60.48.124/index.php/studentchangeagents/article/view/148 (accessed 1st july 2015). https://193.60.48.124/index.php/studentchangeagents/article/view/148 abegglen et al. hacking assignment practice journal of learning development in higher education, issue 10: november 2016 7 allan, h. (2010) ‘mentoring overseas nurses: barriers to effective and non-discriminatory mentoring practices’, journal of nursing ethics, 17(5), pp. 603-613. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0969733010368747 bakhtin, m. (1981) the dialogic imagination: four essays. austin: university of texas press. bligh, d. a. (1998) what’s the use of lectures? 5th edn. exeter: intellect. bourdieu, p. (1984) distinction: a social critique of the judgment of taste. london: routledge. cheng, w. and warren, m. (2007) ‘online collaborative learning and assessment’, in frankland, s. (ed.) enhancing teaching and learning through assessment: deriving an appropriate model. dordrecht: springer, pp. 198-213. crème, p. (2003) ‘why can’t we allow students to be more creative?’, teaching in higher education, 8(2), pp. 273-277. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1356251032000052492 davies, j. (2011) don’t waste student work. science of imagination laboratory [video] available at: http://tedxtalks.ted.com/video/tedxottawa-jim-davies-dont-wast (accessed: 1st july 2015). deleuze, g. and guattari, f. (1987) a thousand plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia. minneapolis and london: university of minnesota press. dewey, j. (1997) democracy and education: an introduction to the philosophy of education. new york: the free press. freire, p. (1993) pedagogy of the oppressed. new york: continuum. freire, p. (1998) pedagogy of freedom: ethics, democracy and civic courage. lanham: rowman and littlefield publishers. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0969733010368747 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1356251032000052492 http://tedxtalks.ted.com/video/tedxottawa-jim-davies-dont-wast abegglen et al. hacking assignment practice journal of learning development in higher education, issue 10: november 2016 8 fox, a. and stevenson, l. (2006) ‘exploring the effectiveness of peer mentoring of accounting and finance students in higher education’, accounting education, 15(2), pp. 189-202. healey, m., flint, a. and harrington, k. (2014) engagement through partnership: students as partners in learning and teaching in higher education. york: higher education academy. available at: https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/system/files/resources/engagement_through_partner ship.pdf (accessed: 3 october 2016). jamieson, c. and morgan, e. (2008) managing dyslexia at university: a resource for students, academic and support staff. oxon and new york: routledge. keenan, c. (2014) mapping student-led peer learning in the uk. york: higher education academy. available at: https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/system/files/resources/peer_led_learning_keenan_n ov_14-final.pdf (accessed: 3 october 2016). lillis, t. m. (2001) student writing: access, regulation, desire. london: routledge. mcinerney, d. m., brown, g. t. l. and liem, g. a. d. (eds.) (2009) student perspectives on assessment: what students can tell us about assessment for learning. greenwich, ct: information age publishing. nancy, j. l. (2000) being singular plural. stanford, ca: stanford university press. prensky, m. (2001) ‘digital natives, digital immigrants’, on the horizon, 9(5), pp. 1-6. http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/10748120110424816 sinfield, s., burns, t. and holley, d. (2004) ‘outsiders looking in or insiders looking out? widening participation in a post-1992 university’, in satterthwaite, j., atkinson, e. and martin, w. (eds.) the disciplining of education: new languages of power and resistance. stoke on trent: trentham books, pp. 137-152. https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/system/files/resources/engagement_through_partnership.pdf https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/system/files/resources/engagement_through_partnership.pdf https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/system/files/resources/peer_led_learning_keenan_nov_14-final.pdf https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/system/files/resources/peer_led_learning_keenan_nov_14-final.pdf http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/10748120110424816 abegglen et al. hacking assignment practice journal of learning development in higher education, issue 10: november 2016 9 tett, l. (2000) ‘‘i’m working class and proud of it’ – gendered experiences of nontraditional participants in higher education’, gender and education, 12(2), pp. 183194. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09540250050009993 higher education academy (2014) framework for partnership in learning and teaching in higher education. york: the higher education academy. available at: https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/system/files/resources/hea_framework_for_partnersh ip_in_learning_and_teaching.pdf (accessed: 3 october 2016). tinto, v. (1998) ‘colleges as communities: taking research on student persistence seriously’, review of higher education, 21(2), pp. 167-177. walberg, h. j. (1998) ‘foreword’, in topping, k. and ehly, s. (eds.) peer-assisted learning. mahwah, nj: laurence erlbaum associates, pp. ix-xii. wenger, e. (2009) ‘social learning capability: four essays on innovation and learning in social systems’, social innovation, sociedade e trabalho. booklets 12 – separate supplement. lisbon: mtss/gep & equal. available at: http://wengertrayner.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/09-04-17-social-learning-capabilityv2.1.pdf (accessed: 3 october 2016). wenger, e. (2010) ‘communities of practice and social learning systems: the career of a concept’, in blackmore, c. (ed.) social learning systems and communities of practice. london: springer and the open university, pp. 179-198. winnicott, d. w. (1971) playing and reality. london: tavistock. author details sandra abegglen is a senior lecturer in education studies and course leader of the ba honours education studies at london metropolitan university. her areas of expertise include peer-to-peer support and experiential learning. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09540250050009993 https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/system/files/resources/hea_framework_for_partnership_in_learning_and_teaching.pdf https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/system/files/resources/hea_framework_for_partnership_in_learning_and_teaching.pdf http://wenger-trayner.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/09-04-17-social-learning-capability-v2.1.pdf http://wenger-trayner.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/09-04-17-social-learning-capability-v2.1.pdf http://wenger-trayner.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/09-04-17-social-learning-capability-v2.1.pdf abegglen et al. hacking assignment practice journal of learning development in higher education, issue 10: november 2016 10 tom burns is a senior lecturer with the centre for professional and educational development, london metropolitan university. his area of expertise is creativity as emancipatory practice. sandra sinfield is a senior lecturer with the centre for professional and educational development, london metropolitan university. her area of interest is creativity as emancipatory practice. hacking assignment practice: finding creativity and power in the fissures and cracks of learning and teaching abstract introduction don’t waste student work the modules and students in question discussion summary and recommendations references author details literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 7: june 2014 ‘a productive and happy collaboration’: maximising impact through project design janet hargreaves university of huddersfield, uk sue bond university of huddersfield, uk paul dagg university of huddersfield, uk benji dawson university of huddersfield, uk blake kendrick university of huddersfield, uk mark potter university of huddersfield, uk abstract this case study reports on and analyses the impact that collaborating on a developmental project had on the people involved. the project created an online self-assessment tool that offers students the opportunity to plan their preparedness to enter the work place, named the preparation for placement assessment tool. the aim of the project was to develop an artefact that aids all students to think about and prepare for placements, and more broadly to be work-ready. it also aims to help disabled students to identify and manage their individual needs. a practice research ethos, which included the engagement of a diverse mix of students, was central to successful development. working in collaboration with students is offered as an effective strategy for improving project outcomes and embedding student involvement into research, teaching, learning and scholarly activities. whilst evaluation of the usefulness of the tool is still ongoing and will be reported at a later date, what is already clear is the positive impact involvement in the project had on the team members, particularly those who were students. four key factors are identified as hargreaves et al. ‘a productive and happy collaboration’ journal of learning development in higher education, issue 7: june 2014 2 significant for this success – student power, methodology, the use of funding, and slow burn. keywords: collaboration; disability; preparation for placement; student impact. background an expectation that universities have a primary responsibility for preparing students for the world of work has grown during the period of this project development. personal development planning has been a quality assurance agency requirement in the uk since 2001 (qaa, 2009a), and the development of careers support is now seen as an essential rather than a peripheral feature of university provision (qaa, 2009b; uk commission for employment and skills, 2009). the above recommendations, alongside strategic health authority funded research related to disabled students entering professional practice (hargreaves et al., 2013; walker et al., 2013), formed the backdrop to the development of the preparation for placement assessment tool (ppa). this tool aims to aid students to prepare for placements, as a conduit to developing the skills and confidence needed in the world of work. in parallel a five year programme, a centre for excellence in teaching and learning awarded by the higher education funding council for england, was coming to a close. it sought to: explore ways which ensured that students from courses in health and social care graduate fully equipped to perform confidently and competently at the start of their professional careers. (assessment and learning in practice settings (alps), 2010) outputs from alps, including research regarding disabled students (dearnley and walker, 2009) and the evaluation of collaboration (hargreaves et al., 2011) provided guidance and structure to the ppa tool. having identified a need for a tool to help students to recognise and manage their personal strengths and limitations, our experience suggested that catering for disabled students as a separate sub group was problematic. in addition, uk legislation in the form of the hargreaves et al. ‘a productive and happy collaboration’ journal of learning development in higher education, issue 7: june 2014 3 equality act (government equalities office, 2010) advocates a policy of inclusivity, moving from making adjustments and exceptions for disabled people, to changing practice to render adjustments unnecessary. thus, rather than developing a tool exclusively aimed at students who had declared a disability, a self-assessment that captured the needs of all students was developed. a budget was provided jointly by alps and the university of huddersfield innovation fund. the timeline from initial ideas to the delivery is outlined in figure one. figure one. timeline for ppa development. apls-cetl university of huddersfield (uoh) universities of huddersfield and bradford 2005 the alps programme was a 5 year cetl including 16 different health and social care professions, 5 universities and education providers across a strategic health authority. artefacts for enhancing assessment and learning, and methods of working – particularly collaboration – were developed and evaluated 2006 uoh allocated teaching quality enhancement funding to a bid exploring the transitions of disabled students into higher education. this evaluation highlighted the needs of students entering higher education 2007 2008 2009 a successful bid was made to the strategic health authority to jointly research the experience of disabled students and professionals in the nhs. risk assessment for practice placements was identified as a recommendation from the findings the two universities continue to collaborate but have developed solutions specific to their individual systems 2010 uoh successfully gained alps funding to lead one of several follow on networks. focusing on developing outcomes from the alps programme, the network explored ways to enhance students' self-assessment of their preparedness and confidence for practice. 2011 the uoh team gained additional internal innovation funding to develop a preparation for placement self-assessment tool for all students, regardless of discipline or disability (ppa). 2012 ppa was developed and tested and is available online: http://ppa.hud.ac.uk/ 2013 http://ppa.hud.ac.uk/ hargreaves et al. ‘a productive and happy collaboration’ journal of learning development in higher education, issue 7: june 2014 4 project design and delivery a highly collaborative methodology was used to develop the tool which involved creating a group, initially of over 30 people. this included members of academic staff and educational technologists; colleagues and students with disability and professional practice expertise, and student collaborators recruited from across the university via the ‘jobshop’. ethical approval was sought and given from the university of huddersfield ethics panel. at this stage, evaluation just focused on the development process (not the effectiveness of the tool). this included feedback from a national seminar, the scrutiny of usage data from the self-assessment tool, and reflective data from those involved with the project. the project was initiated though a series of workshops where the students involved began to identify the questions that they felt would have helped them to prepare for the placements they had experienced. from this a prototype questionnaire began to emerge that the learning technologist (two of whom were also undergraduate students on yearlong sandwich placements) could develop into a software solution. the tool asks users a series of questions regarding their preparedness for practice which they rate. feedback is then generated including a swot analysis derived from the scores. a range of resources are included to aid preparation. further information, the tool and its resources can be found at: http://ppa.hud.ac.uk/ around eight months into the project, a national seminar to discuss and disseminate ppa attracted over 80 delegates. they came from a wide range of disciplines and were enthusiastic, helpful and vocal in their evaluation. this aided refinement of the selfassessment and the series of resources that accompany it. these now included advice and guidance on financial support and preparation; understanding placements in a country different from the student’s own culture; advice and guidance for disabled students; and action planning. by july 2012 a full prototype was online and being used. funding allowed for a further 12 month cycle of development so a second phase commenced. this involved reviewing the user interface of the tool; improving the 'back end' of the database to make information retrieval easier; and the continued development of the resources to include an interactive http://ppa.hud.ac.uk/ hargreaves et al. ‘a productive and happy collaboration’ journal of learning development in higher education, issue 7: june 2014 5 game, alternative forms of information delivery, and interviews with disabled students talking about their experiences of placement. as of july 2013 the tool is openly available on the internet as a creative commons development, as well as embedded into university systems at two universities. work is continuing to improve and disseminate the tool and the resources. critical review of the methodology and evaluation of the tool will be reported in 2014/15. impact the experience of working with alps and of earlier project work had convinced the team that projects were enhanced through effective student involvement. despite this knowledge, looking back over the first two years of development, what struck us was the richness of the collaboration and the impact it had, particularly on the student members of the team. figure two offers an illustration of the multiple achievements for the university, external colleagues, disabled people, staff and students. looking inwardly to the project itself, the ways in which the team was constructed affected the outcome. student involvement included those who responded to the jobshop advert and the full-time sandwich year technology students, as well as a staff member and external colleague who were also part time students. they represented a rich cross section of international and home students, disabled and non-disabled, undergraduate, postgraduate, part/full-time, and many subject disciplines. we developed the tool though a series of iterative workshops over a two year period. the aim was to build the tool from the bottom up and from the second workshop onwards all participants began to interact with each other to actively influence and change the direction of the project. for example, a group of students talked about how hard it had been financially; this led to developing a set of questions students should ask themselves about money before they started a placement, and a finance calculator which was subsequently developed into a web application. another group of international students worked with home students to write a guide to working in a different culture. a mixed group of disabled and non-disabled students and staff developed guidance on managing impairment and deciding when to disclose. an international management student argued for and developed a swot hargreaves et al. ‘a productive and happy collaboration’ journal of learning development in higher education, issue 7: june 2014 6 analysis which was subsequently refined following the national seminar, coded into the tool by the technology students, and tested by all. moving the gaze to the people themselves, everyone gained. as might be expected, staff involvement in the project has raised individual profiles and given confidence, but the student achievements are most significant. the students came to the project with a broad range of skills and left having shared these, gaining new abilities and confidence, as well as some financial remuneration. international students improved their spoken and written english; home students gained understanding of different cultures. disabled and nondisabled people talked freely about the talents and impairments that everyone brings to their work. a small number of students continue to be involved, as this fits with their study and other work patterns. key personal achievements for individual students include:  all students honed their communication, group work and presentational skills, enhancing their cv.  seven students chose to use their experience of ppa as a focus for assessed coursework (so far of the undergraduate students, one has gained 2.1 marks and two gained 1 st class marks directly related to ppa, and two have gained 2:1 and 1 st class honours overall). one education student is using evaluation of ppa as an undergraduate final year project, and a computing student has successfully gained fees for a full time masters by research to develop ppa further.  one collaborator’s involvement was part of a personal profile that led to a full-time phd studentship.  another student has used their involvement to gain a full time year-long placement.  several students gained personal confidence following recovery from health problems.  six students travelled to international or national conferences, preparing and presenting materials.  six students have been involved in writing this and other publications.  the technology students gained new skills not just related to software development, but collaboration and communication. they learned to share current expertise with others, developing their own portfolio. hargreaves et al. ‘a productive and happy collaboration’ journal of learning development in higher education, issue 7: june 2014 7 figure two. ppa impact. key factors for success reflecting on the impact, specifically with regard to student achievement, four factors emerge as significant: student power at all stages students have outnumbered staff and been majority stakeholders in the process. at its largest, 30 + students and six staff were active contributors. as the second year focused down, the smaller group of around ten was still weighted 2:1 towards students, with two staff members also students. this meant that there was never a chance that the student voice was lost or tokenistic. it was also a project in which student motivation to engage was unrelated to assessment, supporting orr’s (2010) assertion that a lack of pressure to compete, and no risk of failure, hargreaves et al. ‘a productive and happy collaboration’ journal of learning development in higher education, issue 7: june 2014 8 increased students’ success at collaboration. interestingly, as can be seen from the student achievements above, several students linked their involvement in ppa to assessed coursework. this was their choice, a shrewd decision to utilise something they felt confidence and pride in, but in which the success or failure of the actual tool was not linked to their assessment. methodology we loosely used two approaches to developing the project. firstly cyclic after action learning (park, 1999; stinger, 2013), and secondly incremental and practitioner led (davies et al., 2007). values such as mutual respect, open discussion, skills sharing, and feedback which are embedded in these methods, led to positive feedback. reflecting on the experience, members suggested that it worked ‘exceptionally well’, that they felt ‘proud and lucky’ to be involved and it was a ‘productive and happy’ collaboration. elements of the project echoed vygotsky’s (1978 – reprinted in guavain and cole, 1997, pp.34-41) ‘zones of proximal development’ where individual expertise and confidence rubbed off on others. use of funding with just under £12,000 over a two year period, funding was significant, but not huge. we used it mainly to:  employ students as paid collaborators.  buy time for a former student/ researcher with significant expertise regarding disability.  offer reward and recognition to students through involvement in conference attendance, presentation and writing. funding was stretched further by positioning the project within core work areas such as the technology student placements and coordination for disabled students, which ensured wider commitment and greater resource. earlier work (millard and hargreaves, 2013) suggests that whilst funding is practically desirable, the ways in which it is used symbolically to recognise and respect each contribution is also important. thus the funding hargreaves et al. ‘a productive and happy collaboration’ journal of learning development in higher education, issue 7: june 2014 9 not only paid students for their time, but offered rewards in other ways that validated their involvement. slow burn the ideas that underpin ppa and the collaborative methodology had been developing for several years (see figure one). in addition, through a combination of serendipity, that the alps programme was coming to an end and practical management of the budget at the university, we were able to roll the remaining budget over into a second year. many learning and teaching projects are short, lack lead-in time and have inflexible reporting and budget deadlines. this means that projects may have to complete in a shortened time frame; but we met all report deadlines and then had a second loop of review and development. the more intimate and long term group led not only to a better outcome for the ppa tool, but also to greater student gains in terms of confidence and achievement. a combination of all four factors meant that we could be creative with timescales and stretch the funding to go much further than we had anticipated. conclusion this case study has briefly outlined the use of a collaborative methodology where students were majority stakeholders to develop a self-assessment tool for preparation for placement experience. it is presented in order to highlight what the team believe are the key factors in this success. it remains to be seen if the ppa tool is also successful: reporting on this aspect of evaluation is due later in 2014. acknowledgements this project was made possible by the collective work of nearly 40 people; too many to name. however we would like to acknowledge bev crossland, bilal khan, duane laverick, carrie mitchell, jo mitchell, nancy refai and lizzie walker who were particularly influential, but were not involved in writing this case study. hargreaves et al. ‘a productive and happy collaboration’ journal of learning development in higher education, issue 7: june 2014 10 references alps (2010) about alps. available at: http://www.alps-cetl.ac.uk/alps.html (accessed 10 january 2014). davies, p., hamilton, m. and james, k. (2007) maximising the impact of practitioner research. london: national research and development centre for adult literacy and numeracy. dearnley, c. and walker, s.a. (2009) ‘mobile enabled research’, in vavoula, g. (ed.) researching mobile learning: frameworks, methods and research design. oxford: peter lang, pp. 259-269. government equalities office (2010) equality act. available at: (http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2010/15/contents (accessed: 10 january 2014). hargreaves, j., nkosana-nyawata, i., joynes, v., millard, l. and freeman, r. (2011) strength in numbers? a collaborative approach to innovation in professional education. alps. available at: http://www.alpscetl.ac.uk/documents/strengthinnumbers.pdf (accessed: 10 january 2014). hargreaves, j., dearnley, c., walker, s.a. and walker, l. (2013) ‘the preparation and practice of disabled health care practitioners: exploring the issues’, innovations in education and teaching international, 51(3), pp. 303-314 [online]. available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14703297.2013.778048. (accessed: 10 january 2014). millard , l. and hargreaves, j. (2013) ‘creatively employing funding to support innovation’ innovations in education and teaching international. published online 8 february 2013. available at: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14703297.2012.760775?tab=permissio ns#tabmodule (accessed: 10 january 2014). http://www.alps-cetl.ac.uk/alps.html http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2010/15/contents http://www.alps-cetl.ac.uk/documents/strengthinnumbers.pdf http://www.alps-cetl.ac.uk/documents/strengthinnumbers.pdf http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14703297.2013.778048 http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14703297.2012.760775?tab=permissions#tabmodule http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14703297.2012.760775?tab=permissions#tabmodule hargreaves et al. ‘a productive and happy collaboration’ journal of learning development in higher education, issue 7: june 2014 11 orr, s. (2010) ‘collaborating or fighting for marks? students’ experience of group work assessment in the creative arts’, assessment & evaluation in higher education, 35(3), pp. 301-313. park, p. (1999) ‘people, knowledge and change in participatory research’, management learning, 30(2), pp. 141-157. qaa (2009a) personal development planning: guidance for institutional policy and practice in higher education. 2 nd edn. gloucester: qaa. available at: http://www.qaa.ac.uk/publications/informationandguidance/pages/personaldevelopment-planning-guidance-for-institutional-policy-and-practice-in-highereducation.aspx (accessed: 10 january 2014). qaa (2009b) learning from elir 2003-07: emerging approaches to employability and personal development planning. mansfield: qaa. available at: http://www.qaa.ac.uk/publications/informationandguidance/documents/employabili ty09.pdf (accessed: 10 january 2014). stinger, e.t. (2013) action research. los angeles: sage. uk commission for employment and skills (2009) employability challenge. available at: http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/+/http://www.ukces.org.uk/upload/pdf/em ployabilitychallengefullreport.pdf. (accessed: 10 january 2014). vygotsky, l. (1978) ‘interaction between learning and development’, mind and society, cambridge ma: harvard university press, (pp. 79-91). reprinted in: guavain, m. and cole, m. (1997) readings on the development of children. 2 nd edn. new york: w h freeman and co, pp. 29-36. walker, s., dearnley, c., walker, e and hargreaves, j. (2013) ‘risk, fitness to practice and disabled health care students’, journal of psychological issues in organizational culture, 3(4), pp. 46-59. http://www.qaa.ac.uk/publications/informationandguidance/pages/personal-development-planning-guidance-for-institutional-policy-and-practice-in-higher-education.aspx http://www.qaa.ac.uk/publications/informationandguidance/pages/personal-development-planning-guidance-for-institutional-policy-and-practice-in-higher-education.aspx http://www.qaa.ac.uk/publications/informationandguidance/pages/personal-development-planning-guidance-for-institutional-policy-and-practice-in-higher-education.aspx http://www.qaa.ac.uk/publications/informationandguidance/documents/employability09.pdf http://www.qaa.ac.uk/publications/informationandguidance/documents/employability09.pdf http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/+/http:/www.ukces.org.uk/upload/pdf/employabilitychallengefullreport.pdf http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/+/http:/www.ukces.org.uk/upload/pdf/employabilitychallengefullreport.pdf hargreaves et al. ‘a productive and happy collaboration’ journal of learning development in higher education, issue 7: june 2014 12 author details janet hargreaves is associate dean for the school of human and health sciences at the university of huddersfield, and hea national teaching fellow. sue bond is a final year student at the university of huddersfield, studying for an honours degree in education paul dagg is learning technology advisor for the school of human and health sciences at the university of huddersfield, and is just completing his masters degree in multimedia education. benji dawson is in the final year of an honours degree in interactive multimedia at the university of huddersfield, having successfully completed a placement year in the school of human and health sciences. blake kendrick is in the final year of an honours degree in computing and engineering at the university of huddersfield, having successfully completed a placement year in the school of human and health sciences. mark potter is in the placement year of an honours degree in accountancy and finance at the university of huddersfield. literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 11: april 2017 student as researcher: rethinking how to make research methods interesting for students alison rodriguez university of leeds, uk sarah jane daly university of huddersfield, uk abstract this project aimed to enable students to appreciate the technical and epistemological nuances of different phenomenological approaches. we involved a small group of selfselecting honours level undergraduate students in the plural analysis of focus group data. students reported that this supportive teaching technique, facilitating peer working, resulted in deeper learning. this case study describes the piloting of a collaborative teaching method, engaging students as researchers. the project lasted six months, with monthly meetings from tutors to guide procedure and to support academic discussion. the group had a shared interest and joint cause but as each student also had an individual task of conducting a certain analysis, we did not observe any group member failing to offer full effort and participation. reflections of how this type of teaching could be conducted with larger cohorts are considered and critiqued. keywords: peer learning; students as researchers; collaboration; group work; qualitative research methods. introduction teaching undergraduate qualitative research methods such as interviewing, participant observation and documentary analyses can be challenging (earley, 2014; meyer et al., 2005) and how different methodological approaches can be informed by the research aims/questions can lead to students feeling overwhelmed. using lectures and seminars to http://0-link.springer.com.wam.leeds.ac.uk/article/10.1007%2fs10734-015-9945-z#cr19 rodriguez and daly student as researcher: rethinking how to make research methods interesting for students journal of learning development in higher education, issue 11: april 2017 2 teach research methods is not always conducive to learning or the motivation of students but embedding research methods in applied topics can be fruitful in enhancing their engagement and learning experiences. we are also faced with studies that advocate research-led teaching, so we have the evidence base that tells us that research methods teaching is both relevant and needed for today’s students (jiang and roberts, 2011; zamorksi, 2002). at undergraduate level across human and health science subjects (for example psychology and nursing), students may be introduced to the practical application of a thematic analysis and, through didactic seminars, be taught the key yet basic differences between grounded theory, ethnography, narrative approaches and phenomenology. this method of teaching however, keeps the students at a distance from both the tutor and the empirical material. a number of studies have detailed how many institutions create a close interconnection between research and the programme curricula they deliver. however, usually undergraduate students are placed ‘at arm’s length’ (brew, 2006, p.52) from wider university research. indeed studies have detailed how students feel excluded from direct involvement in research as stakeholders (lindsay et al., 2002; turner et al., 2008) and too often the curriculum is ‘framing learning as the passive acquisition of knowledge’ (baxter magolda, 2008, p.75). prior to this project, a cohort of health psychology students was involved in research looking at the healthy eating perceptions and experiences of students (rodriguez et al., 2014). this work enabled them to appreciate models of behaviour change and to consider relevant outcome measures, as included in the design and conduct of the study. aside from the more quantitative elements of the research design, students were also invited to participate in focus groups and practise the role of facilitator. at the close of this study and teaching on the associated module, a group of students approached us to engage in further learning that could support their final year of studies. their interest, stimulated by participation in the healthy eating project, had encouraged them to read about qualitative research methods. specifically, and aligned to our own methodological preferences as tutors, these students wanted to learn more about the phenomenological paradigm. their questions included: why are there different approaches? do the different approaches produce different findings? why would we adopt one approach over another? whilst we could have referred them to additional reading lists or run an additional seminar, we reflected that what had worked so well in the preceding module was treating the students http://0-link.springer.com.wam.leeds.ac.uk/article/10.1007%2fs10734-015-9945-z#cr13 http://0-link.springer.com.wam.leeds.ac.uk/article/10.1007%2fs10734-015-9945-z#cr31 rodriguez and daly student as researcher: rethinking how to make research methods interesting for students journal of learning development in higher education, issue 11: april 2017 3 as researchers. they learned and their interest was enthused from both doing and the responsibility of doing. the decision then was made to support these students over a summer term, to engage in the plural analysis (an analysis involving a number of different types/methods of analysis) of focus group discussions around healthy eating. the purpose of this small and collaborative peer study group was to: 1. enable the students to appreciate the technical and epistemological nuances of different phenomenological approaches; 2. pilot a collaborative peer support and student as researcher teaching method that could potentially be explored for future mainstream and larger research methods modules; 3. evaluate student learning experiences. methods three focus groups had been conducted and digitally recorded for the purpose of a previous student-based study around healthy eating. this project was approved by the academic school ethical panel and included ethical clearance for students to be involved in the data collection and analyses of both the quantitative and qualitative elements of this project. the data collection was conducted across three participating campuses. five honours level students agreed to participate in a peer study support group to analyse the transcription of one of the focus group discussions that they had not been involved in as either participant or facilitator. at our first meeting we explored their interest in the topic under study and the methodology of phenomenology, as well as the phenomenological literature and their existing levels of understanding. each student was then assigned a different phenomenological approach, provided with a directed reading list and encouraged to start reading and, if confident, start analysing. the different approaches were interpretative phenomenological analysis ipa (smith et al., 2009), the human science approach of van manen (2001), the critical narrative approach of langdridge (2008), the descriptive phenomenological approach of colaitzzi (1978, cited sanders, 2003), and the analytic procedure of braune and clarke (2006) which considers interpretive phenomenology more broadly. rodriguez and daly student as researcher: rethinking how to make research methods interesting for students journal of learning development in higher education, issue 11: april 2017 4 we arranged six further meetings across a six month period, mindful that this activity was extracurricular to the other study commitments of these students. we had an open agenda but always updated on progress, what was going well, what was interesting, and students were encouraged to voice difficulties, queries and questions. we noted observations, for example, obstacles and key learning evidences, following each meeting. these notes and added electronic member testimonies were later used to reflect on the success of the project. students were also aware that they could seek peer support from each other in between meetings and could contact us as tutors for extra support and guidance. at the end of the six month period we reflected on the quality of the analyses and the learning activity. a number of other authors have promoted moving away from traditional teaching methods in order to be more student-centred (rust et al., 2005), which encourages students to explore and construct their own meanings, contextualising prior knowledge and being more active in their learning (herman, 1995). the current teaching style aimed to put the responsibility of learning on the student, hopefully making them more invested in their studies and leading to a greater depth of knowledge. outcomes involving students in ‘real world’ data collection and analysis can help them to understand methodological purpose and indeed motivate their interest for research (smyth et al., 2016). it is thought that few students enter into a human or health science course because their motivation has been research methods and so it is our challenge as lecturers to engage students as researchers themselves (earley, 2014). the promotion of the socratic or student-centred approach to teaching is often cited as a good quality indicator (herman, 1995). student requests to learn outside of the module space is not commonplace but we responded with interest to explore how we may better engage students in learning, especially in the qualitative research methods context. each student clearly articulated a rationale for their given approach, a methodological procedure, and set of themes. the degree to which there was movement away from the given data (interpretation) seemed to be dictated by the chosen methodological approach and confidence the student had in http://0-link.springer.com.wam.leeds.ac.uk/article/10.1007%2fs10734-015-9945-z#cr24 http://0-link.springer.com.wam.leeds.ac.uk/article/10.1007%2fs10734-015-9945-z#cr10 rodriguez and daly student as researcher: rethinking how to make research methods interesting for students journal of learning development in higher education, issue 11: april 2017 5 being able to engage in a level of reflexivity. irrespective of methodological approach, the students agreed on shared thematic areas and their analyses were found to be contributory or add to debate around the more cultural issues of healthy eating in a student population. a layered and critical plural analysis (a combined and multiple phenomenological analysis) was achieved, something that prior to this learning activity, we would have not considered possible in our larger teaching sessions. at the close of this exercise, the students could broadly articulate how phenomenological philosophy has developed over time with existentialist, hermeneutic and, more recently, narrative implications (langdridge, 2007). they discussed that in order to apply a phenomenological approach in practice, it is important to have a grasp of its underpinning philosophy. they noted that, as active researchers, we have available to us methods informed by theories of understanding and interpretation. however, a phenomenological method never provides us with a direct recipe and it is through reading and understanding the philosophical foundations of an approach that we can then ‘start to join up the dots to make a picture’, or in other words take steps to achieve a relevant analysis. in class, the students claimed that this is hard to assimilate but through practice it can be appreciated. there is a need for creativity and reflexivity in conjunction with any chosen approach (stige et al., 2009). arguably this should also extend to the ways in which we consider our teaching of these very complex methodological traditions/processes. students desire to be active learners; we therefore need to provide the best ways to support this. the students commented that this way of working had made them ‘feel like university students’, independently learning yet still appreciating the advice and expertise of their tutors. in other areas of the curriculum they discussed how they ‘needed to only revise facts, models or theories’ and ‘the lack of application of this knowledge struggled to engage them’ and arguably ‘did not move them much forward beyond pre university styles of teaching and learning’. this group of students benefited also in terms of how this allied learning could support them in their dissertation studies and their ambition for postgraduate study. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/pmc3627202/#r80 rodriguez and daly student as researcher: rethinking how to make research methods interesting for students journal of learning development in higher education, issue 11: april 2017 6 concluding reflections reports on student experience often highlight the lack of a full understanding and exposure to the research process and there is also a lack of agreement among students regarding the expectations and requirements implicit in undertaking research (meyer et al., 2005). despite their crucial importance for students’ professional development and academic training, these skills are often not established. the findings of this small project are therefore illuminating. the learning activity was deemed to be worthwhile, both in terms of the analyses produced and the reported enriching learning experience. through peer support and the informal but structured monthly meetings, students felt able to appreciate the science and philosophy of qualitative research methods. their wider reading had led them to understand epistemology and ontology. they had learned to appreciate the work and opinion of others in the group and, as such, had not just learned from reading and doing, but had also learned from each other. their dual yet different pursuits with the same data had prevented any level of over-reliance on other group members to conduct the majority of the work and it had inspired them to consequently consider the formation of a reading group or journal club for the remainder of their studies. they reported enjoying the process of active and peer learning. this activity was serendipitous and proved to be a useful learning technique that we will apply to other (and larger) modules in the future. its major limitation is the fact that it was a small self-selected group of students who volunteered for extra-curricular study. its success could be more strategically evaluated by including a greater number of students in this type of working and by conducting a more structured evaluation and analysis of student experience. to teach students electronically/remotely is an option that this type of learning activity could easily be combined with. students could share data and discuss their analytic reading, approaches and progress via closed social media group applications that could be monitored by tutors. replacing formal lectures with group tutor time to monitor learning and understanding may be a more fruitful teaching and learning experience for all. individual group skype meetings could be orchestrated for this purpose. assessment could then be in the form of a group analysis feedback presentation to the full cohort. if http://0-link.springer.com.wam.leeds.ac.uk/article/10.1007%2fs10734-015-9945-z#cr19 rodriguez and daly student as researcher: rethinking how to make research methods interesting for students journal of learning development in higher education, issue 11: april 2017 7 different groups were engaging in looking at different qualitative methods, it would then also be an opportunity for further peer learning. what appears to be important for this kind of task to work is students each having their own analysis to conduct and for them to be working with data they have some investment in – here they were involved in the design of the related study, where the data was relevant to their subject or practice interests. different students have different levels of motivation. working on the same data set encouraged group support and needing to conduct one’s own analysis encouraged independent working. to then need to reflect on one’s own findings and the groups’ working for formal assessment, would perhaps prove to be a further source of learning encouragement. however, this is something that would need to be trialled and evaluated. phenomenologically speaking, it is our willingness to step back and let things speak to us, it is a matter of us allowing a passive receptivity to let the things of the world present themselves in their own terms that will encourage our teaching development (van manen and shuying, 2002). references baxter magolda, m.b. (2008) ‘self-authorship as the common goal of 21st century education’, in baxter magolda, m.b. and kings, p.m. (eds.) learning partnerships: theory and models of practice to educate for self-authorship. sterling, virginia: stylus publishing, pp. 1-35. braune, v. and clarke, v. (2006) ‘using thematic analysis in psychology’, qualitative research in psychology, 3(2), pp. 77-101. brew, a. (2006) research and teaching: beyond the divide. london: palgrave macmillan. earley, m.a. (2014) ‘a synthesis of the literature on research methods education’, teaching in higher education, 19(3), pp. 242-253. rodriguez and daly student as researcher: rethinking how to make research methods interesting for students journal of learning development in higher education, issue 11: april 2017 8 herman, w.e. (1995) ‘humanistic influences on a constructivist approach to teaching and learning’, annual meeting if the american educational research association. san francisco, ca 18-22 april. jiang, f. and roberts, p.j. (2011) ‘an investigation of the impact of research-led education on student learning and understandings of research’, journal of university teaching and learning practice, 8(2), article 4. langdridge, d. (2007) phenomenological psychology. theory, research and method. harlow: pearson education limited. langdridge, d. (2008) ‘phenomenology and critical social psychology: directions and debates in theory and research’, social and personality psychology compass, 2(3), pp. 1126-1142. lindsay, r., breen, r. and jenkins, a. (2002) ‘academic research and teaching quality: the views of undergraduate and postgraduate students’, studies in higher education, 27(3), pp. 309-327. meyer, j.h.f., shanahan, m.p. and laugksch, r.c. (2005) ‘students’ conceptions of research. i: a qualitative and quantitative analysis’, scandinavian journal of educational research, 49(3), pp. 225-244. rodriguez, a., kola-palmer, s., fry, a., postlethwaite, r., dlamini, t. and dire, k. (2014) ‘authentic research and dissemination in health psychology; building a community of practice and student self-efficacy’, annual teaching and learning conference: putting the strategy into practise. university of huddersfield, huddersfield 23 june. rust, c., o’donovan, b. and price, m. (2005) ‘a social constructivist assessment process model: how the research literature shows us this could be best practice’, assessment & evaluation in higher education, 30(3), pp. 231-240. sanders, c. (2003) ‘application of colaizzi's method: interpretation of an auditable decision trail by a novice researcher’, contemporary nurse journal, 14(3), pp. 292302. rodriguez and daly student as researcher: rethinking how to make research methods interesting for students journal of learning development in higher education, issue 11: april 2017 9 smith, j., flowers, p. and larkin, m. (2009) ipa: theory, method and research. london: sage. smyth, l., davilla, f., sloan, t., rykers, e., backwell, s. and jones, s.b. (2016) ‘how science really works: the student experience of research-led education’, higher education, 72(2), pp. 411-427. stige, b., malterud, k. and midtgarden, t. (2009) ‘toward an agenda for evaluation of qualitative research’, qualitative health research, 19(10), pp. 1504-1516. turner, n., wuetherick, b. and healey, m. (2008) ‘international perspectives on student perceptions of research: the role of academic development in implementing research-based teaching and learning in higher education’, international journal of academic development, 13(3), pp. 161-173. van manen, m. (2001) ‘professional practice and ‘doing phenomenology’’, in toombs, s.k. (ed.) handbook of phenomenology and medicine. netherlands: springer, pp. 457474. van manen, m. and shuying, l. (2002) ‘the pathic principle of pedagogical language’, teaching and teacher education, 18(2), pp. 215-224. zamorksi, b. (2002) ‘research-led teaching and learning in higher education: a case’, teaching in higher education, 7(4), pp. 411-427. author details alison rodriguez currently works in the department of health care, a member of the children's nursing team, faculty of medicine at the university of leeds. alison predominantly teaches qualitative and quantitative research methods, and child and health psychology. her research focuses on psycho-spiritual needs and palliative care. sarah jane daly currently works in the department of behavioural and social sciences, a member of the division of psychology, school of human and health sciences at the rodriguez and daly student as researcher: rethinking how to make research methods interesting for students journal of learning development in higher education, issue 11: april 2017 10 university of huddersfield. sarah jane predominantly teaches qualitative research methods and social psychology. her research focuses on female bisexual identity and monogamy. student as researcher: rethinking how to make research methods interesting for students abstract introduction methods outcomes concluding reflections references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 10: november 2016 extended science: a powerful tool in widening participation david j harwood university of plymouth, uk abstract year zero courses, as part of extended degree programmes, offer a robust and efficacious means of increasing participation in science and other areas of the university curriculum where graduate shortages have been identified, stem subjects for example. this 23-year longitudinal study investigates the efficacy of this approach at one university and identifies the features which contribute to its success and may be transferable to other institutions and models. quantitative and qualitative data are analysed and discussed. a particular feature of this approach is success in attracting, retaining and graduating mature returners as well as those with no prior familial history of participation in higher education. the critical importance of establishing a higher education learning culture also emerges. keywords: year zero; extended degree; mature returner; widening access. introduction since 1990, the student population in uk universities has changed considerably. more mature students than ever before have taken advantage of alternative routes into higher education, which emerged from initiatives both within the sector and in tertiary education (fe). the challenges facing students from diverse educational backgrounds in making a successful transition to university life are well documented (martinez and munday 1998; fisher and hood, 1987) as well as the economic consequences of universities and colleges failing to facilitate this transition (yorke, 2000). although there has been a great deal of progress in the admission of ethnic minorities, mature adults and women, particularly in science, there remains work to be done in increasing the participation of lower socio-economic groups in higher education (tight, 2012). the development of foundation programmes within universities, or “stage zeros”, has contributed strongly to harwood extended science: a powerful tool in widening participation journal of learning development in higher education, issue 10: november 2016 3 this increased uptake as well as playing a pivotal role in the widening participation (wp) agenda (de rennes, 1999). wp will be increasingly important in view of the tuition fee structure in the united kingdom, where institutions who wish to charge the full amount will have to demonstrate not only effective action but also positive results in widening participation. there remain considerable challenges in reaching lower socio-economic groups and families without prior experience of higher education. further, the financial outlay and increased risk for students taking this route needs to be justified, not least to prospective applicants (chipperfield, s., 2012). extended science at the university of plymouth was piloted in 1990 and has continued successfully ever since. expansion in recent years has been unprecedented and appears to have been unaffected by tuition fee increases, which was unexpected. it has also been demonstrated here, and at many other institutions, that the admission of students with non-standard qualifications to universities does not result in a lowering of academic standards (keane, 2011); in fact, the opposite may be demonstrated. this purpose of this paper is to document developments in curriculum design, the provision of appropriate student support and the development of students in their university academic studies. hence, to disseminate what is believed to be best practice. the importance not only of curriculum design but also of a logical approach to the teaching of science, taking into account the psychology of learning is well expressed by johnstone (2000), taking the example of chemistry. students find the physical sciences particularly difficult because of the need to embrace new concepts and build a sound understanding of a world they cannot physically see but must imagine, by building appropriate analogous models or pictures. it is also notable that this subject area has remained for the most part the preserve of white, traditional age students, predominantly from professional and managerial backgrounds (smith and white, 2011). hence, support for learning plays a critical role in confidence building and learner development. further, it is necessary to understand the aims and aspirations of mature students in particular who have little or no recent educational experience and often no familial background in higher education (laing et al., 2005). foster et al. (2012) identified confidence in the ability to learn and study as a key feature in student retention in a recent higher education academy study. the efficacy of our approach may be demonstrated by objectively measuring student performance and progression. with over 22 years of data to call upon, there is strong harwood extended science: a powerful tool in widening participation journal of learning development in higher education, issue 10: november 2016 4 statistical evidence of the vitality and fitness for purpose of year zeros in effectively widening participation in university education. changes to the university fees structure have increased the need to demonstrate value for money, as well as meeting the major challenge of maintaining graduate supply in areas of perceived shortage, such as the stem subjects. in parallel, over the same time period, access to higher education courses in further education colleges developed. these too played an important role in widening access (harwood and harwood, 2004) and have been particularly successful when developed in close partnership with local higher education institutions. the university of plymouth higher education learning partnership cetl was a good example of this, which also benefitted from close collaboration with the open college network. further, there have been continual new developments in secondary education: baccalaureates; advanced gnvqs; avces and level 3 diplomas (wellings et al., 2010). although having more applied and vocational foci respectively than traditional ‘a’ levels, these qualifications are increasingly recognised, valued and accepted by university admissions tutors and can be suitable for direct entry to degree programmes. post-16 educational routes are likely to continue to diversify. the introduction of foundation degree programmes, a logical extension of the more vocational post-gcse developments, is illustrative of this. where these courses and pathways are unsuitable for direct entry to honours degree programmes in the sciences and elsewhere, the year zero, forming part of extended degree programmes at university is well placed to fill the “knowledge and skills gap”. university teachers have been singularly adept at developing stage one programmes and courses to meet the needs of an increasingly diverse student body (ellis and allan, 2008) but the limitations posed by a three-year degree programme and the need to maintain high academic standards have made it necessary to consider how best to adapt student support measures and procedures to adjust to these changes. in the first decade of this study, hefce data indicated that although participation rates in higher education had increased from approximately 15 to 30%, the non-completion rate increased marginally from 14 to 18%. the fact that retention rates have continued to improve across the sector, with current participation rates around 44% is testimony to the success of these developments. the emphasis on transition is justified because the vast majority of nonharwood extended science: a powerful tool in widening participation journal of learning development in higher education, issue 10: november 2016 5 completion manifested as withdrawal during the first year of university study (yorke, 1999). there was considerable emphasis in the early days on the updating of key graduate attributes and skills. however, this was essentially a deficiency model based approach (wingate, 2007) and carried with it the danger of remedying only those problems which were overt and filling gaps. a more holistic approach was warranted with support for learning which builds confidence in an individual, together with encouragement for the student to take increasing responsibility for their own learning; in short, a developmental model for learning. when considering graduation from university, previous academic attainment is a useful predictor but also important are factors such as integration and selfefficacy (mckenzie and schweitzer, 2010). where the majority of students lack recent experience of the subject and/or educational achievement, student development in terms of confidence as well as competence is fundamental (smith and naylor, 2001). classes in which students feel comfortable and are encouraged to ask questions in a supportive environment are also important. (gasiewski et al., 2012). year zero programmes are now delivered by more than 55 higher education institutions and allow university degrees to be accessible to a much wider range of students than was previously possible. this is not essentially a new idea and has been used by the open university since its early days (taylor, 1981). however, it was not until the early 1990s that large-scale experimentation was carried out at campus based universities. many of these foundered on the flawed idea that such educational activities were best delegated to the further education sector, where level three teaching is common (facilitated by partner college networks). however, this model inadvertently encountered significant cultural transition-related learning difficulties, which meant that successful progression at university was lower than expected, especially in comparison with direct ‘a’ level entrants. learning culture is not simply the curriculum, course or learning environment but rather the cultural practice of learning (james, 2001). hence, to engender a higher education learning culture in an institution whose primary focus is not higher education is challenging. moreover, as many institutions have discovered, students wish, wherever possible, to come to university in order to begin their he studies and overwhelmingly choose the university campus version rather than the partner college alternative. in the period 2007-2012, for example, 25 out of 27 students living roughly equidistant from a partner college and the university campus elected to take the university based option. harwood extended science: a powerful tool in widening participation journal of learning development in higher education, issue 10: november 2016 6 the status of being a university student appears to be a key factor here based on student surveys. local provision is important for those for whom the step of direct entry to university is too great. this is very well addressed by the provision of access to higher education courses, being part-time and often flexibly delivered. however, even with the status of university students, although not actually on campus, there are still residual issues around identity as well as transition and this appears to be why study on-campus is widely preferred by students. year zero provision has contributed very significantly to widening participation in a number of institutions. there has also been considerable success with year zero courses internationally (mabila, 2006). they continue to expand and are likely to continue to be important, if not key, in many wp strategies. it is therefore of considerable value to understand as precisely as possible how successful progression has been consistently achieved in a one-year programme where practically no prior knowledge of science is required or assumed. further, the subsequent performance of these students needs to be compared with that of their direct entry peers taking the same courses so as to ensure that progression in the two cohorts is comparable. the model of student support is also explained and it is hoped that such dissemination will contribute to the continuing success of this mode of entry into higher education, particularly in subject areas such as stem where there is an ongoing shortfall of graduates. methodology two sources of student data were available for interrogation: the university student records system (unit e) and course spreadsheets for each year (stored securely). the latter contained most detail, including marks for individual pieces of coursework. data from these spreadsheets were transferred to microsoft access and anonymised using student registration numbers as identifiers in order to allow tracking of progression through subsequent stages of study and graduation. post-university progression data was also included, where known. the data was verified and “cleaned” by comparison with the university student record system. this was a time-consuming task, because internal changes of course necessitated individual tracking, but necessary as it allowed, for harwood extended science: a powerful tool in widening participation journal of learning development in higher education, issue 10: november 2016 7 example, subject transfers, years out and reasons for non-progression to be discovered. quantitative data on progression was then compiled, comparing marks gained at year zero with progression and degree classification obtained. mature and non-mature student data was compared. once the subject mix of stage zero had been determined, it was then possible to normalise data for direct entry students in order to make direct comparisons of performance on a subject basis. details of this are beyond the scope of this paper but the normalised data was able to provide a valid control for this study. the main research questions were:  does the extended year adequately prepare non-standard students for their subsequent undergraduate studies?  how do extended degree students compare with their direct entry peers in terms of progression and results at graduation?  what systems of support and teaching methodologies can be identified which facilitate student progression and could be applied to later stages (stage one for example) and more widely across the sector? the first two questions could be adequately answered from analysis of the databases alone but the latter required additional evidence. this was gathered using semi-structured interviews with former stage zero students both after graduation and during their undergraduate studies. anonymity was guaranteed and standard ethical procedures were followed. as a result of these interviews, some students volunteered to tell their stories to camera and appear on the national life pilot web site (www.lifepilot.ac.uk developed by western vocational progression consortium) as an inspiration to others. the interviews were transcribed and the transcriptions anonymised before textual analysis with nvivo software, which allowed words as well as phrases to be searched and quantified in context, in order to ensure that meaning was not misconstrued. in the following sections it seems logical to present results and discuss them in the narrative rather than separate the two. http://www.lifepilot.ac.uk/ harwood extended science: a powerful tool in widening participation journal of learning development in higher education, issue 10: november 2016 8 the extended science programme this programme was developed in 1990 as a means of realising the aspirations of an increasing number of non-standard ‘a’ level applicants for degree programmes in science, focussing on the needs of mature student entrants who have continued to apply in increasing numbers. students may have appropriate qualifications in science but these have typically been gained sometime in the past. most frequently, however, mature applicants have little or no formal educational qualifications, post-gcse or ‘o’ level. nevertheless, many have considerable intelligence, aptitude and the ability to succeed in higher education. given the right grounding and the necessary confidence in their abilities they do well. a 22-year longitudinal study has shown progression rates from year zero to graduate status to be in excess of 92% among students aged 21 years or over (table 1). mature students rapidly became the majority of the cohort which had positive effects on work ethic and motivation for all students on the course and, given their excellent progression rates, this may be regarded as a significant contributor to its success. it is apparent the proportion of mature students has declined recently and progression rates have declined significantly (as a result of numerical expansion of the course). however, the pass rate has remained consistent, so it may be concluded that younger students are more likely to move institutions than their older counterparts for various reasons, not least familial and cultural ties. approximately one third of the cohort is typically between 18 and 20 years of age. these students were admitted only with post-gcse qualifications; normally but not exclusively ‘a’ levels, with grades which may be high enough for university entrance but in different subjects than usual for the degree concerned. some had appropriate subject combinations but without the grades demanded. for this younger fraction of the cohort, progression rates were comparable with those for stage one of science degrees, around 83%. in recent years this has improved to 87%, the mean for 2008-2011 for this fraction of the cohort. taken as a whole, the 22-year mean progression rate for the extended science course was 86.5%. this figure alone would be meaningless if subsequent undergraduate performance failed to match that of direct entry students. however, the data demonstrates that former extended science students not only performed as well as their direct entry peers but tended to fare better in terms of degree classifications with a statistically significant increase in upper seconds obtained in most subject areas (table 3: overall harwood extended science: a powerful tool in widening participation journal of learning development in higher education, issue 10: november 2016 9 38.34% from extended science compared to 36.3% from the faculty, matched by subject, p=0.0347 using a standard t test). drop-out rates at stages one and two are also significantly lower. student feedback (whole cohort, using optically read forms) and semistructured interviews (conducted with 50 randomly selected former extended science students from the 2005 – 2010 cohorts) strongly suggest that this may be attributed to increased time at university, becoming more immersed in the learning culture; the oneyear advantage given by the extended degree. in order to address the needs of the various types of student on the programme, the extended science curriculum was developed around a knowledge base which addresses the fundamentals of biology, chemistry and physics, together with increased learning and study support compared with the norm for stage one. this increased support was focussed on the first (autumn) term with support in the spring term similar to that of stage one students. timetabled tutorials were used in some subjects, mathematics for example. in the sciences, laboratory classes were designed to relieve time pressure (often an unhelpful feature of undergraduate laboratory classes) as well as to allow for informal tutorial and workshop activities. experiments were closely correlated to the curriculum so that new ideas and concepts could be effectively reinforced and misconceptions addressed. particular attention was paid to two areas defined by meyer and land (2006): 1. threshold concepts; concepts which assist students in grasping and understanding difficult core concepts which constitute a significant barrier to further learning. 2. troublesome knowledge: areas of the curriculum which students tend to find difficult. examples from chemistry would be stereochemistry and chemical equilibria. in this way it has proved possible to prepare students well for study at degree level without assuming any prior knowledge of science, in a single year. the success of the programme in achieving this ambitious aim has been demonstrated by the progression record of extended science students both within science as well as degree programmes in other faculties. the number of progression routes has continued to increase across the university as more degree programmes show interest: further testimony to the continued success of the harwood extended science: a powerful tool in widening participation journal of learning development in higher education, issue 10: november 2016 10 programme. it is interesting that as well as science-based degrees, a small number of students have also progressed to social science and humanities degrees. measurement of progression progression may be measured in several ways as illustrated below. an adequate control is required and for this purpose a peer-group comparison was made with standard ‘a’ level, gnvq or access to higher education entrants: 1. progression from the extended year to stage one. 2. progression from stage one to stage two. 3. degree classification on graduation. 4. progression to post graduate study. at the outset, (1) was of the greatest concern and regarded as the crucial test of the programme’s “fitness for purpose”. however, (2) is also critical as it is the one of the best ways to validate (1). the situation is complicated by increasing numbers of non-standard entrants to university courses year on year and in that sense the “control” must be regarded as fluid. nevertheless, the comparison is valid because these entry routes are deemed by admissions tutors to be appropriate and their efficacy has been closely monitored over a considerable period of time. many teaching staff in higher education are convinced that ‘a’ level is not the best preparation for a degree programme. however, the vast majority of admissions tutors in the h.e. sector use ‘a’ level point scores as their main admissions criterion and are reluctant to ‘experiment’ with non-standard entrants because of the absence of significant alternatives. however, the experience of those courses with year zero students progressing into stage one is overwhelmingly positive and the establishment of a foundation year network (www.foundationyear.ac.uk) with an annual conference is increasing the profile of similar courses. it was felt important to include post graduate study (4) not least because extended degree students may suffer a financial disadvantage; the extra year’s student loan debt being a significant discouragement for some graduates. furthermore, if a student goes on to complete a programme such as mchem or mgeol, this would take a total of five years and harwood extended science: a powerful tool in widening participation journal of learning development in higher education, issue 10: november 2016 11 may be a powerful financial disincentive. there may also be an increased tendency to spend too much time in part-time working, to the detriment of academic achievement (robotham, 2012). the cohorts were surveyed from september 1990 entry, the pilot year, to september 2010 and successful progression from stage zero to stage one calculated as a percentage of the whole group of engaged students (corrected for withdrawn students). table 1. progression in bsc extended science from stage zero to stage one. year of entry total recruited pass to degree credits awarded failed withdrew 1990 34 32 2 0 0 1991 73 60 10 0 3 1992 92 73 4 3 12 1993 118 95 4 2 17 1994 139 112 15 2 10 1995 160 117 16 14 23 1996 163 118 4 18 23 1997 168 132 13 12 11 1998 161 114 20 13 15 1999 158 127 10 7 14 2000 118 97 4 14 5 2001 117 77 15 10 15 2002 148 108 5 12 23 2003 138 104 10 18 6 2004 123 83 14 14 12 2005 146 96 10 16 22 2006 118 86 11 12 9 2007 102 80 6 5 11 2008 147 108 17 11 11 2009 153 118 12 17 6 2010 152 122 17 11 2 harwood extended science: a powerful tool in widening participation journal of learning development in higher education, issue 10: november 2016 12 one of the most notable features is that withdrawal and failure rates are very low compared with access to he courses and have been significantly lower than stage one drop-out across science degrees nationally. the mean withdrawal rate was 8% and the mean failure rate only 5%, roughly half of the stage one drop-out rate nationally for the period (hefce). the main reason for this is the considerable effort expended in recruiting mature students to the programme. more detailed analysis revealed that withdrawals and failures came predominantly from 18-20 age-group. these students mostly entered with ‘a’ level grades insufficient to allow direct entry to stage one. it must be concluded therefore that students with more recent post-gcse formal educational experience, find the cultural transition to university study more difficult than their more mature colleagues. whether this is because of changes to the ‘a’ level curriculum is worthy of consideration in the light of studies by the royal society of chemistry, who found, among other things, that breadth of knowledge had increased, very much at the expense of depth. perhaps due to developments in first-year university curricula and student support, drop-out rates for science degrees have not increased but rather improved in recent years, which would appear to counter that assertion. university science curricula could be said to have developed successfully to deal with changes in the academic backgrounds of entrants. student tracking student tracking; the identification of students at risk of failure as early as possible in the year, certainly within the first term, is a vital component of support. laboratory and lecture attendance registers were constantly monitored. laboratory attendance records are precise whereas lecture registers may not be robust for a particular session but nevertheless provide a reliable pattern. students identified from these sources were contacted by email and followed up by letter to see if help was required. in 70% of cases, a positive response was either elicited or the student’s attendance spontaneously returned to acceptable levels. in the other 30% of cases, a follow-up letter was sent to the term-time and home addresses of the student, formally requiring an appointment with their personal tutor to be made within seven days. this resulted in positive replies from the majority together with a positive change in behaviour with or without tutor intervention. a small minority of students formally notified suspension of study, or complete withdrawal, following appropriate discussions. since the programme manager acts as personal tutor for the cohort (because of the wide diversity of degree pathways followed subsequently by students) managing this process with administrative support was relatively straightforward. harwood extended science: a powerful tool in widening participation journal of learning development in higher education, issue 10: november 2016 13 partner colleges and learning culture internal consistency is an important measure of whether partner colleges have been successful in engendering a higher education learning culture. this alone is not enough and progression rates for the latter stages were therefore also monitored. table 2 gives the year zero pass rates for university and partner-college cohorts. table 2. percentage pass rates to degree programmes of extended science students from the university partner college cohorts. year of entry university partner college 1990 94 no cohort 1991 86 77 1992 91 85 1993 94 77 1994 87 85 1995 80 88 1996 84 57 1997 84 85 1998 78 82 1999 88 89 2000 86 87 2001 76 88 2002 86 92 2003 79 69 2004 75 78 2005 77 92 2006 79 no cohort 2007 79 no cohort 2008 81 no cohort 2009 80 72 2010 81 65 note: withdrawn students were not deemed to have fully engaged and are excluded. harwood extended science: a powerful tool in widening participation journal of learning development in higher education, issue 10: november 2016 14 there were no statistically significant differences between the two, either at stage zero or during later stages, although mean pass rates at the colleges tended to be slightly higher. semi-structured interviews with student cohorts and six college staff indicated that they felt smaller group size, i.e. low student-staff ratio, was an advantage. however, partner college students did report lower confidence in their ability to study at university compared with those who had studied on campus (68% confident or very confident as opposed to 85% of the university cohort). these data were collected by on-line questionnaire early in stage one at university, for the 2005 – 2010 cohorts (340 responses). progression records indicate that partner college students did in fact do as well as their university counterparts. subsequent progression as well as measuring progression from stage zero to stage one, it was also necessary to evaluate student progress in later stages of study, since a high pass rate at stage zero would be meaningless if drop-out rates at later stages were higher than normal. students who were admitted prior to 2010 have now graduated, unless they have taken time out or have taken a route via a sub-degree programme only allowing entry to later stages of a university degree. the september 1990 to 2010 entrants were also tracked in terms of the degree classification obtained at graduation (table 3). these students would normally have been expected to graduate between july 1994 and july 2014. a number took an extra year or more for various reasons: the need to have a year out, earning, in order to complete their studies, personal circumstances dictating a necessary break in study and, in a minority of cases, electing to repeat referred modules on a part-time basis. in all, over half of the students (51%) gained at least an upper second class degree. given the entry qualifications and educational background of these students this represents a considerable achievement. 96% of former extended science students gained a higher education qualification, 93.4% of the total gained a degree and 88.4% graduated with honours. table 3. qualifications obtained at graduation. harwood extended science: a powerful tool in widening participation journal of learning development in higher education, issue 10: november 2016 15 year graduated 1st firstclass honours 2:1 secondclass honours, upper division 2:2 secondclass honours, lower division 3rd thirdclass honours degree  ordinary degree (pass) dip he withdrew 1994 7.5 (2) 41 (11) 29.6 (8) 11.1 (3) 3.3 (1) 3.3 (1) 3.3 (1) 1995 13 (8) 37 (22) 33.3 (20) 10 (6) 3.3 (2) 3.3 (2) 0 1996 15.3 (9) 37.3 (22) 40.7 (24) 0 0 1.6 (1) 5 (3) 1997 13 (12) 33.7 (31) 32 (29) 1 (1) 3.2 (3) 4.3 (4) 13 (12) 1998 15.2 (17) 34 (38) 33 (37) 3.6 (4) 3.6 (4) 2.7 (3) 8 (9) 1999 15.4 (18) 34.2 (40) 33 (39) 2.6 (3) 3.4 (4) 3.4 (4) 7.6 (9) 2000 14.3 (9) 31.7 (20) 39.7 (25) 3.1 (2) 6.3 (4) 4.8 (3) 0 2001 4.8 (3) 49.2 (31) 30.2 (19) 1.6 (1) 7.9 (5) 3.2 (2) 1.6 (1) 2002 10.7 (6) 51.8 (29) 30.4 (17) 3.6 (2) 3.6 (2) 0 0 2003 11 (14) 32.3 (42) 32.3 (41) 5.5 (7) 7.1 (9) 3.9 (9) 3.9 (5) 2004 10.5 (12) 38.6 (44) 35.1 (40) 5.3 (6) 3.5 (4) 1.8 (2) 5.3 (6) 2005 16.1 (14) 41.4 (36) 25.3 (22) 4.6 (4) 2.3 (2) 3.4 (3) 6.8 (6) 2006 21.4 (18) 31 (26) 28.6 (24) 6 (5) 8.3 (7) 4.7 (4) 0 2007 18.6 (11) 33.9 (20) 23.7 (14) 1.7 (1) 18.6 (11) 1.7 (1) 1.7 (1) 2008 15 (9) 48.3 (29) 28.8 (17) 3.4 (2) 1.7 (1) 1.7 (1) 0 2009 14.3 (12) 31 (26) 36.9 (31) 9.5 (8) 3.6 (3) 0 4.8 (4) 2010 13.5 (10) 32.4 (24) 39.2 (29) 2.7 (2) 5.4 (4) 0 6.7 (5) mean % 13.51 37.58 32.46 4.43 5.01 2.58 3.98 standard deviation 3.9 6.65 4.79 3.19 4.13 1.58 3.71 (percentages with numbers in brackets) harwood extended science: a powerful tool in widening participation journal of learning development in higher education, issue 10: november 2016 16 stage one withdrawal rates as mentioned previously, the progression of students from stage one to stage two was regarded as a critical test of the stage zero in terms of preparation for degree level study. the withdrawals (right hand column above) were found to be generally less than ten percent of the number passing to degree and most frequently under 5% of the cohort. this is most satisfactory in that it is well below the withdrawal rate from stage one of any of the degree programmes open to extended students and tends to support the students’ perception of the advantages of the extra year. as expected, the majority of withdrawals took place at the end of stage one. of the 34 students withdrawing from the first six cohorts, 31 of these withdrew at the end of stage one. this figure includes those who took a year out to earn money and intended to return. it has not proved possible to track enough of these students to date so that the figures are presented simply as withdrawals, although a significant number have returned and completed their studies so that the true withdrawal rate is lower than the 3.98% indicated. postgraduate study as would be expected from the first class and upper second honours graduates (more than half of the students), a good number have gone on to post graduate study. to date 62 students are known to have successfully completed phd, masters, or postgraduate diploma (including pgce) qualifications. since these qualifications take between one and three years to complete and the degree classification required for entry to the various postgraduate programmes is variable, it is not possible to calculate exactly the size of the pool from which these students are drawn. many students take postgraduate degrees at different institutions and only of a fraction of these are known so that the true figure is certain to be higher. this does however demonstrate that these students are not academically disadvantaged compared with students from other backgrounds and that the extra year is advantageous. these higher degrees have been taken at a wide variety of institutions, including russell group universities. whilst this does not necessarily indicate an equality of access, it does appear that the extended degree route is no barrier to academic success. comparison with ‘a’ level entrants it is useful to compare the performance of extended science students with those from typical ‘a’ level backgrounds on various degree programmes. since the number of degree harwood extended science: a powerful tool in widening participation journal of learning development in higher education, issue 10: november 2016 17 programmes admitting these students is so large, there are few programmes where a statistically valid analysis of data is possible. this situation will improve as more students graduate. it is, however, possible to analyse degree classifications obtained across the faculty of science and compare this with the performance of bsc extended science students. these figures are presented in table 4 for the first six cohorts. table 4. degree classifications obtained in science (expressed as percentages of the total cohort). year graduated 1st first-class honours 2:1 secondclass honours, upper division 2:2 secondclass honours, lower division 3rd third-class honours degree ordinary degree (pass) 1994 7 (5) 41 (41) 30 (44) 11 (4) 7 (6) 1995 13 (9) 37 (35) 33 (50) 10 (2) 7 (5) 1996 15 (7) 37 (34) 41 (40) 0 (3) 2 (9) 1997 13 (3) 34 (40) 32 (50) 1 (2) 8 (6) 1998 15 (8) 34 (35) 33 (41) 4 (5) 6 (8) 1999 15 (9) 34 (32) 33 (40) 3 (5) 7 (8) mean 13 (6.83) 36.17 (36.17) 33.67 (44.17) 4.83 (3.5) 6.17 (7) standard deviation 3.1 (2.4) 2.79 (3.54) 3.78 (4.75) 4.62 (1.38) 2.14 (1.55) notes: percentage pass for the whole of the faculty of science in brackets the percentages of extended science students obtaining a certain degree classification are remarkably consistent year on year, comparing very favourably with those for the faculty of science as a whole. a significantly higher percentage of firsts were gained by former extended science students (mean 13%) than direct ‘a’ level entrants (mean 6.83%) (p=0.00323) and slightly more upper seconds. fewer lower second class degrees were obtained by these students (33.67% as opposed to 44.14%, p= 0.0163) with thirds and pass degree figures being not significantly different. harwood extended science: a powerful tool in widening participation journal of learning development in higher education, issue 10: november 2016 18 during the last decade (2000 – 2010), the number of firsts gained by faculty of science graduates increased to the extent that the two cohorts were not statistically distinguishable in terms of firsts gained; the extended science firsts have remained broadly constant. in terms of upper seconds though, extended science students performed statistically significantly better during this period (p = 0.0107). the mean classifications obtained by these cohorts are given in table 5 below. table 5. a comparison of degree classifications obtained from 2000-2010 (normalised for subjects studied). degree classification graduates from extended science faculty of science first 11.2% 12.1% upper second 41.5% 36.3% lower second 37.1% 27.5% third 2.9% 3.5% cert he 0.5% 2.2% deg 4.8% 2.2% dip 0.9% 2.0% fail 0.5% 1.0% other 0.5% 12.9% one reason for the improvement in the faculty figures for firsts is believed to be improvements in support for stage one students, a number of which were introduced as a result of lessons learned from stage zero. students have reported in annual feedback questionnaires, feeling more confident in their studies in subsequent stages since student support has improved (specifically increased tutorial time and improved access to personal and academic tutors were mentioned). over the 20 years of graduation covered by this study, bsc extended science students have been more likely than their peers with 'a' levels to obtain at least an upper second class honours degree. at the lower end, third and pass/ordinary degree, there were no statistically significant differences between extended science students and the predominantly 'a' level cohort. harwood extended science: a powerful tool in widening participation journal of learning development in higher education, issue 10: november 2016 19 table 5 gives a summary of the progression and degree classifications obtained by former extended science students from the faculty of science. as a comparison, the results for the faculty as a whole are also given. the data is broken down into the categories published and used by the university in the relevant unit e reports, which form the basis for annual programme monitoring. there are currently around 470 former extended science students on stages one to three of undergraduate programmes. 52.7% of former extended science students graduated with a first or upper second class honours degree between 1993 and 2010, compared with 48.4% from the faculty as a whole. this is statistically significant (p = 0.0167). the faculty figure for “other” represents those students who do not fit into the categories above and includes repeat and completing students. this figure is likely therefore to increase the lower second and below percentages for the faculty when comparing strictly like with like to a greater extent than the higher classifications. of the 2248 students taking extended science, 1997 progressed to programmes run by the faculty of science (89%). factors influencing progression a series of semi-structured interviews were conducted with 56 past students, both graduates and those in stages one to three. these students came from eight different cohorts between the years 1994 to 2009. they suggested that the following factors contributed strongly to the success of the extended science programme:  the extra year at university.  development of teaching and learning skills from stage zero.  motivation to succeed having given up a career.  strong desire to succeed having embarked on a four-year programme.  motivation to grasp the chance to get a degree (linked by the majority to improved employment prospects).  confidence in their ability to study at this level engendered by extended science. harwood extended science: a powerful tool in widening participation journal of learning development in higher education, issue 10: november 2016 20  practice in university examinations. the extended science programme at this university compares favourably with other similar programmes at 55 different institutions but detailed progression data for these programmes was unavailable. none of the four programmes for which we have seen overall figures currently matches the first/upper second class degree attainment. the reason for this is unknown and the sample is too small for meaningful analysis but it could be speculated that since most have come into being only during the past decade, their stage of development is not sufficiently advanced to enable a fair comparison. the longer-lived programmes have progression to degree rates averaging 77% of the cohort (extended science 78 – 85%) but the first/upper second profile is below 50%. generally, programmes which are taught on university campuses by departmental academic staff have been the most successful. programmes franchised to partner colleges at university tend to be either less successful or short lived and certainly less popular in terms of ucas applications. the reasons identified for this lack of success are strongly related to learning culture. it is extremely difficult to generate a university learning culture in a non-university setting. one partner college in cornwall has been partially successful in establishing a separate higher education unit and a second in devon has recently instigated a similar model. however, where honours and foundation degree students work together in the same learning facilities alongside further education students, it is difficult to compare the two groups since they are not truly separate. cross fertilisation may have benefits but for whom and why, are avenues for further research. conclusion the bsc extended science programme has been shown to be an excellent preparation for higher education. the above analysis demonstrates conclusively that a lack of formal or recent educational qualifications is by no means a barrier to graduate status. roughly 63% of the extended degree students in this 22-year study were mature, that is of 21 years of age or over (ranging from 62-75% of the cohort) and the vast majority of these lacked traditional qualifications such as ‘a’ level. most had no post-gcse level science. nevertheless, their results and progression were comparable with, or in some cases better than their direct entry counterparts. harwood extended science: a powerful tool in widening participation journal of learning development in higher education, issue 10: november 2016 21 it has also been demonstrated that ‘a’ level entrants with unusual subject combinations or unsatisfactory grades can benefit from a stage zero at university. hence good students who made unconventional ‘a’ level choices, or just missed the required grades in more standard subjects, are able to gain good science degrees with an extra year’s preparation. despite their shortcomings in terms of formal qualifications, extended science students were more likely to gain a first or upper second class honours degree than direct stage one entrants with the traditional ‘a’ level subjects and grades. even in subject areas such as chemistry which are widely regarded as the more difficult, this holds true. strong student motivation, a particular attribute of mature students and prolonged exposure to the university learning culture are significant factors in the success of year zeros. a high level of student support, particularly during the critical first term at university is also demonstrably important. no particular student support measures appeared to be significantly better than others for stage zero students but increased frequency of laboratories, formal assessments, good quality feedback, tutorial opportunities and revision workshops compared with later stages of study, together with a strong and more overt personal tutor system were all factors cited by students as important in their learning development. references chipperfield, s. (2012) ‘self-preservation and the individualisation of risk in universitybased foundation course students’, journal of further and higher education, 37(5), pp. 623-642. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0309877x.2011.645472 de rennes, j. (1999) ‘maintaining spaces for adult learners in science’, standing conference on university teaching and research in the education of adults (scutrea): 29th annual conference. university of warwick, warwick 5-7 july [online]. available at: http://www.leeds.ac.uk/educol/documents/000000987.doc (accessed: 17 september 2016). ellis, r. and allan, r. (2008) ‘learning styles and learning strategies: assessing their impact on science foundation students’, widening participation and lifelong learning, 10(2), pp. 41-50. available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0309877x.2011.645472 http://www.leeds.ac.uk/educol/documents/000000987.doc harwood extended science: a powerful tool in widening participation journal of learning development in higher education, issue 10: november 2016 22 http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/openu/jwpll/2008/00000010/00000002/art0 0005 fisher, s. and hood, b. (1987) ‘the stress of the transition to university: a longitudinal study of psychological disturbance, absent-mindedness and vulnerability to homesickness’, british journal of psychology, 78(4), pp. 425-441. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.2044-8295.1987.tb02260.x foster, e., lawther, s., keenan, c., bates, n., colley, b. and lefever, r. (2012), higher education: engagement and retention (the here project) final report. higher education academy, january. available at: http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/resources/detail/what-works-studentretention/here_project_what_works_final_report (accessed: 17 september 2016). foundation year network (2014) available at: www.foundationyear.ac.uk (accessed: 17 september 2016). gasiewski, j., eagan, k., garcia, g., hurtado, s. and chang, m. (2012) ‘from gatekeeping to engagement: a multicontextual, mixed method study of student academic engagement in introductory stem courses’, research in higher education, 53(2), pp. 229-261. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11162-011-9247-y harwood, david and harwood june. (2004) higher education in further education: delivering higher education in a further education context—a study of five south west colleges. journal of further and higher education vol. 28, iss. 2, james, d. and bloomer, m. (2001) ‘cultures of learning and the learning of cultures’, cultures of learning conference. university of bristol, bristol 22 april [online]. available at: http://education.exeter.ac.uk/tlc/docs/publications/br_dja_pub_04.01.doc (accessed 17 september 2016). johnstone, a. (2000) ‘teaching of chemistry – logical or psychological?’, chemistry education, 1(1), pp. 9-15. http://dx.doi.org/10.1039/a9rp90001b http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/openu/jwpll/2008/00000010/00000002/art00005 http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/openu/jwpll/2008/00000010/00000002/art00005 http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.2044-8295.1987.tb02260.x http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/resources/detail/what-works-student-retention/here_project_what_works_final_report http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/resources/detail/what-works-student-retention/here_project_what_works_final_report http://www.foundationyear.ac.uk/ http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11162-011-9247-y http://education.exeter.ac.uk/tlc/docs/publications/br_dja_pub_04.01.doc http://dx.doi.org/10.1039/a9rp90001b harwood extended science: a powerful tool in widening participation journal of learning development in higher education, issue 10: november 2016 23 keane, e. (2011) ‘dependence-deconstruction: widening participation and traditional-entry students transitioning from school to higher education in ireland’, teaching in higher education, 16(6), pp. 707-718. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2011.570437 laing, c., robinson, a. and johnston, v. (2005) ‘managing the transition into higher education: an on-line spiral induction programme’, active learning in higher education, 6(3), pp. 243-255. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1469787405059575 martinez, p. and munday, f. (1998) 9000 voices: student persistence and drop-out in further education. london: further education development agency. (eric number: ed427169). available at: http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ed427169.pdf mabila, t., malatje, s., addo-bediako, a., kazeni, m. and mathabatha, s. (2006) ‘the role of foundation programmes in science education: the unify programme at the university of limpopo, south africa’, international journal of educational development, 26(3), pp. 295-304. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ijedudev.2005.08.004 mckenzie, k. and schweitzer, r. (2010) ‘who succeeds at university? factors predicting academic performance in first year australian university students’, higher education research and development, 20(1), pp. 21-33. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07924360120043621 robotham, d. (2012) ‘student part‐time employment: characteristics and consequences’, education + training, 54(1), pp. 65-75. http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/00400911211198904 sewart, david (1981). distance teaching: a contradiction in terms? teaching at a distance, n19 p8-18 available at: http://eric.ed.gov/?id=ej248813 smith, j. and naylor r. (2001) ‘dropping out of university: a statistical analysis of the probability of withdrawal for uk university students’, journal of the royal statistical society (statistics in society, series a), 164(2), pp. 389-405. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/1467-985x.00209 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2011.570437 http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1469787405059575 http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ed427169.pdf http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ijedudev.2005.08.004 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07924360120043621 http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/00400911211198904 http://eric.ed.gov/?id=ej248813 http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/1467-985x.00209 harwood extended science: a powerful tool in widening participation journal of learning development in higher education, issue 10: november 2016 24 smith, e. and white, p. (2011) ‘who is studying science? the impact of widening participation policies on the social composition of uk undergraduate science programmes’, journal of educational policy, 26(5), pp. 677-699. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02680939.2010.540676 tight, m. (2012) ‘widening participation: a post-war scorecard, british journal of educational studies, 60(3), pp. 211-226. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00071005.2012.697541 thompson, k. c. (2010), the ou fd in analytical science, chemistry and industry, july 2010, p33 wellings, d., spours, k. and ireson, j. (2010) ‘advanced gnvqs, avces and level 3 diplomas in england: a motivational analysis’, research in post-compulsory education, 15(4), pp. 387-403. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13596748.2010.526800 western vocational progression consortium (wvpc) (2013) life pilot. available at: www.life-pilot.co.uk (accessed: 17 september 2016). wingate, u. (2007) ‘a framework for transition: supporting ‘learning to learn’ in higher education’, higher education quarterly, 61(3), pp. 391-405. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2273.2007.00361.x yorke, m. (1999) ‘student withdrawal during the first year of higher education in england’, journal of institutional research in australasia, 8(1), pp. 1-15. available at: http://www.aair.org.au/articles/volume-8-no-1/8-1-student-withdrawal-during-thefirst-year-of-higher-education-in-england (accessed: 17 september 2016). yorke, m. (2000) ‘smoothing the transition into higher education: what can be learned from student non-completion’, australasian association for institutional research, 9(1), pp. 1-10. available at: http://www.aair.org.au/articles/volume-9-no-1/9-1-smoothingthe-transition-into-higher-education-what-can-be-learned-from-student-noncompletion (accessed: 17 september 2016). http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02680939.2010.540676 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00071005.2012.697541 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13596748.2010.526800 http://www.life-pilot.co.uk/ http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2273.2007.00361.x http://www.aair.org.au/articles/volume-8-no-1/8-1-student-withdrawal-during-the-first-year-of-higher-education-in-england http://www.aair.org.au/articles/volume-8-no-1/8-1-student-withdrawal-during-the-first-year-of-higher-education-in-england http://www.aair.org.au/articles/volume-9-no-1/9-1-smoothing-the-transition-into-higher-education-what-can-be-learned-from-student-non-completion http://www.aair.org.au/articles/volume-9-no-1/9-1-smoothing-the-transition-into-higher-education-what-can-be-learned-from-student-non-completion http://www.aair.org.au/articles/volume-9-no-1/9-1-smoothing-the-transition-into-higher-education-what-can-be-learned-from-student-non-completion harwood extended science: a powerful tool in widening participation journal of learning development in higher education, issue 10: november 2016 25 author details david harwood is associate professor and director of the institute for science education at the university of plymouth. his particular passion is teaching chemistry and he has developed expertise in communicating the subject to non-chemistry specialists. david cowrote the stage zero extended science course in 1990 and has managed the programme as well as acting as its admissions tutor for most of the last 25 years. he also has research interests in the indoor environment, liquid crystals and fourier transform infrared spectroscopy, a technique which he helped pioneer in the 1980s. david teaches on the chemistry and environmental science degree programmes and, contributes to the pgce chemistry programme. “i still get a kick out of chemistry and real enthusiasm for being in the lab, something i hope communicates to my students. research is fun and a wonderful thing to be able to do but it is teaching that really gets me out of bed in the mornings; to be able to do research into teaching more effectively, and put that into practice in the lab and lecture theatre, is an immense privilege”. extended science: a powerful tool in widening participation abstract introduction methodology the extended science programme measurement of progression student tracking subsequent progression stage one withdrawal rates postgraduate study comparison with ‘a’ level entrants factors influencing progression conclusion references author details literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special edition: academic peer learning, november 2015 sustainability and innovation: a blended approach to peer mentor leader training jason hettrick university of cumbria, uk linda moses-allison university of cumbria, uk abstract peer assisted study sessions (pass) is an established part of widening participation and retention activities at the university of cumbria. in october 2013, the question of sustainability and growth of the scheme was addressed. the small team of pass supervisors needed to create an effective and innovative way to meet the challenges of growing and maintaining the university’s most successful peer mentoring scheme. to this end a new blended approach to pass training was trialled in 2014. the training combined a range of face-to-face support, training and debriefs (plus online elements), via a virtual learning environment (vle) and facebook. having been successful in both implementation and outcomes, this new blended approach to delivering training has now been adopted by the pass supervisor team. the purpose of this paper is to give an overview of the approaches and methods taken at the university of cumbria in delivering this blended approach to pass leader training. initially it addresses the motivation behind the need for change, in an institutional context. it then explores some of the challenges faced during the implementation and delivery of training. finally, it reflects on the evaluation and acknowledges future developments for leader training. keywords: peer mentoring; pass; peer assisted study session; peer assisted learning; sustainability; widening participation; student support. hettrick and moses-allison sustainability and innovation: a blended approach to peer mentor leader training journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 2 introduction uk higher education (he) institutions are seeing a growing and increasingly diverse student population as a result of the ongoing national agenda to widen participation and a greater number of non-uk students choosing to study in the uk. over 445,000 applicants accepted a place in 2014 (ucas, 2014). this figure included an increase in international students and those from disadvantaged and under-represented backgrounds (hefce, 2015; ucas, 2014). consequently there is a need for an inclusive, flexible, effective and sustainable method of student support that is suitable for such a diverse student body. this is directly linked to, and is reinforced in, the institution’s mission statement (university of cumbria, 2015a). at the university of cumbria there are a number of student support initiatives. one of these initiatives is the group peer mentoring scheme, peer assisted study sessions (pass). the initiative was first introduced at the university of cumbria in 2008, trialled in our education programmes. the scheme is championed by library and student services (liss) in collaboration with academic staff in the relevant subject disciplines. by 2013, the scheme had grown significantly; the pass team trained 209 pass leaders in twelve subject disciplines, across three campuses. background national centre guidelines state that pass leader training is traditionally delivered via two days of face-to-face delivery (university of manchester, 2010). after reviewing the scheme, in light of expected growth and challenges for delivery, in october 2013 the pass supervisor team discussed multiple options to ensure future sustainability. as a result it was decided to trial a combination of online and face-to-face activities. to be effective, delivery methods and approaches needed to be ‘more open-ended, participative, diverse and interactive’ (sterling, 2012, p.37). it was agreed to begin trialling the blended method in early 2014. this included moving the first day of training online and the introduction of additional support via a social platform. the decision to take the blended approach was based on a number of factors. the supervisor team was looking for a creative and innovative way in which they could deliver hettrick and moses-allison sustainability and innovation: a blended approach to peer mentor leader training journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 3 training to an increasing number of students, without jeopardising quality and experience. the scheme was continuing to grow, staff resources were stretched, and the supervisor team wanted to ensure that leaders had accessible support available. additionally, changes would aim to address student feedback which had previously highlighted that the face-to-face training was perceived to be too long. one of the advantages of adopting a blended approach, with the inclusion of online training, is the flexibility that it offers to students (fleck, 2012). this is particularly important as the team wanted to put pass leaders in control of some of their pass training and learning. the blended approach the choice of a blended approach balanced important face-to-face support, whilst allowing for the delivery of the values of pass via an online medium. initially, in spring 2014, prospective pass leaders were invited to a 60 to 90 minute workshop in their subject groups to discuss what pass meant for them and what it would mean to be a pass leader. this was an opportunity to meet with their named pass supervisor; a named contact for the subject discipline. the team introduced students to the idea that pass should be tailored to the distinct needs of the first years within their own discipline. tasks in this introductory training session focused on mapping the academic experience of a first year and identifying ‘crunch points’. students were also introduced to the online course and the expectations for completion. the online element of the leader training came next. this was modelled on the, award winning, head start pre-entry online course offered by the university (tes, 2015; university of cumbria, 2015b). blackboard, the university’s virtual learning environment (vle), was deemed the natural choice for the delivery of online materials. the reason for this was twofold: students already had existing familiarity with the vle, plus ease of tracking student progress through the course. articulate software was used to create the training modules. this software made it possible to combine a mix of different content types including: pass supervisor videos, videos of previous pass leaders, interactive pages and quiz elements to check hettrick and moses-allison sustainability and innovation: a blended approach to peer mentor leader training journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 4 knowledge and promote active learning. articulate is scorm compatible and therefore enabled tracking of student progress. a key advantage was the ability to provide instant feedback to students; an important aspect of successful online delivery (hunt and chalmers, 2012; race, 2015). the underpinning principle of the online course was to develop foundational knowledge (amaral and shank, 2010). the content was based on day one of training (university of manchester, 2010). the online course introduced five main areas to the leaders: the principles of pass; the role of the pass leader; the importance of signposting; what happens in a pass session; and dealing with difficult incidents. as part of the online training, blackboard discussion boards were launched in september 2014. this aimed to provide an opportunity for students to reflect and discuss their own first year experiences. these were timed to encourage students to engage with the pass scheme before undertaking the face-to-face training. the next element of the training was the face to face aspect. the training day was adapted to align with the new online module. the day began with a consolidation of online training. there were then activities on teaching vs facilitation, communication and group management, and creating the pass environment – each designed to allow leaders to display what they had learnt online and put into practice some key facilitation techniques. in the latter part of the training day the focus surrounded mock sessions, enabling the leaders to prepare for their first pass session. there was also an optional task during the day that required leaders to engage with the new facebook site – a social platform designed to encourage social interaction and the sharing of best practice between leaders. it also enabled the supervisor team to support new leaders with tips and session materials throughout the academic year. this approach, aligned with the use of a blackboard module for the online training, gave the pass leaders the ability to re-visit information and support. in addition to the online channels, throughout the year leaders had contact with academic coordinators and scheme supervisors during pass debriefs and other scheduled contact. hettrick and moses-allison sustainability and innovation: a blended approach to peer mentor leader training journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 5 evaluation there have been varying degrees of success across the different elements of training and there are areas that will be amended and developed moving forward. after all training had taken place, leaders were asked to complete a feedback form. this allowed the team to measure how comfortable leaders felt in their role, the information that had been provided to them, and how the leaders felt about the blended approach to training. overall, the feedback has been positive. 100% of students felt that their expectations had been met, with 86.7% stating their impression of the training was either really good or excellent. all students stated they felt they had a ‘good idea’ or were ‘well informed’ of the key areas covered in training. additional feedback also showed that students enjoyed applying techniques through mock sessions. surprisingly, 42% of the students still felt that the faceto-face element of the training was ‘too long’. students have responded well to the online blackboard module and the pass facebook page but, disappointingly, there was little student interaction on the discussion boards; less than 10% of the leaders engaged in this activity. pass as a group mentoring scheme, in its very nature, is designed to be social. however, the blackboard discussion boards were not being used in this way. despite the fact that the internet enables and promotes the deconstruction of social barriers, wiley and edwards (2002, cited in thomas, 2010) suggest that a major challenge to online training is a tendency towards anti-social design. they argue that this is often a result of attempting to design a virtual learning environment that represents the class room. therefore the poor engagement levels may be a result of the unfamiliarity of using blackboard as a social platform, rather than an educational hub. for future years, the team will consider the focus of this task and repurpose the use of the discussion board. blackboard allowed students to revisit the underpinning theory and key principles of pass, as and when required. however, as stated, the social interactions were limited and engagement figures were low. higher levels of engagement on facebook suggest that leaders have found this page useful. the number of students who engaged with facebook was encouraging; 112 leaders initially joined the facebook page. during the first 6-8 weeks students engaged at varying levels. each post was ‘viewed’ by between 51-78% of members. students also used the platform to discuss various subjects including useful hettrick and moses-allison sustainability and innovation: a blended approach to peer mentor leader training journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 6 techniques, questions about pass, promotional products, signposting, and other social questions. to look at increasing engagement for future years and to promote social interactions, a discussion activity on facebook will be included in the online training. however, it is yet to be decided whether or not this will replace the blackboard discussion board or be in addition to. whilst facebook has seen far higher levels of engagement compared to blackboard, we cannot assume that all leaders have, or are willing to use, their personal facebook pages for this purpose. some changes to the online module are being made, primarily to include more videos of experienced pass leaders and increase the amount of interactivity and immediate feedback given to students. face-to-face training is also currently being updated. these changes are informed by the evaluation process that was undertaken post-training. the focus of the face-to-face training will surround the leaders’ ability to practice facilitation techniques through a series of mock sessions. these activities will also be used to demonstrate and support the underpinning theory and regulations that are covered in the online training. conclusion in conclusion, the blended approach should be considered a success; student feedback is positive, training is less onerous during a very busy period in the academic calendar, and students have access to an array of ongoing support. nonetheless, ongoing, cyclical consideration and reflection are needed to ensure that this approach continues to meet the needs of all parties. research recommends that using a variety of approaches can be useful for learners. importantly the peer-to-peer interaction students experience through this can both improve and assist with learning during training (howe, 2013). after a successful trial, the blended approach will be adopted in forthcoming years. for 15/16 there will be some minor adaptations. these changes will focus on integrating online and face-to-face elements. importantly, rather than looking to measure the students’ ability to recite online content, the face-to-face training will further enable students to practise and demonstrate techniques, linking the two. according to littlejohn and pegler (2008), rather hettrick and moses-allison sustainability and innovation: a blended approach to peer mentor leader training journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 7 than trying to seamlessly integrate online and face-to-face training, a ‘wraparound’ approach will help each support the other; providing that attention is spent on ensuring a coherent link between the two. in 15/16, the pass scheme will be delivered across 18 subject areas and five campuses. sustaining quality whilst maintaining growth is still a priority for the supervisor team and placing part of the training online will enable the team to dedicate more time to planning and supporting students from a wider range of programmes. ultimately, it is hoped that the number of leaders trained and the number of students that are likely to participate in the pass scheme will increase. this case study demonstrates that adopting a blended approach to pass leader training and development can be successful. this method can provide an effective way of meeting the requirements of all stakeholders and assist in ensuring a continued and sustainable student support scheme. references amaral, k.e. and shank, j.d. (2010) ‘enhancing student learning and retention with blended learning class guides’, educause quarterly, 33(4), p. 16. fleck, j. (2012) ‘blended learning and learning communities: opportunities and challenges’, the journal of management development, 31(4), pp. 398-411. hefce (2015) higher education in england 2015. key facts. available at: http://www.hefce.ac.uk/analysis/heeng/ (accessed: 5 july 2015). howe, c. (2013) ‘scaffolding in context: peer interaction and abstract learning’, journal of learning, culture and social interaction, 2(1), pp. 3-10. hunt, l. and chalmers, d. (eds.) (2012) university teaching in focus. a learning-centred approach. london: routledge. littlejohn, a. and pegler, c. (2008) preparing for blended e-learning. london: routledge. http://www.hefce.ac.uk/analysis/heeng/ hettrick and moses-allison sustainability and innovation: a blended approach to peer mentor leader training journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 8 race, p. (2015) the lecturer’s toolkit. 4 th edn. london: routledge. sterling, s. (2012) the future fit framework: an introductory guide to teaching and learning for sustainability in h.e. york: higher education academy. available at: https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/sites/default/files/future_fit_270412_1435.pdf (accessed: 9 august 2015). tes (2015) previous winners. available at: http://www.thelmawards.co.uk/thelma2015/previous-winners (accessed: 11 august 2015). thomas, h. (2010) 'learning spaces, learning environments and the dis'placement' of learning', british journal of educational technology, 41(3) pp. 502–511. ucas (2014) undergraduate 2014 end of cycle report. available at: https://www.ucas.com/corporate/data-and-analysis/analysis-reports (accessed: 5 july 2015). university of cumbria (2015a) corporate strategy 2012-2017. available at: http://www.cumbria.ac.uk/public/vco/documents/communications/publications/co rporate-strategy-2012-17.pdf (accessed: 11 august 2015) university of cumbria (2015b) head start. available at: http://www.cumbria.ac.uk/courses/subjects/businesscomputing/cpd/headstart.as px (accessed: 30 june 2015). university of manchester (2010) ‘pass folder@ pass/ si supervisor training may 2012. peer assisted study sessions. the university of manchester. unpublished. https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/sites/default/files/future_fit_270412_1435.pdf http://www.thelmawards.co.uk/thelma2015/previous-winners https://www.ucas.com/corporate/data-and-analysis/analysis-reports http://www.cumbria.ac.uk/public/vco/documents/communications/publications/corporate-strategy-2012-17.pdf http://www.cumbria.ac.uk/public/vco/documents/communications/publications/corporate-strategy-2012-17.pdf http://www.cumbria.ac.uk/courses/subjects/businesscomputing/cpd/headstart.aspx http://www.cumbria.ac.uk/courses/subjects/businesscomputing/cpd/headstart.aspx hettrick and moses-allison sustainability and innovation: a blended approach to peer mentor leader training journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 9 author details jason hettrick is a wp learning enhancement and retention adviser at the university of cumbria. in the early stages of his career in academia, his current focus surrounds academic skills development, student support and peer mentoring. research interests include peer support, pedagogical practices and retention initiatives. linda moses-allison is a library and academic adviser at the university of cumbria. she has worked in various roles within library settings, all with a student support focus. linda led the project to develop pass leader training online at the university of cumbria. her research interests include online learning within student services and peer mentoring. sustainability and innovation: a blended approach to peer mentor leader training abstract introduction background the blended approach evaluation conclusion references author details literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special edition: developing writing in stem disciplines, november 2012 processes and tasks in collaborative writing in engineering: research-informed views and pedagogical applications julio gimenez university of nottingham, uk abstract writing plays a central role in the activities that engineers carry out both in academia and industry. different from other disciplines, in engineering a considerable amount of writing takes place as collaboration between a group of individuals. despite this recognition, research in collaborative writing (cw) in engineering is rather scant and the available studies are mostly theoretical in nature, with very little empirical evidence. this article reports on an empirical study that examined cw in four schools at a faculty of engineering at a university in the uk. it specifically looks at the processes and the tasks in which engineering students and professionals get involved when writing collaboratively. based on the findings of the study, the article suggests a number of research-informed pedagogical practices for developing cw in engineering. keywords: collaborative writing in engineering; processes and tasks in collaborative writing; pedagogical applications. introduction writing in engineering has been recognised to be a central activity in academia as well as industry (e.g. kreth, 2000; nelson, 2000; reave, 2004; day, 2011). it plays a substantive role in the life of both students and professionals, occupying a significant amount of their time (e.g. bracewell and witte, 2003; gygi and zachry, 2010). coupled with this, research has demonstrated that engineering students and professionals seldom write alone, carrying out many writing tasks collaboratively (nelson, 2000; wheeler and mcdonald, 2000; calvo et al., 2011; gimenez and thondhlana, 2012). however, the number of gimenez processes and tasks in collaborative writing in engineering studies that have investigated collaborative writing (cw) in engineering is still rather limited, with a marked paucity in studies that look at how cw actually happens both in academia and industry. this article reports on a study that examined writing processes and products in four schools at a faculty of engineering at a university in the uk (gimenez et al., 2009). the empirical base of the study comprises a number of data sets that include observations, text analysis, ‘talk around text’ (lillis, 2008), and interviews with a group of students and lecturers from the faculty. the article specifically focuses on the processes and the tasks that a group of students in one of the four schools got involved in to write collaboratively. the article first presents a critical examination of the existing literature in cw in engineering, with a specific focus on the processes and the tasks usually reported in the literature. against this background, it examines the findings of the study in an attempt to provide further empirical evidence to help advance our knowledge in this area. it concludes by suggesting a number of pedagogical applications for teaching cw in engineering. collaborative writing in engineering: processes and tasks writing has been identified to be central to most professional and academic activities in engineering, a vehicle for the construction and dissemination of knowledge, and a practice that reflects the ideology and values of the profession (kreth, 2000; nelson, 2000; wheeler and mcdonald, 2000; winsor, 2001; reave, 2004). it has also been recognised to be crucial for the education of future engineers (kreth, 2000; winsor, 2001; day, 2011; gimenez and thondhlana, 2012). by the same token, it has been pointed out that both engineering students and professionals seldom write anything alone. as one of the participating lecturers forcefully put it during his interview: brunel did it all himself maybe but nowadays nothing is done like that and so because you’re working, all your work is as a group then inevitably the writing is journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 2 gimenez processes and tasks in collaborative writing in engineering going to be in a group. [int/03/lec/3es] (see appendix for an explanation of the abbreviations used to code the data) as collaborative research articles, team project reports, design reports, and joint annual reports are becoming increasingly frequent in academia and the workplace, cw is gradually becoming more important (calvo et al., 2011; henderson and de silva, 2006). despite the recognition of its role and importance, empirical studies that examine cw in engineering are under-represented in the writing-in-engineering literature, especially in the uk. coupled with this, existing studies on cw (e.g. kreth, 2000; nelson, 2000) have been based on interviews to students and professionals, with little or no observational validation of the processes writers tend to follow when writing collaboratively and the tasks they produce as teams. in terms of the models that represent typical writing processes in cw, henderson and de silva (2006) and lowry et al. (2004) have identified: the sequential, the parallel and the group single-author models. in the sequential model each member of a team writes following an agreed sequence. once a member of the team has finished writing their part of the document, they pass it on to the next member in the sequence. in contrast, the parallel model requires team members to work in a simultaneous fashion. this model has been further divided into the horizontal-division and the stratified-division models. whereas the first focuses on the ‘division of labour’, the second emphasises the ‘division of roles’. in horizontal-division model individual participants write different sections of the document that had been previously distributed at random. in the stratified-division model each member plays a particular role (e.g. team co-ordinator, writer, editor, or advisor), largely depending on their skills or talents. the group single-author model is usually used for simple writing tasks, about which consensus as to the final results can be easily achieved. in this model, one team member writes on behalf of their team. useful as these model descriptions have been, they are, however, largely theoretical, with very little empirical evidence to determine whether teams actually follow any of them or have other ways of writing collaboratively. in studies of cw in engineering, models are mostly theoretical in nature, with no or very little empirical evidence (e.g. kreth, 2000; nelson, 2002). journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 3 gimenez processes and tasks in collaborative writing in engineering together with these model descriptions there has been in the existing literature some explanation of other associated processes in cw. these mainly involve social and enabling processes that accompany the core writing processes. among the social processes most commonly mentioned are discussing the composition of the team, team introduction and trust-building strategies. other processes, which may seem peripheral to cw, yet equally important for teams to achieve their goals, include what can be termed ‘enabling processes’ (menary, 2007). enabling processes, which support and make possible writing activities, comprise asking for advice from external experts, seeking external approval (from a client, for instance), and evaluating it tools for collaborative work. the description of these processes has been accompanied by a reference to the tasks commonly carried out collaboratively, albeit sometimes in a cursory manner (henderson and de silva, 2006; nelson, 2000). collaborative research articles, module submission documents and course performance reports have been reported to be the most common tasks in which engineering lecturers get involved, whereas team project and joint annual reports rank high in the list of collaborative tasks in industry. day and his team (2011) have identified a wider range of writing tasks which included emails, letters and reports to clients, although their study did not aim to identify what tasks were individually or collectively written. there is then a growing need for further research that offers evidence of how engineering students and professionals go about writing collaboratively so that we can develop a better understanding of the processes and tasks involved in cw. the study reported on here had three main aims, to: • collect empirical evidence in support of the models used by engineering students and professionals when writing collaboratively. • examine the processes involved in cw. • create a taxonomy of collaborative tasks both in academia and industry. this article mainly focuses on the first two aims. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 4 gimenez processes and tasks in collaborative writing in engineering the study: participants, data and methods the study examined collaborative writing at four schools (chemical engineering, civil engineering, electrical and electronic engineering, and mechanical, materials and manufacturing engineering) at the faculty of engineering of a university in the uk. twentyone final-year students and four academics, two of whom had substantial industrial experience, participated in the study. although small, the sample of participants is representative of the composition of a faculty of engineering of this type. students and lecturers represented the four major branches in the faculty, 16 students and 3 lecturers had english as their mother tongue and 5 students and 1 lecturer spoke english as a second or foreign language. there were 17 male and 4 female students and all lecturers were male. a breakdown of the participants is presented in table 1. table 1. distribution of participants by school. school students lecturers university university + industry chemical engineering 6 1 civil engineering 4 1 electrical and electronic engineering 4 1 mechanical, materials and manufacturing engineering 7 1 total 21 2 2 the empirical base of the study comprises observation notes, text analysis, ‘talk around text’ (lillis, 2008), and interviews. the study started with an exploratory group meeting which aimed at identifying the processes that a group of final-year students usually went through to write collaboratively. based on the views and descriptions offered at this meeting, questions were designed for the semi-structured interviews. these questions covered three central areas: the nature and role of cw in engineering, the processes (writing, social and enabling) and models followed, and the tasks written collaboratively. the data from the interviews were later complemented with data from group tutorials where lecturers and students discussed how the students had gone about writing journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 5 gimenez processes and tasks in collaborative writing in engineering collaboratively and the writing tasks they were producing or, at a later stage, had produced. of the written tasks the groups had written collaboratively, the study focused on design reports in considerable detail. design reports were selected as they represent a central and recurrent writing practice in engineering, both in academia and industry. as gibson (1998) has stated, design is essential in engineering as it involves creativity, synthesis and problem-solving, the three central processes underlying many practices in engineering. after the groups had submitted their final reports, consent was sought and seven reports were randomly chosen from a set which had already been marked as successful by the lecturers in the schools. preliminary analysis of the chosen texts was followed by ‘talkaround-text’ sessions where student writers discussed their perspectives about the texts they had written. an overview of the data collected is offered in table 2. table 2. overview of data sets. method of data collection participants data exploratory group meeting students narratives: audio recordings first round of interviews lecturers views & perceptions: audio recordings second round of interviews students views & perceptions: audio recordings group tutorials students and lecturers tutorial discussions: audio recordings and observation notes document collection lecturers and students documents: project briefs and guidelines, design reports talk around text students writers’ perspectives about their texts: audio recordings findings and discussion   this section provides a discussion of those findings which are the most relevant to the issues addressed in this article. it has been divided into two subsections. subsection one deals with the processes and the models reported by the students during the exploratory meeting and the interviews, and by the lectures during interviews. data collected at the journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 6 gimenez processes and tasks in collaborative writing in engineering group tutorials and the ‘talk about text’ sessions are also used. the second subsection presents an exploration of the tasks that the students wrote collaboratively. data for this section come from the documents collected and the interviews. processes in cw this subsection first refers to the writing processes that the participating students got involved in when writing collaboratively. it then examines the social and enabling processes that accompanied cw. apart from writing itself, the most recurrent writing processes the groups we studied got involved in were planning and editing. planning consisted of number of cycles which included: deciding how to write the report, which involved breaking it down into manageable sections, agreeing on the objectives of each section (e.g. extended summary, supporting evidence) and distributing them to individual members of the team, and who was going to assume editorial responsibilities for the final report. planning was defined by the students as an important activity in writing collaboratively. they clearly identified it as the first activity they got involved in when they met for the first time: before we set out to do anything we had a group meeting where we looked at the general project, we decided what we needed to do, how to go about doing it, and who was doing what. [emtg/01/st/3ms] they also described planning as cyclical and needing to be revised as their project progressed: as we worked on the project and developed different sections we realised [we] needed to get together again and again to discuss new planning strategies, we learnt that planning all at once was not going to work actually… [int/07/st/3es] when we constructed the extended summary we had a group meeting where we sat down together and looked at the general, for the general and extended summary, we sat around a table and said, ‘can you see any problems with how this journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 7 gimenez processes and tasks in collaborative writing in engineering goes with that? can you see any problems with this, that?’ all the way through the general section, so we have an understanding of how the process works and how things interact by kind of being able to say, ‘could we have done this part better? could we have done that part better? how does this fit?’. [tut/03/3ms] these processes were also mentioned by the lecturers in their interviews: you certainly need to have formed and agreed an overview of the document so that people know what they’ve got to do but they know what everybody else is doing as well and how the whole thing will come together. i mean that’s not a particularly sophisticated strategy but i think it’s sometime missed. yeah i think it’s very important for everybody to have the overview. [int/02/lec/cve] …we are saying to the student groups you really need to have a general view of the project and have your lines of communication within the group very clear. you need to know how you’re bringing things together, which bits have been done by which individuals. [int/01/lec/che] as these quotes illustrate, planning is quite central to cw. more important though is the fact that planning recurs as the documents the groups write develop, requiring them to meet several times to adjust their initial plans. during these planning meetings, members also decide who is doing what. this is usually distributed by interest and skills: when we worked on stretching the extended summary it was very beneficial that [name of team member] and [name of team member] collated the whole document, everyone’s section into one document, they are very good at doing that…it would have made writing the extended summary hugely difficult if we just had everyone’s section without being able to all of us go away, read through everything and then come to that meeting… [tut/02/3es] we each had areas where we were stronger than other group members. i took this part here [the economic part] because i’ve done a course in economics/finance so i can appreciate. [tat/03/cve] journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 8 gimenez processes and tasks in collaborative writing in engineering this division of labour is also common in industry although it happens by expertise rather than interest: …it entirely depends on your specialism. it might be a report on the rationale for a public development, perhaps you have two or three lead inspectors, an engineer who will probably have a different approach, and then marketing departments who also like to do their own thing, but ideally a team would capitalise on the expertise of each of its members… [int/06/lec/3ms] so if you’re tendering to build a road you have to demonstrate that you know how to build a road but you also need to demonstrate that you understand the environmental and social impacts of that. you need to demonstrate that you’ve looked at whole life issues, you know, how, the way it’s built will impact on future maintenance requirements and things like that. you need to demonstrate that you’ve considered how to minimise and then deal with ways that you generate and these are all specialisms that no one individual can cover. [int/02/lec/cve] as seen in the findings presented here, cw requires planning to be flexible and on-going. as the task progresses, teams need to make adjustments to the plans they originally made when they first met so that planning remains relevant to the task. by the same token, cyclical planning will allow team members to have an overview of the task and its latest developments. this is also important for making decisions about how the requirements of the task are going to be divided among the members of the team. underlying all this is the need for establishing an effective communication strategy and keeping communication channels clear, as will be discussed later on in the article. editing, the other recurring writing process, was also recognised as important in cw both in academia and industry as one of the lecturers mentioned during the interview: virtually all the work you do will be very actively reviewed by at least a colleague, which is an essential collaborative exercise even if it isn’t every other word…it is impossible to write on your own. if you don’t have a critical review, the quality of any work is lower, so collaboration’s then vital in professional life. [int/02/lec/cve] journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 9 gimenez processes and tasks in collaborative writing in engineering as a process, editing included decisions about who was going to assume editing responsibilities which, in some groups, started very early in the planning process: we also started thinking about the editor you know who was good with detail, who was best at nit-picking [laughter]. [emtg/01/st/3ms] it was also interesting to discover that for most groups how editing was going to take place depended on the section being edited. for the extended summary, for example, the editor would compile the different drafts and critique, revise and edit each before the group met together to discuss the new edited version of the summary. in the case of the supporting evidence section, however, each writer in charge of a section would be both the writer and the editor, with no group editing of each individual section taking place: student: for the group work [extended summary] everyone sent me and [name of team member] the group work and we put it all together as one big document because it needed to follow straight through. tutor: first folder? student: yeah, and then for the second bit [supporting evidence] everyone put their own bit because it’s easier to have everything separate like that. everyone writing and editing their own section […] [tut/03/3ms] for other sections, the alternative design section for instance, yet another process was followed. the editor would put the different parts together and edit the resulting document, but the other members of the team would also participate in the editing process: it depends on the section. let’s say alternative design here. it was broken down and we went away and did our own research to start with and came back with different designs. we then decided to cut out any redundancy, any repeats, any plant design so that it was possible to arrive at that because it was theoretical, etc…we had this process each person chose to process a little section of the work on their section. the sections were then submitted, in this case, [name of team member] who collated them into a word document. edited, inserted punctuation, changed words around. this document was then opened up to everyone to read through, criticise, modify and edit until we were happy. [tat/04/3ms] journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 10 gimenez processes and tasks in collaborative writing in engineering it is interesting to notice that, like planning, editing in cw is also cyclical and closely related to the task or section of the task the team was involved in. it appears that the section of a document would determine how editing is distributed. as shown above, editing could be the responsibility of a single person, that is, the editor of a section written by different members of the team, the writer of a given section, or a responsibility shared by the whole team, as in the case of the alternative design section. of the enabling processes that accompanied writing, the most salient was the choices and possibilities offered by technological applications. the most frequently mentioned by the different groups was the chance of sharing documents on-line, thus making the writing and editing processes more efficient: this is actually what happened with this one. with the advents of online file sharing anyway which we’ve got with office live work space so it was really helpful because it means that you could automatically just send everyone the updated piece of work. so basically it’s a good thing because that means the others are updated everyone could just see it right there in an instant. you don’t even have to print out anything. we’ve got a new feature with microsoft which we use quite a lot which tracks the edits from other people’s, from the other guys’ comments because it actually does comment and highlight the sections which have been edited by the other person. it makes the interaction much more efficient. [tat/01/che] yes. [name of team member]’s work was submitted to this online portal thing and you could just open the document up and review it. we just turned on track changes in word where you insert comments and made changes and it showed up in the document. [tat/02/3es] one of the most interesting findings of the study is the type of processes and the models followed by the participating teams of writers. despite the neat descriptions presented in the existing literature, our findings indicate that cw is more cyclical in nature than we had first believed, and that groups tend to mix different models or parts of models depending on the nature of the task at hand (see table 3). journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 11 gimenez processes and tasks in collaborative writing in engineering table 3. cw models and mix of models. cw model definition variation sequential group members write a specific section of the task in sequence. sequential stratifieddivision (sections distributed according to skill, talent or seniority) parallel horizontal-division (sections distributed at random) parallel group members write a specific section of the task in parallel. parallel stratified-division (sections distributed according to skill, talent or seniority) group single author one writer writes on behalf of the group. mixed parallel stratified-division + group single author summarising, cw requires groups to get involved in a series of cycles of writing and editing, possibly more frequently than they had anticipated when they met for the first time. this has clear implications for the communication strategies that teams need to put in place: how to communicate with one another, at what points in the writing processes and through which media. technology certainly plays a decisive role in the communication of the teams, as will be later discussed. similarly, from analysing the results there emerges a clear link between processes and writing tasks. in particular, the study has shown that the decisions teams make about planning, writing models and editing are closely related to the nature of the task they are doing. the groups we interviewed and observed used different models for different tasks. for example, they used stratified division writing of the parallel model for the extended summary of their design project which required a group decision about the final written product and demanded higher levels of collaborative editing. in the case of tasks that did not require this level of convergence (e.g. writing the supporting evidence section of the project) students and professionals alike usually chose a mix of models. of the possible combinations available to writers, the ‘stratified division of the parallel model and the group singleauthor’ combination appeared the most frequent. in a similar vein, when writing technical papers, for instance, academics and professionals in industry prefer a combination of a primary author who was responsible for writing most of the document and a primary editor who was in charge of editing the final draft. this could be named the journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 12 gimenez processes and tasks in collaborative writing in engineering sequential stratified-division model. table 3 summarises the models identified in the existing literature, together with the combination of models made by the participants of the study (shaded areas). main tasks in cw as mentioned above, students and professional engineers write a wide variety of documents (day, 2011) both in academia and industry. different report types (e.g. lab, progress and design reports) rank the highest, but participants also mentioned research papers (in academia), tendering documents, instructions and specifications (in industry), and proposals (in both settings): i do engineering consultancy in industry which involves writing reports with other people. but then of course we also write research papers with colleagues. [int/06/lec/3ms] for consultants that’s what they do generate reports. for contractors, that’s the set of people that actually go and build things. even then there’s a lot of group writing involved because there’ll be a tendering process and then there’ll be a process which very often these days for large and often public sector construction jobs consultants and contractors who in the past might have worked separately, so a consultant will work at the design stage and the contractor at the construction and maintenance stage more and more often now are being asked to work together at the design stage to reduce the risk that someone designs something which the contractor then says can’t be built that way. [int/02/lec/cve] yes, it obviously depends what you’re specialising in but most of us have written reports of some type whether it is lab reports, progress or design reports. we have also written proposals for the design project. i have friends who have also had to write sets of instructions, you know, to tell people how to follow a process for example. they had to write specifications to technicians to operate a certain type of machine or a software manual for computers. [int/05/st/che] journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 13 gimenez processes and tasks in collaborative writing in engineering as noted by day and his colleagues (2011), reports for clients were singled out by the lecturers as being of high importance, especially after students graduate and move into industry. the key and challenging issue in this type of reports is writing for an audience who has no or very little technical knowledge, something that the existing literature seems to overlook: because the more senior you are in the organisation the more likely you are to understand the client for which you’re writing the report. you know that they probably don’t have sophisticated technical knowledge so you have to write in an accessible manner cause you may want to send your draft to the client and say, ‘what do you think of this draft?’ and the client reads it and throws up implications they might have considered before and they want to come back to you and say, ‘hmm i think you need to add a bit about this or that’…this is something students are very rarely told about. [int/02/lec/cve] the tasks mentioned in the interviews constitute an emerging taxonomy of tasks in cw, as presented in table 4. table 4. emerging taxonomy of tasks in cw. academia industry project design reports academic articles (e.g. research papers) module specifications course revision reports laboratory reports proposals project design reports tendering documents progress reports laboratory reports instructions specifications proposals from the results discussed in this section, there emerge a number of processes that should be taken into consideration when teaching and researching cw in engineering: • planning is a whole-team activity that would be better approached as a flexible, ongoing process that is closely linked to the different stages involved in writing a task. • planning meetings provide all members with an overview of the task and its development, and an opportunity to contribute to the task with their own individual skills, talents or expertise. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 14 gimenez processes and tasks in collaborative writing in engineering • editing is also cyclical but, depending on the section of the writing task, it can be a whole-team or individual activity so team members would need to identify which section or sections are to be edited individually and which collaboratively. • communication is central for successful task completion as are communication tools such as applications for on-line composing and editing, therefore team members would need to establish their communication strategies, including on-line tools, as early as possible. • models for cw seem to be chosen by groups depending on the type of writing tasks at hand. groups also choose to combine different models to facilitate writing; it is then important for groups to consider which combinations are more useful to the task they are doing. • writing tasks are central to the activities engineers get involved in and seem to increasingly occupy a considerable amount of their time, it would therefore seem advisable for writers to explore those that are more effectively written as collaboration. research-informed pedagogy for collaborative writing in engineering there are three fundamental aspects of cw that pedagogical practices for developing writing in engineering would need to consider. they are the: • nature of planning in writing collaboratively. • role of communication skills. • appropriate technological tools to support cw. as shown in the previous section, planning is a central process in cw that consists of a number of cycles, involving planning, composing and editing. thus, it would be beneficial for student writers to become aware that keeping planning flexible will facilitate decisions to be easily adjusted and modified as new needs arise with the development of the project. this flexibility will also facilitate the composing and editing processes involved in cw. to this end, students may be provided with opportunities for discussing skills for effective planning, breaking down tasks into more manageable mini-tasks, and evaluating strategies for mid-term and long-term planning. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 15 gimenez processes and tasks in collaborative writing in engineering the second central aspect of cw that emerges from the findings of the study reported on here relates to communication skills. these can be seen as a set of enabling skills which comprise strategies for writers to be able to communicate their ideas, interests (especially in academia) and expertise (especially in industry) about the different sections of the task being developed. based on this, students benefit from opportunities to develop skills that enable them to negotiate their individual positions and ideas about both the content (e.g. when discussing the supporting evidence for a design project they are in charge of) and the structure of the writing task (e.g. when planning, composing and editing a report). the final aspect that could be used to inform pedagogical practices for cw teaching concerns technological tools that support the communication activities of teams. as reported by the students in the project, online applications are very effective for sharing documents at different stages of the writing process. in this sense, student writers could be made aware of different applications for collaborative work (e.g. google documents, office live work space, wickis, writeboard). they could be encouraged to experiment with different applications so that they become proficient users as most require a certain level of expertise and may be rather demanding for the novice writer (calvo et al., 2011), learn to choose the most efficient for their own purposes, and identify those that lend themselves more easily to the part of the task they are involved in writing. figure 1 shows how these aspects of cw are linked together when writing collaborative tasks: figure 1. fundamental aspects of cw in engineering. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 16   gimenez processes and tasks in collaborative writing in engineering conclusion this article has shown ways in which research has contributed to our understanding of cw as a professional practice in engineering. it has provided some empirical evidence for the processes, models and tasks that engineering students and professionals engage in when writing collaboratively. following the findings of the study, the article has also discussed a number of aspects that pedagogical practices for developing writing in engineering should consider. these principles should, however, be further explored and evaluated in a followup, classroom-based study. further research in cw in engineering is needed. we still need to understand, for example, how teams writing collaboratively make decisions about leadership, the dialectical relationship between writing, social and enabling processes and tasks, and the facilitating roles that technologies play in cw. it is hoped that these areas of further enquiry will open up new avenues for research in this emerging area of discipline-specific writing. acknowledgements i would like to acknowledge the financial support for the project provided by the teaching and learning committee at the university of nottingham (grant a114t5/2009). i am also grateful to the participating lecturers and the students, and to my colleagues juliet thondhlana, anne kavanagh and richard lee at the centre for english language education, and david whitley at the faculty of engineering, for their help and support throughout the project. references bracewell, r.j. and witte, s.p. (2003) ‘tasks, ensembles, and activity: linkages between text production and situation of use in the workplace’, written communication, 20(4), pp. 511-559. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 17 gimenez processes and tasks in collaborative writing in engineering calvo, r.a., o’rourke, s.t., jones, j., yacef, k. and reimann, p. (2011) ‘collaborative writing support tools on the cloud’, ieee transactions on learning technologies, 4(1), pp. 88-97. day, t. (2011) ‘what writing expectations do uk employers have of engineering graduates? and how might universities respond?’, european association for the teaching of academic writing (eataw). university of limerick, 30 june. available at: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1udp4paprgmxzin84s0uux4xu0jvqjxswps mfw6alabs/edit?hl=en_us&pli=1 (accessed: 4 april 2012). gimenez, j. and thondhlana, j. (2012) ‘collaborative writing in engineering: perspectives from research and implications for undergraduate education’, european journal of engineering education, 37(5), pp. 471-487. gimenez, j., thondhlana, j., kavanagh, a. and lee r. (2009) processes and products in discipline-specific group writing: a tool-kit to enhance collaborative writing for engineering students. report for the teaching and learning committee. university of nottingham. gygi, k. and zachry, m. (2010) ‘productive tensions and the regulatory work of genres in the development of an engineering communication workshop in a transnational corporation’, journal of business and technical communication, 24(3), pp. 358381. henderson, p. and de silva, n. (2006) ‘a narrative approach to collaborative writing: a business process model’, proceedings of the 8th international conference on enterprise information systems (iceis). paphos, cyprus 23-27 may. kreth, m.l. (2000) ‘a survey of the co-op writing experiences of recent engineering graduates’, ieee transactions on professional communication, 43(2), pp. 137-152. lillis, t. (2008) ‘ethnography as method, methodology, and ‘deep theorizing’. closing the gap between text and context in academic writing research’, written communication, 25(3), pp. 353-388. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 18 https://docs.google.com/document/d/1udp4paprgmxzin84s0uux4xu0jvqjxswpsmfw6alabs/edit?hl=en_us&pli=1 https://docs.google.com/document/d/1udp4paprgmxzin84s0uux4xu0jvqjxswpsmfw6alabs/edit?hl=en_us&pli=1 gimenez processes and tasks in collaborative writing in engineering lowry, p.b., curtis, a. and lowry, m.r. (2004) ‘building a taxonomy and nomenclature of collaborative writing to improve interdisciplinary research and practice’, journal of business communication, 41(1), pp. 66-99. menary, r. (2007) ‘writing as thinking’, language sciences, 29(5), pp. 621-632. nelson, s. (2000) ‘teaching collaborative writing and peer review techniques to engineering and technology undergraduates’, proceedings of the 30th asee/ieee frontiers in education conference. kansas city, missouri 18-21 october. s2b-1-5. reave, l. (2004) ‘technical communication instruction in engineering schools’, journal of business and technical communication, 18(4), pp. 452-490. wheeler, e. and mcdonald, r. (2000) ‘writing in engineering courses’, journal of engineering education, 89(4), pp. 481-486. winsor, d.a. (2001) ‘learning to do knowledge work in systems of distributed cognition’, journal of business and technical communication, 15(1), pp. 5-28. author details julio gimenez is a lecturer in english language and academic literacies at the school of education, university of nottingham. his main research interests include academic literacies, academic and professional discourses, and workplace communication. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 19 gimenez processes and tasks in collaborative writing in engineering appendix abbreviations used to code the data. emtg exploratory meeting int interview tut tutorial doc document tat talk around text 0+number (e.g. 03) order of collection of data lec lecturer st student 3es electrical and electronic engineering che chemical engineering cve civil engineering 3ms mechanical, materials and manufacturing engineering journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 20 processes and tasks in collaborative writing in engineering: research-informed views and pedagogical applications abstract introduction collaborative writing in engineering: processes and tasks the study: participants, data and methods findings and discussion processes in cw main tasks in cw research-informed pedagogy for collaborative writing in engineering conclusion acknowledgements references author details appendix literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special edition: academic peer learning, november 2015 aim for success: peer-led team learning supports first-year transition to college-level mathematics janet liou-mark new york city college of technology, cuny, usa a.e. dreyfuss new york city college of technology, cuny, usa sandie han new york city college of technology, cuny, usa laura yuen-lau new york city college of technology, cuny, usa karmen yu new york city college of technology, cuny, usa abstract students graduating from high schools in the united states are often underprepared, unaware of, and surprised by the rigours of mathematics courses offered at universities, and consequently they find themselves repeating the same mathematics course in their first year. the academic inventory module (aim) for success in mathematics project at a minority-serving higher education institution in the united states was a pilot intervention for first-year students. the goal of the project was to decrease the failure rates of their first credit-bearing mathematics course, fundamentals of mathematics. the programme required the participants to attend a nine-hour mathematics preparation workshop before the start of the semester and a weekly peer-led team learning (pltl) workshop offered with the mathematics course during the fall semester. this study examined the effects of pltl workshops on the students’ mathematics performances and persistence, and on their self-efficacy, task values, and goal orientation towards mathematics. results showed students participating in peer-led workshops had statistically significantly higher grades and lower failure and withdrawal rates than those who did not participate. there were also significant differences in the students’ attitudes toward mathematics. liou-mark et al. aim for success journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 2 keywords: collaborative learning; first-year college students; intermediate algebra; mathematics attitude; peer-led team learning; transition to college. introduction helping first-year students make a successful transition in succeeding in college mathematics has been a challenge. every year in the united states, thousands of students graduate from high school academically unprepared for post-secondary education, despite their eligibility to attend a college. approximately 60% of incoming undergraduates discover they are in need of remediation or developmental work in mathematics after their enrolment (national center for public policy and higher education and southern regional education board, 2010). standardised tests have reported that under-represented minorities in the united states, defined as african-american or black, american indian or alaskan native, hispanic or latino, native hawaiian or other pacific islander, in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (stem) disciplines, do not perform well in mathematics compared to other racial groups. the college board (2012) reports that 5% of african-americans and 10% of hispanics scored 600 or higher on the mathematics section of the scholastic aptitude tests (sats, a standardised test widely used for college admission), compared to 30% of whites and 53% of asianamericans. moreover, aud et al. (2010) reported only 22% of the american college testing (act, an alternative national college admissions examination) test-takers met the college readiness benchmarks in all four subjects, including mathematics. similarly to the sat profiles, african-american test takers had the lowest readiness rates, as only 3% of those of african descent met the benchmarks in all four subjects. kena et al. (2014) found that although the percentages of high school graduates who had completed required mathematics courses increased between 1990 and 2009, the percentage of hispanic and african-american high school graduates completing calculus remained low at 9% and 6% respectively in 2009. these low percentages call for post-secondary institutions to provide effective interventions to assist under-represented minorities in their transition to collegelevel mathematics. the academic inventory module (aim) for success in mathematics project, at a higher education institution with significant numbers of under-represented minorities in the united states, addressed the need for an academic intervention by providing a first-year liou-mark et al. aim for success journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 3 experience that supported student transition into credit-bearing mathematics coursework, as well as increased the student engagement and persistence in these courses. based on the components of the peer-led team learning (pltl) model (see www.pltlis.org), the aim for success in mathematics project focused on activities that created a seamless pathway from developmental to credit-bearing mathematics courses through a ‘community of practice’ concept (lave and wenger, 1991). peer-led workshops were organised to support first-year students enrolled in fundamentals of mathematics, a course that covered selected topics in algebra and geometry. the peer-led team learning model peer-led team learning (pltl) is an instructional model that supports student learning in a collaborative workshop setting led by an undergraduate peer leader (gosser et al., 2001). a typical workshop session at this study’s college involves eight to ten students in a team guided by a peer leader, who meet for one hour a week to complete problem sets consisting of challenging and carefully structured problems. these problems emphasise key course concepts, provide a means to guide students’ efforts in effective collaboration, and demonstrate applications that are meaningful and relevant to the students. the weekly workshops provide an opportunity for students to discuss their understanding of the concepts presented in the lecture and the textbook in a collegial environment. professors monitor the process and assist in designing problems relevant to the topics being taught in the lecture, however, they do not participate in the group activities. the peer leaders are the crux of the pltl model, differentiating it from other methods of collaborative learning (quitadamo et al., 2009). peer leaders are students who have previously done well in the course and they are formally trained for their role. they facilitate their workshop by ensuring that the team members are engaged with the exercises and with their peers, by encouraging trust and raising confidence, and by promoting enthusiastic debates and healthy discussions. additionally, the peer leaders serve as role models, keeping students on task, providing direction and guidance, and using language that can easily be understood. liou-mark et al. aim for success journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 4 a sustainable pltl model includes strong institutional support that provides funding and recognition for the faculty and student peer leaders. these points are highlighted as the pltl six critical components which were developed through many years of evaluations of pltl programmes: 1. workshops are integral to the course. 2. a faculty is involved with the workshops. 3. peer leaders are trained and supervised. 4. materials are appropriately challenging. 5. suitable time and space are designated for workshop sessions. 6. there is institutional support. when the six critical components are followed, the model has the possibility of becoming well-integrated in the institutional culture. the impact of peer-led workshops studies have demonstrated an immense improvement in student performance where peerled workshops were a required component in chemistry courses. results have shown that students who participate in these workshop sections received a (‘90-100’), b (‘80-89’), or c (’70-79’) grades (‘marks’) at higher rates than those students who have not had a peerled workshop (hockings et al., 2008; lyon and lagowski, 2008; gafney, 2001a). moreover, students are less likely to withdraw from introductory chemistry courses (gafney, 2001a), and they are more likely to persist to higher-level science courses (wamser, 2006). in mathematics, there are only a few studies reported in implementing peer-led workshops. in an earlier study of students in a precalculus course, liou-mark et al. (2010) found that the pass rates (abc grades) for workshop participants were 30% higher than the non-participants with the same instructor and the withdrawal rates were 7.5% lower among workshop participants than for non-participants. furthermore, the participants reported that the engagement with peer leaders and with other workshop participants created an inviting and encouraging environment to work on mathematics problem sets. liou-mark et al. aim for success journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 5 the term, peer-assisted learning (pal) is often used synonymously with the supplemental instruction (si) model: a group study method led by a trained student facilitator that is not integrated within the course (arendale, 1993). a study by cheng and walters (2009) at the university of minnesota using the si model found that facilitator-led workshops improved students’ grades in two mathematics courses, algebra and probability and precalculus. students who attended a weekly 50-minute optional workshop were ten times more likely to achieve a grade of cor higher, rather than a d+ or below (including failures and withdrawals). other studies have also shown evidence that peer-assisted workshops help improve calculus success. in a study conducted at california state university in los angeles, subramanian et al. (2009) found students who worked collaboratively on the homework assignments in supplemental workshops twice a week showed significant improvement in calculus compared with those who did not participate in the workshop. a study conducted by parkinson (2009) at dublin city university, the school of biotechnology in ireland, found that peer-assisted learning in calculus led by second-year students significantly changed first-year student performance results. in this study, the group that received peer tutoring showed higher exam grades and lower failure rates than the control group that had not received peer tutoring. similarly, a peer-assisted study session (pass) programme at ulster university in northern ireland (condell et al., 2011) found that students who participated in the mathematics ii module (topics include programming, statistics, and mathematical modelling) had improved average grades. likewise, duah et al. (2014) implemented the pal scheme in a first-year mathematics course, vector spaces, at the school of mathematics at loughborough in the united kingdom, and results showed that the final examination scores for pal participants were higher than the non-participants, even after controlling for lecture attendance and prior attainment. moreover, the pal model was found to be effective in reducing the ‘cooling off’ phenomenon, i.e. students losing the motivation to pursue a degree in mathematics. malm et al. (2011) examined the impact of peer-assisted si workshops on student success in five engineering programmes at the school of engineering at lund university in sweden. the challenging courses required in the engineering school were identified as single variable calculus i and ii and linear algebra. students in these courses were encouraged to attend si workshops led by senior students. for all three courses, the pass rates for students who attended the workshops were significantly higher than those who liou-mark et al. aim for success journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 6 did not attend the workshops. for the calculus i and ii sequence, the pass rate for students who frequently attended the workshops was 79%, compared to a pass rate of 39% of those students who did not attend. in addition, students who attended the workshops reported higher course grades than those who did not attend. furthermore, malm et al. (2010) reported that the si workshops had an immense impact on the educational progress of the students; 79% of the workshop participants met the credit requirement for the first-year engineering programme, whereas only 55% of non-workshop participants met the credit requirement. in a survey distributed to all students in the five engineering programmes, 67% of students agreed that the workshops had developed their problem-solving skills, and 68% felt that the workshops had given them a deeper understanding of the subject. moreover, 57% agreed that the workshops had developed their ability to work collaboratively in a group setting, and 91% agreed that it was easy to ask questions during the workshop. horwitz and rodger (2009) found that introducing a pltl programme in introductory computer science courses at eight universities in the united states was successful in attracting under-represented minority students and women. through participation in the pltl programme, the retention and pass rates were significantly improved, especially for women. methodology in an urban minority-serving technical college, fundamentals of mathematics is the first credit-bearing course that students take after remediation (‘no credit-bearing courses’). the term ‘minority-serving institutions’ in the united states provides tertiary education where the student populations reach threshold categorisations of 35% africanamerican/black, american indian or alaskan native, hispanic or latino, native hawaiian or other pacific islander. the fundamentals of mathematics course covers topics in intermediate algebra and geometry, and it is required of all science, technology, engineering and mathematics (stem) majors. each year, at least 10% of the total student population at this institution is enrolled in the course. the pass rate for this course is generally between 57 to 65%, with fewer than 50% of the students receiving a grade of c or higher, according to institutional data. liou-mark et al. aim for success journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 7 participants the participants in this study were first-year undergraduates enrolled in the fundamentals of mathematics course during the fall 2009 semester. there were three distinct cohorts defined as follows. 1) cohort i was comprised of 22 students who voluntarily participated in the aim for success project and fulfilled the following criteria: 1) attended a nine-hour summer mathematics preparation workshop; 2) enrolled in fundamental of mathematics during the fall 2009 semester; and 3) participated in at least six one-hour peer-led workshops during the fall 2009 semester out of a total of ten sessions. 2) cohort ii was comprised of 23 students enrolled in a fundamentals of mathematics class with a one-hour pltl workshop component embedded in the course. out of 33 students enrolled in this class, only the 23 first-year students taking the course for the first time were selected to be included in cohort ii for this study. similarly to cohort i, cohort ii also had a self-selection bias because students had knowingly registered for the course because of its additional one-hour workshop support and the participants were also given a free mathematics textbook. cohort ii students, however, had not participated in the summer mathematics preparatory workshop, but also attended at least six of the ten workshop sessions. 3) cohort iii was a comparison group that consisted of 20 first-year undergraduate students. these students were enrolled in a learning community; a restructured curriculum that linked courses so that greater coherence between courses is fostered and interpersonal connections among students and faculty are strengthened (tinto, 2003). this fundamentals of mathematics course was connected to a first-year english composition class, and the learning community was designed to keep the same group of students together for these two classes. the learning community mathematics class was chosen as the comparison group because the group shares the same conceptual goal as the aim for success in mathematics project; that is, to provide support for first-year students through a community of learning and practice. lastly, the institutional data on all students who registered for fundamentals of mathematics during the fall 2009 semester provided a baseline comparison. the data from the three cohorts were measured against the average fundamentals of mathematics performance of all those sections at the college during the fall 2009 semester. liou-mark et al. aim for success journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 8 combining cohorts i and ii, 73.3% (33) from a total of 45 participants were from underrepresented minority groups, 53.3% (24) were females, and 46.7% (21) were males. cohort iii comprised 75% (15) students from under-represented minority groups, with a gender breakdown of 45% (9) females and 55% (11) males. informed consent was obtained from the participants in cohorts i and ii. project design the aim for success in mathematics project provided two pltl intervention strategies for first-year participants enrolled in a fundamentals of mathematics course. the participants in the pltl intervention (cohort i and ii) were voluntary, and non-participation did not affect their grades. the first pltl intervention involving cohort i was structured to include a nine-hour summer mathematics preparatory workshop followed by ‘freestanding’ pltl workshops during the fall 2009 semester. the nine-hour mathematics preparatory workshop, spread over three days, was offered one week before the start of the fall 2009 semester. during this session, cohort i participants worked with a mathematics professor and two peer leaders in reviewing key algebraic concepts covered in fundamentals of mathematics. those who completed the nine-hour workshop were rewarded with a free mathematics textbook. during the fall semester, cohort i participants were required to attend a ‘freestanding’ pltl workshop. the term ‘freestanding’ means the workshop was not tied to a particular fundamentals of mathematics section or instructor. there were five freestanding workshops scheduled on different days and times during the week so that students could choose the session that fit their personal and class schedules. the second pltl intervention structure involving cohort ii was the ‘embedded’ workshop, where students participated in pltl workshops that were integrated into the course structure. the workshops were scheduled immediately after a class lecture once a week, and students met for one hour to work on sets of problems (known as ‘modules’). students were strongly encouraged by the instructor to participate in the embedded workshops, and students were informed that pltl workshop participation or non-participation would not affect their grades. liou-mark et al. aim for success journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 9 both the freestanding and embedded pltl workshops were facilitated by peer leaders, students who had done well in the course and were trained for their role. each peer leader had previously worked through the full set of problems, so was familiar with the materials; each led the same group of students throughout the semester. the selection and training of the peer leaders is a critical component to the success of pltl workshops. peer leaders were required to have mastered precalculus or any higher-level mathematics courses. they were selected for their academic ability, usually a grade point average of 3.0 or higher (on a scale of 0 to 4, or marks above 80), and they were chosen for their interpersonal and communication skills. formal training was provided through a one-credit independent study course with a practicum component taught by a learning specialist. in this course, students learned several pedagogical techniques in promoting strong group dynamics which were experimented with and adopted in their workshops. they were also introduced to various learning theories in order to understand the processes of how people learn. at the end of the project period (fall 2009 semester, 15 weeks), the final course grades for fundamentals of mathematics were recorded for all the participants in cohorts i, ii, and iii. the results were compared with the institutional data for all fundamentals of mathematics sections. mathematics attitude and student experiences surveys this study also examined if there were differences in mathematics attitude before and after the pltl intervention. preand post-surveys on questions related to mathematics self-efficacy (bong, 2002), task value (bong, 2004), and goal orientation (vandewalle, 1997) were given to the participants in cohorts i and ii. they completed the pre-survey on the first day of workshop and the post-survey one week before the end of the semester. the statements on the survey found in table 1 are based on a seven-point scale with 1 indicating ‘strongly disagree’ and 7 indicating ‘strongly agree,’ and they are divided into three categories. the first category, statements se 1 – 5, addresses the students’ sense of self-efficacy with regards to mathematics (bong, 2002). self-efficacy is one’s belief or perception about one’s capability to perform at a certain level on a task. a higher response in self-efficacy indicates that the student has strong motivation and a positive learning attitude (bandura, 1994). the second section, statements tv 1 – 3, addresses the liou-mark et al. aim for success journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 10 students’ sense of task values to mathematics (bong, 2004). task value refers to one’s perception or the awareness about the task in terms of usefulness, importance, or applicability (liu and lin, 2010). a higher response in task values signifies a higher sense of mathematics relevance for the students. the last section, statements go 1 – 12, addresses the students’ goal orientation (vandewalle, 1997). goal orientation concerns the underlying attitudes or motivation that give rise to action (ryan and deci, 2000). a higher response in goal orientation means the student is strongly motivated in mathematics by a particular type of goal orientation, whether it is intrinsic (motivation from the inner self) or extrinsic (motivation from outside factors such as grades, money, praise, or even fear of punishment). at the end of the semester, participants in cohorts i and ii also completed a student experiences survey (gafney, 2001b) evaluating the various aspects of the pltl workshop involvement. the survey was based on a five-point scale with 1 indicating ‘strongly disagree’ and 5 indicating ‘strongly agree.’ statements from the survey are listed in table 2. research questions the aim for success in mathematics project focused on the following four research questions: 1) did fundamental of mathematics students perform better with either pltl workshop support than without it? 2) which pltl structure (embedded or freestanding) was associated with better performance outcomes? 3) what were the effects of pltl workshops on the participants’ self-efficacy, task value, and goal orientation with respect to mathematics? 4) what were participants’ perceptions of the pltl workshops? liou-mark et al. aim for success journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 11 results the results from the study are reported by the respective research questions. 1) did fundamental of mathematics students perform better with either pltl workshop support than without it? the overall results from this study showed that the impact of pltl workshops on the fundamental of mathematics course grades was positive. the final grades for cohort i (mathematics preparatory workshop and freestanding pltl workshop participants) and cohort ii (embedded pltl workshop participants) were higher and the failure rates were lower when compared with cohort iii (the comparison group) and the overall institution. the results are summarised in figure 1. figure 1. fundamentals of mathematics grade distribution for cohorts i, ii, iii, and the institution in fall 2009. across all the sections of the fundamentals of mathematics course, the institutional data reported that in fall 2009, 47.3% of the students received abc grades, 37.5% withdrew or failed; and 14.2% received a ‘d’ grade (60-69), denoting little mastery of the subject. for cohort i, 77.0% of the students received abc grades and 13.6% withdrew or failed. for cohort ii, 91.0% of these students received abc grades, no one failed, and this group had liou-mark et al. aim for success journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 12 the fewest withdrawals. for cohort iii, students performed about the same as the institutional average. the results of this study show that first-year students enrolled in fundamentals of mathematics performed better with pltl workshop support, either freestanding or embedded, than without it. similarly, a meta-study by arendale (2004) showed that highly structured study groups that are integrated into the course with trained facilitators have demonstrated better results compared to less structured programmes such as out-of-class tutoring. the pltl workshop is highly structured such that each week the participants have a well-defined task (the problem sets) to complete. the problem sets follow the course outline and provide reinforcement to the concepts learned in class. furthermore, the peer leaders are knowledgeable in the mathematics and they are trained to encourage students to stay on task. 2) which pltl structure (embedded or freestanding) produced better performance outcomes? an independent sample’s t-test was used to see if cohort i, which had the extra mathematics preparatory workshop over the summer, performed better than cohort ii. comparing the average final grade for cohort i (m=2.38, sd=1.3) and cohort ii (m=2.77, sd=1.0), the t-test showed no statistically significant difference [t(43)=1.125, p=.267] in the average final grade. a pearson correlation coefficient was used to determine whether or not the number of workshops attended during the fall 2009 semester affected students’ grades. results showed a moderate positive correlation (r=0.52) between the number of workshops attended and fundamentals of mathematics course grades. both the embedded workshops and the freestanding workshops used the same problem sets and were facilitated by peer leaders. however, the results indicate that there was no significant difference between students who participated in the embedded workshops and those who participated in the freestanding workshops with the additional nine-hour preparation. the major contributing factor to the differences in performance appears to be workshop attendance. the attendance in the embedded workshop by the cohort ii participants was better than the attendance of the freestanding workshop by the cohort i liou-mark et al. aim for success journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 13 participants. clearly, if students did not attend the workshop, they would not benefit from the workshop. an explanation as to why the embedded workshop had better attendance may be that since it was tied directly to a particular class and instructor, it was better integrated into the course with well-structured weekly routines and tasks; it also formed a more closely-knit community of learning among the participants, peer leaders, and the instructor. the more flexible freestanding workshop, on the other hand, depended on the participants’ motivation to attend; the instructor was neither directly nor indirectly involved in the workshop. 3) what were the effects of pltl workshops on the participants’ self-efficacy, task value, and goal orientation with respect to mathematics? to evaluate the effects of pltl workshops on the participants’ self-efficacy, task value, and goal orientation with respect to mathematics, preand post-surveys were analysed. there were statistically significant differences (at the .10 alpha level) in the before and after attitudes regarding the following four statements: 1) i am certain i can understand the ideas taught in the mathematics course; 2) i expect to do very well in the mathematics class; 3) i am sure i can do an excellent job on the problems and tasks assigned in the mathematics class; and 4) i enjoy it when others are aware of how well i am doing. in summary, results showed having a positive mathematics self-efficacy provided students with the confidence to persist and overcome challenges in mathematics. table 1 summarises the results of this survey. liou-mark et al. aim for success journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 14 * p<.10 ** p<.01 table 1. means, standard deviations, and paired sample t-test results for self-efficacy, task value, and goal orientation. mathematics self-efficacy (bong, 2002) modified version of motivated strategies for learning questionnaire (mslq) (1= strongly disagree and 7= strongly agree) pre-survey mean (sd) post-survey mean (sd) paired sample t-test se1. i am certain i can understand the ideas taught in the mathematics course.** 4.98 (1.49) 5.75 (1.50) t(43)=2.764, p =.008 se2. i expect to do very well in the mathematics class.* 5.45 (1.39) 5.91 (1.33) t(43)=1.829, p =.074 se3. i am sure i can do an excellent job on the problems and tasks assigned in the mathematics class.* 5.00 (1.48) 5.52 (1.34) t(43)=1.902, p =.064 se4. i think i will receive a good grade in the mathematics course. 5.43 (1.35) 5.68 (1.33) t(43)=0.968, p =.339 se5. i know that i will be able to learn the material presented in the mathematics class. 5.45 (1.41) 5.86 (1.25) t(43)=1.620, p =.113 task values (bong, 2002) (1= strongly disagree and 7= strongly agree) tv1. i think what i learn about mathematics is important. 5.07 (2.70) 5.59 (1.85) t(43)=0.763, p =.450 tv2. i think mathematics is a useful subject. 5.66 (1.78) 5.73 (1.62) t(43)=0.228, p =.821 5.00 (1.98) 5.00 (2.00) t(43)=0.000, p=1.000 goal orientation (vandewalle,1997) (1= strongly disagree and 7= strongly agree) go1. i am willing to select a challenging assignment that i can learn a lot from. 5.10 (1.48) 5.41 (1.50) t(41)=1.115, p =.271 go2. i often look for opportunities to develop new skills and knowledge. 5.31 (1.54) 5.50 (1.61) t(41)=0.503, p =.618 go3. i enjoy challenging and difficult tasks where i’ll learn new skills. 5.17 (1.25) 5.23 (1.75) t(41)=0.077, p =.939 go4. i prefer to work in situations that require a high level of ability and talent. 5.12 (1.21) 5.32 (1.67) t(41)=0.682, p =.499 go5. i am concerned with showing that i can perform better than my colleagues. 4.64 (1.43) 4.59 (1.90) t(41)=0.368, p =.715 go6. i try to figure out what it takes to prove my ability to others. 4.71 (1.61) 4.36 (1.98) t(41)=1.456, p =.153 go7. i enjoy it when others are aware of how well i am doing.* 4.88 (1.73) 4.36 (2.07) t(41)=1.853, p =.071 go8. i prefer to work on projects where i can prove my ability to others. 4.58 (1.53) 4.50 (2.05) t(37)=0.095, p =.925 go9. i would not avoid taking on a new task if there was a chance that i would appear rather incompetent to others. 4.29 (1.53) 3.82 (1.83) t(41)=1.346, p =.186 go10. avoiding a show of low ability is more important to me than learning a new skill. 3.63 (1.68) 3.33 (1.78) t(40)=0.696, p =.491 go11. i’m concerned about taking on a task if my performance would reveal that i had low ability. 4.02 (1.69) 3.41 (1.88) t(41)=1.680, p =.101 go12. i prefer to avoid situations where i might perform poorly. 4.05 (1.71) 3.86 (2.12) t(41)=0.710, p =.482 liou-mark et al. aim for success journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 15 4) what were participants’ perceptions of the pltl workshops? participants from cohorts i and ii responded favourably when surveyed on their experience with peer-led workshops. statements were drawn from gafney’s (2001b) questionnaire as listed in table 2. the students in cohorts i and ii felt strongly that the problem sets reflected the material taught in lecture. they perceived workshops as helping them prepare and perform better on exams. they strongly agreed that interacting with the peer leader and with the other group members increased their understanding of the material, and they felt comfortable asking questions. a student noted that ‘it [peer-led workshops] helped me better understand the concepts through the extra help from peers and the workshop leaders’. table 2. means and standard deviations for responses on students’ experiences with the fundamentals of mathematics pltl workshops (embedded and freestanding). statements (n=43) mean (sd) 1 (strongly disagree) – 5 (strongly agree) 1. the workshops are closely related to the material taught in the lectures. 4.46 (.59) 2. workshops help me do better on tests. 4.47 (.67) 3. interacting with the workshop leader increases my understanding. 4.33 (.75) 4. the workshop materials are helpful in preparing for exams. 4.33 (.65) 5. i believe that the workshops are improving my grade. 4.44 (.59) 6. interacting with the other group members increases my understanding. 4.26 (.76) 7. i would recommend workshop courses to other students. 4.49 (.63) 8. in the workshops i am comfortable asking questions when i do not understand something. 4.51 (.60) 9. in the workshops i enjoyed interacting with the other students. 4.67 (.48) 10. the workshop experience led me to join formal or informal study groups related to other courses. 3.67 (.99) discussion in a first credit-bearing mathematics course where enrolment is high and completion rate is low, the course is taken by mostly first-year students. the results of an additional hour of focused study in a group led by a peer leader were shown to be successful in increasing the first year students’ engagement and performance in mathematics. while better performance by students who have participated in peer-led workshops has been a consistent finding in various studies, this study suggests that another factor is at play that liou-mark et al. aim for success journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 16 has not previously been mentioned. that is, the workshop provided an open and safe learning environment where the participants built trust among the team members and with the peer leaders, and they met weekly to assist each other in the learning process. being comfortable in asking questions and in increasing one’s understanding in mathematics suggest the first steps in entering the world of mathematics as a ‘legitimate peripheral participant’ (lave and wenger, 1991). under the guidance of a novice-expert, (the peer leader), as well as the instruction of the expert (the instructor), students are beginning to be involved in a ‘community of practice’. the relationships denoted by the participle ‘interacting’ speak to the nature of an academic apprenticeship, a relationship that is missing in the common view of the instructor-student dyad. working within a group – a ‘workshop’ – of learners allows for the sharing of knowledge while working on challenging problems, seeing how others approach the material, and having a low threshold of fear that one ‘looks incompetent’ when asking a question. in the pltl programme, whether the workshop was embedded or freestanding, students were involved in an inherently less formal situation than the lecture alone. the discussion of problems and concepts then becomes situated in a collegial environment. the familiarity and comfortable interactions, coupled with the task at hand of learning mathematics, was a winning combination. students may not have joined the community of mathematicians as yet, but they were legitimately involved in a nascent ‘community of practice’. recommendations for future studies based on the results of the aim for success in mathematics study, some suggestions in strengthening performance gains for first-year students may be aided by:  making workshops mandatory for the first credit-bearing course in mathematics: pltl workshops should be made mandatory in a mathematics course since it is a challenge to motivate first-year students to attend an extra one-hour session.  providing incentives from the instructors to encourage students to participate in a pltl workshop, e.g. a percentage of the grade devoted to workshop participation. liou-mark et al. aim for success journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 17  encouraging instructor involvement in pltl, e.g. designing and creating problem sets, maintaining constant communication with peer leaders. moreover, the aim for success in mathematics project is a programme that could be replicated in higher education institutions, especially those which serve minority or lowincome populations. however, the following limitations should be considered:  to truly test the effectiveness of the pltl workshops, a random design study should be implemented, controlling for instructor and peer leader effects.  an increase in participants in the study may help determine why a summer preparatory mathematics workshop was not effective.  although the study was only a semester long, a longitudinal study is recommended to include comparisons of how pltl and non-pltl participants perform in their next sequential mathematics course.  an area of investigation suggested by observations and responses of the students in this study was how the emotional response the students have towards the peer leaders is related to the level of participation in the workshops.  since all the participants in the aim for success in mathematics programme received a free textbook, this may be cost prohibitive, so other types of incentives should be considered. conclusions with many students struggling in their first college mathematics course in the united states, it is imperative to implement strategies that will increase the persistence and success of these students. because the majority of the study participants were from under-represented minority groups and were female, the results suggest that integrating first-year students with their peers, and having a peer as a leader facilitating the workshop group, will also help those from groups that have noticeably faltered in the transition from high school to college. more explicitly, pltl workshops could provide a structure where students develop the language and skills to solve mathematical problems through their discussions, interactions, and relationships with each other and the peer leader. liou-mark et al. aim for success journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 18 since the pilot project in 2009, the institution has adopted the aim for success in mathematics model for the fundamentals of mathematics course. two sections with an embedded one-hour pltl workshop are offered every semester, and its abc pass rates have been at least 15% higher when compared with the overall institutional data (lioumark et al., 2014). because of the positive pass rates, the pltl workshop model has meanwhile expanded to the next four successive mathematics courses: intermediate algebra and trigonometry, precalculus, calculus i and calculus ii. projects like the aim for success in mathematics described in this study may also be a catalyst for attitudinal changes in mathematics. the residual effects from an increased level of confidence and motivation by the participants to persevere and perform in foundational mathematics may increase the number of students taking higher level mathematics courses. this positive direction would certainly assist the need for the united states to recruit more students in stem disciplines. acknowledgments this work was partially supported by the city university of new york coordinated undergraduate education grant, the honors scholars program, and the black male initiative. the authors wish to thank dr. pamela brown, dr. reginald blake, and ms. lauri aguirre for their support, and dr. reneta lansiquot for her partnership in this project. liou-mark et al. aim for success journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 19 references arendale, d.r. (1993) ‘foundation and theoretical framework for supplemental instruction’, in martin, d.c. and arendale, d.r. (eds.) supplemental instruction: improving first-year student success in high-risk courses (no.7). columbia sc: national resource center for the freshman year experience and students in transition, pp. 41-50. arendale, d.r. (2004) ‘pathways of persistence: a review of postsecondary peer cooperative learning programs’, in duranczyk, i.m., higbee, j.l. and lundell, d.b. (eds.) best practices for access and retention in higher education. minneapolis, mn: center for research on developmental education, general college, university of minnesota, pp. 27-40. aud, s., fox, m. and kewal ramani, a. (2010) status and trends in the education of racial and ethnic groups (nces 2010-015). u.s. department of education, national center for education statistics. washington, dc. available at: http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2010/2010015.pdf (assessed: 5 december 2013). bandura, a. (1994) ‘self-efficacy’, in ramachaudran, v.s. (ed.) encyclopedia of human behaviour (vol. 4). new york: academic press, pp. 71-81. bong, m. (2002) ‘predictive utility of subject-, task-, and problem-specific self-efficacy judgments for immediate and delayed academic performance’, journal of experimental education, 70(2), pp. 133-162. bong, m. (2004)‘academic motivation in self-efficacy, task value, achievement goal orientations, and attributional beliefs’, journal of educational research, 97(6), pp. 287-297. cheng, d. and walters, m. (2009) ‘peer-assisted learning in mathematics: an observational study of student success’, journal of peer learning, 2(1), pp. 23-39. http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2010/2010015.pdf liou-mark et al. aim for success journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 20 college board (2012) percentile ranks for 2012 college-bound seniors’. available at: http://media.collegeboard.com/digitalservices/pdf/research/sat-percentile-ranksby-gender-ethnicity-2012.pdf (assessed: 5 december 2013). condell, j.v., zacharopoulou, a., giles, m. and o'neill, l. (2011) ‘engaging and supporting students in mathematics through peer assisted study session support at ulster (pass @ ulster) – a comparison with psychology and law’, international conference on engineering education (icee) – engineering sustainability for a global economy. belfast, uk 21-26 august. duah, f., croft, t. and inglis, m. (2014) ‘can peer assisted learning be effective in undergraduate mathematics?’, international journal of mathematical education in science and technology, 45(4), pp. 552-565. gafney, l. (2001a) ‘chapter 6: workshop evaluation’, in gosser, d.k., cracolice, m.s., kampmeier, j.a., roth, v., strozak, v. and varma-nelson, p. (eds.) peer-led team learning: a guidebook. upper saddle river, nj: prentice hall, pp. 75-93. gafney, l. (2001b) ‘appendix iii: student survey’, in gosser, d.k., cracolice, m.s., kampmeier, j.a., roth, v., strozak, v. and varma-nelson, p. (eds.) peer-led team learning: a guidebook. upper saddle river, nj: prentice hall, pp. 129-133. gosser, d.k., cracolice, m.s., kampmeier, j.a., roth, v., strozak, v. and varma-nelson, p. (2001) peer-led team learning: a guidebook. upper saddle river, nj: prentice hall. hockings, s.c., deangelis, k.j. and frey, r.f. (2008) ‘peer-led team learning in general chemistry: implementation and evaluation’, journal of chemical education, 85(7), pp. 990-996. horwitz, s. and rodger, s. (2009) ‘using peer-led team learning to increase participation and success of under-represented groups in introductory computer science’, the 40th acm technical symposium on computer science education: proceedings of sigcse 2009. chattanooga, tn, usa 4-7 march. new york: acm, pp. 163-167. http://media.collegeboard.com/digitalservices/pdf/research/sat-percentile-ranks-by-gender-ethnicity-2012.pdf http://media.collegeboard.com/digitalservices/pdf/research/sat-percentile-ranks-by-gender-ethnicity-2012.pdf http://jchemed.chem.wisc.edu/journal/issues/2008/jul/jcesubscriber/jce2008p0990.pdf http://jchemed.chem.wisc.edu/journal/issues/2008/jul/jcesubscriber/jce2008p0990.pdf liou-mark et al. aim for success journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 21 kena, g., aud, s., johnson, f., wang, x., zhang, j., rathbun, a., wilkinson-flicker, s. and kristapovich, p. (2014) the condition of education 2014 (nces 2014-083). u.s. department of education, national center for education statistics. washington, dc. lave, j. and wenger, e. (1991) situated learning: legitimate peripheral participation. cambridge, uk: cambridge university press. liou-mark, j., dreyfuss, a.e. and younge, l. (2010) ‘the implementation of peer assisted learning workshops in precalculus: an approach to increasing student success’, mathematics and computer education, 44(3), pp. 249-259. liou-mark, j., han, s., ahmed, m., anglade, f. and young, j. (2014) ‘strengthening foundational mathematics courses through the implementation of peer-led workshops’, 2013 conference proceedings of the peer-led team learning international society. university of houston-downtown, texas 30 may – 1 june 2013. issn 2329-2113. available at: http://pltlis.org/wpcontent/uploads/2015/10/liou-mark-han-ahmed-anglade-young-2013.pdf (accessed: 10 november 2015). liu, e.z.f. and lin, c.h. (2010) ‘the survey study of mathematics motivated strategies for learning questionnaire (mmslq) for grade 10 – 12 taiwanese students’, tojet: the turkish online journal of education technology, 9(2), pp. 221-233. lyon, d.c. and lagowski, j.j. (2008) ‘effectiveness of facilitating small-group learning in large lecture classes’, journal of chemical education, 85(11), pp. 1571-1576. malm, j., bryngfors, l.e. and morner, l.l. (2010) ‘supplemental instruction (si) at the faculty of engineering (lth), lund university, sweden. an evaluation of the siprogram at five lth engineering programs autumn 2008’, journal of peer learning, 3(1), pp. 38-50. malm, j., bryngfors, l.e. and morner, l.l. (2011) ‘improving student success in difficult engineering education courses through supplemental instruction (si) – what is the impact of the degree of si attendance?’, journal of peer learning, 4(1), pp.16-23. http://pltlis.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/liou-mark-han-ahmed-anglade-young-2013.pdf http://pltlis.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/liou-mark-han-ahmed-anglade-young-2013.pdf http://jchemed.chem.wisc.edu/journal/issues/2008/nov/jcesubscriber/jce2008p1571.pdf liou-mark et al. aim for success journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 22 national center for public policy and higher education & southern regional education board (2010) beyond the rhetoric: improving college readiness through coherent state policy. san jose, ca: national center for public policy and higher education; and atlanta, ga: southern regional education board. parkinson, m. (2009) ‘the effect of peer assisted learning support (pals) on performance in mathematics and chemistry’, innovations in education and teaching international, 46(4), pp. 381-392. quitadamo, i.j., brahler, c.j., and crouch, g.j. (2009) ‘peer-led team learning: a prospective method for increasing critical thinking in undergraduate science courses’, science educator, 18(1), pp.29-39. ryan, r. and deci, e. (2000) ‘intrinsic and extrinsic motivations: classic definitions and new directions’, contemporary educational psychology, 25(1), pp. 54-67. subramanian, p.k., cates, m. and gutarts, b. (2009) ‘improving calculus success rates at california state university los angeles’, journal of mathematics and computer education, 43(3), pp.259-269. tinto, v. (2003) ‘learning better together: the impact of learning communities on student success in higher education’, higher education monograph series 2003-1. higher education program, school of education, syracuse university, 1-8. available at: http://www.nhcuc.org/pdfs/learning_better_together.pdf (accessed: 15 september 2014). vandewalle, d. (1997) ‘development and validation: a work domain goal orientation instrument’, educational and psychological measurement, 57(6), pp. 995-1015. wamser, c.c. (2006) ‘peer-led team learning (pltl) in organic chemistry: student performance, success, and persistence in the course’, journal of chemical education, 83(10), pp.1562-1566. http://www.nhcuc.org/pdfs/learning_better_together.pdf http://www.jce.divched.org/journal/issues/2006/oct/plussub/v83n10/p1562.pdf http://www.jce.divched.org/journal/issues/2006/oct/plussub/v83n10/p1562.pdf liou-mark et al. aim for success journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 23 author details janet liou-mark is a professor of mathematics at new york city college of technology of the city university of new york (cuny), usa. as a result of her research interest in the implementation of peer-led team learning (pltl) instructional model in mathematics she was awarded the 2011 cuny chancellor’s award for excellence in undergraduate mathematics instruction. she has received numerous national grants in which pltl is a vital component to student success. she has published her research and presented her work with undergraduates at national and international conferences. a.e. dreyfuss is a learning specialist/developer who has worked with peer-led team learning in disseminating this instructional model, currently through the peer-led team learning international society, serving as its first president (www.pltlis.org). her work in the field of adult learning and leadership has included developing training for peer leaders, undergraduate students who facilitate learning for groups of students in various disciplines, as well as authoring publications on peer leading, the transition to college, and a guide for teaching for new faculties. sandie han is the chair and an associate professor of mathematics at new york city college of technology of the city university of new york (cuny). she has extensive experience in programme design and administration, including administrative roles as the chair of the mathematics department, computer science programme coordinator, high school programme coordinator, as well as the principal investigator on the u.s. department of education minority science and engineering improvement programme grant and co-principal investigator on national science foundation scholarship in stem grants. she has several publications on the theory and practice of self-regulated learning, mathematics self-efficacy, and peer-led team learning, and numerous local, national, and international presentations. sandie’s research on self-regulated learning and self-efficacy has won her the 2013 cuny chancellor’s award for excellence in undergraduate mathematics instruction. laura yuen-lau is a programme coordinator of the honours scholars programme and a project manager of the national science foundation research experience for undergraduate (nsf reu) programme at new york city college of technology of the city university of new york (cuny), usa. she supervises the honours scholars office http://www.pltlis.org/ liou-mark et al. aim for success journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 24 and coordinates programme events such as cultural field trips, workshops, and seminars throughout the semester. her passion and dedication for the programme and for the students has earned her two outstanding commitment awards. karmen yu is a doctoral student and research assistant for the mathematics education ph.d. programme at montclair state university, usa. her research interest is in students’ mathematical learning situated in the peer-led team learning (pltl) instructional model. she helped to adapt the pltl model at her institution and she has conducted a pilot study for the noyce @ montclair programme at montclair state university. the results of the pilot study have been presented at local and national conferences. aim for success: peer-led team learning supports first-year transition to college-level mathematics abstract introduction the peer-led team learning model the impact of peer-led workshops methodology participants project design mathematics attitude and student experiences surveys results 1) did fundamental of mathematics students perform better with either pltl workshop support than without it? 2) which pltl structure (embedded or freestanding) produced better performance outcomes? 3) what were the effects of pltl workshops on the participants’ self-efficacy, task value, and goal orientation with respect to mathematics? 4) what were participants’ perceptions of the pltl workshops? discussion recommendations for future studies conclusions acknowledgments references lyon, d.c. and lagowski, j.j. (2008) ‘effectiveness of facilitating small-group learning in large lecture classes’, journal of chemical education, 85(11), pp. 1571-1576. author details literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 8: march 2015 assessments and the self: academic practice and character attributes stuart hanscomb university of glasgow, uk abstract a case is made for how, within higher education, we might make use of the relationship that exists between students’ academic practices and outputs, and their character attributes such as open-mindedness, enthusiasm and perseverance. examples of how academic practices have the capacity to reveal a range of character attributes are discussed, and even though there are very good reasons for believing this potential exists, the need is identified for further research of a kind that would stimulate engagement from students, teachers and academic support staff. since any generalised, formalised or nonstudent-led application of these insights to teaching practice would be inappropriate, two points are made about the nature and application of such investigation. first, qualitative methods, and in particular narrative analysis, would be best suited to the complex, ethically sensitive and significantly idiographic nature of the relationship in question. second, research that generated detailed case studies would also serve as an appropriate means of inspiring this form of reflection in students. this could occur either as a direct result of students engaging with these case studies, or indirectly via increased teacher and learning development staff’s sensitivity to possibilities of these kinds of dialogues occurring. a brief example from my own teaching experience indicates the form and content of the studies that i have in mind. keywords: coaching; student experience; empowerment; learning engagement. hanscomb assessments and the self: academic practice and character attributes journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 2 introduction among the attributes implicitly or explicitly promoted by many universities and governments (e.g. university of sydney, 2012; university of glasgow, 2014; ncihe, 1997; european commission, 2002), the relationship between skills such as ‘effective communication’ and ‘critical thinking’ and academic output is relatively uncontroversial and straightforward. appropriately conceptualised, these attributes can be mapped onto academic learning and performance, and then duly reflected in assessment criteria such that a student is able to articulate to (typically) an employer what they learned at university aside from subject-specific knowledge. the initial point put forward in this article, however, is that the academic practices that determine the qualities of students’ assessments also have the potential to serve as indicators of character-based attributes such as openmindedness, flexibility, and perseverance. in other words, a student’s reflections on the work they produce, and the way they go about producing it, could serve to improve selfknowledge beyond a narrow academic identity. following this it is argued that evidence supporting this hypothesis and, if it is supported, its communication to staff and students, should be achieved via qualitative studies that reinforce the subtle, complex and idiographic nature of such knowledge. these could serve to increase the sensitivity of teachers, and to inspire student-led dialogue, and handled correctly, this perspective on academic practices and outputs has the potential to provide a valuable tool for student self-reflection. how assessments can signify character attributes the idea of promoting a ‘thinking disposition’ or ‘intellectual virtues’ such as curiosity, attentiveness and open-mindedness through academic education has been the subject of recent discussion within educational psychology (e.g. perkins, jay and tishman, 1993; mccune and entwistle, 2011), and the philosophy of education (e.g. paul, 1981; siegel, 1988; barnett, 1997; battaly, 2006; sockett, 2012; baehr, 2013). the approach taken in this article, however, differs in several respects. first, the focus is on the potential that assessments and academic practice in general have for facilitating students’ reflections on their personal development. although it would likely be a positive outcome of this reflective process, improving academic performance is not the primary aim of what is being proposed. second, the ideas discussed are applied specifically to higher education, paying hanscomb assessments and the self: academic practice and character attributes journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 3 attention to the practicalities of how this connection might be best approached in this context. third, it does not draw a sharp distinction between ‘intellectual’ and other kinds of attributes. classifications of graduate attributes invariably include characteristics such as ‘critical, analytical and problem-solving abilities’ and ‘a capacity for systematic enquiry and independent thought’ (university of stirling, 2014) that further ‘the pursuit of goods like knowledge, truth and understanding’ (baehr, 2013, pp.248-9), but they also incorporate social behaviours such as cultural sensitivity, leadership and collaboration. the university of sydney’s science faculty, for example, includes ‘empathy’, ‘flexibility’, ‘openness’, and a commitment to ethical principles among its ‘contextualized graduate attributes’ (university of sydney, 2012); and the university of glasgow’s ‘graduate attribute matrix’ makes reference to broad character attributes such as ‘responsibility’, ‘confidence’, ‘flexibility’, ‘conscientiousness’, ‘perseverance’, ‘resilience’, and cultural inclusiveness (university of glasgow, 2014). with a number of universities there are also direct statements on selfknowledge and personal growth more holistically understood, including attributes like ‘honest self-awareness’ (university of edinburgh, 2011), ‘a capacity for self-reflection, selfdiscovery and personal development’ (university of aberdeen, 2014), and being ‘well rounded, reflective, [and] self-aware’ (university of sheffield, 2014). this last point is of great importance for understanding the nature and significance of the argument being made. graduate attributes, whether explicitly or implicitly, encompass a broadly ‘personal’ dimension, and personality research (e.g. peterson and seligman, 2004) and virtue ethics (e.g. hursthouse, 1999) strongly indicate that certain strengths and weakness we exhibit in particular domains tend to signify more generalised character traits. the person who displays minimal kindness towards peers or colleagues, for example, will be more likely to display minimal kindness in other situations. it can be concluded from this that if character attributes like those listed can be shown to be identifiable in academic outputs, then academic work has the potential to facilitate deep and wide-ranging self-reflection. if deep and wide-ranging self-reflection is generally speaking a positive activity, and is promoted by universities in the form of graduate attributes, then this conclusion should be of interest to higher education practitioners. the first step is to offer some examples of how, in theory, features of academic output and practice could act as signs of character attributes. the ones that will be discussed – openmindedness, flexibility, respectfulness, perseverance, commitment and non-defensiveness – are not intended to generate a definitive list of character attributes that might be evident hanscomb assessments and the self: academic practice and character attributes journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 4 in academic outputs and processes (nor could there be such a list), but their presence is at the same time not arbitrary. they are primarily drawn from descriptions of attributes produced by universities (see above), but in each case their inclusion is supported by scholarly enquires into dispositions, traits and virtues considered important, not only for fostering and maintaining intellectual activity and motivation (e.g. barnett, 2006), but for human authenticity, growth and happiness in the broadest sense (e.g. nussbaum, 1998; peterson and seligman, 2004; van hooft, 2006). however, despite this grounding there are two important reasons why these examples should be seen as having a largely heuristic function. first, the history of virtues demonstrates that different cultures and practices in different times and places will value different attributes to different degrees (e.g. macintyre, 1985). with this in mind, it is less the particular selection of attributes that is of concern and more their ability to serve as illustrations of how such attributes might be revealed to a student through her academic practices. second, and as will be discussed in greater detail at the beginning of the next section, the aim here is not to offer specific hypotheses for qualitative research that will provide generalised guidelines for practitioners, but rather to encourage the accumulation of detailed case-studies that serve to inspire student reflection. in comparison to such case-studies, the suggestions below are abstract and generalised, and are designed only to demonstrate the plausibility and scope of the link between academic processes and outputs and character attributes. before proceeding, some clarification concerning terminology is required. the term ‘character attribute’ is used to distinguish between graduate attributes, such as being an effective communicator, that are best understood as skills or ‘performance’ (hinchliffe and jolly, 2011), and those, such as being open-minded, that are more akin to personality traits. personality traits can be defined as: situation sensitive psychological and behavioural dispositions. (flanagan, 1991, p.277) they are: stable and general but also shaped by individual’s setting and thus capable of change. (peterson and seligman, 2004, p.10). hanscomb assessments and the self: academic practice and character attributes journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 5 two features of these definitions are worth reinforcing: first, the too often overlooked ‘capable of change’ aspect of traits has significant bearing on the extent of this article’s conclusions. if traits were inflexible, then although reflecting on them would enhance selfknowledge and adaptation, it would not facilitate change in a more direct or deeper sense. their mutability allows for reflection upon them to have the potential to initiate more profound personal development. second, for the purposes of this discussion it is hoped that it will suffice to acknowledge that whilst some of our behaviours are strongly situationspecific, and others are more influenced by our character attributes, the vast majority combine both. one reason for placing significant emphasis on these reflections being student-led is that a primary task of the reflective process is for the student to determine where on the continuum the behaviours in question lie. thanks, in part, to the academic literacies paradigm, it is now quite well understood how assessments and other academic practices can function as signs of circumstantial factors. these can range from the novel or implicit expectations of specific teachers and disciplines (e.g. lea and street, 1998, 2006), to forms of academic, social or institutional alienation (mann, 2001; mckenna, 2004). the focus of this article is character attributes, but as the academic literacies approach clearly demonstrates, whether it is primarily about context or character attribute, there is the potential for wider insight to be gained through reflection on academic outputs. with these definitions and caveats in mind, the next few pages will consider the potential relationship that exists between a selection of character attributes and attributes of student assessments. open-mindedness open-mindedness, or ‘receptiveness’, is the willingness to listen to and actively engage with unfamiliar ideas. for rogers ‘openness to experience’ (1967, pp.115-118), and ‘loosening of constructs’ (1967, p.137, p.280) is a strong sign of psychological health. perkins, jay and tishman (1993) include open-mindedness among seven ‘key dispositions for good thinking’ (see also stanovitch et al, 2013); peterson and seligman (2004) list it under the general virtue of ‘wisdom and knowledge’, and employers have been shown to value it highly in their graduate recruits (hinchliffe and jolly, 2011, p.580). the opposite is narrow thinking and dogmatism, and in the context of a student essay the hanscomb assessments and the self: academic practice and character attributes journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 6 arguments presented (and the essay as a whole) might end up weaker because one side of the debate is not taken seriously, or other possible approaches to the issue are not discussed or even acknowledged. two signs, and possibly causes, of closed-mindedness are poor listening and faulty thinking. listening is a ‘crucial skill’ (hargie 2004, p.169) that is ‘far harder to do than is generally realised’ (winbolt, 2002, p.117), and the same can presumably be applied to accurate reading. open-mindedness is crucial for truth-seeking and is fundamental to harmonious teamwork and sound leadership (e.g. daft, 1999; fisher and ury, 1991; greenleaf, 2002, and for personal wellbeing (hargie and dickson, 2004, p.170). in academic assessments a deficit in this area could be one reason for inaccurate or incomplete descriptions and explanations of protagonists’ positions, and thus a tendency to generate straw man arguments. open-mindedness requires effort and courage: listening is a very dangerous thing. if one listens one may be convinced. (hargie and dickson, cited oscar wilde, 2004, p.190. if you really understand another person ..., if you are willing to enter his private world and see the way life appears to him, without any attempt to make evaluative judgments, you run the risk of being changed yourself. (rogers, 1967, p.333) it does not, however, have to be a change to oneself in any profound sense that necessitates various degrees of effort and courage. to recognise one is wrong, even with regard to a small and localised issue, goes along with the recognition that one will have to re-think and re-write previous efforts (perry, 1970, p.52) and may be associated with a knock to one’s pride. flexibility aristotle saw virtues as the mean between two extremes; for example courage sits between the poles of cowardice and rashness (aristotle, transl.thomson, 1976, p.103). this model can be usefully applied to the character attribute of flexibility as demonstrated hanscomb assessments and the self: academic practice and character attributes journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 7 in academic practices. it is situated between, for example, excessive respect and disrespect for rules and norms, and between excessive tendencies to accommodate and ignore the desires of others. flexibility is a frequently used term in descriptors of ideal job applicants, and in discussions of graduate attributes (e.g. university of glasgow, 2014; university of sheffield, 2014). it refers to both cognitive and socio-emotional flexibility, and is opposed to unimaginative approaches to problem solving, and to an unwillingness to accommodate the shifting demands and idiosyncrasies of team members, managers and subordinates. applied to academic work, we might see conformity and rebelliousness with regard to the norms of essay writing as polarities, and there will be other discipline-specific practices that, like most rules, must allow for exceptions. making sound judgements and demonstrating the will to accommodate contingencies and particularities requires flexibility, and is often understood as basic to academic development in higher education (baxter magolda, 2001; barnett, 2007). its absence could be a sign of naïve exuberance or a misunderstanding of the meaning and appropriate exercise of creativity; but it might also indicate attributes such as low confidence, unimaginativeness, egocentrism, or arrogance. respectfulness a range of attributes such as justice, fairness, empathy, and social intelligence are implied by a student’s willingness to read and listen carefully to the views of those with whom they are unfamiliar, or disagree with. there is a clear link between respectfulness and openmindedness: both are impeded by the fear of being changed, and in both cases modesty is an underpinning attribute. they are, however, differently oriented: one towards justice and the wellbeing of the other; the other towards adventurousness, curiosity, self-exploration and creation (siegel, 1988; ennis, 1996). for different students these two could be more or less powerful motivators towards what would be, in some respects, similar results more careful exposition and more balanced arguments. the absence of these, combined with, say, a dismissive tone or even more passive signs such as the glaring omissions of important commentators and points of view, could be signs of tendencies towards disrespectfulness. with oral communication such as dialogues hanscomb assessments and the self: academic practice and character attributes journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 8 in seminars, body language and paralinguistic factors can serve as more vivid indicators of dismissive attitudes; ones that potentially extend beyond academic practices. perseverance perseverance refers to tendencies such as a student’s willingness to fully formulate and think through difficult concepts and arguments. peterson and seligman take it to be synonymous with persistence and industriousness, and describe it as the: voluntary continuation of a goal-directed action in spite of obstacles, difficulties, or discouragement. (peterson and seligman, 2004, pp.229-230). a common weakness in essays is the incomplete paragraph, where a point is only half, or three-quarters made. there are many possible reasons for this, but among them is a deficit of perseverance; sometimes greater persistence on behalf of the author could be what is required to elevate them to a higher level of understanding. low perseverance seems to be related to two further sets of character attributes. on the one hand there is courage and resilience; a student might not persevere because to do so risks the kind of failure that they have to take responsibility for. it is the kind where there is no option but to acknowledge “i tried my best but still didn’t quite get there”, which carries with it the harsh truths of personal limitations and/or the need for greater future effort. the resilient student exhibits willingness to reframe their self-perception and objectives and she is prepared to work harder in response to defeat. the second set of attributes that might influence student persistence is dealt with under the next heading. commitment, energy and enthusiasm this collection encompasses notions such as ‘ownership’ or ‘to understand for oneself’ (mccune and entwistle, 2011; entwistle and mccune, 2013); passion (kierkegaard, 1974; barnett, 1997); zest (russell, 1961 perkins, jay and tishman, 1993) and exuberance (redfield jamison, 2004). a ‘measure of authenticity’ in a student, says barnett, is her ‘commitment’, and part of being committed is the ‘infusing’ of the student into her actions hanscomb assessments and the self: academic practice and character attributes journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 9 (barnett, 2007, p.51). a detailed account of the development of this kind of intellectual responsibility and commitment is found in the work of william perry who describes commitment as ‘affirmation’ that is made: after detachment, doubt, and awareness of alternatives have made the experience of personal choice a possibility. (perry, 1970, p.136). with many essays (and other forms of assessment) students are required to offer a firm answer to a question, or to reach a firm conclusion on a complex issue, even if that conclusion amounts to an informed argument for why, at this stage, it is hard to reach a strong conclusion. one way of failing to achieve this is to offer a series of points that, although relevant to the question, lacks an overarching critical narrative. the student has failed to impose themselves on the material and thus failed to reach a satisfactory conclusion. with new undergraduates this is often the result of not being fully conversant with the distinctive demands of higher education, but it could also be a sign of an unwillingness to fully commit to the task and to take full responsibility and ownership of it. where this is the case it could be a sign of a lack of confidence, or a (related) unwillingness to be decisive or to take risks. non-defensive response to criticism defensiveness in response to negative feedback will impair learning and development. it is very hard for most of us to be appropriately open to criticism, but since it is a foundation of effective self-reflection a strong argument can be made for it being a vital capacity to develop ( rockbank and mcgill, 1998; tiberius, 2008). being able to respond constructively to criticism is related to attributes such as resilience, modesty and courage, and it highlights the extent to which we exist, and therefore must develop, in relation to others (bonnett, 2009). the art of receiving criticism seems to require achieving equilibrium between defensive measures that, on the one hand dismiss it, and on the other magnify it, and perhaps the best response involves the kind of measured realism often associated with humility or modesty (flanagan, 1990; peterson and seligman, 2004). hanscomb assessments and the self: academic practice and character attributes journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 10 implications for further research and teaching if causal links were confirmed between specific tendencies in academic outputs and character attributes by, say, correlating essay feedback with scores from personality inventories, this would in theory provide practitioners with the confidence to pass this on to students and directly or indirectly offer advice on directions their personal development could take. for epistemological and ethical reasons though, it is hard to imagine a circumstance in which this would be desirable. first, if such suggestions were directly initiated by teachers this would run contrary to the orthodoxy regarding feedback, that it should be directed at the work, not the person (boud, 1995; brockbank and mcgill, 1998; värlander, 2008). to gesture towards the student’s character in this way will often be construed as intrusive and, from the teacher’s point of view, signals a breach in the ‘ringfence’ that identifies appropriate reflection in an academic context (cowan, 2013). second, the reality of institutional education is that the level of intimacy between student and teacher required for the teacher to be confident of insights along these lines is unusual. even where it exists, however, there is a third problem, which underlines how a quantitative approach to this subject matter would be epistemologically wrong-headed. correlating academic performance and transferable attributes like critical thinking and communication skills is achievable because of the relative straightforwardness and definability of the concepts in question; they are not especially deep or messy. character attributes, on the other hand, are deep and messy. by their nature they are an entangled part of a unique and complex personality such that a proper understanding of them requires a holistic appreciation of the person in question. furthermore, this appreciation is of a kind where the individual’s perspective has particular epistemological and ethical privileges. this is an example of the ‘idiographic turn’ discussed by ashworth and greasley (2009). the idiographic approach emphasises how, in important senses, each student will engage with academic ideas and materials via an: interplay of factors which may be quite specific to the individual ... [or that] are uniquely patterned in a given person’s life. (ashworth and greasley, 2009, p.573). hanscomb assessments and the self: academic practice and character attributes journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 11 investigation into the possibility of academic outputs-character attributes relationships is a case in which a pronounced awareness of the idiographic self is required. a richly accurate understanding of how character attributes and academic performance affect one another would involve highly autonomous self-reflection and teacher sensitivity to the fact that: student diversity in studying cannot be ‘factored in’ to pedagogy easily. (ashworth and greasley, 2009, pp.573-574). therefore, instead of attempting to provide a statistically valid set of generalisations, a more helpful approach to research would be of the qualitative variety; notably narrative analyses of individuals’ accounts of their understanding of what (if anything) their academic work has revealed about their character. space does not allow for extended case studies from my experiences as a teacher, student adviser and researcher, but i can at least provide one example. it concerns a mature undergraduate student i had known in the capacity of teacher and student adviser for several years. he had undoubted academic talent in so far as he was strong on the comprehension of complex ideas and their implications, and highly creative in the way he made connections between concepts and theories such that he would occasionally hit on something that was quite original. his progress was impeded, however, by a tendency to overlook secondary literature, by an adversity to seeking the advice of his tutors, and sometimes ignoring aspects of an assessment’s rubric. poor progress with his final year dissertation led to frustration and eventually a personal crisis, which he came to explain in terms of his relationship to authority figures (which he traced back to his relationship with his father). this prevented him from asking for help or accepting advice, which he rationalised by over-emphasising his self-sufficiency. it was apparent from the way he explained himself that, through reflection on this problematic academic tendency, he had become acutely aware of its deep and pervasive psychological roots. he was of the view that this insight could make a significant difference to how he subsequently engaged with academic work. there is much more that needs to be said about this case in order to do justice to its specificity, but hopefully it begins to illustrate not just what research data might look like, but also how the indirect communication that comes from detailed and extended narratives could be a helpful method for promoting the value of the connection discussed in this hanscomb assessments and the self: academic practice and character attributes journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 12 article. if they did emerge, an expanding collection of these narratives could help us as practitioners to tune into the kinds of signs and circumstances and enable us to recognise and appropriately facilitate such reflection when we are presented with its possibility. this might result in a dialogue with the student, or it might just be a case of directing them to relevant case studies. summary and future directions the argument presented can be summarised in this way: first, there are good reasons for believing that there is a deep and wide-ranging relationship between aspects of academic practices and outputs and character attributes. second, to provide evidence for the existence and nature of this connection in the context of higher education, further studies are needed that should employ qualitative methods. third, if the results support the hypothesis then, whilst reinforcing the complex and idiographic nature of the connection in question, the studies generated could also serve as reflective tools for students, teachers and learning development staff. overall, a non-student-led approach to applying these findings would be unsuitable; however this doesn’t mean there wouldn’t be circumstances under which it would be appropriate for a dialogue of this nature to occur. neither does it mean that such a discussion would be of little consequence, or somehow out of keeping with the kind of learning development that should be happening in higher education. a final remark worth making, concerns the sorts of background and structural requirements that would further facilitate this depth and quality of reflection. one specific line of inquiry could address how reflection on attributes via assessments is affected by anonymous marking and feedback, and in particular whether and how this impedes teacher-student relations. another could concern the manner of, and extent to which dialogue (especially one-to-one) between students and teachers (as well as learning development staff) is part of pedagogical practice. finally a more generalised consideration could be given to the ways we can create the ‘positive emotional climate’ (värlander, 2008, p.153; see also brockbank and mcgill, 1998; mann, 2001; cowan, 2006; baehr, 2013) that an institution must have if it wishes to encourage deep, wide-ranging and honest self-reflection in its students. hanscomb assessments and the self: academic practice and character attributes journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 13 references aristotle (c. 350 b.c.) nicomachean ethics. translated by thomson, j.a.k. (1976). london: penguin. ashworth, p. and greasley, k. (2009) ‘the phenomenology of ‘approach to studying’: the idiographic turn’, studies in higher education, 34(5), pp. 561-576. baehr, j. (2013) ‘educating for intellectual virtues’, journal of philosophy of education, 47(2), pp. 248-262. barnett, r. (1997) higher education: a critical business. buckingham: open university press. barnett, r. (2006) ‘graduate attributes in an age of uncertainty’, in hager, p. and holland, s. (eds.) graduate attributes, learning and employability. dordrecht: springer, pp. 49-65. barnett, r. (2007) a will to learn: being a student in an age of uncertainty. buckingham: society for research into higher education and open university press. battaly, h. (2006) ‘teaching intellectual virtues: applying virtue epistemology in the classroom’, teaching philosophy, 29(3), pp. 639-663. baxter magolda, m. b. (2001) making their own way: narratives for transforming higher education to promote self-development. sterling, virginia: stylus. bonnett, m. (2009) ‘education and selfhood: a phenomenological investigation’, journal of philosophy of education, 43(3), pp. 357-370. boud, d. (1995) enhancing learning through self assessment. london: kogan page. hanscomb assessments and the self: academic practice and character attributes journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 14 brockbank, a. and mcgill, i. (1998) facilitating reflective learning in higher education. buckingham: society for research into higher education and open university press. cowan, j. (2006) on becoming an innovative university teacher. 2 nd edn. maidenhead: open university press. cowan, j. (2013) ‘facilitating reflective journaling – personal reflections on three decades of practice’, journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5, march, pp. 1-17. ennis, r. h. (1996) critical thinking. upper saddle river, new jersey: prentice-hall. entwistle, n. and mccune, v. (2013) ‘the disposition to understand for oneself at university: integrating learning processes with motivation and metacognition’, british journal of educational psychology, 83(2), pp. 267-279. european commission (2001) making a european area of lifelong learning a reality. available at. http://eur lex.europa.eu/lexuriserv/ lexuriserv.do?uri=com:2001:0678: fin:en:pdf? (accessed: 20 march 2015) fisher, r and ury, w. (1991) getting to yes: negotiating an agreement without giving in. london: random house. flanagan, o. (1990) ‘virtue and ignorance’, the journal of philosophy, 87(8), pp. 420-428. flanagan, o. (1991) varieties of moral personality: ethics and psychological realism. cambridge, massachusetts: harvard university press. greenleaf, r. (2002) servant leadership: a journey into the nature of legitimate power and greatness. 25 th anniversary edn. mahwah, nj: paulist press. hargie, o. and d. dickson. (2004) skilled interpersonal communication: research, theory and practice. 4 th edn. london: routledge. hanscomb assessments and the self: academic practice and character attributes journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 15 hinchliffe, g. and jolly, a. (2011) ‘graduate identity and employability’, british educational research journal, 37(4), pp. 563-584. hursthouse, r. (1999) on virtue ethics. oxford: oxford university press. kierkegaard, s. (1846) concluding unscientific postscript. translated by d. f. swenson (1974). princeton, new jersey: princeton university press. lea, m.r. and street, b.v. (1998) ‘student writing in higher education: an academic literacies approach’, studies in higher education, 23(2), pp. 157-172. lea, m.r. and street, b.v. (2006) ‘the “academic literacies” model: theory and applications’, theory into practice, 45(4), pp. 368-377. macintyre, a. (1985) after virtue: a study in moral theory. 2 nd edn. london: duckworth. mann, s. (2001) ‘alternative perspectives on the student experience: alienation and engagement’, studies in higher education, 26(1), pp. 7-19. mccune, v. and entwistle, n. (2011) ‘cultivating the disposition to understand in 21 st century university education’, learning and individual differences, 21(3), pp. 303310. mckenna, s. (2004) ‘the intersection between academic literacies and student identities: research in higher education’, south african journal of higher education, 18(3), pp. 269-280. ncihe (national committee of inquiry into higher education) (1997) report of the national committee. available at: http://www.leeds.ac.uk/educol/ncihe (accessed: 14 march 2015). nussbaum, m. (1998) ‘non-relative virtues: an aristotelian approach’, in sterba, j.p. (ed.) ethics: the big questions. oxford: blackwell, pp. 259-276. http://www.leeds.ac.uk/educol/ncihe hanscomb assessments and the self: academic practice and character attributes journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 16 paul, r. (1981) ‘teaching critical thinking in the ‘strong’ sense: a focus on self-deception, world views, and a dialectical mode of analysis’, informal logic newsletter, 4(2), pp. 2-7. perkins, d.n., jay, e. and tishman, s. (1993) ‘beyond abilities: a dispositional theory of thinking’, merrill-palmer quarterly, 39(1), pp. 1-21. perry, w.g. (1970) forms of intellectual and ethical development in the college years: a scheme. new york: holt, rinehart and winston. peterson, c. and seligman, m. (2004) character strengths and virtues: a handbook and classification. oxford: oxford university press. redfield jamison, k. (2004) exuberance: the passion for life. new york: knopf rogers, c. (1967) on becoming a person: a therapist’s view of psychotherapy. london: constable. russell, b. (1961) the conquest of happiness. london: unwin. siegel, h. (1988) educating reason. new york: routledge. sockett, h. (2012) knowledge and virtue in teaching and learning: the primacy of dispositions. new york: routledge. stanovich, k.e., west, r.f., and toplak, m.e. (2013) ‘myside bias, rational thinking, and intelligence’, current directions in psychological science, 22(4), pp. 259-264. tiberius, v. (2008) the reflective life: living wisely with our limits. oxford: oxford university press. university of aberdeen (2014) graduate attributes. available at: http://www.abdn.ac.uk/graduateattributes/#attributes (accessed: 8 august 2014). hanscomb assessments and the self: academic practice and character attributes journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 17 university of edinburgh (2011) graduate attributes framework. available at: http://www.employability.ed.ac.uk/ga_overarchingattributes.htm (accessed: 8 august 2014). university of glasgow (2014) what are my graduate attributes. available at: http://www.gla.ac.uk/students/attributes/yourattributes / (accessed: 20 march 2015). university of sheffield (2014) the sheffield graduate attributes. available at: http://www.sheffield.ac.uk/sheffieldgraduate/studentattributes (accessed: 8 august 2014). university of stirling (2014) what are graduate attributes? available at: http://www.stir.ac.uk/employability/staff/components-ofemployability/graduate_attributes/ (accessed: 11 august 2014). university of sydney (2012) the sydney graduate. available at: http://www.itl.usyd.edu.au/graduateattributes/ (accessed: 8 august 2014). van hooft, s. (2006) understanding virtue ethics. chesham, buckinghamshire: acumen. värlander, s. (2008) ‘the role of students’ emotions in formal feedback situations’, teaching in higher education, 13(2), pp. 145–156. winbolt, b. (2002) difficult people: a guide to handling difficult behaviour. seaford, east sussex: institute of social relations. wingate, u. (2006) ‘doing away with ‘study skills’’, teaching in higher education, 11(4), pp. 457-469. acknowledgements i would like to thank steve draper, benjamin franks and two anonymous reviewers for their comments on earlier drafts of this article. hanscomb assessments and the self: academic practice and character attributes journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 18 author details stuart hanscomb has an academic background in philosophy and psychology, and is a university teacher in philosophy and communication at the university of glasgow’s school of interdisciplinary studies. as well as a practical and conceptual interest in graduate attributes and other aspects of higher education learning and teaching (especially feedback practices), his teaching and research interests include critical thinking, virtue theory and environmental communication. journal of learning development in higher education journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 1: february 2009 teaching english as a foreign language – a personal exploration of language, alienation and academic literacy. helen bowstead university college plymouth, st. mark and st. john, uk abstract this article is part personal narrative, part exploration of alienation. by tracing my own journey, i have been able to identify, both on a personal and a professional level, the real and perceived effects of exclusion from a given discourse community. i have looked at the ways in which even one’s own language can be experienced as ‘foreign’ and how this can affect self esteem. i have reflected on my own experiences as i return to the uk (and in particular higher education) after more than a decade abroad, and by recording the thoughts and feelings of students and subject tutors as they engage with academic tasks, i have gained an insight into what lies behind the student disengagement i encounter on a daily basis. drawing on my own research and the work of sarah mann, i conclude that a more creative approach, both to the processes of teaching and assessment and models of student support in he is needed if we are to close the gap between the ‘insiders’ and the ‘outsiders’ of the academic community and to allow an increasingly diverse student population to find their voice. this is my story by allowing ourselves to be known and seen by others, we open up the possibility of learning more about our topic and ourselves, and in greater depth (ethrington, 2004:25). twelve years on a greek island teaching english, with limited success it has to be said, to students who ranged from bored teenagers to highly motivated adults, had bowstead opinion piece: teaching english as a foreign language – a personal exploration of language, alienation and academic literacy. left me with serious doubts regarding both my own skills as a language teacher and the widely the accepted approaches to language teaching as enshrined in the ‘efl course book’. something was missing; something very basic, essential to language learning, wasn’t being communicated, but i didn’t know what it was. it was time for a change, the uk beckoned once more. i signed up to a newly accredited postgraduate programme at the university of plymouth and found myself attempting to complete a 60 credit masters level course in just over a month. this course was specifically designed to enable the qualified and experienced tefl teacher to make the transition from overseas private language schools to uk institutions of higher education. our mission was to learn how to teach eap (english for academic purposes) as opposed to tenor (english for no obvious reason) to the increasing numbers of overseas students choosing to take their degrees in the uk. at the heart of the course lay the fundamental question: what exactly do non-native english speaking students need to succeed in the uk? the answer didn’t seem to be more language, these students already had unconditional offers and reasonable ielts scores, so we focussed instead on ‘study skills’. it all seemed perfectly logical and rational, of course they needed to know how to reference according to the harvard system, structure an academic essay and give an oral presentation. don’t all students? however, as i began teaching on a four week pre-sessional, some interesting issues began to arise: there was the chinese student who would not raise his eyes from the floor during his oral presentation but who could write with nearnative fluency; the dutch student who could speak with such eloquence and confidence and yet had little more than a tenuous grasp of acceptable written conventions; the super bright czech student who continually railed against my attempts to explain referencing, furious that she couldn’t say “anything of her own”. how could i possibly address these diverse concerns in a matter of four weeks? i did what i could. the pre-sessional over, i returned to teaching english privately. the nagging doubts about the conventional approaches to language teaching grew. surely we were failing our students when a proficient user with over 20 years experience of teaching journal of learning development in higher education, issue 1: february 2009 2 bowstead opinion piece: teaching english as a foreign language – a personal exploration of language, alienation and academic literacy. english in her own country was equally as bewildered as a newly arrived beginner by a simple, everyday question like “d’ya wanna cuppa?” i began to suspect that the only real language learning that went on took place in the college bar on a friday night. perhaps a broader look at the education would help. i found myself enrolling, at the very last minute, on a pgce in post-compulsory education. it was my turn to feel as if i had beamed down into an alternative universe as i suddenly found myself straining to understand a language that i had believed was my own. surely i belonged here in this classroom? i had a degree, perhaps not from an institution that would have been known as a university even before 1992, but, i reminded myself, i had just successfully completed a demanding postgraduate qualification within a highly pressurised timescale. surely that counted for something? so why couldn’t i understand what they were saying? what was a fento and why did it have to be mapped? was a ‘sodal’ a joke? who were lluk and the ifl? and what on earth was a learning outcome? i gripped my small bag of cultural capital a little more tightly. two years later, here i am. i have just completed the final module of the pgce. my fento standards are mapped against my practice, i have reflected, self-evaluated and achieved all the learning outcomes. i am no longer a ‘stranger in a strange land’, and yet i still deal on a daily basis with those that feel they are. i work in higher education, just as i had hoped, and my job is to deliver study skills support. yet my work is not primarily with overseas students as i had expected, in fact the majority of undergraduates i work with are native english speakers, british born and bred. however, the irony is that the ‘language’ of academia they are required to learn to succeed and survive may just as well be foreign. working closely with a whole range of students, many of whom have come into higher education through ‘non –traditional’ routes, i have been amazed by the number who find academic discourse impenetrable. most come through my door saying that they don’t know how to reference, but what they really mean is that they have no idea how to produce a piece of ‘academic’ writing. at first i thought this ‘problem’ would be easy to remedy; i had a stack of study guides they could take away with them; one that showed them how to reference according to the harvard system, another that explained how to structure an essay, there was a punctuation journal of learning development in higher education, issue 1: february 2009 3 bowstead opinion piece: teaching english as a foreign language – a personal exploration of language, alienation and academic literacy. guide, one on proof reading and, of course, me, someone they could work with on a one to one basis to improve their general writing skills. as the academic year progressed my diary got busier and busier. soon i was seeing eight, sometimes more, students a day, and for every eight i saw, another eight couldn’t get an appointment. what was going on? i began to listen more carefully. i decided to start recording these study skills sessions. most students were happy to oblige and those that didn’t wish to be captured were open and honest about their feelings in a way i felt they probably weren’t with their subject tutors. for them i was both ‘insider’ and ‘outsider’, someone who could understand and empathise with what they were saying, and yet someone who, as an official representative, must also have some insight into the mysterious language and culture of the academic institution. listening back to the recordings, an interesting picture began to emerge: these students were not bored generation y technophiles, nor were they lazy or illiterate, but they were, without a doubt, experiencing a significant amount of frustration, confusion and bewilderment. • “i don’t know how to write it in the way they’re asking me and still make it interesting” • “if i could talk through my essays there’d be no problem” • “it’s just really boring” • “i can’t write anything of my own” • “i’ve completed my assignment, i’ve done what they asked from me” their alienation from the processes of learning and assessment they were involved in was tangible. much of the frustration was directed at ‘them’, the subject tutors, the markers of their work, the ‘holders of power’. there was a definite sense that the students believed the markers could be appeased and good marks gained, if only they knew what ‘they’ wanted. so, what did they want? using the ‘think aloud’ technique pioneered by someren, barnard and sandberg (1994), i began also to investigate tutors’ thoughts and feelings as they engaged in the processes of assessment. as i listened, i became fascinated by the language being used: “fragmented, well-evidenced, coherent, well-presented, superficial, anecdotal, embedded, underpinned, relevant, spurious … “ it was clear that these words meant journal of learning development in higher education, issue 1: february 2009 4 bowstead opinion piece: teaching english as a foreign language – a personal exploration of language, alienation and academic literacy. something to the subject tutors, but i had a sneaking suspicion that they would mean nothing to most of the students i came into contact with. according to sarah mann (2001: 11), in recent years we have seen a kind of mass immigration whereby a new breed of students now occupy a position “akin to the colonized or migrant from the colonized land”. the power relations that are still at work in higher education, what mann (2001:13) terms, “the unequal distribution of power within the teaching and learning relationship, and the ownership by lecturers and the institution of the means for, and values given to, work produced through assessment”, perpetually reinforce the ‘migrant’s’ place at the bottom of the hierarchy. and, according to bauer and trudgill (1998), this power is enshrined in the language of academia: ... in an age where discrimination in terms of race, colour, religion or gender is not publicly acceptable, the last bastion of overt social discrimination will continue to be a person’s use of language (cited in burns and finnigan 2003:127) like the overseas students i first came into contact with two years ago, by entering a uk university non-traditional students quickly finds themselves at a “double disadvantage” (granger, 2002:132). knowledge and experience is suddenly negated both by the language of academic discourse and the power relations at play. the resulting estrangement is located in the way students are denied access to academic discourse. assignment briefs, marking criteria, feedback, lectures, tutorials, even learner support, are all couched in terms that reinforce the barriers between the members of the discourse community and those on the outside. if higher education is to do more than pay lip service to widening participation, and if our mission as educators really is to embrace a truly diverse student population, then as northedge (2003a: 17) argues, this challenge requires “a more radical shift in teaching than simply incorporating remedial support within existing teaching programmes”. study skills support, whether provided as a bolt-on or somehow ‘embedded’ in subject specialisms, is little more than an institutional response, a sticking plaster, that is doing little but masking an increasingly festering wound. i journal of learning development in higher education, issue 1: february 2009 5 bowstead opinion piece: teaching english as a foreign language – a personal exploration of language, alienation and academic literacy. believe that the huge financial and emotional investment that students are required to make nowadays in order to study in higher education deserves a more creative and thoughtful response. either we need to think long and hard about the way we provide and promote access to academic discourse, or more radically, we need encourage students to find their own academic voice, not by ‘dumbing down’ content or ‘lowering standards’, but by embracing alternative forms of knowledge, and by providing a flexible and truly inclusive approach to assessment. only then can we truly claim to celebrate and respect the rich tapestry of lives and experience that now make up our student populations. to insist that academic knowledge can only be valued if it is presented according to the set of narrow conventions that still define most of which is termed ‘academic’ writing, denies students their voice, requiring them to “repress their being as non-rational, creative, unconscious and desiring selves, the very selves which they may need for engaging in learning” (mann, 2001: 13). and so i come back to my greek charges of long ago and the fundamental problem i still wrestle with; the nature of language and how it can best be ‘taught’, if indeed it can be taught at all. a language can be ‘foreign’ in many senses of the word and any language which is not that of our everyday world is bound to be at the very least awkward and unfamiliar. language that does not ‘belong’ to us is likely to be misused, misconstrued and misinterpreted, it may even be perceived as a threat to our very identity, something we need to distance ourselves from in order to protect our fragile self-esteem (baron and byrne, 1994). it seems to me that it is perhaps out of this very desire to preserve a coherent sense of self that the disengaged (and much maligned) surface/strategic learner has been born. our clumsy attempts to resolve the tension between the novice and the expert user of any language or discourse, whether it be the tefl course book or the study skills handbook, often do little but compound the problem by robbing their target audience of their own ‘authentic’ voice. just as my greek students were unable to wrest anything meaningful out of the ‘useful’ phrases provided to help them write in english, neither can most undergraduates gain much from the ‘how to write an academic essay’ approach of most study skills materials. academic writing is not painting by numbers, although if the instructions are followed carefully and skillfully enough the product may possibly give the illusion of mastery. by encouraging our journal of learning development in higher education, issue 1: february 2009 6 bowstead opinion piece: teaching english as a foreign language – a personal exploration of language, alienation and academic literacy. students to believe that there is indeed a ‘magic formula’, we stifle individuality, crush creativity and deny them the right to experiment with the unfamiliar discourse/language and therefore make it their own. if our students are to develop any true fluency we need to provide them not with a guide, but with “opportunities to speak and write the discourse in the presence of a competent speaker who can, by responding, help to shape their usage” (northedge, 2003b: 178). no matter who our students are or where they are from, surely this is what learning support is really about. brookfield (1995:28) states that “consulting our autobiographies as teachers and learners puts us in the role of the “other” … we become viscerally connected to what our own students are experiencing”. the last two years have certainly been an insightful journey for me, one that continually informs and influences the way i deal with students on a daily basis. in writing this piece i have started to find a voice that i am comfortable with; it is personal, passionate and most of all it is mine. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 1: february 2009 7 bowstead opinion piece: teaching english as a foreign language – a personal exploration of language, alienation and academic literacy. references baron, r. and byrne, d. (1994) social psychology (7th ed) allyn and bacon. burns, e. and finnigan, t. (2003) “i’ve made it more academic, by adding some snob words from thesaurus”. in satterthwaite, j., atkinson, e. & gale, k. (2003) (eds.) discourse, power, resistance: challenging the rhetoric of contemporary education. stoke-on-trent, trentham brookfield, s. (1995) becoming a critically reflective teacher. san francisco, ca.: jossey bass. ethrington, k. (2004) ‘reflexivity: meanings and other mattters’ in becoming a reflexive researcher. london: jessica kingsley publishers granger, d. (2002) barriers or bridges? in crosling, g. and webb, g. (eds) supporting student learning. london: kogan page mann, s. (2001) alternative perspectives on the student experience: alienation and engagement. studies in higher education. vol. 26, no.1 northedge, a. (2003a) rethinking teaching in the context of diversity. teaching in higher education, 8 pp 17-32 northedge, a. (2003b) enabling participation in academic discourse. teaching in higher education, 8:2 pp169-180 journal of learning development in higher education, issue 1: february 2009 8 bowstead opinion piece: teaching english as a foreign language – a personal exploration of language, alienation and academic literacy. bibliography becher, t. (1989) academic tribes and territories. milton keynes: srhe and oup cohen, l., manion, l. & morrison, k. (2000) (5th ed) research methods in education london, routledge light, g. and cox, r. (2001) learning and teaching in higher education. london: sage nichols, s. (2003) ‘they just won’t critique anything’: the ‘problem’ of international students in the western academy’ in satterthwaite, j., atkinson, e. & gale, k. (2003) (eds.) discourse, power, resistance: challenging the rhetoric of contemporary education stoke-on-trent, trentham raynor, s. and riding, r. (1997) ‘towards a categorisation of cognitive styles and learning styles. educational psychology. vol. 17, issue 1/2 pp 5-34 riding, r.j. (1997) ‘on the nature of cognitive style.’ educational psychology. vol. 17, issue 1/2 pp 29-53 satterthwaite, j., (2003) the terror! the terror! speaking the literal to inspire the understanding of a friend. in satterthwaite, j., atkinson, e. & gale, k. (eds.) discourse, power, resistance: challenging the rhetoric of contemporary education . stoke-on-trent, trentham satterthwaite, j., atkinson, e. & martin, w. (2004) (eds.) the disciplining of education: new languages of power and resistance. stoke-on-trent, trentham someren, w., barnard, y. and sandberg, j. (1994) the think aloud method. london: academic press. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 1: february 2009 9 bowstead opinion piece: teaching english as a foreign language – a personal exploration of language, alienation and academic literacy. acknowledgements i would like to thank dave harris, professor of leisure and education at ucp marjon for his encouragement and support and for introducing me to the ‘think aloud’ technique. author details helen bowstead is the study skills coordinator at the university college plymouth st. mark and st. john and also lectures in efl at the university of plymouth. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 1: february 2009 10 teaching english as a foreign language – a personal exploration of language, alienation and academic literacy. abstract this is my story references acknowledgements author details literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special edition: digital technologies, november 2014 editorial helen beetham consultant in higher education [all references are to papers in this special edition unless stated otherwise] this special edition of jldhe focuses on the intersection of learning development with new practices of the digital age. on the one hand this might simply mean the 'ways in which digital technologies are used in the work of learning developers, academic teaching staff or other practitioners seeking to improve student learning' (jldhe call for papers, digital technologies special edition, august 2014). like all good, reflective practitioners, we embrace new technologies when they seem designed to help us do our work more effectively. we use screencasts to build learning resources (see reid et al., this edition), and audio capture to give engaging feedback; social media to amplify our good advice, and productivity tools to manage our resources of time and professional energy. on the other hand, the papers published here take a wider and deeper view of what is at stake. even if we confine our attention to the technologies we use as professional developers and educators, these change the meaning of our practices, and – because our practices fundamentally concern this – our relationships with students. whistance, for example, finds that blended feedback (spoken, written and signed content) is received by students as more personal, thoughtful, and actionable than written-only feedback, which at some point in the fairly recent past replaced in situ verbal feedback as the predominant mode. in their case study on open badges, hole et al. point to the possibility that a wide range of development opportunities could in future be credentialised. in both cases we see that fairly simple tools for recording a learning process can be used to change its meaning and value. technologies are not just tools for performing particular tasks, but tools for thinking with, relating with, creating the settings for those relationships and performing our identities in the world. if we want to support students through the difficult business of coming to think, act and be different(ly), we will have to engage with (their specific engagements with) digital technologies. in what follows i explore how digital technologies have been implicated in changes both to formal modes of learning and to learners' informal practices beetham editorial journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2014 2 on the border zone. i also consider how wider changes in the character of institutions are impacting on our professional practice and on our relationships with students. finally, in gathering up some of the diverse threads of thinking in this special edition, i ask how we might move towards a more resilient stance in our own relationship with digital technologies in the context of our work as developers and educators. to begin, it seems unarguable that learning in academic settings has changed profoundly in response to the ubiquitous use of digital technologies. case studies in this edition describe students learning through online scenarios (levin et al.), video feedback (whistance) and virtual collaborations (reedy and goodfellow). reeves' contribution looks at learning in the new subject areas of digital curation and digital sustainability. other papers consider the whole enterprise of learning against a backdrop of transformation in academic ways of knowing and coming to know (bainbridge, thanaraj and williams). different fields of knowledge and practice have experienced different kinds and directions of stress, but there is not one field whose practitioners can carry on as if the internet never happened: as if their research methods, their relationships with colleagues, their publishing and communication practices, the public perceptions of their field, their professional identities and reputations and the learning habits of their students are the same as they ever were. we know that many academic staff find these changes difficult: thanaraj and williams identify feelings of fear, anxiety and loss of identity (among other more positive responses). but surely students are at home in the brave new digital world? it is true that most students are confident users of their own devices and apps/services (though a much smaller number explore beyond the basic functions or can recover when things go wrong). but many if not most students struggle with formal, academic uses of digital technology. academic digital spaces have different rules to facebook or instagram, for example about the acknowledgement of other people's material. they have different registers of communication and different criteria for judging the value of those messages. access is carefully guarded and closely regulated through policies on copyright, plagiarism and fair/safe use, and through secure identity management which allows students' behaviour in academic spaces to be monitored (more on this later). learners who have grown up with 'plug and play' devices and apps designed for 'frictionless adoption' can also find academic systems – those that correspond to complex practices such as cad or reference management or data analysis – difficult to learn. we should not be surprised that students beetham editorial journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2014 3 struggle to know what is expected of them or to inhabit these ways of digital being as their own: this is lea and street's academic literacies model played out in the digital arena (lea and street 2006). but educators themselves are not always certain how to behave in this arena, and unless we are confident enough to admit to these uncertainties, and/or committed to a pedagogy in which vulnerability and risk play a part, we may be less able to support students with their own identity work. i find it interesting that both almond and bainbridge include discussions of 'difficulty' in their accounts of digital learning. when students in almond's 'university conversation' ask for learning to be accessible and 'fun', academics worry that this misses 'threshold concepts and troublesome knowledge, and the productive role of discomfort'. there is an old truism here – that learning requires the right kind of challenge – and one that acquires a new force at a time when the difficult process of self-transformation is being refigured in terms of learning 'experiences' to be consumed. what interests me is how bainbridge brings technology into this picture. for him, the novelty of digital technology is distracting us from the difficulties of real learning, and at the same time estranging us from the natural and (face-to-face) social worlds where we experience the 'holding' that we need to encounter those difficulties with resilience. there are echoes of this concern in the conversations i and other researchers have had with students under the umbrella of the jisc 'digital student' project (beetham and white 2014). many students find digital technology a distraction from learning, at times. most would rather have face-to-face contact with their tutors and peers than spend time in virtual spaces, however well-designed the setting or the materials. but there are many ways in which digital spaces do provide 'holding' to students who have grown up with technologies at hand. mobile communications and social media allow them to feel connected with families and friends. social life takes place in parallel online and offline spaces – as indeed does learning. even signing on to institutional systems is an aspect of achieving an identity as a student, and students often form work patterns around specific it facilities. students also have powerful relationships with their own devices, and being encouraged to use these in class can make academic tasks seem less daunting. rather than estranging students from more 'authentic' relationships, digital technologies can provide a sense of familiarity and belonging. beetham editorial journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2014 4 to take on the other side of bainbridge's argument, digital technologies can also provide challenges that are productive of authentic learning. interviewed towards the end of their courses, students often recall specific encounters with technology that have been critical to their academic development. one common such experience is learning to use systems that – as i argued earlier – correspond with complex practices of the discipline such as data analysis, design, project management and problem solving. another is the production of digital artefacts relevant to the field of study. these might be wiki pages or blogs, curated collections and digital narratives, coded apps, multimedia artefacts, research outputs and learning materials, e-portfolios. the meaning of these artefacts depends on whether they are collaboratively or individually produced, locally or publicly shared, whether they arise within a wider research/professional project, and whether or not they include personal material. but all have authentic value in the digital spaces of the subject or profession, and relative to students' aspirations. so if technology can alienate us, it can also (with the right educational intention) be used to release our creative and productive energies and for identity work. i would tentatively relate this observation to heidegger's distinction between the condition of humanity in modern technological systems – which he understood to subsume human reason to their own instrumentality – and our 'proper' relation to technology as a creative revealing or bringing forth of human potential (techne-as-poesis) (see e.g. holden 2009, nadal 2010). these changes in formal learning are relatively well known to teaching staff, even if they do not wholeheartedly embrace them. another set of changes has taken place on what i described as the 'border zone' between formal academic and informal learning. despite our intensive monitoring of their behaviours and experiences, students still spend much of their study time in their own spaces: reading, annotating, collating, marking references and leaving traces, note-making (whatever that means to them), sharing ideas, making judgements about content and context, supporting each other, pursuing interests and offering up what interests them to others, writing, drawing and creating other kinds of representation, solving problems, managing (more or less successfully) their time, tasks and attention. these are lifelong habits for which the vast majority of students use digital technology as a context and a means of support. in whistance's case study on the use of video to record and give feedback on sign language, i have already suggested that video capture changes the meaning of students' beetham editorial journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2014 5 performances as learning events. with mobile devices, the potential to capture learning as it happens is always ready-to-hand. in fact, many of today's students do not know what it is to perform in an unrecorded/unrecordable space, unless a teacher or developer explicitly creates that space by asking for mobile devices to be put away. the habit of constant selfrecording and self-reporting is of great potential value in learning development. it allows for a closer relationship between informal practice and the kinds of reflection, review and conscious self-development that we want to encourage in learners. not many learners will develop those habits for themselves, however. so in our conversations with them, we are not only helping to clarify what is expected in the academic digital space (and dealing with that as a site of contestation and change), we are also hoping to support 'good', reflective habits in their own use of digital technologies and in their personal digital spaces – without necessarily following them there. these two kinds of digital practice can of course be in tension with one another, leading to concerns about plagiarism, about legitimate vs illegitimate sharing between students, about academic forms of expression vs social media norms, around issues of provenance and the ownership of students' ideas and data. again, as developers we are used to this border zone being a site of difficulty for learners – of contested meanings and identities – but we may be less used to navigating it as a specifically digital space. for some students the digital space does introduce new and unhelpful kinds of difficulty. this is especially true for those who have had little – or mainly negative – experience of using technology for learning in the past. thoughtfully applied, though, digital technologies can scaffold students' access to academic ways of thinking and being, as case studies in this edition show. an example i often use in my own work is social bookmarking, which helps students to define an academic space through simple practices of linking and annotating, and offers a bridge between social and academic norms for acknowledging that other people have interesting things to say. this brings me to a third area of intersection, between digital technologies and academic institutions. reeves draws attention to the fact that our practices are situated in specific and structural ways: how we relate to learners and their development depends on the institutions we inhabit. in 2014 those institutions are inherently digital organisations, reliant on digital systems for all of their core functions, and increasingly valued against metrics that can only be established through the use of digital data at scale: kis, delhe, nss beetham editorial journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2014 6 scores and so on. the institutional systems i mentioned earlier as giving students a sense of belonging also of course subject them to constant monitoring of their online behaviours. 'the structural features of universities as organisations continue to drift towards the bureaucratic, requiring extensive tracking and regulation' notes nick almond (citing brown, 2004). digital technologies do not dictate such practices but they certainly support them. when the value of our work with students is expressed as a function of these data-derived metrics, we may well agree with bainbridge that digital technologies have been fetishised, and we may even exhibit some of the resistant behaviours that thanaraj and williams observe among teaching staff. ironically, though, our organisations are also forced to define their role and assert their value in direct contrast with the digital alternatives. one of the most obvious advantages of a 'traditional' degree programme over those alternatives – open badges, open courses, open journals, wikipedia, online interest groups, ted talks, youtube and the kahn academy, to name only a few – is the availability of academic developers and other professionals with responsibilities for student learning. reid et al. see a rise in demand for learning development services as the result of students exercising this advantage. reedy and goodfellow are more inclined to ask how support can be embedded into courses of study. they remind us of the requirement placed on universities by dearing (ncihe 1997), and reinforced by successive governments since, to support students' general development alongside their grasp of subject matter. digital and information literacies are now, in their view, central to what a modern university should offer, but only as part of their more general responsibility for students' thriving in and beyond their studies. so while cuts to services make learning development work vulnerable, and pressures on teaching staff make it ever more difficult to provide each student with the safe holding, the nurturing and the appropriate challenges that they need, nevertheless this work has never been more important. the qaa has this month announced that digital capability will be one of its two review themes for 2015-16 (qaa 2014). institutions are about to be assessed on how effectively they prepare students to thrive in a digital world. what would it look like if we were doing this well? how do we develop resilience in our own relationship to digital technologies, so that we can provide safe spaces for students to do the same? perhaps it could be part of our role, as we support students' developing digital practices, to help them become not just good consumers of digital media and product, but creative beetham editorial journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2014 7 producers and critical actors as well. perhaps we could help them to question the ends for which digital technologies offer themselves so easily as the means. questions learners can be encouraged to ask in relation to any new device or service could include: how does this help me to express my ideas? how is it shaping the world for me and for others? how will it allow me to act in accordance with my values and how will it sustain the life i want to lead? learning activities such as investigating the life of digital goods – their raw materials, manufacture, marketing and disposal – encourage deeper thinking about what it means to live in digital world. building wiki pages or developing multi-media materials give students new insight into how digital messages are constructed and have their effects. we need to critique the role of technologies in learning and to claim digital tools creatively (and selectively) for our own practice, but this should be in the service of our work with learners, which should focus on developing their own repertoire of digital practices and their capacity for informed critique. this ties in with the work of hall et al. (2014, cited by reedy and goodfellow in their article), whose recent review of digital literacy frameworks concluded that 'criticality' rather than technical competence is key. digital technologies mark out a new landscape in which the work of development takes place, not a utopian one certainly, but not one devoid of light. technologies offer new ways of nurturing, reassuring and 'holding' students in the difficult work of learning and development, particularly students for whom the digital route is the only or the most supportive way of accessing opportunity. technologies also usher in new forms of alienation, commodification and – for less digitally confident students – of difficulty. they promise to level out inequalities of access but at the same time they amplify inequalities of learning capital, especially as 'bring your own' (device, software, attitude, capability) becomes the norm. we need to understand these interactions in all their complexity and specificity, both at the structural level of organisations, disciplines and knowledge practices, and at the human level of learners and their identity work. the papers in this special edition begin to map out that space. references beetham, h. and white, d. (2014). digital student: students' expectations and experiences of the digital environment. jisc. available online at: http://digitalstudent.jiscinvolve.org/wp/ (accessed 12 november 2014). http://digitalstudent.jiscinvolve.org/wp/ beetham editorial journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2014 8 brown, r. (2004). quality assurance in higher education: the uk experience since 1992. psychology press. hall, r., atkins, l. and fraser, j. (2014). defining a self-evaluation digital literacy framework for secondary educators: the digilit leicester project. research in learning technology vol. 22, 2014 holden, j. (2009). heidegger, writing, and technology. writing technologies vol. 2, no. 2. lea, m.r. and street, b.v. (2006). theory into practice. london: taylor & francis. nadal, p. (2010). heidegger’s critique of modern technology: on “the question concerning technology”. available online at: https://belate.wordpress.com/2010/07/12/heidegger-modern-technology (accessed 12 november 2014). ncihe (1997). higher education in the learning society. report of the national committee of inquiry into higher education: the dearing report. london:hmso. quality assurance agency (2014). higher education review: themes for 2015-16. available online at: http://www.qaa.ac.uk/en/publications/documents/her-themesguidance-15-16.pdf (accessed 12 november 2014). author details helen beetham is a researcher, writer and adviser on e-learning in higher education. she has worked as a consultant to jisc since 2004 and in that capacity produced influential reports on topics as diverse as curriculum design, e-portfolios, open educational practice and digital literacy. her chapters and edited volumes (e.g. rethinking pedagogy for a digital age, routledge 2013) are set texts on many postgraduate courses in education. a regular keynote speaker and guest lecturer, she has advised more than 30 universities on digital education issues, including most recently under the hea changing the learning landscapes programme. she is currently writing up a study into the experiences of digital students. https://belate.wordpress.com/2010/07/12/heidegger-modern-technology http://www.qaa.ac.uk/en/publications/documents/her-themes-guidance-15-16.pdf http://www.qaa.ac.uk/en/publications/documents/her-themes-guidance-15-16.pdf editorial references author details literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special edition: academic peer learning, part two, april 2016 peer-to-peer learning through research: a case study in delivering a healthcare message sadaf ilias university of manchester, uk jill barber university of manchester, uk abstract this article describes a recent learning activity involving pharmacy undergraduate students in which a final (fourth) year student trained 21 second year students to administer questionnaires about antibiotic resistance to over 700 student users of a large university building. the aim was to raise awareness of the problem of antibiotic resistance. the second year students were also trained to correct any misapprehensions held by the questionnaire participants about antibiotic resistance, and to encourage them to become ‘antibiotic guardians’. finally, the 22 students analysed the data to give a picture of what the other students understood about antibiotic resistance. peer-assisted learning therefore cascaded from a single fourth year student to 21 second year students and then to over 700 students from various disciplines and year groups. the first stage of the cascade was evaluated and the 21 second year students overwhelmingly believed that their knowledge of antibiotic resistance was enhanced. a follow-up study using the same questionnaire will be used to determine whether the exercise was effective in raising awareness of antibiotic resistance among the body of students surveyed. keywords: peer-to-peer learning cascade; learning through research; antibiotic resistance. introduction among the most important duties of a healthcare professional is the education of the public, both patients and those who do not regard themselves as patients, in caring for ilias and barber peer-to-peer learning through research: a case study in delivering a healthcare message journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 2 themselves. it is important that the public understand, for example, the risks of smoking, the nutritional benefit of green vegetables and the value of exercise. in the internet age, members of the public are highly informed about their own health, but are also prey to a great deal of misinformation. the popular press and social media are rich sources of healthcare myths, some of which, such as the suggestion that triple vaccines can cause autism, can cause serious harm (godlee et al., 2011). healthcare professionals have the training, but not always the time or the resources (easy access to the primary literature) to evaluate the healthcare advice that interests their patients. students in healthcare disciplines have the skills and knowledge to address at least some of these issues and are required to practise communication on healthcare matters. communication is core to the role of a pharmacist especially and is reflected in many of the educational standards required by the professional body (gphc, 2011), for example, ‘standard 10.2.4h: provide accurate written or oral information appropriate to the needs of patients, the public or other healthcare professionals’. it should therefore be possible to design a course unit in which healthcare students, specifically pharmacy students in this case, can practise communication by educating the public in an important aspect of healthcare. practice in peer-to-peer learning is also strongly encouraged by the professional body, for example, ‘standard 10.1f: contribute to the education and training of other members of the team, including peer review and assessment’. in their applications to university, healthcare students usually mention a desire to improve the lives of others and often back up their claims with evidence of volunteering. we believed, therefore, that the opportunity to disseminate a healthcare message in a controlled environment at an early stage of their course would prove popular with students. antibiotic resistance is extremely topical (pinder et al., 2015; cameron, 2014). since the commercial production of penicillin in 1942, antibiotics have played a major role in preventing and treating bacterial infection (for example, kollef et al., 1999). almost immediately after their widespread introduction, however, resistance to antibiotics began to emerge. resistance is an almost inevitable result of overuse and inappropriate use of these precious drugs. patients who demand antibiotics when they present with viral infections, such as colds and flu, are a menace. antibiotics are becoming less effective in treating infections and this has imposed a major threat to health and to the economy. in europe approximately 24,000 deaths occur annually as a result of antibiotic resistant ilias and barber peer-to-peer learning through research: a case study in delivering a healthcare message journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 3 bacteria (a number set to rise dramatically) and the cost burden of multi-drug resistance was conservatively estimated to be €1.5 billion in 2007 (european centre for disease control, 2009; gandra et al., 2014). antibiotic resistance was therefore chosen as an excellent topic for a peer-to-peer learning cascade. this article describes an exercise in peer-assisted learning in which knowledge about antibiotic resistance was cascaded from a single final year pharmacy student to 21 second year students to over 700 student users of a large university building. additionally, data about their understanding of antibiotic resistance was collected from the 705 participants, providing the 22 pharmacy students with an opportunity to learn through research. the final year student was carrying out a short project comprising 60% of a 30-credit unit ‘critical analysis and communication’ (demonacos et al., 2014; barber, 2015). this is a research unit with a strong practice focus, designed to train students in the analysis and communication of research data and to empower them to undertake small research projects in a practice setting. thus, 40% of the unit is didactic, focusing on analysis of scientific claims in both the scientific literature and the popular press. research ethics are also covered, with a focus on ethical data acquisition, storage and dissemination when human subjects are involved. the ‘project’ material may be the design of a detailed protocol (which is not carried out) or a simple non-laboratory project (typically involving a meta-analysis or a survey). aims the aims of the project were formulated as follows:  to embed the students’ understanding of antibiotic resistance by enabling them actively to promote an understanding of the issue in other people.  to enable students to take an active (but adequately supervised) part in public health education prior to qualification as pharmacists.  in a small way to improve public understanding of antibiotic resistance, thereby saving lives. ilias and barber peer-to-peer learning through research: a case study in delivering a healthcare message journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 4 logistics dictated further desirable aims. a student with a clipboard saying ‘may i ask you a few questions?’ is likely to be much more confident than a student with no props asking ‘may i tell you about antibiotic resistance?’. further, the questioning approach will yield data, leading to further educational benefit, and enabling the activity to qualify for modest funding. we therefore considered an activity in which students would question other students or members of the public about their perceptions of antibiotic resistance and would then seek to fill any gaps in their understanding. peer-to-peer instruction (crouch and mazur, 2001) presented itself as a natural method of delivery. data collection and communication of information about antibiotic resistance could, with suitable training, be carried out by second year students, whereas coordination of the project and data analysis was suitable for a final year project. two further objectives were then incorporated into this activity, known as the antibiotic resistance survey:  to provide an opportunity for learning through research for both second and fourth year students.  to enhance second year students’ understanding of antibiotic resistance by peer instruction. the aims of the project are summarised in figure 1. ilias and barber peer-to-peer learning through research: a case study in delivering a healthcare message journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 5 figure 1. graphic summarising the antibiotic survey, showing both the cascade of peer instruction and the collection of research data. project design and implementation the first task for the final year student (si) was to design, pilot and validate a questionnaire that would make up the survey. the focus of the survey was on practical ways in which the survey participants could help to limit antibiotic resistance. we were, however, aware that the participants would be university staff and students who would expect a clear rationale to underlie any request to reconsider their behaviour. the questionnaire was tested on 100 final year pharmacy students who gave constructive feedback resulting in a few minor changes (largely clarification of language). the final form of the questionnaire is presented in appendix 1. ethical issues were explicitly addressed by the fourth year student. although formal ethics committee approval is not normally required for the collection of non-sensitive data, without identifiers, when the issues are unlikely to upset or disturb participants, we deemed it essential that the fourth year student determined this for herself and explained ilias and barber peer-to-peer learning through research: a case study in delivering a healthcare message journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 6 the principles to the second year students. it was especially important for them to explain that participation was voluntary and participants could withdraw at any time. recruitment of second year students involved a short presentation by si. volunteers received an antibiotic guardian tee-shirt (figure 2) to allow them to be clearly identified in a crowded building, and a small amount of credit (for volunteering) in the manchester leadership programme (http://www.college.manchester.ac.uk/awards/manchesterleadershipawardmlp/). volunteers were required to sign an antibiotic guardianship pledge (http://antibioticguardian.com/). figure 2. antibiotic guardian tee-shirt (designed by sadaf ilias, modelled by a second year volunteer, iqra zafar, photograph by ed swindells). funding for teeshirts was though a grant from the university of manchester’s (2015) ‘learning through research’ fund. the fourth year student briefed the volunteers on both antibiotic resistance (reinforcing course material) and on research ethics, using role play exercises to ensure that they fully http://www.college.manchester.ac.uk/awards/manchesterleadershipawardmlp/ http://antibioticguardian.com/ ilias and barber peer-to-peer learning through research: a case study in delivering a healthcare message journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 7 understood their role. although the antibiotic resistance survey can, in principle, be conducted using members of the public as participants, university premises were chosen for the first survey because participants were expected to be broadly sympathetic to the aims of the project. the building chosen for the survey houses students in medicine, pharmacy, other healthcare subjects and life sciences. these groups are expected to have a great deal of influence over antibiotic guardianship in their future careers. the survey was conducted over a period of one week. each volunteer collected data for a total of about 5 hours. nobody was excluded from taking part in the survey but responses from non-students were excluded from the data analysis. data suitable for analysis were collected on paper forms from 705 student participants, entered manually into excel and then imported in spss version 20. about 40 additional questionnaires were collected from academic and support staff. the results of the survey will be reported elsewhere. key findings were: 81.5% of healthcare students (n=411) and 73.3% of life sciences students (n=251) understood that antibiotics can be used to treat some pneumonias but not colds, flu, and sore throats. 91.5% of healthcare students and 86.5% of life sciences students understood that premature discontinuation of treatment can contribute to antibiotic resistance. life sciences students (87.7%) were more likely than healthcare students (81.6%) to understand that the use of antibiotics as growth promoters in farm animals is a cause of antibiotic resistance. only 55.2% of healthcare students and 45.1% of life sciences students understood the importance of good hygiene in limiting antibiotic resistance and this finding was immediately communicated to academic staff so that it could be reinforced in classes. the volunteers (16 out of 21) filled in a short feedback form using a likert scale (strongly agree, agree, uncertain, disagree, strongly disagree) and descriptive statistics are given in table 1. ilias and barber peer-to-peer learning through research: a case study in delivering a healthcare message journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 8 table 1. student volunteers’ perceptions of conducting the antibiotic resistance survey. strongly agree agree uncertain disagree strongly disagree i was well informed about the purpose of the research project 11 6 0 0 0 i was aware of my role as a volunteer 13 4 0 0 0 the instruction to conduct my role was clear and concise 11 6 0 0 0 i have gained communication skills and confidence by surveying the students and staff 11 6 0 0 0 i have enhanced my knowledge regarding antibiotic resistance 12 5 0 0 0 i have managed to raise awareness about antibiotic resistance amongst students and staff on campus 11 5 1 0 0 i have gained analytical skills from analysing the data gathered 10 4 1 1 0 there were no unforeseen difficulties in conducting the survey and the students’ efforts were well-received by participants. discussion a significant body of literature about peer-to-peer learning in higher education has been reviewed by keenan (2014). the most prevalent models are peer assisted learning (pal) ilias and barber peer-to-peer learning through research: a case study in delivering a healthcare message journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 9 and peer assisted study sessions (pass), which are deeply embedded and validated in many university courses. leaders of these sessions are believed to be the main beneficiaries (dawson et al., 2014; becker and fostier, 2015), gaining employability skills, and hilsdon (2013) has commented on the social focus of pal. nevertheless, the headline objective of most peer-to-peer learning is to aid learning for success in assessments. typically, but not exclusively, leaders are second year students and learners are first year students. the headline objective of our model is different. we sought to deliver an important healthcare message to a wider public (in this pilot most of the wider public were students) with the ultimate purpose of saving lives. we used a peer-to-peer cascade to embed an understanding of antibiotic resistance in second year pharmacy students and then in a body of over 700 students. we believe that the peer-to-peer learning cascade is novel, and an important feature is that the learning by the final (large) group is quite simple and capable of being expressed in a few minutes. another important point is that the second year students did not expect directly to improve their examination performance as a result of this activity. they were recruited as volunteers, rather than as learners. nevertheless, the second year student volunteers believed that this approach had improved their understanding of antibiotic resistance and they valued the opportunity to practise communication of healthcare issues, believing that their communication skills had improved. we cannot yet determine whether the second stage of the cascade (student volunteers talking to other students) was successful in raising awareness of antibiotic resistance among the larger group. both the second year and the fourth year students were given an opportunity to learn through research. second year students were fully briefed on the practical and ethical considerations of carrying out a large scale research project using human subjects. they found the data analysis relatively difficult but were able to develop their understanding of this aspect of the project. the exercise was therefore very largely successful in achieving its aims. we are currently repeating it with some modifications: replacing paper forms with i-pad based ‘e-forms’ which send data to a central computer; recruiting participants from a wider range of ilias and barber peer-to-peer learning through research: a case study in delivering a healthcare message journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 10 student disciplines; and seeking to understand which aspects of the activity were most valued by the second year students. the peer-to-peer cascade could be used to deliver many important healthcare messages, but might be equally powerful in delivering short messages in the arts and humanities. one topical example might be an introduction to the easter 1916 uprising delivered by history students. conclusion the antibiotic resistance survey is an example of a peer-to-peer learning cascade, in which a final year student trained 21 second year students to deliver a healthcare message to over 700 university staff and students. the second year students learned through carrying out research and through communicating an important healthcare message to other people. the activity may also be expected to yield benefit in terms of raising public awareness of antibiotic resistance. the peer-to-peer learning cascade differs from established models such as pass and pal in a number of respects, most importantly that the participants were not expecting to improve assessment scores as a result of the activity. 21 second year students (in this case) had the opportunity to practise important skills, but the final learning was a simple healthcare message. acknowledgements we are grateful for a grant from the university of manchester’s ‘learning through research’ fund; to the 21 second year student volunteers; and to over 700 students and staff who participated in the antibiotic resistance survey. references barber, j. (2015) critical analysis and communication: an alternative research project for pharmacy students. higher education academy: innovative pedagogies project. available at: https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/critical-analysis-and-communicationalternative-research-project-pharmacy-students (accessed: 1 april 2016). https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/critical-analysis-and-communication-alternative-research-project-pharmacy-students https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/critical-analysis-and-communication-alternative-research-project-pharmacy-students ilias and barber peer-to-peer learning through research: a case study in delivering a healthcare message journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 11 becker, r. and fostier, m. (2015) evaluating non-compulsory educational interventions – the case of peer assisted study groups. the university of manchester economics discussion paper series edp-1509. available at http://hummedia.manchester.ac.uk/schools/soss/economics/discussionpapers/edp1509.pdf (accessed 29 april 2016). cameron, d. (2014) press release: prime minister warns of global threat of antibiotic resistance. prime minister’s office, 2 july. available at https://www.gov.uk/government/news/prime-minister-warns-of-global-threat-ofantibiotic-resistance (accessed: 16 november 2015). crouch, c. and mazur, e. (2001) ‘peer instruction: ten years of experience and results’, am. j. phys, 69(9), pp. 970-977. dawson, p., van der meer, j., skalicky, j. and cowley, k. (2014) ‘on the effectiveness of supplemental instruction: a systematic review of supplemental instruction and peerassisted study sessions literature between 2001 and 2010’, review of educational research, 84(4), pp. 609-639. demonacos, c., aarons, l. and barber j. (2014) ‘critical analysis and communication: an alternative to the research project’, hea health and social care education 2014, pp. 1-5. european centre for disease control, european medicines agency (2009) the bacterial challenge: time to react. a call to narrow the gap between multi-drug resistant bacteria in the eu and the development of new antibacterial agents 2009. stockholm: european centre for disease prevention and control. gandra, s., barter, d.m. and laxminarayan, r. (2014) ‘economic burden of antibiotic resistance: how much do we really know?’, clin. microbiol. infect, 20(10), pp. 973980. general pharmaceutical council (gphc) (2011) future pharmacists. standards for the initial education and training of pharmacists. (pp 37 and 33). available at: http://www.pharmacyregulation.org/sites/default/files/standards%20for%20the%20i http://hummedia.manchester.ac.uk/schools/soss/economics/discussionpapers/edp-1509.pdf http://hummedia.manchester.ac.uk/schools/soss/economics/discussionpapers/edp-1509.pdf https://www.gov.uk/government/news/prime-minister-warns-of-global-threat-of-antibiotic-resistance https://www.gov.uk/government/news/prime-minister-warns-of-global-threat-of-antibiotic-resistance http://www.pharmacyregulation.org/sites/default/files/standards%20for%20the%20initial%20education%20and%20training%20of%20pharmacists.pdf ilias and barber peer-to-peer learning through research: a case study in delivering a healthcare message journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 12 nitial%20education%20and%20training%20of%20pharmacists.pdf (accessed: 29 march 2016). godlee, f., smith, j. and marcovitch, h. (2011) ‘wakefield's article linking mmr vaccine and autism was fraudulent’, bmj, 342(5 jan), c7452. hilsdon, j. (2013) ‘peer learning for change in higher education’, innovations in education and teaching international, 51(3), pp. 244-54 [online]. available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14703297.2013.796709 (accessed: 1 april 2016). keenan, c. (2014) mapping student-led peer learning in the uk. york: higher education academy. available at: https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/sites/default/files/resources/peer_led_learning_keen an_nov_14-final.pdf (accessed: 29 march 2016). kollef, m.h., sherman, g., ward, s. and fraser, v. (1999) ‘inadequate antimicrobial treatment of infections: a risk factor for hospital mortality among critically ill patients’, chest j., 115(2), pp. 462-474. pinder, r., sallis, a., berry, d. and chadborn, t. (2015) behaviour change and antibiotic prescribing in healthcare settings: literature review and behavioural analysis. london: public health england. available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/4050 31/behaviour_change_for_antibiotic_prescribing_-_final.pdf (accessed: 16 november 2015). university of manchester (2015) learning through research. available at: http://www.manchester.ac.uk/study/undergraduate/teaching-learning/methodsmaterials/research/ (accessed: 16 november 2015). author details sadaf ilias graduated from the manchester pharmacy school in 2015 and is currently working towards registration as a member of the royal pharmaceutical society. her http://www.pharmacyregulation.org/sites/default/files/standards%20for%20the%20initial%20education%20and%20training%20of%20pharmacists.pdf http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14703297.2013.796709 https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/sites/default/files/resources/peer_led_learning_keenan_nov_14-final.pdf https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/sites/default/files/resources/peer_led_learning_keenan_nov_14-final.pdf https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/405031/behaviour_change_for_antibiotic_prescribing_-_final.pdf https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/405031/behaviour_change_for_antibiotic_prescribing_-_final.pdf http://www.manchester.ac.uk/study/undergraduate/teaching-learning/methods-materials/research/ http://www.manchester.ac.uk/study/undergraduate/teaching-learning/methods-materials/research/ ilias and barber peer-to-peer learning through research: a case study in delivering a healthcare message journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 13 ambition is to practise in primary healthcare alongside gps to provide optimal patient outcome. she also aims to become an independent prescriber. jill barber completed her b.a. and ph.d. in chemistry at the university of cambridge but is now a reader in pharmacy at the university of manchester. she maintains an active research group in pharmacoproteomics as well as pursuing innovations in teaching, especially e-learning and e-assessment. she was awarded a national teaching fellowship by the higher education academy in 2014. ilias and barber peer-to-peer learning through research: a case study in delivering a healthcare message journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 14 appendix 1. questionnaire survey attached with patient information leaflet antibiotic resistance survey i am a fourth year pharmacy student and i would like you to participate in my research survey which is approved by the university of manchester. the purpose of this survey is to assess your knowledge regarding antibiotic resistance. by taking part in this research, it will benefit you by raising your awareness on antibiotic resistance and benefit the university in future teaching and development. your participation in this research is entirely voluntary and you are free to withdraw whilst filling out the survey without giving reason. you can provide a unique identifier number to enable you to withdraw your data within 48 hours after handing the survey. the information you provide is anonymous and if the data is shared or published your anonymity will be preserved. you can email the researcher for any questions or decide to withdraw your survey data sadaf.ilias@student.manchester.ac.uk. please tick the box to confirm that you have understood the purpose and provide consent to undertake this survey  1.) please state your occupation or degree course that you are studying 2.) which of the condition listed below do you think should be primarily treated with an antibiotic? (please tick one option)  colds  sore throat  pneumonia  cough less than 14 day duration  flu 3.) can you name an antibiotic? 4.) tick any of following that you think antibiotics are effective against:  fungi  bacteria  worm  virus  bovine spongiform encephalopathy 5.) are you aware of the term antibiotic resistance?  yes  no if yes, then please continue filling out the survey 6.) how have you heard of the term antibiotic resistance?  news  newspaper  lecture  personal experience mailto:sadaf.ilias@student.manchester.ac.uk ilias and barber peer-to-peer learning through research: a case study in delivering a healthcare message journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 15  other please state 7.) which of the following statements do you think is the correct definition of antibiotic resistance? (please tick one option)  antibiotic kills the microorganisms and treats the infection  microorganisms can withstand the action of the antibiotics and is able to multiply and spread causing severe infections  virus can resist the action of antibiotics causing severe infection 8.) antibiotic resistance is a major concern worldwide due to adverse impact on health and economy? (please tick one option)  true  false  don’t know 9.) resistant bacteria are bacteria that is not controlled or killed by an antibiotic. an example of such bacteria is c. difficile. can you provide another example of antibiotic resistant bacteria? 10.) which of the conditions below are becoming difficult to treat due to antibiotic resistance?  tb  urinary tract infection  gonorrhoea  meningitis  all of the above 11.) which of the practices below do you think could contribute to antibiotic resistance: individual stop taking antibiotic once they feel better  yes  no overuse of antibiotics in farming animals  yes  no prescribing narrow spectrum antibiotic for known causative agent  yes  no inadequate hygiene practices  yes  no sharing antibiotics with family and friends  yes  no 12.) provide three examples how you can play a role in minimising the risk of antibiotic resistance development? 1.) 2.) 3.) thank you for participating! peer-to-peer learning through research: a case study in delivering a healthcare message abstract introduction aims project design and implementation discussion conclusion acknowledgements references author details appendix 1. questionnaire survey attached with patient information leaflet literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 7: june 2014 returning to learning: what are the academic development needs of mature and part-time students? what works to support and retain these students? louise frith university of kent, uk allia wilson university of kent, uk abstract this paper considers the support and retention of mature and part-time (map) students. it analyses the specific academic development needs of map students based on wenger’s model of learning (1998) which puts the academic learning needs of students into three broad categories; the first is academic confidence and learner identity, the second is the need for map students to integrate and build a sense of community, and the third is for these students to overcome anxiety through practice and practical considerations. then an appreciative inquiry (cooperrider et al., 2008) approach is used to develop the university of kent’s student learning advisory service (slas) map programme called value map. the programme offers; self-assessment of needs, one to one advice and targeted study skills sessions. the conclusion points to the positive responses received from map students about the programme but also acknowledges that more could be done; perhaps through reflection on students’ prior knowledge, a stronger emphasis on building social learning networks, and the increased use of technology. keywords: mature and part-time students; identity; community; practice. introduction an outcome of the uk government’s widening participation agenda is the emergence of a ‘new constituency of learners’ (macdonald and strutta 2001, p.205). two of these constituencies are mature and part-time students, who are now significant minority groups frith and wilson returning to learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 7: june 2014 2 within the uk student population. the focus of recent government policy has been on improving non-traditional students’ access to university, but there has not been the same government drive to ensure these students participate, achieve and are retained at university. in this paper, mature and part-time students are considered together because, although they are two distinct groups, their access to on-campus learning development support is similarly restricted. at the university, across two campuses (at canterbury and medway) there are a total of 16,463 undergraduate students of whom 3,286 are part-time, of these more than 85% are also mature (over 21). this is a very significant overlap, thus for the purposes of providing a support initiative and for this research, the two groups have been combined. there are significant factors which inhibit mature and part-time students’ full engagement with higher education; mature students will have had a break in their formal education which can often result in a loss of confidence, whilst part-time students are often juggling other commitments such as childcare, work or dealing with a long-term health issue. reay et al. (2005) comment that these factors mean that the decision for mature and part-time students to participate in higher education is much riskier than it is for younger full time students. in addition mature students often find it difficult to integrate in classes where the majority of students are school-leavers. trotter and cove’s research (2005, p.35) reported that mature students felt excluded from the out-of-class social interactions that younger students took for granted and they felt that there was a ‘big divide’ between their experience and that of their younger counterparts. in response to tinto’s work on student retention (1998), ashar and skenes’ data (1993) shows that smaller class sizes are a crucial factor in retaining mature students because greater integration and communication is possible in smaller classes. mature students may also feel less academically capable having left school some years previously or having undergone work-based learning which they perceive as academically inferior to a three-year university degree. stevenson and clegg (2013) note that mature students have often previously underachieved academically and are also often from lower socio economic groups than younger students. younger part-time students may feel less integrated since they are not entitled to on-campus accommodation and therefore find it harder to build up a social network amongst their peers. indeed davies (1999, p.144) comments that part-time higher education is usually a ‘half empty experience, rather than a half full version of the real thing’. frith and wilson returning to learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 7: june 2014 3 these factors indicate that the support and retention of map students should be targeted to meet their specific needs. in fact in 2005 the national institute of adult continuing education (niace) expressed concern that provision for part-time and mature students is often the least resourced, least valued and least well understood. the student learning advisory service (slas) has responded to this by developing and devising the value map programme as a series of 12 academic development sessions specifically aimed at map students registered on university of kent courses (see appendix 2). in line with other specific retention and support initiatives developed by slas, the programme was given the value label (value added learning in university education). methodology for this study, new-entrant map undergraduates were surveyed (this was done in adherence to the university’s ethical approval). data was gathered in three ways; the age, gender and programmes of study for which the students were enrolled on was collected from the university’s student data system. information about the academic development sessions and levels of participation in these workshops came from slas’ records. this revealed that in the total of 12 x 2 sessions offered on both campuses, 347 students attended. formal and anonymous feedback was gathered from 72 students who had attended at least one session. this was done via online surveys after the last of the workshops in the autumn term and then again after the spring term sessions (see appendix 1 for more details of the questions used in these surveys). finally, qualitative information about mature and part-time students’ academic development needs and evaluations of their experiences was gathered through twelve unstructured interviews before and after the value map programme. the interviews were carried out by 4 slas staff, however, in order to avoid students being influenced by knowing the interviewer, staff who had taught the value map sessions did not conduct the interviews. the questions used in these interviews were based on five key questions which were developed by the learning development team at kent: 1. how do you identify yourself (say what you do) to others? 2. what are the reasons that you decided to become a mature or part-time student? 3. do you feel that you belong to part of a learning community at the university? frith and wilson returning to learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 7: june 2014 4 4. what practical issues do you face as a mature or part-time student that you think other students do not face? 5. do you feel supported by your friends and family as a student? the data generated from the surveys and interviews was used to construct themes by which to examine the value map programme, and an appreciative inquiry (ai) approach was used to see what works in terms of supporting map students at university. ai stems from organisational development (od) theory, but differs from other od approaches which tend to focus on solving problems. therefore the value map programme resisted seeing map students as problems; instead following the ai model, it established an ‘affirmative topic’, i.e. the retention and academic achievement of mature and part-time students. the programme then focused on these students’ strengths and used collaboration with these students to develop the value map programme. profile of mature and part-time students at the university: the context for academic year 2009-2010. total number of undergraduates full-time undergraduates part-time undergraduates 16,463 13,177 3,286 % 80% 20% total number of undergraduate new entrants full-time part-time 6,096 5,119 977 84% 16% undergraduate part-time new entries by gender female male 483 494 49% 51% undergraduate, part-time new entries by faculty sciences humanities social sciences. other 54 533 342 48 6% 54% 35% 6% undergraduate, part-time new entries by age < 21 21-24 107 169 11% 17% frith and wilson returning to learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 7: june 2014 5 = and > 25 nk 693 8 70% undergraduate, part-time new entries by campus canterbury medway tonbridge associated colleges 596 208 8 165 71% 22% 1% 16% (university statistic – blue book – 2009-10) students’ academic development needs 1. perceptions of identity a major concern for mature and part-time students is lack of confidence in their academic ability. this often has a lot to do with the students’ sense of self identity: much has been written about mature students’ conceptions of identity as a barrier to full participation in higher education. reay (2002) refers to it as an imposter feeling. crossan et al. (2003) say that for some mature students, a rejection of education in earlier experiences can lead to mature students having a fragile sense of student identity. this is reinforced by ramsay (2004) who says previous academic failure can become part of mature students’ learner identity. often map students see themselves as parents or employees but not as students or, as christie et al. (2005) put it, they see themselves as day students returning to other identities when they are not at university. one mature student at kent said: i’ve been working for 12 years already so i think of myself as a youth worker, not a student. anxiety over the resumption of learning is also a common feature: many map students will report a long gap, often of many years, since their last formal learning experience. this is not entirely surprising, given that the average age of a value map student is 41, with over half the students in the 30-49 age group and another 25% over the age of 50. sitting in a classroom that feels as if it is full of 18-20 year olds, therefore, can seem like being back at school. some mature students may have left formal education prematurely because of personal circumstances – for example, one student reports: frith and wilson returning to learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 7: june 2014 6 i had to give up studying when i was 19 because i got pregnant. many of those returning to study have a sense that they are being required to move outside their ‘comfort zone’ and will talk about the loss of control they felt when they first started in higher education – they may feel personally ‘de-skilled’ as they move back into what they see as the role of the student-novice. although transition into university is unsettling for many students regardless of whether or not they are mature or part-time, transition for map students is often more complex. the key issue for map students is about building up levels of confidence and enabling them to navigate a path successfully through these perceived changes in status and self-identity, precisely so they can see the transition into higher education as a positive achievement that will enhance and not diminish their sense of self-worth. 2. community of learners belonging to a community of learners has been demonstrated to be instrumental in students’ success. wenger (1998) talks of the ‘social phenomena of learning’ and goes on to say that the most transformative learning is social learning. tutors thus need to be aware of the importance of this social dimension and their own role in the social network and the part they play in the creation of a supportive environment for peer-group learning. research by parmer and trotter (2005) shows that universities which focus on pre entry information and inductions to help students make friends have significantly better retention rates than universities which do not prioritise induction. wenger (1998) suggests that there are three key components in a functioning community of practice (figure 1 below). one major issue with this model of community of practice, however, is that map students frequently report feeling isolated from other students on their programme of study. mature students cannot, or maybe do not want to, get involved in the same social activities that attract the majority of younger students: i don’t really want to talk with the younger students about what they did last night...they can’t relate to me and my experiences of life, they just treat me like their mum! frith and wilson returning to learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 7: june 2014 7 figure 1. wenger (1998). all of the mature students interviewed were living away from campus, so they had little or no informal contact outside the classroom with other students who live in university or share student accommodation. map students feel that this puts them at a distinct disadvantage because they are not able to access informal learning with the same ease as younger, full-time students. 3. overcoming practical barriers another significant consideration for many mature and part-time students is their capacity to overcome practical barriers to learning. timing, travel arrangements, other priorities, and responsibilities loom large for this group of students and affects their choice of where to study (lucas, 1990). interviews with map students at the start of their degree programme are frequently dominated by their anxieties about balancing these competing responsibilities, often compounded by the complications and costs of travelling into a campus which could be some distance from home. it takes me nearly two hours to get into university. i can’t just come in for one session. i have to take everything with me and camp at the university for the day to make it worthwhile. frith and wilson returning to learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 7: june 2014 8 issues of child care are especially important for student parents. mothers, in particular, often have to re-negotiate household responsibilities with their partner and older children. this can lead to tension as old habits are often hard to change. i’ve always done everything at home so it’s hard to get them [her family] to help. further pressure may be put on part-time and mature students by the demands of balancing paid work with study which can mean that they are less able to access some of the extra support and personal development experiences available at university. even issues as seemingly peripheral as the lack of adequate it training can place these students at a further disadvantage as they are quickly confronted with the need to gain access to internet resources. for some of these students, something as mundane as a routine trip to a modern it-focused library can feel utterly overwhelming. background information about value map the aim of the value map programme is to help mature and part-time students ‘feel at home’ in a higher education environment so that they can develop the effective learning strategies needed for successful completion of the course. the sessions are not disciplinespecific, but concentrate on ‘learning to learn’ in an academic environment. students can choose a number of value map sessions according to their self-identified learning development needs. session tutors are aware of the needs of this particular cohort and thus select suitable materials and teaching methods to help students settle into university life. the value map sessions run for three consecutive weekends at the start of the autumn term. the classes are small to facilitate discussion and there is an emphasis on communicative learning so that within the session a community can be built. most workshop days ended with ‘study clinics’ to give those students who find it difficult to access the student learning advisory service during normal office hours the option of meeting with a learning advisor and of discussing their own individual learning needs. frith and wilson returning to learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 7: june 2014 9 how value map addresses identity the value programme addresses these issues of time-lapse in education and interrupted study through the ‘introduction to university’ session. this session places emphasis on discussion of students’ previous experiences and takes a ‘strengths based’ (staron, 2010) approach to reviewing students’ academic skills. cowan (p 76, 2011) describes this as: enabling learners to experience, feel and appreciate themselves as a knower. this helps students to focus on areas where they have some experience or expertise, such as time management, meeting deadlines and being prepared to ask questions. the programme focuses on building academic confidence for students who may not have participated in formal learning for some time, recognising that: students entering into these programs without having learned the skills of selfdirected inquiry will experience anxiety, frustration, and often failure, and so will their teachers. (knowles, 1975, p.15) at the same time, however, these initial sessions also enable participants to work at the process of establishing a confident new self-identity as a student. as wenger argues (1998, p.56), this is most effectively formed through active participation: in this case, mature students form a new peer group to support each other as they explore shared concerns. often it is enough simply to articulate these hopes and fears to start the process of transition into the first year of higher education, moving gradually from dependence to independence. this provides a starting point for integration into the university learning environment, as students mix with other like-minded individuals and develop a stronger sense of academic confidence. this is critical for academic success if mature students are to build on their initial motivation, and ultimately complete their studies. how the value programme addresses community the value programme aims to facilitate collaboration and create a sense of community through classroom activities; session plans are negotiated with students at the beginning of each class. sessions begin with a review of students’ previous experience of the activity under discussion, such as note taking, academic writing or reading. students are encouraged to reflect on their successes in these areas and in this way build up a ‘shared frith and wilson returning to learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 7: june 2014 10 repertoire’ (wenger, 1998) of transferable academic skills. in addition, students are given in-class activities such as comparing notes from reading, discussing speed reading techniques, or designing a poster with their top tips for essay writing. these activities require discussion with other students and so help to build up a sense of community through ‘mutual engagement’ and ‘joint enterprise’ (wenger, 1998). some of the work that students have produced during these sessions has been of high quality, therefore it has been made available for other students via the slas resources website (e.g. revision notes for sports studies). these sessions provide the opportunity for map students from across departments to mix and develop informal socio-educational peer support networks. how value map addresses practical barriers sessions on time management tend to be popular and produce a high level of debate amongst the students. this is often an area when students can contribute freely from their own expertise and this experiential knowledge is captured in an exercise where students are asked to produce posters on time management. the need to combine adult responsibilities with the practical constraints of formal study lead on to another key area for negotiation: local data shows that map students are most likely to attend extra academic development sessions on saturday; however, they are unlikely to make the journey for just one hour, therefore sessions are scheduled for four consecutive hours so that students can set aside a whole morning for their study, making childcare and travel arrangements worthwhile. however, there remain students for whom these times are not suitable, therefore they have the option to attend the standard slas workshops open to all students either on wednesday afternoons or twilight sessions on monday evenings. discussion the value map programme has been deemed by the university as successful as sessions are mostly well attended and student feedback is positive. most of the students reported that they appreciated the opportunity to ‘brush-up’ their skills as well as meet other map students. overall, therefore, students were very happy with the content, structure and timing of the sessions. feedback received from the participants has provided frith and wilson returning to learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 7: june 2014 11 valuable insight on each of the three areas discussed in this paper. in particular, students noted that their levels of confidence had increased significantly – as one student said: i think that the sessions help to give confidence and provide valuable information about studying. (online survey, 2010) another student made specific reference to her feeling of empowerment as a result of the value map sessions: she said it was ‘extremely useful. very empowering!!’ (online survey, 2010). many students also commented on becoming a member of a learning community through engagement with value map. as one student put it: i attended all of the saturday sessions at medway in october/ feb/ march. found them very useful and also it was good to meet other mature students from different courses. (student interview 2010) students particularly enjoyed meeting students from different disciplines and backgrounds; as wenger (1998) suggests, diversity is a key element in the formation of a strong and dynamic community: i enjoyed mixing with other students from other courses. (online survey 2010) this element of confidence and identity is vital to the future academic success of the programme. students responded well to the practical arrangements and many students found it useful to have sessions bunched: it is good to have the sessions timetabled together as it makes my arrangements easier. (student interview, 2010) students also commented positively on the practical sessions such as it skills: the it session told me things i had never heard before; marks went up afterwards. (online survey, 2010) frith and wilson returning to learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 7: june 2014 12 conclusion support and retention of mature and part-time students is a key indicator of a university’s commitment to widening participation. the barriers that mature and part-time students face are categorised into three main areas; fragile student identity, lack of a sense of belonging to a learning community, and anxiety about the practical barriers to learning. the university is addressing these concerns through its value map programme which is a supportive and developmental learning intervention for mature and part-time students, offering a means by which they can establish a positive student identity and a sense of belonging to an academic community through participation. recognition of students’ prior experiences and existing skills are valued and built upon. the anxiety which map students experience at the start of a programme of study is countered by targeted practical sessions, sensitive tutors, and a supportive environment of peers. furthermore, students’ academic confidence grows through joint enterprise and mutual engagement in class-based activities. the value map programme will continue next year and there are plans to improve it. firstly, through strengthening reflection on students’ prior knowledge to enhance students’ positive identity with learning; also by putting a greater emphasis on building social learning networks; and finally with the increased use of technology, such as e-portfolios for maintaining contact between students and enabling them to record a wider range of their achievements. references ashar, h. and skenes, r. (1993) ‘can tinto’s student departure model be applied to nontraditional students?’, adult education quarterly, 43(2), pp. 90–100. christie, h., munro, m. and wager, f. (2005) ‘day students in higher education: widening access students and successful transitions to university life’, international studies in sociology of education, 5(1), pp. 3-29. cooperrider, d, whitney, d. and stavros, j. (2008) appreciative inquiry handbook. 2 nd edn. brunswick, oh: crown custom publishing, inc. frith and wilson returning to learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 7: june 2014 13 cowan, j. (2011) ‘creating a buzz – ‘lifewide learning’: the need for a radically revised pedagogy’, student lifewide development symposium. aston university, birmingham 1 march. crossan, b., field, j., gallacher, j. and merrill, b. (2003) ‘understanding participation in learning for non-traditional adult learners: learning careers and the construction of learning identities’, british journal of sociology of education, 24(1), pp. 55-67. davies, p. (1999) ‘half full, not half empty: a positive look at part-time higher education’, higher education quarterly, 53(2), pp. 141-155. knowles, m. (1975) self-directed learning. a guide for learners and teachers. englewood cliffs: prentice hall/cambridge. lucas, s. (1990) ‘open college and the transition to university’, journal of access studies, 5(1), pp. 35-46. macdonald, c and stratta, e. (2001) ‘from access to widening participation: responses to the changing population in higher education in the uk’, journal of further and higher education, 25(2), pp. 249-258. national institute of adult continuing education (niace) (2005) policy briefing to westminster hall adjournment debate. 22 june 2005. parmer, d. and trotter, e. (2005) ‘keeping our students: identifying factors that influence student withdrawal and strategies to enhance the experience and retention of first year students’, learning and teaching in the social sciences, 1(3), pp. 449-168. ramsay, e. (2004) ‘blurring the boundaries and re-thinking the categories: implications of enabling education for the mainstream post-compulsory sector’, australian journal of adult learning, 44(3), pp. 273-305. reay, d. (2002) ‘class, authenticity and the transition to higher education for mature students’, sociological review, 50(3), pp. 398-418. frith and wilson returning to learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 7: june 2014 14 reay, d., david, m. and ball, s. (2005) degrees of choice: social class, race and gender in higher education. stoke-on-trent: trentham. staron, m. (2010) ‘life-based learning model – a model for strength based approaches to capacity development and implications for personal development planning’, student lifewide development symposium. aston university, birmingham 1 march. stevenson, j. and clegg, s. (2013) ‘‘my past is a double edge sword’: temporality and reflexivity in mature learners’, studies in continuing education, 35(1), pp. 1-13. tinto, v. (1998) ‘colleges as communities: taking research on student persistence seriously’, the review of higher education, 21(2), pp. 167–177. trotter, e. and cove, g. (2005) ‘student retention: an exploration of the issues prevalent on a healthcare degree programme with mainly mature students’, learning in health and social care, 4(1), pp. 29-42. university statistic – blue book – 2009-10 (available on request from the university planning and business information office) wenger, e. (1998) communities of practice: learning meanings and identity. cambridge: cambridge university press. author details louise frith is a student learning adviser specialising in academic and reflective writing. allia wilson is the student learning advice service manager specialising in student to student support and language development. http://www.tandfonline.com.chain.kent.ac.uk/loi/csce20?open=35#vol_35 frith and wilson returning to learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 7: june 2014 15 appendix 1 questions for online survey for value map students 1. under which department do you study? 2. what session(s) did you attend? 3. on which campus was the session held? 4. on what date was the session held? 5. who ran the session? 6. how did you find out about this session? 7. did the session fulfil your expectations? 8. was the session useful? 9. did you learn anything new? 10. is there anything that should be changed? 11. what other subjects would you like us to cover? 12. please rate the following using this scale:  the length of the session.  the pace of the session.  the materials/resources provided.  the delivery of the session. 13. have you got any comments or questions? is there anything more we can do to help? frith and wilson returning to learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 7: june 2014 16 appendix 2: value map workshop programme workshop canterbury medway wshop300 getting started at university: understanding what to expect and what is expected of you: seminar lecture, assignments, assessment, work load, etc. sat 5 oct 2013 09:30 10:30 room: gs3 sat 12 oct 2013 09:30 -10:30 room: m122 wshop302 time management: developing strategies for managing study, work and family commitments and understanding the difference between being a virtuous student and being an effective student. sat 5 oct 2013 10:45 11:30 room: gs3 sat 12 oct 2013 10:45 -11:30 room: m122 wshop303 learning from lectures: understanding the value of lectures, how and what you can learn from them, how you can prepare and how to take notes sat 5 oct 2013 11:45 12:45 room: gs3 sat 12 oct 2013 11:45 -12:45 room: m122 wshop304 introduction to e-learning/moodle: understanding the advantages of online learning and learning how to use moodle. n.b. this is not an introduction to computing. sat 5 oct 2013 13:15 14:30 room: ksa1 sat 12 oct 2013 13:15 -14:30 room: m122 wshop305 research and reading: planning your research, selecting the appropriate reading material and reading techniques sat 12 oct 2013 09:30 11:00 room: ks17 sat 19 oct 2013 09:30 -11:00 room: m122 wshop306 sat 12 oct sat 19 oct frith and wilson returning to learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 7: june 2014 17 note taking skills: taking notes from lectures, seminars and written material, making planning notes for assignments. 2013 11:15 12:15 room: ks17 2013 11:15 -12:15 room: m122 wshop307 critical thinking skills: presenting and evaluating an argument or line of reasoning, learning to identify and draw valid conclusions. sat 12 oct 2013 12:45 14:00 room: ks17 sat 19 oct 2013 12:45 -14:00 room: m122 wshop308 study clinics: an opportunity to discuss any study related issues with a learning advisor (20-minute, confidential appointments). sat 12 oct 2013 14:00 15:00 room: ks17 sat 19 oct 2013 14:00 -15:00 room: m122 wshop309 essay planning: understanding essay questions and planning to write sat 19 oct 2013 9.30-10.30 room: gs3 26 oct 2013 9.30-10.30 room: m122 wshop310 structuring and paragraphing: what goes into the introduction, conclusion and paragraphs; organising and linking ideas sat 19 oct 2013 10:45 11:45 room: gs3 26 oct 2013 10.45-11.45 room: m122 wshop311 referencing and paraphrasing: how to use the literature to support your ideas and practice in paraphrasing sat 19 oct 2013 12.00-13.00 room: gs3 26 oct 2013 12.00-13.00 room: m122 wshop312 study clinics: an opportunity to discuss any study sat 19 oct 2013 26 oct 2013 frith and wilson returning to learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 7: june 2014 18 related issues with a learning advisor (20-minute, confidential appointments). 14.00-15.00 room: gs3 14.00-15.00 room: m122 literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 6: november 2013 lego serious play: a three-dimensional approach to learning development dr alison james london college of fashion, uk abstract this paper discusses work underway to explore the use of lego serious play (lsp) as an unconventional means of developing student learning. designed originally as a thinking tool within the corporate sector, the techniques and applications of lsp are not those conventionally used in developing academic capacities within students. however, experiences with lsp at the london college of fashion and that of users in other settings offer evidence of its value in aligning with other approaches to learning to provide a nonhierarchical and student-centred lens through which to consider personal growth and subject understanding. this paper suggests that lsp has an important role to play in supporting multisensory approaches to reflecting on learning, either in tandem with, or instead of writing. while the use of lsp discussed here focuses on its implementation on creative arts courses, it is a highly transferable methodology which can be applied across the spectrum of disciplines and for multiple purposes. keywords: student-centred; methodology; interdisciplinary; innovative. what is lego serious play (lsp)? lsp was originally developed in 1996 by kjeld kirk kristiensen, the owner of lego, and bart victor and johan roos, professors at the swiss business school imd, as an innovative and effective way of exploring complex issues without obvious answers. initially for the corporate/business sectors, its purpose was to generate ‘more engagement, imagination and playfulness in staff meetings’ (roos and victor 1998, cited nolan 2009, p.365). since then it has been adopted by numerous high profile organisations (google, ebay, the international red cross, roche and nasa are some examples). full accounts james lego serious play: a three-dimensional approach to learning development of the use of lsp in a variety of learning contexts can be found in gauntlett (2008), nolan (2009), james and brookfield (2014 forthcoming), as well as in open source lsp guidance and many online fora. these accounts describe lsp workshop activities in detail, while here a more synthesised outline will be provided. lsp comprises a set of activities combining metaphorical modelling, building with lego and peer discussion to explore complex issues. its techniques draw heavily on story and the use of metaphor through representing one thing in the form of another. the science of lego serious play leaflet (online) draws on schön’s view (1971, cited lego, n.d., p.7) that metaphors are a means of ‘creating radically different ways of understanding things’, citing his illustration of this when ‘product development researchers, trying to make an artificial paintbrush, had a breakthrough when one member of the group observed ‘a paintbrush is a kind of pump’’. an aeroplane is therefore not just (or even) a plane; a builder might use it to indicate concepts, values, or embody clichés (‘high flier’, ‘sky’s the limit’, ‘i grew wings’). a green plant is not just something for the window ledge, it may signify growth, inspiration, abundance, or it may not even be a plant at all, but hair or energy. a red rectangular piece, the archetypical brick of the early lego packs, is not a plastic geometric shape; rather it may be heat, passion, a shoe, a person. the ethos is playful, exploratory and creative, with freedom for participants to experiment and test out ideas without fear of failure or being wrong. activities start with individual models, followed by shared or joint constructions, and are highly respectful of ownership and opinion. the meaning that a participant invests in a brick or a model is accepted, it is not for others to superimpose their own meaning on it, although they are welcome to make observations or offer comments. even if participants are using what appear to be tired, old clichés (rollercoaster ride, end of the rainbow etc.), these mean something to the individual and their choice of phrase should be honoured. lsp taps into the learning philosophy of the creative arts and design through its affiliation with constructivism (piaget’s theory of building knowledge structures, 1954), as well as papert’s constructionist pedagogy, which demands ‘that everything be understood by being constructed’ (papert and harel, 1991, online, para 3), as opposed to the ‘instructionist’ models of school teaching. as a student of piaget, papert (1999) sought to apply the former’s work to his own learning theory, arguing that students learn best when constructing something and that two kinds of learning happen during this; one, an output is journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 2 james lego serious play: a three-dimensional approach to learning development created and two, new knowledge and meaning (the science of lego serious play, p.9). in his book creative explorations (2007), gauntlett shares papert’s account of how he formulated constructionism through observing students making soap sculptures, noting their heightened level of engagement and creativity. the hands are central to constructionist learning, with studies of brain function showing that nerve receptors in our fingers send electrical codes to the brain via our central nervous system (e.g. the explanation of touch (n.d.) at www.faq.org). there, in the cerebral cortex, these messages are interpreted, thus we can envisage thinking as starting with our hands, as opposed to the popular assumption that the brain ‘thinks’ first and tells the hands to act. the lego serious play training manual (trivium, 2013) further suggests that, as 70-80% of our brain cells are connected to our hands, physically handling objects and constructing things activates a richer kind of learning. the creative arts context lsp was not invented purely for use by ‘creative types’, nonetheless there is much about it that affiliates with learning preferences within arts and design disciplines. creative arts learning is predominantly visual and kinaesthetic, evolving from the 19th century preoccupation with developing creative, craft and industrial skills within a specific tradition to the interdisciplinary interests of today. creative practitioners also often have ‘portfolio careers’, which allow them to perform several roles at different times, including that of practitioner-educator. learning is problem and project based, constructionist, constructivist, about social and situated cognition, and rooted in communities of practice (wenger, 1998). it is also often about divergent outcomes and thinking, not finding the one right answer. all of these aspects can be related to learning with lego serious play. while writing inhabits large parts of the learning territory on creative arts courses, practicebased and experiential learning are dominant and more popular features of the curriculum. this tension between traditional academic writing and activities which are perceived in opposition to the academic – i.e. vocational – is one that causes disjuncture in the learning development of many creative arts students, either because they are actively trying to avoid conventional academic delivery or because the vocational is sometimes misinterpreted as ‘less clever’ than the traditionally academic. as is well known, there is a higher proportion of students with dyslexia in studying creative arts disciplines as opposed journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 3 http://www.faq.org/ james lego serious play: a three-dimensional approach to learning development to others (appleyard, 1997; james, abi., 2003). this is illustrated by data extracted from the higher education information database 2011/12, revealing that 15% of students in arts institutions had a specific learning difficulty (most often dyslexia), compared to 4% in other uk heis. in addition, much work has been done to argue for a recognition of academic intelligence which is not predicated on writing, but on other modes of embodying and expressing knowledge (james, 2007; pink, 2008; west, 2009; robinson, 2011; james and brookfield, 2013; 2014). elkins (2007) and robinson (2011) are two among those who note how strange it is that we continue to organise formal education in the post compulsory sector around the written word as opposed to the visual text. as stephen brookfield and i note elsewhere, this is not a new observation: ‘in the 1950’s and 1960’s, rudolph arnheim (2004) noted that visual ways of learning have traditionally been viewed as inferior intellectual capacities to the logico-rational, text based models of our traditional academic structures’ (james and brookfield, forthcoming, 2014). the challenge for learning development within the creative arts sector is often (at least) two-fold; enabling those students who struggle with producing academic writing to overcome their difficulties and also to support the recognition of other modes of learning and assessment, often associated with accommodating a difficulty, rather than being ‘first choice’ options. much work has been done in universities over the last two decades to move away from a narrow menu of exams and essays to a gamut of other assignment formats and this will not be reproduced here. however, in terms of understanding where lsp might fit in as an approach to learning development it is important to remember the challenges faced within this specific disciplinary context. using lsp as a non-traditional mode of reflection in the course of the last thirty years, reflection has become an established component of curricula at all levels of education and has an extensive literature to support it (e.g. boud et al., 1985; schön, 1987; mezirow, 1991; moon, 2006) which will not be explored here for lack of space. while the introduction of personal development planning (pdp) helped formalise the place of critical reflection within the curriculum, reflecting is something that many creative practitioners feel is an inescapable part of making, although it may not have been articulated in quite such an explicit fashion as pdp requires. in addition, although it is an academic practice of longstanding, the purpose and value of reflection is still journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 4 james lego serious play: a three-dimensional approach to learning development misinterpreted by some staff and students as merely being a dull, paper-based review of experience. by making reflection hands on and three dimensional through modelling, lsp has been effective in deepening reflection, provoking thought and making recollections more memorable. across the he sector, reflection has primarily taken written form, either in journals, logs, diaries or annotated sketchbooks, and latterly through wikis, blogging and tweeting, and more visually through social networking and video diaries. this has generated its own challenges; the continuation of a focus on writing as the primary or sole mode of recording evidence of development, and a shift in focus to make the implicit (reflecting on learning) explicit and to focus specifically on the metacognitive processes involved in the development of learning capabilities instead of on subject knowledge per se. while many staff and students have come to appreciate the purpose and potential impact of reflecting on their own learning, there are others who find it dull and divorced from the business of ‘proper learning’. as a result their own engagement with it is superficial and rushed and of little interest to either writer or reader. the adoption of lsp was piloted as a means of reenergising this engagement and enabling students to deepen their insights into their personal and professional development (our pdp). on some courses lsp is used instead of writing, on others – as in the case of the international preparation for fashion (ipf) course which follows – in combination with textual and video records. thinking in 3d: the use of lego serious play for reflecting on learning lsp was first introduced at the london college of fashion (lcf) in 2011 for staff workshops; following the success of these it was trialled as a creative and novel approach to personal and professional development study, as part of an international preparation for fashion (ipf) course. ipf has an entirely international cohort, and prepares students (to date 360 of them) for degree study, although it is the equivalent of the first year of an undergraduate programme. reflection is seen as an integral part of development of practitioner, identity and process of creation (james, 2004; james, 2007; shreeve et al., 2008) and an important part of ‘learning how to learn’. however, coming from diverse educational cultures, some students have encountered reflection before, some have not; lsp was also chosen as a means of bridging diverse learning cultures, and something that was likely to be new to all, as opposed to just a few. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 5 james lego serious play: a three-dimensional approach to learning development there are important learning modalities at work in lsp– including its democratic protocols (everyone builds, everyone shares, everyone speaks) – which stimulate involvement and override issues of passivity. on the ipf programme an investment was made to work with students in groups no bigger than 12 (this year meaning 20 workshops) to maximise opportunities to build, speak and share, however it is possible to use lsp with larger groups, different lengths of time and for alternative outcomes (see also gauntlett, 2008; nolan, 2009), and lsp is being used with a group of 48 incoming students in autumn 2013 to launch a brand identity project. on ipf, lego workshops last three hours and take place towards the end of the academic year (at present, although plans to bring them in earlier as well are under discussion) as part of a three-stage approach to summative reflection. first, students participate in a workshop, in which they develop a metaphorical, three-dimensional language through building models with lego: with these they share and discuss their representations of their learning development, achievement and challenges, since starting at lcf the previous september. time for building is kept short (anything from 3 to 15 minutes) and is always followed by discussion; such variation keeps momentum and focus up. there is a clear structure to the workshop in terms of techniques and activities employed, however, freedom to build wherever and however they like within the room is permitted, although a big table is the most convenient place for sharing. a student describes this construction process: we used this notion in mind [metaphor] to construct a lego structure that represents our current journey in life and the ipf course. i made a structure with two tiers; the bottom is a zigzag path that represents the path of my life, which is not straightforward and a future that is unpredictable. constructed with curved pieces jointed together, the top represents the winding journey of getting through the obstacles in my life. the metaphor for my structure is that my road towards success is narrow, complicated and unexpected. the height between the two tiers symbolises the fact that failure is a long way down and the struggle to keep staying up is the essence. (ipf participant on their lego model) while every student has a starter bag of lego, they can add more to this as activities unfold and are encouraged to move around, bend down, peer around each other’s models journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 6 james lego serious play: a three-dimensional approach to learning development to get a sense of height, proportion, scale and angle. afterwards they record a reflective video in the pod (an inflatable space with mac and photo booth for recording), using the five questions of brookfield’s (1995) critical incident questionnaire (http://www.stephenbrookfield.com/dr._stephen_d._brookfield/critical_incident_question naire.html), to review their learning experience; these invite students to consider when they have been most engaged, most distanced, surprised, puzzled or helped during the session. both experiences then inform their summative written self-assessments at the end of the unit. this reflection comes at an important time of transition for the learners, the majority of whom are staying on at the university to study for a creative arts degree, and needs to be meaningful. pioneering lsp with ipf was accompanied by two main concerns: that building metaphorically might be difficult for students communicating in a second language and that using lego might be misunderstood as infantilising or trivialising learning. with regard to the first, i was surprised by the extent to which students felt able to engage, facilitated also by the knowledge that if they could not think of any metaphors in english (although it was surprising how many they did generate), they could draw on those in their own language or invent new ones. lsp is also not purist in its interpretation of metaphor (debating the niceties of whether something is in fact an analogy, a simile or other, and not a real metaphor); as long as students are using one thing to discuss another in a ‘metaphorical manner’ then this is perfectly acceptable. they often observed that they felt their english had developed through participating in workshops; noting they felt more able to contribute to group work and class discussions as people’s attention was on the models, not individuals, which boosted their confidence in speaking. through others commenting on, or asking questions about their models, they were gently encouraged to expand on their initial thoughts and embodied expressions. suzanne rankin dia, english tutor to ipf and workshop observer, felt lsp paralleled thornbury’s (2000) analogy of promoting real language acquisition with the dogme95 approach to film making which prioritises story and performance over techniques and special effects. as students had control over the topics they were discussing they had a high level of engagement linguistically and kinaesthetically. there were other cross cultural outcomes as well, with students commenting either on the differences in academic conventions and styles between the uk and their homeland or on the fact that recognising ‘weakness’ or areas for development does not have to be shameful, but is a healthy and helpful aspect of learning. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 7 http://www.stephenbrookfield.com/dr._stephen_d._brookfield/critical_incident_questionnaire.html http://www.stephenbrookfield.com/dr._stephen_d._brookfield/critical_incident_questionnaire.html james lego serious play: a three-dimensional approach to learning development as to the second, there is often suspicion or uncertainty at the start of a lego session as participants are unsure what to expect. some are excited by the novelty, others nervous of it, while yet more may be wondering why, given their level of education and maturity, they are being expected to work with a children’s toy. beyond ipf, lsp has now been used as part of doctoral student induction, staff course and team development, to explore student engagement and how we motivate learning, and is being used in 2013/14 for industry collaborations, to examine sustainable education, and in many other contexts. at each of the sessions offered there have always been participants who have felt, or expressed, reservations as to what lies in store, but in the overwhelming majority of cases these have been dispelled by the end of the workshop. as they discover, lsp is surprisingly hard work and involves total focus and multisensory participation which is absorbing and often quite tiring. part of the reason for this is the lsp works best when the issues being considered are complex and have no obvious answer or interpretation. another part is that mobile phones are banned and all other bits of personal ‘kit’ (bags, notepads etc.) are all kept away from the building areas, which minimised distractions. participants are allowed, however, to take photographs of their models throughout the session, and this they do frequently, which also boosters engagement and ownership. benefits to learning development of using lsp while the greatest number of student users to date have been on ipf, lsp is being used in a much broader range of contexts, as already indicated; to date over 600 staff and students have participated in an lsp session of some kind. the role of the facilitator in sessions aligns itself well with that of the learning developer in that it requires the individual to work with the students so that they can elicit and model their own views, rather than being led to a single right answer or dominant interpretation. it is also an approach which reminds participants of the importance of listening to each other, rather than simply waiting for their turn to speak, and of the value of understanding different perspectives (unless otherwise indicated, the quotes which follow are from international ipf participants and are reproduced verbatim): one of the main things i noticed was how differently and complexly all of us think and perceive. it was almost euphoric when i was pointed out and had to talk. that is exactly what made it so insightful, the fact that no person was left out, everyone had journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 8 james lego serious play: a three-dimensional approach to learning development to take part and everyone had to present his or her thoughts and ideas. there was no presence of a usual classroom environment where there are a few dominant students. overall the session was very soothing in a way that it made me analyse myself in a way that i would not have on my own. it was very helpful to look at everyone else’s interpretations of themselves and how they think they can improve. the kinaesthetic and three-dimensional nature of building with lego is another significant aspect, compared to drawing or discussing issues and progress. part of this is to do with the neuroscientific premise alluded to earlier, and also the ability to physically touch and move around the models that have been created. size, scale, height and depth can all be brought into play (with models suspended above tables, situated in corners of rooms and so on) which helps visualise issues in a highly memorable way. even kneeling down to see someone’s model on eye level as opposed to viewing it from a chair can affect the thoughts that spring up in relation to it. among many surprises for participants has been the way that using bricks can test the imagination, release observations, give rise to insights, help consolidate knowledge or access alternative ways of seeing: for me it was amazing to see how a few pieces of lego can boost your imagination and make you come up with different and surprising ideas. i have understood within my model that my weaknesses lay in my tendencies to do things safely, repeat what i’ve done before because i know i can do it, but it is not risky nor innovative, therefore that work cannot be excellent. as noted above with regard to language acquisition, the important three words in this second quote are ‘within my model’ – as the focus of lsp is that what is to be expressed is embodied within participant constructions. it is through the model that latent insights often surface or vaguer thoughts become clarified. participants also commented on the way that working with lego on one aspect of their learning (reflective practice and improving metacognitive awareness) spilled into their journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 9 james lego serious play: a three-dimensional approach to learning development subject area; using metaphor for the design process, to develop ideas and research methods, as a starting point for inspiration. during lego serious play i can find my passion and become more effective at my project proposal development. the lego play workshop did not only give us one and a half hours of fun and stress relief, but it has also subtly taught us valuable techniques and skills that can be applied into our projects, work and even our daily lives. when i first started working on my project and coming up with a concept, i found that my concept was too broad and i couldn’t narrow it down easily. the concept i came up with at the beginning was birds, however, birds could be anything. i needed to brainstorm and think of all the different aspects of birds to use one for my project. taking part in the lego serious play helped me a lot. the workshop gave me further insight into the aspects of conceptualizing. most often objects are seen as they are, not as what they can potentially become. this was a creative and effective way of analysing our weaknesses and our strengths. it gave me a greater sense of direction for my future plans. the emphasis on building as opposed to writing was extremely helpful for students with dyslexia and extraordinarily effective for a student with adhd who had major concentration and engagement issues in a classroom setting, and yet who was completely absorbed and on task during the workshop. as stephen brookfield and i note elsewhere, when alison [james] mentioned how attentive she had been the student replied, ‘it’s because of what we were doing. when i can think with my fingers, i’m golden’. she went on to say that any kind of traditional lecture with power point and handouts left her crawling up the walls, whereas anything that involved activity completely held her attention. (james and brookfield, 2014, forthcoming) although group bonding has never been identified as an outcome for lsp workshops, a sense of connection to or with others recurs constantly in feedback, from simply working journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 10 james lego serious play: a three-dimensional approach to learning development with others less well known, to seeing people in a different light or forging stronger links. at a time when a desire for community is similarly recurrent in feedback from students (and staff) working in isolation or across sites, this sense of belonging can be a subtler aid to motivation and engagement: this session taught me how to approach the project from multiple different perspectives and helped to reignite my passion for my theme. not only did it build a new sense of perspective, but it also helped me to build a closer bond with my classmates and so it helped me feel as if i was the only one struggle with the project. when we give shape and form to our imagination, making them tangible and shareable, we not only reflect on them ourselves but also invite others to reflect with us. the process of sharing inspired me a lot. the value of lsp as a means of shaking up thinking was also remarked on: the lego workshop was indeed very interesting. the activities helped me to ‘loosen up’ my mind and somehow it felt like i was being less restricted when coming up with ideas and even words to describe my learning journey at the end of the workshop as compared to the start. by getting us to build anything out of random blocks to illustrate our learning journey, it felt like it really exercised and challenged my creativity. i found it was very helpful in terms of creativity, critical thinking, as well as receiv[ing] peer comments and evaluations. as a reflection of the unit, i fe[lt] involved at all time, especially the discussion after every individual task. i enjoy thinking ideas while experiment[ing] with lego bricks. the ideology of ‘do not hide behind from pre-conceived assumptions’ is also applied in lego project. i was truly inspired by the shape/form that [i] created without [a] plan – the exploration of unexpected shape surprised me and leads to something new. using lsp also proved a useful means of prompting students to delve into their reflective observations with a little more depth than they may habitually do – moving them from the generic statement (‘my time management used to be bad and now it is better’) to more journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 11 james lego serious play: a three-dimensional approach to learning development specific identification of areas of improvement and the consequences of these: alison james' lego serious play sessions have been exceptionally effective in changing perceptions about what reflection is and can be. in our first year the external examiner came to visit the ipf and observe our teaching in process. he was clearly struck by the lego workshop and took photographs. i have no doubt that students' reflective writing improved as a consequence of these innovative workshops. (course leader, ipf) lsp offers flexibility, portability and transferability in terms of learning development; its techniques can be used anywhere, at any time. beyond the workshops, student models become part of other learning memories and portfolios through the photographs and videos students take of their models, which quickly become meaningful to them as personal representations of their own learning. these reappear in their written reflections and on their social media sites as memorabilia and become reference points in discussion. they construct models in which they invest meaning and which helps them understand things that they may not have grasped through a two-dimensional or more traditional read/write process of learning. even drawing may not have contributed the insights that constructing something did for them, due to the fact that their construction is in three dimensions, not two, and offers additional sensory information. challenges with lsp for all the positive feedback generated by using lsp there can also be aspects of the process which generate resistance; two of these (fear and timewasting) have been touched on earlier. there is an interesting tension with lsp in that as a creative methodology it would appear to be something that would be accepted without question by participants in the arts, design and media. however, for some – fine artists in particular (albeit a distinct minority of them) – the use of rigid plastic bricks is seen as too constraining a format. lsp is also structured around a distinct series of protocols and applications which need careful handling to ensure that these too do not feel constricting. while many (particularly those who need convincing that this is an appropriate use of their time when they have invested money in a course) are reassured by the global track record of lsp, a few others are put off by the prospect that this is a ‘corporate training tool’ – its journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 12 james lego serious play: a three-dimensional approach to learning development malleability notwithstanding. in very rare cases, participants may believe that they are being psychologically analysed by the facilitator, which is completely unfounded. as with any learning development process, sensitivity has to be shown to the energy levels of those participating in workshops, with the facilitator knowing when to ‘gee up’ the group, and when to let them back off and get a cup of tea. the ideal timescale and group size for lsp workshops can also be an issue in a climate of massified delivery, however, this is being experimented with and also does not preclude the very effective use of lsp as a one-to-one or small group discussion tool, once the basic skills have been acquired – an essential first step in any usage. furthermore, to understand the stories behind the constructions it is essential to be in the session or have the model narrated somehow: being metaphorical and/or abstract it may need interpretation, just as some art and design works may need explaining to the uninitiated or plain baffled. we can see this in the case of the student who built two models of their experience on their course side by side; one had familiar metaphors of ladders for progress and bridges between elements to signify change and movement in the course of learning, while the other, entirely black evoked their ongoing challenges with bipolar disorder, something which lives alongside their learning. while this example demonstrates a very personal kind of disclosure, it should be stressed that learners are only ever invited to include in their models that which they feel comfortable sharing: no tutor or peer should force any other kind of revelation or content. the vast majority of issues that might present themselves, however, can be dealt with through sensitive and careful facilitation and a real feel for the group – the kinds of skills that any good teacher uses. a final obstacle in the past has been that, until relatively recently, to be able to use lsp effectively it was necessary to go on a training course and access to materials and the ability to use these limited to accredited facilitators only. with the release of lsp materials and techniques ‘into the wild’ (through open source avenues) this barrier has now been removed, although the author would strongly recommend training for anyone interested in pursuing this further. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 13 james lego serious play: a three-dimensional approach to learning development conclusion this paper has introduced the lsp history and methodology and given examples of its use within a creative arts context, with the rider that appreciation of the potential of lsp should not be influenced by this disciplinary context as it is a highly transferable methodology, which had its origins outside art and design. examples have been shared of how and where lsp has been used to develop student learning, illustrated with feedback on these experiences. the argument has been put forward for lsp (and other approaches of its kind) to be included as a useful adjunct or alternative to engaging students in reflecting on learning. as lsp is a highly portable methodology it has helped students transfer meanings and models into different locations and, through its three dimensional and sensory nature, has made learning more memorable. figure 1. participant model of learning journey using lsp. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 14 james lego serious play: a three-dimensional approach to learning development references appleyard, d. (1997) ‘education: the art of being dyslexic’, the independent, 27 february (online). available at: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/educationnews/education-the-art-of-being-dyslexic-1280776.html (accessed: 25 october 2013). boud, d., keogh, r. and walker, d. (eds.) (1985) reflection: turning experience into learning. london: kogan page, pp. 18-40. brookfield, s. (n.d.) the critical incident questionnaire. available at: http://www.stephenbrookfield.com/dr._stephen_d._brookfield/critical_incident_qu estionnaire.html (accessed: 20 june 2013). brookfield, s. (1995) becoming a critically reflective teacher. san francisco: jossey-bass. elkins, j. (2007) how to use your eyes. new york: routledge. gauntlett, d. (2007) creative explorations: new approaches to identities and audiences. abingdon: routledge. gauntlett, d. (2008) media, gender and identity: an introduction. abingdon: routledge. james, abi. (2003) what subjects do students study at university? available at: http://www.dyslexic.com (accessed: 25 october 2013). james, a. (2004) ‘autobiography and narrative in personal development planning in the creative arts’, art, design and communication in higher education, 3(2), pp. 103118. james, a. (2007) ‘reflection revisited: perceptions of reflective practice in fashion learning and teaching’, art, design and communication in higher education, 5(3), pp. 179196. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 15 http://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/education-news/education-the-art-of-being-dyslexic-1280776.html http://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/education-news/education-the-art-of-being-dyslexic-1280776.html http://www.stephenbrookfield.com/dr._stephen_d._brookfield/critical_incident_questionnaire.html http://www.stephenbrookfield.com/dr._stephen_d._brookfield/critical_incident_questionnaire.html http://www.dyslexic.com/ james lego serious play: a three-dimensional approach to learning development james, a. and brookfield, s. (2013, forthcoming) ‘the serious use of play and metaphor: legos and labyrinths’, international journal of american vocational education and technology (ijavet), 4(3), july-sept. 2013. james, a. and brookfield, s. (2014, forthcoming) engaging imagination: helping students become creative and reflective thinkers. san francisco: jossey-bass. lego (n.d.) the science of lego serious play. usa: executive discovery llp. [online] available at http://www.strategicplay.ca/upload/documents/the-science-of-legoserious-play.pdf (accessed: 2 june 2013). mezirow, j. (1991) transformative dimensions of adult learning. san francisco: josseybass. moon, j. (2006) learning journals: a handbook for reflective practice and professional development. 2nd edn. new york: routledge. nolan, s. (2009) ‘physical metaphorical modelling with lego as a technology for collaborative personalised learning’, in o’donohue, j. (ed.) technology-supported environments for personalized learning: methods and case studies. usa: information science reference, pp. 364-385. papert, s. (1999) papert on piaget. available at: http://www.papert.org/articles/papertonpiaget.html (accessed: 17 june 2013). papert, s. and harel, i. (1991) situating constructionism. available at: http://www.papert.org/articles/situatingconstructionism.html (accessed: 25 october 2013). first published in papert, s. and harel, i. (1991) constructionism. norwood, nj: ablex publishing corporation. piaget, j. (1954) the construction of reality in the child. new york: basic books. pink, d. (2008) a whole new mind: why right brainers will rule the future. marshall cavendish, new york: penguin. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 16 http://www.strategicplay.ca/upload/documents/the-science-of-lego-serious-play.pdf http://www.strategicplay.ca/upload/documents/the-science-of-lego-serious-play.pdf http://www.papert.org/articles/papertonpiaget.html http://www.papert.org/articles/situatingconstructionism.html james lego serious play: a three-dimensional approach to learning development robinson, k. (2011) out of our minds. learning to be creative. chichester, uk: capstone. schön, d. (1987) the reflective practitioner: how professionals think in action. new york: basic books. shreeve, a., wareing, s. and drew, l.(2008) ‘key aspects of teaching and learning in the visual arts’, in fry h., ketteridge, s. and marshall, s. (eds.) a handbook for learning and teaching in higher education. 3rd edn. london: kogan page, pp. 345-362. thornbury, s. (2000) ‘a dogma for efl’, iatefl, issue 153, february-march [online]. available at: http://www.thornburyscott.com/assets/dogma.pdf (accessed: 13 august 2013). touch (n.d.) web page defining physiology of touch. available at: http://www.faqs.org/health/topics/3/touch.html (accessed: 25 october 2013). trivium (2013) facilitator’s manual: designing and facilitating workshops with the lego serious play method. not for publication. wenger, e. (1998) communities of practice: learning, meaning and identity. new york: cambridge university press. west, t. (2009) in the mind’s eye: creative visual thinkers, gifted dyslexics and the rise of visual technologies. amherst, ny: prometheus books. author details dr alison james is associate dean, learning and teaching, at the london college of fashion, with particular interests in personal and professional development (ppd) and enhancing reflective capacity in students using alternative approaches to writing. some of these are housed in her online resource for supporting student engagement with ppd – ppd coach (http://www.arts.ac.uk/ppd). she is the coauthor, with professor stephen brookfield, of ‘engaging imagination: helping students become creative and reflective thinkers’, which is being published by journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 17 http://www.thornburyscott.com/assets/dogma.pdf http://www.faqs.org/health/topics/3/touch.html http://www.arts.ac.uk/ppd james lego serious play: a three-dimensional approach to learning development jossey-bass in april 2014. she is an accredited lego serious play (lsp) facilitator and in 2013 she won a ual excellent teaching award for using lsp to enhance student learning and staff and educational development. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6: november 2013 18 lego serious play: a three-dimensional approach to learning development abstract what is lego serious play (lsp)? the creative arts context using lsp as a non-traditional mode of reflection thinking in 3d: the use of lego serious play for reflecting on learning benefits to learning development of using lsp challenges with lsp conclusion references author details literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special edition: digital technologies, november 2014 ‘you’ve been frameworked’: evaluating an approach to digital and information literacy at the open university katharine reedy the open university, uk robin goodfellow the open university, uk abstract this article explores the effectiveness of the open university’s (ou’s) digital and information literacy (dil) framework (reedy and goodfellow, 2012) in promoting the integration of digital skills into modules and qualifications – a key strategic priority for the university and in contributing to cultural change in the digital practices of teachers and learners – a key aim for the uk he sector as a whole. we trace the history of digital and information literacy in the ou curriculum and elsewhere, leading up to the development of the framework. four sets of interviews tell the story of academic and library staff engagement with it. these case studies are supplemented by two further interviews giving the perspective of ou middle managers responsible respectively for learning design and digital and information literacy development. we evaluate the success of the framework and suggest how it might be further developed in future. conclusions point strongly towards the need to involve students in shaping their own skills development, as suggested in other recent research (for example, jisc, 2011a; 2011b). keywords: digital literacy; information literacy; educational framework; skills development; competency; cultural change. introduction an influential report from the european e-learning programme (rosado and bélisle, 2006, p.10) defines an educational framework as ‘a rational structure that organizes institutional assumptions, curriculum objectives, educational concepts, ethical values, technologies, reedy and goodfellow ‘you’ve been frameworked’: evaluating an approach to digital and information literacy journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2014 2 pedagogical goals and constraints, and professional practices, in order to implement educational policies’. the authors categorise frameworks for ict in education as having two basic types of rationale: those that foster ‘enriching everyone to cope with the new demands of an information/knowledge society...’ and those that build on ‘the need for change and innovation in the education system’ (rosado and bélisle, 2006, p.26). in their view a lack of engagement with the latter results in failure to bring about ‘a generalised integration of digital culture within school and university settings’ (rosado and bélisle, 2006, p.11). in this paper we describe the processes through which the open university’s (ou’s) digital and information literacy (dil) framework (reedy and goodfellow, 2012) has been developed to try and meet both these aims. we explore its effectiveness in helping to promote the integration of digital skills into modules and qualifications – a strategic priority for the university, and in contributing to cultural change in the digital practices of teachers and learners – a key aim for the uk higher education (he) sector as a whole (see leadership foundation, 2012-13). the framework builds on earlier information literacy strategy in the ou and elsewhere and also draws on recent research in digital literacy. we describe the formal and informal consultation processes through which the framework was brought into being, and discuss the views of academic and library staff who have been involved in integrating it into the curriculum and mediating it to faculty colleagues. we raise the question of whether the two aims of fostering skills and integrating cultural change are really compatible within a single competency framework. the unique contribution of the framework to digital literacy development activities in the wider community is highlighted. background – the ou information literacy framework information literacy (il) at the ou emerged as a priority in the early 2000s, as widespread access to the internet became available and ou courses began to move online. it was preceded by developments in he, such as the dearing report (ncihe, 1997), which stated that students needed to become more self-directed and that they should be supported to develop the necessary skills. il skills were also included in the quality assurance agency (qaa) framework for higher education qualifications (qaa, 2001/2008). reedy and goodfellow ‘you’ve been frameworked’: evaluating an approach to digital and information literacy journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2014 3 the open university library’s information literacy unit (ilu) was established in 2002, ‘to promote and support the development of information literacy within the ou community both for lifelong learning and professional development’. the ilu developed an il strategy (2003) for the university, and promoted integration of il at strategic level, resulting in il statements being incorporated into ou policy documents. strategic objectives included raising the importance of information literacy throughout the university, helping ou staff to feel confident in their own skills, and – importantly – integrating il into the curriculum. over the last decade, integrating il into ou modules has been a strategic priority for the library, supported by the inclusion of il in qaa benchmarking statements (2007) and the ou’s own undergraduate levels framework (cobe, 2005 – currently under review). however, more was needed to enable ou module teams to engage with il in their own context. as kirkwood (2006, p.239) puts it: ‘…information literacy skills are not totally generic: they must be developed in the context of a specific subject or discipline because a basic understanding of any discipline is necessary to enable learners to frame pertinent questions with which to evaluate and select appropriate sources’. the information literacy levels framework (open university library services, 2010) was created to provide a starting point for this contextualisation. it aimed to clarify what is meant by the term ‘information literacy’, suggest how the skills could be developed progressively through the curriculum, and provide examples of learning materials to teach the skills. it drew heavily on existing frameworks, for example, the sconul seven pillars of information literacy (1999, revised 2011). the il levels framework covered finding, evaluating, managing and referencing information – the ‘traditional’ information literacy skills needed for academic study. it provided a tool to enable ou module teams working on the ground to put high-level university strategy and faculty policy into practice. it was adopted into the ou’s learning and teaching strategy in 2010, with subsequent widespread engagement from faculties. digital literacy frameworks at the same time it was becoming evident that an approach was needed to provide opportunities for students and staff to develop their skills and practices in communicating, reedy and goodfellow ‘you’ve been frameworked’: evaluating an approach to digital and information literacy journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2014 4 collaborating and teamwork, as well as to build community and to support students in learning in a technology-rich world. hefce and jisc were both promoting the development of digital skills, with one of the key recommendations from the jisc ‘supporting learners in a digital age’ (slida) study (2011b) being that digital capabilities of the kind mentioned above should be explicitly specified in learning and teaching strategies, contextualised for the discipline, embedded into the curriculum, and mapped across all programmes. two main aims for an ou digital literacy strategy arose from this, one being to articulate digital literacy skills in the curriculum, and the other to promote practices and habits of digital communication amongst ou students and staff. a review of the literature on practice across the sector showed that a number of earlier frameworks had been based, implicitly or explicitly, on distinctions between ‘types’ of literacy, for example: computer literacy, information literacy, and media literacy (goodfellow, 2011). 'digital literacy' was adopted to try and encompass all these different notions of competence within a single model of personal and institutional transformation (martin, 2008). recent digital literacy projects and other initiatives have also focused on specifying the individual skills, competences and capabilities which are thought to be implied in the more general discourses of ‘transforming’ and ‘reframing’. the jisc ‘learning literacies in a digital age’ (llida) project followed this trend and widened the focus of responsibility for implementing its literacy framework to include professional groups (librarians, learning technologists) and others involved in supporting curriculum development, as well as teachers and academics (jisc, 2008-2009). a subsequent jisc-funded programme ‘developing digital literacies’ (2013a) supported a number of uk he and further education (fe) institutions in developing and implementing digital literacy frameworks of their own, but summative findings from this programme suggested that practices involved in ‘digital literacy’ are too complex to be reduced to a checklist of specific skills and, moreover, that the definition of the term adopted for the jisc programmes is not specific enough to support action at the level of courses of study or specific professional services (beetham, 2013). hall et al.’s (2014, no pagination) review of digital literacy frameworks also highlights the problems of collapsing ‘complex concepts into discrete collections of skills and practices'. for these researchers the key issue in defining a framework which can be used for self-evaluation is the need to ensure reedy and goodfellow ‘you’ve been frameworked’: evaluating an approach to digital and information literacy journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2014 5 progression across the framework in terms of ‘levels of criticality’ which means judgement around ‘personal and social issues and risks’ that arise from engagement in digital practices. the jisc programme findings recommend the development of digital literacy work in ‘specific local contexts’ (beetham, 2013, no pagination). given the complexities of trying to specify digital practices, and the fact that the already well-used ou il levels framework had a strong critical dimension, the amalgamation of digital and information literacy within the same framework appeared to be the best solution to the ou’s requirements for a digital literacy strategy. however, as rosado and bélisle (2006) had shown, institutional ict frameworks had not had much success in supporting the kind of cultural change that the aim of integrating new digital practices across the institution implies. this aim was therefore always going to be subordinate to the more immediate requirement to integrate digital skills into the curriculum. developing the framework: a collaborative digital process the dil framework was developed by the authors of this article, in consultation with a group of ou stakeholders representing different faculties and departments across the university with an interest in digital and information literacy. the development process involved a series of stages, including: getting support from senior management; identifying key personnel in faculties; setting up consultation exercises (group activities below); drafting the framework document and getting critical feedback; and publicising and disseminating the framework across the university. two group consultation exercises were held using an in-house social networking platform. participants in these group activities looked at real-life examples of student online collaborative work where students were required to demonstrate a variety of skills, including group working, creating a joint presentation, selecting and using appropriate technologies, and evaluating the collaborative process. in the first activity, participants together evaluated how far the outcomes specified in the existing il levels framework could be used to assess student activities at third year undergraduate and master’s level. it was clear that the il levels framework only covered reedy and goodfellow ‘you’ve been frameworked’: evaluating an approach to digital and information literacy journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2014 6 certain skills. having identified gaps, the group then developed some new statements, addressing communicative and collaborative practices. the fledgling framework was used in a second activity with a different group comprising ou associate lecturers (tutors) who are directly involved in front-line teaching and could determine what students at first and second year undergraduate level would need. the resulting outputs were used to expand the il levels framework into a draft digital and information literacy (dil) framework covering all levels of taught study. new areas included creating and sharing digital content, evaluating online interactions and tools, greater emphasis on communicating, and collaborative working in a digital environment. a number of digital practices which characterise online learning in the twenty first century were also identified, for example, managing one’s digital identity and participating in networks outside the study environment. ‘critical friends’, including faculty academic colleagues and learning technology managers, tutors and library staff, provided feedback on the draft dil framework. the framework was agreed to be comprehensive and useful, and its general shape was deemed to be suitable. the draft circulated had included examples of particular technologies. following feedback, these were reduced or removed entirely, to avoid the framework dating too quickly. some other wording was also clarified and simplified. the final framework (reedy and goodfellow, 2012) was made available to ou faculties in september 2012. as there were a number of fundamental changes occurring in highpriority strategic areas at that time, such as the learning and teaching plan and the employability strategy, it did not get the top-level championing that the previous il strategy had received. however, the new focus on qualifications at the ou had opened up an opportunity to engage with faculties on skills development at programme level. ou curriculum development strategy was also moving to a learning design approach, in which the importance of digital and information literacy was clearly recognised (ou learning design blog, 2013). it was decided to promote the framework directly with faculties. like its predecessor, the dil framework provided a starting point and a shared language when discussing how these skills should be integrated into the curriculum. an official launch of the framework took place in february 2013 at an annual staff development event focusing on use of technologies for learning. by the end of 2013 the reedy and goodfellow ‘you’ve been frameworked’: evaluating an approach to digital and information literacy journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2014 7 dil framework had been endorsed by all faculties and was being used by both academic and library staff to audit the digital skills content of ou modules and qualifications. the framework had also been included in the set of ou learning design resources and tools made available to qualification and module teams in the form of dil facilitation cards (jisc, 2013b) for use at workshops and meetings. the framework was created at a time when there was much talk about digital literacy both at the ou and in the wider he community, but less clarity about what the term meant or what institutions should be doing about it. the framework’s unique contribution lies in its articulation of digital skills and practices to the ou community in a way that had not previously been done. the fact that the ou framework has been used as part of the jisc ‘changing the learning landscape’ programme (jisc, 2013c) suggests that this work has wider value. evaluating the framework take-up of the framework in the development of teaching materials by academic staff has proceeded slowly, partly due to the number of other new curriculum and teaching-related procedures competing for their attention. however, the ou teaching librarians have had some success in introducing it into their interactions with a number of module teams in different faculties. this has allowed us to conduct a small-scale evaluation to gather some initial evidence of the way in which the framework can be used to shape the integration of digital skills into the curriculum and influence digital practices amongst the module teams themselves. we set out to create a small number of case studies based on interviews with academic colleagues and librarians who had engaged with the framework as part of their module-development practice .these case studies could then be used to assess the relevance and usability of the framework and to help library staff develop further approaches to disseminating it. semi-structured interviews were carried out with four academic colleagues and four librarians working respectively on a postgraduate science foundation module, a third-level classics module, a second-level interdisciplinary english module and a range of health and social care undergraduate qualifications, in particular social work. two further interviews were then carried out with colleagues with responsibility for leading strategy in reedy and goodfellow ‘you’ve been frameworked’: evaluating an approach to digital and information literacy journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2014 8 learning design and digital and information literacy. all of the interviews were conducted face-to-face except one which was done by telephone, and all lasted approximately 40 minutes. written notes were taken by the interviewer and these were subsequently expanded into a short case study. interviewees were asked: 1. how is the dil framework being used in practice for your module or qualification? 2. how far does the dil framework meet your needs? 3. what more is needed? findings the common themes identified from the responses to each question are set out below: 1. how is the dil framework being used for your module or qualification? the main ways in which the framework has been used are:  to determine what skills should be developed.  as a conversation starter and thinking tool.  to facilitate collaboration between faculty and library staff.  to support more diverse information-finding practices. in all cases the framework has been used by module team or library staff for auditing purposes when developing level-appropriate skills content and identifying gaps. for example, with the cross-disciplinary education module, the auditing process revealed a gap around referencing and plagiarism, which resulted in an activity being added to the module, later expanded in light of student feedback. in the case of the postgraduate science module, students are directed to use the framework as part of a broader skills self-audit. since the framework was not particularly designed for student use, this is worthy of note. health and social care students reflect on skills indicated by the framework at level one via questions in formative computer marked assessments. reedy and goodfellow ‘you’ve been frameworked’: evaluating an approach to digital and information literacy journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2014 9 the academic from the second level education module regarded the framework as a very useful ‘rhetorical tool’ for developing conversations around dil strategy and activities. for classical studies, the dil framework was used to prompt discussion amongst the module team about what students could be expected to already know and be able to do, and how much support they would need. this view was supported by the library services manager (digital and information literacy), who stated that the original impetus for the dil framework was to connect theory and policy to real life – to ‘make it happen’ at the ou. skills integration is a collaborative process between academic and library staff. the postgraduate science and second-level education modules are particularly successful examples of this. for science students, a particular benefit of the framework is to encourage them to engage with more sophisticated approaches to searching, for example, using social media in research. assessment tasks include finding papers on a topic, selecting a specific paper and writing a blog-style comment on it. students are required to keep research diaries and some use internet applications or other dedicated software for this purpose. the module team for education started from particular online resources, using the ‘find’ category of the dil framework at level 2 to identify and develop student activities. 2. how far does the framework meet your needs? the stages of the framework are seen as fitting well with the curriculum in some areas, but less so in others. for science, framework statements make progression clear and help students to see the competence requirements at different levels. the librarian involved has used the framework to carry out detailed mapping for all science qualifications from level 1 to masters, suggesting the core skills to be focused on at each stage and tailoring the framework to each module. this has saved considerable time for curriculum teams. the picture is similar for social work, where students have to do modules in sequence and can build on what has gone before. skills activities were already integrated into the programme and the framework is being used to update these. in contrast, the framework has enabled third level education modules to build on the dil elements of the second-level module in a way that may not have happened otherwise. at present, study pathways to a classical studies degree are many and complex, and it is not possible to map routes to progression across the dil framework. in the future, when the qualification pathways are better established, the picture may be different. as it is, reedy and goodfellow ‘you’ve been frameworked’: evaluating an approach to digital and information literacy journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2014 10 many students at third level have little background in even the basic il skills; and at master’s level – in contrast to science – the dil framework competences are regarded as too complex. 3. what more is needed? the main findings can be grouped as follows:  agreement about what is meant by digital literacy.  buy-in from academic colleagues.  contextualisation.  help to translate the terminology into student-friendly language.  support for transferability of skills.  appropriate learning design. all four sets of interviews showed that there are different concepts of dil (with some conflating it with instructional ict training). the engagement and enthusiasm of the module team chair was identified as a key factor by all library staff interviewed. in the view of the learning and teaching development manager, librarian-faculty relations are still a key factor in getting the message across. it was suggested that staff development in online pedagogy is needed for both academic and library staff. in the case of education, dil activities (such as blogging) are often seen as irrelevant to subject content. it is also sometimes wrongly assumed that everybody, including students, is now completely used to using the digital tools required for study (a view challenged by farrell, 2013). dil is here perceived as an unwanted curriculum in itself and the framework as prescriptive. the author of the science postgraduate module has contextualised and personalised the framework by comparing the information landscape of 1993 with the current day, drawing on the module author’s own experience. all the librarians interviewed believed that discipline-specific examples are the key to helping module team colleagues translate the framework into practice. it was highlighted by the majority of interviewees that the language of the framework is very academic; they are not always sure what all the statements mean. consequently, people find it difficult to interpret. academics involved with the social work degree would like the terms used in the framework to become common parlance. this needs to be informed by the student voice. reedy and goodfellow ‘you’ve been frameworked’: evaluating an approach to digital and information literacy journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2014 11 within the field of classical studies, there is a strong focus on the more traditional ‘information literacy’ skills related to academic practice (for example, using journal databases, referencing, citing, etc.). although it is accepted that many of these skills now involve digital technologies, neither these nor the cutting edge digital humanities practices of many classical scholars, including the module team chair herself, are here equated with ‘digital literacy’. students of this module are supported to use context-specific digital tools (for example, an interactive map and online database), but not to explore transferability of these skills to other situations. learning design was identified as a key factor for successful skills integration, especially by library staff. this includes articulation of skills in learning outcomes and alignment of assessment strategy to skills content. this view was reinforced by the learning & teaching development manager with responsibility for ou learning design implementation. new ou policy from 2014 requires librarians to be invited to learning design workshops at the start of the module development process. this is an opportunity for the librarian to feed dil into discussions about the overarching structure and learning outcomes of the module. discussion several participants, both academic and library staff, highlighted the role of the framework in prompting discussion and supporting efforts to mediate skills work to the module teams: ‘a very useful rhetorical tool’ (2nd level english). mediation of the framework is important. there is variation in the extent to which librarians use the framework to get dil integrated into learning outcomes and activities. factors influencing this include faculty-library relations and the backing of the module team chair. senior management backing in faculties is needed to ensure dil is given serious consideration at programme/qualification level. the process of mapping the framework to module learning outcomes has been found useful at the start of the module design process and to review what is in a module or qualification. some early adopters have embedded the framework more fully and are using it to engage students directly with self-reflection on skills. reedy and goodfellow ‘you’ve been frameworked’: evaluating an approach to digital and information literacy journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2014 12 stages of dil development do not always map to levels of study (for example, the fit is better for science than for classical studies) and students may be at different stages in their development. this supports the view that the relation between ‘level’ of digital competence and level of module is probably dependent on subject matter. module teams do not always see the value of dil skills development activities. this is due to varying interpretations of what digital literacy is or the belief that students can already do everything necessary. it appears that the dil framework may be partly having the effect of constructing digital literacy as if it were a curriculum in its own right (a ‘tick list’), rather than a technological perspective on disciplinary practice. our findings suggest that ‘traditional’ information literacy skills are still more widely integrated. this is because people are more familiar with them: information literacy is wellestablished at the ou and learning materials are available to teach the skills. the newer concepts are less well-understood and the language of the framework is not always easy to interpret. students should be encouraged to articulate their engagement and outcomes. a ‘plain english’ version of the framework – informed by students themselves – will help programme and module teams to implement digital and il development on the ground. contextualised resources could support the embedding of specific skills. ou-wide systems are now recording dil skills implementation as part of learning design. from a student point of view, a joined-up approach with other skills (for example, employability and academic skills) would make sense, however, existing ou frameworks do not fulfil this role. in order to be effective, the framework needs to be given serious consideration at programme/qualification level and relate to other frameworks in use at the ou. a statement of ‘graduateness’ is needed. the need has been highlighted for more staff development (for academic staff and librarians) in online pedagogies and opportunities to share good practice. this could stimulate module team authors to use digital technologies and literacies more creatively in their teaching and avoid the compartmentalising of subject content and skills as separate components of teaching and learning. reedy and goodfellow ‘you’ve been frameworked’: evaluating an approach to digital and information literacy journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2014 13 summary and conclusions this article has addressed the question of how far the ou’s digital and information literacy (dil) framework has enabled the ou to realise in practice the aspirations set out in its learning and teaching strategy and policy. the dil framework, like the information literacy (il) framework before it, aimed to articulate the ou’s conception of digital and information literacy to those involved in ou curriculum development. it did not set out to be a curriculum in its own right. however, feedback from those interviewed suggests that it may be viewed as an end in itself. ironically, the success of the il framework – in widespread use since 2010 – may be standing in the way of take-up of the dil framework. it could be argued that the more restricted focus of the il framework on skills required for academic study, makes it easier to implement in a university context. it is also worth reflecting on the history of il integration into the ou curriculum and the amount of time (up to a decade) needed to bring about change when delivering learning on a large scale. where the dil framework is gaining currency, it appears that a mediated approach, contextualised to discipline, is yielding the best results. however, the bigger question remains about the relationship of the framework with other institutional frameworks (for example, the ou’s undergraduate levels framework), and how different frameworks can be brought together in a coherent way for the benefit of students. what is the future of the framework? are frameworks of this kind even effective in shaping the realisation of educational policy and teaching practices (rosado and bélisle, 2006), especially for such a contested concept as digital literacy? many discussions of digital literacy founder at the point of trying to define what is meant by the term. it is clear that digital literacy is often understood very differently by researchers, teachers, learning developers and librarians, even within the same institution – let alone students. whilst the framework has enjoyed some success as a means of facilitating curriculum development, its role in promoting broader cultural change around digital practices has not yet been proved. new ways of working and teaching are currently being championed at ou strategic level. in order for these to become established, they also need to be modelled in practice for others to learn from. reedy and goodfellow ‘you’ve been frameworked’: evaluating an approach to digital and information literacy journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2014 14 an important development in he is the involvement of students as partners in their own learning and development (for example, hea (2014) students as partners and jisc (2013d) digital student projects). for the ou, this seems to be the key to refining the framework so that it more clearly meets student needs and expectations. for example, the language used to talk about digital literacy may need to change. we already know from student consultations that the term ‘digital literacy’ has connotations of deficiency, as found by hall et al. (2014) in a school context. a better term might be ‘digital fluency’ or ‘digital confidence’. it is also a case of empowering students to own the skills and practices they have developed, and to articulate them in a way that makes sense not just to themselves and their tutors, but also to employers. work has begun on a student-friendly version of the framework. ou students will be involved in its development. whether it continues to look like a framework is not known at this stage, but the aspiration for our students to be equipped for the digital world in which they live and work remains unchanged. by bringing students’ own practices to the centre, students may act as ‘game-changers’ (ford and bowden, 2013, p.9) and ‘change agents’ (jisc, 2014) and enable the university to address both the skills development and cultural change agendas. references beetham, h. (2013) summative findings from the synthesis report, jisc developing digital literacies programme. available at: http://jiscdesignstudio.pbworks.com/w/file/71213322/dl%20findings%20final.doc (accessed: 13 october 2014). cobe (2005) undergraduate levels framework. milton keynes: centre for outcomes based education, the open university. farrell, l. (2013) ‘challenging assumptions about it skills in higher education’, journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6, november, pp. 1-20 [online]. available at: http://www.aldinhe.ac.uk/ojs/index.php?journal=jldhe&page=article&op=view&path %5b%5d=173 (accessed: 13 october 2014). http://jiscdesignstudio.pbworks.com/w/file/71213322/dl%20findings%20final.doc http://jiscdesignstudio.pbworks.com/w/file/71213322/dl%20findings%20final.doc http://www.aldinhe.ac.uk/ojs/index.php?journal=jldhe&page=article&op=view&path%5b%5d=173 http://www.aldinhe.ac.uk/ojs/index.php?journal=jldhe&page=article&op=view&path%5b%5d=173 reedy and goodfellow ‘you’ve been frameworked’: evaluating an approach to digital and information literacy journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2014 15 ford, n. and bowden, m. (2013) ‘facing the future: the changing shape of academic skills support at bournemouth university’, journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5, march, pp. 1-11 [online]. available at: http://www.aldinhe.ac.uk/ojs/index.php?journal=jldhe&page=article&op=view&path %5b%5d=168&path%5b%5d=131 (accessed: 13 october 2014). goodfellow, r. (2011) ‘literacy, literacies, and the digital in higher education’, teaching in higher education, 16(1), pp. 131–144. hall, r., atkins, l. and fraser, j. (2014) ‘defining a self-evaluation digital literacy framework for secondary educators: the digilit leicester project’, research in learning technology, 22:21440: no pagination. hea (2014) students as partners. available at: https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/workstreams-research/themes/students-partners (accessed: 9 september 2014). jisc (2008-2009) learning literacies in a digital age (llida). available at: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/projects/elearningllida.aspx (accessed: 6 october 2014). jisc (2011a) seamless student experience. jisc inform, issue 31 [online]. available at: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/inform/inform31/default.html (accessed: 25 november 2014). jisc (2011b) supporting learners in a digital age: briefing paper. available at: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/publications/briefingpaper/2011/jisc_slid a_final_web.pdf (accessed: 29 september 2014). jisc (2013a) developing digital literacies. available at: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/elearning/developingdigitalliteracies.as px (accessed: 6 october 2014). jisc (2013b) library digital facilitation cards. available at: http://jiscdesignstudio.pbworks.com/w/file/63019416/library_digital_faciltation_car ds_new_v23.pdf (accessed: 6 october 2014). http://www.aldinhe.ac.uk/ojs/index.php?journal=jldhe&page=article&op=view&path%5b%5d=168&path%5b%5d=131 http://www.aldinhe.ac.uk/ojs/index.php?journal=jldhe&page=article&op=view&path%5b%5d=168&path%5b%5d=131 http://oro.open.ac.uk/view/person/rg25.html http://oro.open.ac.uk/26758/ https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/workstreams-research/themes/students-partners http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/projects/elearningllida.aspx http://www.jisc.ac.uk/inform/inform31/default.html http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/publications/briefingpaper/2011/jisc_slida_final_web.pdf http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/publications/briefingpaper/2011/jisc_slida_final_web.pdf http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/elearning/developingdigitalliteracies.aspx http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/elearning/developingdigitalliteracies.aspx http://jiscdesignstudio.pbworks.com/w/file/63019416/library_digital_faciltation_cards_new_v23.pdf http://jiscdesignstudio.pbworks.com/w/file/63019416/library_digital_faciltation_cards_new_v23.pdf reedy and goodfellow ‘you’ve been frameworked’: evaluating an approach to digital and information literacy journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2014 16 jisc (2013c) changing the learning landscape. available at: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/elearning/changing the learning landscape.aspx (accessed: 25 november 2014). jisc (2013d) digital student. available at: http://digitalstudent.jiscinvolve.org/wp/ (accessed: 9 september 2014). jisc (2014) students as change agents. available at: http://jiscdesignstudio.pbworks.com/w/page/31087422/students%20as%20change %20agents (accessed: 13 october 2014). kirkwood, a. (2006) ‘going outside the box: skills development, cultural change and the use of on-line resources’, computers and education, 47(3), pp. 316-331. leadership foundation for higher education (2012) changing the learning landscape. available at: http://www.lfhe.ac.uk/en/programmes-events/youruniversity/cll/index.cfm (accessed: 6 october 2014). martin, a. (2008) ‘digital literacy and the ‘digital society’’, in lankshear, c. and knobel, m. (eds.) (2008) digital literacies: concepts, policies and practices. oxford: peter lang, pp. 151-176. ncihe (1997) the dearing report: higher education in the learning society. london: her majesty's stationery office open university (2010) learning and teaching strategy, internal document. open university (2013) learning design blog, internal blog. open university library services (2010) information literacy levels framework. available at: http://www.open.ac.uk/libraryservices/illframework/ (accessed: 13 october 2014). http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/elearning/changing%20the%20learning%20landscape.aspx http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/elearning/changing%20the%20learning%20landscape.aspx http://digitalstudent.jiscinvolve.org/wp/ http://jiscdesignstudio.pbworks.com/w/page/31087422/students%20as%20change%20agents http://jiscdesignstudio.pbworks.com/w/page/31087422/students%20as%20change%20agents http://www.lfhe.ac.uk/en/programmes-events/your-university/cll/index.cfm http://www.lfhe.ac.uk/en/programmes-events/your-university/cll/index.cfm http://www.open.ac.uk/libraryservices/illframework/ reedy and goodfellow ‘you’ve been frameworked’: evaluating an approach to digital and information literacy journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2014 17 qaa (2007) subject benchmark statements, quality assurance agency for higher education. available at: http://www.qaa.ac.uk/assuring-standards-and-quality/thequality-code/subject-benchmark-statements (accessed: 13 october 2014). qaa (2001/2008) frameworks for higher education qualifications in england, wales and northern ireland – august 2008. available at: http://www.qaa.ac.uk/publications/information-andguidance/publication/?pubid=2718#.vhkfmu5fbms (accessed: 13 october 2014). reedy, k. and goodfellow, r. (2012) digital and information literacy framework. available at: http://www.open.ac.uk/libraryservices/subsites/dilframework (accessed: 13 october 2014). rosado, e, and bélisle, c. (2006) analysing digital literacy frameworks. a european framework for digital literacy. lyon: lire, université lyon 2 [online]. available at: http://lire.ish-lyon.cnrs.fr/img/pdf/analysing-edu-frameworks.pdf (accessed: 13 october 2014). sconul working group on information literacy (1999, revised 2011) the sconul seven pillars of information literacy: core model for higher education. available at: http://www.sconul.ac.uk/sites/default/files/documents/coremodel.pdf (accessed: 6 october 2014). author details katharine reedy is a digital and information literacy specialist at open university library services. previous work includes development of the ou’s award-winning being digital site and the ou’s information literacy levels framework. she is a chartered librarian, fellow of the higher education academy and active member of aldinhe. robin goodfellow is senior lecturer in teaching with new technologies at the open university’s institute of educational technology. he was principal investigator for the economic and social research council (esrc)-funded seminar series ‘literacy in the digital university’ from 2009-2011. his published research has included work on http://www.qaa.ac.uk/assuring-standards-and-quality/the-quality-code/subject-benchmark-statements http://www.qaa.ac.uk/assuring-standards-and-quality/the-quality-code/subject-benchmark-statements http://www.qaa.ac.uk/publications/information-and-guidance/publication/?pubid=2718#.vhkfmu5fbms http://www.qaa.ac.uk/publications/information-and-guidance/publication/?pubid=2718#.vhkfmu5fbms http://www.open.ac.uk/libraryservices/subsites/dilframework http://lire.ish-lyon.cnrs.fr/img/pdf/analysing-edu-frameworks.pdf http://www.sconul.ac.uk/sites/default/files/documents/coremodel.pdf reedy and goodfellow ‘you’ve been frameworked’: evaluating an approach to digital and information literacy journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2014 18 computer-assisted language learning, literacies and learning technologies, learning cultures in online education, and most recently, digital scholarship. ‘you’ve been frameworked’: evaluating an approach to digital and information literacy at the open university abstract introduction background – the ou information literacy framework digital literacy frameworks developing the framework: a collaborative digital process evaluating the framework findings 1. how is the dil framework being used for your module or qualification? the main ways in which the framework has been used are: 2. how far does the framework meet your needs? 3. what more is needed? the main findings can be grouped as follows:  agreement about what is meant by digital literacy. discussion summary and conclusions references author details literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special edition: developing writing in stem disciplines, november 2012 integrating academic reading and writing skills development with core content in science and engineering kathryn j. amos university of adelaide, australia ursula mcgowan university of adelaide, australia abstract this paper presents the application of genre pedagogy as an approach to teaching academic reading and writing skills development to a class of undergraduate engineering students. this approach was designed so that it may be applied by core subject teachers in courses with students who typically do not engage well with these aspects of their studies. our focus was specifically on the ‘bigger picture’ of writing skills development by encouraging students to learn how to analyse for themselves a particular genre from their own discipline, and how to use this knowledge to develop an appropriately academic style in writing their own essay. our approach involved combining the expertise of subject teacher and linguist in running four workshops in class time during the first half of a semesterised course. these workshops had associated homework tasks, designed incrementally to contribute to students’ understanding and application of the skills they need for academic writing. these were followed by the submission of a written report on the topics covered during the first six weeks of the semester, and was of direct relevance to their degree major. assessment criteria focused on both technical content and academic literacy. with this integrated approach to literacy and content development it was intended to engage traditionally resistant students with the development of their academic language skills, and also to model a possible approach for the engagement of stem academics in fostering this academic literacy development. student participants in this programme agreed that this strategy improved both their writing skills and their understanding of course content. keywords: stem; integrated academic language development; genre-analysis; reading; academic writing; engineering; science. amos and mcgowan integrating academic reading and writing skills development with core content introduction a commonly reported problem from employers is that the writing of engineering graduates is not of sufficient standard (e.g. berthouex, 1996; oakley et al., 1999). the incorporation of writing within engineering courses is not a new topic of discussion, with published articles focusing on this matter dating from 1911 (references cited within wheeler and mcdonald, 2000). despite this, the development of student writing skills in some discipline areas, including engineering, is still a challenge (cismas, 2010). this is in part due to a typical lack of engagement with writing by students in the sciences, technology, engineering and mathematics (stem) and in part also to a lack of engagement of stem lecturers with the development of writing skills in students. it is often perceived that to focus on transferable skills development in students, some of the core content teaching and learning needs to be sacrificed. however, it has been shown that development of academic reading and writing skills can also enhance student understanding of core content (wheeler and mcdonald, 2000). this paper presents an application of genre pedagogy, which involves a cyclical process of analysing and discussing examples of good writing in order to assist students in learning their structure and language, and then applying this to their own writing, first in groups and then individually (e.g. disadvantaged schools program, 1988). a modified approach of this methodology was applied that could be delivered in a limited amount of time available within mainstream classes, integrated into an undergraduate subject. here the writing skills development was combined with increasing student understanding of technical course content and offered to the whole class. we use the word ‘development’ carefully; it is perhaps self-evident that the development of any skill requires practice, rather than students simply being told what they should do (e.g. biggs, 1999). our approach, patterned on the genre pedagogy approach cited above, involved the teaching of principles and techniques, followed by analysis of examples of the target genre (‘modelling’), group practice (‘joint construction’) within class, the encouragement of subsequent practice by students in their own time, and finally the ‘individual construction’ of an assignment for assessment. our focus was specifically on the ‘bigger picture’ of writing skills development: on how students can ‘unpack’ densely written academic texts (ventola,1996) by analysing the journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 2 amos and mcgowan integrating academic reading and writing skills development with core content structure of a report, the structure of content in paragraphs, the language choices at various stages; and finally how to use all of these analyses as models to advance their own writing skills. we purposefully avoided any focus on traditional grammatical terminology. our work is based on the extensive theory and practices of the systemic functional linguistic movement’s early implementation in the disadvantaged schools project (martin, 1989; 1997) as well as the work in english for specific purposes by swales (1990) in higher degree thesis writing; and it also draws on two practical textbooks that develop stages of an experimental research paper by systematic modelling of structure and language choices found in published research papers (weissberg and buker, 1990; cargill and o’connor, 2009). with our approach, instead of instructing students about correct sentences, we taught them how to analyse for themselves a particular genre from their own discipline and how to imitate the structure and style of writing that is appropriate for the context, and to do this without inadvertently plagiarising. the background and justification for these different facets of the study are explained in greater detail below. aims in the adaptation of genre pedagogy to teaching integrated academic language skills with course content, our aims related to both the development of student reading and writing skills, and to student learning of core content. the aims were to: 1. develop students’ academic reading and writing skills, through providing students with specific tools for reading and writing that they can apply in the future. 2. better engage students with course content. 3. improve students’ integration of the technical content taught over the first six weeks of the course. an additional challenge: engaging engineering students with geoscience course content the latter two aims of this study warrant further introduction. the course focused on in this case-study teaches sedimentology and stratigraphy, i.e. geoscience subjects, to second journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 3 amos and mcgowan integrating academic reading and writing skills development with core content year petroleum engineering students. the course includes the application of qualitative geological concepts to data, often with multiple possible solutions to a problem. students need to be able to visualise landscapes and sub-surface sedimentary deposits that vary in three-dimensional space and in time. this differs substantially from many of the subject areas in which engineering students in this programme typically excel, such as maths and physics, where problem-solving frequently relies on quantitative methods. many students have said that they struggle to understand or excel at the content of this course compared with their other courses. one consequence of this is that some of those students do not engage with the course material as well as they could and are more likely to revise specific tasks set during the course in isolation, rather than developing their learning through integrating different aspects of the content as the course develops. an integrated approach to skills development a number of different teaching approaches have been applied within tertiary education for the development of transferable skills. chadha and nicholls (2006) divide these into three distinct categories: embedding, integrating, and bolting-on; where a distinction is made between ‘embedding’ (no direct reference made to skills development within the core teaching of a course) and ‘integrating’ (direct reference is made to skills development). bolting-on (sometimes described as ‘parallel’ or ‘stand-alone’ development, e.g. drummond et al., 1998) describes the development of skills independently from the core discipline. it has been suggested that, despite some advantages, ‘embedded’ skills development (in the sense used by chadha and nicholls, 2006) is less effective than when development of transferable skills is explicitly mentioned to students (mottershead and suggitt, 1996) and indeed named for students as learning objectives. this is supported by the findings of a study conducted by kemp and seagraves (1995) in which a high percentage of students at the end of their course did not feel that they had received help in the development of skills that the lecturers had stated that they were developing in an embedded manner. at the other end of the spectrum, the teaching of transferable skills in a bolt-on manner may result in students failing to understand the academic value of these skills; it is argued that core content and skills development should be integrated, and that skills development should be discipline-orientated (e.g. kemp and seagraves, 1995; drummond et al., 1998; atlay and harris, 2000). effective skills development relies on the provision of journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 4 amos and mcgowan integrating academic reading and writing skills development with core content opportunities for students to practise skills with support and guidance in a way that encourages strategies for development to be constructed (drummond et al., 1998). it has been proposed that inclusion of skills development into the curriculum provides an ‘explicit pedagogy for inclusion and access’ for all (cope and kalantzis, 1993, p.64; mcgowan, 2010). wingate (2006, p.459) uses the term ‘embedding’ but extends it to address ‘the complexity of skills in an inclusive and holistic manner by providing learning opportunities for all students progressively throughout the degree course’. she dismisses this, deeming its realisation to be impractical, since it would ‘require an institutional approach’, and that it would be ‘especially unlikely that research-intensive universities, which attract a large percentage of high-achieving ‘traditional’ students, will see the need to make such a commitment to student learning’. she concludes that more effective support for student learning than that offered in a bolt-on format can be achieved without wide-ranging institutional changes, if more academic staff promote student skills development ‘within their regular teaching’ (wingate, 2006, p.467). it is on this basis that an ‘integrated’ approach was implemented here. unpacking densely written academic text academic writing typically uses very formal language, and is generally more densely ‘packed’ than informal language (halliday, 1985; halliday and hasan, 1985; martin, 1997). typically, the more densely-packed a text is with information, the more difficult it is to read, particularly for students new to the disciplinary content or students for whom english is an additional language (eal). informal language, such as the language of conversations, presents information in ways that can be less abstract, and therefore may be more easily understood. in order to help themselves make sense of densely written academic text, students need to ‘unpack’ it by converting abstract nouns into a more conversational form (mcgowan, 2005). taking students through the process of unpacking excerpts from a model academic text will assist them in their reading of discipline-specific articles, and can then be used to help them tackle the process of writing academically. they can do this by learning how to follow the process in reverse, and re-packing by converting information and ideas from an informal to a more formal style (ventola, 1996). journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 5 amos and mcgowan integrating academic reading and writing skills development with core content ‘harvesting’ language a technique that can be taught to students which will assist them as they learn to write in a more densely-written academic style is that of making use of well written models for ‘harvesting language’ (mcgowan, 2008; 2010), or purposefully making use of ‘borrowed’ language (pennycook, 1996). these metaphors both describe the language learning strategy enabled by the tool of genre analysis, which involves the active development of an awareness of the structures and language patterns used in a particular discipline and for specific assignments (mcgowan, 2005). in order to learn the technique of ‘harvesting’ academic language, students are encouraged to analyse excerpts from a model text (e.g. a published article from their academic discipline) and identify commonly used phrases that are appropriate to be used in their own writing. the use of genre analysis techniques in assisting student writing skills development provides a means by which students can acquire the structure and language that characterise their academic discipline at a faster rate than they otherwise are likely to achieve. method development of our approach in preparation for integrating the academic writing development component into the curriculum, the existing course content and methods of assessment were reviewed. in the previous year (2010), the course assessment comprised 40% from coursework and 60% from the end-of-semester exam. the coursework component consisted of several assessed data-interpretation exercises and two short (two-page) fieldtrip reports, submitted throughout the semester. it was decided that all aims of this project could be met by the introduction of a series of inclass workshops and ‘homework tasks’, culminating in the submission of a substantial piece of written assessment. the homework tasks were not assessed, but feedback was provided. the submission of these tasks was not mandatory, but was encouraged by giving students a small percentage of the final course mark for their submission. the new material presented during the workshops and used in the homework tasks would have a focus on both academic reading and writing skills and on course content. in addition to the stated aims, it was also expected that, through writing about course content in this way, students would develop a deeper and more thorough understanding of subject material. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 6 amos and mcgowan integrating academic reading and writing skills development with core content this integrated approach was designed to encourage students to engage with both the workshops and homework tasks, so that their submitted written assignments would benefit from being developed over a significant part of the semester. the composition of the final grade for the course in 2011 was 35% from coursework, 50% from the final exam, and 15% from the new written assignment. the rationale behind this change to assessment weighting was that 15% of a final course grade would be significant enough to emphasise its importance and to engage those students that are more motivated by assessment than course content. the assignment length was around 10003000 words, however, students were told: the actual length of this written assignment is less important than the structure, referencing and content. use the assessment criteria...as a guide to judge whether you have done enough to fulfil the criteria. however, i’d recommend that you aim for between 1000-3000 words. selection of the assignment title as ‘sedimentologic controls on reservoir quality’ was done specifically with the aims to better engage students with course content and to improve students’ integration of technical content in mind. this title emphasises the impact of the course content on something that is obviously of relevance to petroleum engineers (the factors that influence the potential volume and flow of hydrocarbons in a reservoir rock). this focus also provides students with a direct way of seeing the links between and importance of the different topics taught during the first six weeks of the course. at the conclusion of the final workshop, the aims and content of the approach were summarised for students in a handout, ending with the following statement: what we have been doing deliberately here is what people learn to do gradually, unconsciously: by absorbing both the content and the language of their readings, they begin to re-use the structures and ways of writing they are exposed to. by doing this process consciously and deliberately, you can help yourself and accelerate your academic language development. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 7 amos and mcgowan integrating academic reading and writing skills development with core content the workshops four academic language development (ald) workshops were run, each given one hour of lecture time (table 1). these were spread out over six weeks of the semester and were jointly run by the academic developer/linguist (mcgowan) and the course lecturer (amos), taking turns in leading students through the linguistic exercise and the technical content. these workshops each involved some explanation of the aspect of academic writing being focused on, followed by a presentation of a demonstration example, and then students working through similar exercises during the workshop. both the examples provided and practical exercises made use of the two selected journal articles that were used during each of the four workshops. selection of the example articles article selection was a non-trivial process, since it was determined in advance that the articles to be used should ideally fulfil the following criteria: 1. content covers material taught during the first six weeks of the course. 2. content includes an evaluation of reservoir quality (the focus of the set assignment). 3. the article should have a petroleum-industry focus, to better engage the students. 4. the article needs to be well written and structured (both as a whole and at paragraph level). 5. the article should not be overly technical, as too much advanced technical geoscience content might disengage engineering students. 6. the article should not be too long, as this might overwhelm and/or disengage students. a substantial search through published articles was conducted and no paper was found that we felt met all of the desired criteria. the article selected was: ‘depositional controls on reservoir properties in a braid-delta sandstone, tirrawarra oil field, south australia’ (hamlin et al., 1996), published in the american association of petroleum geologists bulletin. this met the first four criteria, but was initially considered to contain too much technical detail and to be too long (~ 5500 words) for encouraging student engagement. however, it was deemed beneficial that this article focused on a local (south australian) oil field, and that the research was funded by a key locally-based company that students journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 8 amos and mcgowan integrating academic reading and writing skills development with core content would be familiar with. we also provided students with a second article, and used some excerpts from this in the workshops as well: ‘sandstone reservoir quality prediction: the state of the art’ (ajdukiewicz and lander, 2010; also published in the american association of petroleum geologists bulletin and authored by industry scientists). workshop 1 this introduced our approach to the class and focused on the concept of unpacking academic language, i.e. ‘translating’ excerpts of the selected academic articles into spoken language. students worked through examples of this and the significant differences between these two modes of communication were discussed. workshop 2 this workshop focused on analysis of one of the chosen articles (hamlin et al., 2006) to identify its structure and how the title related to this. we then discussed with the class how they could start planning their assignment content based on its title. in a second exercise, the structure of the introduction section of the selected article was analysed. workshop 3 the third workshop focused on paragraph structure, through analysis and discussion of excerpts from the selected articles. workshop 4 the fourth workshop presented the concept of discipline-specific ‘re-useable language’. students were shown how to extract re-useable language from well-written text; an example is included below. in the course of doing this, we had a brief discussion on academic integrity and plagiarism, making the point to students that re-using ‘common language’ with new content in general does not constitute plagiarism. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 9 amos and mcgowan integrating academic reading and writing skills development with core content example of model text selected from hamlin et al. (1996): ‘a key to our approach was to conduct petrographic analyses in the context of the stratigraphic framework’. what is the common (re-useable) language within this excerpt? ‘a key to our approach was to conduct ________ analyses in the context of _________’. the homework tasks the ‘homework tasks’ were set to encourage students to practise applying the tools and techniques taught to them during the workshops. their other purpose was to encourage continual work by the students towards the written assignment, rather than it being left to the last minute. these homework tasks were not assessed, but students were awarded 0.5% of their overall course mark for submission of each one. in order to further encourage students to engage with these exercises, they were structured such that the students could directly see their relevance to the final assignment task (table 1). students were given a date by which they would be provided with feedback by the course lecturer (usually one week from submission), to encourage them to utilise feedback comments in the planning of their written assignment, thereby developing their skills. table 1. details of the academic writing workshops and homework tasks. ald workshop title content detail homework task introduction and reading academic articles how to examine differences between formal academic and informal ‘spoken’ style language (halliday 1985) ‘translating’ an excerpt from the article provided into more easilyunderstandable, spokenstyle language. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 10 amos and mcgowan integrating academic reading and writing skills development with core content de-constructing an article to identify its structure how to analyse model text and imitate it for structure deconstructing assignment task to make a plan putting together the assignment structure (given one-month before the deadline) paragraph structure identifying common paragraph structure writing a paragraph of the assignment (any paragraph they liked; given three weeks prior to assignment submission) re-useable language how to extract language from well-written text. academic integrity. n/a assessment of the written assignment several weeks before the submission deadline for this assignment, a handout was provided to students that contained detailed instructions for this assessment task, as well as a simple assessment rubric that showed them how their mark for this assessment would be determined (table 2). this rubric was designed to emphasise the academic reading and writing skills development aspects of the assignment over the disciplinespecific content. only 20% of the assignment mark was based on the relevance and appropriateness of the content; 80% was based on writing skills that were focused on during the workshops and homework task exercises. the motivation for this from the point of view of the course lecturer was the anticipation that, in getting students to focus on the structure of their writing, they would have to spend time thinking about the content, and thus improve their understanding of this. we also made sure that the assessment rubric reflected our emphasis on attribution of material used rather than on the protocols for citation (e.g. see mcgowan, 2005; chanock, 2008; magyar, 2012), with 15% awarded for referencing within the text and 5% awarded for correct formatting of citations (table 2). journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 11 amos and mcgowan integrating academic reading and writing skills development with core content table 2. simple rubric of assessment criteria provided to students. aspect of assignment % assessment criteria – what you should aim for introduction 15 clear, focused statement of the topic. starts with a broad introductory sentence, and then progresses to become more specific. relates to the title. structure of assignment as a whole and structure of paragraphs. 20 assignment is well structured, with a logical flow of information. as a result, the assignment is easy to read and not confusing. i will provide you with further information on paragraph structure after writing workshop 3. relevance and appropriateness of content 20 the content is comprehensive and is fully relevant to the title. overall quality of the information presented is outstanding, presenting a comprehensive but concise review of the topic. each aspect of the topic that is mentioned has been explained clearly and the ways in which this aspect can influence reservoir quality have been clearly explained. technical language is appropriate; concepts are clearly explained. if a figure has been included, it needs to be of good quality, relevant to the content and mentioned within the text. sources of information 10 the minimum expectation for this aspect of the assignment is that lecture material is referenced as the source of information presented (p). to obtain a better mark, you should also look for material from other sources. one source could be textbooks (c). another source could be the articles provided to you during writing workshop 1 (d). to achieve the maximum possible marks for this aspect of the assignment (hd), you should cite at least one published article that you have researched for yourself. referencing within the text 15 all sources of information mentioned that are not your own ideas are cited. conclusion/summary 10 the content of the assignment is clearly and excellently summarised. all key aspects of material presented in the assignment are succinctly described. spelling and grammar 5 very few minor errors in spelling and grammar. formatting of reference list 5 accurate and in the correct format, with no more than a few minor formatting errors. includes all cited references, and no references that do not appear within the text. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 12 amos and mcgowan integrating academic reading and writing skills development with core content results and observations workshop attendance was lower than lecture attendance, even though workshops were scheduled to run immediately after a course lecture, in the same room, and the distinction between lecture and workshop was not entered separately in the timetable. twenty-six students were enrolled in the class, of whom two were chronic non-attenders. typical lecture attendance was between 10 and 20 students, and typical workshop attendance was 10 to 15 students. the number of homework tasks submitted were 11 (task 1), 19 (task 2) and 16 (task 3). personal observations the selected article used as the principal model text (hamlin et al., 1996) was initially thought to be too technical and overly long for this group of students. both of these aspects of the article turned out to be advantageous. when shown the article in the first workshop, students were daunted by its length and technical language. we explained that this was not something we expected them to understand without help, and that we would be taking them through a series of exercises during these workshops that would break it down for them, and give them the tools with which to read and understand it more easily. by the last workshop, following some unsolicited feedback, we sensed that a number of students felt significantly more confident in their abilities to read academic articles. they were probably more proud of their achievements than they would have been if we had presented them with a less apparently complicated or lengthy text. after the last workshop, one student (a native speaker of english and who achieved marks in the top 20% of the class) acknowledged that she had been ‘turned off’ by this paper at the start, but that she now felt confident in how to approach reading it. one student indicated that he found the exercise in the first workshop too simple, which may have disengaged him from future sessions. nevertheless, some students engaged very well with the first workshop exercise, and homework tasks submitted from this exercise showed that all students who submitted something, including the one that made this comment, had room for improvement. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 13 amos and mcgowan integrating academic reading and writing skills development with core content the workshops were led by the linguist, with input from the course lecturer. it was immediately apparent that the presence of the course lecturer in these workshops was hugely important, for several reasons: 1. clarification of discipline-specific terminology, which frequently arose in the middle of a demonstration or exercise. 2. relating the text from the example article being used in the workshop to the content of the lecture that had just been taught. this had several benefits: engaging students with the content of the reading and writing skills development workshop, highlighting aspects of taught content that the students had not grasped well, and providing an opportunity for students to revise relevant content soon after it had been taught. 3. the provision of a disciplineand industry-specific emphasis on the direct importance of reading and writing abilities to engineers. we believe this resonated more with the students than if the issue had been addressed by the linguist, as someone external to their discipline. it was noticed immediately by the course lecturer during these workshops that the students were thinking about, and integrating, course content in a way that they, and previous classes of students, had not been doing in the usual lecture and practical classes. our approach involved a significant increase to the lecturer workload. following marking, it was felt that the assessment rubric was too heavily weighted towards some aspects of writing that were relatively easily achieved (figure 1). the overall distribution of marks awarded were skewed to a higher value than appeared appropriate to the course lecturer. the average mark awarded for the written assignment was 77%, compared with 70% for the practical coursework and 69% for the final exam. fifteen of the 24 students that completed all three modes of assessment obtained a higher grade for their written assignment than they did for both the more technical coursework submissions and the final exam (six achieved their highest grade in the coursework, and three in the exam). journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 14 amos and mcgowan integrating academic reading and writing skills development with core content figure 1. average mark awarded for each of the assessment criteria for the written assignment, presented as a percentage of the total mark available for each aspect. see table 2 for the rubric. the error bars represent one standard deviation. student survey responses students were asked to complete an anonymous online survey after the first workshop, but only two of them did so. however, when they were asked to complete an anonymous paper-based survey on the day that they submitted the written assignment, nineteen responses were submitted. of the 19 responses, 11 replied that english was not their first language. fifteen students believed that the workshops helped them improve their writing skills, and fourteen said that the workshops helped them improve their understanding of course content (figure 2). whilst a significant proportion of the survey respondents stated that english was not their first language, the survey respondents who stated that english was their first language also stated that their reading and writing skills benefited from this approach. during the workshops, we observed the most engaged and responsive students to include both eal students and students who are native speakers of english. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 15 amos and mcgowan integrating academic reading and writing skills development with core content figure 2. student responses to survey questions (anonymous) regarding their perception that aspects of this approach improved their writing skills and understanding of course content. 0 2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16 yes no n/a q.9 the workshops  helped improve writing  skills q.10 the workshops  helped improve   understanding of course  content  q.11 doing the writing  assignment helped  improve understanding of  course content  three students provided written comments: one student commented that they had already begun applying the techniques taught to them through our workshops to other things; one student said they did not think they needed writing tuition like this (and their survey responses showed that they had only attended the first workshop); and one student commented that they found it difficult to write the assignment because they were focusing on how to write rather than on the content. n um be r of r es po ns es evaluation student survey responses and our observations indicate that the four aims of this study were achieved. we provided students with specific tools for reading and writing, and the majority of students believed that the workshops and writing the assignment improved their writing skills (in a way that could be transferred to other subjects and genres) and their engagement with and understanding of the course content. we plan to re-survey this cohort of students at the end of their 3rd and 4th years of study to find out whether they have continued to use the techniques introduced to them during this series of workshops. overall, this appeared to be a successful way of motivating these engineering students to think about writing. we are of the opinion that involvement of the course lecturer in the journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 16 amos and mc jou gowan integrating academic reading and writing skills development with core content rnal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 17 writing workshops was important, as was linking this writing assignment directly to both the technical course content and the academic language development workshops and homework tasks, and the careful selection of the model text. however, student participation in workshops and homework tasks was lower than that of student participation in lectures, which is something that will need to be addressed. future development we will follow this approach again, with some adaptations based on the observations and comments presented above. we will change the focus of the first workshop in order to better challenge the over-confident students, and by this hope to increase their engagement in the workshops. the most significant difference for the running of these workshops during 2012 is that the course lecturer (amos) will run the workshops on her own, using the material already put together by mcgowan in 2011. this project has resulted in a significant increase in the pedagogical expertise of the lead author (the course lecturer and geoscientist) as a result of this collaboration with the linguist, who is also an academic developer within the discipline of higher education. this was anticipated from the outset and is a key facet of mcgowan’s proposals for improving student skills in this area. both authors will continue to adapt and develop this approach for application in other university courses. a more explicit rubric has been developed that sets out expectations for different levels of achievement (grades) for each of the assessment criteria (table 3). making use of an online mechanism for semi-automated feedback provision based on an assessment rubric will be explored as a way of reducing lecturer workload. for those teaching large class sizes, a substantial assignment need not be necessary. we propose that our approach could be adapted such that only a single paragraph is assessed, reducing the marking workload on the course lecturer (as supported by woods et al., 2000). gowan integrating academic reading and writing skills development with core content rnal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 18 amos and mc jou table 3. more detailed assessment rubric developed for use in 2012. amos and mcgowan integrating academic reading and writing skills development with core content we propose that if the integration of academic language skills development and understanding core content can be demonstrated to improve both facets of student learning and development, and an approach is developed that can be readily applied by course lecturers to enable them to do this, then we anticipate that more stem academics are likely to engage with the development of academic language skills. a commitment by academics could serve to motivate their students to accept the importance of literacy competence for their undergraduate learning, as preparation for their research writing at honours level as well as for written communication within their future workplace. conclusions this paper outlines the development of a new approach for enhancing academic reading and writing skills of engineering students. observations by the lecturer, linguist and student feedback indicate that it achieved the aims of better developing student writing skills, providing students with tools for academic reading and writing that they can apply in the future, better engaging students with course content, and improving student integration of course content. a series of academic language development workshops was run during lecture time that formed part of their course curriculum, and content focused explicitly on both reading and writing skills, as well as on course content. our approach draws on genre analysis; students were taught how to ‘unpack’ densely written academic texts and to use these as models to advance their own writing skills (at the levels of sentences, paragraphs and whole articles). students were encouraged to complete nonassessed ‘homework tasks’ following the workshops, for which they received feedback, and which were directly related to student preparation of a substantial and assessed written assignment. assessment of this assignment focused more on writing skills than on technical content. in a post-completion survey, most students said that the workshops and writing the assignment improved both their writing skills and their understanding of course content. this approach could readily be adapted to different academic disciplines. it is hoped that its integrated nature, with benefits to student understanding of core content, may increase engagement of traditionally resistant students with the development of their academic language skills and encourage the engagement of stem academics. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 19 amos and mcgowan integrating academic reading and writing skills development with core content acknowledgements we acknowledge the role of associate professor kogi naidoo, coordinator of the university of adelaide’s academic staff development course ‘teaching at university’, for providing the productive environment in which this project collaboration was conceived and facilitated. the 2012 assessment rubric draws on aspects of other rubrics that were developed jointly by kathryn amos, mark tingay and mary gonzalez, australian school of petroleum. references ajdukiewicz, j.m. and lander, r.h. (2010) ‘sandstone reservoir quality prediction: the state of the art’, aapg bulletin, 94(8), pp. 1083-1091. atlay, m. and harris, r. (2000) ‘an institutional approach to developing students' transferable skills’, innovations in education and training international, 37(1), pp. 76-81. berthouex, p.m. (1996) ‘honing the writing skills of engineers’, journal of professional issues in engineering education and practice, 122(3), pp. 107-110. biggs, j. (1999) ‘what the student does: teaching for enhanced learning’, higher education research and development, 18(1), pp. 57-75. cargill, m. and o’connor, p. (2009) writing scientific research articles. strategies and steps. chichester, uk: wiley-blackwell. available at: http://www.writeresearch.com.au/ (accessed: 3 march 2010). chadha, d. and nicholls, g. (2006) ‘teaching transferable skills to undergraduate engineering students: recognising the value of embedded and bolt-on approaches’, international journal of engineering education, 22(1), pp. 116-122. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 20 http://www.writeresearch.com.au/ amos and mcgowan integrating academic reading and writing skills development with core content chanock, k. (2008) ‘when students reference plagiarised material – what can we learn (and what can we do) about their understanding of attribution?’, international journal for educational integrity, 4(1), pp. 3-16. available at: http://www.ojs.unisa.edu.au/index.php/ijei/issue/view/48 (accessed: 25 april 2012). cismas, s.c. (2010) ‘educating academic writing skills in engineering’, in dondon, p. and martin, o. (eds.) latest trends on engineering education: proceedings of the 7th wseas international conference on engineering. corfu island, greece 22-24 july. wseas press, pp. 247-251. cope, b. and kalantzis, m. (1993) ‘how a genre approach to literacy can transform the way literacy is taught’, in cope, b. and kalantzis, m. (eds.) the powers of literacy: a genre approach to the teaching of writing. london: falmer press, pp. 1-21. disadvantaged schools program (1988) teaching factual writing. a genre-based approach. sydney. metropolitan east region. new south wales department of education. drummond, i., nixon, i. and wiltshire, j. (1998) ‘personal transferable skills in higher education’, quality assurance education, 6(1), pp. 19-27. halliday, m.a.k. (1985) spoken and written language. burwood, victoria 3125: deakin university press. halliday, m.a.k. and hasan, r. (1985) language, context, and text: aspects of language in a social-semiotic perspective. burwood, victoria 3125: deakin university press. hamlin, h.s., dutton, s.p., seggie, r.j. and tyler, n. (1996) ‘depositional controls on reservoir properties in a braid-delta sandstone, tirrawarra oil field, south australia’, association of american petroleum geologists bulletin, 80(2), pp. 139– 156. kemp, i. and seagraves, l. (1995) ‘transferable skills: can higher education deliver?’, studies in higher education, 20(3), pp. 315-328. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 21 http://www.ojs.unisa.edu.au/index.php/ijei/issue/view/48 amos and mcgowan integrating academic reading and writing skills development with core content magyar, a. (2012) ‘plagiarism and attribution: an academic literacies approach?’, journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4, march, pp.1-18. martin, j.r. (1989) factual writing: exploring and challenging social reality. oxford: oxford university press. martin, j.r. (1997) ‘analysing genre: functional parameters’, in christie, f. and martin, j. (eds.) genre and institutions. social processes in the workplace and school. london and washington: cassell, pp. 3-39. mcgowan, u. (2005) ‘does educational integrity mean teaching students not to ‘use their own words’?’, international journal for educational integrity, 1(1), pp. 1-11. available at: http://www.ojs.unisa.edu.au/index.php/ijei/article/view/16/6 (accessed: 15 april 2012). mcgowan, u. (2008) ‘international students: a conceptual framework for dealing with unintentional plagiarism’, in roberts, t.s. (ed.) student plagiarism in an online world: problems and solutions. hershey, new york: information science reference, pp. 92-107. mcgowan, u. (2010) ‘re-defining academic teaching in terms of research apprenticeship’, in devlin, m., nagy, j. and lichtenberg, a. (eds.) research and development in higher education: reshaping education, volume 33. herdsa, pp. 481-489. available at: http://www.herdsa.org.au/?page_id=1371#m (accessed: 15 april 2012). mottershead, d. and suggitt, s. (1996) ‘developing transferable skills: some examples from geomorphology teaching’, journal of geography in higher education, 20(1), pp. 75-82. oakley, b., connert, b. and allen, k. (1999) ‘incorporating writing skills into the engineering curriculum’, 29th asee/ieee frontiers in education conference. san juan, puerto rico 10-13 november. available at http://fieconference.org/fie99/papers/1071.pdf (accessed 29 april 2012) journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 22 http://www.ojs.unisa.edu.au/index.php/ijei/article/view/16/6 http://www.herdsa.org.au/?page_id=1371#m http://fieconference.org/fie99/papers/1071.pdf amos and mcgowan integrating academic reading and writing skills development with core content pennycook, a. (1996) ‘borrowing others’ words: text, ownership memory and plagiarism’, tesol quarterly, 30(2), pp. 201-230. swales, j. (1990) genre analysis. english in academic research settings. new york: cambridge university press. ventola, e. (1996) ‘packing and unpacking information in academic texts’, in ventola, e. and mauranen, a. (eds.) academic writing. intercultural and textual issues. amsterdam and philadelphia: john benjamins, pp. 153-194. weissberg, r. and buker, s. (1990) writing up research. experimental research report writing for students of english. englewood cliffs, nj: prentice hall. wheeler, e. and mcdonald, r.l. (2000) ‘writing in engineering courses’, journal of engineering education, 89(4), pp. 481-486. available at: http://www.jee.org/2000/october/322.pdf (accessed: 15 april 2012). wingate, u. (2006) ‘doing away with ‘study skills’’, teaching in higher education, 11(4), pp. 457-469. woods, d.r., felder, r.m., rugarcia, a. and stice, j.e. (2000) ‘the future of engineering education iii. developing critical skills’, chemical engineering education, 34(2), pp. 108-117. author details kathryn amos is a lecturer at the australian school of petroleum (asp), faculty of engineering, computing and mathematical sciences, university of adelaide. kathryn teaches courses in sedimentology and stratigraphy to students enrolled in engineering and geoscience degree programmes. she leads the lake eyre basin analogues research group and is programme co-ordinator for the honours and msc (coursework) degrees in petroleum geoscience. kathryn was awarded a phd (2004) in the field of sedimentology from the university of east anglia, uk, and a bsc (hons) in environmental sciences (1999) from the same university. kathryn journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 23 http://www.jee.org/2000/october/322.pdf amos and mcgowan integrating academic reading and writing skills development with core content worked as a research fellow at the university of leeds (uk), university of new south wales (unse@adfa, canberra, australia) and the university of adelaide before taking up her current lectureship position in 2009. kathryn is a clastic sedimentologist with expertise in dryland and sub-marine sedimentology, focusing on the application of scale models and modern analogues for interpreting ancient successions. (kathryn.amos@adelaide.edu.au) ursula mcgowan is senior lecturer, academic staff development in the discipline of higher education at the school of education, university of adelaide. she has been responsible for academic staff development, including the support of academic induction for tenured, contract and sessional staff. she is bilingual (germanenglish) and is an experienced linguist in core course lecturing (german language and literature) and in teaching english as an additional language (eal). her current research focus is on oral and written language issues for students and staff from language backgrounds other than english. in her recent publications she has developed an approach to minimising students’ inadvertent plagiarism by highlighting the research-based nature of undergraduate assignment writing. (ursula.mcgowan@adelaide.edu.au) journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 24 mailto:kathryn.amos@adelaide.edu.au mailto:ursula.mcgowan@adelaide.edu.au integrating academic reading and writing skills development with core content in science and engineering abstract introduction aims an additional challenge: engaging engineering students with geoscience course content an integrated approach to skills development unpacking densely written academic text ‘harvesting’ language method development of our approach the workshops selection of the example articles workshop 2 workshop 3 workshop 4 the homework tasks assessment of the written assignment results and observations personal observations student survey responses evaluation future development conclusions acknowledgements references author details literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special edition: academic peer learning, november 2015 reflective journals as a developmental tool in pal carolyn gentle plymouth university, uk rachel shaw plymouth university, uk sophie scott plymouth university, uk abstract reflection is frequently used as a means towards evaluating and improving performance. in the context of peer learning, post-session debriefs are reflective conversations between peer assisted learning (pal) leaders and their academic co-ordinators. reflection-foraction (killion and todnem, 1991) is a good fit with peer learning which is typically actionoriented. this case study considers the extent to which a pal leader’s professional capability and personal development may be further boosted by keeping a reflective journal. it raises the question whether or not there are tangible benefits to the journal-keeper in terms of their perceptions of their own learning, soft skills and employability. a pal leader at a uk university who kept a reflective pal journal found the process enriching and it led to some changes in thought in respect of assumptions about what pal success could look like. keywords: reflection-for-action; confidence; writing cycle. gentle et al. reflective journals as a developmental tool in pal journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 2 background uk universities already make use of reflection for learning. we could be confident that a second year student at plymouth university would be familiar with the concept of reflection, although this would not necessarily mean that they were inclined to adopt a reflective approach. furthermore, we knew that the peer assisted learning (pal) debrief between leaders and programme academics offers regular opportunities for informal reflective peer discussion. we were, however, also aware that in practice, debriefs are frequently more focused on description and forward planning, than analysis and evaluation. we were therefore interested to know whether structured written reflection could generate more or richer reflexivity. moon (1999) identifies five stages in reflection: noticing – making sense – making meaning – working with meaning – transformative learning. schön (1991) suggests that reflection can take two forms: reflection-in-action, which occurs during an event or process, and reflection-on-action, coming after the event. killion and todnem (1991) claim that reflective learning ought not to be concerned only with understanding but with its application to future decisions and actions: reflection-for-action. case study according to hagyard and watling (2011, pp.178): the most effective way to introduce students to researching and developing research-mindedness is to focus on real and topical examples of research which have an impact on everyday lives. this project was an attempt to achieve this. ethical approval was applied for and granted in advance of september training 2013. during training all 160 trainee pal leaders from 19 subject areas were invited to participate. this case-study is based on the reflections of the sole pal leader (s) who succeeded in maintaining a pal journal for the whole academic year. s was a second year physical geography with geology student. 2013 was the first year of pal in earth sciences and therefore she had not experienced sessions as a first year. after training she was in a subject group of 14 leaders, had a leader partner, gentle et al. reflective journals as a developmental tool in pal journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 3 and a peer assisted learning scheme (pals) group of 24 students. the programme had decided that sessions would be held every three weeks. s made seven journal entries based on seven pal sessions, followed by a final entry evaluating the use of the reflective journal. she was provided with guidelines based on the stages identified by moon (1999) and after gibbs’ reflective cycle (1988). permission to use her data in this case study was not required since she is one of the authors of this article. this is a skeleton outline of the structured writing instructions she was asked to follow:  description of the pal session: what did i do, see, hear?  interpretation and rationale: what was the reason for this?  evaluation: how was this useful/relevant? what was its impact on leader(s) and students?  implications: what have i learnt and how can i apply this? thus s experienced the benefits of maintaining a writing cycle (campbell-evans and maloney, 1998). description s entered accounts of each pal session: we had planned on getting our students to talk to each other about how they think university has changed them as a person and what they think about differently now. …proof-reading your essay, figure captions, and how to find journals...getting our students to look at a page of a journal with references in small groups to give them an idea of how they can put references within their own work. gentle et al. reflective journals as a developmental tool in pal journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 4 interpretation in each entry s analysed how and why they selected specific activities: the reason behind getting the students to talk about their experiences was to get them thinking about what they have achieved and being able to talk it over with others may get them to realise the extent…uni has changed them. the activities were all to build up confidence for presenting…it also gets the students to talk to each other and feel more at ease with each other thus making it less nerve wracking when presenting. s also reflects on her own experience, feelings and behaviour during sessions: it ‘makes me realise how difficult it is not to give answers’; and on what they had learnt from having only one student, where ‘there are no other students… [with whom] ideas and discussions can take place so you have to make sure you are careful about not teaching them’. the entries evidence the consideration given to selecting relevant topics, activities and discussions. evaluation leaders sometimes consider low attendance a reflection on their performance. in debriefs it is often regarded as disappointing. s was frank about low attendance but used the journal to articulate a nuanced perspective. her interpretations go beyond the leader analysis typical during debrief conversations. she is also proactive and solutions-oriented: poor attendance has not been a bad thing – it has helped me change plans quickly and get to know people better. however, [it should be] addressed more at the start of the year (specific lecture.../pals sessions on timetables/pals session during fresher’s week)...topics that are useful – like fieldtrips and revision. s also discussed the challenge of coaching students towards an independent style of learning where they become used to sourcing information themselves: gentle et al. reflective journals as a developmental tool in pal journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 5 the group had lots of questions about minerology and did seem reluctant to look in the textbooks in front of them...someone kept asking us the same questions and we are not allowed to give answers. s puts herself in the students’ position to interpret their behaviour and concludes that, despite the challenges and student resistance, the activity is a useful one: they are still getting used to university and how to work effectively through the need to refer to textbooks and to gain a better understanding of being more proactive in their learning. as in the previous section, she also discussed how pal supported her own development: it was useful not only to the students but also to myself going over presentations and skills as i have my own presentation to do in a few weeks. even though no-one turned up, [preparation for] the session has helped me think about my own revision and how to revise best. pals overall has helped me immensely with confidence issues, presenting to others, and going over previous work has helped me academically and will definitely help me with my future career. these honest, perceptive and mature written reflections demonstrate that there may be much to say that does not typically emerge during a debrief discussion. implications s expresses expert knowledge in her own context: working round the timetable for everyone is difficult, but feel it would be more effective to hold a session towards the middle of the day after a lecture, i think this may have been the reason for the lack of students as the session was held in the middle of a four hour break. gentle et al. reflective journals as a developmental tool in pal journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 6 if we have future pals sessions with only one student, i know we can adapt what we had planned and still have a good session. s ascribes an improvement in soft skills to pal: ‘better communication skills is something that will help me’; academic performance, confidence and employability: this topic is very relevant to pals, my course and my future life...it helps to give me self-confidence, and is a great skill for a job. the subject was good to get me thinking about minerology again and to go over what i thought i knew about minerals. i realised how much i had forgot. donelan’s (1999) view that leaders are major beneficiaries in peer learning contexts seems to be borne out by the experience of this leader in respect of her own subject learning as well as development of soft skills. evaluative journal entry at the end of the journal-keeping period, s completed a final entry evaluating whether she thought keeping a journal for pal influenced how she and her partner planned and delivered sessions: i think overall the pals journal did influence my pals process greatly and made me consider wider aspects, like my future skills and why students didn’t turn up; …it also helped in getting me to think more in depth, which helped improve my reflective skills. she thought she detected a difference between her own approach and that of her partner and she suggests the journal-keeping played a part: gentle et al. reflective journals as a developmental tool in pal journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 7 i think for it [journal] to truly influence and effect the planning and running of sessions, my fellow pals leader should have completed a reflective journal too…for instance sometimes when planning together they did not put much thought into a task…it was my decision to keep a reflective journal…as it does provide you with a greater insight. she further observes – ‘[it] helped me focus on ideas in the debrief sessions’. this is an interesting outcome as it may indicate the potential for journal-keeping to have a qualitative impact on pal debriefs. commentary the consistent quality of the evaluative entries supports the use of journals for professional development and suggests they can exceed the reflexivity achieved in those debriefs which are insufficiently critical and where, for example, embarrassment might impede the analysis of reasons for low attendance. the perceived personal and academic benefits of peer learning to leaders (donelan, 1999; hilsdon, 2014) are articulated by s in all her entries: there are significant advantages to be had if students are convinced of the benefits of learning to learn, self-awareness, and taking ownership and responsibility for personal development (keenan, 2011, p. 69). s contrasted her own with her partner’s approach to planning sessions and claimed journal-keeping was a contributory factor in the difference. she describes how she sought to influence her partner, thereby demonstrating a nascent leadership skill. s also comments that her contributions to debriefs were more thought-out as a result of journal-keeping. this is an interesting observation – bulpitt and martin (2005) suggest that reflection can be enhanced by in-class sharing, so s may have had an enriched experience of debriefs. gentle et al. reflective journals as a developmental tool in pal journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 8 conclusion the aim of the project was to determine whether keeping a pal journal enriches pal sessions and supports leader personal development. s used the journal to reflect on what took place and how this could influence future sessions. her entries suggest that she found the process helpful in interpreting events and informing future sessions. she also charted personal development milestones. this outcome indicates that there is scope for wider piloting of journal-use in pal. the journal design in this case study accorded with the aims of this small-scale project. refining the leaders’ writing instructions to probe reflection-for-action and its subsequent implementation may enable greater precision in the discussion of longitudinal and developmental outcomes. from this case study it is difficult to generalise. although the majority of leaders might not want to keep a journal, at plymouth we are introducing written reflection at the beginning of debriefs so that all leaders will have an individual reflective moment followed by the usual group discussion. for s, written reflection was a powerful tool for professional and personal development. in order to really benefit pal through journal-keeping, it would need to be widely adopted. however, this case study indicates there can also be benefits from partial take-up and that these benefits are wide-ranging. references bulpitt, h. and martin, p.j. (2005) ‘learning about reflection from the student’, active learning in higher education, 6(3), pp. 207-217. campbell-evans, g. and maloney, c. (1998) ‘an analysis framework for reflective writing’, australian journal of teacher education, 23(1), pp. 29-38. donelan, m. (1999) ‘si leaders: the real winners’, national conference on supplemental instruction. university of missouri, kansas city, usa 20-22 may. gentle et al. reflective journals as a developmental tool in pal journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 9 gibbs, g. (1988) learning by doing: a guide to teaching and learning methods. london: further development unit. hagyard, a. and watling, s. (2011) ‘the student as producer: learning by doing research’, in hartley, p., hilsdon, j., keenan, c., sinfield, s. and verity, m. (eds.) learning development in higher education. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan, pp. 169-182. hilsdon, j. (2014) ‘peer learning for change in higher education’, innovations in education and teaching international, 51(3), pp. 244-254. available at: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/14703297.2013.796709 (accessed: 12 august 2015). keenan, c. (2011) ‘a personal development planning perspective on supporting student transition in higher education’, in hartley, p., hilsdon, j., keenan, c., sinfield, s. and verity, m. (eds.) learning development in higher education. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan, pp. 67-78. killion, j.p. and todnem, g.r. (1991) ‘a process for personal theory building’, educational leadership, 48(6), pp. 14-16. moon, j. (1999) reflection in learning and professional development. london: kogan page. schön, d. (1991) the reflective practitioner: how professionals think in action. aldershot: ashgate publishing ltd. author details carolyn gentle is pals co-ordinator at plymouth university. as a senior lecturer in elt and tesol she published language learning materials for overseas students and edited a research informed teaching publication in the uclan rit impact series. her research has addressed the management of online ‘classrooms’, the use of technical tools for synchronous online interaction, and e-assessment. currently she is mostly concerned with scaffolding pals leaders as pedagogic researchers and following their lead. http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/14703297.2013.796709 http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/14703297.2013.796709 gentle et al. reflective journals as a developmental tool in pal journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 10 rachel shaw is a research assistant for the peer assisted learning scheme (pals) and lead coordinator for the pals in partner colleges project at plymouth university. having completed her doctorate in psychology, her interests are now centred around the dynamics of peer learning and support within the pals framework at university and colleges of further education. sophie scott is an earth science graduate from plymouth university who enjoyed working as a pals leader for an academic year. she then took on the role of a senior pals leader for a second year after witnessing the benefits and skills the role brought to first year students as well as leaders, particularly brought to light by completing a reflective journal. this encouraged her to volunteer as an ambassador in driving learning in earth science based on work in the field. reflective journals as a developmental tool in pal abstract background case study description interpretation evaluation implications evaluative journal entry commentary conclusion references author details literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special edition: academic peer learning, part two, april 2016 the impact of a peer coaching programme on the academic performance of undergraduate students: a mixed methods study jill andreanoff university of essex, uk abstract peer support interventions have been widely used within the higher education sector as a means to enhance student success and retention. however, much of the evidence to measure the impact of mentoring and coaching has relied on anecdotal, self-reported evidence from the participants. in addition, there is much confusion in the terms to describe peer support interventions, making it difficult to compare and contrast the different programmes. the need for evidence of a more robust, quantitative nature has long been called for by a number of authors such as jacobi (1991), capstick et al. (2004) and medd (2012). this mixed methods case study of an extant peer coaching programme in higher education in the uk makes explicit the process of the coaching intervention, measuring the impact on academic attainment in the form of module grade data. in addition, the use of a control group enables a comparison to be made of the academic attainment of non-coached students with those who received peer coaching. academic behaviour confidence of those who were coached was also measured preand postcoaching using the sander and sanders (2009) abc questionnaire. there was found to be a significant impact in the attainment of students who received coaching when compared to those students in the control group who did not. the peer coaching had a beneficial impact in particular for those in their first year of study and those who were performing less well at the outset, as well as students within the business school. a significant increase in the academic behaviour confidence was found in those who received coaching as well as a reduced attrition rate when compared to those in the control group. keywords: peer coaching; academic attainment; higher education students; mentoring. andreanoff the impact of a peer coaching programme on the academic performance of undergraduate students journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 2 background peer support interventions for students have been implemented for several years by many higher education institutions (heis). authors such as tinto (1993), astin (1984), goodlad (1998) and kuh et al. (2003) advocate student involvement with their institution as a means to reduce attrition rates and as a predictor of student success. ward et al. (2010) found that goals were more likely to be obtained by those being mentored and griffin (1995), hill and reddy (2007), and andrews and clark (2011) all reported benefits such as improved student engagement and satisfaction. however, there is a growing body of literature available that highlights the confusion between the terms used to describe peer support and the precise nature of the interventions. this confusion was emphasised by gibson (2005) and chao (1998) who reproach others for not clarifying their definition of the terms in their studies. jacobi (1991) and d’abate et al. (2003) report that the lack of clarity in the terms makes it difficult to compare and contrast the different interventions. jacobi (1991) first reported this difficulty and d’abate et al. (2003) in her review of mentoring and coaching mirrored these same concerns. parsloe and wray (2000) also recognised the confusion between the terms coaching and mentoring. donegan et al. (2000) describe the process as an expert teacher giving support, feedback and making suggestions to untrained or less skilled peers, indicating a more directive approach. stober and grant (2006) and ives (2008) discuss the different approaches and contexts in which coaching is used. whilst advice giving is discouraged in some definitions, in others ‘guidance’ is stated as part of the process. coaching is often described as ‘goal focused’ and a shorter term activity concerned with maximising performance (whitmore, 2002). mentoring is often thought to be more of a transfer of knowledge as described by parsloe and wray (2000). despite this confusion, the presented evidence seems to suggest that peer support interventions are useful in attaining many objectives. the methodology more commonly adopted to study the impact of these interventions relies heavily on anecdotal evidence. many studies refer to increased student success, although success is often defined by social integration or increased student involvement with the hei rather than academic attainment. andreanoff the impact of a peer coaching programme on the academic performance of undergraduate students journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 3 some studies have used quantitative evidence to determine the impact of peer support initiatives but have been quite specialised, limiting the transferability of the findings, or have adopted inadequate methodology. for example, fox and stevenson (2005) conducted a quantitative study of accounting and finance students who were mentored compared to a control group of students who were not. whilst the findings did report higher attainment in those being mentored, the intervention was described as pre-determined group sessions, which some would argue is not ‘mentoring’. sanchez et al. (2006) carried out a longitudinal study that reported improved satisfaction and commitment of students to complete their studies compared to a non-mentored group. however, the sample size was significantly reduced by the end of the study, resulting in missing data compromising the validity of the findings. this intervention too was described as having a team leader working with small groups of students. the study by short and baker (2010) determined the impact of peer coaching, this time a one-to-one intervention but the small sample size of eight participants reduced the reliability of the quantitative evidence. this mixed method study focuses specifically on the academic attainment of higher education students using quantitative data collected from a sample size of 150 coached students and a control group of 93 non-coached students selected from eight different academic schools. it aimed to determine how academic attainment is impacted through a robust peer coaching programme. the coaching was offered over a 10-12 week period and promoted specifically to students as a means to improve grades. it comprised of oneto-one meetings with a coachee led agenda rather than predetermined group sessions, with a suggested guideline of one hour, weekly meetings. with such a result-orientated objective, coaching can be considered an appropriate label to adopt. peer coaches are trained to refrain from ‘advice giving’ not only to avert the possibility of the coaches giving incorrect advice but to create a less directive relationship that is better aligned to lead to self-efficacy in the coachee. the research takes a case study approach conducted within one uk based hei selected due to the well-established peer support programmes delivered there. this includes mentoring which is offered for a year’s duration, has the aim of improving social integration, and is targeted at those from lower socio economic groups, whilst the peer coaching is offered to all students. a dedicated team of eight staff are in place to deliver the programmes and over 300 students are recruited and trained each year to take part. once trained, the peer coaches and mentors support over 1,000 students. this study andreanoff the impact of a peer coaching programme on the academic performance of undergraduate students journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 4 focuses on the undergraduate peer coaching programme that uses older and more experienced students to support younger less experienced ones. the programmes at the case study institution all adhere to good practice as defined by husband and jacobs (2009), andrews and clark (2011) and thomas (2012). these authors identified the need for a well-structured programme to be in place in order to meet objectives. coaches and mentors are selected, following interview, having provided a full application form. for the peer coaching, a good academic attainment record is essential in addition to personal attributes such as well-developed communication skills. once accepted, the student coaches undergo a mandatory two day training programme that culminates in an assessment to test their knowledge and understanding of the coaching role. the training actively encourages the students to refrain from ‘advice giving’ and instead teaches effective questioning techniques to help facilitate self-efficacy in the coachees through goal and target setting. coaches are also reminded about the risks of collusion and plagiarism. coachees apply for a peer coach through an application process and are involved in the matching process following a mandatory induction to define their role in the relationship. the coaches are offered fortnightly support workshops throughout the process to further develop their coaching skills and assist with any issues arising from the developing relationships. methodology the purpose of the study was to explore whether peer coaching improved academic performance and provide a greater understanding of the impact on coachee attainment. qualitative data illuminated the quantitative findings and made a mixed methods approach a logical methodology to adopt. johnson and onwuegbuzie (2004, p.16) state that ‘research approaches should be mixed in ways that offer the best opportunity for answering important research questions’. creswell and plano clark (2011) describe a convergent parallel type of design as one where concurrent timing is implemented to the quantitative and qualitative strands during the same phase of the research process. the design prioritises the methods equally but keeps the two strands independent during analysis mixing the results during the overall interpretation. they suggest that the andreanoff the impact of a peer coaching programme on the academic performance of undergraduate students journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 5 convergent design is best when there is a need to corroborate quantitative data using pragmatism as an umbrella philosophy. in this study, module grade data was compared with the student perception data collected, exploring any commonalities or incongruities. the overall design comprised of quan + qual and the quantitative data was stored and manipulated using spss. the research comprised of 150 undergraduate participants who elected to be peer coached. data was accessed on their academic performance both prior to being coached and post-coaching. in addition to this, qualitative data was collected via semi-structured interviews and six focus groups. 21 students who were coached took part in ether a oneto-one interview or one of four focus groups and fourteen coaches took part in a further two focus groups. participants were asked about their perceptions of the coaching process and perceived impact on academic performance. interviews and focus groups were conducted by three researchers who had no involvement with the delivery of the peer coaching programme for avoidance of possible respondent bias. themes were drawn independently from the data and compared as a means of investigator triangulation. tables 1.1 and 1.2 show information on the students who received coaching. table 1.1. breakdown of student participants who took part in the peer coaching. academic school number of peer coaches number of peer coachees life & medical sciences 20 30 law school 17 23 business school 21 40 engineering 7 13 physics, astronomy & maths 8 13 humanities 9 16 education 8 14 nursing 1 1 total number 91 150 andreanoff the impact of a peer coaching programme on the academic performance of undergraduate students journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 6 table 1.2. breakdown of students into separate year groups. year 1st (level 4) 2nd (level 5) 3rd (level 6) 4th year number of students 82 52 14 2 as well as being asked about their perceptions of the coaching, coachees were also asked preand post-coaching to comment upon their level of confidence and satisfaction in the following areas using a 7 point likert scale:  how satisfied they were with their academic progress so far.  how they felt they were managing the requirements of their course.  how satisfied overall they were with student life. whilst the peer coaching was not designed to enhance student satisfaction, there would likely be a link with this and academic performance, as has been explored by mckenzie and schweitzer (2001) and martirosyan et al. (2014). a control group of 93 participants were also selected comprising of students who were offered peer coaching but declined through choice, as can be seen in tables 1.3 and 1.4. similar data on academic achievement was collected for the control group students for comparison. care was taken when inviting the control group to avoid bias, contamination and pre-existing attributes, as described by mosley (1997). andreanoff the impact of a peer coaching programme on the academic performance of undergraduate students journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 7 table 1.3. breakdown of student participants in the control group. academic school number of students life & medical sciences 20 law school 18 business school 35 engineering 9 physics, astronomy & maths 1 humanities 7 education 3 nursing 0 total number 93 table 1.4. breakdown of control group students into separate year groups. year 1st (level 4) 2nd (level 5) 3rd (level 6) 4th year number of students 48 39 6 0 academic progress of both the control group and the peer coached group was explored and compared using independent t tests. in addition to this, the sander and sanders (2009) academic behaviour confidence (abc) questionnaire was administered to the coached group, both preand post-coaching. this questionnaire is designed to measure confidence levels in relation to academic behaviours which are recognised as being required for success in higher education. data from the likert scales was quantitized, enabling further statistical analysis. table 1.5 shows the types and numbers of data collected. andreanoff the impact of a peer coaching programme on the academic performance of undergraduate students journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 8 table 1.5. types and numbers of data samples collected. perception data performance data post-coaching perceptions of student satisfaction and academic performance post-coaching sander and saunders – abc questionnaire module grade data semester a module grade data semester b coached group 65 (150 collected pre-coaching) 63 (150 collected pre-coaching) 146 127 control group not collected not collected 92 72 the qualitative findings student perception data the semi-structured interviews used as part of the focus groups enriched and helped elucidate the quantitative data collected, putting the peer coaching process into context. four themes emerged from the transcripts. theme 1 – academic improvement there were a number of students who directly attributed the coaching intervention to their improved academic grades: towards the end i could see it clearly that my grades, which at the start were at 2:1, went straight to a 1st which is what we aimed at achieving. so overall i would say that because of her support i am more confident in my academic work. (law student) other students similarly remarked on their improvement: andreanoff the impact of a peer coaching programme on the academic performance of undergraduate students journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 9 figure 1. academic improvement. many of the students made a connection between improved grades and greater academic confidence. rather than refer to a vague notion of performing better they were able to specifically identify the particular area where they had noticed an improvement: figure 2. academic confidence. andreanoff the impact of a peer coaching programme on the academic performance of undergraduate students journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 10 the quotes above illustrate the perceived impact on academic performance as seen by the coachees. it is clear from these findings that the students perceived themselves to be performing better academically. theme 2 – increased confidence and motivation many students reported improved confidence and motivation as a result of the coaching which was also apparent from the survey questionnaire data. figure 3 provides evidence illustrating increased confidence attributed to the support provided by the peer coaching: figure 3. examples of how coaching increased confidence and motivation. this perceived increase in motivation could have a beneficial impact on higher education students. it has been found in previous studies that where students display low academic self-efficacy they are more likely to lose motivation. bandura (1993), for example, reported that students may give up persisting with academic tasks. torres and solberg (2001) and zajacova et al. (2005) state that students might also lose motivation and spend less time studying and preparing for tutorials. this evidence to suggest increased levels of motivation is therefore likely to impact positively on academic attainment and persistence. andreanoff the impact of a peer coaching programme on the academic performance of undergraduate students journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 11 theme 3 – examples of the value of one-to-one support nineteen students commented on the beneficial nature of the one-to-one aspect of the programme in their post-coaching questionnaires and the preference for speaking to a peer rather than seeking help from their tutor, which can be seen in figure 4. figure 4. supporting the theme ‘one-to-one support’. whilst other interventions such as student support sessions, delivered by staff, are available at the case study university, it can be seen from the extracts that it is particularly valued when the support is offered by a peer. similar findings have been reported for peer assisted learning (pal) by capstick et al. (2004) who found that students taking part in pal enjoyed being able to discuss academic concerns away from teaching staff. in this study the participants also noted the benefits of one-to-one peer support. theme 4 – practical and emotional support many of the coachees cited the practical help that they were given as being valuable. this concurs with the findings from the sander and sanders (2009) abc scale data that is explored later, suggesting that academic behaviour confidence had improved from preto andreanoff the impact of a peer coaching programme on the academic performance of undergraduate students journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 12 post-coaching. coachees were able to identify in what way the peer coaching had assisted them from simply organising their time more efficiently to setting actions, as the following extracts suggest. figure 5. practical and emotional support. these quotes and extracts demonstrate the practical support that was offered by the coaches to the coachees. it also demonstrates that the ‘coaching practice’ is in line with the training given, with the coaches identifying goals, breaking down tasks into more manageable ones, and agreeing actions for the coachee to follow. this approach is also likely to lead to improved self-efficacy in the coachees through the achievement of small goals (ives and cox, 2012). it can be seen from the evidence that the peer coaching has been instrumental in bringing an increased understanding of the requirements for success in higher education study. having the opportunity to share experiences with a more experienced student has led to the enlightenment of the less experienced students as to academic expectations. as students were matched with those studying the same or a similar course, this sharing of experiences was seen to be particularly beneficial by the coachees: andreanoff the impact of a peer coaching programme on the academic performance of undergraduate students journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 13 my peer coach helped me to understand what was required from me for my course. (biomedical science student) this aspect of peer coaching may be particularly beneficial for those students who are from widening participation backgrounds who have not had the advantage of parental involvement in higher education: it was extremely important for me to have someone to go to other than my tutor to discuss issues i may have… as university was a completely new experience for me. (law student) this enlightenment and improved understanding of the requirements of their course and for success could be a key factor in the impact of the peer coaching. a link has been found to suggest that students with unrealistic expectations about the nature of teaching and learning in higher education are more likely to withdraw from their studies (charlton et al., 2006; lowe and cook, 2003; yorke, 2002). nicholson et al. (2013) suggest that students will perform better if they have realistic expectations of personal responsibility for independent study in higher education. the peer coaching has demonstrated to facilitate this type of knowledge acquisition. the quantitative findings student satisfaction paired sample t-tests were calculated to determine whether there was a statistical increase in perceived student satisfaction and confidence levels from preto postcoaching. there was found to be a statistically significant increase in student satisfaction with their academic progress from pre-coaching (m = 3.56, sd = 1.45) to post-coaching (m = 4.30, sd = 1.43), t (60) = 3.65, p <.0005 (two-tailed). the mean increase in satisfaction with academic progress was 0.74 with a 95% confidence interval ranging from 1.14 to 0.33. the eta squared statistic (.18) indicated a large effect size. there was also a statistically significant increase in the students’ perception of how they were managing their course requirements from pre-coaching (m = 3.98, sd = 1.41) to post-coaching (m = 4.72, sd = 1.37), t (59) = 4.24, p < .0005 (two tailed). the mean increase in perception of being able to manage their course requirements was 0.74 with a andreanoff the impact of a peer coaching programme on the academic performance of undergraduate students journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 14 95% confidence interval ranging from 1.08 to 0.39. the eta squared statistic (.24) also indicated a large effect size. there was also a statistically significant increase in the students’ satisfaction with student life from pre coaching (m = 4.24, sd = 1.48) to post-coaching (m = 4.77, sd = 1.30), t (61) = 3.07, p < .0005 (two-tailed). the mean increase in satisfaction with student life was .53 with a 95% confidence interval ranging from 0.88 to 0.19. the eta squared statistic (.13) indicated a moderate effect size. these results would indicate that the students perceived themselves to be performing better academically, were more satisfied with their academic progress, and with general student satisfaction from preto post-coaching. academic confidence the sander and sanders (2009) academic behaviour confidence (abc) scale was also administered both preand post-coaching. this enables self-efficacy and self-concept to be measured on academic confidence only. self-efficacy has been demonstrated to be instrumental in academic success as has been reported by pajares and schunk (2006), crozier (1997), and sander and sanders (2009). in particular within a higher education context where autonomy and independence of students are essential to success, it is said to affect academic performance. the full table of pre and post results can be found in appendix 1. from these calculations it was seen that there was an increase in the mean scores of all 24 aspects of self-efficacy from preto post-coaching. the eta squared statistic was calculated to determine the effect size of each item using cohen’s d (1998) guideline, where .01 is a small effect, .06 is a moderate effect, and .14 is a large effect. the least impact or movement was seen with ‘attending tutorials’, although the initial pre-coaching mean score for this question was relatively high at 4.2. as the aim of the coaching was academically focused, it is not surprising that ‘making the most of the opportunity of studying for a degree at university’ showed little change from preto post-coaching. the more social aspects of attending university were not stated to be a particular focus for the peer coaching intervention. there was, however, a large statistically significant increase from preto post-coaching items as shown in table 1.6 using cohen’s (1998) calculation. andreanoff the impact of a peer coaching programme on the academic performance of undergraduate students journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 15 table 1.6. showing items where a large significant increase from preto postcoaching was identified. question precoaching mean post coaching mean increase/ decrease study effectively on your own in independent/private study 3.35 3.92 +0.57 produce your best work under examination conditions 2.59 3.33 +0.74 respond to questions asked by lecturer in front of a full lecture theatre 2.57 3.12 +0.55 manage your workload to meet coursework deadlines 3.27 3.98 +0.71 give a presentation to a small group of fellow students 3.43 3.88 +0.45 attain good grades in your work 3.08 3.70 +0.62 ask lecturers questions about the material they are teaching, during a lecture 3.60 3.90 +0.30 prepare thoroughly for tutorials 3.10 3.53 +0.43 produce coursework at the required standard 3.15 3.64 +0.49 ask for help if you don’t understand 3.42 3.88 +0.46 plan appropriate revision schedule 2.79 3.41 +0.62 remain adequately motivated throughout 2.66 3.24 +0.58 produce your best work in coursework assignments 3.17 3.58 +0.41 the most notable areas of improvement as shown in table 1.6 were with: ‘producing your best work under examination conditions’, showing a mean increase of 0.74 (from 2.59 to 3.33) and ‘managing your workload to meet coursework deadlines’, showing a mean increase of 0.71 (from 3.27 to 3.98). increases were also found with ‘attain good grades in your work’, with a mean increase of 0.62, and ‘planning an appropriate revision schedule’ showing a mean increase of 0.62 andreanoff the impact of a peer coaching programme on the academic performance of undergraduate students journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 16 (from 2.79 to 3.41). this aspect was reported by coachees in the focus groups and survey questionnaires to be one of the most useful topics discussed. module grade data an independent t-test was conducted to compare the overall average module grades of the coached group (m = 57.24, sd = 8.8) and the non-coached, control group (m = 52.81, sd = 13.52); t (239) = 2.80, p = .006 (two-tailed). the eta squared statistic was calculated to be .03 which demonstrated a small but statistically significant effect size overall. table 1.7. showing mean grade comparisons between coached and control groups. group number mean std. deviation average grade overall coached 149 57.24 8.80 control 92 52.81 13.52 average grade semester a coached 146 56.54 9.34 control 92 52.16 14.14 average grade semester b coached 127 58.57 10.90 control 72 54.70 14.61 the independent t-test was repeated to compare the average semester a module grades of the coached group (m = 56.54, sd = 9.34) and the non-coached, control group (m = 52.17, sd = 14.14); t (236) = 2.63, p = .009 (two-tailed). the eta squared statistic was calculated to be .03 which again demonstrated a small but statistically significant effect size overall. the same independent t-test was repeated to compare the average semester b module grades of the coached group (m = 58.57, sd = 10.91) and the non-coached, control group (m = 54.71, sd = 14.62); t (197) = 2.63, p = .053 (two-tailed). the eta squared statistic was calculated to be .02 which again demonstrated a small but statistically significant effect size overall. andreanoff the impact of a peer coaching programme on the academic performance of undergraduate students journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 17 exploring the effect on students studying different courses having established a small effect size for the participants as a whole, calculations were then performed for students from each of the different academic schools. the small sample sizes for the academic schools did not allow for reliable findings other than for those students in life and medical science, law, and the business school. further calculations showed a significant difference in student module grades of those from the business school only. the independent t-test revealed a significant difference in the overall module grades of the coached group (m = 57.75, sd = 9.74) and the non-coached group (m = 51.38, sd = 12.66); t (72) = 2.44, p = .02 (two tailed). the eta squared statistic was calculated to be .08 which demonstrates a moderate effect size. it is worth noting that the peer coaching within the business school was extremely well established, the scheme being in its third year of delivery. many of the peer coaches were in their second year of participation in the programme and the scheme itself well-embedded within the department. this may be a contributing factor in the success of the programme for business school students in particular. year group independent samples t-tests were performed for students in all four year groups to compare the results of those who received coaching to those in the equivalent control group. the results for year 3 and 4 students can be ignored due to the low number of participants in these years. the tables in figure 6 show the different results for each of the year groups: figure 6. showing the difference in attainment for different year groups. year of study = 3rd year group n mean std. deviation std. error mean average grade coached 14 59.51 7.52 2.01 control 6 54.89 6.84 2.79 andreanoff the impact of a peer coaching programme on the academic performance of undergraduate students journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 18 year of study = 2nd year group n mean std. deviation std. error mean average grade coached 52 56.48 7.61 1.05 control 39 53.99 14.03 2.24 year of study = 1st year group n mean std. deviation std. error mean average grade coached 81 57.18 9.64 1.07 control 47 51.56 13.81 2.01 no significant increase in average grades was found between those in the 2nd and 3rd year of study and those students in each of the equivalent control groups. however, for those in the first year of study there was a significant increase in average grade for those who were coached (m = 57.18, sd = 9.64) and those in the control group (m = 51.56, sd = 13.81); t (126) = 2.70, p = .008, two tailed). the magnitude of the different means (mean difference = 5.62, 95% ci: 1.50 to 9.73) was small (eta squared = 0.05). from these calculations it could be concluded that the peer coaching was more effective in increasing grades for those students in their first year of study. whilst the increase in grades is statistically small, it is likely to impact more effectively in overall degree attainment and graduation, as the skills learned through peer coaching can be implemented in subsequent years of learning. attrition exploration was also made into the number of students who had withdrawn from their studies. in the control group it was found that by the end of the academic year, a total of 19 students had withdrawn, a total 20% of the students. in the coached group, 11 students had withdrawn from their studies by the same date, a total of 9.9%. whilst it is evident that there was less attrition in the coached group it should be remembered that the grades of the students in the control group were also lower overall. this may have been a contributory factor in the lower attrition rate as well as their being a self-selected group. andreanoff the impact of a peer coaching programme on the academic performance of undergraduate students journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 19 conclusion and discussion it can be seen from this evidence that the peer coaching has impacted significantly on academic performance, although it is more evident for some students than others. in particular it appears to have had more impact on those in the business school and for those in their first year. it is likely that the improvement in academic attainment seen in the first year students will continue into subsequent years as it has for other interventions (nicol, 2009; o’donovan et al., 2004). the qualitative evidence would suggest that those who were coached had increased academic confidence and were more enlightened about the requirements of their course. these are benefits that have been reported to be desirable as students enjoy their studies more (putwain and sander, 2014) and they become more likely to complete their course (robbins et al., 2004). although the qualitative results might initially appear very positive, it should be noted that the increases may have occurred naturally through the passage of time alone or even through other interventions and support received. bong (2001) suggests, however, that students with a strong sense of self-efficacy are willing to invest greater effort and persistence in completing challenging tasks. robbins et al. (2004) noted that the best psychosocial and study skills predictor of academic performance are academic selfefficacy and achievement motivation. therefore, the increased scores found in the selfefficacy of the coached students may have resulted in higher levels of performance. the qualitative evidence presented, however, suggests that the perception of improved academic performance of the coached students is greater than the actual impact found statistically. it has been shown that those in the coached group had a lower attrition rate than those in the control group. this has previously been reported as a benefit of mentoring and other peer support schemes (andrews and clark, 2011). whilst coaching has been demonstrated to be effective in increasing hope, cognitive hardiness and in decreasing self-reported symptoms of depression (green and rynsaardt, 2007), it has not so far been linked to improved retention in higher education. whilst this was not the intended focus for the peer coaching intervention, these additional benefits could all be considered important factors in enhancing the reputation of an hei, particularly when they occurred after a relatively short term intervention. this could be important for heis’ strategy as the financial andreanoff the impact of a peer coaching programme on the academic performance of undergraduate students journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 20 savings from preventing a student leaving prematurely in their first year of study is even greater than for those in subsequent years. if peer coaching can improve grades and academic behaviour confidence then it may also be a worthwhile consideration as a measure to address the attainment gap in black and minority ethnic (bme) students or to support those with identified lower retention rates, such as mature students or those from widening participation backgrounds. further study is suggested using a similar methodological approach, incorporating the use of a control group. it would be of value to incorporate other factors, such as prior academic attainment, socioeconomic backgrounds, to determine impact of peer coaching on academic attainment. a longitudinal study would also be beneficial to determine whether the impact on attainment in the first year students, which has been demonstrated in this study, continues into subsequent years. peer support has frequently been reported to be beneficial in the context of higher education. whilst there are many variations in the delivery of such schemes, it has been shown in both this study and previous work, such as capstick et al. (2004), that the oneto-one support of a peer is particularly well regarded. further research to establish where a one-to-one intervention, such as peer coaching, might be more appropriate for particular groups of students than group work could be useful in planning hei strategies. the case study institution is unique in having such sizeable peer support interventions and a dedicated team for delivery. this may limit the transferability of the findings to others heis that do not have such resources. the benefits may be reliant on the robustness of the peer coaching practice as has been seen for other peer support programmes (husband and jacobs, 2009; andrews and clark, 2011; thomas, 2012). consideration should also be given to the impact that seems to have occurred in the raised levels of student satisfaction in the students who received coaching. this increase was moderate and cannot be directly attributed to the peer coaching, although it is likely to have contributed to the improvement seen from preto post-coaching. as heis compete to attract students and to maintain or increase their position in the league tables, this outcome should not be ignored. the position of an hei in the national student survey league tables is likely to have a strong impact on the attraction of potential students, as andreanoff the impact of a peer coaching programme on the academic performance of undergraduate students journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 21 reported by james et al. (1999). if peer coaching can improve student satisfaction scores as well as increase academic confidence and attainment within a relatively short timescale, then it is an intervention worth consideration. appendix 1 preand post-coaching: sander and sanders (2009) academic behaviour confidence scores question (likert scale 1-5) confidence in your ability to: pre coaching mean score post coaching mean score increase/ decrease 1 study effectively on your own in independent/private study 3.35 3.92 + 0.57 2 produce your best work under examination conditions 2.59 3.33 + 0.74 3 respond to questions asked by lecturer in front of a full lecture theatre 2.57 3.12 + 0.55 4 manage your workload to meet coursework deadlines 3.27 3.98 + 0.71 5 give a presentation to a small group of fellow students 3.43 3.88 + 0.45 6 attend most taught sessions 4.12 4.33 + 0.21 7 attain good grades in your work 3.08 3.70 + 0.62 8 engage in profitable academic debate with your peers 3.08 3.40 + 0.32 9 ask lecturers questions about the material they are teaching, in a one-to-one setting 3.60 3.90 + 0.30 10 ask lecturers questions about the material they are teaching, during a lecture 2.83 3.33 + 0.50 11 understand the material outlined and discussed with you by learners 3.31 3.63 + 0.32 12 follow the themes and debates in lectures 3.33 3.55 + 0.22 13 prepare thoroughly for tutorials 3.10 3.53 + 0.43 14 read the recommended background material 2.86 3.24 + 0.38 15 produce coursework at the required standard 3.15 3.64 + 0.49 16 write in an appropriate academic style 3.12 3.47 + 0.35 17 ask for help if you don’t understand 3.42 3.88 + 0.46 andreanoff the impact of a peer coaching programme on the academic performance of undergraduate students journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 22 18 be on time for lectures 4.10 4.34 + 0.24 19 make the most of the opportunity of studying for a degree at university 3.51 3.73 + 0.22 20 pass assessments at the first attempt 3.49 3.68 +0.19 21 plan appropriate revision schedule 2.79 3.41 +0.62 22 remain adequately motivated throughout 2.66 3.24 + 0.58 23 produce your best work in coursework assignments 3.17 3.58 + 0.41 24 attend tutorials 4.20 4.32 + 0.12 references andrews, j. and clark, r. (2011) peer mentoring works; how peer mentoring enhances student success in higher education. birmingham: aston university. astin, a.w. (1984) ‘student involvement: a developmental theory for higher education’, journal of college student personnel, 25(4), pp. 297-308. bandura, a. (1993) ‘perceived self-efficacy in cognitive development and functioning’, educational psychologist, 28(2), pp. 117-148. bong, m. (2001) ‘role of self-efficacy and task-value in predicting college students' course performance and future enrolment intentions’, contemporary educational psychology, 26(4), pp. 553-570. capstick, s., fleming, h. and hurne, j. (2004) ‘implementing peer assisted learning in higher education: the experience of a new university and a model for the achievement of a mainstream programme’; peer assisted learning conference 2004. bournemouth university, bournemouth 21 january. chao, g.t. (1998) ‘invited reaction: challenging research in mentoring’, human resource development quarterly, 9(4), pp. 333-338. andreanoff the impact of a peer coaching programme on the academic performance of undergraduate students journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 23 charlton, j.p., barrow, c. and hornby-atkinson, a. (2006) ‘attempting to predict withdrawal from higher education using demographic, psychological and educational measures’, research in post compulsory education, 11(1), pp. 31-47. cohen, j.w. (1988) statistical power analysis for the behavioural sciences. hillsdale, nj: lawrence erlbaum associates. creswell, j. and plano clark, v. (2011) designing and conducting mixed methods research. thousand oaks, ca: sage publications. crozier, r. (1997) individual learners: personality differences in education. london: routledge. d'abate, c.p., eddy, e.r. and tannenbaum, s.i. (2003) ‘what’s in a name? a literaturebased approach to understanding mentoring, coaching, and other constructs that describe developmental interactions’, human resource development review, 2(4), pp. 360-384. donegan, m., ostrosky, m. and fowler, r.s. (2000) ‘peer coaching: teachers supporting teachers’, young exceptional children, volume 3, spring, pp. 9-16. fox, a. and stevenson, l. (2005) ‘exploring the effectiveness of peer mentoring of accounting and finance students in higher education’, accounting education: an international journal, 15(2), pp. 189-202. gibson, s. (2005) ‘whose best interests are served? the distinction between mentoring and support’, advances in developing human resources, 7(4), pp. 470-488. goodlad, s. (1998) ‘students as tutors and mentors’, in goodlad, s. (ed.) mentoring and tutoring by students. london: kogan page, pp. 1-17. green, l. s. & rynsaardt, j. (2007) evidence-based life coaching for senior high school students: building hardiness and hope. international coaching psychology review, 2, 24-32. andreanoff the impact of a peer coaching programme on the academic performance of undergraduate students journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 24 griffin, b. (1995) ‘student mentoring to facilitate university entry’, mentoring & tutoring for partnership in learning, 3(2), pp. 21-24. hill, r. and reddy, p. (2007) ‘undergraduate peer mentoring: an investigation into processes, activities and outcomes’, psychology learning and teaching, 6(2), pp. 98-103. husband, p. and jacobs, p. (2009) ‘peer mentoring in higher education: a review of the current literature and recommendations for implementation of mentoring schemes’, the plymouth student scientist, 2(1), pp. 228-241. ives, y. (2008) ‘what is ‘coaching’? an exploration of conflicting paradigms’, international journal of evidence based coaching and mentoring, 6(2), pp. 100-113. ives, y. and cox, e. (2012) goal focused coaching. new york: routledge. jacobi, m. (1991) ‘mentoring and undergraduate academic success: a literature review’, review of educational research, 61(4), pp. 505-532. james, d.l., baldwin, g. and mcinnis, c. (1999) which university? the factors influencing the choices of prospective undergraduates. melbourne: melbourne centre for the study of higher education. johnson, r.b. and onwuegbuzie, a.j. (2004) ‘mixed methods research: a research paradigm whose time has come’, educational researcher, 33(7), pp. 14-26. kuh, g.d., palmer, m. and kish, k. (2003) ‘the value of educationally purposeful out-ofclass experiences’, in skipper, t.l. and argo, r. (eds.) involvement in campus activities and the retention of first year college students. the first-year monograph series. columbia: university of south carolina, national resource center for the first year experience and students in transition, no. 36, pp. 19-34. lowe, h. and cooke, a. (2003) ‘mind the gap: are students prepared for higher education?’, journal of further and higher education, 27(1), pp. 53-57. andreanoff the impact of a peer coaching programme on the academic performance of undergraduate students journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 25 martirosyan, n., saxon, d.p. and wanjohi, r. (2014) ‘student satisfaction and academic performance in armenian higher education’, american international journal of contemporary research, 4(2), pp. 1-5. mckenzie, k. and schweitzer, r. (2001) ‘who succeeds at university? factors predicting academic performance in first year australian university students’, higher education research & development, 20(1), pp. 21-33. medd, w. (2012) coaching for research in uk higher education institutions: a review. in vitae (ed.) research councils uk. crac (careers research advisory centre). mosley, p. (1997) the use of control groups in impact assessment for microfinance. discussion papers in development economics. enterprise and cooperative development department social finance unit, university of reading. nicholson, l., putwain, d., connors, l. and hornby-atkinson, p. (2013) ‘the key to successful achievement as an undergraduate student: confidence and realistic expectations?’, studies in higher education, 38(2), pp. 285-298. nicol, d. (2009) quality enhancement themes: the first year experience', in education. linney direct: the quality assurance agency for higher education. o'donovan, b., price, m. and rust, c. (2004) ‘know what i mean? enhancing student understanding of assessment standards and criteria’, teaching in higher education, 9(3), pp. 325-335. pajares, f. and schunk, d. (2006) the development of academic self-efficacy. san diego: purdue university. parsloe, e. and wray, m. (2000) coaching and mentoring. london: kogan page. putwain, d. & sander, p. (2016) does the confidence of first-year undergraduate students change over time according to achievement goal profile? studies in higher education, 41, 381-398. andreanoff the impact of a peer coaching programme on the academic performance of undergraduate students journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 26 robbins, s.b., lauver, h.l., davis, d., langley, r. and carlstrom, a. (2004) ‘do psychosocial and study skill factors predict college outcomes? a meta-analysis’, psychological bulletin, 130(2), pp. 261-288. sanchez, r., bauer, t. and paronto, m. (2006) ‘peer-mentoring freshmen: implications for satisfaction, commitment and retention to graduation’, academy of management learning & education, 5(1), pp. 25-37. sander, p. and sanders, l. (2009) ‘measuring academic behavioural confidence: the abc scale revisited’, studies in higher education, 7(1), pp. 19-35. short, e. and baker, s. (2010) using peer coaching to enhance resilience. university of bedfordshire: centre for excellence in teaching and learning. stober, d. and grant a.m. (2006) ‘toward a contextual approach to coaching models’, in stober, d. and grant a.m. (eds.) evidence-based coaching handbook. new york: wiley, pp. 17-50. thomas, l. (2012) what works? student retention and success. london: paul hamlyn foundation and higher education funding council for england. tinto, v. (1993) leaving college: rethinking the causes and cures of student attrition, chicago, university of chicago press. torres, j.b. and solberg, v.s. (2001) ‘role of self-efficacy, stress, social integration and family support in latino college student persistence and health’, journal of vocational behaviour, 59(1), pp. 53-63. ward, e., thomas, e. and disch, w. (2010) ‘goal attainment, retention and peer mentoring’, academic exchange quarterly, 14(2), pp. 170-176. whitmore, j. (2002) coaching for performance. london: nicholas brealey publishing. yorke, m. (2002) ‘academic failure: a retrospective view from non-completing students’, in peelo, m. and wareham, t. (eds.) failing students in higher education. buckingham: open university press, pp. 29-44. andreanoff the impact of a peer coaching programme on the academic performance of undergraduate students journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 27 zajacova, a., lynch, s.m. and espenshade, t.j. (2005) ‘self-efficacy, stress and academic success in college’, research in higher education, 46(6), pp. 677-706. author details dr jill andreanoff is an independent researcher, consultant and author of a book on exemplary practice coaching and mentoring in higher education. she currently works in an employability consultancy capacity for the university of essex, uk, for both the strategic planning and change section and within their employability and careers centre. the impact of a peer coaching programme on the academic performance of undergraduate students: a mixed methods study abstract background methodology the qualitative findings student perception data theme 1 – academic improvement theme 2 – increased confidence and motivation theme 3 – examples of the value of one-to-one support theme 4 – practical and emotional support the quantitative findings student satisfaction academic confidence module grade data exploring the effect on students studying different courses year group attrition conclusion and discussion appendix 1 preand post-coaching: sander and sanders (2009) academic behaviour confidence scores references author details literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 12: november 2017 engaging business: using practice-based experiential learning approaches to enrich mba programmes justin o’brien royal holloway, university of london, uk donna brown royal holloway, university of london, uk abstract this practice-oriented paper seeks to identify business engagement as a form of experiential learning and to share insights of an approach which was developed to enhance reflective practitioner opportunities for mba students. the authors have significant experience in partnering, designing and delivering a variety of business engagement activities undertaken with postgraduate management students. this is collated as a reflexive review of attempts, across 20 iterations with a diverse range of partner organisations, to introduce and expand on elements of experiential learning within the authors’ institution. the paper’s main contribution is the identification of opportunities and challenges involved in implementing and managing engagement with business to enrich the experience of master in business administration (mba) students. firstly, a summary of the rationale for introducing different iterations of the business engagement approach is given. then the paper seeks to identify a variety of potential hurdles and solutions associated with harnessing business engagement as a form of practical experiential learning, which are designed to illustrate the practicalities of implementing the approach for school, college and university professionals. findings highlight implementation insights and the learning achieved by staff, students and business partners. keywords: business engagement; experiential learning; management education. o’brien and brown engaging business journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 2 ‘the only source of knowledge is experience’ (einstein) introduction whilst the opening quote may seem an extreme position, experiential learning approaches are particularly powerful; bevan and kipka (2012) posit that they can be effectively utilised in a wide range of management education fields. whilst the rationale for utilising ‘learning by doing’ approaches appears robust and widely supported (fenwick, 2003; mccarthy, 2010; beard, 2010; mughal and zafar, 2011), evidence of uk university experiential learning in practice was found to be sparse (for examples see beard and wilson, 2005; pedler, 2011). using a qualitative approach to evaluation, this paper seeks to identify a variety of benefits and potential hurdles in maximising engagement with external organisations to enhance master in business administration (mba) students’ teaching and learning. building on kolb’s (1984) experiential learning theory, the paper examines participant reflections from twenty different business engagement activities, involving ten diverse organisations. stakeholder insights were gleaned from student, teacher and business partner feedback during a five year period of planning, delivering and following up phases of engagement. using a heuristic approach, supported by reflection on professional practice, we seek to encourage further experimentation with business engagement. perhaps the key contribution offered by this paper is to further motivate wider innovation with forms of experiential learning in practice. this paper seeks not to reiterate and reinforce the extensive literature on kolb’s experiential learning (see references below), but rather to offer colleagues practical insights into how they might embed business engagement into their own teaching practice. the paper starts by briefly discussing the original concept of experiential learning (kolb, 1984) and its impact. one distinct form of experiential learning, business engagement, was introduced at this institution, with iterations integrated in to the mba programme to allow postgraduate students, who already had considerable employment experience, to assume greater control of the learning process. the qualitative approach to evaluation of these iterations is outlined in the methodology section. there were a number of practical challenges faced in successfully facilitating a business engagement approach; considered first are a number of internal issues, followed by those experienced at the external interface. we conclude the paper with practical recommendations for course design. o’brien and brown engaging business journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 3 considering experiential learning in 2005, kolb and kolb reviewed the six original facets of experiential learning identified by kolb (1984). the initial concept was built on six propositions; firstly, that learning should be a continuous process, based on ongoing feedback, rather than something measured at an end point. it was argued that ‘all learning is relearning’, which implies that students with work experience are at an advantage when applying academic concepts and models to business problems and could be expected to be more capable of the reflection needed to reconcile conflicting information (kolb and kolb, 2005, p.194). kolb argued learning will involve emotional and perceptual involvement rather than a purely intellectual response, (kolb, 1984; kolb and kolb, 2008). and finally, and of greatest relevance here, were the arguments that learning involves students in the co-creation of knowledge as they integrate and reconcile new and existing theory and experience. whilst the attention of kolb and kolb (2005) subsequently shifted to the interaction of the transformation and absorption of experience, this paper is concerned with the operationalisation of the final two facets of kolb’s 1984 concept of experiential learning. how can engagement with external partners, organisations and businesses, be deployed to permit students to ‘birth’ new perspectives? consideration has been given to a number of related approaches that appear to derive from or are similar to kolb’s (1984) experiential learning theory and how and why these approaches might manifest themselves as part of an advanced learning programme. valkanos and fragoulis (2007) explain that experiential learning can be expressed in simple terms as a form of ‘learning by doing’, which seems to miss the importance of reflection and the conscious evaluation of the conflict between theory and real-world experience. wilson and beard (2003) posit that due to the centrality of experience in all learning, that learning and experience essentially mean the same thing, and are therefore a tautology. however, they conceptualise a learning-experience continuum typology with one extreme being that of pure knowledge dissemination, that might be typified as rote learning and the other purely reliant on learning by doing. experiential learning, according to wilson and beard (2003) offers a philosophical underpinning, an integrating framework if you will, which can help unify many different theories and offer a more practical orientation. hodge et al. (2011, p.180), from their research using 230 participants across three australian universities, argue that ‘practice o’brien and brown engaging business journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 4 based learning exchanges clearly provide a powerful and highly valued learning experience for students’. they found that students ‘can experience transformative and emotional elucidations of learning’, leading to assumption, changing ways of thinking and altering students’ world views (hodge et al., p.167). hickcox (2002) identifies that educators can use experiential learning programmes, courses and tasks to engineer innovative interactions for both faculty and students. valkanos et al. (2007) suggest that participative techniques integrated with experience can facilitate behavioural, attitudinal, skill and knowledge development linked to the workplace and in social contexts. yet hodge et al. (2011) found that extant experiential learning models underestimated the extent of multidirectional learning flows and co-learning. before moving on to consider the university graduate skills expectation gap that may exist between employers and educators, a number of key terms associated with experiential learning theory are briefly considered, namely; situated, authentic and action learning, reflective practice, and continuing and lifelong learning. lave and wenger (1991) believe that learning is embedded in activity, context and culture and use the terminology ‘situated’ to encompass this. they believe that learning needs to be presented in an authentic context. xu et al. (2012) explain authentic learning as a form of research skill enhancement achieved through simply exposing students to practical business contexts using guest speakers and field visits. action learning, as defined by zuber-skerritt (2002), would seem to represent a ruminative group based approach to kolb’s experiential learning concept and describe it as a reflective learning technique that utilises group discussion, discovery, experiment and error stepped iterations. wilson and beard (2003) argue that action learning and reflective practice are common variations of the symbiosis of practice and theory. building on a somewhat clichéd notion that change is a defining factor of modern life, is the idea that successful individuals need to, in a continual self-directed process, engage themselves in continuing and lifelong learning. yang states ‘even if educational institutions evolve and ensure newly minted workers are ready for employment, workers must continue learning throughout their lives to stay relevant’ (2013, p.1). it would appear that learning how to learn is the crucial point here. o’brien and brown engaging business journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 5 macgregor and semler (2012) highlight that movement away from purely cognitive intellectual development has been underway for decades and that business education has already integrated a number of contextual learning approaches, but significantly they suggest that management education needs to go further than merely using the 1930’s originating case method. the authors argue cogently in favour of engaging management students across a variety of intertwining levels that comprise a convergence of intellectual, behavioural, social and physiological elements to assist achieving the change and reflection needed. the authors believe that many educators implicitly assume that a blend of traditional knowledge transfer techniques are enhanced and not replaced by the experiential. notable by its absence in the literature is any consideration of the appropriate allocation of the balance of learning time across a term or semester, the optimal orchestration, for example longitudinal or capstone, nor the degree to which such techniques might be embedded and interconnected within the curriculum journey. this absence is perhaps further evidence of a lack of sufficient engagement and systemic experience in this important field. kolb and kolb (2005) also highlight certain areas where changes to institutional behaviours (across faculty, student and curriculum development) will enhance experiential learning; and evaluation of the innovations is advocated. whilst accepted as good practice in principle, it is the authors’ contention, supported by macgregor and semler (2012), that a full range of experiential learning techniques have not been universally adopted in university management education. therefore an examination of the use of in-business and with-business exchanges, to develop students’ learning ability to integrate and reconcile new and existing theory and experience, and thus co-create knowledge, is provided below. the case for using business engagement as an experiential learning approach there appears to be a mismatch between what employers are looking for in graduates and the qualities developed in universities (vasagar, 2011). whilst some academics have discussed and advocated the concept of experiential learning to help to prepare students for employment, uk commission for employment and skills (2016, p.3) stated ‘a growing o’brien and brown engaging business journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 6 number of jobs are being left unfilled because companies can’t find the right people with the right skills’. similarly, yang (2013, p.1) cites an important dis-connect between business and us university perceptions of graduate workplace preparedness: ‘employers report frustration at not finding skilled workers. jobs wait to be filled – current job seekers just lack the right skills’. indeed, kumaraswamy and chitale (2012) argue that in a context of rapid change, fulfilling industry’s expectations requires academic institutions to adopt innovative learning systems. griffiths (2007) notes a historic, close, but uneasy relationship between professions and higher education institutes. giffiths’ bi-modal environment model powerfully illustrates the segregated, discipline-based approach to management used in many universities, which they believe is at variance to the complex and highly interconnected real world. according to yang (2013) the root of the problem is that traditional universities were not designed for a dynamic environment where skill depreciation is rapid, so they are unable to keep pace with ever changing industry requirements. perhaps the focus on academics’ publishable research and developing new researchers is too strongly embedded. heron (1999) indicates that conventional cognitive learning approaches attach insufficient focus to whole person learning and posits that sense-making from in-person experience is instrumental in learning and change. more recently, marzo-navarro et al.’s (2009) study of the graduate skills gap corroborates the need for improved mastery of generic competencies that include practical training, adaptability, oral communication, workplace integration, and the application of practical knowledge. they identified a sparse academic literature addressing solutions to the void between a perceived gap between business needs and university educated graduate skill sets. tyran and garcia (2005) identify the constant challenge for management educators to find ways for students to link skill acquisition to career success. they note that perhaps one of the important inhibitors is the laborious planning required to ensure that experiential learning activities are effective and useful. an ashridge-eabis study found that 70 per cent of senior executives agreed that experiential learning was an important element in developing crucial business changing mind sets and skills, whilst only 30 per cent felt the same about lecture-based learning (gitsham and lenssen, 2009). o’brien and brown engaging business journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 7 whilst it might be argued that employers should shoulder more responsibility, rather than just waiting for work-ready graduates to drop off the education conveyor belt, tholen (2014, p.1) counters, stating that ‘a vast and rapidly growing body of literature on employability has emerged in the last 15 years across both the academic and popular management literature’. snyder (2003) identified industry complaints about a lack of critical thinking and creative skills from students employed in entry-level managerial roles. few companies integrate experiential learning for staff into their leadership development programmes as seriously as ibm and hsbc, according to gitsham (2012, p.298), who reflects ‘the learning programmes had a powerful impact and that a range of outcomes was achieved. the experiential, immersive experience was a fundamental factor in the achievement of these outcomes, from the perspective of participants’. the sample size for semi-structured interviews was small, but in tracking participants for up to three years following their immersion, gitsham (2012) was able to explore the long term benefits and the importance of wider organisational receptiveness in maximising the value to the business. macgregor and semler (2012) suggest that management education needs to go further than merely using the 1930’s originating case method. they argue the importance of engaging management students across a variety of intertwining levels that comprise a convergence of intellectual, behavioural, social and physiological elements to assist achieving the change and reflection needed. conversely, hodge et al. (2011) challenge a popular perception of academics in isolated, ivory towers using traditional didactic techniques, discovering that business hosts, students and academics all teach and learn in experiential learning scenarios. activity, they claim, that sees academics play a crucial role in real world learning. they believe that although learning in formal academic settings has changed significantly in recent decades, changes to what constitutes learning, notably in respect to experience-led and situated learning models, is challenging traditional universities’ provision of purely academic programmes (hodge et al., 2011). gitsham (2012) notes the growing recognition for a mind-set change and the development of wider skill sets, recommending the powerful role that experiential learning should have here. a number of campus-based activities would include experiential learning even when class room based, for example; case study, role play presentations and context based discussions. interestingly, tyran and garcia (2005) formally identify activities such as; internships, business simulations, off-campus projects, mentoring and guest speakers in o’brien and brown engaging business journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 8 their consideration of experiential learning approaches. additionally, hickcox (2002) also mentions consulting, off-campus visits and discussions, which supports the idea that experimental learning approaches can use a blend of onand off-campus delivery styles. there is perhaps an opportunity for universities to ensure a greater understanding, stakeholder engagement if you will, of the education value they provide to students, alumni and employers (gitsham, 2012). it appears evident from the academic literature that a strong case for further change is understood. some may posit that a university education, underpinned by the rigour of empirical research, is different and superior to work-based training approaches popular in business. systemic resistance here may be a material factor inhibiting change and the differing expectations may be a suitable topic for further research. the theoretical validity of experiential pedagogic approaches would seem to be accepted by many, with numerous examples of how different, rich learning environments can be engendered. however, a number of significant and valid inhibiting hurdles have also been identified in the primary research outlined below and perhaps others exist that are yet to raise their heads in publication. whilst the cognitive case appears to be well made, it seems that widespread evidence supporting the actual behavioural and structural changes required to operationalise the gap closure are sparse. implementing experiential learning with business partners why was experiential learning identified to address student engagement? the catalyst for exploring innovations in business engagement was dwindling attendance for the weekly management school industry guest lecture series, primarily provided for the mba programme. the observed student behaviour was paradoxically juxtaposed by attitudinal feedback requesting more opportunities to interface with business professionals. the 2010 mba programme review survey (36 responses from a five cohort population of 150 current students and alumni) identified a number of very clear wants; 42% of respondents were keen to see more guest speakers; 61% identified a desire to engage in more practical activities; and 75% wanted to visit businesses in person. a different approach to traditional industry guest lectures was needed. o’brien and brown engaging business journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 9 negotiating and engaging with business partners in seeking to develop and grow innovative business-university relationships, we discovered, through several difficult early discussions with potential industry partners, that the terminology of ‘experiential learning’ was problematic. even the more common ‘action learning set’ phraseology resulted either in an over simplification to ‘learning by doing’ or an uncomfortable explanation of kolb’s (1984) learning cycle that was greeted with glazed eyes. a more straightforward yet accurate explanation was needed that framed the opportunity as an easily orchestrated, low cost, immersive and meaningful encounter that ideally offered some value back to the partner organisation. lebeau and bennion (2014) noted the use of community engagement and public engagement. by packaging the concept as business engagement we sought to emphasise active-not-passive and unpaid reciprocity as key elements. the crucial and perhaps subtle difference in the sales pitch was requesting business professionals not merely to contribute unilaterally, but to identify potential benefits for everyone as part of an equitable tripartite cashless exchange. this idea appears to accord with hodge et al. (2011) who recognise the need for universities to facilitate and structure exchanges, build relationships and engender co-participation. examples of co-operative or reciprocal academic and industry partnerships the authors experimented with include: industry guest lectures to coaching public speaking; framing a student consulting project as a dissertation; a half day in-company workshop to think out loud about current business problems; or engendering team work by creating and running a live business consultancy case study. unexpected benefits were observed amongst business participants including; positive feelings resulting from a return to a campus environment, gratification from peer-like engagements with faculty, the résumé kudos of being invited to be a university guest lecturer, and an altruistic glow from giving back to a local university. others were perhaps more hard headed and instrumentalist in gleaning benefits from collaborations and using these as opportunities to identify future talent for their business and low cost consultancy. engaging academic staff – challenges and model developed initially a number of faculty staff indicated a lack of interest in off-campus visits and a dearth of external contacts drawn on to offer guest lectures. clear student feedback and unequivocal recommendations from the school’s mba accrediting body amba were used o’brien and brown engaging business journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 10 as powerful justifications to negotiate the integration of field visits, which included a business focused international study week, and a stronger emphasis on the case teaching method during the curriculum redesign. the lead author, as mba director, encouraged staff by making introductions to potential new business partners and by emphasising that funding was always available to support new engagement activity. gradually the new approaches were adopted by most of the teaching teams. many also reported deriving greater pleasure from interacting with and directing the students following the introduction of the innovations, in line with observation of dewey (1916, cited kolb and kolb, 2005) that ‘chalk and talk’ approaches demoralise faculty as well as students. in addition to helping design and deliver the business collaborations, faculty were found to play an important role in engendering student reflexivity during and following business engagements, connecting experiential learning episodes back into relevant areas of the curriculum. thus having explored the evolution and development of the concept, by way of summary, business engagement is defined for the purposes of this pedagogic paper as the trilateral knowledge exchange model that organisations (considered to include commercial, public sector and third stream not-for-profits), groups of students and lecturers apply across a range of business contextualised learning activities. table 1 presents summaries of the engagement activities introduced in the school of management to boost the students’ experiential learning. o’brien and brown engaging business journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 11 table 1. business engagement innovations to boost distance learning (dl) and on-campus (oc) mba experiential learning. year brewing multinational theme park telcoms multinational chemical coatings engineering multinational theatre / drama engagement craft brewery 2010 three iterations of live consultancy case studies (csr and digital marketing) with dl cohorts during summer school residential 2011 offer plenary workshop to dl cohort guest lectures to oc oc guest lecture used as staff development presentation coaching exercise 2012 offer formative consultancy to oc cohorts (park visit, senior management briefing and group consultancy findings presentation) offer dl visit to iconic hq followed by conference event deliver & assess oc student performance on core course experimental london theatre experiences connected to oc open space drama workshops embedded into curriculum 2013 two live consultancy case studies with dl summer school residential factory tours with engagement with founding directors dl & oc 2014 company visit including ceo interaction for oc 2015 o’brien and brown engaging business journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 12 methodological approach the grounded case study research approach used data drawn from twenty different faculty organised, student-business interactions at a mid-sized english university. collaborations with ten different global and national organisations took place over a five-year period, involving a range of small, medium and large, commercial and not-for-profit enterprises. the students had a minimum of three years post-graduate work experience with highly diverse industry, function and cultural backgrounds, studying on full-time and distance learning mba international management programmes. the primary research data was collated from oral and e-mail based post-event unstructured free comment feedback from participating students, business partners and colleagues by the lead author who orchestrated and participated in all of the business engagement activities. participants were invited to comment on what went well, what could be improved and to reflect on their learning. clearly respondents were identifiable in their e-mail and conversational exchanges, but all sources have been anonymised when presented here. this qualitative and non-generalisable research methodology has been certified through the school of management ethics committee approval process. findings and recommendations the findings are presented in four parts, initially considering insights gleaned from managing business engagement projects, and this is followed with discussion of academic, student and business partner learning. managing the project and learning from this successful implementation of business engagement was found to require some important structural and behavioural changes. aside from developing the established curriculum and ring-fencing the required resourcing, a number of important internal cultural inhibitors were identified, including: costs and inertia; logistical complexity; the need for cashless exchanges; and the ethics of immaterial labour. o’brien and brown engaging business journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 13 costs and inertia travel time and costs militate against engaging in relationships with distant organisations; thus a strategy of looking for local partnering opportunities was found to be more effective. the first business engagement saw a half-day theme park visit take place early in the first term during the closed season, assuring free entrance and timed to sit well away from assignment deadline pressure (see column two of table 1). students were given a behind the scenes tour by a group of experienced senior park managers, who shared insights into how their business operated. this was followed by a visit to the thrills workshop, a large space used for educational visits and decorated with a range of props, posters and models, where the business questions were put across following a multi-media company presentation. close geographic proximity helped make a follow-up on campus interaction feasible, after an assignment peak. this allowed student groups to present back their recommended approaches to questions set by the visiting company managers. additionally students were also encouraged to visit the park in operation at their own expense, which the majority did. students were able to gauge their own performance based on observing the company management’s body language, questioning approach and evaluative oral feedback of their own and peers’ presentations. particularly effective groups were sometimes invited to represent their ideas to a senior management board. a few ideas were taken forwards and implemented. most students commented that these encounters were particularly motivating. overall, it was found that tourism and hospitality venues have scalable facilities that can offer heavily discounted prices for off-peak educational groups and were happy to tailor the experience to address required learning outcomes. subsequent highly successful engagements have included partnerships with a local brewery and theatre. to ease bureaucratic inertia, trialling without the additional pressure of adhering to formal assessment constraints and regulations was a lower risk, pragmatic approach. however, sometimes un-weighted programme elements were seen by students as optional or worthy only of limited engagement. modest teaching-innovation funding to cover coach transportation and any off-peak entrance fee was found to greatly simplify planning arrangements. logistics of time and space finding suitable engagement windows outside assignment deadlines, in a congested teaching timetable, required some tenacity. the development of additional formative, nonassessed, interactions was not straight forward and subsequently led to the embedding of o’brien and brown engaging business journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 14 business-engagement activity into timetabled sessions. a typical mba cohort of around 30 is often considered too big for most companies to host; they did not have rooms of that size and using smaller sub-groups required extensive logistical co-ordination that was often considered just too difficult. the use of micro and self-directed approaches was found to yield some surprisingly positive results, with cold-calling and networking approaches used by proactive student groups to self-select a suitable business to engage with. one enthusiastic group challenged with assessing one of london’s tourist attractions elected to visit a public house adjacent to campus and then were surprisingly invited to a local craft brewery for a private tour, driven there by the landlord. illustrating clearly a lesson about luck, relationships and seizing every opportunity. cashless exchanges: do not ask for money it was found that income generating opportunities for sponsored students, gifted chairs and contributions to library funds were unattractive. one partner explained that ‘i ask my ceo to allow me merely to spend time here’ and another elucidated, ‘there would have to be a bottom line benefit for me to be able to invest any of my budget. i just don’t see that justification’. successful exchanges were centred on the intrinsic value of knowledge transfer and looking to ensure an equitable exchange. however, requests for limited time commitments, manifested as both personal and corporate social responsibility, were more easily forthcoming than expected, and often offered proactively once the business engagement concept, based on trilateral knowledge exchange and experiential learning, had been explained. ethics of immaterial labour it is important to consider the ethics of inviting students to offer their labour immaterially, particularly when the engagement offers a more structured consulting context. the use of some non-assessed course elements allowed students to opt out, although very few did, and it was clear that students valued this form of experiential learning so highly that they were not unduly concerned about working without payment. the activity was perceived as enrichment rather than exploitation. however, it was crucial to ensure an appropriate balance was achieved, with the centrality of student-learning a prime consideration. engagement with notfor-profit organisations, which often rely on volunteer labour with a clear community minded purpose, offered a more ethically optimal collaboration. o’brien and brown engaging business journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 15 what academics learned /gained size matters: impact asymmetry whilst some faculty enjoyed some kudos from interactions with global brand names, big company engagements were often complex and it was difficult to get under the skin of tacit organisational considerations. working with small and medium sized enterprises (sme), students were often able to engage with senior management or even the leadership team directly. this resulted in higher levels of commitment and easier co-operation across the organisation. students working with a sme were often able to understand the whole business more quickly and have a greater chance of making meaningful, implementable recommendations. networking terror adoption of business engagement approaches requires some risk taking, even where a supportive culture and sufficient resources are available. a rather surprising finding was to discover that some experienced academics lacked a material external business network and/or felt they lacked the necessary skills to engage in networking activity, illustrated powerfully by this earnest statement ‘my worst fear would be to walk into a room of strangers and be expected to talk to them’. partnered collaborations, pairing the inexperienced with more experienced staff, and formal training activities were used to mitigate here. building trust and commitment bastow et al. (2014) suggest the challenge for management research ‘impact’ is a function of credibility and divergent time spans. we soon learnt to start small and not expect too much, too quickly. hodge et al. (2011) identified that not every practice-based learning exchange goes to plan, so we grasped that we needed to work with rather vague and ambiguous objectives, what might be referred to as an emergent strategic approach. an important element of the ‘trust development phase’ was ensuring the establishment of realistic expectations pertaining to the level of problem solving that might be reasonably garnered from the students. rather surprisingly business partners were considerably less guarded and more open than initially expected, ‘i had assumed that company confidentiality would be a huge stumbling block. we never used our own confidentially agreement, and actually this was rarely an issue. in contrast to written information, in person exchanges were often detailed o’brien and brown engaging business journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 16 and candid and this level of trust and openness was something staff and students appreciated greatly’. set expectations low and be flexible this was unlikely to be at the level or depth of professional consultancy. however, host organisation activities such as problematising, requiring useful introspection and opening up for external exchanges of ideas, were seen as key outcomes. given very limited time to put across what were often complex issues, it was illuminating to note that business partners valued engaging in the process ahead of garnering specific recommendations. currency and impact although not everyone possesses the complex skill set to juggle student-client expectations to successfully deliver a live consultancy, participating teaching staff found their subject currency and credibility was enhanced, with some students noting that academic staff benefitted by becoming ‘more aware about business operations’. modest impact related scholarship was observed in the form of a number of published teaching case studies, business journalism and paid individual consultancy. what students learned /gained theory into practice: the importance of being real and live students highlighted that the most significant benefit of business engagement was the opportunity to put theory into practice and obtain formative and summative feedback on their ideas from real business practitioners. one mba candidate stated ‘it was an excellent opportunity to practise our presentation skills, building from our personal development lectures. the presence of industry senior management listening to our ideas was very motivational’ (o’brien, 2012a). whilst another said ‘this exercise was a brilliant opportunity to put some of the theories we learnt in the mba into practice. ansoff's matrix, bcg boxes, swot & pest analysis, 5 forces model, revenue management, corporate social responsibility… we had it all in our tool box and we did not shy away’ (o’brien, 2012b). a faculty observation noted that watching students prepare for their final presentations often brought on an electric-like buzz, a heady blend of nerves and excitement. receiving o’brien and brown engaging business journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 17 immediate, direct feedback via both the spoken word and body language from highly credible business professionals considering current, important business challenges was particularly highly prized. a supportive mba reflection stated ‘i enjoyed the fact-gathering sessions and team brainstorming meetings where we had heated debates about what was potentially relevant to offer as solutions and what was not. in the end, the possibility of making a difference drove us. this was not just an academic exercise as our work and proposed solutions could be implemented by the businesses’. management consultancy insight others appreciated the insight the exercises gave them on management consultancy. ‘we had to prepare and brainstorm ideas on how to resolve complex business challenges and this was no mean feat, as in some cases we lacked the expertise on their specific industries’. in working with a small company that did not know what they needed or wanted, students learnt that ‘the basics are most valuable’. ‘the mid-size project like [company name] was a business performance challenge that taught respect for the client and professionalism while managing circumstances that you might not like’. during ‘the international strategy consultancy… [it] was the methodology challenge that tested our wits and humbled us [we learnt to focus on] what was best for the client's interest and not what we believed was the best idea’. what business partners learned /gained initially several companies strongly questioned the motivation of their staff wishing to undertake university-based activities, struggling to appreciate the business benefits. but, a number of diverse forms of organisational value to help justify the time and modest expenses have been identified, most notably; the opportunity to investigate at the cost of ‘only’ staff time (no consultancy fees) a non-critical business problem, to facilitate a conversation that engenders knowledge transfer and staff development and catalysing some real business changes. problem formulation: investigating non-critical business problems one of the more surprising insights from this research was the internal value to an organisation that happened before the engagement took place, in framing and being able to o’brien and brown engaging business journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 18 communicate the business problem clearly to outsiders. this is evidenced in the following direct quotes from business partners: the engagement… created a focus for the business team to think about their current business transformation problem in a structured analytical way. [our] managers had to identify a present challenge to the business and quantify the problem. root cause analysis was required from involved managers to determine clearest layout of the problem. this was often important, as these problems had often not been explored fully because of internal pressures. additionally business participant leaders highlighted the value of having the time to look at problems that were neither trivial nor business critical: the importance here was that the problems used were often issues that were too large for quick fixes but not overtly damaging enough to justify resource to change the consultancy group has the time to consider the problem fully which a business often does not. and finally: accessing the latest business school approaches and thinking [using a] free of charge methodology meant we were able to examine areas where we wouldn't have thought of engaging outside consultants [which we found] surprisingly beneficial. facilitating conversation: enabling knowledge transfer and staff development one business partner stated ‘we greatly valued the experience. the chance to interact with bright, young minds was genuinely useful and shining a spotlight on aspects of our business has identified a number of opportunities’ (o’brien, 2012c). another stated ‘it allowed everyone involved to reflect, in an open and objective and non-judgemental atmosphere, on what was happening within the business’. the engagement ‘offered new perspective over problems and o’brien and brown engaging business journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 19 open debate over solutions generated by university groups’. several partners highlighted the benefit from their own intra-organisational dialogues. because student groups had very diverse cultural and professional backgrounds and lacked tacit internal business knowledge, slow, often iterative, conversations were needed, which ‘resulted in real self-questioning’ generating ‘some surprising and valuable insights’ and ‘created conversations within the [company name] through different staff levels that wouldn't have taken place without the stimulus’. all partners valued the conversational knowledge exchange but one partner primarily used a week long case study interaction on campus as an explicit team building and staff development vehicle which they found ‘confidence boosting and insightful,… [which demonstrated] the value of formal mba training’. catalysing real business changes whilst the conversation and idea exchange was the most highly valued benefit perceived, some partners were also able to point to their university interaction as catalyzing real business change. ‘we saw one concise and developed [student] solution which has resulted in gradual adoption of its key principles by the business… the initial [student] groundwork was key to changes in business strategy’. another evidenced alternative approaches that ‘were taken back and used in our organisation’. lastly, drawing on the idiom which suggests remarkable insight can come ‘out of the mouths of babes’, a student during a consultancy interaction in front of the company’s whole board, which at the time was made up of middle aged male engineers, asked a seemingly innocuous question ‘why are there no females on the board and why no marketing director?’. one innocent question, but both ideas were acted upon within three months. conclusion the academic literature suggests that students can benefit from a range of contextual learning experiences, but evidence of adoption of this powerful approach is meagre. this paper’s key contribution is proposing the idea of business engagement, a trilateral knowledge o’brien and brown engaging business journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 20 exchange between students, business and faculty, that emphasises active-not-passive and unpaid reciprocity. learning in a novel and meaningful commercial context can be highly motivational, which is evidenced in the participant reflections. mba students valued the opportunity to put their theoretical knowledge into practice, working on live, real business problems and gaining insight into management consultancy. business partners benefitted by being challenged to formulate and communicate business problems, garnering value from their own intra-organisation conversations, as well as the external perspectives provided by freshly minted mba students. the knowledge transfer exchange was also used as a talent recruitment opportunity and for staff and team development. there was also some modest evidence of interactions catalysing some real business change, validation of meaningful impact. implicitly this paper underscores the valuable currency faculty can gain from the external engagement required to facilitate business engagement. however, a number of important challenges for staff considering innovating their pedagogic practice have been highlighted. internal organisational constraints identified include cultural inertia, access to financial resources, and logistical limitations. resilient staff need to be able to harness their business networking capability, skilfully build trust and commitment with new partners, and carefully manage expectations from often cashless exchanges. the reflections on practice presented above aim to inspire and enable management educators, and the authors recommend that they look to expand their use of business engagement more widely across their curricula. acknowledgements the authors would like to acknowledge support offered by the journal editor and the willingness and enthusiasm demonstrated by the various colleagues, students and business partners who participated in the numerous business engagements that provided the context for this paper, often beyond the call of duty. o’brien and brown engaging business journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 21 references bastow, s., dunleavy, p. and tinkler, j. (2014) the impact of the social sciences: how academics and their research make a difference. london: sage. beard, c. (2010) the experiential learning toolkit: blending practice with concepts. london: kogan page ltd. beard, c. and wilson, j. (2005) experiential learning: a best practice handbook for educators and trainers. bodmin: mpg books. bevan, d. and kipka, c. (2012) ‘experiential learning and management education’, journal of management development, 31(3), pp. 193-197. fenwick, t. (2003) learning through experience: troubling orthodoxies and intersecting questions. florida: krieger. gitsham, m. (2012) ‘experiential learning for leadership and sustainability at ibm and hsbc’, journal of management development, 31(3), pp. 298-307. gitsham, m. and lenssen, g. (2009) developing the global leader of tomorrow. berkhamsted: ashridge and eabis for the un prme. griffiths, r. (2007) ‘knowledge production and the research-teaching nexus: the case of the built environment disciplines’, studies in higher education, 29(6), pp. 709-726 [online]. available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0307507042000287212 (accessed: 10 oct 2017). heron, j. (1999) the complete facilitator's handbook. london: kogan page publishers. hickcox, l. (2002) ‘personalizing teaching through experiential learning’, college teaching, 20(4), pp. 123-128. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=redirecturl&_method=externobjlink&_locator=url&_issn=14728117&_origin=article&_zone=art_page&_plussign=%2b&_targeturl=http%253a%252f%252fdx.doi.org%252f10.1080%252f0307507042000287212 o’brien and brown engaging business journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 22 hodge, p., wright, s., barraket, j., scott, m. and melville, r. (2011) ‘revisiting ‘how we learn’ in academia: practice‐based learning exchanges in three australian universities’, studies in higher education, 36(2), pp. 167-183. doi: 10.1080/03075070903501895. kolb, d. (1984) experiential learning: experience as the source of learning and development. englewood cliffs, nj: prentice hall. kolb, a. and kolb, d. (2005) ‘learning styles and learning sources: enhancing experiential learning in higher education’, academy of management learning and education, 4(2), pp. 193-212. kolb, a. and kolb, d. (2008) ‘experiential learning theory: a dynamic, holistic approach to management learning, education and development’, in armstrong, s.j. and fukami, c. (eds.) handbook of management learning, education and development. london: sage, pp. 42-68. kumaraswamy, k. and chitale, c. (2012) ‘collaborative knowledge sharing strategy to enhance organizational learning’, journal of management development, 31(3), pp. 308-322. lave, j. and wenger, e. (1991) situated learning: legitimate peripheral participation. cambridge: cambridge university press. lebeau, y. and bennion, a. (2014) ‘forms of embeddedness and discourses of engagement: a case study of universities in their local environment’, studies in higher education, 39(2), pp. 278-293. doi: 10.1080/03075079.2012.709491. macgregor, s. and semler, k. (2012) ‘towards whole person learning through sustainable executive performance’, journal of management development, 31(3), pp. 231-242. marzo-navarro, m., pedraja-iglesias, m. and rivera-torres, p. (2009) ‘curricular profile of university graduates versus business demands: is there a fit or mismatch in spain?’, education and training, 51(1), pp. 56-69. o’brien and brown engaging business journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 23 mccarthy, m. (2010) ‘experiential learning theory: from theory to practice’, journal of business & economics research, 8(5), pp. 131-140. mughal, f. and zafar, a. (2011) ‘experiential learning from a constructivist perspective: reconceptualizing the kolbian cycle’, international journal of learning & development, 1(2), pp. 27-37. o’brien, j. (2012a) mba students solve thorpe park business challenges. available at: http://mbadirector.blogspot.co.uk/2013/11/thorpe-park-directors-set-royal.html (accessed: 24 october 2017). o’brien, j. (2012b) thorpe park business engagement. available at: https://mbadirector.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/thorpe-park-royal-holloway-mbabusiness.html (accessed: 24 october 2017). o’brien, j. (2012c) thorpe park: the royal holloway mba business engagement. http://mbadirector.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/thorpe-park-royal-holloway-mbabusiness.html (accessed: 10 october 2017). pedler, m. (ed.) (2011) action learning in practice. farnham: gower. snyder, k. (2003) ‘ropes, poles and space – active learning in business education’, active learning in higher education, 4(2), pp. 159-167. tholen, g. (2014) ‘graduate employability and educational context: a comparison between great britain and the netherlands’, british educational research journal, 40(1), pp. 117. doi: 10.1002/berj.3023. tyran, k., and garcia, j. (2005) ‘connecting coursework to real work: university alumni and friends as ‘virtual’ mentors to management students’, academy of management annual meeting proceedings [serial online]. august c1-c6. united kingdom commission for employment and skills (2016) employer skills survey 2015: uk results. evidence report 97, may. https://owa.bbk.ac.uk/owa/redir.aspx?c=t8rsns992cbnvjt2pemcbqgqys-a5rjcvszla6g3iesusop8chrvca..&url=http%3a%2f%2fmbadirector.blogspot.co.uk%2f2013%2f11%2fthorpe-park-directors-set-royal.html https://owa.bbk.ac.uk/owa/redir.aspx?c=q7bjd0tqan1_q_ihcincgph6l9n_99f-mwkkt9mkilcusop8chrvca..&url=https%3a%2f%2fmbadirector.blogspot.co.uk%2f2012%2f11%2fthorpe-park-royal-holloway-mba-business.html https://owa.bbk.ac.uk/owa/redir.aspx?c=q7bjd0tqan1_q_ihcincgph6l9n_99f-mwkkt9mkilcusop8chrvca..&url=https%3a%2f%2fmbadirector.blogspot.co.uk%2f2012%2f11%2fthorpe-park-royal-holloway-mba-business.html http://mbadirector.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/thorpe-park-royal-holloway-mba-business.html http://mbadirector.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/thorpe-park-royal-holloway-mba-business.html o’brien and brown engaging business journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 24 valkanos, e. and fragoulis i. (2007) ‘experiential learning – its place in in-house education and training’, development and learning in organizations, 21(5), pp. 21-23. vasagar, j. (2011) ‘universities minister warns of graduates' skills gap’, the guardian, 15 march [online]. available at: http://www.theguardian.com/education/2011/mar/15/universities-minister-graduatesskills-gap (accessed: 10 october 2017). wilson, j. and beard, c. (2003) ‘the learning combination lock – an experiential approach to learning design’, journal of european industrial training, 27(2/3/4), pp. 88-97. xu, j., dinwoodie, j. and chang, c-h. (2012) ‘seeing is believing: developing research skills in international maritime students through authentic learning’, the international journal of management education, 10(1), pp. 50–60 [online]. available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ijme.2012.02.005 (accessed: 10 october 2017). yang, d. (2013) ‘can we fix the skills gap?’, forbes [online]. available at: http://www.forbes.com/sites/groupthink/2013/08/02/can-we-fix-the-skills-gap/ (accessed: 10 october 2017). zuber-skerritt, o. (2002) ‘the concept of action learning’, learning organization, 9(3), pp. 114-124. author details justin o’brien is a senior lecturer (teaching focussed), strategy and marketing, at the school of management, royal holloway, university of london. dr donna brown is a senior lecturer in the accounting, finance and economics subject group at the school of management, royal holloway, university of london. http://www.theguardian.com/education/2011/mar/15/universities-minister-graduates-skills-gap http://www.theguardian.com/education/2011/mar/15/universities-minister-graduates-skills-gap http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ijme.2012.02.005 http://www.forbes.com/sites/groupthink/2013/08/02/can-we-fix-the-skills-gap/ engaging business: using practice-based experiential learning approaches to enrich mba programmes abstract ‘the only source of knowledge is experience’ (einstein) introduction considering experiential learning the case for using business engagement as an experiential learning approach implementing experiential learning with business partners why was experiential learning identified to address student engagement? negotiating and engaging with business partners engaging academic staff – challenges and model developed methodological approach findings and recommendations managing the project and learning from this costs and inertia logistics of time and space cashless exchanges: do not ask for money ethics of immaterial labour what academics learned /gained size matters: impact asymmetry networking terror building trust and commitment set expectations low and be flexible currency and impact what students learned /gained theory into practice: the importance of being real and live management consultancy insight what business partners learned /gained problem formulation: investigating non-critical business problems facilitating conversation: enabling knowledge transfer and staff development catalysing real business changes conclusion acknowledgements references hodge, p., wright, s., barraket, j., scott, m. and melville, r. (2011) ‘revisiting ‘how we learn’ in academia: practice‐based learning exchanges in three australian universities’, studies in higher education, 36(2), pp. 167-183. doi: 10.1080/030750709... author details literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 4: march 2012 editorial: interventions and boundaries in learning development spaces kerry bellamy university of wales, newport, uk andy hagyard university of lincoln, uk peter hartley university of bradford, uk john hilsdon plymouth university, uk pauline ridley university of brighton, uk sandra sinfield london metropolitan university, uk this edition of the journal of learning development in higher education brings together five papers, five case studies and three opinion pieces whose themes and contents span many of the broad territories covered by our work. the notion of territories, or spaces for learning development, their dimensions – cultural, physical, analogue and digital and the scope for action within them, has particular relevance at this time. the accelerating changes in the world of higher education, in the uk and globally, present many challenges but also many crossovers and nodes. as gráinne conole points out in her opinion piece, ‘connectivity’, networks offer the potential for powerful positive interventions by learning developers, students and academics working to promote learning in a global, connected environment. when cowan took on the role of tutor with english major students alongside chiu in taiwan they explored the potential for virtual encounters in developing student critical thinking strategies (‘public feedback but personal feedforward?’). chiu’s face-to-face modelling of good practice was supplemented by cowan’s asynchronous online discussions. looking at the socio-cultural and cognitive implications of their work they argue that sensitive public and private modes of feedback and feed-forward as developed editorial interventions and boundaries in learning development spaces in a confucian heritage cultural context would also be applicable to the ‘west’. the students recognised the value of the discussion mechanisms utilised in developing their critical thinking processes: ‘the most important and precious thing we learned on this online forum is not learning how to outstrip our rivals but learning how to think logically and organise our ideas well’. the case study by peter samuels, mary deane and jeanne griffin describes another use for online peer-communication; this arose from a one-day training event on writing for publication, provided for doctoral students in science education. the approach taken sees writing as a social process and describes attempts to create a writing community, enhancing the workshop with opportunities for online feedback and review from peers. hogg and doig discuss the problems and possibilities of using their university vle, moodle, to develop engaging blended learning for students. they wanted to overcome the potential for isolation inherent in online learning and to foster dialogic and engaging encounters whilst creating a community-learning environment that replicated to some extent the physical campus. their paper (‘engaging blended learning students: an evolving approach to engaging students through the vle’) demonstrates the use of the moodle book format, with narrative and checklists to aid student navigation, use and understanding, plus the use of video introductions and video tutorials. this format generated very positive feedback from students and improved retention rates on distance learning courses. in ‘plagiarism and attribution: an academic literacies approach?’ magyar challenges the reader to consider the academic writing practice of attribution through the experiences and perceptions of international students. the study presents a thought-provoking piece that discusses the differences in approach to linguistic manipulation and subsequent developments of virtual resources that seek to develop students’ confidence in the application of uk academic practice. karen fitzgibbon and jacqueline harrett (‘telling tales: students’ learning stories’) provide useful insight into the affective dimension of learning. their research explores the use of personal learning narratives as a way of promoting empathy and providing a more supportive and less anonymous learning environment. also relevant to the affective journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 3 editorial interventions and boundaries in learning development spaces dimension of learning and how the negotiation of boundaries and roles affects academic work is emily danvers’ case study (‘dissertation question time: supporting the dissertation project through peer advice’). she explores some of the issues facing learning developers when supporting students undertaking dissertations and independent projects, in particular the potential overlap or conflict with the role of the dissertation supervisor. her innovative 'question time' format offers an informal arena for collaborative support from peers, academic staff and learning developers. ‘dissertation question time’ explores a creative and dialogic way of providing informal and peer-informed guidance to students undertaking the individual research project or dissertation that complemented support provided by faculty modules and supervisors. anne hill, simon spencer and nicola bartholomew (‘tmi too much information: creating employability skills resources’) remind us again how the domain of higher education is intersected by the demands to develop an ‘employability’ as well as a graduate identity. they describe the outcome of a project aiming to create 'future-proof' graduates. through discussion with staff, students and employers they argue for the importance of communicating in a clear, concise and relevant way in the workplace, avoiding the trap of providing tmi. the result is a scenario-based online resource that highlights characteristics of communication in a professional environment. similarly, ian turner and liz day describe how they encouraged bioscience students to develop their understanding of ‘employability’ skills (‘engaging biological sciences students in the development of employability skills through creative teaching and peer reviewed action plans’). the personal action plans relate to specific bioscience standards. stem students sometimes report discomfort with conventional models of reflective practice, but a key element here was the incorporation of anonymised online peer critique of draft action plans to help students engage more deeply with the standards and enhance their own development. jamie cleland and geoff walton’s paper provides further powerful evidence for the value of online environments in encouraging freer and fuller peer feedback than is usually possible in face to face settings. ‘online peer assessment: helping to facilitate learning through participation’ describes a structured and iterative framework of tasks for an undergraduate research and study skills module. the authors report that this had longterm benefits for their students’ learning. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 4 editorial interventions and boundaries in learning development spaces both turner and day and cleland and walton’s initiatives were embedded within specific course contexts and used to complement face to face learning. in contrast, michael goldrick and james o’higgins-norman’s paper, ‘reducing academic isolation in favour of learning relationships through a virtual classroom’, shows how the virtual classroom helped reduce academic isolation for off-campus and distance students, by offering them opportunities to communicate synchronously with peers and teachers. along with structured tasks and presentations, the authors also used what they describe as ‘game show’ elements such as voting systems and audio applause to engender a sense of fun and increase engagement. staying with the theme of fun, yvon appleby and alison barton offer a case study entitled: ‘engaging conceptual learning about threshold concepts with pots and pans’. they see meyer and land’s notion of ‘threshold concept’ as itself a threshold concept for the topic area of curriculum design with their med students. their novel way of getting this across via a practical session with pots and pans teases out the concept of heat transfer in cooking. initial student reactions ranged from curiosity to confusion and scepticism but later written reflections showed significant application of threshold concepts in their own practice. at first sight, this article has little in common with gavin fairbairn’s discussion of two tactics which have been criticised by some colleagues but which he uses with students to help them develop as learners: offering feedback in a group setting, and working with students on their written texts. in ‘supporting students as learners: two questions concerning pedagogic practice’, he justifies both tactics in terms of their impact on the students’ development and the positive consequences of these different collaborative activities. however; both articles, like so many in the current edition of jldhe share fundamental concerns about the impact of our interventions on students and the boundaries of our professional role. these are issues which need further debate across the aldinhe community. for example, how far do or should we reveal our own uncertainties to students in the process of developing their independence and confidence? this review of the contents of jldhe 4 indicates that the field of practice we call learning development has increasingly to negotiate issues related to learning spaces and learning identities. our 2012 aldinhe conference theme, "learning development in a digital age: emerging literacies and learning spaces", also signals the coming together of issues related to communication, technologies and the identities of those who use them. along journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 5 editorial interventions and boundaries in learning development spaces with notions of identity we find considerations that are key to learning: ‘literacy’ for example, arises from participation and from having negotiated rights and responsibilities in a particular context. for students in general this relates to what they can do and say in the higher education context; and what is valued and rewarded in the behaviours of both students and staff. in virtual learning environments, for example, students often have little control, which tends to work against inquiry and problem-based approaches to learning. for learning developers the exploration of the what, why and how of successful ‘blends’ of face-to-face and online teaching and learning is often hampered by being under-resourced and frequently by being marginalised in academic structures. alongside such questions we might ask what a successful online university would look like. when designing digital teaching and learning experiences, learning developers should, as far as possible, work to ‘design-in’ the social conditions for excellent online and enabling learning experiences. these exemplify both the values and the practicalities that make for accessibility, collaboration and participation in higher education for all who can benefit from it. faced with increased student numbers and reduced resources, it is tempting to see online environments simply as a more or less adequate replacement for face-to-face teaching. the papers in this edition of jldhe show how both asynchronous and synchronous online activities can offer very distinctive advantages for students. their ability to give and receive peer feedback can be positively enhanced by the extra time to reflect and (where appropriate) make use of the anonymity that online discussions can offer. similarly, the chance to replay and review online sessions may encourage them to assume more control and responsibility for their learning. for both subject-based lecturers and learning developers, these new modes of engagement offer challenges as well as opportunities: not just the technical challenge of grappling with unfamiliar software and techniques, but the pedagogical and cultural challenges of adapting our existing expertise and developing new approaches to help us make full use of the multiple discourses and multiple starting points generated by online learning. as we move towards more virtual teaching and learning environments and activities, now is the time to raise again the question of what a ‘real’ university is, what constitutes a successful and enabling university experience and, for us, what role learning developers can play in keeping that vision alive. our collective professional experience of working across disciplines, of networking across institutions and of promoting the students viewpoint puts us in a good position to support journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 6 editorial interventions and boundaries in learning development spaces the “rhizomatic … horizontal, evolving, networked and intelligent” learning possibilities conole refers to. acknowledgements the editorial team would like to thank all those who have contributed to this issue of the jldhe, especially those who acted as peer-reviewers. the work of reviewers is generally unsung but is absolutely vital in making sure we maintain high standards for research and writing in learning development. we are always keen to hear from others in the field who are willing to help in this role. once again we would like to say a very heartfelt thank you to natalie bates from the university of bournemouth, who worked with us ‘up to the wire’ on proofreading and formatting material to ensure that this edition was published on time. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 7 editorial: interventions and boundaries in learning development spaces journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 27 april 2023 ________________________________________________________________________ ©2023 the author(s) (cc-by 4.0) inclusive assessment in higher education: what does the literature tells us on how to define and design inclusive assessments? katrin bain london metropolitan university, uk abstract in recent decades the diversity of university students has increased, and it has been observed that degree results vary between student groups. this degree awarding gap is particularly high between white students on the one hand and black, asian, and other ethnic minority students on the other. assessments are a key aspect of closing the degree awarding gap. a systematic literature review was conducted to explore ‘what makes higher education assessments inclusive?’ and ‘how to design inclusive assessments in higher education?’. 14 articles were qualitatively analysed using braun and clarke’s (2006) thematic analysis. four dominant themes were found in the literature: defining ‘inclusive’, assessment, wider context, and student perspectives. in the literature a clear response to the first research question was found, defining inclusive assessment as the provision of assessments that allow all students to do well without receiving alternative or adapted assessments. the second question proved more difficult to answer. while some aspects of inclusive assessments could be identified, others are still unanswered. the results showed that assessments cannot be planned in isolation but need to be integrated within the wider course design. only one of the articles included data on student grades and progression. the existing qualitative findings could be enhanced by parallel quantitative data to understand the impact of inclusive assessments on grades and their potential in closing the degree awarding gap. ultimately, this paper will argue that the current literature concerning inclusive assessment is limited by the lack of data on student attainment. keywords: inclusive assessment; higher education; widening participation; inclusive education; attainment gap. bain inclusive assessment in higher education: what does the literature tells us on how to define and design inclusive assessments? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 2 introduction inclusive assessments are a small but important aspect of the wider field of inclusive pedagogies and inclusive learning and teaching spaces. in recent decades university students have become more diverse. widening participation initiatives actively recruit nontraditional students, like those from lower socio-economic groups, first generation students, ethnic minorities, students with disabilities, mature, and international students (tai, ajjawi and umarova, 2021, p.2; gibson, clarkson and scott, 2022, p.543). therefore, a wider range of student experience, skills, and abilities, lived experiences and cultural backgrounds can be found in the classroom and it has been observed that degree results vary between student groups. this degree awarding gap demonstrates a phenomenon of differences in degree grades between student groups that cannot be related back to the individual’s ability. the difference is particularly great between white students on the one hand and black, asian, and other ethnic minority students (bame) on the other (mountford-zimdars et al., 2015; universities uk and national union of students, 2019). in social work these differences continue after graduation in the assessed and supported year in employment (asye) where 53% of newly qualified social workers who fail the asye are bame despite only 26% of all asye participants identifying as bame (skills for care, 2021). the degree awarding gap also exists between students of higher and lower socio-economic status, between younger and older students, and between those with and without disabilities. assessments are one of the key aspects of the awarding gap as ‘[s]tudents can, with difficulty, escape from the effects of poor teaching, they cannot (by definition if they want to graduate) escape the effects of poor assessment’ (boud, 1995, p.35). there is a wide range of literature on inclusive educational practices but only a small part of that focuses specifically on assessment design (tai, ajjawi and umarova, 2021, p.3). the following literature review sets out to establish what makes assessments in higher education inclusive and how to design inclusive assessments in higher education, with the aim of eliminating the degree awarding gap and allowing all students to do well regardless of their background and protected characteristics (equality act 2010). bain inclusive assessment in higher education: what does the literature tells us on how to define and design inclusive assessments? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 3 methodology this study aims to investigate two questions: • what makes higher education assessments inclusive? • how to design inclusive assessments in higher education? to answer the research questions a literature review was conducted using a systematic approach (aveyard, 2014). two online databases were used to find literature: [university 1] ebsco database and [university 2] e-resources catalogue. several pre-searches were conducted to establish appropriate keywords to get relevant results, and to determine the range of available literature to develop inclusion and exclusion criteria. this led to the understanding that ‘inclusive assessment’ had to be in the title for the results to be relevant. it was also established that it is not necessary to limit by subject area or years (see table 1 for full inclusion and exclusion criteria). table 1: inclusion and exclusion criteria. inclusion criteria exclusion criteria • language: english. • all years and subject areas. • higher education. • inclusive assessment of students in modules. • all other languages. • school context. • inclusive design of student surveys. • assessment outside modules. • general literature on assessment. the first systematic search was conducted on 26 november 2021 in [university 1] ebsco database. title (exact) inclusive assessment and any field ‘higher education’ led to 12 results (n=12). a second search with any field is (exact) ‘inclusive assessment’ and any field is (exact) ‘higher education’ and language german yielded one result of an english chapter in a german book. within the results one was a duplicate and one was removed as it was a book bain inclusive assessment in higher education: what does the literature tells us on how to define and design inclusive assessments? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 4 review that was not relevant to this study. on the 28 november 2021 i systematically searched [university 2] e-resources catalogue for title ‘inclusive assessment’ and keyword ‘higher education’. this led to 28 results. of those six were duplicates of titles found in the [university 1] database and two were duplicates within the database. i removed another 11 as they covered irrelevant topics. after reading the abstracts of the remaining 19 articles i excluded seven articles as they referred to assessments in schools not in higher education. this left 12 articles that were retrieved. one article could not be retrieved under the title found in the searches. the same authors published an article on the same topic in the same year that was used instead (sharp and earle, 2000). an initial read revealed that one article looked at higher education evaluation surveys that students completed rather than assessment of students, and another was a first-person commentary. both were excluded. the remaining ten documents were selected for analysis (see appendix for a full list). of the ten documents, two are book chapters, and eight are journal articles. eight of the documents are based on primary research, mostly case studies, and report results from projects the authors have been involved in. the other two are theoretical papers. the documents cover a wide range of subject areas including law, history, and drama. on 13 february 2023 i repeated the search in both databases with the same keywords and a date range from 26 november 2021 to date to ensure that the literature is up to date. both databases found the same five articles. two (tai, ajjawi and umarova, 2021; gibson, clarkson and scott, 2022) are literature reviews and two (nieminen, 2022; paguyo, sponsler and iturbe-lagrave, 2022) explore inclusive assessments from a theoretical, conceptual perspective. the final article (reason and ward, 2022) was included in the original research as a pre-print and is now published in the journal. the reference has been updated. no new primary research was found. the articles were qualitatively analysed using braun and clarke’s (2006) thematic analysis. ‘[t]hematic analysis provides a flexible and useful research tool, which can potentially provide a rich and detailed, yet complex, account of data’ (braun and clarke, 2006, p.78). this method is particularly useful for inductive category building, which was used in this research: ‘inductive analysis is therefore a process of coding the data without trying to fit it into a preexisting coding frame, or the researcher’s analytic preconceptions’ (braun and clarke, 2006, bain inclusive assessment in higher education: what does the literature tells us on how to define and design inclusive assessments? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 5 p.83). inductive category building was chosen as this is an exploratory research project that wants to give meaning to the ‘buzzword’ of inclusive assessment and fill it with content. thematic analysis allows for the rich description of all elements in the data that make assignments inclusive and uncovers similarities and differences in how the term is understood. in braun and clarke’s thematic analysis themes are developed through a sixstage process that was followed in this research. it starts with familiarisation with the topic and the reading and re-reading of the full data set. in this process an initial list of ideas and themes within the data is compiled. in a second step initial codes are generated. braun and clarke (2006) stress the importance of context by including the text before and after the coded section. in the third step the codes are sorted into potential themes before the themes are reviewed in the fourth step to ensure they accurately represent the data set. themes are then named and defined. the initial codes were arranged into four themes: defining ‘inclusive’, assessment, wider context, and student perspectives. this is followed by the final analysis and write-up that is presented in the following sections. findings and discussion how is ‘inclusive’ defined and who should be included? the first thing that stood out within the texts were the different understandings and emphases on what ‘inclusive’ means, or more precisely who should be included. for collins (2010) it was the desire to offer onand off-campus students an equitable and inclusive experience. gibson, clarkson and scott (2022) focussed on distance learners with disabilities. forsyth and evans (2019) explored inclusivity in the context of history and how inclusive assessments could contribute to including all students within the context of widening participation. jackson (2006), keating, sharp and earle (2000), zybutz and rouse (2012), morris, milton and goldstone (2019), and reason and ward (2022) focus on the inclusion of students with disabilities. while the authors emphasise different disabilities, like dyslexia or learning disabilities, they all use the social model of disability as the justification and starting point as to why inclusive assessment is necessary: ‘either way, we were seeking to operate within a social model of disability and insisting that, like society in general, universities must adapt to enable everyone the opportunity to reach their full potential’ (reason and ward, 2022, p.139). as will be discussed below, reasonable adjustments that are commonly granted to students bain inclusive assessment in higher education: what does the literature tells us on how to define and design inclusive assessments? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 6 with disabilities are not seen by these authors as suitable to achieve that. nieminen (2022) also focusses on the inclusion of students with disabilities but uses the resistance model of disability that builds on the medical and social model. the model accepts that accommodations might be necessary and that disability is socially constructed while adding ‘the self-determination and agency of disabled people themselves’ (nieminen, 2022, p.4). the final group of authors (kaur, noman and nordin, 2017; kneale and collings, 2018; mcconlogue, 2020; tai, ajjawi and umarova, 2021; paguyo, sponsler and iturbe-lagrave, 2022) had the widest understanding of inclusion, looking at diverse characteristics like gender, ethnicity, language, ability, experience, social background, disability, sexuality, and intersections between these characteristics. the authors also included mature students and international students in their considerations. the interest in inclusive assessment for students with disabilities was fuelled by the 2001 special educational need and disabilities act and the 2005 disabilities discrimination act. a further motivation for making assessments more inclusive are the low satisfaction scores of students within the national student survey (nss). the nss is conducted annually with final year undergraduate students and the results have a significant impact on rankings and recruitment: ‘in the uk, assessment is the element of higher education that receives the lowest satisfaction scores from students’ (reason and ward, 2022, p.140; see also morris, milton and goldstone, 2019; kneale and collings, 2018). in morris, milton and goldstone’s research more students with additional learning needs than without were not satisfied with current assessment practices (2019, p.439). while the authors looked at different student groups, they all agreed that inclusive assessment needs to be suitable for and should be offered to all students: ‘inclusive assessment processes provide for all students whilst also meeting the needs of [a] specific group.’ (morris, milton and goldstone, 2019, p.437). inclusion in this context therefore means the provision of assessments that allow all students, including the groups listed above, to do well without receiving alternative or adapted assessments. the next section looks at assessments in more detail. bain inclusive assessment in higher education: what does the literature tells us on how to define and design inclusive assessments? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 7 assessment the search for inclusive assessments is rooted in the observation that within current assessment practices some student groups either do not perform as well as others or require adaptations to balance out disadvantages. for disabled students and those with additional learning needs reasonable adjustments aim to mitigate this. reasonable adjustments include measures such as extra time, or a quiet exam room, and are granted to disabled students who have disclosed and proven their disability (tai, ajjawi and umarova, 2021). nieminen writes: ‘in higher education, disabilities are largely seen as deficits that need to be accommodated, rather than understanding them as something that enriches academia’ (2022, p.1). sharp and earle rightly see adaptations of this kind as exclusionary and problematic: the principle which underlies all such practices, would seem to be compensation. it is not argued that these alternative forms of assessment are, in any sense, equivalent to those which non-disabled students must undertake, but instead that they are justified on the basis that disabled students possess disadvantages for which they are entitled to be compensated. this principle is evidenced by the fact that such an alternative form of assessment would not be offered until the candidate had successfully demonstrated that his or her disability justified it. (2000, p.195). they go on to state that if equivalent assessments tested identical skills and knowledge then it should be offered to all rather than just to students who have proven a need for adjustments. this is the first characteristic of inclusive assessments: all assessment variants are offered to all students and the assessment enables all students to do well. inclusive assessment therefore is an alternative to reasonable adjustments (kneale and collings, 2018; mcconlogue, 2020). staff in morris, milton and goldstone’s research stated that they rely on central services like the disability and dyslexia service to mitigate the impact of disabilities (2019, p.441). they also acknowledge that waiting times are long and some students, for example young carers, students with anxiety and students with english as and additional language do not fit the service well while still needing support or adjustments. inclusive assessments as an alternative to reasonable adjustments have the advantage that the responsibility for assessment is clearly with the lecturer and in the classroom. all students can be successful regardless of diagnosis. bain inclusive assessment in higher education: what does the literature tells us on how to define and design inclusive assessments? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 8 the texts offered no straightforward answer as to how to design assessments that allow all students to do well. the following sections will address some of the contradictions and tensions inherent in the discussion around inclusive assessment. it is worth considering why assessments are part of higher education degrees: there are several reasons which could be advanced in favour of this requirement, but perhaps the most important is that higher education, like other forms of education, functions to ensure that individuals entrusted to carry out certain roles, do in fact possess the skills and knowledge necessary to do so. this is perhaps most obvious in the case of professional qualification, where practitioners are expected to be competent in their field of practice; indeed where considerable harm may result if they are not. (sharp and earle, 2000, p.192). if we accept this argument, then assessments ‘should genuinely test the skills and knowledge in question and nothing else’ (sharp and earle, 2000, p.193). often assessments test two things: the professional skills and knowledge being assessed, and the skills and knowledge required to master the assessment instrument itself (sharp and earle, 2000; morris, milton and goldstone, 2019). sometimes the assessment format, like an essay or presentation, prepares students for the future workplace: writing essays might be the most authentic preparation for the myriad workplaces that need people to absorb, synthesise and evaluate diverse sources of information to prepare recommendations or draw strategic conclusions. (forsyth and evans, 2019, p.757). where the assessment instrument is not relevant to the professional skills and knowledge that the assessment tests, a choice of assessment formats can be offered (keating, zybutz and rouse, 2012; gibson, clarkson and scott, 2022). choice is a frequently mentioned but not uncontested characteristic of inclusive assessment (tai, ajjawi and umarova, 2021). it is stressed that choice in inclusive assessments should not lead to easier assessments: ‘equity bain inclusive assessment in higher education: what does the literature tells us on how to define and design inclusive assessments? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 9 in assessment choice is key, so it is important to create a range of assessments of similar complexity and involving similar effort and time from students’ (mcconlogue, 2020, p.145). at the same time inclusive assessments should enable students to play to their strengths. usually, tasks that play to one’s strengths are perceived as easier which would suggest that it is inevitable that choice in assessments will lead to students finding assessments easier. it is also worth considering that some students already find traditional assessments easier than others, and if done well, choice could enable all or at least more students to find a format that suits them and that they might perceive as easier. the concern about the standard of inclusive assessments goes beyond choice. inclusive assessment is not ‘easier assessment’, and it should not give students the opportunity to avoid specific tasks which are fundamental to their development in their subject discipline. it is about enhancing practice to offer students greater opportunity to develop both skills and disciplinary knowledge in a supported and challenging environment (kneale and collings, 2015). students must demonstrate that all learning outcomes, academic and professional standards have been achieved (kneale and collings, 2018, p.31; see also morris, milton and goldstone, 2019). the authors use universal design principles (morris, milton and goldstone, 2019; mcconlogue, 2020; tai, ajjawi and umarova, 2021) and authentic assessment principles (kaur, noman and nordin, 2017; kneale and collings, 2018; forsyth and evans, 2019; morris, milton and goldstone, 2019) to design inclusive assessments. authentic assessments are aligned to employability skills so that the assessments are meaningful to the students. understanding authentic assessment as aligned to workplace skills can be problematic if existing social structures should not be replicated, but equally students should be given the best possible employment opportunity (forsyth and evans, 2019, p.751). this consideration is very relevant at a time where universities are potentially more inclusive than society. forsyth and evans are rightly considering: ‘in seeking to transform, not just replicate, the discipline, we are compelled to reconsider some of the attributes of “authenticity” and reflect on whose “authenticity” we value, and to which our assessments must align’ (2019, p.749). bain inclusive assessment in higher education: what does the literature tells us on how to define and design inclusive assessments? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 10 again, choice and customisable assessment are seen as one way to ensure assessments are suitable for and meaningful to a diverse student body. however, ensuring task equivalence is complicated as the same academic standards need to be addressed in all tasks (jackson, 2006; kaur, noman and nordin, 2017; kneale and collings, 2018; mcconlogue, 2020). grading non-traditional, non-written assignments can also be challenging, even though jackson (2006) suggests that this could be learned from art, media and design where these formats are regularly used. while the above does not offer direct instructions on how to design inclusive assessments or present assessment formats that can be considered inclusive, it does offer a framework for questioning existing practice and to think about how inclusive assessment could look within one’s module. the next section considers inclusive assessment from the students’ perspective. student perspectives one of the weaknesses of the analysed primary research papers is that they did not include any information on whether student grades have improved, or whether the degree awarding gap has been reduced or closed. in their literature review tai, ajjawi and umarova found that few studies address student attainment and the results of those which do are inconclusive (2021, p.4). this is a major omission given that grades are one of the most important outcomes of assessments, and how inequalities beyond the university years manifest. some articles did not include any reference to outcomes whereas five articles included the student perspective. the students who experienced alternative assessment formats and were interviewed or surveyed afterwards are divided. students in morris, milton and goldstone’s research are in favour of choice to be able to play to strengths (2019), and students in jackson’s research were positive about practical assessments (2006). two thirds of students in forsyth and evans’ (2019) research thought authentic assessments were as good or better than traditional ones. they liked that the task was engaging, that they owned the work, and that they produced something of which they could be proud. bain inclusive assessment in higher education: what does the literature tells us on how to define and design inclusive assessments? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 11 on the other hand, students had concerns about the fairness of different assessments, for example an essay and a presentation being offered as equivalent (forsyth and evans, 2019). the students perceived some assessment formats as easier than others. interestingly, there was wide variation in which mode of assessment students felt was the most challenging, with the four suggestions (presentation, oral examination, written assignment, or exam), being equally weighted as challenging, in the responses (morris, milton and goldstone, 2019, p.443). this perception can be seen as supporting the aim of inclusive assessments to allow students to play to their strengths. students also raised concerns about how alternative assessments are marked, especially if part of the grade included peer feedback as they were worried about favouritism (kaur, noman and nordin, 2017). creativity put pressure on students who were expecting an essay or research and caused anxiety for some (forsyth and evans, 2019). some students in kaur, norman and nordin’s (2017) research were unhappy with how time consuming the assessment group work was. they also felt it was not their role to ensure everyone can participate: some unexpected attitudes were identified through the data. one student mentioned that ‘giving opportunity to everyone in the group to participate was [a] very challenging task and tiresome for us, it is not our fault that some people are not fluent in english, why do we have to suffer, they deserve to lose marks?’ another one wrote, ‘it is sometimes not fair to make us work harder to demonstrate our understanding just to accommodate those who can’t show their understanding in [a] straightforward manner’. (kaur, noman and nordin, 2017, pp.766-767). some students seem to have an expectation of what university work involves and what legitimate assessments are, and do not see alternative formats as equally valid. students’ prior educational experiences frequently lead them to anticipate conventional assessments at university. survey respondents expressed anxiety about an authentic assessment that does not feel sufficiently like an assessment. this affective bain inclusive assessment in higher education: what does the literature tells us on how to define and design inclusive assessments? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 12 component of traditional assessment is rarely mentioned: the experience of completing an essay or exam – regardless of its benefit to learning or self-betterment – legitimises, in part, the assessment form (forsyth and evans, 2019, p.758). to overcome the resistance of students to new assessments formats, students can be eased into it by initially giving new formats a lower weighing. time is needed to develop assessment literacy in class (kaur, noman and nordin, 2017, p.768), for example through regular formative feedback (gibson, clarkson and scott, 2022). another way to overcome resistance is to include students in the assessment design and co-construction of rubrics so they understand the requirements, and then give them opportunities to apply them by assessing their own and their peers’ work (nieminen, 2022) (discussed below). students have a pre-existing perception of what university is and how knowledge is assessed and can sometimes find it difficult to recognise creative assessments as equally valid. students in keating, zybutz and rouse’s (2012) research agreed that they need more training to develop skills for alternative assessments. this links back to the concerns some students had on how time-consuming inclusive assessments are. module leaders need to ensure that assessments develop transferable skills that prepare students for the workplace and develop necessary academic skills. in situations where traditional assessment formats are most suited to this, they can be adapted to be more inclusive: care over scaffolding and support for their projects is essential. we need to retain traditional assessment but treat it, we suggest, as authentic. as indeed it is: essaywriting is exactly the same as what many, perhaps even most, professional historians actually do. the question to ask of traditional assessment is defined by student observations of authentic assessment: how can essay-writing be about student becoming, rather than merely demonstrating familiarity with a lecturer’s selected topics. this issue warrants future exploration. (forsyth and evans, 2019, p.758). the above quote indicates that inclusive assessment cannot be designed separately from the module content and the wider context. the next section discusses this in more detail. bain inclusive assessment in higher education: what does the literature tells us on how to define and design inclusive assessments? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 13 wider context the findings above suggest that the inclusivity of assessment cannot be judged by the assessment task alone. assessments need to be integrated into the wider context of the module, university, and external stakeholders. external stakeholders like the quality assurance agency for higher education (qaa) or regulatory bodies like social work england for social work were seen as a hindrance to change (jackson, 2006). looking at the social work england standards that need to be met they stipulate the ‘what’ but not the ‘how’, giving educators discretion as to how courses are structured and assessed. the wider societal context and employment requirements can also slow down the progress towards inclusion (see above). here a process of critical questioning of the status quo can help in establishing what is fixed or needed, and what can be changed and adapted. at the university level, quality assurance systems were seen as a barrier to change and the validation/re-validation of courses considered a ‘paper exercise’ rather than a chance to make substantial changes towards inclusion (jackson, 2006). a university-wide initiative can create the institutional framework for change. plymouth university rewrote the university’s assessment policies and turned a 200-page handbook into a short, easy to understand online resource that is accessible to all (kneale and collings, 2018). it is important to understand the structural inequalities inherent within higher education institutions: kneale and collings (2018) insist that inclusive assessments should not compromise academic or professional standards. whereas reason and ward (2022) and nieminen (2022) point out that university standards and processes are designed from an ableist perspective and benchmarking against these standards can be exclusionary. similar arguments can be made for other protective characteristics including racism built into structures. new policies and frameworks might not instantly alleviate inbuilt practices, but offer a better standard to calibrate to. across the course, assessments need to be scheduled to ensure an even distribution throughout the year to allow students to receive early feedback and learning and prevent an accumulation of assessments at the end of term (kneale and collings, 2018). the university should also provide training for staff who have limited experience and lack confidence in bain inclusive assessment in higher education: what does the literature tells us on how to define and design inclusive assessments? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 14 designing inclusive assessments (jackson, 2006; kneale and collings, 2018; morris, milton and goldstone, 2019). alternative assessment formats such as assessed role play, for example, are resource intensive. there is a risk that certain assessment formats will not be supported, even if they have the potential to foster inclusivity due to resource constraints (tai, ajjawi and umarova, 2021, p.11). inclusive assessments therefore need to be part of a wider university strategy to ensure adequate resources. on the module level assessment must feel meaningful to the students being assessed. they must understand its processes, its vocabulary, its purpose. without this, assessment becomes something done to students in a mysterious and almost violent manner. (reason and ward, 2022, p.141). therefore, assessment literacy needs to be developed within the module (morris, milton and goldstone, 2019). assessment literacy is ‘the competency among students to be able to judge the quality, completeness and accuracy of the work they produce’ (kaur, noman and nordin, 2017, p.758). this can include formative feedback, understanding the learning outcomes and marking rubrics, and marking or giving feedback on each other’s work in class (collins, 2010; keating, zybutz and rouse, 2012; nieminen, 2022). students’ confidence in inclusive assessments needs to be built up and they need to be reassured that the alternative assessment formats have the same academic value (jackson, 2006). inexperience with new assessment formats might lead to students initially underperforming (kaur, noman and nordin, 2017): ‘in planning an assessment programme with a range of assessment methods it is essential that students have opportunities to practice, rehearse and improve their performance over time’ (kneale and collings, 2018, p.36). including students in the design and development of marking criteria can build confidence (kaur, noman and nordin, 2017; nieminen, 2022; reason and ward, 2022). kaur, noman and nordin (2017) suggested giving alternative assessments a smaller weighting initially and increasing this over time until it has the same value as traditional assessments. kneale and collings (2018) found that fast bain inclusive assessment in higher education: what does the literature tells us on how to define and design inclusive assessments? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 15 assessment feedback either on the same day or within a few days had a positive impact on students’ learning and was reflected in better nss results. with all these requirements on embedding inclusive assessments within the module it is important that the assessment is aligned with the learning outcomes and module content. there is otherwise a danger that the focus on assessment literacy or the development of creative skills distracts from the module content. assessment should support learning in the module, not be the focus of the module. conclusion the articles in this research make a strong case for inclusive assessment as an alternative to reasonable adjustments. the demand that all assessment variants are offered to all students and that assessments enable all students to do well is simple and compelling. on the surface it looks like a straightforward solution to widening participation, lowering the degree awarding gap, and the inclusion of students with disabilities and specific learning needs. the previous sections have shown that the implementation of this is tricky. this literature review set out to investigate the following two questions: • what makes higher education assessments inclusive? • how to design inclusive assessments in higher education? the first question could be relatively easily answered as meaning the provision of assessments that allow all students to do well without receiving alternative or adapted assessments. the second question however proved more difficult to answer. whilst some aspects of inclusive assessments could be identified, this research also showed that many questions around inclusive assessment are still unanswered. staff and students raised concerns and the articles gave the impression that the existing frictions require a longer negotiation process before inclusive assessments are equally accepted forms of assignments. the biggest weakness of this review is that only one of the articles included data on student grades and progression. the qualitative findings could be enhanced by bain inclusive assessment in higher education: what does the literature tells us on how to define and design inclusive assessments? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 16 parallel quantitative data to understand the impact of inclusive assessments on grades and their potential for closing the degree awarding gap. without this data the effectiveness of inclusive assignments as they were presented in this review cannot be assessed. quantitative primary research is required to fill this gap. further research is also required to establish whether choice and more creative assignments alone can really foster inclusion and reduce the degree awarding gap. the more promising approach to inclusion seems to be the focus on in-module learning, scaffolding, regular formative feedback, and supporting students to develop skills over time. this is something that can be immediately integrated in all modules. while this literature review did not offer the evidence-based specifics on inclusive assessment design i had hoped for, it has been a good starting point to understand the current state of research and can be used as a springboard to conduct primary research to fill in the gaps. references aveyard, h. (2014) doing a literature review in health and social care: a practical guide. 3rd edn. maidenhead: open university press. boud, d. (1995) ‘assessment and learning: contradictory or complementary?’, in knight, p. (ed.) assessment for learning in higher education. london: kogan, pp.35-48. braun, v. and clarke, v. (2006) ‘using thematic analysis in psychology’, qualitative research in psychology, 3(2), pp.77-101. https://doi.org/10.1191/1478088706qp063oa. collins, p. (2010) ‘inclusive team assessment of off-campus and on-campus first year law students using instantaneous communication technology’, the law teacher, 44(3), pp.309-333. https://doi.org/10.1080/03069400.2010.524032. forsyth, h. and evans, j. (2019) ‘authentic assessment for a more inclusive history’, higher education research & development, 38(4), pp.748-761. https://doi.org/10.1080/07294360.2019.1581140. https://doi.org/10.1191/1478088706qp063oa https://doi.org/10.1080/03069400.2010.524032 https://doi.org/10.1080/07294360.2019.1581140 bain inclusive assessment in higher education: what does the literature tells us on how to define and design inclusive assessments? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 17 gibson, p., clarkson, r. and scott, m. (2022) ‘promoting potential through purposeful inclusive assessment for distance learners’, distance education, 43(4), pp.543-555. https://doi.org/10.1080/01587919.2022.2143321. jackson, c. (2006) ‘towards inclusive assessment’, educational developments, 7(1), pp.1921. kaur, a., noman, m. and nordin, h. (2017) ‘inclusive assessment for linguistically diverse learners in higher education’, assessment & evaluation in higher education, 42(5), pp.756-771. https://doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2016.1187250. keating, n., zybutz, t. and rouse, k. (2012) ‘inclusive assessment at point-of-design’, innovations in education and teaching international, 49(3), pp.249-256. https://doi.org/10.1080/14703297.2012.703022. kneale, p. e. and collings, j. (2018) ‘towards inclusive assessment: the journey at the university of plymouth’, in auferkorte-michaelis, n. and linde, f. (eds) diversität lernen und lehren ein hochschulbuch. opladen: verlag barbara budrich, pp.31-43. mcconlogue (2020) assessment and feedback in higher education: a guide for teachers. london: ucl press. morris, c., milton, e. and goldstone, r. (2019) ‘case study: suggesting choice: inclusive assessment processes’, higher education pedagogies, 4(1), pp.435-447. https://doi.org/10.1080/23752696.2019.1669479. mountford-zimdars, a., sabri, d., moore, j., jones, s. and higham, l. (2015) causes of differences in student outcomes. available at: https://dera.ioe.ac.uk/23653/1/hefce2015_diffout.pdf (accessed: 19 january 2023). https://doi.org/10.1080/01587919.2022.2143321 https://doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2016.1187250 https://doi.org/10.1080/14703297.2012.703022 https://doi.org/10.1080/23752696.2019.1669479 https://dera.ioe.ac.uk/23653/1/hefce2015_diffout.pdf bain inclusive assessment in higher education: what does the literature tells us on how to define and design inclusive assessments? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 18 nieminen, j. h. (2022) ‘assessment for inclusion: rethinking inclusive assessment in higher education’, teaching in higher education, pp.1-19. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2021.2021395. paguyo, c. h., sponsler, l. e. and iturbe-lagrave, v. (2022) ‘centering theories of learning to design humanizing pedagogies and inclusive assessments’, new directions for student services, 178-179, pp.175-183. https://doi.org/10.1002/ss.20438. reason, m. and ward, c. (2022) ‘improving, achieving, excelling: developing inclusive assessment processes for a degree-level learning disability arts programme’, research in drama education: the journal of applied theatre and performance, 27(1), pp.137146. https://doi.org/10.1080/13569783.2021.1997581. sharp, k. and earle, s. (2000) ‘assessment, disability and the problem of compensation’, assessment & evaluation in higher education, 25(2), pp.191-199. https://doi.org/10.1080/713611423. skills for care (2021) assessed and supported year in employment (asye) child and family annual report to the department for education april 2020-march 2021. available at: https://www.skillsforcare.org.uk/resources/documents/regulated-professions/socialwork/asye/child-and-family/quality-assurance/asye-child-and-family-annual-report2020-21.pdf. (accessed: 9 march 2023). tai, j., ajjawi, r. and umarova, a. (2021) ‘how do students experience inclusive assessment? a critical review of contemporary literature’, international journal of inclusive education, pp.1-18. https://doi.org/10.1080/13603116.2021.2011441. universities uk and national union of students (2019) black, asian and minority ethnic student attainment at uk universities: #closingthegap. available at: https://www.universitiesuk.ac.uk/sites/default/files/field/downloads/2021-07/bamestudent-attainment.pdf (accessed: 9 march 2023). https://doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2021.2021395 https://doi.org/10.1002/ss.20438 https://doi.org/10.1080/13569783.2021.1997581 https://doi.org/10.1080/713611423 https://www.skillsforcare.org.uk/resources/documents/regulated-professions/social-work/asye/child-and-family/quality-assurance/asye-child-and-family-annual-report-2020-21.pdf https://www.skillsforcare.org.uk/resources/documents/regulated-professions/social-work/asye/child-and-family/quality-assurance/asye-child-and-family-annual-report-2020-21.pdf https://www.skillsforcare.org.uk/resources/documents/regulated-professions/social-work/asye/child-and-family/quality-assurance/asye-child-and-family-annual-report-2020-21.pdf https://doi.org/10.1080/13603116.2021.2011441 https://www.universitiesuk.ac.uk/sites/default/files/field/downloads/2021-07/bame-student-attainment.pdf https://www.universitiesuk.ac.uk/sites/default/files/field/downloads/2021-07/bame-student-attainment.pdf bain inclusive assessment in higher education: what does the literature tells us on how to define and design inclusive assessments? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 19 appendix: literature used in analysis reference method inclusion focus subject area country collins, p. (2010) ‘inclusive team assessment of offcampus and oncampus first year law students using instantaneous communication technology’, the law teacher, 44(3), pp.309-333. https://doi.org/10.108 0/03069400.2010.52 4032. in depth description of one course that offers inclusive assessment for online and on campus students. equitable and inclusive experience of on and off-campus students. law australia forsyth, h. and evans, j. (2019) ‘authentic assessment for a more inclusive history’, higher education research & development, 38(4), pp.748-761. https://doi.org/10.108 0/07294360.2019.15 81140. small survey of students (n=18), questionnaire with 13 questions, open ended question, thematic analysis, 16 students have doen assignment 1, 2 assignment 2 and 8 assignment 3. inclusive history: whose stories do we tell? from which perspective? decolonisation of history. authentic assessment in history. history australia jackson, c. (2006) ‘towards inclusive assessment’, educational developments, 7(1), pp.19-21. workshop, focus groups with staff and students, audits of current assessment methods. students with dyslexia. hospitality, leisure, sport, tourism uk (southhapm ton, oxford, bournemout h) kaur, a., noman, m. and nordin, h. (2017) ‘inclusive assessment for linguistically diverse learners in higher education’, assessment & evaluation in higher education, 42(5), design-basedresearch 114 participants, teachers on ma in education, diverse languages, data collection over 2 semesters. diverse student body: race, culture, language, gender ability, skills, prior experience. education malaysia https://doi.org/10.1080/03069400.2010.524032 https://doi.org/10.1080/03069400.2010.524032 https://doi.org/10.1080/03069400.2010.524032 https://doi.org/10.1080/07294360.2019.1581140 https://doi.org/10.1080/07294360.2019.1581140 https://doi.org/10.1080/07294360.2019.1581140 bain inclusive assessment in higher education: what does the literature tells us on how to define and design inclusive assessments? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 20 pp.756-771. https://doi.org/10.108 0/02602938.2016.11 87250. keating, n., zybutz, t. and rouse, k. (2012) ‘inclusive assessment at pointof-design’, innovations in education and teaching international, 49(3), pp.249-256. https://doi.org/10.108 0/14703297.2012.70 3022. case study: inclusive assessment at point-of-design, student group: specific learning differences and no other known disabilities, small sample (10 students), questionnaire and focus groups. no adjustment for disability necessary. performanc e arts uk (london) kneale, p. e. and collings, j. (2018) ‘towards inclusive assessment: the journey at the university of plymouth’, in auferkorte-michaelis, n. and linde, f. (eds) diversität lernen und lehren ein hochschulbuch. opladen: verlag barbara budrich, pp.31-43. case study of plymouth inclusive assessment project 2012-2016, interviews and consultation meetings with 250 academics, students, and student union officers, student representatives to review assessment practice in 2012. mainly structure. students with diverse learning needs, higher level of students with declared disabilities, lower nss scores in assessment questions, mature students, international students, disabled students. all uk (plymouth) chapter 9 in: mcconlogue (2020) assessment and feedback in higher education: a guide for teachers. london: ucl press. n/a social background, disability, gender, race and sexuality and intersections between them. morris, c., milton, e. and goldstone, r. (2019) ‘case study: suggesting choice: inclusive assessment processes’, higher education case study, action research, questionnaire + semi-structured interviews. universal design, no adaptation for students with additional learning needs necessary. uk https://doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2016.1187250 https://doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2016.1187250 https://doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2016.1187250 https://doi.org/10.1080/14703297.2012.703022 https://doi.org/10.1080/14703297.2012.703022 https://doi.org/10.1080/14703297.2012.703022 bain inclusive assessment in higher education: what does the literature tells us on how to define and design inclusive assessments? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 21 pedagogies, 4(1), pp.435-447. https://doi.org/10.108 0/23752696.2019.16 69479. reason, m. and ward, c. (2022) ‘improving, achieving, excelling: developing inclusive assessment processes for a degree-level learning disability arts programme’, research in drama education: the journal of applied theatre and performance, 27(1), pp.137-146. https://doi.org/10.108 0/13569783.2021.19 97581. focus groups with current academy students a 3 learning disabled artists that completed programme previously to establish what assessment meant to them. learning disabled and autisic students; "inclusive approach offering all opportunities to all students" (7). drama (degree level learning disabilities programme) uk (york) sharp, k. and earle, s. (2000) ‘assessment, disability and the problem of compensation’, assessment & evaluation in higher education, 25(2), pp.191-199. https://doi.org/10.108 0/713611423. n/a students with disabilities. uk (coventry) tai, j., ajjawi, r. and umarova, a. (2021) ‘how do students experience inclusive assessment? a critical review of contemporary literature’, international journal of inclusive education, pp.1-18. https://doi.org/10.108 literature review of 13 papers, all empirical studies, published between 2015-2020. gaining understanding of students targeted in inclusive assessment, outcomes of inclusive assessment on students and recommendations in literature about designing international https://doi.org/10.1080/23752696.2019.1669479 https://doi.org/10.1080/23752696.2019.1669479 https://doi.org/10.1080/23752696.2019.1669479 https://doi.org/10.1080/13569783.2021.1997581 https://doi.org/10.1080/13569783.2021.1997581 https://doi.org/10.1080/13569783.2021.1997581 https://doi.org/10.1080/713611423 https://doi.org/10.1080/713611423 https://doi.org/10.1080/13603116.2021.2011441 bain inclusive assessment in higher education: what does the literature tells us on how to define and design inclusive assessments? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 22 0/13603116.2021.20 11441. inclusive assessments. paguyo, c. h., sponsler, l. e. and iturbe-lagrave, v. (2022) ‘centering theories of learning to design humanizing pedagogies and inclusive assessments’, new directions for student services, 178-179, pp.175-183. https://doi.org/10.100 2/ss.20438. theoretical. create an understanding of inclusive assessment as a suite of tools to design spaces and relationships that facilitate powerful learning. nieminen, j. h. (2022) ‘assessment for inclusion: rethinking inclusive assessment in higher education’, teaching in higher education, pp.1-19. available at: https://doi.org/10.108 0/13562517.2021.20 21395. conceptual, theoretical. students with disabilities. gibson, p., clarkson, r. and scott, m. (2022) ‘promoting potential through purposeful inclusive assessment for distance learners’, distance education, 43(4), pp.543-555. https://doi.org/10.108 0/01587919.2022.21 43321. literature review. distance learning students with disabilities. https://doi.org/10.1080/13603116.2021.2011441 https://doi.org/10.1080/13603116.2021.2011441 https://doi.org/10.1002/ss.20438 https://doi.org/10.1002/ss.20438 https://doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2021.2021395 https://doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2021.2021395 https://doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2021.2021395 https://doi.org/10.1080/01587919.2022.2143321 https://doi.org/10.1080/01587919.2022.2143321 https://doi.org/10.1080/01587919.2022.2143321 bain inclusive assessment in higher education: what does the literature tells us on how to define and design inclusive assessments? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 23 author details katrin bain is a senior lecturer in social work at london metropolitan university where she teaches research methods and relationship-based approaches for social change. she has a particular interest in the implementation of the university’s education for social justice framework and in creating inclusive learning spaces. she is a social pedagogue and her research examines the representations of parents in policy, organisation, and statutory social work practice. licence ©2023 the author(s). this is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (cc-by 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. see http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. journal of learning development in higher education (jldhe) is a peer-reviewed open access journal published by the association for learning development in higher education (aldinhe). inclusive assessment in higher education: what does the literature tells us on how to define and design inclusive assessments? abstract introduction methodology findings and discussion how is ‘inclusive’ defined and who should be included? assessment student perspectives wider context conclusion references appendix: literature used in analysis author details licence literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 8: march 2015 a co-operative, connected and distributed approach to developing digital literacies heather conboy de montfort university, uk sukhtinder kaur de montfort university, uk julie lowe de montfort university, uk ian pettit de montfort university, uk rob weale de montfort university, uk abstract in 2011 the centre for enhancing learning through technology (celt) was established at de montfort university. the aim of the celt team is to work with staff and students to transform their learning and teaching experiences through the situated use of technologies. this case study offers an overview of the ways in which the celt team seeks to realise its aims in relation to the use of digital technologies for enhancing teaching and learning. in particular, it focuses on how they utilise a simultaneously co-operative, connected and distributed model for staff development in seeking to bridge the gap between digital knowhow and the effective pedagogic implementation of digital technology as part of a curriculum. conboy et al. a co-operative, connected and distributed approach to developing digital literacies journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 2 key elements of the celt strategy and the team’s on-the-ground approaches to catalysing engagement and driving innovation in the use of digital technologies for teaching and learning will be detailed. this will include a series of situated examples of developmental projects that have sought to enhance student learning through the use of digital technologies. it is hoped that the case study will be of value in terms of highlighting effective practices and broader strategic approaches towards developing digital literacies for staff and students. keywords: professional development; digital literacies; co-operative; collaborative; enhancing learning through technology; situated technology. introduction student engagement with digital aspects of their learning depends on teaching staff being knowledgeable, able to model and take the initiative to integrate technologies into their teaching processes in creative ways, as beetham et al. (2009) suggest. staff and student digital literacies become connected through learning and teaching experiences. by supporting teaching staff, the celt team, albeit indirectly, work to enrich the student experience and innovate across varied curricula. this system of support is complex and at times difficult to assess the direct impact of support networks (sharpe et al., 2013). given its mission of ‘the transformation of learning by staff and students through the situated use of technology’, the celt team engage a range of practices and technologies to encourage meaningful and pedagogically-grounded digital literacies. in the context of higher education, being digitally literate is being: able to make informed decisions about the appropriate situative use of technology in all areas of one’s professional and personal activities (atkins and kaur, 2014). the scope of this paper is to share strategies, which have proved useful in bridging the apparent gap between abstract technical ‘know-how’ and pedagogy, through a model which has evolved as simultaneously co-operative, connected and distributed. here we conboy et al. a co-operative, connected and distributed approach to developing digital literacies journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 3 focus on two core strategies that we have adopted; scoping processes and co-operative dialogues. scoping processes a core assumption of our work is the understanding that both student and staff communication, learning and teaching extend beyond the university. this has led us to develop a scoping approach and framework that incorporates horizon scanning as well as local practice awareness. a visualised model is used to help signpost and communicate a range of pedagogic practices and technologies that have potential teaching and learning application. beyond this, where appropriate, identified potentials are trialled; this can happen as formal project-based trials that are owned by one or more of the celt team, or less formal explorations of potentials that are carried out by individual team members and escalated to the whole team should the potential be judged to be worth further formal trialling. for formal projects we tend to work using a buddy pair system with one of the pair being the project lead. this approach is important in terms of resiliency in that, should one of the team leave, there will be at least one other member who has detailed knowledge of a specific technology and its teaching and learning application. the results of our scoping processes are articulated where appropriate through the various networks and media that constitute our co-operative dialogic approach. co-operative dialogues acknowledging that technological skills do not lie solely within our small group (celt), dialogic engagement with colleagues across the university is vital. through our role we raise awareness, seek feedback and establish and maintain networks with teaching fellows, enhancing learning through technology champions and through the pgcerthe and pedagogical projects (see figure 1). however, as the aldinhe baseline survey suggests, independent engagement with technological skills is still common place, with 91% of survey respondents noting that they developed their competencies in digital technologies through self-teaching (hagyard, 2011, p.6). for this reason, the development of a pedagogically-inspired online hub, a one-stop shop, has helped to foster day-to-day practical engagement (http://celt.our.dmu.ac.uk). however, the hub cannot work without being relevant to local contexts; this can happen through dialogue with staff encouraging http://celt.our.dmu.ac.uk/ conboy et al. a co-operative, connected and distributed approach to developing digital literacies journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 4 them to make decisions and take initiatives regarding their own and team teaching. thus, as a way of integrating face-to-face, online contact, just-in-time support and self-help approaches, the hub enables staff to see case studies in a range of media formats (http://celt.our.dmu.ac.uk/effective-practice/elt-case-studies/). figure 1. celt co-operative approach for bridging skills and pedagogy our approach to sharing practice is stimulated by working from examples that others can replicate, sharing lessons learnt and highlighting the student voice; in other words modelling and demonstrating what colleagues have already done, or are doing to enhance the student learning experience and incorporating that as part of our approach to staff development. in order to exemplify snapshots of this practice we present the following four situated examples: distance learning in technology; the creation of a virtual high street in nursing; a training needs analysis for research students; and student eportfolio development. http://celt.our.dmu.ac.uk/effective-practice/elt-case-studies/ conboy et al. a co-operative, connected and distributed approach to developing digital literacies journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 5 distance learning distance learning (dl) is one area where our teaching and learning focused approach is enabling the university to engage with a wide variety of student cohorts through matching appropriate technological enablers to a diverse set of curricula. working across faculties via our sharing and dissemination ethos, once small, isolated pockets of dl-related practice have been documented and adapted across campus. for example, a whole msc programme in the faculty of technology moved to dl enrolment in 2012. through conversations facilitated by embedded networks, including those already teaching blended dl and attending cohorts, and based on an analysis of teaching styles and student needs, we were able to identify and support the entire msc teaching team in designing and rolling out a roadmap for engaging with dl students for the first time. in addition, our expertise and grounding in teaching and assessment techniques has enabled the production of a distance learning support strategy that provides examples of models, good practice and guidance for individuals, teams or subject groups who are teaching dl students, which aims to increase flexibility and enhance the student experience. with this in mind, technology can be used to stimulate innovation in the curriculum, ensuring that the dl students are included in virtual collaboration spaces and that assessment activities are consistent across the cohort. in turn, this can help with retention and progression as dl students’ needs and motivators for learning are often different to those of campus-based students, as osika (2006) described in development of the concentric support model. student feedback suggests that by using innovative techniques (such as live capture to create rich, student-voice enhanced, study resources and collaborative tools to enable dl students to work with each other and their campus-based peers) can add value to the whole student experience, whether that be at a distance or in a classroom. the virtual high street project the virtual high street project is an example of our collaborative, project-based approach towards the development of innovative teaching and learning resources. we work directly with teaching staff to prototype innovative digital teaching and learning resources. ‘high street’ is a virtual, fictional community created to support and enhance teaching and learning for students on the bsc nursing programme: built in the core virtual learning environment (blackboard) it provides a space within a recognised online teaching and learning environment in which teaching staff can create, develop and explore the use of scenarios for teaching and learning. conboy et al. a co-operative, connected and distributed approach to developing digital literacies journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 6 in brief, the high street consists of residences, which include pertinent health related information about the residents; and various key services, such as the high street health centre which contains the medical records of all residents. teaching staff author all of the content in these spaces in relation to their teaching and learning requirements, and then integrate this content into their teaching and learning activities. as high street is an open/shared resource, teaching staff are able to use each other’s resources as required. the collaborative hands on development of such resources carries with it an inherent enhancement of digital literacy for those staff involved in the collaboration. through the sharing practice model that we employ, other staff can be catalysed to engage with similar innovative developments and hence the enhancement of digital literacy can spread, in a less formally contrived manner than that of structured workshops. the broader aims of the high street project, beyond its implementation as a teaching and learning enrichment resource for nursing, are to create and establish a resource that acts as a catalyst for teaching staff to explore and engage with a broader palette of pedagogic approaches; where necessary and relevant in terms of the curriculum. the hope is that high street will:  spark dialogues around the potentials of scenario-based approaches to teaching and learning, beyond the school of nursing;  be a key component in articulating the role that digital technology can play in developing pedagogically focused resources that enhance and enrich teaching and learning;  demonstrate the extent to which close collaboration between academic teaching staff and learning technologists can result in the development of pedagogically relevant teaching and learning resources that enhance the student learning experience. training needs analysis the original training needs analysis (tna) document was in paper format, it was lengthy and information was not succinct. completion of the tna enables phd students to identify weaknesses in their skill set and to subsequently select university training courses to strengthen their skills. conboy et al. a co-operative, connected and distributed approach to developing digital literacies journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 7 creating a new resource involved co-operation with a wide range of practitioners. redesigning the tna online required alignment with the current ‘researcher development framework’. we investigated various online survey programmes, however none of them allowed students to view submitted answers. the university’s virtual learning environment was used to create the resource, making it cost effective. initial mapping of the available training courses was made to the researcher development framework wheel quadrants (vitae, 2014). thought was given to the diversity of the phd student users including international students; those with a first language other than english; diverse digital literacy skills of mature students and varied cultures and backgrounds. design and development of the tna included theories of human computer interaction; four surveys with colour coordinated text representing the four researcher development framework domains; clear and precise question language, making it accessible to all; hyperlinks within each question that open a colour co-ordinated document listing appropriate training; dedicated space where ‘how to’ guides are available in both visual and written format, which provide detailed instructions. the online tna tool has proved to be a valuable resource. students have expressed the flow and succinct format is easy to follow. the most significant impact is where students are using the surveys for personal development planning. by completing the surveys each year they can monitor development of their skill set. furthermore, we are exploring the potential to adapt the tool for early career researchers. e-portfolio for biomedical science students our expertise in working closely with course lecturers was key in enabling the development and deployment of an eportfolio utilising wiki technology through the virtual learning environment for the bsc in biomedical science programme. the project involved analysis of technological options which would best meet the situated requirements of the compulsory professional skills course module. the project involved open dialogue and professional development for staff so that skills were transferable. it is testament to the success of the eportfolio that it has continued to be used, now with a third cohort, and that the development model has been used to establish eportfolio solutions in other courses. the portfolio was designed so that students can present reflective logs and evidence of achievement about a variety of learning activities in a systematic manner. evidence of learning is based on reflective accounts and questions set by the lecturer and employs a conboy et al. a co-operative, connected and distributed approach to developing digital literacies journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 8 template which was developed for the eportfolio. the benefits of the eportfolio over the previous paper-based format in terms of the practicalities for the lecturer included student progress checking, feedback, marking and accessibility. there were also benefits for students who had to demonstrate skill sets and apply deeper active learning through reflective writing in an online setting, thus making the process more enjoyable. coincidently having students maintain an eportfolio supported responsible student professional skills development (research/scientific skills) and demonstration of applied learning required as evidence for professional bodies. having an online portfolio allowed students a holistic view of their portfolio and enabled them to work through sections which suited their learning and commitments and facilitated good practices in developing digital literacies. once again this project demonstrated a mutual focus on pedagogy, technology and expertise between the learning technologist and the academic lead, so enabling a positive outcome. summary in this case study we have attempted to demonstrate ways in which the celt team applies a co-operative, connected and distributed model, based on the strategies of cooperative dialogue and scoped processes, with the aim of grounding technological skills and rendering them relevant and meaningful to staff and students. we have demonstrated how such processes are often cyclical, working between the local context, documented cases and adaptation to new situated scenarios. this case study represents some of the successes of our approach in terms of bridging the gap between digital know-how and the effective pedagogic implementation of digital technology as part of a curriculum. however there still remain challenges in terms of the broader recognition of the positive potential of digital technology for enhancing teaching and learning across the institution and the subsequent adoption of digital technologies. for the most part, we find that it is those staff and students who are already switched on to the potentials of technology who tend to be the first to walk through our door – the early adopters. through our sharing practice strategy their endeavours do have some impact on those staff and students who may be less technology aware, from a pedagogic perspective. still it appears that a key barrier to engagement in many cases is a lack of confidence in terms of individual digital literacy. given this, our challenge is to continue to conboy et al. a co-operative, connected and distributed approach to developing digital literacies journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 9 explore, experiment and discover ways in which to support staff and students in the development of their digital literacy towards the effective situated use of digital technologies for teaching and learning. going forward in this respect, we aim to enhance our staff development programme through the implementation of a structured, yet flexible framework with which staff can develop their personal digital literacies. this framework will be based on that which has been developed as part of the digitlit leicester project (hall, atkins and fraser, 2014; atkins and kaur, 2014). references atkins, l. and kaur, s. (2014) supporting staff development in digital literacy. slide 6. available at: http://www.slideshare.net/lucyjca1304/152-atkins-and-kaur (accessed: 28 august 2014). beetham, h., mcgill, l. and littlejohn, a. (2009) thriving in the 21st century: learning literacies for the digital age (llida project). available at: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/projects/llidareportjune2009.pdf (accessed: 20 august 2014). hagyard, a., hilsdon, j., reid, m. and shahabudin, k. with pocklington, a. (2012) developing digital literacies: base-lining report for the association of learning development in higher education (aldinhe). available at: http://jiscdesignstudio.pbworks.com/w/file/fetch/50489516/aldinhe_ddl_baseline _report_jan_2012.pdf (accessed: 15 august 2014). hall, r., atkins, l. and fraser, j. (2014) ‘defining a self-evaluation digital literacy framework for secondary educators: the digilit leicester project’, research in learning technology, 22(1) [online]. available at: http://www.researchinlearningtechnology.net/index.php/rlt/article/view/21440/ht ml (accessed: 28 august 2014). http://www.slideshare.net/lucyjca1304/152-atkins-and-kaur http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/projects/llidareportjune2009.pdf http://jiscdesignstudio.pbworks.com/w/file/fetch/50489516/aldinhe_ddl_baseline_report_jan_2012.pdf http://jiscdesignstudio.pbworks.com/w/file/fetch/50489516/aldinhe_ddl_baseline_report_jan_2012.pdf http://www.researchinlearningtechnology.net/index.php/rlt/article/view/21440/html http://www.researchinlearningtechnology.net/index.php/rlt/article/view/21440/html conboy et al. a co-operative, connected and distributed approach to developing digital literacies journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8: march 2015 10 osika, e. (2006) ‘the concentric support model: a model for the planning and evaluation of distance learning programs’, online journal of distance learning administration 9(3) [online]. available at: http://www.westga.edu/~distance/ojdla/fall93/osika93.htm (accessed: 28 august 2014). sharpe, r., deepwell, f. and clarke, p. (2013) ‘a developmental evaluation of the role of faculty-based student support coordinator’, journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5, march, pp.1-21. vitae (2014) introducing the researcher development framework planner. available at: https://www.vitae.ac.uk/vitae-publications/rdf-related/introducing-the-vitaeresearcher-development-framework-rdf-to-employers-2011.pdf (accessed: 28 august 2014). author details the authors, heather conboy, sukhtinder kaur, julie lowe, ian pettit, and dr. rob weale, are project officers in the centre for enhancing learning through technology at de montfort university. collectively their interests are focused on pedagogical aspects of the implementation of learning technologies, with a range of expertise covering digital literacies; accessible learning experiences; virtual communities; distance learning; the use of mobile and classroom technologies and interactive digital multimedia. the team consists of a strategic team lead, six educational developers/project officers (embedded in faculties, the graduate research school and university library) alongside a researcher in digital literacies. the authors would like to acknowledge professor richard hall for his support. http://www.westga.edu/~distance/ojdla/fall93/osika93.htm https://www.vitae.ac.uk/vitae-publications/rdf-related/introducing-the-vitae-researcher-development-framework-rdf-to-employers-2011.pdf https://www.vitae.ac.uk/vitae-publications/rdf-related/introducing-the-vitae-researcher-development-framework-rdf-to-employers-2011.pdf a co-operative, connected and distributed approach to developing digital literacies abstract introduction scoping processes co-operative dialogues distance learning the virtual high street project training needs analysis creating a new resource involved co-operation with a wide range of practitioners. re-designing the tna online required alignment with the current ‘researcher development framework’. we investigated various online survey programmes, however none of the... e-portfolio for biomedical science students our expertise in working closely with course lecturers was key in enabling the development and deployment of an eportfolio utilising wiki technology through the virtual learning environment for the bsc in biomedical science programme. the project invo... summary references author details situated personal development planning journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special edition: researching pdp practice, november 2010   situated personal development planning peter hughes university of bradford, uk neil currant university of salford, uk jackie haigh university of bradford, uk carol higgison university of bradford, uk ruth whitfield university of bradford, uk abstract in the uk, institutional strategies regarding personal development planning (pdp) are based on two main approaches: 1) legitimising local practices, with an emphasis on pdp process, and 2) central approaches, often it based, focused on meeting threshold requirements (ward et al., 2006). this paper reports on the nature and purposes of situated pdp practices that have evolved in four academic programmes of study within a uk university that took the first approach. the study examines the sorts of local pdp practices that have developed within such an institutional framework; how they have come about and what they say about the role and nature of pdp. using an ethnographic approach, supplemented by staff interviews and document analysis, the four case studies illustrate how an enabling institutional framework has afforded academic course teams the spaces to develop implicit and explicit pdp practices. in two cases a formal and explicit programme-deep model of pdp through e-portfolio has been developed. in the others, there are implicit, but strong pdp practices evident hughes, currant, haigh, higgison and whitfield situated personal development planning   although they are not necessarily claimed as pdp. the four case studies are not readily categorised but they do exhibit hybrid characteristics of the ‘professional’, ‘employment’ and ‘academic’ domains (clegg and bradley, 2006). in conclusion, it will be argued that the diverse and situated nature of pdp practices that have emerged in different contexts need not be seen as institutionally troublesome. these four cases present authentic pictures of what pdp has become, even if it isn’t called pdp. key words: pdp; e-portfolio; academic practice; curriculum; social practices. introduction in the uk, institutional strategies regarding personal development planning (pdp) are based on two main approaches (ward, jackson and strivens, 2006): 1) legitimising local practices, with an emphasis on pdp process. 2) central approaches, often it based, focused on meeting threshold requirements. within these two broad categories lies a diversity of pdp practices. the key purpose of this paper is to see what pdp has become in different academic settings, rather than to evaluate pdp practices against some ideal type of what policy makers think it ought to be. to this end this paper will capture four rich pictures of situated pdp practice that have developed within the context of one uk higher education institution (hei). we build on the work of haigh (2008) in looking at the social practices that influence the creation and implementation of pdp. pdp as curriculum development the idea that all students in uk heis should engage in pdp, which together with the institutional transcript would make up something called a ‘progress file’, was put forward by the dearing report (1997). the definitive ‘guidelines for he progress files’ (uuk, scop, universities scotland and qaa, 2001) emerged in 2001 (revised, qaa, 2009) and journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 2  hughes, currant, haigh, higgison and whitfield situated personal development planning   have framed the pdp/progress file policy context since then. the headline requirement of these guidelines was that all uk heis would offer pdp to students on all he awards by 2005/6. as such, this represents a major curriculum change initiative. wholesale curriculum change raises many issues, and as d’andrea and gosling (2005, p.15) point out: many faculty/staff feel alienated by the increased levels of bureaucracy and administration forced on them. the pace and extent of change have led to weariness and resistance to what is perceived to be externally imposed shifts in the higher education environment. curriculum development is a complex process. curricula emerge through a mediation of individual, departmental, faculty/school, institutional and professional/disciplinary factors. toohey’s (1999) analysis of curriculum design practices revealed five major types: discipline-based, performance-based, cognitive, experiential and socially critical. without getting into the detail of what each approach might imply for pdp – the key point to make is that with varied academic contexts, and varied approaches to curriculum design, it should be anticipated that pdp will be received, rejected, welcomed, contested and reconfigured in different ways in different contexts. as clegg puts it (2003, p.817), although dominant policy discourse may present improvements in learning and teaching as axiomatic, what these mean on the ground will be mediated through the concrete actions of those implementing policy. situated academic practices when academics and learning development professionals design pdp learning activities, they are engaged in academic practice. as discussed above, pdp therefore needs to be considered in the situation where it is designed and implemented. the idea of situated academic practice lies at the convergence of a number of ideas: • discipline-based ‘academic tribes’ with distinct practices in research and learning and teaching (becher and trowler, 2001). • communities of practice (cop) (lave and wenger, 1991). journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 3  hughes, currant, haigh, higgison and whitfield situated personal development planning   • ways of thinking and practicing (wtp) (entwistle, 2003). a further way of exploring the various influences on academic practices lies with a social practices approach (bamber et al., 2009). this approach recognises that people are ‘carriers of practices’, and develop unique sets of practices in different contexts. when looking at heis, this perspective will reveal a ‘multi-cultural configuration’ of different social practices in different locales. these practices are shaped by ‘tools’, which might be anything from a policy document to a specific piece of learning technology. the practices that emerge will also be significantly influenced by the dominant discourse of each context. a further key element is that ‘histories and stories about the past will impact on enhancement initiatives in the present’ (trowler, 2010, p.5). institutional context the university of bradford was established in 1966 as one of a group of ‘technological’ universities. in uk terms it is small-medium sized. more than 70% of its taught courses are professionally accredited or recognised. the university has a strong widening participation mission. its current student profile reflects a strong local/regional basis (44% of first year students live at home) but also a high proportion of international students (20% currently the highest of any uk hei outside of london). just over half the students are black or ethnic minorities (bem). the university is organised around seven academic schools: life sciences; management; engineering, design and technology; health; computing, informatics and media; social and international studies and lifelong education and development. the university established a progress files working group in 2003 which developed an institutional framework for personal development planning. this was agreed by senate in may 2005 and has been integrated with the institutional learning, teaching and assessment strategy. the framework anticipates that bradford students’ pdp experiences will largely be defined by their academic course, and while requiring a threshold provision of pdp opportunity for students, is not directive or restrictive. the process of establishing a pdp framework also led to the adoption of an institution-wide e-portfolio provision from 2007-8, with the commercial pebblepad package being selected. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 4  hughes, currant, haigh, higgison and whitfield situated personal development planning   methodology this paper emerges from a small-scale study that was conducted as part of the higher education academy (hea) funded national teaching fellowship scheme (ntfs) project strand: the national action research network for researching pdp and e-portfolios (2007-2010). a related project, conducted in parallel with this one, draws upon a similar evidence base but has a primary focus on the use of e-portfolios in the development of learner autonomy (currant et al., 2010). the authors are all immersed in the pdp practices of the institution, be that as subjectbased lecturers, educational and learning developers or learning technologists. all of us are to some degree pdp teachers, the majority of us also provide advice and training on aspects of pdp and/or e-portfolios to other academic and learner support staff across the institution. as such we are very much engaged as actors and agents in the processes that this research area covers. while this gives us great access to what we have researched, we acknowledge that our own activities and perspectives will have some influence on our interpretation of pdp practices. within this context our research has been conducted using a pragmatic, mixed method approach (johnson, 2004) drawing upon elements of ethnography and case study analysis (cousin, 2009). it is primarily qualitative in nature. the ethnographic approach emerges from us being immersed in the field of inquiry, noting and gathering impressions and evidence relating to pdp within the context of the academic cultures that they are produced in. this evidence partly comes from formal research interventions, like interviews and document analysis (or course documents, programme specifications, module handbooks), and partly through informal observations and conversations gathered through our normal working practices. a case study approach is appropriate to our emphasis on situated academic practices and our interest in looking at how pdp has developed in specific case-bounded circumstances. through purposeful sampling we selected four academic programmes of study as our cases, each from different schools of the university. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 5  hughes, currant, haigh, higgison and whitfield situated personal development planning   situated pdp – four cases some description is necessary to provide context for the situated pdp practice, but in selecting certain aspects of each case to foreground here we are also offering an interpretative perspective. drawing from our synthesis of evidence relating to the cases, we are presenting some key elements of the particularities of situated pdp, and some explanation and interpretation of how those came about. as explained above, we want to outline what pdp has become in each of the cases, but also explore what has influenced it to develop in that way. psychology this is a relatively newly established degree course for the university, and is accredited by the british psychological society (bps). from its inception it was recognised that there was an opportunity to forge links between the academic subject content (e.g. key concepts in educational psychology) with provision for the learning development of the students. a first year module the psychology of learning and study was created with this in mind: students study concepts like metacognition, but then reflect on how what they have learned affects their own learning. students compile and present an e-portfolio which includes reflections, action plans and a cv. beyond the first year pdp is not formally embedded within a module, but is integrated to the course through personal tutor support, and students and tutors have a pdp handbook for each year of the degree. the lecturer who co-ordinates pdp describes its key role as: to get students into the way of studying and reflecting on that. to provide structured support that integrates learning of skills, reflection and self-development. a key aspect is alignment with the british psychological society’s expectations for students. two excerpts from student first-year portfolios illustrate the sorts of approaches that students can take within this environment: journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 6  hughes, currant, haigh, higgison and whitfield situated personal development planning   one of the most important goals for me was to become involved in some sort of voluntary work. it is my ultimate goal to become a clinical psychologist and work in the national health service or a mental health trust. enrolling as a volunteer will certainly improve my cv when i begin to apply for postgraduate study or for prospective jobs. (student a, portfolio extract) in reflection to the goals and steps outlined above, i view them to be quite realistic. this is a self evaluative reaction as outlined by baumeister (1999) in relation to self efficacy. (student b, portfolio extract) the first of these reveals a strong professional orientation, the second illustrates how a combination of subject knowledge and self-reflection has been elicited by the psychology of learning and study module. an earlier investigation of the relationship between metacognition, reflection and learning on this module showed that students viewed the engagement with e-portfolio as positive, and that both structured and unstructured reflection through the e-portfolio improve the students’ use of metacognitive strategies (rodway et al., 2008). in developing their approach, the subject group have drawn upon the resources of the uk higher education academy psychology network (e.g. lantz, 2008), and have also made use of instruments developed by the central learner development unit (ldu) of the university, for example, the sapra tool (http://www.brad.ac.uk/developme/sapra/) (currant et al., 2008a). this illustrates a desire both to situate the pdp practice within the national subject base but also within the resources of the broader institution. the approach to pdp is programme-deep and embedded and has both strong academic and professional orientation. combined studies like many uk heis, the university of bradford offers a programme of study whereby students can study different, normally discrete, subjects in various combinations. such courses often have a strong ethos of lifelong learning. unlike most other degree journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 7  http://www.brad.ac.uk/developme/sapra/ hughes, currant, haigh, higgison and whitfield situated personal development planning   programmes within uk higher education, there is no subject benchmark to frame the nature of the provision, nor is there a higher education subject centre. the host school for ba/bsc combined studies degree requested a staff development session relating to pdp. the request for the session was partly motivated by a perception that the course pdp provision was not yet up to speed with institutional and national requirements. this perception was partly fed by the fact that little or nothing that students did within the course was labelled as pdp. during the course of the workshop, when the design and practices of the course were examined, a different story emerged. the course offers students the opportunity to combine courses from different parts of the university, but in order to bring some coherence to the student experience, there are a number of core modules: • in 1st year: the effective learner; communication in an information age. • in 2nd year: critical planning; career planning. • in 3rd year: dissertation. an excerpt from the programme learning outcomes illustrates how much of what would be typically regarded as pdp activity is embedded in the course: on completion of the combined studies core modules, you will be able to: develop self-management and study skills appropriate to your own needs and the requirements of your course of study; formulate a career development plan to implement in both the short and long terms, showing a connection between past, present and future career goals; through personal reflection evaluate your skills, abilities, interests and values and relate these to a range of career options; demonstrate an ability to plan and complete a study based on a selected topic. (excerpt: ba/bsc combined studies programme specification). the two main constituencies of the student body are: mature students, motivated but lacking confidence as learners; students repeating after failing in other courses, less motivated and again lacking in confidence as learners. the social and learning context of one learner is illustrated by the following portfolio extract: journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 8  hughes, currant, haigh, higgison and whitfield situated personal development planning   the amount of work each week did sometimes prove difficult being a single parent, working full time and having only a laptop between us at home. i did manage to complete most, but not all, of the tasks on time. time management is certainly something to improve for future modules, as well as the purchase of another computer, as my children use the laptop for their homework as did i for this module. (student c, portfolio extract) another student reflected on a key pdp process, action planning, within the context of her primary motivation for coming to university: i always have an action plan at the back of my mind, err i’ve come here to do something, i’ve come here to learn, i’ve taken time out,...i want to learn and as i said, i’m an independent learner, what i’ve come for and that’s what i want to achieve so my hard work will prove it i hope. (student f, interview) another pointed to the benefits that emerged from being asked to engage in ongoing, week by week reflective activity: it’s a week by week reflection on how we err see the module, what we’ve been doing, what we’ve learnt, kind of a week by week reflection if you like on, on how we’ve learned and then doing the actual sort of end of module reflective statement you’ve actually got the blogs to refer back to because i didn’t realise how much you’ve actually learnt; because it is step by step. you don’t appreciate until you actually look back and, oh yeah this is what i thought at the beginning and then you can see how you’ve built up all the way through. so it has been really good. (student e, interview) the key thing to draw out from this case is the fact that the course team have identified a particular set of learning development needs for their students, and designed a curriculum appropriate to meet those. this involves developing purposeful learning habits, reflection and action planning. this design would be widely recognised as a pdp curriculum, but it has not been developed as a response to a sector or institutional pdp agenda, it is just the journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 9  hughes, currant, haigh, higgison and whitfield situated personal development planning   appropriate curriculum for their students. pdp is context specific rather than discipline specific in this situation. geography, environmental science and environmental management these are three closely related small degree programmes offered from within the school of life sciences. tutors have taken a proactive attitude to integrating skills development, collaborative working and reflection into the curriculum (hopkinson et al., 2003). in the first year students complete a module in contemporary issues in geography and environmental management which has a skills focus (hopkinson and whitfield, 2005). in the second year, environmental management: case studies involves collaborative working with a strong emphasis on employability and real-world engagement (hopkinson et al., 2009). the final year features an initiative that embeds reflective learning and eportfolio use within a mainstream subject based module (hughes, 2010; hughes et al., 2010). an extract from a student portfolio mid-way through their final year gives a glimpse into how the relationships between personal interest, career development and academic aspects of the course can be integrated within a student’s reflection and planning activity: i remain excited by the challenges within the field of water management...in this light, i wish to gain a position dealing with the legislative aspects of (global) water management...my ‘dream job’ would be with the un water centre in hamilton, canada,...this strongly influenced my module choices last summer. i chose global environmental management as at its core is the critical engagement with global management systems, strongly overlapping with my ambitions for my future in regards to water. (student g, portfolio extract) a number of issues emerge from exploring the pdp activity in this subject area. there is a strong influence of staff personal epistemologies of teaching which has led to a willingness to innovate and to engage with learning and teaching initiatives. however, there is a strong emphasis on contextualising and grounding this within the subject study. to aid in this there has been significant engagement with the hea-gees subject centre which has been proactive in developing the pdp, skills and employability agenda with geography, earth and environmental sciences (gedye and chalkley, 2006). much of the relevant curriculum journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 10  http://www.inweh.unu.edu/inweh/ hughes, currant, haigh, higgison and whitfield situated personal development planning   activity is not labelled pdp and in some cases emerges from ‘key skills’ initiatives that predate pdp. if students were asked if they were doing pdp, they would probably not know, yet the core components of pdp are embedded in their curriculum. the relatively small size of the course has raised some issues as institutional reorganisations have changed where the subject department is located. when this happens, pdp curriculum practices that have evolved internally over many years can be under pressure from, for example, merging modules with those offered by associated subjects. this illustrates that if pdp practices are to endure, they need to be resilient to change. midwifery the midwifery programme is delivered through problem-based learning (pbl) and has a distinctive core spine of lifelong learning modules. in each of these modules students compile an e-portfolio and throughout their course they are recording and reflecting on their academic and professional experiences (haigh and meddings, 2008). the portfolio building activity serves to link the academic and practice parts of the course and continues while students are on placements (haigh and currant, 2010). students complete reflective statements at the beginning and end of each year and the final year portfolio also includes reflections on preparing for and attending job interviews. an extract from a final year portfolio student illustrates the proactive attitude toward pdp at the beginning of the year: academically this will be a tough year. i have already started to develop plans for my practice project and have made contact with significant people for support. i have organised my learning needs and intend to make use of all available support from the university. i will discuss all plans with my personal tutor and will access her support on a regular basis. i have made arrangements to take part in various workshops run by the learner development unit to develop my writing skills and develop a more confident attitude when carrying out presentations. (student d, portfolio extract) journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 11  hughes, currant, haigh, higgison and whitfield situated personal development planning   this programme serves as an example of pdp being fully embedded within assessed modules at each level of study. these life-long learning modules have been explicitly designed to support students’ transition and progression into, through and out of their university study into their profession. although stand-alone modules, they also serve to integrate other aspects of the programme, for example, practice placements and interprofessional learning. one consequence of the move toward pdp through e-portfolio in this course has been that what has been typically seen as an individual process (personal reflection, personal action planning), has become more collaborative as students share reflections and support each other through the e-portfolio, particularly when they are in practice settings (haigh and currant, 2010). thus personal development planning is becoming collaborative development planning (currant et al., 2008b). discussion and conclusion the brief outlines above give a glimpse into the diverse forms of pdp curriculum that have developed within different social contexts. the mix of influences on these practices includes professions, disciplines, student characteristics, personal epistemologies of individual teachers, institutional context, resources and technologies. in response to the question ‘what has pdp become?’, the answer is different in each context. it is tempting to try to fit this diversity into boxes, to order and classify it. for example, we could analyse the cases in terms of clegg and bradley’s (2006) three ideal types of pdp: professional; employment; and academic. however, it is more consistent with a social practices based analysis to revel in the particularities of each case. we have exposed a range of situated pedagogies of pdp; we have not identified a best practice pedagogy of pdp. we haven’t addressed in this project questions about which of these practices, these pedagogies, are more or less successful in promoting student learning. the general thrust of our argument is that the context, the situation, is absolutely key. what may be empirically shown to be an effective pdp practice in one context, may not translate into another context. as ylijoki states (2000, p.360): journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 12  hughes, currant, haigh, higgison and whitfield situated personal development planning   …there can be no universal criteria for quality nor any single, correct model to be mechanistically implemented in order to improve teaching. instead, both the assessment and the improvement of teaching have to emanate from each department’s own cultural bias. what we think the four cases do show is that local contexts and cultures (and the individuals of which they are composed) are influential in shaping pdp practices. these can be learning cultures which can respond to changing circumstances (e.g. in characteristics of students). these local cultures are in turn situated within and mediated by their institutional context, with the institutional ‘centre’ seen both as a pressure and a resource. a social practices analysis of these cases shows that although individual and local practices have had the space to develop, there is still a broader social context that these situations are positioned within. as kogan (2000, p.210) puts it, part of individual academic identity is a professional identity: …which is both individual and social, so that people are stronger because of their expertise and their own moral and conceptual frameworks, but also performing a range of roles which are strongly determined by the communities and institutions of which they are members. if we can say anything about pdp effectiveness at this stage, it would be that, from a social practices perspective, pedagogies of pdp are likely to be better understood, and more relevant, if they are developed and introduced paying attention to the range of social influences on curriculum design. perhaps the pdp community, and policy makers, need to worry less about whether the right sort of pdp is happening, and instead focus on encouraging ‘reflective practice within reflexive departments that are situated in learning universities’ (trowler et al., 2005, p.440). acknowledgement this paper is an outcome of the national action research network on researching and evaluating personal development planning and e-portfolio practice project (2007-2010). the project was led by the university of bolton in association with the university of journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 13  hughes, currant, haigh, higgison and whitfield situated personal development planning   worcester and centre for recording achievement, and in national collaboration with the university of bedfordshire, bournemouth university and university of bradford. the project was funded by the higher education academy, national teaching fellowship project strand. more details about the project can be found at: http://www.recordingachievement.org/research/narn-tree.html. references bamber, r., trowler, p., saunders, m. and knight, p. (2009) enhancing learning, teaching, assessment and curriculum in higher education. buckingham: open university press. becher, t. and trowler, p. (2001) academic tribes and territories. 2nd edn. buckingham: open university press. clegg, s. (2003) ‘learning and teaching policies in higher education: mediations and contradictions of practice’, british educational research journal, 29(6), pp. 803819. clegg, s. and bradley, s. (2006) ‘models of personal development: practices and processes’, british educational research journal, 32(1), pp. 57-76. cousin, g. (2009) researching learning in higher education, new york and abingdon: routledge. currant, n., currant, r. and whitfield, r. (2008a) ‘from paper to e-portfolio: the meteoric progression of a university skills tool’, learning excellence – making it happen: jisc rsc-yh e-learning conference. university of bradford 10 june. available at: http://www.slideshare.net/ncurrant/online-skills-profile (accessed: 9 june 2010). currant, n., hughes, p., currant, r. and whitfield, r. (2008b) ‘from pdp to cdp? exploring pdp and web 2.0 connections at bradford’, pdp and web 2.0: opportunity for partnership? cra seminar. available at: http://www.elp.ac.uk/downloads/craweb2.pdf (accessed: 9 june 2010). journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 14  http://www.recordingachievement.org/research/narn-tree.html http://www.slideshare.net/ncurrant/online-skills-profile http://www.elp.ac.uk/downloads/craweb2.pdf hughes, currant, haigh, higgison and whitfield situated personal development planning   currant, n., haigh, j., higgison, c., hughes, p., rodway, p. and whitfield, r. (2010) designing e-portfolio based learning activities to promote learner autonomy: final report to the fourth cohort of the inter/national coalition for research into electronic portfolios. available at: http://ncepr.org/finalreports/cohort4/university%20of%20bradford%20final%20rep ort.pdf [accessed: 9 june 2010]. d’andrea, v.m. and gosling, d. (2005) improving teaching and learning in higher education: a whole institution approach. london: mcgraw-hill. dearing, r. (1997) report of the national committee of inquiry into higher education. london: hmso. entwistle, n. (2003) concepts and conceptual frameworks underpinning the etl project: occasional report 3. edinburgh: tlrp and esrc. available at: http://www.ed.ac.uk/etl/docs/etlreport3.pdf (accessed: 18 january 2007). gedye, s. and chalkley, b. (2006) employability within geography, earth and environmental sciences. plymouth: hea-gees. available at: http://www.gees.ac.uk/pubs/guides/emp/geesemployability.pdf (accessed: 9 june 2010). haigh, j. (2008) ‘integrating progress files into the academic process: a review of case studies’, active learning in higher education, 9, pp. 57-71. haigh, j. and meddings, f. (2008) ‘using an assessed e-portfolio to support and monitor personalised and collaborative learning in an undergraduate midwifery programme’, conference proceedings: e-portfolios, identity and personalised learning in healthcare education, special report 10. newcastle: hea-medicine, dentistry and veterinary medicine [online]. available at: http://www.medev.heacademy.ac.uk/static/uploads/workshop_resources/105/105_e portfolios___lr.pdf (accessed: 9 june 2010). journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 15  http://ncepr.org/finalreports/cohort4/university%20of%20bradford%20final%20report.pdf http://ncepr.org/finalreports/cohort4/university%20of%20bradford%20final%20report.pdf http://www.ed.ac.uk/etl/docs/etlreport3.pdf http://www.gees.ac.uk/pubs/guides/emp/geesemployability.pdf http://www.medev.heacademy.ac.uk/static/uploads/workshop_resources/105/105_eportfolios___lr.pdf http://www.medev.heacademy.ac.uk/static/uploads/workshop_resources/105/105_eportfolios___lr.pdf hughes, currant, haigh, higgison and whitfield situated personal development planning   haigh, j. and currant, n. (2010) ‘guiding, supporting and assessing midwifery students in clinical placements’, effective use of pebblepad: a collection of case studies from pebblebash 2010 [online]. available at: http://www.pebblepad.co.uk/pp2010/cs04.pdf (accessed: 22 july 2010). hopkinson, p., sharp, l. and whitfield, r. (2003) ‘demonstrating progress in key skills – stories from the front line’, learning and teaching conference. university of bradford 18 june. hopkinson, p. and whitfield, r. (2005) ‘measuring key skills through progress files’, learning, teaching and assessment conference. university of bradford 7 june. hopkinson, p., sharp, l., leigh miles, s. and comerford boyes, l. (2009) ‘from harvard to bradford: experiences of running a peer education for sustainable development project’, planet, 22, pp. 34-38 [online]. available at: http://www.gees.ac.uk/planet/p22/phlssmlb.pdf (accessed: 9 june 2010). hughes, p. (2010) ‘a critical, collaborative and constructivist pedagogy for the social science of climate change’, in haslett, s.k., france, d. and gedye, s. (eds.) pedagogy of climate change. plymouth: hea-gees. (in press) hughes, p., currant, n., haigh, j., higgison, c. and whitfield, r. (2010) ‘integrating subject knowledge and self-development to promote learner autonomy through eportfolios’, gees learning and teaching to 2020: gees subject centre 10th annual conference. university of plymouth 7-9 july [online]. http://gees.ac.uk/events/2010/ac2010/ac2010.htm (accessed: 23 july 2010). johnson, a.j. (2004) ‘mixed methods research: a research paradigm whose time has come’, educational researcher, 33(7), pp. 14-26. kogan, m. (2000) ‘higher education communities and academic identity’, higher education quarterly, 54(3), pp. 207-216. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 16  http://www.pebblepad.co.uk/pp2010/cs04.pdf http://www.gees.ac.uk/planet/p22/phlssmlb.pdf http://gees.ac.uk/events/2010/ac2010/ac2010.htm hughes, currant, haigh, higgison and whitfield situated personal development planning   lantz, c. (2008) ‘psychology student employability guide’, higher education academy psychology network [online]. available at: http://www.psychology.heacademy.ac.uk/docs/pdf/p20080915_employability_guide .pdf (accessed: 9 june 2010). lave, j. and wenger, e. (1991) situated learning: legitimate peripheral participation. new york: cambridge university press. qaa (2009) personal development planning: guidance for institutional policy and practice in higher education. gloucester: qaa. rodway, p., schepman, a. and hartley, p. (2008) ‘the effect of e-portfolios on reflection and metacognition’, psychology learning and teaching conference. bath 1-3 july 2008 [online]. available at: http://www.psychology.heacademy.ac.uk/plat2008/html/programme.asp (accessed: 9 june 2010). toohey, s. (1999) designing courses for higher education. buckingham: srhe/oup. trowler, p., fanghanel, j. and wareham, t. (2005) ‘freeing the chi of change: the higher education academy and enhancing teaching and learning in higher education’, studies in higher education, 30(4), pp. 427-444. trowler, p. (2010) ‘large scale university curriculum change: from practice to theory (and back again)’, tomorrow’s sustainable universities, university of bradford 15-16 july. [online]. available at: http://www.brad.ac.uk/sustainableuniversities/media/sustainableuniversities/keynote-prof-paul-trowler.pdf (accessed: 4 october 2010). uuk, scop, universities scotland and qaa (2001) guidelines for he progress files [online]. available at: http://www.qaa.ac.uk/academicinfrastructure/progressfiles/guidelines/progfile2001.p df (accessed: 9 june 2010). journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 17  http://www.psychology.heacademy.ac.uk/docs/pdf/p20080915_employability_guide.pdf http://www.psychology.heacademy.ac.uk/docs/pdf/p20080915_employability_guide.pdf http://www.psychology.heacademy.ac.uk/plat2008/html/programme.asp http://www.brad.ac.uk/sustainable-universities/media/sustainableuniversities/keynote-prof-paul-trowler.pdf http://www.brad.ac.uk/sustainable-universities/media/sustainableuniversities/keynote-prof-paul-trowler.pdf http://www.qaa.ac.uk/academicinfrastructure/progressfiles/guidelines/progfile2001.pdf http://www.qaa.ac.uk/academicinfrastructure/progressfiles/guidelines/progfile2001.pdf hughes, currant, haigh, higgison and whitfield situated personal development planning   ward, r., jackson, n. and strivens, j. (2006) progress files – are we achieving our goals? a working paper. centre for recording achievement and the higher education academy. [online]. available at: http://www.recordingachievement.org/research/narn.html?view=item&item_id=397 (accessed: 24 august 2010). ylijoki, o.h. (2000) ‘disciplinary cultures and the moral order of studying: a case study of four finnish university departments’, higher education, 39(3), pp. 339-362. author details peter hughes is senior lecturer in learning development within the centre for educational development at the university of bradford (p.hughes3@bradford.ac.uk). neil currant is academic development adviser in the learning development unit at the university of salford. jackie haigh is lecturer in midwifery in the division of midwifery and reproductive health at the university of bradford. carol higgison is senior lecturer in e-learning within the centre for educational development at the university of bradford. ruth whitfield is learning architect within the centre for educational development at the university of bradford. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 18  http://www.recordingachievement.org/research/narn.html?view=item&item_id=397 mailto:p.hughes3@bradford.ac.uk situated personal development planning abstract introduction pdp as curriculum development situated academic practices institutional context methodology situated pdp – four cases psychology combined studies geography, environmental science and environmental management midwifery discussion and conclusion acknowledgement references author details literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 10: november 2016 emerging strategies for supporting student learning a book review of allan, b. (2016) emerging strategies for supporting student learning. london: facet publishing. helena beeson university of northampton, uk keywords: strategies for supporting student learning; skills; employability. overview changing times in terms of fees, student expectations, ‘millennials’ etc., all demonstrate the need for the shift in thinking that creates the call for this book. the title reflects a very practical, hands-on approach and the book delivers exactly what it says on the cover. this is achieved through case studies and tried and tested methods from a number of international institutions. specific approaches to teaching and learning are discussed and evaluated from the perspective of librarians and associated tutor roles, although it would be applicable to anyone teaching in higher education (he) or even further education (fe). the text reflects the author’s background in he working in libraries and learning and teaching, focusing on the student experience, internationalisation and employability. this publication is organised in four obvious overarching sections. it starts with the students’ needs, including skills and employability, then moves on to the discussion and utilisation of teaching and learning strategies. the third part takes a step back and looks at the preparation and design of some of the more recent teaching methods that many of us will already be aware of. these include the increased use of technology and autonomous learning associated with flipped and blended approaches, along with a discussion around the delivery and evaluation of these methods. finally, opportunities for professional development are considered, including networking and self-led courses. throughout the text, lots of case studies illustrate some of the practices used as examples and to beeson emerging strategies for supporting student learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 10: november 2016 2 demonstrate how differently organisations and individuals approach similar issues successfully. structure and content at the beginning of the book, the question is raised about whether we as professionals consider the technological needs and expertise of our learners, establishing a loose theme for the book around the diverse nature of the student body. the importance of preparing for and responding to ongoing change faced by he is stressed and complemented by a renewed call for collaboration between library staff, course tutors and other support teams. a challenge to student stereotypes is offered in an overview of different groups in chapter two, along with the various approaches and methods we have for interacting with each of them. this reflects the recent valuable shift in working with our learners as partners in their own learning, although in my own experience there are still a number of undergraduates who want to be told what to do with specific instructions on tasks and handholding throughout assignments. as the jisc report for technology for employability states (chatterton and rebbeck, 2015), graduates are not ‘work-ready’ and need to be empowered as self-aware independent learners. student attitudes are not discussed in the text or covered in wider research particularly, but there is a great deal focused on engagement strategies and technology throughout the literature. the author explores a range of literacies including digital literacy and media literacy. allan discusses how these can contribute to redesigning teaching approaches, including quizzes, organised events, and establishing one’s own online identity. notably, this section promotes the shift of information literacy from a prescriptive, linear approach, to reflect the more chaotic reality of the trial and error nature of research. several frameworks are introduced which address different points of focus, for example, digital literacy competencies (a model of applied information literacy which promotes collaboration and digital badges for accomplishment). employability is a general theme which runs throughout the text, but it is discussed specifically in terms of our professional role in contributing to graduate attributes. peer learning and working with students to cultivate their own university experiences are suggested as useful strategies. this is an area librarians have been working towards for many years from a more individual student perspective, but in order to promote all beeson emerging strategies for supporting student learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 10: november 2016 3 employability opportunities, allan emphasises the importance of aligning with all areas of the university, including taking a proactive role in shaping strategic developments. common teaching and learning approaches are explored and evaluated, including the use of reflection and group working. practical applications of these are offered in the guise of almost everything from lectures to gamification to podcasts. these are considered as largely student-led with some useful tips and appropriate plans for delivery. the only notable omission here is the use of lego in teaching which has been a source of debate recently for learning developers as to whether it represents the infantilisation of teaching or an exciting opportunity for enabling learning (james, 2015). the arguments for student engagement and social learning are also presented which are at the core of our experiences as tutors and librarians. in fact, this area could be developed into another book in its own right given the changing nature of students and expectations over the last few years. the book then takes a step upwards in the hierarchy of delivering teaching and discusses how these strategies can be incorporated in the programme design level. it stresses the importance of constructive alignment whereby activities need to be planned to reflect designated learning outcomes. to reinforce this, the basic design principles of courses are also taken into account. the planning of individual activities is woven in well through the use of bloom’s taxonomy, existing pro-formas and the identification of a number of resources which can be reused and repurposed. flipped and blended learning approaches are demonstrated positively from a librarian’s perspective. most of this section discusses asynchronous tools and techniques where students do not have to engage with study at the same time, and avoids the technical issues often connected with synchronous learning which can affect distance learners in various time zones and those with poor internet connectivity. the practicalities and detail associated with teaching are covered in depth in order for the reader to be as prepared as possible for any challenges and opportunities they may face as an effective teacher. this includes both face-to-face and online provision, timing, and elements of emotional intelligence. it appears that this section is aimed primarily at those new to teaching, although this is not stated explicitly (bar a short section on embedded librarians). some of the good practice guidelines would have been useful for me as an assistant librarian back when we were concerned about the millennium bug, while others beeson emerging strategies for supporting student learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 10: november 2016 4 demonstrate how far such beneficial technology has come in recent years. it serves as a useful refresher today and the up-to-date case studies demonstrate the specific issues associated with the discussed approaches. the question of quality provides a valuable discussion point with the observation that many of the teachers working within library and information services may not be subject to the same quality processes as the rest of their institutions. it is therefore recommended that librarians and their teaching colleagues should identify their institution’s stance and relevant policies in order to inform their approach. the uk quality code for higher education is explained in detail which will undoubtedly be useful to anyone who has not come across it in this field. the evaluation of the quality of learning and teaching activities from a library perspective is explained in depth with a range of both qualitative and quantitative measures investigated to determine impact. these include statistics and analytics, interviews, key performance indicators and focus groups. however, there is no link back to the uk quality code provided here which would have been useful. the final part of this hands-on and accessible text is concerned with professional development and appears to be aimed at newly qualified librarians and information workers. options for networking and the benefits of a number of international library and information professional associations are discussed. there is no mention of any limitations, however, such as cost. workshops, self-led courses and online networks are offered and explored as strategies for professional growth which includes a number of well-known websites. overall, this book represents a good snapshot of where our professions are at currently, along with some of the challenges we are facing in our ever-evolving roles. more could be included in places, but part of the appeal of the text is that it is designed to offer guidance succinctly and perhaps quickly at a time of need. to this end the language is very clear and accessible. useful practical approaches for teaching are offered throughout and each chapter comes armed with an impressive list of case studies and references so you know you are in safe, informed hands with this book. beeson emerging strategies for supporting student learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 10: november 2016 5 references chatterton, p. and rebbeck, g. (2015) report: technology for employability. study into the role of technology in developing student employability, jisc. available at: http://repository.jisc.ac.uk/6249/3/technology_for_employability_-_full_report.pdf (accessed: 23 may 2016). james, a. (2015) innovating in the creative arts with lego. available at: https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/innovating-creative-arts-lego (accessed: 1 june 2016). author details helena beeson is an academic practice tutor at the university of northampton and practised as an academic librarian for 10 years. research interests include reflection and collaboration. she has a reputation for grammatical pedancy. http://repository.jisc.ac.uk/6249/3/technology_for_employability_-_full_report.pdf https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/innovating-creative-arts-lego emerging strategies for supporting student learning a book review of allan, b. (2016) emerging strategies for supporting student learning. london: facet publishing. overview structure and content references author details literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special edition: researching pdp practice, november 2010 forming communities of practice christine keenan bournemouth university, uk arti kumar university of bedfordshire, uk peter hughes university of bradford, uk abstract the national action research network (narn) on researching and evaluating personal development planning (pdp) and e-portfolio was funded through the higher education academy national teaching fellowship scheme in 2007. it brought together a partnership of people from 16 english higher education institutions (heis) who were already members of national pdp networks – most significantly the centre for recording achievement. the broader project aim was to develop research capacity among pdp practitioners and in order to help keep this aim manageable, smaller groups based on regional groupings were set up. although the membership did come together to share experiences at national events, it was thought that the smaller groups would be more manageable units for the more concentrated work of setting up local research projects. each group member came with an idea for a research project, many of which are exemplified in this special edition, and over the course of the three years regional groups met to review, feedback and build on the research they had been undertaking. this brief article describes the experiences of the three regional groups and concludes that there are a number of characteristics that contribute to the success of a community of practice, including notions of joint enterprise, shared repertoire and mutual engagement, but success in achieving these relies on shared commitments and the development of trust and respect amongst the group members. key words: communities of practice; regional groups; team working; research. keenan, kumar and hughes forming communities of practice introduction communities of practice can develop when a group of like-minded people come together informally to share common interests. an example of this might be the coming together of practitioners within the learning development in higher education community, an informal grouping of people who share a vision and passion for empowering student learning. they can also be formed more formally for a particular purpose, for example, the ntfs narn project which is the subject of this case study. in this example, a network of people who were already involved in national personal development planning networks were brought together to develop and share their knowledge and experience. according to lave and wenger (1991) it is through the sharing of information, experiences and practice that members learn from each other and develop themselves personally and professionally. according to wenger (1998) a community of practice is constituted of people who have a passion for what they do and through interactions with others can improve their practice. for lave and wenger a community of practice has three important features: firstly the domain, which in the ntfs narn example is personal development planning (pdp); secondly, the community and finally, the practice. our community was drawn from an existing grouping of practitioners who all share a passion for pdp and are all members of the centre for recording achievement. the three year ntfs narn project was designed to be an action research network structured through three regional groupings. these smaller groupings within the overall project provided a space within which members could explore, share experiences and progress, develop themselves personally and professionally and, most importantly, act as critical friends to each other. by briefly reviewing their experiences it is possible to draw out some of the features of successful communities of practice. the overall aim of the ntfs narn project was to develop research capacity within the uk pdp community. the deliberate regional grouping of partners (south, midlands and north) was helpful as it made regular face-to-face meetings more feasible and six scheduled regional meetings were held during the three years of the project. the meetings were designed to mirror the project research cycle. the sequence of meetings was: • trust building and sharing issues. • defining research questions. • sharing and discussion about gathering data. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 2 keenan, kumar and hughes forming communities of practice • sharing and discussion about analysing data. • discussion of research findings and recommendations. • dissemination strategies. the southern region experience – led by christine keenan the southern region bonded into an effective community of practice very quickly. members came from universities in kent, canterbury, portsmouth, exeter and bournemouth and brought a wide range of strengths and experiences with them to the project. a significant feature of this group was its membership stability: there were no changes in institutional or individual membership during the life span of the three year project. the group membership was all female. a key factor for the southern region was that most members already knew each other, which facilitated rapid bonding. it is difficult to know whether gender was in itself a significant factor in the bonding process that led to a very successful group, or whether it was something to do with the combination of circumstances which were stable membership, existing strong relationships and shared core values that seems to define how our very effective strong community of practice evolved so quickly. an important further characteristic of this group was the highly developed sense of mutual support and shared endeavour that came through the first discussions. this speedily set the scene and atmosphere around the exploration of new ideas and provided a safe space for the articulation of any doubts, concerns or worries that emerged during the time of the project. regular face to face meetings took place, and although the first meeting was held within an institutional context, subsequent meetings were held at the british museum and the british library in london. initially this was done to ease travel difficulties across the width of the region but the change of scenery and atmosphere was very much valued by the members. the trips to london, the beautiful surroundings, the sense of occasion and special lunches added to the sense of occasion! the southern team shared a common vision of the project goals which were to improve staff and student experiences of pdp. our shared interest and collective enthusiasms formed the basis of our mutual learning. these shared interests and enthusiasms provided the underpinning of a sense of ‘belonging to a community’, our developing confidence in ‘becoming’ researchers, how understandings and meanings developed through our journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 3 keenan, kumar and hughes forming communities of practice ‘experiences’, and how we put our practice into ‘doing’ action, mirrored wenger's 1998 model (figure 1). learning practice learning as doing community learning as belonging identity learning as meaning learning as figure 1. wenger (1998, p.5). the southern team took successful outcomes as a given. however, within the expectation of successful outcomes, the team developed an environment in which worries could be expressed, new ideas and approaches could be safely explored, and reassurance given when things went wrong. criticality was also achieved. the group acted as critical friends, challenging each other, being critically evaluative, praising each other and learning from each other. there are quantifiable measures of success. for example, deadlines were met and attendance was high at regional and national meetings. exactly how success was achieved is less tangible. there were frequent communications including phone conversations and email discussions, and extra meetings were held when needed, for example, when one member had been unable to attend scheduled regional meetings other members got together and met with her separately to keep her up to speed. success was also achieved by members working proactively on each other’s behalf when pressures of other work were pressing. this was central to the members making effective personal contributions within the community of practice. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 4 keenan, kumar and hughes forming communities of practice it was hard work and sometimes traumatic. however, the team members got to know each other very well and had clear insights into each other’s contexts and local stress points. the success of the group relied very much on the interplay between its members each playing their part in the identity building and maintenance of the group. this closeness helped the southern region members sustain each other through the hard times both emotionally with encouragement and practically with members picking up work for each other when times were difficult. there was also a lot of fun along the way which helped with the community maintenance that is so important in developing communities of practice. the midlands group experience – led by arti kumar the midlands region comprised membership from universities at bedfordshire, birmingham city, coventry, gloucester, wolverhampton and worcester. again there was stability in the institutional membership with all six institutions and a core group of individuals staying with the project for its three year lifespan. however, in contrast to the southern region, over the course of the project about twenty further partners were drawn in, sometimes temporarily, sometimes as permanent substitutions. this led to different dynamics but the midland team maintained a sense of continuity of purpose throughout, though more in the sense of team building rather than community of practice development. during their first meeting, the team concentrated on getting to know each other, creating shared understandings and a common vision of the group’s perception of the overall project goals and a vision of what might be realistically achieved. a graphic representation was used as a frame of reference for the discussions (figure 2) to remind partners that team dynamics and processes are influenced by a variety of factors that in turn influence project management and project outcomes. the graphic provided a useful reflective resource to help partners look inwards as well as outwards – to consider how they reference themselves as individuals within the narn project, how they are influenced by other teams to which they belong and in turn how these teams align (or misalign) with the demands of the university to which they belong. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 5 keenan, kumar and hughes forming communities of practice figure 2. berens et al., 2004. getting to know each other through expressing personal values, aspirations, needs, experiences and expertise that individuals within the team had in relation to a) pdp and/or e-portfolio practice and b) research, was an important first step. this was very helpful in identifying the considerable diversity of perceptions, experience and confidence within the group in pdp practice and research. there was also much discussion about what was expected of the project members and about the complexity of the broader narn project and how individuals within the team would develop in order to achieve their own project outcomes. the team looked at the overall project time frames and developed their own action plans, meeting plans and communication structures that would help it meet them. the midlands group quickly realised that the team structures were highly complex. there were tensions sometimes in managing the complex mix of personal, institutional and national aspects of belonging to a national project that would influence members’ ability to function as a team, let alone develop themselves as practitioner-researchers and writers. a key influence was in how individuals managed these interactions and the type of support received from line managers and colleagues with their respective institutions. as time went by, some of the members did receive less institutional support than others, and for others competing priorities meant they were unable to engage fully with narn meetings. the cohesion and dynamics of the midlands group was also affected by its changing membership. the initial team-building efforts did not transfer to the subsequent members who joined – and the wider and looser groupings that resulted from the changes were not journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 6 keenan, kumar and hughes forming communities of practice always conducive to creating shared values around a specific common pdp goal (this was indeed a problem that occurred to a greater or lesser extent in each of the regions). nevertheless, there was great individual enthusiasm around setting up projects and the core group worked hard together to ensure that ambitions were realistically feasible in the given timescales and work situations. the team also worked hard to overcome geographical difficulties, often coming together at birmingham city as a most convenient meeting place. towards the end of the project the team retreated together to a country house near northampton as a quiet contemplative space for writing, discussion and relaxing. this was much appreciated by all! the northern group experience – led by peter hughes the university partners in the northern group were bolton, newcastle, bradford, salford and central lancashire. the experience of this group was characterised by an initial period of instability but this evolved into a mature community of critical friends. the group experienced a number of pressures very early on in the process, mostly to do with fluidity and uncertainty in group membership, in terms of individuals representing institutions, rather than the institutions themselves. in only one of the institutions did the individual named in the initial project bid document remain as the key link person throughout the project. in a similar way to the midlands group there were often larger groupings involved within the individual institutions and this led to some uncertainly about group boundaries. as the initial period of the project was about trust building and group formation, the turnover of group members was initially unsettling. however, by the end of the first year a solid core membership had been reached, and the fact that occasionally different faces were at meetings was embraced as a positive feature: there was always an injection of fresh perspectives and new ideas. a further characteristic of the group was the different academic backgrounds of the members, which included arts, social science and science. this enriched the discussion of research issues, as members were often operating according to very different epistemologies. within the context of the group, this led to some genuine movement in journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 7 keenan, kumar and hughes forming communities of practice people’s perspectives and approaches to research, showing that the multi-disciplinary membership of the group led to inter-disciplinary learning. a further thing to reflect on is the development of this group as a community of practice outside of institutional space. if educational development initiatives seek to develop communities of practice, then it makes sense that they adopt a community-based development approach (in contrast to individual or organisational-scale development) (hughes, 2004) as van note chism et al. (2002, p.38-39) note: the cop model…situates faculty development in a communal context. the tasks of faculty development, then, turn from an emphasis on individual change to promoting experimentation, inquiry and reflection in a collegial fashion. the fact that these regional groupings were established outside of institutional context was found to liberate discussion and action from some of the practice situations that people encountered in their day-to-day settings. overall, the northern group developed into a cop with a core group of people, but also had fluid boundaries that enabled other people to productively contribute and learn through ‘legitimate peripheral participation’ (lave and wenger, 1991). in practical terms, this saw the group support each other through a process which saw them move from an initial sharing of practice and perspectives on research, through identification of research questions and the conduct of research questions, before returning to enriched, evidenceinformed discussions of practice and research. what gives life to a community of practice? these brief descriptive accounts of the regional experiences reflect on their differing approaches, yet each demonstrates some common and fundamental characteristics of community of practice. the evolution of the three regional groups demonstrates strongly that each group was different. each developed a unique sense of identity, each had its own ways of working and each managed its group relationships within the constraints they found themselves in. yet, every participant bought into the idea of the regional group as a journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 8 keenan, kumar and hughes forming communities of practice safe space for the development of ideas and it was often seen as a refreshing first step outside of a single institution perspective. the community voice during the final national meeting of the narn project, members from all regions reflected on what made the regional teams work. a sense of community seems to arise where there is: • a sense of shared enterprise. • voluntary membership. • selfless collaboration. • commitment to the success of the team. • collaboration, trust, respect. • a safe place with critical friends. • friendship, shared experiences, stories. • validation of each other giving strength and value to individuals. • supportive leadership. • acceptance of different perspectives. • empathy. • a sense of purpose. • strong communications. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 9 keenan, kumar and hughes forming communities of practice the southern region perspective of community of practice is represented in figure 3: figure 3. model developed by members of the southern regional group (buckley and frith, 2010) based on wenger (1998, p.72-73). how this model worked in practice is articulated in the comments below: joint enterprise: the group mostly met in london because of the difficulties of travel in the south region (everything goes via london). this decision proved very serendipitous as it meant that no one person was responsible for the logistics. it also gave everyone the same sense of being away from the office, no popping in and out for phone calls etc. all of the accounting to the national group and various activities at the national level have been negotiated and different members of the group have taken responsibility for activities according to issues of time and expertise. the rhythm of the regular regional meetings, national days and writing days has helped to keep momentum going. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 10 keenan, kumar and hughes forming communities of practice shared repertoire: the style of working has been non-intimidatory: although we all have different levels of experience and academic credentials, we all approached the project fresh. the tone was non-competitive and at times self-deprecating. although all our backgrounds and projects were different we did share a similar approach to pdp. we came from a ‘pdp for learning’ route and we all saw pdp as a potentially positive approach to help students make sense of their learning and transformation. mutual engagement: all of our roles and projects were different but we needed the group to share ideas and sustain motivation. the group was particularly good at community maintenance. the leader did a lot of work behind the scenes supporting members, and all members supported each other with ideas and solutions. all members of the group can identify a point at which they would have dropped out were it not for the efforts of the others in the group. the space and time for a decent lunch was seen by all members of the group as a ‘treat’ and therefore contributed to positive feelings towards the group. in conclusion whatever the theoretical and conceptual frameworks and underpinnings, projects such as this would not succeed without the commitment, engagement and enthusiasm of the people involved. the overall project aim of developing the research capacity of pdp practitioners was very dependent on the wholehearted willingness of all the partners to get involved and support each other. the sense of joint enterprise was built on individual ideas for institutional research projects and although the journey was not always a smooth one, it was through joint enterprise and mutual support that the individual projects achieved their journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 11 keenan, kumar and hughes forming communities of practice aims in a rigorous way. the identity of the groups emerged through the notion of shared repertoire. each of the regional groups had characteristics unique to them. the experience of meeting in the british museum and the british library added to the character of the southern region, and waiting for flights at manchester airport will never be the same again for a number of reasons that always involved wine! the sense of mutual engagement shines through each of the descriptive regional accounts. the overall project achievements are greater than the sum of its parts and although the project has been completed it is clear that some friendships will continue. the regional leads would like to thank all of the members for contributing so enthusiastically to the success of this narn project. particular thanks go to carina buckley, louise frith, sue riddell and jane rowe for permission to re-create their model and use their words! references berens, l.v., ernst, l. and smith, m. (2004) quick guide to the 16 personality types and teams: applying team essentials (tm) to create effective teams. huntington beach, ca: telos publications. buckley, c. and frith, l. (2010) ‘building a pdp community of practice’, cra international conference on pdp and e-portfolios. nottingham 26-28 april. hughes, p. (2004) ‘community educational development for academic communities of practice’, seda spring conference. cardiff 29 march. lave, j. and wenger, e. (1991) situated learning: legitimate peripheral participation. cambridge: cambridge university press. van note chism, n., lees, n.d. and evenbeck, s. (2002) ‘faculty development for teaching innovation’, liberal education, 38 (3): pp. 34-41. wenger, e. (1998) communities of practice: learning, meaning and identity. cambridge: cambridge university press. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 12 keenan, kumar and hughes forming communities of practice author details christine keenan is a learning and teaching fellow at bournemouth university where she is involved in education and learning development within the school of design, engineering and computing. her research interest is around student transition and induction to he. she is also a steering group member of the association of learning development in higher education (aldinhe). arti kumar’s work, as associate director of the centre for excellence in teaching and learning (cetl) at the university of bedfordshire, has been central in the university’s adoption of effective learner-centred pedagogies that connect personal and career development with good learning and employability approaches in higher education curricula. as part of her national teaching fellowship project (awarded in 2005) she authored the book entitled personal, academic and career development in higher education – soaring to success published in 2007 by routledge taylor & francis. she was awarded an mbe in the queen’s honours list 2008 in recognition of her services to higher education. she is currently an honorary visiting research fellow at the university of bedfordshire and also a fellow of the national institute of career education and counselling (nicec) and of the uk higher education academy. she is an agcas lifetime achievement award winner 2010. peter hughes is senior lecturer in learning development within the centre for educational development at the university of bradford (p.hughes3@bradford.ac.uk). journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 13 mailto:p.hughes3@bradford.ac.uk forming communities of practice abstract introduction the southern region experience – led by christine keenan the midlands group experience – led by arti kumar the northern group experience – led by peter hughes what gives life to a community of practice? the community voice in conclusion references author details literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special edition: developing writing in stem disciplines, november 2012 the development of, and response to, an academic writing module for electrical engineers at the university of bath miranda armstrong university of bath, uk jackie dannatt university of bath, uk adrian evans university of bath, uk abstract the academic writing module for electrical engineering students, offered at the university of bath, is the result of collaboration between the department of electronic and electrical engineering (eee) and the english language centre (elc) and is currently designed to deliver academic writing support to undergraduate students embarking on their engineering studies at bath. the need for the course arose from subject tutor recognition of the students’ lack of awareness of the genre within which they were expected to write, suggesting that not only the subject content but also the expression of that content needed input and support. this paper presents details of the academic writing input provided by the university of bath english language centre, the background to the module and ongoing development based on feedback from students, academic staff and eap (english for academic purposes) tutors. feedback indicates that the course succeeds in supporting students in their writing. the principal direction for future development lies in tailoring the course to fit the modular nature of students’ degrees, addressing issues connected to language proficiency and the nature of assessment. keywords: stem, academic writing, electrical engineering, disciplines, in-sessional armstrong et al. the development of, and response to, an academic writing module for electrical engineers introduction in 2004, engineering staff at the university of bath identified a need to raise awareness amongst undergraduate students of the importance of writing within the discipline. this aligns with a proposal that students should be encouraged to reach an ‘understanding of the expectations of the communities they are writing for’ (hyland and hyland, 2006, p.206) and to see beyond content to develop an awareness of the target genre (alexander et al., 2008). however, it has been acknowledged that students might be unfamiliar with writing practices in their field (deane and o’neill, 2011, p.7) and might not have the level of accuracy valued by both academic and professional discourse communities (ferris, 2006, p.81). coupled with the tertiary sector focus on enhancing student employability, these perceived needs prompted a decision by the department of electronic and electrical engineering (eee) to provide additional writing support for both home and international students making the transition from school to university. this decision resulted in the development of a bespoke module designed and delivered by the writing developers of the university’s english language centre (elc) in liaison with eee staff. this provision is now in its eighth year and has become an integral part of the first year undergraduate programme. the 2011/12 module was evaluated in order to establish whether students’ awareness of and competence in stem writing was being enhanced as a result of the classes. this article presents the findings of this evaluation. it begins with the background of the course, outlines its present form, presents student and staff responses, and concludes with implications for future writing development input. background the department of electronic and electrical engineering (eee) has incorporated material on academic english within its degree programmes since 2004. the motivation for doing so was the growing concern among the department’s academic staff that the undergraduates were increasingly less well-prepared for the academic writing and presentation tasks of their degree programmes. a number of initiatives were introduced to address the problem, including the introduction of formal technical reports in the first and second years and the development of a new first year module, ‘academic english for journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 2 armstrong et al. the development of, and response to, an academic writing module for electrical engineers electrical engineering’, with the elc. the aim of this module was to provide a bespoke writing course in addition to the elc’s general in-sessional english programme. the academic english module was introduced in the 2004/05 academic year as a sixcredit (100 study hours) optional module, running in semester one of the first year of the degree programmes. students were assessed in the first week of the semester and were directed towards the unit according to their assessment result. students were required or advised to take the module, or were directed to other optional subject modules. the academic english module continued in this form for three years until 2007/08 when syllabus changes resulted in some elements of the six-credit module being incorporated into a first year module: electronic laboratory techniques. this module was a core unit for all degree programmes. in the 2010/11 academic year, a number of changes happened. the first of these was the need to include material on professional engineering practice in the earlier years of the degree programmes, resulting in increased pressure on syllabus space. the second was the start of a joint degree programme with north china electrical power university (ncepu), a chinese university with campuses in beijing and baoding. this resulted in approximately 20-30 students per annum directly entering the second year of selected degree programmes in eee. the result of these changes was that eee was unable to retain the academic english input within the core year one module and, in addition, it wanted to make the input available to both the first year students and the direct entrant second years. these desires were accommodated by the creation of a three-credit (50 study hours) optional module of academic english for electrical engineers and this is the current form of the input. in 2011/12, students were not assessed but self-selected following a presentation about the academic english for electrical engineering module in induction week. the academic english for electrical engineering module the aims of the module were to address deficiencies identified by subject tutors, principally weaknesses in the structure, layout and style of laboratory and technical reports, and to improve referencing skills, grammatical accuracy and clarity of expression [see appendix 1 for course syllabus]. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 3 armstrong et al. the development of, and response to, an academic writing module for electrical engineers the course in 2011/12 consisted of eight two-hour classes, offered to the entire cohort of 125 first-year undergraduate students and 21 second-year ncepu students; 76 attended, 19 (25%) of whom were ncepu students. in previous years, class groupings were made largely on writing competency and whether english was the students’ first (l1) or additional (l2) language. this was in anticipation of the fact that l1 and l2 writers might have conflicting needs. in 2011/12, the rationale for the groupings was changed, in response to the request of subject tutors, who wanted to promote integration of home and international students by mixing native and non-native writers within classes. course content covered not only academic writing but also presentation skills, although the latter were not assessed. formative feedback throughout the course and final assessment addressed overall report structure, referencing and academic style. feedback and analysis feedback on the module from engineering subject staff, eap writing tutors and students has been very positive from the outset. there is consensus that the module has its place alongside the engineering input. feedback from subject staff feedback was collected from engineering subject staff involved in the assessment of the technical reports and final year project dissertations from the second and final years of the eee degree programmes. the feedback was initially collected on an ad hoc basis and by a more formal focus group in 2011/12. the overall view was that the standard of writing had improved since the academic english module was introduced, a typical response being ‘there has definitely been less concern about the quality of the academic writing since the unit started than there was before’. tutors also commented that ‘the benefit of the sections and exercises on referencing, summarising etc. does appear to be showing in the technical reports the students subsequently produce’. the current arrangement, whereby students self-select for the course was also positively received by engineering staff, as it is much easier to administer and provides access to the discipline-specific academic writing course without adding to the increasing pressure on syllabus space. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 4 armstrong et al. the development of, and response to, an academic writing module for electrical engineers feedback from eap writing tutors pedagogical issues were raised at tutors’ meetings throughout the eight weeks of the module. in line with subject tutors’ feedback, eap tutors reported successful outcomes, but also commented on course content, class composition and assessment. tutors agreed that the closer liaison established with the subject tutors had greatly benefited the content and materials used in the module, ensuring that the classes delivered what was needed. however, as engineering degrees tend to be modular in form and writing tasks can vary across modules, it was recognised that there was a risk of addressing only those writing tasks set in the first year modules. indeed, 2011/12 course students expressed surprise that the support would not continue throughout their degree course, as a real need was perceived. the writing tutors also believed that this course could easily be extended to 10 weeks with real added value for the students. the writing developers were confident that both native and non-native english speakers benefited from the syllabus as set. however, the different levels of language ability of the students meant that the tutors were challenged to meet the different needs of these two groups in mixed classes. there was a need for increased english language support for the non-native students, while native speaker students needed little help with accuracy, but clearly benefitted from the input on style and appropriateness. it was also found that those students with a lower level of language ability chose not to take the module for credits and so did not do the assessments, thus losing the opportunity for further feedback. this reaction to the assessment was a disappointment to the writing tutors who believed that a key benefit for the students on a course of this length was the opportunity to practise and to get feedback on writing. indeed, it was the eap tutors’ experience that assessment tended to inhibit the rationale of the course, which was to take a formative rather than summative approach in the development of students’ writing. feedback from students current and previous students were asked to fill in questionnaires [appendix 2] that asked for their comments on their confidence in writing before and after the module, the usefulness of the different components of the module, their improvement as a result of the module, and whether they wanted further support. a total of 37 students returned questionnaires, 31 from the current cohort and six 3rd year students who had taken the unit journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 5 armstrong et al. the development of, and response to, an academic writing module for electrical engineers in previous years, having reflected on the extent to which the module had met their subsequent writing needs. approximately 2/3 were non-native speakers. feedback from students commented on content, delivery and perceived gain from attending the module. report structure was clearly seen as the most useful component of the course by all students, and the component most successfully mastered, and very few current students wanted more input on this. nevertheless, previous students indicated that extra input on report structure would be as beneficial as extra input on the other components of the course. student attitudes to their mastery of referencing were far less uniform: current 1st years generally felt they had mastered referencing, current 2nd years were not quite so confident and previous year students saw referencing as the aspect over which they had the least control. this could suggest that once students have to start including citation in their writing, generally later in their degree course, they find it more challenging than they had anticipated. in terms of academic language and style, 27 of the 31 current students, including four of the seven native speakers, felt that language, and not just skills, was important. all of the previous students believed that language was important, perhaps reflecting a growing realisation of the challenge to produce clear, accurate writing. students’ feedback on the open questions asking for general comments and ideas on future support, further highlighted the perceived importance of language. other points raised were problems with scheduling, the wish for more writing practice in class, and a comment from one previous student that much of the course content repeated work done at school. in addition, over 90% of the students expressed an interest in further academic writing support. 1:1 tutorials were clearly the preferred form for current students, while previous students were slightly more interested in weekly drop-in sessions. there were suggestions that this support continue beyond the 1st year, and be timed to help students with particular assignments, for example final year projects. conclusions the academic english course has delivered on its main aim of improving students’ academic writing and the department of electronic and electrical engineering is committed to continuing this eap provision for its students. analysis of students’ responses has proved beneficial to course development, and tracking of the current cohort will continue in journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 6 armstrong et al. the development of, and response to, an academic writing module for electrical engineers order to inform the content and increase the effectiveness of the course in line with the students’ needs. the findings of this study might be useful to those providing writing support in the wider stem community. subject staff tutors, eap writing developers and students at the university of bath are unanimous in their recognition of the success of this module, which has become a springboard for a programme of university-wide academic writing support for all 1st year undergraduates. not only did the classes help students gain ability and confidence in their writing, but they also highlighted the requirements of their academic community and the gap they each needed to bridge to become effective writers in their field, which might include language as well as awareness of genre. this gap, which can become more apparent to students as their degree progresses, will vary according to the particular demands of the module. therefore, there may be a case for writing support to also follow the subject modular pattern. by mapping provision in this way, the students will be better supported at each stage of their degree. for this continuing support to be truly effective, a commitment from both the subject and writing tutors to collaborate in the development of the module is vital. for the university of bath tutors involved in the module, the key issues to be addressed in future development are the questions of whether native and non-native speakers should be grouped together for writing development, and the nature and purpose of assessment. references alexander, o., argent, s. and spencer, j. (2008) eap essentials: a teacher’s guide to principles and practice. reading: garnet publishing ltd. deane, m. and o’neill, p. (2011) writing in the disciplines. basingstoke, uk: palgrave macmillan. ferris, d.r., (2006) ‘does error feedback help student writers? new evidence on the short and long-term effects of written error correction’, in hyland, k. and hyland, f. (eds.) feedback in second language writing: contexts and issues. new york: cambridge university press, pp. 81-104. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 7 armstrong et al. the development of, and response to, an academic writing module for electrical engineers hyland, k. and hyland, f. (2006) ‘contexts and issues in feedback on l2 writing: an introduction’, in hyland, k. and hyland, f. (eds.) feedback in second language writing: contexts and issues. new york: cambridge university press, pp. 1-19. author details miranda armstrong is course director for the in-sessional programme at the university of bath english language centre. she is currently developing a university-wide programme for writing in the disciplines. jackie dannatt has taught eap and has co-ordinated the academic english for electrical engineering course at the university of bath. she now teaches at the university of bristol, where she continues to focus on academic skills in the disciplines, at foundation, undergraduate and postgraduate level. adrian evans is a senior lecturer in the department of electronic and electrical engineering at the university of bath. he has 18 years experience of teaching technology and engineering subjects at higher education institutes in the united kingdom and overseas and is currently the department's director of undergraduate studies. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 8 armstrong et al. the development of, and response to, an academic writing module for electrical engineers appendix 1 academic english for engineering overview of course the course is delivered by the english language centre and looks at the structure and language of technical reports and oral presentations. aims of the course are to be fully aware of: • the order and content of each section of a laboratory report • the correct method of referencing information • the correct method of labelling figures and tables • how to structure and deliver a presentation • appropriate academic style and vocabulary assessment formative assessment tasks and feedback will be given throughout the course. week 1 students will study the stages of a technical report with regard to content and appropriate language. students will also receive an introduction to oral presentations. week 2 students will look at examples of abstracts and introductions for content, layout and style. examples will be discussed. week 3 students will study how to structure the description of the investigation section of a report, with appropriate academic style and punctuation. week 4 students will study examples of theory sections with academic referencing. guidelines for referencing and quotation will be given and examples will be worked through. week 5 students will look at ways of describing data and analysing results. week 6 students will learn how to structure a conclusion, and to position the remaining parts of the report, that is, the title page, the contents page, the acknowledgements and the appendices. week 7 presentations students will give a ten minute presentation on an agreed subject-related topic, after which feedback will be given. week 8 course review and an opportunity to address any areas arising from the course. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 9 armstrong et al. the development of, and response to, an academic writing module for electrical engineers appendix 2 academic english for electrical engineering student feedback form (current students) please tick (√) to indicate the information below which applies to you: the year of your course 1st ( ) 2nd ( ) english is your first language ( ) english is not your first language ( ) how confident did you feel in writing at the beginning of this course? (1 to 5, where 5 is the most confident) 1 ( ) 2 ( ) 3 ( ) 4 ( ) 5 ( ) how confident do you feel in writing now? (5 is the most confident) 1 ( ) 2 ( ) 3 ( ) 4 ( ) 5 ( ) please indicate the usefulness of the course content (1 to 5, where 5 is the most positive response). report structure introduction / theory section the investigation referencing results and analysis abstract, conclusions, and appendices presentations to what extent do you feel you have mastered this aspect of the course? (1 to 5, where 5 is the most positive response). report structure introduction / theory section the investigation referencing results and analysis abstract, conclusions, and appendices presentations please tick (√) any aspect you would like to see covered in more detail. report structure introduction / theory section the investigation referencing results and analysis abstract, conclusions, and appendices presentations is there anything else which you would like to see included in the course? ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… ……………………… journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 10 armstrong et al. the development of, and response to, an academic writing module for electrical engineers which writing task(s) do you feel this writing course will help? tick any number of the following tasks or leave blank: task laboratory report technical report group project individual project poster presentation other (please state) √ unit code can you give a little detail of how exactly the course has helped you with the tasks you have indicated above: ……………………………………………………………………………………….…………… …………………………………………………………………………………………………………….…… …………………………………………………………………………………………………………….…… ……………… how important is help with english language, rather than skills, during this course? (please indicate 1 to 5, where 5 is the most positive response) 1 ( ) 2 ( ) 3 ( ) 4 ( ) 5 ( ) do you have any other comments about the course in general? ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… …………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. …………………….. if further supported was provided, in which form would prefer it to be given: tick (√) any of the following: another course weekly drop-in sessions 1:1 tutorials other (please specify) thank you. miranda armstrong director in-sessional courses english language centre university of bath jackie dannatt course co-ordinator english language centre university of bath dr adrian evans director of studies for undergraduate degree programmes department of electronic & electrical engineering university of bath journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 11 armstrong et al. the development of, and response to, an academic writing module for electrical engineers informed consent form what is the purpose of the questionnaire? you are being asked to complete a questionnaire as part of an investigation into the design of this course and its effectiveness in providing academic writing training for electrical engineering students. it is hoped that the results will be useful to both teachers and students on this course and will help to improve progress in this key skill. data protection to protect your identity and the nature of your personal responses to the tasks, your name will be removed from all materials discussed and will be replaced by a code, known only to the research team. this form will be the only document bearing your name. authorization: i have read the above and understand the nature of the investigation. i grant permission to the researchers to obtain anonymous information and i understand that, by responding to the survey, i agree to allow my responses to be used in an investigation of the course provision, which may be used to inform future course design and which may be reported within the academic community to which it is of interest. i understand that if i have any concerns about the questionnaire or any other aspect of the investigation, i can contact my department head or the english language centre at any time. participant’s signature _________________________ date: _________________ (if replying by email, submission will signify authorization has been given) journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 12 armstrong et al. the development of, and response to, an academic writing module for electrical engineers academic english for electrical engineering student feedback form (previous students) please tick (√) to indicate the information below which applies to you: undergraduate ( ) postgraduate ( ) the year of your course 1st ( ) 2nd ( ) 3rd ( ) 4th ( ) 5th ( ) english is your first language ( ) english is not your first language ( ) please think back to the academic english support you received in your first year to answer these questions: how confident in writing did you feel at the beginning of the course? (1 to 5, where 5 is the most confident) 1 ( ) 2 ( ) 3 ( ) 4 ( ) 5 ( ) how confident in writing did you feel at the end of the course? (1 to 5, where 5 is the most confident) 1 ( ) 2 ( ) 3 ( ) 4 ( ) 5 ( ) please indicate the usefulness of the course content (1 to 5, where 5 is the most positive response). report structure introduction / theory section the investigation referencing results and analysis abstract, conclusions, and appendices presentations to what extent do you feel you have mastered this aspect of the course? (1 to 5, where 5 is the most positive response). report structure introduction / theory section the investigation referencing results and analysis abstract, conclusions, and appendices presentations please tick (√) any aspect you think should have been covered in more detail. report structure introduction / theory section the investigation referencing results and analysis abstract, conclusions, and appendices presentations are there any other aspects you think should have been included in the course? …………………………………………………………………………………………………………….…… …………………………………………………………………………………………………………….…… ………………………………………………………………………………………………………….……… ……………………… journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 13 armstrong et al. the development of, and response to, an academic writing module for electrical engineers which writing task(s) do you feel this writing course helps? tick any number of the following tasks or leave blank: task laboratory report technical report group project individual project poster presentation other (please state) √ unit code can you give a little detail of how exactly the course has helped you with the tasks you have indicated above: ……………………………………………………………………………………….…………… …………………………………………………………………………………………………………….…… …………………………………………………………………………………………………………….…… ……………… how important is help with english language, rather than skills, during this course? (please indicate 1 to 5, where 5 is the most positive response) 1 ( ) 2 ( ) 3 ( ) 4 ( ) 5 ( ) do you have any other comments about the course in general? ………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… ……………… ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… ……… now, please think about your studies since the 1st year to answer these questions: how important is academic english support beyond the 1st year? (please indicate 1 to 5, where 5 is the most positive response) 1 ( ) 2 ( ) 3 ( ) 4 ( ) 5 ( ) if further supported was provided, in which form would you prefer it to be given: tick (√) any of the following: another course weekly drop-in sessions 1:1 tutorials other (please specify) if further supported was provided, in which year of study or for which module would you like it to be? …………..……………………………………………………………………………………………………… is there anything in particular you would like to be included? …………………………………………….. ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… ………..………………………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………... thank you. miranda armstrong director in-sessional courses english language centre university of bath jackie dannatt course coordinator english language centre university of bath dr adrian evans director of studies for undergraduate degree programmes department of electronic & electrical engineering university of bath journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 14 armstrong et al. the development of, and response to, an academic writing module for electrical engineers informed consent form what is the purpose of the questionnaire? you are being asked to complete a questionnaire as part of an investigation into the design of this course and its effectiveness in providing academic writing training for electrical engineering students. it is hoped that the results will be useful to both teachers and students on this course and will help to improve progress in this key skill. data protection to protect your identity and the nature of your personal responses to the tasks, your name will be removed from all materials discussed and will be replaced by a code, known only to the research team. this form will be the only document bearing your name. authorization: i have read the above and understand the nature of the investigation. i grant permission to the researchers to obtain anonymous information and i understand that, by responding to the survey, i agree to allow my responses to be used in an investigation of the course provision, which may be used to inform future course design and which may be reported within the academic community to which it is of interest. i understand that if i have any concerns about the questionnaire or any other aspect of the investigation, i can contact my department head or the english language centre at any time. participant’s signature _________________________ date: _________________ (if replying by email, submission will signify authorization has been given) journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 15 the development of, and response to, an academic writing module for electrical engineers at the university of bath abstract introduction background the academic english for electrical engineering module feedback and analysis feedback from subject staff feedback from eap writing tutors feedback from students conclusions references author details appendix 1 appendix 2 literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special edition: researching pdp practice, november 2010 an evaluation of the impact of e-portfolio supported pedagogic processes on students’ reflective capacity sarah wilson-medhurst coventry university, uk andrew turner coventry university, uk abstract this paper describes research evaluating pedagogical strategies and processes that develop the reflective capacity of students. an appreciative inquiry framework was adopted to establish, from a student perspective, what works or ‘gives life’ in terms of supporting and encouraging a reflective capacity. the context was an undergraduate module with an explicit focus on employability and ‘transition-out’ of university. students were drawn from a range of courses as diverse as performing arts, business management, engineering and computing science. this presented both challenges and benefits. the module utilised an e-portfolio tool (pebblepad) linked to formative and summative assessment to support students in their learning development, including reflection around personal and career development. key elements of the module which developed the reflective capacity of students, evident in appreciative feedback, were a personal statement first assignment linked to interdisciplinary group work and activities which scaffold the reflective process. the paper discusses the pedagogical processes involved and highlights areas for further research. key words: reflection; pdp; employability; e-portfolio; assessment for learning; appreciative inquiry. introduction the authors are two researcher practitioners who are members of the ntfs national action research network (narn) project on researching and evaluating personal wilson-medhurst and turner an evaluation of the impact of e-portfolio supported pedagogic processes development planning and e-portfolio practice (http://www.bolton.ac.uk/edu/hea ntfsnarnproject/home.aspx). personal development planning (pdp) is defined as 'a structured and supported process undertaken by an individual to reflect upon their own learning, performance and/or achievement and to plan for their personal, educational and career development' (qaa, 2001, p.2). all uk higher education institutions (heis) are required to offer opportunities to students to engage in this process. the outcomes of the pdp process are a transcript which is the formal record of the outcomes of the student’s he experience, and a personal development portfolio product which encompasses the records and claims for learning that underlie the pdp process. there has been a movement toward the use of electronic portfolio platforms to support pdp production (strivens, 2007). this research emanates from earlier work by the researchers as outlined in wilsonmedhurst (2005a; 2005b) and from strategic curriculum interventions around employability at coventry university. it is also informed by a body of literature around the value of eportfolio and pdp processes in supporting student development (for example, stefani et al., 2007; orsini-jones and jones, 2007). in particular, research by brennan and shah (2003) highlights confidence as an important determinant of students’ success (or otherwise) in securing employment or other graduate destination at the end of their degree, as well as the need to provide equality of access to resources and processes that will support this confidence building. this fits well with notions of self-efficacy (bandura, 1997) flagged in the usem (understanding, skills or skilful practices, efficacy beliefs, and meta-cognition) model of employability, which also highlights meta-cognition or a reflective capacity as an important component of employability (yorke et al., 2003) that can be supported through the pdp process. the usem model is depicted in figure 1 (yorke et al., 2003, p.5). in the usem model, ‘the ‘e’ component suffuses the other contributions to employability’ (yorke et al., 2003, p.5) but the other components, including meta-cognition, interact in the ‘production’ of employability and citizenship. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 2 http://www.bolton.ac.uk/edu/hea%20ntfsnarnproject/home.aspx http://www.bolton.ac.uk/edu/hea%20ntfsnarnproject/home.aspx wilson-medhurst and turner an evaluation of the impact of e-portfolio supported pedagogic processes employability, citizenship, etc subject understanding metacognition skills, including key skills personal qualities, including self-theories and efficacy beliefs e s u m figure 1. the usem model (yorke et al., 2003, p.5). coventry response a key feature of coventry university’s response to supporting undergraduates to develop their employability and pdp has been the introduction of the add+vantage suite of modules. with the exception of accredited health courses, all students must choose one add+vantage module each year to study as part of their course. they count towards the total number of credits required for a student's degree in the same way that the other course modules do and must be passed in order for a student to progress and receive their final award. there are a total of around 60 add+vantage modules at each level of study which develop a diverse range of skills, knowledge or attributes. a common element running through all the modules is a self-directed but assessed element which is designed to develop employability competencies. more details of the add+vantage scheme can be found at http://wwwm.coventry.ac.uk/careers/addvantage/pages/scheme.aspx. this research focuses on a level 3 undergraduate add+vantage module where the pdp process has an explicit focus on employability and ‘transition-out’ of university (into journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 3 http://wwwm.coventry.ac.uk/careers/addvantage/pages/scheme.aspx wilson-medhurst and turner an evaluation of the impact of e-portfolio supported pedagogic processes employment, post-graduate study or other graduate destination). eighty five students (two intakes) studied the module in 2008/9, and forty eight (one intake) in 2009/10 drawn from a range of courses as diverse as performing arts, business management, engineering and computing science, which presented both challenges in meeting their needs and benefits through the interaction between such a diverse group of learners. the module utilises an e-portfolio tool (pebblepad) linked to formative and summative assessment to support students in their learning development, including reflection around personal and career development. reflection, the role it plays in student learning and how it can be supported is likely to be a key focus for the next generation of electronic portfolio research (yancey, 2009) who also observes ‘many colleges and universities, including sheffield hallam university, the university of waterloo, and alverno college, have also found that helping students develop a ‘capacity to reflect’ is a critical educational outcome, in and of itself’ (yancey, 2009, p.5). citing penny-light et al: reflection is a learned skill. students do not necessarily ‘know’ how to reflect effectively on their learning and use those reflections to make connections between the learning that occurs in different contexts (academic, workplace, community). this indicates that we need to carefully scaffold opportunities for reflection into academic programs for students so that they have time to develop this ability. (penny-light et al., cited yancey, 2009, p.6). this also presents challenges to the academic who may see supporting such development, especially in relation to employability, as a blurring of practice boundaries between themselves and other professional staff, such as those in careers. our research question therefore was: what are the elements that support and encourage a reflective capacity in students? in this research context, the module assignments provide the key challenges that aim to stimulate students’ reflection around personal and career development. thus the elements in the above research question include these assignments as well as the assignment marking criteria, the e-portfolio support tool, group and self-evaluation activities. these elements provide for the structured and supported process of pdp. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 4 wilson-medhurst and turner an evaluation of the impact of e-portfolio supported pedagogic processes the elements chosen reflected an intention to support students in meeting the following learning outcomes of the module: 1. reflect upon their employability competencies and career management skills, and plan for their future development. 2. critically reflect upon their personal and professional development within their undergraduate studies and wider experiences. 3. identify, analyse and evidence the personal capabilities and attributes that will be important to relevant employer, professional body and/or postgraduate requirements. 4. plan to support their transition from university and achievement of their chosen graduate destination or activity. 5. appreciate the links between personal development planning at university and continuing professional development. in outline, the key elements and associated pedagogical strategies were: • a self-reflective personal statement assignment submitted part-way through the module. o a linking interdisciplinary group work activity with a peer-to-peer formative feedback point. • self-assessment activities including relating to the career choice processes of: accurate self-appraisal; gathering occupational information; goal selection; making plans for the future; and problem solving (crites, 1976; 1978). • scaffolding questions: where am i now? where do i want to be? where do i need to be? how will i get there? (kumar, 2007). • self-assessment of personal statement submission against assignment marking criteria (before tutor feedback and mark returned). • a personal action plan assignment submitted at the end of the module. • e-portfolio scaffolding, particularly for assembling and presenting evidence related to the personal statement and action planning assignments. • activity-led learning approach (wilson-medhurst, 2008) for key parts of the delivery. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 5 wilson-medhurst and turner an evaluation of the impact of e-portfolio supported pedagogic processes defining reflection reflection and reflective writing (as one way of ‘evidencing’ reflection) require explanation in order for students to understand what is required of them (wilson-medhurst, 2005b), especially since there are various definitions of reflection according to the different background theories of reflection (andrew et al., 2002; ada, 2010). in this module, students are introduced to reflection by way of kolb’s learning cycle (kolb, 1984) and then through moon’s, ‘the presentation’ reflective writing example (moon, 2001). in this way they are introduced to a ‘common sense’ view of reflection i.e. that it is: …a form of mental processing with a purpose and/or an anticipated outcome that is applied to relatively complicated or unstructured ideas for which there is not an obvious solution. (moon, 1999, p.4) there is an outcome to the process (moon, 1999). also that: reflection lies somewhere around the notion of learning and thinking. we reflect in order to learn something, or we learn as a result of reflecting. (moon, cited wilsonmedhurst, 2005b, p.91) as it is an internal mental process, we can’t ‘see’ reflection. the evidence (or otherwise) for reflection comes from the students’ outputs, such as their behaviours and self-reports. here reflection is within the context of employability and personal development planning for ‘transition out’ of university. as reflection is a personal process, the researchers’ aim was to find out, from the learner perspective, what aspects or elements ‘give life’ in terms of this module and what this tells us about the elements that support and encourage a reflective capacity. that is, the evidence comes from the students’ own feedback on the process they have taken part in and the elements they have engaged with. linking back to the usem model (yorke et al., 2003) this module asks students to reflect upon their development – the skills or skilful practices, understandings (of the subject and of themselves) and their own personal qualities that they have developed. this reflection is within the context of a target graduate destination that they have chosen. the reflection is journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 6 wilson-medhurst and turner an evaluation of the impact of e-portfolio supported pedagogic processes therefore focussed around a specific purpose (moon, 1999) i.e. career decision making and related career choice processes. in students’ commentary and feedback on the process they have undertaken, the researchers are therefore looking for evidence of an outcome i.e. that something has been learnt, that thinking has shifted or an affective change, and what this might tell us about the elements and processes the student has engaged with. methodology for this research we used an appreciative inquiry (ai) (cooperrider et al., 2008) framework. ai looks for what is working well (rather than problems) and assumes that whatever it is you would like more of, it is already in situ in one form or another – you therefore need to find it and then develop it. in its full or pure form ai has four ‘d’ phases: discovery (what gives life? or the best of what is); dream (what might be?); design (how can it be?); destiny (what will be?) (cooperrider et al., 2008). as cousins, 2009 observes ai can be viewed as a ‘spirit of inquiry’ rather than a ‘pure’ methodology and the researchers took the same view and adapted ai to meet this investigation’s requirements. hence, an ai framework was adopted to establish, from a student perspective, what works or ‘gives life’ in terms of supporting and encouraging a reflective capacity. this effectively constitutes the ‘discovery’ phase of the full ai methodology. our aim was to complete the discovery phase, so that for future iterations of the module we would have a better basis to ‘dream’ how we might best use the supporting elements to encourage a reflective capacity, and ‘design’ what would work and how. for this research then, at a key point during the module students were asked to comment on what had worked and things they would develop or improve further in the light of their experience. the questions were: • what did you think is the thing you did best in [personal statement] assignment 1? • how could you improve your assignment 1 submission? • what was the most useful thing you learned while doing this assignment 1? • where do you think this will come in useful next? • finally, what has been the most useful aspect of the module so far? and why? journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 7 wilson-medhurst and turner an evaluation of the impact of e-portfolio supported pedagogic processes the feedback was captured as written submissions managed through the electronic portfolio environment. in addition there were other various self-assessment and reflection points during the module which again were captured within the electronic portfolio environment. these reflection points were built into the module and were designed to support students in getting the most out of the module, including planning for the next activity. they also served as a source of data on what works from the student perspective. the written submissions were thematically analysed with the aid of the qualitative data analysis software, atlasti. findings the findings are drawn from an analysis of the students written answers to the above five key questions after they were over half way through the module and had submitted the first assignment (a self-reflective personal statement) and had self-assessed their submission against the assessment criteria for the assignment. as part of the module design they had not yet received the tutor’s feedback (and mark) at this point. for many students there was clear evidence of a self-development outcome, indicating that the students perceived that they had developed their capacity to identify their developments and an understanding of the skills that they had developed. this is reflected in the following sample quotes from students (students typed their responses within the eportfolio environment and were not asked to spell check their responses. minor slips on the keyboard are left as written, as are spelling errors): i now feel comfortable with my strengths and weaknesses, which was used, using self-assessment. i feel that i can reflect and critically analyse areas for development and improvement in relation to a career in the graduate market. a greater understanding of my own skills and the way i have developed in my time at university. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 8 wilson-medhurst and turner an evaluation of the impact of e-portfolio supported pedagogic processes analysing myself more and learning more about myself in terms of reflection has been really interesting and a unique experience, this has been the most useful part of the module so far. the most useful aspect of this module so far is the fact that it has enabled me to realise what skills i have and what i have developed during my time at university. this, i believe, will help me immensely as i am going on to further education next year, and i have all the information now to aid me with this. the above feedback was evidence that students were beginning to surface the development of skills and attributes at university which had previously been implicit within their studies. such an understanding of the skills and skilful practices and understandings one has gained lies at the heart of being able to promote one’s skills and competences externally and for targeted self-development. for other students the surfacing of the requirement to plan for their future career was the most valuable aspect of the module: identifying the things i need to do before i finish university to prepare me for making the most of my career. that it's useful to look back and plan from your experiences, no matter how trivial they may seem. learning how important it was to plan for the future. it [personal statement assignment 1] really made me think about my next steps in my future and career, which is vital. this is the only module at university which made me think about my aspirations in greater depth. this is crucial because you need direction in the future. for others there was clear evidence that they had come to decisions or resolutions of uncertainty: journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 9 wilson-medhurst and turner an evaluation of the impact of e-portfolio supported pedagogic processes the most useful thing i learned whilst doing this assignment [personal statement] was definitly finding out the skills, abilities, opportunities, and general information on becoming a magazine journalist. so now when i leave university i know exactly what type of journalist i’d like to be, what the salary is like etc so it was a very useful assignment in my opinion. as i can now take a realistic approach to the world of work. by writing out and researching into ‘where i want to be’, it made me think about the things i want to do after university. it also helped me to figure out that i do want to complete masters. […]. and finally, for others there was clearly an affective outcome: establishing what my passions are and what i want to gain from life on planet earth. i feel that learning more about the job market ingeneral has been very useful, as it has highlighted to me how hard it may be to be able to achieve the career i aspire to. this gives me more motivation to reach my goal. as outlined above, the module employed a variety of pedagogical strategies which included self-assessment activities through the e-portfolio package and an activity-led learning approach (wilson-medhurst, 2008) for key parts of the delivery. whilst engagement in these elements appeared to develop a shift in the reflective capacity of many students, some students struggled conceptually with the meta-cognitive nature of reflection, unable to identify developed skills or capabilities beyond descriptive accounts of often limited experiences. this reflects the findings of orsini-jones (2006) who proposed meta-cognition as a generic skill threshold in reference to the notion of threshold concept. the notion of threshold concepts was first introduced by meyer and land (2003) to characterise the idea that in certain disciplines there are concepts that ‘represent a transformed way of understanding, or interpreting, or viewing something without which the learner cannot progress’ (meyer and land, 2003, pp. 412-424). threshold concepts are often likened to a portal or conceptual gateway in that they open up a new and previously inaccessible way of thinking about something. such concepts may be transformative, irreversible and integrative in the way they change how people think in a discipline or perceive particular phenomena. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 10 wilson-medhurst and turner an evaluation of the impact of e-portfolio supported pedagogic processes the students undertaking this module were final year students and other interventions may be necessary which will be the subject of continuing research. nevertheless all students reported some personal gains even if these were small shifts from, for example, what might be described as descriptive writing to descriptive reflection (hatton and smith, 1995) e.g. reporting increased confidence in a specific skill or surfacing the need to work on a particular skill area. reviewing the research question so what does our appreciative feedback data tell us about the elements that support and encourage a reflective capacity? table 1 below summarises findings gathered from further analysis of the responses to the question ‘...what has been the most useful aspect of the module so far? and why?’. the analysis focussed on identifying any specific elements that students flagged up in their appreciative responses. this analysis was derived from the responses from the 25 (from a total of 48) students in the 2009/10 cohort who completed this question (data for this specific question is not available for the 2008/9 cohort). again, students typed their responses within the e-portfolio environment and were not asked to spell check their responses. hence, as above, minor slips on the keyboard are left as written, as are spelling errors. the findings in table 1 indicate that, as might be expected, different elements were appreciated by different learners within the 2009/10 cohort. however, the most frequently mentioned were the group activity or sub-elements within it, and the personal statement assignment 1 or sub-elements within it (in fact these two elements were intrinsically linked), as well as an appreciation of the module in its entirety. there is insufficient data here to make any more claim than this but it does point to elements of the module that were working well. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 11 wilson-medhurst and turner an evaluation of the impact of e-portfolio supported pedagogic processes table 1. module elements that students appreciated. element % of respondents team activity on the graduate job/destinations market e.g. ‘the group task, as i learned good techniques off of others and good places to look for jobs. it also helped me to give more time to lokoing into placements and how i could apply and opened my eyes to new niche areas’. 28% personal statement assignment 1 incorporating self-assessment e.g. ‘completing the self-assessment coursework as it puts me in good stead to see where i stand’. 24% the module itself (feedback indicated various elements linked to the module itself) e.g. ‘the module has helped me to begin looking at what i can do once i have finished my degree, and has also shown me how to organise my achievements, and how i can use them as evidence when applying for jobs in the future’. 24% a specific activity (3 were mentioned – personal swot analysis; ‘a structured breakdown of the way a business thinks about the progress of its employees’; action planning lecture) e.g. ‘conducting the swot analysis helped me understand my strengths and weaknesses – very useful for when i apply for a job’. 12% reflective process itself e.g. ‘learning how to reflect on what i have done and evidencing my progress’. 12% total 100% journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 12 wilson-medhurst and turner an evaluation of the impact of e-portfolio supported pedagogic processes further analysis of the above 25 feedback statements revealed that they evidenced engagement with one or more of crites’ (1976; 1978) career choice processes in all except two (out of 25) responses. in some instances the appreciative feedback statement revealed engagement with more than one career choice process, for example: i managed to explore myself in terms of qualities such as finding out what kind of team player type i am and i have developed confindence in applying for jobs after finishing my degree. i also developed confidence and skills in making presentations. the above feedback statement suggested engagement with both ‘accurate self-appraisal’ and ‘making plans for the future’ career choice processes. thus from 25 statements, 52 codes were allocated. the findings are summarised in table 2. table 2. career choice processes evident in appreciative feedback. career choice process % of allocated codes accurate self-appraisal e.g. ‘making me see my strengths and weaknesses much clearer. it will help me a lot because i can now correct my weaknesses and build on my strengths in time for work in the real world’. 29% gathering occupational information e.g. ‘to have a structured breakdown of the way a business thinks about the progress of its employees, and to know a bit better what will be expected of me’. 15% goal selection e.g. ‘i have found this module useful as it has made me think about where i want to be by the end of my degree, i now know that i wish to further my studies with a ma degree’. 12% making plans for the future e.g. ‘it [the module] has triggered me to think about my future in more detail and carry out more research into possible areas i could work in’. 27% journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 13 wilson-medhurst and turner an evaluation of the impact of e-portfolio supported pedagogic processes problem solving e.g. ‘the most useful aspect has been in identifying my weaknesses and looking at methods of improving them’. 13% other – specific skills (reflective writing; presentation skills) e.g. ‘i have learnt to write reflectively, and the ways in which to do so. i can also use pebblepad properly’. 4% table 2 and the quotes in the section above indicate that students were engaging in reflective activity around personal and career development. taken together with table 1, the authors suggest this evidence indicates the module design itself supported this reflection, but that the interdisciplinary group activity linked to personal statement assignment 1 was particularly supportive within this design. support for the claim of the success of the module in supporting the reflective capacity of learners also comes from external examiners’ feedback for the 2009/10 session, as well as the module pass rates for the 2009/10 session which was 96% of registered students. in their general comments on the nature of the task and student performance in 2009/10 the external examiner’s comments included the following: this was a very interesting range of self-reflective passages oriented towards the students’ future career plans. i particularly liked the idea of encouraging the students to link their skills development at university to the needs of their potential employers in the future. it helps them to think about transferable skills and continuous professional development/lifelong learning. there were some really good pieces of work which show the students are readily able to analyse themselves and their skills performance in relation to future needs. below is an exploration of the key features of two of the key elements that seemed to work – the interdisciplinary group activity and personal statement assignment 1. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 14 wilson-medhurst and turner an evaluation of the impact of e-portfolio supported pedagogic processes key features of the group activity and personal statement assignment 1 1) group activity on the graduate job/destinations market: • teams of six (or exceptionally five or seven) drawn from a range of disciplines. • each team member researches different graduate destination. • activity design requires them to pool information and analyse to complete successfully. • team presentations to rest of cohort. • formatively assessed (no marks, formative feedback only using pre-issued feedback grid). • experience feeds into personal statement assignment 1. the interdisciplinary composition of the group work exercises, combined with presentations to the whole group, seemed to allow an appreciation of the skills and attributes developed within the students’ own disciplines which might not have been previously apparent to them. the interdisciplinary possibilities are a unique feature of the add+vantage scheme at coventry which brings together learners from a wide range of disciplines. the authors suggest this interdisciplinary composition facilitates reflection by encouraging a ‘standing back’ and seeing one’s own discipline and development through others’ eyes. 2) personal statement assignment 1: • experience from the group activity feeds into personal statement assignment 1 with the aid of the scaffolding questions below. • scaffolding questions: where am i now? where do i want to be? where do i need to be? (kumar, 2007). • e-portfolio scaffolding, particularly for assembling and presenting evidence related to self-reflection and action planning. • self-assessment of personal statement submission against assignment marking criteria (before tutor feedback and mark returned) – this was e-portfolio enabled. the reviewing of one’s own submission is an example of an embedded activity explicitly designed to support the reflective process. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 15 wilson-medhurst and turner an evaluation of the impact of e-portfolio supported pedagogic processes conclusions and areas for further research this research highlights that students do appreciate the module elements designed to support them in planning and preparing for ‘transition out’ of university and in career choice processes. key elements of the module which encouraged and supported the reflective capacity of students were the personal statement first assignment linked to interdisciplinary group work, including embedded and e-portfolio enabled activities which scaffold the reflective process. for example, the opportunity for students to review their first assignment was an integral part of the learning in the first assignment and this process was facilitated and managed within the e-portfolio environment. a focus for further work will be to further examine the benefits of inter-disciplinary group work. this is an important feature of the scheme at coventry which brings together groups of learners from a wide range of disciplines. the interdisciplinary composition of the group work exercises seemed to allow an appreciation of the skills and attributes developed within their own discipline which might not have been previously apparent to students. this seemed to come through discussions relating to the skills and attributes of their peers who came from unrelated disciplines. subsequently, the scaffolding questions in the personal statement assignment then supported the students in reflecting on their learning from this experience. a further area for research is whether enhancements to the module elements, including the interdisciplinary group work, would help develop the reflective capacity of those learners who, despite the interventions outlined in this paper, still struggle conceptually with the meta-cognitive nature of reflection. for example, an appreciative peer-review of other students’ personal statement submissions might be one enhancement that could be investigated and is consistent with enhancements suggested by the external examiner. this would further expose students to the learning and vantage points of those who come from different disciplines and backgrounds, and hence have the potential to facilitate reflection. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 16 wilson-medhurst and turner an evaluation of the impact of e-portfolio supported pedagogic processes acknowledgement this paper is an outcome of the national action research network on researching and evaluating personal development planning and e-portfolio practice project (2007-2010). the project was led by the university of bolton in association with the university of worcester and centre for recording achievement, and in national collaboration with the university of bedfordshire, bournemouth university and university of bradford. the project was funded by the higher education academy, national teaching fellowship project strand. more details about the project can be found at: http://www.recordingachievement.org/research/narn-tree.html. references ada, w.w. (2010) ‘computer supported collaborative learning and critical reflection: a case study of fashion consumerism’, interdisciplinary journal of e-learning and learning objects, 6, pp. 87-102 [online]. available at: http://ijello.org/volume6/ijellov6p087-102ma686.pdf (accessed: 9 october 2010). andrew, d., green, m., pheiffer, g. and holley, d. (2002) ‘a critical review of the use of the concept of reflection in higher education’, best conference. edinburgh 8-10 april. bandura, a. (1997) self-efficacy: the exercise of control. new york: w.h. freeman. brennan j. and shah t. (2003) access to what? converting educational opportunity into employment opportunity. final report. london: the centre for higher education research and information. cooperrider, d.l., whitney, d. and stavros, j.m. (2008) appreciative inquiry handbook. 2nd edn. brunswick, oh: crown custom publishing inc. cousins, g. (2009) researching learning in higher education. new york: routledge. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 17 http://www.recordingachievement.org/research/narn-tree.html http://ijello.org/volume6/ijellov6p087-102ma686.pdf wilson-medhurst and turner an evaluation of the impact of e-portfolio supported pedagogic processes crites, j.o. (1976) ‘a comprehensive model of career development in early adulthood’, journal of vocational behaviour, 9, pp.105-118. crites, j.o. (1978) the career maturity inventory: administration and use manual. 2nd edn. monterey, california: mcgraw hill. hatton, n. and smith, d. (1995) ‘reflection in teacher education – towards definition and implementation’, teaching and teacher education, 11(1), pp. 33-49. kolb d.a. (1984) experiential learning: experience as the source of learning and development. new jersey: prentice-hall inc. englewood cliffs. kumar, a. (2007) personal, academic and career development in higher education: soaring to success. london and new york: routledge taylor and francis group. meyer, j.h.f. and land, r. (2003) ‘threshold concepts and troublesome knowledge: linkages to ways of thinking and practising within the disciplines’, in rust, c. (ed.) 10th international symposium on improving student learning: theory and practice – 10 years on. oxford: oxford centre for staff and learning development, pp. 412424. moon, j. (1999) reflection in learning and professional development. london: kogan page. moon, j. (2001) pdp working paper 4: reflection in higher education learning. ltsn generic centre. available at: http://www.york.ac.uk/admin/hr/training/gtu/students/resources/pgwt/reflectivepracti ce.pdf (accessed: 18 may 2010). orsini-jones, m. (2006) ‘identifying troublesome concepts and helping undergraduates with crossing grammar threshold concepts via assessed collaborative group work’, threshold concepts within the disciplines symposium. glasgow (durham university/staffordshire university/university of strathclyde) 30 august – 1 september, pp. 119-129. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 18 http://www.york.ac.uk/admin/hr/training/gtu/students/resources/pgwt/reflectivepractice.pdf http://www.york.ac.uk/admin/hr/training/gtu/students/resources/pgwt/reflectivepractice.pdf wilson-medhurst and turner an evaluation of the impact of e-portfolio supported pedagogic processes orsini-jones, m. and jones, d. (2007) ‘supporting collaborative grammar learning via a virtual learning environment (vle): a case study from coventry university, arts and humanities in higher education, 6(1), pp. 90-106. qaa (2001) qaa guidelines for he progress files. quality assurance agency. available at: http://www.qaa.ac.uk/academicinfrastructure/progressfiles/guidelines/progfile2001. pdf (accessed: 13 july 2010). stefani, l., mason, r. and pegler, c. (2007) the educational potential of e-portfolios: supporting personal development and reflective learning. london: routledge. strivens, j. (2007) a survey of epdp and e-portfolio practice in uk higher education. york: higher education academy. wilson-medhurst, s. (2005a) ‘using assessment to support employability awareness and development’, investigations in university teaching and learning, 3(1) autumn, pp.72-79. london metropolitan university, issn 1740-5106. wilson-medhurst, s. (2005b) ‘supporting student development using reflective writing’, investigations in university teaching and learning, 2(2) spring, pp. 89-92. london metropolitan university, issn 1740-5106. wilson-medhurst, s. (2008) ‘towards sustainable activity led learning innovations in teaching, learning and assessment’, proceedings of engineering education 2008 international conference on innovation, good practice and research in engineering education: ee2008. loughborough university, 14-16 july. available at: http://www.engsc.ac.uk/downloads/scholarart/ee2008/p008-wilson-medhurst.pdf [accessed: 10 september 2009). yancey, k. b. (2009) electronic portfolios a decade into the twenty-first century: what we know, what we need to know. peer review. available at: http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa4115/is_200901/ai_n31964582/ (accessed: 24 july 2009). journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 19 http://www.qaa.ac.uk/academicinfrastructure/progressfiles/guidelines/progfile2001.pdf http://www.qaa.ac.uk/academicinfrastructure/progressfiles/guidelines/progfile2001.pdf http://www.engsc.ac.uk/downloads/scholarart/ee2008/p008-wilson-medhurst.pdf http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa4115/is_200901/ai_n31964582/ http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa4115/is_200901/ai_n31964582/ http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa4115/is_200901/ai_n31964582/ wilson-medhurst and turner an evaluation of the impact of e-portfolio supported pedagogic processes yorke m., knight p. and contributors (2003) the undergraduate curriculum and employability: a briefing paper. available at: http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/resources/detail/resource_database/id248_the_unde rgraduate_curriculum_and_employability (accessed: 18 may 2010). author details sarah wilson-medhurst is a teaching practitioner, educational developer and researcher leading pedagogic innovation, development and adoption within the faculty of engineering and computing at coventry university. her focus is on student-centred and active learning approaches. from 2007-2010 she was a leading member of two major research and evaluation initiatives in relation to pdp and e-portfolio practice: cohort iv of the inter/national coalition for e-portfolio research, and the ntfs national action research network (narn). andrew turner is programme manager for teaching and learning in organisational learning and development at coventry university where he leads the postgraduate programmes in higher education professional practice. he was formerly in the centre for the study of higher education (cshe) at coventry university where he led the iped pedagogical research network and the team of teaching development fellows. in addition, he chaired the university personal development planning working group to develop an institutional pdp policy. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 20 http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/resources/detail/resource_database/id248_the_undergraduate_curriculum_and_employability http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/resources/detail/resource_database/id248_the_undergraduate_curriculum_and_employability an evaluation of the impact of e-portfolio supported pedagogic processes on students’ reflective capacity abstract introduction coventry response defining reflection methodology findings reviewing the research question key features of the group activity and personal statement assignment 1 conclusions and areas for further research acknowledgement references author details literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special edition: digital technologies, november 2014 embedding technology enhanced learning at universities: a collaboration between newcastle university and university of cumbria ann thanaraj university of cumbria, uk steve williams newcastle university, uk abstract the aim of this article is to raise the profile of how universities can support academics in implementing their university strategy on technology-enabled learning (tel), thereby contributing to the transformation of students’ learning. using evidence from a series of workshops and structured interviews, our findings suggest that universities should undertake a contextual analysis of the factors that motivate and constrain academics in their own organisations to engage with technology in curriculum delivery and development. the authors encourage universities to explore how the barriers and motivators can be used to develop and implement tel in an institution. institutional leaders should develop and publicise a vision for what tel can do for their organisation, recognising the barriers and enablers to the successful adoption of tel by academics. institutions need to recognise the role of academics as leaders of cultural change, subject experts and content creators. keywords: adoption of tel; barriers and enablers; cultural change in organisations. context of project by combining the perspectives of an academic leader and the head of a service, and seeking contributions from a wide range of staff at two very different institutions, new insights should emerge. the aims of the project are: thanaraj and williams embedding technology enhanced learning at universities journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2014 2 a) to break down the barriers between academics and technology enhanced learning (tel) by investigating the influence on the adoption and implementation of tel. b) to develop recommendations and implementation strategies for higher education institutions in facilitating effective and sustainable tel adoption. research argues that many universities struggle to engage a significant percentage of students and staff with tel and real development beyond projects by innovators has so far been modest (beetham et al., 2009). this is despite the fact that embedding tel figures highly in the aspirations of many policy makers and senior managers. in over a decade, oliver and dempster in 2003, barton et al. in 2007 and gourlay et al. in 2014 have concluded that there is no ready model that universities can utilise to embed the adoption of e-learning. this research advocates that the success of implementing tel initiatives lies with academics, who are the curriculum developers, designing and delivering the teaching using various methods. however, academic staff can be reluctant to change their methods of teaching and learning without a deep understanding of what the impact will be in terms of quality and any resultant benefits (salmon, 2005; gourlay et al., 2014). much of the focus has been into the development of technologies or top-down policy aspirations, and not on the human dimensions of what inhibits or motivates academics to adopt tel. the common argument is that there is not sufficient evidence for such innovation. however, this is indefensible (picciano and dziuban, 2007; garrison and vaughan, 2008). for example, blended learning (tel combined with some traditional models of learning) has been shown to have an advantage over face-to-face learning experiences (means et al., 2010). despite strong pedagogical benefits, there has been no organisational change that significantly enhances the effectiveness and efficiency of the teaching and learning transaction. this research proposes that in order to deliver institution-wide change, consideration of the needs, concerns and motivating factors of academics in adopting tel in curriculum and pedagogy must be addressed. thanaraj and williams embedding technology enhanced learning at universities journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2014 3 rationale academic staff have a key role to play in the innovation efforts of universities, aiming to transform education through the potential of technology-enhanced learning pedagogies. it will be difficult to implement e-learning without the full cooperation and support of lecturers, as the degree of interaction between lecturers and students is still predominant in elearning environments (warburton and perez-garcia, 2009; kelton, 2007; 2008; kirriemuir 2010). furthermore, it must be recognised that adopting technology is a ‘…complex, barrier-ridden and time–consuming process’ (jacobsen, 2000, p.26). literature on the barriers and enablers to the adoption of tel include larson’s (2005, p.104) case study findings that ‘…rewards such as a feeling of accomplishment and personal satisfaction are key enablers’. parker’s (2003) meta-analysis found the motivators which institutional leaders thought would be effective (such as extra pay, recognition and awards, and royalties on copyright material) did not motivate academics to adopt tel. the role of academics’ confidence in using tel is a major determinant of people’s choice of activities, how much effort they will expend, and of how long they will sustain effort in dealing with stressful situations (bandura, 1977, p.194). chen’s (2009) study explored an academic’s lack of time, lack of interest and the lack of rewards given as deterrence to the adoption of tel. ucisa’s study (browne et al., 2010) showed that the lack of academic staff knowledge was the top barrier for academics. lane and lyle in 2010 looked at how factors such as academics’ age, gender and experience affected perceptions of the strengths of the barriers. they found that the main influences were teacher experience and expertise with the technology. sharpe and beetham’s (2010) study explored the real necessity for academics to develop understanding of how the tools operated, their stability, knowledge of how to use them, and the reliability of one tool over another. most research in this area investigates barriers, whilst enabling factors are seldom mentioned or examined. there also does not appear to be much research which privileges the academic’s voice and lived experience. in spite of the work which has been done to date, further study is needed to test several aspects around the question of the adoption of tel in order to explore how the motivators can be used as part of driving tel forward in an institution, whilst handling the restraining factors that could be in the way. our research thanaraj and williams embedding technology enhanced learning at universities journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2014 4 advocates that the success of implementing tel initiatives lies with academics, who are the curriculum developers, designing and delivering the teaching using various methods. methodology our project featured two institutions in the north of england: newcastle university, a research intensive institution, and university of cumbria, a newer, teaching-led institution. as well as being our home institutions, these universities were chosen because of their diverse nature in their institutional objectives and missions. we expect that this will provide rich perspectives on the similarities and differences in the factors that motivate or hinder the adoption of tel. the tel strategies for both universities are at different stages. newcastle university has institutional wide tel activities (such as wide-ranging lecture capture and eportfolio projects) which are adopted by the majority of academic units. university of cumbria has a variety of tel initiatives (eportfolios and video enhanced teaching) developed through the institution’s initiatives and individual pockets of excellence, however, these need to be shared across departments, faculties and campuses for institutional adoption and impact stiles (2004, p.14) has argued persuasively that ‘clearly understanding where you are starting from is as important as understanding where you want to get to. expanding the use of elearning in an institution requires a clear and honest analysis of the organisation in terms of strengths and weaknesses viewed against its strategic goals’. friesen et al. (2014) argue for the importance of developing empirical findings in order to take forward any technology based learning initiatives. therefore, this project begins by examining the needs, concerns and motivations of academics in relation to the adoption of tel in their curriculum design and investigates the factors which inhibit or encourage the adoption of tel and the implications of those factors. this approach allowed the researchers to delve into and expose the more personal, cultural and organisational reasons why individuals elect to take up or avoid online teaching. thanaraj and williams embedding technology enhanced learning at universities journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2014 5 the authors ran four focus groups across two institutions, involving a total of 34 staff. the focus groups offered a free space for academic and professional service staff to discuss the following statements, taking fifteen minutes for each.  i would like to support students’ learning more by using online tools, but…  i see benefits in supporting students online, because…  there are concrete actions that institutions can take to help staff become more effective in their teaching by using online tools. the first and second questions are deliberately contradictory – the authors wanted the audience to adopt a negative and a positive outlook, respectively, influenced by de bono’s yellow and black hats (de bono’s six thinking hats, 2004). running the workshops with a self-selecting audience of those who replied to the invitations opens up risks of possible bias. the authors consulted a professional statistician, who reassured them that the validity of the conclusions would not be compromised as long as the questions about positive and negative opinions were asked openly. no attempts were made to produce a representative sample, but following the principles of purposive sampling (bryman, 2004), a cross section was sought especially across a range of subject disciplines in both institutions. the analysis was deepened by six interviews with institutional representatives, both staff and students. these discussions included senior academic leaders in both institutions. ten staff unable to attend responded by e-mail, and these responses were added to the analysis. the project approach allowed us to expose the more personal, cultural and organisational reasons why individuals choose to take up or avoid online teaching, which has the potential to lead the way to more effective interventions and a more informed decision in developing strategies and practices of implementing elearning in multidisciplinary subjects. anonymity and confidentially were guaranteed and participants were offered the chance to withdraw at any time. evidence from these discussions was analysed and informed by a literature review and theoretical frameworks. the authors categorised and prioritised the comments made and synthesised the main lessons from that work. that in turn fed into our conclusions and recommendations. findings from four focus groups undertaken across two institutions thanaraj and williams embedding technology enhanced learning at universities journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2014 6 examined the factors that influence academics’ decisions to adopt and integrate educational technology, viewpoints for structural peculiarities of universities, motivational and habitual traits of academic staff, and long-standing cultural values in the academic community, in an attempt to understand their impact on technology-enhanced innovation in higher education. the findings were systematically analysed and informed by literature. the discussion in this paper will focus on the pedagogical motivations and concerns of academics and explore the underlying structural and cultural barriers to technologyenhanced innovation in higher education. findings our findings are presented in three sections in the following table (see table 1), identifying the factors that are similar in both institutions and those that appear in one institution but not the other. these similarities and differences will be discussed within the context and nature of e-learning within our universities. thanaraj and williams embedding technology enhanced learning at universities journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2014 7 table 1. findings. enablers newcastle cumbria both  motivated by the better retention of students  enhanced learning  international/cross faculty/ cross discipline opportunities  employability  staff development of skills  tel as a priority for the university, enhancing the university’s reputations  staff recognition  scalability, reliability and innovation in the software  staff gain better communication skills  student experience  identity and belonging  personalised learning  flexibility  creativity  access to education through widening participation and diversity thanaraj and williams embedding technology enhanced learning at universities journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2014 8 barriers newcastle cumbria both  staff support with the tools  social diversity, widening participation  legal issues (copyright, ip)  developing multiple online personalities  design of online study spaces  staff disenfranchised  assumption that students are confident with the tools  student support with the tools  sufficiency of digital literacy/fluency skills  lack of concrete pedagogic evidence in existing literature  the extent of career recognition and progression  impact on time, resource and staff workload  lack of opportunity to communicate and share best practice  not knowing how it impacts student experience of learning  fear and reticence on the part of staff  lack of sign posting of support and tools  believing that just because it is e, it’s not better thanaraj and williams embedding technology enhanced learning at universities journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2014 9 institutional measures newcastle cumbria both  develop a long-term tel plan (sustainability and transforming learning)  staff digital literacy plan  share best practice  develop hybrid managers  be risk-aware rather than risk-averse in new developments  reward, recognition, incentive in tel  put students at the heart of education  empower staff  managing hardware and software well – don’t change too much at once  use suitable, meaningful names for tel projects  embed tel into learning+teaching+assessment strategy, with qaa process  reflect tel involvement in staff workload  localise use of tel in schools/ departments/subjects (practice)  recognise research on teaching as a scholarly activity  make pedagogy fit the subject discipline  invest in software, people and training thanaraj and williams embedding technology enhanced learning at universities journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2014 10 discussion our findings show that the most common barriers in both institutions are the lack of time for learning the use of new technology and to undertake training, lack of experience with technology, and doubts towards the effectiveness of tel within the curriculum. the lack of accessibility and lack of technical support are also barriers that contribute to the lack of engagement with technology in both institutions. the authors argue that attitude towards e-learning is important. to achieve sustainable benefits through tel, institutions need to provide the appropriate support and incentives to academics within their digital literacy plans, with a focused vision and strategies. preliminary recommendations this opinion paper will be developed into a full publication after further analysis. the evidence supports previous work (oliver and dempster, 2003) which argues that there is no single best practice in this area. instead, each institution must set these decisions in its own context. our recommendations are likely to be: 1. tel adoption must be tailored to real learning needs and the motivations of academic staff. 2. staff face complex pedagogical, technological, economic and cultural challenges in the adoption of tel. 3. increasing consumerisation of technology is having an impact. staff and students expect to be able to use the tools of their choice, quickly and easily. 4. universities need both to set sensible institutional policies and to allow for innovation to ‘bubble up’ across the organisation. 5. universities should recognise and value both the roles of academics as subject matter experts and content creators, and dedicated resources for technical support of tel. 6. academic champions should be identified, supported and resourced for each tel initiative. thanaraj and williams embedding technology enhanced learning at universities journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2014 11 7. universities should support programmes to develop the digital literacy of staff and students, as this benefits effective learning. contribution of research our recommendations will equip academic leaders to realise the benefits of effective adoption of tel across subject disciplines. our findings will benefit university leaders (who may lack information on whether existing staff development approaches are sufficient) to understand and explore how the barriers and motivators can be used to develop tel in an institution. furthermore, most research in this area investigates barriers whilst enabling factors are seldom mentioned or examined. there also does not appear to be much research which privileges the academic’s voice and lived experience. contributions from all readers are welcome on our blog at: https://blogs.ncl.ac.uk/removingtelbarriers/ references bandura, a. (1977) ‘self efficacy: toward a unifying theory of behavioral change’, psychological review, 84(2), pp. 191-215. barton, s., corbitt, b., nguyen, l. and peszynski, k. (2007) 'cultural factors behind the adoption of e-learning in turkey', 18th australasian conference on information systems. toowoomba, queensland, australia 5-7 december. beetham, h., mcgill, l. and littlejohn, a. (2009) thriving in the 21st century: learning literacies for the digital age (llida project), jisc. available at: http://www.caledonianacademy.net/spaces/llida/uploads/main/llidareportjune09 .pdf (accessed: 26 november 2014) browne, t., hewitt, r., jenkins, m., voce, j., walker, r. and yip, h. (2010) 2010 survey of technology enhanced learning for higher education in the uk. a jisc/ucisa funded survey. https://blogs.ncl.ac.uk/removingtelbarriers/ http://www.caledonianacademy.net/spaces/llida/uploads/main/llidareportjune09.pdf http://www.caledonianacademy.net/spaces/llida/uploads/main/llidareportjune09.pdf thanaraj and williams embedding technology enhanced learning at universities journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2014 12 bryman, a. (2004) social research methods (2nd edn). oxford: oxford university press. chen, b. (2009) ‘barriers to adoption of technology-mediated distance education in highereducation institutions’, the quarterly review of distance learning, 10(4), pp. 333338. de bono, e. (2004) six thinking hats. london: bbc active. friesen, n., gourlay, l. and oliver, m. (2014) ‘editorial: scholarship and literacies in a digital age’, research in learning technology, vol. 21, doi: 10.3402/rlt.v21.23834. garrison, d. and vaughan, n. (2008) blended learning in higher education. san francisco: jossey-bass. gourlay, l., hamilton, m. and lea, m. (2014) ‘textual practices in the new media digital landscape: messing with digital literacies’, research in learning technology, vol. 21, doi: 10.3402/rlt.v21.21438. jacobsen, d.m. (2000) ‘examining technology adoption patterns by faculty in higher education’, learning technologies, teaching and the future of schools. melbourne, australia 6-9 july. kelton, a.j. (2007) second life: reaching into the virtual world for real-world learning. boulder, co: educause center for applied research. available at: http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/erb0717.pdf (accessed: 26 november 2014). kelton, a.j. (2008) virtual worlds? ‘outlook good’. educause review, 43(5), pp. 15-22. available at: http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/erm0850.pdf (accessed: 26 november 2014). kirriemuir, j. (2010) virtual world activity in uk universities and colleges: what now? available at: http://virtualworldwatch.net/vww/wpcontent/uploads/2011/09/snapshot-9.pdf (accessed: 26 november 2014). http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/erb0717.pdf http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/erm0850.pdf http://virtualworldwatch.net/vww/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/snapshot-9.pdf http://virtualworldwatch.net/vww/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/snapshot-9.pdf thanaraj and williams embedding technology enhanced learning at universities journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2014 13 lane, c. and lyle, h. (2010) ‘obstacles and supports related to the use of educational technologies: the role of technological expertise, gender, and age’, journal of computing in higher education, 23(1), pp. 38-59. larson, a. (2005) ‘lifelong learning at the international agenda – and its implementation in a danish context’, in kiefer, s. and peterseil, t. (eds.) analysis of educational policies in a comparative perspective. linz: trauner verlag, pp. 123-140. means, b., toyama, y., murphy, r., bakia, m. and jones, k. (2010) evaluation of evidence-based practices in online learning: a meta-analysis and review of online learning studies. usa: us department of education. oliver, m. and dempster, j. (2003) ‘embedding e-learning practices’, in r. blackwell, r. and blackmore, p. (eds.) towards strategic staff development in higher education. buckingham: buckingham, srhe and open university press, pp. 142-153. parker, a. (2003) ‘motivation and incentives for distance faculty’, online journal of distance learning administration, 6(3), pp. 1-6 [online]. available at: http://www.westga.edu/~distance/ojdla/fall63/parker63.htm (accessed: 26 november 2014). picciano, a. and dziuban, c. (2007) blended learning: research perspectives. needham, ma: sloan consortium. salmon, g. (2005) 'flying not flapping: a strategic framework for e-learning and pedagogical innovation in higher education institutions', alt-j, 13(3), pp. 201-218. sharpe, r. and beetham, h. (2010) ‘understanding students’ uses of technology for learning: towards creative appropriation’ in sharpe, r., beetham, h. and de freitas, s. (eds.) rethinking learning for the digital age: how learners shape their experiences. london and new york: routledgefalmer, pp. 85-99. stiles, m. (2004) ‘is an elearning strategy enough?’, educational developments, 5(1), pp. 13-15. http://www.westga.edu/~distance/ojdla/fall63/parker63.htm http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415875431/ http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415875431/ thanaraj and williams embedding technology enhanced learning at universities journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2014 14 warburton, s. and perez-garcia, m. (2009) ‘3d design and collaboration in massively multi-user virtual environments’, in russel, d. (ed.) cases on collaboration in virtual learning environments: processes and interactions. hershey, pa: igi global, p. 417. author details ann thanaraj is a principal lecturer in law and barrister at the university of cumbria. she is the university's faculty representative at the cumbria learning and teaching committee and the technology enhanced learning special interest group, and delivers guest workshops on internationalisation of curriculum and changing pedagogy through the adoption of e-learning. ann has developed a clinical legal education scheme implemented through the use of virtual game-based learning. her work on embedding globalisation through tel in the curriculum was recognised as best practice by the hea in 2013. ann has a very keen interest in history and particularly in the design of original buildings and enjoys relaxing in coffee shops, walking along the coast in tynemouth with a box of chocolates. steve williams is director of it at newcastle university. before joining newcastle university in 2008, steve led it teams in germany, the usa and asia, in a number of international businesses and in local government. steve leads the it service which supports and enables teaching and learning, research and the business of the university. his interests are in transforming organisations with it, developing high-performing teams, creativity, risk, delivering benefits from projects, and providing services to complex international stakeholders. he has spoken internationally on programme management in higher education, on encouraging take-up of e-learning, and on how it underpins the internationalisation of he. outside work, steve competes in triathlons and plays the drums. embedding technology enhanced learning at universities: a collaboration between newcastle university and university of cumbria abstract context of project rationale methodology findings discussion preliminary recommendations contribution of research references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 12: november 2017 making a difference to student employability through assessment andy hollyhead birmingham city university, uk jon curwin birmingham city university, uk abstract students will know some of the benefits and costs of an undergraduate degree. they will be told of the degree ‘premium’ and that, over a lifetime, they can expect to be better off. a university education will open doors to professions that will seem distant when completing school education. they will anecdotally hear stories about employers expecting a first or upper second. they will also know that some students will never pay back their loans. the reality is that an undergraduate degree can lead to a good job but this is not the case for all students as finding graduate level employment will be very challenging for some. we argue that courses should continually look at ways to enhance the employability of their students. it is understandable that students will see good grades from assessment as the route to a good degree and ultimately to a good job. if assessment can also develop and evidence the skills valued by others, particularly employers, then further benefits are added. there are a number of ways that student employability can be supported, including: careers advice; jobs fairs; visiting speakers and possibly a placement opportunity. we argue that, additionally, assessment can make a difference and with thoughtful design can make an even bigger difference. it is the author’s experience that if students are asked what they learnt on their course, they are likely to talk about the outcomes of assessment. if these outcomes also evidence the skills valued by the employer, then this will present a more persuasive response. assessment is critical for all courses. if assessment can leave the student with outcomes, experience or artefacts that evidence a ‘can-do’ ability then we argue this must positively impact on employability. hollyhead making a difference to student employability through assessment journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 2 keywords: employability; assessment; student engagement; skills enhancement. introduction it is unsurprising that undergraduates will say that they are working for a first or upper second classification. bis (2016) statistics show: graduates that achieved an upper second in their degree had the highest employment rates, although graduates that achieved a first in their degree had the lowest unemployment rates; these findings held across both the working age and young populations. (department for business, innovation and skills (bis), 2016, p. 25) the bis report also shows that young graduates (21 to 30 years) are more likely to be employed and are paid an average of £6,000 a year more than those with no degree but that this ‘graduate premium’ – the extra amount a graduate can expect for those three or more years of study – is narrowing. a degree can lead to a good job but not for all; the bis report shows that one-third of all graduates in the working population are not doing a highskilled job (bis, 2016, p.11). assessment can mean different things to different people: to staff it can confirm the expected learning; to students a proof of knowledge and skills; to an employer it can give credibility to a qualification. it can also be a motivator, give a sense of achievement and broaden horizons. we argue that it is just too important to be seen exclusively as a means of mark determination. we do see a place for a broad range of assessment methodologies but if we merely ask students to complete multiple choice tests or examinations what can a student say to an employer about their course or themselves? in contrast, if part of the assessment was a statistical analysis of recent economic trends or a digital story, when asked about what they have learnt a student could say ‘i will show you’. within the context of higher education, assessment is accepted as a significant driver of student behaviour (rowntree, 1989; kirkwood, 2009) and will convey what is valued and what leads to success. we argue that assessment should be designed to deliver fair and consistent results but deliberately give students the opportunity to develop and evidence hollyhead making a difference to student employability through assessment journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 3 their employability. surely becoming more employable is going to be motivational for a student. assessment needs to embrace that motivation and offer something that is relevant to their career aspirations and make them ‘stand out from the crowd’, as brown (2004) suggests: if we want our students to demonstrate employability when they graduate, our assignments need to be designed to be practice-based, whether in terms of the practice of being a researcher or applications to professional contexts such as being an artist, an accountant, a health practitioner or a quality surveyor. rather than assessing a learner’s ability to write about good practice, an effective assessment strategy would seek to measure how the student can put into practice the learning achieved. (brown, 2004, p. 83) we argue that employability and the opportunities it offers are too important to be addressed exclusively in one or two isolated modules. traditionally, a final year project was seen as the major piece of work that would bring various disciplines together in an applied way. it is now the case that fewer students are taking a final year project and this might be their only practice-based module. in our view, employability needs to be embedded across a course and considered in the design of all modules, even if it is not directly included in all modules for good reason. the course needs to offer some kind of balance for the student in terms of skills and knowledge, with each module making some but not necessarily equal contribution to employability. it may also be the case that the course does offer the opportunities to develop the knowledge, skills and attributes valued by employers but students still need to find ways to articulate this. the use of an eportfolio, for example, can help the student present information in a way that aligns with online applications. however, we believe that more can be done and that good practice could be extended across a wider range of modules. what is employability? employability is about the person as well as the qualification. how often do we hear that if you have the skills ‘we can give you the on-job training you need’? in the joint report by the hollyhead making a difference to student employability through assessment journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 4 confederation of british industries and universities uk, a positive attitude is seen as the factor underpinning successful employability skills, exemplified by: …a ‘can-do’ approach, a readiness to take part and contribute, openness to new ideas and a drive to make these happen. (confederation of british industry, 2009, p.8) employability is a willingness to apply relevant skills and knowledge and can be defined in terms of: … a set of attributes, skills and knowledge that all labour market participants should possess to ensure they have the capability of being effective in the workplace – to the benefit of themselves, their employers and the wider economy. (confederation of british industry, 2009, p.8) however, the list of skills (which could be a box ticking exercise) may not make the applicant effective in a competitive job market. if employers see only identical skills paraded, how can they select the best matched candidate? we argue that candidates will have a mix of common and unique skills and it is those unique skills such as an international business language or a technical ability that make a difference. curwin and lawton (2015) argue that students need to do more than merely articulate a list of skills, like team working or numeracy: these can be thought of as threshold skills; without which an applicant will struggle to compete. if being uniquely good is important, then the applicant needs to be advised to evidence these threshold skills but they will also need to be advised to evidence all those attributes, characteristics and insights that make them special. to stand out an applicant will need to showcase those qualities and skills that make them different. (curwin and lawton, 2015, p.42) in any competitive environment there is a pressure to match what others are doing, analogous to benchmarking in business. however, the driver is not merely equivalence but the achievement of competitive advantage. this comes from exceeding threshold competencies in one or more ways. these ways can often come from natural advantages hollyhead making a difference to student employability through assessment journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 5 like location and inherited skill sets. for an individual, it might come from an existing interest in fashion or language skills picked up as a child. the important point is that to be competitive is not just a matching of what others can do but also demonstrating other qualities that make the individual stand out. recent interviews with employers have confirmed that offering an additional language, keeping a blog over an extended period and being able to take an old car engine to pieces and get it back together have all made a difference. we argue that assessment should allow a student to evidence difference as well as sameness. how can assessment make a difference? according to race assessment is: ...the most important thing that happens to you in higher education. (race, 2001, p.3) assessment can be fair, consistent and objective but add little to employability. if courses all offer homogenised curricula structure and content (and outcome), how can we expect students to evidence their unique qualities? if assessment becomes a series of standardised tasks such as multi-choice tests and examinations that require the application of existing knowledge or a coursework that critically reviews a case-study, a student can struggle to stand out. employability is more than a complete cv. if all we are going to ask students to do is replicate a model cv, they (and we) are likely to miss the point that employability is more complex and is about the development and special qualities of the individual. employability is about being more insightful, more experienced, evidencing the development of new and transferable skills, being aware of new knowledge and being sensitive to others. the advice we give needs to match the complexity of making the employability case. the careeredge model of employability developed by dacre pool and sewell (2007) (shown in figure 1) uses: career development learning; experience (work and life); generic skills; degree subject knowledge, skills and understanding; and emotional intelligence as the building blocks of employability. the ability to reflect and evaluate will impact on selfesteem, self-efficacy and self-confidence – all of which are supported within this model of hollyhead making a difference to student employability through assessment journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 6 employability. assessment can be informed by these ‘building blocks’, reflection and evaluation. figure 1. the careeredge model (dacre pool and sewell, 2007). some examples of how assessment and other activities can engage the student with the components of the model (shown in figure 1) are given in the table below. table 1. course responses and examples for the careeredge model. component possible course response examples career development learning  find ways for students to become more self-aware, identify things they enjoy doing and motivate them  mock interviews  feedback on cv  talks from alumni experience (work and life)  guide students in terms of work and wider-life experiences  placements  in-company projects  organisational visits generic skills  develop an explicit strategy to enhance these skills over the length of the course  skills audit and evaluation  action planning hollyhead making a difference to student employability through assessment journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 7 component possible course response examples  ensure skills are also embedded across the range of modules  e-portfolio such as mahara and pebblepad degree subject knowledge, skills and understanding  find ways for assessment to do more than just give a mark  create short video  digital stories emotional intelligence  recognise the importance of emotional intelligence and make this explicit within the rationale for this course  peer assessment  team working an example of innovative assessment all assessment will carry some cost. ideally, the assessment provides a challenge for the student, can confirm expected learning and be cost effective in terms of marking. birmingham city business school offers a level five module ‘creative problem solving’ within the business range of courses. the focus of the module is the recognition, definition and redefinition of a problem of importance to the individual student, e.g. employability. students are presented with models of the creative problem solving process and can make a choice about how they proceed. essentially, students work on their own and in groups, to manage the problem solving process creatively. their summative assessment is to report and reflect upon the outcomes achieved using a digital story of three to five minutes. a digital story is a snippet of video that brings together images and voice. typically, we do not see a nervous individual talking to camera (but a digital story can include some of this) but a story told alongside the richness of pictures. the assessment allows students to enhance their skills in the use of modelling, the management of creative problem solving techniques, producing options and justifying choice as specified by the learning objectives. the assessment also allows the student to demonstrate unintended outcomes such as the imaginative use of video, artistic images and insightful fact-finding. in this case, the assessment does deliver the engagement with problem solving skills, is time effective to mark but also can make a practical difference to student employability. individual modules can make a difference, but synergy will be realised if activities across modules are complementary. a digital story could be added to an e-portfolio alongside other content from the course. an articulation of such work, as facilitated by e-portfoilio software such as hollyhead making a difference to student employability through assessment journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 8 mahara or pebblepad for example, prepares the type of content necessary for a professional presence on social media or online application. assessment in this context can be a mechanism to build confidence to present a persuasive argument to others. conclusion the process of becoming more employable as an undergraduate is an important one and should, in itself, be motivational to the student. it will give a relevance to the course when it is known that others will value it. assessment provides a signal to the student of what is valued and the outcomes of assessment, a record of achievement. achievements over the course can provide students with outcomes and artefacts that they can take forward to employers as evidence that they can do and have a ‘can-do’ attitude. individual modules, such as the ‘creative problem solving’ module (given as an example above) can make a difference but it is our view that employability needs to be embedded throughout a course. it is our experience that looking at assessment across the course will provide assurance that the outcomes are an effective measure of achievement. additionally, this review could also provide students with evidence of knowledge, skills and attributes that will make a difference for them in the workplace. this does not mean that employability begins to dominate all we do but rather the awareness is there and a proportionate response given. references brown, s. (2004) ‘assessment for learning’, learning and teaching in higher education, 1(1), pp. 81-89. (not available online). confederation of british industry, universities uk (2009) future fit: preparing graduates for the world of work. available at: http://www.universitiesuk.ac.uk/policy-andanalysis/reports/pages/future-fit-preparing-graduates-for-the-world-of-work.aspx (accessed: 11 november 2017). curwin, j. and lawton, r. (2015) ‘the challenge of uniqueness employability in higher education’, rapport the international journal for recording achievement, planning and portfolios, 1(1), p. 43 [online]. available at: hollyhead making a difference to student employability through assessment journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 9 https://view.joomag.com/rapport/0727239001439797282?page=43 (accessed: 29 october 2017). dacre pool, l. and sewell, p. (2007) ‘the key to employability: developing a practical model of graduate employability’, education+ training, 49(4), pp. 277-289. https://doi.org/10.1108/00400910710754435 department for business, innovation and skills (bis) (2016) graduate labour market statistics: 2015. available at: http://dera.ioe.ac.uk/26145/1/bis-16-232-graduatelabour-market-statistics-2015.pdf (accessed: 21 march 2017). kirkwood, a. (2009) 'e‐learning: you don’t always get what you hope for’, technology, pedagogy and education, 18(2), pp. 107-121. https://doi.org/10.1080/14759390902992576 race, p. (2001) assessment: a guide for students, learning and teaching support network generic centre. available at: https://phil-race.co.uk/wpcontent/uploads/assessment_guide_for_students.pdf (accessed: 29 october 2017). rowntree, d. (1989) assessing students: how shall we know them? 2nd revised edn. london, kogan page. author details andy hollyhead is an associate professor at birmingham city business school, birmingham city university. (email: andrew.hollyhead@bcu.ac.uk) jon curwin is an associate professor at birmingham city business school, birmingham city university. (email: jon.curwin@bcu.ac.uk) https://doi.org/10.1108/00400910710754435 mailto:andrew.hollyhead@bcu.ac.uk making a difference to student employability through assessment abstract introduction how can assessment make a difference? an example of innovative assessment conclusion references author details literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 3: march 2011 coming to writing helen bowstead university of plymouth, uk abstract this paper attempts to engage on a practical and theoretical level with laurel richardson’s (1997) notion of ‘writing as a method of inquiry’ and ‘transgressive data’ as defined by elizabeth st. pierre. the author has employed an autobiographical/biographical approach to explore the nature of academic writing from both her own perspective and from that of an undergraduate student she worked closely with in her role as study skills coordinator. through the interweaving of the two narrative voices, and by embracing data that is subjective, personal and emotional, this piece of writing questions the privilege discourse bestows on traditional forms of writing, research and data analysis, and demonstrates the transformative potential of a more ‘heartfelt’ approach to academic research. keywords: narrative data; transgressive data; embodied texts; autoethnography; academic discourse. introduction ‘the sweat of the heart is sweet’ (cixous, 1997, p.109) last night my head was filled with helene cixous. as i lay in the darkness, listening to the strange and unfamiliar sounds of the spanish night, the introduction to this piece flowed around my mind. this writer, my ‘unhoped for other’ will, i know, permeate my writing. inspiring me to write in a way i have never dared. i am indebted to her. thrilled by her. i am holding a pen. a biro. transparent body. black cap. i am intrigued by the clip. why is that piece of plastic there? a poor imitation of a more expensive pen. one that you might wear proudly in your breast pocket. i had a fountain pen as a child. i loved to write with it. bowstead coming to writing but i was too slow. it took too long for me to form the letters. nowadays i prefer a finenibbed bic. what am i trying to achieve in this piece of writing? i am not sure. mireille calle-gruber says that in writing ‘there is a necessity of abandoning oneself, of abandoning a conventional image of oneself, of letting oneself go, of practising a permeability, a vulnerability’ (cited cixous, 1997, p.111). i want my writing to stand as a challenge to writing. to my own writing. to writing that conforms and conceals. to writing that is readily accepted and acceptable. the kind of writing which i hide behind because i don’t want to feel vulnerable. exposed. my story/gill’s story – narrating the personal i was always ‘good’ at writing. whatever that means. i like words. i love reading. i have always found it easier to express myself in the written form. gill is the opposite. a natural talker. open and honest and unafraid to express what she feels. how she feels. she doesn’t need to hide behind the pen, or use the keyboard to protect her. her words aren’t filtered, diluted, constructed and arranged on a page. they come tumbling out of her mouth, fully formed and ready to go. and that is how she writes. a tumble of words. ideas scattered across a page. thoughts voiced. you could always hear gill’s spoken voice in her writing. but we can’t write as we speak, can we? gill knew that. and yet, even in the academic world she now found herself in, she wrote as she spoke. she couldn’t help herself. together we would go back and try and mould her words into something a bit more ‘academic’. until she felt she had disguised herself enough. until her words no longer betrayed her. exposed her. who did she think she was anyway? doing a degree at her age. let me introduce gill. i met gill met not long after i started my new job as a study skills coordinator at a small university college. she came to me for help with her writing. ‘i can’t do it’, she said, ‘i know what i want to say but i can’t get it down on paper’. i didn’t know then how often i would hear those words over the next two years. and not just from gill. but from all those students, ‘traditional’ or otherwise, who struggle to access academic discourse. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 2 bowstead coming to writing it was gill’s frustration that i responded to i think. she was writing her dissertation on a family support centre she had worked at and that was being closed down. she was determined to document what was happening. to tell the story of the people who used the centre and how funding issues had been put above their needs. but gill was tired, tired of being told her writing was too descriptive. not ‘academic’ enough. that her punctuation was faulty, her structure poor. what did it matter when these families, vulnerable and in need of support, were being farmed out, palmed off, ignored? and so we met. sometimes over a cup of tea, often hungry. our stomachs rumbling in unison. me the ‘expert’ writer, the one with the ‘skills’ gill desired, required. gill, full of passion and honest compassion for her fellow (wo)man. but convinced that she was ‘crap at writing’. i read one of gill’s essays once. she wrote about her husband who had died of cancer and how it had nearly crushed her. and how she had picked herself up off the floor for the sake of her daughter. it made me cry. i didn’t think she was crap at writing at all. i wonder if my writing has ever moved anyone to tears? i am sure not. gill had made me cry. elizabeth st. pierre too. i cried again yesterday reading laurel richardson on the train. the story of louisa may a single mother born and raised in the deep south, written not as prose, but in the form of a poem. louisa may’s words. laurel richardson’s poetry. beautiful. serious. challenging. intensely moving. like elizabeth st. pierre and laurel richardson, i felt there was a deep ethical sense of purpose to gill’s work, a desire to tell the story of a vulnerable group of people whose lives had been profoundly affected by the closure of the family support centre. in order to do these lives justice, gill had applied academic rigour to her work. she had read and researched. she had identified and contextualised procedures and policies. she had talked to those directly involved, and given them the opportunity to speak. she had recorded their words and represented them fairly and accurately. but the dissertation was hard for her. hard to write. hard to structure. but the hardest thing for gill, i think, was to make her impassioned words fit into the academic straightjacket. she brought me her supervisor’s feedback: ‘too descriptive. too personal’. her writing had failed to create the ‘illusion of objectivity’ demanded by the academy (richardson, 1997). well, for gill it was personal. early on in the writing of this piece, i asked gill to read what i had written about her. this is the e-mail she sent back to me: journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 3 bowstead coming to writing dear helen wow what a great begining and so personal and by the way i think of you has a friend too. lol punctuation and grammar shocking ha ha it shows a relationship between a tutor and a student developing in a very informal way within a formal environment great. and your right there were definately times i wanted to throw in the towel but refused too and your support help with that decision you know helen i have had to overcome many personal perceptions and barriers in achieving the goal of gaining a 2:1 degree. personally my life has been filled with various family issues were my early self belief was pretty low, losing my husband, family issues, were all issues that at times played a role in my disbelief in being able to achieve gaining a degree and now those same issues are still placing doubt in my abilities in turning this degree into a career .... i will overcome my doubts and i will succeed and the support i have gained via study skills services has helped me to realise i can do this and if i need to ask for help it is not a negative but a positive aspect in moving forward. frustrations at uni = when a tutors would not return essays for collection in on time... because i wanted the feedback. when essays were misplaced and my placement folder was only found when i had completed my dissertation and the folder contained all my background information for my dissie very annoying. hope that helps anything else just ask ok gill ☺ i am not sure whose story i am telling; mine or gill’s. i am not sure that it even matters, or even if they can be separated. why gill and not any of the other students i worked with? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 4 bowstead coming to writing perhaps it is just that we get along, that i liked her from the outset. that we shared something, our age, our gender, our passion. does that compromise the telling? or enrich it? i hope the latter. i hope that the bond that we have formed over the past two years gives my writing more validity, not less, a sense of the ‘radical reciprocity’ that friendship as a method of enquiry demands (tillmann-healy, 2003). lost data – evidencing lived experience yesterday i realised that i have lost the recordings i made of my early study skills sessions with gill. i swore. then i cried. how can i finish my essay? i have lost her words. i have no hard data. no proof. all i have left are the audio files gill recorded for me at home while she was working on her dissertation. i had given her a digital recorder and had asked her to talk through her thoughts and feelings. gill knew i was hoping to use some of the data in my writing and she seemed a bit nervous when she brought the recorder back. ‘i hope it’s alright’ she had said. when i play them back i understand the source of her anxiety. the voice is gill’s, but it is another gill. ‘academic gill’. talking herself through her essays, justifying her research, analysing her data. her language is formal, stilted, her accent muted. this isn’t the gill i wanted to present. the warmth, the passion, is all missing. gill is performing to the recorder, in the same way she felt she had to perform in her writing. i read back over this paragraph and i am at once struck by the way i have positioned myself in relation to gill. my words surprise me in the re-reading. shock me a little. disappoint me. there i am, exerting my authority over my ‘data’. i am frustrated because the version of gill i had wanted to present is gone. lost. erased. i wonder how gill would feel about my desire to show her to the world as i see her, when i have no real knowledge of how she sees herself, let alone how she would like to be seen. i refer to her in the extract as ‘academic gill’, insinuating that this is some how inferior to ‘real gill’. yet much of the driving force behind this paper is the desire to underscore the validity of gill’s academic work and to acknowledge how much her writing has helped me develop my own. for me, the lost recordings were a record of conversations that laid the foundations of a friendship and capture, in a particular temporal and spatial context, the developing relationship between two people trying to make sense of academic discourse. for this reason they were valuable to me, but perhaps they are less so for gill, for they also captured her frustration and disappointment with what she felt was her lack of ‘academic’ journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 5 bowstead coming to writing skills. the other recordings were made by gill in the knowledge that they were part of my research, and they self consciously demonstrate the extent to which she had learned the language of the academy. they are proof of her success, her hard won ‘academic voice’. i think i should send them to gill and ask her what she thinks. how does she feel now as she listens to herself? i am sure she will not share my frustration that her words at times seem to objectify her out of existence (richardson, 1997). i am sure she will feel proud. and so she should. i cook lunch for gill and tell her about the recordings. she laughs when i tell her that i am going to use the loss to argue for the validity of autoethnographic research, of writing as a method of inquiry, and the value of transgressive data. we talk over how the placement folder she had given to a tutor ‘went missing’ a few months before her dissertation deadline. in it was much of the data she had collected from her time working at the family support unit. it turned up again in july. too late for gill to use in her dissertation. pissertation. i steal the word from helene cixous (1991, p.54) i must remember to tell gill, i think it would make her laugh. thinking about the lost data, reminds me of an incident i witnessed at a learning and teaching conference. the keynote speaker had talked at length about the researcher’s ethical obligations towards his/her participants. a member of the audience raised his hand to comment. he was clearly agitated and grew more so as he recounted how his own research had been ‘sabotaged’ at a late stage by a number of the participants exercising their right to withdraw from the study. who protects me was his cry? all that time, all that effort. for nothing. and i remember thinking, but how can the data be ‘lost’? nothing can take away those people’s stories, their experiences. surely the researcher will forever be touched, influenced, changed by what he had heard? it seemed to me that what really angered him wasn’t so much the ‘loss’ of the data, but the loss of the opportunity to ‘use’ that data. to present it, publish it, profit from it. by withdrawing their permission, the participants had denied him what he felt was his right to public recognition for his work. his data represented his ‘desire for validity’ (st. pierre, 1997a). so i too have lost my ‘hard data’. quite literally it has been erased. so what? it never belonged to me anyway. it was nothing but a few moments in time. a conversation between two women. perhaps it captured something. the frustration gill felt with her writing. the bitter disappointment with the mark she had received for an essay she had put her heart and soul into. a snapshot of the dynamics of our relationship. but then, so many of our conversations are equally as journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 6 bowstead coming to writing lost. unrecorded. unsubstantiated. untraceable. and yet they are not lost. they are here in this essay. they have shaped, and continue to shape, my thinking. like elizabeth st. pierre, i prefer to think of those conversations as living ‘crabgrass’ that will forever spring up in my thoughts and writing and research (1997b, p.403). they are part of who i am and how i see the world. i carry them in my head and heart. academic discourse – blurring the boundaries but what of those ‘transcendental signifiers’ that have shaped academic thought and knowledge production for so long? what of method, validity, truth, power, rationality, and objectivity? where is my method? where is my proof? can these concepts really be put aside and leave anything of any academic ‘worth’ behind? elizabeth st. pierre argues that there is nothing ‘nihilistic or apolitical or irrational or relativistic or anarchistic or unethical about the task of resignification’ (st. pierre, 1997a, p.176), rather, by placing such concepts ‘sous rature’, by questioning the very concepts these words claim to unambiguously signify, what we can do is begin to ‘throw off the burden of a life weighed down by the transcendence of ‘higher values’, values whose worth is not at all self-evident’ (st. pierre, 1997a, p.176). i know gill often felt weighed down, burdened by a ‘dead language’ (bourdieu et al., 1994) that squeezed the life-blood out of her writing, but i have also come to see how my own writing has been constrained by academic discourse. brookfield (1995, p.28) says that by consulting our autobiographies as teachers and learners ‘we become viscerally connected to what our own students are experiencing’. i like the word visceral. i look it up in the dictionary: ‘of or affecting the viscera. characterised by instinct rather than intellect’. embodied, cixous might say. as i write i wonder if i am experiencing the same physical and mental frustrations that i often sensed in gill. i certainly feel unsure and inadequate. stuttering and stammering in my writing as i try to escape the ‘academic’ and discover within myself a more ‘literary’ voice. what is a stammer but a physical manifestation of hesitation, uncertainty, of fear? gale and wyatt (2006, p.1126) argue that it is in fact this act of stammering that gives writing its vitality; its power to invigorate, ‘eloquence, confidence, and certainty seem, by contrast, to distance, to close down’. i think about the book i am reading, divisadero by michael ondaatje. the book is named after a street, so called because it used to form the boundary between san francisco and the fields of the presidio. the name is said to journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 7 bowstead coming to writing derive from the spanish word for ‘division’ or perhaps from the word ‘divisar’: ‘to gaze at something from a distance’. division and distance. the founding principles of academic discourse. ondaatje writes so beautifully, so lyrically, that i can only read a few pages at a time. the language is so rich i can only take it in little sips. helicodal, helix, villanelle. these unfamiliar words call to me. i can’t find helicodal or villanelle in the dictionary. but i find helix: ‘a spiral. the incurving fold that forms the margin of the external ear’. i like that too. listening is what i do. i listen to the stories of others. i try to listen ‘around’ and ‘beyond’ the words (ellis and berger, 2003) and to tell the stories that i hear. and in the listening, as in the telling, i am changed. foucault says of his own research, that everything he does is done ‘with the conviction that it may be of use’ (foucault 1980/2000, cited st. pierre, 2004, p.293). i cannot say what use this piece of writing is except that it has been useful to me. cixous (1997) states that the principle enemy in life is fear and that for her, writing only has meaning if it makes the fear retreat. i have written in a way that i have never written before. and it has made me feel both vulnerable and liberated. my hope was to invoke a ‘lived experience that challenges, if not subverts, traditional forms of empirical description’ (gubrium and holstein, 2003, p.4). i wanted to explore the notion of researcher as writer with the literary privilege to be ‘experimental, avante-garde, multivocal, transgressing’ (clifford 1986, cited richardson, 1997, p.16). by weaving gill’s story into my own, i wanted to strip away the hierarchical positions of power inherent in the researcher/participant relationship and to celebrate the validity of ‘narrative knowing’ (richardson, 1997). i wanted to embrace st. pierre’s notions of transgressive data both by making space for emotions, senses and dreams, and by inviting gill to read and respond to what i have written. sharing my writing has extended and deepened a precious friendship and challenged my own natural inclination to function as a ‘lone scholar’ (hood 1985, cited st. pierre, 1997a, p.184). it has also revealed so much to me about the ways in which traditional academic discourse divides and distances. as a result, i have begun to question the very nature of ‘data’ and to recognise the vital importance of doing so, for as st. pierre (1997a) argues, when we put a signifier like data under erasure, ‘the entire structure that includes it begins to fall apart’ (st. pierre, 1997a, p.179). and yet i still find myself troubled. post-modern approaches to social research certainly have the potential to liberate the researcher and i am intrigued and excited by the sense in which the shackles which have bound academic research are being so imaginatively and journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 8 bowstead coming to writing creatively shed. even so, i am still a little afraid that i haven’t succeeded, that i haven’t the talent to evoke what clifford (1986, cited richardson, 1997, p.16) terms the ‘higher values’ of literature; ‘taste, aesthetics, ethics, humanity and morality’, and that as a result my work may come across as simplistic and self-indulgent. i am also concerned that i possess the authoritative voice in the research, that i have objectified gill, that i am still the ‘voice above’. still divided. still distant. i wonder how louisa may feels about her words becoming the poetry of laurel richardson. the lyrical beauty of the work is undeniable, yet louisa may is not so much the co-constructor of the text as the supplier of the raw materials. in the same way, i have chosen to construct gill from the words she has given me in the way that reflects and reinforces my own agenda, my own narrative. i begin to wonder if the only story i can really tell is my own. can i, can anyone, write another without doing at least some harm? there are, of course, ethical dilemmas inherent in all ‘research’, in all attempts to represent another, even oneself, as st. pierre (1997b) points out, little that drives us is ever truly ‘innocent’. she argues that traditional research has circumvented these thorny issues by hiding behind the rituals of consent forms and conducting member checks, but for poststructural writers there is no such hiding place. as the traditional binaries of researcher and participant dissolve, so a new, or at least different, moral space emerges. what might fill it? foucault (1972) talks of ‘care of the self’, the ancient greek concept that requires us to take full responsibility for our actions. unlike the christian belief in morality as deriving from obedience to a code of rules, ‘care of the self’ requires us to recognise that what we do is who we are. only in this way, foucault argues, may we begin to ‘construct ourselves as ethical subjects in relation, not only to others, but to ourselves as well’ (st. pierre, 1997b, p.410). i hope i have done justice to gill, and, as i embark on my fledgling ‘academic’ career, i am acutely aware that if i am to retain any intellectual and spiritual integrity with respect to myself and my students, i must continue to seek out and celebrate academic approaches that favour ‘exteriority, motion, chance, and variation outside the contrived confines of a [traditional] text’ (st. pierre, 1997b, p.409), gill, and the wonderful writers who have inspired this piece of work, laurel richardson, elizabeth st. pierre, helene cixous, michel foucault and ron pelias, write from the heart. but as gill found out, traditional academic discourse doesn’t value the heart, only a ‘bloodless prose’ (stoller xv, cited pelias, 2004, p.10), and textualized data that can be ‘coded, categorized, analyzed, and interpreted’ (st. pierre, 1997b, p.411). my hope, then, is that this piece of writing goes some way towards reflecting my own deeply held journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 9 bowstead coming to writing conviction that there can, and should, be an opening up to difference, a deeper questioning of the value judgements imposed on teaching and learning practices, and a final recognition that the heart has a central place in academic writing. if those of us working in education wish it to be ‘more worthy of and...not betray those who come to it with hopes and dreams of splendid transformation’ (st. pierre, 2004, p.293), then we need to embrace academic writing as ‘an exquisitely brazen, ethically astute rhizome that deterritorializes subjects and method’ (st. pierre, 1997b, p.414). i send gill what i have written so far. this is what she wrote back: hey helen wow i think your essay is fabulous, im just sorry it took me so long to reply ........... new email address ............ my old one freespirit i think wouldnt go down well when applying for work haha......... i love the way you write and what your words say about me is true ........... i did feel that the academic world was frustrating for me to truly write what i felt was relevant to my essays ................. and now that i have a degree i haev been afraid to apply for a lot of work because i didnt feel qualified enough ................ and felt the agencies wouldnt think i was good enough............. so even though i know i could do the work i was still fighting an inner battle of confidence .............. i believe i am getting over that now and an applying for work more often now .................... so hopefully i shall get work soon ....................... i would love to meet up again before crimbo if tha is possible as i know you are busy ............. you should come over one evening and ill crack open a bottle of wine............... if you need anything else from me dont hesitate to ask ok :-) the e-mail makes me feel a little sad. as she prepares to enter the workplace once more, gill no longer feels she can identify herself as a ‘free spirit’. there is the ongoing battle with her confidence, the cracks in her dream of a ‘splendid transformation’. elizabeth st. pierre writes of data that transgresses. i wonder if data can also transform. i go back to the audio files that gill recorded for me and i am struck by the way the language resonates in different ways. many of the recordings capture gill talking herself through her academic assignments, the outline for her presentation, essay plans, the data analysis for her dissertation. i realise that i had never listened to them all, for when i listen to one of the journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 10 bowstead coming to writing later tracks, it knocks the breath out me. it is so personal, so emotional, a cry for help that i never heard. to transcribe or not – dis/embodied texts i have thought a lot about laurel richardson, and her use of poetry to represent louisa may’s words and experiences. i listen to the track again and in the rawness of gill’s words it suddenly became clear why the poetry has such value. written as prose gill’s words are lifeless. written as a poem, they take on a different quality. a greater emotional intensity. cixous (1991) says that for us to hear the vibrations there must be silence. i am panicking like crazy here less than 8 weeks to get everything done feels like i’m running a marathon i’ve hit 23 miles i’ve hit a brick wall my brain seems to stop functioning i’m ignoring what i’ve got to i’m too scared to do it i select three audio files and ask gill to listen to them again and record her responses a year on. st. pierre talks of the importance of response data, how its ‘sprawling tendrils’ have the power to ‘creep into and dehisce the staged unity of every research project’ (st. pierre, 1997, p.186). as i listen back to gill’s responses to the original three recordings, i am overwhelmed on so many levels by the richness of the data. the possibilities it offers for insight, expression and transformation. another poem makes itself heard through gill’s words as she travels back to a time and place which she remembers but no longer recognises. it took me back to the fear working towards a dissertation the workload earning money journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 11 bowstead coming to writing keeping a house giving time to my child my voice out of breath talking rather fast it didn’t sound like me but it was and how important you were to me at that time like an anchor i don’t know how i would’ve got through ‘a poem masquerading as a transcript and a transcript masquerading as a poem’ (richardson, 1997, p.139). gill’s words. my ‘poetry’. cixous (1991) says that we write with our ears. when i write gill’s words as a poem, i can hear her. i become fascinated, not just by gill’s words, but by the very act of transcribing. the process itself is so revealing. it begins with my first scribbled notes, in pencil. capitalised and apostrophised, almost no full stops, and only a few commas. commas and full stops, the written ‘pause for breath’. some of them do fall where gill paused. but most do not. i transcribe again, this time i work on the computer, i use three dots to indicate the pauses. i am panicking like crazy here i’ve got less than 8 weeks to get everything done ... i’ve still got to get my dissertation together ... i’ve got to pull together one powerpoint that i’ve done for race and racism ... i’ve still got the portfolio and essay to do ... welfare i’ve got a powerpoint and a report to do ... and i’m just lacking in time ... it feels like i’m running a marathon and i’ve hit 23 miles and i’ve hit a brick wall ... my brain seems to stop functioning ... i’m ignoring what i’ve got to do because i’m too scared to do it ... i’ve got such little time ... and i’ve worked constantly over the last couple of weeks to get some money in ... which i need um i’m going to go and see helen tomorrow ... hopefully she can structure me a timetable and ... i can have a continual link with her along the line so ... i can get my motivation ... i might be asking her to go beyond what she’s paid to do but i’m hoping she will ... kick me up the rear end ... and give me what i need journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 12 bowstead coming to writing does the transcript reflect the spoken word any more for that? not really. although somehow it looks less ‘written’. i take out the punctuation completely. i am panicking like crazy here ive got less than 8 weeks to get everything done ive still got to get my dissertation together ive got to pull together one powerpoint that ive done for race and racism. ive still got the portfolio and essay to do welfare ive got a powerpoint and a report to do, and im just lacking in time it feels like im running a marathon and ive hit 23 miles and ive hit a brick wall my brain seems to stop functioning im ignoring what ive got to do because im too scared to do it ive got such little time and ive worked constantly over the last couple of weeks to get some money in which i need im going to go and see helen tomorrow hopefully she can structure me a timetable and i can have a continual link with her along the line so i can get my motivation i might be asking her to go beyond what shes paid to do but im hoping she will kick me up the rear end and give me what i need i work on the words again. no punctuation, no pauses, a tumble of words. iampanickinglikecrazyhereivegotlessthan8weekstogeteverythingdoneivestillgottoget mydissertationtogetherivegottopulltogetheronepowerpointthativedoneforraceand racismivestillgottheportfolioandessaytodowelfareivegotapowerpointandareporttodo andimjustlackingintimeitfeelslikeimrunningamarathonandivehit23milesandivehita brickwallmybrainseemstostopfunctioningimignoringwhativegottodobecauseimtoo scaredtodoitivegotsuchlittletimeandiveworkedconstantlyoverthelastcoupleofweeksto getsomemoneyinwhichineedimgoingtogoandseehelentomorrowhopefullyshecan structuremeatimetableandicanhaveacontinuallinkwithheralongthelinesoicangetmy motivationimightbeaskinghertogobeyondwhatshespaidtodobutimhopingshewillkickm euptherearendandgivemewhatineed it feels, perhaps looks closer to a stream of consciousness. no elaborate transcription format to reveal what is ‘really going on’ (davies and gannon, 2006, p.1). but why transcribe at all in the digital post modern age? are we not just hanging on (surely by our fingernails by now) to the modernist view of ‘data’? davies and gannon (2006) and richardson (1997) argue that transcription is an attempt to make sense-making more ‘scientific’ by engaging in elaborate forms of coding and quantifying. underlying the process of transcription is: journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 13 bowstead coming to writing the belief that the purpose of the text is to convey information, as though information consists of facts or themes or notions that exist independently of the context in which they were told, as if the story we have recorded, transcribed, edited, and rewritten as snippets is the true one: a ‘science’ story. (richardson, 1997, p.140) she argues that traditional modes of representation serve only to conceal the ‘lived, interactional context in which the text was co-produced’ (richardson, 1997, p.139) and that poetic representation is not only more accessible in that it resonates as speech, but that it can also give us a ‘greater chance of vicariously experiencing the self-reflexive and the transformational process of self-creation than do standard transcriptions’ (richardson, 1997, p.143). i look at the other transcripts, but i find no poetry there. but they aren’t empty of meaning either. no language is. all interaction is situated in ‘the context of an ongoing relationship where the personal and social identities of both interviewers and interviewees are important factors’ (ellis and berger 2003, cited gubrium and holstein, 2003, p.159). when i listen, i hear gill the person, i hear gill the student. i hear gill talking to the institution, as part of the institution, in the language of the institution. i hear gill speaking to me. but who am i to gill? she refers to me as ‘an anchor’, an ‘avenue of support’, a way of getting through. she calls me her ‘study skills lecturer’. but i also hear her call to me as a friend. insiders/outsiders – natives and migrants gill sometimes refers to herself as a ‘right janner’. i am not sure what she means. i think it is something to do with her accent. what i do know is that she is positioning herself as inferior. inferior in terms of her language. disadvantaged in terms of her background. i suppose it was partly this sense of inferiority that drove her to seek study skills support. i suppose it is also this perception that drives the widespread belief that such support is needed. that ‘non-traditional’ is inferior. according to sarah mann (2001, p.11), in recent years we have seen a kind of ‘mass immigration’ whereby a new breed of students now occupy a position ‘akin to the colonized or migrant from the colonized land’, and it is clear to both the students themselves and to those charged with ‘educating’ them, that this journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 14 bowstead coming to writing ‘migrant’s’ place is at the bottom of the hierarchy. gill talks a lot of the difficulties she faced re-entering education: being a single parent um and always being independent and not relying on others and going into university asking for help was a massive thing for me to do... we can also sense her feelings of inferiority. of otherness. there is the underlying issue she has with self-confidence: i don’t know if i can do another two years i want to but i just don’t know whether i’ll have the motivation the ability there’s times that i feel i’m not even clever enough to be doing what i’m doing now i’m doubting myself which i don’t particularly like to do. she talks of the problems her and her fellow students experienced trying to balance their lives and their studies. mostly they are women, most of them have families. some work, others have a long commute. time is an issue. responsibilities weigh heavy. but in the recordings i can also hear gill’s pleasure in her achievements. her pride in her ‘hard won’ academic voice: um listening to myself here and working on an essay...concerning immigration...i ...broke it down it showed that i’ve sort of got a wider knowledge of understanding and i’m using language that...i wouldn’t use or have used in my daily life before i entered university...um...and that’s that’s quite a nice feeling actually...to think that...i’ve gained a...broader knowledge...within an academic sort of world the difficulties and frustrations that gill, and others like her, experience in higher education, seem to me to have less to do with background, language or lack of ‘study skills’, and much more to do with the way particular educational discourses are constructed. davies and gannon (2006, p.147) argue that it is only by recognising the ways in which discourse works on us, and we on it, that we can begin to initiate some kind of change, to begin the vital process of ‘disturbing and destabilizing sedimented thinking’ (davies and gannon, 2006, p.147). and not just the thinking of others. but our own. what we can claim to ‘know’ ‘is shaped as much by what we are able to think as by whatever our ‘data’ might be’ (davies and gannon, 2006, p.3). i wonder what i am able to think. i suppose if we want to talk in binaries, then i am positioned on the ‘positive’ side of the journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 15 bowstead coming to writing academic/non-academic divide. but i believe that i am also able to think, to ‘know’, what it is like to be on the outside, at the bottom of a hierarchy (mann, 2001), and to be excluded by language. i have literally been a ‘stranger in a strange land’. perhaps in some ways i still am. i am sitting in a bedroom. the windows are shuttered against the bleach white sunlight. the bed is tightly made. everything in its place. i sit with maria at her desk. her essay is in front of her. we are looking at it together. checking over her english. i move to pick up a pen. it is a fountain pen. maria’s not mine. she takes it from my hand. i look up surprised. she looks back at me. i see myself reflected in her glasses. she doesn’t want me to use that pen. she doesn’t think i know how. i wrote this at a collaborative writing workshop. we had been asked to write on the theme of (mis)recognition. it took me a while to think of something ‘safe’. something that was not too personal or revealing. i began to write about a time, many years ago, when in order to fund my travels i had given english lessons to a young greek girl named maria. we had rented a cheap room on the roof of an apartment block for the winter and part of the deal was that i went down once a week to ‘teach’ the landlady’s daughter. i wrote about the time maria refused to let me use her fountain pen because she didn’t think i had ever used one before. in that moment, i realised that i had not been ‘recognised’. to maria, i wasn’t a british graduate with a bright future taking a year or two out to travel. i was a foreigner, a nobody, a ‘stranger’ who lived in a studio flat on the roof of her family home. to her, i came from a place where they didn’t have fountain pens. or know how to use them. i have never forgotten that moment. what it feels like to be stripped of your identity and to suddenly find yourself at the bottom of the heap. because you are seen as other. because you don’t speak the language. when i read what i have written to the group, i cry. conclusion there are difficult times ahead. higher education funding is set to be cut by 449 million (nash, 2010), and despite widespread opposition, the current government has lifted the cap on fees. the fallout is likely to impact upon the very courses and support mechanisms that were introduced in response to the widening participation agenda, silencing once again the voices from the margins. gregoriou (2001, p.135) says that it is ‘not so much journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 16 bowstead coming to writing whether others can speak from positions of marginality but more whether we can receive what is different by creating margins (intervals) of discontinuity within our own pedagogical practices, narratives and genealogies’. as we move into a new era of cuts and cutbacks, i wonder if we will we begin to display even more of the ‘governmentality’ that foucault (1980, p.155) argues leads the individual to exercise ‘surveillance over, against himself’. if we are fearful for our jobs, if university places are squeezed, if graduate unemployment continues to rise while the economy continues to decline, then it is likely that there will be even less room made for the challenging and the experimental. which, of course, is what makes such practices all the more important. foucault (1972) says that he writes so as not to have a face. i know what he means. this essay is my attempt to lift my own veil. to show my face. conventional academic writing is a powerful discourse that conceals and excludes. in opening up my ‘academic’ writing to include other tropes, poetic, literary, narrative, i have tried not to hide behind an ‘illusion of objectivity’ and i have tried to write in a way that tangibly invokes my belief that ‘an emotionally vulnerable, linguistically evocative, and sensuously poetic voice can place us closer to the subjects we wish to study’ (pelias 2004, cited gale and wyatt, 2006, p.8). one of the transcripts makes me smile. listening back to her analysis of an essay question, gill says, ‘wow, look how clever i am’. she hears herself using the ‘language of the academy’ and i think she is proud. she talks again of post-graduate study. and i am happy. perhaps in my writing, if nothing else, i have ‘heeded the call’ and i have given something useful back to gill (ellis and berger, cited gubrium and holstein, 2003, p.159). deleuze talks of rhizomes. elizabeth st. pierre of crabgrass. it is spring and i think of daffodils. when i was very young, my mother let me tend one of the flower beds that lay in the shadow of our back terrace. nothing grew in it but daffodils. in the autumn i used to help her tie the fleshy stems into knots. through the winter they would yellow and wither. but every spring the flower bed would be filled again with audacious yellow heads. more every year. why do daffodils grow in groups, my youngest daughter asks me. i am not sure that i know, but i think i do. i like to call it ‘tuborescence’. under the cold dark earth, when there is no outward sign of life, they grow and multiply. split away a clump of daffodil bulbs and they will grow and multiply elsewhere. and so, i hope both in my writing and my work i can continue to champion the rhizome. the crabgrass. the daffodil. narcissus. the flower that grew where vanity died. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 17 bowstead coming to writing references bourdieu, p., passeron, j. and de saint martin, m. (1994) academic discourse. cambridge: polity press. brookfield, s. (1995) becoming a critically reflective teacher. san francisco, ca: jossey bass. cixous h. (1991) coming to writing and other essays. cambridge: harvard university press. cixous, h. (1997) rootprints. london: routledge. davies, b. and gannon, s. (2006) doing collective biography. maidenhead: open university press. ellis, c. and berger, l. (2003) ‘their story/my story/our story’, in gubrium, j. and holstein, j. (eds.) postmodern interviewing. ca: sage publications, pp. 157-186. foucault, m. (1972) the archaeology of knowledge. london: tavistock. foucault, m. (1980) ‘the eye of power’, in gordon, c. (ed.) power/knowledge. harlow: pearson education ltd. gale, k. and wyatt, j. (2006) ‘inquiring into writing’, qualitative inquiry, 12(6), pp. 11171134. gregoriou, z. (2001) ‘does speaking of others involve receiving the ‘other’?’, in biesta, g. and kuehne, e. (eds.) derrida and education. london: routledge, pp. 134-49. gubrium, j. and holstein, j. (2003) postmodern interviewing. ca: sage publications. mann, s. (2001) ‘alternative perspectives on the student experience: alienation and engagement’, studies in higher education, 26(1), pp.7-19. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 18 bowstead coming to writing nash, i. (2010) ‘widening participation will be the first victim of funding cuts’, the guardian, 2 march (online). available at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2010/mar/02/funding-cuts-higher-education (accessed: 22 february 2011). pelias, r. (2004) a methodology of the heart. walnut creek: altamira press. richardson, l. (1997) fields of play: constructing an academic life. new jersey: rutgers university press. st. pierre, e. (1997a) ‘methodology in the fold and the irruption of transgressive data’, qualitative studies in education, 10(2), pp. 175 -189. st. pierre, e. (1997b) ‘circling the text: nomadic writing practices’, qualitative inquiry, 3(4), pp.403-417. st. pierre, e. (2004) ‘deleuzian concepts for education: the subject undone’, educational philosophy and theory, 36(3), pp.283-296. tillmann-healy, l. (2003) ‘friendship as method’, qualitative inquiry, 9(5), pp. 729-749. author details helen bowstead lived and worked abroad for many years before returning to the uk in 2006. she currently works as an efl lecturer at the university of plymouth and has a strong interest in the transformative potential of narrative approaches to educational research. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 19 http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2010/mar/02/funding-cuts-higher-education coming to writing abstract introduction my story/gill’s story – narrating the personal lost data – evidencing lived experience academic discourse – blurring the boundaries to transcribe or not – dis/embodied texts insiders/outsiders – natives and migrants conclusion references author details literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 13: april 2018 the person-centred approach in maths skills development: examining a case of good practice dr russell delderfield university of bradford, uk helen mchattie university of bradford, uk abstract the development of students’ mathematics skills in higher education is often the topic of professional debate in learning development circles. less prevalent are discussions taking place around the interpersonal dynamics that occur during one-to-one (tutorial) sessions. this case study explores these dynamics. it arose from the continuing professional development activities of an adviser (learning developer) at a uk university. as a result of recording one-to-one mathematics sessions it was found that the adviser was unconsciously competent and that, although she was adept at identifying her areas for development, she struggled to articulate the considerable strengths of her practice. we wanted to find a way of describing, analysing and evaluating her competence, and alighted upon the person-centred approach. the aim of this paper, therefore, is to present the synthesis of maths skills practice with this approach in the hope of stimulating further research and professional conversation in the learning development community. the report offers novel idiographic findings through the application of person-centred theory to one practitioner’s experience of delivering maths skills development. we conclude by suggesting that focusing on the relationship between adviser and student can help to create conditions conducive to successful one-toone education. keywords: learning developer; maths support; person-centred; maths advice; one-toone; academic skills; congruence; unconditional positive regard; empathy. delderfield and mchattie the person-centred approach in maths skills development journal of learning development in higher education, issue 13: april 2018 2 introduction and background the development of students’ mathematics skills in higher education is often the topic of professional debate in learning development circles (fletcher, 2013; perkin et al., 2012). less prevalent are discussions taking place about one-to-one learning in maths support (frequently referred to as ‘tutorials’). rarer still is exploration of the relational aspects involved in one-to-one interactions. wisker et al. (2007) suggest that there are fundamental skills and values when working one-to-one with students, such as observing, empathising, and being authentic and non-judgemental. however, these are not presented as qualities associated with the person-centred approach, which is a salient concept in this case study. other works do conceptualise this link (cooper and reynolds, 2008; mcgahey and szumko, 2006) and even go as far as stipulating that person-centred values are key to learning development (hartley et al., 2011). focusing on maths practice, croft et al. (2011) offer guidance to novice tutors. whilst the advice provided is mainly about teaching skills in maths tuition, it also introduces concepts from counselling that have utility in a tutoring relationship. these are three ‘conditions’ necessary for successful one-to-one work, originally proposed by rogers (1951/2003). rogers argues that successful helping is achieved by putting the person at the heart of the process, hence his term ‘person-centred practice’ that is used in this case study. rogerian person-centeredness suggests that the strength and responsiveness of the helping relationship matters as much as (or more than) a set of prescribed interventions (rogers, 1961/2004). reflecting on people attending therapy, rogers states that they are often nervous, see themselves as having a problem, and want to learn how to change (1951/2003). this echoes what students report about their maths competency. he suggests that in order for a session to be successful the practitioner should demonstrate congruence, acceptance (termed ‘unconditional positive regard’), and empathy. these are presented as ‘core conditions’ for successful change and growth to be effected (gidugu et al., 2015, p.450). in summarising these conditions, ‘therapist’ and ‘client’ are exchanged for ‘adviser’ and ‘student’. congruence means that the adviser cannot be ‘putting on an act’ or pretending. the adviser has to be genuine so that the student feels secure and can trust the advice. to accompany congruence, an adviser can create an atmosphere of caring, irrespective of student ability. this is unconditional positive regard. it means the adviser treats students delderfield and mchattie the person-centred approach in maths skills development journal of learning development in higher education, issue 13: april 2018 3 as worthy of their time and support, and does not issue subjective judgements about the person and their presenting maths needs (e.g. ‘you should know this by now’ is the antithesis to unconditional positive regard). lastly, empathy is required. the adviser should be able to ‘tune in’ in order to see the student’s experience from her/his point of view. this helps to glean why an individual student is struggling with a particular concept and allows the adviser to ascertain feelings that can inhibit understanding, such as frustration or disappointment (blackie et al., 2010; croft et al., 2011; mearns et al., 2013). the croft et al. (2011) guidance about these three core conditions is the first of its kind to our knowledge, in that it creates an explicit link between person-centred values and maths support. however, the ideas remain unapplied and theoretical. this suggests that reporting this case study can offer original insight by applying the conditions to actual practice. the case arose from the continuing professional development activities of one adviser (learning developer), as part of her performance appraisal. we (h and r) wanted to find a way of describing, analysing and evaluating h’s professional competencies. what emerged was the use of the aforementioned ‘person-centredness’. this theory helped h, an experienced practitioner, to process her practice. it facilitated reflection on the relational nature of one-to-one maths education. the purpose of this case study, therefore, is to present the synthesis of maths skills practice with the person-centred approach, in the hope of stimulating further research and conversation about one-to-one work in learning development. case study in 2007, an enhanced focus on learning development at the university of bradford led to the creation of the academic skills advice service. this service, consisting of five staff, continually enhances its provision through an annual cycle of review and evaluation. an integral part of this is ensuring that individual advisers maintain their subject knowledge and continue to develop their practice. h, one of two maths advisers, has been providing maths education, from basic to advanced level, for more than 15 years. she has taught maths using a variety of formats, from large classes with pre-planned learning activities, to responsive drop-in consultations. as one-to-one appointments are in-demand, these form a significant part of her current role. delderfield and mchattie the person-centred approach in maths skills development journal of learning development in higher education, issue 13: april 2018 4 the focus here is on h’s practice during these pre-arranged maths skills appointments. one-to-ones are an intensive form of interaction as there is no preparation for the adviser and they are largely student-led. the student decides on the topic(s) and brings the maths problems most pertinent to her/him. students can be from any degree discipline and range from those struggling with basic maths to those who want to maximise their chances of achieving 1st class or distinction marks. students return to see h and also recommend her to other learners. however, h had not rigorously analysed why the feedback was consistently positive. it is suggested here that years of practice had resulted in unconscious competence (cannon et al., 2010) in one-toone work. it seems that h creates a positive and stimulating environment, without conscious attention to the relationship fostered between learner and adviser, that allows students to tackle their confidence and skills issues in maths without feeling overwhelmed or demoralised. peer-supported review of practice (psrp) is one aspect of the university of bradford’s commitment to continuous teaching quality development. it involves colleagues observing one another’s practice to provide constructive feedback and identify future areas for development. h and r (another adviser with a different specialism) were partnered as part of psrp. in order to explore and evaluate h’s practice, a minimally-invasive strategy was chosen whereby h video-recorded sessions in the autumn term. the recorded material was reviewed in the winter. recorded sessions involved four students: two one-to-ones and one pair. all students gave verbal consent for recording. h and r reviewed the recordings together, multiple times, whilst taking running notes of evaluative observations. it was decided to review all recordings to ensure a full and realistic example of day-to-day maths support. a thorough qualitative analysis was then carried out by the reviewer and shared with the reviewee to scrutinise. once the reviewee had had time to reflect on the analysis, both met to agree final areas for development and to discuss professional practice. this is referred to as the ‘debrief’. what follows is a summarised version of reviewer observations:  a calm and purposeful working atmosphere was fostered;  open questioning and redirection were used well; delderfield and mchattie the person-centred approach in maths skills development journal of learning development in higher education, issue 13: april 2018 5  differentiated methods of correction, including corrective questioning, were exemplary;  correction was ‘honest’ but presented as neutrally as possible, without use of judgemental language or negative non-verbal cues;  positive reinforcement was employed to draw attention to successes;  rapport and motivation were created through non-verbal cues (mirroring of individual’s posture when listening, for depth);  silence was ‘held’ and utilised for deeper learning. in the debrief h explained these behaviours and skills as emanating from three elements of an ethos she espoused. firstly, she does not want to perpetuate people feeling ‘bad’ about needing support with maths. secondly, she believes that everyone can excel with appropriate support. finally, she knows that the students have a better experience if they are made to feel like mistakes are part of the process, rather than insurmountable obstacles. whilst this was respected as h’s view, it seemed insufficient to account for the extensive learning developer work that was evident on-screen. the reviewer suggested that using person-centred theory could help h to articulate what transpires during interactions and, therefore, why students repeatedly report positive experiences. the following discussion captures the application of the core conditions to h’s practice. discussion congruence in the case of a maths skills appointment the student needs to feel safe enough to admit their problems and not be made to feel ‘silly’ about asking what can feel like ‘obvious’ questions. students often imagine that someone more experienced with maths does not commit errors, so it is important to model for them that it is ‘ok’ to make mistakes. this was evident in h’s practice when, during an individual one-to-one, she was observed selfcorrecting a method she was teaching. she verbally acknowledged ‘that doesn’t work, does it? i’ve made a mistake somewhere along the line’. this is congruence at work. rather than bluffing through an error, or simply correcting without acknowledgement, she showed the student how to deal with the mistake. this had the added benefit that she then modelled how to backtrack in order to problem solve step by step, talking through her realdelderfield and mchattie the person-centred approach in maths skills development journal of learning development in higher education, issue 13: april 2018 6 time thought process. as h reflected, this helped the student to trust her, as well as acquiring strategies for resolving mistakes. unconditional positive regard for students to engage productively, they need to feel that advisers care about their learning. h showed that she accepted a variety of obstacles and emotional responses from the students, without judgement. during debrief h commented: ‘we have to accept: their mistakes; their not understanding; that they don’t like maths; that they can’t understand their lectures’. these responses have to be processed without affecting an adviser’s regard for the learner. r observed that, in conjunction with honesty when she corrected poor or incorrect maths practice, h used positive reinforcement liberally when students had breakthroughs in their understanding or achieved the desired answer. it was a recurring theme throughout recordings that students were made to feel welcome and comfortable instantly, and that they felt ‘ok’ to express misgivings and negativity about their previous experiences with maths. empathy this was a significant point of reflection for h. she expressed how, having taught maths for years, it can be easy to forget her early experiences as a maths learner. she suggested that the more time that passes, the more difficult it can be to remember how it felt to learn the subject; how many different concepts there seemed to be, and how difficult it was to put them all together and remember what to do and when. she said it can be too easy to indulge in negative regard for the learner, thinking: ‘this is so easy what is the problem? why can’t you do this?’. later she reflected: ‘we have to get our thinking out of that world and into the world of the student who is seeing this for the first time’. the reviewer felt this was evident in the recordings. h subconsciously mirrored her students’ body language, which is a useful way to show empathy (knox, 2008). she paraphrased phrases and statements they expressed to show she was following them closely and understood their concerns and frustration (sanders, 2011). at one point in a session, whilst modelling some maths, she clearly sensed the learner’s unspoken confusion, checked-in with them, then, without prompting, formulated another way to explain the process. delderfield and mchattie the person-centred approach in maths skills development journal of learning development in higher education, issue 13: april 2018 7 a final example of ‘tuning in’ to the learner emerges from h’s adept use of silence. there were several instances in recordings where h said nothing, maintained open body posture and regular, neutral eye-contact. this time appeared to be well-used by the students. one decided to take more paper and try something out before responding further. another clearly sat thinking and then asked a question, which h was able to use as a teaching point. using silence in this way requires empathy, as otherwise it can be misjudged and illtimed, coming at the wrong point during the interaction and causing the student to feel misunderstood, or awkward. implications examining the observations made about h’s practices using the core conditions demonstrates that ‘just being good at high-level maths’ is insufficient when developing learners during intensive one-to-one work. not only will an accomplished adviser be able to establish rapport but they will be able to maintain it through challenging situations, such as learners experiencing frustration and failure. h uses the relationship she builds with the learner as much as she uses maths teaching strategies. her empathic response to students’ verbal and non-verbal cues, as well as her consistent positive regard for the learner, combine to create an environment in which mistakes are acceptable and can be exploited for learning. similar to other professions, learning development involves the practitioner’s values and qualities, not just an extensive knowledge of the skills that they teach. concluding reflections this study offers a novel starting point for conceptualising the importance of ‘relationship’ in maths skills work. it has explored behaviours and qualities, that an experienced adviser might take for granted, through the lens of rogerian core conditions using one learning developer’s practice. taking its inspiration from the world of therapy, the paper has suggested that focusing on the relationship between adviser and student can add to existing learning development knowledge by proposing conditions for successful one-toone practice with students. delderfield and mchattie the person-centred approach in maths skills development journal of learning development in higher education, issue 13: april 2018 8 limitations are part of any synthesis of theory and practice, and this study is no exception. h recorded three out of hundreds of sessions. recording was done by convenience and where students verbally assented. during preparation for this paper, both reviewer and reviewee identified that the experience of being recorded could lead to changes in adviser practice, e.g. nervousness. similarly, even though students were informed they were not under scrutiny, it cannot be guaranteed that they did not behave differently during the interaction. it is also important to note that this represents one case study of a single practitioner; therefore, there is no generalisability to offer. although, it is hoped that other learning developers may reflect on h’s experience and evaluate how it echoes or differs from their own. future research could involve qualitative analysis of observed practitioner values across a variety of settings. additionally, alongside focusing on the practitioner, the student voice could be captured. this may offer valuable data about learners’ expectations and experiences of receiving one-to-one maths support. by way of concluding remarks, this review led to individual insight for the experienced adviser: after all, there is discussion about the value of becoming unconsciously competent in one’s craft but little about what follows beyond this. engaging in this study also invigorated professional discussions within our service about the nature of the extensive one-to-one work we do and why we have our ethos. keeping these discussions fresh and critical is not only beneficial to us, but to our learners, which is why we are here. references blackie, m.a., case, j.m. and jawitz, j. (2010) ‘student-centredness: the link between transforming students and transforming ourselves’, teaching in higher education, 15(6), pp. 637-646 [online]. available at: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13562517.2010.491910 (accessed: 12 june 2017). http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13562517.2010.491910 delderfield and mchattie the person-centred approach in maths skills development journal of learning development in higher education, issue 13: april 2018 9 cannon, h.m., feinstein, a.h. and friesen, d.p. (2010) ‘managing complexity: applying the conscious-competence model to experiential learning’, developments in business simulation and experiential learning, 37, pp. 172-182 [online]. available at: https://journals.tdl.org/absel/index.php/absel/article/view/306 (accessed: 12 june 2017). cooper, j. and reynolds, a. (2008) the one to one toolkit: tips and strategies for advisers, coaches and mentors. 2nd edn. london: careertrain. croft, a.c., gillard, j.w., grove, m.j., kyle, j., owen, a., samuels, p.c. and wilson, r.h. (2011) tutoring in a mathematics support centre: a guide for postgraduate students. edgbaston: the national he stem programme. available at: http://www.mathcentre.ac.uk/resources/uploaded/46836-tutoring-in-msc-web.pdf (accessed: 9 march 2017). fletcher, l. (2013) the mathematics support community of practice. edgbaston: the national he stem programme. available at: http://www.sigma-network.ac.uk/wpcontent/uploads/2012/11/sigma-final-report.pdf (accessed: 23 june 2017). gidugu, v., rogers, e.s., harrington, s., maru, m., johnson, g., cohee, j. and hinkel, j. (2015) ‘individual peer support: a qualitative study of mechanisms of its effectiveness’, community mental health journal, 51(4), pp. 445-452 [online]. available at: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25535049 (accessed: 8 july 2017). hartley, p., hilsdon, j., keenan, c., sinfield, s. and verity, m. (eds.) (2011) learning development in higher education. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan. knox, r. (2008) ‘clients’ experiences of relational depth in person‐centred counselling’, counselling and psychotherapy research, 8(3), pp. 182-188 [online]. available at: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14733140802035005 (accessed: 12 june 2017). https://journals.tdl.org/absel/index.php/absel/article/view/306 http://www.mathcentre.ac.uk/resources/uploaded/46836-tutoring-in-msc-web.pdf http://www.sigma-network.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/sigma-final-report.pdf http://www.sigma-network.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/sigma-final-report.pdf https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25535049 http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14733140802035005 delderfield and mchattie the person-centred approach in maths skills development journal of learning development in higher education, issue 13: april 2018 10 mcgahey, p. and szumko, j. (2006) ‘relationship at the heart of helping’, brain.he 2006: brainhe one day conference. de montford university, leicester 15 september. available at: http://www.brainhe.com/resources/2006brainheconference.html (accessed: 14 july 2017). mearns, d., thorne, b. and mcleod, j. (2013) person-centred counselling in action. london: sage. perkin, g., lawson, d. and croft, t. (2012) mathematics learning support in higher education: the extent of current provision in 2012. edgbaston: the national he stem programme. available at: http://www.mathcentre.ac.uk/resources/uploaded/52789-mls-in-uk.pdf (accessed: 9 march 2017). rogers, c.r. (1951/2003) client-centred therapy. london: constable and robinson ltd. rogers, c.r. (1961/2004) on becoming a person: a therapist's view of psychotherapy. london: constable and robinson ltd. sanders, p. (2011) first steps in counselling: a student’s companion for introductory courses. 4th edn. ross-on-wye: pccs books. wisker, g., exley, k., antoniou, m. and ridley, p. (2007) working one-to-one with students: supervising, coaching, mentoring, and personal tutoring. abingdon: routledge. author details dr russell delderfield is senior academic skills adviser (postgraduate research development), academic skills advice, university of bradford. helen mchattie is academic skills adviser (mathematics), academic skills advice, university of bradford. http://www.brainhe.com/resources/2006brainheconference.html http://www.mathcentre.ac.uk/resources/uploaded/52789-mls-in-uk.pdf the person-centred approach in maths skills development: examining a case of good practice abstract introduction and background case study discussion congruence unconditional positive regard empathy implications concluding reflections references author details the fragmented route to a whole institution approach to integrating learning development journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 2: february 2010 the fragmented route to a whole institution approach to integrating learning development. reporting on a work in progress dr frances m gibson st george’s university of london, uk janette myers st george’s university of london, uk abstract this case study outlines a route to developing institutional approaches to learning development, in particular to the introduction of integrated learning development. there are two key messages. one is the role of isolated examples of change in practice in producing wider institutional and attitudinal change. the other is the nature of the interaction between learning developer and academic in creating opportunities for integration. one initiative within the overall project is explained in detail to give a flavour of the project and to explain the role of individual initiatives in creating opportunities for learning development and in contributing to a process of change. keywords: collaborative learning development; integrated learning; institutional change. why integrate learning development? the underpinning rationale behind integrating learning development is that as well as learning about a body of knowledge, students should also become involved in understanding how knowledge is constructed through practice, enhancing their development as students (warren, 2002). this links to approaches such as academic literacies and academic socialisation in its view that knowledge and skills are subject based and develop in the context of interaction between student, subject teacher and discipline (lea, 2004). this view also has important pragmatic consequences. if this kind gibson and myers the fragmented route to a whole institution approach to integrating learning development of learning opportunity forms part of timetabled activity then it is more likely to reach a wider group of students. wingate (2007) argues that extra curricular learning development suffers from limitations because it addresses the needs of only a few students and is usually offered after a problem has developed. to benefit from it students have to accept that they need it and make the effort to attend. this has particular implications at an institution such as st george’s university of london (sgul) where many of our students have high attainment and are used to being high achievers. support that appears to be addressing low achievement seems to them to be of no relevance. in addition, the difficulties that may lead some students to struggle may make it difficult for them to make time to attend separate sessions. finally, this type of provision may also have the disadvantage of being stigmatising. integrating learning development with the curriculum reinforces many messages that we would like to send to students in other contexts. first, learning is a developmental process in which all students are engaged and which all students should find challenging at times (earwaker, 1992). this can be a new and destabilising experience for some of our students. second, professional healthcare workers should be assessing their abilities and addressing their learning needs at all stages in their career. third, the institution has confidence in their ability to learn and to cope with their higher education and in its ability to enable students to learn. although these messages have been developed in a health care education context they are of relevance to all students. developing an integrated approach can require a process of change in individual and institutional practice. institutions vary in the extent to which learning developers can create top down change, for example, via direct input to teaching and learning strategies. malcolm (2009) describes the university of abertay’s teaching and learning strategy which requires subject teachers to develop students as independent learners through their teaching and prescribes that active enquiry forms 60% of contact time. d’andrea and gosling (2001) have identified best practice as a cross-institutional approach which links teaching teams, embeds innovative practice into departments and has direct reporting into institutional committees and structures. an alternative, or precursor, approach for the learning developer without access to institutional policy is to work in a more fragmented way, collaborating with individual lecturers to produce examples of integrated provision. this provides learning opportunities for students and may help to create an environment in which the fragments can be joined to create a whole institution policy. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 2 the role of the subject lecturer in integrating academic and learning development this project is part of an approach which recognises academic colleagues’ desire to see their students learning well and also acknowledges the considerable demands on colleagues’ time. the complex range of factors operating in this area is reflected in the range of approaches taken to integration, leading to the fragmentation mentioned in the title of this paper. in our case a range of learning and teaching activities has been developed as opportunities have arisen, for example, when academic colleagues have suggested collaboration with learning development. networking is important to identifying opportunities for collaboration and potential collaborators. wingate (2006) argues that effective support can be provided via integrating learning development with subject teaching. we are working on this whilst also keeping our eye on the prize of a whole institution approach to the embedding of learning development within the curriculum. wingate has identified that university lecturers may be reluctant for a number of reasons to ‘teach more than subject knowledge’ (wingate, 2007: 396). a number of factors contributing to this are identified. lecturers may fear that this will leave little time for the curriculum and that it will draw on knowledge and skills they do not have. they also fear that the development of integrated teaching sessions will take up a lot of their time, further encroaching on research time. lecturers’ expectations of student preparedness may be both high and implicit, and can be based on beliefs about students’ pre-university educational experience derived from their own sixth form days (myers, 2007; myers, 2008). the question of whether lecturers facilitate learning or deliver material is another issue. the ubiquitous use of the word deliver when the word teach might usefully be substituted could be argued to shape thinking about this issue, implying it is the job of the lecturer to transmit a body of information rather than to enable students to learn about their subject. whilst this represents a polarised view of a division between those interested only in the transmission of subject knowledge and those with a wider interest in learning, it is helpful to acknowledge these anxieties so that they can be addressed. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 3 the case study the institutional context sgul is a small college of the university of london specialising in healthcare subjects. the creation of a new post of senior lecturer in student learning and support in 2008 presented the opportunity to think about the role of learning development. the challenge was to create a model of learning development that served all students, integrating learning development, teaching and the curriculum. for the reasons explained above the decision was taken to try to start this from the ground up, and follow initial activity with working to get the approach adopted as a formal part of teaching and learning strategy and embedded into curriculum design. this project arose out the new post holder’s aim to integrate learning development, teaching and the curriculum. this case study refers to the initial, ground-up stage. the purpose of the work was to indentify existing and create new opportunities for students to develop academic skills as part of their usual subject learning. sgul has a mixture of selecting and recruiting courses and many of our undergraduate students have very high ‘a’ level points scores. approximately half of our students are medical students, the other half study a range of healthcare and biomedical courses. existing learning support at the college uses a range of models developed on a course by course basis to address the needs of specific students. these models vary in their level of integration; some are outside the curriculum, some relate but are taught separately, and some are fully integrated. most are directed at preventing or addressing failure. at the 5th ldhen symposium in 2008 janette myers suggested that these models could be likened, in our healthcare institution, to either a sticking plaster or a vaccination, designed to address or prevent problems. she invited the audience to suggest a metaphor for a more integrated and ongoing form of learning development, so thanks to the colleague who suggested a transdermal patch (e.g. a nicotine patch). the project aims we sought to extend our existing learning development provision, creating more examples of integrated practice with a developmental rather than a remedial focus. our students have a lifelong responsibility to engage in continuous professional development, recognising and addressing their learning needs at all stages of their careers. this means that learning development can be seen as ongoing, not a once and for all preventive fix, and not just for students who are struggling academically. we also sought to question journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 4 assumptions held by staff and students about the extent to which study at ‘a’ level, however successful, prepares students for studying at degree level and to ask whether we could assume that students would know how to study in the ways demanded by their courses. to address these issues the senior lecturer in student learning and support (janette myers) sought to work with colleagues to develop ways of integrating learning development into individual teaching sessions and eventually into the curriculum. in order to do this she collaborated with interested individuals who would develop integrated teaching sessions, evaluate the process and provide their colleagues with information on how they carried out the task. integrating learning development at st george’s the approach that has been adopted is to encourage as wide a range of projects as possible under the umbrella of linking the encouragement of learning with subject teaching. using warren’s typology, some projects are fully integrated, in that learning development is part of normal subject teaching, and some are semi integrated in that they are separate sessions linked to the curriculum (warren, 2002). the central aim is for teaching staff to ask how they can use their subject teaching to help students to learn. this has resulted in a number of teaching sessions which together form the first stage of the process of institutional development. the next stage is to disseminate accounts of these individual projects to encourage the development of further sessions and to work towards the goal of integrating learning development with the curriculum. we are moving away from the sticking plaster for failure via the ongoing transdermal patch of continuous support to the oxygen of continuous development. this section of the paper is an account of one project in the first stage of the programme. it describes the processes we went through to create, teach and evaluate the session. the two practitioners were frances gibson, a senior lecturer in the division of cellular and molecular medicine, and janette myers, a senior lecturer in student learning and support. we met when janette attended a problem based learning session which frances facilitated and continued to meet at various university occasions. frances is a very useful person in the institution because she bridges two large courses, the bsc in biomedical science and the 4-year stream of the mbbs medical degree, having senior roles in each. at the time of the project she was also a student on the postgraduate certificate in journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 5 healthcare and biomedical education. this project also formed the basis for an assignment for the certificate. the students were second year biomedical science students who took part in a lecture on flow cytometry. there were 120 students in the group. previously this subject has been taught via a didactic lecture. the learning development aim was to answer the question ‘how can i help the students to learn during my lecture? this was to take place alongside the teaching about flow cytometry. in order to begin the process of developing the session we discussed some of the issues involved in helping students to learn, focussing on the desired outcomes of the session, both in terms of subject knowledge and learning development. the aim was to help students learn during the lecture and to develop their ability to study the lecture material independently. we were concerned to indicate to students that whatever was done in this lecture could also be used in subsequent learning. we also considered the particular issues caused by the large lecture format. janette reviewed some teaching techniques that had been used in similar situations and we decided to use the extended learning outcomes format developed by janette myers and dr ruth kirk at kingston university. extended learning outcomes link the traditional list of learning outcomes (los) to ways in which students can develop and demonstrate their knowledge by explaining how the outcomes can be achieved. an example is given in table 1. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 6 table 1. example of extended learning outcomes. learning outcome when will i be tested on this learning outcome? how should i achieve this learning outcome? you know that you have achieved the learning outcomes if you can… 4. discuss staining of surface and cytoplasmic antigens. in semester 3 exam and synoptic exam at end of year. during lecture, make notes using learning outcomes as headings. read lecture notes in handbooks. read resources (1, 3). make notes using learning outcomes as headings. list common sources of cells for flow cytometry. describe and differentiate between direct and indirect fluorescence labelling. demonstrate an understanding of data analysis. study hints can be included such as reminding the students of material that has already been covered and showing how to relate new material to that already known. additionally, reading resources, both subject and study related can be provided. an important feature is that extended los explain how the students would know when they have achieved the outcomes. this process is designed to scaffold student understanding of how they might use learning outcomes in self directed study so that eventually they can create extended learning outcomes for themselves. extended los were built into the lecture to focus students on the intended outcomes of the session and indicate to them how they could use the los to develop their learning of the subject material. the lecture was structured around seven los. a summary slide listing these seven sections was shown at the beginning and at the end of the lecture and after each lo had been taught. at this point the relevant extended learning outcome was shown and explained and students were asked to think how they could work the relevant activities into their independent study. in order to contextualise learning, and to indicate to students that extended los had a use in other contexts, links were made between this and previous lectures, and it was explained how the lecture fitted into the module and the module aims. the summary slide was shown after each completed section of the lecture, providing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 7 students with clear signals, signposting the path through the seven sections. this was done to re-capture the students’ attention, prompt recall of previous information and essentially repeat the material, and to allow the students to integrate the new information with previous information. evaluation of the student feedback at the end of the lecture clearly showed that the students valued the structure and clarity of the session, which helped them to understand their los and how to achieve them. they were less enthusiastic about their understanding of how to apply this approach to future sessions, or indeed whether they would use this approach. however, this was a one-off session without any preparation of the students beforehand and perhaps indicates that such an approach should be taken earlier in their course and developed gradually over time. these students are still developing as independent learners and their response may reflect this. it would also be interesting to repeat the evaluation when students have had a chance to work with the los and reflect on the lecture; their responses may then be different. we were aware of the interpersonal aspects of the process when working together to design the session. both parties had to deal with their feelings about lack of expertise in the complementary area. this should not be underestimated as a stumbling block in an environment in which expertise confers legitimacy. it can also bring benefits if acknowledged and used. there are advantages if the learning developer is not expert in the field. first, it evens out lack of expertise, assuming that the academic does not feel themselves to be an expert in learning development. reviewing the issue from different perspectives can be extremely stimulating as each collaborator seeks to explain their point of view in the light of the other’s interests and concerns. second, the non-expert perspective can help the expert to think about issues such as clarity, level and quality of explanation. conclusion a combination of word of mouth and using available dissemination routes, such as course committees, has extended the range of teaching sessions involved to include a number of projects on several courses. our learning development provision grows with each example. a fragmented approach, with several isolated interventions, brings benefits in its journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 8 own right, as well as creating a climate in which a whole institution approach can be developed. each session increases the learning development experienced by students, enabling them to explore and develop the processes through which they learn. as staff find out that they can create effective sessions without undue stress or workload their enthusiasm for the process grows and they spread the word. our knowledge of the dynamics of the interaction between learning developer and academic also increases and we can work towards facilitating the process. the nature of the productive tensions in this relationship is one of the key messages of this case study. the other key message is that small-scale projects can have an effect on the attitudes of individuals and then on institutional attitudes. we have moved from a remedial perspective in which only failing students were perceived as needing learning development to a preventive perspective in which learning development prevents failure. we are currently developing the next attitudinal stage, in which learning development is seen as part of the process of studying a subject or discipline and is therefore part of the processes of teaching and learning. the next steps would be to develop a formal course curriculum that recognises the role of learning development as an aspect of learning about a subject or discipline and for this to become a requirement in the institutional committee and reporting structures. references d’andrea, v. and gosling, d. (2001) ‘joining the dots: reconceptualizing educational development’, active learning in higher education 2(1) pp 64-80. earwaker, j. (1992) helping and supporting students: rethinking the issues. buckingham: society for research into higher education and open university press. lea, m.r. (2004) ‘academic literacies: a pedagogy for course design’, studies in higher education 29(6) pp 739-756. malcolm, m. (2009) ‘nurturing critical minds’, times higher education, 15 october 2009, p24. myers, j. (2007) ‘back to school: educating ourselves about students’ previous learning experiences’, the science learning and teaching conference. higher education journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 9 academy centre for bioscience, keele university, june. online: http://www.bioscience.heacademy.ac.uk/ftp/events/sltc07/papers/o23myers.pdf (accessed 8 march 2010). myers, j. (2008) ‘what do students know as they enter university?’, transition issues for bioscientists/scientists event. higher education academy centre for bioscience, university of east anglia, march. online: http://www.bioscience.heacademy.ac.uk/events/norw130308.aspx (accessed 8 march 2010). warren, d. (2002) ‘curriculum design in a context of widening participation in higher education’, arts and humanities in higher education 1(1) pp 85-99. wingate, u. (2006) ‘doing away with ‘study skills’’, teaching in higher education 11(4) pp 457-469. wingate, u. (2007) ‘a framework for transition: supporting ‘learning to learn’ in higher education’, higher education quarterly 61(3) pp 391-405. author details dr frances gibson is the deputy head of the graduate school and senior lecturer in the division of cellular & molecular medicine, st george’s, university of london. janette myers is the senior lecturer in student learning and support, st george’s, university of london. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 10 http://www.bioscience.heacademy.ac.uk/ftp/events/sltc07/papers/o23myers.pdf http://www.bioscience.heacademy.ac.uk/events/norw130308.aspx the fragmented route to a whole institution approach to integrating learning development. reporting on a work in progress abstract why integrate learning development? the role of the subject lecturer in integrating academic and learning development the case study the institutional context the project aims integrating learning development at st george’s conclusion references author details a little and often: unanticipated outcomes from an eportfolio evaluation impacting on early identification of risk and non submission of work journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 2: february 2010 a little and often: unanticipated outcomes from an eportfolio evaluation impacting on early identification of risk and non submission of work megan lawton university of wolverhampton, uk emma purnell university of wolverhampton, uk abstract since 2005 all staff and students within the university of wolverhampton have had access to an eportfolio system – pebblepad. in 2007 the university ran a hea pathfinder project ‘embedding eportfolio at level 1’ which involved 1800 level 1 learners and 31 members of staff across all academic schools. the staff development activities used to develop teacher capabilities tried to mirror the student experience to great success. the knowledge gained from this project was then taken into a university-wide impact evaluation. the evaluation identified anticipated and unanticipated outcomes of pedagogic processes for personal development planning (pdp) and e-portfolio development. this paper will deal with two key areas: 1) the early identification of risk and 2) the reduction in non-submission of work. this work now feeds into the university’s blended learning strategy (2008a). the overarching aims of this strategy are to enhance student learning and to improve each student’s learning experience. this is articulated via student entitlements of which the following are directly addressed by this work: all students should be entitled to: formative assessment/s opportunities on line with meaningful electronic assessment feedback; have the opportunity to participate in electronic personal development planning (epdp); lawton and purnell a little and often: unanticipated outcomes from an eportfolio evaluation journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 2 the paper will look at how an eportfolio system was used to develop learner skills, learner support issues and how staff from a central department worked with discipline-based staff to help support their students, finally addressing institutional strategy and support issues. keywords: personal development planning (pdp); eportfolio; progression; formative feedback. introduction: the institutional context within the university of wolverhampton, personal development planning (pdp) was strategically placed within the institution’s learning and teaching strategies 2002-05, 2005-06 and 2006-10. in 2008 a blended learning strategy was amended to the learning and teaching strategy. the blended learning strategy is articulated via student entitlements of which one is: students should have opportunities to engage with epdp. the term epdp was defined in the university of wolverhampton pathfinder project (2008b) as pdp activities facilitated by electronic tools. as an outcome of the 2002-05 learning and teaching strategy an institutional framework for pdp processes was established that set out that pdp should: be a formative student-centred process; provide a product that documented a student's achievement and experience at the university; be integrated throughout the whole of the student experience at the university; be developmental; be used by students with tutor guidance. the framework was re-titled from pdp to pace (personal, academic, careers and employability) planning and development (figure 1) to reflect more closely the activities and outcomes, potentially at different levels, that the institution wished students to achieve. for example, at level 1 the emphasis might be on personal and academic development and planning moving onto career and employability development and planning in levels two and three. in postgraduate studies, the entire pace areas may be covered with an appropriate emphasis relating to the postgraduate experience. lawton and purnell a little and often: unanticipated outcomes from an eportfolio evaluation journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 3 figure 1. formative student-centred process. at an institutional level it was decided that for both practical and pedagogical purposes that a paper-based system for recording pdp for all students would be inefficient and would go against the institutional blended learning approach to learning and teaching. as a consequence of this framework an electronic tool, pebblepad, was developed to support and deliver the pace process. at the start of the academic year 2005/6 this tool was made available to all staff and students. in june 2007 a review of pdp at level 1 showed that all academic schools were using pebblepad in some way to deliver pdp processes in the level 1 curriculum. between may 2007 and may 2008 the university ran a hea pathfinder project to embed the use of e-pdp activities into the level 1 curriculum of two modules from each of the 10 academic schools. this project included 31 members of staff and 1810 level 1 students. modules ranged from groups of 15 to the largest module with 350 students. the project was important to the institution as it helped us to move past ‘champions’ and early adopters of the eportfolio system, building personal capability in a wider range of staff. see www.wlv.ac.uk/pathfinder for further details (university of wolverhampton, 2008b). pace academic skills for learning, academic literacies careers specific to the subject(s) personal metacognition, learning preferences employability transferable skills underpinned by technology http://www.wlv.ac.uk/pathfinder lawton and purnell a little and often: unanticipated outcomes from an eportfolio evaluation journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 4 what is an eportfolio system? the concept of our eportfolio systems is: a system which allows users, in any of their learning identities, to selectively record any abilities, events, plans or thoughts that are personally significant; it allows these records to be linked, augmented or evidenced by other data sources and allows the user to integrate institutional data with their personal data. it facilitates self-awareness, promotes reflection, and supports enrichment through commentary and feedback from the recipients of shared assets. it grows, develops and matures as the user accesses it, without constraint, over time. it provides tools for aggregating assets in multiple forms; for telling myriad stories to diverse audiences and ensures absolute user-control over what is shared, with whom, for what purpose and for how long. it is a personal repository; a personal journal; a feedback and collaboration system; and a digital theatre where the audience is by invitation only (see ‘what is an eportfolio?’ http://asp.wlv.ac.uk/level6.asp?usertype=6&level6=3302 on the university’s website for further details). though the majority of eportfolio and pdp activities in the taught curriculum take place within pebblepad, pdp processes are also found within the institution’s virtual learning environment wolf (wolverhampton on-line learning framework), in particular the use of group forums, and by the use of word documents and email. there are key differences between wolf and pebblepad that affect how the different pieces of software are perceived as supporting pdp processes. wolf is described as providing a range of tools and facilities by which tutors can deliver enhanced learning material in support of classroom-based teaching and tutorial contact. wolf does offer collaborative tools to facilitate discursive activity among classes and smaller workgroups. wolf is tutor driven with staff being able to see all areas of the software including the ability to track and monitor student usage. http://asp.wlv.ac.uk/level6.asp?usertype=6&level6=3302 lawton and purnell a little and often: unanticipated outcomes from an eportfolio evaluation journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 5 pebblepad is a personal learning space where no-one can access another person’s account or view materials unless shared by the owner on an individual basis or published to a gateway (a gateway can be thought of as an institutional space, the place where assets can be published to so that other users such as tutors, peers or external moderators can view, comment, collaborate or give grades as appropriate). between september 2008 and februrary 2009 an evaluation of pedagogic processes for pdp and e-portfolio development at the university was carried out. this evaluation took the pace framework looking at the anticipated and unanticipated outcomes. the eportfolio evaluation the evaluation drew on a variety of quantitative and qualitative data; some of this data was naturally arising, some was repurposed and some was especially gathered as indicated below. 1. data sources: this included relevant internal and external documentation, internal reviews and external project reports, raw evaluation data gathered for other purposes and repurposed (including face-to-face, video and telephone interviews), mapping of practice, quantitative data from university systems (very limited) and discussions with key stakeholders including, students, staff and senior managers. 2. formative evaluation: through creating a narrative that collated baseline data with staff qualitative data, examples of practice, key events and activities, the evaluation was able to analyse an initial, comprehensive, holistic overview of all the epdp activity across the university that then led to the summative evaluation exercise. 3. summative evaluation: this summative evaluation hones down the holistic big-picture narrative to address the key objectives in light of feedback and reflections from key stakeholders. lawton and purnell a little and often: unanticipated outcomes from an eportfolio evaluation journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 6 the structure of the report took each element of the institution framework for the pdp processes and treated them as key objectives. reference, where appropriate, was also made to the qaa policy statement (2000) to give sector-wide indicators of areas that an institution might want to address. each objective was stated with associated outcomes. this was then followed by an examination of the evaluative feedback and any related issues raised. recommendations are drawn from key stakeholders or from the implication from the evidence gathered. where appropriate, images and examples of practice were included to illustrate or clarify an issue. though the evaluation was about pdp/epdp and eportfolio processes and development, inevitably issues, language and functions related to the specific software pebblepad were mentioned. where this happened, it was acknowledged and wherever possible transferable lessons to be learnt were identified. two key findings of the evaluation that were not anticipated in the original framework were: the early identification of risk; the increased submission of work. early identification of risk the majority of pdp activities take place in the taught curriculum though tutor-driven activities. at level 1 these are predominantly aimed at developing personal and professional attributes but also include the development of study skills, reflection, self analysis, confidence, self-esteem, sense of belonging, subject knowledge, collaboration, critical thinking, meta cognition and learning how to learn. research and evaluation of a recent cross-university hea funded pathfinder project (2008b) looking at embedding eportfolio in level 1, has shown that students like using electronic methods for their learning, teaching and personal development planning (pdp) but that they must see a value and benefit to undertaking those activities. students found that by using an eportfolio they had the ability to go backwards and look at their previous work, as well as plan forwards, both of which they saw as being really useful. 75% of the 606 students who lawton and purnell a little and often: unanticipated outcomes from an eportfolio evaluation journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 7 responded to the pathfinder evaluation questionnaire said they enjoyed participating in epdp. the majority of pdp/epdp activities have an element of both formative and summative assessment. students commented that this affected their engagement with tasks. 75% said that they would not have undertaken pdp/epdp tasks unless they were assessed. the most widely used teacher-led process for the production of documents that show a student’s achievement and experience at the university is by module-based scaffolded web folio templates (figure 2). scaffolded templates are used in all academic schools with both large and small class sizes. cowan (1998) described what is attempted by the scaffolded template as ‘creating a constructive occasion for reflection-in-action’ and within that an opportunity for a structured dialogue for reflection. characteristics of the scaffolded web folio templates are that they: have multiple formative activities that are taken throughout the module; create a whole web folio for summative assessment; are written to guide students through a reflective process; give examples of the language and writing style that the teacher expects this work to be produced in; ask students to link evidence of their progress and achievements; open a structured dialogue between staff and students and in some examples student to student dialogue. lawton and purnell a little and often: unanticipated outcomes from an eportfolio evaluation journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 8 figure 2. page 1 of the scaffolded template for ad1007 research and study skills. the use of scaffolded templates at level 1 and in particular asking the students to write about themselves, their own abilities and aspirations, has allowed a dialogue between tutors and students to be opened up in language and writing styles that students can readily access without having to get to grips with academic conventions straight away. another key element at level 1 is the recognition of the prior experience and learning that a student brings with them to the university. students have commented as follows: really enjoyable. can write my feelings etc. down better than verbalising them! using pebblepad helps to break tasks down for you into manageable chunks. conventions for academic writing can then be introduced and explored as a ‘topic’ and as part of a repertoire of writing and learning skills that a student is expected to acquire while studying in he. an academic literacies approach (lea, 2004) has been adopted with the scaffolded templates acting as a support ‘tool’. the role of the cetl: critical interventions for enhanced learning (ciel) central team has been to draw together a multi-disciplinary staff group that can develop models, offer examples and explore pedagogic practice that can then be transferred to a wider university audience. what we found meaningful from an academic literacies approach were the following: lawton and purnell a little and often: unanticipated outcomes from an eportfolio evaluation journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 9 understanding different settings, gaining a repertoire of practice, and how to apply this knowledge. all our courses are modular, which means that students have to be aware that they need to gain a repertoire of skills to produce work to different expectations from different subjects, modules or even lecturers. moving away from a deficit study skills model towards reading and writing in a particular discipline. with an academic literacies approach we might reasonably be sure that students are unaware of academic writing conventions in a given subject in higher education, but that this does not mean that they can’t read and write. understanding staff expectations. members of staff may not always clearly articulate their expectations of academic writing in their discipline to their students. to do this staff needed to identify clearly what those expectations are and the reasons for them. formative feedback. we needed to make sure that students are developing their academic writing skills. the use of formative feedback needs to be used to help them gain these skills. active writing – little and often. we found that it was important to get students writing and then to give feedback to develop their repertoire of skills. writing a little and often also reinforced the expectation that students in the modular scheme needed to work over the whole period of the semester. the elements of an academic literacies approach together with the use of an eportfolio system to support pdp processes can be found within the level 1 taught curriculum via the use of scaffolded web folio templates. an unexpected outcome of this approach was the early identification of risk. example 1: the school of art and design as part of the university’s centre for excellence in teaching and learning (cetl): critical interventions for enhanced learning (ciel) (www.wlv.ac.uk/cetl), the centre for learner development (cld) was established within the school of art and design (sad) based on their work that designed and developed an individual learning profile (ilp) (salter and http://www.wlv.ac.uk/cetl lawton and purnell a little and often: unanticipated outcomes from an eportfolio evaluation journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 10 peacock 2001, 2002; salter et al., 2003). the ilp was originally a paper-based selfassessment document that asked a student to rate their own confidence in their skills for learning. the paper-based ilp also had a free-text box where a student was asked about their aspirations. this tool became part of the pebblepad software as a stand alone function or as something that could be used and linked to other applications such as action plans or web folios. in sad they linked the ilp to a web folio and set it as an early task for students to complete and publish to their tutors. an outcome of embedding this task in a module as the first piece of formative selfassessment was an increase in students asking for support. in 2006, before the use of a scaffolded web folio template with formative activities, 44 students came forward for additional support. in 2007 (the introduction of the web folio) 198 students came forward rising in 2008, to 253 asking for help. of the students being helped by the cld in 2008 94% progressed successfully on their course. of particular note is a culture shift in both staff and students that now sees asking for help not as a stigma or a sign of inadequacy but as a sensible thing to do to understand the expectations of studying in he and as a way of improving your own learning. by using short formative activities, as well as the cld, subject teaching staff and personal tutors were able to make contact with their students. this enabled the identification of support needs and any non-academic issues that might be affecting student learning. issues highlighted included such things as it facilities being stopped through non-payment of fees, non-attendance at the taught sessions, some misunderstanding of the instructions given and basic itc skills which were hampering student engagement with the e-learning opportunities offered by the university. all issues raised were able to be addressed before it was too late for the student to complete their work. as mary lea (2004) comments, ‘supporting the relationship between writing and learning is not generally regarded as the remit of course designers. as subject specialists they are usually primarily concerned with course content and, therefore, often overlook the ways in which writing and textual practices more generally are central to the process of learning’. the use of the scaffolded template has knitted together the student activities, academic literacies and subject content and created a space for meaningful dialogue, and by that dialogue and early identification of risk with appropriate action being taken. for example, the school of art and design has a disproportionately large number of students with lawton and purnell a little and often: unanticipated outcomes from an eportfolio evaluation journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 11 dyslexia. the module team has now developed podcasts (dyson and rhodes, 2008) to support the student activities in response to the needs of this group of students. this initiative has three main objectives: to improve tutor communication with students taught in large groups; to enhance the learning experience by recognising different student learning styles; to allow working students to ‘time shift’ their studies. increased submission of work the use of scaffolded templates and gateways has shown an increase in submission of work. a key element of this is the timely and appropriate use of student activities and formative feedback – feed-forward. example 2: a large core level 1 module this is a school-wide core level 1 module with 440 students enrolled. it is taught in four iterations by subject and specialist study skills tutors: week 1: students download and personalise a scaffolded eportfolio template provided by their tutors. this included elements that a student must personalise and formative tasks that, when completed, will form the summative assessment. week 3: students were expected to personalise and use the ilp in their eportfolio, submitting it to their tutor. week 3: 210 eportfolios were submitted. week 4: students are reminded that eportfolios needed to be submitted for formative feedback. week 5: 330 students had submitted at this point. the 140 students who had not submitted were contacted by their tutor or a member of support department staff (electronically initially). week 6: 110 students identified as potentially 'at risk', as after repeated reminders they still had not submitted any work. week 12: all but 20 eportfolios were received for assessment. lawton and purnell a little and often: unanticipated outcomes from an eportfolio evaluation journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 12 this is just one illustration but many other examples of a similar nature can be found across the university. one of the key elements identified by staff and students is the use of timely and appropriate formative feedback. formative feedback – feed-forward the cetl: ciel activities in the school of humanities, language and european studies have developed ementoring and electronic feedback and feed-forward to students using an eportfolio in pebblepad. burke (2007) based student feedback activities around an online form which encouraged students to unpack the feedback, prepare for a tutorial, get more out of a tutorial, action plan to act on feedback and try out selected resources. as the feedback is attached to the student’s work there is no issue of the students failing to collect their work or feedback. the uk national student survey continues to record student dissatisfaction with feedback, both in terms of the quality of the feedback and the time lag between handing in and return on work (yorke, and longden, 2008) students are encouraged to engage with the feedback and to edit and review work before summative assessment (prowse et.al., 2007). in the feedback url links to study skills sites (including to our own ‘sharpen up your skills’ open web resource: www.wlv.ac.uk/skills) are given to students so that they have direct, concrete steps to help them improve their own learning. a key element is to get students to value the feedback that they receive, as weaver (2006) points out this is not always the case. this can be exacerbated within a modular scheme where students may not see their assessment tasks as feeding into the whole course. student comments on using an eportfolio system to support the pdp process show that they can and do give a bigger picture perspective: using pebblepad for pdp has helped me understand what i have learned in this module and in relation to other modules. the tasks were really helpful in helping me identify my strengths and weaknesses and where i need to focus on to improve these. i really enjoyed the epdp tasks and intend to use the eportfolio to help me structure my learning in the rest of my degree. http://www.wlv.ac.uk/skills lawton and purnell a little and often: unanticipated outcomes from an eportfolio evaluation journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 13 lessons learned and key considerations research has shown that the cetl: ciel central team has been most effective when working with subject staff within their own learning and teaching school, subject and module cultures. we have been able to see, and in a small way experience, some of the situations that make a difference to staff and students. this could range from the it infrastructures and equipment available, student cohorts and profiles and subject specific issues. our role has been one of capability and capacity building rather than of ‘doing’. we have tried to use an ethos of development mentoring (megginson et al., 2006). the characteristics of developmental mentoring being: the mentor is more experienced than the mentee in relevant issues; there is mutual growth; the mentor helps the mentee do things for themselves; the mentor helps the mentee develop their own wisdom; the mentor helps the mentee towards personal insights to steer their own development; the primary outcome is one of personal development; good questions are central; any social exchange emphasises learning. in most instances we have not been able to operate in a full mentoring relationship with staff, mainly due to time constraints, although we have kept to its essence. support for staff is crucial when you are expecting them to try new pedagogical and technical approaches in their teaching. any risk is lessened if there is a stable it infrastructure and adequate resourcing on a practical and logistical level. in addition, there must be a robust and systematic process for staff to receive technical help and guidance at the exact point of time when it is needed. the potential for student advisors to contribute as an extra layer of support is an area being explored currently by the institute for learning enhancement (ile), (the central learning and teaching department). where student advisors are being used both staff and students have commented on the fact that they each have more appreciation of each others learning and teaching environments and experiences. research and evaluation has shown that embedding pdp processes and the use of an eportfolio system into the curriculum does not happen overnight. we were fortunate with lawton and purnell a little and often: unanticipated outcomes from an eportfolio evaluation journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 14 the timing and funding of the pathfinder project that enabled us to do a large scale implementation and embedding initiative, with 31 members of staff and over 1800 students. however, this was only possible as we had an established core of ‘eportfolio experts/enthusiasts/champions’ who were able to act as mentors and thus enthuse and develop less eportfolio experienced staff. of particular use was the trialing and development of different pedagogic approaches that really used the ‘e-ness’ of the eportfolio system for formative assessment, for example, to give quick, timely and meaningful feedback to students. this practice being very different from practices observed with paper-based portfolios which can often come to the tutor as a large completed entity. the eportfolio evaluation and the pathfinder project gave us the opportunity to work closely with a number of staff from across the entire discipline spectrum. through this we, as a central department, have taken on board factors that enable and inhibit pdp processes and the use of an eportfolio system within the taught curriculum, having a better understanding of subject specific issues. by the use of writing a little and often and getting feedback no matter how short this is, we have seen an increase in student submissions and an increase in the early identification of students potentially at risk due to a number of other social and academic issues arising while studying in he. partly this is to do with timely and appropriate critical interventions but it is also, we believe, because staff and student must see a value and benefit in undertaking what can be perceived as onerous tasks. references burke, d. (2007) ‘getting the most out of feedback’, pp. 3649, in nutt, d. and tidd, j. (eds.) 1st european first year experience conference: april 2006. teesside: university of teesside. cowan, j. (1998) on becoming an innovative university teacher. buckingham: open university press. lawton and purnell a little and often: unanticipated outcomes from an eportfolio evaluation journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 15 dyson, j. and rhodes, j. (2008) ‘supported learning with podcasts – the key to the future’, cltad 4th international conference enhancing curricula: using research and enquiry to inform student learning in the disciplines. lycée francais, new york. usa 3-4 april 2008. lea, m. (2004). ‘academic literacies: a pedagogy for course design’. studies in higher education, 29, pp 739–756. megginson, d., clutterbuck d., garvey b., stokes p. and garret-harris r. (2006) mentoring in action: a practical guide for managers (2nd edn.). london: kogan page ltd. prowse, s., duncan, n., hughes, j. and burke, d. (2007) ‘…do that and i’ll raise your grade’. innovative module design and recursive feedback’, teaching in higher education 12(4) pp 437-445. qaa (2000) policy statement of a progress file for higher education [online]http://www.qaa.ac.uk/academicinfrastructure/progressfiles/archive/policysta tement 16/02/2009 salter, p. and peacock, d. (2001) an 'individual learning profile' (ilp). online: http://wlv.openrepository.com/wlv/handle/2436/5933 (accessed: 16 february 2009). salter, p. and peacock, d. (2002) identifying and addressing the needs of art and design students at risk of underachievement in their incoming year of study. online: http://wlv.openrepository.com/wlv/handle/2436/3794 (accessed: 16 february 2009). salter, p., peacock, d. and ives, j. (2003) identifying, monitoring and addressing the needs of art and design students at risk of underachievement in their incoming year of study. online: http://wlv.openrepository.com/wlv/handle/2436/5243 (accessed: 16 february 2009). university of wolverhampton (2006-2010) learning and teaching strategy (2006 – 2010). online: http://www.wlv.ac.uk/pdf/celt-lt-stgy-2006-10.pdf (accessed: 16 february 2009). http://www.qaa.ac.uk/academicinfrastructure/progressfiles/archive/policystatement http://www.qaa.ac.uk/academicinfrastructure/progressfiles/archive/policystatement http://wlv.openrepository.com/wlv/handle/2436/5933 http://wlv.openrepository.com/wlv/handle/2436/3794 http://wlv.openrepository.com/wlv/handle/2436/5243 http://www.wlv.ac.uk/pdf/celt-lt-stgy-2006-10.pdf lawton and purnell a little and often: unanticipated outcomes from an eportfolio evaluation journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 16 university of wolverhampton (2008a) blended learning strategy. online: http://www.wlv.ac.uk/blu (accessed: 16 february 2009). university of wolverhampton (2008b) pathfinder project: ‘embedding eportfolio at level 1. online: http://wlv.ac.uk/pathfinder (accessed: 16/02/2009). weaver, m.r. (2006) ‘do students value feedback? student perceptions of tutors’ written response’, assessment and evaluation in higher education 31(3) pp 379-394. yorke, m. and longden, b. (2008) the firstyear experience of higher education in the uk: final report. york: higher education academy. author details megan lawton is assistant director of cetl: critical interventions for enhanced learning. megan has presented on staff development and pedagogy relating to the use of an eportfolio both nationally and internationally and is currently the institutional lead for three international and national research projects relating to eportfolio. emma purnell is a cetl: ciel eportfolio advisor. emma has presented on eportfolio pedagogy and the learner experience both nationally and internationally. she is currently a member of two international and two national research projects relating to eportfolio. her work is featured in the jisc ‘effective practice with eportfolios’ booklet and the jisc eportfolio info kit. http://www.wlv.ac.uk/blu http://wlv.ac.uk/pathfinder a little and often: unanticipated outcomes from an eportfolio evaluation impacting on early identification of risk and non submission of work abstract introduction: the institutional context what is an eportfolio system? the eportfolio evaluation early identification of risk example 1: the school of art and design increased submission of work example 2: a large core level 1 module formative feedback – feed-forward lessons learned and key considerations references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special edition: academic peer learning, part two, april 2016 an overview of the benefits of peer mentoring for pass leaders melanie giles ulster university, uk amanda zacharopoulou ulster university, uk joan condell ulster university, uk abstract pass, which stands for peer assisted study sessions, is a long running and internationally renowned form of peer learning that involves trained higher year students (pass leaders) working in pairs to facilitate regular study groups with students in the year below. not only does it aim to widen participation by providing a support mechanism aimed at helping students stay in higher education but the use of pass has been shown to enhance academic performance and promote the development of skills and attributes to strengthen employability. this is particularly the case for pass leaders who are often described as the ‘real winners’ in the process. however, research in this area is limited. with this in mind, this paper sets out to describe the particular benefits of pass for peer leaders and, in so doing, draws on some peer mentoring research, much of which has been conducted in an american and australian context. as such, the paper should be of particular interest to those wishing to determine whether the various claims can be generalised to the pass process, as it currently exists within the uk. keywords: pass; peer mentoring; benefits; employability skills. giles et al. the benefits of peer mentoring for pass leaders journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 3 introduction since its inception within the uk, there has been a proliferation of pass/pal (peer assisted learning) activity within many degree programs and research evidence is available to suggest that the scheme has the potential to: enhance academic performance (bidgood, 1994; mccarthy et al., 1997; coe et al., 1999; ashwin, 2003; rodger and tremblay, 2003); aid the transition process (glaser et al., 2006; giles et al., 2012; collings et al., 2015) and reduce student drop-out (higgins, 2004; bolton et al., 2009; collings et al., 2014; pugliese et al., 2015). whilst the quasi-experimental comparison of grades between those who attend sessions and those who don’t has led to some criticism of these findings, with the suggestion that there may be a degree of self-selection involved (capstick, 2004), more rigorous longitudinal studies conducted within the us have reinforced the notion that academic achievement is enhanced (e.g. loviscek and cloutier, 1997). there is also some evidence to suggest that the scheme serves to engender enthusiasm for the discipline; provide an additional mechanism for communication and feedback between teaching staff and students; increase group cohesiveness; enhance employability and more generally enhance the quality of the student learning experience (see capstick and fleming, 2001; capstick, 2004; laurs, 2009). more recently, various commentators have begun to acknowledge that pass participants are not the only ones to benefit from the peer mentoring process (stout and mcdaniel, 2006; skalicky, 2008). for example, donelan (1999) described student leaders as ‘the real winners’ believing them to acquire a range of transferable skills and experiences (see also, drew et al., 2000; heirdsfield et al., 2008; smith, 2008; terrion and philion, 2008; bolton, et al., 2009; bunting et al., 2012). these skills are generally reported as employability skills or lists of graduate attributes (skalicky and caney, 2010), with many writers choosing to categorise them in different ways. for example, couchman (2009) reports on generic leadership skills, which may be said to include ‘communication’, ‘organisational’ and ‘group skills’, ‘self-confidence’ and ‘teamwork’. alternatively, congos and stout (2003) identify categories of benefits including ‘learning’, ‘leadership’, ‘interpersonal relations’ and ‘work related’ skills and ‘content knowledge’. however, perhaps the ways in which leaders benefit could be more usefully described in terms of their academic, personal and professional development (stout and mcdaniel, 2006). giles et al. the benefits of peer mentoring for pass leaders journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 4 academic benefits whilst it is acknowledged that the academic benefits of being a pass leader are generally secondary to the personal and professional outcomes more frequently reported leaders often comment that the process of having to familiarise themselves with course materials in preparing for sessions serves to increase their understanding of the subject matter (ashwin, 1994; see also calder, 2004; shrestha et al., 2008): as facilitators of learning, they must think through and mentally organise information before explaining it to students. this process forces peer leaders to engage with the material at a deep level, helping to solidify their own understanding of it. (micari et al., 2005, p.270). in a traditional pass setting, leaders are encouraged to use the student’s lecture notes to facilitate group discussion. however, technological advances, specifically the widespread availability of various teaching resources through the virtual learning environment, has reduced the need for students to take notes during lectures with the result that the structure this imposed on pass sessions is now often missing. whilst leaders are reassured that pass is also based on the premise that the participants themselves set the agenda, they are often unwilling or ill-equipped to do so. this puts more emphasis on the leaders to identify relevant and purposeful activities of an appropriate level of difficulty to engage students during sessions (e.g. games and quizzes) which in turn serves to enhance their own learning and study habits (donelan, 1999; ogden et al., 2003; stone et al., 2008). personal benefits confidence of course, as stout and mcdaniel (2006) acknowledge, as the leaders understanding of their course content is enhanced so too is their self-confidence. indeed, confidence and self-esteem are probably the most frequently cited personal attributes to develop as a result of the pass process (e.g. wallace, 1992; ashwin, 1994; donelan, 1999; stone et al., 2012). this is probably not surprising given the nature of tasks and/or activities leaders are required to perform and the associated attributes that develop as a consequence. for example, preparing materials in advance of sessions and dealing with students’ issues and giles et al. the benefits of peer mentoring for pass leaders journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 5 concerns during the sessions themselves are said to enhance their problem-solving and time-management skills. not only do leaders have to plan their pass activities in and around their own work schedules but they must attend weekly pass and debrief classes, arrive on time and manage timings within each session including opening and closing the sessions appropriately. allowing participants to set the agenda and having a contingency plan if they arrive with nothing and responding to their varying needs within each session will also serve to develop their flexibility and adaptability. as stout and mcdaniel (2006) acknowledge: session plans must be flexible enough to accommodate the needs of the students attending. (stout and mcdaniel, 2006, p. 57). interpersonal relationships responding to the various needs of students often from quite diverse backgrounds will also serve to develop leaders’ skills in interpersonal relations (laurs, 2009; stone et al., 2012) and promote a better understanding of cultural diversity: in collaborative endeavours, students inevitably encounter difference and must grapple with recognising and working with it. building the capacities for tolerating or resolving differences, for building agreement that honours all the voices in a group, for caring how others are doing – these abilities are crucial aspects of living in a community. (smith and macgregor, 1992, p.3). leaders will also be encouraged to consider the different learning styles of their mentees and adapt activities accordingly. their role is to establish a supportive environment so that all participants feel confident to ask questions, make mistakes and practice their subject in private. this will require a degree of emotional intelligence (goleman, 1995). indeed, to be effective, leaders must be attuned to the feelings of others and move them in a positive emotional direction. they must also be able to recognise when students are experiencing problems and be able to refer them to the appropriate sources of help if required. giles et al. the benefits of peer mentoring for pass leaders journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 6 communication skills interacting with participants during pass sessions also serves to improve the leaders’ communication skills (e.g. muldoon, 2008; see also beltman and schaeben, 2012). not only are they required to set appropriate boundaries but they must also be able to employ appropriate strategies to deal with difficult situations. leaders will be introduced to communication theory during training and will frequently be required to use their skills to engage participants who are silent and unresponsive or who stop listening to each other and start to engage in private conversations. they will also be required to deal effectively with those who arrive late or become dominant and aggressive. they must also be able to assess the student’s level of understanding in order to plan activities using both verbal and non-verbal cues (ashwin, 1994). obviously good listening and questioning skills will be fundamental to this process. as trained facilitators, they must be able to engage the group in exploratory discussion and redirect questions since their role is not to give answers but to inspire participants to identify their own solutions or possible sources of help. being able to establish a rapport with their group will also be important in promoting attendance. in this respect, many leaders will use social networking sites (e.g. facebook) to communicate with their group outside of sessions. their ability to express themselves in written form may also be enhanced as they are frequently required to produce materials to facilitate learning. moreover, delivering these materials and providing feedback on their progress during the weekly debriefs will serve to further develop their presentation skills. teamwork as a consequence, most pass leaders will have established effective study groups and will use the session strategies and group facilitation techniques acquired during training to further develop their team working skills (donelan, 1999). indeed, pass sessions are designed to promote collaborative learning and as such, all activities employed by leaders will be designed to encourage participation at the group level. however, pass is also a process that involves ‘learning by doing’ and as such there will be a focus on the development of creativity skills during training and associated events (e.g. annual pass student conference) during which leaders are actively encouraged to think of novel ways to engage participants with their academic content. these skills will be further developed during the weekly debriefs which generally require the leaders to work in groups as they reflect on progress and plan for subsequent sessions. giles et al. the benefits of peer mentoring for pass leaders journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 7 leadership inherent within many of these activities is the concept of leadership. leadership is a difficult concept to define and perhaps as a consequence many writers have chosen to express the benefits gained from being a pass leader as generic ‘leadership skills’ which include many of the attributes already discussed (e.g. couchman, 2009). skalicky and caney (2010), for example, report that the most common aspect of the pass leadership role is ‘organisation’. in the words of one of their students: the preparation that goes in beforehand is part of leadership that most people don’t consider, but it’s just as integral as standing up in front of a group of students and talking about bonding. it’s also setting a good example to the students: you can’t just rock up and expect everything to work. (skalicky and caney, 2010, p. 29). however, effective leadership is clearly more than being organised. increasingly, it is being recognised that good leadership occurs when ‘heart and head’ meet ‘feeling and thought’. in other words, effective leaders: execute a vision by motivating, guiding, inspiring, listening, persuading and creating resonance. (goleman et al., 2002). this is very much in keeping with affiliative leadership and suggests that the ability to empathise with others is fundamental to being a good leader. this focus on the emotional needs of others is very much at the heart of the pass process and there is some evidence to suggest that pass leaders experience growth in these skills as their role develops. indeed, skalicky and caney (2010) identified twelve aspects of leadership developed in the role including a number of dimensions that are in keeping with a person-centered approach to leadership such as providing advice (support), guiding discussion (facilitation), working with others (collaboration) and creating an atmosphere (relationships). professional benefits pass leaders will also benefit professionally from the relationships they develop with each other, with the academic staff associated with the pass process (see martin and wilcox, 1996; eisen et al., 2014) and from the knowledge they acquire about their own university giles et al. the benefits of peer mentoring for pass leaders journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 8 or institution (drew et al., 2000; ehrich et al., 2004; bunting et al., 2012). working in pairs, leaders are often required to lead sessions with other students they may not necessarily have chosen as friends. they will also be required to work closely with those academic staff teaching on modules affiliated with the pass process which should further develop their communication skills and serve to foster mature and professional relationships. leaders will also be trained to view the pass process as confidential. sessions are presented as ‘a safe place to ask questions’ and to explore issues that participants might not want to address in lectures. leaders must respect this and summarise the outcomes of their sessions during the weekly debriefs in a confidential and professional manner. as part of this process, leaders are continually required to reflect critically on their role and personal experiences which is probably one of the most important aspects of their professional development and improvement (ehrich et al., 2004; gilles and wilson, 2004; see also heirdsfield et al., 2008). reflective practice is certainly an effective tool in practice-based professional learning settings and in this context has been shown to impact on confidence and the quality of pass sessions (skalicky, 2008). conclusion in spite of the above, it is important to acknowledge that much of what has been written about the pass/pal process is based on the american or australian model or relates to peer mentoring research more generally. much less has been written about the benefits to pass leaders within a uk context. some have alluded to the potential gains but generally not in any great depth and often not in any coordinated fashion. as couchman (2009) acknowledges, the benefits to leaders have been noted in a variety of documents ranging from post-session forms, surveys, semi-structured interviews and discussion groups (capstick, 2004) to weekly journals (lundeberg and moch, 1995), portfolios and narratives (green, 2007). moreover, the information reported is often secondary to the primary aim of exploring the benefits to pass participants. certainly, there is still ‘a dearth of research on the skills leaders feel they gain’ (stout and mcdaniel, 2006, p.61) and that which does exist is based almost exclusively on a qualitative perspective. rarely have quantitative methods been employed other than to determine the impact on academic performance. indeed, evaluative research is limited (see gershenfeld, 2014; collings et al., 2015). as such, more research is needed not only to determine whether the various claims can be giles et al. the benefits of peer mentoring for pass leaders journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 9 generalised outside their specific contexts but perhaps more importantly, to ensure ongoing improvements in training and in programme design and delivery. references ashwin, p. (1994) ‘the supplemental instruction leader experience, why supplemental instruction is not teaching: a student’s perspective’, in rust, c. r. and wallace, j. (eds.) helping students to learn from each other: supplemental instruction. birmingham, uk: staff and educational development association, pp. 87-90. ashwin, p. (2003) ‘peer support: relations between the context, process and outcomes for students who are supported’, instructional science, 31(3), pp. 159-173. doi: http://www.doi.org/10.1023/a:1023227532029 beltman, s. and schaeben, m. (2012) ‘institution-wide peer mentoring: benefits for mentors’. the international journal of the first year in higher education, 3(2), pp. 33-44. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/intjfyhe.v3i2.124 bidgood, p. (1994) ‘the success of supplemental instruction: statistical evidence’, in rust, c. r. and wallace, j. (eds.) helping students to learn from each other: supplemental instruction. birmingham, uk: staff and educational development association, pp. 71-79. bolton, t., pugliese, t., and singleton-jackson, j. (2009) ‘advancing the promotion of information literacy through peer-led learning’, communications in information literacy, 3(1), pp. 20-30. bunting, b., dye, b., pinnegar, s. and robinson, k. (2012) ‘understanding the dynamics of peer mentor learning: a narrative study’, journal of the first-year experience and students in transition, 24(1), pp. 61-78. calder, a. (2004) ‘peer interaction in the transition process’, journal of the australia and new zealand student services association, 23, pp. 4-16. http://www.doi.org/10.1023/a:1023227532029 http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/intjfyhe.v3i2.124 giles et al. the benefits of peer mentoring for pass leaders journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 10 capstick, s. (2004) benefits and shortcomings of peer assisted learning (pal) in higher education: an appraisal by students’, peer assisted learning conference. january 2004, bournemouth university, uk. available at: https://www1.bournemouth.ac.uk/sites/default/files/asset/document/stuartcapstick.pdf (accessed: 5 april 2016). capstick, s. and fleming, h. (2001) ‘peer assisted learning in an undergraduate hospitality course: second year students supporting first year students in group learning’, journal of hospitality, leisure, sport & tourism education, 1(1), pp. 6975. coe, e., mcdougall, a. and mckeown, n. (1999) ‘is peer assisted learning of benefit to undergraduate chemists?’, university chemistry education, 3(2), pp. 72-75. collings, r., swanson, v. and watkins, r. (2014) ‘the impact of peer mentoring on levels of student wellbeing, integration and retention: a controlled comparative evaluation of residential students in uk higher education’, higher education the international journal of higher education research, 68(6), pp. 927-942. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10734-014-9752-y collings, r., swanson, v. and watkins, r. (2015) ‘peer mentoring during the transition to university: assessing the usage of a formal scheme within the uk’, studies in higher education, pp. 1 16. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2015.1007939 congos, d. and stout, b. (2003) ‘the benefits of si leadership after graduation’, research and teaching in developmental education, 20(1), pp. 29-41. couchman, j. a. (2009) ‘an exploration of the lived experience of one cohort of academic peer mentors at a small australian university’, journal of peer learning, 2(1), pp. 87-110. donelan, m. (1999) ‘si leaders: the real winners’, national conference on supplemental instruction. university of missouri, kansas city, usa 20-22 may. https://www1.bournemouth.ac.uk/sites/default/files/asset/document/stuart-capstick.pdf https://www1.bournemouth.ac.uk/sites/default/files/asset/document/stuart-capstick.pdf http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10734-014-9752-y http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2015.1007939 giles et al. the benefits of peer mentoring for pass leaders journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 11 drew, n., pike, l., pooley, j., young, a. and breen, l. (2000) ‘school of psychology peer mentoring pilot programme’, the fourth pacific rim first year in higher education conference: creating futures for a new millennium. queensland university of technology, brisbane, australia 5-7 july [online]. available at: http://www.fyhe.com.au/past_papers/abstracts/pooleyabstract.htm (accessed: 13 april 2016). ehrich, l., hansford, b. and tennent, l. (2004) ‘formal mentoring programs in education and other professions: a review of the literature’, educational administration quarterly, 40(4), pp. 518-540. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0013161x04267118 eisen, s., sukhani, s., brightwell, a., stoneham, s. and long, a. (2014) ‘peer mentoring: evaluation of a novel programme in paediatrics’, archives of disease in childhood, 99(2), pp. 142-146. http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/archdischild-2013-304277 gershenfeld, s. (2014) ‘a review of undergraduate mentoring programs’, review of educational research, 84(3), pp. 365-391. http://dx.doi.org/10.3102/0034654313520512 giles, m., zacharopoulou, a. and condell, j. (2012) ‘peer assisted study sessions: the evaluation of a cross-faculty initiative in ulster’, centre for higher education practice perspectives on pedagogy and practice, 3, pp. 67-80. gilles, c. and wilson, j. (2004) ‘receiving as well as giving: mentors’ perceptions of their professional development in one teacher induction program’, mentoring and tutoring: partnership in learning, 12(1), pp. 87-106. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1361126042000183020 glaser, n., hall, r. and halperin, s. (2006) ‘students supporting students: the effects of peer mentoring on the experiences of first year university students’, journal of the australia and new zealand student services association (janzssa), 27, pp. 4-17. goleman, d. (1995) emotional intelligence: why it can matter more than iq. new york: bantam books. http://www.fyhe.com.au/past_papers/abstracts/pooleyabstract.htm http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0013161x04267118 http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/archdischild-2013-304277 http://dx.doi.org/10.3102/0034654313520512 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1361126042000183020 giles et al. the benefits of peer mentoring for pass leaders journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 12 goleman, d., boyatzis, r. and mckee, a. (2002) ‘the emotional reality of teams’, journal of organizational excellence, 21(2), pp. 55-65. http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/npr.10020 green, a. (2007) ‘peer assisted learning: empowering first year engagement with a formal curriculum through the educative’. available at: https://www.exeter.ac.uk/media/universityofexeter/academicservices/changeagents/ pal/pal_research.pdf heirdsfield, a., walker, s., walsh, k. and wilss, l. (2008) ‘peer mentoring for first‐ year teacher education students: the mentors’ experience’, mentoring and tutoring: partnership in learning, 16(2), pp. 109-124. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13611260801916135 higgins, b. (2004) ‘relationship between retention and peer tutoring for at-risk students’. journal of nursing education, 43(7), pp. 319-321. http://dx.doi.org/10.3928/01484834-20040701-01 laurs, d. e (2009). developing student leaders’ graduate attributes: how student learning support can play a part. in m.a.f silvester (ed.) transformations: proceedings of the2008 annual international conference of the association of tertiary learning advisers of aotearoa new zealand (atlaanz) (pp. 68-88). auckland, nz: atlaanz. loviscek, a. and cloutier, n. (1997) ‘supplemental instruction and the enhancement of student performance in economics principles’, the american economist, 41(2), pp. 70-76. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/056943459704100209 lundeberg, m. a. and moch, s. d. (1995) ‘influence of social interaction on cognition: connected learning in science’, journal of higher education, 66(3), pp. 312-335. martin, d. c. and wilcox, f. k. (1996) supplemental instruction: helping students to help each other, in brown, s. and wisker, g. (eds.) enabling student learning: systems and strategies. london: kogan page and staff and educational development association (seda) pp. 97-101. http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/npr.10020 https://www.exeter.ac.uk/media/universityofexeter/academicservices/changeagents/pal/pal_research.pdf https://www.exeter.ac.uk/media/universityofexeter/academicservices/changeagents/pal/pal_research.pdf http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13611260801916135 http://dx.doi.org/10.3928/01484834-20040701-01 http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/056943459704100209 giles et al. the benefits of peer mentoring for pass leaders journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 13 mccarthy, a., smuts, b. and cosser, m. (1997) ‘assessing the effectiveness of supplemental instruction: a critique and a case study’, studies in higher education, 22(2), pp. 221-231. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03075079712331381054 micari, m., streitwieser, b. and light, g. (2005) ‘undergraduates leading undergraduates: peer facilitation in a science workshop program’, innovative higher education, 30(4), pp. 269-288. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10755-005-8348-y muldoon, r. (2008) ‘recognising and rewarding the contribution and personal development of peer supporters at university’, journal of further and higher education, 32(3), pp. 207–219. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03098770802220405 ogden, p., thompson, d., russell, a., and simons, c. (2003) ‘supplemental instruction: short and long-term impacts’, journal of developmental education, 26(3), pp. 2-8. pugliese, t., bolton, t., jones, g., roma, g., cipkar, s. and rabie, r. (2015) evaluating the effects of the faculty of arts and social sciences mentor program. toronto: the higher education quality council of ontario. available at: http://www.heqco.ca/enca/research/respub/pages/evaluating-the-effects-of-the-faculty-of-arts-andsocial-sciences-mentor-program-.aspx (accessed: 13 april 2016). rodger, s. and tremblay, p. (2003) ‘the effects of a peer mentoring program on academic success among first year university students’, canadian journal of higher education, 33(3), pp. 1-17. shrestha, c., may, s., edirisingha, p., burke, l., and linsey, t. (2008) ‘from face-to-face to e-mentoring: does the “e” add any value for mentors?’ international journal of teaching and learning in higher education, 20(2), pp. 116-124. skalicky, j. (2008) ‘providing multiple opportunities for pass leaders to reflect critically’, journal of peer learning, 1(1), pp. 91-98. skalicky, j. and caney, a. (2010) ‘pass student leader and mentor roles: a tertiary leadership pathway’, journal of peer learning, 3(1), pp. 24-37. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03075079712331381054 http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10755-005-8348-y http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03098770802220405 http://www.heqco.ca/en-ca/research/respub/pages/evaluating-the-effects-of-the-faculty-of-arts-and-social-sciences-mentor-program-.aspx http://www.heqco.ca/en-ca/research/respub/pages/evaluating-the-effects-of-the-faculty-of-arts-and-social-sciences-mentor-program-.aspx http://www.heqco.ca/en-ca/research/respub/pages/evaluating-the-effects-of-the-faculty-of-arts-and-social-sciences-mentor-program-.aspx giles et al. the benefits of peer mentoring for pass leaders journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 14 smith, b. l. and macgregor, j. t. (1992) ‘what is collaborative learning?’, in goodsell, a. s., maher, m. r., and tinto, v. (eds.), collaborative learning: a sourcebook for higher education. pennsylvania: national center on postsecondary teaching, learning, and assessment, pp. 10-30. smith, t. (2008) ‘integrating undergraduate peer mentors into liberal arts courses: a pilot study’, innovative higher education, 33(1), pp. 49-63. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10755-007-9064-6 stone, a., meade, c. and watling, r. (2012) ‘peer-assisted learning in research methods and statistics’. psychology teaching review, 18(2), pp. 68-73 stone, m. e., jacobs, g. and hayes, h. (2008) ‘supplemental instruction: student perspectives in the 21st century’, in lundell, d. b., higbee, j.l., duranczyk, i. m. and goff, e. (eds.) student standpoints about access programs in higher education. minneapolis, mn: the centre for research on developmental education and urban literacy, university of minnesota, pp. 129-141. available at: http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ed499050.pdf (accessed: 13 april 2016). stout, m. l. and mcdaniel, a. j. (2006) ‘benefits to supplemental instruction leaders’, in stone, m. e. and jacobs, g. (eds.) supplemental instruction: new visions for empowering student learning. san francisco: jossey-bass, pp. 55-62. terrion, j. l. and philion, r. (2008) ‘the electronic journal as reflection‐ on‐ action: a qualitative analysis of communication and learning in a peer‐ mentoring program’, studies in higher education, 33(5), pp. 583-597. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03075070802373073 author details melanie giles is a professor of psychology and head of school. she is also a chartered psychologist and a registered health practitioner with the hcpc. her main research interests are in the area of health psychology and she is an active member of the http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10755-007-9064-6 http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ed499050.pdf http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03075070802373073 giles et al. the benefits of peer mentoring for pass leaders journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: april 2016 15 psychology research institute at ulster. she also has a keen interest in learning and teaching. she has assumed a variety of administrative roles in this respect and is responsible for overseeing the quality of teaching and the development of enhancement activities. she is a trained pass/si supervisor and is responsible for the introduction of the pass peer mentoring scheme at ulster. she is a senior fellow of the higher education academy and a fellow of the centre for higher education research practice. amanda zacharopoulou is a senior lecturer in the school of law at ulster university. she has been teaching for over twenty years and has an interest in legal education. she has occupied various teaching and learning roles within the university including that of faculty teaching and learning coordinator for social sciences. she is a trained pass/si supervisor and has pioneered pass (peer assisted study sessions) within the school of law. she continues to develop student centred interventions within the school of law designed to enhance the pre-entry, induction and transition experiences of law students. she is a senior fellow of the higher education academy and a fellow of the centre for higher education research practice. dr joan condell is a senior lecturer in the school of computing and intelligent systems in the department of computing and engineering at ulster university. she has been teaching maths and computing modules in ulster since 1998. joan has published work in computer imaging and maths, alongside robotics and health applications. this work includes publication in over 120 journal and conferences, successful completion of phd students and the enhancement of student learning and engagement through peer assisted learning methods for maths (specifically pass). she is a trained pass/si supervisor. her work has also extended in promoting computing as a career with initiatives such as wicadet, a widening access project which involved teaching mobile app. development to local secondary pupils. an overview of the benefits of peer mentoring for pass leaders abstract introduction academic benefits personal benefits confidence interpersonal relationships communication skills teamwork leadership professional benefits conclusion references author details literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 14: april 2019 students’ perceptions of the learner attributes required for (and resulting from) heutagogical learning john stoszkowski university of central lancashire, uk liam mccarthy st mary’s university, uk abstract heutagogy, a form of self-determined learning, is a learner-centred approach to learning and teaching, grounded in constructivist principles. this case study explores final year undergraduate students’ perceptions of the learner attributes required for (and resulting from) heutagogical learning. as part of a larger research study, data were collected at two uk universities using an online survey that was intended to elicit their perceptions and experiences of a module designed using heutagogical principles. results indicate that foundational knowledge, skills and attitude are a requirement for, and an outcome of, heutagogical learning. potential implications for the use of heutagogical approaches to learning and teaching are discussed. keywords: heutagogy; self-determined learning; autonomy; sports coaching. background university education has traditionally been seen as a didactic, top-down relationship between the lecturer and the student, with the lecturer deciding the knowledge and skills students need, as well as where, when and how they should be taught (snowden and halsall, 2016). in recent years, however, teaching within higher educational institutions has undergone a transformational shift toward increasingly student-led pedagogies, grounded in constructivist learning assumptions that seek to improve student autonomy, motivation, and achievement (paquette and trudel, 2018; rowley et al., 2018). heutagogy (hase and stoszkowski and mccarthy students’ perceptions of the learner attributes required for (and resulting from) heutagogical learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 14: april 2019 2 kenyon, 2000), a form of self-determined learning, has been positioned in the literature as being ideally suited to achieving such aims (abraham and komattil, 2017). the heutagogical approach puts learners firmly in control of their own learning, moving beyond the development of knowledge and skills, and instead focusing on capability, that is, the ability to integrate and effectively apply one’s knowledge and skills in novel and unanticipated situations (hase and kenyon, 2007). heutagogical learning is grounded in real-world practice and is said to nurture autonomous, adaptive and critically reflective learners, better aligning higher education with the needs and complexities of the 21st century workplace (blaschke and hase, 2016), where the pace of change is rapid and innovators, complex problem solvers, and good communicators are in demand (kizel, 2016). context of the case study as part of an 18-month long ‘innovation in teaching and learning’ project, funded by the higher education funding council for england, our current work involves the application of heutagogy on undergraduate degree programmes at two different uk institutions. over the course of a 15-week semester and consistent with the protocol outlined by stoszkowski and collins (2015), two final year cohorts, studying an optional applied sports coaching practice module, used collaborative online group blogs, created using wordpress (www.wordpress.com), to share and discuss relevant resources, as well as their ongoing self-determined learning and practical experiences. students on the module self-sourced a community-based coaching placement to undertake applied coaching practice and it is this which formed the basis of their discussions. each student’s module grade was based on the quality and quantity of their participation in their group blog. our role as module tutors was that of a facilitator as opposed to a provider of content; indeed our primary aim was to encourage students to take personal responsibility for, and ownership of, what and when they learned (ashton and elliott, 2007). furthermore, we wanted students to become active participants and co-producers of knowledge by facilitating engagement in cross-institutional dialogic reflection and supportive peer mentoring. in this case, we define peer-mentoring as students supporting, educating, guiding and counselling one another (sims-giddens et al., 2010). remaining consistent with principles of heutagogic learning design as far as we could within the constraints of a http://www.wordpress.com/ stoszkowski and mccarthy students’ perceptions of the learner attributes required for (and resulting from) heutagogical learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 14: april 2019 3 taught undergraduate degree programme, we involved learners in negotiating how and what they learned, maintained flexible curricula, encouraged learners to learn from each other, provided formative and personalised feedback, and embedded opportunities in the learning environment for learners to explore and reflect (blaschke and hase, 2016). our ongoing experiences on the module have been mixed, however, leading us to doubt the efficacy of heutagogical approaches when deployed over relatively short-term periods (i.e. over the course of a semester or academic year), especially when part of a formal (i.e. structured, assessed and certificated) programme of study. we suspect that, although heutagogical approaches offer clear potential for developing more autonomous and selfdetermined learners, many students appear to lack the learner attributes needed to engage in more autonomous and self-determined learning in the first place. aim of the case study as part of a larger research project exploring staff and students’ experiences of a module designed using heutagogical principles, this case study had two distinct purposes: 1. to identify the attributes that students perceive they need if they are to succeed on a module that employs a heutagogical approach to learning and teaching. 2. to identify the attributes that students perceive they develop on a module that employs a heutagogical approach to learning and teaching. method prior to data collection, ethical approval was obtained from both authors’ institutional ethics committees. at the midway point of the module (8 weeks), each student on the module (n = 62) was e-mailed an explanation of the study aims, information about confidentiality and anonymity, and a web link to a survey, which was hosted by the online survey tool surveymonkey (www.surveymonkey.com) and developed to provide feedback about their ongoing experiences and perceptions of the module. it was made clear at this point that participation was voluntary and the sample was self-selected by their own volition. http://www.surveymonkey.com/ stoszkowski and mccarthy students’ perceptions of the learner attributes required for (and resulting from) heutagogical learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 14: april 2019 4 the first page of the survey repeated the information contained in the e-mail, and explained that all answers would remain anonymous, with students notified that by ‘clicking’ continue they would give informed consent for any submitted answers to be used as data in the study. it was also made clear that, because answers were anonymous, they could not be withdrawn once submitted as no identifying information would be tracked or recorded at any stage of the data collection process. a mid-module survey was chosen deliberately to capture students’ perceptions of the skills that they felt they had already developed (over 8 weeks) as a result of heutagogic learning experiences. further, the survey compelled the students to consider their future selves and the skills which would be required to successfully complete the module. thirty-five students (9 females and 26 males, mage = 21 years, sd = 1.03), completed the survey. the data reported in the current paper relates to two specific items in that survey. firstly, students were asked to list up to three attributes they felt students need if they are to succeed on a module that employs a heutagogical approach to learning and teaching. secondly, they were asked to list up to three attributes they felt students develop on a module that employs a heutagogical approach to learning and teaching. open-ended survey questions were used to allow for detail, meaning and unexpected insight to emerge. responses were transferred to a microsoft excel 2010 spreadsheet and then the first author conducted an inductive analysis of the raw data to generate relevant themes (patton, 2002). information rich statements were identified as stand-alone meaning units (thomas and pollio, 2002), then they were listed and labelled, before being compared for similarities and clustered together into raw data themes. the initial themes were audited by the second author to establish trustworthiness and credibility (lincoln and guba, 1985) then, in a collaborative analytical approach (bean and forneris, 2017), the two authors established relationships between raw data themes and grouped them together to generate broader themes where appropriate (holt et al., 2012). results table 1 depicts the attributes that students perceived they need if they are to succeed on a module that employs a heutagogical approach to learning and teaching, while table 2 shows the attributes students perceived they develop on a module that employs a heutagogical approach to learning and teaching. significant overlap was apparent between stoszkowski and mccarthy students’ perceptions of the learner attributes required for (and resulting from) heutagogical learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 14: april 2019 5 the emergent raw data themes in both sets of attributes, which were grouped into three main umbrella themes: knowledge, skills and attitude. twelve of the thirteen raw data themes in table 1 are also represented in table 2 (92.86%), with the addition of two new raw data themes (writing skills and reflection). table 1. the attributes students perceive they need to succeed on a module that employs a heutagogical approach. raw data theme lower order theme higher order theme knowledge and understanding (9) knowledge and experience (12) knowledge and experience (12) applied experience (3) organisation (10) self-regulation (27) skills (51) consistency (5) time management (12) communication (1) peer discussion (12) peer discussion (11) criticality (9) criticality (9) reading skills (1) reading and research skills (3) research skills (2) motivation/drive (16) motivation/drive (16) attitude (32) confidence (6) confidence (6) open mind (6) open mind (6) independence (4) independence (4) (numbers refer to number of meaning units, not students) stoszkowski and mccarthy students’ perceptions of the learner attributes required for (and resulting from) heutagogical learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 14: april 2019 6 table 2. the attributes students perceive they develop on a module that employs a heutagogical approach. raw data theme lower order theme higher order theme knowledge and understanding (20) knowledge and experience (23) knowledge and experience (23) applied experience (3) planning and organisation (2) self-regulation (10) skills (57) consistency (3) time management (5) communication (6) peer discussion (16) peer discussion (10) critical thinking (11) critical thinking (11) research skills (8) research skills (8) writing skills (5) writing skills (5) reflection (7) reflection (7) confidence (3) confidence (3) attitude (9) independence (2) independence (2) motivation/drive (3) motivation/drive (3) open mind (1) open mind (1) (numbers refer to number of meaning units, not students) knowledge and experience knowledge was an attribute that students felt they needed to succeed, especially in terms of ‘understanding’ coaching practice and/or broader course content (e.g. ‘being able to engage with and make sense of the course content’). similarly, knowledge and understanding were viewed by some as being a requirement to engage in effective peer discussion. for example, one student highlighted the importance of being ‘able to pick out key things to have a discussion about’. some students also referred to the importance of having experience of applying their content knowledge in practical scenarios (e.g. ‘try the things we talk about... and see the impact for yourself’). encouragingly, students perceived the development of knowledge and understanding to be an outcome of the module, with the number of meaning units almost doubling in that regard. several students simply referred to ‘knowledge’ as an attribute that they develop, while some were more specific. for example, one student referred to ‘knowledge on topics some coaches wouldn't normally come across’, with others referring to specific types of knowledge (e.g. ‘different coaching styles’ and ‘different reflection methods’). stoszkowski and mccarthy students’ perceptions of the learner attributes required for (and resulting from) heutagogical learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 14: april 2019 7 skills self-regulation was a key theme describing learner attributes that students felt were necessary to succeed. as part of this, ‘time management’ was mentioned both explicitly and in more explanatory terms (e.g. ‘create time to input on the blog over the week’), while ‘organisation’ and ‘consistency’ were also referred to. interestingly, these same elements of self-regulation were also alluded to as attributes that students felt they developed on the module, but on far fewer occasions. being able to engage in peer discussion was cited as an attribute that was needed. for example, one student referred to being able to ‘interact with other students’, while another stated ‘good at discussion and giving their opinion’. peer discussion was also viewed as an attribute that students developed, with some referring directly to ‘communication’ and others being more specific about the ability to ‘debate’ ideas (e.g. ‘discussing your point and arguing why it is valid’). criticality in terms of analysis was also highlighted as being required, with students referring to the ‘ability to critique’ and ‘critical analysis skills’. this criticality was also viewed as being an attribute that engagement in the module develops; however, it was referred to more directly as ‘critical thinking’ or ‘critical thought’. reading and research skills were mentioned as being required attributes on three occasions, while research skills were mentioned more often as an outcome of the module. writing skills (e.g. ‘formal and informal writing’) and reflection (e.g. ‘ability to self-reflect’) were both reported as attributes that some students felt they develop on the module. attitude having a facilitative attitudinal disposition was viewed as being an important attribute to succeed on the module. being motivated and driven to learn was most commonly seen as important (e.g. ‘motivated’, ‘self-driven’, ‘dedication’), with being confident (e.g. ‘confidence’), having an open mind (e.g. ‘open to new concepts’) and independence (e.g. ‘independent study ethic’) also mentioned. importantly, these same components of stoszkowski and mccarthy students’ perceptions of the learner attributes required for (and resulting from) heutagogical learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 14: april 2019 8 ‘attitude’ were mentioned as outcomes of the module, but on far fewer occasions, especially in terms of motivation. discussion the students in the current case study appear to recognise that the heutagogical approach we employed on the module has the potential to develop a range of attributes we as educators aspired to develop. however, it also appears that to be successful (i.e. engage in and pass the module), students might need a foundational level of many of those attributes in place prior to starting. for example, although bangura (2005) suggests that heutagogical learning helps students develop confidence and competence, it has also been suggested that if an individual is to reason independently and engage in successful problem-solving type activities, a foundational level of domain-specific knowledge is required upon which to build new knowledge (kirschner et al., 2006). without this background knowledge, and if simultaneously aligned with an absence of explicit instruction, students are likely to become demotivated pretty quickly. indeed, our results suggest that students recognise the importance of motivation if they are to take control of their own learning, however, the heutagogical approach taken did not appear to be inherently motivating for many in and of itself. it even appears that if students lack some specific attributes (e.g. knowledge and/or skills), it could be actively demotivating and taking such an approach with those students could therefore be detrimental. indeed, blumberg (2008) suggests that open-ended situations or situations lacking structure may frighten less motivated students. consequently, we believe that some students might require more direct hands-on guidance and support, at least initially, and especially if they lack previous experience of being self-determined in their learning (stricker et al., 2011). after all, it is not unreasonable to suggest that the education system has a reputation for defaulting to rewarding quantities of knowledge rather than qualities of behaviour (nickless et al., 2015), and previous research has suggested that a focus on ‘teaching to the test’ contributes to students being underprepared for university study (suto, 2012). might we therefore need to ‘teach’ some of the attributes that emerged from this study in a more explicit way, rather than simply hope they emerge? that is, teach students how to learn in a heutagogical way before expecting them to learn heutagogically? if so, developing attributes such as selfregulation will likely take time and we encourage both programme developers and module tutors to embrace that. to mitigate against, or at least minimise any potential knowledge stoszkowski and mccarthy students’ perceptions of the learner attributes required for (and resulting from) heutagogical learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 14: april 2019 9 and skills gaps, we would also encourage programme developers and module tutors to think carefully about what is most appropriate for their learners, when, and why, and to carefully develop heutagogical learning experiences over longer time periods where necessary. conclusion and future plans in order to facilitate effective heutagogical learning, educators need to carefully consider the timescale over which they intend to utilise approaches of this type, as well as the educational and intrapersonal background of their students and the existing knowledge, skills and attitude they bring to the table. at the very least, it appears that there is a need for the carefully staged and deliberate introduction of such approaches over time – heutagogy is not a quick fix. this is consistent with the work of thomas et al. (2015), who suggest that learners develop independent learning skills over time or may never develop them at all! as such, educators need to ensure they work with their teaching reality, rather than idealised models of practice. moving forward, we intend to conduct more focussed and in-depth investigation into the underpinning mechanisms and students’ experiences of heutagogy. for example, work employing a realist-inspired approach to explain a single student’s interaction with the module is currently underway. references abraham, r.r. and komattil, r. (2017) ‘heutagogic approach to developing capable learners’, medical teacher, 39(3), pp. 295-299. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/0142159x.2017.1270433 (accessed: 21 august 2018). ashton, j. and elliott, r. (2007) ‘juggling the balls – study, work, family and play: student perspectives on flexible and blended heutagogy’, european early childhood education research journal, 15(2), pp. 167-181. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/13502930701321378 (accessed: 21 august 2018). https://doi.org/10.1080/0142159x.2017.1270433 https://doi.org/10.1080/13502930701321378 stoszkowski and mccarthy students’ perceptions of the learner attributes required for (and resulting from) heutagogical learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 14: april 2019 10 bangura, a.k. (2005) ‘ubuntugogy: an african educational paradigm that transcends pedagogy, andragogy, ergonagy and heutagogy’, journal of third world studies, 22(2), pp. 13-53. bean, c. and forneris, t. (2017) ‘examining the role of needs support in mediating the relationship between programme quality and developmental outcomes in youth sport’, international journal of sport and exercise psychology [online]. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/1612197x.2017.1350825 (accessed: 21 august 2018). blaschke l.m. and hase s. (2016) ‘heutagogy: a holistic framework for creating twentyfirst-century self-determined learners’, in gros, b., kinshuk and maina, m. (eds.) the future of ubiquitous learning. lecture notes in educational technology. heidelberg: springer, pp. 25-40. available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-66247724-3_2 (accessed: 21 august 2018). blumberg, p. (2008) developing learner-centered teaching: a practical guide for faculty. san francisco, ca: jossey bass. hase, s. and kenyon, c. (2000) ‘from andragogy to heutagogy’, ultibase articles. australia: southern cross university. hase, s. and kenyon, c. (2007) ‘heutagogy: a child of complexity theory’, complicity: an international journal of complexity and education, 4(1), pp. 111-118. holt, n.l., knight, c.j. and tamminen, k.a. (2012) ‘grounded theory’, in armour, k. and macdonald, d. (eds.) research methods in physical education and youth sport. abingdon: routledge, pp. 277-294. kirschner, p.a., sweller, j. and clark, r.e. (2006) ‘why minimal guidance during instruction does not work: an analysis of the failure of constructivist, discovery, problem-based, experiential, and inquiry-based teaching’, educational psychologist, 41(2), pp. 75-86. available at: https://doi.org/10.1207/s15326985ep4102_1 (accessed: 21 august 2018). https://doi.org/10.1080/1612197x.2017.1350825 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-47724-3_2 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-47724-3_2 https://doi.org/10.1207/s15326985ep4102_1 stoszkowski and mccarthy students’ perceptions of the learner attributes required for (and resulting from) heutagogical learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 14: april 2019 11 kizel, a. (2016) ‘philosophy with children as an educational platform for self-determined learning’, cogent education, 3(1) [online’]. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/2331186x.2016.1244026 (accessed: 21 august 2018). lincoln, y.s. and guba, e.g. (1985) naturalistic inquiry. newbury park, ca: sage. nickless, s., stoszkowski, j. and palmer, c. (2015) ‘education’s not black and white, it’s vibrant grey’, journal of qualitative research in sports studies, 9(1), pp. 73-100 paquette, k. and trudel, p. (2018) ‘the evolution and learner-centered status of a coach education program’, international sport coaching journal, 5(1), pp. 24-36. available at: https://doi.org/10.1123/iscj.2017-0038 (accessed: 21 august 2018). patton, m.q. (2002) qualitative research and evaluation methods. thousand oaks, ca: sage. rowley, c., fook, j. and glazzard, j. (2018) ‘adopting a student-led pedagogic approach within higher education: the reflections of an early career academic’, reflective practice, 19(1), pp. 35-45. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/14623943.2017.1351352 (accessed: 21 august 2018). sims-giddens, s., helton, c. and hope, k.l. (2010) ‘student peer mentoring in a community-based nursing clinical experience’, nursing education perspectives, 31(1), pp. 23-27. snowden, m. and halsall, j.p. (2016) ‘self-determined approach to learning: a social science perspective’, cogent education, 3(1) [online]. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/2331186x.2016.1247608 (accessed: 21 august 2018). stoszkowski, j. and collins, d. (2015) ‘using shared online blogs to structure and support informal coach learning—part 1: a tool to promote reflection and communities of practice’, sport, education and society, 22(2), pp. 247-270. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/13573322.2015.1019447 (accessed: 21 august 2018). https://doi.org/10.1080/2331186x.2016.1244026 https://doi.org/10.1123/iscj.2017-0038 https://doi.org/10.1080/14623943.2017.1351352 https://doi.org/10.1080/2331186x.2016.1247608 https://doi.org/10.1080/13573322.2015.1019447 stoszkowski and mccarthy students’ perceptions of the learner attributes required for (and resulting from) heutagogical learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 14: april 2019 12 stricker, d., weibel, d. and wissmath, b. (2011) ‘efficient learning using a virtual learning environment in a university class’, computers and education, 56(2), pp. 495-504. available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2010.09.012 (accessed: 21 august 2018). suto, i. (2012) ‘how well prepared are new undergraduates for university study? an investigation of lecturers’ perceptions and experiences’, conference of the society for research in higher education. newport, wales 12-14 december. thomas, s.p. and pollio, h.r. (2002) listening to patients: a phenomenological approach to nursing research and practice. new york, ny: springer. thomas, l., hockings, c., ottaway, j. and jones. r. (2015) independent learning: student perspectives and experiences. york: hea. author details john stoszkowski is a senior lecturer in sports development and coaching at the university of central lancashire, uk, and a fellow of the higher education academy, uk. e-mail: jrstoszkowski@uclan.ac.uk liam mccarthy is a lecturer in sports coaching at st. mary’s university, twickenham, uk, and a fellow of the higher education academy, uk. e-mail: liam.mccarthy@stmarys.ac.uk https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2010.09.012 mailto:jrstoszkowski@uclan.ac.uk mailto:liam.mccarthy@stmarys.ac.uk students’ perceptions of the learner attributes required for (and resulting from) heutagogical learning abstract keywords: heutagogy; self-determined learning; autonomy; sports coaching. background context of the case study aim of the case study method results knowledge and experience skills attitude discussion conclusion and future plans references author details literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special edition: academic peer learning, part two april 2016 editorial this is the second part of a special edition of the jldhe focussing on academic peer learning. this issue includes a further ten articles (five papers and five case studies) exploring a wide range of features associated with peer learning in higher education, including issues of culture, communication, community and employability, as well as academic learning. this collection offers insights into subject-specific as well as more general approaches, and covers varying contexts, including online environments. in a subject-specific study, jill barber and sadaf ilias describe their use of peer assisted learning to raise students’ awareness of the problem of antibiotic resistance. illustrating the efficiency and effectiveness of the approach, they describe how peer assisted learning successfully cascaded knowledge from a single fourth year student to 21 second year students, and then to over 700 students from various disciplines and year groups. sigrun wagner explains how peer feedback was implemented to facilitate a shift from assessment of learning to assessment for learning. this shift has been very successful with demonstrable improvements reported in engagement and performance. claire cornock’s paper reports on the value undergraduate students place on a wellestablished peer assisted learning (pal) scheme in mathematics. the pal programme matches small groups of first year students with final year students, with the aim of easing transition in the early stages of degree level study through supporting the development of a maths learning community and through enabling transfer of academic skills. while the findings of the study are mixed, clear benefits of the scheme include the prevalence of sustainable peer learning groups, and the high value the third year pal leaders place on the guidance of academic staff. the notion of learning community also features in lucy chilvers’ paper, which evaluates the contribution of peer assisted study sessions (pass) to supporting international students in making the adjustment to learning within higher education (he). the paper draws on lave and wenger’s (1991) social-learning model, communities of practice (cop) editorial journal of learning development in higher education, special edition part two: april 2016 2 and explores the data through the themes of community, practice and participation. it explores the extent to which pass can contribute to support international students in, for example, adjusting to cultural norms, learning academic-specific and discipline-specific languages and practices; and motivating participation and independent study. the idea of ‘learner communities of practice’ also underpins the student academic mentoring project that is the subject of an interpretivist qualitative case study by gillian pye, susan williams and linda dunne. second year undergraduate students on an education programme acted as mentors to first years on the same programme. a ‘tripartite structure’ was used with individual, small group and in-class mentoring. the authors report notable benefits in terms of student engagement, belonging and developing a community of practice. jannike hille, gundula hiller and stefanie vogler-lipp explore the positive impact that the peer tutor training delivered at the european university of viadrina has had on peer tutors’ intercultural learning progress. by encouraging peer tutors to reflect on their own and others’ teaching and learning practices, the study has found that the specialised training offered by viadrina peer tutoring has been highly successful in developing a range of intercultural competencies, including empathy and respect for otherness and communicative awareness. eleanor quince and charlotte medland also address the role of peer mentoring in supporting the transition to higher education. their case study explains the development and initial evaluation of a student-led pilot rolled out across an entire humanities faculty. the use of social media, particularly facebook, was central to the success of this project. as the authors note, ‘harnessing familiar social media networks to link new and current students gives both parties the confidence to interact with their peers, and gave mentees an additional support option outside of their face-to-face meetings’ (p. 12). the importance of such competence and developing community is particularly relevant and presents particular challenges in online environments. sharon boyd and jessie paterson present an evaluation of their online, distance-learning, postgraduate peer tutor project which has two core aims: first, to develop student academic skills in group facilitation and learning support; second, to enhance support for their increasing numbers of online, distance-learning students. feedback from staff, peer tutors and the students editorial journal of learning development in higher education, special edition part two: april 2016 3 involved suggested that fostered a real sense of community for all the different sets of participants. the qualitative findings from jill andreanoff’s mixed method study support the premise that undergraduate students perceive peer coaching as improving their academic performance, confidence and motivation. this was also tested quantitatively preand post-coaching using the sander and sanders (2009) academic behaviour confidence scale. these data suggested significant increases in academic confidence which, in turn, can positively affect academic performance. her study supports the use of peer coaching in universities – particularly at first year level – as a means of improving student success and retention, through increased confidence, motivation and practical and emotional support. in their piece ‘the benefits of peer mentoring’, melanie giles, amanda zacharopoulou and joan condell explore the application of peer assisted study sessions (pass) in a uk higher education context. pass is a long running and internationally renowned form of peer learning which is well-established in america and australia. it involves trained higher year students (pass leaders) working in pairs to facilitate regular study groups with students in the year below. both sets of participants benefit from the experience which enhances learning development for the recipients and employability skills for the developers. we hope that readers will enjoy this second part of our special edition on academic peer learning as much as the first. once again we wish to thank marcia ody and melanie giles who acted as guest editors, and all the authors of these papers. helen bowstead; sue eccles; amanda french; lucy gray; andy hagyard; john hilsdon; christina howell-richardson; moira maguire editorial enhancing pass leaders’ employability skills through reflection journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special edition: academic peer learning, november 2015 enhancing pass leaders’ employability skills through reflection amanda zacharopoulou ulster university, uk melanie giles ulster university, uk joan condell ulster university, uk abstract whilst the benefits for students attending peer assisted study sessions (pass) have been widely acknowledged, the benefits for its leaders have not been as clearly evaluated. this paper will explore how the more senior students who take on the role of pass leader can develop employability skills through a programme of activity that formally rewards students for their participation and assists them in articulating their competencies. the paper presents the findings of a project undertaken by a cross-disciplinary team at ulster university which focused on the benefits for pass leaders and, more explicitly, on graduate employability skills such as communication, teamwork and leadership. students were required to reflect on the pass process and plan for subsequent sessions whilst also engaging in a series of skill-building activities (games and various practical exercises) which focused on those facets of employability that are of direct relevance to the pass experience. quantitative and qualitative methods were employed to evaluate the impact of the pass programme: initial findings suggest that the programme served to enhance students’ perceived competence in respect of some employability skills (e.g. spoken communication) but, more generally, served to raise their awareness and highlight their limitations in some areas. this paper suggests that the process of reflection has helped them to better articulate these skills and identify the steps needed to further develop them. as such, this project has provided research evidence to support the effectiveness of the pass process and a collection of materials to support the further development of its leaders. zacharopoulou et al. enhancing pass leaders’ employability skills through reflection journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 2 keywords: employability; pass; graduate skills; professional development. introduction the recent wilson review (2012), focusing on business-university collaboration, recommended that universities should be reflecting on the opportunities that students have to develop their employability skills. the review highlighted the fact that: the cbi education and skills survey 2011 found that 82 percent of employers surveyed rated employability skills as the highest graduate recruitment factor. selfmanagement, teamwork, problem solving, communication skills, application of it, application of numeracy all featured consistently in employer needs. (wilson, 2012, p.31). the national centre for universities and business (ncub) in their annual ‘state of the relationship report’ (2014) points out the significance of continuous professional development ‘to help bring about the rounded graduate’ (2014, p.6). moreover, it is now accepted that employability is part of good pedagogy (pegg et al., 2012): student learning should be viewed as a holistic experience in which many forces operate to encourage students to become confident learners who will be able to contribute effectively to society upon graduation (pascarella and terenzini, 2005). harvey presents employability as being: more than about developing attributes, techniques or experience just to enable a student to get a job, or to progress within a current career. it is about learning and the emphasis is less on ‘employ’ and more on ‘ability’. in essence, the emphasis is on developing critical, reflective abilities, with a view to empowering and enhancing the learner’ (harvey, 2005, p.13). this encourages a shift away from the more traditional, narrow skills focus when defining employability, and provides a clearer recognition of a reflective, student-centred approach in developing employability: zacharopoulou et al. enhancing pass leaders’ employability skills through reflection journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 3 which encompasses the value of learning in higher education as enabling and creative. (pegg et al., 2012, p.5). here at ulster, we have turned to the pass initiative as a way of promoting effective learning and enhancing employability for students. pass (peer assisted study sessions) is a teaching initiative derived from the american model of ‘supplemental instruction’ (si) developed at the university of missouri, kansas in 1973. adapted for use in the uk and renamed pass, this internationally renowned initiative, involves using senior students to facilitate group learning in an informal environment. its purpose is to support the student experience through collaborative exploratory discussion and in so doing, improve academic performance and achievement and reduce student drop-out. it also enhances the learning experience and personal development of pass leaders thereby enhancing their employability and provides an additional mechanism for communication and feedback between teaching staff and students and serves to foster a sense of commitment and belonging. based on the philosophy of ‘tell me and i forget, show me and i remember, involve me and i understand’, pass promotes an active approach to learning and teaching and has been shown to enhance performance by engaging students more explicitly with their academic discipline (see e.g. ashwin, 1994) and promote the development of skills and attributes to strengthen employability (skalicky and caney, 2010). however, mindful of the need to assist students in articulating these skills, we also realised the importance of reflection. thus, in line with the thinking of jarvis et al. (2013), we used the process of reflection to help our students understand how they are learning and relate their learning to a wider context. the pass leader programme the success of pass is built on the thorough training of pass leaders, regular debriefing sessions with teaching staff and formative evaluation enabling progressive changes in the process. whilst our training programme is broadly consistent with the pass approach, the workshops and debriefs were designed to focus more explicitly on graduate employability skills such as communication, teamwork and leadership. as such, leaders first received a compulsory one-day course followed by two discipline-specific workshops. they then enrolled for two modules, one per semester. the modules were designed to assess a range of outcomes some of which are specific to the process (e.g. their ability to plan, zacharopoulou et al. enhancing pass leaders’ employability skills through reflection journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 4 deliver and evaluate a pass session; apply relevant learning strategies to enhance learning; employ a range of collaborative learning techniques to facilitate group discussion) and others which are more generic (e.g. their ability to communicate effectively and reflect on their personal development). these more generic employability skills were further developed during the weekly debriefs. thus each week students were required to reflect on the pass process and plan for subsequent sessions whilst also engaging in a series of skill-building activities (games and various practical exercises) focused on those facets of employability that are of direct relevance to the pass experience (e.g. listening skills, interpersonal communication, teamwork, time management, problems solving, creative thinking etc). the two co-curricular modules were initially designed as a component of our certificate of personal and professional development (cppd) and are now a recognised component of the edge award, a recent initiative designed to enhance the employability of ulster students by providing engagement with, and official recognition of, extracurricular and co-curricular achievements. aim mindful of the need to make better use of student engagement initiatives to enhance the employability of our students, to assist them in articulating their skills and also to reward them for their participation as peer mentors, we developed a programme of activity that is broadly consistent with the pass approach, but is designed to focus more explicitly on graduate employability skills such as communication, teamwork and leadership. as such, the aim of this project has been to evaluate a programme of activity designed to:  enhance the employability skills of our students and to help them articulate the skills they have gained during their time as a pass leader, thus making the implicit more explicit.  formally reward pass leaders for their participation in the pass programme by refining two co-curricular modules that could be delivered as part of the personal and professional development scheme within the university. zacharopoulou et al. enhancing pass leaders’ employability skills through reflection journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 5 method design to evaluate the effectiveness of this programme both quantitative and qualitative methods were employed, not only to explore the benefits and shortcomings of the pass process from the leaders perspective but ultimately, to assess its impact on employability. specifically, a questionnaire survey was administered to all second year students in participating disciplines at the beginning and towards the end of the process, thereby allowing for a comparison between pass leaders and the rest of the student cohort. focus group interviews were also conducted and students were encouraged to reflect on the process during the weekly pass and debrief sessions and in written assignments. a steering group comprising faculty coordinators, a placement officer and other student representatives, also met regularly to monitor and review progress. participants participants were recruited from the second year cohorts of both the school of law and the school of psychology. for the questionnaire survey, 50 participants (7 males, 43 females) aged 19-37 years completed questionnaires at two points in time. of these, 23 were pass leaders. focus group interviews were conducted with 6 groups of students, with each group comprising between 5 and 7 people. the selection of participants was based on an availability sample and included a mix of pass leaders and other second year students not involved in the pass scheme. further, 36 pass leaders from both schools were required to reflect on their experiences, of whom 11 were male and 25 were female. procedure the pass leaders’ perceptions of the scheme were assessed using both quantitative and qualitative methods. specifically, the following methods were employed: (i) a questionnaire survey, (ii) focus group interviews and (iii) reflections submitted as part of the module assessment process. ethical approval for the data collection was granted by the ulster university ethics committee. zacharopoulou et al. enhancing pass leaders’ employability skills through reflection journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 6 questionnaire survey: the questionnaire survey focused specifically on the concept of employability and included 63 items focused on 10 facets including for example teamwork, leadership, presentation skills and time management. six questions were used to assess each facet; a 6-point response format was employed ranging from ‘definitely agree’ to ‘definitely disagree’. thus, to assess students’ perceptions of their team working skills for example, they were asked to respond to questions of the form: ‘i am able to work effectively as part of a team’ and ‘i can collaborate well with others’. similarly with respect to presentation skills, participants were asked to respond to statements like: i am able to express myself clearly and concisely to a group of people’ and ‘i can prepare plans and deliver a presentation’ (see table 1). table 1. details of the employability measure. employability facets no. items sample items alpha coefficient leadership 6  i can coordinate the work of others.  i can give direction, feedback and guidance to other people.  managing people and resources is one of my strengths.  i am able to encourage and motivate others.  supervising or directing the work of others is something i am good at.  i can assign responsibility and delegate work to others. 0.86 teamwork 6  i can work towards a shared goal.  i am able to work effectively as part of a team.  i can reach a mutually satisfactory outcome through compromise.  i am able to respond appropriately to different types of people.  i can collaborate well with others.  i work well as a member of a group or team. 0.80 problem-solving 6  i am able to generate new ideas or conceive existing ideas in a new way.  i am able to set down a systematic sequence of activities and carry them through in an effective manner.  i am able to gather information in a systematic way to establish certain facts or principles.  i am able to understand and summarise information.  i am able to initiate, take decisions and act resourcefully.  i am effective at solving problems. 0.77 zacharopoulou et al. enhancing pass leaders’ employability skills through reflection journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 7 written communication 6  i am able to express myself well in writing.  i can punctuate, use grammar and spelling correctly.  i am confident in my ability to present my ideas in written form.  i am able to adapt my writing styles to suit the appropriate media/audience.  i can produce a written plan to answer an assignment question.  my written communication skills are good. 0.86 spoken communication 6  i can communicate easily with other people.  i am able to express myself clearly and concisely to a group of people.  i can prepare, plan and deliver a presentation.  i am confident speaking in front of a group of people.  i am able to express my views verbally.  i can communicate well with others. 0.91 listening 6  i am able to listen to and appreciate the views of others.  i find it hard not to interrupt when others are speaking.  i am able to match my body language appropriately to what is being said.  i tend to wait until the other person has finished speaking before responding.  i am able to respond appropriately to others’ comments during a conversation.  i am a good listener. 0.63 time management 6  i am able to allocate my time efficiently.  i am able to manage several tasks at the same time.  i am good at meeting deadlines.  i am able to prioritise tasks and set appropriate timelines.  i can set goals and monitor progress .  i have effective time management skills. 0.84 self-management 6  i am able to identify my personal goals.  i am a good judge of what my strengths and areas of development are.  i am able to identify opportunities for learning outside my course.  i am able to plan for my personal development.  i can accept responsibility.  i can evaluate and monitor my 0.80 zacharopoulou et al. enhancing pass leaders’ employability skills through reflection journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 8 personal performance. creativity 6  i can adapt to situations of change.  i can provide novel solutions to problems.  i know how to initiate change to enhance productivity.  i like inventing things.  i am always thinking of new ways of doing things.  i am a creative person. 0.72 personal growth 9  i know how to change specific things that i want to change in my life.  i have a good sense of where i am headed in my life.  if i want to change something in my life, i initiate the transition process.  i can choose the role that i want to have in a group.  i know what i need to do to get started toward reaching my goals.  i have a specific action plan to help me reach my goals.  i take charge of my life.  i know what my unique contribution to the world might be.  i have a plan for making my life more balanced. 0.90 the questionnaire was designed specifically for use in this study and thereby to assess the extent to which pass had served to enhance the employability skills of our students. reliability was assessed using cronbach’s alpha and values ranging from 0.63 (listening) to 0.91 (spoken communication) were obtained. students were also asked to provide information about their involvement with the pass process and other extra-curricular activities including work experience, thereby enabling us to employ statistical techniques to objectively determine the impact of pass on different aspects of employability. focus group interviews: focus group interviews were conducted with 6 groups of participants (3 in each participating discipline which comprised the schools of psychology; law; computing and intelligent systems), with each group comprising between 5 and 7 people, thereby allowing us to explore the concept of employability in more depth. as such, participants were asked to comment generally on a range of issues including their general perceptions of the pass process. the focus group moderator had experience of facilitating group discussions and was independent of the pass team. all focus groups were recorded and subsequently transcribed verbatim. zacharopoulou et al. enhancing pass leaders’ employability skills through reflection journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 9 students reflections: thirty-six pass leaders (24 from the school of psychology, 12 from the school of law) were expected to enrol on two specific modules and were formally assessed on a range of activities including: a reflective diary in which they recorded their experience of the pass and debrief sessions; a written review of the pass process in which they were required to demonstrate an awareness of how they had developed as a result of training; a portfolio of session plans in which they were required to identify the content to be covered and the process/strategies to be employed during their pass sessions and, finally, a practical facilitation of a pass session. the research team sought permission to use the reflections in the evaluation process. results to reiterate, the aim of this project was to evaluate the effectiveness of a programme of activity designed to enhance the employability skills of a group of pass leaders. anovas (analysis of variance tests) were used to explore changes in mean scores on the various employability dimensions and a content analytic approach was used to analyse the transcripts emerging from the focus group discussions, which involved the extraction of key themes (morse and field, 1996). quantitative findings a 2 x 2 mixed anova was conducted to determine whether pass leaders differed from non-pass leaders on each employability facet across time. mean scores are displayed in table 2 (see also figure 1). table 2. mean scores for pass leaders on each employability dimension. employability facet pass leader non-pass leader time 1 time 2 time 1 time 2 1. leadership 4.536 4.355 4.355 4.288 2. teamwork 5.065 4.840 4.840 4.938 zacharopoulou et al. enhancing pass leaders’ employability skills through reflection journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 10 3. problem-solving 4.659 4.644 4.644 4.666 4. written communication 4.818 4.608 4.608 4.672 5. spoken communication 4.558 4.630 4.630 4.456 6. listening 4.985 4.791 4.791 4.705 7. time management 4.834 4.669 4.669 4.761 8. self-management 4.761 4.579 4.579 4.538 9. creativity 4.215 4.204 4.204 4.388 10. personal growth 4.347 4.376 4.376 4.222 the findings suggest that whilst there were some changes in mean scores (e.g. with respect to spoken communication) the differences were not significant. moreover, the general pattern of responding suggests that pass leaders actually perceived themselves to be less competent in some areas at time 2 than at time 1, although they did perceive themselves to be generally more competent than non-pass leaders across all dimensions at the beginning of the process. figure 1. mean scores for pass leaders on employability facets at time 1 and time 2. zacharopoulou et al. enhancing pass leaders’ employability skills through reflection journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 11 qualitative findings in spite of the above and consistent with previous research (see e.g. skalicky and caney, 2010) the qualitative findings did suggest that pass leaders perceived themselves to have benefited from the employability initiative. from the transcripts, two main themes emerged relating to ‘key skills’ and ‘personal development’ (see table 3). table 3. themes and subthemes emerging from the focus group interviews. themes sub-themes 1. key skills  teamwork  presentation skills  time management  confidence  communication skills 2. personal development  employability  reputation in relation to skills, pass leaders reported that the scheme had allowed them to develop in a number of ways, for example, in relation to teamwork, presentation skills, and time management, although an increase in confidence was highlighted by many as the most significant benefit: it builds your confidence … it is good to keep up because there are quite a few things you forget from the year before so you are refreshing yourself all the time as well … pass sessions were great revision classes for myself. i feel the experience was an extremely good one, which i enjoyed, and i can see it has boosted my confidence as i can talk to people more easily now than i could before. i also feel the experience will benefit me when it comes to future employability as it shows that i can work well with others, as well as alone, that i am approachable and friendly. it also demonstrates that i have good time management skills as i achieved everything i planned. zacharopoulou et al. enhancing pass leaders’ employability skills through reflection journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 12 the two skills i believe i have developed the most as a result of being involved in pass are effective communication and self-confidence, which will help me greatly when seeking future employment. in relation to time management, students also commented: you need to be good with your time. before i started pass i was dreadful, like i’d be late for everything. but then whenever you know that people are depending on you, you are there on time. well it helped with planning your sessions, organisation skills, time keeping and speaking in front of people…it helped us gain confidence, as we had to speak in front of our pass class and in front of the other pass leaders. students also recognised the importance of the process for developing their presentation and communications skills: in debrief we covered things like interview skills and tips, presentation skills as well, and we were always feeding back so we just got used to getting up in front of a room and presenting your poster or whatever it was you created. when i was asked if i would be interested in becoming a pass leader i was quite indecisive as i was worried about talking in front of a group of people and didn’t think i would be very good at it … but all in all, i feel it has been a really beneficial scheme … it has enabled me to recap on first year topics and has given me a sense of achievement when helping others. it has also given me a great confidence boost and i now have no worries about leading a group. and in relation to teamwork: it also gave me valuable experience as a facilitator and as a team member, from meeting my co-leader to planning and organising weekly sessions to taking part in group discussions. these were all key experiences for me. zacharopoulou et al. enhancing pass leaders’ employability skills through reflection journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 13 as a leader i found the pass sessions were great revision classes for myself. it also gave me valuable experience as a facilitator and as a team member, and in terms of organising myself for weekly sessions and developing my leadership skills. i think it has really helped me personally in that now i can see the lecturers like whenever our seminar teacher is telling us stuff then i can work out why they’re putting us into groups or why they’re doing things in a particular way. however, the scheme was not solely focused on skills development but rather also sought to encourage leaders to reflect on their experience and to perceive how it could benefit them in the future. lees observes that: reflective thinking refers to the capacity to develop critical consideration of ones’ own world-view and the relationship to the world-view of others. (lees, 2002, p.8). when students were asked to think or reflect about the pass scheme, what they had done and how it had helped them, significantly, all pass leaders perceived themselves to be more employable as a result of having participated in the process. for example: it improves your communication skills and it’s good for your cv. pass has also helped me develop skills. although i thought i already had them it made me realise how much more i had to develop on those skills such as working within a team and group activities, learning to include everyone and not try and take on the task entirely myself. i believe that being a pass leader will have a positive impact on my future employability. preparing for and facilitating weekly group sessions and attending debrief sessions, illustrates my commitment to the process and demonstrates that i can be relied upon. availing of the opportunity to be a pass leader demonstrates to future employers that i showed initiative by taking an opportunity to further develop personally and also enhance my employability skills. the two skills i believe i have developed the most as a result of being involved in pass are effective communication and self-confidence which will help me greatly when seeking future employment. zacharopoulou et al. enhancing pass leaders’ employability skills through reflection journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 14 whilst it is clear that ‘the elusive quality of employability makes it a woolly concept to pin down’ (cranmer, 2006, p.172) it is generally accepted that, irrespective of its definition, developing graduate employability has emerged as a key aim of higher education establishments. it is perhaps a little too early to comment on the impact of this work given the evaluation has only just been completed. however, we have been able to show that the scheme is having a positive impact on employability having served to enhance students’ perceived competence in some areas (e.g. spoken communication), and more generally has helped them to identify their deficiencies in respect of certain employability skills and the steps needed to achieve competence in these areas. specifically, the quantitative data suggests that whilst leaders do perceive themselves to have enhanced their competence in some areas (e.g. with respect to spoken communication), for some skills, a decrease in mean scores was apparent between times one and two. in terms of teamwork, for example, whilst the mean score at time one was slightly higher for pass leaders compared to the rest of the student cohort (5.06 compared to 4.87) attributable, we think, to the timing of data collection (i.e. following the initial training period) and a sense of illusory superiority on the part of leaders, their mean score had reduced to 4.81 by time two, which was also slightly lower than the non-pass comparison group (4.94). although most of the differences observed were not significant, the general pattern of responding suggests that, in the context of learning theory and in particular the ‘conscious competence learning model’ developed by noel burch in the 1970’s, most participants were initially at stage one i.e. ‘unconscious incompetence’ and were thus unaware of the nature and relevance of the skills covered and the extent of their deficiencies. however, the programme served to move leaders to the second stage of ‘conscious incompetence’ whereby they became aware of the existence, complexity and relevance of the various skills but also of their apparent deficiencies, hence the reduction in mean scores observed (as may happen when learning to drive a car). whilst the length of the programme was not sufficient to allow students to practice the skills to the extent that they achieved ‘unconscious competence’ or mastery, the process of reflection did enable them to better articulate these skills and to identify other opportunities to further develop them. indeed, the qualitative findings would support this. zacharopoulou et al. enhancing pass leaders’ employability skills through reflection journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 15 conclusions of course, it is important to acknowledge that the sample size achieved in the present context was relatively small, which limits the conclusions that can be drawn from the statistical analyses. certainly, more research is needed with a larger sample to confirm the findings of this study. nevertheless, it seems feasible to suggest that whilst the pass experience does have a positive impact in terms of enhancing employability, it is not in itself sufficient to ensure mastery of all of the associated employability skills. to truly achieve competence, pass leaders must firstly understand the benefit of a particular skill or ability and its complexity and must recognise the relevance of their own ‘incompetence’ or limitations with respect to the skill concerned. this process is consistent with yorke’s claim that: employability goes well beyond the notion of key skills, and is evidenced in the application of a mix of personal qualities and beliefs, understandings, skilful practices and the ability to reflect productively on experience. (yorke, 2006, p.13). the process of reflection would seem to be particularly important here in terms of helping students to identify their own development needs and the opportunities to do something about them. by continually reflecting on where and how they are using the skills, by watching and monitoring their progress, the skill will eventually become second nature. however, regular reflection and review should prevent complacency. of course, this has implications for skill development beyond the pass initiative. the usem model of employability (yorke and knight, 2006; knight and yorke, 2004) comprises four key components of understanding, skills, efficacy belief and metacognition. yorke and knight are concerned that students should be able to demonstrate metacognition (capacity for reflection) and thus become malleable learners, as opposed to fixed, believing that they can take action to enhance their own abilities and hence enhance their employability. the pass process can be used in such a way as to develop students’ attitudes to learning in order to strengthen their self-efficacy beliefs and competencies. the project at ulster actively promotes reflection as a capability that students can then use to adapt and respond to situations, thus enhancing their graduate abilities and employability. our findings show that the pass process can be used to zacharopoulou et al. enhancing pass leaders’ employability skills through reflection journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 16 encourage students to develop a capacity for reflection and is consistent with a more holistic view to employability. however, the process of reflection will become a more integral part of our pass training process and more effort will be invested in helping students to identify co-curricular and extra-curricular opportunities to further develop the skills covered as part of the pass programme. now that we have developed the resources we intend to repeat the evaluation perhaps across other disciplines to further explore the ideas emerging from this project. here it may be of interest to note that the project continues to thrive in participating disciplines (i.e. the schools of law, psychology and computing and intelligent systems), it has also been extended to the school of computing and information engineering and the school of the built environment. recognising the value of the experience provided, the university, for four consecutive years, provided funding for a placement student to assist with the development of the scheme and associated projects. interest in the role of pass leader is also continuing to grow – an indication of the extent to which the experience is also valued by our students. this is particularly apparent in the school of psychology where the number of students volunteering for the role has increased dramatically from 10 in 2010 to more than 40 in 2013. further, students are also volunteering to spend their placement year working on associated projects in an unpaid capacity. indeed, in the 2013/14 academic year three placement students were supported by the pass process. students clearly see the added value in becoming a pass leader. the university also formally recognises the initiative with accreditation though the edge award. in a climate where graduate employability skills are in the spotlight, this proactive and developmental approach enhances career prospects and allows graduates to demonstrate to future employers a commitment to continuing personal and professional development. references ashwin, p. (1994) ‘the supplemental instruction leader experience, why supplemental instruction is not teaching: a student’s perspective’, in rust, c. r. and wallace, j. (eds.). helping students to learn from each other: supplemental instruction (pp.8790). birmingham, uk: staff and educational development association. zacharopoulou et al. enhancing pass leaders’ employability skills through reflection journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 17 cranmer, s. (2006) ‘enhancing graduate employability: best intentions and mixed outcomes’, studies in higher education, 31(2), pp. 169-184. harvey, l. (2005) ‘embedding and integrating employability’, new directions for institutional research, 128, pp. 13-28. jarvis, j., dickerson, c. and stockwell, l. (2013) ‘staff-student partnership in practice in higher education: the impact on learning and teaching’, procedia social and behavioral sciences, 90, pp. 220-225. knight, p. t and yorke, m. (2004) learning, curriculum and employability in higher education. london: routledgefalmer. lees, d. (2002) graduate employability – literature review. university of exeter. available at: http://www.qualityresearchinternational.com/esecttools/esectpubs/leeslitreview.pdf (accessed: 14 november 2015). national centre for universities and businesses (2014) state of the relationship report 2014. available at: http://www.ncub.co.uk/reports/sor.html (accessed: 14 november 2015). morse, j. m. and field, p. a. (1996) nursing research: the application of qualitative approaches. 2 nd edn. london: chapman and hall. pascarella, e.t. and terenzini, p.t. (2005). how college affects students: (volume 2) a third decade of research. san francisco: jossey-bass. pegg, a., waldock, j., hendy-isaac s. and lawton r, (2012) pedagogy for employability. york, uk: higher education academy. available at: http://oro.open.ac.uk/30792/ (accessed: 14 november 2015). skalicky, j. and caney, a. (2010) ‘pass student leader and mentor roles: a tertiary leadership pathway’, journal of peer learning (formerly the australasian journal of peer learning), vol. 3(1), pp. 24-37. http://www.qualityresearchinternational.com/esecttools/esectpubs/leeslitreview.pdf http://www.ncub.co.uk/reports/sor.html http://oro.open.ac.uk/30792/ zacharopoulou et al. enhancing pass leaders’ employability skills through reflection journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 18 wilson, t. (2012) a review of business-university collaboration, department for business, innovation and skills, uk government. available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/business-university-collaboration-thewilson-review yorke, m. (2006) employability in higher education: what it is what it is not. york, uk: higher education academy. available at: http://www.employability.ed.ac.uk/documents/staff/heaemployability_in_he(is,isnot).pdf yorke, m. & knight, p.t. (2006) embedding employability into the curriculum. york, uk: higher education academy. available at: http://www.employability.ed.ac.uk/documents/staff/heabriefings/esect-3embedding_employability_into_curriculum.pdf author details amanda zacharopoulou is a senior lecturer in the school of law at ulster university. she has been teaching for over twenty years and has an interest in legal education. she has occupied various teaching and learning roles within the university including that of faculty teaching and learning coordinator for social sciences. she is a trained pass/si supervisor and has pioneered pass (peer assisted study sessions) within the school of law. she continues to develop student centred interventions within the school of law designed to enhance the pre-entry, induction and transition experiences of law students. she is a senior fellow of the higher education academy and a fellow of the centre for higher education research practice. melanie giles is a professor of psychology and head of school. she is also a chartered psychologist and a registered health practitioner with the hcpc. her main research interests are in the area of health psychology and she is an active member of the psychology research institute at ulster. she also has a keen interest in learning and teaching. she has assumed a variety of administrative roles in this respect and is responsible for overseeing the quality of teaching and the development of enhancement http://www.employability.ed.ac.uk/documents/staff/hea-employability_in_he(is,isnot).pdf http://www.employability.ed.ac.uk/documents/staff/hea-employability_in_he(is,isnot).pdf http://www.employability.ed.ac.uk/documents/staff/heabriefings/esect-3-embedding_employability_into_curriculum.pdf http://www.employability.ed.ac.uk/documents/staff/heabriefings/esect-3-embedding_employability_into_curriculum.pdf zacharopoulou et al. enhancing pass leaders’ employability skills through reflection journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 19 activities. she is a trained pass/si supervisor and is responsible for the introduction of the pass peer mentoring scheme at ulster. she is a senior fellow of the higher education academy and a fellow of the centre for higher education research practice. dr joan condell is a senior lecturer in the school of computing and intelligent systems in the department of computing and engineering at ulster university. she has been teaching maths and computing modules in ulster since 1998. joan has published work in computer imaging and maths, alongside robotics and health applications. this work includes publication in over 120 journal and conferences, successful completion of phd students and the enhancement of student learning and engagement through peer assisted learning methods for maths (specifically pass). she is a trained pass/si supervisor. her work has also extended in promoting computing as a career with initiatives such as wicadet, a widening access project which involved teaching mobile app. development to local secondary pupils. enhancing pass leaders’ employability skills through reflection abstract introduction the pass leader programme aim method design participants procedure results quantitative findings employability facet pass leader non-pass leader time 1 time 2 time 1 time 2 qualitative findings conclusions references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special edition: developing writing in stem disciplines, november 2012 editorial: developing writing in stem disciplines trevor day university of bath, uk john hilsdon plymouth university, uk andy hagyard university of lincoln, uk the first special edition of the jldhe, published in 2010, was a collection of papers written as part of the national action research network project on pdp and e-portfolio practice, and was called “researching and evaluating personal development planning and e-portfolio practice”. the second special edition is also a collaborative venture. it was prompted by the national he stem programme project developing writing in stem disciplines (http://go.bath.ac.uk/stemwriting) which ran throughout 2010-11. its follow-up activities (of which this special edition is one) are extending into 2013. the project was responding to the issue of graduate literacy, with surveys such as those of the association of graduate recruiters (graduate prospects, 2008) and the council for industry and higher education (archer and davison, 2008) identifying the writing abilities of graduates as a key area for concern. learning developers are acutely aware of the importance for students of acquiring the successful habits, and adopting the socially approved codes, of written language in their chosen discipline. the theme of developing the capabilities to write successfully is a very important one, especially given the extent to which value is attached to the appropriate use of language in education and employment. for this reason it is important that we explore how students can develop successful practices for their context and discipline. the he stem project supported initiatives aiming to identify and respond to concerns about writing in the science, technology, engineering and maths disciplines and, if there were needs to address, what form appropriate responses might take. editorial. developing writing in stem disciplines journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 2 in its response to this agenda, the ‘developing writing in stem disciplines’ project adopted two approaches. the first, a research strand, explored the views and experiences of engineering undergraduates, industrial supervisors and faculty staff in relation to writing development and employability. in the second strand, involving the setting up of a collaborative network, the project’s seven partner universities (bath, coventry, exeter, limerick, oxford brookes, plymouth and west of england) shared their writing-related research findings and good practice. the findings and identified good practice were then disseminated through conferences and workshops, and prompted the setting up of a national he stem-funded special interest group ‘writing and communicating in stem disciplines’ (http://go.bath.ac.uk/stemwritingandcommunicatingsig). through the various activities, the project identified evidence-led, writing-related issues that applied to the graduate employability agenda and suggested writing development practices that would be effective responses. in the project, analysis of interviews and questionnaire survey responses from engineering students, industrial supervisors and faculty staff suggested the prevalence of an instrumental, skills-driven agenda for writing development, with students becoming socialised into the writing conventions of their discipline. this, to some extent, contrasted with the more contested forms of disciplinary discourse encouraged by many writing developers, which are often influenced by academic literacies theory (lea and street, 1998) and constructs of identity and authorial presence (ivanic, 1995; lillis, 1997, 2001). the project’s second strand, in responding to such findings, identified a range of responses, including: promoting ‘writing in the disciplines’ (wid) approaches (deane and o’neill, 2011; wac clearinghouse, 2012) with learning developers and writing specialists working alongside subject specialists to embed writing practice within the disciplinary curriculum; introducing and/or demystifying writing-related assignment guidelines and assessment criteria; multi-dimensional diagnostic instruments for assessing students’ writing; creative use of prompt material, such as newspaper articles, project reports, legal case studies and other work-related documents; use of online technologies to support both academic and employment-related writing; students writing collaboratively; and recognition that academic and broader employability needs can be met within a disciplinary curriculum at one and the same time. many of these approaches are considered by the breadth of papers in this special edition of the jldhe. editorial. developing writing in stem disciplines journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 3 this edition is a response to the underreporting of writing development practice in stem disciplines in the uk, and especially that relating to collaboration between stem subject specialists and various kinds of learning developer, including writing and language specialists. in that respect, the 10 papers and case studies in this edition represent a cross-section of that spectrum, with papers written by subject specialists, others by learning developers of various kinds, and some as collaborative partnerships between the two. in eastern australia, collaborative approaches between learning developers and disciplinary specialists have been at the forefront of internationally-recognised writing development initiatives for at least two decades. building on this practice, drury and mort give an account of the write reports in science and engineering (wrise) project and its online resource, which contains modules drawing upon eight stem disciplines. this resource is accessed by thousands of undergraduate students in australia and beyond, and there is a strong evidence base for its success. amos and mcgowan offer a potential model for collaboration between a writing specialist and subject teacher in stem disciplines. their account describes the application of genre pedagogy, encouraging students to develop their own academic writing by analysing a particular genre from their own discipline. two case studies report on fine-tuning improvements in writing interventions over one or more years, with subject specialists working with writing developers or language specialists. narduzzo and day report on a small-scale wid intervention in physics, employing peer assessment, which shows how an undergraduate student assignment can yield rich returns in terms of helping students to acclimatise to academic writing practices. through analysing qualitative and quantitative data on the process and product of the assignment, they show how small-scale research can productively inform curriculum development in a stem discipline. armstrong, dannatt and evans give an account of their collaboration between an english language centre and an electronic and electrical engineering department in meeting the writing needs of first year undergraduates and visiting chinese second year students. of course, writing development is just part – albeit a key part – of students’ learning development and preparation for employment after graduation. appleby, roberts, barnes, qualter and tariq address some aspects of writing development at the editorial. developing writing in stem disciplines journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 4 transitional stages from school/college to university, through university, and then on to employment. based in part on evidence from student, alumni and employer interviews, they argue for the importance of social learning and writing development within a ‘learning to learn’ agenda. bernaschina and smith provide a case study examining how teaching about writing can be embedded in the first year curriculum. they describe issues arising from an initiative by their school of science and technology that seeks to integrate skills for writing into the wider employability skills framework. simonite’s case study on data-driven journalism in mathematics disciplines makes clear links between developing writing capabilities and employability. through a review of students’ practices, as reported in online feedback, she reveals benefits and challenges of asking students to research and analyse data and communicate it meaningfully to a nonspecialist audience using writing and graphics. bowman and cullen describe the impact of weekly written tasks on the quality of computing students' final year projects. in addition to reporting a positive correlation between engagement with the tasks and the standard of completed reports, the paper concludes with some recommendations for further 'learning through writing' activities. for mathematical writing, samuels proposes four methods for capturing advanced mathematical activity that can inform both the creative process and subsequent reporting of outputs. this paper highlights how written text interacts closely with other forms of representation, a feature also common to other stem subjects. giminez considers students writing collaboratively – something engineers and scientists commonly do in their professional practice. he reviews various sources of evidence (observation notes, text analysis, ‘talk around text’ and interviews) gathered from 21 students and four academics across four schools of engineering. giminez proposes that planning and composing can be orchestrated for a group through the use of technological tools (especially online), and he explores some of the pedagogical implications of doing so. we hope that this special edition of the jldhe will stimulate further interest in research and the shaping of good practice in the field of stem writing. this small collection captured some snapshots of the wide range of approaches being applied in stem writing editorial. developing writing in stem disciplines journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 5 development. as well as adding to the evidence base and discussion in support of embedding effective practice, it also highlights the value of practitioners from different disciplines and perspectives coming together. points of friction generate heat, but also light that provides some illumination. partnerships between stem academics and learning developers can help transform the practice of both groups, enhancing the student experience and contributing to them developing socially and economically valued skills. this coming together of a wide range of practitioners, with various voices and pedagogic perspectives, was also a hallmark of the original project. it is an emerging community of practice that is vital to help ensure that students’ writing development is given the attention it deserves, and in responding to this impetus, effective and collaborative pedagogic practices are embedded, not simply ‘bolted’ on to, undergraduate stem programmes. references archer, w. and davison, j. (2008) ‘graduate employability: what do employers think and want?’ report for the council for industry and higher education (cihe). london: cihe deane, m. and o’neill, p. eds. (2011) writing in the disciplines. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan graduate prospects (2008) ‘graduate recruitment in 2008 and outlook for 2009.’ manchester: graduate prospects. available from: http://www.prospects.ac.uk/cms/showpage/p!epkmfjx [accessed 28 august 2012] ivanic, r. (1995) ‘writer identity.’ prospect: the australian journal of tesol, 10 (1), pp. 8-31. lea, m.r. and street, b.v. (1998) ‘student writing in higher education: an academic literacies approach’. studies in higher education, 23 (2), pp. 157-172 lillis, t.m. (1997) ‘new voices in academia? the regulative nature of academic writing conventions’. language and education, 11 (3), pp. 182-199 lillis, t.m. (2001) student writing: access, regulation, desire. london: routledge. editorial. developing writing in stem disciplines journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2012 6 wac clearinghouse (2012) an introduction to writing across the curriculum and what is writing in the disciplines? fort collins, co: colorado state university. available from: http://wac.colostate.edu/intro/ and http://wac.colostate.edu/intro/pop2e.cfm respectively [accessed 28 august 2012] acknowledgements we are indebted to fran laughton, director of the he stem programme south west (http://www.hestem-sw.org.uk/about/south-west-spoke/) who arranged co-funding for this special edition and who supported the original project together with other members of her team: sarah chatwin, alana coyle, ed stevens and ruth waring. the original developing writing in stem disciplines project members, in addition to two of us (jh and td), were karen bultitude, barrie cooper, rachel canter, lawrence cleary, mary deane, lisa ganobscik-williams, ide o’sullivan and margarida sardo. we are grateful for their gracious willingness to share their, often inspirational, good practice. four of them (bc, rc, lc and lgw) kindly contributed their editorial insight to this special edition. we also wish to thank those referees – who must remain anonymous – who invested their time and expertise in peer reviewing the papers. and finally many thanks to natalie bates for proofreading the final manuscripts. literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 7: june 2014 ‘distance travelled versus the ‘distance’ travelled’: enhancing the student learning experience using a creative and innovative approach to tutorial organisation dr simon brownhill university of cambridge, uk abstract in an effort to remain both competitive and attractive to prospective and established students, higher education institutions, both at a national and international level, are actively seeking innovative ways of improving the experience, progression and retention of students (jones, 2008). this paper reports on an original approach to tutorial organisation to enhance the learning experience of undergraduate students on a practice-based foundation degree at a university in the uk. students’ perceptions of tutorials prior to and post their active engagement with a classroom-based tutorial stations system (tss) will be shared and discussed. whilst there is a positive calling from students to sustain usage of the system as part of other taught modules on the programme, further research is needed to evaluate the impact of the system on helping to improve student attainment. keywords: tutorials; student experience; student learning; change. introduction ‘in the late 20th century, changes in the uk and global economies meant that expanding post-compulsory education, particularly higher education, to meet the needs of the transforming economy became a preoccupation of government’ (david et al., 2008, p.7). the resulting pressure and demands on academic staff to meet the diverse needs of an increasing student body has resulted in many seeking new and innovative ways to engage their learners with the intent of improving the quality of learning and teaching at university. from interactive lectures, engaging seminars and supportive workshops, to the utilisation of online materials, video supervision and contemporary social media (see elavsky et al., brownhill distance travelled versus the ‘distance’ travelled journal of learning development in higher education, issue 7: june 2014 2 2011), institutions in the uk are working hard, many in response to the national student survey (see http://tinyurl.com/2c76nm), to enhance the experience of an ever diverse cohort of students that will enable them to participate and achieve in the higher education arena (thomas, 2011). this paper considers the ‘integral part’ (robinson, 2008, p.59) that tutorials play as part of taught modules on an undergraduate practice-based foundation degree (for information about foundation degrees see http://tinyurl.com/b9utz4e) at a university in the midlands, uk, where the author previously worked. whilst there are many definitions of the term ‘tutorial’ (see herrmann, 2014), a tutorial within the context of this paper is defined as a short meeting (15-20 minutes duration) involving a teaching tutor with a small group of students (2-6) which aims to support them in the development of their assignment. traditionally these tutorials take place over two consecutive weeks (one three hour session per week) following the taught input of the module (four taught sessions over four consecutive weeks, each session of three hours duration) to ensure that students are adequately prepared to engage in their module coursework (a 3000 word written assignment). during these tutorials, tutors ascertain the progress individual students are making with regard to writing their assignments, asking and answering questions relating to the module assessment. student feedback from previous modules undertaken on the programme highlighted how many students perceived the distance they had to travel (the physical distance travelled), the monetary costs associated with this travel, and the time taken to reach the university for a ‘15 minute-tutorial-slot’ as outweighing the actual value [academic progress made by students] of the tutorial attended (the progression ‘distance’ travelled). additional concerns linked to pressures on finite resources in the university library and effective (quiet) learning spaces for students to study in at the university resulted in the development of an innovative tutorial stations system (tss) to positively address the areas of consideration identified above. this paper reports on the use of the tss as part of a research based taught module (entitled ‘research methods and practice’) for full-time undergraduates in the second (final) year of their studies on the programme (level 5). funded by an internal research for learning and teaching fund (rltf) bid in 2011/12, the paper will offer an explanation of the system, how it operates, and will reflect on the views of students who actively engaged with the system as part of the preparation work for their module assignment. http://tinyurl.com/2c76nm http://tinyurl.com/b9utz4e brownhill distance travelled versus the ‘distance’ travelled journal of learning development in higher education, issue 7: june 2014 3 review of literature tutorials are considered to be a ‘time-honoured feature of the university world’ (startup, 1977, p.192). race (1989, cited keddie and trotter, 1998, p.172) describes the general purposes of a tutorial as giving students the chance to ‘ask questions…encourage team working…[and]…give practice at making presentations’. this description is refined by robinson (2008, p.59) who suggests that ‘[i]n an ideal form [tutorials are]…an effective way to create dialogue at an individual level between the student and a relevant staff member, in which learning requirements can be reviewed or identified, progress discussed, and future work planned’. the notion of ‘learning’ in robinson’s thinking is evident in the work of dawson (1998, cited sweeney et al., 2004, p.313) who suggests that tutorials are designed to complement classroom lectures, offering opportunities for learning (the progression ‘distance’ travelled) such as ‘practising and applying concepts the students are learning and…checking the validity of their understanding through feedback and constructive criticism’. tutorials come in numerous forms, examples of which include face-to-face, distance (online), individual, group and workshop. (readers are to note that the remainder of this review concerns itself with literature relating to tutorials that include several students). these are used in different ways by different institutions: for example, tutorials at the university of cambridge (palfreyman, 2008) and the university of oxford ‘are part of a learning system that usually involves students in a period of intensive individual study, the preparation of some work, whether an essay or completion of a problem sheet, followed by the tutorial [or supervision] itself’ (ashwin, 2006, p.652). in comparison, online tutorials at universitas terbuka in indonesia are ‘open throughout the semester so that students [can] post questions, comments, and responses to tutor’s and others’ questions at any time’ (belawati, 2005, p.18). there is an emphasis in the examples above on students demonstrating some kind of active engagement in the tutorial, be it prior to or actually during it. jones (2010) supports this observation by suggesting that tutorials should purposefully encourage this participation. this mirrors the thinking of gibbs (2010) who argues that being active in the process of learning helps to not only facilitate deep learning but is also a way of promoting more independent learning. an additional benefit to tutorial engagement is acknowledged by divaharan and atputhasamy (2002) who recognise that students can learn from one another, an opportunity which can be capitalised upon within the tutorial learning environment if promoted. brownhill distance travelled versus the ‘distance’ travelled journal of learning development in higher education, issue 7: june 2014 4 whilst there are seemingly many benefits associated with tutorial support, it is important to acknowledge some of the issues which surround their usage. for the purposes of this review four key issues will be highlighted. the first two issues presented below have been raised by teaching tutors who conduct tutorials; issues three and four are offered from the student perspective: 1. poor participation: marlina (2009) acknowledges how some students adopt a rather passive approach to tutorial participation, either sitting in silence or rarely volunteering an answer unless called upon to do so. 2. poor attendance: employment pressures are considered to be a key reason as to why students do not attend tutorials (kottasz, 2005). students who live ‘far away’ (ng, 2007) (the physical distance travelled) may be reluctant to attend tutorials due to the cost and time implications. 3. satisfaction rates: douglas et al. (2006) and stevenson and sander (1998) highlight how some students are either ‘not very’ or ‘not at all’ satisfied with the overall provision made in terms of tutorial support they receive. 4. student anxiety: it is suggested that students find tutorials intimidating (takaesu et al., 2010) if they do not know their peers, do not respond well to their tutor, or do not appreciate the act of soliciting criticism and submitting their ideas to challenge (petress, 1998) as supporting the learning process. in order to make tutorials a more effective and positive experience for both students and tutors, numerous practical suggestions have been offered by academics to address the issues identified above. webb (1980, p.20) suggests that ‘[t]he most effective way of increasing…participation rates of students in tutorials is for the tutor to absent himself from the discussion’. this is in direct opposition to the author’s personal suggestion of planning for a variety of interactive activities to take place during it – the premise of the tutorial stations system – as opposed to the tutorial being overloaded with ‘tutor talk’ which is likely to result in student boredom. ‘correspondence (through postal services), mass media, radio and television broadcast and the internet’ are identified by belawati (2005, p.16) as practical ways to overcome barriers which affect student attendance at tutorials, particularly those who are distance learners (thus positively addressing the issue of the physical distance travelled). making tutorial attendance a compulsory element of studied brownhill distance travelled versus the ‘distance’ travelled journal of learning development in higher education, issue 7: june 2014 5 modules is another possibility. in terms of addressing students’ levels of satisfaction linked to tutorial support, allowing students to set the tutorial agenda ensures that they ‘get what they want’, content wise (thus positively addressing the issue of the progression ‘distance’ travelled). however, this does raise the question whether what students want from their tutorials is necessarily what they actually need; as such, harris and silva (1993, p.528) advocate an agenda which is ‘negotiated’ between the student and tutor. hiola and moss (1990, p.35) suggest that variations in tutorial time (duration), frequency of provision, tutorial group size, and access to tutorials are factors likely to positively influence students’ attitudes towards tutorials. embracing a pressure-less working environment, inviting students to contribute when they feel ready and willing to, and offering ‘freedom, knowledge and autonomy’ over proceedings (shaw et al., 2008, p.712) are all further practical approaches tutors could embrace in an effort to reduce student anxiety during tutorials. unwin (1984, p.190) claims that ‘a conscientious teacher can do a lot to improve tutorials’. efforts to embrace this trait as a teaching tutor were utilised in the development of the tutorial stations system (tss) to which the remainder of this paper is dedicated to. a full explanation of the tss is offered as part of the research results (pages 7-13). the research aim and objectives the aim of the research was to critically evaluate the use of the tss by exploring students’ perceptions of the value and benefits of tutorials prior to and post their active engagement with the system as part of an undergraduate final year (level 5) research-based taught module on a practice-based foundation degree. sweeney et al. (2004, p.314) argue that ‘very little research exists on students’ perspectives on tutorials’; a subsidiary aim of the research was thus to address a need for research within this particular area of interest. two objectives were used to drive the direction of the research: 1. to explore students’ perceptions of tutorials as part of their learning experience on previously taught modules. 2. to evaluate the perceived ‘preparedness’ of students to undertake their module coursework following their active engagement with the tss. brownhill distance travelled versus the ‘distance’ travelled journal of learning development in higher education, issue 7: june 2014 6 research methodology the research embraced a mixed method approach (tashakkori and teddlie, 2010) in relation to the collection of the primary data, purposefully using ‘converging lines of enquiry’ (yin, 2003, p.98) to explore and address the overall research aim and objectives. a staged approach, as advocated by clough and nutbrown (2011), was utilised as part of the research design: stage one: 54 semi-structured paper-based questionnaires were distributed to establish a pre-existing baseline of level 5 (final year) students’ perceptions of tutorials and their value as part of taught modules to date on their practice-based foundation degree (september 2011). the questionnaire contained a total of ten questions which utilised a range of question types to maintain respondents’ interest. the piloted questionnaire took approximately 15 minutes to complete. data generated from the questionnaire was both quantitative and qualitative in nature. stage two: a non-participant observation of students was made of their engagement with both pre-existing arrangements for tutorials and the tss (two observations in total) (november 2011). both observations were 30 minutes in duration and were conducted using interval sampling. they were undertaken consecutively during the middle hour of the three hour period in which the pre-existing arrangements for tutorials and the tss were timetabled. stage three: analysis of documentary evidence (in the form of module evaluation forms) was made to gauge students’ perceived ‘preparedness’ to undertake their module coursework and their subsequent academic attainment (the progression ‘distance’ travelled) (november/december 2011). a total of four questions were included in the module evaluation form relating to the students’ engagement with the tss, gathering both quantitative and qualitative data. permission to undertake this research was initially sought and given in written form by the university committee who awarded the author a successful internal rltf bid. ethical approval was also sought and given in written form by the university’s ethics committee who offered suggestions to strengthen the ethical requirements of the research. documentation of this approval may be requested from the author. the author’s line brownhill distance travelled versus the ‘distance’ travelled journal of learning development in higher education, issue 7: june 2014 7 manager at the time of the research being undertaken and the programme leader (the observer at stage two) of the foundation degree whose students would be taking part in the research, were both kept fully informed of the research from its conception to completion, providing valuable ethical oversight with regard to the processes adopted as and where appropriate. research results stage one full time undergraduate students in the second (final) year of their practice-based foundation degree were invited to complete a paper-based questionnaire about their perceptions and experiences of tutorials as part of their first year on the programme during their induction period in september 2011. the cohort (n54; 85% female, 15% male) were offered a piloted questionnaire which utilised a range of question types including list, dichotomous, category, ranking, scale and exact answers in an effort to engage and sustain respondent interest. a one-page covering letter served as a written vehicle for seeking informed consent. assurances of student confidentiality and anonymity were detailed in the letter. copies of this may be requested from the author. all students willingly completed the questionnaire during the induction period (n54, 100% return). the questionnaire was administered by two colleagues as the author was unable to distribute these on the induction day; the author fully briefed (verbally) the two colleagues prior to the questionnaires being administered. select findings generated from these questionnaires are offered below:  only 52% (n28) of the cohort (n54) had attended all six of the tutorials offered to them in the previous academic year (one tutorial being offered for each of the six modules the students had studied at level 4 (their first year of study)).  the tutorials students had attended in the previous academic year were typically conducted in either small groups (made up of three to four students) or individually.  on average 60% of the tutorials students had attended in the previous academic year lasted between 10-15 minutes. 61% (n33) of students indicated that they were able to access other activities in the teaching room used for their tutorial, along with a face-to-face discussion with their brownhill distance travelled versus the ‘distance’ travelled journal of learning development in higher education, issue 7: june 2014 8 teaching tutor. when asked to identify three of these ‘other activities’ students acknowledged the following as the three most prominent activities: 1. questions and answers 2. help with my assignment 3. looking at past assignments. in the questionnaire students were asked to indicate whether they agreed or disagreed with a series of statements relating to the perceived value of tutorials. select findings are presented in table 1: table 1. table to show the percentage of student agreement with select statements about the perceived value of tutorials. statement percentage of students (n54) in agreement with the statement (number of students) tutorials support me in improving my grades 87% (n47) tutorials are valuable to my learning experience on taught modules 77% (n42) tutorials give me confidence to write my module assignment 72% (n39) there was variance in student thinking related to the best way of conducting tutorials; just over two thirds of respondents (69%, n37) agreed that ‘tutorials should be conducted in a group’, whilst only 50% (n27) of students felt that ‘tutorials worked best when they are conducted privately’. students were finally invited to identify from a range of practical suggestions what they personally wanted to be included during a tutorial. the three most prominent responses are presented in table 2: brownhill distance travelled versus the ‘distance’ travelled journal of learning development in higher education, issue 7: june 2014 9 table 2. table to show the percentage of students identifying practical suggestions for inclusion in a tutorial. practical suggestion percentage of students (n54) identifying the suggestion for inclusion in a tutorial (number of students) looking at past assignments for the module 85% (n46) individual time with the teaching tutor 76% (n41) reviewing referencing guidance/advice 69% (n37) stage two tutorials for the research based module took place in november 2011 following the taught input for the module by two tutors who each taught one of two separate teaching groups (n27 in each group). due to staff illness only one of the two timetabled tutorial sessions assigned to the module was delivered (referred to as ‘tutorial two’). one tutor conducted pre-existing arrangements for tutorial support (see page 2) with their group (referred to for the purposes of this paper as ‘group b’). this was conducted in the room where the taught input for group b had been delivered. the other tutor [the author] secured the use of a new learning space in the form of a freshly designed teaching room in the university to conduct the tss in an effort to enrich the student learning experience of his group (referred to for the purposes of this paper as ‘group a’). this room, decorated in a vibrant colour scheme, consisted of moveable tables and chairs, collaborative computer stations and glass writing walls. various tutorial ‘stations’ were set up around the room by the author; these are identified and described in table 3: brownhill distance travelled versus the ‘distance’ travelled journal of learning development in higher education, issue 7: june 2014 10 table 3. description of the tutorial stations. tutorial station details face-to-face tutorial with tutor [1*] students attended group tutorials which they had signed up to a week prior to the tss being utilised. students were asked to take ownership of their tutorial agenda prior to attending it, discussing things with their teaching tutor that they wanted to in relation to the module, their handbooks and their coursework. this was the only station that was staffed (by the author as a teaching tutor). previous assignments [2] students had access to a selection of anonymised assignments from previous cohorts pertinent to the module being taught. the author had collected written permission from previous students (by e-mail, seven in total) to allow their work to be seen by others. all written feedback (both formative and summative) which appeared on the assignments had been removed electronically prior to them being made available to the current cohort in paper form. students were not allowed to take images of the assignments with their camera phones, nor were they allowed to make any written notes when engaging with this station. verbal reminders were firmly shared with all students prior to accessing this station and written reminders were clearly presented around this station. students were encouraged to monitor this station themselves to ensure that nobody ‘took advantage’ of the materials. the author numbered each of the assignments made available at this station and ensured that the total number of assignments matched the number of assignments that were collected in. academic literature [3] students had access to a range of academic literature (in the form of both academic and professional books) sought from the university library relating to research methods. in consultation brownhill distance travelled versus the ‘distance’ travelled journal of learning development in higher education, issue 7: june 2014 11 with a librarian, the literature was carefully selected in response to the academic and professional needs of the students. computers in the teaching room were also made available for students to access e-materials (internet based/electronic journals/materials from the online learning platform) in relation to research methods. discussion area [4] students were encouraged to use this area to openly discuss the work for their assignment with their peers. private study area [5] students were encouraged to use this area to engage in their own private study, be it individual or collaborative. *see figure 1 for a labelled ‘visual’ of the tutorial stations system ‘in action’. due to the resource-dependent nature of several of the stations (stations 2 and 3), time consuming preparations were necessary to both prepare and organise support materials and the teaching room. in an effort to positively address the issue of the physical distance travelled by students, all of the stations were made available for a three hour period following a peer assessed task which formed part of the module assessment. students were free to engage with any of the stations available for as long as they wished; the only station which was ‘time bound’ was the face-to-face tutorial with tutor station (timetabled tutorial slots of 20 minutes had been signed up for by students the previous week in the author’s absence). students attended these tutorials in groups of between two and four; due to the class size it was not possible for the author [serving as the teaching tutor] to see students on an individual basis in the time available. non-participant observations (30 minutes each) were undertaken by a supportive colleague (the programme leader of the foundation degree) whereby an interval sampling approach was utilised to gain an overview of proceedings (pre-existing arrangements for tutorials first and then the tss). permission from the students to be observed was verbally sought prior to each of the observations taking place. select findings from the observation of the tss highlighted that: brownhill distance travelled versus the ‘distance’ travelled journal of learning development in higher education, issue 7: june 2014 12  many students chose to select a space in the room from which they engaged with the different stations, either taking samples of materials from each station to their working space or asking passing peers to collect materials for them.  some students chose to leave the tutorial room to collect refreshments, returning with these and consuming them as they engaged with the different stations.  it was observed that ‘there was a really calm, productive feel in the room’ (observer’s written comment). figure 1. the tutorial stations system 'in action'. 1 3 4 permission sought for use (simon brownhill) stage three during their engagement with the tss, students were asked to complete an anonymous end-of-module evaluation form. the form was an amended version of the standard one used for all of the taught modules on the programme; this was so that information could be gathered to gauge students’ thoughts about the tss and to see if it had positively addressed the issue of the progression ‘distance’ travelled that had been highlighted by students in previous module feedback (see page 2). the form took approximately ten minutes to complete. of those students fully completing the module evaluation form (n16), the following findings presented in table 4 were considered significant: 5 2 brownhill distance travelled versus the ‘distance’ travelled journal of learning development in higher education, issue 7: june 2014 13 table 4: table to show significant findings from the module evaluation form about the tss and the associated percentage of students. finding percentage of students (n16) (number of students) students accessed the tss for an hour or more 82% (n13) students found the tss to be valuable to their learning experience on the module 100% (n16) students felt ‘well prepared’ or ‘very prepared’ for the writing of their assignment following the taught input and the tss 82% (n13) (‘well prepared’ (57%, n9); ‘very prepared’ (25%, n4)) a small number of students (n4) offered written comments about the tss on their amended module evaluation form: the development of the tutorial stations – the availability of books, previous assignments and [teaching tutor’s name] was valuable in developing the learning outcomes better and ensuring we knew what was expected. as other students stayed, it encouraged lots of others to stay too. face to face tutorial helped me with assignment and [there] were different stations which helped me a lot too. good use of different stations. to keep using the tutorial station method. it was much much better than the previous method of 15 mins. brownhill distance travelled versus the ‘distance’ travelled journal of learning development in higher education, issue 7: june 2014 14 discussion and conclusion in november 2011 students submitted their module coursework for assessment. it was personally felt that the tss had been a success in relation to positively addressing the issues of the physical distance travelled by students and the progression ‘distance’ travelled in terms of the value [academic progress made by students] of the tutorial experienced, particularly when one took into consideration the student feedback (via the amended module evaluation forms) and informal discussions with the observer. however, the author was curious to determine the effects (if any) of the tss on student attainment (the progression ‘distance’ travelled). module coursework was marked by the two tutors who had taught the module and led the subsequent tutorials (one tutor leading the pre-existing arrangements for tutorials, with the other tutor [the author] leading the tss). both tutors were experienced markers. student achievement for the module was collated by the module leader (the author) in an effort to compare levels of attainment between the group who had experienced the tss (group a) and the group who had not (group b). analysis of student achievement highlighted that attainment was higher in the group that had not engaged with the tss (group b). whilst the same number of a and f grades were obtained in both groups, a larger number of b and c grades were achieved by students in the group who had experienced pre-existing arrangements for tutorial support (group b). following this analysis, discussions with colleagues on the programme highlighted the need for further research to be undertaken to investigate the factors which may have influenced the grades attained by the two groups. possible factors relate to the differing demographics of the two groups; these include more male learners in group a as opposed to group b, more mature students in group b as opposed to group a, and lower entry grades onto the programme of students in group a as opposed to group b. by reflecting on the aim(s) and objectives set for the research undertaken, it can be acknowledged that the tss was a successful venture. the system was effective in addressing known issues with tutorial provision: in terms of student participation, 100% of the group (group a, n27) who were offered the tss had travelled the physical distance to actively engage with it. it must be noted, however, that all students were already in attendance at the university due to the peer assessed task they had to complete prior to brownhill distance travelled versus the ‘distance’ travelled journal of learning development in higher education, issue 7: june 2014 15 the tss being made available to them. the system offered a substantial amount of time for students to engage with preparations for their module coursework, offering them a range of activities which both they and tutors felt would be valuable to their studies e.g. looking at previous assignments, time with the teaching tutor and reviewing referencing guidance/advice; this was largely facilitated through the face-to-face tutorials with students. active participation was promoted through the different stations which were on offer, and satisfaction rates were positive in the percentage of students feeling ‘well prepared’ (57%, n9) or ‘very prepared’ (25%, n4) in terms of writing of their assignment following the taught input and the tss (the progression ‘distance’ travelled). there was no evidence of student anxiety in terms of students engaging with the system from the perspective of the author, the observer (at stage two), or the students themselves. whilst favourable comments have been offered by students to use the system in other modules on the programme, and more recently from senior management at the university to whom this research was presented by the observer, it is felt that more research is needed to evaluate the impact of the tss on the grade attainment of students (the progression ‘distance’ travelled), considering ways in which these could be improved as a result of students actively engaging with an amended version of the system. practical strategies for amendment are currently being implemented and reviewed for discussion in a follow-up paper. note efforts to disseminate the findings of the research reported in this paper can be found in the form of an online poster – see http://tinyurl.com/kjeoaya references ashwin, p. (2006) ‘variation in academics’ accounts of tutorials’, studies in higher education, 31(6), pp. 651-665. belawati, t. (2005) ‘the impact of online tutorials on course completion rates and student achievement’, learning, media and technology, 30(1), pp. 15-25. http://tinyurl.com/kjeoaya brownhill distance travelled versus the ‘distance’ travelled journal of learning development in higher education, issue 7: june 2014 16 clough, p. and nutbrown, c. (2011) a student’s guide to methodology: justifying enquiry. 3 rd edn. london: sage. david, m., parry, g., vignoles, a., hayward, g., williams, j, crozier, g., hockings, c. and fuller, a. (2008) widening participation in higher education: a commentary by the teaching and learning research programme, london: teaching and learning research programme. divaharan, s. and atputhasamy, l. (2002) ‘an attempt to enhance the quality of cooperative learning through peer assessment’, journal of educational enquiry, 3(2), pp. 72-82. douglas, j., douglas, a. and barnes, b. (2006) ‘measuring student satisfaction at a uk university’, quality assurance in education, 14(3), pp. 251-267. elavsky, c.m., mislan, c. and elavsky, s. (2011) ‘when talking less is more: exploring outcomes of twitter usage in the large‐lecture hall’, learning, media and technology, 36(3), pp. 215-233. gibbs, g. (2010) dimensions of quality. york: the higher education academy. harris, m. and silva, t. (1993) ‘tutoring esl students: issues and options’, college composition and communication, 44(4), pp. 525-537. herrmann, k.j. (2014) ‘learning from tutorials: a qualitative study of approaches to learning and perceptions of tutorial interaction’, higher education, february, doi: 10.1007/s10734-014-9731-3. hiola, y. and moss, d. (1990) ‘student opinion of tutorial provision in the universitas terbuka of indonesia’, open learning: the journal of open, distance and elearning, 5(2), pp. 34-38. jones, a. (2010) encouraging student participation in tutorials. carlton 3053: the teaching and learning unit, faculty of business and economics, university of melbourne. brownhill distance travelled versus the ‘distance’ travelled journal of learning development in higher education, issue 7: june 2014 17 jones, r. (2008) ‘student retention and success: a synthesis of research’, evidencenet, higher education academy, pp. 1-43 [online]. available at: http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/assets/evidencenet/syntheses/wp_retention_synthesi s_for_pdf_updated_090310.pdf (accessed: 25 may 2014). keddie, j. and trotter, e. (1998) ‘teaching note: promoting participation-breathing new life into the old technology of a traditional tutorial: a teaching note’, accounting education: an international journal, 7(2), pp. 171-181. kottasz, r. (2005) ‘reasons for student non-attendance at lectures and tutorials: an analysis’, investigations in university teaching and learning, 2(2), pp. 5-16. marlina, r. (2009) ‘‘i don’t talk or i decide not to talk? is it my culture?’ – international students’ experiences of tutorial participation’, international journal of educational research, 48(4), pp. 235-244. ng, k. c. (2007) ‘replacing face-to-face tutorials by synchronous online technologies: challenges and pedagogical implications’, the international review of research in open and distance learning, 8(1), february [online]. available at: http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/335/764 (accessed: 25 may 2014). palfreyman, d. (2008) ‘higher education, liberal education, critical-thinking, academic discourse, and the oxford tutorial as sacred cow or pedagogical gem’, in palfreyman, d. (ed.) the oxford tutorial: ‘thanks, you taught me how to think’. oxford: oxcheps, pp.1-37. petress, k. (1998) ‘critical thinking: an extended definition’, education, 124(3), pp. 461466. robinson, s. (2008) ‘using a strategy of ‘structured conversation’ to enhance the quality of tutorial time’, journal of further and higher education, 32(1), pp. 59-69. http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/assets/evidencenet/syntheses/wp_retention_synthesis_for_pdf_updated_090310.pdf http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/assets/evidencenet/syntheses/wp_retention_synthesis_for_pdf_updated_090310.pdf http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/335/764 brownhill distance travelled versus the ‘distance’ travelled journal of learning development in higher education, issue 7: june 2014 18 shaw, l., carey, p. and mair, m. (2008) ‘studying interaction in undergraduate tutorials: results from a small-scale evaluation’, teaching in higher education, 13(6), pp. 703714. startup, r. (1977) ‘staff experience of lectures and tutorials’, studies in higher education, 2(2), pp. 191-201. stevenson, k. and sander, p. (1998) ‘how do open university students expect to be taught at tutorials?’, open learning, 13(2), pp. 42-46. sweeney, j., o'donoghue, t. and whitehead, c. (2004) ‘traditional face-to-face and webbased tutorials: a study of university students' perspectives on the roles of tutorial participants’, teaching in higher education, 9(3), pp. 311-323. takaesu, a., sudo, m. and christianson, m. (2010) ‘‘some tutorials were only scarily’: students' perceptions of teacher-learner conferences within a japanese university elp program’, language research bulletin, 25, icu, tokyo, pp. 1-17 [online]. available at: http://web.icu.ac.jp/lrb/docs/takaesu-sudo-christiansonlrb25l.pdf (accessed: 25 may 2014). tashakkori, a. and teddlie, c. (eds.) (2010) handbook of mixed methods in social and behavioral research. 2 nd edn. thousand oaks, ca: sage. thomas, l. (2011) ‘chapter 2: engaging students to improve retention and success’, in thomas, l. and tight, m. (eds.) institutional transformation to engage a diverse student body. international perspectives on higher education research. volume 6. bingley: emerald, pp. 41-55. unwin, d. (1984) ‘things i do badly: tutorials’, journal of geography in higher education, 8(2), pp. 189-192. webb, g. (1980) ‘student participation in tutorials’, journal of geography in higher education, 4(1), pp. 16-22. yin, r.k. (2003) case study research design and methods. london: sage publications. http://web.icu.ac.jp/lrb/docs/takaesu-sudo-christiansonlrb25l.pdf brownhill distance travelled versus the ‘distance’ travelled journal of learning development in higher education, issue 7: june 2014 19 author details dr simon brownhill is a senior teaching associate in the faculty of education at the university of cambridge, working on the kazakhstan project as part of the international educational development programmes. he was previously a senior lecturer at the university of derby where he taught on a range of undergraduate and postgraduate education-based programmes. his research interests include children’s story writing, creative learning and teaching in the classroom, international perspectives on reflective practice, children’s behaviour management, children’s physical development, and the male role model in the early years (0-8) (the focus of his doctoral thesis). literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 9: july 2015 profiling sports therapy students preferred learning styles within a clinical education context christopher holland university college birmingham, uk claire mills university of gloucestershire, uk abstract the aim of this study was to report the learning style preferences of final year sports therapy students within the context of clinical education, with a further specific focus on differences between male and female learning styles. a total of n = 32 bsc. (hons) sports therapy degree students ( s; age = 21.8 4.8 years, male:female = 14:18) were recruited from the university of gloucestershire whilst completing a 24 week clinical practice module. data collection involved the kolb learning style inventory (version 3.1) being administered to all participants with reference to their clinical practice experience. data analysis, involving mean scores for these learning style orientations, were then used to determine the group preference for abstractness over concreteness (ac-ce) and action over reflection (ae-ro). group analysis revealed a preference for the converging learning style (ac-ce = 5.3, ae-ro = 5.2) and was in contrast to the favoured individual learning styles of accommodator (34%) and diverger (31%). these individual findings are consistent with kolb & kolb’s (2005) belief that individuals involved in human-related professions are person orientated and likely to adopt concrete learning styles. gender comparison revealed a statistically significant difference between the ac-ce scores (p = 0.03), possibly leading to the assumption that male sports therapy students have a predilection for more abstract modes of experiential learning (8.6), whereas females have a slight preference for more concrete means (2.7), suggesting a more balanced learning style. the findings of this study indicate that learning activities could be tailored in order to optimise potential learning within a clinical sports therapy context. keywords: learning styles; kolb; student; undergraduate; sports therapy x holland and mills profiling sports therapy students preferred learning styles within a clinical education context journal of learning development in higher education, issue 9: july 2015 2 introduction the aim of teaching is to facilitate the learning process and to develop students’ competencies within their chosen field through meaningful goal-orientated activity (ramsden, 1992; mosston and ashworth, 2002; rink, 2002). the idea that people learn differently is revered within many educational systems and has its origins in ancient greece (wratcher, et al. 1997; chia, 2011; taylor and walton, 2011). many educators are now occupied with the idea that students have a pre-determined preference for particular sensory inputs, learning conditions and learning strategies (linares, 1999; neuman and bekerman, 2001). these learning styles have been argued to be a key construct in the educational achievement of students (coffield et al., 2004a), and have been further suggested to be mediated by gender (sadler-smith et al., 2000). teachers must therefore be aware and have knowledge of the learning style preferences of their students (anderson and adams, 1992). indeed, nelson et al. (1993) have reported that higher academic results are achieved by students who have been tested on their learning style and provided with an instructional session on how to apply their subsequent strengths and weaknesses. as the emphasis on access, diversity, retention rates and life-long learning continues to increase within higher education establishments, there is an evident benefit to incorporate strategies to reach students based on learning style preference. the critics of learning styles do argue that learning styles are only one of a host of influences on learning and are unlikely to be the most significant (furnham et al., 1999; coffield et al., 2004b). furthermore, due to the number of different learning style dichotomies, there is a lack of accumulated theoretical coherence and an absence of replicated findings which, if not addressed, will continue to produce more disorganised proliferation (coffield et al., 2004b). within the discipline of sports therapy, clinical education is seen as an integral part of the teaching process as it permits the development of competent practitioners who are able to function successfully within this specialty (hobbs et al., 2000). indeed, sanford et al. (1993) argue that this is the most important element of vocational healthcare programmes. within the sports therapy discipline strategies are therefore required that improve students learning during clinical education and ensure that they achieve clinical competency. holland and mills profiling sports therapy students preferred learning styles within a clinical education context journal of learning development in higher education, issue 9: july 2015 3 this study reports the learning style preferences of final year sports therapy students within the context of clinical education, with a further specific focus on differences between male and female learning styles due to the interpretation that learning styles may also be gender specific (brew, 2002). an understanding of this phenomenon will promote a means by which to improve the learning process by allowing teaching to be presented in a way that is most conducive to the students’ needs, as well as highlighting areas where clinical teaching may be adapted. concept of learning styles over the years the concept of learning styles has saturated the personalised learning agenda where an understanding of these styles, can allow teachers to exploits pupils’ strengths and build their capacity to learn (dfes, 2004; hauer et al., 2005). within modern educational institutions the idea that teachers should pay close attention to the learning styles of their students carries a strong intuitive appeal (coffield et al., 2004a). however, the application of this paradigm is often inconsequential as the utilisation of a wide variety of teaching methods is often seen as an effective means by which to support each student’s individual learning preference. although such a method would seem cogent, a teacher who adapts their teaching to satisfy four different learning styles will only accommodate a student’s individual learning style preferences for 25% of the time. assuming that learning is enhanced by this learning style accommodation, the student will actually be disadvantaged for the remaining 75% of the time, inevitably leading to a reduction in knowledge assimilation and comprehension, as well as learning and assessment performance (torrance and rockenstein, 1998). studies in learning styles originally developed as a consequence of interest in the relationship between individuals and their ways of learning. this attention has seen a vast amount of research conducted on all aspects of learning styles, with a large proportion referring to the higher education setting (baykan and nacar, 2007; d’amoreet al., 2012; milanese et al., 2013). however, a host of empirical and conceptual problems appear to arise once the apparently unproblematic and straightforward appeal of learning styles is analysed. such problems include conflicting assumptions regarding learning and the division of the learning styles field among theorists (coffield et al., 2004b). holland and mills profiling sports therapy students preferred learning styles within a clinical education context journal of learning development in higher education, issue 9: july 2015 4 to understand how individuals learn, a number of learning theories have been proposed. these theories can be characterised into three domains based upon their principal theoretical framework (hung, 2001). behaviourist theory focuses on the aspects of learning that are observable and is based upon stimulus-response theories, whilst cognitive theories place emphasis upon brain-based representational learning. the view that learning is a process by which learners actively construct new ideas and concepts forms the basis for the constructivist theory (brandon and all, 2010), which forms the basis for experiential learning theory (elt). herein, learning is seen as a recursive cycle in which knowledge is created through the combination of grasping and transforming experience (kolb, 1984). the foundation for kolb’s learning styles model and the development of the learning styles inventory (lsi) is made possible by this combination of experience, cognition, perception and behaviour (kolb, 1984; 1985). moreover, kolb’s lsi was created to serve both as an educational tool to increase an individual’s understanding of the learning process and their unique approach to learning and to provide a research tool for investigating experiential learning theory (kolb and kolb, 2005). success of this model can be gauged by the fact that in 2000, a bibliography of research was produced that documented over 1000 studies incorporating the lsi and associated theory (mainemelis et al., 2002). however the experimental research base for the initial model was small and, as such, there are critics who maintain that the model is too narrow and underdeveloped (heron, 1992; reijo, 2000). the kolb lsi is a self-reported questionnaire that was developed from kolb’s cyclical learning process model and comprises four learning modes: concrete experience (ce); abstract conceptualisation (ac); reflective observation (ro) and active experimentation (ae) (walklin, 2002). within the 12-point questionnaire, questions follow a forced choice rank-order structure, where respondents are asked to rank four sentence endings in a way that best describes their learning styles. scores are then summed across statements to derive a total for each of the four modes of learning (highhouse and doverspoke, 1987). by crossing the perception continua (ce and ac) with the processing continua (ae and ro), four types of learning are identified: divergers (ce and ro); assimilators (ac and ro); convergers (ac and ae) and accommodators (ce and ae) as shown in figure 1 (jonassen and grabowski, 1993). the relative emphasis placed on these learning style orientations is the focus of the lsi measurement (kolb, 1985). holland and mills profiling sports therapy students preferred learning styles within a clinical education context journal of learning development in higher education, issue 9: july 2015 5 figure 1. kolb’s learning styles (adapted from kayes et al., 2005). kolb claims that learning styles have a significant role in at least five main areas: behaviour/personality; educational specialisation; professional career; current job and adaptive competencies. the idea that educational experiences shape learning styles is argued by kolb (1984) and, as such, it should not be surprising to find correlations between learning styles and educational specialisation (kolb and kolb, 2005). indeed kolb (1984) asserts that people choose fields that are consistent with their learning styles and are further shaped to fit the learning norms of their field once they are in it. within the sports therapy discipline, clinical education is heavily influenced by experiential processes as it requires students to construct and assimilate theoretical and practical knowledge through clinical practice experience. as such, it could be expected that an overarching learning characteristic would be present among sports therapy students. however, the concept of learning styles is not a fixed personality trait and students’ learning style preferences may change substantially as they mature from adolescence into adulthood (coffield et al., 2004b). this assertion leads to the argument as to whether a rigid assessment tool such as the lsi can be used to measure a dynamic personality state. in answer to this smith et al., (2002) state that the lsi is based on the assumption that learning styles, if not a fixed characteristic, are at least relatively stable over time, whilst garner (2000) advocates that there is a marked tendency, in practice and research, holland and mills profiling sports therapy students preferred learning styles within a clinical education context journal of learning development in higher education, issue 9: july 2015 6 to treat learning style as a fixed personality trait. such advocacy allows learning styles to be measured and studied in order to develop appropriate teaching and learning strategies. empirical investigations into the use of the lsi in evaluating the relationship between learning styles and teaching methods have produced some interesting findings: both mcneal and dwyer (1999) and buch and bartley (2002) found that matching teaching mode to the learner’s individual preference yielded no significant results. indeed buch & bartley (2002) concluded that, regardless of learning style, all learners prefer the traditional face-to-face classroom approach to learning. conversely, previous research by katz (1990) and sein and robey (1991) produced disparate results, with the latter concluding that performance can be enhanced by tailoring instructional methods to accommodate individual learning style preferences. however the legitimacy of katz’s claim needs to be certified, as it did not apply to basic knowledge but instead high order cognitive outcomes, whilst sein and robey (1991) did not utilise a control group or give an indication to the magnitude of the effect. additional studies into the use of learning styles to enhance academic achievement have shown the validity of understanding student learning style preferences. indeed, many studies (nelson et al., 1993; lenehan et al., 1994; rochford, 2006) have reported that students who were provided with instructional sessions regarding how to apply their strengths and weaknesses based on their individual learning style achieved higher academic results and grade point averages than their peers. furthermore sandmire and boyce (2004) found that significant improvement in simulated clinical case exercise performance was elicited when students were mismatched based on learning style. an understanding of the individual learning styles of sports therapy students may therefore improve the development, design and delivery of educational programmes that aid the integration and application of students’ professional knowledge (brown et al., 2009). within the context of clinical education this is of particular importance due to the challenges being faced within the education of health professionals: these include difficulties in attracting appropriate clinical educators; limited availability of clinical education placements and the reduction in government funding for health and education (hobbs et al., 2000). holland and mills profiling sports therapy students preferred learning styles within a clinical education context journal of learning development in higher education, issue 9: july 2015 7 methods participants and recruitment a total of 32 final year bsc. (hons) sports therapy degree students ( s; age = 21.8 4.8 years, male:female = 14:18) were recruited from the sports therapy clinical practice module that involved students completing 24 weeks of practice within a clinical environment. the sample represented 97% of the total final year sports therapy cohort (32/33) and the male to female ratio for this cohort was split 14:18 (44%:56%) respectively. sampling included participants who were all over 18 years of age and who agreed to act as participants for the study by giving their written informed consent. before commencement of the study all participants were given an information sheet that detailed the aims of the study and the procedures involved, including competence, voluntarism, full information and comprehension (cohen et al., 2007). they were also aware of their right to withdraw at any time and that their data would be kept confidential and anonymous. all data was collected and stored in compliance with the data protection act (1998). data collection procedures the kolb learning style inventory was administered (version 3.1) to all participants. all participants were asked to complete the learning style inventory with reference to their clinical practice experience. the learning style inventory was completed without the researcher present to minimise researcher bias (oppenheim, 2000). data analysis summary results, including mean and standard deviations (sd), were calculated for each of the four learning style orientations (i.e. ac; ce; ae; ro) using microsoft office excel (version 2010). mean scores for these orientations were then used to determine the group preference for abstractness over concreteness (ac-ce) and action over reflection (aero). independent samples t-tests using an alpha level of 0.05 were conducted with respect to group learning style preferences and gender differences for the perception and processing continua using microsoft office excel (version 2010). x holland and mills profiling sports therapy students preferred learning styles within a clinical education context journal of learning development in higher education, issue 9: july 2015 8 results a total of 32 students (mean age 21.8 years, range 20-47 years, sd 4.8 years) took part in the study, representing 97% of the total final year sports therapy cohort (32/33). the male to female ratio for this cohort was 14:18 (44%:56%). the mean scores and standard deviations for the four learning style orientations upon which the lsi is based are presented in figure 2. figure 2. learning styles inventory scores for the four learning style orientations for n = 32 undergraduate sports therapy students. ce s ro s ac s ae s male (n = 14) 20.1 4.9 33.5 5.9 28.7 7.2 36.3 7.5 female (n = 18) 22.9 4.8 31.5 7.1 25.7 4.8 38.6 4.2 total (n = 32) 21.7 5.0 32.4 6.6 27.0 6.0 37.6 5.9 key: ce: concrete experience; ro: reflective observation; ac: abstract conceptualisation; ae: active experimentation. the group learning style characteristics for the perception and processing continua were calculated from the group mean scores for the relevant learning style orientation (ac-ce and ae-ro) are illustrated in figure 3. a statistical analysis of these orientations revealed a statistically significant difference for ae-ro (p < 0.001) and ac-ce (p < 0.001). the lsi data for each separate participant was also used to identify distinct learning styles and the number of participants within each learning style category. x x x x holland and mills profiling sports therapy students preferred learning styles within a clinical education context journal of learning development in higher education, issue 9: july 2015 9 figure 3. learning styles inventory scores for perception and processing continua and preferred learning styles for n = 32 undergraduate sports therapy students ac-ce ae-ro ass acc con div male (n = 14) 8.6 2.8 7 (50%) 4 (29%) 1 (7%) 2 (14%) female (n = 18) 2.7 7.1 0 (0%) 7 (39%) 3 (17%) 8 (44%) total (n = 32) 5.3 5.2 7 (22%) 11 (34%) 4 (13%) 10 (31%) key: ass: assimilator; acc: accommodator; con: converger; div: diverger. specific data for each gender was also calculated due to the potential influence that gender may have on learning style preferences. a statistical analysis of the genders revealed no significant differences between the genders for ce (p = 0.11), ro (p = 0.42), ac (p = 0.16), ae (p = 0.27), or ae-ro (p = 0.21). however, statistically significance was obtained for gender comparison of the ac-ce scores (p = 0.03). discussion in the present study, the kolb lsi was used to examine the learning style preferences of undergraduate sports therapy students within a clinical education setting. lsi scores revealed that when gaining experience the cohort showed a preference for abstractness (ac-ce = 5.3, range -14 to 19, p < 0.001). when reflecting upon these experiences the students reported a preference for action (ae-ro = 5.2, range -9 to 22, p < 0.001). these findings are in agreement with those obtained in other studies that have focussed upon the learning style preferences of students from various health professions (hauer et al., 2005; brown et al., 2008; zoghi et al., 2010; milanese et al., 2012). an important factor is that none of these studies focussed upon specific areas of health professional education, thereby suggesting that the preference for abstractness and action described within the current cohort may be relevant to other aspects of the sports therapy programme. holland and mills profiling sports therapy students preferred learning styles within a clinical education context journal of learning development in higher education, issue 9: july 2015 10 when perceiving information, sports therapy students are more likely to prefer to first learn from a theoretical perspective as opposed to developing their learning though situational experience, allowing them to contemplate the problem at hand before actually experiencing it (joy and kolb, 2009). however, when transforming this experience into knowledge, results indicated that students preferred to utilise active practice with real clients, as opposed to observing others. a preference for ac and ae learning styles suggests that the sports therapy students within the current cohort have a converging learning style. during clinical education students are required to attend to clients whilst having their performance assessed by a clinical educator. the converging style allows students to provide a focussed answer to a question or problem. indeed these learners are best at finding practical uses for ideas and theories and prefer to experiment with simulations and practical applications that can be found within the clinical environment (kolb and kolb, 2005). however, although the converging learning style can be shown to be the prevailing learning style based upon the group analysis, the learning style preferences for each individual student actually reveals this to be the least preferred style. the reason for this may be due to the wide variation in scores within the data set (see figure 2). when global averages are calculated, these variations may have skewed the results to reveal mean scores that are not representative of the population studied (field, 2009). the favoured individual learning style was actually that of accommodator (34%) and diverger (31%) (figure 3). these findings are in contrast to other studies by hauer et al., (2005), brown et al., (2008) and milanese et al., (2012), involving health professionals, which reflect a low preference for the divergent learning style. however these findings are in accord with a number of studies involving health science students and professionals who have determined that the divergent and accommodator learning styles were the preferred learning style among undergraduate paramedic students (smith, 2010; zoghi et al., 2010; williams et al., 2013). they conclude that divergent individuals prefer to work in groups, listen with an open mind, and receive personalised feedback, whilst accommodators are characterised as hands on learners. this is consistent with kolb and kolb’s (2005) belief that individuals involved in human-related professions are person orientated and likely to adopt concrete learning styles. although statistical analysis of the lsi scores revealed no differences between the genders for the majority of their learning style preferences, the comparison of the ac-ce scores did reveal a statistically significant difference (p = 0.03). the male sports holland and mills profiling sports therapy students preferred learning styles within a clinical education context journal of learning development in higher education, issue 9: july 2015 11 therapists in the group demonstrated a predilection for more abstract styles of experiential learning (8.6), whereas the females had a very slight preference for more concrete means (2.7). this potentially indicates a more balanced learning style for female students within the study cohort. previous research by brew (2002), bowman et al., (2003) and jones et al., (2003) on the learning styles of males and females has identified some substantial differences that are in contrast to the current findings. brew (2002) argued that males displayed a preference for ce over ac, but that this predilection was not as mutually exclusive as that observed for females. however, research by jones et al., (2003) concluded that learning styles are subject area specific, suggesting that there is an interaction between gender and educational choice. as such, findings from the studies by brew (2002) and jones et al., (2003) must be interpreted with care as it is difficult to establish how much of the learning style variance is attributed solely to gender, and how much is a function of educational choice (willcoxson and prosser, 1996; kolb and kolb, 2005). a study by bowman et al., (2003) on a cohort of 212 physical therapy students and professionals reported a preference of the female participants for the assimilator learning style, whilst the males in the group demonstrated a converger learning style. this is in contrast to the existing study, where males exhibited a preference for the assimilator style, whilst females had a relatively even split between the accommodator and diverger styles. these differences may be explained as the previous studies findings were related to general educational learning as opposed to having a specific focus on the clinical education context. conclusions results of this study show that a wide variety of learning styles are evident within the studied cohort. however, there is statistical evidence of a predominance in learning styles that may be exploited through effective teaching and learning strategies. the use of kolb’s theory to ascertain learning style preferences is still open to critique. for example, the process of learning involves individual choice and decision-making, as well as personalised goals, intentions and purposes (rogers, 1996). as such it is unclear where these elements would fit into kolb’s learning cycle. as for the inventory itself, one of its greatest limitations is that the results are based purely on how the learners rate themselves. these learning style preferences are also not measured through standards or behaviour, but merely through an individual’s perception of how they behave. this is a holland and mills profiling sports therapy students preferred learning styles within a clinical education context journal of learning development in higher education, issue 9: july 2015 12 central problem for the lsi in that the ability to accurately measure an individual’s experience of the world may be limited by errors in their own perception. the findings of this study indicate that learning activities could be tailored in order to optimise potential learning. however, this is not to suggest that other styles of learning should be ignored or neglected as results from this study show that it is difficult to prescribe a predominant learning style to final year sports therapy students within a clinical education setting. clinical educators of sports therapy students should therefore attempt to introduce a variety of teaching approaches and strategies in order to enable learning to occur regardless of students learning style preference. providing specific educational sessions designed to teach students how to apply the strengths and weaknesses of their preferred learning style has been shown to augment academic achievement (nelson et al., 1993). this may be a key method by which to enhance learning but does require more research into the effects within a clinical education environment. references anderson, j.a. and adams, m. (1992) ‘acknowledging the learning styles of diverse student populations: implications for instructional design’, in border, l.l. and van note chism, n. (eds.) new directions for teaching and learning. san francisco: jossey-bass publishers inc., pp. 19-33. baykan, z. and nacar, m. (2007) ‘learning styles of first-year medical students attending erciyes university in kayseri, turkey’, advances in physiology education, 31(2), pp. 158-160. bowman, k., delargy, k., deshong, l., kutcher, r. and roush, s. (2003) ‘learning styles of physical therapy students and clinicians’, physical therapy, 80(5), (s7). brandon, a.f. & all, a.c. (2010) ‘constructivism theory analysis and application to curricula’, nursing education perspectives, 31(2), pp. 89-92. holland and mills profiling sports therapy students preferred learning styles within a clinical education context journal of learning development in higher education, issue 9: july 2015 13 brew, c.r. (2002) ‘kolb’s learning style instrument: sensitive to gender’, educational and psychological measurement, 62(2), pp. 373-390. brown, t., cosgriff, t. & french, g. (2008) ‘learning style preferences of occupational therapy, physiotherapy and speech pathology students: a comparative study’ the internet journal of allied health sciences and practice, 6(3), pp.1-12 [online]. avaialbel at: http://ijahsp.nova.edu/articles/vol6num3/pdf/brown.pdf (accessed 13 july 2015). brown, t., zoghi, m., williams, b., jaberzadeh, s., roller, l., palermo, c., mckenna, l., wright, c., baird, m., schneider-kolsky, m., hewitt, l., sim j. and holt t.a., (2009). are learning preferences of health science students predictive of their attitudes towards e-learning? australian journal of educational technology, 25(4), pp.524543 [online]. available at: http://ascilite.org.au/ajet/submission/index.php/ajet/article/view/1127/380 (accessed 13 july 2015). buch, k. & bartley, s. (2002) ‘learning style and training delivery mode preference’, journal of workplace learning, 14(1), pp. 5-10. chia, n.k.h. (2011) ‘a brief theoretical examination of the developmental process of continuous learning and teaching: from antegogy to gerontogogy’, international journal of theoretical educational practice, 1, pp. 30-43. coffield, f.j. moseley, d.v. hall, e. & ecclestone, k. (2004a) learning styles for post 16 learners: what do we know? london: learning and skills research centre, university of newcastle upon tyne. coffield, f.j. moseley, d.v. hall, e. & ecclestone, k. (2004b) learning styles and pedagogy in post 16 learning: a systematic and critical review, learning and skills research centre. london: cromwell press ltd. available at: http://sxills.nl/lerenlerennu/bronnen/learning%20styles%20by%20coffield%20e.a..p df (accessed 13 july 2015). http://ijahsp.nova.edu/articles/vol6num3/pdf/brown.pdf http://ascilite.org.au/ajet/submission/index.php/ajet/article/view/1127/380 http://sxills.nl/lerenlerennu/bronnen/learning%20styles%20by%20coffield%20e.a..pdf http://sxills.nl/lerenlerennu/bronnen/learning%20styles%20by%20coffield%20e.a..pdf holland and mills profiling sports therapy students preferred learning styles within a clinical education context journal of learning development in higher education, issue 9: july 2015 14 cohen, l., manion, l. & morrison, k. (2007). research methods in education. abingdon, oxon: routledge. d’amore, a., james, s. & mitchell, e.k.l. (2012) ‘learning styles of first-year undergraduate nursing and midwifery students: a cross-sectional survey utilising the kolb learning style inventory’, nurse education today, 32(5), pp. 506-515. department for education and skills (dfes) (2004) pedagogy and practice: teaching and learning in secondary schools. unit 19: learning styles. available at: http://learning.gov.wales/docs/learningwales/publications/130423-pedagogy-andpractice-teaching-and-learning-in-secondary-schools-en.pdf (accessed: 29 july 2015). field, a. (2009) discovering statistics using spss. 3 rd ed. london, uk: sage publications ltd. furnham, a., jackson, c.j. and miller, t. (1999) ‘personality, learning style and work performance’, personality and individual differences, 27(6), pp. 1113-1122. garner, i. (2000) ‘problems and inconsistencies with kolb’s learning styles’, educational psychology: an international journal of experimental educational psychology 20(3), pp. 341-348. hauer, p., straub, c. and wolf, s. (2005) ‘learning styles of allied health students using kolb’s lsi-iia’, journal of allied health, 34(3), pp.177-182. heron, j. (1992) feeling and personhood: psychology in another key. london: sage publications ltd. highhouse, s. and doverspoke, d. (1987) ‘the validity of the learning style inventory (1985) as a predictor of cognitive style and occupational preference’, educational and psychological measurement, 47(3), pp. 749-753. http://learning.gov.wales/docs/learningwales/publications/130423-pedagogy-and-practice-teaching-and-learning-in-secondary-schools-en.pdf http://learning.gov.wales/docs/learningwales/publications/130423-pedagogy-and-practice-teaching-and-learning-in-secondary-schools-en.pdf holland and mills profiling sports therapy students preferred learning styles within a clinical education context journal of learning development in higher education, issue 9: july 2015 15 hobbs, c., henley, e., higgs, j. & williams, v. (2000) ‘clinical education program strategies for challenging times’, focus on health professional education: a multidisciplinary journal, 2(2), pp. 1-17. hung, d. (2001) theories of learning and computer-mediated instructional technologies. education media international, 38(4), pp. 281-287. jonassen, d.h. and grabowski, b.l. (1993) handbook of individual difference, learning and instruction. hillsdale, nj: lawrence erlbaum associates inc. jones, c., reichard, c. and mokhtari, k. (2003) ‘are students’ learning styles discipline specific?’, community college journal of research and practice, 27(5), pp. 363375. joy, s. and kolb, d.a. (2009) ‘are there cultural differences in learning style?’, international journal of intercultural relations, 33(1), pp. 69-85. katz, n. (1990) ‘problem solving and time: functions of learning style and teaching methods’, the occupational therapy journal of research (otjr), 10(4), pp. 221236. kayes, a.b., kayes, d.c. and kolb, d.a. (2005) ‘experiential learning in teams’, simulation and gaming, 36(3), pp. 330-354. kolb, d.a. (1984) experiential learning: experience as the source of learning and development. new jersey: prentice-hall. kolb, d.a. (1985) learning style inventory, (revised edition). boston, ma: hay group. kolb, a.y. & kolb, d.a. (2005). the kolb learning style inventory – version 3.1: 2005 technical specifications. boston, ma: hay group. holland and mills profiling sports therapy students preferred learning styles within a clinical education context journal of learning development in higher education, issue 9: july 2015 16 lenehan, m.c., dunn, r., ingham, j., murray, w. & signer, b. (1994) ‘learning styles: necessary know-how for academic success in college’, journal of college student development, 35, pp. 461-466. linares, a.z. (1999) ‘learning styles of students and faculty in selected health care professions’, journal of nursing education, 38(9), pp. 407-414. mainemelis, c., boyatzis, r.e. and kolb, d,a. (2002) ‘learning styles and adaptive flexibility: testing experiential learning theory’, management learning, 33(1), pp. 533. mcneal, g.h. & dwyer, f. (1999) ‘effect of learning style on consistent and inconsistently designed instruction’, international journal of instructional media, 26(3), pp.337345. milanese, s., gordon, s. and pellatt, a. (2012) ‘profiling physiotherapy student preferred learning styles within a clinical education context’, physiotherapy, 99(2), pp. 146152. mosston, m. and ashworth, s. (2002) teaching physical education. 5 th ed. san francisco, ca: benjamin cummings. nelson, b., dunn, r., griggs, s.a., primavera, l., fitzpatrick, m., bacilious, z. & miller, r. (1993). effects of learning style intervention on college students’ retention and achievement. journal of college student development, 34(5), pp. 364-369. neuman, y. and bekerman, z. (2001) ‘cultural resources and the gap between educational theory and practice’, teachers college record, 103(3), pp. 471-484. oppenheim, a.n. (2000) questionnaire design, interviewing and attitude measurement, 2 nd edition. aylesbury: continuum. ramsden, p. (1992) learning to teach in higher education. london: routledge. holland and mills profiling sports therapy students preferred learning styles within a clinical education context journal of learning development in higher education, issue 9: july 2015 17 reijo, m. (2000) ‘the concept of experiential learning and john dewey’s theory of reflective thought and action’, international journal of lifelong education, 19(1), pp. 54-72. rink, j.e. (2002) teaching physical education for learning, 4 th ed. boston: mcgraw hill. rochford, r.a. (2006) ‘enhancing standardized assessment scores and academic performance through learning styles’, journal of applied research in the community college-jarcc, 14(1), pp. 29-38. rogers, a. (1996) teaching adults. 2nd edn. buckingham: open university press. sadler-smith, e., allinson, c.w. & hayes, j. (2000) ‘learning preferences and cognitive style: some implications for continuing professional development’. management learning, 31(2), pp. 239-256. sandmire, d.a. & boyce, p.f. (2004) ‘pairing of opposite learning styles among allied health students’, journal of allied health, 33(2), pp.156-163. sanford, j., stratford, p. and solomon, p. (1993) ‘clinical evaluation: physiotherapists’ ranking of competencies’, medical teacher, 15(4), pp. 369-377. sein, m.k. and robey, d. (1991), ‘learning style and the efficacy of computer training methods’, perceptual and motor skills, 72(1), pp. 243-248. smith, a. (2010) ‘learning styles of registered nurses enrolled in an online nursing program’, journal of professional nursing, 26(1), pp. 49-53. smith, w., sekar, s. and townsend, k. (2002) ‘the impact of surface and reflective teaching and learning on student academic success’, in valcke, m. and gombeir, d. (eds.) learning styles: reliability and validity. proceedings of the 7th annual european learning styles information network conference. university of ghent, ghent 26-28 june. ghent: university of ghent. pp. 407-418. holland and mills profiling sports therapy students preferred learning styles within a clinical education context journal of learning development in higher education, issue 9: july 2015 18 taylor, v.j. and walton, g.m. (2011) ‘stereotype threat undermines academic learning’, personal and social psychology bulletin, 37(8), pp. 1055-1067. torrance, e.p. and rockenstein, z.l. (1988) ‘styles of thinking and creativity’, in schmeck, r.r. (ed.) learning strategies and learning styles. new york: plenum press, pp. 275-290. walklin, l. (2002) teaching and learning in further and adult education. london: nelson thornes. willcoxson, l. and prosser, m.t. (1996) ‘kolb’s learning style inventory (1985): review and further study of validity and reliability’, the british journal of educational psychology, 66(2), pp. 247-257. williams, b., brown, t. and winship, c. (2013) ‘learning style preferences of undergraduate paramedic students: a pilot study’, journal of nursing education and practice, 3(1), pp. 51-59. wratcher, m.a., morrison, e.e., riley, v.l. & scheirton, l.s. (1997) curriculum and program planning: a study guide for the core seminar. programs for higher education, nova southeastern university. fort lauderdale, fl: nova southeastern university. zoghi, m., brown, t., williams, b., roller, l., jaberzadeh, s., palermo, c., mckenna, l., wright, c., baird, m., schneider-kolsky, m., hewitt, l., sim, j. and holt, t.a. (2010) ‘learning style preferences of australian health science students’, journal of allied health, 39(2), pp. 95-103. author details christopher holland is a lecturer of sports therapy and lectures at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels. he is a fellow of the higher education academy and currently a doctoral candidate. christopher’s research interests include mobilisation techniques and injury rehabilitation. holland and mills profiling sports therapy students preferred learning styles within a clinical education context journal of learning development in higher education, issue 9: july 2015 19 claire mills is a senior lecturer of sports education and coaching and lectures at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels and is a fellow of the higher education academy. her research interests include body composition and childhood obesity issues. journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 10: october 2016 psychogeography and its relevance to inclusive teaching and learning development: why it matters where students choose to sit richard reynolds central saint martins, uk abstract this paper is based on my own experiences of classroom psychogeography, as experienced through working with a group of around 50 masters students at central saint martins over a period of more than ten years. much has been written and published about the design of learning spaces, as well as the dynamics of group work, but relatively little has been published about the psychogeography of learning, especially at the higher education level. space is never neutral. it separates or it includes. it can be used to reinforce or challenge power-based relationships. students express their feelings about learning by their mode of occupation of learning spaces, but these choices can also influence peer dynamics and students’ subsequent levels of engagement. i began my research as a passive observer, by noticing how certain student interactions tended to take place in certain parts of a classroom, irrespective of the individuals involved. i subsequently devised various interventions in classroom psychogeography, designed to facilitate the most effective mixing of students in group work. the outcomes of these interventions were recorded through questionnaires given to my students after participating in various classroom interventions, as well as through granular evidence, assembled through both formal and informal interviews. my conclusions reflect on my attempts to intervene in the spatial dynamics of learning, in order to facilitate a more inclusive psychogeography. keywords: inclusivity; psycho-geography; peer learning relationships; group learning; learning spaces. reynolds psychogeography and its relevance to inclusive teaching and learning development journal of learning development in higher education, issue 10: october 2016 3 introduction group learning within a multidisciplinary ma course since 2001, i have been working once a week with a cohort of 50-plus postgraduate students on a multi-disciplinary masters, which attracts a very diverse and international student cohort. the course makes widespread use of group and peer learning methods, processes which can challenge the preconceptions students may have about what constitutes learning. facilitating such group learning over a number of years has led me to consider ways in which the occupation of space – either by the entire cohort when working as individuals, or by teams undertaking group work – impacts on the quality of the student experience, and thus on student learning. if the psychogeography of learning spaces has the potential to impact, in a positive or negative way, on the student experience, then its study has a key role to play in learning and teaching development. over a period of years, i observed that groups of students with certain characteristics in common tended to occupy particular geographical areas of a studio or lecture room. even when the entire cohort moved to a different teaching space, the same overall pattern or classroom psychogeography tended to reappear. it seemed to be the case that students with similar attitudes to their studies and to the pedagogy of the course would tend to sit together and, if asked to form groups, then the groups they formed would share these characteristics. a great deal of recent research exists concerning the facilitation of group learning, such as jaques (2006), lakey (2010) and michaelsen et al. (2008). there has also been much valuable recent work on peer-assisted learning, including byl et al. (2015), gurbutt and gurbutt (2015), and pritchard (2015). however, less has been published about the processes of peer group formation, and the relationship between the groups themselves and the physical environment of the learning space. specifically, this area of research asks: are characteristic attitudes and approaches to learning influenced by, as well as expressed by, the seating positions that students elect to occupy? if such a relationship exists, then by repeatedly occupying specific parts of the room, students will inevitably congregate with other students who share similar attitudes to learning and so those attitudes, over time, will be strengthened and reinforced. these shared attitudes to learning are particularly noticeable in group work, as they surface through student interactions. reynolds psychogeography and its relevance to inclusive teaching and learning development journal of learning development in higher education, issue 10: october 2016 4 classroom psychogeography psychogeography is the study of how geography affects human emotions. psychogeographers, from thomas de quincey, to the surrealists, situationists and into the current era – have focused their activities chiefly on walking and otherwise exploring outdoor urban environments. meanwhile, the practice of indoor or interior psychogeography has remained relatively underdeveloped. however, observing and working with successive student cohorts, in a variety of spaces, over a period of years, has led me to develop a theory about the ways in which students express their attitudes to learning through their choice of seating positions. furthermore, i posit in this paper that there exist an ‘axis of attention’ and an ‘axis of engagement’ for students occupying any roughly rectangular lecture space:  the ‘axis of attention’ runs from the front of the room to the back, and expresses the degree to which any student feels personally involved in the content of a lecture, seminar or group presentation. in a conventionally-structured lecture or seminar, authority and information are expected to flow from the front of the room, where the lecturer is normally positioned. the more involved that a student feels themselves to be, then the closer that student will tend to sit to the front – a tendency which wulf (1976), holliman and anderson (1986), pedersen (1994), race (2001), benedict and hoag (2004), horne martin (2004) and kalinowski and taper (2007) have all evidenced.  in addition i propose there exists an ‘axis of engagement’ which runs from side-toside in any learning space. its orientation in any given room appears to be governed by the side on which the door is located, in that students who feel fully engaged with the lecturer’s pedagogy or methodology of a course tend to sit on the side closer to the door, while students who are (relatively speaking) more ready to challenge that pedagogy or methodology will cross the room and sit on the opposite side. this interpretation of students’ choice of seating is based on the idea that deliberately positioning oneself at the front and opposite the door involves entering the lecturer’s space, the perceived locus of power, at the front of the class. this, i would argue, is a more challenging gesture than meekly sitting down on the same side of the room on which you entered. reynolds psychogeography and its relevance to inclusive teaching and learning development journal of learning development in higher education, issue 10: october 2016 5 i wanted to see if these intuitive conclusions could be supported by objective evidence, and, more importantly, whether i could implement learning and teaching strategies which could counterbalance the effects which this embedded psychogeography might have on student learning. i also wanted to find ways of moving beyond existing strategies and to further improve the learning experience of all the students in my class. studies of psychogeography in higher education an extensive literature already exists, particularly in the usa, which examines the question of classroom dynamics at primary or grade school level. studies undertaken specifically with students at university level are, however, less numerous. there appears to be a tacit assumption that classroom dynamics cease to be of major importance once students reach their teenage years. race (2001) is an exception. his exposition on group dynamics and his evaluation of the various ways in which buzz groups can be formed shows an awareness of the factors in play when allowing groups to form geographically: simply putting students into groups according to clusters as they are already sitting… is one of the easiest and quickest ways of dividing a class into groups… [however] it is not unusual for the students nearest the tutor to be rather higher in motivation than those in the most remote corner of the room! (race, 2001, p.145). student motivation has been extensively studied in relation to the front-to-back axis, and there have been several studies based around the relative grades achieved by students who sit at the front of lecture rooms versus those who habitually sit at the back. it has been established by wulf (1976), holliman and anderson (1986), pedersen (1994), benedict and hoag (2004) and gossard et al. (2006), as well as others, that students who choose to sit at the front of the class will tend to achieve better grades. wulf (1976) suggests the existence of an ‘action zone’ at the front and middle of the classroom, and reports that participation in her classes was highest at the front on the right-hand side (but without specifying where the door of the classroom was situated). pedersen (1994) summarizes his findings as follows: the relationship between privacy preferences and the location of selected seats in a classroom was investigated. subjects were 17 men and 34 women in an undergraduate psychology class. the location of the seat selected in a rectangular classroom was described according to depth: front, middle, and back. privacy reynolds psychogeography and its relevance to inclusive teaching and learning development journal of learning development in higher education, issue 10: october 2016 6 preferences were measured using marshalls (1974) privacy preference scale. those who opted to sit in the back were significantly higher on the not neighboring and seclusion scales. (pedersen, 1994, p.393) pedersen’s conclusions have a clear resonance for any lecturer supervising students in group work who might be tempted to allow groups to form through the existing geographical distribution of students in the classroom. groups which are permitted to form in this way are likely to have measurable differences, with regard to the front to the back of the room, in aspects of student engagement (‘not neighboring’ and ‘seclusion’) which, in turn may have a significant impact on a learning group’s ability to function. both wulf (1976) and holliman and anderson (1986) had previously demonstrated that there is a measurable correlation between student seating preference and student grades: a study of the relationship between student grades and: (a) proximity (distance from the student to the instructor), (b) centrality (seating in the center of the room compared to seating toward the sides), (c) student density (presence of other students to the front, sides, and back of the student), and (d) aisle seating is reported. … students who occupied the front rows received higher grades than those who sat farther back. centrality, student density, and aisle seating were not related to grades. although these findings cannot be generalized freely, they indicate the value of studying ecological factors in classrooms. (holliman and anderson, 1986, p. 200) on a typical university course, little or nothing is done to mitigate the impact of these factors. the question of classroom psychogeography usually passes ‘under the radar’, as horne martin (2004) points out: observation in classrooms identified predicting patterns of participation in class activities from seating arrangements, patterns of which teachers were not aware. (horne martin, 2004, p.79) seifert and sutton (2007) draw particular attention to the persistent social and physical patterns that underlie almost all classroom interactions: many class activities take on communication patterns that class members learn to expect without even being reminded. each pattern is a participation structure, a set reynolds psychogeography and its relevance to inclusive teaching and learning development journal of learning development in higher education, issue 10: october 2016 7 of taken-for-granted rights and responsibilities expected from students and teacher during an activity…. a lecture, for example, has a particular participation structure: students are responsible for listening, for raising a hand to speak, and for keeping comments brief and relevant if called on…. in principle, a host of participation structures are possible, but just a handful account for most class activities. (seifert and sutton, 2007, ch.12, p.1) seifert and sutton’s identification of the ubiquity of student expectations when engaged in any specific learning activity is pertinent. clearly, teachers should be aware of the need to signal a phase change in the expected mode of student engagement, and not simply assume (especially when dealing with students from diverse cultural backgrounds) that individuals will be capable of instantly moving from one participation structure (‘lecture mode’) to another (‘group work mode’). any difficulty experienced in moving from one participation structure to another might be compounded by students remaining in the same geographical part of the room, with the same peers surrounding them. in such a situation, it will not necessarily be clear to the student that the participation structure, which they are expected to recognise and engage with, has just been changed. wulf (1976), and subsequently benedict and hoag (2004), determined that students who were directed to sit at the front of the classroom instead of their habitual position at the back would tend to start achieving higher grades. if it is possible to enhance an individual student’s grades by the expedient of moving them to a different part of the classroom, then by analogy it should be possible to enhance the experience of students involved in group work, either by moving entire groups to different parts of the room, or by ensuring that the individual members of a group do not all come from the same habitual seating positions. in other words, the dynamics of classroom seating can be modified in relatively simple ways that are capable of having a significant impact on student learning and – presumably – the overall quality of the student experience. the research strategy my initial research was carried out in 2011, with some of the interventions being repeated in 2015-16. the research was planned as a three-stage process. during stage one, i asked students to complete two surveys, designed to capture their feelings about their reynolds psychogeography and its relevance to inclusive teaching and learning development journal of learning development in higher education, issue 10: october 2016 8 seating choices in a statistical form. the aim was to discover if there were specific correlations between a student’s seating position, and their attitude towards the pedagogy of the course. during stage two, i introduced a series of randomised methods of group formation and seating arrangements. these approaches were designed to mitigate the effects of students choosing buzz groups and teams influenced by habitual geographical seating choices. during this phase i talked informally to students about their reactions to the various methods of forming groups. some of these conversations were, with the students’ permission, recorded. during the third stage of my research, i introduced several new interventions into seating and group formation, including a reversion to a purely geographical group-formation method, a complete front-to-back and left-right reversal of the normal seating plan of the room, and a method of group formation based on a partly random and partly self-selecting approach. student responses to these interventions were recorded via two more student surveys, plus a further series of interviews, which were all recorded on video. at all times i was transparent with the students regarding what i was attempting to do, and why i was doing it. the students repaid me with a high level of co-operation at every phase of the research. i had no concerns about the students trying to ‘second guess’ what i was doing, as i believed that participation in the research created a heightened awareness of the dynamics of the learning process which could only have a beneficial effect on the students’ overall feelings of inclusion and motivation, and therefore the quality of their learning experience. the group learning assignments that the students were engaged in during the research do not receive any individual summative assessment, as the unit in question is graded holistically. therefore, the focus was on improving the students’ individual experience of the learning process, rather than any evaluation though the grades they achieved. the survey results the first survey was designed to test if there were any genuine differences in attitude to the course pedagogy between students who occupied different parts of the room. the survey was carried out at a time when there was no group work in progress, so there were no formal restraints on the students’ choice of seating position. the survey contained three questions. reynolds psychogeography and its relevance to inclusive teaching and learning development journal of learning development in higher education, issue 10: october 2016 9 question one asked students to gauge the degree to which they felt that they understood the learning and teaching strategies of the course. question two asked them to gauge how valuable they expected the course to be. question three asked them to identify where they were sitting, relative to the front of the room and the door. i received a total of 45 responses to the survey and, after tabulating the results, it became clear that there were indeed patterns of engagement and involvement to be discerned. table 1. results of the first survey. seating position front near door front opp. door middle back near door back opp. door q.1: l already fully understand and accept the learning and teaching strategies of this course. 20% 25% 25% 22% 37.5% q.1: in due course i will come to fully understand this course. 60% 75% 75% 66% 25% q.1: i am uncertain if i will ever fully understand this course. 20% nil nil 11% 37.5% q.2: i expect to gain valuable insights by taking this course. 80% 58% 75% 44% 75% q.2: i hope to gain valuable insights by taking this course. 20% 42% 25% 44% 12.5% q.3: i am at present uncertain whether or not i will gain valuable insights by taking this course nil nil nil 11% 12.5% total students responding 10 12 8 9 8 when answering question one, 75% of students who described their seating position as being at the front opposite the door, chose option no.2 (‘i believe that in due course i will come to fully understand and accept the learning and teaching strategies of this course’) as their preferred response. sixty percent of the students sitting ‘front nearest the door’ chose this option, but only 25% of the students sitting ‘back opposite the door’ chose this. none of the students sitting at the front opposite the door selected response no.3 (‘i am at reynolds psychogeography and its relevance to inclusive teaching and learning development journal of learning development in higher education, issue 10: october 2016 10 present uncertain as to whether i will ever fully understand or accept the learning and teaching strategies of this course’) while 37.5% of the eight students sitting at the back opposite the door selected this option. the highest number of students choosing response two to question two (‘i hope to gain valuable insights and make creative discoveries by taking this course’) were sitting at the front opposite the door – 42% chose this option. in other words, students sitting at the front and opposite the door were less confident of gaining valuable insights than students who sat at the front and near the door, 80% of whom expected to gain valuable insights through taking the course. these results, while based on a relatively small number of students, tend to support the empirical observation that students who sit at the front are more highly motivated. furthermore, students who sit at the front opposite the door appear to be more ready to deconstruct and even challenge the pedagogic basis of their learning – perhaps because they are the most highly motivated and independent-thinking in the classroom. a second survey was designed to investigate how students themselves understood (or rationalised) their choice of seating position. students were asked to tick as many of the reasons supplied for their seating choice as they believed applied to them. they were also asked to supply any additional reasons for their choice of position that did not appear in the survey. there were 12 possible responses, divisible into nine responses dealing with issues of physical, emotional or social comfort, and three dealing with issues of academic attention and involvement. table 2. results of the second survey. seating position front near door front opposite door middle near door middle opposite door back near door back opposite door comfortrelated responses 13 6 10 8 14 2 studyrelated responses 9 9 8 3 8 2 reynolds psychogeography and its relevance to inclusive teaching and learning development journal of learning development in higher education, issue 10: october 2016 11 total in student group 7 6 7 6 8 7 (but only three responses received!) the most interesting difference in these results emerged between the group sitting at the front opposite the door, and all the other groups. the group sitting at the front opposite the door were the only group to rate academic concerns above personal comfort in their choice of seating position. granular research i subsequently recorded a series of video interviews with students, individually and in groups, all held immediately after a group had been asked to form. the student groups were formed using various methods of selection. the first set of interviews took place after students had been asked to form ‘randomly assigned’ groups, that is the group members were chosen by algorithm, without reference to seating patterns. the students were asked to locate the other members of their group, and then to find a place in the studio for the group to gather and begin their group assignment. during this series of interviews, i sensed that many of the students were reluctant to think deeply about the reasons why they preferred to occupy certain parts of the studio. most of their comments were descriptive, rather than analytical: both of us were together and were part of the group. they sit next to each other anyway. [this was] the only place left over. (interviews 25 may 2011) there was no discernable pattern in the answers given by groups occupying different parts of the studio. only one student was prepared to dig a little deeper at this stage, but he also regarded the group choice of seating position as being essentially random: reynolds psychogeography and its relevance to inclusive teaching and learning development journal of learning development in higher education, issue 10: october 2016 12 when one of us identifies another person in the group, the first place where two of them get together, then all of the others go to that place. (interviews 25 may 2011) after this round of interviews, i introduced a new experiment: the normal seating positions, and the front-to-back axis of the room, were reversed. i conducted the seminar from the opposite end of the room to normal. some students, returning after a break and seeing the new seating layout, elected to remain in the same geographical part of the studio, while some tried to find an equivalent position in relation to the lecturer to that which they had formerly occupied. once the students were established in their new positions, they were asked to split into a new set of randomly-generated groups for a team assignment. i conducted interviews both during this process and after the new teams were established. the comments from some of the students in these interviews show that the students acknowledged the role that strong or dominant individuals play in determining which part of the studio a group would sit in. you always follow the leader... we have a hierarchy. you gravitate around a dominant personality, probably because that person holds their ground, and expects people to come to them. (interviews 1 june 2011) one clear outcome of the reversed seating position was that once the students had formed themselves into groups, no groups chose to occupy what is normally the front of the studio. my inference is that the students who normally occupy the front space, and around whom groups tend to form, had gravitated to the new front, so there were no dominant individuals to ‘seed’ groups in what had now become the back of the studio. one week later, i repeated the group-formation process, but without the reversal of the normal seating positions. the interviews produced similar responses: certain people come first, and the rest follow... alpha males. alpha male [is] a metaphor for this leading person. (interviews 8 june 2011). a second intervention on the same day invited students to form buzz groups on a purely geographical basis, forming groups with whoever happened to be sitting near them. this produced a situation that i had encountered before, namely that the students near the back formed a giant-sized group, containing about 15 individuals, instead of the five or six reynolds psychogeography and its relevance to inclusive teaching and learning development journal of learning development in higher education, issue 10: october 2016 13 that had been suggested. once this super-group had been split into three, i carried out interviews with all the geographically formed groups. these interviews revealed a dramatic split between students who felt more comfortable in geographically formed groups, and those students who could see the limitations of this approach: comfortable. very comfortable. quite welcoming. perhaps we’re a little bit too comfortable. in this case we all know each other... it’s harder to concentrate. if you did it that way every week, you’d always have the same people together so maybe you wouldn’t have as [many] valued contacts. the good thing… is that you have people you like, but the bad thing is that you always end up with them, so it’s not going to change you. (interviews 8 june 2011) when asked whether the geographically formed groups were more or less sympathetic to their views than random groups, 22 students responded that the geographically formed groups were more sympathetic, and only 1 student said that they were less sympathetic. finally, i introduced a new method for splitting the students into buzz groups, which was intended to leave opportunity for personal choice, but to prevent those who habitually sit together from working together. students sitting in six different areas of the room were given cards of a similar colour, and then asked to form into groups of six, but with no group being allowed to contain more than one student with the same colour card. the students then carried out a short group exercise. after the task was completed, i asked the students to complete two surveys, about their perception of the reasons behind their new group’s choice of seating position and about their perceptions of the new group they were now a member of. reynolds psychogeography and its relevance to inclusive teaching and learning development journal of learning development in higher education, issue 10: october 2016 14 table 3. results of the third survey. group’s chosen seating position front near door front opposite door middle near door middle opposite door back near door back opposite door comfortrelated reasons 5 12 4 9 4 7 studyrelated reasons 2 13 1 2 1 nil group dynamics reasons 5 6 nil 5 5 3 total responses received from group 6 5 3 4 5 5 as can be seen, the group sitting at the front and opposite the door were the only students to cite a higher number of study-related than comfort-related reasons for their seating choice. group dynamics reasons are cited at a roughly constant level through the whole space, but study-related reasons are far outnumbered by comfort-related ones towards the back of the room. when asked in survey four if, when compared with the geographically-formed groups, these new groups were more or less supportive and sympathetic to their views, 15 students answered ‘yes’, nine said they were less sympathetic, and 19 could discern no difference. this is, on the surface, a puzzling result, as it implies that forcing students to select teammates from other parts of the room produces an even more comfortable consensus of views than when working with their geographical neighbours. however, the reynolds psychogeography and its relevance to inclusive teaching and learning development journal of learning development in higher education, issue 10: october 2016 15 interviews conducted after the exercise went some way to uncovering the reasons behind this surprising result. in the group thing, with the colours, you forced us to choose different people, but in the end it was always people you like, even though they were sitting at the other end. there was a certain element of selecting people you thought you would get along with. what you are trying to do is to find somebody that you know... with the colour card that corresponds. (interviews, 23 june 2011) in these responses, we see evidence of horne martin’s ‘patterns’ of student engagement. geographical positioning is just one of the ways in which a student cohort organises itself within a learning space. the colour-coded card intervention disrupted the normal psychogeography of the cohort, but created the opportunity for new, non-random student groupings to be formed around established social relationships. one student seemed to appreciate the pedagogic issues involved very clearly: i prefer random groups... because we share different opinions. if we are allowed to choose our group mates, then we prefer to pick our friends, and then [we come] to the same opinion and we finish the discussion quickly. (interviews, 23 june 2011) conclusions my purpose with this research has been to improve the quality of the student experience when participating in group work. the research supported some of the intuitive conclusions that i have reached over the previous decade, but it also suggested new questions for investigation. i am satisfied genuine differences in students’ involvement and engagement with lecturer pedagogies and course methodologies are suggested by students’ decisions, conscious or unconscious, to sit in different parts of a lecture room or studio along the ‘axis of engagement’. my data suggests that students who sit near the front are relatively more concerned with academic issues, while students who sit near the back are relatively more concerned with issues of physical or emotional comfort. students reynolds psychogeography and its relevance to inclusive teaching and learning development journal of learning development in higher education, issue 10: october 2016 16 who sit near the front and opposite the door are more likely to challenge the course pedagogy, but they do so from a position of keen involvement with the progress of their course. students who sit at the front near the door are also demonstrably more highly involved than those who sit at the middle or back, but they have a greater tendency to give unequivocal trust to the course and to their lecturers. i have no clear evidence that the near-the-door/ away from the door split applies as strongly at the back of the classroom. in fact, the back of the classroom emerges as an area where clear distinctions of all kinds have a tendency to break down. it is a zone where students prefer to avoid direct eyecontact with their lecturers (wulf, 1976, p.3) and seek the safety (and anonymity) of large groups. the psychogeography of the back of the room is a subject worthy of further research. what surprised and fascinated me the most through the research process was the gradual uncovering of the layered networks of interaction that underlie all learning activities, seifert and sutton’s ‘patterns’ and ‘participation structures’. friends do not necessarily sit with friends. in fact, the complex intersecting and interlocking patterns of friendship in a cohort of 50 students would probably make such an arrangement topographically impossible. rather, there are layered and nuanced factors at work in determining where students choose to sit: enthusiasm and involvement; attitudes to the course and its pedagogy; personal comfort; a desire to be near to friends and perhaps other factors yet to be identified. thus my final intervention, which forced students to form buzz groups with anyone except those students who they normally sit near to, created an unexpected opportunity for students to seek out their existing friends who were sitting in other parts of the room. friends do not necessarily sit together, as they may not share the same attitudes to learning: psychogeography can over-ride even the ties of friendship. the colour-card intervention, with its consequent seeking-out of friends from other areas of the room, produced groups which a high proportion of students found even more supportive to their point of view (i.e. less challenging) than those groups that were arranged on a purely geographical basis. this outcome lends even more weight to the approach that i now prefer to adopt: selecting student groups on a purely random basis, and making sure – over the course of a term or a course unit – that each student gets to work, at some point, in the same team as every other student. this research reinforces the idea that students are a valuable learning resource for each other, and every student has an important role to play in group work and in peer learning. reynolds psychogeography and its relevance to inclusive teaching and learning development journal of learning development in higher education, issue 10: october 2016 17 unexamined and unchallenged classroom psychogeographies could be working to limit certain students’ access to learning, by reinforcing existing patterns of attention and engagement. the facilitation of more inclusive psychogeographies is thus key to more inclusive learning. this field of enquiry, which has hitherto received relatively little attention in higher education, has therefore the potential to open valuable new avenues of development in both learning and teaching. references benedict, m. and hoag, j. (2004) ‘seating location in large lectures: are seating preferences or location related to course performance?’, journal of economics education, 35(3), pp. 215-231. http://dx.doi.org/10.3200/jece.35.3.215-231 byl, e., struyven, k., abelshausen, b., meurs, p., vanwing, t., engels, n. and lombaerts, k. (2015) ‘the potential of peer assisted learning as a tool for facilitating social and academic integration’, journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: academic peer learning, november, pp. 1-28. gossard, m., jessup, e. and casavant, k. (2006) ‘anatomy of a classroom: an exploratory analysis of elements influencing academic performance’, nacta journal, 50(2), pp. 36-39. gurbutt, d. and gurbutt, r. (2015) ‘empowering students to promote independent learning: a project utilising coaching approaches to support learning and personal development’, journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8, march, pp. 1-17. holliman, w. and anderson, h. (1986) ‘proximity and student density as ecological variables in a college classroom’, teaching of psychology, 13(4), pp. 200-203. http://dx.doi.org/10.1207/s15328023top1304_7 horne-martin, s. (2004) ‘environment behaviour studies in the classroom’, journal of design and technology education, 9(2), pp. 77-89. http://dx.doi.org/10.3200/jece.35.3.215-231 http://dx.doi.org/10.1207/s15328023top1304_7 reynolds psychogeography and its relevance to inclusive teaching and learning development journal of learning development in higher education, issue 10: october 2016 18 jaques, d. (2006) learning in groups: a handbook for face-to-face and online environments. new york: routledge. kalinowski, s. and taper, m. (2007) ‘the effect of seat location on exam grades and student perceptions in an introductory biology class’, journal of college science teaching, 36(4), pp. 1-4. available at: http://www.nsta.org/publications/news/story.aspx?id=53084 (accessed: 24 september 2016). lakey, g. (2010) facilitating group learning: strategies for success with adult learners. san francisco: jossey-bass. michaelsen, l., sweet, m. and parmelee, d. (eds.) (2008) team-based learning: small group learning's next big step: new directions for teaching and learning. san francisco: jossey-bass. marshall, n. (1974) ‘dimensions of privacy preference’, multivariate behavioral research 9(3), pp. 255-271. http://dx.doi.org/10.1207/s15327906mbr0903_1 pedersen, d. (1994) ‘privacy preferences and classroom seat selection’, social behavior and personality: an international journal, 22(4), pp. 393-398. available at: https://www.sbp-journal.com/index.php/sbp/article/view/774 (accessed: 24 september 2016). pritchard, c. (2015) ‘mentoring in the writing café: identity, belonging and ownership’, journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: academic peer learning, november, pp. 1-20. race, p. (2001) the lecturer’s toolkit. 2nd edn. london: kogan page. seifert, k. and sutton, r. (2007) contemporary educational psychology. available at: https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/contemporary_educational_psychology (accessed: august 2011). http://www.nsta.org/publications/news/story.aspx?id=53084 http://dx.doi.org/10.1207/s15327906mbr0903_1 https://www.sbp-journal.com/index.php/sbp/article/view/774 https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/contemporary_educational_psychology reynolds psychogeography and its relevance to inclusive teaching and learning development journal of learning development in higher education, issue 10: october 2016 19 wulf, k. m. (1976) ‘relationship of assigned classroom seating area to achievement variables’, 60th annual meeting of the american educational research association. san francisco, california, april 19-23. (eric number: ed134603). available at: http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ed134603.pdf (accessed: 24 september 2016). author details richard reynolds is joint head of academic support and course leader of ma applied imagination in the creative industries, at central saint martins. he can be contacted at r.reynolds@csm.arts.ac.uk. http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ed134603.pdf mailto:r.reynolds@csm.arts.ac.uk psychogeography and its relevance to inclusive teaching and learning development: why it matters where students choose to sit abstract introduction group learning within a multidisciplinary ma course classroom psychogeography studies of psychogeography in higher education an extensive literature already exists, particularly in the usa, which examines the question of classroom dynamics at primary or grade school level. studies undertaken specifically with students at university level are, however, less numerous. there a... simply putting students into groups according to clusters as they are already sitting… is one of the easiest and quickest ways of dividing a class into groups… [however] it is not unusual for the students nearest the tutor to be rather higher in motiv... student motivation has been extensively studied in relation to the front-to-back axis, and there have been several studies based around the relative grades achieved by students who sit at the front of lecture rooms versus those who habitually sit at t... the relationship between privacy preferences and the location of selected seats in a classroom was investigated. subjects were 17 men and 34 women in an undergraduate psychology class. the location of the seat selected in a rectangular classroom was d... pedersen’s conclusions have a clear resonance for any lecturer supervising students in group work who might be tempted to allow groups to form through the existing geographical distribution of students in the classroom. groups which are permitted to f... a study of the relationship between student grades and: (a) proximity (distance from the student to the instructor), (b) centrality (seating in the center of the room compared to seating toward the sides), (c) student density (presence of other studen... on a typical university course, little or nothing is done to mitigate the impact of these factors. the question of classroom psychogeography usually passes ‘under the radar’, as horne martin (2004) points out: seifert and sutton (2007) draw particular attention to the persistent social and physical patterns that underlie almost all classroom interactions: many class activities take on communication patterns that class members learn to expect without even being reminded. each pattern is a participation structure, a set of taken-for-granted rights and responsibilities expected from students and teacher d... seifert and sutton’s identification of the ubiquity of student expectations when engaged in any specific learning activity is pertinent. clearly, teachers should be aware of the need to signal a phase change in the expected mode of student engagement,... wulf (1976), and subsequently benedict and hoag (2004), determined that students who were directed to sit at the front of the classroom instead of their habitual position at the back would tend to start achieving higher grades. if it is possible to en... the research strategy the survey results granular research conclusions references author details literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 12: november 2017 supporting student transition to higher education feedback: an evaluation of an online feedback training approach michael hast st mary’s university, twickenham, uk abstract recent research has indicated higher education students from the current net generation increasingly prefer to access their assignment feedback online rather than in hard copy, allowing universities to harness technological approaches towards a more up-to-date student experience. however, this prior research has also highlighted lack of training for students on how to access and make use of online feedback. the present study therefore evaluates a novel training approach embedded within an undergraduate teaching programme. students completed a survey on the training approach. a sub-set and an additional comparison group took part in focus groups. the findings indicate a clear need for such specific training, that it can reduce depersonalisation in an age where universities are becoming increasingly digital, and that the transition into higher education can be supported through appropriate realignment of student instruction. more research is required to address the extent of the training’s impact on feedback engagement, but the outcomes should contribute to a refining of current approaches to introducing undergraduate students to working with feedback, which should ultimately enhance the overall higher education student experience. keywords: online feedback provision; student transition; structured training. introduction alongside the rapid developments in technology and an increasingly digitally resourced world (abrahams, 2010; altbach et al., 2009; sarkar, 2012), higher education institutions across the globe are welcoming and engaging with a continually changing student body. the majority of young people entering university today are of the so-called net generation hast an evaluation of an online feedback training approach journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 2 (manuguerra and petocz, 2011; prensky, 2012) who are seen as highly comfortable with technology and who, as a result, are looking for learning that reflects this experience (bradwell, 2009; lai, 2011). consequentially, this means that teaching and learning approaches in higher education are increasingly embracing – or having to embrace – technology (laurillard, 2006; turney et al., 2009; selwyn, 2016; walker et al., 2012). a key area of the higher education experience where students need to be supported is their engagement with assessments. assessment and feedback engagement are integral to student achievement of educational goals and motivation (brown et al., 2009; grieve et al., 2016; heinrich et al., 2012) and they can promote self-regulated learning (brown et al., 2016). these issues emphasise the importance of this domain. in particular, assessment and feedback in higher education, too, have gone digital and various studies have examined how technology can be used to support student engagement (e.g. ambler et al., 2014; hepplestone et al., 2011; pellegrino and quellmalz, 2010; säljö, 2010). however, despite students increasingly coming from a digitally confident population, their engagement with feedback through digital means is often subject to unexpected difficulties with the particular digital approaches used in higher education settings. this warrants further examination. digital approaches to teaching and learning are often seen in a positive light. for instance, many higher education institutions follow blended learning systems that incorporate digital approaches because students make outcome gains (lópez-pérez et al., 2013) and they tend to show positive attitudes towards these approaches (lópez-pérez et al., 2011). in the particular context of assessment and feedback, digital approaches are viewed favourably by institutions because they help reduce plagiarism (baker et al., 2008; batane, 2010) and allow for faster marking, reducing the administrative workload (buckley and cowap, 2013). in addition, online marking is seen to be just as valid as marking in hard copy (shaw, 2008) and feedback is perceived to be more targeted and more effective (ambler et al., 2014). among students, too, preferences are turning more towards online marking and feedback provision. for instance, hast and healy (2016) recently found that 86% of undergraduate students preferred submitting assignments online rather than in hard copy, adding to a growing trend that started with only one in four students showing such a preference just a decade earlier (ambler et al., 2014; bridge and appleyard, 2005; 2008). similarly, when it hast an evaluation of an online feedback training approach journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 3 came to accessing feedback online, hast and healy (2016) noted an increase in preferences from prior studies (ambler et al., 2014; bridge and appleyard, 2008), and added by noting similar student preferences for reading feedback online. added to this are various benefits that students see in digital approaches. in particular, they offer greater flexibility in terms of time and space (brown et al., 2016; hast and healy, 2016; timmis, broadfoot et al., 2016; turney et al., 2009) and increased ease of access (grieve et al., 2016; hast and healy, 2016). in essence, all these allow students to ‘work, learn, and study whenever and wherever they want to’ (gosper et al., 2013, p.278). the changes noted above are most likely a response to the increase in so-called net generation students (manuguerra and petocz, 2011; prensky, 2012) as well as reflecting technological innovations. however, technology is not always categorically seen as a positive in higher education (see e.g. selwyn, 2016) and it is therefore of essence that any new digital approaches are evaluated as carefully as possible. in doing so, higher education teaching and learning can be realigned and reformed as appropriately as possible. for instance, despite the fact – or assumption made – that many young people now entering higher education are familiar with new technologies, these experiences vary and often do not match the new skills required at university. this means institutions have a responsibility to promote appropriate learning opportunities for students to fully engage with digital approaches (newman and scurry, 2015), thereby having to support the transition process in a field that is easily overlooked. the consequences of a lack of such transition support can be seen in the negative student experiences surrounding online assignments. a key issue for students is that online feedback, in the absence of face-to-face discussion, leads to difficulties in interpretation and use of feedback (andrade, 2010; hattie and timperley, 2007). this lack of relationship with the online marker can have knock-on effects, leading towards depersonalisation and reduced self-regulated learning (mccabe et al., 2011; parkin et al., 2012) and can, in turn, impede the issue of interpretation. appropriate engagement on the student behalf contributes to issues such as retention rates, indicating an enhanced engagement with supporting transition (gale and parker, 2014; kift et al., 2010). the issues noted above could be resolved in a relatively simple manner – through the provision of structured training that guides students through all relevant processes, including aspects of submission and access, and clarifying the relationship between online feedback access hast an evaluation of an online feedback training approach journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 4 and communicating with tutors to discuss the feedback. doing so should enhance engagement motivation. to support students in their transition into online feedback provision, a series of activities was embedded in a first year undergraduate module on learning skills, centring on submission and access. in the first lecture students were given a live demonstration on how to submit work online (step 1). importantly, the instructors showed this from the student perspective by having the instructors enrolled on a practice module as a student. this was necessary since the student view of turnitin is different from that of an instructor. students were then set a simple writing activity and were asked to submit this assignment online after the lecture (step 2). the instructors provided basic written feedback on the assignment through grademark and students were requested to access the feedback online, using video materials posted on the vle (virtual learning environment) to support the process if this was necessary (step 3). following a later assignment on which students were provided with more extensive formative feedback, students were given a lecture on how to use the feedback, including knowing who to speak to and how this could be identified from the feedback (step 4). what follows in this paper is an evaluation of this structured training approach, drawing on quantitative and qualitative data of student views. specifically, it seeks to draw on how these views compare to those of students who had not undergone this training. method the target participants for the present study were undergraduate students in their first year of a social science degree programme at a university in the greater london area. the research was carried out during the second semester, which meant all of the participants had previous experience of submitting work and accessing feedback online as required by the programme. to gain more detailed insight into the student views a mixed method approach was chosen, combining both statistical trends and personal experiences (creswell, 2015). once ethical approval to conduct the research was granted by the host institution’s ethics committee, a survey drawing on both quantitative and qualitative data was carried out first, followed by qualitative focus groups. hast an evaluation of an online feedback training approach journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 5 survey to gather initial insight the survey covered a range of items and response approaches across two sections using 4-point likert scales. in the first section, questions were asked around the first writing activity and subsequent feedback access (steps 1, 2 and 3). in the second section, questions were asked around post-feedback engagement (step 4). this was then followed by open-ended response opportunities. questions were asked about perceived ease, perceived usefulness of the training, confidence in relation to future work, and the impact of the training on the students’ transition experience. the survey was distributed to students in hard copy during lectures. before completion of the survey its purpose was explained to the participants, including how data would be used and stored. the students were then asked to sign a consent form acknowledging their participation. participants responded anonymously; the survey took approximately 10 minutes to complete. a total of 62 students (55 female) originally registered for the module in question completed the survey. this represents a response rate of 82%. the majority of respondents (81%) were aged 18 to 20 years at time of degree enrolment, with the remainder identifying as aged 21 or above at that time (classified as mature students; cf. ucas, 2017). following data collection, an initial reliability analysis was carried out on the likert items in the survey. cronbach’s alpha showed the items to have high internal consistency (10 items; α = 0.83), suggesting the survey to be highly reliable (cronbach, 1951). all likert items were found to be worthy of retention for further survey analysis, since removal of any of the items would have reduced the alpha. to then examine any significant relationships amongst the likert items, kendall’s tau correlations were run. all quantitative data were analysed using spss. focus groups out of the 62 students who completed the survey, 8 participants were invited to take part in one of two focus groups (groups 1 and 2), with 4 participants in each. selection was made to represent the student body as closely as possible in terms of gender (6 female) and age group (7 aged 18-20 at start of course). while recommended focus group sizes are typically five or six participants (cf. krueger and casey, 2014), the requirement of specific participants meant that organising appropriate times to conduct a single group hast an evaluation of an online feedback training approach journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 6 presented a challenge. a further focus group (group 3) was run with 4 students who were from the same programme but who had not taken the particular module. data are presented according to focus group and participant number in that group (e.g. the first participant from the first focus group is referred to as 1.1). all sessions were video recorded to ease the process of transcription. prior to the recording students were given information about the purpose of the group and how the recordings would be used. the participants were asked to sign a consent form acknowledging their participation and to confirm that they were happy to be recorded. the focus groups were facilitated by the researcher, using a pre-determined set of questions to guide the participant interaction. in relation to the training or lack thereof, participants were asked to discuss the initial experiences of working with turnitin and grademark, their relationship with the online marker, and the overall transition into higher education. each session lasted for around half an hour. after completion of the focus groups, the transcripts were analysed by drawing on a grounded theory approach (see e.g. charmaz, 2014; corbin and strauss, 2014). transcripts were first openly coded by reading and re-reading the transcripts, and identifying all emerging instances of attitudes, feelings, ideas, thoughts and experiences repeated multiple times. these were constantly compared within and across transcripts. this was done until theoretical saturation had been reached. memos were written alongside the extraction of codes then, during axial coding, the initial codes were grouped to form thematic relationships. finally, central and peripheral themes and relationships between themes were established through selective coding. results and discussion perceived need for training when asked about their experiences of working with online feedback, students who had not taken the learning skills module indicated that ‘it was quite hard without having like a proper training’ (participant 3.1). even though all participants in group 3 had received some basic form of instruction through their other modules on how to submit work to turnitin, they felt specific in-depth training was needed. as participant 3.3 pointed out, ‘every tutor at the beginning just talks like really briefly about it, but it’s just too fast’. conversely, those students who had gone through the structured training perceived it as a positive, removing unnecessary stress. they acknowledged that ‘turnitin isn’t the easiest hast an evaluation of an online feedback training approach journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 7 system to navigate without help and training cleared my confusion’ (survey). some even felt that the training placed them at an advantage over other students: ‘i found that i used it a lot more easily and i understood it better than other students from other courses’ (participant 2.3). participant 1.1 further pointed out that structured training was, in fact, essential: ‘i think if you’re just gonna freestyle it, you can’t do it’. this idea was similarly expressed by participant 3.2 from the comparison group, who emphasised that a lack of training places a much greater onus on the students to be proactive in trying to engage with turnitin: ‘we really need to go and search for [support]’. these views reflect findings from previous work where students expressed a desire for training that supports their engagement with online submission and feedback processes, which they are not averse to in principle (e.g. hast and healy, 2016). so despite coming from a generation that is supposed to be comfortable with technology (manuguerra and petocz, 2011; prensky, 2012) it is evident that they still see a need for training to support their engagement with specific digital approaches, especially ones they are unlikely to have experienced outside of higher education. the findings also point to the potential danger of leaving students to their own devices as this may have potential to lead to disengagement with feedback if the cost of effort is too high (cf. mccabe et al., 2011; parkin et al., 2012), again highlighting the need for structured training to be in place. perceived usefulness of training from the survey data it is evident that the structured training eased the submission process for students. there were moderate positive correlations between the views on the in-class demonstration and perceived ease of both submitting work, τ = 0.48, p < 0.001, and accessing feedback, τ = 0.40, p < 0.01. supporting this, there was a moderate positive correlation between the views on the demonstration and the perceived difficulty of working with turnitin if training had not been provided, τ = 0.42, p < 0.01. however, not only did the training make the submission and access processes easier for students, it also seemed to foster confidence towards future processes. there were moderate positive correlations between the views on the in-class demonstration and confidence both in submitting future work, τ = 0.34, p < 0.01, and in accessing future feedback, τ = 0.38, p < 0.01. this was also reflected in the open survey responses, as students felt they were, as a result, ‘able to submit essays better – easier for the future’. furthermore, there was a moderate positive correlation between submission ease and confidence in submitting future work, τ = 0.45, p hast an evaluation of an online feedback training approach journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 8 < 0.01, and a strong positive correlation between feedback access ease and confidence in accessing future feedback, τ = 0.57, p < 0.001. reducing disengagement and depersonalisation a key issue pointed out by students in the comparison focus group was that ‘it would be maybe also helpful if you would have like a tutor to talk about [the feedback]’ (participant 3.2). a similar issue was noted in previous work where students expressed a favouring of face-to-face tutor communication (e.g. hast and healy, 2016) – despite not being prohibited from doing so. however, beyond the possible perception that they might not be allowed to speak to a tutor, a further issue contributing to this lack of engagement seems to be marker anonymity: ‘i’ve had my feedback but i don’t know who gave the feedback… i would first need to go to everyone’ (participant 3.3). this is an area where structured training is helpful since it supports the clarification of post-feedback engagement. in fact, there was a strong positive correlation between the perceived usefulness of the students’ ability to identify the marker and understanding who to speak to about the feedback, τ = 0.59, p < 0.001. this ability was seen as important, as exemplified by participant 2.2’s insight: ‘knowing that the feedback was from her… helped me connect with the feedback’. conversely, not having this insight reduced the students’ perceived efficacy to engage: ‘there’s so much missing, ‘cause you just read it but you can’t really interact… you want to see emotions and all that’ (participant 3.4). critically, the training not only helps students know who marked their work, it allows them to connect with the feedback and the marker on an emotional level, which was seen as missing by participant 3.4: ‘it changes the way you read… if you didn’t know, you wouldn’t know whose sort of eyes you’re reading it through’ (participant 1.2). as a whole, it is evident that structured training is not just seen as necessary to reduce stress; it has the potential to address concerns relating to interpretation (andrade, 2010; hattie and timperley, 2007) and depersonalisation of students in their engagement with online feedback (mccabe et al., 2011; parkin et al., 2012). training and transition into higher education a final key area of interest was how structured training might support the overall transition experience into higher education. where the training had not been experienced, students hast an evaluation of an online feedback training approach journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 9 commented on the transition challenges in the particular context of online assessment and feedback: ‘i spent quite a lot of time… just to get used to it… it was quite a big transition’ (participant 3.2). being aware of this perspective should help to understand how appropriate training and support can enhance motivation to engage with feedback and thus reduce potential issues surrounding retention (cf. gale and parker, 2014; kift et al., 2010). this becomes particularly clear when placing this in contrast to the students who went through the structured training, whose views were far more positive in relation to their transition experience. the training ‘allowed the transition to be a lot smoother’ (survey), and as a result, participant 2.4 was able to comment that the training ‘has made higher education better’. it is thus evident that appropriate training impacts the overall student transition experience, making it easier and more efficient. conclusion and further recommendations despite an ever increasing digitally competent and confident student body, which means higher education institutions must realign and reform their digital approaches to teaching and learning, this student body still requires support to make the transition into higher education – even on a technological level. the data presented here have shown that structured training can support students in an effective manner. it reduces the stress of the overall transition experience, builds confidence in their experiences with submission and feedback access processes, and has the potential to foster their engagement by reducing depersonalisation. however, future research will be needed to examine long-term implications of such training and whether the training can lead to sustained feedback engagement that goes beyond mere access. references abrahams, d.a. (2010) ‘technology adoption in higher education: a framework for identifying and prioritising issues and barriers to adoption of instructional technology’, journal of applied research in higher education, 2(2), pp. 34-49 [online]. available at: http://doi.org/10.1108/17581184201000012 (accessed: 22 october 2017). http://doi.org/10.1108/17581184201000012 hast an evaluation of an online feedback training approach journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 10 altbach, p.g., reisberg, l. and rumbley, l.e. (2009) trends in global higher education: tracking an academic revolution. paris: unesco. ambler, t., breyer, y. and young, s. (2014) ‘piloting online submission and online assessment with grademark’, in kennedy-clark, s., everett, k. and wheeler, p. (eds.) cases on the assessment of scenario and game-based virtual worlds in higher education. hershey: information science reference, pp. 125-151. andrade, h.l. (2010) ‘students as the definitive source of formative assessment’, in andrade, h.l. and cizek, g.j. (eds.) handbook of formative assessment. new york: routledge, pp. 90-105. baker, r.k., thornton, b. and adams, m. (2008) ‘an evaluation of the effectiveness of turnitin.com as a tool for reducing plagiarism in graduate student term papers’, college teaching methods & styles journal, 4(9), pp. 1-4 [online]. available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.19030/ctms.v4i9.5564 (accessed: 22 october 2017). batane, t. (2010) ‘turning to turnitin to fight plagiarism among university students’, journal of educational technology & society, 13(2), pp. 1-12. bradwell, p. (2009) the edgeless university: why higher education must embrace technology. london: demos. bridge, p. and appleyard, r. (2005) ‘system failure: a comparison of electronic and paperbased assignment submission, marking, and feedback’, british journal of educational technology, 36(4), pp. 669-671 [online]. available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8535.2005.00485.x (accessed: 22 october 2017). bridge, p. and appleyard, r. (2008) ‘a comparison of electronic and paper-based assignment submission and feedback’, british journal of educational technology, 39(4), pp. 644-650 [online]. available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.14678535.2007.00753.x (accessed: 22 october 2017). http://dx.doi.org/10.19030/ctms.v4i9.5564 http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8535.2005.00485.x http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8535.2007.00753.x http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8535.2007.00753.x hast an evaluation of an online feedback training approach journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 11 brown, g.t.l., peterson, e.r. and irving, s.e. (2009) ‘beliefs that make a difference: adaptive and maladaptive self-regulation in students’ conceptions of assessment’, in mcinerney, d.m., brown, g.t.l. and liem, g.a.d. (eds.) student perspectives on assessment: what students can tell us about assessment for learning. charlotte: information age, pp. 159-186. brown, g.t., peterson, e.r. and yao, e.s. (2016) ‘student conceptions of feedback: impact on self-regulation, self-efficacy, and academic achievement’, british journal of educational psychology, 86(4), pp. 606-629 [online]. available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/bjep.12126 (accessed: 22 october 2017). buckley, e. and cowap, l. (2013) ‘an evaluation of the use of turnitin for electronic submission and marking and as a formative feedback tool from an educator’s perspective’, british journal of educational technology, 44 4), pp. 562-570 [online]. available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/bjet.12054 (accessed: 22 october 2017). charmaz, k. (2014) constructing grounded theory. london: sage. corbin, j. and strauss, a. (2014) basics of qualitative research: techniques and procedures for developing grounded theory. 4th edn. london: sage. creswell, j.w. (2015) a concise introduction to mixed methods research. london: sage. cronbach, l.j. (1951) ‘coefficient alpha and the internal structure of tests’, psychometrika, 16(3), pp. 297-334 [online]. available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007%2fbf02310555?li=true (accessed: 22 october 2017). gale, t. and parker, s. (2014) ‘navigating change: a typology of student transition in higher education’, studies in higher education, 39(5), pp. 734-753 [online]. available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2012.721351 (accessed: 22 october 2017). http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/bjep.12126 http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/bjet.12054 http://dx.doi.org/10.1007%2fbf02310555?li=true http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2012.721351 hast an evaluation of an online feedback training approach journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 12 gosper, m., malfroy, j. and mckenzie, j. (2013) ‘students’ experiences and expectations of technologies: an australian study designed to inform planning and development decisions’, australasian journal of educational technology, 29(2), pp. 268-282 [online]. available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.14742/ajet.127 (accessed: 22 october 2017). grieve, r., padgett, c.r. and moffitt, r.l. (2016) ‘assignments 2.0: the role of social presence and computer attitudes in student preferences for online versus offline marking’, the internet and higher education, 28, pp. 8-16 [online]. available at: http://doi.org/10.1016/j.iheduc.2015.08.002 (accessed: 22 october 2017). hast, m. and healy, c. (2016) ‘higher education marking in the electronic age: quantitative and qualitative student insight’, procedia social and behavioral sciences, 228, pp. 11-15 [online]. available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.sbspro.2016.07.002 (accessed: 22 october 2017). hattie, j. and timperley, h. (2007) ‘the power of feedback’, review of educational research, 77(1), pp. 81-112 [online]. available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.3102/003465430298487 (accessed: 22 october 2017). heinrich, e., milne, j. and granshaw, b. (2012) ‘pathways for improving support for the electronic management and marking of assignments’, australasian journal of educational technology, 28(2), pp. 279-294 [online]. available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.14742/ajet.874 (accessed: 22 october 2017). hepplestone, s., holden, g., irwin, b., parkin, h.j. and thorpe, l. (2011) ‘using technology to encourage student engagement with feedback: a literature review’, research in learning technology, 19(2), pp. 117-127 [online]. available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/21567069.2011.586677 (accessed: 22 october 2017). kift, s.m., nelson, k.j. and clarke, j.a. (2010) ‘transition pedagogy: a third generation approach to fye – a case study of policy and practice for the higher education sector’, the international journal of the first year in higher education, 1(1), pp. 120 [online]. available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/intjfyhe.v1i1.13 (accessed: 22 october 2017). http://dx.doi.org/10.14742/ajet.127 http://doi.org/10.1016/j.iheduc.2015.08.002 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.sbspro.2016.07.002 http://dx.doi.org/10.3102/003465430298487 http://dx.doi.org/10.14742/ajet.874 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/21567069.2011.586677 http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/intjfyhe.v1i1.13 hast an evaluation of an online feedback training approach journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 13 krueger, r.a. and casey, m.a. (2014) focus groups: a practical guide for applied research. london: sage. lai, k.w. (2011) ‘digital technology and the culture of teaching and learning in higher education’, australasian journal of educational technology, 27(8), pp. 1263-1275 [online]. available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.14742/ajet.892 (accessed: 22 october 2017). laurillard, d. (2006) ‘e-learning in higher education’, in ashwin, p. (ed.) changing higher education: the development of learning and teaching. london: routledge, pp. 7184. lópez-pérez, m.v., pérez-lópez, m.c. and rodríguez-ariza, l. (2011) ‘blended learning in higher education: students’ perceptions and their relation to outcomes’, computers & education, 56(3), pp. 818-826 [online]. available at: http://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2010.10.023 (accessed: 22 october 2017). lópez-pérez, m.v., pérez-lópez, m.c., rodríguez-ariza, l. and argente-linares, e. (2013) ‘the influence of the use of technology on student outcomes in a blended learning context’, educational technology research and development, 61(4), pp. 625-638 [online]. available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11423-013-9303-8 (accessed: 22 october 2017). manuguerra, m. and petocz, p. (2011) ‘promoting student engagement by integrating new technology into tertiary education: the role of the ipad’, asian social science, 7(11), pp. 61-65 [online]. available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.5539/ass.v7n11p61 (accessed: 22 october 2017). mccabe, j., doerflinger, a. and fox, r. (2011) ‘student and faculty perceptions of efeedback’, teaching of psychology, 38(3), pp. 173-179 [online]. available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0098628311411794 (accessed: 22 october 2017). newman, f. and scurry, j.e. (2015) ‘higher education and the digital rapids’, international higher education, 26, pp. 13-14. http://dx.doi.org/10.14742/ajet.892 http://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2010.10.023 http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11423-013-9303-8 http://dx.doi.org/10.5539/ass.v7n11p61 http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0098628311411794 hast an evaluation of an online feedback training approach journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 14 parkin, h.j., hepplestone, s., holden, g., irwin, b. and thorpe, l. (2012) ‘a role for technology in enhancing students’ engagement with feedback’, assessment & evaluation in higher education, 37(8), pp. 963-973 [online]. available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2011.592934 (accessed: 22 october 2017). pellegrino, j.w. and quellmalz, e.s. (2010) ‘perspectives on the integration of technology and assessment’, journal of research on technology in education, 43(2), pp. 119134 [online]. available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15391523.2010.10782565 (accessed: 22 october 2017). prensky, m. (2012) from digital natives to digital wisdom. thousand oaks: corwin. säljö, r. (2010) ‘digital tools and challenges to institutional traditions of learning: technologies, social memory and the performative nature of learning’, journal of computer assisted learning, 26, pp. 53-64 [online]. available at: https://ai2-s2pdfs.s3.amazonaws.com/60dd/89d8a8298d273858a22bedb0f18fbce743b7.pdf (accessed: 27 october 2017). sarkar, s. (2012) ‘the role of information and communication technology (ict) in higher education for the 21st century’, the science probe, 1(1), pp. 30-41. selwyn, n. (2016) ‘digital downsides: exploring university students’ negative engagements with digital technology’, teaching in higher education, 21(8), pp. 1006-1021 [online]. available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2016.1213229 (accessed: 22 october 2017). shaw, s. (2008) ‘essay marking on-screen: implications for assessment validity’, elearning and digital media, 5(3), pp. 256-274 [online]. available at: http://doi.org/10.2304/elea.2008.5.3.256 (accessed: 22 october 2017). timmis, s., broadfoot, p., sutherland, r. and oldfield, a. (2016) ‘rethinking assessment in a digital age: opportunities, challenges and risks’, british educational research journal, 42(3), pp. 454-476 [online]. available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/berj.3215 (accessed: 22 october 2017). http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2011.592934 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15391523.2010.10782565 https://ai2-s2-pdfs.s3.amazonaws.com/60dd/89d8a8298d273858a22bedb0f18fbce743b7.pdf https://ai2-s2-pdfs.s3.amazonaws.com/60dd/89d8a8298d273858a22bedb0f18fbce743b7.pdf http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2016.1213229 http://doi.org/10.2304/elea.2008.5.3.256 http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/berj.3215 hast an evaluation of an online feedback training approach journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 15 turney, c.s.m., robinson, d., lee, m. and soutar, a. (2009) ‘using technology to direct learning in higher education: the way forward?’, active learning in higher education, 10(1), pp. 71-83 [online]. available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1469787408100196 (accessed: 22 october 2017). universities and colleges admissions service (ucas) (2017) mature students’ guide. available at: https://www.ucas.com/file/35436/download?token=2q6wiw-l (accessed: 21 april 2017). walker, r., voce, j. and ahmed, j. (2012) 2012 survey of technology enhanced learning for higher education in the uk. oxford: ucisa. author details michael hast is senior lecturer in psychology of education at st mary’s university, twickenham. his primary research interests lie in early cognitive development and the resulting implications for educational practice. however, he is also interested in how higher education experiences can be improved for students, particularly in the context of engagement with feedback. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1469787408100196 https://www.ucas.com/file/35436/download?token=2q6wiw-l supporting student transition to higher education feedback: an evaluation of an online feedback training approach abstract introduction method survey focus groups results and discussion perceived need for training perceived usefulness of training reducing disengagement and depersonalisation training and transition into higher education conclusion and further recommendations references author details literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special edition: 2018 aldinhe conference, october 2018 dramatising learning development: towards an understanding without definition jason eyre de montfort university, leicester uk tracy slawson de montfort university, leicester uk abstract as learning developers increasingly seek recognition of their practices as a coherent and shared approach to teaching and learning in higher education, the notion of a ‘definitive’ understanding of learning development may appear an appealing prospect, one that promises clarity in recognising, understanding and valuing learning development. however, attempts at definition should be approached with caution, as they can be founded upon assumptions that permit no scope for evolution or change. drawing on the philosophical work of gilles deleuze (1967) and his concept of the virtual, this paper problematises the idea of there being a ‘clear and distinct’ definition of learning development, arguing instead for a ‘distinct and obscure’ concept of learning development open to creative evolution. keywords: recognition scheme; professional development; philosophy; gilles deleuze. introduction: a learning developer walks into a bar… a learning developer walks into a bar. she orders a drink and gets chatting with some strangers. ‘so what do you do?’ one of them asks. how does she answer this question? she could reply with: ‘i’m a learning developer’. what is the likely response to this answer? recognition? misapprehension? perplexity? this paper presents a philosophical discussion of learning development as a set of distinct practices, and in particular focuses on the question ‘what is learning development?’. the eyre and slawson dramatising learning development: towards an understanding without definition journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: october 2018 2 discussion draws on the thought of gilles deleuze and félix guattari (1994), in particular deleuze’s (1967) concept of the virtual, in order to critique the notion that there can, or should be, a ‘clear definition’ of learning development. we argue that there are ways and means of obtaining a shared understanding of learning development as a distinct set of practices without recourse to fixed notions of what these practices should be, and in so doing emphasise the openness and vitality of learning development. the aim throughout is to stimulate thought and seed discussion of issues around identity, practices, and values that we feel are important to consider as learning development evolves, and to encourage an engagement with philosophy as a way to approach these issues. let’s get back to that bar. if our sociable learning developer was instead a doctor, a lawyer, or a teacher, we might expect a degree of recognition from these strangers on hearing what she does, for these latter jobs are well-established professions. our strangers may even ask follow-up questions: ‘a doctor? are you a specialist, or are you in general practice?’; ‘a lawyer? what area of the law?’; ‘a teacher? primary or secondary?’. in each case, we might expect there to be an understanding that these professions are not monolithic but consist of sub-branches and specialisms. in a similar vein, the strangers may respond with stereotypes or clichés, representing partial knowledge of what the profession entails (‘a teacher? i’d love to have all those holidays!’). even so, a cliché represents some kind of recognition, however misguided or lacking in understanding. at present, a learning developer might not expect this level of recognition from a group of strangers, let alone a high degree of understanding. it is perhaps unlikely that our strangers would immediately recognise the label ‘learning developer’ as they might with ‘doctor’, ‘lawyer’ or ‘teacher’, and no follow-up questions regarding specialisms or stereotypical assumptions would likely be forthcoming. there are some clues in the label as to what such a job might entail (learning – ‘are you some kind of teacher?’; learning and development – ‘you work in human resources?’), and some of our strangers may pick up on one or more of these, depending on their own knowledge and background. most likely, we would suggest (and any learning developer reading will have their own view on this) the response would be: ‘a learning developer? what’s that?’. so rather than recognition or misapprehension, at the present time the label ‘learning development’ is likely to engender some degree of perplexity (empirical studies to test this contention would of course be welcomed). given this, it is also likely that our learning eyre and slawson dramatising learning development: towards an understanding without definition journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: october 2018 3 developer would not use the label at all, but may attempt some kind of pre-emptive explanation: ‘i’m a university lecturer’. ‘i work in a university’. ‘i’m in education’. ‘i help students with their writing’. ‘i work in a study skills unit’. [insert favourite self-description here]. it is likely that the learning developer, when faced with the question ‘what do you do?’, would consider their audience and the likely impact of their answer upon them. in our example, we had our learning developer meet some strangers in a bar, but learning developers also spend at least some of their time in other places, not least on a university campus – in a classroom, in meetings, in chance encounters in the car park. the audience here might perhaps be more familiar with the role (and certainly, ‘i work in a university’ is not going to illuminate a student or fellow academic). the way any response is then phrased depends on the effect the learning developer wishes to produce on their interlocutor, and status may be a consideration, consciously or unconsciously. in our bar room scenario, ‘i work as a university lecturer’ might perhaps be chosen ahead of ‘i help with study skills’ for this reason. in the absence of a recognisable label, our selfdescriptions aim not only to describe what we do, but also to convey something of the value of our practices. hence, when we talk of value and values in relation to practice, we are referring to the extent to which our practices are worthy of pursuit, both in our own estimation and in the opinion of others. to summarise, the way others apprehend the identity of learning developers matters in at least three ways: firstly, in terms of recognition of the role in broad terms, as a profession/discipline/field of practice with some kind of distinctive identity; secondly, in terms of an understanding of what such a role might entail in practice, as opposed to misapprehensions or clichés; finally, in situations where there is some degree of recognition and understanding (such as in the university itself), there is an additional concern for the status of the role and how it is valued. in the absence of what we might call ‘clarity’ about these issues among non-learning developers, we may find what we do unrecognised, misunderstood, and our status misrepresented. it may be that the label eyre and slawson dramatising learning development: towards an understanding without definition journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: october 2018 4 ‘learning developer’ may have some utility in addressing all three of these concerns, particularly as it becomes better understood. steven briggs (2018) sets out these issues in relation to the newly introduced (as of 2018) certified practitioner scheme, but at the present time, the title ‘learning developer’ itself is not sufficiently well known to carry with it the meanings we might wish to convey. the appeal of the definitive issues around identity, and the question ‘what is learning development?’, are therefore not merely trivial concerns for the learning developer but impact on the recognition, understanding and status of what we do in our interactions with others. the clarity of our response to the question ‘what do you do?’ – or the lack of clarity – perhaps speaks to the uncertainty of how a nascent field of practice like learning development both sees itself and is seen by others (see hilsdon, 2018). as a result of this, we perhaps find ourselves drawn towards attempts to obtain this kind of clarity – a definitive understanding of learning development that captures the essence of what it is, and what learning developers do; something that can be summarised and communicated efficiently and effectively, thereby mitigating the risks of being misunderstood. for learning development, the following characterisations are offered as instructive and in some way representative of what has been written on the subject in recent years: learning development is a complex set of multi-disciplinary and cross-disciplinary academic roles and functions involving teaching, tutoring, research, and the design and production of learning materials, as well as involvement in staff development, policy-making and other consultative activities. (hilsdon, 2011, p.14) …we argue for learning development to be allowed to be understood as a set of socio-political or emancipatory practices designed to empower students, from a range of diverse contexts, for ‘action’. (sinfield et al., 2011, p.55) eyre and slawson dramatising learning development: towards an understanding without definition journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: october 2018 5 ld promotes the development of students’ academic ‘voice’ through enhancing their understanding of academic conventions, developing critical thinking and reflection strategies, written and verbal communication skills, writing and creativity. (winter et al., 2015, p.2) we can add to these summaries provided by the association of learning development on higher education (2018) and the journal of learning development in higher education (2018) on their respective websites, along with characterisations presented by the likes of samuels (2013); rust (2009); and bishop et al. (2009), to present just a few illustrative examples, to which the reader could likely add a few of their own. while there may not be any glaring inconsistencies across these various characterisations of learning development, they cannot be said to be identical, and none could lay claim to be definitive (nor do they attempt to make such a claim). even so, while each author seeks to emphasise one aspect or another of learning development values and practices, these accounts make clear that there is a high degree of shared understanding about what learning development is all about, and each account has its own merit. given this cohesiveness and shared understanding, there is perhaps a temptation to drill down further to the bedrock of what learning development is, its essential features, its essence. we are not necessarily against such an exercise. shared understanding, common cause, and a sense of professional identity and cohesion are all laudable aims, for they can be empowering to the practitioner in fostering a sense of community, of belonging, and of solidarity in a changeable higher education environment. furthermore, it will be clear to many colleagues that if we don’t somehow define ourselves, other actors in the higher education sector may seek to define us for themselves in ways that may be antithetical to our own shared professional values. in this sense the ‘status’ of learning development relates not simply to how good we might want to feel about ourselves, but to our capacity to act and exert influence, to engage in the practices that we value. notwithstanding these reasons, in this paper we argue that attempts to appeal to a ‘definitive’ understanding of learning development needs to be understood as being not without a degree of risk. indeed, we argue that an understanding constructed as ‘definitive’, while seemingly banal and uncontroversial is, in fact, inherently problematic. eyre and slawson dramatising learning development: towards an understanding without definition journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: october 2018 6 ‘clear and distinct’ why is this so? well, the very question ‘what is…?’ is bundled up with certain ontological assumptions. that is to say, the question ‘what is…?’ itself is based on potentially contestable assumptions about the nature of our being. this might sound somewhat esoteric, so let us look at why this matters. our learning developer is now back at work. the team she works in is recruiting to a new position, and her manager has asked for a copy of her role profile to base the new position on. she locates the document and, while looking over it, our learning developer notices how different the various focuses of the role profile (written three or four years ago) now seem in relation to the work she is currently engaged in. she comments on this to her manager who points out that ‘things have moved on from the way they were back then’ and ‘you’ve really made the role your own, playing to your strengths and the changing needs of the team’. another scenario: our learning developer is contacted by the university’s research support office, who oversee support for research staff. they cite her work in supporting the writing of research students and wonder if, given her expertise and experience, she would be able to offer a workshop for staff researchers as well? she is happy to oblige, delighted even, but then realises that the stated remit of her team is to support students, not staff. she wonders if turning her attentions to the support of staff might in some way be seen as a problem. a final scenario: in a one-to-one tutorial with a student, our learning developer is asked a question about research methods. this level of ‘content knowledge’ is typically left to the teachers on a programme of study to address, but the learning developer sees that the student’s progress could be advanced significantly with just a simple explanation of a routine concept that she herself, as a researcher, understands well. should she address the substance of the question or defer to the expertise of the academics in the course of study? all three of these scenarios are plausible examples of what happens when you fix (that is, write down) the ‘role’ and/or ‘remit’ of a learning developer or learning development team, or, in the case of the final scenario, where there is a tacit understanding of what is eyre and slawson dramatising learning development: towards an understanding without definition journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: october 2018 7 expected. here we have a tangible expression of the ‘what is…?’ question, framed in terms of ‘what is it you will do?’. of course, this kind of articulation of role and remit happens all the time, and we wouldn’t expect to be able to proceed in the modern university with vague suggestions or half-baked indications about what learning developers are going to do. rather, we are obliged to be accountable and transparent in our practices, often with targets and deliverables to adhere to, and this requires that our activities be articulated, documented, and communicated. however, the examples are intended to highlight the fact that, in spite of this ‘fixing down’ of individual roles or team remits, there remains a residual need to flex, to evolve our practices, to be (in managerial terms) ‘agile and responsive’. if we rigidly stuck to our respective role profiles for years on end, or refused to countenance undertaking activities that seemed to be in tension with our ‘core mission’ or commonly understood parameters, we might be seen as inflexible, bureaucratic, or lacking in vision. the comforts of a fixed understanding of our work, of having a ‘clear’ framework to which we can (and must) adhere can, over time, become a restrictive cage. malcolm and zukas (2009) highlight the tensions inherent in academic practices between the need for clarity and the need to be ‘messy’, and point to the imperative towards categorisation that prevails in contemporary higher education. those activities which cannot be clearly demarcated and understood, institutionally speaking, are liable to be ‘othered’, and devalued. here we see another expression of the need for ‘recognition’ in learning development, that is, to mitigate against such an ‘othering’ by the institutions we work within. hence, we can perceive a tension in learning development between the need to conform to some form of communicable categorisation on the one hand; and on the other, the need to defy such categorisations in order to enable responsiveness to the environment in which learning development operates; that is, to permit evolution. philosophers such as nietzsche are critics of this perceived need for clarity in our attempts to understand our world. nietzsche dismisses such attempts as ‘platonism’, the view that there exists in the world a set of pre-determined and perfect forms, if only we could uncover them (deleuze, 1990, p.253). when we fail to do so, finding only imperfection, we are liable to blame ourselves or others for this failure. instead, nietzsche (and those that followed and developed his work, including deleuze) insists that there are no forms, no fixed ideal of the way things are, only becomings. the world is not an expression of eternal, unchanging entities emanating from a transcendent domain of forms, but a eyre and slawson dramatising learning development: towards an understanding without definition journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: october 2018 8 dynamic, ever-changing, messy, domain of things in constant flux, subject to forces and relations of power. in this way, the very idea that we might be able to answer the question ‘what is learning development?’ carries with it the assumption that such a question is even answerable, perhaps by somehow discovering the ‘true form’ of learning development. but, as anyone who has talked to learning development colleagues at other institutions knows, the way learning development is expressed in different places and at different times is… different. any attempt at a ‘definitive’ understanding of ‘what is learning development?’ is soon overcome by the prevailing tendency towards particular practices rather than universal ones, or else our attempts to reach a common understanding fall short of something resembling anything definitive, and looks instead more like an exhausted, irritable consensus. ‘distinct and obscure’ this does not mean that we are destined to dwell in a permanently confused state in which all is noise and no sense at all is possible. rather, we must refocus our attention onto what we can hope to achieve in a positive sense. in his 1967 lecture the method of dramatisation, the french philosopher gilles deleuze (1925-1995) draws a distinction between what he sees as the cartesian ideal of the ‘clear and distinct’ with an idea he draws from leibniz – the ‘distinct and obscure’. to paraphrase, for deleuze there is an objective, material world that is ‘out there’. this world is dynamic, always changing. what we refer to as ‘reality’ is not simply that which has a material form, but also the conditions whereby material things are able to change. deleuze does not distinguish between the ‘real’ and the ‘possible’ (which is not real, but which somehow might become real), but between the ‘actual’ and the ‘virtual’, both of which can be said to be real. in this way of thinking, every actual thing (that we can see, touch, sense in some way) also possesses a degree of virtuality. manual delanda (2011) provides a good example of this: imagine a knife. it has a material reality – it is made of metal, has a wooden handle, is sharp, and so on. these are material properties of the actual knife, and we can measure them. but the knife also has virtual properties. one of these is its capacity to cut. we can take the knife and use it to cut something – at which eyre and slawson dramatising learning development: towards an understanding without definition journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: october 2018 9 point this capacity is said to be ‘actualised’ (that is, we have actually cut something). but we can also imagine a situation where we never use the knife to cut something. perhaps it stays in its packaging, at the back of a cupboard for all eternity: that knife’s capacity to cut remains a real property of the knife, just one which has never been actualised. we can think of that knife’s actual properties as ‘distinct’ – we can weigh it, measure it, take a photograph of it, represent it in various ways. it is distinguishable as a knife and not something else. insofar as that is our interest, we can also say that these actual, measurable properties are ‘clear’. but what is not ‘clear’ is what the knife might be used for in the future. will it be used to cut something? maybe, maybe not. the virtual properties of the knife lack clarity, for we don’t know how it will be used, or even if it will be used at all. these are virtual properties of the knife and these virtual properties can never be fully clear to us until they are actualised. while the actual properties of a thing are distinct (measurable, identifiably belonging to that thing), the virtual properties of a thing must remain obscure until they are actualised. we don’t know what is going to happen until it does – and suddenly all becomes clear. likewise, we might take the knife and instead of using it to cut something, find some way of dulling the blade so that it no longer has the capacity to cut. this blunt knife remains largely unchanged: it still looks the same, weighs the same as before. perhaps it might be used as an ornament rather than as a cutting tool. nevertheless, the physical changes to the actual knife have altered its virtual properties – it no longer has the capacity to cut. in this way, changes in the domain of the actual have an effect on the virtual, just as the virtual ‘structures’ what can be actualised. our learning developer lives and works in this dynamic world of the actual and the virtual. there are things that she actually does – you can measure them if you like: the number of students seen, the number of lectures delivered, page views for the online resources she has developed. you can document all of these actual activities, clearly and distinctly. but she also possesses virtual capacities as well, latent properties that may or may not be actualised – but which are nevertheless real. when she received the e-mail, our learning developer had the capacity to support the writing skills of staff, but this virtuality was only actualised when she was asked to do this by the research support department. over the years she has developed the capacity to be able to walk a student through some of the basics ideas of research methods, but this was not foreseen as relevant to her learning development practice until a student asked her to do it. after three or four years of responding to the environment, of being flexible, ‘agile’, in this way, the work she does has eyre and slawson dramatising learning development: towards an understanding without definition journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: october 2018 10 ‘moved on’ from her original role profile, and of course her original role profile could not have anticipated that these things would occur in the future. how could it? there may well be an expectation that everything we do should be ‘clear and distinct’, but the reality of the dynamic world we live in means that such an expectation is unrealistic. when we seek to define learning development, then, when we answer the question ‘what is…?’, we run the risk of circumscribing the virtualities inherent in such work, of shutting down what we, as practitioners, are capable of doing. definition becomes a boundary. we can see this boundary in evidence in other, more established professions – the doctor, the lawyer, the teacher. the limits and expectations in these domains are enacted through formalised codes of practice, processes of registration, and compliance regimes. a boundary circumscribes virtualities in these professions in order to ensure that certain proscribed or unvalued practices are not actualised. the boundary here represents a clear demarcation of what is permissible and is enforced through certain relations of power. but these are mature professions in the sense that the power relations at play within and around them have been stabilised (‘territorialised’ to use deleuze and guattari’s (1994) language). readers may recognise attempts to stake out a stable territory in this way in other, related areas within higher education (e.g. in educational development, as detailed by samuels, 2013). the imperative to codify accepted practices in this way can be seen as the price that must be paid (but to whom, and at what cost?) in order to occupy a certain niche within the higher education milieu. arguably, learning development remains an open prospect, whose very openness is an indication that relations of power around it remain unresolved and contestable. instead of trying to be ‘clear and distinct’, we could perhaps instead aspire to be ‘distinct and obscure’. distinct because, yes, there are a set of practices we can identify as learning development; and yes, there are common values that we share. it is certainly the case that learning development practices become clear as they are actualised – in our activities, our conversations, in the way we think about our work. but this is not the end of it. there remains a ‘virtuality’ to what we do – capacities that have yet to be actualised, or even anticipated. these are just as much a part of the reality of learning development and represent the space through which our practices might evolve, just as a fire burns in the space between the logs. this account has perhaps been rather abstract, but our hope is that our colleagues can eyre and slawson dramatising learning development: towards an understanding without definition journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: october 2018 11 see where we are coming from. we can hear the pause as many of you think: ‘okay, sure, let’s not pin ourselves down and all that, but…what do i tell my managers? they’re not going to buy all this obscurity stuff’. to answer this anticipated question, our point here is not that we don’t account for ourselves as learning developers. indeed, we must. we started this discussion by talking of recognition, understanding, and status, arguing that learning developers have need of all three in order to work effectively in our various roles. to achieve any of these things, we need to account for ourselves – our perspectives, our practices, our value (and our values). in practical terms, a learning developer can come to an understanding of our own practices (and the practices of our teams) through a process of tracing of the dynamics that constitute what we do – the various actors, agents, forces, interests, power relations, that comprise our working lives. this is an exercise in understanding our practice in the particular case. there is value in this, for in doing so, we can then speak with one another (and our managers) and compare notes – not to uncover some universal ‘truth’ about our practices, but simply to lay them side by side in order to notice patterns, to share experiences and to ‘speak alongside’ one another. the key to all of this, following deleuze’s thinking, is to initially confine the scope of such an exercise to what is actually the case, rather than seeking to devise or uncover an assumed ‘universal’ understanding, a common denominator, or a generalised view of what constitutes the ‘true’ learning development. from that point, once a perspective is obtained, we can venture outside, so to speak, and see what others have discovered – not to ‘get to the bottom of it’ (there is no bottom), but to note the tendencies across a range of practices. as we have argued, seeking a kind of fixed ‘ideal’ of practice is both illusory and unhelpful, as it sets one understanding against another in a futile process of contradiction without end (‘this, not that’), whereas the interest should lie in the dynamics of relations, in the tendencies across practices, in the drama: the clear and the distinct is the claim of the concept in the apollonian world of representation; but beneath representation there is always the idea and its distinct obscure ground, a ‘drama’ beneath all logos. (deleuze, 1967, p.101) the early work on professional certification for learning developers shows promise in this regard, as it sets out no ‘clear and distinct’, codified, criteria for the practitioner to ‘tick off’, no defined role or ‘core practices’, but rather a broad but coherent set of values for the practitioner to consider and respond to, which in turn is then assessed by members of the aldinhe community (briggs, 2018). this at least provides the basis for a distinctive eyre and slawson dramatising learning development: towards an understanding without definition journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: october 2018 12 understanding of learning development but retains the space for a necessary degree of obscurity and dynamism. a ‘pedagogy’ of learning development in their book what is philosophy (1994), deleuze and his collaborator felix guattari suggest that a concept moves through three ages as it develops (deleuze and guattari, 1994, p.12), and we can include here the ‘concept’ of learning development. a concept starts in what the authors refer to as an age of the ’encyclopedia’, in which the creation of a concept is a function of our individual perspective. we can see an example of this whenever we examine our own individual practices of learning development, for our dayto-day work is understood and known by ourselves, as reflective individuals, our myriad experiences accumulating much as the entries in an encyclopedia accumulate. the following age deleuze and guattari refer to as ‘pedagogy’, and it is in this age that a concept (and indeed, a field of practice unified under that concept) truly lives: the concept as a creative force. we can see this unleashing of potential occur as learning developers engage and share practices with one another, our perspectival individual experiences becoming part of a broader whole. our various perspectives are enhanced and enriched as we learn from each other, creating (and actualising) a distinctive ‘learning development’. finally, however, as it becomes more established, a concept can become prone to stasis, in what deleuze and guattari refer to as the age of ’commercial professional training’. here the concept is reduced to formulaic repetition, drained of life and energy, and conceived entirely in the actual without any sense of its inherent virtuality: entirely ‘objective’, but as a consequence merely a lifeless object. for learning developers, this would represent a stifling of our creative potential as we attempt to adhere to self-imposed criteria for compliance (or else imposed by others), with none of the creative ‘obscurity’ which permits our evolution as practitioners. deleuze and guattari, in their writing on philosophy, caution against shifting from the dynamics of ‘pedagogy’ into the disastrous formalisms of ‘commercial professional training’: eyre and slawson dramatising learning development: towards an understanding without definition journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: october 2018 13 if the three ages of the concept are the encyclopedia, pedagogy, and commercial professional training, only the second can safeguard us against falling from the heights of the first into the disaster of the third – an absolute disaster for thought whatever its benefits might be, of course, from the viewpoint of universal capitalism. (deleuze and guattari, 1994, p.12) conclusion there is in this a note of caution for us then, in our project of obtaining recognition, understanding and status for learning development. the ‘absolute disaster of thought’ represented by the third age of the concept is the point at which the concept of learning development, indeed the very notion of education which it seeks to underpin, ceases to be an active, living, entity, and becomes instead the ‘clear and distinct’ object of commodification and exchange, drained of its virtual capacities to evolve, ‘…overwhelmed by regimes of quality-control, coupled with an ultimately nihilistic, because empty, notion of excellence’ (standish, 2008, p.222). we have argued that it is better to determine what is distinctive about our work without recourse to any sense of there being a transcendent ‘universal’ understanding of learning development. such an approach focuses our attention instead on the relational dynamics and tendencies inherent in each particular case of practice, and how they came to be that way. by recognising that there is no fixed ideal form of learning development, we preserve our virtual capacities to respond to our ceaselessly shifting world of higher education, and so too evolve along with our practices. anything else would surely sell us out and sell us short. a learning developer walks into a bar. ‘damn’, she thinks, ‘we should have set it higher’. references association for learning development in higher education (2018) about aldinhe. available at: http://www.aldinhe.ac.uk/about.html (accessed: 25 may 2018). bishop, c., bowmaker, c. and finnigan, t. (2009) ‘mrs mop, mechanic and/or miracle worker: metaphors of study support’, journal of learning development in higher education, issue 1, february, pp. 1-14. http://www.aldinhe.ac.uk/about.html eyre and slawson dramatising learning development: towards an understanding without definition journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: october 2018 14 briggs, s. (2018) ‘development of the aldinhe recognition scheme: certifying the ‘learning developer’ title’, journal of learning development in higher education, issue 13, april, pp. 1-11. delanda, m. (2011) metaphysics as ontology: aristotle and deleuze's realism [online lecture]. european graduate school video lectures. available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zjmkgtyfk4 (accessed: 26 may 2018). deleuze, g. (1967) ‘appendix 1: the method of dramatization: paper presented to the société française de philosophie’, 28 january, bulletin de la société française de philosophie. lxii pp. 89-118. deleuze, g. (1990) the logic of sense. new york: columbia university press. deleuze, g. and guattari, f. (1994) what is philosophy? london: verso. hilsdon, j. (2011) ‘what is learning development?’, in hartley, p., hilsdon, j. and keenan, c. (eds.) learning development in higher education. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan, pp.13-27. hilsdon, j. (2018) the significance of the field of practice ‘learning development’ in uk higher education. thesis. available at: https://pearl.plymouth.ac.uk/bitstream/handle/10026.1/10604/2018hilsdon10029559 edd.pdf?sequence=1&isallowed=y (accessed: 25 may 2018). journal of learning development in higher education (2018) home page. available at: https://journal.aldinhe.ac.uk/index.php/jldhe (accessed: 25 may 2018). malcolm, j. and zukas, m. (2009) ‘making a mess of academic work: experience, purpose and identity’, teaching in higher education, 14(5), pp. 495-506. rust, c. (2009) ‘a call to unite in a common cause’, journal of learning development in higher education, issue 1, february, pp. 1-5. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zjmkgtyfk4 https://pearl.plymouth.ac.uk/bitstream/handle/10026.1/10604/2018hilsdon10029559edd.pdf?sequence=1&isallowed=y https://pearl.plymouth.ac.uk/bitstream/handle/10026.1/10604/2018hilsdon10029559edd.pdf?sequence=1&isallowed=y https://journal.aldinhe.ac.uk/index.php/jldhe eyre and slawson dramatising learning development: towards an understanding without definition journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: october 2018 15 samuels, p. (2013) ‘promoting learning development as an academic discipline’, journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5, march, pp. 1-22. sinfield, s., holley, d., burns, t., hoskins, k., o’neill, p. and harrington, k. (2011) ‘raising the student voice: learning development as socio-political practice’, in hartley, p., hilsdon, j. and keenan, c. (eds.) learning development in higher education. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan, pp. 53-63. standish, p. (2008) ‘the education concept’, in smeyers, p. and depaepe, m. (eds.) educational research: the educationalization of social problems. belgium: springer, pp. 217-226. winter, j., barton, g., allison, j. and cotton, d. (2015) ‘learning development and education for sustainability: what are the links?’, journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8, march, pp. 1-23. author details jason eyre and tracy slawson are senior lecturers in learning development in the centre for learning and study support at de montfort university, leicester. dramatising learning development: towards an understanding without definition abstract introduction: a learning developer walks into a bar… the appeal of the definitive ‘clear and distinct’ ‘distinct and obscure’ a ‘pedagogy’ of learning development conclusion references author details literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 10: november 2016 the complete guide to referencing and avoiding plagiarism a book review of neville, c. (2016) the complete guide to referencing and avoiding plagiarism. 3rd edn. london: open university press. isbn-13: 978-0-33-526202-1. jason eyre de montfort university, uk keywords: referencing; plagiarism; academic practice; disciplinarity. colin neville’s third edition of the complete guide to referencing and avoiding plagiarism sees this useful and popular text extensively re-written and updated. aimed at uk-based university students and staff alike, the essential structure of the book remains familiar to those who have made use of earlier editions (first published in 2007, with the second edition published in 2010). neville makes extensive use of quizzes, quotes from students and academics, and presents concrete examples to bring the more abstract ideas to life, and these elements remain in this update. there are, however, some key differences with the previous incarnation. the excellent early chapters providing the contextual background to referencing and citation practices have been retained and enhanced (for example, there are now nine good reasons to reference rather than six). the chapter on the ‘what and when of referencing’ has been split into two distinct chapters, one dealing with the ‘what’, the other with the ‘when’. the content of these chapters has been largely reorganised and incorporates more visual representations of some of the key concepts, but otherwise remains fairly similar in content and tone. perhaps most significant are the addition of two entirely new chapters on: referencing and writing; and referencing in the digital world. the latter chapter is a short but useful addition, bringing in discussions of reference management software, text matching software (such as turnitin), and how to evaluate and reference a website. these discussions are prefaced with a concise snapshot of how much has changed in recent years in terms of the digital eyre the complete guide to referencing and avoiding plagiarism journal of learning development in higher education, issue 10: november 2016 2 scholarly environment. the coverage of these quite wide-ranging areas is somewhat brief, and the fact that they are brought together under the ‘digital world’ banner makes the content feel just a little tacked-on. one would expect that any future editions would find the content of this particular chapter integrated into other parts of the text as the seeming novelty of the ‘digital’ fades. the new chapter on referencing and writing is far more extensive and, certainly from my own perspective as a learning developer in higher education, far more significant. this addition has been integrated into the text to follow logically on from the chapter on plagiarism, which itself has been extensively revised, and the two can be seen to work together rather well. rather than commencing with a discussion of the various aspects of plagiarism as in the 2010 edition, the chapter on plagiarism now begins with a number of quizzes and case studies to test the reader’s initial understanding of this rather contested and complex term; indeed, there is a new emphasis on the problematic nature of plagiarism as a concept, and although he doesn’t put in quite the same terms, neville highlights how the imperative to share, to borrow, to adapt (the proliferation of knowledge), works against the imperatives of ownership and acknowledgment (the containment of knowledge). neville does well to present a more nuanced account of plagiarism in higher education than in the previous edition. significantly, there is less of an emphasis here on international students as being particularly prone to plagiarism, viewing the ‘cultural’ issues involved more broadly to potentially apply to anyone new to uk higher education. the new chapter on writing and referencing takes up where the discussion of ‘avoiding plagiarism’ in the previous chapter leaves off. this is a most welcome development, as plagiarism is now framed in the context of academic writing rather than a somewhat isolated phenomenon, and approaches to writing are more clearly presented as an appropriate means to address issues of both plagiarism and ‘bad academic practice’. the chapter moves from a discussion of the practicalities of integrating citations into a text to a more in-depth discussion of academic writing, bringing in such topics as critical analysis and the idea of ‘voice’ in writing. much of the content of this chapter was present in the previous edition, but was buried in a chapter in the middle of the book and consequently perhaps didn’t clearly connect to the broader issues around academic practice; the new edition corrects the structural flaw. for me, this approaches the problem from the right eyre the complete guide to referencing and avoiding plagiarism journal of learning development in higher education, issue 10: november 2016 3 direction, emphasising how the development of writing practices can improve academic practice overall, as opposed to presenting ‘plagiarism’ as a pernicious problem in need of some kind of remedy. in the previous edition, this emphasis of the importance of writing practices was alluded to (for example, in the section in the plagiarism chapter on ‘patchwork writing’), but the new chapter in the latest edition presents a far more thorough account. the second and third sections of the text remain largely unchanged from their equivalent sections in the previous edition, although updated and revised throughout. part two presents a detailed account of referencing styles. neville’s introduction to this section makes much of the proliferation and variety of styles, pointing out that students can find this confusing. one issue i have with neville here is his recommendation that students put pressure on university managers to reduce the number of referencing styles they have to deal with (ch.8, p.102). the proliferation of styles may well confuse the student, but is it the place of senior management to impose rules on the number of styles a university may employ? if we view the various referencing styles as concrete expressions of disciplinary discourse, then i wonder how such directives from university managers would go down with academic staff. earlier in the text neville writes: ‘each referencing style… has its own standardised ‘language’: a way of presenting information and way of communicating with others in an academic community’ (ch 2, p.21). i have an issue with the use of the term ‘standardised’ here. i would characterise referencing styles as being more conventional and fluid than standardised, a term which implies that there is a ‘correct’ form that has been agreed to and codified somewhere. clearly, in spite of numerous localised attempts at such codification, this is not the case; indeed, the very proliferation of localised ‘versions’ of the common referencing genres (name-date; numerical-footnote; sequential numbering) belies any attempt at a more universal standardisation. this tells us something about referencing, insofar as it represents a localised form of discipline affiliation which resists interference from without (notably, from institutions); it also tells us much about some disciplines, where the insistence on one particular variation is rigidly enforced by academics within that discipline (you know who you are). part three of the book is mostly given over to providing examples of references. no such listing could possibly be exhaustive, and neville has clearly focused on what he has established are the most common genre of styles (that is, ‘harvard’ and the numerical systems). the types of sources listed are as up to date as they probably could hope to be eyre the complete guide to referencing and avoiding plagiarism journal of learning development in higher education, issue 10: november 2016 4 – the presence here of twitter and buzzfeed aside, we can always find some new format to cite (wither instagram?). some may object that these social media are not particularly ‘academic’ sources anyway; but then neither, perhaps, is ‘street art/graffiti’ at first blush, but its presence here will satisfy those in art, design, media studies, semiotics and sociology. to that extent, neville has made a good fist of selecting which sources to provide examples for, and the examples themselves are clearly presented. his treatment of (uk) government publications, long the bane of students of the social sciences, is particularly clear and concise. a more serious objection is the utility of this section. if localised rules prevail (as acknowledged in chapter 8), what is the role of neville’s extensive (if not quite exhaustive) listing of sources – nearly a third of the entire book? one can envisage a student assiduously using neville’s text to reference an essay or report, only to be pulled up by their marker for some diacritical infraction of the locally prescribed referencing system. perhaps neville could have acknowledged such a possibility and offered a caveat to the student in his introduction to this section? in spite of this particular shortcoming, one can also envisage this section being utilised fruitfully by academic staff and librarians keen to update their own, local referencing guides; or being consulted by librarians seeking to answer that tricky ‘how do i reference…’ question. a further minor criticism of the text overall is that the proliferation of numbered lists, section headings, subheadings and tables make the text somewhat difficult to navigate at times, although perhaps that is a criticism most likely to be made by a reviewer than the general reader. neville’s revisions and structural reorganisation of the text represent a laudable improvement on the previous edition, which itself represented probably the most comprehensive and accessible discussion available on referencing and citation practices in uk higher education. author details jason eyre is a senior lecturer in learning development at de montfort university, leicester. he has an interest in disciplinarity and the role of context in learning. he is eyre the complete guide to referencing and avoiding plagiarism journal of learning development in higher education, issue 10: november 2016 5 currently working on his doctorate in the philosophy of education at the ucl institute of education. the complete guide to referencing and avoiding plagiarism a book review of neville, c. (2016) the complete guide to referencing and avoiding plagiarism. 3rd edn. london: open university press. isbn-13: 978-0-33-526202-1. author details article journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 14: april 2019 ________________________________________________________________________ the leap (learning excellence achievement pathway) framework: a model for student learning development in higher education emily mcintosh university of bolton, uk mary e. barden university of bolton, uk abstract this article explores the development of the leap (learning excellence achievement pathway) framework at the university of bolton, uk. it describes the nature of the project and focuses on the methodology involved in conducting an institution-wide audit of student learning development (ld) provision and producing a visual framework to stimulate a culture of ld within the organisation. whilst most uk universities offer a student ld programme at undergraduate level, little work has been undertaken to develop and define a visual framework which underpins these programmes and assists students to conceptualise their progress. this paper explores the context for creating an ld framework and outlines how ld provision is mapped to align curricular ld opportunities with co-curricular student engagement initiatives. the article then considers the implementation of the leap framework. a mixed-methods evaluation activity was conducted, involving both staff and students, using a variety of data. evaluation methods were used to assess the impact of the framework on student ld, revealing a number of positive changes to their ld behaviour and habits, their assessment of ld, the accessibility of help and support and their awareness of the context in which ld takes place. finally, we identify future developments to the framework to embed it further within the institution. keywords: learning development framework; digital literacy; academic development; learning development culture; digital badging; student engagement. mcintosh and barden the leap (learning excellence achievement pathway) framework: a model for student learning development in higher education journal of learning development in higher education, issue 14: april 2019 2 introduction higher education (he) is changing rapidly. the introduction of the teaching excellence framework (tef), enshrined in the higher education and research act (hera, 2017), places a firm focus on metrics to quantify student retention, success and employability. the dearing report (ncihe, 1997) argued that students need to become more selfdirected and identified that students require support to develop the skills necessary to succeed in he. in 2009, gibbs offered a conceptual map of learning development (ld) and identified the need for students to develop the ability ‘to cope with the challenging intellectual and academic demands they face, and to develop their sophistication as learners within their academic disciplines’ (gibbs, 2009, p.2). almost ten years on, student learning development, that is curricular and co-curricular skills activities, has gained in importance. indeed, ld is now a key part of the student experience (hilsdon, 2011). ld initiatives offer students the opportunity to explore skills and competencies, and help them make sense of academic and professional practices, as well as reflecting on their progress and identifying future actions. most uk universities offer a student ld programme at undergraduate level but little work has been undertaken to develop and define a framework which underpins and champions these programmes, providing adequate visibility for them across the organisation. reedy and goodfellow (2014, pp.1-2) endorse the european e-learning programme’s definition of an educational framework as: a rational structure that organises institutional assumptions, curriculum objectives, educational concepts, ethical values, technologies, pedagogical goals and constraints, and professional practices, in order to implement educational policies. we extend this definition, and apply it to ld practice in he specifically, to propose that an ld framework is one which integrates and combines curricular and co-curricular developmental activities to structure, scaffold, champion, highlight and embed student ld in all its forms. here, we define curricular ld activity as that which takes place within traditional academic teaching and learning environments. this includes capturing the experiences that happen within lectures, seminars, virtual learning environments (vles), live briefs, and placements. co-curricular activity is defined as equally central to student ld and captures any activity, whether it be peer learning, volunteering, or participation in mcintosh and barden the leap (learning excellence achievement pathway) framework: a model for student learning development in higher education journal of learning development in higher education, issue 14: april 2019 3 clubs and societies, that encourages students to apply their skills and experiences in practice, forming a central part of their development as learners. we argue that a student ld framework should be collaborative and involve the whole institution; its success should be measured in the provision of inclusive, high-quality ld activities, delivered and embedded across recognised institutional and disciplinary boundaries. an ld framework should encourage autonomous and deep learning strategies and support students to become lifelong learners, indeed, ‘citizen scholars’ (arvanitakis and hornsby, 2016). in terms of student outcomes, students who engage in ld activities should not only value the acquisition of disciplinary knowledge and skills, but also apply these in various contexts. the impact of this approach on student outcomes, employability and the pursuit of further study should also be significant. this paper outlines the design and development of the leap (learning excellence achievement pathway) framework at the university of bolton, uk. the leap framework was developed over a period of twelve months and launched formally in september 2017. the paper describes the institutional project and the methodology involved in designing, developing and launching the leap framework and evaluates its initial impact on student ld. the framework was produced as part of an institutional project to streamline ld provision across taught programmes and has achieved significant success in the twelve months since its launch. learning development in context – the uk perspective in 2011, hilsdon explored student ld within the context of uk he, declaring it critical to the student experience. hilsdon reflects on the ‘increasing currency’ of ld and the use of the term to describe ‘a complex set of multi-disciplinary and cross-disciplinary academic roles and functions’ arguing that ld’s distinguishing feature is in emphasising ‘how students experience and make sense of learning activities and academic practices’ but that its ‘status and meaning remain contested’ (2011, p.14). indeed, hilsdon highlights that the word ‘development’ is critical to emphasising the process of learning at university, thus dissociating the ld agenda from the more traditional ‘deficit model’ of study skills and skills acquisition (pp.16-17). hilsdon considers the challenges associated in delivering ld within a progressively massified and diversified uk he system with an increasingly large number of students from ‘non-traditional’ backgrounds and a focus on employability and graduate mcintosh and barden the leap (learning excellence achievement pathway) framework: a model for student learning development in higher education journal of learning development in higher education, issue 14: april 2019 4 skills (pp.14-15). hilsdon also addresses the dangers of associating ld with deficit discourses and highlights some of the challenges affecting its delivery. these include the provision of ‘specialised support’ and ‘services’ to students, which champions a culture of ‘consumerism’ and goes against embedding ld within mainstream teaching and learning. similarly, verity and trowler (2011) write about the institutional context for ld, stressing its significance, the importance of giving it a ‘voice beyond [its] immediate vicinity’, and also providing cross-organisational opportunities to develop ‘new practices and embed new resources within curricula’ (pp. 245-6). the lessons learned about ‘organisational architecture’ are significant because they send important messages about how ld is seen as either ‘a fundamental aspect of teaching and learning, or a remedial understanding where underperforming students need ‘fixing’ (p. 246). the accepted view, therefore, is that ld should be embedded within ‘core teaching’, that it should be developmental rather than remedial, and not challenged by ‘bolt-on’ provision (p. 246). indeed, barlow, acroyd, and phillips (2011) place emphasis on the importance of ‘self-directed learning’, ‘learner autonomy’, and promoting the concept of ‘lifelong learning’ as central tenets of student ld (pp.42-43). seven years on, more significant and far-reaching changes have occurred within and outside of the sector. these include the increase of student fees, in 2012, to more than £9,000 a year. the hera (2017) now places a metrics-based approach at the heart of assessing value in he. the tef metrics assess university performance in teaching and learning based on student retention, degree outcomes, satisfaction (as measured by the national student survey, nss) and the number of graduates in highly-skilled employment. at the same time, students with ‘marginal learner identities’ (reay et al, 2010) such as those with disabilities, those from black, asian and minority ethnic (bame) backgrounds and those from low socio-economic backgrounds, struggle to persist in he and, if they do, are less likely to achieve a good honours degree (zimdars et al, 2015). we argue that these changes threaten to unbalance the embedded and ‘developmental’ culture of student ld in teaching and learning. governmental policy can potentially damage the good practice that has been emerging in universities in recent decades, one which seeks to understand each student’s context and background, the way in which they learn, how they connect ideas and agendas, how they apply their knowledge and also the ways in which they reflect on their development. here, we argue that the provision of ld is now more important than ever to the mission of uk he but that to add real value and meaningful mcintosh and barden the leap (learning excellence achievement pathway) framework: a model for student learning development in higher education journal of learning development in higher education, issue 14: april 2019 5 change ld needs to be more visible institutionally, positioned strategically, embedded within the curriculum and championed holistically across the whole university, as well as within disciplinary programmes. ld should therefore be at the forefront of interventions to encourage students to understand the purpose of he and their role within it. it is only through a culture of strategic endorsement for ld that we can establish true staff-student partnership which guards against the language of consumerism (mcintosh and cross, 2017) and encourage colleagues in he to work with students as co-creators and coinvestigators of this important ld agenda. learning development at the university of bolton, uk ld activities, broadly conceived, have always been a significant feature of student support at bolton and they are central to the delivery of our student experience and learning, teaching and assessment strategies (2015-2020). these recognise the importance of ld and student-centred pedagogies for student retention, progression and success. central to this is a recognition that initiatives developed to support our students must consider the diversity of our student body and be sensitive to their context. we are one of the most socially diverse he institutions in the uk: many of our learners are mature (54%), part-time (33%) and commute into university from the local area (over 91%). over 74% are from the lowest-participation neighbourhoods, over 14% have a recognised disability or mental health issue and 34% are from bame backgrounds. many of these student groups experience recognised differences in degree outcomes (zimdars et al, 2015) which means that integrated and embedded ld initiatives are particularly critical to the development of our student support infrastructure. as a result, the institution operates a model of early intervention and transitional support (ei) which comprises six elements to support student transition, progression and success. ld (the leap programme) is one of these six critical elements in this infrastructure and sits alongside welcome and induction, personal tutoring and peer support (see figure 1). figure 1. the six dimensions of the early intervention and transitional support (ei) model mcintosh and barden the leap (learning excellence achievement pathway) framework: a model for student learning development in higher education journal of learning development in higher education, issue 14: april 2019 6 a learning development working group (ldwg) was established in 2015 to take forward institutional ld. the principal aim of the group was to re-conceptualise ld to ensure that it is a fundamental feature of the ei approach. the objectives of the ldwg were to bring together various stakeholders from across the institution to: (1) carry out a systematic review, audit and evaluation of ld provision across the institution; (2) facilitate a shared understanding of ld and establish the most effective ways of providing embedded ld opportunities; (3) develop a culture of ld by exchanging ideas, developing expertise and sharing examples of best practice and (4) develop a ld framework which outlines the skills, knowledge and attributes required of students at different he levels and modes of study. key to this was a fundamental recognition that ld is developmental, contextual and critical to encouraging learner independence and autonomy. the systematic review revealed significant differences in the design, delivery and terminology used to describe various ld initiatives across the institution. whilst ld activities have always been delivered at bolton in some shape or form, ld as a concept had been largely undefined and unarticulated. in 2015, ld activity was fractured and without coordination; there was undue focus on study skills over development, ld had no mcintosh and barden the leap (learning excellence achievement pathway) framework: a model for student learning development in higher education journal of learning development in higher education, issue 14: april 2019 7 natural ‘home’ within the organisational architecture and there was also a disconnect between study skills modules, undertaken within the curriculum, and wider co-curricular student-engagement activities. as a result, ld was not recognised as a powerful strategic vehicle within which to promote learner autonomy, student transition and success. at that time there were three principal areas of ld activity in the institution, in addition to the delivery of programme-specific skills modules: (1) bissto (bolton interactive study skills tutorial online), an online ld programme in the library, (2) the skills for success programme which delivered 1:1 academic writing and numeracy support and (3) the bitesize study skills programme, delivered by the student liaison officers (slos) which offered one hour face-to-face workshops. the different names used to describe these interventions meant that they were not linked in the institution’s consciousness and, as a result, were perpetuating a deficit approach. ld opportunities were not overtly visible to staff or students as being an integral part of student ld per se. whilst these initiatives were well-regarded by students and staff familiar with them, they were seen as separate ‘bolt-on’ entities, delivered by separate teams and hidden rather than embedded. after a short consultation with staff and students, leap (learning excellence achievement pathway) was adopted as a universal term to recognise cross-institutional, embedded ld activity and work began to design and develop the leap framework. the development of the leap framework whilst the ambition of leap is to connect and champion a mainstream culture of ld across the organisation, we also recognise that students identify primarily with their discipline (thomas, 2012 and 2017) and that this is fundamental to realising their cohort and learner identity (whannell and whannell, 2015). gibbs (2009, p.4) acknowledges the importance of embedding ld in a disciplinary context as there is ‘little evidence that skills can transfer across contexts’. moreover, he argues that as ld policy shifts to working with the ‘whole institution, in ways that are aligned with other institutional efforts, as part of a broad strategy . . . efforts will need to be well conceptualised and backed up with convincing empirical evidence of impact’ (gibbs, 2009, p.9). this links with the longstanding debate concerning the distinction between ‘core’ and ‘generic’ study skills and their overall ‘transferability’ (bennet et al, 1999, p.76) and also relates to the complex inter-relationship between the learning that takes place outside of the academy and the mcintosh and barden the leap (learning excellence achievement pathway) framework: a model for student learning development in higher education journal of learning development in higher education, issue 14: april 2019 8 rapidly changing global environment. bligh et al (2010, p.1) sum up the nature of the challenge that this presents: he involves attempts to allow students to gain new knowledge, understanding and skills. at the core . . . are complex concepts, theories and ideas. . . . effective university teachers and students are constantly searching for better ways to both engage in teaching and facilitate new models of learning within these disciplines. when developing the leap framework, it was therefore necessary to strike a delicate balance between the delivery of ld within and external to each academic discipline. it was also important to acknowledge that there are manifold opportunities for students to learn both inside and outside of the classroom and, indeed, the academy. these factors were taken into consideration when formulating the framework methodology and in the contextualisation and strategic coordination of the resulting leap programme. a core goal was for the framework to be used primarily within the curriculum, endorsed by academic colleagues and actively used in the classroom for the delivery of skills and ld activities at the discipline level. the leap framework (mcintosh and barden, 2016) was developed systematically over a period of several months. it was then issued, in draft, to academic schools and professional support services for consultation. the ld audit was used as an initial baseline scoping exercise and the information gathered for that informed the overall framework methodology. this consisted of two principal activities: (1) an in-depth analysis of the content delivered in ld or skills modules situated within the curriculum (across all academic programmes), and (2) cross-referencing academic skills module data and analysis with the various co-curricular engagement and learning development opportunities available to students. the in-depth analysis of skills module content involved systematically analysing the skills module specification for over 40 academic programmes delivered across the institution. this exercise revealed the breadth of ld interventions delivered at the discipline and curricular level although, perhaps unsurprisingly, we found that there were also many commonalities across programmes such as academic writing, report writing, digital literacy and referencing. we used this information to create a map of ld topics and these were then cross-referenced with the co-curricular activities delivered mcintosh and barden the leap (learning excellence achievement pathway) framework: a model for student learning development in higher education journal of learning development in higher education, issue 14: april 2019 9 in other areas of the institution, such as in the library and careers. once these two main activities were complete we analysed the topics and identified distinct themes. four dominant categories emerged from this exercise and we used these to inform the four principal dimensions of the leap framework: (1) my academic development; (2) my personal development; (3) my digital literacy, and (4) my student engagement. within these four dimensions we identified significant sub-dimensions (three in each, twelve in total) and, following that, used these sub-dimensions to identify the best fit for the different ld topics we had recognised in our analysis, which were then listed accordingly. the overall framework structure of the dimensions, sub-dimensions and topics, delivered at level he3 and he4, are illustrated in figure 2. further work was undertaken to identify the delivery of ld at different he levels of study to chart the progressive development of skills over time. separate topic lists, using the same dimensions and sub-dimensions, were identified for learners in he5 and he6. this helped to distinguish he3 and he4 ld activities from more advanced ld activities for students in higher years, such as dissertation writing. figure 2. the four dimensions of the leap framework incorporating twelve subdimensions and ld topics at he3 and he4. mcintosh and barden the leap (learning excellence achievement pathway) framework: a model for student learning development in higher education journal of learning development in higher education, issue 14: april 2019 10 within the my academic development dimension, three sub-dimensions were identified: my research needs, my writing techniques, and my assessments. these subdimensions reflect the apparent distinction made in curriculum delivery between research, writing and assessment. highlighting these topics separately, but aligning them under the heading of academic development, ensures that the various components of academic development are visible and connected. placing complementary topics alongside one another visually is designed to encourage students to consider and reflect, developmentally, upon the connections between different ld concepts. at the same time, these sub-dimensions provide a nominal structure, and flexibility, for students to explore ld opportunities, primarily within the classroom setting. the leap framework is sustainable and can develop and respond to the evolving, embedded delivery of ld over time – it is possible to add subject-level or disciplinary topics under these broad headings. this applies at both the institutional and local, i.e. discipline level. the topics listed under these sub-dimensions are not exhaustive and allow for further growth. under the my digital literacy category, a distinction is made in the sub-dimensions between my ict, my digital footprint and my virtual learning. this is to ensure that students are not only able to recognise the difference between developing the skills needed to use various digital technologies (e.g. email, various software packages and social media platforms), but also to develop sustainable habits which ensure that they are able to critically evaluate the use of such tools in their ld journey. when identifying the dimensions, sub-dimensions and topics, our approach was informed by various external frameworks which promote learner independence and developmental activity, including the citizen scholar framework (arvanitakis and hornsby, 2016). this framework highlights student skills, attributes and proficiencies, emphasising the social mission of he. arvanitakis and hornsby relate he to practical life and highlight the pedagogical importance of creativity, critical thinking and problem solving. importantly, they make a distinction between process-driven and design and systems thinking, encouraging the student to reflect on the process of their learning, not just the product. our approach also considered and drew upon the categories in the sconul seven pillars of information literacy (revised, 2011) as well as the higher education academy flexible learning framework (hea, 2015). we intended to create a thematic framework for students to explore the relationship between core topics and themes and to relate this to mcintosh and barden the leap (learning excellence achievement pathway) framework: a model for student learning development in higher education journal of learning development in higher education, issue 14: april 2019 11 their experience in the classroom, and also outside of it. the framework is designed as a visible, informative tool for exploring ld, for organising resources and content which sit underneath it and focussing on the potential inter-relationship between common underpinning topics and themes. the recognised structures that inform ld practices in he were therefore made more visible and accessible to staff and students. reedy and goodfellow (2014) in particular, endorse hall et al’s (2014) review of digital literacy frameworks and highlight the importance of guarding against approaches that reduce complex ld concepts into a series of ‘discrete collections of skills and practices’ (p.4). the leap framework champions, visually, the fundamental pillars of ld within our university, but one of its key features is the opportunity for further exploration and contextualisation within the classroom. the framework is intended to be used and endorsed by academic colleagues at the embedded, discipline level, a practice which is designed to encourage all students to see the value of exploring their learning and experiences and connecting disparate themes and agendas in a way that helps them to construct new meaning and relate it to their subject knowledge and the conventions of their discipline. one significant aim of the leap framework is to acknowledge the role of students as partners in their learning experience and this is apparent in the my student engagement dimension. the framework supports students to develop self-efficacy and capability in their chosen subject area. it also supports them to take advantage of the opportunities and experiences which will help them to develop as lifelong, autonomous learners and to pursue their chosen career path. the leap framework can assist students to navigate different points of transition into and across their degree programme, acknowledging independent learning and the proposition that students themselves have a key part to play in making their goals a reality. the framework is designed to empower students to tackle their academic and personal development in a pragmatic and meaningful way, by providing an organic and flexible structure within which to organise skills module content and related resource materials. it promotes the values of student ownership and partnership which is much discussed in the literature on student engagement (trowler, 2010; russel, 2015; mcintosh, 2017; mcintosh and cross, 2017). the leap framework is designed to help students develop confidence and self-efficacy through the promotion of student engagement, peer learning and reflective practice, alongside academic development, all of which are essential to the creation of a vibrant and stimulating, applied learning environment. the framework is also designed to assist the university to showcase mcintosh and barden the leap (learning excellence achievement pathway) framework: a model for student learning development in higher education journal of learning development in higher education, issue 14: april 2019 12 to students the multitude of opportunities available to create for themselves a unique, dynamic, stretching and challenging student experience. these factors were taken into consideration when the framework was designed and inform its ongoing development. although the underpinning dimensions and sub-dimensions, which inform structure of the leap framework, were mapped across different levels of study from he3 to he6 (as demonstrated in figure 2), we identified the need for one holistic, visual model to represent the framework itself. this ensures that the framework is visible, identifiable and can be used to showcase and embed the different dimensions, sub-dimensions and categories within the curriculum. a visual model helps to engage staff and students in developmental conversations about ld across the institution. as bligh et al (2010, p.1) argue, visual techniques must be used to support learning in he and, in particular ‘models . . . play a critical role in supporting learning of complex ideas’. we therefore created a circular model for the leap framework which is accessible, engaging and gives parity to all four dimensions and twelve sub-dimensions. the circular representation, illustrated in figure 3, is an icon of student ld across the institution. embedded content and resources sit underneath the framework which scaffolds ld provision and is designed to reduce many of the barriers to independent learning that students face, particularly when they first transition into university (kift and nelson, 2005). figure 3. the circular representation of the leap framework. mcintosh and barden the leap (learning excellence achievement pathway) framework: a model for student learning development in higher education journal of learning development in higher education, issue 14: april 2019 13 the leap framework: an initial evaluation in the twelve months since the launch of the leap framework we have been evaluating its effectiveness by investigating the use of leap online (lo) within embedded, blended and classroom settings. lo is an interactive digital resource, built using instructional design measures, and used to promote student ld and information literacy: it is primarily accessed by academic colleagues and students within the classroom and in a blended environment, with moodle (vle) integration. whilst bissto, the forerunner to lo, was well regarded by those who used it, it was disconnected from classroom learning and mcintosh and barden the leap (learning excellence achievement pathway) framework: a model for student learning development in higher education journal of learning development in higher education, issue 14: april 2019 14 teaching activities, not embedded within timetabled module delivery and separate from moodle. as part of the development process, work was completed to redesign bissto, align it with the leap framework and create an ld tool for embedded delivery of ld content and resources, led by academics within the classroom. lo was launched in september 2017 and it can be accessed here: https://www.bolton.ac.uk/leaponline/home.aspx. the circular representation of the framework is the principal interface for the lo portal where students are able to explore information literacy and access interactive ld modules. badged assessments are used to track completion of ld activities and a full analysis of the data will be provided in a subsequent paper. in addition to using the badged assessments to evaluate the effectiveness of lo, we devised two online questionnaires, one for staff and one for students in the first six weeks after launch. at that time there were 370 badge holders. these were surveyed about their ld habits and, in particular, their use of lo. 55 students responded to the survey with overwhelmingly positive feedback. 91% (n=50) of respondents had been recommended to use leap online by their academics. 70% (n=38) of the students had been encouraged to earn the digital badges. 87% (n=48) enjoy collecting the badges. most students stated that they completed the activities in each section and almost 80% (n=44) found them useful. we also captured qualitative comments. a thematic content analysis (braun and clarke, 2006; bryman, 2008) of the free-text comments revealed that responses about the impact of lo fell into four dominant categories: (1) their ld behaviour and habits, (2) assessment of skills, (3) accessing help and support, (4) different ld contexts. in terms of (1) ld behaviour and habits many students (n=28) stated that using lo had improved their academic skills and helped to build confidence. several students requested further content and increased levels of difficulty. of particular interest in the comments concerning ld behaviour and habits were the comments about the usefulness of the content and the impact that this had on their ld journey, particularly on the development of new competencies and skills. one student commented: ‘the academic writing section has really helped with referencing and avoiding plagiarism’ and another mentioned that lo has ‘helped me to learn how to construct and plan an assignment, so it has benefitted me massively’. students also commented on raised levels of self-awareness and reflection: ‘it has made me more aware of my academic writing and referencing skills’. in terms of (2) assessment of skills, respondents were actively reflecting on their progress: ‘building https://www.bolton.ac.uk/leaponline/home.aspx mcintosh and barden the leap (learning excellence achievement pathway) framework: a model for student learning development in higher education journal of learning development in higher education, issue 14: april 2019 15 confidence, learning new skills, refreshing already acquired knowledge’ and ‘it has certainly helped in learning new skills and refreshing old ones’. several (n=5) commented that lo content had helped ease their transition into university: ‘it has benefitted me with the transition from college to university study’ and ‘it has helped me to get back into studying again as it has been a while’. students were also mindful of the increasing level of their skills development, an indication that they were interested in the actual process of their learning and enjoyed being ‘challenged’ by the material. student respondents were also actively linking academic development with other forms of ld, including personal development such as mindfulness. a key objective of leap was to coordinate ld activity and to improve the culture of ld across the organisation. in this regard students were also linking ld with (3) accessing help and support. several respondents (n=4) specifically mentioned that lo had helped them to understand how to seek help and support: ‘it has made me more aware of the university and where to go for information’. finally, lo has helped students to understand (4) different ld contexts at the university. another key objective was to ensure that ld was embedded within the curriculum and delivered across recognised institutional boundaries. several students mentioned the use of lo in class and many (n=5) stated that they were using it to support their independent study habits: ‘completing the activities has allowed me to refresh my memory and learn without the traditional setting of a classroom’. the online and collaborative nature of the project has helped to position information literacy outside of the library per se and embedding it into mainstream curriculum delivery. several students mentioned the level of accessibility and that the framework itself helped them to navigate opportunities. we recognise that, in targeting the students who already held badges, we were contacting learners who were already engaged in ld. that said, many students were directed to use the platform in the classroom as well as to self-refer to the tool outside of taught sessions. nevertheless, a survey of their ld habits revealed the features that were important to them in the delivery of an integrated and engaging ld programme. the lo staff questionnaire was developed and sent to the schools via subject librarians, it was completed by 14 members of staff. 88% (n=12) had actively encouraged their students to use lo and 69% (n=10) had actively encouraged their students to obtain the digital badges with 100% (n=14) agreeing that digital badges were a useful way of mcintosh and barden the leap (learning excellence achievement pathway) framework: a model for student learning development in higher education journal of learning development in higher education, issue 14: april 2019 16 measuring engagement. the survey reinforced the themes generated from the student lo survey. qualitative comments reflected the use of lo as a tool for transition into higher education and the impact of lo on student ld behaviour and habits, particularly concerning academic writing, confidence and referencing. overall, the qualitative comments demonstrate that the objectives of the leap framework had been fulfilled. namely, the easing of transition into university life; raising student awareness of their skills development; linking academic development with other forms of ld, including personal development such as mindfulness; improving accessibility to development opportunities; embedding ld within the classroom and the curriculum; coordinating ld activity to improve the culture of ld across the organisation. external recognition the quality of the leap framework, and specifically of leap online, has been recognised externally. in april 2018, four members of the ldwg received the national lilac digital literacy award. the award recognises an innovative and high impact digital resource developed by a uk-based individual or group. the external judges commented: this is well thought-through and the front end is visually appealing. it has a strong underpinning framework that enables students to develop their skills in a scaffolded way, with clear links to the curriculum and to employability. there is evidence of positive student engagement with the resource through badges gained and survey feedback. conclusion this paper has outlined the development of the leap (learning excellence achievement pathway) framework at the university of bolton, uk. the principal objectives of the leap framework were to map ld activity across the organisation and align disparate ld activity in the organisational consciousness, recognising that ld should be a key part of any embedded student success strategy. a key aim was to initiate a culture of ld across the institution, showcasing the variety of engagement opportunities available to students. the circular representation of the leap framework is visual, accessible and engaging. it has placed ld at the forefront of an early intervention (ei) approach at the university to support mcintosh and barden the leap (learning excellence achievement pathway) framework: a model for student learning development in higher education journal of learning development in higher education, issue 14: april 2019 17 student transition and retention. initial indications, principally data collected from the badged assessments and two online staff and student questionnaires, suggest that a culture of classroom-based and embedded student ld, underpinned by an institutional framework, is gaining traction in the institution as a key vehicle in which to promote student engagement, retention and success. students are beginning to articulate changes to their behaviour and habits regarding ld, identifying sources of help and support as well as assessing their level of skill and understanding the different contexts in which ld takes place, both inside and outside of the classroom as well as external to the academy. work is now ongoing to continue developing and embedding the leap framework within the institution, most especially in blended and classroom settings. a subsequent paper will consider the impact and evaluation of leap in more detail. there are ambitions to conduct a longitudinal study to assess the impact of leap activities on student success, learner autonomy and independence and to align the badged assessment data with the ei model, particularly the development of academic tutoring and the use of learning analytics to assess engagement. students and staff alike have expressed the need to develop subject/discipline level content. increasing numbers of academic staff have requested to collaborate with us on the development of content for new sections. academic advocacy has played a significant role in raising the profile of ld across the institution and it is our ambition that leap will continue to grow in response to both staff and student requirements. references arvanitakis, j. and hornsby, d. (2016) universities, the citizen scholar and the future of higher education. london: palgrave. barlow, a., ackroyd, j., and phillips, a. (2011) ‘is learning development part of the problem?’, in hartley, p., hilsdon, j., keenan, c., sinfield, s., and verity, m. (eds.) learning development in higher education. london: palgrave. bennett, n., dunne, e., and carré, c. (1999) ‘patterns of core and genetic skill provision in higher education’, higher education 37, pp.71-93. mcintosh and barden the leap (learning excellence achievement pathway) framework: a model for student learning development in higher education journal of learning development in higher education, issue 14: april 2019 18 bligh, b., wiesemes, r., and murphy, r. (2010) ‘introduction to the special issue on visual learning in higher education’, international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 6(1), pp. 1-6. braun, v. and clarke, v. (2006) ‘using thematic analysis in psychology’, qualitative research in psychology 3(2), pp. 77-101. bryman, a. (2008) social research methods. oxford: oxford university press. gibbs, g. (2009) ‘developing students as learners – varied phenomena, varied contexts and a developmental trajectory for the whole endeavour’, journal of learning development in higher education 1, pp. 1-12. hall, r., atkins, l. and fraser, j. (2014) ‘defining a self-evaluation digital literacy framework for secondary educators: the digilit leicester project’, research in learning technology, 22:21440, no pagination. hilsdon, j. (2011) ‘what is learning development?’, in hartley, p., hilsdon, j., keenan, c., sinfield, s., and verity, m. (eds.) learning development in higher education. london: palgrave, pp. 13-27. higher education academy (2015) framework for flexible learning in higher education. available at: https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/system/files/downloads/flexible-learningin-he.pdf (accessed: 9 may 2018). kift, s. and nelson, n. (2005) ‘beyond curriculum reform: embedding the transition experience’, higher education research & development society of australasia (herdsa) conference. available at: http://conference.herdsa.org.au/2005/pdf/refereed/paper_294.pdf (accessed: 18 october 2018). mcintosh, e. (2017) ‘working in partnership: the role of peer assisted study sessions in engaging the citizen scholar’, active learning in higher education, online first, pp. 1-16. https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/system/files/downloads/flexible-learning-in-he.pdf https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/system/files/downloads/flexible-learning-in-he.pdf http://conference.herdsa.org.au/2005/pdf/refereed/paper_294.pdf mcintosh and barden the leap (learning excellence achievement pathway) framework: a model for student learning development in higher education journal of learning development in higher education, issue 14: april 2019 19 mcintosh, e. and barden, m. e. (2016). the learning excellence achievement pathway (leap) – striving for excellence in learning development (committee document), education committee, the university of bolton, february 2016. mcintosh, e. and cross, d. (2017) ‘who sets the agenda on student engagement?’, journal of educational innovation, partnership and change, 3(2), pp. 1-3. ncihe (1997) the dearing report: higher education in the learning society. london: her majesty's stationery office. reay, d., crozier, g., and clayton, j., (2010) ‘fitting in’ or ‘standing out’: working class students in uk higher education’, british educational research journal 36(1), pp.107-124. reedy, k. and goodfellow, r. (2014) ‘“you’ve been frameworked”: evaluating an approach to digital and information literacy at the open university’, journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: digital technologies, pp. 1-18. russel, e. (2015) ‘what does partnership produce?’, journal of educational innovation, partnership and change, 1(2), pp. 1–2. sconul working group on information literacy (1999, revised 2011) the sconul seven pillars of information literacy: core model for higher education. available at: http://www.sconul.ac.uk/sites/default/files/documents/coremodel.pdf (accessed: 5 may 2018). thomas, l. (2012) what works? student retention and success programme (report), york: higher education academy. available at: https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/sites/default/files/what_works_final_report.pdf (accessed 12 january 2017). thomas, l. (2017) what works 2? supporting student success, strategies for institutional change (report), york: higher education academy. available at: http://www.sconul.ac.uk/sites/default/files/documents/coremodel.pdf https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/sites/default/files/what_works_final_report.pdf mcintosh and barden the leap (learning excellence achievement pathway) framework: a model for student learning development in higher education journal of learning development in higher education, issue 14: april 2019 20 https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/knowledge-hub/supporting-student-successstrategies-institutional-change (accessed 11 april 2017). trowler, v. (2010) student engagement literature review, york: higher education academy. available at: https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/resources/detail/evidencenet/student_engagement_li terature_review (accessed 4 july 2017). verity, m. and trowler, v (2011) ‘looking back and looking into the future’, in hartley, p., hilsdon, j., keenan, c., sinfield, s., and verity, m. (eds.) learning development in higher education. london: palgrave, pp. 241-252. whannell, r. & whannell, p. (2015) ‘identity theory as a theoretical framework to understand attrition for university students in transition’, student success, 6(2), pp. 43-52. zimdars, a., sabri, d., moore, j., sanders, j., jones, s., and higham, l., (2015) causes of differences in student outcomes (report), bristol: hefce. available at: http://www.hefce.ac.uk/media/hefce,2014/content/pubs/independentresearch/20 15/causes,of,differences,in,student,outcomes/hefce2015_diffout.pdf (accessed 8 may 2018). author details emily mcintosh is director of student life at the university of bolton and a principal fellow of the higher education academy (pfhea). she has experience in leading, developing and implementing student-centred strategy, policy and operational change across the student lifecycle and leads on a number of cross-institutional student experience initiatives, as well as various aspects of teaching and learning activity. emily’s research interests include student success, transition, personal/academic tutoring, student resilience, student learning development and peer learning. https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/knowledge-hub/supporting-student-success-strategies-institutional-change https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/knowledge-hub/supporting-student-success-strategies-institutional-change https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/resources/detail/evidencenet/student_engagement_literature_review https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/resources/detail/evidencenet/student_engagement_literature_review http://www.hefce.ac.uk/media/hefce,2014/content/pubs/independentresearch/2015/causes,of,differences,in,student,outcomes/hefce2015_diffout.pdf http://www.hefce.ac.uk/media/hefce,2014/content/pubs/independentresearch/2015/causes,of,differences,in,student,outcomes/hefce2015_diffout.pdf mcintosh and barden the leap (learning excellence achievement pathway) framework: a model for student learning development in higher education journal of learning development in higher education, issue 14: april 2019 21 mary barden has over 10 years’ experience of working as an academic librarian and is currently eresources librarian at the university of bolton. she is a senior fellow of the higher education academy (sfhea). she has taken a leading role in in developing and enhancing the university’s provision of information literacy and academic skills support. mary was part of the small team at bolton which won the lilac digital literacy award in 2018 for work on developing the leap framework. the leap (learning excellence achievement pathway) framework: a model for student learning development in higher education abstract this article explores the development of the leap (learning excellence achievement pathway) framework at the university of bolton, uk. it describes the nature of the project and focuses on the methodology involved in conducting an institution-wide aud... introduction learning development in context – the uk perspective learning development at the university of bolton, uk the development of the leap framework the leap framework: an initial evaluation external recognition conclusion references author details article journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 15: november 2019 ________________________________________________________________________ achieving transformation through collaboration: the role of academic literacies ursula wingate king’s college london, uk abstract the academic literacies model has been transformative in the sense that it offered a new perspective for research into students’ writing as well as pedagogic principles that have influenced writing practitioners in many contexts. in this paper i discuss why a more wideranging transformation is needed to provide adequate academic literacy support to all students. this transformation would entail the integration of academic literacy instruction into study programmes, delivered as part of subject lecturers’ regular teaching and assessment practices. this would require collaboration between writing/learning development practitioners and subject lecturers, which in turn would need to be facilitated by changes in institutional policies and practices. i argue that the academic literacies model provides both the rationale and the principles for this kind of transformation. keywords: academic literacy instruction; student support; higher education policies and practices; genre approaches. introduction academic literacies emerged in the 1990s as a critical framework for the investigation of students’ writing in the uk’s higher education system. at a time when there was a substantial increase in student numbers and diversity, the model offered a new perspective on academic writing and exposed the inadequacy of the traditional student support measures. since lea and street’s (1998) seminal paper, academic literacies has had considerable impact on academic writing research and pedagogy in the uk and internationally. the model, which is based on ethnographic research, understands writing wingate achieving transformation through collaboration: the role of academic literacies journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 2 at university as social practices that are shaped by ideologies and institutional power relations. it critiques the conventional approaches, called ‘study skills’ and ‘academic socialisation’ by lea and street (1998), as these approaches tend to regard writing as a transferable skill and focus only on the linguistic and rhetorical features of texts, leading to a deficit view of students who are unable to produce texts according to the expected standards. in lea and street’s (1998, p.158) view, academic literacies ‘encapsulates’ these approaches and builds on their insights. other scholars have taken a more dichotomous perspective, identifying academic literacies as the ‘transformative’ approach, as opposed to the (not clearly specified) ‘normative’ approaches (lillis and scott, 2007). the label ‘normative’ echoes with the critique of ‘pragmatic english for academic purposes (eap)’, a term that has been used to describe the typical provision of academic english courses to non-native speakers of english (nnes). this provision has been accused of ‘teaching students a set of dominant academic discourse norms’ (harwood and hadley, 2004, p.356), to which they are expected to conform without criticality. although this evaluation may be justified in relation to some teaching practices, a careful distinction must be made between this type of eap work and genre-based instructional approaches, which seem to be included in the category ‘normative’. whilst these approaches require students to analyse genres to help them understand their disciplines’ ways of communication, genre scholars have explicitly warned of prescribing norms and, at the same time, promoted the investigation of writing contexts and practices (e.g. swales, 1990; johns, 2008). consequently, genre approaches have used ethnography not only as a research tool, but also as a teaching method, by which students are asked to explore the target discourse communities (e.g. johns, 2008 and 2011; motta-roth, 2009). the labelling of genre approaches as normative has therefore been questioned by wingate and tribble (2012) and flowerdew (2019), who point out that genreas well as corpus-based research and pedagogy share common ground with academic literacies. as both paradigms have important contributions to make, i.e. the genre approaches with their clearly defined and successful teaching methodologies (see pérez-llantada and swales, 2017, for an overview), and academic literacies with valuable insights from ethnographic studies (see the discussion in lillis and tuck, 2016), researchers and practitioners have advocated their convergence towards an academic literacy (reading and writing) pedagogy that is capable of transforming the current student support provision (wingate and tribble 2012; hathaway, 2015; flowerdew, 2019). a core element of this transformation must be that academic literacy instruction is available to all wingate achieving transformation through collaboration: the role of academic literacies journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 3 students instead of specific target groups on the premise that all students new to university are unfamiliar with the literacy practices of their academic disciplines. a systematic provision of academic reading and writing support that is inclusive of all students does not exist in anglophone universities.1 in many institutions, english language support is offered exclusively to ‘international’ students; for the rest of the student population, there may be a learning support unit available. neither type of provision supports students in learning to understand and produce the genres used in their disciplines. this learning can only take place within the disciplines, or, more specifically, as an embedded component of study programmes. however, there are sparse examples of methodical integration of academic literacy support into study programmes (e.g. purser, 2011). this leaves students largely dependent on individual subject lecturers’ willingness and ability to provide support and, as a consequence, many students struggle far longer than necessary with the unfamiliar genres and conventions. making academic literacy support an entitlement for all students by embedding it into study programmes would require a comprehensive transformation of institutional structures and practices. in the rest of this article, i want to consider the level of transformation achieved by academic literacies, as well as the importance of the model’s principles for an institution-wide, or large-scale, transformation. the current transformative value of academic literacies originally, lillis and scott (2007) assigned the label ‘transformative’ to academic literacies research on the basis that ‘practice is privileged above text’ (lillis and scott, 2007, p.10, italics in original) and ethnographic methods are used to explore practice. as lillis (in lillis et al., 2015, p.9) explains, unlike the ‘normative’ approaches, which are concerned with research questions such as ‘[w]hat is the nature of the writing required’ with the aim to identify and then teach the required textual features, academic literacies researchers are interested in possible alternatives to traditional conventions of ‘making knowledge’, which would allow students to express meaning in ways with which they are more comfortable than with the genres imposed on them. however, at this point it is important to look more 1 the writing-intensive courses, which are part of the writing across the curriculum/writing in the disciplines (wac/wid) programmes in universities in the usa and canada, could be regarded as an inclusive provision. however, according to a survey on the state of wac/wid in 2010, only 51% of the responding 1,126 us and canadian he institutions had wac/wid programmes (thaiss and porter, 2010). wingate achieving transformation through collaboration: the role of academic literacies journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 4 closely at the notion of ‘transformative’. the critique of conventional norms and the search for alternatives are not directly transformative in my view; however, they have the potential to lead to changes in instructional policies and practices that in turn will lead to improvements in the student experience. i would therefore argue that critique and research can be facilitative of transformation, if they bring about institutional changes that would be directly transformative for students – in the sense that they receive support that helps them to do better. the next point to consider then is the extent of the transformation that can be triggered by research – does it facilitate instructional improvements for one or a few student groups in a specific context, a whole department, or a whole institution? as explained previously, given the lack of academic literacy support across the anglophone higher education system, a wide-ranging transformation is necessary. academic literacies has over the years clearly achieved transformation in teaching practices, materials and curriculum design in numerous settings, and continues, as the articles in this volume show, to inspire teaching initiatives and interventions. following earlier theoryand research-based recommendations for improvements in teaching and curriculum design (e.g. lillis, 2001 and 2003; lea, 2004), 31 chapters relating to ‘transformative practice’ in different disciplines and educational settings in 10 countries were presented in a recent volume edited by lillis et al. (2015). the heading of each of the volume’s four sections begins with ‘transforming’, relating to ‘pedagogies of academic reading and writing’, ‘the work of teaching’, ‘resources, genres and semiotic practices’, and ‘institutional framings of academic writing’ respectively. of the 31 chapters, 19 present case studies of teaching interventions and curricular changes; these include raising the visibility of expected conventions and their hidden features, exploring disciplinary conventions through dialogue with subject lecturers, and encouraging students to draw on alternative semiotic resources. whilst these case studies describe some innovative applications of academic literacies principles, from which other practitioners will take inspiration, at the same time they reveal that academic literacies has had limited impact in terms of wide-ranging institutional change. apart from jacobs (chapter 9) and boz (chapter 25), who report some institutional impact achieved through collaborations with subject lecturers across a range of disciplines, and cleary and o’sullivan (chapter 26) who created a writing centre for an irish university, all the other cases present initiatives that are restricted to specific contexts and individual study programmes. wingate achieving transformation through collaboration: the role of academic literacies journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 5 changes in institution-wide policies and practices are admittedly difficult to achieve; as lillis (in lillis et al., 2015, p.11) observes, ‘working towards transformation in higher education is a large and challenging project, possible only through extensive collaboration’. in the final section, i will discuss the kind of collaboration necessary to move forward with a large-scale transformation of institutional policies and practices related to academic literacy instruction. i will also highlight the importance of academic literacies principles for this transformation. working towards institution-wide transformation of academic literacy support as argued earlier, academic literacy instruction has to be embedded in study programmes to be inclusive of all students and to target their discipline-specific communication needs. the most effective provision would be if subject lecturers integrated academic literacy instruction into their regular teaching and assessment practices, and i have elsewhere discussed in more detail various methods for this integration (wingate, 2015). examples would be lecturers dedicating some lecture time to discussions about academic literacy requirements or using feedback more purposefully to help students address shortcomings in their reading and writing. however, as subject lecturers often have only a ‘tacit’ (jacobs, 2005, p.477) knowledge of their discipline’s discourses, they would rely on collaboration with experts in academic language and learning, that is eap and learning development staff. this collaboration would require structural changes, for instance in workload allocations and the position of eap and learning development specialists in the institution. since it is unlikely that university managements would implement such changes without evidence of their benefits, they can only be realised through bottom-up work that is based on sound educational principles and teaching methodologies. this work would entail eap and learning development units seeking closer collaboration with academic departments, supporting increasing numbers of lecturers in integrating academic literacy support into their regular routines, continuously evaluating and improving this approach, and disseminating successful practice across the university. a number of eap and learning development units in universities in the uk, australia and south africa have long collaborated with staff in the disciplines (e.g. thesen and van pletzen 2006; morley, 2008) and, judging from recent conference contributions (for wingate achieving transformation through collaboration: the role of academic literacies journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 6 instance at the baleap pim conference in march 2016 and the baleap conference in april 2019), this type of collaboration is on the increase. whilst many of the practitioners involved are guided by academic literacies principles, i would argue that the main teaching approach should be genre-based. as mentioned earlier, genre approaches have effective teaching methods, the most prominent of which is to ask students to analyse the genres they will have to write. genre pedagogy has therefore long been recognised as transformative or ‘empowering’ (hyland, 2004, p.15), since it accelerates students’ participation in disciplinary communication. and despite its previous critique of eap/genre, it is the academic literacies model that provides much of the rationale not only for embedding academic literacy instruction into the disciplines, but also for using genre pedagogy. an important academic literacies principle, proposed by lillis (2003), is to take a dialogic approach to student writing by providing ‘talkback’ rather than feedback. a dialogue about texts in progress would be most transformative if it was conducted between the subject lecturer who sets and assesses the assignment and the students who need to understand how to meet the assignment requirements. another principle, that of ‘exploring alternative ways of meaning making in academia’ (lillis and scott, 2007, p.13) or opening up ‘the academy to a broader range of semiotic/linguistic practices’ (lillis and tuck, 2016, p.35) can also be followed through dialogue between subject lecturers and their students. in such dialogues, facilitated through the embedding of academic literacy support in study programmes, negotiation about alternatives to the required genres would undoubtedly occur. a concept that supports the use of genre pedagogy is lillis’s (2001, p.58) ‘institutional practice of mystery’. much of the mystery students experience is around the unfamiliar genres in which they are required to express themselves. without genre purpose and features being made explicit, the mystery becomes misery for many students, because they are assessed on the adequate production of these genres. developing students’ ‘genre awareness’ (johns, 2011) should therefore be the central objective of embedded academic literacy instruction. in this process, students will also learn to recognise genres as ‘problem spaces open to critique and challenge’ (johns, 2011, p.61). the discussion has shown that transformation of university policies and practices is needed to transform the experience of whole student cohorts. change can be initiated through closer collaboration between eap and learning specialists and subject lecturers. it wingate achieving transformation through collaboration: the role of academic literacies journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 7 also requires the collaboration of the proponents of different paradigms to make a strong case for embedding academic literacy instruction into the disciplines.. references flowerdew, l. (2019) ‘the academic literacies approach to scholarly writing: a view through the lens of the esp/genre approach’, studies in higher education. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2019.1576165 (accessed: 3 november 2019). harwood, n. and hadley, g. (2004) ‘demystifying institutional practices: critical pragmatism and the teaching of academic writing’, journal of english for specific purposes 23, pp.355-377. hathaway, j. (2015) ‘developing that voice: locating academic writing tuition in the mainstream of higher education’, teaching in higher education 20, pp.506-517. hyland, k. (2004) genre and second language writing. ann arbor, michigan: university of michigan press. jacobs, c. (2005) ‘on being an insider on the outside: new spaces for integrating academic literacies’, teaching in higher education 10(4), pp.475-487. johns, a. m. (2008) ‘genre awareness for the novice academic student: an ongoing quest’, language teaching 41(2), pp.237-252. johns, a. m. (2011) ‘the future of genre in l2 writing: fundamental, but contested, instructional decisions’, journal of second language writing 20, pp.56-68. lea, m. (2004) ‘academic literacies: a pedagogy for course design’, studies in higher education 29(6), pp.739-756. lea, m. and street, b. (1998) ‘student writing in higher education: an academic literacies approach’, studies in higher education 23(2), pp.157-172. https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2019.1576165 wingate achieving transformation through collaboration: the role of academic literacies journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 8 lillis, t. (2001) student writing: access, regulation, desire. london: routledge. lillis, t. (2003) ‘student writing as “academic literacies”: drawing on bakhtin to move from critique to design’, language and education 17(3), pp.192-207. lillis, t. and scott, m. (2007) ‘defining academic literacies research: issues of epistemology, ideology and strategy’, journal of applied linguistics 4(1), pp.5-32. lillis, t., harrington, k., lea, m. and mitchell, s. (eds) (2015) working with academic literacies: case studies towards transformative practice. fort collins, co: the wac clearinghouse/parlor press. lillis. t. and tuck, j. (2016) ‘academic literacies: a critical lens on writing and reading in the academy’, in hyland, k. (ed.) the routledge handbook of english for academic purposes. abingdon, new york: routledge, pp.30-43. morley, j. (2008) ‘writing support in british higher education: an institutional case study’, in friedrich, p. (ed.) teaching academic writing. london: continuum, pp.125-146. motta-roth, d. (2009) ‘the role of context in academic text production and writing pedagogy’, in bazerman, c., bonini, a. and figueiredo, d. (eds.) genre in a changing world. fort collins, co: the wac clearinghouse/parlor press, pp.317336. pérez-llantada, c. and swales, j. (2017) ‘english for academic purposes’, in hinkel, e. (ed.) handbook of research in second language teaching and learning, vol. iii. abingdon, new york: routledge, pp.42-55. purser, e. (2011) ‘developing academic literacy in context: trends in australia’, in deane, m. and o'neill, p. (eds.) writing in the disciplines. london: palgrave macmillan, pp.30-43. swales, j. m. (1990) genre analysis: english in academic and research settings. cambridge: cambridge university press. wingate achieving transformation through collaboration: the role of academic literacies journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 9 thaiss, c. and porter, t. (2010) ‘the state of wac/wid in 2010: methods and results of the u.s. survey of the international wac/wid mapping project’, college composition and communication 61(3), pp.534-570. thesen, l. and van pletzen, e. (eds.) (2006) academic literacy and the languages of change. london, new york: continuum. wingate, u. (2015) academic literacy and student diversity. the case for inclusive practice. bristol: multilingual matters. wingate, u. and tribble, c. (2012) ‘the best of both worlds? towards an english for academic purposes/academic literacies writing pedagogy’, studies in higher education 37(4), pp.481-495. author details ursula wingate is reader in language in education and works in the school of education, communication and society at king’s college london. ursula’s research interests are in academic literacy, english language policies and practices, and language teaching methodology. her recent publications are concerned with the teaching and learning of argumentation, genre-based approaches to academic literacy instruction, and dialogic interaction in academic writing tutorials.. achieving transformation through collaboration: the role of academic literacies abstract the academic literacies model has been transformative in the sense that it offered a new perspective for research into students’ writing as well as pedagogic principles that have influenced writing practitioners in many contexts. in this paper i discu... introduction the current transformative value of academic literacies working towards institution-wide transformation of academic literacy support as argued earlier, academic literacy instruction has to be embedded in study programmes to be inclusive of all students and to target their discipline-specific communication needs. the most effective provision would be if subject lecturers integrated ... a number of eap and learning development units in universities in the uk, australia and south africa have long collaborated with staff in the disciplines (e.g. thesen and van pletzen 2006; morley, 2008) and, judging from recent conference contribution... an important academic literacies principle, proposed by lillis (2003), is to take a dialogic approach to student writing by providing ‘talkback’ rather than feedback. a dialogue about texts in progress would be most transformative if it was conducted ... the discussion has shown that transformation of university policies and practices is needed to transform the experience of whole student cohorts. change can be initiated through closer collaboration between eap and learning specialists and subject lec... references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 16: december 2019 ______________________________________________________________________ investigating the feasibility of co-production of digital media with students karin johnstone university of northampton, uk samantha thomas university of northampton, uk nathan dodzo university of northampton, uk abstract the learning development (ld) team has a suite of online videos which aim to provide students with support and guidance in a range of academic skills. the usage statistics show that they are more widely used than other content such as pdf documents or visual guides. an audit of these videos revealed that most were written by or featured academic and professional staff, were of poor technical quality, and were ‘talking heads’ which, rather than encourage active learning, may result in passive engagement and therefore shallow rather than deep learning (ryan, 2013). an opportunity was identified to remake videos in collaboration with students to address these issues and to increase student participation and representation in learning development content. two ld tutors and a media and journalism lecturer collaborated on a project to co-produce academic skills videos with students. students were given a brief to create videos based on their own experience of study skills. they also took part in focus groups and completed a survey to find out more about their perception of educational videos and the experience of creating their own. there were two main aims in undertaking the project: the creation of original content by students that addressed some of the concerns we had about the efficacy of existing videos, and the development of a model of co-production which could be used as a framework to produce future content in collaboration with students. keywords: video co-production; active blended learning; educational videos; student created videos; life brief; service learning. johnstone et al. investigating the feasibility of co-production of digital media with students journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 2 introduction this project aimed to develop greater knowledge and understanding of what features of educational videos contributed to student learning, and, as a result, to be able to provide resources in line with these findings. an additional consideration was that we would be able to provide a real-life professional brief for students to work to, which would provide an authentic assessment opportunity (frey et al., 2012), contribute to their portfolio of work, and thereby enhance their future employability. research has already established the growing importance of video as an educational tool. student feedback on their preferences has been analysed and put into practice; for example, videos must provide ‘something extra’ to other resources, and the presentation of visual examples is an important element (rice and farmer, 2016). researchers have also explored the variety of tools used to produce videos (baker, 2016) and developed guidelines for producing effective videos based on pedagogical models and research (brame, 2015). these studies provide a solid foundation for us to develop questions and focus on specific aspects of the production process with our student cohort. we built on this research by gathering qualitative feedback from students via focus groups on what, for them, makes an effective educational video. using this research as a starting point, new video content was created with the students as co-producers. finally, a core set of principles and guidance for producing video content in line with student recommendations and preferences are being developed, which can be used by any subject area. the university has an open access online skills portal where students can find guidance about a variety of academic skills. institutional research showed that students access the video content on this site more than any other resource type including the print pdf documents. the 12 most popular academic skills resources were videos. however, a review of this online video content established there were many issues: the technical quality of the video and audio was poor, the majority were too long, and the audio narration was not engaging. mayer’s multimedia voice principle (2017) states that a human voice, not a machine voice, should be used in presentations. although the voicejohnstone et al. investigating the feasibility of co-production of digital media with students journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 3 overs were not machine-generated, some sounded monotonous and machine-like, and were not as engaging as they could be. hampe found that videos with a ‘talking head’ presenter can turn the viewer into a ‘zombie’, in other words a passive learner (1999, cited in majekodunmi and murnaghan, 2012, p.3). as a team we aim to create more active online learning for students, and to include more student feedback and participation in the creation of resources. as a result, we decided that video content should be remade and updated, using it as an opportunity to involve students as co-creators of the new video content. the project process the project had six stages: 1. researchers met with students to introduce the project and obtain consent for participation. 2. student focus groups were conducted to explore what makes educational videos effective. 3. students were given the project brief to create the videos within a given timescale. 4. students pitched initial ideas for their videos to the researchers – feedback was given, and videos commissioned. 5. students created their academic skills videos and presented these to the project researchers/clients. 6. a follow-up survey was sent to all student participants to explore their experiences of taking part. a first-year cohort of 26 media students who were taking the module ‘digital and social media production’ were chosen for the project. focus group participants were volunteers from the cohort; two small groups of students viewed a selection of academic skills videos, then took part in discussions assessing the effectiveness of these resources before they went on to produce videos of their own. ethical approval for the study was granted by the university, and participants were fully informed about the johnstone et al. investigating the feasibility of co-production of digital media with students journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 4 research process before they gave their consent to take part. they were able to withdraw from the research project at any time. as part of the module assessment, students had to produce several videos for their portfolio; creating an academic skills video could successfully be embedded into this structure. reflecting professional media practices, and in line with the module criteria and learning outcomes, the ld tutors acted as ‘clients’ and presented a professional ‘client brief’ to the students. students were encouraged to look at the video content on the university skills portal and to research other academic skills videos in order to choose a theme or skill, and then pitch their ideas to the researcher ‘clients’. feedback from the ‘clients’ enabled students to refine and focus their plans, which were then produced as draft videos. focus groups two focus groups took place, of four and five students respectively. each group watched five academic skills videos that are produced by and hosted on the skills support websites of five different he institutions, each of which demonstrated a different style or approach. student comments about the videos made during the focus groups are summarised in table 1. johnstone et al. investigating the feasibility of co-production of digital media with students journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 5 table 1: focus group comments on educational videos video content producer duration (mins.secs) focus group 1 comments focus group 2 comments students giving tips about reading strategically learning services in house 2.42 student interviews mean ‘you feel more comfortable, rather than hearing from an older voice’; range of students therefore something for all; ‘the audio was really bad’ good layout; quick, short points – ‘it definitely keeps your interest’; ‘having different opinions is good’; noise quality changed a lot light-hearted animation about evaluating information commissioned – professional production 1.23 pacing ‘perfect’; high-quality, professional animation; humorous with visual gags; easy to follow; too general in content ‘grabbed my attention right from the start’; ‘at points it seemed a little bit patronising’; animation ‘completely unrelated to what’s actually being said’ videoscribe about critical writing learning services inhouse 7.47 ‘it was really interesting, but it just felt too long’; too many pauses, too slow; ‘[it] felt like a lecture and that’s not the kind of thing i want to hear’ ‘you couldn’t stay engaged after three minutes’; ‘way too much information’; ‘bad audio levelling’; ‘needs a bit more emotion with the voice’ video with student presenters about group work student produced 4.01 ‘this felt like advice to me from students who were also doing the same thing, so it felt nicer to listen to’; ‘this is a group of friends and they were fun to listen to’ ‘i like how they related it to themselves’; ‘learn from our mistakes’; audio levels ‘terrible’ montage with images and text about choosing sources university inhouse 1.27 felt rushed; video quality not great; seemed old-fashioned; music too loud ‘the whole thing was just flashy animations’; ’the upbeat music helps you engage a lot more’ johnstone et al. investigating the feasibility of co-production of digital media with students journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 6 analysis of focus groups we were surprised at the degree to which opinions varied regarding the strengths and weaknesses of the videos, and this is perhaps due to the mix of personalities and impact of group dynamics, which have been identified as a limitation of using focus groups (stewart et al., 2007). overall, the participants responded positively to student participation in the videos and welcomed the opportunity to learn from others in a similar situation to themselves. both groups disliked the lecture style video; however, the main drawbacks identified in all videos tended to be technical, for example that some were too long, or the audio was of a poor quality. there was no consensus on style, pace, and use of music or animation. project briefs and video production students had three weeks between receiving the initial brief and the meetings in which they needed to present their pitches, and then 12 weeks to produce the first drafts of their videos (which included the christmas break). of the eight groups that presented pitches, four videos reached the final draft stage and are now resources hosted on our skills website. the final videos focus on time management, assignment planning and notetaking skills, and present refreshing, dynamic and engaging student views of these topics. they all focus on the student experience by using student ‘actors’ (the students working on the videos and their friends, some of whom were studying acting) who address the viewer directly to give advice or guidance. they all incorporate humorous aspects, for example by using music, props, editing techniques and storylines to highlight common mistakes or to make a point. the finished videos ranged in length from 3.23 to 6.22 minutes, and most kept to the brief of producing a short video on a specific study skill. we are thrilled with the resulting videos, which add significantly to the diversity of approach and overall appeal of our existing resources, and which have so far received positive feedback from colleagues. in the near future we will evaluate the effectiveness of these videos as learning tools for other students. johnstone et al. investigating the feasibility of co-production of digital media with students journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 7 student feedback an online survey exploring the students’ views of the project and aiming to identify any additional benefits of taking part was distributed to all students in the cohort at the end of the project. 15 students responded, including all the students that took part in the focus groups, and all agreed that taking part in the group activity positively influenced their approach to developing their video. their reasons for choosing the topics of their videos varied, but most based the decision on what they thought would be useful. they were also asked to rate their perception of the improvement in their knowledge of the skills explored in the video and their technical skills in video production (figures 1a and 1b). most students thought that their skills had improved in both areas, interestingly, more in skills development than in technical skills. those that had taken part in the focus groups were more likely to report an increase in their knowledge of the academic skill on which they had worked. it could be argued that the focus group activity, in which the content of videos was discussed, enabled students to focus on the purpose of the videos. this in turn meant that when they came to develop their own videos, greater emphasis was placed on the academic skills content for these students, and they therefore learned more about the skill area on which their video was based. figure 1a. student self-evaluation of skill improvement after taking part in the project: focus group participants. johnstone et al. investigating the feasibility of co-production of digital media with students journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 8 figure 1b. student self-evaluation of skill improvement after taking part in the project: other students. discussion and reflection there were many benefits to this project. it was clear that this process gave students autonomy in the creation of their own academic skills videos, which gave them a voice and meant that they could see themselves represented in university resources. an additional benefit was that they actively learned about both video production and the skills they were presenting in the videos. the project involved collaboration between academic staff, students and learning development tutors, which could potentially break down barriers for students wanting to use ld services in the future. the project also embedded academic skills into the module in a creative way; students learned about specific academic skills in the process of making videos for clients. we found the process of working with the students to produce the videos enlightening and enjoyed their refreshing perspectives and enthusiasm, so we would recommend this approach to developing video content. the main recommendations from this project would be:  allow adequate time for planning, briefing and giving feedback to students to ensure they keep to the brief and complete the project. johnstone et al. investigating the feasibility of co-production of digital media with students journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 9  encourage students to do plenty of research on the topic of the video and provide specific support to ensure the content is accurate. one group produced a video about referencing that reached the draft stage with incorrect references and was therefore not completed.  think carefully about how to employ or engage with students. we chose this cohort because making videos was a core component of their module, and the project could be classified as an authentic assessment in this context. however, to facilitate this in other subject areas would require a different approach to assessment or involve engaging students outside of their formal studies, in which case additional incentives may be required.  producing professional quality videos was not our aim and would probably be unachievable for a project like this. we were impressed by the technical competence of the students; however, the resulting videos were imperfect, and we accepted early on that the videos would be variable in quality.  ensure that students have planned for all eventualities. despite their specialist knowledge, students still had issues in sourcing actors and gaining permission for filming, meaning that there were last-minute changes to scripts and plans. next steps we are currently evaluating the impact of the videos on students and how well they are received in comparison to our existing resources, using the criteria generated by the students in our focus groups. we are also using this experience to fully develop a set of guidance and principles for creating videos with students for our own use and potentially others across the whole university. in future we would like to repeat a similar project with non-media students and academics. johnstone et al. investigating the feasibility of co-production of digital media with students journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 10 references baker, a. (2016) ‘active learning with interactive videos: creating student-guided learning materials’, journal of library & information services in distance learning, 10(34), pp.79-87. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/1533290x.2016.1206776 (accessed: 22 november 2018). brame, c. j. (2015) ‘effective educational videos’, vanderbilt university center for teaching. available at: http://cft.vanderbilt.edu/guides-sub-pages/effectiveeducational-videos/ (accessed: 22 november 2018). frey, b. b., schmitt, v. l. and allen, j. p. (2012) ‘defining authentic classroom assessment’, practical assessment, research and evaluation, 17(2). available at: https://pareonline.net/pdf/v17n2.pdf (accessed: 22 may 2019). majekodunmi, n. and murnaghan, k. (2012) ‘"in our own words": creating videos as teaching and learning tools’, partnership: the canadian journal of library and information practice and research, 7(2), pp.1–12. available at: https://journal.lib.uoguelph.ca/index.php/perj/article/view/2007 (accessed: 29 may 2019). mayer, r. e. (2017) ‘using multimedia for e-learning’, journal of computer assisted learning, 33(5), pp.403-423. available at: https://doi.org/10.1111/jcal.12197 (accessed: 29 may 2019). rice, p. and farmer, r. (2016) ‘educational videos – tell me what you want, what you really, really want’, journal of learning development in higher education, 10. available at: http://journal.aldinhe.ac.uk/index.php/jldhe/article/view/297 (accessed: 22 november 2018). ryan, b. (2013) ‘a walk down the red carpet: students as producers of digital video-based knowledge’, international journal of technology enhanced learning, 5(1), pp.2441. available at: https://doi.org/10.1504/ijtel.2013.055950 (accessed: 16 october 2019). https://doi.org/10.1080/1533290x.2016.1206776 http://cft.vanderbilt.edu/guides-sub-pages/effective-educational-videos/ http://cft.vanderbilt.edu/guides-sub-pages/effective-educational-videos/ https://pareonline.net/pdf/v17n2.pdf https://journal.lib.uoguelph.ca/index.php/perj/article/view/2007 https://doi.org/10.1111/jcal.12197 http://journal.aldinhe.ac.uk/index.php/jldhe/article/view/297 https://doi.org/10.1504/ijtel.2013.055950 johnstone et al. investigating the feasibility of co-production of digital media with students journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 11 stewart, d. w., shamdasani, p. n. and rook, d. w. (2007) applied social research methods: focus groups. 2nd edn. thousand oaks, ca: sage publications, ltd. author details sam thomas is a learning development tutor at the university of northampton. prior to this she worked in academic and public libraries in a range of professional roles, including reader development, teaching digital literacy, and supporting a wide range of library users. her current research interests include the role of language in teaching and learning, and how best to support top-up students in business subjects in reaching their full potential. karin johnstone is a learning development tutor at the university of northampton. prior to this position she led an hnd in film making and was previously head of screen writing at the south african school of motion picture and live performance in cape town. johnstone also worked as an engineer at channel 4 television. her interest in film making and storytelling is evident in her academic research in using video and narrative based projects with he students. nathan dodzo is a senior lecturer in media and journalism at the university of northampton. he is also the programme leader for the creative film, television and digital media production programme. he is a passionate, enthusiastic, energetic, selfmotivated educator with extensive high-level teaching, broadcast and journalism experience, and the ability and skills to translate these into effective and meaningful learning. he inspires and encourages both students and staff to reaching their full potential. investigating the feasibility of co-production of digital media with students abstract introduction the project process focus groups analysis of focus groups project briefs and video production student feedback discussion and reflection next steps references author details literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 11: april 2017 holiploigy – navigating the complexity of teaching in higher education phil wood school of education, university of leicester, uk abstract the processes involved in teaching in higher education, as with schools, have on occasion become simplified to a dichotomy of being either 'transmission' or 'discovery' led. such characterisations of teaching fail to engage with the context driven complexities of teaching, learning, curriculum and assessment. this opinion piece reflects upon the complexities involved and how they might be characterised and explained without reducing teaching and allied processes to simplistic frameworks. i argue that we need to develop holistic, process-led models of teaching, learning, curriculum and assessment, and associated systems for module and programme development and execution, a combined set of processes and principles that i refer to here as holiploigy. keywords: complexity; teaching; holiploigy; process; educational experiences. introduction historically, the role of teaching in universities was to provide academics with an income on which they could rely whilst immersed in their research. vestiges of this mindset remain in many universities, where research is considered a ‘high-level’ cognitive act, whilst the practice of teaching is deemed to be some form of lesser activity. however, over time there has emerged a developing interest in seeing teaching as an important area of endeavour within the academy. the development of scholarship of teaching and learning (boyer, 1990), whilst still contested in terms of focus and detail, has begun to highlight the multi-faceted nature of teaching. in several countries, frameworks (however imperfect) for officially recognising excellence in teaching have been developed, for example, the conferring of fellow status on individuals by the higher education academy. in england, wood holiploigy – navigating the complexity of teaching in higher education journal of learning development in higher education, issue 11: april 2017 2 this focus on teaching has now taken another step forward due to the introduction of student fees. with any market in a service comes the inevitable need to differentiate, in this case through the development of the teaching excellence framework (gunn, 2015). because of these changes, increasing interest in teaching is being taken by university leadership teams keen to demonstrate that they are listening to students and providing them with a high-quality experience commensurate with the fees they are paying. the emerging interest being shown in teaching can seem somewhat performative (ball, 2012) in nature, focusing on those areas of activity which will have the greatest impact on student evaluations. in some cases, ‘corporate narratives’ relating to teaching have developed to offer unique selling points in the educational market. it is in this context that roughly two years ago, i started to question what the role of my teaching is in a higher education environment. i predominantly teach international post-graduate students at masters’ level on both face-to-face and distance learning courses. whilst hugely valuing my work and using my teaching as a basis for my research, i felt unsure about how to conceptualise what i am trying to achieve with these students, i have also sensed that organisational narratives are beginning to diverge from the processes and philosophies which underpin my own praxis. what follows is an initial reflection on how i have come to think about teaching at higher education level, and through this i attempt to offer an alternative perspective on how we might understand our work with students, as well as our own emergence as experts in teaching, a perspective i refer to as holiploigy, relating to a network of processes and systems as briefly outlined in the abstract above and expanded on below. what is a teacher? teaching is not a single universally accepted form of practice (kreber, 2013); there are many different views of what constitutes the process of teaching and, by extension, teachers. tubbs (2005) outlines the contrast between teacher as master and teacher as servant, the former being central to the teaching process, ‘delivering’ content to students and dictating the environment for learning, whilst the latter is more a facilitator, supporting the discovery process driven by students. whilst these characterisations suggest extreme positions, this debate is an important one as some institutions move towards problem and enquiry-based learning as the only legitimate approach to the educational experience. wood holiploigy – navigating the complexity of teaching in higher education journal of learning development in higher education, issue 11: april 2017 3 biesta (2016) makes a sound argument for seeing teaching as being central to the educational experience. in opposition to an ‘egological’ experience (which can lead to a restricted experience of learning which starts and ends with the individual), teaching can fulfil the role of helping students engage with a wide experience of disciplinary expertise offered by the teacher. rather than allowing for the opening up to new perspectives through dialogue and alternative perspectives, student-led approaches, if dominant, can lead to a restricted worldview. there is a need to develop a balanced view which sees the teacher as offering both expertise and guidance. the teacher needs to understand the complexity involved in helping students to encounter the world via the act of teaching, fulfilling many possible roles dependent on the context and aims of the educational experience at any point in time; teaching should not be a narrowly defined process. what are we trying to achieve? is it enough to see the work of teachers as centred on understanding ‘teaching’ alone? it is all too easy to see teaching as an event-orientated activity. we teach ‘lessons’, we create a ‘curriculum’; these take the form of events and substances, such as handouts, resources on virtual learning environments, powerpoints. but an alternative perspective is that which comes from process philosophy, ‘temporality, activity, and change – of alteration, striving, passage, and novelty-emergence – are the cardinal factors for our understanding of the real’ (rescher, 2000, p.6). here, it is the flow of processes which is central to understanding reality. substances and events are important, but so are transient nodes and clusters in the flow of process. but teaching cannot then be a singular thing. it is in constant interaction with learning (both student and teacher), the curriculum and assessment (see figure 1). conceptualising the activity of teachers as ‘teaching and learning’ becomes reductive as the formal activity of university teaching must be understood not only in relation to learning, but also curriculum and assessment. wood holiploigy – navigating the complexity of teaching in higher education journal of learning development in higher education, issue 11: april 2017 4 figure 1. see teaching as part of a wider complex of processes. but these four interpenetrating systems cannot themselves be an exhaustive account of the teaching process, as they are meaningless without the presence of tutor and students. it is the interaction of humans with teaching, learning, curriculum and learning which creates educative experiences and change. finally, change emerges over time: experience and learning are temporally driven processes. this account of the elements of educative experience and change is characterised by a series of interpenetrating complex adaptive systems (byrne and callaghan, 2014). much of the higher education literature has ignored the insights offered by complexity theory, but the many processes involved in teaching are non-linear in nature and emergent in form. rather than seeing teaching as a simple, linear process, if we are to begin to capture the reality of the many processes involved we must recast them as contextualised, emergent and complex. to become expert in developing educational experiences and change, we need to have a far reaching and holistic understanding of this complexity. beyond teaching – the complex nature of the educational experience? any attempt to capture the complexity of educational experiences and change in their entirety will fail. this is because they are context driven and will involve almost limitless wood holiploigy – navigating the complexity of teaching in higher education journal of learning development in higher education, issue 11: april 2017 5 combinations of processes. different disciplines, underand post-graduate, face-to-face, blended, or distance learning, will all lead to different practice. what appears below (figure 2) is an attempt to capture only some of the possible wider elements which might act as important features and processes in the emergence of practice and expertise. such complexity reduction (biesta, 2010) is bound to occur as any exhaustive model of a complex system would need to be as complete as the system itself, which is not possible. however: just because a complex system is incompressible it does not follow that there are (incomplete) representations of the system that cannot be useful – otherwise how would we have knowledge of anything, however limited? incompressibility is not an excuse for not bothering. richardson and tait (2010, pp.92-93) figure 2. an expanded model of complexity in educational experiences and change. as well as the elements which appeared in figure 1, there are a series of other processes and issues which are part of this complex system. in this view of the educational experience, teachers learn as much as students, although the professional growth involved is of a different form and focus. educational values and philosophies are crucial to wood holiploigy – navigating the complexity of teaching in higher education journal of learning development in higher education, issue 11: april 2017 6 bringing authenticity (kreber, 2013) to praxis focused on the understanding and practical application of disciplinary concepts, application of knowledge, and links to employability. the environments (both formal and informal) through which the processes emerge need to be considered, leading to the need to understand and apply the contributions offered by technology, resources and possibly work placements, as well as different formal teaching contexts. finally, to foster emergent expertise, teachers need to reflect upon their philosophies and values and their resultant practices to aid emergence of new perspectives and approaches. this can be done alone but, at least some of the time, it can be aided by communal activity as a way of overcoming ‘pedagogic solitude’ (shulman, 1993). such collaboration can make use of pre-existing research to inform and can also generate research, making praxis central to the work of teachers. this outline, as stated above, will only ever capture some of the processes and issues pertinent to any given context. it can act as a starting point for discussion and reflection, however, it cannot offer an exhaustive account or ‘roadmap’ for creating a single ‘best’ framework or recipe book for practical expertise in teaching. seen through a complexity lens, it is only possible to offer insight and reflection on experience. what is offered is a philosophy, not a set of rules. why holiploigy? capturing the complexity of teaching in higher education the outline given in figure 2 is an attempt to capture, however incompletely, the complexity of the tasks involved in the conduct of higher education. but what might this set of processes be called? some of my initial interest in this idea came from a linguistic problem – i had no name for the complex set of processes outlined here. ‘pedagogy’ seems inappropriate as etymologically it means to ‘lead children’. this is a higher education orientated model relating to adults, and i do not see my role as one which only ‘leads’. this then also discounts ‘andragogy’ (knowles, 1970) as once again, whilst it stresses an interaction with adults, it still suggests a form of leading, albeit linked to self-direction. the only other possible pre-existing term is heutagogy (hase and kenyon, 2000). whilst this stresses the notion of self-determined learning, literally ‘self-leading’, this potentially ‘sidelines’ the teacher in the way suggested by biesta (2016), potentially leading to impoverished ‘egological’ (that is wanting to move away from a teaching experience which wood holiploigy – navigating the complexity of teaching in higher education journal of learning development in higher education, issue 11: april 2017 7 is focused only on the student) experiences. firstly, the task at hand suggests a level of complexity, in terms of how we understand the processes of teaching, learning, curriculum and assessment, as well as their interpenetration to create learning experiences. however, there is also the complexity of the processes which intertwine with this core, the contexts, philosophies, and the emergence of the teacher’s own practice. this leads to the need to think holistically on many different levels (holi-). thinking back to the work of tubbs (2005), i also want to consider how we might create an analogy for the role of the teacher. running through the discussion above is the importance of context, of varied approaches which might be appropriate at different points in the educational experience. at some points the teacher may need to play the role of a leader, introducing content, creating structures to help students understand the ‘shape’ of an area of a discipline. given the inclusion of threshold concepts (meyer and land, 2003) in the model, there may be times when students struggle with troublesome knowledge (perkins, 1999), as they traverse liminality. here, the teacher plays an explicit and leading role. but at other points, and in different contexts, the teacher is more peripheral, at times fulfilling the role as suggested by heutagogy, guiding and offering support when required. i see this ability to gauge, to help students understand the terrain through which they are moving, as a form of navigation (‘ploigos’ in ancient greek). hence, the holistic process of helping others navigate through a disciplinary terrain whilst also developing our own expertise, becomes a process of holiploigy. an initial definition for this concept would read: holiploigy is the emergent enactment of the processes of educative experiences. it is based on the complex interaction of curriculum, teaching, learning and assessment as enacted by tutors and students, mediated through philosophies, contexts and research. these emergent processes foster the growth of expertise in both tutors and students. i suggest that the acceptance of this definition would have several ramifications for the perceived place of teaching in higher education, and for the increasing number of simplistic and reductive frameworks being used to measure its quality. wood holiploigy – navigating the complexity of teaching in higher education journal of learning development in higher education, issue 11: april 2017 8 references ball, s.j. (2012) ‘performativity, commodification and commitment: an i-spy guide to the neoliberal university’, british journal of educational studies, 60(1), pp. 17-28. biesta, g.j.j. (2010) ‘five theses on complexity reduction and its politics’, in osberg, d.c. and biesta, g.j.j. (eds.) complexity theory and the politics of education. rotterdam: sense publishers, pp. 5-13. biesta, g.j.j. (2016) ‘the rediscovery of teaching: on robot vacuum cleaners, nonegological education, and the limits of the hermeneutical worldview’, educational philosophy and theory, 48(4), pp. 374-392 [online]. available at: http://bura.brunel.ac.uk/handle/2438/10587 (accessed: 3 april 2017). boyer, e.l. (1990) scholarship reconsidered: priorities of the professoriate. princeton, n.j: carnegie foundation for the advancement of teaching. byrne, d. and callaghan, g. (2014) complexity theory and the social sciences: the state of the art. abingdon: routledge. gunn, a. (2015) ‘how the teaching excellence framework will work’, the conversation, 6 november [online]. available at: https://theconversation.com/how-the-teachingexcellence-framework-will-work-50323 (accessed: 27 february, 2017) hase, s. and kenyon, c. (2000) from andragogy to heutagogy. ultibase, rmit [online]. available at: http://pandora.nla.gov.au/nphwb/20010220130000/http://ultibase.rmit.edu.au/articles/dec00/hase2.htm (accessed: 3 april 2017). knowles, m.s. (1970) the modern practice of adult education. andragogy versus pedagogy. englewood cliffs: prentice hall/cambridge. kreber, c. (2013) authenticity in and through teaching in higher education: the transformative potential of the scholarship of teaching. abingdon: routledge. http://bura.brunel.ac.uk/handle/2438/10587 http://pandora.nla.gov.au/nph-wb/20010220130000/http:/ultibase.rmit.edu.au/articles/dec00/hase2.htm http://pandora.nla.gov.au/nph-wb/20010220130000/http:/ultibase.rmit.edu.au/articles/dec00/hase2.htm wood holiploigy – navigating the complexity of teaching in higher education journal of learning development in higher education, issue 11: april 2017 9 meyer, j.h.f. and land, r. (2003) threshold concepts and troublesome knowledge: linkages to ways of thinking and practising within the disciplines. enhancing teaching-learning environments in undergraduate courses project, occasional report 4, may 2003. available at: http://www.etl.tla.ed.ac.uk/docs/etlreport4.pdf (accessed: 22 october 2016). perkins, d. (1999) ‘the many faces of constructivism’, educational leadership, 57(3), pp. 6-11. rescher, n. (2000) process philosophy: a survey of basic issues. pittsburgh: university of pittsburgh press. richardson, k.a. and tait, a. (2010) ‘the death of the expert?’ e:co, 12(2), pp. 87-97. shulman, l.s. (1993) ‘teaching as community property: putting an end to pedagogical solitude’, change, 25(6), pp. 6-7. tubbs, n. (2005) philosophy of the teacher. oxford: blackwell. author details phil wood, associate professor in education. school of education, university of leicester, le1 7rf, pbw2@le.ac.uk, @hereflections1 http://www.etl.tla.ed.ac.uk/docs/etlreport4.pdf mailto:pbw2@le.ac.uk holiploigy – navigating the complexity of teaching in higher education abstract introduction what is a teacher? what are we trying to achieve? beyond teaching – the complex nature of the educational experience? why holiploigy? capturing the complexity of teaching in higher education references author details literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special edition: academic peer learning, november 2015 peer learning leaders: developing employability through facilitating the learning of other students neil ford bournemouth university, uk charlotte thackeray bournemouth university, uk paul barnes bournemouth university, uk katharina hendrickx bournemouth university, uk abstract employability is a key theme in higher education and attitudes towards its development have shifted from a focus on technical skills development to a broader focus on values, intellect, social engagement and performance contributing to graduate identity (hager and hodkinson, 2009). peer assisted learning (pal) and language conversation clubs are both examples of student-led peer learning schemes at bournemouth university (bu), and are reviewed to explore the development of students employed to lead and facilitate group learning sessions. data from four annual evaluation surveys (n=239) is reviewed in addition to qualitative comments and reflective writing. peer leaders were found to have developed employability attributes including: leadership, time management and organisation, communication, and cultural awareness. above all, peer leaders identified with developing confidence in their roles. comments provided examples of student leaders who had actively selected peer learning as an opportunity to develop their confidence and were able to transfer this to other academic and employment contexts. keywords: peer assisted learning; pal; employability; graduate attributes; graduate identity; confidence. ford et al. peer learning leaders journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 2 background context employability is a key theme in contemporary higher education as we prepare graduates to participate in an increasingly global society (higher education academy, 2014; higher education academy, 2015). currently, the hea defines employability as: a set of achievements – skills, understandings and personal attributes – that makes graduates more likely to gain employment and be successful in their chosen occupations. (pegg et al., 2012, p.4) early work to develop employability in higher education tended to focus on teaching practical or technical skills that graduates of a particular discipline were expected to demonstrate (for example it skills). more recent definitions of employability recognise the importance of higher critical and metacognitive attributes, such as critical thinking (reflection), communication and cultural awareness (harvey, 2003), that enable graduates to adapt to the organisational culture and apply their skills to shape innovation and change (lowden et al., 2011). in this model, graduate employability comprises a range of: inter-related attributes, skills and competencies that help individuals to both secure and perform well in employment. (lowden et al., 2011, p.4). contemporary approaches to developing employability accordingly focus on providing opportunities for students to develop a graduate identity comprised of values, intellect, social engagement and performance (hinchliffe and jolly, 2011; hager and hodkinson, 2009). the employment landscape is increasingly diverse, global and environmentally aware (hinchliffe and jolly, 2011, p.574) and industry reports a skills gap of the personal attributes needed to thrive in this environment. attributes such as communication, leadership and creative problem-solving are highly prized, but employers observe that graduates are unlikely to have developed them (bloomberg business, 2015). there is increasing recognition that developing employability is an active, experiential process, requiring a departure from didactic pedagogies to more active, social and reflective forms of learning: ford et al. peer learning leaders journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 3 the ability to articulate learning and raising confidence, self-esteem and aspirations seem to be more significant in developing graduates than a narrow focus on skills and competencies. (pegg et al., 2012, p.9) in summary, attitudes towards employability have shifted from a skills-based focus to an emphasis on transferable attributes, values and experiences (for example, communication, leadership, confidence and diversity). current understanding is that, as well as learning skills and developing attributes, students need authentic experiences to apply their learning, as well as opportunities to assess their progress and identify future development needs (deeley, 2014). two forms of peer learning at bu this paper explores how two forms of peer learning at bournemouth university (bu) – peer assisted learning (pal) and language conversation clubs – contribute to the development of employability in the student leaders trained to facilitate sessions. it should be noted that, whilst there is a wealth of anecdotal evidence, and several papers identify potential employability benefits for peer leaders (stout and mcdaniel, 2006; saunders and gibbon, 1998; capstick, 2004), there is a lack of hard evidence in the literature (dawson et al., 2014). many institutions who practice peer learning schemes have observed that the peer leaders gain more than the students who participate (donelan 1999, cited stout and mcdaniel, 2006), however, much of the evidence for this is anecdotal. whilst this paper does not present any research specifically undertaken to investigate a causal link between peer learning and employability, we are able to offer observations from our schemes that strongly support a link and hope that this leads to further research and discussion. peer assisted learning (pal) peer assisted learning (pal) was formally established at bu in 2001. although it has evolved some distinct features to meet local needs, it retains links to the university of ford et al. peer learning leaders journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 4 missouri-kansas city, supplemental instruction (si) model: for example, all current trainers of pal leaders have attended supervisor training provided by the pass (peer assisted study sessions) national centre. pal provides active, group-learning facilitated by more experienced students who have been trained to help students to adjust to independent learning and develop understanding of their course (bournemouth university, 2014). it runs across all full-time undergraduate courses at bu and currently employs approximately 300 students as pal leaders. as well as supporting the learning of participants, pal offers significant development opportunities for the pal leaders. annual surveys of pal leaders evaluate how they feel they have developed through their experiences of regularly facilitating group learning. conversation clubs for independent language learners the independent language learning scheme at bu is open to all students and staff wanting to learn a new language or improve their existing knowledge. it promotes the advantages of independent language learning whilst also addressing disadvantages: namely a lack of opportunity to actively use the language with other students who have similar cultural interests. to address this disadvantage, conversation clubs were introduced for french, german and spanish in 2005. originally, these were only available to intermediate or advanced learners, and were soon extended to include the majority of independent language learners who are beginners or false beginners. the language portfolio has since expanded to include italian, mandarin chinese and arabic, and conversation clubs now employ 15 international students who are native speakers to facilitate these clubs. training, resources and registers are provided for the facilitators who organise the clubs themselves in collaboration with the learners. they decide on the times of the clubs and also book the rooms they require. english conversation and culture clubs have also been added to provide international students with an informal environment to improve their speaking and listening skills, and to find out more about british culture. international students from some cultures, who may be ford et al. peer learning leaders journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 5 reluctant to participate in academic seminars, may participate in a session led by fellow students to improve their speaking confidence and enable greater engagement in seminars. methods a range of data from pal and conversation clubs was analysed to provide insight into student leaders’ employability development. implications are discussed below and include the following sources of data: 1) pal surveys pal leaders are surveyed annually, including a question that asks them to tick to indicate: ‘which of these skills(s) did you develop during your experience being a pal leader? organisation/presentation skills; listening/communication skills; leadership/teamwork skills; confidence; problem solving/‘thinking on my feet’; other (please specify)’ (ford and thackeray, 2014). we aggregated the last four years’ results to give an indication of the employability attributes that pal leaders commonly associated with their role (see table 1). table 1 – summary of pal leader survey results relating to employability attributes 2011/12 2012/13 2013/14 2014/15 total s u rv e y number of responses 60 36 75 68 239 total pal leaders 146 170 260 253 829 % response rate 41.1 21.2 28.9 26.9 28.8 % a tt ri b u te problem solving/'thinking on my feet' 71.7% 66.7% 74.7% 67.6% 70.7% confidence 95% 80.6% 82.7% 77.9% 84.1% leadership/teamwork skills 83.3% 69.4% 74.7% 77.9% 77% listening/communication skills 73.3% 75% 85.3% 77.9% 78.7% organisation/presentation skills 75% 80.6% 88% 80.9% 81.6% ford et al. peer learning leaders journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 6 the proportion of pal leaders recognising each attribute is fairly consistent. figure 1 shows the aggregate percentages across the whole period. figure 1. % pal leaders recognising the development of employability attributes (2011/12 to 2014/15). during june 2015, a short, informal, follow-up survey was delivered to all pal leaders who are current students (past three years) asking them to pick the attribute that pal had most helped them to develop and then provide a response to the question ‘how did being a pal leader help you to develop this attribute?’. 56 responses were received (representing a response rate of 8.2%). figure 2 (below) shows the employability attributes with which respondents most identified. whilst this data is not necessarily representative, it has provided qualitative comments that are discussed below. 2) conversation club: feedback from facilitators conversation club facilitators are not formally surveyed, so feedback was requested by an e-mail to recent facilitators, asking them to reflect on whether, and how, being a facilitator had prepared them for employment. ford et al. peer learning leaders journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 7 in addition to this, one student facilitator produced a case study reflecting on her development in the role. extracts have been included in the discussion below and the author is credited as a co-author of this paper. 3) institutional data bu has a strong student development award (sda), which involves collecting points for undertaking different extracurricular activities. being a pal leader or conversation club facilitator both carry a high proportion of the points-tariff for the award. students also submit reflective writing, evidencing how extracurricular activities have developed graduate attributes. examples of reflective writing have been analysed as a source of qualitative data that describes how peer learning experiences have contributed to the development of specific attributes. we have also used data from work placements to identify which employability attributes the employers of our peer learning leaders value. we identified 31 job descriptions for the student work placements and analysed these to identify examples of the specific attributes required by employers. figure 2 shows the proportion of job descriptions identifying attributes that bu peer leaders commonly recognised as having developed. it could be argued that this is selfselecting, in that job descriptions were scanned for mention of the attributes our leaders had identified. the sample is certainly too small to be representative; alongside the literature, however, this analysis has helped us to decide which attributes to discuss in this paper. ford et al. peer learning leaders journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 8 figure 2. attributes peer leaders identified as having developed most compared to attributes identified in placement job descriptions. discussion: do pal and conversation clubs develop employability? in this section, we discuss the development of selected employability attributes by peer learning leaders. leadership, organisation and time management, communication, cultural awareness, and confidence are discussed with reference to their importance in employability. two sources from the literature have been particularly influential in selecting these categories: ‘the bloomberg recruiter report’ (bloomberg business, 2015) and hinchliffe and jolly’s ‘graduate identity and employability’ (2011). both surveyed employers to offer insight into which graduate attributes are valued. the bloomberg recruiter report refers specifically to mbas (and is therefore potentially discipline biased); what is interesting is that it asked employers to categorise how common and how desirable attributes were in recruits. we found the ‘less common, more desired’ category helpful for identifying attributes that our students may have limited opportunities to develop and that are highly valued by employers. ford et al. peer learning leaders journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 9 leadership 22% of the placement job descriptions we reviewed identified leadership as important (figure 2) and identified a range of activities such as leading events or motivating teams. bloomberg identifies leadership as ‘less common, more desired’ (bloomberg business, 2015), suggesting that opportunities to develop leadership may be limited. there is an obvious need for leadership in business management roles where employers expect graduate skills to include: an additional focus on empowerment, delegation, change management, building teams, and motivating others (riebe and jackson, 2014, p.320) however, it is important to distinguish that leadership attributes are valuable in a broader sense than those required of business management roles. kelley’s concept of independent ‘followership’ highlights that some attributes commonly ascribed to leaders, such as critical thinking and acting independently, are important attributes for any effective team member to demonstrate (kelley, 1988). 77% of respondents to our pal leader survey considered that their ‘leadership/ teamwork skills’ had developed (figure 1) and 17.9% selected it as the main attribute that they gained through pal (figure 2). qualitative comments from peer leaders suggest that peer learning roles offer leadership experience that students may have limited opportunities to practice. comments tended to focus on facilitative and democratic facets of leadership style rather than authoritarian or managerial approaches, for example: it wasn't about managing them, talking at them or giving instructions; it was heavily reliant on a two-way relationship. (pal leader) there are numerous examples of peer leaders identifying experiences relating to working with others and evidence of behaviours that enable this, such as: team working; cultural awareness (see below); and conflict resolution (riebe and jackson, 2014). similarly, peer leaders identified the coaching and mentoring aspects of the role as an effective leadership style. some even suggested that they could apply coaching techniques to their own development: ford et al. peer learning leaders journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 10 i will be able to see in myself when i need to improve and personally be able to reflect on it and change’. (pal leader) this suggests a high level of reflective ability – applying the experience of leading others through coaching and mentoring techniques to their own independent personal development. the conversation club case study provided insight into how experiencing being a leader regularly over time helped to develop confidence and interpersonal skills as facets of leadership (mahoney et al., 2003): the consistent participation throughout my degree increased my confidence and interpersonal skills which enabled me to transfer this confidence onto the academic level. (katharina hendrickx, conversation club facilitator) qualitative comments provided numerous examples of leaders gaining confidence in the role of a leader over time and highlights the opportunities that peer learning provides for leaders to develop their learning through practice and reflection. our data also suggests that peer leaders are able to utilise their experiences to gain further employment in leadership roles. for example, two facilitators secured work as a summer school leader in the united states and as an activity leader for a local language school, both citing experience as a peer leader as significant. time management/organisation hinchliffe and jolly identified that employers expect graduates to be able to ‘plan and manage their time’ as soon as they are appointed (2011, p.571). time management and organisation were identified in 16% of the placement job descriptions reviewed. there is evidence that our peer learning leaders identify with developing these skills. unfortunately, we’re not able to disaggregate organisation from presentation skills in the pal leader survey. interestingly though, the strongest response to another survey question, what advice would you offer future pal leaders?, is consistently to ‘plan and prepare’, suggesting that leaders have learnt this through experience (ford and thackeray, 2014). 10% of respondents to our additional survey identified time management or organisation as the main attribute they had developed (figure 2). ford et al. peer learning leaders journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 11 qualitative comments included reflection on planning sessions, making time to spend with students, and organising sessions that were diverse and creative enough to suit everyone, especially in the context of increased commitments for their own studies. comments relating to organisation and time management again highlighted that employability attributes can overlap. for example, pal leaders working in pairs reflected that collaborative working required planning and one respondent remarked that their presentation skills have improved through learning the importance of timing. conversation club facilitators are expected to schedule and book rooms for their sessions and communicate this to their students, whilst managing their own studies. this case study extract highlights the development opportunities provided by schemes that require students to plan and organise their own sessions: i quickly discovered that there was far more required of me than i initially thought and that i had to use more than just my language skills. i had to plan each lesson carefully in advance and predict the timings of each exercise in order to have enough material for each session. this challenged me to get organized and manage my time efficiently. (katharina hendrickx, conversation club facilitator) communication there is strong evidence that employers value communication. hinchcliffe and jolly (2011, p.575) identified ‘interpersonal skills’ and ‘written communication skills’ as the categories ranked highest by employers and the bloomberg report found communication to be a highly desired attribute and less common in graduates (bloomberg business, 2015). 32.1% of the placement job descriptions we reviewed sought ‘excellent’ communication skills. the job descriptions illustrated that ‘communication skills’ can be expressed as a number of related themes. some focused on people skills, a larger proportion emphasised ‘tailoring’ communications to different groups, and others specified listening and presenting attributes. 78.7% of pal leader survey respondents considered that the role had developed their communication skills and 10.7% selected it as the attribute that had most developed. it is perhaps unsurprising that pal leaders identify strongly with communication skills, as training for the role carries a strong emphasis on listening and questioning and this is a key part of the role. ford et al. peer learning leaders journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 12 qualitative data from both peer learning schemes offers insight into how leaders develop their interpersonal communication and a number of themes emerge. some, for example, referred to sharing relatable experiences with others: …making the support and guidance relatable is important to pique the student’s interest (pal leader) this demonstrates understanding that the subjective experience of the audience differs from their own and suggests an ability to flex their behaviour to achieve the best outcome. ‘behavioural flexibility is an integral component of communication competence’ (martin, 2003, p.3) and it appears that peer learning offers valuable opportunities to practice. this relates to employer requirements to ‘tailor’ communications and may also be an important aspect of cultural diversity: it helped me understand my language better because i had to teach it considering you’re speaking to an audience whose language doesn’t function in the same way. (conversation club facilitator) another theme relates to delivering communication: partly in terms of organising the content and partly in terms of engaging learners. mehrabian’s research (1981) into the verbal and non-verbal elements of communication has become widely accepted and comments show that peer learning leaders recognise the importance of words, body language, and tone in effective communication: speaking in front of people, listening to others, being aware of posture etc. when in front of people – all developed my communication skills. (pal leader) some respondents also recognised that they had practised listening, explaining and clarifying information: i had to be clear and concise when speaking in-front of the group...listening effectively to the group to understand any problems or issues that they needed addressing. (pal leader) ford et al. peer learning leaders journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 13 peer leaders clearly recognised the importance of communication in the workplace. for example, one participant expressed how important it would be ‘to communicate with fellow colleagues and clients’. cultural awareness the ability to work with diverse clients and customers in a global economy is a growing business driver (hinchliffe and jolly, 2011, p.574). this clearly links to the internationalisation theme in higher education and student diversity is an important resource that can be harnessed to develop global citizenship (caruana, 2014). suárezorozco and sattin (2007) suggest that global citizens: need the cultural sophistication to empathise with their peers who will likely be of different racial, religious, linguistic and social origins (suárez-orozco and sattin, 2007, p.61). riebe and jackson (2014) identify cultural and diversity awareness alongside conflict resolution as important behaviours when working with others, and there is evidence that peer learning can provide valuable opportunities to practice: …many of the students participating in the language conversation clubs were from across the world which oftentimes leads to cultural misunderstandings. i found myself more than once in the role of the mediator, listening to both sides and making sure this would not interfere with the learning process… (katharina hendrickx, conversation club facilitator.) qualitative data suggests that some peer leaders developed cultural awareness through their roles. leaders seemed to mostly attribute gaining cultural awareness through speaking to students about differences between the uk and other countries, and through establishing a safe, inclusive environment where they could talk about whatever they wanted. from our analysis, the development of cultural awareness appears to be closely inter-related with communication. ‘voluntary social segregation’ among student groups is a known barrier to cultural exchange (caruana, 2014, p.86). our data suggests that peer learning can create safe ford et al. peer learning leaders journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 14 learning environments that foster cross-cultural exchange and enable students to benefit from international mobility: …there’s actually not much chance for me to make friends with british students. thus, for me, the conversation club is not only a class to gain experience of language teaching, but also a chance to make friends, and understand british culture through personal conversation. (conversation club facilitator.) we found evidence that peer learning provides opportunities for both international and domestic students to learn from experiencing other cultures. the conversation club case study offers deeper insight into the process by which peer learning can achieve cultural exchange (eccles and barber, 1999): i saw myself as a role model who encourages and supports introverted students and enables an open-minded and non-judgemental space for debate and exchange between students. this greatly improved my emotional intelligence as well as ethnical sensitivity which are important skills in order to build trust and a friendly learning environment, giving every student an equal opportunity to participate in the learning process. (katharina hendrickx, conversation club facilitator. this example suggests that peer leaders are able to employ a number of behaviours (such as social intelligence and conflict resolution) to create a safe environment for cultural exchange, which in turn develops cultural awareness. confidence it is challenging to justify our inclusion of ‘confidence’ as an employability attribute. it does not feature in any of the lists of employability skills we referred to and was rarely mentioned in placement job descriptions. confidence is not explicitly mentioned in the cbi/nus student guide to employability ‘working towards your future’ (cbi and nus, 2011), however, a quote from a recent graduate in a cbi focus group offers some insight into our rationale for discussing confidence: ford et al. peer learning leaders journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 15 when i went to my interview they were hardly asking me about my degree. they were asking me about confidence, how i react, and leadership skills. that’s what gets you the job! (cbi and universities uk, 2009, p.18.) on one level, confidence can represent a level of attainment relating to other attributes (for example ‘confident communication’). there also appears to be an aspect of selfconfidence, possibly relating to the concept of self-efficacy and an overall positive selfbelief in being ‘up-to-the–job’. across all of our data, confidence is the attribute that our peer leaders most identify with developing in their role. 84.1% of pal leaders stated that they had developed confidence, with 42.9% citing it as the attribute they had developed most. qualitative comments suggest that confidence is seen as an overarching attribute: being a pal leader has given me so many skills that i was able to speak about in interviews, (all of the options!!) however, confidence i think is the overriding factor for me. (pal leader.) peer learning leaders identified building confidence from a number of aspects of the role, including: receiving positive feedback from the students; reflecting on successful sessions; and from leading the group when they were not necessarily an expert in the subject. for some this had a significant impact in overcoming previous negative employment experiences. overcoming nerves is a common theme in the data. leaders often admitted to being nervous before they ran their first session and then growing in confidence as time passed: i have to say that this experience has increased my self-confidence: as i am very shy and usually not keen to speak in public, i found that after the first few lesson i felt much better already. (conversation club facilitator.) a number of respondents reflected how they had been able to transfer the confidence to other contexts, for example: when presenting to groups; ‘speaking-out’ in seminar groups; applications, assessment centres and interviews for placements or jobs; and with career ford et al. peer learning leaders journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 16 direction. peer leaders also mentioned actively seeking opportunities to develop their confidence to address self-perceived development needs. it was the first time living on my own and in a foreign country. i was quite shy and felt lost at university. thus, it was difficult to make friends and i lacked a feeling of belonging…i applied for a few extracurricular activities including the language conversation clubs in the hope to meet new people and engage in new experiences. (katharina hendrickx, conversation club facilitator.) as well as providing a social learning environment for participants, there is some evidence that peer learning can provide a safe space for leaders to practise their skills: the more i gained the friendship of the students, the easier it was for me to teach. i developed a great deal of self-confidence and public speaking skills through the weekly practice, which also benefitted me in academic presentations. (katharina hendrickx, conversation club facilitator.) in a sense this is co-created. peer leaders use their facilitation skills to foster the social learning environment which, when successful, enables the peer leader to gain confidence through observing the positive outcomes of their behaviour. feedback from participants can validate and situate the peer learning leader’s self-assessment. again, there is evidence that successful peer leaders gain the confidence to apply their skills in other settings and are able to use their experience to obtain further opportunities (dickinson, 2000), for example: i have been able to use the transferable skills to obtain work placements in south africa and the usa and finish my degree successfully with a scholarship offer for my master. i believe it helped me to close the skills gap many graduates are confronted with when graduating. (katharina hendrickx, conversation club facilitator.) ford et al. peer learning leaders journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 17 conclusions we conclude that peer learning roles can help leaders to develop leadership, organisation and time management, communication, cultural and diversity awareness, and above all, confidence within their roles. qualitative comments have been particularly useful in identifying how peer learning leaders develop these attributes through their experience of practising in the role. a number of comments have identified that this is a sustained development over time, and there are numerous examples of peer leaders reflecting on initial lack of understanding or nervousness, to become confident practitioners following positive feedback from their groups. there are also numerous examples of peer leaders being able to transfer attributes to other contexts, both academically and in employment. the concept of confidence cuts across all attributes. peer leaders report building confidence through practising specific attributes and also report a broader self-confidence that comes from overall reflection on their development in the role. some peer leaders have actively sought leadership activities to address self-perceived development needs (for example, shyness). this independent personal and professional development indicates sophisticated self-reflection. it is reassuring that some peer leaders are independently aware of their own development needs and that peer learning provides opportunities to address them. definitions of employability are ‘complex and multi-faceted’ (edwards, 2014, p.229). our selection of specific attributes could be argued to be subjective and we therefore suggest that further work would benefit from exploring and mapping to accepted models of employability. whilst we have observed employability development in peer leaders, our analysis does not offer insight into the effectiveness of peer learning compared to other forms of student development. this distinction is hard to prove and further research may benefit from objective measurement, for example, using psychometric testing. as we found confidence to be a significant factor, there may also be some merit in exploring established psychological measures of confidence or self-efficacy, and this is consistent with emerging research from other peer learning schemes. ford et al. peer learning leaders journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 18 we acknowledge that relatively low response rates are a limitation of this study. we attribute this to a number of factors, including: timing, survey fatigue, and institutional limitations on promoting surveys. selection bias is also a potential limitation. for example, the students who volunteer to be conversation club facilitators could be argued to already be culturally aware as they have chosen to study in a foreign culture, so we are cautious about making any claims about wider groups. in this context, it is important to acknowledge that not all peer learning leaders will have had a positive experience. further studies should seek to identify how negative experiences of peer learning leadership may affect employability, as well as how best to support all leaders through training, session observations, debriefs, and reflective practice. our study has highlighted local variation in evaluating peer learning schemes. we reflect that there is potentially value in developing standardised measures for peer learning schemes to enable data to be compared across different peer learning initiatives and institutions. student portfolios are acknowledged to be an effective form of assessing employability skills (riebe and jackson, 2014) and we found reflective writing from student development award portfolios to be a useful source of evaluation data. we reflect that it would be beneficial to investigate embedding the use of reflective portfolios in peer learning schemes. riebe and jackson (2014) highlight the use of rubrics to assess employability portfolios and this could provide both an objective measure of student development, as well as scaffolding opportunities for peer leaders to reflect on their development. there is also potential to use institutional data to investigate outcomes. destination of leavers of higher education (dlhe) data could provide evidence of correlation between engagement with peer learning and employment success. whilst this would be prone to achievement bias, it could be validated with qualitative data from alumni and employers. work experience is only valuable if it can be translated and transferred into other contexts, requiring strong interpersonal skills and capacity for reflective thinking. we conclude that student-led peer learning provides opportunities to develop employability and a useful focus will be to investigate and enhance ways to encourage participants to reflect on their experiences and integrate them with their graduate identity. ford et al. peer learning leaders journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 19 references bloomberg business (2015) the bloomberg recruiter report: job skills companies want but can’t get. new york: bloomberg. available at: http://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2015-job-skills-report/ (accessed: 17 august 2015 2015). bournemouth university (2014) peer assisted learning (pal): an overview. bournemouth: bournemouth university. available at: http://www.bournemouth.ac.uk/library/guestvisitor/pal.html (accessed: 10 august 2015). capstick, s. (2004) benefits and shortcomings of peer assisted learning (pal) in higher education: an appraisal by students. working copy produced for the peer assisted learning conference, january 2004. bournemouth: bournemouth university [working paper]. available at: https://www1.bournemouth.ac.uk/sites/default/files/asset/document/stuartcapstick.pdf (accessed: 14 november 2015). caruana, v. (2014) ‘re-thinking global citizenship in higher education: from cosmopolitanism and international mobility to cosmopolitanisation, resilience and resilient thinking', higher education quarterly, 68(1), pp. 85-104. cbi and nus (2011) working towards your future: making the most of your time in higher education. london: cbi. available at: http://www.nus.org.uk/global/cbi_nus_employability%20report_may%202011.pdf (accessed: 15 august 2015). cbi and universities uk (2009) future fit: preparing graduates for the world of work. london: cbi. available at: http://www.cbi.org.uk/media/1121435/cbi_uuk_future_fit.pdf (accessed: 15 august 2015). http://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2015-job-skills-report/ http://www.bournemouth.ac.uk/library/guest-visitor/pal.html http://www.bournemouth.ac.uk/library/guest-visitor/pal.html https://www1.bournemouth.ac.uk/sites/default/files/asset/document/stuart-capstick.pdf https://www1.bournemouth.ac.uk/sites/default/files/asset/document/stuart-capstick.pdf http://www.nus.org.uk/global/cbi_nus_employability%20report_may%202011.pdf http://www.cbi.org.uk/media/1121435/cbi_uuk_future_fit.pdf ford et al. peer learning leaders journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 20 dawson, p., van der meer, j., skalicky, j. and cowley, k. (2014) 'on the effectiveness of supplemental instruction: a systematic review of supplemental instruction and peerassisted study sessions literature between 2001 and 2010', review of educational research, 84(4), pp. 609-639. deeley, s.j. (2014) 'summative co-assessment: a deep learning approach to enhancing employability skills and attributes', active learning in higher education, 15(1), pp. 39-51. dickinson, m. (2000) 'an analysis of the accreditation of transferable skills in extra curricular activities within higher education', assessment & evaluation in higher education, 25(1), pp. 61-70. eccles, j.s. and barber, b.l. (1999) 'student council, volunteering, basketball, or marching band: what kind of extracurricular involvement matters?', journal of adolescent research, 14(1), pp. 10-43. edwards, m. (2014) 'the impact of placements on students' self-efficacy', higher education, skills & work-based learning, 4(3), pp. 228. ford, n. and thackeray, c. (2014) evaluation of the peer assisted learning (pal) scheme at bournemouth university 2013/14. bournemouth: bournemouth university. available at: https://www1.bournemouth.ac.uk/sites/default/files/asset/document/pal-evaluation2013-14.pdf (accessed: 17 august 2015). hager, p. and hodkinson, p. (2009) 'moving beyond the metaphor of transfer of learning', british educational research journal, 35(4), pp. 619-638. harvey, l. (2003) transitions from higher education to work. sheffield: centre for research and evaluation, sheffield hallam university. available at: http://www.qualityresearchinternational.com/esecttools/esectpubs/harveytransitions. pdf (accessed: 17 august 2015). https://www1.bournemouth.ac.uk/sites/default/files/asset/document/pal-evaluation-2013-14.pdf https://www1.bournemouth.ac.uk/sites/default/files/asset/document/pal-evaluation-2013-14.pdf http://www.qualityresearchinternational.com/esecttools/esectpubs/harveytransitions.pdf http://www.qualityresearchinternational.com/esecttools/esectpubs/harveytransitions.pdf ford et al. peer learning leaders journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 21 higher education academy (2014) internationalising higher education framework. york: higher education academy. available at: https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/sites/default/files/resources/internationalisinghefram eworkfinal.pdf (accessed: 17 june 2015). higher education academy (2015) employability. york: higher education academy. available at: https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/workstreamsresearch/themes/employability (accessed: 17 june 2015). hinchliffe, g.w. and jolly, a. (2011) 'graduate identity and employability', british educational research journal, 37(4), pp. 563-584. kelley, r.e. (1988) 'in praise of followers', harvard business review, 66(6), pp. 142-148. lowden, k., hall, s., elliot, d. and lewin, j. (2011) employers' perceptions of the employability skills of new graduates: research commissioned by the edge foundation. glasgow: university of glasgow scre centre and edge foundation. available at: http://www.edge.co.uk/media/63412/employability_skills_as_pdf__final_online_version.pdf (accessed: 14 november 2015). mahoney, j.l., cairns, b.d. and farmer, t.w. (2003) 'promoting interpersonal competence and educational success through extracurricular activity participation', journal of educational psychology, 95(2), pp. 409-418. martin, p.w. (2003) 'key aspects of teaching and learning in arts, humanities and social sciences', in fry, h., ketteridge, s. and marshall, s. (eds.) a handbook for teaching and learning in higher education: enhancing academic practice. 2 nd edn. new york/london: routledge, pp. 301-323. mehrabian, a. (1981) silent messages: implicit communication of emotions and attitudes. 2 nd edn. belmont, ca: wadsworth publishing co inc. https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/sites/default/files/resources/internationalisingheframeworkfinal.pdf https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/sites/default/files/resources/internationalisingheframeworkfinal.pdf https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/workstreams-research/themes/employability https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/workstreams-research/themes/employability http://www.edge.co.uk/media/63412/employability_skills_as_pdf_-_final_online_version.pdf http://www.edge.co.uk/media/63412/employability_skills_as_pdf_-_final_online_version.pdf ford et al. peer learning leaders journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 22 pegg, a., waldock, j., hendy-isaac, s. and lawton, r. (2012) pedagogy for employability. york: higher education academy. available at: https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/sites/default/files/pedagogy_for_employability_updat e_2012.pdf (accessed: 22 june 2015). riebe, l. and jackson, d. (2014) 'the use of rubrics in benchmarking and assessing employability skills', journal of management education, 38(3), pp. 319-344. saunders, d. and gibbon, m. (1998) 'peer tutoring and peer–assisted student support: five models within a new university', mentoring & tutoring: partnership in learning, 5(3), pp. 3-13 [online]. available: routledge. available at: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0968465980050301?journalcode=cme t20#.vb-kkvnvhbc (accessed: 3 august 2015). stout, m.l. and mcdaniel, a.j. (2006) 'benefits to supplemental instruction leaders', new directions for teaching and learning, no. 106, summer 2006, wiley periodicals inc., pp. 55-62 [online]. available at: http://supportservices.ufs.ac.za/dl/userfiles/documents/00001/975_eng.pdf (accessed: 3 august 2015). suárez -orozco, m.m. and sattin, c. (2007) 'wanted: global citizens', educational leadership, 64(7), pp. 58-62. author details neil ford is academic liaison development manager in library and learning support at bournemouth university and coordinates their peer assisted learning programme. neil has developed a number of student co-creation projects and is interested in working with students as partners in learning. charlotte thackeray is peer learning officer at bournemouth university and centrally supports over 300 leaders and 50 academics at the institution. she shares good practice with other institutions in the uk and develops excellent peer learning opportunities at bu. https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/sites/default/files/pedagogy_for_employability_update_2012.pdf https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/sites/default/files/pedagogy_for_employability_update_2012.pdf http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0968465980050301?journalcode=cmet20#.vb-kkvnvhbc http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0968465980050301?journalcode=cmet20#.vb-kkvnvhbc http://supportservices.ufs.ac.za/dl/userfiles/documents/00001/975_eng.pdf ford et al. peer learning leaders journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 23 paul barnes is language learning manager and eap tutor at bournemouth university and his main interest has always been using technology in language learning. paul is a keen advocate of using students to help other students. katharina hendrickx has a ba in english and is currently studying her ma in literary media at bournemouth university. katharina has been teaching german at bu for three years and is passionate to learn more about different cultures and languages. peer learning leaders: developing employability through facilitating the learning of other students abstract background context two forms of peer learning at bu peer assisted learning (pal) conversation clubs for independent language learners methods 1) pal surveys 2) conversation club: feedback from facilitators 3) institutional data discussion: do pal and conversation clubs develop employability? leadership time management/organisation communication cultural awareness confidence conclusions references author details article journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 14: april 2019 ________________________________________________________________________ making use of students’ digital habits in higher education: what they already know and what they learn eva hansson halmstad university, sweden jeanette sjöberg halmstad university, sweden abstract varieties of digital practices have increasingly become part of people’s everyday lives and people, in general, use these communicative practices on a daily basis, mostly for social and entertaining purposes. as to higher education, researchers have pointed out that digital technology could be a useful tool in how to learn more effectively, if it is based on the abilities that students bring with them into higher education from their everyday life (for example, buzzard et. al., 2011). in this case study, we explore the issue of students' digital practices in everyday life as well as in higher education, in a teacher training programme at a swedish university. the aim is two-fold: on the one hand, to provide knowledge regarding students' everyday experiences of digital practices and the ways in which these are utilised in higher education; on the other hand, to contribute to the understanding of the ways in which higher education contributes to challenging and developing students' digital skills. twenty-nine students from teacher training programmes participated in the study by answering a questionnaire. the results show that the students’ digital habits are not being used or acknowledged in higher education, except for when it comes to their teacher training practice (ttp). furthermore, the results also show that higher education contributes to students’ digital skills. this, we argue, could be of interest for teachers and researchers in teacher training programmes and for teachers in primary to tertiary education, in developing education activities with digital technology based on pupils’ and students’ digital habits. we can also see that the study can inspire other teachers in higher education, where the idea of using students’ digital habits perhaps is not yet taken into consideration. hansson and sjöberg making use of students’ digital habits in higher education: what they already know and what they learn journal of learning development in higher education, issue 14: april 2019 2 keywords: digital technology; higher education; teacher training practice; digital habits; digital skills; digital environment. introduction ‘if i lose my cell phone, i lose half my brain’ (teenager in prensky, 2009, p.2). one of the concerns of research on digital learning is technology’s impact on the learning process itself. in the quotation above, the teenager expresses that the digital device is a part of her body. could it be that the teenager, because she implies that the mobile phone and the brain belong together, also implies that it is not possible to learn without the digital device? beaudoin (2006) states that the rapid proliferation of digital technologies will have a dramatic influence on higher education and that it will affect the conventional ways of teaching. in addition, predictions were made that ‘new technologies will transform teaching and learning processes from being highly teacher-dominated to student-centred’ (guri rosenblit, 2009, p.5). how should a teacher in higher education relate to digital learning? are the institutions of higher education successful in arranging and providing learning environments based on the potential of digital media? often, we find ourselves only incorporating analogue material (compare conventional literacies: knobel and lanksher, 2007), in a digital platform and/or learning management system (lms), without considering the expanded potentials available in the digital media. perhaps the students would rather use facebook than lms because the university teacher failed to design the learning task optimally? previous research shows that students' own experiences of digital practices are not used in higher education (buzzard et al, 2011; kelm, 2011; lichy, 2012). instead of only using the technology of social and entertaining values, maybe the technology, if it is based on the abilities the student brings into higher education from their daily lives, may be a positive tool in learning more effectively (buzzard et al, 2011). students’ digital habits and higher education from their childhood, students of today have used other artefacts as well as created knowledge in new ways than earlier generations have done. for generation y (persons born between 1982-95, also known as millennials) represented by the teenager above, hansson and sjöberg making use of students’ digital habits in higher education: what they already know and what they learn journal of learning development in higher education, issue 14: april 2019 3 digital technology is a natural component of daily life (moos & honkomp, 2011). one consequence of that is that both teachers and parents today have a notion that students are studying less because they spend a great deal of time on the internet, most commonly on social media or playing online games (o’brien, 2010). in addition, there is a contemporary global debate concerning the place of mobile phones and other screen devices in schools. in france, for example, mobile phones have been banned up to secondary school. there is also a debate about young people's worsened physical, social and psychosocial health today, related to the extended screen time. in the seyle report (carli et al, 2014) findings showed that a group of pupils who were positive towards the use of internet/tv/videogames not related to school and work had a sedentary lifestyle and reduced sleep as well as suffered from suicidal thoughts and depression. on the other hand, there are those who advocate that mobile phones and time in front of other digital devices actually benefit children’s learning development. for instance, neumann and neumann (2013) suggest that digital tablets have the potential to enhance children’s emergent literacy skills. furthermore, in the latest programme for international student assessment (oecd, 2016) the findings show that boys' reading comprehension on the computer screen, in almost all oecd countries, is relatively better than reading comprehension on paper. instead of only using technology for social and entertaining purposes, technology could be a useful tool in how to learn more efficiently if it is based on the abilities that students bring with them into higher education from their everyday life (buzzard et. al., 2011). when it comes to adults, research shows that students' own experiences of digital practices are not much considered in higher education (for example buzzard et al, 2011; kelm, 2011; lichy, 2012). however, some recent studies point in the opposite direction. for example, liu (2018) describes social media as a ‘potential powerful tool’ in higher education and uses twitter as an example, and jain and dutta (2018) argue for the congruency of gamification as a tool for effective learning among the millennial population. both examples derive from students' experiences of digital tools outside higher education and take into account their everyday use as an origin for further knowledge. however, university students, regardless of their digital experiences and skills, often encounter pedagogies and teaching structures that still follow traditional approaches, hansson and sjöberg making use of students’ digital habits in higher education: what they already know and what they learn journal of learning development in higher education, issue 14: april 2019 4 referred to as teacher-focused approach to teaching (entwistle, 2009), where knowledge is seen as something that could be transferred from the teacher to the student. chen (2008) found that teachers, even though they believed themselves to be following the constructivist learning theory, in reality, had a teacher-based way of teaching with the lecture as a basis. in those cases where they used technology, it was merely used as a support for that kind of teaching. in 2005, trucano concluded that ‘[s]tudies on the use of icts [information and communication technologies] suggest that despite the rhetoric that icts can enable new types of teaching and learning styles, for the most part they are being used to support traditional learning practices’ (p.35). higher education institutions are forced to change since the shift to a more student-centred learning is needed and the globalised twenty-first century skills for work environment are more complex and demanding than before. educators are today more of facilitators, they are ‘no longer the sole authoritative source of information and are expected to assist students in navigating the mastery of content and skills’ (adams becker et al, 2017). in the context of teacher training programmes, we note that the traditional pedagogy, teacher-focused and not very digital, is still in place. how can that be? this is probably due to the paradigm shift, where institutions have to take advantage of new technology (rogers, 2000). as laurillard expresses it: ‘the arrival of digital technology over the past three decades, increasingly impacting on work, leisure, and learning, has been a shock to the education system that it has yet to absorb’ (2012, p.2). an opposite approach is when the students are active participants in the learning process, creating knowledge together with both teachers and other students in learning situations that are purposeful and relevant to the subject: ‘this framework suggests that quality learning is achieved when teachers and learners together deal with content in pedagogically suitable ways’ (zepke, 2013, p.98). this approach could be called studentfocused and the knowledge is contextualised (entwistle, 2009). the study in the study presented here, 29 students from an undergraduate teacher education programme at a small swedish university participated by answering a questionnaire (see appendix 1). the focus of the study was on the students' digital practices in everyday life hansson and sjöberg making use of students’ digital habits in higher education: what they already know and what they learn journal of learning development in higher education, issue 14: april 2019 5 and in educational situations. by ‘digital practices’ we mean the different contexts in which students participate in digital media (such as forums, communities) and their use of interactive online and offline games. in our study, there is an interest in both students as actors in relation to their own studies in encounters with digital media and in the knowledge of how students' digital practices in everyday life and in educational situations are utilised and developed during their education. the research questions were:  how can students' digital habits be an asset in higher education?  how can higher education that includes digital practice develop students' digital skills? methodology in the present study, a questionnaire containing six questions (see appendix 1) was digitally distributed to 269 students in two teacher training programmes during their last spring semester. the reason for this approach was to capture experiences from students who were about to complete their education; hence the chosen method was a case study. case studies play a significant role in educational and social research (alnaim, 2015) and are often used to gain knowledge about phenomena related to individuals, groups, and organisations (yin, 1994). a mere 29 students answered the questionnaire and their answers were gathered in spread sheet where each respondent received an identification number. the main reason for the relatively small number of participants (11%) is most likely due to the fact that the students had almost completed their education and were not motivated to answer, but since this was the target group, that was taken into consideration beforehand. obviously, such a small sample cannot be generalised in any way. however, the results can still provide important indications within a limited area of interest. in a case study, research aims to explore a contemporary real-life phenomenon within its context through detailed contextual analysis of a limited number of events or conditions and their relationships (yin, 1984). the 29 students answered individually and could not see each other's answers. informed consent was obtained (see appendix 2). hansson and sjöberg making use of students’ digital habits in higher education: what they already know and what they learn journal of learning development in higher education, issue 14: april 2019 6 analysis the analysis, which had an inductive approach, contained several steps (1-4): step 1: all data was read through several times, with the purpose of getting to know the data (taylor-powell & renner, 2003) and to identifying patterns. this reading led to the conclusion that the answers to question 1, 2 and 3 could be quantified, while the answers to question 4, 5 and 6 (that were open-ended) could not, thus these were separated in the analysis. step 2: in working with questions 1, 2 and 3, tables were constructed to illustrate the answers. in the analysis of the answers to the open-ended questions 4, 5 and 6 colour coding was used to identify similarities and differences in the answers. in the process of analysis, three themes were identified: 1. students’ digital habits (questions 1-3); 2. students’ experience of how their digital habits are used in their studies in higher education (questions 4-5); and 3. students’ experience of how their digital habits are developed during their education (question 6). step 3: the relative importance of different themes (taylor-powell & renner, 2003) was assessed by, for example, asking: what are the differences in the way the respondents answered this specific question? what is the main idea that this category expresses? categories connected to themes two and three were then constructed: 2.1: students’ digital habits related to in-class activities; 2.2: students’ digital habits related to teacher training practice (ttp); 3.1: interaction knowledge; 3.2: presentation knowledge; 3.3: professional knowledge for the future. step 4: a quantitative analysis of the qualitative data was done by counting the number of unique respondents who referred to a specific answer or theme. this was not used for statistical analysis, but it revealed general patterns in the data. this methodological approach identified content related to ‘students’ experiences of how their digital habits are developed during their education’. findings hansson and sjöberg making use of students’ digital habits in higher education: what they already know and what they learn journal of learning development in higher education, issue 14: april 2019 7 theme 1: students’ digital habits the first two questions in the questionnaire focus on the students’ digital habits in their spare time. in the answers to the first question the students specified a range of programme and digital forums that they participate in during their spare time (see appendix 3), and it becomes obvious that facebook is the most popular media used. instagram and snapchat (apps for taking and sharing photos and videos) come as second and third. the answers to question 2 show that most students in the questionnaire have been active online for approximately ten years, but the use ranges from approximately two years up to almost 20 years of activity. the third question in the questionnaire was two-fold: about the frequency of participation and about the roles in participation (see appendix 1). the answers indicate that all students are participants in one way or another in digital practices every day. the difference is related to frequency and type of activity. we asked them to consider if they were participants by watching/reading/listening/taking part of/updating information, etc., which we labelled as passive participation; or participants by commenting/writing/ uploading material/playing, etc., which we labelled as active participation. the results show that more students are active as passive participants each day than as active participants. among the students who answered that they participate actively (by commenting/writing/uploading material/playing/etc.), the frequency of the activity ranges from every day to once a month. theme 2: students’ experience of how their digital habits are used in their studies in higher education in questions 4 and 5 (see appendix 1), the students were asked to describe the connection between their digital habits during their spare time and their education. in question 4 they were asked to answer if they think that there is any connection between these two and if the answer was ‘yes’, they were asked to describe the type of connection. if the answer was ‘no’ they were asked to formulate what was missing for such a connection to be made. additionally, in question 5 they were asked the ways in which their digital habits are accounted for in their education. the results show that there is a discrepancy in the experience between in-class learning and their teacher training practice (ttp). the findings regarding theme 2, presented in the participants’ own words, will be organised into two categories: firstly, the students’ description of the connection concerning their hansson and sjöberg making use of students’ digital habits in higher education: what they already know and what they learn journal of learning development in higher education, issue 14: april 2019 8 studies at the university; and secondly, the connection according to their teacher training practice (ttp). table 1. answers for question 4. connection student # yes, related to campus studies 2, 3, 6, 7, 13, 14, 15, 17, 18, 19, 20, 22, 23, 24, 26, 27, 28, 29 yes, related to ttp 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 8, 10, 11, 12, 14, 16, 18, 21, 23, 25, 27, 29 number of ‘no’ responses to the question 9 the result for the main question in question set 4, shows that 28 out of 29 students clearly stated that they saw a connection between their digital habits in their spare time and their studies. the students describe two kinds of connection. one, referred to as in-class studies, is about how the students communicate and work with tasks for study purposes. the other connection, also described below is connected to their teacher training practice. student identification number is included with each quote. category 2.1: students’ digital habits related to campus studies the students reported that, in social media, they work with tasks for classroom study purposes. they noted that they share information, thoughts and texts through facebook. below is an example of such a response: yes, i see a large connection between facebook and my studies. i can also see a smaller connection between twitter and my education. facebook is actively used to share both course literature and information about courses. also we, in the class, use it for groups for studying and for social activities that are related to the education programme. (#27) hansson and sjöberg making use of students’ digital habits in higher education: what they already know and what they learn journal of learning development in higher education, issue 14: april 2019 9 some of the students’ descriptions of the connection between studies and facebook tended towards descriptions of its function as a digital learning platform (lms): task groups are often arranged and discussed via groups on facebook or in messenger. (#14) my class and me have a group on facebook where we sometimes write. it can be questions about a date for a task to be made, class party, an examination question, et cetera (#17) yes, for example we have a class group on facebook where we sometimes discuss tasks and share interesting material. i also use it to send tasks to my friends for feedback. (#18) category 2.2: students’ digital habits related to teacher training practice (ttp) students noted that social media provide a link to sites concerning pedagogical matters: you are, in facebook, able to follow different sites that give you tips about teaching, that can be used during the practice or you can find examples of others’ work. (#2) several students revealed that, thanks to how they use devices in their free time, they acquired an insight into children's digital activities. at the same time, the students also showed appreciation for the ethical dimension: those apps, that i use during free time, are the same apps as the children use at school, so i can absolutely see a connection to them in my education, it is important that i think of what i post. . . . (#4) by being aware of instagram and other communities, you can help the pupils in conflicts, this has helped me during ttp. (#14) student #11 reported that he/she had used the context of a computer game to explain difficult english words: in one of our last days at teaching practice, i had to explain a few difficult english words for a pupil and he did not understand until i connected to a game that i knew hansson and sjöberg making use of students’ digital habits in higher education: what they already know and what they learn journal of learning development in higher education, issue 14: april 2019 10 he played and through that reference everything became totally clear for the pupil. (#11) theme 3: students’ experience of how their digital skills are developed during their education from the students' answers to question 6, it appears that the majority (17/29) believe that they develop digital skills during their education. these skills vary in terms of functionality: skills to interact and communicate with each other, skills required to present content, and a combination of these two linked to their future profession as a teacher. thus, the answers have been arranged into three categories: interaction knowledge, presentation knowledge, and professional knowledge for the future. category 3.1: interaction knowledge findings show that students both use and develop skills in using digital tools for interaction during their education. skype and google documents have been of large use in our group work. (#1) my digital skills are constantly evolving, much to do with the fact that education takes place digitally. especially communication opportunities are constantly evolving between teachers, practice-teacher, classmates, et cetera (#19) category 3.2: presentation knowledge furthermore, several students said that they not only use different programmes for presentation, but also develop further digital skills (for presentation): i have been trying to use movie maker, something i have never tried before, i also developed my skills in word. (#5) since i started studying here at university, i feel that i'm challenged in my digital use, by for example making movies, changing file type and other things that i have not done before, this i see as very positive. (#10) hansson and sjöberg making use of students’ digital habits in higher education: what they already know and what they learn journal of learning development in higher education, issue 14: april 2019 11 category 3.3: professional knowledge for the future finally, the students expressed their insights about the importance of being updated concerning the digital world of today, related to their future profession as a teacher: i get tips of many good and for me new digital tools. in my practice (ttp) i will for example use ict inspired by teachers at the university. (#6) by using ict in education, i am constantly updating and developing in my use of the digital. it is very important for me to get the opportunity to develop this, so that i can feel confident in it in order to teach later on. (#25) i also got tips on how to make use of games in the school world or how much source criticism is needed when searching the internet. in terms of communities, we have had numerous discussions about how facebook or other sites affect young children and their lives. this is something that will become even more current when i complete my teacher training. (#29) discussion students’ digital habits as an asset in higher education the presented study shows that the students are not novices in the digital environment. they have been users for an average of ten years, more as passive than active participants and mostly in a small number of programmes, typically forums. they also clearly stated that they could see a connection between their digital habits in their spare time and their digital habits in their education. this is something that in one way surprised us, since earlier studies (buzzard et al, 2011; kelm, 2011; lichy, 2012) show that students’ own experiences of digital practice are not considered in higher education. the importance of communication and learning with fellow students could be explained with the need for the students to be private together without the teachers always seeing their discussions and outcomes. it could also be that the students prefer to use social media due to the teachers’ lack of pedagogical and technological competence (for hansson and sjöberg making use of students’ digital habits in higher education: what they already know and what they learn journal of learning development in higher education, issue 14: april 2019 12 example to create a functional flow in the lms). it has been shown that both teachers and students need support (buzzard et al, 2011; twidle et al, 2006). guri-rosenblit (2009) highlighted that ‘[w]ithout providing adequate infrastructure and support systems for academic faculty to utilize the wide applications of the technologies, the gap between the potential of the technologies and the reality will remain wide and profound’ (p.36). students’ digital skills related to teacher training practice (ttp) furthermore, the students expressed that during their teacher training practice they felt needed and their expertise asked for when it comes to their digital skills. their teacher training practice is an authentic arena where they act and communicate in close relation to the pupils; they construct meaning together with the pupils. in this approach to learning, knowledge is clearly conceptualised (entwistle, 2009). according to hilsdon (2014), ‘such an approach stresses the situated nature of learning and reveals that knowledge is constructed or challenged through practice’ (p.252). the students tell stories of a pragmatic use of their digital skills in their future professional arena; student #14 (see category 2.2), says that he/she can help the pupils with conflicts in the community, which can be seen as an example of a student being a supportive asset in his/her education at the academic institution. some students believed that they could also be a resource in, for example, the subject of english where they could use their experience of computer games to explain the meaning of difficult words. zepke (2013) points out that quality learning could be realised when teachers and students together deal with content in pedagogically suitable ways. the students’ use of digital technology in their studies may indicate that they find that their knowing and learning become more geared towards producing competences that are relevant for the specific purpose (säljö, 2010), at their teacher training practice (ttp) in schools. harasim (2012) argued that the twenty-first century knowledge age has introduced a new mind-set in society, which is related to the constructivist theory that stands in opposition to behaviourism and cognitivism. she implies that we are ‘active creators of our own knowledge, reconciling our previous ideas as we encounter new experiences and information’ (p.12). hansson and sjöberg making use of students’ digital habits in higher education: what they already know and what they learn journal of learning development in higher education, issue 14: april 2019 13 development of students’ digital skills by digital practice in higher education as mentioned above, the students in this study were digital users with digital habits and skills even before they entered the studies. despite this, they state that they still develop their digital skills during their teacher education programme. however, there is a clear difference in what they already know and what they learn during their education. they are already users of social media: firstly, of facebook, instagram and snapchat; and secondly, for example, of different computer programmes for gaming and webpages for blogging and e-commerce. the knowledge that they develop in higher education is of another kind. the findings show that they develop three different kinds of digital skills at university: interaction, presentation, and professional knowledge for the future. during their teacher education programme, the students have learnt different digital programmes (such as powerpoint, word, google docs and programmes for making videos) both for educational and future professional purposes. this is in contradiction to chen’s findings (2008) who stated that the teachers (in higher education) use the technology for support of teaching only. in addition, findings show that students during their teacher training programme also develop deeper knowledge in areas connected to their already familiar digital habits and skills, as well as an awareness of the crucial need for a critical and ethical perspective on young people’s exposure to the digital environment. a consequence of this is that learning and cognitive skills must be understood in relation to the cultural artefacts (säljö, 2010) people are surrounded with. conclusions and implications how can higher education face the fact that some students might think that their mobile phone is half their brain (teenager in prensky, 2009)? the technology ‘is a major part of everyday life and they are comfortable with using the different applications simultaneously and collaboratively’ (currant, currant & hartley, 2011, p.218). students are willing to experiment with contemporary tools if the possibility is given to them and there is support available (buzzard et al, 2011). how can higher education arrange learning situations similar to authentic practical contexts where students are able to use their digital habits and skills with the purpose of developing these within their future profession? one obstacle might be that higher education has rather specific conditions where learning outcomes are defined in curricula focused on goals. resources in terms of time, teachers, and classrooms are predefined and fixed. there is a resistance in higher education to try hansson and sjöberg making use of students’ digital habits in higher education: what they already know and what they learn journal of learning development in higher education, issue 14: april 2019 14 new ways of learning, even if these ways are accepted outside the academic world (kelm, 2011, p.2). how can the conditions in this specific framework be negotiated (avery & wihlborg, 2013) to engage students to be active participants in their own learning? in relation to education it is important how we frame the discussion about technology in relation to education (herring, koehler and mishra, 2016). this study can be seen as a contribution to that discussion. furthermore, this study can be an inspiration for future studies on the topic as well as for supporting the practice within teacher training programmes, in how to integrate students’ everyday technology skills within higher education. even though this is a small scale study in a purely swedish context, we think that higher education needs to find ways to acknowledge students, with their different experiences of the digital world, as resources, hence it has global relevance. references adams becker, s., cummins, m., davis, a., freeman, a., hall giesinger, c. and ananthanarayanan, v. (2017) nmc horizon report: 2017 higher education edition. austin, texas: the new media consortium. alnaim, f. (2015) ‘the case study method: critical reflection’, global journal of human social science: a. arts & humanities – psychology, 15(7). available at https://globaljournals.org/gjhss_volume15/4-the-case-study-method-criticalreflection.pdf (accessed: 26 february 2019) avery, h. and wihlborg, m. (2013) ‘teachers’ interpretation of bildung in practice: examples from higher education in sweden and denmark’, journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5, pp.1-20. beaudoin, m.f. (ed.) (2006) perspectives on higher education in the digital age. new york: nova science publishers, inc. buzzard, c., crittenden, v.l., crittenden, w.f. and mccarty, p. (2011) ‘the use of digital technologies in the classroom: a teaching and learning perspective’, journal of marketing education 33(2), pp.131-139. https://globaljournals.org/gjhss_volume15/4-the-case-study-method-critical-reflection.pdf https://globaljournals.org/gjhss_volume15/4-the-case-study-method-critical-reflection.pdf hansson and sjöberg making use of students’ digital habits in higher education: what they already know and what they learn journal of learning development in higher education, issue 14: april 2019 15 carli, v., hoven, c. w., wasserman, c., chiesa, f., guffanti, g., sarchiapone, m., apter, a., balazs, j., brunner, r., corcoran, p., cosman, d., haring, c., iosue, m., kaess, m., kahn, j. p., keeley, h., postuvan, v., saiz, p., varnik, a., wasserman, d. (2014) ‘a newly identified group of adolescents at ‘invisible’ risk for psychopathology and suicidal behavior: findings from the seyle study’, world psychiatry: official journal of the world psychiatric association (wpa) 13(1), pp.78-86. chen, c. (2008) ‘why do teachers not practice what they believe regarding technology integration?’, the journal of educational research 102(1), pp.65-75. currant n., currant b. and hartley, p. (2011) ‘defining and supporting the new digital students’, in hartley, p., hilsdon, j., keenan, c., sinfield, s. and verity, m. (eds.), learning development in higher education. new york: palgrave macmillan. entwistle, n. (2009) teaching for understanding at university: deep approaches and distinctive ways of thinking. houndmills, basingstoke: palgrave macmillan, 2009. guri-rosenblit, s. (2009) digital technologies in higher education: sweeping expectations and actual effects. new york: nova science publishers, inc. harasim, l.m. (2012) learning theory and online technologies. new york: routledge. herring, m.c., koehler, m.j. and dona, p. (ed.) (2016) handbook of technological pedagogical content knowledge (tpck) for educators. 2nd edn. new york: routledge. hilsdon, j. (2014) ‘peer learning for change in higher education’, innovations in education and teaching international 51(3), pp.244-254. jain, a. and dutta, d. (2018) ‘millennials and gamification: guerilla tactics for making learning fun’, south asian journal of human resources management 6(1), pp.116. hansson and sjöberg making use of students’ digital habits in higher education: what they already know and what they learn journal of learning development in higher education, issue 14: april 2019 16 kelm, orlando r. (2011) ‘social media: it’s what students do’, business communication quarterly, 74(4), pp.505-520. knobel, m. and lankshear, m. (2007) ‘sampling “the new” in new literacies’, in knobel, m. and lankshear, c. (ed.), a new literacies sampler. new york: p. lang. laurillard, d. (2012) teaching as a design science: building pedagogical patterns for learning and technology. 3rd edn. london: routledge. lichy, jessica (2012) ‘towards an international culture: gen y students and sns?’ active learning in higher education 13(2), pp.101-116. liu, c. (2018) ‘social media as a student response system: new evidence on learning impact’, research in learning technology 26. available at https://doi.org/10.25304/rlt.v26.2043 (accessed: 22 november 2018) moos, d. c. and honkomp, b. (2011) ‘adventure learning: motivating students in a minnesota middle school’, journal of research on technology in education 43(3), pp.231–252. neumann, m.m. and neumann, d.l. (2013) ‘touch screen tablets and emergent literacy’, early childhood education journal 42(4), pp.231-239. available at https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/48ab/b4f35949ea9561f9fddc29d71472f9bc047d.pd f (accessed: 22 november 2018) o’brien, k. (2010) ‘what happened to studying?’, the boston globe. available at: http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2010/07/04/what_happened_to_s tudying/ (accessed: 22 november 2018) oecd (2016) ‘pisa 2015 results (volume i): excellence and equity in education’, paris: pisa, oecd publishing. available at https://doi.org/10.1787/9789264266490-en (accessed: 22 november 2018) https://doi.org/10.25304/rlt.v26.2043 https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/48ab/b4f35949ea9561f9fddc29d71472f9bc047d.pdf https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/48ab/b4f35949ea9561f9fddc29d71472f9bc047d.pdf http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2010/07/04/what_happened_to_studying/ http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2010/07/04/what_happened_to_studying/ https://doi.org/10.1787/9789264266490-en hansson and sjöberg making use of students’ digital habits in higher education: what they already know and what they learn journal of learning development in higher education, issue 14: april 2019 17 prensky, m. (2009) ‘h. sapiens digital: from digital immigrants and digital natives to digital wisdom’, innovate: journal of online education 5(3). available at https://nsuworks.nova.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1020&context=innovate (accessed: 12 march 2019) rogers, d.l. (2000) ‘a paradigm shift: technology integration for higher education in the new millennium’, educational technology review 13 (spr-sum), pp.19-27,33. available at http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.196.5141&rep=rep1&type =pdf (accessed: 22 november 2018) säljö, r. (2010) ‘digital tools and challenges to institutional traditions of learning: technologies, social memory and the performative nature of learning’, journal of computer assisted learning 26(1), pp.53-64. taylor-powell, e. and renner m. (2003) ‘analyzing qualitative data’, university of wisconsin-extension. available at: http://blog.soton.ac.uk/dissertation/files/2013/09/taylor-powell-2003.pdf (accessed: 31 may 2017). trucano, m. (2005) ‘knowledge maps: ict in education’, world bank: the information for development program. available at http://www.infodev.org/infodevfiles/resource/infodevdocuments_8.pdf (accessed: 17 may 2017) twidle, j., sorensen, p., childs, a., godwin, j. and dussart, m. (2006) ‘issues, challenges and needs of student science teachers in using the internet as a tool for teaching’, technology, pedagogy and education 15(2), pp.207-221. yin, r.k. (1984) case study research: design and methods. beverly hills, ca: sage publications. yin, r. (1994) case study research: design and methods. 2nd edn. beverly hills, ca: sage publishing. https://nsuworks.nova.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1020&context=innovate http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.196.5141&rep=rep1&type=pdf http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.196.5141&rep=rep1&type=pdf http://blog.soton.ac.uk/dissertation/files/2013/09/taylor-powell-2003.pdf http://www.infodev.org/infodev-files/resource/infodevdocuments_8.pdf http://www.infodev.org/infodev-files/resource/infodevdocuments_8.pdf hansson and sjöberg making use of students’ digital habits in higher education: what they already know and what they learn journal of learning development in higher education, issue 14: april 2019 18 zepke, n. (2013) ‘threshold concepts and student engagement: revisiting pedagogical content knowledge’, active learning in higher education 14(2), pp.97-107. author details eva hansson is a lecturer in primary school teacher programme and a pedagogical developer at the centre for educational development at halmstad university. jeanette sjöberg is a senior lecturer in pedagogy and head of the centre for educational development at halmstad university. appendix 1 questionnaire please answer the following six questions: 1. which different digital practices (e.g. forums, online communities, interactive onand offline gaming), do you participate in and use, in your spare free time? 2. for how long (approximately) have you been active in digital practices during your free time? 3. how often are you active / do you participate in digital practices? specify the activity relative to: a) how often you participate by watching / reading / listening / taking part of / updating /information /et cetera? and b) how often you participate by commenting/writing/uploading material/playing/et cetera? 4. do you see any connection between your digital habits in spare time and your education? if yes, how can such a connection be described? if no, what is missing for such a link to be made? 5. in which ways are your digital habits accounted for in your education (practice, selfstudy, campus)? hansson and sjöberg making use of students’ digital habits in higher education: what they already know and what they learn journal of learning development in higher education, issue 14: april 2019 19 6. in what ways are your digital habits developed through your education (practice, selfstudy, campus)? number your answers as above. you answer individually and your classmates can not see your answers. appendix 2 translated from the swedish document that was sent to the participants research ethical principles we will take into account the research ethical principles that have to do with the requirement for: information, consent, confidentiality and utilization. read more in the attached document ("research ethics principles") about what these mean! in short, we want to make it clear that your participation is entirely voluntary! you can, if you want to cancel your participation at any time and you associate yourself with nothing. you can request more information about the project and your participation when you want. you can also choose not to participate at all. if you choose to participate, we guarantee that we only use your statements in the research context, where your personal data will be anonymised. contact information, researchers: jeanette sjöberg: jeanette.sjoberg@hh.se annika elm fristorp: annika.elm_fristorp@hh.se eva hansson: eva.hansson@hh.se appendix 3 hansson and sjöberg making use of students’ digital habits in higher education: what they already know and what they learn journal of learning development in higher education, issue 14: april 2019 20 answers to question 1: which different digital practices (eg. forums, online communities, interactive onand offline gaming), do you participate in and use, in your spare free time? making use of students’ digital habits in higher education: what they already know and what they learn abstract varieties of digital practices have increasingly become part of people’s everyday lives and people, in general, use these communicative practices on a daily basis, mostly for social and entertaining purposes. as to higher education, researchers have p... introduction students’ digital habits and higher education the study methodology analysis findings theme 1: students’ digital habits theme 2: students’ experience of how their digital habits are used in their studies in higher education category 2.1: students’ digital habits related to campus studies category 2.2: students’ digital habits related to teacher training practice (ttp) theme 3: students’ experience of how their digital skills are developed during their education category 3.1: interaction knowledge category 3.2: presentation knowledge category 3.3: professional knowledge for the future discussion students’ digital habits as an asset in higher education students’ digital skills related to teacher training practice (ttp) development of students’ digital skills by digital practice in higher education conclusions and implications references author details questionnaire translated from the swedish document that was sent to the participants research ethical principles we will take into account the research ethical principles that have to do with the requirement for: information, consent, confidentiality and utilization. read more in the attached document ("research ethics principles") about what these mean! in short, we want to make it clear that your participation is entirely voluntary! you can, if you want to cancel your participation at any time and you associate yourself with nothing. you can request more information about the project and your participation when you want. you can also choose not to participate at all. if you choose to participate, we guarantee that we only use your statements in the research context, where your personal data will be anonymised. contact information, researchers: jeanette sjöberg: jeanette.sjoberg@hh.se annika elm fristorp: annika.elm_fristorp@hh.se eva hansson: eva.hansson@hh.se journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 11: april 2017 editorial sue eccles bournemouth university amanda french birmingham city university, uk lucy gray open university, uk andy hagyard university of leeds, uk john hilsdon plymouth university, uk christina howell-richardson birkbeck, university of london, uk moira maguire dundalk institute of technology, ireland issue 11 of the journal of learning development in higher education draws together contributions from a wide spectrum of current issues in learning development. this issue which includes papers, case studies and an opinion piece illustrates the richness of the field through reflections on promoting the effectiveness of student learning through supporting students as researchers, bilingual learning and the use of online learning objects. the development and evaluation of ‘tools’ features in two papers, tanguay and hanratty’s needs analysis tool and awad and cuculescu’s exploration of the effective lifelong leaning inventory (elli). we hope that you enjoy this rich collection of reflections. awad and cuculescu’s paper, using learning dimensions within the effective life-long learning inventory (elli) as indicators of academic success in biosciences is concerned with supporting lifelong learning and reports on a study into the affordances of the effective life-long learning inventory tool (elli) in the context of a biosciences programmes at northumbria university. elli provides an indicator of academic editorial journal of learning development in higher education, issue 11: april 2017 2 performance through raising students’ awareness of their own learning power. results from the study indicate that elli is a useful tool for identifying key dispositions in successful learners, which could inform interventions to improve learning. the paper concludes that there is an opportunity to explore learning specific to the biosciences through the development of a questionnaire to explore characteristics of successful learners in these disciplines in order to devise interventions more targeted to support learning in less successful students. for learning developers, ensuring that our provision is informed by and responsive to student learning needs is a priority. tanguay and hanratty report on an innovative system of ongoing needs analysis that is likely to be of wide interest. the system involves the use of an anonymised, online form to record key features of 1:1 tutorials. this allows identification of patterns in the support needed by students enabling the design of ‘bespoke’ support for specific cohorts of students. the authors illustrate this with an example of using the system to inform provision for nursing students. wood’s opinion piece, ‘holiploigy – navigating the complexity of teaching in higher education’ discusses how the processes of teaching in he are often reduced to a dichotomy of being either 'transmission' or 'discovery' led. such characterisations of teaching, he maintains, fail to engage with the actual context-driven complexities of teaching, learning, curriculum and assessment. consequently, he reflects upon how teaching processes might be characterised and explained without reducing them to simplistic frameworks and argues instead for holistic, process-led models of teaching, learning, curriculum and assessment and associated systems for module and programme development and execution which he has termed holiploigy. in ‘student as researcher: rethinking how to make research methods interesting for students’, rodriquez and daly present a case study of how academics can enhance students’ understanding and application of different approaches to phenomenological analysis through collaborative teaching and learning. using data from a study the students had themselves participated in, they each analysed the data using one of five different approaches. the students were provided with guided reading and met with their tutors to discuss their analysis and findings. this was then shared across the whole group, encouraging peer learning and reflection. overall, students increased their subject knowledge and understanding of more complex issues around research methodology and editorial journal of learning development in higher education, issue 11: april 2017 3 analysis, developed their skills of working independently but benefitted from the collaborative experience of sharing ideas and learning from both academics and their peers. for learning developers, this case study provides an example of how a different approach to the more traditional ways of ‘teaching’ research methodologies and analysis of data can provide greater engagement with or ‘ownership’ of the research process, whilst also increasing students’ knowledge, skills and confidence. in their case study, ‘promoting language choice in health care courses in wales by using dynamic approaches to teaching and learning incorporating bilingual digital technology,’ peggy murphy and beryl cooledge explore inclusive teaching within the context of meeting learner needs in a bilingual (english and welsh) environment. the case details their use of a blended approach to address some of the challenges of bilingual teaching. pre-registration nursing students were offered pre-recorded lectures in both english and welsh on key pain management topics. within the classroom, students worked on pain management scenarios in groups and individually completed a ‘gapped’ handbook to selfassess their knowledge. murphy and cooledge align this work to the united kingdom professional standards framework (ukpsf) and their emphasis on modelling accessibility is particularly useful. john fulton and catherine hayes address learning needs at doctoral level in their paper ‘evaluating retrospective experiential learning as process in scholarship on a work based professional doctorate’. the authors note the increasing popularity of professional doctorates which focus on enhancement of professional practice. they report on an evaluation of one such programme. interviews with candidates explored learning needs and experiences. they concluded that ‘…progressive development of a foundational solid base of transferable skills, underpinned by incorporating methodological approaches integrated with the skills of critical reflection, allowed doctoral candidates to develop their individual practice in a uniquely creative manner.’ roberts and windle’s paper, ‘development and evaluation of an online learning object to improve pre-registration nursing students’ knowledge and engagement with pre-operative fasting’, presents an evaluation of the development of an online learning object in combination with a conventional one hour tutored session to support students’ learning of the troublesome concept of pre-operative fasting. a learning object is a small focused package of e-learning content based around a single learning outcome; that in this case editorial journal of learning development in higher education, issue 11: april 2017 4 allowed for self-paced learning using text based and visual input and formative quizzes. the evaluation discusses the students’ accounts of their experiences of learning in the learning object and tutor judgements of learning and retention based on summative tests. taken together, these seven papers provide a snapshot of the wide-range of innovative learning development work ongoing throughout the uk and beyond. we hope that you will find the issue thought-provoking and relevant. journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 12: november 2017 developing socio-emotional intelligence in first year higher education students through one-to-one learning development tutorials camila devis-rozental bournemouth university, uk sue eccles bournemouth university, uk marian mayer bournemouth university, uk abstract the relationship between socio-emotional intelligence and one-to-one learning development (ld) support offered to he students is relatively under-explored. socioemotional attributes are often difficult to achieve solely within the classroom environment, although we know that engaging students in becoming more confident, resilient and selfaware can reduce their likelihood of withdrawal from their studies and improve personal achievement and success. this study explored whether the support provided during one-to-one ld tutorials enhances areas of students’ socio-emotional intelligence and, in turn, positively impacts on their overall academic and personal development. through a focus group with students and analysing feedback given by students from one uk university in the south of england, the experiences and benefits of receiving faculty-based ld support were explored. the findings suggest that students accessing this type of support further develop aspects of socio-emotional intelligence. this assists students in their transition into and through higher education, can reduce withdrawal rates and significantly enhances the individual student’s learning experience. we argue that supporting students in developing areas of socio-emotional intelligence such as motivation, self-awareness and confidence as part of the ld provision, empowers them to successfully complete their learning journey and benefit from the wider student experience. devis-rozental et al developing socio-emotional intelligence in first year he students through one-to-one learning development tutorials journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 2 keywords: higher education; socio-emotional intelligence; learning development; retention; academic achievement; student experience. introduction as universities strive to reduce student withdrawal from programmes and increase their achievement and success rates (higher education academy, 2016), the provision of learning development can provide students with the skills and knowledge to support this. it can also enhance the student learning experience (hilsdon, 2011). what is less understood is the relationship between one-to-one learning development support (ld) and the development of students’ socio-emotional intelligence (devis-rozental, 2016). this is relevant since areas of socio-emotional intelligence such as resilience, motivation or selfawareness amongst others, have the potential to engage students with their studies so that they can succeed (perera and digiacomo, 2015). this article presents an overview of emotional intelligence and social intelligence, and a rationale for merging these two terms. following this, socio-emotional intelligence within the context of education is presented. to set the context of this study, the support that the learning development (ld) team at a faculty of media and communication in a uk institution provides, in order to develop academic skills, as well as facilitate strategies to develop socio-emotional intelligence will be discussed. finally, design, development and findings from this small-scale study will be presented, with conclusions about how these may impact on similar provision across the sector. from social and emotional intelligence to socio-emotional intelligence socio-emotional intelligence (castejon et al., 2008; devis-rozental et al., 2014; devisrozental, 2016) is the ability to understand, manage and engage both our emotions and our social interactions in an appropriate manner, for the right purpose and with the right person (bar-on, 2005; goleman, 1996, 2007; devis-rozental et al., 2014). its main aim is to enrich our experiences, improve our relationships and enhance our overall wellbeing (devis-rozental, 2016). socio-emotional intelligence has been traditionally studied as a devis-rozental et al developing socio-emotional intelligence in first year he students through one-to-one learning development tutorials journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 3 dual premise, where emotional and social intelligence are defined separately but arguably these are intertwined. salovey and mayer defined emotional intelligence as: the ability to monitor one's own and other's feelings and emotions, to discriminate among them and to use this information to guide one's thinking and actions. (salovey and mayer, 1990, p.189) goleman (1996) explains that emotional quotient-intelligence (eq) is an individual’s ability to understand and manage their own emotions and relationships, as well as those of others. interestingly thorndike (1920) posited the notion of social quotient-intelligence (sq); the ability to understand and manage other people, cantor and kihlstrom (1987) later redefined sq as a personal understanding of the social world. more recently, this notion of sq as one-dimensional and generalised has been challenged, for example, by gardner (2000), who introduced the concept of multiple intelligences, positioning sq as two types of intelligence: interpersonal, the ability to read other people’s social cues; and intrapersonal, the ability to understand our own emotions. today, both eq and sq are seen, as intrinsically linked (bar-on, 2005, castejon et al., 2008). for instance, goleman asserts that ‘all emotions are social’ (2007, p.83), as individuals are sharing what they are feeling for a common purpose and those emotions might be triggered by the social environment, or an external influence. concurring with the idea presented above by gardner (2000) and goleman (2007) that social and emotional intelligence intertwine and it may be quite difficult to distinguish between them, bar-on (2005) provides a further definition of emotional-social intelligence. according to him it is a: cross section of interrelated emotional and social competencies, skills, and facilitators that determine how effectively people understand and express themselves, understand others, and relate with them, and cope with daily demands. (bar-on, 2005, p.14) devis-rozental et al developing socio-emotional intelligence in first year he students through one-to-one learning development tutorials journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 4 consequently, it can be argued that social and emotional intelligence should be integrated as they are both essential to the understanding of each other. acknowledging that, jennings and greenberg (2009) use what they see as the wide construct of social emotional learning (sel), to discuss these aspects in relation to teaching and learning within the classroom. experience affects how people behave, especially as the way in which people act, reflect, react or re-enact changes is based on personal experiences (bandura, 1977; lankshear and knobel, 2011; vygotsky, 1978). the same could be true for socio-emotional intelligence, and whilst personality characteristics, which are innate, should to be taken into account, these are not fixed and can be developed or managed with appropriate knowledge and support for instance whilst in education. the importance of socio-emotional intelligence in the classroom has been widely accepted (jennings and greenberg, 2009). in the uk, school age children have initiatives such as social and emotional aspects of learning (seal) (humphrey et al., 2010). to jennings and greenberg (2009) social and emotional competences (sec) are central to classroom outcomes. consequently, supporting students to develop these capabilities adds to their experience (davis, 2010). dryden and vos (1994) assert that education must consider personal and emotional development as these are critical to effective learning. whilst studying the best educational practices, they found that emotional development was at the centre of their programmes. learning development in higher education according to hilsdon (2011): learning development is a complex set of multi-disciplinary and cross-disciplinary academic roles and functions involving teaching, tutoring, research and the design and production of learning materials. (hilsdon, 2011, p.14) this study is situated within one faculty in a university in the south of england. the provision may be similar to that offered elsewhere across the sector and is based around a team of four research active academics, with a background in education and pedagogical approaches, who support students in a variety of ways to develop their learning and devis-rozental et al developing socio-emotional intelligence in first year he students through one-to-one learning development tutorials journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 5 academic skills as well as transitions (foster et al., 2011). within the team, all of these functions noted by hilsdon (2011) are undertaken, although the main focus is on one-toone tutorials where students can be supported holistically. in 2015-2016, over four hundred students received ld tutorials, which covered not only discussion around their learning development needs, but also other elements of their overall university experience that may have a positive or negative impact on their learning and academic engagement. matters et al. (2004) suggest such support requires experienced staff and appropriate training for those working with students and each member of the team is knowledgeable and skilled in all areas of learning development, as well as being familiar with the subject disciplines (and conventions) within the faculty. latsome (2013) argues that lecturers should, as part of their teaching, promote and encourage development of attributes like acceptance, empathy and respect for successful social and intercultural interactions. however, we argue that, where such support is taken out of the lecture theatre or classroom but still provided within the same academic context as the students’ programme, relevant and tailored opportunities can be provided to develop students’ socio-emotional intelligence, whilst enhancing their learning and academic ability. the rationale for this is the simple premise that subject-specific academics may not have the time or, in some cases, the expertise to support students to develop these types of skills. seal et al. (2011) and qualter et al. (2009) argued that integrated teaching programmes can provide the level of support and opportunities for students to develop both their learning ability and their socio-emotional intelligence. this is further supported by low et al. (2004), who collated findings from their main studies and research projects related to emotional intelligence. they were able to confirm: ..the importance and value of emotional intelligence and personal skills to college and career success. (low et al., 2004, p.2) they established a programme to support first year he students to develop their emotional intelligence in order to aid their success. their programme is delivered through formal classroom interventions. devis-rozental et al developing socio-emotional intelligence in first year he students through one-to-one learning development tutorials journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 6 the site of this study reflects such a programme by also delivering lectures and workshops to all students, as well as one-to-one ld tutorials. these tutorials are student-initiated and -led, specifically responding to individual students’ needs. this differentiated approach provides an opportunity to get to know and understand the student in a holistic way. they often seek an individual tutorial because of specific personal issues that are ‘blocking’ their learning and through understanding and addressing these, a scaffold or structure for their learning and overall experience can be developed – ultimately making them more likely to achieve, succeed and flourish. at the same time, by building positive relationships, students develop a sense of belonging whilst gaining knowledge, which in turn will support them in becoming more confident, independent learners. this bespoke ld support carried out by academics with an in-depth knowledge of pedagogical approaches, provides individualised tutorials taking into account each student’s academic, social and emotional needs. this aligns with arambewela and maringe’s (2012) idea of the importance of providing continuous support, including pastoral support, from the outset. this, arambewela and maringe (2012, p.16) argue, helps towards ‘integrating students so that they feel they belong to the programme and are part of a student body within the wider university’ enhancing their overall experience. for first year students, either at undergraduate or postgraduate level, making transitions from school, work or other commitments, to university (parker and duffy 2005), and coping with a range of issues as diverse as homesickness, adapting to the academic conventions or experiencing a culture clash (davis, 2010), can be problematic. qualter et al. (2009) noted that for some students this creates tensions which, in the absence of appropriate support, lead to negative experiences and eventual withdrawal from their course. they have evidenced that a programme targeted at undergraduate students to increase their socio-emotional intelligence, could ‘increase their likelihood of staying on at university’ (qualter et al., 2009, p.14). fayombo (2012) found that there is a relationship between emotional intelligence and academic achievement. furthermore, a national study by the american college test organisation (act), found that the main reason first year students leave is not their ‘academic ability’ but because of ‘personal factors’ (low et al., cited act, 2004, p.5). therefore, by providing the one-to-one bespoke support it is possible to support those devis-rozental et al developing socio-emotional intelligence in first year he students through one-to-one learning development tutorials journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 7 students who might be struggling, to ensure they are able to continue with their studies as they gain confidence and resilience and, by gaining new-found knowledge, become more motivated. research aim and methodology the aim of this study was to explore how the existing one-to-one ld support offered to students helps in developing their socio-emotional intelligence, gaining confidence and fully engaging with all the academic and related learning opportunities. whilst institutional data can provide the academic progress of students, it does not provide the detail of how the students progressed, nor specific interventions which would support (or otherwise) such progress. for this reason, this small-scale study adopted an interpretivist approach (lincoln and guba, 1985; hudson and ozanne, 1988; black, 2006), as reality is subjective and depends on individual experiences and how these are perceived. this would allow students’ views and reflections to be captured through an informal focus group (stewart et al., 2007), and the recording and analysis of all spontaneous verbal feedback and written comments given by students via emails. aligned with the discussions around socio-emotional intelligence, a series of themes were identified, based on the literature (see table 1 below) and these provided a framework both for the focus group discussion and subsequent analysis. table 1. key elements of socio-emotional intelligence. term theoretical frameworks informing use of the term motivation • goleman (1996). • self-motivation; self-awareness (bar-on, 2005). • set and achieve positive goals (payton et al., 2008). resilience • self–regulation (goleman, 1996). • recognise and manage emotions (payton et al., 2008). • emotional perception and identification (salovey and mayer, 1990). empathy • goleman (1996); albrecht (2006). • empathic accuracy; primal empathy (goleman, 2007). • demonstrate caring concerns for others (payton et. al, devis-rozental et al developing socio-emotional intelligence in first year he students through one-to-one learning development tutorials journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 8 2008; dfes, 2005a; dfes, 2005b). social engagement • social skills (goleman, 1996). • attunement, social cognition, synchrony, influence (goleman, 2007). • situational awareness; clarity (albrecht, 2006). • demonstrating care and concern for others; establish and maintain positive relationships; handle interpersonal situations effectively (payton et al., 2008; dfes, 2005a; dfes, 2005b). • social awareness and interpersonal relationships; selfexpression (bar-on, 2005). confidence & selfesteem • emotional understanding (salovey and mayer, 1990). • self-awareness (goleman, 1996). • self-presentation (goleman, 2007). • authenticity; presence (albrecht, 2006). • make responsible decisions (payton et al., 2008). patience • emotional management (salovey and mayer, 1990). • emotional management and regulation (bar-on, 2005). • self-regulation (goleman, 1996). • recognise and manage emotions (payton et al., 2008; dfes, 2005a; dfes, 2005b). • self-awareness (bar-on, 2005). research methods in addressing the aim of this study, two broad methods were used – the first was to analyse data that students who had received ld support had given either verbally or sent via email. these comments and emails were student initiated, and were written giving feedback regarding the support students had received from our team. in order to follow ethical protocol and once ethical approval from our institution was gained, permission was sought from the students to use their feedback for research purposes. these emails provided an overview of some of the key issues. this was then followed by a focus group consisting of four undergraduate students, in their second and third year, to explore some of these issues in more detail. the rationale for engaging second and third year students was that they would have had time to reflect on the type of support received, and how it had impacted on their socio-emotional intelligence. all the students who had received one-to-one support were approached to take part in the study. six students showed an interest and of those, four were able to participate. these four students were females between the ages of 20 and 50 completing devis-rozental et al developing socio-emotional intelligence in first year he students through one-to-one learning development tutorials journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 9 a higher education qualification. they had all received one-to-one support to develop their academic skills during their first academic year. a focus group was selected in preference to individual interviews because it presented an opportunity to observe interactions, to gain a better understanding through: …listening to the participants’ discussions, challenges and contradictions. (liamputtong, 2011, p.32) the aim was to understand these students’ experiences of and reflections on the ld support they had received. at the same time, specific areas of socio-emotional intelligence were explored to understand how students felt these impacted on their university experience. ethical considerations according to the british educational research association (bera, 2011, p. 4) “all educational research should be conducted within an ethical respect for: • “the person” – participants were given time to reflect and contribute, respecting each individual’s ideologies, culture, principles and rights. anonymity and confidentiality where adhered to throughout the study. • “knowledge” – we aimed to present these findings by interpreting them using robust methods so that, whilst developing a new gained insight we represented the students’ views preserving that knowledge. • “democratic values” – fairness, transparency and choice have been integral to this study. we encouraged students to explore their views whilst respecting their privacy. we accounted for quality and diversity issues and treated everyone with ‘unconditional positive regard’ so they felt valued and able to express freely. participants were offered the opportunity to read the transcription to establish if there was anything else to contribute, and for them to know that their contribution would be voiced effectively. devis-rozental et al developing socio-emotional intelligence in first year he students through one-to-one learning development tutorials journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 10 • “the quality of educational research” – we maintained a systematic approach to carrying out qualitative research. ethical procedures were adhered to, taking into consideration ethics guidelines. permission was sought to consider participants’ confidentiality, privacy and anonymity (bell, 2010; atkins and wallace, 2012; holloway and brown, 2012). we ensured that all participants were clear about their involvement in the project. • “academic freedom” was and is sought throughout each stage, by expressing freely and independently ideas and findings, whilst maintaining professionalism, with the aim to create new meaningful knowledge to learning development. transparency and reflexivity were applied throughout this research project. participants were aware of their right to change their mind and leave the project if they wished to do so. none of those involved in the project withdrew. institutional ethical approval was granted – aside from the standard issues of confidentiality, right to withdraw, use of the information mentioned above, the power imbalance between researcher (academic) and participant (student) was acknowledged. students who had given feedback were reassured that their names would be changed before transcribing their comments. students who took part in the focus group were provided with an information sheet, which included details of staff outside of the project to whom they could turn if they had any concerns or questions. all students were reminded that their input would not impact in any way on the learning development support they received, or any other part of their academic studies. after completing the ethics forms, students taking part in the focus group were briefed and reminded of both the ethics underpinning this study and that their names would be changed prior to analysing the transcription. they were then provided with a definition of socio-emotional intelligence to ensure their understanding of the study – as presented above – and each term was discussed sequentially. there were also discussions around their experiences of receiving ld support within the broader context of their university life. the focus group was audio-recorded (with consent) for later transcription. devis-rozental et al developing socio-emotional intelligence in first year he students through one-to-one learning development tutorials journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 11 data analysis the data from both the written feedback and the focus group were analysed thematically by one member of our team and collaboratively discussed to confirm the findings (butlerkisber, 2010). using the characteristics listed in table 1, a generic interpretivist qualitative research (black 2006) was carried out. data were scrutinised for ‘themes, categories, or patterns’ (johnson 2005, p. 63). in addition, overarching ‘stories’ of these students’ experiences were noted, providing a rich picture of some of their perceptions of and reflections on transitioning into and through university. findings and discussion the purpose of this paper was to find out if one-to-one learning development tutorials had an effect in supporting the development of socio-emotional intelligence. the written feedback from students showed that they had used terminology traditionally related to socio-emotional intelligence with words such as confidence and motivation. they alluded to ideas linked to self-awareness, resilience, social cognition and others which have been explored by theorists when referring to socio-emotional intelligence (albrecht, 2006; goleman, 1996, 2007; salovey and mayer, 1990). students talked about ‘feeling better’ ‘feeling more confident’ and one stated: i found your comments very educative and encouraging. (alan) qualitative formative findings and conclusions based on students’ written and verbal recorded feedback acknowledged the value of personalised support. for instance, this post-graduate international student stated: thank you very much for your professional input. it does really help; i had some doubts before which are now clarified…i feel more confident. (stefan) with our support, stefan was able to complete his assignment and feel confident about his capabilities. concurring with this, marco noted: devis-rozental et al developing socio-emotional intelligence in first year he students through one-to-one learning development tutorials journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 12 without your academic and psychological support, i would have left my course…there should be one of you in every university course. marco had approached our team as he had been failing his programme and was feeling anxious due to finding the transition to university quite hard (parker and duffy, 2005). he acknowledged how, after receiving our support, he felt ‘psychologically’ better and more confident in his abilities. in this case, his emotional wellbeing, resilience and confidence improved and he was able to continue his studies successfully. all these areas are well documented in the literature as being aspects of socio-emotional intelligence (albrecht, 2006; devis-rozental et. al, 2014, 2016). daniel, a postgraduate student who also refers to our support as ‘psychological’ wrote: i couldn’t imagine what i would do without your psychological support! thank you one more time! in this specific instance, we worked to improve daniel’s academic confidence and self esteem so he was able to complete his studies successfully. after daniel graduated he emailed: i am so happy to inform you that i have been awarded the ma with merit…needless to say how grateful i am, and how i feel so happy about our meetings! you really helped me so much, me and many, many other students. to daniel, our support had been integral to his success. this finding concurs with low et al. (2004) and fayombo’s (2012) notion regarding the importance of emotional intelligence for academic success. we provided this student with a safe space in which he could be himself and where he could learn these new academic skills by trying them without a fear of failure. he went on to successfully complete his master’s programme. qualter et al. (2009) discuss that without appropriate support students may eventually withdraw, and in this particular case that would have happened. similarly, linda, a first year undergraduate student said: devis-rozental et al developing socio-emotional intelligence in first year he students through one-to-one learning development tutorials journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 13 i can't explain how much it (our tutorial) helped me to calm down and feel a bit more relaxed. we were able to give linda the space and time to work on her anxiety whilst still developing her academic skills. by incorporating positive psychology techniques and a safe environment in which she could work productively, linda’s wellbeing was enhanced. as discussed in the literature review, we know that our learning development tutorials, which incorporate pastoral support, are in line with arambewela and maringe’s (2012) view of how this type of provision can enhance the student experience. indeed, all the students who gave feedback expressed how much the one-to-one tutorials had been a positive experience. the focus group included four students, dana and stella in the second year of their degree and alli and lucy in their third year. they had all received personalised support in the form of one-to-one tutorials during their first year. their responses highlighted that personalised provision seems to also support the development of socio-emotional intelligence. they discussed and agreed that having the support, space and especially the time to develop their socio-emotional intelligence through ld tutorials, had a positive impact on their learning and academic journey. conversely, seal et al. (2011) and low et al. (2004) argued that integrated teaching programmes could provide such support. however, given the emotionally charged environment in which such tutorials may take place, especially if students are upset, we argue that delivering this type of support on a more personal oneto-one can be much more effective. these participants placed great value on aspects of socio-emotional intelligence such as ‘confidence’, ‘resilience’ and ‘motivation’ (salovey and mayer, 1990; goleman, 1996, 2007; payton et al., 2008 amongst many others), and acknowledged that without appropriate support, these may not be developed as effectively, at least whilst at university. alli for example, continuously referred to her confidence following the one-to-one support, and when discussing sei she stated that having someone: …who you can go to and talk about … how you are going to approach your work… [or] that i am struggling with my essay or i’m struggling with work or i’m struggling devis-rozental et al developing socio-emotional intelligence in first year he students through one-to-one learning development tutorials journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 14 with time management…gives you that confidence to be able to graduate yourself because i think a lot of it is not having the belief in yourself. it seems that this personalised type of tutorial is necessary to support students in developing some areas of socio-emotional intelligence. based upon words such as ‘encouragement’ or ‘engagement’ (all areas of socio-emotional intelligence), students identified how our support had made a difference to their learning journey as well as their personal development. as is evident from the quotes above, they reported feeling more relaxed, calm and able to stay in their programme. this is further validated as they gained and reinforced positive relationships, both with the academic staff and other students. implications for practice it would appear that the intervention of ld tutorials, supports students in becoming selfdirected and more confident learners, able to fully engage with their university experience. this intervention provides students with the academic skills and knowledge to support their learning and also the time to develop a rapport and the space to discover the barriers that impede their learning. since most of the time these barriers relate to personal circumstances which in turn influence areas such as motivation, engagement or confidence, our support enables students to develop their socio-emotional attributes. this has an effect on their final grades, work prospects and long-term improvement and/or maintenance of the educational establishment’s national and global reputation. most importantly it influences their own socio-emotional intelligence as they gain skills, motivation and the confidence and belief to be self-reliant and independent. our students expressed the opinion that the support they received in their first year, from our ld team, helped them recognise and respond to feedback, plan for and meet deadlines, work in groups and understand the requirements and conventions of academic work more effectively. students reported a more ‘rounded’ and positive learning experience, which they felt equipped them to achieve in, and enjoy their academic studies, whilst also having the confidence to engage in wider university and life opportunities. devis-rozental et al developing socio-emotional intelligence in first year he students through one-to-one learning development tutorials journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 15 going forward, one-to-one tutorials that incorporate positive learning strategies such as praise, constructive feedback and opportunities for self-efficacy and self-awareness, will continue to be available to students, informed by research-evidenced practice. conclusion the findings from this small-scale study suggest that faculty-based ld teams – who are experienced academics with a background and in depth knowledge of pedagogical approaches as well as an understanding of how to support students with pastoral issues, but not necessarily subject specialists can have a positive effect on aspects of students’ socio-emotional intelligence, by providing bespoke support within a holistic context. our support sits outside the individual programmes but within the faculty, providing greater synergy between this form of support and the students’ own programmes of study. it is offered face-to-face by academics who, whilst not subject specialists, are subject knowledgeable and expert pedagogues. findings from our research are encouraging, suggesting that students do feel settled and have a sense of belonging, when developing positive relationships with our team. what is more, with our intervention and support, students do succeed where otherwise, they may have failed. references albrecht, k. (2006) social intelligence: the new science of success. san francisco: jossey-bass. arambewela, r. and maringe, f. (2012) ‘mind the gap: staff and postgraduate perceptions of student experience in higher education’, higher education review, 44(2), pp. 6384. atkins, l. and wallace, s. (2012) qualitative research in education. london: sage publications ltd. devis-rozental et al developing socio-emotional intelligence in first year he students through one-to-one learning development tutorials journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 16 bandura, a. (1977) social learning theory. englewood cliffs, nj: prentice hall. bar-on, r. (2006) 'the bar-on model of emotional-social intelligence (esi)',psicothema, 18(1), pp. 13-25. bell, j. (2010) doing your research project: a guide for first-time researchers in education, health and social science. 5th edn. berkshire: open university press. black, i. (2006) 'the presentation of interpretivist research', qualitative market research: an international journal, 9(4), pp. 319324. https://doi.org/10.1108/13522750610689069 bera british educational research association (2011) ethical guidelines for educational research. london: bera. available at: https://www.bera.ac.uk/wpcontent/uploads/2014/02/bera-ethical-guidelines2011.pdf?noredirect=1 (accessed: 20 october 2017). butler-kisber, l. (2010) qualitative inquiry: thematic, narrative and arts-informed perspectives. london: sage publications ltd. cantor, n. and kihlstrom, j. f. (1987) personality and social intelligence. englewood cliffs, nj: prentice-hall. castejon, j. l., cantero, m. p. and perez, n. (2008) ‘differences in the socio-emotional competency profile in university students from different disciplinary areas’, electronic journal of research in educational psychology, 6(2), pp. 339362. davis, j. (2010) the first generation student experience: implications for campus practice, and strategies for improving persistence and success. virginia: stylus publishing. dfes department for education and skills (2005a) excellence and enjoyment: social and emotional aspects of learning. norwich: crown copyright. available at: http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20110809172506/http://wsassets.s3.ama https://doi.org/10.1108/13522750610689069 https://www.bera.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/bera-ethical-guidelines-2011.pdf?noredirect=1 https://www.bera.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/bera-ethical-guidelines-2011.pdf?noredirect=1 https://www.bera.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/bera-ethical-guidelines-2011.pdf?noredirect=1 http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20110809172506/http:/wsassets.s3.amazonaws.com/ws/nso/pdf/0848b5e22bb2703a07a1e58567bce886.pdf devis-rozental et al developing socio-emotional intelligence in first year he students through one-to-one learning development tutorials journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 17 zonaws.com/ws/nso/pdf/0848b5e22bb2703a07a1e58567bce886.pdf (accessed: 20 october 2017). dfes department for education and skills (2005b) social and emotional aspects of learning (seal): improving behaviour, improving learning. norwich: crown copyright. available at: http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20110812101121/http://nsonline.org.uk/n ode/87009 (accessed: 20 october 2017). devis-rozental, c. (2016) 'developing socio-emotional intelligence in early years educators', european conference on positive psychology. angers, france. 28 jun1 jul. devis-rozental, c., eccles, s., mayer, m., and jones, j. (2014) ‘developing socioemotional intelligence in first year students', inspiring future generations embracing plurality and difference in higher education: society for research into higher education (srhe) annual research conference. newport, wales 10-12 december. dryden, g. and vos, j. (1994) the learning revolution. canada: skills of learning publications. fayombo, g. a. (2012) ‘relating emotional intelligence to academic achievement amongst university students in barbados’, the international journal of emotional education, 4(2), pp. 43-54. foster, e., lawther, s. and mcneil, j. (2011) ‘learning developers supporting early student transition’, in hartley, p., hilsdon, j., keenan, c., sinfield, s. and verity, m. (eds.) learning development in higher education. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan pp. 79-90. gardner, h. e. (2000) intelligence reframed: multiple intelligences for the 21st century. new york: basic books. http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20110809172506/http:/wsassets.s3.amazonaws.com/ws/nso/pdf/0848b5e22bb2703a07a1e58567bce886.pdf http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20110812101121/http:/nsonline.org.uk/node/87009 http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20110812101121/http:/nsonline.org.uk/node/87009 devis-rozental et al developing socio-emotional intelligence in first year he students through one-to-one learning development tutorials journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 18 goleman, d. (1996) emotional intelligence: why it can matter more than iq. london: arrow books. goleman, d. (2007) social intelligence:the new science of human relationships. london: arrow books. higher education academy, (2016) student retention and success in higher education. available at: https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/workstreamsresearch/themes/retention-and-success (accessed: 27 august 2016). hilsdon, j. (2011) ‘what is learning development?’, in hartley, p., hilsdon, j., keenan, c., sinfield, s. and verity, m. (eds.) learning development in higher education. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan, pp. 11-27. holloway, i. and brown, l. (2012) essentials of a qualitative doctorate. california: left coast press, inc. hudson, l. and ozanne, j. (1988) 'alternative ways of seeking knowledge in consumer research’, journal of consumer research, 14(4), pp. 508–521. https://doi.org/10.1086/209132 humphrey, n., lendrum, a. and wigelsworth, m. (2010) social and emotional aspects of learning (seal) programme in secondary schools: national evaluation. manchester: department for education (dfe-rr049). available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1817 18/dfe-rr049.pdf (accessed: 20 october 2017). jennings, p. a. and greenberg, m. t. (2009) ‘the prosocial classroom: teacher social and emotional competence in relation to student and classroom outcomes’, review of educational research, 79(1), pp. 491525. https://doi.org/10.3102/0034654308325693 johnson, a. p. (2005) a short guide to action research. boston: allyn and bacon. https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/workstreams-research/themes/retention-and-success https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/workstreams-research/themes/retention-and-success https://doi.org/10.1086/209132 https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/181718/dfe-rr049.pdf https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/181718/dfe-rr049.pdf https://doi.org/10.3102/0034654308325693 devis-rozental et al developing socio-emotional intelligence in first year he students through one-to-one learning development tutorials journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 19 lankshear, c. and knobel, m. (2011) new literacies: everyday practices and social learning. maidenhead: open university press. latsome, l. (2013) ‘socially intelligent intercultural education’, educational research journal (教育研究學報), 28(1/2), pp. 145-162. available at: http://hkier.fed.cuhk.edu.hk/journal/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/erj_v28n1-2_145162.pdf (accessed: 20 october 2017). liamputtong, p. (2011) focus groups methodologies: principles and practice. london: sage publications ltd. lincoln, y. and guba, e. (1985) naturalistic inquiry. london: sage. low, g., lomax, a., jackson, m. and nelson, d. (2004) ‘emotional intelligence: a new student development model’, national conference of the american college personnel association. philadelphia, pennsylvania. available at: https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/48be/fc9180883782e590fb0e0f28ffb0c0395402.pdf (accessed: 9 november 2017). matters, h., winter, j and nowson, c. (2004) ‘enhancing learning for culturally and linguistically diverse (cald) students’, focus on health professional education, 6(1), pp. 26-36. available at: http://dro.deakin.edu.au/eserv/du:30002543/nowsonenhancinglearning-2004.pdf (accessed: 9 november 2017). parker, j. d. and duffy, j, m. (2005) making successful transition during the first year of college: does emotional intelligence matter? available at: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.458.2733&rep=rep1&type =pdf (accessed: 9 november 2017). payton, j., weissberg, r., durlak, a., dymnicki, a. b., taylor, r, d., schellinger, k. b. and pachan, m. (2008) the positive impact of social and emotional learning for kindergarten to eighth-grade students: findings from three scientific reviews. chicago: collaborative for academic, social and emotional learning (casel). http://hkier.fed.cuhk.edu.hk/journal/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/erj_v28n1-2_145-162.pdf http://hkier.fed.cuhk.edu.hk/journal/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/erj_v28n1-2_145-162.pdf https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/48be/fc9180883782e590fb0e0f28ffb0c0395402.pdf https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/48be/fc9180883782e590fb0e0f28ffb0c0395402.pdf http://dro.deakin.edu.au/eserv/du:30002543/nowson-enhancinglearning-2004.pdf http://dro.deakin.edu.au/eserv/du:30002543/nowson-enhancinglearning-2004.pdf http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.458.2733&rep=rep1&type=pdf http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.458.2733&rep=rep1&type=pdf http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.458.2733&rep=rep1&type=pdf devis-rozental et al developing socio-emotional intelligence in first year he students through one-to-one learning development tutorials journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 20 available at: http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ed505370.pdf (accessed: 20 october 2017). perera, h, n. and digiacomo, m. (2015) 'the role of trait emotional intelligence in academic performance during the university transition: an integrative model of mediation via social support, coping and adjustment', personality and individual differences, 83, pp. 208-213. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2015.04.001 qualter, p., whiteley, h., morley, a. and dudiak, h. (2009) ‘the role of emotional intelligence in the decision to persist with academic studies in he’, research in post-compulsory education, 14(3), pp. 219-231. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13596740903139255 salovey, p. and mayer, j. d. (1990) ‘emotional intelligence’, imagination, cognition and personality, 9(3), pp. 185-211. https://doi.org/10.2190/dugg-p24e-52wk-6cdg seal, c. r., naumann, s. e., scott, a. n. and royce-davis, j. (2011) ‘social emotional development: a new model of student learning in higher education’, research in higher education journal (academic and business research institute), 10, pp. 113. available at: http://www.aabri.com/manuscripts/10672.pdf (accessed: 20 october 2017). stewart, d. w., shamdasani, p. n. and rook, d. w. (2007) focus groups: theory and practice. 2nd edn. thousand oaks: sage publications. thorndike, e. l. (1920) ‘intelligence and its uses’, harper’s magazine, 140, pp. 227-235 vygotsky, l. s. (1978) mind in society: the development of higher psychological processes. usa: harvard university press. author details http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ed505370.pdf https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2015.04.001 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13596740903139255 https://doi.org/10.2190/dugg-p24e-52wk-6cdg http://www.aabri.com/manuscripts/10672.pdf devis-rozental et al developing socio-emotional intelligence in first year he students through one-to-one learning development tutorials journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 21 dr camila devis-rozental is a learning development academic at bournemouth university. her expertise is in education and the role that emotions and social interactions can have on effective learning and teaching. she is also interested in the notion that enjoyment and achievement should be intrinsically linked within the classroom for successful learning. dr sue eccles is acting deputy head of the centre for excellence in learning at bournemouth university and has worked in he since 1995. her research is focused around the experiences of students as they transition into, through and out of higher education, the widening participation policy agenda and how this impacts on/influences practice, and supporting academics through effective leadership. she has experience of strategic management and leadership, as well as in-depth knowledge and understanding of education practice within he. marian mayer is a learning development academic at bournemouth university. she is currently completing a doctoral study “understanding habitus and transformative learning in undergraduate media students” which, rather than focussing on the ‘process’ of transformation explores ‘what’ is transformed, and how that transformation occurs. her study develops transformational learning and considers the potential for bourdieu’s concept of habitus can be utilised as a theoretical and methodological tool to study the impact of transformational learning on undergraduate students. journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special edition: 2018 aldinhe conference, october 2018 success in academic writing a book review of day, t. (2018) success in academic writing. london: palgrave macmillan. christopher little keele university, uk keywords: academic writing; assignments; plagiarism; reading; referencing; writing. overview at times, you feel like you are ‘reading’ an academic writing class or tutorial. each chapter features a range of useful activities and tips, which serve to keep the reader active and break up the prose. trevor day brings a wealth of experience to this book from his background in many different forms of writing: from press releases and news articles to journal papers and academic articles. the book starts with a key message that those working in student-facing, learning development (ld) roles will be familiar with; yes, there are discipline-specific academic writing conventions to adhere to but there are also some universal principles that can be shared and used by all disciplines and the book goes on to explore many of these. while there are lots of published books aimed at helping students with academic writing, this is a particularly good one. structure and content chapter one is the key to the book and all subsequent chapters assume you have read it. as a whistle-stop tour around the cross-disciplinary traits of academic writing, it sets these out clearly and sensitively. chapter one introduces us to notions such as writing to your disciplinary audience and the importance of adopting a critical mindset for the whole process of planning, researching, reading, writing and editing. day also spells out that little success in academic writing journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: october 2018 2 which is often obvious to ld practitioners, writing is so much more than getting assignments done. it is a cognitive, iterative and developmental process, which helps you to learn and understand within your discipline. the second chapter introduces the ipace (identity, purpose, audience, code and experience) model, adapted from hickman and jacobson’s (1997) space model. the chapter uses ipace as a method to work through the initial stages of understanding an assessment. here, discussions around construction of identity and persona in assessment writing are particularly useful. we are encouraged to question what identity the assessment brief suggests the writer may need and what words and tone this identity may use. this chapter provides an overview of the ipace model and a flowchart of questions that would be useful to ld practitioners working in student-facing roles who deliver academic writing development provision. chapter three explores essays and practical reports. the advice is sound and certainly resonates with the sort of questions students ask. while the section specifically about essays is a little repetitive, the section concerning lab reports is thorough and incredibly useful for students and ld practitioners alike. day offers advice on the grey areas of tenses, structure and passive/active voice. the chapter is very sensitively handled, reiterating the ethos that any guidance provided is ‘a stimulus, not a straightjacket’ (p.42). the next chapter covers much of what lds frequently advise students regarding research, i.e. start from a general perspective and make your evidence more specific from there, appreciate and appraise a range of literature as it is the substance behind your assertions. day delivers a number of activities that could easily be turned into a session about researching for the purposes of assignments, essentially offering a ready-made pack for teaching. pleasingly, day highlights the integral role that library services often play. it is also refreshing to see a published author say that, while wikipedia should not be cited as ‘evidence’, it can offer a good starting point on topics you have little understanding of and can lead to further inquiry. finally, the author introduces the rabt system (relevance, authority, bias/balance, timeliness) as a means of quickly appraising evidence. there are so many good ideas in this chapter, that summarising them all would be difficult, but this stands as a particularly enjoyable and useful section of the book both for students seeking advice and for ld practitioners perhaps looking for inspiration. little success in academic writing journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: october 2018 3 the next chapter is largely focused around reading techniques. a short section at the end of the chapter offers an overview of a small selection of note-taking techniques with some useful links to excellent resources offered by the open university. focusing on purposeful reading, however, is a good choice, as day handles this very well. the author is bold in stating on numerous occasions that students do not always need to read every source from cover-to-cover, by highlighting the strategic worth of skimming and scanning work. stating that he does not always read every source in its entirety and ‘i know that most of my colleagues do this too’ should offer much-needed comfort to students. the concept of purposeful reading is thought-provoking. explicitly writing down what the purpose of a particular reading is, and what you may be able to do differently after said reading, is a very powerful technique that is certainly worth sharing with students. finally, this chapter sparked some thoughts around how we may take the sheer mechanics of reading for granted, particularly when advising or teaching groups of international students. day explores buzan’s (2010) seven-step model for reading in some detail. it is worth considering how much longer it may take some international students to complete these processes when translating between languages. day next negotiates how to plan business and analytical reports, presentations, posters and critical reflective accounts. throughout the chapter, there are a number of excellent activities that could be used in-class and frequent examples of how to enact the passive voice, where it is required, in each of these forms of assessment. the chapter also includes a number of sections detailing the kind of ‘nuts and bolts’ advice regarding font size, words per slide, words per poster presentation, etc. this is the kind of minutiae that students often want to know and often ask student-facing lds. there are two particularly useful tables (p.111-112) that allow students to conceptualise how they might apply a sixstep dissertation plan and evolve this into more detailed chapter plans. simply getting some words down on a page is often the hardest part of the academic writing process for students. the next chapter looks at the art of moving away from planning, research and notes, to writing free-flowing prose. day recommends a range of approaches including: writing to prompts, the importance of knowing what your setting preferences are (place, time of day, etc.) and breaking writing into small bursts of time á la the writing retreat model that is often cited to have such benefits (murray and newton, little success in academic writing journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: october 2018 4 2009; papen and theriault, 2018). at times, the language of this chapter may be considered a little too dense for some anxious students or those completely new to writing in this manner. the chapter features just one activity; it may have benefited from more or from this activity being broken down. nevertheless, excellent sections on the value of freewriting, punctuated with examples of his own drafts of this book, make this a worthwhile chapter. the following, albeit brief, chapter offers tips on how to maximise the impact and readability of your graphs, charts and images. the message of this chapter is that images, figures and tables should complement your work and be presented with clarity, consistency and care, and that by doing so they will become impactful parts of your work. the activities in this chapter are, again, excellent; however, it would have been great to see a few more. day then tackles perhaps one of the most challenging aspects of teaching or advising around academic writing: referencing, citation and avoiding plagiarism. this chapter admirably adopts the stance throughout that ‘you are a member of an academic community’ (p.145) and that to plagiarise is ‘academic theft’ (p.158). the second position here may chime with the regulations employed by universities around academic misconduct and, rightly so, that to plagiarise is to steal, whether it was intentional or not. however, one wonders how many times students might be told, or feel, that they are part of an ‘academic community’. day reiterates that sound academic conduct involves the continued development of academic practices that many students have never needed to develop previously and that we should not expect them to do this overnight. it is not uncommon to find that teaching about academic conduct is delivered via a ‘talk’ during induction and then only followed up after someone puts a foot wrong in an assessment; day suggest that a longer-term and more embedded approach is needed. a few more activities to apply what is discussed here would be great but the chapter is extremely respectful towards the journey most students go on with respect to academic conduct. chapter ten builds on much of what has come before and focuses upon reviewing and editing writing. there are some particularly excellent tables and charts explaining the stages of editing and reviewing (p.166) and the different uses for a range of punctuation marks (p.181); these are yet more excellent resources that could be signposted to. there little success in academic writing journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: october 2018 5 are also similarly useful activities in this chapter around the shortening of sentences (p.175) and using punctuation effectively (p.182). finally, there is an important message towards the end of the chapter surrounding the presentation of written work and the impact it can have on preconceptions of the final piece. fine-detail proofreading is something easily addressed but all too often missed by many students and it is reassuring to see this chapter address this. any ld who delivers student tutorials around academic writing will be familiar with students lamenting ‘but i did use word’s spellchecker and there’s still loads of errors’. ld practitioners know that any technology must be used critically, to avoid allowing a negation of responsibility on the part of the user. this chapter details a number of core functions of word processing and image processing software that students may wish to make use of. it does, however, keep the caveat of needing a critical use ever present throughout the chapter and rightly so. software such as this ‘should be used as a guide, which you may choose to override’ (p.190). pleasingly, day also highlights that a single journal article can be the ‘jackpot’ when researching an essay, as it can contain much of the relevant literature pertinent to that area and, through ‘cited by’ options, it can often be a gateway to the research that followed it. the book concludes with a small chapter that promotes adopting a reflective approach as an integrated part of the assessment creation and submission processes. mapped to kolb’s (1984) experiential learning cycle, day encourages students to treat postsubmission and post-feedback reflection as a part of the assessment cycle itself. this chapter also encourages students to be more directive and demanding when asking for feedback from peers and staff members. it even offers a wonderful table with six levels of analysis, complete with exemplar questions that students could use to self-assess their work or, equally, to ask questions of people offering feedback. the book signs off with a reiteration of the powerful role that academic writing has in developing critical mindsets and disciplinary knowledge with the sentiment of ‘be prepared to be inspired’ (p.212). summary this book adopts a commendable and respectful approach regarding the ways in which students learn. it is packed full of easily reusable (with permission of course) activities and little success in academic writing journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: october 2018 6 resources that could, quite easily, form their own writing course or complement existing provision. while the text is aimed at university students, it really is a fantastic resource for those of us who work in student-facing roles or indeed anybody interested in writing. there are, necessarily given the subject matter under discussion, some quite dense chapters but day’s method of breaking up text with frequent, easily-digested activities is a helpful approach. in the main, the text is relatively easy to read and often quite enjoyable. the book is a good contribution towards demystifying the key mechanisms of academic writing at university and will therefore be a very useful text for students and ld practitioners alike. author details christopher little is a learning developer and teaching fellow at keele university where he delivers student-facing and consultative ld work within the faculty of medicine and health sciences as well as cross-institutional ld provision. research interests include undergraduate research and writing retreats, transitions to higher education, learning technology and academic writing. references buzan, t. (2010) the speed reading book. harlow: bbc active. hickman, d. e. and jacobson, s. (1997) the power process: an nlp approach to writing. camarthen: crown house publishing. kolb, d. a. (1984) experiential learning: experience as a source of learning and development. englewood cliffs: prentice hall. murray, r. and newton, m. (2009) ‘writing retreat as structured intervention: margin or mainstream?’, higher education research & development, 28(5), pp. 541-553. https://doi.org/10.1080/07294360903154126 papen, u. and thériault, v. (2018) ‘writing retreats as a milestone in the development of phd students’ sense of self as academic writers’, studies in continuing education, 40(2), pp. 1-15. https://doi.org/10.1080/0158037x.2017.1396973 https://doi.org/10.1080/07294360903154126 https://doi.org/10.1080/0158037x.2017.1396973 success in academic writing a book review of day, t. (2018) success in academic writing. london: palgrave macmillan. overview structure and content summary author details references literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 9: july 2015 editorial andrew doig southampton solent university, uk amanda french birmingham city university, uk andy hagyard university of lincoln, uk john hilsdon plymouth university, uk stephanie mckendry strathclyde university, uk moira maguire dundalk institute of technology, ireland issue 9 of the journal of learning development in higher education has an international flavour, with contributions from hong kong, australia, new zealand, england and scotland, and including material relating to online tutoring in taiwan. a key theme of papers in this issue is how students approach learning, in terms of contested notions such as ‘learning style’ or ‘self-efficacy’ and via digital media. the contents of this issue also span a wide range of disciplines, contexts, and orientations to learning development practice, and from a variety of academic perspectives. these contrasting research reports, case studies and opinion pieces offer a wealth of insights, innovative ideas and strategies with the potential to enhance student learning; and make a valuable contribution to scholarship in learning development. yiu kong chan’s paper, ‘the impact of business school students’ extracurricular activities on learning approaches and academic performance’, focuses on the experiences of a sample of business school students from the university of hong kong. it explores the editorial journal of learning development in higher education, issue 9: july 2015 2 relationship between seemingly disconnected variables which make up the undergraduate learning environment in higher education. the results suggest an interesting connection between high levels of involvement in extracurricular activities and a greater propensity on the part of students to use ‘deep’ approaches to learning, which in turn affects their academic performance positively. the implication that encouraging students to get involved in a range of social and co-curricular activities whilst in higher education has positive impacts on learning – may not be new, but chan’s use of biggs’ 3p framework offers an interesting additional perspective. charteris et al., a group of pre-service teacher educators at the university of new england, australia, worked together to produce the paper ‘e-assessment for learning in higher education: is it a wolf in sheep’s clothing?’ they offer a timely critique of the discourses of ‘learnification’, ‘responsibilisation’ and ‘performativity’ in relation to eafl. whilst acknowledging the potential of electronic assessment to support student agency, the authors oppose the increasingly commodified conceptions of learning implied in the more linear, knowledge transmission approaches. they argue for more socio-political awareness in eafl so that students can be active participants in its development, rather than mere consumers of educational products. in his thought-provoking paper, “promoting self-efficacy through affective feedback and feedforward”, john cowan of edinburgh napier university, encourages us to consider the importance of how students perceive their abilities to preform and succeed in academic tasks. linking a range of research findings on self-efficacy with his own experiences as an online tutor, he suggests that authentic interventions by tutors to nurture positive selfbeliefs through feedback and feedforward mechanisms, can enhance learning potential and results, through factors such as improving motivation and the perception of control over performance. in her case study, avril buchanan (de montfort university) discusses the centre for learning and study support’s investigation of data on student engagement with the learning development service. she highlights the importance of seeking evidence to understand and improve student engagement, and looks at the valuable data that can be harnessed when shaping activities, publicising services and communicating with colleagues. the investigation provides an analysis of centre’s reach, as well as bringing editorial journal of learning development in higher education, issue 9: july 2015 3 issues of under-representation and diversity to the fore useful as examples in any discussion around student engagement with learning support provision. christopher holland and claire mills, of university college birmingham and the university of gloucestershire, write about a study profiling the preferred learning styles of sports therapy students. highlighting the potential role of learning styles in learning, whilst mindful of the powerful critiques of such approaches, they note ‘… a lack of accumulated theoretical coherence and an absence of replicated findings…’ in the area. data from final year students on a clinical practice module demonstrated wide variety in learning styles with a preference for ‘concrete’ styles. there was also evidence of a gender difference, the nature of which differs from previous research. the authors point out that more research is needed on the interaction between gender and academic discipline. the implications of these findings are especially relevant to those involved in clinical education. fiona roberts, of robert gordon university, aberdeen, presents the results of her research into students' views of e-learning tools in anatomy and physiology. using a case study methodology, she investigated students' perceptions of online learning resources as a replacement for face to face sessions. although there were no significant differences in student outcomes for topics delivered with and without workshop support, the paper concludes: 'students do not want more independent learning and like the confidence provided by attending workshops'. fiona suggests a positive solution, however: 'using more selective online resources may be beneficial and ensuring that materials addressed online are used in other classes may be a way forward, thus ensuring a constructive approach to learning while encouraging more independent learning’. chris keenan, learning and teaching fellow at bournemouth university, reports on the development of a recently launched network and jiscmail discussion list concentrating on peer-led academic learning. she begins with a review of recent work in this field commissioned by the uk higher education academy, and goes on to offer a vision for the remit of this new group. academicpeerlearning@jiscmail.ac.uk involves subscribers in discussions of how to share best practice, conduct evaluation and promote research in this growing field; and to plan events for learning developers, other academics and students. she also proposes links between the new network and the association for learning development in higher education. mailto:academicpeerlearning@jiscmail.ac.uk editorial journal of learning development in higher education, issue 9: july 2015 4 chris‘s opinion piece offers a timely opportunity for us to announce that the next edition of the jldhe will be a ‘special’ focusing on practice and research in peer learning. this promises to be a rich collection of papers and case studies which we hope will help practitioners in the field peer learning to see their work in the broader context of learning development. we hope it will also provide learning developers with inspiration and ideas to develop their own practice in partnership with students and subject academics. literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 7: june 2014 a phenomenological evaluation of a hybrid model of problem based learning for multidisciplinary healthcare practitioners dr catherine hayes university of sunderland, uk prof. mark s. davies university of sunderland, uk abstract this study reports on the evaluation, using a phenomenological approach, of a hybrid model of problem based learning (pbl), implemented with a cohort of fifteen students. semi-structured interviewing provided an interpretive basis for the lived experience of teaching and learning in the context of a masters degree programme designed specifically for multidisciplinary postgraduate healthcare education. the findings point towards a differentiation of attitude from behaviour and are grouped into three themes of ‘professionalism and the value of character’, ‘perceived cognitive development and meaningful learning‘ and the ‘situatedness of learning and knowledge transfer’. it was perceived by students that professionalism could be learned through the process of pbl, although they did not necessarily feel familiar or comfortable when this process was new to them. they perceived the major benefit of using a hybrid model of pbl as a teaching strategy was that it afforded all students in the cohort a means of being valued in their contribution to the sessions and in their wider contribution to a multidisciplinary workforce. the significant degrees to which both interprofessional learning and the adoption of a multidisciplinary approach had impacted upon student engagement were the two most salient outcomes of the study. keywords: problem based learning; health; phenomenology; hybrid model; interprofessional learning; multi-disciplinary learning; masters; lived experience. hayes and davies a phenomenological evaluation of a hybrid model of problem based learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 7: june 2014 2 introduction problem based learning (pbl) approaches are well-established in healthcare and medical education. however, their use in programmes that cross disciplines is scant and to our knowledge no evidence exists on the evaluation of hybrid educational models that aim to facilitate multi-disciplinary approaches in higher education (he). this study evaluates a hybrid model of pbl designed and implemented in a msc in advanced clinical practice programme. this hybrid model is categorised as a merge of situated learning (lave and wenger, 1991) and pbl (dolmans et al., 2005). since onethird of the programme’s credits constitute a practice-based placement, the use of situated learning was a valuable adjunct to pbl since it allowed students to learn in the context of patient-centred care. aim the overall aim of this study was to evaluate the educational experiences of students who had experienced the hybrid model of pbl. by illuminating their experiences it was hoped that how valuable the hybrid model of pbl was to the process and outcomes of a multidisciplinary approach to healthcare education could potentially be established. accounting for this lived experience involved acknowledging the previous educational experiences that students had and also considered the relationship between their intellectual development and the best way to tailor individual learning pathways. the programme the msc in advanced clinical practice is a full-time, 12-month programme for graduate healthcare professionals. the fundamental basis of the programme is to provide the healthcare arena with practitioners capable of performing a strategic and needs-led role both within the teams in which they work and in capacity building between professional disciplines in patient-centred care. the programme consists of five modules, three of which are ‘taught’, and is structured so that all taught sessions are delivered to all students. the ‘non-taught’ modules are a placement and a research project. teaching staff act as facilitators of students’ learning and are trained in-house in the hybrid pbl hayes and davies a phenomenological evaluation of a hybrid model of problem based learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 7: june 2014 3 approach. the cohort reported on here comprised fifteen students. the curriculum moves beyond traditional approaches to postgraduate healthcare educational provision and hinges directly on the facilitation of a ‘community of practice’ (lave and wenger, 1991). the move towards capacity-building lends itself to a strategic pedagogy that enables collective learning yet individual assessment to take place. it is hoped that this approach to learning might promote critical reflexivity rather than the one-dimensional approach to reflective practice traditionally adopted at this level of education (westwood et al., 2008). since the context of learning matters, ‘situated learning’ (lave and wenger, 1991) is implemented in the curriculum. situated learning has evolved in recent years to encompass how positive learning experiences are closely linked to the processes of regular human interaction. for postgraduate students in patient-centred care, education can be regarded as a shared endeavour (pasquinelli, 2011). the notion of context has been developed by lave and wenger into three characteristics of ‘context specificity’, identified by:  community – defined here as students’ inclusion in their cohort and ‘belonging’ to a healthcare profession;  domain – specified as the clinical area within which students are experiencing teaching, learning and assessment;  practice – defined as their contribution to patient-centred care. instead of engineering acquired knowledge, skills and behaviour in a regimented manner through the curriculum, these are allowed to emerge through participation in a flexible (negotiated) assessment system driven by the processes of teaching, complemented by the opportunity for collaborative and social learning (dirkx,1997). problem based learning throughout the programme, short case scenarios are used to initiate and guide the process of learning at postgraduate level. emphasis is placed on the gaps that students discover in their knowledge and skills, and how to bridge these gaps with new knowledge, new understanding and modified behaviour patterns. this particular pbl approach aims to enable students to discover and learn for themselves through facilitation by experienced hayes and davies a phenomenological evaluation of a hybrid model of problem based learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 7: june 2014 4 tutors (barrett, 2010). the system essentially replaces traditional didactic teaching methods and enables learning through the creation of a cohesive learning group. each element of the programme consists of a series of clinically-related problems, which students use to define their specific study objectives on a day-by-day basis. students work collaboratively in developing their understanding of advanced clinical practice. using a seminal and identified approach to the process of pbl (moust et al., 2001) students work collaboratively in developing their knowledge and understanding of advanced clinical practice and how this knowledge applies to practice. students’ induction to the programme incorporates time dedicated to teaching the process of pbl in practice, allowing them to practice the technical process before the start of the programme. students begin with relevant clinical problems. as a group, facilitated by a specialist in the discipline of the case within which they are working, the students first establish how much they already know and understand of the element of advanced clinical practice in question. they then define what they need to learn in order to fully understand the element and its associated problems that they encounter in everyday clinical practice, by formulating learning objectives (moust et al., 2001). what students study is, therefore, more clearly defined by the needs of their own individual work, supplemented by robust learning opportunities, including the consideration of problem-based scenarios. robust here refers to the fact that all cases students worked on were constructively aligned in terms of learning domains, which in turn were constructively aligned to the mechanism of assessment. how learning drives the process of assessment learning is enhanced by allowing students to negotiate how they fulfil individual learning outcomes at module level. the challenges presented in developing the programme were significant since to teach people from different healthcare disciplines together, emphasis had to be shifted from assessment processes to assessment outcomes. the content of the assessment is constructively aligned with the domain of learning (as previously outlined) and the nature of the evidence they wish to submit as a portfolio to demonstrate the achievement of learning outcomes. this process demonstrates the purposefulness of their work to their field of clinical practice and also illuminates the benefits of adopting the hybrid hayes and davies a phenomenological evaluation of a hybrid model of problem based learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 7: june 2014 5 pbl approach in terms of being able to individually tailor not just the teaching and learning processes across the programme, but the assessment process as well. methods design and rationale of the approach in the last fifty years a wealth of research has demonstrated the convergence of shared experience and interpretation of experience that can be captured by the phenomenological tradition (see pringle et al., 2011 for review). debates have emerged around the ability of interpretive phenomenological approaches to demonstrate relevance in the development of new patient/practitioner experiences in healthcare provision (e.g. kuller, 2007). often it is the question of whether or not consistency between the philosophical origin and its application to methodological execution exists (e.g. knox, 2004). following formal institutional ethical approval, this study adopted an interpretive method, where emphasis was placed directly on accessing the lived experience of participants through the use of semi-structured interviews and the formal evaluation questionnaires regarding the msc. in an attempt to gain access to and make sense of the lived experience of postgraduate healthcare students, we used a basic modification of the phenomenological method originally developed by the duquesne school, first articulated and demonstrated by giorgi and further developed by stevick-colaizzi-keen as documented by moustakas (1994). this is a relatively reductionist approach to distilling themes and perspectives of the lived experience of the students. sampling and data collection all fifteen students (who were allocated a pseudonym to preserve confidentiality throughout the study) completed a questionnaire that contained only four items, as follows. 1. tell us about the kind of teaching and learning experiences you have had on the msc programme here at the university. 2. how is it different to what you have experienced before? 3. what will you take away from this experience? 4. tell us about any positive and negative experiences of your time on the programme in relation to those teaching and learning experiences. hayes and davies a phenomenological evaluation of a hybrid model of problem based learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 7: june 2014 6 we adopted, in accordance with a phenomenological approach, a position of ‘conceptual silence’ (stones, 1988), or naivety, and bracketed off pre-existing suppositions about what the participants might disclose. this involved suspending any ideas we might have about the thoughts and feelings of the participants. though we are confident through reflection that this was achieved, we, of course, cannot be sure at an interpretive level. the questions were designed to encourage respondents to think deeply and critically about their experience of the hybrid pbl approach. we deliberately avoided questions that (a) would lead to a listing of answers and (b) would afford respondents the opportunity to become overly theoretical since we wanted to capture and access their personal livedworld, the concrete experience of their educational pathway. the questionnaire acted as a rough sieve for selecting a smaller group of respondents (ten) to act as participants in in-depth interviews; and provided a framework for those interviews. ten was purposively selected because this is optimal for a phenomenological investigation (moustakas, 1994). we selected the ten respondents on the richness of their responses (i.e. the students who had been most forthcoming in sharing detailed knowledge of their individual experiences of the programme). the demographics of the participants were significant to the research since we wished to build a picture of the diversity of the people we had interviewed in terms of their professional identities, but we did not deliberately seek specific racial, cultural or gender representation. nor did we seek to relate demography to these professional roles. in keeping with the fact that phenomenology seeks to capture the lived experiences of individuals from their perspectives alone, we felt it appropriate to list below the important attributes of profession, race and gender. the sample comprised:  a black male doctor,  a white male healthcare manager,  a white male podiatrist,  a white female podiatrist,  a white female orthopaedic ward manager,  two white female community healthcare practitioners,  a white male biomedical scientist,  a white female biomedical scientist,  a white female midwife. hayes and davies a phenomenological evaluation of a hybrid model of problem based learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 7: june 2014 7 each of these participants was then interviewed, with the questions varying according to the responses to the questionnaire. questions typically asked for clarification or more detail of opinions and perceptions. interviews were audio recorded and transcribed in full. the transcript of each interview was then given to each respective participant for checking of respondent (content) validity to ensure that the transcript accurately represented the dialogue between researcher and participant. in three cases, some additional follow up questioning due to a lack of clarity of expression within the interviews was necessary and was obtained using a further brief interview, which again was transcribed and checked with the participant. data analysis all the analysis was undertaken by one person for consistency. the transcripts were examined for commonality of emergent themes between participants in the study. this produced an annotated descriptive and summarised version of the raw data, in accordance with the framework analysis advocated by ritchie and spencer (2004). in terms of developing key themes and perspectives, their framework analysis involves five clearly identifiable phases, which the researcher found logical to execute. phase 1: familiarisation with the raw data this is the process that allowed the researcher involved in this phase of the research to become ‘at one’ with the transcribed data collected. it also allowed field notes and the few observational comments made during the interviews to be integrated alongside the transcribed interviews, enabling contextualisation and framing of their significance. through this immersion it was possible to gain an overview of the data and begin to identify the repeated themes or perspectives. for students where too much raw data had been collected it was possible to be selective in what we included, although focus on incorporating a representative sample from all participants was a key aim. phase 2: identifying a thematic framework within which to work this was heavily reliant on the ability to move beyond purely being familiar with the data transcriptions and to fully recognise the themes and perspectives emerging from within hayes and davies a phenomenological evaluation of a hybrid model of problem based learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 7: june 2014 8 them. when the broadest perspectives were identified they were used to filter the transcripts and develop specific themes. themes were developed at this stage according to the framework analysis tool of ritchie and spencer (2004). vigilance was necessary in recognising any potential for ideas the researcher might already have about the general perspectives that emerged. nonetheless, ritchie and spencer (2004) acknowledged that since investigation of this nature is likely to have been designed around a particular issue (in this case our evaluation of the curriculum), this will potentially direct the development of the thematic framework. intuitive processes were used to make value judgements based on meaning, the contextualisation of evidence, and the interconnectedness of key factors identified. phase 3: indexing themes and perspectives specifically identified themes for indexing purposes were decided upon here. manually handling the data, instead of using a software package, gave a greater sense of perspective on them. phase 4: charting results the data were then taken out of context and given in diagrammatic form that contained headings and subheadings developed during phase 3. ordering of the data was very important here, since if it were not logical and sequential any clear meaning might be lost or appear nebulous. phase 5: mapping and interpreting here the researcher constructed a diagram of the phenomenon under investigation (the evaluation of the curriculum). we then compared this diagram with that produced in phase 4 to contextualise the themes and perspectives that had emerged. any inference drawn at this stage had to be a true representation of the value systems, perceptions and beliefs of the participants in our research, i.e. their experience of learning via a hybrid model of pbl. a final validating step of content was achieved by returning to the participant and asking whether the description produced was a trustworthy and authentic account of the original experience (pope et al., 2007). in all cases no amendments were required. hayes and davies a phenomenological evaluation of a hybrid model of problem based learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 7: june 2014 9 analysis of findings and discussion from the transcripts three dominant themes emerged and were further developed into a theoretical interpretation of findings, which merged the phenomenological experiences of students into a tangible base for the development of theoretical perspectives of significance from the study, which had not been previously identified from the published literature. again, these interpretations were validated by students using the process described above. the themes, and sub-themes, were as follows. under each section is a report of the interpretation (phase 5) of what students expressed. we give quotations from students to provide an insight into their overall experiences of the programme across the dominant theoretical themes that emerged. 1. professionalism and the value of character subtheme one: differentiating attitude from behaviour the interpretation was that experience of the curriculum enabled students to differentiate between the concepts of attitude and behaviour, and that this aided the development of their professionalism. social learning was seen as being central to this and professional engagement in the sessions became a social norm rather than being driven by staff. subtheme two: interprofessional capacity building it was interpreted that the hybrid pbl model had broken down barriers between different healthcare disciplines and that facilitated discussions allowed students to articulate not only an evidence base but also how they applied this evidence base to practice. it was also interpreted that in terms of social integration in the group, as might be expected, individual personalities and characters were very relevant to the overall group dynamics. these group dynamics facilitated collaborative learning and the transferrable skills students learned while taking part in this collaborative learning were interpreted as being highly relevant to the workplace. hayes and davies a phenomenological evaluation of a hybrid model of problem based learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 7: june 2014 10 subtheme three: the situated context of learning and experiential learning it was interpreted that by adopting the hybrid model of pbl, students had been enabled to internalise knowledge and use this as a tool in their own professional development. 2. perceived cognitive development and meaningful learning subtheme one: student entry behaviour it was interpreted that the perceptions students held about their cognitive development and their conceptualisation of the meaningfulness of learning were closely linked to their educational experience on entry to the programme. it was considered that their self-perceived cognitive development related directly to their current educational standing in an academic community. those students who had not been in formal education for an extended period (several years) appeared to respond more flexibly to the introduction of new approaches to teaching and learning, whereas those who had recently been undergraduates found the transition from a didactic teaching approach more of a challenge. subtheme two: applying knowledge to practice two students felt that their historical roots of learning had revolved around memorising facts and then attempting in practice to apply the things they had memorised without any process of facilitation. others though appreciated the diverse range of topics that the hybrid pbl model permitted. from this point of view it built capacity within and between professional healthcare disciplines. the variety of topics covered in lectures – sometimes not relevant to your own profession – but this gives you an insight to your fellow colleagues’ professions. (anna, podiatrist) it was interpreted that the hybrid model of pbl facilitated them in engaging with the translation and application of knowledge to practice. in this sense, the hybrid model of pbl had not allowed them to go down the path of rote learning. hayes and davies a phenomenological evaluation of a hybrid model of problem based learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 7: june 2014 11 subtheme three: motivation to learn it was considered that the hybrid pbl model had motivated students to learn and that this linked directly to the ability of individual facilitators in helping to develop metacognitive skills; thus the skill of facilitation is crucial to the success of our model of pbl. ‘meaning making’ was facilitated, where the facilitator had identified the significance of what the students had internalised and reflected upon. one student in particular reflected deeply on the impact of the hybrid pbl model relative to other programmes of study he had experienced: never in my life have i been exposed to such a huge range of obtainable knowledge in a short period of time and not only been undaunted by it, but excited and eager to want to know it all. (derek, bioscientist) the process of meaning making was not simply related to straightforward solutions to the pbl cases used in teaching sessions, but to how the solution was arrived at and how key generalisations on the transferability of knowledge might be made or inferred. bridging the theory-practice gap was significant and we interpreted that students felt able to both build professional relationships and build capacity within and between clinical healthcare disciplines. subtheme four: skill acquisition it was interpreted that there was a need to recognise students’ individual starting points in learning development. in relation to this it was considered that engagement with the hybrid pbl approach enabled them to identify their own specific learning needs and had facilitated them in setting their own means of fulfilling learning outcomes across the programme. students’ explicit engagement with affective domain learning had a significant impact on both their sense of self-perception and their regard for other professional healthcare disciplines with which they had formerly not been familiar. the degree of freedom that the hybrid pbl model afforded students was something one student found particularly empowering: unlike other courses i have attended such as my degree, on this course i enjoy the freedom to learn what i wish, explore as far as i want and it will still be relevant in one way or another. my degree would show me want i need to learn and understand but hayes and davies a phenomenological evaluation of a hybrid model of problem based learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 7: june 2014 12 exploration too far into an interesting matter would mean neglecting concentration and effort on the areas i am to be assessed, whereas with this course it is as if i am being told, ‘the world is yours to learn, indulge your interests. go forth, create, discover and here is some things to think about and ways to make sure you’re doing it right along the way’. (julia, biomedical scientist) it was also interpreted that the intentional observation by the facilitator of their cognitive performance was helpful in allowing students to analyse and make meaning of the cases with which they were engaging. in conjunction with this, one-to-one tutorial provision was useful in consolidating the process of meaning making. also, the development of metacognitive strategies had to be facilitated and this played a role in students’ learning and was a motivating factor within it. 3. the ‘situatedness’ of learning and knowledge transfer subtheme one: associationism the researcher interpreted and refined the concept of ‘associationism’ in terms of students expressing their ability to transfer their knowledge base to practice. knowledge acquisition was important, but it was interpreted that students also valued the focus on professionalism the programme had given them. the placement element of the programme had allowed them to work within their own scope of practice, yet explore the parameters that existed between professions. the programme had changed how students would seek to build relationships with professionals from other disciplines that they had never deemed of any relevance to their own. learning was driven by previous connections or associations to pre-existing knowledge. unless knowledge gained in the context of the classroom advanced their already competent practice, then it would not be cognitively retained for long enough to be internalised and then reactivated at a later stage. subtheme two: the creation and facilitation of knowledge it was interpreted that where sessions were not constrained by formality, students felt at liberty to experiment with knowledge or push the boundaries of their own understanding, particularly in the placement module. this was facilitated by a range of healthcare staff: hayes and davies a phenomenological evaluation of a hybrid model of problem based learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 7: june 2014 13 working and learning beside a variety of allied health care professionals gave a depth of knowledge that otherwise i’d never have experienced. (james, musculoskeletal podiatrist) this was, however, counterbalanced by the need to legitimate newly-created knowledge, especially where they perceived this to have been developed within the group. it was extracted that the hybrid pbl approach meant students could not be passive in their approach to learning across the programme and this was significant when it came to the creation of new knowledge. it was also rationalised that where there was little pre-existing knowledge of a topic of study, their perception of the assessment process was that it was less flexible and that assessments were more difficult than in other modules. this happened despite the process being identical in all modules of the programme. it was also evident that the hybrid pbl approach allowed them to learn far more than previously grow, emotionally in their ability to relate to other professions, and enhance their professional capacity to engage with others from different backgrounds. subtheme three: legitimacy of knowledge it was considered that the hybrid model of pbl made students think about the knowledge that was created in the sessions and the legitimacy of that knowledge. the process of how and by whom the sessions were facilitated were critical factors in determining the knowledge gained. the programme created a forum where the students could establish and extend the parameters of their social norms within an atmosphere of relative trust, and the relationship between the facilitator and the cohort was significant. historically students had been left feeling intimidated, contained, and unable to either create or take ownership of any knowledge from teaching sessions because of the sense of ‘power’ they perceived their former teachers possessed. it was also interpreted that they no longer felt they were expected to absorb knowledge and then regurgitate it at a later stage, and because of this they could then usefully define what they both wanted and needed to learn, as expressed by one student who said: learning the research process and philosophy in greater depth and having the knowledge and skills to rationalise why one method or philosophy is best suited to particular research. (claire, occupational health nurse) hayes and davies a phenomenological evaluation of a hybrid model of problem based learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 7: june 2014 14 the hybrid model of pbl gave them the opportunity to apply their knowledge within the context of their workplace roles and settings. cognitive meaning from the specific subject areas was interesting, but it was considered that it was the transferrable skills and enhanced critical thinking skills that they gained from the programme that were valued most highly. we concluded that the notion of authentic learning, what constitutes authentic real life problems, and the value of connections between tacit knowledge and applied practice were of fundamental value. transcending themes there was an interrelationship between the three themes, though the notion of ‘learning’ was central to all three. meaning making was dependent on both the individual starting point of intellectual development as defined by perry (1981) and by the integration of professionalism, knowledge and skills through the programme. transcending the three themes, three theory-related areas were identified, as follows: 1. facilitation of learning the reciprocal relationship between the learners and the person facilitating the hybrid model of pbl was important to students and this raises the issue of the level of expertise necessary to facilitate sessions. emphasis is placed on the creation rather than the consumption of knowledge, though the process of facilitation and the relevance of knowledge produced, and its application to practice, is also important. having the opportunity to apply all the newly found skills to a research project with the valuable support of a supervisor via tutorials was a really positive part of the programme. (james, podiatrist) 2. associationism although there is no single theoretical stance termed ‘associationism’, it has a long tradition in experiential learning and the acquisition of knowledge, going back as far as aristotle (ackrill, 2010). this study has highlighted the need for consideration of key features of associationism, which are that all ideas can be reduced to a simplistic level, hayes and davies a phenomenological evaluation of a hybrid model of problem based learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 7: june 2014 15 built upon the connections of knowledge already established as part of their lived experience (poikela, 2005). this was reinforced by one student who said: to be honest, i cannot think of anything that can be considered ‘bad’ about this course. some things have not been in my style of learning, the way i would normally enjoy them most or as easy to grasp, but i have started to understand why things have been done the way they have. it is as if by being educated in the processes of the importance of being critical, being philosophical and being methodical, i have started to see reason in all things and understand were the logic lies. so even in aspects of the course not ideally suited to me, like others i won’t foolishly and unreasonably brand them as ‘bad’, i alternatively think of it as an opportunity to learn and experience things in a different way. (derek, bioscientist) associationism in the context of this study can be seen as a direct attempt by students to reconstruct and engage existing intellect with the least possible engagement with educational theory – something that social learning space positively enhances (o’rourke and kahn, 2005). for the purposes of this study, social learning space can be defined as an environment which is conducive to learning, away from the classroom, that contains equipment to facilitate informal study. associationism also serves to reinforce the notion that the addition of more complex ideas, cognitive strategies and connections to the body of knowledge, is one way in which new knowledge is created. this is an integral part of social constructivist approaches to education, consistent with the hybrid model of pbl adopted here. one student commented: we have a great group of mixed disciplines which is friendly and provides a good environment for discussion and learning. this is one of many attractions and it is beneficial to view subjects from different viewpoints and although i initially felt daunted about embarking on a masters i am motivated to complete. (alice, ward manager) the notion of professionalism as a developmental activity was highlighted by students and, through their engagement with the teaching and learning processes across the programme, they considered that they were better equipped to evaluate their stage of professional development. one consideration, however, must be that their self-perception of ‘where they were’ was relative to the other members of the cohort. it was not hayes and davies a phenomenological evaluation of a hybrid model of problem based learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 7: june 2014 16 necessarily benchmarked against their own achievements to date, and it was the degree of critical reflexivity and reflection on lived experience that allowed them to further develop their skills of professionalism. using teaching and learning to drive purposeful mechanisms of assessment has been a focal point of discussion by educational theorists for several years (e.g. savin-baden, 2004). evidence came from one of the students describing the relevance of the programme to practice: a great course to deepen my knowledge in general but in topics that i’m really interested in, whilst being valuable to my future practice. (sarah, nurse practitioner) 3. meaning making and the legitimacy of knowledge barrett (2004) engaged at length with the need to consider social learning opportunities, and the findings from the present study are consistent with the notion that the discourse that underpins the pbl facilitation is highly significant to the outcome of the experience of being taught. the hybrid pbl model also highlighted for some students mechanisms of overcoming learning disability: it has rekindled my passion for wanting to pursue a phd and has helped me to overcome my dyslexia in such a way that i now feel my thoughts are more easily transferred to writing and i am more able to articulate my passions and feelings like never before. (derek, bioscientist) the students showed a dichotomy of thinking around how this impacted upon the ability to improve the means by which they developed not only an awareness of their own professionalism but also the further extension of it within the context of their workplaces. some thought that professionalism was an inherent part of personality, while others thought professionalism was an acquirable attribute. social learning facilitated a means of bridging who they were professionally with who they were personally, consistent with severiens and schmidt (2009). this was seen as being very different by students, one of whom said: new and innovative teaching methods which help you learn in a new and exciting way. i will always look back fondly on my experiences. (james, podiatrist) hayes and davies a phenomenological evaluation of a hybrid model of problem based learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 7: june 2014 17 daniels’ (2008) commentary on the work of lave and wenger and vygotsky is of obvious significance to this study. lave and wenger (1991) advocated learning best within the context of ‘communities of practice’ and vygotsky (1978) provided an overview of the ‘scaffolding’ of knowledge. however, it is the integration of the hybrid model of pbl that raises the issues of how social learning can be integrated across specific domains of learning and in particular the notion of constructive alignment. also significant in the context of higher education provision for postgraduate healthcare students is the issue of international education provision and cultural diversity (eaton et al., 2011). one student on the programme expressed his opinion of how the programme functioned to integrate people culturally and across healthcare disciplines when he stated: the integration of students from a wide variety of health care disciplines has given me the chance to learn about other professions at a greater level than i would learn about them in any other way. (derek, bioscientist) the emergent themes from this study highlight the need to examine the concept of ‘realworld relevance’ and how this is designed in the context of a hybrid pbl approach. this is a finding that consolidates the work of raine and symons (2005) who studied pbl in physics education in the compulsory sector. in order to be authentic, the cases with which students work ought to match the actual tasks as closely as possible (schmidt et al., 2011). conclusions and implications for practice the significant degrees to which both interprofessional learning and the adoption of a multidisciplinary approach had impacted upon student engagement were the two most salient outcomes of the study. these have a direct implication to pedagogic practice. both promote consideration of how social constructivist perspectives in education can be used as a means of best facilitating affective domain learning in the process of constructive alignment. this is significant in the scope of developing professionalism and the processes of how students interact with one another in a formalised learning environment, and how this translates into healthcare practice. how patient-centred care can be optimised by enabling healthcare practitioners to develop their knowledge and skills provides a valuable opportunity for educators to develop curricula that incorporate opportunities for hayes and davies a phenomenological evaluation of a hybrid model of problem based learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 7: june 2014 18 interprofessional learning. the issue of whether professionalism can be taught remains a significant debate in the light of this study. it would appear that it was not what was taught that contributed most to the notion of generic skill transferability, but rather how the teaching and learning process was formalised so that all students had to contribute equally to the creation of new knowledge and the consolidation of that which pre-existed. an ongoing issue for discussion remains the legitimacy of knowledge created within the context of any pbl curriculum. building curricula around shared visions of improving assessment, diagnosis and management of patients has become a keystone in facilitating collaborative working. although this is a small scale study from the perceptions of students, there is much potential for our hybrid model to contribute to developing effective practitioners. in particular, the building of capacity within and between healthcare disciplines in the context of patient-centred care through a shared understanding of the differentiation, and blurred edges, of disciplines. acknowledgements we are grateful to two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments. references ackrill, j.l. (2010) essays on plato and aristotle. oxford: oxford university press. barrett, t. (2004) ‘researching the dialogue of pbl tutorials: a critical discourse analysis approach,’ in savin-baden, m. and wilkie, k. (eds.) challenging research into problem based learning. buckingham: open university press, pp. 93-102. barrett, t. (2010) ‘the problem-based learning process as finding and being in flow’, innovations in education & teaching international, 47(2), pp. 165-174. daniels, h. (2008) vygotsky and research. london: taylor and francis. hayes and davies a phenomenological evaluation of a hybrid model of problem based learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 7: june 2014 19 dirkx, j.m. (1997) ‘nurturing the soul in adult learning’, new directions for adult and continuing education, 74, pp. 79-88. dolmans, d.h.j.m., de grave, w., wolfhagen, i.h.a.p. and van der vleuten, c.p.m. (2005) ‘problem-based learning: future challenges for educational practice and research,’ medical education, 39(1), pp. 732-741. eaton, d.m., redmond, a. and bax n. (2011) ‘training healthcare professionals for the future: internationalism and effective inclusion of global health training’, medical teacher, 33(7), pp. 562-569. knox, k. (2004) ‘a researcher’s dilemma – philosophical and methodological pluralism’, electronic journal of business research methods, 2(2), pp. 119-128. kuller, l. (2007) ‘is phenomenology the best approach to health research?’, american journal of epidemiology, 166(10), pp. 1109-1115. lave, j. and wenger, e. (1991) situated learning: legitimate peripheral participation. cambridge: cambridge university press. moust, j.h.c, bouhuiijs, p.a.j. and schmidt, h.g. (2001) problem–based learning. a student guide. groningen: walters-noordhoff. moustakas, c. (1994) phenomenological research methods. thousand oaks, ca: sage, pp. 16-38. o’rourke, k. and kahn, p. (2005) ‘understanding enquiry-based learning,’ in barrett, t., mac labhrainn, i. and fallon, h. (eds.) handbook of enquiry and problem-based learning; irish case studies and international perspectives. galway: aishe and nui galway, pp. 36-45. pasquinelli, e. (2011) ‘knowledgeand evidence-based education: reasons, trends, and contents’, mind, brain, and education, 5(4), pp. 186-195. hayes and davies a phenomenological evaluation of a hybrid model of problem based learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 7: june 2014 20 perry, w.g. (1981) ‘cognitive and ethical growth: the making of meaning,’ in chickering, a.w. and associates (eds.) the modern american college. san francisco: josseybass, pp. 76-116. poikela, s. (2005) ‘learning at work as a tutor: the processes of producing, creating and sharing knowledge in a work community,’ in poikela, e. and poikela, s. (eds.) pbl in context: bridging work and education. tampere: tampere university press, pp. 177-195. pope, c., ziebland, s. and mays, n. (2007) ‘analysing qualitative data’, in pope, c. and mays, n. (eds.) qualitative research in health care. 3 rd edn. oxford, uk: blackwell publishing ltd., pp. 63-81. pringle, j., hendry c. and mclafferty, e. (2011) ‘phenomenological approaches: challenges and choices’, nurse researcher, 18(2), pp. 7-18. raine, d. and symons, s. (2005) ‘experiences of pbl in physics in uk higher education,’ in poikela, e. and poikela, s. (eds.) pbl in context: bridging work and education. tampere: tampere university press, pp. 41-46. ritchie, j. and spencer, l. (2004) ‘qualitative data analysis for applied policy research’, in bryman, a. and burgess r.g. (eds.) analysing qualitative data. london: routledge, pp. 173-194. savin-baden, m. (2004) ‘understanding the impact of assessment on students in problem based learning’, innovations in education and teaching international, 41(2), pp. 221-233. schmidt, g., rotgans, j. and yew, e. (2011) ‘the process of problem-based learning: what works and why’, medical education, 45(8), pp. 792-806. severiens, s. and schmidt, h. (2009) ‘academic and social integration and study progress in problem based learning’, higher education, 58(1), pp. 59-69. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/asin/0875894666/qid%3d933105022/002-4604654-9664832 http://www.josseybass.com/ http://www.josseybass.com/ hayes and davies a phenomenological evaluation of a hybrid model of problem based learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 7: june 2014 21 stones, c.r. (1988) ‘research; toward a phenomenological praxis’, in kruger, d. (ed.) an introduction to phenomenological psychology. 2 nd edn. cape town: juta, pp. 141156. vygotsky, l.s. (1978) mind in society. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. westwood, o.m.r., leinster, s.j. and weinberg, j.r. (2008) ‘a healthcare curriculum for the 21st century: time for flexibility?’, journal of the royal society of medicine, 101(3), pp. 59-62. author details catherine hayes is qualified in podiatric medicine and has worked in the context of learning and teaching in higher education, with a particular focus on multi-professional learning for healthcare practitioners. catherine is a founding fellow in podiatric medicine of the royal college of physicians and surgeons (glasgow), a fellow of the college of podiatric medicine and general practice (london) and a senior fellow of the higher education academy. mark s. davies is a biologist with a large portfolio of activities relating to learning and teaching in higher education. his research in education concerns formulating strategies for student retention, and the definitions and functions of assessment. he is a national teaching fellow and principal fellow of the higher education academy. literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 7: june 2014 fostering a sense of belonging: supporting the early formation of student identity as successful learners in higher education sarah parkes newman university, uk abstract since the widening participation (wp) policy of the new labour government (1997-2010) and the increased market-like environment created by raised tuition fees, institutions are increasingly focusing significant effort on enhancing the student experience in order both to retain existing students as well as competitively market themselves to prospective students (brown, 2011; department for business, innovation and skills, 2011; thomas, 2012). pre-entry activities that include information, advice and guidance (iag), supporting social and academic integration, managing student expectations and encouraging the development of appropriate academic study skills (gorard et al., 2006; crabtree et al., 2007) have thus been utilised to engage new learners in the experience of higher education (he), with the potential to influence their progression and retention once onprogramme (thomas, 2002; 2011; yorke and thomas, 2003; thomas and quinn, 2006; thomas and jamieson ball, 2011). thomas (2011, p.45) suggests that evidence does indeed indicate that such pre-entry interventions ought to influence retention and progression yet it is still not clear how such interventions affect a student’s experience of he. drawn from interviews conducted in 2012, this paper discusses the experiences of students participating in headstart; a two week pre-entry blended learning course at newman university, birmingham. using notions of belonging, this thematic analysis explores the extent to which participation supports the early formation of a sense of belonging in he, which is a key element to successful student progression and success (thomas, 2012). keywords: pre-entry, expectations, transition, integration, belonging, retention parkes fostering a sense of belonging journal of learning development in higher education, issue 7: june 2014 2 introduction work previously associated with the widening participation policy of the new labour government (1997-2010) sought to improve access and participation of groups who were under-represented in higher education (he) (higher education funding council for england hefce, 2004). pre-entry activities that worked to encourage participants to develop aspirations to study within he were one of the ways in which access to university was thus promoted. however, how such activity continues to influence students' experiences in the first year of their degree and beyond has been largely ignored (thomas, 2011, p.45). this paper adds to the discussion and debate by asserting that participation in headstart, a pre-entry blended learning course at newman university, positively affects a student’s subsequent experience of he, and thus their commitment to continuation, through fostering an early sense of belonging. this assertion is supported by data gathered as part of an endogenous study conducted in 2012 by the academic staff responsible for delivering the course. after brief discussion of the importance of pre-entry activities in supporting retention, followed by subsequent commentary on research methodology, this paper explores the extent to which participation in headstart affects the experiences of students involved through thematic analysis of interviews conducted with past participants. this is interpreted with regard to the extent that headstart fosters a sense of belonging in students through supporting the early formation of identity as a successful learner in he. specifically, this considers how participation shapes a student’s expectations of he and the extent to which headstart assists with developing basic academic skills, such as independent learning and time management, increasing awareness in students of the greater need to organise their own time and take responsibility for their learning. the effect of participation on student confidence, and knowledge to ask for help from peers, academic staff and professional service staff, is also explored. what is headstart? headstart was initially designed as a 14 day blended learning pre-entry course for potential students who did not possess the necessary ucas tariff or prior experience to meet the entry requirements for their desired program. previously such students were parkes fostering a sense of belonging journal of learning development in higher education, issue 7: june 2014 3 accepted onto their programme of study via a certificate of he (certhe), with university transition supported through a generic study skills module to be completed in tandem with their subject specific level four modules. however, feedback from 0506-0809 cohorts indicated that students would prefer activities before they started their course. they believed that the extra generic on-programme module contributed to a greater workload and put too much pressure on them during a time of anxiety and change. indeed, staff reported that their students were overwhelmed by the demands of their subject and the additional work associated with the certhe. since the pilot in 2009, headstart has evolved into a course which is no longer explicitly for such students, but offered to all new undergraduates. following dodgson and bolam’s (2002, p.24) assertion that the summer period is a useful timeframe for conducting activities that prepare students for he, headstart delivery commences during the two weeks prior to fresher’s week. aligning the course so closely to the start of the academic year enables students to access all the institutional systems they would expect to interact with once enrolled on-programme, whilst providing the opportunity to make friends with other students who they are most likely to be studying alongside. with similar aims to other pre-entry activities (see walker, 1999; blicharski and allardice, 2000; cook, 2009; hatt et al., 2009, p.339), one of the ways headstart affects the subsequent he experience of participants is by providing early exposure to the skills needed to cope with the demands of he. where headstart differs from other work in the sector is in its construction: as a blended learning course, students interact via workshops on campus and online ‘e-tivities’. these are underpinned by constructivist theories whereby ‘…learners create knowledge as they attempt to understand their experiences’ (driscoll, 2000, p.376) this can be seen through continuing interactions within the discussion forum and reflection in their personal learning journals. ‘e-tivities’ are designed to encourage a reflective approach to learning, generating ‘an ongoing set of attitudes’ (vaill, 1996, p.42) to help students navigate the demands of university life and increase their digital residency (white and le corno, 2011) once on-programme. this links to siemens’ notion of ‘connectivism’ (2004) whereby, in the ever increasing world of new knowledge, learners must be prepared to learn how to learn: it is just as important to ‘know-why and how’ learning is facilitated before the ‘know-what’ is learnt. parkes fostering a sense of belonging journal of learning development in higher education, issue 7: june 2014 4 during the course students independently complete online tasks such as entries into their journal, to include reflections on their previous experience and future aspirations, alongside interactive study skills tasks. furthermore, they are taken through the process of preparing subject related ‘practice assignments’ which are completed and submitted on the final day. throughout the course, members of the senior academic support team (sast) (see parkes et al., 2013) work with a group of students whose degree subject is aligned to their own. utilising the sast team in this way introduces institutional support mechanisms to the students early on. sast comment on student reflections detailed within the personal learning journal; headstart discussion boards; and provide feedback on the ‘practice assessments’ that are completed at the end of the course. headstart students are also supported over the two weeks by headstart mentors: mentors are students who have previously participated and successfully progressed into their second or third year of study. student retention: engagement, belonging and identity and pre-entry activity the reasons why students continue to study or leave university early are multifaceted. they are attributable to both the characteristics of the student, along with the pedagogy and processes employed within the institution. historically, retention has been seen as only attributable to entry characteristics such as family, class, race, academic aptitude and economic status alongside the level of student involvement in social and academic activities (goodenow and grady, 1993, p.60; walker et al., 2004, p.53; berger and lyon, 2005, p.20). however, it has since been accepted that student retention is part of a much more complex social and cultural picture (quinn, 2004, p.59-63; walker, 2004, p.45) and though many of the aforementioned student characteristics play a part, student persistence is further influenced by the interaction between individuals, institutions and wider society. indeed, ‘institutional habitus’ (mcdonough, (1996) and reay et al. (2001), cited thomas, 2002, p.431) affects student retention through ‘…the impact of a cultural group or social class on an individual’s behaviour as it is mediated through an organisation’ in turn, determining ‘…the way in which difference is dealt with, and thus the way students encountering difference for the first time react’ (thomas, 2002, p.439). in this way then, institutional structures and attributes could be seen as perpetuating the dominant cultures in society through pedagogy and process that socialise and reinforce parkes fostering a sense of belonging journal of learning development in higher education, issue 7: june 2014 5 societal status (thomas, 2002, p.431; quinn, 2004, p.58). thus organisational attributes of institutions that go on to influence student persistence should be considered when discussing student retention (berger and lyon, 2005; kuh et al., 2005; tinto, 2006; james et al., 2010) rather than longing for a more homogenous student body (thomas and may, 2011, p.12). key to student retention is the successful generation of a sense of belonging within students (osterman, 2000; krause, 2011; thomas, 2012). this can be defined as a students’ sense of being accepted, valued, included, and encouraged by others in the academic setting and involves supporting and respecting the personal autonomy of the student as an individual (goodenow, 1993, p.25). this sense of belonging is fostered during interactions within the social, academic and professional services spheres of a student’s experience. the success of such activity is underpinned by ensuring that student and staff capacity is built and supported across the student lifecycle: from pre-entry to employment. the ‘student engagement to improve student retention and success’ model (diagram one) encompasses a set of key characteristics, underpinning principles and wider institutional culture that intend to foster student belonging (thomas, 2012). this sense of student belonging is achieved through: ‘…supportive peer relations; meaningful interaction between staff and students; developing knowledge, confidence and identity as successful he learners and providing a he experience relevant to students’ interests and future goals’. the model reflects findings from a uk national longitudinal study that suggest activities across all institutional domains: the academic, social and professional service spheres (thomas and may, 2011) foster student engagement that promotes student retention and success. parkes fostering a sense of belonging journal of learning development in higher education, issue 7: june 2014 6 diagram one. final version of student engagement to improve student retention and success (thomas, 2012). following the logic of the model, activity located at the pre-entry stage of the student lifecycle that builds staff and student capacity should support belonging and thus retention. indeed, issues identified within the literature as contributing to student attrition, such as poor preparation for he and lack of social/academic integration (connor and dawson (2001), cited dodgson and bolam, 2002, p.17; doherty et al (2007)., cited thomas, 2011, p.239; yorke and longden, 2008, p.238) highlights the importance of preparation and admission; induction and transition support; social engagement and student support (thomas, 2011). associated with academic preparedness and support prior to entry, thomas (2011, p.242) with harvey and drew (2006) propose that a failure to adjust and integrate within a he context, perhaps borne from a mismatch between expectation and actual experience (quinn et al., 2005; gorard et al., 2006; crabtree et al., 2007), all contribute to student withdrawal (mclinden, 2003, p.5). thomas (2011, p.239) and jones (2008) both indicate that insufficient academic experience can be linked to student non-completion. this is perhaps demonstrated most succinctly by yorke and longden (2008, p.23-25) who state that students with no prior knowledge and/or experience of he indicated, more often than their better-informed peers, that difficulties in coping with the academic demand were influential in their departure from their institution, and implied their withdrawal was due to a difficulty involving social integration with other students. academic parkes fostering a sense of belonging journal of learning development in higher education, issue 7: june 2014 7 insofar as preparation for he extends, tinto (2006, p.7) discusses the merits of contextualised study skills courses as a way to potentially provide an experiential learning experience that ‘…constructs experience in a particular way, as something from which knowledge can be derived…through observation and reflection’ (usher and soloman, (1999), cited moon, 2004, p.104). moreover, thomas (2011, p.238) asserts that it is reasonable to expect that these courses could contribute to improving preparation for he, promoting commitment in the student to their studies and resulting in a satisfactory academic experience. one example of such a pre-entry skills course is the longitudinal ‘flying start’ project at the university of central lancaster (uclan) that focuses on developing the emotional and social intelligence of participants. by working with participants to develop these skills, the course encourages student progression and success, promoting better social integration and generating an ability in students to seek help or support when required (engelberg and sjoberg (2004) and gohm et al. (2005), cited cook, 2009). cook (2009) asserts that on average 80% of participants have no parental experience of he and that retention of ‘flying start’ students is twice as high as that of uclan as a whole. walker (1999) and walker et al. (2004) detail a further pre-entry activity; the ‘top up’ programme run by the university of glasgow. this programme promotes academic preparedness in participants through activities designed to develop critical thinking; study skills and highlight the notion of deep and surface learning. ‘top up’ participants involved in focus groups believed that involvement in the programme had enhanced their university experience by providing the opportunity to practice academic tasks, familiarise themselves with the university campus and systems whilst developing greater confidence through selfreflection (walker et al., 2004, p.54). by combining the findings from the focus groups with progression rates, the authors assert that the intervention positively affected student progression by promoting academic integration. blicharski and allardice (2000) discuss pre-entry interventions available at the university of dundee: access; a 10 week programme that closely mirrors a standard undergraduate first year and aims to embed participants into full-time university support structures through an intensive educational experience. parkes fostering a sense of belonging journal of learning development in higher education, issue 7: june 2014 8 aspire; a four week version of the access programme for participants who are closer to the entry levels for university and identified through their ucas application. both courses aim to develop academic skills, confidence and self-esteem. blicharski (1999), (cited thomas, 2011, p.245) reports that participants appeared ‘…no more vulnerable to drop out than any other cohort of undergraduate students’. the research purpose the purpose of this small scale endogenous study was to understand the extent that participation in headstart goes on to affect the experiences of students and their subsequent progression and success in higher education and was, to a small degree, evaluative. the study was underpinned by three questions: (i) how does participating in a pre-entry initiative shape a student’s expectations of he? (ii) to what extent does a pre-entry intervention begin to develop basic he academic skills? (iii) how does participation in a pre-entry programme affect students’ confidence and knowledge in terms of asking for help from peers, academic staff and professional service staff? it is clear that establishing a causal relationship between participation in an intervention and student decision making regarding persistence would, as longden (2006, p.176) agrees, ‘…present formidable methodological difficulties’. using a non-probability sampling technique, this research was therefore situated within an interpretivist paradigm to acknowledge the complex relationship between people’s attitudes and their behaviour. student perspectives on their experiences of headstart were collected through semistructured interviews which were used to empower the interviewees by giving them time and freedom to express their views. this meant that ideas could be followed up, answers probed and motives and feelings investigated (bell, 2005, p.157). parkes fostering a sense of belonging journal of learning development in higher education, issue 7: june 2014 9 as the researcher was the academic running headstart, discussion relating to the ‘insiderness’ of the study occurred during the research ethics approval process. it was recognised here that detachment from the subject matter could potentially pose difficulty, and thus the study did not propose to look for ‘…validity in any external or objective sense’, though an open and critical attitude to practice and interpretation was maintained throughout. moreover, the research reported here openly acknowledges that it took place within its own context and is inseparable from the world within which it exists (trochim, 2006). indeed, during thematic analysis of the interview transcriptions a process of exploration and elimination of interpretations took place. this was based on a reflective interaction with the ‘preferences and methodological assumptions’ present (hart, 2005). research ethics approval was granted in march 2012. headstart participants and research sample the numbers of headstart participants, between 2009-2012, are detailed in table one. table one. headstart participation by year, gender and age. year/cohort number male female 18-21 22-35 36-50 51+ 09/10 30 15 15 18 9 2 1 10/11 55 14 41 28 21 5 1 11/12 33 9 24 13 11 8 1 total 118 38 80 59 41 15 3 students were invited to participate in the semi-structured interviews by email, using both institutional and personal addresses. their contact details were taken from a database compiled as part of the registration process for headstart thus, all participants selfselected to be interviewed. 118 past participants were invited to take part with twenty students taking up the invitation. due to time constraints, 15 out of 20 students participated in interviews, taking place over april and may 2012. the distribution of interview participation across the three cohorts is detailed in table two. parkes fostering a sense of belonging journal of learning development in higher education, issue 7: june 2014 10 table two. headstart interview participants by year, gender and age. year/cohort number male female 18-21 22-35 36-50 51+ 09/10 5 1 4 0 2 2 1 10/11 2 0 2 0 2 0 0 11/12 8 2 6 3 1 3 1 total 15 3 12 3 5 5 2 within the total headstart population, the highest proportion of participants were between the age ranges of 18-21 and 22-35 years old respectively (see table one): a pattern not repeated within the headstart sample where the most represented age range fell equally between 22-35 and 36-50 years old (see table two). participant numbers in headstart were similar for both 09/10 and 11/12 groups. however, most of the interviewees came from the 11/12 cohort, perhaps a result of the course being relatively fresh in their minds. the difference in interview take up between these two cohorts may also have been affected by the timing of the interview request as this was made when third year students were most likely pre-occupied with completing their dissertations. third year participants too, might be presented with difficulties in remembering the course and thus answering questions about it. interestingly, there were only two participants from the 10/11 cohort; the largest of the three cohorts. the reason for this is unexplained though it may well be that informants might have been more willing to bare their souls to a detached outsider than to someone so intimately bound up with the life of the institution and so enmeshed in its power relations (dimmock (2005), cited mercer, 2007, p 7). the research findings interviewees across all cohorts and ages were overwhelmingly positive about headstart though some expressed difficulty in articulating what it was about it that they felt was beneficial. however, despite such difficulties, it emerged that headstart promoted a sense of belonging as a learner in he through: parkes fostering a sense of belonging journal of learning development in higher education, issue 7: june 2014 11  providing familiarisation with the campus, study environment and newman university systems.  helping students feel motivated in their studies.  beginning to build peer to peer and staff relationships.  introducing the skills needed for successful study in he.  exposing the existing attitudes participants had towards he and encouraging the development of realistic expectations. expectations of he gorard et al. (2006), harvey and drew (2006), crabtree et al. (2007) and thomas (2011) identified that a mismatch between expectation and actual experience in he can negatively influence student continuation. the interviews across all cohorts indicated that headstart helped students to develop realistic expectations of he. leigh (lines 239-240) says that his ‘…pre-conceived ideas’ of he were blown out of the water during headstart and lauren (lines 97-100) agrees that having the opportunity to ‘practice’ being at university was helpful: …it was quite nice to be given a little bit of a taster…this is how to write academically, this is what a presentation is…because it is nervewracking. we can therefore describe headstart as an experiential learning experience where the materials of learning are the direct experiences (moon, 2004, p.122) that influence expectations. thus, headstart generates an early sense of belonging by providing an opportunity for participants to be actively involved in coordinating and aligning their energy and power towards activities that affect their world. motivation increased motivation was reported by participants mainly from the 09/10 cohort, yet is not a theme explicitly identified within the literature. emma (line 79) says headstart helped her regain her ‘…old competitive spirit’ whilst vanessa felt that although she didn’t ‘...know parkes fostering a sense of belonging journal of learning development in higher education, issue 7: june 2014 12 how [she was] going to do [it]’, after completing headstart she was determined to get her studies done. indeed, she ‘…stuck to it and did all that [she] needed to do’ (line 206). for vanessa, a student who had been undecided about university for years (lines 15-18; 61), headstart provided an initial spark that fostered a sense of belonging to begin development of her identity as a he learner. campus familiarisation, study environment and newman university systems similar to findings by walker et al. (2004), all cohorts and ages commented on how headstart affects participant expectations of he through providing the opportunity to experience the campus and university systems. leigh (lines 78-79) and lauren (lines 137139) discuss this in practical terms: for leigh it was about ‘…just learning the basics [of]…how to use the computers’ with lauren agreeing that headstart provided familiarisation so that ‘...when you [came] back to start your degree…it’s not quite as daunting’. thus, as headstart participants become more comfortable in the physical he environment, they begin to imagine their future selves as successful students. academic skills development through early exposure to academic conventions, students repeatedly reported increased confidence within essay writing, planning, referencing, presentation, collaborative working and time management. though difficult to express at times, all interviewees commented that the course did ‘something’ that helped them with their academic work once onprogramme: even though it’s taken 8 months…now i can see the connection there. (joe, lines 165-175) referencing was highlighted as a particular skill that was acquired and developed through participation in headstart, as described by abby (lines 131-135) upon discussing the headstart practice assignment: parkes fostering a sense of belonging journal of learning development in higher education, issue 7: june 2014 13 when i was doing the assignment for headstart i was like ‘ok, i’ve thought of a point there, i need to reference’ so…it was always there in my mind…if i hadn’t gone on [headstart] i’d have been like ‘whatever’. many asserted that the subject specific mini-assignments, and the support offered prior to compiling them, contributed to the development of their academic writing skills. sarrah (lines 57-59) describes the academic writing classes as illustrating ‘the jump from a-level writing to degree writing’. ayshea (lines 54-56) comments positively on the introduction to collaborative work headstart provided ‘…because at a level we didn’t do those…it kind of throws you into what you have to do, the different ways of putting it across really.’ vicki (lines 200-212) says the collaborative tasks encouraged a period of self-reflection when things didn’t go to plan. she asserts that as a student, you ‘…have to work with people you don’t like… so if i do: how am i gonna work with them? how am i gonna challenge it? what do i need to do?’. similarly the timetable of headstart, as described by cassandra, highlighted the need for reflection on effective time management skills: interviewer: how does that reflect what your experience has been like on your course? cassandra: independent learning: it’s like the work is there for you to do, again it’s up to you, like the pace that you want to go and again, you have to know how to manage your time in it (lines 113-114) thomas (2012, p.7) talks about how student belonging is generated through ensuring that the ‘…he experience [is] relevant to students’ interests and future goals’, thus an important element for pre-entry interventions must be to ensure that the participants are involved in skills development activities that are relevant to their degree. by providing practical tasks aligned to the student’s subject of study, engagement and thus belonging is promoted. this is contextualised within the headstart experience through subject alignment whereby students are offered ‘…support and respect for personal autonomy’ (goodenow, 1993, p.25) in a bid to generate a sense of belonging. parkes fostering a sense of belonging journal of learning development in higher education, issue 7: june 2014 14 increased confidence both walker et al. (2004) and blicharski (1999, cited thomas, 2011) reported that participants in their respective interventions were well prepared for he through activities designed to build confidence and raise self-esteem. equally, headstart interviewees from all cohorts reported that a sense of increased confidence prevailed after completion of the course. joe (lines 194-196) believed headstart helped him overcome his ‘…initial nerves about…going to university…[as he] had two weeks to sort of find [his] feet’. interestingly, interviewees discuss the establishment of a self-perceived increase in confidence during a relatively short period of time. sarrah (line 198) asserts that she ‘…was able to pass on… knowledge’ which abby (line 104) describes as being given the ‘upper hand’. this sense of ‘knowing’ was further elaborated by kevin (lines 176-181): i remember my first year presentation…my group was panicking about it…i was like: listen, i learnt this before…so…i felt more confident…i was able to tell them ‘this is how we do it’. the interviewees reported generally that headstart enabled them to begin to develop effective study skills, though a few participants implied that they initially felt inadequate, as dawn describes (lines 140-149): you almost feel like a failure before you start…it’s almost saying to somebody that whatever you’ve done before is no good…but then…you feel a bit more confident as you go through them. whilst dawn does state she got through it and came out feeling confident, this could potentially have amplified an imbalance of power where participants struggle to negotiate meaning thus disempowering them. confidence and knowledge in students to ask for help from peers, academic staff and professional service staff across the majority of the interviewees, headstart is seen as helping to build peer to peer and staff relationships. this could be interpreted as promoting a sense of belonging as a learner in he. parkes fostering a sense of belonging journal of learning development in higher education, issue 7: june 2014 15 staff familiarisation thomas and may (2011) and thomas (2012) assert the importance of developing the capacity of students to engage effectively in their he experiences across all spheres of institutional activity, including engaging in support with staff. interview transcriptions highlight the sense of approachability participants felt towards members of professional staff, because they ‘already knew a few faces of the tutors’ (dawn, line 131), familiarisation that was fostered during workshops in headstart. sarrah (lines 164-167) echoes this when she talks of the library liaison officers she met on headstart: ‘…i was able to just go to him…because i knew he was on the headstart and i knew his kind of job’. indeed, the whole notion that you could ask for support at university was something all interview participants felt headstart had introduced them to, as abby (lines 91-93) concludes ‘…if i’d have been just at uni starting i wouldn’t... have done the asking and stuff’. the experience of participants was that headstart had a positive effect on their confidence and knowledge to ask for help from peers, academic staff and professional service staff. building peer to peer relationships thomas and may (2011) tell us that engagement in the social sphere of activity can foster a sense of belonging when integrated into the academic sphere. the importance of peer to peer relationships within the academic sphere can be most explicitly seen in vicki’s response (lines 129; 195-197), as she describes meeting a fellow student with whom she had to work on a presentation during headstart: maddy is still my mate now […] i really enjoyed that, going to meet maddy at a university library; never met this guy before…then we were getting together and getting this work done and it was really good! emma (line 316-319) also talks about the importance of interacting with others within the ‘settling in process’ (walker, 1999, p.13; quinn et al., 2005, p.20) and explains that headstart enabled her to have someone to talk and chat to. this resonates with sarrah (lines 51-54), pauline (lines 67-68) and dawn (lines 131-136) who agree that headstart enabled them to make great friends, even with ‘…other students from other different courses’ (dawn, lines 131-136). parkes fostering a sense of belonging journal of learning development in higher education, issue 7: june 2014 16 concluding remarks this paper is underpinned by the notion that higher education institutions should focus on what is within their power to influence with regard to promoting student retention and success, rather than wishing for increased homogeneity within the student body. specifically, the discussions here surrounding headstart at newman university explored how participation in pre-entry activity can positively affect a student’s subsequent experience of he through fostering an early sense of belonging, a key factor in successful student progression and success (thomas, 2012). interviews conducted with participants on headstart have echoed the findings of walker (1999) and walker et al. (2004) which reported that participation had positively affected the student’s experience of he, aligning their expectations with the realities of study and allowing participants to become acquainted with the physical, social and academic study environments. specifically for headstart, interviewees discussed how the course promoted a sense of belonging as a learner in he through; providing familiarisation with the campus and study environment and newman university systems; helping students feel motivated in their studies; beginning to build peer to peer and staff relationships and introducing the skills needed for successful study in he. the experience exposed the existing attitudes participants had towards he and encouraged the development of realistic expectations, consequently supporting the early formation of identity in students as successful learners in he. a limitation to this study is in triangulating the interview themes against retention and progression data. initial investigations conducted into the retention and success rates of headstart students, compared to non-participants from the same programme (see parkes, 2012), suggested that those participating in headstart were retained in he at the same or better rate than non-participants. however, these investigations only looked at retention and progression after the first two years of study and did not look at student characteristics such as gender, class, race or disability. it would therefore be interesting to complement the findings reported here with a longitudinal analysis of retention, progression and success for headstart participants against non-participants by such characteristics and perhaps course type. despite these limitations, this small scale study has not only increased understanding into how pre-entry activity, such as headstart, can parkes fostering a sense of belonging journal of learning development in higher education, issue 7: june 2014 17 positively affect a student’s subsequent he experience, but has also influenced institutional direction at the university during a time of key change. since 2012/13, these research findings have underpinned an institutional academic practice fellowship into ‘induction and transition’. the fellowship investigated the extent to which student belonging is nurtured through student-centred learning, teaching and assessment (which are offered through mainstream activities in the academic curriculum during the first year and during the first semester at each subsequent level of study). the conclusions from the fellowship inspired the development of fundamental modules that formed part of an institutional move to a 20 credit modular structure across which subject-based scholarship, study skills and independent learning are developed, particularly through reflective assessment. references bell, j. (2005) doing your research project. maidenhead: open university press. berger, j.b. and lyon, s. (2005) ‘past to present’, in seidman, a. (ed.) college student retention: formula for student success. westport, usa: american council on education and praeger publishers, pp. 1-29. blicharski, j. and allardice, m. (2000) ‘tracking students progression: learning their lessons’, widening participation and lifelong learning, 2(3), pp. 32-37. brown, r. (2011) ‘markets rule, ok?’, the coalition government’s higher education reforms in context: oxford lecture 14 november 2011. available at: www.education.ox.ac.uk/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/oxfordlecture-14-november-2011.docx (accessed: 17 february 2013) cook, v. (2009) ‘still flying ten years on!’, towards a new agenda for lifelong learning: access, diversity and participation: face conference 2009. staffordshire university, staffordshire 1-3 july. available at: http://www.f-a-c-e.org.uk/conferenceand-events/face-2009-conference.htm (accessed: 3 november 2009). http://www.education.ox.ac.uk/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/oxford-lecture-14-november-2011.docx http://www.education.ox.ac.uk/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/oxford-lecture-14-november-2011.docx http://www.f-a-c-e.org.uk/conference-and-events/face-2009-conference.htm http://www.f-a-c-e.org.uk/conference-and-events/face-2009-conference.htm parkes fostering a sense of belonging journal of learning development in higher education, issue 7: june 2014 18 crabtree, h., roberts, c. and tyler, c. (2007) understanding the problems of transition into higher education. available at: http://www.ece.salford.ac.uk/proceedings/papers/35_07.pdf (accessed: 5 november 2008). department for business, innovation and skills (2011) students at the heart of the system. london: department for business, innovation and skills. dodgson, r. and bolam, h. (2002) student retention, support and widening participation in the north east of england. sunderland: universities for the north east. driscoll, m. (2000) psychology of learning for instruction. needham heights, ma: allyn and bacon. goodenow, c. (1993) ‘classroom belonging among early adolescent students: relationships to motivation and achievement’, journal of early adolescence, 13(1), pp. 21-43. goodenow, c. and grady, k. (1993) ‘the relationship of school belonging and friends' values to academic motivation among urban adolescent students’, the journal of experimental education, 62 (1), p 60-71. gorard s., smith, e., may, h., thomas, l., adnett, n. and slack, k. (2006) review of widening participation research: addressing the barriers to participation in higher education. available at: http://www.hefce.ac.uk/pubs/rdreports/2006/rd13_06/ (accessed: 11 september 2008). hart, c. (2005) doing your masters dissertation, london: sage harvey, l. and drew, s. (2006) the first-year experience: briefing paper on integration. higher education academy. available at: http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/assets/documents/archive/first_year_experience_briefi ng_for_policy_makers_and_practitioners.pdf (accessed: 1 january 2012). http://www.ece.salford.ac.uk/proceedings/papers/35_07.pdf http://www.hefce.ac.uk/pubs/rdreports/2006/rd13_06/ http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/assets/documents/archive/first_year_experience_briefing_for_policy_makers_and_practitioners.pdf http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/assets/documents/archive/first_year_experience_briefing_for_policy_makers_and_practitioners.pdf parkes fostering a sense of belonging journal of learning development in higher education, issue 7: june 2014 19 hatt, s., baxter, a. and tate, j. (2009) ‘‘it was definitely a turning point!’ a review of aimhigher summer schools in the south west of england’, journal of further and higher education, 33(4), pp. 333-346. higher education funding council for england, (2004), aimhigher: guidance notes for integration. h. 2004/8. bristol: hefce. james, r., krause, k. and jennings, c. (2010) the first year experience in australian universities: findings from 1994–2009. available at: www.cshe.unimelb.edu.au/research/fye_report_1994_to_2009.pdf. (accessed: 5 december 2011). jones, r. (2008) student retention and success: a synthesis of research. higher education academy. available at: http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/resources/detail/inclusion/wprs/wprs_retention_synt hesis (accessed: 8 november 2009). krause, k. (2011) ‘transforming the learning experience to engage students’, in thomas, l. and tight, m. (eds.) institutional transformation to engage a diverse student body. bingley: emerald, pp. 199-212. kuh, g.d., kinzie, j., schuh, j.h., and whitt, e.j. (2005) student success in college: creating conditions that matter. san francisco: jossey-bass. longden, b. (2006) ‘an institutional response to changing student expectations and their impact on retention rates’, journal of higher education policy and management, 28(2), pp. 173-187. mclinden, m. (2003) ‘retention: developing and implementing pre-entry, induction and ongoing retention tactics’, learning transformations: face 2003 conference. university of stirling, stirling 2-4 july. available at: http://www.face.stir.ac.uk/documents/paper015mclinden.pdf (accessed: 23 december 2011). http://www.cshe.unimelb.edu.au/research/fye_report_1994_to_2009.pdf http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/resources/detail/inclusion/wprs/wprs_retention_synthesis http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/resources/detail/inclusion/wprs/wprs_retention_synthesis http://www.face.stir.ac.uk/documents/paper015mclinden.pdf parkes fostering a sense of belonging journal of learning development in higher education, issue 7: june 2014 20 mercer, j. (2007) ‘the challenges of insider research in educational institutions: wielding a double‐edged sword and resolving delicate dilemmas’, oxford review of education, 33(1), pp. 1-17. moon, j. (2004) a handbook of reflective and experiential learning: theory and practice. london: routledge falmer. osterman, k.f. (2000) ‘students’ need for belonging in the school community’, review of educational research, 70(3), pp. 323-367. parkes, s. (2012) ‘giving students a ‘headstart’; discussing the impact of a pre-induction course on student experience, and their progression within higher education after the first two years of undergraduate study’, what works? student retention and success conference 2012. university of york, york 28-29 march. available at: https://newman.academia.edu/sarahparkes (accessed: 26 june 2014). parkes, s., cousins, h. and blackwell-young, j. (2013) ‘senior academic support tutors: fostering student engagement through supporting academic development’, in clark, r., andrews, j., thomas, l. and aggarwal, r. (eds.) compendium of effective practice in higher education: volume 2. york: higher education academy, pp. 169173 [online]. available at: http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/assets/documents/retention/compendium_2_rc_ja_fi nal.pdf (accessed: 19 november 2013). quinn, j. (2004) ‘understanding working-class ‘drop-out’ from higher education through a sociocultural lens: cultural narratives and local contexts’, international studies in sociology of education, 14(1), pp. 57-74. quinn, j., thomas, l., slack, k., casey, l., thexton, w. and noble, j. (2005) from life crisis to lifelong learning: rethinking working-class ‘drop out’ from higher education. york: joseph rowntree foundation. siemens, g. (2004) ‘connectivism: a learning theory for the digital age’, elearnspace: everything elearning. available from: http://www.elearnspace.org/articles/connectivism.htm (accessed: 3 june 2009). https://newman.academia.edu/sarahparkes http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/assets/documents/retention/compendium_2_rc_ja_final.pdf http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/assets/documents/retention/compendium_2_rc_ja_final.pdf http://www.elearnspace.org/articles/connectivism.htm parkes fostering a sense of belonging journal of learning development in higher education, issue 7: june 2014 21 thomas, l. (2002) ‘student retention in higher education: the role of institutional habitus’, journal of educational policy, 17(4), pp. 423-32. thomas, l. (2011) ‘do pre-entry interventions such as ‘aimhigher’ impact on student retention and success? a review of the literature’, higher education quarterly, 65(3), pp. 230-250. thomas, l. (2012) building student engagement and belonging in higher education at a time of change: a summary of findings and recommendations from the what works? student retention & success programme, london: paul hamlyn foundation. thomas, l. and quinn, j. (2006) first generation entry into higher education. milton keynes: open university press. thomas, l. and jamieson-ball, c. (eds.) (2011) engaging students to improve student retention and success in higher education in wales. york: higher education academy [online]. available at: http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/resources/detail/inclusion/retention/engagingstudent stoimrpoveretentioninwales_english (accessed: 14 june 2011). thomas, l. and may, h. (2011) ‘student engagement to improve retention and success model’, in thomas, l. and jamieson-ball, c. (eds.) engaging students to improve student retention and success in higher education in wales. york: higher education academy, pp. 11-21 [online]. available at: http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/resources/detail/inclusion/retention/engagingstudent stoimrpoveretentioninwales_english (accessed: 14 june 2011). tinto, v. (2006) ‘research and practice of student retention: what next?’, journal of college student retention, 8(1), pp. 1-19 [online]. available at: http://edit.uaa.alaska.edu/governance/facultysenate/upload/jcsr_tinto_200607_retention.pdf (accessed: 11 december 2011). trochim, w. (2006) ‘positivism and post-positivism’, research methods knowledge base [online]. available at: http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/resources/detail/inclusion/retention/engagingstudentstoimrpoveretentioninwales_english http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/resources/detail/inclusion/retention/engagingstudentstoimrpoveretentioninwales_english http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/resources/detail/inclusion/retention/engagingstudentstoimrpoveretentioninwales_english http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/resources/detail/inclusion/retention/engagingstudentstoimrpoveretentioninwales_english http://edit.uaa.alaska.edu/governance/facultysenate/upload/jcsr_tinto_2006-07_retention.pdf http://edit.uaa.alaska.edu/governance/facultysenate/upload/jcsr_tinto_2006-07_retention.pdf parkes fostering a sense of belonging journal of learning development in higher education, issue 7: june 2014 22 http://www.socialresearchmethods.net/kb/positvsm.php (accessed 19 december 2009). vaill, p.b. (1996) learning as a way of being. san francisco, ca: jossey-blass inc. walker, l. (1999) ‘longitudinal study of drop-out and continuing students who attended the pre-university summer school at the university of glasgow’, international journal of lifelong education, 18(3), pp. 217-233. walker, l., mathew, b. and black, f. (2004) ‘widening access and student noncompletion: an inevitable link? evaluating the effects of the top-up programme on student completion’, international journal of lifelong education, 23(1), pp. 43-59. white, d. and le cornu, a. (2011) ‘visitors and residents: a new typology for online engagement’, first monday, 16(9) [online]. available at: http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/3171/3049 (accessed: 20 february 2012). yorke, m. and thomas, l. (2003) ‘improving the retention of students from lower socioeconomic groups’, journal of higher education policy and management, 25(1), pp. 63-75. yorke, m. and longden, b. (2008) the first-year experience of higher education in the uk: final report. york: the higher education academy. author details sarah parkes is a tutor for transition and retention at newman university, birmingham. sarah’s principal interests lie in the factors affecting student retention, progression and success in a widening participation context. as well as supporting student themselves, this includes notions of institutional transformation that develops staff capacity to enable student success, rather than looking for increased homogeneity within the student body. http://www.socialresearchmethods.net/kb/positvsm.php http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/3171/3049 journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 18: october 2020 ________________________________________________________________________________ journal of learning development in higher education, issue 18: october 2020 1 are vles still worthwhile? christine davies university of wales trinity saint david. abstract this opinion piece considers the current value of virtual learning environments (vles), and associated technologies such as e-portfolios, from the perspective of both lecturers and learners. student satisfaction is discussed, and the relationship between vle engagement and academic performance is considered. the piece concludes by highlighting the need for flexibility in the ways in which universities utilise technologies for teaching and learning. keywords: virtual learning environments; vle; vle engagement; institutional technology; ngdle. introduction ‘virtual learning environments’ (vles), or ‘learning management systems’ (lms) started to appear in higher education institutions (heis) in the late 1990s. their uptake was rapid, accelerated by national and international policy (konrad, 2003) and initiatives such as the open university’s (ou) vle project (weller, 2006). by 2007, vles had become ubiquitous, and currently include ‘blackboard’, ‘moodle’, and ‘canvas’. back in 2006, martin weller from the ou believed that vles acted as pioneers, paving the way for many more exciting technological developments in teaching, learning and assessment (weller, 2006). however, other authors were anxious that vles were too traditional in approach, primarily acting as administrative tools (blin and munro, 2008), and even having the effect of inhibiting innovation in hei technology (stiles, 2007). there was a recognition that online learning, including vles, required sound design (laurillard, davies are vles worthwhile? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 18: october 2020 2 2010), and substantial interactivity (salmon, 2002). it was also realised that in addition to it specialists, tutors and librarians had a key role to play in setting up and promoting vle pages (markland, 2003). tutors also needed support and training to help them use vles effectively (comas-quinn 2012), and this was also the case for technologies that sit within vles, such as e-portfolios (e.g. pebblepad), assignment submission and plagiarism detection software (e.g. turnitin), and lecture-capture technology (e.g. panopto). heis continue to invest a great deal of money and time in vles and associated technologies, in the hope that they will help them be competitive (stoller, 2016), and with the implicit assumption they improve teaching and learning. however, assumptions about the pedagogic value of educational technologies are not always correct. interactive whiteboards, for example, were installed in large numbers in school classrooms across the uk and elsewhere over the last twenty years but are now generally used as if they were merely ordinary (and substantially cheaper) whiteboards (schnackenberg and vega, 2016). is there a good enough return on investment in the case of university vles? do they help lecturers to teach their subjects and courses? do they enrich students’ learning experience and lead to higher marks? vles and lecturers there is little in the literature that examines whether vles have directly benefitted university teaching, though hew and syed abdul kadir working in malaysia linked ‘instructor effectiveness’ with factors such as trust in the technology and support from the institution (hew and syed abdul kadir, 2016). chris shelton surveyed academic staff from 27 english universities to gauge their views on vles and other institutional technologies (shelton, 2014). he found that around 60% of respondents used their institutional vle frequently, but there was considerable variation across heis in lecturers’ levels of confidence in their use. some of the lecturers responding to the survey commented that they continued to use institutional technologies such as vles even though they ‘did not consider them to have a positive effect on learning’ (shelton, 2014, p.757), and shelton davies are vles worthwhile? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 18: october 2020 3 speculated that for some lecturers ‘institutional rules or expectations require them to use technology in ways with which they are not comfortable’ (shelton, 2014, p.757). he also noted that barriers to lecturer engagement with institutional technologies such as vles included lack of training, and lack of support, but the major barrier, mentioned by 65% of his respondents, was lack of time. this was also found to be the case by other authors such as farrelly et al (2018). vles and learners student satisfaction with vles appears to vary by institution (shelton, 2014) and course (boulton et al, 2018), though it is not uncommon to have a low frequency of interaction with vle resources (agudo-peregrina et al, 2014; davies and harries, 2016), or for students to spend little time engaging with vle resources (boulton et al, 2018). surveys of students have indicated that student satisfaction, and also student retention, increase with the richness of vle communication tasks (rienties and toetenel, 2016), and this reinforces the early work in this area by authors such as salmon (2002). distance learners in particular seem to appreciate vle activities which are social and tutor-led (agudoperegrina et al, 2014; tour, 2017). does the engagement of students with vles improve their academic performance? to provide a sound answer to this question we need robust measures of student engagement. many studies in this area have used survey responses for this purpose (e.g. toole et al, 2015), but surveys may provide unrepresentative samples, and it is also possible for students to over-estimate their vle usage. it could be argued that a ‘learning analytics’ approach is a superior way of gauging vle engagement (agudo-peregrina et al, 2014; boulton et al, 2018). this approach can involve counting the number of clicks on a webpage (e.g. agudo-peregrina et al, 2014; rienties and toetenel, 2016), the number of contributions a student makes, for example on a vle forum (e.g. goggins and xing, 2016), or the time spent on a web-page (e.g. boulton et al, 2018). boulton et al (2018) examined the vle engagement and ultimate achievement of campus-based undergraduates on a range of courses. they found a positive association between vle davies are vles worthwhile? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 18: october 2020 4 usage and class of degree in some subjects (e.g. medicine), but not in others (e.g. mathematics). agudo-peregrina et al (2014) found a significant positive association between vle engagement and performance for online courses, but not for ‘blended’ courses where there was some face-to-face delivery in addition to vle based study. this was also observed by davies and harris (2016). e-portfolios play an important role within vle usage on several he courses, particularly those with practice-based components such as nursing. though not widespread in some countries, for example ireland (farrell, 2018), they have been used extensively in regions such as the united states (kahn et al, 2014; association of american colleges and universities, 2020). however, kahn et al (2014) noted that within any one us institution usage of e-portfolios was sparse. this ties in with shelton’s (2014) survey of english heis which found that less than 10% of tutors used e-portfolios frequently. technical difficulties appeared to be a barrier to e-portfolio uptake in the case of both academic staff (andrews and cole, 2015) and students (birks et al, 2016). however, many studies, for example, roberts et al (2016), have commented that eportfolios help to promote reflective thinking. turnitin is another application used widely in conjunction with vles. primarily designed to detect plagiarism, this technology can help students learn about aspects of academic writing (abrahamson & mann, 2018). turnitin also acts as a key portal for uploading and assessing assignments, and a means of providing feedback to learners. on some he courses, the requirement to submit assignments via turnitin, or an equivalent vle component, may be the prime motivator in students’ engagement with their institutional vle (hampel & pleines, 2013). vles may also incorporate lecture capture. a review of the literature on this topic by o’callaghan et al (2017) suggested that the benefits of this technology outweigh its drawbacks, and dommett et al (2019) noted that lecture capture may be particularly beneficial for learners with health issues who may have to miss lectures. however, ikonne et al (2018) noted that the availability of lecture capture on a medical course was associated with a reduction in attendance at lectures, and edwards and clinton (2018) also found a negative association between lecture capture and attendance on a uk davies are vles worthwhile? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 18: october 2020 5 undergraduate science module. both of these studies found that viewing videos of lectures did not appear to improve student achievement. edwards and clinton (2018) held the view that the ‘net effect of lecture capture introduction… is generally negative’ (edwards and clinton, 2018, p.403). looking to the future the evidence of the value of vles and associated technologies is clearly mixed and, in many cases, heis may be continuing to use them because of past investment rather than their benefits to teaching and learning. dron and anderson (2016, p.11) made reference to ‘the monolithic lms’, and salmon and asgari (2019, p.1) similarly commented that when it comes to institutional technology there is ‘stasis in the university sector’. with the increasing range and accessibility of information online, students may not need typical vle content and may decide to use their vle purely to access turnitin or equivalent for assignment submission. the increasing numbers of learners who are part-time, mainly distance-based and/or professionally focussed may preferentially use online resources which are visually appealing, do not require login, and are easily accessible on mobile devices. the increased time spent online during the 2020 covid-19 pandemic may have further raised expectations. the 2020 educause horizon report on teaching and learning lists ‘next generation digital learning environments’ (ngdle) as one of the key current technological trends in the he sector (educause, 2020). these environments are considered to be ‘learning ecosystems’ that incorporate some existing features of a vle, but additionally use learning analytics to give increased flexibility and agility. they may constitute a major improvement on vles because of the provision of a more personalised learning experience that includes synchronous and asynchronous elements, advice, collaboration and assessment (educause, 2015). the flexibility promised by ngdle is vital and links to the observations of orr et al (2018, p.12) who commented that ‘there is no ‘one size fits all’ approach to the implementation of technology’. this translates into a need for a range of technological davies are vles worthwhile? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 18: october 2020 6 options and the freedom to choose the tools that best suit specific learners and courses. it also necessitates adequate time and support for lecturers so that they can maintain awareness and understanding of the increasing range of online delivery options. references abrahamson, e. and mann, j. (2018) ‘for whom is the feedback intended? a studentfocused critical analysis of turnitin software as a tool for learning’. journal of pedagogical research, 2(3), pp. 146-166. agudo-peregrina, a.f., iglesias-pradas, s., conde-gonzález, m.a., and hernándezgarcía, a. (2014) ‘can we predict success from log data in vles? classification of interactions for learning analytics and their relation with performance in vlesupported f2f and online learning’. computers in human behaviour, 31, pp. 542550. andrews, t. and cole, c. (2015) ‘two steps forward, one step back: the intricacies of engaging with eportfolios in nursing undergraduate education’. nurse education today, 35(4), pp. 568-572. association of american colleges and universities (2020) ‘eportfolios’ [online] available at: https://www.aacu.org/eportfolios [accessed 10.7.20]. birks, m., hartin, p., woods, c., emmanuel, e. and hitchins, m. (2016) ‘students' perceptions of the use of e-portfolios in nursing and midwifery education’. nurse education in practice, 18, pp. 46-51. blin f., munro, m. (2008) ‘why hasn’t technology disrupted academics’ teaching practices? understanding resistance to change through the lens of activity theory.’ computers & education volume 50 (2), pp. 475-490. https://www.aacu.org/eportfolios davies are vles worthwhile? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 18: october 2020 7 boulton, c.a., kent, c. and williams, h.t.p. (2018) ‘virtual learning environment engagement and learning outcomes at a ‘bricks-and-mortar’ university’. computers & education 126, pp. 129-142. comas-quinn, a., de los arcos, b. and mardomingo, r. (2012) ‘virtual learning environments (vles) for distance language learning: shifting tutor roles in a contested space for interaction.’ computer assisted language learning, 25(2), pp. 129-143. davies, c. and harries, l. (2016) ‘engagement of professional learners with the vle: a case study from social care’. wales journal of learning and teaching in higher education, 1 (1), 60-65 pp. [online] available at: https://www.uwtsd.ac.uk/media/uwtsd-website/contentassets/documents/enhancement-unit/wales-journal/60-65-davies-and-harris.pdf (accessed 4.4.20) dommett, e.j., gardner, b. and van tilburg, w. (2019) ‘staff and student views of lecture capture: a qualitative study’. international journal of educational technology in higher education, 16 [online]. available at: https://educationaltechnologyjournal.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s41239019-0153-2 [accessed 22.3.20]. dron, j. and anderson, t. (2016) ‘the future of e-learning’, pp.1-23, in haythornthwaite, c., andrews, r., fransman, j. and meyers, e.m. (eds). sage handbook of elearning research, 2nd edn. london: sage. educause (2015) ‘7 things you should know about ngdle’. educause learning initiative [online]. available at: https://library.educause.edu//media/files/library/2015/12/eli7127-pdf.pdf [accessed 10.7.20]. educause (2020) 2020 educause horizon report, teaching and learning edition. [online] available at: https://library.educause.edu/https://www.uwtsd.ac.uk/media/uwtsd-website/content-assets/documents/enhancement-unit/wales-journal/60-65-davies-and-harris.pdf https://www.uwtsd.ac.uk/media/uwtsd-website/content-assets/documents/enhancement-unit/wales-journal/60-65-davies-and-harris.pdf https://educationaltechnologyjournal.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s41239-019-0153-2 https://educationaltechnologyjournal.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s41239-019-0153-2 https://library.educause.edu/-/media/files/library/2015/12/eli7127-pdf.pdf https://library.educause.edu/-/media/files/library/2015/12/eli7127-pdf.pdf https://library.educause.edu/-/media/files/library/2020/3/2020_horizon_report_pdf.pdf?la=en&hash=08a92c17998e8113bcb15dca7ba1f467f303ba80 davies are vles worthwhile? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 18: october 2020 8 /media/files/library/2020/3/2020_horizon_report_pdf.pdf?la=en&hash=08a92c1799 8e8113bcb15dca7ba1f467f303ba80 [accessed 10.7.20]. edwards, m.r. and clinton, m.e. (2019) ‘a study exploring the impact of lecture capture availability and lecture capture usage on student attendance and attainment’, higher education, 77(3), pp. 403–421. farrell, o. (2018) ‘failure to launch: the unfulfilled promise of e-portfolios in irish higher education: an opinion piece.’ dbs business review, 2, pp. 154–163. farrelly, t., raftery, d. and harding, n. (2018) ‘exploring lecturer engagement with the vle: findings from a multi college staff survey.’ irish journal of technology enhanced learning, 3(2), pp. 11-23. goggins, s. and xing, w. (2016) ‘building models explaining student participation behaviour in asynchronous online discussion’. computers and education, 94, pp. 241-251. hampel, r. and pleines, c. (2013) ‘fostering student interaction and engagement in a virtual learning environment: an investigation into activity design and implementation’. calico journal, 30(3), pp. 342. hew, t. and syed abdul kadir, s. (2016), ‘predicting instructional effectiveness of cloudbased virtual learning environment’. industrial management & data systems, 116 (8), pp. 1557-1584. ikonne, u., campbell, a.m., whelihan, k.e., bay, r.c. and lewis, j.h. (2018) ‘exodus from the classroom: student perceptions, lecture capture technology, and the inception of on-demand preclinical medical education’. the journal of the american osteopathic association, 118(12), pp. 813-823. kahn, s. (2014) ‘e-portfolios: a look at where we’ve been, where we are now, and where https://library.educause.edu/-/media/files/library/2020/3/2020_horizon_report_pdf.pdf?la=en&hash=08a92c17998e8113bcb15dca7ba1f467f303ba80 https://library.educause.edu/-/media/files/library/2020/3/2020_horizon_report_pdf.pdf?la=en&hash=08a92c17998e8113bcb15dca7ba1f467f303ba80 davies are vles worthwhile? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 18: october 2020 9 we’re going.’ peer review washington, 16(1), pp. 1-5. konrad, j. (2003) ‘review of educational research on virtual learning environments [vle] implications for the improvement of teaching and learning and access to formal learning in europe.’ proc european conference on educational research, university of hamburg, 17-20 september 2003 [online]. available at: http://www.leeds.ac.uk/educol/documents/00003192.htm [accessed 20.3.20] laurillard, d. (2010) ‘effective use of technology in teaching and learning in higher education’, pp. 419-426, in baker, e., peterson, p. and mcgaw, b. (eds.), international encyclopedia of education 4, oxford: elsevier. markland, m. (2003) ‘embedding online information resources in virtual learning environments: some implications for lecturers and librarians of the move towards delivering teaching in the online environment’. information research, 8(4) [online]. available at: http://informationr.net/ir/8-4/paper158#wyn01 [accessed 20.3.20]. o’callaghan, f.v., neumann, d.l., jones, l. and creed, p.a. (2017) ‘the use of lecture recordings in higher education: a review of institutional, student, and lecturer issues.’ education and information technologies, 22, pp. 399–415. orr, d., weller, m. and farrow, r. (2018) models for online, open, flexible and technology enhanced higher education across the globe – a comparative analysis. international council for distance education [online]. available at: http://oro.open.ac.uk/55299/ [accessed 19.3.20]. rienties, b. and toetenel, l. (2016) ‘the impact of learning design on student behaviour, satisfaction and performance: a cross-institutional comparison across 151 modules.’ computers in human behavior, 60, pp 333-41. roberts, p., maor, d. and herrington, j. (2016) ‘eportfolio-based learning environments.’ journal of educational technology and society, 19(4), pp. 22-33. http://www.leeds.ac.uk/educol/documents/00003192.htm http://informationr.net/ir/8-4/paper158#wyn01 http://oro.open.ac.uk/55299/ davies are vles worthwhile? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 18: october 2020 10 salmon, g. (2002) e-tivities: the key to active online learning. london: routledge. salmon, g. and asgari, t. (2019) ‘higher education – the last bastion? distance and elearning policy and development – the role of e-learning and distance education in the modernisation process of economies, societies and education systems.’ european journal of open, distance and e-learning, 22(1) [online]. available at : https://www.eurodl.org/?p=current&sp=brief&article=792 [accessed 18.3.20]. schnackenberg, h.l. and vega, e.s. (2016) ‘throwback technologies: interactive whiteboards in schools’, in schnackenberg, h.l. and burnell, b. (eds.) best practices for education professionals, volume two. new york: apple academic press. shelton, c. (2014). ‘“virtually mandatory”: a survey of how discipline and institutional commitment shape university lecturers’ perceptions of technology’. british journal of educational technology, 45(4), pp. 748-759. stiles, m. (2007) ‘death of the vle?: a challenge to a new orthodoxy.’ serials, 20(1), pp.31–36 [online] available at: https://serials.uksg.org/articles/abstract/10.1629/20031/ [accessed 10.8.20]. stoller, e. (2016) ‘the future of uk higher education: why the student experience matters more than ever’. inside higher ed [online] available at: https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/student-affairs-and-technology/future-ukhigher-education [accessed 10.7.20]. toole, t., khetaguri, t. and zangaladze, m. (2015) ‘an evaluation of e-learning in eastern and western europe’. journal of educational innovation, partnership and change, 1 (1) [online] available at: https://www.journals.studentengagement.org.uk/index.php/studentchangeagents/art icle/view/150 [accessed 25.9.20]. https://www.eurodl.org/?p=current&sp=brief&article=792 https://serials.uksg.org/articles/abstract/10.1629/20031/ https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/student-affairs-and-technology/future-uk-higher-education https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/student-affairs-and-technology/future-uk-higher-education davies are vles worthwhile? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 18: october 2020 11 tour, e. (2017) ‘teachers’ personal learning networks (plns): exploring the nature of selfinitiated professional learning online.’ literacy, 51(1), pp. 11–18. weller, m. (2006) ‘vle 2.0 and future directions in learning environments’. proceedings of the first international lams conference 2006: designing the future of learning [online] available at: http://lams2006.lamsfoundation.org/pdfs/weller_lams06.pdf [accessed 6.3.20]. author biography dr christine davies is a senior lecturer at the wales academy for professional practice and applied research at uwtsd, and programme director for the doctorate in professional practice programme. in the past, she has held professional roles in secondary schools, further education and other universities, and has significant experience of teacher training and staff development. her early career involved biomedical research, and her phd degree is in the field of respiratory physiology. current research interests include technology in learning and teaching, and best practice in doctoral teaching and supervision. http://lams2006.lamsfoundation.org/pdfs/weller_lams06.pdf are vles still worthwhile? abstract keywords: virtual learning environments; vle; vle engagement; institutional technology; ngdle. introduction vles and lecturers vles and learners looking to the future references author biography dr christine davies is a senior lecturer at the wales academy for professional practice and applied research at uwtsd, and programme director for the doctorate in professional practice programme. in the past, she has held professional roles in seconda... journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 16: december 2019 the ldhen hive mind: learning development in uk higher education as a professional culture katharine stapleford university of leeds, uk abstract the learning developer in higher education (he) works with students to help them make sense of the language and practices of he. it is a relatively new role and has grown in response to the widening participation agenda which has seen an increase in entry of 'non-traditional' students into he. learning developers' job descriptions, employment contracts and institutional location vary between institutions and the role is often misunderstood across academia. there has long been discussion and debate within the learning development community regarding the professionalisation of the role and what this might look like. the literature in this area is sparse and to date consists of small-scale surveys of learning development practitioners with inconclusive findings. this study aims to contribute to our understanding of learning developer professional identity by analysing six months of discourse from the learning development in higher education network (ldhen) listserv. this is explored through the lens of social identity theory and findings suggest that the learning development community functions as a professional culture based on collegiality, trust, shared values and a protected collective knowledge base. this attitudinal perspective of professional identity as professional culture is proposed as a more productive approach to the debate than more traditional interpretations of professionalism based on qualifications and formal training. key words: learning development; professional identity; distributed communities of practice; professional culture; social identity. introduction stapleford the ldhen hive mind: learning development in uk higher education as a professional culture journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 2 i am a learning developer in a uk he institution. the role of the learning developer in uk he is ‘to work with students to help them make sense of the seemingly mysterious and alienating practices of academia’ (hilsdon, 2011, p. 16), in other words, to improve the student learning experience. however, when i am asked about my work, my response rarely does justice to this complex and nuanced role; often i resort to reductive and simplistic descriptions such as ‘i teach study skills’ or ‘i help students write essays and reference correctly', usually with a sense of guilt and letting the side down. this paper is the result of my drive to better understand the reasons behind this lack of professional recognition and an attempt to gain a sense of ownership and clarity around the learning development professional identity. learning development in he learning development (ld) arose largely in response to the widening participation agenda in uk he during the late 1990s, particularly in the wake of the dearing report (1997) recommendations to facilitate an increase in participation in he. the resultant drive to increase access for lower socio-economic groups (greenbank, 2006) meant that there was a need for services to meet the needs of ‘non-traditional’ students who lacked the cultural capital and habitus (bourdieu and passeron, 1990) of the traditional more affluent he entrant with an academic background. ld provided a response to this need and thus is grounded in a social emancipatory philosophy (sinfield et al., 2011). this ethos constitutes a fundamental element of ld identity, it is what distinguishes the practice from ‘study skills’ and ‘learning support’, it is about creating a positive student experience rather than a deficit approach to ‘fixing’ the student. in this way, it plays a key role in creating a sense of belonging for students highlighted in the what works programme (thomas, 2002). however, ld practitioners and the students they work with ‘[occupy] a dichotomous position: needed in he to meet government targets – but still not wanted by “the academy”’ (sinfield et al., 2011, p. 54). the professional standing of learning developers is a key concern within the community, as ld contracts, terms and conditions and physical presence vary widely among institutions (murray and glass, 2011). this inconsistency results in a lack of understanding of ld as a profession (silvey et al., 2018, hilsdon, 2011) and arguably leads to vulnerability, isolation and frustration among ld practitioners. furthermore, there is little in stapleford the ldhen hive mind: learning development in uk higher education as a professional culture journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 3 the way of professional training, ld qualifications or clear career progression (webster, 2017). learning developers are not alone in this phenomenon; academic developers, librarians and administrator/managers often work in hybrid professional/academic or ‘third spaces’ (whitchurch, 2008) which ‘lack a unifying professional identity’ (handal, 2008, p. 55). since its inception, there has been uncertainty as to whether ld is a community or a profession (murray and glass, 2011). while it is a ‘paid occupation’, thereby fitting the simple definition of profession, there is no ‘prolonged training and a formal qualification’ as per the extended definition in the oxford dictionary of english (2010, profession entry). there is little doubt that most learning developers are professional in that they are educated beyond degree level and generally enter ld from other careers (murray and glass, 2011, pp. 36-37). however, according to external definitions, they are professional ‘other’, not professional learning developers. despite, or perhaps because of this, the ld community is vibrant, with a strong sense of identity, professionalism, mutual support and interaction, thereby suggesting that it is not necessary to be deemed a profession by external standards, in order to have a strong professional identity. indeed, johnson (2018, p. 18) concludes that internal affirmation of ld values is needed to ‘permeate into the wider academic community’, indicating that a reconceptualisation is needed. the learning development in higher education network the ld community is represented by the association for learning development in higher education (aldinhe). aldinhe supports learning developers by facilitating discussion and debate, sharing practice and promoting ld values, namely:  working alongside students to make sense of and get the most out of he learning  making he inclusive through emancipatory practice, partnership working and collaboration  adopting and sharing effective learning development practice with (and external to) our own institutions  critical self-reflection, on-going learning and a commitment to professional development  commitment to a scholarly approach and research related to learning development. (association for learning development in higher education, n.d.) stapleford the ldhen hive mind: learning development in uk higher education as a professional culture journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 4 this is achieved largely through the learning development in higher education network jiscmail list or listserv (henceforth ldhen), an active and well-used network. it was set up in 2003 by a small group of like-minded learning developers as a support network for practitioners working in this new and often isolated role (hilsdon, 2011). since then it has grown significantly and now has 1335 subscribers. the ldhen functions as a distributed community of practice. based on lave and wenger’s (1991) communities of practice theory, the notion of distributed communities of practice (dcop) takes account of the dispersed nature of many professional communities which are sustained through computer technology (sato et al., 2008). dcop differ from virtual learning communities in that they are less formal, voluntary, self-starting, needsdriven and tend to have a stronger sense of identity (schwier and daniel, 2008). while there exists a significant body of literature investigating virtual and online learning communities in education, research into dcop, particularly within he, is less plentiful. it is the aim of this paper to contribute to our understanding of ld professional knowledge, practices and values through an investigation of the ldhen dcop. by illuminating how professional identity is reified in the ldhen, this study offers insights into the professional identity of the traditionally undervalued and unrecognised ‘academic-professional hybrid role’ (the guardian, 2017). gaining a deeper theoretically informed understanding of the relationship between the ldhen dcop and the professional identity of its members will illuminate what it means to be a professional learning developer and help practitioners articulate and advance their professional standing within the wider he community. this in turn can encourage similar ‘new professions’ to gain support, confidence, and direction from such communities by engaging more meaningfully in the development of their professional identity. literature and theoretical framework distributed communities of practice the majority of dcop featuring in the literature concern formally established communities with a specific educational goal, usually professional development, and with an evaluative focus to the research (goodyear and steeples, 1998; hew and hara, 2008; klecka et al., stapleford the ldhen hive mind: learning development in uk higher education as a professional culture journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 5 2004; steeples and goodyear, 1999). however, some studies explore the more commercial arena (hildreth et al., 2000) or the potential of dcop as emancipatory tools for social change (quintana and morales, 2015). a focus on the practical aspects of providing a platform for communication between geographically dispersed colleagues features in several studies (beaumont et al., 2009; dimitrova et al., 2015) although these studies also found significant affective and social impacts. this affective factor often provides the impetus for the establishment of dcop, for example support networks for caregivers (lucas, 2011) and parents of children with autism (lazaro et al., 2014). information, resource and knowledge sharing (kurtz-rossi et al., 2017) and knowledge construction, particularly reifying tacit knowledge (goodyear and steeples, 1998; hildreth et al., 2000), is a key theme in the literature, with a particular emphasis on the need for trust as a precursor to collaborative knowledge building (beaumont et al., 2009; daniel et al., 2003). the contexts for much of the empirical research in this area are medical and healthcare settings. although a number of studies come from the field of education, particularly teacher professional development (klecka et al., 2004, neukrug et al., 2010, parker and bowell, 1998, pennington and graham, 2002, pennington et al., 2004, spitzer and wedding, 1995), research into dcop for staff in he is scarce. whether explicitly stated, for example daniel et al.’s (2003) social capital and quintana and morales’ (2015) distributed leadership, or implicit in the nature of the research, there is a tendency towards socio-cultural approaches in the literature. this is to be expected considering the social nature of communities of practice. however, there is a lack of rigorous theoretical underpinnings to this particular body of literature generally and he, in particular, remains under-represented. therefore, this study aims to offer a theoretically informed analysis of the ldhen dcop in order to extend our understanding of this context. professional identity there is no shortage of literature in the area of professional identity, particularly teacher professional identity, and the notion of professionalism remains a popular construct within the field of education, it seems, in response to the recent political and economic changes in the field. however, a lack of unity and agreement regarding understandings, definitions and applications of professional identity persists (beauchamp and thomas, 2009). stapleford the ldhen hive mind: learning development in uk higher education as a professional culture journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 6 given the lack of agreement of the meaning of the term and the many and varied interpretations of ‘profession’, evetts (2003, p. 398) suggests a refocussing from a preoccupation with definitions of profession, to an examination of the ‘appeal of the concepts of ‘profession’ and particularly of ‘professionalism’’. she concludes that professionalism’s appeal lies in the sense of practitioner agency in terms of knowledge and collegiality (p. 407), while the reality for many professionals is one of economic constraints and accountability. indeed, along with the marketisation of education, the idea of professional and professionalism has undergone a shift away from traditional notions of practitioner autonomy, control and public status to accountability to external agencies and quality of practice (evetts, 2003; evans, 2008). in contrast, practitioners retain some control argues helsby, (1995, p. 320 as cited in evans, 2008, p. 23) who makes the point that professionalism is a social construct and as such, practitioners can shape it from within. similarly, evans (2008) makes a case for the notion of professional culture, which emphasises the attitudinal and collective nature of professionalism, or ‘professionality’, which she defines as ‘an ideologically-, attitudinally-, intellectuallyand epistemologicallybased stance on the part of an individual, in relation to the practice of the profession to which s/he belongs, and which influence her/his professional practice’ (evans, 2002b, pp. 6-7, as cited in evans, 2008, p. 26). this definition aligns with hoyle’s (1975) model of ‘extended’ professionality, which moves beyond everyday practice to the underlying mindset (cited in evans, 2008). this perspective encapsulates well, the professionality of the learning developer whose practice, as we have seen, is very much values-based ideologically-oriented. building on this idea of professional culture and extended professionality, johnson (2018, p. 18) highlights the importance of ‘growing the collective voice’ from within the ld community in order to broaden recognition and understanding of ld values across academia rather than attempting to conform to external ideas of professionalism. it is the intention of this study to examine the ‘collective voice’ of the ld community, that is, the ldhen, in order to augment the body of knowledge on ld professional identity and offer a reconceptualisation from a professional culture perspective. stapleford the ldhen hive mind: learning development in uk higher education as a professional culture journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 7 social identity theory in the context of professional identity, barbour and lammers (2015) differentiate between belonging as simple membership and attachment as a more emotional connection. with regard to ldhen, we can take belonging as a given as all subscribers are by definition members, therefore i adopt a broader definition of belonging and attachment in terms of a sense of belonging which derives from/leads to the emotional attachment. this reflects tajfel’s (1982, p. 2) claim that group identification requires cognitive and evaluative components and often an emotional investment in these. social identity, according to tajfel, is ‘the individual’s knowledge that he [sic] belongs to certain social groups together with some emotional and value significance to him [sic] of the group membership’ (tajfel, 1972, p. 31 as cited in turner, 1982, p. 18). it is based on the notion of intraand intergroup attitudes and behaviours which are primarily determined by self-definition (tajfel, 1974, p. 67), thus it aligns well to the attitudinal and collective interpretation of professionality discussed in the previous section. although much of tajfel’s work on social identity is concerned with prejudice and conflict in terms of national and ethnic identity (spears, 2011), the premise upon which the construction of social identity is built is a relevant one for investigations of professional culture. a profession is necessarily a group, and we often define ourselves by our employment, which, in turn plays a significant role in determining our socio-economic status. moreover, turner’s (1982, p. 15) broader definition: ‘a social group can be defined as two or more individuals who share a common social identification of themselves or… perceive themselves to be members of the same social category’ is particularly appropriate for the current investigation as is emphasises personal agency rather than relying on external labels. not everybody who subscribes to and participates in ldhen has a learning development job title, but they come together under the auspices of ldhen and share the 'common social identification of' learning developer, that is, they all must ‘perceive themselves to be’ learning developers in some sense at the time of participating. this temporary state, reflects tajfel’s (1974) point that identity is a dynamic rather than a static state of being as with the concept of professionalism (evans, 2008). tajfel presents a sequence of four concepts to explain social identity: ‘social categorization, social identity, social comparison and psychological distinctiveness’ (1974, p. 69). social categorisation denotes the classification of the social world; social identity stapleford the ldhen hive mind: learning development in uk higher education as a professional culture journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 8 places the individual into one of these categories; social comparison refers to the individual’s sense of identity in relation to other categories of which the individual is not a member, and psychological distinctiveness promotes the individual’s positive self-image resulting from the ‘positively valued distinctiveness from other groups’ (cairns, 1982, p. 285). underpinning this sequence are the notions of secure and insecure social identity and superior and inferior groups. individuals desire a positive social identity, which psychological distinctiveness provides, however, if one’s group is socially inferior or devalued, then their positive social identity is threatened or insecure (spears, 2011, p. 207). in this situation, the inferior group and the individual make recourse to a range of strategies to reclaim the positive social identity, one such strategy being ‘social creativity’ by which the inferior traits are reframed in a more positive light and embrace the inferior traits as drivers to enact social change (tajfel, 1974). in this study, i investigate the professional culture of learning developers with reference to these social identity processes and concepts in order to provide insights into the nature of ld identity and the potential for social change. the research questions guiding this study are: 1. how is the professional culture of learning developers reified through the ldhen listserv? 2. what are the implications for the learning development community? methodology data collection the data consists of the text-based interactions occurring on the ldhen discussion list during a six-month period from september 2017 – february 2018. these are publicly available from the jiscmail listserv archives. for each month in the archives i extracted the table of contents in order to identify discussion threads which met two criteria: firstly, the subject indicated a discussion topic rather than a simple announcement or administrative/technical query; secondly, the thread consisted of at least three messages, in order to constitute a discussion or extended interaction. this selection resulted in 35 separate discussion threads each comprising between three and 19 messages. stapleford the ldhen hive mind: learning development in uk higher education as a professional culture journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 9 analysis as noted in the introduction, i am a learning developer and a member of the ldhen dcop; i have insider knowledge of the community, its members, its priorities and agendas. as such, i am a ‘complete member researcher’ (adler & adler, 1987 as cited in dwyer and buckle, 2009, p. 55). while i acknowledge that this insider status has the potential to influence interpretation and analysis of results (dwyer and buckle, 2009, p. 58), more importantly it can provide a deeper understanding from which to explicate the findings. the unit of analysis was a complete thought or idea expressed, rather than the whole post or message. as the results and discussion section will show, many posts began by responding to a request for information and then proceeded to offer reflections, opinions, experiences and more tangential thoughts. i used content analysis initially to begin to organise and draw meaning from the data using a priori descriptive categories comprising the aldinhe values; the uk professional standards framework and tajfel’s (1974) social identity concepts to code the data. these were then subsumed into broader conceptual themes. i used discourse analysis to further analyse and interpret the data within each theme. given the focus of this study on identity as experienced and expressed by the participants of the ldhen listserv, and ‘discourse is interactive identity-based communication’ (gee, 2014, p. 24), discourse analysis offers an appropriate methodological approach. gee distinguishes between ‘d/discourse’ and ‘d/discourse’ with the latter encompassing context, associations, insider knowledge and socio-political, historical undertones. given that these factors comprise important elements of ld professional identity as well as my positioning as insider researcher, d/discourse was my particular analytic lens. ethics ethical approval was given by the university where i am a doctoral student. additionally, i sought permission from the ldhen list owners, who responded that the archives are public and searchable so no consent was required from the list members. i also consulted the jiscmail terms and conditions of service to ensure there were no clauses preventing the use of content for research purposes. to provide anonymity, the participants are labelled ld 1, ld 2, etc. however these are not assigned to particular participants, rather they simply denote different contributors. stapleford the ldhen hive mind: learning development in uk higher education as a professional culture journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 10 results and discussion the coding of the message content revealed three prominent themes: 1. professional values and beliefs 2. belonging and attachment 3. professional knowledge and practices. this section will present these themes illustrated by the data and interpret the discourse through a social identity lens. the excerpts from the discussions are rendered here verbatim and i have not corrected any language errors or typos. professional values and beliefs the role and positioning of the learning developer values and beliefs regarding the role and positioning of ld are expressed in conversations explicitly on this topic such as requests for literature addressing collaborative working and leadership and discussions on the hybrid nature of the role. these discussions often lead to critically reflective responses regarding recognition and professional standing as well as references to external scholarly sources, which are critically evaluated with reference to personal career experiences, such as the following: ld 1: celia whitchurch’s work is certainly very interesting – though it explicitly excludes library and information professionals. i have been a member of a course team, have published, am a pfhea and am still largely professionally defined in the uk higher education sector by what i am not! ld 2: i feel this. i have just moved to a pss role and i can’t see where the career progression is for me. it’s a bit of a minefield. i can also see these hybrid roles increasing as the work we do diversifies. i certainly know of colleagues (the library for instance) who have great publication records and also do some teaching but they are not on similar academic pay grades. stapleford the ldhen hive mind: learning development in uk higher education as a professional culture journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 11 when viewed in the context of the long-term uncertainty around the ld role, these comments reflect the social categorisation and social identity concepts. firstly, while ld 1 is not by definition a learning developer, she is a library and information professional, her active participation in the ldhen list implies a level of self-determination as a learning developer, and that the group is meaningful to ld 1 and contributes to her self-image. her final remark, suggests a degree of resentment or hostility towards the uk he sector outgroup thus strengthening the ld in-group affiliation and providing a positive social identity through psychological distinctiveness. similarly, ld 2 highlights the group value of the hybrid colleagues, against the implied system who do not recognise the value of such roles in terms of salary, despite their perceived worth resulting from publication records. some understanding of the current policy background in uk he with regard to the focus on publishing and the funding attached to the research excellence framework can shed further light on these sentiments. the undervalued learning developer, while contributing to this cause, is still seen as lesser than ‘academic’ counterparts. these examples illustrate social creativity in that the inferior traits are represented in a more positive light: the system, or out-group, while holding the power, is presented negatively, while the undervalued learning developer adopts a higher moral position. further debate arising from values and beliefs regarding the role of the learning developer, are seen in discussions of the use of external (both to ldhen and academia generally) services, for example in response to an enquiry about recommending proof readers to students. first, the initial enquiry is tentative and adopts a seeking permission tone after justifying and explaining their rationale in some detail: it seems like there are cases – after other strategies have been tried – when it is appropriate to suggest that a student uses the services of a commercial proofreader to highlight ‘surface’ errors in their work, e.g. spelling, grammar, ambiguous sentences. of course, there are boundaries: the student must seek the tutor/supervisor’s permission; the proofreader must annotate the text in such a way that the student can decide whether or not to accept each suggested change; no changes must be made to the meaning, ideas or argument, and so on. stapleford the ldhen hive mind: learning development in uk higher education as a professional culture journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 12 again, some insider knowledge of the ld background and its aversion to the deficit model of ‘fixing’ students’ mistakes, is important to acknowledge here. the caveats, qualifications and careful presentation of the question is a clear indication of the enquirer’s awareness of this sensitive issue. responses equally recognise the deeper philosophies in question: ld 1: so my answer is no. after all, as learner developers, what are we trying to develop? ld 2: i think yes […] also, isn’t it our job as learning developers to support learning rather than communication? both responses refer to the role or ‘job’ of ld which is differently interpreted at a fundamental level. this might beg the question of whether there is agreement as to the professional identity of ld or whether this is an indication of learning developers as professionals, with strong attachment to (their interpretation of) the professional values. it is important to note here, that this is the only example of a direct disagreement between members in the six months of discussions analysed and, on the whole, the community displays high levels of agreement and in-group affiliation. nonetheless, it is perhaps an indication of the ‘self-definition’ tajfel notes is a necessary precursor to in-group out-group attitudes and behaviours. social emancipatory function much more prevalent are instances of shared professional values and beliefs in response to external artefacts, often academic journal articles or newspaper articles, which are posted for the purpose of garnering professional responses thus: ld 1: i think we need to understand other cultures ways of knowing and understanding in order to scaffold students in the acculturation process rather than seeing them as deficit. ld 2: hi [name] – couldn’t agree more on both points as to homogenisation and limited notions of criticality (and decolonisation of such?) ld 3: yes [name], [name] – huge agreement from me too: the political, social and ideological contexts of ‘western’ ‘critical’ ‘thinking’ need some serious interrogation! ld 4: to me, one very interesting aspect of this is how come, despite our very ‘western’ trumpeting of inclusive education, the welcoming of diversity, and a claimed ‘criticality’ that apparently questions all claims for knowledge and truth, we stapleford the ldhen hive mind: learning development in uk higher education as a professional culture journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 13 are still (i’m thinking of education generally, not individual practitioners!) taking profoundly deficit – and othering – views of learners we deem to be ‘different’…. these more cohesive perspectives move beyond cognitive principles to more personal shared social and political values. once more, insider knowledge confirms that sentiments are shared by many learning developers and mediate the social emancipatory underpinnings of the aldinhe professional values generally and value 3 specifically: ‘making he inclusive through emancipatory practice, partnership working and collaboration.’ (association for learning development in higher education, 2018). this provides grounding for in-group hostility towards colonial and western hegemonic deficit views of the non-traditional student, which the ld community would appear to distance itself from. furthermore, the apparent contradiction pointed out by ld 4 of the superficial inclusiveness of he which is not borne out in practice is reminiscent of the ‘dichotomous position’ (sinfield et al., 2011) of ld pointed out in the introduction to this paper. belonging and attachment individuals’ sense of belonging is a strong theme running through all of the discussion threads. this is often signified in the salutations which have an informal tone and explicitly state the professional yet social relations felt by members: ld 1: dear ld colleagues and friends ld 2: good afternoon fellow ld-ers! ld 3: dear folks, several posts also make use of emoticons and abbreviations which has the effect of signalling social presence and a sense of familiarity. social presence is also seen through the sharing of personal information, asides and anecdotes to illustrate points or extend others’ contributions with several posts beginning ‘i… was reminded of’. the following excerpt demonstrates a level of trust as well as familiarity with the community etiquette and norms by sharing this anecdote: ld 1: thanks for that i always regret not having taken a pic of an elderly couple seated opposite me on a train journey once. one was reading from a hard-copy paperback the other from a kindle kind of 'analogue meets digital.' 😊 stapleford the ldhen hive mind: learning development in uk higher education as a professional culture journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 14 although it is related to a discussion thread on ebooks v. print, the anecdote is an aside and arguably serves a purely social purpose in that it does not extend the knowledge construction occurring earlier in the thread. it reflects a face-to-face ‘water cooler moment’ which are less common in virtual communities. this accords with earlier studies highlighting the affective, social aspects of dcop and the importance of trust as a basis from which to share and construct knowledge. the perception of intensity of attachment (barbour and lammers, 2015) is also seen through the use of humour which suggests members feel a level of comfort and familiarity to share jokes and trivia. these data reflect the emotional significance of group membership to the individual and suggest an affective basis for group belongingness (spears, 2011). professional knowledge and practice the ‘common social identification’ (turner, 1982, p. 15) is writ large in openers such as: ld 1: hi ldhen hive mind ld 2: i would like to pick the collective ld brain … such phrases are frequently used when introducing requests and point to ld knowledge as distributed and common property of the community. the ‘collective’ is the source of knowledge rather than the individual members and the ldhen mediates this communal intelligence. this is a particularly powerful community principle; there is a strong sense of ownership of this collective cognition, and it is protected and defended against external services, which are not privy to it and are thus viewed as imposters encroaching on the ld role. this idea of control suggests a return to the ‘old-school’ definitions of professionalism (evans, 2008). the extracts below are from discussions on so-called ‘essay mills’ and online skills development services: ld 1: i found the email quite amusing as learning development is perhaps the polar opposite of their whole business model so they had no chance of success in emailing me. it was also so poorly formatted and structured, i would question the quality of any work they would produce. i leave this here for your amusement: [+link] ld 2: i can't decide if the author is too naive to be a good academic, or criminally self-deceiving, or just mendacious. the 'i was only writing model essays, it's not up to me what students do with them' defence is pathetic. stapleford the ldhen hive mind: learning development in uk higher education as a professional culture journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 15 here is clear evidence of tajfel’s social comparison and psychological distinctiveness principles (1974). there is a desire to differentiate the ld group from the commercial businesses, describing them as ‘the polar opposite’ refers back to the social justice roots of ld as opposed to the capitalist goals of neoliberal corporates. the in-group disdain is unambiguous and forthright at what it perceives as the inferior ability and insidious motivations of the out-group thereby strengthening the in-group superiority and offering, for a time, a sense of secure social identity. so the changing, dynamic nature of social identity is played out in such conversations where the previously marginal social group adopts the superior position. a significant proportion of interaction concerns sharing practice, both in teaching and administrative tasks. there is an implied assumption regarding the credibility, of the community’s professional knowledge in posts starting, ‘how do others approach this?’ or ‘seeking advice…’ or ‘any recommendations…?’ ‘has anyone explored…’, ‘i would be grateful for any information…’. the fact that such requests receive substantial replies often with extensive detailed advice, suggestions and offers of resources and further assistance, indicates a desire to share knowledge. this is taken further to knowledge construction, when the initial enquirer collates and summarises the contributions and represents this back to the community. in fact, there is often an expectation that such knowledge will be shared suggesting the community feels it has an entitlement to this knowledge and the enquirer is obligated to share: ld 1: if you are gathering more examples as people reply directly to you it would be great if you shared them back to the list? ld 2: any comments / suggestions etc. will be gratefully received and i will (off course) collate answers. this further corroborates the proprietary stance with regards to distributed or collective knowledge seen earlier. overall, the analysis of the ldhen discourse through the social identity lens reveals that the ld identity is grounded in the social emancipatory purpose of ld; it is what informs ld stapleford the ldhen hive mind: learning development in uk higher education as a professional culture journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 16 practice and provides a source of unity. this philosophy is how ld distinguishes itself from the business model of student support and justifies its guardianship of ld knowledge. conclusion this paper set out to contribute to our understanding of the professional identity of the learning developer by analysing the discourse of the ld dcop from a social identity perspective. the questions underpinning this study concerned the reification of professional identity through the ldhen listserv and the implications for learning developers regarding a reconceptualisation of their professional identity. the findings that i have presented and discussed suggest that the lived professional identity of the learning developer as seen through the ldhen interactions is a form of professional culture. the results suggest that ld culture comprises a powerful positive social identity based on collegiality, trust, shared values of social justice and a protected collective knowledge base. limitations and further research it is important to note that a mere six months of discourse data offered abundant rich data of which only a relatively small portion is presented in this study. ideally, in a longer project, 12 months of data representing a complete academic cycle would present a fuller picture. while the ldhen jiscmail list currently has 1335 subscribers, significantly fewer of these are active participants and as such this study cannot claim to be representative of all ld practitioners. however, it could be argued that ldhen constitutes the essence of the ld community considering its beginnings, as discussed in the introduction, it does offer a valid perspective on the public face of learning development in uk he and contributes to our understanding of the nature of ld identity and similar hybrid roles referred to in the introduction. a further point to note with regard to the discourse available for analysis, is the data collection process, which does not ensure a representative sample of the ld population. the more extrovert dominant members are perhaps overly represented within the ldhen dcop. therefore, it would be useful to extend this research by investigating other ld domains and a wider range of voices, for example the annual conference, regional stapleford the ldhen hive mind: learning development in uk higher education as a professional culture journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 17 symposia and shared online resources, to build a more comprehensive model of ld identity. the mediators of ld professional identity, including the jiscmail list itself, external resources, personal beliefs and institutional and political contexts, have been alluded to within this study, but word count restrictions prevented a fuller analysis of these. further research might therefore usefully investigate these mediators from a distributed cognition or cultural historical activity theory perspective. overall, this study has shown that ld professionality is reified through social identity principles of belonging, attachment, in-group affiliations as well as through distributed knowledge and a sense of guardianship of this knowledge. what is expressed through the email list is an embodiment of the social emancipatory principles on which ldhen was founded in the form of a professional culture. by reconceptualising their professional identity as a professional culture, learning developers have recourse to a potentially more powerful and appropriate source of unity than traditional notions of qualifications and formal training. moving forward, the ld community could further explore this notion of ld professional culture in a wider range of research contexts and theoretical frameworks. references association for learning development in higher education (n.d.) about. available at: http://www.aldinhe.ac.uk/about/ (accessed: 17 november 2018). barbour, j. b. and lammers, j. c. (2015) 'measuring professional identity: a review of the literature and a multilevel confirmatory factor analysis of professional identity constructs', journal of professions and organization, 2(1), pp. 38-60. beauchamp, c. and thomas, l. (2009) 'understanding teacher identity: an overview of issues in the literature and implications for teacher education', cambridge journal of education, 39(2), pp. 175-189. beaumont, r., stirling, j. and percy, a. (2009) 'tutors' forum: engaging distributed communities of practice', open learning, 24(2), pp. 141-154. http://www.aldinhe.ac.uk/about/ stapleford the ldhen hive mind: learning development in uk higher education as a professional culture journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 18 bourdieu, p. and passeron, j. c. (1990) reproduction in education, society and culture [electronic resource]: sage. available at: http://web.b.ebscohost.com.ezproxy.lancs.ac.uk/ehost/ebookviewer/ebook/bmxlymt fxzq3odgzx19btg2?sid=094a8a98-d2ea-465a-90ebdf7f105ff60b@sessionmgr101&vid=0&format=eb&rid=1. (accessed: 17 november 2018) cairns, e. (1982) 'intergroup conflict in northern ireland', in tajfel, h. (ed.) social identity and intergroup relations. cambridge: cambridge university press, pp. 277-297. daniel, b., schwier, r. a. and mccalla, g. (2003) 'social capital in virtual learning communities and distributed communities of practice', canadian journal of learning and technology, 29(3). dearing report (1997) higher education in the learning society main report: her majesty's stationery office. available at: http://www.educationengland.org.uk/documents/dearing1997/dearing1997.html. (accessed: 17 november 2018) dimitrova, d., mok, d. and wellman, b. (2015) 'changing ties in a far-flung, multidisciplinary research network: the case of grand', american behavioral scientist, 59(5), pp. 599-616. dwyer, s. c. and buckle, j. l. (2009) 'the space between: on being an insider-outsider in qualitative research', international journal of qualitative methods, 8(1), pp. 54-63. evans, l. (2008) 'professionalism, professionality and the development of education professionals', british journal of educational studies, 56(1), pp. 20-38. evetts, j. (2003) 'the sociological analysis of professionalism: occupational change in the modern world', international sociology, 18(2), pp. 395-415. http://web.b.ebscohost.com.ezproxy.lancs.ac.uk/ehost/ebookviewer/ebook/bmxlymtfxzq3odgzx19btg2?sid=094a8a98-d2ea-465a-90eb-df7f105ff60b@sessionmgr101&vid=0&format=eb&rid=1 http://web.b.ebscohost.com.ezproxy.lancs.ac.uk/ehost/ebookviewer/ebook/bmxlymtfxzq3odgzx19btg2?sid=094a8a98-d2ea-465a-90eb-df7f105ff60b@sessionmgr101&vid=0&format=eb&rid=1 http://web.b.ebscohost.com.ezproxy.lancs.ac.uk/ehost/ebookviewer/ebook/bmxlymtfxzq3odgzx19btg2?sid=094a8a98-d2ea-465a-90eb-df7f105ff60b@sessionmgr101&vid=0&format=eb&rid=1 http://www.educationengland.org.uk/documents/dearing1997/dearing1997.html stapleford the ldhen hive mind: learning development in uk higher education as a professional culture journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 19 gee, j. p. (2014) an introduction to discourse analysis: theory and method. available at: https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/lancaster/detail.action?docid=1613825. (accessed: 17 november 2018). goodyear, p., and steeples, c. (1998) ‘creating shareable representations of practice’, alt-j, 6(3), pp.16-23. greenbank, p. (2006) 'the evolution of government policy on widening participation', higher education quarterly, 60(2), pp. 141-166. handal, g. (2008) 'identities of academic developers: critical friends in the academy?', in barnett, r. and di napoli, r. (eds.) changing identities in higher education. abingdon: routledge, pp. 55-68. hew, k.f. and hara, n., (2008) ‘an online listserv for nurse practitioners: a viable venue for continuous nursing professional development?’ nurse education today, 28(4), pp.450-457. hildreth, p., kimble, c. and wright, p. (2000) 'communities of practice in the distributed international environment', journal of knowledge management, 4(1), pp. 27-38. hilsdon, j. (2011) 'what is learning development?', in hartley, p., hilsdon, j., keenan, c., sinfield, s. and verity, m. (eds.) learning development in higher education. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan, pp. 13-27. johnson, i. p. (2018) 'driving learning development professionalism forward from within', journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: aldinhe conference 2018, pp. 1-29. klecka, c. l., cheng, y.-m. and clift, r. t. (2004) 'exploring the potential of electronic mentoring', action in teacher education, 26(3), pp. 2-9. https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/lancaster/detail.action?docid=1613825 stapleford the ldhen hive mind: learning development in uk higher education as a professional culture journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 20 kurtz-rossi, s., rikard, r. v. and mckinney, j. (2017) 'learning from the field and its listserv: issues that concern health literacy practitioners', information services & use, 37, pp. 219-234. lave, j. and wenger, e. (1991) situated learning: legitimate peripheral participation. cambridge: cambridge university press. lazaro, j. a., bundy, m. b. and english, s. l. (2014) 'qualitative themes of a listserv for parents of children with autism', international journal on disability and human development, 13(1), pp. 71-78. lucas, m. r. (2011) 'a private caregiver listserv: maximum benefit for minimum cost', journal of psychosocial oncology, 29(2), pp. 168-174. murray, l. and glass, b. (2011) 'learning development in higher education: community of practice or profession?', in hartley, p., hilsdon, j., keenan, c., sinfield, s. and verity, m. (eds.) learning development in higher education. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan, pp. 28-39. neukrug, e., cicchetti, r., forman, j., kyser, n., mcbride, r. and wisinger, s. (2010) 'a content analysis of cesnet-l e-mail messages: directions for information delivery in higher education', research and integration of instructional technology, 22(1), pp. 60-72. parker, b. and bowell, b. (1998) 'exploiting computer-mediated communication to support in-service professional development: the senco experience', journal of information technology for teacher education, 7(2), pp. 229-246. pennington, t. and graham, g. (2002) 'exploring the influence of a physical education listserv on k-12 physical educators', journal of technology and teacher education, 10(3), pp. 383-405. pennington, t., wilkinson, c. and vance, j. (2004) 'physical educators online: what is on the minds of teachers in the trenches?', physical educator, 61(1), pp. 45-56. stapleford the ldhen hive mind: learning development in uk higher education as a professional culture journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 21 quintana, m. and morales, a. (2015) 'learning from listservs: collaboration, knowledge exchange, and the formation of distributed leadership for farmers' markets and the food movement', studies in the education of adults, 47(2), pp. 160-175. sato, g. y., barthes, j. p. and chen, k. (2008) 'following the evolution of distributed communities of practice'. proceedings of the seventh ieee international conference on cognitive informatics, icci 2008, stanford university, california, usa, 14-16 august. schwier, r. a. and daniel, b. (2008) 'implications of a virtual learning community model for designing distributed communities of practice in higher education', in communities of practice: creating learning environments for educators, volume 2. pp. 347-365 [online]. version. available at: https://ebookcentral-proquestcom.ezproxy.lancs.ac.uk/lib/lancaster/reader.action?ppg=381&docid=4955965&tm =1537005479739. (accessed: 17 november 2018) silvey, v., pejcinovic, l. and snowball, t. (2018) 'crossing divides: professional development for third space professionals', in bossu, c. and brown, n. (eds.) professional and support staff in higher education. singapore: springer singapore, pp. 1-16. sinfield, s., holley, d., burns, t., hoskins, k., o'neill, p. and harrington, k. (2011) 'raising the student voice: learning development as socio-political practice', in hartley, p., hilsdon, j., keenan, c., sinfield, s. and verity, m. (eds.) learning development in higher education. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan, pp. 53-63. spears, r. (2011) 'group identities: the social identity perspective', in schwartz, s.j., luyckx, k. and vignoles, v.l. (eds.) handbook of identity theory and research. new york: springer, pp. 201-224. spitzer, w. and wedding, k. (1995) 'labnet: an intentional electronic community for professional development', computers and education, 24(3), pp. 247-255. https://ebookcentral-proquest-com.ezproxy.lancs.ac.uk/lib/lancaster/reader.action?ppg=381&docid=4955965&tm=1537005479739 https://ebookcentral-proquest-com.ezproxy.lancs.ac.uk/lib/lancaster/reader.action?ppg=381&docid=4955965&tm=1537005479739 https://ebookcentral-proquest-com.ezproxy.lancs.ac.uk/lib/lancaster/reader.action?ppg=381&docid=4955965&tm=1537005479739 stapleford the ldhen hive mind: learning development in uk higher education as a professional culture journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 22 steeples, c., and goodyear, p. (1999) enabling professional learning in distributed communities of practice: descriptors for multimedia objects. journal of network and computer applications, 22(2), pp. 133-145. tajfel, h. (1974) 'social identity and intergroup behaviour', information (international social science council), 13(2), pp. 65-93. tajfel, h. (1982) ‘social psychology of intergroup relations’, annu. rev. psychol., 33, pp139. the guardian (2017) 'work in an academic-professional hybrid role? say goodbye to career progression', 29 september. available at: https://www.theguardian.com/higher-education-network/2017/sep/29/workacademic-professional-hybrid-role-say-goodbye-career-progression (accessed: 18 november 2018). thomas, l. (2002) building student engagement and belonging in higher education at a time of change: final report from the what works? student retention and success programme. available at: https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/system/files/what_works_final_report.pdf. (accessed: 17 november 2018) turner, j. c. (1982) 'towards a cognitive redefinition of the social group', in tajfel, h. (ed.) social identity and intergroup relations. cambridge: cambridge university press, pp. 15-40. webster, h. (2017) 'developing the developers', aldinhe 2017: the learning development conference, university of hull, hull 10-12 april. whitchurch, c. (2008) 'shifting identities and blurring boundaries: the emergence of third space professionals in uk higher education', higher education quarterly, 62(4), pp. 377-396. https://www.theguardian.com/higher-education-network/2017/sep/29/work-academic-professional-hybrid-role-say-goodbye-career-progression https://www.theguardian.com/higher-education-network/2017/sep/29/work-academic-professional-hybrid-role-say-goodbye-career-progression https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/system/files/what_works_final_report.pdf stapleford the ldhen hive mind: learning development in uk higher education as a professional culture journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 23 author details katharine stapleford is now a lecturer in digital education at the university of leeds. she was an online learning tutor at leeds beckett university when she carried out this project. she is currently completing a phd in e-research and technology enhanced learning at lancaster university for which this project constituted one of the module papers. the ldhen hive mind: learning development in uk higher education as a professional culture abstract introduction learning development in he the learning development in higher education network literature and theoretical framework distributed communities of practice professional identity social identity theory methodology data collection analysis ethics results and discussion professional values and beliefs conclusion limitations and further research references author details article journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 15: november 2019 ______________________________________________________________________ it’s learning development, jim – but not as we know it: academic literacies in third space sandra abegglen university of calgary, canada tom burns london metropolitan university, united kingdom sandra sinfield london metropolitan university, united kingdom abstract this paper maps our experience of conceptualising and teaching an interdisciplinary firstyear undergraduate ‘higher education orientation’ module against the seminal paper written by lea and street in 1998. we conclude by arguing for third spaces within the curriculum and for practices that re-imagine what education is and what the university could be. keywords: learning development; third space; academic literacies; widening participation; higher education. introduction in united kingdom higher education students are said to ‘read for their degrees’. this indicates that there is very little direct teaching, and if there is, it is often in a traditional lecture format, and that contact-time with academics, those members of the university who teach or research, is limited. instead the students are expected to be able to organise themselves for independent study and inter-dependent learning. our students are expected to understand the forms and processes of university teaching and learning; to know how we teach and assess, and what sorts of academic labour – what actual work – they have to undertake to get tasks and assessments successfully completed. they are abegglen, burns and sinfield it’s learning development, jim – but not as we know it: academic literacies in third space journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 2 also expected to have the motivation and self-discipline to engage actively and proactively with their learning; and to be able to step back from their learning experience to develop critical and analytical approaches, and to engage in reflective practice and writing, to improve on future performance and be employment ready. the reality is that many students are underprepared for the sort of university teaching and learning environment just described. increasingly they emerge from a transactional preuniversity system (at least in the united kingdom) where the emphasis is on ‘teaching to the test’ to ensure that students meet performance targets (jozefkowicz, 2006). hence, many students struggle to think and act autonomously and powerfully whilst ‘selfgoverning’ their studies. in our particular institution, london metropolitan university, this is complicated in that most of our students are classified as ‘non-traditional’ coming from a ‘widening participation’ background (london metropolitan university, 2018); they are often the first in their families to attend university and they work, often full time, alongside having caring responsibilities. this means, our students have little to no time for academic study outside of class time. further, it tends to mean that our students cannot – or at least do not – engage in the sort of coor extra-curricular activities that are said to be of most benefit to undergraduates: the clubs and societies that develop students, creating the networks and feeding the joy – that makes them ready for the world – and for work. there have been many attempts to develop practice models designed to help nontraditional students succeed at university study. a model particularly embraced in these lean and mean academic times (viz. giroux, 2014) is the delivery of extraor co-curricular ‘skills’ programmes targeted at just those students deemed to be ‘at risk’, with the aim to bring these students ‘up to speed’ and ‘fix’ their deficits. this ignores reiterated warnings not least from the learning development (ld) community that widening participation practices should not stigmatise either learning development per se nor widening participation students as ‘remedial’ (viz. aldinhe, 2019). it also sidesteps the proposition that what facilitates successful widening participation is not ‘bolt-on’ courses and workshops but the development of creative and inclusive curricula designed to help nontraditional students to succeed and to help all students maximise their potential (warren, 2002; wilcox et al., 2005). targeting resources only at those deemed ‘at risk’ leaves ld on the sidelines, shouting for equity in this new austerity-driven academia which is anchored almost exclusively in the rhetoric of a reductive employability agenda. abegglen, burns and sinfield it’s learning development, jim – but not as we know it: academic literacies in third space journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 3 the purpose of this paper is to map our experience of conceptualising and teaching an interdisciplinary first-year undergraduate ‘higher education orientation’ module against the seminal paper written by lea and street in 1998 that first described this sort of work as a learning taxonomy: skills; socialisation; literacies. we want to discuss our module, becoming an educationist, arguing that it is akin to that created by gutierrez (2008, p.148), ‘a collective third space, in which students begin to reconceive who they are and what they might be able to accomplish academically and beyond’; and with an emphasis on ‘redesigning what counts as teaching and learning of literacy’. we argue this is not ‘embedding’ ld within the curriculum. ours is a much more rhizomatic model: one that offers multiple, non-hierarchical entry and exit points (deleuze and guattari, 1987) and that embraces uncertainty (cormier, 2012). it is the collective ‘third space’ (bhabha, 2004) where by ‘being with’ you start to ‘become’ or, as soja (1996, pp.56-57) said, where everything comes together . . . subjectivity and objectivity, the abstract and the concrete, the real and the imagined, the knowable and the unimaginable, the repetitive and the differential, structure and agency, mind and body, consciousness and the unconscious, the disciplined and the transdisciplinary, everyday life and unending history. thus, our becoming module welcomed and honoured our diverse non-traditional students for the people they already were as they engaged in the process of becoming the academics that they wanted to become. we therefore argue for holistic and inclusive learning and teaching approaches that enable students to find their own voices in the exclusionary, competitive and often hostile higher education environment. becoming: case study module in 2013, we developed a first-year undergraduate module that embraced critical pedagogy (freire, 2007; giroux, 2007) as it introduced students to their disciplinary subject as well as to (a contested notion of) academia and academic practices. making use of the ludic and creative, we posed authentic challenges that invited students to actively learn and to interrogate the university as a (co-)constructed learning landscape as they consciously engaged with their own processes of learning. abegglen, burns and sinfield it’s learning development, jim – but not as we know it: academic literacies in third space journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 4 becoming was designed for the first-year undergraduate students of three different courses based in the school of social professions. the three courses were aimed at students interested in becoming educationists in the widest sense: teachers, youth workers, educational instructors, learning consultants, health promoters, community supporters etc. the student body of these courses traditionally consists of over fifty percent non-traditional students (blagburn and cloutterbuck, 2011); ours were about 100% non-traditional. our students were mature, with work commitments, looking after dependants and attending part-time at least part of the academic year. this means, students on these courses managed, on top of their studies, multiple and often conflicting responsibilities. they also came from a wide range of educational backgrounds, national and international, and hence they struggled to find a ‘common ground’ for their learning. this presents them with a double bind in that they are either perceived as academically ‘deficit’ or as lacking commitment to their studies. similarly, lecturers on those courses find themselves caught between differing professional discourses and contrasting and contradicting demands. thus, together staff and students tread contested ground, requiring a model of teaching and learning that accommodates the ‘flawed self’ of both the learner and the teacher: a model that acknowledges and accommodates learning in all its ‘supercomplexity’ (barnett and hallam, 1999) both within academia and the wider world. becoming was credit bearing running over the whole of the academic year. this gave the module necessary academic weight and it created time and space not only to explore topics and themes in depth but also to ‘be with’ each other (nancy, 2000). this helped students bond and belong; to ease the transition into academia and to reveal that intense engagement with themes and topics creates opportunities for ‘rich’ learning. becoming was designed as a rhizomatic (deleuze and guattari, 1987) ‘de-schooling’ (illich, 1970) space where we embedded emancipatory and creative praxis to help our students become the academics they wanted to be. we utilised ‘drawing to learn’, ‘free writing’ and ‘blogging’ to help students develop thinking and writing habits such that, especially with the blogging, they wrote what they wanted to say – and they wrote often and thus became better at writing (abegglen et al., 2017). we scaffolded student reading through the use of visual practices (abegglen et al., 2018) and ‘textscrolls’ (middlebrook, 2014; abegglen at al., 2019), and we asked them to experiment with alternative genres such as songs, dances and videos/films/animations (burns et al., 2018a, 2018b, 2018c, 2018d, 2018e) abegglen, burns and sinfield it’s learning development, jim – but not as we know it: academic literacies in third space journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 5 with the aim to shake up their notions of ‘education’ whilst making space for them to ‘reach their own accommodation with discourses of belonging, identity and power’ (medhurst, 2000, p.31). specifically, we decided to develop a module that would welcome all students into the university for the people they already were – as it took them on a developmental journey to become the academics they wanted to be. the module created multiple opportunities for the students to bond and belong – with each other and with the module as a whole. we used role-play and simulation – to get students talking and to validate their thinking. we used drawing and making to learn with proactive discussion mediated by images, by topic, by objects and by academic texts (palus and drath, 2001). the students participated in a range of projects including producing a multimodal exhibition (abegglen et al., 2016) to showcase results of an early participant observation exercise of what makes learning happen in a university – and what stops learning from happening. students represented their findings as knitting, poetry, 3d objects, animations, video, collages, comic books and posters. the students blogged their learning – and so wrote to learn – and concomitant formal academic writing flourished as a result (abegglen et al., 2015). they develop a ‘digital me' for a further showcase and end of term party; a further opportunity to celebrate their achievements rather than merely ‘assess’ their learning. they each also engaged in a small qualitative research project on a topic of their own choosing but based around university study. some of these projects produced innovative findings – such as the first year student who uncovered the benefits of group work because it allowed 'flow' in student directed learning – and another student who discovered that students resisted visual note making because they were frightened of drawing. by the end of the module the students took over the running of the sessions developing interactive learning opportunities for their peers. formal and informal feedback, classroom discussions and module evaluations (all carried out throughout the academic year), showed that none of the participating students saw this as a 'deficit fixing' skills module. they saw it as a space to learn and they were capable of learning so much more than they had thought when they entered the university – similar to gutierrez’s (2008) and also idrus’s (2015) students that were ‘transformed’ by their experiences: abegglen, burns and sinfield it’s learning development, jim – but not as we know it: academic literacies in third space journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 6 thank you very much for taking me to another level of my journey to become an educationist, each class was captivating, refreshing and interesting. you are legends, l am really grateful to have worked with you. i've spent more time than expected on my portfolio but to say i'm proud is an understatement, you've really inspired my creativity and drive, especially approaching the final hurdle. thank you for teaching such an inspirational module. it brought out such creativity within the group and i believe it changed the group dynamics as we had to work with various people whom we generally wouldn’t. thank you for all your support within the module and the experience was truly invaluable (anonymised comments taken from 2016 module monitoring log). students tend to succeed on becoming with many receiving a and b grades (in the united kingdom considered the highest grades), only dropping out, if they do, for personal rather than academic reasons. we argue that the reason for this is that we designed becoming to be a creative, challenging and engaging module that allowed all members of the nonhomogeneous group labelled ‘non-traditional’ to develop their self-efficacy and to succeed. becoming was the hybrid space where they could make sense of themselves as actors and agents in their own learning, of the other modules they were studying, and of the university as a whole. it’s that lea and street experience educationists might argue that what we have done in becoming is simply good curriculum design. our argument would be that whilst this is true, it is only true because the module was designed to be emancipatory and empowering: something to inspect, laugh at and jump off from (sinfield et al., 2019). the challenge is to make a case for such a module when the macro-culture within higher education is increasingly focused on the bottom line: nss scores and league table positions; student employability and staff salary-reduction targets that need to be reached. this reductionist vision asset-strips creativity from courses and directs or targets resources at those ‘in need’ rather than learning and abegglen, burns and sinfield it’s learning development, jim – but not as we know it: academic literacies in third space journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 7 teaching as a whole (viz. kalin, 2018). the micro-reality of this is that most widening participation students tend to have experienced some form of educational ‘rebuff’ and tend to have lower self-efficacy (bandura, 1982) than middle-class students from a traditional university (soria and bultmann, 2014). thus, for us there is an increased need to develop programmes that better ‘hold’ those ready to flee, and to foster positive learning experiences and outcomes especially for those who are new to and unsure of (uk) academia. in our module, following nancy (2000, p. 2), we therefore ensured that our students had enough time and opportunities to ‘be with each other’ and ‘learn together’: there is no meaning if meaning is not shared, and not because there would be an ultimate or first signification that all beings have in common, but because meaning is itself the sharing of being. by taking a dialogic rather than a didactic approach, we encouraged the emergence of ‘heutagogy’ (hase and kenyon, 2000): self-directed and self-determined learning. as emancipatory educationists we argue that this should be the ultimate goal of academia: for students to take control of their learning, finding their academic identities in ways that are recognised by the academy, but which they negotiate on their own terms. we were aware that adopting this approach to teaching might be confusing for students used to the lecture-seminar format where the lecturer presents, and represents, the all-knowing teacher (viz. illich, 1970). however, as our dialogic approach ran through every session, our students adapted and responded well to this new challenge. moreover we created ‘time’ – time for students to explore and to experience and experiment with their own learning (viz. jackson et al., 2006; johnson, 2010). time to take risks, to lose a fear of failure and time to ‘be with’ (nancy, 2000) and learn from each other; time to create and inhabit their own community of practice (lave and wenger, 1991). a community of practice (cop) is a group of people who share a profession or craft and, through the sharing of information and experiences, learn from each other, and so gradually improve their knowledge and/or practice: communities of practice are formed by people who engage in a process of collective learning in a shared domain of human endeavor: a tribe learning to survive, a band of artists seeking new forms of expression, a group of engineers abegglen, burns and sinfield it’s learning development, jim – but not as we know it: academic literacies in third space journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 8 working on similar problems, a clique of pupils defining their identity in the school, a network of surgeons exploring novel techniques, a gathering of first-time managers helping each other cope. in a nutshell: cops are groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly (wenger, cited wong et al., 2001, p.317). in other words, cops are groups of people who share ideas and insight and help each other solve problems and through that develop a common practice or approach. in academia generally and in becoming, this meant that students work together on projects, developing ideas and solutions, or plan and create their own learning sessions tailored to their needs and supported by others, who either are more experienced and knowledgeable or who have different experiences and knowledges. it is a tricky business navigating that which empowers students to operate powerfully within higher education, with what facilitates effective teaching (angelo, 1993) because becoming a learning cop in this time of ‘supercomplexity’ (barnett, 2000) requires the negotiation of identity in a complex dance in complex landscapes of practice that are lanced by multiple meanings and tensions. creating becoming as a year-long module with multiple creative challenges gave us, and the students, time for this complexity. academic literacies: a contested space lea and street (1998) discuss in their paper ‘student writing in higher education’ the (often contrasting) expectations, interpretations and conceptualisations of learning and teaching. they adduced a taxonomy of approaches to academic writing: describing first a mechanistic study skills model – where the student is deemed to be deficient and in need of remediation via staged ‘skills’ development; moving through a ‘third way’ model of academic socialisation – where the student is a learner, but essentially a passive one; and culminating in an academic literacies model which sees the student as having agency in a politicised landscape of power and authority. in more detail, the study skills approach suggests that there are various discrete skills and strategies that students need to employ to succeed at university study: time management, note making, reading for learning, writing in the correct genre and mode, etc. lea and abegglen, burns and sinfield it’s learning development, jim – but not as we know it: academic literacies in third space journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 9 street (1998) argue that, in regard to academic writing, this approach conceptualises student writing as technical and instrumental forcing academics and learning developers to focus on ‘grammar, spelling and punctuation’ rather than ‘writing to learn’. whilst we agree with lea and street (1998) and reject the idea of atomised skills that students need to master, we do argue that there are moments where students realise that they have not been taught how to study – or learn – successfully and thus where a focus on a particular study approach or strategy might empower them to learn more successfully. for example, when entering university, many will not realise that they need to become active learners, to ‘surface’ what constitutes academic work, and planning and managing their own academic labour. in our experience, the majority of our students, as with many staff, are unaware of the active learning potential of note making – having been taught instead to passively rely on teaching handouts. being allowed time and space to explore and rehearse successful note making strategies might improve student agency in their own learning making them less reliant on the good will or the good practice of their tutors. thus, tackling study strategies directly, and in a supportive and transparent way, need not be experienced as remediation and may enable students to proactively take control of their own learning although the isolated teaching of ‘skills’ is certainly problematic (wingate, 2006). regardless of their views on skills, most academics acknowledge that disciplines and academic communities have habits and epistemological practices that students need to learn, that they need to model and embrace, in order to become full community members. lea and street (1998, viz. also 1997) refer to this as academic socialisation where there is a focus on student orientation to disciplinary learning and interpretation of epistemic learning tasks. although this approach is much more sensitive to the idea of the student as a learner, the idea is often critiqued for representing students as novitiates, inexperienced learners that need to be moulded into successful adults (and employees) (viz. kalin, 2018). however, if we take lave and wenger’s (1991) apprenticeship model of communities of practice, it becomes evident that novice students will need to learn how to become academics within their own epistemic communities, and that this need not be a passive and unquestioning indoctrination but, as with the development of successful study strategies as mentioned above, an active, nuanced and embodied process of becoming. according to lea and street (1998), the academic literacies approach, allied to the new literacies studies, sees the student as an (active) actor and agent in their own learning, abegglen, burns and sinfield it’s learning development, jim – but not as we know it: academic literacies in third space journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 10 subjects capable of operating with awareness and criticality within their epistemic communities. the individual student is no longer seen as potentially deficient rather questions can be asked of the institution itself and its own systemic ways of hiding or mystifying its power. this contradicts the general assumption and perception that students, especially widening participation students, are lacking the skills and knowledge to succeed in academia and that academic literacy is ‘falling’ (brockes, 2003). in this context, lea and street (1998) argue that not only current approaches but also current perception in regard to academic literacies need to change. rather than locating 'problems' within individual students, wider, more empowering institutional approaches to teaching and learning need to be developed, and embedded, that are meaningful within and across the curriculum. although this argument is plausible, there exist still countless approaches within and across courses, subjects and disciplines and between students and academic tutors – with an underlying assumption that academic literacies are the highest literacies to be achieved. we argue for a more nuanced discussion of and approach to student learning that uses and acknowledges more than one approach. students need to be provided with a wide range of opportunities that creatively scaffold their learning throughout their studies, and that build on their existing skills and knowledge while creating a sense of purpose and belonging. our module was not designed to ensure ‘league table outcomes’ where power might shift infinitesimally from academics to students, but in reality, it still resides with the higher education institution and its goals (viz. healey et al., 2018). rather, in becoming, we created a collective third space by sharing the responsibility for the success of the teaching/learning process – with the students driving ‘the action’ in partnership with each other and with us: choosing their own qualitative research projects; interpreting their multimodal challenges in their own unique ways; and having creative autonomy in how they developed and delivered the concluding weeks of the module itself. we treated our students not as empty vessels to be filled but as agents harnessing their own particular knowledge and experiences to drive their own learning (and that of others). thus, our students were gradually given the lead on topics and sessions as the year progressed. we wanted our students to experience a more collaborative, complex, subtle and nuanced version of education and to see and experience themselves as actively learning, and learning as becoming – a realignment of competence and experience, socially defined, personally experienced and collaboratively expressed. abegglen, burns and sinfield it’s learning development, jim – but not as we know it: academic literacies in third space journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 11 looking at the module outcomes and the feedback by our students (and positive comments from the other staff who also taught our students), we argue that all students should be given the sorts of third space opportunities that we have described here. moreover, we argue that it is particularly important for the so-called non-traditional student to have the opportunity to experience third space opportunities within their (assessed) modules. these students are the ones who persistently experience educational rejection and refusal, who are labelled as deficient and stereotyped as ‘less than’; if third space opportunities only happen outwith the curriculum, in the form of club and society membership for example, this becomes another way for higher education to privilege the traditional and dispossess the non-traditional student. these latter are the students for whom we attempted to create becoming as a radical, emancipatory and transformative space for action: a space of potentiality. whatever next: whither the transformational educational experiences? in austerity-driven higher education there is the danger that university – and all the learning development support that is still built into universities – is focused primarily on getting students ready for the market, with ever dwindling resources targeted at widening participation students in ever more stigmatising and diminishing ways. higher education has itself been marketised and commodified (viz. giroux, 2007; 2017), thus arguably all the pedagogy, all the learning development, is really about getting everyone into employment and fit for work. lea and street (1998) provided a model that criticises this approach and outlined what learning development and support might look like when it goes beyond the teaching of skills and the socialisation of students. arguably, what is needed is: a more complex and contested interpretation . . . about what constitutes valid knowledge within a particular context, and the relationships of authority that exist around the communication of these assumptions (lea and street, 1998, p.170). this suggests the multiplicity and the diversity in classrooms and lecture halls should be used to explore something as complex as learning and teaching in a more democratic and abegglen, burns and sinfield it’s learning development, jim – but not as we know it: academic literacies in third space journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 12 empowering way because it is something that cannot be managed and dealt with in an atomised or mechanistic manner. in our becoming module, a first-year undergraduate module, we aimed to promote multidimensional and proactive student learning, designed to engage and develop all of our diverse students. most importantly, we wanted to value and take into account the whole student, and the subtle range of attributes and practices they bring with them as well as that which they will need to develop over time to become academic in their own discipline. underpinning this approach are arguments surrounding critical, emancipatory and empowering pedagogy (freire, 2007), and an emergent approach to practice that fosters creativity (jackson et al., 2006) for self-efficacy (bandura, 1982). we argue that when you set challenges that pique students’ curiosity and invite them to critically engage with that which they want to learn – without one particular skills-set in mind – your very fluidity can create more holistic and humanistic (rogers, 1969) learning and teaching experiences. built into our model is also the idea of a community of practice (lave and wenger, 1991) where students have time and space to be with each other and their lecturers (nancy, 2000). this requires a nuanced literacies approach sustained by continuous and critical reflection (schön, 1983) upon learning and teaching – and upon the discourses of learning and teaching – from both academics and students: becoming has been the most unique and creative module with the education studies course at the london metropolitan. its content has been all-encompassing and has helped me greatly in other modules, yet the real lesson has been the way in which the content has been delivered; the module is democratic and relies heavily on the dialogic. it lets us express ourselves honestly and freely, and asks that we allow others to do the same. becoming has made me question why we as people rather than just students do or think certain things, and makes us ask if there isn’t another way (extract from a student blog taken from the week that they were asked to reflect on the module overall – viz. the social hand grenade blog). our module operated as a collective third space for socio-political and critical practice, adopting a critical academic literacies approach and operating in an emergent, oscillating, playful and creative way; capable of engaging and developing the self-efficacy of all our students no matter where they started on their academic journey. abegglen, burns and sinfield it’s learning development, jim – but not as we know it: academic literacies in third space journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 13 based on this experience, if asked ‘what next?’ or ‘where next?’ for the lea and street (1998) model and academic literacies per se, we would seek to stand on the shoulders of giants and argue for a paradigm shift in uk higher education teaching and learning. we argue that what widening participation – and all – students deserve and need is a form of the becoming module at every level of their university study. students deserve third spaces within the curriculum: socio-political spaces that challenge, extend and explore the very nature of knowledge itself; spaces that nurture those more creative and life-enhancing attributes; spaces that continue to value the people our students are as well as the academics they are becoming. we need emancipatory practices within a radical reconfiguration of what education is and what the university could be. references abegglen, a., burns, t., middlebrook, d. and sinfield, s. (2019) ‘unrolling the text to facilitate learning: the scroll as curriculum disruption’, journal of learning development in higher education, no.14. available at: https://journal.aldinhe.ac.uk/index.php/jldhe/article/view/467 (accessed 22 september 2019). abegglen, s., burns, t. and sinfield, s. (2018) ‘drawing as a way of knowing: visual practices as the route to becoming academic’, canadian journal for studies in discourse and writing/rédactologie, 28, pp.173-185. abegglen, s., burns, t. and sinfield, s. (2017) ‘‘really free!’: strategic interventions to foster students' academic writing skills’, journal of educational innovation, partnership and change, 3(1), pp.251-255. abegglen, s., burns, t. and sinfield, s. (2016) ‘the power of freedom: setting up a multimodal exhibition with undergraduate students to foster their learning and help them to achieve’, journal of peer learning, 9, pp.1-9. abegglen, s., burns, t. and sinfield, s. (2015) ‘voices from the margins: narratives of learning development in a digital age’, journal of educational innovation, https://journal.aldinhe.ac.uk/index.php/jldhe/article/view/467 https://journals.gre.ac.uk/index.php/studentchangeagents/article/view/589 abegglen, burns and sinfield it’s learning development, jim – but not as we know it: academic literacies in third space journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 14 partnership and change, 1(1) [online]. available at: https://journals.gre.ac.uk/index.php/studentchangeagents/article/view/148 (accessed: 11 march 2019). aldinhe (2019) about: the association in learning development in higher education [online]. available at: http://www.aldinhe.ac.uk/about/ (accessed: 4 march 2019). angelo, t. a. (1993, april) ‘‘teacher’s dozen’: fourteen general, research-based principles for improving higher learning in our classrooms’, aahe bulletin, pp. 3-13. barnett, r. (2000) realizing the university in an age of supercomplexity. buckingham: open university press. barnett, r. and hallam, s. (1999) teaching for supercomplexity: a pedagogy for higher education, in mortimore p. (ed.) understanding pedagogy and its impact on learning. london: paul chapman, pp. 137-154. bhabha, h. k. (2004) the location of culture. abingdon: routledge. bandura, a. (1982) ‘self-efficacy mechanism in human agency’, american psychologist, 37(2), pp. 122-147. blagburn, p. and cloutterbuck, s. (2011) ‘a multi-disciplinary approach to retention and drop out: a response to institutional concerns’, in access and retention: experiences of non-traditional learners in higher education, university of lower silesia, 7-8 april 2011 [online]. available at: http://www.dsw.edu.pl/fileadmin/wwwranlhe/files/blagburn_et_al.pdf (accessed: 4 march 2019). brockes, e. (2003) ‘taking the mick’, the guardian, 15 january [online]. available at: http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2003/jan/15/education.highereducation (accessed: 5 march 2019). burns, t., sinfield, s. and abegglen, s. (2018a), ‘regenring academic writing. case study 1: collages’, journal of writing in creative practice, 11(2), pp. 181-190. https://journals.gre.ac.uk/index.php/studentchangeagents/article/view/148 http://www.aldinhe.ac.uk/about/ http://www.dsw.edu.pl/fileadmin/www-ranlhe/files/blagburn_et_al.pdf http://www.dsw.edu.pl/fileadmin/www-ranlhe/files/blagburn_et_al.pdf http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2003/jan/15/education.highereducation abegglen, burns and sinfield it’s learning development, jim – but not as we know it: academic literacies in third space journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 15 burns, t., sinfield, s. and abegglen, s. (2018b) ‘case study 2: cabinet of curiosity’, journal of writing in creative practice, 11(2), pp. 211-215. burns, t., sinfield, s. and abegglen, s. (2018c) ‘case study 3: games and board games’, journal of writing in creative practice, 11(2), pp. 261-266. burns, t., sinfield, s. and abegglen, s. (2018d) ‘case study 4: digital storytelling’, journal of writing in creative practice, 11(2), pp. 275-278. burns, t., sinfield, s. & abegglen, s. (2018e) ‘case study 5: multimodal exhibition’, journal of writing in creative practice, 11(2), pp. 297-303. cormier, d. (2012) ‘embracing uncertainty: rhizomatic learning’ [online]. available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=95&v=vjiwyilybpq (accessed: 4 march 2019). deleuze, g. and guattari, f. (1987) a thousand plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia. minneapolis, london: university of minnesota press. freire, p. (2007) pedagogy of the oppressed. new york: continuum. giroux, h. a. (2014) neoliberalism’s war on higher education. chicago: haymarket books. giroux, h. a. (2007) ‘utopian thinking in dangerous times: critical pedagogy and the project of educated hope’, pp. 25-42, in coté, m. day, r. and de peuter, g. (eds.) utopian pedagogy: radical experiments against neoliberal globalization. toronto: university of toronto press. gutierrez, k. d. (2008) ‘developing a socio-critical literacy in the third space’, reading research quarterly, 43(2), pp. 148-164 [online]. available at: http://lchc.ucsd.edu/mca/mail/xmcamail.2014-12.dir/pdftsnr0mxbcj.pdf (accessed: 4 march 2019). https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=95&v=vjiwyilybpq http://lchc.ucsd.edu/mca/mail/xmcamail.2014-12.dir/pdftsnr0mxbcj.pdf http://lchc.ucsd.edu/mca/mail/xmcamail.2014-12.dir/pdftsnr0mxbcj.pdf http://lchc.ucsd.edu/mca/mail/xmcamail.2014-12.dir/pdftsnr0mxbcj.pdf abegglen, burns and sinfield it’s learning development, jim – but not as we know it: academic literacies in third space journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 16 hase, s. and kenyon, c. (2000) 'from andragogy to heutagogy', ulti-base in-site, december [online]. available at: http://pandora.nla.gov.au/nphwb/20010220130000/http://ultibase.rmit.edu.au/new/newdec00.html (accessed: 4 march 2019). healey, r. l., healey, m. and cliffe, a. (2018) engaging in radical work: students as partners in academic publishing [online]. available at: http://www.efficiencyexchange.ac.uk/12775/engaging-radical-work-studentspartners-academic-publishing/ (accessed: 5 march 2019). idrus, f. (2015) ‘examining classroom transformational spaces using third space theory in developing students’ sense of shared identity, theory and practice in language studies, 5(1), pp.28-37. illich, i. (1970) deschooling society. new york: harper & row. jackson, n., oliver, m., shaw, m. and wisdom, j. (eds.) (2006) developing creativity in higher education: the imaginative curriculum. london: routledge. johnson, s. (2010) where good ideas come from. london: penguin. jozefkowicz, e. (2006, july) ‘too many teachers ‘teaching to the test’’, the guardian [online]. available at: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2006/jul/20/schools.uk5 (accessed: 19 december 2018). kalin, n. m. (2018) the neoliberalization of creativity education: democratizing, destructing and decreating. new york: palgrave macmillan. lave, j. and wenger, e. (1991) situated learning: legitimate peripheral participation. cambridge: cambridge university press. lea, m. and street, b. (1998) ‘student writing in higher education: an academic literacies approach’, studies in higher education, 23(2), pp. 157-172. http://pandora.nla.gov.au/nph-wb/20010220130000/http:/ultibase.rmit.edu.au/new/newdec00.html http://pandora.nla.gov.au/nph-wb/20010220130000/http:/ultibase.rmit.edu.au/new/newdec00.html http://www.efficiencyexchange.ac.uk/12775/engaging-radical-work-students-partners-academic-publishing/ http://www.efficiencyexchange.ac.uk/12775/engaging-radical-work-students-partners-academic-publishing/ https://www.theguardian.com/education/2006/jul/20/schools.uk5 abegglen, burns and sinfield it’s learning development, jim – but not as we know it: academic literacies in third space journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 17 lea, m. and street, b. (1997) perspectives on academic literacies: an institutional approach. swindon: economic and social research council. london metropolitan university (2018) about: our key statistics [online]. available at: https://www.londonmet.ac.uk/about/our-university/university-publications/keystatistics/ (accessed: 11 december 2018). medhurst, a. (2000) ‘if anywhere: class identification and cultural studies academics’, pp. 19-35, in munt, s. (ed.) cultural studies and the working class: subject to change. london: cassell. middlebrook, d. (2014) the textmapping project [online]. available at: http://www.textmapping.org/ (accessed: 5 march 2019). nancy, j. l. (2000) being singular plural. stanford: stanford university press. palus, c. and drath, w. h. (2001) ‘putting something in the middle: an approach to dialogue’, reflections, 28(2), pp. 28-39. rogers, c. (1969) freedom to learn: a view of what education might become. columbus, ohio: charles merrill. schön, d. a. (1983) the reflective practitioner: how professionals think in action. new york: basic books. sinfield, s., burns, t. and abegglen, s. (2019) ‘exploration: becoming playful the power of a ludic module’, pp. 23-31, in james, a. and nerantzi, c. (eds.) the power of play in higher education: creativity in tertiary learning. london: palgrave macmillan. soja, e. w. (1996) thirdspace. malden (mass.): blackwell. soria, k. and bultmann, m. (2014) ‘supporting working class students in higher education’. nacada journal, 34(2), pp. 51-62 [online]. available at: https://www.londonmet.ac.uk/about/our-university/university-publications/key-statistics/ https://www.londonmet.ac.uk/about/our-university/university-publications/key-statistics/ http://www.textmapping.org/ https://doi.org/10.12930/nacada-13-017 abegglen, burns and sinfield it’s learning development, jim – but not as we know it: academic literacies in third space journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 18 https://doi.org/10.12930/nacada-13-017 (accessed: 10 october 2018). warren, j. r. (2002) ‘reconsidering the relationship between student employment and academic outcomes: a new theory and better data’, youth and society, 33(3), pp. 366-393. wong, k., kwan, r. and leung, k. (2001) ‘an exploration of using facebook to build a virtual community of practice’, pp. 316-324, in kwan, r., fong, j., kwok, l.-f. and lam, j. (eds.) hybrid learning: 4th international conference, ichl 2011, hong kong, china, august 2011, proceedings. london: springer. wilcox, p., winn, s. and fyvie‐gauld, m. (2005) ‘‘it was nothing to do with the university, it was just the people’: the role of social support in the first‐year experience of higher education’, studies in higher education, 30(6), pp. 707-722. wingate, u. (2006) ‘doing away with 'study skills'’, teaching in higher education, 11(4), pp. 457-469. author details sandra abegglen was formerly senior lecturer and course leader ba hons education studies at london metropolitan university, united kingdom, and is now a researcher based at the university of calgary, canada. tom burns is senior lecturer in learning development in the centre for professional and educational development (cped) at london metropolitan university, united kingdom. he is co-author of teaching, learning and study skills: a guide for tutors and essential study skills: the complete guide to success at university (4th edition). sandra sinfield is senior lecturer learning development in the centre for professional and educational development (cped) at london metropolitan university, united kingdom, a co-author of teaching, learning and study skills: a guide for tutors and essential study skills: the complete guide to success at university (4th edition), and a https://doi.org/10.12930/nacada-13-017 abegglen, burns and sinfield it’s learning development, jim – but not as we know it: academic literacies in third space journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 19 co-founder of aldinhe. it’s learning development, jim – but not as we know it: academic literacies in third space abstract introduction becoming: case study module it’s that lea and street experience academic literacies: a contested space whatever next: whither the transformational educational experiences? references journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 20: march 2021 ________________________________________________________________________ skills for business and management a book review of sedgley, m. (2020) skills for business and management. london: red globe press. anne davey bournemouth university, uk keywords: academic writing; business and management; critical analysis; group work; personal development planning; plagiarism; presentation skills; reading; referencing; reflective writing; time management. overview the transition into university can be a stressful experience for many students. they are often faced with having to adapt to a very different way of learning, compared to their previous experiences of study. this book aims to help students embarking on a business and management course at university to overcome some of these hurdles. it concentrates on five key study skills needed by university students: time management, academic reading, academic writing, group work, and independent learning. there are a lot of general study skills books available, but this book is of particular interest as it concentrates on skills development for business management and finance students. martin sedgley draws on his considerable experience of working in learning support to offer practical guidance and learning strategies to undergraduate and postgraduate students. his knowledge and obvious enthusiasm for the subject comes across very clearly in this useful and practical book. structure and content davey skills for business and management journal of learning development in higher education, issue 20: march 2021 2 the first chapter sets the scene for the rest of the book. it gives a brief overview of the topics covered. it offers some diagnostic tests to establish whether the reader understands the difference between their previous experience of study and studying in higher education. advice is given on how to get the most out of the book. each chapter starts with a list of intended learning outcomes and finishes with a summary of the topics covered. the emphasis is on active learning, therefore there are activities and quizzes in every chapter. this active learning approach is very effective and helps to lead the reader through the book. it also allows them to pause at different points to test their understanding of the subjects in each section. throughout the whole book the author stresses the importance of developing transferrable skills thus enhancing the students’ employability. he reinforces his points with quotes from business, management, accounting, and finance students. the quotes are a nice touch and help the reader relate to the issues being discussed. the first main section of the book deals with time management and self-management. it begins with advice on managing challenging times while studying at university. this includes enhancing self-confidence, assessment success, dealing with emotional challenges, and the importance of reflection. sedgley bases much of the advice in this chapter on the work of albert bandura, the psychologist who first came up with the term self-efficacy (bandura, 1997). lots of books have been written on time management but not many combine this skill with self-efficacy. this holistic approach to time management helps to make it more relevant to students who are facing major life changes when moving into higher education. the chapter on time management covers daily and weekly planning, managing perfectionism, and how to deal with procrastination. various time management techniques are discussed including the place mat process (hicks and hicks, 2004). this aims to align long term goals and aspirations with short term time management, thus returning to the author’s holistic approach to study skills acquisition. there is a nice mix of well-known techniques and some more uncommon ones such as the place mat process. next is a section on academic research. this includes chapters on searching for relevant texts and employing efficient reading strategies. the chapter on searching for relevant texts gives hints and tips on finding different types of sources such as textbooks, marketing reports, financial newspapers, and journals. it is gratifying and reassuring to see that students are advised to use library resources, rather than relying on google, and to seek support from the davey skills for business and management journal of learning development in higher education, issue 20: march 2021 3 business librarians at their institution. the author takes a sample essay title and then guides the reader through a series of exercises designed to help them refine their research skills. this is a very effective way of bringing together different aspects of the research process. different ways of improving reading skills are discussed, including selective reading, scanning, and reading for notetaking. academic writing is discussed next. this section covers academic writing, referencing, critical analysis, and reflective writing. many students struggle with academic writing and critical thinking. this book offers practical help in this area. the chapters in this section have a clear structure and offer a range of activities and quizzes. these are very helpful in guiding the reader through the process of academic writing and critical analysis, in a logical and straightforward way. each one builds on the previous activity. this approach works very well. the result is a useful and practical guide for students on how to develop their own individual writing style or voice. the final chapter in the section looks at reflective writing and its importance in long term professional development. most of the exercises are based around gibbs’ reflective cycle (gibbs, 1988). the use of sample essays as part of the activities, to demonstrate good writing practice, is a particularly nice touch. the fourth section of the book focusses on communication and contains chapters on group work and delivering effective presentations. the author introduces these soft skills by explaining why being able to work in teams and communicating effectively is so important in the workplace. one of the nice things about this book is the way that sedgley underpins the study skills discussed with the need to develop transferable skills and therefore become more employable. different team building methods are discussed, including analysis of personality traits and how to exploit them effectively. the myers-briggs system is used as an example in many of the activities. the final section deals with personal development planning. it encourages the reader to make the most of their learning journey and to come up with an action plan for their future professional development. this section neatly brings together the different strands running through the book dealing with reflection, self-efficacy, and professional development. readers are encouraged to carry out their own personal swot analysis. this is similar to the strengths, weaknesses, opportunity, and threat analysis familiar to all business management davey skills for business and management journal of learning development in higher education, issue 20: march 2021 4 students, with two important differences. weaknesses are replaced with worries and threats become tendencies. by doing this, the author has very cleverly and effectively taken what could have been a rather negative exercise, stressing weaknesses and threats, and turned it into a positive affirmation of skills and attributes. summary this book is primarily aimed at students starting a degree course. however, students of all levels would find it useful for improving their study skills. the practical and interactive nature of the book makes it ideal for students to use in independent study. it would work with a range of learning styles, particularly visual and kinesthetic learners. in addition, some of the activities could be used by librarians, learning developers, and study skills tutors as a starting point to develop their own workshops and face-to-face interactions with students. references bandura, a. (1997) self-efficacy: the exercise of control. new york: freeman. gibbs, g. (1988) learning by doing: a guide to teaching and learning methods. oxford: further education unit, oxford polytechnic. hicks, e. and hicks, j. (2004) ask and it is given: learning to manifest your desires. london: hay house. author details anne davey is a faculty librarian at bournemouth university, supporting staff and students in the bournemouth university business school. she also manages the university’s library and learning support study skills provision. anne has been working in academic libraries for over davey skills for business and management journal of learning development in higher education, issue 20: march 2021 5 30 years. research interests include transitions into higher education, the development of transferrable skills, and student employability. skills for business and management a book review of sedgley, m. (2020) skills for business and management. london: red globe press. overview structure and content summary references author details research article journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 2: february 2010 a comparison of staff perceptions and student experiences of issues associated with university study steve briggs university of bedfordshire, uk norma pritchett university of bedfordshire, uk abstract a significant body of research (tinto, 1975; rickinson and rutherford, 1995; ozga and sukhnandan, 1998; yorke, 1999a, 1999b, 2000a, 2000b; yorke and longden, 2004; cook, 2006) has examined difficulties experienced by students who withdraw from university. however, less work has been undertaken around students who experience difficulties but choose to remain in their studies. similarly, limited work has addressed how tutors and university support staff perceive difficulties associated with the student experience and whether these are in line with student accounts. the lack of research around university staff perceptions is surprising given that tutors must have a good knowledge of the student experience in order to be able to understand and support learning. the purpose of this study was twofold. firstly, to examine what difficulties students reported experiencing during university and, secondly, to ascertain if university staff’s knowledge of student difficulties was in line with student accounts. using semi-structured interviews and an online questionnaire, staff and student perceptions of university difficulties were examined. results showed that all students experienced a range of difficulties whilst studying. it was generally found that university staff had a good knowledge of the issues that students encountered. however, amongst university staff apparent ‘knowledge gaps’ associated with specific areas of student difficulty were identified (primarily linked to university systems and use of support services). possible explanations for findings are offered along with recommendations as to how findings might be used by a learning developer. keywords: student experience; difficulties; life events; tutor awareness; university staff awareness briggs and pritchett a comparison of staff perceptions and student experiences introduction recent higher education (he) policy has resulted in significant change in the university sector in terms of student demographic and funding. the promotion of widening participation has resulted in increasing numbers of non-traditional applicants attending university (higher education funding council for england (hefce), 1997; 2006: department for education and skills, 2003). changes in demographic have meant that growing numbers of students report coping with a range of commitments whilst studying. these include family commitments (sayer et al., 2002; hughes, 2005), relationships (andrews and wilding, 2004), academic work (haggis and pouget, 2002) and living arrangements (christie et al., 2002; wilcox et al., 2005; christie et al, 2006). similarly, over the last fifteen years, students’ financial circumstances have changed as levels of debt have steadily increased since the introduction of student loans (hutchings, 2003). this has resulted in growing numbers of students facing increased financial hardships (hutchings 2003; cooke et al., 2004; christie et al., 2005; pollock, 2006) and needing to undertake employment whilst studying (curtis and shani, 2002; hunt et al., 2004; carney et al., 2005; anonymous, 2006; gibbs, 2006). given the extent of these changes, it is imperative that staff who work in a learning development context maintain a current understanding of the modern student experience so that they are able successfully to support and facilitate student learning. research has highlighted a number of factors associated with why students drop out from university, such as doubts associated with course selection (rickinson and rutherford, 1995), motivation and expectations (charlton et al., 2006), preparedness, choice compatibility and external circumstance (ozga and sukhnandan, 1998). such work indicates that what a student experiences whilst studying and how they perceive university influences withdrawal decisions. this assertion is supported by roberts et al (2003) who reported that a student’s course, financial and personal perceptions were associated with intention to leave university during the first year of study rather than specific ‘at risk’ characteristics. likewise, mackie (2001) found that the problems that university drop outs experience were no worse than those encountered by persisters. rather a key difference between leavers and doubters is their university commitment. specifically, leavers’ commitment was eroded through university experiences or was initially too low to sustain the student. collectively, this signifies that students face a range of challenges during their journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 2 briggs and pritchett a comparison of staff perceptions and student experiences time at university. it is therefore very important that academics and university support staff are familiar with the range of issues that students might encounter to ensure that their progression can be effectively supported. however, one might question how well lecturers, pastoral support staff and learning developers actually appreciate the range of events students experience whilst studying. storm (1973) outlined that behaviour is interpreted differently depending upon whether an individual is a situation actor (actively participating within a situation) or a situation observer (watching other people who are involved in a situation). an actor will ‘watch their environment (which includes the behaviour of other people) more than they watch their own behaviour’ (storm, 1973: 166) whereas an observer will focus less upon a situation and more upon an actor. based on this premise, individuals will perceive the student experience differently depending upon whether they are ‘acting’ or ‘observing’ the student role. this would suggest there could be misunderstandings between students and staff around aspects of the student experience. this is supported by ozga and sukhnandan (1998) who found evidence that some academic staff employed stereotypical views to explain typical reasons why students dropped out from university. the likelihood of misperceptions is increased given that many university staff, be they academic or support, will not possess first-hand situational experience of what it is like to be a modern student because they graduated before he reforms were introduced. to compensate for this, they are likely to base their understanding of student needs and behaviour on their own he experiences, which are likely to be very different and possibly outdated. likewise, they might consult with colleagues, who themselves might have dated he perceptions and firmly grounded institutional perspectives of the student experience. it is possible that university staff will consult published literature in order to conceptualise the student experience. however, when one reviews previous literature, it is apparent that there are limitations around research scope and content that could easily bias a reader’s perception. one might suggest such perceptions could emerge because a disproportionate amount of research has focused extensively upon the experience of university dropouts (yorke, 1999a, 1999b, 2000a, 2000b; yorke and longden, 2004) rather than those who persist. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 3 briggs and pritchett a comparison of staff perceptions and student experiences furthermore, a significant proportion of the work that has addressed the experience of student ‘persisters’ has typically focused on predetermined events (christie et al., 2002; curtis and shani, 2002) rather than addressing the events that shape the student persister experience in a grounded fashion. it is therefore suggested that potentially, individuals who have relied heavily upon secondary observations might not realise that they hold misperceptions around how students experience aspects of university. given this potential for discrepancy between staff and student perceptions of the student experience, it is surprising that little work has attempted to ascertain whether perceptions held by staff are in line with student accounts. furthermore, the limited work that has been undertaken around this area has typically focused on very specific aspects of the university experience, such as employment (metcalf, 2003; curtis, 2005), rather than adopting a more generalist approach. consequently, there was a need for research to be undertaken to establish how accurately university staff perceived aspects of the student experience without placing emphasis on predetermined areas of interest. this provided the rationale for this study. method and results phase i – scope work reported in this paper was a pilot study that formed part of a larger investigation into how students changed whilst studying at university. this pilot study raised a number of interesting findings associated with events students encountered during their academic career which are discussed within this article. furthermore, through this work questions were also raised associated with group variations around, for example, what events are experienced during university, when events occur whilst a student is studying and whether there are variations in event perceptions between different student cohorts. addressing each of these issues is beyond the scope of this article but has formed the basis for an ongoing phd (currently being undertaken by the first author). results that are presented should therefore not be seen as conclusive but rather as a basis from which some key questions associated with student support best practice have emerged. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 4 briggs and pritchett a comparison of staff perceptions and student experiences phase i – participants data was collected from students and staff from a post-1992 uk university. the university student population was broadly representative of post-1992 institutions. each participant participated in one semi-structured interview about the difficulties that students experience whilst studying at university. both students and university staff were interviewed. student participants were asked to discuss their own university experience whereas university staff were asked to draw upon their experience of working with students. interviews took place between march and june 2007. students eighteen students participated in semi-structured interviews about the difficulties they had experienced during university. all of students were studying during the 2006-2007 academic year. the majority of participants were women (n=12) and from the uk (n=14). participants represented a diverse range of ages (m = 33.56; sd = 11.485) and ethnic backgrounds. participants were recruited from first, second and third years of their degree programme (6 students from each) and represented a range of faculties. staff seven university staff participated in semi-structured interviews that addressed what difficulties they perceived students typically experienced. all staff worked at the same university within either a support (n = 5) or academic capacity (n = 2). the majority of staff were male (n = 4). participants had a range of different experiences around working within he. support staff worked in a variety of pastoral roles (including learning development). phase i – data collection and analysis semi-structured interviews were used to collect data. prior to analysis, interviews were transcribed and checked to ensure accuracy. a grounded theory approach (glaser and strauss, 1967) was applied, in that findings from previous research were not used as a basis for developing an interview-coding frame. a coding frame emerged through the analysis of transcripts. in total, eleven types of difficulty (themes) were identified. once a parsimonious coding frame was established journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 5 briggs and pritchett a comparison of staff perceptions and student experiences theme definitions were written. this defined coding frame was then used to analyse interview content. to ensure that the coding frame was applied reliably, two of the authors independently coded an interview transcript using the coding frame. no pronounced differences in coding frame application were identified. phase i – results eleven main themes emerged that represented types of difficulty that students experienced. it should, however, be noted that many themes were reported by staff and students as being interrelated and participants seldom reported that difficulties occurred in isolation, as illustrated by the following metaphor used by a lecturer: that ball i mentioned earlier where problems get tangled up with each other. this quote highlights how students typically experience multiple problems (the ball) which are usually interrelated (get tangled up). for example, a student might experience financial issues whilst studying, so they get a part-time job. by undertaking employment they reduce their financial pressure but experience new problems related to time availability. consequently, study time is reduced which leads to issues around academic performance. this assertion is supported by roberts et al. (2003) who reported that students with higher doubt about remaining at university cited more reasons why they wanted to leave. similarly, christie et al. (2004) found that students typically cite on average 2.9 reasons why they withdraw from university. therefore, whilst it is acknowledged that difficulties seldom occur in isolation, themes are presented in a segmented fashion to aid interpretation of findings. table 1 provides theme definitions and indicates the percentage of participants who discussed each theme: journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 6 briggs and pritchett a comparison of staff perceptions and student experiences table 1. definition of difficulty themes and frequency of reporting. theme definition reported by % of students reported by % of staff academic skills/work difficulties around academic work and/or in relation to developing the skills associated with undertaking academic work. for example, difficulty in relation to writing, maths or assessments. 100% 100% relationships /interactions difficulties linked to interactions with other people. for example, difficulty when interacting with academic staff, students, non-academic staff or people outside university. 100% 100% time conflicts difficulties related to competing demands on student time. for example, time pressure associated with studying or activities external to university. 89% 100% course related difficulties experienced because of issues specific to a programme of study. for example, receiving limited information, teaching content/style or issues around attending a placement. 67% 28% finances difficulties linked to financial discrepancies that students incur. for example, financial outgoings, level of income or budgeting. 61% 71% transitions difficulties around university transitions. for example, starting university, moving between levels of study or the prospect of leaving university. 56% 86% journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 7 briggs and pritchett a comparison of staff perceptions and student experiences theme definition reported by % of students reported by % of staff student’s state of mind difficulties experienced due to how a student perceives himself/herself and/or how they feel. for example, anxiety, low confidence or negative self-belief. 56% 71% mental/ physical state difficulties around mental or physical condition that impact on a student. for example, difficulty because of personal health or the health of a significant other. 50% 100% access university services/ facilities difficulties experienced in relation to utilising facilities/services that should be available to all students. for example, online learning materials, study support, career advice, workshops, learning resources. 50% 14% place of residence difficulty associated with where students are living. 28% 57% culture/ religion difficulties because of religious belief and/or linked to their cultural background. for example, religious belief conflict or integrating into a new culture. 22% 57% in addition to establishing that difficulties seldom occur in isolation, it was found that generally, university staff have a sound awareness of most issues associated with the student experience. as shown, variations were, however, found in the level of agreement around the salience of certain themes. specifically, three distinct levels regarding the alignment of staff and student perceptions were identified (presented in table 2). journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 8 briggs and pritchett a comparison of staff perceptions and student experiences table 2. levels of agreement between students and staff. type of agreement themes description close agreement academic skills/ work relationships/ interactions finances time conflicts close consensus between staff and student reporting. proportionally over-reported by staff transitions mental physical condition student’s state of mind place of residence culture/religion themes were proportionally perceived by university staff to be more typical than students’ accounts suggested. a number of staff referred to examples of specific students or small cohorts when discussing these themes (however, reference to specific students was not restricted solely to areas that were over reported). possible explanations for staff over reporting are considered in the discussion. proportionally under-reported by staff course related accessing university services and facilities themes associated with areas where staff appeared to under appreciate the difficulties that students experienced. further analysis was undertaken around the proportionally under-reported themes to establish if limited staff awareness was specific to certain aspects of themes. findings indicated the main reasons why students reported course-related difficulties was linked to journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 9 briggs and pritchett a comparison of staff perceptions and student experiences quality of information, organisation of teaching and issues linked to placement attendance. in terms of accessing university services/facilities, it was found that the main types of issue stemmed from service availability and accessibility. collectively, findings suggested university staff generally had a limited knowledge of these areas. further, those staff who did report student difficulties around these areas had typically discussed recent experiences. phase ii – overview as noted, phase 1 comprised an early stage of ongoing student experience research. interview data was used (in conjunction with other project data that is not reported) as the basis for developing an online questionnaire that incorporated 81 ‘typical’ life events related to university study (this included positive events as well as difficulties). this questionnaire was emailed to university staff to ascertain what events they perceived to be most typically experienced by students at some point during their time at university (based on their own experiences of working with students). participants were asked to indicate on a five point scale the extent to which they thought each event was typical of the student experience. if respondents were unsure about event occurrence they were asked to select an ‘unsure’ option. using online life event questionnaire results, the researchers attempted to establish whether the proportional underreporting of difficulties linked to course and accessing university services and facilities was evident amongst staff per se. consequently, the authors considered the types of events to which university staff responded ‘unsure’ and so indicating with which they were less familiar. phase ii – participants an invitation to complete the online questionnaire was sent to 281 university staff at a post 1992-university (between october and november 2008). in total, 94 staff (34%) completed the questionnaire. participants represented a range of support areas (n = 27) such as learning development, finance advice, librarians and disability support, and lecturers (n = 67) across academic faculties. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 10 briggs and pritchett a comparison of staff perceptions and student experiences phase ii – data collection and analysis data presented in this section indicates which aspects of the university experience staff appeared least and most familiar. these areas were identified based on the proportion of participants who selected the ‘unsure’ option when completing the online questionnaire. phase ii – results the average ‘unsure’ rating was 17.9% which indicated that generally the majority of the sample was able to indicate how typical each event was in terms of the student experience. broadly online questionnaire results supported interview findings. these results are highlighted in table 3 and table 4 table 3. online questionnaire items that received the highest number of participant unsure responses. university events % of unsure responses (all respondents) accessed university language centre services (provides support to international students around the development of linguistic skills) 46% accessed university chaplaincy services 45% change in where they study 40% change in who a student studies with 36% change in when they study 33% participated in university sports team 32% accessed centre for personal and career development 31% accessed university counselling service accessed university financial support services 30% accessed student union services 29% journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 11 briggs and pritchett a comparison of staff perceptions and student experiences table 4. online questionnaire items that received the lowest number of participant unsure responses. university events % of unsure responses (all respondents) attended seminar/tutorial received academic advice from lecturers 4% gave a presentation communicated with lecturers 2% sat an exam received grades 1% attended lecture(s) assignment writing group work dissertation writing 0% as can be seen, university staff appeared to have limited awareness of events that occurred beyond their own direct experience of working with students. this is evident in the fact that staff were least aware of student usage of particular university services and facilities and the nature of typical student study behaviours. in contrast, staff appeared most familiar about events associated with their own direct student contact (such as the occurrence of academic and relationship based events) in line with interview findings. summary when considered collectively, results suggested that university staff broadly had a good awareness of most events related to university study and were familiar with many of the issues that students faced. however, certain staff appeared less familiar about the typicality of particular types of events linked to academic study (associated with facility and service usage). this conclusion is supported by both interview and online questionnaire data. explanations for these findings are presented in the discussion. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 12 briggs and pritchett a comparison of staff perceptions and student experiences discussion unsurprisingly the range of events that students and staff reported were generally found to be broadly in line with those that have been previously documented (yorke, 1999a, 1999b, 2000a, 2000b; haggis and pouget, 2002; curtis and shani, 2002; hutchings, 2003; cooke et al, 2004; carney et al., 2005). however, unlike previous research, this study begins to provide a valuable insight into the salience and frequency of event occurrence that is reported by students and how this is perceived by university staff. this in turn has generated some interesting findings and raised some important questions. nonetheless, as stated, this article is based on a limited sample of participants, therefore these early conclusions must be treated with some caution. it is intended that this work will be expanded through an ongoing body of research which will permit more robust conclusions to be drawn. generally, results indicated that university staff have a good awareness of the range of issues that affect students (broadly in line with metcalf, 2003). there do, however, appear to be certain areas where staff awareness of the student experience is not in line with student accounts (offering partial support for curtis, 2005). overall, results highlighted areas of under-reporting which suggested that within a university, certain staff (both academic and learning support) may suffer from a ‘knowledge gap’ associated with aspects of the student experience that fall outside of their own job remit. in this instance, knowledge gaps were primarily found to be associated with how students utilised university facilities and services. however, it is possible that had other staff been interviewed other knowledge gaps might have been identified, peculiar to other aspects of the university. within a university, this type of awareness deficit could affect staff promotion of service availability, which could easily undermine aspects of the student experience. support for this conclusion can be found in the national student satisfaction survey (nsss) results (hefce, 2007). nsss results appeared to confirm a large number of students experience problems around university-based services and facilities in that, nationally, 20% of students were not satisfied with university learning resources and 29% were unsatisfied with the provision of academic support from their university. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 13 briggs and pritchett a comparison of staff perceptions and student experiences it might be that discrepancies in reporting relate to differences in how staff and students perceive the university. specifically, experienced university staff will have become acquainted with the university systems and staff that they need to know about in order to do their job. it is therefore suggested that most staff form a segmented perception of university which means departments with which they have little or no contact do not form part of their general university related thinking. this is in stark contrast to how students will experience university, in that students need to perceive university in a holistic fashion, knowing about a range of services that cross over university departments, in order to get the most from their studies. this assertion would appear to be in line with online questionnaire results which highlighted that areas synonymous with under-reporting were also those that staff knew less about in terms of student usage. as noted, there were certain areas (such as, religion or accommodation) that university staff over reported. potentially, this finding could also be a cause for concern for those who work with university students. an individual with inaccurate perceptions about event frequency could reach incorrect conclusions about how best to support their students. as identified, the issues that students reported seldom occurred in isolation. it could therefore be argued that when issues associated with university facilities occur in conjunction with more common or ‘well-defined’ issues (such as, finances or academic work) staff who are trying to support the student automatically focus on the well-defined difficulty and fail to fully appreciate the influence of other factors. they may well adopt a hierarchical framework of conceptual/perceptual categories which differs both from those of students and colleagues in other parts of the university. however, given the limited sample size, further work would be necessary to confirm this assertion. there are a number of explanations as to why certain events were viewed to be most salient. when discussing the student experience, staff might have focused on students who stood out during their career but were not typical of the student population. one might propose that such students represented complex cases, which consumed large amounts of time and effort and had a disproportionate influence upon perceptions of ‘typical’ students. during interviews a number of staff referred to a specific student or cohort when discussing over reported areas, which would appear to offer tentative support for this assertion. likewise, during interviews it was found that staff who worked within a specific area disproportionately focused on factors related to their own department. for example, unsurprisingly the university chaplain focused on religious difficulties. it might therefore be journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 14 briggs and pritchett a comparison of staff perceptions and student experiences proposed that staff knowledge of the ‘typical’ student experience will be biased by where they work within a university and their own background. equally, it is possible that staff will attempt to provide excessive support in certain areas so as to meet institutional priorities or reduce the possibility of receiving criticism. it is also possible that students might only be more willing to discuss specific types of difficulties with university staff. should this be the case, edited accounts of the university experience reported by students could easily distort an individual’s perspective of modern day academic study. this notion was not explicitly addressed during interviews but could form the basis for insightful future research. however, some more specific issues should be borne in mind in interpreting findings. firstly, the study design can only provide a snapshot of students’ experience taken from one point in time. this design relies upon students accurately remembering previous experiences. it is recognised that students will change during university, which in turn could have influenced how they report previous events. currently, further work is being undertaken that aims to track events that students experience whilst studying over an extended period using a longitudinal methodology. this methodological approach will enable a very accurate identification of specific periods of the student career that are associated with certain types of experience and whether specific university events are ongoing. furthermore, this work will establish how students perceive different types of events that they encounter. it is hoped that this approach will be of significant use in terms of informing university policy around student development and retention. as noted, results from this study will have limited generalisability and cannot be easily generalised due to sample size. likewise, the sample was recruited from one uk post1992 university and is not therefore representative of he institutions per se. to help learn general lessons, improved generalisability work might establish if findings are applicable to a larger sample of students. similarly, a larger sample would make it possible to establish if there are between group differences amongst student perceptions of the student experience. again, research is currently being undertaken around these areas. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 15 briggs and pritchett a comparison of staff perceptions and student experiences therefore, to the extent that the findings reported above are representative, the following recommendations might be tentatively adduced: learning developers should actively consider what factors could bias their understanding of university students’ experience and look for ways in which a better appreciation of what students encounter and experience can be developed. this might involve making use of existing resources such as, the student transition and retention (star) project (cook, 2006). staff might consider setting up working groups that allow colleagues from different university departments to share experiences of working with students. similarly, student focus groups could be used to identify what issues affect students as they move through their studies; results could then be disseminated to university staff. periodic updating of staff knowledge of student difficulties through staff development activities might be employed. such activities could involve representatives from less wellknown areas of the university (in some cases this could include a learning development unit) formally meeting with colleagues to discuss what service they provide. the focus of such training could be based on results from ‘in-house’ student satisfaction questionnaires or findings from national student surveys. undertaking this type of staff development activity will help to eliminate out-of-date stereotypes associated with the university experience that might influence how student learning is promoted and supported. conclusion although only a pilot study, this research has raised a number of important issues associated with what students experience during university and how this is perceived by university staff. findings clearly indicate that students experience a wide range of difficulties during their time at university. reassuringly, university staff generally have an accurate and broad understanding of many events that comprise the student experience. however, there would appear to be areas where staff do not accurately perceive students’ university experience. it is argued that knowledge gaps of this nature could potentially affect how effectively students are supported in certain aspects of their studies. it is planned that through subsequent work a greater and more detailed understanding of many of the issues raised by this article will emerge. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 16 briggs and pritchett a comparison of staff perceptions and student experiences references andrews, b. and wilding, j.m. (2004) ‘the relation of depression and anxiety to life-stress and achievement in students’, british journal of psychology 95 pp 509-521. anonymous. (2006) ‘long hours and soaring debts are ‘lethal cocktail’ for students’, nursing standard 21(14-16) pp 6. carney, c., mcneish, s. and mccoll, j. (2005) ‘the impact of part time employment on students’ health and academic performance: a scottish perspective‘, journal of further and higher education 29(4) pp 307-319. charlton, j.p., barrow, c. and hornby-atkinson, p. (2006) ‘attempting to predict withdrawal from higher education using demographic, psychological and educational measures‘, research in post-compulsory education 11(1) pp 31-47. christie, h., cree, v.e., hounsell, j., mccune, v. and tett, l. (2006) ‘from college to university: looking backwards, looking forwards‘, research in post-compulsory education 11(3) pp 351-365. christie, h., munro, m. and fisher, t. (2004) ‘leaving university early: exploring the differences between continuing and non-continuing students’, studies in higher education 29(5) pp 617-636. christie, h., munro, m. and rettig, h. (2002) ‘accommodating students‘, journal of youth studies 5(2) pp 209-235. christie, h., munro, m. and wager, f. (2005) ‘‘day students’ in higher education: widening access students and successful transitions to university life’, international studies in sociology of education 15(1) pp 3-29. cook, t. (2006) student transition and retention (the star project). online: http://www.ulster.ac.uk/star/index.htm (accessed: 13 december 2009). journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 17 http://www.ulster.ac.uk/star/index.htm briggs and pritchett a comparison of staff perceptions and student experiences cooke, r., barkham, m., audin, k., bradley, m. and davy, j. (2004) ‘how social class differences affect students’ experiences of university’, journal of further and higher education 28(4) pp 407-421. curtis, s. (2005) ‘support for working undergraduates: the view of academic staff’, education and training 47(7) pp 496-505. curtis, s. and shani, n. (2002) ‘the effect of taking paid employment during term-time on students’ academic studies‘, journal of further and higher education 26(2) pp 130138. department for education and skills (2003) widening participation in higher education. online: http://www.dfes.gov.uk/hegateway/uploads/ewparticipation.pdf (accessed: 20 january 2009). gibbs, g. (2006) ‘why assessment is changing’, pp.11-22, in bryan, c. and clegg, k. (eds.) innovative assessment in higher education. london: routledge. glaser, b.g. and strauss, a.l. (1967) the discovery of grounded theory: strategies for qualitative research. usa: aldine publishing company. haggis, t. and pouget, m. (2002) ‘trying to be motivated: perspectives on learning from younger students accessing higher education’, teaching in higher education 7(3) pp 323 336. higher education funding council for england (1997) research series m8/97: the participation of non-traditional students in higher education. online: http://www.hefce.ac.uk/pubs/hefce/1997/m8_97.htm (accessed: 20 january 2009). higher education funding council for england (2006) widening participation: a review: report to the minister of state for higher education and lifelong learning by the higher education council for england. online: http://www.hefce.ac.uk/widen/aimhigh/wpfinalreview.pdf (accessed: 20 january 2009). journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 18 http://www.dfes.gov.uk/hegateway/uploads/ewparticipation.pdf http://www.hefce.ac.uk/pubs/hefce/1997/m8_97.htm http://www.hefce.ac.uk/widen/aimhigh/wpfinalreview.pdf briggs and pritchett a comparison of staff perceptions and student experiences higher education funding council for england (2007) higher education survey reveals continued student satisfaction. online: http://www.hefce.ac.uk/news/hefce/2007/nss.htm (accessed: 20 january 2009). hughes, s.j. (2005) ‘student attendance during college-based lectures: a pilot study’, nursing standard 19(47) pp 41 49. hunt, a., lincoln, i. and walker, a. (2004) ‘term-time employment and academic attainment: evidence from a large-scale survey of undergraduates at northumbria university‘, journal of further and higher education 28(1) pp 3-18. hutchings, m. (2003) ‘financial barriers to participation’, pp. 155-173, in archer, l., hutchings, m. and ross, a. (eds.) higher education and social class: issues of exclusion and inclusion. trowbridge: routledge farmer. mackie, s.e. (2001) ‘jumping the hurdles – undergraduate student withdrawal behaviour‘, innovations in education and teaching international 38(3) pp 265-276. metcalf, h. (2003) ‘increasing inequality in higher education: the role of term-time working’, oxford review of education 29(3) pp 315-329. ozga, j. and sukhnandan, l. (1998) ‘undergraduate non-completion: developing an explanatory model‘, higher education quarterly 52(3) pp 316-333. pollock, i. (2006) new students face future of debts. online: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/5274342.stm (accessed: 20 january 2009). rickinson, b. and rutherford, d. (1995) ‘increasing undergraduate student retention rates‘, british journal of guidance and counselling 23(2) pp 161-172. roberts, c., watkin, m., oakey, d. and fox, r. (2003) supporting students’ ‘success’: what can we learn from persisters? online: http://usir.salford.ac.uk/1208/1/ece_paper_2003.pdf (accessed: 13 december 2009). journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 19 http://www.hefce.ac.uk/news/hefce/2007/nss.htm http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/5274342.stm http://usir.salford.ac.uk/1208/1/ece_paper_2003.pdf briggs and pritchett a comparison of staff perceptions and student experiences sayer, m., chaput de saintonge, m., evans, d. and wood, d. (2002) ‘support for students with academic difficulties‘, medical education 36 pp 643-650. storm, m.d. (1973) ‘videotape and the attribution process: reversing actors’ and observers’ points of view‘, journal of personality and social psychology 27(2) pp 165-175. tinto, v. (1975) ‘dropout from higher education: a theoretical synthesis of recent research‘, review of educational research 45(1) pp 89-125. wilcox, p., winn, s. and fyvie-gauld, m. (2005) ‘it was nothing to do with the university, it was the people: the role of social support in the first-year experience of higher education‘, studies in higher education 30(6) pp 707-722. yorke, m. (1999a) ‘student withdrawal during the first year of higher education in england’, journal of institutional research in australia, [online], http://www.aair.org.au/jir/may99/yorke.pdf [accessed: 21 march 2007]. yorke, m. (1999b) leaving early: undergraduate non-completion in higher education. great britain: falmer press. yorke, m. (2000a) ‘the quality of the student experience: what can institutions learn from data relating to non-completion?’, quality in higher education 6(1) pp 61-75. yorke, m. (2000b) ‘smoothing the transition into higher education: what can be learned from student non-completion?’, journal of institutional research 9(1). yorke, m. and longden, b. (2004) ‘why students leave their programmes’, pp. 103 – 119, in yorke, m. and longden, b. (eds.) retention and student success in higher education. cornwall: society for research into higher education and open university press. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 20 http://www.aair.org.au/jir/may99/yorke.pdf briggs and pritchett a comparison of staff perceptions and student experiences author details steve briggs currently works as a learning development tutor in pad (the professional and academic development team) based at the university of bedfordshire. he is currently undertaking a part time phd investigating the nature and timing of events associated with studying at university and how these shape student development. norma pritchett is dean of students at the university of bedfordshire. she is a chartered psychologist with interests in the psychology of teaching and learning in higher education. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 21 a comparison of staff perceptions and student experiences of issues associated with university study abstract introduction method and results phase i – scope phase i – participants students staff phase i – data collection and analysis phase i – results phase ii – overview phase ii – participants phase ii – data collection and analysis phase ii – results summary discussion conclusion references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 16: december 2019 ________________________________________________________________________ investigating impact: exploring the effect of ‘open’ support on student success jennie rose steres blake university of manchester nicola grayson university of manchester sami karamalla-gaiballa university of manchester abstract traditional investigations into the impact of skills support on student success tend to focus on embedded or curriculum linked modes of delivery. the subject of this investigation concerns a study of the impact of ‘open’ support delivered through the university of manchester library’s my learning essentials skills programme (mle). mle is a blended service providing both face-to-face and online support through two dominant pathways: one which is embedded in the curriculum and one which is ‘open to all’ regardless of degree programme or level of study. the ‘open’ nature of this type of support and the variety amongst the student population who engage with it means that measuring the impact on areas such as attainment has always been difficult. this article will present the results of a small study that investigated a specific cohort of undergraduate students in order to assess whether connections could be drawn between attendance at mle ‘open’ workshops and degree classification. although the cohort investigated was quite small, there is evidence of significant positive impact on student attainment as a result of engagement with the mle programme. the data was run through a regression analysis that controlled for factors that could influence attainment and compared attendees of mle open workshops with those who did not attend. beyond the results of the regression analysis the study reveals interesting data around student uptake of mle as a service and presents the methodology used, the results gained, and the lessons learned throughout the process. blake, grayson, karamalla-gaiballa investigating impact: exploring the effect of ‘open’ support on student success papers journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 2 key words: academic development; intervention; impact; open; regression; attainment; undergraduate. introduction with nearly 40,000 students enrolled in its degree programmes, the university of manchester is one of the largest single-site universities in the uk. the student body is diverse, as are the requirements for its degree programmes, and the demands for academic support reflect these needs. this is compounded by recent changes to disability support and the recognised needs of students with learning difficulties (mortimore and crozier, 2006). any support that seeks to address the campus as a whole must therefore be flexible and accessible (without presenting itself as generic or remedial) and able to respond to demands put upon it by manchester’s student body. the support must recognise the needs of the learners and utilise the available research to inform practice, but due to the size and diversity of the student population it needs to serve (and the size of the campus), the support offered cannot depend on resource-heavy interventions such as one-to-one drop ins or individual proofreading support (howard-jones et al., 2018). one of the central support programmes is the university of manchester library’s my learning essentials (mle). mle is now just over six years old and follows a blended learning model. it encompasses face-to-face workshops, limited one-to-one support and open online resources that address a broad range of topics. topics covered range from the traditional information literacy areas such as searching and referencing, to academic skills such as writing and critical analysis, through to well-being support that focuses on perfectionism, procrastination, and managing academic pressure. it is important to note that while the well-being workshops focus on areas such as procrastination or academic pressure, they follow the mle model of addressing these topics through the development of specific skills and strategies and tend to focus on the academic implications of these behaviours. the face-to-face and online support embraces interactivity and promotes key aspects of learning as a process of partnership and co-creation (blake and illingworth, 2015). both also incorporate aspects of nancy fisher and douglas frey’s ‘release of responsibility’ blake, grayson, karamalla-gaiballa investigating impact: exploring the effect of ‘open’ support on student success papers journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 3 model, which sees learning as a process that ends with participants confidently employing new knowledge independently (frey and fisher, 2013). as a whole, the mle programme is responsive and commits to a deliberate integration of the student voice both through an emphasis on co-creation in learning and through the integration of student feedback to directly shape the design of learning resources and the delivery of support (grayson et al., 2018). mle has two distinct avenues through which students and staff access its resources. ‘embedded’ support is delivered through face-to-face teaching and online resources, which are worked into and aligned with courses (or modules) at the request of academic staff. the embedded support can be online only or ‘blended’ and typically involves a partnership between library staff (who design and deliver the sessions) and academics who are teaching on the course/module. participants accessing embedded support are almost always from the same subject area and working at the same level of study. in contrast, the ‘open’ support comprises online resources that are freely available to all and can be self-selected through the library website, short drop-in support which is open to all students, and face-to-face workshops. in the face-to-face open workshops, students from any degree programme and working at any level of study attend together, and the focus is on enabling participants to apply new or improved skills to their own study. the focus for this small study is the mle open workshops (excluding the one-to-one drop-in support). although we were keen to see the results, we also felt it was important to explore different methods of evaluating an open and self-selecting resource. in the end, this study specifically seeks to explore how impact can be investigated when dealing with ‘open’ learning support in contrast to traditional modes of investigating impac,t which tend to focus on the delivery of support which is ‘embedded’. it will present an understanding of the attendee profile data of participants who engage with the open learning service and outline the impact of participants’ use of multiple face-to-face mle workshops. this study is very much seen as an exploratory first step, not only to understand the service and its impact on the participants engaging with it, but also to examine the different methodologies and models that may be used to assess study support. it is our hope that the results of this study will be useful for those assessing similar work and that our methods can make a positive contribution to the ongoing conversation of how to define, present, and articulate the worth of skills support and, in turn, of learning development. blake, grayson, karamalla-gaiballa investigating impact: exploring the effect of ‘open’ support on student success papers journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 4 the tension between openness and demonstrable impact in order to understand the contextual landscape of the data and gain a holistic understanding of the mle service, a small analysis was conducted on those who had selfselected to attend the open workshops. we examined a specific cohort of participants and conducted a regression analysis to compare mle attendees with non-attendees in relation to attainment. the objective in doing this was to identify any correlation between the use of mle as a service and degree classification. there is a significant tension between delivering an ‘open to all’ service and gathering adequate data in order to understand the reach, breadth, and impact of such a service. as the wealth of support offered through mle open workshops differs in content (e.g., it can be focused on academic skills, information literacy, referencing, or well-being support) and students from any cohort and at any level of study can attend, it is a significant challenge to try to gain insights and draw connections that might be more easily drawn in relation to, e.g., attendance at ‘embedded’ sessions. with support embedded in the academic programme, participants can be tracked longitudinally to examine any links between the support provided and specific assessment or learning outcomes (wingate, 2006). however, with the open support workshops offered by mle, students self-identify their learning needs and then choose to engage in community with others from different schools and who are working at various levels (undergraduate, post-graduate, and phd). while essential to reaching the students and staff at the university, this structure does not necessarily enable mle as a service to easily access the type of data and information that could allow for any definitive causal or correlative impact work. since the launch of mle in 2013, the open strand has gathered attendance data in the form of student id numbers alongside attendee behaviour data, which can be accessed from our booking system. the numbers are anonymised and, by using them as our data points, we are able to examine other aspects of the participants’ make-up (such as gender) without personally identifying the student. access to this information has allowed us to see who is attending the open workshops (in terms of their faculty/school and level of blake, grayson, karamalla-gaiballa investigating impact: exploring the effect of ‘open’ support on student success papers journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 5 study), which sessions these particular students are selecting and how often they are attending. in addition, we seek to understand the participants’ responses to the workshops themselves and to do this we designed a 90-second ‘quick impact’ survey, which participants complete directly after attending a session (which has a high response rate of approximately 66%). the short survey is followed up with a longer survey sent by email (which has a lower response rate of around 17%) but allows participants to give more detailed response and features a formative feedback mechanism to enable attendees to feed into the support on offer. we do this to reflect known best practice and so that they can let us know if there is anything else that they need support with (hattie and timperley, 2007). however, both these surveys look mainly at engagement on the day or self-reported change. in 2016, to improve the quality of our analysis, we reviewed the mechanisms used to gather impact and feedback of mle and a series of changes were made. the ‘quick impact’ survey was aligned with the kirkpatrick model for evaluating training programmes (kirkpatrick and kirkpatrick, 2006), the longer email survey was revised to support a more detailed understanding of participants’ responses, and a series of interviews were conducted with pass (peer assisted study support) leaders who attended mle sessions as part of their training. pass leaders are drawn from undergraduate programmes (years two and above) to support year one students in time-tabled sessions within their schools and were selected for the interviews because of their close connection to the wider support network on campus. all this work enriched our understanding of the service but did little to help us create predictive models or see if that was even possible given the constraints of our data. seeking to address that lack, we undertook a deeper analysis of the attendee profile data. the review of the mle feedback and data collection led to partnerships with two key central services: widening participation and the directorate of planning support. the partnership with manchester’s widening participation and recruitment (wp) team meant that we were able to use discoverer (a tool used internally to analyse datasets) and this enabled us to access more detailed information about the mle attendee population, e.g.: year of study, mature student status, international status, and whether participants had blake, grayson, karamalla-gaiballa investigating impact: exploring the effect of ‘open’ support on student success papers journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 6 engaged with any widening participation initiatives at a university or school level. as the directorate of planning support has access to official higher education statistics agency (hesa) return data (which is the official and centralised data-set for higher education institutions in the uk and thus provides raw data in relation to exams and student attainment), we worked with them to analyse the larger mle attendee data-set to understand its significance and to investigate ways of measuring the impact of mle as a supportive intervention. historically, we had struggled to find a methodology that would allow us to make strong statements about the impact of the open workshops on student attainment. as is common across the sector, it has become increasingly important to show robust analysis of services and resources. through the ‘quick impact’ surveys we asked how participants felt the session had run on the day and whether they had any suggestions for improvement, and these questions are useful for service improvement and management of the programme. however, the surveys did little to tell us what was actually happening to participants after they attended our sessions. therefore, we could not claim that mle was helping them to achieve any personal or academic goals; this issue is well-recognised in relation to measuring support of any kind, from the academic support offered via mle to continuing professional development (spowart et al., 2017). the new partnerships we developed with the directorate of planning support and the wp team meant that we were able to run three years’ worth of attendance data through discoverer using their more comprehensive datasets and further understand our attendee population. in addition, by using the hesa data, we were able to connect the student id numbers of mle attendees to the degree classifications they obtained. establishing a link between our attendee population and their results then enabled us to work with the directorate of planning support to conduct a correlation analysis using regression modelling. working in partnership to quantify impact in an effort to move beyond how participants felt on the day, we decided to focus on the attendance data gathered for each workshop. in order to truly understand the attendance data we were gathering, we worked with the directorate of planning support to devise an appropriate methodology that we could build on in future years and that would signal the blake, grayson, karamalla-gaiballa investigating impact: exploring the effect of ‘open’ support on student success papers journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 7 start of a longitudinal study on the impact of the mle open programme. the methodology we decided upon constituted a significant reduction in our sample size (reducing it from 8,244 attendees which we saw over the first three years of the programme to 856 attendees who fit the analysable profiles) and the rationale behind this decision was to establish a sustainable process for exploring the impact of students’ attendance at mle open workshops on their results. however, the historical data excluded from the scope of this report is still available (so that further analysis may be carried out at a later date). the primary objective behind the work done to analyse the attendee data has been to investigate the following questions:  who we are supporting?  what are the implications?  can we tie the support to learning, retention, and results?  how do we know? the study uses the first three years’ worth of data gathered from the mle open programme workshops to present a picture of who is attending (via the demographic details of the attendee population in comparison to the wider university population) in order to assess what effects mle may be having on attendees (particularly in respect to attainment). we focused on these two aspects in order to understand the ways in which the participants of mle workshops reflect the make-up of the current student body and to begin to sketch a line between attendance of the skills support workshops and student achievement. the study focuses on:  one cohort of full-time undergraduate students (ugs) enrolled in 2013/14 for the duration of their three-year course.  three cohorts of full-time postgraduate taught masters and pgce students (pgts) studying for one year (for 2013-14, 2014-15, and 2015-16). blake, grayson, karamalla-gaiballa investigating impact: exploring the effect of ‘open’ support on student success papers journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 8  two cohorts of full-time postgraduate research students (pgrs) on three-year courses tracking their usage in the first two years of their studies (those who started 2013-14 and 2014-15). though our initial sample was significantly reduced, using this more limited sample enables the claims we can make about mle to have more credibility. for example, if we are looking at a full cohort of ugs it is easier to compare those who attended mle workshops with those who did not, and through the use of regression modelling (which helps to control for other influencing factors such as tariff entry data, disability status, domicile, gender, and mature status) we are able to see whether attendance of mle workshops results in a higher or lower probability of attendees gaining a first class degree. because the open nature of the workshops meant typical longitudinal studies would be difficult, we were unable to base our methodology strictly on previous studies. we chose to use a regression analysis because we wanted to explore what it could tell us about the relationships between the variables, and because it allowed us to account for variables that are known to have an impact on attainment. we also sought to better understand the attendees of the workshops by creating attendee profiles. in this case, the three groups analysed were:  full time ugs enrolled in 2013-14: 362 mle attendees were compared to the wider university population of 3,669 in this category (table 1).  full time pgt masters (and pgce) students: 276 mle attendees (total for three cohorts) were compared to a wider university population of 4,200 (table 2).  full time pgr students: 218 mle attendees (total for two cohorts) were compared to a wider university population of 1,109 (table 3). first degree 2013/14 entrants. table 1. mle users in the first degree entrants 2013 population. categories count % of mle % of uom population multiple user 139 38.4% 3.8% single user 223 61.6% 6.1% mle user total 362 9.9% non user 3307 90.1% university total 3669 100.0% blake, grayson, karamalla-gaiballa investigating impact: exploring the effect of ‘open’ support on student success papers journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 9 postgraduate taught full-time students of 2013/14, 2014/15, and 2015/16. table 2. postgraduate taught mle users in the three years. type of mle user 2013/14-count 2013/14-% 2014/15-count 2014/15-% 2015/16-count 2015/16-% multiple user 153 3.6% 185 3.9% 251 5.0% single user 123 2.9% 172 3.6% 278 5.6% mle total 276 6.6% 357 7.5% 529 10.6% non-user 3924 93.4% 4400 92.5% 4456 89.4% uom total 4200 100.0% 4757 100.0% 4985 100.0% table 3. postgraduate research mle users in the two years analysed. type of mle user 2013/14 2014/15 total 2013/14 2014/15 total multiple user 46 67 113 8.6% 11.6% 10.2% single user 49 56 105 9.2% 9.7% 9.5% mle total 95 123 218 17.9% 21.3% 19.7% non-user 437 454 891 82.1% 78.7% 80.3% uom total 532 577 1109 100.0% 100.0% 100.0% the mle population in each area was compared to the wider university population in order to establish whether cohorts such as mature students, international students, and others were proportionally represented in the former. the comparison enabled us to demonstrate that specific groups are receiving support through mle and that the programme is fulfilling its role as an intervention with strategic importance for the library and the wider university (particularly in respect to groups which the university has identified as a concern in relation to differential attainment). it provides a valuable insight into who accesses the support as well as giving us a chance to demonstrate the impact the programme is having. matching behaviour to student profiles allows for a more nuanced view of the quantitative data so that we understand not only who is using the face-to-face element of the open programme but also how it is being used. our analysis can thereby move from summative statements such as ‘all faculties and degree programmes use mle’ to a much more useful narrative around the fact that certain cohorts, from certain areas, use mle in a specific way. the first picture is a gratifying one, but the second allows for a much deeper analysis of the effects of the service on the participants. results of the analysis blake, grayson, karamalla-gaiballa investigating impact: exploring the effect of ‘open’ support on student success papers journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 10 the data for the cohort of undergraduates from 2013-16 was run against the hesa return data and regression modelling was used to control for factors influencing attainment so that mle attendees could be compared to non-attendees to assess whether attendance at mle workshops has any influence on degree outcome. the regression analysis focused solely on the undergraduate cohort. in respect to undergraduates, 9.9% of those completing during the cohort analysed accessed the mle workshops. those from the school of social sciences (soss) and alliance manchester business school (ambs) are over-represented proportionally in the mle attendee population with the school of arts languages and cultures (salc) as the most under-represented school. well-being sessions were the most common workshops (mostly being accessed in the third year of study) but this behaviour coincides with changes in the nature of the support on offer, e.g., when the counselling service became a bigger part of the mle delivery team in 2014/15. both international and eu (european union) students are over-represented in the mle population; international students are over-represented as multiple users and eu students as both single and multiple users. students with a known disability are slightly under-represented (6.4% of mle users compared to 6.9% of wider university population), but mature students are overrepresented and more likely to be multiple users. non-white students are also overrepresented as attendees and all ethnic minorities (especially black students) are more likely to be multiple users of mle. in order to display the results of the regression model, effects plots were produced to illustrate the strength of the impact of an independent variable on the dependent variable, which was two different measurements across two models: 1) graduating with a first-class degree or not. 2) graduating with a good degree or lower degree. when looking at figure 1 and figure 2 (see below), there is a point representing the probability of gaining a first-class/good degree and a vertical line which represents how confidently the model can predict the effect that the independent variable has on the offer rate. this is known as the 95% confidence interval, meaning we can be 95% confident the blake, grayson, karamalla-gaiballa investigating impact: exploring the effect of ‘open’ support on student success papers journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 11 actual probability of graduating with a first-class degree/or good degree is within the range of the line. smaller sample sizes produce wider confidence intervals. after controlling for other factors (such as academic school, disability status, gender, ucas tariff, age, and domicile group) the effects plot shows that multiple users of mle workshops have a higher probability of graduating with a first-class degree than non-users and the difference between the two groups is one which can be claimed to be statistically significant (figure 1). figure 1. probability of gaining a first. figure 2. probability of gaining a good degree. a regression analysis was also conducted to assess whether multiple users of mle have a higher probability of gaining a good degree: although there is an increased probability amongst repeat users compared to non-attendees, in this instance, due to the sample size, the difference cannot be claimed to be statistically significant (figure 2). in future attempts at this sort of analysis, we intend to make an effort to include part-time students and investigate whether the presence of careers workshops (which moved out of mle in 2014) and the inclusion of workshops led by the disability advisory and support blake, grayson, karamalla-gaiballa investigating impact: exploring the effect of ‘open’ support on student success papers journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 12 service (dass) (which were designed with the mle team and began in 2014/15) shift the results. we envisage that there will now be a proportional over-representation of students with a known disability attending the programme, as in 2014/15 dass began delivering compulsory workshops for students needing to access the service and for those interested in using assistive technology. in addition, we recognise that the cohorts that do not use the face-to-face workshops may be accessing mle online resources, and thus we need to make sure that our statements around correlation are specific to the face-to-face workshops. moving forward with greater understanding this research was always intended to act as an investigation into the potential for analysing the mle open programme as well as considering the impact of the programme itself. with all the difficulties inherent in making correlative (let alone causal) statements around the benefits of skills support (particularly ‘open’ skills support), we wanted to ensure that we were using the data we could gather as effectively as possible. the results of the regression modelling are promising as we can claim that it is likely that mle plays a positive role in supporting its users to obtain a first-class degree, however, we cannot prove causality. the hope is that with the addition of data for three more years (and thus an increased sample size), we will be able to demonstrate an ongoing correlation supported by a wider sample and will be able to claim statistical significance in relation to an increased probability of those who use mle gaining a good degree (as well as those gaining a first-class degree). a continuation of this analysis will be a true test of the programme’s contribution to improving students’ performance and attainment. in addition, the work we have done, and our greater understanding of the mle attendee profile population, has opened up the potential to link mle to work currently being done to address differential attainment at the university. answering the questions the impact of open learning support on attainment can be traced to some extent through correlation analyses, but when you have a commitment to resources which are fully open blake, grayson, karamalla-gaiballa investigating impact: exploring the effect of ‘open’ support on student success papers journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 13 (and also online), guaranteeing that some groups have never used the online resources is difficult. the results of this study are limited to the delivery of face-to-face workshops, but we cannot claim with confidence that those who did not attend the workshops had not engaged with other open, online support offered by mle; it is not possible for us to have a clear ‘control’ group with which to compare those who attended the workshops. in respect to the question ‘who are we supporting?’, the collection and analysis of attendee profile data has enabled us to draw conclusions about who attends and engages with the mle programme so that we can now answer this question to a much greater extent. in respect to ‘what are the implications?’, and ‘can we tie the support to learning, results, and retention?’, the regression analysis has demonstrated that the probability of obtaining a first-class degree was higher for those who were repeat attendees of the mle programme so we now understand more about who we are supporting, and what some of the implications are. furthermore, we now have evidence that mle is supporting groups that the university is targeting in order to try and address the attainment gap. our contribution to the support needed in this area demonstrates the value of our work to the wider university (and the uk higher education sector) as we can clearly demonstrate that students who fall into some of the groups most at risk in relation to the attainment gap are engaging with and benefitting from open skills support where they can work in community with one another to develop new skills and further enhance existing ones. the partnerships we have built with the wp team and the directorate of planning support have given us greater insight into the cohorts we are supporting through mle; the implications of these findings mean that we can now examine areas of under-representation and take steps to address them. in addition, we can effectively demonstrate our value to the academic schools, the student body, and the university as a whole in respect to the benefits gained by those who are self-selecting to attend the support we offer. which leaves the question ‘how do we know?’. through the ‘quick impact’ survey, the longer email survey and the deeper analysis of our attendee profile data combined, we can connect the support we offer through mle to learning and to results, but there is still a lot of work to do to ensure that we are supporting the university and the groups most at risk particularly in regard to retention. although the links we have drawn and the connections we can demonstrate (so far) rest firmly within the bounds of correlation (and not causality), the strength of the correlations we can demonstrate and our sample sizes are both on the blake, grayson, karamalla-gaiballa investigating impact: exploring the effect of ‘open’ support on student success papers journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 14 rise, and it is our sincere hope that others wishing to create similar programmes might use this study as a supporting factor in the justification of their potential to significantly impact attainment. our final question remains unanswered for now but we have nonetheless taken some positive steps in relation to measuring our worth and the worth of the work we do for our students. for the future even with a small sample size, the results of this study have enabled us to demonstrate that mle is an important part of the support offered to students at the university of manchester. it has brought us, as learning developers into conversations around differential attainment, teaching excellence, widening access, progression, and curriculum development. it has brought the work that we do out of the library so that we now participate in a number of other key initiatives both university and sector-wide. because of its commitment to enfranchising the student voice and because of the rigorous work we are doing to evaluate and research the effects of the service, mle is now part of the university’s official access and participation plan for widening participation work. we have begun to move forward with our impact work and we are looking at other methodologies for evaluation. for example, we have used our more recent data to investigate other ways to draw conclusions about correlation between use of my learning essentials and other variables, including a spearman’s rank correlation, a numerical measure of statistical dependence. the initial results are promising and have allowed us to make further supporting statements in relation to the strength of the connection between student attainment and the use of the mle open workshops. if we had remained content to simply assess how things went or even to understanding merely who attended the mle open workshops, we could paint an incomplete, if pleasant, picture of what actually happens via our skills support programme. we would have been able to make important claims about who we support and what they think about our work, but we would not have been able to take the next steps and make larger, more generalisable statements about the service as a whole and about the impact an ‘open’ skills programme where students self-select the support they require can have. further work is needed, and it is hoped that we (and others) will continue this work, but the initial blake, grayson, karamalla-gaiballa investigating impact: exploring the effect of ‘open’ support on student success papers journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 15 steps we have taken have had a positive impact both on how the mle open support is received by students (and staff) and on how evaluation and impact measures are valued across the university (e.g., our work has prompted similar studies to be undertaken in other areas and we are often asked to consult and support those running the studies). we see the analysis we have conducted as an important addition that supplements and strengthens the story-telling and qualitative work we regularly engage in around skills support and learning development. we need to be gathering data in relation to all those who attend or engage with our support (whether ‘open’ or ‘embedded’), and, where possible, design our programmes to support data collection so that we can share gains we have made and insights we have discovered. we need to work in partnership across our universities and across the he sector to pool our skills, understanding, and resources, and make the most of our institutional expertise (particularly with respect to data analysts) by working in partnership with other departments to assess whether the systems they use can help us to demonstrate our value and to understand the effect that the support we deliver is having on those who attend it beyond what they report through feedback. learning developers can make a positive contribution to the conversations around metrics that are currently happening (in relation to resources and funding) and in order to strengthen our position we need to share what we have learnt and collaborate across institutions. if we work together to connect and share evaluation measures across the sector, we can collectively show the impact of the type of support we offer, allowing us to demonstrate the extent to which it is valued in community. often student support seems relegated to something that is ‘nice to have’ or is ‘only for certain cohorts’. we wish to challenge these assumptions by arguing that any student, regardless of their background or degree programme, should have access to support and services which can make their time at university a success; we can play a role in maximising their chances of success by giving them the power to self-select the support they need, when they need it. references blake, j. and illingworth, s. (2015) ‘interactive and interdisciplinary student work: a facilitative methodology to encourage lifelong learning’, widening participation and lifelong learning, 17(2), pp. 108–118. blake, grayson, karamalla-gaiballa investigating impact: exploring the effect of ‘open’ support on student success papers journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 16 fisher, d. and frey, n. (2013) better learning through structured teaching: a framework for the gradual release of responsibility. 2nd edn. alexandria, va: ascd. grayson, n. j., blake, j. and stock, m. (2018) ‘the co-creation of exam support: students as partners in the research, planning, design and quality assurance of learning resources’, the journal of educational innovation, partnership and change, 4(1). availabe at: doi: 10.21100/jeipc.v4i1.767 (accessed: 10 december 2019). hattie, j. and timperley h. (2007) 'the power of feedback', review of educational research, 77(1), pp. 81-112. howard-jones, p., ioannou, k., bailey, r., prior, j., yau, s. h., & jay, t. (2018). 'applying the science of learning in the classroom', impact: journal of the charted college of teachers, 18(2), p. 19 kirkpatrick, d. l. and kirkpatrick, j. d. (2006) evaluating training programs: the four levels. 3rd edn. san francisco: berrett-koehler. mortimore, t. and crozier, w. r. (2006) ‘dyslexia and difficulties with study skills in higher education’, studies in higher education, 31(2), pp. 235–251. spowart, l., winter, j., turner, r., muneer r., mckenna c. and kneale p. (2017) ‘evidencing the impact of teaching-related cpd: beyond the “happy sheets”’, international journal for academic development, 22(4), pp. 360–372. wingate, u. (2006) ‘doing away with “study skills”’, teaching in higher education, 11(4), pp. 457–469. author details jennie blake is the learning development manager at the university of manchester library. she is a senior fellow of the higher education academy and a national teaching blake, grayson, karamalla-gaiballa investigating impact: exploring the effect of ‘open’ support on student success papers journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 17 fellow and has taught and researched in education for nearly twenty years. she is particularly interested in the power of collaboration and inclusive and accessible materials and teaching to widen participation and support student success. nicola grayson is a learning developer with expertise in measuring impact and researcher development. she is a senior fellow of the higher education academy and works as an associate lecturer teaching philosophy in addition to supporting the design, delivery, and evaluation of the university of manchester library’s learning programmes. sami karamalla-gaiballa is a data analyst in the equality, diversity and inclusion team at the university of manchester. he focuses on statistical analysis and building models which help identify areas of underrepresentation of protected characteristics, potential bias in decision making and evaluation of equality policy in relation to student attainment as well as participation, employees’ progression, and research strategy. investigating impact: exploring the effect of ‘open’ support on student success abstract introduction the tension between openness and demonstrable impact working in partnership to quantify impact results of the analysis moving forward with greater understanding answering the questions for the future references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 10: november 2016 critical thinking skills for healthcare a book review of mckendry, s. (2016) critical thinking skills for healthcare. oxon: routledge. isbn: 978-1-138-78752-0. moira s lewitt university of the west of scotland, uk critical thinking is an essential goal of all education, particularly higher education. however it is: a complex and controversial notion that is difficult to define and, consequently, to study. (abrami et al., 2008, p.1103). the critical thinking movement that emerged in north america in the 1980s was characterised by debate around how this concept should be defined, as well as how it should be taught. with these debates in mind, in 1990, a multidisciplinary panel of experts collaborated using the delphi method to come to a consensus that included the following statement: we understand critical thinking to be purposeful, self-regulatory judgement which results in interpretation, analysis, evaluation and inference, as well as explanation of the evidential, conceptual, methodological, criteriological or contextual considerations upon which that judgement is based. (facione, 1990, p.3). this aligns with the ‘student-centred’ definition presented by mckendry in her book, which requires the capacity to: ask awkward or uncomfortable questions and not be dismissed with easy answers; consider issues from an objective viewpoint and evaluate varying perspectives before coming to a balanced judgement that can be substantiated with credible evidence. (p.1). moira s. lewitt critical thinking skills for healthcare journal of learning development in higher education, issue 10: november 2016 2 this book addresses the question of how to think rather than what to think and is most suitable for undergraduates in a healthcare context. chapter one, ‘taking a critical approach in everyday life’, leads the reader in gently, and is very much targeted at less experienced learners. however this is a book that one can certainly ‘dip into’ at any place, and more experienced university students might prefer to start at chapter two, ‘taking a critical approach at university’, in which skills involved in critical thinking are further clarified (p.17):  weighing up an argument from many perspectives.  evaluating evidence.  challenging assumptions (your own, as well as others).  investigating the context of any work or statement.  questioning and examining everything you encounter.  thinking at a deep rather than surface level.  making logical connections between ideas and knowledge.  relating theory to practice (and vice versa). critical thinking skills are more important than ever in clinical practice. in an era of evidence-based medicine and a plethora of practice guidelines and algorithms, it is essential that healthcare practitioners are aware that these do not take all contextual factors into account. this book is timely and very accessible, being well structured around a clear set of learning outcomes (p.5). these form the basis for the following sections, in which i summarise the content of the book, and highlight some of the important messages. recognising critical thinking learning outcome: you will recognise your existing ability as a critical thinker. (p.5). while this is a key theme throughout, two chapters specifically focus on this learning outcome. chapter one fosters a systematic self-evaluation of general critical thinking skills, while chapter two aims to foster a more critical approach in academic work. everyone will relate to the use of: moira s. lewitt critical thinking skills for healthcare journal of learning development in higher education, issue 10: november 2016 3  the toddler question: ‘why?’ (p.24)  the teenage question: ‘so what?’ (p.25) as techniques to foster a critical approach to everything, including the process of reflection (p.102). spotting flaws and inconsistencies in arguments learning outcome: you will be able to spot logical flaws and inconsistencies in arguments. (p.5). in order to be able to identify flaws and inconsistencies in an argument, an understanding of how one is constructed is essential. this is addressed in chapter four, ‘building a rational and credible argument’, wherein the reader is guided through the process of deconstructing an argument. examples of common mistakes in reasoning are also nicely highlighted, chapter-by-chapter:  ad hominem arguments (p.27).  cherry-picking the literature (p.47).  the non sequitur (p.58).  ad populum and received wisdom (p.72).  causation versus correlation (p.85).  representing all sides of an argument equally (p.98).  false cause (p. 107). considering multiple perspectives learning outcome: you will learn to consider health issues from multiple perspectives, weighing up the strengths and weaknesses of a case. (p.5). the fundamental importance of considering different perspectives around healthcare issues is identified from the start and is a key theme throughout the book. chapter three, ‘taking a critical approach to reading’, encourages reading beyond one’s discipline and moira s. lewitt critical thinking skills for healthcare journal of learning development in higher education, issue 10: november 2016 4 profession and the demonstration of criticality through defining and explaining the limits of transferability between discipline areas. critical thinking however requires more than this, and chapter four encourages the use of different sources from diverse areas to build an argument while chapter five, ‘taking a critical approach in assessments’, focuses on how to bring these approaches together in communicating with others. building a convincing argument in assessments learning outcome: you will be able to build a convincing argument in assessments. (p.5). this is a practical book for the undergraduate student for whom assessments are a key driver of learning. while creative thinking is not the same as critical thinking, they overlap and constitute ‘good thinking’. i like the emphasis therefore, in chapter two, on the creation of ‘a novel or unique argument’ (p.18) by the good critical thinker. taken together, chapters four and five facilitate the building of rational and credible arguments. with a view to writing essays, or preparing for exams or presentation, chapter five in particular reminded me how important the process of critical thinking is to learning. this deep approach to learning is based on constructivism, i.e. learners structuring their own understanding based on their experience of the world. developing a range of critical skills for successful study and healthcare practice learning outcome: you will develop a range of critical skills for successful study and healthcare practice. (p.5) critical thinking is described as the ability to grasp inferential connections, which should also be exercised (mulnix, 2012). this exercising of critical skills is considered as an important component of their definition and various facets of this theme are addressed throughout the book. in chapter one, the systematic self-evaluation of general critical thinking skills encourages the reader to identify their own needs for further development and steps to address them. then, shifting from reflection on skills, to practice, i like the simple three-step model of a critical approach outlined in chapter two (pp.17-18): moira s. lewitt critical thinking skills for healthcare journal of learning development in higher education, issue 10: november 2016 5 1. get to the heart of the concept/theory/argument with which you are engaged. 2. analyse and evaluate that concept. 3. synthesise the concept along with others to construct your own argument. chapter three is a strong chapter supporting this learning outcome, as the reader is supported to develop skills in relation their reading. it is written clearly and of sufficient depth for visual and verbal learners. those with a good knowledge of statistics however, should probably avoid the section on critically reading graphs since this is dealt with superficially. this is one topic for which references to other resources would have been helpful to students. on the other hand, the tools suggested for synthesising literature, including guidance towards thematic analysis, were extremely helpful. chapters four and five use examples and activities relevant to healthcare to encourage the reader to deepen and hone critical skills for study and practice. today it is easy to be overwhelmed by the volume of healthcare literature, and as practitioners we will frequently use literature reviews, or perhaps be in a position to write our own. chapter six, ‘taking a critical approach in literature reviews’, is therefore an important one and, in conjunction with chapter seven, ‘taking a critical approach in dissertations’, is a sound introduction for healthcare students and practitioners seeking to increase research skills. reflection is a key component of healthcare practice and chapter eight encourages the reader to take a critical approach to ‘actions, feelings and attitudes’ (p.100), by linking theory to practice, particularly in the writing of reflective assessments. concluding comments undergraduates are constantly asked to evaluate evidence, and to be critically reflective. it is particularly important not only to introduce all healthcare professionals in training to these ideas, but also to facilitate the practice of critical thinking. this book does this successfully. it provides excellent starting points, leading the reader through a variety of concepts and, most importantly, provides practice examples to develop essential skills. moira s. lewitt critical thinking skills for healthcare journal of learning development in higher education, issue 10: november 2016 6 critical thinking, as presented in this book, places the student at the heart of the learning experience. being comfortable with uncertainty and taking responsibility for their own learning are key steps in developing criticality. as the book points out and reinforces, becoming and being comfortable with uncertainty is of critical importance in healthcare: i would certainly prefer to be treated by a professional who questioned, evaluated and made up their own mind rather than someone who blindly followed instructions and believed in absolute certainties in all areas of their work. (p.26). if there is a flaw in the book, it is that it does not include a bibliography or reference to an evidence base. why is this approach to developing critical thinking skills useful? what is the evidence for this? this would have been helpful for teachers who might recommend the book to their students. it would also have been useful for the reader to have a list of resources for further practice. in a book on critical thinking skills, if it is successful, it is inevitable that the reader will apply the principles to the book itself. indeed students with greater self-awareness and understanding of critical thinking as a process would expect to see the evidence on which the definitions and frameworks are based. however the book includes an appropriate caution about the use of frameworks for critical analysis in terms of any kind of formulaic approach: frameworks are there to provoke critical engagement, to assist you in asking the right questions and knowing what to look for with different kinds of research. they do not provide a ready-made template for critical reading, however… frameworks must themselves be used in a critical manner. (p.44). this book is excellent for the independent learner. however, in order to ensure the use of critical thinking skills in healthcare education and practice, greater attention should be paid to the context. there should be greater clarity as to the requirement for critical thinking and the environment necessary to encourage it should be explicitly nurturing. in higher education the language of intended learning outcomes should therefore align appropriately with the outcomes for developing critical thinking. further more it is important that close attention is paid to the design of research that will contribute to the evidence base around the success of interventions supporting the learning of critical thinking skills (beharhorenstein and niu, 2011). in a recent systematic review of knowledge sources used by newly graduated nurses, it was concluded that they tend to: moira s. lewitt critical thinking skills for healthcare journal of learning development in higher education, issue 10: november 2016 7 draw uncritically on the experienced co-worker as primary knowledge source [and clinical practice] needs to provide a supportive environment which nurtures critical thinking. (voldbjerg, 2016, p.1). the development of critical thinking skills oriented towards evolving autonomy or selfregulation, is dependent on sufficient practice. if ‘critical thinking is not a method to be learned, but rather a process’ (simpson and courtney, 2002, p.91), then it is best supported by an approach that inspires and facilitates practice. this book does just that. indeed the principles and exercises in the book are helpful for students beyond healthcare studying in other areas in higher education. references abrami, p.c., bernard, r.m., borokhovski, e., wade, a., surkes, m.a., tamim, r. and zhang, d. (2008) ‘instructional interventions affecting critical thinking skills and dispositions: a stage 1 meta-analysis’, review of educational research, 78(4), pp. 1102-1134. doi: https://doi.org/10.3102/0034654308326084 behar-horenstein, l.s. and niu, l. (2011) ‘teaching critical thinking skills in higher education: a review of the literature’, journal of college learning and teaching, 8(2), pp. 25-42. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.19030/tlc.v8i2.3554 facione, p.a. (1990) critical thinking: a statement of expert consensus for the purposes of educational assessment and instruction. research findings and recommendations. newark, de: american philosophical association. available at: http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ed315423.pdf (accessed: 19 june 2016). mulnix, j.w. (2012) ‘thinking critically about critical thinking’, educational philosophy and theory, 44(5), pp. 464-479. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.14695812.2010.00673.x https://doi.org/10.3102/0034654308326084 http://dx.doi.org/10.19030/tlc.v8i2.3554 http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ed315423.pdf http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1469-5812.2010.00673.x http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1469-5812.2010.00673.x moira s. lewitt critical thinking skills for healthcare journal of learning development in higher education, issue 10: november 2016 8 simpson, e. and courtney, m. (2002) ‘critical thinking in nursing education: literature review’, international journal of nursing practice, 8(2), pp. 89-98. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1046/j.1440-172x.2002.00340.x voldbjerg, s.l., grønkjær, m., sørensen, e.e. and hall, e.o.c. (2016) ‘newly graduated nurses’ use of knowledge sources: a meta-ethnography’, journal of advanced nursing. advance online publication. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/jan.12914 reviewer details moira s lewitt is a professor in interprofessional learning and practice at the university of the west of scotland. http://dx.doi.org/10.1046/j.1440-172x.2002.00340.x http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/jan.12914 critical thinking skills for healthcare recognising critical thinking spotting flaws and inconsistencies in arguments considering multiple perspectives building a convincing argument in assessments developing a range of critical skills for successful study and healthcare practice concluding comments references reviewer details from deficiency to development: the evolution of academic skills provision at one uk university journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 2: february 2010 from deficiency to development: the evolution of academic skills provision at one uk university pat hill university of huddersfield, uk amanda tinker university of huddersfield, uk stephen catterall university of huddersfield, uk abstract this article discusses the context in which study support has emerged in higher education in the uk. within this context the article documents the establishment of a ‘devolved model’ of academic skills at the university of huddersfield. whilst acknowledging that this model is not unique, its formation allows for the exploration of pedagogical and practical issues. it highlights the complexity of providing support which is effective and viable, recognising that the increasing diversity of the student body calls for multiple strategies. an examination of the evolution of the provision at huddersfield illustrates the journey from a focus on student deficit and retention towards one clearly associated with learning development. this model assumes an integrated, flexible and student centred approach within the subject discipline, rather than one which is extra-curricular and may be perceived as remedial. originally predicated on the individual student tutorial and standalone workshop, the provision is now focusing on working within the disciplines to embed academic development within the curriculum. keywords: academic skills provision; learning development; embedding. hill, tinker and catterall from deficiency to development: the evolution of academic skills provision at one uk university introduction the massive increase in uk undergraduate numbers, often referred to as widening participation, has meant a departure from an elitist provision catering for a small minority of the population. this minority, privileged by intellect or social status, was seen as including‘those with ideas, with intellectual creativity and with capacities for cultural innovativeness’ (thompson, 2000:161). higher education now seeks to develop a wider range of individual potential for the benefit of society as a whole (radford et al., 1997:17). there is an argument that even this change has been overtaken by 'a rhetoric of business models and market relations' (walker, 2006: 6) and has become too closely linked with the notion of employability. many of those involved in study support, however, will not see these different purposes of higher education as mutually exclusive, as the question will always be approached from the individual student perspective. if any of these purposes are to be achieved without lowering standards, then a range of support is required to ensure that every learner develops in a way which allows them fully to contribute to and benefit from higher education. this article explores the place of learning development in higher education with particular reference to two issues. the first is the legacy of remedial provision and a move towards development rather than deficiency; the second is how a devolved provision may provide opportunities for an embedded approach which situates academic development within the discipline. beginning with an overview of the contentious issues related to the place of learning development within a higher education framework, there follows a description and evaluation of the model adopted at huddersfield, a post-1992 university with over 24,000 students. the article details the journey from a retention-focused initiative towards an inclusive, responsive and embedded provision aimed at enhancement and achievement for all. the changing face of ‘study support’ in higher education higher education institutions have recognised the need to consider ways in which a greater number of students can be helped to meet the criteria necessary to succeed. this has journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 2 hill, tinker and catterall from deficiency to development: the evolution of academic skills provision at one uk university generated a great deal of research and scholarship. although the majority of the research outlined here is concerned with writing, many of the issues raised are pertinent to all disciplines and skills. lea and street’s much cited work on academic literacies has resulted in a heightened awareness of the need to be more explicit in what is required of students. their insistence on ‘a more encompassing understanding of the nature of student writing within institutional practices, power relations and identities’ (lea and street, 1998: 158) has rightly prompted a more student centred focus which acknowledges different student experiences and rejects a ‘student deficit’ approach. another major shift has been the move away from separate study skills provision to a more embedded approach which sites writing practices at the heart of academic work rather than at the periphery (creme and lea, 1999). a major influence in moving towards the embedding of study support within the curriculum has been insights from the american experience which has seen a shift from separate provision towards writing across the curriculum (wac) and writing in the disciplines (wid) approaches. in a keynote speech to the writing development in higher education conference, david russell of iowa university maintains that ‘the trick is to raise awareness without segregating writing development’ (russell, 1999). in her article ‘doing away with study skills’, wingate draws heavily on this american experience, and on learning theory, to suggest that separate or ‘bolt-on’ study skills provision ‘has severe limitations’ (wingate, 2006: 457). whilst acknowledging these limitations, however, it is important to maintain as wide a range of provision as possible so that students can choose the most appropriate support for their individual learning development. as blythman et al. (2003:196) point out, ‘the key issue is not whether students are suitable for tutoring, but rather how the institution can respond to meet the learning needs of all students’. ganobcsik-williams’ call for a ‘comprehensive, whole institution provision’ (2004:34) is clearly paramount, yet there are many practical and logistical issues which institutions face, even if the pedagogical and epistemological will is in place. this article documents how the university of huddersfield has responded to these challenges as it seeks to meet student needs in a developmental and sustainable way. as noted by wingate (2006: 457), any provision already in place before the large expansion of higher education was firmly based on a remedial approach, as it was assumed that most journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 3 hill, tinker and catterall from deficiency to development: the evolution of academic skills provision at one uk university students coming into higher education would already have the necessary academic skills. remedial provision was generally offered outside the discipline in the form of optional courses provided by support centres and students were identified as failing. wall (2006: xii) indicates the effect of this remedial approach upon student perceptions: non-embedded skills teaching, such as non-curricular writing classes, tends to be perceived negatively by many students. to attend them at all is seen to be a public admission of failure…to attend the writing class on grammar or punctuation, referencing or structuring an essay, is to admit that you can’t do it. you are at university, perhaps even studying english literature, and you cannot perform the basic routines of competence in your subject. there is a growing body of evidence to support an inclusive approach to academic development. research has shown that both traditional and non-traditional students find themselves ill-prepared for the demands of self-directed academic study at this level, with a third of 7,109 survey respondents finding ‘academic work harder than they had expected it to be’ (yorke and longden, 2008: 7). a quality assurance agency (qaa) for higher education review of transition suggests that the discussion should move beyond perceptions of student deficit to one of ’enhancement’, an approach ‘which values and builds on existing strengths, skills and knowledge regardless of learner profile’ (whittaker, 2008: 26). institutions have to find ways of developing students’ learning and writing practices without attracting the traditional stigma associated with such input. in identifying the main areas of contention in the successful provision of study support, blythman et al. (2003: 203) identified ‘five key areas’: (1) geographical and structural location; (2) staffing; (3) co-operation and liaison; (4) resourcing; and (5) strategic factors. all five areas are considered within a broad framework here but have been adapted to illustrate particular circumstances and concepts relevant to the huddersfield case. for instance, in examining the impact of location on provision, the choice of name was also viewed as an important factor in how the provision is perceived. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 4 hill, tinker and catterall from deficiency to development: the evolution of academic skills provision at one uk university challenging different priorities and perceptions the association for learning development in higher education (aldinhe) has recently debated the topics of location and naming. a survey of member institutions conducted by the learning development in higher education network (ldhen, now aldinhe) showed that the majority of over forty respondents had centrally based study support (association for learning development in higher education, 2008). in on-line discussion (ldhen jiscmail discussion, 2007a), the location of support was seen as extremely significant in how that support is perceived. the discussion confirmed that the majority of correspondents were still centrally based in libraries, study skills centres, learning development or support units. some respondents stressed the importance of establishing links with the different departments and the need to become more accessible and visible, citing breakfast clubs and a presence in cafés as one way to reach reluctant students. those based within departments appeared to value the inclusiveness and collaboration that this engendered. overall, location was seen as part of a marketing issue where accessibility, visibility and status are clearly linked with student demand. the name of the service was viewed as another marketing tool in making learning development attractive to students (ldhen jiscmail discussion, 2007b). divergence from a remedial ethos is reflected in the popular choice of the word ‘development’ which has in some instances been specifically chosen to replace ‘support’, both in relation to models of provision and job titles such as ‘learner developers’. acronyms with positive associations are also popular, for example class, wiser, ask, splash and upgrade. the discussion showed that new services were giving a great deal of thought to the choice of a name which would have no corrective or remedial associations. this is an ongoing consideration; as detailed below, huddersfield has academic skills tutors (asts) but there has recently been discussion within the team about whether the word ‘skills’ has the right connotations (see lillis, 2001: 22 for a discussion of ‘writing-as-skill’). another key issue covered by the survey was staffing. data was collected about the level of expertise of those involved and this has implications for the status and role of the service in terms of student perceptions, other staff members and the institution generally. according to the survey, the staff involved in academic development range from part-time hourly paid or journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 5 hill, tinker and catterall from deficiency to development: the evolution of academic skills provision at one uk university fixed contract staff classed as ‘admin’ through to permanent principal lecturers. some institutions recorded only one part-time member of staff whilst at the other end of the scale was a learning development unit with 30 full time members of staff and 30 hourly paid lecturers. as turner (2000: 49) suggests, the changes in higher education ‘as a result of socio-economic forces and the demands of the quality assessment perspective’ are leading to a measurable increase in learning support. the roles asked of these staff might span first year student workshops to extensive staff training and development. the wide variety of provision reflects the post-‘92 university focus on support but increasingly pre-‘92 universities are acknowledging the need for learning development that can be given through a variety of channels. the recent appointment of a learning development adviser at oxford university is a good example of this (oriel college, university of oxford, 2008). finance is another important issue which has implications for the provision of an effective service and the ldhen survey also revealed the variety of funding sources. the sources named included the higher education funding council for england (hefce), the higher education academy, teaching quality enhancement funds (tqef) and widening participation funds as well as ‘centrally funded’, ‘top sliced’ and ‘core’ funding. some institutions showed a mixture of funding which was reviewed within a fixed time period. these resource issues illustrate the complex challenges that face institutions wishing to establish learning support. establishing a devolved provision within the context of these challenges, in 2002 the university of huddersfield implemented a devolved model of academic skills development within subject disciplines. the successful hefce and tqef project bid has resulted in at least one permanent academic skills tutor (ast) in each of its seven schools and two university centres. the key aim of this three year project was to establish ’a distributed academic skills unit‘ (academic skills tutors, university of huddersfield, 2005, title page) for the university. this would provide students with support for the non-subject aspects of their work, with a target of 200 student contacts by the year 2004; a target which has since been dramatically exceeded. despite academic skills provision being commonplace in many universities in a centralised form, the ast appointments were still the subject of controversy in the national press, perpetuating perceptions of a deficiency model: journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 6 hill, tinker and catterall from deficiency to development: the evolution of academic skills provision at one uk university huddersfield university is advertising for ‘academic support tutors’ to help students ‘with grammar’ and ‘to read academic books’. how have we arrived at a state where universities are recruiting remedial teachers to help students with basic reading and writing skills? letter from magill (cited by woodhead, 2002) although the project sought to move away from this climate of student deficit, it has to be acknowledged that addressing retention was an underlying issue. in addition to establishing a devolved academic skills service, part of the project was to develop a diagnostic tool (named the individual learning profile) for all first year undergraduates to enable early identification of students potentially ‘at risk’ of non-progression; this process is still in use in some schools but not all. initially, the role of the academic skills tutor was focused on individual students via one-toone tutorials and driven by the students’ academic needs, usually focused around their assignments. figure 1 below shows the number of requests under various categories in which individual students sought advice: numeracy note takin g tim e managem ent unders tandin g ta sks confidenc e ex am techniques reading academ ic tex presentations gram m ar sou rcing information report w ri ting ac adem ic ref erenci ng es say s s um 2 00 1 00 0 figure 1. areas in which students sought support from their ast during the academic year 2003/04 (academic skills team, university of huddersfield, 2005: 11). journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 7 hill, tinker and catterall from deficiency to development: the evolution of academic skills provision at one uk university the demand for tutorials has successively increased year on year (see figure 2) leading to additional tutor appointments in some schools. the university now has thirteen permanent (eleven full-time equivalent) asts across three different centres (huddersfield, oldham and barnsley). all are appointed on academic contracts and have both teaching and postgraduate qualifications, including four with doctorates. figure 2 illustrates that the rather tentative target of 200 contacts in 2002/03 was grossly underestimated. demand continues to increase, although it should be acknowledged that the number of students seen is still relatively small in proportion to the whole student body. 0 500 1000 1500 2000 2500 3000 3500 4000 4500 5000 2002/03 2003/04 2004/05 2005/06 2006/07 academic year n um be r student numbers tutorials figure 2. growth in tutorials and student numbers, 2002-2007. such one-to-one provision has proved successful in meeting its initial aim of retention. evaluation of the devolved model indicated a correlation between academic skills development and retention; students who had seriously considered leaving their course and then stayed, often attributed this decision to ast support. this figure rose from 57% in 2004, to 74% for 2005 (academic skills team, university of huddersfield, 2005). qualitative comments from students also reflected this: i had seriously considered leaving my course and my academic skills tutor was my first point of contact. without her support and encouragement i would not be here now. before meeting with my academic skills tutor i was going to leave the course. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 8 hill, tinker and catterall from deficiency to development: the evolution of academic skills provision at one uk university i feel that if this support had not been available i would have left after the first few months. this service helps to keep students like me at university. if this service wasn’t available i don’t know what i’d have done to complete. the academic skills tutor has been a lifeline to myself and many others over the past three years, many of whom would have left in the first year, myself included. (academic skills tutors, university of huddersfield, 2005) this contribution to retention and transition was also supported by the qaa in the university’s institutional audit: the university’s internal evaluation of the ast system concluded that the service was highly valued and a major contributor to retaining students at the university; the audit team had no reason to dissent from this finding…it has the capacity to improve the confidence of some first-year students who might otherwise not thrive. overall, it seemed to the team that the university’s development of its ast scheme represented a feature of good practice. (quality assurance agency for higher education, 2004: 24) however, in addition to retention the impact on achievement was also noticeable, with 79% of students saying that the academic skills tutors had made a ‘significant contribution’ to improvement in their coursework (academic skills team, university of huddersfield, 2005). again, this quantitative result was supported by comments from students: the academic skills tutor personalised advice to my specific needs and was able to explain things on a level i was able to understand…i have attained firsts in two modules this year thanks to your help. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 9 hill, tinker and catterall from deficiency to development: the evolution of academic skills provision at one uk university my grades have started to improve and i will be going for advice in my second year. this gives me the confidence to carry on in my university life. [the ast] has helped me achieve grades a and b through the first year as it is scary moving from a level to university level education. he has been very helpful, as i was upset about my first essay. he helped me understand where i had gone wrong. my second essay came back with a high grade due to the help i had received. (academic skills tutors, university of huddersfield, 2005) however successful this has been, the percentage of students seen makes it apparent that this strategy needs to be made more inclusive; increasing tutor numbers to meet individual tutorial demand is not sustainable in terms of cost efficiency and meeting diverse student need. moreover, individual tuition will not suit every style of learning; some students may respond to this informal, personal approach specifically tailored to their own needs whilst other students may seek more independent learning. for instance, evaluation in the school of music, humanities and media in 2004/5 showed a pronounced gender imbalance where female students seeking advice outnumbered male students by five to one. this was addressed by using more in-class activities and focusing promotion on developmental success rather than support; figures for 2007/8 show a marked improvement. multiple strategies are therefore essential in ensuring that learning development becomes an integral part of all student experience. diversity, inclusion and multiple strategies the provision at huddersfield has expanded beyond individual tutorials and stand alone workshops in response to this need. to cater for students who prefer a more formal environment where they can engage in practical exercises, group work and discussion, asts developed a range of strategies, including longer induction sessions, english for academic purposes (eap) courses, workshops tailored and integrated into modules (involving close liaison with course tutors) and module or co-module leadership, including assessment. one journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 10 hill, tinker and catterall from deficiency to development: the evolution of academic skills provision at one uk university useful addition has been a social book-marking site (http://www.del.icio.us.com) which allows all students access to a range of material; this is selected by asts from various websites and grouped under appropriate headings with evaluative comments and, where possible, tailored to the subject discipline. originally used as a stand-alone resource, this is now being more frequently integrated into student tutorials and taught sessions. group sessions foster a developmental ethos, being timely, relevant, linked to the subject curriculum and devolved into each school. in attending such sessions, students also become aware of the ast’s physical location and developmental role within the school. this challenges any traditional perceptions of deficit and encourages students to take advantage of the provision to realise their potential. this is also reflected in how students first make contact with their ast. although course tutors may refer a student who they feel would benefit from additional academic support, a large proportion of students now self-refer, often as a result of ast group sessions, a recommendation to a course cohort by tutors, or student word of mouth (asts often see a particular student, followed by a succession of their peers). although this move from working solely with individuals to incorporate group sessions has been successful, it was recognised that there was still potential to integrate the provision more fully and this has led to further initiatives. embedding and curriculum development the question has progressed to how the nature of the devolved provision can be adapted and further improved rather than whether it should exist at all. current dialogue involves discussion of how academic skills can be further embedded within the curriculum (hill and mullen, 2007; byrne and tinker, 2007). this is working towards the ‘build-up’ model advocated by dowling and ryan (2007: 18) which ‘emphasises the importance of developing learners’ academic skills on a progressive, staged basis throughout their programme of study’. the provision has now changed from being purely focused on students to include engagement with subject discipline staff. these relationships with staff have been developed over a number of years and, as blythman and orr (2006) observe, they can be complex and difficult. there are several schemes involving a wid approach which aim to integrate writing development into subject learning either through staff development or module design (see ganobscik-williams, 2004: 29-35 for an overview and details of initiatives which have been journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 11 hill, tinker and catterall from deficiency to development: the evolution of academic skills provision at one uk university funded). the closer disciplinary links established by having asts within schools would appear to be an advantage; even within a devolved model, however, there are challenges in working with the different perceptions of academic skills provision. staff development on related issues has become a growing element in the work of asts. conversations are becoming more frequent between asts and subject staff at the curriculum development stage, although this is still dependent on recognising timely opportunities and encouraging change with receptive staff. there are currently various initiatives across the university which reflect this collaboration. asts in the business school are co-operating with subject staff to take this concept beyond ‘one-off’ skills sessions to embed both academic skills and personal development planning into specific modules as part of curriculum development for accountancy undergraduates (english and ireland, 2008). in the school of art, design and architecture, a previously stand alone, first year, study skills module has been successfully embedded into subject discipline modules at the most relevant points in year one with plans to take this forward into subsequent years two and three. although embedded, the ‘long-thin’ module is assessed by way of a progressive reflective portfolio in which students articulate and evidence their learning development. they are thus encouraged to view their course programme and learning holistically, recognising links beyond a modular structure (squires et al., 2009). this has proved to be a transformative learning experience for many students: understand what you have actually learnt…helped me see that i have been learning and not noticed [it]. changed how i will record my learning in the future …additionally my formal writing technique has improved. i now understand how i have developed …and shows my achievements…thoughtful and gives direction. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 12 hill, tinker and catterall from deficiency to development: the evolution of academic skills provision at one uk university i’ve found that reflecting on your work allows you to see how and what you can improve and where your strengths lie. i also find it a form of self encouragement and it shows how you are gradually growing. (academic skills tutors, university of huddersfield, 2005) a further example of progress is the request for the asts in the school of music, media and humanities to contribute to a learning and teaching committee working group to discuss specific ways in which learning development can be embedded in first year curricula; two first year modules have been identified as pilots where the asts can work with the module leaders as the curriculum is adapted. these ad hoc initiatives are currently being discussed amongst asts with a view to how school-based conversations can be converted into university-wide strategies. huddersfield is not alone in seeking to establish consistency and parity of student experience across the university. one example is the university of brighton, who had a longstanding ethos of embedded support based around a mixture of carefully designed first year curricula, with staged assignments to help diagnose problems and develop academic skills, personal tutoring and, in some courses, discrete study skills modules, supplemented by some central provision (ridley, 2009). although this approach had ‘gained the university consistently high ratings in external reviews’, brighton decided to survey its provision in response to perceived concerns about increasing demands on staff time and the need to maintain ‘curriculum content and rigour’ (ridley, 2009). this review revealed a great deal of effective study support but marked variations in the student experience across the university, with little cross-referencing between central and local support. one of the key recommendations (since implemented) was for improved coordination and sharing of information and materials across the university. in a bid to foster the desired coordination, asts at huddersfield, although devolved into the schools, work closely as a team and meet on a regular basis to discuss areas of common interest and issues relevant to their work with students. however, recent meetings have highlighted the ambition to translate localised embedding initiatives within schools to a more formal, university-wide provision. the aim is to create sustainable and more systematic journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 13 hill, tinker and catterall from deficiency to development: the evolution of academic skills provision at one uk university embedding of skills at the curriculum development stage without losing discipline-specific focus. as gibbs (2009: 9) suggests: efforts will have to change from working with individual students to working with teachers, courses, degree programmes and the whole institution, in ways that are aligned with other institutional efforts, as part of a broad strategy, and that these efforts will need to be well conceptualised and backed up with convincing empirical evidence of impact. huddersfield appears well-placed to be at the forefront of these changes, and it is recognised that an expanded collection of relevant data could be a way of realising this ‘empirical evidence’, which would contribute to university-wide strategies. conclusion the ‘widening participation’ agenda promoted the view of study support as necessary remedial intervention for non-traditional students who lacked the skills to succeed in higher education. within this climate, the university of huddersfield’s initial response was to focus on students deemed ‘at risk’, with an underlying motivation to address retention. however, in contrast with the more usual central provision, a devolved model where tutors worked within schools was established, giving the advantages of closer links with subject staff and students, and an awareness of specific curriculum and assessment demands. the provision expanded organically through a three-phase journey. an initial concentration on student-centred, individual tutorials was extended to incorporate multiple strategies and work with larger groups. this second phase moved towards a more inclusive and sustainable approach to address diverse student need and to promote achievement and academic development for all. the third phase has recognised the need for integration, and more progressive rather than one-off sessions. although one-to-one sessions are still a major component, as gibbs (2009) predicts, there is now also a focus on staff development, curriculum design and embedding at point of need within the subject discipline. in line with ganobcsik-williams’ call for ‘a whole institution approach’ (2004), our challenge now is to employ best practice from across the university with a focus on teaching processes, staff development and recording documentary journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 14 hill, tinker and catterall from deficiency to development: the evolution of academic skills provision at one uk university evidence. small scale initiatives can then be expanded to achieve more coordination, thus fully realising parity of student experience. references academic skills team, university of huddersfield (2005) tqef project: the establishment of a distributed academic skills unit for the university. unpublished report. university of huddersfield. association for learning development in higher education (2008) working documents: ldhen, january 2008. online: http://www.aldinhe.ac.uk/docs.htm (accessed: 14 april 2008). blythman, m., mullin, j., milton, j. and orr, s. (2003) ‘implementation issues for study support’, pp. 195-208, in bjork, l., brauer, g., rienecker, l. and stray jorgenson, p. (eds.) teaching academic writing in european higher education. usa: kluwer academic publishers. blythman, m. and orr, s. (2006) ‘mrs mop does magic’, zeitschrift schreiben 9 pp 1-8. online: http://www.zeitschrift-schreiben.eu/beitraege/blythman_orr_mrsmop.pdf (accessed: 12 august 2009). byrne, g. and tinker, a.j. (2007) ‘localised ‘one-stop’ shops: a devolved, embedded model of academic skills provision’, crossing boundaries: academic support for the learner in he, middlesex university, hendon, middlesex, 30 june. crème, p. and lea, m.r. (1999) ‘student writing: challenging the myths’, pp. 1-13, in thompson, p. (ed.) academic writing in higher education: perspectives, explorations and approaches. proceedings of the 5th annual writing development in higher education conference. university of reading 1-2 april 1998. reading: centre for applied language studies, university of reading. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 15 http://www.aldinhe.ac.uk/docs.htm http://www.zeitschrift-schreiben.eu/beitraege/blythman_orr_mrsmop.pdf hill, tinker and catterall from deficiency to development: the evolution of academic skills provision at one uk university dowling, l. and ryan, o. (2007) ‘academic skills development and the enhancement of the learning experience’, all ireland society of higher education conference: teaching and learning in changing world of higher education. national university of ireland, maynooth 30-31 august. online: http://www.aishe.org/events/20062007/conf2007/proceedings/paper-32.pdf (accessed: 12 august 2009). english, j. and ireland, c. (2008) ‘developing the tools of the trade: reconciling vocational and academic demands’, ‘doing university’: student transitions and skills in higher education. university of huddersfield, huddersfield 19 march. ganobcsik-williams, l. (2004) a report on the teaching of academic writing in uk higher education. online: http://www.rlf.org.uk/fellowshipscheme/documents/teachingwritingukhe.pdf (accessed: 10 august 2009). gibbs, g. (2009) ‘developing students as learners – varied phenomena, varied contexts and a developmental trajectory for the whole endeavour’, journal of learning development in higher education 1: 1-12. online: http://www.aldinhe.ac.uk/ojs/index.php?journal=jldhe&page=article&op=view&path%5b %5d=30&path%5b%5d=14 (accessed: 17 august 2009). hill, p. and mullen, j. (2007) ‘the study skills conundrum: writing skills an integrated approach’, 4th association for learning development in higher education conference (aldinhe). bournemouth university, bournemouth 12 april. ldhen jiscmail discussion (2007a) ‘location of study skills/learning support’, ldhen jiscmail discussion list, 16-21 february [online]. available e-mail: ldhen@jiscmail.ac.uk (accessed: 21 february 2007). ldhen jiscmail discussion (2007b) ‘service names’, ldhen jiscmail discussion list, 3-4 may [online]. available e-mail: ldhen@jiscmail.ac.uk (accessed: 4 may 2007). journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 16 http://www.aishe.org/events/2006-2007/conf2007/proceedings/paper-32.pdf http://www.aishe.org/events/2006-2007/conf2007/proceedings/paper-32.pdf http://www.rlf.org.uk/fellowshipscheme/documents/teachingwritingukhe.pdf http://www.aldinhe.ac.uk/ojs/index.php?journal=jldhe&page=article&op=view&path%5b%5d=30&path%5b%5d=14 http://www.aldinhe.ac.uk/ojs/index.php?journal=jldhe&page=article&op=view&path%5b%5d=30&path%5b%5d=14 mailto:ldhen@jiscmail.ac.uk mailto:ldhen@jiscmail.ac.uk hill, tinker and catterall from deficiency to development: the evolution of academic skills provision at one uk university lea, m. r. and. street, b. v. (1998) ‘student writing in higher education: an academic literacies approach’, studies in higher education 23 (2) pp 157-172. lillis, t (2001) student writing: access, regulation, desire. london: routledge oriel college, university of oxford (2008) learnsmart: getting the most out of oxford. online: http://www.oriel.ox.ac.uk/content/294 (accessed: 14 april 2009). quality assurance agency for higher education (2004) university of huddersfield, institutional audit, december 2004. online: http://www.qaa.ac.uk/reviews/reports/institutional/huddersfield04/huddersfield04.pdf (accessed: 10 august 2009). radford, j., raaheim, k., de vries, p. and williams, r. (1997) ‘quantity and quality in higher education’, higher education policy, series 40. london: jessica kingsley. ridley, p. (2009) e-mail to pat hill, 7 august. russell, d. (1999). ‘learning to write and writing to learn across the university: the us experience’, pp. 1-13, in graal, m. and clark, r. (eds.) proceedings of the 6th writing development in higher education conference: partnerships across the curriculum. 20-21 april. leicester: teaching and learning unit, university of leicester. squires, p., tinker, a. j. and redmore, n. (2009) ‘reflect, connect and plan: an integrated learning portfolio’, enhancing the first-year experience: theory, research and practice. 4th annual european first year experience conference. university of groningen, university medical center, groningen, the netherlands 13-15 may. online: http://www.efye.eu/presentations.html (accessed: 18 august 2009). thompson, g .f. (2000) ‘towards a relegitimation of higher education: reinvigorating the humanities and social sciences’, pp. 150-164, in brown, r.h. and schubert, j.d. (eds.) knowledge and power in higher education: a reader. new york: teachers college press. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 17 http://www.oriel.ox.ac.uk/content/294 http://www.qaa.ac.uk/reviews/reports/institutional/huddersfield04/huddersfield04.pdf http://www.efye.eu/presentations.html hill, tinker and catterall from deficiency to development: the evolution of academic skills provision at one uk university turner, j. (2000) ‘academic literacy and the discourse of transparency’, pp. 149-160, in jones, c. (ed.) students’ writing in the university: cultural and epistemological issues. usa: john benjamins publishing company. walker, m. (2006) higher education pedagogies: a capabilities approach. maidenhead: open university press. wall, a. (2006) ‘introduction’, pp. xi-xv, in davies, s., swinburne, d. and williams, g. (eds.) writing matters: the royal literary fund report on student writing in higher education. london: royal literary fund. whittaker, r. (2008) quality enhancement themes: the first year experience – transition to and during the first year. mansfield: the quality assurance agency for higher education. online: http://www.enhancementthemes.ac.uk/documents/firstyear/transition%20%20final.pdf (accessed: 10 august 2009). wingate, u. (2006) ‘doing away with ‘study skills’, teaching in higher education 11(4) pp 457-469. woodhead, c. (2002) ‘chris woodhead: answer the question’, the times, 20 september. online: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/article815346.ece?token=null&offset=12&page= 2 (accessed: 12 august 2009). yorke, m. and longden, b. (2008) the first year experience of higher education in the uk: final report. york: higher education academy. online: http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/assets/york/documents/ourwork/research/surveys/fye/f yefinalreport.pdf (accessed: 10 august 2009). journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 18 http://www.enhancementthemes.ac.uk/documents/firstyear/transition%20-%20final.pdf http://www.enhancementthemes.ac.uk/documents/firstyear/transition%20-%20final.pdf http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/article815346.ece?token=null&offset=12&page=2 http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/article815346.ece?token=null&offset=12&page=2 http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/assets/york/documents/ourwork/research/surveys/fye/fyefinalreport.pdf http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/assets/york/documents/ourwork/research/surveys/fye/fyefinalreport.pdf hill, tinker and catterall from deficiency to development: the evolution of academic skills provision at one uk university author details dr pat hill is an experienced lecturer in english language. she has been an academic skills tutor in the school of music, humanities and media at the university of huddersfield for five years and is presently co-leading a cross-university teaching and learning project on embedding learning development within the curriculum. dr amanda tinker has been academic skills tutor in the school of art, design and architecture since 2002. having the additional role of learning development team leader, she has strategic responsibility for the school's virtual learning environment and other learning resources. she is a chartered librarian, with a phd in information retrieval. dr stephen catterall has been the academic skills tutor in the school of computing and engineering since 2002 and has a background in research and teaching in the humanities and social sciences and more latterly in learning development. he has been involved in a university sponsored project to develop diagnostic assessment of student it, literacy and numeric skills in the school and is also a disability coordinator. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 19 from deficiency to development: the evolution of academic skills provision at one uk university abstract introduction the changing face of ‘study support’ in higher education challenging different priorities and perceptions establishing a devolved provision diversity, inclusion and multiple strategies embedding and curriculum development conclusion references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 16: december 2019 ________________________________________________________________________ stepping up to edge hill university: the value and impact for students following the completion of a virtual pre-entry module helen jamieson edge hill university, uk julie nolan edge hill university, uk abstract as learning developers, our main role is to support students in developing their academic skills throughout their time at university. we are particularly interested in students’ transition into university and have developed a programme-specific pre-entry module within blackboard open education to support undergraduate students with their transition into their academic programme of study. as part of a pedagogical research project for the postgraduate certificate in teaching in higher education (pgcthe), we have attempted to assess the value and impact of this pre-entry module. our project employed a mixed methods analysis of a wide range of quantitative and qualitative data, including student conversion data (quercus student records system); module engagement and completion data (blackboard open education); student satisfaction data (bristol online survey); value and impact data from key academic staff (semi-structured interviews) and students (focus group/semi-structured interview and bristol online survey); and a thorough review of associated literature. we shared our preliminary findings at the association for learning developers in higher education conference (aldhe) in exeter in april 2019. our research has shown that, although student satisfaction is high with some indication of added value and a positive impact on the students’ transitional experience, these are self-reported and we thus conclude that this research would benefit from further exploration and more extensive student, stakeholder and platform evaluation. keywords: pre-entry; transition; student experience; blackboard open education. jamieson and nolan stepping up to edge hill university: the value and impact for students following the completion of a virtual pre-entry module journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 2 introduction founded in 1885, edge hill university (ehu) is a campus-based university in the north west of england. it is currently ranked gold in the teaching excellence framework (tef) and was times higher university of the year in 2014/15. the provision of centralised academic skills support is managed by library and learning services (ls), one of the largest support departments within ehu, with approximately 130 staff based across three libraries. the academic skills team work with students in one-to-one and classroom-based environments to help them develop their academic writing, information literacy and general study skills. in 2016, we embarked on a project with a small number of academic programmes to develop a pre-entry learning intervention to support students’ transition into their academic programme of study. this learning intervention developed into an online pre-entry course called stepping up to edge hill university (stepping up). this article will discuss our findings from a pedagogical research project to ascertain the value of this preentry module for students and attempt to assess its impact on the student experience. for the purposes of this research, we have chosen to focus on the english programme, as they have taken part since 2016, and nursing, who were the most recent programme to join the pre-entry activity. the module context the primary aim of the pre-entry module is to support students with their transition into a specific programme of study at ehu in a supportive online environment. since its inception in 2016, the pre-entry module has expanded to include five programmes: english, nursing (with two intakes per year), criminology, history and creative writing, with interest from other programmes increasing each year. the module itself, which is currently optional and non-credit bearing, is created within blackboard open education, which offers students a genuine experience of accessing learning materials in a digital environment almost identical to the virtual learning environment (vle) they will use at ehu. as useful as this platform is for creating modules, there are several drawbacks, including design limitations and mobile compatibility. students are sent an email invitation, distributed centrally by the university’s student recruitment communications team, approximately six weeks before their course begins. objectives of the module include: jamieson and nolan stepping up to edge hill university: the value and impact for students following the completion of a virtual pre-entry module journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 3  meeting the academic teams: students become acquainted with their tutors through staff videos, enabling the academics to seem more human and accessible.  managing student expectations of the programme: students are introduced to the programme, the wider department, and how that department interacts with the wider university. an overview of learning activities and how they will be taught on the programme is provided, and videos from previous students are used to good effect.  introduction to the language of the university: students can often feel overwhelmed with the jargon used at university, so the module outlines some of the terminology students may come across during their ehu learning journey, for example, the difference between a lecture and a seminar.  what to expect during the first few weeks at university: these can be particularly overwhelming weeks for students with competing social and academic priorities. the module gives an overview of the types of activities in which students can expect to participate during those first key weeks.  overview of assessment on the course: whilst it may feel incongruous on a preentry course to discuss assessment, we include a light section to help demystify and normalise it as part of university life. this includes the different ways students may be assessed and reassurance about how they will be supported throughout the process.  study support: the module introduces students to the range of academic skills support available to them once they are on their programmes, including basic concepts such as notetaking, referencing and research skills.  engagement opportunities with other students on the same course: through discussion boards and interactive walls, students begin to develop connections with their peers. these objectives are split across four key steps and have been designed to include an element of gamification through a series of digital badges (figure 1) which students receive on completion of each step. jamieson and nolan stepping up to edge hill university: the value and impact for students following the completion of a virtual pre-entry module journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 4 figure 1. stepping up badges. methods we know from our previous evaluation data that students report high levels of satisfaction with the module. to investigate whether stepping up has any value or impact for students completing it, we employed a mixed methods analysis of a wide range of quantitative and qualitative data including student conversion data (quercus student records system), module engagement and completion data (blackboard open education), student satisfaction data (bristol online survey), value and impact data from key academic staff (semi-structured interviews) and students (focus group/semi-structured interview and bristol online survey), and a thorough review of associated literature. literature review a known key factor influencing students’ learning experiences is the quality of their transition into university (cole, 2017; meehan and howells, 2018), whether this is direct from further education (fe) or after a break in study. there is a significant amount of literature discussing how best to support students during their first few weeks and months at university (knox, 2005; fergy et al., 2008; thomas, 2011; ribchester et al., 2014; cole, 2017; brunton et al., 2018; kubincova et al., 2018; macfarlane, 2018; pennington et al., 2018; tchen et al., 2018). we know that experiences during the first semester may be jamieson and nolan stepping up to edge hill university: the value and impact for students following the completion of a virtual pre-entry module journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 5 critical in a student’s decision to continue or discontinue studies (kyndt et al., 2018), and that retention is closely linked to the quality of the first-year experience (cole, 2017). given the volume of research within this area, it is not surprising that there is no agreed definition of transition in higher education (he). gale and parker define it as ‘the capability to navigate change’ (2014, p. 737), while meehan and howells describe it as a ‘process rather than an event’ (2018, p. 3). regardless of the definition, most agree there is an expectation for students to adapt to a new academic culture that is emotionally demanding; emphasises self-reliance, independent learning and autonomy; and allows for an immersive experience in which students can take charge of their own learning (anderson et al., 2016; breeze et al., 2018). there is a growing body of literature discussing what interventions can be used at the preentry stage to support students in their preparation for university. it was noted that students who participated in a pre-entry programme reported higher self-efficacy and satisfaction compared to typical route students (knox, 2005; macfarlane, 2018; pennington et al., 2018). several studies found that engaging with a pre-entry programme may have positively influenced students’ academic self-efficacy and satisfaction. this is an attribute discussed frequently with many citing it as pivotal to students’ positive experiences (knox, 2005; macfarlane, 2018; pennington et al., 2018). pre-entry programmes are highlighted as initiatives that help develop academic preparedness and confidence, and foster a sense of belonging (knox, 2005; macfarlane, 2018; pennington et al., 2018). they also support students with the emotional and academic impact of preparing for study at he level (fergy et al., 2008). however, most of the pre-entry programmes discussed in the literature are not mandatory, with students only ever invited to take part. as a result, self-selection bias may occur in which it is highly motivated students who choose to engage (knox, 2005). another key theme that emerged from the literature was the importance of managing students’ expectations of studying at university level, as it is these expectations that can inhibit or facilitate successful transition (cole, 2017). expectations develop from a variety of sources and are described as the interaction of our experience with our anticipated environment (cole, 2017). expectations can develop from students interacting with materials provided at school or college, online and digital information, or visits to the jamieson and nolan stepping up to edge hill university: the value and impact for students following the completion of a virtual pre-entry module journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 6 university during open days and recruitment events, many of which present a positive and optimistic view of student life. several studies highlight the importance of managing student expectations of the programme of study itself, as well as life at the university, and advocate being more transparent with students about what will be expected of them on the course (coertjens et al., 2016; cole, 2017; breeze et al., 2018; meehan and howells, 2018). several studies also suggest that universities should clearly articulate the transition jump and be clear about how students will need to adjust their learning strategies in order to thrive at university (ribchester et al., 2014; cole, 2017; breeze et al., 2018). there is agreement that integration into the discipline is key, and students should be introduced to a disciplinary mindset and perspective as early as possible (meehan and howells, 2018; breeze et al., 2018; kubincova et al., 2018). meehan and howells (2018) report that students have a readiness to belong to the academic community they are joining and a desire to be fully engaged with their learning (anderson et al., 2016). several authors also argue that academics need to create an environment that nurtures trust, belonging and inclusion (cole, 2017; meehan and howells, 2018), and relationships between students and academic staff should crucially be formed as early as possible (coertjens et al., 2016; kubincova et al., 2018; macfarlane, 2018; meehan and howells, 2018). university lecturers were often described as distant and unapproachable, and opportunities to learn more about academic staff were welcomed by students, who benefited from seeing academic staff as more human and approachable (breeze et al., 2018). a range of key skills and attributes for students to consider when starting university were referred to across a wide range of research:  motivation: intrinsic motivation − which compels students to participate in activities, not because of external reward, but because the activity itself satisfies an ‘innate psychological need for competence, relatedness and autonomy’ (cole, 2017, p. 542) − was viewed as an important factor. a lack of motivation was found to be the main indicator for students dropping out of their first year in he (kyndt et al., 2018).  self-efficacy and emotional resilience: those with a belief in their own ability to achieve are more likely to engage in autonomous learning and excel at university (cole, 2017). emotional resilience is described as crucial during the first few weeks jamieson and nolan stepping up to edge hill university: the value and impact for students following the completion of a virtual pre-entry module journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 7 and months of study, with good emotional resilience helping with academic success and ultimately increased retention (anderson et al., 2016).  growth mindset: several studies discussed the concept of a growth mindset, the importance of developing skills for self-directed learning and empowering students to take charge of their studies (fergy et al, 2008; coertjens et al., 2017; cole, 2017; macfarlane, 2018). a quantitative study by wagner and brahm (cited in coertjens et al., 2017) showed that students who are afraid of failing their courses have a lower probability of passing their first year.  developing a learner identity: as an he student this can contribute to successful student transition (anderson et al., 2016). a learner identity is described as social as opposed to personal and is brought about by the ‘immersive experience’ of university and new connections with fellow students (anderson et al., 2016).  becoming part of a learning community: most researchers agree that being an active part of a community and having a sense of belonging were helpful in supporting transition. students who develop a connection with other students and academic staff, their surroundings and the subject they are studying are more likely to feel they belong (meehan and howells, 2018). students who feel part of a network of social learning relationships with lecturers and fellow students have an increased feeling of connectedness and more confidence in their ability to learn (anderson et al., 2016).  academic skills: several scholars felt it was important that academic support should complement the course (fergy et al., 2008; breeze et al., 2018; kubincova et al., 2018). two elements were cited as particularly important to introduce during transition activities: research skills (information gathering, note taking, research methods) and academic writing (essay, report writing, referencing) (fergy et al., 2008; macfarlane, 2018). as the literature has shown, these key attributes are vital to a successful transition, but this is a challenge for one small pre-entry module to address. a pre-entry intervention of any description should form part of a broader holistic offer, ideally driven and framed by the academic programme. jamieson and nolan stepping up to edge hill university: the value and impact for students following the completion of a virtual pre-entry module journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 8 research findings academic staff value and impact evaluation as part of our research, two semi-structured interviews were held with the key academic leads from the english programme (26th february 2019) and nursing programme (3rd march 2019). the project leads agreed a set of open questions, and the following is a summary of the academics’ responses, with the topics of the questions highlighted in bold. english and nursing leads both stated that their main reason for wanting to be involved with pre-entry was to support student transition and help students feel a connection before they arrived. given the diverse backgrounds of their students, the nursing department were keen to be involved, and, as they were often being asked about pre-arrival or preparatory activities, this suggests that their students are already highly engaged. on the other hand, the english department were keen to encourage a growth mindset by asking students to reflect on their existing skills, to let them know what support would be available to them to help them build on these, and to reduce any pre-arrival anxiety. there was agreement that the most important part of the pre-entry module was making contact with the students before they arrived, and both programme leads felt the staff and student videos were essential in bridging this gap. the videos allow students to meet their tutors and hear existing students talk about their experiences, which the english lead felt offered aspirational role models for new intakes. the nursing staff were very engaged in discussion-board activities on their pre-entry module and highlighted these as useful tools to encourage the students to engage with each other before they arrived in terms of the main benefits of the pre-entry module for students, both academics agreed that this was creating a sense of belonging and community. throughout the interviews, both nursing and english leads also suggested that the introduction of academic skills at this stage was also important in order for the students to relieve any anxiety or nerves and to reinforce a learning community. the main benefits for the departments were unquestionably supporting retention and a successful transition. both programme leads were pleased with the levels of engagement from their students and the perception was one of success. jamieson and nolan stepping up to edge hill university: the value and impact for students following the completion of a virtual pre-entry module journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 9 the final questions in the interview focused on the value and impact of the pre-entry module and links to student retention. these were undoubtedly more difficult for the academics to answer, as there was no substantial supporting evidence, but both had received positive feedback from staff and students. the nursing department reported that their students had fed back that they felt more comfortable with their transition because of the module, and english tutors reported that their students were very engaged and enthusiastic on course commencement. the english and nursing leads both raised the issue of the non-compulsory nature of the module, but whereas the english lead was happy that engagement levels demonstrated a commitment from their students, the nursing lead raised concerns that some students may feel disadvantaged if they did not take part. neither academics could confirm a direct relationship with completion of the preentry module and student retention, but both were pleased to be a part of the initiative. student engagement and conversion to establish whether there were any links between module engagement and student conversion to degree programmes, we investigated further within the data available from english september 2017, english september 2018, nursing march 2018 and nursing september 2018 intakes. english and nursing students were invited to take part in stepping up via an email containing their subject-specific course link and access instructions (figure 2). 92% (502) of the invitations sent were opened, leaving only 8% (46) unopened. there was a slightly higher percentage of nursing students who opened the invitation, which we believe was influenced by academic staff promoting the course through events such as a pre-arrival coffee morning. figure 2: invitation engagement data sent invitation opened email did not open email accessed module eng sep 17 57 48 (84%) 9 (16%) 45 (79%) eng sep 18 102 92 (89%) 11 (11%) 48 (47%) nur mar 18 141 132 (94%) 9 (6%) 86 (61%) nur sep 18 248 231 (93%) 17 (7%) 161 (65%) 548 502 (92%) 46 (8%) 340 62%) module completion rates were similar across nursing and english, with an average of 45% (152) completing the full course (figure 3) and both september 2018 intakes seeing a jamieson and nolan stepping up to edge hill university: the value and impact for students following the completion of a virtual pre-entry module journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 10 higher completion rate for both subjects. however, it is possible more students completed the full module than the data indicates owing to design limitations within the blackboard open education platform. the platform relies on a manual action (selecting a ‘completed’ button) by the students to record a positive completion of each step. the students can complete the full module without ever selecting this option, but the platform does not have the capability to record this engagement. for this reason, any ambiguous engagements were recorded as follows: students who indicated they had completed step 4 but omitted to indicate completion of an earlier step were considered a completion; if step 4 had not been indicated but steps 1, 2 or 3 had, these were identified as a part completion; and if none of the steps were indicated as complete this was recorded as enrolment only. figure 3. pre-entry module engagement. accessed module enrolled only part completion full completion eng sep 17 45 (79%) 20 (44%) 11 (24%) 14 (31%) eng sep 18 48 (47%) 14 (29%) 7 (15%) 27 (56%) nur mar 18 86 (61%) 59 (69%) 10 (12%) 17 (20%) nur sep 18 161 (65%) 34 (21%) 33 (20%) 94 (58%) 340 (62%) 127 (37%) 61 (18%) 152 (45%) to further explore a possible relationship between pre-entry engagement and student conversion, we mapped a comparison of those who had been sent an initial email invitation and had accessed the pre-entry module, to those who had been sent an initial email invitation and had fully enrolled at ehu (figure 4). this data was sourced from the ehu quercus student records system and from blackboard open education. jamieson and nolan stepping up to edge hill university: the value and impact for students following the completion of a virtual pre-entry module journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 11 figure 4. pre-entry engagement vs student conversion rates. at first glance the data suggests engagement with the pre-entry module may impact on student conversion with good pre-entry engagement and student conversion observed for english september 2017. however, the following year saw an increase in students enrolling on the degree programme but only slightly more students engaging with the preentry module (figure 4). it is also evident from the data that a higher percentage of students who had engaged with the pre-entry module (87%) went on to fully enrol at ehu; however, only 53% of those completed the full module (figure 5). however, this could be coincidental evidence, as students who are taking part in an optional pre-entry module may be considered to already be highly engaged. the number of students who registered but subsequently withdrew from their programme of study, who cancelled, or who had no record is higher for those who merely enrolled on the pre-entry module (7%) compared to those who fully completed it (5%). jamieson and nolan stepping up to edge hill university: the value and impact for students following the completion of a virtual pre-entry module journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 12 figure 5. pre-entry conversion data. pre-entry university programme of study enrolled only registered withdrawn cancelled unknown/no record eng sep 17 10 (22%) 1 (2%) 0 9 (20%) eng sep 18 8 (17%) 0 2 (4%) 4 (8%) nur mar 18 13 (15%) 1 (1%) 0 3 (3%) nur sep 18 30 (19%) 2 (1%) 0 2 (1%) 61 (18%) 4 (1%) 2 (1%) 18 (5%) pre-entry university programme of study part completion registered withdrawn cancelled unknown/no record eng sep 17 10 (22%) 1 (2%) 0 0 eng sep 18 7 (15%) 0 0 0 nur mar 18 8 (9%) 2 (2%) 0 0 nur sep 18 31 (19%) 2 (1%) 0 0 56 (16%) 5 (1%) 0 0 pre-entry university programme of study full completion registered withdrawn cancelled unknown/no record eng sep 17 13 (29%) 0 0 1 (2%) eng sep 18 27 (56%) 0 0 0 nur mar 18 55 (64%) 2 (2%) 1 (1%) 1 (1%) nur sep 18 85 (53%) 7 (4%) 1 (1%) 1 (1%) 180 (53%) 9 (3%) 2 (1%) 3 (1%) student satisfaction, value and impact evaluation student satisfaction to gain a deeper understanding of students’ motivations for taking part in the pre-entry module, we needed to engage with them directly. we already knew from existing substantial satisfaction data that they had enjoyed taking part in the module. a short satisfaction questionnaire, using bristol online surveys (bos), has been embedded within all pre-entry modules since 2017, and 164 students have provided feedback. through analysis of the most frequently used words and themes in free text responses, we were able to understand the key differences students indicated having experienced after taking part in the pre-entry module (figure 6). jamieson and nolan stepping up to edge hill university: the value and impact for students following the completion of a virtual pre-entry module journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 13 figure 6. student satisfaction themes. some free text responses that succinctly summarise the overarching themes from the student responses include: it has put me at ease and made me less worried about starting. (march 2018) since completing the stepping up module i feel very confident that once i start university that there are things that my lecturers and personal tutor can assist me. also, i fully believe that if i was ever in any difficulty that i could ask for help and use the [learning] services when i need further support with essay writing or study skills. (september 2018) completing the stepping up module has given me more confidence on completing the whole experience of 'uni'. it has assured me that i will be fine throughout my experience as there are lots of different places and people that i can go to for advice when i'm struggling. it has explained what is expected of me in great detail and it has explained how i can produce work that is the best of my ability. another thing is that it has also started to teach me about all the different words that i will be using though out [sic]s my course as well as increasing my knowledge on how to reference. (april 2019) jamieson and nolan stepping up to edge hill university: the value and impact for students following the completion of a virtual pre-entry module journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 14 we also conducted a series of semi-structured interviews with students who had taken part in the september 2017 pre-entry module. feedback from these indicated that students had been keen to know what to expect when they arrived on campus; they found the information contained in the module comforting and reassuring; they felt there was a significant time gap between a-levels and starting university, and that the module helped to ease their apprehensions; they described accessing the module as getting in the right mindset and thinking about academic work again; and they found their first weeks at university less daunting because of the feelings of familiarity provided by the staff and student videos. with regard to english and nursing, 28% (59) of the students who took part in the september 2018 pre-entry module completed the final evaluation survey. 88% (59) of these students enjoyed or enjoyed very much completing the module, and 100% (59) would recommend it to other students starting at university. in september 2018 an additional confidence spectrum question was introduced to the survey, and the results saw a significant self-reported increase in students’ confidence on completion of the pre-entry module (figure 7). figure 7. student confidence spectrum value and impact our pedagogical research project now needed to focus on assessing the value and impact on student behaviours and attitudes towards their transition. in compliance with general data protection regulation (gdpr), only students who consented to take part in further evaluation activity via the september 2018 stepping up to edge hill university evaluation were contacted. this limited further research to 53 nursing and 7 english students. these jamieson and nolan stepping up to edge hill university: the value and impact for students following the completion of a virtual pre-entry module journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 15 60 students were invited to take part in a focus group on dates in april and may 2019, with a £10 amazon voucher provided as an incentive to those who attended. despite reminder emails issued closer to the events, only one student contributed to a focus group (3rd may 2019), which we will henceforth refer to as a semi-structured interview. a subsequent stepping up to edge hill university value and impact feedback survey 2019 was distributed in may 2019, and again only one student provided feedback via this method. the semi-structured interview and survey asked the same questions, with the semistructured interview able to offer more clarity and explore in more detail than the questionnaire allowed. both students completed the stepping up to edge hill university english 2018 pre-entry module, were female and from the north west region. age was the only variant with the semi-structured interview attendant indicating that she was 25+ and the survey respondent indicating she was 18-25. the semi-structured interview student identified herself as a mature student and, in addition to completing the pre-entry module, had also taken part in the university’s foundation certificate fastrack: preparation for higher education programme. no further demographical data was requested for the purposes of this research. a brief demonstration of the pre-entry module was provided during the semi-structured interview, which assisted with subsequent questions, but was not included in the survey. as a result, the survey respondent focused her feedback on an alternative pre-entry activity provided independently by the english literature department. whilst this focus invalidated this student’s contribution towards the specific evaluation of the stepping up module, we were able to use their feedback in evaluating more general pre-entry support. both responses suggest that, although the students enjoyed completing the module, it was not a particularly memorable activity. alternatively, with so much happening during the induction period, it is difficult for students to remember individual activities as separate entities, especially when there is overlap with other pre-entry initiatives. although the pre-entry module is optional, both students completed all four steps, with the semi-structured interview student citing her age as the main reason for taking part, as she had not studied for a significant period of time and wanted to familiarise herself with university life. the survey respondent, although referring to an alternative activity, wanted to be prepared for her course and thought it would ease transition from a-levels to jamieson and nolan stepping up to edge hill university: the value and impact for students following the completion of a virtual pre-entry module journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 16 university. the semi-structured interview student felt there were a couple of elements missing from the pre-entry module, most notably key logistical information such as a course timetable. as a mature student with family commitments, she felt it would have been useful to know in advance the weekly structure including examples of evening classes. the student would also have liked to have been given more detail about the reading expectations of the course to better prepare and manage her study time. both students agreed that engaging with the pre-entry activity helped them in the period before they started university, and that it eased their transition into the course. they understood more about what would be expected of them during lectures, seminars and assessment activities. the semi-structured interview student, who had previously completed fasttrack, said that she would have managed without completing the pre-entry course, but did find it useful. having previously focused on an education pathway, she felt that this course allowed her to engage with the english department and understood more about their feedback process as a result. in terms of the impact of pre-entry support, both students felt more prepared and less anxious about starting their course. the staff videos were highlighted as a positive element within the module, as they allowed them to ‘meet’ their tutors before they arrived. once the students did arrive, the pre-entry module was discussed by their tutors, but again this was not regarded as a memorable activity by the students. conclusion and recommendations our research has shown that student satisfaction with the stepping up to edge hill university pre-entry module is generally high. however, whilst there is some evidence to suggest a relationship with student conversion onto the programme of study, it has been difficult to identify a direct correlation owing to a wide range of variables. the research found some indicators of added value and a positive impact on the students’ transitional experience, but these were self-reported, and at this stage there is limited robust evidence to support a connection between the pre-entry module and, for example, improved student retention. jamieson and nolan stepping up to edge hill university: the value and impact for students following the completion of a virtual pre-entry module journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 17 the study has shown that a successful transition can be supported by pre-entry activity, but this should form part of a broader holistic offer driven and framed by the academic programme/department in order to support the development of a disciplinary mindset and the creation of a learning community. our research suggests the stepping up to edge hill university pre-entry module would benefit from the implementation of the following:  a review of key stakeholders and their roles and responsibilities. the literature shows that pre-entry activity is most effective when it is framed and integrated into the academic programme so as to ensure a disciplinary mindset from the beginning. this requires significant commitment from academics within the programme and relies on strong collaborative working relationships between academics, learning developers and other professional support services.  a review of the mode of delivery of pre-entry information. our pre-entry module provides students with a similar experience to our vle, which is why blackboard open education has so far been the platform of choice. we need to assess alternative options to delivering key pre-entry information that encourages students to engage with the module, the university and each other, and ensures they have agency. whatever mode of delivery is chosen, information should be provided in a mobile and dynamic way, and the platform should allow for intuitive content design.  a review of content. the content of any pre-entry activity needs to match the essential skills and attributes identified in the literature: motivation, self-efficacy and emotional resilience, academic skills, growth mindset, and developing a learner identity. content also needs to provide open, honest and realistic key logistical information about the programme of study. wider opportunities for peer to peer engagement should also be investigated. this recommendation would benefit from further research with ehu students to ensure content matches expectations. overall, the findings from this small-scale pedagogical research project do provide evidence that there is some value to the stepping up to edge hill university pre-entry module; however, this was a limited research project focusing on two academic programmes, and further exploration, with more extensive student evaluation data, is required to investigate the impact of the pre-entry module further. jamieson and nolan stepping up to edge hill university: the value and impact for students following the completion of a virtual pre-entry module journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 18 references anderson, d., wason, h., wason, h. and southall, j. (2016) ‘supporting business students' transition into higher education: the case of marketing downloads’, teaching in higher education, 21(8), pp. 978-989. breeze, m., johnson, k. and uytman, c. (2018) ‘what (and who) works in widening participation? supporting direct entrant student transitions to higher education’, teaching in higher education, 25(1), pp. 18-25. brunton, j., brown, m., costello, e. and farrell, o. (2018) ‘head start online: flexibility, transitions and student success’, educational media international, 55(4), pp. 347360. coertjens, l., brahm, t., trautwein, c. and lindblom-ylanne, s. (2017) ‘students' transition into higher education from an international perspective’, higher education, 73(3), pp. 357-369. cole, j.s. (2017) ‘concluding comments about student transition to higher education’, higher education, 73(3), pp. 539-551. fergy, s., heatley, s., morgan, g. and hodgson, d. (2008) ‘the impact of pre-entry study skills training programmes on students’ first year experience in health and social care programmes’, nurse education in practice, 8(1), pp. 20-30. gale, t. and parker, s. (2014) ‘navigating change: a typology of student transition in higher education’, studies in higher education, 39(5), pp. 734-753. knox, h. (2005) ‘making the transition from further to higher education: the impact of a preparatory module on retention, progression and performance’, journal of further and higher education, 29(2), pp. 103-110. jamieson and nolan stepping up to edge hill university: the value and impact for students following the completion of a virtual pre-entry module journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 19 kubincova, e., dale, v.h.m. and kerr, j. (2018) ‘how a mooc can effectively facilitate student transitions to an online distance postgraduate programme’, research in learning technology, 26, pp. 1-18. kyndt, e., coertjens, l., van daal, t., donche, v., gijbels, d. and van petegem, p. (2015) ‘the development of students' motivation in the transition from secondary to higher education: a longitudinal study’, learning and individual differences, 39, pp. 114123. kyndt, e., donche, v., coertjens, l., van daal, t., gijbels, d. and van petegem, p. (2018) ‘does self-efficacy contribute to the development of students’ motivation across the transition from secondary to higher education?’, european journal of psychology of education, 34(2), pp. 457-478. macfarlane, k. (2018) ‘higher education learner identity for successful student transitions’, higher education research and development, 37(6), pp. 1201-1215. meehan, c. and howells, k. (2018) ‘in search of the feeling of ‘belonging’ in higher education: undergraduate students transition into higher education’, journal of further and higher education, pp. 1-15. pennington, c.r., bates, e.a., kaye, l.k. and bolam, l.t. (2018) ‘transitioning in higher education: an exploration of psychological and contextual factors affecting student satisfaction’, journal of further and higher education, 42(5), pp. 596-607. ribchester, c., ross, k. and rees, e.l.e. (2014) ‘examining the impact of pre-induction social networking on the student transition into higher education’, innovations in education and teaching international, 51(4), pp. 355-365. tchen, p., leung, l., simpson, f., kim-sing, a. and pearson, m.l. (2018) ‘bridging the gap: an evaluation of self-paced online transition modules for advanced pharmacy practice experience students’, currents in pharmacy teaching and learning, 10(10), pp. 1375-1383. jamieson and nolan stepping up to edge hill university: the value and impact for students following the completion of a virtual pre-entry module journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 20 thomas, l. (2011) ‘do pre‐entry interventions such as ‘aimhigher’ impact on student retention and success? a review of the literature’, higher education quarterly, 65(3), pp. 230-250. further reading blakely, a. and broussard, l. (2003) ‘blueprint for establishing an effective postbaccalaureate medical school pre-entry program for educationally disadvantaged students’, academic medicine, 78(5), pp. 437-447. bowles, a., fisher, r., mcphail, r., rosenstreich, d. and dobson, a. (2014) ‘staying the distance: students' perceptions of enablers of transition to higher education’ higher education research & development, 33(2), pp. 212-225. carragher, j. and mcgaughey, j. (2016) ‘the effectiveness of peer mentoring in promoting a positive transition to higher education for first-year undergraduate students: a mixed methods systematic review protocol’, systematic reviews, 5(1), pp. 68. david, m.e. and bathmaker, a. (2010) improving learning by widening participation in higher education. london: routledge. daza, v., makriyannis, n. and rovira riera, c. (2013) ‘mooc attack: closing the gap between pre-university and university mathematics’, open learning: the journal of open, distance and e-learning, 28(3), pp. 227-238. goodchild, a. (2017) ‘part-time students in transition: supporting a successful start to higher education’, journal of further and higher education, 43(6), pp. 1-14. holmegaard, h.t., madsen, l.m. and ulriksen, l. (2014) ‘a journey of negotiation and belonging: understanding students’ transitions to science and engineering in higher education’, cultural studies of science education, 9(3), pp. 755-786. jamieson and nolan stepping up to edge hill university: the value and impact for students following the completion of a virtual pre-entry module journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 21 johnston, b. (2010) the first year at university: teaching students in transition. maidenhead: society for research into higher education & open university press. jones, s. (2018) ‘expectation vs experience: might transition gaps predict undergraduate students' outcome gaps?’, journal of further and higher education, 42(7), pp. 908921. morgan, m. (2011) improving the student experience: a practical guide for universities and colleges. london: routledge. soria, k.m. (2015) ‘building a strengths-based campus to support student retention’, journal of college student development, 56(6), pp. 626-631. thomas, l. and tight, m. (2011) institutional transformation to engage a diverse student body. bingley: emerald. tomusk, v. (2004) the open world and closed societies: essays on higher education policies 'in transition'. basingstoke: new york: palgrave macmillan. ventrone, j. (2014) from the marine corps to college: transitioning from the service to higher education. lanham, maryland: rowman & littlefield. author details helen jamieson is head of student engagement for library and learning services at edge hill university, ormskirk, uk. julie nolan is student engagement manager for library and learning services at edge hill university, ormskirk, uk. stepping up to edge hill university: the value and impact for students following the completion of a virtual pre-entry module abstract introduction the module context methods literature review research findings academic staff value and impact evaluation student engagement and conversion student satisfaction, value and impact evaluation student satisfaction value and impact conclusion and recommendations references further reading author details scholarship in mathematics support services journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 2: february 2010 scholarship in mathematics support services peter samuels coventry university, uk chetna patel university of sheffield, uk abstract mathematics support is a recognised collective term for a variety of extracurricular mathematics and statistics teaching and learning services and resources provided by many tertiary educational institutions. typical services currently provided in the uk are described. even with excellent mathematics teaching, the authors argue that, in the current uk tertiary educational climate, there is still a need for mathematics support services. this paper provides evidence of maturity and scholarly practice within the uk higher education mathematics support community of practice. the definition of scholarship of teaching and learning and its application within this context is discussed. three areas where scholarship can be demonstrated in mathematics support services are identified and explored. firstly, scholarship in the mathematics support community of practice in the uk since the early 1990s is demonstrated through surveys of the extent of mathematics support provision. secondly, scholarly practice in mathematics support is explored through case studies of good practice. in particular, a detailed case study of the use of electronic record keeping in mathematics support tutoring to improve support effectiveness is provided. thirdly, the mathematics support excellence rewarded by the centre for excellence in teaching and learning status given to coventry and loughborough universities is investigated. evidence is provided of scholarship both leading to this award and in developments in mathematics support services provided after it was made. this paper concludes by evaluating how far scholarship has gone within the discipline of mathematics support and anticipating how the community of practice will develop in the future. samuels and patel scholarship in mathematics support services journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 2 mathematics support: definition and rationale mathematics and statistics support is a term used mainly in uk further education (fe) and higher education (he) to describe the provision of supplementary forms of teaching and resources for mathematics (including statistics) learning across institutions in addition to the main teaching provision. according to beveridge (1997) and mathsteam (2003: 3), common forms of mathematics support are: • bridging courses; • computer-aided learning; • diagnostic testing (normally at university entry, and normally followed by other forms of follow-up support); • drop-in centres; • workshops; • numeracy classes; • paper-based open learning materials; • peer study support; • tutoring; • videos; • websites (which may also include some of the above types of resources). two other important terms here are mathematics support centre and mathematics learning centre: these refer to a drop-in centre room from which other forms of mathematics support may also be provided. the main reason for the emergence of mathematics support provisions is the ‘mismatch between students’ mathematical confidence, knowledge and skills at university entry and those required in order to commence their degree courses’ (lawson et al., 2003: 5). a secondary reason for its emergence is ‘the increasing breadth of variation of mathematical and statistical competences of students entering the same university courses’. as lecturers tend to target the average (or slightly below average) student ability, this means that not only ‘at risk’ students with poor entry skills require supplementary support, but support also needs to be provided for brighter students who are not sufficiently challenged (croft and grove, 2006). samuels and patel scholarship in mathematics support services journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 3 in 2001, the uk government commissioned the ‘roberts review’ (roberts, 2002) due to its concern that the supply of high quality scientists and engineers should not constrain the uk’s future research and development and innovation performance. the review found a strengthening demand in the economy for highly numerate graduates but also a decline in numbers of mathematics, engineering and physical science graduates which was starting to result in skills shortages. it also found mismatches between school level physical sciences and mathematics courses and undergraduate courses in related subjects (differences in mathematical knowledge was seen to be particularly important) which prevented some students making the transition to he smoothly. along with other recommendations it recommended (roberts, 2002: 93) that the uk government should ‘help students make the transition from a-level study to degree level study in science, engineering and mathematics … [by] funding heis to use new ‘entry support courses’ and e-learning programmes to ‘bridge’ any gaps between students’ a-level courses and their degree courses’. this recommendation corresponds closely with some styles of mathematics support described above. it is therefore concluded that there is a requirement for mathematics support within uk he in addition to other strategies for improving the quality of mathematics teaching and learning and thus increasing the supply of numerate graduates. history of the mathematics support community of practice although the existence of mathematics support centres in uk he can be traced back to 1990 (and possibly earlier in fe), the mathematics support community of practice (wenger, 1998) in uk he only really came into existence through the first national conference on mathematics support hosted by the university of luton in 1993. this conference provided presentations in the area of mathematics support, feedback on the first national survey of mathematics support provision (beveridge and bhanot, 1994), and a model of how support might be developed based on the academic support centre at minnesota college of education and human development (formerly minnesota general college) (beveridge, 1993). it also led to the establishment of the mathematics support association which ran from 1993 to 1999 and produced eight newsletters. some mathematics support centres, such as those provided at coventry and loughborough universities, were originally set up to support engineering mathematics samuels and patel scholarship in mathematics support services journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 4 teaching. however, many now support mathematics (or numeracy) teaching on a university-wide level – see lawson et al. (2003: 5) for a rationale. this historical association with engineering mathematics may also explain the greater emphasis on mathematics and the lesser emphasis on statistics within the discipline. whilst statistics support has generally been provided within mathematics support centres, statistics was generally not perceived as a subject requiring a specialist approach until 2005 with the emergence of statistics advisory services as part of the strategy of the sigma centre for excellence in teaching and learning. with the demise of the mathematics support association in 1999, publications in mathematics support mainly switched to the learning and teaching support network (ltsn – now superseded by the higher education academy) subject centre in mathematics, statistics and operations research (msor) network’s professional newsletter: msor connections. in 2004, the ltsn funded the development of mathcentre – a website providing a variety of types of integrated resources for students in the transition from school to fe or he, some of which are contextualised (croft and stevenson, 2004). about the same time, the higher education funding council of england (hefce) fund for the development of teaching and learning, the gatsby foundation and the ebs trust jointly funded mathtutor. originally distributed on dvd, this is now a website based around streamed videos which teach generic mathematical subjects. both these sites – mathcentre and mathtutor – have become extremely popular, both nationally and internationally, with mathcentre receiving up to 330,000 hits per month (lawson et al., 2009). from 2002 to 2005 hefce and the higher education academy (hea) funded a project called helping engineers learning mathematics (helm). this project produced a website and resources that were released to the uk he community (harrison et al., 2006) comprising of paper-based student workbooks, electronic versions of the workbooks, a databank of formative and summative computer assisted assessment questions and short video clips showing lecturers solving problems linked to workbooks. since 2005 the helm project and the msor network in conjunction with the sigma cetl have run an annual national conference known as cetl msor which has grown in size and quality with increasing emphasis on more rigorous educational research rather than mathematics lecturers’ ‘show and tell’. samuels and patel scholarship in mathematics support services journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 5 definition of scholarship in mathematics support it is generally accepted that the contemporary concept of the scholarship of teaching was first introduced by boyer in his 1990 report for the carnegie foundation (boyer, 1990). his report enabled the scholarship of teaching and learning to be elevated to the status of a legitimate research field on a par with three other areas of scholarship he identified: subject specific research, synthesis, and professional practice. kreber (2002) reviews the development of the concept of the scholarship of teaching over the previous 10 years and defines scholars of teaching as expert teachers who ‘share their knowledge and advance the knowledge of teaching and learning in the discipline in a way that can be peer reviewed’. a major emphasis of the scholarship of teaching and learning community is therefore the gathering of evidence of some form of teaching or learning enhancement from a wide variety of sources. this article thus provides some specific examples of excellent practice in mathematics support. furthermore, in line with kreber’s definition, the systematic communication of excellent practice in mathematics support is also discussed by investigating the provision of a good practice guide and an accredited training course. healey (2000) argues for the importance of a discipline-based approach to the scholarship of teaching in he in which scholarship of teaching within the community representing the discipline is provided as well as scholarship of teaching within the subject itself. as the mathematics support community within individual institutions is generally very small, a discipline-based approach within mathematics support needs to be organised at the level of the national community of practice. one way this community has presented itself as a professional research community is by carrying out a number of surveys into the extent of provision in uk fe and he. a meta-analysis of these surveys and others outside of the uk is here provided. a final area in which scholarship in mathematics support is explored here is the hefce award for the sigma centre for excellence in teaching and learning (cetl) in mathematics support given to coventry and loughborough universities. cetls were rewarded for their good practice in order to elevate them further as ‘beacons of good practice’ within the uk he sector (saunders et al., 2007). sigma’s strategy to elevate and improve good practice has involved pedagogical research into teaching and learning samuels and patel scholarship in mathematics support services journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 6 effectiveness within mathematics support (samuels, 2006). this strategy is closely linked with scholarship in teaching and learning as it involves both good practice and its dissemination within an academic community. evidence of good practice within sigma is provided from the original bid document and the formative evaluation of the cetl. surveys into the extent of mathematics support provision the first kind of scholarly activity undertaken by the mathematics support community of practice explored here is the carrying out and reporting on surveys into the extent of provision. a summary of the published surveys into the extent of the provision of mathematics support in uk fe and he is shown in table 1. of these, the surveys of beveridge (1997) and perkin and croft (2004) were the most thorough in terms of using several forms of inquiry and attempting to approach several people at each institution. from these two surveys it is concluded that at least 50% of all uk heis had a mathematics support drop-in workshop or drop-in centre at the time they were questioned. samuels and patel scholarship in mathematics support services journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 7 table 1. published surveys into uk fe and he mathematics support provision. investigator(s) date reference type scope proportion offering a drop-in workshop or support centre beveridge and bhanot 1993 (beveridge and bhanot, 1994) questionnaire 800 feis and heis contacted with 100 feis and 42 heis replying 76% beveridge 1996 (beveridge, 1997) telephone and postal surveys replies from 150 heis and 50 feis 56% beveridge 1999 (beveridge, 1999) not stated not stated 77% lawson, halpin and croft 2001 (lawson et al., 2001, 2002) on-line questionnaire replies from 95 heis 48% perkin and croft 2004 (perkin and croft, 2004) email and telephone survey replies from 101 heis 65% mathematics support is not limited to the uk. the community of practice in australia and the republic of ireland has reached a sufficient level of maturity to carry out and publish surveys into their levels of provision. macgillivray (2008) reports that 32 of the 39 universities in australia have some form of mathematics learning support. gill et al. (2008) report there were 13 tertiary mathematics support centres in the republic of ireland. samuels and patel scholarship in mathematics support services journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 8 good practice in the provision of mathematics support in 2003 the ltsn funded a project to produce guidelines of good practice in the provision of mathematics support centres based on the expertise of experienced practitioners (lawson et al., 2003). these include factors to be considered when providing mathematics support, the overall aim and nature of the support need or drivers, physical location of site, staffing and resources, engaging students, funding for the services and evaluation. a recent example of good practice by loughborough university is the introduction of a postgraduate certificate in mathematics support and dyslexia/dyscalculia in he/fe (loughborough university, 2007). this is a british dyslexia association accredited programme and addresses how best to support students with specific learning difficulties. however, the development of this advanced provision in the training of specialist mathematics support tutors highlights the general lack of provision of non-specialist (i.e. not specifically for dyslexia and dyscalculia) training of mathematics support tutors in uk he. the authors are not aware of any uk hei currently providing formal non-specialist training to its mathematics support tutors, although this is mitigated by the general lack of subject-specific teacher training for mathematics lecturers in uk he, which has only recently begun (cox, 2007). evidence of scholarship in mathematics support provisions there are several sources of evidence into the effectiveness of various types of mathematics support provision. these are summarised here. the first published article known to the authors was by beveridge (1994) in which he investigated the influence of attendance at drop-in workshop sessions on the percentage of assignments submitted and performance in these assignments for level 0 access numeracy students at the university of luton. he discovered a positive correlation between workshop attendance and the percentage of assignments submitted (see table 2) but not with examination performance. the latter was explained by the relative ability of students who attended the drop-in workshops being lower than average (indicating that the workshops were being used mainly as a remedial service). samuels and patel scholarship in mathematics support services journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 9 table 2. attendance of drop-in workshop sessions and % of students completing all tasks by level 0 access numeracy students at the university of luton. workshop attendance no. students % students who turned in all tasks never went 125 (46.6%) 53% at least 1 visit 141 (53.4%) 78% at least 5 visits 33 (13.2%) 100% in 2002, msor funded case-study research into the provision of mathematics support in the uk (mathsteam, 2003). this report describes 25 case studies, some of which include evidence of scholarship in their provisions, for example: • ellis (2003) reports an individual student describing their study support centre as: the place to come and ask your stupid questions and get a proper answer, rather than asking your lecturers and getting the ‘well really you should know that’. brilliant. • booth (2003) reports that their learning resource centre receives approximately 18,000 visits per year and was commended by the qaa visiting panel in a teaching quality assessment. • staddon and newman (2003) report that the number of visits received at their education drop-in centre has increased steadily each year since it was opened and the responses to their annual questionnaire indicate a high level of student satisfaction with their service. • coleman (2003) reports on a questionnaire which was administered to all students who receive pre-university paper-based support resources. approximately 75% of students responded, all of whom stated that they had worked through at least some of the materials provided and found them easy to use. more than half of the respondents requested for similar resources to be provided in other areas of mathematics. a similar number stated that they had found the drop-in maths support provided during the introductory week to be useful. samuels and patel scholarship in mathematics support services journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 10 a more recent evaluation of scholarship in mathematics support practice was carried out by dowling and nolan (2006) in which they analysed the effect of attendance at mathematics support sessions on the pass rates of ‘at risk’ students at dublin city university (see table 3). table 3. effect of attendance of mathematics learning support centre sessions on pass rates for ‘at risk’ students at dublin city university in 2004/5 and 2005/6. year 2004/5 2005/6 no. ‘at risk’ students 80 161 no. ‘at risk’ students who visited mlsc 41 95 pass rate of ‘at risk’ students who visited mlsc 53% 60% pass rate of ‘at risk’ students who did not visit mlsc 25% 49% they discovered that attendance of one or more mathematics support sessions increased the pass rate of students by 28% in 2004/5 and by 11% in 2005/6. bamforth et al. (2007) discuss the effectiveness of various mathematics support provisions for electrical engineering students at loughborough university from non-traditional backgrounds (in terms of their entry qualifications). the number of attendances made by these students at a 30 minute action plan meeting, a one hour lunchtime workshop, or a visit to the mathematics learning support centre’s drop-in service were recorded against diagnostic test mark and final exam mark. they discovered that repeated attendance at mathematics support had a positive effect on examination performance. pell and croft (2008) investigated the number of drop-in support sessions attended by over 600 engineering students at loughborough university in 2004/5 and the effect of attendance on their examination grades. they discovered that about 20% of students used the support centre but it was being used more by higher achieving students than by those who were at risk of failure. they also discovered that, on average, attendance of at least one session in the mathematics support centre led to an improvement in pass rate of approximately 3%. samuels and patel scholarship in mathematics support services journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 11 detailed case study of scholarship in record keeping an example of scholarship in investigating good practice in mathematics and statistics support is the development of an electronic record keeping (using an ms access database) of student usage of support – see figure 1. the purpose of the database is twofold: first to enable analysis of effectiveness of support and secondly to enable reflective and collaborative teaching practice. the effectiveness of the support provided can be explored using the database by comparing the students’ diagnostic test results at entry against their module results and usage of support facilities. the database provides an easy means of collecting usage date including support details and frequency of use. running queries to select key variables allows a quick and reliable set of data for analysis. research using such a data set has shown that he students can be helped to achieve on their main course by the provision of contextualised additional study support (patel and little, 2006). the study analysed a data set of over 20,000 records with about 10% of students who had made use of mathematics support. the chi-square test carried out on module results gave a significant result (sig. < 0.0005) with a greater proportion (92%) of maths related module passes associated to mathematics support users than with the nonmathematics support users (88%). the independent samples t-test on the module mean scores also showed a better performance (p = 0.01, sig. <0.0005) by mathematics support users (60%) than the non-users (56%). samuels and patel scholarship in mathematics support services journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 12 figure 1. example of a student log within the database. the database includes an easy means of completing teaching logs to allow tutors to review and reflect on their practice (atherton, 2005). the intention of the database is to make ‘writing-up’ of sessions easier and, more importantly, if used deliberately can enable a cyclic approach to developing and improving teaching methods. this approach is currently being developed for implementation at the university of sheffield. reflective logs/journals have been used by educators as a means of facilitating reflective practice where problems and issues in teaching methods can be considered (kahn et al., 2006: 1317). support tutors seek to keep up with and research their particular discipline expertise and transfer this into their teaching. this way they are able to communicate the subject matter clearly, provoke enthusiasm, stimulate thinking and challenge the student’s intellect (entwistle, 2009; thomas, 1993). the tutors at mathematics support centres are under pressure to accomplish a multitude of tasks; it can be easy to feel one has achieved enough for a student by simply providing reassurance and confidence, and provoking motivation for study. identifying problems with the session and thinking about ways of improving approaches requires time. the database allows for this consideration as tutors collect and input general information about the session (for example time, topic) and additionally a more reflective and analytical prose of samuels and patel scholarship in mathematics support services journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 13 the session noting any critical incident(s), the students’ and tutors’ feelings, things that went well, any issues or challenges, what was learned and action required, how to improve practice and performance. the teaching logs give the tutors an opportunity to reflect on the students’ initial needs and how these were met over a few appointments, whereby the objectives of teaching can be thought about and delivered proactively. the teaching log also provides the opportunity for team teaching; whereby one student can be seen by a number of tutors and still have reasonable continuity. however, one drawback in maintaining a teaching log in the maths support environment where teaching takes place individually or in small groups, is that of efficiency. writing-up on a short 5 minute drop-in session can become cumbersome and impossible to reflect on with any deep meaning because of time constraints and a lack of opportunity to continue developing the teaching approach in that situation i.e. teaching a student for 5 minutes (maybe just that one time) and spending more than 10 minutes to reflect on feelings and issues to extract meaning. the sigma centre for excellence in teaching and learning in 2005, hefce made a massive investment in teaching and learning in uk he through the 5 year centres for excellence in teaching and learning (cetl) programme (hefce, 2004). one of the 74 successful bids was the sigma cetl in university-wide (i.e. both specialist and non-specialist) mathematics and statistics support, based at coventry and loughborough universities. most developments in mathematics support in uk he since 2005 have taken place through sigma. its main aim is move the balance from reactive to proactive activities in order to start to address the problems for the mass of students in need. its activities are being underpinned by a systematic programme of educational research (samuels, 2006). sigma has made a substantial investment to enhance existing provision in the two host universities and to address proactively the needs of those who can benefit from the support available. its activities include: • extended and enhanced drop-in centres at the two universities; • a statistics advisory service offering individual statistical support for final year project students and postgraduate students (smith and gadsden, 2006); • support provision for students with special educational needs (trott, 2003); samuels and patel scholarship in mathematics support services journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 14 • a proactive teaching programme comprising of several mathematics teaching interventions at both universities which target ‘at risk’ students within large cohorts (lawson et al., 2006); and • an investigation and development of innovative uses of technology in mathematics support, such as the use of mobile devices and educational computer games, known as serious games (hu and samuels, 2007). evidence of scholarship in sigma the original cetl bid document by coventry and loughborough universities (loughborough university mathematics education centre and coventry university mathematics support centre, 2004) contains evidence of existing excellent practice, including quotes from students who used the support centres, paper-based resources and websites: having just completed the certificate in maths i'd just like to comment on what an excellent facility i found the maths support centre to be. … the assistance provided was always excellent. the printed handouts are very useful too. i've managed to avoid maths for a long time but your [web] site has given me confidence, and a great deal of revision aids! thank you for being available. without you i wouldn't have got the grade that i have just received. keep up the good work and brilliant site. an interim internal evaluation of the sigma cetl was carried out in 2007 (sigma centre for excellence in mathematics and statistics support, 2007). whilst lawson et al. (2006) reported that the findings of the proactive teaching programme were mixed, a number of these interventions received positive reviews from their departmental module leaders evidencing their effectiveness, including a human sciences intervention: just to give you some updates. last year was the first year that nobody failed [this module] (as far as anybody can remember this is a first!) so i think that is on its own evidence of the value of the support you provided. in addition i recently received the samuels and patel scholarship in mathematics support services journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 15 student feedback questionnaires and there were several that had extremely positive comments about the support you provided. the programme is seeking to identify and build on the strengths of these individual successful interventions. finally, the sigma evaluation report also included a quotation from the manager of the msor subject centre on the influence of sigma to the whole uk he mathematics support community: there is also established and ever growing evidence that sigma is having a substantial impact upon the level and nature of mathematics and statistics support offered to students from across the whole of the uk. the model of mathematics support pioneered by sigma has been widely adopted within heis across the uk, and it is clear that these heis are further developing the ‘sigma model´ and tailoring it to their specific needs. conclusions the requirements for mathematics support within uk he identified within the introduction are well researched and likely to increase in the future as the need for individual or specific mathematics support increases with the average lowering and increasingly diverse mathematical ability of the uk he student intake. it is anticipated that the mathematics support community will continue to respond proactively in developing and sharing support service approaches and resources. this paper provides evidence of a growing body of research into scholarship in mathematics support in uk he and beyond through surveys, evaluations and dissemination of good practice, in particular the activities of the sigma cetl. all those provided have generally shown positive benefits to students of mathematics support services and resources, such as popularity, satisfaction and improved performance in examinations. samuels and patel scholarship in mathematics support services journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 16 in particular, evidence is provided of scholarship in the use of teaching logs within mathematics support tutorials which were found to be an invaluable tool in helping tutors to develop their teaching skills for supporting students’ learning. the iterative process of engaging in analytical reflection of the learning and teaching process enables development of teaching strategies. as with other mathematics support interventions, evaluating the teaching improvement provided is difficult because standard evaluation methods such as portfolios and student learning cannot easily be applied. the support provided was ad hoc and does not follow a pre-planned programme of studies. along with this paper, there have recently been other moves towards improving the level of scholarship within the mathematics support community of practice (croft, 2008; samuels, 2007). it is hoped that these will not be isolated initiatives but that they will lead to a culture change within the community to increased scholarship in teaching and learning. references atherton, j.s. (2005) learning and teaching: reflection and reflective practice. york: the higher education academy. bamforth, s.e., robinson, c.l., croft, a.c. and crawford, a. (2007) ‘retention and progression of engineering students with diverse mathematical backgrounds’, teaching mathematics and its applications 26(4) pp 156-166. beveridge, i. (1993) the minnesota model of developmental maths. online: http://www.sigma-cetl.ac.uk/index.php?section=97 (accessed: 4 august 2009). beveridge, i. (1994) ‘assessing the value: maths workshop’, mathematics support association newsletter 2 p 6. online: http://www.sigmacetl.ac.uk/index.php?section=82 (accessed: 4 august 2009). beveridge, i. (1997) ‘survey: learning support for mathematics in fe and he’, mathematics support association newsletter 6 pp 20-23. online: http://www.sigma-cetl.ac.uk/index.php?section=85 (accessed: 4 august 2009). http://www.sigma-cetl.ac.uk/index.php?section=97 http://www.sigma-cetl.ac.uk/index.php?section=82 http://www.sigma-cetl.ac.uk/index.php?section=82 http://www.sigma-cetl.ac.uk/index.php?section=85 samuels and patel scholarship in mathematics support services journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 17 beveridge, i. (1999) ‘a tale of two surveys’, mathematics support association newsletter 9 pp 20-23. online: http://www.sigma-cetl.ac.uk/index.php?section=88 (accessed: 4 august 2009). beveridge, i. and bhanot, r. (1994) ‘maths support survey’, mathematics support association newsletter 1 p 13. http://www.sigma-cetl.ac.uk/index.php?section=81 (accessed: 4 august 2009). booth, d. (2003) ‘the open learning resource centre at the university of huddersfield’, pp. 16-17, in mathsteam (ed.), maths support for students. birmingham: ltsn mathsteam project. boyer, e.l. (1990) scholarship reconsidered: priorities of the professoriate. new york: the carnegie foundation for the advancement of teaching. coleman, g. (2003) ‘a review of the engineering maths first aid kit and the algebra refresher’, pp. 44-45, in mathsteam (ed.) maths support for students. birmingham: ltsn mathsteam project. cox, w. (2007) practical, theory based principles for teaching mathematics in higher education. mathematicians and mathematics educationalists: can we collaborate? online: http://www.maths.warwick.ac.uk/~mond/mvme/cox.pdf (accessed: 4 august 2009). croft, a.c. (2008) ‘towards a culture of data collection an analysis in mathematics support centres’, 3rd irish workshop on mathematics learning and support centres: 'is mathematics support worthwhile?’. nui maynooth. croft, a.c. and grove, m. (2006) ‘mathematics support: support for the specialist mathematician and the more able student’, msor connections 6(2) pp 39-43. croft, a.c. and stevenson, j. (2004) ‘mathcentre and mathtutor national mathematics support at the school/university transition’, mathematics today, october, pp 164167. http://www.sigma-cetl.ac.uk/index.php?section=88 http://www.sigma-cetl.ac.uk/index.php?section=81 http://www.maths.warwick.ac.uk/~mond/mvme/cox.pdf samuels and patel scholarship in mathematics support services journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 18 dowling, d. and nolan, b. (2006) ‘measuring the effectiveness of a maths learning support centre the dublin city university experience’, cetl msor 2006 conference, loughborough. ellis, d. (2003) ‘the study support centre: the robert gordon university, aberdeen’, pp. 14-15, in mathsteam (ed.) maths support for students. birmingham: ltsn mathsteam project. entwistle, n. (2009) teaching for understanding at university: deep approaches and distinctive ways of thinking. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan. gill, o., o’donoghue, j. and johnson, p. (2008) an audit of mathematical support provision in irish third level institutions. limerick: cemtl, university of limerick. harrison, m., beale, r., foster, w.h., gu, d.w. and hibberd, s. (2006) ‘the helm transferability project’, cetl-msor 2006 conference. loughborough. healey, m. (2000) ‘development of the scholarship of teaching in higher education: a discipline-based approach’, higher education research and development 19(2) pp 169-189. hefce (2004) centres for excellence in teaching and learning: invitation to bid for funds (january 2004/05). bristol: higher education funding council for england. hu, c. and samuels, p.c. (2007) ‘computer games and mobile technologies: motivating students towards mathematics learning’, cetl-msor 2007 conference. birmingham. kahn, p., young, r., grace, s., pilkington, r., rush, l., tomkinson, b. and willis, i. (2006) the role and effectiveness of reflective practices in programmes for new academic staff: a grounded practitioner review of the research literature. york: the higher education academy. kreber, c. (2002) ‘teaching excellence, teaching expertise and the scholarship of teaching’, innovative higher education 27 pp 5-23. samuels and patel scholarship in mathematics support services journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 19 lawson, d.a., carpenter, s., and croft, a.c. (2009) ‘mathematics support: real, virtual and mobile’, international journal of technology in mathematics education 15(2). lawson, d.a., croft, a.c. and halpin, m. (2003) good practice in thepprovision of mathematics support centres (2nd edn.). birmingham: ltsn maths, stats and or network. lawson, d.a., halpin, m. and croft, a.c. (2001) ‘after the diagnostic test what next? evaluating and enhancing the effectiveness of mathematics support centres’, msor connections 1(3) pp 19-23. lawson, d.a., halpin, m. and croft, a.c. (2002) after the diagnostic test what next? evaluating and enhancing the effectiveness of mathematics support centres part 2’, msor connections 2(1) pp 23-26. lawson, d.a., symonds, r. and samuels, p.c. (2006) ‘proactive interventions in mathematics and statistics support’, cetl-msor 2006 conference. loughborough. loughborough university (2007) postgraduate certificate in mathematics support and dyslexia/dyscalculia in fe/he. online: http://pgcert.lboro.ac.uk/ (accessed: 4 august 2009). loughborough university mathematics education centre and coventry university mathematics support centre (2004) centre for excellence in teaching and learning stage 1 bid: a centre for excellence in the provision of university-wide mathematics and statistics support. loughborough: loughborough university. macgillivray, h. (2008) learning support in mathematics and statistics in australian universities – a guide for the university sector. strawberry hills: the australian learning and teaching council. mathsteam (2003) maths support for students. birmingham: ltsn mathsteam project. http://pgcert.lboro.ac.uk/ samuels and patel scholarship in mathematics support services journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 20 patel, c. and little, j. (2006) ‘measuring maths study support’, international journal of mathematics and its applications 25(3) pp 131-138. pell, g. and croft, a.c. (2008) ‘mathematics support – support for all!’, teaching mathematics and its applications 27(4) pp 167-173. perkin, g. and croft, a.c. (2004) ‘mathematics support centres – the extent of current provision’, msor connections 4(2) pp 14-18. roberts, g. (2002) set for success: the supply of people with science, technology, engineering and mathematics skills. london: hm treasury. samuels, p.c. (2006) ‘introducing the sigma mathematics support research programme’, msor connections 6(4) pp 12-13. samuels, p.c. (2007) ‘mathematics support as a practical discipline’, cetl-msor 2007 conference. birmingham. saunders, m., trowler, p., ashwin, p., machell, j., williams, s. and knight, p. (2007) the national evaluation of the cetl programme 2005-2010: first formative phase. lancaster: cset, department of educational research, lancaster university. sigma centre for excellence in mathematics and statistics support (2007) hefce cetl interim evaluation report. coventry: mathematics education centre, loughborough university and mathematics support centre, coventry university. smith, k. and gadsden, r. (2006) ‘sigma sas rescuing projects’, cetl-msor 2006 conference. loughborough. staddon, e. and newman, l. (2003) the education drop-in centre at the university of glamorgan, pp. 22-23, in mathsteam (ed.) maths support for students. birmingham: ltsn mathsteam project. thomas, j. w. (1993) ‘promoting independent learning in the middle grades: the role of instructional support practices’, elementary school journal, 93(5) pp 575-591. samuels and patel scholarship in mathematics support services journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 21 trott, c. (2003) ‘mathematics support for dyslexic and dyscalculic students’ patoss bulletin 16(2) pp 22-28. wenger, e. (1998) communities of practice: learning, meaning and identity. cambridge: cambridge university press. author details dr peter samuels is senior research fellow in the sigma centre for excellence in mathematics and statistics support at coventry university. his main research interests are mathematics support leadership, mathematics study skills and innovative uses of technology in mathematics support, especially serious games. chetna patel is manager of the mathematics and statistics help centre at the university of sheffield. she has worked as a mathematics support centre manager for the last 12 years. her main research interest is in the provision of extracurricular mathematics teaching. scholarship in mathematics support services abstract mathematics support: definition and rationale history of the mathematics support community of practice definition of scholarship in mathematics support surveys into the extent of mathematics support provision good practice in the provision of mathematics support evidence of scholarship in mathematics support provisions detailed case study of scholarship in record keeping the sigma centre for excellence in teaching and learning evidence of scholarship in sigma conclusions references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 19: december 2020 can you teach research in 10 minutes? embedding information literacy micro-sessions in module programmes rachael hunter coventry university london abstract this case study discusses the inception and continued delivery of 10-minute micro research skills sessions within two entrepreneurship modules at coventry university london. the case study starts with an explanation of how and why the project was developed. its rationale was underpinned by both established, current bite-sized learning research, and established psychological and neural evidence. this paper describes how these practices are used in the workplace to promote continuous professional development and disseminate company information for training purposes. discussing both the delivery and skills content, this paper explains the methods used by the information and skills development specialist (isds) in each 10-minute session to engage students and embed database searching skills in to their routine study practices. it also explains how this practice has been adopted by students and how the skills have been embedded to enhance their final business pitches at the end of their modules. keywords: microteaching; microlearning; learning design; information literacy; skills development; research skills; transferrable skills. background study skills at coventry university london have undergone a decade of delivery evolution. starting as mandatory modules delivered by academic staff, they were ‘bolted-on’ to the main study programmes to provide students with the opportunity to develop the core research and analytical skills that they would need to complete their courses to a high standard. however, as wingate (2006) argues, bolting the skills on, rather than embedding them in, is ineffectual; rather like trying to add flour to a cake after it has been baked. hunter can you teach research in 10 minutes? embedding information literacy micro-sessions in module programmes journal of learning development in higher education, issue 19: december 2020 2 taking this into consideration, and following the removal of the core skills modules for postgraduate students, there was a shift towards utilising the skills of librarians and academics to co-design and co-deliver a more embedded approach. embedded sessions at coventry university london are one-hour workshops designed to provide information literacy skills, tailored to particular student assessment. usually delivered in weeks 3 and 4 of a module by the isds or the assistant librarian, they provide a platform for students to develop transferrable skills in research, referencing, critical thinking, and academic writing. whilst still largely successful, this one-step approach, despite being tailored to particular academic needs, has sometimes proved problematic for students as they continue through the course. these workshops have not always allowed space for the fundamental development of these skills to be successfully transferred as students still displayed a silo mentality. in this context, silo mentalities refer to the lack of knowledge transfer in their assessments; the databases that students access to answer one assessment in the module were traditionally not used to access information for the next. neither are embedded sessions a ‘one size fits all’ concept. it was clear that a new approach was needed. this was particularly evident in the research skills development opportunities for two entrepreneurship modules, entrepreneurship: creating a business opportunity (m059) and entrepreneurship: developing the business plan (m060). these modules are delivered in terms two and three respectively, as part of a one-year master of business administration (mba) programme. the rationale the project was born out of three distinct needs: 1. the effectiveness of embedded delivery in the m059/m060 modules 2. the disintegration of silo mentalities 3. the validity of sources used in assessment as previous embedded delivery models had not proved entirely successful in these modules, a microteaching approach was considered as an alternative. microteaching and microlearning are not new concepts. since the introduction of microteaching by stanford hunter can you teach research in 10 minutes? embedding information literacy micro-sessions in module programmes journal of learning development in higher education, issue 19: december 2020 3 university in the 1960s, evidence of its efficacy in professional development has been noted (van monfrands, 1969; cooper & allen, 1970; minton, 1997, cited in higgins and nicholl, 2003). whilst most of these papers highlight a need for further research before definite conclusions can be drawn, they nonetheless note a level of positivity in the effectiveness of the approach. used in workplaces for many years as a training model, it is becoming increasingly popular in higher education (gordon, 1997; armstrong and sadlersmith, 2008; emerson and berge, 2018). from a microlearning perspective, psychological and neuro-scientific evidence (cooper, 1990, p.2; perry, 2000, p.34; dwyer, 2002) highlights that the brain’s cognitive load can be reduced through necessary breaks in information processing to stem neural system fatigue. recent research confirms this view, suggesting that regular bite-sized sessions can help individuals process information and learn more effectively (benton-kupper, 2001; gutierrez trejos, 2016; mella, 2016; alqurashi 2017; melvin 2017). for information literacy development, this approach can be beneficial as it allows for the scaffolding of concepts in practice, as evidenced in this adapted form of baumgartner’s (2013, p.6) ‘competence spiral’ as a design model. first, the principles of research would be established, students would apply this knowledge to their particular businesses, and communicate this in their assessment. (adapted from baumgartner, 2013, p.6) silo mentalities are generally attributed to organisations and in particular, departments that deprive information access to other departments (mohapeloa, 2017). however, as paige et al. (2017) assert, the same mentality can be observed in students. anecdotal evidence collected from coventry university london students since this project began concurs with information application communication hunter can you teach research in 10 minutes? embedding information literacy micro-sessions in module programmes journal of learning development in higher education, issue 19: december 2020 4 this view, and, as previously mentioned, notes that several learners do not utilise the same resource sources for different assessments, both within this module, and across their course. feedback can also be viewed in isolation and not considered as a developmental opportunity; it is monologic, rather than dialogic (carless, 2013). to help break down these mentalities, the 10-minute sessions would include consistent reference to how the information gathered in each session could be conjoined, like the pieces of a jigsaw, to form an overall conclusion. as the m059 students progressed to m060, the same databases would be demonstrated in relation to a different topic, thus acknowledging a further development of transferrable skills and optimistically allowing for additional destruction of the silo mentality. the validity of the sources used for assessments was a cause for concern. statistical data from the library shows an increase in the delivery of more traditional one-hour embedded sessions for finding and evaluating information, rising from 28 in the 2017/18 academic year, to 61 in 2018/19 academic year, and to 63 in the 2019/20 academic year. these figures do not include the 10-minute microlearning workshops (see figure1). figure 1. research skills embedded sessions requests. all of these were arranged between academics and the isds, as academics noted a reliance on google over academic sources such as textbooks and journal articles. this was not behaviour restricted to this institution; evidence of this reliance has been documented previously by judd and kennedy (2011), who observed that students’ confidence in information provided by google and wikipedia was high, and the usage of the library service to gather peer-reviewed, validated information was low. it was hoped 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 2017/18 2018/19 2019/20 2017/18 2018/19 2019/20 hunter can you teach research in 10 minutes? embedding information literacy micro-sessions in module programmes journal of learning development in higher education, issue 19: december 2020 5 that this project would further promote the importance and availability of these peerreviewed resources to encourage students to engage in more critical research practices. the project following a request from a course director to deliver a 10-minute embedded research session at the start of a lecture, a strategy was co-developed between the module leader and the isds for two entrepreneurship modules, m059 and m060. research is currently the only area to adopt this 10-minute approach. all other areas of skills development (referencing, critical thinking, avoiding plagiarism) are delivered as one-hour embedded sessions. this collaboration was key; for the project to have any notable impact, students needed to be aware that these research skills sessions had the full endorsement of the module leader, as they had the detailed understanding of the assessment in relation to the skills development. without this correlation, it was probable that students would display indifference and an absence of comprehension as to the relevance of this information to their assessment (bloxham and boyd 2007). six workshops were developed as a trial run for the september 2017/2018 cohort, with delivery taking place in early 2018. each workshop focussed on a particular database and delivered training on both its usage and its usefulness for module assessment. for m059, this was the uk restaurant industry, for m060, it was business operations and strategies for any industry. each session included an explanation and demonstration of a particular search technique: boolean searching, filters, pearl growing, truncation, and keyword searching. the databases chosen were: euromonitor passport, mintel, and ibisworld, along with the website for the uk government’s statistics producer, office for national statistics (ons). this government data was used to determine average family spending and how this may affect the profits of the students’ hypothetical businesses. the initial session provided instruction on the use of google scholar, along with an introduction to research. the final session would recap on the learning. 150 students took part in this initial trial. hunter can you teach research in 10 minutes? embedding information literacy micro-sessions in module programmes journal of learning development in higher education, issue 19: december 2020 6 given the large numbers of students, and the need for engagement and interactivity, it was decided that a live demonstration, driven by student questions and linked to module assessment would be the best method of delivery. the isds elected not to disparage google in these sessions, providing as it did a fundamental starting point for most students to start their research that was both comfortable and familiar. the introductory session would, instead, be focussed towards linking google scholar to locate, coventry university london’s library catalogue, to enable students’ access to valid sources via accustomed means. students’ learning journeys are individual and non-linear, so the microlearning sessions were designed to be reflective of this, offering the fundamental mechanics of database searching along with guidance on their application. resources were made available via the library and course pages on moodle, and the students had ample opportunity to follow up with the librarian after the sessions. following this initial trial, feedback was collected from students through an informal class survey conducted by the module leader. student feedback was generally positive, with the module leader stating: “[the] 10mins pitches [….] on how to research were: understandable; acted upon; useful to the students and to the teachers, and should be introduced in all lectures” (morrison, 2018). at the end of the trial, all student pitches referred to information taken from the taught databases. whilst this showed evidence of the initial impact, and allowed for the continuation of the programme for future cohorts, it became clear in the final pitches that the data taken from these reports was not used in direct relation to the students’ hypothetical businesses. they used the information simply because they were told that they should; not because they were aware of how the data collected may impact these businesses. in short, they stated the ‘what’, without considering the ‘why?’. this realisation led to a change in delivery for the january 2018/19 cohort with the introduction of the review framework (city and islington college, 2016). adapted from blakeslee’s (2004) craap test, this framework sought to engender critical thinking proficiency through the evaluation of an article’s relevance, expertise, viewpoint, intended audience, evidence and when published data in relation to their business pitches. establishing how these database platforms worked sought to develop hunter can you teach research in 10 minutes? embedding information literacy micro-sessions in module programmes journal of learning development in higher education, issue 19: december 2020 7 understanding of a concept in practice, and stimulate transferrable skill development. it was hoped that teaching this in conjunction with established search techniques mentioned previously would help to focus research and reduce searching time as less time would be spent reading material that was irrelevant to their assessment. anecdotal evidence from the author and academics confirms that this approach reduces the time spent on their research. the programme’s evolution since january 2018 has been forged through continual evaluation and collaboration with the module leader. this has seen, in addition to the review framework, two new platforms added to the programme: the database statista and the uk government directory, companies house. these respectively provided students with a global platform with which to see the data in wider context, and allow for close examination of particular uk businesses through their annual reports. the data could then be analysed in relation to the students’ own hypothetical businesses. recent research on current microlearning practices from chuang (2019) and buhu and buhu (2019) has shaped the present asynchronous delivery model used since the pandemic through the recommendation of technologies to package the learning effectively. the impact the isds was invited to the final pitch presentations at the end of the modules. this was beneficial for the isds to see the application of the data within the presentation and assess the validity of data sources. it also helped to highlight the cross-department collaboration. tracing the development of this project from its first inception for the september 2017/18 cohort to the present, the following impacts have been noted through this observation of the student’s pitches at the end of the module. students’ showed: • increased citations from reliable sources; greater reference had been made to these sources throughout the pitch hunter can you teach research in 10 minutes? embedding information literacy micro-sessions in module programmes journal of learning development in higher education, issue 19: december 2020 8 • stronger connections between sources for cogent conclusions. students now showed that they could use this data in relation to their hypothetical businesses, and detail any potential effects • improved critical thinking skills, evidenced though the aforementioned connections between sources • an increase in grade averages across the three intakes, as evidenced below recent data taken from the registry team at coventry university london in july 2020 showed a slight increase in the average grades for the business pitch assessment, rising from 61.4% in 2018/19 to 62.3% in 2019/20 for m059 across all three intakes. the m060 course showed a similar raise in grades from 60.5% in 2018/19 to 62.8% in 2019/20, again across all cohorts. when compared with the 2017/18 grade average of 57.3% for m059 and 60% for m060, an overall percentage increase of 5% and 2.8% respectively is noted. whilst this impact cannot wholly be attributed to the 10-minute tutorials, it is nonetheless notable (see figure 2). figure 2. increase in grade averages in each module the following was also observed through informal and modular evaluation questionnaires (meq) feedback, and statistical data: • increased communication with the isds through 1-1 appointments. the library’s statistics report shows that 1-1 tutorials specific to finding information rose from 17 in 2018/19, to 40 in 2019/20. an increase of 135% (see figure 3) 54 56 58 60 62 64 m059 m060 2017/18 2018/19 2019/20 hunter can you teach research in 10 minutes? embedding information literacy micro-sessions in module programmes journal of learning development in higher education, issue 19: december 2020 9 • increased recognition and appreciation of the library and learning innovation department and its role within the institution. statistical data from the library guide webpages showed in increase in online traffic from 54,653 hits in 2018/19 to 67,571 hits in 2019/20. an increase of 23.6% (see figure 4) figure 3. increase in 1-1 finding information requests figure 4: increase in library guides webpage hits also in evidence is the wider acknowledgement of the project in other faculties, leading to the development of similar workshops for both undergraduate (363lon fashion management) and additional postgraduate (m003 marketing in a global age) modules. data has not been collected from these modules to ascertain its impact on grades from one academic year to the next, but students demonstrated increased awareness of the databases through their questions and comments during the workshops. increased engagement with the isds was also noted through the previously mentioned rise in 1-1 requests and site traffic. 0 10,000 20,000 30,000 40,000 50,000 60,000 70,000 80,000 2018/19 2019/20 0 10 20 30 40 50 2018/19 2019/20 hunter can you teach research in 10 minutes? embedding information literacy micro-sessions in module programmes journal of learning development in higher education, issue 19: december 2020 10 covid-19 each cohort has brought new challenges and allowed for a consistent evolution of the project. the covid-19 pandemic in particular brought with it its own specific challenges and identified the need for further delivery diversity. the original project was delivered synchronously, with the option of further asynchronous content if the student wished to access it. whilst this delivery mode was still possible, time zones, technological issues and alternative working practices dictated that a new method was needed. aforementioned research on contemporary microlearning methods from chuang (2019) and buhu and buhu (2019) informed this delivery model as the isds took the decision to create a series of eight ‘10-minute tutorials’ over the traditional synchronous delivery mode. containing entirely asynchronous content, each tutorial focuses on a particular database and takes the students through the research process via presentation and video demonstration. this is then promoted through the moodle pages for each module, where student engagement can be tracked. there is currently no available data to determine whether this approach will affect the average grades for these modules, or how the students will respond to the change in format. students are still able to seek additional support from the isds through microsoft teams chat, email and live question and answer (q&a) sessions. conclusions secondary research has shown that microlearning has benefits for cognitive processing as the brain has opportunity and time to absorb the information (cooper, 1990, p.2; dwyer, 2002; perry, 2000, p.34). this can be utilised in a higher education setting just as effectively as in the workplace. this, along with evidence undertaken from primary research, has shown that this project has garnered an increased awareness of both valid research practices and the library and learning innovation service. collaboration between the isds and the module leader was fundamental to the project’s development. without this, students would have no context for their skills development and be disinclined to learn these skills. despite the small, if positive, impact on average grades since 2018, the project has highlighted a demonstrable effect on student pitches at the end of their modules. students are now citing data from these platforms and examining the hunter can you teach research in 10 minutes? embedding information literacy micro-sessions in module programmes journal of learning development in higher education, issue 19: december 2020 11 relationship between this and their businesses. the inclusion of this microlearning project within other modules in 2019 (363lon and m003) establishes the project’s flexible and tailored design. this has allowed for its continued evolution and made it suitable for all. given this evidence, it is hoped that this model could be adopted by other faculties to facilitate information literacy practice and its continual development to students. acknowledgements the author would like to acknowledge the support of callum morrison and the library and learning innovation department at coventry university london in developing the project. references alqurashi, e. (2017) 'microlearning: a pedagogical approach for technology integration'. international educational technology conference. harvard, cambridge, ma. august 2017. available at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/319715909_microlearning_a_pedagogical _approach_for_technology_integration (accessed: 5 august 2020). armstrong, s., & sadler-smith, e. (2008) ‘learning on demand, at your own pace, in rapid bite-sized chunks: the future shape of management development?’ academy of management learning & education, 7(4), pp.571-586 available at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/27759160 (accessed: 7 august 2020). baumgartner, p. (2013) educational dimensions of microlearning – towards a taxonomy for microlearning. available at: https://imb.donau-uni.ac.at/themetest/wpcontent/uploads/2013/04/baumgartner_2013_educational-dimensions-formicrolearning.pdf (accessed: 1 august 2020). benton-kupper, j. (2001) ‘the microteaching experience: student perspectives’, education 121(4), pp. 830-836. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/319715909_microlearning_a_pedagogical_approach_for_technology_integration https://www.researchgate.net/publication/319715909_microlearning_a_pedagogical_approach_for_technology_integration https://www.jstor.org/stable/27759160 https://imb.donau-uni.ac.at/themetest/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/baumgartner_2013_educational-dimensions-for-microlearning.pdf https://imb.donau-uni.ac.at/themetest/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/baumgartner_2013_educational-dimensions-for-microlearning.pdf https://imb.donau-uni.ac.at/themetest/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/baumgartner_2013_educational-dimensions-for-microlearning.pdf hunter can you teach research in 10 minutes? embedding information literacy micro-sessions in module programmes journal of learning development in higher education, issue 19: december 2020 12 blakeslee, s. (2004) ‘the craap test’, loex quarterly, 31(3), 6-7. available at https://commons.emich.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1009&context=loexquarterly (accessed: 7 august 2020). bloxham, s., and boyd, p. (2007) developing effective assessment in higher education: a practical guide. london: mcgraw-hill. buhu, a. and buhu, l. (2019) 'the applications of microlearning in higher education in textiles' the 15th international scientific conference elearning and software for education. bucharest, april 11-12, 2019 available at: doi:10.12753/2066-026x-19189 (accessed: 7 august 2020). carless, d. (2013) ‘sustainable feedback and the development of student self-evaluative capacities’, pp.113–22, in merry, s., price, m., carless, d. and taras, m. (eds.) reconceptualising feedback in higher education: developing dialogue with students london: taylor and francis. chuang, p.m. (2019) 'new training programme offers bite-sized learning for busy sme bosses: modules cover areas such as leadership thinking and are 'stackable' so learners can earn higher certification’ the business times. available at: https://www.businesstimes.com.sg/government-economy/new-training-programmeoffers-bite-sized-learning-for-busy-sme-bosses (accessed: 7 august 2020). city and islington college (2016) finding and using information in the 21st century: a digital information literacy skills builder. [unpublished policy document]. cooper, g. (1990) ‘cognitive load theory as an aid for instructional design’, australasian journal of educational technology 6(2), pp.108-113 available at: https://doi.org/10.14742/ajet.2322 (accessed 30th september 2020). cooper, j.m & allen, d.w. (1970) microteaching: history and present status. available at: https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ed036471 (accessed: 30 september 2020). dwyer, b.m. (2002) ‘training strategies for the twenty-first century: using recent research on learning to enhance training’, innovations in education and teaching https://commons.emich.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1009&context=loexquarterly doi:10.12753/2066-026x-19-189 doi:10.12753/2066-026x-19-189 https://www.businesstimes.com.sg/government-economy/new-training-programme-offers-bite-sized-learning-for-busy-sme-bosses https://www.businesstimes.com.sg/government-economy/new-training-programme-offers-bite-sized-learning-for-busy-sme-bosses https://doi.org/10.14742/ajet.2322 https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ed036471 hunter can you teach research in 10 minutes? embedding information literacy micro-sessions in module programmes journal of learning development in higher education, issue 19: december 2020 13 international 39(4), pp.265-270 available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/13558000210161115 (accessed: 10 august 2020). emerson, l. c., & berge, z. l. (2018). ‘microlearning: knowledge management applications and competency-based training in the workplace’, knowledge management & e-learning, 10(2), pp.125–132. available at: http://www.kmeljournal.org/ojs/index.php/online-publication/article/view/17/17 (accessed: 10 august 2020). gordon, j. (1997) ‘infonuggets: the bite-sized future of corporate training?’ training, 34(7), pp.26-33. guttierrez trejos, k. (2016) 'learning: think small: 8 commandments of bitesized learning', technology enabled learning excellence essentials. available at: https://www.hr.com/en/magazines/all_articles/learning-think-small-8commandments-of-bite-sized-_ije1fm54.html (accessed 30 september 2020). higgins, a. & nicholl, h. (2003) ‘the experiences of lecturers and students in the use of microteaching as a teaching strategy’, nurse education in practice 3(4), pp.220227. available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/s1471-5953(02)00106-3 (accessed: 30 september 2020). judd, t. & kennedy, g. (2011). ‘expediency‐based practice? medical students' reliance on google and wikipedia for biomedical inquiries’, british journal of educational technology, 42(2), pp.351-360 available at: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.14678535.2009.01019.x (accessed: 10 august 2020). mella, m. (2016) 'taking micro-learning beyond bite-sized: a few tips for creating a rounded experience', technology enabled learning excellence essentials. available at: https://www.hr.com/en/magazines/training_development_excellence_essentials/ma y_2016_technology_enabled_learning/taking-micro-learning-beyond-bite-sized-afew-tips_inu149to.html (accessed 30 september 2020). https://doi.org/10.1080/13558000210161115 http://www.kmel-journal.org/ojs/index.php/online-publication/article/view/17/17 http://www.kmel-journal.org/ojs/index.php/online-publication/article/view/17/17 https://www.hr.com/en/magazines/all_articles/learning-think-small-8-commandments-of-bite-sized-_ije1fm54.html https://www.hr.com/en/magazines/all_articles/learning-think-small-8-commandments-of-bite-sized-_ije1fm54.html https://doi.org/10.1016/s1471-5953(02)00106-3 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8535.2009.01019.x https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8535.2009.01019.x https://www.hr.com/en/magazines/training_development_excellence_essentials/may_2016_technology_enabled_learning/taking-micro-learning-beyond-bite-sized-a-few-tips_inu149to.html https://www.hr.com/en/magazines/training_development_excellence_essentials/may_2016_technology_enabled_learning/taking-micro-learning-beyond-bite-sized-a-few-tips_inu149to.html https://www.hr.com/en/magazines/training_development_excellence_essentials/may_2016_technology_enabled_learning/taking-micro-learning-beyond-bite-sized-a-few-tips_inu149to.html hunter can you teach research in 10 minutes? embedding information literacy micro-sessions in module programmes journal of learning development in higher education, issue 19: december 2020 14 melvin, c. (2017) 'employee learning: bite-sized is the right size: tips to transform information into big successes', technology enabled learning excellence essentials available at: https://www.hr.com/en/magazines/all_articles/employeelearning-bite-sized-is-the-right-size-tip_j8dzr1c8.html (accessed 30 september 2020). mohapeloa, t. (2017). effects of silo mentality on corporate itc’s business model. proceedings of the international conference on business excellence, 11(1), pp.1009-1019. available at: https://doi.org/10.1515/picbe-2017-0105 (accessed: 10 august 2020). morrison, c . (2018) 10mins 'how to research' pitches to m059 were understandable, acted upon by students [email]. paige, j.t., garbee, d.d., yu, q. & rusnak, v. 2017, ‘team training of inter-professional students (ttips) for improving teamwork’, bmj simulation & technology enhanced learning 3(4), pp. 127. available at: doi:10.1136/bmjstel-2017-000194 (accessed: 10 august 2020). perry, b. (2000) ‘how the brain learns best’, instructor, 110(4), pp.34-35. available at: https://www.scholastic.com/teachers/articles/teaching-content/how-brain-learnsbest/ (accessed: 10 august 2020). van mondfrans, a.p (1969) ‘student attitudes and achievement in an educational psychology course after micro‐teaching’, educational psychologist, 6(2), pp.15-17. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/00461526909528978 (accessed: 30 september 2020). wingate, u. (2006) ‘doing away with ‘study skills’’, teaching in higher education, 11(4), pp.457-469. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/13562510600874268 (accessed: 10 august 2020). author details https://www.hr.com/en/magazines/all_articles/employee-learning-bite-sized-is-the-right-size-tip_j8dzr1c8.html https://www.hr.com/en/magazines/all_articles/employee-learning-bite-sized-is-the-right-size-tip_j8dzr1c8.html https://doi.org/10.1515/picbe-2017-0105 doi:10.1136/bmjstel-2017-000194 https://www.scholastic.com/teachers/articles/teaching-content/how-brain-learns-best/ https://www.scholastic.com/teachers/articles/teaching-content/how-brain-learns-best/ https://doi.org/10.1080/00461526909528978 https://doi.org/10.1080/13562510600874268 hunter can you teach research in 10 minutes? embedding information literacy micro-sessions in module programmes journal of learning development in higher education, issue 19: december 2020 15 rachael hunter is the information and skills development specialist at coventry university london. she has worked in further and higher education, and has a special interest in embedding skills development in course and lesson design. abstract background the rationale the project the impact covid-19 conclusions acknowledgements references author details literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special edition: 2018 aldinhe conference, october 2018 whose wellbeing is it anyway? sunny dhillon bishop grosseteste university, uk abstract in this opinion piece, i suggest the need for a critical examination of the ‘wellbeing’ agenda currently being developed throughout higher education (he) in the uk. i suggest that problems arise when notions of ‘wellbeing’ are used without being sufficiently well-defined, and are then accepted as the barometer of student health. this approach will be elucidated by contextualising the situation students find themselves in contemporary neoliberal universities; situating the crucial intermediary role that learning developers and student support services fulfil between academics and students; and exploring different modes of engagement available to those in these roles. drawing upon the critical pedagogy of biesta (2013), i argue that the remit of cultivating critical thinking and independent study skills means that learning developers, through one-to-one meetings, may sometimes be as well-placed as those with specific wellbeing roles (such as counsellors or mental health workers) to acknowledge and explore students’ personal and social anxieties and concerns with compassion. this approach may seem to be at odds with wellbeing rhetoric, which, i argue, can act to detract from critical engagement with the explicit challenges facing students in the contemporary socio-political milieu. my aim is therefore to reintroduce the notion of criticality within the discussions taking place among academics and professional support staff, which in turn may inform practice. central to my aim in this is to raise broader questions around the primary role of academics and professionals in he; for example, is it to train students to passively ‘fit in’ within society or to educate them in a manner such that they will act agentively in society? keywords: critical thinking; neoliberalism; pedagogy of discomfort; wellbeing. dhillon whose wellbeing is it anyway? 2 journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: october 2018 introduction i have been in the post of learning development tutor at bishop grosseteste university (bgu), a small, cathedrals group university in lincoln, since autumn 2016. i also teach as visiting tutor on a final year, undergraduate module within the ba theology, ethics and society course. the institution has approximately 3,000 students, 85% of whom are female and 60% of whom are enrolled on education related subjects (ba education studies, pgce primary and secondary among others). the students with whom i work are actively exposed to critical pedagogies (such as paolo freire’s pedagogy of the oppressed,1968, and ivan illich’s deschooling society,1970, for example) and often struggle with negotiating such radical educational theories with the practices that they encounter on placements. these struggles often become apparent during one-to-one learning development appointments, in module workshops, as well as in writing, especially discourse analysis assignments. it is within this context that i have experienced the wellbeing agenda being rolled out across the nation, from top down (e.g. department for work and pensions, 2013; nhs, 2016; department of health and social care, 2017), ostensibly to help he providers better take care of their students. that said, the widespread, uncritical take up of the wellbeing agenda within he has not simply been a response to the injunctions of government, nor the logic of neoliberal economic policies. rather, concerns expressed over the declining mental health and wellbeing (where the two terms are often used synonymously within he discourse) of young people, due to a presumed combination of academic, financial and social pressures (ons, 2018), have led to the emergence of the ‘therapeutic university’ (ecclestone and hayes, 2009; furedi, 2017). unlike the social and emotional learning (seal) programme (hallam, 2009; watson et al., 2012) which has been rolled out across primary and secondary education within the uk, no such universal provision has been implemented in he. rather, each institution has been responding to the question of student wellbeing in an ad-hoc fashion. at bgu’s annual learning and teaching conference in june 2017, pauline hanesworth (hea academic lead, equality and diversity) delivered a workshop to raise the awareness of academic and professional support staff on how to best ensure students’ holistic wellbeing. hanesworth grounded the need for this awareness through the research outlined in the graph below. figure 1. the 2016 student academic experience survey. dhillon whose wellbeing is it anyway? 3 journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: october 2018 hanesworth reported that this data demonstrated that the uk he student population reported lower levels of life satisfaction, worthwhileness and happiness, as well as higher levels of anxiety, than either the general population at large, or the 20 – 24 year old demographic not within he. this research on behalf of the higher education policy institute (hepi) and higher education academy (hea, now advance he) by neves and hillman (2016) informed subsequent work by houghton and anderson (2017), which aimed to embed student mental wellbeing across he curricula, suggesting that both academic and support staff become ‘agents of wellbeing’. an obvious problem with expecting all academics and support staff to become agents of wellbeing is that, up to now, few have received training in counselling skills or mental health awareness. in addition, in my experience, many such staff would not see such a role as their responsibility. however, as evidenced in reports such as that of hanesworth (2017), broglia et al (2017) and thornley (2017), the culture of he appears to be changing. these documents describe attempts to analyse the problems students face and institutional responses in terms of resource allocation policy making. they also report the increase in uptake of training from organisations such as mind and rethink mental illness, as well as the growth of services such as the online peer-support group big white wall (2018). dhillon whose wellbeing is it anyway? 4 journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: october 2018 biesta (2013, p.67) argues that such an approach of training staff to offer counselling to students turns problems arising from the broad socio-economic context and issues surrounding political governance into the responsibility of individual teachers and learners. the current socio-economic policy climate is that of neoliberalism (ball, 1997; bourdieu, 1998; giroux, 2002 and 2014; ward, 2012; radice, 2013). in this culture, organisations from cancer charities to he providers are subject to the same logic of privatisation and competition. this results in a situation whereby individuals are encouraged to shape and sell themselves as marketable commodities to attract viable bidders, be they employers, educational providers, or even voluntary organisations. the neoliberal economic and political climate can be seen to render academics and he support staff as agents of wellbeing as part of a process foucault refers to as ‘governmentality’ (1991). in this case attention is deflected from the social and economic policies (e.g. the introduction of fees and creation of student indebtedness), which have contributed to the wellbeing crises by redefining the ‘problems’ (e.g. resilience, employability) as mainly the responsibility of individuals rather than society. biesta (2013) also discusses the insidiousness of rampant neoliberal competition and the ill effects of it upon students’ wellbeing, arguing that ‘the fact that individuals are made responsible for keeping up their employability in rapidly changing global markets’ obfuscates the critical question as to ‘why such markets should rule over the economy and over social and political life more generally in the first place’ (p.67). a key element in my argument is therefore that it is unsurprising that students are struggling with their overall wellbeing in an age of rising student debt, zero-hour contracts, rising wealth inequalities, and what guy standing (an advocate of a basic income for all) dubs the era of the ‘precariat’ (2016). ‘it is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society’ the observation above by jiddu krishnamurti (n.d) is the fundamental basis of this paper. it is clear that students in the contemporary neoliberal he apparatus are subject to economic challenges and fierce competition for employment on a global scale at levels not witnessed since the aftermath of the second world war (dorling, 2015a; lansley and mack, 2015; standing, 2016; wilkinson and pickett, 2010 and 2018). it is not within the scope of this opinion piece to give a full and detailed account of the challenges students face (see dorling 2015a and 2015b in particular). taking as a given that the sociodhillon whose wellbeing is it anyway? 5 journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: october 2018 economic reality is tough for all but a small minority of economically privileged students, i suggest working from the – albeit exaggerated – adornian premise that ‘where everything is bad it must be good to know the worst’ (2005, p.83). in accepting that students face tangible and harsh challenges, as a deliberately provocative thought experiment, i propose three responses: 1. medication with a huxley-esque soma. 2. learning development gyms. 3. ‘pull up your bootstraps’ training. route one is inspired by aldous huxley’s 1932 dystopian/utopian novel brave new world, whereby a pill named soma is administered to the populace free of charge by the governing powers-that-be in order to induce a sense of contentment with the socio-political reality in which citizens reside. doing so, the powers-that-be nullify any critical engagement with material conditions, and in so doing, any potential revolt. route two draws upon the notion that whilst paying for a gym membership does not make one fit, working alongside a qualified trainer to achieve goals through diligence and a great deal of effort and commitment can, and usually does. in this way, in the role of an academic and/or professional support staff in learning development, for example, one is akin to a gym trainer, and can therefore enable students to develop their critical thinking skills and independence of thought. through embedded workshops and one-to-one sessions, learning developers could help students to develop their academic strength, flexibility and skills. like all effective trainers, learning developers can push, challenge and encourage students to channel their energies, and – often-legitimate – anger and frustrations, in a constructive manner; in effect, to confront and reshape the socio-political conditions in which they reside (peelo, 1994; wisker et al., 2008; hartley et al., 2010; brookfield, 2017; ashton and stone, 2018). route three assumes that students in today’s he have never had it so good in terms of technological advances, opportunities and infrastructure, and that they ought not to expend time and energy complaining about, or criticising, the status quo but, rather, that they ought to be positive, count their blessings and, in effect, get with the programme of neoliberal competition. this route puts the onus squarely upon the students’ shoulders and dhillon whose wellbeing is it anyway? 6 journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: october 2018 argues that they are wholly responsible for what happens to them in terms of learning and employment goals. it is clear that route three is rather crude, and fails to address the wider socio-economic and political challenges that students face. what is not so clear to me is how route one differs in its aims to the wellbeing agenda currently in vogue within he in the uk. policies which encourage academics and support staff to respond to students’ difficulties, frustrations, anger and criticisms of their he experiences by referring them for wellbeing support, produce collusion with the neoliberal agenda and serve to stifle or deflect opposition to the status quo. in my mind, this raises a central philosophical and pedagogical question about what the underlying principle of the contemporary university is. if it is to create compliant employees, who will follow orders uncritically, then perhaps route one is apt. if it is to create critical, independent thinkers, then routes one and three clearly fall short, but route two might be productive. wellbeing symptoms the rationale of the wellbeing agenda within the contemporary, neoliberal he arena is that it will result in students exhibiting a higher rate of happiness, life satisfaction, feelings of worthwhileness, as well as lower anxiety, and that educational providers have an obligation to provide embedded services within curricula to deliver this. facing acute challenges such as the cost of education, housing, existing plutocracies and social injustice, it is no leap to assert that the four symptoms outlined above are inextricably linked to the socio-economic and political milieu in which students (and staff alike) find themselves. however, this acknowledgement is conspicuous by its absence in the hea reports (hanesworth 2016 and 2017; houghton and anderson, 2017). again, following my provocative line of thought, as agents of wellbeing, he providers might be seen as delivering huxley-esque soma whereby petting animals, undertaking mindfulness meditation and aligning one’s chakras through dance (all of which actually form part of bgu’s wellbeing roster of activities) promise to produce feelings of life satisfaction, happiness, worthwhileness and to reduce anxiety – and that this is preferable to challenging students to analyse their socio-political conditions and provoke critical discourse. such wellbeing interventions may well be effective, but, in my view, they would need to work alongside the development of critical discourse. i would expect higher dhillon whose wellbeing is it anyway? 7 journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: october 2018 education to be channelling students’ righteous sense of indignation with existing sociomaterial conditions, together with developing creative proposals for reform and change. where i find the wellbeing agenda to be at its most unnerving is where it purports to put students’ wellbeing at front and centre (seldon and martin, 2017) but, in my view, exacerbates existing social problems by individualising them. the underlying mantra appears to be ‘things may be tough but don’t worry, we’re here to help you feel better’. i am not calling for route three and a stoic attitude which some might think almost revels in student discomfort, but, rather, route two, which should encourage a challenging engagement with the roots of existing injustice and inequality. merely enacting a route one approach through short-term wellbeing activities such as mindfulness workshops will only serve to leave existing social injustices unexamined in the longer-term. individualisation of social problems as allen and bull (2017) argue in their wonkhe blog post: ‘the focus upon individual responsibility is both telling and deeply worrying that there is no mention of wider conditions affecting young people’s mental health such as mounting debt; a housing crisis; and an uncertain graduate labour market’. moreover, as kristiina brunila (2013) asserts, depoliticising students’ wellbeing leads to individualisation of the problems that they face and creates a culture whereby mindset alone is seen as key to growth and attainment, rather than wider material and social conditions. brunila continues by arguing that in a neoliberal culture, where individuals themselves are rendered commodities, and are required to make themselves fit for service and exchange, without critiquing the necessity to do so, or, at the very least, making such critique marketable, ‘one learns to find mistakes in oneself and then hold oneself to blame. this is one way to keep individuals busy by focusing on themselves and making their whole lives available for the interests of the market and the state’ (p.226). route one is wholly complicit with this depoliticised approach, and nullifies critical social engagement in the interest of maintaining the status quo by ensuring that individuals ‘get with the programme’. therefore, in promoting the proliferation of soma-esque coping and/or avoidance techniques to ensure that students get with the programme and do not suffer any crises of conscience or angst in the face of alterable material conditions, i argue that the wellbeing agenda as route one not only distracts from critical social engagement, but is also dhillon whose wellbeing is it anyway? 8 journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: october 2018 problematic insofar as it is opaque to a ‘wider social, political and intellectual framing. when viewed in this light, embracing positive psychology – for example – in uk universities is a dangerous route to travel’ (allen and bull, 2017). bgu learning outcomes bgu’s learning outcomes 2017/18 state within the first four aims that students who graduate from the university will be able to:  think and challenge independently, critically and imaginatively.  be intellectually curious and accept ambiguity. i argue that it is not possible to undertake these processes if one is feeling completely ‘well’ about the situation in which they find themselves. to challenge and accept ambiguity necessarily involves going against the status quo and risking marginalisation. students who are successfully able to enact these learning outcomes will arguably experience illeffects to their wellbeing, as per the definition of the latter by the criteria provided in figure 1 above by advance he. in effect, their level of happiness will likely fall, and their anxiety levels are likely to rise. for example, to critically engage with illich or freire will most likely lead to what ronald barnett (2011) refers to as epistemological uncertainty (p.121). whilst it is apparent that route three is a crude approach that actively disregards the possible legitimacy of a sense of injustice with existing socio-material conditions, route one is clearly not an appropriate manner of cultivating the bgu learning outcomes either. therefore, route two of the gym-esque trainer is the most appropriate course of action to meet these criteria. this manner of student engagement provides an underlying pedagogical rationale that allows academic and support staff to encourage students to criticality engage with normative discourse. moreover, it permits staff and students alike to build the confidence to ask awkward ‘why’ questions and to then foster an environment in which to explore the consequences of entering into the proverbial rabbit hole. maxine greene is an insightful voice in this regard. she argues that learning depends upon ‘breaking free, a leap, and then a question, and that the educative task is to create situations in which students are moved to begin to ask, in all the tones of voice that there are, ‘‘why?’’’ (greene, 2000, p.6). encouraging students to enter the rabbit hole and dhillon whose wellbeing is it anyway? 9 journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: october 2018 critically explore the situations in which they find themselves is something that those working within he, even under contemporary neoliberal governance, are in a crucial position to enact. pedagogy of discomfort having established route two as the most appropriate course of action, i would like to expound upon the benefits of this pedagogy of discomfort before concluding the paper. encouraging students to ask awkward ‘why’ questions fosters critical thinking. in so doing, students will be better equipped to challenge inequality and injustice in its myriad of forms. this process is inextricably an uncomfortable one. as a critic of what he deems the ‘happiness industry’, will davies (2015) claims that ‘once people are critical or angry, they can also be critical or angry about something which is external to themselves’ (p.199). davies continues by arguing that de-individualising social concerns and engaging in critical discourse results in a ‘less lonely, less depressive, less narcissistic state of affairs than one in which people wonder how their minds or brains are behaving, and what they should do to improve them’ (p.200) under a logic of rampant neoliberal individual commodification. it could be argued that wellbeing activities that result in an increase in self-esteem, for example, address the ontological uncertainty (barnett, 2011, p.121) students face and provide a more secure foundation from which to tackle the epistemological uncertainty faced through critical engagement with learning content. that said, a key problem of the wellbeing agenda amidst contemporary neoliberal governance is that it results, as outlined above, in the individualisation of responsibility in the face of wider socio-political issues. to reduce wellbeing to individual engagement with strategies and practices offered by he providers is to distract attention from critical engagement with the conditions that have resulted in the need for a greater proliferation of wellbeing initiatives in the first instance. in terms of practice as academics and learning developers, whilst we in these roles may not all be trained counsellors, to ignore, or seek to nullify, the affective quality of he would be to do a disservice to the transformative power of pedagogy. we are not agents of wellbeing but, rather, professionals that can encourage independent, critical thinking. henry giroux is particularly instructive here. he argues that in our roles we have the capacity to allow students to be critical agents, to learn how to take risks, engage in thoughtful dialogue and address what it means to be socially responsible. in an interview published in a blog by dawes, giroux declares that: dhillon whose wellbeing is it anyway? 10 journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: october 2018 pedagogy is not about training; it is about educating people to be self-reflective, critical and self-conscious about their relationship with others and to know something about their relationship with the larger world. pedagogy in this sense not only provides important thoughtful and intellectual competencies; it also enables people to act effectively upon the societies in which they live. dawes, 2014 acting effectively within the society in which students reside cannot take place if they do not critically engage with the status quo. if they reside and study in a state of fear and desire to integrate with the existing programme, then they cannot act upon societal conditions but, instead, merely survive within them. if pedagogy in he is not about training students to be functionaries but to be self-reflective, critical and self-conscious about how they are situated within society, then in our professional roles we can be agents of criticality. delivering one-to-ones in the role of a learning developer is a particularly ripe arena to encourage critical thinking in a ‘safe’ environment – that is, where ideas and concepts can be probed in a playful manner, even – with compassion. megan boler and michalinos zembylas (2003) observe that doing so ‘nurtures emotions of anger or guilt but challenges them with compassion and courage – there will be possibilities for mutual exploration that also nurture hope and a sense of community for initiating change’ (p.130). boler and zembylas continue by arguing that encouraging this pedagogy of discomfort ‘invites critical inquiry regarding cherished beliefs and assumptions, and also calls for students and educators to take responsibility and even action in the collective struggle for social justice’ (p.126). it is apparent that route two is best equipped to encourage a pedagogy of discomfort. a central issue is then, what professionals in he deem their role to primarily entail: train students to fit within society or to educate in a manner such that students may act upon their socio-cultural milieu. conclusion to summarise my view, the current wellbeing agenda being rolled out through he in the uk is a dangerous path to travel. in effect, it enacts a logic of soma, whereby students are encouraged to become well-adjusted to the status quo. he professionals are being encouraged by research conducted on behalf of hepi (2016) and the hea (2017) to become agents of wellbeing, in effect, to be complicit with route one. this agenda appears dhillon whose wellbeing is it anyway? 11 journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: october 2018 to have been taken on rather uncritically by some he professionals. this paper does not argue for a route three logic and disavow he professionals of any consideration of students’ wellbeing but, rather, deems route two, a pedagogy of discomfort, the most appropriate course of option. this route can entail healthy practices such as meditation, yoga and appropriate diets, but, crucially, acknowledges that these practices are themselves inextricably enmeshed within a particular socio-economic and political discourse that constantly requires critical interrogation. in the late howard zinn’s (2002) terms, it is impossible to remain neutral on a moving train. so, under a logic of neoliberalism, immanent responses to improve the wellbeing of subjects living under its dictates, be it through cognitive behavioural therapy (cbt), neuro linguistic programming (nlp) or, indeed, mindfulness practices, for example, are therapeutic interventions which individualise social concerns, and thus unwittingly serve to maintain the status quo. as a result, these courses of action perpetuate a cycle of route one, shortterm agendas, to distract from the more central issue of wider socio-political governance. doing yoga and the like in and of itself is, of course, not a political problem. the issue is whether doing so is to be undertaken to tolerate and survive amidst harsh socio-economic and political conditions or, preferably, to develop an inner resolve to critically engage with and challenge the presuppositions that scaffold the status quo. so, whilst wellbeing activities such as those outlined above can indeed tackle ontological uncertainty, and perhaps enable students to deal with epistemological uncertainty in a healthier manner, the fact that cbt and nlp, for example, are forms of therapy that, by virtue of the definition of ‘therapy’, seek to cure or remedy the individual such that they be fit for societal purpose, what results is an uncritical acceptance that social norms are, in fact, worthy of adapting oneself to. hence, the status quo remains the barometer of health and wellbeing. as the late mark fisher (2012) observed: ‘[t]herapies such as cognitive behaviour therapy combine a focus on early life with the self-help doctrine that individuals can become masters of their own destiny’. in doing so, the individualisation of wellbeing is divorced from socio-political conditions and the individual becomes a commodity that must make her or himself fit and well for social function. this, at the very least, distracts from engaged socio-political critique and, at worst, is inimical to it, for it is based on the premise that ‘all is well’ but that the individual ought to adjust themselves to the status quo in order to be well. he academics and support staff do have opportunities to encourage students to critically explore the material conditions in which they reside. moreover, they have the capacity to exercise compassion and support in terms of the very real challenges that students face. dhillon whose wellbeing is it anyway? 12 journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: october 2018 in my view, these activities are both at least as essential to he as their other teaching and employability related goals. i would go so far as to argue, in the socratic tradition, that contemporary students are in need of a little ‘corruption’ in the face of a one-sided neoliberal discourse. to conclude, through the words of alain badiou (2012) in the appropriately entitled philosophy for militants, ‘to corrupt here means to teach the possibility of refusing all blind submission to established opinions. to corrupt means to give the youth certain means to change their opinion with regard to social norms, to substitute debate and rational critique over imitation and approval’ (p.10). author details sunny dhillon has been a learning development tutor at bishop grosseteste university, lincoln, since 2016, and a phd candidate within cardiff university’s philosophy department for longer than he cares to remember (since 2011). dhillon whose wellbeing is it anyway? 13 journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: october 2018 references adorno, t. w. (2005) minima moralia: reflections from damaged life (trans. e. f. n. jephcott). london: verso. allen, k. and bull, a. (2017) ‘beware of the positive university’, wonkhe, 2 october.available at: http://wonkhe.com/blogs/beware-of-the-positive-university/ (accessed: 3 october 2017). ashton, s. and stone, r. (2018) an a-z of creative teaching in higher education. los angeles: sage. badiou, a. (2012) philosophy for militants (trans. b. bosteels). london: verso. ball, s. j. (1997) ‘policy sociology and critical social research: a personal review of recent education policy and policy research’, british educational research journal 23(3), pp. 257-274. barnett, r. (2011) being a university. london; new york: routledge. biesta, g. j. j. (2013) the beautiful risk of education. boulder, co.: paradigm. big white wall (2018) online mental health and wellbeing service, available at: https://www.bigwhitewall.com/v2/home.aspx?returnurl=%2f (accessed: date). boler, m. and zembylas, m. (2003) ‘discomforting truths: the emotional terrain of understanding difference’, pp. 110-136, in trifonas, p., giroux, h., and pinar, w. (eds.) pedagogies of difference: rethinking education for social change. new york: routledge. bourdieu, p. (1998) ‘the essence of neoliberalism’ (trans. j. j. shapiro). le monde diplomatique, 8 december. available at: https://mondediplo.com/1998/12/08bourdieu#tout-en-haut (accessed: 30 may 2018). broglia, e., millings, a. and barkham, m. (2017) ‘challenges to addressing student mental health in embedded counselling services: a survey of uk higher and further education institutions’, british journal of guidance & counselling, pp.1–15. brookfield, s. (2017) becoming a critically reflective teacher, 2nd edn. somerset: john wiley & sons. brunila, k. (2013) ‘hooked on a feeling: education, guidance and rehabilitation of youth at risk’, critical studies in education, 54(2), pp.215-228. davies, w. (2015) the happiness industry: how the government and big business sold us well-being. london: verso. dawes, s. (2014) ‘interview with henry a. giroux: the neoliberalisation of higher education’. simon dawes: media theory, history and regulation, 26 june. available at: https://smdawes.wordpress.com/2014/06/26/interview-with-henry-agiroux-the-neoliberalisation-of-higher-education/ (accessed: 14 december 2017). http://wonkhe.com/blogs/beware-of-the-positive-university/ https://www.bigwhitewall.com/v2/home.aspx?returnurl=%2f https://mondediplo.com/1998/12/08bourdieu#tout-en-haut https://smdawes.wordpress.com/2014/06/26/interview-with-henry-a-giroux-the-neoliberalisation-of-higher-education/ https://smdawes.wordpress.com/2014/06/26/interview-with-henry-a-giroux-the-neoliberalisation-of-higher-education/ dhillon whose wellbeing is it anyway? 14 journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: october 2018 department of health and social care (2017) thousands of new roles to be created in mental health workforce plan, 31 july. available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/thousands-of-new-roles-to-be-created-inmental-health-workforce-plan (accessed: 12 december 2017). department for work and pensions. (2013) health, work and wellbeing – evidence and research. available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/health-work-andwellbeing-evidence-and-research (accessed: 19 february 2018). dorling, d. (2015a) inequality and the 1%. london: verso. dorling, d. (2015b) injustice: why social inequality still persists. bristol: policy press. ecclestone, k. and hayes, d. (2009) the dangerous rise of therapeutic education. london: routledge. fisher, m. (2012) ‘why mental health is a political issue’, the guardian, 16 july. available at: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/jul/16/mental-health-politicalissue (accessed: 12 december 2017). foucault, m. (1991) 'governmentality' (trans. r. braidotti), pp. 87–104, in burchell, g., gordon, c. and miller, p. (eds.) the foucault effect: studies in governmentality. chicago, il: university of chicago press. freire, p. (1968) pedagogy of the oppressed. new york: seabury press. furedi, f. (2017) ‘the therapeutic university’. frank furedi: sociologist, commentator and author. available at: http://www.frankfuredi.com/site/article/898 (accessed: 15 june 2018). giroux, h. (2002) ‘neoliberalism, corporate culture, and the promise of higher education: the university as a democratic public sphere’. harvard educational review, 72(4), pp.425-464. giroux, h. (2014) neoliberalism’s war on higher education. toronto: haymarket books. greene, m. (2000) releasing the imagination: essays on education, the arts and social change. san francisco, ca.: jossey-bass. hallam, s. (2009) ‘an evaluation of the social and emotional aspects of learning (seal) programme: promoting positive behaviours, effective learning and well-being in primary school children’, oxford review of education, 35(3), pp.313-330. hanesworth, p. (2016) teach well: embedding mental wellbeing in the curriculum. york: higher education academy. hanesworth, p. (2017) promoting a holistic approach to student wellbeing: considering the curriculum (higher education academy). available at: http://www.insidegovernment.co.uk/uploads/2017/05/paulinehanesworth.pdf (accessed: 20 july 2017). hartley, p., hilsdon, j., keenan, c., sinfield, s. and verity, m. (2011) learning development in higher education. basingstoke, hampshire; new york: palgrave macmillan. https://www.gov.uk/government/news/thousands-of-new-roles-to-be-created-in-mental-health-workforce-plan https://www.gov.uk/government/news/thousands-of-new-roles-to-be-created-in-mental-health-workforce-plan https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/health-work-and-wellbeing-evidence-and-research https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/health-work-and-wellbeing-evidence-and-research https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/jul/16/mental-health-political-issue https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/jul/16/mental-health-political-issue http://www.frankfuredi.com/site/article/898 http://www.insidegovernment.co.uk/uploads/2017/05/paulinehanesworth.pdf dhillon whose wellbeing is it anyway? 15 journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: october 2018 houghton, a.m. and anderson. j. (2017) embedding mental wellbeing in the curriculum: maximising success in higher education. york: higher education academy. huxley, a. (1977) brave new world. london: granada publishing. illich, i. (1970) deschooling society. new york: harper and row. lansley, a. and mack, j. (2015) breadline britain: the rise of mass poverty. london: oneworld. lawrence, j. l. (2017) maximising success in higher education: embedding mental wellbeing in the curriculum toolkit. york: higher education academy. neves, j. and hillman, n. (2016) the 2016 student academic experience survey (higher education policy institute and higher education academy). available at: https://www.hepi.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/student-academic-experiencesurvey-2016.pdf (accessed: 20 july 2017). national health service (2016) five steps to mental wellbeing, 6 january. available at: https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/stress-anxiety-depression/improve-mental-wellbeing (accessed: 21 september 2017). office for national statistics (2018) estimating suicide among higher education students, england and wales: experimental statistics. available at: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/ deaths/articles/estimatingsuicideamonghighereducationstudentsenglandandwalesex perimentalstatistics/2018-06-25 (accessed: 2 july 2018). peelo, m. (1994) helping students with study problems. buckingham; bristol, pa: society for research into higher education & open university press. radice, h. (2013) ‘how we got here: uk higher education under neoliberalism’, acme: an international e-journal for critical geographies, 2013, 12(3), pp.407-418. seldon, a. and martin, a. (2017) the positive and mindful university. available at: https://www.hepi.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/hepi-the-positive-and-mindfuluniversity-paper-18-embargoed-until-21st-sept-1.pdf (accessed: 12 december 2017). standing, g. (2016) the corruption of capitalism: why rentiers thrive and work does not pay. london: biteback. thornley, c. (2017) not by degrees: improving student mental health in the uk’s universities, ippr. available at http://www.ippr.org/research/publications/not-bydegrees (accessed: 20 june 2018). ward, s. c. (2012) neoliberalism and the global restructuring of knowledge and education. new york: taylor & francis. wilkinson, r. and pickett, k. (2010) the spirit level: why equality is better for everyone. london: penguin. https://www.hepi.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/student-academic-experience-survey-2016.pdf https://www.hepi.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/student-academic-experience-survey-2016.pdf https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/stress-anxiety-depression/improve-mental-wellbeing https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/articles/estimatingsuicideamonghighereducationstudentsenglandandwalesexperimentalstatistics/2018-06-25 https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/articles/estimatingsuicideamonghighereducationstudentsenglandandwalesexperimentalstatistics/2018-06-25 https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/articles/estimatingsuicideamonghighereducationstudentsenglandandwalesexperimentalstatistics/2018-06-25 https://www.hepi.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/hepi-the-positive-and-mindful-university-paper-18-embargoed-until-21st-sept-1.pdf https://www.hepi.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/hepi-the-positive-and-mindful-university-paper-18-embargoed-until-21st-sept-1.pdf http://www.ippr.org/research/publications/not-by-degrees http://www.ippr.org/research/publications/not-by-degrees dhillon whose wellbeing is it anyway? 16 journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: october 2018 wilkinson, r. and pickett, k. (2018) the inner level: how more equal societies reduce stress, restore sanity and improve everyone’s wellbeing. london: penguin. watson, d., emery, c., bayliss, p., boushel, m. and mcinnes, k. (2012) children’s social and emotional well-being in schools: a critical perspective. bristol: the policy press. wisker, g., exley, k., antoniou, m. and ridley, p. (2008) working one-to-one with students. new york: routledge. zinn, h. (2002) you can’t be neutral on a moving train: a personal history of our times. boston: beacon press. literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 10: november 2016 editorial sue eccles bournemouth university amanda french birmingham city university, uk lucy gray open university, uk andy hagyard university of lincoln, uk john hilsdon plymouth university, uk christina howell-richardson birkbeck, university of london, uk moira maguire dundalk institute of technology, ireland issue 10 of the journal of learning development in higher education draws together contributions which reflect a range of current debates in learning development. all of the papers in this issue are concerned with understanding the student experience and ensuring that effective support is offered. the importance of ‘learning spaces’ is a recurrent theme, with papers exploring the significance of learning spaces to developing employability skills, supporting co-learning and engagement. the benefits and challenges of creating effective learning is also explored in relation to the use of educational videos and the topical issue of shifting emphasis from lecturer defined content. hayes et al’s discussion of the impact of designing spaces for learning offers perceptions of academic learning environments and perceived impact on articulation of employability skills. in this mixed methods study the focus is on employability skills and how they can be facilitated by the organisation of social spaces for students to develop the social and professional skills which were of high value to students. richard reynolds’ paper explores editorial journal of learning development in higher education, issue 10: november 2016 3 the interesting concept of classroom psychogeography and is based on his work with masters students at central saint martins over a period of more than ten years. his paper raises questions about how learning spaces are never neutral and how consequently students’ learning and levels of engagement are affected in different ways by the spaces that they learn in, both negatively and positively. paul rice and robert farmer present their research into the use of educational videos, focussing particularly on student perceptions of their value and the identification of key features of effective videos. while recognising the primary importance of content, their research highlights the need to provide added value through activities which engage students with that content. in addition they identify aspects of video production, such as length and style, which students prefer. dr emma roberts from leeds trinity university offers a practice-based reflection on how developing higher education (he) pedagogy towards reducing reliance on lecturer defined content shifts both students and lecturers out of their comfort zone with positive effects. in the current context of greater measurement of student satisfaction in he, this can pose a challenge for individual academics as well as universities. however, roberts argues that potentially disruptive and transformational learning experiences require additional support for staff and students if they are to be successful. david harwood considers the value of a university-based foundation programme, ‘extended science’, drawing upon a longitudinal study to share insights about curriculum design and student support. he also reports favourable results in terms of student retention, progression and graduation by comparison to other schemes. he emphasises the importance of embedding support for learning within such programmes and recommends utilising a ‘threshold concepts’ approach. where foundation studies are undertaken in fe environments, he argues, transition-related challenges can be exacerbated whereas, when based within the university, a higher education learning culture may more readily be engendered and they may be more effective in widening participation in a field still marked by low levels of diversity. jack and hampshire’s case study explores the value of story writing in understanding the learning needs of undergraduate nursing students during their first clinical placement. based on a pilot study, the paper explores the value of using story writing, a tool which the authors believe enabled students to describe and construct their experiences through telling stories in their own words. jack and hampshire offer insights into the ways in which story writing might be a helpful way for nurse educators to understand the multiple factors which support or impede student placement learning. sandra abegglen, tom burns, sandra sinfield offer editorial journal of learning development in higher education, issue 10: november 2016 4 an opinion piece which, as the title of so aptly conveys, discusses how productive colearning can be fostered within semi-structured learning spaces. the paper describes the processes and outcomes of pairing first year education students undertaking a first assignment task with second year students studying a peer mentoring module. students develop their own approach to the requirements of the assignment; and the study reports benefits to the overall well-being of the incoming students and substantive learning of academic literacy; as well as benefits of bi-lateral knowledge transfer and experiential learning for their peer mentors. these papers have much to say about how we can enhance the student experience in a range of contexts and we hope you find the issue useful and thought-provoking. editorial journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 21: september 2021 ________________________________________________________________________ learners’ perceptions of the effectiveness of using selfreflection to understand english literary texts: towards an autonomous learning approach in libya hana el-badri university of benghazi, benghazi, libya fatma abu-baker university of glasgow, glasgow, uk abstract teaching learners to reflect on their work has been widely researched within languagelearning contexts in higher education. research has revealed that self-reflection leads to both development in learners’ reading comprehension and lecturers being enabled to write more meaningful corrective feedback on learners’ assignments. using a collaborative teaching approach at benghazi university, this research evaluated the effectiveness of using a self-reflection worksheet for understanding short stories based on the perspectives of 19 tertiary libyan learners and the course lecturers’ feedback. the research process involved the learners first reading a short story and answering text comprehension questions and a reflection question in which they commented on their understanding. they were then introduced to the self-reflection worksheet and advised how to use it in their second reading of the same story. this self-reflection worksheet included a section where students added reflections on their understanding following the second reading, supported by the worksheet. content analysis was used for the qualitative data that investigated the learners’ reflection after their first and second reading. it was also used for staff feedback on the learners’ reflections. the findings show the usefulness of using the self-reflection worksheet in supporting the learners’ meaning understanding. it also helped them make positive changes during their second reading of the story. evidence suggests that using worksheets for reading literary el-badri and abubaker learners’ perceptions of the effectiveness of using self-reflection to understand english literary texts: towards an autonomous learning approach in libya journal of learning development in higher education, issue 21: september 2021 2 texts is effective in improving levels of reading comprehension. implications and suggestions for effective teaching practice and future research are provided in this paper. keywords: self-reflection; self-reliance; learner autonomy. introduction the epistemological views of social constructivists prioritise the active role of learners. social constructivists consider learning to be an-ongoing process in which teachers use classroom activities and reflection tools to achieve their learning targets. for schack (1994), reflecting on learning provides learners with ‘feedback upon the completion and guides their learning along the way’ (p.39). accordingly, the importance of relating selfreflection to learning development should be apparent to language instructors (cheng and fox, 2017; everhard and murphy, 2015). for roberts (2006), learners’ ability to reflect on their own work is ‘a vital skill in the external world’ (p.3). mcconnell (2000) also stresses that when learners are actively involved in the process of ‘judging their own and others’ work’, then their learning will be more meaningful than that of passive learners who are considered as ‘the objects of others’, receiving taught information provided to them by their teacher (p. 127). considering the use of self-reflection in language learning development, cheng and fox stress the following advantages of using portfolios as a tool of self-reflection: • monitoring how students manage tasks over time; • reviewing student development and performance; • examining the nature of different tasks and/or distinguishing situations in which students are most or least successful and; • assessing performance (p.84). it can then be argued that reflection on learning contributes to guiding learners to assess their own areas of weakness and strength; it supports their communication skills and el-badri and abubaker learners’ perceptions of the effectiveness of using self-reflection to understand english literary texts: towards an autonomous learning approach in libya journal of learning development in higher education, issue 21: september 2021 3 develops their self-reliance. for such reasons, the effect of self-reflection on learning should be further researched. this investigation therefore concentrates on the effect of self-reflection on the ability to read english literary texts among libyan university students. at libyan universities, instructors in literature use different methods to measure their students’ learning, including written tests, text summaries, homework exercises, oral presentations, and question-and-answer activities. therefore, libyan instructors are usually engaged in different assessment activities during their class time (stiggins, 2001). moreover, student assessment involves mid-term testing and final exams to assess learners’ achievement (gronlund and linn, 1990). such tests aim to assess the overall knowledge of learners, but do not contribute to the learning process itself. researchers, however, argue that restricting assessment to systematic tests can negatively affect the process of language learning because it may bring fear and anxiety. learners may also be disappointed especially when what they concentrate on is not emphasised in the exam questions (guskey, 2003; shaaban, 2005). hence, learners are required to reflect on their own learning development during the whole learning process. in spite of the fact that recent reading research emphasises the role of active learning to enhance reading (applebee et al., 2003), to the researchers’ knowledge there is no research investigating the effectiveness of using different strategies for reading in higher education. therefore, this investigation fills this gap by examining the effectiveness of using a reflective worksheet as a tool to improve university students’ reading comprehension. in addition, no research has been conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of learners’ self-reflection on reading english literary texts in libyan universities. earlier research has rarely focused on student perspectives on the effectiveness of self-reflection, which would provide an insight into the appropriateness of such an approach. therefore, this research paper sets out to examine the following questions with a group of libyan university students of english: 1. to what extent did the libyan students believe that the self-reflection worksheet supported their own understanding of the text? 2. what were the libyan students’ perceived areas of improvement after using the self-reflection worksheet? el-badri and abubaker learners’ perceptions of the effectiveness of using self-reflection to understand english literary texts: towards an autonomous learning approach in libya journal of learning development in higher education, issue 21: september 2021 4 research methods libyan participants were introduced to the self-reflection sheet as an enhancement activity intended to support their growing understanding and maximise their learning outcomes. the self-reflection worksheet emphasised some areas that the participants were required to develop during their reading by using the prompts included in the self-reflection form (appendix 1). it was essential to investigate the impact of this enhancement to establish its benefits. therefore, an action research approach was adopted (mitchell et al., 2009). bias and ethical considerations for the worksheet were peer reviewed by staff in the department of applied linguistics at benghazi university prior to the data collection. sample a sample of 24 undergraduate libyan learners of english was included, and participants signed consent forms prior to data collection. the participants were all registered in the sixth semester. at this level, learners are required to develop significant self-regulation. from experience, these students study in a traditional teacher-centred context. they have already studied literary modules and passed through an official test system, including midterm and final exams for their courses. moreover, the participants are not usually required to feed back on the development of their own reading or to reflect on the appropriateness of their linguistic knowledge for the reading of texts in their teacher-centred learning setting. therefore, the learners’ autonomy during the learning process was emphasised in this investigation by utilizing critical reflections. procedure the participants had already been directly taught courses on reading comprehension and literary analysis during their university life. this ensured that they were able to access the text regardless of their reading abilities and to understand the short story. in other words, through independent reading, they needed to use their strategies and critical skills with the guidance of the self-reflection form to understand the text. the purpose of the investigation was explained to the students in the first meeting prior to data collection. the task required the learners to read the text entitled the cask of el-badri and abubaker learners’ perceptions of the effectiveness of using self-reflection to understand english literary texts: towards an autonomous learning approach in libya journal of learning development in higher education, issue 21: september 2021 5 amontillado by edgar allan poe, which the learners had not studied yet but was part of their curriculum. learners submitted their answers within a week and reflected on their understanding in the reflection section. the participants were then offered another meeting with the researcher to gain a fuller understanding of the way to use the worksheet. the learners were given another week to revise their answers using the self-reflection sheet. the questions on the text concentrated on the following points: • understanding the story. • paragraphing. • figurative meaning. • sequence of events. the learners’ answers after using the worksheet were reviewed by two literature lecturers to find any developments in in learners’ responses. accordingly, the study plan comprised the following stages: figure 1: an overview of the study. 2. first reading and learners’ reflection on their understanding 4. submission of second reading and learners’ self reflection 5. lecturers’ feedback 3. introducing the learners to the worksheet 1. sampling el-badri and abubaker learners’ perceptions of the effectiveness of using self-reflection to understand english literary texts: towards an autonomous learning approach in libya journal of learning development in higher education, issue 21: september 2021 6 self-reflection worksheet the self-reflection worksheet was constructed by the researcher. it aims to help the students understand and use different reading strategies independently. it consists of the following five parts: understanding language and figurative forms, development of events, identifying the characters, overall meaning, and reflection. each part has a checklist to help the students incorporate different skills and techniques in their reading. the items in the checklists include instructions and examples to support independent reading and understanding. the last part involves the learners’ reflection. an overview of the worksheet which included open and closed questions is summarised in appendix 1. data collection for ethical considerations and ease of reference, participants were given codes (s1, s2, s3, etc.). qualitative data from the learners’ reflections was collected from the last reflective section. using content analysis, learners’ reflections were categorised using nvivo software. moreover, responses to a scaling question in the last reflection section were analysed using a likert scale. the feedback provided by the staff was retained and related to the students’ reflections. data analysis content analysis involved organizing the qualitative data into themes. common themes were checked in both the lecturer’s feedback and the learners’ reflections. to do so, key words for common themes were identified from the data itself rather than being created by the researcher. additionally, content analysis involved counting the number of times the students mentioned the areas of understanding, paragraphing, figurative meaning and sequence of events. however, this repetition also involved descriptive analysis in line with the last scaling question. el-badri and abubaker learners’ perceptions of the effectiveness of using self-reflection to understand english literary texts: towards an autonomous learning approach in libya journal of learning development in higher education, issue 21: september 2021 7 findings the 24 participants submitted the two versions of the text comprehension questions. four participants did not answer or make any changes to the second version. one participant did not submit the worksheet. accordingly, complete data for analysis was available for only 19 students. in line with the research questions, the collected data provided information about the participants’ perspectives on the effectiveness of the self-reflection worksheet, in addition to their perceived areas of improvement based on the difficulties identified and developments made; these were crystalised with the staff feedback. participants’ perceptions of the worksheet data for the first research question concentrated on how the self-reflection supported the learners’ reading. in response to the question, ‘how useful did you find the worksheet?’, the participants responded using words such as ‘the worksheet help me’, ‘the guidelines remember me’, ‘i integrate the instructions’, and ‘i was improving’. these phrases are quoted exactly as used by the participants. it is worth stressing that these phrases appeared with terms including comprehension, irony and figurative uses, story development, cultural background, and theme of the story. the occurrence of these words is categorised, counted and reported in table 1 below: table 1. perceptions of the usefulness of the worksheet. category frequency percentages comprehension 10 53% language forms 13 70% events 11 58% text development 14 74% cultural content 12 63% text meaning 12 63% the table reveals the usefulness of the self-reflection worksheet. all 19 students reported perceived benefits. el-badri and abubaker learners’ perceptions of the effectiveness of using self-reflection to understand english literary texts: towards an autonomous learning approach in libya journal of learning development in higher education, issue 21: september 2021 8 perceived areas of improvement participants also reflected on their perceived difficulties in reading the story. these were identified in their responses to the question, ‘what difficulties did the worksheet help you to address?’. the participants used phrases such as ‘should focused on’, ‘need to use’, ‘my main weakness’, ‘my mistake ’and ‘need make revision’, which directed the emphasis towards the students’ perceived weaknesses. staff feedback on the participants’ revised answers is also summarised in appendix 2. lecturers used expressions such as ‘improved’, ‘developed understanding’, ‘used the worksheet effectively’ and ‘corrected’. such phrases highlight the positive changes the students made in the revised version. the usefulness of the self-reflection worksheet the 19 participants completed the scale question about the usefulness of the worksheet in developing their understanding. the rating was based on a likert scale ranging from 1 (very unuseful) to 5 (very useful). the majority of students’ answers ranged between 4 and 5 (useful and very useful). one participant (s11) responded with a 2 (unuseful), and another student (s10) responded with a 1 (very unuseful) as summarised below: table 2. the percentages of the participants’ responses analysis of the data from responses to the reflection question indicates the extent to which participants benefited from the worksheet and is in line with the data collected from their responses to the scale question. the qualitative data below indicates how the participants benefited from the worksheet: scaling frequency percentage 1 1 5.26% 2 1 5.26% 3 0 0 4 12 63.16% 5 5 26.32% el-badri and abubaker learners’ perceptions of the effectiveness of using self-reflection to understand english literary texts: towards an autonomous learning approach in libya journal of learning development in higher education, issue 21: september 2021 9 • guided my reading in organized way (s5). • helped me to identify difficulties and can treat (s7). • helped me to understand the structure and other things too (s17). • it is like steps to use and understand (s12). • this worksheet helped me to identify irony i thought metaphor first (s9). only three participants suggested that some changes should be made to the worksheet. these suggested changes include the following: • worksheet need to include more meaning of words (s15). • this was useful but can be confusing too (s10). • better if the sheet have summary to the story (s1). discussion and implications in line with earlier research findings (bressoud, 2008; wirth and aziz, 2009; li and hegelheimer, 2013; holbrook and park, 2017), the analysis of the participants’ qualitative data shows promising findings. it indicates that the libyan participants found the selfreflection worksheet useful. their perceptions indicate positive changes corroborated by the staff feedback. the lecturers’ feedback on the second submission indicated developments in the learners’ understanding. the worksheet guided some participants to make major amendments, while others provided minor changes only. the analysis also indicated that the participants were able to identify their specific difficulties in understanding, thus positively impacting upon the reading process. this research demonstrates benefits of the worksheet in understanding the figurative forms, the cultural content and the events of the story leading to an overall understanding. additionally, analysis of the learners’ data triangulated with the staff feedback revealed changes in and development of the participants’ understanding. this suggests that the el-badri and abubaker learners’ perceptions of the effectiveness of using self-reflection to understand english literary texts: towards an autonomous learning approach in libya journal of learning development in higher education, issue 21: september 2021 10 worksheet helped students to identify what to develop and how to develop it during their use of the worksheet. to enhance further improvements, most of the lecturers’ comments on the participants’ first drafts focused on the need to improve critical reading (see appendix 2). this suggests that the worksheet requires enhancement to guide the participants towards their potential in terms of critical reading. a further investigation to determine the appropriateness of critical reading for improving libyan learners’ thinking and the development of their understanding of literary texts is also required. besides critical questioning, some participants needed more scaffolding, according to the lecturers’ feedback. providing some scaffolding can enable the participants to develop their learning (vygotsky, 1987). it may, therefore, be helpful to have directions that refer the participants to resources relating to more challenging aspects of structure and language. in this analysis, figurative language, and more specifically, irony, were found difficult. such scaffolding would enable them to consolidate their understanding of such forms leading to the development of their understanding of texts. the data also reveals that some participants were not able to use the worksheet efficiently. it may be more appropriate to introduce libyan learners at university to more worksheets in order to guide them towards critical reading and shift the learning process towards learner autonomy. other participants still need more guidance from lecturers to address areas requiring development. this can simply be attributed to the participants’ style of learning and to the approach to teaching, which is still lecture based in libyan higher education. at the university level, however, the participants should be more autonomous and able to reflect on their own learning. the self-reflection worksheet can therefore be used to support appropriate levels of autonomy. limitations 1. data was available for only 19 students. drawing conclusions from such a small number in similar contexts of efl learning would be difficult. therefore, it is el-badri and abubaker learners’ perceptions of the effectiveness of using self-reflection to understand english literary texts: towards an autonomous learning approach in libya journal of learning development in higher education, issue 21: september 2021 11 recommended that further research should include a greater number of participants for further investigation of the effectiveness of using worksheets to enhance learning autonomy in libyan higher education learning contexts. 2. it would be more useful for further research to investigate if participants applied their development to subsequent assignments. researchers need to investigate the quality of changes applied not only to second drafts, but also to evaluate subsequent summative assessments learners would complete. 3. methods of data collection in this investigation were limited to the worksheet, which included the participants’ reflections and the staff feedback. the worksheet could not provide rich information that other methods such as interviews would have provided. however, the worksheet has shown the development of some participants. for example, student 7 provided some critical questions that guided his/her critical thinking. it also enabled the participant to provide comments that honestly reflect his/her development. further research further investigation could use other methods of analysis, such as discourse analysis, to closely assess the development made in the participants’ understanding after using the self-reflection worksheet. discourse analysis would provide more information about the learners’ experiences and the impact of the information provided in the worksheet on the learners’ overall understanding (mccarthy,1991). future research could also include a greater number of participants and investigate ongoing uses of the worksheet to support additional benefits with different learning groups. conclusions despite its limitations, this study has shown that the libyan participants had positive perceptions of using the self-reflection worksheet in their reading. it guided them in identifying their difficulties in reading the text independently. it also helped them to address their development. such preliminary results suggest development in the learning experience of the participants. moreover, the study is an extended investigation of earlier el-badri and abubaker learners’ perceptions of the effectiveness of using self-reflection to understand english literary texts: towards an autonomous learning approach in libya journal of learning development in higher education, issue 21: september 2021 12 research findings in the traditional learning setting of libya. however, it would be essential for further research to consider learners’ needs in constructing more effective worksheets to support learners’ reading. references applebee, a., langer, j., nystrand, m. and gamoran, a. (2003) ‘discussion-based approaches to developing understanding: classroom instruction and student performance in middle and high school english’, american educational research journal, 40(3), pp.685-730. available at: https://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.3102/00028312040003685 (accessed: 14 september 2021). bressoud, d. (2008) ‘launchings: getting students to read’, mathematical association of america. available at: https://www.maa.org/external_archive/columns/launchings/launchings_5_08.html#k ey1 (accessed: 13 september 2021). cheng, l. and fox, j. (2015) assessment in the language classroom. london: palgrave. collins, j. and o’brien, n. (2003) the greenwood dictionary of education. westport, ct: greenwood press. crooks, t. (2001) ‘the validity of formative assessment’, the british educational research association annual conference. university of leeds, leeds 13-15 september. retrieved february 2020. everhard, c. and murphy, l. (2015) assessment and autonomy in language learning. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan gronlund, n.e. and linn, r.l. (1990) measurement and evaluation in teaching. 6th edn. new york: macmillan. https://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.3102/00028312040003685 https://www.maa.org/external_archive/columns/launchings/launchings_5_08.html#key1 https://www.maa.org/external_archive/columns/launchings/launchings_5_08.html#key1 el-badri and abubaker learners’ perceptions of the effectiveness of using self-reflection to understand english literary texts: towards an autonomous learning approach in libya journal of learning development in higher education, issue 21: september 2021 13 guskey, t. (2003) ‘how classroom assessment improves learning’, educational leadership, 60(5), pp.6-11. available at: https://www.ascd.org/el/articles/howclassroom-assessments-improve-learning (accessed: 13 september 2021). holbrook, g. and park, v. (2017) ‘student perceptions of the effectiveness of self-editing on their writing: towards a self-regulated approach’, journal of learning development in higher education, 0(12). available at: https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.v0i12.425 (accessed: 13 september 2021). li, z. and hegelheimer, v. (2013) ‘mobile-assisted grammar exercises: effects on selfediting in l2 writing’, language learning & technology, 17(3), pp.135-156. available at: http://dx.doi.org/10125/44343 (accessed: 13 september 2021). mccarthy, m. (1991) discourse analysis for language teachers. cambridge: cambridge university press. mcconnell, d. (2000) implementing computer supported cooperative learning. london: kogan page. mitchell, s.m., reilly, r.c. and logue, m.e. (2009) ‘benefits of collaborative action research for the beginning teacher’, teaching and teacher education, 25(2), pp. 344-349. available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tate.2008.06.008 (accessed: 14 september 2021). roberts, t.s. (2006) self, peer and group assessment in e-learning. london: information science publishing. shaaban, k. (2005) ‘assessment of young learners’, english teaching forum, 43(1), pp.34-40. available at: https://americanenglish.state.gov/files/ae/resource_files/0543-1-g.pdf (accessed: 13 september 2021). https://www.ascd.org/el/articles/how-classroom-assessments-improve-learning https://www.ascd.org/el/articles/how-classroom-assessments-improve-learning https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.v0i12.425 http://dx.doi.org/10125/44343 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tate.2008.06.008 https://americanenglish.state.gov/files/ae/resource_files/05-43-1-g.pdf https://americanenglish.state.gov/files/ae/resource_files/05-43-1-g.pdf el-badri and abubaker learners’ perceptions of the effectiveness of using self-reflection to understand english literary texts: towards an autonomous learning approach in libya journal of learning development in higher education, issue 21: september 2021 14 schack gd. (1994) ‘authentic assessment procedures for secondary students’ original research’, the journal of secondary gifted education,6(1), pp.38-43. stiggins, r.j. (2001).the unfulfilled promise of classroom assessment. portland, oregon: assessment training institute. vygotsky, l. (1987) mind in society: the development of higher psychological processes. cambridge, mass.: harvard university press. wirth, k. and aziz, f. (2009) ‘better learning through better reading and reflecting’, associated colleges of the midwest. available at http://serc.carleton.edu/acm_teagle/projects/wirth.html (accessed: 14 september 2021). author details hana el-badri is a phd holder from the university of aberdeen, school of education. she is an assistant professor at the faculty of languages, university of benghazi, libya. her research interests fall into teaching english as a foreign (efl), classroom pedagogies, teaching literature in efl, the role of language in learning, learning conversations and dialogic learning. her most recent research investigates the use of virtual environments and digital tools in learning. other research interests include the implementation of technology in the teaching of literature. fatma abu-baker is associate tutor in tesol at the school of education, university of glasgow. she obtained her phd in educational studies from the university of glasgow. her research interests fall under teaching efl/esl and has special interests in the teaching of literature in the foreign language classroom, reader-response, and responsebased and arts-based pedagogies. her recent research investigates how literature, language and technology could be integrated to create meaningful learning spaces and the role of the teacher therein http://serc.carleton.edu/acm_teagle/projects/wirth.html el-badri and abubaker learners’ perceptions of the effectiveness of using self-reflection to understand english literary texts: towards an autonomous learning approach in libya journal of learning development in higher education, issue 21: september 2021 15 appendix 1: an overview of the worksheet parts title sub parts content part 1 background cultural content, carnival, amontillado, catacombs part 2 story structure development of events beginning, plot development, and type of end part 3 language understanding language and figurative forms examples of authentic language, figurative language. ironic forms. part 3 identifying characters story elements protagonist, antagonist, minor characters, setting part 4 story overall understanding general and thematic meaning. relating self for intercultural awareness part 5 reflection what did you understand most? why? what supports your understanding? what difficulties did the worksheet help you to address? el-badri and abubaker learners’ perceptions of the effectiveness of using self-reflection to understand english literary texts: towards an autonomous learning approach in libya journal of learning development in higher education, issue 21: september 2021 16 what is your major concern? how useful did you find the worksheet? appendix 2: learners’ reflection on their reading and staff feedback participants perceived weakness needs for improvement/staff view participants’ views of improvement staff feedback of improvement s1 difficulty in understanding the main content of the story. you need to focus on the paragraphs and relate the events. i was able to understand most of events but still difficult the ending. show the beginning of the learner’s selfreliance. s2 language and grammar. use should use the background part to support your understanding. now, i can understand why fortuntao killed him. development of understanding the events. s3 problem to understand the organization of events. read about the story structure in part 2 and what the story is about part, and skim the paragraphs. the prereading language make it easier to understand. i am also can understand the content of the parts of the shows the significance of the pre-reading, development of understanding and ability to negotiate the type of ending. el-badri and abubaker learners’ perceptions of the effectiveness of using self-reflection to understand english literary texts: towards an autonomous learning approach in libya journal of learning development in higher education, issue 21: september 2021 17 story. the end cannot expected. s4 could not understand the plot. you need to focus on the paragraphs to relate the events and think critically. i can say i understand the events better. the beginning of critical reading. s5 my major concern is understanding the events. critical reading and analysis need to be developed. proud of being able to answer the questions. meaning making has improved. s6 cannot understand the end and the sequence of action. critical evaluation of the events to understand the end of the story. i used the worksheet and cut the story into chunks to follow. improvement of understanding the plot and the characters. the students was able to reflect on the ending. s7 the beginning of the story is not obvious to me with the following paragraphs. use the background information and think critically. the instructions in the worksheet helped to proceed understanding of the story. the participant provided questions of critical reading on the text, it shows development of critical analysis and more selfindependence. s8 could not understand using of some vocabulary and lead you need to use the background information, think the story is clearer when i used the the student’s answers show el-badri and abubaker learners’ perceptions of the effectiveness of using self-reflection to understand english literary texts: towards an autonomous learning approach in libya journal of learning development in higher education, issue 21: september 2021 18 me to not understand the whole story. critically to relate the events. worksheet questions. development in understanding. s9 my big difficulty is the words and the grammar in the story you need to consider figurative language forms used in the text. i can know irony used, it was difficult to understand the story without finding the irony attempts for understanding the figurative forms led to development in meaning making. s10 it was hard to understand the events correct you need to read critically. i get they went to catacombs but he killed him? it shows how the learner developed understanding but scaffolding required. s11 meaning of metaphors and i also find the plot is difficult. identify the figurative forms correctly and read critically. not easy to find the form but i can say the end becomes clear. shows beginning of independent reading but more scaffolding required. s12 grammar of the story and the organization of paragraphs. use the background information and read the text critically. yes, i understand the text clear with the parts in the sheet. improved understanding the events, better answers and clear focus on the figurative forms s13 i could not proceed with events development. critical reading requires you to the worksheet was the skeleton i the worksheet has been used correctly to relate el-badri and abubaker learners’ perceptions of the effectiveness of using self-reflection to understand english literary texts: towards an autonomous learning approach in libya journal of learning development in higher education, issue 21: september 2021 19 provide clues and to report questions. build on my understanding. events and to identify figurative forms. this second version is much better than the first. s14 difficult to relate the events in the story. critical questioning is required while reading the story. the conclusion and the second and the third paragraphs became clear to me. used the worksheet effectively to work on the structure of the text. s15 i cannot understand the words and cannot understand the events. you still need to use the background information and make more critical questioning. i understand the end. some improvements made to the first version. s16 i find difficult to understand the events follow and the end is not clear to me. to answer the questions correctly, more critical evaluation is required. i feel i bring the events together events well understood. positive changes made to the version following the instructions of the worksheet. s17 the structure of the story is not clear. you need to utilize your critical evaluation. i followed the story better used the worksheet quite effectively for better meaning el-badri and abubaker learners’ perceptions of the effectiveness of using self-reflection to understand english literary texts: towards an autonomous learning approach in libya journal of learning development in higher education, issue 21: september 2021 20 making of the story. 18 connect the events is difficult. make use of critical questioning while reading, keep focused and relate precise events. i was able to integrate the guidelines in my reading. the second version has improved significantly from the first draft, making inferences for meaning making. the worksheet is used effectively. s19 language, tenses, some vocabulary like as amontillado use the background part, make inferences and question critically. i think the flow of the events is clearer you have worked on providing better understanding of the text following the worksheet learners’ perceptions of the effectiveness of using self-reflection to understand english literary texts: towards an autonomous learning approach in libya abstract introduction research methods sample procedure self-reflection worksheet data collection data analysis findings participants’ perceptions of the worksheet perceived areas of improvement the usefulness of the self-reflection worksheet discussion and implications limitations further research conclusions references author details appendix 1: an overview of the worksheet appendix 2: learners’ reflection on their reading and staff feedback journal of learning development in higher education journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 1: february 2009 learnhigher – a quantum leap for learning development? jackie cawkwell sheffield hallam university, uk philip roddis sheffield hallam university, uk ... [the] learnhigher ... [website] develops and collates peer reviewed resources in twenty learning areas that underpin activity across all academic subjects. by pooling expertise and sharing resources between institutions, learnhigher aims to resolve problems of access and duplication across the sector. learnhigher is also taking a strategic approach to build and disseminate a sound evidence base to inform learning development ... http://www.learnhigher.ac.uk/aboutlearnhigher.htm the referencing and plagiarism sections were especially helpful. the case study format is a great approach. the website is not complicated to use and the interactivity is good. the navigation for most people should be easy. all students should visit this site! sheffield hallam university student. scope in this brief review of learnhigher's impressive site we confine ourselves to general comments on 'look' and 'feel', together with a few remarks on the extent to which the particular strengths of the web have been exploited. we end with a slightly more detailed appraisal of just one of the site's sixteen skills areas. ‘look’ the interface is visually attractive, using colour and simple repeating elements to establish a clear identity. the for students main page, a single click from home, is especially appealing. its icon-links to the skills areas, from academic writing to visual practices, communicate effectively and look good. that matters: aesthetics http://www.learnhigher.ac.uk/aboutlearnhigher.htm cawkwell & roddis review: learnhigher – a quantum leap for learning development? may determine whether a resource is accessed at all, and the for students page, arguably the site's most important, would look better still without the redundant bullet points below the masthead "take better notes" etc as this would allow more icons to display without our having to scroll. a more instrumental appraisal of visual factors might focus on what interface designers call perceived affordance – the degree to which ‘look’ conveys, to a first time user, functional cues. here too the site does well, drawing the eye to key areas and resources. on the downside, some links, like contact learnhigher and editor's login, would be better removed from the navigation pane, or at least grouped more logically, using extra space to separate semantic categories. similarly, latest news deserves better than to be buried at foot of a home page way too deep. ‘feel’ notwithstanding the criticism just made, the navigation pane is well placed at the left of every page, clearly labelled, and in good working order. at the right of the home page, a learning area of the month ('numeracy, maths & stats' in december 2008) inspired confidence in site maintenance. (that said, a visit in february 2009 found the ‘monthly’ topic unchanged!) navigation from the dedicated pane, or by serendipitous use of embedded links, is simple, though again we found minor flaws. the learnhigher spaces page, for instance, displays logos for the partnering universities. some are links, some aren’t. of more concern, though, are the many offsite links. while we are warned that their destinations "are not the responsibility of learnhigher" (and most users are in any case backbutton-adept), we’d welcome less reliance on such links – risks of insularity seem low here, given learnhigher's open forum ethos. (speaking of which, a learnhigher aim as important as the resources themselves is to promote research and evidence-based enquiry. we welcome the research and evaluation pages, but making clear how colleagues may contribute would further that open forum ethos.) journal of learning development in higher education, issue 1: february 2009 2 cawkwell & roddis review: learnhigher – a quantum leap for learning development? we did not always feel competent to judge quality of content, especially in specialised areas like maths, but found considerable variation in the extent to which web strengths are exploited. take the 'workshop' on differentiation (numeracy, maths & stats section), whose presentation on a pdf several screens deep might reflect a view of the web as little more than an online document store. by contrast, the time management section, while not tapping the web’s multimedia nature to the extent the group work section (considered below) does, is very effective in exploiting another key web attribute: the ease with which hypermedia allow users to control levels of detail. what could be more appropriate, when advising on time management, than to offer choices of 5 minute summary versus deeper exploration? skills area: group work in so short a review, we could choose only one skills area to examine in slightly more detail. why this one? group study experience, vital to employability, still sits uneasily with university practices (and student expectations) implicitly premised on individualist models of learning. he is getting better at supporting group work but can still be vulnerable to charges of assessing untaught skills, asking students for qualities of assertiveness their assessors may themselves lack, and failing to devise discriminators sufficiently protective of individual effort and ability. with many otherwise sound study skills texts failing to do justice here, the bradford university team responsible for this section has done student and tutor a great service. the section centres on ten video episodes in which five students grapple with creating a presentation, and with the more challenging tasks of transcending individual differences to form an effective group. leadership, decision making, conflict, (mis)understanding the task, and (mis)understanding others are a few of the issues raised as we follow the team’s fortunes from forming and storming to norming and performing. (initial responses by sheffield hallam university students suggest the characters, in true soap style, become psychologically ‘real’.) most episodes show a pair of four-minute clips – alternative takes that contrast ‘bad’ and ‘better’ approaches – while a few offer ‘video diaries’; individual reflections on exchanges seen in the main clips. certain elements repeat across all episodes: scenario journal of learning development in higher education, issue 1: february 2009 3 cawkwell & roddis review: learnhigher – a quantum leap for learning development? description, observing group behaviour (discussion prompts) and commentaries (on issues arising from the episode in question). from long experience with student groups, we can vouch for the soundness of this section's content, and recommend it to all who care about the thorny issues raised by group study in he. it applies findings from social psychology more effectively than is usual in this area, and sets new standards for web based study support in any area. verdict the learnhigher website, launched in october 2008, is a landmark in learning development. all stakeholders should use, promote, gather evidence and supply critical feedback on it. ultimately it will be judged less on current quality of materials than on its capacity to foster and adapt to debate, to new findings, and to shifting he realities – all criteria on which it is as yet simply too early to call. author details jackie cawkwell is lead education adviser, and manages the study practice service, at shu. she has worked with students since 1985, variously in research, management, learner development and guidance roles. philip roddis, an education adviser and study practice tutor at shu, has taught communications, computing and social sciences in he for over 20 years. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 1: february 2009 4 learnhigher – a quantum leap for learning development? scope ‘look’ ‘feel’ skills area: group work verdict author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special issue 22: compendium of innovative practice october 2021 ________________________________________________________________________ teaching the literature of the sixteenth-century plague during the covid-19 pandemic aoileann ni eigeartaigh dundalk institute of technology, ireland keywords: plague; liminality; elizabethan literature; james conroy; humanities; covid19. the challenge james conroy argues for the essential role a liminal perspective plays in education. based on the work of arnold van gennep and victor turner, liminality is defined by its potential to transcend the limitations of fixed positions. conroy argues that literature is at its heart a liminal force, using metaphorical language, ambiguity, and imaginative possibilities to suggest alternative perspectives (conroy, 2004, p.143). the great pleasure of teaching literature at tertiary level is the debate that can be inspired by the close reading of a text. this paper reflects on my teaching on a ba (hons) arts programme. facilitating the exchange of ideas and the new perspectives they can elicit has definitely been the most significant challenge of teaching literature in an entirely online setting, particularly in a sixteenth-century literature module which requires more detailed instruction to dissect and understand the unfamiliar language and concepts. i was concerned that if i focused too much on ‘teaching’ the texts i would not succeed in encouraging students to adopt an expansive approach to the literature and, moreover, that their lack of familiarity with the context and themes of the sixteenth century, as well as the isolation engendered by their confinement in their separate homes, might make them reluctant to share their thoughts during classes. in june 2020, professor daniel carey of nui galway argued that the humanities had the potential to make a significant intervention into how a society would deal with the impact of lockdown. historical and literary accounts of previous crises could assist us in mapping out the future course of our social responses, he explained, while understanding that the ni eigeartaigh teaching the literature of the sixteenth-century plague during the covid-19 pandemic journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 2 motivations that drive people to act in particular ways are cited by all public health experts as crucial to defeating the disease (carey, 2020, cited conrad, parsons and mccormick, 2020). carey’s invitation to reflect on the impact of the pandemic on teaching and learning, thus creating the kind of liminal space advocated by conroy, was central to the decision i made to include a few classes on the literature of the sixteenth-century plague. my hope was that this would facilitate a wider conversation about the ways in which literary texts can intervene in periods of crisis, encouraging students to use their own experiences of lockdown to enhance their engagement with the themes and anxieties expressed by the writers. the response the mid-sixteenth century saw the development of detailed public health measures, with many of the original texts digitally preserved and accessible on websites like nationalarchives.gov.uk. this presented an ideal opportunity to combine an analysis of sixteenth-century texts with a broader contextual examination of the management of the disease and the strategies adopted to encourage public compliance. we examined mortality records, acknowledging that our empathy was significantly increased by our own experience of listening to the daily notifications of covid-19 deaths published by the irish government every evening. we read a number of ‘plague orders’, which outlined a range of mandatory measures, including quarantining, social-distancing, travel restrictions, and enhanced hygiene and sanitation. the extent to which current public health guidelines mirror measures put in place 450 years ago was a source of particular wonder, and students responded enthusiastically to these texts by supplementing material i presented with articles and reports detailing measures they found particularly interesting or onerous. this engagement and desire to use their own experiences to reflect on the elizabethan texts was very evident in the lively exchanges of information and anecdotes, confirming conroy’s thesis on the success of liminal spaces in developing new perspectives. although we all missed the immediacy of a face-to-face class, the electronic space certainly facilitated the easy uploading and sharing of information and meant that students could insert their ideas into the discussion in a constructive way by using the chat. ni eigeartaigh teaching the literature of the sixteenth-century plague during the covid-19 pandemic journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 3 a significant theme in the elizabethan period was the conflation of plague and immorality: the plague was widely interpreted as a punishment inflicted on the world by a vengeful god, angry that materialism was replacing spirituality. some of our liveliest discussions were sparked by reading extracts from such texts, like william bullein’s a dialogue against the fever pestilence (1564), which specifically indicts ‘slotishe beastlie people, that kepe their houses and lodgings vnclene’ for succumbing to the plague and constituting a threat to ‘other cleane bodies’. the disparaging way in which these ‘infectious’ people are compared to ‘clean’ people struck a chord with many of the students. we talked a lot about the implications of being ‘clean’, expanding the literal focus on hygiene to a more ambiguous signifier of moral superiority, drawing on anecdotal evidence that certain groups of people were presumed to be less compliant with public health measures than others and thus blamed for rising case numbers. many of the students noted that, as younger people, they often felt unfairly singled out by media commentaries. however, they also acknowledged that the othering of minority groups in society, whether defined by age or socio-economic or racial background, was an understandable response, reflective of widespread societal anxiety and perceived lack of control over the spread of the disease. recommendations sharon todd argues that measuring the success of a learning intervention cannot be based on the successful completion of the curriculum alone but must take into account its ‘transformative potential’, which she defines as the ‘small moments of grace, those instants of living transformation (which) actually make a difference to who we as students and teachers become in the process’ (todd, 2014, p.243). the role of education thus transcends the delivery of examinable facts and skills by emphasizing the transformation within one’s worldview. the central argument made in this reflection is that examining literary texts written during the sixteenth-century plague can constitute precisely the kind of liminal space we need in order to encourage reflective and transformative perspectives on our current experiences of education during a sustained period of lockdown. the classes in which we spent reading the literature of the plague were among the most enjoyable and fulfilling i had all year. the texts had such resonance for us and provided great insight into the development of public health strategies. the overt blame assigned to the poorer classes in the elizabethan texts gave us the opportunity to reflect on the prevailing narratives of the current pandemic, and students drew on their frustrations and anxieties to ni eigeartaigh teaching the literature of the sixteenth-century plague during the covid-19 pandemic journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 4 really empathise with writers who in many other respects had very different, sometimes incomprehensible, values and priorities to their own. references bullein, w. (1564) a dialogue against the fever pestilence. available at: https://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/eebo/a17158.0001.001?view=toc (accessed: 22 june 2021). conrad, k., parsons, c. and mccormick weng, j. (2020) ‘science and the humanities in the time of pandemic: better together’, the irish times, 1 june. available at: https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/science-and-the-humanities-in-the-time-ofpandemic-better-together-1.4261769 (accessed: 22 june 2021). conroy, j. c. (2004) betwixt and between: the liminal imagination, education and democracy. new york: peter lang publishing. todd, s. (2014) ‘between body and spirit: the liminality of pedagogical relationships’, journal of philosophy of education, 48(2), pp.231-245. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9752.12065. author details aoileann ní éigeartaigh is a lecturer in english literature and culture studies at dundalk institute of technology. she has published widely in the areas of irish literature, american literature, feminism and border studies, and is the co-editor of three books. she has recently published a number of articles on northern irish women writers, feminist adaptations of fairy-tales, and the role of the humanities during the covid-19 pandemic. she is editor of dealga: irish journal of humanities and social science research, the journal of the department of humanities at dkit. https://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/eebo/a17158.0001.001?view=toc https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/science-and-the-humanities-in-the-time-of-pandemic-better-together-1.4261769 https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/science-and-the-humanities-in-the-time-of-pandemic-better-together-1.4261769 https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9752.12065 teaching the literature of the sixteenth-century plague during the covid-19 pandemic the challenge the response recommendations references author details embedding report writing workshops into an undergraduate environmental science module through a subject specialist and learning developer partnership journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 2: february 2010 embedding report writing workshops into an undergraduate environmental science module through a subject specialist and learning developer partnership robert blake lancaster university, lancaster, uk jacqueline pates lancaster university, lancaster, uk abstract in recent years, there has been an increasing need for all university students to receive help with learning to write. consequently, there has been a shift away from a pure study skills approach towards embedding the teaching of writing into the mainstream curriculum. embedded writing courses can be designed and delivered by various combinations of learning developer and subject specialist. students view delivery by subject lecturers as more valuable, but subject specialist delivery may be challenging for those lecturers who feel it is outside their zone of expertise and consider writing as the province of learning developers. however, it is difficult for learning developers to contextualise such teaching in terms of subject values and expectations, and the shared knowledge of coursework assignments. by working through the different stages of teaching partnership, from cooperation to team teaching, both learning developer and subject specialist become empowered, facilitating the transition from teaching writing as a study skill to a fully embedded model. keywords: study skills; scientific writing; academic literacies; teaching partnerships, embedding. introduction it has been recognised for some time that many students across disciplines enter higher education poorly equipped with writing skills (winch and wells, 1995; wingate, 2006). this blake and pates embedding report writing workshops into an undergraduate environmental science module general trend is accentuated in the sciences as students often gravitate towards more numerical subjects when they are uncomfortable with written communication. although the sciences do not require extensive essay writing to the same degree as the arts and social sciences, assessment for science students still centres on the written word. thus, developing students’ writing skills cannot be ignored in science subjects. in uk universities, writing is frequently taught through study skills sessions, separate to the subject that the student is learning (wingate, 2006). although the evidence indicates that most university students would benefit from improving their writing, the integrated teaching of writing within modules is seen as an optional extra. however, recent research framed in an academic literacies context suggests that acquisition of subject-knowledge and writing have a complex relationship (lea, 2004). spiller and fraser (1999: 36) state that ‘learning to write articulately and with understanding about a subject cannot be separated from the acquisition of knowledge about the subject itself’. in addition, universities are starting to recognise that giving extensive support to individual students can become costly when the majority need some level of help. therefore, there has been a recent move towards embedding the teaching of writing into the curriculum. partnerships between learning developers and subject specialists have a particular role in the teaching of writing in science and technology subjects. academic scientists may feel that they are poorly equipped to deal with teaching writing. informal discussions with colleagues indicate that their own writing skills are instinctive, and they often lack the language to explain why a piece of writing is correct or incorrect. learning developers have an overview of writing across disciplines, and can bring different perspectives and examples of good practice. however, they lack detailed knowledge of the conventions and requirements of the individual disciplines they support. this paper describes a three-year partnership of a subject specialist (ss) and a learning developer (ld) to redesign a report-writing course in environmental science (es) and deliver it through team teaching. we explore the usefulness of genre analysis to produce report writing materials. in discussing team teaching, we highlight the value of discussion between co-teachers to make explicit tacit knowledge of report writing and argue that delivery by the ss is a goal of such partnerships. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 2 blake and pates embedding report writing workshops into an undergraduate environmental science module models and the process of embedding writing in this section, we look at two different approaches to teaching writing and the implications for a science curriculum. we then examine models of embedding and the roles of ld/ss partnerships to integrate writing into a module. prior to the current phase of embedding the teaching of writing in mainstream courses, study skills courses were the most common form of provision. generally, these courses have been offered centrally within a university by learning development or english for academic purposes (eap) units. the study skills approach views ‘literacy as a set of atomised skills, which students have to learn and which are then transferable to other contexts’ (lea and street, 1998). thus, student writing can be viewed in the light of a deficit model in which problems can be ‘fixed’. this is a remedial approach in which ‘…learning and teaching do not thrive if they are divorced from the students’ overall teaching and learning experience’ (cottrell, 2001). in this model, scientific writing would be taught through generic workshops on report structure. however, this provision is limited in its abilities to address the varied requirements of the different scientific or technological disciplines (for example, reports in computing differ to those in environmental science or physics). furthermore, within a subject, there may be a number of report sub-genres that undergraduates are required to learn. for example, in environmental science these might be laboratory reports, consultancy-style reports (aimed at a more general audience) or paper-style reports (aimed at a specialist audience). a second limitation of the study skills model is that it is difficult for students to transfer knowledge of generic report structure to the specific requirements of a coursework assessment. as lea and street point out, ‘this approach focuses on the surface features of language form and presumes that students can transfer their knowledge of writing unproblematically from one context to another’ (lea and street, 2006). for the ss and ld in the current study, the third key issue with a study skills approach is its lack of contextualisation in terms of subject values, assessment and writing practices in relation to the sub-genres of reports. in contrast, the academic literacies model focuses on how knowledge is constituted within a particular field (lea and street, 2006). it avoids a deficit view of writing as a cognitive skill learnt on an individual basis, concentrating instead on facilitating a shift in writing practices for all students. an example of this shift is the transition from the first to the second year of the environmental science degree discussed here. the academic literacies approach works well with embedding though ld journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 3 blake and pates embedding report writing workshops into an undergraduate environmental science module and ss partnerships, as these can deal more effectively with epistemological issues than study skills sessions provided solely by lds. next, we will look at different ld and ss partnerships and how these partnerships relate to embedding. in their model describing how eap lecturers work with subject departments to support international students, dudley-evans and st john (1998) postulate three levels of cooperation and partnership (table1). the first stage is cooperation with the ss, which involves the collection of information about the discipline such as key text types and typical texts, language, expectations and priorities. this information is used for teaching separate bolt-on sessions outside the curriculum delivered by the ld. this stage is classified as a study skills approach, as writing may be taught using generic skills-based techniques, with little attention paid to disciplinary sub-genres and knowledge. writing tasks may be assigned separately from the work students are engaged with at that time. this separation can result in students not taking the tasks seriously or viewing them as not worthwhile. collaboration, dudley-evans and st johns’ second stage, involves close consultation about specific tasks, concepts and language. this is followed by supplementary classes, which are delivered by the ld either prior to the main lecture, to prepare for areas of difficulty, or afterwards to pick up problematic areas and language. although such collaboration is one step away from embedding, it allows for the possibility of team teaching. this style has often been used to address the needs of specific groups, such as international and widening participation students, perceived as requiring remedial support. dudley-evans and st johns’ final stage is team teaching by the ss and ld, which can play a particularly useful part in embedding writing through their combined perspectives and experience. they point out that their relationship is vital and can break down if, for example, the ld fails to understand the subject content. the role of the ss here is to draw on his/her disciplinary knowledge in the teaching of writing and to contextualise the teaching of a sub-genre by reference to specific assignments. the ss can relate to the students as a fellow insider within the discipline. team teaching within a core module can facilitate embedding by addressing a complete cohort, rather than targeting specific groups such as international students. by working with the whole class, several advantages can be identified: (i) students with previously unrecognised support needs can be identified; (ii) the assessed work of all students can be improved, encouraging good students to aspire to higher grades; and (iii) specific student journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 4 blake and pates embedding report writing workshops into an undergraduate environmental science module groups, such as international students, can continue to receive specialist support, but are also more closely integrated with their peers. table 1. stages in subject specialist and learning developer partnerships in embedding writing (adapted from dudley-evans and st john, 1998). who leads stage of development approach to writing cooperation: learning developer (+ subject specialist) ld runs separate workshops using information about study practices in discipline from ss. may be generic or geared for particular courses using information supplied. study skills teaching generic skills or writing workshops but taught by ld only. bolt-on approach. likely to deal broadly with genres rather than specific sub-genres within courses. teaching of writing excludes disciplinary knowledge. collaboration: subject specialist + learning developer ld works with ss to prepare preparatory class run before main lecture or adjunct class to solve problem areas post-lecture. study skills may be targeted at groups requiring remedial provision e.g. courses with large numbers of international or widening participation students. limited use of disciplinary knowledge, but subject conventions more to the fore. team teaching: learning developer + subject specialist may initially be ld led, with ss as a guest, then moving to equal roles; finally ss led with ld assuming a secondary role. academic literacies: embedding discipline specific writing practices are embedded within modules. begins process of integrating writing and subject knowledge. may cover specific course assignments. aimed at the writing development of all students in the programme, rather than remedial provision targeted at specific groups. learning developer subject specialist handover and consultancy: subject specialist (+ learning developer). ld acts as a consultant or plays a guest role. academic literacies: embedded learning about writing and science closely integrated. dudley-evans and st johns’ model provides a useful starting point for examining how a ld and ss can work together. while useful in the context of eap, he has changed significantly since the 70s and 80s; student numbers have increased dramatically, less emphasis is placed on extended writing in schools and more international students are recruited. in response, there is growing momentum to embed the teaching of writing and other skills in the curriculum and extend this to all students. therefore, we have attempted to modify dudley-evans and st johns’ model to take account of embedding writing in journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 5 blake and pates embedding report writing workshops into an undergraduate environmental science module mainstream courses. in doing so, we have added a fourth stage of handover and consultancy. there are a number of options for the design and delivery of embedded courses: • they can be designed and taught by lds in consultation with the target department; • they can be developed and taught jointly by ld and ss; • they can be run by sss, with optional consultation from learning or professional development staff. looking at the first option, we have seen ‘embedded’ courses based on cooperation with lecturers that are part of mainstream courses, despite being delivered by lds. the lack of specialist input, other than secondary input from the ss, and, hence, the degree of contextualisation that the ss as co-lecturer can provide about assessment, data analysis and presentation and above all subject content, means that these sessions are not truly integrated with the curriculum and therefore closer to a study skills approach. the second team teaching partnership option to embed writing may often require the longterm commitment of both ld and ss. their roles vary according to the ss’s experience in teaching writing. these partnerships can be ld initiated and led with ss as the specialist informant adding specific information about subject content and assessment. this format is more likely with an early-career ss or in technological disciplines where teaching writing has not been considered part of the curriculum. team teaching sessions can be jointly delivered with the ss dealing with content and assessment, and the ld focusing on writing and discourse. alternatively, the ss can lead, with additional input from the ld. this is more likely to occur at a final stage of the partnership shortly before handover or where ld has been invited as guest, for example to teach part of the session dealing with a particular skill. the third embedding option may involve an ss initiative or it may constitute our fourth stage of handover and consultancy. we see handover as the goal of the process when the teaching of writing is fully embedded. here as much emphasis is placed on learning about the discipline as about the writing. students are not just learning the mechanics of report structure, but also need to develop their understanding of the subject they are writing about in order to prioritise and select information and to develop coherent arguments. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 6 blake and pates embedding report writing workshops into an undergraduate environmental science module wingate (1996) views such long-term embedded approaches as very successful yet problematic to put into practice. we believe that a scaffolded approach, in which the ld and ss work through the stages of partnership, is a valuable model for introducing the teaching of writing into scientific and technological disciplines. the evolution of a teaching partnership context environmental science at lancaster lies between the ‘traditional’ sciences and the social sciences. subject-specific material focuses on understanding the physical, chemical, geological and mathematical underpinning of environmental process, but communication and writing skills are recognised as being essential for the students’ future careers as scientists. however, es students have a wide-range of educational backgrounds, and many have chosen to study a science subject at university because they do not like writing. the need for students to write well is communicated to them both explicitly (through marking criteria) and implicitly (through feedback). for example, marginal notes may indicate where there are issues with poor grammar, style or structure, and these points may be reinforced in summary notes referenced to the marking criteria. within es, writing skills are first taught in 1st year, when most students take env121 communicating science, delivered by ss staff. however, across 1st year, the majority of the assessment is based on highly structured work, often requiring only a few connected paragraphs. in contrast, in part 2 (2nd and 3rd years), students are required to write a range of reports for a variety of audiences. further, students should critically evaluate sources and pull together multiple strands of evidence to form a coherent whole. immediately prior to the start of the 2nd year, all students (approximately 70-80 annually) take part in a field course (env200 carrock fell), during which they study the impact of a disused mine on water quality. the assessment for the field course is a single piece of coursework, in the form of a report, due in at the end of the term. this course is followed by env201 project skills, a 10-week core module that aims to develop skills in data presentation and analysis and report writing, using the field course data and the associated report as a framework. the writing component, which is jointly delivered by the authors, focuses on helping students recognise the different requirements of part 2 and to journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 7 blake and pates embedding report writing workshops into an undergraduate environmental science module make that transition successfully. here we discuss the evolution of our roles through the stages of a teaching partnership. the existing module env201 is a long-standing module; the previous lecturer initiated the introduction of writing skills and collaboration with the student learning development centre (sldc), pioneering the embedding of skills into a science curriculum. when jackie took over the module in 2006, writing was covered over a three-week period, during which time report structures, style and abstracts were covered. the ss and ld each took responsibility for a session, ensuring that students gained the benefit of their different perspectives, and both contributed to development of materials and session delivery. the writing sessions were run with small groups (15 – 20 students). although this small group size was amenable to highly interactive teaching, opportunities were limited by the amount of material covered; teaching was more by ‘telling’ than ‘doing’. students had one opportunity to practise the writing skills they were learning and receive feedback prior to submitting their final reports, by writing a fictitious abstract. the abstracts were reviewed in class and given individual feedback. this model was successful, but suffered from a lack of reinforcement. the session devoted to report structure was limited to looking at the overall structure of a report. no time was available to work on the individual sub-sections or specialist scientific writing skills, such as presenting data. limited time was available to analyse examples, and only two sample abstracts were discussed with students. finally, the writing sessions were early in the term, but many students did not start writing their reports in earnest until some weeks later, leading to a disconnection between what they were learning and putting these skills into practice. given the weaknesses identified above, the ss decided to rewrite the curriculum, building on the strengths in the existing model. more time would be devoted to writing skills, increasing opportunities for student activity and extending the collaboration between the ss and ld. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 8 blake and pates embedding report writing workshops into an undergraduate environmental science module the new curriculum the new curriculum took as its starting point the piece of writing the students were working on that term, i.e. the carrock fell field report. the report was then broken down into its component parts (e.g. introduction, results, conclusions, etc) and each was worked on in turn (table 2). we aimed to work on the topics in a sequence natural for the construction of a report (e.g. the session on abstracts was towards the end of term, when the reports were nearly complete). each week we introduced the topic with a question and answer session, and outlined an approach to writing that section of the report based on genre analysis (see below). the class then worked through ‘good’ and ‘bad’ examples from the subject literature, analysing them according to the framework we had provided. the students then had a week in which to produce the relevant section of their own report. we concluded with a feedback session in which the class analysed selected examples from the cohort’s work. table 2. outline of the topics covered. week topic 1 report writing: standard lab reports 2 report writing: alternative styles 3 writing an introduction: structure and purpose 4 introduction to the library and literature searching 5 using information sources: referencing, note taking and avoiding plagiarism 6 writing the results: using figures, tables and appendices effectively 7 writing the conclusions: tying the report together 8 writing an abstract: structure and function although on the surface, the focus of these sessions is learning to write, the emphasis throughout is on the report they are preparing for the field course. there is an ongoing discussion about the underlying science, during which the students are learning how to prioritise evidence, bring disparate strands together into a cohesive whole, organise data and frame research questions. as wingate (2006) states ‘it is ... necessary to teach students that knowledge is constantly developing, and that they are expected to question existing knowledge and contribute to its development... ’. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 9 blake and pates embedding report writing workshops into an undergraduate environmental science module changing roles in this case study, the staff are both experienced teachers. the ld (robert) had been involved in delivering the module, as described above, for several years. he also provides individual support to students across the faculty of science and technology, works with several sss teaching scientific writing on undergraduate and postgraduate modules, and runs student writing support groups. the ss (jackie) is also an experienced lecturer, but despite a strong interest had not previously taught writing skills. over four years our roles changed as follows: year 1: the module was taught following the old curriculum using team teaching. the ss initiated course redesign to address the weaknesses identified above. year 2: the ss redesigned the course; she selected topics to cover the full 10 weeks of the module, linking the programme with coursework objectives. however, she was unsure about how to deliver the material and consulted with the ld. the ld has a bank of scientific writing teaching materials and experience of tailoring materials to departmental needs with ss input. the ld suggested using an approach based on genre analysis (see below). the ld and ss delivered the sessions jointly, but the ld was the overall leader. year 3: formal student feedback, centred around an end of module questionnaire comprising a standard question set and free text responses, was used to make adjustments to the teaching. of the free text responses, half referred to the writing component of the module. the general methodology was praised, but issues were identified with the order in which the topics were encountered and the amount of work required. consequently, the content and ordering of the topics was refined and the coursework demands adjusted. overall, the module was much better received in year 2 than in year 1 (overall module score of 4.09/5.00, up from 2.91/5.00). in addition, the ld stepped back from the delivery. in general, the ld briefly introduced the generic issues found in the week’s topic, leading into a discussion of subject specific examples. the ss led the remainder of the session, with input from the ld. session leadership had shifted from the ld to the ss, who had also taken on the ‘writing voice’. an important part of a successful transition from ld to ss leadership is the ld stepping back at an appropriate time. the ld needs to be able to recognise when the ss has gained enough knowledge and confidence to deliver the material effectively. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 10 blake and pates embedding report writing workshops into an undergraduate environmental science module year 4: the ld is now playing a purely consultative role. the ss has taken ownership of the teaching materials and their delivery. the ld is still involved in the background, helping to develop new materials where needed and coming in to co-teach in guest slots. we felt that the continued presence of the ld in the classroom was desirable, as it starts to break down barriers students sometimes experience about seeking individual help from learning support staff. table 3 summarises the knowledge and experience that the ld and ss bring to the teaching partnership. both play important roles in teaching writing; although the ss may have limited experience of teaching writing and is unlikely to have the language or materials available to do so easily, s/he provides an essential context in which to place writing development. the ld will not be involved in assessing student work, and therefore does not have a complete insight into subject conventions and priorities. in addition, students tend to take more account of the person marking their work, often believing that there is some hidden knowledge that only the ss has. finally, the ld has limited knowledge of the subject and therefore it is difficult to contextualise examples. therefore, leadership by the ss is the ideal situation, as and when they have the skills and confidence to deliver the materials. table 3. comparison of the knowledge and experience that the ld and ss bring to the teaching partnership. subject specialist learning developer knowledge of assessment across degree programme: current coursework assignments in 2nd year, relationships with past (foundation work in 1st year) and future assessments (dissertation in 3rd year). experience of working with staff and producing customised workshops in courses. broad knowledge of subject specific content across degree. experience of teaching scientific writing and modelling writing workshops. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 11 blake and pates embedding report writing workshops into an undergraduate environmental science module more detailed knowledge of individual students’ backgrounds, both academic and personal. experience of one-to-one working with science and technology students, in relation to their knowledge / difficulties / issues / feedback. own knowledge and experience of writing papers in discipline. overview of writing requirements in different disciplines across faculty. development of materials based on genre analysis based on experience in teaching report writing to international students, the ld suggested using materials developed from genre analysis. swales (1990) defines a genre as ‘a class of communicative events’ for a group who share a common communicative goal. it shares four characteristics: structure, style, contents and intended audience (swales, 1990). in the analysis of a genre, texts are analysed as a series of steps or ‘moves’. this approach works particularly well for science and technology texts such as reports and papers, as they often have a standard, prescribed format. our key text was weissburg and buker’s (1990) ‘writing up research: experimental research report writing for students of english’, which provides an analysis of experimental scientific report structure section by section and the moves within sections. it also provides very useful guidance on language features such as tense usage in different sections and modality in making claims about data. the ld has long used this book as a tool for analysing report, paper and dissertation structure. our teaching process is illustrated here with reference to writing introductions. we used weissburg and buker’s analysis as a starting point for the weekly sessions, and then examined journal articles selected by the ss to see how closely they conformed to the model, before producing our revised model (table 4). the next step was to identify papers with well-organised introductions and to provide a contrasting paper with a poorly organised series of moves. using our model, we asked the students to work in groups to identify the moves in the examples provided and evaluate the success of each in terms of clarity and readability. encouraging students to critique published examples by ‘experts’ was valuable in developing their confidence as writers. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 12 blake and pates embedding report writing workshops into an undergraduate environmental science module table 4. key stages in writing introductions to reports (adapted slightly from weissburg and buker, 1990). 1 general statements about the field of research to provide the reader with a setting for the problem to be reported. 2 more specific statements about the aspects of the problem already studied by other researchers i.e. indicate current knowledge of problem. 3 statements that indicate the need for more investigation i.e. highlighting a gap in research data or methodology. this provides the context for 4: your purpose and hypotheses. 4 very specific statements giving the purpose/objectives/hypotheses or research questions of your study. it also begins the introduction to your work. 5 explanation of the value or justification for carrying out the study. 6 signposting of structure of report or dissertation (optional: longer reports only). task-based approach in the redesign of the course, a key criterion for the ss was to change the way in which we taught the module. therefore, we replaced previous lecture-style approach of telling students about report structure, interspersed with some questions, with a task-based approach borrowed from second language teaching (e.g. willis, 1996). as discussed above, students analysed examples from the literature using genre analysis. however, while excerpts from papers are a useful tool to illustrate structure, they may seem removed from the students’ actual writing. therefore, each week the students were given a short writing task, based on the report they were working towards (e.g. write a detailed outline of your introduction based on the moves discussed today). the tasks were not summatively assessed and were submitted electronically to facilitate fast turnaround. during the feedback class, the ss used a tablet laptop with the whole lecture group to conduct live editing by peer feedback of selected examples (figure 1). any of the student’s work could be selected for feedback and the ss identified both positive and negative examples to illustrate particular points. at the end of the class, students were asked to identify the things they needed to do to improve their work and the key feedback points were consolidated with a set of written notes. we also used post-it notes to collect journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 13 blake and pates embedding report writing workshops into an undergraduate environmental science module students’ questions during the class and responded via our virtual learning environment (vle) discussion forum. figure 1 example of in-class student-led annotation of student writing (a fictitious abstract). although submission of these tasks was voluntary, a mean submission rate of approximately 80% indicates that the students found them valuable. we considered that the active approach to learning was more effective. by equipping the students with the skills to analyse structure there would be greater likelihood of transferring this learning to their own writing. conversations between learning developer and subject specialist conversations between the ld and ss are key to the scaffolding process underpinning the transition from study skills to the embedded teaching of writing. the ld has the stance of a social scientist investigating writing practices in a department. his role was to identify the main text types and compare them with other scientific and technological fields to uncover journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 14 blake and pates embedding report writing workshops into an undergraduate environmental science module how text types differ. he conducted in-depth analysis of text organisation to determine how it functioned at section level as well as macro level. this required conversations with the ss to explore the discoursal and conceptual framework of the subject. the ss needed conversations with the ld to bring out her tacit writing knowledge; in our experience ss staff know when writing is incorrect, but not necessarily why, and find it hard to explain to students how to improve their work. here, the scaffolding process involved identifying values, expectations, text types and areas of priority for the department. between staff and students throughout the module, the ss used informal conversations with students to evaluate the course and the materials. being a science subject, there were frequent opportunities for dialogue with students during practical classes, which were used to find out which delivery methods were most effective and how the students found the style of teaching in general. in addition, students frequently came forward at the end of lectures to elucidate specific points about their work. these questions, together with an active discussion forum on the vle, in which at least 70% of the students participated, were used to gauge students’ understanding and difficulties. conclusions we have gained a number of insights from this partnership, which may be of use to others embarking on this journey: • the initial stages of curriculum and material design are time-consuming, and sufficient space needs to be set aside for discussion between ld and ss. • both ld and ss need to be open to their own limitations, to respect the skills that the other has to offer and be willing to learn. • the relationship needs to be flexible. each partnership is unique, and the ld needs to be able to adapt his/her approach according to the previous experience of the ss. however, each partnership provides the ld with additional materials, which can further enhance subsequent work. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 15 blake and pates embedding report writing workshops into an undergraduate environmental science module to summarise, embedding the teaching of writing skills into the curriculum is more effective than separate study skills sessions. we have shown that the combined expertise of the ld and ss are essential to successful delivery. the ss needs to understand the frameworks underpinning successful writing and the ld needs to develop a subject voice and to contextualise the material in a way that relates to the students. by working together, utilising our individual skill sets, an effective, embedded writing course was developed and the target of handover was achieved. acknowledgements thanks to our colleagues ali cooper and tony luxon in celt for their encouragement and valuable discussions. references cottrell, s. (2001) teaching study skills and supporting student learning. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan. dudley-evans, t. and st john, m. (1998) developments in english for specific purposes: a multi disciplinary approach. cambridge: cup. lea, m.r. (2004) ‘academic literacies: pedagogy for course design’, studies in higher education 29(6) pp 739-756. lea, m.r. and street, b.v. (1998) ‘student writing in higher education: an academic literacies approach’, studies in higher education 23(2) pp 157–172. lea, m.r. and street, b.v. (2006) ‘the ‘academic literacies’ model: theory and applications’, theory into practice 45 pp 368-377. spiller, d. and fraser, d. (1999) ‘writing to learn: a collaborative endeavour’, innovations in education and teaching international 36(2) pp 137-144. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 16 blake and pates embedding report writing workshops into an undergraduate environmental science module swales, j. (1990) genre analysis: english in academic and research settings. cambridge: cup. weissburg, r. and buker, s. (1990) writing up research: report writing for students of english. new jersey: prentice hall. willis, j. (1996) a framework for task-based learning. harlow: longman. winch, c. and wells, p. (1995) ‘the quality of student writing in higher education: a cause for concern?’, british journal of educational studies 23(1) pp 75-87. wingate, u. (2006) ‘doing away with study skills’, teaching in higher education 11(4) pp 457-469. author details robert blake is the academic support tutor for the faculty of science and technology, working in the student learning development centre, celt in lancaster university. jacqueline pates is a lecturer in the lancaster environment centre at lancaster university with research interests in environmental radioactivity. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 17 embedding report writing workshops into an undergraduate environmental science module through a subject specialist and learning developer partnership abstract introduction models and the process of embedding writing the evolution of a teaching partnership context the existing module the new curriculum changing roles development of materials based on genre analysis task-based approach conversations between learning developer and subject specialist between staff and students conclusions acknowledgements references author details journal of learning development in higher education journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 1: february 2009 editorial john hilsdon university of plymouth, uk it has taken almost a year to prepare this first edition of the journal of learning development in higher education, and so it is with some relief as well as much pleasure that i came finally to write this editorial. there is a great deal to say about how we got to this point, and some of that story is told by contributors to the current issue of the journal, notably christine keenan. at the inception of our network in 2003 the term ’learning development’ was not yet in common use; now it is to be found quite frequently in titles of posts, units and services in many he institutions. more importantly, the teaching, research, policy and developmental activities of those who choose to use the phrase have now had such impact on the sector that writing or speaking of learning development work, the ld community or profession is no longer novel; nor do i feel obliged to qualify it as ‘emergent’, as i have done previously. though definitions of ld are likely to remain the subject of discussion and debate, as an approach to working with students in universities to improve their learning, the scope and practice of ld has been quite extensively described in conversations posted to the email list ldhen since 2003. most notably, it is the commitment to look at the whole he learning experience from students’ perspectives that has marked the development of the field. it is true, as chris rust argues in his opinion piece in this issue, ‘a call to unite in a common cause’, that there are dangers in concentrating on what divides us from our colleagues in the more traditional educational development roles. chris suggests that now is a uniquely propitious time to work together, drawing attention to factors where the combined insights and expertise of ld and ed with academics could help us address some of the current issues around the effectiveness of assessment; the need for clarity of purposes for he in meeting social and economic needs, and in meeting the challenges of demographic changes. his worries are that if we cannot editorial issue 1 unite, the tendency for institutions to go for seemingly cheap ‘support’ options, especially e-learning ‘solutions’, will increase. he suggests a new drive to work with academics to develop common understandings and approaches to the he experience, which has a strong appeal for us all. drawing upon notions such as ‘threshold concepts’ and graduate attributes he calls upon us to work jointly for a ‘paradigm shift’; giving centrality to learning but retaining the perspective of disciplinary practice. there can be no doubt, however, that the emergence of the distinctive ld community is a phenomenon worthy of attention and, as chris acknowledges, its supportive functions for practitioners are greatly valued. this is manifested, as christine keenan describes in her article, in the highly active ldhen discussions over the last few years; the outputs from six very successful conferences; and the establishment of a centre for excellence in teaching and learning specialising in ld: ‘learnhigher’. for many in the uk ld community it was a pivotal moment when we achieved success in our bid for funding from the higher education funding council for england in 2004, to set up learnhigher. for this reason it is especially important to see aspects of the cetl’s work referred to in several articles here. in ‘reaping the fruits of collaboration’, kim shahabudin outlines the some of the uniquely reflective and practice-based learning development research undertaken across the 16 universities in the cetl partnership. there is also a case study by carol elston, one of the cetl’s developers, which discusses the learnhigher ‘groupwork’ learning resource. alongside this, we have an independent review by jackie cawkwell of the ‘groupwork’ resource, and some comments about the website overall. addressing our community by taking a comparative and historical view from a variety of he contexts, graham gibbs draws upon his experience as an educational developer over 30 years to offer a conceptual map for the possible evolution of ld. in outlining the inter-related ‘domains’ of learning and pointing to the complex implications of highly context-dependent and varied he experiences, he warns against simplistic generalisations about what learning development should consist of. reminding us of how ed’s focus on developing teaching has shifted from largely individual and ‘micro’, to more strategic and ‘macro’ features (towards institutional teaching and learning strategies, for example), he challenges us to consider how our journal of learning development in higher education, issue 1: february 2009 2 editorial issue 1 ld initiatives may have greatest impact – to learn from and build on ed’s “decades of development and institutional integration”. by contrast, in drawing our attention to the importance of the ‘emotion work’ associated with supporting students, jan huyton’s paper offers a counter view to those who envisage a complete ‘embedding’ of ld into subject contexts and undertaken only by subject-specialist academics or members of course teams. she also opposes those who deride such work as part of a ‘therapeutic turn’ in education which characterises students as essentially needy. jan poses important questions about tutors’ responses to students’ emotional issues, and makes a key contribution to the debate which our 2009 ldhen symposium will also feature, where dennis hayes and alan mortiboys offer contrasting interpretations of the role of emotion in learning. we anticipate that the next issue of the jldhe will follow up on this highly contested debate. jan notes evidence that use of the language of support and emotional well-being in institutional practices may actually be a marketing tool seeking to manage student retention and satisfaction with the curriculum and the institution. where such institutional drives over-ride more genuine and pedagogically inclined approaches problems are likely to arise. she points out that staff also experience the need for support as a consequence of the growing levels of emotion work they are required to undertake, and calls for a wholesale re-examination of this area in relation to pedagogy and to learning relationships. richard bailey’s paper on the ways that students interpret and attempt to make use of written feedback relates to huyton’s arguments by pointing to findings that suggest many students feel frustrated and confused by feedback; they find it inconsistent and vague. this is not helped by increasing uniformity in, for example, the use of standardised feedback forms and the lack of opportunities for genuine dialogue about assessed work. consequently an important – but contested – role for learning developers is as mediators in working with students to demystify assessment and feedback processes. how we negotiate the boundaries of such a role is a question ripe for further examination. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 1: february 2009 3 editorial issue 1 there are links here to mckinney, wood and little’s paper, which explores the often hybrid nature of ld type roles by presenting a model of a 'learning development and research associate' whose work is to support staff and students in the development of collaborative inquiry or ‘inquiry-based learning’ approaches. focussing on experiences at the university of sheffield’s centre for inquiry-based learning in the arts and social sciences a ‘brokering’ role is explored. a related set of case studies by jamie wood is also included in this issue. here the need to engage students with the questions and problems of their academic or professional disciplines is emphasised, combined with the importance of ‘scaffolding’ and supporting them in developing their own inquiry process. similarly, annamarie mckie describes the need to help students develop the skills to undertake effective, focused searches. whilst the pervasiveness of computers and the use of google might lead to assumptions about young people being ‘digital natives’, she argues that many students actually spend very little time in evaluating information for relevance, accuracy or authority. given findings about how students spend their time online, annamarie suggests a range of flexible and active learning workshops to address these issues. helen bowstead writes of her personal journey from teaching english as a foreign language to taking on an ld role in an he institution, reflecting how issues of language, alienation and academic literacy are relevant in both cases. the extent to which students and staff feel themselves to be ‘insiders’ or ‘outsiders’ of the academic community has a great impact on what we can achieve. it is the need to find an authentic voice, the struggle to have it accepted, and then use it to participate that helen identifies as most vital. in “mrs mop, mechanic and/or miracle worker: metaphors of study support” celia bishop, christine bowmaker and terry finnigan of the university of the arts, london emphasise that ld practitioners are part of the academy, not separate from it, and that we need to reflect on our relationships within our own community and institution. this fascinating paper reminds us of the power of metaphor in understanding roles and relationships, how we see ourselves and how we are perceived by others. the metaphors we choose help to reveal assumptions about underlying power-relations and the implied theoretical orientations of ld roles. in encouraging practitioners journal of learning development in higher education, issue 1: february 2009 4 editorial issue 1 towards new and more potent metaphors they describe an empowering and energising experience. and finally, speaking of empowerment, conducting this overview of the journal’s contents has reminded me again how this community began – from a sense of being disempowered, isolated and unheard. we came together to share ideas about a practice that seemed not to have been described or theorised previously. we offered support to each other and found value, first in establishing a network for discussion, next by holding conferences, and then by setting up the association for learning development in higher education, aldinhe. this latest initiative – a peer-reviewed academic journal – represents another step on our developmental journey. it follows closely on the heels of a conference in december 2008 organised jointly by aldinhe and the staff and educational development association, seda, demonstrating that we hear chris rust’s call to unite with our ed and other colleagues. most of all it demonstrates our commitment to forge a stronger identity and voice for those who work directly with students in attempting to make sense of, and to make the best of, the experiences (and particularly the learning experiences) of higher education. i hope you will find the journal stimulating and informative. it is a relatively modest collection of papers but represents a great deal of hard work on behalf of the contributors, the reviewers and editors. do let us know your reactions and please tell others to read it. most of all, please consider writing for our next edition. this will be published as soon as sufficient material has been accepted. details of how to contribute can be found at http://www.aldinhe.ac.uk/ojs/. in closing, i would like to thank all who helped, but most especially my co-editor andy hagyard of the university of lincoln. andy’s tireless and relentlessly cheerful efforts underpin every aspect of this publication and it is no exaggeration to say that without him this edition of the journal would not exist. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 1: february 2009 5 http://www.aldinhe.ac.uk/ojs/ editorial journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 19: december 2020 ________________________________________________________________________ on peer reviewing: how to nourish an author’s mind and win a jldhe editor’s heart eleanor loughlin durham university, uk alicja syska university of plymouth, uk gita sedghi university of liverpool, uk christina howell-richardson birkbeck, university of london, uk abstract editors and publishers of scholarly journals rarely agree on what makes for a good publication; they do, however, agree on the need for a robust peer review process as a crucial means to judge the merits of potential publications. while fraught with issues and inefficiencies, a critical and supportive peer review is not only what editors rely on when assessing scholarship presented for publication but also what authors hope for in order to improve their work. understanding how peer review may best serve all parties involved – authors, editors, and reviewers – is thus at the heart of this article. the analysis offered here is based on a session the journal for learning development in higher education editors gave at the 2020 ld@3 seminar series, entitled ‘the art of reviewing’. it explores the different aspects of the peer review process while formulating recommendations regarding best practices and outlining jldhe initiatives for supporting reviewers’ vital work. keywords: peer review; publishing; reviewing. loughlin, syska, sedghi and on peer-reviewing: how to nourish howell-richardson an author’s mind and win a jldhe editor’s heart journal of learning development in higher education, issue 19: december 2020 2 introduction as editors at the journal for learning development in higher education (jldhe), we annually process scores of submissions, and when it comes to providing a streamlined publishing experience for all the parties involved, we recognise that we achieve varied levels of success. the difficulties are often the result of time constraints and unforeseeable delays; in an ideal system, intrepid editors would communicate most efficiently, determined reviewers respond to requests promptly, and inspired authors revise and resubmit their papers enthusiastically. alas, in reality, this editorial operation rarely goes to plan. the publishing process, more often than not, is a series of hiccups and delays, not to mention a lot of – at times futile – waiting. in view of its built-in peculiarities and impediments, why maintain the system of editorial oversight and peer review at all? since the mid-twentieth century, peer review has been an integral part of the journal publication process. the review’s role is, firstly, to provide an editor with an expert opinion on whether a submission should be published (with or without revisions); and secondly, to offer the author constructive criticism on how their work can be revised and improved. the majority of all journal submissions are subject to various degrees of revision, and reviewer input is widely seen as essential to ensuring the quality of the pieces published (fytton, 2002). in essence, reviewers are an intrinsic element of the publishing process and identifying means by which they can be best supported to play their role effectively has been at the forefront of our mission at the jldhe. based on a workshop delivered by our editorial team of as part of the ld@3 series (jldhe, 2020a), this article will explore the role reviewers play in the journal publication process and how publishing protocols can be fine-tuned in order to not only increase efficiency in the journal but also energise the entire community. it will probe what constitutes good reviewing practice in the field of learning development and how reviewers, authors, and editors can work together in the most productive and rewarding way. in this spirit, we will also briefly outline planned developments in the support available to reviewers through the jldhe and explain the priorities that form our ethos and the mission of the journal. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1u681xdm8ku8itszaplb0gxffqbqulaob/view loughlin, syska, sedghi and on peer-reviewing: how to nourish howell-richardson an author’s mind and win a jldhe editor’s heart journal of learning development in higher education, issue 19: december 2020 3 the role of reviewers in the publication process being essential to the publication process, reviewers make an appearance at its various stages. even before they get involved, however, the editor first needs to decide whether a submission should be sent for review at all. a jldhe editor will thus examine the submitted piece carefully and, if necessary, undertake preliminary discussions with the authors, for example when their submission does not fully meet the journal’s requirements or requires additional work to bring it to publishable standard. while not a modus operandi of most academic journals, this stage is important to us at the jldhe as it provides more scope to investigate cutting-edge topics and more opportunities to increase writers’ confidence, especially that of novice authors. this stage of the process is shown as the opening phase of our peer review process in the flowchart below: loughlin, syska, sedghi and on peer-reviewing: how to nourish howell-richardson an author’s mind and win a jldhe editor’s heart journal of learning development in higher education, issue 19: december 2020 4 selection of reviewers in most journals, once an editor deems the submission ready to be seen by a peer reviewer, they usually recruit two or three potential reviewers (fytton, 2002), based on loughlin, syska, sedghi and on peer-reviewing: how to nourish howell-richardson an author’s mind and win a jldhe editor’s heart journal of learning development in higher education, issue 19: december 2020 5 these reviewers’ knowledge and experience with regard to both the remit of the journal and the specific focus of the submission. for example, for subject-specific journals, an editor will seek reviewers with knowledge or expertise in the particular branch of the discipline covered in the submission (badar, 2006). for journals focused on the research process, the editor may concentrate more on identifying reviewers familiar with particular methodologies and methods (donmoyer, 1996). many journals, like the jldhe, have a broad remit and the reviewer selection criteria can vary depending on the subject and format of the submission, which in the case of the jldhe can range from articles based on empirical research to critical commentaries and reflections (jldhe, 2020b). the extent to which editors are able to ‘match’ reviewers with authors is debateable, given the diversity of viewpoints even within the most specialist fields (female science professor, 2011). also, given that a piece worthy of publication should be accessible to the diverse readership of a journal, a reviewer with knowledge of the broader context or a related, rather than the exact same field, is often equally well placed to review a piece. in other words, the editor is looking to identify reviewers able to evaluate not only if a submission is a good example of research or investigation in the field but also whether it is appropriate for the remit of the journal (donmoyer, 1996). the ways in which journals recruit reviewers vary greatly, with most editors directly approaching known experts, often with a solid record of publishing. this strategy can ensure both subject specific knowledge and familiarity with the literary conventions in the field. knowledge of experts in a field means an editor can recruit a range of reviewers including not only those who they believe will be sympathetic to a piece but also those whose portfolio suggests they might offer a useful critical or alternative perspective to help develop the writer’s argument. such an approach will garner a wide range of opinions, of particular value to an editor who might be uncertain about the scope or suitability of a submission (donmoyer, 1996). the role of established reviewers in ensuring academic rigour is incontrovertible. they act as mentors and guides to both editors and authors; and they have an important part to play in confirming that papers that are published make a contribution to the field. at the same time, learning development as an area of practice is transdisciplinary. submissions to the journal are presented by authors in a variety of roles across the academic community, including subject lecturers, librarians and information science staff, learning loughlin, syska, sedghi and on peer-reviewing: how to nourish howell-richardson an author’s mind and win a jldhe editor’s heart journal of learning development in higher education, issue 19: december 2020 6 technologists, senior management, and specialists in educational and learning development. evaluation of subject matter and of the strength of an argument across disciplinary boundaries is challenging (becher and trowler, 2001). epistemic and intercultural differences combine with differences in academic writing conventions, which can result in failure to recognise an author’s argument or their contribution to knowledge (lea and street, 1999), particularly so if the paper represents a divergence from established and prevalent discourses (gallo et al., 2016). it is evident to most editors, however, that reviewers’ expertise is not a guarantee of a smooth peer review process and the traditional method of selection produces mixed results. after contacting potential reviewers, editors tend to wait for two or three weeks for the review, or even just a confirmation that the reviewer will undertake it, which regrettably does not always arrive. in addition, even if such designated reviewers respond promptly, the quickly assembled opinions sometimes fall short of the developmental and supportive reviews the authors hope for. communication failures, busy schedules, and endless other impediments contribute to this inefficient system that editors at the jldhe decided to address. in order to respect the availability and flexibility of reviewers as well as to enhance the engagement of potential and existing reviewers, a new method for reviewer recruitment has been initiated in our journal, whereby an open call for reviewers is sent out via the three main jisc mail lists for educational and learning development (ldhen, seda, and eataw). the call includes the submission abstract and a request for potential reviewers to provide an outline of their interest and expertise in the subject. as such, these calls appeal to the particular interests of the reviewers in the community while also encouraging new members to engage as reviewers, adding an element of communitybuilding. at the same time, for an editor, this method produces a degree of uncertainty as the volume and type of responses can vary greatly. this uncertainty is heightened if the potential reviewer is not an active author themselves. indeed, one question that editors often grapple with, and which was also raised in the ld@3 workshop, is whether it is necessary for a reviewer to be a published author (jldhe, 2020a). although for some journals this can be a criterion, and being able to advise novice reviewers to draw on their experience of being recipients of reviews can be useful for editors (female science professor, 2011), for fields where the proportion of published authors is lower, this would only serve to limit the number of potential reviewers. loughlin, syska, sedghi and on peer-reviewing: how to nourish howell-richardson an author’s mind and win a jldhe editor’s heart journal of learning development in higher education, issue 19: december 2020 7 in the case of the jldhe, it should also be noted that as learning developers or those working in associated fields, a high proportion of the journal’s reviewers have the advantage of being aware of what constitutes good feedback in terms of both content and tone, and are able to apply this in their approach to reviewing – a factor very much evident from the quality and depth of the discussion in the ld@3 workshop. the issue of authorship aside, there are tremendous advantages to the self-selection process practised by our journal. as already indicated, in the model where editors select and approach potential reviewers, a reviewer may agree, through a sense of obligation, to review an article that they have little interest in. this can result in a superficial or cursory review. in contrast, those responding to an open call are expressing a keen interest in the topic, which often results in a prompt and fastidious review. this in turns makes a world of difference to editors, who are dependent on reviewers submitting reviews by agreed deadlines (fytton, 2002). as outlined in the flowchart above, review is a multi-stage process and sticking to a timescale is important in ensuring the timely publication of articles and the continued engagement of authors who may suspect there are problems with their submission if they do not receive reviewers’ comments by the expected time. because of the importance of this, a reviewer’s track record of meeting deadlines is often taken into account by editors when selecting reviewers (badar, 2006). this is, however, less likely to be an issue when potential reviewers are responding to an open call as their capacity to engage with the process is a factor they will take into account before volunteering for the task. indeed, responders to the jldhe open calls often include details of their availability, particularly if it is limited or intermittent. finally, a further challenge faced by editors who approach reviewers is building up a pool of potential reviewers (badar, 2006) and in particular, maintaining it with up-to-date information. in contrast, an open call can reach a wider group of potential reviewers and is not reliant on an editor’s personal networks or their awareness of those currently working in what might be very specific fields. journal guidance for reviewers whether it is via a covering letter from the editor, information provided on the journal’s website, or a list of specific questions reviewers are asked to engage with, an important part of ensuring good reviews is the editor providing clear guidance about the remit of the loughlin, syska, sedghi and on peer-reviewing: how to nourish howell-richardson an author’s mind and win a jldhe editor’s heart journal of learning development in higher education, issue 19: december 2020 8 journal and the areas the reviewers should consider (weller, 2001; fytton, 2002). these are often presented as thematically grouped questions, as is the case with the jldhe, where the groupings are: 1. contribution to the field (including relevance to the journal). 2. structure. 3. methods and methodology (where appropriate for the type of submission). 4. references/sources. 5. style and language issues. the jldhe review forms, customised to different types of submissions, are made available to reviewers as an electronic form on the ojs platform with a series of prompts, each followed by free text boxes (see appendix for list of jldhe themes and prompts). the thematic questions are followed by a further request for reviewers to provide any other comments to support the author, and an option to share private comments with the editor. the former provides an opportunity for a reviewer to add summary comments or prioritise the revisions that they believe need to be made, while the latter is a chance to open a dialogue with the editor if they have concerns or questions. the reviewer is also asked to indicate whether they think the submission should be accepted, with or without revisions, or rejected. an alternative to providing reviewers with a standard form is for an editor to give specific guidance through a tailored covering letter sent to reviewers. where editors employ this method, they often highlight particular areas or questions they would like the reviewer to focus on. although this can be very useful in helping the reviewer frame their response, the editor can run the risk of being overly directive or prescriptive (donmoyer, 1996). even when asked to comment on particular areas or themes, reviewers may still have questions about their role. these are often around the level of detail and tone of the response required. for example, a reviewer concerned about formatting or language may wonder about the extent to which they should address this in the review without slipping into the role of copyeditor. an effective way to address reviewers’ concerns about their role and promote good practice is through training focused on the publishing process (weller, 2001). this training often takes the form of role-play and enables participants to gain insights through taking on the different roles of authors, editors, and reviewers (farley, loughlin, syska, sedghi and on peer-reviewing: how to nourish howell-richardson an author’s mind and win a jldhe editor’s heart journal of learning development in higher education, issue 19: december 2020 9 2019). this approach was at the heart of jldhe editors’ effort to provide a supportive workshop, although given the time constraint of the ld@3 session, an alternative format was used (jldhe, 2020a). the editors mapped three fictional reviews onto the thematic sections of the jldhe review process (jldhe, 2020b), in the form of a table that allowed for easy comparison of the quality of responses as these fictional reviews varied in tone, level of detail, and length. the participants were divided into small groups and asked to discuss the reviews, identifying the strengths and weaknesses of the examples. from this, they then explored what makes a review useful for both an editor and an author. following small group discussions, the individual groups shared key points with the rest of the participants. the following sections expand on the themes that emerged from this activity, focusing on what constitutes a good review, followed by a discussion of the value of peer reviews to both our authors and reviewers, as well as to us as editors. what constitutes a good review? a review can be a powerful and intimidating instrument in the publishing process and many authors, particularly early career or novice authors, can find it challenging to engage with and to respond to reviewers’ comments (female science professor, 2011). when asked to sum up their perceptions of reviews from an author’s point of view using a single word or short phrase, participants in the ld@3 workshop proffered ‘scary’, ‘demoralising’, ‘worrying’, ‘confusing’, and ‘mountain to climb’ (jldhe, 2020a). it has further been suggested in the literature that some authors may perceive a request for revisions accompanied by highly critical and negative reviewer’s feedback to be at best discouraging and at worst a thinly veiled rejection, resulting in authors not re-submitting revised versions of texts (martín et al., 2014). it is therefore not surprising that how to respond to reviews is a theme often discussed in advice for academic authors and has been shown to be an area that should be incorporated into training programmes for academic writing (farley, 2019; martín et al., 2014). for an author, the article they submit for publication can represent the culmination of a long period of research and writing and as such, makes them both vulnerable and open to feedback. as identified by a participant in the ld@3 workshop, the reviewer can serve as a ‘fresh pair of eyes’ for an author whose familiarity with the text prevents them from seeing their work as a reader would (jldhe, 2020a). research into the impact of loughlin, syska, sedghi and on peer-reviewing: how to nourish howell-richardson an author’s mind and win a jldhe editor’s heart journal of learning development in higher education, issue 19: december 2020 10 reviewers’ comments has shown that when an author engages, a submission is improved (weller, 2001; fytton, 2002). indeed, a review can have a wider impact on an author than just supporting them in revising a particular article. in reporting on the strategies used by multilingual academics to learn how to write academic articles in english, martín et al. (2014) found that one of the most commonly cited strategies was to engage with comments and feedback from editors and peer reviewers. this emphasises the importance of constructive feedback not only in identifying specific problems with content and methodology of an article, but also in enabling greater understanding of expectations and linguistic conventions in the field. in the workshop, the importance of a reviewer being impartial and not connected to the author was also highlighted as a concern of authors. the double-blind review process at the jldhe is aimed at ensuring the anonymity of both the author and reviewer, and enables both to make judgements based purely on the text of the submission and review. the value of reviews to authors the quality of a journal to a large extent depends on the quality of reviews offered in response to the submitted manuscripts, a premise rarely questioned by the parties involved in the process, including authors, editors, and reviewers. in fact, three-quarters of researchers consider a robust peer review process more important than a journal’s general reputation when deciding where to publish, and 90% see peer reviews as essential to their professional development (nicholas et al., 2014). being a crucial means to improve an article by giving an author the necessary support and guidance regarding potential revisions, a good review contributes vitally to the quality of research, scholarship, and practice in higher education. working from the perspective of an author, the participants in the ld@3 workshop identified a set of characteristics of a good review, which largely align with the good practices recognised in the literature. in particular, it was highlighted that authors need constructive criticism delivered in a supportive rather than dismissive or judgemental tone. the style and tone of the feedback must be respectful and developmental; a patronising tone will not encourage authors to enhance their article. reviewers act as consultants and coaches who put their own expertise into practice and advise authors professionally as to loughlin, syska, sedghi and on peer-reviewing: how to nourish howell-richardson an author’s mind and win a jldhe editor’s heart journal of learning development in higher education, issue 19: december 2020 11 how their article qualifies for publication (rochitte and mesquita, 2018). participants agreed that a good review provides authors with expert advice and they rely on the reviewer to critically assess an article, identify the areas of improvement, and provide the author with professional suggestions as to how to advance the manuscript. feedback should cover both overarching issues, for example, the structure, argument, clarity or progression of ideas, as well as subject-specific themes or sections, in a detailed and coherent way. in a discussion of the examples provided in the workshop, participants were able to focus on the level and types of detail that should be included in a review and concluded that a good peer review should be sufficient to enable the author to consider ways forward. this may involve referring to specific areas of the text or a particular example of the type of improvements to be made. some reviewers may even decide to include an annotated text to indicate which sections they are referring to and which need further attention. how much detail a review should contain depends on the type and quality of the article; the key aim and intention is to be specific and clear about what the author needs to do to improve the manuscript. the value of reviews to editors good reviews are essential to maintaining high editorial standards and editors rely on reviewers’ expertise and recommendations to help them make a decision about whether to accept or reject a submission; indeed, the literature strongly suggests that this decision should ‘be constrained by reviewers’ judgments’ (donmoyer, 1996, p.23). if reviewers are unanimous in their verdict and this aligns with the view of the editor, then this is a given. when reviewers disagree, however, or their verdict goes against editorial opinion, the editor is faced with a challenge. although donmoyer recommends always closely following reviewers’ advice, at the point of conflict, the quality of the reviews is of paramount importance. whether supportive or critical of the submission, the reviewer who has provided the most detailed argument with reference to particular areas of the text will be the one the editor will likely follow; on the other hand, when weak reviews do not offer enough meaningful argument, making the final decision will remain the editor’s prerogative (donmoyer, 1996). the editor may also consider discussing the issue with the author, thus loughlin, syska, sedghi and on peer-reviewing: how to nourish howell-richardson an author’s mind and win a jldhe editor’s heart journal of learning development in higher education, issue 19: december 2020 12 offering them an opportunity to respond to conflicting reviews and strengthen their case for publishing the work. a good review can also help clarify and refresh the editor’s thinking around not only the particular submission but also the criteria used to evaluate further submissions (donmoyer, 1996). at the jldhe, editors constantly refine their approach to the different types of research published and fine-tune the editorial process to best serve both authors and readers. benefits for reviewers reviewing is often seen as a thankless job and not all participants in the process are aware of the amount of work, the time pressures, and commitment involved. being a reviewer for journals that employ open peer review (as opposed to blind peer review) can serve to increase respect in the field and raise one’s professional profile (female science professor, 2011). as noted in the ld@3 workshop, this incentive of professional recognition is absent in journals where reviewers remain anonymous to both authors and readers (jldhe, 2020a). in such circumstances the incentive to be a reviewer is limited to the opportunity to learn, both about academic writing and current work in the field, and to make a positive impact on the literature in the field (fytton, 2002; female science professor, 2011). for more experienced authors, reviewing is on a quid pro quo basis as they in turn are recipients of reviews (fytton, 2002), while for others the personal reward comes from being able to support colleagues in the sector. having reflected on the most rewarding approaches, we changed our processes at the jldhe, incorporating a range of initiatives to support our reviewers and reinforce their critical role in the success of the journal. as an example, we include lists of reviewers in our acknowledgements section to recognise their contribution to the quality of papers we publish. once the peer review process is complete, we also share the individual reviews among all reviewers involved in the particular submission, so less experienced reviewers can learn from the expert knowledge of their colleagues. finally, we support our reviewers through webinars such as the one we are discussing in this article, as well as developing further resources. loughlin, syska, sedghi and on peer-reviewing: how to nourish howell-richardson an author’s mind and win a jldhe editor’s heart journal of learning development in higher education, issue 19: december 2020 13 conclusion: a way forward the ld@3 webinar and the discussions it generated reinforced for us the need to support both authors and reviewers by providing continuous professional training and best practice guidance regarding peer review. as one of the participants wrote in response to the session: ‘i appreciated being able to talk about some of my experiences; i didn’t think as a first-time author i’d have much to contribute . . . it would be useful to do another one’. clearly, the webinar identified the benefits of community conversations that demystify the publishing process, and offering more such sessions and resources for reviewers has become our key objective, particularly in light of developing the reviewer’s zone on the jldhe website. we acknowledge that writing a good review can be challenging for anyone. a published author may lack confidence in their ability to review (female science professor, 2011) and even an experienced reviewer may struggle with how to respond to a particular submission. in providing training and support to reviewers it is therefore important to recognise that both experienced and novice reviewers, regardless of their experiences and expertise, can benefit from such support. the jldhe editorial team aims to address this by building on the model employed in the ld@3 workshop to develop online training (subsequently available as webinars) for those new to reviewing. among the numerous training models available, we see most benefits in the two-stage model, which divides training into an orientation session, followed by a practical workshop. the orientation session serves as an introduction to the publishing process, focussing on understanding the sequence of events from article submission to publication, buttressed by a discussion of the reviewer’s role and some of the dos and don’ts of reviewing. after this initial session, participants are ready to engage with the review process itself. thus they are provided with two short articles to review in preparation for the second workshop, which focuses on the reviews they have completed and explores the importance of providing constructive and encouraging feedback. adopting this model will allow participants of our workshops to gain an understanding of the role of a reviewer in the publishing process, alongside acquiring firsthand experience of reviewing in a ‘safe’ environment where mistakes are not only expected but also provide the necessary fodder for productive discussion. loughlin, syska, sedghi and on peer-reviewing: how to nourish howell-richardson an author’s mind and win a jldhe editor’s heart journal of learning development in higher education, issue 19: december 2020 14 in order to reinforce the good practices learned in this training, participants will be offered the opportunity to apply their skills by serving as the third reviewer on a jldhe article. here is where our practice of sharing complete anonymised reviews among reviewers will be particularly beneficial to the trainee reviewers, as it provides an opportunity for further insights to be gained from the process. in addition, the editor looking after the submission will be available to answer questions and provide feedback on their review. a dedicated area on the jldhe website will highlight not only the training and support available to novice reviewers but also the fact that the editors are able to provide support and feedback to all reviewers. it is hoped that through enhanced support and training, more potential reviewers will feel that they have a way into becoming community reviewers, while experienced reviewers will be reinvigorated to engage with the process as a developmental activity, rather than just a chore. while the peer review process is not infallible and can be problematic due to issues such as reviewer bias or limited effectiveness in identifying all innacuracies in the content, it has also been shown to constitute the most critical pillar in publishing, when it comes to the trustworthiness and reliability of scholarly journals (nicholas et al., 2014). peer review is currently the most crucial indicator of quality, intellectual rigour, and authority of a journal, and the jldhe will strive to ensure that our peer review practices, bolstered by robust support for reviewers, continue to build that trust within the discipline of learning development and its professional community. acknowledgments we are very grateful to the participants of our ld@3 webinar for their insights and recommendations regarding how best to support jldhe authors. we would like to thank them for sharing their stories and contributing to the community conversations about what the peer review process means today and how we can all work towards strengthening its role in the learning development community. loughlin, syska, sedghi and on peer-reviewing: how to nourish howell-richardson an author’s mind and win a jldhe editor’s heart journal of learning development in higher education, issue 19: december 2020 15 references badar, a. (2006) ‘problems faced by a medical journal editor a farewell editorial’, journal of ayub medical college abbottabad, 18(2), pp. 1-3. becher, t. and trowler p.r. (2001) academic tribes and territories: intellectual enquiry and the culture of disciplines. 2nd edn. buckingham: society for research into higher education & open university press. donmoyer, r. (1996) ‘educational research in an era of paradigm proliferation: what's a journal editor to do?’, educational research, 25(2), pp. 19-25. farley, p.c. (2019) ‘using role-play to teach novice writers the expectations of journal editors and reviewers’, english for specific purposes, 55, pp.1-11. female science professor (2011) ‘confessions of a journal editor’, chronicle of higher education, 57(34), p.27. fytton, r. (2002) ‘the peer-review process’, learned publishing, 15, pp. 247–258. gallo, s.a., sullivan, j.h. and glisson, s.r. (2016) ‘the influence of peer reviewer expertise on the evaluation of research funding applications’, plos one, 11(10): e0165147. available at: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0165147. journal of learning development in higher education (jldhe) (2020a) ‘12th may 2020 ld@3: the art of reviewing’ workshop. available at: http://www.aldinhe.ac.uk/aldinhe-events-resources/ (accessed: 12 december 2020). journal of learning development in higher education (jldhe) (2020b) ‘submission guidelines’. available at: https://journal.aldinhe.ac.uk/index.php/jldhe/about/submissions (accessed: 12 december 2020). https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0165147 http://www.aldinhe.ac.uk/aldinhe-events-resources/ https://journal.aldinhe.ac.uk/index.php/jldhe/about/submissions loughlin, syska, sedghi and on peer-reviewing: how to nourish howell-richardson an author’s mind and win a jldhe editor’s heart journal of learning development in higher education, issue 19: december 2020 16 lea, m. and street, b.v. (1999) ‘student writing in higher education: an academic literacies approach’, studies in higher education, 23(2), pp.157-172. martín, p., rey-rocha, j., burgess, s. and moreno, a. i. (2014) ‘publishing research in english-language journals: attitudes, strategies and difficulties of multilingual scholars of medicine’, journal of english for academic purposes, 16, pp. 57-67. nicholas, d., watkinson, a., volentine, r., allard, s., levine, k., tenopir, c. and herman, e. (2014) ‘trust and authority in scholarly communications in the light of the digital transition: setting the scene for a major study’, learned publishing, 27(2), pp.121134. rochitte, c.e. and mesquita, c.t. (2018), ‘what are the characteristics of an excellent review of scientific articles’, abc cardiol, 110(2), pp. 106-108 weller, a.c. (2001) editorial peer review: its strengths and weaknesses. new jersey :asist monograph series, information today, inc. author details eleanor loughlin is an academic skills programme manager at durham university and an editor of the journal of learning development in higher education. alicja syska is a learning development advisor at the university of plymouth, where she also lectures in history. alicja serves as co-lead editor at the journal of learning development in higher education. gita sedghi is a senior lecturer (teaching & scholarship) at the university of liverpool. she is a co-lead editor at the journal of learning development in higher education. christina howell-richardson is an associate lecturer in higher education at birkbeck, univeristy of london, and an editor of the journal of learning development in higher education. loughlin, syska, sedghi and on peer-reviewing: how to nourish howell-richardson an author’s mind and win a jldhe editor’s heart journal of learning development in higher education, issue 19: december 2020 17 appendix jldhe guidance for reviewers https://journal.aldinhe.ac.uk/index.php/jldhe/reviewers when considering the suitability of a submission for acceptance and preparing a review for jldhe, our reviewers are asked to bear in mind the following questions: contribution to the field • is this paper relevant to the journal and up to date? • what does it contribute to current debates in the field of learning development? • is it original and interesting? structure • does the paper have a clear and succinct title that adequately represents its point? • does the abstract summarise the paper’s perspective, purpose and key findings? • does the paper tell a coherent story? does the argument flow or are there any significant gaps? • has it got an engaging opening paragraph? • has it got a clear concluding paragraph that clarifies the article’s key message and its contribution to the field? • is it the right length, does it use subheadings effectively, and does it include 3-4 keywords? methods and methodology • are methods used appropriate to the work reported? • is the methodology clearly identified, explained and discussed? • are the results discussed in a logical way? are potential weaknesses and/or alternative interpretations acknowledged? references/sources • are all the references and sources appropriate and do they take account of current work in the field? style and language issues • is the article written in a way that is succinct, clear and accessible to a wide audience? • is it written in plain english? (avoiding unnecessary jargon, explaining technical terms) • is it technically accurate? are complex ideas clearly expressed? https://journal.aldinhe.ac.uk/index.php/jldhe/reviewers loughlin, syska, sedghi and on peer-reviewing: how to nourish howell-richardson an author’s mind and win a jldhe editor’s heart journal of learning development in higher education, issue 19: december 2020 18 • does it follow jldhe style guide? is correct referencing used in the text and bibliography? (please refrain from correcting it; just indicate) any other comments to support the author • what content/thematic issues need addressing to bring this paper to publishable standard? • what language/formatting issues need addressing to bring this paper to publishable standard? on peer reviewing: how to nourish an author’s mind and win a jldhe editor’s heart abstract introduction the role of reviewers in the publication process selection of reviewers journal guidance for reviewers what constitutes a good review? the value of reviews to authors the value of reviews to editors benefits for reviewers conclusion: a way forward acknowledgments references author details appendix journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special issue 22: compendium of innovative practice october 2021 ________________________________________________________________________ providing business school students with online social networking opportunities during remote learning xianghan o’dea york st john university, uk keywords: business school; ice-breaker activity; interactive quizzes; online learning; online social networking; postgraduate. the challenge due to the covid-19 pandemic, uk universities have had to move teaching online. the absence of in-person teaching means that students have had far less opportunity to socialise with each other on campus. this can have adverse impacts on students’ emotional well-being and engagement in their studies (margalit, 2010). the situation appears particularly challenging to new students, because they are new to the environment and have had little opportunity to get to know others in person. i decided to provide students with social networking opportunities during online classes, aiming to help them adapt to interacting, and staying connected, with their virtual learning communities (lenning and ebbers, 1999). my response in the second semester (january–may 2021), i experimented with the use of online interactive quizzes as an ice-breaker activity on a postgraduate module. i gained the idea from the study published by elliott (2020). the module had 40 students, and 20 of them were new january starters. i also offered them social interaction time (15 minutes during seminars on a weekly basis) throughout the semester. the rationale was to encourage the social aspect of online learning by allowing students to get to know their fellow students, get used to virtual collaboration, and remain socially interactive online. the solutions also aimed to help the o’dea providing business school students with online social networking opportunities during remote learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: october 2021 2 newcomers self-select their group members, as students on the module needed to complete a group work assessment. virtual icebreaker activity the quiz was hosted on microsoft (ms) teams and took place during the first week of the seminar. i chose to use mentimeter to design the quiz, because it is an institutionally supported software application, and provides a range of affordances. for example, it allows unlimited quiz takers and enabled me to set up leader boards for individual questions and the entire quiz, which helped engage students and make the quiz more interesting. i was also able to design different types of questions using the built-in features. in addition, students could easily access the quiz using their mobile phones. the 25 questions quiz lasted around 1 hour and a half and included general knowledge and business information technology (bit) related questions, as bit was a key focus of the module. the former aimed at motiving newcomer contribution by enabling them to have some fun in their online classroom (hurst, wallace and nixon, 2013). meanwhile, students were encouraged to practise online peer learning. since learning is considered a social process (vygotsky, 1978), they were asked to introduce each other and discuss and work out the answers together. all students were randomly allocated into small breakout rooms and presented with one question at a time. the answer was then entered by one representative. students’ feedback suggests that the quiz really helped them to meet others on the module and to break down social barriers: as a new student reported, ‘the quiz was fun, enjoyable and helpful!’ an existing student also commented ‘i wish other tutors were doing something similar’. through this practice, i gained valuable experience of supporting students’ social development in online learning, and of designing and running quizzes using mentimeter. o’dea providing business school students with online social networking opportunities during remote learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: october 2021 3 social interaction time during seminars during seminars, i randomly assigned students to their breakout rooms to allow them to speak with different students. each room had a maximum of three students, with the aim of easing the pressure on them and making it easier for them to switch their camera on when having conversations. i also suggested some ice-breaker questions, such as ‘any recommendations for films on netflix?’ in order to create a more relaxing environment, i did not enter the breakout rooms, but let students know that i was available if they needed me to join their discussion. this is because tutors’ social and facilitatory presence is considered essential in online learning (rapanta et al., 2020). the extra social bonding time was also well received, and the students appreciated the fact that i made the effort to help them with their social connections and interactions. one student commented: ‘i often feel lonely…it is nice to have a casual chat with others’. my recommendations based upon the discussions above, it is very important for universities to adopt a learner centred approach, encouraging and assisting collaborative learning to keep students engaged in online learning (bandura, 1977; rayens and ellis, 2018). reflecting on my personal experience, students’ social needs should be considered as an important component of the learning environment, if a similar situation arises in future. academic staff, for example, should consider embedding collaborative activities, such as virtual classroom games into online classes. these are easy to design and run and have proven beneficial in helping reduce nervousness and increase online student engagement (ernest et al., 2013). references bandura, a. (1977) social learning theory. englewood cliffs, nj: prentice hall. elliott, j. (2020) ‘the importance of social presence and strategies for incorporating it into an online course’, in sistek-chandler, c. m. (ed). exploring online learning through o’dea providing business school students with online social networking opportunities during remote learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: october 2021 4 synchronous and asynchronous instructional methods. pennsylvania: igi global, pp.107-122. ernest, p., guitert catasús, m., hampel, r., heiser, s., hopkins, j., murphy, l. and stickler, u. (2013) ‘online teacher development: collaborating in a virtual learning environment’. computer assisted language learning, 26(4), pp.311-333. https://doi.org/10.1080/09588221.2012.667814. hurst, b., wallace, r. r. and nixon, s. b. (2013) ‘the impact of social interaction on student learning’. reading horizons, 52(4), pp.375-398. lenning, o. t. and ebbers, l. h. (1999) ‘the powerful potential of learning communities: improving education for the future’, ashe-eric higher education report, 26(6), pp.112. margalit, m. (2010) lonely children and adolescents: self-perceptions, social exclusion, and hope. new york: springer. rapanta, c., botturi, l., goodyear, p., guàrdia, l. and koole, m. (2020) ‘online university teaching during and after the covid-19 crisis: refocusing teacher presence and learning activity’, postdigital science and education, 2(3), pp.923-945. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42438-020-00155-y. rayens, w. and ellis, a. (2018) ‘creating a student-centred learning environment online’, journal of statistics education, 26(2), pp.92-102. https://doi.org/10.1080/10691898.2018.1475205. vygotsky, l. s. (1978) mind in society: the development of higher psychological processes. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. https://doi.org/10.1080/09588221.2012.667814 https://doi.org/10.1007/s42438-020-00155-y https://doi.org/10.1080/10691898.2018.1475205 o’dea providing business school students with online social networking opportunities during remote learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: october 2021 5 author details xianghan o’dea, phd, is senior lecturer at york st john university. her major research interests lie in the areas of digital education and international education. providing business school students with online social networking opportunities during remote learning the challenge my response virtual icebreaker activity social interaction time during seminars my recommendations references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 20: march 2021 ________________________________________________________________________ maximizing the impacts of academic research a book review of dunleavy, p. and tinkler, j. (2021) maximizing the impacts of academic research. london: red globe press. samantha ahern university college london, uk keywords: academic writing; research; knowledge exchange; citation; impact. overview for those pursuing a career in academia, research output and its impact plays a key role in obtaining academic positions and research funding. the tagline of this book is ‘how to grow the recognition, influence, practical application and public understanding of science and scholarship’. this is a very useful reference text for those who are undertaking doctoral studies or for early career researchers. the content of the book is organised into three parts: part one: academic impacts, part two: academic and external impacts, and part three: external impacts. part one is the most useful in supporting learning development as it provides a range of useful figures that will help all students develop their information literacy and writing skills. the latter sections would better support doctoral students and early career researchers in designing and developing research dissemination plans and directions in which to take their research. the book closes with an afterword that reiterates the importance of knowledge sharing for wider societal benefit. content and structure the opening chapters provide an overview of how citations work, citation tracking mechanisms, and the different impact factors, including alt metrics. these themes are discussed in relation to different discipline areas and the factors that can influence ahern maximising the impacts of academic research journal of learning development in higher education, issue 20: march 2021 2 academics’ and researchers’ total citations, both positive and negative. developing an understanding of these metrics is an important tool in helping students develop their information literacy, and will enable them to undertake effective reviews of literature. in addition, it will support early career researchers (ecrs) in understanding their own metrics and the nature of research outputs in their discipline area. the remaining chapters in this section are more practical in nature. chapters three and four focus on journal articles, whereas chapter five’s focus is on books and book chapters. particularly useful in chapter three, is figure 3.3, ‘comparing journals when choosing where to publish’. chapter four’s focus is on how to craft better articles, including guidance on article structure and selecting a title. figures 4.4 and 4.5 distil the key content and provide helpful prompts. unlike other texts such as graff and birkenstein’s ‘they say/i say’ (2010) which focuses on the development of arguments within academic writing, the focus is on the structure and discoverability of the writing. this is a different, but useful, resource for helping students develop their academic writing skills. however, as noted by elton (2010), authors should be mindful of not being constrained by tacit knowledge becoming overt. chapter five discusses the potential benefits and considerations of various book authorship and contribution scenarios in regard to a range of academic disciplines. in addition to guidance on selecting a title and authorship, there are overviews of the peer-review process for authored books and chapters in edited books, providing a useful description of the process for those who have not previously authored or contributed to edited books. part two takes a longer term and broader view of research activity and its impacts. chapter six discuses non-traditional resource outputs and research portfolios, chapter seven focuses on the affordances of digital scholarship, and chapter eight dives into improving impact at department and institutional level. chapter six is particularly useful for highlighting the types of activities academic engage in and how different outputs are cited and evidenced in the ref. the content of this chapter will help ecrs plan and manage a range of outputs across projects and will help them facilitate recognition of these outputs. chapter seven introduces and discusses core concepts of digital scholarship for both facilitation and dissemination of research activity including new publication and review models such as those used by plos one. chapters seven and eight overlap with their discussion of blogs: figure 7.4 is a deep dive into the characteristics of different blog types; chapter eight gets more into the nature of different communication models and the nature of the communications materials created. it goes beyond the individual researcher, and looks at departmental and institutional practices. ahern maximising the impacts of academic research journal of learning development in higher education, issue 20: march 2021 3 part three focuses solely on external impacts. there is some overlap in the content of this section with that of chapter eight. chapter nine dives a bit more into what is meant by impact, how it can be recognised, and how research interfaces with wider society. chapter ten, ‘working with other organizations’, is a detailed overview of the key considerations for individual researchers, research teams, and institutions when working with external organizations. the figures in this chapter provide an overview of the key information. the closing chapter in this section, chapter eleven, returns to the topic on impact, but through the lens of public engagement. it discusses knowledge exchange in the public sphere and how to present the knowledge in an accessible and engaging way to the wider public. the figures for this chapter provide in-depth guides and prompts for public engagement. summary this is an incredibly in-depth book that discusses all they key areas related to the dissemination of academic research, both within academia and beyond. however, at times it feels as though it drifts into the academese which it warns authors against in the opening chapters. the figures are incredibly useful resources and provide a good way of dipping into the key content of each of the chapters, without having to engage with the full text. however, in some sections the discussion and examples are predominantly science, technology, engineering, maths, and medical sciences (stemm) focused, with limited discussion relating to the humanities, arts, or social sciences. the latter chapters of the book are more slanted towards principle investigators and more senior researchers, making it a useful resource throughout a researcher’s career. in summary, this is a useful reference book with sections appealing to researchers at different stages of their careers. my recommendation would be to dip into the key areas of interest, as and when required. references elton, l. (2010) 'academic writing and tacit knowledge', teaching in higher education, 15(2), pp. 151–160. ahern maximising the impacts of academic research journal of learning development in higher education, issue 20: march 2021 4 graff, g. and birkenstein, c. (2010) 'they say, i say': the moves that matter in academic writing. 2nd ed. new york: norton. author details samantha ahern is a faculty learning technology lead at ucl. in addition to her main role, her interests include open education, equitable and inclusive education, and edtech ethics. her research focus is learning analytics and wellbeing. maximizing the impacts of academic research a book review of dunleavy, p. and tinkler, j. (2021) maximizing the impacts of academic research. london: red globe press. overview content and structure summary references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 20: march 2021 impact of writing workshops on doctoral student wellbeing charles a. buckley university of liverpool eli r. saetnan university of liverpool amelia gerber university of liverpool joanna cheetham university of liverpool thomas a. r. price university of liverpool jenna kenyani university of liverpool alan m. greaves university of liverpool abstract few interventions addressing student wellbeing have been designed or evaluated specifically with doctoral students in mind despite the doctoral experience being distinct from that of other students. we therefore explore the benefits of interventions designed specifically to address a key source of stress or anxiety for doctoral students, namely thesis writing. this research uses a mixed-methods approach to explore the ways in which doctoral thesis writing support sessions, in the form of writing workshops or writing retreats, can reduce the stress and anxiety associated with thesis writing specifically or academic writing more generally. firstly, we quantified the reduction in writing related stress and anxiety associated with workshop participation using a survey completed before and after workshop attendance. subsequently, we gathered student experiences of workshop participation through focus group interviews. buckley, saetnan, gerber, cheetham, price, kenyani and greaves impact of writing workshops on doctoral student wellbeing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 20: march 2021 2 survey responses showed a clear reduction in participants’ levels of stress and anxiety related to thesis writing and focus group respondents described many clear benefits of participating in writing support sessions. we conclude that participation in thesis writing workshops and writing retreats is a valuable strategy for reducing stress and anxiety associated with thesis writing. the sense of empowerment and confidence that comes from discussing thesis writing in a supportive environment with others in the same situation, and the opportunity to experiment with new tools and strategies, is very valuable for improving the wellbeing of doctoral students. keywords: doctoral students; stress; anxiety; wellbeing; thesis writing; writing workshops; writing retreats. introduction student wellbeing is of serious concern, with higher rates of stress and anxiety recorded among doctoral students than among other comparable populations (hargreaves et al., 2014; panger, 2015; guthrie et al., 2017; levecque et al., 2017; evans et al., 2018; metcalfe, wilson and levecque, 2018). yet strategies that are specifically designed for doctoral students that support mental health and wellbeing are somewhat lacking across the sector (metcalfe, wilson and levecque, 2018). the approaches to wellbeing support offered by universities for doctoral students are typically similar to those offered for undergraduates; the underlying assumption is that what works for undergraduate students will also work for doctoral students. however, the experiences of doctoral students are distinct from those of undergraduates and their wellbeing challenges are likely to reflect this (hunter and devine, 2016). mackie and bates (2019) therefore recommend better alignment between proposed interventions and the distinct challenges that occur during doctoral studies and indeed a number of projects addressing this issue have recently been established (vitae, 2020). thesis writing is one such distinct doctoral level experience that both impacts on, and is impacted by, mental wellbeing. wellbeing is not easily measurable, nor clearly defined in an academic context, though can at least in part be thought of as the absence of damaging levels of mental or physical stress (muurlink and poyatos matas, 2011). in this buckley, saetnan, gerber, cheetham, price, kenyani and greaves impact of writing workshops on doctoral student wellbeing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 20: march 2021 3 study, we consider mental wellbeing as the antithesis of such stress or anxiety. doctoral students (and their supervisors) are under increasing pressure from funders and universities to complete their theses on time, publish in high-ranking academic journals, and communicate to non-specialists via social media as expert contributors to public debates. doctoral students therefore must successfully make the transition from novice to expert within a short time frame, and this process is often unclear, leading to a sense of stress and anxiety associated with the writing process. poor mental wellbeing can in turn lead to poor productivity and lower levels of commitment to research (guthrie et al., 2017) with over 75% of doctoral students in uk universities completing their thesis later than expected (hefce, 2010). learning academic writing is particularly challenging because it requires adopting tacit and implicit knowledge which extends across different disciplinary practices making academic writing extremely hard to share and to teach (lonka, 2003; starke-meyerring, 2011). negotiating this thesis writing journey elicits strong emotions, both positive and negative, which contribute to feelings of stress and anxiety (wellington, 2010; stubb, pyhältö and lonka, 2012) thereby impacting on the mental wellbeing of doctoral students. supporting doctoral students through this challenging process is therefore key to both improving wellbeing and improving outcomes. often, writing support offered by universities is focused on the explicit and technical aspects of writing (e.g. burgoine et al., 2011; ciampa and wolfe, 2019). such technical instruction is addressing the final product of the thesis and may reduce some anxiety students have by improving their perception of their own technical skills (samuels, deane and griffin, 2012; foot, 2017; crisfield, 2020). however, writing is a complex activity tied to changing social, cultural, and disciplinary discursive practices (badenhorst, 2018) and learning to write in context is an ongoing endeavour (lea and street, 2006). doctoral students benefit from support which emphasises thesis writing as an ongoing developmental and dialogic process through peer review and discussion across disciplinary boundaries (delyser, 2003; aitchison, 2009; johnson, 2018), empowering them to negotiate their own thesis writing journey, and to handle the inevitable challenges along the way. buckley, saetnan, gerber, cheetham, price, kenyani and greaves impact of writing workshops on doctoral student wellbeing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 20: march 2021 4 empowering students in this way, by focusing on process rather than product, leads to higher levels of wellbeing (stubb, pyhältö and lonka, 2012). some have examined longer term writing groups for their role in reducing writing anxiety, suggesting that such interventions can enhance student confidence (ferguson, 2009; fergie et al., 2011; oluwole et al., 2018). the support of the group boosts students’ perceptions of motivation and productivity (noone and young, 2019) by giving members of the group a sense of community (aitchison and lee, 2006) and peer support (fergie et al., 2011; tyndall et al., 2019). by opening up discussions with fellow writers, participants develop their own academic literacy and identity (boud and lee, 2007; cuthbert, spark and burke, 2009; mantai, 2017; papen and theriault, 2018) further building confidence. similarly, writing retreats provide community support and are valued for the pleasure of sharing a room with other writers, and for the opportunity to talk about writing practices and experiences, as well as for task-focused time to write (paltridge, 2016; noone and young, 2019). this community support provides both a social and emotional benefit, reducing the anxiety and stress associated with writing (maher et al., 2008; beasy et al., 2020). most research to date has focused on the impact of long-term writing programmes or intensive writing courses (e.g. bærenholdt et al., 2010; fergie et al., 2011; wilmot, 2018); however, little evidence is available for the benefit of brief writing interventions which typically form part of central skills provision at uk universities. to gain insights into what might constitute suitable pedagogical approaches or to evidence the value of different adopted interventions, it is vital to examine the students' experiences of them (cotterall, 2011). for this reason, we decided to evaluate the impact of a series of short writing support workshops that were developed to support doctoral students at our uk researchintensive university by exploring the student experience of participating in these sessions. methodology and methods the lack of writing support specifically aimed to support doctoral students had been noted as a concern at our institution. at the same time, the institution has become aware of growing concern for the wellbeing of this group of students. as a result, a programme of workshops to address thesis writing was developed as a strategy for addressing doctoral wellbeing by reducing stress and anxiety associated with thesis writing. the new buckley, saetnan, gerber, cheetham, price, kenyani and greaves impact of writing workshops on doctoral student wellbeing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 20: march 2021 5 programme was implemented in 2017, and exploratory data gathered to evaluate the impact of the programme was gathered over the 2017/18 academic year. specifically, this research aimed to address the following research questions: 1. does participation in short writing workshops reduce doctoral students’ anxiety or stress associated with writing? 2. how do doctoral students experience the writing support sessions and what do they perceive as being the value? to both assess the impact of workshop participation on student perceptions of stress and anxiety, as well as explore the student experience of thesis writing support, we chose to adopt a mixed methods approach to this study. to answer the first research question, a survey was used to quantify changes in writing anxiety and associated levels of stress before and after attending structured or semi-structured workshop sessions. subsequent focus group interviews allowed us to explore the student experience of thesis writing support more fully and address the second research question. the context for this research project this research project was conducted at a research-intensive uk university. thesis in this context refers to the final doctoral level product submitted for assessment at the end of the doctoral degree. a series of writing support sessions were developed to support doctoral students from across the institution ranging from structured, to semi-structured, and completely unstructured sessions: structured thesis writing workshops focused on the technical aspects of thesis writing as a genre, including appropriate structure, and writing style. advice and guidance were provided by means of brief lectures. participants were then able to put the advice into practice through specific writing exercises. throughout these workshops, participants were encouraged to share their own experiences and disciplinary perspectives through group discussions. the workshops were facilitated by a learning developer with specific experience of developing writing skills and knowledge of diverse disciplinary approaches to writing. buckley, saetnan, gerber, cheetham, price, kenyani and greaves impact of writing workshops on doctoral student wellbeing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 20: march 2021 6 semi-structured writer’s block workshops were less structured and focused on thesis writing as a process. the sessions were designed to prompt personal reflection followed by group discussion around key themes connected with overcoming writer’s block. sessions were facilitated by a uk council for psychotherapy (ukcp) accredited psychotherapist who focused on encouraging participants to reflect on their own practices and connect with their emotions. participants were asked to identify and connect with their ‘blocked’ (i.e. non-writing) state and their ideal ‘flow’ (i.e. writing) state and toggle between them. known in neuro-linguistic programming as ‘resource states’, it was emphasised that each of these two states can have value to the writer (see tosey and mathison, 2009, for criticism of using positive psychology in isolation without balancing negative states and emotions). the desired, but elusive, ‘flow’ state in which the writer is performing comfortably and the words are literally flowing from their fingertips, was then used as a basis for discussion of suggested strategies. this mirrors the ‘miracle question’ used in solution-focused brief therapy (de shazer and dolan, 2012) to assist the client to visualise solutions to their presenting issue themselves. having engaged participants with their emotions, the workshop also raised awareness of the symptoms of anxiety and depression and how to access support. unstructured writing retreats were developed as group writing retreats. with no formal instruction, these offered a protected time and space for writing in the company of others for mutual peer support. writing retreats combined quiet, focused writing time, with regular breaks for informal chats and discussion with peers. the retreats were facilitated by a learning developer with experience of developing writing skills and an interest, but no qualifications, in supporting doctoral student wellbeing and mental health. each workshop or writing retreat session lasted three hours and together these formed a series of events that were offered over the course of a month each academic term, with an additional three writing retreats offered in november in conjunction with an academic writing festival. doctoral students attending the sessions represented a wide range of discipline areas from across the institution and all stages of thesis writing from complete novice to near submission. buckley, saetnan, gerber, cheetham, price, kenyani and greaves impact of writing workshops on doctoral student wellbeing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 20: march 2021 7 survey methods the change in perceptions of wellbeing associated with writing was explored using an online survey sent to all participants who had booked onto the structured and semistructured writing support sessions during the 2017/18 academic year. writing retreats had no pre-booking and so could not be included in this process. the survey questions were adapted from the writing process questionnaire developed by lonka et al. (2014) and the mednord survey developed by lonka et al. (2008). specifically, we used the questions relating to writer’s block and procrastination from the writing process questionnaire and the questions relating to anxiety and stress from the mednord survey. each topic consisted of a set of statements, with participants rating their agreement with each statement on a scale from one to five. in addition, the pre-session survey included a set of monitoring questions including gender, native language and stage of degree as these are all factors thought to impact on writing anxiety (huerta et al., 2016). all responses were downloaded to excel for analysis and the average response for each topic calculated for each respondent. all pre-session responses were used to explore any potential differences in wellbeing or writing motivation among participants before they attended the structured or semistructured workshops. data were analysed by fitting a linear model with gender, language, and stage as fixed factors. we matched preand post-session responses, using only matched responses to explore the effects of participating in a writing support session. next, data were analysed by fitting a linear mixed-effects model (lme) which accounts for the random effects associated with the response variable being repeated within subjects (morrell, 1998). the model was fitted with workshop type and time (pre/post) as fixed factors and respondent as a random factor. the impact of each fixed factor was analysed using the likelihood ratio test (morrell, 1998). all statistical analyses were completed using r version 3.5.0. focus group interviews invitations to participate in focus groups were sent to all 130 doctoral students who had participated in any thesis writing session over the 2017/18 academic year. only 12 participants volunteered to take part, having participated in one or two writing support workshops each. participants were organised into three focus groups to discuss: their buckley, saetnan, gerber, cheetham, price, kenyani and greaves impact of writing workshops on doctoral student wellbeing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 20: march 2021 8 perceptions of whether their expectations were met; whether they felt more confident about writing following the workshops; feelings they had during and after the workshops; and changes they would like to see made to the ways in which the workshops were organised. one of the project team facilitated the interviews and was observed by another colleague involved in the project for the purposes of researcher triangulation to record dynamics and enhance credibility of the process. interviews were audio recorded and transcribed verbatim. the transcribed focus group interviews were analysed using thematic analysis (braun and clarke, 2006). this approach provides a robust, systematic framework for coding qualitative data to identify patterns in relation to the research question and is used widely for health and wellbeing research (braun and clarke, 2014). initial codes were assigned to sections of the transcripts and each code was checked and cross-referenced by other members of the research team to enhance credibility. results and discussion exploratory survey findings in total 29 participants from three structured sessions and 30 participants from two semistructured sessions were invited to participate in the online survey. response rates were relatively low with only 23 participants responding to the pre-workshop survey. the majority of respondents were female (15 female, 8 male) in the middle of their degree (8 early, 11 middle, 4 late). respondents were evenly split between native english speakers (11) and non-native english speakers (12). none of the tested factors (gender, stage of degree, language) explained any of the variation in responses to the questions on writer’s block (f4,18 = 0.269, p = 0.894), procrastination (f4,18 = 1.056, p = 0.406) or anxiety (f4,18 = 1.326, p = 0.298). perceived stress levels did differ between some groups of participants (f4,18 = 4.962, p = 0.007) with those in the middle of their degree reporting higher levels of stress than those early or late in their degree (t = 3.076, p = 0.007). non-native english speakers also reported lower levels of stress than native english speakers (t = -2.343, p = 0.031). previous work has suggested that gender is a significant predictor of stress and poor mental health in doctoral students, with women reporting worse outcomes than men buckley, saetnan, gerber, cheetham, price, kenyani and greaves impact of writing workshops on doctoral student wellbeing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 20: march 2021 9 (hargreaves et al., 2014; guthrie et al., 2017). in this research we found no significant effect of gender on reported stress or anxiety levels. instead, the stage of degree appeared to be a more significant explanatory factor. among our participants, those in the middle of the degree reported higher levels of stress, perhaps suggesting that this is the stage in their studies when work-life balance is most challenging and work demands are high. alternatively, it may be that by the end of their degree, students have developed coping mechanisms, increased skills, or increased confidence in their writing, and so report less anxiety associated directly with writing. certainly, the experiences shared by interviewees in morris et al. (2015) show how much of a rollercoaster the phd journey can be, and the skills and coping mechanisms doctoral students build along the way. future research might usefully explore further how the areas of stress, and therefore the specific types of support needed, change through the doctoral journey. only 16 respondents could be matched with preand postsession responses (nine from the structured thesis writing sessions; seven from the semi-structured writer’s block sessions). participants reported a positive response to all measured variables when comparing pre-session to post-session survey responses. participants reported a big impact on their perceived writer’s block (x2 = 7.268, p = 0.007) and procrastination (x2 = 8.791, p = 0.003) while the impact on their sense of wellbeing such as anxiety (x2 = 4.017, p = 0.045) and stress (x2 = 2.917, p = 0.088) was less pronounced. workshop type was not a significant explanatory factor for any of the measured response variables (p > 0.1 for all factors) suggesting that both workshop types had positive impacts on perceived levels of stress and anxiety. one aspect of these benefits may be increasing confidence. in particular, the structured thesis sessions focus on clarification of expectations which should give participants confidence in their ability to meet those expectations. such structured writing courses have been shown to improve both confidence in and knowledge of academic writing (crisfield, 2020). as suggested by guthrie et al. (2017), confidence in abilities should reduce perceived stress and anxiety around completing the task. the use of solution-focussed brief therapy (sfbt) used by the trained psychotherapist delivering the semi-structured writer’s block workshops may account for why some participants felt that they were of benefit. meta-analysis of the sfbt technique shows that it is has a slight effect on improving internalising (i.e. depressive) behaviours (kim, 2007). however, it cannot be buckley, saetnan, gerber, cheetham, price, kenyani and greaves impact of writing workshops on doctoral student wellbeing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 20: march 2021 10 claimed that the benefits to participants were restricted to those who participated in that particular form of workshop alone, or that it was the sfbt element of the eclectic therapeutic approach used in that workshop that made the most difference. both workshop types were seen to be equally beneficial in improving quantitative measures of writing anxiety and stress. perhaps the main benefit of both workshop types may have emerged from shifting the focus of thesis writing from the final product to the thesis as an ongoing developmental process. as shown by stubb, pyhältö and lonka (2012), those who see the thesis as a process report better wellbeing and study engagement. although the facilitators of the two different workshops may have approached workshop facilitation differently, both were focused on empowering participants to find their own solutions and strategies for thesis writing. focus group themes as the survey shows, participating in short writing sessions can reduce students’ writing related anxiety and improve their overall productivity and wellbeing as a result. following up the survey with focus group interviews, we found that interviewees identified many benefits from engaging with the workshops. these benefits can be encapsulated in three themes discussed below: ‘tangible benefits’, ‘supportive environment’ and ‘empowerment’. theme 1: tangible benefits as the survey showed, workshop participation reduced the stress and anxiety students had around writing. doctoral students are juggling many conflicting demands on their time which adds to their sense of stress, and means that workshop participation is often not prioritised (saetnan, 2020). our research indicates that participation in thesis writing workshops and writing retreats, rather than being considered an added demand on their time and an added source of stress, is a valuable strategy for reducing stress and anxiety associated with thesis writing. one way in which these workshops provide value for participants is in the explicit tips and tricks for writing and productivity as highlighted by our participants such as changing working habits, creating a writing plan and tips for being more productive: buckley, saetnan, gerber, cheetham, price, kenyani and greaves impact of writing workshops on doctoral student wellbeing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 20: march 2021 11 and tips on how to stop procrastinating. i thought that was very useful because it made, it kind of put in perspective that not everyone is always on top of things all the time, so that was kind of reassuring. it made me aware, just forget about revising and write for as long as you feel comfortable and then come back and revise and put it the way you like it. there were notable differences in perceived benefits for individuals, showing that students took away their own unique strategies and thoughts about writing which were relevant to their personal practice: like a very practical thing of benefit to me, so it wasn’t generic to everybody, it was like this is personal to me, this is personal to my thesis, and for the next two weeks, i know what i am doing, and so that was really good. all workshop formats encouraged the sharing and open discussion of personal strategies and approaches to writing. a positive consequence and learning technique mentioned by some was the power of learning through teaching and explaining the process to others and they felt that the workshops had helped them in this regard: i am doing some tutoring so i actually explain to others how to write, and being on the other side of the table, sometimes really helps. interviewees expressed a desire to find the motivation to write, as well as reassurance with regards to their writing abilities. some individuals describe how they went with the expectation of developing their motivation, and despite this being the case, for some it failed to create a sustained effect: i am looking for, to take, to take something for motivation, perhaps some knowledge, but mostly the motivation to write […] some workshops they keep your motivation for a week, or two weeks, but never for a month unfortunately. buckley, saetnan, gerber, cheetham, price, kenyani and greaves impact of writing workshops on doctoral student wellbeing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 20: march 2021 12 aspects of the academic journey are often unclear, with a hidden curriculum which is never explicitly stated (starke-meyerring, 2011). this sense of mystery or unknown, combined with the high stakes of thesis writing, can be a great source of stress and anxiety for doctoral students. workshops such as those discussed here are an opportunity to make some of these hidden expectations explicit, and to demystify the thesis or writing process through conversations with peers and experienced writers (samuels, deane and griffin, 2012; foot, 2017; crisfield, 2020) and thereby allay the fears and anxiety of participants. having a set of tangible tools and strategies to implement can therefore be reassuring. although understanding the final product is helpful, it is interesting to note that some of these tangible benefits identified by participants are in the form of strategies for managing the writing as a process rather than the end product. problems in scientific writing, such as blocks and procrastination, perfectionism, and seeing writing as an innate ability are all negatively related to productivity (lonka et al., 2014). a focus of both the structured and semi-structured workshop sessions was to provide tools and strategies for overcoming these challenges, but also aim to change participants’ perceptions of writing; to help them recognise that writing is a skill that can be improved through practice. as indicated by this participant, we did achieve this for some – they felt it had altered their whole approach to the writing process: …the biggest difference, because i think that that has probably changed my psyche a bit, about writing, and i think that has helped… the freewriting one was the one that had made the biggest impact…that is just a good way of writing and thinking. as stubb, pyhältö and lonka (2012) suggest, seeing the thesis as a learning process rather than focusing on the end product is associated with better wellbeing and lower levels of anxiety around writing. what we cannot know from these results are whether those who choose to participate in our workshops do so because they already see the thesis as a writing process and are looking for tools to manage the process, or whether the workshop changes participants’ initial perception of thesis writing. this is perhaps something worth exploring further in future. buckley, saetnan, gerber, cheetham, price, kenyani and greaves impact of writing workshops on doctoral student wellbeing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 20: march 2021 13 theme 2: supportive environment being surrounded by supportive peers also impacted on participants’ sense of wellbeing. several participants brought up aspects of the workshop environment as crucial to workshop success and benefit, related both to the physical aspects of the workshop environment, and to the social dimension created by the participants and the facilitator during the session. in a very physical sense, being taken out of your normal working environment was beneficial, removing the usual distractions and providing a welcome change: it was off campus but that was quite nice in a way, because it meant you, you were a bit removed, you know like i’m in uni and i’m here it’s a bit like well you doing something different and you’re sitting down and writing kind of thing. this aspect of the working environment was particularly highlighted in relation to the writing retreats which offered a diversion from their routine and usual environment with an unanticipated consequence of feeling a social group pressure to be productive which gave them a motivation to write as everyone else was doing it. being part of the group gave them an impetus to work and a focus that they sometimes lacked on their own: that competitiveness i think, you don’t want to look like you’re the lazy one who’s not doing it if everyone else around you is doing it. so you think, well, sort of as i’m here i may as well do something. all workshops were generally viewed as an opportunity to share in some way, with peer discussion an explicit pedagogic tool used by all facilitators. participants felt that they offered some sense of community and a chance to share concerns and discuss writing: then sometimes um there’d be more general discussions on well what people do more generally to motivate themselves to write, what’s stopping you from writing, um so there was sort of little discussions in between which is helpful as well. buckley, saetnan, gerber, cheetham, price, kenyani and greaves impact of writing workshops on doctoral student wellbeing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 20: march 2021 14 there was a feeling that being surrounded by others who were in a similar position gave a sense of belonging that was reassuring. other interviewees reported that it was helpful to be able to talk with others who were at different stages of their degree and for some, the workshops generated lasting connections: we actually ended up working together and meeting after work for, talking about science, or having a drink…one boy and a girl, they are still my friends nowadays, after three years. talking to others in similar situations can be encouraging (crisfield, 2020) and thus act as a form of stress management. doctoral students are looking for opportunities for social engagement with fellow students and recognising the value of these social interactions to improve their own wellbeing (saetnan, 2020). knowing that you are not alone, and finding companionship among peers, can be great motivation and inspiration for productivity as others have also found (oluwole et al., 2018; noone and young, 2019; tyndall et al., 2019) and this improved productivity can be reassuring, reducing the sense of stress or anxiety associated with thesis writing and hence improve wellbeing. one key aspect of this supportive environment is that it opens up spaces for conversations about writing, which can turn into valuable learning opportunities that help participants to articulate implicit theories and beliefs, and test out professional knowledge or practice in a safe space (haigh, 2005). for many academics, the process of writing is never shared or explicitly discussed (starke-meyerring, 2011). talking about writing not only provides tangible benefits as discussed above, it potentially also makes writing a more meaningful and manageable activity and improves people’s experiences of writing (murray, 2015). this dialogic pedagogy was incorporated explicitly in both the structured and semistructured workshop sessions and became an important feature of the writing retreats through the serendipitous conversations in the writing breaks. empowerment indicative of the stress and anxiety highlighted in the pre-workshop surveys, some interviewees described the process of writing as overwhelming. however, the workshops helped them feel as though they were in control, thereby reducing their stress levels: buckley, saetnan, gerber, cheetham, price, kenyani and greaves impact of writing workshops on doctoral student wellbeing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 20: march 2021 15 i guess it sort of makes you think about writing, as like, it can be easy to get overwhelmed by the amount that you’ve got to do… because it’s a lot and there’s no way of getting over that a phd is, at the end of the day, a hell of a lot of writing. i think it has had an impact on my stress levels. feeling in control of their own writing process can be both powerful and empowering considering the fraught and confusing journey that thesis writing can be. part of that sense of empowerment can be having confidence in their own skills. as discussed in the first theme, workshops provided specific skills and strategies which gave a sense of confidence. however, for some more experienced doctoral students, they felt that the workshops merely reinforced some principles they already knew. this experience was still beneficial as validation of current skills, and for some the experience surfaced strategies and knowledge that were latent in their consciousness: it was something that was common sense. it was something that i already knew but i wasn’t fully aware … er, but something that i didn’t proactively know or had in the back of my mind another related aspect of this theme was freedom. the workshops were experienced as a safe space to experiment and try new things without fear of judgement, and this sense of freedom can be empowering. free writing was a deliberate strategy incorporated into some workshops, most notably the semi-structured writer’s block sessions, and several participants noted this as a valuable strategy: so we had five minutes of just writing or whatever was in our head, get something down on paper, erm, and i find that quite fascinating because i think i am a bit of a perfectionist when it comes to writing, so if i write a sentence i will go back to correct the grammar, you know i’ll think it over and i’ll over criticise it. this theme highlights the value of workshops as a space to experiment and take control of the participants’ own personal writing process. becoming an academic is in large part about finding your own voice; and doing so in negotiation with the expectations of buckley, saetnan, gerber, cheetham, price, kenyani and greaves impact of writing workshops on doctoral student wellbeing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 20: march 2021 16 supervisors and colleagues in the discipline. this negotiation involves recognising and adapting to tacit disciplinary expectations, which are rarely, if ever, openly discussed, and such negotiation requires confidence. talking about research and research processes, such as writing, with others becomes an opportunity to validate doctoral students’ own identity as researchers (mantai, 2017). the interdisciplinary nature of these workshops may have the added benefit of empowering participants to become proponents of their own discipline through dialogue across disciplines (cuthbert, spark and burke, 2009). building on the previous two themes, gaining specific skills or tools is one element of building confidence. discussing ideas, strategies and fears with colleagues and peers is another element of building confidence. together these empower participants to experiment and take control of their own writing journey. by developing a sense of confidence and feeling in control of their own writing journey, we can reduce anxiety and stress related to the thesis, specifically, or academic writing more generally. by gaining confidence and a sense of self-efficacy, participants’ motivation for writing and their writing outcomes are likely to improve (pajares, 2003). in this way, we can improve the wellbeing of doctoral students by empowering them to take control of their own wellbeing through managing the writing process. conclusions our exploratory survey suggests that participating in even short writing workshops can have a positive impact on doctoral students’ wellbeing by reducing their perceived levels of writing related stress and anxiety. participants appreciated how workshops offered tools and techniques for managing the writing process as well as a space to explore and discuss writing with peers in a supportive environment. the sense of empowerment and confidence which comes from these brief interactions can be very valuable for improving wellbeing of doctoral students. although using different strategies or facilitation techniques, all workshop types explored here provided valuable opportunities for students to connect with peers and discuss challenges and strategies in an open and supportive environment. a few participants noted that they remained in contact with peers from the writing retreats and continued to write together after the workshop. in this project we were limited to exploring only the immediate impact of workshop attendance on stress and anxiety buckley, saetnan, gerber, cheetham, price, kenyani and greaves impact of writing workshops on doctoral student wellbeing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 20: march 2021 17 associated with thesis writing. further research is therefore suggested to explore how to foster more sustained impacts on participants beyond the workshop, and whether this longer-term peer support has lasting impacts on participants’ wellbeing. references aitchison, c. (2009) ‘writing groups for doctoral education’, studies in higher education, 34(8), pp. 905–916. doi:10.1080/03075070902785580. aitchison, c. and lee, a. (2006) ‘research writing: problems and pedagogies’, teaching in higher education, 11(3), pp. 265–278. doi: 10.1080/13562510600680574. badenhorst, c. (2018) ‘graduate student writing: complexity in literature reviews’, studies in graduate and postdoctoral education, 9(1), pp. 58–74. doi: 10.1108/sgpe-d-1700031. bærenholdt, j. o., gregson, n., everts, j., granås, b. and healey, r. l. (2010) ‘performing academic practice: using the master class to build postgraduate discursive competences’, journal of geography in higher education, 34(2), pp. 283–298. doi: 10.1080/03098260903502695. beasy, k., emery, s., dyer, l., coleman, b., bywaters, d., garrad, t., crawford, j., swarts, k. and jahangiri, s. (2020) ‘writing together to foster wellbeing: doctoral writing groups as spaces of wellbeing as spaces of wellbeing’, higher education research & development. taylor & francis, 39(6), pp. 1091-1105. doi: 10.1080/07294360.2020.1713732. boud, d. and lee, a. (2007) ‘“peer learning” as pedagogic discourse for research education’, studies in higher education, 30(5), pp. 501–516. doi: 10.1080/03075070500249138. braun, v. and clarke, v. (2006) ‘using thematic analysis in psychology’, qualitative research in psychology, 3(2), pp. 77–101. doi: 10.1191/1478088706qp063oa. buckley, saetnan, gerber, cheetham, price, kenyani and greaves impact of writing workshops on doctoral student wellbeing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 20: march 2021 18 braun, v. and clarke, v. (2014) ‘what can “thematic analysis” offer health and wellbeing researchers?’, international journal of qualitative studies on health and well-being, 9, pp. 9–11. doi: 10.3402/qhw.v9.26152. burgoine, t., hopkins, p., rech, m. f. and zapata, g. p. (2011) ‘“these kids can’t write abstracts”: reflections on a postgraduate writing and publishing workshop’, area, 43(4), pp. 463–469. doi: 10.1111/j.1475-4762.2011.01030.x. ciampa, k. and wolfe, z. (2019) ‘preparing for dissertation writing: doctoral education students’ perceptions’, studies in graduate and postdoctoral education, 10(2), pp. 86–108. doi: 10.1108/sgpe-03-2019-0039. cotterall, s. (2011) ‘doctoral students writing: where’s the pedagogy?’, teaching in higher education, 16(4), pp. 413–425. doi: 10.1080/13562517.2011.560381. crisfield, m. (2020) ‘making the transition to master’s dissertation writing: evaluating the impact of a dissertation writing course on pgt students’ confidence’, journal of learning development in higher education, 17. available at: https://journal.aldinhe.ac.uk/index.php/jldhe/article/view/561 (accessed 4 july 2020). cuthbert, d., spark, c. and burke, e. (2009) ‘disciplining writing: the case for multi‐ disciplinary writing groups to support writing for publication by higher degree by research candidates in the humanities, arts and social sciences’, higher education research & development, 28(2), pp. 137–149. doi: 10.1080/07294360902725025. delyser, d. (2003) ‘teaching graduate students to write: a seminar for thesis and dissertation writers’, journal of geography in higher education, 27(2), pp. 169–181. doi: 10.1080/03098260305676. evans, t. m., bira, l., gastelum, j. b., weiss, l. t. and vanderford, n. l. (2018) ‘evidence for a mental health crisis in graduate education’, nature biotechnology, 36, pp. 282–284. doi: 10.1038/nbt.4089. buckley, saetnan, gerber, cheetham, price, kenyani and greaves impact of writing workshops on doctoral student wellbeing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 20: march 2021 19 fergie, g., beeke, s., mckenna, c. and creme, p. (2011) ‘“it’s a lonely walk”: supporting postgraduate researchers through writing’, international journal of teaching and learning, 23(2), pp. 236–245. ferguson, t. (2009) ‘the “write” skills and more: a thesis writing group for doctoral students’, journal of geography in higher education, 33(2), pp. 285–297. doi: 10.1080/03098260902734968. foot, r. e. (2017) ‘it’s not always what it seems’: exploring the hidden curriculum within a doctoral program. kent state university college. guthrie, s., lichten, c., van belle, j., ball, s., knack, a. and hofman, j. (2017) understanding mental health in the research environment: a rapid evidence assessment. available at: https://royalsociety.org/~/media/news/2017/understanding-mental-health-in-theresearch-environment.pdf (accessed 4 july 2020). haigh, n. (2005) ‘everyday conversation as a context for professional learning and development’, international journal for academic development, 10(1), pp. 3–16. doi: 10.1080/13601440500099969. hargreaves, c. e., de wilde, j. p. and walsh, e. (2014) re-evaluating doctoral researchers’ well‐being: what has changed in five years? available at: https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/study/graduateschool/public/well-being/wellbeing-for-gs.pdf (accessed 4 july 2020). hefce (2010) research degree qualification rates. available at: www.hefce.ac.uk (accessed 4 july 2020). huerta, m., goodson, p., beigi, m. and chlup, d. (2016) ‘graduate students as academic writers: writing anxiety, self-efficacy and emotional intelligence’, higher education research & development, 4360(october), pp. 1–14. doi: 10.1080/07294360.2016.1238881. buckley, saetnan, gerber, cheetham, price, kenyani and greaves impact of writing workshops on doctoral student wellbeing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 20: march 2021 20 hunter, k. h. and devine, k. (2016) ‘doctoral students’ emotional exhaustion and intentions to leave academia’, international journal of doctoral studies, 11, pp. 35– 61. available at: http://ijds.org/volume11/ijdsv11p035-061hunter2198.pdf (accessed 4 july 2020). johnson, e. m. (2018) ‘the doctoral writing conversation: establishing a generic doctoral writing programme’, open review of educational research, 5(1), pp. 16–27. doi: 10.1080/23265507.2017.1419439. kim, j. s. (2007) ‘examining the effectiveness of solution-focused brief therapy: a metaanalysis’, research on social work practice, 18(2), pp. 107–116. doi: 10.1177/1049731507307807. levecque, k., ansel, f., de beuckelaer, a., van der heyden, j. and gisle, l. (2017) ‘work organization and mental health problems in phd students’, research policy. elsevier b.v., 46(4), pp. 868–879. doi: 10.1016/j.respol.2017.02.008. lonka, k. (2003) ‘helping doctoral students finish their theses’, in björk, l. et al. (eds) teaching academic writing across europe. dordrecht: kluwer university press, pp. 113–131. lonka, k., sharafi, p., karlgren, k., masiello, i., nieminen, j., birgegård, g. and josephson, a. (2008) ‘med nord--a tool for measuring medical students’ wellbeing and study orientations’, medical teacher, 30(1), pp. 72–79. doi: 10.1080/01421590701769555. lonka, k., chow, a., keskinen, j., hakkarainen, k., sandström, n. and pyhältö, k. (2014) ‘how to measure phd students’ conceptions of academic writing – and are they related to well-being?’, journal of writing research, 5(3), pp. 245–269. mackie, s. a. and bates, g. w. (2019) ‘contribution of the doctoral education environment to phd candidates’ mental health problems: a scoping review’, higher education research and development, 38(3), pp. 565–578. doi: 10.1080/07294360.2018.1556620. buckley, saetnan, gerber, cheetham, price, kenyani and greaves impact of writing workshops on doctoral student wellbeing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 20: march 2021 21 maher, d., seaton, l., mcmullen, c., fitzgerald, t., otsuji, e. and lee, a. (2008) ‘“becoming and being writers”: the experiences of doctoral students in writing groups’, studies in continuing education, 30(3), pp. 263–275. doi: 10.1080/01580370802439870. mantai, l. (2017) ‘feeling like a researcher: experiences of early doctoral students in australia’, studies in higher education, 42(4), pp. 636–650. doi: 10.1080/03075079.2015.1067603. metcalfe, j., wilson, s. and levecque, k. (2018) ‘exploring wellbeing and mental health and associated support services for postgraduate researchers’, (may). available at: www.vitae.ac.uk (accessed 4 july 2020). morrell, c. h. (1998) ‘likelihood ratio testing of variance components in the linear mixed-effects model using restricted maximum likelihood’, biometrics, 54(4), pp. 1560–1568. doi: 10.2307/2533680. morris, c., wisker, g., cheng, m., lily, j., warnes, m., robinson, g. and trafford, v. (2015) ‘wellbeing and the research student’, in marshall, l. and morris, c. (eds) taking wellbeing forward in higher education: reflections on theory and practice. university of brighton press, pp. 72–83. murray, r. (2015) writing in social spaces: a social processes approach to academic writing. abingdon, oxon: routledge. muurlink, o. and poyatos matas, c. (2011) ‘a higher degree of stress: academic wellbeing’, in marshall, l. and morris, c. (eds) taking wellbeing forward in higher education: reflections on theory and practice. university of brighton press, pp. 60– 71. noone, j. and young, h. m. (2019) ‘creating a community of writers: participant perception of the impact of a writing retreat on scholarly productivity’, journal of professional nursing, 35(1), pp. 65–69. doi: 10.1016/j.profnurs.2018.07.006. buckley, saetnan, gerber, cheetham, price, kenyani and greaves impact of writing workshops on doctoral student wellbeing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 20: march 2021 22 oluwole, d. o., achadu, o., asfour, f., chakona, g., mason, p., mataruse, p. and mckenna, s. (2018) ‘postgraduate writing groups as spaces of agency development’, south african journal of higher education, 32(6), pp. 370–381. doi: 10.20853/32-6-2963. pajares, f. (2003) ‘self-efficacy beliefs, motivation, and achievement in writing: a review of the literature’, reading & writing quarterly, 19(2), pp. 139–158. doi: 10.1080/10573560308222. paltridge, b. (2016) ‘writing retreats as writing pedagogy’, writing & pedagogy, 8(1), pp. 199–213. doi: 10.1558/wap.v8i1.27634. panger, g. (2015) graduate student happiness & well-being report. available at: http://ga.berkeley.edu/wellbeingreport/ (accessed 4 july 2020). papen, u. and theriault, v. (2018) ‘writing retreats as a milestone in the development of phd students’ sense of self as academic writers’, studies in continuing education, 40(2), pp. 166–180. doi: 10.1080/0158037x.2017.1396973. saetnan, e. r. (2020) ‘graduate students ’ motivations for participating in development workshops’, practice and evidence in the scholarship of teaching and learning in higher education, 14(1), pp. 117–136. samuels, p., deane, m. and griffin, j. (2012) ‘report on postgraduate training event in science education writing’, journal of learning development in higher education, 4. available at: https://journal.aldinhe.ac.uk/index.php/jldhe/article/view/134 (accessed 4 july 2020). de shazer, s. and dolan, y. (2012) more than miracles: the state of the art of solutionfocused brief therapy. abingdon: routledge. starke-meyerring, d. (2011) ‘the paradox of writing in doctoral education: student experiences’, in doctoral education: research-based strategies for doctoral buckley, saetnan, gerber, cheetham, price, kenyani and greaves impact of writing workshops on doctoral student wellbeing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 20: march 2021 23 students, supervisors and administrators. springer netherlands, pp. 75–95. doi: 10.1007/978-94-007-0507-4. stubb, j., pyhältö, k. and lonka, k. (2012) ‘the experienced meaning of working with a phd thesis’, scandinavian journal of educational research, 56(4), pp. 439–456. doi: 10.1080/00313831.2011.599422. tosey, p. and mathison, j. (2009) neuro-linguistic programming: a critical appreciation for managers and developers. palgrave macmillan uk. doi: 10.1057/9780230248311. tyndall, d., forbes iii, t. h., avery, j. and powell, s. b. (2019) ‘fostering scholarship in doctoral education: using a social capital framework to support phd student writing groups’, journal of professional nursing, 35(4), pp. 300–304. doi: 10.1016/j.profnurs.2019.02.002. vitae (2020) pgr catalyst fund resources. available at: https://www.vitae.ac.uk/doingresearch/wellbeing-and-mental-health/catalyst-project-resources-1 (accessed: 21 august 2020). wellington, j. (2010) ‘more than a matter of cognition: an exploration of affective writing problems of post-graduate students and their possible solutions’, teaching in higher education, 15(2), pp. 135–150. doi: 10.1080/13562511003619961. wilmot, k. (2018) ‘designing writing groups to support postgraduate students’ academic writing: a case study from a south african university’, innovations in education and teaching international, 55(3), pp. 257–265. doi: 10.1080/14703297.2016.1238775. author details charles a. buckley is a senior academic developer at the university of liverpool. charles is a national teaching fellow and principal fellow with advance he. he has a number of research interests including the use of visual representation in research, buckley, saetnan, gerber, cheetham, price, kenyani and greaves impact of writing workshops on doctoral student wellbeing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 20: march 2021 24 learning and teaching, lecturer identities and perceptions of continuing professional development and the use of grounded theory in qualitative research. eli r. saetnan is a senior academic developer at the university of liverpool, supporting the scholarship and teaching development of early career researchers. her main research interest is in the impact of academic development on the academic practices and confidence development of novice academics. amelia gerber participated in this project as part of her masters in psychology research methods. joanna cheetham is a senior educational developer in the centre for innovation in education at the university of liverpool. she is particularly interested in compassionate pedagogies and inclusive curriculum design. tom a. r. price is a senior lecturer in evolutionary biology at the university of liverpool. his main focus is the impact of climate change on fertility, but he also works to develop resources to support wellbeing and good mental health in phd students and the wider university community. jenna kenyani is public engagement officer and pgr wellbeing advisor for the faculty of health and life sciences. she is a mental health advocate and has an interest in supporting both students and staff in their wellbeing. alan m. greaves is a senior lecturer in archaeology at the university of liverpool. alan is a national teaching fellow, a principal fellow with advance he, and an accredited psychotherapist registered with the uk council for psychotherapy (ukcp). his pedagogic and therapeutic interests include writer's block, post-traumatic stress disorder (ptsd) and lgbt mental health and inclusion in higher education. impact of writing workshops on doctoral student wellbeing abstract introduction methodology and methods the context for this research project survey methods focus group interviews results and discussion exploratory survey findings focus group themes theme 1: tangible benefits theme 2: supportive environment empowerment conclusions references author details literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special edition: 2018 aldinhe conference, october 2018 the dip-approach: student-staff partnerships as a vital tool for learning developers and educators to develop academic [and digital] literacies alexandra j.f. patel university of leicester, uk mark van der enden university of leicester, uk patsy clarke oxford brookes university, uk frances deepwell university of leicester, uk bethany z. cox university of leicester, uk phil marston university of leicester, uk steve rooney university of leicester, uk abstract student-staff partnerships can be used to support the development of contextualised digital learning and teaching practices. this can be done by shifting the focus from it skills to addressing a priority in learning and teaching using a digital approach that is appropriate for that discipline. the development of a formal ‘digital innovation partnership’ (dip) scheme at the university of leicester brings students’ digital confidence, perspectives and motivation to enhance learning and teaching. it also recognises the valuable contribution and expertise of student and staff participants. this draws on the academic literacies work of lea and street (1998; 2006) and digital literacies work of sharpe and beetham (2010) to appreciate that staff and students are developing social practices that are situated within a discipline and intertwined with social, cultural and political factors, power and identity. patel et al. the dip-approach journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: october 2018 2 the reasons for the success of the scheme are explored here, with recommendations for how the model can be applied more generally to educational design to support students’ academic literacies development. keywords: student – staff partnership; digital literacies; academic literacies; learning communities. 1. introduction the development of digital literacy is widely perceived to be important for citizenship (for example, the extensive work of the european union digcomp 2.0 https://ec.europa.eu/jrc/en/digcomp) and in higher education in the uk, jisc are at the forefront of considering digital capabilities (https://www.jisc.ac.uk/rd/projects/buildingdigital-capability). the university of leicester has recently committed itself to the creation of a digital campus and underpinned this intention by the creation and implementation of a new digital strategy. the strategy provides a framework for the institution (in all its facets) to raise its digital profile and a number of initiatives have already been deployed in this respect. the notion of a digital campus is not restricted, however, to service initiatives but equally aims to raise the bar in terms of developing and implementing digital practices in the realm of learning and teaching. in order to support staff in raising their digital practice and develop innovative digital approaches to learning and teaching, the digital strategy has developed in collaboration with the leicester learning institute a new project, the digital innovation partnership (abbreviated to dip). dip is a student – staff partnership scheme designed to raise the digital literacy/capability of students and staff through initiating, supporting and implementing the development of locally meaningful digital enhancement projects which address current pedagogical challenges and/or opportunities. dip is designed to support students and staff in collaborating to improve the learning and teaching experience by jointly identifying elements within the curriculum which could benefit from incorporating new or existing digital technologies. dip is unique within the university of leicester because it provides a formal platform and mechanism for students to share their perspectives and work with staff as partners to implement and deliver jointly developed projects. https://ec.europa.eu/jrc/en/digcomp https://www.jisc.ac.uk/rd/projects/building-digital-capability https://www.jisc.ac.uk/rd/projects/building-digital-capability patel et al. the dip-approach journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: october 2018 3 in this paper we will present dip as a recently initiated project and outline its aims, approach and structure in some detail. we will also briefly explore some of the projects currently underway and report on the impressions obtained from the ongoing evaluation of the scheme. finally, this paper aims to draw attention to the role of the learning developer in supporting academic literacies and partnership working across the curriculum amongst both students and staff. the dip scheme is presented as a potential model for learning developers interested in exploring and supporting academic literacies in curricular settings through the medium of student – staff partnership. 1.1 digital literacies as academic literacies the academic literacies approach that we subscribe to has been defined by lea and street (1998, p.159) as the following: [the academic literacies approach]…views student writing and learning as issues at the level of epistemology and identities rather than skill or socialisation. [it] views the institutions in which academic practices take place as constituted in, and as sites of, discourse and power. it sees the literacy demands of the curriculum as involving a variety of communicative practices, including genres, fields and disciplines. from the student point of view a dominant feature of academic literacy practices is the requirement to switch practices between one setting and another, to deploy a repertoire of linguistic practices appropriate to each setting, and to handle the social meanings and identities that each evokes. lea and street (1998; 2006) have argued that educators in higher education need to move beyond an idea of study skills that are generic, isolated and transferable, and instead use an academic literacies approach. this means we must appreciate that we are dealing with contextualised practices that include disciplinary rules and conventions around academic language, accepted methodologies, and how a discipline constructs, understands and communicates knowledge. in addition to this, lea and street (1998; 2006) extend our understanding of ‘ways of doing’ and ‘ways of thinking’ to realise that these practices are situated within social, cultural and political contexts. when helping learners understand, adopt and even challenge these academic ways of thinking and doing, we must encourage them to consider aspects such as social interactions, diversity, power structures and hierarchy, and hidden political agendas, for example. the same can be argued for ‘digital patel et al. the dip-approach journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: october 2018 4 literacy’. walker and patel (2018) suggest that digital literacies are an extension of academic literacies for several reasons – first, much of what we do in higher education is mediated by digital technologies to varying extents – whether it involves using research software to create knowledge; or accessing, analysing, and evaluating digital texts and other sources; or communicating through electronic texts, presentations, or web resources. second, the digital ‘ways of thinking’ and ‘ways of doing’, like academic practices, are above all social practices – again meaning these are contextualised disciplinary practices that are bound up with power and identity (walker and patel, 2018). the arguments of lea and street (1998; 2006) in many ways align well with the work by sharpe and beetham (2010) and bennett (2014) around becoming digital practitioners (for a more detailed discussion see walker and patel, 2018). all suggest that to view skills, whether ‘study skills’ or ‘it skills’, as discrete, generic, isolated and easily transferable from one context to another, is unhelpful. for example, an educator may have the it skills to operate ms powerpoint but that alone does not make them a good teacher – instead, they must make informed, critical choices about how to use powerpoint in a meaningful way for their particular purpose and audience. when considering how people become digitally capable, sharpe and beetham (2010) suggest that learners require or develop the following areas, and these can be linked to the conceptualisation of academic literacies (see figure 1): access – to time, support, resources, hardware, software, networks. we must acknowledge that access to these resources can be dependent on power dynamics, organisational structures, and many other socio-cultural and political factors. for example, it departments may traditionally be gate-keepers to installation and licencing of both hardware and software, without which an individual cannot develop associated ways of working. skills – the ability to operate software/hardware. practices – an understanding of how those skills can be used in meaningful, contextualised ways of working within a discipline or social context. here, digital practices align well with lea and street’s (2006) emphasis on academic literacies being situated social practices. patel et al. the dip-approach journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: october 2018 5 digital attributes and identity – ultimately an individual starts to see ‘digital’ as part of their identity and repertoire, to the extent of becoming post-digital and no longer seeing digital as something strange or ‘other’. it also means being critical about choosing the appropriate tool for a task, whether digital or non-digital. the development of a digital identity speaks to lea and street’s (1998; 2006) notion of developing an academic identity. we can further draw on their work to consider the interplay of different identities, political agendas and discourses around digital – something that has been called for in the development of digital citizenship. brown (2017) argues that if we truly wish to develop ‘digital citizens’ then we should prepare them to challenge and reshape the unjust societies we live in, as opposed to ‘fitting’ in with them. adopting this way of thinking, therefore, requires us to structure our learning development programmes to move beyond study skills and it-skills, and instead develop social practices that are situated within a context and discipline. we propose that student-staff partnerships are one effective approach towards achieving this. figure 1. the relationship between academic literacies (lea and street, 1998; 2006) and digital literacies (sharpe and beetham, 2010; bennett, 2014). reproduced from walker and patel (2018). patel et al. the dip-approach journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: october 2018 6 1.2 role of student-staff partnerships in literacies development as learning developers we are convinced of the benefits of engaging with students as partners and see the creation of opportunities for students to become more actively involved in developing their own teaching and learning environment as a core part of our job. the potential benefits that this can confer upon student participants are tremendously powerful and can range, for example, from increased student engagement with their learning, to the creation of a sense of institutional belonging and a community of practice, to enhanced employability skills (see healey et al., 2014; bovill et al., 2009; bovill and bulley, 2011; evans et al., 2015; freeman et al., 2014; marquis et al., 2016). a core benefit of involving students as partners in learning and teaching is the sharing of different perspectives that this enables. as learners, and as participants in the educational experience, students have potentially a very different perspective from staff. incorporating their perspectives, instead of trying to second guess what students might want or need, proves time and again to be insightful and constructive, and there are various ways in which this can be accomplished. the hea (now also part of advancehe) framework for partnership provides a good starting point for an overview of the areas in learning and teaching in which partnership working can take place (hea, 2015). students can be engaged as partners in, for example, curriculum transformation, co-creation of assessment practices; pedagogical consultancy; peer assisted learning; authentic research experiences; or pedagogical research. one of the primary benefits associated with engaging students in this manner, not mentioned so far but particularly relevant for learning developers, is the increased understanding of academic practices and their own learning that participating students experience. helping to co-create assessment criteria provides students, for example, with much greater insights into what these are and how to go about using them (deeley and bovill, 2017; healey et al., 2014). the same can be said, for example, for students acting as peer assisted learning leaders (for pal benefits see green, 2011). student – staff partnership is, thus, one way in which students can be supported in their learning, and dip provides a model for doing so and one which might be of interest to other learning developers. patel et al. the dip-approach journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: october 2018 7 student-staff partnership working equally may act as a counter to the current consumerist view of higher education. students are encouraged and enabled to position themselves not as passive recipients of their educational experience but instead are invited to actively collaborate with staff in shaping their learning and teaching environment (healey et al., 2014). working with students as partners can create learning communities and facilitate the development of an inspiring and motivating environment for both staff and students. there is evidence from recent research literature (chilvers, 2016) that such an environment may have the potential to make a difference with regards to addressing student transition into highly contextualised and discipline-specific academic literacies. 1.3 dip aims and structure the overall aim of the digital innovation partnership (dip) scheme is to enhance the student learning experience through the development of digital learning and teaching practices. the academic literacies perspective advocates that, instead of a focus on it skills development, we should instead emphasise that these are social practices, situated within a disciplinary context, and bound-up with social, cultural and political issues (lea and jones, 2011). this translates into the following key dip objectives:  the establishment of a supportive and sustainable model of staff and student development of digital literacies in relation to teaching and learning.  involving students as active partners with staff in the design, development and/or delivery of teaching resources, activities and approaches, by drawing on their experience, perspectives and motivation.  sharing and recognising good practice and innovation in digital approaches to teaching and learning, in a way that is meaningful and beneficial to staff and students. inspired initially by the oxford brookes instepp programme (https://www.brookes.ac.uk/instepp/), the dip has a tripartite structure (figure 2) made up of a member of teaching staff motivated to develop a digital teaching practice and requiring support (digital innovator), a student who has confidence, experience or ideas around digital tools and learning in a digital environment (digital associate), and a member of staff who has expertise in implementing change in digital practices in their discipline (digital advocate). the member of teaching staff and student work together on a small-scale, https://www.brookes.ac.uk/instepp/ patel et al. the dip-approach journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: october 2018 8 achievable, project of around 20 hours contribution each. they are supported and guided by the (digitally) more experienced member of staff (the digital advocate) who serves as a mentor to the team. figure 2. the digital innovation partnership is a student-staff collaboration around a small-scale project to implement a meaningful digital learning and teaching practice. projects must be led by pedagogy, impact an entire class or cohort; and be sustainable. the dip scheme aims to recognise the good practice and share it through learning communities. each project must aim to enhance the learning experiences for a cohort of students, be informed by a pedagogic need and rationale as opposed to using technology for its own sake, and be sustainable for implementation in following years, for example, by using or integrating with institutionally supported software and technology. in order to recognise and reward student participation, students accepted on to the scheme receive an award of £200 and an official leicester learning institute certificate. undergraduate students also have their involvement recorded under extracurricular activities on their hear transcript (higher education achievement report). students and patel et al. the dip-approach journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: october 2018 9 staff also receive a digital credential which gives further detail about their projects and links to supporting online evidence. more generally the scheme recognises student and staff participation by providing ample opportunity for projects to showcase their work (e.g. via conference presentation, seminars, website promotion, etc.). 2. methodology 2.1 the digital innovation partnership approach – support, resources, timeline dip was launched in the 2017/18 academic year. funding was provided in the first year as a pilot by the university of leicester digital strategy and it services, with staff resource and expertise provided by the leicester learning institute. we aimed to recruit 30 digital innovation partnership teams, ten in each of the university’s three colleges. staff and students were recruited through a multipronged advertising campaign which involved pushing the initiative out via the usual e-mail channels, fly-posting in departments, liaising with directors of learning and teaching, and pedagogic research groups. students and staff were invited to complete an online competitive application process (via the dip website) in which they outline areas of (digital) interest, which were then used to pair up students and staff from the same disciplines with similar aims. we required all teams to take part in a planning session, although we had to be flexible to accommodate availability. the planning session approach was developed in consultation with leicester learning institute’s (lli) curriculum designers and was effective in focusing participating teams on the educational outcomes of their work, making sure that the key parameters of dip were observed. the planning sessions also provided an opportunity for the dip teams to present their ideas and receive feedback from key stakeholders and experts, and other teams in a ‘dragons den’ format. furthermore, ethical approval was gained for a small range of standard evaluation approaches for teaching in order to facilitate later publication should partnerships so wish. the scheme is flexible in its approach and works around student and staff commitments, whilst following an overall structure. this involves the planning session in which we scope out the projects; individualised follow-up meetings to provide further support and facilitate project progress; project teams are required to evaluate and present their work at the annual leicester learning and teaching conference and to submit a final report (in the https://www.dip.le.ac.uk/ patel et al. the dip-approach journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: october 2018 10 form of a poster). partnerships are invited to attend an evaluation session based on theory of change (for more information see http://www.theoryofchange.org/what-istheory-of-change/; anderson, 2012) to provide concise guidance around educational research approaches. in order to further support the dip teams, lli supporting staff have created a number of resources available for use. a blackboard test site which is intended to host tools, resources, guidance and, importantly, to create a safe space that students and teaching staff can use to develop digital resources without breaching gdpr (general data protection regulation). small sums of funding are also available to project members to cover travel to conferences or purchase of additional equipment. 2.2 evaluation methodology in our educational evaluation of the scheme, we deployed a simplified theory of change approach (resource available at: www.dip.le.ac.uk). we refined our long-term goal of the project as being the enhanced learning experience for students, and that this would be enacted through the following short-term goals, along with their measures/indicators:  successful collaboration between staff and students measured by individual interviews;  development of contextualised digital practices, measured by analysis of project themes and evaluation of pedagogic rationale;  development of digital confidence and identity, measured by individual interviews;  evaluation of individual projects, measured by project poster-reports;  recognition, sharing of good practice and development of learning communities, measured by individual interviews and analysis of how participants have made use of or shared this experience. one hour structured interviews and focus groups were designed using social research principles (cronin, 2008; krueger and casey, 2000; wilkinson, 2008), with audio recordings transcribed and interpreted through thematic analysis (braun and clarke, 2006). partnerships were required to submit a report in poster format and to evaluate the impact of their digital practice on the learning of students. ethical approval was granted by the university of leicester ethics sub-committee for criminology and school of education. http://www.theoryofchange.org/what-is-theory-of-change/ http://www.theoryofchange.org/what-is-theory-of-change/ patel et al. the dip-approach journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: october 2018 11 3. results and discussion twenty-three out of a target of 30 projects have completed, or are on track to be implemented in semester 1 of the current academic year. the projects span departments in the colleges of science and engineering, social sciences, arts and humanities; and life sciences at the university of leicester. 3.1 development of contextualised digital teaching and learning practices true to the aims of the scheme and its intention to foster contextualised development, the interviews reveal that staff and students have gone beyond learning it skills and have indeed developed meaningful, contextualised digital practices that have been led by pedagogy and focused on a specific issue that will enhance the learning experience of students in those subject areas as shown by the project descriptions below. some who were digitally savvy to start with reported having improved in some respects, for example, now knowing more about how to embed digital in teaching and learning. an advocate described an increase in digital confidence and competency beyond already known technologies and having become more familiar with aspects of teaching with technology. a student associate with good digital skills now considers he understands better how to integrate that into a course and was able to expose other students to new technology. a student associate benefited by expanding his knowledge about digital options that helped his own revision and gave him the opportunity to think about how to use more digital ways in his life. the planning session was identified by participants as honing the partnerships to identity interventions that were specific to the disciplinary area, thus aiming at enhancing the student learning experience, instead of being technology-driven. this can be seen in the diversity and educational aim of the projects, grouped by emerging theme: use of virtual reality to help student transition to learning in a new environment: dip teams from the school of business and the school of medicine used virtual reality to create a 360 degree virtual reality (vr) experience of campus and a medical-ward round. both aimed to help students to transition as part of a package around studying at university, and to explore the challenges of learning in a clinical setting. patel et al. the dip-approach journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: october 2018 12 use of interactive tutorials to promote higher level thinking: dip teams from the medical school, biological sciences and chemistry have been using a range of approaches to develop interactive, story-board, decision-based e-tutorials on topics such as the identification of microbiological epidemic; metabolism biochemical pathways, medical diagnosis and clinical reasoning; and safety in chemistry labs, respectively. common to all projects is the emphasis on creating enquiry-based learning experiences where learners are immersed in real-world scenarios. video resource creation to capture and share information: dip teams from biological sciences, physiotherapy and chemistry have been exploring the production and use of video to communicate information about plant identification on field trips, transition to university and building molecular models in a flipped classroom format. collaboration, communication and participation to enhance learning experience: dip teams from biological sciences, engineering and physics have been improving student interaction in and around lectures using a range of approaches such as audiencevoting systems, online discussion forums, and interaction within virtual learning environment. use of learning apps by students: a dip team from physiotherapy engaged students in a review process for learning apps using the virtual learning environment. electronic submission and feedback: dip teams from mathematics evaluated a range of electronic-submission and electronic-marking approaches for mathematical solutions. teams from criminology trialled audio-feedback within the virtual learning environment and asynchronous audio discussions around assignments. 3.2 importance of student-staff partnerships ‘a huge level of respect between all the partners’ (advocate) the evaluative interviews conducted have provided some insights into how the participants experienced working in partnership. the relationships between partners were diverse, with some student associates being given a brief and told to ‘get on with it’, and in others all partners sharing in the ideas, decision-making and implementation. however, even where patel et al. the dip-approach journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: october 2018 13 main decisions were taken by the staff member as an advocate or innovator, the student associate had an active and significant role in checking whether the process and development was suitable and engaging for students and giving feedback. several student associates commented that they valued the opportunity to work on the projects, for the opportunity to ‘make a difference’, learn new skills, or work with staff in a different way: [it was]…valuable to encounter lecturers who i saw as authority figures in a more equal and collaborative way. (student associate) …the most redeeming moment was when we were in the poster session, … when we were talking to other people and when she said, ‘oh she did most of the work’, so i liked it that my work was recognised, not actually when i received 50 pounds before. (student associate) student associates’ input was also valued by innovators in the projects for several reasons. first, they provided different views and student perspectives on learning, making materials more comprehensive in terms of language and were able to provide information on other departments’ tools through friendship networks. one innovator appreciated how a student associate led her to new digital competencies, as well as helping to broaden out the project goals to be more generalisable than originally envisaged: just to have another set of eyes on the idea and a younger set of eyes that are much more familiar with these systems and also thinking in a different perspective to perhaps from you. but also having the link in through her to all the other students. (innovator) just switching the relationship and allowing them to be helping and supporting me, rather than the other way around, and having a slightly different relationship with the student is good. and i valued the knowledge about the digital world coming through as well. but from this i learnt how to take a step back and not be the teacher for a bit, and actually let them learn and guide their learning. (innovator) patel et al. the dip-approach journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: october 2018 14 second, student associates, due to the selection process, had more familiarity with technology and provided digital skills. third and last, student involvement ‘enhanced the project’. most innovators commented on the inspiring ideas and different perspectives that students brought with them, and how it led to gathering other view points from a larger number of students. one innovator went as far as suggesting that ‘no digital resource should be designed without student involvement’. it is also acknowledged that some partnerships, however, were less successful due to factors such as concurrent industrial action in the spring of 2018; prioritisation of exams or departmental commitments over this project; differing interests of staff members and students, and lack of agency of staff-member or student to implement the idea within their own setting. 3.3 importance of recognition, sharing good practice and learning communities creating opportunities for staff and students to share their good practice is reported as one of the most successful aspects to the scheme. during the evaluative interviews, several innovators and advocates spoke of the value of opportunities to showcase their work, to present posters, participate in conferences and learning and teaching events, and produce publications, both internally and externally to the university. for example, two teams from chemistry presented separately at the variety in chemistry education / physics higher education conference 2018, and a team from the school of medicine presented at the swansea university vr/ar conference 2018. we intend to work with dip ‘alumni’ to develop a learning community and further develop them as ‘experts’ in a particular digital teaching practice, and inspire others to consider digital approaches within their teaching. some partners were keen to have more opportunities to present their work, particularly at a departmental level. staff have reported using this experience as evidence of continuing professional development as originally intended, providing substance for applications for fellowship or senior fellowship of the higher education academy; university distinguished fellowship award; for job applications; for personal development discussions; and for their cv for promotion. the scheme itself, and key individuals in the team, have received recognition through a university award of discovering excellence. patel et al. the dip-approach journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: october 2018 15 4. conclusion in conclusion, the scheme and the approach to digital literacies development that it represents, have led to significant enhancements to current practices. the scheme provides another mechanism that learning developers, in partnership with other educational colleagues, can use to support the development of meaningful and contextualised digital learning and teaching practices. the highlight features of the dip that can be transferred to other contexts and other topics are:  the use of group planning sessions that focus on educational design and pedagogy within a disciplinary context instead of being led by technology.  student-staff partnerships that, in addition to bringing a critical student perspective on learning in a digital environment, also encourage the consideration of broader issues, ‘enhance’ the project, and bring digital confidence and skills.  opportunities for partnerships to share their work with colleagues supports the development of learning communities that can inspire members and provide peer support and expertise.  recognition of good practice through opportunities to present and publish, nominations for awards, and a certification. our open educational access resources are available on webpages: www.dip.le.ac.uk acknowledgements we would like to thank the dip teams who worked on projects within this scheme and took part in its evaluation – it has been an inspiring journey for all of us. more information about them and their projects can be found at www.dip.le.ac.uk. http://www.dip.le.ac.uk/ http://www.dip.le.ac.uk/ patel et al. the dip-approach journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: october 2018 16 references anderson, a.a. (2012) the community builder’s approach to theory of change: a practical guide to theory development. available at: http://www.mspguide.org/sites/default/files/resource/aspen_institute__the_community_builders_guide_to_theory_of_change.pdf (accessed: 7 october 2018). bennett, l. (2014) ‘learning from the early adopters: developing the digital practitioner’, research in learning technology, 22, pp. 1-13 [online]. available at: https://doi.org/10.3402/rlt.v22.21453 (accessed: 7 october 2018). bovill, c., morss, k. and bulley, c. (2009) ‘should students participate in curriculum design? discussion arising from a first year curriculum design project and a literature review’, pedagogic research in maximizing education, 3(2), pp. 17-26. bovill, c. and bulley, c.j. (2011) ‘a model of active student participation in curriculum design: exploring desirability and possibility’, in rust, c. (ed.) improving student learning (18). global theories and local practices: institutional, disciplinary and cultural variations. oxford: the oxford centre for staff and learning development, pp176188. braun, v. and clarke, v. (2006) ‘using thematic analysis in psychology’, qualitative research in psychology, 3(2), pp. 77-101. brown, m. (may, 2017) exploring the underbelly of digital literacies. oeb insights: midsummit, opinions. available at: https://oeb-insights.com/exploring-theunderbelly-of-digital-literacies/ (accessed: 7 october 2018). chilvers, l. (2016) ‘communities of practice for international students: an exploration of the role of pass in supporting transition and learning in higher education’, journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: academic peer learning (part 2), april, pp. 1-25. http://www.mspguide.org/sites/default/files/resource/aspen_institute_-_the_community_builders_guide_to_theory_of_change.pdf http://www.mspguide.org/sites/default/files/resource/aspen_institute_-_the_community_builders_guide_to_theory_of_change.pdf https://doi.org/10.3402/rlt.v22.21453 https://oeb-insights.com/exploring-the-underbelly-of-digital-literacies/ https://oeb-insights.com/exploring-the-underbelly-of-digital-literacies/ patel et al. the dip-approach journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: october 2018 17 cronin, a. (2008) ‘focus groups’, in gilbert, n. (ed.) researching social life. 3rd edn. london: sage, pp. 226-244. deeley, s.j. and bovill, c. (2017) ‘staff student partnership in assessment: enhancing assessment literacy through democratic practices’, assessment & evaluation in higher education, 42(3), pp. 463-477. evans, c., muijs, d. and tomlinson, m. (2015) engaged student learning: high-impact strategies to enhance student achievement. york: he academy. freeman, f., millard, l., brand, s. and chapman, p. (2014) ‘student academic partners: student employment for collaborative learning and teaching development, innovations in education and teaching international, 51(3), pp. 233-243. green, p.a (2011) literature review of peer assisted learning (pal). national he stem. healey, m., flint, a. and harrington, k. (2014) engagement through partnership: students as partners in learning and teaching in higher education. york: higher education academy. higher education academy (2015) framework for student engagement through partnership. york: he academy. krueger, r. and casey, m.a. (2000) focus groups: a practical guide for applied research. 3rd edn. london: sage. lea, m. and jones, s. (2011) ‘digital literacies in higher education: exploring textual and technological practice’, studies in higher education, 36(4), pp. 377-393. lea, m. and street, b. (1998) ‘student writing in higher education: an academic literacies approach’, studies in higher education, 23(2), pp. 157-172 [online]. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079812331380364 (accessed: 7 october 2018). https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079812331380364 patel et al. the dip-approach journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: october 2018 18 lea, m. and street, b. (2006) ‘the ‘academic literacies’ model: theory and applications’, theory into practice, 45(4), pp. 346-351 [online]. available at: https://doi.org/10.1207/s15430421tip4504_11 (accessed: 7 october 2018). marquis, e., puri, v., wan, s., ahmad, a., goff, l., knorr, k., vassileva, i. and woo, j. (2016) ‘navigating the threshold of student-staff partnerships: a case study from an ontario teaching and learning institute’, the international journal for academic development, 21(1), pp. 4-15. sharpe, r. and beetham, h. (2010) ‘understanding students' uses of technology for learning: towards creative appropriation’, in sharpe, r.b., beetham, h. and de freitas, s. (eds.) rethinking learning for a digital age: how learners are shaping their own experiences. london, england and new york, ny, routledge, pp. 85-99. walker, s. and patel, a.j.f. (2018) ‘more than skills: what can approaches to digital literacies learn from academic literacies?’, journal of learning and teaching in higher education, 1(1), pp. 93-100 [online]. available at: https://www108.lamp.le.ac.uk/ojs1/index.php/jlthe/article/view/856/2535 (accessed: 7 october 2018). wilkinson, s. (2008) ‘focus groups’, in smith, j.a. (ed.) qualitative psychology: a practical guide to research methods. london: sage, pp. 186-206. author details dr alexandra patel combines a learning development perspective with her role as an educational developer at leicester learning institute, university of leicester. she is particularly interested in student-staff partnerships, academic and digital literacies, and applying these ideas to help staff and students develop in ways that are personally meaningful. dr mark van der enden is the project officer student – staff partnerships at the leicester learning institute at the university of leicester. he is particularly interested in and passionate about collaborating with students (as genuine partners) in developing the https://doi.org/10.1207/s15430421tip4504_11 https://www108.lamp.le.ac.uk/ojs1/index.php/jlthe/article/view/856/2535 patel et al. the dip-approach journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: october 2018 19 learning and teaching environment, and creating institutional learning communities in which students and staff are empowered and enabled to benefit from each other’s expertise and perspectives. mark is involved in various ‘students as partners’ initiatives at the university of leicester and additionally supports the learning development team in supporting student learning and academic literacies development. patsy clarke spent four years as an educational developer in the oxford centre for staff and learning development at oxford brookes university, where she supported a number of research projects including an appreciative inquiry for the jisc-funded users and innovation research programme. since retirement, patsy works as a certified platinum nvivo trainer and independent qualitative researcher in diverse fields including international development, hiv-aids, technology in education, professional development and creative methodologies. dr frances deepwell is director of the leicester learning institute at the university of leicester. her main interests lie in the areas of sustainable educational innovation and its evaluation, and how this contributes to continuing professional development in learning and teaching beyond initial training. she is principal fellow of the higher education academy and senior fellow of the staff and educational development association, and founding editor of the online journal of learning and teaching in higher education. bethany cox is a digital strategy intern, part of the it services department at the university of leicester. she is currently working with the leicester learning institute and library, supporting the implementation of two innovative projects as part of the development of the university’s digital campus. phil marston is an educational development adviser currently specialising in assessment and feedback. he has a particular interest in collaborative and peer supported learning. phil also has extensive experience as a technology-enhanced learning adviser, specialising in innovative uses of mobile technologies, game-based learning and contemplative pedagogy. steve rooney is head of learning development at the university of leicester (uk). his particular focus is on working with academics and students to devise integrated, curriculum-level support for the development of academic literacies. journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 15: november 2019 associations in collaboration: how the first baleap and aldinhe joint one-day conference came about steve briggs university of bedfordshire, uk mick kavanagh university of essex, uk abstract in this article, we outline the thinking leading up to a collaborative event, shared by two professional associations. the event is briefly described, but our main aim here is to encourage colleagues not only to attend such gatherings, but also to seriously consider holding a similar event. keywords: collaboration; aldinhe; baleap; academic literacies. context for collaboration historically, aldinhe (the association for learning development in higher education) members had limited opportunities, beyond an annual conference, to network and share best practice. to start to address this, aldinhe launched a regional symposium scheme in 2014 whereby member universities were encouraged to arrange and host themed events where practitioners could meet and share ideas/challenges. events were supported by aldinhe financially and in terms of planning logistics. there was an overwhelmingly positive response to regional symposia and since launching, around twenty regional events have taken place, attended by circa 400 delegates. the aldinhe steering group agreed in 2016 to explore expanding the regional symposium remit to include co-hosting events with other higher education associations. this was seen as potentially a necessary development given the growing national trends around super converged services whereby learning development professionals briggs and kavanagh associations in collaboration: how the first baleap and aldinhe joint one-day conference came about journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 2 work alongside other student development staff, such as english for academic purposes (eap) tutors, educational developers and librarians. at the 2017 aldinhe conference, a session was held to explore cross-association synergies and the possibility for future collaborations between aldinhe and other educational associations. invitations to attend were accepted by representatives from the global forum for english for academic purposes professionals (baleap)1, the staff and education development association (seda)2, the sigma network3 and the chartered institute of library and information professionals (cilip)4 (buckley et al. 2017). this session indicated there was a strong community consensus that there was a need for cross-association collaborations in order to meet changing needs of members. as such, it was agreed that there would be real benefits to arranging crossassociation events. the first collaboration – academic literacies and eap: same or different? university of essex, 24 november, 2018 the first aldinhe cross-association event was run in partnership with baleap in november 2018 at the university of essex. it was decided that academic literacies (lea and street, 1998) would be both a relevant and familiar topic to both eap tutors and learning developers and provide a good foundation for collaborative discussions. accordingly, the theme of the event suggested that participants might explore areas of contrast and overlap in our remits, roles, and practices. the event uptake was excellent and over 100 delegates attended. the full conference programme and a selection of presentation recordings is available at: https://www.baleap.org/event/academicliteracies. 1 https://www.baleap.org/ 2 https://www.seda.ac.uk/ 3 http://www.sigma-network.ac.uk/ 4 https://www.cilip.org.uk/ https://www.baleap.org/event/academic-literacies https://www.baleap.org/event/academic-literacies https://www.baleap.org/ https://www.seda.ac.uk/ http://www.sigma-network.ac.uk/ https://www.cilip.org.uk/ briggs and kavanagh associations in collaboration: how the first baleap and aldinhe joint one-day conference came about journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 3 it was intended that the day should provide as much opportunity as possible for crossassociation networking and sharing of ideas so a keynote was not arranged. rather, the day comprised many stimulating and constructive workshops, discussions and presentations delivered by attendees. these covered topics including academic skills, oracy, online learning and collaborative practice. the day closed with a panel discussion (comprising liz austin, steve briggs, tracey costley, and maxine gilway) which pulled together the day’s themes. a number of practice-related questions emerged throughout the day which, whilst discussed at length, could not be conclusively answered. these included:  is learning development an academic literacy?  how and when do eap and learning development overlap?  what is unique about the professional identities/roles of learning developers and eap tutors? responses to such questions, which provide a thought-provoking opportunity for practitioners to reflect on their own practice/professional status and offer a rich context for future discussions between aldinhe and baleap members, are inevitably varied and individualised. the day was not intended to produce definitive answers, but to prompt discussion and debate. feedback from attendees delegate feedback indicated that the day provided a great opportunity to network and opportunities to reflect on similarities and differences between the eap and learning development fields: ‘it was good to talk to both eap and ld staff about approaches in different institutions.’ briggs and kavanagh associations in collaboration: how the first baleap and aldinhe joint one-day conference came about journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 4 ‘i learned a great deal about practices in other institutions and also about the relationships that are being established or are emerging between eap departments and academic development units.’ ‘primarily i took away the feeling that others working in very different roles are also interested in understanding our work holistically and finding common ground.’ ‘to be quite honest i learnt something from every sessions i attended.’ there was a real feeling that the collaboration between the two associations had provided a valuable space within which to explore the theme and become more familiar with colleagues from each group. paving the way for future collaborations the aldinhe and baleap event has already led to future cross-association collaboration. most notably it provided the catalyst for producing this special academic literacies issue of the journal of learning development in higher education. in addition to bringing together a host of excellent articles from members of the baleap and aldinhe communities, the journal production process has provided opportunities for members of aldinhe and baleap to work collaboratively as guest editors. the benefits of collaborating with baleap has also prompted aldinhe to embark on a number of other cross-association collaborations. for example:  members of scotela (scottish association for learning development professionals) remotely attended an aldinhe recognition scheme writing retreat in may 2019.  carina buckley (aldinhe co-chair) delivered a keynote at the 2019 seda conference. briggs and kavanagh associations in collaboration: how the first baleap and aldinhe joint one-day conference came about journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 5  aldinhe and the sigma network co-ran a regional symposium in july 2019 focused around the theme of ‘differentiation’ (attended by 30 practitioners from 18 different institutions). many university eap and learning development teams are already in the age of crossteam collaboration and it is certain that others will follow. it is therefore becoming increasingly important that practitioners are familiar with cross-disciplinary issues and appreciate nuances between different roles. collaborations between professional associations provide a perfect opportunity to start to build such bridges. given the success of the essex event, it is certain that more collaborative events between aldinhe, baleap and other educational associations are required and should be arranged. references buckley, c., briggs, s., members of the aldinhe steering group and external representatives. (2017) ‘strategic collaborations: how aldinhe should work with other professional associations to strengthen the case for learning development’, aldinhe 2017: the learning development conference, university of hull, hull 10-12 april. lea, m. r. and street, b. v. (1998). ‘student writing in higher education: an academic literacies approach’. studies in higher education, 23(2), pp. 157-172. author details steve briggs is co-chair of the association for learning development in higher education and head of professional and academic development at the university of bedfordshire. mick kavanagh is a senior tutor in english for academic purposes and academic study skills at the university of essex talent development centre. associations in collaboration: how the first baleap and aldinhe joint one-day conference came about abstract context for collaboration the first collaboration – academic literacies and eap: same or different? university of essex, 24 november, 2018 feedback from attendees paving the way for future collaborations references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 18: october 2020 ________________________________________________________________________ a learning development-faculty collaborative exploration of postgraduate research student mental health in a uk university russell delderfield university of bradford kirsten riches-suman university of bradford mathias ndoma-egba university of bradford james boyne university of huddersfield abstract mental ill-health is an escalating problem in higher education. not only does this impact students’ ability to learn, it can lead to poor completion, with learners opting to withdraw from studies, even if attainment has been satisfactory. the aim of this study was to gain insight about perceptions of poor mental health from postgraduate research students in a diverse uk university and canvas opinion regarding how the university could improve this. a short, pragmatic survey with basic quantitative and qualitative responses was distributed. this was analysed by a team comprising the learning developer responsible for postgraduate researcher learning development, academics and a doctoral student. the study found that poor mental health was evident, with over three quarters of respondents reporting some experience of mental ill-health. we identified five areas in need of attention: university systems, supervisor training, well-being monitoring, building networks, and finance. sources of university-based stress were finance, administrative support, and an environment where a perception that poor mental health was an expectation rather than a problem was experienced. students preferred to access support outside the academic environment. this is the first study of its kind at a diverse, plateglass uk university, to consider research student mental ill-health, with a staff-student team working with data, and the learning developer spear-heading changes across delderfield et al. a learning development-faculty collaborative exploration of postgraduate research student mental health in a uk university journal of learning development in higher education, issue 18: october 2020 2 postgraduate research. these findings have already influenced university strategy, staff training, and induction practices. the synthesis of the five areas could be used to visualise where further work is needed to improve mental health in these learners. keywords: postgraduate research students; pgr; doctoral learning; mental health; learning development and supervision; researcher development framework. introduction the mental health of students in higher education (he) has an increasingly elevated profile. what began as a tacit acknowledgement that students experience poor mental health has grown into an area of openly debated concern (neves and hillman, 2017). academics with pastoral responsibilities are concerned at what they perceive to be a significant increase in the number of tutees experiencing mental health issues (hughes et al., 2018). the most recent summary of student experiences of mental ill-health in 2017 (collating over 14,000 responses in the uk) found that positive mental health measures have showed a year-on-year decline since 2007, with students reporting lower levels of mental health than the national population using the uk’s office for national statistics data as comparator (neves and hillman, 2017). it is also known that those students with the greatest need (significant distress or particularly poor mental health) are the least likely to seek help or support (gorczynski et al., 2017). furthermore, a national initiative for student mental health support, the step change framework (universities uk, 2017) reports an increase in suicide among students. these serious concerns are not unique to the uk, with studies across 21 countries analysing and evidencing mental health issues, suicidal thoughts and behaviours (mascaskill, 2012; evans et al., 2018; mortier et al., 2018). there is a starker message about mental health issues when specifically focussing on postgraduate researchers (pgr). both science and nature have recently reflected on pgr mental health. the issues already outlined above have been deemed so severe that terms such as ‘crisis’ or the effects of ‘indentured servitude’ are employed (pain, 2018; editorial, 2018). the supervisory relationship is a key part of these experiences (pole et al., 1997; solem et al., 2011). in this context, supervision is configured as a complex learning and teaching relationship. where supervision is deemed to be effective, students may flourish and overcome personal and professional adversity. where supervision is delderfield et al. a learning development-faculty collaborative exploration of postgraduate research student mental health in a uk university journal of learning development in higher education, issue 18: october 2020 3 poor, a student can feel the effects of a mental health condition more acutely or begin to develop a previously unexperienced condition (pain, 2018; editorial, 2018). supervisors may struggle to appreciate the need for a clear work-life balance, as they too may be grappling with issues around stress and poor mental health caused by routine overworking (kinman, 2008; sang et al., 2015; guthrie et al., 2017), perhaps a severe example of which would be the suicide of a cardiff university academic, reported to be a ‘wake-up call’ to all in academia (pells, 2018). students who undertake research degrees reportedly experience additional challenges that are not found when undertaking taught courses, including isolation, financial difficulties, impostor syndrome and an increasingly difficult employment landscape (levecque et al., 2017). the mental health of these students may be indicative of the future state of a nation’s ability to lead and deliver on much-needed research advancements. recent work has highlighted that the persistent subjugation of the mental and physical well-being of students, in favour of cerebral attainment and output, has personal consequences. we are losing sight of a key element of doctoral learning: the ‘production of new . . . selves’ (hopwood and paulson, 2012, p.668), as we obsess over the production of a new thesis, instead. a landmark uk report about pgr mental health was recently published (metcalfe et al., 2018). data reported suggest an escalation – in 2014, only 0.9% of students declared a mental health issue in official returns. yet, by 2017 the postgraduate research experience survey (pres), a biennial survey conducted across pgr in he, found that 3.3% of respondents declared a mental health condition. metcalfe et al. (2018) make a compelling case for the incidence of mental health problems found in these learners but contrast this with the dearth of site-specific studies that investigate this phenomenon. doctoral learning is allegedly stressful to undertake, denoted by its ‘trauma and neglect’ (john and denicolo, 2013, p.41), yet there can be benefits of this through the building and nurturing of personal resources and resilience, and the use of stress or anxiety as intrinsic motivators to effect progress and change. however, when mental health is not prioritised by departments and services, and ‘working hard above all else’ is the default learning culture (metcalfe et al., 2018, p.22), this can lead to students feeling ashamed to admit difficulties to supervisory teams when problems arise. this is compounded by perceptions delderfield et al. a learning development-faculty collaborative exploration of postgraduate research student mental health in a uk university journal of learning development in higher education, issue 18: october 2020 4 that higher education institutions (heis) are reluctant to address complex or problematic supervisory relationships (metcalfe et al., 2018). sources of strain for these learners include financial issues. funding often covers project costs but grants (or ‘stipends’) can average out at lower than the minimum wage. money for social activities that could have a restorative effect on mental health through self-care and connection is considered sparse (metcalfe et al., 2018). there is also an expectation that undertaking a phd means a poor work-life balance, and that working long hours is part of the experience. students reported that supervisors appeared to think that the weekend was for further study. some students felt they were being ‘exploited’ through overwork due to graduate teaching responsibilities and that they had little control over this. finally, being confident about future career possibilities was linked with improved mental health (cowling, 2017; metcalfe et al., 2018). it is important to be clear from the outset that there are two key concepts this paper relies upon. the first is that we all have mental health, and the quality of our mental health can ‘ebb and flow’, changing over time due to various factors (mental health foundation, 2018). these factors may be socio-economic, cultural, environmental or physical in nature (world health organization, who, 2014). when referring to self-reported mental ill-health we are drawing on who’s (2014) definitions, which suggest that the way people think, feel, and behave can be influenced for the worse by undiagnosed experiences of stress, anxiety or depression, as well as diagnosed conditions. there are some tensions in the use of terminology; for example, services and activities designed to improve mental health are often referred to as ‘well-being’ services in our institution and form part of a larger offer around physical health, as well as creating communities. we are mindful of dhillon’s (2018) assertions about the broad, unquestioning uptake of the concept of well-being and the dangers that this entails, namely that students should adapt to the status quo, but there can be little doubt the term currently pervades. we do not suggest that this term can be synonymously substituted for the concept of mental health, and efforts are made to apply consistency, but we recognise students’ identification of differing terminology based on their experience of named services and resources in our hei, and this is reflected in our synthesis below. delderfield et al. a learning development-faculty collaborative exploration of postgraduate research student mental health in a uk university journal of learning development in higher education, issue 18: october 2020 5 the second concept upon which our collaborative work in this study has relied is that of learning development (ld). this paper frames pgr as students (the terms learners and students are used interchangeably), with learning development being the overarching field that has much to offer in terms of how the personal development of our students is underpinned, implemented, and supported across an institution. ld itself encompasses the pedagogical, psycho-social and systemic aspects of higher education at all levels, with a clear ethos of ‘creating a sense of belonging’ for all (stapleford, 2019, p.2). it is also the vocation of one of our authors, who has been an institutional member of the association for learning development in higher education since membership was introduced (further detail about the ld role in our institution is offered below in the context section). all five of the ld values as available via the website and in stapleford (2019, p.3) are in evidence here through: • our work with a pgr student in developing and writing up the study and our engagement with our pgr student body (value 1). • our collaboration across roles, disciplines and institutional structures (value 2). • sharing our practice, its insights and limitations for the benefit of others (value 3). • the experience leading to reflection and development between scientists (staff and student) and the learning developer, as we learn about our own students, our systems and practices, and even our writing and reporting conventions (value 4). • our commitment to using scholarship to inform and question ld and its place in doctoral education (value 5). our working together illuminated the advantages of such a collaboration. there is a ‘twoway sharing of knowledge and expertise’ between the learning developer and the faculty subject-specialists (cairns et al., 2018, p.4), which is used to benefit the student experience – our shared goal. thus, ld is suitable for our study’s aims. this is important for what follows in the context of this study and the role of the learning developer at our university. research aims a conclusion from a review of doctoral students’ experience (john and denicolo, 2013) was that there is a dearth of data from within specific institutions. our aim was to discover delderfield et al. a learning development-faculty collaborative exploration of postgraduate research student mental health in a uk university journal of learning development in higher education, issue 18: october 2020 6 whether students identified with mental health issues, and, more significantly for our immediate practices as learning developers and academics, where they turn for support. to our knowledge, this is the first preliminary survey study of its kind in a northern-uk institution. it represents an innovative, collaborative effort between the learning developer in charge of pgr development, faculty academics, and a student in making sense of pgr mental health. whilst this collaboration is not suggested as an aim of our study, it was certainly a driver in our working together to produce this work. finally, whilst it draws on a modest convenience sample, it provides site-specific data in a field that is deemed to be of high import but is aetiolated by lack of research-derived examples. this is an important contribution because recent reports regarding student mental health rarely contextualise these issues to an immediate he environment, therefore, it is assumed rather than evidenced, that similar issues occur across institutions (see ampaw and jaeger, 2012, for work carried out on a single institution in the us). such studies are rare in the uk. our study’s original contribution aims to address this sparsity of data by offering insights drawn from one local population of pgr students in a uk hei. the context the university of bradford is a uk plate-glass university situated in west yorkshire. in the 2017-18 academic year, total enrolled numbers were 8,860 students, with 10% of our student body declaring a disability, including mental health conditions (under uk law these conditions form part of the protected characteristic of ‘disability’). the pgr community is relatively small, with only 320 of these students studying a research degree leading to a doctoral award (such as a phd or equivalent) at the time of our study. the institution has a diverse profile – whilst gender is relatively balanced, over 50% of our pgr are mature students and over 65% are international. students are allocated a minimum of two research supervisors. the university makes a range of resources and services available to pgr students. there are library, careers, counselling, disability (including mental health) and language teams. faculty colleagues in this collaboration have reflected upon on how quickly subject specialists may become siloed within institutional structures and strictures that are perpetuated within their academic communities in terms of the accepted role of a research academic. the learning developer experiences fewer constraints. indeed, given previous delderfield et al. a learning development-faculty collaborative exploration of postgraduate research student mental health in a uk university journal of learning development in higher education, issue 18: october 2020 7 (and continuing?) debate about ld operating within a deficit model (johnson, 2018), at bradford, the opposite may be said to be the case. ld is agile, connected and ‘liberated’ from the typical structures used to organise academic teams and programmes. ld is at the forefront of pgr support, as a dedicated senior learning developer (one of the authors) not only offers one-to-one and group development, but also manages the postgraduate researcher framework. this framework covers all aspects of doctoral student experience, bringing together faculties and support services in providing a holistic development and support programme. this programme of events ranges from formal research training to peer-support events, including our ‘pgr connect’ project which is establishing systems for pgr mental health and well-being support. the framework encompasses the entire student lifecycle, including pgr induction through to doctorate completion, including scholarly writing skills and viva skills. he is involved in pres outcomes action-planning across the institution and works actively with researchers and supervisors on issues arising around research culture, belonging, and research supervision. the learning developer delivers training and support to research supervisors as part of the university’s commitment to improving pgr supervision. in this way, the learning developer’s role is simultaneously academic and non-academic, and moves between students, research supervisors, and professionals within support services. whitchurch (2013) has described this lack of fixed positionality as a valuable benefit, a third space from which to work. the learning developer offers a ‘service’ that is founded upon the values above and is academically grounded. he holds a doctorate in his own field, thus having personal experience of the doctoral journey, and trains both staff and students in the craft of research and researcher identity. he also works at a senior level with key stakeholders, including support service managers, to inform and mould the future of the pgr provision at our hei. occupying a space that cannot be reduced to one of two binary positions (academic or non-academic), the learning developer can effect change for students across disciplines and practices, and can work from an authentic place, being able to help-without-constraint (whitchurch, 2013) wherever he is able to do so, in a person-centred way (delderfield and mchattie, 2018). most uk heis are reimagining their pgr experience, as the re-affirmation of the researcher development concordat (vitae, 2020a), requires research degrees to offer more than training in becoming a subject expert. in other words, the aforementioned obsession with thesisoutput is giving way to the development of a student’s entire self as a high-level, reflective, delderfield et al. a learning development-faculty collaborative exploration of postgraduate research student mental health in a uk university journal of learning development in higher education, issue 18: october 2020 8 adaptable, and adept problem-solver and thinker. the doctoral experience is becoming one of the changes to the selfhood of the researcher (hopwood and paulson, 2012), as much as developing insights into the researched. the learning developer is ideally situated to support individuals to develop, flourish and cope with the demands of doctoral life, as well as producing quality research. ld professionals help researchers to reflect and work on building skills to improve belonging and relationships with their learning communities (parkes, 2018). as such, the findings presented below are being used to inform the continuous improvement of the pgr framework and the learning developer’s work with faculty research leads. pertinent to what follows below, we have recently been trialling a mentor system in one of our faculties, where learners are allocated an additional academic, unrelated to their project, with whom they can have regular contact to seek support for issues outside of their specific research, for example, concerns regarding supervision or personal strategies for coping with high-level study. this is currently a trial and may be implemented across the university by the learning developer working with our academics leading pgr in each faculty. methods there has been work conducted to design an instrument that can evaluate the well-being of students from a mental health perspective (juniper et al., 2012); given our topic, it is notable that no further newly-developed instruments have been published that aim to engage with pgr mental health. considering this, and for our purposes, we needed something smaller in scale and easier to administer within a small community. a short, anonymous survey was composed and received ethical approval. it was distributed to all actively enrolled students on 5th june and closed on 11th june 2018, after which data was collated, analysed and discussed at the university’s annual internal conference that same month. we wish to make it clear that the survey was opportunistic and simplistic, in a straw pollstyle, using an opening in the student survey calendar. questions were iteratively generated through collegiate discussions and framed by an assumption that poor mental health is prevalent in heis. the survey comprised five questions (figure 1). the free-form delderfield et al. a learning development-faculty collaborative exploration of postgraduate research student mental health in a uk university journal of learning development in higher education, issue 18: october 2020 9 responses to the final question gave anonymous quotes; selected ones of which are presented in the results and discussion to illustrate proposed areas of improvement. responses to the questions were analysed by frequency count with some iterative qualitative analysis undertaken on the limited experiential comments offered by respondents. said analysis consisted of an adaptation of braun and clarke’s (2006) thematic analysis to explore trends and patterns in the personal comments and reflections. the resultant synthesis identified the main areas of import to our students (figure 3) and the relationships between these. researchers analysed in parallel, then explored consensus for shared interpretations. fine-grained detail influencing our method’s steps is available but is beyond the scope of this paper (braun and clarke, 2006; maguire and delahunt, 2017). delderfield et al. a learning development-faculty collaborative exploration of postgraduate research student mental health in a uk university journal of learning development in higher education, issue 18: october 2020 10 figure 1. postgraduate researcher mental health. structure of the short survey that was distributed to all pgr at the university of bradford in june 2018. delderfield et al. a learning development-faculty collaborative exploration of postgraduate research student mental health in a uk university journal of learning development in higher education, issue 18: october 2020 11 results response rate of the 320 pgr students invited to take the survey, 54 responded (16.9%). this could not be broken down further by faculty, gender or domestic/international status as this demographic data was not collected. self-reported examples of poor mental health only 9.3% of respondents reported no experiences of mental distress. difficulty sleeping was the most prevalent problem (75.9%) closely followed by stress that interferes with life outside the university (72.2%) and anxiety (66.7%). depression was the lowest reported example but was still applicable to 42.6% of students (figure 2a). figure 2. features of poor mental health in pgr. (a) survey respondents were asked to self-report whether they had experienced any features of poor mental wellbeing throughout their studies. (b) the number of students reporting from 0 to 4 experiences of poor mental well-being. students were able to select multiple options. of the 49 students who reported problems with mental health, 6 selected only one option (with no single example standing out as prevalent), 12 selected two, 13 selected three and 18 had all four (figure 2b), suggesting that students who did self-report tended towards more complex mental health issues. it is important to place this result in the context of response bias, as it may be likely that those who chose to respond already had experience of poor mental health, whereas those without may not have replied to our survey. delderfield et al. a learning development-faculty collaborative exploration of postgraduate research student mental health in a uk university journal of learning development in higher education, issue 18: october 2020 12 sources of support in times of psychological stress sources of support were segregated into those within the university and those outside. the most obvious source of support would be the supervisor; however, only 33.3% of students selected this. a similar proportion (31.5%) would access student services, and only 14.8% would approach their mentor. the biggest source of internal support were friends within their postgraduate peer-group; however, this still only accounted for 37.0% of respondents. students were much more likely to seek help outside the academic environment, with 51.9% indicating they would approach their family, and 61.1% their friends outside of university. however, of all respondents, 9.3% would not approach any of the aforementioned sources of support if they were experiencing mental distress. whilst only a third of students selected the option that they would approach their supervisor, a significantly larger number (53.6%) did feel that their supervisor would be fully supportive. only 5.6% would rather approach their mentor. once again, however, this needs to be placed in context: our mentor scheme is new and in trial, with not all pgr students automatically receiving access to a mentor. this still left a substantial proportion of students (40.8%) who would not speak to their supervisor, with the majority perceiving this would impact negatively on their progress (35.2%). only 5.6% of students stated that their supervisor would be unsupportive. as previously stated, the university has multiple services including the counselling service and training courses on personal and professional development and resilience; however, only 51.9% were aware that the university had dedicated services for pgr. clearly, we take from this that the learning developer needs to work even closer with faculty research leads and supervisors to improve awareness of the tailored support experience available. suggestions for university provision of support students were given free-form space to suggest areas in which the university could improve their mental health. the highlighted university-based causes of stress and possible solutions could be broadly split into 5 areas – university systems (e.g. pgr administration and facilities), supervisor training, well-being monitoring (e.g. regular contact to ascertain overall mental health needs), building networks, and finance. of these, delderfield et al. a learning development-faculty collaborative exploration of postgraduate research student mental health in a uk university journal of learning development in higher education, issue 18: october 2020 13 the first three received the highest volume of comment, and had substantial overlap (figure 3). figure 3. areas of improvement identified by pgr. venn diagram summarising freeform answers from the question ‘how do you think that the university could improve the mental well-being of postgraduate students?’. answers coalesced into five interrelated areas: university systems, supervisor training, well-being monitoring, building networks, and finance. comments were housed within each of these areas or applied across multiple areas as demonstrated. text size is indicative of the frequency in which particular issues arose – more common suggestions are highlighted by larger text. delderfield et al. a learning development-faculty collaborative exploration of postgraduate research student mental health in a uk university journal of learning development in higher education, issue 18: october 2020 14 four areas of improvement were suggested most frequently – providing stable administrative support (university systems), creating student support groups (building networks), for staff to regularly check for mental health (well-being monitoring) and to publicise the existing support services more widely (straddling well-being monitoring, supervisor training and university systems). some of the suggestions for improvement pertained to systems that are already in place at the university, for example, provision of academic mentors or training opportunities. the fact that these were given as areas of improvement validates the common suggestion to advertise these support services more widely and embed them further in the pgr experience. one respondent suggested: eliminate the culture of bad mental health where individuals who are currently not burnt out or suffering from mental illness are considered to be not working hard enough, and where the necessity of prescription drugs to alleviate anxiety and depression are currently seen as the norm. therefore, there is an awareness amongst the students that supervisors can be overloaded with teaching or supervisory responsibilities (university systems) and that academia often presents with a culture that rewards overworking (e.g. not taking annual leave, sending emails out of hours) where poor mental health is seen as the ‘norm’ (supervisor training). discussion the impact of he on mental health is increasingly well-recognised, with government policies recently announced to address the problems with stress and anxiety that reportedly afflict up to 17% of hei students in the uk (thorley, 2017). in keeping with metcalfe et al. (2018), our study on mental health highlights the existence of poor mental health, and the difficulties inherent to academic institutions in terms of management, provision and finance. this poses a serious threat to the long-term mental health of graduates, both socially and psychologically, as it can impact their academic success (eisenberg et al., 2009). delderfield et al. a learning development-faculty collaborative exploration of postgraduate research student mental health in a uk university journal of learning development in higher education, issue 18: october 2020 15 the number of learners self-reporting experiences of poor mental health in our study is in keeping with institute for public policy research (thorley, 2017), suggesting that he culture needs to be assessed and revised to ameliorate these issues. furthermore, our findings are in keeping with those of metcalfe et al. (2018), who suggest the problem is escalating; our reported prevalence is higher than that reported in pres (slight, 2017). university systems and finance an issue emerging from our analysis is that of the processes and systems that underpin procedures for navigating doctoral learning. transparent administrative processes can help students to feel in control and well prepared for key milestones and necessary bureaucratic hurdles. most universities have administrative systems that are unique to pgr, given how different research degrees are from taught courses. doctoral students are likely to seek guidance from their administrator(s) (metcalfe et al., 2018), which was highlighted in our survey: our pgr admin had a crucial function: she could help students' mental health and ease students' anxiety because she was a person enough involved in . . . the pgr journey to understand sensitive supervision relationship dynamics, meaning she could provide pastoral support even when the supervisor relationship was problematic. . . . at the same time [s]he was connected enough . . . to provide timely assistance . . . for instance, the counselling service – even though very helpful in general – may not be able to.’ conceptualised this way, admin is no longer ‘admin’ but part of the relationship-building with students who may want signposting to existing services and processes before raising things in research supervision. this has been configured as a positive and agentic aspect of students’ confidence to look outside the doctoral relationship for relevant, timely support (mcalpine and mckinnon, 2013). related to this is the vital function of administrators in understanding and resolving financial aspects of daily living, project funding and fees. this finding is consistent with the role of financial (in)security found elsewhere (ampaw and jaeger, 2012), suggesting issues with money contribute to attrition and non-completion of doctoral programmes. changes to administration exacerbate financial issues such as delayed subsistence payments or a lack of guidance for pgr in navigating the systems for managing fee delderfield et al. a learning development-faculty collaborative exploration of postgraduate research student mental health in a uk university journal of learning development in higher education, issue 18: october 2020 16 payments, studentships and living allowances. the value of administration in securing a happy student experience is supported elsewhere (cowling, 2017). currently, the learning developer has regular and positive two-way interactions with pgr administration: directly supporting students and supervisors in accessing the wealth of information available through administration colleagues and actively taking referrals for support and development through administrators who work to ensure students access support when a need emerges. it is suggested that, given the importance attributed by respondents, these two-way relationships require further attention and resources. publicity for existing systems results indicate that most respondents would seek support outside of the university, with less than a third opting to access designated support services. this remains confusing as over half of respondents were aware of support services in the first place, leaving the question of why students would use outside services if it were not due to a lack of awareness of what is on offer. indeed, due to the format of the survey, we cannot determine which support services students were aware of, nor why they opted not to access an internal service. it might be suggested that university services would benefit from greater awareness raising, including those offered by the pgr-dedicated learning developer. this is difficult, as it has been found that during induction programmes there was a perception that students were potentially receiving information when they least needed it (metcalfe et al., 2018). ergo, induction processes appear to be irrevocably flawed: presenting service information as part of an extended schedule of welcome and orientation events (the approach taken at our university) risks poor recall later in the learner’s journey, as it may be shared at a time when personal value is not attributed to it. each university support service markets itself to students directly through a newsletter and online information that can be retrieved through the intranet upon searching. faculty research student handbooks include service provision and contact details, and students undertake a training needs analysis as part of their initial supervisory engagement. as this is based on the researcher development framework (vitae, 2020b)(rdf is a uk framework that sets out professional skills and qualities development for all researchers, irrespective of career stage), it incorporates qualities, attributes and skills that can be developed that are more intrapersonal in nature, such as working on perseverance and https://www.vitae.ac.uk/researchers-professional-development/about-the-vitae-researcher-development-framework/developing-the-vitae-researcher-development-framework delderfield et al. a learning development-faculty collaborative exploration of postgraduate research student mental health in a uk university journal of learning development in higher education, issue 18: october 2020 17 resilience, including attending relevant training sessions that can help to develop these skills. nevertheless, the national report highlights some of the issues with meaningful awareness raising of services that can support mental health. it is likely that our findings are consistent with this (metcalfe et al., 2018, p.13). an action we have taken from this is to examine our taken-for-granted assumption that all pgr know enough about the internal support on offer to them at the different stages of their degree by research. as a research team, we reflected that hei experiences reproduce those found, anecdotally, outside of education, namely that signposting and preventative initiatives go unnoticed when an individual does not perceive a personal need, but only that individual would know when, in their learning journey, that point had been reached. despite this, it is still something that our students feel that they would benefit from: give more information about the counselling service and the mental health advice that is part of disability services. it is important to know that other phd students may be experiencing similar problems and these are not signs of weakness or poor academic ability. there is currently no meaningfully reliable way to anticipate when any given student might benefit from mental health support, other than through interpersonal interaction with those important to the student’s experience: supervisors, mentors, peers, and the learning developer. empowering students to talk to those with whom they are in contact, in anticipation of mental health needs, may be the only way to effectively publicise pastoral and development services in a personally resonant way, especially when other students insist they want to know about everything on offer right from the beginning, rather than being ‘drip-fed’ information over time (metcalfe et al., 2018). the latest institutional figures also reveal the incongruity of our findings: on average 50% of new students attend all induction sessions. could it be the case that our respondents suggesting a need for better awareness raising are those who do not engage in the preparatory, cohort-building classes? this may link to the point made above, that these are held within the first few weeks of learning (to build teams, help students to network and impart useful skills). yet some may opt out due to it being too early for the value to be felt. as the learning developer runs our cross-institutional induction processes, further work is needed with research students and staff to identify how important support resources and delderfield et al. a learning development-faculty collaborative exploration of postgraduate research student mental health in a uk university journal of learning development in higher education, issue 18: october 2020 18 services information can be made available on a needs basis. to date we have created an enhanced induction offer which supplies opportunities for networking and development over the first month of research (rather than a couple of concentrated days at the beginning) and worked with research leads and student evaluations to identify content for a pgr induction best-practice guide. both initiatives are co-ordinated by the learning developer, who has regular contact with all parties involved, irrespective of research centre or faculty structures. this continues to be a work-in-progress. building networks we recognise that less than 40% of respondents said they would turn to their peer networks for support. this is potentially of concern, as a similar proportion of respondents (just over 40%) said they would not approach their supervisors, in which case, where are these students turning for support? the value of helping students build, maintain and utilise networks is a potential way forward in terms of working preventatively with students on their mental health (hughes et al., 2018). this is, perhaps, under-utilised in our hei currently. peer-support schemes are becoming embedded at undergraduate level at the university, but a similar scheme for pgr is in its infancy. at present, only specific research groups have been selected for trial. linked to the importance of peer support networks is the very idea that a ‘network’ evokes, namely, that students are not actually alone, even if much time is spent on solitary scholarship; they can feel part of larger group of students all with a similar goal. as one of our respondents stated: . . . as i am an international student, one of the reasons that worsen my anxiety, and depression is sometimes, especially at weekends. i do not find any one to go out with or talk to. if there would have been more activities for international students, i think that will help a lot. when used effectively, there is evidence that feelings of isolation can be tackled through having a network to draw on and peer support is not only beneficial but essential (solem et al., 2011). even those who live away from campus can be connected to others electronically for ‘moral’ support, thinking and processing of frustrations, stressful experiences, failures and personal issues. our survey, unlike metcalfe et al. (2018) delderfield et al. a learning development-faculty collaborative exploration of postgraduate research student mental health in a uk university journal of learning development in higher education, issue 18: october 2020 19 emphasises peer-to-peer student support, whereas the recent report also suggests that personal networks, unrelated to the daily pressures of the researcher, can provide relief, appropriate diversion and grounding, through continued investment in social or family life. this extends the idea that physical space to learn, work, and (importantly) connect during doctoral study is paramount, as students are embodied beings whose experiences are lived on and off campus, in relationship with others (hopwood and paulson, 2012). this may maintain perspective during anxietyand stress-inducing periods at university. as described above, inductions are essential but can be problematic in terms of timing and preferred content: have an induction between the newcomers and the previous phd students, to help everyone integrate and feel wanted. this student’s perception indicates the beginning of the relational work that is needed, where individual learners are expected to develop and maintain fruitful relationships. the learning developer has worked with research leads to adapt our induction process following this, with existing research students meeting newcomers. he has also used student feedback to develop further induction and post-induction activities with the peerassisted learning team in professional services. this means students encounter a range of introductory sessions designed to build relationships and interpersonal skills, in addition to more traditional research skills, in the hope of offering a more rounded experience, with better integration and personal development (hopwood and paulson, 2012). we now need to monitor whether this has a positive impact. well-being monitoring and supervisor training it was decided to name this area based on the language used by respondents: well-being. well-being monitoring requires overarching support across the hei and should not be left solely to the supervisor, who may well be untrained and unfamiliar in this area. instead, a network led by the learning developer, comprising students, supervisors, and administrative support is necessary to fully support positive mental health. at our university, this has led to the development of a multi-voiced strategy to this effect. delderfield et al. a learning development-faculty collaborative exploration of postgraduate research student mental health in a uk university journal of learning development in higher education, issue 18: october 2020 20 successful relationships between supervisors and students are critical to the student experience. currently, all supervisors undergo a one-day training course on university procedures and how to supervise doctoral students, with some emphasis on scenarios in which students are struggling. however, this training could be expanded specifically to address the growing awareness around mental health. whilst supervisors are well versed in the need to monitor achievement over time, it can be argued that it is equally important to consider if pgr are happy, content and feeling valued, as this may indicate coping with the demands of doctoral study and that they are likely to be more productive than those who are not (howells et al., 2017). arguably, these students want their supervisors to broach these topics with them: talk more about it [mental health and well-being] especially by training supervisors to be approachable and watch out for signs and encourage students to seek help when they need it. this reflects a resistance to the normalised discourses in doctoral learning, in which intrapersonal suffering and being left to deal with issues alone are prevalent (john and denicolo, 2013). one source of conflict is a mismatch of expectation, both from the point of view of the student and of the supervisor. in such cases, expectation management on both sides very early on in the process is crucial in order to facilitate a harmonious and productive relationship (bui, 2015); however, this is known to often be disjunctive (malfroy, 2005). anecdotally, students can have unrealistic expectations of the amount of time they will spend with their supervisor, and the role that they will play in the wider research group. as an example, students often imagine that their role is strictly to answer their research ‘question’. however, in reality, a phd is a training degree bestowing the student with essential transferable skills for independence and future employment. this includes time management, prioritisation and peer training in addition to their research project. thus, emphasising this level of independence in initial supervisory meetings, the induction process and peer-support networks would be beneficial, as students’ expectations may need to be managed in terms of both supervisor contact and the nature of degrees by research. this notion of expectation management also occurs when developing research supervisors. supervisors can have unrealistic expectations regarding students’ abilities and workloads, which often lead to conflict. students have reported this as: delderfield et al. a learning development-faculty collaborative exploration of postgraduate research student mental health in a uk university journal of learning development in higher education, issue 18: october 2020 21 for the institution to remember students are human and not thesis machines. this has been explored in supervision research as an issue of ‘contradiction and congruence’, whereby a supervisor may wish to facilitate autonomy, academic exploration, and personalisation of learning (delderfield and mchattie, 2018). however, supervisors may be subject to pressures to adhere to completion rates and other research metrics that place the obtaining of outputs ahead of the human experience of facilitated learning (deuchar, 2008). as well as the increasing prevalence of mental ill-health in pgr, there is a growing recognition of psychological issues throughout academia including, crucially, supervisors. recent large-scale studies in the guardian and times higher education have highlighted issues with anxiety (82%), depression (74%; thomas, 2014) and sleeplessness (up to 55%; grove, 2018) in uk academics. stressors include juggling everincreasing workloads and roles, including administrative duties that are not considered traditionally ‘academic’ jobs and with which research-focused academics are not familiar or confident. although this culture of mental ill-health in academics has long been recognised (kinman, 2008; pells, 2018), it has received limited attention, with mental health interventions in heis usually focussing solely on student experiences. however, it is interesting to note that stressors for academics include high self-expectation, lack of support, poor remuneration and poor work-life balance (kinman, 2008; sang et al., 2015) – factors which mirror concerns for students. it is possible that, as academics are routinely experiencing these stressors themselves, they are inadvertently perpetuating the cycle of poor mental health and work-life balance among the next generation. it may be that until mental health in supervisors is addressed, there will be no improvement in the mental health of students. this is recognised by respondents: i do think the culture of academia currently is pressured and we see university staff working with large workloads. . . . there seems to be a culture of expectation to work unsocial hours, for example emails being sent out late in the evenings and weekends. this can make you feel that . . . you don't want to work where this is expected as it is an unhealthy work-life balance. being realistic and transparent about expectations from all sides (student, supervisor and institution) is subject to current research. for example, routine over-work and a nondelderfield et al. a learning development-faculty collaborative exploration of postgraduate research student mental health in a uk university journal of learning development in higher education, issue 18: october 2020 22 individualised, one-size-fits-all approach to doctoral learning are beginning to be resisted (parker-jenkins, 2018). at our university, the learning developer is in an optimal position to use his situatedness in the ‘third space’ (whitchurch, 2013) and the rdf to frame advanced training for all researchers from pgr to experienced supervisors in order to improve the training and one-to-one support offer pertaining to enhanced skills for supervision. this cross-over work between ld, human resources, and staff research services is trialling this new training to address supervisors’ ongoing development. in addition, teaching was added to induction fostered around the objective of successful working with supervisors for new pgr who wanted to learn more about the supervisory relationship. this means systemic challenge and change to staff skills and research culture can be collaboratively achieved (parkes, 2018), whilst serving the transient population of research students year-on-year. limitations, future work and conclusions there are several limitations that need to be borne in mind when interpreting our findings. the design of the study was necessarily pragmatic, as it arose from an opportunity to ask questions of our learners at a time when academics and learning developers were meeting to discuss this group of students. the sample size is small, with no additional contextualising demographic data that might allow issues around features such as ethnicity or gender to be drawn out. response bias also needs to be considered. as stated above, it is likely that respondents replied to our call as they had a personal interest or experience in mental health. at its most fundamental level, the small sample and unvalidated survey mean we have no way to determine the relative integrity of students’ responses. we also recognise that the questions asked include demand characteristics, whereby our respondents could take their cue from the purpose of the survey and the framing of the question, choosing to respond in a certain manner emphasising problematic issues rather than positive mental health. in these respects, our survey is inferior to the validated instrument developed for use with doctoral researchers mentioned previously (juniper et al., 2012), yet has still provided us with a useful indication of the mental health concerns of our students, of which we would otherwise have remained ignorant. delderfield et al. a learning development-faculty collaborative exploration of postgraduate research student mental health in a uk university journal of learning development in higher education, issue 18: october 2020 23 this study emulates more modest studies (e.g. brown and watson, 2010) by focussing on pgr within a single hei. it has provided us with a snapshot of mental health among our learners and has highlighted several areas which can be improved in order to enhance their experience, these being: university systems, supervisor training, well-being monitoring, building networks, and finance (figure 3). should the survey run in the future, to give a more exhaustive account of mental health and the issues facing pgr, we would make significant amendments. these relate to the methodological robustness of its design. the survey does not currently allow students to identify whether they had preexisting poor mental health or whether this was exacerbated by (or originated during) their postgraduate studies. we recognise that the survey response rate is quite low, although the data collated is from 54 respondents. in the future, we would leave the survey open for one month and send weekly reminders to pgr requesting they fill in the survey to increase our sample size. further research would benefit from focussing across multiple sites to ascertain the universality of declining mental health in doctoral learners. there is also potential for a reflective study on the collaborative relationship between academic research supervisors and learning developers, something that deserves further attention. notwithstanding these shortcomings, our modest engagement does have merits. knowledge is sparse in this area, and our site-specific data are the first of their kind. our research supports recent uk findings about pgr mental health discussed above (metcalfe et al., 2018) and, whilst we do not itemise specific recommendations at this exploratory stage, the insights here form the basis of potential future work at our university. examples of these include: working to deliver more to address the well-being aspects of the rdf; continued work on pgr induction; developing our institutional pgr strategy (led by our learning developer), the pgr experience of which involves the five areas gleaned from our work; and, lastly, continuing our work to improve the training of mentors and research supervisors. this endeavour is shared between the research leads and the learning developer, who, of all colleagues, continues to be ideally placed and professionally skilled to work across institutional boundaries and structures to deliver changes for individuals and the organisation. this is our first foray into capturing the meanings and relationships between ld, pgr and mental health. our institutional changes are fresh and, as yet, unreported. thus, evaluations of this work are likely to be available in due course. delderfield et al. a learning development-faculty collaborative exploration of postgraduate research student mental health in a uk university journal of learning development in higher education, issue 18: october 2020 24 references ampaw, f. d. and jaeger, a. j. (2012) ‘completing the three stages of doctoral education: an event history analysis’, research in higher education, 53(6), pp.640-660. braun, v. and clarke, v. (2006) ‘using thematic analysis in psychology’, qualitative research in psychology, 3(2), pp.77-101. brown, l. and watson, p. (2010) ‘understanding the experiences of female doctoral students’, journal of further and higher education, 34(3), pp.385-404. bui, h. t. m. (2015) ‘student-supervisor expectations in the doctoral supervision process for business and management students’, business and management education in higher education, 1(1), pp.12-27. cairns, j., hervey, t. and johnson, o. (2018) 'neither “bolt‐on” nor “built‐in”: benefits and challenges of developing an integrated skills curriculum through a partnership model', journal of learning development in higher education. (13)1, pp.1-22. available at: https://journal.aldinhe.ac.uk/index.php/jldhe/article/view/435 (accessed: 15 august 2020). cowling, m. (2017) happiness in uk postgraduate research: an analysis of results from the postgraduate research experience survey. available at: https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/knowledge-hub/happiness-uk-post-graduateresearch-uk-heis (accessed: 3 september 2018). delderfield, r. and mchattie, h. (2018) ‘person-centred dynamics in maths skills development: examining a case of good practice’, journal of learning development in higher education, 13(1), pp.1-10. available at: https://journal.aldinhe.ac.uk/index.php/jldhe/article/view/447 (accessed: 14 january 2020). deuchar, r. (2008) ‘facilitator, director or critical friend?’: contradiction and congruence in doctoral supervision styles, teaching in higher education, 13(4), pp.489-500. https://journal.aldinhe.ac.uk/index.php/jldhe/article/view/435 https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/knowledge-hub/happiness-uk-post-graduate-research-uk-heis https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/knowledge-hub/happiness-uk-post-graduate-research-uk-heis https://journal.aldinhe.ac.uk/index.php/jldhe/article/view/447 delderfield et al. a learning development-faculty collaborative exploration of postgraduate research student mental health in a uk university journal of learning development in higher education, issue 18: october 2020 25 dhillon, s. (2018) ‘whose wellbeing is it anyway?’, journal of learning development in higher education, 13(2). available at: https://journal.aldinhe.ac.uk/index.php/jldhe/article/view/460 (accessed: 30 july 2020). editorial (2018) ‘time to talk about why so many postgrads have poor mental health’, nature, 556(5). available at: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-04023-5 (accessed: 15 october 2018). eisenberg, d., golberstein, e. and hunt, j.b. (2009) ‘mental health and academic success in college’, the b. e. journal of economic analysis and policy, 9(1), pp.1-37. evans, t. m., bira, l., gastelum, j. b., weiss, l. t. and vanderford, n. l. (2018) ‘evidence for a mental health crisis in graduate education’, nature biotechnology, 36(3), pp.282-284. gorczynski, p., sims-schouten, w., hill, d. and wilson, j. c. (2017) ‘examining mental health literacy, help seeking behaviours and mental health outcomes in uk university students’, the journal of mental health training, education and practice, 12(2), pp.111-120. grove, j. (2018) ‘half of uk academics suffer stress-linked mental health problems’, times higher education 6 july 2018. available at: https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/half-uk-academics-suffer-stresslinked-mental-health-problems (accessed: 15 october 2018). guthrie, s., lichten, c. a., van belle, j., ball, s., knack, a. and hofman, j. (2017) ‘understanding mental health in the research environment: a rapid evidence assessment’, rand health quarterly, 7(3). available at: https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/rr2022.html (accessed: 15 october 2018). https://journal.aldinhe.ac.uk/index.php/jldhe/article/view/460 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-04023-5 https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/half-uk-academics-suffer-stress-linked-mental-health-problems https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/half-uk-academics-suffer-stress-linked-mental-health-problems https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/rr2022.html delderfield et al. a learning development-faculty collaborative exploration of postgraduate research student mental health in a uk university journal of learning development in higher education, issue 18: october 2020 26 hopwood, n. and paulson, j. (2012) ‘bodies in narratives of doctoral students' learning and experience’, studies in higher education, 37(6), pp.667-681. howells, k., stafford, k., guijt, r. and breadmore, m. (2017) ‘the role of gratitude in enhancing the relationship between doctoral research students and their supervisors’, teaching in higher education, 22(6), pp.621-638. hughes, g., panjawni, m., tulcidas, p. and byrom, n. (2018) ‘student mental health: the role and experiences of academics’, student minds. available at: https://www.studentminds.org.uk/theroleofanacademic.html (accessed: 29 september 2018). john, t. and denicolo, p. (2013) ‘doctoral education: a review of the literature monitoring the doctoral student experience in selected oecd countries (mainly uk)’, springer science reviews, 1, pp.41-49. available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40362-0130011-x (accessed: 29 september 2018). johnson, i. (2018) ‘driving learning development professionalism forward from within’, journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: aldinhe conference 2018, pp.1-29. available at: https://journal.aldinhe.ac.uk/index.php/jldhe/article/view/470 (accessed: 19 august 2020). juniper, b., walsh, e., richardson, a. and morley, b. (2012) ‘a new approach to evaluating the well-being of phd research students’, assessment and evaluation in higher education, 37(5), pp.563-576. kinman, g. (2008) ‘work stressors, health and sense of coherence in uk academic employees’, educational psychology, 28(7), pp.823-835. levecque, k., anseel, f., de beuckelaer, a., van der heyden, j. and gisle, l. (2017) ‘work organization and mental health problems in phd students’, research policy, 46(4), pp.868-879. https://www.studentminds.org.uk/theroleofanacademic.html https://doi.org/10.1007/s40362-013-0011-x https://doi.org/10.1007/s40362-013-0011-x https://journal.aldinhe.ac.uk/index.php/jldhe/article/view/470 delderfield et al. a learning development-faculty collaborative exploration of postgraduate research student mental health in a uk university journal of learning development in higher education, issue 18: october 2020 27 maguire, m. and delahunt, b. (2017) ‘doing a thematic analysis: a practical, step-by-step guide for learning and teaching scholars’, aishe-j: the all ireland journal of teaching and learning in higher education, 9(3), pp.1-14. malfroy, j. (2005) ‘doctoral supervision, workplace research and changing pedagogic practices’, higher education research and development, 24(2), pp.165-178. mascaskill, a. (2012) ‘university student mental health in crisis: a united kingdom perspective’, british journal of guidance counselling, 41(4), pp.426-441. mental health foundation (2018) your mental health. available at: https://www.mentalhealth.org.uk/your-mental-health (accessed: 6 february 2020). metcalfe, j., wilson, s. and levecque, k. (2018) exploring wellbeing and mental health and associated support services for postgraduate researchers. cambridge: careers research and advisory centre. available at: https://www.vitae.ac.uk/doingresearch/wellbeing-and-mental-health/hefce-report_exploring-pgr-mentalhealth-support/view (accessed: 3 may 2018). mcalpine, l. and mckinnon, m. (2013) ‘supervision the most variable of variables: student perspectives’, studies in continuing education, 35(3), pp.265-280. mortier, p., auerbach, r.p., alonso, j., axinn, w.g., cuijpers, p., ebert, d.d., green, j.g., hwang, i., kessler, r.c., liu, h., nock, m.k., pinder-amaker, s., sampson, n.a., zaslavsky, a.m., abdulmalik, j., aguilar-gaxiola, s., al-hamzawi, a., benjet, c., demyttenaere, k., florescu, s., de girolamo, g., gureje, o., haro, j.m., hu, c., huang, y., de jonge, p., karam, e.g., kiejna, a., kovess-masfety, v., lee, s., mcgrath, j.j., o'neill, s., nakov, v., pennell, b.e., piazza, m., posada-villa, j., rapsey, c., viana, m.c., xavier, m. and bruffaerts, r. (2018) ‘suicidal thoughts and behaviors among college students and same-aged peers: results from the world health organization world mental health surveys’, social psychiatry and psychiatric epidemiology, 53(3), pp.279-288. https://www.mentalhealth.org.uk/your-mental-health https://www.vitae.ac.uk/doing-research/wellbeing-and-mental-health/hefce-report_exploring-pgr-mental-health-support/view https://www.vitae.ac.uk/doing-research/wellbeing-and-mental-health/hefce-report_exploring-pgr-mental-health-support/view https://www.vitae.ac.uk/doing-research/wellbeing-and-mental-health/hefce-report_exploring-pgr-mental-health-support/view delderfield et al. a learning development-faculty collaborative exploration of postgraduate research student mental health in a uk university journal of learning development in higher education, issue 18: october 2020 28 neves, j. and hillman, n. (2017) student academic experience survey, higher education policy institute. available at: https://www.hepi.ac.uk/2017/06/07/2017-studentacademic-experience-survey/ (accessed: 15 january 2020). pain, e. (2018) ‘graduate students need more mental health support, new study highlights’, science (blog). available at: https://www.sciencemag.org/careers/2018/03/graduate-students-need-more-mentalhealth-support-new-study-highlights (accessed: 15 january 2020). parkes, s. (2018) ‘a learner developer perspective: critiquing dominant practices and cultures within university spaces’, journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: aldinhe conference 2018, pp.1-13. available at: https://journal.aldinhe.ac.uk/index.php/jldhe/article/view/464 (accessed: 18 august 2020). parker-jenkins, m. (2018) ‘mind the gap: developing the roles, expectations and boundaries in the doctoral supervisor–supervisee relationship’, studies in higher education, 43(1), pp.57-71. pells, r. (2018) ‘lecturer’s suicide a ‘wake-up call’ on overworking in academia’, times higher education 14th june (accessed: 28th july 2020). pole, c. j., sprokkereef, a., burgess, r. g. and lakin, e. (1997) ‘supervision of doctoral students in the natural sciences: expectations and experiences’, assessment and evaluation in higher education, 22(1), pp.49-63. sang, k., powell, a., finkel, r. and richards, j. (2015) ‘being an academic is not a 9-5 job: long working hours and the ideal worker in uk academia’, labour and industry: a journal of the social and economic relations of work, 25(3), pp.235-249. slight, c. (2017) postgraduate research experience survey 2017: experiences and personal outlook of postgraduate researchers. higher education academy. available at: https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/knowledge-hub/postgraduate-researchexperience-survey-report-2017 (accessed: 15 october 2019). https://www.hepi.ac.uk/2017/06/07/2017-student-academic-experience-survey/ https://www.hepi.ac.uk/2017/06/07/2017-student-academic-experience-survey/ https://www.sciencemag.org/careers/2018/03/graduate-students-need-more-mental-health-support-new-study-highlights https://www.sciencemag.org/careers/2018/03/graduate-students-need-more-mental-health-support-new-study-highlights https://journal.aldinhe.ac.uk/index.php/jldhe/article/view/464 https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/knowledge-hub/postgraduate-research-experience-survey-report-2017 https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/knowledge-hub/postgraduate-research-experience-survey-report-2017 delderfield et al. a learning development-faculty collaborative exploration of postgraduate research student mental health in a uk university journal of learning development in higher education, issue 18: october 2020 29 solem, m., hopwood, n. and schlemper, b. (2011) ‘experiencing graduate school: a comparative analysis of students in geography programs’, the professional geographer, 63(1), pp.1-17. stapleford, k. (2019) ‘the ldhen hive mind: learning development in uk higher education as a professional culture’. journal of learning development in higher education, 16(1), pp.1-23. available at: https://journal.aldinhe.ac.uk/index.php/jldhe/article/view/510 (accessed: 1 january 2020). thomas, k. (2014) ‘we don't want anyone to know, say depressed academics’, the guardian he, 8 may. available at: https://www.theguardian.com/higher-educationnetwork/blog/2014/may/08/academics-mental-health-suffering-silence-guardiansurvey (accessed: 13 october 2019). thorley, c. (2017) not by degrees: improving student mental health in the uk’s universities. institute for public policy research (september). available at: www.ippr.org/publications/not-by-degrees (accessed: 28 july 2020). universities uk (2017) step change: mentally healthy universities. available at: https://www.universitiesuk.ac.uk/stepchange (accessed: 15 october 2019). vitae (2020a) evolution of the concordat. available at: https://www.vitae.ac.uk/policy/concordat/background (accessed: 10 september 2020). vitae (2020b) the vitae researcher development framework. available at: https://www.vitae.ac.uk/researchers-professional-development/about-the-vitaeresearcher-development-framework/developing-the-vitae-researcher-developmentframework (accessed: 10 september 2020). whitchurch, c. (2013) reconstructing identities in higher education: the rise of ‘third space' professionals. london: routledge. https://journal.aldinhe.ac.uk/index.php/jldhe/article/view/510 https://www.theguardian.com/higher-education-network/blog/2014/may/08/academics-mental-health-suffering-silence-guardian-survey https://www.theguardian.com/higher-education-network/blog/2014/may/08/academics-mental-health-suffering-silence-guardian-survey https://www.theguardian.com/higher-education-network/blog/2014/may/08/academics-mental-health-suffering-silence-guardian-survey http://www.ippr.org/publications/not-by-degrees https://www.universitiesuk.ac.uk/stepchange https://www.vitae.ac.uk/policy/concordat/background https://www.vitae.ac.uk/researchers-professional-development/about-the-vitae-researcher-development-framework/developing-the-vitae-researcher-development-framework https://www.vitae.ac.uk/researchers-professional-development/about-the-vitae-researcher-development-framework/developing-the-vitae-researcher-development-framework https://www.vitae.ac.uk/researchers-professional-development/about-the-vitae-researcher-development-framework/developing-the-vitae-researcher-development-framework delderfield et al. a learning development-faculty collaborative exploration of postgraduate research student mental health in a uk university journal of learning development in higher education, issue 18: october 2020 30 world health organization. (2014) social determinants of mental health. available at: http://www.who.int/mental_health/publications/gulbenkian_paper_social_determinan ts_of_mental_health/en/ (accessed: 15 october 2019). author details russell delderfield is pgr framework lead at the university of bradford. kirsten riches-suman is a lecturer in biomedical science at the university of bradford. mathias ndoma-egba is a postgraduate researcher in the faculty of management, law and social sciences at the university of bradford. james boyne is a reader in molecular biology at the university of huddersfield. http://www.who.int/mental_health/publications/gulbenkian_paper_social_determinants_of_mental_health/en/ http://www.who.int/mental_health/publications/gulbenkian_paper_social_determinants_of_mental_health/en/ a learning development-faculty collaborative exploration of postgraduate research student mental health in a uk university abstract introduction research aims the context methods results response rate self-reported examples of poor mental health sources of support in times of psychological stress suggestions for university provision of support discussion university systems and finance publicity for existing systems building networks well-being monitoring and supervisor training limitations, future work and conclusions references author details article journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 14: april 2019 unrolling the text: using scrolls to facilitate academic reading sandra abegglen independent academic tom burns london metropolitan university, united kingdom david middlebrook independent academic sandra sinfield london metropolitan university, united kingdom abstract this case study shows how we have used textscrolls to address academic reading in our facilitating student learning postgraduate module. we outline how we explored with staff the potential of the textscroll to offer a more welcoming, accessible, collaborative and dialogic encounter with reading than the codex (bound book or article). drawing briefly on a literature review commissioned when part of the learnhigher centre for excellence in teaching and learning, we consider reading not just as a semantic or linguistic activity but as a socio-political one, especially for those, like our students, who are typically placed as educational outsiders. we harness the work of dave middlebrook (one of our co-authors) and his discussion of the power relations of the bound text and the liberatory potential of the unrolled textscroll. we conclude with an example of what happened when one of our staff participants took scrolls back to her third year design students, and we argue that utilising emancipatory teaching practices can make higher education more inclusive. keywords: textscrolls; academic reading; higher education; staff development; emancipatory teaching; inclusion. abegglen, burns, middlebrook, sinfield unrolling the text: using scrolls to facilitate academic reading journal of learning development in higher education, issue 14: april 2019 2 introduction at london metropolitan university we recruit culturally diverse mature students with care and work commitments, some of whom have diagnosed learning disabilities (london metropolitan university, 2018). in the centre for professional and educational development (cped) we are tasked with providing certificated and non-certificated staff development – with a focus on emancipatory practice and association for learning development in higher education (aldinhe) values (association for learning development in higher education, 2018). the focus of this paper is how we work with discipline staff to enhance the way that they develop academic reading strategies with their undergraduate students. specifically, we discuss how we have used unrolled textscrolls (middlebrook, 2018) to address academic reading in our facilitating student learning (fsl) module, which forms part of our pgcert (postgraduate certificate) in learning and teaching in higher education. we outline how we explored with our fsl participants the potential of the textscroll to offer a more welcoming, accessible, collaborative, and dialogic encounter with reading than the codex (bound book). drawing on a literature review commissioned when part of the learnhigher cetl (centre for excellence in teaching and learning, 2005-2010), we consider reading not just as a semantic or linguistic activity but as a socio-political one (freire, 1970) – one from which our non-traditional students typically feel excluded (hoskins, 2008). our argument is that using textscrolls with our students can empower especially those who are deemed to have little or no cultural or academic capital (hoskins, 2008) and thus who are typically placed as education outsiders (sinfield, burns and holley, 2004). congruent with this approach we also draw on the work of dave middlebrook (one of our co-authors) and his discussion of the power relations of the bound book and the liberatory potential of the unrolled textscroll: the book unbound (middlebrook, 2015; 1994a; 1994b; 1994c). we conclude with an example of what happened when one of our staff took the practice back to her third year design students, and we argue, in line with aldinhe, that utilising emancipatory teaching practices can make higher education (he) more inclusive. academic reading – an issue of social justice abegglen, burns, middlebrook, sinfield unrolling the text: using scrolls to facilitate academic reading journal of learning development in higher education, issue 14: april 2019 3 the learnhigher cetl was funded for five years to produce resources and research to enable excellent he practice (see: http://www.learnhigher.ac.uk/). one focus for us was the facilitation of successful academic reading practices. to initiate our project, we recruited a phd student to undertake a literature review on the topic. kate, a working-class graduate of a widening participation university, wrote the literature review online and in real time, whilst simultaneously blogging about her process of writing that literature review (see: http://litreview.pbworks.com/w/page/18059710/frontpage and http://onlinelitreview.blogspot.com/2008/01/). in her exploration, she drew on her own experiences of exclusion, utilising bourdieu’s (1977; 1984) concepts of cultural capital and institutional habitus, and foucault’s (ball, 1990) concept of discourse, to make sense of the way that non-traditional students in particular experience the power imbalance of he and especially of the power imbalance surrounding academic reading (see: http://litreview.pbworks.com/w/page/18059717/this%20link). the literature review categorically placed reading at university as a socio-political activity, with widening participation students excluded by the middle-class habitus and discourse of he. what was, and is, apparent is that those with greater social, cultural and academic capital tend to do better in he than those without (meuleman, garrett, wrench and king, 2015). knowing this, the challenge for us was to enable academic staff to facilitate successful participation in university practices, especially reading, without creating or increasing negative experiences for our non-traditional students. scrolls vs conventional academic text formats so, what might textscrolls have to do with academic reading as a socio-political activity? we begin with the observation (middlebrook, 1994a) that the printed journal or book’s fundamental design – pages bound between covers – restricts and complicates how we approach a text and how we go about performing the various tasks that collectively comprise reading. when a student opens a book or prints off an article, they see a twopage display. that is the most that they can see at any one moment. they can fan the pages back and forth in order to gain some sense of the larger context but, in the end, they are left to discover and make sense of content that is fragmented and scattered across many pages. the unrolled scroll, in contrast, is wide-open to the reader. it offers an http://www.learnhigher.ac.uk/ http://litreview.pbworks.com/w/page/18059710/frontpage http://onlinelitreview.blogspot.com/2008/01/ http://litreview.pbworks.com/w/page/18059717/this%20link abegglen, burns, middlebrook, sinfield unrolling the text: using scrolls to facilitate academic reading journal of learning development in higher education, issue 14: april 2019 4 expansive, panoramic display of the content. in doing so, it reveals the structure and flow of ideas across the entire text. scrolls can be produced from articles or chapters, or other large chunks of texts (scrolling a whole book would be unwieldy). they can be displayed by unrolling them across walls, desktops or floor areas. a text displayed in this manner invites readers to get out of their chairs – to stand up and move about, to walk back and forth across the scroll’s unrolled expanse, to engage with the text through movement and touch, to feel how their bodies scale to the ‘bookspace’, and to see and know, moment to moment, where they are in the text, where they have and have not been, and where they want to go next. navigation across unrolled textscrolls is visual and physical and, perhaps for this reason, fast and intuitive. readers can start anywhere and move to any part of the text. they can engage as they wish – in groups or individually. there is plenty of room to explore – to move in close so as to (in the ancient germanic/saxon sense of the words) physically nearstand and understand the details, and then step back to farstand the larger context (onions, 1994). we came to understand these observations after the fact – after seeing how much better our undergraduate students did with the textscroll’s wide-open display. scrolls allowed our students to explore and question the text in front of them; this positioned them powerfully in relation to the written word, and thus academic reading became something that helped them navigate academia and develop a sense of self-efficacy (bandura, 1982) as they became academic on their own terms. we thus wanted to develop the practice in our pgcert classroom such that for staff as well, reading could unfold as a richly constructivist, socio-political process where our staff learners could see reading – and hopefully thus our students – differently. our pgcert: how we unrolled the text as with our students, our academics also come from diverse cultures and backgrounds; from different he systems across the globe and from different industries. when entering he and teaching for the first time, they may feel just as disempowered as their students (harrington, sinfield and burns, 2016). moreover, because of their varied backgrounds they have philosophically multiple approaches to teaching and learning; this can make abegglen, burns, middlebrook, sinfield unrolling the text: using scrolls to facilitate academic reading journal of learning development in higher education, issue 14: april 2019 5 them also feel like outsiders pitched against traditional academics. the dilemma for our staff learners is how to ensure that their students can function critically and effectively – and gain power and voice – in an environment that is familiar to neither of them. our role in the pgcert is to help staff experience differing learning, teaching and assessment practices so that they feel enabled more confidently to empower their students to succeed. this involves sharing not only the creative and emancipatory practices that we have developed with our undergraduate students (abegglen, burns and sinfield 2018; 2017; 2016a; 2016b), but also the use of textscrolls to help staff see reading, and the teaching of reading, differently. we create our textscrolls following the example of middlebrook (1994d). we photocopy or print, on one side of the paper only, articles of sufficient relevance, interest and complexity to be of real use to our fsl students; typically enlarging them to a3, for the enlarged text is more accessible. we tape the pages together side by side so that a scroll is produced – often of some length. for our 2017/18 textscroll session we produced three such textscrolls – one per group – and gave our staff learners coloured felt tips and a set of questions and prompts to seed their active engagement with their text. the texts selected stemmed from the module reading list and would later be utilised for the module assessment, which made them meaningful for staff learners. we asked staff to notice what is going on in the text as a physical, constructed thing. we asked them to concentrate on structure, headings and paragraphs. this meant unrolling the text and moving about. immediately choices had to be made as the staff decide whether to spread their scroll across the table, stick it on the wall or settle on the floor and cluster around. propelled into this hands-on relationship with the text, participants were forced to interact peer-to-peer and self-to-scroll. there was instantly discussion and engagement, with each other and the text. arguably, this engagement is understanding and farstanding (onions, 1994; see above) enacted – the social and embodied engagement with the words presented on paper. we deepen the staff-facing textscroll session by explaining how we undertake this activity with undergraduate students. once undergraduate students have annotated a textscroll, we feed in a small assignment question to push the interaction further. now students move from noticing the structures of a text, to seeking information in the text, and to answer a real assignment question. this gives engagement with the textscroll a different sense of abegglen, burns, middlebrook, sinfield unrolling the text: using scrolls to facilitate academic reading journal of learning development in higher education, issue 14: april 2019 6 urgency and purpose, yet in a collegiate and non-threatening mode. this is university praxis in meaningful action; as angelo (1993, p.3) states: ‘students do learn more and better by becoming actively involved’. in addition, the use of textscrolls allows us to slow things down (berg and seeber, 2016), and through that to make room for exploring and thinking more deeply (biggs and tang (2007). what the lecturer did: the case study within there may be concern that this reading technique disadvantages those students who feel threatened by engaging with texts publicly and students with spld (specific learning difficulty), especially those with dyslexia or dyspraxia, who need longer to comprehend texts; thus we share here, and with permission from the tutor concerned, an example of using textscrolls with design students. this cohort typically has a larger proportion of students with dyslexia or dyspraxia than other courses (for reasons that need further research). the task this tutor has given her design students was to illustrate texts produced by literature students by capturing the meaning of those complex texts from an alien discipline. it appears that using textscrolls made this process more successful than in previous years: in my last practical teaching session (tuesday 23 jan), i tried out the text-mapping exercise we were introduced to in workshop 3. . . . i made a scroll for each student of their assigned text. the students felt quite excited about receiving their texts in this unusual physical format. i asked them to fully unfurl their scrolls and find space to look at and interact with it, using highlighters and pens to mark out sections, highlight key words and phrases and activate some meaning from the text, treating it as a visual entity in a spatial dimension. . . . i think it was useful for the students, there was a good energy in the room. the exercise was a fun and enjoyable way to break down a long-ish text and at least one student who started the session feeling very unsure and nervous about working with a text (on william blake – an inspiring but potentially intimidating subject) went away more confident. i will certainly use the technique again. abegglen, burns, middlebrook, sinfield unrolling the text: using scrolls to facilitate academic reading journal of learning development in higher education, issue 14: april 2019 7 she related the success of this approach in particular to the dialogic (bahktin, 1981) and social (lave and wenger, 1991) nature of textscrolls as well as the emancipatory approach to teaching and learning (holt, 1970) they enable: the exercise used a dialogic approach to classroom practice, helping to form a community of practice and bolster students' confidence in their ability to tackle the project in a way that would gain them a successful outcome (encouraging resilience and self-efficacy). this taps into the holtian idea that the learning process should not set students up for failure as in the traditional classroom. but rather, we can teach in ways that encourage students to question what they are looking at and being asked to do, rather than to answer the question (or respond to the brief) in a way that pleases the teacher (or the system). this is something we have also experienced when using textscrolls with our staff learners. textscrolls create powerful learning spaces that make content not only visible, but also accessible and explainable – powerful spaces in which to become, in the fullest sense, a reader, a thinker, an academic. in conclusion on our pgcert course, we wanted to harness the power of textscrolls to enable our staff participants to see both reading and their students through a different and more emancipatory lens. typically our non-traditional undergraduate students feel excluded, and are positioned as excluded, by the university’s habitus and particularly by the power and discourse of academic reading. we found that when using the bound text unbound, the scroll, our staff and their students experienced in an embodied way that academic reading could be dialogic, cooperative and discursive. unrolled textscrolls offer a powerful learning experience de facto positioning readers differently towards a text. rather than exclusion and alienation, dialogue and empathy (rogers, 1959) are promoted as everybody engages with text, with meaning, and with each other. as expressed by a participant in one of dave’s workshops, this reading approach ‘… gave me the opportunity to walk in my abegglen, burns, middlebrook, sinfield unrolling the text: using scrolls to facilitate academic reading journal of learning development in higher education, issue 14: april 2019 8 students’ shoes’. (middlebrook, 1999). hence, we encourage readers to unroll their conventional texts, and make scrolls part of their learning and teaching practice. coda: dave middlebrook, one of our co-authors, has experimented extensively with scrolls and he is interested in further projects with academic staff to explore the potential of scrolls in university learning and teaching. please check his website for further details: http://www.textmapping.org/ references abegglen, s., burns, t. and sinfield, s. (2016a) ‘hacking assignment practice: finding creativity and power in the fissures and cracks of learning and teaching’, journal of learning development in higher education, issue 10. abegglen, s., burns, t. and sinfield, s. (2016b) ‘the power of freedom: setting up a multimodal exhibition with undergraduate students to foster their learning and help them to achieve’, journal of peer learning, 9, pp. 1-9. abegglen, s., burns, t. and sinfield, s. (2017) ‘”really free!”: strategic interventions to foster students' academic writing skills’, journal of educational innovation, partnership and change, 3(1), pp. 251-255. abegglen, s., burns, t. & sinfield, s. (2018) ‘drawing as a way of knowing: visual practices as the route to becoming academic’, canadian journal for studies in discourse and writing/rédactologie, 28, pp.173-185. angelo, t. a. (1993) ‘a teacher's dozen: fourteen general, research-based principles for improving higher learning in our classrooms’, aahe bulletin, 45(8), pp. 3-7. association for learning development in higher education (2018) about: the association for learning development in higher education [online]. available at: http://aldinhe.ac.uk/about/ (accessed: 15 august 2018). http://aldinhe.ac.uk/about/ abegglen, burns, middlebrook, sinfield unrolling the text: using scrolls to facilitate academic reading journal of learning development in higher education, issue 14: april 2019 9 ball, s. j. (ed.) (1990) foucault and education: disciplines and knowledge. london: routledge. bandura, a. (1982) ‘self-efficacy mechanism in human agency’, american psychologist, 37(2), pp.122-147. bakhtin, m. (1981) the dialogic imagination: four essays, austin: university of texas press. berg, m. and seeber, b. (2016) the slow professor: challenging the culture of speed in the academy, toronto: university of toronto press. biggs, j. and tang, c. (2007) teaching for quality learning at university, maidenhead: open university press. bourdieu, p. (1977) outline of a theory of practice. new york: cambridge university press. bourdieu, p. (1984) distinction: a social critique of the judgement of taste, cambridge: harvard university press. freire, p. (1970) pedagogy of the oppressed, new york: continuum. harrington, k., sinfield, s. and burns, t. (2016) ‘student engagement’, pp.106-124, in pokorny, h. and warren, d. (ed.) enhancing teaching practice in higher education, london: sage. holt, j. (1970) what do i do monday?, new york: dutton. hoskins, k. (2008a) literature review [online]. available at: http://onlinelitreview.blogspot.com (accessed: 15 august 2018). hoskins, k. (2008b) online literature review: critical reading skills for students; an evolving literature review [online]. available at: http://onlinelitreview.blogspot.com/ abegglen, burns, middlebrook, sinfield unrolling the text: using scrolls to facilitate academic reading journal of learning development in higher education, issue 14: april 2019 10 http://litreview.pbworks.com/w/page/18059710/frontpage (accessed: 15 august 2018). hoskins, k. (2008c) evolving literature review [online]. available at: http://litreview.pbworks.com/w/page/18059717/this%20link (accessed: 15 august 2018). lave, j. and wenger, e. (1991) situated learning: legitimate peripheral participation. cambridge: cambridge university press. learnhigher (2018) teaching and learning resources [online]. available at: http://www.learnhigher.ac.uk/ (accessed: 15 august 2018). london metropolitan university (2018) our key statistics [online]. available at: https://www.londonmet.ac.uk/about/our-university/university-publications/keystatistics/ (accessed 15 august 2018). meuleman a., garrett, r., wrench, a. and king, s. (2015) ‘”some people might say i'm thriving but…”: non-traditional students' experiences of university’, international journal of inclusive education, 19(5), pp.503-517. middlebrook, r. d. (1994a) scrolls are the foundation [online]. available at: http://www.textmapping.org/scrolls.html (accessed: 22 august 2018). middlebrook, r. d. (1994b) using scrolls [online]. available at: http://www.textmapping.org/using.html (accessed: 18 august 2018). middlebrook, r. d. (1994c) the benefits of scrolls and textmapping [online]. available at: http://www.textmapping.org/benefits.html (accessed: 17 august 2018). middlebrook, r.d. (1994d) making a scroll [online]. available at: http://www.textmapping.org/making.html (accessed: 22 august 2018). http://litreview.pbworks.com/w/page/18059710/frontpage http://litreview.pbworks.com/w/page/18059717/this%20link http://www.learnhigher.ac.uk/ https://www.londonmet.ac.uk/about/our-university/university-publications/key-statistics/ https://www.londonmet.ac.uk/about/our-university/university-publications/key-statistics/ http://www.textmapping.org/scrolls.html http://www.textmapping.org/using.html http://www.textmapping.org/benefits.html http://www.textmapping.org/making.html abegglen, burns, middlebrook, sinfield unrolling the text: using scrolls to facilitate academic reading journal of learning development in higher education, issue 14: april 2019 11 middlebrook, r. d. (1999) comments from educators and students [online]. available at: http://www.textmapping.org/comments.html (accessed: 17 august 2018). middlebrook, r. d. (2015) why use scrolls? [online]. available at http://www.textmapping.org/whyusescrolls.pdf (accessed 17 august 2018). middlebrook, r.d. (2018) overview of textmapping [online]. available at: http://www.textmapping.org/overview.html (accessed: 04 december 2018). onions, c. t. (ed.) (1994) the oxford dictionary of english etymology, oxford: clarendon press. rogers, c. r. (1959) ‘a theory of therapy, personality, and interpersonal relationships as developed in the client-centered framework’, pp.184-256, in koch, s. (ed.) psychology: a study of a science, (vol. 3, formulations of the person and the social context), new york: mcgraw hill. sinfield, s., burns, t. and holley, d. (2004) ‘outsiders looking in or insiders looking out? widening participation in a post-1992 university chapter’, pp.137-152, in satterthwaite, j., atkinson, e. and martin, w. (ed.) the disciplining of education: new languages of power and resistance, stoke on trent: trentham books. author details sandra abegglen was formerly senior lecturer and course leader ba hons education studies at london metropolitan university, united kingdom and is currently an independent academic based in calgary, canada. tom burns is senior lecturer in education and learning development in the centre for professional and educational development (cped) at london metropolitan university, united kingdom. http://www.textmapping.org/comments.html http://www.textmapping.org/whyusescrolls.pdf http://www.textmapping.org/overview.html abegglen, burns, middlebrook, sinfield unrolling the text: using scrolls to facilitate academic reading journal of learning development in higher education, issue 14: april 2019 12 david middlebrook invented the textmapping method and pioneered the use of scrolls and textmapping for classroom instruction. he has been collaborating in classrooms and conducting workshops for teachers since 1994. sandra sinfield is senior lecturer in the centre for professional and educational development (cped) at london metropolitan university, united kingdom. unrolling the text: using scrolls to facilitate academic reading abstract this case study shows how we have used textscrolls to address academic reading in our facilitating student learning postgraduate module. we outline how we explored with staff the potential of the textscroll to offer a more welcoming, accessible, colla... introduction academic reading – an issue of social justice scrolls vs conventional academic text formats our pgcert: how we unrolled the text what the lecturer did: the case study within in conclusion references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 12: november 2017 incorporating augmented reality to enrich student learning ronan t. bree dundalk institute of technology, ireland abstract learning in higher education is now performed across several dimensions, for example: face-to-face in the classroom or practical sessions; engaging with reusable learning objects; online distance learning and virtual learning environments, all represent significant ‘places’ of learning. with the advent of technology, the incorporation of multimedia resources to complement lecture theory/practical applications is increasingly evident in modules and programmes. however, with these advances come excessive supplementary digital resources that are available to students, often across multiple platforms. the resources can become separated from relevant lecture notes and this disconnection represents a potential block to learning. augmented reality (ar) addresses this concern. through activation via a ‘trigger’ image placed in a printed handout, students can engage with specific multimedia content in real-time, and more importantly at the appropriate part of their course. examples of these multimedia resources are pre-existing online, or customised electronic sketch, videos. each can be made available for repeat viewings at a later stage, empowering students and benefiting self-paced learning and revision. here, the role and benefit of ar in empowering students with regard to their learning and the steps needed to introduce ar are discussed. keywords: technology enhanced learning; augmented reality; reusable learning object; aurasma; quick response code. introduction complementing lectures, today’s students are often provided with course material/resources on virtual learning environments (vles) (demian and morrice, 2012). vle’s allow immediate mobile access to view and print online content, in addition to other bree incorporating augmented reality to enrich student learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 2 features. however in our digital era, this can have limitations students may become overwhelmed with large numbers of digital resources and references in vles, finding them difficult to handle (gordon, 2014). with excessive circulation of hyperlinks, online resources residing in multiple locations on top of handwritten lecture notes, students have to spend time locating specific resources and linking them to relevant sections of lecture handouts. hence it may be difficult for students to find relevant material for learning when they are studying or revising a particular topic when they need it most. essentially, learning materials can become separated from each other, with deep learning potentially impacted. to avoid such scenarios, educators should consider the processes they use, consistency across these methods and tools to simplify how students will access this material when needed. supporting learning with technology there are numerous reports outlining the importance of technology to enrich the teaching and learning experience while supporting personalised learning (kihlén and waligorski, 2003; brouwer and mcdonnell, 2009; mayer et al., 2009; dunne and ryan, 2012; boylan, 2014; eu commission, 2014; bright et al., 2015; national forum for the enhancement of teaching and learning in higher education, 2015; y1feedback, 2016). digital applications have the power to engage and motivate learners, assess knowledge and understanding, provide feedback in different formats and provide instant access to a world of accessible theory (dervan, 2014; y1feedback, 2016). however, it is important technology is viewed as a means to encourage or support learning and have an impact, rather than be included to add ‘bells and whistles’ to a module (light et al., 2009). multimedia/video access as part of face-to-face lectures, in addition to providing lecture handouts, educators regularly utilise multimedia technology resources to support or enable learning. the use of video in particular has the power to grab students’ attention and motivate learning (whatley & ahmad, 2007; chua et al., 2015). learners regularly refer to instructional videos online for demonstrations and procedural guidance (chan, 2010). many educators identify online video resources to assist their teaching, while others create their own customised videos with robust effect (dunne et al., 2015). in most cases, educators provide post-lecture access to multimedia objects via vles or e-mail circulation of bree incorporating augmented reality to enrich student learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 3 hyperlinks. the intention is to allow self-paced learning to occur via electronic devices. there is a limitation to this approach; if each module educator circulates 10 hyperlinks to multimedia video clips over the course of their module, and the student has 4 modules, this amounts to 40 hyperlinks. some may reside on a youtube channel, some circulated as hyperlinks via e-mail or social media and others uploaded to a vle. for a student to have the ability to search and easily retrieve specific information online when needed can be challenging and we have to consider this limitation and identify a solution. when a student is reviewing a particular topic prior to an exam, a large-scale search operation has to take place. the students have class handouts and their handwritten notes in front of them yet have to search through multiple online locations for the relevant digital resource complementing the topic of interest. in the case of hyperlinks, they don’t contain many identifiable clues in their addresses. while there are beneficial avenues for learners and educators to manage increasing number of hyperlinks, for example ‘diigo’ (diigo, 2017) which allows you to keyword label/tag and subsequently search bookmarks in your account (glynn, 2016), these still fail to directly link the digital content to the relevant paper-based handouts/notes. hence, educators need to consider this issue and implement solutions – one of which could involve augmented reality (ar) technology. engaging with augmented reality (ar) ar combines virtual and real-world entities allowing them to interact in real time (azuma 1997; garrett et al., 2015). in using ar, virtual objects such as computer graphics can be superimposed or overlaid on real-life ‘triggers’ (lukosch et al., 2015). with ar technology, any one-dimensional object can be brought to life, with a new dimension being added, providing its role in student learning with significant potential. while ar adds a new dimension to many walks of life, in education it can provide support and opportunities for communication, learning and understanding (atherton et al., 2013; enyedy et al., 2015; pauly et al., 2015; mcmahon et al., 2016). implementing ar technology as mentioned above, in this digital age, there can be concerns around providing students with large numbers of digital resources/hyperlinks to assist their understanding across programmes. what students critically need is the opportunity to access appropriate video resources at the appropriate time – this is crucial for enabling learning and understanding, bree incorporating augmented reality to enrich student learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 4 facilitating assimilation and synthesis of information. this streamlining process can maintain attention, improve understanding and reduce time spent trawling through: hyperlinks; vle pages; youtube channels and e-mail inboxes. the integration of ar technology, using apps such as aurasma (aurasma, 2017), can help achieve this goal. aurasma is a freely available app that can be installed on any smartphone. users can set up a free account online and ‘follow’ various contributors. the app uses its camera function to scan triggers, referred to as ‘auras’ (these are images selected and provided by the educator). once the camera/scanner identifies an ‘aura’ trigger, the appropriate video will play within the app, appearing to ‘float’ above the image being scanned. this is incredibly powerful, as students can access relevant videos for specific topics at the correct time – all directly from their handout or lecture notes. it represents a method for adding structure/organisation of electronic resources. here, the learner can reap the true intended benefit of the educator including the technology in their teaching and synthesise the information. customised videos, or online resources can be linked to via the aurasma app and this can enrich the learning potential of any printed handout. i introduced ar with undergraduate science students to enrich the teaching and learning of complex scientific processes. eight videos were recorded (figure 1 details the technical approaches required for any educator wishing to implement a similar approach with customised sketch videos). these reusable learning objects were comprised primarily of customised electronic sketches recorded on an ipad pro. from a student viewpoint, the immediate availability of multimedia resources during and after lectures, complementing and enhancing understanding was a welcome addition. during exam preparations, the easily accessed videos represented an ideal revision tool. correct positioning of the ‘trigger’ image at the appropriate position in lecture notes empowered the student, allowing viewing of complementary multimedia resources in the right context, essentially bringing the handouts ‘to life’ and fulfilling deeper understanding. bree incorporating augmented reality to enrich student learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 5 figure 1. a technical overview of the implementation process of ar for customised videos. certain apps are required to:  record and edit your video (explain everything).  upload and store your final video file (dropbox).  set up the trigger image/video (aurasma). download the free 'aurasma', 'explain everything' and 'dropbox' apps to an ipad pro tablet device & set up accounts online where appropriate. use 'explain everything' app on an ipad pro with an apple pencil to record a customised electronic sketch video (or identify a hyperlink to an appropriate online resource). if a customised video has been created, export the video as an .mp4 file to your dropbox account. identify or draw an image that will be used as a 'trigger' image in the lecture handout to activate the playing of the video. upload the recorded .mp4 video file and corresponding 'trigger' image to your aurasma account and ensure the video is set to public (rather than private) to allow others to use. pilot videos/technology with a sample student group to identify any concerns or areas of improvements so enhancements can occur in future videos. invite students to download the free aurasma app, set up a user account and 'follow' your account (note they must follow your account to see your videos). provide students with print out of 'trigger' images (or label on slide handouts provided as a trigger image) students will now be able to activate playing of the video using the 'trigger' image. bree incorporating augmented reality to enrich student learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 6 to experience ar, simply download the free ‘aurasma’ app on a smartphone, set up a free account, follow the account named ‘ronanbree’ and scan over the image in figure 2 (shown below) with the app’s camera facility. the appropriate video can then be seen on the smartphone screen. (the video describes the events that occur during the scientific process of dna replication). figure 2. engaging with augmented reality using aurasma. lecturer experience/viewpoint from my point of view, the aurasma software was extremely user-friendly. incorporating the use of an apple ipad pro and apple pencil allowed me to create customised, bespoke electronic sketch videos. these bespoke videos gave me editorial control of content, aligned to the focus of key topics covered in my lectures. for anyone considering aurasma, some key aspects to consider before getting started would be the orientation of the video (portrait vs. landscape), the quality of the sound playback, the length of the video and the use of customised bespoke sketches versus professionally recorded online resources. as mentioned in figure 1, i would recommend firstly engaging with a sample learner group to obtain feedback on their viewing/format/preferences. my current goal is to generate and include a wider selection of videos and triggers in lecture handouts, allowing further video viewing alongside relevant course content. another recommendation for educators is to upload any completed videos to a youtube channel playlist in parallel. this will avoid any frustration for students with an incompatible mobile device (garrett et al., 2015). bree incorporating augmented reality to enrich student learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 7 one limitation encountered was the requirement for students to set up accounts and follow the educator’s account. while this can be bypassed by a “significant software investment” for a ‘universal aura’, the software providers say this feature is designed for “major campaigns with large exposure” (aurasma, 2017). however, there are alternatives i am piloting now that possess many of the advantages to the ar approach mentioned above. implementing quick response (qr) codes in lecture handouts will allow students to use free smartphone apps to scan the square shaped barcode, and be ‘brought’ to the corresponding website/youtube video with the information of interest (for an example of this, download a qr scanning app to your smartphone and scan the qr code in figure 3 to view a learning and teaching animation video created by the author). figure 3. using qr barcodes to bring learners to specific online content. with the introduction of any technology-based approach, another limitation can be the need for expensive equipment. a solution to this is often the use of a smartphone for video capture and editing. the initial investment of time represents the most significant limitation; needed for planning, recording/editing content before uploading and piloting same. in my opinion, the payoff for the investment of time and resource from an educator perspective reaps its reward by enriching learning, helping students access content efficiently, improving understanding and offering hands-on demonstrations of skills, techniques or procedures. ar will be part of our future – now is the time to embrace it in our learning environments. conclusion the days of spending an entire lecture transcribing notes from an overhead are well and truly behind us. in a digital era, students are living in a world of expanding volumes of information. with material spread across numerous sources, retrieval is resource intensive for students and may confuse, preventing important resources from being located, hampering learning. the structured integration of ar allows students to engage with bree incorporating augmented reality to enrich student learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 8 appropriate multimedia efficiently in handouts in class, or at a later stage. this approach allows student self-paced learning to occur, while providing an easy way to access the multimedia resource. ar technology can allow us to trigger instructional videos on pieces of equipment, additional information on background theory or links to practical/clinical skills videos etc. in summary, the introduction of ar in education environments is worth considering, and represents a student-friendly technology intervention that can assist in developing learning and understanding in this new digital era. acknowledgements the author would like to acknowledge funding which was received from the ‘what, works and why’ initiative which ran in dundalk institute of technology, dublin city university, athlone institute of technology and maynooth university sponsored by the national forum for the enhancement of teaching and learning in higher education. references atherton, s., javed, m., webster, s. v and hemington-gorse, s. (2013) 'use of a mobile device app: a potential new tool for poster presentations and surgical education', journal of visual communication in medicine, 36(1-2), pp. 6-11. http://dx.doi.org/10.3109/17453054.2013.790794 aurasma (2017) aurasma (version: 5.1.2) [mobile application software]. available at: http://www.aurasma.com (accessed: 17 february 2017). azuma, r. (1997) 'a survey of augmented reality', presence: teleoperators and virtual environments, 6(4), pp. 355-385. http://dx.doi.org/10.1162/pres.1997.6.4.355 boylan, f. (2014) the 12 apps of christmas 2014. available at: https://the12appsofchristmas.wordpress.com/ (accessed 23 april 2016). bright, p., lord, b., forbes, h., oprescu, f., barr, n., downer, t., phillips, n.m., mctier, l., simbag, v. and alla, k. (2015) 'expert in my pocket: creating first person pov http://dx.doi.org/10.3109/17453054.2013.790794 http://www.aurasma.com/ http://dx.doi.org/10.1162/pres.1997.6.4.355 https://the12appsofchristmas.wordpress.com/ bree incorporating augmented reality to enrich student learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 9 videos to enhance mobile learning', proceedings of the 2015 the higher education technology agenda conference. gold coast, queensland 11-13 may. brouwer, n. and mcdonnell, c. (2009) 'online support and online assessment for teaching and learning chemistry', in eliks, i. and byers, b. (eds.) innovative methods of teaching and learning chemistry in higher education. london: rsc, pp.123-152. chan, y.m. (2010) video instructions as support for beyond classroom learning. procedia social and behavioral sciences, 9, pp. 1313-1318. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.sbspro.2010.12.326 chua, k.h., oh, m.y., wee, l.k. and tan, c. (2015) multimedia-video for learning. available at: http://arxiv.org/abs/1502.01090 (accessed: 24 september 2017). demian, p. and morrice, j. (2012) 'the use of virtual learning environments and their impact on academic performance', engineering education, 7(1), pp. 11-19. available at: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.11120/ened.2012.07010011 (accessed: 24 september 2017). dervan, p. (2014) 'increasing in-class student engagement using socrative (an online student response system)', the all ireland journal of teaching and learning in higher education, 6(3), p.180;1-180;13 [online]. available at: http://ojs.aishe.org/index.php/aishe-j/article/view/180 (accessed: 24 september 2017). diigo (2017) diigo (version 3.3.78) [online software]. available at: https://www.diigo.com/ (accessed: 24 september 2017). dunne, j. and ryan, b. (2012) 'learning in the science lab: a new approach', irish journal of academic practice, 1(1), pp. 1-18 [online]. available at: http://arrow.dit.ie/ijap/vol1/iss1/2 (accessed: 24 september 2017). dunne, k., brereton, b., bree, r. and dallat, j. (2015) 'integrating customised video clips into the veterinary nursing curriculum to enhance practical competency training and http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.sbspro.2010.12.326 http://arxiv.org/abs/1502.01090 http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.11120/ened.2012.07010011 http://ojs.aishe.org/index.php/aishe-j/article/view/180 https://www.diigo.com/ http://arrow.dit.ie/ijap/vol1/iss1/2 bree incorporating augmented reality to enrich student learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 10 the development of student confidence', the all ireland journal of teaching and learning in higher education, 7(3), pp. 258;1-258;25 [online]. available at: http://ojs.aishe.org/index.php/aishe-j/article/view/258 (accessed: 24 september 2017). enyedy, n., danish, j.a. and deliema, d. (2015) constructing liminal blends in a collaborative augmented-reality learning environment, international journal of computer-supported collaborative learning, 10(1), pp. 7–34. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11412-015-9207-1 eu commission (2014) the changing pedagogical landscape. available at: http://www.changingpedagogicallandscapes.eu/publications/ (accessed: 24 september 2017). garrett, b.m., jackson, c. and wilson, b. (2015) 'augmented reality m-learning to enhance nursing skills acquisition in the clinical skills laboratory', interactive technology and smart education, 12(4), pp. 298–314. http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/itse-05-2015-0013 glynn, m. (2016) t1 step: organisational tools: using diigo and other social media tools to support learning. limerick institute of technology, take 1 step roadshow, 15 march [video]. available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=orhm0rxsz8s (accessed: 24 september 2017). gordon, n. (2014) 'flexible pedagogies: technology-enhanced learning' [online] the higher education academy. available at: https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/knowledgehub/flexible-pedagogies-technology-enhanced-learning (accessed: 24 september 2017). kihlén, m. and waligorski, m. (2003) 'electronic lab notebooks a crossroads is passed'. drug discovery today, 8(22), pp. 1007–1009. https://doi.org/10.1016/s13596446(03)02887-3 http://ojs.aishe.org/index.php/aishe-j/article/view/258 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11412-015-9207-1 http://www.changingpedagogicallandscapes.eu/publications/ http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/itse-05-2015-0013 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=orhm0rxsz8s https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/knowledge-hub/flexible-pedagogies-technology-enhanced-learning https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/knowledge-hub/flexible-pedagogies-technology-enhanced-learning https://doi.org/10.1016/s1359-6446(03)02887-3 https://doi.org/10.1016/s1359-6446(03)02887-3 bree incorporating augmented reality to enrich student learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 11 light, g., calkins, s. and cox, r. (2009) learning and teaching in higher education: the reflective professional. london: sage publications ltd. lukosch, s., billinghurst, m., alem, l. and kiyokawa, k. (2015) 'collaboration in augmented reality', computer supported cooperative work, 24(6), pp. 515–525. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10606-015-9239-0 mayer, r.e., stull, a., deleeuw, k., almeroth, k., bimber, b., chun, d., bulger, m., campbell, j., knight, a. and zhang, h. (2009) 'clickers in college classrooms: fostering learning with questioning methods in large lecture classes', contemporary educational psychology, 34(1), pp. 51–57. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cedpsych.2008.04.002 mcmahon, d.d., cihak, d.f., wright, r.e. and bell, s.m. (2016) 'augmented reality for teaching science vocabulary to postsecondary education students with intellectual disabilities and autism', journal of research on technology in education, 48(1), pp. 38-56. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15391523.2015.1103149 national forum for the enhancement of teaching and learning in higher education (2015) teaching and learning in irish higher education: a roadmap for enhancement in a digital world 2015-2017. available at: http://www.teachingandlearning.ie/wpcontent/uploads/2015/03/digital-roadmap-web.pdf (accessed: 23 february 2017). pauly, o., diotte, b., fallavollita, p., weidert, s., euler, e. and navab, n. (2015) 'machine learning-based augmented reality for improved surgical scene understanding', computerized medical imaging and graphics, 41, pp. 55–60. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.compmedimag.2014.06.007 whatley, j. and ahmad, a. (2007) 'using video to record summary lectures to aid students’ revision', interdisciplinary journal of knowledge and learning objects, 3, pp. 185196. available at: http://www.ijklo.org/volume3/ijklov3p185-196whatley367.pdf (accessed: 24 september 2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10606-015-9239-0 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cedpsych.2008.04.002 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15391523.2015.1103149 http://www.teachingandlearning.ie/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/digital-roadmap-web.pdf http://www.teachingandlearning.ie/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/digital-roadmap-web.pdf http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.compmedimag.2014.06.007 http://www.ijklo.org/volume3/ijklov3p185-196whatley367.pdf bree incorporating augmented reality to enrich student learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 12 y1feedback (2016) technology-enabled feedback in the first year: a synthesis of the literature. available at: http://y1feedback.ie/synthesisoftheliterature/ (accessed: 23 february 2017). author details dr. ronan bree is a biochemist/molecular biologist with a strong research background in embryo developmental genetics and dna damage/cancer research. dr. bree possesses an ma in learning and teaching and is an established researcher in the area of assessment both the in classroom and the practical laboratory. http://y1feedback.ie/synthesisoftheliterature/ incorporating augmented reality to enrich student learning abstract introduction supporting learning with technology multimedia/video access engaging with augmented reality (ar) implementing ar technology conclusion acknowledgements references author details literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 12: november 2017 optimising disruptive approaches: extending academic roles and identities in higher education anne quinney bournemouth university, uk carly lamont bournemouth university, uk david biggins bournemouth university, uk debbie holley bournemouth university, uk abstract responding to the changing landscape of higher education (he) requires the development and implementation of flexible and imaginative approaches to continually inspire, engage and support academics and professional services staff in delivering high quality studentcentred learning experiences. at bournemouth university (bu), the cross-university centre for excellence in learning (cel) was created to promote, support and co-ordinate pedagogic initiatives and embed the explicit valuing of teaching and learning into all aspects of university life. it represents a collaborative, inter-disciplinary and transdisciplinary model with multiple stakeholder voices. operationalised through the secondment of academics two days a week, and taking a thematic approach, theme leaders ‘bid’ for the secondment, and drive forward an agreed agenda. the bu ‘fusion’ corporate strategy promotes clear links between pedagogy, professional practice and research, complemented by the current cel themes of: employability; innovation in technology enhanced learning and innovative pedagogies; assessment and feedback. we believe that the sustainability and creativity required to deliver this agenda are promoted through the building of strong networks, the sharing of challenges and the collaborative development of solutions, however, as academics moving into the realms of learning development, our roles and identities are constantly being challenged, contested, quinney et al. optimising disruptive approaches journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 2 and reframed by the responses of peers, students and our wider disciplinary roots. this paper offers a model for mapping and managing change and optimising these and other ‘disruptive’ practices within he institutional settings, and considers the flexible and blended academic identities that facilitate this approach. keywords: academic roles; academic identities; education innovation; leading change. introduction higher education (he) has undergone a transformation of the context within which universities operate (bis, 2015; offa, 2015; dcm and bis, 2016). as predicted by noble (2002) in his seminal work, digital diploma mills; the reification and commodification of he led to policies of ‘massification’. in the uk, pressure has come from governments requiring more direct inputs into the economy and society, leading to the introduction of professionally qualifying ‘newly -academic’ programmes, such as social work, nursing, business studies and teaching (findlow, 2012). the ever-increasing horizontal reach of he and the notion of lifelong learning (churchman and king, 2009) has led to an even greater diversification of the student body, driven by a changing population with more varied aspirations. newer professions and occupational groups seeking recognition and status have strived to become degree bearing bodies (henkel, 2010). thus, privatisation, increased means of controlling expenditure, along with more stringent forms of accountability, have been imposed on he (lamont and nordberg, 2014).these changes have put pressure on he institutions to take greater responsibility for their futures, forcing them to secure additional sources of income and recruit new student populations (henkel, 2010). this had led universities to reconsider their approaches and priorities in terms of excellence in research and teaching, and at bournemouth university (bu) these are positioned as part of the tri-part ‘fusion’ strategy, encompassing and ‘fusing’ research, education and professional practice (see figure 1). fusion is a concept at the heart of the university strategy, combining inspirational teaching, internationally-acknowledged research and exemplary professional practice to create a continuous and productive exchange of knowledge. quinney et al. optimising disruptive approaches journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 3 this approach has led to the creation of the centre for excellence in learning (cel), tasked with harnessing pedagogic synergies across the university, inspiring new research and sharing best practice. figure 1. the fusion triangle. established three years ago, the mission of cel is to make a significant contribution to the fusion strategy by enhancing the student learning experience across the university. it seeks to do this by: developing and supporting collaborative communities to inspire excellence in learning practice across bu and elsewhere; supporting an innovative and creative environment, enabling staff to creatively use new purpose-built learning spaces; building strong mechanisms for sharing good educational practice; and adding value to existing pedagogical practice. through channeling the energy, knowledge and experience of academic and professional service staff, cel provides a focal point for leadership, direction and support to improve and innovate education practice. cel is structured to enable it to focus resources and attention on three key areas of learning and teaching: assessment and feedback; work-based learning and employability; and technology enhanced learning (tel). the cel team, working collaboratively, support pedagogic research and evaluation leading to high quality outputs that have significant impact within and beyond the university. their acknowledged commitment to teaching and learning development is reflected in requests for them to provide consultancy (in the form of interactive workshops) to teams, departments and faculties engaged in educational change and development. quinney et al. optimising disruptive approaches journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 4 the cel themes the assessment and feedback theme promotes best practice and excellence in the assessment of students’ work and the provision of timely and developmental feedback to inform future learning, working in partnership with faculties and the students’ union to review and rewrite institutional policy and develop and disseminate innovative and effective assessment practices. the work-based learning and employability theme recognises the importance of understanding the employment landscape so that successful practices can be developed and shared to inform teaching, and staff can engage in the pedagogy of employment. the technology enhanced learning (tel) theme seeks to harness available technologies to develop the competencies and confidence of staff, and to engage and enthuse students in their studies. all three themes have associated sponsored projects, research and publications, and working across the themes acknowledges the interconnectedness and symbiosis of teaching and learning in higher education intuitions (heis). the themes provide focus for teaching and learning activity within the university and enable cel to deliver the education/pedagogy component of the fusion triangle. cel promotes inspirational teaching, internationally-acknowledged research, and developments in academic practice to create a continuous and productive exchange of knowledge to generate and promote innovative ideas in teaching and learning practices, with theme leaders acting as change agents. influenced by the ideas of boyer (1990) on the scholarship of teaching and learning, in which academics reflect on and research their own practice, the cel approach is: collaborative, entailing working alongside, enthusing and inspiring colleagues and students; interdisciplinary, through the sharing of ideas between disciplines to generate new solutions; and transdisciplinary, in the focusing on pedagogic ideas and principles common to all staff and which transcend disciplinary boundaries. integral to the approach is the notion of social justice by which transformation is achieved through critical engagement, authentic learning experiences, and reciprocity (leibowitz and bozalek, 2015). examples include the provision of departmental consultations and workshops on assessment and feedback, employing interactive group work practices; the development of a technology enhanced learning toolkit; collaborative working with the students’ union to tackle seemingly intractable ‘wicked’ problems (rittel and webber, 1973) in relation to assessment and feedback; pedagogic co-creation projects, including employing students as technology trainers to support academics in becoming more adept with new quinney et al. optimising disruptive approaches journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 5 technologies to support learning and teaching; knowledge-exchange activities, including staff development for staff delivering ‘he in fe’; input into the post-graduate diploma in educational practice programme for academic staff; and a celebrate week showcasing innovation, new ideas and inspirational guest speakers. the university peer assisted learning (pal) mentoring scheme ensures that all students begin work placement with an improved understanding of professional workplace behaviours, thereby ensuring the university retains its reputation with placement and graduate employers. we drew upon the experiences of pal schemes within other he institutions, particularly those that had successfully scaffolded the use of peer learning to support employability (keenan, 2014). model of change the model of educational innovation underpinning our work is adapted from that proposed by hutchings and quinney (2015) (figure 2) which articulates the process of negotiating complexity as a triple helix, with research orientations, education strategies, and technology affordances as the three strands which have the potential to trigger transformation. these three strands share synergies with the bu cel priorities. building on earlier work (hutchings et al., 2010; 2013a; 2013b), hutchings and quinney (2015, p.108) recognise and explore the challenges that change agents face when researchinformed educational initiatives are ‘experienced as too uncomfortable, too difficult or simply too unwelcome and therefore resisted or rejected’, or where academics may be ‘uncertain, unconvinced or indifferent’ about educational initiatives (hutchings et al., 2010, p.201) and have proposed strategies for negotiating the complexity of the higher education environment, with the aim of achieving optimum disruption (hutchings et al., 2010). whilst this model was developed in the context of a health and social care curriculum, the model is transferable to other disciplines and to university-wide settings, acknowledging that in any context there will be expected and unexpected outcomes to negotiate. seemingly competing agendas or strategies can be negotiated by employing one or more of the effective processes advocated in the model. quinney et al. optimising disruptive approaches journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 6 figure 2. hutchings and quinney (2015). in the work of cel, research orientations focus on pedagogic research, new education strategies are pioneered, evaluated or disseminated, and the technology affordances are utilised in the technology enhanced learning toolkit developed by one of the theme leaders. triggers for educational transformation support effective student learning, academic role transitions and the organisational change required to introduce and sustain an excellent teaching and learning environment. these triggers, in the form of cel theme leader activities, seek to positively disrupt the current culture and develop agility and resilience to provide a student-centred educational experience. in the context of cel, the staff and student engagement is supported by a weekly blog, cocreation projects, collaborative working, team and departmental consultations, and masterclasses, rather than the questionnaires and focus groups utilised by hutchings and quinney (2015). the literature on academic identities is useful here to help understand the tensions created by introducing new initiatives into an environment that is in constant flux. as other research suggests (baruch and hall, 2004; navis and glynn, 2011), changing organisational conditions or cultures creates role conflicts (in this case, for academics) that continue to unsettle or disrupt both individuals and the organisations in which they work. the role of an academic has extended significantly as organisational changes have become established, requiring academics to contribute to institutional research and development, enterprise and community partnership, as well as teaching and learning. quinney et al. optimising disruptive approaches journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 7 involvement in this diverse range of groups and activities often presents an overlap, which has implications for the identities of the staff involved (gordon and whitchurch, 2010). delanty (2008) argues that pressure to perform a variety of roles leads to an individual developing multiple (sometimes conflicting) identities. there lies the potential for incongruence between self-identity (an individual’s personal identity), the collective identity of a group, and the demands of the organisation. he adds, universities ‘do not easily articulate a collective identity that is capable of acknowledging the numerous identity projects that arise within it’ (delanty, 2008, p.126) often resulting in identity conflicts. for clarification, an identity project, according to giddens (1991), is one that has no end point, being continuous and reflexive, representing an on-going effort to make sense of who we are (geijsel and meijers, 2005). in the case of cel, the theme leaders are seconded parttime to the role and retain their discipline focus in their respective faculties, with the linkages being represented by their active engagement in pedagogic initiatives and research activities in each of their distinct roles. the contemporary field of academia is a contested one involving a continuous struggle with the representations its agents have of it (archer, 2008; delanty, 2008, gordon and whitchurch, 2010). organisational members may well have opposing views about what it means (or might mean) to be an academic and hold various conflicting interests and identity constructions. while research reputation has undoubtedly become a priority within he, as articulated in the research assessment framework, the requirement to generate income has also permeated the role of academic staff, encouraging individuals to secure independent commercial ventures. for growing numbers, academic work is internally scrutinised, both administratively and academically, with pay progression and job tenure being performance dependent. archer (2008, p.386) contends this recent shift in priorities has created ‘new forms of relationships, knowledge and academic labour’ and the concept of the ‘corporate’ university which, according to archer (2008), henkel (2005; 2010) and dent and whitehead (2002), has the potential to disrupt what it means to be an academic and what constitutes academic work. what it means to be an academic is interesting in itself and williams (2008) invites us to question whether or not academe can be considered a profession and, if so, where the professionalism of academics may lie? he also asks, are academics professionals as discipline experts or as educators? the cel theme leaders arguably occupy both domains quinney et al. optimising disruptive approaches journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 8 adding to the complexity of understanding the role and identity of academics, baruch and hall (2004, p.6) suggest changing conditions often lead to a greater awareness of identity and how ‘this may be shaped by individual academic interests or by the interests of the institution’. clearly, a significant redefinition of the academic profession has taken place, leaving some organisational members struggling with the ‘regimes of performativity’ (archer, 2008, p.392) whilst attempting to make sense of who they are and the multiple roles they are to assume. traditionally academics may have been reluctant to undertake pedagogic rather than subject-based research out of concern for the opportunities for career progression, or to identify with learning and teaching advancements as their primary focus. nevertheless, with increasing numbers of doctor of education or professional doctorate routes being offered, these identifies are being reshaped and valued, and the fusion agenda provides career progression routes which recognise the importance of pedagogic practice and pedagogic research. graham (2012) has drawn attention to changing academic identities and roles as the he sector changes in response to government initiatives and economic realities, creating the potential for discordance between individual practices and organisational policy. however, an optimistic view is that within these spaces and intersections exists the opportunities for creativity and transformation (smith, 2010) and these ideas are central to the work of cel. encapsulated in barnett’s work is heidegger’s (heidegger 2002, cited barnett, 2007) belief that the questions of ‘being’ and of ‘value’ are brought together in the university. whilst university ‘top down’ policies refocus our efforts on the student experience, in the contemporary context of external scrutiny, through league tables and the national student survey, barnett (2007, p.3), in his philosophically orientated text, asks us to consider ‘what forms of ‘student experience’ are likely to prompt a student’s continuing engagement with her studies’. this question is informed by an arguably radical perspective which requires the individual student to be the focus, and whilst working in partnership with the students’ union at bu it is important not to lose sight of individual student experiences and voices, in a consideration of the whole. collaborative conversations with colleagues from other institutions tell us that the triggers for change experienced at bu are common in the he sector and include on a national scale the introduction of the teaching excellence framework, (tef) alongside the research excellence framework (ref). on an institutional level, the strategic plan which articulates the priorities and future trajectory of the institution has an impact on the ability quinney et al. optimising disruptive approaches journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 9 of the wider staff team to feel equipped to deliver these objectives (biggins et al., 2016). this requires individual and organisational agility and resilience to facilitate the emergence of new staff roles and identities. in doing so, the rapid increase in technology enhanced learning (tel) must be recognised, and the resultant changing relationships between staff who increasingly occupy a wider range of roles, and between staff and students. in one cel project, identities and roles are being reversed, as students are acknowledged as occupying a more expert role in technology and are employed to train and support academics in becoming more adept with new technologies to support learning and teaching. changing identities and blurring of boundaries, whereby academic identities are continually being revised and new spaces occupied, are being recognised with the notion of a ‘blended academic’, whose role might span academic and professional domains within a university, with a mixed portfolio of roles and for whom strong lateral networks are important, both within and outside the host university (whitchurch, 2008). these notions fit well with the cel theme leader roles, with the emphasis on teaching and learning practices and pedagogic research as an alternative career route to the traditional subject research-focused career trajectories. the optimal disruptions were seen as situationally driven in the study by hutchings et al. (2010) and across the sector it is common for staff to be working in an environment of continuous disruptive practices. cel-supported incentives may encourage staff to develop their identities and extend their professional boundaries in the form of teaching and learning fellowships; recognition of their teaching and learning development through accredited post-graduate diploma programmes; higher education academy fellowship; acknowledgment of pedagogic practice development and research in a career progression framework; and to occupy what whitchurch (2008) refers to as a third space, where creativity is encouraged in a supportive and stimulating environment. conclusion negotiating and merging multiple identities of ‘teacher/lecturer’, ‘researcher’ and of learning technologist, whilst raising the profile of and celebrating pedagogic research, is not without challenges. whilst barnett (2007) talked about being a student in an age of quinney et al. optimising disruptive approaches journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 10 uncertainty, it is equally challenging being an academic in uncertain times and with new frameworks to assess teaching quality as well as research quality. this requires institutional, departmental and team recognition of the centrality of the scholarship of teaching and learning if academic staff are to embrace and juggle effectively these new roles and identities. the work of cel signals to the wider university a recognition of and commitment to the scholarship of learning and teaching, which requires secure underpinning by individual, cultural and strategic shifts, and acknowledges that pedagogic research and practice is given parity with discipline specific research and practice. facilitating student-centred learning approaches within organisational and role transitions is a common challenge in the he sector and it cannot be assumed that staff or students will embrace change. returning to the work of hutchings et al. (2014, p.106), cel have adopted their strategies for negotiating the complexity of hei cultures and practices by developing a ‘shared vision, a robust team approach, the need for ongoing horizon scanning and application of soft skills’ to deliver ‘optimal disruption’. the cel approach is transferable to other institutions which seek to harness energy and provide leadership that inspires excellence in learning. references archer, l. (2008) ‘younger academics’ constructions of ‘authenticity’, ‘success’ and professional identity’, studies in higher education, 33(4), pp. 385-403. barnett, r. (2007) a will to learn. being a student in an age of uncertainty. maidenhead: oup/srhe. baruch, y. and hall, d.t. (2004) ‘the academic career: a model for future careers in other sectors?’, journal of vocational behavior, 64(2), pp. 241-62. biggins, d., quinney, a., lamont, c. and holley, d. (2016) ‘embedding the value of learning by extending professional boundaries’, aldinhe 2016: the learning development conference. heriot-watt university, edinburgh 21-23 march. quinney et al. optimising disruptive approaches journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 11 boyer, e. (1990) scholarship reconsidered: priorities of the professoriate. princeton nj: the carnegie foundation for the advancement of teaching. business innovation and skills (2015) fulfilling our potential: teaching excellence, social mobility and student choice. available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/4742 27/bis-15-623-fulfilling-our-potential-teaching-excellence-social-mobility-andstudent-choice.pdf accessed: 14 october 2017). churchman, d. and king, s. (2009) ‘academic practice in transition: hidden stories of academic identities’, teaching in higher education, 14(5), pp. 507-516. delanty, g. (2008) ‘academic identities and institutional change’, in barnett, r. and dinapoli, r. (eds.) changing identities in higher education: voicing perspectives. london: routledge, pp. 124-33. dent, m. and whitehead, s. (2002) managing professional identities: knowledge, performativity and the ‘new’ professional [kindle edition]. london and new york: routledge. department for culture, media and sport and department for business, innovation & skills (2016) digital skills for the uk economy. available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/digital-skills-for-the-uk-economy (accessed: 19 january 2016). findlow, s. (2012) ‘higher education change and professional-academic identity in newly ‘academic’ disciplines: the case of nurse education’, higher education, 63(1), pp. 117-133. geijsel, f. and meijers, f. (2005) ‘identity learning: the core process of educational change’, educational studies, 31(4), pp. 419-430. giddens, a. (1991) modernity and self-identity: self and society in the late modern age. cambridge: polity press. https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/474227/bis-15-623-fulfilling-our-potential-teaching-excellence-social-mobility-and-student-choice.pdf https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/474227/bis-15-623-fulfilling-our-potential-teaching-excellence-social-mobility-and-student-choice.pdf https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/474227/bis-15-623-fulfilling-our-potential-teaching-excellence-social-mobility-and-student-choice.pdf https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/department-for-culture-media-sport https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/department-for-business-innovation-skills https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/digital-skills-for-the-uk-economy quinney et al. optimising disruptive approaches journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 12 gordon, g. and whitchurch, c. (2010) academic and professional identities in higher education: the challenges of a diversifying workforce [kindle edition]. new york and london: routledge. graham, c. (2012) ‘transforming spaces and identities: the contribution of professional staff in learning spaces in higher education’, journal of higher education policy and management, 34(4), pp. 437-452. henkel, m. (2005) ‘academic identity and autonomy in a changing policy environment,’ higher education, 49(1-2), pp. 155-176. henkel, m. (2010) ‘change and continuity in academic and professional identities’, in gordon, g. and whitchurch, c. (eds.) academic and professional identities in higher education: the challenges of a diversifying workforce [kindle edition]. new york and london: routledge, pp. 3-12. hutchings, m. and quinney, a. (2015) ‘the flipped classroom, disruptive pedagogies, enabling technologies and wicked problems: responding to 'the bomb in the basement'’, electronic journal of e-learning, 13(2), pp. 106-119. hutchings, m., quinney, a. and galvin, k. (2014) ‘negotiating the triple helix: harnessing technology for transformation’, in yanez, t., rodriguez, o. and griffith, p. (eds.) proceedings of the 9th international conference on e-learning. technical university federico santa maría, valparaiso, chile 26-27 june. hutchings, m., quinney, a. and scammell, j. (2010) ‘the utility of disruptive technologies in interprofessional education: negotiating the substance and spaces of blended learning’, in bromage, a., clouder, l., thistlethwaite, j. and gordon, f. (eds.) interprofessional e-learning and collaborative work: practices and technologies. hershey pa: igi, pp. 190-203. hutchings, m., scammell, j. and quinney, a. (2013a) ‘praxis and reflexivity for interprofessional education: towards an inclusive theoretical framework for learning’, journal of interprofessional care, 27(5), pp. 358-366. quinney et al. optimising disruptive approaches journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 13 hutchings, m., quinney, a., galvin, k. and clark, v. (2013b) ‘the yin/yang of innovative technology enhanced assessment for promoting student learning’, in greener, s. (ed.) case studies in elearning research for researchers, teachers, and students. reading: academic publishing international, pp. 62-79. keenan, c. (2014) mapping student-led peer learning in the uk. york: higher education academy. available at: https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/sites/default/files/resources/peer_led_learning_keen an_nov_14-final.pdf (accessed: 16 march 2015). lamont, c. and nordberg, d. (2014) ‘becoming or unbecoming: contested academic identities’, british academy of management conference. belfast 9-11 september. leibowitz, b. and bozalek, v. (2015) the scholarship of teaching and learning from a social justice perspective. teaching in higher education. doi: 10.1080/13562517.2015.1115971. navis, c., and glynn, m.a. (2011) ‘legitimate distinctiveness and the entrepreneurial identity: influence on investor judgements of new venture plausibility’, academy of management review, 36(3), pp. 479-499. noble, d.f. (2002) ‘technology and the commodification of higher education’, monthly review, 53(10) [online]. available at: https://monthlyreview.org/2002/03/01/technology-and-the-commodification-ofhigher-education/ (accessed: 14 october 2017). office for fair access (offa) (2015) promoting fair access to higher education. available at: https://www.offa.org.uk/ (accessed: 14 october 2017). rittel, h.w.j. and webber, m.m. (1973) ‘dilemmas in a general theory of planning’, policy sciences, 4(2), pp. 155-169. smith, j. (2010) ‘academic identities for the twenty first century’, teaching in higher education, 15(6), pp. 721-727. https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/sites/default/files/resources/peer_led_learning_keenan_nov_14-final.pdf https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/sites/default/files/resources/peer_led_learning_keenan_nov_14-final.pdf https://monthlyreview.org/2002/03/01/technology-and-the-commodification-of-higher-education/ https://monthlyreview.org/2002/03/01/technology-and-the-commodification-of-higher-education/ https://www.offa.org.uk/ quinney et al. optimising disruptive approaches journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 14 whitchurch, c. (2008) ‘shifting identities and blurring boundaries: the emergence of third space professionals in uk higher education’, higher education quarterly, 62(4), pp. 377-396. williams, k. (2008) ‘troubling the concept of the ‘academic profession’ in the 21st century in higher education’, higher education, 56(5), pp. 533-544. author details anne quinney is the theme leader for innovative pedagogies, assessment and feedback in the centre for excellence in learning at bournemouth university. carly lamont is a lecturer in the faculty of management and previously the theme leader for employability and work-based learning in the centre for excellence in learning at bournemouth university. david biggins is an academic learning designer in the centre for excellence in learning at bournemouth university. debbie holley is professor of learning innovation and head of the centre for excellence in learning at bournemouth university. optimising disruptive approaches: extending academic roles and identities in higher education abstract introduction the cel themes model of change conclusion references department for culture, media and sport and department for business, innovation & skills (2016) digital skills for the uk economy. available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/digital-skills-for-the-uk-economy (accessed: 19 january 2016). author details theoretical perspectives on learning and teaching in higher education journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 2: february 2010 ‘very urgent, very difficult and quite possible’: changing students’ attitudes to notemaking by encouraging user generated content tom burns london metropolitan university, uk sandra sinfield london metropolitan university, uk debbie holley london metropolitan university, uk kate hoskins london metropolitan university, uk abstract as soon as one can no longer think things as one formerly thought them, transformation becomes both very urgent, very difficult and quite possible (foucault, 1980:154). this paper explores the role that notemaking strategies can play as part of an emancipatory pedagogy designed to empower students. we will argue that being taught active notemaking is fundamental in enabling students to use information with confidence and thus that notemaking allows students to gain a voice (bowl, 2005; burns et al., 2006) within their own education. rather than taking a psychological approach to notemaking, we suggest that notemaking allows students to take ownership of ideas and concepts in powerful ways (gibbs, 1994 cited burns and sinfield, 2004), ways that reinforce understanding and build knowledge. these processes and practices can essentially help students to learn what they want to learn – and, pragmatically, to write essays that are adequately researched and correctly referenced (burns and sinfield, 2004). the final focus will be on the collaborative burns, sinfield, holley and hoskins changing students’ attitudes to notemaking development of notemaker, a reusable learning object (rlo) designed for use across the university – and across the sector. setting the context debates over strategies such as the practice of notemaking tend to centre on memory: does notemaking improve the recall of significant information? (buzan, 1989; buzan and buzan, 1999) and/or result in behaviour change: does information in notes appear in assignments and examinations (sutherland, badger and white, 2002)? and our students do tend to want to learn and re-call information for their essays and exams. however, the key point for us is that students must make notes in some form because this positions them more powerfully within academic discourse, offering them opportunity to become stakeholders in their own educational experiences. making notes enables students to record knowledge claims (holmes, 2002 cited burns and sinfield, 2003), test ideas and record bibliographic details. proactive notes, when combined with an active revision cycle (burns and sinfield, 2004), can be part of the student’s learning processes, fostering ownership and voice (bowl, 2005; burns et al., 2006). a critique of this position can be seen in the discourses around deep and surface learning, whereby notemaking and other ‘study skills’, can be marginalised by the ‘academy’. haggis, (2003: 97) comments that: at the time of entry, students are expected to arrive already prepared to engage with ideas, texts and debates. the plethora of universities offering ‘study skills’, ‘transferable skills’ and ‘higher education orientation’ courses indicates the fallacy of this assumption. the original research on deep and surface learning was undertaken with students and their reading strategies, and suggested that students varied their strategy according to the task (marton and saljo, 1976; marton et al., 1997). a model of students and how they choose to engage with study in a particular instance developed, which has been polarised in some texts journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 2 burns, sinfield, holley and hoskins changing students’ attitudes to notemaking to imply deep learning as ‘good’ and surface learning as having more negative connotations (richardson, 2000). haggis (2003: 98) offers a different view of the learner, where the learner may be a person who is experiencing difficulty with unexplained norms and values in higher education, and he or she may be exhausted from part-time work or parenting, distracted by family or financial problems, or lacking the fundamental confidence, self-esteem or health to engage in the ways that are assumed to be both desirable and possible. the experiences of these different kinds of learners, pushed through a mass education system by a raft of government initiatives, do not meet with the expectations of academics driven by a research agenda: new and different ways of teaching and learning are needed. if ‘the system is to grow into a genuinely accessible form of education for 50% of 18 year olds, in addition to the widest possible range of adults learning throughout their lives, it is going to have to find new ways of conceptualising its core values and activities’ (haggis, 2003: 102). we argue that appropriate notemaking is not only central to success at university but the practices it fosters are also central characteristics of the reflexive self (giddens, 1996). that is, good notemaking strategies involve not just passively summarising information, but actively absorbing, analysing, reflecting upon and using information. this form of notemaking, we argue, can be seen as a cyclical process that fosters analytical and creative attributes that are critical for a citizen in a globalised information driven society. indeed, as foucault (1980: 39) argues, notemaking is: the point where power reaches into the very grain of individuals, touches their bodies and inserts itself into their actions and attitudes, their discourses, learning processes and everyday lives. notemaking: an empowering practice for students? thomas (2001), as with freire (1997), argues that a traditional education can position students as ‘accepting and passive’ (thomas, 2001: 32). however, freire (1997:32) argued journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 3 burns, sinfield, holley and hoskins changing students’ attitudes to notemaking for education as an opportunity for ‘empowerment’ with ‘the primary function of education and educative processes to be the dynamic development of critical consciousness, which involves critical thought and action’. learning is posited as a reflexive and critical endeavour, enabling the learner to challenge disempowering political practices; it is here that we position active notemaking and it is for that reason that we collaborated to design and build an interactive and empowering notemaking resource. making notes medway, et al (2003: 41), and our own observations and anecdotal evidence from across the sector, indicates that less and less notemaking is being undertaken by students and thus typically ‘students may avoid learning to take notes and acquiring skills of summarising, synthesising and ordering that require the material to be actively processed and understood’. medway (2003: 41) further argues that by not developing these essential study skills, students are disempowered to engage on a deep level with their ‘learning processes’. the following section will briefly discuss some key notemaking forms and their strengths and weaknesses – and will move on to discuss the notemaker, a reusable learning object (rlo) designed to introduce students to empowering notemaking practice that was developed here at london met under the aegis of two of the university’s centres for excellence in teaching and learning (cetls): rlo – and learnhigher cetl. linear notes linear (line by line) notes are the most typical notemaking form adopted by students, and university staff, when they do make notes. typically this form involves making lists, perhaps with bullets or numbers – with highlighting and underlining used to identify key or important topics. whilst this practice has an instant logic and can be very neat and appealing to look at, there is a danger that it locks the notemaker into the argument and evidence structure used by the subject; thus it is too passive and is the form most likely to promote conscious or unconscious plagiarism (burns and sinfield, 2004). indeed, this is the form most akin to notetaking and is not notemaking at all. that is, it tacitly encourages taking down the words, journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 4 burns, sinfield, holley and hoskins changing students’ attitudes to notemaking thoughts and argument structures of others rather than breaking information down into its component parts and re-structuring it for oneself. we posit that it is the active, intellectual and critical engagement with ideas fostered by good notemaking practices that put the learner at the centre of their own learning, and that makes notemaking an aspect of emancipatory practice. for it is only when students wrestle with ideas and information for themselves that they gain the means to contest, or accept (!), dominant political discourses and gain their own voice (bowls, 2005; burns et al., 2006). cornell notes cornell notes are similar to linear notes in that they too have a linear form. however, the cornell system is intrinsically more active than the straightforward linear format, requiring the notemaker to engage reflexively, analytically and critically with the notes that they make. typically in the cornell system, the notemaker divides their page in two: one side is for the collection of notes; the other is for their critical commentary upon the notes. it is here that the notemaker can indicate immediately why the notes have been made and how they might use the information therein (burns and sinfield, 2004). the key benefit of this strategy is that it encourages students to reflect on why particular information is important and why they have noted it. it encourages critical reflection and the making of sense, meaning and connections. it puts the student’s understanding and participation at the centre of the knowledge construction process (burns and sinfield, 2004) and it is here that we are arguably moving from notetaking to notemaking. mindmaps mindmaps are perhaps the most familiar non-linear notemaking format. also known as spidergrams or nuclear notes, these non-linear notes are encouraged by buzan and buzan (1999) as an active and creative way to both generate and capture ideas. the idea with the mindmap is to put the main topic in the centre of a diagram that the notemaker builds by drawing out subsidiary lines with ideas linked to the main topic. the mindmap can be made memorable by the notemaker with the use of colour and the construction of cartoons or pictures with a mnemonic function. buzan’s argument is that it is literally more engaging journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 5 burns, sinfield, holley and hoskins changing students’ attitudes to notemaking because it harnesses both halves of the brain, the logical left and the creative right. when working with students we have encountered resistance to the use of non-linear notemaking formats; but once adopted, students feed back that these are the formats that prove to be the most powerful in promoting their concentration, participation, learning and active engagement. concept maps the concept map, as with the mindmap, offers a graphical representation of key concepts organised hierarchically – and with relationships between concepts or sub-concepts indicated by links and connections. a concept is defined as ‘a perceived regularity in events or objects, or records of events or objects, designated by a label’ (novak and canas, 2006: 1). the psychological foundations with respect to the use of concept maps are that the material to be learned must be conceptually clear and stated in language relevant to the learner’s prior knowledge; the learner must possess prior knowledge; and the learner must choose to learn meaningfully (novak and canas, 2006: 2-3) – and it is with pedagogical strategies that place the learner as active within their own learning that the tutor attempts to motivate students to learn in socio-political/emancipatory ways, that is, to learn meaningfully. pattern notes pattern notes are the name that can be given to any non-linear format and this is the one that we teach the most frequently. the pattern note format is more flexible than buzan and buzan’s strict one word per line mindmap and when teaching it we stress that it is both a notemaking and a learning tool. as with the mindmap, the idea is that students select and connect information for themselves, enabling them to synthesise a range of complex ideas. students have to dissect, engage with and re-structure complex concepts on their own terms and they have to engage with a range of diverse and often unfamiliar ideas (gibbs 1994, cited burns and sinfield, 2004) as they do so. the argument is that this very selection/connection process is itself an active learning strategy; thus this can be seen as an extremely powerful, active notemaking system. pattern notemaking allows the formation of ‘a set of unique pattern notes’ (burns and sinfield 2004: 93) each time the student works. typically when teaching this we stress that students build in their own mnemonic triggers at the notemaking stage and thus each set of notes they make is unique and consequently more memorable. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 6 burns, sinfield, holley and hoskins changing students’ attitudes to notemaking pattern notemaking is difficult, time-consuming and often frustrating. it requires thought, concentration and active decision-making. it can be worrisome and aggravating – but it can also be creative, challenging and as powerful as it is non-hierarchical. we argue that when taught, supported and rehearsed, this system allows for ownership of ideas and can be central to transformatory and emancipatory education, for according to foucault (1980: 154): as soon as one can no longer think things as one formerly thought them, transformation becomes both very urgent, very difficult and quite possible. and that is the goal with active notemaking – it is the student’s first struggle with information and after this struggle it should be more difficult to think of things as the previous speaker or author thought them and more difficult to think of them as you once thought them. we argue that in this way, notemaking places the student at the centre of their learning, and thus can provide the potential for a transformative experience. development of the web based notemaking tool (rlo) thus whilst notemaking may be overlooked, we argue that it is central to emancipatory education as a socio-political tool that empowers students to navigate, negotiate, excavate, learn and own information that they are reaching for themselves (rogers, 1994). for these reasons learnhigher and rlo-cetl came together, to collaborate for a ‘transformative pedagogy’ (hooks 1994, cited in bowl, 2005) and produce a notemaking tool that would enable students their own access to these ideas and strategies, and that would create a resource that subject academics could teach from or to which they could guide their students. the notemaking rlo is composed of three parts: • an introduction to why we make notes (see figure 1) • a consideration of what sort of notes to make (featuring linear, cornell and pattern notes – illustrated in figure 2) – and • a final section that initially hosted only a brief ‘how to make notes’ lecture within a notemaking tool that allows the student to view/pause the video and make notes (see journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 7 burns, sinfield, holley and hoskins changing students’ attitudes to notemaking figure 3). we have now added several different mini-lectures and demonstrations for students to practice upon. user-generated content following evaluation, one extension of the tool requested by students was the ability for the students themselves to enter their own content, and indeed if the tool is to be used and reused it will be because of its usefulness to students themselves. in this instance students were simply given access to the section where the video of the lecture was originally placed and given the option to upload any media file (podcasts, images, videos, mp3s) they wanted to make notes upon. this increased the functionality of the tool – but more than that, it increases student control of the use to which the tool can be put. a further iteration of the prototype in discussion, is to offer the notemaker the option of placing their notes into a 3d space. the motivation of adding this further functionality is to promote a sense of immersion and being physically a part of one’s learning. such techniques were adopted by ancient orators in order to remember speeches using a combination of organisation, visual memory and association (yates, 1992). in such a prototype users will be offered the choice of mapping their notes onto an already existing 3d space or (for greater cognitive payback) offered the opportunity to create simple 3d spaces prior to mapping the notes onto them. we have invited members of the ldhen to use the notemaker and to report back their comments and criticisms to enable future developments, and that offer is extended to readers of this paper. currently response has been positive with respect to use of the tool and the experimentation and exploration of notemaking that it has supported. there has been some disappointment that there are no ‘save’ and ‘edit’ functions – but we have included links in our extra resources section (http://learning.londonmet.ac.uk/tltc/learnhigher/notemaker/page3.html) to open source software such that users can find and download their own notemaking resources for consistent use once the exploration stage has been engaged with. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 8 http://learning.londonmet.ac.uk/tltc/learnhigher/notemaker/page3.html burns, sinfield, holley and hoskins changing students’ attitudes to notemaking figure 1. why make notes? figure 2. pattern note example. figure 3. web based tool prototype (and link to staff tutorial). the notemaker: http://www.learnhigher.ac.uk/learningareas/notemaking/home.htm staff tutorial drafted to help with embedding: http://www.catsconsulting.com/workshops/notemaking/player.html conclusion we have argued that notemaking allows students to take ownership of theories and concepts and to critically engage with ideas (gibbs, 1994 cited burns and sinfield, 2004) which reinforces understanding and builds knowledge (burr, 2003). these processes and practices journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 9 http://www.learnhigher.ac.uk/learningareas/notemaking/home.htm http://www.catsconsulting.com/workshops/notemaking/player.html burns, sinfield, holley and hoskins changing students’ attitudes to notemaking can, socio-politically, help students to learn what they want to learn and, pragmatically, to write essays which are adequately researched and correctly referenced and to revise for and pass exams (burns and sinfield, 2004). our work with the first year students in a business school shows a pattern of narrations of reported practice of success but when students are successful in the detail of their study, this is often dismissed as ‘surface learning’ (entwistle, 2000). our thesis is that active notes become successful academic scripts indicative of ‘deep learning’ and thus form aspects of transcendent and transformative education experiences (satterthwaite et al., 2004). we argue that active, creative notemaking strategies empower and engage students and place the learner truly at the centre of their own learning. drawing these elements together, we discussed collaborative action to develop transformative pedagogy in action: the collective generation of a notemaking rlo that was designed as a pedagogical tool for staff and student use. our argument is that the teaching of study and academic skills is more than fixing deficit students, it is more than academic socialisation and more than the process of inducting students into academic literacies – rather it is emancipatory and socio-political and when undertaken well it fosters student learning, power and voice (bowl, 2005; burns et al., 2006). resources developed by: richard haynes and james connor presented at ldhen symposium april 2009 references bowl, m. (2005) ‘valuing diversity in the social science curriculum’, learning and teaching in the social sciences 2(2) pp 121-136. burns, t. and sinfield, s. (2003) essential study skills: the complete guide to success @ university. london: sage. burns, t. and sinfield, s. (2004) teaching, learning and study skills: a guide for tutors. london: sage. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 10 burns, sinfield, holley and hoskins changing students’ attitudes to notemaking burns, t., sinfield, s. and holley, d. (2006) ‘the silent stakeholder: an exploration of the student as stakeholder in the uk government e-learning strategy 2005’, the corporate social responsibility conference. edrine, turkey, may. burr, v. (2003) social constructionism. east sussex: routledge. buzan, t. (1989) use your head. london: bbc publications. buzan, b. and buzan, t. (1999) the mind map book. london: bbc publications. entwhistle, n. (2000) ‘approaches to studying and levels of understanding: the influences of teaching and assessment’, higher education: handbook of theory and research 15 pp 156-219. foucault, m. (1980) power/knowledge: selected interviews and other writings 1972-1977, edited by colin gordon. london: harvester. (see in particular 'the confession of the flesh' [interview, 1977]). freire, p. (1977) the pedagogy of the oppressed. harmondsworth: penguin. giddens, a. (1996) consequences of modernity. cambridge: polity press. haggis, t. (2003) ‘constructing images of ourselves? a critical investigation into ‘approaches to learning’ research in higher education’, british educational research journal 29(1) pp 89-104. marton, f., hounsell, d. and entwistle, n. (1997) the experience of learning: implications for teaching and studying in higher education. edinburgh: scottish academic press. marton, f. and saljo, r. (1976) ‘on qualitative differences in learning: 1 outcome and process’, british journal of educational psychology 46(1) pp 4-11. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 11 burns, sinfield, holley and hoskins changing students’ attitudes to notemaking medway, p., rhodes, v., macrae, s., maguire, m. and gewirtz, s. (2003) widening participation through supporting undergraduates: what is being done and what can be done to support student progression at king's? london: king's college department of education and professional studies. novak, j.d. and canas, j.c. (2006) the theory underlying concept maps and how to construct them. online: www.ihmc.us (accessed: 19 december 2006). richardson, j. (2000). researching student learning. buckingham: open university press. rogers, c. (1994) freedom to learn. upper saddle river nj: merrill. satterthwaite, j., atkinson, e. and martin, w. (eds.) (2004) the disciplining of education: new languages of power and resistance. stoke on trent: trentham books. sutherland, p., badger, r. and white, g. (2002) ‘how new students take notes in lectures’, journal of further and higher education 26(4) pp 377-388. thomas, e. (2001) widening participation in post-compulsory education. london: continuum. yates, f. (1992) the art of memory. london: pimlico. author details tom burns is a senior lecturer in the learning development unit at london metropolitan university and co-author of essential study skills: the complete guide to success at university and teaching, learning and study skills: a guide for tutors. he has produced a short video, ‘take control’, which won the 1998 ivca gold award for education. sandra sinfield is coordinator for learning development at london metropolitan, co-author with tom burns and learning area coordinator for reading and notemaking on the learnhigher cetl. a student from a non-traditional background herself, sandra is journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 12 http://www.ihmc.us/ burns, sinfield, holley and hoskins changing students’ attitudes to notemaking fascinated by the policies and practices of he and the emancipatory potential of learning development. debbie holley is principal lecturer in learning and teaching at london metropolitan university business school. since joining the university from industry, she has become very interested in the use of technology to facilitate learning. using a variety of multimedia objects within the webct/blackboard environment she has successfully engaged students with blended learning. part of the reusable learning object centre of excellence for teaching and learning (www.rlo-cetl.ac.uk) team, she is working with students to develop interactive learning materials. she was recently awarded a 3 year university teaching fellowship. kate hoskins is currently a lecturer in youth participation on the msc degree at birkbeck. she also lectures and supervises students on the ma in education studies at london metropolitan university. kate completed a master's degree in education and social policy at king’s college london and is now undertaking a phd in the policy studies centre at king's college london. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 13 http://www.rlo-cetl.ac.uk/ ‘very urgent, very difficult and quite possible’: changing students’ attitudes to notemaking by encouraging user generated content abstract setting the context notemaking: an empowering practice for students? making notes linear notes cornell notes mindmaps concept maps pattern notes development of the web based notemaking tool (rlo) user-generated content conclusion references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 21: september 2021 ________________________________________________________________________ centralisation: placing peer assisted study sessions (pass) within the wider work of learning developers maxinne connolly-panagopoulos university of glasgow, uk abstract this article investigated whether a centralised pass system, run in partnership between academic leads (als) and learning developers (lds), might be supported by staff and students currently involved in pass (n=11) within a higher education institution (hei). the study interviewed staff from the humanities, physical science, medical science, and the arts. findings revealed that all participants were in favour of some form of centralisation. centralised training of pass mentors, advertising, and quality control received the strongest support. based on these findings, the article argues that if lds work closely with als centralisation is a viable solution to common challenges to pass – such as low attendance, misconceptions about pass, administrative costs, and scheme maintenance. keywords: peer assisted study sessions; peer assisted learning; learning developers; supplemental instruction. introduction peer assisted study sessions (pass), commonly found in higher education institutions (heis), aim to support learning and integration within a specific programme of study by providing a space for active discussion and cooperative learning between students (capstick, 2004). traditionally, pass often focus on discussion or activities around academic course work. however, sessions might also include pastoral discussions (green, 2011), or include one-to-one sessions (mcintosh, 2019). pass sessions are most often offered to firstand second-year students and facilitated by pairs of secondor third-year students, referred to as ‘pass mentors’ (garcia-melgar et al., 2021) or ‘leaders’ in some connolly centralisation: placing peer assisted study sessions (pass) within the wider work of learning developers journal of learning development in higher education, issue 21: september 2021 2 literature (rapley, 2011; mcintosh, 2019). pass may also include support from students within the same year group (hammond et al., 2010). while pass is most often located and managed within specific subjects, this article will outline the benefits of centrally managed pass schemes in higher education. the benefit of a pass scheme that is codeveloped by learning developers and faculty academics is the inclusion of expert knowledge from learning developers in training pass mentors to facilitate sessions. this article argues that the unique position of the learning developer within heis also presents an opportunity for greater exposure of the wider student body to the benefits of pass. benefits of pass pass initiatives have been associated with higher pass rates and attainment (dawson et al., 2014; herrmann-werner et al., 2017), increased subject knowledge (hammond, et al., 2010), and retention in historically challenging courses, especially within stem (congos and schoeps,1998; dawson et al., 2014; herrmann-werner et al., 2017; fredrikkson et al., 2020). according to herrmann-werner (2017), due to the scholarly evidence of the benefits of pass, it has become an integral part of medical courses in germany. fostier and carey (2007) indicate that offering pass on a biomedical cohort produced a marked positive effect on both exam scores and student retention. similarly, green (2018) reported that within a nursing cohort, 90% of students who engaged with pass displayed an increase in subject knowledge. pass attendance as a predictor of higher academic attainment was substantiated by spedding, hawkes and burgess (2017) who found a positive relationship between pass attendance and academic performance among 340 first-year psychology students. this positive correlation is perhaps a result of the active learning which we know pass permits; according to capstick (2004) and garcia-melgar et al. (2021) peer discussion of course material moves learning from a grade-focused, and perhaps a more surface learning position, to a position which focuses on deeper learning through the creation of meaning from the course content. by being peer led, pass sessions allow students to learn in an informal and supplementary environment; this encourages deeper knowledge and a greater sense of belonging and ownership among student cohorts (hoffman et al., 2002; tibinganaahimbisibwe et al., 2020; garcia-melgar et al., 2021) as well as increased communication and cohesion between students in the higher year(s) (green, 2001; dawson, et al., 2014). connolly centralisation: placing peer assisted study sessions (pass) within the wider work of learning developers journal of learning development in higher education, issue 21: september 2021 3 pass is particularly beneficial to students from economically or socially disadvantaged communities as well as undergraduate and postgraduate international students, aiding both learning and integration (rapley, 2011; zaccagnini and verenikina, 2013; duah, croft and inglis, 2014; chilvers, 2016). pass schemes create a highly social and interactive learning environment that encourages the establishment of relationships with domestic and other international students feeling increased confidence, a greater sense of community, and ownership and learner cohesion (zaccagnini and verenikina, 2013; higgins et al., 2019; tibingana-ahimbisibwe et al., 2020). the benefits of participation in pass also extend to mentors, who are able to develop transferable skills and in turn increase their employability (smith, may and burke, 2007). the benefits to the mentors also include developed academic knowledge as they are able to review and strengthen their understanding of course material through facilitation (ody and carey, 2009; herrmann-werner et al., 2017). in addition, among a cohort of medical students, tamachi et al. (2018) found mentors reporting greater camaraderie, shared purpose, and social cohesion through their involvement as mentors. this finding points to the social benefits of pass, as well as highlighting the implications for developing feelings of institutional belonging. furthermore, academics benefit from pass as they can adjust their courses in direct response to consistent feedback from mentors (green, 2001; rapley, 2011). challenges of pass despite its many benefits, pass schemes often experience low attendance (allen, et al., 2019). with the exception of the sciences where engagement rates are higher (draper, 2011), scholars have reported low attendance as a major challenge to the success and stability of pass (capstick, 2004; green, 2011; hammond, et al., 2010). low attendance may be due to several practical issues such as timetable clashes and demanding course loads (meertens, 2016). additionally, allen et al. (2019) found that low attendance was also due to incorrect perceptions that pass was only for students who were failing. stable attendance is vital for the success of pass due to the central aspect of supplemental instruction which involves co-learning and discussion with peers (fredrikkson et al., 2020). for a scheme to be effective, it is recommended to run weekly sessions that are routine and well planned with time for activities as well as questions and discussion (herrmannwerner et al., 2017; pass national centre, 2018). connolly centralisation: placing peer assisted study sessions (pass) within the wider work of learning developers journal of learning development in higher education, issue 21: september 2021 4 academic leads are also often responsible for the recruitment and training of pass mentors (glynn et al., 2006; tibingana-ahimbisibwe et al., 2020). hermann-werner et al. (2017) find that while supplemental instruction may reduce time demands on faculty, the task of recruiting and training mentors to ensure high quality schemes often led to more, rather than less, demand on al time. this not only adds to the demands of pass but might also lead to instances where mentors are not adequately trained in the skills necessary for the facilitation and running of a pass (herrmann-werner et al., 2017; garcia-melgar et al., 2021). mentors who are not adequately trained also run the risk of not knowing when to assert boundaries between facilitation and teaching. in some cases, this has led to programmes which are perceived as exam support or proof-reading services (garcia-melgar et al., 2021). difficulty in securing funding to support the development of pass has also been reported as a challenge to developing and maintaining pass (green, 2011). institutional funding is aligned with strategic drives which are, in turn, often informed by quantitative measures such as academic attainment; pass may be overlooked in favour of other academic initiatives (ashwin, 2002). despite evidence for a correlation between pass and improved academic attainment (i.e.: spedding, hawkes and burgess, 2017), it is difficult to ascertain why funding for pass is a challenge. perhaps more institution-specific results are needed to justify funding. as a result of a lack of funding, many pass initiatives are unable to receive financial support which might ensure their success. context of research the research for this paper was conducted in a hei where the model of pass described above was dominant. pass was concentrated in disparate ‘pockets’ of the university – a large russell group institution in scotland – and was coordinated in these various departments by academic leads (als). the premise for research was the lack of communication between lds and als championing pass. moreover, als were not aware of, or in contact with other academics working on pass. this meant that within a single institution, there was considerable inconsistency in the delivery of pass and a lack of resources and support for als. according to ody and carey (2013), flexibility is a positive feature of pass. however, in the institution under discussion here, inconsistency made the development and promotion of a culture of peer-to-peer academic support challenging. connolly centralisation: placing peer assisted study sessions (pass) within the wider work of learning developers journal of learning development in higher education, issue 21: september 2021 5 it is the growth of this culture which, according to black and mackenzie (2008), is vital to the success of a pass. with these practitioner observations as a starting point, i conducted a deeper appraisal of pass within the institution and proposed that schools move from developing pass in a subject vacuum, to working in partnership with learning developers (lds) to co-create and share responsibility for the implementation and maintenance of pass. this concept, which will be referred to as the centralisation of pass, appears in other institutions such as the university of exeter’s centralised study zone (2021), the university of plymouth (2021), and the university of bournemouth (2021). centralisation is hardly novel and has achieved institutional success (capstick, 2004) and yet is not routinely organised within heis which may be due to varying organisations of lds within institutions. centralisation this research proposes that schemes which are co-created and shared between lds and als could be beneficial in mitigating challenges to creating and maintaining pass through a process of shared ownership. by sharing ownership of pass, lds would have an active involvement in setting up and maintaining the schemes, thus addressing the issue of the demands of time and resources in setting up a pass. another issue affecting the success of pass is staff turnover. in some instances, one staff member is highly involved in pass, and in the event of them leaving, the scheme crumbles. continued co-partnership between als and teams of lds would lead to sustained academic involvement in the running and maintenance of classes which, according to green (2011), is vital for the longevity of pass. additional funding would also alleviate some of the start-up costs associated with pass. therefore, lds would be encouraged to engage in scholarship on pass to support funding bids. due to their specialist knowledge of learning and development, as well as their frequent contact with a variety of students, ld practitioners often have a ‘birds eye view’ of an institution. by becoming co-owners of pass, through centralisation, lds would be able to advise on how best to run and maintain pass. they would also provide an area for staff and mentors to receive support for training, establishing, and maintaining pass. training is particularly vital for developing positive perceptions of pass among staff and students. the lds would work closely with faculty colleagues to train the mentors in facilitation, as connolly centralisation: placing peer assisted study sessions (pass) within the wider work of learning developers journal of learning development in higher education, issue 21: september 2021 6 well as to ensure quality control and that the scheme was successfully addressing the needs of the subjects. as lds are accustomed to teaching across an institution, rather than within a specific subject area, they are likely to hold the skills necessary for engaging groups of students in a non-subject-specific scenario. thus, lds are well placed for passing their unique skills onto mentors. therefore, by placing pass within the wider work of lds, an institution might see a co-ownership of pass and greater benefits to both staff and students. methodology as outlined above, the broader context of this study is a longer-term research project which appraised the varieties of pass within the researcher’s scottish hei. the present research involved an investigation of the institutional website, conversations with academics who had published on pass or been cited as being involved in pass, and a literature search to determine the number of active pass schemes within the institution. this process was followed by semi-structured interviews and a focus group. participants and procedure the study included 11 participants. six were academic staff involved in a pass within the humanities (1), medical (2) and physical sciences (3), and arts (4). five, who formed the focus group, were student pass mentors. one student, from humanities (1), who could not attend the focus group sent the researcher a personal statement regarding their experiences of pass. all identifiable information has been removed and, where named, participants have been given pseudonyms and referred to as academic lead (al) for those who were interviewed and pass mentor for student mentors who participated in the focus group. the interview and focus group questions explored the structure and content of each pass, the department’s approach to recruitment, training, and remuneration, overall attendance at sessions, challenges faced by als, the role of als, and finally a response to the idea of centralisation or the moving of pass to co-ownership between als and lds. questions were guided by the scholarly literature which outlines the challenges to pass, as well as the researcher’s aim of appraising pass and responses to centralisation within connolly centralisation: placing peer assisted study sessions (pass) within the wider work of learning developers journal of learning development in higher education, issue 21: september 2021 7 their institution. the focus of these questions informed the broad topics, which were later used to inform thematic clusters. for clarity in questioning, all participants were asked ‘what are your thoughts on the movement towards a centralised pass which would be developed and maintained alongside the team1’. when asked to elaborate on centralisation, i made it clear that centralisation was not merely an instance where lds took control of all administrative tasks but were actively involved in the development of schemes as partners who are knowledgeable in student learning and enhancement. interviews and focus group were later transcribed and analysed using nvivo v.11. using braun and clarke’s (2006) thematic analysis as a guide, the interview and focus group questions formed the broad themes upon which data was clustered. themes were populated to ensure that the varieties of pass within the institution were represented. results a summary of the full research findings relating to thematic clusters is presented in table. 1. the research found that all four pass schemes were academic with pastoral discussions reported as a by-product of the scheme. attendance was variable in the humanities (1) and physical sciences (3) who held their pass on an informal and drop-in basis. the medical sciences (2) and arts (4) had timetabled sessions and reported better attendance and student involvement overall. all schemes recruited mentors internally via informal announcements or circulated posts. all mentors were trained by staff except in (3) who received no training. mentors from (2) and (3) were unpaid, while those from (1) and (4) were paid. most schemes indicated little staff involvement and appeared to be studentled. however, the clinical-based pass within the medical sciences (2) reported high staff involvement. all staff indicated a preference for a centralised pass scheme, but with varied degrees of involvement from lds. the main concern over centralisation was that the subjects would lose ownership over the content of pass sessions. the medical sciences (2) expressed the least interest in a centralised pass, due to the clinical nature of the scheme and the course being offered away from the main campus. however, staff expressed an interest in acquiring formal validation for mentors via a centralised pass initiative such as the 1 pseudonym connolly centralisation: placing peer assisted study sessions (pass) within the wider work of learning developers journal of learning development in higher education, issue 21: september 2021 8 academic development services. other participants were in favour of a centralised pass initiative in order to gain support in recruitment and training of mentors, and quality assurance. the results indicate that, despite concerns from all als and the focus group over schools maintaining ownership, centralisation appeared to be well-supported. a discussion of the findings in their entirety is outside of the scope of this piece. instead, this article will focus on the themes which most closely speak to developing a case for the coownership of pass schemes by lds and academic departments. these themes are attendance, academic involvement, mentor recruitment, training and remuneration, and centralisation. table 1 shows the features of each subject’s pass. the findings indicate the variance between the structure of the pass, with1, 2, and 4 being highly structured and 3 drop-in. in relation to content, 1-4 were set up to be academic in content, but did boast pastoral aspects. attendance varied overall, with the most consistent attendance shown in 2 and 4, both of which were timetabled. all schemes recruited internally: 2 and 4 paid their mentors, while 1 and 3 did not. all except 2 had minimal academic involvement in the sessions. 1, 3, and 4 were in favour of a centralised system, with 2 being cautious due to the clinical aspect of the pass. table 1. overview of the research findings related to each of the 4 major themes. connolly centralisation: placing peer assisted study sessions (pass) within the wider work of learning developers journal of learning development in higher education, issue 21: september 2021 9 the results presented below are focussed on the question of centralisation in order to shed further light on the benefits of involving learning developers in the development and maintenance of pass schemes in co-ownership with subject academics. this section will also highlight some of the variances in vital aspects of pass such as the training and remuneration of mentors, student attendance, and the structure of pass. the results illustrate how academics and mentors in the sample expressed concern that centralisation would lead to a loss of ownership over schemes. however, these concerns were found to be mitigated by the strengths of co-ownership between academic leads and learning developers, which included the increase in support and the generation of awareness about pass through existing ld networks. advertising and attendance timetabled schemes (medical sciences (2) and arts (4)) appeared to have more stable attendance in the findings. conversely, those which are not timetabled (humanities (1) and physical science (3)) report less stable attendance overall. those which are not timetabled appeared to rely on advertising to students through virtual learning environments (vle), social media, or student emails. yet attendance remained unstable: advertising and getting it out there were the most difficult, it wasn’t enough for me to just go on induction day and say something about pass and please sign up. i would have to sort of guilt my first year into going. that is not ideal, we don’t want to have to do that.2 according to meertens (2016) and allen et al. (2019) unpredictable and low student attendance may also be due to students having the impression that pass is solely for students who are academically weak. this notion was confirmed by a pass mentor in the focus group who stated: i feel like there is a bit of a reputation problem as well because it seems like pal is only for those who are really struggling, have a d and need the help. i think it would do better if it was marketed as if you have a b, come and try get an a.3 2 academic lead for (1). 3 jim, pass mentor in (3). connolly centralisation: placing peer assisted study sessions (pass) within the wider work of learning developers journal of learning development in higher education, issue 21: september 2021 10 despite attempts at advertising and timetabling, attendance continues to be a challenge among the pass initiative within the humanities (1), physical sciences (3), and the arts (4). as the excerpt above indicates, lower attendance in these areas might be based on a lack of student awareness that a scheme is in place, as well as misconceptions around the purpose of a pass. centralised schemes would benefit from wider advertising as lds are often in contact with a broader range of students. mentor training the study found that humanities (1) provide an internally-led training day for mentors. on this day, mentors are given practical exercises to develop their facilitation skills. by the end of the training day, the mentors leave with knowledge of the requirements of the role, services for referral, and a rough plan for the first few sessions. training in the arts (4) and medical sciences (2) was done by staff and previous pass mentors. the physical sciences (3) did not have formal training for mentors. the focus group indicated that pass was growing within the school and that additional attention to the mentors through communication and training was desirable. this point was confirmed by the academic pass lead in (3) who stated that greater involvement from lds in pass would aid training of mentors. these findings illustrate the diversity in training provided by each subject. while subject-specific training is necessary, greater involvement from lds would build on successful subject-specific training by providing additional material, such as training on facilitation. mentor remuneration when establishing pass, the humanities (1) did not pay their mentors but acknowledged their contribution through formal recognition from the principle at a peer support awards ceremony. however, with the awards ceremony no longer occurring, the scheme decided to pay their mentors, as the al explains: ‘there were conversations which we had, and the school then determined that they receive remuneration. which i think is right in this instance because the degree is highly time consuming’.4 4 academic lead for (1) connolly centralisation: placing peer assisted study sessions (pass) within the wider work of learning developers journal of learning development in higher education, issue 21: september 2021 11 alternatively, one academic cautions against monetary remuneration based on unstable funding: ‘if you build it on a temporary bit of money and the money goes then the support will go. if you embed it into the culture, then it will be more mainstream and likely to last a bit longer’.5 the excerpt above highlights how funding and monetary remuneration is a challenge to the sustainability of pass. academic involvement participants stated that support from the wider academic staff team, as well as communication between mentors and staff, were vital for a scheme’s success. equally, all participants stated that this area could be improved. the physical sciences (3) report that staff are aware of, but do not actively promote, pass. furthermore, the al explains that despite attempts to set up regular meetings between mentors and the relevant academics, there was little uptake. communication continued to be an area for improvement, as one mentor reports: ‘i think even just if we had more meetings it would be really beneficial. some informal supervision and feedback’.6 the medical sciences (2) exhibit substantial staff support; this is due to the high level of involvement from staff in developing the scheme, as well as in training the mentors. mentors in the humanities (1) meet with academics bi-weekly to plan upcoming activities, exchange knowledge, discussing the sessions, and any challenges. similarly, the arts (4) report strong communication between mentors, who met with the al once a week for one hour to discuss the scheme and any concerns. unfortunately, the school also reported that buy-in from other academics within the school was incredibly low. the academic pass lead reported that without a dedicated member of staff to oversee pass, the support within the school became ‘fractured’. should staff other than the al within the subjects not take up involvement with pass, the additional support from lds in a co-owned scheme would prove beneficial. 5 academic (1) 6 sam, pass mentor in (3). connolly centralisation: placing peer assisted study sessions (pass) within the wider work of learning developers journal of learning development in higher education, issue 21: september 2021 12 centralisation there is always the fear that if it is centralised you will lose some of its flavour and become bureaucratic. we still want to feel as though we run it, we know what our students need. we wouldn’t want it taken over or away from us but working in partnership with you.7 the excerpt above exemplifies most participants’ response to centralisation. when asked if the schools would support a centralised pass, co-ordinated by learning developers, each school expressed varying degrees of support. the biggest concern was that als would lose ownership of the material. this is a reasonable concern when considering the efforts of als to develop and maintain pass. participants were especially positive regarding the opportunity to have lds involved in developing mentor training: ‘i would say there absolutely is a need for some centralised training, which focuses on the general skills needed for facilitation’.8 centralised training would be encouraged to focus on preparing the generic skills needed for facilitation, followed by subject-specific training. it would also inform mentors of the referral services such as learning development, mental health, careers, and disabilities services. furthermore, this training would enable mentors to create networks of communication and support. discussion in this appraisal of the varieties of pass within a single hei the objective was to investigate: the structure and content of pass; attendance and ways of advertising; approaches to mentor recruitment, training, and remuneration; academic involvement. these areas were investigated alongside the overarching question of whether a more centralised pass, developed in co-ownership with learning developers, would mitigate some of the challenges facing the successful development of pass. as the results above indicate, the question of centralisation was welcomed by academics. specifically, as it 7 academic pass lead for (3). 8 academic pass lead for (1). connolly centralisation: placing peer assisted study sessions (pass) within the wider work of learning developers journal of learning development in higher education, issue 21: september 2021 13 related to support for increasing student awareness of pass as well as training. the discussion below situates the idea of centralisation within the wider literature and indicates areas in which centralisation may improve challenges associated with pass such as low attendance, misconceptions of pass, mentor training, and means of recognition. advertising with support of learning development services unstable attendance is a challenge to the success of pass (hammond et al., 2010; meertens, 2016) largely because sessions rely on collaboration and discussion of course work between attendees (fredriksson et al., 2020). participants reported that timetable clashes and student misconceptions about pass were common reasons for low attendance. a means of addressing unstable attendance might be through timetabling sessions as schools which had timetabled sessions reported more stable attendance above. moreover, greater advertising to address misconceptions that pass is only for students who are struggling academically could also combat low attendance. these assumptions are in line with the suggestions of cameron et al. (2015), meertens (2016), and allen, et al (2019). despite the benefits of wider advertising, the findings indicated that timetabling placed an administrative burden on organisers – a resource which was not available to all schools. the support of lds, especially relating to advertising, would be a useful resource to help establish successful schemes. this in turn would act to combat unstable attendance as well as to address misconceptions over pass. the research found participants supporting involvement from lds in advertising schemes. due to their networking across the institution and their frequent contact with students, lds are particularly well placed to present the benefits of pass along with increasing students’ awareness of ongoing sessions. in addition, lds can support the advertisement of pass due to their experience of having to communicate that the services they deliver are useful to all students, not just those who are at risk of failure. dawson, et al. (2017) and fostier and carey (2007) stress the importance of advertising strategies to inform that pass will be helpful to students of diverse ages, academic abilities, and social economic status. when schemes are coowned and developed in partnership between als and lds it means that more time and resources can be dedicated to advertising, thereby working towards greater uptake of pass to ensure that many students receive the numerous benefits associated with peerto-peer learning. connolly centralisation: placing peer assisted study sessions (pass) within the wider work of learning developers journal of learning development in higher education, issue 21: september 2021 14 finally, the wider literature indicates that involvement from senior subject academics in promoting pass has led to students viewing schemes as having legitimacy, making them more likely to attend (kodabux and hoolash, 2015). academics may be able to communicate the overall benefits of pass but this rests on the assumption that they are aware of these benefits. a centralised service is able to communicate the benefits of pass to academics through dissemination of information at steering groups and teaching committees, or through practitioner research within the institution. this discussion indicates support for shared ownership of pass not only within the current sample, but within the wider literature. centralised training learning developers’ proposal for centralised training of mentors received unanimous support from participants largely due to the high demands of running mentor training. the idea of centralised learning development services being involved in training mentors provides a strong case in the argument for centralisation. garcia-melgar et al. (2021) state that the consequences of inadequate training of pass mentors may lead to mentors who are not able to recognise the need to facilitate, rather than to teach material. this is supported by ody and carey (2009) and capstick, fleming and hurne (2004) who also reported that a major challenge of pass mentorship was that mentors tended to move to teaching rather than facilitating sessions due to inadequate training. moreover, inadequate training, which often results from academics not having enough time and resources to adequately train mentors, can also lead to mentors being unable to assert appropriate boundaries, and a lack of awareness of the necessary channels of referral – such as counselling, academic, or financial services (garcia-melgar et al., 2021). conversely, training which provides mentors with knowledge over the function of their role, as well as increasing their knowledge of services, had the additional benefit of developing schemes which ‘scaffolded and supported pathways to effective help-seeing’ (garcia-melgar et al., 2021, p.11). it is therefore clear that adequate training of pass mentors is vital to the overall success and quality control of schemes (hermann-werner, 2017). centralised training might also be supported due to a recognition of the expertise offered by lds in areas of learning and teaching. lds may draw on insights from scholarship to provide mentors with best practice resources for facilitating pass sessions. connolly centralisation: placing peer assisted study sessions (pass) within the wider work of learning developers journal of learning development in higher education, issue 21: september 2021 15 centralised training, developed by learning developers and subject academics may provide a stronger foundation for schemes than subject-only training. should training be undertaken through a centralised service, it would be specific to excellence in pass mentorship in addition to subject-specific training. it would also lead to the development of material which addressed the subject needs and academic literacies. in their study, garcia-melgar et al., (2021) found that sessions lacked support for students’ academic literacy needs. it is evident that due to the expertise which learning developers hold, their involvement in training and setting up of pass schemes would make a vital contribution to the content of sessions. following the example of the university of bournemouth’s centralised pal project (capstick and fleming, 2001) the involvement of lds in training might also extend to refresher sessions, resources on vles, and pass development workshops for academic staff. mentor remuneration wadoodi and crosby (2002) state that some form of mentor remuneration is required: this may take the form of ‘intrinsic or extrinsic reward’ (p.242). my research found that each school recognised and promoted both the intrinsic and career benefits associated with pass mentorship. however, the schools expressed confusion over which was the most sustainable option. learning developers, who have an understanding of matters relating to learning and teaching and peer assisted schemes, would be able to provide guidance for schools which are creating a pass. academics also expressed a desire to recognise the work of their mentors alongside an inability to arrange areas for mentors to receive recognition such as formally tracking their teaching experience through higher education academic records. one academic explained how the pal awards ceremony was previously well received by mentors as a form of recognition, but that the school was unable to organise this. a centralised service might contribute to the recognition of the service of mentors by arranging pass awards ceremonies. the organisation of such an event might not be appealing to academics who are involved in pass within a single subject. however, the position of the learning developer within higher education translates to wider networks and a greater awareness of learning support being offered across an institution. an event such as this would act to promote the benefits of pass to the wider student body. connolly centralisation: placing peer assisted study sessions (pass) within the wider work of learning developers journal of learning development in higher education, issue 21: september 2021 16 examples of centralisation as we have noted, centralised schemes, managed by lds or pal co-ordinators in partnership with subjects, is not a new approach, and has received support both in ukhei and scholarly literature (makala, 2017). mccabe and daudi (2018) presented discussions of centralised services which developed each scheme in co-ownership with academic leads and learning developers. the service oversaw recruitment and training of mentors, continued development, and quality enhancement by supporting any problems experienced by the schools. similarly, capstick and fleming (2001) report that at bournemouth university, peer assisted schemes are successfully managed through a centralised ‘pal project’ wherein lds oversee training of pass mentors, staff development, advertising to students, and research into the improvement of peer learning schemes within the university (bournemouth university, 2021). however, despite the objective value of centralisation, the current research indicated that some als have reservations centred around fears about a loss of ownership. thus, it is vital that more literature is offered to present the benefits of centralisation to academics interested in peer-to-peer student learning. the current article presents an important consideration of centralisation: its emphasis is on collaboration and ownership between learning developers and academics, rather than one body holding sole ownership. the findings here, of course, pertain to a single uk institutional case study and are not considered to be representative. however, the findings also uphold what other researchers have observed regarding the training of mentors (hermann-werner et al., 2017), low attendance (hammond et al., 2010), misconceptions of pass (kodabux and hoolash, 2015; allen et al., 2019) and the need for greater institutional support (makala, 2017). in focusing on pass across an institution, rather than within a single subject, this study cannot claim to offer any significant trends in subject/disciplinary pass. yet by focusing on a range of subject schemes, it has foregrounded centralisation as a solution to common challenges. conclusion this article outlined the academic and cultural benefits that pass brings to an institution. it has also presented how a centralised service responsible for supporting the creation and connolly centralisation: placing peer assisted study sessions (pass) within the wider work of learning developers journal of learning development in higher education, issue 21: september 2021 17 maintenance of pass, with a specific role in the training of pass mentors within an institution, would be beneficial. specially, through advertising and greater exposure, it would work to combat low attendance and incorrect assumptions of pass. vitally, a pass co-owned with academics and learning developers can provide additional training and certifications for mentors. finally, the current article stressed that any centralisation of pass should be done in a spirit of partnership, maintaining flexibility, and allowing each pass to be designed according to the needs of each school. references allen, p. j., tonta, k. e., haywood, s. b., pereira, r. m. and roberts, l. d. (2019) ‘predicting peer-assisted study session attendance’, active learning in higher education, 20(3), pp.249-262. https://doi.org/10.1177/1469787417735613. ashwin, p. (2002) ‘implementing peer learning across organisations: the development of a model’, mentoring and tutoring, 10(3), pp.221-231. https://doi.org/10.1080/1361126022000037051. black, f.m. and mackenzie, j. (2008) peer support in the first year. available at https://www.enhancementthemes.ac.uk/docs/ethemes/the-first-year/peer-supportin-the-first-year.pdf?sfvrsn=2562f981_8 (accessed: 11 october 2016). bournemouth university (2021) peer support leader guide. available at: https://libguides.bournemouth.ac.uk/peersupport (accessed: 3 march 2021). braun, v. and clarke, v. (2006) ‘using thematic analysis in psychology’, qualitative research in psychology, 3(2), pp.77-101. cameron, d. a., binnie, v. i., sherriff, a. and bissell, v. (2015) ‘peer assisted learning: teaching dental skills and enhancing graduate attributes’, british dental journal, 219(6), pp.267-272. https://doi.org/10.1038/sj.bdj.2015.722. capstick, s. (2004) ‘benefits and shortcomings of peer assisted learning (pal) in higher education: an appraisal by students’, peer assisted learning conference https://doi.org/10.1177/1469787417735613 https://doi.org/10.1080/1361126022000037051 https://www.enhancementthemes.ac.uk/docs/ethemes/the-first-year/peer-support-in-the-first-year.pdf?sfvrsn=2562f981_8 https://www.enhancementthemes.ac.uk/docs/ethemes/the-first-year/peer-support-in-the-first-year.pdf?sfvrsn=2562f981_8 https://libguides.bournemouth.ac.uk/peersupport https://doi.org/10.1038/sj.bdj.2015.722 connolly centralisation: placing peer assisted study sessions (pass) within the wider work of learning developers journal of learning development in higher education, issue 21: september 2021 18 proceedings. bournemouth university, uk january. available at: https://www.bournemouth.ac.uk/sites/default/files/asset/document/stuartcapstick.pdf (accessed: 16 june 2021). capstick, s. and fleming, h. (2001) ‘peer assisted learning in an undergraduate hospitality course: second year students supporting first year students in group learning’, journal of hospitality, leisure, sport & tourism education, 1(1), pp.69-75. capstick s., fleming, h., and hurne, j. (2004) ‘implementing peer assisted learning in higher education: the experience of a new university and a model for the achievement of a mainstream programme’, peer assisted learning conference proceedings. bournemouth university, uk january. available at: https://www.bournemouth.ac.uk/sites/default/files/asset/document/capstick-fleminghurne.pdf (accessed: 16 june 2021). chilvers, l. (2016) ‘communities of practice for international students: an exploration of the role of peer assisted study sessions in supporting transition and learning in higher education’, journal of learning development in higher education, special edition, april, pp.1-25. https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.v0i0.366. congos, d. h. and schoeps, n. (1998) ‘inside supplemental instruction sessions: one model of what happens that improves grades and retention’, research and teaching in developmental education, 15(1), pp.47-61. dawson, p., van der meer, j., skalicky, j. and cowley, k. (2014) ‘on the effectiveness of supplemental instruction: a systematic review of supplemental instruction and peerassisted study sessions literature between 2001 and 2010’, review of educational research, 84(4), pp.609-639. https://doi.org/10.3102/0034654314540007. draper, s.w. (2011) peer assisted learning. available at: https://www.psy.gla.ac.uk/~steve/localed/pal.html (accessed: 6 february 2018). duah, f., croft, t. and inglis, m. (2014) ‘can peer assisted learning be effective in undergraduate mathematics?’, international journal of mathematical education in https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.v0i0.366 https://doi.org/10.3102/0034654314540007 https://www.psy.gla.ac.uk/~steve/localed/pal.html connolly centralisation: placing peer assisted study sessions (pass) within the wider work of learning developers journal of learning development in higher education, issue 21: september 2021 19 science and technology, 45(4), pp.552-565. https://doi.org/10.1080/0020739x.2013.855329. fostier, m. and carey, w. (2007) ‘exploration, experience and evaluation: peer assisted study scheme (pass), sharing the experience of the university of manchester: 480 1st year bioscience students’, science, learning and teaching conference, manchester 10 june, pp.19-20. available at https://www.advancehe.ac.uk/knowledge-hub/exploration-experience-and-evaluation-peer-assistedstudy-scheme-pass-sharing (accessed: 11 october 2016). fredriksson, j., malm, j., holmer, a. and ouattara, l. (2020) ‘attendance numbers at si sessions and their effect on learning conditions’, journal of peer learning, 13(3), pp.21-35. garcia-melgar, a., east, j. and meyers, n. (2021) ‘peer assisted academic support: a comparison of mentors’ and mentees’ experiences of a drop-in programme’, journal of further and higher education, pp.1-14. https://doi.org/10.23918/ijsses.v8i3p55. glynn, l. g., macfarlane, a., kelly, m., cantillon, p. and murphy, a. w. (2006) ‘helping each other to learn–a process evaluation of peer assisted learning’, bmc medical education, 6(1), pp.1-9. green, j. l. (2018) ‘peer support systems and professional identity of student nurses undertaking a uk learning disability nursing programme’, nurse education in practice, 30, pp.56-61. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nepr.2017.11.009. green, p. (2011) ‘a literature review of peer assisted learning (pal)’, national he stem. available at: http://projects.hestemsw.org.uk/upload/literature_review_26.1.11_green-1.pdf (accessed: 28 september 2021). hammond, j. a., bithell, c. p., jones, l. and bidgood, p. (2010) ‘a first year experience of student-directed peer-assisted learning’, active learning in higher education, 11(3), pp.201-212. https://doi.org/10.1177/1469787410379683. https://doi.org/10.1080/0020739x.2013.855329 https://www.advance-he.ac.uk/knowledge-hub/exploration-experience-and-evaluation-peer-assisted-study-scheme-pass-sharing https://www.advance-he.ac.uk/knowledge-hub/exploration-experience-and-evaluation-peer-assisted-study-scheme-pass-sharing https://www.advance-he.ac.uk/knowledge-hub/exploration-experience-and-evaluation-peer-assisted-study-scheme-pass-sharing https://doi.org/10.23918/ijsses.v8i3p55 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nepr.2017.11.009 http://projects.hestem-sw.org.uk/upload/literature_review_26.1.11_green-1.pdf http://projects.hestem-sw.org.uk/upload/literature_review_26.1.11_green-1.pdf https://doi.org/10.1177/1469787410379683 connolly centralisation: placing peer assisted study sessions (pass) within the wider work of learning developers journal of learning development in higher education, issue 21: september 2021 20 herrmann-werner, a., gramer, r., erschens, r., nikendei, c., wosnik, a., griewatz, j., zipfel, s. and junne, f. (2017) ‘peer-assisted learning (pal) in undergraduate medical education: an overview’, zeitschrift für evidenz, fortbildung und qualität im gesundheitswesen, 121, pp.74-81. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.zefq.2017.01.001. higgins, d., dennis, a., stoddard, a., maier, a. g. and howitt, s. (2019) ‘“power to empower”: conceptions of teaching and learning in a pedagogical co-design partnership’, higher education research & development, 38(6), pp.1154-1167. https://doi.org/10.1080/07294360.2019.1621270. hoffman, m., richmond, j., morrow, j. and salomone, k. (2002) ‘investigating “sense of belonging” in first-year college students’, journal of college student retention: research, theory & practice, 4(3), pp.227-256. https://doi.org/10.2190/dryccxq9-jq8v-ht4v. kodabux, a. and hoolash, b. k. a. (2015) ‘peer learning strategies: acknowledging lecturers’ concerns of the student learning assistant scheme on a new higher education campus’, journal of peer learning, 8(1), pp.59-84. makala, q. (2017) ‘peer-assisted learning programme: supporting students in high-risk subjects at the mechanical engineering department at walter sisulu university’, journal of student affairs in africa, 5(2), pp.17-31. https://doi.org/10.24085/jsaa.v5i2.2700. maccabe, r. and daudi, h. (2018) ‘the good, the bad, the ugly: students co-producing learning, past, present and future’, seda staff and educational development association. available at: https://www.seda.ac.uk/resources/files/rebecca%20maccabe%20and%20hinna%2 0duadi%20seda%20final.pdf (accessed: 28 september 2021). mcintosh, e. a. (2019) ‘working in partnership: the role of peer assisted study sessions in engaging the citizen scholar’, active learning in higher education, 20(3), pp.233248. https://doi.org/10.1177/1469787417735608. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.zefq.2017.01.001 https://doi.org/10.1080/07294360.2019.1621270 https://doi.org/10.2190/dryc-cxq9-jq8v-ht4v https://doi.org/10.2190/dryc-cxq9-jq8v-ht4v https://doi.org/10.24085/jsaa.v5i2.2700 https://www.seda.ac.uk/resources/files/rebecca%20maccabe%20and%20hinna%20duadi%20seda%20final.pdf https://www.seda.ac.uk/resources/files/rebecca%20maccabe%20and%20hinna%20duadi%20seda%20final.pdf https://doi.org/10.1177/1469787417735608 connolly centralisation: placing peer assisted study sessions (pass) within the wider work of learning developers journal of learning development in higher education, issue 21: september 2021 21 meertens, r. (2016) ‘utilisation of a peer assisted learning scheme in an undergraduate diagnostic radiography module’, radiography, 22(1), pp.e69-e74. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.radi.2015.08.004. ody, m. and carey, w. (2009) 'demystifying peer assisted study sessions (pass): what…? how…? who…? why…. why’, the challenge of learning development., 6th ldhen symposium. bournemouth. available at: https://documents.manchester.ac.uk/display.aspx?docid=7418 (accessed: 12 march 2019). ody, m. and carey, w. (2013) ‘peer education’, in dunne, e. and owen, d. (eds.) student engagement handbook: practice in higher education. bingley: emerald group publishing limited, pp.291-312. pass national centre (2018) uk national pass network. available at: http://www.pass.manchester.ac.uk/uk-national-pass-network/ (accessed: 12 march 2018). rapley, e. (2011) ‘“i get by with a little help from my friends”: peer assisted learning’, journal of pedagogic development, 1(1), pp.16-19. smith, j., may, s. and burke, l. (2007) ‘peer assisted learning: a case study into the value to student mentors and mentees’, practice and evidence of the scholarship of teaching and learning in higher education, pp.80-109. https://doi.org/10.3102/0034654314540007. spedding, j., hawkes, a. j. and burgess, m. (2017) ‘peer assisted study sessions and student performance: the role of academic engagement, student identity, and statistics self-efficacy’, psychology learning & teaching, 16(1), pp.144-163. https://doi.org/10.1177/1475725716687166. tibingana-ahimbisibwe, b., willis, s., catherall, s., butler, f. and harrison, r. (2020) ‘a systematic review of peer-assisted learning in fully online higher education distance learning programmes’, open learning: the journal of open, distance and elearning, pp.1-22. https://doi.org/10.1080/02680513.2020.1758651. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.radi.2015.08.004 http://www.pass.manchester.ac.uk/uk-national-pass-network/ https://doi.org/10.3102/0034654314540007 https://doi.org/10.1177/1475725716687166 https://doi.org/10.1080/02680513.2020.1758651 connolly centralisation: placing peer assisted study sessions (pass) within the wider work of learning developers journal of learning development in higher education, issue 21: september 2021 22 tamachi, s., giles, j. a., dornan, t. and hill, e. j. (2018) ‘“you understand that whole big situation they’re in”: interpretative phenomenological analysis of peer-assisted learning’, bmc medical education, 18(1), pp.1-8. wadoodi, a. and crosby, j. r. (2002) ‘twelve tips for peer-assisted learning: a classic concept revisited’, medical teacher, 24(3), pp.241-244. https://doi.org/10.1080/01421590220134060. zaccagnini, m. and verenikina, i. (2013) ‘peer assisted study sessions for postgraduate international students in australia’, journal of peer learning, 6(1), p.8. author details maxinne connolly-panagopoulos is a lecturer in psychology at the university of highlands and islands and an associate tutor in psychology at the university of glasgow. she has also worked as an effective learning advisor at the university of glasgow. her research largely focuses on the psychology of religion, but she also conducts research into student identity and belonging. https://doi.org/10.1080/01421590220134060 centralisation: placing peer assisted study sessions (pass) within the wider work of learning developers abstract introduction benefits of pass challenges of pass context of research centralisation methodology participants and procedure results advertising and attendance mentor training mentor remuneration academic involvement centralisation discussion advertising with support of learning development services centralised training mentor remuneration examples of centralisation conclusion references author details i send students to the study skills centres journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 2: february 2010 the role and efficacy of generic learning and study support: what is the experience and perspective of academic teaching staff? richard bailey university of teesside, uk abstract the importance of student learning and study support is now widely recognised in higher education but empirical research into this aspect of teaching and learning is limited in scope. in particular the experience, perceptions and understandings of academic staff constitutes a perspective which seems under-explored. this paper presents the findings of a qualitative study in this area undertaken in one institutional context. data are presented which illustrate academic staff attitudes to, and beliefs about, learning and study support and the effects of institutional practices and priorities on how this type of provision is addressed in the curriculum. the findings have implications for the challenge of learning development in higher education. key words: student learning; teachers’ attitudes and beliefs; teaching and learning in the curriculum; institutional practices. introduction hilsdon (2008) points out definitions of learning development (ld) in higher education are open to debate as the field is recently-emerged, broad church and continually reassessing its boundaries. there is, nonetheless, a general consensus among practitioners (lders) that developing learning involves working with teaching staff as well as students, and that the responsibility for supporting learning rests ultimately with teachers in the disciplines. intrinsic is a critique position of student ‘support’ as predicated on a deficiency in individual bailey the role and efficacy of generic learning and study support students (haggis, 2006; blythman and orr, 2002; lillis, 2001; lea and street, 1998) and the ‘outmoded’ (wingate, 2007) view that students’ learning needs can be ‘fixed’ (wingate, 2006) separately through provision which is predominantly extra-curricular or ‘bolt-on’ as opposed to embedded or ‘built-in’ (bennett, et al, 2000). the beliefs and attitudes of teaching staff are central concerns. blythman and orr (2002: 53), for example, state that study support must be ‘firmly linked to the curriculum’ and that ‘strategies’ of student support should take into account the ‘culture of academic staff’ allowing them a key role in determining and implementing initiatives. orr and blythman (2003:181) call for closer ‘partnerships’ across the curriculum between academic staff and study support specialists where overlaps can be negotiated, but lament that this frequently results in support specialists dealing with aspects of the curriculum which are squeezed out due to lack of time – ‘…what we do in the study support service is dictated by what the lecturer does not do in class’. evidence of embedded and cooperative ventures are rare and involve, for example, compromises such as using student mentors rather than direct participation of academic staff (e.g. durkin and main, 2002). others point to a perceived reluctance on the part of academic staff to concern themselves with ‘student learning’ outside the direct teaching of disciplinary content knowledge (haggis, 2006; wingate, 2006; yorke, 2005). but how far is this portrayal of reluctance or indifference representative? what other aspects of the higher education experience in the contemporary context impact on academic staff attitudes, beliefs and practices in this regard? how can lders get more insight into that experience and what can it tell us? the present research attempted, in some small measure, to address this ostensibly neglected line of inquiry. the research approach the research reported here was part of a part-time doctoral study during which data collection spanned two years. data were gathered through semi-structured interviews with a cross-section of academic teaching staff as part of a broader institutional case-study research strategy, realised through a critical ethnographic style inquiry. ethnography aims to explore reality as others perceive it. researchers attempt, as far as possible, to obtain a ‘thick description’ (geertz, 1973) of social and cultural phenomena by examining not only journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 2 bailey the role and efficacy of generic learning and study support the processes but also the circumstances and intentions integral to how something is experienced in given contexts. a researcher ideally occupies a dual position, that of both ‘insider’ and ‘outsider’. being a member of staff at the institution under study gave me the status of an insider – a member of the cultural group being studied. in so far as i was based in a discipline area other than those represented in the research, i had something of the status of an outsider which enabled me to look critically at what is familiar, routine or taken-for-granted to insiders in other contexts. respondents came from traditional humanities; applied and ‘hybrid’ disciplines in social and applied sciences; and emergent or ‘practice-based’ disciplines. my insider status facilitated extensive contact with teaching staff and enabled me to expand the sample of interviewees as the research progressed. in total 48 academic staff were interviewed in the course of the study providing scope and depth to the data. the data presented and commented on here were in response to two questions which were part of a larger interview guide and were as follows: • what is the role and purpose of learning and study support? • what is your experience with this provision? the purpose of the questions was to explore academic staff perceptions, understandings and beliefs about generic support, but especially in relation to its role in the curriculum and teaching and learning in the discipline(s). secondly, and consistent with an ethnographic approach to research, to investigate the lived reality of teaching staff in the current context of higher education in this regard. the findings emerged from the data as the research progressed. once similar data were identified as occurring regularly in responses, findings were established and interviewing ceased. the analysis and discussion presented here are, therefore, grounded (glaser and strauss, 1967) in the views and experiences of teaching staff. the data are presented as illustrative excerpts from the interviews. there are two overarching themes around which the data are organised: the understandings, experience and beliefs of teaching staff with regard to generic study and learning support, and the extent to which institutional agendas and the way provision is framed and implemented influence lecturers’ practices and perceptions. in addition, a range of contextual factors journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 3 bailey the role and efficacy of generic learning and study support consistently surfaced in teaching staff accounts and are commented on here as having subtle influences on their attitudes as well as revealing their underlying concerns. the disciplinary backgrounds of respondents are provided in brackets at the end of each excerpt. brackets are also used for elliptical references within the data excerpts. presentation of the data with analysis and commentary a frequent finding was that teachers often have ostensibly limited notions of what constitutes ‘generic support’. this is exemplified in the excerpt that follows. a teacher in a humanities discipline seems to associate generic support with ‘computer literacy’ and it knowledge, and locates this provision outside the curriculum: there are a number of areas where generic study support is extremely useful. when supplied by the library for example, in terms of it, which we couldn’t do as well ourselves so we want the students to take advantage of that. later he uses the term ‘study skills’ and appears to refer to various kinds of support across curriculum areas within the humanities. there is a discernable note of personal disaffection in what followed: on the other hand we want some more subjective material because the generic material we are supplying even across the humanities is a) not exciting to students, b) not engaging them, c) not helping students. either they think they know it already, which might be the case, or they are bored or can’t see the point. we recognise that developing study skills materials is absolutely essential; it’s got to be done in the modules but it has also got to be done separately (humanities). a number of inferences can be drawn from this particular example. firstly, his words imply a conceptualisation of ‘generic study support’ as something extraneous to the curriculum. secondly, he appears conflicted about what should be ‘done in the modules’ and ‘done separately’. thirdly, an institutional agenda regarding the provision of generic ‘study support’ can militate against teaching staff not only being able to make changes that would be more embedded, but even being able to coherently conceive of alternatives. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 4 bailey the role and efficacy of generic learning and study support the next excerpt, from a lecturer in a separate humanities discipline, seems to support this interpretation. he is referring to a module which was taught in the first semester of the first year of undergraduate study (it is no longer current in the form described here but is still a bolt-on): students do a study skills module in the first year. it is based on the assumption you can teach people things in one go. it is a poor premise. it hasn’t been changed or up-dated since it was produced over ten years ago. it was originally taught by visiting lecturers. two points can be inferred from this particular example. firstly, the teacher is fully aware that a ‘one-size fits all’, disembodied, study skills approach is a ‘poor premise’ for learning in the discipline(s). secondly, this work was originally outsourced to a non-disciplinary ‘support’ specialist and not regarded as within the remit of academic staff. this highlights a real issue and one that came to the surface on a number of occasions. academic staff may not feel they have, individually, the expertise to deal with study skills provision in the curriculum. furthermore, the notion of ‘study skills’ is equated with deficiencies in basic skills, as is clear in what the same respondent said next: learning support should be done by lecturers. the really useful thing i can do as a lecturer is mark students work as efficiently as i know how. we are in higher education; teaching reading and writing is not what we do (humanities). this ambivalence appeared regularly in teachers’ accounts, a frequent acknowledgement that learning support should be embedded, but reluctance concerning perceived remedial needs, as is evident in the following: [students] sometimes don’t understand what constitutes a paragraph. they are not well prepared before they come here. i think the solution has to be bolt-on generic skills input (social sciences). on the other hand, a colleague in the same department was explicit: journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 5 bailey the role and efficacy of generic learning and study support study skills is patronising to students. it abstracts out an organic process and disconnects it from the real context. the same respondent added: we would like people to come in and talk to students about the epistemologies and genres in sociology but there isn’t time… learning is becoming part of a community. bolt-on, non-integrated support is not good enough (social sciences). this is evidence of what teaching staff value in terms of embedded support (blythman and orr, 2002) and an indication of a persistent concern that emerged regularly – time and resource constraints. another respondent elaborated: most of higher education is going the way of getting students through degrees with fewer resources. one-to-one tutorials are the best way to support student writers. to develop their writing [learning] in the department, well, it has to come from the department. but workloads and lack of resources constrain being able to do things the way you want to do them (applied sciences). teachers have experienced a change in their pedagogical relationships with students. the last two excerpts indicate that teaching staff continue to subscribe tacitly to what lillis (2001) has referred to as ‘a model of learning as implicit induction’. however, the conditions under which this model flourished – smaller classes, regular tutorial contact between students and their teachers, continuity in teaching relationships – are to a much lesser extent a feature of the university experience. in their place a standardised approach to teaching and learning systems comprising virtual learning environments, distributed learning systems, and an extensive range of printed and automated institution-wide and department-specific textual sources for students and teaching staff has become widespread, necessitated, and driven, by economy of scale considerations. concomitant values emphasise student/learner independence, self-sufficiency and self-direction. taken together these may reinforce certain beliefs and attitudes among staff, as appears to be the case in the following: we would be much happier if these issues about study skills and the ways in which students write were taken care of by others (humanities). journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 6 bailey the role and efficacy of generic learning and study support the attitude here seems to correspond what orr and blythman (2003) called the ‘leftovers’ approach. the support team is regarded as there to take care of what is squeezed out and not done in the curriculum by the lecturer. in the next excerpt a lecturer in an area with a very high intake, and in which there is extensive student diversity across programmes, espoused a more hard-line view: students who want support have to seek the supporter rather than the other way round. there are major problems with some students in just understanding what we mean by adult education (nursing). the term ‘adult education’ is used as if it were indivisible. students should not expect to be given additional contact time with academic staff; they should strive to be the independent learners that the university and current education policy hold up as an ideal. students can access other sources of support and guidance if they need to. however, when teaching staff were probed on the efficaciousness of those resources there was overt scepticism: we don’t think blackboard is really effective but it suits senior management. stuffing so much contact time onto ict doesn’t really work…we pay lip-service to it (business school). another respondent stated: when students seem to have persistent problems we use the study skills service. we expect them to put things right. but they are not always good at that. they have failed to pick up on dyslexia in some of our students… i’ve had students who can’t write using paragraphs. these are some of the difficulties we need them [study skills] to sort out (nursing). the teacher here was a programme leader in a curriculum area which is on the front line of widening access. the excerpt is palpable evidence of some of the challenges teachers in these areas experience. it also indicates that the curriculum is not addressing the issues which concern her. her expectations of the study skills service as a source of all-serving, unlimited remedial help reflects a wide-spread (mis)conception about the nature and journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 7 bailey the role and efficacy of generic learning and study support capabilities of such support. another respondent, also from an area of the university with a large and diverse student intake, sums up the problem as follows: we don’t explicitly recognise different types of student… it is more difficult to spot if students are having difficulties until it is too late. we need to identify more clearly the issues students face when they embark on the programmes (business school). there is an identification here of ‘when’ diagnostic support should be effected. but a social practices perspective on student learning in higher education maintains that learning is situated and contextualised. as such it needs to be supported throughout a student’s university experience. teachers are aware that students need help beyond the first year. a lecturer in a traditional discipline area who recently returned from a sabbatical year, comments: it came as quite a shock to remind myself of what some second year students are not capable of. it does seem to be quite clear that they confuse ‘assertion’ and ‘evidence’ for example, and they don’t understand what a consistent argument is and that they don’t really understand structure (humanities). words like ‘argument’, ‘structure’, and ‘evidence’ have different connotations and even specific meanings depending on field of study and even the expectations of individual teachers (lea and street, 1998; lillis, 2001). students engaged in learning and assessment will need to be in a position to manage that learning. however, the further the student progresses with undergraduate study the fewer opportunities there are, as the data here reveal, for tutorial contact with teachers. a recurrent theme in the interview data was a concern which went beyond the obvious and familiar issues regarding time and resources – the way in which the curriculum is managed at the institutional level: we can’t get rid of the skills thing, or replace it. we think it should be done here [in the department] but the decision was taken to concede to the better provision made by the university. we are squeezed in terms of resources. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 8 bailey the role and efficacy of generic learning and study support the ‘skills thing’ referred to here is university-wide provision mostly in the form of printed and automated materials focusing on generic study skills which is incorporated into taught programmes in the social sciences. generic support in, and across, the university where this research was conducted is conceptualised and construed as flexible, accessible and reactive for a number of reasons. the first is the requirements of the university’s infrastructure. the university is a large central campus with a number of satellite sites inside and outside the city area. it is divided into schools which differ in size and complexity. secondly, the organisational structure of the university is periodically in flux. this is in part a response to the need to respond dynamically to change and to internal agendas related to adjusting and reviewing provision. university policy (entitled ‘guidance and learner support’ and available to all teaching staff) also stresses fairness and equality; all students should have, in principle, the same opportunities for, and access to, support. these factors underpin the university’s commitment to generic support in a shifting and responsive organisational environment. new structures have developed in heis such as teaching and learning committees based within broad divisions in which ‘strategies’ for enhancing teaching and learning are mostly centrally directed and determined and overseen by academic management. academic staff involvement may be partial or token in many cases; the real nature of these committees is to implement top-down policy agenda. programme leaders are a layer of operational management and their autonomy in managing the curriculum is restricted. the data also revealed that the curriculum does not accommodate learning needs beyond the first year of study; space is taken up with other things: employability has been a big concern. the more generic skills we include the more subject specific skills we lose. we are trying to get them to do both but it is hard to get the space on the curriculum (applied sciences). in principle all higher education institutions (heis) (but in particular the post-92 universities) are expected to demonstrate a commitment to the values of life-long learning and the knowledge economy and make explicit employability in graduate education. a discourse in which skills (key, transferable) and outcomes are emphasised permeates from the top down and takes priority in the curriculum beyond the first year of study in the form, for example, of student progress files and a range of employability and graduate journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 9 bailey the role and efficacy of generic learning and study support skills modules. these are currently core mandatory components at all levels of undergraduate study and integral to other modules. in addition, academic staff are required to comply by including references to key or transferable skills in the rubric of documents such as templates for module descriptors, course guides and proformas for assessment feedback, all of which are subject to standardisation and approval by teaching and learning committees. the teacher’s words above indicate that this is diverting time and energy which teaching staff may well prefer to focus on ‘subject specific skills’. the effect on the ground is that teachers feel they have little control over what they can realistically do in the curriculum to help students (yorke, 2005) as is evident in the next excerpt. a teacher describes the function of student guides and handbooks produced in the department: common [to all modules] material is separated off. there are course specific handbooks but they are focused on the programme structure. they don’t say anything about what i would call ‘the learning process’. they are mainly information… the main thrust is talking about learning objectives (business school). the production of these materials is mandatory; a university requirement and a quality assurance recommendation (in accordance with the quality assurance agency). the institutional priority is to ensure that students are provided, equally, with specified information related to their course(s) and modules. given that higher education has moved extensively towards modularity in degree structures to facilitate and accommodate flexible patterns of participation, students will receive a wide range of these documents, sometimes all at once. in practice these sources may consist of little more than a diet of information on course outlines or synopses, assessment details and criteria, suggested reading, outcomes (objectives) and injunctions regarding academic misconduct (especially plagiarism). teachers have little or no time to address their concerns for students, what this teacher calls ‘the learning process’. the situation is further complicated by what teaching staff can assume is done in other curriculum areas. central to the ‘academic literacies’ thesis (lea and street, 1998) is that students throughout their time at university have to manage and negotiate the demands of ‘course switching’. it is at the level of epistemology that students experience difficulty but this may not be obvious to teaching staff who assume students may be deficient in basic journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 10 bailey the role and efficacy of generic learning and study support skills. the suggestion is there should be more explicitness about the (frequently tacit) expectations of academic teaching staff as students produce writing and assessments for different teachers across various fields of study. however, teaching staff have concerns as is evident in the following response: we have many joint degrees with other departments. do film studies or history do a ‘skills for sociologists’ module? i don’t know. we want to cut the extraneous stuff and make the module as embedded as possible but there is a problem with joints and the assumptions you can make… in an interdisciplinary degree structure we are measuring different things. they [students] need to understand why we ask them to write [for assessment] in certain ways and we need to show more understanding of the difficulties they face. we need to do this to retain students. those [students] on joints are particularly vulnerable (social sciences). the reference here to a ‘skills’ module is part of the key/transferable skills agenda. it is possible to discern in the excerpt above how a discourse of skills and outcomes influences the teacher’s perception of what should be prioritised. it seems that this agenda marginalises what are traditionally referred to as ‘study skills’ (wingate, 2006). the teacher’s mention of ‘extraneous stuff’ is a reference to generic support which is provided in the curriculum within a department which offers numerous options for degree study including a variety of ‘joints’. the teacher acknowledges that a more embedded form of support linked directly to the requirements of study in the discipline is in the best interests of students. however, a centrally provided generic form of support has replaced it, while in the curriculum an emphasis on components linked to skills and employability predominates. this teacher, like many whose words have been included in this paper, experiences certain conflicts which are not helped or resolved by the way the institution frames student learning and study support provision or how it exercises control over the curriculum. what are the salient findings? the evidence indicates that teaching staff are aware of the learning needs of students and the importance of addressing these directly and in an embedded way at various stages in degree study. in fact the very premise on which generic study support is based is journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 11 bailey the role and efficacy of generic learning and study support perceived as false. they lack the confidence and, to some extent, the know-how, but not the will, to support student learning outside the teaching of content knowledge (blythman and orr, 2002). however, they are conflicted over the nature of that support and what they are willing to do (haggis, 2006). resources are a perennial issue, especially staff shortages set against rising numbers of students. this situation plays on other issues lecturers may have and compounds a sense of reluctance to voice concerns and take initiatives. institutional agendas over-ride departmental and individual preferences and restrict what teachers can do on the ground (yorke, 2005). in turn, this can subtly reinforce certain attitudes and assumptions about student learning at university. on the other hand, there is evidence among teaching staff of wide-spread ambivalence, and in some cases outright scepticism, about practices. a core finding is that the curriculum is overloaded and taken up with agenda such as key skills and ‘employability’ components constricting space for on-going, embedded support. teaching staff are distracted by these requirements, sometimes confusing or conflating purposes. the problem is also contextual. too many hybrid courses and joint degree structures engendering complications around the sorts of assumptions teachers can make (lea and street, 1998). academic teaching staff experience uncertainty. they maybe circumspect about institutional requirements, or openly dissatisfied, but they have to comply, consuming time and effort that is at a premium. the situation seems to compound the separation of learning support from the curriculum (wingate, 2006). this separation state of affairs is, arguably, the most significant challenge of learning development. references bennet, n., dunne, e. and carre, b. (2000) skills development in higher education and employment. buckingham: open university press and the society for research in higher education. blythman, m. and orr, s. (2002) ‘a joined-up policy approach to student support’, pp.4555, in peelo, m. and wareham, t. (eds.) failing students in higher education. buckingham: open university press and the society for research in higher education. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 12 bailey the role and efficacy of generic learning and study support durkin, k. and main, a. (2002) ‘discipline-based study skills support for first-year undergraduate students’, active learning in higher education 3(24) pp 24-39. geertz, c. (1973) the interpretation of cultures. new york: basic books. glaser, b. and strauss, a. (1967) discovery of grounded theory: strategies for qualitative research. chicago: aldine. haggis, t. (2006) ‘pedagogies for diversity: retaining critical challenge amidst fears of ‘dumbing down’’, studies in higher education 31(5) pp 521-535. hilsdon, j. (2008) ‘towards a brief definition of learning development’, ldhen jiscmail list, 22 april [online]. available e-mail: ldhen@jiscmail.ac.uk lea, m. and street, b. (1998) ‘student writing in higher education: an academic literacies approach’, studies in higher education 23(2) pp 157-172. lillis, t. (2001) student writing: access, regulation, desire. london and new york: routledge. orr, s. and blythman, m. (2003) ‘an analysis of the discourse of study support at the london institute’, pp.175-184, in rijlarsdam, g. (series ed.) and björk, l., bräuer, g., rienecker, l. and stray jörgensen, p. (volume eds.), studies in writing, volume 12: teaching academic writing in european higher education. netherlands: kluwer academic publishers. wingate, u. (2006) doing away with ‘study skills’, teaching in higher education 10(4) pp 457-469. wingate, u. (2007) ‘a framework for transition: supporting ‘learning to learn’ in higher education’, higher education quarterly 61(3) pp 391-405. yorke, m. (2005) ‘increasing the chances of student success’, pp.35-52, in rust, c. (ed.) improving student learning: diversity and inclusivity. oxford: the oxford centre for staff and learning development. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 13 mailto:ldhen@jiscmail.ac.uk bailey the role and efficacy of generic learning and study support author details richard bailey has recently completed a phd in student learning and academic literacy development in higher education. he is currently a visiting lecturer in the school of social sciences and law at teesside university. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 14 the role and efficacy of generic learning and study support: what is the experience and perspective of academic teaching staff? abstract introduction presentation of the data with analysis and commentary what are the salient findings? references author details literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special edition: academic peer learning, november 2015 the development and implementation of a peer assisted learning programme at the university of liverpool gita sedghi university of liverpool, uk trish lunt university of liverpool, uk abstract a peer assisted learning (pal) programme was designed and implemented in the department of chemistry in the university of liverpool during the 2012-13 academic year. the pal programme was initially set up to support first year chemistry undergraduate students with one particular maths module but was extended to offer support to all year 1 modules. the pal programme was also designed to meet the needs of a second cohort of students, year 2 direct entry international students, but this paper focuses on the first year student programme. a key element to the development of the liverpool pal programme was the contribution of student input throughout the initial programme design stages and, importantly, the ongoing involvement of students during the operation of the programme over the last three years. they provided evaluation and feedback on the programme’s organisation and effectiveness, and were involved in subsequent discussions to analyse the data from these processes in order to improve and develop the programme. the concept of working with students as partners is not new, but it has risen in profile in recent years as highlighted by healey et al. (2014) and many others. we believe that the pal programme would not be as effective as it is without the ongoing involvement of students in all elements of the programme. the paper will discuss the development and implementation of the pal programme over the past three years, and highlight the value and importance of the role and contribution of sedghi and lunt the development and implementation of a pal programme at the university of liverpool journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 2 the students in making the programme what it is today, as evidenced by the evaluation feedback from the students. keywords: peer assisted learning; collaborative learning; student as partners. what is peer assisted learning (pal)? peer assisted learning (pal) is a student-to-student academic support scheme designed to typically benefit first year students. student volunteers from higher levels are trained to become pal leaders who facilitate group discussions which support academic topics but also learning strategies more generally. the role of the trained pal leaders is not to teach, but one of facilitating collaborative learning. the benefits of enhanced learning from students working in groups are well documented (jacques and salmon, 2007; and others), but one of the important features deliberately designed into the development of the liverpool pal programme was the ethos of working with the students as partners throughout all stages of the development and on an ongoing basis, beyond the traditional evaluation role. developing the pal programme at the university of liverpool pal was implemented in the department of chemistry in september 2012 after one year of research on various schemes at different higher education institutions. the aim of the programme was to develop a suitable scheme to support first year undergraduate students in adjusting to university life in general, and also to provide help with a specific maths module which is regarded as one of the most difficult subjects in the chemistry degree programme (becker and towns, 2012). evaluation of the first year maths course in the department of chemistry had identified a number of issues that students were struggling with, especially those without a level maths. these included lack of knowledge on how to approach problems from different angles, lack of confidence, lack of maths practice, and lack of assessment experience. while these issues were partially addressed at programme level via the changing of teaching delivery and assessment methods, it was believed that the pal scheme could be used to enhance students’ confidence in maths and to improve their skills on approaching problems from different angles. sedghi and lunt the development and implementation of a pal programme at the university of liverpool journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 3 in addition, the pal programme was intended to support international students, primarily a cohort from china entering directly into the second year of undergraduate studies in liverpool. while language proficiency and culture is an acknowledged difficulty for international students in english-speaking universities (andrade, 2006), a research project undertaken in 2010-11 within the faculty of science and engineering at the university of liverpool identified that year 2 direct entry chinese students were also unfamiliar with actual chemistry labs and the equipment used, which resulted in health and safety issues, as well as a loss of confidence. a related research project undertaken by willis and sedghi (2014) highlighted the support that the pal programme could offer to international students with general key skills (e.g. laboratory skills) and practical skills (e.g. writing and presentation skills), two areas of particular difficulty for international students. initial research into various pal programme models was funded by the national he stem programme. this funding enabled academic staff from the department to tailor the pal programme developments to meet the specific requirements of the students at liverpool. the programme was initially adapted from the model operated by bournemouth university. colleagues from the universities of sussex and bradford were approached to act as critical friends during the initial programme development: one institution (bradford) was at a similar initial stage, and the other (sussex) had adapted a similar model a few years previously and was willing to share their learning. initial developments were also informed by focus groups comprising undergraduate students from the department. as well as providing valuable input, involving the students also helped them to recognise that the system was being designed to be run by students for students. the pal programme academic staff coordinator also attended a pass (peer assisted study sessions – another name for pal) training course delivered by the teaching and learning support office at the university of manchester, the uk national centre for such training. attending the pass training programme (which is recognised internationally as the uk benchmark) assisted the academic staff coordinator to understand, plan, implement, and evaluate the scheme, as well as offering guidance on the training of undergraduate students to become pal leaders. arendale (1994) gives a detailed introduction to the pass model (also known as supplemental instruction (si)). sedghi and lunt the development and implementation of a pal programme at the university of liverpool journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 4 operationalising the pal programme four key roles have evolved for the liverpool pal programme:  academic staff coordinator – with overall responsibility for the programme in the department.  pal session leaders – students who volunteer to lead/facilitate specific pal sessions.  pal subject leaders – a new role introduced in 2014-15. these are pal session leaders who volunteer to take primary responsibility for coordinating materials to support a particular subject/topic and ensure appropriate materials are available for that subject for a particular session.  pal student coordinators – a new role introduced in 2014-15. this is a small team of year 4 students who now organise and co-ordinate the pal programme, assign the pal leaders for the various sessions, and support them as required. recruiting pal leaders and co-ordinators second year undergraduates (some of whom will have participated in sessions during their first year of studies) receive a short talk delivered by the academic staff coordinator and existing pal leaders to introduce the pal programme. students interested in becoming a pal leader are required to submit an application form which includes details of why they wish to become a pal leader and the subjects that they would be willing to ‘lead’. the academic staff coordinator will then review the academic performance of the students who have applied, particularly with respect to the subjects that they have offered to lead. when the new role of pal student coordinator was introduced for the 2014-15 academic year, this was offered to a small team of existing trained pal leaders. promotion of the pal programme to new students pal is introduced to new students in a lecture given by the academic staff coordinator and an existing pal leader during welcome (induction) week. in week 1 of the new academic year, the pal academic coordinator also delivers a separate introductory talk on study skills in university, and so this is another opportunity to promote the pal programme. the week 1 study skills talk also highlights the importance of peer discussions and sedghi and lunt the development and implementation of a pal programme at the university of liverpool journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 5 collaborative working as part of degree studies, a skill reinforced through the pal sessions. organisation of the pal programme the pal sessions take place for one hour every week, with a variety of subjects being covered during each session according to student demand. although the sessions are not compulsory for new students, the pal programme appears on student timetables. organising the pal sessions through the timetabling system ensures that the first year students are able to attend if they wish, and also that the second and third year pal leaders are available to lead the sessions. another important element in the organisation of the programme is that all pal session plans are uploaded into the ‘chemistry pal’ course on the university’s virtual learning environment (vle), the online repository for all module information. all year 1 students and pal leaders are enrolled on to this course. pal leaders are registered as instructors on the vle so they can add to or amend pal materials. all students need to access the vle on a regular basis, so they become used to seeing the ‘chemistry pal’ course alongside the other modules they are studying. the pal sessions are held in a large seminar room which allows students to split into groups of typically 6-8 participants, with each group focusing on a specific subject or topic. each group will be led by one or a pair of pal leaders and there may be up to three different subjects/topics covered at each weekly session. learning strategies and session activities are planned mainly by pal subject leaders and the pal leaders, with help from academic staff who lead the modules relevant to the subjects being covered at the pal sessions. since 2014-15, the pal student coordinators have organised the pal session leaders and the subject leaders. they keep in regular contact with the academic coordinator to provide feedback on the scheme throughout the year and also assist in training new pal leaders every academic year. pal sessions are typically attended by 8-10 pal leaders who support approximately 40 first year students per session. when the pal programme was first introduced in 2012-13, sedghi and lunt the development and implementation of a pal programme at the university of liverpool journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 6 a booking system was implemented. this was found not to work due to significant numbers of students booking on to sessions and not turning up, leading to a number of session leaders, who had prepared materials, not being required. the booking scheme was therefore withdrawn after a year, but there was still the problem of how many leaders to assign and how to deal with unexpected numbers of applicants. for the 2013-14 academic year, there were occasions when there were more pal leaders at the sessions than would be needed for an approximate ratio of 1:7. in these situations, pal leaders would be paired up so they could all contribute. a gradual decrease in participant numbers over the whole academic year made it easier to predict how many leaders would be needed to cover each session. in 2013-14, almost all year 1 modules were supported by the scheme. assigning one or two subjects to each session allowed each subject to be delivered every three weeks. however, this was found not to be ideal as students did not benefit from receiving continuous support on topics they were struggling with. in particular, students without a level maths felt that they needed weekly maths sessions to discuss challenging topics related to the weekly workshops. in 2014-15, regular weekly pal sessions were delivered specifically aimed at supporting students without a level maths, with one or two other subjects alongside the maths. some subjects were delivered only during the revision period to enable regular sessions to be assigned to more challenging subjects. evaluation regular evaluation of the scheme has provided the opportunity to detect and resolve any issues, to identify areas for improvement, and to adapt the scheme to the needs of students, both the pal ‘beneficiaries’ as well as the pal leaders, as quickly as possible. evaluating the pal programme for beneficiaries (target students) various methods are used to evaluate the pal scheme at different times during an academic year. online questionnaires consisting of both multiple choice and free text questions are administered at the end of every semester. in addition, the pal student coordinators regularly liaise with pal session leaders to gain more informal feedback, with mid-semester feedback collated via a questionnaire. the pal student coordinators meet sedghi and lunt the development and implementation of a pal programme at the university of liverpool journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 7 the academic coordinator regularly to discuss the feedback and decide if any immediate or longer term action is needed. the results of the end of semester surveys are also discussed as part of these meetings as appropriate. the students are therefore taking ownership of collating the regular feedback and also suggesting and implementing any action that may be required, with guidance from the academic coordinator as may be needed. feedback from the end of year questionnaires also informs the following year’s pal leaders training sessions. in addition to the questionnaires, focus groups have been organised with pal beneficiaries for the last two years in order to gain more detailed evaluation evidence. additional feedback also comes from staffstudent liaison committee (sslc) meetings. evaluating the pal programme for pal leaders the academic staff coordinator and the team of student coordinators organise at least two meetings during each semester with the pal session leaders to gain formative feedback and discuss any issues that have arisen for them as pal leaders. leaders also complete end of year evaluation questionnaires which cover areas of the training they received, as well as organisational issues. over the last two years, this questionnaire process has also been supplemented by focus groups. results and discussion of evaluation outcomes from 2012-2015 training of pal leaders feedback from the first training session for pal leaders in preparation for the 2012-13 academic year programme highlighted a need for more specific training. the training programme for the 2013-14 academic year therefore included a range of short topics including the history of pal, how to facilitate sessions without teaching, the benefits to both leaders and participants, the structure of the system, and how to plan the sessions. another well-received development to the pal leaders training session, which again resulted from student feedback, was the introduction of role plays delivered by experienced pal leaders. sedghi and lunt the development and implementation of a pal programme at the university of liverpool journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 8 materials and topics covered pal leaders are asked regularly about the level of detail they would find helpful in terms of the materials prepared to support the pal sessions by the pal subject leaders. not unexpectedly, there are a range of views, illustrated by these typical responses: the scripts didn’t seem that necessary. i would have rather if they just came to me and asked us questions that they needed answering, rather than the questions we wanted them to need to answer. it would be really handy tutorial stuff, at least then we could send them in advance, we’d have the answers, we’d be able to sit through and just say, ‘we’ve got some questions that are pre-prepared, can we have a look at them’. because i remember, in the first pal session which was maths, we had to make up questions at the time for them, and that’s not easy. year 1 student representatives in the sslc were supportive of having detailed session plans as they would bring ‘more structure to the pal sessions’. therefore, it was decided that session plans would be prepared to cover the various subjects to support the pal leaders as needed. evaluation of the pal programme in 2013-14 highlighted additional issues associated with a particular subject only being discussed every 2-3 weeks. the pal leaders did not find the gaps between the specific subjects helpful (a finding which was also reported by the pal beneficiaries) and so it was decided to cover the less challenging subjects only near the exam period in order to allow more regular sessions with the more challenging subjects. organising and assigning pal leaders another issue arising in 2013-14 was poor attendance of some pal leaders which resulted in poorly organised sessions. these frequent absences highlighted the requirement of a system to deal with such a situation if it happened, or ideally to prevent it happening in the first place. the solution to this problem came from feedback from pal leaders who suggested that the new post of pal student coordinators be developed, with a role to ensure that sessions were planned and covered by prepared pal leaders. the leaders sedghi and lunt the development and implementation of a pal programme at the university of liverpool journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 9 suggested that a coordinator would be in charge of each topic (e.g. 'organic', 'inorganic'); coordinators would have the lists and contact details of all the pal leaders in that topic; they would lead the planning to make sure everyone had a chance to give input; and they would then e-mail the plan to everyone after the planning meeting. this was an interesting solution proposed by the students as it had the potential for significant tensions, since students would have to take on an authority role with fellow students. however, for the 2014-15 academic year, these discussions with the students resulted in the creation of two new roles: pal subject leaders and pal student coordinators. pal subject leaders would take on the role of planning the sessions and preparing session plans for their subject of interest. they would take the lead on the related subject and get help from the academic module leaders and other pal leaders if required. the pal coordinators would help in assigning leaders to different subjects, communicating between leaders and participants, resolving difficulties, organising meetings with leaders, and supervising the sessions. benefits for pal leaders and coordinators evaluation with pal leaders highlights that the programme has helped them to enhance their employability and communication skills. providing session plans and facilitating group discussions for year 1 students has also deepened their understanding of the subject studied. as one student said: when we first started university, we were quite shy, finding it difficult to approach lecturers for help. now we have the confidence to lead group discussion, whilst also teaching 1st year students how to become more independent learners. this has really enhanced our career prospects, whether it be for a career in teaching or more generally through the communication and organisation skills we have acquired. at the end of the 2014-15 academic year, some additional evaluation was conducted with the three year 4 students who had taken on the new role of pal student coordinator to ascertain what they felt they had gained from being both pal leaders and pal student coordinators. they were interviewed as a group. all three students had (typically) coordinated about 15-20 pal sessions over the three years that they were pal leaders, with their 2014-15 role involving coordination of the whole programme. during 2014-15, these sedghi and lunt the development and implementation of a pal programme at the university of liverpool journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 10 three students typically devoted a minimum of 3-5 hours per week to the pal programme, with one also being captain of the university basketball team, and another a student course representative, additional roles which also needed time and commitment. the third coordinator spent in excess of 5 hours/week supporting the pal programme. in addition, all three students were involved with supporting other department activities such as open days, amounting to another ten days or so over the year. asked what motivated them initially to volunteer as pal leaders, typical responses included ‘i saw it as an opportunity to build my confidence’ and ‘it could provide evidence to support a possible future career as a teacher’. when asked to describe what they believed they had gained from their involvement in the programme, all three talked about the development in ‘confidence’ and ‘self-confidence’ and about being able to ‘speak in front of a group…which was something i couldn’t have done two years ago’. two students also mentioned that undertaking the coordination role had ‘helped to develop their people skills’. for example, they had had to deal with students ‘who had been trained as pal leaders, didn’t turn up to their sessions, and then turn up again and expect to run a session’. resolving such situations had needed patience, tact, and organisation, both in dealing with less reliable pal leaders who also were fellow students, and also in organising the sessions and materials/worksheets with the pal leaders who were able to attend to run the sessions. the following quotes illustrate their learning and the perspective that they brought as student organisers: it was important that we understood the problems that some pal leaders were having which resulted in them not being able to attend some sessions; we needed to understand where they were coming from, and to talk to them on their level, but also explain the situation from our point of view. we also had to learn to be firm early on so that we didn’t waste the time of the pal leaders or the students who had come to the sessions. one student also talked about the transferability of organisational skills to and from her role in organising the basketball team, and the importance of ‘learning how to suggest changes in a professional manner’. in terms of more subject-based learning, all three sedghi and lunt the development and implementation of a pal programme at the university of liverpool journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 11 students talked about how running pal sessions provided an opportunity to ‘revise and reaffirm knowledge, from year 1 through to year 3’. benefits for pal beneficiaries (target students) the end of semester evaluations of pal in 2012-14 showed that student participants found pal sessions very useful in adapting to university life and assisting them with the challenging modules and topics: with the help of the pal leaders, i got advice and support i needed to understand and structure my studies. they offered tips and explanations on some topics i initially struggled with and set me on the right path. i used to have a problem with getting help when i was younger because i was embarrassed. but i have attended a few pal sessions and they have been very useful and it made me comfortable with getting help. the following results are taken from the end of (2014-15) year online questionnaire that was sent to all first year chemistry students; 45 responses were received (which represents approximately 17 % of the student cohort). when asked what encouraged them to attend the pal sessions, 91% of respondents mentioned the fact that the sessions were timetabled. this is an interesting finding: as mentioned earlier, the pal sessions are optional for first years, but the fact that they are included on the timetable (which was purely for logistical reasons) had an impact on the students. other key findings from the survey included: 25% of respondents attended because they were ‘struggling with their course’; 16% of respondents cited ‘lack of confidence with studying at university’. 58% of respondents attended the pal sessions regularly/weekly with the top four reasons cited for this being usefulness of talking to students who had already completed year 1, the opportunity to clarify basic concepts, help with understanding course subject matter, and gaining an awareness of course expectations. sedghi and lunt the development and implementation of a pal programme at the university of liverpool journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 12 following the analysis of the questionnaire, a group of ten first year students attended a focus group to probe some of the questionnaire responses in more depth. the students gave a variety of responses to what motivated them to attend the pal sessions initially: ‘it was on our timetable so i thought we had to go’; ‘i didn’t want to miss out’; and ‘i thought i’d try them to see if they were useful’. some had also heard from some second year students that they had been very useful in supporting learning. as the questionnaire results indicate, many students continued to attend the sessions and so students were asked what encouraged them to continue to participate. typical responses included ‘it is easier to talk to a second year student sometimes than the lecturer’ and ‘the pal leaders can sometimes help to ‘make things easier’ the way they explain things’. some students further commented that they preferred to stay with the same pal leaders and that this influenced their choice of pal sessions and groups. they talked about ‘staying with someone they knew and trusted’, and ‘someone whose support style was meeting their needs’. an additional comment was that the students felt that they could ‘go more in depth’ with someone they knew. again, the importance and value of support from peers is demonstrated in these responses. asked if they would recommend the pal sessions to other new first year students, typical comments included ‘it’s worth going to hear the experiences of the second year students and the focus of their revision topics’; ‘it builds your confidence’; and ‘they are reassuring’. it is clear from these comments that the first year students had valued the learning they were receiving from the pal sessions, but also that the learning environment and the opportunity to engage with the students from a higher year group was a significant contribution to their learning experience. from a wider perspective, pal recipients also have the potential to develop skills of communication (through communicating the difficulties they are having), teamwork (through working and sharing their thoughts with other students in the pal groups), as well as learning about themselves through the act of supporting others with their learning. sedghi and lunt the development and implementation of a pal programme at the university of liverpool journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 13 the department perspective: some general trends over the three years of the pal programme figure 1 shows the increase in number of applications received from year 2 and 3 chemistry students who were interested in becoming pal leaders in each academic year. in the first year of pal implementation (2012-13), both year 2 and year 3 students were invited: from 2013, applications have only been invited from year 2 students, with numbers increasing every year. figure 1. number of applications from students to become pal leaders. this is itself a positive indicator of students who have perhaps valued the pal sessions as student beneficiaries but who are also sufficiently engaged to be prepared to give something back to other students in their departments. figure 2 shows the increasing number of year 1 students attending the pal programme over the past three years, perhaps another indicator of the value of the programme spreading by word of mouth. sedghi and lunt the development and implementation of a pal programme at the university of liverpool journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 14 figure 2. increase in number of year 1 participants over past three years. summary there are many benefits of pal to the recipients. in terms of supporting subject learning, the pal leaders tend to be quite close in age to the first year students. the evaluation comments highlighted that the first year students saw the pal leaders as more approachable, but also perhaps more understanding of the difficulties that they were facing, having been in the same position only 12-24 months previously. pal sessions can also offer additional feedback opportunities from peers and pal leaders, as well as offering a different learning environment to the one in which the subject was originally covered, which could be advantageous to some students. both pal leaders and beneficiaries can also benefit substantially as highlighted by their evaluation comments about the sessions reinforcing and reaffirming their learning. there are arguably also wider benefits to the institution. pal is a beneficial student engagement programme that can support the critical phase of transition into higher education. kandiko and mawer (2013) recommend implementing intervention strategies to support this crucial phase. research by chickering and gamson (1987), kuh (1995; 2009) and many others demonstrates a positive relationship between students engaging in a range of activities and their student experience. sedghi and lunt the development and implementation of a pal programme at the university of liverpool journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 15 as kuh (2009, p.698) noted: student engagement and its historical antecedents – time on task, quality of effort, and involvement – are supported by decades of research showing positive associations with a range of desired outcomes of college. pal programmes provide one such educational opportunity that can benefit all participants and reinforce the role of ‘students as partners’ – in this case, as partners in the design of the learning, as well as partners in implementing and supporting learning of other students. lessons have also been learned from an organisational point of view. the fact that the programme information is set up as a ‘module’ in the institution’s vle, so appearing alongside all credit-based modules, perhaps reinforces its ‘academic standing’ but also has the benefit of the information relating to students’ studies all being in the same place, as well as providing the opportunity for communication between pal leaders and first year students. it has also proved important that the scheme is tailored and structured to support particular learning needs from specific modules, and that the individual sessions are well organised from the perspective of both the pal leaders and the pal beneficiaries. arguably, the most important element to the successful sustainability and development of this programme has been the continuous involvement of the students in the planning and development of the pal programme, a key element in fostering ownership and ensuring that the programme is tailored to the needs of the students, the discipline and the department. acknowledgements the authors would like to acknowledge the support and contribution of all the students who contributed to the research studies/development of the pal programme and, in particular, to the first group of pal student coordinators. the authors would also like to acknowledge the support received from the national he stem programme. sedghi and lunt the development and implementation of a pal programme at the university of liverpool journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 16 references andrade, m.s. (2006) ‘international students in english-speaking universities’, journal of research in international education, 5(2), pp. 131-154. arendale, d. (1994) ‘understanding the supplemental instruction (si) model’, new directions for teaching and learning, 60(4), pp. 11-22. becker, n. and towns, m. (2012) ‘students' understanding of mathematical expressions in physical chemistry contexts: an analysis using sherin's symbolic forms’, chemistry education research and practice, 13(3), pp. 209-220. chickering, a.w. and gamson, z.f. (1987) ‘seven principles for good practice in undergraduate education’, aahe bulletin, 39(7), pp. 3-7. healey, m., flint, a. and harrington, k. (2014) engagement through partnership: students as partners in learning and teaching in higher education. available at: https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/engagement-through-partnership-students-partnerslearning-and-teaching-higher-education (accessed: 12 august 2015). jaques, d. and salmon, g. (2007) learning in groups. 4 th edn. london: routledge. kandiko, c.b. and mawer, m. (2013) student expectations and perceptions of higher education. london: king’s learning institute. kuh, g.d. (1995) ‘the other curriculum: out-of-class experiences associated with student learning and personal development’, journal of higher education, 66(2), pp. 123155. kuh, g.d. (2009) ‘what student affairs professionals need to know about student engagement’, journal of college student development, 50(6), pp. 683-706. https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/engagement-through-partnership-students-partners-learning-and-teaching-higher-education https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/engagement-through-partnership-students-partners-learning-and-teaching-higher-education sedghi and lunt the development and implementation of a pal programme at the university of liverpool journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2015 17 willis, i. and sedghi, g. (2014) ‘perceptions and experiences of home students involved in welcoming and supporting direct entry 2nd year international students’, practice and evidence of scholarship of teaching and learning in higher education, 9(1), december 2014, pp. 2-17. author details gita sedghi is a lecturer in the department of chemistry, university of liverpool. she is passionate about teaching and active in researching her own practice for the enhancement of student learning. she was awarded hea funding to undertake research in the areas of internationalisation and peer assisted learning which led to her implementing a peer assisted learning programme in her department which she continues to run successfully. further, she was awarded hea funding to create pre-lab activities which resulted in a series of videos, photos and online assessments across first and second year undergraduate lab courses. trish lunt is an educational developer in the centre for lifelong learning at the university of liverpool. she contributes to the cps and pg cert programmes run by the department, and leads a team dedicated to increasing student access to and take-up of coand extra curricular activities, alongside developing an eportfolio system for the institution that will support students in recognising the achievements and skills gained from these extracurricular activities. she has long standing areas of interest in researching and developing activities that support the student experience, such as peer mentoring, peer assisted learning, group-work, and the field of student engagement in general. the development and implementation of a peer assisted learning programme at the university of liverpool abstract what is peer assisted learning (pal)? developing the pal programme at the university of liverpool operationalising the pal programme recruiting pal leaders and co-ordinators promotion of the pal programme to new students organisation of the pal programme evaluation evaluating the pal programme for beneficiaries (target students) evaluating the pal programme for pal leaders results and discussion of evaluation outcomes from 2012-2015 training of pal leaders materials and topics covered organising and assigning pal leaders benefits for pal beneficiaries (target students) the department perspective: some general trends over the three years of the pal programme summary acknowledgements references author details literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 12: november 2017 e for enigma: the teaching excellence framework (tef) and the challenges of measuring excellence a book review of french, a. and o’leary, m. (2017) teaching excellence in higher education: challenges, changes and the teaching excellence framework. bingley, uk: emerald publishing limited. dr alexandra j. f. patel university of leicester, uk introduction the teaching excellence framework (tef) aims to recognise and reward excellence in teaching and learning, and help inform prospective students' choices for higher education (higher education funding council for england, 2017). developed by the department of education in england and first trialled in 2016, the tef claims to be a voluntary scheme that recognises excellent teaching and helps students choose where to study through awarding institutions a gold, silver or bronze status. from 2018-19, universities with a tef award will be allowed to increase their tuition fees in line with inflation. the tef has, however, been met with some concern. this debate is critical in shaping how we think of teaching and learning, the ways in which we seek to develop educational practice and, as learning developers, should be something we engage with, as amanda french points out in chapter 2 of this book: the tef, one can argue therefore, should be regarded as much more than a tool for measuring teaching excellence; it has the potential to become the key vehicle for changing the face of the he sector in britain (pp.11-12). the book entitled ‘teaching excellence in higher education: challenges, changes and the teaching excellence framework’ helps us to understand the tef by placing it within the social, political, and historical contexts in which it developed. it discusses some of the main factors driving the development of tef, such as the increased marketisation, patel e for enigma: the teaching excellence framework (tef) and the challenges of measuring excellence journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 2 globalisation and accountability of he, that have led to the contentious higher education and research bill and the introduction of the teaching excellence framework (tef). this book, instead, seeks to develop the concept that teaching is multifaceted and complex, and measurement of excellence must be contextualised by many factors such as discipline, institution and socio-political climate. the book considers how we can capture excellence in the wide-ranging contexts of higher education (he) teaching and what tef means for those involved in learning and teaching.i in doing so, it hopes to inspire debate. this review will provide a brief background to the authors and describe the structure of the book. it will then discuss three main questions that the authors address – what are the socio-political drivers behind tef? can tef measure teaching excellence? what approaches might be more meaningful in developing teaching? author background teaching excellence in higher education is edited by dr amanda french and dr matt o’leary, with contributions from professor sue robson and associate professor phil wood. french and leary have over 25 years’ experience each of teaching across colleges, schools and universities, and both are currently based in the school of education in birmingham. robson is professor of education at newcastle university and is actively involved in research around the internationalisation of higher education. wood is an associate professor in the school of education at the university of leicester and involved in teaching and research around pedagogic innovation and organisational change, using the lens of complex theory and process philosophy. book structure the book is concise, well written and thought provoking, with six chapters, including an introduction and conclusion. chapter 2 contextualising excellence in higher education teaching: understanding the policy landscape by french puts the higher education and research bill and consequent patel e for enigma: the teaching excellence framework (tef) and the challenges of measuring excellence journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 3 teaching excellence framework in a socio-political context – a valuable contribution to understanding the discourse and approach of tef through its drivers and origins. french also considers how well teaching excellence can be measured by the tef metrics which use: the higher education funding council for england (hefce) data on students’ entry and retention; the national student survey (nss); the destination of leavers from higher education (dlhe) survey and a contextualised information report. chapter 3 from teaching excellence to emergent pedagogies: a complex process alternative to understanding the role of teaching in higher education by wood gives a thorough review of the literature around what excellence might be, whether the tef can hope to measure it and what other approaches might be more meaningful to developing learning and teaching. he puts forward the idea of ‘emergent pedagogy’ to help the reader appreciate the complex interactions and relationships that we simplify under the term ‘teaching’. chapter 4 monitoring and measuring teaching excellence in higher education: from contrived contemplation to collective collaboration by o’leary considers what teaching excellence means to teachers themselves, explores the diversity of learning and teaching environments, activities and participants, and then helpfully evaluates the types of evidence used to measure teaching quality in terms of: student voice; student outcomes; hea fellowship and observation of teaching. chapter 5 developing and supporting teaching excellence in higher education by robson explores the need for recognition of diverse teaching excellence and approaches that promote development of teachers such as collaborative enquiry, reflection and dialogue. having examined some of the fundamental problems and limitations around tef, in the conclusion, french and o’leary finish on a positive note: the tef is encouraging debate around teaching excellence and shifting the power dynamic between research and teaching to give teaching more importantance. patel e for enigma: the teaching excellence framework (tef) and the challenges of measuring excellence journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 4 what are the socio-political drivers behind tef? the authors put forward a consensus that some of the main drivers behind tef are several beliefs held by the government. first, there appears to be a prevailing idea that higher education would be better if conceptualised and managed as a business, that knowledge is a tradable commodity and teachers ought to be held accountable for student satisfaction and performance. as such the tef aims to determine whether teaching offers ‘value for money’. second, that higher education needs to be ‘opened up’ to competition between existing and new institutions with reduced regulation and that students, as consumers, would benefit from a simple ranking system for teaching. french argues that far from opening up education, the tef will perpetuate the imbalance that exists around institutional prestige and funding, and may actually reduce widening participation. third, that teaching is of poor quality, lacks research or evidenced-based approaches, and that measuring and ranking institutions, and linking this to status and tuition fees, will help develop teaching practices. o’leary points out that although successive ministers of state for universities and science have claimed that teaching is weak, this is based on assumption, not evidence, and that overall nss scores are increasing. fourth, that a ‘new public management’ approach to running institutions, using big data analysis and performance management processes, will improve teaching standards. french suggests that it is hard to draw meaningful conclusions about teaching from big data sets that generalise across the institutions and, as with research excellence framework (ref), it may be used for accountability, to compare institutional status, to influence funding and hei teaching culture, and therefore it may lead to institutions gaming the system. this book is therefore invaluable in helping situate current government policy around he and the development of the tef in its political context and encourages us to consider the approaches, motives and discourse in a critical way. can tef measure teaching excellence? again the authors are in agreement that, whilst tef may help balance the undue focus on the ref and research, it falls short of measuring teaching excellence for many reasons and certainly does not help develop teaching. first, it is widely acknowledged in the literature that defining teaching excellence is difficult, if not impossible, as different individuals, disciplines and institutions view it in different ways. o’leary illustrates this well patel e for enigma: the teaching excellence framework (tef) and the challenges of measuring excellence journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 5 by examining the range of learning environments, activities and agents that may be involved in pure or vocational subjects. wood further argues that criteria for measuring teaching needs to be contextualised, alluding to differing disciplinary practices by quoting readings (1996) that ‘an excellent boat is not excellent by the same criteria as an excellent plane’. second, french and o’leary both question whether the tef matrices can be used as proxies for teaching. the use of the nss to measure teaching is flawed as satisfaction is not learning in fact the best learning experiences may be unsettling or challenging. students may make unreliable judgements about teaching quality, having little experience of teaching in other institutions, or tending to poorly rate teachers or learning experiences that do not fit their expectations. o’leary further points out that even experienced classroom observers with clear criteria find it challenging to consistently rate teaching, and questions how we can use student satisfaction when little is known about how they evaluate their educational experience. french raises important questions about using the dlhe as a proxy of teaching. it captures student destinations and wages six months after graduation but these outcomes are also dependent on institutional reputation, student socio-economic status and the likelihood of a degree leading to either immediate employment, as in teaching or nursing, or higher wages, as in accountancy or law degrees. furthermore, measures such as student recruitment, retention, progression and attainment collected by the higher education statistics agency (hesa) are also weak proxies for teaching due to the multitude of other factors at work, not least of all a student’s own role in their learning. additionally, these do not capture the value-added improvement that occurs during study in many widening participation cases, where a learning and teaching experience can be truly transformational. this book makes a thorough consideration of what these measures can and cannot tell us about teaching excellence. a further area of consideration that is not addressed in this work, but would be vital to this debate, is the validity of the grouping of universities within the benchmark system. an average of the metrics for the institutions within a group create the benchmark for that group, which all group members are then measured against. those that fall far from the average receive a positive or negative flag, which ultimately determines the gold or bronze status of an institution (bagshaw and morris, 2016). however, an institution that is above the average of one group, may be below the average of a different group. in other words, an ‘average’ university compared to ‘inadequate’ universities could receive a gold award, but the same ‘average’ university compared to ‘excellent’ universities could receive a bronze award. therefore, we should ask to what extent would moving an institution from patel e for enigma: the teaching excellence framework (tef) and the challenges of measuring excellence journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 6 one group to another change its flags and therefore its rating? furthermore, as this simple allocation to a group is critical in determining an institution’s flags how are these groups decided? what approaches might be more meaningful in developing teaching excellence? wood’s consideration of the language around tef is insightful, suggesting that instead of being developmental, the discourse that tef uses is about measurement, accountability and human capital. thankfully, the authors discuss a range of evidence-based approaches that support the development of teaching and learning in a meaningful way but tend not to quantify it. wood argues that teaching excellence emerges from an infinite number of complex and nuanced factors and therefore cannot be broken down into simplistic measures, likert scales or tick box criteria. wood draws on complexity theory and process philosophy to develop the idea of ‘emergent pedagogies’. teaching can be seen as a complex adaptive system, having many elements and interactions, such as learning, curriculum, assessment, students and teachers. the interactions are complex, disproportionate, there are both positive and negative feedback loops, boundaries are hard to define and the system is ever changing. as such we cannot hope to reduce it and maintain its meaning. instead, wood, drawing on richardson, cilliers and lissack (2007) suggests that: …to understand them, at least in part, we need to use different perspectives to build ever richer, if incomplete, models of the system we are interested in. (p.58) wood discusses five lenses or foci that can help the development of teaching– values, personal and collaborative growth, organisational and societal contexts. robson also emphasises the value of collaboration in developing teaching. collaborative networks for professional enquiry can support critical reflectivity, encourage engagement with literature, provide an opportunity for the development and reinterpretation of ideas around pedagogy, and help to develop a quality culture within institutions. this helps colleagues to appreciate the complexities around teaching, such as how it is situated within structures, policies and environments, and how agendas at local, institutional and national levels shape practice and identity. leadership and recognition are also highlighted by o’leary and robson. patel e for enigma: the teaching excellence framework (tef) and the challenges of measuring excellence journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 7 o’leary expresses concern over the higher education academy (hea) promoting leadership at more senior levels of the fellowship scheme. for robson, however, leadership in teaching is not through managerial roles but the ability to inspire; to change practice and policy through a more democratic culture, encouraging a sense of agency and developing identity. lastly, o’leary suggests that whilst observation can be used as a performance management tool which tends not to develop teaching and can discourage innovation, it can be most effective as a low-stakes collaboration between peers and students, in supporting reflection and giving students agency in shaping their education. this book frames an excellent discussion of some of the key literature around teaching excellence and importantly suggests meaningful ways in which teaching can be developed. as learning developers, we not only have a stake in the way teaching approaches at our institutions are measured and ranked, and a need to have our role in supporting learning recognised, we also have valuable expertise in understanding how people, even teachers, learn. it is therefore important that we actively contribute to this ongoing debate. references bagshaw, a. and morris, d. (2016) fun with flags: how metrics will work in tef outcomes. available at: http://wonkhe.com/blogs/policy-watch-fun-with-flags-the-role-ofmetrics-in-tef-outcomes/ (accessed: 21 october 2017). higher education funding council for england (hefce) (2017) about the tef. available at: http://www.hefce.ac.uk/lt/tef/whatistef/ (accessed: 21 october 2017). author details dr alex patel is an educational developer at leicester learning institute, at the university of leicester. her main interests are around developing student staff partnerships, and developmental approaches to academic and digital literacies. due to her cross-disciplinary http://wonkhe.com/blogs/policy-watch-fun-with-flags-the-role-of-metrics-in-tef-outcomes/ http://wonkhe.com/blogs/policy-watch-fun-with-flags-the-role-of-metrics-in-tef-outcomes/ http://www.hefce.ac.uk/lt/tef/whatistef/ patel e for enigma: the teaching excellence framework (tef) and the challenges of measuring excellence journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 8 background, she is also interested in how we attempt to represent the world using different research methodologies. a book review of french, a. and o’leary, m. (2017) teaching excellence in higher education: challenges, changes and the teaching excellence framework. bingley, uk: emerald publishing limited. introduction author background book structure what are the socio-political drivers behind tef? can tef measure teaching excellence? what approaches might be more meaningful in developing teaching excellence? references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 19: december 2020 ______________________________________________________________________ emotional labour, information literacy instruction, and the covid-19 pandemic karen sobel auraria library, university of colorado denver, us lorraine evans auraria library, university of colorado denver, us abstract the authors of this article, both instruction librarians, have researched the emotional labour that information literacy instruction librarians perform for several years. several months into the covid-19 pandemic, they discuss concepts of emotional labour among instruction librarians in that evolving context. they outline common aspects of emotional labour that manifest differently during the pandemic, compared to non-pandemic times. they identify and analyse new layers of emotional labour that many instruction librarians currently experience on top of their “normal” lives and emotional labour. they provide a brief overview of aspects of emotional labour that may be easier or lesser during the pandemic. the article concludes with a call for future research on these concepts, particularly using qualitative and mixedmethods research. keywords: emotional labour; information literacy instruction; library instruction; academic libraries; deep acting; surface acting. sobel and evans emotional labour, information literacy instruction, and the covid-19 pandemic ________________________________________________________________ journal of learning development in higher education, issue 19: december 2020 2 introduction several years ago, we began researching the emotional labour that information literacy instruction librarians in higher education experience. now, months into a global pandemic, these ideas seem a bit quaint at times. when we were putting together our first research and presentations on this topic, for example, our younger children went to neighborhood schools every day, and neither of us had ever worn a medical face mask. that said, much of the discussion we currently experience within our home department at the library (virtually, of course), and much of what we read through our professional connections on social media, deals with the emotions of working in academic libraries during the current pandemic. in this article, we will discuss the emotional labour that academic librarians perform in the course of their work. we will compare emotional labour during the current global covid-19 pandemic with labour performed during normal, non-pandemic times. we will introduce readers to two relevant concepts within the study of emotional labour (deep acting and surface acting) that will help readers to parse challenges with respect to internal response and intensity. we will outline ways in which the normal emotional labour of information literacy instruction manifests differently in the current pandemic, as well as new ways in which emotional labour overlays the labour that was already there. later in the piece, we connect our work with psychologists’ recent assertions that some individuals currently experience improved emotional states during the pandemic. finally, we identify several aspects of emotional labour among instruction librarians that would benefit from qualitative and mixed methods research in the near future. concepts related to emotional labour several major concepts help to understand emotional labour in the context of information literacy instruction. the definition of emotional labour itself is not quite what many people imagine it to be. emotional labour was defined as situational work in which we have to publicly display emotions that do not reflect our true feelings (hochschild, 1983). while people sobel and evans emotional labour, information literacy instruction, and the covid-19 pandemic ________________________________________________________________ journal of learning development in higher education, issue 19: december 2020 3 often expand the concept of emotional labour to describe other challenges in the workplace and other settings (such as struggling with emotionally difficult patrons, or simply feeling exhausted after an occasional twelve-hour work day), the challenges generally connect with that feeling of having to hide one’s true emotions and proceed with a smiling (or at least neutral) face. hochschild went on to describe two varieties of emotional labour: deep acting and surface acting. deep acting refers to situations in which an individual believes in what they are doing, but still have to show some altered emotions (hochschild, 1983, p. 33). for example, a librarian may feel preoccupied over their child’s school situation on a given day and have to force a smile during an instruction session. however, the librarian still strongly believes in the value of the information literacy instruction. the emotion is genuine; they are just heightening it. surface acting, by contrast, refers to situations in which an individual has to display truly false emotion (hochschild, 1983, p. 35). for example, a librarian may have to participate in campus reopening plans that they feel are ineffective. when they have to unveil the plans to their colleagues while attempting to use a positive tone, they are surface acting. the emotions that one feels while deep acting and surface acting are different, and their aftereffects also often differ. the following sections will apply these concepts in current contexts. altered manifestations of emotional labour we have written about emotional labour among instruction librarians in more standard times (see, for example, sobel & evans, 2021). most importantly, our past work has put a good deal of emphasis on (a) minor power struggles between classroom faculty and instruction librarians, as the two parties co-design instructional content, and (b) communication challenges related to “silos” among units within a university. based on our combined decades of experience in academic libraries, we have observed these to be two of the main sources of emotional labour during non-pandemic times. sobel and evans emotional labour, information literacy instruction, and the covid-19 pandemic ________________________________________________________________ journal of learning development in higher education, issue 19: december 2020 4 at present, the challenges seem to have shifted toward issues of distance rather than professional head-butting. in author evans’ recent experience—and related experiences that others at a range of institutions have shared with her—faculty often seem grateful for connection and support. they may, however, debate the modes by which support is offered. both parties often have multiple directives that change rapidly over time, leading to frustration for each side. however, the overarching layer of gratitude is powerful. once the current situation has progressed farther, it will be interesting to track librarians’ perceptions of faculty attitudes and emotional responses toward librarians’ work during the pandemic. issues related to “silos” within academic institutions have long provided challenges for academic librarians. library leader kaetrena davis kendrick (2017) has also identified ways in which silos within an institution lead to classroom faculty members’ lack of knowledge about librarians’ roles and abilities. this in turn leads to low morale among some academic librarians. it will be interesting to see how this changes during and after the pandemic. in our experience, faculty members are reaching out, requesting help, and expressing gratitude— but in many cases, librarians note that these are faculty members who have existing connections with the library. those faculty members are likely to have at least some positive associations with librarians and experience with librarians’ skills. they are also in a different frame of mind than usual. how will this shape connections and librarian morale in the future? we have researched the emotional labour of academic librarians in recent years. up to this point, our work has focused on non-pandemic scenarios, which seemed weighty enough without the added complexities of the present time. in a chapter written immediately prior to the pandemic (sobel & evans, 2021), we discussed the challenges that face librarians as academic departments, as well as university committees, make major decisions without library representation. this situation continues to evolve during the covid-19 pandemic. however, it appears to us that the traditional “silo” situation has been temporarily eclipsed by university-wide changes moving at a faster rate than many faculty and staff can follow. groups making major decisions at this point are often so small and selective that many units and individual faculty may feel this sort of exclusion. it remains to be seen whether this emotional experience will change departments’ and faculty members’ future practices with relation to librarian inclusion. sobel and evans emotional labour, information literacy instruction, and the covid-19 pandemic ________________________________________________________________ journal of learning development in higher education, issue 19: december 2020 5 new layers of emotional labour for many instruction librarians—and many university faculty members in general—the new layers of emotional labour involved in simply working and living day to day eclipse anything they may have experienced in the recent past. many of us have new complications related to family: children “home schooling” in the house, concerns over adult children’s living situations, greater than usual worry about aging parents’ or chronically ill family members’ health; the list goes on. others face deep loneliness, boredom, and lack of daily conversation. the effort required to show up for work, even online, and to put on a pleasant, professional face despite all the challenges should not be underestimated. librarians also face concerns about their own health, and that of their family members, as they consider physically returning to campus. understandings about modes of virus transmission change every day; public health guidelines change even more frequently than that. universities’ individual strategies and guidelines may change during the course of a single workday. this type of uncertainty, and the lack of established guidance, greatly adds to many people’s emotional labour. we are at times expected to work with choices that we do not believe in (surface acting). these are not our only levels of concern. many library staff and librarians have been laid off from work or have experienced salary cuts or furloughs that may strain personal budgets (peet, 2020). some are also experiencing newly highlighted levels of inequity between staff and faculty at universities. some institutions of higher education (such as ours) rank librarians as faculty, and others designate them as staff. staff at some institutions face more layoffs than faculty, or orders to return to campus despite the situation being “unsafe” for faculty and students (perry, 2020). these situations add the weight of working under conditions that one may disagree with, or in enforcing these conditions for others. they add a complex layer of emotional weight. sobel and evans emotional labour, information literacy instruction, and the covid-19 pandemic ________________________________________________________________ journal of learning development in higher education, issue 19: december 2020 6 improvements in emotional labour a few aspects of emotional labour may improve during the current situation. one example relevant to many academic librarians involves the fact that the concept of remote work is contentious in many workplaces. in the recent past, institutions may have frowned upon “working from home” for some categories of employees, including librarians. they have often made vague statements about accountability and measuring productivity. librarians have long argued for the value of some quiet time working at home, in the face of prevailing attitudes that indicated a lack of professional trust by administration. this contributes to several layers of emotional labour: for example, struggling to work from the library when family needs, or the simple need for quiet workspace, contradicted that behavior; and the tension of implied distrust from administrators. now, by necessity, institutions have seen how truly productive librarians can be at home. they have also seen that productivity can be measured in terms of tasks and needs, rather than hours. this evidence provides some support for future change in policies regarding remote work during normal times. we hope that this begins a shift toward different guidelines for remote work, adding trust and removing a layer of emotional labour from librarians. conclusions this is doubtless a time of increased emotional labour for most librarians. handling increased health concerns, loneliness, family labour, and more, while maintaining professionalism is a huge challenge. we hope that, not too far in the future, the pandemic situation will resolve. we hope that the end of the pandemic will also bring some reexamination of workplace norms, such as considering greater openness to remote work. librarians in the future will read this brief piece and imagine this strange time. we encourage our colleagues to engage in research to gauge the effects of this time, and the changes that it has brought about. while this research is a stretch at the present time, it will be of great value to future librarians. sobel and evans emotional labour, information literacy instruction, and the covid-19 pandemic ________________________________________________________________ journal of learning development in higher education, issue 19: december 2020 7 references evans, l. and sobel, k. (2021) ‘emotional labour of instruction librarians: causes, impact and management’, in powell, c. and ruffin, i. (eds.) the emotional self at work in higher education. hershey, pennsylvania: igi global: pp. 104-119. hochschild, a. r. (1983) the managed heart: commercialization of human feeling. oakland, california: university of california press. kendrick, k.d. (2017) ‘the low morale experience of academic librarians: a phenomenological study’, journal of library administration, 57(8), pp. 846-878. available at: 10.1080/01930826.2017.1368325 peet, l. (2020) ‘pandemic-caused austerity drives widespread furloughs, layoffs of library workers’, library journal. available at: https://www.libraryjournal.com/?detailstory=pandemic-caused-austerity-driveswidespread-furloughs-layoffs-of-library-workers perry, d.m. (2020) ‘what about the health of staff members?’, chronicle of higher education. accessed at: https://www-chronicle-com /article/what-about-the-health-of-staffmembers/ author details karen sobel is an associate professor and teaching & learning librarian at the university of colorado denver in the united states. she also directs the center for faculty development & advancement at the university of colorado denver. her research interests focus on the motivations behind students’ academic behaviors. https://doi.org/10.1080/01930826.2017.1368325 https://www.libraryjournal.com/?detailstory=pandemic-caused-austerity-drives-widespread-furloughs-layoffs-of-library-workers https://www.libraryjournal.com/?detailstory=pandemic-caused-austerity-drives-widespread-furloughs-layoffs-of-library-workers sobel and evans emotional labour, information literacy instruction, and the covid-19 pandemic ________________________________________________________________ journal of learning development in higher education, issue 19: december 2020 8 lorraine evans is a senior instructor and the teaching & learning program lead librarian at the university of colorado denver in the united states. lorraine’s academic backgrounds are in psychology and library science; she combines them in the study of emotional labour among academic librarians. emotional labour, information literacy instruction, and the covid-19 pandemic abstract introduction concepts related to emotional labour altered manifestations of emotional labour new layers of emotional labour improvements in emotional labour conclusions references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 15: november 2019 knowledge making practices as vehicles for teaching academic literacy bente kristiansen aarhus university, denmark abstract several studies have established a connection between how a discipline communicates in texts and how disciplinary knowledge is produced (e.g. bazerman, 2000; blåsjö, 2004; carter, 2007). this article suggests that a didactic consequence of such a connection could be to use the rhetorical contexts and the knowledge-making practices as vehicles for teaching academic literacy. a conceptual framework for doing this in practice is presented, including teaching and learning activities. keywords: academic literacy, academic writing, knowledge-making practices, discourse communities, teaching academic writing. introduction in this article i understand academic literacy as ‘the ability to communicate competently in an academic discourse community’ (wingate, 2015, p. 6). from this presumption follows that teaching academic literacy can be seen as a matter of teaching students how to understand and master the rhetorical context for communicating in an academic discourse community. i further understand academic texts as ‘social interaction with the purpose of presenting knowledge claims and persuading peers to assent these knowledge claims’ (hyland, 2004, p. 12). from this presumption follows that the way knowledge is produced and argued for (the knowledge making practices) is crucial for communication in academic discourse communities. this article is about how these two presumptions can contribute to a framework for teaching academic literacy in a disciplinary context. kristiansen knowledge making practices as vehicles for teaching academic literacy journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 2 epistemologies and writing conventions several studies have shown how writing conventions differ from one academic discipline to another (bazerman 2000; blåsjö 2004; hyland 2004; carter 2007; nesi and holmes 2010). blåsjö (2004) has pointed out significant differences in student writing, professional discourses and educational settings between the department of history and the department of economics at stockholm university. blåsjö concludes that the epistemology of economics is defined as rationalistic, dominated by a ‘linear logical reasoning with clearcut solutions’, while the epistemology of history is critical-pluralistic, dominated by reasoning with a multitude of perspectives (blåsjö, 2004, p. 2). such differences in epistemology and thinking can also be seen in specific linguistic features. nesi and holmes (2010) show how the identities of agents are commonly suppressed in physics to emphasise ‘that knowledge is derived from replicable laboratory activities, observations and measurements’ (p. 67). in the field of history, on the other hand, identities of authorities and sources are important in establishing their validity and relevance, and therefore academic texts in history have explicit agents (nesi and holmes, 2010, p. 67). it seems that academic texts entail – and can reveal – implicit ways of thinking in a discipline. declarative knowledge, like methods (surveys, interviews, laboratory work, text analysis etc.), is usually described and thus made visible for discussion and critique. but some ways of disciplinary thinking are much more ‘hidden’, for instance whether agents should be visible or not, or whether the argumentation should be logical-rationalistic or provide many perspectives. these ways of thinking and working in a discipline are hidden in disciplinary literacy. therefore, the aim of teaching academic writing should not be to master writing conventions, but to understand the interdependence between knowledge-making, disciplinary thinking and textual features in an academic discipline. in the following, i will present some scholars who have developed tools and strategies that subject teachers can use when teaching disciplinary content, while also maintaining a strong focus on knowledge-making practices and how these relate to rhetorical practices (carter 2007; bizup 2008; bean 2011). kristiansen knowledge making practices as vehicles for teaching academic literacy journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 3 knowledge-making practice and text production carter (2007) explains the lack of interest in literacy that many subject teachers have as a consequence of how knowledge is understood. if knowledge is understood as something more or less static and education is seen as the delivery of knowledge, then writing will be seen as separated from the discipline, as ‘knowing what’. on the other hand, if knowledge is understood as active ways of knowing, then writing will be understood in connection to the way knowledge is produced, as ‘knowing how’. carter refers to learning theories in which we see the same distinction between conceptual (declarative) knowledge and procedural (process) knowledge. one way of making this connection between disciplinary knowledge-making practices and the literacy practices visible – and relevant for disciplinary teachers – is to guide academic staff in identifying ways of ‘doing’ (‘knowing how’) in their disciplines. when carter asked academic staff about learning outcomes in different disciplines, zoology staff mentioned two key disciplinary ways of doing: being able to engage in scientific inquiry and being able to solve problems in zoology (carter, 2007, p. 390). the question about how to assess these kinds of learning outcomes got the answer: different kinds of texts, e.g. lab reports, scientific papers, posters, management plans, project proposals and environmental statements. these texts represent different ways of ‘doing’ in the discipline. carter identified four different ways of ‘doing’ across faculties, named metadisciplines. some disciplines (e.g. business, engineering, economics) solve practical problems for clients, and they often write in genres like reports or management plans. other disciplines (e.g. physical and social sciences) focus on empirical enquiry, while others are interpretive/theoretical (mostly humanities). the fourth metadiscipline is performative disciplines like journalism and rhetoric. from this perspective, academic literacy is about understanding the purpose of the specific text, for instance presenting a solution to a problem or investigating a problem. and students need more than conceptual knowledge to write these genres, they need knowledge about how to ‘do’ the discipline. misunderstandings of how to ‘do’ the discipline will result in texts that do not meet the writing conventions for the given genre in the given kristiansen knowledge making practices as vehicles for teaching academic literacy journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 4 discipline. therefore, the ‘doing’ of the discipline, as the core of the knowledge-making practices, is a relevant focus for both the subject teacher and the writing teacher. bean is another writing scholar who focuses on disciplinary knowledge-making and disciplinary writing. bean has developed a concept of three one-hour workshops for academic staff. his aim is to show subject teachers that teaching writing is also a matter of teaching subject matter knowledge (bean, 2011, p. 219). bean’s argument starts with macdonald’s (1994) description of how an academic writer develops through four stages. the first stage is non-academic writing (primary school and high school), the second is generalised academic writing (freshman courses teaching ‘academic writing’), the third is writing novice approximations of particular disciplinary ways of making knowledge (written discipline-specific assignments), and the last stage is expert insider prose (bean, 2011, p. 217). assignments can be used to develop ‘expert’ insider prose by improving the disciplinary ways of conducting inquiry and making arguments. bean also presents beaufort’s model (beaufort, 2007) of different knowledge domains: subject matter knowledge, genre knowledge, rhetorical knowledge and writing process knowledge. for beaufort, these overlapping knowledge domains represent knowledge needed to participate in an academic discourse community. according to bean, these workshops, and especially the term ‘expert insider prose’, make disciplinary academic staff realise that they as subject specialists actually ‘own’ the teaching of disciplinary writing (bean, 2011, p.219). next, bean opens a discussion about which discourse communities students in a specific discipline must be able to join (bean, 2011, p. 221). as a frame for this discussion, bean introduces carter’s (2007) concept of metadisciplines and metagenres, and asks what kind of writing their students should be able to do. in bean’s last workshop, the academic staff discuss how students understand ‘research’ and what they need to learn about research. many students have a naïve understanding of research as similar to going to the library to borrow some books (bean, 2011). therefore, bean introduces another way of talking about sources, namely a vocabulary developed by bizup (2008) in which sources are labelled on the basis of the rhetorical function they have in the academic paper. bizup (2008) argues that labelling the sources primary, secondary and tertiary is not meaningful for students because these words do not refer to the rhetorical function of the sources. bizup instead suggests that sources are labelled according to their different kristiansen knowledge making practices as vehicles for teaching academic literacy journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 5 rhetorical purposes. if students are to adopt a rhetorical perspective toward researchbased writing, then it is important to use language that focuses the attention on what writers might do with the sources (bizup, 2008, p. 75). bizup distinguishes between four rhetorical purposes for the use of sources. he uses the acronym beam for these:  some sources provide the background, like factual knowledge or knowledge that the writer considers authoritative and that the reader is expected to consider as authoritative. the writer relies on background sources.  exhibit sources are ‘materials a writer offers for explication, analysis, or interpretation’ (bizup, 2008, p. 75), for instance examples. bizup emphasises that he does not mean evidence. evidence is data supporting a claim, whereas exhibits can lend support to claims, and they can provide occasions for claims. the writer interprets or analyses exhibits.  argument sources are the sources that the writer engages with, builds upon or maybe argues against.  method sources are materials that provide the key concepts, a model or a specific perspective. the writer follows method sources. what carter (2007), bizup (2008) and bean (2011) have in common is their focus on the rhetorical context and how this is interconnected with knowledge-making practices. they build a bridge between disciplinary knowledge production and disciplinary text production. this bridge is where subject specialists and writing specialists could meet and cooperate around academic literacy. writing specialists primarily contribute with what kind of questions and activities are relevant for mastering the rhetorical situation and understanding the connection to knowledge-making practices, while subject specialists primarily contribute with the specific disciplinary ways of producing knowledge and texts. therefore, it is relevant to look at characteristics of the rhetorical context in academic discourse communities. the rhetorical context kristiansen knowledge making practices as vehicles for teaching academic literacy journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 6 beaufort (2007) has developed a simple model of five knowledge domains that an academic writer draws on. the model serves as a ‘mental schema for learning writing skills in new genres in new discourse communities’ (beaufort, 2007, p.17). thus the model offers an overview of important issues and i will use the model as a starting point for elaborating a framework for teaching academic writing. beaufort’s model (2007) derives from a study of how students develop their writing throughout their academic education, including their shifting between disciplines. as a writing teacher in american freshman courses, beaufort’s focus is on how to teach transferable writing skills. beaufort believes that by teaching the students broad concepts like discourse communities, rhetorical tools, genres etc., students will be able to understand and analyse new writing situations and recognise the specific demands of genres in new contexts (2007, p. 149). the domains overlap, and together they represent the fifth knowledge domain, the discourse community. by this notion, beaufort refers to the academic community in which knowledge is discussed: academic journals, conferences etc. a discourse community shares goals and values and establishes norms for genres (beaufort, 2007, pp. 18-19). figure 1. knowledge domains in academia (beaufort , 2007, p. 19). rhetorical knowledge refers to ways of addressing a specific rhetorical situation, including understanding the purpose of the text (beaufort, 2007). subject matter knowledge is knowledge commonly acknowledged in a field. this includes factual knowledge, important theoretical disagreements, benchmark persons, methodological questions, specific kristiansen knowledge making practices as vehicles for teaching academic literacy journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 7 terminology, the most important assumptions and arguments within the discipline, and acknowledged ways of using sources, producing empirical data and making an argument (beaufort, 2007, p.19). thus beaufort is referring to both conceptual and procedural knowledge. or, in carter’s terminology: both knowledge and knowing (carter, 2007). according to beaufort, genre knowledge refers to knowledge about the boundaries and features of genres defined and stabilised by the discourse community (2007, p.20). based on carter’s (2007) understanding of genre as a way of doing a discipline, i will interpret this domain as knowledge-making practises. in most academic genres, two elements are crucial in the knowledge-making practice: the argumentation and the use of sources. writing process knowledge refers to the ability to handle the writing process and the various phases and obstacles throughout the process. in the following i will use this model of knowledge domains as an overall frame for teaching academic literacy. i argue that many common challenges for students can be understood in relation to these knowledge domains. based primarily on carter (2007), bizup (2008) and bean (2011), i will suggest teaching and learning activities in each knowledge domain that address these challenges by focusing on the connection between knowledge-making practises and texts. this is of course not a comprehensive examination of literacy problems in academia. it is a framework, offering a rhetorical perspective on academic literacy and putting the teaching of literacy in a disciplinary context. rhetorical knowledge the purpose of academic texts is to argue for new knowledge, and to present new knowledge in a way that makes it possible for peers to discuss the production of this new knowledge (jensen, 2004; ask, 2007; carter 2007). to many students, this is not obvious. text genres in schools are in general reproductive writings or personal creative writings, or they are answers to specific questions (krogh, 2010). this also relates to the perception of knowledge. many students enter university with a reproductive conception of learning (clughen and hardy, 2012). studies (e.g. nieminen et al., 2004) indicate that many students go through a development process during their studies, from having a dualistic understanding of knowledge to having a relativistic understanding. the understanding of knowledge as ‘a set of clear, absolute, and unchangeable facts’ (nieminen et al., 2004, p. 390) is often related to an understanding of kristiansen knowledge making practices as vehicles for teaching academic literacy journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 8 learning as the acquisition of knowledge from an outside source and is primarily aimed at reproducing knowledge. with this as the unconscious perception of knowledge, it is difficult to write in argumentative genres and position oneself as a participant in knowledge-making practices and engage in disciplinary dialogues. when this misconception of the purpose of academic writing is not addressed, it will take even longer for the individual student to go from a dualistic to a relativistic understanding of knowledge. another problem is the use of sources. in academic texts, the writer must engage in a dialogue with the discourse community. this dialogue will be based on references to what other members of the discourse community have written (bazerman, 2000; ask, 2007). the academic writer is expected to refer to important insights from within the field. this professional dialogue causes problems for students (ask, 2007; clughen and hardy, 2012). students have a tendency not to state the references, and they have a tendency not to indicate when they quote (lunsford and lunsford, 2008). this is not only a matter of learning to use different reference systems. it is also basically a matter of developing an identity as a participant in an academic discussion. developing an academic voice is challenging. besides the basic perception of knowledge, it is also a question of developing an academic voice (ask, 2007) and an identity as a legitimate participant in the discourse community. one way of supporting this identity can be to provide the students with metaphors for their own role in the discourse community. the metaphors should visualise the student as an active subject producing a text. the idea is to emphasise how the student can act as a member of the discourse community. one metaphor could be comparing the literature review with a dinner table: imagine the student being the host deciding which scholars are invited, who will be seated at the most prominent seats, and who will have the most time to talk (kamler and thomson, 2006). another possibility is to lend the students some phrases, known as ‘syntactic borrowing’ (kamler and thomson, 2006, p. 57): ‘this study builds on and contributes to work in …’; ‘this study analyses …’; ‘i address this issue by demonstrating …’.the purpose of syntactic borrowing is to eliminate the content to make the rhetorical moves visible and explicit. subject matter knowledge kristiansen knowledge making practices as vehicles for teaching academic literacy journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 9 an important activity for understanding subject matter knowledge is reading. however, reading an academic text also requires discipline-specific literacy (shanahan and shanahan, 2012). to read and fully understand an academic text, you must know what the crucial parts of information are and where to look for them. in mathematics, the purpose of reading is to determine whether a proof is true or not. when mathematicians read, they pay attention to every single word, e.g. singular or plural, definite or indefinite singularity. historians, on the other hand, are concerned about the sources. even before reading, they pay attention to who the author is and what kind of bias the author might have (shanahan and shanahan, 2012, p. 49). therefore, many students need to develop discipline-specific reading strategies. not just techniques such as skim-reading, but also strategies for finding the relevant information, doing critical reflections, comparing theories and arguments etc. academic staff can support this process by asking questions focusing on the relevant topics in specific disciplines. questions guiding the reading will support a deep learning strategy as the students will be searching for information and trying to make connections instead of simply memorising. students’ reading can also be supported by showing their own reading strategy. talk about: what exactly do you pay attention to when reading an academic text? what is important? what is irrelevant? what do you look for first? how do you decide on what to read and what not to read? (bean, 2001, p. 138). another important element in subject matter knowledge is discipline-specific terminology. some expressions or concepts might have an everyday meaning as well as a very specific meaning in the academic disciplinary context (ulriksen et al., 2009). one example is the word ‘discussion’. in an everyday context, a ‘discussion’ can reflect different opinions on an issue, but in most academic disciplines a discussion follows some rather strict rules. these rules are related to how knowledge is validated, and therefore a discussion in literature will unfold quite differently compared to a discussion in economics. one way of handling this challenge could be many small writings in which the students can work with the meaning of different words. ask the students to: name the two most important differences between … and …; give an example of …; explain this concept to your grandma … where have you met the concept …before? questions that help relate kristiansen knowledge making practices as vehicles for teaching academic literacy journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 10 new concepts and terminology to previous knowledge and experiences will be especially helpful. some of these could be of a more reflective character: what surprised you in the text? what was new to you? what is difficult to understand? genre knowledge one way of describing argumentation in academic texts is that the author makes a knowledge claim and argues for this claim in a way that can be acknowledged in the discourse community (hegelund and kock, 2003; jensen 2004; ask 2007). therefore, an important part of genre knowledge in academia is based on the understanding of how to argue for and/or to document knowledge production. the way of arguing varies, but some simple tools can be used for investigating and explicating how the argumentation works in a discipline and how sources can be used. hegelund and kock (2003) argue that what is central in relation to the problems students have with writing academic papers is that they do not understand the overall purpose of the texts or how the different components contribute to the overall purpose (hegelund and kock, 2003, p. 75). they suggest using toulmin’s argument model (toulmin, 1958) as an analytical tool and as a tool for producing and critiquing an academic argumentation. the three basic elements in the model are claim, data and warrant (hegelund and kock, 2003). the claim (or hypothesis) must be supported by data. data can be own empirical studies, studies conducted by others or authoritative statements within the field. if we as readers are to acknowledge the data as valid support for the claim, the data must have a warrant, something that is agreed upon in the discourse community, usually methods, and sometimes theories. for instance, if the data is a focus group interview, we only acknowledge it as data when it has been carried out and documented in a way that is normally accepted within the field. academic discourse communities have critical discussions, and toulmin’s model has three more elements addressing the investigation of such discussions. methods can be criticised, so the element of refutation is important. but we also have an element of backing to cover that the method – in spite of these acknowledged weaknesses – is still valid. the sixth element is the strength marker in the conclusion, indicating how sound the conclusion based on all this is. kristiansen knowledge making practices as vehicles for teaching academic literacy journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 11 the strength of this argument model is that it helps students understand that the purpose of the text is argumentation, not regurgitation. it also provides an overview of how elements are connected. there is no focus on surface genre features, but on highlighting the meaning-making elements. the model also makes it possible for the subject teacher to show how different kinds of data and different kinds of warrants can form a valid argument in the discipline. if students are working crossor interdisciplinarily, they might use the model for analysing different ways of arguing in the different disciplines. and, the model also shows how the warrant, the reason we acknowledge data as support for a claim, is not a granted everlasting truth. it is what members of a certain discourse community agree on at a certain time. another significant element in academic genres is the use of sources. here bizup’s (2008) suggestion of naming the sources based on their rhetorical purposes can help students gain a better understanding of the different purposes that sources can have in their text. there are basically two ways of working with beam: either identifying the sources in a written text according to beam, or using beam in the writing process, that is asking about the rhetorical function of each source, for instance by asking students to write an annotated bibliography, describing which sources serve which rhetorical purpose. writing process knowledge from a teaching and learning perspective, writing process knowledge is very important, because writing is also a learning process (emig, 1977). writing is also valuable for learning the terminology, and for practicing the way of thinking and arguing in the discipline. a very important insight into the writing process is the distinction between writing to explore and writing to present (dysthe et al., 2001). writing to explore is writing notes, paraphrases, crazy ideas and questions – the writing one does in order to think, to investigate, to understand, to go deeper into the issue. writing to present is writing for an audience, the writing that explains everything in a clear and logical way to the reader. some instances of writer’s block might come from a misunderstanding about these ways of writing. if students expect their writing to be well written and nicely presented from the start instead of using the writing to explore the issue, they might lose confidence in their own writing. as one student expresses: kristiansen knowledge making practices as vehicles for teaching academic literacy journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 12 my problem is that i never realised that it is normal to write in a bad manner in the beginning but it gets better when you keep on working. i was good in school. i have pretty much done only what i was good at. i have been good at many things. it is really hard to realise this late that practice makes perfect, and that you can ask for help. to me this feels like failure (kristiansen, 2017, p. 139). it can be liberating in relation to the students’ writing process to show them that writing is a way of learning, a way of getting to know the subject, and that it is important to write to explore before you can write to present. to further legitimise explorative writing, academic staff can provide many opportunities for short writing activities. the thinking-writing project at the queen mary university of london (www.thinkingwriting.qmul.ac.uk) shows many examples from different disciplines. also speedwriting, reflective writing and social writing (murray, 2009) can support writing processes. participating in a discourse community together, these knowledge domains form the knowledge and competences needed to participate in the discourse community. in higher education, there are several possibilities for giving students access to ‘real’ discourse communities: seminars with peer feedback and participation in research activities and maybe conferences. class discussions can be conducted in the same way as a scholarly discussion at a conference. the written participation takes the form of a bachelor’s project, a master’s thesis or articles for scholarly journals or student journals. what seems to cause problems for students is when teachers expect them to be able to jump right into the discourse community without any kind of teaching in the other knowledge domains. within each domain, students face challenges: new ways of thinking, reading, writing and talking. the table below shows some didactic consequences of the argument i have made in this article: that mastering academic writing and writing conventions is about understanding the rhetorical situation and having knowledge in all five knowledge domains. http://www.thinkingwriting.qmul.ac.uk/ kristiansen knowledge making practices as vehicles for teaching academic literacy journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 13 many of the challenges that students face when writing academic texts relate to these domains. this understanding of students’ challenges as related to the rhetorical situation not only allows for placing the subject specialist in the forefront, but it also provides some guidance regarding what kind of questions need to be addressed in teaching. the first column in the table refers to the knowledge domains. the second column refers to some common challenges that students face in this domain. the third column are suggestions for pedagogical strategies and learning activities, representing ways of making hidden conventions explicit. these suggestions are generic. the specific learning activities should have a disciplinary content and design. this is where the writing specialists and subject specialist together might form a fourth column with discipline specific variations. table 1. a framework for teaching academic literacies. knowledge domain common challenges for students learning activities that address these challenges by focusing on the relation between knowledge production and textual features subject matter knowledge develop relevant disciplinespecific reading strategies  give introduction to the text: why read it? what to look for? provide questions to answer when reading  show how you yourself read disciplinary texts (e.g. christensen, 2007) understand and master concepts and terminology in the discipline(s).  give many opportunities for using new terminology  acknowledge that imitation is part of the learning process – give opportunities for ‘experimenting/playing with’ the terminology within the field develop a deep understanding of concepts  provide opportunities for making connections between abstract scientific knowledge and concrete everyday experiences: examples, analogies, metaphors etc.  use reflective writings or ‘summing-up’ writings genre knowledge develop a disciplinespecific argumentation  show what is valid argumentation in the discipline by using an argument model – as a tool for developing own argumentation or as a tool for analysing others’ argumentation (e.g. hegelund and kock, 2003) understand the rhetorical purposes of sources in an  focus on how different sources have different rhetorical purposes in relation to the argumentation (beam: background, exhibit, argument, method (bizup, 2008) kristiansen knowledge making practices as vehicles for teaching academic literacy journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 14 academic argumentation  make literature search a part of teaching  ask students for an annotated bibliography identify ways of thinking and working that are significant for the knowledge production in the discipline  analyse different genres used in the discipline: what is the overall purpose of the text e.g. problem solving, empirical investigation, interpretation or performance? (bean 2001; carter 2007; bean, 2011) rhetorical knowledge understand what the reader expects  make your own reader expectations explicit  give feedback (or facilitate peer feedback) with a focus on how the text meets criteria in relation to methods, analysis, argumentation, the use of references/sources etc.  invite people from relevant target groups to give feedback on relevant texts find own academic voice and identity in the discourse community (kammler and thomson, 2006)  use metaphors to support an identity as an active participant in the discourse community  provide many opportunities for practicing a discipline-specific discourse: oral, written, in seminars, in groups master different rhetorical tools analyse different kinds of discipline-specific text: structures, ways of addressing the reader, ways of arguing, typical expressions etc. writing process knowledge master both ‘writing to think’ and ‘writing to present’ (dysthe et al., 2001)  make use of short writing-to-think tasks: reflective writing, learning logs etc.  support writing to present: show, analyse and discuss successful examples of texts in relevant genres share writing processes  support the students in sharing the writing process with peers, e.g. writing retreats, halfhour writing meetings (murray, 2009; 2012) discourse community knowledge participate in a discourse community  arrange seminars during the semester, give students opportunities for presenting, commenting and revising  involve students in research activities kristiansen knowledge making practices as vehicles for teaching academic literacy journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 15  have students participate in research seminars, conferences etc. conclusion in this article i have suggested a conceptual framework for teaching academic literacy. this framework is based on two presumptions: one presumption is that ‘academic literacy is the ability to communicate competently in an academic discourse community’ (wingate, 2015, p. 6). to understand what this means, or what it takes to communicate competently in this context, i used beaufort’s model of knowledge domains. this model provides an overview of the kind of knowledge needed for communicating competently. the other presumption is that academic texts are ‘social interaction with the purpose of presenting knowledge claims and persuading peers to assent these knowledge claims’ (hyland, 2004, p. 12). this presumption along with many studies showing how disciplines produce knowledge in different ways and accordingly express their knowledge production in different ways, is the argument for including the relation between the knowledge-making practices and the rhetorical practices in the teaching of academic literacy. i suggest beaufort’s model of knowledge domains as an overview of important issues related to communicating in a discourse community. many of the challenges that students face in relation to disciplinary writing and learning can be related to these knowledge domains. if we understand the challenges not as linguistic challenges but as challenges in relation to communicating disciplinary knowledge, we must address these challenges with learning activities that address both the communicative aspect and the disciplinary content. this is what the learning activities suggested in this article are aiming to do. they all have the same purpose of making the connection between knowledge-making practices and text production explicit. this is important because any activity that can make the production of knowledge in a discipline or field a little more explicit will be a step forward towards a critical perspective on how knowledge is produced in a discipline, as well as a step forward towards demystifying academic writing. kristiansen knowledge making practices as vehicles for teaching academic literacy journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 16 references ask, s. (2007) vägar till ett akademiskt skriftspråk. doctoral thesis. växjö: växjö university press. available at: swepub:oai:diva.org:vxu-1276 (accessed: 3 april 2019) bazerman, c. (2000) ‘shaping written knowledge: the genre and activity of the experimental article in science’. wac clearinghouse landmark publications in writing studies. available at: http://wac.colostate.edu/books/bazerman_shaping/. (accessed: 29 may 2019). bean, j. (2001) engaging ideas. jossey-bass: san fransisco. bean, j. (2011) ‘backward design: towards an effective model of staff development in writing in the disciplines’, in deane, m. and o’neill, p. (eds). writing in the disciplines. universities into the 21st century. london: palgrave macmillan. beaufort, a. (2007) college writing and beyond: a new framework for university writing instruction. utah, co: utah state university press. bizup, j. (2008) ‘beam: a rhetorical vocabulary for teaching research-based writing’, rhetoric review, 27(1), pp. 72-86. blåsjö, m. (2004) ’studenters skrivande i två kunskapsbyggande miljöer’, acta universitatis stockholmiensis. stockholm studies in scandinavian philology. new series. 37. stockholm: almqvist & wiksell international. carter, m. (2007) ‘ways of knowing, doing, and writing in the disciplines’. college composition and communication, 58 (3), pp. 385-418. available at: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20456952. (accessed: 29 may 2019). christensen, l. m. (2007) ‘show me, don’t tell me! teaching case analysis by “thinking aloud’. perspectives: teaching legal research and writing, 15(2) pp. 142-145. swepub:oai:diva.org:vxu-1276 http://wac.colostate.edu/books/bazerman_shaping/ http://www.jstor.org/stable/20456952 kristiansen knowledge making practices as vehicles for teaching academic literacy journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 17 clughen, l. and hardy, c. (2012) ‘student and staff expectations and experiences’. in: clughen, l. and hardy, c. (2012) writing in the disciplines. building supportive cultures for student writing in uk higher education. bingley: emerald. dysthe, o.; hertzberg, f. and hoel, t. l. (2001) skrive for at lære – faglig skrivning i de videregående uddannelser, århus: klim. emig, j. (1977) ‘writing as a mode of learning’. college composition and communication, 28(2), pp. 122-128. hegelund, s. and kock, c. (2003) ‘a good paper makes a case: teaching academic writing the macro-toulmin way’, in bjørk, l., bräuer, g., rienecker, l., and stray jörgensen, p. (eds.) teaching academic writing in european higher education, amsterdam: kluwer academic publishers,. hyland, k. (2004) disciplinary discourses: social interactions in academic writing. ann arbor, mi: university of michigan press jensen, l. b. (2004) fra patos til logos – videnskabsretorik for begyndere. frederiksberg, roskilde universitetsforlag. kamler, b. and thomson, p. (2006) helping doctoral students write: pedagogies for supervision. new york: routledge. kristiansen, b. (2017) om at skrive på universitetet. odense: university press of southern denmark. krogh, e. ed. (2010) videnskabsretorik og skrivedidaktik. rapport om et forskningsog udviklingsprojekt med deltagelse af avedøre gymnasium og hf’. kongsholm gymnasium og hf samt syddansk universitet. lunsford, a.a; lunsford, k. j. (2008): ‘‘mistakes are a fact of life’: a national comparative study’. college composition and communication, 59(4) pp. 781-806 [online]. available at: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20457033. (accessed: 29 may 2019). http://www.jstor.org/stable/20457033 kristiansen knowledge making practices as vehicles for teaching academic literacy journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 18 murray, r. (2009) writing for academic journals. maidenhead: open university press murray, r. (2012) ‘social writing’, in clughen, l. and hardy, c. writing in the disciplines. building supportive cultures for student writing in uk higher education. bingley: emerald. nesi, h. and holmes, j. (2010): ‘verbal and mental processes in academic disciplines’, in: charles, m., pecorari, d. and hunston, s. (eds.) academic writing: at the interface of corpus and discourse. london: continuum. nieminen, j., lindblom-ylänne, s. and lonka, k. (2004) ‘the development of study orientations and study success in students of pharmacy’. instructional science, 32(5), pp. 387-417. shanahan, t. and shanahan, c. (2012) ‘what is disciplinary literacy and why does it matter?’ top lang disorders, 32(1), pp. 7-18. ulriksen, l., murning, s. and ebbensgaard, aa. b. (2009) når gymnasiet er en fremmed verden. frederiksberg, samfundslitteratur. wingate, u. (2015) academic literacy and student diversity. the case for inclusive practice. bristol: multilingual matters author details bente kristiansen, ph.d., is chief consultant at the centre for learning development and digital media, aarhus university. she has experience as a writing consultant for university students and as a pedagogical consultant. knowledge making practices as vehicles for teaching academic literacy abstract introduction epistemologies and writing conventions knowledge-making practice and text production the rhetorical context rhetorical knowledge subject matter knowledge genre knowledge writing process knowledge participating in a discourse community conclusion references author details literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 12: november 2017 ‘coming from somewhere else’ – group engagement between students and academics sofia chanda-gool plymouth university, uk christoforos mamas university of california, san diego, usa abstract the present political and economic climate for universities can promote competitive learning and anxieties about individual students’ academic achievements. it can inhibit the enjoyment and skill in shared learning. group work can provide a creative, empowering avenue so students become proactive in their learning and engage more equally with academics. it has potential to enhance intellectual ability as well as social and emotional wellbeing, yet careful planning is essential to achieve this. this paper addresses the shortfall of prioritising assessment over relationships and identifies how relationships are central in preparation for assessment. it draws upon an ethnographic, qualitative and emancipatory approach to research. this approach enabled students to initiate the research focus and design of the last session. the paper identifies how the group was set up, developed and what it achieved. it makes recommendations for overcoming some tensions and fears that can inhibit effective group work so that social and emotional equity inspires intellectual development. keywords: group work; belonging; empowerment; social and emotional wellbeing; equality; ethnographic; increased confidence in learning. introduction university is the chance in a life time – expensive yet expansive: socially and intellectually alive. yet these characteristics are not inevitable. universities evolved as communities of chanda-gool and mamas ‘coming from somewhere else’ – group engagement between students and academics journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 2 scholars and teachers, and yet biesta (2014) argues that the contemporary economic focus on students as consumers, and on ‘learnification’, inhibits these ideal communities developing. he argues that the dialogic process depends upon the development of ‘subjectification’. subjectification involves the development of individual initiative, action and responsibility, culminating in freedom and emancipation for learners so they engage more effectively with teachers. learnification ignores the purpose of education and the need for students to direct their own learning. biesta (2014) argues that this individualistic focus abstracts learning from its context, and that by contrast education is about a communal activity. if students are recognised as active learners in a community, their wellbeing and engagement with the university is valued. consequently, if they experience a lack of identification with the university’s culture, this becomes of concern as their confidence and initiative may not flourish. inclusive practices need to be embedded in the university’s culture so that all students have the confidence to question, take risks and develop mentally and socially (cotton et al., 2013; mamas, 2017). this paper is based upon a research project that aimed to address discrepancies in power between academics and students. laurillard (2002) and noddings (2003) highlight this potential barrier to communication. it was therefore imperative that the methodology and ideological aims of the research corresponded. our ethnographic, emancipatory model (boog, 2003) aimed to achieve this. post-structuralist and critical ethnographic approaches challenge the cultural hegemony in conventional ethnography (kincheloe et al., 2011). this critical approach acknowledges the dialogic engagement between researcher and participants (or co-researchers) that develops, and aims to equalise the relationship for all engaging in the process. this highlights the importance of ’writ[ing] the researcher into the text’ (gordan et al., 2002, p.197). as lecturers and leading researchers, there was an ethical responsibility to be transparent about our ontological reflection. this related to our professional integrity and involved disclosing some personalised material. therefore the design and engagement in the group process positioned us as part of the work. this rationale affects both the style and content of this paper. this rationale made it implicit that i, as the key researcher, should expose my motivation and ideological stance. as a child with an asian appearance growing up in north norfolk in the 1960s, people saw me as ‘coming from somewhere else,’ and i grew into the position of being an outsider. this sense of not belonging reverberates in other contexts for other people. i surmised that some students may well experience being an outsider. the chanda-gool and mamas ‘coming from somewhere else’ – group engagement between students and academics journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 3 potential to feel alienated and not belong may well inhibit engagement. primo levi (1987, p.15), in the preface to ‘if this is a man’ (his profound book on the holocaust), writes: ‘…every stranger is an enemy’. this perceived suspicion implies that developing connections with others may require some negotiation and courage, finding common ground, and overcoming a sense of difference. as a counsellor i had learnt that students’ capacity to exchange experiences and thoughts increased confidence and diminished a fear of other students. our previous experiences and beliefs may underlie this capacity. experience of being bullied at secondary school was a common reason for students to take up counselling at university (weale, 2017). bullying erodes confidence and can affect academic attainment (ladd et al., 2017). furthermore, when students arrive at university they may know no one, and may feel isolated and anxious about their presentation. goffman (1967) draws our attention to our ‘performances’ in different environments. he identifies how the concept of ‘face’ affects our sense of self-esteem and dignity so that we are invariably looking for approval from others in terms of who we appear to be. selfconsciousness, compounded by the experience of being bullied and lack of identification with, or sense of belonging to the university, may inhibit confidence and initiative. universities aim to address potential alienation in their ‘fresher’s’ week, but after this valuable start, checking up on students’ sense of belonging, or integration into university, may begin to fade as the academic curriculum and pressure take over. as reay et al. (2005) note, not all students may come from a cultural background that has primed them for what to expect, how to behave, nor where they may feel a sense of belonging. they can become socially isolated and withdraw from the institutional habitus of the university because their social world and experience is often excluded from the curriculum (reay et al., 2005). thomas (2002) considers the role of ‘institutional habitus’ which intensifies the difference between the positions of students from poorer disadvantaged backgrounds, who face financial hardships with increased fees. she also notes the cultural hegemony within universities that blames the student for not achieving by ignoring their disadvantages, rather than critique its own selective limitations. academic hierarchy and elitism is inherent in universities. for example, bourdieu (1992) considers the socio-political complexities whereby certain cultural values are reified at the expense of others. he talks of ‘cultural capital’ and ‘symbolic violence’ within educational institutions that prejudice certain knowledge and values over others, thereby silencing and undermining other cultural values. this can sanction and consecrate ‘elite’ and middle chanda-gool and mamas ‘coming from somewhere else’ – group engagement between students and academics journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 4 class perspectives and power, maintaining social inequality. murphy and costa (2016) critique this generalisation, and argue for a more nuanced appraisal and examination of what specific cultural elements may affect access to cultural capital. however, laurillard (2002) concurs with the concern raised by highlighting the difference in expectations. she clarifies how academics have expectations of ‘higher level thinking’ which may well be unfamiliar and daunting for certain students. students and lecturers may have quite different expectations and identification with the university. therefore working in groups, implicit in the delivery of lectures and seminars, can be affected. the assumption that learning will occur requires further examination. robinson et al. (2015) studying group work notes the contextual factors that can heighten fear of failure. lecturers themselves may experience some anxiety around the presentation of their lecture (scott, 2007). this dialogic dilemma and shared trepidation is invariably unspoken. here then is an opportunity, yet success is in the balance. cultural discrepancies between students and academics, the university’s values, and bias can affect communication implicit in group work. we set out to examine group processes that would address the cultural discrepancy and power imbalances that can inhibit learning. our group work the context for our group work gathered students who may well not be as confident as others and, may be unfamiliar with the universities’ expectations. it included a set of eight students on the ba early childhood studies (ecs) degree. these students are invariably more interested in becoming practitioners and this can affect their academic aptitude, as fewer enter university with a levels (several have diplomas). the plymouth university strategy 2020 and office for fair access (offa) agreement (plymouth university, 201314; 2017-18) identify ways to address these challenges and thereby overcome cultural disadvantages and power imbalances. nonetheless, early childhood, with its implicit awareness of our shared vulnerability and humanity, provides a fertile platform for uncovering connections and discovering insights. chanda-gool and mamas ‘coming from somewhere else’ – group engagement between students and academics journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 5 drawing upon our shared interest in early childhood we chose to adapt and reinvigorate group work in specific ways (chanda-gool and mamas, 2017). we noted the positive attributes of group work as outlined by williams et al. (1991), johnson et al. (1991) and gibbs (1995). group work is understood to have the potential to promote a sense of belonging and social integration which ultimately affects wellbeing (jaques, 2000). winchester-seeto (2002) note peer evaluation in groups is a useful tool for developing student’s analytical and evaluative skills. yet as robinson et al. (2015) have noted, group work can also create tensions and anxieties for students. students’ progress and achievement is assessed individually and it may not feel safe, or reassuring, to work collaboratively (rock, 2009). without careful consideration of the dynamics, power relations, and expectations, group work can become tokenistic. harrison and cairns (2008) argue student-centred approaches are central to student participation. laurillard (2002) sees the importance of situating knowledge in terms of a student’s experience, and healey (2005, p.194) notes students often see themselves as the ‘recipients’ rather than the producers of research. our group work located students as co-researchers and participants. students initiated parts of the research, and their own interests, as well as those of the course, were included. the aim to empower students to feel confident entails a holistic approach in terms of who the students are and how they may learn (tinto, 1993). tinto highlights the value in informal and formal dimensions of learning as a means of increasing students’ motivation and engagement with academic work. this study aimed to synthesise the experiential and personal to develop intellectual exchange. it recognised underlying tensions, dismantled hierarchies, and developed a sense of fun and enthusiastic engagement. approach in this study, group work takes a developmental approach and thematic progression. the ultimate aim was to encourage students to take the lead. the ethnographic approach aims to enrich understanding and capture the complexity of cultural exchange. it entails a deeper exploration of a particular group – studying the culture within its own terms. our emphasis on self-reflection and group awareness was central to the dialogical approach, where meanings develop though the interaction between the researched and researchers. chanda-gool and mamas ‘coming from somewhere else’ – group engagement between students and academics journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 6 extrapolation of shared meanings (vermunt, 1998), the dialogic, conversational exchange of ideas (tedlock and mannheim, 1995), were central to the methodology. criticality was embedded in the planning and throughout the research process. for example, as lead researchers prior to and post all sessions, we evaluated our degree of participation. we considered to what extent we were to engage, how much of our personal life was relevant or suitable, and how did we interpret what had happened and consequently plan the next session? argyle (1992) suggests that the enquiry that ensues, when data is open to a range of perspectives, keeps an intellectual debate alive. also, critical intersubjectivity retains the ‘open-minded, responsive to evidence, accountable, critical-seeking manner’ (fay, 1996, p.221). all participants were encouraged to be ‘active’ in the research design, delivery and identification of topics design prior to students agreeing to commit themselves to the group work, each student was given an half an hour interview. this ensured their ideas were implicit in the design, helped students prepare themselves for the group work, and consider what they wanted to bring to the group work. five group work sessions ensued and these lasted two hours each. the data was composed of: transcripts of one-to-one interviews with each participant prior to the group work, and a group work transcript; anonymised feedback from participants; and reflective interviews of the researchers themselves. the transcripts and anonymised feedback aimed to triangulate findings, and the reflective interviews aimed to interrogate the findings and interpretation of material, to increase epistemological integrity between the researchers. the procedure entailed ethical approval from the university to access the participants and to ensure they were not disadvantaged by the researchers’ position as assessors of course work. also, that the participants were fully aware of what the interviews and group work entailed. a departmental professor helped to evaluate what we were doing and developing. chanda-gool and mamas ‘coming from somewhere else’ – group engagement between students and academics journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 7 prior to the interviews, accessing the participants proved to be challenging. we had initially accessed first year students and presented our plans to them. the response was muted and we later realised that second year students may well be more responsive because they had to complete a piece of research themselves as part of their coursework. however, the most effective means of encouraging students was to communicate with students we already knew, and they in turn drew in other students. thus ‘snow-balling’ (becker et al., 2012), where we deferred to the students’ networks and realised our position as outsiders, enforced a student-centred approach. therefore, despite the limitation of partial representation, snowballing was an effective and appropriate means. researchers in accordance with the ethnographic approach, the researchers themselves need to declare their bias and interests, this was part of the reflective notes and recorded interview we shared. my childhood experience of racism (see chanda-gool, 2006) gave me an embodied link to other disadvantages the students may face (see oliver, 1990). my coresearcher comes from a research background specialising in inclusive practice, with a particular interest in friendship networks and relational dynamics. we both wanted to create student-led, relational, active learning sessions to develop deeper learning through a dialogical approach (calkins and light, 2008). both in design and delivery i drew upon my counselling experience and knowledge; staying with emotions when there is social tension to maintain the safety and trust that may develop. we structured the sessions to start with and set out mutually agreed ground rules, identifying boundaries and safety of participants. we explained that this was not a therapy group and, if something uncomfortable arose, there were other sources of support outside the group, yet within the university. confidentiality was crucial to the wellbeing of the group. we aimed to identify themes that could be analysed and processes that could be evaluated. the processes centred on establishing a collaborative environment through the one-to-one interviews, and then using a developmental approach to the sessions to increase the confidence and initiative of students. furthermore we lead and modelled the first two sessions to ensure turn-taking. we also exposed the confidence we had, as the chanda-gool and mamas ‘coming from somewhere else’ – group engagement between students and academics journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 8 academics, to have different opinions which we were both interested in. this dialectic was essential to encourage the students to voice their individual differences and challenge without causing discomfort. this dialectical approach also helped to develop a culture of belonging and connection. the data analysis and findings emanate from an inductive, dialogical process to develop shared understandings. findings and discussion key themes that emerged from the participants’ feedback were: the importance of safety; increased trust and voice; increased initiative and engagement with diversity and difference; and enjoyment in learning. these findings endorsed the potential for group work to enhance communication, shared understanding and wellbeing, as articulated by williams et al. (1991) and jaques (2000). importance of safety as identified above, a key ingredient to the success of the study depended upon clear boundaries, confidentiality, and clarity around the lack of assessment. these features developed the sense of being safe. as one student expressed: …it was being able to talk openly on sensitive subjects… knowing that i won’t be judged. however, this was done when we first discussed the ethics concern right at the beginning [there was a safe base]. also the initial interviews, anonymous feedback, and the group work comments identified anxiety around group work. for example: i become very nervous when meeting and communicating with new people, so on the first session i felt very poorly and didn’t contribute as much as i could have done to the discussions. as the sessions carried on…, i contributed more and was able to present my own findings and ideas to the entire group, this made me feel like i had really accomplished something and i was very proud of myself. the initial anxiety concurs with rock’s (2009) awareness of tensions around group work: chanda-gool and mamas ‘coming from somewhere else’ – group engagement between students and academics journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 9 … what i learnt from the experience was that i am able to engage in-group work activity as i always thought that i was a shy person… i showed myself that i do have the courage to open my mind and to be able to share my own opinions on things. these responses identify how feeling safe (through increasing the sense of equality) increased courage to speak out and related to the trust that developed. the comment ‘thank you for sharing your opinions/ experiences with us as well’ registered the students’ appreciation for our more equal setting, thereby, overcoming some of the hierarchical structure inherent in universities that bourdieu (1992) and thomas (2002) articulate. increased trust and voice students voiced this increased trust in the group: ‘i have learnt that i can trust people’, registering a transition and development through the sessions. for some, increased trust was a considerable development: i started to hate group work, because i was bullied… and i’ve always been scared of group work since. it’s really nice here, to actually feel like no-one’s judging me, and i can actually contribute… and feel equal. the trust and sense of equality that developed also increased confidence and ultimately the capacity for initiating the session. for example: i learned that i have a voice, and that i have opinions and ideas that can be valuable to the group, as previously my self-esteem was quite low about my abilities. most importantly an informal approach (see tinto, 1993) and dialogical approach (see calkins and light, 2008) helped to increase the participants’ sense of voice, and ultimately engendered confidence to ask the tutors about academic work, which they had not felt able to before: chanda-gool and mamas ‘coming from somewhere else’ – group engagement between students and academics journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 10 i liked the dynamic with the tutors, as it felt like everyone was equal and we all engaged to the same extent with the topics we covered, and the work that we did, and it also felt like we could be a lot more open about issues that we were having to do with our courses, and other areas of our lives. again this increased confidence and openness to engage was enhanced by our decision that all participants should choose their own subject to present, and bring their depth of experience and thinking into the session. students became more able to look outside themselves and open to learning, as one student said: ‘…being part of this group allowed me to put my personal feelings regarding the situation to one side for a minute and consider the bigger picture’. increased confidence and selfworth, through voicing anxieties and gaining support, helped to develop evaluative and analytical thinking. initiative and engagement with diversity and difference valuably students did refer to their academic work and material spontaneously. there were references to course work and themes such as diversity, racism, ted talks and prejudice, as well as self-evaluation with reference to disadvantaged groups and other relevant themes. students initiated discussions and integrated academic reflection with personal perspectives. the focus on what ‘normality’ could possibly mean encapsulates this, as outlined below: the quotations articulated below are represented by ‘l’ for lecturer and ‘s’ (1-5) for particular students. s1: i want to discuss normality. from my interview with sofia, i assumed that i had a normal family, and then going further into the interview, i was like, oh, okay, my brother’s gay, my sister’s got special educational needs, i’ve been temporarily disabled twice, and my parents are still together but they’re full-time foster carers now. we’ve got two children living in our family and my dad’s also got long-term illnesses and stuff. and i just assumed because that, for me, has always been the norm, so i thought that was normal. and like, i just wanted to see what everybody thought about what makes normal ‘normal’? chanda-gool and mamas ‘coming from somewhere else’ – group engagement between students and academics journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 11 s2: i have a question... as a child, had you thought about it at all? had you thought about being a normal child, or not a normal child? because i thought about it quite a lot when i was a child. this idea of wanting to be normal… s3: this is kind of a general point for me, because i am trying to see how children think today, whether they think they are normal or not. how us adults can help them to feel fine with themselves and not feel like, you know, i’m not normal. s2: because that’s been your main area, hasn’t it, to do with disability and inclusion and wanting to know how to make people feel part of society rather than outside it? initiating this discussion ultimately made the student feel as follows: s1: to start with, i did feel like… there wasn’t much contribution to begin with but once other people got into it i definitely learned a lot. yeah, it was cool. enjoyment in learning scarfe (1962, p.120) identifies how ‘play itself is education’ and refers to einstein’s words: ‘all play is associated with intense thought activity and rapid intellectual growth’. this playfulness emanating from productive thought was captured by an increase in laughter as the sessions progressed. at the end of the discussion on normality, this playfulness is captured in the exchange below: s1: yes. but we could spend hours [on the topic of normality]. l: yes we could spend hours on this one. obviously …, you did brilliantly! s1: it helps that i was very good! finally, on departing one student expressed the enthusiasm and engagement she had experienced: chanda-gool and mamas ‘coming from somewhere else’ – group engagement between students and academics journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 12 s5: it’s been great. i’m so glad that i did it. i’ve learnt more about myself and stuff, i’ve learnt more about everyone. not just my friends, but i’ve made new friends and i’ve got to know you guys and i think that’s an opportunity that’s priceless. you know, you pay all this for uni, but signing up for things like this, i think that’s what makes it worthwhile, yeah. i’m grateful for it. limitations paradoxically, as the engagement and enthusiasm increased, so did the need to hold on to structure and timing. students’ initiative still required monitoring and facilitating by lecturers. students were not assessed. the lack of assessment, though a strength in terms of creating a more trusting environment, limits the relevance of our findings in terms of lectures and seminars that entail assessment. they are therefore only relevant to building the foundations for group engagement. however, we do believe that fostering social understanding and engagement is essential for working in groups that are later to be assessed. the discussions between researchers prior and post sessions were crucial to the success of these sessions: boundaries, issues of confidentiality, timekeeping, and monitoring of process were regularly assessed. this requires time, commitment and evaluation. the one-to-one interviews established the value in all participants’ contributions but again this is time consuming, and also requires some pastoral skills academics may not always be trained in. this was a small scale study with participants that are unrepresentative of the general student body. our participants all volunteered which may have an influence on their motivation to engage. further research is required to ascertain how to engage all students. in this instance the rationale for the group work was set up as an opportunity for research experience, and thereby integrated into the syllabus. nonetheless we did experience a challenge in engaging students generally. this carefully considered approach is vital to build relationships. as tinto (1993) and harrison and cairns (2008) argue, peer evaluations and student initiatives are highly attractive to students, and are more likely to develop out of good relationships and chanda-gool and mamas ‘coming from somewhere else’ – group engagement between students and academics journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 13 communications. the students themselves recommended more task orientated collaborations once the group had been securely formed. conclusion we were all surprised and inspired by our engagement. both students and academics became more relaxed emotionally, socially integrated and interested in each other. the process became transformative, students led and we all learnt more about our shared worlds. we developed a group identity and sense of belonging, we learnt about our differences and connections, and shared our mutual enthusiasm for learning. trepidation was transformed into trust and confidence. as the main researcher, my own sense of being an outsider dissolved and i walked into large lectures with a new sense of connection with the many students present. our shared humanity was more apparent to me. diversity lay at the heart of our particular group and yet all of us revealed an ability to step out of our ‘comfort zones’. differences were embraced rather than experienced as problematic. ‘coming from somewhere else’ was transformed into an opportunity to share, celebrate learning, and develop understanding. references argyle, m. (1992) the social psychology of everyday life. london: routledge. becker, s., bryman, a. ferguson, h. (eds.) (2012) understanding research for social policy and social work. themes, methods and approaches. 2nd edn. bristol: the policy press. biesta, g. (2014) the beautiful risk of education: (interventions education, philosophy, and culture). london, new york: routledge, taylor francis group. http://www.ioe.stir.ac.uk/staff/gertbiesta.php chanda-gool and mamas ‘coming from somewhere else’ – group engagement between students and academics journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 14 boog, b.w.m. (2003) ‘the emancipatory character of action research, its history and the present state of the art’, journal of community & applied social psychology, 13(6), pp. 426-438. bourdieu, p. (1992) language and symbolic power. cambridge: polity press. calkins, s. and light, g. (2008) ‘promoting student-centred teaching through a projectbased faculty development program’, to improve the academy, 26(2), pp. 217-29. chanda-gool, s. (2006) south asian communities: catalysts for educational change. london: trentham books. chanda-gool, s. and mamas, c. (2017) ‘becoming others’: valuing our relationship and communication with students’, pastoral care in education, 35(3), pp. 192-202. cotton, d., kneale, p. and nash, p. (2013) horizon-scanning report: widening participation, retention and success. plymouth university: pedrio. fay, b. (1996) contemporary philosophy of social science. oxford: blackwell. gibbs, g. (1995) learning in groups: tutor guide. oxford: oxford centre for staff development. goffman, e. (1967) interaction ritual: essays on face-to-face behaviour. new york: pantheon. gordan, t., holland, j. and lahelma, e. (2002) ‘ethnographic research in educational settings’, atkinson, p., coffey, a., delamont, s., lofland, j. and lofland, l. (eds.) handbook of ethnography. london: sage, pp. 118-203. harrison, a. and cairns, a. (2008) the changing academic workplace. degw uk ltd. available at: https://ipddirectedstudies.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/the-changingacademic-workplace-degw-27-10-08.pdf (accessed: 13 november 2017). https://ipddirectedstudies.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/the-changing-academic-workplace-degw-27-10-08.pdf https://ipddirectedstudies.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/the-changing-academic-workplace-degw-27-10-08.pdf chanda-gool and mamas ‘coming from somewhere else’ – group engagement between students and academics journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 15 healey, m. (2005) ‘linking research and teaching to benefit student learning’, journal of geography in higher education, 29(2), pp. 183-201. jaques, g. (2000) learning in groups. london: routledge. johnson, d.w., johnson, r.t. and smith, k. (1991) co-operative learning: increasing college faculty instruction productivity. ashe-eric higher education report no. 4. washington dc: the george washington university school of education and human development. kincheloe, j.l., mclaren, p.l. and steinberg, s.r. (2011) critical pedagogy and qualitative research. moving to the bricolage’, in denzin, n.k. and lincoln, y.s. (eds.) the sage handbook of qualitative research. 4th edn. thousand oaks, ca: sage, pp. 163-178. ladd, g.w., ettekal, i., and kochenderfer-ladd, b. (2017) ‘peer victimization trajectories from kindergarten through high school: differential pathways for children’s school engagement and achievement?’, journal of educational psychology, 109(6), pp. 826-841. laurillard, d. (2002) rethinking university teaching. a conversational framework for the effective use of leaning technologies. london: routledge. levi, p. (1987) if this is a man. great britain: abacus. mamas, c. (2017) ‘exploring peer relationships, friendships and group work dynamics in higher education: applying social network analysis’, journal of further and higher education, pp.1-16. murphy, m. and costa, c. (eds.) (2016) theory as method in research: on bourdieu, social theory and education. abingdon, oxon; routledge, taylor & francis group. noddings, n. (2003) caring: a feminine approach to ethics and moral education. london, england: university of california press ltd. chanda-gool and mamas ‘coming from somewhere else’ – group engagement between students and academics journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 16 oliver, m. (1990) the politics of disablement: a sociological approach. new york: palgrave macmillan. plymouth university (2013-14) plymouth university strategy 2020. available at: https://www.offa.org.uk/agreements/university%20of%20plymouth%200073%20ac cess%20agreement%202013-14.pdf (accessed: 13 november 2017). plymouth university (2017-18) plymouth university strategy 2020. available at: https://www.offa.org.uk/agreements/university%20of%20plymouth%201718.pdf (accessed: 13 november 2017). reay, d., davis, j., david, m. and ball, s. ( 2005) degrees of choice: class, race, gender and higher education. stoke on trent: trentham books. robinson, l., harris, a. and burton, r. (2015) ‘saving face: managing rapport in a problem-based learning group’, active learning in higher education, 16(1), pp. 1124. rock, d. (2009) ‘managing with the brain in mind’, strategy +business, 56 (autumn), pp. 1-10. scarfe, n.v. (1962) ‘play is education’, childhood education, 39(3), pp. 120. scott, s. (2007) ‘college hats or lecturer trousers? stage fright and performance anxiety in university teachers’, ethnography and education, 2(2), pp. 191-207. tedlock, d. and mannheim, b. (1995) the dialogic emergence of culture. urbana and chicago: university of illinois press. thomas, l. (2002) ‘student retention in higher education: the role of institutional habitus’, journal of education policy, 17(4), pp. 423-42. tinto, v. (1993) leaving college: rethinking the causes and cures of student attrition. 2nd edn. chicago: university of chicago press. https://www.offa.org.uk/agreements/university%20of%20plymouth%200073%20access%20agreement%202013-14.pdf https://www.offa.org.uk/agreements/university%20of%20plymouth%200073%20access%20agreement%202013-14.pdf https://www.offa.org.uk/agreements/university%20of%20plymouth%201718.pdf chanda-gool and mamas ‘coming from somewhere else’ – group engagement between students and academics journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 17 vermunt, j.d. (1998) ‘the regulation of constructive learning processes’, british journal of educational psychology, 68, pp. 149-171. weale, s. (2017) british teenagers more competitive than peers but more likely to bullied [online]. available at: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/apr/19/britishteenagers-competitive-bullied-schools-anxiety (accessed: 19 october 2017). williams, d.l., beard, j.d. and rymer, j. (1991) ‘team projects: achieving their full potential’, journal of marketing information, 13(2), pp. 45-53. wincester-seeto, t. (2002) ‘assessment of collaborative work – collaboration versus assessment’, annual uniservice science symposium. the university of sydney, sydney 5 april. author details dr. sofia chanda-gool is a lecturer in early childhood studies at plymouth university. dr. christoforos mamas is an assistant professor at the university of california, san diego. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/apr/19/british-teenagers-competitive-bullied-schools-anxiety https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/apr/19/british-teenagers-competitive-bullied-schools-anxiety ‘coming from somewhere else’ – group engagement between students and academics abstract introduction our group work approach design researchers findings and discussion importance of safety increased trust and voice initiative and engagement with diversity and difference enjoyment in learning limitations conclusion references biesta, g. (2014) the beautiful risk of education: (interventions education, philosophy, and culture). london, new york: routledge, taylor francis group. author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 18: october 2020 editorial andy hagyard university of leeds, uk christina howell-richardson birkbeck, university of london, uk eleanor loughlin durham university, uk cathy malone sheffield hallam university, uk craig morley manchester university, uk gita sedghi university of liverpool, uk alicja syska university of plymouth, uk we are publishing this issue at a time of what must be the most puzzling, challenging and, simply busiest beginning of semester higher education institutions have experienced in a while. we are aware of how hard everyone is working at the moment, how many new trails are being blazed and how much effort it takes to ensure the success of the new way of teaching and learning, foisted on us by the pandemic. we hope that this issue will provide a welcome distraction from the current relentlessness of work. issue 18 brings you four papers, two case studies and one opinion piece, and we are also delighted to announce that all these articles now have dois assigned to them. we are currently indexed in the directory of open access journals and google scholar, as well as linked to crossref so our authors’ publications can be more easily identified, accessed and cited by other authors. in the first article in this issue, edward john bradley, steven anderson and laurence eagle investigate the effectiveness of a marking rubric in improving level 5 sports student editorial performance and staff marking efficiency. student engagement with the rubric led to a 7% mark improvement compared with the previous year and staff marking time was also found to be reduced by average of 25 minutes when guided by the rubric. based upon these findings the authors argue that rubrics should be considered when implementing a laboratory-based practical assessment and report. russell delderfield, kirsten riches-suman, mathias ndoma-egba and james boyne turn our attention to postgraduate students’ mental health. as a team comprising a learning developer, academics and a doctoral student, their collaborative investigation is wide reaching, revealing, for example, a number of university-based sources of stress including the very expectation of poor mental health, while suggesting areas for improvement. one aspect of their research exposes the unexpected fact that students tend to look for sources of support outside of the university, although the reasons for this are unclear. the authors’ findings in this ‘first study of its kind at a diverse, plate-glass uk university’ have already influenced university processes, including induction and staff training, while identifying potential for future initiatives and interventions, particularly when it comes to the role of learning developers. the authors rick hayman, andy coyles, karl wharton and antony mellor report on an investigation into the impact of academic tutorials delivered at the university of northumbria. informed by astin’s student involvement theory (1984) which posits a relationship between academic and social involvement and overall student experience, the research was particularly interested in the experience of widening participation students. they set out to investigate the role played by personal tutors in supporting effective transition through focus groups carried out early in the academic year with a diverse cohort of sports students. results revealed that main contributory factors to successful student involvement were a focus on social integration and investment of time and energy in personalised tutoring early in the academic year. these findings note the influence of coaching and mentoring among this subject group and indicate the need to establish clear understanding of the role, given prior student experiences of academic tutoring. the findings have relevance beyond the discipline and add to the growing area of scholarship around academic advising. the challenge of ensuring that graduates of higher education are employable has become a pedagogical issue for teaching colleagues at universities worldwide. the last paper in editorial this issue, by tom lowe, highlights that students already possess the skills sought after by employers and that students are only missing the opportunity to translate their disciplinespecific skills into more flexible graduate attributes. the research was conducted through a trial intervention with students from multiple disciplines, to assess whether a translation exercise would raise awareness of skills and then to evaluate the student experience of this exercise. this study offers an alternative to longer interventions and explores how translating discipline-specific skills through short conversations may have both relevance and impact in a pressurised higher education world. nathalie sheridan’s case study provides examples of how creative and active pedagogies can be used in learning development. working with both first year undergraduates and master’s students, she takes a creative approach in developing non-subject specific learning opportunities. through a two-step process of de-contextualising and recontextualising learning, the students gain a fuller understanding of the relationship between their expectations and those of the institution into which they are transitioning. the author further discusses the positive impact the learning had on the students’ academic work. in the second case study, oliver thiel, rolv lundheim, signe marie hanssen, jørgen moe and piedade vaz rebelo discuss an approach for engaging often reluctant trainee early childhood education and care (ecec) teachers with teaching stem subjects. taking an object-based learning approach, they introduced the students to using automata in their teaching. through providing the teachers with an opportunity to build their own automata, as part of a process that enabled both ‘in-action’ and ‘on-action’ reflection, they found not only that the teachers’ attitudes to the integration of stem into teaching became more positive, but also that they had gained the tools and knowledge to be able to integrate the model into play and learning environments. finally, in her opinion piece, christine davies discusses the current value of virtual learning environments (vles) from the perspective of both lecturers and students. she argues that universities need to think more flexibly in how they make use of technologies for teaching and learning. we hope that in this collection of articles, our subscribers and readers will find thought provoking and stimulating material. editorial we also want to take this opportunity to thank our wonderful reviewers whose critical reading of submissions and thoughtful feedback and recommendations have made invaluable contributions to the quality of articles we publish. our heartfelt appreciation for the time, expertise and work it took to review papers in this issue goes to the following reviewers: karen angus-cole, uk nicholas bowskill, uk deborah breen, usa monica broido, israel john dermo, uk sunny dhillon, uk joy igiebor, uk ian johnson, uk louise kay, uk julie kraft, germany kathryna kwok, uk kim m. mitchell, canada stacey mottershaw, uk eva shackel, uk jane turner, uk saranne weller, uk with very best wishes, the jldhe editorial board editorial journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 20: march 2021 ________________________________________________________________________ challenging the teaching excellence framework a book review of a. french, and k. carruthers thomas (eds) (2020) challenging the teaching excellence framework: diversity deficits in higher education evaluations. bingley: emerald publishing. dr. teresa de fazio cultural diversity manager, victoria university keywords: teaching excellence framework (tef); diversity; higher education. overview the teaching excellence framework (tef) is controversial for the way it interprets and sets out to reward excellence in higher education. the debate on the implications of the framework for the uk higher education environment is rich and complex as it necessitates an exploration of higher education in terms of its purpose and its stakeholders. the text details the contextual background to the tef and the underlying drivers that contributed to its development and adoption, namely, neoliberal factors such as commercialisation, globalisation and expectations around quality assurance. further, the text provides excellent interdisciplinary discussions into various aspects of how students and staff maybe impacted by the framework. this review will provide an overview of the contributions and the arguments presented. whilst specific to the tef, the discussions in this edited book have broad international appeal and the exploration on the question of excellence and the extent to which it responds to the diversity of its stakeholders is pivotal to the he sector more broadly. de fazio challenging the teaching excellence framework journal of learning development in higher education, issue 20: march 2021 2 structure and content the text is easy to read and reference. the edited text of 235 pages includes seven chapters, one chapter devoted to a single essay. each essay represents various perspectives on the tef and includes a useful reference list. the text itself provides a convenient index at the end. the text has a clear layout with each chapter providing a particular focus and the threads of the arguments are brought together by the editors in a “postscript”. the first chapter by sanders et al. provides an insightful literature review which maps out the problematic nature of defining excellence and the different levels of engagement by different stakeholders. it presents a model for considering the notions of excellence, namely macro, meso and micro and presents a deep and surface level interpretation of teaching excellence. this essay provides a strong foundation for the next six essays. the next chapter, again by sanders et al., examines ways in which excellence is evidenced in higher education and how the concept of ‘excellence’ is recognised and rewarded. it explores the tension between research and teaching in how each is perceived (the latter being the ‘poor cousin’ of the former) and the nexus between both in terms of developmental curricular design to support student learning outcomes. the third chapter by crockford, takes up the question of awards and provides an insightful sotl based discussion on checklists and the complexity of measures used. it focuses on how learning and teaching is particularly contextual and sensitive to various dependencies and variables, and how the tef can therefore, be problematic. lawrence et al, in the fourth chapter, provide a discussion of research on the rapport between teachers and students as evidence of excellence. it outlines various barriers to building personal relationships such as unconscious bias and the question of gender pay gaps. the argument is somewhat vague at various points in this essay, however, overall, it does provide the reader with thought-provoking cues to consider. the next essay (chapter 5) delves into the question of student evaluations as an ‘authoritative source’, that is, representing the student voice in the process of evaluating de fazio challenging the teaching excellence framework journal of learning development in higher education, issue 20: march 2021 3 the learning experience. the essay points out that the process relies on using the metrics at a general or superficial level, and without a deeper level analysis of result, much of the rich learnings around excellence are overlooked. further, it notes that students may respond in particular ways that are not open to (respectful of) the diversity of their teacher, for instance, their sexuality, gender, cultural background, etc. this then complicates the data collected. bartrum, in chapter six, takes up the discussion and provides an insightful essay using queer theory to analyse the framework. the premise presents he as situated in a ‘masculinist business ontology’ (p. 192) which continues to perpetuate a sense of ‘normal’. queer theory is posited as a way of challenging the status quo, in order to consider teaching and learning from an authentic place of openness and inclusion. brogan presents the last essay in which he argues that the quantifiable measures used in the tef reduce teaching and learning to a ‘provider-consumer relationship’. the essay argues that conformity is elicited by the framework, that is, ensuring that each person remains in their ‘proper place’ and is required to interact in ‘expected ways’ (p.208). the essay draws on the work of social theorist michel de certau and his call to practice ‘wiggery’. in this very clever essay, brogan takes up this call to teachers to elicit a creative response to resisting the neoliberal tef framework. concluding remarks the text questions the interpretation of excellence adopted by the tef and limitations of how it is measured by the framework from the perspective of diverse learners and staff. the contributors and editors provide a pivotal text that carefully presents key issues on the tef, specifically, how it will impact perspectives and experiences of higher education in the uk by not fully addressing or, at times, acknowledging the diversity of students and staff as key stakeholders of the sector itself. it is important reading for anyone who is interested in the issue of excellence in higher education and its measurement, in particular, from the perspective of equity and diversity. de fazio challenging the teaching excellence framework journal of learning development in higher education, issue 20: march 2021 4 author details dr. teresa de fazio is the manager, cultural diversity office at victoria university (vu) where she has developed and leads vu’s cultural diversity strategy. she has over 25 years of experience in tertiary education, with a constant focus on student diversity, interculturality and teacher education. she has developed various initiatives for marginalised groups such as asylum seekers and refugees and is a strong advocate for multiculturalism. she has published various books and journal articles and is a reviewer for several journals. teresa served as a commissioner of the victorian multicultural commission in australia and continues to work closely with communities. further details: https://www.vu.edu.au/contact-us/teresa-de-fazio https://www.vu.edu.au/contact-us/teresa-de-fazio challenging the teaching excellence framework a book review of a. french, and k. carruthers thomas (eds) (2020) challenging the teaching excellence framework: diversity deficits in higher education evaluations. bingley: emerald publishing. overview structure and content concluding remarks author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 16: december 2019 ________________________________________________________________________ ‘once there was a learning developer…’: the potential of parables to stimulate critique. steve rooney university of leicester abstract this article builds on a workshop that took place at the association for learning development in higher education (aldinhe) annual conference in april 2019. it explores the role of the parable in provoking and stimulating debate and critical reflection. beginning with a discussion of the parable as a form, the article then explores how the oft-cited parables that appear in the gospels according to mark, matthew and luke help to reveal the subversive pedagogical potential of parables. returning to the terrain of contemporary higher education, it is argued that the parable is an apt form for encouraging education practitioners to explore more deeply and more critically some of the assumptions and practices they encounter in their working lives. all this serves as a prelude to the presentation of a selection of parables, which are accompanied by some guidance to help structure and support engagement. the article ‘concludes’, at the risk of infuriating readers, with yet another parable. keywords: learning development; reflective practice; criticality; creative writing. prologue ‘examples persuade; parables provoke’ john dominic crossan (1976, p.104) once there was a learning developer who, during a workshop at the 2019 annual conference of the association for learning development in higher education, presented the following parable about parables, by the great franz kafka: rooney ‘once there was a learning developer…’: the potential of parables to stimulate critique journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 2 many people complained that the words of the wise were always couched in the form of parables, but were useless in daily life, which is the only sort of life we have. when the wise man says: “cross over," he doesn’t mean that we should cross over to the other side of the street, which is something we might at least be able to do, if it were worth our while; no, he means some fabulous yonder, some place we don’t know, some place that doesn’t get any closer description from him either and that therefore can’t help us. all these parables are really trying to tell us is that the intangible is impossible to grasp and we knew that anyway. but the things we struggle with every day, those are different. thereupon someone said: ‘why struggle? if you followed the parables, then you would have become parables yourselves, and thereby free of your daily cares.’ someone else said: ‘i bet that’s a parable as well.’ the first person said: ‘you have won.’ the second said: ‘yes, but unfortunately only in a parable.’ the first man said: ‘no, in reality: in the parable you’ve lost.’ on parables (kafka, 2017 [1922], p.181) introduction somewhat daunted by the company i have chosen to keep, here, i would like to share some parables i have been working on. they deal with various aspects of educational practice, features of institutional life, and commonly expressed values and assumptions with which fellow learning developers and other higher education practitioners should, i hope, be familiar. before getting to the stories themselves, though, i want to discuss some of my original and abiding inspirations (ancient and biblical, modern and secular) for deciding to have a go at writing them in the first place. in doing so, i hope to establish a little more clearly the pedagogical ‘work’ that parables set out to do. ‘away from here, away from here’ (kafka, 2017 [1922], p.124): where parables tend to take us it is not uncommon to encounter ‘the parabolic’ in books, films, tv shows etc., which point towards social, moral, political or existential themes beyond their immediate fictive context. rooney ‘once there was a learning developer…’: the potential of parables to stimulate critique journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 3 thompson (n.d.), for instance, describes chimamanda ngozi adiche’s 2006 novel, half of a yellow sun, as ‘a parable of race, class and politics’ in postcolonial nigeria. arundhati roy’s capitalism: a ghost story (2015) opens with a gut-wrenching parabolic story concerning the material and spiritual harms wrought by neoliberalism in contemporary india. for the purposes of this article, though, i have in mind a more specific tradition of story-telling; often involving quite short, or ‘micro’, stories, containing deliberate elements of surprise, strangeness and equivocacy. as thomas c. oden (1978) notes in his introduction to the parables of kierkegaard, parables of this kind have been deployed throughout the world, and across cultures, for thousands of years. to draw on an example from twentieth-century europe, gerhart fishcher (2008, p.138) describes bertolt brecht’s parables as seeking to make ‘the familiar appear strange’, and in doing so to raise ‘the question of why things are as they are… [in order to] open up a process of critical thinking’. as james champion (1981, p.21) observes, brecht’s near contemporary franz kafka likewise used parables to produce a ‘radical displacement of how things are supposed to go in the order of things.’ walter benjamin (2008 [1934], pp.83-84), in an essay on kafka, deploys a parable of his own – one that exemplifies well, i think, how this kind of ‘radical displacement’ of expectations often plays out. benjamin’s story is set in a ‘shabby inn’ where a group of acquaintances are playfully discussing ‘what each man thought he would wish for if he had a wish to spare.’ things proceed predictably enough: ‘one wanted gold, another a son-in-law, a third a new carpenter’s bench…’ when, however, a ‘shabbily dressed’ beggar is pressed to speak, he has this to say: ‘i’d wish i was a great and powerful king and ruled a large country and was lying asleep one night…when the enemy breached the frontier and horsemen reached the square in front of my palace before dawn and there was no resistance and i, starting up out of sleep, no time even to get dressed, wearing just my shirt, had to take flight and was chased up hill and down dale, through forests and mountains, day and night without let-up, until i had reached this bench in your corner, safe. that is what i would wish.’ the others looked at one another in bewilderment. ‘but what would such a wish leave you with?’ asked one. ‘a shirt.’ was the reply. these kinds of strange, expectation-confounding qualities are likewise frequently to be found in some the most famous and widely-cited parables of all: those attributed to jesus of nazareth, and found in the gospels of mark, matthew and luke (‘the synoptic gospels’ rooney ‘once there was a learning developer…’: the potential of parables to stimulate critique journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 4 as they are known collectively). it was re-encountering these, and some of the scholarship concerning them, that first ignited my own curiosity about parables. i would like, then, to spend a little time clarifying what these stories reveal about the pedagogical purpose and workings of the parable. ‘but alas for you who are rich…’ (luke, 6: 24-25, in hart, 2017, p. 118): the gospel parables’ subversive pedagogy ‘it is interesting, if not surprising, to watch white new testament scholars explain away the real theological significance of jesus’ teachings on the kingdom and the poor.’ james h. cone (2018 [1970], p.122) there persists, it seems, a popular perception that the parables that appear in the synoptic gospels are intended primarily as ‘religious’ (in the modern, and somewhat impoverished, sense of that term) stories relaying clear moral-religious messages (rollins, 2006). this is, i suppose, symptomatic of a broader, and similarly anachronistic, tendency to view the bible itself as a ‘book’ containing consistent, clear-cut, moral-religious instruction for the pious. but the bible is, of course, nothing of the sort. indeed, a regular theme to emerge from the pages of this dizzyingly diverse, multi-genre compilation of ancient hebrew and greek texts is, as terry eagleton (2009: p.8) writes, ‘god’s endless… struggle with organized religion’ (as well as, we should add, with pharaohs, kings and emperors). in the gospels of the christian canon, these are struggles said to find their ultimate expression in the person, life and teachings of an itinerant galilean artisan and popular prophet, executed as a result of the combined actions of jerusalem’s aristocratic high-priestly ruling class and the colonial power under whose control and supervision they ruled (carter, 2006). even by the often extravagantly sadistic standards of the roman empire, crucifixion was a particularly horrific form of public state killing – reserved for those classed as ‘non-persons’, deployed as punishment for political offences, and designed explicitly ‘to terrorize subject peoples into submission.’ (horsley, 2013, p.156). and keeping in mind this broader narrative context of the gospels – of jesus incurring the ultimate punitive sanction of the repressive imperial state apparatus – is important in helping us appreciate the critical-pedagogical role played by the stories he himself tells (herzog, 1994; schottroff, 2009). rooney ‘once there was a learning developer…’: the potential of parables to stimulate critique journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 5 broadly speaking, these stories served to provoke reflection on the nature of a liberating social order (horsley, 2001) referred to in mark and luke as the ‘kingdom of god’ and in matthew as the ‘kingdom of the heavens’ (hart, 2017). faithful to ancient jewish prophetic traditions of social-economic critique, eschatological hope and the pronouncement of judgement against systems of oppression and injustice, this (anti)kingdom was to be inaugurated and lived through a praxis of radical love1, healing, non-violence, shared abundance, spiritual renewal, community reconciliation and – perhaps most transformatively of all in the context of the first-century palestinian economy – debt-forgiveness (myers, 2008; horsley, 2012, 2015). all this was, quite understandably, cast as ‘good news’ for the poor and marginalised, whose debt-haunted lives were dominated by the constant, demoralising tyranny of actual or threatened destitution (van eck, 2010). equally understandably, it would have been received rather more like bad news by those whose wealth, power and social status were derived from, and could survive only by maintaining, this very same tyranny. and, as we know all too well from the dismal record of human history, to challenge iniquitous economic structures and practices, to threaten to disrupt the orderly administration of empire, is to risk inviting the full fury of institutional power (horsley, 2013). along with numerous other biblical scholars and theologians, diana l. hayes (2000) points out that such a reading of the gospels has often proven straightforward enough to oppressed peoples. the colonisation of these texts has never been, after all, an entirely successful ideological enterprise. to return to the parables, for edward schillebeeckx (1987, p.29) it was precisely the utopian/eschatological (and as such ultimately indescribable) nature of ‘the kingdom’ that necessitated the use of parabolic and metaphorical modes of communication, able to reach imaginatively beyond the ‘impoverishing sharpness’ of more direct and definitional modes. in this way, the parables worked to dislodge and destabilise ‘the entrenched domination of worldly logic and power’ (putt, 2017, p.50) – creating in the space thus opened opportunities to think against and beyond this logic. as peter rule (2017, p.2) 1 not to be confused with a perfectly laudable, if comparatively anodyne, ‘concern for the wellbeing of others’, this love was an altogether more militant and immoderate affair, entailing an unyielding solidarity with the oppressed, even at the risk of (indeed, very likely to result in) a violent death at the hands of the authorities. rooney ‘once there was a learning developer…’: the potential of parables to stimulate critique journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 6 explains, a related feature of these stories is their refusal to admit any simple, singlemeaning interpretations: … [t]he pedagogical purpose of [jesus’] parables… [is] to tease the minds of listeners into active thought. the purpose thus differs from more straightforward instructional genres such as commandments, rules and procedures. it involves provoking a playful but serious labour of interpretation, an opening to possibilities of meaning, rather than indicating a single denotation. now, i realise that i have strayed some distance from the terrain of contemporary higher education, so i will stop here and stray no further. i hope, though, that these introductory sections have helped to establish the parable’s ancient as well as modern criticalpedagogical credentials. but enough about those guys… i trust it goes without saying, but i will say it just in case: the stories i have been working on do not serve anything like the kind of revolutionary aspirations narrated and dramatised in the synoptic gospels! nor am i so utterly lacking in self-awareness as to claim any kind of creative or intellectual lineage with the likes of brecht, kafka or benjamin. what i am doing is borrowing certain narrative and stylistic devices in order to further the far more modest aims of encouraging critical and reflective orientations towards certain values and practices in my own area of tertiary education. writing specifically of the potential for parables to help enable this process within the context of educational practice, bullough explains: ‘moving from concrete and commonplace events and experiences, parables… [require that] a troubling imaginative choice be made that reveals who and what they [the readers/hearers] are, what they value, and where they stand’ (2010, p.154). it is just this kind of ‘troubling imaginative choice’ that the parables i have been working on are attempting to prompt readers into considering. to what end? well, if pressed to reveal a broader agenda behind all of this, i would say that i am attempting to work with jan mcarthur’s notion that the role of higher education in promoting social justice is sustained, at least in part, by its ‘providing a place, a sanctuary, for thinking outside the current reality, which is simultaneously anchored in that reality.’ (2013, p.109). rooney ‘once there was a learning developer…’: the potential of parables to stimulate critique journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 7 ‘in the parable, you’ve lost.’ (kafka, 2017 [1922], p.181): how (and how not) to read a parable. during the conference workshop in which i presented the parables below, i offered a brief set of recommendations entitled, ‘how (and how not) to read a parable’. here, i have taken the more mischievous step of adapting these into a set of anti-guidelines (perhaps they might themselves be read as a parable on the provision of such guidelines?): 1) every parable carries a clear and unambiguous message, and so it is very much your job to figure out what this message is – preferably before anybody else does. as a contest of how clever, and how ‘in on the author’s intentions’ you are, it is crucial to ‘solve’ the parable and announce your solution as the correct one, over and against any erroneous interpretations you hear from others. 2) parables often present certain tensions and conflicts and, as such, it is absolutely vital you take sides – quickly and without compromise. bearing in mind the previous recommendation, every parable also contains a correct side. so, and just to add to the stress of it all, you will have to think very carefully as well as very quickly. just imagine the shame and humiliation of discovering you have chosen the wrong side! 3) if you detect the allegorical or metaphorical at work in a parable, then the next step is to nail precisely, and indisputably, what it is an allegory or metaphor for. figure that out and, provided you’ve followed the previous two steps, you will be the undisputed winner – a true master of parable interpretation. in all seriousness, though, here are some questions that, i hope, will prove genuinely helpful in supporting engagement: 1) what questions or issues does the story draw your attention to? 2) what tensions or contradictions does the story seek to open up and make more visible? 3) what assumptions/values/practices etc. does the story seem to invite (re)examination of? rooney ‘once there was a learning developer…’: the potential of parables to stimulate critique journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 8 4) who are the characters? what relations, including power relations, might be at work between them? 5) do you find yourself drawn to/repelled by any of the characters and what they have to say? if so, why do you think this is? 6) what assumptions might you be bringing to the story and its characters, and where might these come from? how might these shape your responses to the story? in devising these questions, i have the generous advice and practical help of my university of leicester colleague, dr alexandra patel, to thank. here, then, are a trio of parables discussed during the workshop. (at this point, i really must express my immense gratitude to those who attended the workshop. i could not have wished for a more generous, willing and insightful group of people with whom to share these stories in public for the first time.) i would encourage collaborative discussion, wherever possible, as this should allow a greater diversity of perspectives to be shared and so provide for a more interesting interpretive experience. 1) the unconventional marker once, during a staff development session entitled ‘improving assessment and feedback’, discussion turned to the allocation of marks. (as is the fashion these days, it was one of those sessions where periodic injunctions to talk out loud were deemed to be an indispensable aid to the learning process.) people spoke of how challenging they often found marking – of how much care they felt they needed to take to ensure that it was fair, consistent, transparent, and above all based on ‘relevant and well-designed criteria and rubrics’. ‘oh, i don’t let any such concerns interfere with my marking’ said one. ‘really?’ said another. ‘what do you do, then?’ ‘i just give everyone the same pre-allocated mark. indeed, i’ve started to release all the marks at the beginning of the module so as to avoid any further anxiety or confusion.’ well, you can imagine the response. someone said, ‘but…but… how will they know if they’ve done a good job or not?’ ‘time permitting, i’ll tell them. indeed, the time freed up by not worrying about what mark to give means i’m more likely to be able to tell them. to be honest, though, in my rooney ‘once there was a learning developer…’: the potential of parables to stimulate critique journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 9 experience they usually already know perfectly well themselves if they’ve done a decent job or not.’ another said, ‘but… then….i mean… how… how on earth can you justify doing this? your students are all different, surely? you’re not seriously telling me they’ve ever actually, literally, all produced work of identical quality?’ ‘oh, you’re absolutely right about the whole difference thing. couldn’t agree more. i’d never do violence to the diversity of my students by awarding them anything other than identical marks. differential marks, in such circumstances, would be horribly unjust. everyone is different, after all.’ ‘and these identical marks you award, do they tend to be higher or lower?’ ‘high marks, of course, always the higher marks. what good are lower marks to anyone? don’t forget, they’ll soon be leaving behind this game of ours to go and play the game of ‘getting-a-job’. imagine sending them out into that brutal charade with low marks next to their names? i couldn’t live with myself!’ a few days after the workshop, this unconventional marker received an email inviting them to meet with someone who went by the title, ‘dean of quality’. 2) belonging week the university was very proud – excited, in fact – to be hosting its inaugural belonging week. a series of events, all with a focus on fostering a ‘greater sense of belonging’, were taking place. these included: a festival of belonging; a belonging question time, featuring a panel drawn from the senior leadership team; and, taking pride of place in the centre of campus, a great big bouncy castle of belonging which, owing to persistent heavy rainfall and consequent health and safety concerns, had thus far proved unusable. every academic department had nominated a belonging champion, large photographs of whom were displayed on tv screens and on giant belonging boards around the campus. students could find out more about events and activities either by downloading the university’s i-belong app, or by visiting one of the numerous pop-up belonging booths, staffed by volunteer belonging buddies. during the week, all first year undergraduate students were invited meet with their personal tutor for a belonging conversation. during one such conversation a student explained: ‘i can’t say i feel like i belong here at all, to be honest.’ ‘oh,’ said the tutor, ‘why is that?’ rooney ‘once there was a learning developer…’: the potential of parables to stimulate critique journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 10 ‘well, it seems that to belong here, to really belong here, you just have to kind of be a certain way. i’m not like that and i never will be, so i guess i’ll never belong.’ the personal tutor glanced nervously down at the ‘guidance notes and suggested questions’ they had been issued at a recent belonging briefing they had been mandated to attend. after a few moments fruitless scanning they finally asked, rather mechanically: ‘are you aware of the full range services in place to support students’ mental health and wellbeing?’ ‘mind you’ the student continued, ignoring the tutor’s question, entirely. ‘it could be worse, i suppose.’ ‘really? how so?’ asked the tutor. ‘well, i could be more like one of those who do belong.’ 3) the manager who despised quick wins once there was a manager – a very melancholy, dejected-looking manager. the reason for this dismal countenance? a profound and impossible-to-conceal distaste for ‘quick wins’. and yet quick wins were all anyone would ever propose. indeed, the manager was convinced, quick wins were all that anyone was capable of even conceiving. whatever the problem, whatever its scale, in they would rush, proudly proclaiming their latest ‘good-togo’ proposals for quick wins. then one day, at a hastily convened meeting to discuss the latest institutional panic to have somehow found its way to their section, a newcomer (they had only been in post for a couple of weeks, during which time they had uttered not a single word the others could recall) said: ‘i’ve an idea about what we might do.’ ‘oh good’ said a colleague. ‘something we can do straight away? something guaranteed to bear fruit in the short-term?’ ‘oh no,’ replied the newcomer, ‘nothing like that. i can see this taking years, maybe even decades.’ ‘decades?’ said the colleague, ‘decades!?’ the others in the room looked stunned and embarrassed. none dared look at the newcomer, or at each other for that matter. ‘ok, ok’ said another at last. ‘let’s not judge until we’ve heard more.’ although privately as horrified as the others, this member of the team – being of a kindly, nurturing disposition – was nonetheless anxious to ensure the newcomer did not suffer the rooney ‘once there was a learning developer…’: the potential of parables to stimulate critique journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 11 kind of public embarrassment that might dissuade them from venturing ideas for quicker wins in future. turning a benevolent gaze towards the newcomer, they went on: ‘you must feel very confident in this long-term solution of yours delivering the goods? you’re sure it will work, i trust?’ ‘oh, i very much doubt that’ said the newcomer. ‘i can’t see it working at all, to be honest. indeed, i’d be dismayed in the extreme if i thought for one moment it was in any danger of, to use your phrase, “delivering the goods”’. at this, the manager coughed gently (more for effect than of necessity), smiled publicly for the first time anyone could remember, and said: ‘well, what are you all waiting for? this slow loss [how the manager savoured these words!] won’t implement itself.’ ‘well, actually…’ began the newcomer, rather awkwardly it must be said. ‘i mean, i don’t want to cause…’ the manager’s smile broadened as they raised their hand to interrupt. ‘that’s alright, you needn’t say any more. i quite understand. my mistake, and i’m sorry for it, i truly am. i, of all people, should have known better!’ with that, the manager got up to leave the room – not only smiling now but chuckling, too, with the air of one for whom cheerful contentment with the world was their most natural and common disposition. in conclusion where next with any of this? as i explained to those who attended the workshop, i would like to present these and other parables to a wider cross-section of educational practitioners so as to explore in greater depth their use and effectiveness (or otherwise!). i would also like to encourage and support others in experimenting with this form in their own professional contexts. i realise i could go further along these lines at this point. i could summarise and distil the previous sections; pull together various strands into some kind of closing statement; perhaps sketch out some further questions for future exploration. but i cannot help feeling that, given all i have said about parables, this would be a rather unfaithful move on my part – more a betrayal than a ‘summing up’ of what has gone before. so instead, i will offer one more parable – a story that owes more than a minor debt to the one with which the article opened... rooney ‘once there was a learning developer…’: the potential of parables to stimulate critique journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 12 epilogue once there was a learning developer who, having had the idea of writing some parables, decided to take these to a conference workshop to see what colleagues thought. before being allowed to view the parables, workshop participants were made to endure a protracted history of the parable as a form. great pains were taken, during this tiresome exposition, to point out that the parable was – in the words of contemporary theologian and fellow-parablist, peter rollins – ‘not reducible to some clear, singular, scientific formula but rather…[open to] a multitude of commentaries.’ (mindful of the scholarly sensitivities of the audience, the learning developer was careful to add that this quotation was taken from a book published in the year 2006, and could be found on pages sixteen and seventeen.) next, the participants were issued with a set of questions to accompany their engagement with the parables. these had been designed, it was announced, ‘to foreclose the possibility of closure’ – a phrase the learning developer uttered with a certain flourish, suggesting they felt rather pleased with themselves for having coined it. when, at long last, participants got to work with the parables, however, something strange and rather unexpected took place. responding to story after story, they kept arriving, with minimal fuss or deliberation, at precisely the same interpretation. worse, these identical interpretations were all couched in definitive terms – as if any other interpretation than the one they had all arrived at was unthinkable. there were lots of ‘oh, i see what it’s saying’ and ‘yes, my view, entirely, it’s clearly encouraging us to…’ and ‘wait, i think i’ve got it!’ and so on. throughout, the learning developer tried their best to intervene, to suggest alternative possible readings. but these were all calmly rejected by the participants. if anything, they seemed to serve merely to strengthen the unanimity of opinion. ‘why are you doing this?’ the learning developer asked at last. ‘we’ve been through it so many times. you’ve all seen how parables are designed to work and yet you keep on arriving at the single meaning, the one message you’ve all agreed the parables must be instructing you to take away. you don’t get it at all, do you? i’m disappointed in you, to be honest.’ after a brief silence, one of the participants smiled and said: ‘i suppose we must seem to you like characters in one of your stories.’ rooney ‘once there was a learning developer…’: the potential of parables to stimulate critique journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 13 with this, the participants burst into raucous and, to the learning developer’s ears at least, rather deranged laughter. one of them began to sing (to the tune of the chorus of the beatles’ yellow submarine): “weee ah – gree on what all the stories mean / all the stories mean / all the stories mean…” soon, the rest of them joined in, and it wasn’t long before other conference delegates, from other sessions taking place in tandem, arrived to find out what all the commotion was about. without really understanding the source or context for the laughter or the singing, they all joined in nonetheless – this seeming like the most appropriate and participatory thing to do in the circumstances. (one of the key themes of that year’s conference was, after all, the importance of ‘participatory learning’.) there was only one person who remained silent all this time, and that was the learning developer, who really hadn’t a clue what was going on. references adichie, c.n. (2006) half of a yellow sun. london: 4th estate. bullough, r.v. jr. (2010) ‘parables, storytelling and teacher education’, journal of teacher education, 61(1-2), pp. 153-160. benjamin, w. (2008 [1934]) ‘franz kafka: on the tenth anniversary of his death’, pp. 5191, in benjamin, w. and underwood, j.a. (translator) the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction. london: penguin books. carter, w. (2006) the roman empire and the new testament: an essential guide, nashville (usa): abingdon press. champion, j. (1981) ‘the parable as an ancient and modern form’, journal of literature & theology, 3(1), pp.16-37. cone, j.h. (2018 [1970]) a black theology of liberation, new york (usa): orbis books. rooney ‘once there was a learning developer…’: the potential of parables to stimulate critique journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 14 crossan, j.d. (1976) raid on the articulate: comic eschatology in jesus and borges. oregon (usa): wipf and stock publishers. eagleton, t. (2009) reason, faith and revolution: reflections on the god debate, new haven (usa): yale university press. fischer, g. (2008) ‘‘good building’: bertolt brecht’s utopian historical optimism at the end of world war ii’, cultural studies review, 14(1), pp. 137-146. hart, d.b. (2017) the new testament: a translation. new haven (usa): yale university press. hayes, d.l. (2000) ‘james cone’s hermeneutic of language and black theology’, theological studies, 66, pp. 609-631. herzog, w.r. (1994) parables as subversive speech: jesus as pedagogue of the oppressed. westminster (usa): john knox press. horsley, r.a. (2001) hearing the whole story: the politics of plot in mark’s gospel. westminster (usa): john knox press. horsley, r.a. (2012) the prophet jesus and the renewal of israel: moving beyond a diversionary debate. michigan (usa): wm. b. eerdmans publishing co. horsley, r.a. (2013) jesus and the politics of roman palestine. usa: university of south carolina press. horsley, r.a. (2015) ‘you shall not bow down and serve them: economic justice in the bible’, interpretation: a journal of bible and theology, 69(4) pp.415-431. kafka, f. and hofmann, m. (translator) (2017 [1931]) the burrow. london: penguin. kierkegaard, s. (1978) parables of kierkegaard, new jersey (usa): princeton university press. rooney ‘once there was a learning developer…’: the potential of parables to stimulate critique journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 15 mcarthur, j. (2013) rethinking knowledge within higher education: adorno and social justice. london (england): bloomsbury. myers, c. (2008) binding the strongman: a political reading of mark’s story of jesus. new york (usa): orbis books. putt, b.k. (2017) ‘a poetics of parable and the ‘basileic reduction’: ricoeurean reflections on kevin hart’s kingdoms of god’, sophia, 56(1), pp.45-58. rollins, p. (2006) how (not) to speak of god. massachusetts (usa): paraclete press. roy, a. (2015) capitalism: a ghost story. london: verso. rule, p.n. (2017) ‘the pedagogy of jesus in the parable of the good samaritan: a diacognitive analysis’, hts theological studies, 73(3), pp. 1-8. schillebeeckx, e. (1987) jesus in our western culture: mysticism, ethics and politics. london: scm press ltd. schottroff, l. (2009) ‘the kingdom of god is not like you were made to believe: reading parables in the context of germany and western europe’, pp. 169-179, in botta, a.f. and andiach, p.r. (eds) the bible and the hermeneutics of liberation. society of biblical literature. thompson, p.l. (n.d.) ‘half of a yellow sun: adichie’s historical parable of race, class, and politics’, radicalscholarship.wordpress.com. available at: https://radicalscholarship.wordpress.com/2017/01/18/half-of-a-yellow-sun-adichieshistorical-parable-of-race-class-and-politics/ accessed 1.12.19 van eck, e. (2010) ‘a prophet of old: jesus the 'public theologian'’, hts theological studies, 66(1), pp.1-10. https://radicalscholarship.wordpress.com/2017/01/18/half-of-a-yellow-sun-adichies-historical-parable-of-race-class-and-politics/ https://radicalscholarship.wordpress.com/2017/01/18/half-of-a-yellow-sun-adichies-historical-parable-of-race-class-and-politics/ rooney ‘once there was a learning developer…’: the potential of parables to stimulate critique journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 16 author details steve rooney is head of learning development at the leicester learning institute, university of leicester. he has been a member of the aldinhe steering group and is currently a member of the conference and research and development working groups ‘once there was a learning developer…’: the potential of parables to stimulate critique. abstract prologue introduction ‘away from here, away from here’ (kafka, 2017 [1922], p.124): where parables tend to take us ‘but alas for you who are rich…’ (luke, 6: 24-25, in hart, 2017, p. 118): the gospel parables’ subversive pedagogy but enough about those guys… ‘in the parable, you’ve lost.’ (kafka, 2017 [1922], p.181): how (and how not) to read a parable. 1) the unconventional marker 2) belonging week 3) the manager who despised quick wins in conclusion epilogue references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 14: october 2018 making the second year count: embedding learning development in a progressive student journey pat hill university of huddersfield, uk amanda tinker university of huddersfield, uk abstract in over a decade of working on embedding skills within the curriculum, it became apparent to us that the second or intermediate year was rather neglected in terms of intervention. across the uk higher education sector, focus has been on supporting first year transition and final year projects (yorke, 2015; whittle, 2018). the aim of this paper is to explore a progressive approach to learning development within the curriculum which ensures that the second year is fully exploited in terms of bridging the gap between first and final years. focus groups were used to investigate perceptions of students, subject specialists and learning developers and the subsequent issues are thematically analysed and discussed. two case studies are then used to demonstrate the design of a curriculum which supports a collaborative and progressive approach to student learning in which learning developers can play a key role. keywords: embedding skills; progressive learning development; student journey; curriculum design. introduction uk higher education has embraced widening participation over the last twenty years but the complexity of dealing with such diversity in terms of learning development has presented many challenges. the initial reaction was that there was an imminent problem that would need fixing (ivanic and lee, 2006) and the response was to provide study hill and tinker making the second year count: embedding learning development in a progressive student journey journal of learning development in higher education, issue 14: october 2018 2 support for those ‘non-traditional’ students that were seen to lack the necessary skills to succeed, following a typical remedial, deficit intervention which was retention oriented (hill et al., 2010). in more recent years, a move away from this deficit approach has embraced a goal of inclusivity and sustainability aimed at learning development for all students, which is achievement-led rather than concentrating on those solely deemed ‘at risk’. there has been a clear drive towards making uk higher education a breeding ground for independent, confident graduates with solid communication skills and other employability skills, such as critical thinking and problem solving, irrespective of their chosen discipline (rust, 2016; cacciolatti et al, 2017). the value of developing these skills within the discipline has been well documented in relation to student antipathy towards ‘bolt-on’ skills sessions (wall, 2006; wingate, 2006). hill and tinker (2013) have previously explored ways of embedding skills and have suggested a set of ‘generic principles’ which are important considerations when integrating skills into the subject curriculum. during this research process, initiatives to embed skills within the curriculum were found to be useful but sporadic, and not developing students throughout their entire learning journey. there was a noticeable gap at intermediate level: the ‘forgotten year’ (tobolowsky, 2008; liverpool john moores university, 2013; milsom et al, 2015), which has received relatively little attention in research literature on uk higher education (webb and cotton, 2018). this article argues for, defines and demonstrates a progressive approach to learning development within the curriculum. it details an investigation into stakeholder perceptions of progressive learning development through collaboration with students, subject specialists and learning developers. these perceptions are also shared and disseminated by the creation of a video resource (huddersfield university, 2014) accessible on a website (aldinhe, 2014a). case studies are then used to illustrate how this is subsequently realised in collaborative curriculum design and teaching practice. embedding skills within the curriculum the need for ensuring that students are taught the necessary skills for studying in higher education and for employment has been largely accepted, but engaging students in such skills outside the curriculum has proved difficult. for example, clughen and connell (2011, p.333) maintain that academic writing ‘needs to be contextualized within the discipline’ or hill and tinker making the second year count: embedding learning development in a progressive student journey journal of learning development in higher education, issue 14: october 2018 3 students may not recognise its value in their personal and professional development. this is important for all students, irrespective of their ‘linguistic identities’, as all students ‘can benefit from an explicit and structured introduction to academic writing’ (hathaway, 2015, p.506). hathaway also encourages writing development that: is firmly framed as being concerned with the next stage of students’ development and is not in any way remedial or compensating for any deficiency (hathaway, 2015, p.507). this move towards integrating aspects of learning development within the curriculum, however, is not without its challenges. in an earlier project, these challenges were categorised as ‘staff related’, ‘student related’ and ‘institution related.’1 learning developers have highlighted: staff resistance to change, student diversity and the need for evidence of impact as particular challenges which may affect the way students learn. in facing these challenges, several factors have been identified for consideration when embedding skills. figure 1 below illustrates these factors as a set of generic principles which may need to be considered in order to establish successful integration. figure 1. generic principles for embedding academic skills (hill and tinker, 2013, pp. 10-11; aldinhe, 2014b). 1 for a more detailed analysis of these challenges and suggestions for solutions, please visit: http://aldinhe-embeddingskills.hud.ac.uk/node/60 http://aldinhe-embeddingskills.hud.ac.uk/node/60 hill and tinker making the second year count: embedding learning development in a progressive student journey journal of learning development in higher education, issue 14: october 2018 4 one of the major features identified above is a holistic approach to embedding learning development which not only takes into account the whole cohort and the whole programme but also the whole student journey. the complexity involved in developing student learning, not simply in terms of acquiring knowledge but also in terms of how to learn, has been well recognised: moving away from uncritical acceptance of knowledge to critically constructing one’s own perspective is more complex than learning a skill set (baxter-magolda, 2006, p.50). this is a gradual process which needs to be recognised and supported throughout the degree programme. compartmentalising the higher education system into modules with a focus on assessment has arguably made it more difficult for students to explore and to learn through making mistakes (blake and illingworth, 2015) or to make connections (squires et al., 2009). it becomes more important, then, to establish a progressive learning environment which is ‘scaffolded’ and ‘contextualised’ (cassar et al., 2012, pp. 35-45). collaborating with subject specialists in context, learning developers have tried to ensure that skills are introduced in a timely manner at point of need. it is important to recognise, however, that there needs to be progression which ensures that students develop. it cannot be assumed that skills taught in the first year will be adequate throughout their degree programme, or even applied by students, or that the same skills sessions can simply be repeated. progressive learning one of the main ideas to evolve from our initial work on embedding was a recognition of what is known in the united states as ‘the sophomore slump’ (hunter et al., 2010). in the last few years: it has been recognised in the usa that second year students have substantial needs but receive the least attention of all undergraduates (yorke, 2015, p.4). hill and tinker making the second year count: embedding learning development in a progressive student journey journal of learning development in higher education, issue 14: october 2018 5 us research has shown that students often experience a loss of engagement, struggle to manage a smooth transition into year two and, consequently, to get the best out of their intermediate level of undergraduate study (gump, 2007). gump acknowledges that there had previously been a great deal of research on the first year transition into higher education that led to many interventions, many of them particularly aimed at retention. he also points out that research suggests that these interventions may actually simply postpone the emergence of issues until the second year when there is far less support available (pp. 111-112). the system in the united states differs from the uk, in that american students have a general introduction to higher education before the process of choosing a ‘major’, but uk universities have also focussed more attention on the first year and are beginning to recognise similar issues (scott and cashmore, 2012). liverpool john moores university (2013) were one of the first to highlight the situation in the uk with a hefce project ‘the forgotten year: tackling the second year slump’ (thompson et al, 2013). following an intervention which introduced additional on-line support for second year students (see skills@library, university of leeds, n.d.), whittle concludes that: further longitudinal studies will be required to determine whether a slump in second-year satisfaction or performance is a consistent finding nationally (whittle, 2018, p.98). statistics from a previous project at the university of huddersfield showed that intermediate students were less likely to seek help individually from learning developers and that taught sessions were also less frequent (see figure 2 below). hill and tinker making the second year count: embedding learning development in a progressive student journey journal of learning development in higher education, issue 14: october 2018 6 figure 2. total percentages of tutorials and taught session delivery in the schools of ‘art, design and architecture’ (ada) and ‘music, humanities and media’ (mhm) 2010-2011. our previous research had also highlighted that skills assessed at intermediate level were often not specifically taught. a project was then initiated to ascertain whether skills could be embedded more holistically and progressively, across the entire student journey. the idea of year two being a ‘bridge’ between initial and final year needed to be explored and how the second year could be enhanced to ensure student progression. method focus groups have become an established method for capturing perceptions from stakeholders (krueger and casey, 2009, p.3). within the schools of ‘art, design and architecture’ and ‘music, humanities and media’, six focus groups and one interview were conducted separately with subject staff, students and learning developers to explore ideas, perceptions and experiences about progressive learning development and the second year of study. it was decided to separate the groups by role so that participants could feel confident in expressing their honest views, aiding the validity of the research. care has to be taken in using pre-existing groups, as hierarchical relationships, such as tutor-student, hill and tinker making the second year count: embedding learning development in a progressive student journey journal of learning development in higher education, issue 14: october 2018 7 may ‘inhibit the frank exchange of ideas’ (barbour, 2007, p.67). it was anticipated that a further focus group of learning developers would offer a more objective perspective. all participants had self-selected to attend. in line with barbour (2007), it was decided to not simply ask questions of the focus group but to provide ‘stimuli’ in the form of posters for ‘their usefulness in breaking the ice’ and ‘capacity to stimulate discussion’ (p.84). rather than simply record individual participant responses, as per traditional focus groups, the group were given an activity which encouraged them to debate and reach consensus on the most pertinent issues (colucci, 2007, p.5). the design of the activity stimuli not only ensured that the group provided relevant information but also allows for future replication, contributing to reliability. posters were designed by the project team appropriate for the three different types of stakeholder/focus group and each was given the activity to map progression, as they perceived this, across the three years of study (see figure 3 below for an example). figure 3. example of workshop poster. the summary discussions were audio recorded and, along with individual perspectives written on the posters, this became the data set for transcription and analysis. ethical consent to use the data was granted by all participants. two subject-staff focus groups, each with 20 participants were conducted. these were university of huddersfield academic staff from different disciplines who were attending teaching and learning events and self-selected to attend our workshops. within these, hill and tinker making the second year count: embedding learning development in a progressive student journey journal of learning development in higher education, issue 14: october 2018 8 participants were organised into four different groups and asked to discuss and map issues and experiences from first to final year of study according to broad themes:  staff-student expectations for each year.  curriculum content, assessment and feedback.  different working environments, internal and external factors.  pastoral care and personal development planning (pdp). each group was given one of above areas to consider and provided with 3-5 questions, devised by the project team to prompt discussion and facilitate the mapping exercise. participants were also provided with an opportunity to record their individual and overall group reflections relating to progression. each group then, in turn, was asked to report the key elements of their discussion, which was recorded and later transcribed, together with the photographing and noting of issues raised on the mapping posters. two student focus groups were conducted, one within each school, each with 6 intermediate-level participants. students were given a list of graduate skills to consider and were asked to write on post-it notes in response to the question ‘how can we develop student skills?’ and a series of more specific questions in relation to years one, two and three of study. the group were then asked to talk through their poster and this feedback was audio recorded for analysis. two follow-up focus groups were attempted with final year students; although only two and one attended respectively, this provided some very rich data as their view of the progress was informed and reflective. the final focus group was with 25 learning developers from a variety of uk universities who attended an aldinhe conference workshop (bailey et al., 2013). the participants were split into 4 groups and asked to consider the question ‘how can we develop skills progressively?’ again, mapping posters were used and participants were asked to consider themes of ‘expectations’, ‘experiences’ and ‘evolution’, considering how skills can be integrated progressively, making the most of the intermediate year. as previously, groups were asked in turn to report key elements of their discussion and this feedback was similarly recorded and transcribed. hill and tinker making the second year count: embedding learning development in a progressive student journey journal of learning development in higher education, issue 14: october 2018 9 the qualitative data from the above focus group activities and transcribed audio was then analysed for emergent themes. these themes were generated through manual, inductive ‘framework analysis’ (originated by ritchie and spencer, 1994) according to krueger and casey’s definition of ‘key concepts’ (2009, p.125). the system: allows themes to develop from the research questions and from the narratives of research participants (rabiee, 2004, p.657). however, as braun and clarke (2006) point out, researchers play an active role in identifying patterns and in this small scale investigation, our focus gradually moved towards selecting themes which reflected tensions arising from different stakeholder perceptions (maclellan, 2001). these perceptions from the focus group analysis have been shared in the form of thematic videos added to the aldinhe website resource on embedding skills (aldinhe, 2014a), where a new section on progressive learning was developed (see hill and tinker, 2013, for a description of the original website development project). the focus groups excerpts were extracted using open source audio recording and editing software (audacity, 2018) and thematic videos were created, together with an accompanying context and rationale (see figure 4 below). figure 4. screen shots embedding skills resource (aldinhe, 2014a; huddersfield university, 2014). technical assistance was sourced from a recent graduate and his company, fifth planet productions (2016). the videos were organised in terms of question prompts, which were hill and tinker making the second year count: embedding learning development in a progressive student journey journal of learning development in higher education, issue 14: october 2018 10 devised specifically; the original voices can be heard, followed by visual keyword summaries, which were colour-coded according to staff, student and learning developer voices (see figure 4). the combination of these three different stakeholder views have provided both internal and external perspectives, supporting validity and giving the opportunity to extract relevant and interesting themes, which are disseminated in the current paper and through the embedding skills resource shown above. the findings below summarise these key themes and offer a view of progression in learning, illustrated through these participant ‘voices’. focus group findings and analysis five key themes were identified from the analysis: assessment, autonomy, collaboration, progression and expectations. subject staff, learning developer and student perceptions of the student learning journey, documented through focus groups and interview, are captured in the following ‘content-analytic summary table’ (miles and huberman, 1994, p.183). the voices represented in table 1 below illustrate different perceptions of a multi-layered learning journey demonstrating the inherent complexity and conflict. the challenge for learning developers is to acknowledge these tensions and help to design curricula resources which balance these expectations. hill and tinker making the second year count: embedding learning development in a progressive student journey journal of learning development in higher education, issue 14: october 2018 11 table 1. content-analytic summary table of subject staff, learning developer and student perceptions. colour code: subject staff; student; learning developer. hill and tinker making the second year count: embedding learning development in a progressive student journey journal of learning development in higher education, issue 14: october 2018 12 autonomy and expectations in relation to the themes of autonomy and expectations, there are clear conflicts between staff and students where first year students expect to be directed to the ‘right answer’ and staff are trying to encourage students to begin to acknowledge that there ‘might be multiple ways of addressing issues and problems’ (subject staff focus group). in contrast, some staff perceive themselves as ‘spoon-feeding’ first year students, and learning developers felt that this was what students wanted. in terms of writing, students explained that ‘what you wrote at a’ level was alright, but when you get to university what they are looking for is completely different’ (student focus group). learning developers mentioned ‘quite a variation’ amongst academics’ expectations around writing, particularly in relation to fostering critical analysis in first year versus description. students also felt that not enough had been said about the differences in expectations between further and higher education. they suggested that whilst they were required to write every week at school or college, ‘the difference was not really explained’ so that whilst expecting ‘more hitting the ground running’ they ostensibly had less work and regarded it as ‘an easy year’. this was linked by one student to accountability as he pointed out that students could omit the reading without penalty unless there was a direct associated task. another student said that he was given ‘three months to do an essay’ but that ‘we were never really reminded that much or pushed to do it’ so even though the assessment was in the module handbook from week one, priority was given to practical work and it came as a surprise to them when the tutor mentioned the essay the week before the deadline. even though they were given reading lists, students expected to be told exactly what to read. whereas some staff did give directed reading, which students appreciated (student focus group), other staff expected students to ‘just get on with it’ (learning developer focus group). a lack of consistency and communication was a fundamental issue with students but staff appeared to feel that students needed to be more proactive and responsible for their own learning. although they can never be a fix-all for the issues around differing staff and student perceptions, there does appear to be a role for learning developers in brokering and managing expectations on both sides. collaboration with subject staff and involvement in curriculum planning can ensure timely interventions. a related area of conflict in terms of the themes of autonomy and expectations was where second and third year students expected more help with more demanding work, whereas hill and tinker making the second year count: embedding learning development in a progressive student journey journal of learning development in higher education, issue 14: october 2018 13 staff seek to step back in order to foster autonomy. students explained ‘that we expected more, like, help…but when we got to year two, we had to try and, like…learn it ourselves, really, and just kind of wing it’ (student focus group). staff, however, said that ‘they [students] feel they need real support individually to help them get into their groove whereas staff think that we are going to let go because you’re more independent and we want to give you more space’ (subject staff focus group). learning developers also identified a conflict between the need for knowledge acquisition and making room for the development of autonomous learners with a wider skills base. as identified earlier, there could be an opportunity for learning developers to bridge the gap so that staff can confidently focus on content, in the knowledge that students will be able to access relevant support, for example, in the form of directed and timely workshop interventions. the dearth of such interventions in the second year was noted by learning developers and is discussed further under the theme of progression. collaboration in terms of collaboration, subject staff felt that there was a ‘delicate balance’ between first year students working as individuals and as part of a team and their inclination was to be competitive. even when students were working together, staff perceived this as students working alongside each other rather than as a cohesive team. staff felt that students began to share ideas and tasks more readily in year two. however, it was not until year three, often following a work placement, that this became true teamwork, with peer to peer support and students viewing staff as collaborators not just teachers. generally, first year students, although they expected more teamwork, regarded it as onerous and suggested that ‘it’s a lot easier to do it on your own’; part of the issue is the perception of unfair assessment. one student admitted that he had done far less work than another student, yet still achieved the same grade and perceptions of assessment are discussed further below. collaboration between students through peer mentoring and peer assisted learning was identified by learning developers as a positive solution both for those needing support and those who supported. students can be guided by those who have been through the process and mentors can develop graduate skills in leadership and communication. learning developers also suggested year three support mechanisms such as social media and dissertation clubs. hill and tinker making the second year count: embedding learning development in a progressive student journey journal of learning development in higher education, issue 14: october 2018 14 assessment assessment was a theme which students felt quite strongly about and staff perceived them to be driven primarily by grades, particularly in the first year: ‘how do i get an a? how do i get a first?’ other first year students, however, were unconcerned about grades as ‘year one doesn’t count’ (student focus group). in retrospect, the year three student said that although he found the first year ‘quite simple’, he felt that his first year effort in developing academic writing had helped him throughout his degree whereas students who coasted in the first year struggled in the second and third years. he felt that there needed to be more formal assessment of skills so that students realised the importance of it. learning developers were also concerned that in an effort to break down challenging concepts, staff avoided ‘long written assignments which doesn’t necessarily help prepare them because the first year then becomes very basic’ (learning developer focus group). this then causes a dissonance between first and second year with some students unprepared for the increased demands of year two. intermediate students felt that there were too many deadlines and were conscious that these would count towards their degree classification, so even though staff felt that year two students should be willing to take risks and know that ‘making mistakes is a learning process’ (subject staff focus group) the students were felt to be ‘risk averse…everything counts so students become strategic’ (learning developer focus group). both year two and year three students commented on the need for models or exemplars to make it clearer what was expected of them so that ‘you know you’re going on the right lines’. some students were also concerned that the marks awarded did not always reflect the amount of work necessary to complete a task and that they were sometimes unsure of how and why marks were allocated. this was despite staff providing written criteria and rubrics for each assessment. learning developers can have a useful role in providing models and helping students to interpret criteria and to show how they can be applied and how this links to tutor feedback. these different perceptions and challenges reflect the complexity in accommodating the needs of a diverse student population and ensuring that each student has a clear sense of their own progression from fresher to graduate. hill and tinker making the second year count: embedding learning development in a progressive student journey journal of learning development in higher education, issue 14: october 2018 15 progression the overarching theme of progression has been one that has driven the current project and, in evaluating the voices of these stakeholders, it has become apparent that the learning developer can have a vital role in bridging gaps in perception, mediating between subject staff and students. subject staff expressed a ‘clear narrative’ of the student journey from acquiring the basic ‘tools’ and communication skills, through ‘knowledge gathering’ and ‘making connections’ in year two towards the ‘holistic outlook’ necessary in year three, as students follow their own ‘personal journey.’ students, however, were often failing to see this progression; first year students found year one ‘a bit of a free ride’ (first year focus group), not realising the value of developing, honing and the potential to transfer these skills. interestingly, an issue for second year students was repetition, where they felt that the reiteration of skills taught in the first year was unnecessary, for example the use of the library’s electronic resources database: ‘i think… once you’ve done it you kind of know…how to use summon and things like that’ (student focus group). a final year student warned that ‘quite a few people suffered in first year – they’re paying for it now…putting in effort in first year helped me in third year’ (final year student interview). he felt that ‘there’s a flaw in the second year’ as the ‘third year skills should be enhanced from first year,’ with even ‘some sort of compulsory component that keeps going through the years’. this contrast in subject staff and student perceptions is a clear issue for learning developers who need to ensure that their interventions are timely, at the right level and are fostering development and progression in terms of undergraduate and graduate skills. timely interventions, however, are not always in the control of learning developers, who identified a lack of requests from subject specialists in the second year to help enhance skills: ‘almost like the preparation happened in the first year; they can get on with it and then there’s the third year’. they called for academic skills to be ‘scaffolded in a more progressive way’, rather than ‘strategically focused in year two around particular types of assessments…they haven’t done one of these yet, come in and help them’. ideally, there needs to be a move away from a ‘model of seconded learning development as needed’ towards a collaborative and consultative role which takes course and curriculum design into account. learning developers also suggested that this might also take the form of a ‘progression framework’ which makes skills ‘more explicit’. in many cases this is typically accomplished through reflective, personal development planning portfolios in which hill and tinker making the second year count: embedding learning development in a progressive student journey journal of learning development in higher education, issue 14: october 2018 16 students can articulate their learning and staff can map clear progression of the student journey and development of graduate attributes (higher education academy, 2018) this concept of a progression framework has formed the basis of collaborative curriculum development. curriculum design and delivery for progressive learning development in response to the above focus group findings, we are now working with subject teams to embed the teaching of academic skills progressively across all years of study. the previously mentioned generic principles (see figure 1, p.3) have been useful as a basis for an effective embedding strategy. in terms of collaboration, there have been planning meetings with subject staff and other stakeholders, including librarians and learning technicians. embedded, rather than separate, skills development sessions mean that all students have the opportunity to be included and have access to learning developer expertise throughout their programme. a holistic view of the programme ensures that sessions are not simply repeated but offer enhancement, focusing on increasing demands of the subject discipline. discussions with stakeholders allow for timely and relevant interventions throughout each year of study. sessions are designed to be interactive and to encourage reflective practice. as learning developers, we share ideas and teaching resources across the different schools whilst fulfilling discipline specific requirements in order to engage students. although each school works differently, the core content of what we offer can be seen in figure 5 below. this has been used as a discussion tool with course teams in order to facilitate curriculum planning that accommodates the entire student journey and emphasises the need for progressive learning development throughout all three years of study, including the ‘forgotten’ second year. this generic structure is then tailored to the needs of the subject discipline context. hill and tinker making the second year count: embedding learning development in a progressive student journey journal of learning development in higher education, issue 14: october 2018 17 figure 5. curriculum development tool. tables 2 and 3 below illustrate specific subject discipline case studies in history and photography: table 2. history case study. hill and tinker making the second year count: embedding learning development in a progressive student journey journal of learning development in higher education, issue 14: october 2018 18 table 3. photography case study. for both case studies, the sessions shown are learning development timetabled workshops which are embedded in the curriculum and delivered in collaboration with subject tutors, librarians, it specialists or careers advisors. this collaboration was driven by student-need and the student voice was a major element in all aspects of curriculum development. the written tasks become more demanding throughout the student journey, requiring an increasing level of critical analysis. alongside these workshops, learning developers continue to offer individual support through tutorials and drop-in sessions. in history, the foundation year has a non-credit bearing module entitled ‘becoming a historian’ which has regular seminars with personal academic tutors alongside the workshops. the work done in these sessions feeds in to the other foundation module assessments as formative work. the intermediate module is a 20 credit ‘research skills’ module and includes other subject specific content material and this can feed into the final year dissertation although there are obvious caveats about repetition. the final year sessions are part of a 40 credit module named ‘history dissertation and graduate futures’ in which students take part in a research fair with posters that they have designed based on their dissertation topics and produce a 12,000-word dissertation. alongside this, they have input from the university careers service and professionals in the field. hill and tinker making the second year count: embedding learning development in a progressive student journey journal of learning development in higher education, issue 14: october 2018 19 photography is structured slightly differently, particularly at foundation level, as the collaborative learning development input is within the theory modules of the course, which all have summative assessment and are credit bearing. although photography is a practical subject, an understanding and articulation of theory through critical reading and writing is an important element. as such, it is ‘scaffolded’ across the three years from an introduction to academic research, writing and referencing at foundation level, towards a more critical approach in the intermediate year through the use of scrolls to encourage active reading of challenging texts (middlebrook, 2015) and an in depth research-led session in the final year. the input into the history modules has been noted in the annual evaluation as an example of good practice: ‘dedicated skills tutors who are integrated into the teaching programme . . . at all 3 levels’. as part of this evaluation, the second year history research module, in particular, has been recently adapted in relation to student feedback which called for more autonomy in topic choice. for photography students, the ‘scrolling’ session was highlighted as particularly enjoyable and useful. the course team are working with learning developers to continue to enrich the curriculum in innovative ways that make connections between art theory and creative practice, underpinned by critical reflection to help students recognise and articulate narratives of their own learning and progression. conclusion the intermediate year has been shown to be neglected in favour of intense concentration on transition in the first year and outputs in the final year. a holistic approach to curriculum design and process means that the intermediate year can become a significant step in learning development which gives the student journey a clear sense of progression. our focus group analysis demonstrated that the second year is complex in that students felt the need for more guidance whereas tutors were trying to foster more autonomous learners. learning developers are ready to be part of a solution to these tensions, particularly through collaborative interventions. these voices were captured thematically in an online resource which can prompt ideas for progressive curriculum design. two examples of curriculum design are used to illustrate different models of collaboration which have resulted in successful pathways for scaffolding student learning development. hill and tinker making the second year count: embedding learning development in a progressive student journey journal of learning development in higher education, issue 14: october 2018 20 proactively embedding learning development into a course requires a concerted effort from all stakeholders to work towards eradicating some elements of the ‘second year blues’, thus enabling students to achieve their potential in the final year. references aldinhe (2014a) progressive learning development. available at: http://aldinheembeddingskills.hud.ac.uk/progressive_learning_development (accessed: 17 july 2018). aldinhe (2014b) generic principles for integrating learning development into the curriculum. available at: http://aldinhe-embeddingskills.hud.ac.uk/node/43 (accessed: 20 october 2018). audacity (2018) audacity: free, open source, cross-platform audio software (version 2.3.0) [audio software]. available at: https://www.audacityteam.org/ (accessed: 5 june 2018). bailey, r., tinker, a. and hill, p. (2013) ‘ensuring progression in learning development’, celebrating learning development: 10th aldinhe conference 2013, plymouth university, plymouth 25-27 march. barbour, r. (2007) doing focus groups. sage: london. baxter-magolda, m. b. (2006) ‘intellectual development in the college years’, change: the magazine of higher learning, 38(3), pp. 50-54. https://doi.org/10.3200/chng.38.3.50-54 blake, j and illingworth, s. (2015) ‘interactive and interdisciplinary student work: a facilitative methodology to encourage lifelong learning’, widening participation and online learning, 17(2), pp. 108-118. https://doi.org/10.5456/wpll.17.2si.107 http://aldinhe-embeddingskills.hud.ac.uk/node/43 https://www.audacityteam.org/ https://doi.org/10.3200/chng.38.3.50-54 https://doi.org/10.5456/wpll.17.2si.107 hill and tinker making the second year count: embedding learning development in a progressive student journey journal of learning development in higher education, issue 14: october 2018 21 braun, v. and clarke, v. (2006) ‘using thematic analysis in psychology’, qualitative research in psychology, 3(2), pp. 77-101. https://doi.org/10.1191/1478088706qp063oa cacciolatti, l., lee, s. h. and molinero, c. m. (2017) ‘clashing institutional interests in skills between government and industry: an analysis of demand for technical and soft skills of graduates in the uk’, technological forecasting and social change, 119, pp. 139-153. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.techfore.2017.03.024 cassar, a., funk, r., hutchings, d., henderson, f. and pancini, g. (2012) ‘student transitions – evaluation of an embedded skills approach to scaffolded learning in the nursing curriculum’, the international journal of the first year in higher education, 3(1), 35-48. https://doi.org/10.5204/intjfyhe.v3i1.102 clughen, l. and connell, m. (2011) ‘writing and resistance: reflections on the practice of embedding writing in the curriculum’, arts and humanities in higher education, 11(4), pp. 333-335. https://doi.org/10.1177/1474022211429543 colucci, e. (2007) ‘focus groups can be fun: the use of activity-oriented questions in focus group discussions’, qualitative health journal, 17(10), pp. 1422-1433. https://doi.org/10.1177/1049732307308129 fifth planet productions (2016) fifth planet. available at: http://www.fifthplanet.org/ (accessed: 17 july 2018). gump, s. e. (2007) ‘classroom research in a general education course: exploring implications through an investigation of the sophomore slump’ the journal of general education, 56(2), pp. 105-125. https://doi.org/10.1353/jge.2007.0020 hathaway, j. (2015) ‘developing that voice: locating academic writing tuition in the mainstream of higher education’ teaching in higher education, 20(5), pp. 506-517. https://doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2015.1026891 https://doi.org/10.1191/1478088706qp063oa https://doi.org/10.1016/j.techfore.2017.03.024 https://doi.org/10.5204/intjfyhe.v3i1.102 https://doi.org/10.1177/1474022211429543 https://doi.org/10.1177/1049732307308129 http://www.fifthplanet.org/ https://doi.org/10.1353/jge.2007.0020 https://doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2015.1026891 hill and tinker making the second year count: embedding learning development in a progressive student journey journal of learning development in higher education, issue 14: october 2018 22 higher education academy (2018) graduate attributes framework. available at: https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/knowledge-hub/graduate-attributes-framework (accessed: 4 july 2018). hill, p., tinker, a. and catterall, s. (2010) ‘from deficiency to development: the evolution of academic skills provision at one uk university’ journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2, february, pp. 1-19. hill, p. and tinker, a. (2013) ‘integrating learning development into the student experience’ journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5, march, pp. 1-18. huddersfield university (2014) progressive learning development – intro. embedding skills teaching and learning project, huddersfield university, 15 april [video]. available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ke6diqvawxw&index=2&list=plzuejzvzpls5mjt 2mvmi2hajnc6p0x8r1 (accessed: 24 october 2018). hunter, m. s., tobolowsky, b. f., gardner, j. n., evenbeck, s. e., pattengale, j. a., schaller, m. and schreiner, l. a. (2010) helping sophomores succeed: understanding and improving the second-year experience. san francisco: josseybass. ivanic, r. and lea, m. r. (2006) ‘new contexts, new challenges: the teaching of writing in uk higher education’, in ganobcsik-williams, l. (ed.) teaching academic writing in uk higher education: theories, practice and models. london: palgrave/macmillan. krueger, r.a. and casey, m.a. (2009) focus groups. a practical guide for applied research. 4th edn. london: sage publications. liverpool john moores university (2013) the forgotten year: tackling the sophomore slump. available at: http://secondyearexperience.ljmu.ac.uk/ (accessed: 4 july 2018). https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/knowledge-hub/graduate-attributes-framework https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ke6diqvawxw&index=2&list=plzuejzvzpls5mjt2mvmi2hajnc6p0x8r1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ke6diqvawxw&index=2&list=plzuejzvzpls5mjt2mvmi2hajnc6p0x8r1 http://secondyearexperience.ljmu.ac.uk/ hill and tinker making the second year count: embedding learning development in a progressive student journey journal of learning development in higher education, issue 14: october 2018 23 maclellan, e. (2001) ‘assessment for learning: the differing perceptions of tutors and students’, assessment and evaluation in higher education, 26(4), pp. 307-318. https://doi.org/10.1080/02602930120063466 middlebrook, d. (2015) unrolling the book: why use scrolls? a brief introduction to the benefits of using scrolls for classroom instruction. available at: http://www.textmapping.org/whyusescrolls.pdf (accessed: 17 july 2018). miles, m. b. and huberman, a.m. (1994) an expanded sourcebook: qualitative data analysis. london: sage publications. milsom, c., stewart, m., yorke, m. and zaitseva, e. (eds.) (2015) stepping up to the second year at university: academic, psychological and social dimensions. london: routledge. rabiee, f. (2004) ‘focus-group interview and data analysis’, proceedings of the nutrition society, 63(4), pp. 655–660. https://doi.org/10.1079/pns2004399 ritchie, j. and spencer, l. (1994) ‘qualitative data analysis for applied policy research’, in bryman, a. and burgess, r. g. (eds.) analyzing qualitative data. london: routledge pp. 173-194. rust, c. (2016) shifting the focus from skills to ‘graduateness’, phoenix (the agcas: association of graduate careers advisory services journal), 148, pp. 8-10. scott, j. and cashmore, a. (2012) fragmented transitions: moving to the 2nd year. proceedings stem annual conference. available at: https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/knowledge-hub/fragmented-transitions-moving2nd-year (accessed: 18 july 2018). skills@library, university of leeds (n.d.) second year success. available at: https://resources.library.leeds.ac.uk/second-year-success/thisyear.html (accessed: 18 july 2018). https://doi.org/10.1080/02602930120063466 http://www.textmapping.org/whyusescrolls.pdf https://doi.org/10.1079/pns2004399 https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/knowledge-hub/fragmented-transitions-moving-2nd-year https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/knowledge-hub/fragmented-transitions-moving-2nd-year https://resources.library.leeds.ac.uk/second-year-success/thisyear.html hill and tinker making the second year count: embedding learning development in a progressive student journey journal of learning development in higher education, issue 14: october 2018 24 squires, p., tinker a. and redmore, n. (2009) ‘reflect, understand and plan: an integrated learning portfolio’, in wade, s. and walton, k. (eds.) futurescan: mapping the territory: association of fashion and textile courses conference, university of liverpool, 17-18 november 2009, pp.100-109 [online]. available at: http://eprints.hud.ac.uk/id/eprint/10688/ (accessed: 19 july 2018). thompson, t., milsom, c., zaitseva, e., stewart, m., darwent, s. and yorke, m. (2013) the forgotten year? tackling the second year slump, the higher education academy. available at: https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/system/files/projects/liverpool_john_moores_ntfs_20 10_project_final_report.pdf (accessed: 18 july 2018). tobolowsky, b. (2008) ‘sophomores in transition: the forgotten year’, new directions for higher education, 144, pp. 59-67. https://doi.org/10.1002/he.326 wall, a. (2006) ‘introduction’, in davies, s., swinburne, d. and williams, g. (eds.) writing matters: the royal literary fund report on student writing in higher education. london: royal literary fund. webb, o. j. and cotton, d. r. e. (2018) ‘deciphering the sophomore slump: changes to student perceptions during the undergraduate journey’, higher education, pp. 1-18. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-018-0268-8 whittle s. r. (2018) ‘the second-year slump – now you see it, now you don’t: using dreem-s to monitor changes in student perception of their educational environment’, journal of further and higher education, 42(1), pp. 92-101. https://doi.org/10.1080/0309877x.2016.1206854 wingate, u. (2006) ‘doing away with ‘study skills’’, teaching in higher education, 11(4), pp. 457-469. https://doi.org/10.1080/13562510600874268 yorke, m. (2015) ‘why study the second year?’, in milsom, c., stewart, m., yorke, m. and zaitseva, e. (eds.) stepping up to the second year at university: academic, psychological and social dimensions. london: routledge, pp. 1-13. http://eprints.hud.ac.uk/id/eprint/10688/ https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/system/files/projects/liverpool_john_moores_ntfs_2010_project_final_report.pdf https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/system/files/projects/liverpool_john_moores_ntfs_2010_project_final_report.pdf https://doi.org/10.1002/he.326 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-018-0268-8 https://doi.org/10.1080/0309877x.2016.1206854 https://doi.org/10.1080/13562510600874268 hill and tinker making the second year count: embedding learning development in a progressive student journey journal of learning development in higher education, issue 14: october 2018 25 author details dr pat hill is a senior lecturer and academic skills tutor in the school of music, humanities and media at the university of huddersfield. dr amanda tinker is a senior lecturer and academic skills tutor in the school of art, design and architecture at the university of huddersfield. making the second year count: embedding learning development in a progressive student journey abstract introduction embedding skills within the curriculum progressive learning method focus group findings and analysis autonomy and expectations collaboration assessment progression curriculum design and delivery for progressive learning development conclusion references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 16: december 2019 using ux research techniques to explore how computing undergraduates understand and use library and student guidance services laura woods university of huddersfield, uk richard dockery university of huddersfield, uk alison sharman university of huddersfield, uk abstract this collaborative project, between the library and student guidance services at a mediumsized uk university, used qualitative user experience (ux) techniques to explore computing undergraduates’ experiences of support services. the research found that most students struggled with academic skills, and felt they had lacked support in developing academic literacies. students were often unaware of support services available from student guidance and the library. many struggled to balance studying with work, commuting, or family life. lack of time due to external commitments may be a barrier to accessing support services. this research project has suggested several avenues for future research, including a larger-scale study to investigate demographic categories such as mature students and overseas students, and an exploration of the needs of commuter students. key words: academic skills teaching; cross-team collaboration; support services; user experience. introduction this study examines how computing undergraduates experience support services, and how these can be better utilised to support students’ development of academic literacies. the study was a collaboration between the library subject team and the student guidance woods, dockery and sharman using ux research techniques to explore how computing undergraduates understand and use library and student guidance services journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 2 team at the university of huddersfield, a mid-sized, post-1992 university in the north of england. the study focused on computing students because previous research had found that these students showed disproportionately low use of the library (collins and stone, 2014). this is a concern, as library use correlates with both higher grades and higher retention (abrams and jernigan, 1984; soria et al., 2013; stone and ramsden, 2013; collins and stone, 2014). the cross-team approach allowed us to explore how both the library (which provides information literacy support across the whole university) and student guidance (which provides study skills and personal development support to students in the school of computing and engineering (sce)) were seen by students. study skills and information literacy are closely linked so exploring both together allowed us to identify where further collaboration could be useful. this research used user experience (ux) techniques to gain a holistic view of students’ experiences of support services, how they approached their assignments, and what library resources they used to support their work. the aim was to understand how students understood and engaged with support services, and what barriers might prevent them accessing support services as needed. historically, user research in libraries and support services has mainly consisted of quantitative methods such as measuring usage statistics of library resources, or mixed methods such as questionnaires and surveys (priestner and borg, 2016, p. 3). these methods are useful for giving a large-scale picture of what the majority of library users are doing, but they provide no context on the quality of the user experience, or why users make certain decisions that may seem counter-intuitive. by contrast, ux research techniques are well-suited to gaining in-depth insight into small groups of users. ux is increasingly used in libraries to explore topics of concern to library users and non-users (ramsden, 2016). the techniques are mainly derived from ethnography and are subject-led: rather than having an interviewer with set questions, questions are drawn from the interviewee’s initial thoughts on the topic. they allow the woods, dockery and sharman using ux research techniques to explore how computing undergraduates understand and use library and student guidance services journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 3 researcher to gain a more accurate picture of how users experience libraries: a key concern in higher education where the ‘student experience’ is increasingly central to how university services are evaluated (priestner and borg, 2016, p. 2). this research used several ux activities in combination. these techniques are described in full in the methodology section. literature review there is a recognised need for universities to support students in developing study skills, particularly among post-1992 universities who often have higher numbers of students from ‘non-traditional’ backgrounds (wingate, 2006). this is key to improving both academic performance and retention (mezick, 2015). feeling unprepared for the challenges of academic study and unsupported in developing the skills needed are common reasons for students to withdraw from their courses (jones, 2008). new students often feel uncertain about what is expected of them at university. in a study of first-year social work students at a uk university, goldingay et al. (2014, p. 46) found that students ‘stated they felt like they had to “learn” these inherent assumptions during their initial weeks at university, while simultaneously learning course material and navigation of the institution as a whole’. new students may also be reluctant to use their university library due to a phenomenon referred to as ‘library anxiety’ (jiao et al., 1996). this may be more common where students are unused to using libraries, unsure of what services are available, and have not had training or advice from library staff (mcpherson, 2015). uncertainty about ‘knowing the rules’ of the university environment in general is another factor that may lead students to withdraw from their studies (crosling et al., 2009). study skills support, such as that provided by the library and other support services, can go some way towards addressing these anxieties. a study skills course at a us university was found to increase ‘academic self-efficacy’ (i.e. confidence and self-motivation in academic ability) among students identified as ‘academically underprepared’ (wernersbach et al., 2014). there is also evidence that attending study skills classes and woods, dockery and sharman using ux research techniques to explore how computing undergraduates understand and use library and student guidance services journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 4 seeking help from dedicated study skills tutors or librarians is associated with higher grades (abrams and jernigan, 1984; beisler and medaille, 2016). however, the common ‘bolt-on’ approach to study skills, where support is offered outside of timetabled classes and unconnected to module outcomes and assessments, is less effective in addressing student anxieties and increasing attainment (wingate, 2006). students who are in the most need of study skills support, such as those with low confidence and low skills in academic reading and writing, are the least likely to seek out such help (dodgson and bolam, 2002). this may be for several reasons: students may see having to seek help as a threat to their self-esteem (karabenick and knapp, 1991), may be unaware of what support is available and how to seek it out, or may simply struggle to fit additional support sessions or appointments into their already busy schedules (goldingay et al., 2014). where students do seek help, they are more likely to do so from ‘unthreatening’ sources such as their friends and family, and tend to do so towards the end of their assignment-writing process, despite recognising that the research and information-gathering stages at the start of an assignment presented the most challenges (beisler and medaille, 2016). another factor impacting the take-up of support services at universities is the increase in commuter students, i.e. those who live locally to the university and commute in, rather than living in university accommodation. the demographics and working patterns of university students have changed over the last ten years. according to thomas and jones (2017) there is an increasing trend for students to live at home and travel. in 2014/15, 55.8% of students in english universities travelled to learn (donnelly and gamsu, 2018). students who commute into university, or who are juggling studying with work, family or caring responsibilities, are less likely to engage with support services outside of timetabled classes (thomas and jones, 2017). this literature shows the importance of targeted and structured study skills support for students. there is little published research on collaborative efforts between the library and other support departments. the current study aims to fill this gap by exploring how students view study skills and support services as part of their overall experience of studying and university life. woods, dockery and sharman using ux research techniques to explore how computing undergraduates understand and use library and student guidance services journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 5 methodology ux techniques library staff at the university had previously used ux techniques in related research with international students, also identified as low library users (jensen et al., 2019). the objectives for this research were similar enough that it was thought the same ux methods would be suitable. the techniques, the first two adapted from asher and miller (2011), were: 1. retrospective process interviews 2. cognitive mapping 3. card-sorting. these ux techniques are what asher and miller (2011) term as applied ethnographic research methods, which allow ‘… the researcher to tell a group’s story from the point of view of participants by deeply examining the context in which activities occur’. we used multiple methods to give us a more complete picture as to how students are using support services. retrospective process interviews students were asked to sequentially note down the different stages they go through to complete a project or assignment, from first receiving the brief, up to submitting the completed assignment. they explained their drawings to the interviewer who asked relevant questions or invited them to elaborate on specific points. this method is participant-led, meaning the student directs the conversation. it enabled the researchers to explore how students tackled their assignments, how and from whom they sought help if required, and any hindrances that impeded their study. cognitive mapping cognitive mapping was used to find out where students go to learn or study. students were given an a3 sheet of paper and instructed to draw a map of their preferred study spaces, for six minutes. they were asked to change the colour of their pen every two woods, dockery and sharman using ux research techniques to explore how computing undergraduates understand and use library and student guidance services journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 6 minutes, in a set order. this enabled the researcher to identify which parts of the drawing were completed first, as this is likely to indicate which spaces the participants considered most important. the researcher then asked open-ended questions, prompted by the drawings. as with the retrospective process interview, this method is participant-led. it enabled the researchers to explore where and how the students preferred to study, and identify any barriers to using university-provided spaces such as the library. card-sorting students were given a set of cards with the names of a mixture of free, web–based sources, and scholarly sources printed on them (see table 1). the students were asked to sort these into three piles: resources they used frequently, those they sometimes used and those they never used. the researcher then asked the student to talk through why they had placed certain cards in certain piles. table 1. resources from card-sorting exercise. general library resources subject-specific resources free web-based resources summon (the library catalogue and discovery tool) lynda.com google books digital tutors google scholar e-books eat3d youtube journals 3d motive wikipedia mintel reports gdc vault (gdc: games developers conference) lecture notes total training woods, dockery and sharman using ux research techniques to explore how computing undergraduates understand and use library and student guidance services journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 7 lecture capture ieee xplore (ieee: institute of electrical and electronics engineers) acm digital library (acm: association for computing machinery) recruitment of volunteers participants were recruited via sce lecturers who asked for volunteers in class, and passed their details on to the researchers. each student was offered a £10 voucher as an incentive. three students from each year of undergraduate study were recruited (years 1, 2 and 4: the courses include a placement year, so year 3 students are not on campus). this allowed the researchers to compare the experiences of students as they transitioned through their study. their responses have been anonymised: throughout this paper they will be referred to by numerical codes. volunteers were recruited from courses in computing and information systems, computing in business, computer games programming, and information and communication. ethical clearance for the research was granted by the school. each student at the beginning of the research was told the reasons for conducting the research, informed that they could withdraw from the research, and told how their information would be recorded, stored and analysed. all interviews were recorded with the consent of the student. drawings and notes made by the students were retained and photographs were taken of the card-sorting results. when discussing the findings of this research, it is important to bear in mind that these are drawn from a very small pool of subjects. we cannot state that these issues would be common to all students on these courses, based on a sample group of nine, self-selected volunteers. woods, dockery and sharman using ux research techniques to explore how computing undergraduates understand and use library and student guidance services journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 8 it was noticeable in the interviews that all the students were aiming for (and often achieving) high grades. it is possible that motivated and high-achieving students were more likely to volunteer for this research project, and therefore they may not have been representative of the full range of students enrolled on computing courses. after interviewing the nine students and beginning analysis of their interviews, it was decided to conduct follow-up interviews with four members of teaching staff from the same courses. this was to gain the academics’ perspective on some of the themes raised in the student interviews, and to clarify academic expectations of students. the academic staff were also asked to conduct the card sorting exercises: once to identify the sources they used for their own research, and then to identify what they expected students to use. responses from academic staff have been anonymised, and will be referred to by letters a, b, c and d. findings academic skills most students reported struggling with academic skills, especially independent study and academic reading and writing. they found the standards higher than they had experienced in further education (fe), with more emphasis on self-directed study: …it is a lot more independent. like, you do everything yourself… they make you think a lot more than what they did at 6th form…i’m still kind of adjusting. but i’m getting used to it. (student 5, yr1) the lack of regular structure to the academic day vexed some students who struggled to adapt to gaps in their timetable. some comments indicated understanding that “gaps” in timetables were in fact intended for independent learning, rather than being free time: it’s one thing that is quite irritating for me now, for example, my mondays, i’ve got a lecture at 10-11, then a 2 hour gap, then a lecture then another woods, dockery and sharman using ux research techniques to explore how computing undergraduates understand and use library and student guidance services journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 9 2 hour gap. so by the time it would take me to walk home, i’d need to be back to uni again…but i find ways of using up that time and studying. (student 4, yr4) staff noticed differences in students’ abilities and approaches to academic work based on what kind of prior educational experience they had: students who have attended …colleges with a programme that is a lot closer to a university’s programme, they are very well prepared, in terms of know how to use sometimes google scholar, know how to do referencing…so that gives them a good starting point but that’s very rare at least at this university in our department. (staff d) some students found some of the course content was already familiar from their time in fe, but the style of assignments was more academic than they had experienced previously. some final year students struggled with structuring essays as they had only had to write technical reports in their first and second years: but an essay is different…and i was like, i actually don’t know what to do…i mean i got there, i didn’t get the best grade. (student 3, yr4) the research showed how the students’ study practices had changed as they progressed through university, as they developed an appreciation of the importance of research and factored it into their assignment preparation. they also used more academic sources rather than relying on google: in 1st year, i’m not gonna lie, it was more google... and now it’s more academic, like i have to look for journals, books, all that kind of stuff… now i start researching way before i even started it in first year. (student 3, yr4) it is clear from the comments that students’ academic practices improve as they develop confidence and experience throughout their university career. there is a need for woods, dockery and sharman using ux research techniques to explore how computing undergraduates understand and use library and student guidance services journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 10 structured support throughout this time: first year students felt lost and confused by academic requirements, while final year students had developed their own coping techniques through trial and error. it is worth remembering that the final year students interviewed for this study were high achievers. it is possible that less capable and motivated students may not have developed successful academic strategies and skills without adequate support. support services students were either unaware of support services (including student guidance and the library) or reluctant to use them. most preferred to ask their friends for advice, either faceto-face or online: when working in a group, done most of the work in the classroom, anything we’ve needed to do outside we’ve got a group on facebook so we’ll just talk about it. (student 2, yr1) some indicated they had struggled alone rather than ask for help, even when they identified that help could have been useful: if i have been feeling stressed, i’ve just really put it upon myself to say i can do it. like i didn’t want to ask for an extension, so i just made myself do the work to not need one. (student 4, yr4) the student guidance service was underused and its purpose frequently misunderstood. it was often confused with the student support office, which fulfils a purely administrative role. students were frequently unaware of what student guidance could do for them and wished they had used them when they found out. those students who had used the service were positive about the help they had received: woods, dockery and sharman using ux research techniques to explore how computing undergraduates understand and use library and student guidance services journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 11 [after being offered support with a managed work plan by the student guidance adviser] i never knew that, thank you sir. i wish i would have come to see you sooner. (student 8, yr1) the library was similarly underused. several students opted to access materials electronically as opposed to visiting the library itself and therefore were unlikely to request help from librarians. this was a common theme throughout the year groups. notably final year students were more likely to visit the library, access physical resources, and seek help from library staff. some students felt it would have been beneficial to have had more library input in their degree. they wanted the librarians to come into classes on a regular basis: so i think what probably might have been more beneficial is if the library kept coming to us, maybe throughout first year, throughout second year, you know constant reminders like you are here, we can help you, sort of thing. (student 1, yr4) one student expressed disappointment that they had not had library help sessions on his second year module, especially as he was unsure about the use of secondary sources. he felt it might have helped all of the students: [interviewer: we used to go into the session to help the students]. did you do that this year? it could have helped. you could have saved everyone. (student 9, yr2) the fact that students were unaware of the support available to them through the student guidance and the library, despite both services being prominently featured in first year inductions, indicates that support services need to be a continual presence. regular visits from librarians and student guidance throughout first and second year timetables would be beneficial. woods, dockery and sharman using ux research techniques to explore how computing undergraduates understand and use library and student guidance services journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 12 use of scholarly sources most students preferred to use web-based sources (such as google and youtube) and their lecture notes rather than scholarly sources. free sources such as google and youtube were heavily used by first and second year students. final year students were slightly more likely to use scholarly sources. see figure 1 and figure 2 for a breakdown of resource use by frequency and year of study. figure 1. resource use by all students. 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 total training mintel reports digital tutors acm digital library ieee xplore google scholar lynda.com wikipedia summon books ebooks journals youtube google lecture notes often used sometimes used never used woods, dockery and sharman using ux research techniques to explore how computing undergraduates understand and use library and student guidance services journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 13 figure 2. “often” used resources compared across years. web search engines (mainly google) were heavily used by all students. some comments indicated that the students were using such sources in an appropriate way either as a starting point for research, or to find non-scholarly material: google is important because when i’ve gone through an assignment and picked out key words, if i don’t know what a key word is, before i start researching it, it makes sense for me to go and see if i can get a basic definition of what it is. (student 1, yr4) however, the staff interviewed believed their students were over-reliant on google: they’re not going to read a book, they’re not even going to look at a book, it’s google and whatever’s on the top first page of google is what they’ll look at. (staff c) this could indicate that either a) the staff overestimate how much their students use web search, or b) the students downplayed their use of google. this requires further research. 0 1 2 3 ist years 2nd years final years woods, dockery and sharman using ux research techniques to explore how computing undergraduates understand and use library and student guidance services journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 14 youtube was used by all students, mainly for programming and coding tutorials. the staff indicated that they saw students using youtube frequently, although one expressed concern that they were missing out on better quality resources available elsewhere: i would say youtube must be 90% of their usage i think… in fact so many of them will come and say ‘i couldn’t find a tutorial on youtube’. have you looked anywhere else? (staff a) most students were aware of video training database lynda.com, but rarely used it despite recommendations from lecturers. youtube was seen as more ‘accessible’, possibly referring to the style and language used, but could also indicate that the requirement to log in to subscription sources such as lynda.com is a barrier to use. students at all levels reported using some scholarly sources, but to differing levels. all three final year students used academic journals. one commented that they had increased their use of journals since their first year, having realised that their work required more academic sources: in 1st year, i’m not gonna lie, it was more google …i think now i look more journals and books because it’s more academic isn’t it. (student 3, yr4) only two of the first years said that they had used journal articles, and this was specifically because they had been required to by a lecturer. the implication was that they probably would not have used them otherwise. where library sources were used, all students preferred those that were available online. some students mentioned preferring e-books over print books because of the convenience of accessing them from home. this was particularly important for students who commuted into the university or were fitting studying around other commitments. free online resources are preferred, most likely because students are already familiar with them and see them as easier to use. this could be related to academic confidence: a free web page is likely to be written in simpler language and be easier to understand than a woods, dockery and sharman using ux research techniques to explore how computing undergraduates understand and use library and student guidance services journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 15 scholarly journal article. it could also be that the requirement to log in to library databases is seen as a barrier to use. work/life balance balancing studying with work, commuting, or family life was a consistent theme. it is possible that a lack of time is a barrier to accessing optional (i.e. non-timetabled) support services. student 8 explicitly stated that the reason they did not access library support was because they did not have time to. external commitments undoubtedly have an impact on independent study. for example, student 2 has no weekend commitments and is therefore able to stay in the library for long hours. by contrast, student 1 commutes into university during the week and then works at the weekend: i’m restricted because i commute in, my last direct train is 18.45 so i have to be done by that time else i won’t get home. (student 1, yr4) three of the students, two of whom were mature students with children, noted that they had to study mostly at home rather than in the library due to the restrictions on their available time: mainly i study at home because basically i’m working and the family. as soon as i finish a session i go to pick up the kids from the school, take them home and have the tea. (student 8, yr1) two participants spoke about how their employment affected their study patterns: i work weekends. i’m gonna quit my job soon to focus on work [studying], but i work 8 hours a day saturday and sunday, so there’s no chance for me to do any work. (student 1, yr4) woods, dockery and sharman using ux research techniques to explore how computing undergraduates understand and use library and student guidance services journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 16 two mature students mentioned how they balance their studying with caring for their children. one was broadly positive about the support they had received from the university, although the other had found difficulty with getting their timetable rearranged to accommodate their caring responsibilities: even getting here for nine thirty today was difficult with the dropping my child at school for ten to nine and then getting through the rush hour here. (student 8, yr1) two students spoke about how their commuting to university dictated how and where they would work. another student said they are more productive when working in the morning, but are unable to take advantage of this due to their long bus journey. the university has a high proportion of both mature students and commuter students (and many who are both). it is therefore important to consider how external commitments such as work, family and commuting time impact on the student experience. these interviews show evidence that mature and commuter students, and those who work while studying, experience barriers to accessing support services. this could be partly because support services are largely structured on the assumption that students will be in university during the working day. flexible, out-of-hours and remote support services could all improve access for students who may not be able to stay in university outside of timetabled hours. recommendations the research highlighted several areas for student guidance and library services to consider for enhancing the student experience. these fall under four overarching recommendations: 1. regular visits from the library and student guidance 2. support for peer mentoring 3. promotion of academic sources woods, dockery and sharman using ux research techniques to explore how computing undergraduates understand and use library and student guidance services journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 17 4. consideration of commuter and mature students when timetabling regular visits from the library and student guidance numerous comments about not being aware of the services available from the library and student guidance indicate a need for a continual presence of support staff, beyond the initial presentations to first year students in the first week of term. in addition, many comments regarding the challenges of literature-based written assignments suggest that additional support would be welcome. regular visits and updates from both the library and student guidance throughout students’ academic careers could help to address points highlighted in the interviews. these, at a minimum, should include: a) regular and timely communication to all year groups of the services offered by student guidance and the library. b) development of a suite of workshops on independent learning, academic writing, and approaches to study. c) hold library drop-in advice sessions in the sce buildings, to encourage students who may not have the time to walk across campus between classes to seek help or access optional workshops held in the library. d) offer research skills classes for second year students, who reported forgetting information given to them in their first year about the library and student guidance. at present the majority of research skills classes delivered by the librarians and student guidance are timetabled for first years and final years only. support for peer mentoring by far the most frequent support accessed by students of all year groups was from their friends and peers. most were unlikely to access ‘official’ channels of support, partly due to lack of awareness of support services. given that most second and final year students indicated that their own academic habits had improved vastly since their first year, this indicates an opportunity for peer mentoring. woods, dockery and sharman using ux research techniques to explore how computing undergraduates understand and use library and student guidance services journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 18 for example, final year students could provide advice to first years about things they wish they had known in their first year. in a more formal way, first year students could be partnered with volunteers from the second or final year of the course. the more experienced students could provide advice on developing their academic skills, and signpost to other support services as needed. promotion of academic sources students were more likely to make use of library resources if their lecturers specifically required them to, or in later years of the course when they had developed a greater understanding of the information landscape of their field of study. academic staff indicated that they did recommend library resources to their students, but observed that students frequently preferred to use ‘easier’ resources, for example choosing youtube over lynda.com. reading lists were considered helpful by first years in particular, but could also be useful for later year students who were uncertain where to begin on a topic. actively using a reading list (for example, referring to it in teaching and in assignment marking rubrics) sets the expectation that students should be engaging with academic materials. consider commuter and mature students when timetabling given that approximately half of the university’s student population commutes to study (university of huddersfield, 2016), it is essential that the needs of commuter students are taken into account. similarly, the number of comments regarding balancing studying with family, caring responsibilities, or employment, also indicate areas in which students may require further support. as far as possible, the school should try to condense timetables to help students who commute or have busy family or working lives. flexible timetabling has been recommended by the sutton trust as a way of supporting commuter students in particular (donnelly and gamsu, 2018). woods, dockery and sharman using ux research techniques to explore how computing undergraduates understand and use library and student guidance services journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 19 the library stays open 24/7 for the majority of the academic year. this is appreciated by many students, particularly those who fit their studying around other commitments. however, 24/7 access carries the slight risk of promoting unhealthy studying habits, and contributing to stress levels. the library should continue to promote 24/7 access as a way of studying on a flexible schedule, and should consider working with disability and wellbeing to encourage healthy studying habits. conclusion this research has provided valuable insight into the studying habits of computing undergraduates, and their perceptions of support services. using participant-led ethnographic research techniques allowed us to explore their concerns in a holistic way, and provided responses that may not have surfaced in a researcher-led interview. this research project has suggested several avenues for future research. it would be useful to explore how student experiences and support needs differ according to demographic, such as international students. it has not been possible to break down the current study by demographics, due to the small sample size. a larger-scale study would enable this, but would not necessarily use ux techniques as they are better suited to smaller groups of participants. more research is needed into students’ use of web sources and scholarly sources. although the card-sorting exercise was useful to get an impression of the types of information sources students use, self-reporting may not give an accurate picture. students may overor under-estimate their use of certain sources, either from difficulty recalling their past research accurately, or reluctance to admit poor academic practice. live-recording ethnographic methods such as research diaries, self-narration, or observation of students’ use of library databases may help build a more accurate picture. the issue of commuter students is worthy of further attention. further exploration could identify specific barriers to accessing support services experienced by commuter students, such as requiring support out-of-hours. woods, dockery and sharman using ux research techniques to explore how computing undergraduates understand and use library and student guidance services journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 20 references abrams, h. g. and jernigan, l. p. (1984) 'academic support services and the success of high-risk college students', american educational research journal, 21, pp. 261274. asher, a. d. and miller, s. (2011) so you want to do anthropology in your library? or a practical guide to ethnographic research in academic libraries. available at: http://www.erialproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/toolkit-3.22.11.pdf (accessed: 20 september 2019). beisler, m. and medaille, a. (2016) 'how do students get help with research assignments? using drawings to understand students' help seeking behavior', the journal of academic librarianship, 42, pp. 390-400. collins, e. and stone, g. (2014) 'understanding patterns of library use among undergraduate students from different disciplines', evidence based library and information practice, 9, pp. 51-67. crosling, g., heagney, m. and thomas, l. (2009) 'improving student retention in higher education: improving teaching and learning', australian universities review, 51, pp. 9-18. dodgson, r. and bolam, h. (2002) student retention, support and widening participation in the north east of england. available at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/252068942 . (accessed: 20 september 2019). donnelly, m. and gamsu, s. (2018), home and away: social, ethnic and spatial inequalities in student mobility. available at; https://www.suttontrust.com/wpcontent/uploads/2018/02/home_and_away_final.pdf (accessed: 20 september 2019). woods, dockery and sharman using ux research techniques to explore how computing undergraduates understand and use library and student guidance services journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 21 goldingay, s., hitch, d., ryan, j., farrugia, d., hosken, n., lamaro, g., nihill, c. and macfarlane, s. (2014), ' "the university didn't actually tell us this is what you have to do": social inclusion through embedding of academic skills in first year professional courses', the international journal of the first year in higher education, 5, pp. 4353. jensen, k., ramsden, b., haigh, j. and sharman, a. (2019), 'using ethnographic methods to explore how international business students approach their academic assignments and their experiences of the spaces they use for studying', evidence based library and information practice, 14, pp. 92-107. jiao, q. g., onwuegbuzie, a. j. and lichtenstein, a. a. (1996), 'library anxiety: characteristics of ‘at-risk’ college students', library & information science research, 18, pp. 151-163. jones, r. (2008), student retention and success: a synthesis of research. higher education academy. available at: https://www.advance-he.ac.uk/knowledgehub/student-retention-and-success-synthesis-research (accessed: 20 september 2019). karabenick, s. a. and knapp, j. r. (1991), 'relationship of academic help seeking to the use of learning strategies and other instrumental achievement behavior in college students', journal of educational psychology, 83, pp. 221-230. mcpherson, m. a. (2015), 'library anxiety among university students: a survey' ifla journal, 41, pp. 317-325. mezick, e. m. (2015), 'relationship of library assessment to student retention', the journal of academic librarianship, 41, pp. 31-36. priestner, a. and borg, m. (2016), 'uncovering complexity and detail: the ux proposition', in priestner, a. and borg, m. (eds.) user experience in libraries: applying ethnography and human-centred design. abingdon: routledge, pp. 1-8. woods, dockery and sharman using ux research techniques to explore how computing undergraduates understand and use library and student guidance services journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 22 ramsden, b. (2016), 'ethnographic methods in academic libraries: a review', new review of academic librarianship, 22, pp. 355-369. soria, k. m., fransen, j. and nackerud, s. (2013) 'library use and undergraduate student outcomes: new evidence for students’ retention and academic success', portal: libraries and the academy, 13, pp. 147-164. stone, g. and ramsden, b. (2013), 'library impact data project: looking for the link between library usage and student attainment', college & research libraries, 74, pp. 546-559. thomas, l. and jones, r. (2017), 'student engagement in the context of commuter students'. the student engagement partnership. available at: https://www.lizthomasassociates.co.uk/projects/2018/commuter%20student%20en gagement.pdf (accessed: 20 september 2019). university of huddersfield (2016), university of huddersfield tef provider submission. london: office for students. available at: https://apps.officeforstudents.org.uk/tefoutcomes/docs/submissions/submission_1 0007148.pdf (accessed: 20 september 2019). wernersbach, b. m., crowley, s. l., bates, s. c. and rosenthal, c. (2014), 'study skills course impact on academic self-efficacy', journal of developmental education, 37, pp. 14-33. wingate, u. (2006), doing away with 'study skills', teaching in higher education, 11, pp. 457-469. author details laura woods is subject librarian for the school of computing and engineering at the university of huddersfield. https://apps.officeforstudents.org.uk/tefoutcomes/docs/submissions/submission_10007148.pdf https://apps.officeforstudents.org.uk/tefoutcomes/docs/submissions/submission_10007148.pdf woods, dockery and sharman using ux research techniques to explore how computing undergraduates understand and use library and student guidance services journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 23 alison sharman is academic librarian at the university of huddersfield, with responsibility for the school of computing and engineering and the business school. richard dockery is student adviser in the school of computing and engineering at the university of huddersfield. using ux research techniques to explore how computing undergraduates understand and use library and student guidance services abstract introduction literature review methodology ux techniques retrospective process interviews cognitive mapping card-sorting recruitment of volunteers findings academic skills support services use of scholarly sources work/life balance recommendations regular visits from the library and student guidance support for peer mentoring promotion of academic sources consider commuter and mature students when timetabling conclusion references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 13: april 2018 development of the aldinhe recognition scheme: certifying the ‘learning developer’ title steve briggs university of bedfordshire, uk abstract over the last fifteen years, the pedagogy of learning development has become increasingly established within uk universities (hilsdon, 2018). as such, there have never been more individuals who professionally identify with the ‘learning developer’ title. selfidentification with a professional title is always going to be problematic as there will be significant variation in background, experience, qualifications and values amongst practitioners. this will result in confusion and ambiguity around the meaning of a title (such as learning developer), which in turn can undermine practitioners’ professional status and career development opportunities. it is therefore unsurprising that over the last five years there has been a growing call amongst the learning development community to introduce greater consistency around how the learning developer title is used (webster, 2015; webster, 2017; johnson, 2018). the association for learning development in higher education (aldinhe) has responded to this call to action by developing a recognition scheme for learning developers. this has two levels certified practitioner (cep) and certified leading practitioner (celp). unlike other educational development recognition schemes for example, higher education academy (hea) fellowships or staff and educational development association (seda) fellowships) the cep/celp scheme involves evidencing core values associated with practicing learning development. as such, it provides the first bespoke recognition opportunity for the learning development community. this article outlines how the aldinhe recognition scheme was conceived, piloted and launched at the 2018 learning development conference. keywords: recognition scheme; learning development; values; professional development. briggs development of the aldinhe recognition scheme: certifying the ‘learning developer’ title journal of learning development in higher education, issue 13: april 2018 2 a time for recognition although learning development as a field of practice has matured in the uk since the beginning of the century (hilsdon, 2018), when one reviews the further/higher education landscape there is significant variation in how different institutions operationalise and deliver this provision (pritchard, 2018). for example, learning development could be based within a faculty/school or aligned to a centralised service such as the library, careers, teaching and learning or student support. individuals working in a learning development capacity are employed on different contracts (academic/academic-related/professional services) and are diverse in terms of educational background, professional experience and qualifications. furthermore, learning development practitioners have different job titles throughout the sector such as tutor, trainer, lecturer, advisor or coach. as such, there are growing numbers of higher education professionals who describe themselves as being a ‘learning developer’. is this a good thing? yes, obviously in the sense that a learning development pedagogy is becoming increasingly prominent. however, encouraging the widespread use of the title ‘learning developer’ is not necessarily in the interest of individuals who are invested in a learning developer career path. established learning development practitioners might question if it is appropriate that individuals non-engaged, peripheral to or very new to the learning development community can, should they wish, call themselves a ‘learning developer’? does this not de-skill the practice of learning development and fundamentally undervalue the specialist expertise that can only be acquired through working as a learning developer over a period of time? in the absence of a defined learning developer career pathway, it is unsurprising that there is inconsistency in how the ‘learning developer’ title is used. a long running theme at the aldinhe learning development conference has been the notion of professional status and identify (see for example, webster, 2015; webster, 2017; johnson, 2018). similarly the professional status of learning developers has been a recurrent theme on the learning development in higher education network (ldhen) jisc list for over ten years (see, for example, ridley, 2006). typically, community responses to ‘calls to action’ for greater recognition have been overwhelmingly positive; suggesting the aforementioned issues are a real concern for many within the learning development community. briggs development of the aldinhe recognition scheme: certifying the ‘learning developer’ title journal of learning development in higher education, issue 13: april 2018 3 sector recognition when one compares learning development with other teaching and learning roles in the higher education sector a very different picture emerges in terms of professional standing and title use. elsewhere career pathways are mapped and it is commonplace for individuals to obtain a dedicated qualification and/or demonstrate good standing before using professional titles. for example:  individuals involved in teaching and learning applying for a higher education academy fellowship (hea, no date).  librarians undertaking accredited librarianship qualifications: charted institute of library and information professional (cilip, no date a) and/or seeking professional registration (cilip, no date b).  education developers applying for a staff and educational development association fellowship (seda, 2018).  learning technologists applying to become a certified member of the association for learning technology (alt, 2018). given the diversity of learning development many practitioners will already hold qualifications/recognitions related to teaching and learning and one might argue that such indicators are sufficient to demonstrate learning development expertise. however, this stance is contrary to shahabudin and coonan (2015) who cited fundamental ‘metaprofessional’ and cultural differences between librarians and learning developers suggesting that (whilst relevant) a librarianship qualification would not universally prepare individuals to work as a learning developer. as such, whilst proxy teaching and learning qualifications/recognition/training would undoubtedly enhance a practitioner’s capacity to adopt a learning development pedagogy, it does not automatically make an individual a ‘learning developer’. identifying principles at the 2016 summer residential, the aldinhe steering group discussed the growing community desire for recognition within the learning development community and agreed to develop a recognition scheme for learning developers. it was seen as paramount that briggs development of the aldinhe recognition scheme: certifying the ‘learning developer’ title journal of learning development in higher education, issue 13: april 2018 4 our scheme should involve engagement with the learning development community to inform appropriate expectations and standards. at the national aldinhe 2017 learning development conference, the aldinhe co-chairs delivered a community keynote exploring the future of learning development (buckley and briggs, 2017). this session was attended by circa 120 delegates and included a group exercise exploring the characteristics that made an individual a ‘learning developer’. it quickly became apparent that within the learning development community there was no consensus in terms of pre-requisites required to work as a learning developer. essential requirements (such as having a degree or a teaching qualification) were proposed. however, attendees argued against such a formulaic approach and cited colleagues who worked effectively in a learning development context without such pre-requisites. in contrast, consensus emerged in terms of how learning developers work, with a focus on: student centred delivery; partnership working and collaboration; evidence-based practice; critical self-reflection and a commitment to personal development. it was therefore concluded that a set of core learning development values shared by learning developers could form the basis for a recognition scheme. such a scheme would be inclusive of individuals from academic, academic-related and professional backgrounds (representing the diversity of our community) but be exclusive in the sense that successful applicants would all demonstrate and promote the same core values in their practice. using session feedback, the aldinhe steering group agreed five core values (see briggs, 2018a): aldinhe values 1. working alongside students to make sense of and get the most out of higher education (he) learning. 2. making he inclusive through emancipatory practice, partnership working and collaboration. 3. adopting and sharing effective learning development (ld) practice with the he community. 4. commitment to scholarly approach and research related to ld. 5. critical self-reflection, on-going learning and a commitment to professional development. briggs development of the aldinhe recognition scheme: certifying the ‘learning developer’ title journal of learning development in higher education, issue 13: april 2018 5 pilot 1 the aldinhe professional development working group (pdwg) identified potential ways to demonstrate the aldinhe values and made recommendations to the aldinhe steering group (who agreed application requirements). the first iteration of the scheme was piloted in spring 2017 and included the following tasks to demonstrate commitment to the aldinhe values: experience career history including qualifications and work experience. evidence dimensions in aldinhe ldmaps resource (2015). detail two personal development goals. internal ld engagement a 750-word case study detailing a specific project / initiative that demonstrates a contribution to effective ld practice. external ld engagement two examples of engaging with the wider ld community. testimonials two supporting statements from further education (fe) or higher education (he) education practitioners. seven experienced learning development practitioners piloted the scheme. each application was reviewed by two members of the aldinhe steering group. feedback from both applicants and reviewers indicated that requirements encompassed too much and would be unobtainable for many practitioners. a primary concern being that it could exclude practitioners who were not be in a position to actively engage with the wider community but nonetheless routinely championed learning development values within their institution. consequently, this version of the scheme was judged unfit for purpose. instead, it was agreed that the scheme would be recast to include two distinct levels of value engagement: 1) institutional commitment 2) community commitment briggs development of the aldinhe recognition scheme: certifying the ‘learning developer’ title journal of learning development in higher education, issue 13: april 2018 6 refocusing the scheme during summer 2017 the scheme was refocused around the two recognition levels. again the aldinhe professional development working group assumed project oversight. the following outlines how each dimension was operationalised: certified practitioner (cep) – institutional commitment roles and responsibilities career history including qualifications and work experience. for each value a statement citing relevant ld work experience. ld case study a 750-word case study detailing a specific project / initiative that demonstrates a contribution to effective ld practice. supporting statements details of two fe or he education practitioners who support your application. certified leading practitioner (celp) – community commitment roles and responsibilities career history including qualifications and work experience. a 1000-word statement reflecting on how learning development work experience demonstrates commitment to values. community engagement two examples of work that demonstrates a sustained commitment to disseminating best practice to the ld community. testimonials two supporting statements from fe or he education practitioners. pilot 2 the cep/celp scheme was piloted in autumn 2017. five experienced learning development practitioners piloted the celp version and five practitioners piloted the cep version. again, all applications were double-reviewed by members of the aldinhe steering group who made outcome recommendations. briggs development of the aldinhe recognition scheme: certifying the ‘learning developer’ title journal of learning development in higher education, issue 13: april 2018 7 applicant feedback indicated that cep/celp scheme format worked well. specifically, feedback about the design of application forms and applicant guides indicated an improvement on pilot 1 in that applicants now clearly understood what was required for each level. applicants reported that the application felt achievable, personally relevant and prompted critical reflection on their learning development practice. notably a number of applicants stated that they found the application to have greater personal relevance than a hea fellowship application. all reviewers were able to make recommendations about applicants’ learning developer status based on provided evidence. further, reviewers were largely consistent in terms of initial outcome recommendations. in the small number instances where reviewers disagreed a panel reviewed applications and made a final decision. the only notable issue around reviewing was some variation around how much feedback was provided by reviewers – this will be addressed in future training. launch the recognition scheme was officially launched at the 2018 aldinhe learning development conference in leicester. two workshops provided an overview of each strand (briggs, 2018a, 2018b). in total, circa 50 practitioners attended the sessions. attendees were asked to provide feedback on the scheme and the extent to which it represented their work as learning developers. gratifyingly, responses strongly endorsed the structure of the cep/celp format and the suitability of required evidence. individuals who had participated in pilot 2 were awarded cep/celp status at the conference (it is planned that this will become an annual highlight of the conference). following the conference an email was sent to the learning development community via ldhen promoting the scheme. at the time of writing there are six weeks left of the cep/celp application window for 2018, based on initial expressions of interest i anticipate that there will be at least 25 applications. there is a long way to go in terms of the aldinhe recognition scheme reaching a status comparable to more established educational support schemes run by seda (2018a) briggs development of the aldinhe recognition scheme: certifying the ‘learning developer’ title journal of learning development in higher education, issue 13: april 2018 8 (current holders circa 35 senior fellows, 80 fellows and 20 associate fellows) or alt (2018a) (circa 200). however, given the growth of the learning development community, i believe that, longer-term, aldinhe should aspire for comparable numbers of cep/celp recognitions. future the introduction of cep and celp is an exciting milestone for learning developers and recognises the significant contribution that they make. i hope that as the scheme becomes more established we will start to see greater consistency into how the ‘learning developer’ title is used within the uk higher education sector. given the growth in the field of learning development, i suspect it is a matter of time until other learning developer career pathways start to emerge (potentially via a teaching qualification/undergraduate course/postgraduate course/higher apprenticeship). i would welcome such developments but urge caution. it would be a retrograde step to introduce formal career pathways into learning development that do not adhere to consistent standards and principles. as such, i believe that professional bodies, such as aldinhe, should play an important role in the design, validation and re-validation of learning developer training routes. if you are interested in applying to become a cep or celp details are available on the aldinhe website: http://www.aldinhe.ac.uk references aldinhe (2015) association for learning development in higher education ‘ldmaps resource’ https://aldinheprofdev.files.wordpress.com/2010/10/ld-maps-aug-2015.pdf alt (2018) association for learning technology certified membership (cmalt). available at: https://www.alt.ac.uk/certified-membership (accessed: 17 april 2018). alt (2018a) association for learning technology (2018) cmalt holders list. available at: https://www.alt.ac.uk/certified-membership/cmalt-holders (accessed: 17 april 2018). http://www.aldinhe.ac.uk/ https://aldinheprofdev.files.wordpress.com/2010/10/ld-maps-aug-2015.pdf https://www.alt.ac.uk/certified-membership https://www.alt.ac.uk/certified-membership/cmalt-holders briggs development of the aldinhe recognition scheme: certifying the ‘learning developer’ title journal of learning development in higher education, issue 13: april 2018 9 briggs, s. (2018a) ‘an introduction to the aldinhe certified practitioner (cep) recognition scheme’, aldinhe 2018: the learning development conference, university of leicester, england, 26-28 march. briggs, s. (2018b) ‘an introduction to the aldinhe certified leading practitioner (celp) recognition scheme’, aldinhe 2018: the learning development conference, university of leicester, england, 26-28 march. buckley, c. and briggs, s. (2017) ‘community keynote: defining the future of learning development’, aldinhe 2017: the learning development conference, university of hull, england, 10-12 april. abstract available at: http://www.aldinhe.ac.uk/resources/files/hull17/abstracts/community-keynote.pdf (accessed: 17 april 2018). chartered institute of library and information professionals (no date, a) getting qualified. available at: https://archive.cilip.org.uk/getting-qualified (accessed: 17 april 2018). chartered institute of library and information professionals (no date, b) professional registration. available at: https://archive.cilip.org.uk/cilip/professional-registration (accessed: 17 april 2018). hea (no date) higher education academy fellowship: supporting individual professional development. available at: https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/individuals/fellowship#section-3 (accessed: 17 april 2018). hilsdon, j. (2018) ‘learning development: pedagogy, principles and progress’, aldinhe 2018: the learning development conference, university of leicester, england, 2628 march. abstract available at: http://www.aldinhe.ac.uk/events/leicester18.html (accessed: 17 april 2018). johnson, i. (2018) ‘learning development and professionalism: driving ourselves forward’, aldinhe 2018: the learning development conference, university of leicester, http://www.aldinhe.ac.uk/resources/files/hull17/abstracts/community-keynote.pdf https://archive.cilip.org.uk/getting-qualified https://archive.cilip.org.uk/cilip/professional-registration https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/individuals/fellowship#section-3 http://www.aldinhe.ac.uk/events/leicester18.html briggs development of the aldinhe recognition scheme: certifying the ‘learning developer’ title journal of learning development in higher education, issue 13: april 2018 10 england, 26-28 march. abstract available at: http://aldinhe.ac.uk/resources/files/leicester18/abstracts/leic18-abstract-6-2.pdf (accessed: 17 april 2018). pritchard, c. (2018) ‘locating learning development in higher education: can you ever have enough learning developers?’ aldinhe 2018: the learning development conference, university of leicester, england, 26-28 march. abstract available at: http://aldinhe.ac.uk/resources/files/leicester18/abstracts/leic18-abstract-4-5b.pdf (accessed: 17 april 2018). ridley, p. (2006) ‘qualifications/cpd for learning development work’, ldhen jiscmail list, 30 march [online]. available at: http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/ldhen. seda (2018) staff and educational development association seda fellowships scheme. available at: https://www.seda.ac.uk/fellowships (accessed: 17 april 2018). seda (2018a) staff and educational development association seda fellowship holders available at: https://www.seda.ac.uk/fellowship-holders (accessed: 17 april 2018). shahabudin, k. and coonan, e. (2015) ‘dilemmas of difference in an age of convergence: co-working for librarians and learning developers’, aldinhe 2015: the learning development conference, southampton solent university, england, 30 march – 1 april. abstract available at: http://www.aldinhe.ac.uk/resources/files/solent15/abstracts/1-1.pdf (accessed: 17 april 2018). webster, h. (2015) ‘“trust me, i’m a professional” – what do learning developers profess?’ aldinhe 2015: the learning development conference, southampton solent university, england, 30 march – 1 april. abstract available at: http://www.aldinhe.ac.uk/resources/files/solent15/abstracts/4-1.pdf (accessed: 17 april 2018). webster, h. (2017) ‘developing the developers: professional training for learning development’, aldinhe 2017: the learning development conference, university http://aldinhe.ac.uk/resources/files/leicester18/abstracts/leic18-abstract-6-2.pdf http://aldinhe.ac.uk/resources/files/leicester18/abstracts/leic18-abstract-4-5b.pdf http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/ldhen https://www.seda.ac.uk/fellowships https://www.seda.ac.uk/fellowship-holders http://www.aldinhe.ac.uk/resources/files/solent15/abstracts/1-1.pdf http://www.aldinhe.ac.uk/resources/files/solent15/abstracts/4-1.pdf briggs development of the aldinhe recognition scheme: certifying the ‘learning developer’ title journal of learning development in higher education, issue 13: april 2018 11 of hull, england, 10-12 april. abstract available at: http://www.aldinhe.ac.uk/resources/files/hull17/abstracts/hull17-abstract5-3.pdf (accessed: 17 april 2018). author details dr steve briggs led the development of the aldinhe cep/celp recognition scheme. he is a chartered psychologist, sfhea and has worked in the learning development field for over 12 years. steve is currently head of professional and academic development at the university of bedfordshire, co-chair of aldinhe and co-chair of the aldinhe professional development working group. http://www.aldinhe.ac.uk/resources/files/hull17/abstracts/hull17-abstract5-3.pdf development of the aldinhe recognition scheme: certifying the ‘learning developer’ title abstract a time for recognition identifying principles pilot 1 refocusing the scheme pilot 2 launch future references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 16: december 2019 ________________________________________________________________________ student voices in academic writing: psychliverpool a community for meaning making alex forsythe university of wolverhampton, uk emir demirbag university of liverpool, uk jasmine warren university of liverpool, uk abstract the practice and expectations of academic communication are changing and blogging provides a socially liberating mechanism through which to support the development of student writing and literacy. the study reported here examines the impact of an academic– student partnership in supporting the development of student discourse. anonymous feedback gathered from both the contributors and readers of the student blog, psychliverpool, was analysed using automated text analysis. the analysis identified that high levels of positive emotion were associated with psychliverpool. students valued its capacity to trigger thinking and insight, and the social and networking relationships the blog offered. psychliverpool empowered students to expand their learning networks outside their classroom and to peer-network by connecting them with like-minded students and academics. by providing students with safe opportunities to develop their skills and networks, it fulfilled their needs for affiliation and achievement, power, and reward. the particular advantage of psychliverpool was that in operating outside traditional university processes of assessment and feedback, students were more motivated to write about and engage with academic language on their own terms. keywords: peer networking; blogging; student voice; student partnership. introduction forsythe, demirbag and warren student voices in academic writing: psychliverpool a community for meaning making journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 2 good academic writing practice in higher education is established as an essential transferable skill but ensuring that students have good writing skills is often seen as problematic (lillis and turner, 2001; goodfellow, 2005; bruning and kauffman, 2015). developing good writing is a process: from the basics of writing, the development of good syntax, punctuation and spelling; progressing into competencies of argument and structure that differ according to the audience; being both reflective and disciplined to prewrite, write and reformulate; all whilst developing technical skills such as referencing, footnoting, and avoiding plagiarism. being academically literate also requires students to unpick the nuances of their specific discipline (badenhorst, 2012), and as students are gradually trained (and socialised) into the ways of researching, thinking, and using discipline-specific language, they often face difficulties in comprehension (hallett, 2010; white and lowenthal, 2011). examples include ‘the student told to write an introduction without knowing what an introduction calls for’, ‘knowing when and how to cite sources’, ‘the dark art of the scientific abstract’, unpicking instructions such as ‘be explicit and express your ideas clearly’, the avoidance of vague words, and choosing the active or passive voice. the requirements of discipline-specific language for students is rarely transparent and, as such, difficulties can impact not only on the application of the appropriate academic vocabulary, but also on the activities that stem from their academic vocabulary (lillis and turner, 2001). for example, the sourcing of relevant materials, performing evaluative judgements on those materials, then converting those resources into the required activity or assessment by writing clearly and succinctly. for students in higher education, what counts as knowledge is transmitted through relatively constant (if not, in fact, monotonous) forms of communication (french and kennedy, 2017). when universities focus on styles of writing that are anonymous and rational, it has been suggested that they inadvertently create students who become asocial seekers of the truth (hyland, 2009). students are not afforded the richness of experience that comes through the exploration of their understandings and their preferences, and, as the processes of globalisation impact on our education system, monoglossic language assumptions not only fail to serve our diverse student population but also teach graduates that there are only a few legitimate language practices. it is not surprising then that deficits in student writing skills stunt the development of student identity, can lead to feelings of inadequacy and marginalisation (kobayashi, zappaforsythe, demirbag and warren student voices in academic writing: psychliverpool a community for meaning making journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 3 hollman and duff, 2017), and inhibit the development of subject matter authority (badenhorst, 2012; badenhorst et al., 2015). many academics struggle to understand how to help student develop their academic writing (french, 2011; paré, 2011), often resorting to the recycling of the pedagogies and personal styles of those who taught and supervised them (mcalpine and amundsen, 2011; aitchison and paré, 2012; guerin, kerr and green, 2015; french and kennedy, 2017). therefore, it is hardly surprising that students are often writing-reluctant (asadifard and koosha, 2013) and disinclined to share their work with academic staff, let alone their peers (boud, cohen and sampson, 1999; hawe and dixon, 2017). despite these challenges, written and verbal discourse continues to play a central role in most academic programmes: ‘it is the way that individuals collaborate and compete with others, to create knowledge, to educate neophytes, to reveal learning and define academic allegiances’ (hyland, 2009, p.171). therefore, academics need to find new approaches to student writing (lea, 2017). considering how quickly students are required to ‘get up to speed’ with disciplinaryspecific communication, information and communications technology (ict) can support and improve the student learning experience and the development of good academic literacy (badenhorst, 2012; gordon, 2014). ict can enable writing practice at different levels and in different contexts and is therefore a natural partner of a pedagogy that is flexible, empowering the students to be in control of the when, where, and how of their learning. in this paper we examine the extent to which technology-mediated communication helps break down some of the traditional barriers to the development of academic literacy, by examining its role in supporting students to collaborate, create new knowledge, and develop the capability to make evaluative decisions about the quality of one’s own work, and the work of others (boud et al., 2018). psychliverpool; a community for meaning making a significant number of students entering university experience some degree of anxiety in relation to their studies with minor problems having the potential to rapidly impact on their learning and personal well-being (ibrahim, 2013; shackle, 2019). this perennial problem forsythe, demirbag and warren student voices in academic writing: psychliverpool a community for meaning making journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 4 was a significant driver in our seeking new ways to reach those students and to provide a community for peer support for students of all abilities, where they were free to make meaning from the academic literature in psychology, apply it to their lives, explore topics that interested them, and build writing and networking skills without the emphasis on academic assessment. that is why we created the online blog ‘psychliverpool’ and called it a community for meaning making (silverio and forsythe, 2018). psychliverpool was designed to provide a balance between the many complexities of being a student, accommodating preferences for digital communication, underdeveloped writing skills, evaluation anxiety, need for affiliation, and desire to develop the necessary skills and experience to make them work ready. given key findings and recommendations surrounding what works to support student retention and success, it was hoped that the blogging initiative would support improvements in student engagement, support students to become more engaged and effective learners, develop their identities as legitimate participants in their future academic communities and therefore improve their future career outcomes (astin, 1984; tinto, 1993; thomas, 2012). educators are now using blogs in many ways, including: as online portfolios, for student personal reflective journals, as a record of field notes, as discipline-specific spaces for knowledge sharing, as a space for student dialogue and class administration, and for creating communities of scholarly enquiry and enriching students’ learning experiences (garcia et al., 2015; carnell and fung, 2017; kochoska et al., 2017; kuo, belland and kuo, 2017). the ease of access, immediacy, informality, frequency, and conversational style associated with blogging appears to provide many advantages in supporting learning. these include the opportunity to communicate complex topics to a general audience (cox and hollyhead, 2009; brown & woolston, 2018), enrich language skills (othman et al., 2014), self-reflect (chen et al., 2005; bolton, 2014), stress manage (wang, lin and liao, 2012), enrich employability (longridge, hooley and staunton, 2016), teamwork and leadership (brown & woolston, 2018), and encourage citizenship behaviours (tremayne, 2012). blogs support students to record their progress chronologically, providing a record of achievement personally and/or professionally contextualised; as such, they promote reflective practice, deep learning, and creative thinking in students (bartlett-bragg, 2003; oravec, 2003; williams and jacobs, 2004). blogs also operate as a successful social forsythe, demirbag and warren student voices in academic writing: psychliverpool a community for meaning making journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 5 learning mechanism, developing and supporting communities of practice (guerin, carter and aitchison, 2015). they facilitate group work and increase feelings of inclusivity and interactivity (dickey, 2004; williams and jacobs, 2004) which, it has been argued, may potentially transcend the classroom (baim, 2004; halavais, 2006). blogging is arguably not bounded by psychosocial, cultural conventions (cox and hollyhead, 2009), and as such it can help bypass the power and authority relationships that come with academic writing. in the early days, the introduction of assessed blogs triggered much debate along the lines of ‘how are we going to grade this?’, particularly when teams of students can be posting on the blogging software up to 15 times per week (sample, 2010). there were those who went much further, arguing that blogging was not really breaking a mould, because it still tended to be perceived and evaluated in much the same way as the more dominant literacy practices of the academic and professional learning communities (bourdieu 1991; goodfellow, 2005) as such, blogging was perceived as doing little more than reinforcing the habitus in academic practice. more recently, a strong argument has emerged that blogging, which is not embedded in peer learning, does not itself create self-reflective communities. students are rarely motivated to give critical peer feedback when blogs are a required coursework activity, and their participation is largely centred around the activity and feedback of the academic initiating the blog (specht, 2019). to address such challenges at psychliverpool we created an academic–student partnership which was not linked to any university modular credit or evaluation. the platform provided peer support by creating meaning beyond textbooks, supporting students to explore information about significant topics. students had the freedom to explore small, nuanced areas of interest, or broader themes, issues, and debates. students were encouraged to discuss their worries, annoyances, and successes all within a supportive and safe, but public, space, and to critique each other’s work. students benefited from an academic editorial eye and peer review from fellow students, but they also had the liberty to ignore the guidance and critique that comes with a formal academic assessment. the student editors gained publishing experience by preparing the weekly posts, providing feedback to contributors and the other editors, as well as developing highly transferable skills in digital technologies, marketing, and communication. the process transformed the mostly passive style of generating a solo response to an forsythe, demirbag and warren student voices in academic writing: psychliverpool a community for meaning making journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 6 academic assignment towards the collaborative and active creation of content, its management, and its dissemination. this initiative provided an additional extra-curricular activity for students. the initiative would not be assessment driven and therefore had the potential to trigger self-directed learning that would enable students to develop a deeper understanding (dobozy, 2008; lemanski, 2011) and enhance the development of professionalism in online environments that are so often associated with distractive and destructive human activities (thornton et al., 2014; brooks, 2015; smith, 2016). the blogging experience may not only enhance academic literacy skills, but may also enhance students’ networks and social capital, and foster reciprocity and trust (vaezi, torkzadeh and chang, 2011). psychliverpool’s virtual nature could improve opportunities for students, increase awareness, and, in particular, raise the aspirations of students from diverse backgrounds who are often less likely to pursue career enhancing extra-curricular activities (clark et al., 2015). with these goals in mind, rather than operating solely inside the originating russell group department, participation in the initiative was widened to include all psychology students across the four central universities in merseyside, also including students studying internationally through online programmes. evaluation methodology to evaluate the impact of psychliverpool, over 2500 words were collected anonymously from free text feedback from users of the blog. students were asked to provide anonymous comments using two methods: (i) the survey platform qualtrics and (ii) anonymous comments directly through the psychliverpool feedback portal. they could also, if they were happy to be identified, provide comments directly to the editor. contributors (n = 40) were from the four main universities in the liverpool area (university of liverpool, liverpool john moores university, liverpool hope university, and edge hill university). informed consent was sought from the contributors to use their comments in an impact evaluation. to analyse the comments we utilised linguistic inquiry and word count (liwc), a text analysis software that was developed by researchers with interests in social, clinical, forsythe, demirbag and warren student voices in academic writing: psychliverpool a community for meaning making journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 7 health, and cognitive psychology, to analyse the language categories capturing people’s social and psychological states (tausczik and pennebaker, 2010). liwc is a thematic content analysis system originally designed to discover features of writing that related to negative life experiences (pennebaker, 1997), but is now used for a wide range of analyses including the study of academic language (pennebaker, 2011; pennebaker et al., 2015). a number of liwc categories are derived from psychological theories (e.g., inhibition words, discrepancy words). the system also captures linguistic dimensions (e.g., percentage of articles, pronouns, word categories), tapping into psychological constructs (e.g., positive and negative emotions, causal words), and personal concern categories (e.g., sex, death). the system can accommodate user-defined dimensions as well. liwc calculates the frequency ratings for different categories of words across a wide array of texts (pennebaker et al., 2015) and then provides an analysis of sentiment through the text classification of a sample of interest. liwc achieves this by ‘reading’ a section of given text, counting the percentage of words that reflect different emotions, thinking styles, social concerns, and even parts of speech, and providing data reflecting psychologically meaningful categories. liwc is then able to convert the themes to data for future analysis. it does this sequentially enabling the researcher to access these themes as they emerge and, if required, store the results in a tab delimited format for future analysis in programmes such as spss or excel. this process enables the researcher to easily identify the categories which are most reflected by the language under examination. prominent themes will be reflected by a larger number of words relating to the relevant categories. impact the most prominent sentiment categories resulting from liwc analysis were ‘drives’, particularly the networking and social aspects of the community: for example, the need for achievement, power and reward, and cognitive processes around ideas, thinking and insight. some examples of statements falling into these categories are detailed below: forsythe, demirbag and warren student voices in academic writing: psychliverpool a community for meaning making journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 8 social aspects and relationships here students describe their experiences of blogging in enhancing their networks and in facilitating a sense of community: “i have had the opportunity to showcase my work which has led to networking with academics outside of my university.” they describe an enhanced sense of belonging and the support of others: “this blog provides something unique; it helps to connect students across universities, to help them feel like part of a wider research community, something which is very rare in academia.” “it is wonderful to see the liverpool universities working together to discuss psychology.” “i feel the idea of a blog creates a community feel and allows people to share ideas and connect with each other.” “i think it will help psychology students in the area feel connected and that they have a voice.” “it is nice to feel like other students are interested in what i have to say and i look forward to reading about the thoughts and experiences of others.” “it also helps to build those strong links between the various local universities, which is very important in a modern research environment.” “i think the blog’s a valuable reminder of the exciting things students and staff are getting up to, which are not usually shared elsewhere.” this sense of community included students who are studying at a distance: “browsing the psychliverpool blog revealed the blogs of other students either on campus or outside and of overseas students that shared their stories and made me feel more valued [removed for anonymity]. online studies, even though they have gained a considerable popularity nowadays, may not all the time make you feel like you were a student.” forsythe, demirbag and warren student voices in academic writing: psychliverpool a community for meaning making journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 9 the need for achievement some students from non-russell group universities spoke to the editors about the encouragement they gained from their connection with the university of liverpool and several went on to pursue phd applications. some perceived their experience of the blog as a unique opportunity to improve their employability and for others it created a safe space to explore their writing outside the ‘high-stakes’ of classroom writing: “being involved with the online psychological community here at liverpool is also handy as a way of further developing my written skills and communicating to new/different audiences. writing pieces for the blog is also a useful way to attempt an alternative writing style without the fear of being marked for it!” “it’s a great opportunity to have a go at writing and sharing my ideas without the pressure of doing an ‘academic’ piece’.” “the use of guest editors not only gives invaluable and very transferable skills to the students who undertake this, but also helps to showcase their talents”. “using the psychology blog to inform others about my experience of [removed for anonymity] is important as it allows others to see that fellow students are actively involved in such important simulations.” “i think it is also important for other students who may read the blog as they may feel more motivated to achieve their goals and work harder at university in order to gain more achievements on top of having their final degree.” “it will look good on my cv and it will help me to improve my networking skills.” “i think it is important to raise the profile of the work that i do at university as it shows that i am conscientious, dedicated and determined to achieve my goals.” thinking and insight “i noticed the report on the replicable [sic] of psychological studies last month, really interesting and made me think long and hard about my phd and the research that is informing it.” “i wasn’t aware of the requirements and procedures connected to a career of a psychologist and what was required for a fresh graduate to actually become one. i wanted to but i had no clue how. the section ‘careers and jobs’ were, forsythe, demirbag and warren student voices in academic writing: psychliverpool a community for meaning making journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 10 therefore, the first link that [i] clicked on and it literally opened my eyes and helped me to decide which direction i should follow.” “i find the blog useful for broadening my awareness of wider psychological issues and advances.” “it has given me more confidence in myself and has widened my understanding and enjoyment.” “it helps to facilitate debate and respectful curiosity, which, in my mind, is what helps drive psychological thinking.” reader interests psychliverpool’s visitor engagement reporting indicates that the impact transcends psychology as an academic subject. for example, according to the visitor monitoring frequency statistics (at the time of writing), some of the most read articles explored military ethics and the geneva convention (f = 5301), the wider academic community (f = 4207), and voluntary work experience for students (f = 3041). blogs exploring the wider academic community include ‘why we are still striking’ and ‘reflections on 45 years in psychology at the university of liverpool’, suggesting that readers are engaging with patterns in academia within the uk that are not conventionally explored within the psychology curriculum. further, reader interest in blog topics such as ‘gender inequality in academia’ and ‘time’s up – the sexualisation of academic conferences’ show interest in the academic community globally, which again, is not included in the traditional psychology curriculum. blogs regarding volunteer experiences, including ‘voluntary opportunities’ and ‘why volunteer. why not. brew in the field anyone?’, offer student readers an insight into the opportunities and experiences of other students around valuable work experience. these, together with blogs such as ‘how to help the homeless in liverpool’, guide students towards such extra-curricular experiences within the local community which are important for skills development and are a preparation for future employment. readership and student networking have also led to a variety of additional ‘guest’ bloggers who have covered important topics from specialist perspectives, including honorary professors and practitioners. for example, the human rights campaigner, peter tatchell, wrote a piece for psychliverpool where he discussed the impact of being attacked in forsythe, demirbag and warren student voices in academic writing: psychliverpool a community for meaning making journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 11 moscow by neo-nazis and being beaten unconscious by president mugabe’s bodyguards. his writing on psychliverpool reached the international lgbt community, prompting students to write to the magazine to discuss their own experiences. a further significant indicator of success is the partnership that the core ‘psychliverpool team’ developed with the student editors and contributors. in the past three years, 25 student editors have stayed with the team for more than 12 months; some remain committed alumni who write and seek out opportunities to expand the reach of psychliverpool. this initiative has helped develop the social capital of students outside the usual editorial role. these students now work in areas such as postgraduate study, legal research, and humanitarian and community work. discussion blogging has become an established tool for developing student writing and stimulating enthusiasm in learning (bartlett-bragg, 2003; oravec, 2003; williams and jacobs, 2004; cox and hollyhead, 2009; tremayne, 2012; wang et al., 2012; brown & woolston, 2018; othman et al., 2014; longridge et al., 2016). student blogs, when included as assessed curriculum activities, have the potential to be significant drivers for change, but students will rarely engage with the blog content for its own sake, particularly when they know that an evaluator will examine the text (specht, 2019). this potentially creates conflict within the expectations, values, beliefs, and identities that stem from academic discourse both for the student and the academic evaluator because blogging can be a useful tool for writing development, but students have to want to use it. as we have demonstrated here, good blogging enables students to be in control of the content, the direction and evaluation of their subject discipline, and also to explore how their diverse identities, values, and habits shape their world views and the decisions they make in their lives. in this study, these opportunities were provided outside formal academic activities. of course, motivating students to take part in non-assessed activities is, in and of itself, a challenge. here students were engaged, largely by the developmental and networking opportunities that psychliverpool offered; they could see key academic and social engagement advantages through supportive peer relations, meaningful forsythe, demirbag and warren student voices in academic writing: psychliverpool a community for meaning making journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 12 interactions between staff and students, and a context where they could develop knowledge, confidence, and identity, whilst pursuing interests that were relevant to them and for their future careers. supported by examples of student textual comments, we can see that there is undoubtedly a ‘feel good’ factor about psychliverpool. students could make their voices heard on their own terms, share their experiences, discuss ideas, talk about their dissertations, describe and discuss campus experiences, and connect in a mutually supportive environment. operating through an enthusiastic network of online learners from different socioeconomic and educational backgrounds and cultures, our merseyside students are creating university spaces that are becoming ‘edgeless’ (bradwell, 2009). the most notable sentiments encompassed both the academic and social engagement aspects of student belonging, particularly their sense of being accepted, valued, and included (thomas, 2012). this may in part be explained by the utility and relevance of psychliverpool toward the current academic interests and future aspirations of its students. specifically, the collaborative nature of the network increases students’ social capital. for example, students networked outside their lecturers’ usual span of control, and for many students this became a critical motivator, which ultimately led to excellent earlycareer outcomes. secondly, publishing on the blog increased the visibility of the macro and micro-academic achievements that students accomplish, many of which are often lost in a sea of piecemeal assessment. both of these processes improve opportunities for student employment, further study, increased student self-efficacy, and self-confidence. the environment created a safe space for students to explore the limits of their academic writing without the high-stakes pressures of the classroom environment. the audience is not ‘an assessor’ but is instead composed of people who are interested in the content for its own sake. rather than be judged to be deficient in one skill or another, students could learn disciplinary literacy practices through practising their writing in an authentic way. students own this discourse, and they share and develop it with other interested students. the impact of such additional activities on student personal development, academic achievement, communication skills, self-confidence, and self-awareness has been discussed in detail by clark et al. (2015), but such personal development activities also forsythe, demirbag and warren student voices in academic writing: psychliverpool a community for meaning making journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 13 create additional pressures for students, particularly students who are managing complicated lives. working in an online environment may to some degree mitigate some of the time management and resource challenges that students and academics face, and therefore facilitate the development of the community of practices that can enhance both personal and academic development (guerin., carter., and aitchison 2015). implications for programme developers guerin et al. (2015) make a strong case for the inclusion of blogging opportunities within the academic curriculum. expanding the provision of such opportunities outside the curriculum has demonstrable advantages in reaching students who are outside any single academic’s particular span of control. this extended connectivity reduces the reliance on one-way content delivery and improves networking and social capital opportunities for all students, not just those that have social and other advantages which enable them to build impactful employment networks. the outcomes reported here also completement tinto’s (1993) model of student integration and astin’s theory of student involvement (1984). both theories found that student persistence in their chosen path of study is heavily influenced by the levels of student activity and contact with peers and staff that organisations develop and reinforce. whilst always challenging to engage students in extra-curricular activities, such initiatives offer students the opportunity to take their learning further (lemanski, 2011). taking what students have studied in the classroom and applying it in a range of contexts rewards learning, rather than compliance with assessment standards (dobozy, 2008). as universities seek accessible and innovative ways to support student development, the concept of ‘open access’ can thus be expanded outside the resources that we provide for the advancement of knowledge, to include the mechanisms with which we support our students. such initiatives have a second strategic advantage as they offer a rich primary source of content that piques student interest, information that is vital as we seek to develop and expand our curriculum offerings, widen access to education, and broaden ideas about what effective and impactful academic discourse can be. forsythe, demirbag and warren student voices in academic writing: psychliverpool a community for meaning making journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 14 conclusion the practices and expectations of scholarly communication are changing, and blogging provides a socially liberating mechanism with which to support the development of student writing and literacy. here we examined the impact of an academic–student partnership, which existed outside any university modular credit or evaluation system, by applying sentiment analysis to anonymous student feedback on psychliverpool. automated text analysis (liwc) identified high levels of positive emotion, thinking and insight, the need for affiliation, achievement, power, and reward. blogging enabled students to expand their learning networks outside their classrooms. they developed peer networks and connections with other interested students outside of their usual university network, a process that has the potential to mitigate the dependence on one dominant community of learning, lecturer, or tutor. students expressed delight at working collegiately with other students and being able to practise their writing development in a safe, unpressurised, but public place, and being rewarded for those contributions through the showcasing of their work. in conclusion, there are considerable academic, professional, and personal benefits to student blog writing. the significant advantage that psychliverpool has over other academic blogs was in its situation external to that of the standard university assessment and feedback systems, which meant that students were principally motivated to write and engage with other students on their terms. references aitchison, c. and paré, a. (2012) ‘writing as craft and practice in the doctoral curriculum’, in lee, a and danby, s. (eds.) reshaping doctoral education international approaches and pedagogies, abingdon oxon: routledge, pp.12-25. asadifard, a. and koosha, m. (2013) ‘efl instructors and student writers’ perceptions on academic writing reluctance’, theory & practice in language studies, 3(9), pp.1572-1578. forsythe, demirbag and warren student voices in academic writing: psychliverpool a community for meaning making journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 15 astin, a.w. (1984) ‘student involvement: a developmental theory for higher education’, journal of college student personnel, 25(4), pp.297-308. badenhorst, c. (2012), ‘academic literacies and blog writing in university classrooms’, in wankel, c. and blessinger, p. (eds.) increasing student engagement and retention using online learning activities (cutting-edge technologies in higher education, vol. 6 part a). bingley: emerald group publishing limited, pp. 227-254. badenhorst, c., moloney, c., rosales, j., dyer, j. and ru, l. (2015) ‘beyond deficit: graduate student research-writing pedagogies’, teaching in higher education, 20(1), pp.1-11. baim, s. (2004) ‘blogs help create learning community’, online classroom, 2(8), p.5. bartlett-bragg, a. (2003) ‘blogging to learn’, the knowledge tree, 4, pp.1-12. bolton, g. (2014) reflective practice: writing and professional development. london: sage publications. boud, d., cohen, r. and sampson, j. (1999) ‘peer learning and assessment’, assessment & evaluation in higher education, 24(4), pp.413-426. boud, d., ajjawi, r., dawson, p. and tai, j. (2018) developing evaluative judgement in higher education: assessment for knowing and producing quality work. routledge: london. bourdieu. p. (1991) ‘epilogue: on the possibility of a field of world sociology’, in bourdieu, p. and coleman, j., (eds.) social theory for a changing society. boulder, co: westview press, pp.373-387. bradwell, p. (2009) ‘the edgeless university: why higher education must embrace technology’, ucl, london. available at: https://dera.ioe.ac.uk//23211/ (accessed: 4 december 2019). https://www.emerald.com/insight/search?q=cecile%20m.%20badenhorst https://www.emerald.com/insight/search?q=charles%20wankel https://www.emerald.com/insight/search?q=patrick%20blessinger https://dera.ioe.ac.uk/23211/ forsythe, demirbag and warren student voices in academic writing: psychliverpool a community for meaning making journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 16 brooks, s. (2015) ‘does personal social media usage affect efficiency and wellbeing?’ computers in human behavior, 46, pp.26-37. bruning, r. and kauffman, d.f. (2015) ‘self-efficacy beliefs and motivation in writing development’, handbook of writing research, 2, pp.160-173. carnell, b. and fung, d. (eds.) (2017) developing the higher education curriculum: research-based education in practice. london: ucl press. chen, h.l., cannon, d., gabrio, j., leifer, l., toye, g. and bailey, t. (2005) ‘using wikis and weblogs to support reflective learning in an introductory engineering design course’, human behaviour in design, 5, pp.95-105. brown, e. and woolston, c. (2018) ‘why science blogging still matters’, nature, 31 january 2018. available at: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-01414-6 (accessed: 4 december 2019). clark, g., marsden, r., whyatt, j.d., thompson, l. and walker, m. (2015) ‘“it’s everything else you do…”: alumni views on extracurricular activities and employability’, active learning in higher education, 16(2), pp.133-147. cox. s. and hollyhead, a. (2009) ‘the development of student blogging in higher education’, proceedings of the 2nd international conference of education, research and innovation. madrid, spain, 16-18 november, pp.10-21. dickey, m. (2004) ‘the impact of web-logs (blogs) on student perceptions of isolation and alienation in a web-based distance-learning environment’, open learning: the journal of open, distance and e-learning, 19(3), pp.279-291. dobozy, e. (2008) ‘december. the use and usefulness of non-assessed online learning: tracking students’ behaviour on lams’, in l. cameron & j. dalziel (eds.), proceedings of the 3rd international lams & learning design conference 2008: perspectives on learning design, sydney, australia: lams foundation, pp. 59-69. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-01414-6 forsythe, demirbag and warren student voices in academic writing: psychliverpool a community for meaning making journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 17 french, a. (2011) ‘“what am i expecting and why?” how can lecturers in higher education begin to address writing development for their students?’ journal of academic writing, 1(1), pp.228-238. french, s. and kennedy, g. (2017) ‘reassessing the value of university lectures’, teaching in higher education, 22(6), pp.639-654. garcia, e., elbeltagi, i., brown, m. and dungay, k. (2015) ‘the implications of a connectivist learning blog model and the changing role of teaching and learning’, british journal of educational technology, 46(4), pp.877-894. goodfellow, r. (2005) ‘academic literacies and e-learning: a critical approach to writing in the online university’, international journal of educational research, 43(7-8), pp.481-494. gordon, n. (2014) flexible pedagogies: technology-enhanced learning. york: higher education academy. guerin, c., carter, s. and aitchison, c. (2015) ‘blogging as community of practice: lessons for academic development?’, international journal for academic development, 20(3), pp.212-223. guerin, c., kerr, h. and green, i. (2015) ‘supervision pedagogies: narratives from the field’, teaching in higher education, 20(1), pp.107-118. halavais, a. (2006) ‘scholarly blogging: moving toward the visible college’, in a. bruns and jacob (eds.) uses of blogs, new york: peter lang, pp.117-126. hallett, f. (2010) ‘study support in higher education: the bifurcation of teaching and learning? questioning theory-method relations in higher education research’. paper presented at education close up, lancaster, united kingdom, 20-22 july 2010. forsythe, demirbag and warren student voices in academic writing: psychliverpool a community for meaning making journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 18 hawe, e. and dixon, h. (2017) ‘assessment for learning: a catalyst for student selfregulation’, assessment & evaluation in higher education, 42(8), pp.1181-1192. hyland, k. (2009) academic discourse: english in a global context. london: continuum. ibrahim, a.k., kelly, s.j., adams c.e. and glazebrook, c. (2013) ‘a systematic review of studies of depression prevalence in university students’, j psychiatry res, 47(3), pp.391-400. kobayashi m., zappa-hollman s. and duff p.a. (2017) ‘academic discourse socialization’, in duff p. and may s. (eds.) language socialization: encyclopedia of language and education. 3rd edn. netherlands: springer, pp.239-254. kochoska, j. and petrovski, j. (2017) ‘blogging in the 21st-century classroom’, international journal of science and research (ijsr), 6(1), pp.861864. kuo, y.c., belland, b.r. and kuo, y.t. (2017) ‘learning through blogging: students’ perspectives in collaborative blog-enhanced learning communities’, journal of educational technology & society, 20(2), pp.37-50. lea, m.r. (2017) ‘academic literacies in theory and practice’, literacies and language education, pp.147-158. lemanski, c. (2011) ‘access and assessment? incentives for independent study’, assessment & evaluation in higher education, 36(5), pp.565-581. lillis, t. and turner, j. (2001) ‘student writing in higher education: contemporary confusion, traditional concerns’, teaching in higher education, 6(1), pp.57-68. longridge, d., hooley, t. and staunton, t. (2013) ‘building online employability: a guide for academic departments’, university of derby. available at: http://hdl.handle.net/10545/294311 (accessed: 4 december 2019). http://hdl.handle.net/10545/294311 forsythe, demirbag and warren student voices in academic writing: psychliverpool a community for meaning making journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 19 mcalpine, l. and amundsen, c. (2011) doctoral education: research-based strategies for doctoral students, supervisors and administrators. netherlands: springer. oravec, j.a. (2003) ‘blending by blogging: weblogs in blended learning initiatives’ journal of educational media, 28(2-3), pp.225-233. othman, h., wahidin, i.s., arshad, s.r. and rahman, k.a. (2014) ‘enriching english language skills via blogging activities for employability skills: a preliminary study’, in proceedings of the global conference on language practice & information technology, malaysia, world conferences.net. available at: http://worldconferences.net/proceedings/glit2014/toc/papers_glit2014/gl%20090% 20haniza%20othman.pdf (accessed: 9 december 2019). paré, a. (2011) ‘speaking of writing: supervisory feedback and the dissertation’ in doctoral education: research-based strategies for doctoral students, supervisors and administrators. dordrecht: springer, pp.59-74. pennebaker, j.w. (1997) ‘writing about emotional experiences as a therapeutic process’, psychological science, 8(3), pp.162-166. pennebaker, j. w. (2011) the secret life of pronouns: what our words say about us. bloomsbury, new york. pennebaker, j.w., boyd, r.l., jordan, k. and blackburn, k. (2015) ‘the development and psychometric properties of liwc2015’, austin, tx: the university of texas at austin. available at: https://repositories.lib.utexas.edu/bitstream/handle/2152/31333/liwc2015_langua gemanual.pdf (accessed: 4 december 2019). sample, m. (2010) ‘a rubric for evaluating student blogs: the chronical of higher education’, 27 september. available at: https://www.chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/a-rubric-for-evaluating-studentblogs/27196 (accessed: 4 december 2019). http://worldconferences.net/proceedings/glit2014/toc/papers_glit2014/gl%20090%20haniza%20othman.pdf http://worldconferences.net/proceedings/glit2014/toc/papers_glit2014/gl%20090%20haniza%20othman.pdf https://repositories.lib.utexas.edu/bitstream/handle/2152/31333/liwc2015_languagemanual.pdf https://repositories.lib.utexas.edu/bitstream/handle/2152/31333/liwc2015_languagemanual.pdf https://www.chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/a-rubric-for-evaluating-student-blogs/27196 https://www.chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/a-rubric-for-evaluating-student-blogs/27196 forsythe, demirbag and warren student voices in academic writing: psychliverpool a community for meaning making journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 20 silvero, s. and forsythe, a.m. (2018) ‘blogging as a pedagogy: the award-winning ‘psychliverpool blog’ and how it is developing a community for meaningmaking’, psych-talk, 89, pp.8-10. shackle, s. (2019) ‘the way universities are run is making us ill; inside the student mental health crisis’, 27 september 2019. available at: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2019/sep/27/anxiety-mental-breakdownsdepression-uk-students (accessed: 4 december 2019). smith, e.e. (2016) ‘“a real double-edged sword”: undergraduate perceptions of social media in their learning’, computers & education, 103, pp.44-58. specht, d. (2019) ‘the issue of blogging: using visual network analysis to go beyond self-reporting studies of blogging’, journal of learning and teaching in digital age, 4(2), pp.10-24. tausczik, y.r. and pennebaker, j.w. (2010), ‘the psychological meaning of words: liwc and computerized text analysis methods’, journal of language and social psychology, 29(1), pp.24-54. thomas, l. (2012) ‘building student engagement and belonging in higher education at a time of change’, paul hamlyn foundation, uk. available at: https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/system/files/what_works_final_report_0.pdf (accessed: 4 december 2019). thornton, b., faires, a., robbins, m. and rollins, e. (2014) ‘the mere presence of a cell phone may be distracting: implications for attention and task performance’, social psychology, 45(6), pp.479-488. tinto, v. (1993) leaving college: rethinking the causes and cures of student attrition. chicago: university of chicago press, usa. tremayne, m. (ed.), (2012) blogging, citizenship, and the future of media. london: routledge. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2019/sep/27/anxiety-mental-breakdowns-depression-uk-students https://www.theguardian.com/society/2019/sep/27/anxiety-mental-breakdowns-depression-uk-students https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/system/files/what_works_final_report_0.pdf forsythe, demirbag and warren student voices in academic writing: psychliverpool a community for meaning making journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 21 vaezi, r., torkzadeh, g. and chang, j.c.j. (2011) ‘understanding the influence of blog on the development of social capital’, acm sigmis database: the database for advances in information systems, 42(3), pp.34-45. wang, y.s., lin, h.h. and liao, y.w. (2012) ‘investigating the individual difference antecedents of perceived enjoyment in students’ use of blogging’, british journal of educational technology, 43(1), pp.139-152. white, j.w. and lowenthal, p.r. (2011) ‘academic discourse and the formation of an academic identity: minority college students and the hidden curriculum’, available at: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/j_white3/publication/267954616_academic_d iscourse_and_the_formation_of_an_academic_identity_minority_college_student s_and_the_hidden_curriculum/links/5460cb170cf27487b4525ea3/academicdiscourse-and-the-formation-of-an-academic-identity-minority-college-studentsand-the-hidden-curriculum.pdf (accessed: 4 december 2019). williams, j. b. and jacobs, j. (2004) ‘exploring the use of blogs as learning spaces in the higher education sector’, australasian journal of educational technology, 20(2), pp.232-247. author details dr alex forsythe, cpsych, pfhea, ntf is a senior academic who specialises in improving work and behavioural skills through self-regulation strategies and by helping individuals develop healthy relationships with feedback. she has spent the last seven years applying these principles in the development of medical professionalism and academic performance. her work in this area contributed to her winning the prestigious national teaching fellowship during 2018, and she was awarded principal fellowship of the higher education academy for her national strategic leadership in higher education. https://www.researchgate.net/profile/j_white3/publication/267954616_academic_discourse_and_the_formation_of_an_academic_identity_minority_college_students_and_the_hidden_curriculum/links/5460cb170cf27487b4525ea3/academic-discourse-and-the-formation-of-an-academic-identity-minority-college-students-and-the-hidden-curriculum.pdf https://www.researchgate.net/profile/j_white3/publication/267954616_academic_discourse_and_the_formation_of_an_academic_identity_minority_college_students_and_the_hidden_curriculum/links/5460cb170cf27487b4525ea3/academic-discourse-and-the-formation-of-an-academic-identity-minority-college-students-and-the-hidden-curriculum.pdf https://www.researchgate.net/profile/j_white3/publication/267954616_academic_discourse_and_the_formation_of_an_academic_identity_minority_college_students_and_the_hidden_curriculum/links/5460cb170cf27487b4525ea3/academic-discourse-and-the-formation-of-an-academic-identity-minority-college-students-and-the-hidden-curriculum.pdf https://www.researchgate.net/profile/j_white3/publication/267954616_academic_discourse_and_the_formation_of_an_academic_identity_minority_college_students_and_the_hidden_curriculum/links/5460cb170cf27487b4525ea3/academic-discourse-and-the-formation-of-an-academic-identity-minority-college-students-and-the-hidden-curriculum.pdf https://www.researchgate.net/profile/j_white3/publication/267954616_academic_discourse_and_the_formation_of_an_academic_identity_minority_college_students_and_the_hidden_curriculum/links/5460cb170cf27487b4525ea3/academic-discourse-and-the-formation-of-an-academic-identity-minority-college-students-and-the-hidden-curriculum.pdf forsythe, demirbag and warren student voices in academic writing: psychliverpool a community for meaning making journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 22 emir demirbag is an early career academic interested in the assessment and communication of uncertainty in intelligence to support decision-making, extending to the development and application of tools to support strategic decision-making processes in manufacture. he is also interested in understanding and overcoming psychological barriers to technology adoption. he received a bachelor of science degree in computer science and psychology and a master’s degree in advanced computer science both at the university of liverpool. he is currently a doctoral researcher within the school of electrical engineering, electronics and computer science and the department of psychological sciences at the university of liverpool. emir is psychliverpool’s technical director. jasmine warren is a doctoral researcher in psychological sciences at the university of liverpool working on addiction and sex-specific research, in particular how the menstrual cycle affects alcohol use and mood. jasmine is psychliverpool’s editor-in-chief. student voices in academic writing: psychliverpool a community for meaning making abstract introduction psychliverpool; a community for meaning making evaluation methodology impact social aspects and relationships the need for achievement thinking and insight reader interests discussion implications for programme developers conclusion references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special issue 22: compendium of innovative practice october 2021 ________________________________________________________________________ there is nothing like a pandemic – to force rapid change and upskilling in higher education sabina cerimagic university of sydney, australia keywords: higher education; up-skilling; process improvement; training and development; covid-19. the challenge to improve the teaching and learning experience for both students and academics, our institution formed the business co-design (bcd) team. the bcd team consists of both professional and academic staff and we work with the unit coordinators (ucs) and the teaching team together to redesign existing units or design new units. our activities range from one-on-one consultations, educational innovation, and development project support to professional development programs (cerimagic and khanna, 2020; vallis, bryant and huber, 2020). during the height of the pandemic, we had to rapidly transition to online learning (rohman et al., 2020). this required educators to move all content, activities, and assessment tasks very quickly onto canvas, our university’s learning management system (lms). the role of the bcd team in this change was to collaborate with and support the content experts and educators in transitioning their pedagogy to the online context. this required the educators to re-work traditional didactic content into more ‘bite-sized’ chunks of content and create modules that students could work through (simon, 1974; cram et al., 2020). the online modules were enriched with multimedia (britton, et al., 2020) and interactive tools to maximise student engagement and learning. external etools (such as jamboard, padlet, etc.) were used to test student knowledge and promote collaboration, which could then be embedded into the lms. the main challenges that the bcd team faced during this period included: cerimagic there is nothing like a pandemic – to force rapid change and upskilling in higher education journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 2 (1) increased number of educators who needed our assistance – without a commensurate increase in resources. (2) the requirement to upskill educators in the use of the lms, etools, and good quality diy video/multimedia content creation. (3) ways to provide content so that it could be created with fast turnarounds, attention to detail, and minimal disruption. (4) the content also needed to be sustainable – for example, so that academics did not need to create new multimedia content every semester. the response as our work increased exponentially without a commensurate increase in resources, the only way we could scale up the support that we would usually offer to individual units was to upskill the educators, so that they learnt how to be more self-sufficient. the workshops we chose to run were based on (1) the educator’s needs and (2) on educational pedagogies and literature (atkinson and shiffrin,1968; simon, 1974; mayer, 2001; mayer, 2002; mayer and moreno, 2003; hodges et al., 2020). this was done by running 30-to-60-minute workshops for each of our disciplines individually on: • how to use the canvas template. • using canvas + asynchronous tools. • how to do chunking. • how to add interactivity (synchronous and asynchronous). • how to build community (online). • teaching online intro session (mvp). • using zoom features and practice session. • msteams. • media workshop incl. diy. • obs and avatar multimedia workshops. cerimagic there is nothing like a pandemic – to force rapid change and upskilling in higher education journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 3 we continue to offer a variety of workshops through the semester as required and we have monthly two hour drop-in sessions that are run by the media and ld teams where staff can zoom in or attend in person and get assistance with any multimedia and ld related enquiries. our survey data indicated that most of the workshop participants found the workshops helpful and felt more comfortable redesigning their units. however, upon reflecting we realised that we had two major issues: (1) the bcd team spent a lot of time in preparing and running the workshops and this took the team away from all the other work that had to be done; (2) as the workshops were run for each discipline individually, we sometimes had no one turn-up to the workshops or we had only one or two participants. an additional minor issue was the day, time, and length of the workshops. through surveys, we realised that most of our academics preferred short workshops (between 30 to 45 minutes, with 15 minutes q&a), preferably not on a monday or friday, and preferably not too late in the day (not after 4:00pm). this minor third issue was easily fixed. to deal with the two major issues in semester 1 2021, we decided to run the workshops for the whole school, instead of running the workshops for individual disciplines, and we recorded each workshop. this meant that the workshops had a higher attendance rate, and that the bcd team did not have to run the workshops multiple times (this was more efficient and sustainable for the team). each workshop was recorded on zoom and the recording was shared with all educators – which was useful to staff who were unable to attend the workshop session(s). the team also built a canvas page for the school which included short ‘how to’ videos and written instructions for academics on: how to do chunking, how to add interactivity and multimedia to their units, how to create h5ps and use other etools, and how to use msteams, zoom, etc. we also created a page that had several q&as of ‘most frequently asked questions’ by academics. additionally, we added a page that contained contact details of all the relevant faculty and university departments and centres. one of the biggest challenges that we as an institution faced during the pandemic was some academics’ lack of lms, multimedia, and etool knowledge and skills. yet, we all had to rapidly move our lectures and teaching online in 2020 and online and face-to-face cerimagic there is nothing like a pandemic – to force rapid change and upskilling in higher education journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 4 in 2021. the goal was not just to cut and paste existing unit content into our lms, the goal was (and still is), to improve the units/courses and deliver engaging content. the result was that by up-skilling our academics they were more confident in using lms, etools, msteams, multimedia, and chunking, and were able to be creative and innovative with their course content, teaching approaches, and assessments. recommendations in 2020 this was new territory for us; therefore, we piloted our workshops by running them for each discipline. this created too much work for our team, it was not sustainable and the workshops (because there were too many of them) were not well attended. from the feedback that we received from the academics we knew that the workshops were sometimes too short (i.e., only 30 minutes) and that sometimes they were run on days/times that were not favourable for the academics. however, we very quickly learnt from our mistakes by evaluating the workshops through a qualtrics survey that was sent after each workshop session, where we asked the academics for feedback. simultaneously, we as a team learnt the art of reflecting (gibbs, 1988; driscoll, 2006; hegarty, 2011; ross, 2011) and feeding forward to improve our own processes and the way we offer workshops, deciding the number of workshops, and ensuring the efficiency and sustainability of our work. in reflecting on the type of support that we offer, and if indeed we accomplished what we set out to do, one of the lessons we learnt is that we are constantly improving and finding new ways to support our educators better. the workshops met the purpose of enabling educators to take ownership of their units and the lms site maintenance and rollover in future semesters, teaching the appropriate skills required to create content and/or etools (prieto et al., 2020). the academics not only upskilled but, in most cases, vastly improved their units through chunking and multimedia and by directing the students’ attention to the key features of the material to learn (simon, 1974; mayer, 2002; mayer and moreno, 2003). cerimagic there is nothing like a pandemic – to force rapid change and upskilling in higher education journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 5 others can benefit from our experience, by not repeating our mistakes. our advice to anyone who is planning to run workshops is: (1) ensure that the workshops are based on the stakeholder’s needs, (2) that the workshops are evaluated, and that they are (3) improved in a timely manner. the workshops need to be (4) sustainable and should not take your team away from doing their everyday tasks/projects – hence, (5) find complementary avenues (such as your university’s lms), where you can house additional useful ‘how to’ instructions, ‘most frequently asked questions’, and add a page that contains contact details of all the relevant faculty and university departments and centres. references atkinson, r. c. and shiffrin, r. m. (1968) ‘human memory a proposed system and its control processes’, in k. w. spence and j. t. spence (eds.) the psychology of learning and motivation: advances in research and theory, vol. 2, new york: academic press, pp.89-195. britton, b., shalavin, c., bury, a., cerimagic, s. and bryant, p. (2020) ‘rethinking diy: enhancing possibilities for media-making by educators’, association for learning technology (alt) conference. virtual conference, 15-16 december. cerimagic, s. and khanna, p. (2020) ‘transforming assessment: critical reflections around resolving tensions between assessment for learning and of learning’, australasian society for computers in learning in tertiary education (scilite), 2020 conference. university of new england, armidale, 30 november-1 december. cram, a., wardek, d., zeivots, s., cerimagic, s. and bryant, p. (2020) ‘scaling up innovation in a crisis: the move to online teaching and the embracing of connected learning’, association for learning technology (alt) conference. virtual conference, 15-16 december. driscoll, j. (ed.). (2006) practising clinical supervision: a reflective approach for healthcare professionals. edinburgh: elsevier health sciences. cerimagic there is nothing like a pandemic – to force rapid change and upskilling in higher education journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 6 gibbs, g. (1988) learning by doing: a guide to teaching and learning methods. oxford: oxford further education unit. hegarty, b. (2011) a framework to guide professional learning and reflective practice. unpublished phd thesis. university of wollongong. hodges, c., moore, s., lockee, b., trust, t., and bond, a. (2020) ‘the difference between emergency remote teaching and online learning’, educause review. available at: https://er.educause.edu/articles/2020/3/the-difference-between-emergency-remoteteaching-and-online-learning (accessed: 13 june 2021). mayer, r. e. (2001) multimedia learning. new york: cambridge university press. mayer, r. e. (2002) ‘multimedia learning’, in b. h. ross (ed.) the psychology of learning and motivation. vol. 41. san diego: academic press, pp.85-139. mayer, r. e. and moreno, r. (2003) ‘nine ways to reduce cognitive load in multimedia learning’, educational psychologist, 38, pp.43-52. prieto, c., taylor, m., cerimagic, s. and bryant, p. (2020) ‘from data to learning insights: analysing h5p data to improve interactive content’, association for learning technology (alt) conference. virtual conference, 15-16 december. rohman, m., marji, d. a. s., sugandi, r. m. and nurhadi, d. (2020) ‘online learning in higher education during covid-19 pandemic: students’ perceptions’, journal of talent development and excellence, 12(2s), pp.3644-3651. ross, n. (2011) reflective writing: an approach to developing critical thinking and proficient writing. new york: united states military academy. simon, h. a. (1974) ‘how big is a chunk?’ science, 183, pp.482-488. vallis, c., bryant, p. and huber, e., (2019) ‘a clas on its own: connected learning at scale’, 36th international conference on innovation, practice and research in the https://er.educause.edu/articles/2020/3/the-difference-between-emergency-remote-teaching-and-online-learning https://er.educause.edu/articles/2020/3/the-difference-between-emergency-remote-teaching-and-online-learning cerimagic there is nothing like a pandemic – to force rapid change and upskilling in higher education journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 7 use of educational technologies in tertiary education (ascilite 2019), singapore university of social sciences, 2-5 december. https://doi.org/10.25910/kjm1-5x45. author details sabina cerimagic is a senior lecturer and deputy academic director of the business codesign (bcd) team in the faculty of business, university of sydney, australia. her main areas of research are: educational pedagogy, project management, change management, leadership and motivation, cross-cultural project management and training, curriculum redesign, curriculum renewal through design thinking, systems thinking, designbased research, and higher education pedagogy and technology integration. https://doi.org/10.25910/kjm1-5x45 there is nothing like a pandemic – to force rapid change and upskilling in higher education the challenge the response recommendations references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 20: march 2021 editorial jim donohue manchester metropolitan university nicola grayson university of manchester andy hagyard independent jenny hillman open university eleanor loughlin durham university cathy malone oxford brookes university craig morley university of manchester gita sedghi university of liverpool alicja syska university of plymouth it has now been a full year since the pandemic became a defining feature of our professional and personal lives, leaving an indelible mark on how we think, engage, and produce. our workloads are higher and strains on our time feel harder; our patience and resilience have been tried so ceaselessly and mercilessly that we might wonder what the limit is for our capacity for change and reinvention. and yet, we keep creating, producing, innovating and writing, with our experiments ever bolder and our hopes ever brighter. writers will keep writing and publishers will keep publishing! thus, in this issue 20, we bring you three new papers, one case study, and four book reviews, whose summaries follow. editorial in their paper, charles buckley, eli saetnan, amelia gerber, joanna cheetham, thomas price, jenna kenyani and alan greaves explore the impact writing support sessions (writing workshops and retreats) have on reducing the stress and anxiety associated with thesis writing, and academic writing more generally. this impact was investigated through a mixed-methods approach. participants’ feelings of anxiety and stress were quantified through pre and post session surveys. qualitative data on students’ experiences of the writing support was gathered through focus-group interviews. the findings from this data suggested that participation in writing workshops and retreats had a positive impact on reducing anxiety and stress surrounding thesis writing by creating a safe environment that helped to build up students’ sense of empowerment and confidence. in the second paper in this volume, samantha king analyses how students develop and use metadiscourse, the language used to guide readers through a text, in their writing, and investigates whether the use of metadiscourse impacts student grades. to achieve this, a corpus of summative written assignments was collected from 67 undergraduates studying a health discipline. these assignments were then analysed using software developed for the field of corpus linguistics to identify how students used metadiscourse in their writing. king’s findings contrast with those of previous studies and suggest there is very little difference, in the health disciplines at least, in the use of metadiscoursal features helping students earn higher grades. nevertheless, king uses the findings from this investigation to suggest that learning developers should include some level of metadiscourse training in their teaching. chris maharaj, erik blair and margo burns turn their attention to the impact of student mentoring on the academic performance of undergraduate students identified as ‘at risk’. based on an early intervention programme designed to improve students’ success, and using attribution theory, the study demonstrates that mentoring which guides students to find solutions to the challenges they face can be a powerful determinant of their academic performance. while the authors are cautious in drawing larger conclusions from the study, they feel confident to affirm that the mentoring process, regardless of its length or quality, has a positive impact on students’ sense of self-worth and efficacy. recommendations from the analysis include expanding mentorship schemes and implementing both one-toone and group mentorship as required by a particular context. the study is dedicated to the late dr margo burns who sadly passed away before the publication of this issue. editorial the case study by lucy gill-simmen examines the use of padlet to promote cognitive engagement among undergraduate marketing students. after a previous cohort reported a high level of difficulty in completing one particular assessment in writing, padlet was introduced to facilitate greater engagement and interest in the task. correctly predicting that the more creative and technology-based instructional design would make the assessment more attractive, the results of the study show that the students considered padlet not only a great opportunity to demonstrate their knowledge visually but also an enjoyable experience and a valuable aid in learning. while adopting technology in the classroom should never be an end in itself, this case study provides a good example of how effectively it can be incorporated if underpinned by solid pedagogic goals. anne elizabeth davey and hazel messenger review the book skills for business and management by martin sedgley. the book aims to help students embarking on a business and management course at university to overcome transition hurdles. it is designed around five key areas relevant to the discipline: independent learning, time management, academic reading, academic writing and group working. both reviewers agree that the text would provide valuable support for academic staff, academic mentors and learning designers who could use the content to promote learning development in their own contexts. samantha ahern reviews the book maximizing the impacts of academic research by patrick dunleavy and jane tinkler. the tagline of this book is ‘how to grow the recognition, influence, practical application and public understanding of science and scholarship’. this is a very useful reference text for those who are undertaking doctoral studies or for early career researchers. the content of the book is organised into three parts: academic impacts, academic and external impacts, and external impacts. finally, teresa de fazio reviews the book challenging the teaching excellence framework: diversity deficits in higher education evaluations by amanda french and kate carruthers thomas. the text details the contextual background to the teaching excellence framework (tef) and the underlying drivers that contributed to its development and adoption. it questions the interpretation of excellence adopted by the tef and limitations of how it is measured by the framework from the perspective of diverse learners and staff. it is an important reading for anyone who is interested in the editorial issue of excellence in higher education and its measurement; in particular, from the perspective of equity and diversity. we hope that in this collection of articles, our subscribers and readers will find thought provoking and stimulating material. we also want to take this opportunity to thank our wonderful reviewers whose critical reading of submissions and thoughtful feedback and recommendations have made invaluable contributions to the quality of articles we publish. our heartfelt appreciation for the time, expertise, and work it took to review papers in this issue goes to the following reviewers: monica behrend, australia vesna bogdanović, serbia nicola grayson, uk robert ping-nan chang, uk sonja rewhorn, uk nkaepe olaniyi, uk stephanie doehler, uk steve peters, uk gabrielle smith, austria alison gilmour, uk we look forward to talking to our readers and contributors at the aldinhe annual conference soon! with best wishes, the jldhe editorial board editorial journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 16: december 2019 the disrupted workplace: are the digital and group skills needs of employers being addressed by universities? pauline a.m. bremner robert gordon university, uk audrey laing robert gordon university, uk abstract upskilling moves quickly in today’s ‘disrupted’ workplace, and skill sets need to change to meet the needs of the digital economy (gray, 2016), sometimes referred to as the fourth industrial revolution (4ir). using a mixed methods approach and drawing on data from relevant stakeholders, the aim of this research is to explore, evaluate and identify any mismatch between degree learning outcomes and employability skills. the research also proposes specific strategies to address identifiable skills gaps. focusing on the views of fashion management (fm) alumni, the study highlights gaps in digital skills as well as gaps in professional /group skills which some alumni felt were missing from their university education. the research also notes the importance of digital skills in the workplace from the employers’ point of view. this strengthens the argument for employers and universities to work more symbiotically to address any gaps between degree outcomes and employability skills in order to provide graduates who are ‘work ready’ for 4ir. given the findings, the authors recommend that the data gathered be used not only to inform and enhance our fm degree, but perhaps more importantly, and in a broader educational and academic context, that universities be mindful that they fully address the changing skills requirements of future employers. while this research focuses on fm alumni and employers, because of the creativity and management which are core to this course, the findings are relevant across many related management and creative industries university courses. keywords: employability; groups; skills; digital; future. bremner and laing the disrupted workplace: are the digital and group skills needs of employers being addressed by universities? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 2 introduction the stimulus for investigating this topic was previous research by crebert et al. (2004) and bennett et al. (2016), who discussed the development of generic skills at university, as well as research conducted by hinchliffe and jolly (2010), wilton (2012), jackson (2014) and bremner (2017) on the issues of university degrees meeting the needs of industry. it is important to note that there is a dearth of research examining digital/it skills specifically in the fashion domain. the disruption of workplace skills is also addressed, since digital and professional skills are now expected in many workplaces (jackson and chapman, 2012; gallardo-echenique et al. 2015). norton’s (2016) higher education academy report highlights the need to embed employability into university degrees, and bennett et al. (2016) discuss the strategies required by universities in order to achieve this. o’leary (2017) highlights the variety of approaches to embedding employability across disciplines and universities. with 4ir on the horizon, many reports (ecorys uk, 2016; gray, 2016; bennett, 2016) note a change in skills, which academics must consider for students, ‘enabling each to succeed in a rapidly changing workplace’ (hounsell, 2011, p.2). however, at degree level, the feedback which course teams tend to receive is from student evaluation questionnaires (seqs), the national student survey (nss) and the destinations of leavers from higher education (dlhe). this data is often extrapolated to produce analytics and generate league tables which are used in the external environment in order to benchmark courses and universities. notwithstanding this, the most proactive educational institutes collaborate with employers to share best practice in the area of employability and transferable skills, whilst being considerate of the qaa benchmarks for degrees. although our four-year ba honours fashion management (fm) course at robert gordon university achieves high course satisfaction rates, there was neither recent empirical research to support course developments nor an institutional led subject review (ilsr). part of the responsibility of being head of year for stage 4 (final year) fm students, is to prepare a professional skills enhancement programme (psep). in collaboration with colleagues from our university’s employability and professional enrichment hub (epe), the psep provides sessions which consider the transferability of skills, encouraging the bremner and laing the disrupted workplace: are the digital and group skills needs of employers being addressed by universities? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 3 students to reflect and be more aware of the skills they have developed over the course of their studies. taking these elements into account the aim of this paper is to explore and evaluate a possible mismatch between the fm degree-level learning outcomes (llos) and employability skills required in an increasingly ‘disrupted workplace’. the objectives are:  to review the relevant academic and educational literature on current and future graduate skills requirements.  to investigate skills gaps via a mixed methods approach with a range of relevant stakeholders.  to develop strategic recommendations to ensure any skills gap between academia and industry is addressed. literature review first destination employment for any graduate is challenging, as competition is high (high fliers, 2018). the employment rates of graduates are often presented in league tables, with many universities strategically outlining the importance of the professional employability of its alumni. however, skills requirements are evolving (crebert et al., 2004; bennett et al., 2016; hamill, 2018) meaning changes are necessary to ensure future graduates are ‘work ready’. gray (2016) notes the top 10 skills required for 2020 (table 1). with the many challenges in respect of 4ir, the repurposed vision of universities must evolve. table 1. the top ten skills for 2020 and 2015 from the world economic forum (wef) (2018) and gray (2016). skills for 2020 skills for 2015 1. complex problem solving 1. complex problem solving 2. critical thinking 2. coordinating with others 3. creativity 3. people management 4. people management 4. critical thinking 5. coordinating with others 5. negotiation 6. emotional intelligence 6. quality control bremner and laing the disrupted workplace: are the digital and group skills needs of employers being addressed by universities? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 4 7. judgement and decision making 7. service orientation 8. service orientation 8. judgement and decision making 9. negotiation 9. active listening 10. cognitive flexibility 10. creativity pressure has grown for students to differentiate themselves from the wider student body (walker, 2014) and the requirement for ‘employability skills’ to be intrinsically part of degree programmes has strengthened (norton, 2016; bennett et al., 2016; o’leary, 2017). many reports have highlighted the need for digital skills/literacy (ds/dl) to be incorporated into learning contexts (hounsell, 2011; laurillard et al., 2016; ecorys uk, 2016; scottish government, 2016) or the work sphere (price waterhouse cooper, 2018). whilst the meaning of ‘digital literacy’ is not stable (gallardo-echenique et al., 2015), leading some to favour the term digital competence (ferrari, 2012), it has been identified as a necessity for all jobs (laurillard et al., 2016). yet the cbi (2017) has noted weaknesses in employee it skills, a point echoed by ecorys in 2016. jisc describes digital literacy (dl) as ‘those capabilities which fit an individual for living, learning and working in a digital society’ (jisc, 2014). they extend the ‘seven elements’ of dl (digital scholarship, information literacy, media literacy, communications and collaboration, career and identity management, ict literacy, learning skills) with the inclusion of beetham and sharpe’s framework (2010) encompassing four areas: access and awareness, skills, practices, and identity, thus providing a starting place for many institutions in terms of degree dl integration. the employability in scotland forum (2017) have stressed a ‘collective approach to skills must continue’ as the necessity for digital skills becomes ‘vital to the economic development, internationalisation and innovation’ of scotland (skills development scotland, 2019). a hidden pipeline of talent is identifiable in non-computing sectors such as the creative industries. notwithstanding this, the top ten skills (table 1) include professional skills, with numbers 4-6 for 2020 involving people to some extent. it is vital, therefore, to realise that even in the digital workplace, professional skills and interpersonal expertise are vital. for example, traditional communication roles are being repackaged as digital storytellers. a recent bremner and laing the disrupted workplace: are the digital and group skills needs of employers being addressed by universities? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 5 search on linkedin found 293,230 people with job titles incorporating that type of description (linkedin, 2018). working effectively with people is still as important as ever (cipd, 2017; 2019). indeed, a popular web site for jobs, monster.co.uk (2018), commonly cites personal effectiveness and relationship management as employee requirements. many authors have highlighted the necessity for the transferability of graduate skills which are not discipline-specific (maguire and guyer, 2004) or fixed (hinchliffe and jolly, 2010), and that graduates’ experiences of employer-based support during degrees varies by discipline and gender (o’leary, 2015). bremner (2017, p.3) found that ‘traditional graduate skills have to be transferable and attribute-based inclusive of communication and interpersonal skills, team working, intellect and problem solving, critical and reflective ability, adaptability and risk-taking if organisations are to ‘proact’ to change’. professional skills can often be incorporated into teaching through team work (bennett et al., 2016), presentations, workplace experience (o’leary, 2015) and working with clients on coursework. the communities for practice framework c4p (hoadley and kilner, 2005) is noted (bremner, 2017) as a useful team work model for incorporation into modules as it works ‘by emulating the activities of industry teams on group projects’ (hoadley and kilner, 2005, p. 53). additionally, holistic approaches are reinforced by black (2013), who cites stamina, dealing with people of all ages and cultures, and managing upwards as key aspects of the workplace. this strengthens the argument that students have to be lifelong learners (harvey et al., 1997; jenkins et al., 2002; hinchliffe and jolly, 2010; laal and salamati, 2012). often, some of these ‘skills and competencies’ mentioned are embedded through the inclusion of team work in module assessments (lave and wenger, 1991; hodgkinsonwilliams et al., 2008). hoadley and kilner (2005) note that group work provides underpinning for ‘social learning’ which incorporates the communities for practice framework c4p. although grounded in research undertaken in the it field, the c4p model elucidates the development of four stages (figure 1) and a context which can be used ‘by emulating the activities of industry teams on group projects’ (hoadley and kilner, 2005, p. 53). bremner and laing the disrupted workplace: are the digital and group skills needs of employers being addressed by universities? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 6 figure 1. the c4p framework for emulating an it consultancy of community of practice (hoadley and kilner, 2005, p. 53) fearon et al. (2012) also highlight team work as being ‘increasingly recognised as a way for students to problem solve and demonstrate transferable skills necessary for the workplace’ (2012, p.114). comparing the skill sets from table 1 (gray, 2016, wef, 2018) and figure 1 (hoadley and kilner, 2005), table 2 indicates the dominance of transferable/professional skills is clear, permeating almost all of the skills from wef (2016) and most obvious in the ‘conversation’ and ‘connections’ skill summaries from hoadley and kilner (2005). content consultancy report drafts and technical prototype conversation formal and informal exchange, face-to-face project meetings, emails, phone calls, wikis, texts context a consultancy setting with a project brief and expected deliverables connections between consultant, analyst and programmer as key team/group work roles purpose to emulate an it consultancy working environment bremner and laing the disrupted workplace: are the digital and group skills needs of employers being addressed by universities? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 7 table 2 skills framework adapted from future of jobs report, world economic forum (wef) (2018), and hoadley and kilner (2005) skills (from wef, 2018) skills (hoadley and kilner, 2005) service orientation content context purpose conversation connections quality control complex problem solving critical thinking creativity judgement and decision making active listening people management negotiation cognitive flexibility coordinating with others emotional intelligence the ba honours fm course is designed to take into account the qaa benchmarks, scotland’s quality enhancement framework (qef), the enhancement-led institutional review (elir) and the teaching excellence framework (tef). employers’ viewpoints are also addressed using liaison committees attended by academia and relevant industry members. the ba (hons) course has consistently achieved a course satisfaction rating of over 80% from the nss with a 100% satisfaction rating in 2015-2016. however, the fashion sector is constantly undergoing change and is one of the largest contributors to the uk economy with a market value of 66 billion pounds in 2018 (fashionunited, 2018). globally, consumption patterns and the introduction of digitisation practices such as 3d printers and artificial intelligence for supply chains, is disrupting fashion employment, whilst many consumer reports highlight the need for ‘market prioritisation’ as a strategy for survival (euromonitor, 2017; 2018). the importance of employers and universities working together cannot be underestimated given the skills priorities emerging from research (o’leary, 2015; bennett et al., 2016), which suggests that the gap between degree outcomes and employability skills may have bremner and laing the disrupted workplace: are the digital and group skills needs of employers being addressed by universities? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 8 to be identified more quickly if the education sector is to be competitive. students’ transferable skills are often highlighted in graduate skills attributes frameworks by some universities (e.g. glasgow, oxford brookes, leeds beckett) to enhance students’ and employers’ understanding of the skills and competencies gained from a degree. this is the case in the jisc digital literacies programme, which highlights ‘learner literacies and strategic approaches to their development and support’ (jisc, 2014). as jobs become more transient, skills enhancement and employee development for 4ir will become more streamlined and connected to the workplace (hinchcliffe, 2018), enhancing the student learner journey in any degree programme. this in turn leads to the concept of developing a unique business process model in collaboration with employees, to be incorporated into each degree, similar to strategies suggested by bennett et al. (2016). it has to be noted, however, that ‘lifelong learning’ has to adapt (laurillard et al. 2016; gray, 2016; world economic forum, 2018) and a rethink of education systems has been recommended (gray, 2016). additionally, it highlights the importance of education for sustainable development and associated flexible pedagogies which will provide students with transferable skills for an unknown future. in examining any potential gaps between the fm degree outcomes and employability skills required, feedback from seqs and nss were consulted. in addition, this study uses empirical data to extend and enhance knowledge about potential skills gaps, focusing on data from university alumni and employers. phase one of the research used a mixed methods approach, whilst phase two was solely qualitative. methodology the methodological approach adopted a two-phase mixed methods process, which allowed for the breadth and depth of the topic to be examined. phase one adopted a comprehensive four-stage process (bremner, 2017) of focus groups, interviews, an equestionnaire and follow up interviews. phase two, undertaken eight months later, involved interviewing eight employers as well as key university support staff with career development responsibilities (figure 2). all stages took into account the requirements of the university’s ethics policy, and informed consent was obtained. bremner and laing the disrupted workplace: are the digital and group skills needs of employers being addressed by universities? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 9 figure 2. the methodological stages in order to develop an understanding of the transferability of the degree skills in the fm course, a convenience sample of stage four honours students was selected to take part in two focus groups. the focus groups (n = 2x6) examined the students’ return from workplace experience to university, and any skills gaps they had noted while working in the industry. this interpretivist approach allowed for exploration of their individual experiences (bryman and bell, 2015). post thematic analysis (bryman, 2008) highlighted two areas which needed further examination: group/professional and digital skills. this was subsequently addressed with two alumni using in-depth interviews. a focused approach was adopted in these interviews, discussing the degree-level learning outcomes of the course in order to identify how well skills had transferred and to further probe the two areas of group/professional and digital skills highlighted. themes emerged from these interviews which were similar to those highlighted from the stage four fm students, that is group/professional skills and digital skills. an online questionnaire (table 4) was subsequently developed introducing a positivist element to the research (saunders et al., 2016). the questionnaire examined personal data and explored the use of the modified level learning outcomes using a 5-point likert scale (strongly agree to strongly disagree). the questionnaire also probed participants’ opinions on the missing skills identified at the earlier qualitative research phase. the final section of the questionnaire focused on the use of university training provisions for easing graduates’ transition into the workplace. post pilot (bell, 2010), the questionnaire was distributed to 122 alumni garnering a response rate of 46 % (n=57). from the bremner and laing the disrupted workplace: are the digital and group skills needs of employers being addressed by universities? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 10 questionnaire returns and means analysis, follow up one-to-one interviews (n=7) were conducted, allowing for objective interrogation (denscombe, 2014). table 4. questionnaire themes. theme questions asked 1 four personal demographic type questions about the course 2 four questions on knowledge and understanding of the specific areas of fashion management in relation to the course-level learning outcomes. (three likert scale questions and one open question) 3 10 questions on practical skills usage in the workplace in relation to the course-level learning outcomes. (nine likert scale questions and one open question) 4 nine questions on intellectual skills used in the workplace in relation to the course-level learning outcomes. (13 likert scale questions and one open question) 5 six questions on key employability and transferability of skills to the workplace in relation to the course-level learning outcomes. (five likert scale questions and one open question) 6 five questions on skills students feel they need more of in relation to skills gaps highlighted from the qualitative feedback. (four likert scale questions and one open question) 7 14 questions in relation to the use of university training provisions for personal development. (12 likert scale questions and two open questions) phase two of the research involved semi-structured interviews (ni=8) with employers in the fashion and food marketing sectors, as well as interviews with key professional support service employees working in student employability roles within the university (table 5). here the content of the interviews focused more on the importance of digital skills in the workplace as a key theme identified from the evolution of 4ir. bremner and laing the disrupted workplace: are the digital and group skills needs of employers being addressed by universities? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 11 table 5. sample of employers interviewed with themes of interviews highlighted. business type job role business focus themes 1. marketing/sme owner social communication what are digital skills? 2. marketing/sme owner social communication 3. food agency/ government body communication manager food and marketing  what is the importance of digital skills? 4. manufacturing/sme it director fashion 5. design agency sme design consultant fashion  training and development within the interviewee’s particular business 6. university manager / careers higher education 7. university manager / workplace higher education  the value of higher education degrees. 8. marketing sme joint owner marketing limitations the authors recognise that while there has been a considerable amount of research conducted, there are limitations such as the small sample sizes at some stages of the study and the focus upon a single degree within one institution. the study would need to be replicated for other similar courses and universities to validate the findings on a larger scale. findings/discussion with such a range and amount of data collected, only the key findings are reported here. two themes are included: the gap between employability skills delivered on the fm degree bremner and laing the disrupted workplace: are the digital and group skills needs of employers being addressed by universities? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 12 and those required in the workplace, and the digital skills gap. finally, the relevance of using mixed methods research to enhance student employability will be discussed. the gap between employability skills delivered on the fm degree and those needed in the workplace from phase one of the research, there was overwhelming support for the fact that a majority of degree skills delivered had transferred to placement and first destination employment whether in fashion-related jobs or not. the fm degree was noted by all for its diversity providing a good grounding for employment upon graduating (bremner, 2017). a similar pattern was identified from the e-questionnaire where a number of the degree’s llos were positively skewed (table 6). these included aspects of employability, transferability and enterprise skills, supporting the fact that the fm degree has a high course satisfaction rate (nss 2017), and that some skills transfer effectively when embedded into degrees (crebert et al., 2004; norton, 2016). llos from the questionnaire which did not fare as well included development of digital, group and professional skills. this point was supported by the alumni interviewees (n=7) from the first phase of the research process. a range of ‘digital literacy’ points were noted, such as the use of photoshop, excel, creation of digital portfolios, app development and mail chimp use. interviewee 1 highlighted the need ‘for a range of digital ability within graduates who should be able to use mail chimp and photoshop’. however, interviewee 4 pointed out that ‘more of these ‘digital skills may have been incorporated’ since their own graduation’ suggesting there may no longer be a gap (bremner, 2017, p.4). two students from phase one of the research stated that they did not feel ready for working in groups while on workplace experience, implying that this particular skill set had not transferred as well. participant 1 from focus group one said: ‘i think it is something which will only come from experience’. participant 3 stated that ‘workplace experience, oral presentations and working with “real clients” aided professional /group skills development, and although students do not relish group work, they realise the benefits’. this point was noted by more than one of the alumni interviewees. the group work bremner and laing the disrupted workplace: are the digital and group skills needs of employers being addressed by universities? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 13 included professional skills such as managing conflict and negotiation, team work, and communicating in groups. table 6. means ratings of the statements relating to the llos of the course (statements adapted from the course llos). statement mn score four questions on knowledge and understanding of the specific areas of fashion management in relation to the course-level learning outcomes. (one question was open and not noted here) i have a clear understanding of the application of fashion management within my current job role 1.8 i am confident and familiar with defining concepts, features within my work role 1.8 i can apply research methods/skills in my current role 1.6 10 questions on practical skills usage in the workplace in relation to the course-level learning outcomes. (one question was open and not noted here) i can engage effectively via communication methods and presentation techniques in my workplace 1.2 i can engage professionally via communication methods and presentation techniques in my workplace 1.3 i can produce detailed critiques and projects within a wide range of contexts in my job role 1.6 i am able to use numeracy skills competently 1.5 i am able to use a variety of computer-based packages to manipulate and present data in an appropriate manner 1.5 i can manage my own learning within my workplace, seeking out and making use of feedback 1.3 i can interact effectively in a variety of group situations within my workplace teams 1.2 i am able to use negotiation skills where necessary 1.4 i am able to provide leadership where necessary 1.5 bremner and laing the disrupted workplace: are the digital and group skills needs of employers being addressed by universities? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 14 nine questions on intellectual skills used in the workplace in relation to the course-level learning outcomes. (one question was open and not noted here) i am confident at making accurate selection and application of fashion management principles and procedures to solve a range of professional situations and problems 1.8 i can solve a variety of work-based problems autonomously 1.5 i am able to identify and classify principles and ideas within new work situations 1.5 i am able to analyse ideas systematically, effectively and critically within new work situations 1.5 i can develop ideas in support of well-structured arguments and in evolving new concepts 1.5 i am able to integrate fashion management theory within professional practice, for example, consumer behaviour 1.6 i am increasingly independent, confident and flexible in identifying and defining complex problems 1.5 i am increasingly independent, confident and flexible in the application of knowledge and skills appropriate for the job in hand 1.4 i am able to synthesise facts and ideas into a well-structured argument 1.5 six questions on key employability and transferability of skills to the workplace in relation to the course-level learning outcomes. (one question was open and not noted here) i can critically assess the nature of the interaction between the elements of the creative, business and corporate activities 1.6 in undertaking my fashion research dissertation, i feel it has helped me with my job role 2.1 i have the ability to synthesise areas of difficulty, contention and controversy within my selected job 1.6 i can deal with complex ethical issues in accordance with my current professional practice 1.8 i can deal with complex professional issues in accordance with my current professional practice 1.7 bremner and laing the disrupted workplace: are the digital and group skills needs of employers being addressed by universities? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 15 five questions on skills they feel they need more of in relation to skills gaps highlighted from the qualitative feedback. (one question was open and not noted here) i feel i had enough digital skills development, such as creating web pages 2.5 i feel i needed more development of numeracy skills 1.8 i feel i could have done with more development in group work considering conflict and negotiation 2.4 i feel i had enough development of soft skills, such as dealing with people 1.8 1 = strongly agree 5 = strongly disagree the final section of the e-questionnaire (table 7), which examined preand postgraduation views of alumni with regard to employability skills, highlighted small variances in most of the areas. a minimal variance is highlighted in ‘dealing with groups in the workplace’ (mn= 0.1). table 7. means responses to variances in ‘did you have enough training in’ and ‘did you want more training in’ questions relating directly to these employability areas. question mn before graduation mn after graduation var 14 questions in relation to the use of university training provisions for personal development – preand post-graduation. (plus two open questions) developing your linkedin profile 1.9 1.6 0.3 getting your cv work ready 1.5 1.4 0.1 interview techniques 2.0 1.6 0.4 assessment centre techniques 2.0 2.0 0 how to complete an online job application 1.9 1.8 0.1 how to deal with groups in the workplace 1.9 1.8 0.1 1 = strongly agree 5 = strongly disagree the findings around professional/group work skills build upon the work of hoadley and kilner (2005) and fearon et al. (2012), as it extends their research and highlights the need to manage teams in group work assessment sessions in a more ‘workplace-relevant’ bremner and laing the disrupted workplace: are the digital and group skills needs of employers being addressed by universities? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 16 manner. in light of the analysis of the data, the authors recommend that future university teaching should address skills development for students in digital literacy, digital storytelling and group collaboration (table 8). table 8 author recommendations from the wef and hoadley and kilner (2005) research (gray, 2016; hoadley and kilner, 2005). skills (from wef, 2018) skills (from hoadley and kilner, 2005) author recommendations professional skills service orientation content context purpose conversation connections digital literacy (including digital storytelling) group collaboration quality control complex problem solving critical thinking creativity judgement and decision making active listening people management negotiation cognitive flexibility coordinating with others emotional intelligence taking this into account, as recommended by bremner (2017; 2018), and reflecting upon the implications of the research for academia, a ‘communities 4 practice’ ethos, based on the c4p model (figure 1) was piloted in a stage-four module on the fm degree (2018) in order to increase the level of professional /group skills transferability. a ‘team’ contract was deployed among the students in order to emulate work practice situations. this was welcomed by the external examiner, who commented that the approach was “providing a realistic scenario and assessment method for the students in terms of the work environment they will experience after leaving university”. students found this provided a much better structure to work with in their teams, noting that it facilitated some selfdirection and a more realistic approach (seq feedback). in 2019 this has been further bremner and laing the disrupted workplace: are the digital and group skills needs of employers being addressed by universities? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 17 developed, with the addition of a reflective section for students, which has yet to be evaluated. digital skills gaps and employers’ points of view the eight employer interviews (table 5) provided some useful findings to support the embedding of digital skills. firstly, in defining the term ‘digital skills’, the interviewees noted technical and functional aspects, citing the use of ‘it packages, typing’ (i7), ‘content development, social media’, (i1/2) and ‘digital communication and brand presentation’ (i5) as key aspects. all eight employers highlighted the increasing need for company employees to have digital skills, and ‘improving strategy, customer relationships’ (i4), data analysis and increasing profits were cited as benefits for the business. as interviewee 8 noted, this ‘was driven in some cases by consumer demand’. the university interviewees noted that graduates are not always clear on what their digital literacy is, and are not always good at recognising their own digital skills. for example, i6 noted ‘they have been taught to work with specific it programmes such as final cut pro but would not recognise this as a development in their digital literacy’. in terms of higher education, there was a general consensus, with six of the employer interviewees noting that universities should have some sort of ‘digital’ input in place in any degree discipline, which was in slight contrast to the remaining two interviewees from the marketing field (i 1 and i8), who indicated that only marketing-type courses needed digital skills input. in terms of digital skills ‘futures’, all interviewees stressed the need for greater knowledge and ability with ‘digital’, highlighting that new employees should ‘come prepared’ for employment with appropriate digital skills, such as the ability to create content and data mine information. yet training and development in these skills seems to be piecemeal and tends to revolve around what is needed technically, such as specific it programmes, and on an ad hoc basis in a number of the companies interviewed. there was one exception in which a specific social communication company adopted a monthly training approach to digital skills development: ‘we have a programme of relevant training and development on a monthly basis’ (i1). in addition, all of the employer interviewees (ni=8) indicated that digital skills transferred within the workplace, although this was dependent on the type of employment (however, bremner and laing the disrupted workplace: are the digital and group skills needs of employers being addressed by universities? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 18 one sme owner stressed they are not ‘benefiting from digital skills transfer’ (i 5)). they felt they were not seeing the more useful skills being transferred to the workplace, that is graduates only know some it programmes. finally, digital skills were noted as very relevant for the future with the fast-paced nature of change, in particular the visualisation of data analytics. however, interviewees also noted the failure of universities to keep up with these changing digital skills. the employer interviewees ended with a strong suggestion that digital skills are necessary for company survival. these findings build upon the works of hounsell (2011), laurillard et al. (2016), o’leary (2015), bennett et al., (2016), ecorys uk (2016), scottish government and price waterhouse cooper (2018) who all noted the need for digital skills in both learning and workplace contexts. the research enhances jisc’s (2014) definition of digital literacy, the works of gallardo-echenique et al. (2015) and supports the use of beetham and sharpe’s framework (2010) in degrees, in order to aid educational development. in terms of collaboration it concurs with employability in scotland (2017) and the world economic forum (2018) need for a collective approach where educationalists and employers should work more closely together on course development to ensure there are no skills gaps. finally it adds to the work of bennett et al. (2016) and confirms the need for a rethink of education systems noted by the world economic forum (2016, 2018). observations the above two sections of this paper highlight findings from qualitative and quantitative research which can be used in addition to the seqs and nss surveys. whilst the seqs and nss give good data, this is obtained prior to first destination employment and may be used by students to comment negatively if they have received poor grades for their degree courses. they are a form of course satisfaction measure and do not necessarily highlight any gaps in course delivery, which in turn may affect student employability. however, this study’s use of a mixed methods approach can enhance the nss and seq data. for example, findings from this study have supported course development and the ilsr to confirm the introduction of more ‘digitally skilled’ focused modules. for professional /group skills, the c4p model has been adapted into a coursework assignment to make the scenario more representative of industry and integrates reflective practice. evidence of successful implementation is a work in progress; however, two alumni from the 2018 bremner and laing the disrupted workplace: are the digital and group skills needs of employers being addressed by universities? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 19 fashion management cohort are employed as a ‘digital marketing executive’ at porsche, and ‘content developer’ at a social communication company. this supports the points raised by the employer interviewees about graduates being digitally ready, coming prepared for the job in hand. wider research is required to ensure depth and breadth of information can be provided in relation to employability and the degree. at the strategic university level, research has been ongoing, using mixed methods approaches with key stakeholders (employers and students) to provide a ‘bag of skills’ required to meet the needs of a university graduate, and working towards the new proposed university graduate outcomes framework developed at strategic level. the issue for practitioners lies in the speed at which course changes can be implemented; if universities are to ‘disrupt,’ keeping pace with the speed of change, module changes maybe need to be more flexible. recommendations recommendations from this research are as follows. collaboration with employers and flexibility in course development is required as new information has been identified, ongoing work is required to keep skills up to date on the fm degree. to do this successfully, collaboration and engagement with employers is key to this process. an employer champion could be sought for each module to support and enhance skills transferability and development outcomes. in addition, students could complete skills diaries to keep a log of what they have learned, what they need to learn, and how they are going to achieve this, as part of their learner journey. this could occur via a new it programme used in our university which adopts this approach. on a more strategic level, universities and employers must collaborate more through partnerships to ensure the right group/professional /digital skills are incorporated for the future. this means employers need to work more closely with degree developers to future proof students, giving clarity on skill sets and outcomes requiring development in order to provide clearer graduate outcomes and attributes. it is clear that both employers and students need development in articulating their skills. however, this may mean that educationalists have to think ‘outside of the box’, as flexibility on llos may be required in order to deliver outcomes which respond to a disrupted workplace. bremner and laing the disrupted workplace: are the digital and group skills needs of employers being addressed by universities? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 20 use mixed methods research for employability skills feedback taking on board the findings, it is clear that a mixed methods approach with a variety of sources is required to gather data, alongside the course feedback obtained, if universities are to make relevant changes to the degrees. it would be useful to interview the same respondents annually, for feedback on employability skills, how they have evolved, and how this may impact on the fashion management course, but logistically this may not be easy. nevertheless, structured research should take place to ensure the modules deliver as many of these digital and group/professional skills as possible. as the fourth industrial revolution develops, new skills will develop, and requirements may change. the closing of the loop needs to be more effective. conclusions the aim of this research was to explore and evaluate any skills gaps for stage 4 fm students transitioning into the workplace. while seq and nss data provides useful information, it does not provide data from alumni who have moved into work, nor does it examine employers’ perspectives. it was clear from the mixed methods research that the fashion management alumni believed that changes were required in relation to group/professional and digital skills within the degree programme. while some changes have been incorporated into the course, based on the research findings, further research is required to assess the impact. the additional employer research conducted added to the debate on the importance of digital skills and the need for future employees to begin work ‘digitally ready’. it is therefore recognised that these mixed methods approaches are useful in ascertaining skills gaps, and this is a vital step in enhancing course development to aid in the development of flexible pedagogies and to move with the pace of industry. bremner and laing the disrupted workplace: are the digital and group skills needs of employers being addressed by universities? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 21 references beetham, h. and sharpe, r. (2011) ‘digital literacies workshop’. jisc developing digital literacies programme. available at: https://www.jisc.ac.uk/full-guide/developingdigital-literacies (accessed: 10 dec 2019). bell, j. (2010) doing your research project: a guide for first time researchers in education and social science. london: the open university. bennett, d., richardson. s. and mackinnon, p. (2016) ‘enacting strategies for graduate employability: how universities can best support students to develop generic skill: part b appendices’. australian government office for learning and teaching, department of education and training [online] available at: https://melbournecshe.unimelb.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0011/1874774/sp133258_curtin_bennett_graduate-employability_final-report_part-a_20163.pdf (accessed: 27 oct 2019). black, j. (2013) ‘from student to young professional: what to expect from working life’, the guardian, 24 june 2013. available at: https://www.theguardian.com/careers/careers-blog/student-working-professionalguide-to-transition (accessed: june 2016). bremner, p. a. m. (2017) ‘from fourth year to the outside world: are we making our fashion graduates ‘work ready’ – are their skills transferable into the workplace?’, 3rd qaa international enhancement in higher education conference: inspiring excellence – transforming the student experience. qaa, glasgow 6 8 june. bremner, p. a. m. (2018) ‘the gap between degree outcomes and employability skills’, 15th qaa international enhancement in higher education conference: evaluation, evidence and enhancement: inspiring staff and students. qaa, glasgow caledonian university 7th june. bryman, a. (2008) social research methods. oxford: oxford university press. https://www.jisc.ac.uk/full-guide/developing-digital-literacies https://www.jisc.ac.uk/full-guide/developing-digital-literacies https://melbourne-cshe.unimelb.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0011/1874774/sp13-3258_curtin_bennett_graduate-employability_final-report_part-a_20163.pdf https://melbourne-cshe.unimelb.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0011/1874774/sp13-3258_curtin_bennett_graduate-employability_final-report_part-a_20163.pdf https://melbourne-cshe.unimelb.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0011/1874774/sp13-3258_curtin_bennett_graduate-employability_final-report_part-a_20163.pdf https://www.theguardian.com/careers/careers-blog/student-working-professional-guide-to-transition https://www.theguardian.com/careers/careers-blog/student-working-professional-guide-to-transition https://openair.rgu.ac.uk/handle/10059/2388 https://openair.rgu.ac.uk/handle/10059/2388 bremner and laing the disrupted workplace: are the digital and group skills needs of employers being addressed by universities? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 22 bryman, a. and bell, e. (2015) business research methods. 4th edn. oxford: oxford university press. cbi (2017) helping the uk to thrive: cbi/pearson education and skills survey 2017. available at: https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/cbisc-helping-the-uk-thrive-2017 (accessed: 11 december 2019). cipd (2017) skills development in the uk workplace. available at: https://www.cipd.co.uk/knowledge/work/skills/skills-factsheet, (accessed: 10 may 2018). cipd (2019) skills development in the uk workplace. available at: https://www.cipd.co.uk/knowledge/work/skills/skills-factsheet, (accessed: 10 may 2018). crebert, g., bates, m., bell. b., patrick, c. and cragnolini, v (2004) ‘developing generic skills at university, during work placement and in employment: graduates' perceptions’, higher education research & development, 23(2), pp.147-165. denscombe, m. (2014) the good research guide. philadelphia: open university press. ecorys uk. (2016) ‘digital skills for the uk economy’. department for business innovation and skills, and department for culture media and sport. available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/4928 89/dcmsdigitalskillsreportjan2016.pdf (accessed: 16 june 2016). euromonitor passport (2017) digital consumer index: pinpointing the most promising digital opportunities. available at: https://www.euromonitor.com/2017-digitalconsumer-index-pinpointing-the-most-promising-digital-opportunities/report (accessed: 6 may 2018). euromonitor passport (2018) digital consumer index: pinpointing the most promising digital opportunities. available at: https://go.euromonitor.com/white-paper-digitalconsumer-2019-digital-consumer-index-identifying-key-opportunities-for-digitalhttps://www.bl.uk/collection-items/cbisc-helping-the-uk-thrive-2017 https://www.cipd.co.uk/knowledge/work/skills/skills-factsheet https://www.cipd.co.uk/knowledge/work/skills/skills-factsheet https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/492889/dcmsdigitalskillsreportjan2016.pdf https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/492889/dcmsdigitalskillsreportjan2016.pdf https://www.euromonitor.com/2017-digital-consumer-index-pinpointing-the-most-promising-digital-opportunities/report https://www.euromonitor.com/2017-digital-consumer-index-pinpointing-the-most-promising-digital-opportunities/report https://go.euromonitor.com/white-paper-digital-consumer-2019-digital-consumer-index-identifying-key-opportunities-for-digital-investment.html https://go.euromonitor.com/white-paper-digital-consumer-2019-digital-consumer-index-identifying-key-opportunities-for-digital-investment.html bremner and laing the disrupted workplace: are the digital and group skills needs of employers being addressed by universities? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 23 investment.html (accessed: 20 january 2019). fashionunited uk (2018) fashion industry statistics. available at: https://fashionunited.uk/uk-fashion-industry-statistics/ (accessed: 7 june 2019). fearon, c., mclaughlin, h. and eng, t. y. (2012) ‘using student group work in higher education to emulate professional communities of practice’, education + training, 54(2/3), pp.114-125. ferrari, a. (2012) digital competence in practice: an analysis of frameworks. luxembourg: publications office of the european union. gallardo-echenique, e., minelli de oliveira, j. luis marqués-molias, l. and esteve-mon f., (2015) ‘digital competence in the knowledge society’, merlot journal of online learning and teaching, 11(1), pp.1-16. gray, a. (2016) ‘the 10 skills you need to thrive in the fourth industrial revolution’. world economic forum. available at: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/01/the-10skills-you-need-to-thrive-in-the-fourth-industrial-revolution/ (accessed: 10 may 2018). hamill, j. (2018) ‘the future of jobs in a world of ai and robotics’, leading digital: digital leaders blog. available at: http://www.futuredigitalleaders.com/blog/the-future-ofjobs-in-the-world-of-ai-and-robotics (accessed: 10 may 2018). harvey l., moon, s., geall, v. and bower, r. (1997) ‘graduates’ work: organisation change and students’ attributes’, birmingham: centre for research into quality (crq) and association of graduate recruiters (agr). high fliers (2018) the graduate market in 2018. available at: https://www.highfliers.co.uk/download/2018/graduate_market/gmreport18.pdf (accessed: 10 may 2018). https://go.euromonitor.com/white-paper-digital-consumer-2019-digital-consumer-index-identifying-key-opportunities-for-digital-investment.html https://fashionunited.uk/uk-fashion-industry-statistics/ https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/01/the-10-skills-you-need-to-thrive-in-the-fourth-industrial-revolution/ https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/01/the-10-skills-you-need-to-thrive-in-the-fourth-industrial-revolution/ http://www.futuredigitalleaders.com/blog/the-future-of-jobs-in-the-world-of-ai-and-robotics http://www.futuredigitalleaders.com/blog/the-future-of-jobs-in-the-world-of-ai-and-robotics https://www.highfliers.co.uk/download/2018/graduate_market/gmreport18.pdf bremner and laing the disrupted workplace: are the digital and group skills needs of employers being addressed by universities? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 24 hinchcliffe. d. (2018) ‘designing the digital workplace for the end-to-end employee experience’, available at: https://dionhinchcliffe.com/2018/05/10/designing-thedigital-workplace-for-the-end-to-end-employee-experience/ (accessed: 10 may 2018). hinchliffe, g. w. and jolly, a. (2010) ‘graduate identity and employability’, british education research journal, 37(4), pp. 563 – 584. hoadley, c. m. and kilner, p.g. (2005) ‘using technology to transform communities of practice into knowledge building communities’, siggroup bulletin, 25(1), pp. 3140. hodgkinson-williams, c., stay, h. and sieborger, i. (2008) ‘developing communities of practice within and outside higher education institutions’, british journal of educational technology, 39(3), pp. 433-442. hounsell, d. (2011) ‘graduates for the 21st century: integrating the enhancement themes’ the quality assurance agency for higher education 2011 available at: http://www.enhancementthemes.ac.uk (accessed: 10 may 2018). jackson, d. (2014) ‘testing a model of undergraduate competence in employability skills and its implications for stakeholders’, journal of education and work, 27(2), pp. 220–242. jackson, d. and chapman e. (2012) ‘non-technical competencies in undergraduate business degree programs: australian and uk perspectives’, studies in higher education, 37(5), pp. 541-567. jenkins, a., vignoles, a., wolf. a. and galindo-rueda, f. (2002) ‘the determinants and effects of lifelong learning’, centre for the economics of education, london: london school of economics and political science. https://dionhinchcliffe.com/2018/05/10/designing-the-digital-workplace-for-the-end-to-end-employee-experience/ https://dionhinchcliffe.com/2018/05/10/designing-the-digital-workplace-for-the-end-to-end-employee-experience/ http://www.enhancementthemes.ac.uk/ bremner and laing the disrupted workplace: are the digital and group skills needs of employers being addressed by universities? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 25 jisc (2014) developing digital literacies. available at: https://www.jisc.ac.uk/guides/developing-digital-literacies (accessed: 15 may 2019). laal, m. and salamati, p. (2012) ‘lifelong learning; why do we need it’, procedia social and behavioral sciences, 31, pp. 399-403. laurillard, d. derrick, j. and doel, m. (2016) building digital skills in the fe sector. available at: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attach ment_data/file/634181/skills_and_lifelong_learning__digital_skills_in_further_education_-_laurillard_-_final.pdf (accessed 10 december 2019) lave, j. and wenger, e. (1991) situated learning: legitimate peripheral participation. new york: cambridge university press. linkedin (2018) available at: https://www.linkedin.com/ (accessed april 2018). maguire, s. and guyer, c. (2004) ‘preparing geography, earth and environmental science (gees) students for employment in the enterprise culture’, journal of geography in higher education, 28(3), pp. 369-379. monster uk (2018) available at: https://www.monster.co.uk/ (accessed: april 2018). norton, s. (2016) embedding employability in higher education for student success. available at: https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/system/files/downloads/employability_viewpoint_july 16_1.pdf (accessed: 5 july: 2016). o’leary, s. (2017) ‘graduates’ experiences of, and attitudes towards, the inclusion of employability-related support in undergraduate degree programmes; trends and variations by subject discipline and gender’, journal of education and work, 30(1), pp. 84-105. https://www.jisc.ac.uk/guides/developing-digital-literacies https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/18770428 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/18770428 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/18770428/31/supp/c https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/634181/skills_and_lifelong_learning_-_digital_skills_in_further_education_-_laurillard_-_final.pdf https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/634181/skills_and_lifelong_learning_-_digital_skills_in_further_education_-_laurillard_-_final.pdf https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/634181/skills_and_lifelong_learning_-_digital_skills_in_further_education_-_laurillard_-_final.pdf https://www.linkedin.com/ https://www.monster.co.uk/ https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/system/files/downloads/employability_viewpoint_july16_1.pdf https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/system/files/downloads/employability_viewpoint_july16_1.pdf bremner and laing the disrupted workplace: are the digital and group skills needs of employers being addressed by universities? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 26 price waterhouse cooper (2018) employability guide. available at: https://www.pwc.co.uk/careers/documents/brochure-employability.pdf (accessed: 10 may 2018). saunders, m., lewis, p. and thornhill, a. (2016) research methods for business students. 6th edn. london: prentice hall. scottish government (2016) enhancing learning and teaching through the use of digital technology. available at: https://beta.gov.scot/publications/enhancing-learningteaching-through-use-digital-technology/ (accessed: 18 may 2018). skills development scotland (2019) ‘collective approach to skills must continue as new research shows digital economy growth’, employability in scotland. available at: https://www.skillsdevelopmentscotland.co.uk/news-events/2017/april/collectiveapproach-to-skills-must-continue-as-new-research-shows-digital-economy-growth/ (accessed: 10 dec 2019). walker, h. (2014) employability plus @rgu. available at: file:///c:/users/sarah/downloads/strategicstatementemployabilityfinal.pdf (accessed: 10 may 2018). wilton, n. (2012) ‘the impact of work placements on skills development and career outcomes for business and management graduates’, studies in higher education, 37(5), pp. 603–620. world economic forum (2018) operating models for the future of consumption. available at: http://www3.weforum.org/docs/wef_operating_models_for_the_future_of_consu mption.pdf (accessed: 10 may 2018). https://www.pwc.co.uk/careers/documents/brochure-employability.pdf https://beta.gov.scot/publications/enhancing-learning-teaching-through-use-digital-technology/ https://beta.gov.scot/publications/enhancing-learning-teaching-through-use-digital-technology/ https://www.skillsdevelopmentscotland.co.uk/news-events/2017/april/collective-approach-to-skills-must-continue-as-new-research-shows-digital-economy-growth/ https://www.skillsdevelopmentscotland.co.uk/news-events/2017/april/collective-approach-to-skills-must-continue-as-new-research-shows-digital-economy-growth/ file:///c:/users/sarah/downloads/strategicstatementemployabilityfinal.pdf http://www3.weforum.org/docs/wef_operating_models_for_the_future_of_consumption.pdf http://www3.weforum.org/docs/wef_operating_models_for_the_future_of_consumption.pdf bremner and laing the disrupted workplace: are the digital and group skills needs of employers being addressed by universities? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 27 author details dr pauline a m bremner is a lecturer at robert gordon university in aberdeen. she teaches in the school of creative and cultural business, focusing upon the areas of strategy, internationalisation and omni channel fashion. her research interests encompass the skills development and skills transferability of graduates and the gift giving of toys to children within the sphere of consumption. dr audrey laing is a lecturer at robert gordon university in aberdeen. she teaches in the school of creative and cultural business, focusing upon the areas of communication, research theory and practice, and consumer psychology. her research interests encompass the interaction of people and technology, and she undertakes ongoing research into the impact of digital disruption upon readers, bookshops and booksellers. the disrupted workplace: are the digital and group skills needs of employers being addressed by universities? abstract introduction literature review methodology limitations findings/discussion the gap between employability skills delivered on the fm degree and those needed in the workplace digital skills gaps and employers’ points of view observations recommendations collaboration with employers and flexibility in course development is required use mixed methods research for employability skills feedback conclusions references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 12: november 2017 editorial sue eccles bournemouth university amanda french birmingham city university, uk lucy gray open university, uk andy hagyard university of leeds, uk john hilsdon plymouth university, uk christina howell-richardson birkbeck, university of london, uk moira maguire dundalk institute of technology, ireland we are delighted to introduce issue 12 of the journal of learning development in higher education. this diverse issue includes seven papers, a case study, an opinion piece and a book review which between them consider a range of topics broadly associated with enhancing student support and performance. despite increasing interest in the development of learners’ socio-emotional intelligence, little attention has been paid to the role of learning development in supporting this. camila devis-rozental, sue eccles and marian mayer explore this in their article, ‘developing socio-emotional intelligence in first year higher education students through one-to-one learning development tutorials.’ drawing on an analysis of feedback from students who used the service and a focus group, the authors concluded that ‘it would appear that the intervention of ld tutorials, supports students in becoming self-directed and more confident learners, able to fully engage with their university experience’ (p.14). the participants provide rich descriptions of the wider benefits of one-to-one learning development support and highlight the importance of this aspect of our work. editorial journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 2 students’ growing preference for accessing and receiving feedback on academic work online, and their associated learning needs, are explored in a paper by michael hast of st mary’s university, twickenham, uk. entitled ‘supporting student transition to higher education feedback: an evaluation of an online feedback training approach’, hast’s paper describes a series of activities embedded in a first year undergraduate module. this included a lecture on how to use feedback provided online. an important finding is that those students who undertook the preparatory training were better able to make productive use of their online feedback than those who did not. christine fanthome’s paper, ‘maximising the benefits associated with internship learning for undergraduates,’ offers a fascinating account of how students evaluate their experiences of work placements in a particular context (us students on london based internships). the paper explores the personal and professional learning that students perceive has resulted. fanthome, who works for boston university study abroad, london, uk, highlights that “the playing field is not level” and describes how financial, social and cultural inequalities can generate disadvantages for some. a key finding is that preparatory and ongoing online support materials would be welcomed by the intern participants, and would help them to make the most of their placement experiences. justin o’brien and donna brown’s paper is also concerned with vocational learning and addresses the task of developing partnerships with business to provide situated learning opportunities for mba students at a level of challenge commensurate with their prior knowledge and experience. at the core of the paper is the question of how to develop mba students’ learning capacity to integrate and reconcile new and existing theory and experience, through genuine, co-operative participation in business projects. o’brien and brown delve deeply into kolb’s theory of experiential learning cycle and critically discuss the development and practicalities of their own model of an “equitable, tripartite cashless exchange” of knowledge, expertise and knowledge as praxis involving the business organisation, mba students and academic faculty members. the paper concludes with a discussion, based on 5 years of practice, of hurdles to developing such partnerships and potential solutions. sofia chanda-gool and christoforos mamas’s paper, ‘coming from somewhere else – group engagement between students and academics’, considers the importance of collaborative learning through group work, suggesting that anxieties about individual students’ academic achievements can inhibit the enjoyment and skill in shared learning. editorial journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 3 the authors highlight the potential risks associated with prioritising ‘assessment’ over ‘relationships’, suggesting that relationships are central in preparation for assessment. drawing on an ethnographic, qualitative and emancipatory approach to research, the authors make recommendations for overcoming some tensions and fears that can inhibit effective group work. group work can provide a creative, empowering avenue so students become proactive in their learning and engage more equally with academics. victoria park and gelareh holbrook’s paper, ‘student perceptions of the effectiveness of self-editing on their writing: towards a self-regulated approach’ explores the impact of native english-speaking postgraduate students self-editing their own work. their study evaluates the usefulness of a self-editing worksheet based on students’ perspectives and feedback from writing tutors and the subject lecturer (staff). findings from their study note that students found the worksheet useful and it helped them make some positive changes to the way they thought about and constructed their essays. although this paper focuses on postgraduate students, it highlights that not all students start their studies with the same experiences (and confidence) in writing for academic purposes and this self-editing approach allows them to take responsibility and credit for improvements as they progress through their programme. they conclude that self-editing helps students not only evaluate and address their weaknesses in writing independently, but also identify their strengths – leading to improvements to the overall student learning experience. finally anne quinney et al’s paper reports on the work of the centre for excellence in learning (cel) at bournemouth university which was created to promote, support and co-ordinate pedagogic initiatives and embed the explicit valuing of teaching and learning into all aspects of university life. in particular it considers its recent bu ‘fusion’ a corporate strategy which promotes clear links between pedagogy, professional practice and research. this initiative offers a model for managing change and supporting more flexible academic identities which are both increasingly a characteristic of contemporary he life. ronan bree’s case study picks up michael hast’s theme of digital environments and focuses on the affordances of augmented reality (ar) as a useful digital tool which can be effectively integrated with relevant lecture notes. bree suggests that these is a risk that advances in digital tools can potentially result in excessive supplementary resources, often across multiple platforms. this paper evaluates the use of ar with a group of undergraduate science students in order to enrich the teaching and learning of complex scientific processes. the technology used provided ‘trigger’ images placed in a printed editorial journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 4 handout from which students could engage with specific multimedia content in real-time at the appropriate part of their course. examples of these multimedia resources were preexisting online, or customised electronic sketch, videos. bree’s paper assesses the role and benefit of ar in empowering students with regard to their learning and the steps needed to introduce ar. andrew hollyhead and john curwin’s opinion piece continues the theme of vocational learning. making a difference to student employability through assessment explores ways in which student employability can be supported in higher education. the authors argue that well-designed assessment, in addition to support through careers advice, visiting speakers, placement opportunities, can make a difference to students’ employability. the authors argue that outcomes from assessment which evidence skills are valued by employers. the authors suggest that assessment is critical for all courses and where assessments provide students with outcomes, experience or artefacts that evidence a ‘can do’ ability this can positively impact on employability. book review in a review of the book, ‘challenges, changes and the teaching excellence framework’ by amanda french and matt o’leary, alex patel from the university of leicester, uk, reminds us of the importance of the debates on this topic in shaping how teaching and learning is conceptualised in uk universities. her review not only gives us an overview of the contents of this book but also a flavour of significant debates critiquing the notion of excellence as it applies to the highly diverse and cross-disciplinary landscape of contemporary uk. crucially patel’s review also alerts potential readers of the book to key content that challenges the way institutions are ranked, the role of ‘big data’ and how it is used in the assessment of quality. editorial text removed from take 4 journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 1: february 2009 making group-work work – an overview carol elston university of leeds, uk background group work now plays an integral part in many undergraduate programmes of study; the aim to prepare students for the world of work where being a team-player is often a required skill. in the world of academia, few doubt the importance of the group project as a means of helping students to develop the required skills, however approaches can differ. some advocate the ‘throw them in at the deep end approach’, suggesting that the group project provides the necessary ‘on the job’ development opportunities in a safe environment. others challenge the assumption that students will develop skills simply by completing group projects and suggest that students benefit from some ‘up front’ development before embarking on a group project (ettington & camp, 2002). by understanding group dynamics and the process by which a group develops, the students know what to expect and are more prepared for the challenges they are likely to face (mcgraw and tidwell, 2001). there is a growing emphasis on pre-group project development and, as such, it is interesting to find that in many cases educators are choosing not to include groupwork development sessions either prior to or during practical group work tasks. studies indicate that this deficiency in developing skills is frequently attributed to lack of time (chapman & van auken, 2001). modules often have limited time allocated to preparation for group work and in many cases the student’s first exposure to working as part of a group is a team project. it was this lack of pre-project development along with the growing evidence that many students harbour a negative attitude to group work that prompted the conception of the making group-work work resource. developed by three partners from the learnhigher cetl (the universities of bradford, leeds and brunel), the resource has been specifically designed to make it easier for educators to develop elston case study: making group-work work – an overview student’s skills without incurring a great deal of time, effort or cost. fortunately, from a pedagogical viewpoint, the subject lends itself to the online environment and the flexibility of the web-based solution allows ‘any time, any place’ access without financial cost for the user. however, although the resource is readily available for flexible independent use, it is assumed that it will generally be incorporated as part of a face-to-face or online discussion session. the intention is that a tutor will refer to the resource during a learning session or signpost the resource for pre or post session reference. the resource the resource is a website comprising ten episodes following a group of five students tasked with developing and delivering a group presentation. the project follows a timeline starting with the students’ first meeting, concluding with an analysis of the presentation. the points on the timeline relate to a number of learning issues derived from research (hartley & thorpe, 2001). episode and title focus – main topics 1. the first meeting • first impressions • reading body language • group composition • assumptions and opinions 2. getting started • planning • allocating of tasks • facilitating discussion 3. what is our approach? • decision making • maintaining focus 4. managing conflict • causes and effects of conflict • managing conflict • leadership and roles 5. meeting the tutor • seeking help • the tutor’s role journal of learning development in higher education, issue 1: february 2009 2 elston case study: making group-work work – an overview • student and tutor interaction • productive discussion 6. structuring the presentation • productive discussion • delivery style • defining roles 7. participation and sub-groups • participation • sub-groups • attitudes and assumptions 8. assessment • individual contribution • group assessment • peer assessment • self assessment • tutor assessment 9. support and feedback • group discussion • giving feedback • peer support 10. evaluating the experience • group dynamics • analysis • lessons learned figure 1 the main focus for the episodes the episodes are accessed from a menu and are supported by help information designed for both students and tutors. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 1: february 2009 3 elston case study: making group-work work – an overview figure 2 resource menu options the issues identified within each episode are supported by learning resources accommodating a diverse range of learning preferences. although the video clips have been identified as providing the back-bone of the resource, the additional learning resources that surround the video clips within each episode provide more focussed learning opportunities. the videos provide a visual stimulus for discussion with the resources providing more detailed help with specific issues. each episode includes discussion points, learning resources and an audio commentary that sums up the learning outcomes from the episode. these alternative learning objects reinforce the intended learning outcomes but also, and more importantly, provide learning alternatives. the aim is for the resource to appeal to those with differing learning styles and learning needs as well as those with accessibility constraints. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 1: february 2009 4 elston case study: making group-work work – an overview figure 3 episode 1 from the making group-work work resource dissemination and evaluation the resource was launched in february 2008 and has been well received by both students and educators. statistics show that the resource is being accessed worldwide, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. dissemination is ongoing and the figures show a growing awareness of the resource with over one thousand unique users accessing the resource in november 2008. evaluation played an important part during the development stages of the resource and has been ongoing since the launch. feedback from conferences and workshops show that the resource has been well received by tutors: ‘i will use it as a way to introduce the need for reflective practice in improving group work it reflects the variety of approaches and flexibility needed and that self management relies on.’ ‘not sure if i'm typical but i have already embedded the link in an online study advice resource and now that the website has more complete orientation and journal of learning development in higher education, issue 1: february 2009 5 elston case study: making group-work work – an overview guidance for staff and students i'll be encouraging colleagues to use it directly with their students. all in all a really useful resource thanks!’ since the launch, feedback has shown that tutors use the resource in several ways: 1. students are provided with the web address of the resource either directly or through a virtual learning environment (vle). they are expected to refer to the resource independently if and when needed. 2. students are referred to the resource and directed to watch one or more of the episodes before a face-to-face or online discussion session. 3. students are referred to the resource on a needs basis; if they identify a problem they are sign-posted to the relevant episode. in each case the impact on the tutor’s time or effort is less than the more traditional methods for providing help. typically tutors either provide theoretical sessions on group dynamics and development prior to the group project or they provide one-toone help as issues arise (often responding to the same issues several times, duplicating effort). although tutor engagement is encouraging we are yet to confirm the levels of student acceptance. a current research project is following a cohort of first year undergraduate students who have viewed the video clips and documented their impressions using a blog. the students taking part in the discussions provide a positive indication that they have engaged with the videos and are able to identify with the characters and their personality traits. the scenarios enabled the students to successfully identify group strengths and weaknesses and provoked discussion and opinion. although not conclusive, the data indicates that the resource has proved to be informative and has the potential to change practice. data provided by a series of student focus groups will hopefully confirm these findings. this is just a brief overview of the making group-work work resource; to discover more, access the resource via the learnhigher website at www.learnhigher.ac.uk or journal of learning development in higher education, issue 1: february 2009 6 http://www.learnhigher.ac.uk/ elston case study: making group-work work – an overview directly at www.learnhighergroupwork.com. the resource is free to use and your comments and feedback would be appreciated. references chapman, k., van auken, s. (2001) creating positive group project experiences: an examination of the role of the instructor on students' perceptions of group projects journal of marketing education 23(2):117-127 ettington, d. r. and camp, r. r. (2002) facilitating transfer of skills between group projects and work teams journal of management education, vol. 26: pp. 356 379. hartley & thorpe, 2001 "groupwork!" groaned the students. "as if we haven't enough to do." an examination of the key issues surrounding assessed groupwork from the student perspective. (peter hartley and louise thorpe, sheffield hallam university) paper to ilt annual conference, university of york. mcgraw, p, tidwell, a. (2001). teaching group process skills to mba students: a short workshop education and training volume: 43(3), pp. 162–171 author details carol elston is the e-learning advisor for skills@library, university of leeds. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 1: february 2009 7 http://www.learnhighergroupwork.com/ making group-work work – an overview background the resource dissemination and evaluation author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 18: october 2020 ________________________________________________________________________ use of a marking rubric and self-assessment to provide feedforward to level 5 undergraduate sport students: student perceptions, performance and marking efficiency edward john bradley university of sunderland steven anderson university of sunderland laurence eagle university of wolverhampton abstract the aim of this study was to identify whether level 5 sport students find a rubric and selfassessment helpful in providing feedforward on a lab report, and if the rubric improved performance and marking efficiency. a questionnaire was administered to 58 students in order to identify perceptions. marking time, report grades and classification were compared with the previous year. a significant improvement in the report mark of 7% (ρ=0.029) from the previous year and an increase in the number of passes in the higher classifications, along with a 25-minute decrease in the mean marking time, were observed. perceptions of the rubric were generally positive in terms of increasing students’ understanding of the assessment. the role of the rubric in the self-assessment process was beneficial, as it enabled students to understand what they were doing well and what they needed to improve. overall, rubrics should be considered when implementing a laboratory-based practical assessment and report. keywords: assessment; rubrics; perceptions; feedforward. bradley et al. use of a marking rubric and self-assessment to provide feedforward to level 5 undergraduate sport students: student perceptions, performance and marking efficiency journal of learning development in higher education, issue 18: october 2020 2 introduction valuable and effective feedback remains an aspiration of higher education. feedback for students can emanate from a range of sources and is subject to much academic research and discourse. educators continue to strive for continuous improvement through managed and documented feedback cycles. the 21st century context continues to impact on how we understand and are able to support learning effectively, with quality feedback processes remaining a key aim of higher education institutions (nash and winstone, 2017). ultimately, if learners are not able to internalise feedback and act upon it, they will remain dependent on others to determine their learning success. the ability to evaluate feedback and act upon it for learning is an essential graduate attribute, as it underpins the capacity to become a self-determined or autonomous learner (sambell et al., 2013). feedforward in hattie’s (2009) study, formative feedback was rated as the second most important technique in improving learning with a large effect size (es) of 0.90, with feedback in general coming fifth in the list with a medium es of 0.73 (hattie, 2009). the capacity to understand feedback has been termed ‘feedback literacy’ (sutton, 2012), that is productive engagement with feedback and defined as the ‘understandings, capacities and dispositions needed to make sense of information and to use it to enhance work or learning strategies’ (carless and boud, 2018). feedback literacy allows students to reflect on their work, forming one of the cornerstones of kolb’s model of experiential learning (kolb, 1984). it enables students to incorporate teacher commentary more effectively and enhance active learning (winstone et al., (2017a), and this has been shown to develop as students’ progress through university (carless, 2019a). for feedback to be useful and facilitate learning, it needs to be timely, accurate and specific to the work (gibbs and simpson, 2004). however, the general structure of modules and assessment schedules prevent adequate scope for the utilisation of feedback (gibbs, 1999), as the majority of feedback, even if timely in nature, will be given on an assignment that is submitted at the end of a module (higgins et al., 2002). the primary aim of feedback in this circumstance is to highlight issues that the student can act upon in bradley et al. use of a marking rubric and self-assessment to provide feedforward to level 5 undergraduate sport students: student perceptions, performance and marking efficiency journal of learning development in higher education, issue 18: october 2020 3 future pieces of assessment spanning other modules. in the case of subject-specific feedback, it may not be implemented for six to 12 months after progression to the following academic level. therefore, design and implementation of an assessment schedule should consider the inclusion of an earlier formative assessment that enables feedback to be provided to the students (carless, 2019b) so that they are in a position to act and improve work within a module (black and william, 2009; quinton and smallbone, 2010; sambell et al., 2013), therefore increasing uptake and use of the formative comments (carless, 2019b). this process can also be classified as a feedback loop (hounsell et al., 2008) or cycle (price and o’donovan, 2006), in which early guidance and advice is provided that can be implemented as an iterative process and is beneficial for learning. this is likely to promote deep learning, in which ideas and concepts are critically examined and links are formed with existing constructs to develop understanding, as opposed to surface learning of facts and information in an unconnected and passive approach (marton and saljo, 1984), enabling students to interact with the assessment in greater detail. yang and carless (2013) refer to this as the structural dimension of the feedback triangle, relating to how the feedback is organised and structured. feedback which is timely and clearly displayed, and engages the student in the process, is vital for improving student learning. winstone et al.’s (2017b) study of 31 undergraduate psychology students identified specific barriers to understanding feedback relating to clarity of terminology and use of jargon, ability to understand how to implement feedback, ownership of feedback, and willingness to engage with feedback. it is important, therefore, that assessment design reflects these key components of feedback. one means of achieving this is through the integration of marking rubrics with a corresponding feedback process. rubrics marking rubrics are advocated to produce fair, transparent and consistent marking (qaa, 2006), especially since there is a premium placed on assessment by both academic institutions and students. a rubric, if designed well, provides details of the required level of bradley et al. use of a marking rubric and self-assessment to provide feedforward to level 5 undergraduate sport students: student perceptions, performance and marking efficiency journal of learning development in higher education, issue 18: october 2020 4 performance across a set of assessment criteria and standards and has been defined by andrade (2000) as a document that articulates the expectations for an assignment by listing the criteria and describing levels of quality. this has been supported more recently by jönsson and panadero (2017), who state that they are a tool for communicating expectations, and assist in judging the quality of work, while dawson (2017) explains that rubrics should contain 14 design elements including evaluative criteria, levels of quality and appropriate definitions, and accompanying feedback. similarly, allen and tanner (2006) state that a rubric provides scaled levels of achievement against a set of criteria that a learner must exhibit evidence towards. a range of benefits for both higher education academics and students have been found in the use of rubrics. for rubrics to be most effective, it is argued that student engagement and clarity and appropriateness of language are key factors, both of which require time and effort within, and outside of the classroom. atkinson and lim (2013) describe successful application of rubrics − when the barriers to their use are overcome − in the form of positive outcomes for students who go on to improve their next assignment to increase uptake of marking rubrics, clear benefits to educators must be demonstrated, and this has been documented in the available literature, mainly pertaining to improvements in reliability and consistency. hornby (2003) reported increased valid and reliable marking, while cikis and cil (2009) assert that rubrics minimise arbitrariness and inconsistencies in the marking process. variability in marking across five tutors was reduced from 15% to 10% after the introduction of a rubric in a qualitative level 7 assessment (hack, 2013). assessment marking can be sped up (allen and tanner, 2006), as there is less requirement for the marker to provide written feedback across scripts; instead an overview can be provided on the rubric if designed correctly. this is an important point to take forward, as educators may be reluctant to use rubrics due to heavy workloads that limit the time they are able to award to rubric construction. for educators, the benefits include a reported reduction in marking time without having to compromise on the quality of feedback provided. this paper posits that the benefits of using a rubric in conjunction with written feedback outweigh the perceived drawbacks associated with their construction. however, issues do exist in the use of rubrics. these include the simplification of marking, reducing the level of detail in teacher commentary, which may reduce student awareness of the meaning of the feedback as highlighted by winstone et bradley et al. use of a marking rubric and self-assessment to provide feedforward to level 5 undergraduate sport students: student perceptions, performance and marking efficiency journal of learning development in higher education, issue 18: october 2020 5 al. (2017b), or create primarily objective feedback through converting a subjective reason to a direct percentage mark for a given section (kohn, 2006), limiting student application. perceptions whilst there is agreement on the pedagogical benefits of utilising rubrics from a teaching perspective, and their use is becoming more common within higher education institutions, less attention has been given to students’ approaches to and use of rubrics and how rubrics are perceived by the users. in a study of fourteen undergraduate teacher education students in the united states (andrade and du, 2005), the students were positive about rubric use, including understanding the expectations of the teacher, allowing assignment planning, informal self-assessment during assignment composition, and fairness of marking. similarly, 86% of 140 communication design students in ghana indicated that an assessment rubric helped their learning on a practical studio-based graphics assignment (eshun and osei-poku, 2013). wang (2016) reported that 80 chinese students on an english as a foreign language course indicated that a rubric was useful, as it made them aware of expectations of the writing tasks and check their own work as the tasks progressed. however, negative perceptions of marking rubrics do exist. these often focus on the students’ ability to understand the marking rubric, either suggesting that the criteria are too hard to follow (koshy, 2009) or are too general (popham, 1997). students have remarked that learning how to use marking rubrics, through the teacher including time to explain the marking rubric (eshun and osei-poku, 2013) or formative use of the rubric in a classroom assessment, has removed these negative aspects. if a rubric is provided early in the assessment timeframe, it increases transparency in the process. reynolds-keefer (2010) reported that students had a greater understanding of teacher expectations when a rubric was provided and discussed two-weeks prior to submission date. in addition, she linked this to a decrease in anxiety in 13 of the 45 undergraduate students she studied. similar findings were reported by andrade and du (2005) and panadero et al. (2011). another common issue was the misconception that it is unnecessary to read the whole rubric (andrade and du, 2005) rendering self-assessment ineffective and the rubric a poor formative development tool. bradley et al. use of a marking rubric and self-assessment to provide feedforward to level 5 undergraduate sport students: student perceptions, performance and marking efficiency journal of learning development in higher education, issue 18: october 2020 6 aims the aim of the study was to understand the perceptions of students using a marking rubric. the main objective was to identify whether a group of level 5 undergraduate sport science students found a marking rubric and self-assessment helpful and positive in providing feedforward on a draft version of a biomechanics lab report. a secondary aim was to identify whether the rubric and self-assessment improved student performance and improved marking efficiency. materials and methods design and participants a mixed methods approach was utilised in the study. qualitative information on student perceptions was obtained through a questionnaire, with quantitative data included to identify changes in student performance and summative marking time. these approaches aimed to identify the effect of the implementation of the marking rubrics and selfassessment on student performance in an objective manner (newby, 2014). whilst student perceptions are humanistic in nature, as they involve an understanding of human interaction with the assessment task and tool (cohen et al., 2000), through positivist interpretation of the transcripts and questionnaires by coding and thematic analysis, the identification of common issues relating to the students’ use of the marking rubrics and the assessment process can be determined. all level 5 students (n = 58; male = 83%; mean ± sd age = 20±0.7) on a sport and exercise sciences degree in 2016 participated in the study. participants were fully informed of the purpose of the study and written consent was obtained. the study was approved by the university of sunderland institutional ethics group. while the module leader was aware of the group of students whose work they were marking, the questionnaire was fully anonymised in that the staff member did not have access to student responses and data. marking rubric a marking rubric was developed to assess the performance of students on a framework for higher education qualifications (fheq: uk quality code in higher education to bradley et al. use of a marking rubric and self-assessment to provide feedforward to level 5 undergraduate sport students: student perceptions, performance and marking efficiency journal of learning development in higher education, issue 18: october 2020 7 maintain academic standards) level 5 (second year uk undergraduate) biomechanics module for the task of writing a practical-based lab report. the marking rubric was aligned to the university undergraduate generic marking criteria to distinguish between levels, and specific developmental wording allowed differentiation between grade boundaries within levels. the marking rubric was introduced in the sport & exercise department as a process by which to improve and standardise marking across modules with the aim of positively influencing student outcomes through feedforward, feedback and general understanding. space was provided at the end of the rubric for two positive and two developmental comments to allow the marker to ascribe qualitative commentary to the work. the students were introduced to the marking rubric in week 2 of the module alongside the assignment guidelines. in week 6, the class attended a 60-minute session on how to use the marking rubric, which included examples of previous work with completed rubrics to aid understanding of the different descriptors and sections on the rubric. the students were instructed to complete a self-assessment of a draft of their report using the rubric and submit both the draft and completed rubric to the online learning environment by week 9. the module leader assessed each draft using the same rubric without prior knowledge of the student’s assessment to prevent bias. this was returned to the students in week 10 with instructions to use the module leader assessment and rubric comments for feedforward purposes in finalising their lab report before submission. to achieve this, students were instructed to compare their self-assessment with the module leader rubric to identify how their view of the work differed from that of the module leader. in addition, students were directed to the developmental comments for more detailed instruction on what should be addressed. procedure a questionnaire was developed based on themes identified in the literature, with the questions designed to determine the level of student use and understanding of the rubric, and to identify the reasons behind their feelings and perceptions of the rubric around the themes of rubric construction, implementation, and feedforward use. the questionnaire was administered in class after final submission of the report, and this achieved a 100% response rate. the questionnaire comprised 11 questions focussing on the use of and understanding of the rubric and answered using a 1-6 likert scale (where 1 = strongly disagree, 2 = disagree, 3 = slightly disagree, 4 = slightly agree, 5 = agree, 6 = strongly bradley et al. use of a marking rubric and self-assessment to provide feedforward to level 5 undergraduate sport students: student perceptions, performance and marking efficiency journal of learning development in higher education, issue 18: october 2020 8 agree). for all questions, median likert scores and interquartile ranges were calculated to identify overall student perceptions. the reliability of the questionnaire’s 11 questions was evaluated by calculating the cronbach’s alpha in spss v23 (ibm statistics), with an αcoefficient of 0.876, indicating good internal consistency. these questions were followed by seven open response questions to enable the students to provide qualitative commentary on the rubric. responses were thematically analysed and common responses identified and collated. to identify whether the marking rubric and self-assessment had a positive effect on student performance, the mean report mark and pass rate were compared with those from the previous year. summative marking was completed by the module leader, who had created the assessment and rubric. the time taken to mark each assignment was measured using a stopwatch, and marking efficiency was calculated by comparing the mean time taken to mark assignments across each year. independent samples t tests were conducted in spss v23 (ibm statistics) to identify whether significant differences between the two years existed, with a significance level of ρ<0.05 set a priori. magnitude-based inferences were used to identify practically important differences in marks between the year groups. effect sizes statistics (es) are presented as cohen’s d (hopkins et al., 1999) and were calculated using an effect size spreadsheet (https://www.cem.org/effect-size-calculator) from pooled-mean values. effect sizes were interpreted based on the following criteria: <0.2 trivial, 0.2-0.6 small, 0.6-1.2 moderate, 1.2-2.0 large, >2.0 very large (hopkins, 2004). results perceptions of the rubric students’ perceptions of the rubric were positive, with the median score for all questions greater than 4 (slightly agree or better) (see table 1). student feedback was classified into two distinct themes: 1. rubric construction and use, and 2. rubric as a tool for selfassessment and feedforward. the majority of students agreed that the rubric clearly defined the criteria needed at each level (90%; n = 52) and that the rubric was easy to understand (92.5%; n = 53). as a result, 90% (n = 52) of students agreed that the rubric helped them to understand what bradley et al. use of a marking rubric and self-assessment to provide feedforward to level 5 undergraduate sport students: student perceptions, performance and marking efficiency journal of learning development in higher education, issue 18: october 2020 9 was required in the lab report. this can be observed in the student comments, for example: i felt the rubric was simpler to understand than the marking schemes as it gave an overview of the section. i used both to help me write the report (s1) provided information about what was required to achieve a higher grade and could compare to my own work (s16) gives the chance to view the work from a marker’s point of view (s2) table 1. student perceptions of the marking rubric. student perception criteria median response grade (iqr) strongly agree (%) agree (%) slightly agree (%) slightly disagree (%) disagree (%) strongly disagree (%) the rubric uses language that is easy to understand 5 (4-6) 30 42.5 20 2.5 2.5 2.5 the rubric clearly defined the criteria required for each level 5 (4.25-5.75) 25 50 15 7.5 2.5 0 the rubric helped me understand what was wanted on this assignment 5 (4.25-5) 15 60 15 7.5 2.5 0 i used the rubric while completing the assignment 4.5 (4-6) 32.5 17.5 30 7.5 10 2.5 did the process make you start your report earlier? 4 (2-5) 15 20 22.5 15 17.5 10 the rubric is a fair way to assess assignments 5 (4-5) 20 52.5 22.5 2.5 2.5 0 the feedback provided on the rubric was useful 5 (4-5.75) 25 30 30 7.5 5 2.5 the rubric helped me know what i was doing well 5 (4-5) 15 45 20 12.5 5 2.5 the rubric helped me know what i needed to work on 5 (4-5) 17.5 42.5 22.5 12.5 2.5 2.5 i know what grade i will receive for the report 4 (3-4) 20 35 25 12.5 7.5 0 the rubric helped me to write a better report 4.5 (4-5) 15 35 35 12.5 2.5 0 bradley et al. use of a marking rubric and self-assessment to provide feedforward to level 5 undergraduate sport students: student perceptions, performance and marking efficiency journal of learning development in higher education, issue 18: october 2020 10 however, not all students enjoyed the rubric, and the main criticism focussed on the lack of specificity, with comments such as: only two feedback points with the rubric you should be able to go through each section of the intro methods etc. and see what needs improvement i.e. more specific feedback instead of an overall indication (s15) despite this, 80% (n = 46) of the students agreed that they used the rubric in completing the assignment, and 67.5% (n = 39) agreed that the rubric helped them start the lab report earlier. feedforward feedforward was a critical aspect of the assessment process, and 85% (n = 49) of the students acknowledged that the feedback provided on the rubric was useful. the majority also agreed that the rubric helped them understand what they were doing well (80%; n = 46) and what they needed to work on (82.5%; n = 47). this is reflected in the students’ comments: it just gives you more information and is probably easier to get your head around than comments on your work (s1) i was able to know where i went wrong and i thought needed improving (s19) each section was explained thoroughly on how to achieve that specific mark (s22) the feedforward enabled students to write a better report (85%; n= 48) and, through the self-assessment of the draft, gave an indication of what grade they were likely to receive (80%; n = 46). supporting comments from the group included: it helped us to know what we needed to improve on the report therefore our mark/grade (s22) the self-assessment was very useful in understanding the level of the report (s24) bradley et al. use of a marking rubric and self-assessment to provide feedforward to level 5 undergraduate sport students: student perceptions, performance and marking efficiency journal of learning development in higher education, issue 18: october 2020 11 student performance and marking efficiency the mean mark for the lab report was 61%, and this was a significant but small improvement of 7% (ρ=0.029; d = 0.41) from that of the previous year when no rubric or feedforward was utilised. additionally, no students failed the assignment compared to 10 the previous year, and the proportion of students achieving a 1st or 2:1 grade increased from 43% to 50%. mean summative marking time was 13 minutes, a reduction of 25 minutes from the time of 38 minutes the previous year. discussion the aim of the study was to understand the student perceptions of a rubric when used as self-assessment to provide formative feedforward on a draft version of a level 5 undergraduate biomechanics lab report, and to identify whether a marking rubric and selfassessment together improved student performance and marking efficiency. student perceptions overall, students found the marking rubric to be a positive tool in the assessment process in undergraduate sport science (table 1). this is consistent with findings reported by andrade and du (2005) in undergraduate teacher education, eshun and osei-poku (2013) in a graphic design assignment and wang (2016) on an english as a foreign language writing task. in general, students indicated that they found the rubric useful when completing the assignment and that it was a fair tool for marking the lab report. firstly, the students reflected on the rubric as a tool for understanding the assessment. most students ‘slightly agreed’ or ‘agreed’ that the rubric made the assessment criteria clearer and easier to understand and that they knew what was required by the tutor to attain a good level of performance on the assessment. moni and moni (2008) reported similar positive remarks from a group of dentistry students in australia when completing a physiology concept map, as did eshun and osei-poku (2013), who reported that 76% of students agreed or strongly agreed that a rubric helped explain the subject more clearly. making the assessment criteria explicit across the levels of achievement enables students to identify the requirements needed for success, and acts as a checklist against which they can selfassess the content of their work (andrade, 2007). in this way, students can identify the bradley et al. use of a marking rubric and self-assessment to provide feedforward to level 5 undergraduate sport students: student perceptions, performance and marking efficiency journal of learning development in higher education, issue 18: october 2020 12 appropriate level for their ability and match up their work against the descriptors at that level for each section of the report, as highlighted by bono et al. (2017), who found that 88.7% of undergraduate research design students agreed or strongly agreed that the rubric ‘gave me a better understanding of the assessment criteria’. as part of the assessment process, students were instructed to complete a selfassessment of a draft version of the lab report ensuring a comparison to the criteria on the rubric was conducted, and this may have been one of the drivers to improved performance compared to the previous year. the rubric was made available to the class early in the assessment cycle, allowing them to interpret and use the criteria to plan work (andrade and du, 2005) at an early stage. despite this, students did not perceive that the marking rubric enabled them to start the work earlier. this may be due to the rubric being made available in week 2 but not explained in detail until week 6. researchers have highlighted the benefit of explicitly explaining rubrics (reynolds-keefer, 2010), and the inclusion of a session devoted solely to this is seen as good practice and helped in the perception of comprehension and understanding. however, the delay in providing the explanation until week 6 may account for the low perception of the benefit of the rubric in prompting the students to commence the report early. it is therefore suggested that the rubric should be fully explained at the earliest opportunity in an assessment cycle. secondly, the rubric was used to provide formative feedback during the module, and overall students ‘slightly agreed’ that the feedback provided was useful, and that this allowed them to know what they had done well and what they needed to work on to improve their final grade. whilst the value of using rubrics during the summative assessment process is well established (andrade and du, 2007; eshun and osei-poku, 2013), less focus has been given to higher education students’ perceptions of the formative feedback provided and the role a marking rubric plays in this process. wang (2016) found that 54/80 chinese students utilised the rubric in the ‘self-reflection stage’ of a writing task, as it aided the generation of self-feedback and was valuable for providing diagnostic information. considering the importance placed on feedforward as an approach to improving academic performance (hounsell et al, 2008; black and william, 2009), the effectiveness of the rubric for enhancing this process, especially in the eyes of the students, is very bradley et al. use of a marking rubric and self-assessment to provide feedforward to level 5 undergraduate sport students: student perceptions, performance and marking efficiency journal of learning development in higher education, issue 18: october 2020 13 encouraging. furthermore, there is potential to develop the application of rubrics further in order to enhance their effectiveness, and one such approach is the development of electronic rubrics. raposo-rivas and gallego-arrufat (2016) implemented an erubric at two spanish universities, and the majority of students involved indicated positive learning effects, as the erubric facilitated peer-learning and the online nature of the rubric is ‘handy’ and ‘prompt’. the option of digitising the rubric, and the effect of integrating it within virtual learning environments, should be examined further, with a focus on student value as the shift to digital approaches increases. student performance the results of this study imply that introducing the marking rubric to the assignment has produced a significant 7% improvement in performance, with the mean final mark increasing from 54% in the previous year to a mean of 61%. there was also a significant 7% increase in the number of students who received a mark equating to a 1st or 2:1 degree grade, equivalent to 50% of the cohort. the 7% increase in grade boundary attainment is in line with improvements reported in the literature for university students. for example, petkov and petkova (2006) noted a significantly higher mean percentage grade on a short-term information systems project in a group of 20 students who were provided with a project rubric. hack (2013) also found a significant increase of over 5% in the average mark of students after the introduction of a rubric to an online learning assessment. the author attributed this to greater standardisation and confidence between markers along with an improved interpretation of the marking criteria by students, especially those in the merit category who showed the greatest level of improvement from the first assignment to the second. in addition, hafner and hafner (2003) identified indirect improvements in undergraduate performance when reporting a greater correlation between student and instructor ratings of a rubric-referenced oral biology presentation, assuming that the rubric increased instructor mark level and concurrently student grades increased. marking rubrics do not always produce improved performance. moni and moni (2008) found a reduction in physiology concept map grade from 8.25 (out of 10) to 7.20 after the introduction of a rubric. however, this was attributed to a poorer academic cohort completing the assignment with a rubric. the reverse could possibly account for the bradley et al. use of a marking rubric and self-assessment to provide feedforward to level 5 undergraduate sport students: student perceptions, performance and marking efficiency journal of learning development in higher education, issue 18: october 2020 14 improvement in the current study, although no differences in academic standards was evident between the two year-groups, and therefore it is unlikely to be the cause of the mark increase. it is proposed that the improvement in grades between the two years was not only due to the introduction of the marking rubric, but also its use as a self-assessment tool that improved the feedforward students received. the students were instructed to submit a draft version of the lab report online in week 8 or 9 of the module, along with a selfassessment of the draft using the rubric provided and explained in week 6. feedforward was provided by the module leader with the rubric allowing the student to compare levelness and performance and provide a basis to develop the report for final submission. this approach has shown to improve performance, with a large improvement (d=1.54) in the final score of a child development course assignment reported by lipnevich et al. (2014). the authors attribute this to the introduction of a marking rubric allowing the students to assess their ‘first effort’ against the rubric and create changes to a subsequently submitted ‘second effort’. this structure is reflected in the approach in the current study, with similar improvements in attainment. this assessment structure creates a formative feedforward approach, as advocated by hounsell et al. (2008), in contrast to the written annotations within the report utilised the previous year, which the students did not engage with. self-assessment is also believed to be beneficial for learning (topping, 2003) by allowing students to understand the quality of their work, promoting self-reflection and enabling students to learn from their experience (quinton and smallbone, 2010). indeed, sadler and good (2006) found that self-grading improved the performance of middle-school students, and that this improvement was greater than when peer-grading was implemented. rubrics can act as a checklist during self-assessment (andrade, 2007) whereby students can make judgments about their work (reddy and andrade, 2010). if a rubric is well-structured, detailed and thoroughly explained so that the students can fully understand it, it will facilitate the self-assessment process, enabling the identification of good and bad practice in the report. it is therefore suggested that these are key traits for good rubric implementation. bradley et al. use of a marking rubric and self-assessment to provide feedforward to level 5 undergraduate sport students: student perceptions, performance and marking efficiency journal of learning development in higher education, issue 18: october 2020 15 marking efficiency the result of introducing the marking rubric was a 65% reduction in the time required to summatively mark each report, with a mean time of 13 minutes. atkinson and lim (2013) reported an estimated 40% reduction in marking time using an online rubric. the single page grid and well-defined level criteria on the rubric allowed the marker to focus on the levelness of each section rather than attempting to allocate marks out of a pre-defined limit per section totalling 100%, the approach that was used in the previous year. furthermore, the requirement to annotate the report with specific feedback was removed with the marking rubric, as space was allocated at the bottom to provide overall feedback relating to areas that were well-written and areas for improvement. justification for the reduction in written feedback was based on students’ previous reluctance to collect annotated scripts and act on the feedback. with the single page rubric, all students were emailed a copy of the feedforward after submission of the draft and again once summative marking was complete. thus, it was ensured that all students received timely and accessible feedforward during and after the assessment process, a key factor in understanding feedforward (weaver, 2006) and enhancing student learning (gibbs and simpson, 2004). caution must be taken when considering such an improvement, as the time taken to mark was considered solely with respect to the summative marking process and did not consider the extra formative process that adds to the assessment workload. however, if the rubric is primarily utilised to mark the final submitted assignment, this improves the process for academic staff. the substantial saving in marking time may be further enhanced by the development of electronically embedded rubrics that are linked directly to electronic assignment submissions via virtual learning environments. such an approach was described by smith et al. (2015), who identified the efficiency of an online rubric that improved ease of marking and the release of grades and rubric feedback to a cohort of 300 students. while few studies report the effect of using rubrics on marking time, it is likely that teachers and lecturers will be happy to adopt them into normal practice if there is evidence that they improve marking efficiency and demonstrate a personal benefit within the assessment procedure. bradley et al. use of a marking rubric and self-assessment to provide feedforward to level 5 undergraduate sport students: student perceptions, performance and marking efficiency journal of learning development in higher education, issue 18: october 2020 16 limitations while comparisons of student achievement were conducted between academic years, improvements in performance may be due to comparing different cohorts, the second of which may be stronger academically or display a higher level of motivation and achievement. while differing academic standards may have resulted in the improvement in marks, it is assumed that the likelihood of this is decreased due to the broadly similar academic profiles of the cohorts at the end of their first year of study. however, the study would have been strengthened if two groups in the cohort were assessed, with and without the marking rubric implementation, although this was not possible at the time due to the limitations placed on the modification of assessment as per institutional regulations. additionally, student perceptions of the rubric were only collected in their second year, and no comparison could be made with perceptions of the assessment process when a rubric was not included. potentially students identified with the university’s generic criteria and the scoring sheet used at the time and perceived these in the same manner as the new rubric. however, the authors believe the rubric was a better tool to assist the students, and the improvements are likely to have been as a result of a change in the assessment process and the introduction of self-assessment and formative feedforward. student perceptions were collected via a questionnaire that required responses to a series of set questions on a likert scale with seven pre-set questions to provide qualitative commentary. such an approach has been previously utilised by quinton and smallbone (2010) and eshun and osei-poku (2013). this elicited useful information in an efficient manner; it was, however, restricted in its detail. amendments to the questionnaire to allow open-ended responses alongside the fixed questions would allow students to expand on the reasons for their answers and feelings about the rubric. also, andrade and du (2005) included group interviews, and moni and moni (2008) used filming of class interactions as further methods for capturing perceptions, although similar findings were discovered using all methods and the approach used in the current study was considered appropriate. bradley et al. use of a marking rubric and self-assessment to provide feedforward to level 5 undergraduate sport students: student perceptions, performance and marking efficiency journal of learning development in higher education, issue 18: october 2020 17 conclusions this paper reports on the implementation of a rubric to facilitate self-assessment and provide formative feedback on a level 5 sports science lab report. the assessment process resulted in a significantly improved mean mark, an increased pass rate in the upper degree classifications and reduced report marking time by the module leader. student perceptions of the marking rubric were generally positive in that is was seen to clearly define the criteria needed to succeed and increase understanding of what was required in the assessment. it was also agreed that the role of the rubric in the selfassessment and feedforward process was beneficial, as it enabled the students to understand what they were doing well and what they needed to work on. overall, marking rubrics are an important tool in improving academic performance and should be considered when implementing a laboratory-based practical assessment and report. ethical approval ethical approval was obtained from the university of sunderland institutional ethics committee. all students provided written consent to participate in the study. references allen, d. and tanner, k. (2006) ‘rubrics: tools for making learning goals and evaluation criteria explicit for both teachers and learners’, cbe-life sciences education, 5(3), pp.197-203. andrade, h. (2000) ‘using rubrics to promote thinking and learning’, educational leadership, 57(5), pp.13-18. andrade, h. (2007) ‘self-assessment through rubrics’, educational leadership, 64(5), pp.60-63. bradley et al. use of a marking rubric and self-assessment to provide feedforward to level 5 undergraduate sport students: student perceptions, performance and marking efficiency journal of learning development in higher education, issue 18: october 2020 18 andrade, h. and du, y. (2005) ‘student perspectives on rubric-referenced assessment’, practical assessment, research & evaluation, 10(3), pp.1-11. atkinson, d. and lim, s.l. (2013) ‘improving assessment process in higher education: student and teacher perceptions of the effectiveness of a rubric embedded in a lms’, australasian journal of educational technology, 29(5), pp.651-666. black, p. and william, d. (2009) ‘developing the theory of formative assessment’, educational assessment evaluation and accountability, 21(1), pp.5-31. bono, r., núñez-peña, m. and suárez-pellicioni, m. (2017) ‘rubrics use and in-class feedback in higher education: students’ perceptions and their effect on academic achievement’, proceedings of the 3rd international conference on higher education advances. editorial universitat politècnica de valència, pp.338-346. carless, d. (2019a). ‘longitudinal perspectives on students’ experiences of feedback: a need for teacher-student partnerships’, higher education research & development, 39(3), pp. 425-438. carless, d. (2019b) ‘feedback loops and the longer term: towards feedback spirals’, assessment & evaluation in higher education, 44(5), pp.705-714. carless, d. and boud, d. (2018) ‘the development of student feedback literacy: enabling uptake of feedback’, assessment & evaluation in higher education, 43(8), pp.13151325. cikis, s. and cil, e. (2009) ‘problematization of assessment in the architectural design education: first year as a case study’, procedia social and behavioral sciences, 1(1), pp.2103-2110. cohen, l., manion, l. and morrison, k. (2000) research methods in education. 2nd edn. abingdon, uk: routledgefalmer. bradley et al. use of a marking rubric and self-assessment to provide feedforward to level 5 undergraduate sport students: student perceptions, performance and marking efficiency journal of learning development in higher education, issue 18: october 2020 19 dawson, p. (2017) ‘assessment rubrics: towards clearer and more replicable design, research and practice’, assessment and education in higher education, 42(3), pp.347–360. eshun, e.f. and osei-poku, p. (2013) ‘design students perspectives on assessment rubric in studio-based learning’, journal of university teaching & learning practice 10(1), pp.1-13. hattie, j.a.c. (2009) visible learning: a synthesis of 800+ meta-analyses on achievement. london: routledge. gibbs, g. (1999) ‘using assessment strategically to change the way students learn’, in brown, s. and glasner, a. (eds.) assessment matters in higher education: choosing and using diverse approaches. buckingham: srhe and open university press. gibbs, g. and simpson, c. (2004) ‘conditions under which assessment supports students’ learning’, learning and teaching in higher education, 1(1), pp.3-31. hack, c. (2013) using rubrics to improve marking reliability and to clarify good performance. york: higher education authority. hafner, j.c. and hafner, p.m. (2003) ‘quantitative analysis of the rubric as an assessment tool: an empirical study of student peer-group rating’, international journal of science education, 25(12), pp.1509-1528. higgins, r., hartley, p. and skelton, a. (2002) ‘the conscientious consumer: reconsidering the role of assessment feedback in student learning’, studies in higher education 27(1), pp.53–64. hopkins, w. (2004). ‘how to interpret changes in athletic performance tests’, sportsscience, 8, pp.1-7. bradley et al. use of a marking rubric and self-assessment to provide feedforward to level 5 undergraduate sport students: student perceptions, performance and marking efficiency journal of learning development in higher education, issue 18: october 2020 20 hopkins, w.g., marshall, s.w., batterham, a.m. and hanin, j. (1999) ‘progressive statistics for studies in sports medicine and exercise science’, medicine & science in sports & exercise, 41(1), pp.3-13. hornby, w. (2003) ‘assessing using grade-related criteria: a single currency for universities?’, assessment and evaluation in higher education, 28(4), pp.435-454. hounsell, d., mccune, v., hounsell, j. and litjens, j. (2008) ‘the quality of guidance and feedback to students’, higher education research and development, 27(1), pp.5567. jönsson, a. and panadero, e. (2017) ‘the use and design of rubrics to support afl’, in carless, d., bridges, s., chan, c. and glofcheski, r. (eds.), scaling up assessment for learning in higher education. dordrecht: springer. kohn, a. (2006) ‘the trouble with rubrics’, english journal. 95(4). kolb, d.a. (1984) experiential learning. englewood cliffs, nj.: prentice hall. koshy, s. (2009) ‘using marking criteria to improve learning: an evaluation of student perceptions’, journal of systemics, cybernetics and informatics, 7(1), pp.72-76. lipnevich, a.a., mccallen, l.n., miles, k.p. and smith, j.k. (2014) ‘mind the gap! students’ use of exemplars and detailed rubrics as formative assessment’, instructional science, 42, pp.539–559. marton, f. and saljo, r. (1984) ‘approaches to learning’, in marton, f., hounsell, d. and entwistle, n. (eds.), the experience of learning. edinburgh: scottish academic press. moni, r.w. and moni, k.b. (2008). ‘student perceptions and use of an assessment rubric for group concept map in physiology’, advances in physiology education 32(1), pp.47-54. bradley et al. use of a marking rubric and self-assessment to provide feedforward to level 5 undergraduate sport students: student perceptions, performance and marking efficiency journal of learning development in higher education, issue 18: october 2020 21 nash, r.a. and winstone, n.e. (2017) ‘responsibility-sharing in the giving and receiving of assessment feedback’, frontiers in psychology, 8, p.1519. newby, p. (2014) research methods for education. 2nd edn. london, uk: routledge. panadero, e., alonso-tapia, j. and huertas, j.a. (2011) ‘rubrics and self-assessment scripts effects on self-regulation, learning and self-efficacy in secondary education’, learning and individual differences, 22(6), pp.806-813. petkov, d. and petkova, o. (2006) ‘development of scoring rubrics for is projects as an assessment tool’, issues in informing science and information technology, 3, pp.499-510. popham, j.w. (1997) ‘what’s wrong – and what’s right – with rubrics’, educational leadership, 55 (2), pp.72-75. price, m. and o'donovan, b. (2006) ‘improving performance through enhancing student understanding of criteria and standards’, in bryan, c. and clegg, s. (eds.), innovative assessment in higher education. routledge: new york. quality assurance agency for higher education. (2006). outcomes from institutional audit: assessment of students, qaa 097. available at: https://dera.ioe.ac.uk/9638/1/assessmentofstudents.pdf (accessed: 17 june 2020). quinton, s and smallbone, t. (2010) ‘feeding forward: using feedback to promote student reflection and learning – a teaching model’, innovations in education and teaching international, 47 (1), pp.125-135. raposo-rivas, m. and gallego-arrufat, m.j. (2016) ‘university students’ perceptions of electronic rubric-based assessment’, digital education review, 30, pp.221-233. reddy, y.m. and andrade, h. (2010) ‘a review of rubric use in higher education’, assessment and evaluation in higher education, 35(4), pp.435-448. https://dera.ioe.ac.uk/9638/1/assessmentofstudents.pdf bradley et al. use of a marking rubric and self-assessment to provide feedforward to level 5 undergraduate sport students: student perceptions, performance and marking efficiency journal of learning development in higher education, issue 18: october 2020 22 reynolds-keefer, l. (2010) ‘rubric-referenced assessment in teacher preparation: an opportunity to learn by using’, practical assessment research and evaluation, 15(8), pp. 1-9. sadler, p.m. and good, e. (2006) ‘the impact of selfand peer-grading on student learning’, educational assessment ,11(1), pp.1-31. sambell, k., mcdowell, l. and montgomery, c. (2013). assessment for learning in higher education. london: routledge. smith, p., blooma, m.j. and kurian, j. (2015) ‘a conceptual framework to assess effectiveness of rubric tool’, australasian conference on information systems. sutton, p. (2012) ‘conceptualizing feedback literacy: knowing, being, and acting’, innovations in education and teaching international, 49(1), pp.31-40. topping, k. (2003) ‘self and peer assessment in school and university: reliability, validity and utility’, in segers, m., dochy, f. and cascallar, e. (eds.), optimizing new modes of assessment: in search of qualities and standards. dordrecht: kluwer academic publishers. wang, w. (2016) ‘using rubrics in student self-assessment: student perceptions in the english as a foreign language writing context’, assessment and education in higher education 42(8), pp.1280-1292. weaver, m. (2006) ‘do students value feedback? student perceptions of tutors’ written responses’, assessment and education in higher education, 31(3), pp.379-394. winstone, n.e., nash, r.a., parker, m. and rowntree, j. (2017a) ‘supporting learners’ agentic engagement with feedback: a systematic review and taxonomy of recipience processes’, educational psychologist, 52(1), pp.17-37. bradley et al. use of a marking rubric and self-assessment to provide feedforward to level 5 undergraduate sport students: student perceptions, performance and marking efficiency journal of learning development in higher education, issue 18: october 2020 23 winstone, n.e., nash, r.a., rowntree, j, and parker, m. (2017b). ‘it’d be useful, but i wouldn’t use it’: barriers to university students’ feedback seeking and recipience’, studies in higher education, 42(11), pp.2026-2041. yang, m. and carless, d. (2013) ‘the feedback triangle and the enhancement of dialogic feedback process’, teaching in higher education, 18(3), pp.285-297. author details eddie bradley is a senior lecturer in biomechanics in the faculty of health sciences & wellbeing at the university of sunderland, specialising in biomechanics and performance analysis. his research interests are in developing and implementing pedagogic tools to enhance student attainment, and understanding how students are impacted by educational progression. he is a fellow of the higher education academy and a bases accredited sport & exercise scientist. steven anderson is a senior lecturer in physical education at the university of sunderland, specialising in physical education and the health of young people. his research interests are in implementing pedagogic tools to enhance student attainment and development. he is a fellow of the higher education academy. laurence eagle is a principal lecturer and head of quality, standards and enhancement in the faculty of education, health & wellbeing at the university of wolverhampton, specialising in postgraduate he educator training. his research interests are in curriculum development and information technology to enhance student experiences. he is a senior fellow of the higher education academy. use of a marking rubric and self-assessment to provide feedforward to level 5 undergraduate sport students: student perceptions, performance and marking efficiency abstract introduction feedforward rubrics perceptions aims materials and methods design and participants marking rubric procedure results perceptions of the rubric feedforward student performance and marking efficiency discussion student perceptions student performance marking efficiency limitations conclusions ethical approval references author details a tandem journey through the labyrinth journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 2: february 2010 a tandem journey through the labyrinth marcia b. baxter magolda miami university, usa introduction good company is beneficial on any journey, particularly in complex journeys. higher education is a complex journey in which learners refine their purpose, establish a vision for their lives, question long-held assumptions, and construct more complex ways of making meaning of knowledge, themselves, and their relations with others. to be good company, educators must balance providing appropriate guidance with empowering learners to direct their own learning journeys. i have used a tandem bicycle metaphor to describe the learning partnerships that help learners move toward self-authoring their beliefs, values, identities and social relations (baxter magolda, 2001, 2009). educators take the back seat of the bicycle to fulfill the stoker role – to help provide the pedaling power needed to propel the bicycle forward. learners take the front captain’s seat to direct the journey. learners and educators share authority and expertise in this mutual journey such that the learner is able to achieve the interdependence required to succeed in adult life. good company varies, however, with the characteristics of learners. my 23-year longitudinal study of young adult learning and development from age 18 to 40 revealed three overarching phases of meaning making (baxter magolda, 1992, 2001, 2009). during college most participants relied uncritically on external authorities for what to believe, following external formulas. near the end of college and in the early years after graduation, they found themselves in a crossroads where their own growing internal voices were in tension with external influences. in their late twenties and in their thirties, most participants gained confidence in their internal voices and brought them to the foreground to coordinate external influence in forming their belief systems and identity. this latter phase is often called selfauthorship (baxter magolda, 2001, 2009; kegan, 1994) because learners use internal baxter magolda a tandem journey through the labrynth journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 2 criteria for decision-making. for learners who enter college with the assumption that knowledge is certain and obtained from authorities, good company focuses on helping learners realize that multiple perspectives exist. for learners who are beginning to question authority and becoming aware of the need to form their own views, good company helps them learn how to evaluate multiple perspectives. for learners who are beginning to form their own views, good company takes the form of helping them refine their internal beliefs and act consistently on them. thus the tandem journey is tailored to the meaning making of the learner. the learning partnerships model the learning partnerships model (lpm) (baxter magolda, 2004) emerged from over 1000 interviews during my longitudinal study. annual interviews beginning in the first year of college and continuing into participants’ adult lives focused on their learning experiences, how they made meaning of knowledge, identity and relationships, and the characteristics of environments that promoted their learning and development. experiences in college, graduate and professional schools, and employment yielded the key characteristics of learning partnerships that promote development from uncritical acceptance of external authority to self-authorship, or the internal construction of beliefs, values, and identity. although participants possessed diverse personal characteristics, and experiences spanned numerous contexts, six dynamics emerged that combine to promote learning and self-authorship. learning partners supported participants in developing self-authorship in three ways: • respecting their thoughts and feelings, thus affirming the value of their voices; • helping them view their experiences as opportunities for learning and growth, and; • collaborating with them to analyze their own problems, engaging in mutual learning with them. (baxter magolda, 2009: 251) these supportive functions helped participants recognise the value of and strengthen their internal voices. learning partners also challenged participants to develop self-authorship in three ways: baxter magolda a tandem journey through the labrynth journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 3 • drawing participants’ attention to the complexity of their work and life decisions, and discouraging simplistic solutions; • encouraging participants to develop their personal authority by listening to their own voices in determining how to live their lives, and; • encouraging participants to share authority and expertise, and work interdependently with others to solve mutual problems. (baxter magolda, 2009: 251) this good company enabled learners to see the complexity of knowledge, recognise that they needed to bring their own internal voices to knowledge construction, and see the importance of interdependent collaboration with others to make wise decisions and create new knowledge. they were supported in learning how to become full participants in knowledge construction, work through their own dilemmas, and build interdependent relationships. developmentally sequenced learning partnerships learning partnerships, by virtue of respecting learners’ voices and experiences, link learning to learners’ meaning making capacities. taylor and haynes (2008) explicitly articulate the details of what partnerships look like for learners who follow external authority uncritically, who are in a crossroads marked by tension between external voices and their internal voice, and who are coming to trust their internal voices. the resulting three-tiered framework identifies the developmental goals appropriate to each way of making meaning, the learning outcomes for each tier, and how partners would function to provide good company for learners at each tier. the first tier is designed for learners who tend to view knowledge as absolute, have a limited vision of themselves as legitimate authors of new knowledge, and thus rely uncritically on external authorities for guidance and approval. the developmental goals for this tier include learning to question how authorities construct knowledge, beginning to see the need to create one’s own knowledge, and awareness of the limitations of focusing on others’ views and approval. learning goals in this tier centre around identifying multiple perspectives and interacting with others to encounter multiple perspectives. partners offer good company by baxter magolda a tandem journey through the labrynth journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 4 providing multiple valid perspectives, sequencing material to cultivate learners’ discoveryoriented skills, modeling self-reflection, building on students’ experiences and voices, and creating a safe climate for dialogue. as a result, learners are challenged to view knowledge as more complicated than they originally assumed, yet they are supported in learning the processes of exploring multiple perspectives. tier 2 is designed for learners in the crossroads. these learners are already aware of the uncertainty of knowledge and the need to develop their own views and values. thus appropriate developmental goals include beginning to choose their own beliefs, learn to decide based on evaluating multiple perspectives, define their own values, and mutually negotiate their perspectives with others. corollary learning goals include analysing or comparing concepts and frameworks, assessing and refining one’s educational goals, and working effectively with diverse others in problem solving. good company in tier 2 involves challenging learners to see the limitations and benefits of various knowledge domains, helping learners process problems and discover solutions, and providing opportunities for discovery, connections among learning experiences, and effective teamwork. the primary emphasis here is on supporting learners to trust their own voices and learn processes for evaluating knowledge claims and working in mutual relationships. tier 3 is designed for learners who are developing self-authored meaning making to create their internal belief systems and interdependent relations with others. because they have already concluded that knowledge is complex and contextual and have begun to establish their own beliefs, the development goals for them include acting consistently on their internal belief systems and integrating various aspects of their identities. accompanying learning goals focus on evaluating and integrating diverse perspectives; creating, critiquing and applying knowledge in multiple contexts; aligning actions and values, and developing a commitment to an inclusive community. partners offer good company through opportunities for learners to learn from and teach each other, to participate in constructive dialogues around difference, and to construct knowledge. these partnerships help learners refine their belief systems and values and strengthen the capacity to sustain interdependent relationships with diverse others. baxter magolda a tandem journey through the labrynth journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 5 learning to ride on the back developmentally sequenced partnerships are sometimes challenging for educators because educators are socialised to take charge of the learning journey. although educators must take more responsibility at the start of the journey, learners must be invited to take increasing responsibility as the journey continues. learners are introduced to responsibility through learning environments that promote active engagement in tier 1, invited to co-design learning experiences with educators in tier 2, and guided by educators to design their own learning in tier 3. thus educators must share authority with learners throughout the journey, emphasising that learners are ultimately responsible for their own learning. numerous reflections about the challenges of this tandem journey are available from educators who have implemented the learning partnerships model in diverse contexts (baxter magolda and king, 2004; meszaros, 2007; pizzolato and ozaki, 2007). yet their stories about learner outcomes suggest that rethinking our roles to invite learners into a mutual partnership benefits us all. references baxter magolda, m. b. (1992) knowing and reasoning in college: gender-related patterns in students' intellectual development. san francisco: jossey-bass. baxter magolda, m. b. (2001) making their own way: narratives for transforming higher education to promote self-development. sterling, va: stylus. baxter magolda, m. b. (2004) ‘learning partnerships model: a framework for promoting selfauthorship’, pp. 37-62, in baxter magolda, m.b. and king, p.m. (eds.) learning partnerships: theory and models of practice to educate for self-authorship. sterling, va: stylus. baxter magolda, m. b. (2009) authoring your life: developing an internal voice to navigate life’s challenges. sterling, va: stylus. baxter magolda a tandem journey through the labrynth journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 6 baxter magolda, m. b. and king, p. m. (eds.) (2004) learning partnerships: theory and models of practice to educate for self-authorship. sterling, va: stylus. kegan, r. (1994) in over our heads: the mental demands of modern life. cambridge, massachusetts: harvard university press. meszaros, p. s. (ed.) (2007) self-authorship: advancing students' intellectual growth. new directions for teaching and learning, (vol. 109). san francisco: jossey-bass. pizzolato, j. e. and ozaki, c. c. (2007) ‘moving toward self-authorship: investigating outcomes of learning partnerships’, journal of college student development 48(2) pp 196-214. taylor, k. b. and haynes, c. (2008) ‘a framework for intentionally fostering student learning’, about campus: enriching the student learning experience 13(5) pp 2-11. author details marcia baxter magolda is distinguished professor, educational leadership, miami university. she teaches and advises in the college student personnel master of science program; her research includes young adult epistemological development, assessing intellectual development, the role of gender in epistemology, and constructivedevelopmental pedagogy. a tandem journey through the labyrinth introduction the learning partnerships model developmentally sequenced learning partnerships learning to ride on the back references author details literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 10: november 2016 learning with the labyrinth two book reviews of sellers, j. and moss, b. (2016) learning with the labyrinth: creating reflective space in higher education. london. palgrave alison james london college of fashion, ual, uk sue watling university of hull, uk many people in learning development circles will already be familiar with the use of labyrinths as contemplative spaces, perhaps largely thanks to the work of the authors of this book. however, trying to explain labyrinths and the potential impact of their use to someone who has never heard of them can be difficult. there is so much that could be said, and finding the right starting point is sometimes a challenge. far better to actually walk a labyrinth with a guide and experience it for real; however, if the opportunity to do this is out of reach, then picking up this book is going to be an excellent first step. although not a huge tome, its content is dense and diverse; it draws extensively on existing literature to offer a history of the labyrinth and its adoption within university circles (and other locations and institutions). it mixes photographs, diagrams, poems, short vignettes and longer chapters to combine stories of labyrinth walks which cross disciplines and countries. alongside more lyrical contributions it suggests ways in which to research 'the labyrinth effect' in teaching and learning and how labyrinths may be used to open up creativity. divided into four main sections, learning with the labyrinth is written for anyone wanting to understand how labyrinth practices enhance living and learning. part i offers a first steps introduction to what labyrinths mean across different cultures, and how to create one, including guidance on size and scale. learning developers naturally have an interest in exploring different kinds of spaces, indoor and outdoor, virtual and physical; labyrinths made of chicken feed, shredded office memos, sand, lit candles, painted canvas, stone or a thousand other things all offer new territory for such exploration. as katja marquart alison james / sue watling learning with the labyrinth: creating reflective space in higher education journal of learning development in higher education, issue 10: november 2016 2 reminds us in chapter 5, "space is more than what is visible to the eye" (2016:46). part ii concentrates on examples of labyrinth use in higher education. this is the distinctive aspect of this book, adding to the more general contributions made to the literature on labyrinths by the editors and others. how labyrinths enhance learning and teaching across the disciplines is particularly illuminating, both for those who work in a distinct field and those who support students across a variety of subjects. the flexibility of the approach is further illuminated by myriad uses of the labyrinth, including for creative writing, appreciative inquiry and as a metaphor for delving into the tenets of transformative learning. there are many appealing and unusual juxtapositions and combinations; collaborations between landscape professionals, land artists, scientists and arts council; artists and midwives; universities and the local communities; rural medical practice in australia. while stressing the many benefits to be had from labyrinths, the editors are frank that this is a field that does not as yet have robust or large scale research into the impact of labyrinths on student learning. alongside case studies and chapters on empirical experience, this section includes john rhodes' excellent chapter on the undeveloped area of researching the labyrinth. his considerations and recommendations are one aspect of this book that make it as useful for a reader familiar with labyrinth walking as for a newcomer, as well as academics with research, rather than teaching foci. part iii focuses on campus and community; a broad category encompassing chaplaincy initiatives, dance, entrepreneurship, counselling and more besides. part iv faces forward to the place and value of labyrinths in a turbulent, demanding and uncertain world. finally, in their conclusion sellers and moss express the hope that the reader will have found multiple moments of enlightenment as they have read, or at least sufficient encouragement to try out something that is described, or to create new forms of engagement with the labyrinth. throughout the book there are suggestions of ways to walk the labyrinth in order to draw the most personal benefit from the experience. however there is also a strong message too that there is no right way to do so, which gives the individual the freedom, confidence and ownership to walk, run or dance their way round as they wish. as an exercise in partnership working there are countless anecdotes of the ways in which students have alison james / sue watling learning with the labyrinth: creating reflective space in higher education journal of learning development in higher education, issue 10: november 2016 3 responded to, and taken over, the experience, to help them face up to all kinds of experiences and challenges. as an adjunct to developing meaningful reflective practice irrespective of role or status there is ample evidence to show the benefits of having a labyrinth on campus including several mentions of making walks available at exam time. the authors are not afraid of recognising when there is resistance to, or reticence concerning the labyrinth, as is often the case with the novel or unfamiliar. even when people are reassured that the chance to walk is voluntary and that there is no religious connotation attached there can be misinterpretations or disbelief. i have seen this in action myself as someone who has been involved in several labyrinth workshops and had conversations with people who are dubious about what such an experience might entail. however there are equally as many instances in this book that show how such resistance or misunderstanding can be reduced. while being practical and appealing for readers attracted to alternative spaces and ways of handling the ups and downs of the academic experience, learning with the labyrinth also makes clear through its many examples that it is highly relevant to current he sector priorities; student attainment, retention, managing stress and anxiety, supporting first generation learners, understanding what it means to be a student, supporting transition and rites of passage during the student journey. while all chapters are clearly written by true believers in the worth of labyrinths, where these have really taken hold in universities has been due to institutional commitment supporting the innovation of the few. this must go some way to offsetting what sellers and moss refer to as the "toxic managerialism" that threatens to pervade the present day market and metrics-driven culture of many heis. all authors emphasise how the labyrinth effect defies explication; this for learning developers i believe is welcome in an age where we are expected to measure, explain and prove the value of everything. i found it a very soothing read clearly living out the labyrinth effect through its pages. its language is clear, thoughtful and calming, and the contributors are generous with their materials and ideas. as with any good read, there are new quotes to be enjoyed from other writers and threads to follow up on, within and outside its pages. for me, although i read it in pretty much one go it will be a handy "dip in and out" read too; one that can be referred back to when enthusiasts or experimenters want to try something out, understand something better, see how someone else did something and why. in places it is funny, in alison james / sue watling learning with the labyrinth: creating reflective space in higher education journal of learning development in higher education, issue 10: november 2016 4 others it is thought provoking and moving. taken as a whole, this book also demonstrates the astounding creativity of university staff irrespective of job title and of the transferability of labyrinth use in subject related, contemplative or work-based situations. the editors do not set out fixed objectives for either themselves or their reader to achieve by the end of the book, rather each section is set out in the language of invitation to share, explore and be unafraid to experiment. in the ways they and their contributors draw us into their diverse labyrinth worlds, such an invitation is welcomed and the journey enjoyed. dr alison james associate dean, learning and teaching london college of fashion, ual if you mention the word labyrinth to colleagues across the sector, some will look blank while others will smile. they are the ones who have walked a labyrinth in connection to learning development and will know exactly what you mean. learning with the labyrinth; creating reflective space in higher education, edited by jan sellers and bernard moss, brings together a unique collection of writings and images on the use of the labyrinth in a variety of higher educational settings. those who have experienced a labyrinth walk, or are familiar with the concept, will find much to identify with, while those new to the subject are almost the lucky ones; they have yet to discover how something as simple as walking or tracing the labyrinth’s twists and turns can be such an effective learning development tool for both staff and students. what is a labyrinth? a labyrinth can be made anywhere. it can be on the ground to be walked on or printed on paper or carved from wood to be traced with a finger. labyrinths can be temporary or permanent. they offer a long walk in a small space. an 11 circuit labyrinth 13.03 metres (42 feet and 9 inches) in diameter is 0.5 km (one third of a mile) into the centre and out again (page 58). often seen as the metaphor for a journey, when you walk a labyrinth it might feel like you are lost but the path always takes you into the centre and safely out again. to engage with a labyrinth is to take time out from the busyness of everyday life as concentrating on the circular path offers a rare opportunity to clear the mind. this original alison james / sue watling learning with the labyrinth: creating reflective space in higher education journal of learning development in higher education, issue 10: november 2016 5 and fascinating book aims to show how labyrinths offer creative and mindful approaches to providing the reflective space which is so essential for developing effective higher education experiences. is a labyrinth the same as a maze? the book is clear about the difference between labyrinths and mazes; an inaccuracy reinforced by dictionaries and encyclopaedias which frequently confuse the two. a labyrinth only has a single path, whereas mazes are designed to frustrate and frighten with their multiple barriers and dead ends. the key difference between them is you can get lost in maze but not in a labyrinth. what in the connection between labyrinths and learning? jan sellers has played a leading role in bringing the experience of labyrinth walking to higher education. in the ‘introduction; the heart of learning’, jan explains how labyrinths can be used to support learning and teaching. a higher education experience is always about more than access to and interpretation of knowledge. it is also about creative and reflective thinking, self-development, contemplation and change. any educational journey can be challenging on multiple levels, the personal and practical as well as the cognitive and psychological. what is needed, but so often missed, is time to pause, review progress and consider the wider rationale for being at university in the first place. in particular, during periods of anxiety over presentations, assignment deadlines and exams, it is important to make time to relax and take care of ourselves. the labyrinth can provide opportunities to destress by offering the mindful, meditative space which is often missing from our lives. salvator ambulado (it is solved by walking) attributed to diogenes (@400 bc) and st augustine (@400 ad) the physical process of movement offers opportunities to reflect and reconsider life aspects which might be troubling or require new perspectives. jan sellers quotes kierkegaard (1978:214) ‘above all, do not lose your desire to walk…i have walked myself into my best thoughts’ and throughout the book there are further references to the value of walking which underpin any labyrinth experience. introducing a labyrinth to university settings contributors to the book include academics, students, artists, photographers and poets and this combination offers a rich selection of perspectives and experiences. chapter 4 by debbie holley ‘setting up and sharing: introducing labyrinth practice in two university alison james / sue watling learning with the labyrinth: creating reflective space in higher education journal of learning development in higher education, issue 10: november 2016 6 settings’ describes how existing research and experience can be used to demonstrate labyrinth walking as an enhancement of the learning experience in order to persuade institutions to support and fund development. chapter 14 by helen malcolm ‘towards medical practice – a mindful journey’ uses the writings of thich nhat hanh to demonstrate the links between mindfulness and the practice of medicine for educators and students on university campus and in hospitals. chapter 19 ‘a case study in imagination; drawing the labyrinth’ by liz whitney describes introducing the labyrinth symbolism into midwifery workshops. looking for methods to promote flexible thinking, empathy and compassion, liz views art as a way to shift from logical, linear and reductionist science positions to more intuitive, multi-dimensional and exploratory ones. using finger labyrinths as meditative tools in workshops, liz asks students to reflect on an aspect of clinical practice, or an ethical dilemma or value before tracing the labyrinth pattern. given time and space, ideas and insights emerge with part of the process including students reflecting on the therapeutic potential of the activity and how meditative practice might be used in wider clinical settings. permanent or temporary labyrinths. early permanent labyrinths in higher education include those at the university of edinburgh and university of kent. chapter 21 ‘chaplaincies: labyrinth pioneers’ by di williams, describes how multi-faith and spiritual support services offer another dimension to the use of labyrinth within uk higher education. di describes how a paved labyrinth in georges square in edinburgh has offered inspiration for others who were interested in a growing labyrinth movement across the sector. in the ‘introduction; the heart of learning’, jan sellers writes about the development of the permanent canterbury labyrinth, set in the campus grounds within view of canterbury cathedral, and providing a unique visual juxtaposition of old and new. practical guidance on constructing labyrinths the book is practical as well as informative. it contains labyrinth images which can be photocopied and templates demonstrating the variety of labyrinth styles available. these range from the 3, 5 and 7 circuit classical labyrinths to the more complex 13 circuit medieval labyrinths such as the historic one set into the floor of chartres cathedral in northern france. in chapter 3 ‘masking tape and magic; how to draw and make low-cost labyrinths’, jeff saward describes measurements and ingredients for constructing temporary indoor and outdoor labyrinths. the paths can be created by light projection, laid out with string, tape, birdseed, chalk, tissue and grass paint, or marked with pebbles, alison james / sue watling learning with the labyrinth: creating reflective space in higher education journal of learning development in higher education, issue 10: november 2016 7 tissue, sticks, cups, jars and candles. the only limit is imagination and attention to health and safety regulations when working with fire. in chapter 27 ‘finding resources for labyrinth projects’, kimberley lowelle saward continues the theme of labyrinth construction with advice on sourcing portable canvas labyrinths and offering a useful collection of resources for additional information and advice. labyrinths across subject disciplines part ii teaching and learning perspectives contains a range of case studies from subjects including health care, medicine, social work, art and engineering as well as educational and learning development scenarios. a number of academic approaches have been applied to the effectiveness of working with labyrinths such as appreciative inquiry, transformational learning, and threshold concepts while chapter 7 ‘research and the labyrinth in higher education’ by john w rhodes sets the context for labyrinth research and the emerging use of labyrinths in university settings. table 1.1, page 11, has a list of permanent or temporary labyrinths at uk universities. anyone new to the use of labyrinths in learning development might find this more extensive than expected. chapter 7 also cites a useful range of studies into the positive effects of labyrinth walking on student health and learning. any book review can only skim the surface of its topic and hopefully stimulate interest to discover more. as jan sellers says of the spirit of good pedagogy (page 9), the intention is to get the reader thinking, to stir imagination and encourage the seeking out of further information. there has not been space to go into the history of labyrinths, which stretches back to early rock carvings from many thousands of years ago, their emergence on the floors of the great medieval cathedrals and subsequent destruction, or the recent labyrinth revival led by lauren artress in the 1980s. for all the lack of definitive knowledge about the labyrinth’s origin there is still much to read about their usage over the centuries. this new resurgence of interest, as a learning and teaching tool in higher education, is symptomatic of its endurance. the hope is this brief review will not only stimulate interest, it will leave the reader wanting to know more and if the opportunity should arise to walk a labyrinth, they will now be encouraged and inspired to do so. sue watling academic technology enhanced learning adviser university of hull learning with the labyrinth what is a labyrinth? is a labyrinth the same as a maze? what in the connection between labyrinths and learning? salvator ambulado (it is solved by walking) introducing a labyrinth to university settings permanent or temporary labyrinths. practical guidance on constructing labyrinths labyrinths across subject disciplines journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 21: september 2021 ________________________________________________________________________ he staff’s attitudes and expectations about their role in induction activities camila devis-rozental bournemouth university, uk susanne clarke bournemouth university, uk abstract the views of higher education staff regarding their role in the induction period have not been fully explored. yet this transition to university is a complex period for students. in the uk, many students who are going to university leave home, some for the first time. as they arrive they have to deal with many new and sometimes difficult situations they may not have encountered before. during the induction period students come across many staff within the university and these interactions are vital to support students in developing a sense of belonging within the university community. this small-scale project sought to evaluate the current provision for the induction process in a uk university to identify areas for improvement, by seeking views regarding the induction activities from staff within a uk university. findings from a staff survey with 58 participants suggest opportunities to improve practice. the main areas identified were a need for better communication between teams, and effective training and support for staff to understand the issues students may face and the type of support they will need. additionally, the need to develop a more unifying understanding of every member of the university as an active participant within the induction process was highlighted. keywords: student experience; transitions; he staff; he staff experience. devis-rozental and clarke he staff attitudes and expectations about their role in induction activities journal of learning development in higher education, issue 21: september 2021 2 introduction this paper presents the findings from a research project undertaken in a uk university exploring the views of staff on the transition of students to university. this mixed methods research project was carried out through a survey conducted with 58 academic and professional members of staff and sought to investigate their views concerning the induction process, the role they played within it, and their expectations of the students starting university. the aim of the study was to evaluate current practice and present a series of recommendations for practice improvement. background and literature although literature around students’ transition to university is evident (yorke and longden, 2004; 2008), literature on university staff’s (both academic and professional) expectations of students when they first arrive at university is scarce (hassel and ridout, 2018). the available literature concentrates on academic staff. fraser and killen (2003) explore the expectations of staff and students, concluding that these tend to be very different, for example regarding attendance at lectures and self-motivation. however, their work concentrates on lecturers rather than taking on an all-staff approach. hassel and ridout (2018) found that it is key to ensure that student and staff expectations concur, since disparity between each group’s expectations can result in ‘communication breakdown’ between staff and students (p.11). this way of working together between academic and professional members of staff ensures students are supported more effectively and is therefore very important within the first-year student experience (wojcieszek, 2014), and arguably within the induction period as students are settling in. the transition to university can be challenging in many areas such as developing academic skills and friendships (perry et al., 2001), as well as pedagogical expectations (jones, 2018). tinto (1999) argues that students leave their programmes during their first year because they lack academic skills, coupled with other important aspects such as finance issues, isolation, and a lack of social integration. ensuring students get the appropriate information and support during their induction could potentially reduce this. although not a new idea, it seems that in devis-rozental and clarke he staff attitudes and expectations about their role in induction activities journal of learning development in higher education, issue 21: september 2021 3 the past few years there has been an increase in students entering higher education with multifaceted issues related to their mental health, lacking the academic skills required at this level or with unrealistic expectations of what university life will be like, and this is of concern within the sector (houghton and anderson, 2017). many students enter university without an understanding of the requirements needed for university. this can be in areas related to their wellbeing such as self-care or time management, but also relate to the academic skills required such as academic writing, referencing, or even understanding the marking criterion (devis-rozental, 2018; 2020; jones, 2018). additionally, in many cases they will have to get to know a new city, develop new friendships and, for those moving from another city and living away from home, this can be extremely difficult (devis-rozental, 2018). these many new ways of being can exacerbate the barriers and obstacles they already have, which can diminish their ability to learn effectively (rozental-devis, 2020). a survey by hepi and the hea (seldon and martin, 2018) found that students are ‘doing less well than 20 to 24 year-olds from the general population on four measures – life satisfaction; whether life feels worthwhile; happiness; and anxiety’(p.10). thus, it is important to consider these areas when supporting students as they transition into university. seldon and martin (2018) argue that staff in schools and colleges should take the time to support students in developing the academic and personal skills they will need once they start university: areas such as preparing students to manage their finances and schedule their time, as well as areas which affect students’ holistic wellbeing. still, a focus on exams and results keeps teachers from addressing issues related to preparing students for university (van rooij, 2018). there are few studies exploring the views of academic and professional staff within universities and the role they play in this transition. jones (2013) argues that ‘a cultural change may be required for all staff within he to view themselves as stakeholders in supporting and enhancing the student experience’ (p.165). consequently, a whole institution approach to supporting students in this transition must be sought (clark et al., 2015). this is devis-rozental and clarke he staff attitudes and expectations about their role in induction activities journal of learning development in higher education, issue 21: september 2021 4 the case even though the roles that academic and professional members of staff will have during this period may differ, because what is important is to have a positive attitude, a proactive approach, and consistency from those involved in the induction in order to be able to support and signpost students to the right type of support (jones, 2013). research shows that students develop their socio-emotional intelligence during their time at university by interacting with those around them (devis-rozental and farquharson, 2020). therefore, ensuring staff are effective role models and demonstrate prosocial attributes and behaviours from induction onwards is an important aspect that must be considered. nevertheless, with an emphasis on the student experience, it may be that the views of those delivering this induction and supporting the transition have not been fully considered. therefore, this paper aims to bridge this gap by exploring the views of academic and professional staff regarding this transition. context there has been a marked improvement in how our university supports students transitioning to university, from the students’ point of view. for instance, we now have a dedicated induction and transition team and a steering group in charge of general induction activities and practicalities. data collected from a survey of students during induction in 2017-18 and 2018-19 identified areas of good practice that have improved the students’ experiences throughout this transition, such as the increased availability of student accommodation, the success of the activities planned for students, and the use of the residential life team. the report written to address the survey findings identified a series of recommendations related to logistics, operations communications, and it support, in order to improve or streamline our support for students rather than change current provision. feedback from students was mostly positive, giving the university’s provision a sound framework from which to continue developing. devis-rozental and clarke he staff attitudes and expectations about their role in induction activities journal of learning development in higher education, issue 21: september 2021 5 a survey carried out within the university to discover how academics understand their role in supporting their students’ health and wellbeing found that most academics see this as part of their practice, even during induction. it also found that there needs to be more clarity regarding boundaries and a need to support staff to keep up to date about signposting. in an attempt to involve all staff, both academic and professional, this research project carried out a survey where all university employees could answer a series of questions regarding the type of support that students may need in their transition from school to university as well as their role within this period. methodology following the university’s ethical protocol, a survey was distributed through the university blogs as well as through the heads of education in each faculty, the internal communications team, and a twitter message during the academic year 2018-2019. one of the aims of the survey was to explore the views of all staff (academic and professional) regarding their involvement in the induction process at this university. measuring staff opinions can be challenging through a survey if it merely looks at quantitative data. as these responses are based on the participants’ lived experiences, we chose to conduct a mixed methods study. the survey included qualitative data through open ended questions, supplemented by some relevant quantitative data. these data were gathered in parallel and were integrated within the analysis phase with the aim to enrich our understanding (greene, 2007). groves et al. (2004) argue that ‘a survey is a systematic method for gathering information from (a sample of) entities for the purpose of constructing quantitative descriptors of the attributes of the large population of which the entities are members’ (p.2). the reason for choosing a survey was to gain information from a larger sample, as the survey was shared with all staff. additionally, the survey was anonymous as we were keen to elucidate on areas that perhaps in other situations colleagues would not be comfortable devis-rozental and clarke he staff attitudes and expectations about their role in induction activities journal of learning development in higher education, issue 21: september 2021 6 discussing. there are drawbacks to carrying out surveys. for instance, it may be difficult to clarify questions to participants or a poor response rate. therefore, when designing a study, it is important to be aware of sample sizes for methodological and ethical reasons and to ensure the data generated is reliable (faber and fonseca, 2014). marshall et al. (2013) assert that qualitative methodologists do not agree on a standard when looking at sample size. they go on to say that sample size may be culturally influenced. therefore, it may be difficult to ascertain the right number of participants that will give you the data you need. even though the sample size for this research was small due to poor response, there were themes emerging which allowed us to generalise some of our findings. these concurred with some of the literature explored and raised interesting points for us to continue improving our provision. another issue is around a participant’s understanding or lack of understanding of the questions, which, without direct contact, cannot be ascertained. we aimed to minimise this by creating very simple questions which were easy to understand. we also included our details in case anyone would like to contact us for further clarification. if we conducted this research again and with more time available, we would have followed up the survey with focus groups or qualitative interviews to gain a more in-depth understanding of the issues identified. when developing the sampling plan, it was decided that all staff (academic and professional) would be invited to take part in an online survey (about 600). this was an opportunity to gain rich data on their experiences and views around our induction process and their expectations of students during this time. when developing the questions, we looked carefully at language, using words that were consistent and easy to understand and avoiding biased language (browne and keeley, 1998). participants although from a quantitative point of view we did not have a large response to our call, 58 members of staff completed the survey and provided rich data for us to explore. of those, 47% were academics and 44% professional members of staff. 9% did not specify their role (see figure 1). devis-rozental and clarke he staff attitudes and expectations about their role in induction activities journal of learning development in higher education, issue 21: september 2021 7 figure 1. staff who answered the survey. clearly there was engagement in the survey by academics as well as professional members of staff: ‘this is important as everyone should be involved in the induction regardless of their job role at the university’ (devis-rozental and barron, 2020, p.97). findings and discussion this paper sought to find out the expectations of staff regarding the transition period and activities within the university. in order to understand this, it was important to know the type of support participants felt they provided to students. figure 2 illustrates that most people answering the survey view their role as including opportunities to support students with many aspects, such as emotional issues. figure 2. responsibility within your role. 27, 47% 25, 44% 5, 9% academic professional other 22% 28% 23% 24% 3% academic skills emotional issues knowledge and understanding of the subject professional guidance none of the above devis-rozental and clarke he staff attitudes and expectations about their role in induction activities journal of learning development in higher education, issue 21: september 2021 8 additionally, participants also view their role as providing students with knowledge of the subject as well as academic skills support. this is a positive find which addresses tinto’s 1999 point regarding students leaving university because they lack the academic skills needed at this level. this is not to say that students will gain all the skills they need during their induction; in fact this would not be productive as it would not be applicable or relevant at this point in their journey. nevertheless, it would signal its importance and perhaps ease their worries, as highlighted by devis-rozental and barron (2020). most academic staff identified that they supported students with emotional issues. professional members of staff also felt that emotional issues were something they would be able to support students with. this addresses seldon and martin’s (2018) points regarding the type of support students should receive during this transition. most participants saw their role as one where they were able to support students holistically. this is vital because it means that they take into account the socio-emotional context of learning and developing, something already identified in the literature by devis-rozental and barron (2020) as evident. this was closely followed by the other areas. it is interesting to note that four participants felt that they did not give any type of support to students. there may be a misunderstanding of what support means to students and if it differs from what staff think. taking into account jones’ (2013) point of a need for a culture shift so that all staff within the university feel they have a part to play in the student experience, this is an area where improvements could be made through further training, for example. inductions the next section explored the staff’s views regarding their involvement within the induction period. over half of those who answered indicated that they were involved in the process (devis-rozental and barron, 2020). figure 3 shows that 17 participants did not think they were involved in inductions and four were not sure. devis-rozental and clarke he staff attitudes and expectations about their role in induction activities journal of learning development in higher education, issue 21: september 2021 9 figure 3. involvement in the university induction process. in recent years, the university has emphasised the importance of all staff being involved in the induction process. still there are some members of staff that clearly do not see themselves as being part of it. having the essential information, skills, and behaviours that will support students during this transition is important. it does not have to be in depth knowledge of a subject or programme but rather a positive attitude, so students feel they can approach us, and having the right type of information so that we can either support them or send them to the right place (baer, 2008; mah and ifenthaler, 2017; devis-rozental and barron, 2020). there must be a clearer message and support for staff to develop their understanding and knowledge so that they feel part of the induction activities. this in turn will have a positive impact on the student experience. student expectations when asked what they thought about the expectations of students concerning the induction process, 40 staff participants stated that students sought general information. 13 of those asked stated that students needed (not expected) a warm welcome and to feel that they were part of the university community. there seems to be a disparity in this answer if we consider that in question four, 40 participants mentioned emotional support (pastoral), but in this question only 13 did so. consequently, this is an area that could be further explored to fully understand the reasons why some people think students may need emotional support, but do not expect it as part of the induction process. three participants stated that students did not expect anything or ‘not a lot’ and four did not know what students would expect, with one participant stating: ‘they have no real idea of what 36, 63% 17, 30% 4, 7% yes no unsure devis-rozental and clarke he staff attitudes and expectations about their role in induction activities journal of learning development in higher education, issue 21: september 2021 10 to “expect” as such’ and another one stating ’i’m not sure they expect much at all’. from research we know that students come to university with a multitude of expectations, and it is important to ensure we know what these are and how to meet them if possible (devisrozental and barron, 2020). most participants mentioned effective communication as something students expected. for instance, one participant stated students expected ‘good communication and signposting’ whilst others mentioned ‘knowledge’, ‘clear, ‘concise’, ‘accurate’ information and advice, with one other stating that students expected ‘a font of all knowledge! definitive answers’. thus, effective communication and the knowledge of where to find the right type of information were important to them. staff expectations regarding the staff’s own expectations of commencing students during the induction process, there was a variety of responses, although it is clear that the main expectation was engagement. figure 4. staff expectations of commencing students. almost half of the participants expected students to engage with the induction activities by taking part actively. participants mentioned the importance of resilience and the knowledge that they (students) would have to work hard and engage. other responses included confidence to speak up if they feel lost, respect, and engagement. attendance of sessions nothing attend engagement respect enthusiasm emotions open mindedness 0 5 10 15 20 25 series1 devis-rozental and clarke he staff attitudes and expectations about their role in induction activities journal of learning development in higher education, issue 21: september 2021 11 and engagement were also seen as important, although one participant conceded that perhaps we should not expect students to engage at this point as it could be ‘scary’ to do so. staff role-modelling prosocial attitudes and behaviours could encourage students to do so, too (devis-rozental and farquharson, 2020). clearly most staff have expectations of students and are aware of the needs they may have. there were five participants who expected nothing and six only expected students to turn up. this does not concur with current research which has found that students do have expectations of their university experience and it is important that these expectations match those of staff (fraser and killen, 2003; ridout, 2018). one participant stated ‘i expect to bore them senseless with information they are too excited/bored to take in’. clearly, this is not the right attitude and is something which could impact negatively on the experience of a newlyarrived student (devis-rozental and farquharson, 2020). considering the lived experiences of students before they arrive at university is important in order to cater for their needs (jones, 2018), especially as this is an emotionally charged transition where the majority of students are leaving their family and home life behind, and students will therefore need support in order to settle (rozental-devis, 2020). an option to improve practice could be better training for all staff regarding students’ expectations, the barriers they face, and issues of accessing university. staff working at a university should have opportunities to gain knowledge and understanding of how students are currently prepared before they join their university (seldon and martin, 2018). conversely, and thinking about the specific knowledge students should have before they arrive at university, the idea of having no expectations and an open mind can be beneficial as it may take away added pressure or anxiety for students. for instance, staff could use the tourist metaphor developed by devis-rozental (2018) as a framework for ensuring students gain the required knowledge and skills without making assumptions. this metaphor explores the idea of designing ‘strategies to provide an environment that positively impacts on students’ (devis-rozental, 2018, p.104), by seeing them as migrants arriving at our university with no previous knowledge of our customs (policies), currency (marks), language (academic devis-rozental and clarke he staff attitudes and expectations about their role in induction activities journal of learning development in higher education, issue 21: september 2021 12 writing), laws (plagiarism), geography (campuses), thus avoiding assumptions regarding their knowledge and understanding. doing so would enable universities to develop comprehensive induction packages to ensure students gain the basic knowledge and skills they need to thrive at university. as it stands, there is already a benchmark to ascertain that students have the competence to be at university in the way they go through the application and acceptance stages, assuming it works well. so, once they have gone through that and we know they have the minimum requirements, welcoming them with unconditional positive regard, without prejudice or preconceived ideas but with a positive and welcoming attitude can be beneficial to all (devisrozental, 2018). usefulness of the induction process the last question asked staff about the current induction and what students get from it. figure 5. student gain from the current induction. the majority of respondents envisaged the induction activities as an opportunity to settle and to get to know those around them. developing both a sense of belonging and meaningful relationships at university are key influencers on students’ university experiences and can be predictors of success (devis-rozental and clarke, 2020). consequently, it is vital to ensure that these activities encourage opportunities for social interactions so that students can develop relationships and ‘have the time and space to settle in’ (rozental-devis, 2020 p.79). 39 18 20 37 29 38 0 10 20 30 40 50 settling in gaining academic skills gaining content knowledge making friends getting used to university life meeting members of staff devis-rozental and clarke he staff attitudes and expectations about their role in induction activities journal of learning development in higher education, issue 21: september 2021 13 meehan and howells (2017) found that the three main things that matter to students as they enter university are the relationships they form with the academic staff, the course they are doing, and a developing sense of belonging. therefore, ensuring universities enable opportunities for students to do these things during their induction period is important. ensuring that staff attitudes are positive and engaging and the activities organised are developed with a view to building effective relationships with other students are key areas (jones, 2013). additionally, there should be opportunities for staff to interact with the students so that individuals feel part of the community and, in a way, peers in the learning journey (devis-rozental, 2018; 2020). seldom and martin (2018) offer other suggestions which could be incorporated even before students arrive on campus, such as having contact with a personal mentor, which they suggest could be a second-year student. in this way, students would be able to ask questions of a peer and perhaps feel less isolated once they arrive on campus. this would address the issues raised in the survey regarding students feeling welcomed and supported. analysis: we are all in this together the transition to university is a complex time and can be difficult for some students. a report by hepi (seldon and martin, 2018) identified the importance of taking a whole university approach. this is something that is important and sometimes overlooked or difficult to achieve due to silos, and sometimes misunderstandings about everyone’s role within the induction process, as found in this research. however, this presents a sound opportunity to provide consistency between teams and different areas of our provision and to ensure students will be well supported as staff are well informed and knowledgeable about how best to support students. our university has taken a whole university approach in its central induction activities. through a steering group, the various stakeholders in different areas of the university have worked collaboratively to ensure all students have the right support and activities. still, it devis-rozental and clarke he staff attitudes and expectations about their role in induction activities journal of learning development in higher education, issue 21: september 2021 14 seems that not all staff are aware of this and the important role each of us plays, whatever it is we do. therefore, more effective communication channels between teams to ensure every member of staff within the university community understands how their role can impact on the induction activities and the ability of students to settle in, are needed. this is particularly important for those members of staff who did not feel part of the induction process. it does not have to mean that we should all be experts in all aspects of the university. it is more about understanding that our attitude, prosocial behaviours, and willingness to help can make a difference to the student experience. information sessions could be put into place to ensure all staff feel they can address any issues or questions regarding this transition, or where to signpost students to. also it is key to get them to understand the role they can play as culture leaders representing our university and to consider the importance of providing opportunities for developing meaningful relationships, a sense of belonging, and some general knowledge of their programmes; the three areas identified by meehan and howells (2017) as important to students. we are keen to ensure that every member of staff in our university sees themselves as culture leaders, role modelling the socio-emotional and professional behaviours and attitudes that we aim for our students to develop. research shows that students develop these skills at university from those around them (meehan and howells, 2017; devis-rozental, 2018; 2020; devis-rozental and farquharson, 2020). consequently, an evaluation of the current channels and support for staff, and a stock taking exercise to map the available support to students, both academic and personal, is being undertaken to continue streamlining the communication channels and to provide more clarity and efficiency to both students and staff. this is important because without teams knowing and understanding what other teams can offer, there may be unnecessary duplication of activities which would not be cost effective, or signposting issues which could be frustrating for students. what is more, repetition and duplication can be confusing to students seeking clarity. additionally, having disparity on the type of support offered to students is unfair to devis-rozental and clarke he staff attitudes and expectations about their role in induction activities journal of learning development in higher education, issue 21: september 2021 15 those who do not have access to the same level of support for whatever reason. to ensure consistency of approach with clear channels it is vital that all staff can signpost students to the best support for their needs. most academic staff are traditionally involved within the transition as they will have the most contact with their students. still, it is important to acknowledge that non-academic staff also play a key role within these first weeks and their attitude, behaviour, and message to the students must be similar to that of academic staff to provide a consistency of approach. jones (2013, p.165) argues that these staff ‘make an important contribution to the students . . . through their interactions’. this should be encouraged with appropriate training and support for all staff so that they feel comfortable taking on these roles. this is possible (clark et al., 2015) and would also go towards further humanising higher education practice by breaking down a ‘them and us’ culture between academics and professional staff which sometimes exists at universities and which goes against having a whole university approach (devisrozental and clarke, 2020). conclusions at present, and based on the findings from this research, most staff that answered the survey in this project see induction as a time to give information rather than support. however, considering the emotive nature of these transitions, it is important to be vigilant about students’ wellbeing and to support them effectively or signpost them to the right type of support during this time. these skills will probably be centred on practical activities such as budgeting, home arrangements, or making friends rather than academic expectations. being able to signpost every student to the correct team to seek support with confidence is therefore key. overall, this paper found that most colleagues who answered the survey see the induction period as important and feel part of it. however, specific training to ensure staff are able to support students during this transition with consistency may be needed, as some staff are not clear about their role. devis-rozental and clarke he staff attitudes and expectations about their role in induction activities journal of learning development in higher education, issue 21: september 2021 16 additionally, it found that there is a need for better communication channels between the different services and departments within the university, to ensure staff are well informed and that students are signposted to the right type of support, as well as to provide a more consistent approach, something highlighted in the literature. this is particularly important as some participants do not feel engaged with students within the induction period as discussed previously within this paper. consequently, ensuring staff develop an awareness and understanding of the vital role that each member of our university community plays during the induction period is essential. this is particularly critical since this can be an emotionally charged period for students, and staff’s lack of engagement, knowledge, or clear understanding of their impact on students can be detrimental to the student experience and can ultimately result in students leaving. limitations and blind spots this was a small-scale study and may present some limitations regarding generality; in the future a larger study should be considered. additionally, further exploration of some of the areas could have been included by carrying out post-survey interviews, for example. perhaps using the survey as the data collection method was restrictive as we were not able to follow up with specific participants due to their anonymity, especially considering that we were looking at attitudes and opinions, and some responses needed further clarification. this is something that may have been better explored through interviews or focus groups and should be considered in future research studies. another limitation was the lack of literature looking at staff attitudes about transition. however, this identified a new gap in the literature to be further researched which this project has aimed to tackle, albeit on a small scale. consequently, further research in the area is still needed. devis-rozental and clarke he staff attitudes and expectations about their role in induction activities journal of learning development in higher education, issue 21: september 2021 17 lastly, the main purpose of this research project was to enrich practice and support current provision in a single university. looking at different types of provision and what works for them could add richness to this type of research and should be further explored. references baer, l. d. (2008) ‘misunderstandings about student transitions to university: a slow-motion dialogue between staff and students’, journal of geography in higher education, 32(2), pp.303-320. https://doi.org/10.1080/03098260701514132 . browne, m. n. and keeley, s. m. (1998) asking the right questions: a guide to critical thinking. 5th edn. upper saddle river, nj: prentice hall. clark, j., gurney, l., lawrence, s. leece, r., malouff, j., masters, i., reid, j., tasker, i., valenzuela, f. r. and wilkes j. (2015) ‘embedding an institution-wide capacity building opportunity around transition pedagogy: first year teaching and learning network coordinators’, the international journal of the first year of higher education, 6(1), pp.107-119. https://doi.org/10.5204/intjfyhe.v6i1.268. devis-rozental, c. (2018) developing socio-emotional intelligence in higher education scholars. london: palgrave. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94036-6 . devis-rozental, c. and barron, m. (2020) ‘mind the gap: supporting students to have a successful transition to university, it is everyone’s responsibility’, in devis-rozental, c. and clarke, s. (eds.) humanising higher education: a positive approach to wellbeing. cham: palgrave macmillan, pp.83-106. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-57430-7_6 . devis-rozental, c. and clarke, s. (eds.) (2020) humanising higher education: a positive approach to wellbeing. cham: palgrave macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-03057430-7 . https://doi.org/10.1080/03098260701514132 https://doi.org/10.5204/intjfyhe.v6i1.268 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94036-6 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-57430-7_6 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-57430-7 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-57430-7 devis-rozental and clarke he staff attitudes and expectations about their role in induction activities journal of learning development in higher education, issue 21: september 2021 18 devis-rozental. c. and farquharson, l. (2020) ‘what influences students in their development of socio-emotional intelligence whilst at university?’, higher education pedagogies, 5(1), pp.294-309. https://doi.org/10.1080/23752696.2020.1820887. faber, k. and fonseca, l. m. (2014) ‘how sample size influences research outcomes’, dental press j orthod., 19(4), pp.27-29. https://doi.org/10.1590/2176-9451.19.4.027-029.ebo. fraser, w. j. and killen, r. (2003) ‘factors influencing academic success or failure of firstyear and senior university students: do education students and lecturers perceive things differently?’, south african journal of education, 23(4), pp. 254-260. greene, j. (2007) mixed options in social inquiry. san francisco: jossey-bass. groves, r. m., fowler, f. j., couper, m. p., lepkowski, j. m., singer, e. and tourangeau, r. (2004) survey methodology. hoboken: wiley. hassel, s. and ridout, n. (2018) ‘an investigation of first-year students' and lecturers' expectations of university education’, frontiers in psychology, 8, p.2218. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.02218. houghton, a.-m. and anderson, j. (2017) embedding mental wellbeing in the curriculum: maximising success in higher education. london: hea. jones, g. (2013) ‘supporting staff to be supporters’, in morgan, s. (ed.) improving the student experience: a practical guide for universities and colleges. abingdon: routledge, pp.164-178. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203817513-20 . jones, s. (2018) ‘expectation vs experience: might transition gaps predict undergraduate students’ outcome gaps?’ journal of further and higher education, 42(7), pp.908-992. https://doi.org/10.1080/0309877x.2017.1323195. https://doi.org/10.1080/23752696.2020.1820887 https://doi.org/10.1590/2176-9451.19.4.027-029.ebo https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.02218 https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203817513-20 https://doi.org/10.1080/0309877x.2017.1323195 devis-rozental and clarke he staff attitudes and expectations about their role in induction activities journal of learning development in higher education, issue 21: september 2021 19 mah, d.-k. and ifenthaler, d. (2017) ‘academic staff perspectives on first-year students’ academic competencies’, journal of applied research in higher education, 9(4), pp.630-640. https://doi.org/10.1108/jarhe-03-2017-0023. marshall, b., cardon, p., poddar, a. and fontenot, r. (2013) ‘does sample size matter in qualitative research? a review of qualitative interviews in is research’, journal of computer information systems, 54(1), pp.11-22. https://doi.org/10.1080/08874417.2013.11645667. meehan, c. and howells, k. (2018) ‘what really matters to freshers? evaluation of first year student experience of transition into university’, journal of further and higher education, 42(7), pp.893-907. https://doi.org/10.1080/0309877x.2017.1323194. perry, r. p., hladkyj, s., pekrun, r. h. and pelletier, s. t. (2001) ‘academic control and action control in the achievement of college students: a longitudinal field study’, journal of educational psychology, 93(4), pp.776-789. https://doi.org/10.1037/00220663.93.4.776. rozental-devis, d. (2020) ‘humanising higher education by listening to the student voice’, in devis-rozental, c. and clarke, s. (eds.) humanising higher education: a positive approach to wellbeing. cham: palgrave macmillan, pp.65-82. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-57430-7_5 . seldon, a. and martin, a. (2018) the positive and mindful university. london: hepi. tinto, v. (1999) ‘taking retention seriously: rethinking the first year of college’, nacada journal, 19(2), pp.5-9. https://doi.org/10.12930/0271-9517-19.2.5. van rooij, e. (2018) secondary school students' university readiness and their transition to university. groningen: university of groningen. https://doi.org/10.1108/jarhe-03-2017-0023 https://doi.org/10.1080/08874417.2013.11645667 https://doi.org/10.1080/0309877x.2017.1323194 https://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1037/0022-0663.93.4.776 https://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1037/0022-0663.93.4.776 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-57430-7_5 https://doi.org/10.12930/0271-9517-19.2.5 devis-rozental and clarke he staff attitudes and expectations about their role in induction activities journal of learning development in higher education, issue 21: september 2021 20 wojcieszek, l., theaker, l., ratcliff, m., macpherson, l. and boyd, j. (2014) ‘enhancing the first-year student experience through academic and professional staff collegiality’, the international journal of the first year in higher education, 5(1), pp.143-151. https://doi.org/10.5204/intjfyhe.v5i1.211. yorke, m. and longden, b. (eds.) (2004) retention and student success in higher education. bodmin: open university press. yorke, m. and longden, b. (2008) the first-year experience of he in the uk. london: hea. author details camila devis-rozental is principal academic in socio-emotional intelligence and service excellence, bournemouth university. susanne clarke is head of service excellence, bournemouth university. https://doi.org/10.5204/intjfyhe.v5i1.211 he staff’s attitudes and expectations about their role in induction activities abstract introduction background and literature context methodology participants findings and discussion inductions student expectations staff expectations usefulness of the induction process analysis: we are all in this together conclusions limitations and blind spots references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special edition: 2018 aldinhe conference, october 2018 facilitating learning about academic phraseology: teaching activities for student writers mary davis oxford brookes university, uk john morley university of manchester, uk abstract academic phrasebank is an online, open-access compendium of formulaic phrases for academic writers, created and continuously developed at the university of manchester. originally developed for student writers whose first language is not english, data suggests that over half of the many users are in fact native speakers of english. underpinned by current approaches to academic text analysis and to understanding the phraseological nature of language, the academic phrasebank has become a well-known and widely-used resource which many learning support teachers recommend to students at all levels of study, mainly as a self-study or quick reference tool. in order to explore ways to facilitate learning about academic phraseology, this paper seeks to demonstrate how exercises developed from academic phrasebank can be used to help student writers to better understand the nature and role of academic phrases and to improve their academic writing. the usefulness of different exercise types is discussed, drawing on comments from learning developers. the implication of the study is that such teaching activities can facilitate student engagement with academic phrases and help them to write more effectively. keywords: formulaic phrases; academic writing; learning development; student writers; teaching activities. davis and morley facilitating learning about academic phraseology: teaching activities for student writers journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: october 2018 2 introduction a characteristic of academic writing is that it is rich in conventionalised phrases or what is generally termed formulaic language. here we are referring to commonly-used sequences of words, sometimes with variable elements, which appear to be ready-made and which are often related to a particular communicative purpose. it has been argued that to be successful, a writer needs to be able to use a wide range of these phrases, knowledge of which is lacking or underdeveloped in novice writers. one pedagogic response to this need has been to provide writers with a list of commonly-used phrases to refer to. it was for this reason that the academic phrasebank (hereafter referred to as ap) was created. the ap is a freely available online resource of over 3000 useful generic academic phrases, organised according to the typical communicative functions employed by academic writers. although ap has proved popular mainly as a linguistic resource with novice writers and with more experienced writers in many academic contexts, we argue that it could represent more than a resource to refer students to, since it also has pedagogic potential as a tool for learning, which may be enhanced through tasks designed to raise students’ awareness about this important area of writing. by using ap in teaching activities, we demonstrate that important opportunities can be created for students to improve their academic literacy, for example by understanding how to build sentences, avoid plagiarism and understand criticality. the first part of this paper describes the content and structure of ap and its users in some detail before moving on to explain the theoretical ideas underpinning the resource and its connection with academic literacy. the second part presents and explains a series of instructional exercises based on ap which can be used by learning developers with student writers. we discuss the usefulness of these activities by drawing on comments made by learning developers in interviews about ap, and with reference to literature on academic writing development. academic phrasebank ap is an open-access compendium of formulaic phrases commonly found in academic writing. it contains over 3000 reusable phrases which are grouped in two ways: either under one of the main sections of a research report, for example, discussing findings, or under a more generic functional area, for example, being cautious. within these sections, the phrases are further listed under headings determined by their specific functional davis and morley facilitating learning about academic phraseology: teaching activities for student writers journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: october 2018 3 purpose in the writing. for example, within the section on discussing findings, the following sub-sections can be found: indicating an unexpected outcome; offering an explanation for the findings; advising cautious interpretation of the findings. in most cases, around 20 possible phrases are listed under each sub-heading. below is an example of a sub-section for discussing findings. figure 1. phrases listed under a section for discussing findings. advising cautious interpretation of the findings another source of uncertainty is … a note of caution is due here since … these findings may be somewhat limited by … these findings cannot be extrapolated to all xs. these data must be interpreted with caution because … it could be argued that the positive results were due to … these results therefore need to be interpreted with caution. in observational studies, there is a potential for bias from … it is important to bear in mind the possible bias in these responses. during an early stage of development, the phrases in ap were drawn from a corpus of 100 research dissertations at the university of manchester with the authors’ permissions. however, since the initial stage, phrases from a wide range of academic sources have been included. criteria for inclusion are that i) the combination of words contains formulaic elements, ii) the phrase expresses a useful communicative purpose in academic writing, and iii) the combination of words sounds natural to a native speaker of english. once identified for inclusion in ap, a phrase needs to be sifted of its original content so that only topic-neutral terms remain. although its development was informed by the needs of postgraduate students, around 30% of users are actually undergraduates. an indication of the breakdown of users can be seen in the table below. these figures were obtained using an electronic questionnaire attached to the ap website from 2016 to 2018. although the sampling is therefore not scientific, a rough picture of the users has been obtained. davis and morley facilitating learning about academic phraseology: teaching activities for student writers journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: october 2018 4 figure 2. breakdown of users by level of study or role (n = 3650). in terms of the distribution of disciplinary areas represented by the users, it appears that all areas are represented. however, social sciences seem to be the largest disciplinary group, followed by education and arts and humanities. as we know, these disciplinary areas tend to contain within them the more linguistically demanding subjects. figure 3. disciplinary areas represented by the users (n = 3650). nonuniversity 4.2% researchers 5.4% lecturers 13.3% pgrs 20.2% pgts 26.8% ugs 29.8% arts and humanities, 14.4% business and management 13.7% education, 16.5%engineering, 8.3% life sciences, 7.3% medicine and nursing, 13.6% physical sciences, 2.9% psychological sciences, 6.1% social sciences 17.2% davis and morley facilitating learning about academic phraseology: teaching activities for student writers journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: october 2018 5 originally developed at the university of manchester for student writers whose first language is not english, the data obtained via the electronic feedback form suggest that around one half of all who use the resource are native speakers of english. what is recognised as a need in non-native speakers of english, therefore, also appears to present a significant challenge to many native speakers. theoretical influences the resource has been informed by two very influential theoretical approaches in applied linguistics. the first of these is an approach to describing the structure and features of academic texts known as genre analysis and the second is an approach to analysing and understanding language, known as phraseology or the study of formulaic language. the genre-centred approach to understanding academic texts was pioneered in the 1980s by john swales (1981, 1990). swales was interested in identifying the rhetorical patterning in academic discourse and making this explicit in order to help overseas postgraduate writers who were non-native speakers of english. in his early work on the analysis of the introductory sections of research articles, using a corpus-based approach, swales identified commonly-used ‘moves’ which he defined as a section of text that serves a specific communicative function and purpose (swales, 1990). an example of one of the moves he identified in introductions to research articles is, for example: establishing the field which can be realised by indicating the interest or importance of the topic. such units of analysis are used to organise much of the material in ap; many of the subsections under which the phrases are organised correspond to ‘moves’ identified by swales in his early work. the resource actually utilises many more functional headings and some slightly different ones but the fundamental approach is the same. as well as identifying the communicative functions of sections of text, swales was also concerned with showing the kind of language which was used to achieve this. in other words, he sought to identify ‘the linguistic means’ (1990, p.82) by which the communicative moves can be realised. much of this language was phraseological in nature. this brings us to the second major theoretical influence which has informed the development of the ap. this is the approach to understanding language not in terms of single words or sounds, or in terms of grammatical patterns, but rather in terms of the davis and morley facilitating learning about academic phraseology: teaching activities for student writers journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: october 2018 6 ways words combine to produce conventionalised or commonly-used sequences, described in the introduction to this paper as formulaic language. it is now accepted that much of the language we use has this formulaic quality; that many pairs of words or strings of words are found in combination with a frequency greater than that expected by chance. these observations were becoming apparent around the time that john swales first started working on his rhetorical analysis of communicative moves and were reported by such writers as bolinger (1976) and pawley and syder (1983). later, these intuitive insights began to be supported empirically, as computer technology permitted the identification of recurrent phraseological patterns in very large corpora of spoken and written english using specialised software (for example, sinclair, 1991). this understanding of the formulaic nature of language has become an important area of interest in psycholinguistics, since it has implications for the ways that language is learnt, stored, retrieved and used. it has also become extremely important in the field of applied linguistics where language learning and writer development are major concerns. many researchers share the view that successful academic writing requires a clear specialised knowledge of formulaic phrases, as well as a clear knowledge of academic genres. wood (2015), for example, writes that formulaic phrases comprise the ‘basic elements of academic discourse’ (p.103); others argue that formulaic language is such an important characteristic of academic discourse that poor awareness and insufficient use can mark a writer as inadequate (jones and haywood, 2004; li and schmitt, 2009; hyland, 2008). academic literacy given these theoretical influences, it can be seen that learning about academic phraseology constitutes an important element of students’ development of academic literacy. in order for students to learn to make effective use of formulaic phrases, it seems necessary for educators to design teaching interventions which can help students to demystify the process of academic writing. many studies have highlighted the problems students experience with understanding the requirements of academic writing, often due to a lack of support (french, 2011; murray and kirton, 2006). french (2011) demonstrated that a group of lecturers were unaware how they should support first year undergraduate students with academic writing while, in a much broader study of the uk he context, murray and kirton (2006) drew attention to the widespread inadequacy and lack of availability of academic writing teaching. the use of teaching interventions has been davis and morley facilitating learning about academic phraseology: teaching activities for student writers journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: october 2018 7 strongly recommended. for example, farrell and tighe-mooney (2013) developed an academic writing intervention through group workshops based on both the process and product of writing with students. in their intervention, they devoted a workshop to “demystifying the route to getting an a in essay writing” (p.1107); thus, unsurprisingly, the students were much more motivated about the final assignment product, than about the writing process or activities that were peripheral to assessment. murray and moore (2006) also emphasise the need to demystify the academic writing process by breaking down exactly what students need to do and how to do it, presenting many useful teaching activities. however, to our knowledge, other researchers and educators have not focused on demystifying academic writing by presenting teaching activities based on the use of formulaic phrases, which this study will attempt to do. methodology in the following section, five teaching activities developed by the authors of this paper will be presented. these teaching activities have been used by the authors (based at two uk universities) in study skills classes and workshops to foster student understanding and engagement with phraseological elements and to help them to improve their academic writing. we also draw on comments from four uk based learning developers which were gathered in follow-up interviews to the questionnaire survey of ap users explained above. the interviewees were self-selected in that the questionnaire invited participants to provide an email address if they agreed to be interviewed on how they used ap. ethical concerns for the interviews were followed by requesting consent to the use of interview data for research, anonymising all data and sending a full interview transcript to each participant, to check they were happy with the recorded data. following kvale and brinkmann (2009), the interviews were semi-structured to gather some comparable data but also permit probing of useful areas. the interviews lasted approximately thirty minutes and were based around a discussion of how ap may help student writers with language, rewriting from sources, structure, ideas and style, as well as the impact and role of reusable phrases in academic writing (see appendix for interview questions). this builds on an earlier study by the authors which examined how lecturers in different disciplines viewed the acceptability of re-using phrases from ap (davis and morley, 2015). with each activity, how learning about academic phraseology may be facilitated through the task will be discussed and analysed, with reference to the literature, and using relevant and insightful comments from learning davis and morley facilitating learning about academic phraseology: teaching activities for student writers journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: october 2018 8 developer participants in the interview data. in this way, we aim to inform the use of these teaching activities, not only from research in academic writing but also from the perspective and experience of learning developers. analysis and discussion of teaching activities the five teaching activities presented in this section comprise: using sentence stems, raising awareness of phrases in texts, raising awareness of rhetorical moves in texts, distinguishing between acceptable and non-acceptable reuse of phrases and using critical language. as explained above, relevant comments from learning developers gathered through interviews will contribute to the discussion of these activities. activity 1 using sentence stems for the introduction as a writing prompt figure 4. task to complete sentences from stems for introduction functions. choose one of the following sentence stems for the function indicated and continue the sentence for your own introduction (you may find it useful to substitute some elements): establishing the importance of the topic: one of the most significant current discussions in x is... it is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore the ... highlighting a knowledge gap in the field of study: however, far too little attention has been paid to ... a search of the literature revealed few studies which … focus and aim: this report seeks to address the following questions:… the aim of this study is to determine/examine ... outline of structure: this paper has been divided into four parts. the first part deals with ... the first section of this paper will examine ... explaining keywords while a variety of definitions of the term x have been suggested, this paper will use the definition proposed by y who saw it as ... throughout this paper the term x will be used to refer to.... davis and morley facilitating learning about academic phraseology: teaching activities for student writers journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: october 2018 9 starting a writing task is known to be extremely difficult for writers (murray and moore, 2006); not having the language to start can be a further reason to procrastinate. the introduction section is probably the most formulaic part of a research paper so having these phrases at hand can empower the student writer to put together an introduction with the required elements (scope, knowledge gap, aim, outline, keywords). on this point, one learning developer explained their perception of phrases on ap: they are like a launch. it’s as if you are an artist with a blank canvas. when i am working with a student, we are spitting ideas out and then looking to cluster them but having phrases you can use is very helpful. once you’ve started with the words moving on the line, the continuation is much, much easier. (learning developer 1). using phrases such as these effectively could also enable students to develop what sword (2012) calls ‘smart sentencing’, where the sentence has a clear focus and purpose, rather than being abstract and losing meaning. thus, sentence stems such as these may also impact positively on the quality of student writing, particularly in the introduction. activity 2 raising awareness of phrases in text figure 5. task to raise awareness of reusable academic phrases in a given text. highlight the reusable phrases in this paragraph from a text about gap years for many years, vast numbers of uk students have been taking a break in their studies between school and university. what has become widely known as the ‘gap year’ is a phenomenon that has undergone extensive transformations to the extent that nowadays it could be said that anything goes; it can vary from a 2 month trip to a 3 year work experience. in this essay, various factors related to gap years will be described and evaluated with a view to understanding how the phenomenon works in practice… it is clearly important to understand the use of phrases in a text, both for their meaning as a reader and as a writer, to see how to use them. another learning developer agreed with the need to put phrases within a text: davis and morley facilitating learning about academic phraseology: teaching activities for student writers journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: october 2018 10 it might be nice to see some phrases in context, if there was a section where you could see a short sample of writing with some of the phrases highlighted, just to see how they have been incorporated. (learning developer 2). by using an activity such as highlighting phrases in a given text as shown in figure 5, perhaps first by showing an example paragraph with phrases already highlighted and then giving them a paragraph to highlight phrases themselves, students get practice in identifying useful phrases and thus also have an opportunity to expand their linguistic repertoire of formulaic phrases. in addition, students gain the opportunity to develop an awareness about which combinations of words may be reused or recycled due to their generic and frequent usage. this area is developed further in activity 4 below. it may also be an activity that could be applied to students’ own writing, both to identify phrases used and where incorporating additional phrases would improve the coherence of the text. importantly, such exercises may encourage students to develop their phraseological repertoire beyond using ap, as they learn to identify reusable phrases for themselves (swales and feak, 2012). activity 3 functions of transition signals figure 6. task to analyse the phrases for transition signals. decide on the purpose of each group of phrases below. purpose or function a) the structure and functions of x will be explained in the following section. the following part of this paper moves on to describe in greater detail the… b) as was pointed out in the introduction to this paper.. as previously stated,.. c) so far this paper has focused on x. the following section will discuss… moving on now to consider… d) this section has reviewed the three key aspects of … this chapter has described the methods used in this investigation. davis and morley facilitating learning about academic phraseology: teaching activities for student writers journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: october 2018 11 e) in the chapter that follows, i present … the next chapter describes the synthesis and evaluation of… in a similar way to the activity 1 sentence stems for the introduction, this transitionsignalling activity could be a matching exercise of functions and phrases, or where only phrases are given and students need to decide the function, as shown in figure 6. the activity thus helps students to understand signposting and raises their awareness of rhetorical moves (swales and feak, 2012), as discussed in the review of theoretical influences above. the usefulness of focusing on signposting was emphasised by a learning developer: when i am working on signposting with students i start off with a very basic list of phrases for building on, rather than just ‘and’, but then… sort of explore how to make the signposting within the essay clear so that the person marking it can see you know, they are reviewing what they have done, this where they are, this is where they are going. (learning developer 1). it is clear therefore that being able to manipulate phrases for signposting is helpful, both for a student writer to structure their own text and for them to facilitate clear communication to the reader. in this way, the emphasis on signposting phrases could result in more effective and communicative writing. activity 4 plagiarism and phraseology a frequent concern about re-using any language chunk is whether this might risk plagiarism (davis and morley, 2015). thus, it is important to raise students’ awareness of where it is acceptable and where it is not acceptable to re-use phrases, as can be seen in the task below. davis and morley facilitating learning about academic phraseology: teaching activities for student writers journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: october 2018 12 figure 7. task to distinguish between reusable and non-reusable phrases. do you think these phrases could be re-used without risk of plagiarism? 1. the research to date has tended to focus on x rather than y 2. deliberately and incisively debunks such myths 3. the main weakness of this study was the lack of 4. it has become a catchword used to label and delegitimise political movements 5. while a variety of definitions of the term x have been suggested, this paper will use the definition first proposed by x, who saw it as … 6. taken together, these findings suggest a role for 7. much of the research up to now has been descriptive in nature 8. dawkins is deaf to theology 9. in this paper i argue that 10. the findings of the current study are consistent with the need to differentiate was explained by another learning developer: one thing our students ask when we show the site is ‘will we be able to use it and is it plagiarism?’ that is their only fear of using it. and we do say it isn’t plagiarism, it’s stock phrases, they are not in trouble and in no way will the phrase fit the exact sentence they want to write anyway. but i think showing it and giving them an idea how they can structure their sentences and phrase things, they are given the idea of how to go away and do it themselves. (learning developer 3). as this learning developer explains, using formulaic phrases actually helps students to avoid plagiarism, as they are able to take a phrase and then develop it in their own way. however, some of the phrases in activity 4 are very specific, contain an opinion, and copying would be plagiarism (2, 4, 8), so the activity enables students to practise distinguishing these non-reusable phrases from the remaining phrases in the list which are generic and could be re-used. davis and morley facilitating learning about academic phraseology: teaching activities for student writers journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: october 2018 13 activity 5 understanding criticality in activity 5 below, students practise putting phrases together, through slotting evaluative adjectives into phrases in order to comment on the literature. figure 8. evaluative adjective slotting. choose an appropriate evaluative adjective to comment on a study in her in his in their in this useful timely seminal detailed thorough influential important innovative pioneering comprehensive study (of x), survey (of x), analysis (of x), examination (of x), investigation (into x), smith (2012) showed that … jones (2013) concluded that… doing focused phrase-building activities such as this might ease the problems for students in understanding some aspects of criticality, as emphasised by another learning developer: in terms of being critical, sometimes students don’t understand what that means, they understand it to be criticising, like saying an author is wrong. when they see how they could phrase it, sometimes the penny drops, they get a sense of ‘oh right, that’s the sort of thing i should be saying’. because i think, conceptually, they might understand they’ve got to be critical but they just don’t know how that would look. in their feedback, sometimes the markers will say things like ‘more discussion is needed’ but they are not sure what that would really look like so i think it can help them pin a more abstract concept onto something more specific. (learning developer 4). these comments highlight the importance of helping students to understand what being critical means, particularly since they may not learn how to do this from class or tutor feedback. developing criticality in approaching the literature is known to be a significant challenge for students (ridley, 2012), so activities to practise employing critical expressions can be very useful to assist their understanding. davis and morley facilitating learning about academic phraseology: teaching activities for student writers journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: october 2018 14 conclusion in this paper, we have presented and discussed five teaching activities based on exploiting phrases from ap. we have considered their application to learning development in academic writing, in particular through comments from learning developers. all of these activities, through making use of material freely available on the ap, show how working with formulaic phrases can facilitate learning development in academic writing. by getting students to actively engage with formulaic phrases in these activities, they may be better able to develop the cognitive aspects of academic writing. using the phrases can empower students in their writing, give them a structure and a greater understanding of the tools for academic writing. thus, the overall impact of using formulaic phrases effectively can be very significant; by sounding more academic, students stand a better chance of being accepted as members of their intended discourse community. this paper has presented a small number of teaching activities. in our workshops at the aldinhe conference and elsewhere, we have gathered participant evaluations of a considerably larger number of activities to enable us to make further improvements with the aim, in future, to develop a more complete set available to staff using the resource. in this paper, we focused on the insights of learning developers; it would be very useful to conduct further research which examines the perspectives of student writers using ap and gathers their evaluations of the activities. references bolinger, d. (1976) ‘meaning and memory’, forum linguisticum, 1, pp. 1–14. davis, m and morley, j. (2015) ‘phrasal intertextuality: the responses of academics from different disciplines to students' re-use of phrases’, journal of second language writing, 28, pp. 20-35. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jslw.2015.02.004 farrell, a. and tighe-mooney, s. (2013) ‘process and product: supporting academic writing in higher education’, all ireland journal of teaching and learning in higher education (aishe-j), 5(1), pp. 1101-11018. available at: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/s147515851300043x#bib10 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jslw.2015.02.004 davis and morley facilitating learning about academic phraseology: teaching activities for student writers journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: october 2018 15 http://ojs.aishe.org/index.php/aishe-j/article/view/110/165 (accessed: 6 october 2018). french, a. (2011) ‘‘what am i expecting and why?’ how can lecturers in higher education begin to address writing development for their students?’ journal of academic writing, 1(1), pp. 228-238. http://dx.doi.org/10.18552/joaw.v1i1.8 hyland, k. (2008) ‘as can be seen: lexical bundles and disciplinary variation’, english for specific purposes, 27(1), pp. 4-21. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.esp.2007.06.001 jones, m. and haywood, s. (2004) ‘facilitating the acquisition of formulaic sequences: an exploratory study in an eap context’, in schmitt, n. (ed.) formulaic sequences. amsterdam: john benjamins, pp. 269-292. kvale, s. and brinkmann, s. (2009) interviews: learning the craft of qualitative research interviewing. 2nd edn. thousand oaks, ca: sage. li, j. and schmitt, n. (2009) ‘the acquisition of lexical phrases in academic writing: a longitudinal case study’, journal of second language writing, 18(2), pp. 85-102. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jslw.2009.02.001 murray, n. and kirton, b. (2006) ‘an analysis of the current situation’, in davies, s., swinburne, d. and williams, g. (eds.) writing matters: the royal literary fund report on student writing in higher education. london: the royal literary fund, pp. 7-13. available at: https://www.rlf.org.uk/wpcontent/uploads/2014/05/rlfwritingmatters.pdf (accessed: 6 october 2018). murray, r. and moore, s. (2006) the handbook of academic writing: a fresh approach. maidenhead: open university press/mcgraw hill. pawley, a. and syder, f.h. (1983) ‘two puzzles for linguistic theory: nativelike selection and nativelike fluency’, in richards, j.c. and schmidt, r.w. (eds.) language and communication. new york: longman, pp.191-226. http://ojs.aishe.org/index.php/aishe-j/article/view/110/165 http://dx.doi.org/10.18552/joaw.v1i1.8 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.esp.2007.06.001 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jslw.2009.02.001 https://www.rlf.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/rlfwritingmatters.pdf https://www.rlf.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/rlfwritingmatters.pdf davis and morley facilitating learning about academic phraseology: teaching activities for student writers journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: october 2018 16 ridley, d. (2012) the literature review. london: sage. sinclair, j. (1991) corpus, concordance, collocation. oxford: oxford university press. swales, j. (1981) aspects of article introductions (aston esp research report no.1). birmingham: language studies unit, university of aston. swales, j. (1990) genre analysis: english in academic and research settings. cambridge: cambridge university press. swales, j. and feak, c. (2012) academic writing for graduate students. 3rd edn. ann arbor, michigan: michigan university press. sword, h. (2012) stylish academic writing. cambridge, massachusetts: harvard university press. wood, d. (2015) fundamentals of formulaic language: an introduction. london: bloomsbury. author details dr mary davis is a senior lecturer of english for academic purposes at oxford brookes business school, oxford brookes university, uk. dr john morley is director of the university-wide language programmes (leap) at the university of manchester, uk. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/s0889490607000233#bib23 davis and morley facilitating learning about academic phraseology: teaching activities for student writers journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: october 2018 17 appendix interview schedule for phrasebank users – staff 1. how do you think phrasebank helps students with: a) language b) rewriting from sources c) structure d) ideas e) style? 2. does phrasebank help them with anything else? 3. which section of phrasebank do you find most helpful? why? 4. do you think students feel able to learn phrases from phrasebank and use them by themselves? 5. what is the impact of these phrases on students’ writing? 6. do you think using these phrases leads to greater competence in academic writing? 7. when students use phrases from phrasebank, how do they fit with the rest of their writing? 8. do you have any further suggestions for phrasebank? facilitating learning about academic phraseology: teaching activities for student writers abstract introduction academic phrasebank theoretical influences academic literacy methodology analysis and discussion of teaching activities activity 1 using sentence stems for the introduction as a writing prompt activity 2 raising awareness of phrases in text activity 3 functions of transition signals activity 4 plagiarism and phraseology activity 5 understanding criticality conclusion references author details appendix journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 23 march 2022 ________________________________________________________________________ supporting open university students in prison: a case study geraldine huzar open university, uk hossam kassem open university, uk abstract the open university (ou) has around 1800 students studying in prisons (students in secure environments, 2019) with no internet access. they study offline with no access to the ou library’s online resources. this case study explores the student volunteer scheme introduced to help students in prison to indirectly access online library resources. it looks at how and why the service was set up, the experience of running the service and an initial evaluation. due to the small number of students taking part in the pilot and covid-19 interrupting the service, further research is needed to assess the full impact on students studying from prison. this will be the next stage of our work. keywords: studying in prisons; library support; online library; library resources; no online access; volunteer. introduction to understand the context of this case study it is essential that we give some background about the ou. the ou’s mission is to be: open to people, places, methods and ideas. we promote educational opportunity and social justice by providing high-quality university education to all who wish to realise their ambitions and fulfil their potential. . . . most of our undergraduate courses have no formal entry requirements. . . . we are committed to promoting equal opportunities for all, and close monitoring makes sure that we live up to our ideals. (the open university, 2019a, p.7). huzar and kassem supporting open university students in prison: a case study journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 2 the ou is one of the largest universities in europe with 129,611 students mainly studying part time, which is a fte equivalent of 68,204 (the open university, 2019b). before 2010, the ou delivered distance learning to students, including those in prisons, by sending hard copies of the course materials. access to online resources was non-existent. however, from 2010 onwards the ou started moving its courses online using a virtual learning environment. this was not unique to the ou; other institutions did the same. access to library materials moved online too and became an integral part of module content. however, because students in prisons have no access to the internet, for security reasons and/or due to lack of or varying facilities in prisons, they continued to receive printed materials. other distant learning institutions who offered courses to prisoners faced the same issue. students in prisons are often moved between prisons at short notice and may not be able to carry a lot of printed materials with them, thus putting them at a considerable disadvantage (farley et al., 2016). this case study describes how the ou library worked with colleagues in other ou departments to set up a service providing students in prison with printed library resources. to ensure the service could be evaluated, data was collected on involvement and individual experience. the progress of each request was monitored using a spreadsheet, mailbox and forum, and feedback from the student volunteers and prisoners was gathered using a questionnaire. because there was a small number of participants and a risk of individuals being identified, more in-depth analysis was not possible. the case study outlines the next steps in gathering research data once more students have used the service. ou students in prison the ou works closely with the ministry of justice (moj) to deliver education to students in prison. providing higher education in prison has many benefits including helping to reduce reoffending and providing prisoners with the means to improve their life once they have served their sentences (farley et al., 2016; ministry of justice, 2019). huzar and kassem supporting open university students in prison: a case study journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 3 to support the work of organisations like the ou, the moj has a team of analysts, justice data lab (jdl), who provide access to the central reoffending data. this helps organisations to assess the impact of their work. in the july 2019 quarterly statistics publication, the jdl provided an analysis of the impact of four organisations, including the ou. it found that 14% who were studying an ou module reoffended following their release from prison as opposed to 18% from the comparison group (ministry of justice, 2019). the ou started delivering courses in prisons in 1972. not all courses are available to study. as of march 2019, there were approximately 1800 students on more than 130 courses in 150 prisons (students in secure environments, 2019, the open university, 2021a). some students have access to the ou’s virtual campus (intranet site) depending on the facilities available at their prison. all students in prison are sent printed module materials. some courses require students to carry out independent study which requires online library access, thus, limiting the choice of available courses to study. for example, students in prisons cannot study law courses from year two onwards as they are expected to access databases such as westlaw uk and lexis library for their independent studies. for some courses, students were reliant on their personal tutors or educational officers to obtain independent study material for them with varying results. overcoming the obstacle in late 2018 the head of student support and head of volunteering, at the open university (ou) students association, suggested a student volunteer scheme. under the scheme, the ou student in prison would send an anonymised request detailing what information resources they were looking for and a volunteer student would then carry out the research, using the ou library’s subscribed resources, on their behalf. within the library, meetings involving the head of intellectual property and senior library manager for content and licensing were held to discuss any potential copyright and licensing implications of providing the service. refining the proposal huzar and kassem supporting open university students in prison: a case study journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 4 while the proposal would not give students in prison direct access to online library resources, it would allow them to obtain the materials with the help of the volunteers. the suggested idea was positively received by both the students in secure environments (sise) team, who are responsible for all students studying in prison, and the ou library. work began immediately to refine the proposal by identifying which students in prison were likely to benefit from the service and who could volunteer. discussions identified that master’s level students and year three students would benefit the most due to having projects and dissertations requiring independent research. setting the service up the service was set up in two months, mainly because it was able to utilise and expand on existing relationships. for example, the ou students association provides many opportunities for students to volunteer. this established means of attracting volunteers was used to set up the new service. to express the importance and value the volunteers would be adding to the study experience of ou students in prison, a student who had studied in prison featured in a recruitment video. the student has since been released and is now one of the volunteer students. additionally, the ou has a warehouse in wellingborough which sends print module material to students including students in prison. few adjustments were required to expand this service to include printing and sending library material to these students. volunteers needed to be existing students in their third year of undergraduate study or above. this ensured they had the necessary study experience and library skills to provide the service. as part of their application each volunteer was asked to explain why they wanted to be involved with the service. these statements provided a good indication of their understanding and commitment to supporting students in prison. volunteers had to attend three training sessions: • one session run by the sise team and the students association covered how the volunteer would receive the request from students in prison, the administrative work required, where to seek help, and more importantly how their work would help students in prison. huzar and kassem supporting open university students in prison: a case study journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 5 • two sessions were delivered by the library. one on how to conduct a search on the ou library website or other library subscribed databases was based on existing ou library training sessions (the open university library, 2020). the other session made student volunteers aware of issues surrounding copyright. the training sessions were delivered using online rooms used by the university for all tutorials, therefore the volunteers would be familiar with this medium. in the pilot, 22 volunteers were recruited and trained. ongoing library support is provided for the volunteers. volunteer students can contact the library’s helpdesk directly if they experience problems locating material or have copyright queries. the library web chat service is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week to ou students and staff. a dedicated forum is also available and checked by librarians as part of their helpdesk shift. this has the benefit of other volunteer students seeing the answers to queries and potentially having their own question answered. there is no limit on how many requests a student can make. the chart below explains the process for requesting study materials by students in prison. figure 1. diagram of process for requesting study materials. https://www.open.ac.uk/library/training-and-events huzar and kassem supporting open university students in prison: a case study journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 6 experience of running the service there was rapid take up of the service: 27 requests were received within the first four weeks. a total of 200 requests were received between the start of the service on 25 january 2019 and april 2021. the average request took 3.8 days to turnaround. the service level agreement is ten days. the ou warehouse processed every request within two days. the ou could control the turnaround time, however once the printed material was delivered to the prison the length of time it took to reach the students varied. challenges included requests received not being clear enough, necessitating correspondence between librarians, volunteers, and prison education officers. this has led to the initial request form being updated to be more explicit about the information required. it has also been difficult for librarians to find time to monitor the forum and some requests have been for material that is not available online from the ou library. whilst some requests were for specific resources such as articles and book chapters, others required a subject search; the students would ask for materials on a certain topic and the volunteer would search for them. the volunteers posted 22 requests for help on the library forum, such as how to deal with a request for materials in german, how to search for a specific topic, and what to do about resources to which the ou library has no access. additional requirements sometimes needed to be considered, for example, one student had a disability and needed material to be printed in 14 to 16 size fonts on yellow paper. the service was certainly appreciated by students and found to be a valuable one. on an ou students association page advertising the opportunity to be a library study volunteer, a quote from an anonymous student demonstrates how valuable studies are to students in prison. the additional help provided by the volunteer service will allow more to feel like this: i’m unsure how long i will remember the latin or literary theory i laboured to understand, but my eyes have opened to a multi-textured world rich with history and beauty and my degree has given me the confidence to believe i can yet claim a huzar and kassem supporting open university students in prison: a case study journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 7 place in it and thrive. those are open university lessons i will never forget. (the open university, 2021b). evaluation of service in the first six months of the service, the level of demand was manageable, and all requests were responded to within the service level agreement. a questionnaire was sent to the student volunteers together with a thank you card and a goody bag. the questionnaire asked for their feedback on the support they had received, as well as the impact on their time and their own study experience. student volunteers were appreciative of the support they had received and in particular commented on the training sessions. some said they would have benefited from attending these to support their own studies as it improved their research skills. digital and information literacy is one of the nine open university employability skills (the open university, 2021c) students are supported to develop as part of the role. other employability and transferable skills developed include collaboration and global citizenship. volunteering can be particularly useful if students have a gap in their employment history. a certificate of volunteering which gives a summary of the role, duration, and the impact the role has had for the association, is available on request. the service did not have a detrimental impact on volunteers’ time as they only picked requests when they knew they had the time to answer them. this did result in a varying engagement with the service, with some volunteers picking several queries and others none. the aim was also to measure the impact of the service on the module results obtained by students in prison before and after the service was introduced. however, further investigation showed that our potential sample was too small and specific to produce any meaningful data. individuals would have been identifiable, and we would have needed to write to each student to ask for permission to use their data. we have not yet had the opportunity to follow this up. in july 2019 existing volunteers were asked if they wanted to continue and adverts for new volunteers placed on the ou students association website. due to the success of the huzar and kassem supporting open university students in prison: a case study journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 8 initial pilot, it was decided to provide the service as part of the library’s business as usual and extend it to include year two courses delivered to ou students in prison as well as year two volunteer students. the aim is to extend the service to all ou students in prison and potentially to broaden the choice of courses that can be studied. currently courses that include a large component of research are not offered. as a result of the covid-19 lockdown the ou warehouse was shut temporarily in march 2020 so resource requests could not be printed and sent. the warehouse reopened in june 2020 and the service resumed in october. next steps feedback from the volunteer students and students in prison indicated how much the service is valued. obtaining more in-depth data has proved to be difficult due to the small number of participants, as noted above. the aim will be to carry out an analysis when a larger cohort of students have used the service. the break in service due to the covid-19 lockdown meant this was not possible for the academic year 2019/2020 but should be for 2020/2021. this data is not currently available (august 2021), but when it is, analysis could involve: • comparing the grades of cohorts of prisoners who have completed courses before and after the service was introduced. this would aim to identify any value added. • identifying prisons where eligible students are not using the service to investigate why. • investigating whether students who have used the service are more likely to continue their studies and graduate. • comparing module grades of volunteers with non-volunteers to monitor the potential impact of additional training and experience. the aim is also to conduct further empirical research using questionnaires. the need for feedback has to be balanced with the time constraints of the volunteer students, who like other ou students are often working, bringing up families, and caring for others as well as studying. huzar and kassem supporting open university students in prison: a case study journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 9 potential topics to cover include: • what specific aspects of the volunteer training could be useful for all ou students? • how do the volunteers see themselves using the skills gained from this experience? • how would students in prison like the service to develop to support their unique needs? the service could potentially be expanded and offered to year one students and those undertaking research as part of a master’s degree or phd. before any decisions are taken, capacity to support these developments would need to be reviewed, along with need. year one students are provided with the majority of the resources required to study, to ensure their research skills are developed gradually. providing students on higher degrees with resources could have ethical implications, as they are not conducting the research themselves. this service supports students by sending them print-outs of online resources. an ongoing challenge is how to develop the digital skills of students in prison. these skills are essential to function effectively within the work and personal environment but are difficult to replicate on paper and without having access to the internet. the teams involved in the service are having ongoing discussions around how they can help with this. within the library, one proposal is to create an offline learning activity which can then be piloted with students and staff to evaluate how effective it is in teaching digital and information literacy skills. this case study is a specific example of how training students to support their peers can benefit both the students providing the service and those receiving it. other higher education institutions may not support students in prison but could still have students unable to access the internet for a variety of reasons. these students might benefit from a similar service. alternatively, there may be other services which student volunteers could support. as already mentioned, it is an opportunity for student volunteers to develop their employability and transferable skills. this can be particularly useful if they have little employment experience. references huzar and kassem supporting open university students in prison: a case study journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 10 farley, h., pike, a., demiray, u. and tanglang, n. (2016) 'delivering digital higher education into prisons: the cases of four universities in australia, uk, turkey and nigeria', glokalde the official e-journal of udeeewana, 2(2), pp.147-166. ministry of justice (2019) justice data lab statistics quarterly, england and wales, july 2019. available at: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attach ment_data/file/816029/justice_data_lab_statistics_july_2019.pdf (accessed: 25 may 2020). open university, the (2019a) the open university strategic plan to 2021/22. milton keynes: the open university. open university, the (2019b) the open university financial statement 2019. milton keynes: the open university. available at: https://www.open.ac.uk/foi/main/sites/www.open.ac.uk.foi.main/files/files/financialstatement-2019.pdf (accessed: 27 august 2020). open university, the (2021a) supporting students in secure environments. available at: https://www.open.ac.uk/secure-environments/news/supporting-students-secureenvironments (accessed 07 february 2022). open university, the (2021b) volunteer opportunities: library study volunteer. available at https://www.oustudents.com/volunteer-library-study-volunteer-twenty-one-summer-1 (accessed 16 august 2021). open university, the (2021c) employability skills. available at: https://help.open.ac.uk/employability-skills (accessed 16 august 2021). open university library, the (2020) training and events. available at: https://www.open.ac.uk/library/training-and-events (accessed: 7 february 2022). students in secure environments (2019) students in secure environments (sise). milton keynes: the open university. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/816029/justice_data_lab_statistics_july_2019.pdf https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/816029/justice_data_lab_statistics_july_2019.pdf https://www.open.ac.uk/foi/main/sites/www.open.ac.uk.foi.main/files/files/financial-statement-2019.pdf https://www.open.ac.uk/foi/main/sites/www.open.ac.uk.foi.main/files/files/financial-statement-2019.pdf https://www.open.ac.uk/secure-environments/news/supporting-students-secure-environments https://www.open.ac.uk/secure-environments/news/supporting-students-secure-environments https://www.oustudents.com/volunteer-library-study-volunteer-twenty-one-summer-1 https://help.open.ac.uk/employability-skills https://www.open.ac.uk/library/training-and-events huzar and kassem supporting open university students in prison: a case study journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 11 author details geraldine huzar is a learning and teaching librarian at the open university (ou). her passion is helping ou students to make the most of the library services and resources available during their studies. she is part of a team that does this through helping to develop digital literacy skills and enabling access for groups that are unable to study online. she has supported disabled students since joining the ou in 2002 and students in prison since 2016. hossam kassem is a learning and teaching librarian at the open university library. he specialises in delivering online teaching in information literacy and supporting disabled students and students in secure environments. kassem is passionate about supporting disabled students and students in secure environments to become independent learners. he has been supporting these students since 2018. supporting open university students in prison: a case study abstract introduction ou students in prison overcoming the obstacle refining the proposal setting the service up experience of running the service evaluation of service next steps references author details microsoft word roberts & windle final.docx journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 11: april 2017 development and evaluation of an online learning object to improve pre-registration nursing students’ knowledge and engagement with pre-operative fasting stuart roberts manchester metropolitan university, uk richard windle university of nottingham, uk abstract background having identified a need to improve education around pre-operative fasting, and to facilitate more technology enhanced learning (tel), an online learning tool was developed. design an evaluation study was conducted to ascertain the effectiveness of the tool in developing knowledge in a group of pre-registration nursing students. results a quiz attached to the online teaching tool showed a high level of information uptake, 63% (n=44) of the students achieved a mark of 90% or higher and only 15% (n=11) achieving a mark of less than 70%. a questionnaire was undertaken resulting in the students highlighting their enthusiasm for engagement in similar learning opportunities in the future. keywords: technology enhanced learning; evaluation; blended learning; pre-operative fasting; learning objects. roberts and windle evaluating retrospective experiential learning as process in scholarship on a work based professional doctorate journal of learning development in higher education, issue 11: april 2017 2 introduction the knowledge of newly qualified nursing staff regarding pre-operative fasting can be erratic and poorly applied (chand and dabbas, 2004; bothamley and mardell, 2005; baril and portman, 2007; sutton and smith, 2008; crenshaw and winslow, 2008). given this is such a fundamental aspect of surgical care (roberts, 2013), improvements in nursing knowledge should lead to improvements in patient outcomes relating to post-operative nausea and vomiting (ponv), and consequently avoid delayed discharge. it could be posed therefore that the topic matter is a threshold concept, due to the usual necessity to provide nutrition to a patient rather than withhold it, and therefore consideration of alternative ways to teach this to professionals is needed (meyer and land, 2005). most training around pre-operative fasting is class-based, and whilst face-to-face methods of delivery can be effective and popular with health care students, inclusion of additional online resources in other areas has been shown to enhance the learning experience of the student, as well as increasing knowledge (rigby et al., 2012). it allows for choice, reinforcement and timely repetition of learning (johnson et al., 2010). difficult or threshold concepts, such as starving a patient, need to accommodate diverse approaches to learning such as offered by online resources (sun and ganesh, 2014). these approaches should support flexibility and multiple and reiterative pathways, such as; individual learning at own pace, learning which gives instant feedback, hyperlinking to further study, quizzes etc. moreover, this learning can be supported in a blended way by supporting the student with human interaction and feedback in dialogue that can offer differing explanations until the concept is understood. therefore, there is scope for development of a well-structured learning tool on pre-operative fasting and an evaluation of its effectiveness. whilst online and blended learning have been widely adopted in health care (williams et al., 2015), including training and information dissemination websites, computer aided learning packages (wharrad et al., 2010) and simulations and discussion-based activities (childs et al., 2005), the learning object (lo) format has proved effective and durable; especially for the acquisition of very specific units of training (ruiz et al., 2009), which is what is being developed here. los are small, highly focused packages of e-learning content, each based around a single, well-defined learning outcome. they are usually multimedia in nature and seek to engage the learner in an active learning process through the use of simple interactions and self-testing (windle and wharrad, 2010). they have roberts and windle evaluating retrospective experiential learning as process in scholarship on a work based professional doctorate journal of learning development in higher education, issue 11: april 2017 3 been found to be highly valued by healthcare students of differing professions (gee et al., 2015), especially with respect to the “just in time” nature of the learning, the use of visual learning elements, interactivity, their accessibility and also the extent to which they provide the learner with control over their learning (wharrad and windle, 2010). moreover, this form of learning has been shown to improve learning outcomes in a range of subject areas (alfredosanchez et al., 2015). therefore, we developed an lo which focused upon the threshold concept of fasting patients, allowing students to learn and engage in a selfdirected manner, and followed this a week later with a one hour, blended learning, face-toface session to assess if the concept was understood and to provide further learning opportunities. this was followed by an evaluation study which assessed the student experience of using the lo and the student perception of its usefulness in acquisition of a difficult concept. teaching and learning approach and resources many features of online learning are attractive to learners, including interactivity, imagery and further opportunities to learn; all these elements highlight why mccutcheon et al. (2015) found in their systematic review that a number of papers reported a higher level of satisfaction amongst students using online learning in undergraduate nursing programmes. control of learning is also a key feature, with research showing that the ability of students to take ownership of learning, to work at their own pace and to self-test is mentioned as one of the crucial benefits of e-learning, particularly in relation to los (moeller and reitzes, 2011). the lo was developed using existing functionality within the vle (virtual learning environment, in this case moodle). it consisted of text-based and multimedia content that was evidence based and discussed the threshold concept of pre-operative fasting (figure 1), exploring the necessity for it and the consequences of not fulfilling the need for it. following on from this was a separate online formative quiz that gave instant feedback and signposted students to further learning if required. roberts and windle evaluating retrospective experiential learning as process in scholarship on a work based professional doctorate journal of learning development in higher education, issue 11: april 2017 4 figure 1. (screenshot) the resource was offered to a cohort of students (n=98) in the second year of a bsc preregistration nursing programme. the deployment of the tool was scheduled to be completed 7 days prior to a taught session delivered in october 2013. evaluation methods and analysis students who consented to take part in the study were asked to complete two evaluation instruments. in order to determine whether the resources were effective in supporting student’s learning, an online knowledge questionnaire based on the fasting times recommended in national guidelines (rcn, 2005) was delivered via the vle following completion of the learning tool. secondly, a paper-based evaluation questionnaire to ascertain students’ experience of using the resource was deployed at the end of a subsequent module session. students were asked to rate different aspects of the resource (such as their views of the online tool and how it might be used in future learning) on a roberts and windle evaluating retrospective experiential learning as process in scholarship on a work based professional doctorate journal of learning development in higher education, issue 11: april 2017 5 likert scale, ranging from one (strongly disagree) to five (strongly agree). content validity of the tools was checked by content specialists, as recommended by rebar et al. (2011). face validity of the evaluation questionnaire was checked by four second year undergraduate nursing students from a separate cohort. this study was conducted in line with the ethics policy of the university in which the evaluation took place. this states that for evaluation, ethical approval should be gained from the programme leader. all data was anonymised and stored in accordance with university guidance on data storage and management. data presented are the mean and percentage responses from the group. where group parameters are presented, they are presented as mode score values. correlations were conducted using spearman’s rank correlation tests. results completion rates in total, 70 students consented to take part in the study. this represents 71% of the study population. of these 62 students (5 males, 47 female, 10 gender withheld) completed the online evaluation questionnaire. the age of participants ranged from 19-47. figure 2 categorises the age-distribution within the sample and highlights the broad cross-section of ages represented, 11 participants chose to withhold information regarding their age. roberts and windle evaluating retrospective experiential learning as process in scholarship on a work based professional doctorate journal of learning development in higher education, issue 11: april 2017 6 figure 2. knowledge assessment the majority of students, 63% (n=44) of the students achieved a mark of 90% or higher on the summative online test, indicating that after completing the package they had a comprehensive knowledge of pre-operative fasting (figure 3). only 15% (n=11) achieving a mark of less than 70%. no student achieved a mark of less than 40% (figure 3). tracking data showed that students took between 1 min 14 seconds to 27 min 18 seconds to complete the questionnaire. there was no correlation between the time taken and the results gained (data not shown). 0 5 10 15 20 25 30 below 20 (n=12) 20 29 (n=26) 30 39 (n=7) 40 and above (n=6) roberts and windle evaluating retrospective experiential learning as process in scholarship on a work based professional doctorate journal of learning development in higher education, issue 11: april 2017 7 figure 3. learning experience exploring their experience and the value of the lo, 90.3% (n=56) of students either agreed or strongly agreed that the online teaching tool had improved their knowledge in the area of preoperative fasting. while no students disagreed with this statement (see figure 4a), it may not be seen as an objective measure of knowledge gain but the students saw a perceived value, which is also important in learning and motivation. 85.5% (n=53) of students either agreed or strongly agreed with the statement: ‘i feel this type of online teaching tool enhanced my learning experience’, with only one student (1.6%) disagreeing (figure 4b). students valued the tool as a component of blended learning with 77% of students agreeing or strongly agreeing with the statement ‘i feel the opportunity to follow up the online learning in class was beneficial’ (figure 4c). however 33% of students (n=21) disagreed or strongly disagreed with the statement ‘this format of learning was better than receiving the same information face-to-face’, although 53% (n=33) strongly agreed or agreed with this statement, suggesting a high level of variation in perceived relative value of this type of learning (figure 4d). 0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45 50 0 10 nov-20 21 30 31 40 41 50 51 60 61 70 71 80 81 90 91 100 n um be r of s tu de nt s % grade achieved roberts and windle evaluating retrospective experiential learning as process in scholarship on a work based professional doctorate journal of learning development in higher education, issue 11: april 2017 8 figure 4. in terms of the wider impact on learning, 70.9% of students (n=44) strongly agreed or agreed with the statement ‘i used the extra resource links to learn more about the subject matter’ (figure 5a). however, a lower proportion of students indicated that the use of the resource had had a wider impact on their confidence to use other aspects of online learning with only 41.9% (n=26) agreeing or strongly agreeing with the statement ‘this online teaching resource has made me more confident in using moodle’ (figure 5b). overall, 86% of students agreed or strongly agreed that they ‘hope to use more online learning resources such as this in the future’ (figure 5c). 0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 str on gly di sa gr ee di sa gr ee ne ut ra l ag re e str on gly ag re e n um be r of s tu de nt s 0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 str on gly di sa gr ee di sa gr ee ne ut ra l ag re e str on gly ag re e n um be r of s tu de nt s 0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 str on gly di sa gr ee di sa gr ee ne ut ra l ag re e str on gly ag re e n um be r of s tu de nt s 0 5 10 15 20 25 str on gly di sa gr ee di sa gr ee ne ut ra l ag re e str on gly ag re e n um be r of s tu de nt s figure 3 a c b d roberts and windle evaluating retrospective experiential learning as process in scholarship on a work based professional doctorate journal of learning development in higher education, issue 11: april 2017 9 figure 5. correlations between questions showed that responses to the statement, ‘i feel this type of online teaching tool enhanced my learning experience’ and the statement ‘i hope to use more online learning resources such as this in the future’ were most strongly correlated with 91% (n=48) of those agreeing or strongly agreeing to statement one also agreeing or strongly agreeing to statement six (coefficient 0.5). roberts and windle evaluating retrospective experiential learning as process in scholarship on a work based professional doctorate journal of learning development in higher education, issue 11: april 2017 10 improvements 42% (n=26) of the students felt that no improvements needed to be made to the online learning tool, indicating they were happy with how it engaged them and improved their knowledge: it was great, no problems – particularly liked the links. (student 1) a known technical issue that affected the delivery of the resource was commented on by 19% (n=12) of the students. many students 15% (n=9) wanted increased opportunities to test their own learning: more questions, related to conflicts around fasting. (student 2) other students (15%, n=9) requested improvements to the resources used within the online teaching tool, with suggestions such as inclusion of more visual elements like videos, diagrams or pictures. three students (5%) suggested that online learning should be improved by having more face-to-face lessons alongside it: have follow up sessions after the set work. (student 3) two students (3%) felt the online learning tool would be improved by containing less information. barriers to learning the majority of students 55% (n=34) felt that there was no reason why they would not participate in the use of los in the future by answering either “no” or “none”. a further 21% (n=13) left this answer blank. however, the below issues were raised: if time limits or attempt limits were placed on access 8% (n=5): no second attempt would discourage my future participation. (student 4) roberts and windle evaluating retrospective experiential learning as process in scholarship on a work based professional doctorate journal of learning development in higher education, issue 11: april 2017 11 preferring face to face input (6%, n=4): no substitute for lectures. (student 5) not being able to ask questions (3% n=2): face-to-face affords better opportunities to ask questions. (student 6) if too much information were included: if there were more questions i might not remember all of the information. (student 7) a lack of feedback (2% n=1): if i am not able to know which ones i got right or wrong. (student 8) future uses students were able to articulate suggestions for other areas of the curriculum that could be covered by los. these are summarised in table 1. the largest single subject area identified was anatomy and physiology, whilst smaller groups of students suggested areas such as clinical or pharmacology. many students indicated that all or most subjects would be suitably covered with comments such as: all subjects should use the online tool. (student 9) all (subjects) could benefit, easy tool to use and good for reference. (student 10) only 21% (n=13) of students failed to suggest which other subjects they would like to see adopt this kind of teaching format. roberts and windle evaluating retrospective experiential learning as process in scholarship on a work based professional doctorate journal of learning development in higher education, issue 11: april 2017 12 table 1. suggested subjects number of students all subjects 20 (32%) most subjects 4 (6%) anatomy and physiology 21 (33%) clinical skills 4 (6%) pharmacology 3 (4%) mental health 1 (2%) application 1 (2%) when specifying what further los might be used for, the most common theme to arise was their use as a revision or reference tool: great also for revision, it certainly helped my knowledge. (student 11) revision on subjects we’ve already done. (student 12) but again, students cautioned against the loss of complementary face-to-face contact: not as a complete substitute for face-to-face learning. (student 13) discussion knowledge and learning the results of this study show that all students had acquired a good knowledge of preoperative fasting after completion of the resource, with the vast majority able to answer over 90% of the online test correctly. this is in line with other studies that have shown significant increases in “actual” knowledge or attainment in relation to lo usage, including roberts and windle evaluating retrospective experiential learning as process in scholarship on a work based professional doctorate journal of learning development in higher education, issue 11: april 2017 13 those that have shown a significant increase in modular results after the introduction of los (farha, 2009; windle et al., 2010) or have shown effects more experimentally using pre and post testing (gauss and urbas, 2003; costelloe et al., 2009; halverson et al., 2009). this also supports the theory in the introduction that imparting knowledge of threshold concepts such as this topic, using both online and blended learning, enhances the uptake of knowledge (meyer and land, 2005). to use online learning without blended learning would not fully allow us to gauge student understanding, whereas during a faceto-face session academics are able to have dialogue and use discursive methods to engage students to share ideas and make visible their conceptualisations. whilst it is not possible to show a definitive increase in knowledge in this study, all students in this study felt that use of the resource had improved their knowledge. this again, is consistent with the literature in the area, where a number of studies have shown self-reported increases in knowledge with the use of such resources (macdonald 2005; conceição et al., 2006; cochrane, 2007; lymn et al., 2008). however, consideration needs to be given to perceived knowledge versus actual knowledge, something that is highlighted as an issue in e-learning by ghoncheh et al. (2014) who considered the effectiveness of e-learning to improve knowledge on 154 participants during a randomised controlled trial. there is also evidence to show a correlation between self-reported knowledge and measured knowledge. therefore, it is likely that the perceived increase in knowledge recorded by the students in the current study is consistent with an actual increase in knowledge. reflection pedagogic theory teaching styles as well as dimensions of knowledge need consideration alongside each other within online learning. hughes and quinn (2013) discuss the different styles used specifically within nurse education, their main focus being cognitive styles. they explain how kolb (1984) identified four styles of learner (converger, diverger, assimilator, accommodator) referring to the differing ways in which learners assimilate information. while honey and mumford (2000) alternatively describe a cycle of learning (experiencing, reviewing, concluding, planning) that incorporates a number of learning style characteristics (activist, reflector, theorist, pragmatist). pedagogic theory must be reflected roberts and windle evaluating retrospective experiential learning as process in scholarship on a work based professional doctorate journal of learning development in higher education, issue 11: april 2017 14 upon when implementing online learning to ensure a blended approach is taken, invariably meeting more students’ learning styles. the resources used in this study were delivered in combination with face-to-face training and this allowed evaluation of the role the resources could play in this blended situation. overall students were very positive about the fact that the lo had enhanced their learning experience, and most felt that this was a valuable opportunity to follow up on face-to-face learning. it is worth noting that the over half of the students agreed or strongly agreed with the statement that the online format was better than receiving the same information faceto-face. however, a large number of students were either neutral or disagreed with this statement, suggesting a high degree of variability in preferred learning styles. this theme does recur a number of times throughout many of the students’ responses, calling for a balance between face-to-face teaching and online learning. when considering this feedback it is worth noting that wakefield et al. (2008) recommend that whichever learning mode is to be used, that this is made explicit to the learner. the intention of this study was not to replace face-to-face learning but to introduce new ways of learning alongside existing ones to better cater to differing learning styles, something which rigby et al. (2012) identified as being the most acceptable and effective way of delivering education, and sung et al. (2008) recommend within nursing programmes. as well as this design strength, by incorporating activities such as the online formative quiz feedback, students were able to reflect and undertake further study prior to their classroom engagement, therefore enhancing the face-to-face interaction. it might have been possible to fully meet the needs of a wider range of learners if other aspects of online learning, such as discussion forums had also been included. limitations of the study the main limitation of the study protocol was the fact that no control group was used macnee and mccabe (2008). however, to implement such a group could have raised ethical issues, as there would have been an educational process denied to some of the students even though they could have been given access once the study was complete. in this study protocol it was not possible to correlate the responses of the knowledge quiz with the evaluation questionnaire and therefore it was not possible to look at potential roberts and windle evaluating retrospective experiential learning as process in scholarship on a work based professional doctorate journal of learning development in higher education, issue 11: april 2017 15 correlations between these factors. this might have shed light on the reasons for results found. a ‘pretest-posttest’ design study would be able to establish if the tool enhanced knowledge around pre-operative fasting; melnyk and fineout-overholt (2011) and rebar et al. (2011) highlight the benefit of establishing a pre-test to highlight the benefits of an intervention. if found to be effective, other tools could be developed in nurse education that research highlights are problematic in relation to patient safety, or could benefit from an extra focus. the lo could also be recommended and disseminated to other institutions and a study be undertaken to consider evaluating on a wider audience. this would allow for correlation and comparisons to this study. the reason a ‘pretest-posttest’ was not performed on this evaluation study was due to the fear of over assessing the students unnecessarily. wider implications although students had previously interacted with moodle they had not engaged with a moodle book application, which is how this lo was designed (see figure 1). feedback from the students showed that they enjoyed this type of interaction and that they would be confident in using this method of learning again in the future. supporting this further, the vast majority of the students hoped to use more online learning resources in the future. whilst this does not reflect the type of reuse discussed by windle et al. (2010), which looked at cross-institutional use, the lo has potential to be available and used by other undergraduate students on the course. this facilitates the student as a change agent, giving them the ability to learn at their own pace and creating an adaptable curriculum. as previously highlighted in table 1, this type of learning tool could be implemented to encompass a number of subject areas in nurse education. as well as subject areas that the students highlighted such as anatomy and physiology (a&p) which have been widely implemented by other higher education institutions (heis), other topics could be developed into los such as nursing theories and research methods and be contained within a vle. mcvicar et al. (2014) report success in this type of delivery, specifically with year one pre-registration nursing students on the topic of biosciences. roberts and windle evaluating retrospective experiential learning as process in scholarship on a work based professional doctorate journal of learning development in higher education, issue 11: april 2017 16 conclusion this evaluation study has shown that the development of online learning through los can be well received by students as part of a blended learning approach and can help to support a high degree of knowledge acquisition. future consideration needs to be given to other topics, which could be seen as threshold concepts, to develop alternative means of delivery such as those evaluated here. los need to be considered as an alternative way of learning where current pedagogical theories are not meeting learner requirements. references alfredosanchez, j., perez-lezama, c. and starostenko, o. (2015) ‘a formal specification for the collaborative development of learning objects’, procedia – social and behavioral sciences, 182, pp. 726-731. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sbspro.2015.04.820 baril, p. and portman, h. (2007) ‘preoperative fasting: knowledge and perceptions’, association of perioperative registered nurses (aorn) journal, 86(4), pp. 609617. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.aorn.2007.09.003 bothamley, j. and mardell, a. (2005) ‘preoperative fasting revisited’, british journal of perioperative nursing, 15(9), pp. 370-374. available at: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16178206/ (accessed: 26 march 2017). chand, m. and dabbas. n. (2007) ‘nil by mouth: a misleading statement’, journal of perioperative practice, 17(8), pp. 366-371. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17867424 (accessed: 26 march 2017). childs, s., blenkinsopp, e., hall, a. and walton, g. (2005) ‘effective e-learning for health professionals and students – barriers and their solutions. a systematic review of the literature – findings from the hexl project’, health information library journal, 22(2), pp. 20-32. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1470-3327.2005.00614.x roberts and windle evaluating retrospective experiential learning as process in scholarship on a work based professional doctorate journal of learning development in higher education, issue 11: april 2017 17 cochrane, t. (2007) ‘developing interactive multimedia learning objects using quicktime’, computers in human behaviour, 23(6), pp. 2596-2640. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2006.08.007 conceição, s., olgren, c. and ploetz, p. (2006) ‘reusing learning objects in three settings: implications for online instruction’, international journal of instructional technology and distance learning, 3(4), pp. 3-14. available at: http://www.itdl.org/journal/april_06/article01.htm (accessed: 26 march 2017). costelloe, e., sherry, e. and magee, p. (2009) ‘experiences gained using a set of scorm compliant reusable learning objects for teaching programming’, international journal on e-learning, 8(2), pp. 175-191. crenshaw, j. t. and winslow, e. h. (2008) ‘preoperative fasting duration and medication instruction: are we improving?’, association of perioperative registered nurses (aorn) journal, 88(6), pp. 963-973. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.aorn.2008.07.017 farha, n.w. (2009) ‘an exploratory study into the efficacy of learning objects’, the journal of educators online, 6(2), pp. 1-32. available at: https://www.thejeo.com/archive/archive/2009_62/farhapaperpdf (accessed: 26 march 2017). gauss, b. and urbas, l. (2003) ‘individual differences in navigation between sharable content objects – an evaluation study of a learning module prototype’, british journal of educational technology, 34(4), pp. 499-509. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/1467-8535.00346 gee, b. m., moholy, k., lloyd, k. and seikal, a. (2015) ‘field-testing reusable learning objects related to sensory over-responsiveness’, the open journal of occupational therapy, 3(2), pp. 1-21. http://dx.doi.org/10.15453/2168-6408.1152 ghoncheh, r., kerkhof, a. j. f. m. and koot, h. m. (2014) ‘effectiveness of adolescent suicide prevention e-learning modules that aim to improve knowledge and selfroberts and windle evaluating retrospective experiential learning as process in scholarship on a work based professional doctorate journal of learning development in higher education, issue 11: april 2017 18 confidence of gatekeepers: study protocol for a randomized controlled trial’, trials journal, 15(52), pp. 1-7. http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/1745-6215-15-52 halverson, r., wolfenstein, m., williams, c. c. and rockman, c. (2009) ‘remembering math: the design of digital learning objects to spark professional learning’, elearning, 6(1), pp. 97-118. http://dx.doi.org/10.2304/elea.2009.6.1.97. available at: http://dm.education.wisc.edu/rrhalverson/intellcont/remembering%20math%20elearning-1.pdf (accessed 26 march 2017). honey, p. and mumford, a. (2000) the learning styles helper's guide. maidenhead: peter honey publications ltd. hughes, s. j. and quinn, f. m. (2013) quinn’s principles and practice of nurse education. 6th edn. andover: cengage learning. johnson, n., list-ivankovic, j., eboh, w. o., ireland, j., adams, d., mowatt, e. and martindale, s. (2010) ‘research and evidence based practice: using a blended learning approach to teaching and learning in undergraduate nurse education’, nurse education in practice, 10(1), pp. 43-47. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.nepr.2009.03.012 kolb, d.a. (1984) experiential learning: experience as the source of learning and development. new jersey: prentice-hall. lymn, j. s., bath-hextall, f. and wharrad, h.j. (2008) ‘pharmacology education for nurse prescribing students – a lesson in reusable learning objects’, bmc nursing, 7(2), pp. 1-11. http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/1472-6955-7-2 macdonald, c. j., stodel, e., thompson, t. l., muirhead, b., hinton, c., carson, b. and banit, e. (2005) ‘addressing the elearning contradiction: a collaborative approach for developing a conceptual framework learning object’, interdisciplinary journal of knowledge and learning objects, 1, pp. 79-98. available at: http://trove.nla.gov.au/work/77230123?q&versionid=90453683 (accessed: 26 march 2017). roberts and windle evaluating retrospective experiential learning as process in scholarship on a work based professional doctorate journal of learning development in higher education, issue 11: april 2017 19 macnee, c.l. and mccabe, s. (2008) understanding nursing research: reading and using research in evidence-based practice. 2nd edn. philadelphia: lippincott williams and wilkins. mccutcheon, k., lohan, m., traynor, m. and martin, d. (2015) ‘a systematic review evaluating the impact of online or blended learning vs. face-to-face learning of clinical skills in undergraduate nurse education’, journal of advanced nursing, 71(2), pp. 255-270. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/jan.12509 mcvicar, a., andrew, s. and kemble, r. (2014) ‘biosciences within the pre-registration (pre-requisite) curriculum: an integrative literature review of curriculum interventions 1990-2012’, nurse education today, 34(4), pp. 560-568. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.nedt.2013.08.012 melnyk, b. m. and fineout-overholt, e. (2011) evidence-based practice in nursing & healthcare: a guide to best practice. 2nd edn. london: lippincott williams and wilkins. meyer, j. h. f. and land, r. (2005) ‘threshold concepts and troublesome knowledge (2): epistemological considerations and a conceptual framework for teaching and learning’, the international journal of higher education research, 49(3), pp. 373388. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10734-004-6779-5 moeller, b. and rietzes, t. (2011) integrating technology with student-centred learning. quincy: nellie mae education foundation. available at: http://www.nmefoundation.org/getmedia/befa9751-d8ad-47e9-949dbd649f7c0044/integrating-technology-with-student-centered-learning?ext=.pdf (accessed 20 june 2016). rebar, c. r., gersch, c. j., macnee, c. l. and mccabe, s. (2011) understanding nursing research: using research in evidence-based practice. 3rd edn. philadelphia: lippincott williams and wilkins. roberts and windle evaluating retrospective experiential learning as process in scholarship on a work based professional doctorate journal of learning development in higher education, issue 11: april 2017 20 rigby, l., wilson, i., baker, j., walton, t., price, o., dunne, k. and keeley, p. (2012) ‘the development and evaluation of a ‘blended’ enquiry based learning model for mental health nursing students: “making your experience count”’, nurse education today, 32(3), pp. 303-308. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.nedt.2011.02.009 roberts, s. (2013) ‘preoperative fasting: a clinical audit’, journal of perioperative practice, 23(1), pp. 11-16. royal college of nursing (rcn) (2005) perioperative fasting in adults and children: an rcn guideline for the multidisciplinary team. london: royal college of nursing. available at: https://www.rcn.org.uk/professional-development/publications/pub002800 (accessed: 26 march 2017). ruiz, j. g., mintzer, m. j. and issenberg, s. b. (2006) ‘learning objects in medical education’, medical teacher, 28(7), pp. 599-605. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01421590601039893 sun, q. and ganesh, g. (2014) ‘developing and teaching an online mba marketing research class: implications for online learning effectiveness’, journal of education for business, 89(7), pp. 337-345. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08832323.2013.806885 sung, y. h., kwon, i. g. and ryu, e. (2008) ‘blended learning on medication administration for new nurses: integration of e-learning and face-to-face instruction in the classroom’, nurse education today, 28(8), pp. 943-952. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.nedt.2008.05.007 sutton, p. a. and smith, l. v. (2008) ‘pre-operative nausea and vomiting (pronv)’, the internet journal of anethesiology, 16(2), pp.1-3 [online]. available at: http://print.ispub.com/api/0/ispub-article/11245 (accessed 20 june 2016). wakefield, a. b., carlisle, c. hall, a. g. and attree, m. j. (2008) ‘the expectations and experiences of blended learning approaches to patient safety education’, nurse education in practice, 8(1), pp. 54-61. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.nepr.2007.04.007 roberts and windle evaluating retrospective experiential learning as process in scholarship on a work based professional doctorate journal of learning development in higher education, issue 11: april 2017 21 wharrad, h. j., and windle, r. (2010) ‘case studies of creating reusable inter-professional e-learning objects’, in bromage, a., coulder, l., thistlethwaite, j. and gordon, f. (eds) interprofessional e-learning and collaborative work: practices and technologies. pa, usa: igi-global publishing, pp. 260-274. williams, j., o’connor, m., windle, r. and wharrad, h.j. (2015) ‘using reusable learning objects (rlos) in injection skills teaching: evaluations from multiple user types’, nurse education today, 35(12), pp. 1275-1282. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.nedt.2015.06.001 windle, r. j., wharrad, h., mccormick, d., laverty, h. and taylor, m. g. (2010) ‘sharing and reuse in oer: experiences gained from open reusable learning objects in health’, journal of interactive media in education, 1 [online]. http://doi.org/10.5334/2010-4 windle, r. and wharrad, h. j. (2010) ‘reusable learning objects in health care education’, in bromage, a., coulder, l., thistlethwaite, j. and gordon, f. (eds) interprofessional e-learning and collaborative work: practices and technologies. pa, usa: igi-global publishing, pp. 244-259. https://doi.org/10.4018/978-1-61520-8890.ch020 author details stuart roberts is a principal lecturer in the faculty of health, psychology and social care at the manchester metropolitan university. richard windle is a senior lecturer in the faculty of medicine and health sciences at the university of nottingham. microsoft word awad 394 copyedited final.docx journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 11: april 2017 using learning dimensions within the effective lifelong learning inventory (elli) as indicators of academic success in biosciences suad awad northumbria university, uk mirela cuculescu-santana northumbria university, uk abstract the effective lifelong learning inventory (elli) was developed by the university of bristol and aimed to raise students’ awareness of their own learning power; summarised in seven key dimensions related to the learners’ dispositions, attitudes and behaviours associated with learning (deakin-crick and small, 2006; deakin-crick, 2007; deakin-crick, broadfoot and claxton, 2004). this study used elli with level 4 and level 6 cohorts in biosciences programmes at northumbria university as an indicator of academic performance. the dimension with the highest mean score for level 4 students was ‘meaning making’, followed by ‘changing and learning’. ‘creativity’ had the lowest mean score. students were divided into two groups with respect to their academic achievement; the ‘successful’ and the ‘satisfactory’ group. the successful group scored higher in all dimensions, compared to the satisfactory group. the differences in the scores for ‘meaning making’ and ‘creativity’ were statistically significant. large differences were also found for ‘changing and learning’, ‘strategic awareness’ and ‘resilience’. interestingly, all of these, with the exception of ‘meaning making’, were also the dimensions for which level 6 students scored higher than level 4 students, but the differences were not statistically significant. results indicated that elli is a useful tool for identifying key dispositions in successful learners, which could inform interventions to improve learning within a cohort. awad using learning dimensions within the effective lifelong learning inventory (elli) as indicators of academic success in biosciences journal of learning development in higher education, issue 11: april 2017 2 keywords: elli; student achievement; student success; student learning. introduction lifelong learning is a term that has been used widely in a variety of contexts. it has been described as continuous, deliberate, self-directed learning (simper et al., 2016) using learning opportunities afforded throughout life. according to the developers of elli (deakin-crick et al., 2004; 2013) it is influenced by the learning power summarised in the seven key dimensions discussed in this report. these are essential attributes for biosciences graduates, given the rapidly evolving nature of biological sciences and the rapidly changing employment market. this is reflected in the recently revised ‘subject benchmark statements for biosciences’ (qaa, 2015) which state that, in addition to the subject-specific knowledge and skills, biosciences graduates should demonstrate welldeveloped lifelong learning strategies for continually updating and enhancing their knowledge and effective time management, organisational, enterprise and knowledge transfer skills to enable them to complete complex and challenging tasks. lifelong learning power has been usually discussed in terms of capabilities and dispositions (smith and spurling, 1999; carr and claxton, 2002; entwistle and mccune, 2013), where the former includes the skills and strategies required for learning and the latter involves characteristics that enable the learner to be ready and willing to take learning opportunities, such as ‘habits of mind, tendencies to respond to situations in certain ways’ (katz, 1988, p.30), in addition to a level of metacognition and ‘disposition to understand for oneself’ (entwistle and mccune, 2013, p.277). all of these are complex concepts, difficult to quantify. deakin-crick and colleagues (deakin-crick and small, 2006; deakin-crick et al., 2015) validated the effective lifelong learning inventory (elli) as a reliable tool for measuring learning power, without specific reference to disciplines. the elli is an online selfreporting questionnaire with 72 questions about behaviours, attitudes and feelings related to learning. the associated software converts the answers into scores from 0 to 100 for seven dimensions: changing and learning, critical curiosity, meaning making, creativity, resilience, strategic awareness and learning relationships, defined as shown in table 1 (deakin-crick and small, 2006; deakin-crick et al., 2015). awad using learning dimensions within the effective lifelong learning inventory (elli) as indicators of academic success in biosciences journal of learning development in higher education, issue 11: april 2017 3 the elli was used both for raising learners’ awareness of their own strengths and weaknesses and for enabling academic staff to ‘measure’ the learning power of a cohort, identify elements essential for effective learning and devise suitable pedagogical interventions to improve achievement (deakin-crick et al., 2004; deakin-crick and yu, 2008; deakin-crick et al., 2013). in this study, the elli questionnaire was used as an assessment tool to explore differences in dispositions between learners with different academic achievements among level 4 (first year) and level 6 (final year) students on biosciences programmes at the university of northumbria. the aim was to identify dispositions and attributes of successful learners and use these to devise strategies to boost weaker dimensions and improve learning in weaker members of the cohorts, to improve retention and progression and enhance graduate employability. academic success has been attributed to many factors, such as economic, social, cognitive, gender, and approaches to learning (cattell 1965; jacobs et al., 1996; mills et al., 2009; biggs and tang, 2011; herrmann et al., 2016), but there is less clear evidence to link learning dispositions to academic success. it would be pertinent, therefore, to examine the qualities and dispositions of effective successful learners, as measured by the elli. methodology 2.1 study design this was an exploratory study conducted by invitation of first year students on the biomedical sciences and human biosciences programmes at the university of northumbria to complete the elli questionnaire online. the idea was to gain an insight into their learning power at the point of entry and relate their scores to academic achievement as they progressed through their course. final year cohorts were also invited to take part. all cohorts are referred to as biosciences students throughout this report. students were briefed and alerted to the elli tool during the induction week in september 2011, using the definitions of the seven learning dimensions presented in table 1. they were consented and offered registration on the first week of teaching. their scores were discussed shortly afterwards in individual tutorials and related to individual study plans. awad using learning dimensions within the effective lifelong learning inventory (elli) as indicators of academic success in biosciences journal of learning development in higher education, issue 11: april 2017 4 the cohort outcomes were discussed with the programme teaching teams in module and programme evaluation meetings. table 1. the effective lifelong learning inventory (elli) brief definitions of the seven key dimensions (deakin-crick and small, 2006; williamson et al., 2012). dimension definition changing and learning (cl) a sense of yourself as someone who learns and changes over time; the opposite is being ‘stuck and static’; critical curiosity (cc) an orientation to want to ‘get beneath the surface’; the opposite is being ‘passive’; meaning making (mm) making connections and seeing that learning ‘matters to me’; the opposite is simply ‘accumulating data’; creativity (cr) risk-taking, playfulness, imagination and intuition; the opposite is being ‘rule-bound’; resilience (rs) the orientation to persevere in the development of your own learning power and relish challenge; the opposite is being ‘fragile and dependent’; strategic awareness (sa) being aware of your thoughts, feelings and actions as a learner and able to use that awareness to plan and manage learning processes; the opposite is being ‘robotic’; learning relationships (lr) learning with and from others and also being able to learn alone; the opposite is either being ‘isolated’ or ‘overdependent’. 2.2 ethical considerations in compliance with northumbria university ethical guidelines on working with human subjects, a series of documents were prepared including a participant information sheet, consent form and an invitation letter to participate in the study. participants were assured anonymity, privacy and confidentiality in handling their data. written consent was obtained from each participant. awad using learning dimensions within the effective lifelong learning inventory (elli) as indicators of academic success in biosciences journal of learning development in higher education, issue 11: april 2017 5 2.3 data collection and analysis 23 first year students were consented and 19 of them completed the elli questionnaire. 5 final year students completed the questionnaire. data was summarised in the form of a spider diagram (microsoft excel). the individual scores were used in subsequent statistical analysis. students were assigned to two groups with regards to their achievements at the point of progression to second year. the ‘successful’ performance group achieved first or upper second class, and the ‘satisfactory’ group achieved lower second or third class level averages of marks. all the descriptive and hypothesis testing statistics were carried out using spss for windows v.21 software, at p<0.05 level of significance. the scores for the seven dimensions were compared using one-way anova with post-hoc tests. the elli scores of level 4 and level 6 students, and of the ‘successful’ and ‘satisfactory’ groups were compared using the independent samples t-test. the strength of the relationships between elli scores and level averages of marks was analysed using pearson’s correlation. the changes in average marks from level 4 to level 5 and 6 were analysed using the paired samples t-test. results 3.1 comparison of learning power of first year (level 4) and final year (level 6) students the results are summarised in table 2. for first year students the learning dimension with the highest mean score was mm followed by cl and cc. the mean scores for mm, cl and cc were not significantly different to each other, but all were significantly higher than cr, which was the dimension with the lowest mean score. mm was also significantly higher than the mean scores for rs, lr and sa. there were large differences between the individual student scores, as measured by the relatively large standard deviations and the broad ranges of variation for each learning dimension. the overall average elli score of final year students was 67.1 ± 14.9 which was slightly higher than that of the first year of 63.8 ± 19.6, but the difference was not statistically significant (independent t-test, at p< 0.05 significance). the data presented in table 2 awad using learning dimensions within the effective lifelong learning inventory (elli) as indicators of academic success in biosciences journal of learning development in higher education, issue 11: april 2017 6 were used to construct spider diagrams (figure 1) to illustrate the differences in learning dimensions between first year and final year students. there were a few interesting differences: final year students had higher mean scores for cl (+7.1), cr (+9.9), rs (+8.7) and sa (+11.5), and lower mean scores for cc (-7.6), mm (-4.0) and lr (-2.7). however, none of these differences were statistically significant (independent t-test, at p <0.05 level). table 2. analysis of the elli scores for biosciences students by year of study (mean scores ± standard deviations; the dimensions are arranged in increasing order of scores; the letters a, b, c show which of the numerical differences between dimension scores were significant, based on the outcome of one-way anova, with post-hoc tests, at p < 0.05 level of significance). learning dimension (mean score ± standard deviation) year of study cl changing and learning cc critical curiosity mm meaning making cr creativity rs resilience sa strategic awareness lr learning relationships first year (n=19) 71.1 (±20.9) [17-100] 70.0 (±13.1) [48-96] 80.0 (±12.3) [52-100] 52.3 (±19.5) [10-97] 60.7 (±18.7) [33-100] 56.1 (±22.0) [17-83] 56.5 (±14.6) [22-82] cr < sa < lr < rs < cc < cl < mm a < ab < ab < ab < bc < bc < c one way anova final year (n=5) 78.2 (±12.8) [58-92] 62.4 (±14.3) [41-78] 76.0 (±3.5) [71-81] 62.2 (±17.3) [37-80] 69.4 (±15.1) [47-84] 67.6 (±9.7) [51-74] 53.8 (±18.6) [33-75] lr < cv < cc < sa < rs < mm < cl one-way anova (no significant difference at p<0.05) awad using learning dimensions within the effective lifelong learning inventory (elli) as indicators of academic success in biosciences journal of learning development in higher education, issue 11: april 2017 7 figure 1. comparison of the mean elli scores of first and final year biosciences students (n=19 for year 1; n=5 for final year). 3.2 analysis of marks the average marks at the end of all years of study completed up to the point of analysis were recorded, based on the summer progression and awards board reports for all students who completed the elli questionnaire (table 3). the academic performance of the students who completed the elli questionnaire at the beginning of their first year decreased significantly from first year to second year (paired ttest, p< 0.05), from an upper second class to a lower second class average. the academic performance of those who completed the elli questionnaire during their final year was also poorer at second year, decreasing from a lower second class in first year to a third class average in second year, followed by an increase back to lower second class average in final year (differences not significant). of the 5 final year students who participated in this study, one obtained upper second class, three obtained lower second class and one obtained a third class degree, all bsc honours degrees. awad using learning dimensions within the effective lifelong learning inventory (elli) as indicators of academic success in biosciences journal of learning development in higher education, issue 11: april 2017 8 table 3. indicators of academic performance at different levels of study. year of study avg marks first year avg marks second year avg marks final year stat analysis year 1 63.5 ± 6.9 55.6 ± 7.6 n/a p < 0.05 significant decrease from 1st to 2nd year final year 51.2 ± 6.5 49.2 ± 3.3 54.8 ± 5.7 changes not significant at p<0.05 3.3 correlation analysis of elli scores and academic performance in an approach to identify which of the elli learning dimensions was the best predictor for academic success, the elli individual scores of students were tested for correlation with their respective level averages of marks. for the first year students the dimensions with the strongest positive correlations were cr (1st year marks) and sa (2nd year marks) (table 4a). for the final year students, lr, rs and mm were the dimensions with the highest positive correlations with the marks. none of these correlations were significant at p<0.05 level (pearson’s correlation test). table 4a. summary of the correlation analysis of marks against academic achievement for first year students. elli dimension 1st year marks 2nd year marks changing and learning pearson’s correlation p value (2-tailed) n .266 .258 18 .049 .856 16 meaning making pearson’s correlation p value (2-tailed) n .254 .309 18 .305 .251 16 critical curiosity pearson correlation p value (2-tailed) n -.038 .888 18 .026 .924 16 creativity pearson’s correlation p value (2-tailed) n .364 .137 18 .285 .285 16 awad using learning dimensions within the effective lifelong learning inventory (elli) as indicators of academic success in biosciences journal of learning development in higher education, issue 11: april 2017 9 resilience pearson’s correlation p value (2-tailed) n .081 .750 18 .196 .466 16 strategic awareness pearson’s correlation p value (2-tailed) n .111 .662 18 .443 .086 16 learning relationships pearson’s correlation p value (2-tailed) n .176 .484 18 .308 .247 16 elli avg pearson’s correlation p value (2-tailed) n .244 .329 18 .370 .159 16 table 4b. summary of the correlation analysis of marks against academic achievement for final year students. elli dimension 1st year marks 2nd year marks final year marks changing and learning pearson’s correlation p value (2-tailed) n -.094 .881 5 .169 .752 5 -.781 .119 5 meaning making pearson’s correlation p value (2-tailed) n -.381 .527 5 -.649 .237 5 .436 .463 5 critical curiosity pearson’s correlation p value (2-tailed) n .198 .750 5 -.045 .943 5 -.248 .688 5 creativity pearson’s correlation p value (2-tailed) n -.739 .153 5 -.803 .102 5 .244 .692 5 resilience pearson’s correlation p value (2-tailed) n -.474 .420 5 -.855 .065 5 .443 .455 5 strategic awareness pearson’s correlation p value (2-tailed) n -.169 .786 5 -.658 .227 5 .379 .529 5 learning relationships pearson’s correlation p value (2-tailed) n .479 .414 5 -.192 .757 5 .510 .380 5 elli avg pearson’s correlation p value (2-tailed) n -.219 .724 5 -.661 .224 5 .218 .725 5 awad using learning dimensions within the effective lifelong learning inventory (elli) as indicators of academic success in biosciences journal of learning development in higher education, issue 11: april 2017 10 3.4 analysis of elli scores in relation to academic success in an attempt to identify which learning dimension might be a good predictor for academic success, elli scores for the ‘successful’ group were compared to those in the ‘satisfactory’ group. this analysis excluded the elli scores of those who failed the first or the second year. students in the ‘successful’ group had higher scores than those in the ‘satisfactory’ group for all learning dimensions. when students were split based on the first year results, the largest differences were seen for mm (+ 15, significant at p<0.05), cl (+15, n.s.) and cr (+14, n.s.) (figure 2a). when the same students were split based on their second year results, the largest differences in elli scores were for sa (+23, n.s.), rs (+14, n.s.), and cr (+11, significant at p<0.05) (independent samples t-test) (figure 2b). figure 2a. elli scores of students who completed the elli at the beginning of their first year, split by the academic performance at end of first year (level 4); successful group n = 13; satisfactory group n = 5. significant difference indicated by (*). awad using learning dimensions within the effective lifelong learning inventory (elli) as indicators of academic success in biosciences journal of learning development in higher education, issue 11: april 2017 11 figure 2b. elli scores of students who completed the elli at the beginning of their first year, split by the academic performance at end of second year (level 5); successful group n = 4; satisfactory group n = 12. significant difference indicated by (*). all students who completed the elli questionnaire during their final year fell into the ‘satisfactory’ academic performance group based on their average marks at the end of the first and second years, therefore they could not be split into different academic performance groups at those levels. figure 3 shows the average elli scores, by dimension, of those in the ‘satisfactory’ group (n=4), compared to the scores of one student who fell into the ‘successful’ academic performance group at level 6. the successful student’s profile showed higher scores in lr, sa and rs. interestingly, the lowest of her/his scores was in the cl compared to the satisfactory group. the differences were not statistically significant. awad using learning dimensions within the effective lifelong learning inventory (elli) as indicators of academic success in biosciences journal of learning development in higher education, issue 11: april 2017 12 figure 3. elli scores of students who completed elli questionnaire during their final year (level 6), split by academic performance; successful group n = 1; satisfactory group n = 4. discussion students who participated in the elli study had completed their gce a level, with the exception of one adult student who completed a higher education foundation course at a local college. entrants face the need to adapt to university life and cope with the demands of the biosciences programmes. developing competences to deal with such challenges includes, in addition to knowledge acquisition, personal qualities and dispositions (haste, 2001; hoskins and deakin-crick, 2010). we wanted to explore such dispositions and relate them to the elli scores in different dimensions. the mean elli scores for level 4 students in this study (table 2) were similar to those reported by deakin-crick and yu (2008) in adult learners and those from a collaborative project that included 11 universities in addition to northumbria (small and deakin-crick, 2008, williamson et al., 2012). these studies reported higher scores for mm and cl and awad using learning dimensions within the effective lifelong learning inventory (elli) as indicators of academic success in biosciences journal of learning development in higher education, issue 11: april 2017 13 lower for cr and rs. first year students in this study were able to make connections between previous and newly acquired knowledge, and show the capacity to change. the latter was often emphasised by students in vocational courses (harding and thompson, 2011). elli profiles were discussed individually with the participants in tutorials shortly after completion of the questionnaires. it has prompted a process of reflection on their learning dimensions, and an understanding of attributes linked to learning. the overall outcomes were also discussed with the programme teaching team in order to find ways to boost weaker learning dimensions within a cohort. initially we tried to explore whether there was a correlation between elli scores and students’ average marks at levels 4 and 5. no such correlation was found in this study, similar to the findings reported by harding and thompson (2011) for a larger scale study. the decrease in marks from level 4 to level 5 shown in our study is a recurring feature with biosciences students and could be due to the increase in the demands of the course and complexity of assessment at level 5. students’ achievements usually improve at level 6, when they get better at skills such as time management and organisation and are more motivated to do well. we went on to explore whether the elli scores could be used to identify dispositions of successful learners by comparing the ‘successful’ and ‘satisfactory’ academic achievement groups. our results indicated higher mean scores in all elli dimensions in the successful group, with significant differences for mm and cr. harding and thompson (2011) reported that one of the elli dimensions with the strongest correlations to academic achievements in university students was mm. successful students tend to be better at forming relationships to advance their learning, handling challenges, developing mechanisms to cope with course demands, and being aware of course requirements and their own abilities to meet them. these are components of self-regulated learning (flavell et al., 2002), which could help students to self-monitor and evaluate previous and current learning and subsequently change their thoughts and actions to achieve independent academic goals (zimmerman, 2002; deakin-crick et al., 2015). a study on postgraduate medical students showed that their highest scores were for mm and cl, the lowest for cr and rs and only the students with high grades (the ‘successful’ group) displayed significant improvements in the mean elli scores by the end of the first term of awad using learning dimensions within the effective lifelong learning inventory (elli) as indicators of academic success in biosciences journal of learning development in higher education, issue 11: april 2017 14 postgraduate study for all elli dimensions apart from rs. those with lower grades made declines in scores for several dimensions (rashid-doubell and cuculescu-santana, 2012). successful students at the end of the first year were able to relate their learning to previously acquired knowledge and construct meaning (biggs and moore, 1993). such students are more likely to adopt a deep approach to learning. knapper and cropley (2000) emphasised that a deep approach to learning is integral to lifelong learning, which is related to the personality dimension of need for cognition (cacioppo et al., 1996) and strategic flexibility in learning (cantwell and moore, 1996). creativity has been seen as ways of exploring ideas and testing alternative pathways related to problem-solving, which is essential for approaching problems from different perspectives (tsai, 2012). students who tend to be more active in their own learning seek to be creative in exploring interesting and engaging ways in their study. this involves a degree of confidence and self-belief and a capacity for unreserved involvement (csikszentmihalyi, 1996), which could be reflected in the higher score for rs in the successful group of students in our study. learners with cc ‘try to get below the surface’ and ‘value getting at the truth’ and are therefore more likely to adopt a deep approach to learning (deakin-crick, 2007, p140). successful learners in this study scored higher in this dimension than the satisfactory group. only 5 students in the final year took part in the study. their profile showed higher cl, rs, cr, sa scores than first year students, indicating a better development of learning power. interestingly, there was a small decrease in cc. one successful student in the final year had a higher score for cl compared to the rest of the cohort. all of these differences, however, were too small to attain statistical significance. this study has confirmed key characteristics of successful learners reported by others (shawer, 2010; hanscomb, 2015), that an overlap of academic skills and personal attributes is required for enhanced achievement and successful learning. conclusions and future directions this study explored the relationship between the scores for the elli dimensions and academic success in first and final year students in biosciences programmes. academic success was identified as attaining a ‘first’ or upper ‘second’ class average. students in awad using learning dimensions within the effective lifelong learning inventory (elli) as indicators of academic success in biosciences journal of learning development in higher education, issue 11: april 2017 15 the successful academic achievement group scored better in all elli dimension than their counterparts in the satisfactory group. whilst the small sample size does not allow for generalisation of results, this exploratory study confirms the key characteristics of successful learners indicated by other authors, and shows that successful students displayed the largest increase in dispositions measured through the elli questionnaire. the authors felt that the elli was a useful tool for exploring learning powers specific to biosciences. they plan to design a more discipline-specific questionnaire that could be used to increase awareness of the characteristics of successful learners in biosciences and support learning and personal development for graduate employability in all students, but particularly in those with lower learning power at the point of entry in higher education. references biggs, j. b. and moore, p. (1993) the process of learning. new york: prentice-hall. biggs, j. and tang, c. (2011) teaching for quality learning at university. 4th edn. maidenhead: open university press. cacioppo, j. t., petty, r. e., feinstein, j. a. and jarvis, w. b. g. (1996) ‘dispositional differences in cognitive motivation: the life and times of individuals varying in need for cognition’, psychological bulletin, 119(2), pp. 197–253. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.119.2.197 carr, m. and claxton, g. (2002) ‘tracking the development of learning dispositions’, assessment in education: principles, policy & practice, 9(1), pp. 9-37. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09695940220119148 cantwell, r.h. and moore, p.j. (1996) ‘the development of measures of individual differences in self-regulatory control and their relationship to academic performance’, contemporary educational psychology, 21(4), pp. 500–517. https://doi.org/10.1006/ceps.1996.0034 cattell, r.b. (1965) the scientific analysis of personality. harmondsworth: penguin. awad using learning dimensions within the effective lifelong learning inventory (elli) as indicators of academic success in biosciences journal of learning development in higher education, issue 11: april 2017 16 csikszentmihalyi, m. (1996) creativity: flow and the psychology of discovery and invention. new york, ny: harpercollins. deakin-crick, r. (2007) ‘learning how to learn: the dynamic assessment of learning power’, the curriculum journal, 18(2), pp.135-153. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09585170701445947 deakin-crick, r,, broadfoot, p. and claxton, g. (2004) ‘developing an effective lifelong learning inventory: the elli project’, assessment in education, 11(3), pp. 247-272. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0969594042000304582 deakin-crick, r., haigney, d., huang, s., coburn, t. and goldspink, c. (2013) ‘learning power in the workplace: the effective lifelong learning inventory and its reliability and validity and implications for learning and development’, the international journal of human resource management, 24(11), pp. 2255–2272. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09585192.2012.725075 deakin-crick, r., huang, s., shafi, a. a., and goldspink, c. (2015) ‘developing resilient agency in learning: the internal structure of learning power’, british journal of educational studies, 63(2), pp.121-160. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00071005.2015.1006574 deakin-crick, r. and small, t. (2006) personalising learning: context based knowledge, competencies and learning power. london: royal society for the encouragement of arts, manufactures and commerce (rsa). deakin-crick, r. and yu, g. (2008) ‘assessing learning dispositions: is the effective lifelong learning inventory valid and reliable as a measurement tool?’, educational research, 50(4), pp. 387-402. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00131880802499886 entwistle, n. and mccune v. (2013) ‘the disposition to understand for oneself at university: integrating learning processes with motivation and metacognition’, british journal of educational psychology, 83(2), pp. 267–279. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/bjep.12010 awad using learning dimensions within the effective lifelong learning inventory (elli) as indicators of academic success in biosciences journal of learning development in higher education, issue 11: april 2017 17 flavell, j. h., miller, p. h. and miller, s. a. (2002) cognitive development. 4th edn. upper saddle river, nj: prentice hall. hanscomb, s. (2015) ‘assessments and the self: academic practice and character attributes’, journal of learning development in higher education, issue 8, march, pp. 1-18. harding, j. and thomson, j. (2011) dispositions to stay and to succeed: final report, higher education academy. available at: https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/resources/detail/what-works-studentretention/northumbria-final_report-dec_11 (accessed: 31 march 2017). haste, h. (2001) ‘ambiguity, autonomy and agency; psychological challenges to new competence’ in rychen, d. and salganik, l. (eds.) defining and selecting key competencies. kirkland, wa: hogrefe and huber, pp. 93-120. herrmann, k. j., bager-elsborg, a. and mccune, v. (2016) ‘investigating the relationships between approaches to learning, learner identities and academic achievement in higher education’, higher education, pp. 1-16. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10734016-9999-6 hoskins, b. and deakin-crick, r. (2010) ‘competences for learning to learn and active citizenship: different currencies or two sides of the same coin?’, european journal of education, 45(1), pp. 121-137. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.14653435.2009.01419.x jacobs, b. l., selby, s. and madsen, m. k. (1996) ‘supporting academic success: a model for supported education in a university environment’, occupational therapy in health care, 10(2), pp. 3-13. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/j003v10n02_02 katz, l. g. (1988) ‘what should young children be doing?’, american educator, summer 12(2), pp. 28-45. awad using learning dimensions within the effective lifelong learning inventory (elli) as indicators of academic success in biosciences journal of learning development in higher education, issue 11: april 2017 18 knapper, c. k. and cropley, a. j. (2000) lifelong learning in higher education. 3rd edn. london: kogan page. mills, c., heyworth, j., rosenwax, l., carr, s. and rosenberg, m. (2009) ‘factors associated with the academic success of first year health science students’, advances in health sciences education, 14(2), pp. 205-217. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10459-008-9103-9 qaa (the quality assurance agency for higher education) (2015) subject benchmark statement: biosciences. available at: http://www.qaa.ac.uk/en/publications/documents/sbs-biosciences-15.pdf (accessed: 3 april 2017). rashid-doubell, f. and cuculescu-santana, m. (2012) ‘identifying key effective lifelong learning inventory (elli) dimensions associated with academic success amongst postgraduate medical students’, emerge northumbria university, issue 4, pp. 2648 [online]. available at: https://www.northumbria.ac.uk/static/5007/arpdf/1329815/doubelliss4.pdf (accessed: 31 march 2017). shawer, s. (2010) ‘the influence of student teacher self-regulation of learning on their curricular content knowledge and course-design skills’, the curriculum journal 21(2), pp. 201-232. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09585176.2010.480872 simper, n., kaupp, j., frank, b. and scott, j. (2016) ‘development of the transferable learning orientations tool: providing metacognitive opportunities and meaningful feedback for students and instructors’, assessment and evaluation in higher education, 41(8) pp. 1159-1175. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2015.1070117 small, t. and deakin-crick, r. (2008) learning and self-awareness: an enquiry into personal development in higher education, vital partnerships, report no. 8. available at: http://learningemergence.net/wpcontent/uploads/2014/02/vital_rdp_report_08.pdf (accessed: 31 march 2017). awad using learning dimensions within the effective lifelong learning inventory (elli) as indicators of academic success in biosciences journal of learning development in higher education, issue 11: april 2017 19 smith, j. and spurling, a. (1999) lifelong learning: riding the tiger. london: cassell. tsai, k. c. (2012) ‘play, imagination, and creativity: a brief literature review’, journal of education and learning, 1(2), pp. 15-20. http://dx.doi.org/doi:10.5539/jel.v1n2p15 williamson, k. j., coughlin, a., small, t. and thompson, j. (2012) my learning power: using elli in higher education (a guide to understanding learning power with the effective lifelong learning inventory – elli), higher education academy. available at: https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/system/files/northumbria_elli_dec_11_1.pdf (accessed: 31 march 2017). zimmerman, b.j. (2002) ‘becoming a self-regulated learner: an overview’, theory into practice, 41(2), pp. 64-70. http://dx.doi.org/10.1207/s15430421tip4102_2 acknowledgments we would like to thank jamie thompson for his invaluable discussion and input during earlier stages of the study. author details dr. suad awad is a senior lecturer in the faculty of health and life sciences at the university of northumbria. dr. mirela cuculescu-santana is a senior lecturer in the faculty of health and life sciences at the university of northumbria. journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 17: may 2020 ______________________________________________________________________ how will education 4.0 influence learning in higher education? alan r. williams university of derby, uk richard windle university of nottingham, uk heather wharrad university of nottingham, uk abstract higher education at the start of the fourth industrial revolution (schwab, 2015) is undergoing unprecedented change because of the opportunities revealed for using digital technology, referred to as education 4.0 (feldman, 2018). although societies throughout time have undergone seismic change, it is the speed and magnitude of education 4.0 that is challenging higher education to respond. changes include access to knowledge, ways that knowledge is shared, and the increasing demand by students for their voices to be heard and to be integral to the design of their learning. however, the opportunities revealed for using digital technology must be carefully managed; it is essential academics and higher education institutions investigate the design of learning objects and ensure an authentic student voice is integral to those resources in the education 4.0 landscape. key words: education 4.0; student voice; higher education; learning objects; fourth industrial revolution williams et al. how will education 4.0 influence learning in higher education? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 17: may 2020 2 learning in the education 4.0 world education education is central to human existence and has been a part of life since the greek philosophers and before them (harasim, 2017). throughout the ages, education has provided guidance and direction for society, with formal schooling systems in ancient greece preparing young men for military service (matheson, 2015). many centuries later the first industrial revolution provided the impetus for a compulsory education system in the united kingdom to prepare the population for work in factories. the second industrial revolution around the turn of the 19th century was based on harnessing electrical power, and the third in the 1950s-60s built on scientific progress from the second world war, with the 1944 education act establishing the grammar, secondary modern and technical schools familiar today (brock, 2015). change in compulsory education continues, and smith (2014, p.16) suggests that the ‘spread of ict is arguably one of the greatest changes that compulsory education has witnessed in the last twenty years’. schwab (2015) proposes that we are now in the fourth industrial revolution (see figure 11), in which technology and the internet, lifelong learning, and virtual assistants referred to as education 4.0 provide opportunities for higher education to respond to social and political demands (feldman, 2018). figure 1. industrial revolutions. 1 figure 1 represents the four industrial revolutions described by schwab (2015), with an indication of when they occurred and their impact on society. williams et al. how will education 4.0 influence learning in higher education? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 17: may 2020 3 compulsory education has had to rapidly adapt to an increasingly technological world over a very compressed time period, compared to education over the millennia. the use of information and communication technology is seen as a part of everyday life (clarke, 2011). and higher education also has to rapidly comprehend education 4.0, adopting artificial intelligence such as chatbots and redesigning the campus learning environment (jisc, 2019; the, no date). tierney (2016) considers the role universities play in the 21st century to be based on cardinal newman’s view that a liberal education was of more benefit than training individuals for specific disciplines. however, in more recent times, some universities have focussed on fostering individuals with the necessary knowledge, skill and abilities to enter a specific profession such as nursing or allied health professions, public service, and surveying because of societal demands, perhaps just as in ancient greece. the generations since world war ii have been categorised as baby boomers (born 1946), generation x (1965), followed by generation y/millennials (1977), and those born from 1995 are referred to as generation z/gen z/ post-millennials/the igeneration (schenarts, 2020). it is generation z who have no experience of the world before the web, and who have experienced compulsory education primarily in an online environment; although their teachers educated in an offline world are delivering education in an online world. although there is no definitive view that categorises individuals as belonging to a specific generation, strauss and howe’s (1997) discourse on generations and historical events (admittedly with an american focus), provides a starting point to understand the student in higher education today. williams et al. how will education 4.0 influence learning in higher education? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 17: may 2020 4 table 1. summary of generations generation year range born 2 (approximate) age at the year 2000 baby boomer 1946-1964 36 to 54 generation x 1965-1976 24 to 35 millennials/gen y 1977-1995 5 to 23 generation z/gen z/postmillennials/the igeneration/igen 1995 onwards 5 categorising learners by age range alone creates stereotypes that may not truly represent students currently in higher education. holmes (2011) challenged this simplistic chronological continuum when he analysed young people’s use of technology. his analysis of their online activities revealed three types of uk user: one group that embraces the information superhighway for educational and recreational purposes, a second group engaging primarily in recreational activities, and the third group exhibiting a distinct lack of interest in online activity and using technology for homework and little else. covid-19 (who, 2020) has forced compulsory and higher education to embrace many forms of technology in order to deliver education during the pandemic and beyond, and has brought into sharp focus why attention to the design of learning resources is essential. a binary division categorising students accessing higher education as digital natives or digital immigrants (prensky, 2001) may be too simplistic, as sharpe et al. (2005) identify in their report for jisc, and an editorial by rachel leaver suggests that natives might be ‘more comfortable with the technology but not necessarily having the skills to use it’ (leaver, 2012, p.97). it may be that natives know how to use technology but may not fully appreciate how education 4.0 tools can enhance their learning and opportunities for education. because of the changes in society as a result of education 4.0 and the learner in the 21st century, it is incumbent on academics and institutions to work with students to design 2 the age range ascribed to each generation is an approximation based on literature from gordon (2010), hopkins et al. (2018), oblinger (2003) and schenarts (2020). williams et al. how will education 4.0 influence learning in higher education? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 17: may 2020 5 learning that meets all stakeholders’ needs, whether that is communication through social media apps, commerce, or co-ordinating their professional and personal lives. advance he (2011) highlight the important role technology plays in higher education, recognising the use of ‘appropriate learning technologies’ in the uk professional standards framework. digital technology is a dominant force for change and is transforming society over a much shorter time than in previous industrial revolutions (kahng, 2012; rodriguez et al., 2015). however, this rapid progress has not allowed time for pedagogical practice to adapt in the way other industries have had to. education must investigate, understand and adapt to this new environment if learners are to gain the most from these changes in society. it is incumbent on academics and higher education to exploit the opportunities revealed by education 4.0; those individuals and organisations who do not will be left behind. the learning environment with over half of the world’s population online (kemp, 2018), much of the developed and developing world is dependent on a technological eco-system (sein-echaluce et al., 2019) that has rapidly spread since the start of the 21st century. digital technologies such as hardware (computers, laptops, and ‘smart’ phones), software and, increasingly, applications (apps) and networks accessed through mobile or wi-fi technologies, are part of everyday life and influence how we engage with individuals and organisations in our professional and personal life. weiser (1991) discussed the potential of ‘ubiquitous computing’, by means of which technology is seamlessly integrated into the environment, and the all-pervasive nature of technology is evident in the world now. without the preceding industrialisation of society, the fourth industrial revolution and education 4.0 would not be possible; however, it is the ever-increasing pace of change in the 21st century that is different, requiring education to adapt and exploit technology in order to benefit learners. education 4.0 has influenced and revealed opportunities to enhance learning in higher education. education must embrace the opportunities revealed whilst avoiding gartner’s hype cycle (gartner, 2017), which indicates how the actual usefulness of a specific technology can be over played before longer term gains are identified and established. nevertheless, the changes in society as a consequence of this technological revolution williams et al. how will education 4.0 influence learning in higher education? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 17: may 2020 6 have meant the integration of digital technology in education is an expectation for the majority of learners within higher education (brown, 2015) and in particular for generation z, who have matured alongside the technology. expectation drives demand, but if not carefully planned can also lead to poorly designed or delivered educational resources. learning design and learning objects the tools used in education 4.0 are primarily digital and, because of their availability, are omnipresent in society. views regarding the role of technology in learning have changed over time david wiley described learning objects as ‘any digital resource that can be used to support learning’ (wiley, 2000, p.7) moving the discussion from the technical to the educational sphere. he maintained that a learning object by default will be reusable and digital as a result of technology. more recently, salmon (2013) describes how her ‘carpe diem’ model of learning design, whereby teams enact design ideas on the day, has evolved and spread since 2001; while dalziel and dalziel (2012) highlighted the necessity of moving from a technical to a pedagogical approach in learning design in order to enhance education. criticism persisted as to what actually defined a learning object (friesen, 2003) and metros (2005, p.12) suggested that a learning object ‘must include or link to 1) a learning objective, 2) practice activity, and 3) an assessment’, although this definition focusses more on institutional requirements than a student-centred approach. oliver (2007) described an education ecosystem in which learning objects are an essential building block of a university’s overarching digital education structure. jisc (2014) define a learning object as ‘an aggregation of one or more digital assets which represents an educationally meaningful stand-alone unit’, although only by designing and developing pedagogically useful resources will education 4.0 provide benefits to all. peter goodyear highlights the need for learning design to assume a greater role in higher education whatever teaching and learning methods are used (goodyear, 2015) and goes on to explain how ‘traditional teaching’ in higher education is not fit for purpose because students use the technology they have to hand (laptops, tablets and smart phones) to access learning within and outside traditionally accepted structures. most importantly ‘teaching approaches that may have been the norm 20 or even 10 years ago no longer williams et al. how will education 4.0 influence learning in higher education? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 17: may 2020 7 look affordable or appealing’ (goodyear, 2015, p.37), supporting an approach that makes the student central to the design of their learning resources. students formal education theories have been developed since the late 19th century with three distinct, although to some degree overlapping, schools of thought referred to as behaviourism, cognitivism and constructivism (ertmer and newby, 1993; woollard, 2011; harasim, 2017). disciplines develop and adapt their own brand of educational theory, but, as we are far from understanding how the human brain functions, no one theory can be definitively accepted (dennick, 2015). however, the democratisation of access to knowledge is also influenced by more active student engagement in learning, reflecting a social constructivist approach to learning and the importance of learning design as identified by conole (2014) and laurillard (2002; 2012) among others. an increase in the number of students entering higher education has been noted in england and in 36 countries (hefce, 2015; the economist, 2018; oecd, 2019) with indicators based on widening participation also demonstrating this trend (department for education, 2019). there are a greater number of students entering higher education than two or three decades ago (department of business, innovation and skills, 2011; 2015; cable, 2012; mcgettigan, 2013) when the use of technology in society was in its infancy meaning educational practice must evolve to take account of changes possible in education 4.0. in 2013/2014 there were 1.7 million undergraduate students in higher education in england alone (higher education statistics authority, no date), and lord browne reported that 45% of 18-30-year-olds in england entered higher education in 2010, an increase from 39% ten years previously (browne, 2010). in addition to promoting access to, and participation in, higher education, focus is now turning to graduate success and the employability agenda, with universities uk (2019) identifying cases where universities, not-for-profit organisations and commercial organisations are addressing this third phase of the widening participation agenda. williams et al. how will education 4.0 influence learning in higher education? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 17: may 2020 8 nearly a decade ago, in the ‘higher education: students at the heart of the system’ report (department of business, innovation and skills, 2011), examples of student engagement cited are student evaluation of teaching and a case report from a university in the midlands suggesting there is work to do before the student contribution is central to and embedded in the learning design process. furthermore, with access agreements and a widening participation agenda designed to open universities to underrepresented groups in society (mcgettigan, 2013; matheson and woodward, 2015), the university student population is more diverse, and educators must consider how learning objects can be designed to meet all students’ needs. more importantly, generation z students embarking on higher education study in the first decades of the 21st century have grown up with digital technologies (hutchinson et al., 2012; lippencott, 2012; chung and fitzsimons, 2013) and will be critical of poorly designed resources. it is important to investigate how this technology can be utilised to achieve more effective learning environments. grainne conole suggests that technology is ‘central to how they organise and orientate their learning’ (conole, 2008, p.138), and educational practice must accommodate how students learn in order to enable them to reach their full potential. a report for demos that investigated a child’s learning in the digital age identified the dominant role technology played in their life and a proportion of these individuals have or are about to enter post-compulsory education (green and hanlon, 2007). student voice with higher education now part of a market economy, jones-devitt and lebihan (2018) suggest that the term ‘student voice’ can have different interpretations, one being feedback from students on universities and academics, as seen in the united kingdom in the national student survey (nss, no date). however, the involvement of students in the design of their learning represents a deeper student voice and true partnership because it 1) values their contribution 2) reflects a social constructivist approach to education and 3) is congruent with national policy in the united kingdom that places the student at the centre of their education. williams et al. how will education 4.0 influence learning in higher education? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 17: may 2020 9 campbell et al. (2009) promote the importance of respecting the student contribution and embedding it in learning and curriculum design, with descriptive evidence of the advantages and challenges ahead. campbell et al. (2009) report how students can be integral to the design of curricula in law and science (brooman et al., 2015; woolmer et al., 2016), although the challenges to enabling a sufficiently loud student voice include 1) ensuring the physical learning environment facilitates students’ centrality to their learning and 2) the active engagement of academics, administrators and institutions. healey et al. (2014) suggest that ‘engaging students and staff effectively as partners in learning and teaching is arguably one of the most important issues facing higher education in the 21st century’ and provide examples of true student voice in case studies. another way of achieving true student voice is for learners and academics to undertake pedagogical research projects investigating the design of learning objects fit for education 4.0, with the dissemination of results providing tangible evidence of achievement for all involved. conclusion at the dawn of the fourth industrial revolution that brought about education 4.0, baby boomers, generation x and generation y experienced the same changes in technology − albeit at different stages of their lives − as generation z, who know little else. consequently, generation z students undertaking higher education in the first decades of the 21st century expect the use of technology in education, and because the previous generations were in their early to mid-adulthood at the dawn of this technological age, they also expect this also to be the norm (rosen and nelson, 2008). after all, as norm friesen points out, writing and texts have existed for 4,500 years or ‘150 generational cohorts’ (friesen, 2017, p.151), and we are at the beginning of a new era in education and adapting to how we use these established resources. essentially students should not be considered a homogenous group who are au fait with technology; they require support to navigate their learning journey. however, they can make a significant contribution when involved from the start in the design and development of learning objects. academics must investigate how learning objects are designed and what pedagogical features of a design appear most conducive to the acquisition of knowledge if higher education is to embrace the opportunities of education 4.0. williams et al. how will education 4.0 influence learning in higher education? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 17: may 2020 10 references advance he (2011) the uk professional standards framework for teaching and supporting learning in higher education 2011. available at: https://www.advancehe.ac.uk/guidance/teaching-and-learning/ukpsf (accessed: 30 april 2020). brock, c. (2015) ‘social and spatial disparity in the history of school provision in england from the 1750s to the 1950s’, in matheson, d. (ed.) an introduction to the study of education. oxford: routledge. brooman, s., darwent, s. and pimor, a. (2015) ‘the student voice in higher education curriculum design: is there value in listening?’ innovations in education and teaching international, 52(6), pp.663-674. brown, m. (2015) ‘six trajectories for digital technology in higher education’, educause review, 43(1, pp.16-28. browne, j. (2010) independent review of higher education funding & student finance. available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/4225 65/bis-10-1208-securing-sustainable-higher-education-browne-report.pdf (accessed: 23 january 2020). cable, v. (2012) supporting social mobility and lifelong learning. available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/supporting-social-mobility-and-lifelonglearning (accessed: 23 january 2020). campbell, f., eland, j., rumpus, a. and shacklock, r. (2009) hearing the student voice. involving students in curriculum design and delivery. final report. available at: http://www.sparqs.ac.uk/ch/e3%20hearing%20the%20student%20voice%20involvi ng%20students%20in%20curriculum%20design%20and%20development.pdf (accessed: 23 january 2020). https://www.advance-he.ac.uk/guidance/teaching-and-learning/ukpsf https://www.advance-he.ac.uk/guidance/teaching-and-learning/ukpsf https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/422565/bis-10-1208-securing-sustainable-higher-education-browne-report.pdf https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/422565/bis-10-1208-securing-sustainable-higher-education-browne-report.pdf https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/supporting-social-mobility-and-lifelong-learning https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/supporting-social-mobility-and-lifelong-learning http://www.sparqs.ac.uk/ch/e3%20hearing%20the%20student%20voice%20involving%20students%20in%20curriculum%20design%20and%20development.pdf http://www.sparqs.ac.uk/ch/e3%20hearing%20the%20student%20voice%20involving%20students%20in%20curriculum%20design%20and%20development.pdf williams et al. how will education 4.0 influence learning in higher education? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 17: may 2020 11 chung, s.m. and fitzsimons, v. (2013) ‘knowing generation y: a new generation of nurses in practice’. british journal of nursing. 22(20), pp.1173-1179. clarke, a. (2011) how to use technology effectively in post-compulsory education. london: routledge. conole, g. (2008) ‘listening to the learner voice: the ever changing landscape of technology of technology use for language students’, recall, 20(2), pp.124-140. conole, g. (2014) ‘the 7cs of learning design – a new approach to rethinking design practice’, in bayne, s., jones, c., de laat, m., ryberg, t, and sinclair c. (eds.) proceedings of the 9th international conference on networked learning. university of edinburgh, edinburgh 7-9 april. dalziel, j. and dalziel, b. (2012) ‘adoption of learning designs in teacher training and medical education: templates versus embedded content’, teaching english with technology, special issue on lams and learning design, 12(2), pp.62-73. dennick, r. (2015) ‘theories of learning: constructive experience’, in matheson, d. (ed.) an introduction to the study of education. oxford: routledge. department for education (2019) widening participation in higher education, england, 2017/18 age cohort – official statistics. available at: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attach ment_data/file/852633/wp2019-maintext.pdf (accessed: 23 april 2020). department of business, innovation and skills (2011) higher education: students at the heart of the system. cm 8122. available at: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attach ment_data/file/31384/11-944-higher-education-students-at-heart-of-system.pdf (accessed: 19 may 2020). https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/852633/wp2019-maintext.pdf https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/852633/wp2019-maintext.pdf https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/31384/11-944-higher-education-students-at-heart-of-system.pdf https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/31384/11-944-higher-education-students-at-heart-of-system.pdf williams et al. how will education 4.0 influence learning in higher education? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 17: may 2020 12 department of business, innovation and skills (2015) teaching at the heart of the system. available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/teaching-at-the-heart-of-thesystem (accessed: 23 january 2020). the economist (2018) ‘time to end the academic arms race’. 3 february, p. 16. available at: https://www.economist.com/leaders/2018/02/03/time-to-end-the-academic-armsrace (accessed: 23 january 2020). ertmer, p. and newby, r. (1993) ‘behaviourism, cognitivism, constructivism: comparing critical features from an instructional design perspective’, performance improvement quarterly. 6(4), pp.50-72. feldman, p. (2018) the potential of education 4.0 is huge – the uk must take the lead, now. available at: https://www.jisc.ac.uk/blog/the-potential-of-education-4-is-hugethe-uk-must-take-the-lead-now-12-sep-2018# (accessed: 24 april 2020). friesen, n. (2003) three objections to learning objects and e-learning standards. available at: https://www.normfriesen.info/papers/objections.html (accessed: 27 april 2020). gartner (2017) gartner hype cycle. available at: https://www.gartner.com/technology/research/methodologies/hype-cycle.jsp (accessed: 23 january 2020). goodyear, p. (2015) ‘teaching as design’, herdsa review of higher education, 2, pp.27-50. available at http://www.herdsa.org.au/herdsa-review-higher-educationvol-2/27-50 (accessed: 23 january 2020). gordon, s. (2010) ‘once you get them, how do you keep them? millennial librarians at work’, new library world. 111(9/10), pp.391-398. available at: https://doi.org/10.1108/03074801011089314 (accessed: 23 january 2020). green, h. and hanlon. c, (2007) young people are spending their time in a space which adults find difficult to supervise or understand. available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/teaching-at-the-heart-of-the-system https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/teaching-at-the-heart-of-the-system https://www.economist.com/leaders/2018/02/03/time-to-end-the-academic-arms-race https://www.economist.com/leaders/2018/02/03/time-to-end-the-academic-arms-race https://www.jisc.ac.uk/blog/the-potential-of-education-4-is-huge-the-uk-must-take-the-lead-now-12-sep-2018 https://www.jisc.ac.uk/blog/the-potential-of-education-4-is-huge-the-uk-must-take-the-lead-now-12-sep-2018 https://www.normfriesen.info/papers/objections.html https://www.gartner.com/technology/research/methodologies/hype-cycle.jsp http://www.herdsa.org.au/herdsa-review-higher-education-vol-2/27-50 http://www.herdsa.org.au/herdsa-review-higher-education-vol-2/27-50 https://doi.org/10.1108/03074801011089314 williams et al. how will education 4.0 influence learning in higher education? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 17: may 2020 13 http://dera.ioe.ac.uk/23215/1/their%20space%20-%20web.pdf (accessed: 23 january 2020). harasim, l. (2017) learning theory and online technologies. 2nd edn. abingdon: routledge. healey, m., flint, a. and harrison, k. (2014) engagement through partnership: students as partners in learning and teaching in higher education. higher education academy. available at www.heacademy.ac.uk/students-as-partners (accessed: 29 april 2020). higher education funding council for england [hefce] (2015). young participation in higher education: a-levels and similar qualifications. issues paper 2015/03. available at: https://dera.ioe.ac.uk/22198/1/hefe2015_03.pdf (accessed: 19 may 2020). higher education statistics authority (no date) free online statistics – students & qualifiers. available at: https://www.hesa.ac.uk/stats (accessed: 23 january 2020). holmes, j. (2011) ‘cyberkids or divided generations? characterising young people’s internet use in the uk with generic continuum or typological models’, new media and society, 13(7), pp.1104-1122. hopkins, l., hampton, b., abbott, j., buery-joyner, s., craig, l., dalrymple, j., forstein. d., graziano, s., mckenzie, m., pradham, a., wolf, a. and page-ramsey, s. (2018) ‘to the point: medical education, technology, and the millennial learner’, american journal of obstetrics and gynaecology, 218(2), pp.188-192. hutchinson, d., brown, j. and longworth, k. (2012) ‘attracting and maintaining the y generation in nursing: a literature review’, journal of nursing management, 20, pp.444-450. jisc (2014) open educational resources (oers) guide. available at: https://www.jisc.ac.uk/full-guide/open-educational-resources (accessed 27 april 2020). http://dera.ioe.ac.uk/23215/1/their%20space%20-%20web.pdf http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/students-as-partners https://dera.ioe.ac.uk/22198/1/hefe2015_03.pdf https://www.hesa.ac.uk/stats https://www.jisc.ac.uk/full-guide/open-educational-resources williams et al. how will education 4.0 influence learning in higher education? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 17: may 2020 14 jisc (2019) members stories: moving towards education 4.0. available at: https://www.jisc.ac.uk/blog/member-stories-towards-higher-education-40-15-jan2019# (accessed 29 april 2020). jones-devitt, s. and lebihan, j. (2018) use and abuse of the student voice. available at: https://www.advance-he.ac.uk/knowledge-hub/use-and-abuse-student-voice (accessed 29 april 2020). kahng, a. (2012) ‘the road ahead. predicting the future of information technology and society’, ieee design and test of computers, november/december, pp.101-102. kemp, s. (2018) digital in 2018: world’s internet use passes the 4 billion mark. available at https://wearesocial.com/blog/2018/01/global-digital-report-2018 (accessed 24 april 2020). laurillard, d. (2002) rethinking university teaching: a conversational framework for the effective use of learning technologies. 2nd edn. london: routledgefalmer. laurillard, d. (2012) teaching as a design science: building pedagogical patterns for learning and technology. london: routledgefalmer. leaver, r. (2012) ‘blending with the digital natives’, international journal of urological nursing, 6(3), pp.97-99. lippencott, j. (2012) ‘information commons: meeting millennials’ needs’, journal of library administration, 52(6-7), pp.538-548. matheson, c. and woodward, d. (2015) ‘post-compulsory education (further and higher education)’, in matheson, d. (ed.) an introduction to the study of education. 4th edn. london: routledge. matheson, d. (2015) ‘what is education?’, in matheson, d. (ed.) an introduction to the study of education. 4th edn. london: routledge. https://www.jisc.ac.uk/blog/member-stories-towards-higher-education-40-15-jan-2019 https://www.jisc.ac.uk/blog/member-stories-towards-higher-education-40-15-jan-2019 https://www.advance-he.ac.uk/knowledge-hub/use-and-abuse-student-voice https://wearesocial.com/blog/2018/01/global-digital-report-2018 williams et al. how will education 4.0 influence learning in higher education? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 17: may 2020 15 mcgettigan, a. (2013) the great university gamble; money, markets and the future of higher education. london: pluto press. metros, s.e. (2005) ‘learning objects: a rose by any other name’, educause review, 40 (4), pp.12-13. nss (no date) about the nss. available at: https://www.thestudentsurvey.com/about.php (accessed: 29 april 2020). oblinger, d. (2003) boomers, gen-xers and millennials: understanding the new students. available at: https://er.educause.edu/articles/2003/1/boomers-genxers-andmillennials-understanding-the-new-students (accessed: 23 january 2020). oecd (2019) education at a glance 2019: oecd indicators. oecd publishing: paris. available at: https://doi.org/10.1787/f8d7880d-en (accessed: 21 may 2020). oliver, r. (2007) ‘reusing and sharing learning designs in higher education’, in crisp, g. and hicks, m. (eds) enhancing higher education, theory and scholarship: proceedings of the 30th herdsa annual conference, adelaide, 8-11 july, pp. x429. prensky, m. (2001) ‘digital natives, digital immigrants’, on the horizon, 9(5), pp.1-6. rodriguez, d., busco, c. and flores, r. (2018) ‘information technology within society’s evolution’, technology in society, 40, pp.64-72. rosen, d. and nelson, c. (2008) ‘web 2.0: a new generation of learners and education’, computers in the schools, 25(3-4), pp.211-225. salmon, g. (2013) e-tivities: the key to active online learning. 2nd edn. london: routledge. schenarts, p.j. (2020) ‘now arriving: surgical trainees from generation z’, journal of surgical education, 77(2), pp.246-253. https://www.thestudentsurvey.com/about.php https://er.educause.edu/articles/2003/1/boomers-genxers-and-millennials-understanding-the-new-students https://er.educause.edu/articles/2003/1/boomers-genxers-and-millennials-understanding-the-new-students https://doi.org/10.1787/f8d7880d-en williams et al. how will education 4.0 influence learning in higher education? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 17: may 2020 16 schwab, k. (2015) ‘the fourth industrial revolution; what it means and how to respond’, foreign affairs, 12 december. available at: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/2015-12-12/fourth-industrial-revolution (accessed: 23 january 2020). sein-echaluce, m., fidalgo-blanco, a. and esteban-escano, j. (2019) ‘technological ecosystems and ontologies for an educational model based on web 3.0’, universal access in the information society, 18, pp.645-658. available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10209-019-00684-9 (accessed: 21 may 2020). sharpe, r., benfield, g., lessner, e. and dicicco, e. (2005) scoping study for the pedagogy strand of the jisc e-learning programme. available at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/295400695_scoping_study_for_the_peda gogy_strand_of_the_jisc_elearning_programme (accessed: 23 january 2020). smith, l. (2014) ‘ict for english in english ite: an investigation into the ict component of pcge english courses’, english in education, 48:1, pp.63-75, available at: https://doi.org/10.1111/eie.12037 (accessed: 21 may 2020). strauss, w. and howe, n. (1997) the fourth turning: an american prophecy. new york: broadway books. the (no date) preparing for education 4.0. available at: https://www.timeshighereducation.com/hub/jisc/p/preparing-education-40 (accessed: 29 april 2020). tierney, w. (2016) ‘portrait of higher education in the twenty-first century: john henry newman’s ‘the idea of a university’’, international journal of leadership in education, 19, pp.5-16. universities uk (2019) widening opportunity in higher education the third phase: beyond graduation. available at: https://www.universitiesuk.ac.uk/policy-andanalysis/reports/pages/widening-opportunity-third-phase-beyond-graduation.aspx (accessed 29 april 2020). https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/2015-12-12/fourth-industrial-revolution https://doi.org/10.1007/s10209-019-00684-9 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/295400695_scoping_study_for_the_pedagogy_strand_of_the_jisc_elearning_programme https://www.researchgate.net/publication/295400695_scoping_study_for_the_pedagogy_strand_of_the_jisc_elearning_programme https://doi.org/10.1111/eie.12037 https://www.timeshighereducation.com/hub/jisc/p/preparing-education-40 https://www.universitiesuk.ac.uk/policy-and-analysis/reports/pages/widening-opportunity-third-phase-beyond-graduation.aspx https://www.universitiesuk.ac.uk/policy-and-analysis/reports/pages/widening-opportunity-third-phase-beyond-graduation.aspx williams et al. how will education 4.0 influence learning in higher education? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 17: may 2020 17 weiser, m. (1991) ‘the computer for the 21st century’. scientific american. 265(3), pp.6675. who (2020) coronavirus disease (covid-19) pandemic. available at: https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2019 (accessed 29 april 2020). wiley, d. (2000) ‘connecting learning objects to instructional design theory: a definition, a metaphor, and a taxonomy’, in wiley, d. (ed) the instructional use of learning objects. available at: http://www.reusability.org/read/#1 (accessed: 23 january 2020). woollard, j. (2011) psychology for the classroom: e-learning. abingdon: routledge. woolmer, c., sneddon, p., curry, g., hill, b., fehertavi, s., longbone, c. and wallace, k. (2016) ‘student staff partnership to create an interdisciplinary science skills course in a research intensive university’, international journal for academic development, 21(1), pp.16-27. author details alan williams is academic lead for the nursing and perioperative practice programmes at the university of derby online learning. he is a registered nurse with over 20 years’ experience in the nhs before moving to higher education as an assistant professor at the university of nottingham in 2006. he completed his doctoral thesis in 2018 investigating the design of learning objects, under the supervision of dr windle and professor wharrad and now applies his knowledge and experience to support online students across the globe. richard windle is an associate professor at the university of nottingham, faculty digital learning director and a principal fellow of the hea. ever since appointment as a lecturer in health sciences in 1999, he has had a passion for exploring how digital learning https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2019 http://www.reusability.org/read/#1 williams et al. how will education 4.0 influence learning in higher education? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 17: may 2020 18 technology can be used to support learner-empowerment and ownership in order to address the learning needs of his students. heather wharrad is a professor of e-learning and health informatics at the university of nottingham. she is academic lead for the helm health e-learning and media group and the research group in education and technology for health in the school and has been principal investigator on many externally funded national and international projects on e-learning pedagogy, evaluation and research in health. how will education 4.0 influence learning in higher education? abstract learning in the education 4.0 world education the learning environment learning design and learning objects students student voice conclusion references author details literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 12: november 2017 maximising the benefits associated with internship learning for undergraduates christine fanthome boston university study abroad, london, uk abstract this paper focuses on student responses to an internship programme at an american university in london, with the purpose of highlighting potential areas for curricular improvement. it is based on a survey of 100 undergraduates studying abroad in the uk and concentrates particularly on whether student expectations of their internships are met, the nature of students’ perceived personal and professional learning outcomes, and feedback on the current services offered by the internship management team and academic faculty. findings indicate that student expectations are generally well managed within the current system, and the majority of students feel that their internships have contributed to their personal and professional growth. however, the data highlight discrepancies in the level and nature of support sought by an increasingly diverse student population. potential improvements are therefore under consideration, such as broader self-help online resources to include video interviews with past students, additional reflective writing workshops, and the establishment of subject linked social media groups for additional peer support. keywords: internship; work placement; experiential learning; personal development; learning development; skills development; professional development. introduction the american university that is the subject of this paper has over thirty years’ experience of guiding an increasingly diverse student body through the internship process. its fanthome maximising the benefits associated with internship learning for undergraduates journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 2 practices and policies are continuously examined critically in the light of student feedback as it seeks to improve its service. this paper will present preliminary findings arising from a new student survey, conducted in autumn 2016, which looks at student expectations and internship experiences in the light of the provision currently offered by the internship managers, some of whom were interviewed for the project. it concludes by making recommendations for additional improvements. internships context and dilemmas student internships have for many decades formed part of the american employment landscape (benavides et al., 2013). although the uk is arguably a few years behind the usa in terms of the development of its intern culture (perlin, 2011; perlin and brissenden, 2011), rising undergraduate numbers in britain within an increasingly competitive job market has meant that, here too, workplace experience on the cv has become a prerequisite to presenting oneself as marketable after graduation (gault et al., 2010) and securing an advantageous position in terms of job opportunities (rigsby et al., 2013). moreover, it is not just employment benefits that are enhanced by an internship experience; there are also academic benefits (binder et al., 2015). pizzolato (2008) notes that student learning is enhanced when there is a positive partnership between a student and his/her academic advisor, and pool and sewell (2007) identify the advantages to students of receiving guidance, which in turn helps them to develop the key skills they are utilising in the workplace. overall, the benefits of work placements are widely acknowledged, most particularly in terms of enhanced employment prospects and personal development opportunities for the student (fanthome, 2004) and access to a young and vibrant talent pool for the employer (ncub, 2014). moreover, reflecting the increasing importance of the global marketplace, there has also been a growth in demand for internships abroad that enable individuals to experience new cultures and develop a global mindset (gilroy, 2013). however, despite the known benefits of internship experience, unfortunately the playing field is not level for all students, and there is evidence that certain individuals are at a disadvantage. in the uk, the sutton trust (2014) has pointed out that internships are often unpaid and that the participant often needs to live away from home, observing that fanthome maximising the benefits associated with internship learning for undergraduates journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 3 the ability to support oneself with independent funding can therefore be of primary importance. a report commissioned by the debretts foundation (2014) reaches similar conclusions, furthermore stating that those without family connections are also disadvantaged. this view is reiterated by shade and jacobson (2015) whose research into the experiences of young canadian women undertaking unpaid internships in the creative sector in canada and the usa revealed a class-based advantage applicable to those from privileged backgrounds. similarly, fisher’s (2013) article on white house interns reveals the role of nepotism and networking in the selection process for these positions. internship modules within higher education curricula can address these obstacles and offer a solution to these concerns by providing relevant internships within commuting distance of students’ term time location, based on individuals’ talents and aspirations, regardless of financial or social circumstances, and in addition they are underpinned by a strong advisory support system to ensure that the diverse student body is able to attain academic and personal goals. although the case study in this paper details the experiences of international students in london, the benefits to students of joining an internship programme undertaken locally near their place of study, and supported by dedicated professional internship managers and academic faculty, would equally apply within the british context of a uk module provided by a uk university for its students. london internship programme students on the london internship programme come to the uk from the usa for one semester, the first half of which is spent on the university campus studying one core module plus one elective module, with lectures totalling sixteen hours per week. in the second half of the semester, by which time the students are acclimatised to living in london, they intern for four days per week for a period of six weeks in a business related to their major subject studied. on the fifth working day they attend lectures at the university and may, if they wish, take this opportunity to meet with faculty, staff or their internship managers to discuss any aspects of their learning. however, the process leading up to the start of the internship module begins three to five months before students arrive in the uk. the first meeting between students on the programme and internship managers takes place in the usa. each student completes an fanthome maximising the benefits associated with internship learning for undergraduates journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 4 online registration form giving details of their resumé, achievements, aims, subjects studied, hobbies and internship goals, two days in advance of being interviewed by an internship manager, when the form is discussed in detail in a one-to-one meeting that lasts at least half an hour. the objective is to determine what the student wants, the areas to which the student might be open, and the areas that are not of interest or unrealistic. each student is given feedback on his/her resumé together with an opportunity to articulate what they hope to achieve through the internship. answers generally include: improving soft and hard skills, putting into context what they have learned academically through working, getting a chance to test drive an industry, and gaining office experience. a follow-up email is sent shortly after the meeting that captures what has been discussed and offers the student the opportunity to make changes. once they arrive in the uk some months later, the students undertake an orientation programme which includes information and assistance about british workplace culture and a range of lectures and discussions focusing on various aspects of life in britain, such as uk politics, art and culture, education, and legal regulations, for example with regard to alcohol and drugs. the purpose of the orientation programme is to outline what students might encounter in the world of work, and in doing so to manage their expectations, and to prepare them for any cultural differences, mindful of the relationship between culture shock and lack of preparation (ineson et al., 2006). with growing numbers of non-american international students participating in the london programme, the orientation workshops serve to inform and prepare all individuals from a range of cultures and native languages for what to expect within a british working environment, thus avoiding some of the adjustment issues and acculturative stresses experienced by international students, such as difficulties with social interaction and emotional reactions to a new environment (gebhard, 2012), language barriers, interpersonal problems, and daily independent living stressors (poulakis et al., 2017). during orientation the students are informed about the internship process and its timescales, advised about what to expect from the forthcoming interview with their matched organisation, which they need to pass in order to secure the internship, and reminded that interviews in the uk may be different to those in the usa. a key feature of busal’s internship programme is that a bespoke service is offered to students in that they do not compete with each other for internships. each individual is guided by an internship manager (im) towards an appropriate opportunity. one internship manager described this as being akin to ‘a dating service’ (im1). the matching service fanthome maximising the benefits associated with internship learning for undergraduates journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 5 involves each student being assigned an internship manager for the whole semester who will provide updates and assistance throughout the process. the internship managers consider what the companies are looking for in terms of experience and preferences within the context of the potential intern’s resumé, which might include specific gpa (grade percent average) requirements, language requirements and the individual’s stated goals. each internship manager is well placed to find an appropriate match between students and opportunities on offer, and manages expectations by being transparent about any potential barriers, such as lack of relevant relatable skills or academic experience. the unique consideration of the individual and appropriate placement reflects hergert’s (2009) findings that the value of an internship is enhanced when the experience and the student’s academic background are integrated. between orientation and the start of the internship, students are invited to voluntary ‘confidence workshops’ which help prepare for workplace interviews by providing mock interviews. each session can hold up to 25 students. drop-in sessions are also available on request and comprise one-to-one meetings between the student and her/his internship manager. a week before the start, the internship managers visit each track of students (for example economics majors) and talk to them about internships in that particular track. this takes place during the first of three workshops run by academic faculty and the purpose is to show that the internship manager’s work relates to the academic work. the aim of the three academic faculty workshops, which are track specific and take place at the beginning, middle and end of the programme, is to look at the internship from the perspective of the academic subject from which the work stems and view the internship through a subject specific lens. students each give a presentation about their industry/organisation and discuss any relevant issues with their peers and the faculty member within the context of their track subject. the academic assessments for the module are this presentation, a paper on a project that has been undertaken at work, and a paper critically assessing the internship experience. whilst faculty focus on the academic context, internship managers see their role as offering support, managing expectations and pointing out the transferable nature of the internship experience gained so that students can develop a critical awareness of their learning, some students come to the module with unrealistic expectations of what they will be doing on their internship, most specifically when they do not accept that there may be barriers between what they want and what they will be offered, (for example potential fanthome maximising the benefits associated with internship learning for undergraduates journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 6 journalism interns with an inadequate command of english or students who wish to intern in an investment bank when they do not have relevant mathematical skills to undertake the work). one internship manager confirmed that ‘as part of our job we always try to manage expectations as much as we can from the very beginning’ (im3), believing students with a realistic outlook tend to be happier in their work environment. there is an open door policy at all times and late drop-in sessions so that students can attend after work. there is a formal review two weeks into the internship which is an online process in which students are invited to rate their experience. this is followed up by an email and every student gets a response. students who are not happy are invited in for a discussion and several students are offered practical advice for specific issues. throughout the internship, e-mail monitoring takes place to ensure that the internship is running smoothly, and at the end of the semester a summary of the evaluations done by students is put into a report by the internship managers and sent to the university in order to make any necessary changes to enhance the module. methodology in autumn 2016 a new survey was conducted with the purpose of gathering more detailed qualitative and quantitative information from internship students as part of a review of the programme. the survey, which took the form of two questionnaires, completed before the start and in the final week of the internships, was offered to 106 students, which represented just over half of the student cohort for the autumn semester 2016, across a range of six tracks. a survey was considered to be the optimum method of obtaining the relevant data, mainly because it had the advantage of enabling large numbers of respondents in different locations to become involved (denscombe, 2007). an additional benefit was that it did not require extensive time or resources to implement (brown and dowling, 1998). the groups were selected randomly by the director for academic affairs and take up was very high: of 106 students, 93 contributed to the first questionnaire, and 90 contributed to the second questionnaire approximately six weeks later. as de vaus (2002) points out, a research method may be judged by its response rate and in this instance the high rate indicates an appropriate choice of methodology. fanthome maximising the benefits associated with internship learning for undergraduates journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 7 in keeping with brown and dowling’s (1998) observation that confidentiality and anonymity can encourage participation, the distribution of the questionnaires was administered by colleagues, respondents were not identified, and participation was voluntary. ethical issues were considered carefully at each stage and ethical approval was granted before the empirical research began. the first part of the survey in both instances delivered quantitative data relating to what the students perceived to be important about their internship. students were asked to rank ten factors (for example learning skills, meeting new people, having fun) in order of importance. the same factors were used in both the before and after survey, so that their expectations and the reality of their experiences could be directly compared. in both the before and after surveys, two open questions then followed, designed to gather qualitative data that would provide further clarity about the nature of students’ key thoughts and perceptions, most specifically on their learning and development expectations and their perceived personal and professional learning outcomes. the data was processed using microsoft excel. in keeping with bryman’s four stages of qualitative analysis (2008), the data from the open questions was coded and indexed according to patterns and themes. as bell (2010) notes, coding allows key issues to be clustered, which is a step towards making conclusions. similarly, blaxter et al. (2010) observe that as the size of the data set is reduced, this can draw attention to significant pieces of data. four internship managers were also interviewed with the purpose of drawing on their past interactions with interns and identifying recurring themes. presentation and discussion of findings key to survey reference codes s = student im = internship manager b = before internship start, i.e. data from questionnaire 1 a = after, towards internship end, i.e. data from questionnaire 2 example: b/s19 refers to a comment from student ref code 19 made before internship start, i.e. data from questionnaire 1. fanthome maximising the benefits associated with internship learning for undergraduates journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 8 figure 1 compares the students’ ranking of ten factors in order of importance before and after their internships. the rankings of the various factors varied widely by student with the result that no factor was on average ranked above four or below seven. however, the pattern of rankings was similar before and after, with students selecting learning about workplace culture and enhancing their cvs as being the most important factors both in the anticipatory phase and afterwards in hindsight. the relation between expectations and experiences demonstrates that the students were realistic about what to expect. figure 1. comparing expectations and experience before and after internship. 93 students ranked 10 expected outcomes of an internship from most to least important before and after their experience. the mean ranking of each outcome is presented above. students’ anticipatory feelings the nature of the students’ anticipatory feelings was further explored in the two ensuing open questions. the first asked them to identify what they were feeling as they looked ahead to their internships (figure 2). it was striking that the word ‘excited’ occurred frequently in the answers to this question. 58 students used this word (62%). 53 students (57%) identified the opportunity and challenge that they hoped the internship would offer, 20 (22%) mentioned gaining greater industry knowledge and experience, and 20 (22%) made a firm connection with their future career and employability. the data supported an fanthome maximising the benefits associated with internship learning for undergraduates journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 9 internship manager’s comment that: ‘they are very keen to have an internship that links to what they hope to do in the future, or what their understanding of what they hope to do in the future is’ (im1). figure 2. categorisation of key anticipatory thoughts before internship start. students’ comments included: i am excited for the opportunity to work in a british office and learn a new culture. (b/s45) i am excited to start working. i am excited to learn about a new area of my industry that i have never dipped my toes in before. (b/s8) my main thoughts are that i am excited to be working in this field for the first time. i want to gain more experience in the film/tv industry and i want to experience what it’s like to have a job in this field so that i can decide more specifically what i’d like to do as a career. (b/s15) i am really excited for the internship to begin and can't wait to absorb and contribute as much as i can to the workplace environment. i am excited to learn and challenge myself, while trying my best to make a positive impact. (b/s65) fanthome maximising the benefits associated with internship learning for undergraduates journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 10 the second open question probed specifically about how students thought their internship would contribute to their learning and development. results showed career issues to be a key preoccupation, mentioned by 40 students (43%), together with skills, about which 37 students commented (40%) (figure 3). however, opportunity/challenge (28 students/30%), personal growth (24 students/26%), industry knowledge/experience (19 students/20%) and new culture (19 students/20%) were also significant factors. figure 3. categorisation of learning and development expectations before internship start. students’ comments included: i think it'll give me more marketable administration skills and experience working in an office. as for real personal growth, i suppose it might help me discover what i want to do re film/tv, but i think i have an ok idea of that already. this is mostly a resume builder. (b/s11) i think that i'll get better at multi-tasking and handling stress because my internship is supposedly fast-paced and challenging. i hope to get better at prioritizing and decision-making by working in such an environment. (b/s15) fanthome maximising the benefits associated with internship learning for undergraduates journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 11 my internship will push me out of my comfort zone and test my abilities as a future employee, giving me a new understanding of my capabilities. (b/s80) i think it will help me decide if this is really what i want to do for a career. i think it could give me a network of people that i can use in the future as points of contact. i also think it will push me to be more creative and apply the marketing term. (b/s67) internship managers interviewed for this project confirmed that in their experience, students tended to think more about building their resumés rather than considering their personal development. one spoke of students’ inclination to focus on ‘a big name’ for their cv rather than about ‘where their skills gaps are’ (im4). this often resulted in a divide between what the student wanted in terms of choice of internship and what the internship manager considered an optimum learning environment for the student. another noted ‘actually what they [students] are probably going to do is find out so much more about themselves personally. i don’t know that they always realise that until later’ (im1). students’ reflections post internship data collected towards the end of the internship period looked at students’ perceptions of their personal and professional growth (figure 4). the great majority of respondents (78/90%) to this question felt that they had grown as a person and/or that the internship had affected their future decisions. of the students that indicated they believed their internship had affected their future decisions, most cited the ability to make informed decisions as a key factor (40/44%). 39 students (43%) thought that they had grown in terms of greater competence/skills and 23 students (26%) cited greater understanding. many expressed increased confidence and self-efficacy, which aligns with edwards’ (2014) findings from a comparable study. for some students, the experience prompted a complete track or career rethink. this is in keeping with rothman and sisman’s (2016) observations that internships can offer students the chance to learn what they want and what they do not want, thus helping them to define an appropriate career path and avoid the financial and emotional consequences for themselves and their employers of future job dissatisfaction and early turnover. fanthome maximising the benefits associated with internship learning for undergraduates journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 12 figure 4. showing students’ perceptions of their learning and development (data collected at end of internship). students’ comments included: i developed my oral skills and how i communicate in different environments. (a/s46) it challenged my professional communication skills a lot and i learned how to work for a boss who can be rude a lot. (a/s15) has solidified that i would prefer to work in a larger firm rather than a smaller firm. taught me the importance of always showing up prepared whether it is for class or work. (a/s71) my internship solidified my feelings about what i definitely do not want to be doing for the rest of my life, and i am now looking into post-graduate opportunities to switch industries entirely. (a/s71) since the purpose of the survey was to explore potential enhancements to the curriculum, the final question asked students about the support they had received from internship fanthome maximising the benefits associated with internship learning for undergraduates journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 13 managers and faculty in order to identify opportunities for improvements (figure 5). of the responses gathered, 24 students (27%) wrote mainly positive comments; 35 students (39%) made fairly neutral statements, 24 students offered critical comments (27%), and 7 students did not comment. the main areas attracting criticism were lack of communication; lack of choice of internships; a poor fit between the internship and the major subject studied; and lack of advance details. all these criticisms were levelled at the internship management team. faculty, whose key role was to guide the students through the assessed coursework requirements, were not mentioned in the data apart from in a very few instances in which students were critical of the additional academic workshops scheduled after work when they were already stretched. figure 5. showing the nature of students’ comments about support from staff/faculty (data collected at end of internship). students’ comments included: i feel as if they (both teams) did a fine job at communicating with us and supporting us throughout the term. (a/s25) honestly, they were great. (a/s19) they could have communicated more during the placement process – very stressful not knowing what was happening/ if i hadn't spoken up, my interests would not have been catered to. (a/s7) fanthome maximising the benefits associated with internship learning for undergraduates journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 14 could have given me more timely news on my internship search. when i had questions i had to wait and chase after them. (a/s49) the issues raised by the students required creative solutions, discussed in the recommendations, because the critical comments from students tended not to offer suggestions for resolving the problems. limitations of this study although the take up for this survey was high, not all students chose to respond, and the number of students surveyed (approximately half the autumn cohort for the internship programme from some but not all subject tracks) is relatively small when compared to the yearly intake for this module. findings may or may not be representative of the full student intake or indeed the cohort of previous or subsequent semesters. students were not identified by track, so subject specific issues and solutions could not be identified. overview and recommendations since data indicates that generally students’ expectations were well managed and the majority were satisfied with their internships, the current system requires additions rather than major changes. the orientation programme, in particular, may be considered a success, as culture shock and related issues were avoided. however, whereas in most literature about internship the student body is considered as a whole, it is clear from this data that the spectrum of required support is great. whilst some students do not want any further demands on their time, and have indeed commented on the difficulties of combining work with internship seminars, others would welcome further provision. i also think that we should only have to work 3 days a week if we are required to do this extra seminar work. (a/s21) more frequent seminar discussions/check-ins [required]. (a/s66) fanthome maximising the benefits associated with internship learning for undergraduates journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 15 therefore an optimum way forward would be to augment the range of online resources available as these could be accessed on a voluntary self-referral basis. additional resources might, for example, usefully include information and advice on common problems, along with decision charts indicating the optimum course of action and choices available. additional information online is an out-of-hours resource and would also ease the frustration felt by some students whilst waiting for an appointment with or response from their internship manager. in this study several students cited lack of communication as an issue. further investigation revealed that what they meant was that when they emailed their internship manager with a query they expected an immediate response and found the waiting time for an answer problematic, which is in keeping with pedro’s (2006) findings that the everyday lives of millennial students are characterised by instant communication. the internship managers also confirmed that it is an ongoing problem to persuade students to acknowledge that apart from in an emergency situation, the team responds within business hours, as do the organisations accepting students. average response times could usefully be highlighted clearly as part of the flow charts so that the students could better understand the expected timescale. student social media groups arranged by subject track might be considered, as although research has shown that some students can be disadvantaged in social media groups (garcia et al., 2015) and international students are less likely to disclose their problems via social media sites, (seo et al., 2016) there is evidence that they can increase peer bonding and act as a resource for communal support (uusiautti and määttä, 2014). social media offers the advantage of a full time presence and would be somewhere for students to turn outside of office hours. the survey data revealed a wide range in the quality and depth of student comments, with some students clearly being able and motivated to expound their thoughts in some detail and others offering short bullet points with no real explanation. the spectrum of analytical expression might indicate that some students in particular would benefit from guidance in reflective thinking and writing. lang and mcnaught (2013) found that reflective writing workshops enabled students to reach a deeper level of understanding of internship learning. this might also reduce criticism about internship matches by helping students to identify broader learning opportunities inherent in work experience gained outside of one specific career path. this might be a useful addition to the orientation programme. fanthome maximising the benefits associated with internship learning for undergraduates journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 16 previous students might also be encouraged to contribute to the additional resources site by sharing their perceptions and experiences, possibly in the form of short videos. gebhard (2012) notes that facilitative behaviours from students experiencing difficulties within a new culture include observation and imitation followed by reflection, so it is likely that some current students would benefit and find reassurance from the insights of previous student cohorts. another suggestion was to put in place a mentoring system using the social media platform, both for before and after the internship programme. an augmented website, once constructed, would offer enduring bespoke support for those students who required it. the effectiveness of each aspect of its content would need to be appropriately piloted, assessed and amended for maximum effect. references bell, j. (2010) doing your research project: a guide for first-time researchers in education, health and social science. maidenhead: open university press. benavides, a., dicke, l. and holt, a. (2013) ‘internships adrift: anchoring internship programs in collaboration’, journal of public affairs education, 19(2), pp. 325-353 [online]. available at: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23608953 (accessed: 1 november 2016). binder, j., baguley, t., crook, c. and miller, f. (2015) ‘the academic value of internships: benefits across disciplines and student backgrounds’, contemporary educational psychology, 41(4), pp. 73-82 [online]. available at: http://irep.ntu.ac.uk/19477/ (accessed: 31 october 2016). blaxter, l., hughes, c. and tight, m. (2010) how to research. 4th edn. maidenhead: open university press. brown, a. and dowling, p. (1998) doing research/reading research: a mode of interrogation for education. london: falmer press. bryman, a. (2008) social research methods. 3rd edn. oxford: oxford university press. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23608953 http://irep.ntu.ac.uk/19477/ fanthome maximising the benefits associated with internship learning for undergraduates journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 17 denscombe, m. (2007) the good research guide: for small-scale social research projects. 3rd edn. maidenhead: open university press. de vaus, d. (2002) surveys in social research. 5th edn. london: routledge. edwards, m. (2014) ‘the impact of placements on students’ self-efficacy’, higher education, skills and work-based learning, 4(3), pp. 228-241 [online]. available at: http://www.emeraldinsight.com/2042-3896.htm (accessed: 18 may 2016). fanthome, c. (2004) work placements – a survival guide for students. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan. fisher, j. (2013) ‘revealed: the insiders whose kids got white house internships’, new republic, 25 september, [online]. available at: https://newrepublic.com/article/114844/white-house-internships-go-kids-topdemocrats (accessed: 24 april 2017). garcia, e., elbeltagi, i., dungay, k. and hardaker, g. (2015) ‘student use of facebook for informal learning and peer support’, the international journal of information and learning technology, 32(5), pp. 286-299 [online]. available at: http://www.emeraldinsight.com/doi/abs/10.1108/ijilt-09-2015-0024 (accessed: 26 april 2017). gault, j., leach, e. and duey, m. (2010) ‘effects of business internships on job marketability: the employers’ perspective’, education & training, 52(1), pp. 76-88 [online]. available at: http://digitalcommons.wcupa.edu/mark_facpub/2 (accessed: 31 october 2016). gebhard, j. (2012) ‘international students’ adjustment problems and behaviors’, journal of international students, 2(2), pp. 184-193 [online]. available at: https://jistudents.files.wordpress.com/2011/12/10-international-student-adjustmentproblems.pdf (accessed: 25 april 2017). http://www.emeraldinsight.com/2042-3896.htm https://newrepublic.com/article/114844/white-house-internships-go-kids-top-democrats https://newrepublic.com/article/114844/white-house-internships-go-kids-top-democrats http://www.emeraldinsight.com/doi/abs/10.1108/ijilt-09-2015-0024 http://digitalcommons.wcupa.edu/mark_facpub/2 https://jistudents.files.wordpress.com/2011/12/10-international-student-adjustment-problems.pdf https://jistudents.files.wordpress.com/2011/12/10-international-student-adjustment-problems.pdf fanthome maximising the benefits associated with internship learning for undergraduates journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 18 gilroy, m. (2013) ‘colleges develop internships across majors and borders’, education digest, 79(5), pp. 30-34 [online]. available at: http://search.proquest.com/openview/5d5bb0751bb5f49cd26f3cbf8b1c05b2/1?pqorigsite=gscholar&cbl=25066 (accessed: 1 november 2016). hergert, m. (2009) ‘student perceptions of the value of internships in business education’, american journal of business education, 2(8), pp. 9-14 [online]. available at: http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ej1052655.pdf (accessed: 31 october 2016). ineson, e., lyons, a. and branston, c. (2006) ‘cross cultural change, adjustment and culture shock: uk to usa’, tourism, 54(4), pp. 355-365 [online]. available at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/286499819_cross_cultural_change_adjus tment_and_culture_shock_uk_to_usa (accessed: 31 october 2016). lang, r. and mcnaught, k. (2013) ‘reflective practice in a capstone business internship subject’, journal of international education in business, 6(1), pp. 7-21 [online]. available at: www.emeraldinsight.com/2046-469x.htm (accessed: 18 may 2017). ncub (national centre for universities and business) (2014) ‘what are the benefits of a quality placement?’ 3 july, [online]. available at: http://www.ncub.co.uk/placements-report/the-benefits-of-a-high-qualityplacement.html (accessed: 23 april 2017). pedro, f. (2006) ‘the new millennium learners: challenging our views on ict and learning’, oecd-ceri, may [online]. available at: https://www.oecd.org/edu/ceri/38358359.pdf (accessed: 2 october 2017). perlin, r. (2011) intern nation: how to earn nothing and learn little in the brave new economy. london and new york: verso. perlin, r. and brissenden, j. (2011) ‘internships: privilege and exploitation’, new left project, 2 june [online]. available at: http://www.newleftproject.org/index.php/site/article_comments/privilege_and_exploit ation (accessed: 25 april 2017). http://search.proquest.com/openview/5d5bb0751bb5f49cd26f3cbf8b1c05b2/1?pq-origsite=gscholar&cbl=25066 http://search.proquest.com/openview/5d5bb0751bb5f49cd26f3cbf8b1c05b2/1?pq-origsite=gscholar&cbl=25066 http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ej1052655.pdf https://www.researchgate.net/publication/286499819_cross_cultural_change_adjustment_and_culture_shock_uk_to_usa https://www.researchgate.net/publication/286499819_cross_cultural_change_adjustment_and_culture_shock_uk_to_usa http://www.emeraldinsight.com/2046-469x.htm http://www.ncub.co.uk/placements-report/the-benefits-of-a-high-quality-placement.html http://www.ncub.co.uk/placements-report/the-benefits-of-a-high-quality-placement.html https://www.oecd.org/edu/ceri/38358359.pdf http://www.newleftproject.org/index.php/site/article_comments/privilege_and_exploitation http://www.newleftproject.org/index.php/site/article_comments/privilege_and_exploitation fanthome maximising the benefits associated with internship learning for undergraduates journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 19 pizzolato, j. (2008) ‘advisor, teacher, partner: using the learning partnership model to reshape academic advising’, about campus, 13(1), pp. 18-25 [online]. available at: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/abc.243/abstract (accessed: 31 october 2016). pool, l. and sewell, p. (2007) ‘the key to employability: developing a practical model of graduate employability’, education + training, 49(4), pp. 277-289 [online]. available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/00400910710754435 (accessed: 1 november 2016). poulakis, m., dike, c. and massa, a. (2017) ‘acculturative stress and adjustment experiences of greek international students’, journal of international students, 7(2), pp. 204-228 [online]. available at: http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ej1129152.pdf (accessed: 25 april 2017). rigsby, j., addy, n., herring, c. and polledo, d. (2013) ‘an examination of internships and job opportunities’, the journal of applied business research, 29(4), pp. 1311-1143 [online]. available at: http://www.cluteinstitute.com/ojs/index.php/jabr/article/view/7921 (accessed: 29 october 2016). rothman, m. and sisman, r. (2016) ‘internship impact on career consideration among business students’, education + training, 58(9), pp. 1003-1013 [online]. available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/et-04-2015-0027 (accessed: 25 april 2017). seo, h., harn, r-w., ebrahim, h. and aldana, j. (2016) ‘international students’ social media use and social adjustment’, first monday, 21(11) [online]. available at: http://journals.uic.edu/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/6880/5646 (accessed: 26 april 2017). shade, l. and jacobson, j. (2015) ‘hungry for the job: gender, unpaid internships, and the creative industries’, the sociological review, 63(s1), pp. 188-205 [online]. available at: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1467-954x.12249/abstract (accessed: 25 april 2017). the debretts foundation (2014) social mobility (conducted by opinium), 19 november. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/abc.243/abstract http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/00400910710754435 http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ej1129152.pdf http://www.cluteinstitute.com/ojs/index.php/jabr/article/view/7921 http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/et-04-2015-0027 http://journals.uic.edu/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/6880/5646 http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1467-954x.12249/abstract fanthome maximising the benefits associated with internship learning for undergraduates journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 20 the sutton trust (2014) internship or indenture? research brief – edition 2, 12 november [online]. available at: http://www.suttontrust.com/researcharchive/internships/ (accessed: 5 october 2016). uusiautti, s. and määttä, k. (2014) ‘i am no longer alone – how do university students perceive the possibilities of social media?’, international journal of adolescence and youth, 19(30), pp. 293-305 [online]. available at: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/pmc4238292/ (accessed: 26 april 2017). author details dr christine fanthome is a lecturer at boston university study abroad in london. she has recently completed an ma in academic practice at city, university of london. http://www.suttontrust.com/researcharchive/internships/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/pmc4238292/ maximising the benefits associated with internship learning for undergraduates abstract introduction internships context and dilemmas london internship programme methodology presentation and discussion of findings key to survey reference codes students’ anticipatory feelings students’ reflections post internship limitations of this study overview and recommendations references author details literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 11: april 2017 the big picture: mining the student data resource to inform learning development provision elizabeth tanguay swansea university, uk peter hanratty swansea university, uk abstract accurately assessing student needs is a key concern for learning developers in order for provision to have a strong evidence base. studies investigating student study needs in higher education tend to provide a snapshot in time and are limited to a certain number of students (liu et al., 2011; sloan et al., 2013). others have surveyed users of learning development centres, but not their needs (buchanan, 2015). in order to develop evolving needs-based writing provision across swansea university, the academic success programme (asp) has implemented a web-based system for recording identified areas for improvement in 1:1 tutorial sessions. the ongoing needs analysis is based on student essays in progress and identifies textual and functional categories for improvement. grouping records according to student metadata allows us to profile student needs according to discipline area and year of study. the emerging patterns enable us to create bespoke workshops for particular student cohorts. to illustrate this process, an example needs analysis and curriculum design for swansea university’s college of human and health sciences is described. keywords: learning development; study skills; needs analysis; writing provision; curriculum design; 1:1 appointments; tutorials; subject-specific support. tanguay and hanratty the big picture: mining the student data resource to inform learning development provision journal of learning development in higher education, issue 11: april 2017 2 introduction while study support for non-native speakers (nns) has a long history, support for native speakers (ns) has only recently gained importance in uk higher education, often under a study skills umbrella. there has been much written about the need for embedded or integrated subject specific provision of such skills courses (wingate, 2015; mcwilliams, 2014), with claims that generic ‘bolt on’ skills teaching is not as beneficial to student outcomes (mckendry et al., 2012). where skills programmes are provided by a centralised department (integrated) rather than subject lecturers (embedded) (after mcwilliams, 2014), a clear picture of the specific study needs of different student cohorts is essential. there have been comprehensive surveys of successful disciplinary student writing (for example, nesi and gardner, 2012). however, each institutional context is different, and feedback on current student work and where students’ abilities lie in relation to such exemplar texts, as well as which genres students struggle most with, can be more difficult to ascertain. the centrally-housed academic success programme (asp) at swansea university, recently tasked with providing academic support to the entire student body, has implemented a system to gather information about student writing needs across the university on an ongoing basis. during 1:1 appointments, we have been using a form created through google sheets which allows us to collect and collate information. the data can then be analysed and used to inform our development of integrated courses for different colleges. this paper reports preliminary findings identified using a transferable needs analysis model for different cohorts of students and exemplifies bespoke writing workshop provision in the area of human and health sciences. context after a number of years providing in-sessional language support for international students, asp was rebranded in 2013 with the extended remit of catering to students across all levels and disciplines. this extended remit meant that rather than providing primarily language-based support, there was now a need to understand the needs of an entire student body. for example, during the 2014/15 academic year our student profile comprised 6% international (european), 42% international (non-european) and 52% uk tanguay and hanratty the big picture: mining the student data resource to inform learning development provision journal of learning development in higher education, issue 11: april 2017 3 (of a total of 1595 students). our support is divided into one-off generic workshops open to all students, longer courses and 1:1 appointments. a student will typically book a half-hour 1:1 appointment to discuss aspects of their study, most often bringing a sample piece of work with them. this piece of work is used by an asp lecturer as a teaching aid. the student may have specific questions in mind with regard to their introduction, for instance. during the appointment, the asp lecturer provides advice with regard to improvements which can be made. these interactions were historically recorded on paper and their collection primarily served the administrative task of recording student numbers for the centrally-funded centre. as such, records were seldom revisited. the introduction of a live, web-based record keeping system means we can collate and sort information, enabling us to use the data captured during our interactions with students as a robust, evolving evidence base for materials design. already working closely with departments, we are developing courses based on aggregated feedback from our individual appointments in order to better meet our students’ needs by delivering bespoke courses. needs analysis research in english for academic purposes needs analysis aims at discovering what a student knows, what they don’t know, and what they need to know (hyland, 2006). gathering such information enables curriculum designers to assess the requirements of a particular set of students. however, needs analysis is rarely ongoing and more likely to provide a snapshot in time. much needs analysis of writing skills in higher education has explored the needs of nns (liu et al., 2011; deutch, 2003). there is a paucity of research on the needs of native speaker students although it is generally recognised that an ability to write successfully at university cannot be taken for granted (wingate, 2012) and the pedagogical potential of english for academic purposes (eap) for developing a mainstream model of instruction has been highlighted (wingate and tribble, 2011). researchers have used a number of different methods to conduct needs analyses, perhaps reflecting the complexity of the task of understanding student needs. in examples of studies focusing on student or lecturer views on needs, researchers have used questionnaires to explore perceived needs and found differences in students’ needs perceptions and the courses they took (liu et al., 2011). among needs to be considered are the long-term global and the short-term personal goals (deutch, 2003). thus, as well tanguay and hanratty the big picture: mining the student data resource to inform learning development provision journal of learning development in higher education, issue 11: april 2017 4 as highlighting the fact that students are not necessarily best placed to pinpoint their own needs, the research highlights the fact that student needs change over time. assessing student needs to inform curriculum design should be an ongoing process rather than one which provides a snapshot. others have conducted corpus or text-based research in order to conduct present-totarget situation needs analysis (hyland, 2006). there have been a number of useful insights gained as a result of research comparing novice and expert texts in off the shelf or bespoke academic corpora. comparing student writing in the british academic written english corpus (bawe) with published academic texts, chen and baker (2010) found differences in the range of lexical bundles used by students as well as underuse of certain bundles. similarly, salazar (2014), comparing ns and nns use of lexical bundles in her biomedical corpus, found that nns relied on a limited number of high frequency bundles. particular collocations that nns students had problems with have been investigated and it would seem that neither length of stay in a country or number of years of study influences a student’s use of collocations (nesselhauf, 2005). flowerdew (2008) compared expert and non-expert problem solving texts in engineering to find certain differences in problemsolution patterning. however, while these textual analyses may be generalisable, they are static and based on a fixed data set rather than evolving to meet changing student global and personal needs. in other words, while such research has provided useful insights into the particular problems faced by particular students at particular times, we needed something that would be able to tell us about the ongoing and evolving needs of our everchanging student cohorts. while the research outlined above highlights the complex nature of student needs analysis and provides information about the linguistic challenges that students face, it had the aim of helping nns students. from the perspective of learning development (ld), the profile of students seeking help from learning development centres has been explored. buchanan (2015) explored the profile of those who engaged with a ld service in terms of areas such as gender, module marks and parental education. however, the aim was to target underrepresented groups rather than to assess student needs. so, while ld centres are beginning to realise the potential benefits of profiling their users, they have not yet begun to explore student needs in the same way as researchers concerning nns student writing. it seems that more work, especially into the writing needs tanguay and hanratty the big picture: mining the student data resource to inform learning development provision journal of learning development in higher education, issue 11: april 2017 5 of ns students across cohorts, is urgently required. this study, while also using a text (though not corpus) analysis, aims to assess the needs of all the students we see, irrespective of first language. this text-based analysis is an ongoing process conducted daily by lecturers as part of their work and, as such, the data is always current. the flexible tool being developed at swansea university allows feedback from specialist study skills tutors to record both metadata about the students using the service and their particular needs. in collaboration with staff in academic departments, results are then translated into curriculum design. the ongoing nature of the project will allow needs analysis of an expansive group of students and has already resulted in a number of bespoke workshops for different student cohorts. here, the study into the needs of the first year cohort of student nurses and the resulting workshop, as well as online material, is detailed. methods in order to record and aggregate appointment data, a simple but secure online form has been authored using the free cloud-based platform, google sheets (see figures 1.1 -1.3). the form automatically collates information into a spreadsheet which has enabled us to visualise how many students we see, their level of study and academic college. by sorting the dataset according to different identifiers, we are able to see trends in distinct student cohorts as to the common issues that their work presents and this has ultimately enabled us to tailor workshops to those specific student groups which provide solutions to the issues addressed. each section of the form (for example, student number, level of study, college) is automatically assigned a column in a corresponding google sheets spreadsheet and each entry on the form is assigned a new row under these columns. this transposition allows information concerning our 1:1 interactions with students to be collected, aggregated, updated and searched. the nature of this information spans from metadata concerning the interaction (such as date and time, student number, level of study, and degree programme) to textual features of the work presented. tanguay and hanratty the big picture: mining the student data resource to inform learning development provision journal of learning development in higher education, issue 11: april 2017 6 figure 1.1. a screenshot showing the live form used in student appointments. basic student information the appointment form requires information from the students in the form of personally identifiable information, such as student number and name. such information was traditionally collected as part of the department’s administrative record-keeping requirement (due to the centrally-funded nature of the service) and is not included in any analysis of the dataset. information collected for needs analysis as well as the information above required for record-keeping, further categories were required in order to conduct a comprehensive needs analysis. these are the student’s college, level of study, genre of the work presented, and the nature of areas for improvement. tanguay and hanratty the big picture: mining the student data resource to inform learning development provision journal of learning development in higher education, issue 11: april 2017 7 figure 1.2. type of work. figure 1.3. areas to work on. the ‘type of work’ section (figure 1.2) enables the lecturer to enter the genre of the text which the student presents, whereas the ‘areas to work on’ section is completed by the lecturer depending on the most frequent mistakes present. both the ‘type of work’ dropdown list and the ‘areas to work on’ checkboxes are evolving and subject to refinement, depending largely on feedback from staff, as well as the contents of the ‘other’ option if selected. a comments section allows any other relevant comments to be made. in practice such comments are time-consuming to collate and have not been used in our analysis. tanguay and hanratty the big picture: mining the student data resource to inform learning development provision journal of learning development in higher education, issue 11: april 2017 8 figure 1.4. section of appointment data spreadsheet. figure 1.4 shows a part of the system’s ‘back-end’. this is a cloud-based spreadsheet which is updated automatically each time the appointment form is completed. the data is collated and sorted according to college and level of study. in a growing dataset, the analysis of such qualitative data can be time consuming. by having an automatically filled spreadsheet, the administrative task of manually typing information into different fields is avoided and more staff time can be dedicated to using the collated information to help inform workshop design. ethical considerations and data protection the data collected is anonymised in that student names and identifying numbers are not used in the data analysis. permission is obtained from students and they can either opt in or out of having their anonymised data used for research purposes (see figure 1.1). on a weekly basis, the data is downloaded to an offline master spreadsheet, deleted from the online platform and stored on a local hard drive. tanguay and hanratty the big picture: mining the student data resource to inform learning development provision journal of learning development in higher education, issue 11: april 2017 9 results once arranged by college and level of study, we are able to identify the real-time textual and linguistic trends presented during our appointments (figure 1.2; figure 1.3). appointment data representing one of swansea university’s colleges, the college of human and health sciences (chhs) is shown below: figure 2.1. appointments by level of study with students from the college of human and health sciences at swansea university. figure 2.1 shows that in the college of human and health sciences, first year undergraduate students have attended more appointments than students at other levels. specifically, from 2014-2015 when there were 371 appointments with students from chhs, almost half (49.5%) were with first year undergraduate students. this suggested that there was a real need for additional support for students at this level and that this would be a worthwhile focus of asp’s limited resources. tanguay and hanratty the big picture: mining the student data resource to inform learning development provision journal of learning development in higher education, issue 11: april 2017 10 figure 2.2. percentage of text types seen according to level of study. figure 2.2 shows that 37% of 371 interactions with students from the chhs were with first year undergraduate students concerned about reflective writing. there were a smaller, but not insignificant, number of essays presented by first year students during appointments, with this accounting for 18% of interactions. this exploration of the text types, presented in conjunction with the level of study, shows that while students presented with a number of different text types, reflective writing for first year students is a key area for concern. tanguay and hanratty the big picture: mining the student data resource to inform learning development provision journal of learning development in higher education, issue 11: april 2017 11 figure 2.3. areas to work on’ results representing appointments with students from the college of human and health sciences at swansea university. as well as establishing which level of study and which genre to target, we also needed to focus provision on the linguistic elements of the genre with which students were having most difficulty, as shown in figure 2.3. here, it is important to note that the lecturer has the opportunity to select more than one area to work on during a 1:1 appointment. this means that a student may be advised on how to improve their essay structure and, for example, their use of grammar during a single interaction. therefore, these figures show the number of times a problem was identified rather than numbers of students/ numbers of interactions. particular attention to figure 2.3 shows that of those first year undergraduate students that attended, the majority had issues with essay structure and using appropriate academic register (style/ formality) when writing. implementation: findings to inform curriculum design when consulting with the chhs about planning provision, this dataset was an invaluable resource for shaping our curriculum. based on these findings, we developed a 2-hour workshop to be provided for the following intake of student nurses. the workshop tanguay and hanratty the big picture: mining the student data resource to inform learning development provision journal of learning development in higher education, issue 11: april 2017 12 presented how structure aids a reflective piece of writing, and provided examples of reflective frameworks that could be used to structure such pieces. examples were gathered from module leaders within the chhs so that materials used in the workshop were familiar to the students. as well as a focus on the structure of reflective writing, the workshop addressed the use of appropriate academic register within this genre. it seems that finding the right voice for a partially diaristic genre in an academic context can cause students difficulties. specifically, students had trouble finding the appropriate academic register to express personal experiences, and develop these commonplace events to the abstracted analysis necessary to successfully complete the task. twelve of these workshops were delivered during the 2015 michaelmas term across two campuses, reaching an audience of 300+ students. because these workshops were so well received, there has been higher demand for workshops than we have been able to cater for within the programme. an e-learning workshop based on the materials developed as a result of the needs analysis has since been developed in conjunction with the asp e-learning officer and will be piloted with the next intake of students (see appendix). this targeted e-learning workshop with videos and interactive exercises based on common areas for improvement will hopefully reduce demand on asp’s limited resources. limitations while the study reported here provided us with a number of useful insights into the particular needs of the cohort of first year chhs students, a number of limitations with the current form became apparent. firstly, the ‘grammar’ area to work on was too broad to be useful in providing targeted provision. this has since been changed to provide us with a more nuanced picture of student needs and show us in particular which areas of grammar are of the biggest concern (for example, subject-verb agreement/tense errors). the text types also proved to be limited and we continue to add additional categories as they become apparent. a further limitation with the form was that identifying the student’s college may be too broad to be able to adequately target provision. in order to combat this, we are looking to collect course of study information. tanguay and hanratty the big picture: mining the student data resource to inform learning development provision journal of learning development in higher education, issue 11: april 2017 13 the ‘self-selecting’ nature of the records is a further limitation. only those students who seek help are recorded in this data. while a large proportion of the students presented with similar problems, it cannot be assumed that this dataset also represents those who did not attend, perhaps because they felt they did not need additional help, because they were unaware of the service, or because they were not able to book an appointment. however, the commonalities amongst students within the different student cohorts provide a useful starting point for designing bespoke workshops to be integrated in different courses, and the data here provides a robust basis with which to begin discussions with academics in the colleges. as the data set is updated on a daily basis, it is constantly growing (to date, we have a total of 1,281 interactions recorded). this means that the dataset can be consulted at any time to give a clear picture of current student needs. while the study here shows the analysis of a dataset from one college in the university, parallel analyses from the other colleges are now being conducted. conclusion this research grew out of a real need to understand the needs of different student cohorts across swansea university. the insights gained from the study into first year human and health science students in particular provided us with a robust basis for curriculum design for the cohort of first year nursing students. the workshops on reflective writing implemented as a result of the study have been well received and are in high demand, leading to the creation of a parallel online resource for next year’s student intake. the means of understanding student writing needs analysis through mining a live tutorial dataset will now be replicated across different colleges of the university to gain a greater understanding of various student cohorts and their different needs. the model is also transferable across institutions which would allow for larger scale/comparative studies. future directions include the continued evolution of the form with the further subdivision of categories, and an assessment of students’ perceived learning needs prior to the appointment, as well as recording essay titles. tanguay and hanratty the big picture: mining the student data resource to inform learning development provision journal of learning development in higher education, issue 11: april 2017 14 references buchanan, a. (2015) ‘anecdotal to actual: identifying users of learning development to inform future practice’, journal of learning development in higher education, issue 9, july, pp. 1-16 [online]. available at: http://www.aldinhe.ac.uk/ojs/index.php?journal=jldhe&page=article&op=view&path %5b%5d=295&path%5b%5d=pdf (accessed: 29 june 2016). chen, y. h. & baker, p., 2010. lexical bundles in l1 and l2 academic writing. language learning and technology, 14(2), 30-49 deutch, y. (2003) ‘needs analysis for academic legal english courses in israel: a model of setting priorities’, journal of english for academic purposes, 2(2), pp. 125-146. flowerdew, l. (2008) corpus-based analyses of the problem-solution pattern: a phraseological approach, amsterdam: philadelphia, john benjamins publishing company. hyland, k. (2006) english for academic purposes: an advanced resource book. london: new york, routledge. liu, j.-y., chang, y.-j., yang, f.-y. and sun, y.-c. (2011) ‘is what i need what i want? reconceptualising college students’ needs in english courses for general and specific/academic purposes’, journal of english for academic purposes, 10(4), pp. 271-280. mckendry, s., mckay, j. and o’neill, d. (2012) ‘the role of an embedded learning development centre in enhancing the curriculum’, 9th enhancement themes national conference. heriot-watt university, edinburgh 7-8 march. mcwilliams, r. and allan, q. (2014) ‘embedding academic literacy skills: towards a best practice model’, journal of university teaching and learning practice, 11(3) [online]. available at: http://ro.uow.edu.au/jutlp/vol11/iss3/8 (accessed: 29 june 2016). http://www.aldinhe.ac.uk/ojs/index.php?journal=jldhe&page=article&op=view&path%5b%5d=295&path%5b%5d=pdf http://www.aldinhe.ac.uk/ojs/index.php?journal=jldhe&page=article&op=view&path%5b%5d=295&path%5b%5d=pdf http://ro.uow.edu.au/jutlp/vol11/iss3/8 tanguay and hanratty the big picture: mining the student data resource to inform learning development provision journal of learning development in higher education, issue 11: april 2017 15 nesi, h. and gardner, s. (2012) genres across the disciplines: student writing in higher education. cambridge: cambridge university press. nesselhauf, n. (2005) collocations in a learner corpus. amsterdam: john benjamins publishing company. salazar, d. (2014) lexical bundles in native and non-native scientific writing: applying a corpus-based study to language teaching. amsterdam: john benjamins publishing company. sloan, d., porter, e. and alexander, o. (2013) ‘yes, you can teach an old dog new tricks. contextualisation, embedding and mapping: the cem model, a new way to define and engage staff and students in the delivery of an english language and study skills support programme: a case study of heriot-watt and northumbria university’, innovations in education and teaching international, 50(3), pp. 284-296. wingate, u. (2012) ‘‘argument!’ helping students understand what essay writing is about’, journal of english for academic purposes, 11(2), pp. 145-154. wingate, u. (2015) academic literacy and student diversity: the case for inclusive practice. bristol: multilingual matters. wingate, u. and tribble, c. (2011) ‘the best of both worlds? towards an english for academic purposes/academic literacies writing pedagogy’, studies in higher education, 37(4), pp.481-495. author details elizabeth tanguay is academic success programme coordinator at swansea university and a senior fellow of the higher education academy. peter hanratty is academic success programme lecturer at swansea university. tanguay and hanratty the big picture: mining the student data resource to inform learning development provision journal of learning development in higher education, issue 11: april 2017 16 appendix reflective writing workshop e-learning materials materials developed by frances thornton screenshot 1: the resource landing page. the accompanying audio guides students in using the resource as well as providing an introduction to the specific reflective piece students are required to write. it also notes that the word counts here are approximations only. tanguay and hanratty the big picture: mining the student data resource to inform learning development provision journal of learning development in higher education, issue 11: april 2017 17 screenshot 2: a part of our electronic resource highlighting appropriate pronoun use in different sections of reflective writing. screenshot 3: academic register. the accompanying audio, using relevant examples, discusses how students can employ an appropriate register in their reflective writing. tanguay and hanratty the big picture: mining the student data resource to inform learning development provision journal of learning development in higher education, issue 11: april 2017 18 screenshot 4: academic register continued. screenshot 5: academic register continued. tanguay and hanratty the big picture: mining the student data resource to inform learning development provision journal of learning development in higher education, issue 11: april 2017 19 screenshot 6: examples of appropriate evaluative language for use in reflective writing. journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 19: december 2020 ________________________________________________________________________ enhancing academic skills appointments through a new booking system laurence morris leeds beckett university lindsey mcdermott leeds beckett university abstract this case study examines the introduction of a centrally managed booking system for academic skills appointments conducted by the library academic support team at leeds beckett university, showing how staff-student communication channels can scaffold effective student support. the new system was introduced in order to manage a large number of requests for skills appointments across all academic levels, to ensure an equitable experience for all learners, and to frame staff-student encounters more effectively at the formative stage. further benefits included provision of more focused tuition, additional data on learner requirements, greater capacity to re-route appointment requests, and more efficient use of student and staff time, while retaining the option of human intervention in the system as required. this paper demonstrates a transferrable means of enhancing institutional processes whilst retaining the traditional strengths of oneto-one encounters in order to improve the overall student experience. keywords: academic support; appointments; booking system; communication; learning development; student experience. morris and mcdermott enhancing academic skills appointments through a new booking system journal of learning development in higher education, issue 19: december 2020 2 introduction provision of effective academic skills tuition on an equitable basis across a university can be a significant operational challenge, with practical issues including managing demand and staff and student expectations, as well as understanding and responding to learner needs. this paper shows how the library academic support team (last) at leeds beckett university sought to address such challenges through the central management of their one-to-one skills appointments. a form-based booking system was introduced for the team’s appointments, scaffolding learning encounters from the formative stage, easing student access to appropriate support, and providing fresh data on learner needs, while also retaining the capacity for human intervention in the system as required. this case study examines the practical context of this activity, the underlying project aims, and the details of the intervention made. it also provides an initial interpretation of the new system’s impact at leeds beckett, primarily relating to easier student access to a clear, consistent skills support offer across the institution, and increased capacity to identify and adapt to short-term changes in demand. in doing so, it demonstrates one means of achieving a more supportive institutional framework for learning development, while also highlighting generally transferrable principles and practicalities. it shows how to improve the student experience through agile provision of more effective support, while also harvesting data to provide greater awareness of learner needs in the longer term. operational context and project aims leeds beckett university has approximately 25,000 students, taught across two campuses through full-time, part-time and distance learning courses. the last comprises approximately 20 full-time and part-time staff members, including academic and information services librarians, academic skills tutors and other support staff. this team supports all levels from undergraduate to phd across a range of areas, including referencing, academic writing, finding and using information, maths and it. support is provided on a tripartite basis: in-curriculum tuition; an open programme of workshops (comparable to that described in blake et al., 2019); and bookable one-to-one appointments. the rationale for this structure is that it encourages independent learning, morris and mcdermott enhancing academic skills appointments through a new booking system journal of learning development in higher education, issue 19: december 2020 3 and that each stage offers supplementary support to the one which precedes it, if required. in practice, in a representative semester (autumn 2019), some 325 one-to-one appointments were provided, supplementing approximately 500 in-curriculum and general tutorials and lectures delivered to group sizes ranging from 10 to 100+. in recent years, appointments have generally been booked directly with individual team members, resulting in inevitable local differences of practice, as well as the capacity for delay if a named contact was unavailable. following a review of the last’s activities, a small project group was instructed to develop ‘a high quality, sustainable one-to-one support service for students to enhance their understanding and skills’ (howard, 2019). specific sub-goals included provision of a simple booking system to allow students to access the appropriate support, a clear offer to staff and students, connectivity with other library services, a consistent, university-wide approach, the ability to share cover as required, capacity to manage enquiries and set expectations prior to appointments, and additional data on learner needs and their interaction with the service. intervention the intervention implemented by the project group for academic year 2019-20 was a standardised booking form (see appendix for form content) for one-to-one skills appointments with the last. form submissions are managed from a central email inbox by team members, with either an appointment with a relevant team member or an alternative form of help − such as a direct answer to a simple question or redirection to online guidance − provided as appropriate. more specifically: 1. all appointment requests and comparable enquiries are channelled to the form, with direct bookings no longer accepted by staff. 2. the form is accessible via a button or link from the library website and student support pages on the vle and elsewhere. it is promoted to students by a range of library, course and support staff in person and across multiple platforms, often through simple provision of a direct link. 3. as shown in the appendix, the form harvests the information required for an effective learning encounter at the point of booking, including student details, morris and mcdermott enhancing academic skills appointments through a new booking system journal of learning development in higher education, issue 19: december 2020 4 assignment topic, nature of help required, availability in the next fortnight, and any additional information required. 4. the form also highlights other potentially relevant support options and clearly states service standards such as appointment length, topics covered and the number of appointments requestable per student per semester (two, unless unusual circumstances apply and excluding in-curriculum and open workshop programme support). 5. after an appointment is conducted, a student’s form data is retained to inform response to requests for further support and to aid wider service and curriculum planning. it is ultimately anonymised in accordance with organisational standards. this system derives from the mandate to introduce a simple booking system for accessing the appropriate support in a consistent manner across the institution. crucially, it addresses the operational issues arising from the historic practice of direct bookings, but without pre-empting any longer-term changes driven by evolving theory or further research, for example regarding appointment length and nature. the intervention provides the following specific benefits: • framing student expectations of the learning encounter at a formative stage in the process. • enabling more effective tuition by harvesting the requisite information for adequate preparation at the point of booking. • enhancing the capacity to re-route appointment requests at times of high demand or limited staff availability. • using student and staff time more efficiently, by filtering out enquiries which can be resolved without an appointment. • ensuring more balanced provision of skills support across the university through the central management of learner requests. • collating fresh data on learner behaviour across the institution. from an operational perspective, the intervention offers gains for minimal risk, with the only potentially adverse impact on learners being the gradual shift to a new, but nevertheless straightforward, means of requesting assistance. there were no fresh costs morris and mcdermott enhancing academic skills appointments through a new booking system journal of learning development in higher education, issue 19: december 2020 5 involved beyond the reallocation of staff time, with the it systems used all straightforward tools already in use and supported in the university. to minimise the extent of concurrent change, the administrative processes were an extension of those already used by the team, with a springshare form used (later an ms form, due to wider organisational changes), a spreadsheet to manage form submissions, and then outlook to conduct email correspondence, check staff availability and book appointments. there are a range of similar products available, and their suitability will vary with local needs, the salient point being that the intervention can be implemented with standard it tools, with precise administrative processes adaptable to local practice. implementation while the change was straightforward, it was made to a service delivered by 20 different people in different roles to approximately 25,000 students, all with their own expectations, work patterns and help-seeking behaviours (alexitch, 2002). the form was therefore introduced at the start of a new academic year, when a moderate degree of change is expected, and when there are enhanced opportunities for communicating that change. in practice, students adapted to the new booking system quickly, perhaps helped by its resemblance to other online processes. staff engagement with the new approach took longer; the system was sometimes circumvented by effective existing relationships, or in response to a short-term student need. in such instances, in addition to stressing the longterm benefits of a standardised approach and the implications for equitable support if the new system was not consistently utilised, it was helpful to highlight the fact that form submissions were managed by last members and that human flexibility remained within the system. this was particularly important in view of the recommendation by o’donnell et al. (2016) that diversity of student thought and action be accommodated by university staff, and the work of jacklin and le riche (2009) and roberts et al. (2018) on providing a supportive culture. the operational impact of maintaining this flexibility – rather than adopting a fully automated system – should also be noted. the three last members who manage form morris and mcdermott enhancing academic skills appointments through a new booking system journal of learning development in higher education, issue 19: december 2020 6 submissions all have other roles, and all noted that the volume of work exceeded their expectations, with more submissions requiring some form of clarification than anticipated, for example regarding specific requirements or availability. however, the worth of such work was also noted, resolving potential issues in advance of an appointment and freeing up staff time elsewhere in the team. impact, feedback and initial interpretation it is still relatively early in the operational life of the new system; in the longer term, more in-depth analysis of its impact and the data harvested on learner behaviour and needs across the institution will be conducted. however, even in the short-term, clear benefits were discernible. the new system provided the anticipated benefits, with the number of appointments provided remaining consistent year-on-year, implying that any disruption caused during transition was minimal. staff reported that through the human oversight of the booking process, they had been able to successfully address a significant number of enquiries not truly requiring an appointment by other means, such as providing an answer by email (particularly in the case of referencing) or by redirection to online guidance. as well as providing a faster response in those cases, with the overall number of appointments remaining the same, it can be inferred that the number of appropriate appointments rose. student feedback was positive, with the clear means of accessing a wide range of support and potentially swifter access to specialist advice (rather than having to potentially wait for a named individual) welcomed. such individual feedback was also echoed by the students’ union and course representatives at feedback forums on university-wide issues, reflecting the prominence of the changes to service. interestingly, the increased prominence of service standards seems to have made appointments a more valuable commodity to students. previously, some students had regarded the available support as more of a personal tutoring service, booking multiple appointments with multiple staff members, or in a broad range of subjects, whereas the new system scaffolds a more strategic approach. it encourages individuals to reflect in order to focus an appointment on morris and mcdermott enhancing academic skills appointments through a new booking system journal of learning development in higher education, issue 19: december 2020 7 a specific learning challenge, such as using feedback to improve writing skills, thereby supporting the evolution of a student-centred learning environment (hoidn, 2017). academic staff welcomed this, as well as the central means of access to a range of support and the greater capacity for service-wide flexibility when required. equally, colleagues in other university services, such as the student hub, requested briefings in how best to engage individuals with the new system where required, improving the interconnectivity of university-wide student support. colleagues within the last have praised the effective management of appointment bookings and the provision of information upon which to base focused appointments. while some colleagues have rightly noted the shift from relative local autonomy, they have also noted the student-facing and university-wide benefits of the standardised approach. although online forms are not an ideal means of requesting assistance for all students, it is accepted that such mechanisms are a standard means of obtaining detailed information, and the use of team members to manage bookings ensures that alternative communication channels remain in place where required. the form already followed standard principles of usability (krug, 2014), but it was further streamlined for a simpler user experience on the basis of colleague feedback, with the realisation that it was preferable to request additional details as required rather than to force all learners to submit extensive information, and that the individual management of form submissions enabled such flexibility. general service delivery has also been helped by the assembly of a more comprehensive bank of information about the last’s activities as they are conducted, rather than retrospectively, as was previously the case. this information has enabled more effective planning and targeting of services, helping to ensure more balanced support is provided overall. in the short term, it is more straightforward to see where local and university-wide peaks and troughs of demand are, and to respond accordingly, reallocating staff time as required. however, in doing so, it is also easier to ensure that one particular cohort does not receive a disproportionate level of support. the tracking of demand makes it easier to identify anomalies and, if necessary, provides the evidence to suggest to a course or module leader that there is a need for further in-curriculum skills tuition. additionally, even where such issues are not a factor, the system still underpins more balanced support for morris and mcdermott enhancing academic skills appointments through a new booking system journal of learning development in higher education, issue 19: december 2020 8 all learners through the standardisation of booking and service standards, reducing the capacity for unintentional local discrepancies of practice. covid-19 the agility and robustness of the new system were unexpectedly demonstrated by the operational changes required by the coronavirus outbreak. when leeds beckett’s physical library and teaching spaces were closed, the last provided skills support online and by telephone. the appointment management system meant that it was straightforward to implement and publicise changes, to provide a consistent response to learners across the institution, and to adjust support as required. capacity for such action had not been a specific factor in planning, but it proved useful in adapting to an unanticipated challenge. in particular, the deliberate retention of human judgement within the management process ensured flexibility where required, from providing additional appointments to delivering them through unusual platforms such as instagram. in practice, after an initial fall, demand soon increased as students adapted to working from home, and even where one-to-one assistance was not required, academic staff and students commented that its continued availability – alongside other library services – provided reassurance at a challenging time. further interpretation and action while the intervention fulfilled its initial goals, it would be worth reviewing the broader effectiveness of fine-tuning the delivery of a popular but ultimately time-expensive service (turner, 2010). future evaluative work will therefore use more comprehensive student feedback, more in-depth analysis of the harvested data and quantitative impact analysis to explore why this form of support is so popular and whether the same ends could be achieved by alternative means. some form of socratic or didactic encounter might well remain a key component of learning, but it could be that the end result valued by students could also be supported by other means, such as the further development of a culture of independent learning. equally, it may be worthwhile considering the implications for practice of rendering traditional roles more interchangeable, from an operational morris and mcdermott enhancing academic skills appointments through a new booking system journal of learning development in higher education, issue 19: december 2020 9 perspective, but also in relation to the work of lea and street (2006), wingate (2006) and others, on the ultimate limitations of more generic forms of instruction. in positing such dilemmas, it is emphasised that the system adopted by leeds beckett’s last is only one approach, for a specific set of local circumstances. however, the future resolution of such questions at leeds beckett will now be informed by additional data on learner behaviour and needs, about how, when and why students learn, and about the impact of local and disciplinary differences of practice. once a full year of data is available, we look forward to analysing it in more detail. conclusion this case study has outlined how the last at leeds beckett university introduced a formbased booking system for one-to-one appointments in academic skills, while retaining capacity for human intervention in the system. this intervention was made in order to scaffold the provision of more effective appointments, frame staff-student encounters at a formative stage, enhance service agility and provide a more equitable service. in addition to the particular intervention detailed, the transferrable principles and operational factors elucidated may be of interest to other services considering similar changes. ultimately, the impact of the new leeds beckett last system was underpinned by various factors, but particularly the provision to the project group of both a clear goal and significant practical flexibility in achieving it. this directly contributed to the distinctive elements of the system adopted, such as the retention of human judgement within a more process-driven framework, and the consequent impact on both system agility and staff and student engagement. harnessing existing knowledge in this way was the harbinger of what will follow, as the focus now shifts from short-term impact to using the resultant data on student needs and behaviour to inform future learning development activity at leeds beckett university. morris and mcdermott enhancing academic skills appointments through a new booking system journal of learning development in higher education, issue 19: december 2020 10 references alexitch, l. r. (2002) ‘the role of help-seeking attitudes and tendencies in students' preferences for academic advising’, journal of college student development, 43(1), pp.5–19. blake, j. r. s., grayson, n. and karamalla-gaiballa, s. (2019) ‘investigating impact: exploring the effect of ‘open’ support on student success’, journal of learning development in higher education, 0(16). hoidn, s. (2017) student-centered learning environments in higher education classrooms. new york: palgrave macmillan. howard, h. (2019) library academic support: 2017-2021 plan. leeds: leeds beckett university. jacklin, a. and le riche, p. (2009) ‘reconceptualising student support: from ‘support’ to ‘supportive’’, studies in higher education, 34(7), pp.735-749. krug, s. (2014). don't make me think, revisited: a common sense approach to web usability. 3rd ed. san francisco: new riders. lea, m.r. and street, b.v. (2006) ‘the “academic literacies” model: theory and applications’. theory into practice, 45(4), pp.368–377. o’donnell, v., kean, m. and stevens, g. (2016) student transition in higher education: concepts, theories and practices. york: he academy. available at: https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/system/files/resources/student_transition_in_higher_ education.pdf (accessed: 9 may 2020). roberts, p. a., dunworth, k. and boldy, d. (2018) ‘towards a reframing of student support: a case study approach’, higher education, 75(1), pp.19-33. https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/system/files/resources/student_transition_in_higher_education.pdf https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/system/files/resources/student_transition_in_higher_education.pdf morris and mcdermott enhancing academic skills appointments through a new booking system journal of learning development in higher education, issue 19: december 2020 11 turner, j. (2010) ‘the case for one-to-one academic advice for students’, in hartley, p., hilsdon, j., sinfield, s., keenan, c. and verity, m. (eds.) learning development in higher education. london: palgrave macmillan, pp. 91-101. wingate, u. (2006) ‘doing away with ‘study skills’. teaching in higher education, 11(4), pp.457-469. author details laurence morris is an academic librarian at leeds beckett university, a senior fellow of advance he and a fellow of the royal geographical society. his present role primarily involves supporting students, staff and researchers in accessing and applying relevant information effectively. he has previously worked with online reading systems and in information provision for the ministry of defence. lindsey mcdermott is an administrator in the library academic support team at leeds beckett university, where she has worked for the past 6 years. she is responsible for organising a programme of academic skills workshops, manages student appointment requests and is a member of the working group which recently redesigned the library academic support team’s staff-student appointment system. appendix: the form the questions and text used in the form are given below. leeds beckett’s last uses ms forms for the form at present, but other tools such as google forms and springshare’s libwizard would have a comparable effect. the first two questions were preferred to autopopulation by single sign-on systems for ease of use when university staff are referring students to the service. preamble are you aware of the different kinds of help available from the library? • link to 24/7 enquiry service. morris and mcdermott enhancing academic skills appointments through a new booking system journal of learning development in higher education, issue 19: december 2020 12 • link to referencing guidance. • link to subject-specific guidance. • link to academic skills guidance. if these options don’t cover your question, you can request an appointment. we have a limited number available, so please try to request any help well in advance. questions 1. what is your name? [text answer] 2. what is your university email address? [text answer] 3. what is your course or subject area? [text answer] 4. which year are you in? [choice from a menu: level 4/first year undergraduate to phd/staff] 5. what do you need help with? [choice from a menu: finding and using information, referencing, academic writing or presentations, maths or statistics, other] 6. please describe what help you require, or anything else we need to know (for example, what your assignment topic is, or any specific learning needs). [text answer] 7. when are you available in the next two working weeks? please give specific dates and times. [text answer] note: a question on whether a face-to-face or online/telephone appointment is preferred is not currently in use due to the covid-19 pandemic resulting in the temporary closure of university buildings. pre-submission text we will arrange an appointment for you if we are unable to assist you by email. students can generally book a maximum of 2 appointments with us per semester. they are 30 minutes long and available mon-fri in office hours, subject to staff availability. we can give you pointers on how to improve your academic skills and can help you improve upon your previous work. we are unable to check drafts or proofread work, but we can help you work more effectively as an independent learner. post-submission text thank you for contacting us. we will get back to you within 3 working days. enhancing academic skills appointments through a new booking system abstract introduction operational context and project aims intervention implementation impact, feedback and initial interpretation covid-19 further interpretation and action conclusion references author details appendix: the form literature review wood et al. skills development through extra-curricular inquiry activity ‘the confidence to do things that i know nothing about’ – skills development through extra-curricular inquiry activity jamie wood university of manchester, uk sabine little university of sheffield, uk louise goldring royal college of surgeons, uk laura jenkins university of sheffield, uk abstract this article presents the findings of a survey given to students engaging in educational enhancement activities in inquiry/enquiry-based learning at two centres for excellence in teaching and learning (cetl). the students involved were asked to comment on the skills they felt that they had developed as part of their roles as 'interns' and 'ambassadors'. these comments were analysed inductively and several strong themes emerged. students valued the opportunity to engage in such activities, which developed a wide range of transferable skills and had a positive impact on their academic work and their prospects for future employment. while there is a considerable amount of literature on higher education and skills development, a growing body of work on how curricular inquiry-based learning impacts upon students' capabilities, and a plethora of studies on how paid and unpaid extra-curricular activities affect students' educational achievement, few studies have sought to relate these areas of research. keywords: skills development; students as partners; inquiry-based learning; centres for excellence journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 2 wood et al. skills development through extra-curricular inquiry activity introduction and background this article reports research into students’ perceptions of the skills they had gained from engaging in educational development activities at two centres for excellence in teaching and learning (cetl) in inquiry-based learning. the article begins by introducing the institutional contexts in which the students worked before offering short literature reviews on the topics of transferable skills in higher education, skills development and inquirybased learning, and the relationship between extra-curricular activity, academic achievement and skills development. the next section outlines the methodology adopted, followed by the results, divided according to students’ perceptions of their development of academic and transferable skills, and the students’ views on the importance of these skills for future employability. the discussion section draws out the implications of the research and addresses additional points of interest, including: how the student activities and accompanying learning processes were facilitated; and what institutions can learn from adopting more formalised approaches to extra-curricular activity. the cetl context the centre for excellence in enquiry-based learning (ceebl) at the university of manchester and the centre for inquiry-based learning in the arts and social sciences (cilass) at the university of sheffield were two centres for excellence in teaching and learning (cetls), funded by the higher education funding council for england (hefce) from 2005 to 2010 in recognition of institutional excellence in inquiry-based learning. both cetls placed student engagement at the centre of their educational development initiatives. this included the formation of networks of students, the members of which were paid to engage in a range of activities to promote and support inquiry-based learning in their departments, across the institution and externally. a note on spelling throughout the literature, reference is made to both enquiry-based learning (e.g. khan and o'rourke, 2004; hutchings, 2007) and inquiry-based learning (e.g. brew, 2003; healy, 2005). hutchings (2007) points out that the differences in spelling have historical and linguistic roots, and do not reflect inherently different interpretations of pedagogy. given this difference and recognising that the two cetls featured here took their names journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 3 wood et al. skills development through extra-curricular inquiry activity from enquiryand inquiry-based learning, we have chosen to adopt the term inquiry-based learning (ibl) and therefore apply it consistently throughout this article. the student intern programme at ceebl interns were current students at the university of manchester recruited from a range of disciplines and degree levels. ceebl employed new student interns each year and aimed to include at least one student from each of the four faculties that make up the university. the ceebl intern programme developed out of the university of manchester's students as partners model and as such offered staff the opportunity to work closely with students in the development, delivery, evaluation and dissemination of their inquirybased learning modules. student interns were co-consultants, and worked one day per week alongside staff coordinators in their home faculties. interns also contributed to research and evaluation within ceebl and were encouraged to focus on a specific interest or project during their internships. the interns also came together for larger events such as workshops or conferences. for the academic year 2008/09 the intern programme was expanded to include an intern from the manchester business school and two extra interns to work across all the faculties in order to improve and foster interdisciplinary relationships. the intern programme was coordinated by a full-time sabbatical officer. the student ambassador programme at cilass cilass student ambassadors were drawn from the student body of the university of sheffield. students worked directly with cilass core staff, as well as departmental staff champions for inquiry-based learning, in order to feed the student perspective into iblrelated curriculum enhancement. students worked across a total of 26 departments. apart from two departments, who had two ambassadors each due to their size, each department had one student ambassador, resulting in a student ambassador network of 29 at full capacity (including a student coordinator). ambassadors worked for a total of 60 hours each over the academic year. the network was co-facilitated by one member of staff and one full-time student, who worked for cilass for 135 hours over the academic year. as well as helping to manage day-to-day activity of the network, each student co-coordinator was encouraged to identify an area of interest to research and disseminate during their time in post. the journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 4 wood et al. skills development through extra-curricular inquiry activity network operated at three levels: with ambassadors working individually in their departments; as a full network on a number of large events (e.g. an annual student conference on ibl); and in five working groups focusing on producing a student journal, evaluating cilass projects from the student perspective, dissemination, multimedia productions (e.g. films), and support for cilass technologies. as well as being paid for the work they did, cilass student ambassadors had the option to use their work to gain credit towards the sheffield graduate award, established in 2006/07, which focuses on skills development in relation to the institution's vision of the sheffield graduate (the university of sheffield, n.d.; see e.g. atlay and harris (2000) for a similar programme at luton university; and muldoon (2008) for a model in australia). comparison of the networks the networks therefore shared a range of characteristics, which bear brief repetition. both student ambassadors (at cilass) and interns (at ceebl) worked with academic staff on educational/curriculum development projects. they also worked with members of the 'core' teams at each cetl to take forward strategic priorities for the cetl. the approach taken by the staff members with whom the students engaged was largely facilitative and based on a partnership in which students were trusted to work independently on agreed tasks, and where collaboration between staff and students might have been initiated by either party. describing such partnership from the research context, kirshner et al. (2005, p.136) note that: when youth are involved as full research partners, they are more likely to have transformative developmental experiences as they are more engaged in defining and coming to understand research problems, questions and findings, are placed in positions of greater responsibility, and have more participatory and nonhierarchical interactions with adults. the way in which the student ambassadors and interns worked, whether in groups or individually, was often inquiry-based – i.e. students were given a task but a relatively large degree of freedom in determining how to take it forward to completion. in practical terms, it was also important to note that students in both networks were paid on a part-time basis, while in contextual terms, the universities of manchester and sheffield are of a comparable standing: both are red brick, research intensive institutions in the north of england. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 5 wood et al. skills development through extra-curricular inquiry activity one conceivable difference between the networks is the students’ level of study – whereas the majority of student ambassadors at cilass are undergraduate students, within the ceebl intern body there is more of a balance between undergraduate, taught postgraduate and phd students. literature review in recent years there has been a steady increase in research and publication on the impact of both extra-curricular activities and inquiry-based learning on students’ skills development. this research can be divided into the following categories which, for reasons of space, are summarised more fully elsewhere (wood et al., 2011). 1. transferable skills in higher education. 2. skills development and inquiry-based learning. 3. extra-curricular activity, academic achievement and skills development. in general, studies have reported a positive correlation between skills development and inquiry and extra-curricular activities, although much of the research is based on analysis of individual cases rather than synthetic surveys. methods and methodology it should be remembered when interpreting the data that were collected during this study that none of the students who responded had already been active in the full-time postuniversity job market. data were therefore gathered in front of a background of perceived development needs, an approach to evaluating students' skills development which has been used at the university of lancaster by nabi and bagley (1998), and which produced valuable, though inconclusive, results. curtis and shani (2002) likewise have examined students' perceptions of the impact of paid work on their academic studies, discovering that students in paid employment felt that it had a positive effect upon their confidence, interpersonal, time management and communication skills, and in some cases helped them to relate what they had learnt in class to the world of work. there thus seems to be journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 6 wood et al. skills development through extra-curricular inquiry activity a developing interest in analysis of student perceptions of the relationship between paid employment and the development of disciplinary and other skills. schamber (2000) points out the need for inductive analysis in order to avoid a priori structuring and bias towards the data. the advantage of this approach is that it allows the researcher to form questions, hypotheses and theories during the course of the research process. in the case of the research reported in this article, such a responsive methodology was useful because some of the data on which the research drew had already been collected as part of the process of evaluating cetl-supported activities. the combination of inductive analysis of reports and additional data gathered via questionnaires makes it possible to combine both pre-conceived, unprompted perceptions and reflective data following targeted questioning. through an integrated process of data collection and analysis, sometimes referred to as triangulation (though the use of this terminology has recently come under increased scrutiny (moran-ellis et al., 2006)), we sought to achieve a richer picture of the topic than would be possible through a singlemethod approach (cohen et al., 2000; mathison, 1988). as part of the standard evaluation of the impact of the ceebl intern and the cilass ambassador networks, data were gathered from students every year. in recognition of the lack of research into the links between extra-curricular ibl, skills development and academic achievement, and of the ambiguous nature of much existing research, it was decided to conduct a more in-depth investigation into student perceptions of these issues. the similarities between the networks, the institutions from which they came, and the almost identical thematic foci of their respective cetls meant that we could draw on a deeper body of experience and evidence than would otherwise have been possible. this was especially important given the lack of existing literature on the topic. the study adopted a qualitative, multi-method approach, combining the collection of original evaluative data and the consultation of pre-existing reflective material in order to gain the best possible insight into students' perceptions. data presented here were largely gathered via a qualitative survey given to cilass student ambassadors during a network meeting. seventeen responses were received, a 100% response rate based on attendance at the meeting. these data were augmented with nine interim and final reflective reports completed by ceebl student interns as part of their post, and further by reflective reports completed by cilass student ambassadors who used their work in order to gain the sheffield graduate award, a skills-based additional qualification available for journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 7 wood et al. skills development through extra-curricular inquiry activity students at the university of sheffield (the university of sheffield, n.d.). this method of data collection allowed for direct responses to pertinent pre-defined questions, at the same time as facilitating the emergence of themes identified as important by the students themselves. the following questions were used: 1. what have you enjoyed about being a student ambassador? 2. what three skills do you feel you have gained/developed by being a student ambassador? 3. how has it impacted on your wider university career? 4. what impact do you think it will have on your life after university? at ceebl, student interns were required to write self-reflective reports at the midand end-point of their internship. the reports took the form of a piece of reflective writing, which were generally at least one page of a4 paper, but in some cases significantly longer (up to 4 pages). at the time of research (while the cetls were still operational) we obtained permission from nine past interns to analyse their reports using the questions above. current (at the time the research was conducted) ceebl interns were also asked to write a short paragraph on what they felt they had gained from their internship, which included reflection upon the skills they had developed. the questionnaires and reports were analysed inductively in order to identify common themes. these themes form the basis of our analysis. results at the most general level, students reported that they enjoyed being members of the ambassador and intern networks. the development of social relationships tallies with the research into the impact of involvement in college governance upon student engagement (astin, 1999; see also eccles et al., 2003; curtis and shani, 2002). the cross disciplinary nature of the networks was also noted as a positive factor by the students, as was the opportunity to interact with students from other year groups and staff from across the university, for example: journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 8 wood et al. skills development through extra-curricular inquiry activity i have enjoyed meeting people from different departments and discussing what goes on in their departments. you can't help but feel isolated from other departments, which is to be expected, but learning about the experiences of different departments is good. the sense of belonging in relation to the institution via engagement with extra-curricular activities, suggested by bringle and hatcher (1996) and eccles et al. (2003), certainly seems to be borne out by the students’ experiences. connected to this, students commented positively on the opportunity to contribute to shaping their courses: ‘i am proud of my achievement of setting up ebl within my own course, as most of the past curricula have involved lectures or practicals, so this is a new development'. given the comparative nature of the project it is worth noting here that there were no significant differences between the students from the two networks in terms of their perceptions of skills development. very similar themes could be picked out in the response of students from both networks. this similarity is striking given the different contexts of the two networks and the varying data collection methods which were employed: cilass took a more quantitative approach and ceebl a more qualitative approach. the congruity between responses at the two institutions is interesting and suggests that the commonalities between the strategies adopted (e.g. payment of students, inquiryand team-based approach to working, facilitation from cetl staff) in the networks had similar outcomes in terms of skills development. academic skills eccles et al. (2003) note that there is an increasing volume of evidence for a positive correlation between extra curricular activity and students' academic development: several different studies suggest that involvement in constructive, non-academic activities both at school and in the community facilitates continued school engagement and academic achievement (eccles et al. 2003, p. 883). bringle and hatcher (1996) also note the positive interrelationship between 'service learning' and academic achievement and engagement, in which ‘service learning’ is a: …course-based, credit-bearing educational experience in which students (a) participate in an organized service activity that meets identified community needs, journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 9 wood et al. skills development through extra-curricular inquiry activity and (b) reflect on the service activity in such a way as to gain further understanding of course content, a broader appreciation for the discipline, and an enhanced sense of civic responsibility. (bringle and hatcher, 2000, p. 274) there are three main themes through which this trend is manifested and ultimately confirmed by our data: students gaining greater practical knowledge about how the institution works; students gaining a range of skills that are directly relevant to their academic studies; and students developing a deeper awareness of the learning process. as noted above, a number of students seem to have developed a greater sense of connection with the university through their active participation in teaching and learning initiatives. a side effect of such a development is that they also gained significant insights into how the institution is structured and functions operationally, for example, ‘i got to know my lecturers better, the library structure, and people who can help me’. this has obvious benefits for the students concerned and is clearly a positive outcome, but must raise questions about the accessibility and dissemination of information through institutional support mechanisms more broadly, since it should not be necessary for the students to join extra-curricular networks in order to gain access to this sort of information. virtually every student described themselves as having developed some academic or academic-related skills in the course of their ambassador/intern roles. again, this corresponds with the findings of much of the literature on the relationship between extracurricular activities and academic achievement. although there is no obvious dividing-line between transferable and academic skills, the following evidence is more closely related to academic activity than the more generic skills outlined previously. as the students from both networks engaged in evaluation and research activities, such as running and writing up focus groups and authoring research and conference papers and presentations, they developed a range of evaluation and research skills that were reusable in the context of their disciplinary studies, for example: the way in which i research material has improved; i cover a lot more ground whilst researching now, as my interest in this field has grown since becoming involved with cilass. the importance of research and the technologies available to carry it out successfully were two key things cilass has taught me. i tend to branch off from the typical route whilst writing my essays now, researching a subject journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 10 wood et al. skills development through extra-curricular inquiry activity thoroughly helps me to focus on the aspects of an assignment that really interest me rather than following the set route. i have definitely noticed an improvement in my grades due to this, as well as a higher degree of satisfaction with my study. students felt that they had developed a suite of skills that related to the entirety of the research process, starting with improved creativity in coming up with new ideas, data collection through evaluation methodologies, analytical skills in examining that information, and finally, writing skills in compiling reports or documents for dissemination. in terms of writing skills, there was a recognition that the diversity of activities in which the networks are engaged offered opportunities for developing the ability to write in a range of registers: research articles, practical pedagogical guides, student journal articles and newsletter articles were all referred to as writing styles which students had to master. it is also important to note that several respondents emphasised specifically that they had developed the ability to use these skills in collaboration with their fellow students. a number of students appear to have derived significant cognitive benefits from their roles as interns and ambassadors. they increased their awareness of ibl as a pedagogic approach and of the process of learning in general: ‘being the student ambassador [...] has been an enlightening experience in terms of learning about processes of ibl learning, particularly within my own department’. this is hardly surprising as the students carry out their activities using an inquiry-based approach and are frequently involved as partners and/or consultants in educational development initiatives. one student reported a broadening of their understanding of the concept of university: ‘[the network] helped me to understand that uni isn’t just about lectures’. this echoes schraw et al.’s (2006) previous research into ibl and other more active forms of learning, which suggested that such pedagogies have advantages over transmission forms of teaching in terms of developing students’ abilities to self-regulate, as well as their meta-cognitive capabilities. transferable skills much of the introductory literature on ibl refers to students developing a range of generic skills through engagement in inquiry activities (e.g. kahn and o'rourke, 2004) and this appears to be borne out by the student responses. students identified a range of skills they had developed as part of their engagement in the cetls. working at a variety of levels (i.e. as individuals, in small groups, and as a large unit) assisted them in journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 11 wood et al. skills development through extra-curricular inquiry activity appreciating the various skills involved at each level. the following skills were cited almost unanimously by all students working with both cetls: • interpersonal skills, including: communication, confidence, listening, networking. • team-working skills, including: group work, collaboration, learning from others. • presentation skills. • reflective skills. • self-direction, including: organisation, time management, working to deadlines, decision making. • project management skills, including: event planning, running events/training, producing resources. these findings tally with those of curtis and shani (2002) on the impact of paid work on student capabilities, who emphasised the development of greater self confidence as the most significant positive effect of paid employment (see also gilman et al. (2003) on structured extra-curricular activities). depending upon the specific types of work in which the students had been engaged and the training they had received, more specific and technical skills had also been developed. these included, but were not confined to: filming, specific it skills, skills in facilitating focus groups, leadership, teaching and facilitation skills. the following quotation is emblematic: ‘[my experience] will provide me with the confidence to do things that i know nothing about; which is exactly how i started off with cilass’. importance for employability students were very much aware of the transferability of these skills and explicitly linked their work with the cetl to future career paths. this included statements such as ‘if i choose an academic career, i will have a better understanding of teaching and learning processes’. in addition to asking the students about their perceptions of the skills they were gaining at university and in their extra-curricular activities, they were also questioned about what impact they felt this would have on their future employability and careers. all students were in agreement that the experience of engagement in these networks had improved their employment prospects. their feelings are well summarised by the following comment: journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 12 wood et al. skills development through extra-curricular inquiry activity a lot of people have got degrees, and employers are finding it increasingly difficult to distinguish between prospective candidates – ‘okay, you've got a degree, but what does that mean to our organisation?’ beyond the general observation that experience of extra-curricular work would serve to distinguish students from their peers there were three different classes of comments. firstly, from a relatively pragmatic perspective, students recognised that working as ambassadors or interns had prepared them to deal with questions at interview or provide examples on application forms. secondly, some students made broader observations about how the experience helped them to differentiate themselves from other candidates through the development of inquiry-related capabilities. for example: i will be more able to research confidently and productively, as well as being able to work successfully within a team (prior to cilass any study/assignments i had done were independent). these are both valuable skills in the workplace and will hopefully be received well in interviews/job applications in the future. thirdly, respondents described the development of particular skills which might help them target specific careers. for instance: i have also been considering going into teaching after finishing my degree which is a career that is centred on ibl; my heightened understanding of ibl would surely be a valuable asset in the teaching profession. i have applied for the trainee scheme in programme production with the bbc – something which, had i not been part of the film group, i would not have felt i could have applied for. overall, therefore, the student members of the ambassador and intern networks considered themselves to have developed a significant range of academic and generic skills which they felt would be of value in both applying for jobs and in their future careers. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 13 wood et al. skills development through extra-curricular inquiry activity discussion the students' comments mirror findings from the literature on curricular ibl and skills development, including those from the sciences (powell et al., 2007). in fact, were all the data the result of a specific ibl module, there might be little point in writing this paper. however, as the students perceived that these skills were developed through their engagement in extra-curricular activities, the question remains how these learning processes were facilitated, and what institutions might learn from the formalisation of extra-curricular activity. it is also striking how the skills which students perceive as having developed match almost exactly those outlined as highly desirable or essential by employers (bennett, 2002) and governments in a series of reports throughout the 1990s (see davies (2000) for a summary), rendering the question even more relevant. how, then, are curricular and extra-curricular ibl opportunities related to one another? it is profitable to see these two modes of ibl as very similar in nature, even if the contexts are different (‘education’ as opposed to ‘employment’). in curricular ibl the overall inquiries or problems are defined by the tutor and the students may be given varying degrees of freedom in further defining the exact issues that they will address and the process that they will go through in addressing them. often this will vary according to the level of the student and/or their prior expertise, with more experienced students being given greater freedom to establish their own inquiries and to decide how they will approach them. this is very similar to the approach that the cetl student networks adopted. the students were often confronted with a task by the cetl organisation and were asked to address the task in an open way in dialogue with the network facilitator. students with greater experience and expertise were given more freedom in addressing such tasks, as in curricular ibl. of course, as in curricular ibl, on some occasions it was necessary to predetermine what the students would be doing in order to meet specific operational objectives, but the principle was to open out inquiries and activities wherever possible and thus to increase learning. extra-curricular ibl thus closely models the processes of curricular ibl and faces the same constraints of pre-determined aims and objectives, as well as the need to support less experienced students in undertaking their inquiries. it seems likely that the adoption of an inquiry-based approach to working in the networks was at least partly responsible for the development of skills by the interns and ambassadors, especially as these skills were very similar to those which curricular ibl has journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 14 wood et al. skills development through extra-curricular inquiry activity been shown to develop by previous research (wood et al., 2011)). students commented favourably on the freedom they had when working in groups in order to identify the approaches that were most suited to their task – whether this task was to produce a film, to present at a workshop, or to write a resource for other students. this corresponds to wider research on the positive impact of peer-group association on educational achievement (feldman and matjasko, 2005; gilman et al., 2003). despite this freedom, however, decisions needed to be discussed and negotiated. being, essentially, employees of the respective cetls, both networks had the remit to operate within clear pedagogical and strategic guidelines. this led to a constant negotiation process, asking that students compare their intended outcomes to that of the overall cetl. staff guidance and facilitation, as well as peer feedback via the other students, led to a process of ongoing reflection, which enabled students to retrace the skills acquired through the process. as we did not ask students about skills they developed as part of their degree programme, we cannot make direct comparisons, however, the evidence suggests that students found it easier to link their extra-curricular activities to future advantages in the job market, especially as a distinguishing factor separating them from others seeking employment. no student made mention of the sheffield graduate award, a formalised university of sheffield scheme that recognises student engagement in extra-curricular activities. however, several students had signed up to the scheme, indicating that they had at least some awareness of multiple options available to them to document and capitalise upon skills which they had developed. the reflective approach of the graduate award seeks to highlight skills developed in any context (both intraand extra-curricular), thus differentiating it from other schemes (atlay and harris, 2000; muldoon, 2008). further research could help illuminate how staff and students could work together to help students transfer these skills between different areas of engagement. students are obviously aware of skills they feel they need for employment. however, in a rapidly changing environment, where the concept of 'skills for life' is becoming obsolete, activities such as a student network for ibl creates a multi-disciplinary, problem-solving team with the remit to work on learning and teaching development, and thus ultimately the freedom to influence higher education, thereby filling the gap in such provision identified by froman (1999). whereas the skills cited by students roughly fit the very comprehensive analysis produced by bennett (2002), it is important to remember that virtually all of the literature that has been produced to date concerns itself with skills gained through structured study. thus, further research is needed regarding the transferability of skills journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 15 wood et al. skills development through extra-curricular inquiry activity gained through extra-curricular activities: while students felt they would be able to use certain skills as part of their degree, this has not been investigated, and a long-term followup with students once they have entered employment would assist in identifying just how realistic students' assumptions about their required skills for employment were. a longerterm study, returning to the same students, would alleviate cranmer's (2006) concerns about skewing research, providing a comparative base, whilst at the same time providing data regarding the perceived usefulness of skills development both within and outside the curriculum. both projects were ‘meta ibl’: the students were consciously using an ibl approach to develop ibl in their institution. it is likely that this had some impact on their awareness of the skills that they were developing because ibl has a strong reflective element and this is something that the network facilitators encouraged the students to do as part of their roles and to refer to when discussing ibl with other students and staff. it is hard to imagine this not ‘rubbing off’ when the students came to consider their own learning. it is therefore likely that students who were not using an ibl approach to their work would be less likely to reflect on and recognise the skills that they develop through their extra-curricular work, and this is one of the reasons why we advocate adopting the ibl approach to student extra-curricular work. indeed, students from the cilass network did some valuable work in this area, running inquiry-based sessions with students at the university of sheffield and other institutions to help them to recognise the skills that had been developed during their degrees, with a particular focus on the skills that ibl had inculcated (see wood et al. (2011) for a full description). another possible approach would be to tie in reflection on the skills developed in extra-curricular work (both paid and voluntary) into students’ pdp and career planning processes. in terms of curricular experiences, it would not be difficult to encourage reflection on the skills that students have learnt in the course of particular modules by including a few additional questions on module evaluation surveys. neither of these proposals would necessarily need to be tied to ibl or to extra-curricular work experience, although it would be interesting to see if those students who had experienced inquiry-based ways of working were better able to reflect on and recognise the skills that they had developed. a key feature of the functioning of both networks has been the provision of experienced staff to support and facilitate the student ambassadors and interns (wood et al., 2011). the role of the facilitator is not to direct the students, but to help them to set their own journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 16 wood et al. skills development through extra-curricular inquiry activity goals, to negotiate between the priorities of the cetl as a whole and the interests and abilities of the student networks, and to act as a buffer between academic and educational development staff and students, ensuring that both are aware of their roles and responsibilities. the facilitation of the network has obvious resourcing implications, as does the need to pay for the students’ time and (in some cases) expenses. the benefits to the students in terms of skills and knowledge development are substantial, but we suggest that the impact of the activities goes beyond the personal development of individual students. in professionalising the roles of ambassador and intern there are benefits for the organisation as a whole. put simply, the students are likely to become more reliable, better motivated and take their roles more seriously. this allows them to take on the role of full partners in the educational development enterprise, providing unique insights and ideas. at ceebl and cilass this is reflected in students writing research and conference papers alongside staff, presenting at and organising staff-student conferences, and engaging in independent educational development projects in their departments (for more on the activities of the two networks see wood et al., 2011). investing in these networks does require resourcing, but we suggest that the benefits for the students and the institution are substantial. conclusion ways in which extra-curricular student networks linked to learning and teaching can influence students' skills development have been highly under-researched, especially as the ever-increasing level of student engagement that has emerged from cetls and other institutional initiatives produces results worth exploring. while all students involved in the study were able to pinpoint direct experiences taken from their involvement with the cetls, further exploration is needed, preferably in discussion with students, to identify exactly how this aspect of skills development compares to skills gathered as part of the disciplinary degree programme. long-term follow-ups could provide useful data informing the field on any impact extra-curricular activity has had on students engaged in cetls. the cetl programme came to an end in mid-2010 and, although it was not possible to sustain the ambassador and intern problems without cetl funding, the approaches which have been adopted at cilass and ceebl appear to have had a positive impact on student engagement and educational development practices in the two institutions journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 17 wood et al. skills development through extra-curricular inquiry activity concerned. at the university of sheffield, there have been moves to establish departmental and faculty-level ambassador programmes to replace and build on the work done by the cilass ambassadors, while at the university of manchester, the intern programme has reaffirmed the institution’s commitment to peer learning and student mentoring (for more on the long term impact of the networks see wood et al.,2011). references astin, a.w. (1999) ‘student involvement: a developmental theory for higher education’, journal of college student development, 40(5), pp. 518-529. atlay, m. and harris, r. (2000) ‘an institutional approach to developing students' ‘transferable' skills’, innovations in education and teaching international, 37(1), pp. 76-84. bennett, r. (2002) ‘employers' demands for personal transferable skills in graduates: a content analysis of 1000 job advertisements and an associated empirical study’, journal of vocational education and training, 54(4), pp. 457-476. brew, a. (2003) ‘teaching and research: new relationships and their implications for inquiry-based teaching and learning in higher education’, higher education research and development, 22(1), pp. 3-18. bringle, r.g. and hatcher, j.a. (1996) ‘implementing service learning in higher education’, journal of higher education, 67(2), pp. 221-239. bringle, r.g. and hatcher, j.a. (2000) ‘institutionalization of service learning in higher education’, journal of higher education, 71(3), pp. 273-290. cohen, l., manion, l. and morrison, k. (2000) research methods in education. 2nd edn. london: routledge. cranmer, s. (2006) ‘enhancing graduate employability: best intentions and mixed outcomes’, studies in higher education, 32(2), pp. 169-184. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 18 wood et al. skills development through extra-curricular inquiry activity curtis s. and shani, n. (2002) ‘the effect of taking paid employment during term-time on students' academic studies’, journal of further and higher education, 26(2), pp. 129-138. davies, l. (2000) ‘why kick the ‘l’ out of ‘learning’? the development of students' employability skills through part-time working’, education and training, 42(8), pp. 436-444. eccles, j.s., barber, b.l., stone, m. and hunt, j. (2003) ‘extracurricular activities and adolescent development’, journal of social issues, 59(4), pp. 865-889. feldman, a.f. and matjasko, j.l. (2005) ‘the role of school-based extracurricular activities in adolescent development: a comprehensive review and future directions’, review of educational research, 75(2), pp. 159-210. froman, l. (1999) ‘the university as learning community’, journal of adult development, 6(3), pp. 185-191. gilman, r., meyers, j. and perez, l. (2003) ‘structured extracurricular activities among adolescents: findings and implications for school psychologists’, psychology in the schools, 41(1), pp. 31-41. healy, m. (2005) ‘linking research and teaching to benefit student learning’, journal of geography in higher education, 29(2), pp. 183-201. hutchings, b. (2007) enquiry-based learning: definitions and rationale. manchester: university of manchester, centre for excellence in enquiry-based learning. available at: http://www.campus.manchester.ac.uk/ceebl/resources/papers/hutchings2007_defini ngebl.pdf (accessed: 29 march 2011). kahn, p. and o’rourke, k. (2004) guide to curriculum design: enquiry-based learning. york: higher education academy. available at: http://www.campus.manchester.ac.uk/ceebl/resources/guides/kahn_2004.pdf (accessed: 29 march 2011). journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 19 http://www.campus.manchester.ac.uk/ceebl/resources/papers/hutchings2007_definingebl.pdf http://www.campus.manchester.ac.uk/ceebl/resources/papers/hutchings2007_definingebl.pdf http://www.campus.manchester.ac.uk/ceebl/resources/guides/kahn_2004.pdf wood et al. skills development through extra-curricular inquiry activity kirshner, b., o’donoghue, j. and mclaughlin, m.w. (2005) ‘youth-adult research collaborations: bringing youth voice to the research process’, in mahoney, j.l., larson, r. and eccles, j.s. (eds.) organized activities as contexts of development. mahwah, new jersey: lawrence erlbaum associate, pp. 131-156. mathison, s. (1988) ‘why triangulate?’, educational researcher, 17(2), pp. 13-17. moran-ellis, j., alexander, v.d., cronin, a., dickinson, m., fielding, j., sleney, j. and thomas, h. (2006) ‘triangulation and integration: processes, claims and implications’, qualitative research, 6(1), pp. 45-59. muldoon, r. (2008) ‘recognising and rewarding the contribution and personal development of peer supporters at university’, journal of further and higher education, 32(3), pp. 207-219. nabi, g.r. and bagley, d. (1998) ‘graduates' perceptions of transferable personal skills and future career preparation in the uk’, career development international, 3(1), pp. 31-39. powell, n., moore, i., o'rourke, k., freeman, s., sattenstall, m., gough, g. and jinks, p. (2007) ‘developing professional skills in three professional programmes through enquiry-based learning’, in carey, l., huntley-moore, s., jordan, a., magennis, s. and mcmullin, b. (eds.) aishe conference 2007, teaching and learning in the changing world of higher education, ed. 30th & 31st august 2007, nui maynooth, ireland. dublin: all ireland society for higher education (aishe). available at: http://www.aishe.org/events/2006-2007/conf2007/proceedings/paper-27.doc (accessed: 29 march 2011). schamber, l. (2000) ‘time-line interviews and inductive content analysis: their effectiveness for exploring cognitive behaviors’, journal of the american society for information science and technology, 51(3), pp. 734-744. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 20 http://www.aishe.org/events/2006-2007/conf2007/proceedings/paper-27.doc wood et al. skills development through extra-curricular inquiry activity schraw, g., crippen, k.j. and hartley, k. (2006) ‘promoting self-regulation in science education: metacognition as part of a broader perspective on learning’, research in science education, 36(1-2), pp. 111-139. the university of sheffield (n.d.) the sheffield graduate award. available at: http://www.shef.ac.uk/thesheffieldgraduateaward/ (accessed: 29 march 2011). wood, j., goldring, l., bestwick, a. and barnes, e. (2011) ‘a collaborative evaluation of student-staff partnership in inquiry-based educational development’, in little, s. (ed.) staff-student partnership in higher education. london: continuum, pp. 16-30. wood, j., little, s., goldring, l. and jenkins, l. (2011) ‘the confidence to do things that i know nothing about’ – skills development through extra-curricular inquiry activity: a literature review. available at: http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/files/ldhen/woodlitreview.pdf (accessed: 29 march 2011) author details dr jamie wood is leverhulme early career postdoctoral fellow in religions and theology at the university of manchester. from 2007 to 2009 he was learning development and research associate at the centre for inquiry-based learning in the arts and social sciences at the university of sheffield. dr sabine little was learning development and research associate at the centre for inquiry-based learning in the arts and social sciences at the university of sheffield from 2005 to 2010. louise goldring is innovation and development advisor at the royal college of surgeons. from 2008 to 2010 she was student engagement officer at the centre for excellence in enquiry-based learning at the university of manchester. laura jenkins was coordinator of the student ambassador network at the centre for inquiry-based learning in the arts and social sciences at the university of sheffield from 2007 to 2008. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 21 http://www.shef.ac.uk/thesheffieldgraduateaward/ http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/files/ldhen/woodlitreview.pdf ‘the confidence to do things that i know nothing about’ – skills development through extra-curricular inquiry activity abstract introduction and background the cetl context a note on spelling the student intern programme at ceebl the student ambassador programme at cilass comparison of the networks literature review methods and methodology results academic skills transferable skills importance for employability discussion conclusion   references author details literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 12: november 2017 student perceptions of the effectiveness of self-editing on their writing: towards a self-regulated approach gelareh holbrook robert gordon university, aberdeen, uk victoria park robert gordon university, aberdeen, uk abstract a number of studies have highlighted the importance of teaching students to self-edit their work. self-editing within higher education has been demonstrated to support students’ academic writing skills. it also capitalises on lecturers’ written corrective feedback on students’ essay-based assignments making it more effective and meaningful. utilising a collaborative approach between the study support and the school of health sciences at a uk-based university, this research evaluated the usefulness of a self-editing worksheet based on the perspectives of students, writing tutors, and the subject lecturer (staff) feedback. students’ perspectives were investigated by content analysing their responses provided in the reflection section of the self-editing worksheet. qualitative analysis of staff feedback on preand post-edit writing was also evaluated. the results show that 65% of students’ found the worksheet useful and the worksheet helped them make some positive changes to their essays. evidence would suggest that this pedagogical model is effective in improving levels of academic writing. implications and suggestions for effective teaching practice and future research are provided in this paper. keywords: self-editing; independent learning; self-regulated approach; academic writing. introduction academic writing is one of the cornerstones of university study as it is a crucial means of assessment with students being expected to write analytically and critically across all holbrook and park student perceptions of the effectiveness of self-editing on their writing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 2 disciplines (qaa, 2016). students’ success is therefore partially dependent on their competence in writing (borg and deane, 2009; gopee and deane, 2013). various types of written assessments, such as reports, reflective essays, and dissertations, are often assigned at universities in the uk, and students’ performance is assessed based on criteria such as the format, language use, organisation of ideas, critical analysis, and incorporation of other sources (gopee and deane, 2013). a number of students, however, from undergraduate to postgraduate level, are reported to find conventions of academic writing challenging to understand or implement (gopee and deane, 2013; rickard et al., 2009; jackson, 2009; borg and deane, 2011). several authors report the quality of students’ writing in higher education is one of academics’ major concerns (borg and dean, 2009; dann, 2009; lamb, 2009). this could be due to a number of reasons, namely, students’ limited academic background; cultural differences (for non-native speakers, specifically); and generally limited writing experience. enhancing students’ learning experiences is one of the uk universities’ key strategic aims (qaa, 2016) highlighting the importance of providing support for students to overcome the barriers to their academic success. gopee and deane (2013) suggest that it is inadequate to expect students to pick up writing skills by trial and error. consequently, a number of uk-based universities provide support for students’ writing (wingate, 2006) with support varying from one-to-one tuition, group sessions, short courses, or online self-study resources. a number of studies have highlighted the importance of teaching students to self-edit, so that lecturers’ corrective feedback on students’ assignments become more effective and meaningful (truscott, 1999, 2007; ferris, 2004; bruton, 2009). self-editing has also been recognised as a self-regulated learning strategy. through self-editing, students navigate their learning experience independently by learning to self-evaluate their writing through a systematic identification of their strengths and weaknesses (gopee and deane, 2013; nicol and macfarlane-dick, 2006). however, these studies have only been undertaken with students for whom english is a second language (khaki and biria, 2016; oshima and hogue, 2006; tsai and lin, 2012; diab, 2010). in their recent study, khaki and biria (2016) investigated the effectiveness of self and peer-editing on 100 iranian students undertaking a teaching english as a foreign language (tefl) programme. the category of errors in the self-editing exercise included holbrook and park student perceptions of the effectiveness of self-editing on their writing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 3 punctuation, coherence and cohesion, as well as grammar and vocabulary. in this study, self-editing instructions resulted in significant improvements in postgraduate tefl students’ writing. the authors claimed that self-evaluation help students develop explicit awareness of their writing quality by looking at their work from the reader’s perspective (cho et al., 2010; li and hegelheimer, 2013). ferris (1995) also assessed the effectiveness of self-editing on non-native speakers’ essays at university. their self-editing worksheet was based on five categories of grammatical errors often notified in students’ writing: noun errors; verb errors; punctuation and sentence errors; word form errors; and preposition errors. ferris (1995) introduced patterns of frequent and stigmatising errors to students and provided a checklist to help them identify these errors in sample essays. this approach resulted in significant progress in students’ quality of work, with fewer errors in each category over the course of a semester. these findings are supported by others (truscott 1999, 2007; ferris, 2004; and li and hegelheimer, 2013). there is, however, limited research that evaluates the effectiveness of self-editing worksheets on the writing of english-speaking students studying in uk-based universities. in addition, previous research has rarely focused on student perspectives of the effectiveness of self-editing which would provide an in-sight into the appropriateness of such a worksheet. consequently, this project set out to examine the following questions with a group of english speaking students: 1. did the students believe that the worksheet supported them in evaluating and editing their work? 2. what were the students’ perceived areas of improvement after using the selfediting worksheet? 3. how useful did the students find the worksheet? methods the self-editing worksheet was being introduced with the aim of enhancing the students’ academic writing skills. as with any enhancement, it is essential to evaluate the impact to establish if benefit is gained (qaa, 2016). consequently, an action research approach was holbrook and park student perceptions of the effectiveness of self-editing on their writing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 4 undertaken (mitchell et al., 2009). as this was an enhancement activity, no ethical approval was required. the study protocol was, however, peer reviewed for error, bias and ethical issues prior to commencement. this enhancement was piloted on a convenience sample of msc physiotherapy (preregistration) students. it was important to establish if students perceived the self-editing worksheet as beneficial as if they did not value the worksheet they are unlikely to use it. the self-editing worksheet required students to reflect on areas they needed to develop after using the prompts included in the worksheet (appendix 2). qualitative data from these reflections was gathered and analysed along with quantitative data from one likert scale question. sample a convenience sample of 29 postgraduate msc physiotherapy (pre-registration) were invited to participate. students were native english speakers from ireland, north america, and great britain. they were in their first semester of study and preparing to submit their first summative assessment requiring academic writing at master’s level. from experience, these students frequently require feedback on their writing style and guidance to ensure that appropriate levels of grammar and critical discussion are utilised. working at master’s level requires a significant level of autonomy and self-regulation in learning, which is why this group were selected as the pilot for the worksheet. consent forms were signed by the participants prior to the research. procedure all students were given the opportunity to undertake a formative piece of work to help them develop their writing skills to the required level. the task required students to write a 500-word essay. once the essay was completed and submitted, the students were offered a workshop that introduced them to the self-editing worksheet. this workshop aimed to support students in the completion of their academic writing exercise, by helping them understand the conventions of academic writing, and the use of the self-editing worksheet. after this workshop, students were given 10 days to revise their essays using the selfediting worksheet and resubmit their work. figure 1 gives an overview of the order of events. holbrook and park student perceptions of the effectiveness of self-editing on their writing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 5 students’ essays were independently reviewed before and after using the self-editing worksheet by two writing tutors and their subject lecturer (henceforth staff) using a marking grid and a bank of comments that focused on the following criteria:  content and organisation  language use  punctuation  using other sources;  format (presentation, i.e. font, spacing, referencing style). the second workshop was delivered after the data collection time period and aimed to provide students with some feedback on their results and further advice on areas to improve. figure 1. overview of study. self-editing worksheet the self-editing worksheet (appendix 1) consists of six sections: content and organisation; language use; punctuation; using other sources; format; and reflections. each section contains a checklist, which aims to help students ensure that they have incorporated all the required components for each part of their essays, and they have adhered to the conventions of academic writing. the items in each checklist are followed by an example or instructions aiming to help students’ self-study and develop their understanding of holbrook and park student perceptions of the effectiveness of self-editing on their writing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 6 different writing skills independently (appendix 2). the final section of the worksheet includes a reflection form. data collection data was collected from the reflective section of the self-editing worksheet that students completed. students’ comments were collated and categorised in a database, and the responses to the final likert scale question were collected. for anonymity and ease of reference, each student was given a code: s1, s2, etc. (see table 1). copies of the feedback provided by different staff was retained, consolidated and related to the student’s reflections. data analysis students’ responses to the questions were organised into common themes. where appropriate, data was triangulated by cross checking the students’ comments with that of the staff feedback. to do so, key words were identified in both the student and staff responses, resulting in the emergence of common themes (table 1). quantitatively, the number of times students had mentioned changes in the areas of referencing, paragraphing, organisation, introduction, conclusion and grammar was identified and counted. this along with the results of the likert scale question is reported in descriptive format. results all 29 students submitted the first and second version of the formative essay. one student did not make changes to their second submission. five students did not submit the selfediting worksheet. consequently, full data was available for 23 students. data provided information about the student’s perspectives of the usefulness of the selfediting worksheet, in addition to their perceived areas of improvement based on the weaknesses identified, improvements made, and strengths; this was triangulated with the staff feedback (figure 2). holbrook and park student perceptions of the effectiveness of self-editing on their writing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 7 figure 2. triangulation of data. students’ perceived areas of improvement in response to the question, ‘what part(s) of your paper are you most proud of and why?’, students used words and phrases including ‘proud of’, ‘better’, ‘after using this worksheet i was able to’, ‘improve’, ‘improvement’, and ‘i was able to competently integrate the recommended guidelines for’. these words and phrases appeared with terms such as referencing (or sources, evidence, examples, support); paragraphing; organisation (or structure, layout, construct); introduction; conclusion; grammar; and punctuation, which frequently appeared in students’ responses. these words were highlighted and the number of occurrences in all the responses is reported in figure 3. holbrook and park student perceptions of the effectiveness of self-editing on their writing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 8 figure 3. students’ perceived areas of improvement. abbreviations: refreferencing, para – paragraphing, org – organisation, intro – introduction, conclu – conclusion, gr/p – grammar and punctuation. data in table 1 suggests what amendments students believed they made to their essays as a consequence of using the self-editing worksheet. all 23 students who submitted their self-editing worksheet reported perceived benefit from it (this is shown in table 1). perceived areas for development students’ perceptions of their weaknesses in essay writing and their responses to ‘what errors or weaknesses did the worksheet help you to identify?’ are shown in table 1. phrases such as, ‘needed to work further on’…, ‘weakness’, ‘needed to focus’…, ‘major concerns’…, ‘error’, and ‘revision’ directed the researchers to the students’ perceived areas of weakness. staff feedback on the revised essays are also presented in table 1. adjectives, such as good, much better, improved, well, and clear, which signposted particular strengths in the student’s work were used. these are underlined and illustrated in table 1. phrases in bold, well-structured, paragraphing, or references, followed or preceded by the positive adjectives, highlight the positive changes the staff agree that the students made in holbrook and park student perceptions of the effectiveness of self-editing on their writing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 9 the revised version of their paper. the second column summarises the staff’s suggestions for further improvement. apart from student 2, who did not make any amendments to her/ his essay, all other students believed they made positive changes to their work. this is verified by the staff’s comments. holbrook and park student perceptions of the effectiveness of self-editing on their writing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 10 table 1. student perception and staff feedback. key s= student underlined comments = perceived weaknesses bold comments = strengths/improvements perceived weaknesses student view areas to develop from staff perceived strengths after editing student view positive changes from staff s1 finding evidence to support/referencing correctly. avoiding combining too many ideas and making sure the reader is able to identify each idea need to develop your critical writing further; limited support for your discussion [i am proud of] organisation and transition between paragraphs shows the beginning of critical thinking s2 grammar skill; formatting and referencing. sources not used well to support/refute your discussion. mainly descriptive; include additional sources to support the points my content, valid points about the health promotion role a physiotherapist plays. nothing additional [ ] on second submission s3 my thesis statement [ ] needed work [ ] one of my body paragraphs didn't really back up my thesis points; needed to back up and use examples for my topic sentences; needed a concluding remarks needs to aim for more balanced critique; needs a few more sources to support your discussion after editing, i think my introduction flows better [ ]. my body paragraphs support my points/topic sentence better. reworked conclusion. intro looks much better; good coherence and organisation; some sources [ ] used appropriately to support [ ] discussion s4 proper referencing and punctuation need more development from a critical perspective. need to question evidence and weigh arguments more construct the organisation and structure has improved. s5 in my revisions, i focused on the organization of my introduction, main points and conclusion, the flow of my sentences, and the tenses used throughout the paper. my major concern was the formatting/organization of my main points. occasional sweeping sentences; critical thinking and analysis is an area that could be developed further [this worksheet] helped to identify how my paper should be organized, i am most proud of my introduction, main points, and references used. formatting improved from first draft. improvements in layout and referencing; a good intro and [ ] coherence. irrelevant parts removed. aims of the paragraphs are clearer. s6 lack of structure in conclusion, the formatting/ referencing critical evaluation is lacking; avoid first person forms after using this worksheet i was able to organize the paragraphs into topics has improved from the first attempt with some restricting of paragraphs holbrook and park student perceptions of the effectiveness of self-editing on their writing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 11 s7 this worksheet helped me identify my weaknesses with developing concise conclusion sentences for each paragraph. beginning to consider some critical evaluation but this needs to be developed. utilise a wider variety of literature; avoid sweeping statements, the opening paragraph and the closing paragraph are really good a cohesive piece that flows from introduction to conclusion. s8 it helped identify weaknesses in the organization of my essay, specifically, what is required in the introductory paragraph; my biggest concern is my grammar, [ ] and punctuation. my secondary focus will be on using more advanced vocabulary some counter argument; try to develop this further; avoid first person forms. some changes [ ] have affected the grammar and flow. i am most proud of my introduction these are good points. you begin to offer some counter argument; a good range of sentence structures s9 i feel like i need to concentrate most on my comma use, and ensuring i use proper structure. needs some work to build on effective critical use of the literature the worksheet helped me to identify my wrongful use of commas, my inadequate structure and many other aspects. i was most proud of construction, as i feel my formatting and structure improved refs updated and now correctly formatted. a coherent message; clear introduction s10 some errors with flow and going off topic; have lots of ideas but struggle to put them down in a coherent manner. my reference was not even close to how it was supposed to be on my first submission. need to work more effectively to provide a more balanced opinion; demonstrate some analysis, though this could be further developed; i am most proud of the changes i made from my first version to my second. intro improved. paragraph structure, body para 2 specifically, improved: a better topic sentence and concluding remarks; focus is clear. some improvement in sentence structure s11 grammar, lay-out, appropriate use of sources and referencing. no negative comments [proud of ] the structure and organization of the paper. the use of a wide variety of sources and research. utilised a wide variety of literature; well structured. small changes made have helped with the flow. s12 my major concern is repeating myself critical writing style requires some work so that you provided a balanced opinion; reporting verbs should be used [this worksheet] helped create a skeleton to work off when constructing a paragraph. the body as i feel i could get my point across clearly have used the worksheet well to help you identify long sentences and some grammatical issues. this second version reads better than the first. clear and wellstructured introduction s13 concern: trying to fit more sources into the body of the text to compare against each other; found it difficult to comment and make suggestions at the end of paragraphs lacking detail! ideas could be more fully developed; make use of more sources, use a wider range of sentence structures and linking words. i think the introduction was quite strong and the use of the case study was good to back up evidence. improve[d] this from original draft; now the introduction gives a clearer outline; have used the self-editing worksheet well s14 major concern is that i was unable to stay within the word need to build on using that literature in a more thought the 2nd draft was 100x better than the 1st better than the first attempt. better use of references; holbrook and park student perceptions of the effectiveness of self-editing on their writing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 12 count critical way; use appropriate reporting verbs; avoid informal language have corrected the formatting issues in the first draft. s15 worksheet helped to identify places where i was using words that were not supporting the topic of my paper. some sections(paragraph 3) are more descriptive and you should work on building a more balanced and critical argument on the whole the conclusion and the second paragraph of the body worked on the structure;. improvements in the structure of introduction and sentences; utilised the self-editing worksheet effectively; s16 concern: finding sources and being able to critically think you do still need to work on a more balanced approach to this that offers different perspectives on the topic; do not overuse quotes; make use of a variety of reporting verbs. intro and conclusion and my 3rd body paragraph some improvements made to the first draft. some additions to sources. s17 my conclusion was weak, also, i had a couple of sentences that needed adjustment because they made the flow of my paper choppy and inconsistent i would like to focus on [ ] using references appropriately and effectively. doesn’t really answer the question appropriately; not really a critical evaluation i am most proud of the body of my paper. i feel as if i bring my points together, and provide good examples to support my points. good examples of different exercise interventions. ideas well supported; link together your themes quite well from introduction to conclusion; some positive changes made to the structure following selfediting. s18 this worksheet helped me identify weaknesses in the structure of my paper as well as choppiness; i will focus my revision on the cohesion of thought within the paper as well as eliminating any unnecessary or unrelated content build on your critical evaluation. i am most proud of my conclusion a relatively cohesive piece; the changes made aide in the flow. the introduction and conclusion offer clear indication as to what is covered and evaluated; used the worksheet quite effectively to make positive changes to your work. s19 concern: flow and connection between sentences and paragraphs; overall structure just make sure you don’t go off track and keep focused; some sections become somewhat descriptive; make use of precise reporting verbs body paragraphs. i believe that i was able to competently integrate the recommended guidelines for paragraph structure presentation and cohesion have improved significantly from your first draft; good use of subheadings; improvements in formatting of refs; used the self-editing worksheet to make some effective changes. s20 this worksheet helped me to identify: -incorrect verb tenses i used -incorrect formatting -in text citation error need to concentrate the most on the formatting of my paper there is an over reliance on some sources; more work is required on using your literature critically i think the flow of my paper is relatively decent sources well presented. improved formatting from the original draft; added better linking sentences. well-org; clearer thesis holbrook and park student perceptions of the effectiveness of self-editing on their writing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 13 s21 concerns: avoiding run-on sentences. making sure each paragraph is complete and statements are supported. making sure i am using the harvard referencing correctly good number of sources are used, but views not compared or evaluated. [this worksheet helped me] make sure my paragraph structure is complete, and fully supported with two different evidence sources. communication of my point through concise sentences, while providing sufficient evidence good number of sources are used, good intro. relevant thesis statement generally wellstructured. coherent in general s22 weakness: content and layout of each section; critical analysis. comparison of sources not just using one source to back a point paragraph 4 offers some critical discussion. the other sections are less well written and somewhat descriptive. introduction most improvement. you have worked on providing better linking and summarising statements in your introduction and conclusion. a great deal of improvement in organising ideas. s23 paragraph structure; organisation of ideas; and being specific additional analysis needed; errors in reference format; informal language and 1st person need to be avoided no positive comments good intro and conclusion the usefulness of the self-editing worksheet twenty of the 23 students completed the likert question ‘usefulness of the worksheet’. on a scale of 1 to 5, 65% of the participants (13/20) rated the usefulness as 4 or 5. only one student rated the usefulness as 2. students’ reflections contained key phrases, such as ‘this worksheet helped me’, or ‘was helpful for’, indicating that students’ interpreted the likert scale as 1 not useful and 5 very useful. the following qualitative data indicate how students benefited from the worksheet: 1. it helped to identify how my paper should be organized. (s5) 2. this worksheet helped me to identify my weaknesses with developing concise conclusion sentences for each paragraph. (s7) 3. the worksheet helped me to identify my wrongful use of commas, my inadequate structure and many other issues. (s9) 4. it helped create a skeleton to work off when constructing a paragraph. (s12) holbrook and park student perceptions of the effectiveness of self-editing on their writing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 14 5. i think the worksheet helped to identify places where i was using words that were not supporting the topic of my paper. the check points are helpful for staying on track and determining what should be included in each section. (s15) 6. this worksheet helped me to identify, incorrect verb tenses i used, incorrect formatting, and in text citation error. (s20) few students’ comments suggested some possible shortcomings in the design of the worksheet based on their perspectives: 1. worksheet could be more effective with more examples. (s8) 2. i am not knowledgeable enough. [referring to the checklist for language use] (s1) 3. this was helpful but can be overwhelming. (s15) discussion and implications this data is promising and indicates students found the self-editing worksheet useful, and they perceived that generally they made positive changes to their work as a consequence of using the worksheet. this was corroborated by the staff feedback. these findings are in line with those from previous research with those for whom english is a second language (truscott, 1999, 2007; ferris, 2004; li and hegelheimer, 2013). while some students made major amendments to their work, others made only minor changes. only one student made no changes at all. the subject lecturer indicated the majority of students made positive changes in their second submission. also, the content analysis (bryman, 2009) showed how each student identified their own specific weaknesses and used the worksheet to address those weaknesses to make improvements. none of the work evaluated was negatively impacted upon by the use of the worksheet. most studies on self-editing exercises in higher education have focused on the effectiveness of the approach for non-native speakers and in terms of grammar and punctuation (ferris, 2004; li and hegelheimer, 2013). in addition to demonstrating these benefits, this study suggests the worksheet also facilitated students to develop the holbrook and park student perceptions of the effectiveness of self-editing on their writing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 15 structure of their academic writing (i.e. overall structure and paragraphing) and the incorporation of literature. a significant number of students referred to the corrections they made in terms of referencing, or use of other sources in their work; also recognised in the staff comments. this suggests that the self-editing worksheet helped students to identify where and how they needed to develop their use of supporting literature. while enhancing the use of referencing, staff’s comments in areas for further improvements involve the word ‘criticality’ in relation to most students’ work (table 1.) this suggests the self-editing worksheet may require enhancement to help students reach their potential in terms of critical writing. currently, the prompts in the worksheet refer to structural and grammatical/punctuation issues in relation to writing. they do not encourage students to consider their content and critical writing skills. this is perhaps less important at lower undergraduate level but remains a key issue in terms of honours level and postgraduate work (sqa, 2015). in this study, staff feedback encouraged students to consider the criticality of their writing but the impact of this was not evaluated. further investigation would be valuable to determine if this is the most appropriate method for helping students develop these critical writing and thinking skills. the student comments indicate that the self-editing worksheet was useful at helping them identify where they needed to develop their academic writing skills. overall, they were positive that the worksheet was beneficial. however, although the negative comments were limited, they could inform the development of the self-editing worksheet. it may be helpful to have direction in the worksheet to more detailed learning resources relating to the aspect of writing the student is finding challenging, thus providing further ‘scaffolding’ to enable writing development (vygotsky, 1987). this would enable them to consolidate and develop their understanding of that area before then modifying their work. results suggest the number of prompts may be overwhelming for some students. it may be appropriate to break the worksheet into several separate worksheets that could be introduced to students at the start of their undergraduate degrees. consequently, by the time they reach postgraduate study, these basic structural issues should no longer be problematic, enabling the focus to shift to critical thinking and writing aspects. for other students, it may be that they need a more supportive mechanism of meeting with a tutor to discuss areas requiring development. this may be influenced by how the student has been taught in the past, their level of autonomy or their learning style. however, at holbrook and park student perceptions of the effectiveness of self-editing on their writing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 16 postgraduate level, students should be autonomous and reflection is required as a graduate skill (qaa, 2009). consequently, the use of a self-editing worksheet encourages the appropriate level of graduate skills. limitations and further research what has not been established is whether students have transferred learning from this piece of work to subsequent written assessments. it would be of benefit to assess the quality of the changes applied from the first to second formative submissions of this work and then to evaluate the quality of the summative assessment that these students would complete. this study was carried out with a limited number of students from several countries and therefore replication of the study with a wider population is required to enable generalisability of the results. further investigation into whether the worksheet assists those from the usa/canada to adapt to british writing conventions would be valuable. this self-regulated approach has potential to be further developed and used by a wider number of students at university, while the theme of independent learning is at the core of all uk-based universities’ pedagogical approaches (qaa, 2016). introducing the worksheet to students in year one of their undergraduate studies may therefore be beneficial and worthy of investigation. methods of data collection in this study were limited as they focused on collecting data only from the worksheet and student work. they could not provide the rich data that ethnographic methods such as interviews or focus groups could have provided about student perspectives of the intervention. however, the informal nature of the data collection may have enabled students to be more honest about their actual use of the worksheet. future studies should focus on marking students’ essays before and after the intervention to assess whether the use of a self-editing worksheet impacts on students’ grades due to improvements in their academic writing. it would also be of use to investigate if ongoing use of the worksheet provides additional and sustained benefits. furthermore, future research could be strengthened by means of language-based methods of analysis, such as discourse analysis or text analysis (ritchie and lewis, 2014), to closely assess the holbrook and park student perceptions of the effectiveness of self-editing on their writing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 17 changes made in students’ sentence structure, paragraphing, punctuation, etc. before and after self-editing. effective approaches have been suggested by borg and deane (2011) in this regard. conclusions despite its limitations, this study has shown that the students had positive perceptions of a self-editing approach. it helped them not only to evaluate and address their weaknesses in writing independently, but also to identify their strengths. these preliminary results suggest improvements to the overall student learning experience. moreover, this study extended the results of previous studies by confirming the usefulness of this self-regulated learning strategy for native english speaking students. however, further research aiming to develop this worksheet to support students’ analytical writing skills more effectively is required. acknowledgements with thanks to the msc physiotherapy students for participating in this study and to fiona roberts from the school of health sciences for her efforts in the peer review and editing of the paper. we extend our thanks to the academic development team at delta, dr rachel macgregor, lynne loveday and irina radu, whose help and advice facilitated the completion of this project. references borg, e. and deane, m. (2009) interim report on individualised writing tutorials at coventry university‘s centre for academic writing (caw). coventry university: unpublished document. borg, e. and deane, m. (2011) ‘measuring the outcomes of individualised writing instruction: a multi-layered approach to capturing changes in students' texts’, teaching in higher education, 16(3), pp. 319-331. holbrook and park student perceptions of the effectiveness of self-editing on their writing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 18 bruton, a. (2009) ‘designing research into the effects of grammar correction in l2 writing: not so straightforward’, journal of second language writing, 18(2), pp. 136-140. bryman, a. (2009) social research methods. oxford: oxford university press. cho, k., cho, m.h. and hacker, d.j. (2010) ‘self-monitoring support in learning to write’, interactive learning environments, 18(2), pp. 101-113. dann, c. (2009) ‘the never-ending sentence’, the times higher education, 2 july, p.19. diab, n.m. (2010) ‘effects of peer-versus self-editing on students’ revision of language errors in revised drafts’, system, 38(1), pp. 85-95. ferris, d.r. (1995) ‘teaching students to self-edit’, tesol journal, 4(4), pp. 18-22 ferris, d.r. (2004) ‘the ‘grammar correction’ debate in l2 writing: where are we, and where do we go from here? (and what do we do in the meantime…?)’, journal of second language writing, 13(1), pp. 49-62. gopee, n. and deane, m. (2013) ‘strategies for successful academic writing – institutional and non-institutional support for students’, nurse education today, 33(12), pp. 1624-1631. jackson, d. (2009) ‘mentored residential writing retreats: a leadership strategy to develop skills and generate outcomes in writing for publication’, nurse education today, 29(1), pp. 9-15. khaki, m. and biria, r. (2016) ‘effects of self-and peer-editing on iranian tefl postgraduate students’ l2 writing’, journal of applied linguistics and language research, 3(1), pp. 155-166. lamb, b.c. (2009) ‘british undergraduates make three times as many errors in english as do ones from overseas’, quest, 103, pp. 12-18. holbrook and park student perceptions of the effectiveness of self-editing on their writing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 19 li, z. and hegelheimer, v. (2013) ‘mobile-assisted grammar exercises: effects on selfediting in l2 writing’, language learning & technology, 17(3), pp. 135-156. mitchell, s.m., reilly, r.c. and logue, m.e. (2009) ‘benefits of a collaborative action research for the beginning teacher’, teaching and teacher education, 25(2), pp. 344-349. nicol, d. and macfarlane-dick, d. (2006) ‘formative assessment and self-regulated learning: a model and seven principles of good feedback practice’, studies in higher education, 31(2), pp. 199-218. oshima, a. and hogue, a. (2006) writing academic english. 4th edition (longman academic writing series): level 4. us: pearson education. qaa (2009) enhancement themes. available at: http://www.enhancementthemes.ac.uk/docs/publications/research-teachinglinkages-enhancing-graduate-attributes-overview.pdf#page=18 (accessed: 10 december 2016). qaa (2016) safeguarding standards and improving the quality of uk higher education. available at: http://www.qaa.ac.uk/about-us/scotland/development-and-enhancement (accessed: 26 april 2016). rickard, c.m., mcgrail, m.r., jones, r., o'meara, p., robinson, a., burley, m., and raybarruel g. (2009) ‘supporting academic publication: evaluation of a writing course combined with writers' support group’, nurse education today, 29(5), pp. 516-521. ritchie, j. and lewis, j. (2014) qualitative research practice: a guide for social science students and researchers. 2nd edn. los angeles: sage. scottish qualifications agency (sqa) (2015) the scottish credit and qualifications framework (scqf). available at: http://scqf.org.uk/wpcontent/uploads/2014/03/scqf-level-descriptors-web-aug-2015.pdf (accessed: 26 april 2016). http://www.enhancementthemes.ac.uk/docs/publications/research-teaching-linkages-enhancing-graduate-attributes-overview.pdf#page=18 http://www.enhancementthemes.ac.uk/docs/publications/research-teaching-linkages-enhancing-graduate-attributes-overview.pdf#page=18 http://www.qaa.ac.uk/about-us/scotland/development-and-enhancement http://scqf.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/scqf-level-descriptors-web-aug-2015.pdf http://scqf.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/scqf-level-descriptors-web-aug-2015.pdf holbrook and park student perceptions of the effectiveness of self-editing on their writing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 20 truscott, j. (1999) ‘the case against grammar correction in l2 writing classes: a response to ferris’, journal of second language writing, 8(2), pp. 111-122. truscott, j. (2007) ‘the effect of error correction on learners’ ability to write accurately’, journal of second language writing, 16(4), pp. 255-272. tsai, y.r. and lin, c.f. (2012) ‘investigating the effects of applying monitoring strategy in efl writing instruction’, international journal of business and social science, 3(13), pp. 205-216. vygotsky, l. (1987) mind in society: the development of higher psychological processes. cambridge: harvard university press. wingate, u. (2006) ‘doing away with ‘study skills’’, teaching in higher education, 11(4), pp. 457-469. author details gelareh holbrook holds a phd in education and is a writing and study skills tutor/english for academic purposes lecturer at the department for the enhancement of learning, teaching and access (delta) at robert gordon university, aberdeen. victoria park holds an msc in pain management and bsc in physiotherapy. victoria is a lecturer in physiotherapy in the school of health sciences at robert gordon university, aberdeen. holbrook and park student perceptions of the effectiveness of self-editing on their writing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 21 appendix 1. overview of self-editing worksheet. sections subsections content section 1 content and organisation introduction body conclusions prompts examples self-evaluation of confidence comments or questions – free text box section 2 language verbs sentence structure section 3 punctuation commas semi-colons colons section 4 using other sources section 5 format section 6 reflections what part of the paper are you most proud of and why? what areas of your writing will you concentrate on the most in your revision to improve? what is your major concern? what errors or weaknesses did the worksheet help to identify? on a scale of 1-5 how useful did you find the worksheet? holbrook and park student perceptions of the effectiveness of self-editing on their writing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 22 appendix 2. self-editing worksheet. this button provides additional explanations for the 5th item in the list holbrook and park student perceptions of the effectiveness of self-editing on their writing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 23 as shown, every item is followed by a tap button, where additional explanations or examples are provided holbrook and park student perceptions of the effectiveness of self-editing on their writing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12: november 2017 24 student perceptions of the effectiveness of self-editing on their writing: towards a self-regulated approach abstract introduction methods sample procedure self-editing worksheet data collection data analysis results students’ perceived areas of improvement perceived areas for development the usefulness of the self-editing worksheet discussion and implications limitations and further research conclusions acknowledgements references author details appendix 1. overview of self-editing worksheet. appendix 2. self-editing worksheet. journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 21: september 2021 ________________________________________________________________________ understanding college students' e-loyalty to online practicum courses in hospitality programmes during covid-19 yoanita alexandra universitas multimedia nusantara, indonesia septi fahmi choirisa universitas multimedia nusantara, indonesia abstract this study aims to examine the students’ loyalty to an online practicum course for hospitality education during the covid-19 pandemic in indonesia. premised on the technology acceptance model (tam), we adopted a revised model consisting of information system success model and expectancy confirmation theory (ect) to ascertain the students’ perceptions of the usefulness of the programme and their levels of satisfaction with, and eloyalty to, the programme. this study utilised an online survey to obtain data from 309 participants. the partial least squares structural equation modelling method was employed in the study. the findings show that students’ perceptions of the usefulness of online learning were significantly influenced by information quality, system quality, and system interactions which relate to satisfaction. preliminary research provides insight for stakeholders such as vocational institutions, teachers, and practitioners of education to gain a better understanding of factors that contribute to hospitality students’ continued intentional use of online courses. keywords: e-learning; practicum courses; hospitality students; pandemic; covid-19; student satisfaction; e-loyalty. introduction the covid-19 outbreak, which began in late 2019, has changed world education systems, including in indonesia. social restriction policies have led to students studying from home alexandra and choirisa understanding college students' e-loyalty to online practicum courses in hospitality programmes during covid-19 journal of learning development in higher education, issue 21: september 2021 2 using online learning platforms, replacing traditional face-to-face learning. changing the learning method from conventional education to online learning is not easy; it requires proper and qualified information technology infrastructure support (giatman, siswat and basri, 2020). anecdotal evidence further suggests that some lecturers have faced technical and practical difficulties which have served to limit the pedagogical preparedness needed to provide meaningful online learning experiences (rapanta et al., 2020). these challenges may reduce students' motivation and learning effectiveness and also affect their overall satisfaction (rajabalee and santally, 2020). hospitality programmes usually include practical skills, business knowledge, and soft skills – a combination of skills necessary for graduates intending to work in the hospitality industries (christou and chatzigeorgiou, 2019). however, the lack of practical application of theory will leave the students without an active learning environment, which is crucial for shaping them into the skilled workforce needed by industries (robinson, breakey and ruhanen, 2015). this learning experience is significant to the students since their levels of satisfaction could affect their desire to continue with the programme (rajabalee and santally, 2020). advances in technology have made possible the development of online learning platforms as learning tools in hospitality education, especially in a pandemic situation. this study sought to examine students’ perception, satisfaction, and e-loyalty of online learning usage in practicum courses. literature review this study was based on the technology acceptance model (tam). because of the context of the study, the framework includes external variables and constructs adapted from expectancy confirmation theory (ect) and information system (is) success models which have been applied in previous research conducted by sung mi song (2010). tam (davis, 1989) is often used to explain and predict human behaviour in relation to different computer technologies. tam has been widely adopted as the main theoretical framework to examine factors which influence the user acceptance of targeted technology, computer systems, or online platforms in a broad range of contexts. the four constructs of alexandra and choirisa understanding college students' e-loyalty to online practicum courses in hospitality programmes during covid-19 journal of learning development in higher education, issue 21: september 2021 3 tam are perceived ease of use, perceived usefulness, attitude towards use, and behavioural intention (song and kong, 2017). davis identified two central themes of tam, namely perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use. perceived usefulness is known as ‘the degree to which the person believes that using the particular system would enhance her/his job performance’, while perceived ease of use refers to ‘the degree to which the person believes that using the particular system would be free of effort’ (davis, 1989, pp.319–340). the attitude itself affects the behavioural intention to use a particular technology, which predicts the actual system use (jimenez et al., 2020). satisfaction is a prime indicator of behavioural intention. students' satisfaction leads to the students’ decision to use e-learning and reflects students’ e-loyalty (song, 2010). on the other hand, expectation confirmation theory (ect) is widely used to explain postadoption behaviour (bhattacherjee, 2001). according to the theory, confirmation happens when the perceived performance meets expectations. if there is a difference between them, disconfirmation exists, which affects levels of satisfaction (oliver, 1980). ect is often used to predict and explain consumers’ satisfaction, including the acceptance of information systems context (bhattacherjee, 2001; khalifa and liu, 2002; huh and uysal, 2004). furthermore, delone and mclean (2003) proposed a model used as a framework for measuring the performance of an information system. researchers have used the delone and mclean information system (d&m is) performance model as a theoretical basis for evaluating e-learning systems and facilities' efficiency from both a consumer and organisational perspective (chiu et al., 2005; roca, chiu and martínez, 2006; wang, wang and shee, 2007). most of these studies used the three dimensions of is quality (information quality, service quality, and system quality) as independent variables and satisfaction as a dependent variable to assess students’ satisfaction with e-learning services. for this study, the researcher used four dimensions that suggested perceived usefulness: instructor interaction, service interaction, information quality, and system quality (song, 2010). alexandra and choirisa understanding college students' e-loyalty to online practicum courses in hospitality programmes during covid-19 journal of learning development in higher education, issue 21: september 2021 4 instructor interaction according to ghazal et al. (2018), instructors' interactions are essential to students' usage and acceptance of e-learning systems (al-busaidi and al-shihi, 2010). instructors should continuously improve themselves to keep updated with the recent pedagogical and technological tools in e-learning and should efficiently prepare e-learning teaching materials (mtebe and raisamo, 2014). moreover, previous literature indicates that positive relationships existed between instructor interaction and perceived usefulness (lee, yoon and lee, 2009). service interaction e-learning service interaction was positively related to student satisfaction, and in turn, satisfaction affects e-learning student loyalty (pham et al., 2019). e-learners interactivity is a critical success factor in virtual learning environments because teaching and learning processes are mediated by digital technologies (rodríguez-ardura and meseguer-artola, 2016). further study showed that students who learned through e-learning perceive interaction as an effective means of learning; they prefer to interact online (su et al., 2005). information quality information quality refers to the quality of information given on a website. its measurement includes accuracy, completeness, currency, efficiency, relevance, scope, and timeliness of information (cheng, 2012). further, miyazoe and anderson (2010) showed that students in an online class saw information as their priority, while students learning in a face-to-face class focused on student-instructor interaction. previous research also found a positive relationship between information quality and the perceived usefulness of e-learning systems (salloum et al., 2019). system quality the way that system characteristics affect users' perspectives on using an e-learning system is determined by system quality (alia, 2016). research indicates that system quality plays a crucial role in students adopting and using an e-learning system (salloum et al., 2019). it has alexandra and choirisa understanding college students' e-loyalty to online practicum courses in hospitality programmes during covid-19 journal of learning development in higher education, issue 21: september 2021 5 also been shown that system quality positively affects the perceived usefulness of e-learning (fathema, shannon and ross, 2015; jaber, 2016; mahmodi, 2017). using the four dimensions of perceived usefulness outlined above, this study proposes the following hypotheses: h1: instructor interaction positively affects student perceived usefulness. h2: service interaction positively affects student perceived usefulness. h3: information quality positively affects student perceived usefulness. h4: system quality positively affects student perceived usefulness. satisfaction satisfaction refers to the user's acceptance of a system and the level of comfort in its use (amsal et al., 2020). it refers to perceived usefulness which is informed by users’ decisions to accept and adopt an e-learning platform. moreover, the e-learning system can only be accepted by the students when they perceive that using it will improve their learning performance (rizun and strzelecki, 2020). a study conducted by amsal et al. (2020) proves a positive correlation between perceived usefulness and satisfaction. junjie (2017) also demonstrates a significant effect of perceived usefulness on satisfaction in the context of a massive open online course (mooc). therefore, this study proposes the following hypotheses: h5: perceived usefulness positively affects student satisfaction. e-loyalty previous studies have found that satisfaction with e-learning systems leads to students' continued intentional use of the system (cheng, 2020; garg and sharma, 2020). the current study hypothesises that a key determinant of student e-loyalty is online courses' continuance intention which is reflected by students' satisfaction (song, 2010). therefore, this study proposes the following hypothesis: alexandra and choirisa understanding college students' e-loyalty to online practicum courses in hospitality programmes during covid-19 journal of learning development in higher education, issue 21: september 2021 6 h6: student satisfaction positively affects student e-loyalty. research methods the methodology used to conduct quantitative research utilised a survey method to collect data by distributing online questionnaires through email in the second and third quarter of 2020. the survey was sent to the 309 hospitality students in indonesia, with 100% response rate, who participated in online learning practicum courses during the current pandemic. the questionnaire consists of 55 questions: 9 questions about demographic factors and 46 variable questions using a likert scale with 5 points of plate: 1 (strongly disagree) to scale 5 (strongly agree). this study analysed 309 questionnaires using structural equation modelling (sem). figure 1. research model. alexandra and choirisa understanding college students' e-loyalty to online practicum courses in hospitality programmes during covid-19 journal of learning development in higher education, issue 21: september 2021 7 the questionnaire was developed using the seven constructs of the research model: instructor interaction, service interaction, information quality, system quality, perceived usefulness, satisfaction, and e-loyalty. the questionnaire of perceived usefulness was adapted from roca et al. (2006). the satisfaction questions were adapted from keaveney and young (1997) and the questions of loyalty were adopted from eggert and ulaga (2002) and hennig-thurau et al. (2001). in order to measure the variable questions, indicators were tested with outer loading values. the standardised outer loadings were used to determine individual item reliability (roldán and sánchez-franco, 2012). the manifest variable should meet a loading of 0.707 or more to be accepted as a constituent of a construct (carmines and zeller, 1979; roldán and sánchezfranco, 2012). table 1 (appendix 1) shows that the measurement of each indicator has an excellent consonant to meet the minimum requirements of outer loadings. the strong indicators lead to a better fit in covariance sem analysis (roldán and sánchez-franco, 2012). results and analysis the sample comprises 25% male, 5% unidentified, and 70% female respondents. most respondents are from java island, with 73%, and the rest of the respondents spread across every island in indonesia. the respondents are college students from different education years and semesters. most of them (22%) are in the fourth semester (second year of study). as for experiences, 83% currently have one-five online courses. 100% of the respondents are full-time students. details of respondents’ profiles are provided in table 2 (see appendix 2). according to urbach and ahlemann (2010) and hair et al. (2016), pls-sem can be used to examine complex structural equation models that consist of several constructs. the measurement data from the indicator or manifest variables are used to input the statistical analysis, proving the relationship among latent variables (williams, vandenberg and edwards, 2009). this research has a reflective model that fits the analysis approach, carried out with reference to reliability and validity attributes (roldán and sánchez-franco, 2012). alexandra and choirisa understanding college students' e-loyalty to online practicum courses in hospitality programmes during covid-19 journal of learning development in higher education, issue 21: september 2021 8 according to chin (2010) and hair et al. (2016), pls is the appropriate option for any researchers who need to use latent variable scores in the predictive relationship of subsequent analysis. this research used the variance-based approach partial least square with smart pls 3.0 to conduct the two-step analytical procedure (anderson and gerbing, 1988). the first step of measurement model analysis assesses reliability, convergent validity, and discriminant validity. after that, this study assesses the structural model to test its research hypotheses (rizkalla and setiadi, 2020). the three conditions proposed by fornell and larcker (1981) were used to determine the convergent validity of the measurement items in this study: (a) the average variance extracted (ave), (b) item reliability of each measurement, and (c) the composite reliability of each construct. in this process, convergent validity was evaluated by assessing the outer loadings of each indicator and average variance extracted (ave) (fornell and larcker, 1981). ave values should be greater than 0.50. this means that 50% or more of the indicator variance should be accounted for (roldán and sánchez-franco, 2012). as a result, in table 3 (appendix 3), all the variables above 0.50 indicate an adequate convergent validity measurement. the value of composite reliability (cr) was assessed to determine internal consistency reliability (kamis, et al., 2020). cr scores need > 0.7 to ensure adequate internal consistency (gefen, straub and boudreau, 2000; hair et al., 2016). as depicted in table 3 (appendix 3), all values are above the threshold. moreover, cronbach's alpha α> 0.7 is also a measure of the reliability of items measuring a construct (nunnally and bernstein, 1994). the cronbach alpha values ranged from 0.902–0.950, proving the scores were acceptable. the discriminant validity in table 4 (appendix 4) compares the ave square root value with construct correlation value that indicates the highest value in any column or row compared to the highest correlation value of any other construct (hair et al., 2016). based on the value analysis, results met the criterion. the values responded to the proposed research question related to the construction research framework’s validity (kamis et al., 2020). alexandra and choirisa understanding college students' e-loyalty to online practicum courses in hospitality programmes during covid-19 journal of learning development in higher education, issue 21: september 2021 9 subsequently, to execute the correlations among the constructs’ values and the indicator standardised data, cross loading analysis was used (gefen and straub, 2005). it can also reduce the multi-collinearity between the latent variables by indicating the average variance extracted (ave) value of each indicator that should be higher than the others (fornell and larcker, 1981; chin, 1998; vinzi, trinchera and amato, 2010). the results are shown in table 5 (appendix 5). the cross-loading values prove the validity of the construct measurement model. figure 2. structural model (bootstrap). this examination surveys the basic model to test the research hypotheses. the bootstrapping method was utilised with 5000 resamples to examine each of the path coefficients value. (hair et al., 2016). based on table 6 (appendix 6) and figure 2, out of the six proposed hypotheses, four were proved to be significant. the first significant variable is functional value (beta = 0.211; t-value = 3.633; p-value < 0.05) which indicates with relation to hypothesis 1 (h1) that instructor interaction had a positive effect on students’ perceived usefulness. the second hypothesis value (beta = 0.446; t-value = 6.184; p-value < 0.01) further leads to the alexandra and choirisa understanding college students' e-loyalty to online practicum courses in hospitality programmes during covid-19 journal of learning development in higher education, issue 21: september 2021 10 acceptance of h2 (service interaction positively affects student perceived usefulness). the fourth hypothesis value (beta = 0.260; t-value = 3.394; p-value < 0.05) is also proven to be significant for system quality influencing the perceived usefulness and the fifth hypothesis value (beta = 0.818; t-value = 31.833; p-value < 0.05) leads to the acceptance of h5 (perceived usefulness positively affects student satisfaction). however, the third hypothesis value (beta = 0.013; t-value = 0.062; p-value > 0.05) proves that h3, information quality has no significant effect on student perceived usefulness and the sixth hypothesis value (beta = 0.037; t-value = 0.470; p-value > 0.05) also implies that student satisfaction does not significantly affect e-loyalty. this study also calculated the r squared (r²) of the research model to answer the research question. the r² of perceived usefulness is 0.710, which indicates that the variation can be accounted for 71%. meanwhile, the r² of the satisfaction variable is 0.668 or 66.8%. this indicates that the merged essence of expectation disconfirmation theory, technology acceptance model, and service interaction successfully explains the model for online learning satisfaction and e-loyalty. discussion the path coefficients identified that some of the variables are significantly affected. table 6 (appendix 6) shows that perceived usefulness has the strongest effect (0.818) on satisfaction (h5), followed by the effect of service interaction (0.446) on student perceived usefulness (h2). this result aligns with the studies conducted by amsal et al. (2020) and garcía aracil (2009) that show the positive correlation between perceived usefulness and satisfaction. these constructs explain r² value 0.710 (71%), which were accounted for by the independent variables of instructor interaction, service interaction, and system quality. system quality (0.260) positively affected the perceived usefulness (h4) and to a lesser extent, instructor interaction (0.211) significantly influenced students’ perceptions of usefulness (h1). this finding aligns with the findings of previous studies (lee, yoon and lee, 2009; mahmodi, 2017). alexandra and choirisa understanding college students' e-loyalty to online practicum courses in hospitality programmes during covid-19 journal of learning development in higher education, issue 21: september 2021 11 in contrast, information quality is not a positive influence (0.013) on perceived usefulness (h3) and satisfaction does not significantly influence student e-loyalty (h6). these results are comparable to those of a previous study conducted in poland, examining the impact of distance learning on students during the pandemic (rizun and strzelecki, 2020). further, service interaction has the strongest effect on perceived usefulness, among the other variables. the indicator of variable measurements (appendix 1, table 1) implies the importance of course service delivery and instruction (0.858), engagements (0.826), communication (0.802), and personalisation (0.772) during the learning process. moreover, the students’ perception of usefulness is a strong indicator (appendix 1, table 1) that online learning can improve the student performances (0.861). secondly, the practicum online course experiences helped the students to develop skills (0.856) and increase learning effectiveness (0.845). these indicators lead to the students’ perceptions of the usefulness of conducting practicum distance learning. the students’ expectations of online practicum courses show strong satisfaction indicators (0.885). moreover, it is shown that the students are generally satisfied with the online practicum courses they have taken (0.867). the findings show that the effective learning method emphasised by the instructor, namely quality, service interaction and system quality, influenced the students’ perceived usefulness which significantly affected satisfaction. conclusions and suggestions for further study the developed framework has excellent implications for various parties. although the study focuses on, and is of particular value for, hospitality management programmes that include online practicum course, the study results emphasise the importance of education adapting quickly to new circumstances, by introducing new curricula in response to the students’ needs, in this case addressing the issue of limited access to practicum equipment during a pandemic. in particular, at the level of education management, attention should be paid to the ways of learning. an adequate online platform is required to be able to create an interactive learning environment and responsive communication between instructors and students. alongside this, digital platforms should be designed holistically and include the additional alexandra and choirisa understanding college students' e-loyalty to online practicum courses in hospitality programmes during covid-19 journal of learning development in higher education, issue 21: september 2021 12 features such as learning analytics (ferguson, 2012). subsequently, these features used to identify the students’ usage of the platform will provide detailed data that could be used to evaluate learning behaviours and could effectively support the learning programme (song and kong, 2017). the research process used in this study is important to future researchers as a source of guidance for developing new instruments for related research. this study also potentially has practical implications for national strategies and decision making. for example, indonesia's ministry of education and vocational education department could formulate an effective strategy for vocational schools or institutions for better online practicum class implementation. such new initiatives would have the potential to lead education providers to harness digitalisation to develop learning support and identify emerging types of practice (orr, weller and farrow 2018). according to the findings, the most significant factor to influence the students' perceived usefulness is service interaction. therefore, it is recommended that the educator pays more attention to two-way communications with students and creates an active learning environment in online classes to help students engage during distance learning. finally, future research and comparative analysis would be valuable in better understanding the broader impact of the covid-19 pandemic on higher education. references al-busaidi, k. and al-shihi, h. (2010) ‘instructors' acceptance of learning management systems: a theoretical framework’, communications of the ibima, 1-10. https://doi.org/10.5171/2010.862128. alia, a. (2016) an investigation of the application of the technology acceptance model (tam) to evaluate instructors' perspectives on e-learning at kuwait university. unpublished phd thesis. dublin city university. amsal, a. a., putri, s. l., rahadi, f. and fitri, m. e. (2020) ‘perceived satisfaction and perceived usefulness of elearning: the role of interactive learning and social influence’, https://doi.org/10.5171/2010.862128 alexandra and choirisa understanding college students' e-loyalty to online practicum courses in hospitality programmes during covid-19 journal of learning development in higher education, issue 21: september 2021 13 proceedings of the 3rd international conference on educational development and quality assurance. 506. available at: https://www.atlantis-press.com/proceedings/icedqa-20/125952030 (accessed: 18 january 2021). anderson, j. c. and gerbing, d. w. (1988) ‘structural equation modelling in practice: a review’, psychological bulletin, 103, pp.411-423. https://doi.org/10.1037/00332909.103.3.411. bhattacherjee, a. (2001) ‘an empirical analysis of the antecedents of electronic commerce service continuance’, decision support systems, 32, pp.201-214. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0167-9236(01)00111-7. carmines, e. g. and zeller, r. a. (1979) reliability and validity assessment. beverly hills: sage university paper series on quantitative applications in the social sciences. https://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781412985642. cheng, y.-m. (2012) ‘effects of quality antecedents on e-learning acceptance’, internet research, 22(3), pp. 361-390. https://doi.org/10.1108/10662241211235699. cheng, y.-m. (2020) ‘students’ satisfaction and continuance intention of the cloud-based elearning system: roles of interactivity and course quality factors’, education + training, 62(9), pp.1037-1059. https://doi.org/10.1108/et-10-2019-0245. chin, w. w. (1998) ‘issues and opinion on structural equation modelling’, mis quarterly, 22(1), vii-xvi. available at: http://www.jstor.org/stable/249674 (accessed: 15 january 2021). chin, w. w. (2010) ‘how to write up and report pls analyses’, in esposito vinzi, v., chin, w., henseler, j., wang, h. (eds.) handbook of partial least squares. berlin: springer handbooks of computational statistics. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-32827-8_29. https://www.atlantis-press.com/proceedings/iced-qa-20/125952030 https://www.atlantis-press.com/proceedings/iced-qa-20/125952030 https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.103.3.411 https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.103.3.411 https://doi.org/10.1016/s0167-9236(01)00111-7 https://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781412985642 https://doi.org/10.1108/10662241211235699 https://doi.org/10.1108/et-10-2019-0245 http://www.jstor.org/stable/249674 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-32827-8_29 alexandra and choirisa understanding college students' e-loyalty to online practicum courses in hospitality programmes during covid-19 journal of learning development in higher education, issue 21: september 2021 14 chiu, c.-m., hsu, m.-h., sun, s.-y., lin, t.-c. and sun, p.-c. (2005) ‘usability, quality, value, and e-learning continuance decisions’, computers & education, 45, pp.399-416. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2004.06.001. christou, e. and chatzigeorgiou, c. (2019) ‘experiential learning through industrial placement in hospitality education: the meat in the sandwich’, journal of contemporary education theory and research, 3(2), pp.34-41. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3635961. davis, f. d. (1989) ‘perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, and user acceptance of information technology’, mis quarterly, 13(3), pp.319–340. https://doi.org/10.2307/249008. delone, w. h. and mclean, e. r. (2003). ‘the delone and mclean model of information systems success: a ten-year update’, journal of management information systems, 19(4), pp.9-30. https://doi.org/10.1080/07421222.2003.11045748. eggert, a. and ulaga, w. (2002) ‘customer perceived value: a substitute for satisfaction in business markets?’ journal of business and industrial marketing, 17(2/3), pp.107-118. https://doi.org/10.1108/08858620210419754. fathema, n., shannon, d. m. and ross, m. (2015) ‘expanding the technology acceptance model (tam) to examine faculty use of learning management systems (lmss) in higher education institutions’, journal of online learning and teaching, 11, pp.210233. ferguson, r. (2012) ‘learning analytics: drivers, developments and challenges’, international journal of technology enhanced learning, 4(5/6), pp.304–317. https://doi.org/10.1504/ijtel.2012.051816. fornell, c. and larcker, d. f. (1981) ‘evaluating structural equation models with unobservable variables and measurement error’, journal of marketing research, 18, pp.39-50. https://doi.org/10.1177/002224378101800104. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2004.06.001 https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3635961 https://doi.org/10.2307/249008 https://doi.org/10.1080/07421222.2003.11045748 https://doi.org/10.1108/08858620210419754 https://doi.org/10.1504/ijtel.2012.051816 https://doi.org/10.1177/002224378101800104 alexandra and choirisa understanding college students' e-loyalty to online practicum courses in hospitality programmes during covid-19 journal of learning development in higher education, issue 21: september 2021 15 garcía-aracil, a. (2009) ‘european graduates’ level of satisfaction with higher education’, higher education, 57(1), pp.1-21. available at: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40269103 (accessed: 20 january 2021). garg, s. and sharma, s. (2020) ‘user satisfaction and continuance intention for using etraining: a structural equation model’, vision: the journal of business perspective 24(4), pp.441-451. https://doi.org/10.1177/0972262920926827. gefen, d. and straub, d. (2005) ‘a practical guide to factorial validity using plsgraph: tutorial and annotated example’, communications of the association for information systems, 16, pp.91-109. https://doi.org/10.17705/1cais.01605. gefen, d., straub, d. and boudreau, m.-c. (2000) ‘structural equation modeling and regression: guidelines for research practice’, communications of the association for information systems, 7(7), pp.1-78. https://doi.org/10.17705/1cais.00407. ghazal, s., al-samarraie, h. and aldowah, h. (2018) ‘“i am still learning”: modeling lms critical success factors for promoting students’ experience and satisfaction in a blended learning environment’, ieee access, (6), pp.77179-77201. https://doi.org/10.1109/access.2018.2879677. giatman, m., siswati, s. and basri, i. y. (2020) ‘online learning quality control in the pandemic covid-19 era in indonesia’, journal of nonformal education, 6(2). https://doi.org/10.15294/jne.v6i2.25594. hair jr, j. h., hult, g. t., ringle, c. m. and sarstedt, m. (2016) a primer on partial least squares structural equation modeling (pls-sem). london: sage publications. hennig-thurau, t., langer, m. f. and hansen, u. (2001) ‘modeling and managing student loyalty: an approach based on the concept of relationship quality’, journal of service research, 3(4), pp.331-344. https://doi.org/10.1177/109467050134006. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40269103 https://doi.org/10.1177/0972262920926827 https://doi.org/10.17705/1cais.01605 https://doi.org/10.17705/1cais.00407 https://doi.org/10.1109/access.2018.2879677 https://doi.org/10.15294/jne.v6i2.25594 https://doi.org/10.1177/109467050134006 alexandra and choirisa understanding college students' e-loyalty to online practicum courses in hospitality programmes during covid-19 journal of learning development in higher education, issue 21: september 2021 16 huh, j. and uysal, m. (2004) ‘satisfaction with cultural/heritage sites’, journal of quality assurance in hospitality & tourism, 4(3-4), pp.177-194. https://doi.org/10.1300/j162v04n03_12. jaber, o. a. (2016) an examination of variables influencing the acceptance and usage of elearning systems in jordanian higher education institutions. unpublished phd thesis. cardiff metropolitan university. jimenez, i. c., garcía, l. c., violante, m. g. and vezzetti, e. (2020) ‘commonly used external tam variables in virtual reality, e-learning and agriculture applications: a literature review using qfd as organizing framework’, preprints 2020. https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints202010.0023.v1. junjie, z. (2017). ‘exploring the factors affecting learners' continuance intention of moocs for online collaborative learning: an extended ecm perspective’, australasian journal of educational technology, 33(5), pp.123-135. https://doi.org/10.14742/ajet.2914. kamis, a., saibon, r. a., yunus, f. n., rahim, m. b., herrera, l. m. and montenegro, p. y. (2021) ‘the smartpls analyzes approach in validity and reliability of graduate marketability instrument’, turkish journal of computer and mathematics education, 12(3), pp.829-841. https://doi.org/10.17762/turcomat.v12i3.791. keaveney, s. and young, c. (1997) ‘the student satisfaction and retention model (ssrm)’, working paper, university of colorado at denver. khalifa, m. and liu, v. (2002) ‘satisfaction with internet-based services: the role of expectations and desires’, international journal of electronic commerce, 7(2), pp.3149. https://doi.org/10.1080/10864415.2002.11044267. https://doi.org/10.1300/j162v04n03_12 https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints202010.0023.v1 https://doi.org/10.14742/ajet.2914 https://doi.org/10.17762/turcomat.v12i3.791 https://doi.org/10.1080/10864415.2002.11044267 alexandra and choirisa understanding college students' e-loyalty to online practicum courses in hospitality programmes during covid-19 journal of learning development in higher education, issue 21: september 2021 17 lee, b.-c., yoon, j.-o., and lee, i. (2009) ‘learners’ acceptance of e-learning in south korea: theories and results’, computers & education, 53(4), pp.1320-1329. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2009.06.014. mahmodi, m. (2017) ‘the analysis of the factors affecting the acceptance of e-learning in higher education’, interdisciplinary journal of virtual learning in medical sciences, 8(1). https://doi.org/10.5812/ijvlms.11158. miyazoe, t. and anderson, t. (2010) ‘empirical research on learners' perceptions: interaction equivalency theorem in blended learning’, the european journal of open distance and e-learning. available at: https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ej911753.pdf (accessed: 8 january 2021). mtebe, j. s. and raisamo, r. (2014) ‘a model for assessing learning management system success in higher education in sub‐saharan countries’, the electronic journal of information systems in developing countries, 61(7), pp.1-17. https://doi.org/10.1002/j.1681-4835.2014.tb00436.x. nunnally, j. and bernstein, i. (1994) psychometric theory. 3rd edn. new york: mcgraw-hill. oliver, r. l. (1980) ‘a cognitive model of the antecedents and consequences of satisfaction decisions’, journal of marketing research, 17(4), pp.460-469. https://doi.org/10.1177/002224378001700405. orr, d., weller, m., and farrow, r. (2018) ‘models for online, open, flexible and technology enhanced higher education across the globe – a comparative analysis’. oslo, norway: international council for open and distance education (icde). available at: https://oofat.oerhub.net/oofat/. (accessed: 5 january 2021) pham, l., limbu, y. b., bui, t. k., nguyen, h. t. and pham, h. t. (2019) ‘does e-learning service quality influence e-learning student satisfaction and loyalty? evidence from https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2009.06.014 https://doi.org/10.5812/ijvlms.11158 https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ej911753.pdf https://doi.org/10.1002/j.1681-4835.2014.tb00436.x https://doi.org/10.1177/002224378001700405 https://oofat.oerhub.net/oofat/ alexandra and choirisa understanding college students' e-loyalty to online practicum courses in hospitality programmes during covid-19 journal of learning development in higher education, issue 21: september 2021 18 vietnam’, international journal of educational technology in higher education, 16. https://doi.org/10.1186/s41239-019-0136-3. rajabalee, y. b. and santally, m. i. (2020) ‘learner satisfaction, engagement and performances in an online module: implications for institutional e-learning policy’, education and information technologies, 26, pp.2623-2656. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10639-020-10375-1. rapanta, c., botturi, l., goodyear, p., guàrdia, l. and koole, m. (2020) ‘online university teaching during and after the covid-19 crisis: refocusing teacher presence and learning activity’, postdigital science and education, 2, pp.923-945. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42438-020-00155-y. rizkalla, n. and setiadi, d. d. (2020) ‘appraising the influence of theory of consumption values on environmentally-friendly product purchase intention in indonesia’. management & marketing, xvii, pp.7-25. available at: https://www.mnmk.ro/documents/2020_1/1-7-1-20.pdf (accessed: 18 january 2021) rizun, m. and strzelecki, a. (2020) ‘students’ acceptance of the covid-19 impact on shifting higher education to distance learning in poland’, environmental research and public health, 17(18), p.6468. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph17186468. robinson, r. n., breakey, n. and ruhanen, l. (2015) ‘tourism and hospitality internships: influences on student career aspirations’, current issues in tourism, 19(6), pp.513527. https://doi.org/10.1080/13683500.2015.1020772. roca, j. c., chiu, c.-m. and martínez, f. j. (2006) ‘understanding e-learning continuance intention: an extension of the technology acceptance model’, international journal of human-computer studies, 64(8), pp.683-696. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijhcs.2006.01.003. https://doi.org/10.1186/s41239-019-0136-3 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10639-020-10375-1 https://doi.org/10.1007/s42438-020-00155-y https://www.mnmk.ro/documents/2020_1/1-7-1-20.pdf https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph17186468 https://doi.org/10.1080/13683500.2015.1020772 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijhcs.2006.01.003 alexandra and choirisa understanding college students' e-loyalty to online practicum courses in hospitality programmes during covid-19 journal of learning development in higher education, issue 21: september 2021 19 rodríguez-ardura, i. and meseguer-artola, a. (2016) ‘e-learning continuance: the impact of interactivity and the mediating role of imagery, presence and flow, information and management, 53(4), pp.504-516. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.im.2015.11.005. roldán, j. and sánchez-franco, m. (2012) ‘variance-based structural equation modeling: guidelines for using partial least squares in information systems research’, in m. mora, o. gelman, a, steenkamp, and m. raisinghani (eds.), research methodologies, innovations and philosophies, in software systems engineering and information systems, pp.193-221. https://doi.org/10.4018/978-1-4666-0179-6.ch010. salloum, s. a., alhamad, a. m., al-emran, m., monem, a. a. and shaalan, k. (2019). ‘exploring students’ acceptance of e-learning through the development of a comprehensive technology acceptance model’. ieee access, 7, pp.128445-128462. https://doi.org/10.1109/access.2019.2939467. song, s. m. (2010) e-learning: investigating students' acceptance of online learning in hospitality programs. graduate theses and dissertations, iowa state university. song, y. and kong, s.-c. (2017) ‘investigating students’ acceptance of a statistical learning platform using technology acceptance model’, journal of educational computing research, 55(6). https://doi.org/10.1177/0735633116688320. su, b., bonk, c. j., magjuka, r. j., liu, x. and lee, s.-h. (2005) ‘the importance of interaction in web-based education: a program-level case study of online mba courses’, journal of interactive online learning, 4 pp.1-19. available at: https://www.ncolr.org/jiol/issues/pdf/4.1.1.pdf (accessed: 4 january 2021). urbach, n. and ahlemann, f. (2010) ‘structural equation modelling in information systems research using partial least squares’, journal of information technology theory and application, 11(2), pp.5-40. available at: https://aisel.aisnet.org/jitta/vol11/iss2/2 (accessed: 4 january 2021). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.im.2015.11.005 https://doi.org/10.4018/978-1-4666-0179-6.ch010 https://doi.org/10.1109/access.2019.2939467 https://doi.org/10.1177/0735633116688320 https://www.ncolr.org/jiol/issues/pdf/4.1.1.pdf https://aisel.aisnet.org/jitta/vol11/iss2/2 alexandra and choirisa understanding college students' e-loyalty to online practicum courses in hospitality programmes during covid-19 journal of learning development in higher education, issue 21: september 2021 20 vinzi, v. e., trinchera, l., and amato, s. (2010) pls path modeling: from foundations to recent developments and open issues for model assessment and improvement. berlin: springer handbooks of computational statistics. wang, y.-s., wang, h.-y. and shee, d. y. (2007) ‘measuring e-learning systems success in an organizational context: scale development and validation’, computers in human behavior, 23, pp.1792-1808. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2005.10.006. williams, l. j., vandenberg, r. j. and edwards, j. r. (2009) ‘structural equation modeling in management research: a guide for improved analysis’, the academy of management annals, 3(1), pp.543–604. https://doi.org/10.1080/19416520903065683. appendix appendix 1. table 1. measurement and outer loadings. variable code indicator outer loading instructor interactions ii1 during the covid-19 situation, the online instructor was easy to get in touch with. 0.795 ii2 my practicum courses online instructor had a high level of expertise in the implementation of the online course. 0.794 ii3 during the covid-19 situation, my practicum courses online instructor gave fast feedback via a variety of methods. 0.842 ii4 my practicum courses online instructor supported and counselled me with regard to my learning processes. 0.850 ii5 my practicum courses online instructor frequently offered opinions to students. 0.844 ii6 my practicum courses online instructor frequently asked the students questions. 0.789 service interaction si1 the practicum online hospitality course has a good reputation 0.839 si2 the practicum online hospitality course makes me feel connected in interactions. 0.826 si3 the practicum online hospitality course secure personal information. 0.783 si4 the practicum online hospitality course creates a sense of personalisation. 0.772 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2005.10.006 https://doi.org/10.1080/19416520903065683 alexandra and choirisa understanding college students' e-loyalty to online practicum courses in hospitality programmes during covid-19 journal of learning development in higher education, issue 21: september 2021 21 si5 the practicum online hospitality course creates a sense of community. 0.820 si6 the practicum online hospitality course makes it easy to communicate my needs with the university. 0.802 si7 the practicum online hospitality course service and instruction will be delivered as promised. 0.858 information quality iq1 the online practicum courses hospitality course provides accurate information. 0.818 iq2 the online practicum hospitality courses provide good information and supporting the course goal. 0.870 iq3 online practicum hospitality courses provide timely information. 0.847 iq4 the online practicum hospitality courses provide relevant information (enough for me to master the course content) 0.847 iq5 the online practicum hospitality courses provide easy to understand information. 0.838 iq6 the online practicum hospitality courses provide the right level of detailed information. 0.857 iq7 the online practicum hospitality courses provide an appropriate format of information. 0.865 system quality sy1 my interaction with the site is clear and understandable for practicum courses. 0.764 sy2 i find the site easy to navigate for practicum courses. 0.776 sy3 i find the site easy to use for practicum courses. 0.816 sy4 the site has an attractive appearance for practicum courses. 0.793 sy5 the site has a fast browsing speed for practicum courses. 0.811 sy6 the design is appropriate for the type of online practicum courses site. 0.802 sy7 the site conveys a sense of competency for practicum courses. 0.835 sy8 the site creates a positive experience for myself. 0.744 perceived usefulness pu1 i think the experience of the practicum online course in my major has helped me to develop a clearer idea of my future career plans. 0.831 pu2 i think the experience of the practicum online course in my major has helped me to develop my skills in expressing myself verbally and in writing. 0.811 pu3 the experience of the practicum online course in my major has helped me develop the skills needed to get a better job. 0.856 pu4 the experience of the practicum online course in my major has helped me improve the skills i need for my career. 0.847 alexandra and choirisa understanding college students' e-loyalty to online practicum courses in hospitality programmes during covid-19 journal of learning development in higher education, issue 21: september 2021 22 pu5 the experience of the practicum online course in my major has helped me strengthen my basic hospitality practicum skills. 0.836 pu6 the experience of the practicum online course in my major has helped me increase my overall knowledge of hospitality operations. 0.843 pu7 using practicum online learning services can improve my learning performance. 0.861 pu8 using practicum courses, online learning services can increase my learning effectiveness. 0.845 pu9 i find the practicum courses online learning service to be useful to me. 0.884 consumer satisfaction tfl1 my experience with online practicum courses during covid-19 situation was better than i expected. 0.856 tfl2 the learning experience in online practicum courses was better than i expected. 0.870 tfl3 overall, most of my expectations with the online practicum courses during the covid-19 situation were confirmed. 0.885 tfl4 the online practicum program on our campus compares favorably to other institutions around the country. 0.839 tfl5 i am generally satisfied with the quality of the online practicum course(s) in our department. 0.867 e-loyalty sl1 i am likely to retake an online practicum course from the current hospitality program. 0.908 sl2 i am likely to take another online practicum course that is provided by this hospitality program. 0.929 sl3 i will recommend other people to take practicum online courses from this hospitality program. 0.909 sl4 i will say positive things to other people about the services provided at this hospitality program. 0.741 alexandra and choirisa understanding college students' e-loyalty to online practicum courses in hospitality programmes during covid-19 journal of learning development in higher education, issue 21: september 2021 23 appendix 2. table 2. demographics of the subjects (n=309). appendix 3. table 3. convergent validity and reliability. no.of indicators cronbach’s alpha cr ave instructur information 6 0.902 0.925 0.672 service interaction 7 0.915 0.932 0.664 alexandra and choirisa understanding college students' e-loyalty to online practicum courses in hospitality programmes during covid-19 journal of learning development in higher education, issue 21: september 2021 24 information quality 7 0.935 0.948 0.721 system quality 8 0.915 0.931 0.629 perceived usefulness 9 0.950 0.958 0.716 satisfaction 5 0.915 0.936 0.746 e-loyalty 4 0.903 0.928 0.765 appendix 4, table 4. discriminant validity. fornell-larcker criterion variables satisfa ction eloyalt y informa tion quality instruct or informa tion perceiv ed useful ness service interac tion syst em cs 0.864 e-loyalty -0.036 0.875 information quality 0.768 -0.032 0.849 instructor information 0.755 -0.038 0.741 0.820 perceived usefulness 0.817 0.018 0.726 0.714 0.846 service interaction 0.794 0.003 0.809 0.738 0.805 0.815 system quality 0.715 -0.010 0.766 0.631 0.738 0.750 0.793 appendix 5. table 5. cross loading. instructor information service interaction information quality system quality perceived usefulness cs e-loyalty ii1 0.795 0.591 0.553 0.504 0.597 0.620 -0.024 ii2 0.794 0.618 0.637 0.544 0.559 0.621 -0.018 ii3 0.842 0.624 0.630 0.531 0.606 0.654 -0.078 ii4 0.850 0.629 0.653 0.521 0.652 0.640 0.005 ii5 0.844 0.607 0.619 0.535 0.587 0.628 -0.045 ii6 0.789 0.556 0.544 0.468 0.491 0.538 -0.026 si1 0.678 0.839 0.762 0.670 0.684 0.704 -0.013 si2 0.537 0.826 0.632 0.607 0.632 0.647 0.043 si3 0.612 0.783 0.572 0.563 0.597 0.575 -0.006 si4 0.550 0.772 0.616 0.593 0.621 0.558 0.021 si5 0.577 0.820 0.638 0.579 0.683 0.675 -0.049 si6 0.568 0.802 0.618 0.604 0.639 0.639 0.001 alexandra and choirisa understanding college students' e-loyalty to online practicum courses in hospitality programmes during covid-19 journal of learning development in higher education, issue 21: september 2021 25 si7 0.677 0.858 0.755 0.654 0.723 0.715 0.022 iq1 0.602 0.651 0.818 0.638 0.574 0.649 -0.083 iq2 0.703 0.679 0.870 0.674 0.624 0.648 0.006 iq3 0.617 0.666 0.847 0.624 0.600 0.647 -0.038 iq4 0.608 0.704 0.847 0.654 0.632 0.671 0.003 iq5 0.585 0.686 0.838 0.612 0.630 0.685 -0.011 iq6 0.629 0.689 0.857 0.663 0.611 0.621 -0.044 iq7 0.656 0.726 0.865 0.684 0.640 0.643 -0.027 sy1 0.436 0.512 0.556 0.764 0.574 0.543 0.012 sy2 0.477 0.551 0.574 0.776 0.527 0.541 0.004 sy3 0.490 0.590 0.610 0.816 0.579 0.547 0.040 sy4 0.501 0.569 0.596 0.793 0.574 0.538 -0.008 sy5 0.461 0.558 0.564 0.811 0.579 0.540 -0.007 sy6 0.482 0.608 0.604 0.802 0.592 0.569 -0.078 sy7 0.536 0.704 0.670 0.835 0.640 0.635 -0.020 sy8 0.612 0.646 0.671 0.744 0.604 0.611 -0.005 pu1 0.590 0.697 0.606 0.619 0.831 0.676 0.003 pu2 0.602 0.650 0.567 0.595 0.811 0.649 -0.041 pu3 0.606 0.678 0.625 0.638 0.856 0.705 0.001 pu4 0.587 0.691 0.614 0.622 0.847 0.695 0.028 pu5 0.614 0.701 0.671 0.592 0.836 0.687 0.034 pu6 0.611 0.662 0.612 0.601 0.843 0.668 0.035 pu7 0.619 0.694 0.617 0.662 0.861 0.708 0.006 pu8 0.576 0.662 0.586 0.618 0.845 0.695 0.017 pu9 0.634 0.696 0.632 0.669 0.884 0.737 0.047 tfl1 0.622 0.648 0.600 0.567 0.698 0.856 -0.015 tfl2 0.579 0.684 0.632 0.639 0.703 0.870 -0.054 tfl3 0.663 0.705 0.686 0.634 0.710 0.885 -0.059 tfl4 0.679 0.688 0.684 0.612 0.690 0.839 -0.015 tfl5 0.715 0.704 0.713 0.635 0.727 0.867 -0.011 sl1 -0.029 -0.005 -0.051 -0.007 0.003 -0.034 0.908 sl2 -0.049 -0.002 -0.023 -0.012 0.013 -0.034 0.929 sl3 -0.032 0.011 -0.023 -0.010 0.029 -0.035 0.909 sl4 -0.001 0.009 0.007 -0.007 0.018 -0.009 0.741 appendix 6. table 6. path coefficients. beta standard deviation t values p values result instructor information -> perceived usefulness 0.211 0.059 3.633 0.000 accepted service interaction -> perceived usefulness 0.446 0.071 6.184 0.000 accepted information quality -> perceived usefulness 0.013 0.076 0.062 0.951 rejected alexandra and choirisa understanding college students' e-loyalty to online practicum courses in hospitality programmes during covid-19 journal of learning development in higher education, issue 21: september 2021 26 system quality -> perceived usefulness 0.260 0.079 3.394 0.001 accepted perceived usefulness -> satisfaction 0.818 0.026 31.833 0.000 accepted satisfaction -> e-loyalty 0.037 0.076 0.470 0.638 rejected author details yoanita alexandra is a senior lecturer in hospitality at universitas multimedia nusantara, tangerang, indonesia. her present teaching and research interests are housekeeping management, food and beverage management, business entrepreneurship, and service marketing and e-commerce. septi fahmi choirisa is a senior lecturer at universitas multimedia nusantara, tangerang, indonesia. she conducts research on hospitality management, destination marketing, sustainable destination, and digital transformation. understanding college students' e-loyalty to online practicum courses in hospitality programmes during covid-19 abstract introduction literature review instructor interaction service interaction information quality system quality satisfaction e-loyalty research methods results and analysis discussion conclusions and suggestions for further study references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special issue 22: compendium of innovative practice october 2021 ________________________________________________________________________ blended learning opportunities: skills for working with primary sources zoë enstone york st. john university, uk keywords: foundation year; blended learning; interdisciplinary; information literacy; object-based learning; primary sources; transition to university; academic skills. the challenge the liberal arts foundation year is an interdisciplinary programme that includes integrated academic skills development throughout. the complexities of both widening participation and interdisciplinary provision are well documented (e.g., warren, 2002; jones and lau, 2010; park and son, 2010; enstone and newman, 2015; abegglen, burns and sinfield, 2019) and the transition to university for foundation year learners can be especially difficult (chivers, 2019). to support this transitional process and to develop key information literacy skills, the programme incorporates source skills for both critical or secondary reading in relation to working with novels, data, maps, historic documents, and other primary sources students might encounter in their varied subjects. this exploration enables the development of practical skills and critical approaches through a wider consideration of the nature of academic study, addressing aspects such as access and the focus of these resources in terms of inequalities and social issues in production, transmission, and reception in the past and present. the value of this content draws on the well-documented importance of information literacy within higher education provision (shapiro and hughes, 1996; johnston and webber, 2003; wang, 2007). the programme also explores and challenges pre-conceived notions of the boundaries of subject disciplines, an issue important to the development of interdisciplinary provision (brewer, 1999). this provision includes a session at york explore archive, to consider the implications and use of archival sources, building on well-established connections between the approaches enstone blended learning opportunities: skills for working with primary sources journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: october 2021 2 involved in effective information literacy provision and the hands-on nature of archives (carini, 2016; jarosz and kutay, 2017), drawing on broader approaches from object-based learning (chatterjee et al., 2015) and the disciplinary complexities of material culture (hicks and beaudry, 2010). this year’s restrictions meant that we were unable to visit the archive in person which necessitated a reconsideration of how these key approaches and issues could be supported in a blended delivery, an issue faced by other practitioners in the delivery of object-based learning (sheehy et al., 2021). the key issue was the need to engage students with interdisciplinary approaches to object-based learning and information literacy when the objects themselves and a discursive in-person format were not available. without this intervention, students would have missed a key developmental element of information literacy, which is central to their academic advancement. the response there are many complex issues to consider in the shift to online provision for information literacy and skills development (tang and chaw, 2016; weightman et al., 2017; boyle et al., 2019; fola-adebayo, 2019; nikou and aavakare, 2021), and we were keen to ensure that there was a combination of individual and group, synchronous and asynchronous and, as part of a blended delivery model, integrated on-campus and online, sessions as well as a supporting website (https://zenstone9.wixsite.com/primarysources). one of the immediate advantages was flexible pathways within the resources; the website included a short video for each subject area explaining what students might explore within the discipline to dispel misconceptions and prompt engagement with the range of training available. this was interwoven with a choice of on-campus workshops in critical skills for different source types. this built to a virtual visit to the archives, again facilitated through the website and was framed through content on the nature of archives and a task identifying aspects of archives in their subject area. the scope of the website meant that each student was able to find their own route within the content through the utility of the design of the interactive materials. the second part of the visit was an exploration of materials provided and contextualised by york explore archive and the collaborative creation of a resource for the students to provide their own responses to the materials and reflect on the contributions of others. this was run at a designated time to facilitate time for questions and build a sense of group engagement with the content, but there was also scope for students to explore different aspects of the archival material and website beyond https://zenstone9.wixsite.com/primarysources enstone blended learning opportunities: skills for working with primary sources journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: october 2021 3 this. students responded really positively to the virtual visit (and the content more generally), with comments on the visit noting that it was enjoyable and that it prompted further consideration of the content and materials beyond the class. recommendations the shift to including online materials epitomised a blended learning approach, both in relation to the traditional definition of blended learning as a combination of the physical and digital (allan, 2007), but also in the blend of discipline areas and in the combination of synchronous and asynchronous components. this has raised key questions about what can be taken forward from this for future iterations and, more broadly, the way in which this raises pedagogic and disciplinary questions, tensions, and possibilities. it also offered opportunities to consider the physicality of object-based learning and how this could be best considered in a virtual form. one of the key benefits of this project was that it enabled a more collaborative approach to the development and support of students and had unintended benefits in prompting a dialogue between disciplines. for instance, whereas in a subject like history or literature ‘primary’ was used to refer to a source that was first-hand in nature, for example a novel, photograph, etc., in geography, primary data was collected for a specific study and when used elsewhere would be considered secondary. these distinctions and discussions about disciplinary divergences, terminology, and approaches helped to ensure that resources and teaching were tailored to support students navigating these issues and would provide a good model for use elsewhere. the creation of a set of asynchronous digital resources meant much greater flexibility for students; although this was a blended provision and the on-campus and live sections were crucial, being able to suggest that students explored their own routes and subject interests allowed for a collaborative approach to individualised pathways and bespoke skills development. for colleagues navigating the complexities of interdisciplinary provision, as well as the issues specific to wp, level 3, and subject-specific information literacy, a blended model of this nature might prove useful in navigating some of these diverse needs and concerns. enstone blended learning opportunities: skills for working with primary sources journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: october 2021 4 references abegglen, s., burns, t. and sinfield, s. (2019) 'it’s learning development, jim – but not as we know it: academic literacies in third space', journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15, november, pp.1-19. https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.v0i15.500. allan, b. (2007) blended learning: tools for teaching and training. london: facet. https://doi.org/10.29085/9781856047845, boyle, j., ramsay, s. and struan, a. (2019) ‘the academic writing skills programme: a model for technology-enhanced, blended delivery of an academic writing programme’, journal of university teaching & learning practice, 16(4), pp.1-12. brewer, g. d. (1999) ‘the challenges of interdisciplinarity’, policy sciences, 32, pp.327337. https://doi.org/10.1023/a:1004706019826. carini, p. (2016) 'information literacy for archives and special collections: defining outcomes', portal: libraries and the academy, 16(1), pp.191-206. https://doi.org/10.1353/pla.2016.0006. chatterjee, h. j., hannan, l. and thomson, l. (2015) ‘an introduction to object-based learning and multisensory engagement’, in chatterjee, h. j. and hannan, l. (eds.) engaging the senses: object-based learning in higher education. london: routledge, pp.1-20. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315579641. chivers, e. (2019) 'the trials and tribulations of transition into foundation year study', journal of the foundation year network, 2, pp.69-78. enstone, z. and newman, m. (2015) ‘forming firm foundations: integrating interdisciplinarity in the arts and humanities’, in fraser, l and mas giralt, r. (eds.) it’s all adult education: proceedings of 44th annual conference. leeds: lifelong learning centre, university of leeds, in conjunction with the standing conference on teaching and research in the education of adults, pp.153-159. https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.v0i15.500 https://doi.org/10.29085/9781856047845 https://doi.org/10.29085/9781856047845 https://doi.org/10.1023/a:1004706019826 https://doi.org/10.1353/pla.2016.0006 https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315579641 enstone blended learning opportunities: skills for working with primary sources journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: october 2021 5 fola-adebayo, t. j. (2019) ‘perceptions of undergraduates on the relationship between exposure to blended learning and online critical literacy skills’, reading & writing, 10(1), pp.1-9. https://doi.org/10.4102/rw.v10i1.200. hicks, d. and beaudry, m. c. (2010) 'introduction: material culture studies: a reactionary view', in hicks, d. and beaudry, m. c. (eds.) the oxford handbook of material culture studies. oxford: oxford university press, pp.1-24. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199218714.013.0001. jarosz, e. e. and kutay, s. (2017) 'guided resource inquiries: integrating archives into course learning and information literacy objectives', communications in information literacy, 11(1), pp.204-220. https://doi.org/10.15760/comminfolit.2017.11.1.42. johnston, b. and webber, s. (2003) ‘information literacy in higher education: a review and case study’, studies in higher education, 28(3), pp.335-352. https://doi.org/10.1080/03075070309295. jones, n. and lau, a. m. s. (2010) ‘blending learning: widening participation in higher education’, innovations in education and teaching international, 47(4), pp.405-416. https://doi.org/10.1080/14703297.2010.518424. nikou, s., aavakare, m. (2021) ‘an assessment of the interplay between literacy and digital technology in higher education’, education and information technologies, 26, pp.3893–3915. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10639-021-10451-0. park, j.-y. and son, j.-b. (2010) ‘transitioning toward transdisciplinary learning in a multidisciplinary environment’, international journal of pedagogies and learning, 6(1), pp.82-93. https://doi.org/10.5172/ijpl.6.1.82. shapiro, j. j. and hughes, s. k. (1996) 'information literacy as a liberal art: enlightenment proposals for a new curriculum', educom review, 31(2), np. sheehy, b., sandstrom, m. and heeg, j. (2021) ‘coming together through object-based learning in a pandemic’, the councilor: a journal of the social studies, 82(1), np. https://doi.org/10.4102/rw.v10i1.200 https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199218714.013.0001 https://doi.org/10.15760/comminfolit.2017.11.1.42 https://doi.org/10.1080/03075070309295 https://doi.org/10.1080/14703297.2010.518424 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10639-021-10451-0 https://doi.org/10.5172/ijpl.6.1.82 enstone blended learning opportunities: skills for working with primary sources journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: october 2021 6 tang, c. m. and chaw, l. y. (2016) ‘digital literacy: a prerequisite for effective learning in a blended learning environment?’, electronic journal of e-learning, 14(1), pp.54-65. wang, l. (2007) ‘sociocultural learning theories and information literacy teaching activities in higher education’, reference & user services quarterly, 47(2), pp.149-158. https://doi.org/10.5860/rusq.47n2.149. warren, d. (2002) ‘curriculum design in a context of widening participation in higher education’, arts and humanities in higher education, 1(1), pp.85-99. https://doi.org/10.1177/1474022202001001007. weightman, a., farnell, d., morris, d., strange, h. and hallam, g. (2017) 'a systematic review of information literacy programs in higher education: effects of face-to-face, online, and blended formats on student skills and views', evidence based library and information practice, 12(3), pp.20-55. https://doi.org/10.18438/b86w90. author details zoë enstone is a senior lecturer in liberal arts at york st. john university and senior fellow of the higher education academy. she leads the liberal arts programme and is also learning and teaching lead for the school of humanities. https://doi.org/10.5860/rusq.47n2.149 https://doi.org/10.1177/1474022202001001007 https://doi.org/10.18438/b86w90 blended learning opportunities: skills for working with primary sources the challenge the response recommendations references author details literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 13: april 2018 an examination of developmental assets and academic performance in higher education sport students martin jones university of exeter, uk abstract the purpose of this research was to explore the magnitude and direction of the relationship between developmental assets (subcategories and domain levels) and academic achievement in british students. based on the existing theory, i hypothesised that total asset score, individual asset groups (internal and external assets), and the eight asset subcategories would have a moderate to a large positive relationship with academic achievement. 232 participants were recruited from a second-year compulsory research methods module for undergraduate sport and exercise science students at a uk based university. the participants completed the developmental assets profile (dap) at the beginning of the course and their final module grade was recorded after the course had finished. pearson’s correlation between assets and grade score revealed several significant relationships. the strongest subcategory correlation was between commitment to learning and grade score. the strongest domain level correlation was between internal assets and grade score. the current study provides evidence that developmental assets are positively associated with grade score in university students; however, the size of the relationship is smaller than previously suggested. keywords: thriving; positive youth development; positive psychology. jones an examination of developmental assets and academic performance in higher education journal of learning development in higher education, issue 13: april 2018 2 introduction thriving is a developmental concept that signifies a healthy change process linking a young person with an adult status (lerner et al., 2003). thriving captures a dynamic developmental process characterised by a positive positioning toward life and focus on adaptive goals (benson and scales, 2009). in its adjective form, thriving refers to an orientation toward life that reflects the tenets of the thriving process (bundick et al., 2010). benson and scales (2009, p.85) stated that ‘thriving represents the dynamic and bidirectional interplay of a young person intrinsically animated and energized by discovering his or her specialness, and the developmental contexts (people, places) that know, affirm, celebrate, encourage, and guide its expression’. thriving encapsulates an active developmental process that may be characterised by a positive orientation toward life that is focused on adaptive goals beyond survival (benson and scales, 2009). therefore, adults typically label young people as a ‘thriver’ if he or she is on the path to an adult status marked by making culturally valued contributions to self (for example, doing well in academia), others, and institutions (lerner et al., 2003). thriving is a central concept of positive youth development (i.e. the positive vision of young people as resources rather than problems). from the positive youth development perspective, thriving incorporates the absence of problem behaviours (e.g. drug abuse) and pathology (e.g. mental illness) with indicators of healthy growth (e.g. academic achievement: scales et al., 2000). benson (1993) first used thriving to refer to a set of ‘vital signs’ in adolescence. in this way, benson advocated thriving as an outcome of positive development (i.e. a thriving orientation), rather than a process of positive development (cf. bundick et al., 2010). in the context of higher education, one salient indicator of thriving is the academic grade achieved by the student. other researchers have also used academic performance as an indicator of thriving (for example, scales et al., 2000) and have suggested that thriving occurs because of successful individual-context interaction (for example, lerner et al. 2001). in the context of secondary education, weissberg et al. (2003) suggested that several strategies correspond with thriving. for example, building students’ socialemotional learning, providing frequent opportunities for student participation in community service, fostering caring, supportive relationships among students and teachers, and consistently rewarding positive social, health, and academic behaviour. these types of behaviour are broadly reflected in a model of youth development called the 40 developmental assets. jones an examination of developmental assets and academic performance in higher education journal of learning development in higher education, issue 13: april 2018 3 the 40 developmental assets framework (benson, 1997) is a relevant theoretical theory to study correlates of thriving in higher education because evidence consistently links high levels of assets with positive developmental outcomes, including achievement in education. theoretically, young people who experience high levels of ‘developmental assets’ should achieve higher grades. the 40 developmental assets are subcategorised into external assets (support, empowerment, boundaries and expectations, and constructive use of time) and internal assets (commitment to learning, positive values, social competencies and positive identity). theokas et al. (2005) examined the relationship between the 40 developmental assets and thriving in adolescents by taking the specific asset subcategories and the domain level groupings of assets (internal and external) and examining whether assets contributed unique variance to a thriving index. the thriving index encompassed several thriving indicators, for instance academic success, the value of diversity, and maintenance of physical health, to mirror the assortment of components that might describe thriving. individuals with higher scores on the thriving index had a broader selection of thriving indicators compared to people with lower overall scores. results revealed that external assets account for approximately 28% of the variance in the thriving index and addition of internal assets contributed a further 10% to thriving. the current study extends theokas et al.’s work by considering the relationship between the specific asset subcategories and the domain level groupings of assets and thriving in higher education. however, rather than using the thriving index, i have focused on one specific thriving indicator, namely academic success. i believe that assessing asset categories rather than broader asset domains is the most appropriate approach when predicting thriving because asset subcategories will likely provide practitioners, for instance higher education professionals, with more precise information about how to intervene to facilitate thriving. to this end, the purpose of this research was to explore the magnitude and direction of the relationship between developmental assets (subcategories and domain levels) and academic achievement in british students. based on the existing theory, i hypothesised that total asset score, individual asset groups (internal and external assets), and the eight asset subcategories, would have a moderate to a large positive relationship with academic achievement. jones an examination of developmental assets and academic performance in higher education journal of learning development in higher education, issue 13: april 2018 4 method participants and sampling following ethical approval, i recruited 232 participants from a second-year compulsory research methods module for undergraduate sport and exercise science students at a uk based university. the purpose of the study and outcomes of the study were fully explained to the participants before they consented to take part. feedback was not offered to students because analysis was completed after the sample had graduated from their course of study. the sample comprised 140 males (mage = 20.53 years, sd = 0.956) and 73 females (mage = 20.343 years, sd = 0.722). this sample was chosen because the purpose of the study was to explore the magnitude and direction of the relationship between developmental assets and academic achievement in british students and these students were all british and studying at a british higher education institution. i employed a prospective research design to examine whether developmental assets (collected at the beginning of the term) were associated with the final grade (collected at the end of the term following the author’s university’s internal and external quality assurance procedures). i administered the questionnaires in the introduction lecture (week 1) to the module and participants were told that the data would not be analysed until after the module had finished. i did not contribute to teaching or marking on the module. measures dap (developmental assets profile) the developmental assets profile (dap: the search institute, 2005) is a 58-item selfreport instrument to assess the adolescents’ asset experiences. the dap measures young people’s reported experience of eight categories of developmental assets. the dap comprises four external assets: support, empowerment, boundaries and expectations, and constructive use of time, and four internal assets: commitment to learning, positive values, social competencies, and positive identity. the dap does not measure each of the 40 assets per se but rather provides an asset score, with the higher score reflected, a greater volume of assets. the dap results based on asset categories are highly correlated with the flagship a&b survey of individual assets, providing evidence of convergent validity (scales, 2011). the dap was chosen over the longer a&b survey to reduce the burden on the participants. i adapted some of the items that were originally intended to measure school-based assets by changing school to university or teacher to lecturer in the question. jones an examination of developmental assets and academic performance in higher education journal of learning development in higher education, issue 13: april 2018 5 participants ranked items on a four-point likert scale (0 = not at all or rarely, to 3 = extremely or almost always). i calculated subscales scores by taking a mean for each asset subscale and multiplying this score by 10 to provide a score that ranged between 0 and 30. next, i calculated an internal asset and external asset score by averaging the scale scores for the four internal asset categories and four external assets scores respectively. lastly, i calculated a total asset score by adding together the internal and external assets scores. grade the final grade represents a percentage that the student was awarded in the module. the grade assessment point for the module was a 2000 word research proposal. several members of staff were assigned to mark the research proposals, which were then moderated by the module leader. the marks and feedback were then checked by an independent external examiner and ratified through institutional quality assurance procedures before data analysis commenced. data analysis plan given the number of tests performed (n = 11), i elected to set the alpha level for significance at p ≤ .005 (1-tailed) and to calculate bayes factors (using jasp 0.8.0.0). bf+0 quantifies the evidence for the one-sided alternative hypothesis that the population correlation is higher than zero. bf0+ quantifies the evidence for the null hypothesis relative to the one-sided alternative hypothesis that the population correlation is higher than zero. i used jeffery’s (1961) classification that bayes factors less than one indicated no evidence, between one and three represented anecdotal evidence, between three and ten indicated moderate evidence, and bayes factors greater than ten indicating strong evidence. i performed zero-order pearson’s (1-tailed) correlations with bias-corrected bootstrap confidence intervals based on 10,000 bootstrapped resamples to estimate the sizes of the relationships between asset subcategories, asset groups, and total assets score and grade score. jones an examination of developmental assets and academic performance in higher education journal of learning development in higher education, issue 13: april 2018 6 results data screening and preliminary analyses i checked for accuracy of data input, violations of assumptions of normality, outliers, and for missing data. little’s missing completely at random (mcar) test was not significant at the .05 level (2 = 878.20, df = 909 p = .763) and missing data accounted for 0.6% ( 1%) of the total data set and was there likely mcar, so i replaced missing data with the expectation-maximisation algorithm. i removed six mature students, as they were not from our population of interest. i also excluded 13 participants who did not submit work for summative assessment and therefore received no grade. i did not collect any follow-up data to determine why these students did not provide work. further data screening revealed four cases that violated assumptions regarding univariate normality (z-score > ± 3.29) and one multivariate outlier, using a p < .001 criterion for mahalanobis d2. i removed these outliers due to the extreme scores that indicated incorrect completion of the questionnaires that is marking 1 for all items without reading the item stem. the final sample comprised 213 participants for the main analysis. i calculated estimates of internal reliability (cronbach’s α) for all dap subscales, internal asset, external assets and a total asset score. results revealed that several of the dap asset groups had unacceptably low internal consistency scores (< .700: nunnally and bernstein, 1994). therefore it is important to note that the relationships that we reported were affected by measurement error (see table 1, appendix). estimation of the relationship table 1 shows the results of the eleven separate pearson’s zero-order correlations. total asset score was positively correlated with grade score (r = .173 [.047, .296], n =213, p = .006, bf+0 = 4.071). the data are 4.071 times (moderate evidence) more likely under the one-sided alternative hypothesis that the population correlation is greater than zero than the null hypothesis that the population correlation is not greater than zero. when analysing the domain level assets, the strongest correlate was internal assets (r = .180 [.049, .309], n =213, p =.004, bf+0 = 5.349). the data are 5.349 times (moderate evidence) more likely under the one-sided alternative hypothesis that the population correlation is greater than zero than the null hypothesis that the population correlation is not greater than zero. finally external assets was also positively correlated with grade score (r = .138 [.008, .266], n =213, p = .022, bf+0 = 1.256). the data are 1.256 times (anecdotal evidence) jones an examination of developmental assets and academic performance in higher education journal of learning development in higher education, issue 13: april 2018 7 more likely under the one-sided alternative hypothesis that the population correlation is greater than zero than the null hypothesis that the population correlation is not greater than zero. only internal assets were statistically significant at the p ≤ .005 (1-tailed) level. the strongest subcategory correlation was between commitment to learning and grade score (r = .193[.064, .316.], n =213, p = .002, bf+0 = 8.871). the data are 8.871 times (moderate evidence) more likely under the one-sided alternative hypothesis that the population correlation is greater than zero than the null hypothesis that the population correlation is not greater than zero. none of the other subcategories were significant at the p ≤ .005 (1-tailed). only the correlation between social competencies and academic grade exceeded a bayes factor of three but was not significant at the p ≤ .005 (1-tailed) level (r = .171[.034, .306], n =213, p = .006, bf+0 = 3.752). both positive values (r = .066 [−.068, .306], n =213, p = .170, bf0+ = 4.467) and empowerment (r = .079 [−. 044, .202], n =213, p = .125, bf0+ = 3.456) bayes factors (bf0+) between three and ten showed moderate evidence for the null hypothesis relative to the one-sided alternative hypothesis that the population correlation is higher than zero. discussion the purpose of this research was to explore the magnitude and direction of the relationship between developmental assets (subcategories and domain levels) and academic achievement in british students. based on the existing theory, i hypothesised that total asset score, individual asset groups (internal and external assets), and the eight asset subcategories would have a moderate to a large positive relationship with academic achievement. this article provides evidence for the contribution of developmental assets on (academic) thriving in higher education students. however, the relationship between assets and academic thriving is not as simple as previous researchers might suggest. the relationships between total asset score and grade score, domain level asset groups and grade score, and asset subcategories and grade score, revealed mostly small relationships. this result is interesting given the magnitude of the predictive ability of developmental assets on a thriving index, which comprises several indicators of thriving. for example, scales et al. (2000) reported that developmental assets predicted up to 54% of the variability of a thriving index. given that i only measured one indicator of thriving, jones an examination of developmental assets and academic performance in higher education journal of learning development in higher education, issue 13: april 2018 8 specifically grade score, it is understandable that the magnitude of relationship might not be as large as previous researchers, for instance scales et al. (2000). however, it is worth noting that the relationships are small and it is worthwhile examining why some of the subcategories were not meaningfully related to grade score. it is not surprising that commitment to learning was significantly associated with grade score given the context of thriving in the current study. given the claims of previous researchers that assets have a cumulative effect on thriving, it was intriguing to see that no other assets subcategories were significant (at the p < .005 level) and the bayes factors revealed only anecdotal to moderate evidence, the one-sided alternative hypothesis in favor of the null hypothesis. therefore, in the current sample, developmental assets do not appear to be as important as other researchers have suggested. an important conclusion by leffert et al. (1998) was that it is improbable that assets work in isolation. leffert and colleagues (leffert et al., 1998) stated that some asset subcategories might function as forerunners for other asset subcategories. similarly, theokas et al. (2005) predicted that the internal and external asset categories would interact to contribute to the prediction of thriving in adolescents. the results of the current study provide preliminary evidence that domain level developmental assets (internal and external) do not operate in isolation, and that a model of academic thriving based on the accumulation of assets may over-simplify how developmental assets contribute to academic success. researchers and practitioners may wish to consider hypothetically relevant moderating variables, which could influence the strength and direction of the relationship between domain level asset groups, asset subcategories, and thriving. from a practical perspective, the current findings do not support the contention that practitioners should strive to promote all assets to augment thriving. based on the current results practitioners may wish to research ways in which they can foster a commitment to learning, for example, supportive autonomy teaching (reeve, 2015). based on the 95% confidence intervals that crossed zero, practitioners should also consider the possibility that negative relationships between assets and academic success could exist and therefore they should be wary of applying a one size fits all approach to developmental assets. specifically, some possible negative relationships (assuming that causality exists) could reveal that some asset subcategories could be inversely related to academic thriving. before practitioners attempt to develop commitment to learning, i encourage jones an examination of developmental assets and academic performance in higher education journal of learning development in higher education, issue 13: april 2018 9 replication of the present study to see whether independent researchers find similar results. it is important to remember that the cross-sectional nature of the current study renders inferences of causality impossible. researchers may wish to design studies that involved the manipulation of specific assets over time to examine cause and effect relationships. the current results may have also been influenced by the imprecision of measures and measurement error. for example, the dap was originally intended for use with schoolchildren. in the current study, i changed ‘school’ in the questions to ‘university’ so that it could be used by higher education students. there could be implications and issues that influence the interpretation of results, specifically, school-based assets may be qualitatively different to higher education. just because they are a site of education does not mean they represent the same type of developmental context for young people. future researchers may wish to test the validity of the dap with older participants to ensure that the measurement model is robust. the dap does not directly measure each asset, specicifcally the dap does not provide a score for each of the 40 assets. the dap might not capture assets that the current participants possessed, and some unobserved assets might have been significant correlates of academic achievement. the grade recorded might not be an accurate indicator of academic thriving in the current study. research methods are undoubtedly an important part of the science curriculum. however, some students could have thrived in more practical modules compared with the relatively abstract nature of research methods. therefore, researchers may wish to consider an index of academic achievement that takes into consideration a range of modules across time (and possibly transcends one academic stage, for instance post-16 education results and higher education results). conclusion in closing, the purpose of this research was to explore the magnitude and direction of the relationship between developmental assets (subcategories and domain levels) and academic achievement in british students. i found that internal asset domain group was correlated with grade score; however, only the commitment to learning subcategory was significantly correlated with grade score. several 95% cis crossed zero which could reveal potential negative relationships, and the bayes factors revealed that the results provided jones an examination of developmental assets and academic performance in higher education journal of learning development in higher education, issue 13: april 2018 10 most anecdotal evidence for the one-sided alternative hypothesis versus the null hypothesis. therefore, in the current sample, developmental assets do not appear to be as important as previous researchers have suggested. practitioners and researchers may wish to replicate and expand upon these findings to establish practical ways of stimulating thriving in adolescents. references benson, p.l. (1993) the troubled journey: a portrait of 6th-12th grade youth. minneapolis, mn: the search institute. benson, p.l. (1997) all kids are our kids: what communities must do to raise caring and responsible children and adolescents. san francisco: jossey-bass. benson, p.l. and scales, p.c. (2009) ‘the definition and preliminary measurement of thriving in adolescence’, the journal of positive psychology, 4(1), pp. 85-104. bundick, m.j., yeager, d.s., king, p.e. and damon, w. (2010) ‘thriving across the life span’, in lerner, r.m., lamb, m.e., freund, a.m. and overton, w.f. (eds.) handbook of life-span development, vol. 1: cognition, biology and methods. hoboken, nj: john wiley and sons, pp. 882-923. jeffreys, h. (1961) theory of probability (3rd edn.). oxford: oxford university press. leffert, n., benson, p.l., scales, p.c., sharma, a.r., drake, d.r. and blyth, d.a. (1998) ‘developmental assets: measurement and prediction of risk behaviors among adolescents’, applied developmental science, 2(4), pp. 209-230. lerner, r.m., dowling, e.m. and anderson, p.m. (2003) ‘positive youth development: thriving as the basis of personhood and civil society’, applied developmental science, 7(3), pp. 172-180. jones an examination of developmental assets and academic performance in higher education journal of learning development in higher education, issue 13: april 2018 11 lerner, r.m., lerner, j.v., de stefanis, i. and apfel, a. (2001) ‘understanding developmental systems in adolescence: implications for methodological strategies, data analytic approaches, and training’, journal of adolescent research, 16(1), pp. 9-27. nunnally, j.c. and bernstein, i. (1994) psychometric theory. new york, ny: mcgraw-hill. reeve, j. (2015) ‘giving and summoning autonomy support in hierarchical relationships’, social and personality psychology compass, 9(8), pp. 406-418. scales, p.c. (2011) ‘youth developmental assets in global perspective: results from international adaptations of the developmental assets profile’, child indicators research, 4(4), pp. 619-645. scales, p.c., benson, p.l., leffert, n. and blyth, d.a. (2000) ‘contribution of developmental assets to the prediction of thriving among adolescents’, applied developmental science, 4(1), pp. 27-46. theokas, c., almerigi, j.b., lerner, r.m., dowling, e.m., benson, p.l., scales, p.c. and von eye, a. (2005) conceptualizing and modeling individual and ecological asset components of thriving in early adolescence’, the journal of early adolescence, 25(1), pp. 113-143. the search institute (2005) developmental assets profile user manual. minneapolis, mn: search institute. weissberg, r.p., kumpfer, k.l. and seligman, m.e. (2003) ‘prevention that works for children and youth: an introduction, american psychological association, 58(6-7), p. 425-432. author details martin i. jones is a senior lecturer in sport and exercise psychology at the university of exeter, uk. jones an examination of developmental assets and academic performance in higher education journal of learning development in higher education, issue 13: april 2018 12 appendix table 1. descriptive statistics, correlations, internal reliability estimates and standard multiple regression of assets groups on grade percentage. measures mean sd α rxy [llci,ulci] p bf+0 bf0+ y grade score 53.730 12.618 x1 support 21.385 4.679 .736 .094 [−.037, .222] .086 0.396 2.526 x2 empowerment 21.343 4.387 .665 .079 [−. 044, .202] .125 0.289 3.456 x3 boundaries and expect. 20.386 4.179 .727 .135 [−.001, .266] .025 1.132 0.884 x4 constructive use of time 12.700 4.726 .305 .134 [−.007, .273] .026 1.098 0.911 x5 commitment to learning 19.360 4.194 .730 .193[.064, .316] .002 8.871 0.113 x6 positive values 18.601 3.834 .722 .066 [−.068, .198] .170 0.224 4.467 x7 social competencies 19.300 3.780 .65 .171 [.034, .306] .006 3.752 0.267 x8 positive identity 17.723 4.474 .758 .151 [.017, .280] .014 1.855 0.539 x9 internal assets 18.747 3.303 .825 .180 [.049, .309] .004 5.349 0.187 x10 external assets 18.953 3.585 .808 .138 [.008, .266] .022 1.256 0.796 x11 total assets 37.701 6.303 .804 .173 [.047, .296] .006 4.071 0.246 note. pearson’s r (1-tailed). bca bootstrap cis based on 10,000 resamples. bayes factors based on stretch prior width of 1. an examination of developmental assets and academic performance in higher education sport students abstract introduction thriving is a developmental concept that signifies a healthy change process linking a young person with an adult status (lerner et al., 2003). thriving captures a dynamic developmental process characterised by a positive positioning toward life and fo... in the context of higher education, one salient indicator of thriving is the academic grade achieved by the student. other researchers have also used academic performance as an indicator of thriving (for example, scales et al., 2000) and have suggeste... the 40 developmental assets framework (benson, 1997) is a relevant theoretical theory to study correlates of thriving in higher education because evidence consistently links high levels of assets with positive developmental outcomes, including achieve... the 40 developmental assets are subcategorised into external assets (support, empowerment, boundaries and expectations, and constructive use of time) and internal assets (commitment to learning, positive values, social competencies and positive identi... method participants and sampling dap (developmental assets profile) grade data analysis plan results data screening and preliminary analyses discussion conclusion in closing, the purpose of this research was to explore the magnitude and direction of the relationship between developmental assets (subcategories and domain levels) and academic achievement in british students. i found that internal asset domain gro... references author details martin i. jones is a senior lecturer in sport and exercise psychology at the university of exeter, uk. appendix journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 21: september 2021 ________________________________________________________________________ task-specific short powerpointstm for effective off-campus learning in diagnostic radiography james elliott canterbury christ church university, uk abstract this case study details the implementation of task-specific powerpointtm presentations for an undergraduate diagnostic radiography module in response to the first covid-19 lockdown in the united kingdom. a series of short, focussed learning materials was created over a two-month period to alleviate student anxieties and improve assessment literacy concerning evidence-based practice and research skills. alternative file sizes were offered with optional embedded narration for timeor internet-poor students. statistical tracking on the blackboard virtual learning environment showed high levels of student interaction, with positive qualitative feedback and satisfactory impact upon assessment outcomes. a correlation between a lack of content usage and poor academic results could be inferred, with three students failing one or both assessments through reduced or absent use. despite the benefits of weekly additional content, it was not possible to ascertain whether students viewed/listened to downloaded files. furthermore, instructional presentations may encourage surface learning rather than a deeper comprehension. recommendations include using video streaming platforms to provide meta-data on student interaction alongside periodic formative assessments for confirmation of comprehension. lastly, this research recognises remote learning’s potential to alienate students who prefer in-person teaching in a more sociable environment. keywords: remote learning; assessment literacy; covid-19; engagement. introduction the coronavirus (covid-19) has had a devastating impact on national mental health (pierce et al., 2020) and financial performance (office of national statistics, 2020), and elliott task-specific short powerpointstm for effective off-campus learning in diagnostic radiography journal of learning development in higher education, issue 21: september 2021 2 has resulted in substantial loss of life in the united kingdom. students in higher education underwent unprecedented changes to their learning experiences during the first national lockdown (march-july 2020). changes have included cancellation of in-person teaching, mass transition to online delivery (watermeyer et al., 2021), and closure of university facilities and student accommodation. a variety of complex consequences have arisen worldwide, with students reporting difficult home learning environments (equipment or internet reliability) (mpungose, 2020; katz, jordan and ognyanova, 2021), competing responsibilities (childcare or home duties), and increased reliance upon the virtual learning environment (vle) instead of in-person interaction (almaiah, al-khasawneh and althunibat, 2020). this case study will focus upon the provision of short powerpointtm (microsoft) presentations for asynchronous learning in response to the challenges listed above. the use of powerpointtm as an instructional tool has been highlighted by baker et al. (2018) as being ubiquitous across university teaching. however, application of this learning resource to address timeor internet-poor home environments has seen little investigation. the context for this study concerns 33 students in their second year of bsc (hons) diagnostic radiography at canterbury christ church university within the using evidence module. this module’s learning objectives included the development of research skills, critical analysis, and the appreciation of evidence-based practice. the module had two assessments: analysis of a scientific article using a critique framework and a research proposal concerning a radiography-related project. with the advent of the lockdown, 15 weeks before the submission of the assessments, the author developed a series of short task-specific narrated powerpointtm presentations. the intent was to respond to the challenging home environments and discombobulated tutor-student communication caused by covid-19 disruptions. the intervention sought to reduce assessment anxieties and to develop assessment literacy. quantitative and qualitative feedback for the module was obtained and shall be presented herein. literature review the using evidence module relied upon blended learning, defined as ‘face-to-face instruction with computer-mediated instruction’ (graham, 2006, p.5). the application of elliott task-specific short powerpointstm for effective off-campus learning in diagnostic radiography journal of learning development in higher education, issue 21: september 2021 3 blended learning within undergraduate diagnostic radiography is common within academic literature. topics such as clinical governance (messer and griffiths, 2007), patient care (bleiker, knapp and frampton, 2011), and radiation physics instrumentation (macdonaldhill and warren-forward, 2015) have all advocated blended learning as opposed to purely didactic teaching. shanahan (2007) shares an affinity to this case study by developing a dedicated subsection of the blackboard vle with additional activities resulting in substantial improvement in student information literacy. the creation of online resources for increased student engagement is supported by salmon (2013) who suggest that ‘etivities’ also promote learner-centred, task or problem-based approaches to online learning. such efforts relate to the notions of deep and strategic learning (biggs, 1987; biggs and tang, 2011) where comprehension of concepts and fulfilment of assessment objectives are paramount for student success. a defining feature of the additional learning content was the application of powerpointtm presentations. lorimer and hilliard (2009) provide a comparable example of online narrated powerpointtm slides being deployed within undergraduate diagnostic radiography, with the primary benefit being flexibility of both time and place of student engagement. more recently, anecdotal references are made to its use within radiography interpretation training or assessment studies (winter and lineham, 2014; mclaughlin et al., 2018). despite the aforementioned studies, there is a lack of recent academic literature regarding the use and suitability of powerpointtm within undergraduate diagnostic radiography education. methodology content creation for this intervention, 13 short (7-16 slides) powerpointtm presentations were created over a two-month period to cater for different aspects of the using evidence module. presentations were task-specific, with the aim of improving assessment literacy in three distinct areas; they delivered specific guidance for both critique and research proposal assessments, and in relation to the module’s relevant literature. content included the explanation of key terminologies related to research design and critical evaluation of journal articles. wherever possible, examples were taken from current radiography literature and explicit reference was made to the module assessment brief. presentations elliott task-specific short powerpointstm for effective off-campus learning in diagnostic radiography journal of learning development in higher education, issue 21: september 2021 4 were provided with and without embedded narration of each slide, providing alternative file sizes (~350 kb to ~26 mb) for asynchronous offline viewing and/or listening. additional tutor support was available via one-to-one online meetings throughout the lockdown period. dissemination presentations were uploaded onto the blackboard vle within a dedicated area named ‘using evidence covid-19 learning resources’. the blackboard ally feature allowed alternative formats for viewing on web browsers, e-books, and mobile devices as well as audio conversion of text (blackboard ally, 2020). emails were sent to all students weekly to announce new powerpointtm presentations and to list previously uploaded material. students were also offered the opportunity to request new presentation content, although none acted upon this. data collection quantitative data was gained from two areas: student interaction with blackboard materials and assessment marks for both assignments. ethical approval for data collection was not required as its purpose was classified under evaluation and audit of module delivery. the statistical tracking feature on blackboard was applied to collect data on student download patterns for the powerpointtm presentations, allowing both individual and group information on access frequency and dates. descriptive statistics included access rate per day, percentage of students accessing content, and access frequency per month (up until the submission date). assessment marks were compared to individual student interactions with the blackboard content for correlation analysis. qualitative feedback was sought by two methods: a formal end of module evaluation questionnaire primarily reliant upon a likert scale of agreement, and an informal student representative report generated by student discussion. relevant statistical information was extracted from the former, whilst the latter was searched for specific comments related to the implementation of the short powerpointtm presentations. elliott task-specific short powerpointstm for effective off-campus learning in diagnostic radiography journal of learning development in higher education, issue 21: september 2021 5 results results indicate a positive student opinion of the short powerpointtm presentations with 100% of students completing the end of module evaluation selecting strongly agree (n=9) or agree (n= 5) for online materials enhancing their learning. free-text responses were also overwhelmingly positive with specific comments for ease of online and independent learning directly as a result of the intervention (table 1). download rates were higher for topics concerning relevant literature for the using evidence module, with a slight correlation between greater number of slides and frequency of downloads (table 2). the greatest quantity of downloads occurred in the month preceding the submission dates for both assessments (figure 1). there were high levels of student interaction across all presentations (≥91% of students), with only one student lacking interaction altogether. marks across the student cohort were variable, although predominantly high (figure 2). average marks and pass rates for both assessments were slightly higher when compared to the previous delivery of the module. three students failed one or both assessments, one of whom did not access the new learning content at all. table 1. qualitative feedback for short powerpointtm intervention during march 2020 lockdown. a selection of module evaluation and student representative report feedback “the mini-lectures were fantastic. they only included the relevant details and made all the content simplistic, which was very useful through the online learning portion of the year.” “his topic specific mini lectures regarding the essays were short and to the point, they were very helpful and enabled you to work independently and feel in control of your own learning.” “this module was challenging but nevertheless interesting, more especially due to covid-19 as we were off campus. the presentations posted on blackboard were extremely helpful and it was a lot of help having the lecturer on the other side of an email when i needed help.” elliott task-specific short powerpointstm for effective off-campus learning in diagnostic radiography journal of learning development in higher education, issue 21: september 2021 6 table 2. quantitative data for student interaction on blackboard virtual learning environment. figure 1. presentation downloads per month. powerpoint presentation title number of slides number of times downloaded average download rate per day percentage (%) of students using content which ebooks to use for using evidence? 16 268 1.62 97 which journals to use for using evidence? 14 258 1.63 97 which 'other' literature to use for using evidence? 13 245 1.59 97 how to use the critique framework 12 182 1.26 97 critique example of using a quantitative critique framework on an 14 162 1.25 94 critique qualitative critique framework example 10 150 1.28 91 critique examples of 'poor' scientific rigour 9 148 1.26 94 research proposal title and introduction 7 200 1.32 97 research proposal providing rationale within your introduction 7 194 1.26 97 research proposal writing the literature review 8 180 1.30 97 research proposal writing your aim 7 147 1.08 91 research proposal writing your methodology 8 149 1.08 91 research proposal ethical considerations 9 151 1.29 94 elliott task-specific short powerpointstm for effective off-campus learning in diagnostic radiography journal of learning development in higher education, issue 21: september 2021 7 figure 2. overview of marks from using evidence module. discussion it was hypothesised by the author that the covid-19 learning environment may lead to students adopting a surface learning approach in a non-strategic manner, principally due to an interruption in teacher-student interaction. biggs and tang (2011) outline that students who learn in this way focus upon the assessment as an obstacle rather than a development opportunity, learning enough to pass at the minimum requirements. nonstrategic learners are disorganised, lack adherence to the assessment criteria and ignore underlying teacher preferences (biggs, 1987). the intervention aimed to encourage deep and strategic learning by addressing the main areas of assessment concern: key terminologies, assessment structure, and topic-specific content. explanations and examples of evidence-based practice within diagnostic radiography sought to illustrate the application of theory into clinical practice. the education of research-led practice at an undergraduate level is considered pivotal to the progression of the profession (society of radiographers, 2016) and therefore an essential area for pedagogic investigation. it was hoped that by providing regular new content during the lockdown period (marchjuly, 2020) the teaching intervention would improve assessment literacy and facilitate greater comprehension. however, the format of taking students step-by-step through the elliott task-specific short powerpointstm for effective off-campus learning in diagnostic radiography journal of learning development in higher education, issue 21: september 2021 8 assessments may not have fostered deep learning because of the instructional manner of teaching used. students learnt how to pass the assessment, demonstrating assessment literacy, but perhaps did not learn the meaning or theory behind concepts associated with deep learning (beattie, collins and mcinnes, 1997). this poses the greatest limitation on this case study, as the available results fail to explore whether students developed deeper learning as a result of the intervention. nevertheless, pass rates were high with students exhibiting effective critical analysis and use of relevant literature to support their claims. furthermore, failures were positively correlated to poor or absent interaction with the new content. future research may serve to establish a link between task-specific presentations and deep learning. for instance, deliveries of the module could integrate regular formative assessments or interactive content on the vle to better track students’ understanding. results demonstrated high levels of repeated downloads for the new content (n=151-268) with consistent interaction across four months (figure 1). the qualitative feedback fails to explain download habits, but access rates followed a predictable upward trend leading up to the submission dates. the presentations were provided in a file format rather than a streaming video to allow students to download and view at a time convenient to them. this strategy also aimed to overcome internet reliability issues, using small file sizes for quick download times and low internet burdens. a limitation of this approach was the inability to ascertain whether students used (viewed/listened to) the downloaded presentations. alternative delivery methods such as blackboard collaborate are available and may assist in tracking student interaction, quantifying time spent viewing the content, and therefore providing meta-data on content usage by students. the first covid-19 national lockdown imposed tremendous challenges for both students and academic staff. the additional content deployed by the author used the principle of inclusive practice to remediate potential areas of learning deficiency. regular new online content may have provided sustained interest in the module as well as increased tutor presence (albeit remotely) in a time of separation and remoteness. despite these efforts it must be recognised that remote learning may alienate portions of the student population. previous research concerning mature diagnostic radiography students has highlighted a preference for in-person teaching due to unfamiliarity with information technologies (williams and decker, 2009). furthermore, students may feel isolated during distance learning, experiencing a lack of community and the associated informal cues from elliott task-specific short powerpointstm for effective off-campus learning in diagnostic radiography journal of learning development in higher education, issue 21: september 2021 9 teachers and pupils alike (croft, dalton and grant, 2015). educators in higher education must not underestimate the importance of personal interactions with students who are not sufficiently digitally literate or prefer more sociable learning environments. conclusion the challenges covid-19 has posed upon higher education have been considerable, with wide-scale transition to online teaching. the teaching intervention presented within this case study involved the creation of short task-specific powerpointtm presentations to increase assessment literacy and reduce student anxiety. whilst simplistic in its approach, the presentations were designed to be both small in file size and time investment for quick and direct assessment guidance. both qualitative and quantitative data provide evidence of a positive impact, with high levels of interaction and assessment pass rates. limitations include the inability to determine whether students viewed the presentations once downloaded or if they comprehended the content. furthermore, it is not possible to ascertain from the available results whether the intervention alone instigated student attainment of learning objectives, although an absence of engagement led to the failure of assessments by one student. a cause for concern was whether the task-specific presentations fostered a surface-learning approach due to the instructional teaching strategy employed. future implementation of similar learning content could employ video streaming alternatives with statistical tracking and concurrent testing or activities for regular assessment of student understanding. implications for teaching practice include using additional targeted online content where required, while accepting the continued importance of in-person, sociable teaching. references almaiah, m. a., al-khasawneh, a. and althunibat, a. (2020) ‘exploring the critical challenges and factors influencing the e-learning system usage during covid-19 pandemic’, education and information technologies, pp.1–20. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10639-020-10219-y https://doi.org/10.1007/s10639-020-10219-y elliott task-specific short powerpointstm for effective off-campus learning in diagnostic radiography journal of learning development in higher education, issue 21: september 2021 10 baker, j. p., goodboy, a. k., bowman, n. d. and wright, a. a. (2018) ‘does teaching with powerpoint increase students’ learning? a meta-analysis’, computers & education, 126, pp.376-387. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2018.08.003. beattie, v., collins, b. and mcinnes, b. (1997) ‘deep and surface learning: a simple or simplistic dichotomy?’, accounting education, 6(1), pp.1-12. https://doi.org/10.1080/096392897331587. blackboard ally (2020) making course content accessible. available at: https://ally.ac/courses.html#courses-alternative-formats-general (accessed: 21 september 2020). bleiker, j., knapp, k. m. and frampton, i. (2011) ‘teaching patient care to students: a blended learning approach in radiography education’, radiography, 17(3), pp.235240. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.radi.2011.01.002. biggs, j. (1987) student approaches to learning and studying. hawthorn: australian council for educational research. biggs, j. and tang, c. (2011) teaching for quality learning at university: what the student does. 4th edn. maidenhead: mcgraw-hill education. croft, n., dalton, a. and grant, m. (2015) ‘overcoming isolation in distance learning: building a learning community through time and space’, journal for education in the built environment, 5(1), pp.27-64. https://doi.org/10.11120/jebe.2010.05010027. graham, c. r. (2006) ‘blended learning systems: definition, current trends and future directions’, in bonk, c. j. and graham, c. r. (eds.), the handbook of blended learning: global perspectives, local designs. san francisco: pfeiffer, pp.3–21. katz, v. s., jordan, a. b. and ognyanova, k. (2021) ‘digital inequality, faculty communication, and remote learning experiences during the covid-19 pandemic: a survey of u.s. undergraduates’, plos one, 16(2), e0246641. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0246641. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2018.08.003 https://doi.org/10.1080/096392897331587 https://ally.ac/courses.html#courses-alternative-formats-general https://doi.org/10.1016/j.radi.2011.01.002 https://doi.org/10.11120/jebe.2010.05010027 https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0246641 elliott task-specific short powerpointstm for effective off-campus learning in diagnostic radiography journal of learning development in higher education, issue 21: september 2021 11 lorimer, j. and hilliard, a. (2009) ‘incorporating learning technologies into undergraduate radiography education’, radiography, 15(3), pp.214-219. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.radi.2009.02.003. macdonald-hill, j. l. and warren-forward, h. m. (2015) ‘feasibility study into the use of online instrumentation courses for medical radiation scientists’, radiography, 21(3), pp.282-287. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.radi.2015.02.004. mclaughlin, l., woznitza, n., cairns, a., mcfadden, s. l., bond, r., hughes, c. m., elsayed, a., finlay, d. and mcconnell, j. (2018) ‘digital training platform for interpreting radiographic images of the chest’, radiography, 24(2), pp.159-164. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.radi.2017.12.010. messer, s. and griffiths, m. (2007) ‘an online clinical governance learning package for student radiographers’, radiography, 13(2), pp.95-102. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.radi.2006.01.003. mpungose, c. b. (2020) ‘emergent transition from face-to-face to online learning in a south african university in the context of the coronavirus pandemic’, humanities & social sciences communications, 7, pp.1-9. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-02000603-x. office for national statistics (2020) coronavirus and the impact on output in the uk economy: november 2020. available at: https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/grossdomesticproductgdp/articles/coronavirusandt heimpactonoutputintheukeconomy/november2020 (accessed: 25 january 2021). pierce, m., hope, h., ford, t., hatch, s., hotopf, m., john, a., kontopantelis, e., webb, r., wessely, s., mcmanus, s. and abel, k. m. (2020) ‘mental health before and during the covid-19 pandemic: a longitudinal probability sample survey of the uk population’, the lancet psychiatry, 7(10), pp.883-892. https://doi.org/10.1016/s2215-0366(20)30308-4. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.radi.2009.02.003 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.radi.2015.02.004 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.radi.2017.12.010 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.radi.2006.01.003 https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-020-00603-x https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-020-00603-x https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/grossdomesticproductgdp/articles/coronavirusandtheimpactonoutputintheukeconomy/november2020 https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/grossdomesticproductgdp/articles/coronavirusandtheimpactonoutputintheukeconomy/november2020 https://doi.org/10.1016/s2215-0366(20)30308-4 elliott task-specific short powerpointstm for effective off-campus learning in diagnostic radiography journal of learning development in higher education, issue 21: september 2021 12 salmon, g. (2013) e-tivities: the key to active online learning. 2nd edn. new york: routledge. shanahan, m. c. (2007) ‘information literacy skills of undergraduate medical radiation students’, radiography, 13(3), pp.187-196. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.radi.2006.01.012. society of radiographers (2016) research strategy 2016-2021. available at: https://www.sor.org/learning-advice/professional-body-guidance-andpublications/documents-and-publications/policy-guidance-documentlibrary/research-strategy-2016-2021 (accessed: 22 march 2021). watermeyer, r., crick, t., knight, c. and goodall, j. (2021) ‘covid-19 and digital disruption in uk universities: afflictions and affordances of emergency online migration’, higher education, 81, pp.623-641. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-02000561-y. williams, m. and decker, s. (2009) ‘mature students’ perspectives of studying radiography’, radiography, 15(1), pp.77-85. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.radi.2008.01.002. winter, p. d. and lineham, m. j. (2014) ‘bernstein's theory of pedagogic discourse as a theoretical framework for educators studying student radiographers' interpretation of normality vs. abnormality’, radiography, 20(1), pp.58-64. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.radi.2013.09.004. author details james elliott is a lecturer in diagnostic radiography at canterbury christ church university and senior radiographer at maidstone hospital nuclear medicine department, kent. he has a passion for teaching research skills, evidence-based practice and academic writing. outside of radiography he enjoys research within nuclear medicine, forensic science, and archaeology. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.radi.2006.01.012 https://www.sor.org/learning-advice/professional-body-guidance-and-publications/documents-and-publications/policy-guidance-document-library/research-strategy-2016-2021 https://www.sor.org/learning-advice/professional-body-guidance-and-publications/documents-and-publications/policy-guidance-document-library/research-strategy-2016-2021 https://www.sor.org/learning-advice/professional-body-guidance-and-publications/documents-and-publications/policy-guidance-document-library/research-strategy-2016-2021 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-020-00561-y https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-020-00561-y https://doi.org/10.1016/j.radi.2008.01.002 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.radi.2013.09.004 elliott task-specific short powerpointstm for effective off-campus learning in diagnostic radiography journal of learning development in higher education, issue 21: september 2021 13 acknowledgements i would like to offer my thanks to michelle crowther for providing the inspiration for this case study. task-specific short powerpointstm for effective off-campus learning in diagnostic radiography abstract introduction literature review methodology content creation dissemination data collection results discussion conclusion references author details acknowledgements journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 15: november 2019 pedagogical applications of academic literacies theory: a reflection and case study john wrigglesworth sheffield hallam university, uk abstract the development of the academic literacies approach has provided learning developers with a range of powerful tools to help all students to progress through higher education. twenty years ago, lea and street’s (1998) report on student writing initiated a debate which encouraged the transformation of writing pedagogy in uk higher education. the goal of the transformation was, and remains, to develop an education system which is expanding, inclusive and accessible. this paper focuses on the use of the meaning-making resources that students bring to their learning journey and the ones they encounter throughout their study. it outlines the documentation that enacts the rules that govern university practice at task, module, course and institutional level. the paper draws on academic literacies tools to help to clear away misunderstandings about students’ use of language. it then outlines lea and street’s (1998) classification of institutional approaches to the pedagogical challenges of improving student writing. the case study describes an optional credit-bearing introduction to academic language module on a uk degree course. by conducting a series of analytical tasks, the undergraduates who elected to take the module developed their use of aspects of academic writing including genre, argument and intertextuality. students were assessed by analysing their own assessment scripts from other disciplinary modules. the academic writing module was evaluated in ways that could evidence recommendations for change at multiple levels. the methods of evaluation follow practices regarded as standard in many university quality processes but were used to transform provision along inclusive, academic literacies lines. wrigglesworth pedagogical applications of academic literacies theory: a reflection and case study journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 2 keywords: academic literacies; course design; genre pedagogy; learning objectives; student writing introduction an academic literacies approach to student writing offers a powerful set of analytic tools to learning developers working in complex higher education institutions (heis). many of the tools are grounded in an understanding of language and how students use it to create meaning in their assessments. thus, the use of language and its meaning-making potential can be seen as linking individual students, disciplinary practices, and the policies and procedures of the university. lea and street (1998) opened up a space for a wide-ranging response to student writing, covering student-, disciplinaryand institutionalpractices. to overcome the practical difficulties of weighing the impact of such an influential paper, this reflection and case study broadly restricts itself to citing the contributions of two substantial collections of academic literacies research relating to student pedagogy: jones et al. (1999) and lillis et al. (2016). as of 2019, these collections bookend a debate which has benefited from these and many other voices. the aim of this paper is to offer an interpretation and application of the academic literacies toolbox that may be of use to learning developers. three applications of the academic literacies approach are foregrounded in the opening part of the paper. first, sociolinguistic tools are used to question the notion of ‘student deficit’. second, philosophical tools are used to challenge the idea of the ‘transparency of language’. third, lea and street’s (1998) analysis of student writing pedagogy (skills, socialisation and academic literacies) is summarised, showing how the 1998 paper asked pedagogical questions rather than supplying answers. the second part of this paper exemplifies one interpretation the academic literacies approach in a case study of an academic language module for undergraduates at a university in the uk. the case is unusual as it shows how a module leader applied the academic literacies toolbox to the iterations of the credit-bearing module, one that is within the quality structures of the university. the paper concludes with some reflections on the evaluation of academic literacies interventions and the continued need for a multi-level institutional response to student writing. wrigglesworth pedagogical applications of academic literacies theory: a reflection and case study journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 3 concerns about student writing lea and street’s (1998) paper developed from research commissioned by the economic and social research council which addressed concerns about falling literacy standards and critically reviewed models of writing pedagogies in universities (lea and street, 1997). the paper looked at student writing in the round, allowing the authors to distinguish between the meaning-making resources that a student brings to their university experience and the academic practices governing those experiences. several of the authorities which govern meaning-making in uk heis are shown in table 1. an understanding of the authorities and the associated documentation is important for learning developers as the documentation articulates the rules that lecturers are bound by when assessing courses and marking student scripts. such an understanding of the system, which is often assumed rather than articulated, helps to enable the transformative power of the academic literacies toolbox. at the heart of the system is the individual student and their assessed scripts, which are shown in the first row. a student’s script is assessed against the features that the module leader hopes will be learned, as expressed through learning objectives and marking criteria in the module handbook. the module leader constructs these learning objectives to align with the course learning objectives. this alignment process is governed in turn by the quality assurance policies of the institution, the work of the academic registrar, and the recommendations of the quality assurance agency for higher education (qaa). the scope and coverage of a particular course is governed by subject benchmarks. this dialogue of jointly governed meaningmaking is the constructive alignment described by biggs and tang (2011). these quality processes are translated into student-facing documents such as the module descriptors and assessment tasks (shown in the top half of table 1). when all this works in harmony, we have a meaning-making regime which places the student script firmly in a ‘productive student learning process’, involving learning-oriented assessment tasks, the students’ evaluative expertise and engagement with feedback (carless, 2015, p.27). table 1. levels of authority governing a student’s assessment task. level of authority documentation author student assessment scripts student wrigglesworth pedagogical applications of academic literacies theory: a reflection and case study journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 4 presentations marker explanation of assessment feedback on assessment marker lecturer lecture (handouts) reading list lecturer assessment tasks task description marking criteria module leader module module descriptor module leader course definitive document [e.g. ba english] course leader department programme specification [e.g. english] head of department university academic board undergraduate regulations (inc. assessment regulations) academic registrar university academic board academic quality framework academic registrar subject level [english] subject benchmark statement (2014) review groups from discipline quality assurance agency for higher education (qaa) the revised uk quality code for higher education (2018) chief executive department of education government policy secretary of state for education the institutional system shown in table 1 is complex and rigid but transformable. each level has its own meaning-making language, its documentation and review processes and they are interlinked; however, there can be institutional misunderstandings within and between the levels, rather than a seamless constructive alignment. the key point for a learning developer with a transformative agenda is to identify the level at which a particular change needs to take place. this paper discusses writing pedagogy but emphasises that pedagogical changes need to be aligned with changes elsewhere, for example, in the assessment tasks on a module. learning developers occasion positive transformation through their pedagogy when they understand, transform and re-align to the system. lea and street (1997; 1998 p.160) drew on an ‘ethnographic style’ approach to understand academic literacies within educational systems. they found that a rich description of student writing could productively include the documentation of the various governors in the system, student scripts, and lecturer feedback on those scripts. such an all embracing linguistic ethnography has developed recently through the various contributions of academic literacies researchers (in particular lillis, 2008). the ethnographic style allows the individual student’s voice to be heard through the collection of rich qualitative data. wrigglesworth pedagogical applications of academic literacies theory: a reflection and case study journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 5 the individual student and their relationship with the governing authorities are at the heart of many, if not all, academic literacies’ studies. students bring their own meanings to university courses, meanings which have developed in a personal biography forged in the various cultures of the widening group of people who participate in higher education. student voices, their transformations and the variety of disciplinary contexts are part of the move to literacies rather than a single idea of literacy. academic literacies researchers strive to provide not only the methodological tools for understanding and transforming the education system and the various academic disciplines, but also tools for understanding and transforming the student, while allowing their voice to be respected and included. three areas that impede a productive and equal dialogue between student and institution are discussed below: first, the deficit model; second, the transparency of language model are challenged; then, third, lea and street’s critique of dominant student writing pedagogies is outlined. non-standard or unexpected use of language does not indicate a deficit in academic ability or potential. this argument was crystalized by new literacy studies and is a key academic literacies analytical tool. drawing on a range of sociolinguistic studies, gee (2015) demonstrates that language usage follows social enculturation and that prioritizing one usage over another is merely an exercise of social power. gee argues that we ought to explicate any theory which gives one social group an advantage over another and so gives normative force to his anti-elitist demolition of claims that some cultures are inherently deficit. as gee (2015, p.23) says, ‘theory and meaning are moral matters’. it is probably fair to say that few learning developers would argue that certain students are irreversibly held back by ‘deficits’ in their social or ethnic background. individual students may well, however, have something to learn about variations in how other social groups interpret instances of language use. lea and street (1998, p.159) put it like this: ‘one explanation for problems in student writing might be the gaps between academic staff expectations and student interpretations of what is involved in student writing’. these gaps in expectations are explored in the research collected in jones et al. (1999). hermerschmidt (1999) encapsulates the point when she states, ‘there appears to be a need to explore the relationship between the teaching practices that feel natural and familiar to teachers and lecturers and the practices that students have learned and that wrigglesworth pedagogical applications of academic literacies theory: a reflection and case study journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 6 feel natural and familiar to them’ (1999, p.5). jones (1999, p.150) makes the argument through describing how language works: in construing language as ‘transparent’, it has effectively denied its workings. so in other words, when language is working well, it is invisible. conversely, however, when language becomes ‘visible’, it is an object of censure, marking a deficiency in the individual using it. additionally, the association of language use in academic discourse with rationality and logic can have the effect of marking out such a student with a deficiency in logic and rationality also. scott (1999) agrees that not only do students have the problem of language being seen as transparent, but the individual (the student) is also seen as being deficient. she advocates a ‘conception of the writer as a social individual … an individual as in society, and of society as in the individual’ (scott, 1999, p.172). highlighting the dangers of individuals bringing their own social understandings to a communicative situation, lea (1999) evidences a distinction between two approaches that a student may take to an assessment: (1) the reformulation approach, where students make sense of a text by replicating its meaning and authority; and (2) the challenge text, where they bring in their own experience, meanings and understandings to writing the text. both reformulation and challenge involve the student doing the required reading and assuming they are constructing the required text. however, the challenge text runs the risk of being heard as incoherent and unstructured by the academic marker (who is listening out for the institution’s meanings). lillis (1999), in her case study of ten ‘non-traditional’ students and their struggle with making sense of the institutional conventions of student writing, accuses heis directly: ‘i argue that confusion is so all pervasive a dimension of their experience as a group of ‘non-traditional’ students in higher education that it points to an institutional practice of mystery’ (lillis, 1999, p.127). for lillis, the problem lies with the institution and – once the deficit and the transparency models have been exposed – the academics have a responsibility to listen to all students and make their institutional processes clearer to them. this brings academic literacies practitioners to the issue of whether or not the pedagogy of student writing can be a catalyst for institutional transformation. table 2. models of student writing in higher education (lea and street, 1998). study skills student deficit  'fix it'; atomised skills; surface language, grammar, spelling. wrigglesworth pedagogical applications of academic literacies theory: a reflection and case study journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 7  sources: behavioural and experimental psychology; programmed learning. student writing as technical and instrumental skill. academic socialisation acculturation of students into academic discourse  inducting students into new 'culture'; focus on orientation to learning and interpretation of learning tasks, e.g. 'deep', 'surface', 'strategic' learning; homogeneous 'culture', lack of focus on institutional practices, change and power.  sources: social psychology; anthropology; constructivism student writing as transparent medium of representation. academic literacies student's negotiation of conflicting literacy practices  literacies as social practices; at level of epistemology and identities; institutions as sites of/constituted in discourse and power; variety of communicative repertoire, e.g. genres, fields, disciplines; switching with regard to linguistic practices, social meanings and identities.  sources: 'new literacy studies'; critical discourse analysis; systemic functional linguistics; cultural anthropology. student writing as meaning-making and contested. the three-level classification of student writing pedagogy in higher education (see table 2) is perhaps the most influential analytic tool to emerge from lea and street (1998). their classification is presented as a hierarchy: the study skills approach is subsumed into academic socialization; academic socialization is subsumed into academic literacies. only an academic literacies approach fully supports a practices approach that is ideologically informed. at the first level, appropriate instruction about grammar and atomised skills has some value in describing problems in student writing as a technical and instrumental skill; however, the value of this instruction is limited as it does not explain the choices required in using grammar or those for employing the skills needed to thrive in the new academic culture. at the second level, acculturation into a culture that is unfamiliar to a student is of value when making these grammar and skills choices; however, the value of acculturation instruction is limited if the student brings to that instruction a set of meanings which mislead or cloud the understanding of the required academic practice. the academic socialization approach, in lea and street's (1998) classification, is defined by an understanding of meaning as transparent; transparent meaning suggests that every student should understand the meaning of a text, or even a particular term, in the same unclouded way. applied linguists have had no difficulty debunking this view of meaning. academic literacies specialists have offered many examples showing that meaning is specific to the wrigglesworth pedagogical applications of academic literacies theory: a reflection and case study journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 8 context of particular academic disciplines including terms like 'argument', 'structure', and 'clear'. the difference between the meanings that a student brings to a term (how students use language at home, for example) and the meaning that a history lecturer brings to the same term (as used in a piece of essay feedback) may be as different again from how an engineer uses it (in a case study). the differences are invisible within each group of users but may cause (damaging) breakdowns in communication between them when communicating writing and assessment expectations. to identify these differences and breakdowns in meaning, lea and street (1998) adopt the term 'contested', a term which itself means different things to different people. an academic literacies approach to pedagogy would expand on the study skills and socialization approaches to teach student writing as being both about meaning-making and contested. it would also challenge meaning-making at all levels of table 1. pedagogical implications the academic literacies approach takes meaning-making to be contingent on social practice. looking for pedagogical implications, lillis (2006) asks: ‘what are the design implications for pedagogy?’. she calls attention to task design and two forms of dialogue. dialogue has a descriptive form where dialogue is unquestioned and clear to all (a given); it also has an ideal form which is something cloudy and requires some struggle to understand. the struggle is made possible by a social tension between cultural claims of monologism (one truth, voice, identity, authority) and dialogism (many truths, voices, identities, discourses). once learning developers have task design and dialogue in their conceptual toolbox, they open up a pedagogical space for helping students with their own writing: feedback opens into talkback; disciplinary content opens to other interests; and academic writing conventions become open to other ways of meaning-making (lillis, 2003, pp.204 205). task pedagogy and dialogue are key in two papers from the student writing in the university collection (jones et al., 1999). english is concerned about her eap students’ successes in their essay writing and recognises that ‘without having a clear picture of the exact nature of the problem it is impossible to provide the information that the student really needs to understand what is going wrong’ (english, 1999, p.19). the clear picture is wrigglesworth pedagogical applications of academic literacies theory: a reflection and case study journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 9 framed using an understanding of functional linguistics to conduct a close textual analysis of topic and comment, cohesive relationships, and propositions in her students’ scripts (see halliday and matthiessen, 2014). in using this description of language, english is indicating the potential of systemic functional linguistics to inform an academic literacies approach, a potential indicated in lea and street (1998; see table 2). the picture is developed within a tutorial, which facilitates deep insights such that a learning developer can see the problem and ‘the student can begin to see how to move forward’ (english, 1999, p31). however, the detailed dialogue of an individual tutorial is an affordance that is not always resourced in mass education systems. enhancing students’ ability to move forward with their academic writing is also the purpose of jones’ (1999) task-based programme. she is interested in pre-empting problems by adequately preparing groups of students for their studies within the (explicit version of the) academic socialization model, but she draws on lea and street’s (1998) academic literacies insights about disciplinary epistemology and individual student identities. jones (1999, p.56) provides an ‘interim context’ using academic socialization drawing on academic literacies insights and task-based pedagogical design to empower groups of students to interact positively with their disciplines, institutions and the wider world. a recent collection of case studies (lillis et al., 2016) reports on recent applications of the academic literacies toolbox. equipping students to gain control of both texts and practices remains a key purpose of provision, often through explicit pedagogical tasks (gimenez and thomas, 2016, p.30). in terms of practice, gimenez and thomas (2016) offer techniques of collective meaning-making and for challenging the power of the author, which help students gain access to difficult readings. to help students with text analysis, they offer processes of deconstruction and construction/composition akin to those found in systemic functional linguistics (sfl) approaches to genre pedagogy (martin, 1997; martin and rose, 2003, martin and rose, 2008), but the processes place emphasis on drafting and the range of possible interpretations of, and creativity in, the text. similarly, fischer’s (2016) research addresses questions surrounding explicit instruction. she found that teachers were aware that ‘hidden’ expectations were not being articulated to students successfully; moreover, students were wrongly convinced they had understood, but did not have the resources to critique and adapt how they were making sense of the text. neither teachers nor students had control of the (non-transparent) genres and pedagogy. fisher’s writing wrigglesworth pedagogical applications of academic literacies theory: a reflection and case study journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 10 course provided the opportunity to uncover and address deeper literacy practices buried in the textual practices underpinning the assessment. challenging the transparent generic skills approach in favour of one recognising academic writing as a contestable social practice formed by dominant ideologies, badenhorst et al. (2016, p.99) state their transformative agenda concisely: to open student’s eyes to their position and roles within their respective disciplinary discourse, and provide them with a range of techniques and perspectives to allow them to engage the tension of living inside the system but thinking outside it. their course was built of tasks where discipline-specific texts were deconstructed in groups, and feedback about the product of composition tasks was discussed. emphasis was placed on developing an understanding of epistemologies and choice rather than normative ‘best practice’. discussion, joint meaning-making and contingency set the tone of the discussions of the disciplinary genres. through discussion of how the system functions, transformative learning became possible, as ‘rules were not abolished but revealed’ (badenhorst et al. 2016, p. 105). the choices made by students became ‘informed choices’ (badenhorst et al., 2016). similarly, chanock et al. (2016) highlight voice and choice but importantly list specific sentence level features (technical vocabulary, abstract nominalizations, third person, passive voice, verbal process types and concrete grammatical subjects) that depend on the choices. through their pedagogy, students see how these informed choices differed across registers and when they moved from written assessments to presentations. english (2016) also problematizes approaches to genre pedagogy in higher education. genre pedagogy can have disempowering results: students producing genres rather than producing knowledge; a display of a template rather than a meaning-making process; or a settling on form rather than an engagement with content. english (2016, p.246) proposes ‘regenring’ in which a student takes a previously submitted assessment text and re-writes it in a different genre (e.g. a scripted radio debate between two economists). english then offers a useful ‘social orientations of genre’ framework for analysing the choices made during the regenring process. this process gives the student a delicate set of informed language choices, not dissimilar to the sfl-orientated model suggested by, for example, paltridge (1997), but highlighting transformation in meaning-making. wrigglesworth pedagogical applications of academic literacies theory: a reflection and case study journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 11 case study: an introduction to academic language module the module, introduction to academic language, is used here to exemplify a process of including an academic literacies approach to student writing into an undergraduate course at a post-92 university in the uk. the module was a first year, semester two, 20-credit option on a suite of ba courses: english language and literature; journalism and english language; english studies; and communication and english studies. it lasted 15 weeks and had three hours a week of contact time. the number of students taking the option grew from 18 in the first iteration to 38 in the fifth. the case study draws on the development of the module over five iterations of the course. throughout the delivery of the module, evaluation was conducted using three sets of data. ellis (2011) distinguishes between macro-evaluation (concerned with the effectiveness and efficiency of meeting the programme goals) and micro-evaluation (concerned with smaller, contributory units of analysis like task performance or an aspect of learner participation). first, the students completed a generic, final-week module feedback questionnaire (macro); the questionnaire data was used by module leaders to inform the development of the learning objectives, syllabus, assessment and pedagogy. the questionnaire data fed back into both the moduleand courseevaluation; this informed the alignment of the module with the students’ future concerns. second, the lecturer kept a (micro-evaluation) reflective diary on the materials each week; these notes were used to develop the effectiveness of each pedagogical task. third, the students’ assessment scripts provide data on whether target learning objectives were being met; can they write, cite and think in the expected ways (macro)? all the data was collected as normal university practice within the ethical and quality procedures of the university. students gave their permission for the data to be used for research purposes in addition to course evaluation. a significant gap in the evaluation is tracking data (i.e. evaluation data for the module has not been matched to data on over all course performance, degree classification or demographic data). the challenge for teaching the module was to demonstrate the value of a series of tasks that develop study skills and academic socialization understood through an academic literacies lens (lea and street, 1998). as a first-year module, it has a role in pre-empting problems similar to jones’ interim context (1999). as the module took shape during the wrigglesworth pedagogical applications of academic literacies theory: a reflection and case study journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 12 first and second iterations, it became clear that the demonstration of value was needed in four spheres of governorship. the spheres are: the practices of teaching the module; the practices of assessing the module; the practices of the discipline; and the university’s accreditation practices. the academic literacies approach has the aspiration to enhance all four. the practice of teaching a module is shaped by the learning objectives and the pedagogy. table 3 shows objectives for the academic language module based on the initial brief from the course leader. they reflect a skills approach with lo4 allowing for academic socialization input. the action verbs are a stage towards operationalizing ‘gain control’ through explicit teaching (gimenez and thomas, 2016), where gain control is understood as critically selecting from the meaning-making resource of language and developing an evaluative expertise towards learning (carless, 2015). the pedagogy of the tasks attempted to deliver these objectives with an additional academic literacies sense. table 3. learning objectives on the introduction to academic language module. on successful completion of the unit students will be able, at threshold level, to: lo 1 differentiate and critically appraise a variety of written academic genres and text-types. lo 2 plan, execute, and evaluate the process of constructing an academic text. lo 3 construct and develop an appropriately structured text in named academic macro-genres (e.g. essay, report, dissertation) and micro-genres (e.g. explanation, recount, argument). lo 4 understand and apply the expectations of academic genres within their own discipline. lo 5 identify and label a variety of grammatical functions (theme and new, hypertheme, directives, discourse markers, citation verbs, noun phrases). the module tasks are sequenced over a 15-week syllabus (table 4). many tasks were based on genre pedagogy (martin, 1997; 1999). in genre pedagogy, students establish the purpose and stages of socially situated texts in a deconstruction/reconstruction cycle. a pedagogical task in session one looked at the micro-genre of explanation as applied to the learning objectives in the module handbook (a 300-word text). once the students saw the purpose and stages, the stages were analysed for grammatical choices (question forms, declarative statements and imperatives, see badenhorst et al., 2016). students were asked to evaluate the content of the learning objectives and identify other things they wrigglesworth pedagogical applications of academic literacies theory: a reflection and case study journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 13 could learn on the module, and critique the grammatical options that could be selected to construe the objectives. although there is an element of mental gymnastics in the transformation, understanding the governed contingency of the objectives and how they are expressed grammatically are notions that are transferable to future contexts. the tasks developed evaluative expertise and are a stage towards gaining control. formal modifications of the module specification eventually introduced these verbs into the learning objectives. focussing on a later stage in a student’s assessment journey, the fourth iteration of the module included a more complex genre than explanation. the students conducted a genre analysis of lecturer feedback on assessed student scripts and evaluated its relationship to marking criteria. in highlighting the practices behind both genres (script and feedback) and the value of both, the tasks opened up the space to evaluate and possibly challenge feedback. the analysis was scheduled in week eight, when the students had received feedback on their own assessment task one scripts. this space for dialogue allows for these negotiations of meaning, particularly on their own texts, and helped draw attention to academic literacies ideas about feedback and feedforward. it was also a learning opportunity for the lecturer who had written the feedback. table 4. syllabus for the introduction to academic language module. session title 1 introduction to writing at university 2 who and why of academic writing: discourse communities and genre 3 how to build a text: genre and structure 4 academic argument 1 5 fitting a text together: cohesion 6 acknowledging the role of other people’s work: citation submission of first assessment task 7 paragraph structure, summarizing and referencing 8 review 9 macroand micro-genres; intertextuality 10 genre and academic argument 2 11 signposting, meta-discourse and noun phrases 12 genre and academic argument 3 13 student writing as social practice 14 review submission of second assessment task wrigglesworth pedagogical applications of academic literacies theory: a reflection and case study journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 14 in addition to teaching a genre approach to texts, there are three sessions using argument theory. students started with riddle’s (2000) model, which identifies three logical operators (then, because, since). they then used toulmin’s (1958/2003) approach, first to popular genres and then academic ones. toulmin lays out the structure of an argument using five terms: conclusion, warrant, backing, data, and qualifier. distinguishing formal argument structure from genre stages proved to be a successful way of gaining control of a text. the students were given youtube links for an episode of the american courtroom reality-tv show, judge judy. an infamous episode – kelli filkin’s ‘ebay scammer’ case – was analysed both as a genre (the show’s format transcribed as a printed script) and using toulmin’s approach (the legal argument behind the case). students regenred the judge judy script in this activity, moving from script to academic summary via a toulmin (1958/2003) analysis. the grammatical transformation is from commonplace to academic language (counter to english’s, 2016, direction). consciousness raising activities were used with examples of target academic texts to introduce the use of complex noun phrases, including ones for taxonomy and abstraction, and to demonstrate how sections of text can be controlled and re-packaged in noun phrases. each phase in the pedagogical loop is evaluated as a separate task with the overall purpose being evaluated in the module questionnaire in an item about student confidence in gaining control of genre and argument (early iterations referred to use rather than control). the third session on argument combines genre analysis, argument analysis and intertextuality. students were given the prompt question: ‘what is the use and origin of the term “ok”?’ and four authentic sources. the sources enact different genres but all present evidence for a (different) entomological conclusion. the students worked through this complex task in three pedagogical loops: in-class genreand toulminanalysis of one source; at-home pair analysis of genre and toulmin analysis (1958/2003) of two sources; and individual analysis of the fourth. the meaning-making resource was citation verbs and how they enact an evaluative function (based on thompson and ye, 1991) when presenting other voices in a text. the academic literacies lens gains additional focus through the design of the module assessment tasks. the two assessment tasks report on an analysis of, and reflection on, work in the students’ other modules (table 5). the analysis is conducted using the meaning-making tools taught on the module and the reflection is based on an evolving wrigglesworth pedagogical applications of academic literacies theory: a reflection and case study journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 15 understanding of academic literacies. the tasks remained the same over the five iterations but the wording of the rubrics was revised in the light of feedback. in module feedback, the students requested the details of the length of the introduction and conclusion and an annotated example script, both ‘study skills’ prescriptions. irrespective of the improvements to the clarity of the rubric, students always had questions. these can be classified into three groups: meaning-checking questions, as for the expression ‘a piece of writing that you are yet to submit’ in task 2; definitional questions, especially around what counted as one linguistic tool and a set; and haven’t-read-the-handbook questions. lillis’s advice about ‘clarity’ and talkback were invaluable in helping to ensure that opportunities were made for every student to make sense and gain control of assessment processes. the opportunity for different understandings and the possibility of addressing them is a feature of academic literacies and it was modelled, explicitly highlighted and encouraged in the sessions. this level of detail is difficult to capture on the generic feedback forms so maintaining dialogue with individual students in class time remained the preferred mode of approaching clarity. however, the richest resource for change were the scripts that students submitted for assessment and the deviations from disciplinary expectations in them. at issue was an understanding of the reading-into-application into application-into-writing nature of the assessment task. students need to understand genre and argument analysis, how to critique their own assessment scripts as data, and then how to write a new assessment script for the assessment task. the successful assessment scripts (a reformulation in lea’s, 1999, terms) may indicate that the student had followed the practices modelled in the sessions. however, identifying a challenge or a confused text required discussion with the student. subject specialists develop their skills for spotting confusions in disciplinespecific practices; the academic literacies approach helps to add an understanding of meaning-making to those skills and tools to understand the nature of the challenge/confusion. table 5. assessment tasks on the introduction to academic language module. assessment task 1: report on academic genre submission (500 words; 40% of final mark) you should conduct a genre analysis of one of your assessed scripts from semester 1 using the tools practiced in sessions 1 – 6. you must define genre, genre analysis and one other tool. then outline a genre analysis of the script linking the tool to the functional stages of the genre. include an explanation of how your wrigglesworth pedagogical applications of academic literacies theory: a reflection and case study journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 16 script exemplifies its mis/use. you should append a copy of the assessed script from semester 1. assessment task 2: report on academic genre draft (1000 words; 60% of final mark) you should describe the process before, and analyse the product of, a piece of writing that you are yet to submit (i.e. a draft) in semester 2. you should choose two tools from sessions 1 – 14 to use in the analysis. you must give a cited definition and exemplification of how the two tools work to achieve the purpose of the text. you should append a copy of your draft from semester 2. if the syllabus is to evidence pedagogical value beyond the module through its use of an academic literacies approach, a wider application to other courses would be required. the intention is that the learning objectives of the writing module are not bound to one discipline. the assessment tasks concern the tools and practices involved in working with academic discourse and ‘piggy-back’ on the practices and texts that the students are working with in their own field. there is an opportunity for a transformative effect on course descriptions. the institutional point where disciplinary practices meet assessment in the course documentation is in the module description of assessment tasks. coursework is classified as one of several macro-genres: essay; report; project; dissertation etc. as descriptions of assessment meaning-making resources, these macro-genres have a role in assessment documentation but are blunt instruments in explaining disciplinary practices. wrigglesworth and mckeever (2010) show how component micro-genres can be described in one discipline, history, using genre analysis and ethnographic interviews. their research produced a description of a document commentary, a micro-genre which can be freestanding or part of a longer piece of historical argumentation. detailed descriptions of assessment requirements, presented in the terminology of the introduction to academic language module and linked to meaning-making resources (such as in table 4) would better explain disciplinary practices and together help address the accusation of ‘an institutional practice of mystery’ (lillis, 1999, p.127). the module learning objectives would need to align with all course descriptions, using a common description of meaning-making resources (e.g. those here draw on sfl). if students are equipped with the analytical tools they can feed back to lecturers more effectively and explain their challenges to existing provision. implementing such a move requires demonstrating the value of this type of pedagogy at the level of the university’s accreditation practices, which arguably requires wrigglesworth pedagogical applications of academic literacies theory: a reflection and case study journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 17 extensive tracking projects of a scope which is beyond the case-study and ethnographic approaches to academic literacies. conclusion an academic literacies approach calls for learning developers to engage with the whole education system. it recognises that language use is socially situated, varies with context, and is neither transparent to its users nor indicative of cultural deficits. it helps clear away misunderstandings about the student journey and the ways that students learn and write about disciplinary practices. it understands that a student’s struggle to make sense of academic and disciplinary tasks may be rooted in miscommunications from one or more of the institutional levels identified in table 1. lea and street’s (1998) paper classified ways to teach student writing. it gave a challenge to educationalists across the academy: how might we teach students to use academic language? this paper has added a case study of a credit-bearing module in the first year of an undergraduate course to the literature that answers that question. the learning objectives of the module included using explanations of academic genre, argument, intertextuality and lexico-grammatical features of academic style. it brought disciplinary writing practices to students’ attention by asking them to analyse the writing they are doing in other modules. the explanatory force of those explanations helps to equip students with the tools to work with, gain control of, and critically evaluate the meaning-making resources behind disciplinary assessment practices. the module is an interim context (jones, 1999, p.56) and as such requires the support of module leaders in the following semesters of study. that support manifests itself in how assessment tasks are explained (e.g. discipline-specific micro genres) and how feedback is formulated (e.g. noting how cohesive features improve clarity). whether a module about controlling meaning-making resources could replace study skills modules across all faculties or would have restricted application in a single faculty or department is a question for further pedagogical research. the experience of developing a for-credit academic language module put the learning developer in two roles: a module leader with learning objectives to teach and an assessment board to report to; and an academic literacies practitioner with an oppositional, transformative lens. learning developers may have their greatest impact on wrigglesworth pedagogical applications of academic literacies theory: a reflection and case study journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 18 refining academic writing pedagogy but also need to understand and engage with all the levels of academic governorship. they recognise that students’ prior meaning-making experiences need to be built into a pedagogical approach and that the tasks are evaluated through an academic literacies’ lens. nevertheless, the provision has also to deliver in terms that the other governors of the system recognise as valuable: disciplinary writing practices and assessment board practices enable as well as constrain student success. thus, the account given here suggests the adoption of a more accommodating stance than some of the more oppositional stances in the literature. it has suggested negotiation of meaning at different levels of the institution which might be seen as slow to bear fruit. the stance, however, is built on progressive ambitions and the academic literacies case study research that continues to open up the space for progress. indeed, an optional forcredit module on academic writing would not have found its way onto the course structure if it were not for the pioneering work in lea and street (1998). references badenhorst, c., moloney, c., dyer, j., rosales, j., and murray, m. (2016) ‘thinking creatively about research writing’, in lillis, t., harrington, k., lea, m., and mitchell, s. (eds.), working with academic literacies; case studies towards transformative practice. fort collins, co: the wac clearinghouse, pp. 97-106. biggs, j. and tang, c. (2011) teaching for quality learning at university: what the student does. 4th edn. maidenhead: open university press, mcgraw-hill education. carless, d. (2015) excellence in university assessment: learning from award-winning practice. london: routledge. chanock, k., whitmore, s. and nishitani, m. (2016) exploring constraints and choices in a thesis writing circle, in lillis, t., harrington, k., lea, m., and mitchell, s. (eds.), working with academic literacies; case studies towards transformative practice. fort collins, co: the wac clearinghouse, pp. 107-116. wrigglesworth pedagogical applications of academic literacies theory: a reflection and case study journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 19 ellis, r. (2011) ‘macroand micro-evaluations of task-based teaching’, in tomlinson, b. (ed.) materials development in language teaching (2nd ed). cambridge: cambridge university press, pp. 212-35. english, f. (1999) ‘what do students really say in their essays? towards a descriptive framework for analysing student writing’, in jones, c., turner, j. and street, b. (eds.) students writing in the university. amsterdam: john benjamins publishing company, pp. 17-36. english, f. (2016) ‘genre as a pedagogical resource at university’, in lillis, t., harrington, k., lea, m., and mitchell, s. (eds.), working with academic literacies; case studies towards transformative practice. fort collins, co: the wac clearinghouse, pp. 245-256. fischer, a. (2016) ‘”hidden features” and “overt instruction” in academic literacies practices: a case study in engineering’, in lillis, t., harrington, k., lea, m., and mitchell, s. (eds.), working with academic literacies; case studies towards transformative practice. fort collins, co: the wac clearinghouse, pp. 75-86. gimenez, j. and thomas, p. (2016) ‘a framework for usable pedagogy: case studies towards accessibility, criticality and visibility’, in lillis, t., harrington, k., lea, m., and mitchell, s. (eds.), working with academic literacies; case studies towards transformative practice. fort collins, co: the wac clearinghouse, pp. 29-44. gee, j. p. (2015) social linguistics and literacies: ideology in discourses. 5th edn. london: routledge. halliday, m.a.k. and matthiessen c. (2014) halliday’s introduction to functional grammar 4th edn. london: routledge. hermerschmidt, m. (1999) ‘foregrounding background in academic learning’, in jones, c., turner, j. and street, b. (eds.) students writing in the university. amsterdam: john benjamins publishing company, pp. 5-16. wrigglesworth pedagogical applications of academic literacies theory: a reflection and case study journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 20 jones, c. (1999) ‘the student from overseas and the british university: finding a way to succeed’, in jones, c., turner, j. and street, b. (eds.) students writing in the university. amsterdam: john benjamins publishing company, pp. 37-60. jones, c., turner, j. and street, b. (1999) students writing in the university. amsterdam: john benjamins publishing company. lea, m. (1999) ‘academic literacies and learning in higher education: construction knowledge through texts and experience’, in jones, c., turner, j. and street, b. (eds.) students writing in the university. amsterdam: john benjamins publishing company, pp. 103-124. lea, m. and street, b. v. (1997) student writing and staff feedback in higher education: an academic literacies approach. swindon: economic and social research council. lea, m. and street, b. (1998) student writing in higher education: an academic literacies approach, studies in higher education, 23(2), pp. 157-72. lillis, t. (1999) ‘whose ‘common sense’? essayist literacy and the institutional practice of mystery’, in jones, c., turner, j. and street, b. (eds.) students writing in the university. amsterdam: john benjamins publishing company, pp. 127-148. lillis, t. (2003) student writing as 'academic literacies': drawing on bakhtin to move from critique to design. language and education, 17(3), 192-207. lillis, t. (2006). moving towards an academic literacies pedagogy: ‘dialogues of participation.’ in ganobscik-williams, l. (ed.), teaching academic writing in uk higher education: theories, practices and models. basingstoke: palgrave, pp. 30-45. lillis, t. m. (2008) ethnography as method, methodology, and "deep theorizing": closing the gap between text and context in academic writing research. written communication, 25(3), pp. 353-388. wrigglesworth pedagogical applications of academic literacies theory: a reflection and case study journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 21 lillis, t., harrington, k., lea, m., and mitchell, s. (eds.) (2016) working with academic literacies; case studies towards transformative practice. fort collins, co: the wac clearinghouse. martin, j.r. (1997) ‘analysing genre: functional parameters’, in martin, j.r. and christie, f. (eds.) genre and institutions; social processes in the workplace and school. london: continuum. martin, j.r. (1999) mentoring semogenesis: ‘genre-based’ literacy practices, in christie, f. (ed.) pedagogy and the shaping of consciousness; linguistic and social processes. london: continuum. martin, j.r. and rose, d. (2003) working with discourse; meaning beyond the clause. london: continuum. martin, j.r. and rose, d. (2008) genre relations: mapping culture. london: equinox. paltridge, b. (1997) genre and the language learning classroom. ann arbor, mi: university of michigan press. riddle, m. (2000) ‘improving argument by parts’, in mitchell, s. and andrews, r. (eds.) learning to argue in higher education. portsmouth, nh: heinemann, boynton/cook, pp. 53-64. scott, m. (1999) ‘agency and subjectivity in student writing’, in jones, c., turner, j. and street, b. (eds.) students writing in the university. amsterdam: john benjamins publishing company, pp. 171-192. thompson, g and ye, y. (1991) ‘evaluation in the reporting verbs used in academic papers’, applied linguistics, 12(4), pp. 365-382. toulmin, s. (1958/2003) the uses of argument (updated edition). cambridge: cambridge university press. wrigglesworth pedagogical applications of academic literacies theory: a reflection and case study journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 22 wrigglesworth, j. and mckeever, m. (2010) ‘writing history: a genre-based, interdisciplinary approach linking disciplines, language and academic skills’, arts and humanities in higher education, 9(1), pp. 107-126. author details john wrigglesworth has researched and taught efl and eap using systemic functional linguistics, models of genre, and academic literacies in uk higher education for seventeen years. he takes a learner centred approach in both his english language and teacher education courses. pedagogical applications of academic literacies theory: a reflection and case study abstract introduction concerns about student writing pedagogical implications case study: an introduction to academic language module conclusion references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special issue 22: compendium of innovative practice october 2021 ________________________________________________________________________ talon: shaping the future of online education through connectivity sandra abegglen university of calgary, canada fabian neuhaus university of calgary, canada keywords: online education; learning and teaching; networks; collaboration; partnership; covid-19. the challenge the move online due to the covid-19 pandemic posed many challenges to academics. these difficulties ranged from access to technology and the internet to developing effective and engaging methods and methodologies for remote delivery, and the struggle to overcome structural bias built into software and applications. the virtual classroom, often praised as the ‘future’, proved to be far from unproblematic. there were many instances where it appeared to fail those that should benefit from it the most: the students. this raised fundamental questions about the practice of online education: how and what do we teach online? what is the benefit of using technology in education? who profits from online learning and how? what happens with those spontaneous conversations and interactions – and our emotions – when we meet virtually? and how can we best support students online? however, the biggest challenge appeared to be to find the time and space for reflection and exchange. the response in response to the need for conversations about the move online, we developed talon, the teaching and learning online network. the initial aim was to support instructors with the https://taloncloud.ca/ abegglen and neuhaus talon: shaping the future of online learning through connectivity journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 2 transition of their courses to remote delivery. however, talon’s focus soon expanded from providing practical advice on tools and resources to a broader exploration of online education, incorporating and amplifying the voices of academics and students – talon voices, available in various media formats including a podcast. this was complemented with an electronic newsletter, the talon letter, regularly summarising key developments in the digital classroom from around the world and capturing emerging discussion topics around online instruction and pedagogy. talon also began developing and creating its own resources, the talon maps (methods of appropriate practice), and it started building a network of interested educators through social media. the talon website acts as the hub for all these activities and connections with the aim of fostering a sustainable ecology of online education through an active exchange between all those involved in higher education. what has emerged through this work is a clear manifesto. talon is committed to and actively advocates for: inclusive and equitable online education; open and positive learning environments; interactive and engaging pedagogy; transformative and imaginative design curricula; empowering virtual classrooms; collaborative learning and design teaching; software and tools enabling meaningful learning experiences; respect and care for all students and instructors (see talon manifesto). to achieve these goals, talon promotes the discussion and the exchange of ideas, cultivating a virtual ‘community of practice’ (lave and wenger, 1991; kimble, hildreth and wright, 2001) around new, emerging practices in online higher education. this involves working collaboratively with others, including students, to develop new models and methods. the learning development community is well situated to take a leadership role in this, having education advancement as its focus and being experienced in asking challenging questions to enhance academic practices. recommendations since the launch of talon, we collected 184 resources, conducted 27 voices with 30 people, published 18 letters and recorded 6,849 page views, demonstrating the widespread interest in an exchange about online education. thus, we encourage others working and teaching in higher education to voice their experiences – the successes and the failures – in the digital classroom and to join the debate about the future of education. https://taloncloud.ca/manifesto-glossary abegglen and neuhaus talon: shaping the future of online learning through connectivity journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 3 we recommend that educators, especially learning developers, activate and set up their own networks as nodes in a web of educators. talon has done this in partnership with other academics, both within and outside its own institutional context, and with students. from the outset, talon included between two and three graduate assistant researchers (masters’ students at any stage of their programme) in the project. this staff-student partnership (healey, flint and harrington, 2014) helped to further enhance the work and the outcomes of talon as it brought the student perspective directly into the discussion. it proved important as learning and teaching are closely intertwined and cannot be separated (miller et al., 2019). if conversations are one sided or if they are dominated by a particular group or groups of people, then something important is lost. we all need to shape the digital classroom together. we therefore recommend that educators actively embrace the ‘global reset of education’ (robinson, 2020) brought by the pandemic, and creatively and democratically imagine what education can be, now, and post-covid-19. this means, as a first step, to make one’s own online education work transparent so it becomes open to debate and input. this will then, in a second step, allow the education community to come together and, in a third step, allow it to collectively reflect on what online education might be in the future, and move forward together in a good way. as shor and freire (1987) state: dialogue must be understood as something taking part in the very historical nature of human beings. it is part of our historical progress in becoming human beings. that is, dialogue is a kind of necessary posture to the extent that humans have come more and more critically communicative beings. dialogue is a moment where humans meet to reflect on their reality as they make and remake it. (p.98). together, we can shape the digital classroom and make it an inclusive, empowering learning space that enables all students to participate and succeed. an ongoing and open exchange is key. acknowledgments abegglen and neuhaus talon: shaping the future of online learning through connectivity journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 4 the talon project is funded by the richard parker initiative. references healey, m., flint, a. and harrington, k. (2014) engagement through partnership: students as partners in learning and teaching in higher education. york: hea. kimble, c., hildreth, p. and wright, p. (2001) ‘communities of practice: going virtual’, in y. malhorta, y. (ed.) knowledge management and business model innovation. hershey: idea group, pp.220-234. lave, j. and wenger, e. (1991) situated learning: legitimate peripheral participation. cambridge: cambridge university press. miller, j. p., nigh, k., binder, m. j., novak, b., crowell, s. (2018) international handbook of holistic education. oxon: routledge. robinson, k. (2020) ‘a global reset of education’, prospects, 49, pp.7-9. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11125-020-09493-y. shor, i. and freire, p. (1987) a pedagogy for liberation: dialogues on transforming education. westport, ct: bergin and garvey. author details sandra abegglen is a researcher in the school of architecture, planning and landscape at the university of calgary and the talon project coordinator. her research interests are in digital education, academic literacies, peer mentoring, creative learning and teaching methods, inclusion, visual narratives, identity, and qualitative methods. she is a certified practitioner in learning development, a higher education academy (uk) fellow, and scientific https://doi.org/10.1007/s11125-020-09493-y abegglen and neuhaus talon: shaping the future of online learning through connectivity journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 5 board member for the international conference on education in mathematics, science and technology (icemst). fabian neuhaus is an associate professor at the university of calgary with the school of architecture, planning and landscape in canada. he is the principal author of www.urbantick.org and the project lead for talon (https://taloncloud.ca). his research interests are the temporal aspects of the urban environment, focusing on the topics of habitus, type, and ornament in terms of activity, technology, and memory. he has worked with architecture and urban design practices in the uk and switzerland as well as on research projects at universities in switzerland, germany, and the uk. https://eur03.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3a%2f%2fwww.urbantick.org%2f&data=04%7c01%7cricky.lowes%40plymouth.ac.uk%7c0a725783227c4e1e6dde08d960d29db1%7c5437e7eb83fb4d1abfd3bb247e061bf1%7c1%7c0%7c637647281064272036%7cunknown%7ctwfpbgzsb3d8eyjwijoimc4wljawmdailcjqijoiv2lumziilcjbtii6ik1hawwilcjxvci6mn0%3d%7c2000&sdata=0dl5pvyekft9pzmgwbhht9%2bkrgnbyk50w2oay4dtlig%3d&reserved=0 https://eur03.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3a%2f%2ftaloncloud.ca%2f&data=04%7c01%7cricky.lowes%40plymouth.ac.uk%7c0a725783227c4e1e6dde08d960d29db1%7c5437e7eb83fb4d1abfd3bb247e061bf1%7c1%7c0%7c637647281064281995%7cunknown%7ctwfpbgzsb3d8eyjwijoimc4wljawmdailcjqijoiv2lumziilcjbtii6ik1hawwilcjxvci6mn0%3d%7c2000&sdata=iw6f9cemeplqfdljvpcqbtx0vici6sdzs1hyi%2bqnt6c%3d&reserved=0 talon: shaping the future of online education through connectivity the challenge the response recommendations acknowledgments references author details exploring threshold concepts for linking teachng and research journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 2: february 2010 neither teacher-centred nor student-centred: threshold concepts and research partnerships glynis cousin university of wolverhampton, uk abstract in this paper i argue that pedagogic research organised around the investigation of threshold concepts offers a fresh way of thinking about research collaboration with students, academics and educational developers. i will first introduce the basic ideas about threshold concepts, briefly contrasting it with the phenomenographic tradition. i suggest that threshold concept inquiry effects a turn from this tradition by: a) encouraging partnerships with educationalists, students and subject specialists; and b) by a focus on the difficulty of the subject rather than on general education theory. keywords: threshold concepts; partnerships with students; partnerships with subject specialists; research methods. threshold concepts the idea of threshold concepts came from a uk national research project into the possible characteristics of strong teaching and learning environments in the disciplines for undergraduate education (enhancing teaching-learning environments in undergraduate courses 2001-2004 (www.etl.tla.ed.ac.uk). from involvement in the economics strand of this research, erik meyer and ray land (2006) argued that certain concepts were held by economists to be central to the mastery of their subject. further investigation in other subjects (land et al., 2008) showed this to be true of any subject. threshold concepts could be described as ‘threshold’ ones because they have the following characteristics: http://www.etl.tla.ed.ac.uk/ cousin neither teacher-centred nor student-centred: threshold concepts and research partnerships journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 2 transformative 1. grasping a threshold concept is transformative because it involves an ontological as well as a conceptual shift in the learner. we are what we know. new understandings are assimilated into our biography, becoming part of who we are, how we see and how we feel. an illustration would be a shift from a student of french to a french speaker. or a student of architecture to someone who thinks like an architect. irreversible 2. a threshold concept is often irreversible; once understood the learner is unlikely to forget it (this does not exclude revision or rejection of the concept once understood). one of the difficulties teachers have is that of retracing the journey back to their own days of ‘innocence’, when understandings of threshold concepts eluded them in the early stages of their own learning. their own understandings have become so internalised that it is hard for them to sympathise with students who are having difficulties. this is why talking to them is so important. integrative 3. another characteristic of a threshold concept is that it is integrative in that it exposes the hidden interrelatedness of phenomenon. mastery of a threshold concept often allows the learner to make connections that were hitherto hidden from their view. things start to click into place. bounded 4. a threshold concept is likely to be bounded in that ‘any conceptual space will have terminal frontiers, bordering with thresholds into new conceptual areas’ (meyer and land, 2003: 6). the more interdisciplinary a subject, the more complex this will be. troublesome 5. finally, a threshold concept is likely to involve forms of ‘troublesome knowledge’; david perkins (2006: 7) describes such knowledge as ‘that which appears counter-intuitive, alien or seemingly incoherent’. troublesome knowledge or ‘stuckness’ can be more fully understood through the notion of liminality as i next discuss, but first i should stress that cousin neither teacher-centred nor student-centred: threshold concepts and research partnerships journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 3 threshold concepts are likely to be contested in any discipline and should be regarded as providing provisional stability for teaching, learning and assessment purposes. liminality learning, argue meyer and land (2003), involves the occupation of a liminal space during the process of mastery of a threshold concept. this space is similar to the one occupied by adolescents who are not yet adults, not quite children. it is an unstable space in which the learner may oscillate between old and emergent understandings, just as adolescents often move between adult – like and child – like responses to their transitional status. once a learner enters this liminal space, she is engaged with the project of mastery. threshold concept research is sited in this space, establishing a dialogue with the students about their struggles to comprehend. here are illustrative interview extracts from orsini-jones’ (2006) research with students of linguistics: first student: i understood it in class, it was when we went away and i just seemed to have completely forgotten everything that we did on it, and i think that was when i struggled because when we were sat in here, we’d obviously got help if we had questions but…..when it came to applying it….i understood the lectures and everything that we did on it but couldn’t actually apply it, i think that was the difficulty. q. did you feel the same as student 1? second student: yeah. i felt lost. q. in lecture times as well? second student: you know, i understood the concept for about lets say 10 seconds, yes yes, i got that and then suddenly, no no, i didn’t get that, you know, suddenly, like this. note the oscillation of understanding that perfectly captures what meyer and land mean by a state of liminality. now he has got it, now he hasn’t. arguably most learning involves cousin neither teacher-centred nor student-centred: threshold concepts and research partnerships journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 4 this recursive process. importantly, this is not simply a cognitive movement because it involves a strong emotional dimension concerning the student’s identification with both the subject and his perceived capabilities. the following teacher expresses this well in reflecting on her students’ grasp of cultural studies (cousin, 2006:135): some students take to it and it changes their lives and their way of thinking and they get incredibly engaged….that’s a minority…there’s a bunch in the middle that work away at it and eventually get it by the third year but are in a state of high anxiety in the first year….some acquire it on the way and this becomes an important transition in their whole sense of self but there are a whole bunch of students, middle of the road, for whom they are going through the motions and are finding a utilitarian route through it. common ways in which students try to overcome their state of liminality is through quasi plagiarism, plagiarism or mimicry. some just give up and leave university altogether. involving them in a dialogue about their difficulties, as orsini-jones (2006) discovered, dramatically reduces these possibilities, particularly if the teacher gives them full permission to flounder, fail and forget. here are some more examples from students (lucas and mladenovic, 2008: 157), this time of accounting: i think i can see a bit more of the theoretical thing behind it…..i was probably one of the persons who wrote – it’s just writing down numbers, but now i see that there’s probably a bit more to it. i didn’t realise it was so central to the business world…i didn’t realise it was such a big issue. because i thought that you had to be a mathematical genius to do accounting, and now i know it’s different. note how the students are clearly problematising their mastery, exposing earlier preconceptions (troublesome knowledge) of the subject which were getting in the way of mastery. here are some final examples, this time students of economics (reimann and cousin neither teacher-centred nor student-centred: threshold concepts and research partnerships journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 5 jackson, 2006: 128-129) trying to make sense of the concept of elasticity. each of these students point to the transformational character of learning, the importance of ‘getting it’: well, from not knowing what it is to knowing what it is, that is the big step one. so that can be knowing how to apply the concepts that we use. there are some things you learn, you suddenly think, wow, suddenly everything seems different…you now see the world quite differently. these quotes come from research which explores the difficulty of the subject with students and teachers; they constitute something of a turn away from the phenomenographic approach which has characterised much higher education inquiry. while this has been a valuable approach in so many ways, arguably it has been responsible for de-centring the academic teacher in its emphasis on student experience research. in particular the notion of student-centredness deriving from this research has not always gone down well with academics. killing off the teacher? most educational developers and researchers would accept that they have experienced anything ranging from indifference to hostility from academics who are suspicious of the ‘student-centred’ changes they are asked to make. many educational developers defensively package this suspicion as learner resistance and ignorance, seeing their challenge to be that of leading academics to the true path of student-centred teaching and learning. how many of us have paused to wonder whether academics have a point in their resistance? perhaps an unintended outcome of the student-centred tradition has been what one writer describes as ‘the mortification of the teacherly self’ (mcshane, 2006). this goffmanesque melodramatic notion aids an exploration into how educational developers have often viewed their task as that of dismantling and outlawing ‘teacher-centredness’ in favour of ‘student-centredness’. in pursuing this task, educational developers have not always trod carefully on territory which is held to be sacred by academics. one example is in the disdain many educationalists have for lectures as outdated and unsatisfactory modes of cousin neither teacher-centred nor student-centred: threshold concepts and research partnerships journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 6 knowledge dissemination. i sometimes detect an irritation from academics about this and the associated tendency of educationalists to privilege technique over theatre. for instance, educationalist advice to abandon lectures undermines an understanding of the lecture’s symbolic, ritual content. while traditional lectures may not be effective in linear, aligned ways, it debases their purpose to worry about this because they have a larger role. arguably, lectures perform identity work for both teachers and students, enabling each to feel part of the university and of the subject community. moreover, the lecture theatre is a sacred place in the sense that it delineates a space where academics hope to exercise their freedom, where radical, interesting, contentious ideas are tested and voiced from behind a lectern. in making these points i am not suggesting that lecturing cannot be improved or sometimes replaced; nor am i suggesting that we revert to teachercentredness to tip the scales in the opposite direction. i think it is the very opposition of student-centred and teacher-centred which has exhausted its usefulness. most binaries should be treated with caution and this is no exception. i think we need a restoration of dignity for academic teachers by placing them alongside students and educational researchers rather than above or below them. the symbolic erasure of teacher expertise in education discourse is not confined to the discourse on student-centredness; it is also present in our expectations that they become amateur educationalists. ascending mount kolb as anyone involved in accredited teacher development courses knows, getting academics to underpin their reflections on their practice using educational theory is always an uphill struggle, with most stopping for a permanent rest at mount kolb. this is understandable because subject specialists who are not social scientists are being asked to become informed amateurs in another discipline. threshold concept research offers a way out of this problem because it requires an emphasis on subject expertise, both for students and teachers (albeit at different levels) rather than on education. this is another point of departure from phenomenographic research. in osmond et al’s (2006: 12) research, they note the enthusiasm of teachers to discuss threshold concepts: cousin neither teacher-centred nor student-centred: threshold concepts and research partnerships journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 7 using threshold concepts as a framework has enabled the research team to open up a dialogue with the staff in a discipline that appears, in the main, to be relatively under-theorised. this usefulness of the dialogue was evidenced during the wholestaff meeting and individual interviews by the enthusiasm of the staff to participate. it has certainly been my experience that getting academics to think about what is critical to learn in their subject is easier than getting them to think about learning outcomes. i am not suggesting that phenomenographic research never involved subject specialists. however, there are some important differences between the research framework for phenomenography and that of threshold concepts research (which does not have a settled methodological framework). phenomenography explores student experiences for the discovery of variation in learners’ reported ways of experiencing phenomenon. phenomenographic research is on the students so that once extracted from them (often through interviews or surveys), the student experience data becomes the researcher’s text to analyse, heightening the risk of the students’ experience being represented through the researchers’ experience of the students’ experience. in so far as all research findings are the product of interpretation of some kind, i would not want to claim that threshold concept research escapes this problem entirely (indeed some threshold concept research draws heavily on this tradition) but there is an emergent trend that is apace with contemporary concerns about this kind of interpretive predicament. whereas the convention in universities is to ask students to evaluate the quality of their teaching and learning, how they have experienced assessment, feedback, etc., the thrust of threshold concept research is to share an inquiry into the difficulty of their subject with the academics and the students. it is student-focussed but not student-centred in ways that remove the academic from the stage. conclusion to conclude, i have argued that the search for threshold concepts has the potential to open up discussions among subject specialists, students and educational researchers, creating forms of transactional curriculum inquiry between these three parties. further, i have argued that threshold concept research does not require the academic to learn another discipline; on the contrary, it requires that she goes more deeply into her own for cousin neither teacher-centred nor student-centred: threshold concepts and research partnerships journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 8 the purposes of formulating the best ways of teaching and learning it. by staging the exploration at the site of the subject and of its difficulties, threshold concept research promises to establish partnership research between educational developers, students and subject specialists. references cousin, g. (2006) ‘threshold concepts, troublesome knowledge and emotional capital: an exploration into learning about others', in meyer, j.h.f. and land, r. (eds.) overcoming barriers to student understanding: threshold concepts and troublesome knowledge. abingdon: routledge. land, r., meyer, j.h.f. and smith, j. (eds.) (2008) threshold concepts within the disciplines. rotterdam: sense publications. lucas, p. and mladenovic, r. (2008) ‘developing ‘new world views’: threshold concepts in introductory accounting’, in land, r., meyer, j.h.f. and smith, j. (eds.) threshold concepts within the disciplines. london: routledgefalmer. mcshane, k. (2006) technologies transforming academics: academic identity and online teaching. unpublished phd thesis. university of technology sydney. meyer, j.h.f. and land, r. (2003) ‘threshold concepts and troublesome knowledge (1) – linkages to ways of thinking and practising’, in rust, c. (ed.) improving student learning – ten years on. oxford: oxford centre for staff and learning development. meyer, j.h.f. and land, r. (eds.) (2006) overcoming barriers to student understanding: threshold concepts and troublesome knowledge. abingdon: routledge. orsini-jones, m. (2006) ‘identifying troublesome concepts and helping undergraduates with crossing grammar thresholds via assessed collaborative group work’, threshold concepts within the disciplines symposium. glasgow. cousin neither teacher-centred nor student-centred: threshold concepts and research partnerships journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 9 osmond, j., turner, a. and land, r. (2006) ‘threshold concepts and spatial awareness in transport and product design’, threshold concepts within the disciplines symposium. glasgow. perkins, d. (2006) ‘the underlying game: troublesome knowledge and threshold conceptions’, in meyer, j.h.f. and land, r. (eds.) overcoming barriers to student understanding: threshold concepts and troublesome knowledge. abingdon: routledge. reimann, n. and jackson, i. (2006) ‘threshold concepts in economics: a case study’, in meyer, j.h.f and land, r. (eds.) overcoming barriers to student understanding: threshold concepts and troublesome knowledge. abingdon: routledge. author details glynis cousin is director of the institute for learning enhancement at the university of wolverhampton. her professional background ranges from school, community, adult and higher education. her research and publications are in the fields of diversity, internationalisation and threshold concept inquiry. neither teacher-centred nor student-centred: threshold concepts and research partnerships abstract threshold concepts transformative irreversible integrative bounded troublesome liminality killing off the teacher? ascending mount kolb conclusion author details literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special edition: 2018 aldinhe conference, october 2018 engagement in higher education. who’s not engaging? james wilkinson queen mary university, london, uk abstract just as undergraduates need to develop critical capacities, so as to scrutinise and justify beliefs, decisions and actions (barnett, 1997), higher education teachers need to consider critically their own assumptions about and orientations towards teaching (gow and kember, 1993). these are often unexamined and unchallenged, so teachers can remain unaware of implications for students’ learning (mezirow, 1990; larrivee, 2000). regarding subject disciplinary literacy development, relevant assumptions concern several important challenges: the complexity and opaqueness of disciplinary reading and writing practices (lea and street, 1998; meyer and land, 2003; haggis, 2003; gourlay, 2009); issues concerning engagement and assumed student deficits (mann, 2001; haggis, 2003; 2006); and the potentially alienating environment, norms, values and practices of higher education (mann, 2001; haggis, 2006; bryson and hand, 2007). this paper discusses these challenges and reports on a small-scale study investigating the context of students’ reading and writing difficulties at a london-based, russell group university. methods included analysis of data from interviews with academics and student discussion groups, and from teaching observations. the findings suggest that the teaching orientations of learning facilitation and knowledge transmission, and their links to different learning approaches and outcomes, continue to shape many undergraduates’ experience, for better or worse. the paper contributes to understanding these links using self-determination theory (ryan and deci, 2000). accordingly, teaching oriented towards learning facilitation, but not knowledge transmission, fosters students’ feelings of competence, autonomy and relatedness, assisting internalisation of externally regulated behaviours, and increasing preparedness for engaged, self-directed learning (niemiec and ryan, 2009). wilkinson engagement in higher education. who’s not engaging? journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: october 2018 2 keywords: academic reading and writing; teaching conceptions and orientations; threshold concepts and practices; engagement; alienation; self-determination theory; motivation. introduction teaching on undergraduate degree programmes should reveal to students their subject discipline’s ways of knowing the world and solving its problems. an outcome of this teaching is not just knowledge. a greater challenge is to build students’ capacities for inquiry, reading and writing in the discipline, which allow them to discover, unpack and apply knowledge critically in new contexts, for new purposes (barnett, 1997; lea and street, 1998; haggis, 2003; wingate, 2015). it is challenging because these practices, their underpinning epistemological foundations and the sociocultural conditions in which students have to learn them, are likely to be alien for students (mann, 2001, haggis, 2006; bryson and hand, 2007). teaching should therefore also create familiarity and cohesion (rathje, 2007) and satisfy students’ psychological needs so that they are motivated to engage meaningfully in self-directed learning (niemiec and ryan, 2009). in this paper i argue that while a lot of higher education teaching is concerned with revealing knowledge, not enough is done to build the competences and motivation needed by students to reveal that knowledge for themselves, and for engaging with their subject discipline’s reading and writing practices. the paper also highlights the need for higher education teachers to reflect critically on their teaching assumptions and practice, and to be supported in this. evidence for this argument comes from three sources: from my own experience of teaching in higher education, which includes 20 years in a former polytechnic and, currently, in educational development at a london-based, russell group university and in learning development at a similar institution; from literature perspectives; and from a smallscale study at the university where i work as a learning developer. a central element in the argument concerns two conceptions of what it means to teach, related teaching orientations towards either learning facilitation or knowledge transmission, wilkinson engagement in higher education. who’s not engaging? journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: october 2018 3 and links to more or less desirable learning approaches and outcomes, as identified by gow and kember (1993). i used to think that telling students things meant that i was teaching. however, in their work i often found that they had not understood important concepts, nor could they apply practices i had told them about. and yet in my lectures and slides, online materials, assessment instructions and criteria, i had spelled it out for them. i tended to agree with colleagues who said it was due to widening participation, the massification of higher education and related deficits, not least students’ lack of engagement with literature and practices needed for their work. that telling students things, doing little more than transmit knowledge was itself a deficit, and that i also was not engaging adequately with literature and practices needed for my work, did not occur to me. critical reflection facilitated important changes in my practice towards more learner-centred, active and interactive learning (doyle, 2008; weimer, 2013), as well as enquiry based learning (allan and powell, 2007), and these were accompanied by substantial improvements in my students’ engagement, enthusiasm and results, as well as my own enjoyment in teaching (wilkinson and olason, 2012). assuming that teaching means transmitting knowledge was one of the teaching conceptions identified by gow and kember. the other one was that teaching is understood to mean bringing about intended learning. the small-scale study reported in this article suggests that these two conceptions of teaching and related orientations towards either ‘learning facilitation’ or ‘knowledge transmission’ continue to shape undergraduates’ experience, for better or worse. experience observing more than 300 teaching sessions in my current jobs convinces me that these teaching orientations remain salient and are widespread in current higher education teaching. the study was initiated after nine students from a humanities and social sciences (hss) department had been referred to learning development and attended a workshop, which i co-facilitated in march 2017, because plagiarised material had been found in their coursework. positive feedback led to conversations with academics in the department, who reported widespread difficulties with first year undergraduates’ reading and writing, and problems with motivation, engagement and self-directed learning. this collaborative, exploratory study aimed to help the department understand better the context of these difficulties, to suggest possible responses and to identify implications for further research. wilkinson engagement in higher education. who’s not engaging? journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: october 2018 4 this paper first discusses literature on challenges relating to students’ disciplinary reading and writing, engagement and alienation, and suggested responses. the challenges are interpreted through three perspectives: gow and kember’s (1993) ‘learning facilitation’ and ‘knowledge facilitation’ teaching orientations; self-determination theory (sdt), which suggests that satisfying, or failing to satisfy, students’ psychological need for feelings of competence, autonomy and relatedness is likely to affect their motivation and agency in self-directed learning (ryan and deci, 2000; niemiec and ryan, 2009); and theory on cohesion and the need to facilitate familiarity in environments characterised by cultural diversity (rathje, 2007). next, methods used and their limitations are described, after which findings are presented and discussed. this is followed by suggested responses, including teaching methods, which higher education teachers can use to assist development of students’ disciplinary reading and writing. experience of combining two of these is also described. the paper finishes with tentative conclusions and implications for further research. three appendices provide further details on teaching methods, and a fourth reports on the experience of combining approaches, and details of how a refined adaptation of this can be used for staff development. 1. literature 1.1. challenges for students’ reading and writing in their subject disciplinary reading and writing, undergraduates have to grapple with what have been referred to as ‘threshold concepts’ (meyer and land, 2003; 2005) and ‘threshold practices’ (gourlay, 2009), which are inherently troublesome in nature. these are fundamental to learning in disciplinary areas because how they are taught and how students get to grips with them can either block or open up further learning in their field. grasping threshold concepts is also transformational, revealing to students how phenomena are perceived and understood within their discipline, and allowing them to discover new ways of viewing ‘subject matter, subject landscape, or even world view’ (meyer and land, 2005, p.373). a crucial threshold practice is being critical, which students must grasp if they are to develop higher education’s goal of developing criticality (barnett, 1997). for students, this requires engagement with literature, openness to different perspectives and awareness wilkinson engagement in higher education. who’s not engaging? journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: october 2018 5 that texts do not provide incontrovertible truths but arguments which can be contested (abbott 2013, cited wingate, 2015). further challenges arise from academics often having tacit rather than explicit knowledge of their own literacy practices (lea and street, 1998) and from assumptions that students already know how to read for academic purposes, are able and confident to be strategic in what and how much to read, and can interpret correctly the hidden requirements of assessment essay questions (haggis, 2006). this means that academic reading and writing are often not explicitly taught in the classroom, so that students’ experiences of these practices remain ‘indeterminate and opaque’ (gourlay, 2009, p.181). often students only become aware of these threshold practices when they receive negative assessment feedback (haggis, 2006). these practices are made explicit in coursework rubrics and assessment criteria, but having only limited or no understanding of their subject discipline’s epistemological orientations, these instructions are often poorly understood (lea and street, 1998). moreover, over-reliance by teachers on knowledge transmission can encourage students to assume they should memorise and learn transmitted content by rote, regurgitating it in their work, rather than processing it so that they can make abstractions and apply these meaningfully in new contexts, for new purposes (haggis, 2006). not learning to approach their studies in this way also makes it less likely that students will integrate new material meaningfully with their existing knowledge, a serious problem from a constructivist perspective (ausubel, 1963). without explicit, contextualised literacy teaching, developing competence in academic reading and writing is difficult. sdt predicts that if students do not feel competent, this will reduce their self-motivation and willingness ‘…to learn; extend themselves; master new skills; and apply their talents responsibly’(ryan and deci, 2000, p.68). 1.2. engagement and alienation discourse on student engagement has often featured learning approaches, notably ‘deep’ and ‘surface’, identified by marton and säljö (1976), and ‘strategic’ (ramsden, 1992; prosser and trigwell, 1999; biggs and tang, 2011). wilkinson engagement in higher education. who’s not engaging? journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: october 2018 6 briefly, ‘surface-level processing’ typically involves a ‘reproductive’ approach, learning by rote the text, or ‘sign’ (e.g. words and numbers), whereas with ‘deep-level processing’, the student aims to understand ‘what is signified’ (marton and säljö, 1976:7), and engage in more meaningful and higher level learning. understood in this way, surface approaches can be linked to poor paraphrasing skills and to plagiarism. the ‘strategic’ approach is similar to surface learning but entails more active involvement in specific, extrinsically motivated activity, such as exam preparation (ramsden, 1992; prosser and trigwell, 1999). gow and kember (1993) found relationships between learning facilitation orientations and meaningful, deep learning, and between transmission-based teaching and surface approaches. however, the emphasis on these approaches, and the generalisations and applications that have been inferred from marton and säljö’s (1976) phenomenographic research, have been questioned. empirical evidence suggests that in different circumstances, students can adopt all three of the above approaches (mann, 2001). it is more helpful to view engagement as a continuum on which the same individuals can act at different levels (bryson and hand, 2007). moreover, ‘understanding’ in higher education – the supposed outcome of deep learning – is far from straightforward but requires application of complex skills and practices (prosser and trigwell 1999, cited haggis, 2003), which are not only cognitively but also emotionally challenging (haggis, 2006; gourlay, 2009). an overpreoccupation with learning approaches can result in students being ‘pathologised’ if they fall short of the ‘deep’ ideal, an unhelpful deficit view which is often linked to widening participation (haggis, 2006, p.98). further assumptions that literacy problems relate only to ‘surface features, grammar and spelling’ (lea and street, 1998, p.159) mean that university teachers often do not see it as their job to teach students to read and write (haggis, 2006; wingate, 2015). a deficit perspective also distracts teachers from reflecting critically on aspects of their teaching that might be causing or failing to address the problems (larrivee, 2000). a more contextualised way of viewing engagement is to consider its opposite, namely alienation (mann, 2001; haggis, 2006; bryson and hand, 2007). among the potential sources of alienation facing students, mann includes ‘the post-modern condition’ (2001, pp.8-9, drawing on lyotard, 1984), whereby a student’s motivation is driven by utilitarian goals, such as future employment. if students have extrinsic rather than intrinsic motivations, this is ‘perfectly legitimate’ according to haggis (2006, p.527). moreover, sdt wilkinson engagement in higher education. who’s not engaging? journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: october 2018 7 proposes that the effect of extrinsic factors on motivation is not necessarily a bad thing, however, its effects can be positive or detrimental, depending on how well behaviours, values and norms associated with extrinsic motivations are internalised (ryan and deci, 2000). accordingly, the more a person experiences externally regulated behaviours as controlling, the less likely they are to act autonomously but rather out of compliance, responding only to external rewards and punishments. by contrast, the more they internalise extrinsic motivations, the more likely they are to accept those behaviours and see them as congruent with their own beliefs and motivation. however, such internalisation requires satisfaction of all three psychological needs for feelings of competence, autonomy and relatedness. learning facilitative teaching supports development of competence and also relatedness, because teachers with this orientation ‘…take a personal interest in their students...’ (gow and kember, 1993, p.28). sdt suggests that if teachers also offer choices, respecting students’ freedom to learn as they like (macfarlane, 2017), they will have stronger feelings of autonomy. by contrast, with its focus on subject content rather than the learner, the knowledge transmission orientation satisfies none of these psychological needs. mann (2001, pp.11-12) also suggests that the culture in higher education, with its unfamiliar assumptions, values and practices, can make a student feel like ‘an outsider’, an issue sometimes assumed to be especially relevant for bme students. however, higher education’s culture is new for all students, who find themselves in ‘an unknown social grouping of fellow students’, which can make for tensions and further challenges (ylijoki 2000, cited bryson and hand, 2007, p.353). these conditions can make students unwilling to express personally held convictions, especially if asked to do this in whole group settings (millis, 2010) and if their views are at odds with those expressed by others (mann, 2005; doyle, 2008). and yet being critical in this way is just what higher education aims to develop (barnett, 1997), so creating conditions of psychological safety and collegiality in the classroom is crucially important (mann, 2001), and these are more achievable through small-group activities. achieving similar conditions is also the goal of theory concerning cohesion, in settings characterised by diversity, where participants share in creating new culture together (rathje, 2007). this is radically different to practice where a dominant partner seeks to impose coherence and uniformity in line with their own cultural values. developing new culture requires dialogue permitting familiarisation so that the different parties can interact wilkinson engagement in higher education. who’s not engaging? journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: october 2018 8 effectively and, moreover, so that the culture, experience and frames of reference of students from diverse backgrounds can be validated and affirmed, rather than ignored (howard, 2003; yosso, 2005). once again, the knowledge transmission orientation falls short, since such familiarisation and dialogue are less likely when the teacher does most of the talking, but more so with learning facilitative teaching, which is ‘likely to involve interactive class sessions’ (gow and kember, 1993, p.28). 1.3. suggested responses and teaching methods responses meeting the needs highlighted by the above literature include practices advocated in discourse on retention, engagement and transition. this emphasizes the need to develop students’ sense of belonging and community, and for this to be supported in the classroom (e.g. tinto, 2003). responding to the problems of alienation, mann (2001, p.18) emphasises criticality and how this can be developed ‘through the responses of solidarity, hospitality, safety and the redistribution of power’. in later work, her emphasis shifts to communication aimed at developing mutual understanding and non-judgmental reciprocity, as advocated in the african practice of ‘ubuntu’ (tutu 1999, cited mann, 2005); such an approach is also likely to develop the familiarity needed for cohesion (rathje, 2007). haggis’s (2006) ‘collective inquiry’ approach assists realisation of these goals and makes students’ disciplinary thinking, reading and writing a key focus. these goals and practices all emphasise learner-centred, active, and interactive learning principles (e.g. doyle, 2008; weimer, 2013). race’s (2009) online introduction to higher education teaching addresses many of the above theoretical perspectives and provides helpful guidance on how they can be applied in practice. further, practical applications include interdependent, co-operative forms of learning, such as aronson’s jigsaw classroom model (aronson and bridgeman, 1979. see also appendix 1 for a fuller description, and millis, 2010). allan’s ‘portsmouth model’ of enquiry-based learning supports development of students’ critical thinking, speaking, reading and writing skills, at the same time facilitating autonomous and interactive learning (allan and powell, 2007. for more on this, see appendix 2). ‘student-centred active learning environment with upside-down pedagogies’ (scale-up), developed by robert beichner for large enrolment undergraduate programmes and now rolled out at nottingham trent university, wilkinson engagement in higher education. who’s not engaging? journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: october 2018 9 employs similar principles with additional, technology-enriched support, so that lecture content is mainly accessed online in students’ own time, and instead of listening passively in lectures, they work in small groups solving problems, teaching each other and giving feedback (mcneil et al., 2018). responses enabling students to integrate new material with existing knowledge (ausubel, 1963; biggs, 1996) include concept mapping, as developed by novak (novak and cañas, 2008 – see appendix 3). adapting and combining these methods is potentially also fruitful. appendix 4 evaluates experience combining two of these approaches in the study, and provides material for a staff development activity modelling jigsaw classroom teaching combined with concept mapping, which can be further adapted for more independent, enquiry based learning. ________________________ the above literature identifies challenges concerning academic literacy development in a potentially alienating environment, and identifies problems with over-reliance on knowledge transmission teaching methods. in principle, hss teaching practices appear to provide a suitable mix of approaches, typically comprising: …the stimulation of a good lecture on the subject, … engagement with, and exchange of, ideas, expressed verbally in seminars, in response to reading, and… processes of reading and thought involved in the creation of an academic essay. (haggis, 2006, p.524) teaching observed in the department conformed almost exactly to these practices, so what was causing the students’ reading and writing difficulties? before trying to answer this question, methods used in the small-scale study and their limitations are described. 2. methods and limitations 2.1. methods in order to achieve its aims, this study sought to answer the following research questions: 1. what are the difficulties inherent in students’ disciplinary reading and writing? 2. what is done to support development of students’ reading and writing? wilkinson engagement in higher education. who’s not engaging? journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: october 2018 10 3. how could this support be improved? approval was sought from the university’s research ethics committee, who concluded that the work was ‘extremely low risk’ and did ‘not present any ethical concerns’. the study gathered a mix of naturally occurring data, from four weeks of teaching observations, and generated data from hour-long interviews with three academics, and hour-long discussions with two student groups comprising four and two first year students respectively. two academics were chosen because they were module leaders of two core first year modules, designed to introduce and develop theoretical knowledge and skills related to different study goals. the third academic, who had experience teaching one of the modules, was also the department’s academic misconduct officer. all first year students on the programme for 2016/17 were invited to participate in focus groups. despite an incentive, only six volunteered, hence the decision to run two discussion groups on the two days when volunteers were available. all interviews and discussion groups were recorded and conducted by myself between may and july 2017. in january 2018, i interviewed a further student from the same cohort of students. teaching observation data had suggested issues related to the psychological needs identified in sdt, so this later interview sought to explore the student’s feelings as regards support for competence, autonomy and relatedness. in weeks 1-4 of the first semester, in october 2017, observations of teaching were conducted by a team comprising three learning developers, including myself, and one educational developer. two sets of open, non-leading questions were prepared. for the student discussion groups, questions concerned: whether studying their subject was as they expected; what happened in lectures and seminars; how they prepared for lectures and seminars; how they found the reading; how they found the writing; and what guidance they received for writing essays. for the academics, questions concerned: what knowledge students (typically) arrive with; what knowledge they want students to engage in developing; how they would characterise very good quality work; what happens in lectures and in seminars to get students producing work of this quality; and what they think is causing the difficulties. further questions were allowed to arise spontaneously with the aim of seeking clarification, examples or to test the strength of views held. wilkinson engagement in higher education. who’s not engaging? journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: october 2018 11 observation notes and transcripts of the generated data, which amounted to approximately 25,000 words, were read several times and organised under themes suggested by the data. although an inductive, exploratory approach was initially used, as themes emerged these were compared with existing theoretical perspectives. understanding thus emerged via an iterative process ‘relating findings to a more theoretical framework’ (ritchie et al., 2003, p.253). 2.2. limitations the methods used in this study involved processes of construction shaped by my prior experience and pre-existing awareness of various theoretical perspectives. themes for analysis were also reduced by my aim to focus on issues within the control of teachers to address. the research was also limited, both in terms of the numbers of people interviewed (three academics and seven students) and temporally, with only four weeks of teaching observations. also, because of my background as a teacher and educational developer, my main focus was on the classroom and lecture experience and this meant that an analysis of text, such as students’ coursework or exam essays, was not undertaken. because of these limitations, findings are presented as illustrative and hopefully illuminating rather than as robust and replicable. some findings may have relevance for the bme attainment gap but this was beyond the scope of this study (for examples of relevant perspectives see howard, 2003; and yosso, 2005). 3. findings teaching on each of the two observed core modules comprised one lecture and one seminar, each of 50-55 minutes. the lectures, recorded and made available on the virtual learning environment, introduced core concepts and theories. the team of observers agreed that the lectures were excellent models of carefully structured, synthesised expert knowledge, which the observed lecturers put across interestingly and with considerable enthusiasm. lectures were transmitted with few interactions, either lecturer-student or student-student, though some lecturers would occasionally ask a question. interaction was wilkinson engagement in higher education. who’s not engaging? journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: october 2018 12 intended to occur in the seminars, but there were considerable differences in levels of participation and these appeared to be aligned with the two teaching orientations identified by gow and kember (1993). 3.1. challenges for students’ reading and writing students in the department have to grasp and work with some difficult ideas and processes. a sense of their complexity was given by one of the academics who described two key concepts, and related practices, as intended to help students understand ‘epistemological, ontological positions’ and introduce them to ‘schools of thought within the discipline …’ and different study goals, ‘…whether it’s to contextually understand or to analyse and test hypotheses’. engaging meaningfully with these concepts and practices requires significant shifts in thinking. according to another academic, it ideally involves students ‘changing themselves by their reading’, taking on board multiple perspectives and ‘increasingly making them their own, whether they agree with them or not’; but many students find it ‘extremely anxiety inducing’ having to handle multiple perspectives and produce work for which ‘there is no right or wrong answer’, and discovering that ‘…interpreting the world is a messy, difficult, contested thing’. the academics described many other challenges which, from their tone of voice, verbal, and body language, often made them sound like student deficits, including the following:  moving from reading texts to planning and executing a written argument;  presenting knowledge as argument rather than as information;  integrating reading effectively and appropriately in their writing;  openness to new perspectives;  being critical using other than adversarial, ‘pros and cons’ type approaches;  supporting an argument with suitable evidence, and linking such evidence explicitly with the argument; and  producing coherent syntheses drawn from different perspectives. wilkinson engagement in higher education. who’s not engaging? journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: october 2018 13 one academic acknowledged the challenges of students’ learning needs, admitting that ‘it wasn’t until my third year [as an undergraduate] that i really thought i understood what our tutors wanted us to do… some of my peers at the time were still not getting it’. 3.2. engagement and alienation academics commented on problems with students’ motivation and engagement, linking these to external factors, such as ‘spoonfeeding’ at school, the internet prioritising information rather than thinking, massification of higher education, and an interest only in ‘getting a job’. they talked of ‘instrumentalism’, a lack of intrinsic interest in the humanities and in developing themselves, and a ‘misguided utilitarianism’, all of which disinclined students towards committed study and participation, especially in seminars, where ‘there’s always a question mark as to whether they’ve done any preparation’. lack of participation was especially noticeable where interactions were facilitated by the teacher asking questions to the whole group. in one such session, i noted three students out of about 20 who contributed more than twice, two who responded once, while the remaining 15 remained silent throughout. when no more student contributions were forthcoming, the teacher delivered a mini-lecture on points not yet covered. according to one of the students, this format was typical: …if people don’t want to discuss… the reading during the seminar, … we basically spend the whole seminar, we – well, our teacher – talks for an hour straight because no-one wants to discuss it. the lack of participation in seminars was criticised by two of the academics and by students who expressed frustration that, while they prepared for seminars and made efforts to contribute, others sat in silence or would be ‘on their laptops, scrolling through facebook’. however, commentary by another student suggested that the teaching was at fault: i didn’t have a good experience with one of my seminars… the teacher was… just talking to two people during the whole first semester… [a] lot of people said they didn’t enjoy it because they didn’t take part in the discussions at all. wilkinson engagement in higher education. who’s not engaging? journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: october 2018 14 this lack of interaction also appeared to affect relationships within seminar groups. one student said that while some tutors made an effort to connect and that ‘this made a real difference’, this was more the exception than the rule: they didn’t make a personal connection… in the seminar you’re a student – a person – but after that you’re just like someone they might pass in the street. and it’s the same with other students. you pass the same staff or the same student you were with, in the seminar, and they don’t acknowledge you. observations of tutors in the classroom make this comment surprising. however, a lack of group cohesion and limited connection between individual students were certainly apparent in these sessions: little or no banter as they arrived or were leaving; little acknowledgement of the tutor; eyes mainly down throughout the session. academics generally attributed the lack of interaction to poor preparation and engagement. one believed that students needed to approach their studies as they would ‘a marathon’, maintaining consistent effort over a prolonged period, however most students put in only a series of short ‘sprints’ coinciding with assessment submission deadlines. the same academic did not agree that the right response was to do more for students: ‘more support’ – that’s always the answer: ‘more support; more help; more structure; it’s more resources’, and i think you end up chasing down a rabbit hole. the more support and resources you give, the more likely they are to demand it. such additional support would be wrong, they argued, because it would discourage autonomy: what you’re trying to inculcate in young people is independence. what i want for students is to be independent of me, independent of adults, adult authority. it’s about becoming an autonomous human being. that’s for me what university education is about. to achieve this autonomy, the rules of academic engagement needed to be made explicit: wilkinson engagement in higher education. who’s not engaging? journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: october 2018 15 …they’ve got to realise that in order to be at university and to flourish and to succeed, they’ve got to work hard – they have to apply self-discipline. and… they’ve got to be inculcated into our discipline, and our norms and expectations, … so we need to make it as explicit as possible… it is about socialising them to the rules, habits, values of our institution’. despite doing much to make these norms explicit, academics reported that many students failed to take them on board, for example: ‘what i teach them doesn’t show up in their work’. not all seminar teaching followed the same pattern. the following description highlights students being supported to learn actively: we start with things like, … ‘here’s some different views on [the subject discipline], completely different views. set them in argument with each other and try to decide who’s right and wrong [and] how you can read an article critically and analytically’. so they do some exercises in class, then they write on that… then we look at the way [theories are] applied in case studies and ask them to use those theories in a research essay. it’s very, very scaffolded, … the next piece builds on the rest and they do exercises in workshop format and seminars, and then go away and do this stuff. scaffolded activities were also evident in some observed seminars. in one, the tutor structured activities so that students could work collaboratively, reading, discussing and writing on subject disciplinary concepts and arguments. prepared grids helped students analyse textual material by grouping concepts under key-word headings prior to writing short paragraphs. with students working in groups, the tutor could move between them providing feedback or prompting them to think further via questions. apart from their deliberate focus on disciplinary literacy development, these sessions were also noteworthy for high levels of participation. in the above example, every student participated actively. student commentary provides further evidence of such learning facilitative practice and also of their appreciation of it; however, they did not feel there was enough of it: wilkinson engagement in higher education. who’s not engaging? journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: october 2018 16 we had some exercises on how to write a paragraph, using the reading that we’ve done, and that was very helpful… i was a bit confused what it all meant but i wrote a paragraph, shortly summarising the reading and that was very helpful. then we read it out loud in front of the whole class… my understanding was a bit… shallow i would say, but then when i heard the other people’s paragraphs i could maybe understand more what [the author] meant. [w]riting these paragraphs… helped me… [understand] how to use readings in writing. i wish we’d done it more often, like every other week, ’cause we only did it three times in the year. another student, who said they only had one such seminar, emphasised the value of such development: it would have been helpful… [to learn] how to include the reading… when you write, because that’s what i struggled with. 4. discussion of the findings the findings appeared to reflect the above literature, which emphasised the challenging nature of undergraduates’ reading and writing development: its complexities; students having to get to grips with these, often with insufficient support, in an alien environment; the need for familiarisation with both discourse practices and people; and potential motivation issues if psychological needs are not met. where learning activities were structured and designed to support this development, students participated and were appreciative but felt they were not getting enough practice. in contrast, where teachers did much of the talking and did not provide structure or scaffolding for activities such as discussion, students generally did not participate, did not appreciate the experience and did not appear to connect with the teacher or with each other. from an sdt perspective, the strong orientation towards knowledge transmission – not only in lectures but also in seminars – can thus be interpreted as failing to develop students’ feelings of competence and relatedness, making it less likely that they will engage in autonomous, self-directed learning (niemiec and ryan, 2009). it also does not foster the familiarity needed for cohesion (rathje, 2007) in the potentially alien higher education environment (mann, 2001). wilkinson engagement in higher education. who’s not engaging? journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: october 2018 17 this interpretation suggests that engagement issues must not simply be seen in terms of student deficits, or of factors which are outside teachers’ control, but rather as matters which teachers can and need to address. an example of this was the generally low level of participation in seminars, often interpreted as reflecting poor engagement. this overlooks the fact that the method often used to facilitate interactions – asking questions to the whole group – is highly likely to result in most students remaining silent (doyle, 2008; millis, 2010). it is therefore possible to view non-participation as ‘a lack of skill on the part of the teacher’ which ‘…needs to be understood as a teacher deficit, not a student deficit’ (macfarlane, 2017, p.110). non-participation is problematic from a constructivist perspective because it is through putting ideas into their own words that students learn to articulate new material and integrate it with prior knowledge (e.g. ausubel, 1963; biggs,1996). it also contributes to feelings of alienation. in end-of-first-year interviews for another recent project, several students from different departments and faculties emphasised the unwelcoming atmosphere they experienced in the classroom, one commenting that the lack of interaction in seven out of eight modules had been their biggest disappointment during their first year at university. 5. tentative conclusions just as students need to learn critical thinking and self-reflection so as to scrutinise and justify decisions, beliefs and actions (barnett, 1997), higher education teachers also need to consider critically their own assumptions about teaching and the practices they employ to bring about learning, which are often unexamined and unchallenged, so that they can remain unaware of their implications for students’ learning (mezirow, 1990; larrivee, 2000). regarding literacy development, key assumptions concern the challenges inherent in students’ reading and writing (lea and street, 1998; meyer and land, 2003; haggis, 2003; gourlay, 2009); issues concerning engagement and assumed student deficits (haggis, 2003; 2006), and the alienating practices and environment of higher education (mann, 2001; haggis, 2006; bryson and hand, 2007). some teaching practices in higher education focus on meeting students’ learning needs, however, with other practices the goal of teaching is to transmit content, regardless of whether it brings about the intended learning and enables students to work with that content. these two teaching strategies, oriented towards learning facilitation or knowledge wilkinson engagement in higher education. who’s not engaging? journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: october 2018 18 transmission, and their links to more or less desirable learning approaches and outcomes, have long been recognised (gow and kember, 1993; kember, 1997), and yet over-reliance on knowledge transmission in many university departments often leaves students illequipped and poorly motivated to engage autonomously with their learning (niemiec and ryan, 2009). academics are under intense pressures arising from their dual roles related to research and teaching, and to increased cohort sizes. this can make it difficult to engage adequately with the theoretical perspectives and practices needed in their work as teachers and which, incidentally, can make their teaching a lot more enjoyable. those responsible for the provision of teaching must recognise that ‘students are more likely to persist and graduate in settings that provide academic, social, and personal support (tinto, 2003, p.3). this requires adequate staffing levels, with sufficient time on staff workloads, so that teaching is given the priority it needs. it also requires suitable professional development, so that teachers understand these issues and are able to achieve the conditions needed for students to thrive. 6. implications for future research the findings provide evidence that there are higher education teachers who are engaging well with many of the ideas, issues and practices discussed in this article, and applying them in their teaching. however, not all are and the reasons for this, and how to encourage and support such engagement, would be worth investigating. the implications of sdt have been researched in primary education reading development (e.g. de naeghel et al., 2014), in physical education (ntoumanis, 2001), and in education more generally (niemiec and ryan, 2009), but its relevance for reading and writing in higher education is under-researched. a more in-depth study would therefore be worthwhile. the implications of sdt for engagement and alienation in higher education also appear from the findings to be suitable areas for research, as would be a specific focus on efforts to understand the bme attainment gap. wilkinson engagement in higher education. who’s not engaging? journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: october 2018 19 references allan, g. and powell, n. (2007) ‘examining the underlying principles of enquiry-based learning: two instances of where learning sessions start and end’, the international journal of learning,14(8), pp. 157-165. aronson, e. and bridgeman, d. (1979) ‘jigsaw groups and the desegregated classroom: in pursuit of common goals’, personality and social psychology bulletin, 5(4), pp. 438446. ausubel, d.p. (1963) the psychology of meaningful verbal learning. new york: grune and stratton. barnett, r. (1997) higher education: a critical business. oxford: oxford university press. biggs, j. (1996) ‘enhancing teaching through constructive alignment’, higher education, 32(3), pp. 347-364. biggs, j. and tang, c. (2011) teaching for quality learning at university. 4th edn. maidenhead: open university press / mcgraw-hill education. bryson, c. and hand, l. (2007) ‘the role of engagement in inspiring teaching and learning’, innovations in education and teaching international, 44(4), pp. 349-362. de naeghel, j., van keer, h. and vanderlinde, r. (2014) ‘strategies for promoting autonomous reading motivation: a multiple case study research in primary education’, frontline learning research, 3(2014), pp. 83-101. doyle, t. (2008) helping students learn in a learner-centered environment. a guide to facilitating learning in higher education. sterling, virginia: stylus publishing, llc. gourlay, l. (2009) ‘threshold practices: becoming a student through academic literacies’, london review of education 7(2), pp. 181-192. wilkinson engagement in higher education. who’s not engaging? journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: october 2018 20 gow, l. and kember, d. (1993) ‘conceptions of teaching and their relationship to student learning’, british journal of educational psychology. 63(1), pp. 20-33. haggis, t. (2003) ‘constructing images of ourselves? a critical investigation into 'approaches to learning' research in higher education’, british educational research journal, 29(1), pp. 89-104. haggis, t. (2006) ‘pedagogies for diversity: retaining critical challenge amidst fears of ‘dumbing down’’, studies in higher education, 31(5), pp. 521-523. hay, d., kinchin, i. and lygo-baker, s. (2008) ‘making learning visible: the role of concept mapping in higher education’, studies in higher education, 33(3), pp. 295-311. howard, t.c. (2003) ‘culturally relevant pedagogy: ingredients for critical teacher reflection’, theory into practice, 42(3), pp. 195-202. kandiko, c., hay, d. and weller, s. (2012) ‘concept mapping in the humanities to facilitate reflection: externalizing the relationship between public and personal learning’, arts and humanities in higher education, 12(1), pp. 70-87. kember, d. (1997) ‘a reconceptualization of the research into university academics’ conceptions of teaching’, learning und instruction, 7(3), pp. 255-275. larrivee, b. (2000) ‘transforming teaching practice: becoming the critically reflective teacher’, reflective practice, 1(3), pp. 293-307. lea, m. and street, b. (1998) ‘student writing in higher education: an academic literacies approach’, studies in higher education, 11(3), pp. 182–99. macfarlane, b. (2017) freedom to learn. the threat to student academic freedom and why it needs to be reclaimed. london: routledge, taylor and francis. mann, s. (2001) ‘alternative perspectives on student learning: alienation and engagement’, studies in higher education, 26(1), pp. 7-19. wilkinson engagement in higher education. who’s not engaging? journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: october 2018 21 mann, s. (2005) ‘alienation in the learning environment: a failure of community?’, studies in higher education, 30(1), pp. 43-55. marton, f. and säljö, r. (1976) ‘on qualitative differences in learning: i – outcome and process’, british journal of educational psychology, 46(1), pp. 4-11. mcneil, j., borg, m., kennedy, e., cui, v., puntha, h. and rashid, z. (2018) scale-up handbook. nottingham: nottingham trent university [online]. available at: https://www4.ntu.ac.uk/adq/document_uploads/teaching/181133.pdf. (accessed: 25 september 2018). meyer, j.h.f. and land, r. (2003) ‘threshold concepts and troublesome knowledge: linkages to ways of thinking and practising within the disciplines’, in rust, c. (ed.) improving student learning: improving student learning theory and practice – ten years on. oxford: oxford centre for staff and learning development, pp. 1-16. meyer, j. and land. r (2005) ‘threshold concepts and troublesome knowledge (2). epistemological considerations and a conceptual framework for teaching and learning’, higher education, may issue, pp. 373-388. mezirow, j. (1990) ‘how critical reflection triggers transformative learning’, in mezirow, j. and associates (eds.) fostering critical reflection in adulthood. san francisco: jossey bass, pp. 1-20. millis, b.j. (2010) cooperative learning in higher education. across the disciplines. across the academy. sterling, virginia: stylus publishing, llc. niemiec, c. and ryan, r. (2009) ‘autonomy, competence, and relatedness in the classroom. applying sdt to educational practice’, theory and research in education, 7(2), pp. 133-144. https://www4.ntu.ac.uk/adq/document_uploads/teaching/181133.pdf wilkinson engagement in higher education. who’s not engaging? journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: october 2018 22 novak, j.d. and caňas, a.j. (2008) the theory underlying concept maps and how to construct and use them. technical report ihmc cmaptools 2006-01, rev 012008, pp. 1-36. available at: http://cmap.ihmc.us/publications/researchpapers/theoryunderlyingconceptmaps. pdf. (accessed: 30 january 2018). ntoumanis, n. (2001) ‘a self-determination approach to the understanding of motivation in physical education’, british journal of educational psychology, 71, pp. 225-242. prosser, m. and trigwell, k. (1999) understanding learning and teaching. buckingham: srhe and open university press. race, p. (2009) in at the deep end. starting to teach in higher education. 2nd edn. leeds met press [online]. available at: https://phil-race.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/downloads/2013/05/in-at-the-deepend.pdf. (accessed: 26 june 2018). ramsden, p. (1992) learning to teach in higher education. london: routledge. rathje, s. (2007) ‘intercultural competence: the status and future of a controversial concept’, language and intercultural communication, 7(4), pp. 254-266. ritchie, j., spencer, l. and o’connor, w. (2003) ‘carrying out qualitative analysis’, in ritchie, j. and lewis, j. (eds.) (2003) qualitative research practice. a guide for social science students and researchers. london: sage publications ltd, pp. 219262. ryan, r., and deci, e. (2000) ‘sdt and the facilitation of intrinsic motivation, social development, and well-being’, american psychologist, 55(1), pp. 68-78. http://cmap.ihmc.us/publications/researchpapers/theoryunderlyingconceptmaps.pdf http://cmap.ihmc.us/publications/researchpapers/theoryunderlyingconceptmaps.pdf https://phil-race.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/downloads/2013/05/in-at-the-deep-end.pdf https://phil-race.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/downloads/2013/05/in-at-the-deep-end.pdf wilkinson engagement in higher education. who’s not engaging? journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: october 2018 23 tinto, v. (2003) ‘promoting student retention through classroom practice’, presented at enhancing student retention: using international policy and practice. amsterdam 5-7 november [online]. available at: http://gaia.flemingc.on.ca/~jmior/edu705humber/articles/tinto%20retention.pdf. (accessed: 7 october 2018). weimer, m. (2013) learner-centered teaching. five key changes to practice. 2nd edn. san francisco: jossey-bass. wilkinson, j. and olason, c. (2012) ‘supporting work and inquiry via a clear approach: combined learning for employability and research’, vistas: education, economy and community. the university of west london journal, 1(3), pp. 29-48. wingate, u. (2015) academic literacy and student diversity. the case for inclusive practice. bristol: multilingual matters. yosso, t. (2005) ‘whose culture has capital? a critical race theory discussion of community cultural wealth’, race ethnicity and education, 8(1), pp. 69-91. author details james wilkinson has taught in higher education for more than 25 years in both teaching focused and research intensive institutions, and was awarded a national teaching fellowship in 2010. he currently works in educational development at one london-based russell group university and in learning development at another similar institution. appendix 1. the jigsaw classroom the jigsaw classroom approach was developed by elliott aronson in the 1970s as a response to major problems, including physical violence, and poor associated learning outcomes (aronson and bridgeman, 1979) following de-segregation in american schools. this context clearly differs from that of uk higher education today, however there are certain parallels. just as de-segregation of schools in the united states had brought http://gaia.flemingc.on.ca/~jmior/edu705humber/articles/tinto%20retention.pdf wilkinson engagement in higher education. who’s not engaging? journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: october 2018 24 together students previously kept apart, widening participation in british higher education has brought together white, middle class students, for whom university was always an expectation, with students from different ethnic, racial and social backgrounds, who may be the first in their family to go to university. seminar groups may not have the same competitive or antagonistic dynamic as the ‘traditional classrooms’ described by aronson and bridgeman, but where the teaching is teacher-centred and transmission-based, they are still marked by a tendency for few students to participate actively while many do not. aronson and bridgeman provide evidence that the ‘traditional classroom’ fosters an environment which fails to develop students’ motivation or their ability to interact and work constructively with their peers. by contrast, the jigsaw classroom facilitates learning cooperatively in ‘learning groups’ comprising six students working towards common goals: i. individual students develop expertise by researching one of six different sub-topics, for which materials are provided; ii. they share and discuss knowledge in ‘expert groups’ with 5 students from other groups who have been researching the same sub-topic; iii. next, they return to their original learning group and teach team members about their topic. iv. they are individually tested on all six topics. aronson and bridgeman’s research identified important benefits. because they will be individually tested, students are motivated to do a good job of teaching their colleagues, and when being taught, they understand that it is in their interests to listen and be supportive: …results indicate that… structured interdependence increases the self-esteem, the morale, the interpersonal attraction, and the empathy of students across ethnic and racial divisions, and also improves the academic performance of minority students without hampering the performance of the ethnic majority. (aronson and bridgeman, 1979, p.438) wilkinson engagement in higher education. who’s not engaging? journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: october 2018 25 appendix 2. concept mapping using concept mapping as a teaching strategy allows teachers to gauge students’ understanding and to provide feedback quickly and easily. drawing on constructivist conceptions of learning (notably ausubel,1963), concept maps were developed by josef novak in the early 1970s as a tool to help researchers visualise changes in children’s learning of science concepts (novak and cañas, 2008). to make apparent the assimilation of new concepts, novak’s concept maps comprise concept labels together with cross-links (words or phrases) which show the relationship between the different concepts. each pair of concepts and link thus represent a proposition (see example below). because crosslinks make visible the ‘meaningful learning’ and related understanding, hay et al. (2008, p.302) argue that concept mapping: … is much more stringent than mind mapping… and actively differentiates between knowledge (of appropriate concept labels) and understanding (that is the product of concept linkage). as is evident from the above focus groups and interviews, subject disciplinary writing is a challenge for many students. it is also time-consuming for teachers to assess and provide formative feedback. kandiko et al. (2012) propose that concept mapping offers opportunities for students to develop arguments and organise ideas, and facilitates feedback and reflection. concept mapping can thus be used in conjunction with written assignments to facilitate tutors engaging with students as they are building understanding, and before submitting their written work for assessment. to illustrate this potential to present and visualise meaningful understanding of ideas, the above propositions are presented in the concept map below (and include ideas from the theoretical framework presented earlier). starting with ‘concept maps’ (centre top), the map can be ‘read’ by following the links and arrows to other labels, thus making a series of propositions and complete sentences. for example: ‘concept maps comprise concept labels plus words/phrases (which) link new knowledge with existing cognitive structure’. wilkinson engagement in higher education. who’s not engaging? journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: october 2018 26 figure 1. concept mapping presented in the form of a concept map. appendix 3. enquiry based learning the shift in my teaching towards more learning facilitative approaches emerged from critical reflection and by my attending a highly active and interactive workshop facilitated by george allan. this was designed so that participants would experience – rather than be told about – his ‘portsmouth model’ of enquiry based learning (ebl) (allan and powell, 2007). participants did most of the work while he did relatively little during the actual workshop, appearing relaxed, keeping us busy and gently challenging us with questions. to summarise allan’s approach, the following vignette describes my experience of the workshop and includes key features of the approach: george did not talk at me and my 25 or more fellow participants (university lecturers) other than briefly at the start and at the end of the workshop. instead, he had us all working hard, not only during the workshop but also before it had even started, when he asked us each to bring notes on a paper we had found on a topic relevant to the workshop’s theme. he also explained why this would be useful. in the workshop, later, he explained the importance of motivating students by telling them how the next learning topic will be relevant and valuable for them, relating it to their interests and needs. however, this was not until we had worked in groups of wilkinson engagement in higher education. who’s not engaging? journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: october 2018 27 four, discussing and critiquing each other’s papers and producing a (hopefully) nuanced and coherent written synthesis of the main ideas from all four papers. we then moved around the room, reading the work produced by other groups. it was hard work and also an eye-opener. for one thing, it reminded us how challenging the kind of work we ask our students to do is, and how much it involves. for another, it showed us how important it is to get students doing the things we want them to learn. appendix 4. trialling, evaluating, and refining combined approaches. two teaching practices – jigsaw classroom and concept mapping – were combined and trialled on the programme, in every seminar group of one module during week 4 of the first semester in 2017/18. students worked in small groups of three students, each taking responsibility for reading a paragraph of text – an extract from a book chapter that students were asked to read in advance – and explaining the paragraph’s main ideas to the other two group members. when each student had explained the ideas from their paragraph, each group then designed and presented a concept map representing the ideas from all three paragraphs. they were also shown an example of a concept map on which the concept labels and cross-linking phrases were pointed out. in the event, this was a mixed experience. with the exception of one seminar group, students participated actively and appeared to find the activities motivating. the module convenor commented that it had introduced useful collaborative and individual skills for reading, discussing and structuring ideas from texts. however, concept mapping was timeconsuming, and not all groups remembered to include the important cross-links. further problems were observed in one, unusually small seminar group, where there were only enough students to form two groups of three students. the seminar tutor, a post-doc teaching assistant with limited teaching experience, had missed a training session introducing the combined approaches with their emphases on active and interactive learning. instructions were given to the students rather hastily and, because the students stopped engaging with the activity after about 20 minutes, the tutor delivered a mini-lecture and did not attempt to motivate students to continue with the activity. wilkinson engagement in higher education. who’s not engaging? journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: october 2018 28 this experience emphasises the need for suitable development opportunities before attempting such activities, so that higher education teachers are aware of underpinning theoretical perspectives and can be shown ways of applying these in practice. remarkably, during a recent staff development event, i provided too much text and not enough time for participants to digest and discuss it, thus doing the very thing that this article should have warned me not to do. changes made in the light of this experience have included shortening the texts to a few lines only and getting students to complete partially completed concept maps. the activities can be designed to introduce such an activity to teaching staff. working in groups of six, each participant is given one text only, reads it and explains it to their colleagues in their own words. the group discusses all six texts, comparing them with their own experience and considering them critically. they then fill the gaps on the partially completed concept map together, then use this to assist them in producing written syntheses of the ideas from all six texts, expressing them in their own words and including references. the material below could be used to provide scaffolding for these activities. the following are extracts (slightly adapted) from: wilkinson, j. (2018) engagement in higher education. who’s not engaging? journal of learning development in higher education (in press). a. a challenge for higher education teaching is to build students’ capacities for inquiry, reading and writing in the discipline, which allow them to discover, unpack and apply knowledge critically in new contexts, for new purposes (lea and street, 1998; haggis, 2003; wingate, 2015). b. developing students’ academic literacy is challenging because the practices involved, their underpinning epistemological foundations and the sociocultural conditions in which students have to learn them, are likely to be alien for students (mann, 2001, haggis, 2006; bryson and hand, 2007). wilkinson engagement in higher education. who’s not engaging? journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: october 2018 29 c. achieving cohesion, rather than uniformity and coherence, requires dialogue permitting familiarisation, so that the different parties can interact more effectively and comfortably (rathje, 2007). d. the assumption that teaching means transmitting knowledge was one of the teaching conceptions identified by gow and kember (1993). the other one was that teaching is understood to mean bringing about intended learning (learning facilitation). e. the familiarisation needed for cohesion in the classroom is less likely to develop with the knowledge transmission orientation because this involves the teacher doing most of the talking. the learning facilitative teaching, on the other hand, is ‘likely to involve interactive class sessions’ (gow and kember, 1993, p.28). f. [self-determination theory] suggests that learning facilitation – unlike knowledge transmission – fosters students’ feelings of competence, autonomy and relatedness, assisting internalisation of externally regulated behaviours, and increasing preparedness for engaged, self-directed learning (niemiec and ryan, 2009). wilkinson engagement in higher education. who’s not engaging? journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: october 2018 30 engagement in higher education. who’s not engaging? abstract introduction 1. literature 1.1. challenges for students’ reading and writing 1.2. engagement and alienation 1.3. suggested responses and teaching methods 2. methods and limitations 2.1. methods 3. findings 3.1. challenges for students’ reading and writing 3.2. engagement and alienation 4. discussion of the findings 5. tentative conclusions 6. implications for future research references author details appendix 1. the jigsaw classroom appendix 2. concept mapping appendix 3. enquiry based learning appendix 4. trialling, evaluating, and refining combined approaches. article journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 15: november 2019 ________________________________________________________________________ the trouble with academic reading: exposing hidden threshold concepts through academic reading retreats angela rhead keele university, uk abstract acknowledged as a troublesome threshold concept for students and teachers alike in higher education (he), academic reading persists as a significant yet under-investigated challenge. this paper introduces an exciting teaching innovation launched in 2017 at keele university to meet that challenge: academic reading retreats. adapting a writing retreat format, they deliver a range of strategies for reading journal articles and provide opportunities for private practice and shared reflections, which can facilitate deep learning about complex epistemological concepts. they open a dialogue within the academic community that helps students better understand the relationship between reading and enquiry, and helps academics better understand their students’ reading challenges. this case study provides a brief literature review and personal reflections about facilitating student reading, an introduction to our academic reading retreats and a preliminary evaluation of their potential. it concludes with a recommendation for extended time and space for academics and students to explore academic reading together, alongside an acknowledgement of the challenges that entails. keywords: academic reading; higher education. background the trouble with reading the author’s experience as a lecturer and learning developer has highlighted the poor academic reading practices of many undergraduates and postgraduates alike. in particular, they report reading journal papers difficult, frustrating, perplexing or simply rhead the trouble with academic reading: exposing hidden threshold concepts through academic reading retreats journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 2 ‘boring’. this troubled relationship with the purpose and process of academic reading presents a significant barrier to learning at university that is reflected in pedagogical scholarship. practical sources offer technical strategies to develop or remedy students’ skills (cottrell, 2013; wallace and wray, 2016); theoretical scholarship focuses on the disciplinary context of academic literacies, ‘academic socialization’ (lea and street, 1998; christie et al., 2014), or the underlying causes of the apparent deficit, drawing on concepts of social or cultural capital that point to he’s capacity to share cultural capital (hockings, 2010; morgan and houghton, 2011; hannon et al., 2017). however, practical and scholarly sources both attend primarily to writing, with the role of reading in academic thinking still largely subordinated to its written performance (mcalpine, 2012), and with reading cast as ‘other literacy practices’ (lea and street, 2006, p.376). all sources concur, however, that we face students holding common misconceptions: firstly, about the purpose of academic reading, why we do it, e.g.: ‘i’ve written my essay, i just need to find the references to back it up’. this captures a fundamental misunderstanding of purpose, where students use reading as a way to support preconceived ideas rather than understanding emerging from and through reading (brewerton, 2014; mcalpine, 2016). similarly, reports of academic papers being ‘boring’ indicate a common misunderstanding of the function of journal articles in the academic community to introduce new knowledge, and the application of historical experiences of reading (papen and theriault, 2017) that retain expectations of sequential unveiling of meaning: ‘ta dah!’. secondly, this epistemological misconception of purpose is often complemented by a lack of confidence in the process of academic reading itself: how we do it (shon, 2012; wallace and wray, 2016). students report reading the same pages repeatedly, or ‘getting lost’, and these learning troubles regarding handling and interpreting academic papers in particular are observed at undergraduate, postgraduate and doctoral levels. equally, academics report teaching troubles with high aspirations for their students’ learning, but repeated disappointments with an apparent reluctance to read more broadly (saltmarsh and saltmarsh, 2008; weller, 2010; hallett, 2013). this concern is well founded, with reading essential for learning discipline-specific threshold concepts (meyer and land, 2003 and 2005; macmillan, 2014), but also in itself an epistemological conceptual threshold (wisker and robinson, 2009) that learners in higher education rhead the trouble with academic reading: exposing hidden threshold concepts through academic reading retreats journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 3 need to navigate, with critical reading and the function of journal papers having a crossdisciplinary significance for academic enquiry. how to ‘get’ students to read remains a persistent conundrum, particularly where understanding is reached through the synthesis of combined reading in order to reach a position (mcalpine, 2016). moreover, whilst the range of disciplines hold differing views of criticality (moore, 2013), all seem to share a common concern about the quality of reading students are engaged in. academic reading then, seems persistently troubling for academic staff and students alike. both appear frustrated by a largely private and complex practice that seems hard to pin down, but with limited time and space in the curriculum to address deep seated, often tacit, misconceptions and misunderstandings. many universities attempt to address academic skills through extra-curricular interventions and central support services that deliver remedies (lea and street, 1998; wingate, 2006): symptoms of scant or uncritical reading diagnosed as a student’s lack that sits outside the discipline. discipline outsiders, such as learning developers, librarians or other third-space professionals (veles et al., 2018) are tasked with teaching, for the most part generic writing and, less frequently, reading skills through programme events or extracurricular workshops and tutorials. both strategies, however, place responsibility for translating these generic concepts to specific disciplinary enquiry, with the student. hallett (2013) argues that both skills-focused and learner-focused concepts of support are problematic precisely because they sit outside the discipline, and points to a third concept that views support in terms of the literacy practices of particular academic communities. this supports the view that academic ‘skills’ must be embedded within a discipline as part of a holistic and inclusive learning experience rather than an explicit intervention (morgan and houghton, 2011; hill and tinker, 2013). however, these embedded approaches do not automatically engage with hallett's third concept and may still take the form of a technical, uninterrogated delivery of skills, rather than underpinning a ‘connected curriculum’ (fung, 2017) focused on research and scholarship. equally, a curriculum-embedded but assessment-driven approach does not automatically embrace the critical view of an academic communities’ practices advocated in lea and street’s (1998) widely supported academic literacies model. having explored discipline-specific approaches to developing students’ academic reading practices in programmes and extra-curricular workshops, i remained frustrated both by the rhead the trouble with academic reading: exposing hidden threshold concepts through academic reading retreats journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 4 lack of time required for the deep learning (marton and säljö, 1976) necessary to effectively explore the challenging concepts about the purpose of academic reading in enquiry, and journal papers in particular, alongside the technical process of handling papers. even in longitudinal learning over several weeks, learning remained rushed and surface; lengthy embedded sessions remained persistently (mis)directed towards assessment, with learning strategic and contained. a new strategy, which supported deeper learning and allowed for disciplinary content but also engaged with crossdisciplinary concepts of reading as scholarship, seemed increasingly desirable. retreats: an emerging solution? research on writing retreats suggests that when they are done communally, participants are able to successfully explore writing identities and develop their own writing practices (kornhaber et al, 2016; papen and thériault, 2017). this chimes with the ‘hidden’ nature of reading, which echoes writing in that it is often a solitary and private activity, and suggests that communal exposure might act equally positively on reading practices and identities (mcalpine, 2012). further, writing retreats are inherently purposeful yet diverse, offering a format that supports discipline-specific reading whilst focusing on the crossdisciplinary aspects of academic reading. this suggests that retreats might make space for the deep thinking required to support navigation of conceptual threshold concepts about reading for enquiry (marton and säljö, 1976; wisker and robinson, 2009). they might also provide an ‘imaginative space’ (grant and knowles, 2010) to develop participants’ confidence and identity as academic readers. finally, local writing retreats based on murray and newton’s model (2009) are egalitarian affairs, with phd students, lecturers, teaching fellows and professors alike forming a community of practitioners (lave and wenger, 1991; fung, 2017), submitting voluntarily to a facilitator’s control. i wanted to capture this aspect of writing retreats in the academic reading retreats to expose the ubiquity of the challenges, and pleasures, inherent in academic reading as enquiry. i imagined that including academics as readers-in-residence would demonstrate to students participating more ‘peripherally’ that even those at the centre of our academic community do not merely flick through a journal article to come to a considered and critical understanding. consequently, inspired by writing retreats as a way to safeguard precious time and space, but with a structure that ensures discipline and focus (murray and newton, 2009), i rhead the trouble with academic reading: exposing hidden threshold concepts through academic reading retreats journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 5 devised and delivered ten academic reading retreats to explore the purpose and process of reading academic journal articles for enquiry. they draw on writing retreats in three ways: firstly, they are organised into significant cycles of delivery, practice and discussion that incorporate private and public phases. secondly, participants bring one or two journal articles to support their research or assessment, which facilitates disciplinary enquiry. thirdly, academics and students participate as equals in the retreat, reading, discussing and reflecting together. however, academic reading retreats differ from writing retreats in that they are teaching and learning events in which concepts about enquiry and strategies to perform critical reading are delivered. additionally, whilst students are learning how to read, academics are also learning how to teach reading. finally, in the role of the facilitator i am also a teacher, coach and fellow member of the community academic reading retreat outline open academic reading retreats are full day events for up to fifteen students and two academics in venues that give a sense of retreating ‘for real’. all are invited to participate: ugs, pgts and pgrs are targeted with emails that explicitly offer support for dissertations and literature reviews; academic staff are emailed with a professional development opportunity to support teaching practices. both apply, outlining hopes and challenges. ideally, academics and students come from different programmes, enhancing the interdisciplinary nature of the retreat but also protecting egalitarianism by reducing the sense of hierarchy. after a reflective task and introduction, the retreat follows three cycles of reading (see figure 1). the first phase is an introduction to the process of enquiry using the metaphor of ‘the stage’. this is a role-play developed to represent the academic community and the function of journal papers in sharing and developing new disciplinary knowledge (rhead, 2016). it focuses on an article’s performance of new knowledge in its disciplinary theatre, whilst simultaneously engaging with discourse already playing out on its stage. it casts articles as persuasive pieces and its readers as an audience of actor-critics. next, participants individually analyse their paper to locate its position in terms of previous knowledge, its claim, the premises of that claim and its methods. the group then reconvenes to share findings and thoughts. rhead the trouble with academic reading: exposing hidden threshold concepts through academic reading retreats journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 6 the second phase focuses on scrolling and textmapping an article (middlebrook, 1994) to identify its construction and to deliberately avoid sequential approaches to reading. creating a scroll with their paper (see figure 1) and unrolling it for inspection (abegglen et al., 2019) enables readers to regard it as a whole, to discern the significance of the different sections in formulating and structuring an argument. participants map their scrolled article individually, then reconvene to share findings and thoughts. the third phase turns its attention beyond the individual article, moving to a consideration of the references and evidence used to support the paper and the relevance of the paper for participants' own enquiry, including approaches to synthesising sources and developing a literature review. after another reading of their paper, the group reconvenes finally to share thoughts, reflect on the day’s learning and outline future actions. alongside each silent reading phase i run a parallel clinic where participants can access differentiated support privately, outside the reading room: sometimes, guidance is needed to apply concepts; sometimes, extra challenges for anyone ready to develop a more sophisticated analysis. this has been particularly important where pgr students are participating alongside ugs. rhead the trouble with academic reading: exposing hidden threshold concepts through academic reading retreats journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 7 figure 1. academic reading retreat programme. rhead the trouble with academic reading: exposing hidden threshold concepts through academic reading retreats journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 8 evaluation observation and participant feedback gathering concurs: academic reading retreats are rich learning events that act on academic practice and identity. all our learning development events include an online post-event evaluation form, which collects responses anonymously at source. participants whose responses are used in this text have been informed that anonymised quotations may be included. questions include a simple rating scale for the helpfulness of the event in developing academic performance and an opportunity to tell us why, and how, it will impact on behaviours. over the past two years we have received fifty two responses from ten retreats with an average score of 4.94, where 5 is ‘very useful’ and 1 is ‘not at all’. student feedback falls into three broad categories. firstly, when commenting on the process of reading academic articles, they identify practical skills and technical strategies as very useful. many report that they have learned to ‘break-down’ or ‘take apart’ papers, thus increasing their sense of confidence: it meant whilst reading the actual article i didn’t get lost in all the points being made and unable to piece everything together. this suggests that academic reading retreats can successfully deliver the technical skills of academic reading (hallett, 2013). secondly, student comments suggest that the retreats improve understanding of the purpose of academic reading in supporting enquiry generally, navigating the key conceptual threshold (wisker and robinson, 2009) of academic reading, and their research specifically. this indicates that the retreats may also have a deeper impact on their identity as scholars (papen and thériault, 2017) and facilitate criticality in regard to epistemology (lea and street, 2006): i now take more time with my academic reading. this time allows me to find more depth within the article rather than just providing myself with a surface level analysis. rhead the trouble with academic reading: exposing hidden threshold concepts through academic reading retreats journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 9 thirdly, there is evidence that the interdisciplinary and social nature of the event provides a sense of academic community and authenticity that also impacts on the students’ identity as academic participants, which supports models of social and collaborative learning (lave and wenger, 1991; lea and street, 2006; fung, 2017): the sharing of a diverse range of ideas led to an increase in learning and a more fruitful grasp of the issues faced when it comes to academic reading. academics report learning in terms of gaining a better understanding of the challenges students face, for example: (i)t has made me reflect on assumptions that i might have made about what students know about how to actively read and what to actively read secondly, they report a commitment to practice development: i definitely need to incorporate reading processes more actively into my module design. this suggests that academic reading retreats can be a promising form of academic development, encouraging academic teaching staff to consider developing a connected curriculum (fung, 2017) that moves away from the remedial towards embedded learning development (wingate, 2006). inevitably, there are also challenges raised in running academic reading retreats, chiefly concerning recruitment and logistics. a whole day is both difficult to arrange, in busy student and academic schedules, and to ‘sell’. it is also difficult to accommodate in an appropriate venue, with an increasing paucity of learning spaces in he. the retreats require much preparation, administration and organisation, but by their very nature are limited in scope; they demand high levels of commitment from students, academics and facilitators; they therefore tend to engage those who are already engaged. discussion rhead the trouble with academic reading: exposing hidden threshold concepts through academic reading retreats journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 10 in terms of implications for teaching and learning design, two key themes emerge: the importance of ‘retreating’ with generous time and space and the significance of authenticity. the generosity of time and space afforded in a retreat (murray and newton, 2009) enables deep learning and critical reflection on an individual basis: students can explore, retread and navigate the landscape of an article at their own pace and with personalised support. equally, this generosity enables effective social learning to occur, where shared challenges, passions and cumulative discussion create a temporary community of academic practitioners that exposes shared anxieties and experiences, but also celebrates new understanding (grant and knowles, 2010). the authenticity of the participant’s enquiry is, i suspect, key to the academic reading retreats’ success: whilst the event is technically ‘extra’ curricular, it is driven by individual interests and research, with each participant bringing journal articles pertinent to current, authentic enquiry (fung, 2017). this lends support to lea and street’s (2006) argument that academic reading should not be separated as a generic skill but be seen as inextricably linked to disciplinary knowing. it may also explain the clear establishment of community observed on retreats, since professors and undergraduates alike are engaged in a genuine and common practice. this reflects lave and wenger’s (1991) model of legitimate peripheral practice in thinking about how newcomers can transition in experience and identity from the modelling offered by those at the centre of the community. in terms of benefits to a university’s academic community, reading retreats have a potential dual role as both academic development and learning development events. for readers-in-residence, the retreat can work on academics' teaching practices, focusing their attention on reading as disciplinary learning. for students, the retreat seems to act on their identity as enquirers, focusing their attention away from the strategic assignment passing and towards the pursuit of deeper understanding. however, there remain conundrums, most of which centre on scalability. how can we increase student numbers at reading retreats and maintain a supply of academic readers-in-residence? additionally, with increasing numbers of programmes at keele adopting the academic reading retreat model, how far does the loss of interdisciplinarity, authenticity and generosity of time impact on the benefits? this preliminary evaluation has led to a funded research project, currently being undertaken, which will explore the impact of academic reading retreats further. the case rhead the trouble with academic reading: exposing hidden threshold concepts through academic reading retreats journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 11 study hopes to signal this developmental work to the learning development community and to contribute to discussions regarding reading as a fundamental yet under-valued academic practice, which impacts on academic analysis as significantly as writing, and which warrants closer inspection. our research hopes to build on lea and street’s ‘other literacy practices’ (2006, p.376) with a focus on the broader and the diverse disciplinary social practices of reading, thereby expanding the academic literacies perspective (lea and street, 1998). references abegglen, s., burns, t., middlebrook, d. and sinfield, s. (2019) ‘unrolling the text: using scrolls to facilitate academic reading’, journal of learning development in higher education, issue 14, april 2019. available at: https://journal.aldinhe.ac.uk/index.php/jldhe/article/view/467 (accessed: 9 august 2019). brewerton, g. (2014) ‘implications of student and lecturer qualitative views on reading lists: a case study at loughborough university, uk’, new review of academic librarianship, 20, pp.78–90. christie, h., tett, l., cree, v. and mccune, v. (2014) ‘“it all just clicked”: a longitudinal perspective on transitions within university’, studies in higher education, 41(3), pp.1-13. cottrell, s. (2013) the study skills handbook (4th ed., palgrave study guides). basingstoke: palgrave macmillan. fung, d. (2017) connected curriculum for higher education. london: ucl press. available from http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1qnw8nf (accessed: 15 february 2018). grant, b. and knowles, s. (2000) ‘flights of imagination: academic women be(com)ing writers’, international journal for academic development, 5(1), pp.6-19. https://journal.aldinhe.ac.uk/index.php/jldhe/article/view/467 http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1qnw8nf rhead the trouble with academic reading: exposing hidden threshold concepts through academic reading retreats journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 12 hallett, f. (2013) ‘study support and the development of academic literacy in higher education: a phenomenographic analysis’, teaching in higher education, 18(5), pp.518-530. hannon, c., faas, d. and o'sullivan, k. (2017) ‘widening the educational capabilities of socio‐economically disadvantaged students through a model of social and cultural capital development’, british educational research journal, 43(6), pp.1225-1245. hill, p. and tinker, a. (2013) ‘integrating learning development into the student experience’, journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5. available at https://journal.aldinhe.ac.uk/index.php/jldhe/article/view/172 (accessed: 9 august 2019). hockings , c. (2010) inclusive learning and teaching in higher education: a synthesis of research, hea, april. available at https://www.lboro.ac.uk/media/wwwlboroacuk/external/content/services/cap/downlo ads/documents/hea%20report%20on%20inclusive%20teaching.pdf (accessed: 9 august 2019). kornhaber, r., cross, m., betihavas, v. and bridgman, h. (2016) ‘the benefits and challenges of academic writing retreats: an integrative review’, higher education research and development, 35(6), pp.1210-1227. lave, w. and wenger, e. (1991) situated learning: legitimate peripheral participation. cambridge: cambridge university press. lea, m. and street, b. (1998) ‘student writing in higher education: an academic literacies approach’, studies in higher education, 23(2), pp.157-172. lea, m. and street, b. (2006) ‘the "academic literacies" model: theory and applications’, theory into practice, 45(4), pp.368-377. macmillan, m. (2014) ‘student connections with academic texts: a phenomenographic study of reading’, teaching in higher education, 19(8), pp.943-954. https://journal.aldinhe.ac.uk/index.php/jldhe/article/view/172 https://www.lboro.ac.uk/media/wwwlboroacuk/external/content/services/cap/downloads/documents/hea%20report%20on%20inclusive%20teaching.pdf https://www.lboro.ac.uk/media/wwwlboroacuk/external/content/services/cap/downloads/documents/hea%20report%20on%20inclusive%20teaching.pdf rhead the trouble with academic reading: exposing hidden threshold concepts through academic reading retreats journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 13 marton, f. and säljö, r. (1976) ‘on qualitative differences in learning. i – outcome and process’, british journal of educational psychology, 46, pp.4-11. meyer, j. and land, r. (2003) threshold concepts and troublesome knowledge: linkages to ways of thinking and practising within the disciplines. etl project occasional report 4. edinburgh. available at http://www.leeds.ac.uk/educol/documents/142206.pdf (accessed: 9 august 2019). meyer, j. and land, r. (2005) ‘threshold concepts and troublesome knowledge (2): epistemological considerations and a conceptual framework for teaching and learning’, higher education: the international journal of higher education and educational planning, 49(3), pp.373-388. mcalpine, l. (2012) ‘shining a light on doctoral reading: implications for doctoral identities and pedagogies’, innovations in education and teaching international, 49(4), pp.351-361. middlebrook, r. d. (1994) ‘instructional benefits of textmapping’. available at: http://www.textmapping.org/benefits.html (accessed: 20 february 2019). moore, t. (2013) ‘critical thinking: seven definitions in search of a concept’, studies in higher education, 38(4), pp.506–522. morgan, h., and houghton, a. m. (2011) ‘inclusive curriculum design in higher education: considerations for effective practice across and within subject areas’, the higher education academy. available at https://www.advance-he.ac.uk/knowledgehub/inclusive-curriculum-design-higher-education (accessed: 20 february 2019). murray, r. and newton, m., (2009) ‘writing retreat as structured intervention: margin or mainstream?’, higher education research and development, 28(5), pp.541-553. http://www.leeds.ac.uk/educol/documents/142206.pdf http://www.textmapping.org/benefits.html https://www.advance-he.ac.uk/knowledge-hub/inclusive-curriculum-design-higher-education https://www.advance-he.ac.uk/knowledge-hub/inclusive-curriculum-design-higher-education rhead the trouble with academic reading: exposing hidden threshold concepts through academic reading retreats journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 14 papen, u. and thériault, v., (2017) ‘writing retreats as a milestone in the development of phd students’ sense of self as academic writers’, studies in continuing education, 40(2), pp.1-15. rhead, a. (2016) ‘“i’ve written my essay... i just need to find the references to support it now”: the stage as a metaphor for developing academic practices’. keele annual teaching symposium, 15 june, keele. saltmarsh, d. and saltmarsh, s. (2008) ‘has anyone read the reading? using assessment to promote academic literacies and learning cultures’, teaching in higher education, 13(6), pp.621-632. shon, p.c. (2012) how to read journal articles in the social sciences: a very practical guide for students. 2nd ed. sage study skills. london: sage. wallace, m. and wray, a. (2016) critical reading and writing for postgraduates. 3rd ed. sage study skills). london: sage. weller, s. (2010) ‘comparing lecturer and student accounts of reading in the humanities’, arts and humanities in higher education, 9(1), pp.87-106. wingate, u. (2006) ‘doing away with “study skills”’, teaching in higher education, 11(4), pp.457-469. wisker, g. and robinson, g. (2009) ‘encouraging postgraduate students of literature and art to cross conceptual thresholds’, innovations in education and teaching international, 46, pp.317-330. veles, n., carter, m. and boon, h. (2018) ‘complex collaboration champions: university third space professionals working together across borders’, perspectives: policy and practice in higher education, pp.1-11. author details rhead the trouble with academic reading: exposing hidden threshold concepts through academic reading retreats journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 15 angela rhead is a learning developer at keele university and senior fellow of the higher education academy (sfhea) with a particular interest in academic reading practices. she has presented workshops and research findings regionally and at national conferences such as bera, seda and aldinhe. angela convenes keele’s annual becoming well read symposium and provides professional development workshops for academics and leanring developers interested in running reading retreats. the trouble with academic reading: exposing hidden threshold concepts through academic reading retreats abstract background the trouble with reading retreats: an emerging solution? academic reading retreat outline references author details literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special edition: 2018 aldinhe conference, october 2018 a learner developer perspective: critiquing dominant practices and cultures within university spaces sarah parkes newman university, birmingham, uk abstract this commentary reflects my evolving understanding of the problematic nature of identity and how this relates to notions of professional identity for those in learning development (ld) roles who engage with and produce research. if identity is, as quinn (2010) asserts, boundary-less, and experienced as a perpetual becoming between multiplicities, what does this mean for questions of identity? this paper suggests that perpetual becoming is reflected in ld roles that operate within a third space, crossing or spanning the boundaries of traditional institutional sites of research, teaching or services, administration or knowledge transfer (whitchurch, 2013). from such a place, ld practitioners can become what ball (2007) calls cultural critics, who through their experiences and knowledge of the variety of institutional practices and cultures, are in an enviable place to critique them. ld practitioners need to maintain a dialogical position that enables reflection-in-action (schön, 2001) to understand and respond to the multiplicities present in competing individual, institutional and societal discourses. by way of an example, consider the contrast between the pervasive neo-liberal drive for quantification and performance, set against the complex and often messy realities (biesta, 2010) of ld issues that we, along with our students, often experience. learning developers cannot however ignore the current political and social contexts that represent the environment within which our work exists. nonetheless, ld practitioners must maintain their access to, engagement with, and production of a disparate range of research from across varied institutional and sectoral domains that go beyond seeking evidence of effectiveness. hence, the need for and purpose of ld practitioner research is to create knowledge-of-practice (cochrane-smith and lytle, 1999) that generates ontological understanding of, and exposure to, the epistemological bases of ld practices. parkes a learner developer perspective: critiquing dominant practices and cultures within university spaces journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: october 2018 2 keywords: third space; practitioner-based research; cultural critics; identity. introduction through charting my own history of university employment, this commentary reflects on the relationship between professional identity and research in one of many learning development (ld) contexts. i will discuss how such roles encapsulated within ld operate within a third space that affords the opportunity to critique the cultures and practices ld practitioners experience for the benefit of our students, ourselves and our institutions. this process starts with considering what is meant by identity, how ld practitioners should use and conduct practitioner-based research, concluding that to counter the prevailing discourses that distort the value of ld researchers into technicists, we need to perceive ourselves as ‘cultural critics’ in the academy (ball, 2007). the context for my commentary learning development (ld) as a field of practice can be seen as operating in the ‘third space’ of institutional or sector activity because it cuts across the traditional activities of research, teaching and either services, administration or knowledge transfer (whitchurch, 2013). indeed, those working in such roles are employed on a variety of academic, academic related, professional or non-academic contracts, within a range of institutional roles and departments that include lecturer, advisor, tutor, coach or trainer (briggs, 2018). this represents a huge difference in how such provision operating in this way is conceptualised and delivered within universities (pritchard, 2018), that are nonetheless increasingly conceived as highly collaborative roles enacting interdisciplinarity or even transdisciplinarity (quinney et al., 2017). ld practitioners thus generate a wealth of experience and knowledge of different institutional and discipline-specific practices and cultures. conceptualising ld as third space activity can allow one to view it as a site of negotiation, meaning-making and representation (bhabba, 1990) that generates ‘new ways of being, working and learning’ (solomon et al., 2006, p.6), and characterised as ‘problem solving capability on the move’ (gibbons et al., 1994, p.5). parkes a learner developer perspective: critiquing dominant practices and cultures within university spaces journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: october 2018 3 over the last ten years, i have fulfilled a learning developer role as a tutor on an academic contract at a small, local university in england. the university recruits high numbers of students identified as from households whose previous education occurred in state schools or colleges (99.6%); whose main occupation is defined as routine, semi routine, technical or small employers (56.2%); and whose neighbourhoods have low he participation (18.6%) (higher education statistics agency, 2018). additionally, the university has a high proportion (76%) of students commuting up to 57 miles to study (donnelly and gamsu, 2018). within this arguably widening participation context, my professional responsibilities have shifted over time, however, they have all focused on undergraduate student retention at the institutional level. this initially involved developing, delivering and leading a suite of pre-entry courses and events for new level four, five and six undergraduates respectively, alongside leading a team of academic support advisors who, together with students, review progress and advise on academic-related or personal issues that may be impacting on their studies. now, however, my responsibilities have shifted to a more formal teaching role on foundation year programmes, as well as coordinating projects to support a growing understanding amongst staff of retention-related issues. these activities have all cut across areas of the wider institutional activity, necessitating close working with a range of professional, support and academic colleagues, as well as students themselves. this work requires me to utilise practical wisdom that involves intuitive thinking that is ‘action-present’ (schön, 2001, p.198) which respects the communities students live in, and the inequalities they may often have faced upon accessing or participating in university. thus, my work with students is informed by an awareness of their social and cultural situations and not exclusively based on knowledge contained within a ‘closed’ professional group that boasts ‘technical or specialised body of knowledge’ (furlong, 2000, p 17). hence, when attempting to align myself with traditional notions of professional identity, i have experienced difficulty echoing discussion that briggs (2018) highlights within the association for learning development in higher education community. my role, as do many, ‘cuts across the dichotomies built into the positivist epistemology of practice’ (schön, 2001, p.189), raising questions about what i view ‘professional identity’ in this context to be. parkes a learner developer perspective: critiquing dominant practices and cultures within university spaces journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: october 2018 4 issues of identity identifying myself as a third space educational professional is problematic, not least because of the ways in which academic professional identities are normally understood and defined (wenger, 1998; whitchurch, 2013; hustvelt, 2006). i find quinn’s (2010) discussion on four notions of self in terms of identity helpful here. the first concept of the ‘authentic self’ is founded on an autonomous sense of ‘who we really are’. secondly, the ‘inescapable self’ is bound by gender, ethnicity or class, unable to escape, and potentially disadvantaged in society by their demographical characteristic(s). her third ‘self-made self’ concept is described as a project ‘made over time’ where, through reflexive narratives, one makes sense of experience that constantly sets new boundaries, that ultimately culminates in a sense of identity. quinn’s fourth conception of the ‘un-self’ is described as ‘a becoming’ between multiplicities (tamboukou, cited quinn, 2010) that is constantly dissolving, diffusing and recreating itself in a perpetual process of flux. this resonates with maclure’s (2013) constantly shifting and expanding cabinets of curiosities that never congeal into ‘fixities and definites’ (coleridge, cited quinn, 2010, p.22). indeed, i see these as analogous with that of professional academic identities: the wunderkammer, or wonder cabinet, (maclure, 2013, p.180) was made up of diverse treasures with unanticipated associations that were simultaneously ‘attuned to both classification and wonder […through] eluding the collector’s encyclopaedic ambitions’ (lugli in maclure, 2013, p.180). thus, if ld practitioners consider ourselves and the students we work with as quinn’s un-selves within this third space, we can acknowledge the power of education to both transform and simultaneously oppress, speaking to ideas of education as uncanny – that which is both familiar yet strange. here through green (2011), in relation to the associated practices and cultures of dominant ideas of professional identity, i understand that what gives my own practice its sense and integrity lie beyond explicit speech or words. indeed, i have been taken back to the aristotelian concept of phronesis regarding the purpose of professional identities, understood here to mean ‘practical wisdom based on the disposition to act truly and rightly’ (trotman, 2008, p.161). this concept rests on the notion that education – and facilitating student success within education – is in and of itself a public good. using this concept, one could argue that ld roles potentially lead to human flourishing, that they are engaged in parkes a learner developer perspective: critiquing dominant practices and cultures within university spaces journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: october 2018 5 ‘professions of hope’ (freire, 2014), where education is both a service to and a right within society. when viewing students or staff as ‘un-selves’ then, a translation of theories into practice is needed to enable ld practitioners to make judgements in what are sometimes, uncertain but immediate contexts (baumfield, 2016). this creates a dialogical position; one that reveals the incoherence (bohm et al., 1991) or contradictions in our thought and practices that are ‘mutually constitutive’ (carr and kemmis, 1986, pp.33-34). here, the opportunity for on-the-spot inquiry occurs which schön (2001) calls reflection-in-action: thinking that occurs when ‘…it is still possible to make a difference to the outcomes of action’ (p.198). this i would argue is the intuition ld practitioners experience during the many interactions with students and staff occurring within practice, forming a ‘bridge between tacit and explicit knowledge’ (moustakas, cited trotman, 2008, p.159) and borne from an ability to operate reflexively. such a way of working resists following prescribed sets of procedures or rules allowing us to notice ‘what needs to be done and what end to pursue in the here and now’ (green, 2011, p.122). the value of learning development in neo-liberal times the context of ld work is surrounded by a pervasive moral panic (cohen, 2011) espoused by politicians (see house of lords economics affairs committee report, 2018) and fuelled by the media (for example: adams, 2017; sellgreen, 2018) that positions universities in england as ‘not offering sufficient value for money’ (macfarlane, 2016, p.9). this is triggered by increasingly neo-liberal agendas for privatisation, globalisation and decentralisation of education (naidoo and whitty, 2014) that demand quantifiable outcomes across uk educational settings. thus, there is an ever-growing sense that university study itself has been exposed to a process of what lilley and papadopoulos call ‘biofinancialisation’ (2014, pp.972-4). this presents the aim or value of participating in a university education – or indeed the recruitment of students into the university – as an essentially financial valuation, and depicted as more valuable than any other moral, ecological, cultural, material, utility and/or aesthetic value. this focus on value for money is reflected in the teaching excellence framework (tef), meaning that universities are increasingly forced into taking student retention and performance very seriously due to the high cost of participation (broadfoot, cited thomas, 2012, p.1). parkes a learner developer perspective: critiquing dominant practices and cultures within university spaces journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: october 2018 6 particularly for england, within such an era that is obsessed with ‘value for money’ (gimyah, 2018), conducting ld work and research in the ‘third space’ is a challenge. this is because it is difficult to generate quantifiable evidence that correlates activities to improved performance in terms of retention, progression or degree level attainment of students. my view is that ld work in all its guises should regard its inherent value as generated from helping students to challenge or extend the received understandings of a particular topic (collini, 2012), enabling them to contribute to society wherever they find themselves. though perhaps mutually compatible, there are pressures for performance in terms of evidencing the effectiveness of ld activity that supports students staying, progressing and completing that potentially detracts from the actual needs and wants of students themselves. to counter such pressure for evidence of ld effectiveness in the neo-liberal market place, it is crucial that the ld community accesses, influences and conducts situated practitioner research (bamber, 2018) to enable understanding and analysis of our students’ experiences as un-selves. such research however must move beyond the neo-liberal ideals of ‘causal or technological models of professional action’ (biesta, 2007, p.8) to assert ld practitioners as cultural critics. here, ld practitioners can acknowledge the complexities of their world, reflexively casting doubt on knowledge production (ball, 2007) experienced through work within the third space. such work must focus on challenging the dominant practices and cultures to enable practical understanding and emancipatory reflective knowledge (carr and kemis, 1986) and explore how the diversity in experiences are generated, mediated and potentially overcome. researching learning development within the third space through systematic investigation into the variety of existing practices and beliefs with universities, ld research within the third space can therefore generate different ways of knowing through becoming what ball calls a ‘cultural critic’ (2007, p.117). this resists the creation of ‘knowledge-for-practice’ (cochrane-smith and lytle, 1999) that generates a discrete, explicit body of formal content knowledge or ‘knowledge-in-practice’ (cochranesmith and lytle, 1999) that exposes the indeterminate particularities of everyday life within ld contexts: these do not ask enough deeply critical questions about practice and cultures. this third space should produce research that cochrane-smith and lytle (1999) parkes a learner developer perspective: critiquing dominant practices and cultures within university spaces journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: october 2018 7 describe as ‘knowledge-of-practice’. this can move ld practices beyond technical-rational explanations of action or ideas of training, regarding both knowledge generation and knowledge use as inherently problematic because knowledge-creation does not exist as separate from the knower. thus, the ld researcher is engaged in a different relationship with knowledge (cochrane-smith and lytle, 1999), creating what scott et al. (2004) call ‘mode 4 knowledge’. conceptualised as positioning the practitioner within practice, as well as across wider socio-economic and political contexts, this enables a critique of knowledge, necessitating self-examination and values-checking. indeed, through engaging reflexively to understand our own ld behaviours; the practice of others and the experiences of those exposed to our practice, ld practitioners can come to understand ‘profession’ as a construct (appleby and pilkington, 2014, p.17). understanding ld practitioner-based knowledge-creation in this way can thus produce knowledge of how institutional systems and structures that inform practices and cultures go on to affect student experiences. this affords opportunities to investigate the supercomplexity or essential messiness of ld practice where thinking about ld can become more ‘tentative, ambiguous and indeterminate’ (lauretis, 1990, p.138), and ld activities understood as a complex and self-perpetuating mix of both theory and practice (hickeymoody and malins, 2007). the purpose of this kind of ld research is therefore to foster understanding and improvement of practice, whilst at the same time develop knowledge of the epistemological bases of ld practice (cochrane smith and lytle, 2009). ld practitioners as social scientists then, should not solely focus on what works and why in relation to student success; an approach that promotes cochrane-smith and lytle’s (1999) knowledge-in-practice and knowledge-for-practice model. such approaches can perpetuate ‘effectiveness research’ (ball, 2007, p.111) that apportions causality to what are complex interactions under investigation, including the external contexts of students and staff lives. furthermore, focusing only on what works can privilege certain methodological approaches to research. for example, consider the randomised control trial (rct) that claims to test the effectiveness of educational interventions on student populations and seen as the gold standard (gorard et al., 2017, pp.7-13) due to the perceived objectivity, generalisability and reliability within educational enquiry (aldridge et al., 2018). however, even within the health sciences where rcts are commonplace, criticism concludes that there is an inherent trade-off between the ability to trace causal inference (internal validity) against generalisability (external validity). this means rcts parkes a learner developer perspective: critiquing dominant practices and cultures within university spaces journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: october 2018 8 cannot actually identify exactly who benefits from an intervention: they can only offer central tendencies of a measure that is ‘not going to be representative of anybody if you look at them as individuals’ (williams, cited clay, 2010). additionally, brecker (cited clay, 2010) asserts that ‘the perfect rct is designed strictly with internal validity in mind’ and therefore, is not generalisable. my argument here then is not to say ld researcher/practitioners can disconnect themselves from such drives for evidence of effectiveness or activities driven by what works rhetoric because they permeate the everyday professional experiences of university. however, what ld third space research approaches must critique are the dominant practices and cultures operating within university spaces that inhibit students’ understanding, progression and success. this includes reflecting on ld practices and cultures themselves within universities, as well as those across the university that negate the complexity and indeterminacy of both student and staff lived experiences. indeed, critiquing dominant practices and cultures within university spaces potentially assists in the reimagining of universities (hilsdon, 2018) that can focus on ‘the importance of education for decision, for rupture, for choice, for ethics’ (freire, 1997, p.44). here, a student’s understanding of themselves and the world around them, their growth and flourishing can happen. furthermore, ld practitioners too can reflexively act ‘upon the world in order to transform it’ (freire, 1972, p.12) through their critique that foucault argues is ‘urgent, difficult yet quite possible’ (1988, p.154). references adams, r. (2017) ‘university students failed by rip-off fees, says watchdog’, the guardian education, 8 december. available at: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2017/dec/08/university-students-failed-byrip-off-fees-says-watchdog (accessed: 20 august 2018). aldridge, r., biesta, g. and wainwright, e. (2018) ‘why the nature of educational research should remain contested: a statement from the new editors of the british educational research journal’, british educational research association journal, 44(1), pp. 1-4. https://www.theguardian.com/education/2017/dec/08/university-students-failed-by-rip-off-fees-says-watchdog https://www.theguardian.com/education/2017/dec/08/university-students-failed-by-rip-off-fees-says-watchdog parkes a learner developer perspective: critiquing dominant practices and cultures within university spaces journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: october 2018 9 appleby, y. and pilkington, r. (2014) developing critical professional practice in education. leicester: niace. ball, s. (2007) ‘intellectuals or technicians? the urgent role of theory in educational studies’, in hammersley, m. (ed.) educational research and evidence-based practice. london: open university press/sage, pp 106-120 bamber, r. (2018) ‘tectonic shifts in he = tectonic shifts in learning development?’ [keynote address], aldinhe 2018: the learning development conference, university of leicester, leicester 26-28 march. baumfield, v. (2016) lost in translation? sharing knowledge and experiences of curriculum development in teacher education and medical education in the uk, 25 november. birmingham: newman university. bhabba, h. (1990) ‘the third space: interview with homi bhabba’ in rutherford, j. (ed.) identity: community, culture, difference. london: lawrence and wishart, pp. 207-21. biesta, g. (2007) ‘why ‘what works’ won’t work: evidence-based practice and the democratic deficit in educational research’, educational theory, 1(57), pp. 1-22. biesta, g. (2010) ‘five theses on complexity reduction and its politics’ in osberg, d. and biesta, g. (eds.) complexity theory and the politics of education. rotterdam: sense publishers, pp. 5-14. bohm, d., factor, d. and garrett, p. (1991) ‘dialogue a proposal’, infed.org: pedagogies for change. available at: http://infed.org/archives/e-texts/bohm_dialogue.htm (accessed 04.01.17) briggs, s. (2018) ‘development of the aldinhe recognition scheme: certifying the ‘learner developer’ title’, journal of learning development in higher education, issue 13, april. available at: http://journal.aldinhe.ac.uk/index.php/jldhe/article/view/461/pdf (accessed: 3 august 2018). carr, w. and kemmis, s. (1986) becoming critical. london: falmer press. http://infed.org/archives/e-texts/bohm_dialogue.htm http://journal.aldinhe.ac.uk/index.php/jldhe/article/view/461/pdf parkes a learner developer perspective: critiquing dominant practices and cultures within university spaces journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: october 2018 10 clay, r (2010) ‘more than one way to measure’, monitor on psychology, 41(8), p. 52. available at: http://www.apa.org/monitor/2010/09/trials.aspx (accessed: 26 june 2018). cochran-smith, m. and lytle, p. (1999) ‘relationships of knowledge and practice: teacher learning in communities’, review of research in education: toward a new science of educational practice, 24(1), pp. 249-305. cochran-smith, m. and lytle, p. (2009) inquiry as stance: practitioner for the next generation. new york: teachers college press. cohen, s. (2011) folk devils and moral panics. london: routledge. collini, s. (2012) what are universities for? london: penguin. donnelly, m. and gamsu, s. (2018) home and away: social, ethnic and spatial inequalities in student mobility, university of bath and the sutton trust. available at: https://www.suttontrust.com/wpcontent/uploads/2018/02/home_and_away_final.pdf (accessed: 16 may 2018). foucault, m. (1988) ‘truth, power, self: an interview with michel foucault’, technologies of the self. amherst: the university of massachusetts press. freire, p. (1972) pedagogy of the oppressed, harmondsworth: penguin, london. freire, p. (1997) pedagogy of the heart, new york: continuum freire, p. (2014) pedagogy of hope. london: bloomsbury. furlong, j. (2000) ‘intuition and the crisis in teacher professionalism’ in atkinson, t. and claxton, g. (eds.) the intuitive practitioner: on the value of not always knowing what one is doing. new york: open university press, pp 15-32 http://www.apa.org/monitor/2010/09/trials.aspx https://www.suttontrust.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/home_and_away_final.pdf https://www.suttontrust.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/home_and_away_final.pdf parkes a learner developer perspective: critiquing dominant practices and cultures within university spaces journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: october 2018 11 gibbons, m., limoges, c., nowotony, h., schwartzman, s., scott, p. and trow, m. (1994) the new production of knowledge: the dynamics of science and research in contemporary societies. london: sage publications. gimyah, s. (2018) ‘delivering value for money in the age of the student’, hepi annual conference. london 7 june. available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/delivering-value-for-money-in-the-age-ofthe-student (accessed: 15 june 2018). gorard, s., huat see, b. and siddiqui, n. (2017) the trials of evidence-based education: the promises, opportunities and problems of trials in education. oxon: routledge. green, j. (2011) education, professionalism and the quest for accountability: hitting the target but missing the point. london: routledge. hickey-moody, a. and malins, p. (eds.) (2007) deleuzian encounters: studies in contemporary social issues. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan. higher education statistics agency – hesa (2018) widening participation (table series 1 and 2). available at: https://www.hesa.ac.uk/data-and-analysis/performanceindicators/widening-participation (accessed: 5 january 2018). hilsdon, j. (2018) ‘learning development: pedagogy, principles and progress’ [keynote address], aldinhe 2018: the learning development conference. university of leicester, leicester 26-28 march. house of lords economics affairs committee (2018) treating students fairly: the economics of post-school education. available at: https://www.parliament.uk/higherfurther-education-vocational-lords-inquiry/ (accessed: 11 june 2018). hustvelt, s. (2006) a plea for eros. london: hodder and stoughton limited. lauretis, d. (1990) ‘eccentric subjects: feminist theory and historical consciousness’, feminist studies, 16(1), pp. 133-146. https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/delivering-value-for-money-in-the-age-of-the-student https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/delivering-value-for-money-in-the-age-of-the-student https://www.hesa.ac.uk/data-and-analysis/performance-indicators/widening-participation https://www.hesa.ac.uk/data-and-analysis/performance-indicators/widening-participation https://www.parliament.uk/higher-further-education-vocational-lords-inquiry/ https://www.parliament.uk/higher-further-education-vocational-lords-inquiry/ parkes a learner developer perspective: critiquing dominant practices and cultures within university spaces journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: october 2018 12 lilley, s. and papadopoulos, d. (2014) ‘material returns: cultures of valuation, biofinancialisation and the autonomy of politics’, sociology, 48(5), pp. 972-988. available at: https://doi.org/10.1177/0038038514539206 (accessed: 10 june 2018). macfarlane, b. (2016) freedom to learn: the threat to student academic freedom and why it needs to be reclaimed. research into higher education. oxon: routledge. maclure, m. (2013) ‘classification or wonder? coding as an analytic practice in qualitative research’, in coleman, r. and ringrose, j. (eds.) deleuze and research methodologies. edinburgh: edinburgh university press, pp 164-183 naidoo, r. and whitty, g. (2014) ‘students as consumers: commodifying or democratising learning?’, international journal of chinese education, 2(2), pp. 212-240. available at: https://doi.org/10.1163/22125868-12340022 (accessed: 24 july 2018). pritchard, c. (2018) ‘locating learning development in higher education: can you ever have enough learning developers?’, aldinhe 2018: the learning development conference. university of leicester, leicester, 26-28 march. quinn, j. (2010) learning communities and imagined social capital. london: continuum studies in educational research. quinney, a., lamont, c., biggins, d. and holley, d. (2017) ‘optimising disruptive approaches: extending academic roles and identities in higher education’, journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12, november, pp. 1-14. available at: http://journal.aldinhe.ac.uk/index.php/jldhe/article/view/417 (accessed: 3 august 2018). schön, d. (2001) 'chapter 13: the crisis of professional knowledge and the pursuit of an epistemology of practice', in raven, j. and stephenson, j. (eds.), competence in the learning society. new york: peter lang, pp. 185-207. scott, d., brown, a., lunt, i. and thorne, l. (2004) professional doctorates: integrating professional and academic knowledge. maidenhead: society for research in higher education/open university press. https://doi.org/10.1177/0038038514539206 https://doi.org/10.1163/22125868-12340022 http://journal.aldinhe.ac.uk/index.php/jldhe/article/view/417 parkes a learner developer perspective: critiquing dominant practices and cultures within university spaces journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: october 2018 13 sellgreen, k. (2018) ‘tuition fee value for money: i feel ripped off’, bbc news family and education, 14 march (online). available at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education43384427 (accessed: 20 august 2018). solomon, n., boud, d. and rooney, d. (2006) ‘the in‐between: exposing everyday learning at work’, international journal of lifelong education, 25(1), pp. 3-13. thomas, l. (2012) building student engagement and belonging in higher education at a time of change: a summary of findings and recommendations from the what works? student retention & success programme. paul hamlyn foundation. available at: http://www.phf.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/what-workssummary-report.pdf (accessed: 20 january 2016). trotman, d. (2008) liberating the wise educator’, in craft, a., gardner, h. and claxton, g. (eds.) creativity, wisdom and trusteeship: exploring the role of education. london: sage, pp. 158-166 wenger, e. (1998) communities of practice: learning, meaning and identity. cambridge: cambridge university press. whitchurch, c. (2013) reconstructing identities in higher education: the rise of third space professionals. london: srhe. author details sarah parkes teaches on foundation year routes at newman university, having previously led the university’s participation in the hea & paul hamlyn ‘what works: student retention and success change programme’ (2012-16) and hefce catalyst project ‘using student engagement data to inform pedagogic innovation’ (2016-18). her principal interests lie in curriculum design and institutional organisation that pro-actively supports student navigation of university experience. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-43384427 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-43384427 http://www.phf.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/what-works-summary-report.pdf http://www.phf.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/what-works-summary-report.pdf a learner developer perspective: critiquing dominant practices and cultures within university spaces abstract introduction the context for my commentary issues of identity the value of learning development in neo-liberal times researching learning development within the third space references author details sarah parkes teaches on foundation year routes at newman university, having previously led the university’s participation in the hea & paul hamlyn ‘what works: student retention and success change programme’ (2012-16) and hefce catalyst project ‘using... journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special issue 22: compendium of innovative practice october 2021 ________________________________________________________________________ building a learning community through collaborative, online assessment preparation ellie davison university of lincoln, uk keywords: learning community; peer assessment; foundation; belonging. the challenge: as part of the skills development aspect of an integrated foundation year, students would previously have developed their academic writing during face-to-face sessions. the marking rubric would have been presented, with students invited to discuss how successfully previous submissions had met the criteria, and draft submissions swapped for peer feedback during group tutorials. however, each year, some students were reluctant to participate, perhaps due to a lack of confidence in sharing their opinions and critiquing each other’s work in person. furthermore, due to lockdown restrictions, face-to-face sessions were not possible; thus, could the pandemic provide the environment to improve the approach? peacock and cowan (2019) report that students who feel they are integral to the activity and success of the whole cohort develop a sense of belonging, with thomas, herbert and teras (2014) noting the importance of embedding peer collaboration into assessment for the success of online provision. therefore, the challenge was to facilitate a supportive online learning community to allow students to benefit from each other’s insights, with accessibility and flexibility embedded to support the diverse cohort. furthermore, as students’ ‘academic self-concept’ (their ability to visualise themselves succeeding in academia) (brunner et al., 2010) is arguably as important as the development of subject knowledge for foundation cohorts, could academic confidence be built from afar? davison building a learning community through collaborative, online assessment preparation journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: october 2021 2 the response: a suite of fully captioned, asynchronous micro-lectures, introducing the assessment brief, the marking rubric, and fundamentals of academic writing and referencing were produced to ensure that students could engage with this crucial content at a time that was convenient to them (e.g., fitting around caring or home schooling commitments). students reported that they found the ability to re-watch videos at appropriate points in their assessment preparation hugely beneficial. to facilitate interactivity, synchronous online sessions were delivered, using talis elevate to conduct group annotations of previous submissions. students highlighted sections of the text and added comment boxes to identify areas they felt met aspects of the marking rubric and areas for improvement. comments were threaded and nested to allow for dialogue and debate amongst the cohort and students had the option of commenting anonymously, encouraging less confident participants to engage. while interaction between students and familiarisation with the marking rubric were intended outcomes, an unexpected benefit was the lecturer’s ability to add prompts in real time, direct the discussion, give positive encouragement, and clarify any areas of uncertainty. the activity also proved extremely insightful as to the efficacy of the preparatory teaching, showing which aspects of the task students had got to grips with and which areas of the provision might benefit from improvements. to allow for asynchronous contributions, as well as a later review of the discussion points, the annotated texts continued to be available until the end of the module. to further cultivate a collaborative student support network, the evaluation skills developed through the group evaluation activity were then applied to online peer-feedback, as peer review has been demonstrated to simultaneously promote active engagement and necessitate not only interaction but dependence upon each other for overall success (simonsmeier et al., 2020). turnitin peermark was used to randomly allocate draft submissions amongst the cohort and the feedback was scaffolded through a series of question boxes, all aligned to the marking rubric, with each question requiring a minimum word response. the opportunity for lecturers to view all the peer feedback behind the scenes allowed any misconceptions to be corrected. engagement was significantly higher with this online strategy than in previous face-to-face years and the quality of the feedback davison building a learning community through collaborative, online assessment preparation journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: october 2021 3 was rich, with the detailed suggestions as to how improvements could be made, instead of bland coverall statements, being a particular highlight. recommendations: the described approach allowed students to apply the marking rubric to a variety of submissions prior to the final assessment deadline, generating internal feedback on their own submissions (nicol, 2020), and resulting in excellent attainment despite the challenges of lockdown. students valued the flexibility of both how and when to participate (anonymous vs. onymous; synchronous vs. asynchronous) and evaluating submissions of a range of quality was also effective; seeing common errors encouraged students not to make the same mistakes, while excellent examples stimulated students to improve their work accordingly. the random distribution of submissions for peer feedback also broadened the experience of students who otherwise may only have interacted with texts within their own subject area or tutor group. the ability to provide high quality, constructive feedback is a key graduate skill (nicol, thomson and breslin, 2014), but students need to learn how to do so effectively. in the peer review task instructions, a variety of examples of constructive feedback, specifically linked to how a suggested improvement might move a submission into the next marking bracket, were provided. the opportunity for students to practise this skill in the lecturer supported group evaluation was also crucial to the success of the peer review. with a return to face-to-face sessions, this approach could facilitate truly blended sessions, synthesising verbal discussions with comments, using talis, displayed on the lecture screen. for large cohorts, it may be useful to run parallel group annotations, perhaps with different submissions uploaded, to prevent the dialogue boxes from becoming too busy; students would then be able to access all evaluations following the session. encouraging students to utilise their feedback can be a challenge. to address this, it could be that part of the assessment mark reflects how the peer reviews received have been used to improve the submitted work. marks could also be awarded for the quality of the peer review itself. davison building a learning community through collaborative, online assessment preparation journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: october 2021 4 analysis by senior et al. (2018) revealed three major factors in fostering successful student engagement: opportunities to present opinions, an academic benefit of participation, and the development of professional skills. scaffolded peer evaluation met these criteria to produce a vibrant online community and the approaches introduced will be maintained long after lockdown has lifted. references brunner, m., keller, u., dierendonck, c., reichert, m., ugen, s., fischback, a. and martin, r. (2010) ‘the structure of academic self-concepts revisited: the nested marsh/shavelson model’, journal of educational psychology 102(4), pp.964-981. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0019644 nicol, d., thomson, a. and breslin, c. (2014) ‘rethinking feedback practices in higher education: a peer review perspective’, assessment and evaluation in higher education, 39(1), pp.102-122. https://doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2013.795518. nicol, d. (2020) ‘the power of internal feedback: exploiting natural comparison processes’, assessment and evaluation in higher education. https://doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2020.1823314. peacock, s and cowan, j. (2019) ‘promoting a sense of belonging in online learning communities of inquiry in accredited courses’, online learning, 23(2), pp.67-81. http://dx.doi.org/10.24059/olj.v23i2.1488. senior, r. m., bartholomew, p., soor, a., shepperd, d., bartholomew, n. and senior, c. (2018) ‘the rules of engagement: student engagement and motivation to improve the quality of undergraduate learning’, frontiers in education, 3. https://doi.org/10.3389/feduc.2018.00032. simonsmeier, b. a., peiffer, h., flaig, m. and schneider, m. (2020) ‘peer feedback improves students’ academic self-concept in higher education’, research in higher education, 61(6), pp.706-724. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11162-020-09591-y. https://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1037/a0019644 https://doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2013.795518 https://doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2020.1823314 http://dx.doi.org/10.24059/olj.v23i2.1488 https://doi.org/10.3389/feduc.2018.00032 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11162-020-09591-y davison building a learning community through collaborative, online assessment preparation journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: october 2021 5 thomas, l., herbert, j. and teras, m. (2014) ‘a sense of belonging to enhance participation, success and retention in online programs’, the international journal of the first year in higher education, 5(2), pp.69-80. https://doi.org/10.5204/intjfyhe.v5i2.233. author details ellie davison is the director of teaching and learning for the foundation studies centre, and a director of digital engagement for the college of science, at the university of lincoln. https://doi.org/10.5204/intjfyhe.v5i2.233 building a learning community through collaborative, online assessment preparation the challenge: the response: recommendations: references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 17: may 2020 editorial andy hagyard university of leeds, uk christina howell-richardson birkbeck, university of london, uk eleanor loughlin durham university, uk cathy malone university of sheffield, uk craig morley manchester university, uk gita sedghi university of liverpool, uk alicja syska university of plymouth, uk as i write this editorial, i am sitting outside, in the glaring sun, having escaped my home desk with its ever-present computer screen. the weather is glorious, the streets are quiet, and the hustle and bustle of the campus – where we would normally spend our working days – seems like a distant memory. the covid-19 pandemic has changed the way we work, communicate, interact, think about issues, and even relate to our environment. it disrupted our spaces, practices, rituals and expectations, creating both unwelcome challenges and unanticipated opportunities. it also affected the journal. despite operating entirely online, we are not immune to the current turmoil. we only exist as long as our authors can write, our reviewers can review, and our editors can edit. and these long established and stable workflows have been suddenly obstructed and unsettled. as a result, our current issue is the slimmest one in the journal’s history. but, as randolph (robin williams) in death to smoochy (2002) put it, ‘size doesn't matter, when you want some friendly patter from a pal who is true (and will lift you up when you’re blue)’. it is all about quality. thus, we bring you four splendid articles that investigate significant issues in the learning development community by evaluating the impact of the following ld editorial practices: dissertation writing courses on postgraduate students’ confidence; ld tutorials on student attainment; and the flipped approach on developing students’ academic skills. the issue ends with a timely discussion of how education 4.0 might influence learning in higher education. the transition from undergraduate to postgraduate taught (pgt) studies has received increasing attention over the past decade as universities and educators have recognised that master’s students do not necessarily begin their studies equipped with the academic skills essential to succeed. although the need for specific transition support for pgt students has been recognised in recent literature, this is generally focused on the transition into pgt, and there has been little research to date on the transition from module assessment to writing the master’s dissertation. melanie crisfield’s paper evaluates the effectiveness of a short master’s dissertation writing course on improving students’ writing skills and increasing their confidence in their writing abilities, as reported in pre-course and post-course writing self-evaluations. the study confirms that dissertation writing support designed for pgt students can have a positive impact on students’ confidence in their writing abilities, and thus help support them in making the transition to dissertation writing. in another paper, alison loddick and kate coulson report on their investigation into the impact of learning development tutorials delivered at the university of northampton. in an effort to demonstrate that these tutorials make a difference to students’ attainment and thus provide the desired ‘value for money’, the ld team at northampton set out to trace the academic fortunes of 16 thousand students over 3.5 years, looking for any indication of impact on grades. the large sample size, in comparison to previous studies, combined with statistical inference testing, give the authors confidence in the soundness of the conclusions drawn. indeed, ld tutorials are shown to positively contribute to increases in students’ grades, with the impact peaking at three tutorials. these findings not only align with, but also further extend, the claims made in the literature regarding the value of learning development support, although causality remains a thorny issue. we join the authors in their hope that this evidence will further contribute to promoting ld services and encouraging students to more readily seek academic support at their institutions. sheryl mansfield’s article assesses the effectiveness of the flipped approach in developing students’ academic skills and transforming academic skills training from a passive to an editorial active learning experience. her approach combined face-to-face sessions with asynchronous content to scaffold and feed-forward guidance to inform summative assessments. the success of this approach was measured by attendance data and evaluative surveys completed by students. sheryl’s findings show that the flipped approach used had a positive effect on the students’ summative grades and academic confidence. finally, alan r. williams, richard windle and heather wharrad’s opinion piece provides a timely discussion of how education 4.0 influences learning in higher education. in the face of significant and rapid change, the piece explores factors that impact on how higher education responds to the challenges of education in the twenty-first century. in providing a wide-ranging discussion of the fourth industrial revolution and the subsequent advent of education 4.0, the piece explores ways forward. academics are encouraged to work with students to exploit the opportunities afforded by education 4.0 while not falling into the trap of assuming homogeneity in the student body, particularly with regard to levels of digital literacy. the importance of attention to design in the development of learning objects and resources is highlighted as a key factor in the way we embrace technology in order to deliver education during the pandemic and beyond. we hope that in this small but mighty collection of articles, our readers will find thoughtprovoking and inspiring material. we also hope that in a future edition we will collectively reflect on what it means to work in a time of pandemic and how it affects the ways we practise learning development. the covid-19 crisis certainly exposed and even magnified the existing inequalities in and outside the workplace. depending on our living conditions, childcare responsibilities, health concerns and other worries, we have all coped and managed differently through this time. and so did our students. i am sure that many of you have stories which show that now, even more than ever, your assistance with an assignment, your advice on a project, your word of comfort and even your mere presence in the academic third space made a real difference to someone’s life. keep making a difference, keep writing about it, keep spreading the word by publishing. what we do matters. with very best wishes, the jldhe editorial board maximising student learning through minimising information search time; the role of satisficing and skimming journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 2: february 2010 reasons to be cheerful? john hilsdon university of plymouth, uk this second edition of the journal of learning development in higher education arrives at a time of paradox. as we begin the second decade of the 21 st century, there is uncertainty and pessimism in the world of higher education as in society more widely. in the uk we face budget cuts and the non-continuation of project funding which has underpinned many innovative activities in learning development (ld) over the last decade. uncertainties over fees and students’ ability to afford higher education, capped by worries about unemployment and the real ‘value’ of a degree, all make for discomfort and feelings of insecurity for staff and students alike. there are however many reasons for optimism and good cheer. more students than ever continue to choose higher education and the importance of university life, as part of the wider community and society’s life, continues to grow. i am reminded of ron barnett’s argument when speaking at the ldhen conference in bournemouth back in 2007, that, although both ontology (factors related to ‘being’) and epistemology (how we construct knowledge) are vital, ontology trumps epistemology. learning arises from communication and from interaction – and it is the quality of the relationships associated with these that will determine levels of success in learning. this insight points to the heart of what we mean by learning development. it is reflected in the contributions to this journal that are indicative of the evolution of our field of practice, and the emergence within it of some of the characteristics of a discipline. the theme of the 2010 ldhen conference – that of ‘partnerships’ in learning – is addressed by marcia baxter magolda using the metaphor of a tandem bicycle. marcia’s work has always stressed the importance of learning partnerships and of the key role of educators in taking the ‘rear’ seat rather than attempting to steer on behalf of the learner. we must strive to encourage students’ voices to be heard, and to be ‘good company’ for them on their journeys in order that they progress towards increasingly reflective ways of constructing knowledge. hilsdon editorial: reasons to be cheerful? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 2 a radical notion of partnership is developed by tom burns and his fellow authors. for them, learning development, with its stress on active learning and of setting out from the position of the participant, is an empowering and emancipatory endeavour which complements marcia’s concept of self-authorship as a sophisticated way of knowing, which is not dependent on merely seeking or following the views of others. they remind us that our work is not only about socialising students into accepted practices in disciplinary communities. using models of active notemaking they illustrate how both questioning and ownership of knowledge can be promoted as students’ voices are given legitimacy and are seen to make real and significant contributions to academic practice. glynis cousin urges educational and learning developers to make use of ‘threshold concepts’ as a research methodology for planning our interventions in work with subject specialists. this calls for academics to use their own subject expertise as the basis for initiating communication with students about learning, as they negotiate journeys through liminal territory. this makes it possible to avoid a false binary opposition between approaches which are teacher or learner centred, and focuses instead upon engagement with key and transformative ideas in specific academic practice. academics are likely to be more highly motivated to begin examining the challenges for learning for their students when the approach arises from their knowledge, rather than being dependent upon the kinds of pedagogic knowledge familiar to those in educational development. these ideas are widely applicable and directly address the continuing preoccupation of learning developers of how to ‘embed’ within the curriculum (and the everyday practices of university courses) activities designed to promote learning. several papers in this edition of jldhe seek to explore further our understanding of this area. robert blake and jacqueline pates, for example, emphasise the varying ways that knowledge is constructed in writing in different subject areas. they argue that the teaching of writing cannot be separated from practice, and that partnerships between academics and developers are needed, as glynis also suggests, drawing upon academics’ own writing expertise to elicit relevant learning activities for their students. their use of genre analysis as a way to help academics and students explore how writing works by means of various ‘moves’, has echoes of a threshold concepts approach. michelle reid also highlights the importance of genre in her description of research with academics at the university of reading, which was designed to inform guidance for students on report writing. her findings illustrate complex variations relating to the specific purposes and hilsdon editorial: reasons to be cheerful? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 3 expectations of reports in different disciplines, leading to the conclusion that generic advice around the surface features of these texts may not always be helpful. frances gibson and janette myers also argue for an integrated model for learning development. however, recognising that in reality we have a long way to go, their paper describes how a ‘fragmented route’, which is the norm given patchy funding and varying levels of strategic support for ld, can nonetheless feed progress towards institution-wide initiatives. small projects, with striking results for learning can act as case studies and enhance the reputation of ld as well as justification for an embedding approach. steve briggs and norma pritchett add weight to this argument. their study of the difficulties reported by students in their learning, and of perceptions of these by academic staff, serve to illustrate the importance of building the case for embedding through internal consultation and communication between staff groups, in order to take account of multiple perspectives. however, embedding does suggest a strategic vision: an institution-wide approach to the use of e-portfolio at the university of wolverhampton, described by megan lawton and emma purnell, illustrates that much progress can be made when ld initiatives are linked to institutional strategies which are strongly promoted and supported. in their case study describing an online resource for bibliographical referencing, roisin gwyer and her colleagues demonstrate an important element of ld work – that of demystification and of bringing clarity to the often muddy waters of academic convention. judy cohen develops this theme in relation to the formative and developmental uses of the software package ‘turnitin’. rather than seeing it as punitive, or as a weapon against plagiarism, this resource can then be a powerful tool for learning about academic integrity and the development of scholarly writing. the internet, and increasingly mobile and accessible forms of communication, make it possible for learning developers to work with academics and students to use resources such as this, and to share information and experiences as never before. the development of social and interactive ‘web 2.0’ technologies is described by amanda tinker, gillian byrne and christine cattermole in a case study looking at three particular social software tools, and offering some insightful comments about their potential for promoting collaborative and creative learning communities. importantly, however, as susan wilkinson points out, the massive rise in the amount of information available has implications for how we use and structure our use of time. this, in turn, can influence our hilsdon editorial: reasons to be cheerful? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 4 approaches to learning. in her paper, susan draws upon the notion of ‘satisficing’ in human behaviour and makes connections with reading strategies such as skimming in modelling information search behaviour. she points to factors which can militate against deep learning and concludes that we could learn from the characteristics of humans as foraging ‘informavores’, and use insights into how we interact with information online to design better learning materials and resources for students. as a mechanism to enhance the sharing of good ld practice among subject teachers, rebecca bell and colleagues at nottingham trent university offer a ‘community of practice’ model, in the form of an academic writing readers group. participants were motivated by their concerns about student writing – which made them receptive to ideas from an academic literacies perspective and gave them inspiration to participate in the development of reusable learning resources. this case study is another good example of how we can encourage academics to build upon their subject-focused expertise to feed into their teaching skills. peter samuels and chetna patel also draw upon a ‘community of practice’ model. their study considers the importance of networking across institutions when building the case for mathematics support. mirroring the evolution of ld more broadly, peter and chetna report that staff providing extracurricular mathematics and statistics teaching and learning services have benefited greatly from initiatives which put them in contact with others. they describe the recent history of the community of practice, the role of the subject network, and the work of a centre for excellence in this area in developing and sharing approaches and resources. their paper gives evidence of scholarship in mathematics support in uk he and identifies how a ld approach has been adopted in the use of teaching logs for reflection on learning and teaching processes. richard bailey conducted a small study to examine the beliefs and attitudes of academic staff towards support for learning. he found a great deal of enthusiasm for the notion of embedding but points out that perceptions such as that of an overloaded curriculum, and a lack of confidence on the part of some academics to engage with learning development activities, remain important barriers to be surmounted. the university of huddersfield has responded to precisely these kinds of issues by developing a ‘devolved model’ for the provision of academic skills. since 2002, one academic skills tutor has been located in each of the university’s schools. in their paper about this experience, pat hill, amanda hilsdon editorial: reasons to be cheerful? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 5 tinker and stephen catterall describe considerable success in the embedding of skills for learning in the curriculum and in moving away from a ‘deficit’ model. their example is one which could usefully be shared more widely, illustrating as it does the evolution of a significant role for learning developers within academic and course structures rather than being in separate units and relatively unconnected to much of university life. if the content of this journal can be seen as good evidence of the current state of learning development in the uk, it would suggest that this commitment to embedding, and our search for successful models of how to do that, remains a key area of focus. the journal certainly shows evidence of the enthusiasm for scholarship in the field. as with issue one, it has been produced as a team project, with andy hagyard, joint editor, undertaking a very large amount of the work; along with our many diligent reviewers; and natalie bates, from bournemouth university, playing a significant proofreading and editing role. it is the depth of commitment to understanding learning and how it is experienced which strikes one most forcefully in these papers and case studies – and this bodes well for the ongoing drive to maintain universities as genuine learning organisations. it also confirms that a learning development approach is about so much more than a bolt-on safety net for learners experiencing difficulties; rather it is work driven by the idea of universities as places open to all with the ability to benefit – places that provide opportunities for students to explore, create and contribute to their disciplinary communities, and to society, to their fullest. author details john hilsdon is head of learning development at the university of plymouth and a national teaching fellow. reasons to be cheerful? author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 16: december 2019 teaching and assessment practices for academic writing: an analysis of teacher profiles dyanne escorcia université de poitiers, france mayilin moreno universidad del norte, colombia abstract the present research study aimed to determine what teachers do to promote the learning of academic writing. in particular, we studied how teachers teach and assess writing in higher education based on their self-reported teaching practices. we asked 64 teachers working in a colombian university to fill in a questionnaire that we constructed for the purposes of the present study. the participants were teachers in the field of health sciences, the majority of whom were female (58%), with a mean age of 44 years. data analysis consisted of cluster analysis based on items relative to teaching and assessing academic writing in order to determine teacher profiles. a kruskal-wallis h-test was then conducted to distinguish the found profiles as a function of teacher age. the results revealed three significantly different profiles: transmitting, assessing and no-adherence profiles. these profiles also varied as a function of age. these results will be discussed, taking into account a generational effect hypothesis, with regard to the tendency/lack of tendency for teachers to stimulate the learning of different components of academic writing (norms, methods and reflexive practices). keywords: academic writing; university teacher profiles; teaching practices; assessing practices; self-reported teacher practices. introduction escorcia and moreno teaching and assessment practices for academic writing: an analysis of teacher profiles journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 2 writing is a key activity in higher education. it seems inherent to all disciplines, since university students use writing to assimilate the concepts and notions of their particular disciplinary field (delcambre et al., 2012). however, the practices of academic writing vary in function by discipline areas. castelló and mateos (2015) found that the approaches to teaching writing self-reported by teachers in social sciences, law and health sciences gave more importance to discursive norms and the writing processes than the practices described by engineering or architecture teachers. adopting a cognitive perspective, bereiter (1980) emphasised the contribution of writing to knowledge construction. more than just a product of learning or a mechanical act serving to collect information, writing is a form of learning through which students can structure and build knowledge. writing is a very demanding cognitive activity (kellogg and raulerson, 2007) in that individuals can plan their content and think about what is to be written, how it is to be written and for what purpose. they can also review what they have written, correcting or changing the content as many times as necessary without the recipient being aware of this process of elaboration (hayes, 2012). writing would thus appear to be key to the mission of universities to contribute to the social and economic performance of countries by producing knowledge and promoting lifelong learning (organisation for economic cooperation and development, 1996). in this sense, teachers play a pivotal role, as it mainly falls to them to teach students how to write. this is a particularly complex task, as it involves encouraging students to develop the intellectual abilities of planning, correcting and constructing written language so that they can build new knowledge in their disciplinary field (reuter, 1996). in other words, teachers must teach their students the epistemic value of writing. the present research considers that teacher practices to promote this essential component of learning in higher education constitute an illustration of the social dimension of academic writing. according to lea and street (1998), the interactions between writing and social practices, such as the institutional and cultural norms in learning contexts, could cause contradictions that students have to face at different stages of their progression in higher escorcia and moreno teaching and assessment practices for academic writing: an analysis of teacher profiles journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 3 education. the present study will explore some characteristics of teaching practices, considering them as part of the learning context of academic writing. studying self-reported teaching practices related to writing in higher education teaching practices in higher education have been studied in the literature (eley, 2006; le huu nghia, 2017), emphasising teacher beliefs, teaching approaches and the relationship between these variables and student learning. we chose the term teaching approaches in order to study the teaching and assessment of academic writing practices in higher education. eley (2006) insisted on the necessity of considering this term separately from that of teacher conceptions, given that the former is somewhat related to what teachers say about their teaching practices. in contrast, studies of teaching approaches in higher education have, above all, highlighted teacher-reported teaching practices (eley, 2006). previous studies have identified categories of teaching approaches, and their findings have been highly consistent given that two supra-categories are in evidence (gow and kember, 1993; trigwell and prosser, 1996). in one category, some teachers view teaching as a transmission process where teachers play a key role in communicating knowledge that students then have to learn. in the other category, teaching is considered to be a process in which the students play the central role by participating in their own knowledge construction. between these two typologies exist various other categories that differ in their degree of emphasis on either a teacher-focused or a student-focused approach. in relation to teaching writing in higher education, graham et al. (2002) observed three approaches: a focus on good writing; on explicit and direct instruction; or on ecological learning. in the first category, teachers tended to emphasise the correction of their students’ written material with regard to linguistic norms. in the second case, it was important to the teachers to develop and train the cognitive skills of students. the final approach to teaching writing focused on the interactive and social dimensions of learning, which allowed students to learn through cooperation between pairs. however, these studies in the domain of teaching escorcia and moreno teaching and assessment practices for academic writing: an analysis of teacher profiles journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 4 writing have concentrated on educational practices in primary and secondary education. fewer studies have explored teacher self-reported approaches in higher education. studying the implicit beliefs of students and teachers about writing in higher education, lea and street (1998) observed three categories, some of which were similar to the teaching of writing practices distinguished by graham et al. (2002). the first category emphasised language skills; the second described the social learning of discursive norms that constitute academic culture; and the third category was concerned not only with how students and teachers integrated institutional norms and practices but also the power relationships that impacted a writer’s academic practices. escorcia, et al. (2014) found that colombian and french teachers implemented various pedagogic means, such as teaching writing methods, recalling the importance of respecting linguistic rules, or the display of reflective thinking. however, the most common self-reported practices have been related to communicating disciplinary norms for constructing academic texts. teaching and assessing writing in higher education: educational practices in colombia grijalva (1999) and lópez (2010) observed that higher education institutions in colombia exhibited a distinct lack of interest in improving their teaching practices. for many decades, the development of reading and writing skills have been restricted to those taught in spanish language courses focusing on linguistics, grammar and pragmatics (gonzález and vega, 2010). this is partly the consequence of a lack of teacher training based on contextualised research with regard to the problems in schools and universities (carlino, 2005). however, some changes in recent years have helped to focus conceptions of writing on the specific characteristics of each genre, and the role of the writer in constructing writing and knowledge (arévalo et al., 2008). owing to the lack of interest reported by grijalva (1999) and lópez (2010), few columbian universities have set up systematic programmes to help students learn to write, considering it to be the job of elementary and secondary schools. pérez et al. (2010) showed that colombian university teachers focused on the discursive and functional dimensions of writing escorcia and moreno teaching and assessment practices for academic writing: an analysis of teacher profiles journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 5 and emphasised the importance of writing as a pleasurable activity. however, this study revealed few clues as to how the practice of writing contributes to learning and the development of thinking skills, and how these processes can be efficiently assessed. according to gonzález and vega (2010), the traditional view that the teaching of writing should be restricted to spanish courses still prevails in colombian universities. these authors found that although teachers believe it is important to develop writing skills at university, they do not see this as being an essential role of university teachers. other research that described colombian teacher practices for teaching and assessment of writing has confirmed that teachers do not consider ways to help students construct their texts in their courses (vargas, 2007; escorcia, 2015; escorcia et al., 2014). teachers concentrate on assessing students’ final written productions and do not provide any feedback during the intermediate phases of writing. writing is regarded merely as a product that learners generate in response to teacher orders (escorcia, 2012). escorcia (2015) found that colombian university teachers in the psychology domain concentrated on communicating disciplinary norms for academic texts (apa reference style, expected text structure, etc.) and upholding the linguistic standards of the spanish language, clearly viewing writing solely as a product. consistent with this result, cadena et al. (2007) observed that writing is also viewed as a product—and not a process—in the fields of economics and engineering. research questions considering that writing plays an essential role for learning in higher education, and that this activity presents challenges to university teachers in terms of their educational practices, the objective of the present study was to discover the extent to which teachers actually implement actions to facilitate their students to achieve mastery of diverse facets of academic writing, especially the reflective dimension of writing. in particular, we looked at how teachers teach and assess writing in higher education. we analysed teaching practices via the advice teachers said they gave to their students when setting a written assignment, and their assessment practices via the criteria they declare to use when they judge these written products. based on these analyses, we sought to typify the teaching and assessment of escorcia and moreno teaching and assessment practices for academic writing: an analysis of teacher profiles journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 6 academic writing practices by identifying teacher profiles and interactions with individuals based on teacher age. studying the case of colombian university teachers, in particular, could contribute to knowledge as to how education practices progress in a context where the question of teaching academic writing does not seem particularly integrated. methods context of the study this study was developed in a private university on the colombian caribbean coast. this university was founded 45 years ago and currently has 4,321 students. it offers 11 academic programmes in the field of health: bacteriology, nursing, medicine, physiotherapy, psychology, social work, optometry, nutrition and dietetics, dentistry and occupational therapy. the pedagogy model prescribed by this university is centred on a dialogical model which points to the complexity of the human being and to the importance of social interaction in the construction of knowledge. participants our sample comprised 64 teachers. table 1 shows the characteristics of the sample. participants were mainly female (58%) and their mean age was 44 years (range: 26–70 years). the participants were mainly novice and moderately experienced university teachers with between 1–10 years of experience (81% of the sample). the most experienced participants (five teachers) had 28–38 years of teaching in higher education. the majority of our participants (59%) taught students in a specific year of study: third year (17%), fifth year (16%), second year (12%), first year (8%) or fourth year (6%). the remainder (41%) taught students from several different years. in other words, our participants were mainly teachers in a specific year of study, and most taught in the upper levels of study. table 1. sample characteristics. variables n (%) age (years) range 26-70 mean (sd) 44.26(10.97) escorcia and moreno teaching and assessment practices for academic writing: an analysis of teacher profiles journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 7 sex male 27 (42) female 37 (58) years of experience 1–9 years 52(81) 10–19 years 3(5) 20–28 years 4(6) 29–39 years 5(8) year of study first year 5(8) second year 8(12) third year 11(17) fourth year 4(6) five year 10(16) several years 23(41) disciplinary field specialist health topic 61(63) human and social sciences 22(23) research methodologies 9(9) management 4(4) communication skills 1(1) the participants taught 97 different courses in the health sciences domain. among the courses taught, a majority concerned specialist health topics (63%). the data shows that the teachers in our sample were not specialised in the teaching of language (oral or written skills). survey instrument the data were obtained through a three-part questionnaire that was specially constructed for the present study. the three sections were:  practices for teaching writing: teachers had to indicate how often they implemented specific pedagogical actions to help their students produce texts in their courses. this section of the questionnaire comprised 12 items that illustrated these pedagogical actions (see table 2).  writing assessment practices: six items probed the criteria used by teachers to assess their students’ written production (see table 3).  text genre: the purpose of this section was to identify all the types of texts that the teachers asked their students to produce in their courses. the teachers had to 1) indicate how often they asked students to write each text genre from a predefined list escorcia and moreno teaching and assessment practices for academic writing: an analysis of teacher profiles journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 8 of genres, and 2) list any other text genres they requested. these sections of the questionnaire will not be presented in the present paper. to indicate the frequency of each item (see tables 2 and 3), the participants were asked to choose one option amongst never, almost never, a few times, sometimes, frequently, very frequently, and always. table 2. items on the questionnaire: practices for teaching writing. when you ask students to produce a written text, what advice do you give them? item n° sentence q1 in the case of an essay, i say to them that the written text must contain a critical personal analysis. q2 in the case of a research project, i say to them that the written text must be founded on strong arguments and theoretical bases. q3 i advise them to use the grammar rules in a convenient manner. q4 i recommend that they write the introduction of a text at the end of the writing activity. q5 i advise them to use the norms for producing scientific texts with regard to our disciplinary context. q6 i explain genre characteristics (for example, to know that it is expected to produce a critical point of view for a synthesis). q7 i recommend that they respect linguistic norms (spelling, punctuation, use of upperand lower-case letters). q8 i communicate to them how many pages they have to write. q9 i recommend that they make a plan or draft before they start writing. q10 i advise them to reread their text before submitting it to their teacher. q11 i propose that they construct the text progressively by making corrections in a successive manner. q12 i propose to them a methodology guide explaining the parts of the text to write. table 3. items on the questionnaire: practices for assessing writing when you ask students to produce a written text, what criteria do you take into account to assess it? item n° sentence q13 the critical thinking and distance learning skills of the students. escorcia and moreno teaching and assessment practices for academic writing: an analysis of teacher profiles journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 9 q14 clarity of ideas, coherence and logical flow of ideas. q15 the mastery of theoretical and disciplinary knowledge provided in the course. q16 the students’ motivation for making the text. q17 respecting norms for producing scientific texts with regard to our disciplinary domain. q18 the use of grammar and spelling rules (punctuation, lexical choices, writing style, fluency). data analysis we ran cluster analyses to identity the teacher profiles by including the items in the questionnaire related to the teaching and assessment of writing as variables. we then used the minimum variance method (ward, 1963) to find the similarities between the participants whilst the differences between the profiles were established (we used an indicator named the squared euclidean distance similarity measure). next, we conducted a comprehensive analysis of categories found based on a graphic representation of the clustering of the items resulting from the ward’s method. finally, we made a new analysis by using the k-means clustering method to verify the suitability of the initial cluster solution. this process was completed using a one-way analysis of variance (anova) followed by a posthoc test that allowed a more precise comparison of the clusters ranged by pairs. in addition to cluster analysis, we performed a kruskal-wallis h-test to determine whether teacher profiles differed according to the variable we considered in this study, the age of participants. results using ward’s (1963) method allowed us to obtain a visual representation of the clustering of the items, which revealed three clusters. after careful inspection, we concluded that these three clusters made sense concerning the categories of teaching approaches we mentioned (see introduction). the results of the cluster analysis are presented in table 4. cluster 1, which included the majority of the participants (n = 46), was characterised by the highest scores on items related to teaching linguistic norms (q3, q7) and the constraints escorcia and moreno teaching and assessment practices for academic writing: an analysis of teacher profiles journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 10 relative to the structure (q8, q6) and organisation (q3, q4) of written texts. these teachers scored the highest on items related to the teaching of writing methods, such as counselling students to review (q10) or re-read (q11) their texts. two items probing assessment practices contributed to this profile, emphasising the importance of assessing student spelling abilities (q18) and motivation (q16). taken together, the majority of items characterising cluster 1 concerned teaching practices, with only a few probing assessment practices. this group of participants, therefore, seemed to focus on communicating the norms and constraints of writing, along with some of the strategies students can use to check that they have respected these norms. we named this profile transmitting, which means transmitting written production norms and methods for writing. cluster 2, which contained the fewest participants (n = 5), was more focused on items related to writing assessment, whether the criteria were based on linguistic aspects (q5), disciplinary norms (q17), students’ theoretical knowledge (q15), text organisation (q12, q14) or student reflexive abilities (q13). one particular feature of this typology is that it considered disciplinary norms in relation to both teaching and assessment practices. also, these participants scored the highest on teaching practices that emphasised the importance of exhibiting reflexive skills through written texts (q1, q2). participants in this cluster clearly took account of the context in which the writing was to take place, the disciplinary norms and the epistemic function of writing. cluster 2 revealed a teacher profile that emphasised the assessment of writing practices, which is why we named this profile assessing, which means assessing academic writing in context. the teachers in cluster 3 (n = 13) scored the lowest on all of the items. their mean scores were particularly low on questions related to writers’ knowledge and thinking qualities (q1, q2), as well as on items concerning teaching practices, such as giving advice on how to write, i.e., make a plan, etc. (q4 and q8). these participants would not teach or assess the written productions of their students according to a defined approach, or would simply not adhere to the different characteristics described in the questionnaire. we named this profile no adherence, which means no adherence to specific teaching and assessment approaches. escorcia and moreno teaching and assessment practices for academic writing: an analysis of teacher profiles journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 11 results of the post-hoc test (table 4) provide a more detailed view of the differences between the profiles. the no adherence profile mainly differed from the other profiles on items related to teaching practices: encouraging reflexivity practices through writing (q1, q2); transmitting disciplinary norms (q5); considering the number of pages to produce while planning (q8); and communicating the structure a written text should have (q12). it also differed significantly from the other two profiles on three assessment items: text coherence, theoretical knowledge and acquisition of disciplinary norms. table 4. cluster analysis results. cluster 1 (n= 46) cluster 2 (n= 5) cluster 3 (n= 13) f (n = 64) p post-hoc test teaching items q1 critical analysis 5,61 6 3,38 25,59 0.00 1>3**; 2>3** q2 arguments and theoretical bases 5,57 6 3,31 18,85 0.00 1>3**; 2>3** q3 grammar rules 5,33 3,6 4,08 8,82 0.00 1>2*; 1>3** q4 introduction 5,15 3,8 3,31 12,33 0.00 1>3** q5 scientific norms 5,78 6 3,92 39,11 0.00 1>3**; 2>3** q6 genre characteristics 5,52 4,8 4 20,31 0.00 1>3** q7 linguistic norms 5,76 4,4 4,69 11,98 0.00 1>2*; 1>3** q8 number of pages 5,24 5 3 17,64 0.00 1>3**; 2>3** q9 plan of text 5 1,8 3,54 33,77 0.00 1>2**;2<3**; 1>3** q10 rereading 5,72 1,8 4,46 59,73 0.00 1>2**;2<3*; 1>3** q11 constructing progressively 5,04 4 3,15 15,33 0.00 1>3** q12 the parts of the text 5,65 5,8 3,54 33,77 0.00 1>3** assessing items 5,67 5,8 4,85 6,91 0.02 1>3**;1>3* escorcia and moreno teaching and assessment practices for academic writing: an analysis of teacher profiles journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 12 q13 critical thinking q14 coherence 5,83 6 4,77 13,69 0.00 1>3**; 2<3** q15theoretical knowledge 5,8 6,2 4,85 11,29 0.00 1>3**; 2<3** q16 student motivation 5,63 5 4,77 5,46 0.07 1>3* q17 academic norms 5,59 5,8 4 13,29 0.00 1>3**; 2<3** q18 linguistic rules 5,72 5,6 4,54 13,62 0.00 1>3**; 2<3* ** p ≤ .01; * p ≤ .05 the transmitting profile scored higher than the assessing and no adherence profiles for the consideration of linguistic aspects for both teaching (q3, q7) and assessment (q18) practices. cluster 1 differed significantly from cluster 3 solely on specific items, such as teaching practices where the characteristics of the text genre to be produced were explained to students (q6) and they were advised to reread their texts (q11). finally, teachers with the transmitting profile were significantly more focused than those with the no adherence profile on assessing student motivation to write (q16) and their spelling abilities (q7). finally, the three profiles differed significantly on two specific items concerning teaching practices: recommending that their students plan their text before writing (q9); and rereading their texts before handing them in (q10). on these two items, cluster 1 scored significantly higher than the other two groups of teachers. differences between the teacher profiles a one-way anova revealed a significant difference between the teacher profiles relating to their age (χ 2 (2, n = 64) = 6.80, p = 0.03). teachers with the assessing profile were significantly younger than those with the no adherence profile (p = 0.01). in addition, the differences in age between the transmitting and no adherence profiles tended toward significance (p = 0.06). in contrast, no differences between the three profiles were found relative to the various years of experience. escorcia and moreno teaching and assessment practices for academic writing: an analysis of teacher profiles journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 13 discussion the main aim of the present research was to characterise teacher profiles according to their teaching and assessment practices. we found three very different profiles, indicating that teaching approaches of teachers vary in the extent to which they integrate the epistemic role of writing in their self-reported practices. the first profile corresponded to teaching practices based on the transmission of knowledge in specific linguistic and disciplinary domains. teachers with this profile seemed to espouse the traditional conceptions of teaching focused on the teacher figure and the acquisition of knowledge. findings on teaching approaches in higher education (gow and kember, 1993; trigwell and prosser, 1996; eley, 2006) consistently show that some teachers view teaching above all as a means of communicating the ideas and knowledge that students need to learn in order to succeed. under this approach, academic writing corresponds to mastering a set of norms, such as grammar and syntax, as well as other norms relating to the disciplinary content students learn. the second profile (assessing) corresponded to a very different view of education and assessment practices, with an emphasis on the cultural characteristics of the disciplinary field in which the students produced their texts. teachers belonging to this group acknowledged the need to encourage their students to think about where and why they write. in this sense, they gave priority to learning and adhering to disciplinary norms, in addition to practising highlevel reflective thinking skills through writing. this second profile appears to be related to a teaching approach, supported by evidence in the scientific literature (gow and kember, 1993), that focuses on student processes of knowledge construction. one particular feature of this second profile is that the cognitive function of writing relates to assessment practices, rather than teaching practices. this means that, as in the case of our sample, teaching practices tending to encourage or train students to think reflectively through writing seem relegated to a secondary position. this finding is consistent with escorcia (2015) in that some teachers emphasised the importance of the epistemic role of writing when they escorcia and moreno teaching and assessment practices for academic writing: an analysis of teacher profiles journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 14 described their assessment criteria, but not when they described the advice they gave to their students. the third (no adherence) profile is particularly interesting, as this group of teachers did not seem to be concerned with either teaching or assessing writing. studies of the teaching practices of colombian university teachers (grijalva, 1999; gonzález and vega, 2010; lópez, 2010) have shown that some teachers assume that their students already know how to write, managing all the norms and skills they need to be efficient in this domain. we can surmise that for the third profile teachers, the mission of higher education institutions is not to make up for the deficiencies of secondary school, but to train experts in a given discipline, ensuring that they master specific scientific and technical knowledge. however, in order to confirm this hypothesis, it would seem necessary to know these teachers’ perceptions with regard to teaching academic writing compared with the importance that they ascribe to other aspects of teaching and learning in higher education. these three profiles show some coherence with the findings of graham et al. (2002). our first profile is close to the good writing profile identified by graham et al. (2002), in that it gives priority to learning the norms of writing (mainly linguistic rules) and to judging in what ways the pupils respect these norms. this profile is also similar to a category of practices for teaching writing that, according to lea and street (1998), gives importance to language skills. our second profile is quite similar to the explicit and direct instruction profile revealed by graham et al. (2002), given that in both cases the cognitive dimension is considered essential. we observed, however, that our second profile takes into consideration a sociocultural perspective of writing that is not emphasised in the explicit and direct instruction profile identified by graham et al. (2002). consequently, our second profile seems to correspond more closely with a category of teaching writing that, following lea and street (1998), considers the discursive norms and sociocultural traits that influence the writing activities of students and teachers in higher education. in relation to the interactions between teacher profiles and individual’s age, we found that teacher age was significantly related to the profiles, with the oldest participants exhibiting a no adherence profile and the youngest revealing an assessing profile. this finding is consistent escorcia and moreno teaching and assessment practices for academic writing: an analysis of teacher profiles journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 15 with that of norton et al. (2005). we can compare the influence of an individual’s age with that of their years of teaching experience. some studies demonstrating the influence of this latter variable (gobat and berger, 2018) have argued that more experienced teachers declare a more traditional vision of teaching for either of the following reasons: a) generational effects, or b) the tendency of older persons to be more closely aligned with traditional values. based on a generational effects hypothesis, we might suggest that the oldest teachers in our study have been less affected by changes in education practices in colombian universities, which have only recently started giving university teachers a greater role in the learning and overall success of their students. the third profile illustrates a more traditional vision of teaching at the post-secondary level, where teachers seem not to be actively involved in university student learning processes. conversely, teachers with the second profile were the youngest, probably indicating that their teaching and assessment practices have been more influenced by the aforementioned contemporary questions about practices in higher education in this country. our findings also show coherence with feixas’ (2010) results, which revealed a correspondence between a university teacher’s age and their teaching profile. the oldest tended to focus on the knowledge they communicated, implementing, above all, an expositive education style. in contrast, the youngest teachers were more centred on interactions and knowledge exchanges with and between learners. feixas (2010) argued that this latter group had probably experienced professional development influenced by education theories and pedagogic models that focused more on students. conclusion the present study aimed to typify the profiles of university teachers with regard to their teaching and assessment of academic writing, and to identify to what extent the teacher profiles varied as a function of their age. we sought to understand whether teachers promoted the epistemic function of writing. escorcia and moreno teaching and assessment practices for academic writing: an analysis of teacher profiles journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 16 we observed that the majority of teachers corresponded to profiles unlikely to consider an active role for teachers in the promotion of student learning of academic writing. only the youngest teachers considered the cognitive dimension of writing and the sociocultural variables that contributed to the mastery of academic writing. the profiles we found confirm the traditional categorisation of teaching approaches in higher education as constituted by two poles, teacher-focused and student-focused. our research has some limitations. the instrument used was not exhaustive in that it certainly does not consider all of the diversity of practices for teaching writing. for example, no item questioned factors around identity or how students and teachers experience the appropriation of disciplinary contextual norms. this factor illustrates a category that, according to lea and street (1998), plays an essential role in the practice of academic writing. another limitation is that the profiles identified are only valid for teachers in the health domain. if we are taking a sociocultural approach to writing, it would seem necessary to test these categories against teachers from other disciplines. the present research was based on an exploratory and qualitative method that we implemented previously (escorcia, 2015). this new quantitative stage of the research could facilitate a comparative approach that would seem to be necessary if we are to understand the variations among university teacher approaches related to academic writing in different disciplinary and cultural contexts. acknowledgements we thank action-research-training’s programme of the school of teaching training (espé) of the university of poitiers, and the research and projects department (dpi) of the universidad del norte (colombia), for having contributed to the partial funding of the present work. references escorcia and moreno teaching and assessment practices for academic writing: an analysis of teacher profiles journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 17 arévalo, l. f., campo, o. m., chois, p., escobar, r. a., ordóñez, n. m., ortega, j. o., sandoval, c. e. and valencia, a. m. (2008) lineamientos generales para los cursos de lectura y escritura’. popayán: universidad del cauca. (accessed: 12 june 2019). escorcia, d. (2012). ‘conceptions de l’écriture à l’université: analyse des représentations d’enseignants français et colombiens’. recherches en didactiquesles cahiers théodile, 12, pp. 123-141. escorcia, d. (2015). ‘teaching and assessing writing skills at university level: a comparison of practices in french and colombian universities’. educational research, 57(03), pp. 254–271. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/00131881.2015.1056641 (accessed 2 july 2019). escorcia, d., moreno, m., campo, k., and palacios, j. (2014). ‘enseñanza y evaluación de la escritura en la universidad: análisis de prácticas declaradas de docentes franceses y colombianos’. zona próxima, 0(20). available at: http://rcientificas.uninorte.edu.co/index.php/zona/article/view/6007 (accessed 12 july 2019). campo, k., escorcia, d., moreno, m., and palacio, j. (2016). ‘metacognición, escritura y rendimiento académico en universitarios de colombia y francia’. avances en psicología latinoamericana. 34(2), pp. 233-252. bereiter, c. (1980) ‘development in writing’, in gregg, l. m. and steinberg, e. r. (eds.) cognitive processes in writing. hillsdale, nj: erlbaum, pp. 73–96. carlino, p. (2005) escribir, leer y aprender en la universidad: una introducción a la alfabetización. edición reimpresa. buenos aires: fondo de cultura económica. castelló, m. and mateos, m. (2015) ‘las representaciones de profesores y estudiantes sobre la escritura académica en las universidades españolas’, cultura y educación 27(3), pp. 489–500. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131881.2015.1056641 http://rcientificas.uninorte.edu.co/index.php/zona/article/view/6007 escorcia and moreno teaching and assessment practices for academic writing: an analysis of teacher profiles journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 18 cadena, s., narvaez, e. and chacon, m. (2007) ‘comprensión de textos escritos académicos y tareas escritas en las asignaturas del área profesional: concepciones de maestros universitarios’, lenguaje, 35, pp. 81–118. delcambre, i., donahue, t. and lahanier-reuter, d. (2012) ‘ruptures et continuités dans l’écriture à l’université’. scripta, 13(24), pp. 227-244 available at: http://periodicos.pucminas.br/index.php/scripta/article/view/4405. (accessed: 12 july 2019). eley, m. g. (2006) ‘teachers’ conceptions of teaching, and the making of specific decisions in planning to teach’, higher education, 51(2), pp. 191–214. available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-004-6382-9 (accessed: 12 december 2019). feixas, m. (2010). enfoques y concepciones docentes en la universidad. relieve, 16(2), pp. 1-27. http://www.uv.es/relieve/v16n2/relievev16n2_2.htm. (accessed: 2 july 2019). gobat, e. and berger, j. l. (2018) ‘les croyances pédagogiques et identitaires des enseignants de la formation professionnelle: le rôle de l’expérience d’enseignement et de la formation pédagogique’. canadian journal of education/revue canadienne de l'éducation, 41(2), pp. 441–471. gonzález, b. and vega, v. (2010) prácticas de lectura y escritura en la universidad. el caso de cinco asignaturas de la universidad sergio arboleda. bogotá: fondo de publicaciones. universidad sergio arboleda. gow, l. and kember, d. (1993) ‘conceptions of teaching and their relationship to student learning’, british journal of educational psychology, 63(1), pp. 20-23. graham, s., harris, k. r., macarthur, c. a. and fink, b. (2002) ‘primary grade teachers’ theoretical orientations concerning writing instruction: construct validation and a http://periodicos.pucminas.br/index.php/scripta/article/view/4405 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-004-6382-9 http://www.uv.es/relieve/v16n2/relievev16n2_2.htm escorcia and moreno teaching and assessment practices for academic writing: an analysis of teacher profiles journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 19 nationwide survey’, contemporary educational psychology, 27, pp. 147–166. available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1006/ceps.2001.1085 (accessed: 5 july 2019). grijalva, a. (1999) ‘reflexiones sobre pedagogía universitaria’. bull. instituto francés de estudios andinos 28(3), pp. 451– 460. available at: https://www.redalyc.org/pdf/126/12628310.pdf (accessed: 5 july 2019). hayes, j. r. (2012) ‘modeling and remodeling writing’, written communication, 29(3), pp. 369–388. available at: https://doi.org/10.1177/0741088312451260 (accessed: 10 june 2019). kellogg, r. t. and raulerson, b. (2007) ‘improving the writing skills of college students’, psychonomic bulletin and review, 14(2), pp. 237–242. available at: https://doi.org/10.3758/bf03194058 (accessed: 10 june 2019). lea, m. r., and street, b. v. (1998) ‘student writing in higher education: an academic literacies approach’, studies in higher education, 23(2), pp. 157–172. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079812331380364 (accessed: 5 july 2019 ). le huu nghia, t. (2017) ‘what hinders teachers from translating their beliefs into teaching behaviors: the case of teaching generic skills in vietnamese universities’, teaching and teacher education, 64, pp. 105–114. available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tate.2017.02.003 (accessed: 5 june 2019 ). lópez, g. (2010) la pedagogía crítica en el iesalc/unesco y la universidad colombiana en el marco de la revolución educativa entre el 2005–2010. available at: http://www.eumed.net/libros-gratis/2011a/910/indice.htm (accessed: 10 december 2019). norton, l., richardson, j. t. e., hartley, j., newstead, s. and mayes, j. (2005) ‘teachers’ beliefs and intentions concerning teaching in higher education’, higher education, 50(4), pp. 537–571. http://dx.doi.org/10.1006/ceps.2001.1085 https://www.redalyc.org/pdf/126/12628310.pdf https://doi.org/10.1177/0741088312451260 https://doi.org/10.3758/bf03194058 https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079812331380364 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tate.2017.02.003 escorcia and moreno teaching and assessment practices for academic writing: an analysis of teacher profiles journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 20 organisation for economic cooperation and development. (1996) the knowledge-based economy, oecd, (oecd/gd (96)102), pp. 1–46. pérez, m., barrios, m. and zuluaga, z (2010) ¿cómo se enseña el lenguaje en colombia? grupo de investigación pedagogías de la lectura y la escritura. bogotá: pontificia universidad javeriana. reuter, y. (1996) enseigner et apprendre à écrire: construire une didactique de l’écriture. paris: esf éditeur. trigwell, k. and prosser, m. (1996) ‘congruence between intention and strategy in university science teachers’ approaches to teaching’, higher education, 32(1), pp. 77–87. available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/bf00139219 (accessed: 12 december 2019). vargas, a. (2007) escribir en la universidad. reflexiones y estrategias sobre el proceso de composición escrita de textos académicos, lenguaje, 33, pp. 97-125. ward, j. (1963) ‘hierarchical grouping to optimize an objective function’, journal of the american statistical association, 58, pp. 236–244. author details dyanne escorcia is assistant professor at université de poitiers, france. she teaches subjects about learning theories and pedagogical practices, the writing learning processes, and teaching and learning in the university context. her research focuses on the cognitive and metacognitive aspects of writing and the teaching practices relative to writing in postsecondary education. mayilin moreno is professor of the psychology department of the universidad del norte de barranquilla, colombia. in 2014, she received a phd in psychology from toulouse jean jaures university. she currently researches in the line of psychology of cognitive processes and early language development. https://doi.org/10.1007/bf00139219 teaching and assessment practices for academic writing: an analysis of teacher profiles abstract introduction studying self-reported teaching practices related to writing in higher education teaching and assessing writing in higher education: educational practices in colombia research questions methods context of the study participants survey instrument data analysis results differences between the teacher profiles discussion conclusion acknowledgements references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special issue 22: compendium of innovative practice october 2021 ________________________________________________________________________ democracy in action: students as design partners andrea todd university of chester, uk keywords: students as partners; student voice; curriculum design; feedback; democracy; covid-19. the challenge as part of our institution’s covid-19 response, a decision was made to pre-record all lectures and to only deliver seminars live online. this posed a challenge for two third-year law modules scheduled to be delivered as weekly, face-to-face, two-hour sessions integrating the traditional lecture and seminar. the integrated model had been co-designed with students two years prior to the pivot online, and comprised a lecture followed immediately by an opportunity to ‘learn by doing’, applying new knowledge in a problem-based workshop. the model led to a significant increase in attendance and engagement for both modules and a commensurate increase in student achievement. as such, the advertised method of delivery had been central to some students’ decision-making in registering for these optional modules. the institutional requirement to split the lecture away from the workshop contradicted the integrated model co-designed with students. the challenge was thus to enable and empower current students to co-create design and delivery solutions that worked for them, whilst respecting the boundaries of these necessary institutional constraints. the response in the first live online session for both modules, a commitment was made to students: to respond in real time to their views on module structure and delivery. students were viewed todd democracy in action: students as design partners journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 2 as collaborative partners (cook-sather, bovill and felton, 2017) entering genuine dialogue (bovill, 2017) with the module leader. for this to work, both students and module leader needed to agree to respect the democratic process: students would be given a vote on delivery design, but they (and the module leader) would have to agree to abide by the outcome of this vote. i sought to encourage a participatory approach that would empower students to be ‘authors of their own destiny’ (gravett, kinchin and winstone, 2020, p.2584). whilst it was clear that students were best placed to shape module delivery, it was crucial to retain the vital elements of a successful problem-based workshop, including time spent working: 1. with the tutor setting up the problem and expectations of the response. 2. alone to consider the response. 3. in a group learning from peers and producing an agreed answer. 4. in plenary, ensuring all students achieved the session’s learning outcomes. in week four of teaching, students were asked for input, in each module, as follows: 1. an in-session vote on whether to amend module delivery to allow for some workshop content to be recorded and accessed immediately after the relevant recorded lecture, rather than delivered live online (following more closely the intended classroom-based delivery pattern, and involving, in one sitting, watching the lecture, accessing a problem, spending time alone solving it, and immediately accessing a recording considering the issues raised). 2. an online survey asking for preferences (from a range of options informed by the parameters enabling a successful workshop) in relation to the following: a. the proportion of time spent during online sessions in small groups (in teams channels) versus ‘thinking time’ spent alone. b. how to accommodate plenaries: in a large group (each module caters to 45 students) or in smaller sub-groups. 22 of 43 students from module one, and 20 of 44 students from module two, responded to the in-class poll, representing 100% of the students present during these sessions. 12 todd democracy in action: students as design partners journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 3 students from module one, and 9 from module two, responded to the online survey. the generalisability of the online survey results should therefore be approached with caution. in terms of time spent during sessions, the majority of online survey respondents across both modules (81% from module one; 85% from module two) voted to plenarise the workshops in smaller rather than larger groups. the majority of respondents in both modules (78% in module one, 58% in module two) also voted to spend more time working in groups to solve the problems set, and less time considering the issues alone. as for the delivery pattern, in module one’s in-class vote, 76% voted to retain weekly live workshop sessions, thus rejecting the option of accessing recorded workshop content. however, for module two, 79% voted in favour of accessing recorded workshop content. to take in these changes, it was necessary to redraft the module handbook for both modules and the timetable for module two. this was turned around within one week of the vote, and published to students by week five of teaching, demonstrating a commitment to responding to student voice in real time. once the new system was in place, student contributions during live online workshops increased notably, as did students’ willingness to suggest enhancements anecdotally throughout the year, reflecting an increased confidence in the feedback process. at the end of the year, when surveyed on their views of the partnership approach utilised in both modules, students reported feeling ‘appreciated’, ‘happy that our concerns and views [were] listened to’, and mindful that the desire to include students had been ‘motivated by getting the best out of us’. the benefit of having a vote was appreciated by students even when their selection did not take the majority vote: ‘[t]his worked out really well, i […] voted against […] initially but it was excellent.’ both modules had promised students the same delivery pattern. however, in voting for how to proceed with recorded workshops, the majority in each module came to opposing conclusions. this outcome could not have been predicted; indeed, the profile of students who select these modules is similar (in many cases students take both modules concurrently). it is clear that what worked for a group of students in one module would not have worked for the same group in the other module. the importance of academics not making assumptions about ‘what works’ is therefore underlined. todd democracy in action: students as design partners journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 4 recommendations this ‘democracy in action’ approach was born from a crisis. however, the positive student response to this partnership experience indicates that it could, and should, be rolled out in a more considered and purposeful fashion in future years and across other modules. the learning points to take from this experience are as follows: 1. it is important that students feel part of the process. 2. it is crucial for students (and academic staff) to respect the outcome of the democratic process. 3. academics must not make assumptions about the potential results of the democratic process. 4. it is important to frame the choices available to students in a way that ensures that whatever the outcome, the learning outcomes of each session, and the module, can be achieved. treating students as design partners does not mean giving students a free choice, but it does (and should) mean giving them a choice and honouring it. references bovill, c. (2017) ‘breaking down staff-student barriers: moving towards pedagogic flexibility’, in kinchin, i. m. and winstone, n. (eds.) pedagogic frailty and resilience in the university. rotterdam: brill sense, pp.151-161. cook-sather, a., bovill, c. and felten, p. (2014) engaging students as partners in learning and teaching: a guide for faculty. san francisco: jossey-bass. gravett, i., kinchin, m. and winstone, n. e. (2020) ‘more than customers: conceptions of students as partners held by students, staff, and institutional leaders’, studies in todd democracy in action: students as design partners journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 5 higher education, 45(12), pp.2574-2587. https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2019.1623769. author details andrea todd is senior lecturer in law, undergraduate programme leader and director of pro bono and community engagement at the university of chester. https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2019.1623769 democracy in action: students as design partners the challenge the response recommendations references author details _ journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special issue 22: compendium of innovative practice october 2021 ________________________________________________________________________ transition online: challenges and achievements jonathan andrews university of birmingham, uk keywords: online; hybrid; face-to-face; academic skills; edi; covid-19. the challenge mid-march 2020 within a week of lockdown being seriously discussed, could a whole academic and digital skills division still provide the student support which was previously dependent on a significant campus presence? could we keep going? in our division, we provide assistance with study needs, such as digital skills, academic writing, revision, literature searching, and referencing. skills advisors are from four main backgrounds: digital training; language and literature teaching; maths; and subject librarianship. the division covers all undergraduate and taught postgraduate programmes and demand is high: 665 individual student-advisor appointments were held for the academic year 2019-20, terms one and two (before the march 2020 lockdown); 746 enquiries, including email; and 279 programme-embedded workshops or lectures from autumn 2019 to 18 march 2020, with 13,545 students attending. the new institutional scholar scheme and peer-assisted study sessions (pass) provide significant integrated widening participation and learning support, including two extra one-to-one skills appointments. both are normally campus-based. prior to lockdown online provision was chiefly through libguides and canvas (vle), while face-to-face support was substantially in the form of workshops on campus. students booked one-to-one help in library appointment rooms. andrews transition online: challenges and achievements journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 2 in the middle of the pandemic, the killing of george floyd made world headlines and affected many with its exposure of profound inequalities and systemic racism. as academic skills practitioners, continuing to support students in online transition, how could we respond? so – how to keep going? the response with the whole division off-campus, an early decision was made to replace face-to-face workshops, designed for computer clusters and classrooms, with hour-long online question-and-answer (q and a) sessions. powerpoints, word documents, libguides, and vle (canvas) modules were offered to programmes in advance. this enabled a move to flipped learning, which had previously been hard to achieve. q and as using zoom video conferencing software reinforced advance resources with an introductory presentation, followed by students’ questions and advisors’ responses. this used dialogic learning as an online alternative to face-to-face workshops, in turn pointing to a future blended learning model (petronzi and petronzi, 2020). divisional staff all had work laptops, though adjustment to home working was not always seamless! zoom was unknown before, which meant a learning curve. some staff were at ease with doing multiple video recordings (panopto), others initially less so. we benefitted from having a substantial bank of materials from our existing provision for programmes. for example, vle pages with links, powerpoints, and text have been provided for first year medical students for several years or more: these simply needed updating. a lecture was replaced with a panopto recording and an updated activity-based libguide, followed by q and as, to reinforce these materials and enable queries. colleagues have worked hard at extending and promoting our suite of online guides, videos, and innovative podcasts. one colleague used her smartphone to film ‘taking a break’ outside her home: others recorded ‘google scholar’ on zoom. andrews transition online: challenges and achievements journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 3 the division provides multi-disciplinary drop-ins and workshops. these have also been delivered as q and as over the last year. events are now provided online for revision and assessment weeks. the net result is to extend support, provide flexibility for students, and effectively triage queries. with a colleague’s guidance, we are undertaking training and self-education (ugoala, 2020), and expanding existing or creating new training materials – online resource lists and audio-visual playlists, libguides, and vle content – to promote equality, diversity, and inclusion (edi). our q and as and our individual appointments increasingly use examples of diversity topics in supporting students and staff and visibly promote inclusion in an online environment. edi is a standing agenda item in online team meetings. easier said than done? there were practical and psychological challenges involved in setting up online sessions on an unfamiliar platform, against the backdrop of a pandemic. however, anxieties were shared by many others, nationally and internationally, and still overcome or alleviated (ghazi-saidi et al., 2020). all of us want to support the students and staff. especially at appointments we could see the immense pressures for our students (and tutors) maintaining and balancing home, study, and work. feedback from appointments showed the value to students of maintaining contact: ‘[it] reaffirmed that i am where i am supposed to be and i can do it’; ‘[i] feel more confident and enabled’. our efforts thus bore fruit in the way intended. two q and as drew 136 first year medical students; their information skills vle page had 1.3k views (september to may). 1,009 one-to-one appointments were held online or by email between april 2020 and 15 june 2021, with fewer no-shows than when on campus: online seems easier to attend and attendance is more reliable. regular formal and informal online video conferences (zoom, teams), chats, and gettogethers provided mutual support. achieved: • learning materials maintained or developed for programmes’ vle. • q and as provided in almost all cases. andrews transition online: challenges and achievements journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 4 • experimental approach backed by positive feedback and attendance figures. • further widening participation support: scholar scheme. • greater recognition of our libguides, and increased vle access. recommendations all of us missed campus at some stage. however, for those with commitments or commutes, some home-working can be welcome. is it time to blend online and on-site support for the long-term? this may be necessitated anyway by an ongoing pandemic, but it could also better suit on-campus students with tight timetables, distance learners, or international students temporarily unable to travel (kanwar and carr, 2020). in fact, a hybrid approach combines the flexibility of online learning with the ‘embodied and communal experience’ on-campus (eringfeld, 2021, p. 147) and even assists inclusivity and diversity (eringfeld, 2021, p. 154). the online shift can be exploited to develop flipped learning, with synchronous group delivery used to discuss queries and reinforce material provided in advance. one-to-ones allow for detailed discussion of individual requirements. embedded vle material, libguides, and targeted videos thus facilitate flexible, blended delivery by video conferencing or on campus. hybrid working may be a model forced by circumstance. it can also be an advantage to match modern lives and ways of studying. references eringfeld, s. (2021) 'higher education and its post-coronial future: utopian hopes and dystopian fears at cambridge university during covid-19', studies in higher education, 46(1), pp. 146-157. https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2020.1859681. ghazi-saidi, l., criffield, a., kracl, c. l., mckelvey, m., obasi, s. n. and vu, p. (2020) 'moving from face-to-face to remote instruction in a higher education institution https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2020.1859681 andrews transition online: challenges and achievements journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 5 during a pandemic: multiple case studies', international journal of technology in education and science, 4(4), pp. 370-383. https://doi.org/10.46328/ijtes.v4i4.169. kanwar, a. and carr, a. (2020) 'the impact of covid-19 on international higher education: new models for the new normal', journal of learning for development, 7(3), pp. 326-333. available at: https://jl4d.org/index.php/ejl4d/article/view/467 (accessed: 29 july 2021). ugoala, o. (2020) ‘how to be a true ally’ [facebook] 3 june 2021. available at: https://www.facebook.com/www.joe.co.uk/videos/how-to-become-a-trueally/579944189573777/ (accessed: 17 june 2021) petronzi, r. and petronzi, d. (2020) 'the online and campus (oac) model as a sustainable blended approach to teaching and learning in higher education: a response to covid-19', journal of pedagogical research, 4(4), pp. 498-507. https://doi.org/10.33902/jpr.2020064475. acknowledgements thanks to adsc managers and colleagues for their informed guidance on this piece. author details jonathan andrews is an academic skills advisor at the university of birmingham. he has a background in librarianship and was the library’s subject advisor for medicine. since march 2020 he has been working remotely from home. https://doi.org/10.46328/ijtes.v4i4.169 https://jl4d.org/index.php/ejl4d/article/view/467 https://doi.org/10.33902/jpr.2020064475 transition online: challenges and achievements the challenge mid-march 2020 could we keep going? the response recommendations references acknowledgements author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x correction notice corrigendum to: a holistic approach to authentic and engaging assessment during the covid-19 pandemic: an australian case study authors: sabina cerimagic, m. rabiul hasan; university of sydney email: sabina.cerimagic@sydney.edu.au journal: journal of learning development in higher education (jldhe) year: 2021 (october) issue: special issue 22: compendium of innovative practice doi: https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.vi22.690 article page: https://journal.aldinhe.ac.uk/index.php/jldhe/article/view/690/546 correction date: 2022-02-09 editor’s comment: after publication, the authors brought to our attention several minor errors that required factual correction: in the version of the article originally published, the teaching unit is incorrectly identified as mcom. this has been corrected in the challenge and response sections. the mcom student cohort numbers have consequently also been deleted in the corrected version. in the response section, these words have been inserted in the first sentence of the second paragraph: ‘collaborating with the unit of study coordinator to’. at the end of the second paragraph, this sentence has been inserted: ‘bcd also evaluated them via a student survey’. for each of the example responses provided, the respondents to the student surveys, who were referred to as ‘students’, have been redesignated ‘survey respondents’. the editorial board of jldhe would like to extend its sincere apologies for any inconvenience these corrections may have caused. journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special issue 22: compendium of innovative practice october 2021 a holistic approach to authentic and engaging assessment during the covid-19 pandemic: an australian case study sabina cerimagic university of sydney, australia m. rabiul hasan university of sydney, australia keywords: assessment; connected learning at scale; business co-design; online, active, and peer learning pedagogy; covid-19. the challenge during the height of the pandemic, we had to transition to online learning rapidly. this required educators to move all content, activities, and assessment tasks very quickly onto canvas, our universities learning management system (lms). one of the most significant issues that we experienced was fostering engagement with the students and finding suitable etools to promote engagement and support authentic assessment of this unit. this research uses one case study based on a business school unit, that was run in semester one, 2021, which the business co-design (bcd) team collaborated with. for the unit we had to develop assessments that would foster student engagement throughout the semester. once we had developed the assessment the next hurdle was to trial several etools, such as menti, jamboard, and padlet, to find out which were suitable for our activities. the etools needed to not dictate the pedagogy; the pedagogical approach directly influences learning, and we did not want to compromise the pedagogy of online, active, and peer learning, or the assessment of this unit (clark, 2001; cook, 2020; peterson, 2020). therefore, by developing the assessment first and then identifying the etools that would cerimagic and hasan a holistic approach to authentic and engaging assessment during the covid-19 pandemic: an australian case study journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 3 best support it, we ensured that the development of the assessment was not driven by etools. the response each of the connected learning at scale (clas) units that we are working on is allocated a small team comprising of one learning designer (ld), an educational developer (ed), and media staff. in addition, we have a research assistant (ra) that conducts research and evaluation (r&e), as indicated in figure 1. figure 1. bcd design and development coordination. source: sabina cerimagic, 2021 each team member is tasked with collaborating with the unit of study coordinator to design, develop, and implement changes to units to meet the challenges of the pandemic and the switch to online and blended learning and teaching. with the help of this team approach in co-designing this unit we developed several authentic assessments to encourage student engagement and learning. bcd also evaluated them via a student survey. • icebreaker activities linked to the weekly topic were carried out at the beginning of each workshop. we used mentimeter for the icebreaker activities and most of the survey respondents (73.5%) agreed that participating in these activities motivated them to engage in the workshops. cerimagic and hasan a holistic approach to authentic and engaging assessment during the covid-19 pandemic: an australian case study journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 4 • reflective eportfolio – video log (‘vlog’). there is much content to cover in this unit, and a vlog was one way to ask the students to reflect on each of the perspectives/topics they have covered. students were instructed to upload their vlog to canvas studio, with the bulk of survey respondents (89%) saying they enjoyed the ‘vlog’. • workshop presentation debates were carried out in groups/teams of five. students had to split into two sides in their group – a ‘for’ and an ‘against’ side. students then worked together (as a team) to present both sides of an argument for their designated debate topic (using communication and presentation skills) using the lecture materials and resources. the majority (78%) of the survey respondents indicated that the workshop presentations benefited their learning. some workshops were run face-to-face, and for these, the students did the debates in front of the class but the majority of the workshops were held online using zoom (as most of our students are based overseas). we also utilised jamboard where possible – jamboard is an easy-to-use etool to get the whole class engaged. one downside to jamboard is that it can only support up to 50 students at one time. thus, when our class had more than 50 students, we had to switch over to padlet (another etool). most of our students (67%) indicated that canvas/padlet/jamboard helped support their assessment requirements. it was crucial to ensure that assessments are authentic, as student perceptions of authenticity are vital and contribute significantly to the completion of learning outcomes (ajjawi et al., 2020). students make judgments about the assessment tasks they are given, including judgements on the authenticity of assessments. the individualistic nature of assessment tasks, such as report writing and reflective writing, does not allow students to exhibit the communication, problem-solving, and collaboration skills they learned (mantai and huber, 2021). qualitative analysis conducted by ajjawi et al. (2020) found that students also perceived written assessments as incapable of capturing learnt professional skills adequately. we therefore sought to create authentic assessments which support online, active, and peer learning and by doing so, we increased student engagement and provided learners cerimagic and hasan a holistic approach to authentic and engaging assessment during the covid-19 pandemic: an australian case study journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 5 with a platform to demonstrate the skills they learnt. in addition, academic dishonesty issues (which are often linked to written assessments) were minimized as it is impossible to cheat on a vlog which requires students to film themselves delivering a reflective piece. as a result, we had zero academic dishonesty issues in semester one, 2021. recommendations our goal was to foster student engagement in a predominantly online delivery model, which still encouraged active and peer learning. in addition, we sought to create a relevant, innovative and authentic assessment where learning is applied and tested through authentic assessment modes and supported by opportunities to receive and share feedback from academics and their peers. we achieved this goal by developing innovative assessments, such as icebreaker activities, in-class debates, and vlogs. our aim was to engage students within both large groups and in small tutorial classes, using a process of educational design involving socially constructed alignment, staff development, supported student-led learning, and innovative large-scale teaching pedagogies (bryant, 2019; cerimagic and khanna, 2020). recommendations for others trying to implement similar practices: 1. develop the assessments first: to ensure that pedagogy takes primacy, the tools should serve to allow you to support learning and develop resources that remain authentic to your agreed approach. 2. explore and pilot several etools. select a few etools that will meet your needs and requirements and ensure that the etools are simple to use and that they are inexpensive and/or accessible. 3. additionally, you should create detailed assessment instructions (either as a word doc or on your lms) to manage student queries around assessments. then, your tutors can refer students to this whenever there are questions. cerimagic and hasan a holistic approach to authentic and engaging assessment during the covid-19 pandemic: an australian case study journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 6 never before has it been so crucial that online teaching and assessment is engaging, educational, and innovative. this can be achieved by ensuring that the pedagogy and the etools are chosen to complement and support each other. in this short paper we have outlined an example of how this can be achieved. future studies on assessment design and transformation may incorporate this case study and perhaps merge with other similar cases in the same context to improve the design of authentic assessments to foster and encourage increased student engagement. references ajjawi, r., tai, j., huu nghia, t. l., boud, d., johnson, l., and patrick, c. j. (2020) ‘aligning assessment with the needs of work-integrated learning: the challenges of authentic assessment in a complex context’, assessment & evaluation in higher education, 45(2), pp.304-316. https://doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2019.1639613. bryant, p. j. (2019) being a part of our place: designing a transformative and connected learning experience at the university of sydney business school. available at: https://educationalinnovation.sydney.edu.au/teaching@sydney/being-a-part-of-ourplace-designinga-transformative-and-connected-learning-experience-at-theuniversity-of-sydneybusiness-school/ (accessed: 29 may 2021). cerimagic, s. and khanna, p. (2020) ‘transforming assessment – critical reflections around resolving tensions between assessment for learning and of learning’, australasian society for computers in learning in tertiary education (scilite), 2020 conference. university of new england, armidale, nsw, australia 30 november-1 december. https://doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2019.1639613 https://educational-innovation.sydney.edu.au/teaching%40sydney/being-a-part-of-our-place-designing-a-transformative-and-connected-learning-experience-at-the-university-of-sydney-business-school/ https://educational-innovation.sydney.edu.au/teaching%40sydney/being-a-part-of-our-place-designing-a-transformative-and-connected-learning-experience-at-the-university-of-sydney-business-school/ https://educational-innovation.sydney.edu.au/teaching%40sydney/being-a-part-of-our-place-designing-a-transformative-and-connected-learning-experience-at-the-university-of-sydney-business-school/ https://educational-innovation.sydney.edu.au/teaching%40sydney/being-a-part-of-our-place-designing-a-transformative-and-connected-learning-experience-at-the-university-of-sydney-business-school/ https://educational-innovation.sydney.edu.au/teaching%40sydney/being-a-part-of-our-place-designing-a-transformative-and-connected-learning-experience-at-the-university-of-sydney-business-school/ https://educational-innovation.sydney.edu.au/teaching%40sydney/being-a-part-of-our-place-designing-a-transformative-and-connected-learning-experience-at-the-university-of-sydney-business-school/ cerimagic and hasan a holistic approach to authentic and engaging assessment during the covid-19 pandemic: an australian case study journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 7 clark, r. e., (2001) ‘a summary of disagreements with the “mere vehicles” argument’, in clark, r. e. (ed.) learning from media: arguments, analysis, and evidence. greenwich, ct: information age publishing, pp.125-136. cook, k. c. (2020) ‘an argument for pedagogy-driven online education’, in cook k. c. and grant-davie, k. (eds.) online education: global questions, local answers. new york: routledge, pp.49-66. mantai, l. and huber, e. (2021) ‘networked teaching: overcoming the barriers to teaching experiential learning in large classes’, journal of management education, pp.1-24. https://doi.org/10.1177/1052562920984506 peterson, k. ‘colleges speeding up digital transformation’, 14 october 2020, salesforce.org. available at: https://www.salesforce.org/blog/hed-speedingupdigital-transformation/ (27 may 2021). author details sabina cerimagic is a senior lecturer and deputy academic director of the business codesign (bcd) team at the faculty of business at the university of sydney. sabina’s main research areas are in educational pedagogy, project management, change management, leadership and motivation, cross-cultural project management and training, curriculum redesign, curriculum renewal through design thinking, systems thinking, design-based research, and higher education pedagogy in and technology integration. m. rabiul hasan is associate lecturer at the school of computer science, at the university of sydney. rabiul’s research interests lie in it, computer sciences, project management, and educational pedagogy. https://doi.org/10.1177/1052562920984506 https://www.salesforce.org/blog/hed-speeding-up-digital-transformation/ https://www.salesforce.org/blog/hed-speeding-up-digital-transformation/ https://www.salesforce.org/blog/hed-speeding-up-digital-transformation/ correction notice sabina cerimagic m. rabiul hasan the challenge the response figure 1. bcd design and development coordination. recommendations references author details article journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 15: november 2019 ________________________________________________________________________ academic literacies twenty years on: a community-sourced literature review john hilsdon university of plymouth, uk cathy malone sheffield hallam university, uk alicja syska university of plymouth, uk abstract in 1998, the paper ‘student writing in higher education: an academic literacies approach’ by mary lea and brian street reinvigorated debate concerning ‘what it means to be academically literate’ (1998, p.158). it proposed a new way of examining how students learn at university and introduced the term ‘academic literacies’. subsequently, a body of literature has emerged reflecting the significant theoretical and practical impact lea and street’s paper has had on a range of academic and professional fields. this literature review covers articles selected by colleagues in our professional communities of the association for learning development in higher education (aldinhe), baleap the global forum for english for academic purposes (eap) professionals, and the european association of teachers of academic writing (eataw). as a community-sourced literature review, this text brings together reviews of wide range of texts and a diverse range of voices reflecting a multiplicity of perspectives and understandings of academic literacies. we have organised the material according to the themes: modality, identity, focus on text, implications for research, and implications for practice. we conclude with observations relevant to these themes, which we hope will stimulate further debate, research and professional collaborations between our members and subscribers. keywords: academic literacies; modality; identity; academic writing; knowledge making. hilsdon, malone and syska academic literacies twenty years on: a community-sourced literature review journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 2 introduction mary lea and brian street published their paper ‘student writing in higher education: an academic literacies approach’ in 1998. this special edition of the journal of learning development in higher education (jldhe) takes stock of developments some twenty years on. we have collated this community-sourced review of some of the literature associated with the field that has become known as ‘academic literacies’ using contributions from 17 colleagues (listed below and marked in the text in bold font) from three professional bodies: the association for learning development in higher education (aldinhe), baleap the global forum for eap professionals, and the european association of teachers of academic writing (eataw). contributors were invited to submit critical reviews of texts listed in our call for papers, or to review alternative, related texts, which they believed would be of interest. the results, synthesised here, represent responses from our three practitioner communities to an acknowledged seminal paper and to the debates and further literature it generated and continues to generate. while a systematic literature review aims for a comprehensive analysis of the literature on a topic in order to identify key findings and research gaps, the purpose of this review is slightly different. as one of the roles of he is to further the conversation a society has with itself (bernstein, 2000, p.xx), so our objective here is to further the conversations within and between our learning communities that have arisen from lea and street's paper and the responses to it in terms of research and pedagogy. a collaborative writing process the community sourcing of material for this paper was an attempt to reflect the views and highlight concerns of our three (related yet distinct) professional bodies and areas of academic practice. in selecting contributions, identifying key themes and synthesising content, we were mindful of the need to balance our responsibilities to our co-contributors with our aim to produce a coherent text. we conducted numerous online conversations and shared many drafts as we juggled these obligations and shaped this paper – a process that was very much assisted by the affordances of digital writing technologies. our exploration of fragmentation and reconstruction in producing a multi-voiced text through a layered collaborative writing process reflects a (still relatively new) form of academic authorship where precise attribution is difficult. this process of attempting to write within hilsdon, malone and syska academic literacies twenty years on: a community-sourced literature review journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 3 boundaries which we simultaneously seek to disrupt (lillis and tuck, 2016, p.39) was paradoxically both liberating and constraining. we are conscious that with the commodification of student academic writing (mckenna and hughes, 2013, p.21) and the discourses of ownership and legalistic attribution, the exploratory space we were afforded, in which we could share and develop ideas, is rarely on offer to our students. this is turn aptly demonstrates how academic writing conventions reflexively constrain or expand the opportunities for meaning making, an issue at the heart of academic literacies research. to place this review in historical context, lea and street’s 1998 paper emerged at a time of ‘massification’ in uk he. expansion in the recruitment of students from ‘non-traditional’ backgrounds and from overseas during the last decades of the twentieth and the first decade of the twenty first century was accompanied by the creation of new academic roles designed to provide ‘study skills’ and support for those for whom english was not their first language. despite the policy to invite such non-traditional students into he, they were often described pejoratively, typically suggesting that their writing abilities would limit their academic progression or that academic standards would fall as a result of their presence (scott, 1995; haggis, 2006; smith, 2007; lea, 2015). a number of professional bodies emerged in response to this massification: baleap formed in 1989 building upon a range of precursory collaborations that had begun in the 1970s; eataw was formed in 1999; the learning development in higher education network (ldhen) in 2003; and the association for learning development in higher education was established in 2008 (hilsdon, 2011). while many of those recruited to study skills and student support posts quickly became critical of the limitations of their roles and the unrealistic expectations placed upon them, a widespread response to massification focused on the 'problem' of student writing. mastery of academic discourse was seen as central to student success, but at the same time debate was constrained by prevailing simplistic conceptions of literacy. against this backdrop of upheaval and role changes for students, staff and institutions, lea and street's theoretically informed and research-driven approach to understanding how students learn to write at university made a significant impact. discussions within these professional groups sparked interest in the academic literacies perspective as an alternative to the prevailing ‘deficit’ conceptualisation of nontraditional students (mann, 2001; haggis, 2006). it is worth briefly summarising here some of the key themes in lea and street’s 1998 text. hilsdon, malone and syska academic literacies twenty years on: a community-sourced literature review journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 4 learning to write in he: context, practices, power and identity acknowledging the difficulties of the endeavour of learning to write at university, lea and street set out ‘to develop a more complex account of what it means to become academically literate’ (1998, p.158). they map contestations between different stakeholders: [i]t is important to realise that meanings are contested among different parties involved: institutions, staff and students. viewing literacy from a cultural and social practices approach (rather than in terms of educational judgements about good and bad writing) and approaching meanings as contested can give us insights into the nature of academic literacy in particular and academic learning in general (1998, p.158). their ethnographic, practices-based approach focuses on the student experience of learning to write and, in doing so, validates and values learners’ understandings from their perspectives and contexts. this helps to show ‘the importance of issues of identity and the institutional relationships of power and authority that surround, and are embedded within, diverse student writing practices across the university’ (1998, p.157). the dissonances and tensions between different stakeholders and institutional perspectives of what it means to become academically literate can then become rich material for discussion and for developing academic literacy. however, lea and street’s focus on ‘[a]cademic literacy practices – reading and writing within disciplines . . . [as the] central processes through which students learn new subjects and develop their knowledge about new areas of study’ (1998, p.157) has itself been seen as overly restricted to written text rather than visual, conversational, and other modes of communication (see goodfellow, 2005; archer, 2006). lea and street’s stress on the way literacy practices enact power relations, and impact on identity issues for students and others, acknowledges universities as sites of ‘discourse and power’ that privilege specific relations and ways of knowing (1998, p.159). this critical, socio-political framing of academic writing research and pedagogy has since evoked a significant response from researchers, theoreticians and practitioners working in universities, as evidenced by the quantity and breadth of the literature referred to below. hilsdon, malone and syska academic literacies twenty years on: a community-sourced literature review journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 5 lea and street’s academic literacies approach critiques what they term ‘study skills’ and ‘socialisation’ models of writing instruction in he: [t]he models are not mutually exclusive and we would not want to view them in a simple linear time dimension whereby one model supersedes or replaces the insights provided by the other. . . . the academic literacies model . . . incorporates both of the other models into a more encompassing understanding of the nature of student writing within institutional practices, power relations and identities. . . . we take a hierarchical view of the relationship between the three models, privileging the ‘academic literacies’ approach (1998, p.158). some advocates of linguistically informed approaches to writing development (coffin and donoghue, 2012; tribble and wingate, 2013), have taken issue with this view. in the twenty-one years since its publication the paper itself opened up a rich vein of research and response. one reason for this is that it reframed the way academic writing is discussed and opened up new ways of analysing how students find their disciplinary voices. the landscape in which students study and write essays has evolved in multiple ways, influencing the ‘possibilities of selfhood’ (ivanič, 1998) for student writers. researchers have documented the accompanying changes in attitudes and values amongst teaching staff, which have not always been positive, and reported on the pressure on teaching staff (fuller et al., 2004; wingate, 2006; riddell et al., 2007; gourlay, 2009; ashworth et al., 2010; cameron and billington, 2015; office of fair access, 2017). these pressures in turn have contributed to observed changes in student identity (eurydice, 2014). reflecting how the wide range of responses to lea and street’s 1998 paper have resonated with our professional communities, we have grouped contributions to this synthesis of reviews into the following themes: 1. modality: discussions relating to modes of study in he; for example, the development of e-learning. 2. identity: processes and practices in identity formation. 3. focus on text: discussions of analytical approaches such as genre and systemic functional linguistics and their relationship to writing development. hilsdon, malone and syska academic literacies twenty years on: a community-sourced literature review journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 6 4. implications for research: theoretical framing and investigation of issues associated with the development of academic writing. 5. implications for practice: in pedagogy and in supporting learning. modality several of the texts reviewed by our participants develop ideas about modes of study, expression and the construction of meaning, such as in speech, performance and ‘elearning’. some see a contradiction in the early work on academic literacies in that, despite the critical and transformational purposes espoused, a primary focus on traditional forms of written expression is implied and may work to reinforce the privileging of this mode of academic practice. lillis and scott (2007), for example, call for a critical approach to epistemology as a fundamental underpinning of academic literacies work, feeding into pedagogy – teaching, learning and assessment practices – and strategies for course design. in her review of arlene archer’s 2006 paper, ‘a multimodal approach to academic “literacies”: problematising the visual/verbal divide’, christina howell-richardson points to disciplinary meaning-making as constructed in multi-modal texts and how these ‘different semiotic dimensions of representation’ (2006, p.450) both sit alongside and differ from traditional academic writing. drawing on kress and van leuwen’s (2001) theory of multi-modal discourse, archer’s purpose is to enquire into ways in which first year engineering students from non-traditional backgrounds use visual and verbal modalities to express meanings. the data for archer’s study include written text and posters. howellrichardson reviewed this text because it highlights the ways in which students responded to the different affordances of visual images and writing for various communicative purposes. as she states: [archer’s] work is primarily focused on the experiences of home-based eal students entering a south african university at a time of a newly introduced widening participation policy, which resonates with my own questions related to the challenges of teaching highly diverse groups. . . . [t]he paper has value in unambiguously setting out the original thinking . . . [and] the potential of hilsdon, malone and syska academic literacies twenty years on: a community-sourced literature review journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 7 multimodality to circumvent the cultural and linguistic hegemony identified by lea and street’s seminal (1998) paper. howell-richardson feels that archer’s discussion of different functional conceptions of literacy is especially interesting. citing archer’s careful teasing out of attributes of literacy and the need for recognition of differences in usage and potential across modalities, she argues: [a]lthough this publication dates from a time before digital technologies became universal, archer raises questions about use of multi-modality in pedagogy and assessment that are relevant to current debates on inclusive learning environments and the reframing of the curriculum to represent a wider range of cultures and cultural histories. the enduring impact of this paper is not to ‘posit multimodality as an alternative way of inducting students into academic writing practices’ (2006, p.449); instead, archer problematises our over-reliance in higher education on students’ writing to demonstrate their discursive competences. she also seeks to highlight the work of theorists such as gunther kress – on how values are embedded in discourses, and norman fairclough – on the role of discourse in social change. these ideas, used alongside the examples of student work she draws upon, help her to illustrate that ‘language, power and modalities are inextricably intertwined’ (2006, p.459). thus, she argues for a pedagogy that both accounts for diversity and promotes unity by making multimodality part of a theory of communication. as she concludes, ‘a multimodal approach to teaching academic literacy practices could enable a curriculum design which draws on the full range of students’ semiotic resources and may also help to create less structured curriculum spaces’ (2006, p.460). the rise of online learning environments and proliferation of new modes for constructing and expressing knowledge, including via online communications and social media, prompted louise stringer to review a paper by robin goodfellow, ‘academic literacies and e-learning: a critical approach to writing in the online university’. although now 13 years old, this text remains important since, increasingly, students in he need to navigate hilsdon, malone and syska academic literacies twenty years on: a community-sourced literature review journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 8 unfamiliar communication situations with tutors and peers whom they have not physically met. adopting an academic literacies perspective, goodfellow evaluates master’s students’ experiences of engagement with an online writing resource to support distance learners’ ‘critical awareness of the writing practices on the programme’ (2005, p.481). he highlights problems for non-traditional and distance/online students related to the centrality of writing and embedded issues of power associated with control of dominant discourses, which disadvantage some students. focusing on the (non-traditional) student experience of learning to write at university demonstrates the differences between socialisation approaches to writing, which prioritise immersion in the literacy practices of the discipline, and what he terms ‘more humanistic concerns with self-discovery, voice, and class, ethnic and personal identities’ (2005, p.482). he points out that ‘disciplinary requirements for writing are by no means transparent, and the ways in which subject-specialist teachers attempt to articulate them may be mystifying to novice writers’ (2005, p.482). furthermore, the increasingly modular and inter-disciplinary character of university study activities means students must act in overlapping domains of communication – and this is amplified by the uses of online he environments. despite general calls for students to become critical thinkers, policy and management’s drive to ‘[position] communication as a generic skill obscures the context-dependent dimension of language . . . and works against engaging learners in a critique of literacy practices in university classrooms’ (2005, p.482). developing a critique of both socialisation and skills-based models of developing writing, goodfellow reminds us of ideological as well as pedagogic dimensions ‘concerned with the way that writing is used to construct relations of power and authority’ (2005, p.482) that are likely to disadvantage certain students disproportionately. he argues that ‘we need to support students in developing critical awareness of writing practices . . . in online . . . as in other arenas of academic meaning-making’ (2005, p.482); we need ‘a pedagogy for academic literacies [that] draws attention to the plurality of communication practices implicated in what is generally termed “academic writing”, foregrounding the need to engage students in a critique of the writing practices they encounter’ (2005, p.482). it is not sufficient to demystify existing practices; rather, goodfellow shares street’s view that students need to be supported in contesting conventions, ‘producing a genuinely empowered subject, i.e. neither the "cynic nor the ‘good’ student who ‘does like we do’”’ (goodfellow, 2005, p.483). this means encouraging students to ‘reflect critically on their hilsdon, malone and syska academic literacies twenty years on: a community-sourced literature review journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 9 own and others’ learning and its relation to the norms and goals that are embedded in the discourses of the . . . classroom’ (p.483). goodfellow concludes by calling for greater attention to the construction and use of text in online environments as a helpful way to shed light on the role of writing as discourse in teaching and learning more generally, and a way to promote an academic literacies informed pedagogy. the ‘discourse-analytic’ (2005, p.486) framework employed in his analysis of student texts still provides a good example of how others could frame studies where students are encouraged to develop critical awareness of how language is used in the academy. theresa lillis and jackie tuck’s book chapter ‘academic literacies: a critical lens on writing and reading in the academy’ (2016) also raises key questions about modality. it was chosen by jessica garska, an eap practitioner, because it provides a powerful, historical outline of the field and suggests ways to encourage dialogue between researchers in academic literacies and critical eap. traditional academic discourse and practices are shown to be contested, saturated with identity, power and culture. key differences between the fields of academic literacies and eap are emphasised, contrasting a focus on producer versus on text; ‘english’ as contested in nature and status versus a standard english as the target and focus; encouragement of diversity of knowledge and experience versus a voice-expert dichotomy; and a transformative versus a normative focus. lillis and tuck also identify convergences between academic literacies and critical eap, allowing for rethinking the categories and concepts of producers, trajectories, linguistic and non-linguistic semiotic resources, writing as a social activity, transformative pedagogy, and creative risk-taking in the academy. garska explains that this text played a role in her questioning of theoretical perspectives and pedagogical approaches: the [chapter] by lillis and tuck (2016) was the first that i have read, which clearly and distinctly articulated the two fields as separate, yet also identified similarities and areas for engagement. . . . lillis and tuck (2016) explicitly state what the field of academic literacies is, where it comes from, and how it is both distinct from and hilsdon, malone and syska academic literacies twenty years on: a community-sourced literature review journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 10 similar to eap.. . . it can also provide a starting point for engagement with similar theories in different fields [such as] translanguaging and critical eap. lillis and tuck set out the case for academics from all traditions to engage with research emerging from both critical eap and academic literacies questioning existing practices in teaching, assessment and research. critical, questioning approaches and a transformational agenda, they argue, should not be seen as a distraction from core business but as ultimately practical. they note that criticism of academic literacies has sometimes implied it does not help to ‘raise students’ awareness of valued academic genres and to support them to present “polished” work’ (2016, p.36). the authors rebut this argument with examples such as how academic literacies approaches to marking and assessment practices are complimentary to work aimed at enhancing non-traditional student achievements. reversing questions on the ‘problem’ of student writing, so that they are redirected onto how academic and institutional practices bear on student meaning-making in various modes, helps identify where sustainable improvements can be made. they conclude that ‘criticality is key to any pragmatism centred on . . . desires for meaning-making as well as on academic success’ and in the service of ‘developing richer understandings of knowledge making in the contemporary world’ (2016, p.37). the three publications referred to in this section share a concern to direct attention away from a definition of literacy as confined to the construction, by students, of written texts that conform to traditional academic conventions. rather, they emphasise the need to redefine literacies in multi-modal terms where knowledge is constructed, expressed, contested, and assessed by all members of the academic community. in this way, they demonstrate the enduring power of the academic literacies perspective, as crystallised in lea and street’s 1998 paper, to provide a generative framework for discussions about practice in pedagogy, research and policymaking. identity conflicts and tensions in the academic writing environment discussed by lea and street (1998) influence the ways in which student writers develop their writer identities. in this section, we bring together four papers that in their own distinctive ways respond to the challenges facing students in the academic writing context and encourage reflection on our hilsdon, malone and syska academic literacies twenty years on: a community-sourced literature review journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 11 current strategies of meeting their increasingly diverse needs. the four articles include: ‘writing and being written: issues of identity across timescales’ (burgess and ivanič, 2010) reviewed by aileen hanrahan; ‘pedagogies for diversity: retaining critical challenge amidst fears of “dumbing down”’ (haggis, 2006) reviewed by john hilsdon; ‘“fail better”: reconsidering the role of struggle and failure in academic writing development in higher education’ (french, 2016) reviewed by cathy malone, and ‘threshold practices: becoming a student through academic literacies’ (gourlay, 2009) reviewed by peter levrai. in the same year as lea and street’s exposition on academic literacies, roz ivanič (1998) pointedly argued that writing is an act of identity and this academic writing identity has four aspects: socially available possibilities of selfhood, the autobiographical self of the writer, the discoursal self, and the authorial self. her theories of identity were further developed by burgess and ivanič (2010), where the authors added one more dimension of writer identity (the ‘perceived writer’) and emphasised that identity changes over time, is multifaceted, and may be unconscious or conscious in its development. student writers may participate in multiple, and sometimes contradictory, discourses that shape their sense of self, depending on the social spaces they inhabit, which then has an impact on the multidimensional selfhood they bring into these spaces. these change according to different timescales (wortham, 2003) – from sociocultural timescales counted in decades or even centuries (e.g. gender or class identity) through ontogenetic and mesolevel timescales that encompass one’s lifespan (e.g. life choices or phases) to microgenetic timescales that concern the lived experience of the moment (e.g. the act of writing itself). all these identities that persist on different timescales are interrelated and deeply agentive – not only are they equally capable of shaping an act of writing, but are also profoundly affected by the writing process itself. importantly, the construction of writer identity is highly sensitive to the changing times and discourses (burgess and ivanič, 2010). since lea and street’s article over two decades ago, the nature of the conflicts and tensions in he has changed considerably, and with these shifts so too have changed students’ identity building mechanisms. the altered conditions in uk he have been particularly effectively pointed out by tamsin haggis in her much-quoted article ‘pedagogies for diversity: retaining critical challenge amidst fears of “dumbing down”’ (2006). haggis drew attention to the effects of post-1992 neoliberal reforms including massification, marketisation, and a focus on producing skilled graduates for the labour hilsdon, malone and syska academic literacies twenty years on: a community-sourced literature review journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 12 market. these reforms produced new initiatives, such as widening participation, which, as john hilsdon notes in his review, caused concerns expressed in the media about 'falling standards' in he, alongside internal concerns of some academics, which haggis terms 'defensive cynicism', about students who are ‘seen to be incapable of coping with the critical challenges of conventional higher education’ (2006, p.523). as she explains, ‘[t]his response appears to equate widening participation with an inevitable abandonment of certain key elements of higher education assumptions and values in relation to learning’ (p.523). rather than seeing this situation in terms of 'falling standards', however, haggis suggested instead that it was a challenge to he ‘to transform potentially alienating types of exposure to propositional knowledge (mann, 2001) into richer kinds of engagement, in order that a much wider range of students might gain access to conventional and established forms of knowledge and power’ (haggis, 2006, p.522; emphasis added). she also questioned the assumption that what is needed is more attention either to learning approaches or styles, or to the provision of more generic study skills support to ‘at risk’ students. in any case, she suggests, given the very high increase in numbers of students in he characterised as ‘“mature”, “disadvantaged”, “non-traditional”, “overseas”’, and ‘[p]erceived as being “weaker” in terms of educational experience and/or ability’ (p.522), it would be practically impossible to provide such support. instead, she argues, those supporting learning should offer ‘embedded, subject-specific exploration of different types of disciplinary process’ (p.533) and that academics should articulate more clearly what they believe, wish to share through their teaching, and what they expect students to do. in this respect, amanda french (2016) responds to lea and street’s (1998) academic literacies approach by calling on educators to resist ‘the obsession with standards and performativity’ and instead help students ‘to understand that developing into confident academic writers is not a straightforward, linear or automatic process; rather it inevitably involves struggle, conflict and feelings of uncertainty, inauthenticity, marginalisation, exclusion and occasionally, failure’ (french, 2016, p.409). these struggles and conflicts have a significant impact on student writer identity. citing biggs and tang (2011), french offers a ‘metacognitive approach to he writing development which encourages students to consider not only what . . . but how and why they need to write in particular ways in higher education’ (2016, p.409; emphasis in original). she provides a critique of three common approaches to writing development in uk he (writing centres, bolt-on study skills modules, and writing across curriculum and writing in disciplines approaches) and then describes working with subject specialists embedding teaching of academic writing at a hilsdon, malone and syska academic literacies twenty years on: a community-sourced literature review journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 13 disciplinary level. as cathy malone points out in her review, french acknowledges that the process of learning to write for some is ‘complex, painful and erratic’ (p.409), and this is used to counterpoint the simplicity of institutional models of writing where student development is presented as linear and automatic. french draws on street's work to critique university discourse on academic writing that presents writing as ‘a decontextualised set of skills’, which, once learnt, ‘can be applied . . . universally, without reference to any ideological or cultural values’ (french 2016, p.409-410). french reviews these models of learning and the conceptions of writing in a way that rejects identity implications of personal failure and refocuses attention on ‘the institutional failure to meet the increasingly diverse writing development needs that many students . . . might present’ (2016, p.410). this attention shift from personal to the institution aligns with the ambition of the original academic literacies work and has been reaffirmed more recently by lea, who suggests the ‘need to reclaim the institutional perspective that was inherent in some of the early work in the field of academic literacies’ (lea 2016, p.88). it is also an argument that is still current across the sector. french sums up major trends in how writing is supported at university while foregrounding the student experience and acknowledging the difficulty and distress of transition. according to malone, this methodological focus offers an antidote to the rampant performativity of uk he and the mechanistic nature of ‘you said – we did’ service evaluation. it models careful reflection on actual student experience, recasting failure as opportunity in a way that opens up ‘an alternative discourse of “generative failure”’ (harris, 2014; cited french, 2016, p.414). indeed, in the previously mentioned article, haggis already suggested that ‘it is impossible to succeed in meeting the needs of the range of students now coming into higher education, both in terms of the extent of this diversity and in terms of available resources’ (2006, p.522). instead, she calls for ‘a change of perspective’ from the deficit approach to students and refocuses our attention on the principle of treating students as ends in themselves (mann, 2001). as john hilsdon put it in his review of haggis’s paper, the interpretation of academic literacies it points to is one that does not simply call for students to (be helped to) learn the language and discourse practices of their subject (important though that is), but to be treated respectfully as participants in the academic community, even as they enter it – somewhat as in the idea of legitimate participation promoted by lave and wenger (1991) – on an inward trajectory, so that students might feel encouraged and supported not just to acquire relevant practices of hilsdon, malone and syska academic literacies twenty years on: a community-sourced literature review journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 14 the academy but to comment upon them, critique, and even improve them. reading haggis's paper is a helpful way into thinking about sarah mann's (2001) idea that developing learning in a modern, accessible he environment requires not transactional and transmission pedagogies but an orientation where students are treated as ends in themselves – with all their rich linguistic and cultural variety being acknowledged in the curriculum and by academic practices. in other words, rather than being objectified as 'learners' to be acted upon, students are to be actively involved in all aspects of he. this idea of the development of communities of practice (wenger, 1998) is particularly important when considering how students transition into university, which can be not only an emotionally challenging process that changes novice newcomers into more confident members of the university, but also one that can have a dramatic impact on student identity, something examined by lesley gourlay in ‘threshold practices: becoming a student through academic literacies’ (2009). as peter levrai notes in his review of the article, what particularly stands out in this paper is the critique of the communities of practice when it comes to higher education, particularly in terms of the limited interactions between tutor and student, which problematise the idea of ‘mutual engagement’ where the novice can learn working alongside the expert. levrai concludes that this is an area where eap can play an important role, helping the student through the academic writing process and offering that mutual engagement through formative feedback. it is also an area where collaborative writing assignments can help students navigate new ways of writing, providing a social as well as academic support network, so they can pass through threshold practices together. while questioning the applicability of the concept of communities of practice to higher education contexts, gourlay favours the concept of ‘liminality’, which recognises that students need to engage in threshold practices during their transition and that during this process they may experience emotional destabilisation, uncertainty and ambiguity. her study shows how writing can be an important aspect of students transitioning into believing they belong at university, which links back to the idea of selfhood as theorised by burgess and ivanič (2010). writing can be a challenging process, where students may be unsure of what is expected of them, but can also provide a turning point into belonging when receiving positive feedback or a successful grade. gourlay argues that ‘a recognition of academic literacies as threshold practices could open up discussion of tacit practices’ with hilsdon, malone and syska academic literacies twenty years on: a community-sourced literature review journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 15 regard to ‘how knowledge is textually constructed’ (2009, p.189; emphasis in original). the approach could also help students to accept that uncertainty, struggles and even failures are ‘a normal part of the academic process, as opposed to indicating a deficit’ (p.189), thus limiting the potentially detrimental impact of failure on student writer identity. academic writing has always been a key skill for entry into ‘the academy’; now, however, in a digital era, the question over academic writing and its relationship to professional writing contexts has further highlighted lea and street’s (1998) observation that there was no consensus as to what academic writing was then, or what it is now. recently that argument has changed into an argument about what constitutes ‘academic excellence’ and who should hold authority to maintain such a concept (riddell et al., 2007; shaw, 2009). as aileen hanrahan points out in her review of burgess and ivanič (2010), with the essay serving as one of the main points of contact with academic staff, in terms of working on drafting, marking and giving feedback on the writing, the essay becomes the cornerstone of where student identity-building through contestation becomes manifest. contestation may take the form of engagement with feedback and marking results; with issues about accessing teaching support regarding a particular assignment; or how the reader, in this case an academic, perceives what the writer is trying to achieve in the essay and how that should be judged (e.g. as worthy of academic excellence; see riddell et al., 2007; kinder and elander, 2012). in this way, hanrahan compellingly reasons, the essay might be conceptualised as a ‘site of conflict’, which influences the interactions between the student writer and their intention of becoming a member (or not) of the academy – belonging to the traditionally established community of practice. as she continues, this form of analysis presents a particularly insightful perspective on dyslexia, as a particular community of practice (gourlay, 2009), and other forms of disability/learning disability. for example, burgess and ivanič’s (2010) model of identity and changes in identity over time might be applied in future research to increase understanding of changes in the conflicts and tensions in how dyslexia and other disabilities/learning disabilities are conceptualised, and how these changes influence identity-building for specific communities. application of reasonable adjustments are known to be haphazard (dsac, 2015), which translates into essay writing and marking being a site of conflict for many learning-disabled hilsdon, malone and syska academic literacies twenty years on: a community-sourced literature review journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 16 students. in many of the research studies cited above they are shown to be contested, which needs further analysis in case studies. hanrahan demonstrates that conceptualisations of dyslexia, learning disability, disability and reasonable adjustments amongst various stakeholders, and their relationship to identity-building as expressed in essay writing, would benefit from using the burgess and ivanič (2010) model. currently, there is a lack of research on dyslexia in higher education from an academic literacies perspective (mortimore and crozier, 2006; morken and helland, 2013; pino and mortari, 2014; cameron and billington, 2015), and more specifically, on dyslexia and identitybuilding mechanisms in academic writing across various sites of conflict. the authors of the four texts reviewed in this section agree that when it comes to responding to the challenges to student identity as writers, educators should strive for some form of, in haggis’s words, ‘richer kinds of engagement’ (2006, p.522). this is contrasted, in john hilsdon’s review, with the still all too common and often alienating student experiences of sitting in lecture theatres not really knowing how doing so will help in producing a piece of work – an essay usually – to demonstrate learning, nor how such activities relate to the ‘real world’ and what they need to learn about it in order to participate and be empowered in it. we should thus promote activities that involve students in meaningful conversations with academics and each other about how teaching and learning are achieved in the university, both traditionally and now, under new ‘mass’ conditions and with new technologies. the focus of educators must be on the student experience of learning to write at university while acknowledging the multifaceted, painful, and often messy ways in which this experience influences, and is influenced by, student identity. focus on text three papers reviewed in this section consider academic literacies in relation to more linguistically informed approaches to writing development. britt amell reviews the 2009 article by russell, lea, parker, street and donahue, which uses genre to compare academic literacies and writing across the curriculum, unpacking academic literacies through detailed rationale and historical contextualisation. alicja syska reviews wingate and tribble's (2012) article comparing english for academic purposes and academic literacies writing pedagogies, with the aim of synthesising the best of both. finally, ian hilsdon, malone and syska academic literacies twenty years on: a community-sourced literature review journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 17 johnson reviews coffin and donohue's (2012) paper comparing academic literacies and systemic functional linguistics. the latter two papers form a critical response to the original article and represent a keener concern with classroom practice. the article ‘exploring notions of genre in “academic literacies” and “writing across the curriculum”: approaches across countries and contexts’ (2009) emerged from an international symposium on genre, which included mary lea and brian street. as britt amell notes, using genre as a focus the article compares two approaches to teaching writing in higher education that emerged in the us and the uk: writing across the curriculum (wac) and academic literacies respectively. they contrast historical origins, institutional positions, theory and research about genre and pedagogy using genre to identify commonalities, intersection and difference. while each approach emerged from specific educational contexts, there are significant similarities: both ‘took their impetus from widening participation’ (2009, p.396) and ‘both are oppositional, attempting to reform higher education and make it more open . . . [using] writing/literacy to resist deeply entrenched attitudes about writing and about students and disciplines’ (2009, p.396). the historical origins of academic literacies are mapped out in a detailed research narrative that clarifies some of its distinctive features. street's ideological model of literacy, first explored in 1984, is identified as key. this understanding of literacy highlights the contextual and social nature of literacy practices, and the relationships of power and authority which are implicit in any literacy event. literacy, then, is not something that once acquired can be effortlessly applied to any context requiring mastery of the written word (russel et al., 2009, p.399). similarly, a connection is made with the ethnographic approach to research evident in lea's work, specifically her focus on the micro-level of practice applied to observing students learning to write through acculturation to norms and conventions. both lea and street are concerned with exploring how issues of power and identity are played out through academic writing at university. amell notes the value of genre as a lens through which to explore academic literacies and clarify it as a theoretical frame, evident in the following explanation offered by russell et al.: hilsdon, malone and syska academic literacies twenty years on: a community-sourced literature review journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 18 issues of genre are central to the three models of student writing outlined [in the paper] (skills, socialisation, and academic literacies). each of these models is implicitly associated with a different orientation to the notion of genre. in terms of study skills, genre would be conceptualised as primarily in relation to surface features and form; academic socialisation would be associated with the conceptualisation of genre in terms of established disciplinary norms for communication, given primarily by the texts written by academics within the disciplinary community. the empirically grounded academic literacies perspective is aligned with a view of genre as social practice, rather than genre knowledge in terms of disciplinary communication per se (2009, p.405). an academic literacies approach highlights the extent of genre variation students are faced with and the ‘genre switching’ (scalone and street, 2006) that they need to demonstrate. the ethnographic research roots of academic literacies are evident in an analysis that focuses on ‘the different interpretations and understandings of genres of the participants of any particular writing encounter at university’ (2009, p.406). similarly, this focus on unpacking ‘micro-social practices, such as “gaps” between student and teacher perceptions of particular writing activities’ (2009, p.414) aligns with this research orientation and a social-practices model of genre, which presents meaning as emerging from the ‘relationship between the creation of texts and their associated practices in any particular context . . . [which] vary across disciplines, subjects, fields of study and text types’ (p.406). this results in quite a different approach to supporting student writing, which goes beyond general disciplinary concerns or subject focus. applying the principles of academic literacies to genre involves looking at the ‘level of epistemology, authority and contestation over knowledge, rather than at the level of technical skill, surface linguistic competence and cultural assimilation’ (2009, p.400). in practical terms, such an approach implies a more ambitious role for tutors than to simply make disciplinary expectations explicit to students. as well as clarifying the theoretical positioning of academic literacies, the authors also acknowledge a major criticism that, although practitioner-led, academic literacies tended at this time to be more focused on theory and research than practical applications. this increasing concern with practice became evident in 2012, when two papers were hilsdon, malone and syska academic literacies twenty years on: a community-sourced literature review journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 19 published critically comparing academic literacies to english for academic purposes (eap) and systemic functional linguistics (sfl). in 'the best of both worlds? towards an english for academic purposes/academic literacies writing pedagogy’, ursula wingate and christopher tribble (2012) critically reviewed two approaches to academic writing instruction that dominate uk he: english for academic purposes (eap) and academic literacies. as alicja syska notes, the paper identifies some of the controversies, similarities and points of convergence between these two approaches to formulate pedagogical guidelines that ‘get the best of both worlds’. the authors achieve this by tracing the pedagogical impact of both academic literacies and eap and engaging with the criticisms of eap approaches in the academic literacies model. notably, the article extracts the most valuable elements of eap and academic literacies, pointing out that the ‘insufficiently nuanced’ (p.487) criticisms of both approaches overlook their critical contributions. according to syska’s review, this argument allows the authors to demonstrate that concepts such as ‘academic socialisation’, ‘communities of practice’, and ‘textual bias’ are more complex than acknowledged and involve interlocking social and contextual issues that both eap and academic literacies address in their own way. the paper thus takes on an ambitious task of developing a ‘“mainstream” approach to teaching writing that takes into account the complexities of academic writing and the diverse backgrounds of students at uk universities’ (p.482). what is inspiring to syska is the authors’ conviction that ‘rather than being two separate factions, genre/eap and academic literacies share much common ground’ and ‘can be brought together as complementary components in an inclusive writing pedagogy for students of all backgrounds’ (p.491). the article notes the disconnect between the two factions and challenges the simple either/or categorisation of eap versus academic literacies, instead proposing a writing pedagogy that is embedded, discipline-specific, and inclusive, one that effectively integrates writing instruction with subject knowledge. as the authors write in their conclusions, ‘[t]he development of academic writing could then become a truly collaborative exploration of the discipline’s social practices by teachers and students’ (p.492). the article offers a methodology that constructively combines the principles of eap and academic literacies, creating potential to achieve writing support for all. another paper, published the same year, which explicitly sought to identify common ground and build consensus across disciplinary boundaries, is coffin and donohue's ‘academic literacies and systemic functional linguistics: how do they relate?’ (2012). as hilsdon, malone and syska academic literacies twenty years on: a community-sourced literature review journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 20 ian johnson recognises in his review, academic literacies and systemic functional linguistics (sfl), are respectively strong influences on the pedagogies of learning development and english for academic purposes (eap). sfl foregrounds analysis of written texts from the ‘etic’ perspective of an outsider trained in language analysis and applies this knowledge to disciplinary writing. in this way sfl offers a means to view how a language system ‘is deployed through text to make meaning’ (coffin and donohue, 2012, p.68). pedagogically speaking, sfl proponents would emphasise designing materials to move students’ (language) abilities closer to those found to be typical or ‘successful’ in text analysis. coffin and donohue explore academic literacies' contrasting roots in anthropology, leading to it valuing ‘emic’ views on the practices of the producers and consumers of knowledge. for academic literacies theorists, knowledge is constructed through interaction between context and text, themselves inseparable. coffin and donohue explain that, in direct opposition to a normative approach, the potential of academic literacies’ ‘critical’ gaze is to render disciplinary discourses more transparent, thus open to challenge. while noting that the etic/text-based and emic/person-based starting points represent a logically incompatible difference, in line with wingate and tribble (2012), coffin and donohue suggest some cohesion would be possible if emphases were slightly shifted. they claim that academic literacies’ critiques of sfl underestimate the importance of context, and how broadly ‘text’ is defined. text is used in sfl to encompass concepts such as ‘meaning-making resources’ and ‘the role of language in complex learning and knowledge building’ (p.73). this expanded definition of text sits comfortably in an academic literacies perspective. in his review of coffin and donohue's paper, ian johnson examines karl maton’s legitimation code theory (lct) (2007) and explores how it ‘contribute[s] ideas by means of which complementarity [between sfl and academic literacies] can be recognized and developed ’ (coffin and donohue, 2012, p.73). maton's conception of lct draws on bernstein's work on academic disciplines (1999), which he characterised as either ‘hierarchical’ or ‘horizontal’ ‘knowledge structures’. for bernstein, horizontal structures operate in disciplines with multiple and contested viewpoints (e.g. the humanities), while hierarchical structures are more associated with seeking consensus or unified ‘truth’ (e.g. the sciences). maton (2007), significantly, added the concept of ‘knower structures’ to recognise that in certain disciplines, the means to legitimate and reproduce norms was attained less through the knowledge base and more through displaying the ‘dispositions’ of hilsdon, malone and syska academic literacies twenty years on: a community-sourced literature review journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 21 an ‘ideal knower’ (p.92-93). for maton, each discipline has one of four ‘legitimation codes’ based on privileging knowledge, knowers, both (‘elite’) or neither (‘relativist’); legitimation differences partly explain the difficulties that the sciences and humanities can have in cross-communicating, and the challenge inherent in working across disciplines. a discipline’s basis for legitimation is, however, open to critique and change. maton identified the entry of more varied knowers into higher education from the 1960s onwards as representing an ongoing challenge to the humanities’ hierarchical knower structures, themselves ‘a veneer for tacit social hierarchy’ (p.93). this echoes a similar point by russell et al. (2009, p.413) who remind us of the 'transformatory' potential of academic writing while at the same time acknowledging that academics at all levels use a ‘controlling, expert model’ of writing, the purpose of which is to demonstrate ‘the acquisition of institutional, subject or disciplinary knowledge and insiderdom’ (2009, p.413). while the study of expert models of writing is in itself neutral (in that it can be used to enable transformation or to gate keep and deny access) johnson makes explicit the connection between maton's concerns with greater democracy and the oppositional and democratising agenda of academic literacies. ‘insider knowers’, conclude coffin and donohue (2012), ‘might be best placed to renovate a discipline’ but, to do so, require ‘the means to deconstruct and evaluate the discourses they work within’ (p.72). citing the work of van heerden, clarence, and bharuthram (2017), who apply lct to feedback on written work, johnson suggests this framework could provide a way into a discipline, rendering it more transparent to students. he identifies how this close work around text could be used to equip students with a means to expose and perhaps challenge the type of knowledge or knower valued tacitly. this confirms coffin and donohue’s (2012) assertion of the value of challenging legitimation practices within disciplines. the publications in this section represent an increased focus on practical application of academic literacies principles. they share a common concern with the role of language in learning at university, both as a means to explore disciplinary discourses in fine detail and as a means of honing disciplinary voice. key questions arise about the extent to which the language of university study and academic expression is transferable across disciplinary contexts and, where differences occur, where power resides to enable, or prevent, resolution – especially for students who may work across two or more disciplines. this hilsdon, malone and syska academic literacies twenty years on: a community-sourced literature review journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 22 raises further difficult questions regarding the normative aspects of genres and the role of resistance to such practices as a way to develop or decolonise he curricula – i.e. how do we teach a disciplinary form without inducting students into normative genres? academic literacies foreground the tensions both in terms of subject positionalities but also in terms of power and the de/legitimisation of cultural practices and ways of knowing. the issue is not whether language is central to meaning making but how explicit focus on the study of form is best positioned. what [academic literacies] seeks to explicitly avoid is the idea that students first need to learn ‘the basics' and only then can be exposed to a pedagogy which leaves space for questioning and change (lillis and tuck 2016, p.34). the structure of disciplinary knowledge, which is a focus of both wingate and tribble’s and coffin and donohue’s papers, offers scope for collaborative exploration, bringing together different communities and professional perspectives. it is an intersection that brings together academic literacies conception of literacy as a social practice with bernstein's material focus as a sociolinguist. legitimation code theory offers a means to build a stronger bridge in academic literacies development practice between an understanding of the socially constructed nature of literacy practices and an understanding of the structure of knowledge from which they emerge (clarence and mckenna, 2017, p.41). as johnson argues, sfl and lct provide means to unpack disciplinary knowledge structures. an understanding of ‘what it is to be academically literate across the university’ (lea and street 1998) requires a balance of these two forms of knowledge: understanding of the structure of disciplinary knowledge as well as understanding of the norms, values, and practices that bring it to life (clarence and mckenna, 2017, p.39). understanding the role of disciplinary knowledge (knowledge and knower structures) would seem to be a necessary component of 'a shared ontology for academic literacies' (lillis and scott, 2007) and something that has potential to make significant contribution to increased cross disciplinary collaboration. hilsdon, malone and syska academic literacies twenty years on: a community-sourced literature review journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 23 implications for research in lea and street’s original conceptualisation in the 1990s, the role of academic literacies as an approach to research (alongside a transformative, student-centred pedagogy) was always important. however, the (mis)appropriation and (mis)understanding of the term (often characterised by the use of the singular form ‘academic literacy’) in the early part of this century, by those interested primarily in a normative (‘fix it’) approach to student writing, motivated lea and others to restate and defend the research purposes and potential of academic literacies. paul harrington and qian zhang both contributed reviews of lea and street’s 2006 paper ‘the “academic literacies” model: theory and applications’, seeing this text as influential for their practice in learning development and eap. as zhang explains, lea and street argue that just developing academic language and understanding the language conventions used in specific disciplines are not sufficient to understand the complexity, dynamics and nuance of communication in academic contexts. rather, they re-emphasise the role of ‘social processes, including power relations among people and institutions, and social identities’ (2006, p.228) in the development of literacies. hence, epistemological issues (e.g. about ‘correctness’ and appropriacy), which may be taken for granted in a ‘study skills’ or academic socialisation model, can become subjects for investigation, critique and potential reformulation in research and pedagogy, broadening and validating student identities as participants in academic practice. disciplinary contexts, cultures and their conventional genres also become subjects for exploration. furthermore, wider institutional discourses and genres can be subjected to critical scrutiny via ethnographic research in ways that are helpful to the identity-formation of those from diverse or marginalised backgrounds, such as non-native speakers of english. while harrington notes that the paper is very situated, produced from the uk in the mid-noughties as a response to the deficit model and skills agenda, he feels it remains useful despite progress made to incorporate some of the insights from academic literacies into academic practice since then. what remains true is that the transformational drive of an academic literacies perspective is yet to be widely utilised – and this paper helps to emphasise the vital role students could play in that. arina cirstea reviewed a 2007 paper by theresa lillis and mary scott, ‘defining academic literacies research: issues of epistemology, ideology and strategy’, which, she points out, hilsdon, malone and syska academic literacies twenty years on: a community-sourced literature review journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 24 reasserts the distinctiveness of academic literacies as a field of scholarly inquiry underpinned by a focus on transformative rather than normative writing pedagogies, and a preference for critical ethnography as an approach to the study of academic writing practices. the starting point for research of this kind is locating the ‘problem’ of varying writing standards within institutional practices, including the absence of explicit definitions and guidelines. rather than focusing on remedial measures, cirstea argues that transformative practitioners should set out to define the complexity of the issue by prioritising student rather than institutional perspectives. in this respect, critical ethnography is indicated as the most appropriate tool to investigate the student writers’ lived experiences while raising awareness of the power relationships involved in academic practices of ‘meaning making’. lillis and scott see this field as ‘constituted by teacher-researchers’ (2007, p.22), whose often contested and precarious positions in academic and contractual terms, imply particular needs for collective, collegial support – something most eap and ld practitioners are very likely to agree upon. such a situation, alongside the student focus, indicates the particular value of dialogic methodologies as part of a ‘critical ethnography’ – practitioner research to ‘critically expose issues of social justice and ethnography’ (2007, p.11), which involves: both observation of the practices surrounding the production of texts – rather than focusing solely on written texts – as well as participants’ perspectives on the texts and practices. this ethnographic framing of the study of students’ writing connects strongly with, and indeed gives academic credibility to, long standing practitioners’ interest, in adult and higher education, in exploring and making sense of students’ perspectives on academic writing, including challenging the ‘taken for granted’ (2007, p.11). although, as harrington, zhang and cirstea all point out, learning development and eap practices have taken on some aspects of the student perspective in the years since these papers were written, academic literacies remains an underutilised research and teaching framework, and its transformational power remains as potential for the development of a more inclusive, relevant, and socially just higher education systems and practices. hilsdon, malone and syska academic literacies twenty years on: a community-sourced literature review journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 25 implications for practice the issue of how to support literacy development at university in a way that aligns with the principles identified in lea and street’s 1998 article has proved an ongoing challenge across the sector, something acknowledged by a number of writers in the field including lea and street (cited in russell et al., 2009; see also lillis, 2003; and wingate, 2012). some note the absence of a clear design model (wingate, 2012), while lillis (2008) sees academic literacies as being at the juncture of theory and practice. lea and street describe academic literacies as ‘oppositional in nature’ (russell et al., 2009) and so what emerges from the original research paper is a set of principles, a critique of current practice, which results in a clearer conception of what academic literacies is not rather than what it is. the papers reviewed in this section were published when there was an acknowledged ‘relative paucity’ of literature that considered how to achieve this on a practical and structural level (murray and nallaya, 2016). they present examples of innovative, cross-disciplinary work, and theorise and critique these practices in the light of lea and street's 1998 paper. the four articles in this section are: anna magyar's ‘plagiarism and attribution: an academic literacies approach?’ (2012), reviewed by stephen gow; ‘on being an insider on the outside: new spaces for integrating academic literacies’ by cecilia jacobs (2005), reviewed by helen hewertson; neil murray and shashi nallaya's 2016 article ‘embedding academic literacies in university programme curricula: a case study’, reviewed by craig morley; and neil murray and amanda muller's ‘developing academic literacy through a decentralised model of english language provision’ (2018), reviewed by ide haghi. in her 2012 article ‘plagiarism and attribution: an academic literacies approach?’, anna magyar reports the findings of a small qualitative study that explored international postgraduate students’ understanding of plagiarism and attribution at a uk university. this paper applies an understanding of academic literacies to both the qualitative research and to the resultant materials’ design of a discipline-specific online resource. magyar identified in her analysis four dimensions to attribution: linguistic, rhetorical, epistemological, and culturally situated practice. the findings were used in the resource design, which was also informed by the complementary approaches to writing pedagogy used by lea and street (1998), namely skills, socialisation, and academic literacies. this resulted in four sections: 1) reasons for referencing; 2) identifying sentences that need referencing; 3) paraphrasing; hilsdon, malone and syska academic literacies twenty years on: a community-sourced literature review journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 26 4) structured holistic practice. what this paper makes clear is the sheer complexity of the process that students proceed through in adapting to culturally situated writing practices and the epistemology of attributable knowledge. she demonstrates how applying an academic literacies perspective offers insight as to what elements of the adaptation to study can be made explicit (through games and quizzes), the implicit process of socialisation students go through (into the language and discourse of the context/subject) and, most significantly, the textual and institutional practices (writing, reading, discussing attribution, note making), which have a deeper impact on personal and social identity. thus, in order to not only avoid plagiarism but to understand why it is wrong in terms of authorship in the academic context, it is not simply a case of acquiring skills and following rules, but of cultural, linguistic and epistemological development, which may be highly problematic given the timescale of uk programmes. magyar provides a lens to critically evaluate adaptation to academic practices of all students, not simply those from diverse backgrounds. she is also quite clear concerning the limitations of online tools used on a simple skills basis in quizzes and drills, demonstrating that they are neither conducive to dialogue nor support development of deeper understanding and re-orientation that is aimed for. the unpacking of the design process and the theoretically informed critique provides a welcome analysis of an arena that learning developers are increasingly working in, that of online materials’ design. in doing so, this paper provides a pedagogic framework for evaluating learning resource design. gow in his review explicitly connects magyar's different reasons for plagiarism with theories of epistemological development (marton and säljö, 1976; baxter magolda, 1992), transformative learning (mezirow, 1997), and habermas’s (1987) distinction between instrumental, strategic and communicative action in the academic lifeworld (see gow, 2018). the epistemological development referred to here indicates the complexity of decision-making that underpins the attribution process and affirms the need for a range of resources to help students learn to manage attribution in their work. while at first seemingly straightforward and familiar, magyar's work critically reflects on the challenges of making the implicit nature of attribution in academia explicit to students from diverse backgrounds. the remaining papers in this section are concerned specifically with who supports students to become academically literate, what spaces these staff occupy, and what hilsdon, malone and syska academic literacies twenty years on: a community-sourced literature review journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 27 opportunities are available to collaborate across disciplinary boundaries. in her 2005 article ‘on being an insider on the outside: new spaces for integrating academic literacies’, jacobs revisits new literacy studies' commitment to literacy as a social practice and reexamines some fundamental questions concerning who supports students in learning to write at university. she is clear that academic literacy ‘is best acquired by students when it is embedded within the contexts of particular academic disciplines’ and that ‘students are best inducted into the discourse communities of the various disciplines of study by modelling themselves on “insiders”, others who have mastered the discourse’, suggesting that disciplinary specialists are best placed to teach disciplinary writing (jacobs, 2005, p.477). jacobs scrutinises the expertise of different staff groups – disciplinary specialists and academic literacy practitioners/language lecturers – and critiques their current separation. she is clear that there is a need for disciplinary specialists, ‘insiders’ to the discourse, to share and teach their tacit unarticulated disciplinary knowledge to their students; she is also clear, however, that they may lack the skills to do this. jacobs draws on the work of gee (1990), making the distinction between teaching for acquisition and teaching for learning and his assertion that ‘“meta-knowledge of the structure of a given domain of knowledge” . . . lies at the heart of teaching’ (gee, cited in jacobs, 2005, p.480). gee emphasises that teaching these separately ‘can lead to successful but “colonized” students’ (jacobs, 2005, p.478) in a way that echoes the tension in academic literacies between inducting students into the practices of a discipline while supporting them to critique it. hewertson, in her review, explains how collaboration enables ‘teaching for learning’, and details how this is brought about by disciplinary specialists ‘viewing the discourses of their disciplines through the eyes of a questioning [academic literacies] practitioner’ (jacobs, 2005, p.480). this collaboration allows practitioners to know ‘when and how to scaffold students’ growing abilities', and bring their tacit knowledge and understandings of the workings of a discourse within their disciplines into the realm of ‘overt and explicit teaching’ (jacobs, 2005, p.484 and 478). this theoretical framing is a preface to a case study based in a south african university, which explores how 20 academic literacies practitioners and disciplinary specialists integrated academic literacy into various disciplines. reflecting on the benefits of transdisciplinary working, jacobs maintains that the project created a new discursive space for collaboration. hewertson draws out two key recommendations from this article: the need for a community of practice of tertiary educators that transcends the narrow hilsdon, malone and syska academic literacies twenty years on: a community-sourced literature review journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 28 confines of disciplinary boundaries, and the establishment of sustainable transdisciplinary discursive spaces where dialogue and collaboration can take place. this paper highlights the many challenges of collaborative cross-disciplinary working and jacobs is clear that meeting this challenge may require a redefinition of the role of academic literacy practitioners in tertiary education. within the same theme of embedding, neil murray and shashi nallaya’s 2016 paper presents a case study on how universities can better develop students’ academic literacies through embedding support into the curricula. craig morley in his review explains how embedding is a natural fit for an academic literacies approach given the importance of social context and the discipline specific nature of academic skills. he points out that embedding academic literacies aligns with critiques of extra-curricular, bolt-on support (wingate, 2006). murray and nallaya draw explicitly on vygotsky’s theory of learning to inform their embedding strategy and morley notes the appropriacy and relevance of vygotsky’s ideas of scaffolding to the design of a structured curriculum that seeks to incrementally develop students’ academic literacies. this practical application of academic literacies to curriculum design was developed in response to the increased diversification of the he student body in australia. in this context, murray and nallaya emphasise we cannot ‘make assumptions’ about students arriving at university ‘preloaded with the academic literacies they will need’ (2016, p.1298); they also clearly identify the institutional responsibility to address this need. this article's case study of academic literacy provision across two subject areas presents a model that had some success in embedding academic literacies into curricula. while this model offers an example of innovative collaboration with strategic impact, morley places it in context of an increasing number of published case studies showcasing different embedding strategies (cairns et al., 2018; hill and tinker, 2018). the authors discuss the obstacles to embedding and note the importance of establishing buy-in, particularly amongst academic staff, noting a disconnect between themselves and disciplinary academics, which had significant consequences for their project. their example illustrates an ongoing challenge to the learning development and eap sector, highlighting how much work is involved in articulating potential benefits of applying academic literacies principles to our work. the embedded approach adopted in this case hilsdon, malone and syska academic literacies twenty years on: a community-sourced literature review journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 29 study seems a particularly useful method to evidence long term impact and morley argues that this paper makes a positive case for the larger potential impact ld/eap can have through engaging in collaborative curriculum design. he also highlights how rethinking curricula by embedding academic literacies carefully across programmes is one important way in which he can be made more inclusive and supportive to the diversified student body. embedding academic literacies may involve a centrally located disciplinary specialist working alongside subject tutors in the classroom (e.g. jacobs, 2005) or working with disciplinary subject tutors on curriculum design (e.g. murray and nallaya, 2016). a third model of embedding is presented in neil murray and amanda muller's 2018 article ‘developing academic literacy through a decentralised model of english language provision’, where they report on a model of academic language development provision aimed at supporting international students in a health faculty at an australian university. it focuses on developing the students’ competency in the language skills required for their studies and professional practice, and is delivered by a member of staff employed directly by the faculty with additional courses delivered alongside the students' usual course. in this paper, murray and muller identify ‘the lack of alignment between the language focus of gatekeeping tests and the language students need to negotiate their degree work’ (2018, p.1351). they also critique the backwash that influential, international, english for general academic purposes tests have on the kind of academic support offered to students postenrolment. they are clear that ‘one of the key weaknesses of such tests . . . concerns the fact that they reflect a monolithic rather than a plurilithic view of academic literacy’ (2018, p.1350). in contrast, they set out to align themselves to an academic literacies approach to academic language development which emphasised the need to frame language . . . as something specific to individual disciplines and in which learners need to become conversant if they are to gain membership of their respective communities of practice (2018, p.1350). the question of who academic literacies development is targeted at remains unresolved, with some ongoing tension between staff, students, and institutional understandings of academic literacy provision and need. while academic literacies emerged in the uk in response to widening participation and growth in student numbers, and there is a research hilsdon, malone and syska academic literacies twenty years on: a community-sourced literature review journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 30 focus on the individual student experience, there was an original concern with institutional responsibility for literacy development. murray and muller's work in looking at practical applications of academic literacies reasserts this focus on the institutional, rather than personal, level of responsibility and provision. murray and muller consider how to address the needs of international students who, in spite of demonstrating sufficient language to enter university in large numbers, continue to demonstrate serious problems with their academic work and progression. in some ways their case study represents an institutional response to this issue. however, targeting initiatives at international students and delivering these outside of the mainstream teaching programme has led to superficial skills-based approaches to writing development (lea and street, 1998, p.169) criticised as effectively apportioning blame to individual students. while the needs of home and international students are not identical, developing an understanding of academic literacies is a challenge that all he students face. in spite of the criticisms of remedial services aimed at the needs of ever more specific, discrete student characteristics as unfeasible (haggis, 2006, p.522), such targeted approaches remain prevalent across the sector. murray and muller (2018) present an example of literacy development work positioned outside of the mainstream subject teaching, which indicates an unresolved tension between institutional and pedagogic agendas and the liminal status of literacy development work. here academic literacies’ ideological commitments to transformative education and social equity are at odds with what turner terms ‘remedial communication economy’ (2018). such an economy is both of significant strategic and financial value to anglophone heis and, at the same time, one that positions international students and their teachers on the margins. murray and muller (2018) acknowledge the dilemma of international students at the heart of this tension, as they are simultaneously welcomed in and positioned as deficient. the question is then to what extent a programme can align itself with the transformational agenda of academic literacies from a peripheral position alongside mainstream curriculum delivery, when the conventions and practices of the academy (enacted through assessment practices) have a resolutely normative orientation. ide haghi's review of murray and muller’s article identifies several advantages of decentralised academic literacies provision including promotion of more relevant teaching hilsdon, malone and syska academic literacies twenty years on: a community-sourced literature review journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 31 materials and generation of collaborative research with subject specialists. the role of academic literacies lecturer within a mainstream programme can also help raise awareness of student problems among other academic staff, which in turn may encourage a more sensitive and empathetic pedagogy. undoubtedly, embedding a member of staff offers many advantages to really scrutinise the language of the discipline and examine it in use, as well as offering novel synergies with a disciplinary staff group. haghi notes that this paper provides further evidence for the benefits of tailored academic literacy development provision, as well as detailed and practical guidelines on how decentralised models of such provision can be implemented. however, this model is still a long way from fully embedded academic literacies delivered routinely to all students as part of their course. it suggests a need to examine an alternative fully embedded subject specific exploration that acknowledges and addresses the literacy development needs of the whole student body. the papers in this section all address the practical challenge of teaching in a way that aligns with academic literacies principles (lea and street, 1998). taken together it is possible to garner if not a design frame, then a few principles for practice aligned to academic literacies: mainstreamed and embedded although academic literacies emerged from analysis of widening participation, the centrality of literacy development to higher education and rejection of deficit frames suggest that learning and literacy development are relevant to all students and subjects (lea, 2016, p.89). similarly, separation of development work according to whether english is a student’s first, second, additional, or foreign language are distinctions that have been actively challenged by academic literacies practitioners (lillis and tuck, 2016, p.39). as lillis and tuck put it, '[a] social practices perspective entails a view of writing as inseparable from context' (2016, p.35). analysis of this context has led to acknowledging the need to work at a level of disciplinary specificity and to recognise that students are increasingly expected to fluently manage a diverse set of literacy practices across a range of media and modes. this suggests the need to resist the common practice of managerial separation of language, and learning developer from subject tutor. hilsdon, malone and syska academic literacies twenty years on: a community-sourced literature review journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 32 critical and transformative stance a common theme throughout academic literacies writing is the foregrounding of issues of power and authority evident in language and learning. in practical terms this implies a need to go further than clarifying disciplinary expectations and to engage students in critique, acknowledging the tension between ‘being explicit about norms and conventions of disciplines and opening up curriculum spaces for these to be contested’ (jacobs, 2013, p.133). this reflexive critical stance extends to our institutional and disciplinary norms. researchers and practitioners in academic literacies tradition assert a commitment to critical intellectual value and purpose of university (lea, 2016) and emphasise the need for transformation in pedagogy and a transformative orientation to language and academic production (lillis and tuck, 2016, p.39). this ideological orientation implies a particular stance towards students who are drawn into this space as participants, legitimating students as knowledge producers as well as ‘the resources for meaning making’ that the students themselves bring to the university (see lillis and scott, 2007, p.19). space for diverse knowledge making practices there has been an expansion of conception of literacy from a focus in 1998 on learning to write at university to now include a diverse range of textual and digital knowledge making practices across the university. re-positioning of the student body and rejection of normative pedagogy have led to calls to establish 'richer forms of engagement' (haggis 2006, p.522). at the same time, lea reflects on ‘whether the written word . . . can ever engage fully with the notion of student writing as meaning making without the dialogic, exploratory and critical possibilities of student-teacher interactions’ (lea, 2016, p.91). this suggests that rather than searching for a definitive design frame that can be institutionally enacted, there is a need to reconfigure curricular spaces for formative, dialogic learning to invite students to explore their subjects and take risks with their learning. while we continue to search for alternative ways to use writing and literacies to ‘resist deeply entrenched attitudes about writing, and about students and disciplines’ (russell, hilsdon, malone and syska academic literacies twenty years on: a community-sourced literature review journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 33 2009, p.396), we must find new ways to cross rigid disciplinary divides, create novel spaces for learning, and new hybrid staff roles. as morley suggests, there are opportunities here for learning developers and applied linguists to have strategic impact at scale beyond their immediate teaching responsibilities. undoubtedly, taking full advantage of these opportunities relies on our ability to collaborate and persuasively communicate the successes and opportunities that an academic literacies approach can afford. conclusion lea and street's 1998 paper was genuinely ground-breaking and has had significant impact on he research, pedagogy, and policymaking in many countries. its popularity and influence among our professional communities is evident in the profusion of research and literature it has prompted and the number of citations it still receives. the range of articles referred to above, selected by colleagues from our aligned professional communities of eap and learning development, demonstrates the breadth and persistence of interest in academic literacies, not least because research in this field raised questions about the nature of literacy at university in a way that rejected the deficit framing of students. if, twenty years ago, issues of literacy at university were marginalised and institutionally invisible (street, 1999; turner, 2018), now the debate about how best to work with a range of students characterised by cultural and linguistic diversity is lively and enriched. there is a substantial body of research and literature on academic literacies for practitioners to draw upon, which offers validation of the centrality of language practices in the higher education curriculum, and its relationships with the roles, power and opportunities for achievement available to participants. the importance of language and learning development – and, by implication, the work of practitioners in our communities – is thereby firmly established. generating research academic literacies approaches have offered a new perspective for the study of he classroom practice, suggesting a focus on issues of roles, voices, and subject positions of staff and students. they also indicate moving beyond an approach to text that assumes its transparency and thereby point to research into the culturally situated complexities of learning to communicate at university. understanding the situated nature of literacy implies hilsdon, malone and syska academic literacies twenty years on: a community-sourced literature review journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 34 a need to analyse the quality of disciplinary discourses and conceptions of graduate-level attainment, including the need for code-switching across subject, genre, and mode (lea and street, 1998). as the articles analysed in this review demonstrate, there is a recurrent concern with drawing out issues of power, both at the level of individual interaction and structurally at an institutional level, examining the gaps between discourses and agendas (russell et al., 2009). the stress on an ethnographic focus on individuals and on practices in an academic literacies approach offers a framework for research and the development of pedagogy that is well-suited to meeting the challenges facing early twenty-first century he practitioners. such work implies, for example, helping students grapple with tacit expectations in terms of their learning practices, identity and identification (see gourlay, 2009; burgess and ivanic, 2010; french, 2016). the proliferation of topics and themes for research generated by academic literacies approaches is well illustrated by the literature reviewed in this paper. much of it can be traced back to interest in pursuing the assertion in lea and street's 1998 paper that academic writing is both complex and contested in respect of the gaps between the discourses of teaching, learning and institutional communications and students’ lived experience. contested terminology one consequence of the popularity of the term ‘academic literacies’ has been the ‘considerable fluidity and at times confusion in meanings attached to the use of the phrase’ (lillis and scott, 2007, p.6). furthermore, lillis and scott note ‘the ways in which it is adopted and co-opted for use in many settings, often with a range of meanings sometimes confusing and contradictory and sometimes strategic’ (p.6). this diversity of understandings and interpretations suggests that, as a sector, we are still exploring what ‘academic literacies’ can mean in practice. the popularity of the term and the diverse manner in which it was used led key authors (lea and street, 2006; lillis and scott, 2007; lea, 2016,) to re-assert some of its key principles: its critical stance and the ambition and scale of its perspective, which act as a counterpoint to the focus on individual practices and small-scale investigations. these distinctions are crucial to understanding the critiques of normative practices and academic literacies’ affinity with critical eap and the traditions and approaches of critical linguistics (freire, 1972; pennycook, 2010). hilsdon, malone and syska academic literacies twenty years on: a community-sourced literature review journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 35 here we reach a juncture between different practitioner groups who support writing development and learning at university, and who have developed distinct practical responses to the criticality of academic literacies. faced with increasing numbers of international students accepted onto relatively short courses in anglophone contexts, practitioners experience considerable pressures to adopt normative approaches and induct students to meet anglophone norms. in contrast, for staff supporting home students, the critical oppositionality of academic literacies challenges the liminal status of students who are marginalised by mainstream higher education while being welcomed into it. the question is to what extent such criticality is central to an education that aims to be transformative. academic literacies approaches the typology of approaches to writing development (skills, socialisation, and academic literacies) first outlined by lea and street (1998) received much attention from our community of practitioners. lea explains that in their original formulation ‘academic socialisation was concerned with the acculturation of students into disciplinary academic discourse and culture, . . . [whereas] academic literacies focus[ed] on institutional practices, change and power and institutions as sites of contested meaning making’ (2016, p.90). lea and street (1998) presented academic literacies as building on skills and socialisation approaches to writing and learning development rather than in opposition to them. however, the exact nature of the relationship between approaches has proved difficult to define, both in theory and in practice. if the relationship between these approaches is not one of linear progression then this raises many practical questions concerning the delivery of, and the relationship between, these different approaches to learning, and whether current organisational arrangements for working with students and staff across the university are fit for purpose (jacobs, 2005; wingate, 2015). the intersection of textually focused approaches and academic literacies is especially sharp when considering the needs of home and international students. the challenge of how to enable students to critique the work of a discipline they seek membership of is particularly pertinent for international students (see wingate and tribble, 2012; wingate, 2015; murray and nallaya, 2016; murray and muller, 2018). this confirms the complexity hilsdon, malone and syska academic literacies twenty years on: a community-sourced literature review journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 36 of the precise nature of the relation of language to learning. while there is a desire to identify commonalities and areas of intersection between eap and academic literacies (wingate and tribble, 2012), if the practical focus is on providing students with the tools to deconstruct and manage their own disciplinary journey, the question remains at what point are issues of power and identity addressed. lillis and scott (2007) crucially distinguish between 'normative' and ‘transformative' approaches, analysing key tropes and metaphors used to describe learning. they identify communities of practice, apprenticeships, socialisation, scaffolding, novice and experts as terms drawn from sociocultural theory and signalling a researcher's normative interest. in contrast, they note that explicit discussions of power and authority, the use of notions of dialogism, hybridity, and intertextuality indicate a position in which conventions are viewed as contested and meaning making as a site of struggle (lillis and scott, 2007, p.13). lea warns against simple labels, suggesting that ‘the distinction we made between academic socialisation and academic literacies is too crude, particularly when the former becomes explicitly associated with a normative approach’ (lea, 2016, p.91). the value in distinguishing between normative and transformative approaches is in its explication of theory underpinning practices and the way it raises awareness and encourages critique of our pedagogic habits. modality the digitalisation of university study has been acknowledged as ‘[p]robably one of the most significant changes to the higher education landscape and to the relationship between students and university teachers’ (lea, 2016, p.94). this shift in mode of delivery continues to have huge impact on the emerging textual and multimodal practices of university study (goodfellow, 2005; archer, 2006; lillis and tuck, 2016). in applying academic literacies theory to online resource design, magyar (2012) reveals how teaching in an online blended environment requires a more nuanced understanding of social and relational implications of teaching resources, and how different designs position learners in different ways. similarly, lea (2016) and lillis and tuck (2016) note that, when using a written channel, the substantive content is reified, meaning that however discursively framed or intended, there is a real challenge of maintaining a transformative stance when information is written down. given the ubiquity of online learning environments at uk universities, an understanding of how academic literacies are constructed in online environments is vital for learning developers and eap tutors. this suggests a need to be hilsdon, malone and syska academic literacies twenty years on: a community-sourced literature review journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 37 able to work across modalities and apply theoretical and epistemological critiques to scrutinise emerging textual and multimodal practices, including our own as developers and teachers. future perspectives since 1998, academic literacies perspectives have increasingly influenced researchers’ and practitioners’ attempts to ‘engage with complex issues surrounding . . . student academic writing, in contrast to the often impoverished perspective on language and literacy that is trumpeted in official and public discourses’ (lillis and scott, 2007, p.21). the literature referred to in this review demonstrates the rich potential for further research, and the development of practice, offered by academic literacies perspectives. the sizeable response to our call for reviews (over 20 submissions) for this literature review is evidence of the numbers of practitioner researchers still inspired by lea and street’s 1998 paper and for whom the term ‘academic literacies’ is relevant to their professional thinking and identity. their ideas will continue to stimulate critical questioning of dominant discourses and inspire resistance to the 'relentless marketisation of the sector' and ‘redefinition of the university for its commercial and transfer utility, as opposed to its intellectual or critical value’ (lea, 2016, p.97). the drive to teach and develop academic literacies that are appropriate, inclusive and empowering, as well as academically rigorous, alongside our students, is a motive shared among the professional learning development, writing development, and eap communities. sharing our ideas through projects such as this literature review is an act of collaboration and cross-fertilisation that can encourage us to be ambitious for the future; to co-operate further to promote a wider conception of what counts as appropriate resources for academic meaning making; and to engage our students in negotiation and dialogue to explore what is possible, rather than merely what is acceptable (lillis and tuck, 2016). references archer, a. (2006) 'a multimodal approach to academic literacy practices: problematising the visual/verbal divide', language and education, 20(6), pp.449-462. available at: https://doi.org/10.2167/le677.0 (accessed: 7 october 2019). https://doi.org/10.2167/le677.0 hilsdon, malone and syska academic literacies twenty years on: a community-sourced literature review journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 38 ashworth, m., bloxham, s. and pearce, l. (2010) 'examining the tension between academic standards and inclusion for disabled students: the impact on marking of individual academics' frameworks for assessment', studies in higher education, 35(2), pp.209-223. available at: doi: 10.1080/03075070903062864 (accessed: 7 october 2019). baxter magolda, m.b. (1992) ‘students’ epistemologies and academic experiences: implications for pedagogy’, the review of higher education, 15(3), pp.265-287. available at: https://doi.org/10.1353/rhe.1992.0013 (accessed: 7 october 2019). bazerman, c., bonini, a. and figueiredo, d. (eds.) (2009) genre in a changing world: perspectives on writing. colorado: wac clearinghouse/parlor press. bernstein, b. (1999) ‘vertical and horizontal discourse: an essay’, british journal of sociology of education, 20(2), pp.157-173. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/01425699995380 (accessed: 20 september 2019). bernstein, b. (2000) pedagogy, symbolic control and identity. 2nd edn. oxford: rowman and littlefield publishers. biggs, j. and tang, c. (2011) teaching for quality learning at university. uk: mcgraw-hill education. burgess, a. and ivanič, r. (2010) ‘writing and being written: issues of identity across timescales’, written communication, 27(2), pp.228-255. available at: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0741088310363447 (accessed: 7 october 2019). cairns j., hervey, t. and johnson, o. (2018) 'neither “bolt-on” nor “built-in”: benefits and challenges of developing an integrated skills curriculum through a partnership model', journal of learning development in higher education, 13 (april). available at: https://journal.aldinhe.ac.uk/index.php/jldhe/article/view/435 (accessed: 7 october 2019). https://www.researchgate.net/publication/248963324_examining_the_tension_between_academic_standards_and_inclusion_for_disabled_students_the_impact_on_marking_of_individual_academics'_frameworks_for_assessment https://doi.org/10.1353/rhe.1992.0013 https://doi.org/10.1080/01425699995380 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0741088310363447 https://journal.aldinhe.ac.uk/index.php/jldhe/article/view/435 hilsdon, malone and syska academic literacies twenty years on: a community-sourced literature review journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 39 cameron, h. and billington, t. (2015) 'the discursive construction of dyslexia by students in higher education as a moral and intellectual good', disability & society, 30(8), pp.1225-1240. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/09687599.2015.1083846 (accessed: 7 october 2019). christie, f. and martin, j. (eds.) (2007) language, knowledge and pedagogy: functional linguistic and sociological perspectives. london: continuum. clarence, s. and mckenna, s. (2017) ‘developing academic literacies through understanding the nature of disciplinary knowledge’, london review of education. 15, pp.38-49. doi: 10.18546/lre.15.1.04. (accessed: 7 october 2019). coffin, c. and donohue, j. (2012) ‘academic literacies and systemic functional linguistics: how do they relate?’ journal of english for academic purposes, 11, pp.64-75. available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jeap.2011.11.004 (accessed: 20 september 2019). disabled students’ allowance consultation: equality analysis [dsac] (2015) department for business, innovation and skills (bis-hefce). available at: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attach ment_data/file/481527/bis-15-658-disabled-students-allowances-equalityanalysis.pdf (accessed: 19 august 2019). eurydice (the education, audiovisual and culture executive agency) (2014) ‘modernisation of higher education in europe 2014, access, retention and employability’. available at: https://publications.europa.eu/en/publication-detail//publication/59560dcc-a3c3-11e5-b528-01aa75ed71a1/language-en (accessed: 10 october 2019). fairclough, n. (1992) discourse and social change. cambridge: polity. freire, p. (1972). pedagogy of the oppressed. new york: herder and herder. https://doi.org/10.1080/09687599.2015.1083846 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/315157732_developing_academic_literacies_through_understanding_the_nature_of_disciplinary_knowledge https://eur02.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3a%2f%2fdoi.org%2f10.1016%2fj.jeap.2011.11.004&data=02%7c01%7ch.newnes%40lancaster.ac.uk%7c67b6c4b68ca44a20db3808d7710729c1%7c9c9bcd11977a4e9ca9a0bc734090164a%7c1%7c0%7c637102147903234744&sdata=sgby%2ffppcrwvs%2fe1pzhn2zyuzc19nd0j6qwo%2bixf%2ffc%3d&reserved=0 https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/481527/bis-15-658-disabled-students-allowances-equality-analysis.pdf https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/481527/bis-15-658-disabled-students-allowances-equality-analysis.pdf https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/481527/bis-15-658-disabled-students-allowances-equality-analysis.pdf https://publications.europa.eu/en/publication-detail/-/publication/59560dcc-a3c3-11e5-b528-01aa75ed71a1/language-en https://publications.europa.eu/en/publication-detail/-/publication/59560dcc-a3c3-11e5-b528-01aa75ed71a1/language-en hilsdon, malone and syska academic literacies twenty years on: a community-sourced literature review journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 40 french, a. (2016) ‘“fail better”: reconsidering the role of struggle and failure in academic writing development in higher education', innovations in education and teaching international, 55(4), pp.408-416. available at: doi: 10.1080/14703297.2016.1251848 (accessed: 10 october 2019). fuller, m., healey, m., bradley, a. and hall, t. (2004) 'barriers to learning: a systematic study of the experience of disabled students in one university', studies in higher education, 29(3), pp. 303-318. doi: 10.1080/03075070410001682592. (accessed: 10 october 2019) gee, j. p. (1990) social linguistics and literacies: ideology in discourses. london: falmer. goodfellow, r. (2005) 'academic literacies and e-learning: a critical approach to writing in the online university', international journal of educational research, 43(7-8), pp.481-494. available at: http://oro.open.ac.uk/7847/ (accessed: 10 october 2019). gourlay, l. (2009) ‘threshold practices: becoming a student through academic literacies’, london review of education, 7(2), pp.181-192. available at: doi: 10.1080/14748460903003626 (accessed: 10 october 2019). gow, s. (2018) epistemological obstacles to academic integrity: mainland chinese students’ perceptions of studying in the uk through the habermasian lens. phd thesis, university of york. available at: http://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/24119/ (accessed: 23 october 2019). habermas, j. (1987) the theory of communicative action. boston: beacon press. haggis, t. (2006) 'pedagogies for diversity: retaining critical challenge amidst fears of “dumbing down”’, studies in higher education, 31(5), pp.521-535. available at: doi: 10.1080/03075070600922709 (accessed: 10 october 2019). harris, a. (2014) the creative turn: toward a new aesthetic imaginary. rotterdam: sense. https://doi.org/10.1080/14703297.2016.1251848 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/03075070410001682592 http://oro.open.ac.uk/7847/ https://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/ioep/clre/2009/00000007/00000002/art00008?crawler=true https://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/ioep/clre/2009/00000007/00000002/art00008?crawler=true http://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/24119/ http://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/24119/ http://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/24119/ https://doi.org/10.1080/03075070600922709 hilsdon, malone and syska academic literacies twenty years on: a community-sourced literature review journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 41 hill, p. and tinker, a. (2018) 'making the second year count: embedding learning development in a progressive student journey', journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: aldinhe conference 2018 (october). available at: http://journal.aldinhe.ac.uk/index.php/jldhe/article/view/482 (accessed: 10 october 2019). hilsdon, j. (2011) ‘what is learning development?’ in hartley, p., hilsdon, j. keenan, c. sinfield, s. and verity, m. (eds.) learning development in higher education. london: palgrave macmillan, pp.13-27. ivanič, r. (1998) writing and identity. amsterdam: john benjamin’s publishing company. jacobs, c. (2005) 'on being an insider on the outside: new spaces for integrating academic literacies', teaching in higher education, 10(4), pp.475-487. available at: doi: 10.1080/13562510500239091 (accessed: 10 october 2019). jacobs, c. (2013) 'academic literacies and the question of knowledge', journal for language teaching, 47(2), pp. 127-139. available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.4314/jlt.v47i2.7 (accessed: 10 october 2019). kinder, j. and elander, j. (2012) ‘dyslexia, authorial identity, and approaches to learning and writing: a mixed methods study’, british journal of educational psychology, 82(2), pp.289-307. available at: doi: 10.1111/j.2044-8279.2011.02026.x (accessed: 10 october 2019). kress, g. and van leeuwen, t. (2001) multimodal discourse: the modes and media of contemporary communication. london: arnold. lave, j. and wenger, e. (1991) situated learning: legitimate peripheral participation. cambridge: cambridge university press. lea, j. (2015) ‘the landscape of higher education’, in lea, j. (ed.) enhancing learning and teaching in higher education: engaging with the dimensions of practice. maidenhead, united kingdom: open university press. http://journal.aldinhe.ac.uk/index.php/jldhe/article/view/482 https://doi.org/10.1080/13562510500239091 http://dx.doi.org/10.4314/jlt.v47i2.7 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/224955966_dyslexia_authorial_identity_and_approaches_to_learning_and_writing_a_mixed_methods_study hilsdon, malone and syska academic literacies twenty years on: a community-sourced literature review journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 42 lea, m. (2016) ‘academic literacies: looking back in order to look forward’, critical studies in teaching & learning, 4(2), pp.88-101. available at: https://www.ajol.info/index.php/cristal/article/view/149790 (accessed: 10 october 2019). lea, m. and street, b. (1998) ‘student writing in higher education: an academic literacies approach’, studies in higher education, 23 (2), pp.157-172. available at: doi: 10.1080/03075079812331380364 (accessed: 10 october 2019). lea, m. and street, b. (2006) 'the "academic literacies" model: theory and applications', theory into practice, 45(4) pp.368–377. available at: http://oro.open.ac.uk/21057/ (accessed: 10 october 2019). lillis, t. (2003) 'student writing as 'academic literacies': drawing on bakhtin to move from critique to design', language and education, 17(3), pp.192 -207. available at: http://oro.open.ac.uk/6379/ (accessed: 10 october 2019). lillis, t. (2008) 'ethnography as method, methodology, and "deep theorizing": closing the gap between text and context in academic writing research', written communication, 25(3), pp.353-388. available at: http://oro.open.ac.uk/17069/ (accessed: 10 october 2019). lillis, t. and scott, m. (2007) 'defining academic literacies research: issues of epistemology, ideology and strategy', journal of applied linguistics, 4(1) pp.5–32. available at: http://oro.open.ac.uk/17057/ (accessed: 10 october 2019). lillis, t. and tuck, j. (2016) 'academic literacies: a critical lens on writing and reading in the academy', in hyland, k. and shaw, p. (eds.) the routledge handbook of english for academic purposes. routledge handbooks: routledge, pp.30–43. available at: https://oro.open.ac.uk/44768/3/academicliteracies%20%20lillis%20%26%20tuck.pdf (accessed: 10 october 2019). https://www.ajol.info/index.php/cristal/article/view/149790 https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079812331380364 https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079812331380364 http://oro.open.ac.uk/21057/ http://oro.open.ac.uk/6379/ http://oro.open.ac.uk/17069/ http://oro.open.ac.uk/view/person/tml6.html http://oro.open.ac.uk/17057/ https://oro.open.ac.uk/44768/3/academicliteracies%20-%20lillis%20%26%20tuck.pdf https://oro.open.ac.uk/44768/3/academicliteracies%20-%20lillis%20%26%20tuck.pdf hilsdon, malone and syska academic literacies twenty years on: a community-sourced literature review journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 43 magyar, a. e. (2012) 'plagiarism and attribution: an academic literacies approach?' journal of learning development in higher education, no. 4 (2012). available at: https://journal.aldinhe.ac.uk/index.php/jldhe/article/view/141 (accessed: 10 october 2019). mann, s. j. (2001) ‘alternative perspectives on the student experience: alienation and engagement’, studies in higher education, 26(1), pp.7-19. available at: doi: 10.1080/03075070020030689 (accessed: 10 october 2019). marton, f. and säljö, r. (1976) 'on qualitative differences in learning: outcome and process', the british journal of educational psychology, 46 (1), pp.4–11. maton, k. (2007) ‘knowledge-knower structures in intellectual and educational fields’, in christie, f. and martin, j. (eds.) language, knowledge and pedagogy: functional linguistic and sociological perspectives. london:continuum, pp.87-108. available at: https://ro.uow.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://www.google.com/&httpsre dir=1&article=1915&context=sspapers (accessed: 10 october 2019). maton, k. (2017) ‘making waves together: how lct can help crack the codes of education’, baleap 2017 conference, university of bristol, bristol 7-9 april. available at: https://www.baleap.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/plenary-2-matonslides.pdf (accessed: 20 september 2019). mckenna, c. and hughes, j. (2013) 'values, digital texts, and open practices—a changing scholarly landscape in higher education', in goodfellow, r. and lea, m. (eds.), literacy in the digital university: critical perspectives on learning, scholarship and technology. london/new york: routledge, pp.15-26. mezirow, j. (1997) 'transformative learning: theory to practice’, new directions for adult and continuing education, 74, pp.5-12. morken, f. and helland, t. (2013) ‘writing in dyslexia: product and process’, dyslexia, 19 (3), pp.131-148. available at: doi: 10.1002/dys.1455 (accessed: 10 october 2019). https://journal.aldinhe.ac.uk/index.php/jldhe/article/view/141 https://doi.org/10.1080/03075070020030689 https://ro.uow.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://www.google.com/&httpsredir=1&article=1915&context=sspapers https://ro.uow.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://www.google.com/&httpsredir=1&article=1915&context=sspapers https://www.baleap.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/plenary-2-maton-slides.pdf https://www.baleap.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/plenary-2-maton-slides.pdf https://www.researchgate.net/publication/236968450_writing_in_dyslexia_product_and_process hilsdon, malone and syska academic literacies twenty years on: a community-sourced literature review journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 44 mortimore, t. and crozier, w. r. (2006) ‘dyslexia and difficulties with study skills in higher education’, studies in higher education, 31 (2), pp.235-251. available at: doi: 10.1080/03075070600572173 (accessed: 10 october 2019). murray, n. and muller, a. (2018) 'developing academic literacy through a decentralised model of english language provision', journal of further and higher education, 43(10), pp.1348-1362. available at: doi: 10.1080/0309877x.2018.1483015 (accessed: 10 october 2019). murray, n. and nallaya, s. (2016) 'embedding academic literacies in university programme curricula: a case study', studies in higher education, 41(7), pp.1296312. available at: doi: 10.1080/03075079.2014.981150 (accessed: 10 october 2019). office of fair access uk [ofa] (2017) understanding a whole institution approach to widening participation. available at: https://www.offa.org.uk/egp/whole-institutionapproach (accessed: 19 august 2019). pennycook, a. (2010) critical applied inguistics: a critical introduction. london: routledge. pino, m. and mortari, l. (2014) ‘the inclusion of students with dyslexia in higher education: a systematic review using narrative synthesis’, dyslexia, 20(4), pp.346-369. available at: doi: 10.1002/dys.1484 (accessed: 10 october 2019). riddell, s., weedon, e., fuller, m., healey, m., hurst, a., kelly, k. and piggott, l. (2007) ‘managerialism and equalities: tensions within widening access policy and practice for disabled students in uk universities’, higher education, 54(4), pp.615-628. available at: doi.org/10.1007/s10734-006-9014-8 (accessed: 10 october 2019). russell, d. r., lea, m., parker, j., street, b. and donahue, t. (2009) 'exploring notions of genre in ’academic literacies’ and ’writing across the curriculum’: approaches across countries and contexts', in bazerman, c., bonini, a. and figueiredo, d. (eds.) genre in a changing world perspectives on writing. colorado: wac clearinghouse/parlor press, pp.395-423. https://doi.org/10.1080/03075070600572173 https://doi.org/10.1080/0309877x.2018.1483015 https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2014.981150 https://www.offa.org.uk/egp/whole-institution-approach https://www.offa.org.uk/egp/whole-institution-approach https://repository.lboro.ac.uk/articles/the_inclusion_of_students_with_dyslexia_in_higher_education_a_systematic_review_using_narrative_synthesis/9475496 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10734-006-9014-8 https://wac.colostate.edu/books/perspectives/genre/ https://wac.colostate.edu/books/perspectives/genre/ hilsdon, malone and syska academic literacies twenty years on: a community-sourced literature review journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 45 scalone, p. and street, b. (2006) 'an academic language development programme (widening participation)', in leung, c. and jenkins, j. (eds.) reconfiguring europe: the contribution of applied linguistics. london: equinox, pp.123–37. scott, p. (1995) the meanings of mass higher education. buckingham, united kingdom: society for research into higher education. shaw, j. (2009) ‘the diversity paradox: does student diversity enhance or challenge excellence?’ journal of further and higher education, 33(4), pp.321-332. available at: doi: 10.1080/03098770903266018 (accessed: 10 october 2019). smith, r. (2007) 'an overview of research on student support: helping students to achieve or achieving institutional targets? nurture or de-nature?' teaching in higher education, 12(5-6), pp.683-695. available at: https://wlv.openrepository.com/bitstream/handle/2436/7588/helping%20students% 20to%20achieve.pdf?sequence=1 (accessed: 10 october 2019). street, b. (1984) literacy in theory and practice. cambridge: cambridge university press. street, b. (1999) 'academic literacies' in jones, c., street, b. (eds.) students writing in the university: cultural and epistemological issues. amsterdam and philadelphia: john benjamins publishing company, pp.193–227. tribble, c. and wingate, u. (2013) ‘from text to corpus: a genre based approach to academic literacy instruction’, system, 41(2), pp.307-321. available at : https://doi.org/10.1016/j.system.2013.03.001 (accessed: 10 october 2019). turner, j. (2018) on writtenness the cultural politics of academic writing. london: bloomsbury. van heerden, m., clarence, s. and bharuthram, s. (2017) ‘what lies beneath: exploring the deeper purposes of feedback on student writing through considering disciplinary knowledge and knowers’. assessment and evaluation in higher education, 42(6), https://doi.org/10.1080/03098770903266018 https://wlv.openrepository.com/bitstream/handle/2436/7588/helping%20students%20to%20achieve.pdf?sequence=1 https://wlv.openrepository.com/bitstream/handle/2436/7588/helping%20students%20to%20achieve.pdf?sequence=1 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.system.2013.03.001 hilsdon, malone and syska academic literacies twenty years on: a community-sourced literature review journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 46 pp.967-977. available at: doi: 10.1080/02602938.2016.1212985 (accessed: 10 october 2019). vygotsky, l. (1978) mind in society. london: harvard university press. wenger, e. (1998) ‘communities of practice: learning as a social system’, systems thinker, 9(5), pp.2-3. available at: https://thesystemsthinker.com/communities-ofpractice-learning-as-a-social-system/ (accessed: 10 october 2019). wingate, u. (2006) ‘doing away with “study skills”’, teaching in higher education, 11(4), pp.457-469. available at: doi: 10.1080/13562510600874268 (accessed: 10 october 2019). wingate, u. (2012) ' using academic literacies and genre-based models for academic writing instruction: a ‘literacy’ journey', journal of english for academic purposes, 11(1) pp.26–37. available at: doi: 10.1016/j.jeap.2011.11.006 (accessed: 10 october 2019). wingate, u. (2015) academic literacy and student diversity: the case for inclusive practice. multilingual matters: bristol. wingate, u. and tribble, c. (2012) ‘the best of both worlds? towards an english for academic purposes/academic literacies writing pedagogy’, studies in higher education, 37(4), pp.481-495. available at: doi: 10.1080/03075079.2010.525630 (accessed: 10 october 2019). wortham, s. (2003) ‘curriculum as a resource for the development of social identity’, sociology of education, 76, pp.228-246. available at: https://repository.upenn.edu/gse_pubs/210/ (accessed: 10 october 2019). https://doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2016.1212985 https://thesystemsthinker.com/communities-of-practice-learning-as-a-social-system/ https://thesystemsthinker.com/communities-of-practice-learning-as-a-social-system/ https://doi.org/10.1080/13562510600874268 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/257604035_using_academic_literacies_and_genre-based_models_for_academic_writing_instruction_a_'literacy'_journey https://www.researchgate.net/publication/257604035_using_academic_literacies_and_genre-based_models_for_academic_writing_instruction_a_'literacy'_journey https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2010.525630 https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2010.525630 https://repository.upenn.edu/gse_pubs/210/ hilsdon, malone and syska academic literacies twenty years on: a community-sourced literature review journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 47 author details john hilsdon is the former head of learning support and wellbeing at the university of plymouth, uk. he is a national teaching fellow and completed a doctorate examining the significance of learning development in 2018. cathy malone is an education developer at sheffield hallam university with an interest in supporting students in learning to write and writing to learn in he. alicja syska is a hybrid academic working across learning development and history at the university of plymouth, uk. contributors we would like to acknowledge and thank the following colleagues who contributed individual reviews to this community-sourced literature review: brittany amell, carleton university, canada arina cirstea, de montfort university, leicester jessica garska, trinity college dublin stephen gow, university of york ide haghi, university of bristol aileen hanrahan, independent researcher paul harrington, university of plymouth helen hewertson, university of central lancashire john hilsdon, university of plymouth christina howell-richardson, birkbeck college, university of london ian johnson, university of portsmouth peter levrai, university of turku cathy malone, sheffield hallam university craig morley, university of manchester louise stringer, university of york alicja syska, university of plymouth qian zhang, university of northampton academic literacies twenty years on: a community-sourced literature review abstract introduction a collaborative writing process learning to write in he: context, practices, power and identity modality identity focus on text implications for research implications for practice mainstreamed and embedded critical and transformative stance space for diverse knowledge making practices conclusion generating research contested terminology academic literacies approaches modality future perspectives references author details contributors journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special issue 22: compendium of innovative practice october 2021 ________________________________________________________________________ watch party lectures: synchronous delivery of asynchronous material carolina e. kuepper-tetzel university of glasgow emily nordmann university of glasgow keywords: instruction; lectures; synchronous and asynchronous learning; student engagement; covid-19 the challenge when the covid-19 pandemic hit in early 2020, the majority of university activities on campus were suspended across the world, and teaching pivoted online (nordmann et al., 2020). the challenge was to provide students who were enrolled and expecting a face-to-face, oncampus learning experience with a similar university experience that would encourage them to engage with learning and to develop a sense of belonging (peacock et al., 2020). as year leads for firstand second-year psychology at our university, our cohorts were particularly large with approximately 600 first-year students and 250 second-year students. each week students attend three to five lectures and one practical lab session, and previously all teaching was delivered in person on campus. in the process of planning our move online, we realised the need to develop an approach that offered both asynchronous and synchronous elements. synchronous sessions are vital, not only for community building, but there is also a positive association between scheduled teaching of lectures and practicals and academic achievement (torenbeek et al., 2012). however, with students studying from home in different countries, under a variety of circumstances, and with differential access to internet, study space and technology, it was important to offer all essential teaching material asynchronously too (nordmann et al., 2020). kuepper-tetzel and nordmann watch party lectures: synchronous delivery of asynchronous material journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 2 in the initial period of emergency remote teaching directly following the first lockdown, we kept in touch with students through online remote social activities such as meeting online for a watch party of psychology-related movies and used the integrated chat box function to write comments or thoughts. this was when the concept of ‘watch party lectures’ was born. the response watch party lectures combine asynchronous and synchronous teaching approaches. lecturers record short videos of directly instructed content; for one-hour lectures, lecturers aim to record 2-3 short videos for a maximum of 40-45 minutes. these pre-recorded videos are uploaded onto the virtual learning environment (vle). however, the crucial element of watch party lectures is the scheduled, synchronous time during which these pre-recordings are watched together via screen sharing. watch parties purposely differ from a flipped classroom approach in which students are required to complete the pre-recordings in their own time before coming to class. while, in general, the flipped classroom approach has shown positive effects on student performance across educational sectors and disciplines (strelan et al., 2020), students, particularly younger cohorts, may become overwhelmed by the added requirement of independent learning and, consequently, not complete the learning activities prior to class (tomas et al., 2019). this may be more pronounced now as students report additional strains on mental health and wellbeing during the pandemic (e.g., chirikov et al., 2020; mechili et al., 2020; wang et al., 2020). thus, watch party lectures offer a scheduled time during which the core teaching content is delivered. perhaps more importantly, watch party sessions allowed for meaningful interactions between lecturers and students while watching the videos. students would post questions or comments in the chat box, and the lecturer could address them immediately, for example, by providing links to additional resources. we observed more engagement during watch party lectures from a more diverse body of students than we have experienced in face-to-face lectures, which reflects students’ preference for using the chat box during instruction (see vu and fadde, 2013). collaborative co-creation of knowledge that combines social and cognitive kuepper-tetzel and nordmann watch party lectures: synchronous delivery of asynchronous material journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 3 processes aligns well with the theoretical framework of community of inquiry (garrison et al., 2001; cleveland-innes et al., 2019); and is an essential aspect of watch party lectures. discussion took place not only between lecturers and students, but also between peers who would frequently answer questions or provide follow-up opinions and thoughts to points raised in the chat. besides the ongoing discussions, lecturers enriched the watch party sessions with short quiz activities, either to review previously taught material or to prompt upcoming content. quizzing during lectures not only provides students with a short break from watching the videos, but is also a beneficial strategy to increase retention and transfer of knowledge (thomas et al., 2020). although multiple platforms would be capable of presenting watch parties, we used zoom (zoom video communications inc, 2016). in addition to being adopted as a core technology by our institution, zoom had no known restrictions in terms of international access and was also available for students on mobile devices, and we were not made aware of any cases in which students who wished to engage with the sessions were not able to do so. recordings of the watch party sessions including the chat conversations were also made available to students for asynchronous engagement, although the community and active learning benefits of the sessions would have been limited. the feedback from students on the watch party lectures has been overwhelmingly positive, for example: i like that all lectures are watch party style, it makes it feel more interactive and 'normal’. none of my other subjects have done this so every week i look forward to my psychology lectures. (anonymous, 2020a) online live lecture watch parties are amazing because it feels a lot more engaging than just having to watch the already recorded lecture alone. (anonymous, 2020b) in student evaluations, our approach was praised as an effective way to engage with the material, ask questions during the session, and catch-up afterwards. students appreciated kuepper-tetzel and nordmann watch party lectures: synchronous delivery of asynchronous material journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 4 the different activities during the watch party sessions, citing that these kept them focused and encouraged further elaboration on the topic. as expected, students highlighted the chat box conversations as a positive feature of watch party lectures. student feedback was so positive that the format was adopted by other lecturers and departments at both our own and other institutions. recommendations lecturers interested in implementing this approach may experience an initial hesitation about watching themselves during the watch party session, but from our own experiences and from speaking to our colleagues, this was not perceived as an issue, or was one that quickly became normal. lecturers enjoyed the interactions in the chat box, which allowed them time to construct more elaborate answers to student questions. when moving back to face-to-face lectures, we recommend integrating text-based chats during lectures. lecturers could encourage students to post comments and questions during the lecture using existing tools (e.g., teams, forums on the vle) and then take brief q&a breaks during the lecture. after the lecture, the lecturer could reply to questions that require more elaborate answers or additional resources. in conclusion, watch party lectures demonstrate the benefits of strategically combining asynchronous and synchronous approaches. when considering what the new normal of lectures will look like, it is crucial to consider their social and community aspects (nordmann et al., 2021), and we strongly recommend integrating both asynchronous and synchronous elements regardless of the modality or format of teaching delivery. references chirikov, i., soria, k.m., horgos, b, and jones-white, d. (2020) ‘undergraduate and graduate students’ mental health during the covid-19 pandemic’, uc berkeley: center for kuepper-tetzel and nordmann watch party lectures: synchronous delivery of asynchronous material journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 5 studies in higher education, viewed 3 june 2021. available at: https://escholarship.org/uc/item/80k5d5hw (accessed: 30 june 2021). cleveland-innes, m., gauvreau, s., richardson, g., mishra, s. and ostashewski, n. (2019) ‘technology-enabled learning and the benefits and challenges of using the community of inquiry theoretical framework’, international journal of e-learning & distance education, 34(1), pp.1-18. garrison, d.r., anderson, t. and archer, w. (2001) ‘critical thinking, cognitive presence, and computer conferencing in distance education’, american journal of distance education,15(1), pp. 7-23. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/08923640109527071 (accessed: 30 june 2021). mechili, e.a., saliaj, a., kamberi, f., girvalaki, c., peto, e., patelarou, a.e., bucaj, j. and patelarou, e. (2020) ‘is the mental health of young students and their family members affected during the quarantine period? evidence from the covid‐19 pandemic in albania’, journal of psychiatric and mental health nursing, 28(3), pp.317-325. available at: https://doi.org/10.1111/jpm.12672 (accessed: 5 july 2021). nordmann e., horlin, c., hutchison, j., murray, j.a., robson, l., seery, m.k. and mackay, j.r.d. (2020) ‘ten simple rules for supporting a temporary online pivot in higher education’, plos computational biology, 16(10), pp.e1008242. available at: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1008242 (accessed: 5 july 2021). nordmann, e., hutchison, j. and mackay, j.r.d. (2021) ‘lecture rapture: the place and case for lectures in the new normal’, edarxiv. available at: https://doi.org/10.35542/osf.io/h8zt6 (accessed: 5 july 2021). peacock, s., cowan, j., irvine, l. and williams, j. (2020) ‘an exploration into the importance of a sense of belonging for online learners’, the international review of research in https://escholarship.org/uc/item/80k5d5hw https://doi.org/10.1080/08923640109527071 https://doi.org/10.1111/jpm.12672 https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1008242 https://doi.org/10.35542/osf.io/h8zt6 kuepper-tetzel and nordmann watch party lectures: synchronous delivery of asynchronous material journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 6 open and distributed learning, 21(2), pp. 18-35. available at: https://doi.org/10.19173/irrodl.v20i5.4539 (accessed: 5 july 2021). torenbeek, m., jansen, e. and suhre, c. (2013) ‘predicting undergraduates' academic achievement: the role of the curriculum, time investment and self-regulated learning’, studies in higher education, 38(9), pp. 1393-1406. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2011.640996 (accessed: 5 july 2021). strelan, p., osborn, a. and palmer, e. (2020) ‘the flipped classroom: a meta-analysis of effects on student performance across disciplines and education levels’, educational research review, 30, pp. 100314. available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.edurev.2020.100314 (accessed: 5 july 2021). thomas, a.k., smith, a.m., kamal, k. and gordon, l.t. (2020) ‘should you use frequent quizzing in your college course? giving up 20 minutes of lecture time may pay off’, journal of applied research in memory and cognition, 9(1), pp. 83-95. available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jarmac.2019.12.005 (accessed: 5 july 2021). tomas, l., doyle, t. and skamp, k. (2019) ‘are first year students ready for a flipped classroom? a case for a flipped learning continuum’, international journal of educational technology in higher education, 16(1), pp.1-22. available at: https://doi.org/10.1186/s41239-019-0135-4 (accessed: 5 july 2021). wang, x., hegde, s., son, c., keller, b., smith, a. and sasangohar, f. (2020) ‘investigating mental health of us college students during the covid-19 pandemic: cross-sectional survey study’, journal of medical internet research, 22(9), pp. e22817. available at: https://doi.org/10.2196/22817 (accessed: 5 july 2021). vu, p. and fadde, p.j. (2013) ‘when to talk, when to chat: student interactions in live virtual classrooms’, journal of interactive online learning, 12(2), pp.41-52. available at: http://www.ncolr.org/jiol/issues/pdf/12.2.1.pdf (accessed: 5 july 2021). https://doi.org/10.19173/irrodl.v20i5.4539 https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2011.640996 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.edurev.2020.100314 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jarmac.2019.12.005 https://doi.org/10.1186/s41239-019-0135-4 https://doi.org/10.2196/22817 http://www.ncolr.org/jiol/issues/pdf/12.2.1.pdf kuepper-tetzel and nordmann watch party lectures: synchronous delivery of asynchronous material journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 7 zoom video communications inc. (2016) security guide. available at: https://d24cgw3uvb9a9h.cloudfront.net/static/81625/doc/zoom-security-whitepaper.pdf (accessed: 30 june 2021). author details carolina e. kuepper-tetzel is a senior lecturer in psychology at the university of glasgow and a senior fellow of the hea. she is an expert in applying findings from cognitive science to education and an enthusiastic science communicator. she is a member of the learning scientists and the founder of the teaching innovation & learning enhancement (tile) network. you can follow her work on twitter: @pimpmymemory. emily nordmann is a senior lecturer in psychology at the university of glasgow and was awarded the british psychological society he psychology teacher of the year in 2020. she is an expert in lecture capture and a strong proponent of open educational resources and the teaching of reproducible research methods. you can follow her work on twitter: @emilynordmann. https://d24cgw3uvb9a9h.cloudfront.net/static/81625/doc/zoom-security-white-paper.pdf https://d24cgw3uvb9a9h.cloudfront.net/static/81625/doc/zoom-security-white-paper.pdf https://www.learningscientists.org/ https://www.learningscientists.org/ https://tile.psy.gla.ac.uk/ https://tile.psy.gla.ac.uk/ https://twitter.com/pimpmymemory https://twitter.com/emilynordmann watch party lectures: synchronous delivery of asynchronous material the challenge the response recommendations references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 21: september 2021 ________________________________________________________________________ reflections on how librarians teach information literacy a book review of aston, s. and walsh, a. (eds.) (2021) library pedagogies: personal reflections from library practitioners. huddersfield: innovative libraries press. michelle breen university of limerick keywords: library instruction; information literacy; teaching; pedagogies. overview this book will help librarians to reflect on and improve their teaching to meet the contemporary needs of their learners and develop the information and digital skills of students. librarians who teach don’t need reminding of the many definitions that exist for information literacy from ala, ancil and cilip as examples. equally important in current library instruction is the jisc definition of digital literacy: “equipping students to live, learn and work in a digital society” (jisc, 2019). as information literacy instruction does, the contributions in this book transcend subject discipline. rather than prescribing one single ‘best’ way of teaching, the book presents a range of pedagogical approaches, giving librarians a menu of options to ex periment with to suit them, their topic, their institution and its learners. this book has practical advice on how to help students learn new skills from library instructional sessions. structure and content with contributions from 22 authors, plus the editors, the book examines library pedagogies through many lenses. with this volume of varied contributions, the editors divided the book into sections. the chapters are grouped around the themes of information literacy, authority and power, and pedagogies that have been influenced breen reflections on how librarians teach information literacy journal of learning development in higher education, issue 21: september 2021 2 by specific contexts and environments. as practitioners for whom time is increasingly scarce, librarians may find it useful to begin by reading the author profiles to identify chapters of most relevance to their own context. the editors have compiled a useful handbook that librarians can dip in to regularly to broaden their perspective on effective pedagogical approaches to teaching information literacy. the book has many well observed anecdotes from classroom experiences. the examples serve to highlight the limitations of approaches such as edip (explain, demonstrate, inquire, practice) for student learning. telling students things, and giving them the answers, as vividly described in emma coonan’s honest recollection on her ‘beautifully designed, cut and dried prepared searches ’ (coonan, 2021, p. 45) that she had used in her classes with students is less effective than an engaged dialogue with your students about what they need. emma’s personal pedagogical approach of “listening to and working with my class participants showed me that exploring a topic from multiple perspectives rather than trying to ‘fix’ it immediately could help students better understand the complexities of learning and research” (coonan, 2021, p.56). as you read this book, take time to consider this : if students can interrogate the library catalogue and databases at the end of an instructional session with you, have they learnt anything? are we satisfied with this surface learning as described by wotherspoon (p. 378) or do librarians want students to experience deeper and more meaningful learning in library classes? the value of reflecting on your teaching is a recurring theme throughout the book. sound pedagogical approaches underpin successful teaching. the chapter authors honestly share their experiences and describe an openness to experimentation and discovery in their teaching that makes this book a must read for any librarians who teach. final thoughts the takeaways for me from the book are that information literacy teaching needs to be designed to create learner autonomy. heather barker describes how she adjusted standard lesson plans to “incorporate activities where choice of search terms and resources were left to the learner” (barker, 2021, p. 19) thereby transferring ownership of learning to learners. this approach to teaching and skills building will breen reflections on how librarians teach information literacy journal of learning development in higher education, issue 21: september 2021 3 give students the methods and approaches needed to become confident in their ability to find, use and manage information. librarians need to take a step back from their teaching at intervals to reflect on how they teach and what techniques they can apply to support student learning. aston and walsh have assembled a useful reference text for librarians, and i envisage a relevance for the book in our professional dialogue, helping libraries to review their current approaches to teaching information literacy. i commend the editors for including this line in their preface and i would hope that this practice becomes widespread across new books, encouraging a move towards a more open approach to published content: “individual chapters may be copied or scanned for educational purposes, for permission to scan/copy more than a chapter or to host a pdf version of this work for educational purposes such as a reading list or course pack, please contact the editors”. reference list ala (american library association) (2015) framework for information literacy for higher education. available at: http://www.ala.org/acrl/standards/ilframework (accessed 14 march 2021). aston, s. and walsh, a. (eds.) (2021) library pedagogies: personal reflections from library practitioners. huddersfield: innovative libraries press. barker, h. (2021) ‘developing the learner librarian: traversing threads, thresholds and transformations’ in aston, s. and walsh, a. (eds.) 2021. library pedagogies: personal reflections from library practitioners. huddersfield: innovative libraries press. cilip (2018) cilip definition of information literacy, available at: https://infolit.org.uk/ildefinitioncilip2018.pdf (accessed 14 march 2021). http://www.ala.org/acrl/standards/ilframework https://infolit.org.uk/ildefinitioncilip2018.pdf breen reflections on how librarians teach information literacy journal of learning development in higher education, issue 21: september 2021 4 coonan, e. (2021) ‘librarian through the looking-glass: developing a teaching philosophy on shifting ground’, in aston, s. and walsh, a. (eds.) (2021) library pedagogies: personal reflections from library practitioners. huddersfield: innovative libraries press. jisc (2019) jisc digital capabilities framework: the six elements defined. available at: https://repository.jisc.ac.uk/7278/1/bdcp-dc-framework-individual-6e-110319.pdf (accessed 14 march 2021). wotherspoon, e. (2021) ‘digital literacy in a post-covid world: e-pedagogical approaches to develop social, academic and employability skills’ in aston, s. and walsh, a. (eds.) (2021) library pedagogies: personal reflections from library practitioners. huddersfield: innovative libraries press. author details michelle breen is the head of the information services department at the glucksman library at the university of limerick. michelle's department supports the learning, teaching and research needs of the university community through their work on collections, in teaching, and the provision of reference and consultation services. michelle has worked in academic libraries since 2006, beginning in faculty liaison work and subsequently held a variety of roles in the library. michelle's department moved to online teaching in march 2020 and has offered experimental digital skills workshops to students at the university of limerick, alongside more traditional instructional sessions, always striving to achieve best practice in the physical or virtual classroom that matches the session's learning outcomes. michelle has published in peer-reviewed journals and practitioner literature, presented at many conferences and is a member of ireland's lai council and an active member of conul’s communications and outreach group. https://repository.jisc.ac.uk/7278/1/bdcp-dc-framework-individual-6e-110319.pdf reflections on how librarians teach information literacy overview structure and content final thoughts reference list author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 19: december 2020 editorial andy hagyard university of leeds christina howell-richardson birkbeck, university of london eleanor loughlin durham university cathy malone oxford brookes university craig morley university of manchester gita sedghi university of liverpool alicja syska university of plymouth ‘tis an issue to make all jolly – with this special conference edition we are officially saying goodbye to 2020! despite all the challenges this year has thrown at us, the journal of learning development in higher education is ending it on a high note. we are delighted to announce that three exceptional new editors joined our editorial board: dr nicola grayson from the university of manchester, dr jim donohue, from manchester metropolitan university, and dr jennifer hillman, from open university. we could not be more thrilled to welcome them to our team and we look forward to working together towards new goals next year. at the same time, we would like to thank our long-term member, dr christina howell-richardson, for her five years of service on the board – we will remember her with warm thoughts, and wish her the best of luck in her future endeavours. issue 19 brings together a range of fascinating writings that resulted from the 2020 annual conference of the association for learning development in higher education, which this year took place online, in the form of ld@3 webinars. in addition to papers, case studies, an opinion piece, and a book review, it also includes a special article written by four of our editorial editors, eleanor loughlin, alicja syska, gita sedghi and christina howell-richardson, which is dedicated to the peer review process. the article explores the ways publishing protocols can be fine-tuned in order to not only increase efficiency in the journal but also energise the entire community. while probing how reviewers, authors, and editors can work together in the most productive and rewarding way, we also outline new jldhe initiatives for supporting reviewers’ vital work, to be introduced next year. if our readers would like to gain insight into how our peer reviewing process works and why it works this way, this is just the article to read. emily forster’s paper ‘power and paragraphs’ addresses the important role emotions play in academic writing. using the stories of two students – both from widening participation backgrounds and both with dyslexia – the author demonstrates how in addition to the usual, technical challenges involved in writing, students also experience emotional challenges, which often go unacknowledged. the fact that writing shapes student identity, however, may help us understand students’ emotional responses to writing. indeed, forster argues that, as learning developers, we are uniquely positioned to support students in developing positive emotions related to academic writing, which can lead to widening the space for growth and developing positive learner identities. shortly, acknowledging emotions in writing may result in transformational learning. group work is both increasingly popular as a means of assessment and a perennial source of unhappiness when groups do not gel. while the skills of working effectively in a group have clear relevance to the world of work and are highly valued by employers, there is less clarity about how best to support development of this skillset. in this innovative case study authors helena beeson and richard byles from the university of northampton problematised issues of group work and engaged students in groups to provide their own answers to these challenges. they did this through establishing a context where the students would work together in groups to create video advice for junior students, combining a digital literacies element with a genuine reason to collaborate and work effectively as a group. drawing on feedback from staff and students they synthesise some of the lessons learned and identify other contexts for application. the case study ‘how improvisation techniques can support researchers with the development of public speaking skills’ grew out of another captivating presentation at ld@3. nicola grayson and jessica napthine-hodgkinson begin by explaining that researcher development support for presentation skills is traditionally focused on editorial structuring work effectively, practising the presentation and projecting the voice. through the delivery of a workshop they designed, however, improvisational techniques can disrupt the seriousness of researcher development training to release stress and provide a cathartic space for researchers to develop skills. researchers support one another in a space where the freedom to fail offers them a cathartic release from the pressures of perfection to develop public speaking skills in a way that is innovative, fun and enjoyable. as a result, the authors show, researchers can reframe their worries into opportunities to connect with one another and grow, which empowers them to build confidence in their ability to engage with others in a dialogue about their research. rachael hunter discusses the inception and continued delivery of ten-minute micro research skills sessions within two entrepreneurship modules at coventry university london. the rationale of the study was underpinned by both established, current bitesized learning research, and established psychological and neural evidence. the case study describes how these practices are used in the workplace to promote continuous professional development and disseminate company information for training purposes. discussing both the delivery and skills content, it explains the methods used by the information and skills development specialist in each ten-minute session, how this practice has been adopted by students and how the skills have been embedded to enhance their final business pitches at the end of their modules. furthermore, the inclusion of this microlearning project within other modules establishes the project’s flexible and tailored design. laurence morris and lindsey mcdermott’s case study explores the process and impact of introducing a centrally managed booking system for academic skills appointment. they emphasise the importance of setting clear aims and establishing a project group as the basis for ensuring success. the resulting booking system clearly strikes a balance between standardising processes while still recognising the importance of human judgment, essential to ensuring student needs are best met. although the new system resulted in an increase in administration, this was outweighed by increased capacity to support students and the creation of a bank of information that enables the team to respond to both student and institutional needs. it has further provided greater flexibility to respond to the challenges arising from covid-19 in enabling a smoother transition to online support. editorial in their opinion piece, karen sobel and lorraine evans provide a timely discussion of changes in the ways emotional labour manifests among instruction librarians in this time of pandemic. they explore how the challenges faced by instruction librarians have shifted from establishing good working relationships with faculty and gaining recognition, to adapting to providing distance support and concerns around the safety of returning to campus. they further note that the current situation has resulted in some positive changes, including realisation that librarians can be productive while working remotely and the development of better relationships with departments who are reaching out to libraries for assistance and support. the authors wonder whether this will continue beyond the pandemic and hope that as we emerge from the current situation, there is re-examination of workplace norms. finally, claire saunders reviews the book writing about learning and teaching in higher education: creating and contributing to scholarly conversations across a range of genres by mick healey, kelly matthews, and alison cook-sather. the book unpacks the process of writing for publication in a wide variety of genres while recognising that the boundaries between these genres are overlapping and provisional. this is seen as a strength, not a problem, since working within and across genres may encourage new ways of engaging, analysing, and sharing understandings that can, in turn, legitimate this wider range of ways of writing about learning and teaching. we hope that in this collection of articles, our subscribers and readers will find thoughtprovoking and stimulating material. we also want to take this opportunity to thank our wonderful reviewers whose critical reading of submissions and thoughtful feedback and recommendations have made invaluable contributions to the quality of articles we publish. our heartfelt appreciation for the time, expertise, and work it took to review papers in this issue goes to the following reviewers: mahmoud altal, uk richard bale, uk monica behrend, australia vesna bogdanović, serbia ursula canton, uk editorial alina congreve, uk erika corradini, uk emma davenport, uk caleb domsy, uk lee fallin, uk nicola grayson, uk aileen hanrahan, uk joy igiebor, uk alena kašpárková, the czech republic maddy mossman, uk tamer osman, china joannah o'hatnick, canada robert ping-nan chang, uk sonja rewhorn, uk margaret rachael scott, uk nathalie sheridan, uk gabrielle smith, austria angela rhead, uk portia ungley, uk john weston, finland with very best wishes for a joyful holiday season, the jldhe editorial board editorial tf_template_word_windows_2013 journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 16: december 2019 ___________________________________________________________________ an exploration of taught master’s student perceptions of uk dissertation supervision stephanos anastasiadis * school of business and management, royal holloway university of london, uk justin o’brien school of business and management, royal holloway university of london, uk * corresponding author abstract this paper presents the results of an investigation into taught master’s students’ expectations and experience of being supervised during their final project. it does so using exploratory survey and focus group data from one uk institution with a high proportion of international students. the paper adds to the limited literature on master’s students’ experience and makes two further main contributions. it finds that students both expect supervisor engagement and respond well to it, and argues that focusing on key elements of the dyadic supervision process (supervisor availability and level of engagement, feedback provided, and provision of expert guidance on theory and method) can disproportionately improve students’ overall learning and satisfaction. in addition to furthering knowledge in this area, the research suggests numerous practical implications and lines of potential future inquiry. keywords: taught master’s; dissertation supervision; student perceptions; student experience, international students. introduction taught uk master’s programmes typically last one year, in contrast to undergraduate and doctoral programmes, which take at least three years to anastasiadis and o’brien an exploration of taught master’s student perceptions of uk dissertation supervision journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 2 complete. this means that universities have relatively little time to understand master’s students, which may help to explain why the master’s degree is ‘one of the least understood or researched academic levels in higher education’ (drennan and clarke, 2009, p.483). uk master’s programmes have not been included in public evaluations of teaching quality, but this is changing with the metrics-driven evolution of higher education (tomlinson, 2018), the teaching excellence framework (tef), (bis, 2015; 2016) and the launching of the office for students (ofs), with its focus on student value-for-money (ofs, 2018). the financial potency of business school master’s degrees is already well known. in 2017/18, uk business and management students accounted for 21% of the postgraduate taught student population (hesa, 2019), and many higher education institutions now depend on the income these students bring (hordern, 2014). moreover, 28% of the uk’s postgraduate taught population (126,000 of 450,000) in 2017/18 were non-eu students; these international students are often concentrated in highly multi-cultural business schools (hesa, 2019). european and particularly uk master’s students typically produce a substantial, independent piece of capstone work to complete their degree (meeus et al., 2004). described by pilcher (2011, p.37) as a constantly-changing ‘elusive chameleon,’ the dissertation or final project (as it is called here) represents a significant opportunity for student learning and personal growth, as well as potentially influencing students’ abiding memories of their institutions. yet, ‘little is known of coursework master’s graduates’ experience of research or research supervision’ (drennan and clarke, 2009, p.483). although much work has been done on phd supervision, the master’s level remains under-researched (harwood and petrić, 2018). in other words, not enough is known about master’s students’ experience of the final project, which forms a significant component of their learning. indeed, larivière et al. (2008) and dietz et al. (2000) have challenged the usefulness in practice of dissertations, due to factors such as poor supervision, insufficient time, and students’ limited analytical experience. there may well be a discrepancy between the potential benefits and students’ lived experience. this paper uses focus groups from two temporally distinct cohorts of msc anastasiadis and o’brien an exploration of taught master’s student perceptions of uk dissertation supervision journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 3 international management students and an exploratory questionnaire administered to the first cohort of those students to provide insight into student expectations and experience of supervision at one anonymised institution, businesscollege, which has followed the traditional, dyadic supervision model of one-to-one supervision. at businesscollege, a supervisor is allocated 18 hours per msc student, to cover guidance and marking, with a minimum requirement of at least two face-to-face meetings. the rest of this paper proceeds as follows: the next section provides the theoretical basis for the research, through a review of the literature on supervising master’s level student dissertations, and on student evaluation of teaching. the methodology section then outlines the use of focus groups and a questionnaire. the research findings and discussion sections follow subsequently. the paper concludes with reflections on the consequences of the findings for practice and scholarship. literature review this section provides an overview of two dimensions that are relevant to the student experience of supervision: factors relevant to successful supervision, and student evaluation of teaching. a search of the literature reveals that learning at master’s level, and dissertation supervision in general, has until recently received limited attention. there is some contemporary research on master’s level business/management teaching and learning, focussed on master of business administration (mba) programmes (e.g. simpson et al., 2010; beenen, 2013; hordern, 2014; more generally, hallett, 2010); other programmes receive less attention (beatty and leigh, (2010) speculate on the reasons). literature on supervision, by contrast, tends to concentrate on the supervisor rather than the student, whether the focus be at master’s (anderson et al., 2006) or doctoral level (halse and malfroy, 2010; halse, 2011; morris et al., 2012). supervising master’s students anastasiadis and o’brien an exploration of taught master’s student perceptions of uk dissertation supervision journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 4 according to todd et al. (2004), the supervisor’s challenge is to inculcate autonomous student learning whilst recognising that many supervisees are insufficiently prepared for this study format. ebadi and pourahmadi (2019) highlight different student-staff expectations of supervisory input as problematic, a finding shared by roberts and seaman (2018); simply put, students want supervisors to be more directive, rather than providers of general guidance. filippou et al., (2017) find that international students expect more from their supervision than native students. contradictorily, pilcher (2011) posits that good students desire suggestions, whilst others request direction, linking supervisory approach to student quality. nonetheless, for master-level work, in which original, ground-breaking research is not expected, and in which the timeframe is significantly compressed, we can expect technical expertise to play a significant role. vos and armstrong (2019) argue that there is also a significant gap between supervisors’ knowledge and student learning in the research methods classes. critical incident research (roberts and seaman, 2018) highlights the undergraduate supervisor’s role in confidence building and providing clear, direct advice. reguant and colleagues (2018), however, emphasise the generic skills of fostering and growing student enthusiasm, whilst transferring an understanding of the research process. moreover, different students may require different pedagogical approaches to the supervision of their final project (harwood and petrić, 2018). dysthe’s earlier (2002) study into supervisory roles identifies three kinds of supervisory model, each with its own dynamic; students can have different preferences and, given the highly diverse student population of master’s students in the uk, it is reasonable to expect that they will. research into arabic-speaking master’s students studying with english as a foreign language highlights key learner skills gaps: limited research scoping, design and analysis experience, exacerbated by poor academic writing capability (ebadi and pourahmadi, 2019). challenges can also be compounded by issues of learner isolation, low motivation and poor attendance (vos and armstrong, 2019). however, the literature is relatively silent on the question of factors important for successful dyadic master’s-level supervision. by way of explanation, pilcher (2011) emphasises the elusiveness of the terms ‘master’s dissertation’ and ‘master’s supervision’, a anastasiadis and o’brien an exploration of taught master’s student perceptions of uk dissertation supervision journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 5 challenging situation that has been further augmented by an increasingly diverse student body. nonetheless, some trends can be gleaned from the relatively scant research that has been conducted on master’s dissertations, augmented with insight from doctoral and undergraduate supervision. one can identify five key factors: supervisor availability and level of engagement, feedback provided, and the provision of expert guidance on theory and method. it is to these that the paper now turns. supervisor’s availability and level of engagement most extant work on master’s student supervision has been in the context of the traditional dyadic supervisor-student model. one study (de kleijn et al., 2014) addresses supervisor responsiveness and adaptability to students’ needs and circumstances, and in their earlier research de kleijn et al. (2012) uncovered two variables: affiliation and control. affiliation captures ‘the extent to which the supervisor is emotionally involved in the project and/or with the student’, whilst control captures ‘the extent to which the supervisor gives direction to the student activities’ (de kleijn et al., 2012, pp.926-927). such research suggests that clear communication between supervisor and student is needed, as is matching the appropriate level of direction giving with the specific needs of the student. these findings are congruent with previous work by unsworth and colleagues (2010) which highlights the importance of the relationship between supervisor and student. here, availability is a key theme. some supervisors can allocate insufficient time for supervision (pilcher, 2011; ebadi and pourahmadi, 2019), whilst others are unavailable during the summer term when master’s students need their support most (pilcher, 2011). ebadi and pourahmadi (2019) call for a code of practice to clarify bilateral duties and expectations. parker-jenkins’s (2018) doctoral supervision research warns of the dangers of overstepping professional supervisory boundaries (over-engaged) and being a never-available jet-setting internationalist (underengaged). one can conceptualise availability as the supervisor’s willingness to communicate with the student as needed, as a precursor to the level of engagement indicated. this is defined by the extent to which the supervisor achieves a balance anastasiadis and o’brien an exploration of taught master’s student perceptions of uk dissertation supervision journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 6 between being over-involved with the student’s work (overbearing), engaged (a student-defined optimum) and under-involved (effectively absent). there is also evidence that personal and holistic supervision1 is particularly valuable for international students and those in soft disciplines (egan et al., 2009; khalifa, 2018), such as management. moreover, motivation is widely acknowledged to have an impact on learning in general, and on deep learning in particular (naidoo, 2015). final project supervisors in a dyadic supervision setup are well placed to stimulate student motivation, and can have a transformative impact through the learning environment they promote (rowley and slack, 2004). conceptually, a supervisor’s availability and level of engagement can be identified as two distinct factors. providing feedback andrews and colleagues (2018) find that learner feedback is frequently a contentious topic in student satisfaction measurements. where a supervisory role is poorly defined and understood, expectation mismatches around student support can occur, which can impact on student satisfaction metrics (del rio et al., 2017). vos and armstrong’s (2019) research on marketing dissertation supervision highlights the problem of students missing scheduled meetings and seeking feedback too close to the submission deadline. however, when master’s students receive dissertation feedback that they perceive as positive and as providing good guidance, they tend to perceive themselves to be learning from their supervisors (de kleijn et al., 2013). moreover, it is well established, generally, that feedback that is specific, timely, positive (‘sugar coated’ (zheng et al., 2019)) and tailored to the student is a significant factor in student learning (see petty, 2009; paolini, 2015; wiltbank et al., 2019). expert guidance on theory and method todd and colleagues (2004) identify academic expertise as one of a supervisor’s main roles. however, in the context of large business school cohorts, master’s 1 that is, supervision that does not simply focus on the technical aspects of the task at hand. anastasiadis and o’brien an exploration of taught master’s student perceptions of uk dissertation supervision journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 7 supervisors are not always experts in students’ specific topics, a phenomenon harwood and petrić (2018, p.50) pithily summarise in a chapter title: “this is not my topic but i'll help as much as possible”. vos and armstrong (2019) highlight mismatched supervisors (assigned between 5 and 15 students) as their main challenge: many academics are required to cover topics where they have no in-depth knowledge. however, good quality feedback is particularly salient in the absence of an optimal student-supervisor subject expertise match (de kleijn et al., 2014). a recent report (dericks et al., 2019) suggests that supportiveness rather than specific expertise is more important, even for doctoral student satisfaction. from the literature review, supervisor engagement, availability and feedback appear to be the most salient for successful dyadic master-level supervision. however, supervisors’ specific methodological and theoretical competence are also significant factors, and are therefore included in the research design. student evaluation of teaching student evaluation of teaching quality is a fraught topic. on the one hand, as remedios and lieberman (2008, p.91) argue, teaching quality is ‘by far the largest determinant of student evaluation of courses’, a view supported by gibson (2010) and by douglas and colleagues (2006). these authors’ views present an understandably positive image of teaching evaluation. there is robust evidence that student satisfaction and student learning are indeed strongly related (douglas et al., 2006; gibson, 2010). ideally, therefore, an educator would simply concentrate on teaching. on the other hand, however, there has also been growing disquiet in recent years at the over-reliance on student evaluation of teaching as a measure of teaching quality. blackmore (2009) argues that generic teaching evaluations are more about accountability and marketing than improving teaching and learning. billsberry (2014, p.151) was concerned enough by increasing managerialism and accountability to students, to address his final editorial to the topic. moreover, a recent meta-study of anastasiadis and o’brien an exploration of taught master’s student perceptions of uk dissertation supervision journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 8 students’ evaluation of teaching suggests that evaluations are often unrelated to independent views of the quality of student learning (uttl et al., 2017), supporting blackmore’s (2009) earlier argument. zabaleta (2007) finds a link between low grades and low scores in student evaluations, but no significant link between higher grades and higher evaluations, suggesting that students may merely punish faculty awarding lower grades. more broadly, clayson and colleagues (2006) find a clear reciprocal relationship between grades and students’ evaluation of their teachers (see also lancaster and fanshawe, 2015). metrics gamification appears to be a widespread and persistent phenomenon, and the authors bluntly conclude that, ‘instructors can buy evaluations with grades’, independent of learning (clayson et al., 2006, p.64). although the uk government acknowledged this danger when planning the tef (bis, 2016, p.12), eaton and penaluna’s (2019) analysis shows sharp and unexplained uk university grade inflation, for which they blame the tef. potentially exacerbating the challenges associated with relying on student evaluation of teaching is the changing role of the student. numerous factors have conspired to position the student as a consumer (finney and finney, 2010) in the uk. these include a rise in tuition fees; the remit and actions of the office for students (nicholls, 2019); the introduction of the teaching excellence framework (gunn, 2018); and of the weight given to student evaluations, particularly that of the annual national student survey (holland, 2019). there is a danger, as billsberry (2014, p.152) trenchantly argues, of edutainment, a ‘particular distortion of education where the drive is to entertain students in educational settings rather than teach them’. this concern, that non-expert students may evaluate style more favourably than substance, is at least a generation old (naftulin et al., 1973). it reflects the main message in kruger and dunning’s (1999) seminal work on ‘unrecognised incompetence’ (see also blackwood, 2012, p.72, on business undergraduates). that is, students are not always best placed to evaluate pedagogical or curriculum decisions, with the result that students may judge the teaching they have received by criteria such as grades received or the degree of support they perceive. the foregoing discussion of factors influencing student evaluation of teaching suggests that the supervisor-supervisee relationship may be negatively impacted, anastasiadis and o’brien an exploration of taught master’s student perceptions of uk dissertation supervision journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 9 precisely at the stage where students need to be working more independently. it is certainly possible to be sceptical of student evaluation, whilst recognising its central role. it is therefore desirable to find a way of teaching that minimises the disadvantages of student evaluation and generates the greatest benefit to students. the available literature suggests that supervision of the final project at master-level is a promising arena in this regard. to sum up, the literature suggests that student enjoyment facilitates learning, but by no means guarantees it, and that supervisors can facilitate student learning in the final project in five distinct ways, by: (1) communicating well; (2) providing thorough and appropriate feedback; providing competent guidance on (3) methods and (4) theory; and (5) striking a balance between underand over-involvement. the research questions can thus be stated as: 1. how do taught master’s students at a given institution experience being supervised in their final projects, in terms of the five elements just outlined? 2. what does such experience mean for universities, given the increased significance, and expansion, of teaching ratings? having outlined the theoretical basis for the paper and generated the research questions, this paper now continues to explain the methods used in answering them, before presenting and discussing the results. methods answering the first research question required conducting primary research into students’ experience. addressing the second means analysing teaching evaluations in light of the teaching excellence framework. this section concentrates on the primary research undertaken, in the form of questionnaire and focus groups. in keeping with bunderson and thompson’s (2009) method of generating exploratory anastasiadis and o’brien an exploration of taught master’s student perceptions of uk dissertation supervision journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 10 data, the researchers developed a questionnaire (see appendix 1) to capture student perceptions of each of the five specific aspects of supervision identified, and included open-ended narrative questions, to capture views on possible improvements to supervision arrangements. the survey was prepared in consultation with businesscollege’s educational development unit, and research was conducted strictly according to the standards and guidance in place at the time, including gaining the requisite ethical approval. the study aimed to develop an initial understanding of the student dissertation supervision experience. given the small window of opportunity for data gathering (a summer project submitted at the very end of the degree programme), and the strongly international nature of the student population, it was important to keep the survey as concise and straightforward as possible. in the interests of saliency and consistency, a 5-point likert scale was used with polar opposite ends and a neutral mid-point. question 1, ‘how balanced was your supervisor?’, related to supervisor involvement. question 2 inquired about supervisor availability, and the third question invited a rating of the usefulness of supervisor feedback. questions 4 and 5 elucidated usefulness ratings for methods and theory guidance. the final open-ended question invited participants to identify a change recommendation that could have improved the supervisory experience. two additional open text boxes invited master’s students to offer up any additional comments or suggestions. the questionnaire was administered on the same day as students submitted their final projects. to encourage participation in the data-gathering process, paper questionnaires and tablet computers were available at businesscollege’s reception and its administration office. administrative staff facilitated the process, actively encouraging students to complete the survey, whilst emphasising the voluntary nature of participation. students wishing to enter the prize draw did so via a separate, clearly marked collection box (prize-entry was not permitted for electronic submissions, to preserve anonymity). a suitable prize was offered to incentivise participation, the draw for which took place at the end of the day. two fully subscribed focus groups were scheduled to take place immediately after students had submitted their work, to elicit additional information; one each in anastasiadis and o’brien an exploration of taught master’s student perceptions of uk dissertation supervision journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 11 english and mandarin. this was considered appropriate given the large number of mandarin native-speakers in the cohort. however, turnout on the day led to one group being cancelled and the other becoming an individual interview. additional focus groups were thus scheduled in a subsequent academic year. these solicited student opinions on hopes and expectations, rather than on lived experience of supervision. both student cohorts were comparable in terms of such factors as age, academic background, and country of origin, and there were no material changes to the dissertation supervision process or policies in the intervening time. the second wave of focus groups was well subscribed. three focus groups took place: one in mandarin and two in english. all were subsequently transcribed for analysis. in total, nine students participated in four different events run by the lead author and a mandarin-speaking colleague. quantitative results a total of 199 surveys were received from the outgoing 2014/2015 msc cohort (159 on paper); a response rate of 44.2%. this is within the norm for organisational research (baruch and holtom, 2008). of the surveys received, 195 were complete (all numerical questions were answered) and four were partially complete. table 1 summarises the numerical data gathered. narrative responses to the survey are tabulated in appendix 2. table 1. descriptive statistics. question 1: balance question 2: communication question 3: feedback question 4: methodology question 5: theory average -0.1744 3.7949 3.9333 3.7897 3.5795 standard deviation 0.8375 1.0300 0.8855 0.9316 1.1566 median 0 4 4 4 4 possible range scoring range: -2 (far too involved) +2 (far too uninvolved) scoring range: 1 (not well/useful at all) 5 (extremely well/useful) anastasiadis and o’brien an exploration of taught master’s student perceptions of uk dissertation supervision journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 12 contingency tables, also called cross-tabs, generated using the statistical analysis package spss, were used to identify interactions between different responses. question 1 was re-scored, so that it was in line with the values in other questions. thus, -2 became 1, 0 became 3, and 2 became 5. goodman and kruskal’s gamma was used to determine associations between the different questions amongst the 199 respondents. there were statistically significant moderate-to-strong correlations between all questions. all items had a statistically significant relation to one another (at a confidence level of p ≤ 0.002). questions 2-5 were positively correlated to one another. the strength of this relationship ranged from moderate (g=0.408) to strong (g=0.775). responses to question 1 were negatively correlated with the other four questions, the strength of this relationship ranging from weak (g=0.330) to fairly strong (g=0.635). figure 1 summarises the cross-tab data in bar-chart form, providing the strength and direction of the relationship between each pair, together with the level of significance test. analysis in the next section focuses on the strength and direction of these correlations. figure 1. summary of cross-tab data: relationship between questions. anastasiadis and o’brien an exploration of taught master’s student perceptions of uk dissertation supervision journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 13 qualitative findings this section sets out a discussion of the findings from the four focus groups and the information included in the open-ended questions in the survey. much of the discussion indicated a lack of awareness of the process and of the role of supervisors (and their responsibilities), leading to uncertainty and unrealistic expectations. this was particularly pronounced for the mandarin-language focus group, but was a point of similarity for all students. there were clear differences between the mandarin and english language focus groups. english-language responders wanted supervisors to be interested in students’ work and be supportive and responsive to their needs; notably to put greater focus on the ‘affiliation’ variable (see de kleijn et al., 2012). this preference corresponds with marshall’s waiter model (2009, pp.150, 156-157), in which the anastasiadis and o’brien an exploration of taught master’s student perceptions of uk dissertation supervision journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 14 supervisor is on hand when needed, but otherwise leaves the student to get on with it unhindered. in this model, supervising is more about facilitating than teaching, as the following focus group extract indicates: english-language3: i would say for me, to show interest in what i am trying to get out of the dissertation, to try to at least be positive and give me trust and confidence in what i am doing. that’s at least what i am hoping for from a supervisor. english-language2: it’s kind of a mix of all these things, just the attention or engagement, not just ignoring what you say, to have some interest in you . . . i wouldn’t expect them to be super involved because i mean, because it’s supposed to be your project. i don’t expect much more than guidance really. english-language1: if i really, really had to choose i would choose ‘too involved’ than ‘not enough’. mandarin-language respondents, by contrast, wanted more active guidance from supervisors. to build on marshall’s (2009) gastronomical theme: if english-language respondents preferred the waiter model, then mandarin-language respondents were looking for a cooking-class arrangement. that is, they wanted a mix between teaching and facilitating, with more frequent interventions and the occasional demonstration, and strong guidance on the structure of their work (i.e. greater focus on the ‘control’ variable: see de kleijn et al., 2012; khalifa, 2018). they appeared to want supervisors to take the lead, as the following mandarin language focus group extract illustrates; mandarin-language1: for me, the most important [thing] is the structure of the [final project]. we wish supervisors would give us feedback on the structure in details, so we can start working on each part of the dissertation. anastasiadis and o’brien an exploration of taught master’s student perceptions of uk dissertation supervision journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 15 mandarin-language2: also, we may focus writing on some parts which are not actually important to the research question. we are afraid of deviating from the main theme . . . we hope the supervisors could suggest us which area to focus. mandarin-language1: that would be good [the supervisor giving students a reading list]. mandarin-language 2, 3, 4: yeah, that would be good if we are given that. yeah. agree. mandarin-language1: we are afraid that some supervisors just say you should look for related literature by yourself. but there are so many resources. we don't know which ones are good. it would be great if they could give us a list of literature to read. analysis of the focus group findings largely confirms the limited previous work in this area (e.g., de kleijn et al., 2012; 2013). however, they provide additional insight, particularly in the uk context and on the international dimension. the next section discusses the findings in some detail. discussion the paper started with a review of relevant literature on supervision and student evaluation, then introduced the methods used to conduct the research, the findings of which have just been presented. this discussion section now offers an interpretation of the data gathered and concludes by addressing the limitations of the study. the focus group data suggested that students of all backgrounds are often unsure of what to expect from the final project, and that there are notable differences between anastasiadis and o’brien an exploration of taught master’s student perceptions of uk dissertation supervision journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 16 students, depending on their background. it is unsurprising that some international students desire more active guidance from their supervisors. this arguably reflects the uncertainty associated with their comparative lack of experience in independent study and unfamiliarity with the academic norms of a different culture, including ways of reasoning (see: harwood and petrić, 2019; zheng, et al., 2019). as one respondent put it, ‘[p]robably half the students, they don’t have experience studying abroad so i think they don’t know how to write a proposal, how to write a dissertation, even, some of the people, they don’t know how to write essays.’ such an analysis is congruent with a recent study of international students in the uk that calls for critical thinking typically considered the ‘gold standard’ of western higher education to be reconsidered (hammersley-fletcher and hanley, 2016). the clear differences in expectations between different groups of students arguably provides strong support for the dyadic model of supervision, which by its nature allows for more individually-tailored interaction (wisker, 2012). however, it is relevant to note that businesscollege students were aware that their supervisor plays an influential role in grading their work, and as the primary source for employment references. in such an exposed, power-influence context, it is likely that some students might find it difficult to openly share their honest opinions and issues, even when given the opportunity in an anonymous feedback process. by comparison to the focus groups, the survey asked about students’ experience of having been supervised. the data indicate a negative correlation between question 1 (perceived supervisor involvement) and the other numerical questions (other aspects of the supervision experience). ceteris paribus, this suggests that overinvolved supervisors were seen to provide more useful guidance. this is supported both by narrative responses to survey question 6 (on possible improvements: students expressed more dissatisfaction with under-involved than with over-involved supervisors), and by views in the english-language focus group. this makes sense given the importance of the final project and the student-asconsumer phenomenon. the implication is that supervisors should err on the side of over-involvement, leading supervisees with stronger guidance à la cooking class anastasiadis and o’brien an exploration of taught master’s student perceptions of uk dissertation supervision journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 17 metaphor, rather than waiting in the background to be called upon when needed. however, such an interpretation should be treated cautiously, for three key reasons. first, question 1 scoring was not linear: the ‘ideal’ score for that question was 3; not 1 or 5. second, the descriptive statistics (table 1) indicate that students perceived their supervisors to have already achieved a near-perfect balance between the two extremes of being over-involved and insufficiently supportive, with the lowest variance in responses. interestingly, this is despite focus group indication that different groups of students have very different preferences upon entering the process, suggesting that students’ views change during the final project process, and/or they perceived their supervisors as getting the balance right for them. third, although the dyadic supervisory relationship is shorn of many of the factors that reduce the value of student evaluations, the score could nonetheless be at least partially an artefact of students valuing form over content (see naftulin et al., 1973 – the dr fox effect). responses to question 5 (theory) had the weakest relationships with other questions, with only moderate correlations. question 5 also had the lowest mean score of the four linear questions, and the highest standard deviation. this arguably reflects the non-specialist nature of supervision and represents an area with particular potential for improvement. it is reasonable to assume that students whose supervisors’ expertise matches their own research areas are more likely to feel well served on theory; a view supported by the strong correlations in students’ responses to questions 2-4 (communication, feedback, and methodology). interestingly, evidence from the focus groups suggests limited student expectation of theoretical guidance at the outset. to sum up: survey respondents generally evaluated their experience positively, perceiving their supervisors to have struck a good balance between overand underinvolvement, a key factor identified by wisker (2012). even those who were less satisfied with other aspects of their supervision experience tended to be happy with their supervisors’ involvement. students feel better guided when their supervisor is an expert in their subject area; nonetheless, supervisor engagement can compensate for lack of subject expertise. overall, we can expect student satisfaction anastasiadis and o’brien an exploration of taught master’s student perceptions of uk dissertation supervision journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 18 in final project supervision to map well with learning satisfaction (gibson, 2010; and see earlier), and student satisfaction with supervision to be positively correlated with learning. these results represent good grounds for optimism about the introduction of teaching evaluation for master’s final project supervision. indeed, the present research suggests that student evaluation of supervision has the potential to lead to improved teaching scores, without threatening teaching quality. moreover, the pernicious reciprocity effect between faculty and students outlined earlier (and see clayson et al., 2006) is less salient in a final project, because of the nature of the exercise. in short, therefore, the evidence suggests that paying attention to the student experience in supervision may be a relatively easy way for universities to both improve student learning and raise teaching scores. there is therefore a good argument to be made for timely investment in staff and processes around the final project. businesscollege provides an intriguing exploratory case study. nonetheless, the findings are arguably relevant to practice in other business and/or management schools, and indeed, to the wider higher education environment (hesa, 2019). this discussion section concludes by addressing the limitations of the current research. the focus groups were conducted with small numbers, and results should be seen in that light. in terms of questionnaire design, questions 2-5 were scored differently from question 1, making direct comparisons and interpretation of the data more challenging. this is mitigated somewhat by the simplicity of the exploratory survey, which was intended to capture students’ views on a limited number of questions. although the response rate was good by many measures, respondents were self-selecting. it was thus not random and cannot be considered representative. the results, therefore, need to be treated with caution. nonetheless, the proportion of the student population completing the questionnaire is large enough to be relevant for practice. perhaps the 44% who responded were the most motivated to do so, in which case they arguably represent both extremes of feeling. also, given the differences between the focus groups, future iterations of the survey might capture such additional demographic information as students’ home language. finally, the results presented here must be treated as indicative, in keeping with anastasiadis and o’brien an exploration of taught master’s student perceptions of uk dissertation supervision journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 19 exploratory research. a larger sample would have been needed to test construct validity, and reliability testing would have required a substantially greater sample. having said that, no claim to validity and reliability is being made: validating the questionnaire would have been beyond the stated scope of the research. conclusions this paper has examined the literature relevant to the supervision of master’s final projects, a research area that appears to be underdeveloped. it has addressed challenges related to the student evaluation of teaching. a salient survey instrument was developed using a pragmatic methodology. the results of that survey have been presented and discussed, drawing several significant conclusions. the results suggest that a greater focus on the student experience in supervision may be a relatively easy way for universities both to improve student learning and to raise teaching scores, without compromising teaching quality. the paper now concludes with several suggestions each for practice and research, before ending with a final reflection. the present research has numerous practical pedagogic implications for institutions. this is timely given the increasing regulatory focus (e.g. tef) being given to the postgraduate student experience. first, the importance of feedback for students suggests that final project supervisors should be required to receive specific training on supervision and/or giving feedback. this implication is supported by harwood and petrić’s (2019) reporting on pedagogical activities to promote supervisory practice. second, institutions should carefully consider the optimal number of students that an individual faculty member may simultaneously supervise, taking into account both aptitude and motivation, with a goal of improving both student and staff satisfaction before the tef is expanded to postgraduate students. anastasiadis and o’brien an exploration of taught master’s student perceptions of uk dissertation supervision journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 20 third, the research supports previous literature studies (holdaway, 1995; drennan and clarke, 2009; roberts and seaman, 2018) suggesting that it is beneficial to match supervisors’ expertise with students’ research choices: institutions should do so where possible, particularly in the case of students from non-western backgrounds. however, the data suggests that this aspect is neither decisive in meeting students’ expectations nor in mediating their experience of the process. penultimately, the focus group data and narrative feedback from the surveys indicate some appetite for modified administrative arrangements at businesscollege, particularly in providing greater clarity on processes and procedures (such as frequency of meeting, and commenting on written drafts). finally, universities might usefully consider following the example of many uk local councils, by providing summary information on the processes to follow in preparing and submitting work in the native languages most frequently spoken by their students. doing so would facilitate non-native students’ understanding of unfamiliar academic practices and permit them to focus more fully on the quality of their academic work. the exploratory research presented here suggests numerous directions for further research. the present research has been strengthened by serendipity in failure: conducting research on both pre-dissertation and post-dissertation students provided data from two points along students’ progress, which, although not originally planned, has strengthened the findings and analysis. can the scope be usefully widened further, to draw out expectations, needs and wants before, during and after the dissertation experience? can it be broadened to also include undergraduate dissertations? the second area is one of differences. as is common across the western higher education landscape (universities uk, 2014; australian government, 2016), businesscollege has a high proportion of international students, particularly from china. to what extent do learning cultures embedded in specific educational backgrounds influence students’ expectations of the final project and of the anastasiadis and o’brien an exploration of taught master’s student perceptions of uk dissertation supervision journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 21 supervisor? what role does an international faculty play in the context of supervision? one implication of this paper is that students’ experience of the final project could disproportionately affect their ongoing perceptions of businesscollege, affecting organizational reputation. the third area of further research would thus be to test this possibility through a survey of alumni at some temporal distance from completing their studies. the fourth avenue of inquiry is related to the implication that student satisfaction with the supervision process is more closely related to learning than is student satisfaction with coursework. there are good theoretical reasons for such a conclusion (erichsen, et al., 2014; roberts and seaman, 2018) but can it be empirically tested? also, what about alternative models of supervision? finally, the possibilities of experiential learning are interesting. students’ final piece of work is typically a stand-alone research project. an ongoing discussion about the value of experiential learning (e.g. chia and holt, 2008; ng, et al., 2009) suggests that alternative forms of final assessment such as internships (beenen, 2013) may be worth exploring. in closing, master’s students are the least well-understood student group, and the final project is even less well-understood. universities arguably have a shrinking window of opportunity to experiment; to conduct well-monitored trials of different ways of supervision and other aspects of teaching at master’s level. doing so could both improve students’ learning and experience, and benefit university ratings. acknowledgements the authors thank the education development unit and colleagues at businesscollege for their input at various stages of this paper’s development. thanks are due also to businesscollege for providing financial and organizational anastasiadis and o’brien an exploration of taught master’s student perceptions of uk dissertation supervision journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 22 support with the data gathering, as well as to eli grant for assistance with data analysis. references anderson, c., day, k., and mclaughlin, p. (2006) ‘mastering the dissertation: lecturers’ representations of the purposes and processes of master’s level dissertation supervision’, studies in higher education, 31(2), pp. 149-168. andrews, m., brown, r., and mesher, l. (2018) ‘engaging students with assessment and feedback: improving satisfaction and attainment with students as codesigners’, practitioner research in higher education, 11(1), pp. 32-46. australian government, department of education and training (2016) international student numbers 2015. research snapshot available at: https://internationaleducation.gov.au/research/researchsnapshots/documents/student numbers 2015.pdf baruch, y., and holtom, b. c. (2008) ‘survey response rate levels and trends in organizational research’, human relations, 61(8), pp. 1139-1160. beatty, j. e., and leigh, j. s. a. (2010) ‘taking stock of management education: a comparison of three management education journals’, journal of management education, 34(3), pp. 367-392. beenen, g. (2013) ‘the effects of goal orientations and supervisor concerns on mba intern learning and performance’, academy of management learning and education, 13(1), pp. 82-101. billsberry, j. (2014) ‘the rise and rise of management edutainment’, journal of management education, 38(2), pp. 151-159. anastasiadis and o’brien an exploration of taught master’s student perceptions of uk dissertation supervision journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 23 bis (2015) ‘fulfilling our potential: teaching excellence, social mobility and student choice’, london: department for business, innovation and skills. available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/higher-educationteaching-excellence-social-mobility-and-student-choice (accessed: 25 march 2017). bis (2016) success as a knowledge economy: teaching excellence, social mobility and student choice. london: department for business, innovation and skills. available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/f ile/523396/bis-16-265-success-as-a-knowledge-economy.pdf (accessed: 25 april 2018). blackmore, j. (2009) ‘academic pedagogies, quality logics and performative universities: evaluating teaching and what students want’, studies in higher education, 34(8), pp. 857-872. blackwood, t. (2012) ‘business undergraduates’ knowledge monitoring accuracy: how much do they know about how much they know?’ teaching in higher education, 18(1), pp. 1-13. bunderson, j. s., and thompson, j. a. (2009) ‘the call of the wild: zookeepers, callings, and the double-edged sword of deeply meaningful work’, administrative science quarterly, 54(1), pp. 32-57. chia, r., and holt, r. (2008) ‘the nature of knowledge in business schools’, academy of management learning and education, 7(4), pp. 471-486. clayson, d. e., frost, t. f., and sheffet, m. j. (2006) ‘grades and the student evaluation of instruction: a test of the reciprocity effect’, academy of management learning and education, 5(1), pp. 52-65. anastasiadis and o’brien an exploration of taught master’s student perceptions of uk dissertation supervision journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 24 del río, m. l., díaz-vázquez, r., and maside sanfiz, j. m. (2018) ‘satisfaction with the supervision of undergraduate dissertations’, active learning in higher education, 19(2), 159-172. de kleijn, r. a. m., mainhard, m. t., meijer, p. c., brekelmans, m., and pilot, a. (2013) ‘master’s thesis projects: student perceptions of supervisor feedback’, assessment and evaluation in higher education, 38 (march 2015), pp. 1012-1026. de kleijn, r. a. m., mainhard, m. t., meijer, p. c., pilot, a., and brekelmans, m. (2012) ‘master’s thesis supervision: relations between perceptions of the supervisor-student relationship, final grade, perceived supervisor contribution to learning and student satisfaction’, studies in higher education, 37(8), pp. 925-939. de kleijn, r. a. m., meijer, p. c., brekelmans, m., and pilot, a. (2014) ‘adaptive research supervision: exploring expert thesis supervisors’ practical knowledge’, higher education research and development, (august 2014), pp. 1-14. de kleijn, r. a. m., meijer, p. c., pilot, a., and brekelmans, m. (2014) ‘the relation between feedback perceptions and the supervisor-student relationship in master’s thesis projects’, teaching in higher education, 19(4), pp. 336-349. dericks, g., thompson, e., roberts, m., and phua, f. (2019) ‘determinants of phd student satisfaction: the roles of supervisor, department, and peer qualities’, assessment and evaluation in higher education, 44(7), pp. 1046-1061. dietz, c., arkenau, c., and meyer-wentrup, f. (2000) ‘the german medical dissertation time to change?’ academic medicine. 75(8), pp. 861-863 douglas, j., douglas, a., and barnes, b. (2006) ‘measuring student satisfaction at a anastasiadis and o’brien an exploration of taught master’s student perceptions of uk dissertation supervision journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 25 uk university’, quality assurance in education, 14(3), pp. 251-267. drennan, j., and clarke, m. (2009) ‘coursework master’s programmes: the student’s experience of research and research supervision’, studies in higher education, 34(5), pp. 483-500. dysthe, o. (2002) ‘professors as mediators of academic text cultures: an interview study with advisors and master’s degree students in three disciplines in a norwegian university’, written communication, 19(4), 493-544. dysthe, o., samara, a., and westrheim, k. (2006) ‘multivoiced supervision of master’s students: a case study of alternative supervision practices in higher education’, studies in higher education, 31(3), pp. 299-318. eaton, s. e., and penaluna, l. a. (2019) grading with integrity: opening the uncomfortable conversation around grade inflation. [accessed from https://prism.ucalgary.ca/handle/1880/110055 28 july 2019] ebadi, s. and pourahmadi, f. (2019) ‘exploring challenges in writing efl master theses: students and supervisors' perspectives’, i-manager's journal on english language teaching, 9(2), 42. egan, r., stockley, d., brouwer, b., tripp, d., and stechyson, n. (2009) ‘relationships between area of academic concentration, supervisory style, student needs and best practices’, studies in higher education, 34(3), pp. 337-345. erichsen, e. a., bolliger, d. u., and halupa, c. (2014) student satisfaction with graduate supervision in doctoral programs primarily delivered in distance education settings. studies in higher education, 39(2), 321-338. filippou, k., kallo, j., and mikkilä-erdmann, m. (2017) ‘students’ views on thesis supervision in international master’s degree programmes in finnish https://prism.ucalgary.ca/handle/1880/110055%2028%20july%202019 anastasiadis and o’brien an exploration of taught master’s student perceptions of uk dissertation supervision journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 26 universities’, intercultural education 28 (3), 334-352. doi: 10.1080/14675986.2017.1333713 finney, t. g., and finney, r. z. (2010) ‘are students their universities’ customers? an exploratory study’, education + training, 52(4), pp. 276-291. gibson, a. (2010) ‘measuring business student satisfaction: a review and summary of the major predictors’, journal of higher education policy and management, 32(3), pp. 251-259. gunn, a. (2018) ‘metrics and methodologies for measuring teaching quality in higher education: developing the teaching excellence framework (tef)’, educational review, 70(2), 129-148. hallett, f. (2010) ‘the postgraduate student experience of study support: a phenomenographic analysis’, studies in higher education, 35(2), 225-238. halse, c. (2011) ‘‘becoming a supervisor’: the impact of doctoral supervision on supervisors’ learning’, studies in higher education, 36(5), pp. 557-570. halse, c., and malfroy, j. (2010) ‘retheorizing doctoral supervision as professional work’, studies in higher education, 35(1), pp. 79-92. hammersley-fletcher, l., and hanley, c. (2016) ‘the use of critical thinking in higher education in relation to the international student: shifting policy and practice’, british educational research journal, 42(6), pp. 978-992. harwood, n., and petrić, b. (2018) ‘adaptive master’s dissertation supervision: a longitudinal case study’, teaching in higher education, 0(0), pp. 1-16. https://doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2018.1541881 harwood, n., and petrić, b. (2019) ‘helping international master’s students navigate dissertation supervision: research-informed discussion and awarenessraising activities’, journal of international studies, 9(1), pp. 150-171. anastasiadis and o’brien an exploration of taught master’s student perceptions of uk dissertation supervision journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 27 hesa (2019) what do he students study? [ accessed 11 april 2019 https://www.hesa.ac.uk/data-and-analysis/students/what-study ] holdaway, e. (1995) supervision of graduate students. canadian journal of higher education, 25(3), pp. 1-29. holland, e. p. (2019) ‘making sense of module feedback: accounting for individual behaviours in student evaluations of teaching’, assessment and evaluation in higher education, 44(6), pp. 961-972. holtbrügge, d., and mohr, a. t. (2010) ‘cultural determinants of learning style preferences’, academy of management learning and education, 9(4), pp. 622-637. hordern, j. (2014) ‘management studies educational knowledge: technical, elite or political?’ teaching in higher education, 19(4), pp. 385-396. khalifa, r. (2018) ‘the presence and efficacy of supervision styles: a case study of a professional doctoral progamme in the united arab emirates (uae)’. journal of international business eductation. volume 13: pp:00-00 online kruger, j., and dunning, d. (1999) ‘unskilled and unaware of it: how difficulties in recognizing one’s own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments’, journal of personality and social psychology, 77(6), pp. 1121-1134. lancaster, t., and fanshawe, t. r. (2015) ‘assessing the quality of uk medical schools: what is the validity of student satisfaction ratings as an outcome measure?’ [accessed from https://weblearn.ox.ac.uk/access/content/group/895746d8-7afb-4cb3-a4617e7fca72e67c/validity of student satisfaction ratings as a quality metric in uk medical education.pdf 25 august 2018] anastasiadis and o’brien an exploration of taught master’s student perceptions of uk dissertation supervision journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 28 larivière, v., zuccala, a., and archambault, é. (2008) ‘the declining scientific impact of theses: implications for electronic thesis and dissertation repositories and graduate studies’, scientometrics, 74(1), pp.109-121. marshall, s. (2009) ‘supervising projects and dissertations’, in h. fry, s. ketteridge, and s. marshall (eds.), a handbook for teaching and learning in higher education: enhancing academic practice (3rd ed.). london: routledge. mccallin, a., and nayar, s. (2012) ‘postgraduate research supervision: a critical review of current practice’, teaching in higher education, 17(1), pp. 63-74. http://doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2011.590979 meeus, w., van looy, l., and libotton, a. (2004) ‘the bachelor’s thesis in teacher education’, european journal of teacher education, 27(3), pp. 299-321. morris, s., pitt, r., and manathunga, c. (2012) ‘students’ experiences of supervision in academic and industry settings: results of an australian study’, assessment and evaluation in higher education, 37(5), 619-636. naftulin, d. h., ware, j. e. j., and donnelly, f. a. (1973) ‘the doctor fox lecture: a paradigm of educational seduction’, journal of medical education, 48(7), pp. 630-635. naidoo, d. (2015) ‘understanding non-traditional phd students habitus implications for phd programmes’, teaching in higher education, 20(3), pp. 340-351. ng, k. y., dyne, l. van, and ang, s. (2009) ‘from experience to experiential learning: cultural intelligence as a learning capability for global leader development’, academy of management learning and education, 8(4), pp. 511-526. nicholls, j. (2019) ‘higher education governance and policy on trial’, governing higher education today: international perspectives, 47 in john, r., anastasiadis and o’brien an exploration of taught master’s student perceptions of uk dissertation supervision journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 29 nicholls, j., and strike, t. (eds.). (2019). governing higher education today: international perspectives. routledge. ofs (2018) ‘new office for students research to focus on value for money’, news release, 23 january 2018. bristol: office for students. [accessed from https://www.officeforstudents.org.uk/new-office-for-students-research-tofocus-on-value-for-money/ 25 april 2018] paolini, a. (2015) ‘enhancing teaching effectiveness and student learning outcomes’, the journal of effective teaching, 15(1), 20-33. retrieved from http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=trueanddb=eueandan=102 152590andsite=ehost-liveandscope=site parker-jenkins, m. (2018) ‘mind the gap: developing the roles, expectations and boundaries in the doctoral supervisor-supervisee relationship’, studies in higher education, 43(1), 57-71. petty, g. (2009) teaching today: a practical guide (4th ed.). bath: nelsonthornes. pilcher, n. (2011) ‘the uk postgraduate masters dissertation: an ‘elusive chameleon’?’, teaching in higher education, 16(1), 29-40. reguant, m., martínez-olmo, f., and contreras-higuera, w. (2018) ‘supervisors’ perceptions of research competencies in the final-year project’, educational research, 60(1), 113-129. remedios, r., and lieberman, d. a. (2008) ‘editorial. i liked your course because you taught me well: the influence of grades, workload, expectations and goals on students’ evaluations of teaching’, british educational research journal, 34(1), pp. 91-115. roberts, l. d., and seaman, k. (2018) ‘good undergraduate dissertation supervision: perspectives of supervisors and dissertation http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&an=102152590&site=ehost-live&scope=site http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&an=102152590&site=ehost-live&scope=site anastasiadis and o’brien an exploration of taught master’s student perceptions of uk dissertation supervision journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 30 coordinators’, international journal for academic development, 23(1), 2840. rowley, j., and slack, f. (2004) ‘what is the future for undergraduate dissertations?’ education+ training, 46(4), pp. 176-181. simpson, r., sturges, j., and weight, p. (2010) ‘transient, unsettling and creative space: experiences of liminality through the accounts of chinese students on a uk-based mba’, management learning, 41(1), pp. 53-70. todd, m., bannister, p., and clegg, s. (2004) ‘independent inquiry and the undergraduate dissertation: perceptions and experiences of final-year social science students’, assessment and evaluation in higher education 29(3): 335-55. tomlinson, m. (2018) ‘conceptions of the value of higher education in a measured market’, higher education, 75(4), 711-727. universities uk. (2014) ‘the funding environment for universities 2014. international students in higher education: the uk and its competition’, higher education in focus. retrieved from http://www.universitiesuk.ac.uk/policyand-analysis/reports/documents/2014/international-students-in-highereducation.pdf unsworth, k. l., turner, n., williams, h. m., and piccin‐houle, s. (2010) ‘giving thanks: the relational context of gratitude in postgraduate supervision’, studies in higher education, 35(8), pp. 871-888. uttl, b., white, c. a., and gonzalez, d. w. (2017) ‘meta-analysis of faculty's teaching effectiveness: student evaluation of teaching ratings and student learning are not related’, studies in educational evaluation, 54, pp. 22-42. anastasiadis and o’brien an exploration of taught master’s student perceptions of uk dissertation supervision journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 31 vos, l., and armstrong, k. (2019) ‘context and process challenges associated with supervising postgraduate dissertations: an example from marketing’, the international journal of management education, 17(1), 47-61. wiltbank, l., williams, k., salter, r., marciniak, l., sederstrom, e., mcconnell, m., offerdahl, e., boyer, j., and momsen, j. (2019) ‘student perceptions and use of feedback during active learning: a new model from repeated stimulated recall interviews’, assessment and evaluation in higher education, 44(3), 431-448. wisker, g. (2012) the good supervisor: supervising postgraduate and undergraduate research for doctoral theses and dissertations. 2nd ed. palgrave macmillan, london. yusoff, m., mcleay, f., and woodruffe-buron, h. (2015) ‘dimensions driving business student satisfaction in higher education’, quality assurance in education, 23(1), 86-104. zabaleta, f. (2007) ‘the use and misuse of student evaluations of teaching’, teaching in higher education, 12(1), pp. 55-76. zheng, y., yu, s., wang, b., and zhang, y. (2019) ‘exploring student engagement with supervisor feedback on master’s thesis: insights from a case study’, innovations in education and teaching international, 1-12. author details stephanos anastasiadis is professor at the police academy of lower saxony, germany. whilst preparing this manuscript, he was senior lecturer in organisations and sustainability at royal holloway, university of london, where he taught anastasiadis and o’brien an exploration of taught master’s student perceptions of uk dissertation supervision journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 32 business ethics and sustainability. his research interests centre on the responsible use of organizational power. he previously worked as an environmental lobbyist in brussels. stephanos has published in outlets such as the british journal of management, journal of management inquiry and business & society. justin o’brien is senior lecturer in strategy and marketing and a national teaching fellow. he is director of undergraduate education and teaches digital, services and entrepreneurial marketing, adding design thinking most recently to his portfolio. he publishes on practical, often experiential, pedagogic interventions and business case studies. he teaches internationally in stockholm, paris, toulouse and singapore. anastasiadis and o’brien an exploration of taught master’s student perceptions of uk dissertation supervision journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 33 appendix 1: questionnaire [the original questionnaire was on businesscollege letterhead] thank you for taking the time to complete this anonymous survey about your experience of being supervised during your [final project]. your answers will help us to understand how we are performing, and to identify areas in which we can improve the quality of the supervision we offer. it should take 3-5 minutes to answer all seven questions. completing the questionnaire in person at [institution] entitles you to enter a lucky draw for one of two prizes. each prize is £150-worth of vouchers to [an iconic local store]. after you complete the questionnaire you will be offered a paper token: if you want to enter the draw, complete the token and put it in the box. prizes will be drawn at random on 1 september, and the winners informed the same day. questions balance the supervisor’s role is to provide assistance to the student, striking a balance between being too involved in the student’s work and not providing enough necessary support. how balanced was your supervisor? (choose one option only) far too involved too involved balance about right too little support far too little support      communication supervisor and student should communicate about the project as appropriate. how well do you think your supervisor’s availability matched your needs? (choose one option only) not well at all not particularly well neither well nor badly well extremely well      anastasiadis and o’brien an exploration of taught master’s student perceptions of uk dissertation supervision journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 34 feedback feedback from the supervisor should help the student to develop new insights and improve their work. how useful did you find your supervisor’s feedback in general? (choose one option only) extremely useful useful neither useful nor not useful not particularly useful not useful at all      methodology one of the main areas in which a supervisor can help a student is to provide guidance on research methods. how useful was your supervisor’s guidance on methods? (choose one option only) not useful at all not particularly useful neither useful nor not useful useful extremely useful      theory another main area in which a supervisor can help a student is to provide guidance on theoretical development. how useful was your supervisor’s guidance on theory? (choose one option only) extremely useful useful neither useful nor not useful not particularly useful not useful at all      please suggest one change that your supervisor could have made to improve your experience. anastasiadis and o’brien an exploration of taught master’s student perceptions of uk dissertation supervision journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 35 if you have any further comments or suggestions, please list them below. space for additional comments please place your completed questionnaire into one of the marked boxes provided. if you have any questions about this survey, please contact [named person, with details] thank you! anastasiadis and o’brien an exploration of taught master’s student perceptions of uk dissertation supervision journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 36 appendix 2: narrative responses to survey table 2. areas of student concern (narrative responses to q6 & q7 of questionnaire). theme examples of student responses feedback  be a bit more specific sometimes. i felt that the feedback was too broad and could have been more focused at times.  could have provided more than yes / no answers regarding the appropriateness of the methodology and literature review  a bit more insight, comments and suggestions on the content of the paper and theories.  advice more on discussion part  in the meanwhile [my supervisor] can give us some feedback. we can depend on the feedback to modify our dissertation. availability  i think [my supervisor] was giving too many students supervision  [my supervisor] is too busy and no time for reply to email  more meeting with students.  more meetings. i only had once face-to-face meeting.  i think there are inadequate number of supervisor. … some supervisors did not seem to have time to advise or support their students. i do not think it is fair for both supervisors and students as compared to other department where one person is assigned to supervise only a few students (less than 5) compatibility  match supervisor and student: understand a bit more about the topic  my supervisor is not keen on my research area. . administrative/ organizational concerns  what should be changed is the schedule of research methods class and submission period of [the] proposal. the current schedule of research method has been arranged far anastasiadis and o’brien an exploration of taught master’s student perceptions of uk dissertation supervision journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 37 too early during the term time.  i don’t think the proposals should have been marked… i got a good grade so i am not complaining … we had to submit two proposals, one as an assignment and one is the actual one but they could have been the same. it didn’t make sense to me. anastasiadis and o’brien an exploration of taught master’s student perceptions of uk dissertation supervision journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 38 appendix 3: details of focus group table 3. details of focus groups. event duration language participants interview 1 september 2014 20’40” english one male; not english native-speaker focus group 6 february 2017 22’56” english two male, one female; two english native-speakers, one non-native speaker interview 13 february 2017 25’11” english one male; mandarin native-speaker focus group 13 february 2017 34’19” mandarin four female; all mandarin native-speakers an exploration of taught master’s student perceptions of uk dissertation supervision introduction literature review supervisor’s availability and level of engagement providing feedback expert guidance on theory and method student evaluation of teaching methods quantitative results qualitative findings discussion conclusions references balance communication feedback methodology theory please suggest one change that your supervisor could have made to improve your experience. if you have any further comments or suggestions, please list them below. space for additional comments appendix 2: narrative responses to survey appendix 3: details of focus group journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special issue 22: compendium of innovative practice october 2021 ________________________________________________________________________ how it adds up: dual reflections on the online engagement of one cohort of accounting students vicky collins university of reading, uk sue blackett university of reading, uk keywords: international students; accounting and finance; online learning; english for academic purposes; covid-19. the challenge in september 2020 module preparation began with a plethora of tel (technology enhanced learning) support and a bankable level of expertise in online teaching garnered over the summer. for the autumn term, the university pursued a blended learning approach, combining face-to-face interactive sessions and online core materials. in the spring term teaching was moved online following government restrictions. as lecturers from different disciplines, we present insights into our roles of teaching the same cohort of 26 msc accounting and finance students from autumn 2020 through to spring 2021. approximately 80% pursued their studies remotely and the majority were l2 english speakers from non-alphabetic language systems. a proportion of students each year complete pre-sessional english language programmes to meet language requirements or hold an undergraduate degree from a uk university. levels of language proficiency, adaptation to new content, and a new out-of-class approach to learning had an observable negative effect on participation compared to precovid-19 teaching as evidenced by statistical data on user activity within the vle (virtual learning environment), and preparedness for synchronous activity. this multi-disciplinary account reflects on the emerging obstacles to student engagement in the online environment, and adjustments made to respond to these. collins and blackett how it adds up: dual reflections on the online engagement of one cohort of accounting students journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 2 the disciplinary context: accounting and finance face-to-face accounting information systems classes are dynamic with the focus being on students assimilating new information through the active learning technique of guided discovery (fry et al., 2014) and sharing ideas through peer learning (crouch and mazur, 2001). this creates micro-communities of learners that through participation, share a common experience resulting in high levels of engagement. the disciplinary context: english for academic purposes rather than following the lecture/seminar model, english specific for academic purposes (esap) involves collaboratively unpacking spoken or written texts in groups of 16 maximum. traditional classes usually focus on both productive and receptive interactive language tasks with considerable student-to-student interaction and tutor facilitation. ‘pandemic pedagogy’, with its emphasis on a flipped classroom – the virtues of which have been extolled in language learning (mehring and leis, 2018) – offered a new approach to incorporating these skills. students were expected to engage firstly with one hour of asynchronous material and consolidate understanding in the live lesson. however, three weeks in, it was clear that student participation in pre-class activities was not fulfilling expectations and rather than feeling ‘flippin’ marvellous’ (fry, 2020), we felt more flipped out. two issues emerged: it was not ideal for learners to encounter material ‘cold’, i.e., without the scaffolding a tutorled approach affords. secondly, the time required to complete the materials was invisible to students as it was not represented on the timetable. this was particularly problematic for the esap non-credit bearing module as it was a lower priority for students. despite well-signposted instructions and scaffolded online resources, review of vle module analytics further revealed that few students completed the asynchronous resources. the result was that the cohort was underprepared for the live sessions. this was evidenced by student cameras being switched off, and a general reluctance to speak or use the chat function to discuss lecture content. the absence of visual and verbal clues from the students made it impossible to deliver timely feedback and adjust module delivery and content to better cater to student needs. collins and blackett how it adds up: dual reflections on the online engagement of one cohort of accounting students journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 3 the response for the esap module, the pre-lesson element was removed and students instead worked through tasks collaboratively with the tutor at first sight in the live class. extension tasks were set from this, therefore the live workshop acted as a primer for further asynchronous activities. student participation improved marginally but most importantly nobody lost face by admitting incompletion of pre-class work and this served well to improve tutor-student relations. online drop-in office hours for students to voluntarily attend and discuss issues with core discipline-specific materials were also established. alas, for every week of term, the module convenor was alone in the virtual meeting room perhaps because students were embarrassed or felt they were imposing on lecturer time (cronin, 1991, cited guerrero and rod, 2013). becoming ever more nervous, the response was to increase the frequency of communications via vle announcements and cohort-wide emails. yielding little engagement, the student representative was approached as a conduit to communicate with his peers. a positive result is that a preferred channel of communication was found, and whilst not ideal, the student representative was able to confirm that his peers had received, and were aware, of key information. recommendations students’ overall engagement with the new online culture can be observed through anderson’s (1994) model of cross-cultural adaptation. a few of the 26 students were ‘participators’. they were effective in asynchronous tasks and showed direct inquiry with us in live online lessons. some students demonstrated that they were ‘adjusters’. they tried to understand the new situation but were still actively coping throughout both terms. most students displayed ‘time-server’ behaviours by working at a low capacity with minimal participation and exhibiting poor productivity in their work (anderson, 1994). with in-person delivery, degrees of engagement are also displayed; however, our takeaway is that remote learning coupled with studying outside the uk magnified this minimal participation and poor productivity. the statistical data showing student use of online resources (figure 1) broadly reflects these findings. collins and blackett how it adds up: dual reflections on the online engagement of one cohort of accounting students journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 4 figure 1. extract from vle showing frequency of student access to accounting module resources. students were more active in accessing resources before the summative assessments deadlines in february and april, supporting our ‘time-server’ behaviours observations. we assert that this behaviour contributed to lower coursework results for the module compared to previous years (figure 2). figure 2. comparison of accounting module results 2017/18-2021. as digital learning becomes part of what a university does, institutions may consider additional support for inducting students into their instructional approaches. a gradual implementation of the flipped classroom would be less daunting for learners (lo and hew, 2017). monitoring engagement for different provisions and over a longer period is also collins and blackett how it adds up: dual reflections on the online engagement of one cohort of accounting students journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 5 recommended. finally, greater timetabled visibility of asynchronous content could enhance participation by assisting students with time management. references anderson, l. (1994) ‘a new look at an old construct: cross-cultural adaptation’, international journal of intercultural relations, 18(3), pp.293-328. https://doi.org/10.1016/0147-1767(94)90035-3. crouch, c. and mazur, e. (2001) ‘peer instruction: ten years of experience and results’, american journal of physics, 69(9), pp.970-977. https://doi.org/10.1119/1.1374249. fry, s. (2020) ‘flippin’ marvellous!’, education technology, 9 october. available at https://edtechnology.co.uk/features/update-flipped-learning-et/ (accessed: 30 april 2021) fry, h., ketteridge, s., marshall, s. and ketteridge, s. (2014) a handbook for teaching and learning in higher education: enhancing academic practice. london: routledge. guerrero, m. and rod, a. b. (2013) ‘engaging in office hours: a study of student-faculty interaction and academic performance’, journal of political science education, 9(4), pp.403-416. https://doi.org/10.1080/15512169.2013.835554. lo, c. k. and hew, k. f. (2017) ‘a critical review of flipped classroom challenges in k-12 education: possible solutions and recommendations for future research’, research and practice in technology enhanced learning, 12(4), pp.1-22. https://doi.org/10.1186/s41039-016-0044-2. mehring, j. and leis, a. (2018) innovations in flipping the language classroom: theories and practices. 1st edn. singapore: springer singapore. https://doi.org/10.1016/0147-1767(94)90035-3 https://doi.org/10.1119/1.1374249 https://edtechnology.co.uk/features/update-flipped-learning-et/ https://doi.org/10.1080/15512169.2013.835554 https://doi.org/10.1186/s41039-016-0044-2 collins and blackett how it adds up: dual reflections on the online engagement of one cohort of accounting students journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 6 author details vicky collins is an eap lecturer at the international study and language institute (isli), university of reading. she works with a range of different student cohorts in her roles as academic language and literacy liaison for the business school, pre-sessional english language coordinator, and on global graduate modules for study abroad/erasmus programmes. her professional interests include curriculum design and an exploration of genres of academic writing in the business school. sue blackett is a lecturer in accounting at henley business school, university of reading. she works with predominantly postgraduate students and is the programme director for the bsc accounting & finance programme. she leads a variety of accounting subjects such as accounting information systems, management accounting: theory & practice and business in practice: accounting for managers. professional interests include widening accessibility and curriculum and assessment design in accounting. how it adds up: dual reflections on the online engagement of one cohort of accounting students the challenge the disciplinary context: accounting and finance the disciplinary context: english for academic purposes the response recommendations references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special issue 22: compendium of innovative practice october 2021 ________________________________________________________________________ developing online content to support students: the remote learning skillsguide lee fallin university of hull, uk keywords: covid-19; online learning; remote learning; asynchronous; self-help; higher education. the challenge 17 march 2020 was our last day of campus-based operation for the skills team at the university of hull before lockdown. i had held my last face-to-face appointments that morning and spent the afternoon re-programming our appointment and workshop system to issue webinar urls instead of physical locations. that bit was relatively easy. the challenge came upon realising the team’s extensive range of online self-help skillsguides (see university of hull, 2021b) included nothing that would support remote or blended learning. while support for academic literacies such as writing, critical thinking, and referencing could remain largely the same, this was not the case for all our guidance. topics such as time management, note creation, lecture participation, and academic presentations, need to be addressed differently in the context of remote learning (ebner and gegenfurtner, 2019). in hindsight, students were generally well prepared for how to manage their time within the structured campus regime, but nothing really prepared them for the freedom of remote learning during the lockdown. furthermore, any existing research or support for online learning did not cover the same context as the pandemic. most students would not choose to learn this way and, during the pandemic, may have found themselves with competing priorities such as childcare. the global pandemic forced online learning upon them, and they needed support that was sensitive to this. as per the phrase coined by hodges et al, this was not just online learning, but emergency remote learning (2020). this too needed consideration. fallin developing online content to support students: the remote learning skills guide journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 2 the response with all students and academics suddenly thrown into an online learning context, it was clear further content and support was needed. the team’s current skillsguides provided a suitable environment and template to add new content. on discussion, we were unsure how deeply to embed online approaches to learning, so we built a standalone remote learning skillsguide (university of hull, 2021a). this focused on online learning, time management, and how to use online library tools. it also included social elements like how to collaborate online with other students, which was important for modules that adopted more socially-based approaches to learning (brieger, arghode and mclean, 2020). this mode of content delivery for the new skillsguide included written pages, visualisations, and videos to offer multiple means of communication. putting our pandemic-related support into a single guide made it a convenient place for students to pick up advice for the move to remote learning. it also helped address the context of the students who were experiencing this ‘emergency’ remote learning (hodges et al., 2020) in a supportive way. to support students learning in this new context, the guidance produced for this skillsguide focused on what i felt were the core literacies of online learning that students would need to develop. it is important to assert that these ‘skills’ are complicated literacies (lea and street, 1998; hilsdon, malone and syska, 2019). for example, how to behave in a lecture is not inherent; how students attend, participate, think, and create notes within a lecture varies greatly. in outlining the remote learning skillsguide, i had to reflect on how students would be transitioning those literacies to the online space. it is not an easy move for students (hodges et al., 2020), and it would also be contextualised based on content delivery. as such, the guide focused on things like how to engage with lecture recordings as well as live webinars. it also linked in our existing guidance, for example, on note creation to reinforce other literacies in the context of online learning. from a learning theory perspective, skillsguides are a content-driven mode of learning delivery. this is akin to salmon’s ‘planet contentia’ (2011), based on the transmission mode of teaching. while this does not afford the interactive and active learning opportunities associated with good learning development interventions (such as mansfield, fallin developing online content to support students: the remote learning skills guide journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 3 2020), open content-based approaches ensure that a self-directed base level of support is available (blake, grayson and karamalla-gaiballa, 2019). this was exactly what we needed in the face of the pandemic. when considering broader theories of online instruction, it was also clear that unlearning (brieger, arghode and mclean, 2020) would be an important aspect, as students adapted to new learning contexts. for this reason, we contrasted face-to-face experiences with online learning to assist students making this transition. recommendations the remote learning skillsguide launched on 26 march 2020, just a few days after our campus officially closed. it quickly built towards hundreds of views a day, with a total of 19,961 views from launch to the end of the academic year. the content was also embedded into 24 modules within the university’s virtual learning environment, especially in nursing where teaching continued to run over summer. this demonstrated the benefit of rapidly turning around content to be responsive to student needs. it is something the team plans to take further. open online content is notoriously difficult to evaluate (blake, grayson and karamallagaiballa, 2019) and while the new skillsguide was not formally evaluated, we received plenty of anecdotal feedback from staff and students on how beneficial they had found the guidance. we also received constructive feedback which helped us to develop the skillsguide further. for example, one addition was our manifesto for better online learning which contextualised netiquette (shea, 1996) for contemporary online learning. this was requested by academic staff, to help support students with the often-unwritten rules and etiquette of online learning. a next step for this skillsguide, and for similar online resources, is to develop an evaluation framework and process. this will allow learning developers to better understand the success of such resources. in recognition that this guidance may benefit students beyond our institution, all our content was licensed under creative commons (2020) by-nc-sa. this was the first learning development resource the skills team explicitly licensed under creative commons. i found it heartening to see how this resource was copied, remixed, and fallin developing online content to support students: the remote learning skills guide journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 4 adapted by others in the sector, as allowed under the licence. i am happy to see that this skillsguide has been reproduced in many different forms across over at least 20 different institutions, under the same licence. i hope to recommend this licensing model for further implementation on our guides. references blake, j. r. s., grayson, n. and karamalla-gaiballa, s. (2019) 'investigating impact: exploring the effect of ‘open’ support on student success', journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16, december, pp.1-17. https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.v0i16.540. brieger, e., arghode, v. and mclean, g. (2020) 'connecting theory and practice: reviewing six learning theories to inform online instruction', european journal of training and development, 44(4/5), pp.321-339. https://doi.org/10.1108/ejtd-072019-0116. creative commons (2020) attribution-noncommercial-sharealike 4.0 international. available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/legalcode (accessed: 9 may 2021). ebner, c. and gegenfurtner, a. (2019) 'learning and satisfaction in webinar, online, and face-to-face instruction: a meta-analysis', frontiers in education: frontiers, 4(a92). https://doi.org/10.3389/feduc.2019.00092. hilsdon, j., malone, c. and syska, a. (2019) 'academic literacies twenty years on: a community-sourced literature review', journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15, november, pp.1-47. https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.v0i15.567. hodges, c., moore, s., lockee, b., trust, t. and bond, a. (2020) 'the difference between emergency remote teaching and online learning', educause review, 27, pp.1-12. https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.v0i16.540 https://doi.org/10.1108/ejtd-07-2019-0116 https://doi.org/10.1108/ejtd-07-2019-0116 https://doi.org/10.3389/feduc.2019.00092 https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.v0i15.567 fallin developing online content to support students: the remote learning skills guide journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 5 lea, m. and street, b. (1998) 'student writing in higher education: an academic literacies approach', studies in higher education, 23(2), pp.157-172. https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079812331380364. mansfield, s. (2020) 'changing the face of academic skills workshops', journal of learning development in higher education, issue 17, may, pp.1-23. https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.vi17.508. salmon, g. (2011) e-moderating: the key to teaching and learning online. 3rd edn. new york: routledge. shea, v. (1996) netiquette. san francisco: albion books. university of hull (2021a) remote learning skillsguide. kingston upon hull: university of hull. available at: https://libguides.hull.ac.uk/remote (accessed: 23 april 2021). university of hull (2021b) skillsguides. kingston upon hull: university of hull. available at: https://libguides.hull.ac.uk/skillsguides/ (accessed: 23 april 2021). author details lee fallin is an academic and library specialist (learning developer) at the university of hull with a specialism in academic and digital literacies. his research interests focus on the intersections between education and geography, inclusive of physical and digital spaces. https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079812331380364 https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.vi17.508 developing online content to support students: the remote learning skillsguide the challenge the response recommendations references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special edition: 2018 aldinhe conference, october 2018 right time, right space? developing an online transition course for new undergraduates kim shahabudin university of reading, uk sonia hood university of reading, uk michelle reid university of reading, uk abstract this case study describes the development of a pre-entry transition course for new undergraduate students and its delivery online using a commercial open online course platform. use of this ‘third space’ platform, and the additional in-house support that accompanied it, were essential in creating a professional-looking course to maximise interest among an entire cohort of undergraduates at the start of their academic careers, while the pre-entry timing aimed to engage students before they became engrossed in subject learning. the course had dual aims: to support students in the development of new academic skills and to build a sense of community and identification with the university before arrival. videos of current students and academic tutors provided a face-to-face introduction to the university while articles and activities on academic skills were informed by professional learning development experience and expertise. non-compulsory enrolment attracted 64% of eligible students, 40.2% of which marked 90% or more of the course as completed. the course is now undergoing revision in response to student feedback for next year’s iteration. keywords: transition; first year experience; study skills; undergraduate; online teaching; mooc; widening participation; diversity; inclusion; orientation; induction; community; online mentoring. shahabudin et al. right time, right space? developing an online transition course for new undergraduates journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: october 2018 2 introduction concerns over the transition to university-level study are not new, particularly in reference to successful widening participation (yorke and longden, 2008; thomas and may, 2010; thomas, 2012). recent studies have noted the extension of these concerns to the entire student demographic (hepi and unite students, 2017). issues include lack of academic confidence, failure to recognise the differences between schooland university-level academic practices and difficulties integrating into the university community (quinn et al., 2005; yorke and longden, 2008; thomas, 2012). these issues have the potential for negative impact not only on retention but also on the success levels of completers (thomas et al., 2017). one approach is to offer pre-entry guidance. however, practicalities dictate that pre-entry, on-campus initiatives cannot encompass the whole cohort so the tendency is to focus on a section of the cohort, for instance btec students, mature students or students from lowparticipation postcodes. while this strategy can enable targeted advice, it also runs the risk of damaging academic confidence further with its implications of expected failure and does nothing to encourage feelings of belonging with the wider university community, a noted source of student resilience (thomas, 2012). at our institution, we observed instances of excellent practice by individual academic teams in terms of skills training embedded in first year subject modules. however, to encourage a true level playing-field, we felt it was important to provide timely access to effective skills induction to all new undergraduates (thomas and may, 2010). study smart is our response: a short online pre-entry course combining academic skills induction with community building activities and the chance to network with peers ahead of arrival on campus. study smart study smart was launched for the first time to new undergraduates in august 2017. it was delivered through the futurelearn platform, more commonly used for massive open online courses (moocs). this course was neither massive nor open but limited to our shahabudin et al. right time, right space? developing an online transition course for new undergraduates journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: october 2018 3 own new undergraduates. all new part 1 campus-based entrants were emailed a direct invitation to enrol (n=4202). invitees thus included students from a very wide range of disciplines from politics to pharmacy, business studies to biomedical sciences, computer science to classics, film, theatre and television to food sciences. enrolment was not compulsory but students were strongly encouraged to join through a series of emails, beginning early in the summer with a teaser trailer. at the closure of enrolment, the course had 2694 participants (64% of eligible students). of these, 40.2% marked 90% or more of the course as completed, with 50.5% completing 50% or more. the course was developed by members of the university’s study advice team (the authors) in collaboration with the university’s open online courses (ooc) team. course design and content was informed by small-scale research, drawing on focus groups and surveys with current undergraduates, and our extensive experience of working with new part 1 students to support transitions to university study. we also commissioned current typography students to produce some animations. like a mooc, the course was organised in ‘weeks’, though all three of these were released at the same time so that students could complete them at their own pace; we estimated that completion should take around nine hours in total (approximately three hours per week). weeks were divided into ‘steps’ with around 20 short steps in each week. these used a variety of formats to engage participants and support inclusivity: videos featuring academic tutors and current students, quizzes, infographics, animated videos, click and listen activities and interactive discussions as well as more text-driven articles. to engage students when they were keen to learn but before they started their subject courses, enrolment opened three weeks before the start of term. it remained open until the middle of autumn term to include any later enrolment. comments and discussion activities were moderated and responded to by the study advice team with the help of a small team of six student mentors, recruited from the university’s pool of peer assisted learning mentors. prior to the course launch, the mentors attended a half-day training session in which they were informed about the rationale of the course, given an outline of the content and shown some of the resources. it was important that they understood that their role was to be supportive as well as informative, so focus was placed on the tone of their shahabudin et al. right time, right space? developing an online transition course for new undergraduates journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: october 2018 4 communication, and the in-house ooc team offered examples of comments from other moocs to prepare them. the course was designed to have a longer shelf-life than one-off induction sessions. enrolled students retained access to the course for the whole of their first year, being able to return to guidance once they had assignments to help them put the information in context. using the mooc platform delivering the course via the futurelearn platform enabled us to offer students a polished and attractive, professionally-made, final product. as a small student-facing team offering a popular and well-used service, we have developed a range of innovative initiatives for delivering learning development teaching and support and for widening access to the service. however, these have all been produced using small funding awards which do not extend as far as employing external trainers or expert personnel. while we have had great success with this approach we were aware that, to engage such a broad group of participants, appearance and delivery would be as important as content. using futurelearn’s platform gave us access to the invaluable experience and expertise of the university’s in-house ooc team. through them we worked with external filmmakers (who included previous students at the university) to turn our vague ideas into engaging videos. the university’s design and print team produced professional graphics (figure 1). once the course content had been built, enrolment was managed by futurelearn who also provided course management tools. shahabudin et al. right time, right space? developing an online transition course for new undergraduates journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: october 2018 5 figure 1. professionally designed graphics. unsurprisingly, this did not come for free: from futurelearn there was a charge for hosting and an additional fee per student enrolled and there were further costs for the filmmakers and design. the project was funded by the university’s ‘access fund’ as a potentially valuable strategy for addressing the bame attainment gap in addition to its further benefits for inclusive learning (berry and loke, 2011; stevenson, 2012). the access fund also supported the employment of a 0.5 fte study adviser on a permanent post, to free up existing members of the team for resource development, and give us the capacity to meet increased demand on the service as a consequence of wider awareness of the support available. for the study advice and ooc teams, collaborative working on the project was a valuable experience in itself. through our collaboration, we were able to add our experience of working directly with new undergraduate students to their experience of producing engaging and effective online learning resources. the success of this approach was recognised in march 2018 when the two teams received a collaborative team award for teaching and learning from the university. shahabudin et al. right time, right space? developing an online transition course for new undergraduates journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: october 2018 6 building a sense of community one of the key outcomes for study smart was to respond to potential difficulties in establishing a feeling of belonging and identification with the university community for students from diverse groups, a key factor in student retention (yorke and longden, 2008; thomas, 2012). three elements of the course played a role in achieving this aim. the first (discussed in more detail in the next section) aimed to unite students across disciplines with a common academic identity by surfacing the overarching principles behind all university-level study. the second aimed to personalise the abstract idea of the community with a series of videos showing current members of the university in campus settings. these included ‘vice-chancellor welcome’ videos which book-ended the course; ‘walking tours’ which focused on a particular aspect of study (using the library, attending seminars, managing time), filming students and staff on campus; ‘tutor tutorials’ in which academic tutors from variety of disciplines spoke about the importance of particular academic practices; and ‘student experience’ videos with five students from various disciplines discussing their individual experiences of transition, providing peer-to-peer guidance comparable to an older sibling or school alumnae (figure 2). figure 2. screenshots from student experience videos. shahabudin et al. right time, right space? developing an online transition course for new undergraduates journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: october 2018 7 the third element aimed to promote interaction between students via the discussion boards and comments sections. comments were enabled on every step, with some designated specifically as discussion activities: for instance, in one discussion, students identified an example of common knowledge in their discipline; in another they shared tips for avoiding procrastination. we were impressed by the level of engagement with this element: there were almost 4500 comments in total over the three ‘weeks’ of the course from just over 1000 individual authors: relatively low for a conventional mooc but higher than we expected for this less confident participant group. our six excellent student mentors were crucial in this, sharing their own experiences and encouraging interaction and continued discussion. principles into practice to promote a sense of shared academic identity, we organised content around three underpinning principles for university-level study: academic integrity, communication for audience and purpose, and independent learning. each section started with an explanation of the principle and its importance in university-level study, before contextualising with discussions and demonstrations to develop an understanding of how it might work in practice. by introducing the concept of academic integrity at the very start of the course, we hoped to transform the old punishment-driven narratives about plagiarism into an aspirational trope about becoming academic. the section introduced the five values of academic integrity, showing their relation to more specific practices for research including evaluating sources, critical note-making, reasons for referencing, and the concept of disciplinespecific common knowledge (icai, 2012). the second week took as its starting point the principle of appropriate communication for audience and purpose. from this starting point, we looked at communication in all areas, from speaking up in seminars to writing assignments (figure 3). an area that emerged as a surprising source of anxiety in student focus groups was emailing tutors. some students went so far as to say that they had been deterred from asking their tutors for help by being uncertain how to address them. as an issue that might affect students in all disciplines, shahabudin et al. right time, right space? developing an online transition course for new undergraduates journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: october 2018 8 deciding how to communicate with your tutor was a valuable vehicle for thinking about audience and purpose and how they might relate to style and tone. figure 3. screenshot from animation on communication at university. the final week looked at independent learning, the one thing all new undergraduates cite when asked how they think university will be different. we aimed to expand the narrow perception of independent learning as ‘no-one will remind you about your deadlines’ to show how independence is both a principle for academic study and a practical concern: applying to thinking, reading and writing as well as workload management. articles, discussions and videos looked more closely at use of study time and critical thinking. the section also dealt with the tricky question of balancing independence with seeking available support when you need it. challenges and successes developing a centrally-funded major learning development resource in collaboration with others who had particular professional expertise seemed a dream opportunity. however, our original idea that we would be doing some research, developing some content and shahabudin et al. right time, right space? developing an online transition course for new undergraduates journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: october 2018 9 sitting back while others delivered it, proved distinctly utopian. tasks we thought had been delegated to others turned out to require more of our involvement than anticipated. working with multiple collaborators meant we were not in control of timings. while we had a set of milestones to work towards, activities were often diverted by short-notice requests. in the final push, we were doing last-minute editing over the bank holiday weekend, a day or so before launch. this meant that our most pressured time for content development led straight into the greatest demand for responding to comments in the first weeks after the course opened, which then led into our busiest time for teaching at the start of autumn term. by october we were grateful for the freshers’ flu as a welcome opportunity for a rest. also time-consuming (but rewarding) was recruiting staff support for the project. public backing from senior management was crucial in establishing study smart as a universitywide initiative, but entailed much report writing (thomas et al., 2017). we took a different approach to persuading academics, giving a series of well-attended information and demonstration sessions with homemade cakes and biscuits provided. these interactions were time-consuming but also rewarding, raising both the profile and the reputation of the study advice service beyond the topic of study smart. the discussion boards and the potential for offence (intentional or unintentional) were a source of concern pre-launch. while the ooc team drew confidence from their prior experience of participants self-policing boards, we were concerned that this younger and less socially-experienced cohort might find this difficult. in fact, participants treated the discussion boards as an extension of study and were polite and thoughtful of others. disappointingly, we were not able to convert the majority of comments into conversations, despite the best efforts of our excellent student mentors who shared their own experiences and worked hard to encourage interaction with prompt questions. participants were unexpectedly candid about their anxieties around the transition to university, with comments like: ‘i'm feeling nervous, particularly about the social side and meeting new people, but i'm also really excited as i think it's going to be a bit of an adventure!’ we decided to repay this candour by responding to every comment. given a total of almost 4500 comments, this turned out to be quite a task, and we could not have done it without shahabudin et al. right time, right space? developing an online transition course for new undergraduates journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: october 2018 10 our brilliant mentors (figure 4). however, our eagerness to respond to student comments quickly may have been a factor in inhibiting the development of peer discussion. this practice may need to be reconsidered for future iterations. figure 4. typical student comment with reply from student mentor. evaluation and future plans the first year of study smart was intended as a pilot to be reviewed and revised. we used a variety of methods to gain feedback to inform the next iteration, which revealed some expected and some surprising results. two questionnaires (the first step in week 1 and the last step in week 3) framed the course, offering a self-audit of academic confidence. 94% of students who completed the later questionnaire indicated that their confidence had increased. however, the comparatively small number (16% of 50%+ completers but only 7% of total enrolled participants) means that this result can only treated as indicative. shahabudin et al. right time, right space? developing an online transition course for new undergraduates journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: october 2018 11 more comments came from a wider survey of the university’s ‘welcome week’ activities. these suggested that we had more work to do in making the course appeal to all disciplines, with some students from science-based disciplines stating that they felt it did (or would, in the case of those who had not enrolled) not have relevant content for them. for the next iteration, we have revised content to add a wider range of examples and make the relevance of existing content for students in science-based disciplines more explicit. international students were also reluctant to enrol, feeling that the study skills component in pre-sessional english language courses they had undertaken should be sufficient. we have been working with colleagues providing pre-sessional english courses to promote the course to students about to enter undergraduate studies and show how it differs from previous teaching. these comments indicated that we have more work to do on framing the course to show its function as an induction to undergraduate study at our university, and to our academic community. we had a substantial amount of data from the course itself on participant engagement. in common with most moocs, participation declined towards the end of the course and with all three ‘weeks’ released at once we did not have the natural weekly prompts to participants that conventional moocs use to retain engagement. we also found that certain formats were less popular. surprisingly these included the quizzes, which we had expected to offer a more engaging interactive experience. as a consequence, we are reducing text and removing some steps in each section and seeking ways to crossreference later steps in earlier ones. the course itself yielded a great deal of positive feedback via unsolicited comments (including many from bame, international and mature students) (figure 5). shahabudin et al. right time, right space? developing an online transition course for new undergraduates journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: october 2018 12 figure 5. unsolicited testimonial from study smart participant. an important part of course evaluation was to assess its impact as a first year experience intervention, rather than just a transition resource. figures showing the number of individual accesses made after enrolment closed (for the three sections of the course respectively: 538; 612; 573) were greatly in excess of the number of additional completions (27 additional completions of 50%+, 28 additional completions of 90%+). this suggests that a significant number of students, who may have already completed much of the course, were using it as we had hoped and returning to it over the course of the year as they were able to relate the guidance to their actual studies. looking to the future, funding for the course has been confirmed for the next academic session and there is longitudinal research planned to track the progress of students who have undertaken the course through their undergraduate careers. it will take some time to discover whether study smart has had the positive impact on bame attainment that originally motivated its funding. what we can state with certainty is that, through the course, we have, as a small learning development team of four (three of whom are parttime), reached a much greater number of students at the crucial point of transition than we could have done through our other teaching initiatives. for those students we are optimistic, both that raised awareness of learning development services will have a positive impact in the long term on undergraduate study success and that the course will shahabudin et al. right time, right space? developing an online transition course for new undergraduates journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: october 2018 13 have achieved its more immediate aims: reducing anxiety about the unknown, developing understanding of the differences between school and university and building identification with the university community. references berry, j. and loke, g. (2011) improving the degree attainment of black and minority ethnic students. london/york: equality challenge unit/higher education academy. available at: https://www.ecu.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/external/improving-degreeattainment-bme.pdf (accessed: 1 october 2018). higher education policy institute (hepi) and unite students (2017) reality check: a report on university applicants’ attitudes and perceptions. oxford: hepi. available at: http://www.hepi.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/reality-check-reportonline1.pdf (accessed: 1 october 2018). international center for academic integrity (icai) (2012) the fundamental values of academic integrity. available at: https://academicintegrity.org/fundamental-values/ (accessed: 20 october 2018). quinn, j., thomas, l., slack, k., casey, l., thexton, w. and noble, j. (2005) from life crisis to lifelong learning: rethinking working-class ‘drop out’ from higher education. york: joseph rowntree foundation. available at: https://www.jrf.org.uk/report/rethinking-working-class-drop-out-university (accessed: 1 october 2018). stevenson, j. (2012) black and minority ethnic student degree retention and attainment. york, higher education academy. available at: https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/system/files/bme_summit_final_report.pdf (accessed: 1 october 2018). thomas, l. (2012) building student engagement and belonging in higher education at a time of change. london: paul hamlyn foundation. available at: https://www.ecu.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/external/improving-degree-attainment-bme.pdf https://www.ecu.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/external/improving-degree-attainment-bme.pdf http://www.hepi.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/reality-check-report-online1.pdf http://www.hepi.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/reality-check-report-online1.pdf https://academicintegrity.org/fundamental-values/ https://www.jrf.org.uk/report/rethinking-working-class-drop-out-university https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/system/files/bme_summit_final_report.pdf shahabudin et al. right time, right space? developing an online transition course for new undergraduates journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: october 2018 14 https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/system/files/what_works_final_report.pdf (accessed: 1 october 2018). thomas, l., hill, m., o’mahony, j. and yorke, m. (2017) supporting student success: strategies for institutional change. london: paul hamlyn foundation. available at: https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/system/files/hub/download/what_works_2__full_report.pdf (accessed: 1 october 2018). thomas, l. and may, h. (2010) inclusive learning and teaching in higher education. york: higher education academy. available at: https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/system/files/inclusivelearningandteaching_finalreport. pdf (accessed: 1 october 2018). yorke, m. and longden, b. (2008) the first-year experience of higher education in the uk: final report. york: higher education academy. available at: https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/system/files/fyefinalreport_0.pdf (accessed: 1 october 2018). author details kim shahabudin has been working as a study adviser at the university of reading since 2006, supporting students to develop effective and appropriate study practices for university. she has a special interest in transition issues for mature students returning to study. kim is a university teaching fellow. sonia hood has been a study adviser at the university of reading for 7 years, having worked previously at the university of west london in a similar role. she is in the final stages of completing her ed.d on self-efficacy and academic writing, with a particular focus on non-traditional university students. michelle reid has been a study adviser at the university of reading since 2007. she has published study guides on report writing and time management and has an interest in supporting students making transitions to postgraduate level study. michelle is a university teaching fellow. https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/system/files/what_works_final_report.pdf https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/system/files/hub/download/what_works_2_-_full_report.pdf https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/system/files/hub/download/what_works_2_-_full_report.pdf https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/system/files/inclusivelearningandteaching_finalreport.pdf https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/system/files/inclusivelearningandteaching_finalreport.pdf https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/system/files/fyefinalreport_0.pdf right time, right space? developing an online transition course for new undergraduates abstract introduction study smart using the mooc platform building a sense of community principles into practice challenges and successes evaluation and future plans references author details article journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 15: november 2019 ________________________________________________________________________ applying the ‘social turn’ in writing scholarship to perspectives on writing self-efficacy kim m. mitchell red river college, canada university of manitoba, canada diana e. mcmillan university of manitoba, canada michelle m. lobchuk university of manitoba, canada abstract the aim of this paper is to explore the fit between the cognitive concept of writing selfefficacy and a socially constructed epistemology of writing. socially constructed perspectives on writing emphasise context and community and include academic literacies, rhetorical genre theory, and the writing across the curriculum movement. these perspectives have been prominent in theoretical discussions of writing since the 1980s. this paper argues that the measurement of writing self-efficacy has continued to prioritise assessing writing self-efficacy as ability to successfully accomplish superficial writing product and process features, while the social context of writing and its resultant impacts on the identity forming, relational, emotional and creative impacts on writing self-efficacy have been largely ignored. the historical context of paradigmatic shifts in writing theory will be discussed with a lens toward proposing a synthesis of three constructionist situated perspectives – activity theory, rhetorical genre theory, and communities of practice – and how these situated perspectives may inform a more complete view of how writing selfefficacy should be assessed and measured. how practitioners may consider the merger of these theories in writing pedagogy will be introduced to inspire future research. mitchell, mcmillan and lobchuk applying the ‘social turn’ in writing scholarship to perspectives on writing self-efficacy journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 2 keywords: writing self-efficacy; social cognitive theory; socially constructed epistemology; academic literacies; activity theory; rhetorical genre theory; communities of practice. introduction in the evolution of writing epistemologies, writing research, which at its origins explored and priorit ised writing text as products, evolved to exploring cognitive processes and, more currently, social processes. this evolution is typical of many research movements undergoing paradigm shifts attempting to distance themselves from their epistemologically objectivist origins. nystrand (2006), in his review, situated the root of the historical context for writing research in the cognitive revolution of the 1960s. in the 1970s, media reports highlighted what was pronounced to be a general ised decline in writing ability in society. a ‘literacy crisis’ was declared, which placed a spotlight on grammatical correctness, the product elements of writing, thought to be markers of education and social class. it was cognitive process theorists, in particular the work of flower and hayes (1981) by defining and describing the recursive processes of planning, composing, and revising, that triggered the recognition that a person sat behind the text produced and that person should be considered in research efforts. limitations to the cognitive movement quickly became apparent resulting in a push toward perspectives where the writer could be viewed as more than ‘an isolated individual struggling to express personal meanings’ (hyland, 2003, p.18). writers and writing scholars knew product and cognitive process movements were presenting an incomplete perspective of the complex craft of writing. cognitive process models failed to explore how language functions in human interaction because they said nothing about how meanings were socially constructed or how forces outside the individual guided motives, built relationships, and influenced writing (hyland, 2003). there are several defining moments in the shift from objectivist (product) perspectives on writing to constructionist (social) perspectives: the development of the writing across the curriculum movement in the us in the 1970s (russell et al., 2009); the evolution of genre theory from a movement that looked exclusively at textual features and conventions to a perspective of social action (miller, 1984); and the academic literacies perspective in the uk which mirrored the north american movements (lea and street, 1998) – to name a few. social mitchell, mcmillan and lobchuk applying the ‘social turn’ in writing scholarship to perspectives on writing self-efficacy journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 3 movements focused on describing how writing was socially situated in communities where products and processes would shapeshift from context to context. collectively, they evolved in response to the recognition that there was no single recipe to develop writing in post-secondary student populations. nystrand’s (2006) description of the evolution of writing research from product, to process, to social process, mirrored lea and street’s (1998) seminal discussion of academic literacies, which evolved through three, non-mutually exclusive phases. first, lea and street highlighted study skills (or product focused) approaches, where writing errors were viewed as ‘a kind of pathology’ (p.59). study skills perspectives were followed by the academic socialization perspective which acknowledged the disciplinary factors in written communication; russell et al. (2009) related academic socialization to understanding the genres specific to the discipline. academic socialization, in parallel to the social cognitive movement in psychology, acknowledged writing contexts without addressing their influence. lea and street’s third movement, academic literacies, recogn ised the problem of writing transfer between settings and disciplines. when the gatekeepers of good writing (academic faculty) failed to recogn ise how the tacit nature of their disciplinary considerations and the power relations formed during writing evaluation influenced writing, the consequence was a disruption to student identity. several authors have noted difficulty in translating the ‘social turn’ in writing into pedagogical practices. russell et al. (2009) observed how academic literacies have made a stronger contribution to research and theory than to pedagogy. bauer and theado (2014) conducted an analysis of articles published in the journal of college reading and learning from 2005-2013 exploring the ‘social turn’ in post-secondary literacy research and instruction and concluded that, despite the social turn in writing theory, a parallel social turn in writing pedagogy had not emerged. perry (2012) also observed a weakness of social perspectives in their inability to inform writing pedagogy and suggested that cognitive and social perspectives on writing did not need to be mutually exclusive. perry’s suggestion mirrors reither’s (1985) observation: ‘we need to know more than we now know, not only about cognitive processes during composing, but also about processes involved in coming to know generally’ (p.623). mitchell, mcmillan and lobchuk applying the ‘social turn’ in writing scholarship to perspectives on writing self-efficacy journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 4 one of the more popular cognitive concepts explored in writing contexts is writing selfefficacy (bandura, 1997; pajares and valiante, 2006). self-efficacy, a well-studied motivational concept driving human agency, has been established as a critical factor affecting career choices, course choices, academic progression, persistence in the face of difficulty, and individual performance. the growing importance of the assessment of writing self-efficacy in post-secondary students is evident in the increase in studies measuring the construct since it first appeared in the literature in a measurable format with the seminal work of meier et al. (1984). in an in-progress systematic review (unpublished data), the lead author has identified 88 papers measuring writing self-efficacy in post-secondary students published since 1984. of these, 64 have been published since 2011, and 33 of those since 2016. the educational importance of writing self-efficacy cannot be underestimated as strong self-efficacy is required to keep students striving to improve their writing and advance in their disciplines and future professions. however, numerous contextual and social factors threaten to disrupt (or with pedagogical influence, facilitate) the writing experience and these factors have been largely neglected in writing selfefficacy research and measurement. literature exploring social cognitive perspectives such as writing self-efficacy and socially constructed views of writing appear to operate in silos, where these bodies of literature rarely merge, cite each other, or learn from each other’s conclusions. a 2015 special issue of educational psychologist aimed to start a conversation about the potential for merging the two perspectives by exploring how ‘situative perspectives’ could enhance educational psychology research by recognizing that individual goals were situated within the collective goals apparent in the individual’s social context or system (turner and nolen, 2015).the social movement, for example, could enlighten writing self-efficacy researchers on the contextual factors which limit self-efficacy development. social cognitive perspectives have a more articulated integration of the role of emotions as they affect writing self-efficacy and performance. an added complexity is the use of the word ‘social’ in both movements. the social in ‘social cognitive’ refers to the mere existence of social influences on learning but still emphas ises the individual in that social context. the word social in ‘socially constructed’ takes a deeper look at the nuances and intersections of the social context which drive perceptions of experience where the individual cannot be isolated from the social mitchell, mcmillan and lobchuk applying the ‘social turn’ in writing scholarship to perspectives on writing self-efficacy journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 5 environment in which they operate. the field of writing self-efficacy research, as camfield (2016) noted in her qualitative exploration of the concept, ‘has not yet reached a sophisticated and nuanced understanding of the reciprocal and socially situated nature of the development of writing self-efficacy’ (p.3). similarly, in a review we conducted exploring writing self-efficacy measurement instruments validated in post-secondary contexts (mitchell et al., 2017), we identified that measures purporting to assess writing self-efficacy focus on grammar and sentence level concerns, or concrete writing tasks such as planning or revision, and concluded that writing context, disciplinary discourse issues, and creativity allowances in writing were gaps in current measurement of the concept. thus, while most other theoretical perspectives on writing have seen that epistemological ‘social turn’ from the limited product and process views, writing selfefficacy measurement has not followed suit. could issues of learning the language of a discipline, power relations within communities, understanding audience, identity and creativity development, and feeling of ownership of the writing – all complex writing issues identified within that ‘social turn’ – also impact writing self-efficacy? our goal in this paper, therefore, is to explore the ‘social turn’ in writing scholarship as it may apply to writing self-efficacy. the paper will attempt to answer the question: is there epistemological congruence between a socially constructed epistemology and the measurement of writing self-efficacy, which may allow for the merger of the social perspectives on writing and the social cognitive perspectives on writing self-efficacy? the paper will present a synthesis of bandura’s self-efficacy theory (bandura, 1997) with three social theories that we will refer to collectively as ‘situated perspectives’ in the ‘complimentary yet distinct’ (artemeva, 2008, p.162) triad of socially constructed theories which include activity theory, rhetorical genre theory, and communities of practice. exploring cognitive perspectives on writing bandura’s (1997) seminal theory was one of the first to acknowledge that an emotional response to tasks could affect learning. self-efficacy theory proposed that self-judgement of ability and mastery of tasks could be influenced through interactions that went beyond individual ability and perceptions developed through past experiences. social and relational factors such as feedback received from significant others (e.g. academic evaluators) through social persuasion, and self-comparisons with peers through modeling mitchell, mcmillan and lobchuk applying the ‘social turn’ in writing scholarship to perspectives on writing self-efficacy journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 6 and vicarious experiences, could also have an effect on self-efficacy development. selfefficacy theory is embedded within bandura’s social cognitive theory which is concerned with the effects of cognitive processes on the acquisition and regulation of behaviour. indeed, his perspective of social learning was one of the first to consider that there was a person making conscious decisions in social performance situations and that behaviour could not simply be reduced to neuronal conditioning (bandura, 2006). bandura’s theoretical perspective can be epistemologically situated as constructivism with origins tracing back to vygotsky. social constructivism and social constructionism (e.g. berger and luckman, 1966), while often incorrectly used interchangeably, differ in that constructivism focuses on the individual knower, while constructionism places that individual in a social context where knowing is negotiated among members of a community (raskin, 2002). much of the research conducted exploring writing self-efficacy explores the writing experience as the plight of an individual. viewing writing self-efficacy as developing through processes of individualism defy what students report about their writing experiences in interview studies where self-efficacy is developed through sense of community (camfield, 2016). researchers have primarily explored writing self-efficacy as a measurable construct in quantitative research; however, research has not been able to consistently connect writing self-efficacy, as a measured variable, to writing performance outcomes. inconsistent findings may be a function of a mismatch between the existing productand processfocused writing self-efficacy measures that neglect to consider community influences on writing self-efficacy development, and a written work evaluated for the research study which would have been produced amidst complex, situated social relationships. some writing self-efficacy research, in an effort to maxim ise perceived objectivity of writing assessment, has advocated use of standard ised testing or timed writing as writing performance activities, both of which are unrealistic stand-ins to the kind of writing demanded from students at the post-secondary level. this means that writing self-efficacy researchers often conduct context-free experiments that draw conclusions demonstrating the researchers expect the real world to behave similarly (greeno, 1998). socially constructed perspectives accept the complexity in the writing context (nolen et al., 2015). in previous work, the first author (mitchell, 2018) outlined the broad attributes of socially constructed writing. these attributes are: identity formation as a writer within a mitchell, mcmillan and lobchuk applying the ‘social turn’ in writing scholarship to perspectives on writing self-efficacy journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 7 discipline; creativity associated with ideas and novelty of approach; emotions which can both drive and disrupt writing at all stages from planning to feedback; relational aspects which include the dialogic and intertextual relations built with readers and texts, as well as relationships formed with teachers, peers, and institutions developed during the writing process; and specific attributes unique to the context of writing which explore the demands that communities place on writers as they approach their craft. all five aspects of socially constructed writing are tied together through reflective capacity to enrich the writing experience and contribute to growth in self-understanding and metacognition. thus, because, as greeno (1998; 2015) notes, the cognitive and the social research perspectives have developed in isolation from one another; perspectives that unite the two movements are needed to provide the greatest understanding. this paper proposes that a merging of social cognitive and socially constructed perspectives is necessary for an advancement of writing scholarship. the next sections will introduce the situated perspectives, and then present a synthesis of these perspectives with writing self-efficacy theory. situated perspectives the situated perspectives to be explored here include cultural-historical activity theory (or activity theory), rhetorical genre theory (rgt), and situated learning within communities of practice (cop). what these perspectives contribute to the understanding of writing selfefficacy is that they, to varying degrees, emphas ise the role of community, including the institutional influences on a community, in any writing experience, and function to examine how context influences writing motives. respectively, they have complementary purposes: activity theory focuses on activity or pedagogy as well as how communities regulate activities, rgt focuses on motivated, persuasive text production and interpretation, and cop focuses on community interaction and its influence on development of expertise. all three theories emerged from russian psychological and philosophical thought. the work of psychologist lev vygotsky (1986), who also has cognitive psychology origins, inspired, through various intermediaries, our current versions of activity theory and cop, and mikhail bakhtin (1981;1986), russian philosopher and social theorist, writing on dialogism and speech genres, inspired rgt. rarely are these theories presented in isolation; typically, activity theory is presented in conjunction with rgt (e.g. russell, 1995; 1997; bawarshi, 2003). other authors have attempted to merge the three theories into a synthesis (e.g. mitchell, mcmillan and lobchuk applying the ‘social turn’ in writing scholarship to perspectives on writing self-efficacy journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 8 artemeva, 2008; brent, 2011). cop, in particular the works of theory originators lave and wenger (1991) or wenger (1998), are cited in nearly every article about rgt or activity theory. brief descriptions of each of these theories will follow. activity theory originating with the work of vygotsky, expanded upon by one of his students aleksei leont’ev, and developed into its current form by engeström (2001), ‘activity’ is depicted visually as a triangle with many internal triangles for focused examination of intersecting players in a writing classroom (the ‘activity’) (see e.g. kain and wardle, 2005). activity theory is the most structured of the three situated perspectives and functions as follows: the subjects of study may be students and teachers, the object might be the pedagogical process of an essay requiring critical thinking that the students are assigned to write, with the outcome being a successfully implemented essay. the tools students access might include pens, paper, computers, library resources, the internet, and their knowledge of course content and disciplinary discourse. the students will use these materials to achieve particular goals for their essay writing. influencing these goals are rules, including assignment guidelines written by the teacher, conventions of grammar and style-guide implementation, but also larger system rules encompassing the power relations in writing, such as those set for academic probation and progression in a program. the community includes the classroom environment and relationships, the larger academic community of the institution of higher learning they attend, and disciplinary preferences for writing. lastly, the division of labour for accomplishing the task includes anyone that may be involved in influencing their writing process: peers, tutors, family, and instructional support and grading activities. the strength of activity theory for researchers is its ability to analyze contexts and power relations to diagnose areas of conflicts and barriers existing within the subjects, the tools they work with, other community members, or intersecting communities, each of which have their own motives (russell, 1997). activity theory is a relational theory that can inform pedagogical and policy processes affecting the activity system within intersecting communities. effects on writing self-efficacy can emerge through any interaction in the activity system. mitchell, mcmillan and lobchuk applying the ‘social turn’ in writing scholarship to perspectives on writing self-efficacy journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 9 rhetorical genre theory the study of rhetoric and genre traditionally focused on the surface characteristics of texts in order to classify those texts based on forms of discourse, audiences targeted, modes of thinking, or rhetorical situations (miller, 1984). miller’s seminal paper took rhetorical genre theory (rgt) in new directions by framing genre as social action and articulating that all written genres have a motive and that motive is to (paradoxically) simultaneously evolve and maintain community norms, values, epistemology, ontology, ideology, and power relations (berkenkotter and huckin, 1993; bawarshi, 2003; paré, 2014). genres dictate the form a writer uses and the acceptable discourse within that form, while at the same time writers are the inventors of that genre and can challenge the norms within the genre; the reciprocal relationship between the boundaries of a genre and the writer’s motives within a genre is a relationship known as situated cognition (bawarshi, 2003). genres control writers’ rhetorical moves, and writers control the presentation of genres. genres continually evolve as they interact with other related genres or with previous texts written in the same genre (through the bakhtinian concept of intertextuality). an ongoing conversation (dialogism) develops based on a rhetorical exigence, defined as an urgent objective need, goal, or motive (artemeva, 2004; paré, 2014). genres belong to particular communities and, as a result, can only be mastered by insiders to that specific community (artemeva, 2004) through understanding of that community’s tacit discourse. the use of language in combination with exploring motives for writing to an audience, and the fact that no two writers will bear the same motives even when writing in the same genre in the same community, has led genre theorists to refer to genre as ‘stabil ised-for-now’ (schryer, 1993). genres are continually shapeshifting to fit community needs (devitt, 2000; bawarshi, 2003) and change because the space and time the genre occupies has changed the motives (exigencies) of the community (artemeva, 2004). the strengths of rgt for writing self-efficacy assessment are its focus on ability to write consistently in a discourse for a genre, the recognition that novices will not instantly be able to manage the genres of their discipline, and the emphasis on interpretive acts of reading and writing and how all texts are responding to previous texts. if a writer has a goal for social action within their writing (e.g. to get a job or receive a grant), that writer mitchell, mcmillan and lobchuk applying the ‘social turn’ in writing scholarship to perspectives on writing self-efficacy journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 10 must have enough self-efficacy to believe their writing abilities are strong enough to be successful at that social action. genres will vary over time, between disciplines, and in how they define the relationship between reader and writer. consequences will result from failing to execute a genre in the manner expected by the gatekeepers to a discipline (russell, 1997). paré (2014) notes that to challenge the norms of a genre, the writer likely needs to have power within a community. novice writers will question the success of their application of a genre, and any risk-taking modifications attempted within, which may produce reciprocal effects on writing self-efficacy. communities of practice initially developed by lave and wenger (1991) the first iteration of cop introduced the concepts of situated learning, defined as learning while participating in a practice environment, and legitimate peripheral participation, which explores how novices observe and then trial-and-error the discourses and practices of a community and emerge as full participants. the strength of the cop model is its ability to help researchers come to understand how novices to a community (newcomers, to use lave and wenger’s term), become experts (old timers) thus cop is more amenable to examining how writing contributes to identity development and sense of belonging within a discipline, rather than how writers come to identify as writers. wenger’s (1998) description of the concept of negotiated meaning among participants in a community is reminiscent of the reciprocal way genres and contexts mutually interact with one another in the rgt notion of situated cognition. members of communities simultaneously use genre and rhetoric to manipulate and negotiate meaning, while at the same time being hemmed in by their context (berkenkotter and huckin, 1993; devitt, 1993; wenger, 1998; devitt, 2000). negotiating meaning creates conflicts when boundary crossing occurs between communities – as lea and street (1998) observed when describing the student who received two diverse evaluations on two papers written for two disciplines using similar rhetorical strategies. boundary crossing when learning to write in new genres can have an impact on writing self-efficacy. the primary tool we use to immerse ourselves into a new community is language (bruffee, 1986). how language (and writing) practices brought in from other cops affect the cop under examination, through changing how meanings are negotiated and how identities are developed, are how mitchell, mcmillan and lobchuk applying the ‘social turn’ in writing scholarship to perspectives on writing self-efficacy journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 11 transformation and change take place. transfer of writing ability, only tenuously possible as best, has a large impact on writing self-efficacy in particular in cop transition zones such as from discipline to discipline, high school to first-year, undergraduate to graduate work, and university to workplace writing (russell, 1997). negotiating a synthesis of social cognitive and socially constructed theoretical perspectives the brief description of the three situated perspectives (activity theory, rhetorical genre theory, and communities of practice) serves as an introduction to how these perspectives can be merged to create a new perspective of writing self-efficacy. cognitive theories are lacking in the ability to contribute to our understanding of the complex contextual issues that influence student development of identity, genre knowledge, and practice-based competence through writing. constructionist theories are lacking in concrete solutions about what to do when facing the blank page with nothing but a prompt or a vague idea to guide the writing. they also lack in solutions for teaching complex aspects of writing such as voice or disciplinary discourse, which they acknowledge are tacit and rarely taught (lea and street, 1998; mitchell, 2018). cognitive theories continue to frame writing as an individual act (greeno, 2015). cognitive theories hypothes ise that people create mental representations of external future states and make self-efficacy judgements as a result (bandura, 1997; greeno, 1998). process theories of writing suggest steps for tackling a writing task – steps that are critical for novice writers to find a starting point for their writing. but the reflective requirements to assess if an action is having a positive effect on ability and, therefore, an impact on writing self-efficacy, is a bridge that is supplied by constructionist thinking (bruffee, 1986). constructionist theories can also ask critical questions about components of process writing, such as: where do our goals come from? what ideas are valued? how do we know what needs revising in our writing? (devitt, 1993). if social cognitive and social constructionist theories are blended together through an ‘interweaving’ of individual self-efficacy processes and the structures of the context of the writing (turner and nolen, 2015), how will they intersect with one another and develop a more complete picture of writing self-efficacy to guide research and pedagogy? self-efficacy theory explores the factors that drive motivation to write, to improve upon writing, and to persist in educational programs. cognitive process models can be used to mitchell, mcmillan and lobchuk applying the ‘social turn’ in writing scholarship to perspectives on writing self-efficacy journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 12 guide students through concrete planning, composing, and revising activities of writing. constructionist perspectives fill the gaping holes in these theoretical perspectives because they attend to the context of writing, creativity allowances, and the relationships formed in the writing process. the components that structure constructionist writing (mitchell, 2018) defined earlier, included identity, creativity, emotions, relational aspects, and context, with identity at the core of the model. next, we use the components of this model to tie the theoretical perspectives together. the five domains of the model are tightly wound together through reflexive thought and that reflexive thought must be guided consciously by educators who assign writing in their classrooms. developing an identity in an activity system or cop is marked by understanding the discourse of that system. learner identities shape motivation and because identities are situated, motivations are also situated (nolen et al., 2015). in beginner writers to a discipline, identity conflicts will abound and these conflicts are a result of boundary crossing from one cop or activity system (context) to another (e.g. high school to university). students need to recreate their identities when they begin to appropriate the genres of the new system (russell, 1997). incomplete development of an identity in a system will likely lead to low self-efficacy when writing within that system. having selfefficacy to write in an activity system may be a marker of identity development. if identity can be successfully appropriated through writing, emotional investment in the community will result in creative and passionate management of the genres of that community. emotional response cannot be separated from cognition as bandura’s inclusion of emotional arousal in self-efficacy theory attests. this emotional investment, as phelps (2014) conjectures, may be enhanced through the boundary crossing that occurs between the professional activity systems and the personal activity systems. as russell et al. (2009) observe, use of personal or non-academic genres can contribute to development of an intellectual stance for writing in the discourse of a discipline. developing an identity is also an antecedent to developing expertise in a community, activity system, or context (wenger, 1998). developing mastery, a source of self-efficacy, in a particular activity system cannot happen by only focusing on the mastery of writing process components – although providing suggestions to novice students on how to manage writing processes must also be considered. writing processes will differ in every mitchell, mcmillan and lobchuk applying the ‘social turn’ in writing scholarship to perspectives on writing self-efficacy journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 13 community, and every writing genre, and these must be taught by members of the community (hyland, 2003). identity development, expertise, mastery of a discipline’s genres are all connected experiences. genres, although they appear to some students as rigid rule-based busy-work in classroom environments, can be modified, but it requires the mastery of that genre and an identity in a discipline to see the flexible capabilities of the genre and develop creativity within it (artemeva, 2008; paré, 2014). thus, mastery of a genre allows for creativity where the apparent rules of the system can be altered and genres mixed-and-matched. breaking the rules of a genre and its discourse within a discipline is particularly challenging for novices where attempts to change a genre are often viewed as errors rather than innovations (devitt, 2000). student writing of essays in classrooms is its own genre. certainly, the genres that exist in the relationality of the classroom are most rigid for undergraduates, which is a factor that should be brought to awareness simply for its resultant impacts on pedagogy. students quickly real ise that conformity to the genre is expected and this realization will have impacts on writing selfefficacy in the creative domain. the rules of genre are also rigid for doctoral students where tensions in the doctoral activity system are constantly in motion between the perceived rigidity of genre and the expectations of making an original contribution (paré, 2014). writing functions best through dialogic interactions within a community, and intertextual relations in reading literature that inspires ideas. hence, why the relational aspects of writing are emphas ised in constructionist perspectives (mitchell, 2018), but are absent or token ised in cognitive process perspectives which conjure images of ‘the struggling writer alone in a loft, seeking inspiration’ (paré, 2014, p.a-90). as paré (2014) says, when we look at relationships in writing, ‘the rhetorical situation suddenly becomes quite crowded’ (p. a-89). readers reconstruct texts for their own use based on their own needs, transforming information for their own time and space, which may take ideas to a place the original writer may never have intended. however, writers often doubt their ability to engage in such interpretation or believe that the rules constrain them from transforming knowledge in this way. ultimately, these fears can have compounding effects on the lived experience of writing-self-efficacy. mitchell, mcmillan and lobchuk applying the ‘social turn’ in writing scholarship to perspectives on writing self-efficacy journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 14 bandura (1997) acknowledges relationality in self-efficacy theory through sources such as vicarious experiences, including modelling and self-comparisons with others, and social persuasions, such as feedback. but self-efficacy theory’s vision of feedback is transmissional and unidirectional. constructionist perspectives suggest that feedback needs to be iterative and dialogic in order to be effective. self-efficacy is fostered by developing ties with peers and instructors in the writing process. during the early stages of entry into a discipline students are left with no choice but to appropriate tools of writing processes from other activity systems, may that be high school or other academic disciplines, and these choices, previously successful, may lead to failure in the current context (russell, 1997; lea and street, 1998) with resulting impacts on writing selfefficacy. exploring constructionist models of writing and how they intersect with writing self-efficacy has potential to contribute much to our understanding of persistent problems in writing scholarship such as: 1) transfer of knowledge from theory to practice (miller, 1984); 2) understanding related issues of writing transfer, such as why students seem to need to relearn how to write with every new assignment or why they struggle with the writing requirements of their profession as newcomers to the workplace (miller, 1984; russell, 1997; lea and street, 1998; artemeva, 2004; brent, 2011); 3) how teaching writing in a generic introductory format to students as they enter programs is failing to introduce them to the disciplinary discourses (russell, 1995; mitchell, 2018); and 4) how power relationships between students and faculty affect writing self-efficacy (lea and street, 1998). the above synthesis provokes thoughts of four pedagogical implications that fit with situated perspectives and merge with social cognitive perspectives on writing self-efficacy. 1. if, as russell et al. (2009) state, using personal genres of writing can influence identity development in a discipline, thought must be given to developing assignments that incorporate or springboard from personal experience. allowing the personal within academic writing means relinquishing the belief that academic writing is objective writing with an invisible author. flexibility in instructional expectations for student genres of writing build writing self-efficacy. mitchell, mcmillan and lobchuk applying the ‘social turn’ in writing scholarship to perspectives on writing self-efficacy journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 15 2. defining what it means to be creative within an academic assignment is valuable to beginning writers. it could mean that what we picture as the pinnacle of academic writing – the essay or literature review – is not the only way to establishing knowing. most students will not go on to write literature reviews in their professional careers. alternative forms of writing dispersed across a curriculum, such as digital storytelling, creative non-fiction, or podcast scripting, might be just as effective for learning to write in the discourse of a discipline. 3. while it is known that iterative feedback is the most effective for improving writing, what prevents its academia-wide implementation in undergraduate classrooms is the time-consuming, labour intensive, nature of using multiple feedback rounds and drafts. exploration of effective and efficient peer feedback processes and other relational feedback mechanisms can build self-efficacy and community identity and are necessary to make this form of writing pedagogy standard practice. 4. students only confidently know how to use the writing processes of the last assignment they successfully wrote. scaffolding is a vygotskian constructionist pedagogy but involves actively teaching the cognitive processes of writing in planning, composition, and revision as they apply to a specific assignment. processes differ in small tacit ways between courses, assignments, and the genres students are asked to write. the complexity of these processes increase as students progress to more senior years in their academic program and cross boundaries into graduate school. these process differences are not obvious or intuitive for all students. while attempting to measure a concept is objectivist science, measurement tools are built from a theoretical standpoint on the concept being assessed. a socially constructed theory or standpoint may influence item development on quantitative measures. this paper was developed within the context of the doctoral work of the first author within the discipline of nursing education. previous work on writing self-efficacy which identified a gap in measurement of the concept (mitchell et al., 2017) led to an exploration of socially constructed and situated perspectives on writing (mitchell, 2018). this past work triggered the question of whether there might be an epistemological incompatibility between bandura’s self-efficacy theory and socially constructed theories on writing, a question which inspired this paper. this work will culminate in the development of a measure of mitchell, mcmillan and lobchuk applying the ‘social turn’ in writing scholarship to perspectives on writing self-efficacy journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 16 writing self-efficacy that considers self-efficacy theory and socially constructed perspectives on writing. writing is an identity-building initiation into a profession which has profound impacts on personal efficacy in a writing context. as russell (1995) suggests, a discipline must be acutely aware of what defines good writing in their activity system in order to influence pedagogy. the exploration presented in this paper describes how socially constructed and social cognitive perspectives on writing can intersect and inform researchers and theorists hoping to understand writing experience as lived by students. educators must see the value of what students bring to their writing from other communities of practice or their personal activity system (camfield, 2016). both constructionist and cognitive perspectives are needed to best inform pedagogy for writing. that both perspectives originate in some fashion from vygotskian philosophy adds credence to their possible compatibility. context is critical to the planning and implementation of writing pedagogy and socially constructed perspectives can provide the tools that educators and researchers need to assess their writing contexts. references artemeva, n. (2004) ‘key concepts in rhetorical genre studies: an overview’, technostyle, 20(1), pp. 3-38. artemeva, n. (2008) ‘toward a unified theory of genre learning’, journal of business and technical communications, 22(2), pp. 160-185. bakhtin, m. (1981) ‘discourse in the novel’, pp. 259-422, in m. holquist (ed.). and emersion, c. and holquist, m. (trans.) the dialogic imagination. austin, tx: university of texas press. bakhtin, m. (1986) ‘the problem of speech genres’, pp. 60-102, in emerson, c. and holquist, m. (eds.) and mcgee, v. w. (trans.) speech genres and other late essays. austin, tx: university of texas press. bandura, a. (1997) self-efficacy: the exercise of control. new york, ny: w. h freeman. mitchell, mcmillan and lobchuk applying the ‘social turn’ in writing scholarship to perspectives on writing self-efficacy journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 17 bandura, a. (2006) ‘toward a psychology of human agency’, perspectives on psychological science, 1(2), pp. 164-180. bauer, l. and theado, c. (2014) ‘examining the ‘social turn’ in postsecondary literacy research and instruction: a retrospective view of jcrl scholarship, 2005–2013’, journal of college reading and learning, 45(1), pp. 67-84. bawarshi, a. (2003). genre and the invention of the writer: reconsidering the place of invention in composition. logan, ut: utah state university press. berger, p. l. and luckmann, t. (1966). the social construction of reality: a treatise in the sociology of knowledge. new york, ny: anchor books. berkenkotter, c. and huckin, t. (1993) ‘rethinking genre from a sociocognitive perspective’, written communication, 10(4), pp. 475-509. brent, d. (2011) ‘transfer, transformation, and rhetorical knowledge: insights from transfer theory’, journal of business and technical communication, 25(4), pp. 396-420. bruffee, k. (1986) ‘social construction, language, and the authority of knowledge: a bibliographical essay’, college english, 48(8), pp. 773-790. camfield, e. (2016) ‘mediated-efficacy: hope for ‘helpless’ writers’, journal of developmental education, 39(3), pp. 2-11. devitt, a. (1993) ‘generalizing about genre: new conceptions of an old concept’, college composition and communication, 44(4), pp. 573-586. devitt, a. (2000) ‘integrating rhetorical and literary theories of genre’, college english, 62(6), pp. 696-718. engeström, y. (2001) ‘expansive learning at work: toward an activity theoretical reconceptualization’, journal of education and work, 14(1), pp. 133-156. mitchell, mcmillan and lobchuk applying the ‘social turn’ in writing scholarship to perspectives on writing self-efficacy journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 18 flower, l. and hayes, j. (1981) ‘a cognitive process theory of writing’, college composition and communication, 32(4), pp. 365-387. greeno, j. g. (1998) ‘the situativity of knowing, learning, and research’, american psychologist, 53(1), pp. 5-26. greeno, j. g. (2015) ‘commentary: some prospects for connecting concepts and methods of individual cognition and situativity’, educational psychologist, 50(3), pp. 248-251. hyland, k. (2003) ‘genre-based pedagogies: a social response to process’, journal of second language writing, 12(1), pp. 17-29. kain, d. and wardle, e. (2005) ‘building context: using activity theory to teach about genre in multi-major professional communication courses’, technical communication quarterly, 14(2), pp. 113-139. lave, j. and wenger, e. (1991) situated learning: legitimate peripheral participation. cambridge, uk: cambridge university press. lea, m. and street, b. (1998) ‘student writing in higher education: an academic literacies approach’, studies in higher education, 23(2), pp. 157-172. lea, m. and street, b. (2006) ‘the ‘academic literacies’ model: theory and applications’, theory into practice, 45(4), pp. 368-377. meier, s., mccarthy, p. and schmeck, r. (1984) ‘validity of self-efficacy as a predictor of writing performance’, cognitive therapy and research, 8(2), pp. 107-120. miller, c. (1984) ‘genre as social action’, quarterly journal of speech, 70, pp. 151-167. mitchell, k. (2018) ‘constructing writing practices in nursing’, journal of nursing education, 57(7), pp. 399-407. mitchell, mcmillan and lobchuk applying the ‘social turn’ in writing scholarship to perspectives on writing self-efficacy journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 19 mitchell, k., rieger, k. and mcmillan, d. (2017) ‘a template analysis of writing self-efficacy measures’, journal of nursing measurement, 25(2), pp. 205-223. nolen, s. b., horn, i. s. and ward, c. j. (2015) ‘situating motivation’, educational psychologist, 50(3), pp. 234-247. nystrand, m. (2006) ‘the social and historical context for writing research’, pp. 11-27, in macarthur, c. a., graham, s. and fitzgerald, j. (eds.) handbook of writing research. new york, ny: guilford press. pajares, f. and valiante, g. (2006) ‘self-efficacy beliefs and motivation in writing development’, pp. 158-170, in macarthur, c. a., graham, s. and fitzgerald, j. (eds.) handbook of writing research. new york, ny: guilford press. paré, a. (2014) 'rhetorical genre theory and academic literacy', journal of academic language and learning, 8(1), pp. a83-a94. perry, k. (2012) ‘what is literacy? – a critical overview of sociocultural perspectives’, journal of language and literacy education, 8(1), pp. 50-71. phelps, l. (2014) ‘the historical formation of academic identities: rhetoric and composition, discourse and writing’, canadian journal for studies in discourse and writing, 25(1), pp. 3-25. raskin, j. (2002) 'constructivism in psychology: personal construct psychology, radical constructivism, and social constructionism', american communication journal, 5(3), pp. 1-17. reither, j. a. (1985) 'writing and knowing: toward redefining the writing process', college english, 47(6), pp. 620-628. russell, d. (1995) ‘activity theory and its implications for writing instruction’, pp. 51-78, in petraglia, j. (ed.) reconceiving writing, rethinking writing instruction. hillsdale, nj: erlbaum. mitchell, mcmillan and lobchuk applying the ‘social turn’ in writing scholarship to perspectives on writing self-efficacy journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 20 russell, d. (1997) ‘rethinking genre in school and society: an activity theory analysis’, written communication, 14(4), pp. 504-554. russell, d., lea, m., parker, j., street, b. and donahue t. (2009) ‘exploring notions of genre in ‘academic literacies’ and ‘writing across the curriculum’: approaches across countries and contexts’, pp. 459-491, in bazerman, c. et al. (eds.) genre in a changing world: perspectives on writing. denver, co: wac clearinghouse. schryer, c. f. (1993) ‘genre as record’, written communication, 10(2), pp. 200-234. turner, j. c. and nolen, s. b. (2015) ‘introduction: the relevance of the situative perspective in educational psychology’, educational psychologist, 50(3), pp. 167172. vygotsky, l. (1986) thought and language. (kozulin, a., ed. and trans.) cambridge, ma: the mit press. wenger, e. (1998) communities of practice: learning, meaning, and identity. cambridge, uk: cambridge university press. author details kim m. mitchell is coordinator of research, scholarship, and quality assurance in the department of nursing, school of health sciences and community services, red river college, winnipeg, canada and doctoral candidate in the college of nursing, rady faculty of health sciences, university of manitoba, winnipeg, canada. email: kmmitchell@rrc.ca. diana e. mcmillan is associate professor in the college of nursing, rady faculty of health sciences, university of manitoba, winnipeg, canada. michelle m. lobchuk is associate professor in the college of nursing, rady faculty of health sciences, university of manitoba, winnipeg, canada. applying the ‘social turn’ in writing scholarship to perspectives on writing self-efficacy abstract the aim of this paper is to explore the fit between the cognitive concept of writing self-efficacy and a socially constructed epistemology of writing. socially constructed perspectives on writing emphasise context and community and include academic li... introduction exploring cognitive perspectives on writing situated perspectives the situated perspectives to be explored here include cultural-historical activity theory (or activity theory), rhetorical genre theory (rgt), and situated learning within communities of practice (cop). what these perspectives contribute to the unders... activity theory rhetorical genre theory communities of practice negotiating a synthesis of social cognitive and socially constructed theoretical perspectives references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 15: november 2019 brokering academic literacies in a community of practice lynne gornall university of central lancashire, uk abstract this paper examines the ‘academic literacies’ approach to supporting postgraduate international students in the business school of a post-92 english university. the support service was evaluated with appreciative inquiry methods, consulting students and academics. the most helpful support, according to students and academics, came from the ‘academic literacies’ approach, which was enhanced, and enabled, because it was linked to two other ideas: communities of practice, and the learning developer as a broker. keywords: academic literacies; international students; community of practice; legitimate peripheral participation; learning development; study skills; brokering; deficit model; appreciative inquiry. context this research, conducted in the business school of a post-92 institution (former polytechnic), focuses on the support provided for international postgraduate students by the international student support (iss) tutor, a senior lecturer in the school. the support comprises a weekly learning development session tailored to modules and assessments, which is on the students’ timetable and presented as part of the students’ programme of study, one-to-one tutorials and learning resources on a virtual learning environment (vle). introduction the learning development provided for non-traditional, widening participation and international learners in higher education has been roundly criticised from the standpoint of gornall brokering academic literacies in a community of practice journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 2 ‘academic literacies’, developed primarily by lea and street (1998). the argument is that if institutions assume that all problems lie with the learner, the ‘deficit approach’ to supporting them will prevail and will be inadequate (lea and street, 1998; biggs, 2003; wingate, 2006; shreeve, 2007; wingate, 2011). a deficit approach to supporting the learning development of students is likely to consist of text-focused study skills such as instruction on essay structure, grammar and punctuation and accurate referencing protocol (not practice), which aim to plug the ‘skills gap’. however, lea and street (1998), wingate (2006), and others, challenge the notion that such atomised study skills are discrete, homogenous and based on empirical criteria, and therefore argue that they are not learnable or transferable. wingate is damning and argues that this kind of study skills provision is based on outdated perspectives on students, skills and learning and is in general ‘largely inadequate’ (2011, p.27). unlike a skills approach to supporting students, the hallmark of an ‘academic literacies’ approach is the extent to which ‘practice is privileged above text’ (lillis and scott, 2007, p.10). from a critical perspective, the ‘academic literacies’ model (lea and street, 1998; 2006) sees reading and writing or literacies as cultural and social practices and focuses on the epistemology of literacy at an institutional level. it is concerned with meaning-making, identity, power, and authority, and foregrounds the institutional nature of what counts as knowledge in any particular academic context (lea and street, 2006, p.367). an ‘academic literacies’ approach provides valuable insights into other approaches (wingate, 2011. p.28) but research in the field is dominated by small scale projects, which ‘inhibit theoretical developments’ (lillis and scott, 2007 p.21) and although used to underpin course design, ‘academic literacies’ as an approach, has not been easily translated into a pedagogy (lea, 2004). this lack of pedagogic influence is apparent with much of the support for international students, where writing and/or language support such as english for academic purposes (eap) programmes, provided centrally and often generic, predominate. such programmes which focus on skills not literacy practices, rarely help students to become familiar with the ‘discourse conventions of their own disciplines’ (wingate, 2015, p.39) and without addressing the ‘complex, socially-situated set of meaning-making practices’ they will not fulfil the learning needs of students (gourlay, 2009, p.182). perhaps indicative of the inadequacy of skills or eap programmes is the widely held view that international students are a burden on teaching because of problems with english language competency, gornall brokering academic literacies in a community of practice journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 3 academic writing, plagiarism, lack of critical analysis and independent learning (fallon and berman brown, 1999; kingston and forland, 2008; hall and sung, 2009 and others). however, it is also the case that for many subject lecturers, working with international students may facilitate a greater awareness of their own literacy practices, resulting in more overt literacy teaching. like ‘canaries in the coal mine’ they show us the challenges (ryan and carroll, 2005, pp.9-10) and perhaps make us aware of the diversity of literacy practices. as a result, many subject lecturers will often take responsibility for inducting students into the writing practices of their discipline themselves rather than relying solely on centralised skills or eap support. however, subject lecturers may not recognise the complexity (lillis and scott, 2007, p.19) or only have a ‘tacit understanding of the discipline’s discourses and literacy conventions’ and therefore are not best placed to offer useful feedback on student writing (wingate, 2015, p.58). in addition, the tendency to focus on the international learner’s deficits can obscure the complexity of academic literacies, and might result in neglecting to take into account the ‘gaps between’ subject lecturers’ ‘expectations and student interpretations of what is involved in student writing’ (lea and street, 1998, p.159). to summarise then, international students are often viewed as problematic and a burden on teaching because they are assumed to have a skills deficit, a view which is partly due to a lack of understanding of the complexity of discipline specific ‘academic literacies’. students are frequently supported by centralised services to develop their skills but the skills provision does not address all their needs and the process does not facilitate a greater understanding of discipline specific literacies for either students or staff nor does it influence practice. this research examines whether an ‘academic literacies’ approach to learning development, where the learning developer brokers between staff and students within a specific learning community, is a more effective way of supporting the learning of international students. the role of communities of practice (cop) in supporting an academic literacies approach according to wenger (1998), a community of practice is a group of people or learners who ‘share a concern or passion for something they do, and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly’ (wenger-trayner and wenger-trayner, 2011, no pagination). this gornall brokering academic literacies in a community of practice journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 4 interaction requires ‘community maintenance’ to build and sustain it (wenger, 1998, p.73) and the active participation of members, including students, to develop it (shreeve, 2007). similar to ‘academic literacies’, cop concepts have developed from looking at learning through an anthropological lens rather than a psychological one, where learners might be seen as ‘students’ in the psychological view but ‘members of a community of practice’ in the anthropological view (barab and duffy 2000). learning is seen as fundamentally a social phenomenon which takes place through participation within a community of practice (wenger, 1998), both between students and tutors and between students (taha and cox, 2010, p.397). the rubric for learning which takes place in a community of practice is ‘legitimate peripheral participation’ (lpp) (lave and wenger, 1991), which focuses on the relationships between 'old-timers’, or experienced full members of a community of practice, and ‘newcomers’ and the power, access and transparency aspects inherent in the relationship which allow lpp or learning to take place. learners begin their learning on the edges of a group where their initial position participating on the periphery is seen as legitimate, early-stages learning. such participation requires access to a ‘wide range of ongoing activity, old-timers, and other members of the community; and to information, resources and opportunities for participation’ (lave and wenger, 1991, p.100). international students are at a disadvantage because of the 'regressive movement they experienced by leaving a community of practice in their country of origin, in which they had been full participants’ (halic et al, 2009, p.90). in addition, there are barriers to accessing and participating in the cop because of language competency and lack of cultural capital (bourdieu,1986) or educational knowledge of the new learning environment. for example, international students may not easily understand informal verbal instructions about assessments or catch any colloquialisms, asides or cultural references. nor, as discussed earlier, is the ‘practice’ of higher education learning transparent, nor ways of doing things explicit. so it is clear that for international students there are barriers to entering the cop via lpp and we cannot assume they will 'learn practices and adopt new identities simply through exposure to the environment' (gourlay, 2009, p.183). however, international student and faculty members’ peer support seminars can provide a ‘safe space’ for students to engage in legitimate peripheral participation away from the constraints and issues they encounter in endeavouring to engage in their wider native speaker community of practice (samimy et al, 2011). gornall brokering academic literacies in a community of practice journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 5 in addition, international students already have established literacy practices which may be at odds with the new community’s ‘privileged ways of communicating’ and where tutors are not aware of the privilege of their own literary practices, they offer no help (wingate, 2015, p.110), as discussed earlier. there are then barriers to students entering the cop not least due to subject lecturers’ unawareness of their own and other literacy practices. this, perhaps, is where working with students and their subject lecturers within the cop can facilitate awareness on both sides. for this to happen the learning development practitioner needs to be positioned between students and subject lecturers on the periphery of both groups, and take on a brokering role. the role of brokering in supporting an academic literacies approach brokering, in higher education, could be considered an ‘intentional act’ to collaborate with people to work towards change and development (jackson, 2003, p.5). by ‘spanning boundaries’ between lecturers and students, learning developers can become a sort of ‘cultural broker’ (stage and manning, 1992, p.41) or ‘go-between, one who advocates on behalf of another individual or group’ (jezewski and sotnik, 2001) mediating between groups of people to reduce conflict or invoke change (jezewski, 1990). this might involve challenging assumptions about students, influencing the academic environment by, for example, participating in working groups, and advising students on how to approach lecturers to get solutions (stage and manning, 1992, p.43). in relation to boundaryspanning, connectivity among people is an essential element to a progressive community of practice which could involve brokering relationships between 'people who need to talk or between people who need help and people who can offer help' (wenger, 2001, p.232). subject lecturers are often structurally equivalent in the sense that they have the same contacts and access the same information, resulting in information gaps between social networks or ‘structural holes’ (burt, 2005). arguably, learning developers who know the policy, practice and views of a number of groups, can at a basic level ‘make people on both sides of a structural hole aware of interests and difficulties in the other group’ and at a higher level transfer best practice between groups, far more effectively than people confined within those groups (burt, 2005, p.61). in relation to the ‘academic literacies’ approach, ‘literacy brokering’ is where brokers ‘bridge linguistic, cultural and textual divides for others’ (perry, 2009, p.256). gornall brokering academic literacies in a community of practice journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 6 the iss tutor brokering role within the school’s cop of staff and international students, where regular interaction and exchanging information between both parties takes place, enables and is pivotal to the ‘academic literacies’ approach. research methods the evidence presented here was originally gathered to critically examine the quality of the iss tutor’s practice. however, for this paper the evidence has been re-evaluated in order to specifically examine the significance of the ‘academic literacies’ approach to developing international students. poor english language competency is assumed to be the reason why international students struggle, which contributes to the view that the function of international student support is to improve students’ english. in other words, the deficit approach dominates the discourse. in order to change this discourse, a participatory stakeholder evaluation using the appreciative inquiry model (cooperrider et al, 2008) has been used. the appreciative inquiry (ai) cycle typically has four distinct stages: discovery, dream, design and delivery. however, only the discovery and dream stages have been undertaken for this study due to length of time the full ai process takes in terms of redesigning and delivering outcomes as a result of research findings. at the ‘discovery’ stage information was gathered about what is positive about the past or present in order to critically evaluate the current learning development provision. next came the ‘dream’ stage where a positive future was envisioned or imagined to ascertain and analyse the stakeholders’ vision of an ideal learning development provision. ai has limitations and has been criticised for having a ‘strengths-based orientation’ and the propensity to ignore negative aspects (reed, 2007). however, although things that work well will be discovered by asking questions such as ‘what works well?’ rather than focusing on what problems there might be, it is also the case that where important aspects of a service or practice are not identified as positive or effective through an appreciative inquiry, this could be a strong indication that they are not (cousin, 2009, p.173). gornall brokering academic literacies in a community of practice journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 7 recruitment and data collection data has been drawn from paired interviews where participants interview each other in pairs and note down each other’s responses, involving 25 participants in total; 10 members of academic staff and 15 international students from the business school from a range of business and management disciplines. staff and students were asked different questions and undertook paired interviews separately. staff were encouraged to explore questions such as: ‘for you personally, what is the main benefit of having iss tutors in the business school?’ (discovery stage) and ‘if resources, including time, were unlimited, how would learning development tutors and subject lecturers work together?’ (dream stage). students undertook paired interviews in three separate groups of eight, four and three according to their availability. student interview questions were designed to elicit what they found useful about the support provided such as ‘during one-to-one tutorials, what was the best thing that happened? when did you think “i’m happy i came for a tutorial?’ (discovery stage) and ‘if you were a uk business school dean and had unlimited money, what support would you provide for international students in your school?’ (dream stage). information and consent forms were carefully but simply constructed to maximise understanding of the project and to fulfil ethical requirements. data analysis written responses were transcribed on a master sheet and a content analysis undertaken. responses were categorised using a basic thematic coding technique (see saldana, 2009) according to whether the support described by respondents had the hallmark of ‘academic literacies’ (practice over text) or was generic study skills in nature. the support provided for students is multifaceted, involving timetabled learning development sessions, one-to-one tutorials and vle study skills resources. therefore, it has sometimes been difficult to determine which element participants are referring to in their responses. responses such as ‘guide to get materials from university database’ and ‘help with paraphrasing’ can be accurately categorised as study skills. however, responses such as ‘get more journal information support’ and ‘had a proper understanding of writing academic essays’ could be categorised as study skills or academic literacies because it is not known whether the students were referring to in-class discussion around literacy practices or gornall brokering academic literacies in a community of practice journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 8 generic vle material. such ambiguous responses were excluded from the analysis. one of the questions specifically asked about the usefulness of the vle and as that only contains study skills resources, it was excluded also. findings and discussion the student responses looking at the discovery stage data overall, the elements of iss tutor support indicated as most useful or helpful were academic literacies (al) 51 mentions. study skills (ss) had 31 mentions in total. 12 of the respondents said learning development sessions were most useful, one stated that one-to-one tutorials were most useful, one said email support and one said that the vle was most useful. academic literacies typical iss tutor learning development activity involves, for example, discussion about what counts as knowledge or good work in the particular academic context, whether that be discipline-specific (for example, the mba emphasises theory, while finance and investment focus on models and calculations) or lecturer-specific (lecturer x wants to focus on self-awareness in your reflective writing, lecturer y focuses on language and grammar, for example). so, in classes and tutorials, the activities and discussion are focused on cultural and social practices (lea and street, 1998). students greatly valued this element of their support and talked a lot about deconstructing assignment instructions and discussing what the subject lecturer wants from them. showing an awareness of the complexity involved and understanding that different practices have different requirements, for example, these are examples from the responses of students valuing the hallmark of an ‘academic literacies’ approach in that their responses indicate they value practice being ‘privileged above text’ (lillis and scott, 2007, p.10): ‘how to answer assignment questions properly and knowing the requirement of each module tutor’. ‘help student to understand what the assignment requires’. gornall brokering academic literacies in a community of practice journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 9 ‘breaking down the complex assignments into simple ones (parts)’. ‘understand what tutor wants from my work’. any instruction or discussion on referencing will be focused on practice rather than protocol, because teaching where to put brackets etc., does not explain the practice of referencing where knowledge from literature may be contested as well as used as evidence (wingate, 2006, p.463). so instead of focusing on technical aspects, we talk about who writes journal articles, books etc. and who decides whether they are authoritative, why they write them and what for, and within our academic tradition, what you are expected to do with them and their relationship to themselves and their own ideas. for example, this mention of referencing refers to practice not protocol: ‘was taught how to use academic ref’. and these examples illustrate how students have engaged with what counts as knowledge in their particular academic context (lea and street, 2006, p.367): ‘help student find literature of studied topic’. ‘how to choose the references, like they (iss tutors) don’t suggest text books’. brokering and communities of practice (cop) access to the community of practice (cop) and its members is critical for learning (lave and wenger, 1991, p.101) but as discussed above (gourlay, 2009; wingate, 2015), there are barriers to international students participating in the cop of their discipline via lpp due to access to ‘old timers’, language competence, and less cultural capital. however, in learning development sessions the iss tutor positions herself as a more experienced peer and as discussed earlier, this can become a ‘safe’ space for students to engage in lpp (samimy et al, 2011). it is argued here that offering such a ‘space’ and brokering between the institutional practices, subject lecturers and students, affords better access to the cop for students as evidenced in these examples: gornall brokering academic literacies in a community of practice journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 10 ‘as a group when we brainstorm it gives me the idea on how to best approach my coursework to score high mark’. ‘practise and discuss as a group in front of is tutor’. ‘how to write a reflective essay and she explained clearly to me’. ‘the information i heard about the residential trip’. interestingly, there was also understanding of the brokering relationship: ‘been able to determine what the lecturers want through the iss tutor’s lectures’. ‘iss tutor sorted academic issue with other course tutor’. study skills so it would seem that ‘academic literacies’, cop and a brokering approach to support are valued by students, and mentioned more than stand-alone vle resources and textfocused, atomised technical study skills, which characteristically involve instruction on essay structure, grammar, punctuation and accurate referencing protocol (not practice). interestingly, when study skills were mentioned in responses, the information was somewhat shallow in comparison, atomised and not associated with their assignments, tutors or practice, for example: ‘making using of the e-learn and library online resources’. ‘how to write essays, paraphrase properly’. ‘learning how to paraphrase effectively’. the staff responses before looking in detail at the staff responses, it is interesting to note here that one or two subject lecturers did also refer to study skills as being very useful however, their gornall brokering academic literacies in a community of practice journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 11 responses are entirely in keeping with deficit thinking about students, focusing on students’ inadequacies rather than the possible gaps between their expectations and student interpretations (lea and street, 1998, p.159). this could also indicate that they themselves may not ‘recognise the complexity’ (lillis and scott, 2007, p.19) or only have a ‘tacit understanding of the discipline’s discourses’ (wingate, 2015, p.58). as discussed earlier the ‘deficit’ view of international students prevails in that they are simply lacking the skills for writing; and from the responses in this study, some staff have the view that the iss tutor is there to plug the skills gap or help out the subject lecturer, for example: ‘time saving for the tutor …can refer students with problems …concentrate on delivering the module, not referencing and writing’. ‘have gone to service on one or two occasions with students with language problems’. ‘helps module tutors in coping with a diverse range of students’. brokering academic literacies however, the majority of the staff responses recognised literacy as cultural and social practice and valued the relationship with the iss tutor as a fellow member of the cop. many responses indicated that collaboration between subject lecturers and iss tutors has helped to make assignments and practice transparent and accessible to students, for example: ‘that there was someone able to contextualise and help students make sense of what lecturers might deliver to students in the classroom’. ‘gives students a second chance at better understanding of module material if iss tutor discusses in class’. ‘non-standard requirements/various expectations – sharing module information and assignment details is crucial … generic advice might be detrimental to students’, ‘sharing module information means everyone is on the same script’. gornall brokering academic literacies in a community of practice journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 12 ‘he found particularly useful your services regarding giving you assignment essay titles and you deconstructing and explaining everything the title means … makes assessment briefs a lot clearer to students’. collaboration influencing practice doing things better by ‘interacting regularly’ in the cop (wenger-trayner and wengertrayner, 2011) and brokering between staff and students to influence the academic environment (stage and manning, 1992, p.43) have influenced the practice of subject lecturers. ‘final year students – first assignment, poor performance – students upset. working with tutors is iss (tutors) to make developments. eg what does a good assignment look like?’ ‘from the research side, helps the reflective practice of tutors which makes the student experience better’. brokering provided knowledge where there were ‘structural holes’ and transferred best practice between groups (burt, 2005). ‘helped me to reflect on the language i use and the cultural stereotypes i hold. this comes through professional relationship … can use iss tutor as a sounding board for wording of assignments etc.’. ‘first came here not having experience of teaching international students. i went through mip [module information pack including module content, schedule and assessment instructions] and was able to get feedback on the wording and structure of the assignment brief – it makes a lot of difference. i asked for help if mip will work with students’. ‘helpful because it means i can check my assumptions – if the [iss] tutor is aware of what my module is about, i am able to pre-empt any lack of understanding about things i might assume are not problematic for students’. gornall brokering academic literacies in a community of practice journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 13 ‘collaborating helps us clarify things and helps understanding. gives us a second opportunity to make something right if i had assumed something incorrectly’. the connectivity among people is an essential element to a progressive community of practice (wenger, 2001) and responses indicated the importance of iss tutor being situated in the school, for example: ‘would be difficult to manage if not in school, impossible because of different styles/requirements/subject areas/assignments between schools’. ‘not ethical or fair for the international students if we don’t have iss tutors work with us as part of the delivery team mutually supportive working relationship’. responses indicate that through collaboration we can see elements of lpp (lave and wenger, 1991) with the learning developer taking on the role of the 'old-timer’ with subject lecturers being the ‘newcomers’ to learning development. ‘i liked the engagement with iss tutor and her personal approach and candid discussions between myself and a specialist colleague … another plus is personal relationship and proximity’. ‘someone to talk to about issues and access …your accessibility and how we used that to support students’. the dream stage the ‘dream stage’ data was not as rich as the ‘discovery stage’ however, at the ‘dream stage’ there was a strong sense that support was good, as both students and staff indicated they wanted more of the same rather than dreaming of something different. where the reality and the ideal were different, it was mostly in relation to things which were outside the remit of iss tutors such as more opportunities for work placements or reduction in fees. conclusions gornall brokering academic literacies in a community of practice journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 14 in this paper, the extent to which the ‘academic literacies’ approach is practised and valued in the context of a post-92 business school has been examined. the evidence echoes the literature in relation to study skills, in that the staff responses equate study skills with deficit thinking about students, and where students mentioned study skills the discourse was atomised and relatively shallow in comparison to when they were talking about what has been considered as ‘academic literacies’ support. also reflected, was a lack of understanding by some staff of the complexity of the discourse and literacy conventions of their own practice, perhaps explaining their need to outsource literacy work to the iss tutor rather than collaborating. however, there was a clear indication that staff value highly the collaboration which promotes an epistemological interrogation of their course materials and assessments, which is the hallmark of the ‘academic literacies’ approach. students also greatly valued the iss tutor’s ‘academic literacies’ approach enabled by brokering which involved deconstructing assignment requirements and discussing what subject lecturers want from them: in other words, negotiating power, access and transparency. it is hoped that this research has contributed to the ‘academic literacies’ pedagogy in relation to supporting international students and learning development practice. it is also worth adding that where academic literacy support is outsourced to central services, ‘academic literacies’ expertise (of which there is plenty, see lillis et al, 2016) may continue to be somewhat siloed and have limited capacity to influence or interrogate practice or further the development of an ‘academic literacies pedagogy’. in addition, centralised learning developers will remain undervalued and underpaid, instructed to mostly work with students (russell et al 2009, p.404). however, when learning developers are situated in practice, and work alongside and collaborate with discipline colleagues, they have the opportunity to influence as the responses from subject lecturers in this paper confirm. however, changes in practice will not occur if the collaboration merely results in adjunct, tailored, study skills sessions. it is only when learning development occupies its own space within a learning community from where it can broker between students and discipline practices, that it can influence those practices. references gornall brokering academic literacies in a community of practice journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 15 barab, s.a. and duffy, t. (2000) ‘from practice fields to communities of practice’, in jonassen, d. and land, s.m. (eds.) theoretical foundations of learning environments. mahwah, nj: lawrence erlbaum associates, pp. 25-56. biggs, j. (2003) teaching for quality learning at university. buckingham: society for research into higher education and open university press. bourdieu, p. (1986) ‘the forms of capital’, in richardson, j. (ed.) handbook of theory and research for the sociology of education. new york: greenwood, pp. 241-258. burt, r. (2005) brokerage and closure: an introduction to social capital. oxford: oxford university press. cooperrider, d.l., whitney, d. and stavros j.m. (2008) appreciative inquiry handbook: for leaders of change. williston, vt: berrett-koehler. cousin, g. (2009). researching learning in higher education: an introduction to contemporary methods and approaches. new york, ny: routledge. fallon, g. and berman brown r. (1999). ‘what about the workers? academic staff opinions about working with non-uk postgraduate students in higher education’, journal of further and higher education, 23(1), pp. 41-52. gourlay, l. (2009) ‘threshold practices: becoming a student through academic literacies’, london review of education, 7(2), pp. 181-192. halic, o., greenberg, k. and paulus, t. (2009) ‘language and academic identity: a study of the experiences of non-native english speaking international students’, international education, 38(2), pp. 73-93. hall, g. and sung, t. (2009) ‘mind the gap? a case study of the differing perceptions of international students and their lecturers on postgraduate business programmes’, international journal of management education, 8(1), pp. 53-62. gornall brokering academic literacies in a community of practice journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 16 jackson, n. (2003) engaging and changing higher education through brokerage. basingstoke: ashgate. jezewski m.a., (1990) ‘culture brokering in migrant farmworker health care’, western journal of nursing research, 12(4), pp. 497-513. jezewski, m.a. and sotnik, p. (2001) culture brokering: providing culturally competent rehabilitation services to foreign-born persons. new york: center for international rehabilitation research information and exchange. kingston, e. and forland, h. (2008) ‘bridging the gap in expectations between international students and academic staff’, journal of studies in international education, 12(2), pp. 204 -221. lave, j. and wenger, e. (1991) situated learning: legitimate peripheral participation. cambridge: cambridge university press. lea, m. (2004) ‘academic literacies: a pedagogy for course design’, studies in higher education, 29(6), pp. 739-756. lea, m. and street, b. (1998) ‘student writing in higher education: an academic literacies approach’, studies in higher education, 11(3), pp. 182-199. lea, m. and street, b. (2006) ‘the “academic literacies” model: theory and applications’, theory into practice, 45(4), pp. 368-377. lillis, t. and scott, m. (2007) ‘defining academic literacies research: issues of epistemology, ideology and strategy’, journal of applied linguistics, 4(1), pp. 5-32. lillis, t., harrington, k., lea, m. and mitchell, s. (eds.) (2016) working with academic literacies: case studies towards transformative practice. fort collins, colorado: the wac clearinghouse/parlor press. perry, k.h. (2009) ‘genres, contexts, and literacy practices: literacy brokering among sudanese refugee families’, reading research quarterly, 44(3), pp. 256–276. gornall brokering academic literacies in a community of practice journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 17 reed, j. (2007). appreciative inquiry: research for change. london: sage. russell, d. r., lea, m., parker, j., street, b. and donahue, t. (2009) ’exploring notions of genre in "academic literacies" and "writing across the curriculum": approaches across countries and contexts’, english publications, 192, pp. 395-423 [online]. available at: https://lib.dr.iastate.edu/engl_pubs/192 (accessed: 8 june 2019). ryan, j. and carrol, j. (2005) ‘canaries in the coalmine’: international students in western universities’, in carroll, j. and ryan j. (eds.) teaching international students: improving learning for all. london: routledge, pp. 1-10. saldana, j. (2009). the coding manual for qualitative researchers. london: sage. samimy, k., kim, s., ah lea, j. and kasai, m. (2011) ‘a participative inquiry in a tesol program: development of three nnes graduate students’ legitimate peripheral participation to fuller participation’, modern language journal, 95(4), pp. 558–574. shreeve, a. (2007) ‘learning development and study support – an embedded approach through communities of practice’, art, design and communication in higher education, 6(1), pp. 11-25. stage, f.k. and manning, k. (1992) (eds.) enhancing the multicultural campus environment: a cultural brokering approach. san francisco: jossey-bass. taha, n. and cox, a.m. (2010) ‘social network dynamics in international students' learning’, in dirckinck-holmfeld, l., hodgson, v., jones, c., de laat, m., mcconnel, d. and ryberg, t., (eds.) proceedings of the 7th international conference on networked learning 2010, aalborg, denmark 3-4 may 2010, pp. 396-403 [online]. available at: http://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/10858/1/taha.pdf (accessed: 8 june 2019) wenger, e. (1998) communities of practice. cambridge: cambridge university press. https://lib.dr.iastate.edu/engl_pubs/192 http://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/10858/1/taha.pdf gornall brokering academic literacies in a community of practice journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 18 wenger, e. (2001) ‘communities of practice and social learning systems’, organization 7(2), pp. 225–246. wenger-trayner, e. and wenger-trayner, b. (2011) what is a community of practice? available at: http://wengertrayner.com/resources/what-is-a-community-of-practice/ (accessed 8 june 2019). wingate, u. (2006) ‘doing away with “study skills”’, teaching in higher education, 11(4), pp. 457-469. wingate, u. (2011) ‘using academic literacies and genre-based models for academic writing instruction: a “literacy” journey’, journal of english for academic purposes, 11(1), pp. 26–37. wingate u. (2015) academic literacy and student diversity: the case for inclusive practice. bristol: multilingual matters. author details lynne gornall is a learning development practitioner and senior lecturer at the university of central lancashire where she works with both students and colleagues. her research interests focus on ‘academic literacies’ and making learning equally accessible for all students. http://wengertrayner.com/resources/what-is-a-community-of-practice/ brokering academic literacies in a community of practice abstract context introduction the role of communities of practice (cop) in supporting an academic literacies approach the role of brokering in supporting an academic literacies approach research methods recruitment and data collection data analysis findings and discussion the student responses academic literacies brokering and communities of practice (cop) study skills brokering academic literacies collaboration influencing practice conclusions references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 19: december 2020 ________________________________________________________________________ creative solutions to common groupwork problems helena beeson university of northampton richard byles university of northampton abstract this case study considers an innovative, digitally-based workshop activity designed to provide the opportunity for students to develop skills associated with groupwork, a key element of learning development practice. it aligns with the principles of cooperative learning (johnson and johnson, 2013) and vygotsky’s sociocultural theory (1978), and will be of interest to learning developers, faculty staff and learning technologists. a need was established through discussions between faculty tutors and the authors ̶ a learning development tutor and a learning technologist ̶ for learners to engage in the process of working as a group and utilising technology. a scenario workshop was devised in which groups negotiated, scripted and filmed responses to given team problems. the prospect of potentially advising future students through video without being assessed appeared to galvanise groups and received positive feedback. surveys were administered at the beginning of the process to establish participants’ previous experiences of groupwork, and this data informed five scenarios for future cohorts to storyboard their strategies. feedback on the workshop activity has demonstrated that using video technologies together with scenario-based role-play can be an effective strategy in helping students to become effective group members. the findings provide a practical example of interdisciplinary collaboration and guidelines which could be adapted to use with different subjects. the key benefits of this are developing students’ awareness of industry needs and understanding of groupwork responsibilities, as well as enhancing digital literacies. keywords: groupwork; teams; collaboration; group strategies; role-play; video. beeson and byles creative solutions to common groupwork problems journal of learning development in higher education, issue 19: december 2020 2 introduction groupwork is employed widely at the university of northampton for assessment, reflecting the fact that it is a skill required in many professions. groupwork requires negotiation and communication, thus enhancing co-operative learning. co-operative learning is designed to promote a positive team in which both a students’ own understanding and that of all members of the team is improved by working together (johnson and johnson, 2013). freeman and greenacre (2010) note that team members often struggle to understand each other's needs and face significant communication barriers. despite frequent issues with groupwork, this form of assessment is used widely within the faculty of business and law (fbl), reinforcing the joint information systems committee’s (jisc) assertion that the skill is pedagogically effective and prepares students for employment (2015a). jisc also notes that such tasks can cause anxiety, as the skill ‘is best suited to longer, more complex assignments’ (2015a). however, the authors of this paper have identified that not all students learn how to do groupwork before assessment. this belief was reinforced through conversations with academic tutors alongside our own experiences. the university’s strategic plan promotes collaboration and digital skills development (university of northampton, 2015), and many assignments now require video output. there are several examples of practical teaching approaches in the literature, particularly as discussed by neville et al. (2019), who describe business group simulations and categorising individuals’ roles. throughout our research we worked with six different fbl tutors and student groups, and, through an iterative process, created a student-led activity requiring storyboarding, communication, negotiation, and use of video technology. background having established that there was scope for students to practise the skill of groupwork before assessment, we investigated possible approaches. our starting point was to identify common issues and practices in the literature. barriers to successful groupwork are discussed widely in the literature, including differing levels of contribution, whether through ability or group cohesion, and meeting environments (race and pickford, 2007). beeson and byles creative solutions to common groupwork problems journal of learning development in higher education, issue 19: december 2020 3 parker (2008) notes that the lack of a clear purpose, communication or clear roles also contribute to group failure. ramsden (2003) stresses the importance of identifying student misunderstandings in order to work collaboratively to resolve them. these observations are reinforced by johnson and johnson (2013), who argue that cooperative learning needs structure and pre-planning to be successful. table 1. effective cooperative learning requires five tenets (johnson and johnson, 2013). cooperative learning characteristics positive interdependence a sense that the group identify as a team and need each other to succeed individual and group accountability all members feel responsible for contributing their fair share promotive interaction members support and encourage each other teaching students required group skills students need to learn skills such as communication, decision making and conflict management group processing groups discuss progress, internal relationships and behaviours ramsden (2003) advocates empowering learners to learn rather than just experiencing the transmission of knowledge. this can be achieved through active learning using bloom’s taxonomy, encouraging skills such as analysis and evaluation (anderson et al., 2001). teaching in an environment in which students can create content collaboratively and ask questions is likely to promote deeper learning. indeed, the collaborative aspect is central to vygotsky’s sociocultural theory (1978), which proposes that learning and student growth are social processes born out of conflict resolution between peers. peer and self-directed learning are described as the ‘bedrock of curricula that require students to integrate generic skills, technical knowledge and professional development through issues-based and problem-based learning’ (biggs, 1999, cited in ramsden, 2003, p.161). druckman and ebner (2013) apply peer learning, ascertaining that role-play increases motivation, information retention and student interest, but that it has no impact on critical thinking. in contrast, o’sullivan (2011) observes that, in the event of information overload, beeson and byles creative solutions to common groupwork problems journal of learning development in higher education, issue 19: december 2020 4 role-play can aid in using, critically interpreting and applying information. the value of roleplay is emphasised by howieson and rogers (2018), who state that it instigates deep learning, aids student cooperation, prepares for professional practice and increases confidence. errington (2011) also observes that role-play through digitised video can contribute greatly to the realism of a scenario. developing digital literacies jisc defines digital literacies as ‘the capabilities which fit someone for living, learning and working in a digital society’ (2017, p.2). they detail six elements which are summarised in figure 1. figure 1. digital capabilities. jisc, (2017) building digital capabilities: the six elements defined (this work is licensed under cc by-nc-sa) the concepts of collaboration, participation, problem solving, and digital creation have clear links to groupwork. milton and vozzo (2013) reinforce this, claiming that digital pedagogy requires less content and more problem solving, leading to tutors becoming cocreators of knowledge with students rather than solely educators. pirhonen and rasi beeson and byles creative solutions to common groupwork problems journal of learning development in higher education, issue 19: december 2020 5 (2017) observe that instructional video content generated by students promotes positive emotion and motivation for their course. they found that this approach encourages collaboration, problem solving and video production skills, echoing jisc’s capabilities. thus, with this theoretical background established, we designed an innovative workshop to enhance students’ groupwork abilities, which also embedded digital skills. project aims based on our initial research, we identified four aims which would inform our groupwork intervention: 1. establish the main barriers for students in fbl to succeeding in groupwork projects. 2. engage individuals and groups in the use of prospective tools and critical thinking to address identified barriers and produce prototype teaching materials for future cohorts. 3. develop key principles for using technology to contribute to successful collaborations. 4. work with fbl tutors to develop new strategies within the classroom to address and improve groupwork collaboration. identifying student needs we spoke with fbl tutors about their approach to teaching groupwork skills. we then created a survey that was given to 68 students from across fbl to gain a range of lived groupwork experiences exploring their use of technology. this also aimed to identify current misunderstandings as recommended by ramsden (2003). surveys are a ‘oneshot’ opportunity to gather standardised information from participants (cohen, 2018), which was our aim as we only have access to student groups for single workshops. ethical approval was sought and granted, although no identifying data was collected. beeson and byles creative solutions to common groupwork problems journal of learning development in higher education, issue 19: december 2020 6 41 students provided survey feedback about previous groupwork, including barriers, meetings and technology. there was a range of useful feedback in different areas which we analysed thematically. the most common areas are mentioned below. groupwork barriers experienced previously • lack of availability for meetings x 15. • communication x 10. • differing levels of content contribution x 9. • people don’t contribute to meetings x 9. • personality clash x 8. • team leader didn’t trust the rest of the group x 3. • group members from different backgrounds = conflict x 3. groups’ organisational skills there were several positive comments about students being organised, but poor organisation had a large impact on their group: • not understanding the task fully. • everyone had very different ideas. • too much information in a two-minute video (for assessment). • no meeting notes were taken. technology was largely seen as a solution to the barriers of communication (9), organisation (6) and member availability (5). the only technologies mentioned were for communicating and file storage: whatsapp, google drive and microsoft applications. they were all seen as positive. most respondents were confident with technology. intervention identified barriers of lack of cohesion and differing contributions clearly overlap with the literature by race and pickford (2007), parker (2008) and johnson and johnson (2013). based on our findings, we used the survey results to inform the design of five new beeson and byles creative solutions to common groupwork problems journal of learning development in higher education, issue 19: december 2020 7 scenarios which we felt could focus student debate. the themes we identified for debate were: • group tension: there’s a lot of tension in our group and we argue over little details. • work/life balance: one group member works long hours and can’t make most meetings. • lack of organisation: things are not getting recorded; we forget what we are supposed to do. • lack of agreement: everyone has lots of good ideas, and we can’t decide what to do. • group member domination: one of the group tries to dominate every meeting, so the rest of us don’t have an opportunity to contribute. these themes formed the focus of a classroom activity designed to enhance critical thinking, advocated by errington (2005). small groups were asked to debate ideas in response to a scenario and identify three possible answers, each of which was then acted out as a narrative and filmed to create a multiple-choice interactive video. the task required a right answer, a wrong answer and a ridiculous one. all the students we spoke to had done or were undertaking video assignments. staff and student roles in the activity are identified in table 2. table 2. activity roles. facilitators students explain the task show exemplar video hand out scenarios with instructions debate scenarios as a group support and question student decisions compromise on scripting three responses establish actor and videographer roles offer strategies for effective filming film draft responses review output and feed back share output if desired *re-film where necessary *technical support *upload to video hosting platform beeson and byles creative solutions to common groupwork problems journal of learning development in higher education, issue 19: december 2020 8 *invite class review *students who volunteer can share *friendly feedback discussion *provide more general feedback on scenarios and filming (* denotes steps in the revised facilitation guidelines discussed next) we ran our 1.5-hour activity with six groups from human resource management and marketing modules as part of learning development groupwork classes, replacing more traditional and less student-led sessions. this was informed by the jisc model (2017) and johnson and johnson (2013). we used this opportunity to develop digital literacies and adapted our workshop to fulfil requests for groupwork support. one fbl tutor wanted more emphasis on media construction and editing, whereas a second wanted us to focus on the groupwork process. after our first workshop, we interviewed one fbl colleague, who observed that each group needed to work together through active experiences, applying the skills that had informed our scenarios to succeed, as suggested by ramsden (2003). working as a group to devise a solution provided the opportunity to employ role-play. upon reviewing footage from the first group, we found some were incomplete, lacking in technical quality, or had poorly developed ideas. we realised participants had too much flexibility and not enough guidance regarding timings, boundaries and technical approaches. to address this, we introduced new guidelines for more structured facilitation, which included feedback steps to review scripts, first shots and advice on technical elements pending a reshoot, illustrating the co-creator role advocated by milton and vozzo (2013). a second workshop was devised in which students learned to edit their work using kaltura paths to produce interactive videos. this provided the opportunity for peer review, which was well received by all. results our revised approach was more effective than the pilot due to the structured and facilitated nature of the session. beeson and byles creative solutions to common groupwork problems journal of learning development in higher education, issue 19: december 2020 9 fbl tutor’s significant comments from interview • the workshops have helped to expand the students’ digital literacies and enhanced understanding in this area. • during the workshop, the students became very interested and keen to learn new skills that would help them with submitting their assignment. • those that were already very aware of how to record and frame a piece to camera were able to help others in the group, and those that were a little unsure developed more confidence during the workshops. • as a programme leader, embedding digital literacy into the programme in order to enhance the subject area has been a priority going forward. feedback on the activity we interviewed 13 students to establish their views on the workshop. table 3 details student comments. table 3: feedback extracts (verbatim). positive hr is all about team work, so it was good to have a practical example of how to work together it was useful as we were able to develop our team work, delegating and leadership skills valuable opportunity to practice the teamwork process without being graded opportunity to leave comfort zone was appreciated much more engaging than someone standing at the front talking to us, made it more interesting and enjoyable. enabled increased awareness of issues many students face the session raised discussion around the importance of quality and structure of video production quite a lot of groupwork on my course, showed the necessity of a plan. group work is 50% of our course work which needs much attention i would give a recommendation that students should do the activity every year beeson and byles creative solutions to common groupwork problems journal of learning development in higher education, issue 19: december 2020 10 an initial goal was to work with students to produce media which could be shared with others, but we found that there were practical concerns, such as establishing quality standards in such a short period of time and the ethical issues of sharing students’ materials. we realised that the value of the workshop was not the quality of the output, but in the learning processes of those involved. in the role-play workshop, students were able to think more critically about groupwork than when reflecting on previous experiences. the latter evoked an emotional response and often raised previous grievances. in contrast, when engaged in role-play, the students appeared to think more openly and acknowledged the digital literacy perspective. clear links to industry and practising groupwork were recognised in the comments. evaluation introducing feedback stages and specific timings for writing scenario responses, filming and editing enabled much more productive and focused sessions, reflecting biggs’(1999, cited in ramsden, 2003, p.161) peer and self-directed learning observations. the scenario activity was positively received with proactive student bonding throughout. the opportunity to develop these skills in one session outside assessment appeared to remove anxiety and group politics. we had envisioned that some students might not want to engage but were surprised that all students took part, with only two students reluctant to appear in front of the camera, adopting roles such as videographer or director. the workshop was successfully deployed in different modules with either a technical or practical focus. repurposing of the session for different courses, groups and needs did not to consider activity is too basic needs more complex scenarios it is unrealistic because there can be more problems within a group encourage mixed groups. some groups are made of people of the same high schools, race, country beeson and byles creative solutions to common groupwork problems journal of learning development in higher education, issue 19: december 2020 11 result in substantial differences in student satisfaction, with most students agreeing that there was a benefit to the activity. feedback suggested that the scenarios could be developed further, and, in future sessions, we would consider involving learners and tutors in developing these. however, this would require more time and access to classroom sessions. the suggestion to mix groups to ensure a diverse range of participants had not been considered but presents an opportunity to explore wider perspectives. previously learning development groupwork classes had involved small table discussions which were fed back to the class with no roleplay element or opportunities for students to make decisions. this new approach was more active and better reflects the university’s strategic plan. principles for planning groupwork activities we aimed to identify strategies for tutors to focus students’ approaches to groupwork before assessment and help students avoid common mistakes. we identified the following principles for tutors’ consideration when setting assignments: 1. get to know how any recommended tools work before demonstrating them to students. 2. take time in the first meeting to practise the deployed technologies with each group. 3. offer team building activities to form an effective team (also advocated by tuckman in his group development model, 1965, and race and pickford, 2007). 4. use activities (e.g. scenarios) to encourage students to be aware of potential issues and use peer review to evaluate each other’s observations. this promotes the skills to develop strategies to resolve identified problems. 5. encourage students to develop a collaborative online workspace to: • agree a group contract at the start of their projects. • record and share meeting notes. • record actions and tasks. • assist in the overall management of groupwork projects. • maintain accountability and communicate regularly. beeson and byles creative solutions to common groupwork problems journal of learning development in higher education, issue 19: december 2020 12 our work scaffolding students’ learning through groupwork role-play and technology has been adapted by tutors at the university teaching online. in one level five computing module, student groups work with a live client. through virtual meetings the students can interact with the client and develop skills required in industry. a student on the course blog reflected: ‘i think it makes it more of an exciting assignment as it feels like a preview into what a career would be like as a web designer and working with clients.’ role-play in learning can be adopted flexibly to suit the subject and learning outcomes. a combination of role-play and the exploration of technologies are effective strategies to support groupwork, even when working remotely. conclusion we aimed to identify barriers to groupwork and find new approaches to resolving them utilising technology to improve student communication and organisation. the barriers we found concerning differing contributions, planning, and communication echoed what we had found in the literature. combining the skills of a learning development tutor and learning technologist, we developed a new workshop session in which students worked collaboratively to create content that could advise future students how to engage in groupwork tasks successfully. the workshop was technologically and pedagogically creative and was well received by staff and students. the session plan was flexible and could be adapted to meet different needs, as the facilitators’ role was to introduce the task clearly, question decisions, offer alternative perspectives, and provide encouragement and ongoing technical advice. there were three main overarching findings of this case study: • students engaged effectively in role playing a particular skill and took away new perspectives on future groupwork tasks. • structuring the session to ensure it was interactive was important. giving the students an exemplar video to set expectations, and providing opportunities for feedback, helped to focus what they were doing and achieve the task successfully. beeson and byles creative solutions to common groupwork problems journal of learning development in higher education, issue 19: december 2020 13 • the case study provided a new insight into the use of technology in teaching, utilising video creation and editing. the linking of a scenario-based workshop activity with designing and making videos proved to be fun and engaging for staff and students. overall, the survey feedback demonstrated that the workshop activity was well received. we gained some useful and practical suggestions for improvement, such as including more complex scenarios and promoting a diverse mix of participants. we are now adapting our activity to create an online equivalent. from our findings we developed a set of principles for tutors to utilise and adapt when setting group assignments. the positive themes within the activity comments from secondand third-year workshop participants reflected our hopes that this would be a valuable learning experience in which students’ take an active role responding to real scenarios and are involved in providing creative solutions to common groupwork issues. by engaging students actively in this learning scenario, we witnessed the onus being shifted away from assessments and previous negative groupwork experiences. all students engaged with the exercise positively. the opportunity to engage in successful groupwork was considered a useful developmental experience, encouraging respect and establishing roles and responsibilities. whilst this has been a positive intervention, the example discussed in this paper was only conducted face to face. there is further research to be explored, and we are investigating how to translate this into an online activity to offer more flexibility to future cohorts. the challenges of adapting this are that students and staff will need to be creative in using different tools with alternative outputs to facilitate collaborative working online. however, the identified underlying principles are transferable to any environment. references anderson, l.w., krathwohl, d.r. and bloom, b.s. (2001) a taxonomy for learning, teaching and assessing: a revision of bloom’s taxonomy of educational objectives. new york: longman. beeson and byles creative solutions to common groupwork problems journal of learning development in higher education, issue 19: december 2020 14 cohen, l. (2018) research methods in education. 8th edn. abingdon: routledge. druckman, d. and ebner, n. (2013) ‘games, claims, and new frames: rethinking the use of simulation in negotiation education’, negotiation journal, 29(1), pp. 61-92, https://doi.org/10.1111/nejo.12005. errington, e. (2005) creating learning scenarios: a planning guide for adult educators. palmerston north: cool books. errington, e. (2011) ‘mission possible: using near-world scenarios to prepare graduates for the professions’, international journal of teaching and learning in higher education 23(1) pp.84-91. freeman, l. and greenacre, l. (2011) ‘an examination of socially destructive behaviors in group work’, journal of marketing education, 33 (1), 5–17, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0273475310389150. hartley, p. and dawson, m. (2010) success in groupwork. london: macmillan education. howieson, j. and rogers, s. (2018) ‘using the role-play at the lectern: developing “workready” and confident professionals’, the law teacher, 52(2), 190200, doi: 10.1080/03069400.2017.1340531. jisc (2015a) ‘assessing groupwork’, transforming assessment and feedback with technology. available at: https://www.jisc.ac.uk/guides/transforming-assessmentand-feedback/group-work (accessed: 18 january 2020). jisc (2017) developing organisational approaches to digital capability. available at: https://www.jisc.ac.uk/guides/developing-organisational-approaches-to-digitalcapability/organisational-digital-capability-incontext#:~:text=our%20work%20and%20understanding%20of,working%20in%20a %20digital%20society (accessed: 14 december 2020). https://doi.org/10.1111/nejo.12005 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0273475310389150 https://doi.org/10.1080/03069400.2017.1340531 https://www.jisc.ac.uk/guides/transforming-assessment-and-feedback/group-work https://www.jisc.ac.uk/guides/transforming-assessment-and-feedback/group-work https://www.jisc.ac.uk/guides/developing-organisational-approaches-to-digital-capability/organisational-digital-capability-in-context#:~:text=our%20work%20and%20understanding%20of,working%20in%20a%20digital%20society https://www.jisc.ac.uk/guides/developing-organisational-approaches-to-digital-capability/organisational-digital-capability-in-context#:~:text=our%20work%20and%20understanding%20of,working%20in%20a%20digital%20society https://www.jisc.ac.uk/guides/developing-organisational-approaches-to-digital-capability/organisational-digital-capability-in-context#:~:text=our%20work%20and%20understanding%20of,working%20in%20a%20digital%20society https://www.jisc.ac.uk/guides/developing-organisational-approaches-to-digital-capability/organisational-digital-capability-in-context#:~:text=our%20work%20and%20understanding%20of,working%20in%20a%20digital%20society beeson and byles creative solutions to common groupwork problems journal of learning development in higher education, issue 19: december 2020 15 johnson, d. w. and johnson, r. t. (2013) ‘the impact of cooperative, competitive, and individualistic learning environments on achievement’, in hattie, j. and anderman, e. (eds.). international handbook of student achievement. new york: routledge, pp. 372-374. milton, m. and vozzo, l. (2013) ‘digital literacy and digital pedagogies for teaching literacy: pre-service teachers’ experience on teaching rounds’, journal of literacy and technology 14(1) pp.72-97. neville, c. hartley, p. and dawson, m. (2019) ‘groupwork booklet’, learnhigher. available at: http://www.learnhigher.ac.uk/working-with-others/group-work-working-withothers/group-work-booklet/ (accessed: 20 february 2020). o’sullivan, c. (2011) ‘role-playing’, in cohen, l., manion, l. and morrison, k. (eds.). research methods in education, 8th edn. london: taylor and francis, pp. 536-554. parker, g.m. (2008) team players and teamwork, completely updated and revised: new strategies for developing successful collaboration. san francisco: jossey bass. pirhonen, j. and rasi, p. (2017) ‘student-generated instructional videos facilitate learning through positive emotions’, journal of biological education 51(3) pp.215-227, doi:10.1080/00219266.2016.1200647 race, p. and pickford, r. (2007) making teaching work: teaching smarter in post compulsory education. london: sage. ramsden p. (2003) learning to teach in higher education. london: routledge. tuckman, b. w. (1965) ‘developmental sequence in small groups’, psychological bulletin 63, pp.384-399, https://doi.org/10.1037/h0022100. university of northampton (2015) transforming lives + inspiring change. available at https://www.northampton.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/transforming-liveshttp://www.learnhigher.ac.uk/working-with-others/group-work-working-with-others/group-work-booklet/ http://www.learnhigher.ac.uk/working-with-others/group-work-working-with-others/group-work-booklet/ https://doi.org/10.1037/h0022100 https://www.northampton.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/transforming-lives-and-inspiring-change-strategic-plan-2015-2020.pdf beeson and byles creative solutions to common groupwork problems journal of learning development in higher education, issue 19: december 2020 16 and-inspiring-change-strategic-plan-2015-2020.pdf (accessed: 14 december 2020). vygotsky, l. (1978) mind and society. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. author details helena beeson is a learning development tutor at the university of northampton with an interest in groupwork and teaching online. richard byles is a learning technologist and lecturer with an interest in groupwork, pedagogy and digital media appendix groupwork exercise: adapted for l6 marketing part 1 planning an interactive video on groupwork. common group problem / scenario: there’s a lot of tension in our group and we argue over little details describe how you could illustrate the problem as a short video clip with a main character? what are the three possible actions your main character could take: 1. the serious answer 2. the nearly right but wrong answer https://www.northampton.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/transforming-lives-and-inspiring-change-strategic-plan-2015-2020.pdf beeson and byles creative solutions to common groupwork problems journal of learning development in higher education, issue 19: december 2020 17 3. the silly answer part 2: in your group go out of the room and in 15 minutes film your scenario and 3 answers. the videos do not need to be perfect but should make your message clear. • return the room and share your first drafts with the tutors for feedback. • based on your feedback there is an opportunity to reshoot to enhance your films. creative solutions to common groupwork problems abstract introduction background developing digital literacies project aims identifying student needs groupwork barriers experienced previously groups’ organisational skills intervention results fbl tutor’s significant comments from interview feedback on the activity evaluation principles for planning groupwork activities conclusion references author details appendix journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 15: november 2019 ________________________________________________________________________ ‘what kind of paper do you want from us?’: developing genre knowledge in one kazakhstani university postgraduate school d. philip montgomery franklin road academy, usa jason sparks nazarbayev university graduate school of education, kazakhstan bridget a. goodman nazarbayev university graduate school of education, kazakhstan abstract drawing on the academic literacies perspectives of lea and street and key genre theorists, this mixed-methods case study explored multilingual student experiences of academic literacy practices in one postgraduate social-science school in an english-medium university in kazakhstan. two questions guided the research: (1) to what extent and in what ways do students develop genre knowledge in their school emi contexts? (2) which pedagogical approaches and strategies do students identify as beneficial in supporting genre knowledge development? the study found students developed genre awareness for research-related literacy practices, involving field-, tenorand mode-related genre knowledge. the study also found student capacity to apply genre knowledge successfully across a range of text genres. another finding was that challenge and success in genre knowledge development was a function of the extent of explicit feedback from instructors and peers and explicit assignment expectations. each of our findings are consistent with the critique and recommendations of lea and street (1998; 2006) on the importance of a situated approach to developing student academic literacy practice that accounts for the larger institutional contexts and epistemological traditions in which those practices have meaning. these findings have important value for discussions and debates on student academic literacy learning and practice in higher education in kazakhstan, across central asia and in other countries where montgomery, sparks and goodman ‘what kind of paper do you want from us?’: developing genre knowledge in one kazakhstani university postgraduate school journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 2 policies for internationalisation and research universities are rapidly transforming higher education literacy practice in the current era of globalisation. keywords: academic literacies; systemic functional linguistics; genre; feedback; task guidelines; scaffolding. introduction drawing on the academic literacies perspectives of lea and street (1998, 2006) and genre theorists working in systemic functional linguistics (hasan, 2009; martin, 2009), this paper describes a mixed-methods case study inquiry into multilingual student experiences of academic literacy practices in one postgraduate social-science school in an english-medium university in kazakhstan. as in so many areas of kazakhstani life since independence in 1991, the higher education system is facing ‘the challenge of moving beyond the soviet legacy, with all the norms and values embedded in that way of life, and building a uniquely kazakhstani system of education’ (hartley and ruby, 2017, p. 2). key to this new higher education system is its recent european orientation, manifest in kazakhstan becoming signatory to the bologna process in 2010 (jumakulov et al., 2019). as in other bologna signatory countries (phillipson, 2006), recent years in kazakhstan have witnessed a sharp increase in english as a medium of instruction (emi) in higher education in order to ‘increase competitiveness of students when they leave and position the educational sector as attractive for international students’ (embassy of the republic of kazakhstan, (no date)). important in this policy context is a national trilingual education policy viewing ‘kazakh as the national language, russian as the language of interethnic communication, and english as the language of successful integration in the global economy’ (nazarbayev, 2007). these changes in policy and practice call for greater student capacity to learn, write and, in the case of phd students, even publish in english, raising the question of how to develop capacities for english academic literacy in learners and also develop capacity for programs to support that literacy. montgomery, sparks and goodman ‘what kind of paper do you want from us?’: developing genre knowledge in one kazakhstani university postgraduate school journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 3 in their influential 1998 article, ‘student writing in higher education: an academic literacies approach’, lea and street called on university educators to look beyond conventional ‘skills’ teaching models and imagine ‘a more encompassing understanding of the nature of student writing within institutional practices, power relations and identities’ (p. 158). the authors elaborated the argument in 2006, emphasising the importance of inquiry into ‘the processes involved in acquiring appropriate and effective uses of literacy as more complex, dynamic, nuanced, situated, and involving both epistemological issues and social processes, including power relations among people, institutions, and social identities’ (p. 369). central to our inquiry is the explicit academic literacies focus on: (a) ‘acts of writing and literacy in subject areas and disciplines’ (p. 369); (b) the ‘variety and specificity of institutional practices, and students’ struggles to make sense of these’ (p. 376); and (c) the importance of genre theory in exploring student literacy practices (russell et al., 2009). genre scholars argue that academic writing norms are better understood as socially defined (bruce, 2008), discipline specific (prior, 2013), flexible and dynamic (flowerdew, 2013), and immensely important for students to be successful as members of their respective academic and professional discourse communities (hyland, 2009). this project was taken up in one kazakhstani university graduate school seeking to develop student capacity for scholarship and research sufficient to prepare them for careers as academics or other professionals nationally or internationally. the participants were kazakhstani students coming to the school’s master’s and phd programs primarily from successful professional jobs, and some directly out of their undergraduate programmes. all participants are genuinely multilingual (kazakh, russian, english and often other languages) and are highly motivated and capable learners who value what they describe as unique educational opportunities provided by the english-medium graduate school they attend, taught by an international faculty from around the world, and in programme curricula based in models familiar in ‘western’ contexts. the impulse for this study was to understand their experiences and perspectives, not because relative student capacity presents a ‘problem to be solved through additional or remedial support’ (lillis and scott, 2007, p. 8), but, consistent with the approach described by lea and street (1998), this research impulse is based: montgomery, sparks and goodman ‘what kind of paper do you want from us?’: developing genre knowledge in one kazakhstani university postgraduate school journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 4 on the premise that in order to understand the nature of academic learning, it is important to investigate the understandings of both academic staff and students about their own literacy practices, without making prior assumptions as to which practices are either appropriate or effective. (p. 158) in short, drawing on key insights from lea and street’s model of academic literacies (1998; 2006), and utilizing a conceptual framework for genre, this research is an effort to hear from students themselves about their experiences of engaging in academic literacy practices, including understanding and producing genres, that are often new to them, are critical to their success in their postgraduate programs, and have potential significance to their identities as emerging scholars and professionals during and after their period of program study. thus, given this research purpose, this mixed-methods case study explores two key questions: 1. to what extent and in what ways do students develop genre knowledge in their school emi contexts? 2. which pedagogical approaches and strategies do students identify as beneficial in supporting genre knowledge development? key concepts underpinning the inquiry genre, academic literacies, genre knowledge and genre awareness genre is part of a processand goal-oriented approach to literacy development (martin, 2009). this concept stands in contrast to a view of language as a set of learned rules and fixed grammatical structures in two ways. first, genre scholars view writing as a social action carried out by language rather than a set of formal features (tardy, 2009). second, this understanding of language, stemming from systemic functional linguistics (sfl) (halliday, 2006; halliday and matthiessen, 2014), emphasizes the linguistic choices available in a given social context. both of these features are consistent with an academic literacies approach (hyland, 2007; gee, 2012; paltridge, 2014). this school of thought works against much of the montgomery, sparks and goodman ‘what kind of paper do you want from us?’: developing genre knowledge in one kazakhstani university postgraduate school journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 5 policy and practice of l2 english provision which continues to reflect a deficit model (lea and street, 1998; lillis and scott, 2007), focused on correcting grammar, spelling and punctuation (badenhorst et al., 2015) rather than acknowledging the challenges of ‘understanding the epistemology and ways of communication of their discipline’ (wingate, 2015, p. 2). at the nexus of sfl and genre, i.e. the linguistic and the social, are three meta-functions of language which are central to this study: field, tenor and mode. hasan (2009) elaborates on each of these meta-functions as follows: field is concerned with the social action, goal or purpose one is trying to achieve with language, whether it be to inform, persuade, discuss, or challenge; tenor is concerned with the social relation between those communicating, including their respective roles, status, or social distance; mode is concerned with the medium and channel of communication, including a text’s features as determined by the situation, whether it is spoken or written, prepared or extemporaneous, assisting in a material action or constituting an action in or of itself (pp. 178-179). in this study, we are exploring the extent to which our students feel they have developed their capacity to comprehend and produce an academic text. this ability, as we operationalise it, consists of different skills which can be categorised as elements of field, tenor, or mode. collectively, this ability is understood in our study as a combination of genre knowledge and genre awareness. genre knowledge is defined as the ability to produce an academic text in a predictable way, while genre awareness is the ability ‘to switch practices between one setting and another, to deploy a repertoire of linguistic practices appropriate to each setting, and to handle the social meanings and identities that each evokes’ (lea and street, 1998, p. 159). one essential aspect of having genre awareness is recognizing that academic literacy is a situated practice which changes across purposes, contexts and audiences (gee, 2012; correa and echeverri, 2017). lea and street (2006) add specificity to the situatedness of academic writing as social practices associated with such things as ‘institutional requirements (e.g., regarding plagiarism, feedback)’ and ‘variation across individual faculty members’ requirements and even individual student assignments’ (p. 369). montgomery, sparks and goodman ‘what kind of paper do you want from us?’: developing genre knowledge in one kazakhstani university postgraduate school journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 6 genre, academic literacy development, and pedagogical practice another key aspect of genre knowledge and academic literacy development is the type of pedagogical support provided. in broad terms, genre research supports the view that learners need to be ‘apprenticed’ and ‘scaffolded’ (dreyfus et al., 2016, p. 7) into the ways of producing knowledge for their specific discipline. recent studies of the pedagogical processes and outcomes of genre-based pedagogies for advancing academic literacy in higher education have focused, for example, on metacognitive scaffolding in doctoral students (negretti and mcgraff, 2018), l2 learner understandings of paraphrasing (hirvela and du, 2013), and academic literacy socialisation in l1 teacher education programs (hedgcock and lee, 2017). the current study, like the above-mentioned studies, considers students’ perceptions of the pedagogical practices which have scaffolded and apprenticed their academic literacy development. methods this case study (stake, 1995) uses a sequential explanatory mixed-methods design (creswell, 2014) to explore the perspectives and experiences of kazakhstani students from one graduate school of social sciences in one kazakhstani university that uses emi and provides academic english courses for the length of each program. participants were current master’s and phd students or alumni. for admission to a master’s or phd program at this institution, students are required to demonstrate a minimum english proficiency at a b2 level on the common european framework reference (cefr), i.e. 6.5 overall ielts score. the minimum proficiency requirement to enter the phd program increases to c1 level (ielts 7.0). during master’s coursework, students receive academic english courses face-to-face or online every semester for the duration of their program; phd students take academic english face-to-face for one semester. two data collection methods were used to explore these questions: first a quantitative survey, followed by a set of five focus group interviews. survey montgomery, sparks and goodman ‘what kind of paper do you want from us?’: developing genre knowledge in one kazakhstani university postgraduate school journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 7 a qualtrics online survey tool link was sent via email to students and alumni of the school’s master’s and phd programs (n=364). the final response rate was 32.7% (60 students, 59 alumni). the survey featured two main sections. for students, section i contained repeated sets of ‘can do statements’ (alte, 2002; ashton, 2014; moeller and fu, 2015; denies and janssen, 2016) for reading/research, writing, speaking, and evaluation skills in english, and a 5-point likert scale was used. for alumni, this section was modified to ask participants to evaluate the importance of each of these activities in their current workplace. section ii asked all participants to evaluate the usefulness of different activities, approaches, and resources for developing their academic communication skills on a 5-point likert scale, with an open-ended question to add or comment on pedagogical strategies. like neff-van aertselaer (2013), we designed categories and statements based on genres (e.g. blogs, thesis), genre knowledge subskills (e.g. being able to identify and critically evaluate research literature), and strategies (e.g. peer review) identified by the team as typical or expected in the institutional context. participants were also asked to provide demographic data and general proficiency selfassessment in all languages in their repertoire. the instrument was administered in english. following an analysis of the survey results, focus group interviews were conducted with current students or alumni of each of the four master’s degree program concentrations in the school. focus group interviews a semi-structured interview was administered to five sets of master’s students, one set for each of four programme majors and one group of alumni (n=25; approximately five in each focus group). the protocol elicited four types of information: 1) experience in learning academic genres prior to enrolment in graduate school; 2) self-assessment of development of proficiency and genre knowledge from the beginning until the end of the program; 3) specific experiences acquiring knowledge of specific genres, including the role of pedagogical supports and strategies; and 4) for alumni, the applications of genre knowledge in the workplace. probes were added during the interview to focus on themes identified in the quantitative data, e.g. the importance of instructor feedback and the value of peer review. the researchers facilitated the focus group interviews in english, but participants were permitted montgomery, sparks and goodman ‘what kind of paper do you want from us?’: developing genre knowledge in one kazakhstani university postgraduate school journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 8 to reply in russian or kazakh if they preferred. the preponderance of communication, however, was in english. data analysis procedures the survey data were loaded into spss. means and standard deviations for each item in section i and ii were generated and ranked. items were then coded as representing field, tenor, mode, and general genre knowledge, acknowledging hasan’s (2009) warning that ‘all three parameter choices must be seen together’ (p. 187). cronbach’s alpha was run as a reliability statistic for the scales for students and alumni. for the categories of field, tenor, mode and genre knowledge, the cronbach’s alpha was 0.76 to 0.96 for students, and 0.83 to 0.94 for alumni, which demonstrates the reliability of this scale. focus group interview data were open coded in nvivo for specific elements of field, tenor and mode that students reported developing, evidence of cognitive and situated genre awareness, and the specific pedagogies and learning strategies that contributed to field, tenor, and mode development. for each research question, quantitative data is presented first, and then discussed with support from the qualitative data. findings the quantitative surveys and qualitative focus group interviews highlight the important ways students are developing academic genre knowledge and pedagogical approaches and strategies they identify as beneficial in supporting that genre knowledge development. genre knowledge field-related genre knowledge the strongest reported area of genre knowledge in english was field (m=3.80, sd=0.627), those tasks which foreground the purpose of the text. example field-related survey items montgomery, sparks and goodman ‘what kind of paper do you want from us?’: developing genre knowledge in one kazakhstani university postgraduate school journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 9 include ‘i can find appropriate and relevant scholarly research articles’ and ‘i can define and explain terms in my specialty’. the graduate students in this study readily acknowledge the role research texts, and more importantly they as researchers, play in solving problems and sharing knowledge. the most salient themes that arose from the focus groups include the importance of analyzing and synthesizing data, being critical of the texts they read, and developing expertise in order to make evidence-based decisions in their professional lives. two quotes from students nicely illustrate these sentiments: (1) [previously], when we faced a problem, we tried to solve it based on our previous experience. and now when we look at a problem first try to find the literature, we want to try to find if there any kind of evidences, if before we were looking on the internet, what different sites say. but at the moment what we are doing is we are looking research papers, was there any research on this area, so what are their findings, what are their limitations? now we can do it, […] now we try to make the decision on the basis of research findings. we just created a research group, where we have seven people in this group, so we are making inquiries, so we are making more structured more systemic, small-scaled action researches, sometimes different kind of research, so it helps us better. so i think we are becoming much better, and it helps a lot. (2) i am becoming a researcher, i think. somehow, we are trying to be a researcher and now we know some basics of the research, how to do it and also think we can share it with our colleagues who don’t know english, for example. they do not know how to read those first-hand articles . . . and maybe we can translate some key points in the article and share with them. also in our school, for example, we are asked to conduct action research or lesson study or to do some kind of things, but they don’t know how to do it. they just come and start interviewing you, but you [are] like “where is [the] consent form? stop! what is the problem of your work?” so, we can share with them our knowledge and skills. echoing the experience of many participants, these comments highlight the immediate ways graduate study, in particular academic genre knowledge of research texts, is being applied in the workplace. these alumni are demonstrating what lea and street (1998) describe as the capacity to ‘deploy a repertoire of linguistic practices appropriate to each setting’ (p. 159). montgomery, sparks and goodman ‘what kind of paper do you want from us?’: developing genre knowledge in one kazakhstani university postgraduate school journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 10 mode-related genre knowledge student and alumni textual knowledge, or mode (m=3.76, sd=0.670), was reported as slightly lower than field-related tasks, and manifested itself in participants’ recounting of differences between writing, speaking, and reading strategies, as well as the various text types they become familiar with. for example, the survey included mode-related statements like ‘i can identify the organisational structure in various types of texts’ and ‘i can cite sources according to professionally or academically appropriate standards’. participants reported knowledge of an impressive amount of text-types. in the focus groups, they mentioned general categories of text using terms like ‘scientific writing’, ‘research articles’, and ‘academic texts’, but they also demonstrated an awareness of distinct text genres and sub-genres. they mentioned writing summaries, reviews, critiques, annotations, policy analyses, reports, literature reviews, responses, proposals, theses, presentations, debates, peer review feedback, emails, blogs, and moodle forum posts. in recounting and describing these genres, participants discussed the ways their genre knowledge changed in terms of textual features like structure and concision: (1) one of the challenges that i encounter here, it was structuring my ideas into writing piece that was something i learned through academic english to structure your ideas and then write something, not just flow of what you are thinking. to structure before and then correct it. (2) i was told that i am using the russian style of writing, because my introduction was about twenty sentences. i wanted to write everything in introduction, and it wasn’t right. and my instructor in academic english have told me that i have to change my mind and think about topic statement and i should decrease number of words . . . (3) first, i give the thesis statement, then i try to explain the statement and give an example. even in russian it’s the same, i come to a certain conclusion. so i try make my writing logical. before that i just wrote a lot of beautiful words and etc, etc, but no point, no certain point. now i always try to stick to the point, stick to the point, and i give the point in russian also. montgomery, sparks and goodman ‘what kind of paper do you want from us?’: developing genre knowledge in one kazakhstani university postgraduate school journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 11 (4) when i try to write something formal, formal writing in russian language, it seems for me even more difficult write in russian, right now, than in english. these examples highlight the discourse semantic resources made available by language (dreyfus et al., 2016, p. 38). in particular, the examples underscore how students come to readjust the academic values they hold toward preparing a text, the form and content of texts, and how these values and resulting practices have lasting effects even in the speakers’ l1, russian. tenor-related genre knowledge as the lowest reported dimension of genre, the tasks related to tenor (m=3.58, sd=0.765) speak to the ways students learn to interact ‘academically’ with those around them. interpersonal genre knowledge includes understanding and navigating power dynamics and the multiple roles they need to play as authors, readers, students and colleagues. for example, ‘i can identify the intended audience in various types of texts’ and ‘i can provide my peers constructive, critical feedback about their work’. the focus group interviews revealed that students come to gain awareness of the reader and their expectations, seeing written communication as an interaction rather than a solitary activity. two participants mention this shift explicitly, especially as an author who writes for the reader to understand: (1) to change to style, now we care more about a reader, not about what i am writing and how good it is, but to evaluate how well i can deliver my ideas to the reader. whether they are able to understand me, my points, my evidences. (2) i hope to become a researcher i hope with this experience i will write more logically comprehensive research papers, so the people will understand the concept of a paper, but people would enjoy the way i write, the way i interact with my readers. other participants mentioned that they themselves begin to listen and read more sceptically, something many participants mentioned learning directly from instructor feedback: montgomery, sparks and goodman ‘what kind of paper do you want from us?’: developing genre knowledge in one kazakhstani university postgraduate school journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 12 student: when i hear someone speaking i ask ‘where are they from? what are the sources? can i believe it? where can i check it?’ interviewer: where do you do that? when you are with friends? student: even with friends, i don’t believe what they say. sometimes they say information that is not real, and i don’t want to spread this information. perhaps the most widely mentioned activity demonstrating interpersonal genre knowledge was peer review. students gained experience giving feedback, something they were rarely if ever asked to do before. as they became more comfortable and willing to give feedback, some noticed the difficulty of translating that practice into the workplace where this is not a common practice. (1) as a junior teacher . . . i have no right to give feedback. (2) you see, giving feedback to colleagues who are not prepared to get the feedback, sometimes it was difficult. because some people accepted as critique and some people don’t like to be criticised or something. they don’t see that criticism as the way i want to help them, they think the way i want to criticise them. probably we are not learned, we don’t give feedbacks very well, starting with the good points, i think you should do this, probably we need to work on this skill, how to give good feedback, and then our colleagues will feel comfortable themselves. most notably, the two comments above demonstrate how upon encountering resistance to peer feedback from colleagues in the workplace, students employ an educational strategy to the problem: if we work on the skill by explicitly defining and practising what it means to give good feedback, then it will improve. it is also heartening to see the students take on this role of ambassador to share the lessons from the graduate school to their workplaces, as this and other examples demonstrated. we turn now from the previous discussion of what linguistic and semiotic resources the students gain in an emi graduate program to the pedagogical approaches, tasks and strategies that students identify as most clearly responsible for developing those resources. montgomery, sparks and goodman ‘what kind of paper do you want from us?’: developing genre knowledge in one kazakhstani university postgraduate school journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 13 developing situated genre awareness as described above, genre awareness describes the ‘rhetorical flexibility necessary for adapting socio-cognitive genre knowledge to ever-evolving contexts’ (johns, 2008, p. 238), highlighting the ‘situated’ focus of the academic literacies model concerned with the ‘institutional nature of what counts as knowledge in any particular academic context’ (lea and street, 2006, p. 369). this contextual dimension is further clarified by correa and echeverri (2017), who emphasise the ‘lexical, grammatical, and textual features’ of academic communication relevant to any given context, (p. 45). the qualitative data below demonstrate student development of this situated genre awareness. several students and alumni described their experiences of success or difficulty with surfacelevel textual features like structure and formatting writing assignments in relation to the four communicative skills of reading, writing, listening, and speaking. here, academic is understood by participants as specific genre features of academic communication as compared to conversational or general language use, suggesting an emergent recognition of ways language use responds to different contextual demands. as one student noted: i was struggling with writing skills, because if to compare writing skills before and after, before i had more conversational style of writing but coming here it is more getting academic. similarly, other participants described progress in certain skills during their program learning: (1) reading really help[ed] to improve writing, you get familiar with different sentence structure with new words. and with reading materials i managed to improve my writing skills. (2) interviewer: what other things can you do better . . . that you noticed you can do better in using language . . . that you know you now feel confidence, competence in? things like, oh, i can do this better . . . student: i am really good at writing and reading, my reading is really good at ielts, but i cannot say the same thing about my speaking. montgomery, sparks and goodman ‘what kind of paper do you want from us?’: developing genre knowledge in one kazakhstani university postgraduate school journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 14 interviewer: are you doing things in language, you are doing better or differently? student: you mean four skills? finally, some students and alumni pointed to the importance of structure in academic writing as a tool or strategy that helps them meet the interpreted communication needs of their postgraduate program context and the discipline they are beginning to understand their work within. these examples show how they begin to see structure as noun and a verb by linking it directly to the process and product of writing: (1) but what i know now is a structure of writing, it is not very difficult for me now to write an essay [for a class assignment] in a short period of time. (2) when you know the structure, when you know how to write [for class assignments], i can apply this knowledge into [my master’s thesis] research writing. these examples suggest an emerging genre awareness that is further refined with more practice and exposure to academic genres. the students learn and use the genre features they associated with course essay assignment writing and describe being able to apply it to the master’s thesis genre. as students learn the ways texts must adapt according to their context, purpose and audience, they demonstrate emergent, situated awareness in numerous ways. instead of referring to surface features, respondents differentiate between texts by the way language is used, often emphasizing the purpose that the text is trying to achieve (representing awareness of field), or the person for whom the author is writing (representing that of tenor). one student described her assignments like this: i think some of the assignments are really like puzzle pieces, which we know should connect into one big picture of our thesis. because for example the research proposal we did previously and article evaluations, they all can be connected into the skills that we need to for thesis production. it seems that for her, ‘skills’ are not reading, writing, listening and speaking, but rather the multi-step process of proposing, evaluating, and producing a thesis, i.e. a text socially defined by the faculty. not only that, she demonstrates a metacognitive awareness of how her montgomery, sparks and goodman ‘what kind of paper do you want from us?’: developing genre knowledge in one kazakhstani university postgraduate school journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 15 learning is intentionally scaffolded. for many respondents, academic texts come to be defined by their communicative purpose, often with a specific audience in mind: our professor asked us to interview staff members [of a childcare facility] to identify some problems and suggest ways of solving these problems. and i am proud of those solutions to the problems that i gave, because they can really be helpful. while this awareness was often reported as something that students gained confidence in, respondents also reported not always feeling comfortable in their roles as critical evaluators and problem solvers, especially toward expert authors and scholars: actually, i had an experience, when we were supposed to write not an annotation like in another class, but an article critique and i wrote more like article annotation. and one of the professors told me “you need to be more critical when you are beginning the article, you need to express yourself”. but i was thinking like: “who am i to judge this great researcher, to judge his great piece of writing? who am i?” [i realised] i was trying to be more like polite when writing the article critique. so for the next article critique i got my highest mark, but it was so hard. so i think it really depends on professor, how he wants it, in what way. one common hurdle to the development of situated genre knowledge appears to be gaining awareness of individual professor expectations, as the professor is the principal audience member in most student writing. nevertheless, many participants reflected confidence in the role they were developing into, as critics, scholars, and researchers, most notably in the ways they interacted with their peers: when we were working on thesis writing course, when we sent each other individual . . . how is it called? . . . parts of the thesis . . . we tried to help peer review, because we read the whole thing that was sent to us and we tried to give advice not only in terms of grammar and such things, but also in terms of the parts that need to be corrected as a researcher. montgomery, sparks and goodman ‘what kind of paper do you want from us?’: developing genre knowledge in one kazakhstani university postgraduate school journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 16 these last two examples speak to the quantitative data that suggest that students feel least confident in activities demanding an interpersonal awareness in english. students, especially those learning english as an additional language, likely begin like that student asking, ‘who am i to judge?’ professional scholars. here we see participants reflecting on issues of ‘meaning making, identity, power, and authority’ (lea and street, 2006, p. 369), issues emerging in experience of the ‘variety and specificity of institutional practices’ of the school, and their ‘struggles to make sense of these’ (lea and street, 2006, p. 376). pedagogical approaches the survey included 32 items for students (see table 1) to evaluate the usefulness of specific teaching and learning activities. these were presented in the following groups: general activities, reading and writing, speaking and listening. the items include a range of activities that reflect widely discussed pedagogical principles: group tasks and individual tasks, practice work and project work, informal and formal speaking, informal and formal writing, informal (formative) and formal (summative) feedback, using a rubric, instructor and peer feedback, giving and receiving feedback, professional and student example texts, reflection on learning, writing as a process of revision, translating new words, and using l1 in learning l2. on a scale of 1-5, from 1 being not helpful at all and 5 being extremely helpful, all activities were evaluated as moderately, very, or extremely helpful (m>3.00). table 1. helpful teaching activities ranked. no descriptor n meana sd extremely helpful (m>4.25) 1 receiving instructor feedback on written work 60 4.47 .812 2 receiving informal, formative feedback (comments on ungraded work) 58 4.31 .922 3 completing formal writing assignments (course papers, thesis project) 60 4.27 .821 very helpful (m=3.50~4.25) montgomery, sparks and goodman ‘what kind of paper do you want from us?’: developing genre knowledge in one kazakhstani university postgraduate school journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 17 4 speaking in class discussions 59 4.24 .773 5 using a rubric to evaluate writing and speaking tasks 60 4.20 .879 6 individual practice tasks (homework or in class) 59 4.19 .730 7 receiving formal, summative feedback (comments on graded work) 60 4.17 .977 8 listening to peers in class discussions 59 4.15 .827 9 speaking in formal presentations 59 4.08 .726 10 reflecting on my own work or progress in a course 60 4.08 .809 11 individual research projects 59 4.07 .828 12 asking and answering questions in a formal presentation (debate, poster, q&a) 60 4.07 .710 13 analyzing published research and textbooks as examples 58 4.03 .837 14 writing and revising multiple drafts of an assignment 60 4.03 .956 15 having consultations with instructors or writing center tutors 57 3.98 .973 16 completing informal writing assignments (blogs, outlining, planning, reflections) 60 3.97 .780 17 listening and notetaking in lecture or guest speaker settings 60 3.93 .821 18 giving informal presentations (reporting to the group) 60 3.93 .821 19 having informal chats with instructors 56 3.89 .947 20 research projects in a collaborative group setting 60 3.88 1.027 21 observing others communicate in academic settings (e.g. asking questions, giving presentations) 60 3.83 .905 22 analyzing sample student assignments and theses as examples 58 3.81 1.034 23 giving peer feedback on written work 58 3.79 .987 24 having informal chats with peers 59 3.78 .892 25 receiving peer feedback on written work 57 3.77 1.018 26 group practice tasks (homework or in class) 60 3.73 .954 27 completing semester-long projects or portfolios 59 3.64 1.013 montgomery, sparks and goodman ‘what kind of paper do you want from us?’: developing genre knowledge in one kazakhstani university postgraduate school journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 18 moderately helpful (m=2.75~3.49) 28 preparing for and taking written quizzes or tests 59 3.46 1.134 29 receiving instructor explanations or feedback in kazakh or russian 48 3.35 1.082 30 using kazakh or russian with my peers to complete group tasks 60 3.32 1.033 31 translating new words 58 3.26 .983 32 using non-english language sources in english research writing 58 3.03 1.042 a scale: 5=extremely helpful, 1=not helpful at all as none of the tasks were viewed as only slightly helpful or totally unhelpful, this may suggest that it is the variety of teaching and learning activities which is important. students emphasise several important ways that help them develop as competent academic communicators, as the following data and examples illustrate. feedback and interaction students highly value detailed, descriptive instructor feedback, ranking instructor feedback (m=4.47) on written work as the single most helpful learning activity in the survey and informal, formative feedback (m=4.31) on ungraded work as the second. formal summative comments (m=4.17) are also very helpful, yet slightly less than informal, formative feedback (m=4.31). one student explained it this way: feedback was very important even you get high mark, even you get low mark, you should know why you get this mark it is really important. giving just numbers is not so important like giving real things, areas feedback with errors… peer feedback in general is seen as somewhat less helpful than instructor feedback, although giving (m=3.79) and receiving (m=3.77) feedback are nearly equally very helpful. while peer review and instructor feedback were seen as highly valuable interactions, interestingly, individual tasks such as practice (m=4.19) or research projects (m=4.07) are considered montgomery, sparks and goodman ‘what kind of paper do you want from us?’: developing genre knowledge in one kazakhstani university postgraduate school journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 19 slightly more helpful than group practice (m=3.73) or collaborative projects (m=3.88). feedback itself is a staged goal-oriented social process with the opportunity for students and instructors to engage in negotiated construction of shared meaning of appropriate communication (dreyfus et al., 2016), which students see as essential to building their own genre knowledge. clear task guidelines and expectations participants voiced considerable agreement that sample texts (m=3.03) and rubrics (m=4.20) were quite helpful in communicating guidelines and expectations. this is unsurprising as students are unfamiliar with target genres like literature reviews or critical responses and face challenges interpreting task prompts that ask them to ‘engage the literature’ or ‘critically evaluate sources’. several participants mentioned adopting these practices in their own teaching, and in one particularly memorable instance, a student recalls the frustration felt when they were given an assignment without those detailed guidelines they had become accustomed to receiving: when our teacher assigned us to write an academic paper, we didn’t know what kind of paper we should write, whether it should be literature review, whether it could contain empirical study, whether it should be based on article review. so it was very unclear, so we didn’t know what to write basically we wrote what we understand. it was really strange for some reason. i think some of our colleagues can recall these moments when we asked, what kind of paper do you want from us? this remarkable quote echoes the concerns of students reported by lea and street (1998) that ‘many of the difficulties they experienced with writing arose from the conflicting and contrasting requirements for writing on different courses and from the fact that these requirements were frequently left implicit’ (lea and street, 1998, pp. 161 – 162). this point is elaborated by tardy (2009), who describes the process of building genre knowledge as the experience of numerous textual and oral interactions guiding the learner toward capacity for making judgements on situationally-appropriate academic communication. this student’s montgomery, sparks and goodman ‘what kind of paper do you want from us?’: developing genre knowledge in one kazakhstani university postgraduate school journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 20 agentive plea for the instructor to meet them halfway as they struggle through this ambiguity underscores the highly social nature of both genre knowledge and the process of building it. scaffolded instruction the survey showed that practice activities (m=4.19) with formative feedback (m=4.31), leading to semester-long projects (m=3.88) including research projects (m=4.07) and the thesis (m=4.27) were highly valued teaching activities. students were quick to point out the benefit of assignments and skills fitting together ‘like a big puzzle’, aiding the student to gradually internalise genre knowledge. it was step by step, we started from beginner part and the last task was very big, it was assumed to include all things we learned. of course, we were provided with the structures, previously, example, structure in what way, then the task, when you are trained, like exercises, then after you apply it, you personalise it. this is i think very important when you personalise when you write something that is about you, not i mean about you personally, but about your study, let’s say research. the fact that students lament the lack of purposeful, systematic scaffolding of tasks to develop skills in their prior educational experiences (‘nobody taught me how to write academically in russian language’) makes this is all the more valuable when they do receive it. conclusions in the end, we find that genre knowledge development has less to do with surface features of texts, and more with the social environment in which they learn and write. what students learn and how they learn it are tied directly to the relationship students have with their instructors and peers, and to their awareness of their audience, context and purpose in writing. in particular, students demonstrated awareness that genre knowledge in academic english consists of knowledge of similarities and differences in structures of different types of montgomery, sparks and goodman ‘what kind of paper do you want from us?’: developing genre knowledge in one kazakhstani university postgraduate school journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 21 texts (i.e. mode) and the overall purpose of a text (i.e. field), knowledge which goes beyond construction of grammatically correct individual sentences and moves into the discourse level. here, students reported a capacity for applying genre knowledge to different text genres in ways consistent with what lea and street (2006) describe as the ‘switching, transformation, and the changing of meanings and representations from one genre and mode to another’ (p. 372) for academic literacies development. we also saw important challenges for students in developing awareness of and competence in writing for a particular audience (i.e. tenor), something connected to unclear or diverse expectations from individual professors, echoing findings from lea and street (1998) that ‘it is frequently very difficult for students to ‘read off’ from any such context what might be the specific academic writing requirements’ (p. 161). this challenge was also connected with the perception that professors were at times asking students to position themselves in ways aimed towards the identity they should have as researchers upon graduation, but it was an identity they were still growing into. it is clear from the survey and focus group data that challenge and success in genre knowledge development was largely a function of explicit feedback from instructors and peers. in other words, the lack of explicit feedback or guidelines for completing academic writing tasks was a challenge for students, and explicit feedback and guidelines from instructors and peers facilitated genre knowledge. this suggests that professors across disciplines need to be encouraged to provide such feedback and structure to kazakhstani students. alternatively, lecturers need to communicate to academic writing instructors and tutors the disciplinary specific genres and modes of communication used within their field so they can provide such feedback to students. we will conclude here by considering these findings in relation to three key points from lea and street’s seminal 1998 article that has instigated much discussion and debate in higher education. firstly, it is clear from our findings that understanding student success in literacy practices needs to move beyond focus on the ‘students themselves’ and consider ‘the interaction of the student with institutional practices’ (p. 170); in other words, what is needed is a more situated approach that more productively accounts for the larger institutional context montgomery, sparks and goodman ‘what kind of paper do you want from us?’: developing genre knowledge in one kazakhstani university postgraduate school journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 22 in which those literacy practices have meaning. academic literacy capacities based in genre knowledge and genre awareness developed in ‘complex, dynamic, nuanced, [and] situated’ (p. 369) social processes experienced within this particular school context. secondly, and following on the point above, our findings provide insight into the importance of a more situated approach that accounts for the ways students develop capacity to successfully ‘switch’ between ‘disciplines, course units, modules and tutors’ (p. 162). interestingly, we saw students probably outpace some of their course instructors in realising, and strategically responding to, the ‘ways different assumptions about the nature of writing, related to different epistemological presuppositions about the nature of academic knowledge and learning, are being brought to bear, often implicitly, on the specific writing requirements of their assignments’ (p. 162). there is much for university faculty and programme directors to learn from these student insights, and it seems clear that facilitating student literacy learning and practice is significantly based in institutional capacity to reduce the ‘conflicting and contrasting requirements for writing’ (p. 161) across courses and programmes and making explicit those requirements often left implicit. lastly, we wholeheartedly agree that ‘an academic literacies perspective may provide […] a fruitful area for research and for teacher education in higher education in the coming years’ (p. 171). this certainly holds true in kazakhstan and across central asia, where higher education is dramatically transforming on a trajectory that is, on the one hand, largely familiar to us (the bologna process), but on the other hand, uncertain as the ‘dominance of western discourse on internationalisation has begun to be challenged as other countries emerge as key players’ (jones and de wit, 2012, p. 46). in this evolving context of internationalisation, and more specifically as academic research expands as a university priority across central asia as elsewhere (altbach, et al., 2018), policy and practice for student research capacity will highlight new research-related literacy practices. here, research addressing such topics as ‘the range of genres, modes, shifts, transformations, representations, meaning-making processes, and identities involved in academic learning within and across academic contexts’ (lea and street, 2006, p. 376) will be key, both for understanding and responding to emerging trends facing educators and learners in the current era. montgomery, sparks and goodman ‘what kind of paper do you want from us?’: developing genre knowledge in one kazakhstani university postgraduate school journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 23 references altbach, p., reisberg, l., salmi, j. and froumin, i. (eds.) (2018) accelerated universities: ideas and money combine to build academic excellence. boston, ma: brill. ashton, k. (2014) ‘using self-assessment to compare learners’ reading proficiency in a multilingual assessment framework’, system, 42, pp. 105–119. association of language testers in europe [alte] (2002) the alte can do project. available at: www.cambridgeenglish.org. badenhorst, c., moloney, c., rosales, j., dyer, j. and ru, l. (2015) ‘beyond deficit: graduate student research-writing pedagogies’, teaching in higher education, 20(1), pp. 1-11. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2014.945160 bruce, i. (2008) academic writing and genre: a systematic analysis. london: continuum. correa, d. and echeverri, s. (2017) ‘using a systemic functional genre-based approach to promote a situated view of academic writing among efl pre-service teachers’, how journal, 24(1), pp. 44–62. available at: http://doi.org/10.19183/how.24.1.303 creswell, j. (2014) educational research: planning, conducting, and evaluating quantitative and qualitative research. (4th ed.). harlow, uk: pearson education. denies, k. and janssen, r. (2016) ‘country and gender differences in the functioning of cefr-based can-do statements as a tool for self-assessing english proficiency’, language assessment quarterly, 13(3), pp. 251-276. https://doi.org/10.1080/15434303.2016.1212055 dreyfus, s. j., humphrey, s., mahboob, a. and martin, j. r. (2016) genre pedagogy in higher education: the slate project. london: palgrave macmillan. http://www.cambridgeenglish.org/ http://doi.org/10.19183/how.24.1.303 https://doi.org/10.1080/15434303.2016.1212055 montgomery, sparks and goodman ‘what kind of paper do you want from us?’: developing genre knowledge in one kazakhstani university postgraduate school journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 24 embassy of the republic of kazakhstan. (no date) 100 concrete steps to implement the 5 institutional reforms [online]. available at: https://www.kazakhembus.com/content/100concrete-steps-implement-5-institutional-reforms flowerdew, j. (2013) academic discourse. london: routledge. gee, j. p. (2012) situated language and learning: a critique of traditional schooling. london: routledge. halliday & matthiesen (2014) the development of language: functional perspectives on species and individuals. london: continuum. halliday, m. a. k. (2006) ‘on grammar as the driving force from primary to higher-order consciousness’, in williams, g. and lukin, a. (eds.) the development of language: functional perspectives on species and individuals. london: continuum, pp. 15-44. hartley, m. and ruby, a. (2017) ‘higher education reform in a new nation state: kazakhstan’s experience’, in hartley, m. and ruby, a. (eds.) higher education reform and development: the case of kazakhstan. cambridge, uk: cambridge university press, pp. 1-12. hasan, r. (2009) ‘the place of context in a systemic functional model’, in halliday, m. a. k. and webster, j. (eds.) continuum companion to systemic functional linguistics. london: continuum, pp. 166-189. hedgcock, j. s. and lee, h. (2017) ‘an exploratory study of academic literacy socialisation: building genre awareness in a teacher education program’, journal of english for academic purposes, 26, pp. 17–28. available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jeap.2017.01.004 https://www.kazakhembus.com/content/100-concrete-steps-implement-5-institutional-reforms https://www.kazakhembus.com/content/100-concrete-steps-implement-5-institutional-reforms https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jeap.2017.01.004 montgomery, sparks and goodman ‘what kind of paper do you want from us?’: developing genre knowledge in one kazakhstani university postgraduate school journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 25 hirvela, a. and du, q. (2013) ‘“why am i paraphrasing?”: undergraduate esl writers’ engagement with source-based academic writing and reading’, journal of english for academic purposes, 12(2), pp. 87–98. available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jeap.2012.11.005 hyland, k. (2007) ‘genre pedagogy: language, literacy, and l2 writing instruction’, journal of second language writing, 16, pp. 148–164. hyland, k. (2009) academic discourse: english in a global context. london: continuum. johns, a. m. (2008) ‘genre awareness for the novice academic student: an ongoing quest’, language teaching, 41(2), pp. 237–252. available at: https://doi.org/10.1017/s0261444807004892 jones, e. and de wit, h. (2012) ‘globalization of internationalization: thematic and regional reflections on a traditional concept’, audem: the international journal of higher education and democracy, 3(1), pp. 35-54. jumakulov, z., ashirbekov, a., sparks, j., and sagintayeva, a. (2019) ‘internationalizing research in kazakhstan higher education: a case study of kazakhstan’s state program of industrial innovative development 2015 to 2019. journal of studies in international education, 23(2), pp. 234-247. lea, m. r. and street, b. v. (1998) ‘student writing in higher education: an academic literacies approach’, studies in higher education, 23(2), pp. 157-172. lea, m. r. and street, b. v. (2006) ‘the "academic literacies" model: theory and applications’, theory into practice, 45(4), pp. 368-377. available at: https://doi.org/10.1207/s15430421tip4504_11 lillis, t. and scott, m. (2007) ‘defining academic literacies research: issues of epistemology, ideology and strategy’, journal of applied linguistics, 4(1), pp. 5-32. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jeap.2012.11.005 https://doi.org/10.1017/s0261444807004892 https://doi.org/10.1207/s15430421tip4504_11 montgomery, sparks and goodman ‘what kind of paper do you want from us?’: developing genre knowledge in one kazakhstani university postgraduate school journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 26 martin, j. r. (2009) ‘genre and language learning: a social semiotic perspective’, linguistics and education, 20(1), pp. 10-21. available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.linged.2009.01.003 moeller, a. j. and yu, f. (2015) ‘ncssfl-actfl can-do statements: an effective tool for improving language learning within and outside the classroom’, dimension 2015, pp. 50-69. available at: http://www.scolt.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/dimension2015_final_4-29.pdf nazarbayev, n. (2007) new kazakhstan in a new world: address 2007. available at: http://mfa.gov.kz/en/consuldubai/content-view/kazakstan-respublikasyny-prezidentinnazarbaevty-kazakstan-halkyna-zoldauy-2007-zylgy-28-akpan neff-van aertselaer, j. a. (2013) ‘contextualizing efl argumentation writing practices within the common european framework descriptors’, journal of second language writing, 22, pp 198-209. negretti, r. and mcgrath, l. (2018) ‘scaffolding genre knowledge and metacognition: insights from an l2 doctoral research writing course’ journal of second language writing, 40, pp 12-31. available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jslw.2017.12.002 paltridge, b. (2014) ‘genre and second-language academic writing’, language teaching, 47(3), pp. 303-318. available at: https://doi.org/10.1017/s0261444814000068 phillipson, r. (2006) ‘english: a cuckoo in the european higher education nest of languages?’, european journal of english studies, 10(1), pp. 13-32. prior, p. (2013) writing/disciplinarity: a sociohistoric account of literate activity in the academy. hoboken, nj: routledge. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.linged.2009.01.003 http://www.scolt.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/dimension-2015_final_4-29.pdf http://www.scolt.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/dimension-2015_final_4-29.pdf http://mfa.gov.kz/en/consuldubai/content-view/kazakstan-respublikasyny-prezidenti-nnazarbaevty-kazakstan-halkyna-zoldauy-2007-zylgy-28-akpan http://mfa.gov.kz/en/consuldubai/content-view/kazakstan-respublikasyny-prezidenti-nnazarbaevty-kazakstan-halkyna-zoldauy-2007-zylgy-28-akpan https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jslw.2017.12.002 https://doi.org/10.1017/s0261444814000068 montgomery, sparks and goodman ‘what kind of paper do you want from us?’: developing genre knowledge in one kazakhstani university postgraduate school journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 27 russell, d. r., lea, m., parker, j., street, b. and donahue, t. (2009) ‘exploring notions of genre in "academic literacies" and "writing across the curriculum": approaches across countries and contexts’, in bazerman, c., bonini, a. and figueiredo, d. (eds) genre in a changing world: perspectives on writing. fort collins, co: the wac clearinghouse and parlor press, pp. 395-423. stake, r. e. (1995) the art of case study research. thousand oaks, ca: sage publications. swales, j. m. (2004) research genres: explorations and applications. cambridge, uk: cambridge university press. tardy, c. m. (2009) building genre knowledge (second language writing). anderson, sc: parlor press. wingate, u. (2015) academic literacy and student diversity: the case for inclusive practice. bristol: multilingual matters. author details d. philip montgomery was instructor at nazarbayev university graduate school of education from 2014 to 2019, and currently teaches at franklin road academy, usa. jason sparks is associate professor and vice dean at nazarbayev university graduate school of education. bridget goodman is assistant professor and director of the m.a. in multilingual education program at nazarbayev university graduate school of education. ‘what kind of paper do you want from us?’: developing genre knowledge in one kazakhstani university postgraduate school abstract introduction key concepts underpinning the inquiry genre, academic literacies, genre knowledge and genre awareness genre, academic literacy development, and pedagogical practice methods survey focus group interviews data analysis procedures findings genre knowledge field-related genre knowledge mode-related genre knowledge tenor-related genre knowledge developing situated genre awareness pedagogical approaches feedback and interaction clear task guidelines and expectations scaffolded instruction conclusions references author details article journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 16: december 2019 ________________________________________________________________________ ‘it can’t be found in books’: how a flipped-classroom approach using online videos can engage postgraduate students in dissertation writing jessica clare hancock city, university of london, uk abstract this article explores action research that introduced a flipped-classroom approach to teaching dissertation writing. the cohort involved postgraduates studying at master’s level, with a high proportion of international students. dissertation writing had previously been taught in a lecture-based format, with limited time for activities. moving some of the information-based content to online videos, which students were asked to watch before the teaching sessions, meant that face-to-face content could be entirely based around active learning and a social-constructivist approach. the students who experienced this flippedclassroom approach became more positive about the use of online videos during the teaching period. many favourable comments were made about the videos, although several students appeared to prefer to use video content as a recap of face-to-face teaching, rather than appreciating a true flipped-classroom approach. nevertheless, students agreed that the face-to-face activities helped put their learning from the videos into practice, the videos helped them to complete face-to-face activities, and that the teaching was beneficial for their dissertation writing abilities. despite an absence of existing research for this context, a flipped-classroom approach to teaching dissertation writing is therefore recommended, as long as the students are fully briefed about the reasons for teaching in this way. this teaching method may be particularly beneficial for postgraduate students who are familiar with online learning through videos in earlier parts of their master’s level courses. keywords: flipped classroom; dissertation writing; international students; postgraduate; videos; academic writing. hancock ‘it can’t be found in books’: how a flipped-classroom approach using online videos can engage postgraduate students in dissertation writing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 2 introduction i carried out an action-research project into using a flipped-classroom approach for teaching dissertation writing at a london school of a post-1992 university. this school and campus predominantly has international students on taught postgraduate courses. students on all the school’s master’s programmes are required to undertake a dissertation module. as most of the students are unfamiliar with the academic literacies of uk heis in general, and their school in particular, this extended piece of writing (12,000 or 15,000 words) is often daunting. i initially taught dissertation writing through a series of hour-long lecture-based sessions, which were a mixture of information provision and small-group activities. however, there was not always sufficient time to cover the essential information that students needed nor to include tasks which would encourage students to take an academic literacies approach to their own writing. an action-research intervention, therefore, was used to address these issues by taking a flipped-classroom approach. i chose this in the hope that it would allow students to revisit material, might increase student engagement and enable greater opportunities for active learning (james et al., 2014; heyborne and perrett, 2016; zainuddin and halili, 2016). i created five short (running time varied between 13 and 22 minutes) online videos with knowledge-based content and video-activities which students could re-watch, on-demand from any location.1 using videos for information-based material left more time for active learning (such as discussing writing examples) within the face-to-face seminars, to help students to undergo the deeper learning required in a postgraduate dissertation (james, 1998). this article explores the findings of this action-research, to investigate the experience of introducing a flipped-classroom approach to support students in developing their dissertation writing abilities, and the use of online videos to engage students in their dissertation writing process. as student engagement is an over-determined concept (hea, 2010), for this research i define engagement in the writing process as active participation in activities and becoming empowered to meet assessment requirements. 1 the videos and supporting materials (slides and scripts) are available from the learn higher website: http://www.learnhigher.ac.uk/writing-for-university/academic-writing/videos-to-develop-dissertation writing/ (accessed: 20 august 2019). http://www.learnhigher.ac.uk/writing-for-university/academic-writing/videos-to-develop-dissertation-writing/ hancock ‘it can’t be found in books’: how a flipped-classroom approach using online videos can engage postgraduate students in dissertation writing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 3 flipped classrooms the efficacy of traditional lectures to deliver learning outcomes has been questioned for some time, especially if they do not promote active learning or take account of differing abilities (brown and race, 2002). in response, a restructuring of student learning has been suggested, where knowledge transmission takes place before face-to-face contact, which can then include more active and deep learning (hao and lee, 2016). in the last decade, this approach has been described as a flipped classroom and has begun to be more widely used and investigated (strayer, 2007). a flipped classroom involves students completing work before class to gain information which is used to complete activities during the face-to-face session (abeysekera and dawson, 2015); it is an overturning of a more traditional approach where knowledge is transmitted in class and practised afterwards in individual activities. although some researchers still accept a wide definition of pre-class tasks (so would include preparatory reading; see, for example, o’flaherty and phillips, 2015), many argue that the term ‘flipped classroom’ should only be used when the pre-class activities involve online learning (staker and horn, 2012) and, in particular, watching instructional videos (zainuddin and halili, 2016; zuber, 2016). as research indicates that students prefer viewing videos to reading (sahin et al., 2015), this specific definition is more appropriate for this paper, which aims to examine how students can be engaged in their dissertation writing process. some clear benefits of a flipped-classroom approach have been argued for in the literature. students have reacted positively (james et al., 2014), particularly to the ability to revisit videos (heyborne and perrett, 2016). moreover, huang and hong (2016) report that discussion participation rises and zainuddin and halili’s (2016) meta-analysis states that student motivation is frequently improved. an interesting outcome noted by lage, platt and treglia (2000) was the particular applicability of benefits to female students. some studies demonstrate improved learning outcomes (berg et al., 2015; kurt, 2017; wasserman et al., 2017). yet the evidence for increased assessment scores is mixed, with other research showing no change (galway et al., 2014) and blair et al. (2016) observing that a flipped classroom led to fewer higher-level marks, possibly due to decreased attendance. indeed, comber and brady-van den bos (2018) also discovered that it caused attendance issues and recommend that the pedagogical reasoning should be explained to students (wang and qui (2018) similarly advocate for providing support for students to master this new kind of learning; they also note that there is a lack of literature examining negative student hancock ‘it can’t be found in books’: how a flipped-classroom approach using online videos can engage postgraduate students in dissertation writing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 4 perceptions of flipped classrooms, and that the significant factor for learning is what is done in the face-to-face sessions. these arguments indicate that the enthusiasm for a flipped-classroom approach expressed in the research literature may not be fully supported by learning gains for students. another disadvantage of a flipped-classroom approach described by many researchers is the additional time required to produce videos (schlairet et al., 2014; moran and milsom, 2015). herreid and schiller (2013) suggest sourcing existing videos, but their quality is variable. it is also likely that students would not perceive external videos as authoritative, unlike videos presented by an existing lecturer (bergmann and sams, 2012). accordingly, i chose to create my own videos. in a secondary-school context, bergmann and sams (2012) make the important point that ‘pedagogy should drive technology’ (p. 21) and argue that what is needed is not just videos to be viewed before face-to-face sessions, but a concept which they call flipped mastery – enabling students to take advantage of different ways of learning (text books, videos, the internet) to progress at their own pace through differentiated tasks. the classroom thus becomes a space where students benefit from a personalised approach, being assessed (often by computer marking) when they feel ready. despite the attractiveness of creating this kind of environment, due to the nature of teaching writing (which will be discussed later), the limited face-to-face time available (four hours of class time), the non-adjustable submission dates and requirements for the dissertation assessment, and the extensive use of peer discussion activities, i did not feel that this was possible in my context. the main issue with a flipped-classroom approach appears to be convincing students of the requirement to view the videos (boevé et al., 2016). indeed, pienta (2016) emphasises that a flipped classroom will not automatically solve student problems or increase engagement. however, gilboy et al. (2015) indicate that students are more receptive once they become accustomed and realise the benefits; nevertheless, they recommend that student endorsement should be obtained early on. brunsell and horejsi (2013) assert that students need to be tested regularly to prove that they are viewing the material, but, as slomanson (2014) argues, this does not respect students’ autonomy, something that was especially important as i was teaching postgraduate students who are experienced hancock ‘it can’t be found in books’: how a flipped-classroom approach using online videos can engage postgraduate students in dissertation writing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 5 learners. furthermore, as the school’s dissertation students are from a range of programmes, it would be difficult to alter their assessments to include in-course tests. instead, schwartz (2014) maintains that students are able to self-regulate and will increase their pre-class efforts if they realise they are behind their peers during group work. additionally, davis (2016) and gilboy et al. (2015) advocate clearly explaining the benefits and expectations of the flipped classroom, to encourage student support. doing so may also negate the feedback received in wasserman et al.’s (2017) study, where students objected to active rather than passive learning during classes. furthermore, schmidt and ralph (2016) advise that interactivity also increases the likelihood of students completing the work, whilst nematollahi et al. (2015) indicate that students’ attention spans necessitate videos shorter than twenty minutes; bergmann and sams (2012) suggest a minute per high-school grade but it is not clear how this would translate to he. consequently, i ensured that my five videos were interactive and a suitable length (13-22 minutes), and explained the purposes of the flipped-classroom approach to the students (although, as discussed further in the results section, on reflection this could have been done more effectively). teaching academic writing writing development is a nascent discipline, which has progressed from remedial actions to empowering students to understand the conventions of written academic discourses (englert et al., 2006). lea and street’s (1998) academic-literacies approach establishes that academic writing cannot be described by generic rules; instead, students should be made aware of the socially-constructed nature of the requirements of their own contexts (comber and simpson, 2001). similarly, freire (1972) explores the imperative to teach writing as a creative process, rather than a set of instructions. as students’ backgrounds differ greatly, especially at the school involved in this project, and academic writing varies between subjects, levels, institutions and countries (flowerdew, 2000; foster and russell, 2002), writing development needs to explore ways of decoding literary practices, and ensure that students possess the knowledge assumed by assessment setters. smidt (2009) argues that the process of teaching writing therefore needs to be dialogic, and lavelle (2009) contends that modelling (examining examples of work by other students) is also an essential component of comprehending academic discourses. writing development thus inherently requires a social-constructivist approach to knowledge, and hancock ‘it can’t be found in books’: how a flipped-classroom approach using online videos can engage postgraduate students in dissertation writing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 6 for students to be given opportunities to discuss and practise their own meaning-making; beal (1993), allal et al. (2005) and wagner (2016) demonstrate the efficacy of peer collaboration to revise and improve writing. as such, writing development has particular demands to provide opportunities for active and collaborative learning as well as knowledge transmission. flipping the writing classroom a flipped-classroom approach consequently seems suited to writing development which requires a shared foundation of concepts (such as expected content in a particular dissertation chapter) but also socially-constructed learning. despite the suitability of this teaching method, few studies have investigated a flipped classroom strategy in writing development; most literature examines a more fact-based scientific context. nevertheless, campbell (2016) argues that a flipped classroom provides business-writing students with a better appreciation of concepts. however, hall and dufrene (2016) note that although videos can deliver more academic-writing information to students, class time must be dedicated to checking students’ understanding, especially as some students do not complete pre-class activities. indeed, engin and donaci (2014) reveal that, although students enjoyed academic-writing videos, they desired continued face-to-face dialogue with lecturers. thus, i began seminars by asking students to re-cap the video information and allowed time for questions. as the research on flipping an academic-writing classroom demonstrates increased active learning and a more enjoyable process (hall and dufrene, 2016), it is likely to be a beneficial way of engaging dissertation students with their writing process. videos will also provide some writing-development teaching to off-campus students (students from the school often returned to their countries of origin during the dissertation period). as research in this area is limited (and none addresses dissertation writing or a postgraduate context), this paper will provide a valuable insight into students’ experiences and the efficacy of a flipped postgraduate dissertation writing approach. methodology hancock ‘it can’t be found in books’: how a flipped-classroom approach using online videos can engage postgraduate students in dissertation writing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 7 action research was used to allow me to both make and analyse a change to my teaching. action research began to be clearly theorised in the mid-twentieth century as directly involving social action (lewin, 1946). although precise definitions vary, it is agreed that action research is a ‘practice-changing practice’ (kemmis, 2009, p. 465); it entails a researcher modifying a situation and reflecting on the results of this alteration in a cyclical process, which is particularly applicable to continually-changing educational contexts (morton-cooper, 2000; herr and anderson, 2005). the most significant benefit is the amalgamation of educational research and practice (norton, 2009); other methodologies are often criticised as establishing findings that are either not of concrete value, or which are rarely employed in teaching (pine, 2009). in contrast, a practical application is an inherent aspect of action research (coghlan and brannick, 2005), which always aims to create an improvement (kember, 2000). nevertheless, vaughan and burnaford (2016) state that action research can be seen as more subjective than other methodologies; it cannot involve a true experimental design, and so results such as higher assessment scores may be caused by confounding factors. yet this article does not aim to demonstrate a causal effect on learning outcomes, but instead analyse students’ experiences of a flipped classroom. furthermore, there is nothing in action research that necessarily entails a lack of applicability or rigour (norton, 2009). the data is likely to be pertinent to other settings where lecturers are considering a flipped classroom for academic-writing teaching (elliott, 2009). indeed, this approach has been informed by existing research which has identified potential pitfalls, such as video length (nematollahi et al., 2015). action research is especially relevant to this project because of its political aspects, given its potential for critiquing existing systems and demonstrating possibilities for change; similarly, writing development is fundamentally concerned with social justice, emerging from a focus on widening participation in he for students from non-traditional backgrounds (orr, 2005; lillis, 2006). within education, action research can easily align with objectives to challenge existing teaching methods and approaches, to become critical actionresearch (xiao et al., 2012). thus, it can deliver clear benefits, not only by offering new ways of addressing the learning requirements of students, but also by delivering positive benefits to lecturers through empowering them to make changes (hine, 2013), thereby creating a ‘knowledge democracy’ (pine, 2009, p.55) and interrogating existing thinking about learning (perrett, 2003). action research, therefore, supports the desire to improve hancock ‘it can’t be found in books’: how a flipped-classroom approach using online videos can engage postgraduate students in dissertation writing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 8 the learning experiences of students and provides a more systematic way of reflecting on how teaching can be adjusted to acknowledge the needs of different kinds of students. considerations were given to relevant ethical issues during this study, and ethical approval was obtained from my institution. accordingly, participants were provided with full information about the study and their consent was sought to take part, and they completed the questionnaires anonymously. i made sure i emphasised that their participation or nonparticipation would not affect their dissertation mark or the support i provided in any way, and that their comments would be used in a way which would not identify them. participants were also informed that they could withdraw, without giving a reason, at any time before data analysis commenced. teaching my previous dissertation writing teaching involved four hour-long face-to-face lecturebased sessions with included activities. although the research on using a flippedclassroom approach to teach writing was limited, the evidence indicated that students would benefit from this approach (hall and dufrene, 2016). the flipped-classroom approach entailed producing five videos, using camtasia to create narrated screencasts. writing cannot be reduced to the ability to follow a list of instructions, as it requires awareness of the obligations of contexts (lea and street, 1998; comber and simpson, 2001). thus, to enable a socially-constructivist approach, and to use interactivity to increase student use (schmidt and ralph, 2016), i designed video learning-activities so students could participate in dialogues about dissertation writing, such as using padlet (an online noticeboard) to discuss summaries of their main findings. this also meant that, although students were likely to view the videos alone, they would not feel isolated (wei and chen (2012) note that this is a common issue with online learning) as most tasks allowed them to see other students’ responses and learn from peers (allal et al., 2005). the videos had an additional advantage of on-demand availability, when the content became relevant, and meant that students who could not attend campus seminars could still have some teaching, although they would miss out on valuable learning opportunities from the face-to-face sessions. hancock ‘it can’t be found in books’: how a flipped-classroom approach using online videos can engage postgraduate students in dissertation writing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 9 the face-to-face time involved an active and socially-constructed learning environment that was designed to be more engaging to students and encourage attendance. several activities allowed students to learn through examining other writing, as such modelling is beneficial (lavelle, 2009). students would discuss the strengths and weaknesses of writing excepts in small groups, enabling less confident students to participate in unintimidating peer-dialogues rather than a whole group discussion (barkley, 2010). the writing samples showed students what elements mentioned in the video (such as clarity) looked like in practice. after students evaluated the writing excerpts in small groups, i led a whole-group conversation to share different responses. this dialogue enabled students to benefit from further peer collaboration and to see the contextually and socially-constructed nature of writing requirements (allal et al., 2005). i also provided feedback about my assessment of the writing, thereby increasing their knowledge of appropriate ways of meeting the dissertation requirements (flowerdew, 2000). i also used learning technology to increase participation; for example, in one seminar i asked students to post activity responses on a padlet wall as this might be easier than contributing vocally for some students (hew and cheung, 2012). it also meant that students could learn from each other’s answers and my assessment of and feedback on other students’ work as well as their own (markett et al., 2006). data analysis data was collected at two points:  questionnaire 1 (q1): paper questionnaire given out during the first face-to-face seminar: this covered students’ initial responses to videos.  questionnaire 1 (q2): paper questionnaire given out during the final seminar, with an online version emailed afterwards to all relevant students: this covered students’ concluding responses to the videos and face-to-face seminars. this approach was used to maximise the response rate (historically, attendance for the final session has been low, and online responses are often poor (crawford, 2014)) and to offer insight into whether students’ opinions change as they become more used to the approach. statistical analysis was used for the quantitative survey data (teo, 2013), and a hancock ‘it can’t be found in books’: how a flipped-classroom approach using online videos can engage postgraduate students in dissertation writing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 10 thematic analysis for the qualitative survey data (mertens, 2015). some q1 questions were repeated in q2 to allow for direct comparison. due to lower attendance at the final seminar, fewer responses were gathered. 46 students took a dissertation module during the action-research period. nineteen students (41% of the cohort) answered q1, and eight students (17% of the cohort) answered q2 (three online, five paper). students’ self-report data was triangulated with published research and my observations of the seminars. the questionnaires gathered quantitative data, mainly measured using likert-type scales, and qualitative data from open-ended questions. as both questionnaires were completed anonymously, changes in the data from specific students cannot be tracked. findings a. how can a flipped-classroom approach be used to support students in developing their dissertation writing abilities? the main teaching alteration for the flipped-classroom approach was providing initial information through online videos. therefore, students were asked whether they would prefer to be taught in that format, or through a lecture (as was previously the case). in q1, the modal response was a strong preference for lectures with the median response a slight preference for lectures. in q2, the modal response had changed to no preference and the median response was between a slight preference for lectures and no preference. the distribution of answers can be seen from figure 1, with no student expressing a strong preference for video delivery in either q1 or q2: figure 1. comparison of initial preferences (q1) and final preferences (q2). hancock ‘it can’t be found in books’: how a flipped-classroom approach using online videos can engage postgraduate students in dissertation writing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 11 nevertheless, an unpaired t-test showed that the differences between questionnaires was not statistically significant (p=0.79), due to the small and reduced sample size for the q2. it does, however, suggest that students might have appreciated video delivery more as they became familiar with this method, supporting gilboy and pazzaglia’s (2015) research. yet this was not true for all students, one of whom commented in q2 they could ‘understand better’ in a lecture, echoing q1 students who preferred face-to-face delivery for the ability to ‘ask questions’. indeed, one student said: ‘i think video . . . can be limiting to the learning experience – it . . . doesn't allow for interaction’ (q1). this might reflect the learning context of the school in his research, where students are rarely taught in large groups; students who experience less interactive teaching in big lectures may have reacted differently. a comment about face-to-face teaching being ‘more personal’ (q1) indicates that herreid and schiller’s (2013) suggestion to source existing videos would be even less successful; this indicates that bespoke videos are necessary for the design of an effective flipped-classroom approach. further discussion of the usefulness of videos is provided in part b) of this findings section. still, some students indicated that they had no clear preference of lecture or video as ‘both are good’ (q1). students also described the advantages of videos, noting that ‘i can watch it whenever i want’ (q2), ‘you can repeat it if you don’t understand something’ (q1), and that the videos could be accessed ‘any time’ (q1). these responses accord with heyborne and perrett (2016) who include repeat viewings as a clear benefit. yet, one student’s 0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90% 100% preferences (initial) preferences (final) preferences for video/ lecture delivery strongly prefer lecture slightly prefer lecture no preference slightly prefer video strongly prefer video hancock ‘it can’t be found in books’: how a flipped-classroom approach using online videos can engage postgraduate students in dissertation writing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 12 comment is perhaps telling, as they stated: ‘i think both are necessary! videos can act as a “refresher” . . . face to face allows for interaction’ (q2). although this student valued the videos, they referred to their function of reinforcing content, rather than a flippedclassroom approach where a video introduces information which is used during an activelearning seminar. indeed, another student’s reason for recommending the videos was ‘that [they are] useful, especially if you missed the [seminar]’ (q2). this accords with my experience within the seminars, where a minority of students had not understood the requirement to view the video beforehand. davis (2016) argues that a flipped-classroom approach should be introduced carefully to students to clarify the expectations and the pedagogical justification. however, for this action research project, the first seminar was part of the dissertation induction, meaning that the instructions about viewing the videos were given via email which was not conducive to creating a dialogic exchange with the students about this new pedagogical approach. this problem with student understanding supports other findings that extensive consideration should be given to engaging students with a flipped-classroom approach (gilboy et al., 2015). indeed, the initial questionnaire demonstrated that only 33% of the students had previously learnt through videos. furthermore, those previous videos were designed to be used as an extra resource rather than in a flipped-classroom approach, emphasising the novelty of this method of instruction. the findings clearly illustrate the need to achieve student comprehension of pedagogical choices. when asked about the face-to-face seminars, the modal and median responses indicated that they found the class activities very useful (figure 2), and that the seminars had made them slightly more engaged in the dissertation writing process (figure 3). figure 2. (from q2) hancock ‘it can’t be found in books’: how a flipped-classroom approach using online videos can engage postgraduate students in dissertation writing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 13 figure 3. (from q3) these results indicate that students did find the design of the seminars to focus on practical activities beneficial to their dissertation writing abilities and somewhat engaging. furthermore, all of the students found that the activities had allowed them to put their learning from the video into practice, that the videos had helped them complete the activities (which corroborates my seminar observations), and would recommend the classes to other students. this suggests that, by the end of the teaching at least, students were able to see the benefits of watching the videos before seminars, thus alleviating the key issue identified by boevé et al. (2016). these results also support huang and hong’s 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 very useful slightly useful not very useful not at all useful usefulness of practical activities in seminars 0 1 2 3 4 much more slightly more no difference less did the classes help you feel more engaged in the dissertation-writing process? hancock ‘it can’t be found in books’: how a flipped-classroom approach using online videos can engage postgraduate students in dissertation writing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 14 (2016) findings that a flipped-classroom approach increased student participation in faceto-face activities. comments on the seminars included that the ‘activities make for a realistic “taster” of what you will be writing in your dissertation’ (q2) and that they were ‘very useful’ (q2); this endorses other research which reveals student satisfaction with flipped-classroom approaches (james et al., 2014). wasserman et al. (2017) indicate that some students objected to more active learning, but this does not seem to have occurred and i observed that students were engaged and enjoyed the activities. the responses indicate that students did benefit from the flipped-classroom approach, as the seminar activities enabled the use and application of knowledge from the videos. nevertheless, more could have been done to assist students in transitioning to this novel teaching method. b. how can online videos be used to engage students in their dissertation writing process? not all students accepted video delivery as a replacement for lectures, but most saw the benefits of videos as an additional resource. responses to the final open-ended question in q1 included: ‘i enjoy [the videos]’, ‘keep [the videos] coming’, ‘please arrange more video[s] like this’ and ‘the pace of the person speaking was perfect and it was very clear. the videos were made pretty well!’. although students were clear that they valued face-toface teaching, they also benefitted from the videos. both the modal and median responses in q1 show that students thought the videos were the correct length and that information was pitched at the right level. in q1 and q2 the modal and median responses were that students found the content very useful (figure 4), and that there were the right number of activities (figure 5). figure 4. comparison of initial response to videos (q1) and final response (q2). hancock ‘it can’t be found in books’: how a flipped-classroom approach using online videos can engage postgraduate students in dissertation writing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 15 figure 5. comparison of initial response to videos (q1) and final response (q2). in q1, 88% of students stated that they would watch the videos again, which altered to 75% in q2 (probably because students were towards the end of their writing period, or might have already submitted). in q1, 89% of students stated that they would recommend the videos to other students, which rose to 100% in q2. q2 findings showed that the videos made students feel more engaged in the writing process (figure 6). figure 6. (from q2) 0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90% 100% video content (initial) video content (final) usefulness of video content very useful slightly useful not very useful not at all useful 0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90% 100% video activities (initial) video activities (final) amount of video activities too many activities just the right amount of activities not enough activities hancock ‘it can’t be found in books’: how a flipped-classroom approach using online videos can engage postgraduate students in dissertation writing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 16 these results demonstrate that the videos increased student engagement more than the seminars. this is reflected in the positive comments about the videos. in q1, one student commented that they ‘really liked the schedule creator’, indicating that they had benefitted from the activities within the video, reinforcing schmidt and ralph’s (2016) contention that interactivity is necessary. another student answered that: ‘the little key points . . . were very helpful and it can't be found in books’ (q1). this indicates that unique information was particularly valued and that the videos were seen as more useful than existing written material, corroborating the findings of sahin et al. (2015). in q2, one student even referred to the videos as ‘must watch’. this overall enthusiasm must be treated with a note of caution, however, as the students who chose to answer q1 and, especially, q2 may have been keener than other students who were not represented in the research: particularly considering the response rate as 41% of the cohort answered q1 and 17% of the cohort answered q2. nevertheless, the design of the videos to be relatively short, interactive, and with content that was clearly aligned to the assessment was successful in engaging students in their dissertation writing process. the videos were perhaps particularly helpful in my context, when teaching many international students with english language issues who may not always wish to refer to written information; videos also allowed students to re-watch the information, and to view at their own pace to ensure they understood the content. 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 much more slightly more no difference less did the videos help you feel more engaged in the dissertation-writing process? hancock ‘it can’t be found in books’: how a flipped-classroom approach using online videos can engage postgraduate students in dissertation writing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 17 conclusion the questionnaire responses demonstrate that students enjoyed the videos and that the content, amount of activities, level of information and length were designed correctly and were successful in engaging students in their dissertation writing process. students particularly liked their repeatability and interactivity. yet, it is less clear that students felt that they benefitted from a flipped-classroom approach. it was not adequately explained to students that the videos were a replacement for lecture-style information delivery, and that providing the videos would allow for more interaction and active learning during the faceto-face seminars (gilboy and pazzaglia, 2015). many students would have liked the information from the videos delivered face-to-face, and to have used the videos to revise information. the findings emphasise the need to prepare students more fully for flipped classroom teaching, especially when it is new to them (davis, 2016). although the research evidence suggested that one of the main issues with a flipped-classroom approach is persuading students to view the videos, this was not fully considered (boevé et al., 2016). ensuring that seminar delivery included time at the beginning to communicate the reasons for this approach is likely to have made the teaching more effective (gilboy et al., 2015). nevertheless, students appreciated the seminar activities and the social-constructivist approach made them engaged in their writing process; this provided benefits to students who participated, as i observed an increased understanding of dissertation writing literacies by the end of each session. an additional benefit of the flipped-classroom approach was that, although the seminars continued to be attended by a minority of students, non-attendees could at least experience some of the teaching through the videos. learning development colleagues, therefore, are likely to find aspects of my approach beneficial for dissertation writing teaching, particularly as this is an assessment which many students find difficult. no previous research has addressed the use of a flipped classroom for teaching dissertation writing; this small-scale action research has investigated some of the advantages and issues, which would profit from further exploration through wider use in other institutions, particularly those with different kinds of students. although this paper addressed a solely postgraduate context, a flippedclassroom approach to develop the dissertation writing ability of other kinds of students in higher education is likely to be similarly beneficial. hancock ‘it can’t be found in books’: how a flipped-classroom approach using online videos can engage postgraduate students in dissertation writing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 18 recommendations despite the small and self-selecting sample, the results illustrate both the benefits and problems with this approach. the responses to my research also provide a salutary lesson in the importance of fully explaining a flipped-classroom approach to students for any colleagues who wish to use this method. furthermore, some students did not appear to appreciate the flipped-classroom approach, and several seemed to misunderstand the point of the videos (viewing them as ways to re-visit information rather than receive information for the first time). in retrospect, it was particularly challenging for students to experience a new teaching method at the end of their programme. a flipped-classroom approach for dissertation writing may have been better received if students had become used to this method earlier in their courses; it is likely that they would have been more receptive to new methods at the beginning of their master’s degrees. indeed, as many of the students have not previously studied in the uk before, they are already making significant adjustments to the ways in which they learn at university. requiring them to adapt to a flipped-classroom approach for the teaching for their final assessment may have been overwhelming. i recommend, therefore, using videos to teach writing at an earlier stage by using videos as an additional resource, to allow students to become accustomed to blended learning. a flipped-classroom approach, with a full explanation, could then be gradually introduced, perhaps for one seminar, to enable students to adjust, before experiencing a full flipped-classroom approach for dissertation writing. i would also recommend initiating conversations with students about the flipped-classroom approach during face-to-face seminars, to gain some immediate feedback and to explore the reasoning for using it. this is also likely to make the students feel more involved in their own learning and allow them to consider what teaching methods they prefer and their own learning journey. additionally, a recorded webinar could be used to explain the benefits and purposes of a flipped-classroom approach, so that students could discuss and review this information whenever they needed to; providing online teaching about the benefits of the seminars might entice more students to attend seminars, even if they are initially reluctant to travel to campus during their dissertation writing period. hancock ‘it can’t be found in books’: how a flipped-classroom approach using online videos can engage postgraduate students in dissertation writing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 19 there is currently insufficient research addressing the flipped-classroom approach for teaching academic writing. as with much action research, this project has provided some preliminary indications of the usefulness of this teaching method, but further work is needed. this particularly needs to look at the benefits of different kinds of resources – i used screencasts as i was already familiar with this method, and it was practical within the time i had, but other video or resource types may be more effective. i did not feel able to explore a flipped mastery style classroom, as advocated by bergmann and sams (2012) where students are able to progress and be assessed at their own pace, due to the constraints of the dissertation assessment and the time available, but this would be valuable to investigate in a writing context, particularly as this area is so different from the more knowledge and fact-based science teaching context of bergmann and sams. taking an academic literacies approach to writing means that modelling and peer discussions are invaluable in teaching, and so an exploration of how this could be achieved in a flipped mastery method would be productive. this study has indicated the potential for a flipped approach to teaching writing; it is my hope that it inspires further research into how this might be utilised effectively. references abeysekera, l. and dawson, p. (2015) ‘motivation and cognitive load in the flipped classroom: definition, rationale and a call for research’, higher education research and development, 34(1), pp. 1-14. allal, l., mottier, lopez, l., lehraus, k. and forget, a. (2005) ‘whole-class interaction in an activity of writing and revision’, pp. 69–91, in t. kostouli (ed.), writing in context(s): textual practices and learning processes in sociocultural settings. boston: springer. barkley, e.f. (2010) student engagement techniques: a handbook for college faculty. san francisco: jossey-bass. beal, c. r. (1993) ‘contributions of developmental psychology to understanding revision: implications for consultation with classroom teachers’, school psychology review, 22, pp. 643–655. hancock ‘it can’t be found in books’: how a flipped-classroom approach using online videos can engage postgraduate students in dissertation writing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 20 berg, a.l., ibrahim, h., magaster, s. and salbod, s. (2015) ‘flipping over the flipped classroom’, contemporary issues in communication science and disorders, 42, pp. 16-25. available at: https://www.asha.org/uploadedfiles/asha/publications/cicsd/2015s-flipping-overthe-flipped classroom.pdf (accessed: 20 august 2019). bergmann, j. and sams, a. (2012) ‘flip your classroom: reach every student in every class every day’, washington, dc: international society for technology in education. available at http://i-lib.imu.edu.my/newportal/images/newportal/compebooks/flip-your-classroom.pdf (accessed: 20 august 2019). blair, e., maharaj, c. and primus, s. (2016), ‘performance and perception in the flipped classroom’, education and information technologies, 21(6), pp. 1465-1482. boevé, a.j., meijer, r.r., bosker, r.j., vugteveen, j., hoekstra, r. and albers, c.j., (2016) ‘implementing the flipped classroom: an exploration of study behaviour and student performance’, higher education, 74, pp. 1015-1032. available at: https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007%2fs10734-016-0104-y.pdf (accessed: 20 august 2019). brown, s. and race, p. (2002) lecturing: a practical guide. london: kogan page. brunsell, e. and horejsi, m. (2013) ‘a flipped classroom in action’, the science teacher, 80(2), p. 8. campbell, k.s. (2016) ‘flipping to teach the conceptual foundations of successful workplace writing’, business and professional communication quarterly, 79(1), pp. 54-67. comber, b. and simpson, a. (2001) negotiating critical literacies in classrooms. mahwah, nj: lawrence erlbaum associates. https://www.asha.org/uploadedfiles/asha/publications/cicsd/2015s-flipping-over-the-flipped-classroom.pdf https://www.asha.org/uploadedfiles/asha/publications/cicsd/2015s-flipping-over-the-flipped-classroom.pdf http://i-lib.imu.edu.my/newportal/images/newportal/compe-books/flip-your-classroom.pdf http://i-lib.imu.edu.my/newportal/images/newportal/compe-books/flip-your-classroom.pdf https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007%2fs10734-016-0104-y.pdf hancock ‘it can’t be found in books’: how a flipped-classroom approach using online videos can engage postgraduate students in dissertation writing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 21 comber, d.p.m. and brady-van den bos, m. (2018) ‘too much, too soon? a critical investigation into factors that make flipped classrooms effective’, higher education research and development, 37(4), pp. 683-697. coghlan, d. and brannick, t. (2005) doing action research in your own organization. 2nd edn. thousand oaks, calif; london: sage. crawford, m. (2014) developing as an educational leader and manager. london: sage. davis, n.l. (2016) ‘anatomy of a flipped classroom’, journal of teaching in travel and tourism, 16(3), pp. 228-232. elliott, j. (2009) ‘building educational theory through action research’ in noffke, s.e. and somekh, b. (eds.) the sage handbook of educational action research. los angeles, calif.; london: sage. engin, m. and donanci, s. (2014) ‘flipping the classroom in an academic writing course’, journal of teaching and learning with technology, 3(1), pp. 94-98. englert, c. s., mariage, t. v. and dunsmore, k. (2006) ‘tenets of sociocultural theory in writing instruction research’, pp. 208–221, in macarthur, c. a., graham, s. and fitzgerald, j. (eds.) handbook of writing research. new york: guilford. flowerdew, j. (2000) ‘discourse community, legitimate peripheral participation, and the nonnative-english-speaking scholar’, tesol quarterly, 34(1), pp. 127-150. foster, d. and russell, d. r. (2002) writing and learning in cross-national perspective: transitions from secondary to higher education. mahwah, nj: ncte and lea. freire, p. (1972) cultural action for freedom. harmondsworth: peguin. galway, l.p., corbett, k.k., takaro, t.k., tairyan, k. and frank, e. (2014) ‘a novel integration of online and flipped classroom instructional models in public health higher education’, bmc medical education, 14(1), p. 181. available at: hancock ‘it can’t be found in books’: how a flipped-classroom approach using online videos can engage postgraduate students in dissertation writing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 22 https://bmcmededuc.biomedcentral.com/track/pdf/10.1186/1472-6920-14-181 (accessed: 20 august 2019). gilboy, m.b., heinerichs, s. and pazzaglia, g. (2015) ‘enhancing student engagement using the flipped classroom’, journal of nutrition education and behavior, 47(1), pp. 109-114. hall, a. and dufrene, d. (2016) ‘best practices for launching a flipped classroom’, business and professional communication quarterly, 79(2), pp. 234-242. hao, y. and lee, k.s. (2016) ‘teaching in flipped classrooms: exploring pre-service teachers' concerns’, computers in human behavior, 57, pp. 250-260. hea (2010) ‘student engagement literature review’. available at: https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/system/files/studentengagementliteraturereview_1.pd f (accessed: 12 september 2018). herr, k. and anderson, g.l. (2005) the action research dissertation: a guide for students and faculty. london: sage. herreid, c. f. and schiller, n. (2013) ‘case studies and the flipped classroom’, journal of college science teaching, 42(5), pp. 62-66. hew, k.f. and cheung, w.s. (2012) student participation in online discussions: challenges, solutions, and future research. new york: springer. heyborne, w.h. and perrett, j.j. (2016) ‘to flip or not to flip? analysis of a flipped classroom pedagogy in a general biology course’, journal of college science teaching, 45(4), pp. 31-37. hine, g.s. (2013) ‘the importance of action research in teacher education programs’, issues in educational research, 23(2), pp. 151-163. https://bmcmededuc.biomedcentral.com/track/pdf/10.1186/1472-6920-14-181 https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/system/files/studentengagementliteraturereview_1.pdf https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/system/files/studentengagementliteraturereview_1.pdf hancock ‘it can’t be found in books’: how a flipped-classroom approach using online videos can engage postgraduate students in dissertation writing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 23 huang, y.n. and hong, z.r. (2016) ‘the effects of a flipped english classroom intervention on students’ information and communication technology and english reading comprehension’, educational technology research and development, 64(2), pp. 175-193. james, a.j., chin, c.k.h. and williams, b.r. (2014) ‘using the flipped classroom to improve student engagement and to prepare graduates to meet maritime industry requirements: a focus on maritime education’, wmu journal of maritime affairs, 13(2), pp. 331-343. james, p. (1998) ‘progressive development of deep learning skills through undergraduate and postgraduate dissertations’, educational studies, 24, pp. 95-105. kember, d. (2000) action learning and action research: improving the quality of teaching and learning. london; sterling, va: kogan page. kemmis, s. (2009) ‘action research as a practice-based practice’, educational action research, 17(3), pp. 463–474. kurt, g. (2017) ‘implementing the flipped classroom in teacher education: evidence from turkey’, journal of educational technology, 20(1), pp. 211-221. lage, m., platt, g. and treglia, m. (2000) ‘inverting the classroom: a gateway to creating an inclusive learning environment’, the journal of economic education, 31(1), pp. 30-43. lavelle, e. (2009) ‘writing through college: self-efficacy and instruction’, pp. 415-22, in: beard, r., myhill, d., nystrand, m. and riley, j. (eds.) the sage handbook of writing development. los angeles, calif; london: sage. lea, m. and street, b. (1998) ‘student writing in higher education: an academic literacies approach’, studies in higher education, 23(2), pp. 157-172. hancock ‘it can’t be found in books’: how a flipped-classroom approach using online videos can engage postgraduate students in dissertation writing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 24 lewin, k. (1946) ‘action research and minority problems’, journal of social issues, 2(4), pp. 34-46. lillis, t. (2006) ‘moving towards an academic literacies pedagogy: dialogues of participation’, pp. 30-45, in: ganobscik-williams, l. (ed.) teaching academic writing in uk higher education: theories, practices and models. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan. markett, c., sánchez, i.a., weber, s. and tangney, b. (2006) ‘using short message service to encourage interactivity in the classroom’, computers and education, 46(3), pp. 280-293. mertens, d. m. (2015) research and evaluation in education and psychology: integrating diversity with quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methods (4th ed.). los angeles: sage. moran, k. and milsom, a. (2015) ‘the flipped classroom in counselor education’, counselor education and supervision, 54(1), pp. 32-43. morton-cooper, a. (2000) action research in health care. malden, ma; oxford: blackwell science. nematollahi, s., st john, p.a. and adamas‐rappaport, w.j. (2015) ‘lessons learned with a flipped classroom’, medical education, 49(11), p. 1143. norton, l. (2009) action research in teaching and learning: a practical guide to conducting pedagogical research in universities. new york; london: routledge. o'flaherty, j. and phillips, c. (2015) ‘the use of flipped classrooms in higher education: a scoping review’, the internet and higher education, 25, pp. 85-95. orr, s. (2005) ‘transparent opacity: assessment in the inclusive academy’, pp. 175-187, in: rust, c. (ed.) improving student learning: diversity and inclusivity. oxford: the oxford centre for staff and learning development. hancock ‘it can’t be found in books’: how a flipped-classroom approach using online videos can engage postgraduate students in dissertation writing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 25 perrett, g. (2003) ‘teacher development through action research: a case study in focused action research’, australian journal of teacher education, 27(2), pp. 1-10. pienta, n.j. (2016) ‘a “flipped classroom” reality check’, journal of chemical education, 93(1), pp. 1. pine, g.j. (2009) teacher action research: building knowledge democracies. los angeles, calif.; london: sage. sahin, a., cavlazoglu, b. and zeytuncu, y.e. (2015) ‘flipping a college calculus course: a case study’, journal of educational technology and society, 18(3), pp. 142-152. schlairet, m.c., green, r. and benton, m.j. (2014) ‘the flipped classroom: strategies for an undergraduate nursing course’, nurse educator, 39(6), pp. 321-325. schmidt, s.m.p. and ralph, d.l. (2016) ‘the flipped classroom: a twist on teaching’, contemporary issues in education research, 9(1), pp. 1-6. schwartz, t.a. (2014) ‘flipping the statistics classroom in nursing education’, the journal of nursing education, 53(4), pp. 199-206. slomanson, w.r. (2014) ‘blended learning: a flipped classroom experiment’, journal of legal education, 64(1), pp. 93-102. smidt, j. (2009), ‘developing discourse roles and positionings – an ecological theory of writing development’, pp. 117-125, in: beard, r., myhill, d., nystrand, m. and riley, j. (eds.) the sage handbook of writing development. los angeles, calif; london: sage. staker, h. and horn, m. b. (2012) ‘classifying k–12 blended learning’. available at: http://www.innosightinstitute.org/innosight/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/classifyingk-12-blended-learning2.pdf (accessed: 31 january 2018). http://www.innosightinstitute.org/innosight/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/classifying-k-12-blended-learning2.pdf http://www.innosightinstitute.org/innosight/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/classifying-k-12-blended-learning2.pdf hancock ‘it can’t be found in books’: how a flipped-classroom approach using online videos can engage postgraduate students in dissertation writing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 26 strayer, j. (2007) the effects of the classroom flip on the learning environment: a comparison of learning activity in a traditional classroom and a flip classroom that used an intelligent tutoring system. unpublished phd thesis. the ohio state university, columbus. teo, t. (2013) handbook of quantitative methods for educational research. rotterdam: sense publishers. vaughan, m. and burnaford, g. (2016) ‘action research in graduate teacher education: a review of the literature 2000-2015’, educational action research, 24(2), pp. 280299. wagner, s. (2016) ‘peer feedback: moving from assessment of learning to assessment for learning’, journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: academic peer learning, part two, april, pp. 1-15. wang, y. and qi, g.y. (2018) ‘mastery-based language learning outside class: learning support in flipped classrooms’, language, learning and technology, 22(2), pp. 5074. wasserman, n.h., quint, c., norris, s.a. and carr, t. (2017) ‘exploring flipped classroom instruction in calculus iii’, international journal of science and mathematics education, 15(3), pp. 545-568. wei, c., and chen, n. (2012) ‘a model for social presence in online classrooms’, educational technology research and development, 60(3), pp. 529-545. xiao, l.d., kelton, m. and paterson, j. (2012) ‘critical action research applied in clinical placement development in aged care facilities’, nursing inquiry, 19(4), pp. 322-333. zainuddin, z. and halili, s.h. (2016) ‘flipped classroom research and trends from different fields of study’, international review of research in open and distance learning, 17(3), pp. 467-84. hancock ‘it can’t be found in books’: how a flipped-classroom approach using online videos can engage postgraduate students in dissertation writing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 27 zuber, w.j. (2016) ‘the flipped classroom, a review of the literature’, industrial and commercial training, 48(2), pp. 97-103. author details jessica clare hancock is a lecturer in educational development at city, university of london. prior to this, she worked as a learning developer at several uk heis, and she is a current member of the learn higher working group. her research interests centre around identity, especially gender identities, in a variety of contexts, including in academic writing. ‘it can’t be found in books’: how a flipped-classroom approach using online videos can engage postgraduate students in dissertation writing abstract introduction flipped classrooms teaching academic writing flipping the writing classroom methodology teaching data analysis findings a. how can a flipped-classroom approach be used to support students in developing their dissertation writing abilities? b. how can online videos be used to engage students in their dissertation writing process? conclusion recommendations references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 19: december 2020 ________________________________________________________________________ power and paragraphs: academic writing and emotion emily forster de montfort university abstract emotions play an important role in academic writing (cameron, nairn and higgins, 2009), and, as learning developers, we often support students with the emotional aspects of their work. the process of writing is strongly linked to identity. research into academic literacies has highlighted the fact that this often involves complex negotiations, especially for students from widening participation backgrounds (lea and street, 1998). students’ past experiences of learning strongly shape their identity as learners. for example, the early challenges with literacy faced by people with dyslexia often continue to affect their emotions in adulthood (pollak, 2005; alexander-passe, 2015). the concept of learning identities (bloomer and hodkinson, 2000; christie et al., 2007) helps us to understand students’ emotional responses in the wider context of their lives. this paper uses two case histories of students with dyslexia, who were also the first in their family to go to university, to explore the role of academic writing in shaping a student’s learning identity. it argues that learning developers are in a good position to help students develop a positive sense of themselves as academic writers. keywords: emotion; academic writing; learning identity. introduction this paper argues that supporting students with the emotional aspects of academic writing is a core element of the learning developer’s work. it draws on the concept of learning identities (bloomer and hodkinson, 2000) to provide a theoretical basis for discussing this aspect of our work and uses two students’ ‘case histories’ to illustrate this argument. in my role as a lecturer in learning development, i am often asked by colleagues across the university to support their students with the technical aspects of writing. however, many of forster power and paragraphs: academic writing and emotion journal of learning development in higher education, issue 19: december 2020 2 the students who i see have come for support with what could be termed the emotional aspect of writing: for example, students who procrastinate and have difficulty finishing their assignments, or students who rewrite one paragraph over and over again to get it right. students often come to us at challenging moments in their academic life, such as when going through an assessment for specific learning differences or after they have failed an assignment. clughen and connell note that writing support has much in common with counselling, ‘with issues of self-esteem, rejection, and alienation being [the] everyday stuff’ of writing support encounters (2015, p.46). due to the relationships we have with students, we are well placed to provide them with emotional support, especially when it comes to orientating themselves to life at university (dhillon, 2018). learning development emerged as a response to the massification of higher education (hilsdon, 2011; briggs, 2018). although students from a more diverse range of backgrounds have entered university in recent years, universities have not adapted as much as they could do to include these students (hilsdon, 2018). students who came from ‘non-traditional’ or ‘widening participation’ backgrounds, such as students who were the first in their family to go to university, or dyslexic students were seen by universities and policy makers as lacking in basic skills. skills departments were set up in universities and those who worked there challenged the notion that a lack of student skill was the problem. instead some were critical of the universities’ failure to adapt to meet the needs of their students (haggis, 2006; hilsdon, 2018). hilsdon argues that a central tenet of learning development upholds ‘opposition to a “deficit” model. rather than seeing students and their needs as problematic, ld identifies aspects of learning environments which are inadequate or alienating’ (2011, p.17). in exploring the emotional aspects of academic writing, my aim is not to adopt a deficit model, which sees any emotional response to academic writing as being due to the limitations of the student, but to address the structural barriers that make academic writing such an emotive issue. the field of academic literacies (lea and street, 1998) looked at how writing is linked with student identity and highlighted the fact that it involves complex negotiations. this is particularly true for students from widening participation backgrounds. one of the strengths of this framework is that it focuses on the power dynamics at play in the production and assessment of academic writing and challenged a deficit model which positioned students as lacking basic skills (wingate, 2019). the power dynamics inherent in academic life affect how people see themselves as belonging or not belonging to the university (burke, forster power and paragraphs: academic writing and emotion journal of learning development in higher education, issue 19: december 2020 3 2017; danvers, hinton-smith and webb, 2019). sara ahmed argues that emotions show us how power affects our bodies and help us to understand the difference between ourselves and others (2014). as academic writing is central to the experience of being at university, it can shape our identity and how we see ourselves as being a student (ivanic, 1998). it should not be surprising then, that academic writing should prove to be so emotionally charged. writing and emotion sara maitland states that writers face three types of challenges, ‘emotional challenges, practical challenges and technical challenges’, and that all three are interlinked (2005). while she is discussing creative writing, this is also relevant to academic writing and our role as learning developers. however, there has been relatively little research carried out into the role emotion plays in the writing process. the major study is by brand who studied the emotions of 191 writers (including students and professional writers) during the writing process (1990). during writing, positive emotions such as happiness or excitement rose and ‘negative passive’ emotions such as boredom and confusion decreased. ‘negative active’ emotions such as anxiety and frustration increased when actually writing but dropped off at the end of the session. relief and satisfaction peaked after a writing session. however, less skilled writers were more easily satisfied with their work than writers who were classed as more skilled, which showed that while relief may be a positive emotion it does not always have a positive impact on the quality of writing as dissatisfaction can spur writers on to improve their work. brand asked the student writers to rate their skill level and also asked a teacher to rate them. interestingly, what writers thought about how skilled they were at writing was more accurate in predicting what their emotional response would be than a teacher’s rating of their skill. this shows that the relationship between confidence and writing is complicated and nuanced and there is not a one size fits all approach. negative emotions do not always inhibit learning and ‘productive discomfort’ is an important aspect of student engagement (james and brookfield, 2014, p.7). janke, wilby and zavod recommend developing self-awareness of writing related emotions and using self-talk as a way to manage the writing process (2020). as learning developers, we are well placed to have conversations with students about their ways of working. forster power and paragraphs: academic writing and emotion journal of learning development in higher education, issue 19: december 2020 4 another challenge students face is that the recursive nature of writing is often hidden which can lead student writers to judge their first draft by the standards of other writers’ final products. cameron, narin and higgins found that graduate students and early career researchers in writing groups benefited from the opportunity to share their feelings about the writing process and to realise that others felt the same way (2009). while they found it challenging to share early drafts with other students it helped them to see that other peoples’ early drafts were similar to theirs. part of our roles as learning developers is to make the invisible aspects of study visible to students. in addition to this, as rai highlights, ‘the content of academic writing is not emotionally neutral and any theory or knowledge can potentially connect with the student writer's own experience’ (2012, p.281). having a personal connection to your writing can make it frustrating that the limitations of academic writing mean that you cannot always say all you want to say on the topic. this is highlighted particularly strongly in lillis’s 2003 research where she found that students often engaged critically with the topics they wrote about but felt constrained by having to respond to a set question rather than writing what they wanted to say. one of her participants, mary, felt that it was important to include a positive portrayal of the black community in her assignment which she felt was lacking in the course content. when marking her assignment, the lecturer stated that this section of the assignment was ‘not really relevant’. such emotional connections to the subject are often unacknowledged. a defining characteristic of academic writing is that it demonstrates critical thinking. brand highlighted that emotion is not meant to play a part in critical thinking as the higher-level critical thinker is portrayed as emotionally detached (1987). this idea has possibly contributed to the stereotypes that exist around who is a critical thinker. danvers observes that critical thinkers are seen as being older, privileged, white, and male (2016). she challenges the convention that critical thinkers should be emotionally detached from the topics they study and argues that this emotional connection can form the heart of critical thinking. academics are often drawn to write about issues that have a personal resonance to them (sword, 2017). in our service there is a high level of demand from both students and staff to teach critical thinking. this is also a topic that is much discussed on the aldinhe jiscmail. i often find that students are thinking critically about their subject but are not sure if they are allowed to express this in their writing. the writing tutorial can offer a space forster power and paragraphs: academic writing and emotion journal of learning development in higher education, issue 19: december 2020 5 where students are able to negotiate what they want to say and understand how to be critical in the terms expected from the assignment – what lillis describes as ‘talk back’ (2003). as academic writing is usually produced as a form of assessment there is the implication of being judged. with assessment comes the risk of failure but even for students who pass the assignment the process of engaging with feedback can produce strong emotional reactions (han and hyland, 2019). a failure to write ‘academically’ could mark a student out as not belonging in the university and failing their course could cause them to be excluded from the university: thus, there is a strong power dynamic in academic writing. writing and identity the theory of learning identities can be useful for learning developers to understand writing and emotion and how this links to power and identity. writing is central to the experience of being part of the university and as such forms a core part of our identity as students or academics (lea and street, 1998; sword, 2017). the concept of learning identities (bloomer and hodkinson, 2000; christie et al., 2007) is valuable in that it helps us understand students' emotional responses to writing in the wider context of their lives. while all students have dispositions that influence their sense of themselves as learners, learning identities are situational and influenced by social and cultural contexts. learning is a social practice that is 'tightly bound up with matters of identity or situation and cannot be extracted from them' (bloomer and hodkinson, 2000, p.595). this relates strongly to the challenges students may experience involving academic writing and emotion. if the support that we give students is to be effective it needs to take their identity and situation into account. most discussions of learning identity draw on pierre bourdieu’s concept of ‘habitus’ which refers to a ‘way of being’ that is unconsciously acquired through socialisation; how individual's dispositions such as vocabulary, interests, and way of speaking affect how they interact with the social world (1990). students bring with them a particular life history with past experiences of learning that is both individual to them and shaped by social structure. hodkinson and bloomer's longitudinal qualitative research with sixth form college students found that learning identities were not static (at the time the research was forster power and paragraphs: academic writing and emotion journal of learning development in higher education, issue 19: december 2020 6 carried out, the idea that students had fixed ‘learning styles’ was popular), but highly malleable (2001). they developed the concept of a learning career to describe the process of how this develops over time. learning careers encompass both the personal and the social by locating the uniqueness of an individual's journey in a broader social context. individual teachers can be very influential in a student's learning career and research has shown that students can change their learning disposition as a result of a positive student/tutor relationship (tet, 2016). the idea that students can change how they see themselves as learners speaks to a core motivation for learning developers. academic writing is a key site where students develop their learning identity. this can be seen from the two case histories i outline below. rai argues that being able to have an open discussion around students’ writing anxieties is important for all students but that not acknowledging ‘identity-based barriers could seriously disadvantage particular students who had previous unhelpful educational experiences’ (2012, p.282). for this reason, while the concept of ‘learning identity’ is relevant to all students, this paper will focus on two case histories of students who have dyslexia. the two case histories are taken from my phd research, which was a bigger longitudinal study of transitions for young people who were considered by their school to have special educational needs (forster, 2013). this followed 14 young people, aged 15/16 or 18/20 at the time of the first interview, who attended one rural mainstream secondary school. life history interviews with both the young people and their parents were carried out 18 months apart. the interview covered their experiences of school, aspirations for the future, and any support they had received. both india and fraser* were 18 at the time of the first interview and later went on to university. they were also the first generation of their families to go to university (india was the first in her family; one of fraser’s elder sisters was studying nursing). the challenges faced by students who are the first in the family to go to university are widely recognised in research. reay argues that while working class students are going to university in increasing numbers, they still face many barriers compared to middle class students (2018). they are more likely to attend less prestigious universities with higher ratios of students to staff and to accumulate more debt. they also face more subtle forms of exclusion within the system. it is those with a superior advantage of economic, cultural, and social capitals who are best placed to play 'the academic game'. as a result of this, studying carriers a high emotional cost. reay highlights that working class students are forster power and paragraphs: academic writing and emotion journal of learning development in higher education, issue 19: december 2020 7 more likely to drop out due to a combination of educational, economic, and social factors: ‘educational exclusion is often internalised as a failure of the self rather than a failure of the system' (2018, p.531). for students who drop out of university for academic reasons challenges involving academic writing often feature. fraser was diagnosed with dyslexia when he was 11 and said that the only thing he had liked about school was breaktime as he loved playing football. after doing better than he expected at gcse, he stayed on to his school sixth form where he studied for a levels. he chose his favourite subject pe, despite being discouraged by his teacher who thought fraser would do better with a less theoretical, more vocational subject. fraser dropped as level biology, as he was not keeping up with the work, but got a c in pe which he was pleased with and the teacher who had told him not to study it came up to him to say well done. he worked at a sport centre after leaving school and applied to university to study for an hnd in sports management. he had hoped for a practical course but there was significantly more writing and theory involved than he anticipated, and he quickly became overwhelmed. although he was aware that he could have accessed writing support, he ‘didn’t see how it could help’ him as he thought he would never be able to do the work. fraser had a long history of struggling with reading and writing and he felt that this was something about himself that would not change. this was despite the fact that he had achieved more than he had expected to achieve at both gcse and as level. at the time of his last interview he was looking for more vocational ways to achieve his goal of being an outdoor activities instructor as he did not think he would pass his first year. fraser’s mother reflected that maybe he wasn’t ‘the sort of person who should go to university’ while fraser was looking for something that was ‘more me’. there is a risk that learning identities can act as self-fulfilling prophecies, especially for people whose prior experiences of study have been very negative (tet, 2016). this experience of internalising educational exclusion as a personal failure is common in students who have dyslexia and other specific learning differences. there is a lack of recognition of dyslexia in school; as a result of this children often experience marginalisation and exclusion, are often labelled as low ability, and end up in the bottom sets with low expectations (riddick, 2009; alexander-passe, 2015). a participant in alexander-pass's research said: 'i was too academic for all the practical stuff i was being forster power and paragraphs: academic writing and emotion journal of learning development in higher education, issue 19: december 2020 8 made to do in the lower sets, but i felt i was a visitor to the top sets of the subjects i was good at' (p.74). this experience of low expectations at school has an impact on dyslexic students' confidence in applying to university and as a result they are under-represented in the university system (madriaga, 2007). many of those who do arrive at university have not been formally diagnosed with dyslexia and as a result have never received appropriate support (pollak, 2005; mandriaga, 2007). dyslexic university students often bring with them an emotional legacy from their experiences of school (pollak, 2005; forster, 2013), and once there 'the entire experience of being a higher education student, involves for someone who accepts the dyslexic label, continuous confrontation with experiences which challenge selfconcept and self-esteem, not least academic writing’ (pollak, 2005, p.28). however, it is possible for students to change the perceptions they have of themselves as learners. india, a student with dyslexia from my own research (forster, 2013), was 17 at the time of our first interview and studying for a btec in fine art. in her first interview she was very self-critical and compared herself negatively to her higher attaining friends: ‘there was this one project we had, it was on macbeth and i spent hours doing it. it was really hard, and my friend sam did it on the bus on the way to school and she got a better mark than me and you just think what’s the point?’ she described having difficulties with writing and spelling at school and felt she had done really badly at gcse (she had achieved six gcses at grades a*-c) as she could not do exams. prior to starting her course she had not considered going to university as she ‘didn’t think she was clever enough’ but had applied to university to study graphic design after achieving good marks on her diploma: ‘i went from being the one that struggled to being one of the best in the class’. despite her improved confidence she worried about not being as good as the students who had done a levels. at the time of her second interview she was coming towards the end of the first year of her graphic design course and sounded surprised to be ‘doing really well’. she was receiving support from the university’s dyslexia service and had more understanding of what it meant to have dyslexia, realising that her organisational difficulties were something that she could get help with and improve. despite studying artand designbased courses in both further and higher education (subjects she had always been good at), india’s conception of someone who was clever and who belonged at university was based on being good at writing. due to the challenges she faced with writing she did not consider herself to be clever, which caused her to doubt herself even when she was doing well. however, by the time of her second interview she forster power and paragraphs: academic writing and emotion journal of learning development in higher education, issue 19: december 2020 9 was starting to realise that she could still do as well as other students, even in written tasks, despite having dyslexia. what is interesting about both case histories is that despite the fact that india and fraser were studying courses that were more practice-based, academic writing was central to their learning identities and their ideas about ‘the sort of person’ who should be at university. this is a reflection of how central writing is to dominant discourses about learning and who is a successful learner. these discourses shape students’ learning identities: whether someone sees themselves as a low or a high achiever or someone who has ‘special educational needs’ has a link to their writing history. however, in higher education, students will have some positive experiences to draw upon even though, as in fraser’s case, they may not always be able to recognise this. sometimes their experience of success can come from outside the area of academic writing. from india’s case history in particular, we get a sense of how she drew on her strengths as an artist in order to develop in other areas of learning. therefore, how students see themselves as learners and how they see the role of writing (as something to be feared or something that is part, but not the decisive part, of being a student) is important. these issues of identity, writing, and emotion are areas where learning developers can support students. the one-to-one tutorial format provides students with a confidential space to bring up their anxieties. as part of my role i offer longer tutorials for students who are going through assessments for specific learning differences. these can be very emotional as students share their previous educational experiences. while many students have developed good coping strategies they have, after all, successfully entered university under the same entrance criteria as their neurotypical peers they often lack confidence in their writing ability and some even fear that their coping strategies mean that they are doing it wrong. in these situations, i often share my own experiences of having a learning difference, the things i struggle with about writing, and share some of the strategies that i use. sharing experiences can help break down the power dynamic between student and lecturer and give students more confidence in their own ways of working. when students bring up their past experiences of study in tutorials it is often because they are trying to make sense of themselves as learners or constructing their learning identity. tet (2016) stresses the importance of working through negative past forster power and paragraphs: academic writing and emotion journal of learning development in higher education, issue 19: december 2020 10 learning experiences in order to construct a more positive sense of themselves as learners. as learning developers, we are well placed to do this. conclusion research shows that experiencing a range of emotions is a normal part of the writing process. this does not need to be a negative thing and some level of ‘productive discomfort’ is to be expected. making students aware of this and helping them understand the recursive nature of writing can help students manage the emotional aspects of writing, as can helping them to develop self-awareness around their own feelings and approaches to writing. there are particular emotional challenges involved in academic writing due to the power dynamics at play and its link to identity and how someone sees themself as a student and as belonging in the university. the concept of learning identities (hodkinson and bloomer, 2001) helps us to understand that how students see themselves as learners is situated in the wider context of their lives. in order to tackle the emotional challenges associated with academic writing, students need to understand how they developed. this is particularly important for those students who have had more negative earlier educational experiences (a group who we, as learning developers, see regularly in our service). an important aspect of learning identities is that they are fluid and can change with the context of students’ lives. this can give students space for growth whilst at the same time acknowledging the challenges they face. by focusing on the emotions related to academic writing we can help students to develop both new ways of working and more positive learning identities. *pseudonyms are used. references ahmed, s. (2014) the cultural politics of emotion. 2nd ed. edinburgh: edinburgh university press. forster power and paragraphs: academic writing and emotion journal of learning development in higher education, issue 19: december 2020 11 alexander-passe, n. (2015) dyslexia and mental health: helping people identify destructive behaviours and find positive ways to cope. london: jessica kingsley. bloomer, m. and hodkinson, p. (2000) ‘learning careers: continuity and change in young people's dispositions to learning’, british educational research journal, 26(5), pp.583-597. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/01411920020007805. bourdieu, p. (1990) in other words: essays towards a reflexive sociology. cambridge: polity press. brand, a. (1990) ‘writing and feelings: checking our vital signs’, rhetoric review, 8(2), pp.290-308. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/07350199009388901. briggs, s. (2018) ‘development of the aldinhe recognition scheme: certifying the ‘learning developer’ title’, journal of learning development in higher education, issue 13, may, pp.1-13. burke, p. (2017) ‘difference in higher education pedagogies: gender, emotion and shame’, gender and education, 29(4), pp.430-444. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/09540253.2017.1308471. cameron, j., narin, k. and higgins, j. (2009) ‘demystifying academic writing: reflections on emotions, know-how and academic identity’, journal of geography in higher education, 33(2), pp.269-284. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/03098260902734943. christie, h., tet, l., cree, v., houndsell, j. and mccun, v. (2007) ‘a real rollercoaster of confidence and emotions: learning to be a university student’. online papers archived by the institute of geography, school of geosciences, university of edinburgh. available at: https://era.ed.ac.uk/bitstream/handle/1842/1891/hchristie002.pdf?sequence=1 (accessed: 1 november 2019). https://doi.org/10.1080/01411920020007805 https://doi.org/10.1080/07350199009388901 https://doi.org/10.1080/09540253.2017.1308471 forster power and paragraphs: academic writing and emotion journal of learning development in higher education, issue 19: december 2020 12 clughen, l. and connell, m. (2015) ‘working with power: a dialogue about writing support using insights from psychotherapy’, in lillis, t., harrington, k., lea, m. and mitchell, s. (eds.) working with academic literacies: research, theory, design. fort collins, colorado: wac clearinghouse, pp.45-53. danvers, e. (2016) ‘criticality’s affective entanglements: rethinking emotion and critical thinking in higher education’, gender and education, 28(2), pp.282-297. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/09540253.2015.1115469. danvers, e., hinton-smith, t. and webb, r. (2019) ‘power, pedagogy and the personal: feminist ethics in facilitating a doctoral writing group’, teaching in higher education, 24(1), pp. 32-46. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2018.1456423. dhillon, s. (2018) ‘whose wellbeing is it anyway?’, journal of learning development in higher education, special issue, october, pp.1-16. forster, e (2013) young people with special educational needs experiences of school and the transition to adulthood. unpublished phd thesis, university of york. haggis, tamsin (2006) ‘pedagogies for diversity: retaining critical challenge amidst fears of “dumbing down”’, studies in higher education, 31(5), pp. 521–535. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/03075070600922709. han, y. and hyland, f. (2019) ‘academic emotions in written corrective feedback situations’, journal of english for academic purposes, 38(1), pp.1-13. available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jeap.2018.12.003. hilsdon, j. (2011) ‘what is learning development?’, in hartley, p., hilsdon, j. and keenan, c. (eds.) learning development in higher education. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan, pp.13-27. hilsdon, j. (2018) the significance of the field of practice ‘learning development’ in uk higher education. unpublished phd thesis, university of plymouth. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/09540253.2015.1115469 https://doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2018.1456423 forster power and paragraphs: academic writing and emotion journal of learning development in higher education, issue 19: december 2020 13 https://pearl.plymouth.ac.uk/bitstream/handle/10026.1/10604/2018hilsdon10029559 edd.pdf?sequence=1&isallowed=y (accessed: 25 november 2020). hodkinson, p. and bloomer, m. (2001) ‘dropping out of further education: complex causes and simplistic policy assumptions’, research papers in education, 16(2), pp.117140. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/02671520110037401. ivanic, r. (1998) writing and identity. amsterdam: john benjamin’s publishing company. janke, k., wilby, k., j. and zavod, r. (2020) ‘academic writing as a journey through “chutes and ladders”: how well are you managing your emotions?’, currents in pharmacy teaching and learning, 12(2), pp.103-111. available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cptl.2019.11.001. lea, m. and street, r. (1998) ‘student writing in higher education: an academic literacies approach’ studies in higher education, 23(2), pp.157-172. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079812331380364. lillis, t. (2003) ‘student writing as “academic literacies”: drawing on bakhtin to move from critique to design’, language and education, 17(3), pp.192-207. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/09500780308666848. madriaga, manuel (2007) ‘enduring disablism: students with dyslexia and their pathways into uk higher education and beyond’, disability & society, 22(4), pp.399-412. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/09687590701337942. . maitland, s. (2005) the writer’s way: realise your creative potential and become a successful author. london: arcturus publishing. pollak, d. (2005) dyslexia, the self and higher education: learning life histories of students identified as dyslexic. london: trentham books. rai, lucy (2012) ‘responding to emotion in practice-based writing’, higher education, 64(2), pp.267-284. available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-011-9492-1. https://pearl.plymouth.ac.uk/bitstream/handle/10026.1/10604/2018hilsdon10029559edd.pdf?sequence=1&isallowed=y https://pearl.plymouth.ac.uk/bitstream/handle/10026.1/10604/2018hilsdon10029559edd.pdf?sequence=1&isallowed=y https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cptl.2019.11.001 https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079812331380364 https://doi.org/10.1080/09500780308666848 https://doi.org/10.1080/09687590701337942 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-011-9492-1 forster power and paragraphs: academic writing and emotion journal of learning development in higher education, issue 19: december 2020 14 reay, d. (2018) ‘working class educational transitions to university: the limits of success’ eur j educ., 53, pp.528-540. available at: https://doi.org/10.1111/ejed.12298. riddick, b. (2009) living with dyslexia: the social and emotional consequences of specific learning difficulties/disabilities. routledge, abingdon. sword, h. (2017) air, time, light, and space: how successful academics write. boston: harvard university press. tet, l. (2016) ‘learning, literacy and identity: “i don’t think i’m a failure anymore”’, british journal of sociology of education, 37(3), pp.427-444. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/01425692.2014.939265. wingate, u. (2019) ‘achieving transformation through collaboration: the role of academic literacies’, journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15, november, pp.1-9. author details emily forster is a senior lecturer in learning development at de montfort university. https://doi.org/10.1111/ejed.12298 https://doi.org/10.1080/01425692.2014.939265 power and paragraphs: academic writing and emotion abstract introduction writing and emotion writing and identity conclusion references author details tf_template_word_windows_2016 journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 17: may 2020 ________________________________________________________________________ the impact of learning development tutorials on student attainment alison loddick university of northampton kate coulson university of northampton abstract university learning development teams provide expert advice to learners regarding the development and enhancement of academic skills such as essay writing, dissertations, critical analysis, mathematics, and statistics. the majority of universities have set up learning development or similar academic support services in recent years. however, little research has been conducted to understand the effect of such help on student attainment. at the university of northampton, this service is perceived as pivotal in supporting students through their studies. the impact on student grades and future attainment was examined using three and a half years of student assessment data (over 16,000 students and 175,000 assessments) which was connected to information gathered from the learning development one-to-one tutorials database. although causality cannot be claimed, there was an average rise of one to two sub grades for learners who attended at least one learning development tutorial compared to those who did not use this assistance. furthermore, historical tutorials positively affected grades of students with an additional two percent increase in their future assignments. students from the faculties of business and law and education and humanities saw the largest increase in attainment compared to students within their faculties who did not have tutorials. furthermore, students from a black ethnic background and aged 25 years or below also gained the most in terms of attainment compared to other ethnic groups and more mature students. keywords: learning development; tutorial; attainment; users; academic skills. loddick and coulson the impact of learning development tutorials on student attainment journal of learning development in higher education, issue 17: may 2020 2 background the uk provision for learning development commenced and expanded as a consequence of the development of higher education and the widening student participation agenda of the 1990s. tony blair announced in 1999 the government’s target to boost the proportion of ‘young adults’ attending higher education to 50 percent (blair, 1999). as a result of this, the student profile diversified and now has a wider variety of cultural and social backgrounds (universities uk, 2017). universities adapted to these changes and focussed further on student learning, developing new roles within the universities to advise students (hilsdon, 2011). today, the majority of higher education institutions have academic support services such as learning development for their students. eighty-eight out of 103 universities surveyed by sigma in 2012 stated that they offered additional learning support in mathematics (perkin, lawson, and croft, 2012). although this survey did not ask about all study skills, mathematics does fall under this remit. the learning development team at the university of northampton has supported students’ academic skills (including mathematics and statistics) since 1991. as of october 2017, there were 9,004 undergraduate students, studying 204 programmes. it currently has seven and a half full-time equivalent staff supporting students’ academic skills through workshops, one-to-one tutorials and a drop-in service. the qaa in 2009 described the work of the university of northampton’s learning development team as exemplary practice, that was valued by students and represented an innovative approach to student support that was readily accessible for student learning (qaa, 2009). nevertheless, the team continuously needs to demonstrate it provides ‘value for money’. this research attempts to demonstrate how the learning development team at the university of northampton provide ‘value for money’ through supporting and improving students’ academic skills by examining how their tutorial system relates to student attainment. previous research loddick and coulson the impact of learning development tutorials on student attainment journal of learning development in higher education, issue 17: may 2020 3 research on learning development users and the impact of learning development tutorials on student attainment is limited. most studies confirm a positive impact of tutorials on student attainment (macgillivray, 2009; manalo et al., 2009; choudhary and malthus, 2017). there is some research looking at the impact of transition courses that teach academic skills over several weeks prior to a student commencing university. although transition courses are not the same as one-to-one tutorials, they do demonstrate the impact of developing students’ academic skills. these courses also show increases in student attainment (murphy et al., 2010; strayhorn, 2011; wibrowski et al., 2017). buchanan (2015) examined users of learning development to support future service development. the research found that students using the service were more likely to be female and of black or minority ethnic background (bme) compared to the university student profile. the users were also from a wide range of academic abilities with average percentage marks from 37.67 up to 71.63. however, the research only looked at the users of their service and not the intervention impact on student attainment. buchanan’s research also failed to differentiate different types of service users, assuming students were the same whether they received a tutorial, drop-in appointment or workshop and included all students whether undergraduate or postgraduate. research by manalo et al. (2009) and macgillivray (2009) discovered a positive effect on student achievement from tutorials. manalo, marshall, and fraser examined the impact of one-to-one assignment writing assistance in a nursing degree. the course lecturers encouraged students to seek support from their learning development service. of those students who received assistance, 97% passed both courses, while the pass rate was 48% for those students who did not receive assistance. the study pointed out that other factors could have affected attainment, and that the tutorials were voluntary and therefore students chose to engage in the process but concluded that their findings suggested that the service had a significant impact on results. however, this study was based on a small number of students thirty-seven students receiving assistance compared to twenty-one students not receiving assistance and only included students from one course at the university. macgillivray’s ( 2009) findings were less conclusive. her research examined the impact of mathematics and statistics tutorials on students commencing the first-year mathematics and statistics courses on mathematics degree programs at the queensland university of technology between 2003 and 2007. the results showed that mean loddick and coulson the impact of learning development tutorials on student attainment journal of learning development in higher education, issue 17: may 2020 4 attainment increased in all courses where students had at least one tutorial. however, the 95% confidence intervals overlapped in most courses, showing less confidence in the findings. the research also looked at engineering students who had a significant increase in grade point average with tutorials compared to those that did not. in addition, choundhary and malthus (2017) explored the effect of mathematics tutorials over a 10-week period with first year students studying for a undergraduate degree in nursing. the students attended at least five 1-hour tutorials, either in small groups or on a one-to-one basis. the students completed numeracy tests before and after the 10-week period. before the intervention, the numeracy results varied between 13.3% and 100%. after the intervention, they increased to between 60% and 100%. the results increased in 16 out of the 27 students and the other 11 had over 86 per cent correct in the first numeracy test suggesting less room for improvement. this paper concluded that tutorials had an impact on attainment, however, the sample size was small (n=27) and they only looked at numeracy skills and not at all academic skills. furthermore, students received at least five tutorials of support and the research did not examine the effect of fewer tutorials. in terms of finding improvement in attainment for students following academic studies support, there is research demonstrating improvement in academic results and retention from specific interventions such as bridging or transition courses ( murphy et al., 2010; strayhorn, 2011; wibrowski et al., 2017). wibrowski et al. (2017) found that students from disadvantaged backgrounds who enrolled on a programme to develop their academic skills at the start of their first year at university improved their assessment grades to either similar or higher levels than first year students that did not enrol onto the programme. strayhorn (2011) found that summer bridging programmes positively affected academic skills and academic self-efficacy, and that the students’ positive beliefs about academic ability predicted 30% of the variance in first-semester grades in college. although both wibroski’s and strayhorn’s studies were based on small samples (176 and 55 students respectively), they provide evidence that additional academic support impacts student attainment. however, both programmes included several intensive weeks of an academic programme in the summer before students started university and do not examine the impact of one-to-one tutorials. loddick and coulson the impact of learning development tutorials on student attainment journal of learning development in higher education, issue 17: may 2020 5 the literature, in the main, showed that supporting students’ academic skills can improve student attainment, although all the studies were based on small sample sizes. methods this research explores the impact of one-to-one learning development tutorials upon attainment. tutorials were chosen as they provided the longest period of one-to-one support on specific student needs. the tutorials were 25-minute one-to-one sessions (or 55 minutes for mathematics and statistics) where students asked for academic support during their studies. the tutorial sessions could be face-to-face, online or via the telephone. the students mainly had tutorials with learning development to support essay and dissertation writing, and to support their quantitative maths and statistics studies (see table 1). students may have also attended learning development in drop-ins and workshops, although the interaction between delivery methods is excluded from this analysis. the choice of using tutorials only was made as it was felt through experience that this would have the largest impact on attainment and that 10-minute drop-ins would not have the time to majorly impact attainment. utilising workshop attendance data would have been excessively time consuming. table 1. learning development tutorial topics for undergraduate and postgraduate studies at the university of northampton between 1st september 2016 and 31st august 2017. tutorial topic count percentage essays and assignments 1206 42.4 dissertations 478 16.8 maths/stats/spss 226 8.0 academic writing 204 7.2 literature review 151 5.3 critical analysis 125 4.4 referencing 106 3.7 presentations 68 2.4 loddick and coulson the impact of learning development tutorials on student attainment journal of learning development in higher education, issue 17: may 2020 6 reports 67 2.4 planning/time management 40 1.4 no topic 51 2 other 119 4.2 total 2841 100.0 the methodology utilised within this project was originally set out by macgillvery (2009) who stated that a two-pronged approach was the most effective way to evaluate the value and effectiveness of learning support, taking into account both usage by students and their subsequent performance. as learning development support programmes are optional for students, measuring usage gives a measure of demand for the services and provides evidence that students and staff value the service (macgillivray and croft, 2011). by measuring student subsequent attainment, the research is measuring performance. to understand the relationship of learning development tutorials with student attainment, three and a half years of campus taught undergraduate student profile and assessment data (excluding exams) was taken from the university records system (january 2014 to september 2017) and linked to a database of learning development tutorial information by student identification number. this meant 177,229 student assessments were included relating to 16,194 students. examination assessments were excluded from the research, as, although learning development can help students with revision skills, they are not directly involved with the revision of topics examined. campus-taught students include students attending campus and distance learning students who receive their teaching from staff based at the campus, for example, via blackboard collaborate. the learning development appointment database collected information in relation to student id, date of appointment and topic. unfortunately, it did not collect information on the specific assessments that the student required support for. in order to be able to link appointments with assessments, student tutorials within 30 days prior to the assessment deadline were classified as using learning development to support that assessment. 1,501 (9.3 per cent) students had learning development tutorials within 30 days of an assessment deadline and this related to 3,682 assessments (2.1 per cent of assessments). this is problematic as some students work on assignments long before the loddick and coulson the impact of learning development tutorials on student attainment journal of learning development in higher education, issue 17: may 2020 7 30-day window or students may be assessed on more than one assignment within the 30 day time-frame. however, on average, full-time undergraduate students have 11.4 assessments within a university year so expanding this period further would have been problematic in determining which assignment was being supported. in addition, students with more than one assignment within the 30-day period could gain support for all of them. all tutorial appointment data back to 2008 was included in the research, as students in january 2014 could be second, third or fourth year students that may have had tutorials with learning development in previous years or on previous courses. for example, some nursing students undertake several stand-alone modules over many years. undergraduate tutorials were chosen for analysis in this research, as it was hypothesised that different groups of students and working practices would give differing results. undergraduates were chosen as they formed most of the student body, and the one-toone support would target specific issues they had. this allowed the research to focus on understanding the impact of tutorials on undergraduate attainment and not to be influenced by different teaching approaches and groups with differing needs. different support practices and student groups will be examined in future research. student assessment attainment was recorded in the database as grades. in order to examine the impact on attainment, these grades were converted to numerical values based on baseline value on the university undergraduate grading scales as seen in table 2 (the university of northampton, 2015). one sub-grade change equates to approximately 3 to 4 per cent. these numerical grades were then used to compare the assessment grades of students that had tutorials with learning development and those that did not. the research did not look at final degree grades, as some students were in their first or second years of study as well as the end of the study period. table 2. baseline percentage grade and letter grade for undergraduate degrees at the university of northampton. loddick and coulson the impact of learning development tutorials on student attainment journal of learning development in higher education, issue 17: may 2020 8 the research examined the impact of tutorials on attainment by comparing students who had tutorials with those who did not. there are known difficulties in this approach to measuring the effectiveness of learning development support to students (manalo et al., 2009; macgillivray, 2009; wilkins, 2015; choudhary and malthus, 2017). firstly, students self-select to use the service, which may indicate a higher level of engagement with their studies. secondly, tutorials are often running parallel to subject course teaching, making it difficult to understand the impact of additional support only. the research cannot assume causality between the attainment of students that do or do not attend tutorials with learning development. to assume causality there would need to be a comparison between a matched group of students that received tutorials and those that did not. in addition, students would have to attend tutorials rather than it being voluntary. this would raise ethical questions, as it would mean some students would not receive support when they might wish to. there are also likely to have been other confounding factors impacting student attainment other than just learning development tutorials. while this research cannot confirm that attending tutorials was the only reason for any increases in attainment, it is important that this was measured as it compares a population of students who use the service with those who do not, and looks for differences. loddick and coulson the impact of learning development tutorials on student attainment journal of learning development in higher education, issue 17: may 2020 9 to provide confidence in the findings, statistical inference testing was used. chi-squared tests were conducted to examine if there was any relationship between the demographic profile of students and having learning development tutorials. when testing differences in attainment grades within demographic characteristics, such as faculty or ethnicity, analysis of variance (anova) was used to determine whether there was a difference between groups of students. results student profile table 3 shows the student profiles of those who attended the university compared with those who attended at least one learning development tutorial within 30 days of an assessment deadline. the profile showed that a greater proportion of students attending tutorials were female, or from a black ethnic background or were mature students when compared to the rest of the university profile (𝜒2(1, 𝑁 = 16192) = 180.4, 𝑝 < 0.01), (𝜒2(4, 𝑁 = 16192) = 75.0, 𝑝 < 0.01)), (𝜒2(4, 𝑁 = 16192) = 44.8, 𝑝 < 0.01). these results are similar to those found by buchanan (2015). table 3. student demographic profile of the university and for those attending learning development tutorials. demographic profile groups all university students learning development tutorial student profile count percentage count percentage gender female 10452 64.54 1206 80.35 male 5740 35.45 295 19.65 other 2 0.01 0 0.00 total 16194 100.0 1501 100.0 ethnicity white 9174 56.65 708 47.17 loddick and coulson the impact of learning development tutorials on student attainment journal of learning development in higher education, issue 17: may 2020 10 mixed 392 2.42 30 2.00 asian 2417 14.93 256 17.06 black 3187 19.68 400 26.65 other/not known/refused 1024 6.32 107 7.13 total 16194 100.0 1501 100.0 age at enrolment 20 years or under 8637 53.3 739 49.2 21-24 years 3672 22.7 302 20.1 25-29 years 1214 7.5 128 8.5 30-39 years 1470 9.1 189 12.6 40 years and over 1201 7.4 143 9.5 total 16194 100.0 1501 100.0 disability no known disability 14321 88.43 1260 83.94 disability 1873 11.57 241 16.06 total 16194 100.0 1501 100.0 these results are partially explained by the students’ faculty of study (table 4). students having tutorials with learning development were less likely to be from arts, science and technology. this was the faculty with the greatest proportion of males (34 per cent of all males) and only 12 per cent of black ethnic students compared to 20 per cent across the university. table 4. student faculties of study within the university and for those attending learning development tutorials. faculty all university students learning development tutorial student profile count percentage count percentage arts, science and technology 3582 22.12 152 10.13 loddick and coulson the impact of learning development tutorials on student attainment journal of learning development in higher education, issue 17: may 2020 11 business and law 3417 21.10 320 21.32 education and humanities 1756 10.84 254 16.92 health and society 5692 35.15 562 37.44 joint honours 1747 10.79 213 14.19 total 16194 100.00 1501 100.00 students with a disability were also more likely to attend tutorials with learning development (table 3); 16 per cent attended learning development compared to 12 percent of all students across the university (𝜒2(1, 𝑁 = 16332) = 32.6, 𝑝 < 0.01). this was also found by buchanan (2015). as part of their working practice they signposted students that need academic support to learning development. this finding provides evidence that learning development was reaching this group of students. attainment results table 5 shows student average attainment based on the number of tutorials attended by a student for an assignment. both the mean and median average attainments are presented due to the skewness in the assessment grades. twelve per cent of assessments were awarded a zero mark as they were either not handed in or not graded due to a lack of quality. whilst being conscious of the skewness, given the large number of assessments, the mean value was used for the interpretation as it showed more detailed changes between the groups. table 5. mean and median student grades by number of tutorials with learning development. number of learning development tutorials within 30 days of assessment date grade count mean standard error of mean median no tutorials 173547 51.04 .06 58.00 1 2740 56.37 .36 61.00 2 647 57.93 .68 61.00 3 202 59.09 1.17 61.00 4+ 93 55.15 1.82 58.00 loddick and coulson the impact of learning development tutorials on student attainment journal of learning development in higher education, issue 17: may 2020 12 across all undergraduate data, assessments with a learning development tutorial were on average just under 6 per cent higher (1-2 sub grades) than for those assessments without (no tutorial m=51.04 per cent, one or more tutorials m=56.76 per cent). where students saw the team more than once within 30 days of their assessment deadline, their grades continued to increase by a further three per cent and peaked at three appointments. students seeing the team four or more times made improvement, but only one sub grade higher compared to no tutorials. tables 6 and 7 show that these students were more likely to be studying within the faculties of business and law and arts, science and technology, not studying joint honours (𝜒2 (4, n=3682) =21.0, p<0.01) and from asian or black ethnic backgrounds (𝜒2(4, 𝑁 = 3682) = 17.4, 𝑝 < 0.01). table 6. number of assessments based on faculty and number of tutorials. number of tutorials total faculty 1 to 3 tutorials 4 or more tutorials arts, science and technology number of assessments 382 14 396 % within number of tutorials 10.6% 15.1% 10.8% business and law number of assessments 686 31 717 % within number of tutorials 19.1% 33.3% 19.5% education and humanities number of assessments 704 18 722 % within number of tutorials 19.6% 19.4% 19.6% health and society number of assessments 1188 26 1214 % within number of tutorials 33.1% 28.0% 33.0% loddick and coulson the impact of learning development tutorials on student attainment journal of learning development in higher education, issue 17: may 2020 13 joint honours number of assessments 629 4 633 % within number of tutorials 17.5% 4.3% 17.2% total number of assessments 3589 93 3682 % within number of tutorials 100.0% 100.0% 100.0% loddick and coulson the impact of learning development tutorials on student attainment journal of learning development in higher education, issue 17: may 2020 14 table 7. number of assessments based on ethnic background and number of tutorials. number of tutorials total ethnicity 1 to 3 tutorials 4 or more tutorials asian number of assessments 538 22 560 % within number of tutorials 15.0% 23.7% 15.2% black number of assessments 1056 34 1090 % within number of tutorials 29.4% 36.6% 29.6% mixed number of assessments 79 2 81 % within number of tutorials 2.2% 2.2% 2.2% unknown/refused/other number of assessments 251 11 262 % within number of tutorials 7.0% 11.8% 7.1% white number of assessments 1665 24 1689 % within number of tutorials 46.4% 25.8% 45.9% total number of assessments 3589 93 3682 % within number of tutorials 100.0% 100.0% 100.0% loddick and coulson the impact of learning development tutorials on student attainment journal of learning development in higher education, issue 17: may 2020 15 where students had seen learning development previously, their current assessment grade increased further (table 8) gaining just over two per cent extra compared to those seeing learning development for the first time and seven per cent (2 grades) compared to those assignments where the student was not supported by learning development. table 8: number and average assessments grade based on learning development tutorials and whether the student had seen learning development previously. grade number of learning development tutorials within 30 days of assessment date seen learning development previously count mean standard error of mean median no tutorial no 153422 50.60 .06 58.00 yes 20125 54.35 .15 58.00 1 tutorial no 1911 55.65 .43 58.00 yes 1771 57.96 .42 61.00 table 9 shows the student demographic profile and differences in attainment for assessments with tutorial support compared to those without. differences in student gender and whether they had a disability did not impact attainment (males, females, known disabled and not known disabled students had a mean increase of four to six per cent). loddick and coulson the impact of learning development tutorials on student attainment journal of learning development in higher education, issue 17: may 2020 16 table 9. mean and median assessment attainment based on demographics and whether the student had a tutorial with learning development. demographics tutorial with learning development within 30 days of assignment deadline mean change median change no tutorial tutorial count mean standard error of mean median count mean standard error of mean median gender female 110007 52.44 .07 58.00 2982 57.63 .32 61.00 5.19 3 male 63487 48.63 .10 55.00 700 53.05 .78 58.00 4.43 3 other 53 25.36 3.93 0.00 0 faculty arts, science and technology 46531 52.91 .11 58.00 396 55.34 .96 61.00 2.42 3 business and law 28446 50.19 .15 58.00 717 60.91 .65 65.00 10.73 7 education and humanities 26847 54.52 .11 58.00 722 61.30 .50 65.00 6.77 7 health and society 50165 49.41 .10 55.00 1214 53.93 .56 58.00 4.52 3 joint honours 21558 47.54 .17 55.00 633 53.20 .77 58.00 5.66 3 ethnicity asian 18983 51.48 .16 58.00 560 56.93 .75 61.00 5.45 3 black 35586 40.89 .13 48.00 1090 49.93 .62 55.00 9.04 7 mixed 4365 48.24 .37 55.00 81 54.79 2.22 58.00 6.55 3 white 104205 54.68 .07 61.00 1689 60.76 .39 65.00 6.08 4 unknown/refused/other 10408 49.58 .23 55.00 262 59.67 1.02 61.00 10.10 6 disability known disability 22213 49.83 .16 58.00 609 54.06 .83 58.00 4.22 0 no known disability 151334 51.21 .06 58.00 3073 57.30 .32 61.00 6.09 3 student's age of date of enrolment in academic year 20 years or under 96815 50.59 0.07 58.00 1443 56.76 .48 61.00 6.16 3 21-24 years 43104 51.13 0.11 58.00 1036 59.34 .51 61.00 8.21 3 25-29 years 11469 52.45 0.22 58.00 306 54.74 1.22 61.00 2.29 3 30-39 years 12699 52.24 0.21 58.00 494 55.29 .87 58.00 3.04 0 40 years and over 9460 51.80 0.25 58.00 403 53.49 .97 58.00 1.69 0 loddick and coulson the impact of learning development tutorials on student attainment journal of learning development in higher education, issue 17: may 2020 17 across all faculties, an increase in attainment was seen for those assessments where students sought support from learning development. furthermore, there was a statistically significant difference across the faculties with having a learning development tutorial (f(4, 208934) = 11.958, p < .001). the faculties of business and law and education and humanities assessments saw the largest increase in attainment (mean increase 10.73 and 6.77 respectively). arts, science and technology saw the least (mean increase 2.42). interestingly, arts, science and technology students were less likely to have tutorials with learning development compared to other faculties and it is these students who gained less from tutorials. this could potentially be explained in part by the programmes of study, as learning development tutorials would not assist creative work or scientific experiments. students from a black ethnic background had a greater increase in attainment from tutorials with learning development compared to other ethnic backgrounds (mean increase 9.04 per cent, median increase 8 per cent) (f(4, 208934) = 5.352, p < .001). however, they also had on average lower attainment (mean grade 41.5 per cent for black students; other ethnic backgrounds’ mean grades between 48.4 and 51.6 per cent). given this, the greater increase in part could potentially be due to their attainment level and potential for improvement. students’ age had an impact on attainment improvement (f(4, 208934) = 13.374, p < .001). students aged 25 and below at enrolment onto their academic programme saw an average increase in attainment of between 6 and 8 per cent. however, students aged 25 and above saw only 1.6 to 3 per cent increase. further research showed that the mature students who gained less from learning development tutorials had no specific demographic profile in terms of faculty, programme studied, ethnicity or mode of study. discussion the purpose of this research was to understand whether learning development tutorials have an impact on student attainment. the findings showed that student assignments improved by one to two sub grades (six per cent) where students had tutorial support. this loddick and coulson the impact of learning development tutorials on student attainment journal of learning development in higher education, issue 17: may 2020 18 finding is consistent with research by manalo et al. (2009), macgillivray (2009) and choudhary and malthus (2017) who also found a positive impact on attainment from tutorials. the results from previous research were already encouraging but the results from this study give further confidence that tutorials impact student attainment, due to the large population size. a continued tutorial relationship with learning development increased attainment in two ways. firstly, attainment increased further where students had two or three tutorials for the same assignment (seven to eight per cent increase). the results showed that attainment peaked at three tutorials, with students having more tutorials still gaining in terms of attainment when compared to those with no tutorials but at a lower level. one possible explanation could be that students seeking support from learning development more than three times lack independence in applying tutorial knowledge rather than gaining new learning from additional tutorials. secondly, a continual relationship between students and learning development tutorials where students seek support for more than one assignment increased student results a further two per cent. having a tutorial with learning development impacted future assignment results even when there was no specific further support for these assignments, suggesting that skills learnt have been utilised in future assignments. this is in line with research showing the impact of academic advising on student success (bourne, 2006; young‐jones et al., 2013). young-jones et al. found that the continued relationship with the academic advisor (students meeting at least once per semester) impacted student success when compared to those meeting less frequently. bourne’s (2006) report for the national audit office also supports this by recommending the improved support of academic tutoring systems to improve student chances of success and improve retention. the learning development team at the university of northampton is seen as modelling exemplary practice that is valued by students (qaa, 2009). however, there has been limited published research into the impact on attainment. these findings are significant as they show the importance of learning development tutorials and the impact they can have on student grades. the question needs to be asked why more students do not use tutorials. this could be simply that the impact of tutorials until now has been unknown and therefore marketing activity could increase student numbers. it may be that students who see learning development have different study support needs than those who do not. loddick and coulson the impact of learning development tutorials on student attainment journal of learning development in higher education, issue 17: may 2020 19 student engagement is likely to play a role, since students who seek help from learning development have already begun the engagement process. winograd and rust (2014) analysed the reasons why students did not seek academic support when it was needed. they found that students who felt less comfortable in the university environment were less likely to seek support, as it created feelings of inadequacy and inferiority; that self-stigma was a significant contributor in not seeking help as students felt that professors and other students would look down on them due to their poor performance; and that males rather than females associated academic help-seeking with inferiority and inadequacy. the paper also found positive contributors to students seeking academic support included awareness of academic support and students’ greater sense of belonging within campus. additional marketing of learning development services may therefore help students seek the support they need. the first part of the research showed the demographic profile of students of the university and those attending learning development tutorials: students attending tutorials were more likely to be female, from a black ethnic background, have a disability and be studying with the faculty of health and society compared to the university student profile. the majority of these finding were in line with buchanan’s (2015) research, which showed that female, bme and disabled students were more likely to use the service at her university. as seen previously, winograd and rust (2014) suggested that females rather than males may attend tutorials, as they were less likely to see seeking academic support as a sign of inferiority and inadequacy. this research goes further in breaking down the ethnic background of student and shows that it is black students rather than those from a minority ethnic or asian background that are more likely to use learning development tutorials. however, the link between ethnicity and faculty of study shows that ethnicity may not be the reason for students attending tutorials, as the faculty using learning development the most for tutorials was health and society, which had a higher proportion of black students, and the faculty that used the learning development the least was the faculty of arts, science and technology which also had the lowest number of black students. further research is required to understand the drivers. the finding that students with a disability are more likely to use the service is not a surprising result as other student support teams from within the university signpost learning development to provide academic support when needed. this finding was also reflected by buchanan (2015) who saw 23% of loddick and coulson the impact of learning development tutorials on student attainment journal of learning development in higher education, issue 17: may 2020 20 students with a learning disability compared to 16% of the university population in the academic year 2013/14. a surprise finding from the research was that mature students gained less from tutorials than younger students did. multiple studies have shown that mature students gain similar levels of attainment to younger students ( richardson, 1995; richardson and woodley, 2003; crosling et al., 2009). therefore, further research will be required to understand the characteristics of mature students that attend tutorials and why they gain less from the support. one of the limitations of this study is that of causality. while there are differences in attainment for students who have tutorials with learning development, we cannot say that is it the tutorials that caused this. it is possible that students who have tutorials with learning development are of a higher attainment level before seeing the team or the fact that they have chosen to seek support means that they are already engaged in the learning process. this issue has been addressed in similar research looking at the impact of tutorials ( macgillivray, 2009; manalo et al., 2009) who concluded that these were limitations of the research but examining the patterns from the research would provide conclusions into the impact of tutorials. potential further research could explore a longitudinal view of student attainment results, by looking at individual student attainment prior to seeing learning development and comparing them with after. however, this also has problems as individual assessments vary, and the level of assessment increases in difficulty as students progress. in addition, a limitation of the study is that it only compares students who attend tutorials with those that do not. it does not account for whether the student had support from learning development at drop-ins or workshops or other influencing factors such as embedded faculty support, the difficulty of different assessments, level of study or student ability. conclusion loddick and coulson the impact of learning development tutorials on student attainment journal of learning development in higher education, issue 17: may 2020 21 understanding the impact of learning development tutorials is important to students, the university, the learning development team and learning development as a community of practice. the impact on students is not just student attainment, but also how it improves their confidence and engagement in their studies. the goal for students is to get a university degree that they can be proud of. this research showed that students who have learning development tutorials have higher attainment than those who do not. learning development teams are a finite resource and cannot advise all students within the university. however, with such an impact on student grades, the team needs to look at how they can improve student attainment further in the areas where less impact has been found especially mature students and those from arts, science and technology and support more students where there are gaps in use of the service. references blair, t. (1999) british political speech. speech archive. available at: http://www.britishpoliticalspeech.org/speech-archive.htm?speech=205 (accessed: 6 june 2019). bourne, j. (2006) report by the controller and editor general. hc 616 staying the course: the retention of students in higher education. available at: https://www.nao.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2007/07/0607616.pdf (accessed: 15 may 2018). buchanan, a. (2015) ‘identifying users of learning development to inform future practice’, journal of learning development in higher education, (9), pp. 1–16. choudhary, r. and malthus, c. (2017) ‘the impact of targeted mathematics/numeracy tutorials on maths anxiety, numeracy and basic drug calculation exam marks’, journal of academic language and learning, 11(1). loddick and coulson the impact of learning development tutorials on student attainment journal of learning development in higher education, issue 17: may 2020 22 crosling, g., heagney, m. and thomas, l. (2009) ‘improving student retention in higher education: improving teaching and learning'. australian universities review, 51(2), pp. 9–18. hilsdon, j. (2011) ‘what is learning development?’, in hartley, p., keenan, c. and sinfield, s. and verity, m. (eds.) learning development in higher education. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan, pp. 13–27. macgillivray, h. (2009) ‘learning support and students studying mathematics and statistics’, international journal of mathematical education in science and technology, 40(4), pp. 455–472. doi: 10.1080/00207390802632980. macgillivray, h. and croft, t. (2011) ‘understanding evaluation of learning support in mathematics and statistics’, international journal of mathematical education in science and technology, 42(2), pp. 189–212. doi: 10.1080/0020739x.2010.519801. manalo, e., marshall, j. and fraser, c. (2009) student learning support programmes that demonstrate tangible impact on student retention, pass rates, and/or completion. available at: https://akoaotearoa.ac.nz/download/ng/file/group-5/student-learningsupport-programmes-that-demonstrate-tangible-impact-on-retention-pass-rates-completion.pdf (accessed: 8 june 2018). murphy, t. e., gaughan, m., hume, r. and moore, s. g. (2010) ‘college graduation rates for minority students in a selective technical university: will participation in a summer bridge program contribute to success?’, educational evaluation and policy analysis. nih public access, 32(1), pp. 70–83. doi: 10.3102/0162373709360064. perkin, g., lawson, d. and croft, t. (2012) mathematics learning support in uk higher education the extent of provision in 2012 b. available at: http://www.mathcentre.ac.uk/ (accessed: 21 february 2019). qaa (2009) university of northampton institutional audit. available at: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=gaughan%20m%5bauthor%5d&cauthor=true&cauthor_uid=23136456 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=hume%20r%5bauthor%5d&cauthor=true&cauthor_uid=23136456 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=moore%20sg%5bauthor%5d&cauthor=true&cauthor_uid=23136456 loddick and coulson the impact of learning development tutorials on student attainment journal of learning development in higher education, issue 17: may 2020 23 http://www.qaa.ac.uk/en/reviewsandreports/documents/the university of northampton/university-of-northampton-ia-09.pdf. richardson, j. t. e. (1995) ‘mature students in higher education: ii. an investigation of approaches to studying and academic performance’, studies in higher education. taylor and francis group , 20(1), pp. 5–17. doi: 10.1080/03075079512331381760. richardson, j. t. e. and woodley, a. (2003) ‘studies in higher education another look at the role of age, gender and subject as predictors of academic attainment in higher education’, studies in higher education, 28(4), pp. 475–493. doi: 10.1080/0307507032000122305. strayhorn, t. l. (2011) ‘bridging the pipeline: increasing underrepresented students’ preparation for college through a summer bridge program’, american behavioral scientist, 55(2), pp. 142–159. doi: 10.1177/0002764210381871. the university of northampton (2015) what are the undergraduate and post-graduate grading scales? nile faqs. available at: https://mypad.northampton.ac.uk/nilefaq/2015/07/28/what-are-the-undergraduateand-post-graduate-grading-scales/ (accessed: 9 may 2018). universities uk (2017) patterns and trends in uk higher education 2017. london. available at: https://www.universitiesuk.ac.uk/facts-and-stats/data-andanalysis/documents/patterns-and-trends-2017.pdf (accessed: 24 may 2018). wibrowski, c. r., matthews, w. k. and kitsantas, a. (2017) ‘the role of a skills learning support program on first-generation college students’ self-regulation, motivation, and academic achievement: a longitudinal study’, journal of college student retention: research, theory and practice, 19(3), pp. 317–332. doi: 10.1177/1521025116629152. wilkins, l. (2015) ‘maybe we could just count the boxes of chocolates? measuring the impact of learning development mathematics support for undergraduate students’, journal of academic language and learning journal of academic language and loddick and coulson the impact of learning development tutorials on student attainment journal of learning development in higher education, issue 17: may 2020 24 learning, 9(2), pp. a91-115. available at: http://ro.uow.edu.au/asdpapers/514 (accessed: 8 june 2018). winograd, g. winograg@newpaltz. ed. and rust, j. p. (2014) ‘stigma, awareness of support services, and academic help-seeking among historically underrepresented first-year college students’, learning assistance review (tlar), 19(2), pp. 17–41. available at: https://nclca.wildapricot.org/resources/documents/publications/tlar/issues/19_2.p df (accessed: 5 may 2020) young‐jones, a. d. , burt, t. d., dixon, s. and hawthorne, m. j. (2013) ‘academic advising: does it really impact student success?’, quality assurance in education. emerald group publishing limited, 21(1), pp. 7–19. doi: 10.1108/09684881311293034. author details alison loddick is a chartered statistician and a learning development tutor in mathematics and statistics at the university of northampton supporting students in their academic studies through workshops and 1-1 tutorials. her academic research is focussed on the evaluation of the learning development service on students in terms of attainment, retention, engagement, confidence and satisfaction; and whether different groups of students benefit from the service. kate coulson is a qualified librarian, teacher and senior fellow of the hea. she is head of learning development at the university of northampton where she leads a team of academic tutors who support and advise all students with their academic and study skills. previously her academic research concentrated on the self-reported confidence of students’ academic skills but more recently she has focussed on the engagement, attainment and progression of students utilising her team. https://nclca.wildapricot.org/resources/documents/publications/tlar/issues/19_2.pdf https://nclca.wildapricot.org/resources/documents/publications/tlar/issues/19_2.pdf https://www.emerald.com/insight/search?q=tracie%20d.%20burt https://www.emerald.com/insight/search?q=stephanie%20dixon https://www.emerald.com/insight/search?q=melissa%20j.%20hawthorne the impact of learning development tutorials on student attainment abstract background student profile attainment results crosling, g., heagney, m. and thomas, l. (2009) ‘improving student retention in higher education: improving teaching and learning'. australian universities review, 51(2), pp. 9–18. journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 13: april 2018 editorial christopher drew teesside university, uk sue eccles bournemouth university amanda french birmingham city university, uk andy hagyard university of leeds, uk john hilsdon university of plymouth, uk christina howell-richardson birkbeck, university of london, uk craig morley university of chester, uk lucy rai open university, uk gita sedghi university of liverpool, uk alicja syska university of plymouth, uk the editorial team is delighted to introduce issue 13 of the journal of learning development in higher education. this issue is published at an exciting point in the life of the journal as we welcome four new editors to the team, dr gita sedghi, based at the university of liverpool, dr craig morley from the university of chester, dr christopher drew from teesside university, and dr alicja syska from the university of plymouth. our editorial team shares expertise in education and learning development but also includes a great mix of disciplinary specialisms ranging from history and social work to chemistry. editorial journal of learning development in higher education, issue 13: april 2018 2 the evidence for distinctiveness in learning development roles in higher education is growing. this issue includes an opinion piece from steven briggs, co-chair of aldinhe, in which he describes how the development of a new professional recognition scheme for learning developers acknowledges and celebrates the core values of ld. the scheme, which has been developed through extensive consultation with the ld community, is available to practitioners from academic, academic-related and professional backgrounds. evolving from a pilot in 2017, the scheme has now been launched with two levels of value engagement: certified practitioner (cep) institutional commitment; and certified leading practitioner (celp) community commitment. some 50 colleagues attended sessions describing the scheme at the 2018 aldinhe conference which bodes well for future applications. briggs calls the scheme ‘an exciting milestone’ both for recognition of the work of lds and for the role of the association in certifying their professional engagement. issue 13 offers three papers and two case studies in addition to steven briggs’s opinion piece. three of these share a common theme of the significance of disciplinarity in learning development. crisp’s paper ‘coaching placements and incidental learning – how reflection and experiential learning can help bridge the industry skills gap’ examines the issues related to the delivery and effectiveness of work-based learning (wbl) support and development, learning styles, and occupational competency in sports education. specifically, the paper examines the experiences of a level five cohort who undertook supported coaching placements as part of their placement module. as in other disciplines, the findings demonstrate that it is not only preferential, from the sports students’ perspective, to engage in supported wbl, but that the coaching placements also helped the students meet many of the wider professional sector’s identified skills gaps. following the theme of vocational learning, cairns, hervey and johnson’s paper, ‘neither ‘bolt-on’ nor ‘built-in’, is an interesting case study exploring the challenges for enablers of sustaining a disciplinary based learning development programme taught in partnership by law lecturers and learning development specialists. the authors acknowledge the partnership model does not easily fit within the existing managerial and organisational structures of contemporary he and their work reflects on the possibilities and benefits of the partnership model for all stakeholders; and specifically students. editorial journal of learning development in higher education, issue 13: april 2018 3 minogue, murphy and salmons’s paper ‘embedding learning development: a model for collaborative practice’ focuses on support for criminology and sociology students and explains how they supported schools across st mary’s university in the uk through embedding activities in which academic skills were tailored to subject specific module content. their paper presents the results of a study which evaluated an embedded academic skills module in criminology and sociology delivered at level 4. they argue that embedding study skills within the curriculum in this way has enabled all students to enhance their learning development skills as an integral element of their overall learning – but has been particularly beneficial to those from wp backgrounds. their study suggests that this has led to increased confidence amongst the students, an increased sense of belonging and greater readiness for students to settle into and gain from their academic studies. they conclude that positioning learning development as a normal part of student development at st mary’s rather than a remedial provision for failing students has positive benefits for students and engenders greater collaboration between learning development and academic staff. the outcome is an 'impact-tested' accredited skills module that can be adapted and used by other learning development teams. delderfield and mchattie’s case study, ‘the person-centred approach in maths skills development: examining a case of good practice’, is based on the practice of an experienced advisor working with three maths students. it offers a reflection on the development of students’ mathematics skills in higher education, which focuses on the interpersonal dynamics that occur during one-to-one (tutorial) sessions. it offers a novel starting point for conceptualising the importance of ‘relationship’ in maths skills work, drawing on a person centred approach and exploring behaviours and qualities through the lens of rogerian core conditions. the use of concepts from the world of therapy provides an interesting approach though which to focus on the relationship between adviser and student, proposing conditions for successful one-to-one practice with students. the study suggests that while there is discussion of becoming unconsciously competent, there is little about what follows. the authors suggest that engaging in this study invigorated professional discussions about the nature of the extensive one-to-one work do and why we have our ethos. finally, jones’s focus in the final paper, ‘an examination of developmental assets and academic performance in higher education sport students’ explores the magnitude and direction of the relationship between developmental assets and academic achievement in editorial journal of learning development in higher education, issue 13: april 2018 4 british students using the developmental assets profile (dap). the author hypothesises that total asset score, individual asset groups and the eight asset subcategories impact positively on academic achievement. jones provides evidence that developmental assets are positively associated with grade score in university students; however, the size of the relationship is smaller than previously suggested. editorial article journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 14: april 2019 increasing diversity in peer-to-peer education: a case study of manager experiences with student paraprofessionals in learning development in the canadian context jenna olender wilfrid laurier university, canada michael lisetto-smith wilfrid laurier university, canada abstract this autoethnographic case study examines the experience of managers with hiring student paraprofessionals into various roles within peer-to-peer education models and programmes as a method to increase the diversity in learning development services in the canadian context. tailoring learning development through peer-to-peer education models for diverse student groups is an important aspect of how learning development supports students in higher education. including the knowledge and perspectives of student paraprofessionals who better reflect the diversity of the population we serve has been an important aspect of our practice. our purpose for this case study is to better understand how our experiences with paraprofessional staff diversity, over a seven-year period (20102017), have influenced our practice of learning development in an institutional context focussed on creating a more inclusive and welcoming environment on campus to better support the needs of diverse learners. the knowledge that we gained through this analysis of diversity and peer learning as an approach to learning development may serve as an example of the value of autoethnography as a method to provide useful insight to professionals and leaders in the field. keywords: autoethnography; learning development; management; diversity; peer learning; student paraprofessionals. olender and lisetto-smith increasing diversity in peer-to-peer education: a case study of manager experiences with student paraprofessionals in learning development in the canadian context journal of learning development in higher education, issue 14: april 2019 2 introduction tailoring learning development through peer-to-peer education models for diverse student groups is an important aspect of how learning development supports students effectively in higher education (he). while attainment rates in canada are very high, the issues of access and retention remain key he policy priorities in terms of equity (kirby, 2011). removing access and retention barriers is necessary to address systems of structural oppression that have historically excluded many socio-economic and cultural groups from he. as clark, moran, skolnik, and trick (2009) explain, expectations have been set for institutions to increase access through federal and provincial government directives and legislation in canada. thus, in ontario, we have had to increase learning development programming, such as peer-to-peer programmes, to support diverse students including indigenous students, students with disabilities, at-risk students, new canadians, and international students. in addition to the enhanced programming and services being developed and implemented in our practice at a canadian university, we have found as managers of learning support services that employing more paraprofessional student staff (that is, student employees who receive training to work under the guidance of learning development professionals in supporting students) who better reflect the diversity of the student body is important for increasing the staff diversity within our department and improving the quality of learning development programmes and services. our purpose for this autoethnographic case study is to better understand how our experiences with staff diversity, over a seven-year period (2010-2017), have influenced our perspectives on the practice of learning development in an institutional context focussed on creating a more inclusive and welcoming environment on campus that better supports the needs of diverse learners. autoethnography, or personal narrative research, is ‘an approach to research and writing that seeks to describe and systematically analyze (graphy) personal experience (auto) in order to understand cultural experience (ethno)’ (ellis, adams, and bochner, 2011, section 1, emphasis in original). for this case study, we wanted to critically reflect on our experiences working with diverse students as a way to better understand how we may be both working to foster inclusive environments and remaining complicit in reinforcing systems of oppression within higher education. to engage in this study, we analysed our individual reflective responses to the question of how working with diverse student paraprofessionals has influenced our individual practice. for the analysis, we used a olender and lisetto-smith increasing diversity in peer-to-peer education: a case study of manager experiences with student paraprofessionals in learning development in the canadian context journal of learning development in higher education, issue 14: april 2019 3 creative analytic practice/process (richardson and st. pierre, 2005) and engaged in the interactive interviewing (ellis, adams, and bochner, 2011) of one another about our texts as a way to examine what we can learn from our experiences with staff diversity. in this paper, we first provide a brief background of the issue of access and retention in higher education before describing the specific institutional response and context for the case study. we then include the collected reflections and analyses of each text and engage in a broader discussion of the findings of the case study. background: access and retention as finnie, mueller, and wismer (2015) note, in canada, just as around the world, increasing access to higher education for those groups who remain under-represented is a matter of public policy. because education is seen as essential to national competitiveness in a globalised knowledge economy (finnie, mueller, and wismer, 2015) and as a means to promote better equity of wealth and social cohesion (debroucker, 2005), governments have recognised that it is necessary for institutions to remove barriers and promote access to he. clark and colleagues (2009) point out that, with the necessary policy supports, it will be possible to see more under-represented groups including low-income, first generation, indigenous, and disabled students participating in higher education. and, it is important to note that low-income often intersects with these other factors. however, access alone will not address improving diversity among students; persistence is another piece of the access puzzle. individual and social benefits of educational participation are generally experienced after completion. lambert, zemen, allen, and bussiere (2004) have found that the factors that present as barriers to access initially are also the factors that influence attrition. therefore, it is crucial that institutions not only commit to improving access to entering a higher education programme but to removing impediments to persistence by improving resources and supports. person-environment interaction and ecology models of student development have long recognised the impact the institutional environment has on persistence (evans, forney, guido, patton, and renn, 2009). the experiences that students have at a university or college can promote or discourage persistence, and therefore institutional efforts are essential for improved retention. the challenge is in meeting the diverse needs of varying olender and lisetto-smith increasing diversity in peer-to-peer education: a case study of manager experiences with student paraprofessionals in learning development in the canadian context journal of learning development in higher education, issue 14: april 2019 4 student demographics, as the institutional interactions are not the same for every student. marr, nicoll, von treuer, kolar, and palermo (2013, p. 11) comment on the australian context and suggest that ‘institutional leaders need to take a more “student-centered” approach, one that listens to what current students say they need. . . . leaders must also recognise the different culture that a more diverse student population encapsulates and respond appropriately’. in other words, if institutions want to retain potentially at-risk students, they may need to shift their cultures to become good fits at the institutional level for those students. one opportunity available to higher education institutions to foster a positive campus academic and social environment is the use of peer-to-peer models in the provision of learning development support. peer learning, as boud (2001, p. 3) explains, comprises a variety of programmes and activities, which involve ‘a two-way, reciprocal learning activity’ that ‘offers students the opportunity to learn from each other.’ peer learning provides supplemental learning support to formal teaching activities in the institution and differs from them in that it focuses on ‘the learning process, including the emotional support that learners offer to each other’ (boud, 2001, p. 4). thus, when students are able to work as paraprofessional peer educators, they contribute to the cultivation of a supportive and positive institutional environment for others. institutional response: overview of learning development at an ontario university our institution is a mid-sized comprehensive university, where the total student population is in the range of 15 000 to 20 000 and the university faculty engage in significant research activities and teach in a variety of undergraduate and graduate programmes. at our institution, the learning development departments at both the city 1 and city 2 campuses have adopted an approach that emphasises working with students holistically by supporting their successful transition to he through providing academic advising, study skills, writing, mathematics, and course content support. the units responsible for provision of learning development are study skills and supplemental instruction at the city 1 campus and writing and study skills in city 2. olender and lisetto-smith increasing diversity in peer-to-peer education: a case study of manager experiences with student paraprofessionals in learning development in the canadian context journal of learning development in higher education, issue 14: april 2019 5 from 2010-2017, the staffing complement of the city 1 service was comprised of a fulltime manager, a full-time professional staff member, and approximately 20 student employees throughout the year. in city 2, the staff included a full-time manager, a .75 fulltime equivalent professional staff member, and approximately 10-12 student employees. student paraprofessionals are employed into various roles to support learning development including study skills development, writing development, and peer-led course support. we have also used a peer-to-peer approach in relation to several access and retention programmes designed to support diverse student populations including students who are academically at-risk, indigenous, non-traditional (mature), visible minorities (who are often new canadians or international students), and disabled students. this peer-topeer support model creates a low-risk learning environment where student employees act as ‘model learners’ (international center for supplemental instruction, 2011) to help promote skills development for the students with whom they work. there are a number of access and retention programmes specific to supporting diverse student populations offered through the learning development units on each campus that utilise a peer learning model. students, of course, may elect to participate in as many of them as benefit their individual needs. for example, the retention of students who are academically at-risk is becoming an ever more important priority for our institution and each campus has implemented programming to support this demographic: a student academic success programme targeting students who were admitted just below the minimum admission rate at the city 1 campus and a programme of individualised intensive learning support for those who have been removed from their honours programmes or who are on academic probation at the city 2 campus. another example is how we support our indigenous students’ learning development by working in close partnership with our indigenous student support coordinators, since we recognise that our indigenous peoples remain one of the most disadvantaged demographics when it comes to success in higher education in canada (r.a. malatest and associates, 2004; council of ministers of education, canada (cmec) and statistics canada, 2010). we employ senior indigenous students to provide academic mentoring and learning strategies development at each campus through individual consultations and group workshops. at the city 2 campus, where there is a higher proportion of non-traditional (mature) learners (institution website, 2016, table d2), we developed a transition support programme based on research into factors that support mature students’ success in higher education (macfadgen, 2007). a olender and lisetto-smith increasing diversity in peer-to-peer education: a case study of manager experiences with student paraprofessionals in learning development in the canadian context journal of learning development in higher education, issue 14: april 2019 6 final example of another student demographic that has received targeted learning development support is our multi-lingual learners (mlls) (who are either new canadians or international students, many of whom are also visible minorities). at the city 2 campus, we provide a language support programme, which matches mll students with peer volunteers who are fluent speakers of english in one of two streams: conversational skills practice or academic course support. the peer-to-peer model for language support is designed to benefit both members of the dyad; the volunteers receive training and develop their intercultural competency through their participation. there has been a commitment at each campus to provide tailored programming through peer education to meet the access and retention needs for diverse students, and the use of student paraprofessionals has enabled each campus to scale according to usage and demand. increasing diversity within while not identified as an explicit goal of the peer-to-peer learning model in the learning development department at our institution, we have found that hiring from an increasingly diverse student body has enabled us to increase staff diversity within the department. from the outside, the demographics of the professional staff within the department during this period appear to be 100% white and in a ratio of 18% male to 82% female. compared to both the general provincial population and the institution’s student population, the department does not reflect the population it serves. it is important to note, though, that the department has no policies on affirmative action. with few exceptions, student employees are hired based on academic merit and an interview process to confirm communicative, interpersonal, and leadership skills and potential. one exception includes the hiring of indigenous students to work within indigenous success programmes. despite the absence of an official policy, our student staff hiring is an important way for us to increase our internal diversity to better reflect the population we serve, and the many qualified students who apply come from diverse backgrounds. at both campuses, we ensure there is regular communication between the paraprofessional and professional members of the team through regular weekly team meetings or end of term programme debriefs where we are able to problem-solve and deal with emerging needs that vary from year to year with different cohorts and from different demographics. at these meetings, our student employees are able to draw our attention to olender and lisetto-smith increasing diversity in peer-to-peer education: a case study of manager experiences with student paraprofessionals in learning development in the canadian context journal of learning development in higher education, issue 14: april 2019 7 concerns they observe or have heard about, and they are always encouraged to think creatively within their roles to recommend solutions for consideration. through this feedback loop, we have been able to leverage the knowledge that our diverse student employees have to help us make better informed decisions about the creation of new initiatives and any adjustments that are needed to existing programming and service provision. reflections and analysis our autoethnographic case study data include the two reflective responses we each wrote in answer to the question of how working with diverse paraprofessional staff has influenced our practice supporting diverse students’ learning development. we then engaged in a creative analytic process of interactive interviewing during a close reading of the texts as a way to more deeply examine and analyse the experiences to better understand them. at the conclusion of the interactive interviewing, we asked two final questions of each author: what is the message of the whole narrative and what is it that you want others in the field to learn or take away from your experience? each reflective response is presented holistically and is followed by the joint analysis developed through the interactive interviewing process. manager’s reflection: city 1 at the city 1 campus, increasing diversity within our student employee team has benefited both my practice as a learning developer and the way i administer support services. as an individual who self-identifies as a first-generation canadian descendant of europeancolonialists who is a cisgender gay man, i have come to recognise that i come mostly from a privileged background that has enabled me to receive an education and experience the workforce with few barriers. the barriers i have personally faced have usually been social and legal through my identification as a gay man. for most of my life, i was surrounded by individuals of european descent – mostly white anglo-canadians. when i was employed as a learning strategist, my education in this field started with reading handouts of basic study skills tips and tricks that i then prescribed to students in a way that acknowledged neither their current skill sets nor their individual olender and lisetto-smith increasing diversity in peer-to-peer education: a case study of manager experiences with student paraprofessionals in learning development in the canadian context journal of learning development in higher education, issue 14: april 2019 8 circumstances. i began to interact more with students of non-european descent, different religions, students with disabilities, indigenous students, and students who identify as part of the lgbtq+ community. interactions with these various student groups have helped me to better realise and understand the uniqueness of the student experience and how one’s culture, religion, and life-circumstance can deeply influence how one learns. as a result, i began to recognise that my beliefs and values around education were very strictly based in the western context that often focussed on a particular set of learning strategies. i realised that i needed to start approaching my practice from a student-centred approach that recognised where the student was coming from to help them reach their goals. this better understanding of diversity also resulted in me networking with other campus partners that worked with unique cohorts of students – like the indigenous student centre, the accessible learning centre, the office responsible for international students, and, at that time, the access and transition office. networking with these campus partners led to deeper levels of discussion on how to better support these various cohorts of students in terms of their learning development which in turn led to collaborative projects, programmes, and services to provide a more comprehensive support strategy. from an administrative perspective, where possible, i use institutional data as a self-check to see if my student employees reflect the campus populations that they serve, and i consider the diversity of my student employee workforce when considering equally qualified candidates. though there has been a lot of research indicating the value of peerto-peer education (see for example arco-tirado, fernández-martín, and fernándezbalboa, 2011; dawson, van der meer, skalicky, and cowley, 2014; latino and unite, 2012), more work needs to be done to determine the effect of diversity on this learning model. regardless of the argument that having a diverse student workforce is beneficial to student learning, there is also the argument that we are providing these students the opportunity to participate in the university community and develop skill sets to assist them in their personal and professional development. furthermore, regardless of background, we provide our student employees with both diversity and intercultural communication training to assist them in both their work with students and with developing the skill sets to work within an ever-increasing globalising world. olender and lisetto-smith increasing diversity in peer-to-peer education: a case study of manager experiences with student paraprofessionals in learning development in the canadian context journal of learning development in higher education, issue 14: april 2019 9 reflection 1: analysis as we read through the reflection, we asked questions about what important ideas were being communicated in each paragraph and why they are significant. in the beginning of the text, we saw that the recognition of the importance of acknowledging positionality, particularly in terms of an intersectional identity (hill collins, 1998; mccall, 2005) as a first generation canadian descendant of european colonialists who is a cisgender gay man and who has himself experienced social and legal barriers, is understood to be important as part of his practice in the discipline. however, this has not always been the case as the next paragraph described an experience of beginning work in the field of learning development using a traditional approach that was prescriptive and that universalised student experience and learning skills. it was the experience with diversity on campus that led to the insight or awareness of the effect of positionality on student learning and experiences. through this experience, he became more conscious of the western bias in the traditional approach and came to recognize the value of student-centred pedagogy. for the manager at city 1, these realisations prompted him to expand his knowledge about demographics especially in terms of culture and led him to connect with campus partners, suggesting his valuation of others’ direct and personal experience and knowledge. for a professional with a background in quantitative analysis, it is very interesting to see the recognition of the value of subjective perspectives as a source of knowledge and insight, as the tendency in quantitative study is to prefer generalisability and professed objectivity (denzin & lincoln, 2005). but, it was through the personal connections made with colleagues that he came to further eschew the traditional approach for support, service and programme development that universalises in favour of fostering creative partnerships that brought in other perspectives to inform such development. though the valuation of the subjective as a source of knowledge is apparent in the third paragraph, the fourth paragraph reveals the deeply internalized western paradigm for evidence-based decision-making within organisations that is rooted in a neoliberal approach to managerialism in higher education (peters and besley, 2006). further, his intent to diversify the workforce came from recommendations received from the now defunct diversity and equity office. olender and lisetto-smith increasing diversity in peer-to-peer education: a case study of manager experiences with student paraprofessionals in learning development in the canadian context journal of learning development in higher education, issue 14: april 2019 10 when reflecting on the meaning and significance of his statements in this paragraph, the manager came to realise that he may have been subconsciously limiting the opportunities for students and paraprofessionals because of his imposition of labels on students in his efforts to implement a practical solution to increasing staff diversity. such stereotyping is identified as a barrier for employees in academic workplaces and causes a ‘weak fit’ for those who are limited to ‘a niche in the academic workplace that is typified by their gender and/or minority status and promotes their image as “tokens” or “anomalies”’ (aguirre, 2000, p. 53, quoted in evans and chun, 2007, p.62). his attempt to follow recommendations for hiring practices may have prevented some students from being considered for other opportunities than the ones that he recognised as connected to an aspect of their identities. when reading the comment on the value of providing employment opportunities to a more diverse workforce in the text, he was struck by the obvious assumption he made that suggested that diverse students are not already able to participate in the university community and are perhaps not accessing developmental opportunities. he concludes his reflection by commenting on the training provided to paraprofessional staff, which demonstrates the recognition that diversity does not in itself equal intercultural competence, acceptance of diversity, or knowledge of diversity. the implication is that following recommendations to hire a more diverse staff does not alone achieve the creation of a welcoming, inclusive environment for employees (evans and chun, 2007, p. 90) or in the provision of learning development for the students whom we support. in consideration of the two final questions posed regarding the message of the text overall and the important take-away idea of the text, the author offered the following comments: even with good intent, education and a commitment to working with partners, i still ended up in a position where in the effort to do good, i may have unintentionally harmed or oppressed some students by making assumptions about needs when directing them to support programmes or job opportunities. the important take-away idea is that it is more than just dialogue that is needed – other groups need to be directly involved in decision-making. this type of deeper collaboration may have logistical challenges like timing or scheduling and it may not in and of itself prevent pitfalls such as continuing to impose approaches that reinforce western, colonialist, ableist, sexist, and heterosexist organisational olender and lisetto-smith increasing diversity in peer-to-peer education: a case study of manager experiences with student paraprofessionals in learning development in the canadian context journal of learning development in higher education, issue 14: april 2019 11 structures. regardless of one’s education and experiences, it is also important to recognise the limitations of this approach and not co-opt or appropriate other people’s backgrounds but work to truly engage the community in the process of collaboration. manager’s reflection: city 2 in city 2, i am one of two white women who comprise the professional staff complement. i identify as a cisgender woman of eastern-european descent, and while i have benefited from the privileges of access to education and employment opportunity, i have also experienced the barriers that being female brings to both. over the decade of my work managing learning development services, i have benefited greatly from listening to my student staff team. i have employed student staff from different cultural and religious backgrounds, whose ages span decades, and who have had various accommodation needs for disabilities, and have learned from all of them. through our staff meetings and individual interactions, their perspectives on their student learning experiences have challenged me to be more reflective on the limits of my knowledge about the needs and support of diverse learners. as they have raised questions or have brought particular issues to light, i have made it a point to regularly engage in ongoing learning to support my developing expertise and improve the effectiveness of my own work. as my awareness and understanding has grown, my professional practice has become much more nuanced. my practice supporting students’ learning skills development has shifted away from what was a confident here-is-the-answer approach to one that now confidently facilitates discussion with students. these discussions focus on empowering students to make informed choices about their own learning by presenting them with options and by recognising the value there is in difference and different ways of learning. this improved practice of student learning support has also informed how i administer the service. a key component of my team training every year focuses on the importance of context in everything we do: the context of individual student needs when doing contextspecific learning tasks. i make a point of discussing how diversity influences student needs as well as the experience of specific academic tasks for a variety of different student olender and lisetto-smith increasing diversity in peer-to-peer education: a case study of manager experiences with student paraprofessionals in learning development in the canadian context journal of learning development in higher education, issue 14: april 2019 12 groups. the openness in which we discuss the value of recognising diversity has, i believe, created a workplace culture that encourages student staff to continue to inform the team about gaps or needs in service provision so that i can ensure that we are responsive in addressing them. i also try to model a leadership practice that is consultative, inclusive, and respectful of different points of view. i strongly believe that our best work is achieved through collaboration. some of the initiatives to support access and retention for diverse learners that i am most proud of have developed through this collaborative and inclusive approach. both our transition programmes for indigenous and non-traditional learners had students employed for the development of the curriculum and their delivery. by leveraging the strength of the knowledge and experience of the students, we were able to create meaningful, relevant, and supportive programmes for those cohorts of students. another example is the ongoing work to enhance and expand our resources: the student staff members every year draw on their experiences and interests to identify needs and create new resources that, in better reflecting diverse ways of learning and knowing, better support skills development in meaningful ways. the anecdotal feedback i receive from students suggests that their experience of support from the service has been positive and beneficial to them. reflection 2: analysis in the description of the author’s positionality, we noticed that she contextualised her position in the department in a way that suggests the gendered organisational structure of the fields of learning development in canada in particular, which is also true of student affairs work in general (yakaboski and donahoo, 2011). when asked about the absence of sexual orientation in the description of her intersectional identities, she also realised that while not intentionally withheld in this particular context, it is evidence of a life-long choice since adolescence to not disclose such information because of a deeply held belief that a person’s sexual orientation should not be open to scrutiny or judgment. at this juncture, we discussed at length the current culture of disclosure that demands such identification and how that expectation can be an oppressive imposition on others that sometimes forces people to out themselves before they are ready or can force them into a position in which they opt to identify in a non-truthful way, either of which may be harmful to an individual. in the context of higher education, decisions about self-disclosure can be experienced as olender and lisetto-smith increasing diversity in peer-to-peer education: a case study of manager experiences with student paraprofessionals in learning development in the canadian context journal of learning development in higher education, issue 14: april 2019 13 very real dilemmas for faculty, staff, and students (bettinger, timmins, and tisdell, 2006; miller, 2015). when looking at the beginning of her description of her decade of work as a manager, there were several questions raised by the close reading. for example, is the listening she mentions active or passive? the manager’s choice of technique in terms of either initiating engaged, sustained interaction or waiting to be approached would certainly affect the experience of the paraprofessional staff. further, the comment that listening has been of benefit to her can suggest that there is an imbalance in this manager-employee relationship that favours the self-interest of the manager: do the paraprofessional student staff in fact feel exploited as representatives of minority groups for the personal educational benefit of a privileged person? research about the experiences of students of colour in north american classrooms reveals that this is a very real experience for minorities (rodriguez, 2011). when describing the diversity of paraprofessional staff hires over the years, there was not the same indication as in the city 1 manager’s reflection about the intentionality of the hiring decisions. when asked ‘was the hiring purposeful or based on targets?’ we talked about how, with the exception of a position for an indigenous peer educator, all the diversity within the paraprofessional staff complement at city 2 was happenstance based on hiring for the best qualified candidates. it was of great interest to the city 1 manager that diversity in terms of age was noted, and he asked about the significance of age diversity in learning development practice. like other paraprofessional hires, it occurred by chance depending on the applicant pool and the selection of best qualified candidates, though due to the greater proportion of mature learners at the city 2 campus, it is likely that proportionally more mature learners apply for the positions. having experience as a mature learner herself may have also informed the manager’s recognition of the particular needs of that demographic (see van rhijn, lero, bridge, and fritz, 2016), and so there probably is an awareness that the inclusion of mature learners as paraprofessionals could be beneficial to overall paraprofessional staff development as students learn from one another when sharing experiences on shift and at team meetings. in their review of literature, terrion and leonard (2007) noted that both supportiveness and empathy have been identified as key characteristics of peer mentors in terms of the provision of psychosocial support for students. olender and lisetto-smith increasing diversity in peer-to-peer education: a case study of manager experiences with student paraprofessionals in learning development in the canadian context journal of learning development in higher education, issue 14: april 2019 14 the city 2 manager also arrived at the realisation through interactions with others that a traditional one-size-fits-all approach to learning development may not be meeting the needs of many students, and so she also takes it upon herself to learn more about the experiences of diverse learners. with her background in academic scholarship, her approach to becoming more knowledgeable generally begins by reading the research literature. the focus of this ongoing learning is initially expressed in terms of an intrinsic motivation for self-improvement and not as an external focus on broader service development. there is a separation between her practice of the profession in terms of working with students, and in administration of the service. interestingly, the impact of her growing expertise is considered first in terms of the effect on direct student support. like the city 1 manager, she expresses a move away from a prescriptive approach. her practice evolves toward an approach focussed on the empowerment of students (freire 1970/1993; kreisberg, 1992) and the valuation of difference from a number of perspectives (informed by genre theory, academic literacies, learning theories, universal design, and critical and poststructural theories). it is this direct experience supporting students’ learning development that then informs the administrative, managerial aspect of her work. conversations about the importance of context and diversity on student experiences and learning have become a key part of paraprofessional staff training. her efforts at establishing a collaborative and inclusive work culture are described as being perceived as necessary for the continuing improvement of service delivery, though in this reflection, the primary partners are the paraprofessional team members rather than the interdepartmental colleagues of the city 1 manager. in highlighting some of the specific programming to support the access and retention of diverse learners, she too describes an approach to paraprofessional student involvement that may have unintentionally pigeon-holed students or have been experienced as exploitative. while paraprofessional involvement was sought because student participation is essential in delivering peer learning support models, the question can be asked whether there is a risk of stereotyping a demographic based on the experience of an individual student. though through the interactive interviewing, the city 2 manager did discuss how most service and programme development is done as team or co-authored projects. she suggested that such a collaborative approach may in fact mitigate that concern, even olender and lisetto-smith increasing diversity in peer-to-peer education: a case study of manager experiences with student paraprofessionals in learning development in the canadian context journal of learning development in higher education, issue 14: april 2019 15 though she acknowledged that such a concern had not informed the choice for a collaborative approach. at the end of the close reading and interactive interviewing, the manager was asked the two final questions about the overall message of the text and what she thinks is the important take-away message. her response was: the recognition of diversity prompted a shift from a universal or generic approach to learning development to one that is informed by an awareness of individual and situational contexts as foundational for tailoring support. but in thinking carefully about the experience i described, i also recognise that we need to be careful about not setting up exploitative work cultures that impose on student paraprofessional staff. the responsibility rests with us as managers or leaders to put effort into meaningful engagement that results in a positive work experience for diverse students and a positive experience with learning development for the students with whom we work. discussion the analysis revealed some commonalities in the two managers’ reflections. first, it was the experience with diversity that prompted both managers to question the validity of prescriptive, universalising approaches to learning development. this suggests that increasing diversity does have a noticeable effect on how people reflect on their own practices and can spark the desire to learn. second, the language and structure of statements in both reflections also revealed that the managers were not cognizant at the time of writing of their underlying assumptions regarding their interactions with diverse students and paraprofessional staff. this lack of awareness suggests that they may have been unknowingly complicit in reinforcing problematic structures or systems of oppression (see sullivan and tuana, 2007). the institutional culture and rhetoric surrounding the valuation of diversity informed decision-making about the hiring and engagement of paraprofessional staff that, while implemented with good intentions, may have been more damaging to students than we realised. olender and lisetto-smith increasing diversity in peer-to-peer education: a case study of manager experiences with student paraprofessionals in learning development in the canadian context journal of learning development in higher education, issue 14: april 2019 16 we also considered a key difference that our reflections revealed: while we shared the experience of seeking to improve our knowledge and understanding of diverse students, our approaches to becoming more knowledgeable were very different. where one of us chose to engage with other campus partners to form connections and invite collaboration, the other preferred to review the research literature as a way to engage in personal reflection and generate new ideas to inform professional practice. it occurred to us that there is great value in adopting an approach that includes both. reading alone risks appropriation; consulting alone risks exploitation. it should be our responsibility to educate ourselves and not demand that others shoulder that responsibility by undertaking a pedagogy of the privileged (pease, 2010) or a pedagogy of discomfort (boler and zembylas, 2003). but we need to recognise the limits of that knowledge and invite the participation of diverse collaborators to work with us in a relationship of ‘“consensual allyship,” which requires ongoing dialogue and relationship-building’ (danforth, 2011, quoted in hunt and holmes, 2015, p. 167), to constructively implement changes. an approach of informed inquiry may best set up the possibility for meaningful engagement with diverse communities. lastly, we wanted to note the value that engaging in this critical analytic process had for each of us. by simply reflecting on our experiences with diverse paraprofessional staff in the delivery of learning development programming, we painted very rosy pictures for ourselves. however, when we employed interactive interviewing as a creative analytic process to engage in an autoethnographic case study, we were able to achieve much deeper and richer insight into our work that led us to consider how we still have much to learn about how to do better. it is humbling to be reminded that professional development is an ongoing process with no end. undertaking this work retaught us the very important lesson that, as managers, we need to check our egos and be open to critically engaging in reflective practice. limitations and next steps there are several limitations of the method employed in this case study analysis. personal narrative research or autoethnography is by nature focussed on the local, the particular, and the contextual. the analytic approach is highly subjective and deals with data that is anecdotal. for these reasons, the findings are not generalisable, though generalisability olender and lisetto-smith increasing diversity in peer-to-peer education: a case study of manager experiences with student paraprofessionals in learning development in the canadian context journal of learning development in higher education, issue 14: april 2019 17 as a postpositivist expectation for research design is not a goal of this type of research (denzin, 2014). the purpose of the research was to better understand our own experiences. while we can attest to the effects that increased diversity has had on our own practice in learning development and as managers making operational decisions about service provision, we recognise that important next steps are to examine what kind of impact our efforts to improve diversity within our paraprofessional staff complements are having both on them and on student experiences with our diversity-informed programming. the next step is to design and implement a research ethics board approved research project to survey our employees, campus partners, and students to gather this information for analysis. understanding how improving the diversity of our departments by employing paraprofessional staff may or may not be achieving intended outcomes is necessary in order for us to complete the picture of the benefits and challenges of increased diversity within learning development in our institution in a canadian context. conclusion in our experience, peer learning models have played an important role in supporting access, transition, and retention for students, as well as in diversifying the staff complement in learning development. this greater diversity has also served to inform the design and enhancement of our programmes and services, with the aim of further improving these necessary supports for under-represented students. however, it is crucial to be aware that some of the ways that we may as managers engage with our diverse students and paraprofessional staff could be highly problematic and in fact work counter to our intentions. it is our responsibility to be mindful that we are not reinforcing exploitative practices that may be limiting opportunities for students or burdening them with serving our needs. when we acknowledge the importance of valuing diversity and undertake the responsibility for our own education, we can better prepare ourselves to work with diverse communities in respectful and meaningful ways. part of our own education rests in recognizing our limitations, and engaging in periodic autoethnographic analysis of our experiences may prove to be a valuable tool for improved practice in learning development. olender and lisetto-smith increasing diversity in peer-to-peer education: a case study of manager experiences with student paraprofessionals in learning development in the canadian context journal of learning development in higher education, issue 14: april 2019 18 references arco-tirado, j.l., fernández-martín, f.d., and fernández-balboa, j.m. (2011) ‘the impact of a peer-tutoring program on quality standards in higher education’, higher education, 62 (6), pp. 773-788. bettinger, t.v., timmins, r., and tisdell, e.j. (2006) ‘difficult dilemmas: the meaning and dynamics of being out in the classroom’, new directions for adult and continuing education, 112, pp. 63-71. boler, m. and zembylas, m. (2003) ‘discomforting truths: the emotional terrain of understanding difference’, pp. 107-130, in trifonas, p. p. (ed.) pedagogies of difference: rethinking education for social change. new york: routledgefalmer. boud, d. (2001) ‘introduction: making the move to peer learning’, pp. 1-17, in boud, d., cohen, r., and sampson, s. (eds.) peer learning in higher education: learning from and with each other. london: kogan page. clark, i.d., moran, g., skolnik, m.l. and trick, d. (2009) ‘the challenge of access’, pp. 23-48, in academic transformation: the forces reshaping higher education in ontario. montreal & kingston: mcgill-queen’s university press. council of ministers of education, canada (cmec) and statistics canada. (2010) a literature review of factors that support successful transitions by aboriginal people from k-12 to postsecondary education. toronto: council of ministers of education, canada. dawson, p., van der meer, j., skalicky, j., and cowley, k. (2014) ‘on the effectiveness of supplemental instruction: a systematic review of supplemental instruction and peer-assisted study sessions literature between 2001 and 2010’, review of educational research, 84 (4), pp. 609-639. debroucker, p. (2005) getting there and staying there: low-income students and postsecondary education. ottawa: canadian policy research network. olender and lisetto-smith increasing diversity in peer-to-peer education: a case study of manager experiences with student paraprofessionals in learning development in the canadian context journal of learning development in higher education, issue 14: april 2019 19 denzin, n.k. (2014) ‘reading the challenges of a global community and the sociological imagination’, qualitative inquiry, 20 (9), pp.1122-1127. denzin, n.k. and lincoln, y.s. (2005) ‘introduction: the discipline and practice of qualitative research’, pp. 1-32, in denzin, n.k. and lincoln, y.s. (eds.) the sage handbook of qualitative research, 3rd edition. thousand oaks: sage. ellis, c., adams, t.e., and bochner, a.p. (2011) ‘autoethnography: an overview’, forum: qualitative social research, 12 (1), retrieved from http://www.qualitative-research.net/index.php/fqs/article/view/1589/3095#g41 evans, a. and chun, e.b. (2007) are the walls really down? ashe higher education report, 33 (1). evans, n.j., forney, d.s., guido, f.m., patton, l.d., and renn, k.a. (2009) student development in college: theory, research, and practice, 2nd edition [kindle edition]. san francisco: jossey-bass. retrieved from www.amazon.ca finnie, r., mueller, r., and wismer, a. (2015) ‘access and barriers to postsecondary education: evidence from the youth in transition survey’, canadian journal of higher education, 45 (2), pp. 229-262. freire, p. (1970/1993) pedagogy of the oppressed. new york: the continuum publishing co. hill collins, p. (1998) ‘it’s all in the family: intersections of gender, race, and nation’, hypatia, 13 (3), pp. 62-82. hunt, s. and holmes, c. (2015) ‘everyday decolonization: living a decolonizing queer politics’, journal of lesbian studies, 19, pp. 154-172. institution website. (2016) registrar’s report, winter 2016. international center for supplemental instruction. (2011) the supervisor’s guide to http://www.qualitative-research.net/index.php/fqs/article/view/1589/3095#g41 http://www.amazon.ca/ olender and lisetto-smith increasing diversity in peer-to-peer education: a case study of manager experiences with student paraprofessionals in learning development in the canadian context journal of learning development in higher education, issue 14: april 2019 20 supplemental instruction. kansas city, mo: university of missouri-kansas city. kirby, d. (2011) ‘strategies for widening access in a quasi-market higher education environment: recent developments in canada’, higher education, 62, pp. 267 278. kreisberg, s. (1992) transforming power: domination, empowerment, and education. albany: state university of new york press. lambert, m., zemen, k., allen, m, and bussiere, p. (2004) who pursues postsecondary education, who leaves and why: results from the youth in transition survey. ottawa: statistics canada and human resources and skills development canada. latino, j.a. and unite, c.m. (2012) ‘providing academic support through peer education’, new directions for higher education, 2012 (157), pp. 31-43. macfadgen, l. (2007) mature students in the persistence puzzle: an exploration of the factors that contribute to adult learners' quality of life and retention in post secondary education (doctoral dissertation, simon fraser university). from file:///c:/users/user/downloads/etd3332.pdf marr, d., nicoll, c., von treuer, k., kolar, c., and palermo, j. (2013) ‘improving student preparedness and retention: perceptions of staff at two universities’, higher education studies, 3 (4), pp. 1-14. mccall, l. (2005) ‘the complexity of intersectionality’, signs, 30 (3), pp. 1771-1800. miller, r.a. (2015) ‘“sometimes you feel invisible”: performing queer/disabled in the university classroom’, the educational forum, 79, pp. 377-393. pease, b. (2010) ‘challenging the reproduction of privilege from within’, pp. 169-187, in undoing privilege: unearned advantage in a divided world. london: zed books. peters, m.a. & besley, a.c. (2006) building knowledge cultures: education and file:///c:/users/user/downloads/etd3332.pdf olender and lisetto-smith increasing diversity in peer-to-peer education: a case study of manager experiences with student paraprofessionals in learning development in the canadian context journal of learning development in higher education, issue 14: april 2019 21 development in the age of knowledge capitalism. lanham: rowman & littlefield. r.a. malatest and associates ltd. (2004) aboriginal peoples and post-secondary education: what educators have learned. ottawa: canadian millennium scholarship foundation. richardson, l. and st. pierre, e. a. (2005) ‘writing: a method of inquiry’, pp. 959-978, in denzin, n.k. and lincoln, y.s. (eds.) the sage handbook of qualitative research, 3rd edition. thousand oaks: sage. rodriguez, d. (2011) ‘silence as speech: meanings of silence for students of color in predominantly white classrooms’, international review of qualitative research, 4 (1), pp. 111-144. sullivan, s. and tuana, n. (eds.) (2007) race and epistemologies of ignorance. albany: state university of new york press. terrion, j.l. and leonard, d. (2007) ‘a taxonomy of the characteristics of student peer mentors in higher education: findings from a literature review’, mentoring & tutoring, 15 (2), pp. 149-164. van rhijn, t.m., lero, d.s., bridge, k., and fritz, v.a. (2016) ‘unmet needs: challenges to success from the perspectives of mature university students’, the canadian journal for the study of adult education, 28, pp. 29-47. yakaboski, t. and donahoo, s. (2011) ‘in (re)search of women in student affairs administration’, pp. 270-286, in pasque, p.a. and nicholson, s.e. (eds.) empowering women in higher education and student affairs: theory, research, narratives and practice from feminist perspectives. sterling: stylus. author details olender and lisetto-smith increasing diversity in peer-to-peer education: a case study of manager experiences with student paraprofessionals in learning development in the canadian context journal of learning development in higher education, issue 14: april 2019 22 jenna olender and michael lisetto-smith were managers in learning development at wilfrid laurier university when writing this paper. jenna continues in her managerial role at laurier and is also a doctoral candidate in higher education at the ontario institute for studies in education at the university of toronto. her research interest centres on student learning experiences. michael was the inaugural president of the learning specialists association of canada. since writing this paper, he has moved further into administration and now serves as the senior administrative officer with the lazaridis school of business & economics at laurier. increasing diversity in peer-to-peer education: a case study of manager experiences with student paraprofessionals in learning development in the canadian context abstract this autoethnographic case study examines the experience of managers with hiring student paraprofessionals into various roles within peer-to-peer education models and programmes as a method to increase the diversity in learning development services in... introduction background: access and retention institutional response: overview of learning development at an ontario university increasing diversity within reflections and analysis manager’s reflection: city 1 reflection 1: analysis manager’s reflection: city 2 reflection 2: analysis discussion limitations and next steps conclusion references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 18: october 2020 ________________________________________________________________________ using self-made automata to teach stem in early childhood teacher education oliver thiel queen maud university college, norway rolv lundheim queen maud university college, norway signe marie hanssen queen maud university college, norway jørgen moe queen maud university college, norway piedade vaz rebelo university of coimbra, portugal abstract in recent decades, an increasing number of countries have integrated science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (stem) into their curricula for early childhood education and care (ecec). in contrast to this trend, many ecec professionals are still reluctant about the idea of teaching stem to young children. a reason for this might be too little experience with and knowledge about stem. one way to tackle this problem is to address stem in ecec teacher education in a way that is engaging, motivating, and practical, and shows ecec student teachers appropriate ideas for how to teach stem in a playful and child-centred way. this case study aims to present and analyse an innovative approach to ecec teacher training. we let the student teachers build their own automata (toys that have mechanical moving parts) to promote a better understanding of stem. the students were highly motivated, assessed the approach as exciting and relevant, and consequently could successfully reflect on stem content and pedagogy. keywords: stem; automata; early childhood; teacher education; motivation; experiential learning; learning development. thiel, lundheim, hanssen, moe, vaz rebelo using self-made automata to teach stem in early childhood teacher education journal of learning development in higher education, issue 18: october 2020 2 introduction since the 1990s, the acronym ‘stem’ has been used as a shorthand for ‘science, technology, engineering, and mathematics’ (sanders, 2009). stem can be seen as an integrated approach (rosicka, 2016, p. 4) that implies interdisciplinary teaching aiming at problem-solving and encouraging students to contextualise scientific concepts within reallife situations (european schoolnet, 2018, p. 6). based on his research review, chesloff advises that stem education should start early (2013). tippett and milford suggest that stem concepts are developmentally appropriate for young children (2017). children demonstrate skills and carry out actions that promote ‘stem learning: questioning, play, processing skills, and scientific and engineering practices’ (tippett and milford, 2017, p. 82). in recent decades, an increasing number of countries have developed strategies to enhance early stem education (e.g. norwegian ministry of education and research, 2015). in contrast to this trend in research and education policy, many early childhood education and care (ecec) professionals are still reluctant to teach stem (parette, quesenberry and blum, 2010; timur, 2012; fenty and anderson, 2014). one reason for this might be little experience with stem. in a recent study by chen, huang, and wu, pre-service ecec teachers who had stem teaching experience, were interested in stem, or had participated in stem-related activities, showed more stem-related self-efficacy (2020). park, dimitrov, patterson, and park, however, found that about 70% of the pre-service ecec teachers in their sample did not believe themselves to be ready for teaching stem, regardless of their teaching experience (2017, p. 285). one way to tackle this problem is to address stem in ecec teacher education in an engaging, motivating, and practical way that shows students appropriate ways to teach stem in a playful and child-centred form. this case study is part of the larger project autostem (thiel et al., 2019) that is funded by the european erasmus+ programme key action 2 ‘cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices’. this larger project aims to develop and share an innovative approach in early stem education and thiel, lundheim, hanssen, moe, vaz rebelo using self-made automata to teach stem in early childhood teacher education journal of learning development in higher education, issue 18: october 2020 3 ecec teacher training. the innovative approach is to let young children build their own automata to promote a better understanding of stem. in this case study, we focus on learning development in higher education (hilsdon, 2011) by presenting an object-based teaching unit for ecec teacher education. the research questions are: 1. how did the ecec student teachers perceive our innovative approach? 2. how did the ecec student teachers reflect on the content they learnt? approach and implementation in the project autostem, we use a relational play-based pedagogy. this pedagogy is situated between the extremes of free play without adult intervention and adult-led teaching. ecec teachers use their professional knowledge and skills to interact with the playing children to extend children’s thinking and learning (hedges and cooper, 2018). following broström’s dynamic learning concept, it is the ecec teacher’s task to prepare a play environment that challenges the children and encourages them to create new meanings and understandings (broström, 2017). one way for ecec student teachers to learn this is to experience it themselves. this corresponds with dewey’s pedagogical theory of ’having an experience’ (dewey, 1934, p. 35). this theory was further developed by kolb (2015) into experiential learning theory (elt). elt is used in early stem education and ecec teacher education (thiel, severina and perry, 2020, p. 192) as well as in learning development (kukhareva, lawrence, koulle and bhimani, 2019, p. 4) because of its relationship to constructivist learning and the scientific process (dennick, 2015, p. 53). kolb (2015) describes a learning cycle with four steps: concrete experience – having an experience while doing something; reflective observation – reviewing what you have experienced; abstract conceptualisation – concluding and learning from the experience; and active experimentation – trying out what you have learnt, which leads to a new concrete experience. thiel, lundheim, hanssen, moe, vaz rebelo using self-made automata to teach stem in early childhood teacher education journal of learning development in higher education, issue 18: october 2020 4 concrete experience we used automata, by which we mean toys that have mechanical moving parts. this object-based learning approach (hardie, 2015) was undertaken with a class of 31 norwegian ecec student teachers in the third year of their bachelor studies. a short introduction was followed by three parallel 45 minute workshops each repeated three times. in the first workshop, with an art teacher, a group of students built a crocodile or dinosaur with a scissor-arm mechanism. in the second workshop, with a mathematics teacher, they built a car with a rubber band engine. in the third workshop, with a science teacher, they explored a self-made wind turbine attached to a winch to pull objects (see figure 1). after each student had attended each workshop once, the lesson ended with a 30 minute session with the whole class. figure 1. the automata that we used with the ecec teacher students: a crocodile with a scissor-arm mechanism, a rubber band car, and a wind turbine that powers a winch. reflective observation and abstract conceptualisation schön (1983) distinguishes between reflection-in-action and reflection-on-action. during the workshops, we encouraged the students to reflect in action by asking questions. for example: ‘what will children learn here about physics?’, ‘how can you support a child that has difficulties with this task?’, ‘how does your experience now affect your feelings about mathematics?’. in the plenary session after the workshops, students reflected on the action that they just had experienced. these are questions the students reflected on: ‘what do you think about this activity?’, ‘is this applicable to young children?’, ‘what would you have done differently?’, ‘do you have ideas for other automata?’. the students then had to thiel, lundheim, hanssen, moe, vaz rebelo using self-made automata to teach stem in early childhood teacher education journal of learning development in higher education, issue 18: october 2020 5 carry out a written task in the months after the lesson: ‘choose an automaton. describe the toy briefly, preferably with a picture. explain what young children learn about stem (mathematics, physics, biology, or …) while making and/or playing with your automaton’. active experimentation four weeks after the seminar, all students attended a five-week practical placement, each one in a different ecec institution. here, they had the opportunity to apply what they had learnt to children. method in this paper, we analyse data from two sources. at the end of the half-day seminar, we asked the students to complete a questionnaire including ten items (see table 1 in the appendix) from the two subscales, ‘interest/enjoyment’ and ‘perceived usefulness’ (deci et al., 1994), from the intrinsic motivation inventory (imi). an expected learning outcome on the syllabus is that the student develops an attitude towards stem that includes students viewing stem as an important tool in aesthetic learning processes and as a source of play, learning, and education (queen maud university college, 2019). 26 students responded on a 7-point likert-type scale spanning from (1) ‘not at all true’ to (7) ‘very true’. they gave their informed written consent for us to use the data. furthermore, we analysed the students’ answers to the written task mentioned above. 18 students gave their informed written consent. we coded all utterances in the students’ texts descriptively. afterwards, we categorised the utterances according to the expected learning outcomes. the syllabus includes learning outcomes related to pedagogy (the student has extended knowledge about children’s exploration, wondering, experimentation, and creative enthusiasm related to science and arts, and can foster curiosity and scaffold children’s processes of wondering and creative activities (queen maud university college, 2019)), stem content (the student has knowledge about stem phenomena that one could explore together with children of any age (queen maud university college, 2019)), and other subjects (the student has knowledge about the use thiel, lundheim, hanssen, moe, vaz rebelo using self-made automata to teach stem in early childhood teacher education journal of learning development in higher education, issue 18: october 2020 6 of arts and crafts in stem (queen maud university college, 2019)). we subdivided these three general categories into more specific subcategories, for example stem was divided into the four stem subjects, and then each subject into the stem phenomena related to that subject. figure 2 shows an overview of all categories and subcategories. after we categorised the utterances, we counted different things (see table 2 in the appendix): (1) how many utterances belong to each category? (2) how many utterances in this category were made by every student on average, at least and at most? (3) how many students made utterances in this category? results enjoyment and perceived usefulness the mean of the subscale ‘interest/enjoyment’ was 5.9 (sd = 0.6, min = 4.8, max = 6.8) with a reliability (cronbach’s alpha) of 0.84. the item with the highest score was ‘this training is fun to do’. the mean of the subscale ‘perceived usefulness’ was 5.7 (sd = 0.8, min = 4.0, max = 7.0) with a reliability (cronbach’s alpha) of 0.89. the item with the highest score was ‘i believe that this training is useful for working with stem in kindergarten and/or primary school’. table 1 (see appendix) shows the mean scores for each item. the reliability of both scales is good even though the sample size is rather small. all students enjoyed the half-day seminar and perceived it as interesting and useful for their future work. along with deci et al. (1994, p. 132), we found that the two scales are strongly correlated (r = 0.78, p < .001). students’ reflections we counted a total of 355 utterances. the minimum was 12, the maximum 35, and the average 19.7 utterances per student. every student made at least four utterances about stem. one student made as many as 24 utterances that were related to stem. the average was 11.4 utterances per student. this category contained 58% of all utterances. another 36% of all utterances were about pedagogy. the remaining 6% were about other thiel, lundheim, hanssen, moe, vaz rebelo using self-made automata to teach stem in early childhood teacher education journal of learning development in higher education, issue 18: october 2020 7 subjects: arts and language. not every student wrote about these subjects. 56% of the students wrote about arts and 39% wrote about language. the following example mentions arts and language in the same utterance: ‘children learn a lot through stem activities. they learn language, practical artistic skills, and social competence’ [utt84]. figure 2. categorisation of the students' utterances in the written task. figure 2 shows the utterances’ distribution between the different categories. the detailed figures are in table 2 (see appendix). most of the stem-related utterances were about mathematics, followed by engineering and science. we found only four utterances about technology, and thiel, lundheim, hanssen, moe, vaz rebelo using self-made automata to teach stem in early childhood teacher education journal of learning development in higher education, issue 18: october 2020 8 these were very general, not directly related to the automata. the utterances about engineering, on the other hand, were mostly about the automata, how the automaton works, how it is constructed, or a more general description. within mathematics, the following topics were covered: shapes, measuring, basic methods like classification and comparing, space, and numbers. also, ten utterances were about maths in general without referring to specific content. most of the science was about physics, for example, force, energy, and power: when children use this mechanical toy, they will learn about physics. children will soon understand that if this toy shall catch something, one must apply a force. in physics, force is an influence on an object that can change the state of motion of an object. i do not think the children think about this much when they play with this toy, but i think most of them will understand that you must apply a force to make this toy work [utt313]. all the biology statements came from three students and were related to the automaton with the scissor-arm mechanism. 13 utterances were about general scientific methods, ideas, and principles. they did not mention specific physical or biological concepts. an example of a general scientific method is testing a hypothesis: before the race starts, you can talk with the children about who they think will win, then the children will gain experience in experimenting. they will make a hypothesis that means they will guess who they think will win the race. the hypothesis will be tested and either confirmed or refuted [utt330]. most of the pedagogical utterances were about methods. the most mentioned method was that of wondering: ‘we could have used the automaton when we wonder together with the children about the planet earth and space’ [utt191]. exploration was followed by experience and learning by doing. in the category ‘didactics’, we have collected other methods like teamwork, project work, and presentation. 19 thiel, lundheim, hanssen, moe, vaz rebelo using self-made automata to teach stem in early childhood teacher education journal of learning development in higher education, issue 18: october 2020 9 utterances were about motivation. the ecec student teachers reflected on children’s interest, curiosity, and desire to learn. they wrote that the activity is meaningful and enjoyable and that a self-made toy has an intrinsic value. another 19 utterances were about conditions. the students reflected on the preparation work, the time, and the tools that are needed as well as the children’s prior knowledge and fine motor skills. most utterances in this category, however, referred to the ecec curriculum. eight students reflected on applications. they described possibilities, variations, and their experiences when they made automata with children in the practical period. about half the students reflected on the children’s emotions and autonomy, and the teacher’s role in scaffolding children’s explorations. only three utterances from two students were about general pedagogical principles: ‘according to leontiev, an activity is meaningful when there is a match between the goal and the motive, as in play’ [utt238]. discussion the high scores in the two imi subscales show that all students enjoyed the activities and perceived the seminar as useful. in early childhood teacher education, it is important that prospective ecec teachers develop positive attitudes towards stem. teachers need positive attitudes to inspire the children to discover stem phenomena in nature (karp, 1991). this suggests that hands-on activities as proposed here help reach this goal under certain conditions. the activity should be closely related to what an ecec teacher actually can do with children and enough time should be given to complete the activity, including reflection-in-action, and reflection on possible applications and variations. the norwegian national curriculum for early childhood teacher education claims that prospective ecec teachers shall be able to explore nature, conduct experiments, and reflect together with children (norwegian university counsel for teacher education, 2018, p. 18). the students’ reflections have a strong focus on these methods. all students were aware of opportunities for teaching stem content in a participatory and inspiring way as well as the autostem project’s pedagogical possibilities and challenges. none of the students wrote about traditional teacher-led methods like explaining and demonstrating. furthermore, the curriculum demands that the students are able to choose and use thiel, lundheim, hanssen, moe, vaz rebelo using self-made automata to teach stem in early childhood teacher education journal of learning development in higher education, issue 18: october 2020 10 different materials, techniques, and tools in practical work with children and make use of local natural resources (norwegian university counsel for teacher education, 2018, p. 18). admittedly, most students chose the materials and techniques presented in the workshop, but their reflections show that they understood how to use these in practical work with children. according to one of the most imporant curriculum goals, students should be able to create an inclusive and varied play and learning environment for stem exploration and to guide, lead, and critically reflect on early stem teaching (norwegian university counsel for teacher education, 2018, p. 15). to reach this goal, the practical period (placement) was essential. one of the students expressed his experiences like this: i used the crocodile in the practical period. the children’s wonder and commitment was great. i guess it was not immediately obvious to the children how the mechanism made the crocodile close its mouth. i agree with broström and frøkjær (2016, p. 50) that children’s wonder and questions are a good foundation for learning. what makes the automaton operate in such a way? even for toddlers (one-year-olds) who do not have advanced verbal language skills, i see the value of exploration and wonder. besides, i think that the automata’s aesthetic expression plays an important role. i guess many children thought my ‘snapping crocodile’ was tough since it looked like a kind of crocodile monster that caught the children’s interest more easily than a grey pair of scissors would have done. this can motivate children to play with the toy, which can then help influence the inner motivation. broström and frøkjær (2016, p. 46) point out that children’s desire to learn is greater when they are intrinsically motivated. ‘the snapping crocodile’ is therefore in many ways a simple entrance ticket into the scientific world because it is based on principles that are not too complicated. at the same time, it provides many opportunities for the children to design it in creative ways. the possibilities are endless if competent and supportive teachers help and support the children in the creative process. limitations this is just a small-scale case study with an opportunity sample. we did not use a pre-test post-test design, and we did not have a control group. the presented seminar was only a thiel, lundheim, hanssen, moe, vaz rebelo using self-made automata to teach stem in early childhood teacher education journal of learning development in higher education, issue 18: october 2020 11 small part of a larger stem course including theoretical lectures as well as other hands-on activities. thus, we do not claim that our findings can be generalised or that the work with automata alone contributed to students’ learning. this case study aims to share our experiences with the object-based teaching approach that we have developed. it worked well with our students, but in different contexts, adaptations might be necessary. applications and future work this case study showed that using automata in ecec teacher education was perceived as interesting and useful by the students. their reflections showed that they learnt a lot about stem and the acquired skills that are needed to teach early stem in an engaging way. we are now working on the development of a free online course which will be available in several european languages. the aim is to equip ecec teachers with the tools to use automata construction for teaching basic stem skills and concepts as well as promoting motivation for stem. references broström, s. (2017) 'a dynamic learning concept in early years’ education: a possible way to prevent schoolification', international journal of early years education, 25(1), pp.3-15. broström, s. and frøkjær, t. (2016) realfag i barnehagen: barn og barnehagelærere undersøker naturens lovmessigheter [stem in kindergarten: children and early childhood teachers explore the laws of nature]. oslo: pedagogisk forum. chen, y.-l., huang, l.-f. and wu, p.-c. (2020) 'preservice preschool teachers’ selfefficacy in and need for stem education professional development: stem pedagogical belief as a mediator', early childhood education journal. availale at: doi: 10.1007/s10643-020-01055-3 (accessed: 12 august 2020). thiel, lundheim, hanssen, moe, vaz rebelo using self-made automata to teach stem in early childhood teacher education journal of learning development in higher education, issue 18: october 2020 12 chesloff, j. d. (2013) 'why stem education must start in early childhood', education week, 32(23), pp.27-32. deci, e. l., eghrari, h., patrick, b. c. and leone, d. r. (1994) 'facilitating internalization: the self-determination theory perspective', journal of personality, 62(1), pp.119142. dennick, r. (2015) 'theories of learning: constructive experience', in d. matheson (ed.) an introduction to the study of education. 4th edn. milton park: routledge, pp. 36-63. dewey, j. (1934) art as experience. new york: putnam. european schoolnet. (2018) 'science, technology, engineering and mathematics education policies in europe', scientix observatory report. brussels: european schoolnet. fenty, n. s. and anderson, e. m. (2014) 'examining educators’ knowledge, beliefs, and practices about using technology with young children', journal of early childhood teacher education, 35(2), pp.114-134. hardie, k. (2015) 'wow: the power of objects in object-based learning and teaching', innovative pedagogies series. available at: https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/system/files/kirsten_hardie_final.pdf (accessed: 12 august 2020). hedges, h. and cooper, m. (2018) 'relational play-based pedagogy: theorising a core practice in early childhood education', teachers and teaching, 24(4), pp.369-383. hilsdon, j. (2011) 'what is learning development', in p. hartley, j. hilsdon, c. keenan, s. sinfield and m. verity (eds.), learning development in higher education. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan, pp.13-27. thiel, lundheim, hanssen, moe, vaz rebelo using self-made automata to teach stem in early childhood teacher education journal of learning development in higher education, issue 18: october 2020 13 karp, k. s. (1991) 'elementary school teachers' attitudes toward mathematics: the impact on students' autonomous learning skills', school science and mathematics, 91(6), pp.265-270. kolb, d. a. (2015) experiential learning: experience as the source of learning and development. 2nd edn. upper saddle river, nj: rearson education. kukhareva, m., lawrence, a., koulle, k. and bhimani, n. (2019) 'special collections as a catalyst for flexible pedagogical approaches: three case studies', journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16, december, pp.1-24. norwegian ministry of education and research (2015) tett på realfag. nasjonal strategi for realfag i barnehagen og grunnopplæringen (2015–2019) [stem. national strategy for stem in kindergarten and primary school (2015-2019)], oslo: kunnskapsdepartementet. available at: https://www.regjeringen.no/contentassets/869faa81d1d740d297776740e67e3e65/k d_realfagsstrategi.pdf (accessed: 8 august 2020). norwegian university counsel for teacher education. (2018). nasjonale retningslinjer for barnehagelærerutdanning [national curriculum for early childhood teacher education]. available at: https://www.uhr.no/_f/p1/i8dd41933-bff1-433c-a82c2110165de29d/blu-nasjonale-retningslinjer-ferdig-godkjent.pdf (accessed: 23 september 2020). parette, h. p., quesenberry, a. c. and blum, c. (2010) 'missing the boat with technology usage in early childhood settings: a 21st century view of developmentally appropriate practice', early childhood education journal, 37(5), pp.335-343. park, m. h., dimitrov, d. m., patterson, l. g. and park, d. y. (2017) 'early childhood teachers' beliefs about readiness for teaching science, technology, engineering, and mathematics', journal of early childhood research, 15(3), pp.275-291. https://www.regjeringen.no/contentassets/869faa81d1d740d297776740e67e3e65/kd_realfagsstrategi.pdf https://www.regjeringen.no/contentassets/869faa81d1d740d297776740e67e3e65/kd_realfagsstrategi.pdf https://www.uhr.no/_f/p1/i8dd41933-bff1-433c-a82c-2110165de29d/blu-nasjonale-retningslinjer-ferdig-godkjent.pdf https://www.uhr.no/_f/p1/i8dd41933-bff1-433c-a82c-2110165de29d/blu-nasjonale-retningslinjer-ferdig-godkjent.pdf thiel, lundheim, hanssen, moe, vaz rebelo using self-made automata to teach stem in early childhood teacher education journal of learning development in higher education, issue 18: october 2020 14 queen maud university college (2019) bhfor3590 realfag i leik og læring. available at: https://studier.dmmh.no/nb/emne/bhfor3590/652 (accessed: 22 september 2020). rosicka, c. (2016) translating stem education research into practice. available at: https://research.acer.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1010&context=professional _dev (accessed: 10 july 2020). sanders, m. (2009) 'stem, stem education, stemmania', the technology teacher, 68(4), pp.20-26. schön, d. (1983) the reflective practitioner. new york: basic books. thiel, o., severina, e. and perry, b. (2020) 'reaping the benefits of reflexive research and practice in early childhood mathematics education', in o. thiel, e. severina and b. perry (eds.), mathematics in early childhood: research, reflexive practice and innovative pedagogy. london: routledge, pp. 189-202. thiel, o., vaz rebelo, p., bartoletti, c., kostova, n., josephson, j., moe, j. and lundheim, r. (2019) 'using automata to promote stem education in early childhood first results', early years: making it count: 29th eecera annual conference. aristotle university of thessaloniki, greece 20-23 august. available at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/336232714_using_automata_to_promote _stem_education_in_early_childhood_-_first_results (accessed: 10 july 2020). timur, b. (2012) 'determination of factors affecting preschool teacher candidates' attitudes towards science teaching', kuram ve uygulamada egitim bilimleri, 12, pp.29973009. tippett, c. d. and milford, t. m. (2017) 'findings from a pre-kindergarten classroom: making the case for stem in early childhood education', international journal of science and mathematics education, 15, pp.67-86. https://studier.dmmh.no/nb/emne/bhfor3590/652 https://research.acer.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1010&context=professional_dev https://research.acer.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1010&context=professional_dev https://www.researchgate.net/publication/336232714_using_automata_to_promote_stem_education_in_early_childhood_-_first_results https://www.researchgate.net/publication/336232714_using_automata_to_promote_stem_education_in_early_childhood_-_first_results thiel, lundheim, hanssen, moe, vaz rebelo using self-made automata to teach stem in early childhood teacher education journal of learning development in higher education, issue 18: october 2020 15 appendix table 1. means and standard deviation of the used items from the imi scales interest/enjoyment and perceived usefulness. item mean (sd) usefulness 1 i believe that this training could be of some value for me. 5.9 (.9) interest/enjoyment 1 i feel like i am enjoying the training while i am participating. 6.3 (.7) usefulness 2 i believe that this training is useful for working with stem in kindergarten and/or primary school. 6.3 (.7) interest/enjoyment 2 this training is fun to do. 6.4 (.6) usefulness 3 i think this training is important for my professional development. 5.3 (1.0) interest/enjoyment 3 i enjoy this training very much. 5.8 (.9) usefulness 4 i think this is an important training. 5.5 (.9) interest/enjoyment 4* i think this is a very boring training. 5.4 (.7) usefulness 5 it is possible that this training could improve my pedagogical practice. 5.4 (1.1) interest/enjoyment 5 i think this is a very interesting training. 5.8 (.9) thiel, lundheim, hanssen, moe, vaz rebelo using self-made automata to teach stem in early childhood teacher education journal of learning development in higher education, issue 18: october 2020 16 note: * this item was scaled in reverse; sd: standard deviation; n = 26 table 2. students' utterances by category. categories utterances utterances per student students and subcategories count per cent mean min max count per cent all 355 100 % 19,72 12 32 18 100 % stem 206 58 % 11,44 4 24 18 100 % maths 78 22 % 4,33 0 17 14 78 % shapes 39 11 % 2,17 0 8 11 61 % measuring 11 3 % 0,61 0 2 9 50 % maths 10 3 % 0,56 0 1 10 56 % basics 9 3 % 0,50 0 5 4 22 % space 6 2 % 0,33 0 6 1 6 % numbers 3 1 % 0,17 0 1 3 17 % engineering 67 19 % 3,72 1 7 18 100 % mechanism 38 11 % 2,11 0 5 17 94 % construction 19 5 % 1,06 0 3 14 78 % description 10 3 % 0,56 0 2 9 50 % science 57 16 % 3,17 0 9 16 89 % physics 41 12 % 2,28 0 5 15 83 % scientific 13 4 % 0,72 0 6 6 33 % biology 3 1 % 0,17 0 1 3 17 % technology 4 1 % 0,22 0 1 4 22 % pedagogy 128 36 % 7,11 3 18 18 100 % method 43 12 % 2,39 1 5 18 100 % wonder 11 3 % 0,61 0 1 11 61 % didactics 10 3 % 0,56 0 2 8 44 % exploration 9 3 % 0,50 0 1 9 50 % experience 8 2 % 0,44 0 3 5 28 % doing 5 1 % 0,28 0 2 3 17 % thiel, lundheim, hanssen, moe, vaz rebelo using self-made automata to teach stem in early childhood teacher education journal of learning development in higher education, issue 18: october 2020 17 categories utterances utterances per student students and subcategories count per cent mean min max count per cent motivation 19 5 % 1,06 0 4 9 50 % conditions 19 5 % 1,06 0 4 12 67 % application 13 4 % 0,72 0 3 8 44 % emotions 12 3 % 0,67 0 4 9 50 % autonomy 10 3 % 0,56 0 2 8 44 % teacher 9 3 % 0,50 0 1 8 44 % principles 3 1 % 0,17 0 2 2 11 % others 21 6 % 1,17 0 4 13 72 % arts 14 4 % 0,78 0 3 9 50 % language 7 2 % 0,39 0 1 7 39 % note: you will find a description of the categories in the text. author details oliver thiel is an associate professor in mathematics education at queen maud university college in trondheim, norway. he has taught early childhood mathematics education in germany and norway for over 20 years. his research interests are teachers’ attitudes and beliefs about mathematics and children’s mathematical competence. in the erasmus+ project autostem, he is responsible for the automata’s mathematical content and the development of the online teacher course. rolv lundheim is an associate professor in mathematics education at queen maud university college in trondheim, norway. his research interests are preventive health care and children’s understanding of concepts related to biology. he has more than 20 years of experience in teacher education. in the erasmus+ project autostem, he has mainly developed some of the automata, produced instructional videos, and contributed to the online course. thiel, lundheim, hanssen, moe, vaz rebelo using self-made automata to teach stem in early childhood teacher education journal of learning development in higher education, issue 18: october 2020 18 signe marie hanssen is a lecturer in mathematics education at queen maud university college in trondheim, norway. she has a master degree in engineering and early childhood education. she is especially interested in methods for student active learning concerning her own teaching practice. regarding early childhood mathematics, her focus is on education from the view of the children. jørgen moe is an associate professor in arts education at queen maud university college in trondheim, norway. as an artist, he has participated in many national and international exhibitions with his ceramic art. he has a special interest in mathematical art and arts as a mediator for learning. in the erasmus+ project autostem, he has developed some of the automata and is responsible for children’s creative learning processes. piedade vaz rebelo is an assistant professor and teacher educator at the faculty of psychology and educational sciences of the university of coimbra (fpceuc). she has expertise in teacher education, educational psychology, and science education. her phd research was developed in educational psychology, analysing the impact of family factors on adolescent school failure. she has researched the professional development of teachers, teaching and learning processes, particularly reflective and metacognitive processes and student questioning. she leads the erasmus+ project autostem. using self-made automata to teach stem in early childhood teacher education abstract introduction approach and implementation concrete experience reflective observation and abstract conceptualisation active experimentation method results enjoyment and perceived usefulness students’ reflections discussion limitations applications and future work references appendix author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special issue 22: compendium of innovative practice october 2021 ________________________________________________________________________ playful reflective thinking in a hyflex classroom: using nostalgic games to engage students nayiri keshishi university of surrey keywords: hyflex classroom; nostalgia, playful learning, reflective thinking; social constructivism; covid-19. the challenge amidst the ever-changing government guidelines in response to the covid-19 pandemic, universities have had to balance the safety of students and staff with attempting to maintain as much face-to-face teaching as possible. consequently, a specific challenge some learning developers will have faced is the hyflex classroom, a combination of students who are present in the physical classroom and those participating virtually (columbia university, 2021). while some institutions were operating in this way before the pandemic in order to offer students increased flexibility, i had not encountered this situation before when teaching the topic of reflection. as with any form of teaching, my aim was to ensure all students were engaged and able to actively participate in class. this was especially important as those joining virtually had not chosen that form of participation and were only doing so due to either testing positive for covid-19 or having to self-isolate. this contradicts some of the core values of the hyflex model, including learner choice (beatty, 2019). therefore, i wanted to achieve a consistent student experience in which one group of participants did not feel disadvantaged over the other. i knew this would require experimentation, particularly when it came to the use of technology and designing activities which provided equivalent learning outcomes. for the purposes of this compendium, i will focus on a reflective thinking activity designed for foundation year students. as part of their assessment, they were required to write a reflective journal discussing their personal and academic development. the intention was to support them in understanding the marking criteria and applying it to reflective writing keshishi playful reflective thinking in a hyflex classroom: using nostalgic games to engage students journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 2 examples. with some variations to the online version of the activity, i expected all students to be able to reflect, contribute ideas and interact with their peers. the response playful learning has increased in popularity and is often used as a mechanism for improving engagement and motivation (rivera and garden, 2021). the nature of play, with its fundamental socially negotiated aspects, pushes it into social constructivism (walsh, 2015). though typically associated with children’s education, it is a powerful method to integrate when providing students time in transitional learning spaces. it allows them to practise, apply and fully understand prior knowledge of key concepts; in this case reflective thinking (piaget, 1962; meyer and land, 2006). inspired by gillaspy (2020), i decided to experiment by incorporating a game built on origami fortune tellers. those physically present were divided into pairs, given time to familiarise themselves with the marking criteria and read three reflective writing examples. paper fortune teller templates were then shared (figure 1), and students were given instructions on how to make, operate and play with the device. the hidden questions, revealed at the end of each round, linked to the reflective writing examples and used the same language as the marking criteria. students were encouraged to discuss their answers, using the criteria to justify any comments or grades, where applicable. keshishi playful reflective thinking in a hyflex classroom: using nostalgic games to engage students journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 3 figure 1. fortune teller template used for reflective thinking activity. for students joining virtually, i enabled zoom breakout rooms and chose to substitute the fortune teller with an online spinner created on picker wheel (2020). this mitigated issues of accessibility, such as access to a printer, and would still allow online students to playfully participate. it is also a practical way to deliver the activity fully online, if necessary. the explicit playful elements of these games helped achieve a psychological acceptance of play, or ‘lusory attitude’ (suits, 2005). as many of the students had encountered them before, it also brought a sense of childhood nostalgia to the classroom. this feeling of excitement and human connection is an important part of encouraging a playful environment. this is vital for a learning space — physical and/or virtual — to appear truly playful and for the activities to become meaningful (nørgård et al., 2017). in playing with reflective thinking, students were empowered in the process of constructing knowledge and applying it to the discussion of the reflective writing examples and later to their assessment (rice, 2009). despite the understandable limitations of anecdotal feedback, in-class comments and online chat responses revealed all participants enjoyed and connected with the activity. they felt it helped improve their reflective thinking/writing, keshishi playful reflective thinking in a hyflex classroom: using nostalgic games to engage students journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 4 especially in relation to satisfying the marking criteria. however, some virtual students also observed that it was difficult to create and maintain a dynamic dialogue with the physical classroom. recommendations while there are still lessons to learn, this experience has highlighted viable ways of moving forward: 1) plan allocate time for setting-up, engaging with both groups of students and providing clear instructions. for example, make sure you have written and visual guides on how to make the fortune teller, use the online spinner and play. take time to also familiarise yourself with classroom technology, such as projectors, microphones, online breakout rooms and screen sharing. 2) pedagogy design learning activities that promote active and playful learning. use tools, like learning outcomes, to put agency in the hands of participants through structural invitations to play. this helps create a sense of belonging amongst students and builds an expectation that play is ‘acceptable’. it also eases people into play by inviting and not forcing it (walsh, 2015). 3) engage provide guidelines on what technology features will be used and the options virtual students have to participate. make materials such as slides, templates and links accessible on your vle beforehand. this helps to minimise confusion and saves time (bower et al., 2014). on reflection, i would incorporate discussion boards/collaborative documents to improve dialogue between physical and virtual students. 4) support ideally, you would have two facilitators in the classroom, one to monitor the chat and address online questions and/or share contributions in real time. however, in the more likely scenario that you are teaching alone, consider asking physically present students to take on the role of chat monitor. in conclusion, though we do not know if hyflex classrooms will feature at our institutions in the future, it is always worth considering how we can leverage technology and adjust our teaching to be more inclusive, engaging and playful. keshishi playful reflective thinking in a hyflex classroom: using nostalgic games to engage students journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 5 references beatty, b. j. (2019) hybrid-flexible course design. available at: https://edtechbooks.org/pdfs/mobile/hyflex/_hyflex.pdf (accessed: 26 may 2021). bower, m., kenney, j., dalgarno, b., lee, m.j.w. and kennedy, g.e. (2014) ‘patterns and principles for blended synchronous learning: engaging remote and face-to-face learners in rich-media real-time collaborative activities’. australasian journal of educational technology. 30(3), pp.261–272. available at: https://doi.org/10.14742/ajet.1697 (accessed: 22 july 2021). columbia university (2021) hybrid/hyflex teaching & learning. available at: https://ctl.columbia.edu/resources-and-technology/teaching-withtechnology/teaching-online/hyflex/ (accessed: 25 may 2021). gillaspy, e. (2020) make along live: experimenting with playful learning online. available at: https://creativehecommunity.wordpress.com/2020/07/28/make-along-live/ (accessed 24 november 2020). meyer, j. and land, r. (2006) overcoming barriers to student understanding: threshold concepts and troublesome knowledge. florence: routledge. nørgård, r.t., toft-nielsen, c. and whitton, n. (2017) ‘playful learning in higher education: developing a signature pedagogy’. international journal of play. 6(3), pp.272–282. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/21594937.2017.1382997 (accessed: 2 august 2021). piaget, j. (1962) play, dreams, and imitation in childhood. new york: ww norton. picker wheel (2020) available at: https://pickerwheel.com/ (accessed: 24 november 2020). https://edtechbooks.org/pdfs/mobile/hyflex/_hyflex.pdf https://doi.org/10.14742/ajet.1697 https://ctl.columbia.edu/resources-and-technology/teaching-with-technology/teaching-online/hyflex/ https://ctl.columbia.edu/resources-and-technology/teaching-with-technology/teaching-online/hyflex/ https://creativehecommunity.wordpress.com/2020/07/28/make-along-live/ https://doi.org/10.1080/21594937.2017.1382997 https://pickerwheel.com/ keshishi playful reflective thinking in a hyflex classroom: using nostalgic games to engage students journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 6 rice, l. (2009) ‘playful learning’. the journal for education in the built environment. 4(2), pp.94–108. available at: https://doi.org/10.11120/jebe.2009.04020094 (accessed: 2 august 2021). rivera, e.s. and garden, c.l.p. (2021) ‘gamification for student engagement: a framework’. journal of further and higher education. pp.1–14. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/0309877x.2021.1875201 (accessed: 2 august 2021). suits, b. (2005) the grasshopper: games, life and utopia. toronto: broadview press. walsh, a. (2015) ‘playful information literacy: play and information literacy in higher education’. nordic journal of information literacy in higher education. 7(1), pp.80– 94. available at: https://doi.org/10.15845/noril.v7i1.223 (accessed: 2 august 2021). author details nayiri keshishi is a teaching fellow (learning development) at the university of surrey. she has over seven years’ experience in the design, development and delivery of engaging learning programmes and is currently teaching on the foundation year for both psychology and social science. she has an msc in occupational and business psychology and is also an associate fellow of the higher education academy. https://doi.org/10.11120/jebe.2009.04020094 https://doi.org/10.1080/0309877x.2021.1875201 https://doi.org/10.15845/noril.v7i1.223 playful reflective thinking in a hyflex classroom: using nostalgic games to engage students the challenge the response recommendations references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special issue 22: compendium of innovative practice october 2021 ________________________________________________________________________ community-building through collaborative peer-generated formative assessment: enhancing attainment and assessment literacy emma roberts university of chester, uk keywords: peer assessment; community; collaboration; co-creation; formative; covid-19. the challenge learning under covid-19 conditions, with much of the teaching occurring online, increased student time online. this had the positive effect of creating an active learning community for a frontloaded, intense six-week undergraduate law module. a downside to this, however, was that greater time spent on the virtual learning platform fundamentally altered the way online resources were used by the students, essentially increasing their engagement with such resources, thus exhausting their value far sooner. this paper describes the initiative designed to overcome the challenge posed by changes in student study behaviour in respect of a multiple-choice test (mct) assessment. to help prepare students on a core first-year undergraduate law module for the summative mct assessment, a formative mct was introduced on the module’s virtual learning environment on a weekly-release basis. the mct assessed the students’ knowledge of the foundations of the legal system. formative assessment took on greater importance given the intense delivery schedule, since the module introduced students to their first university assessment (şenel and şenel, 2021). as students grew more accustomed to balancing their time across all the module’s learning activities, the number of questions set increased and all questions were amalgamated to create a time-limited replica of the summative assessment by the penultimate week of the module’s delivery. very engaged students would retake the formative assessment several times. by the end of the module’s penultimate week, learners were engaging with the tool but, by the third formative attempt, few questions were being answered incorrectly. the tool was proving its roberts community-building through collaborative peer-generated formative assessment: enhancing attainment and assessment literacy journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 2 value in generating learning gain and in familiarising the students with the digital skills needed to engage with the tool that was to be used for the summative assessment. its value in testing knowledge, however, had (for some) plateaued. students evidently felt the value of the formative assessment tool was limited by the fact that they were simply being re-presented with the same questions that they had already responded to during the module’s delivery (mccallum and milner, 2021). when learning had primarily been classroom-based, the use of the formative mct tool was predominantly used during classroom teaching when prompted by the instructor. however, adopting blended learning meant greater use of this online resource which highlighted some of its limitations. the closed nature of the resource meant more students experienced a plateau and it was felt that students would benefit from greater exposure to formative assessment. to achieve this end, more questions would need to be designed but staff lacked time to do so, given the intense delivery of the module’s teaching: this further compounded the challenge. the response students were offered an opportunity to create a bank of multiple-choice questions. by this point in the module’s delivery, the group had created a strong learning community. they were demonstrating strong team-working ability through peer-support and social presence (peacock et al., 2020), interacting daily on the chat thread, resolving uncertainties and sharing knowledge. inspired by the students’ enthusiasm for learning and seeking to capitalise and extend upon the strong community spirit, offering this opportunity helped formalise their peer-to-peer support, whilst at the same time providing individuals an opportunity to test their own knowledge and understanding of the assessment material by engaging in assessment-creation. students were asked to devise a question and produce four possible answers. this initiative was facilitated by a shared spreadsheet document. students’ understanding of the necessary format had been established through their use of the existing formative quiz tool. students were asked to contribute by the end of the week, so that the instructor could moderate the submissions for accuracy and produce a finished tool to replicate the existing formative assessment. participation was entirely optional and the ultimate product roberts community-building through collaborative peer-generated formative assessment: enhancing attainment and assessment literacy journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 3 of this exercise was accessible by the entire cohort. not all students were at the stage of seeking out further formative assessment as the self-paced nature of some of the module’s delivery meant that some students had not yet attempted the existing formative assessment tool. the community-driven project stimulated immediate enthusiasm across the group. the time limitation may have prevented some from contributing but 43% (n=47) of the cohort took up the opportunity. with a total cohort of 110 students and the number of attempts on the peer-generated assessment tool totalling 137, a significant proportion, if not all, students used it and many used it more than once. the tool not only replicated the benefit of the existing formative assessment tool across a greater range of subject areas, but it also supported learning (sekendiz, 2018) and further enhanced the module’s learning community, which prepared students well for teamworking and peer-to-peer learning and assessment in their subsequent modules (hogg, 2018). the initiative aligned with the instructor’s social constructivist ethos (vygotsky, 1978), at the core of which is the principle that students have as much as the instructor to contribute to one another’s learning, and the belief that students need to be empowered to take responsibility for their own learning (boud, cohen and sampson, 1999). 17% (n=18) of the cohort engaged in an enhanced evaluation of the module’s provision, wherein students spoke strongly of the module’s capacity to prepare them for future learning opportunities (see figure 1). figure 1. enhanced module evaluation survey results. the summative assessment yielded a 100% pass rate with marks ranging from 42% to 97% and an average mark of 78%. evaluation statement percentage of students who agreed or strongly agreed with the statement the module prepared us well for learning from peers within the virtual learning community 78% the module prepared us suitably for the mct 89% everyone stood a fair chance of performing well on the test 94% i would like to see more of this form of assessment preparation and method of assessment on other modules 94% roberts community-building through collaborative peer-generated formative assessment: enhancing attainment and assessment literacy journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 4 recommendations students are assessment-driven (rust, 2005) and formative assessment opportunities increase confidence levels ahead of summative assessment opportunities (leenknecht et al., 2021). peer-generated assessments foster strong community-building across a cohort (boud, cohen and sampson, 1999) which can enhance student preparedness for future learning opportunities and attainment. this initiative enhanced the students’ assessment literacy by engaging them in the design of the assessment, meaning they worked through the same considerations as the instructor did in creating formative assessment. moreover, working together to create an assessment tool helped create a strong online learning community (peacock et al., 2020), whereby their investment of time and effort into the task of creating a bank of questions benefitted the cohort as a whole. this model can be implemented on other modules by seeking out opportunities for students to engage in assessment design and to test their own ability to reach the module’s learning outcomes by replicating the module’s summative assessment. allowing unlimited attempts on formative assessment built the students’ resilience to the constraints of time and task management. furthermore, students actively reflected upon and shared their reflections on the assessment process with one another and with the instructor on an online learning platform, thus, safeguarding assessment for learning and allowing the instructor insight into ways in which the tool could be further developed. references boud, d., cohen, r. and sampson, j. (1999) ‘peer learning and assessment’, assessment & evaluation in higher education, 24(4), pp.413-426. https://doi.org/10.1080/0260293990240405. hogg, l. m. (2018) ‘empowering students through peer assessment: interrogating complexities and challenges’, reflective practice, 19(3), pp.308-321. https://doi.org/10.1080/14623943.2018.1437404. https://doi.org/10.1080/0260293990240405 https://doi.org/10.1080/14623943.2018.1437404 roberts community-building through collaborative peer-generated formative assessment: enhancing attainment and assessment literacy journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 5 leenknecht, m., wijnia, l., köhlen, m., fryer, l., rikers, r. and loyens, s. (2021) ‘formative assessment as practice: the role of students’ motivation’, assessment & evaluation in higher education, 46(2), pp.236-255. https://doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2020.1765228. mccallum, s. and milner, m. m. (2021) ‘the effectiveness of formative assessment: student views and staff reflections’, assessment & evaluation in higher education, 46(1), pp.1-16. https://doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2020.1754761. peacock, s., cowan, j., irvine, l. and williams, j. (2020) ‘an exploration into the importance of a sense of belonging for online learners’, the international review of research in open and distributed learning, 21(2), pp.18-35. https://doi.org/10.19173/irrodl.v20i5.4539. rust, c. (2005) ‘developing a variety of assessment methods’, in quality assurance agency for higher education, 2005, reflections on assessment. vol. 1. mansfield: quality assurance agency for higher education, enhancement themes publications, pp. 179–186. available at: https://www.enhancementthemes.ac.uk/docs/ethemes/assessment/reflections-onassessment-volume-i.pdf (accessed: 30 september 2021). sekendiz, b. (2018) ‘utilisation of formative peer-assessment in distance online education: a case study of a multi-model sport management unit’, interactive learning environments, 26(5), pp.682-694. https://doi.org/10.1080/10494820.2017.1396229. şenel, s. and şenel, h. c. (2021) ‘remote assessment in higher education during covid19 pandemic’, international journal of assessment tools in education, pp.181-199. https://doi.org/10.21449/ijate.820140. vygotsky, l. s. (1978) mind in society: the development of higher psychological processes. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. author details https://doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2020.1765228 https://doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2020.1754761 https://doi.org/10.19173/irrodl.v20i5.4539 https://www.enhancementthemes.ac.uk/docs/ethemes/assessment/reflections-on-assessment-volume-i.pdf https://www.enhancementthemes.ac.uk/docs/ethemes/assessment/reflections-on-assessment-volume-i.pdf https://doi.org/10.1080/10494820.2017.1396229 https://doi.org/10.21449/ijate.820140 roberts community-building through collaborative peer-generated formative assessment: enhancing attainment and assessment literacy journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 6 emma roberts is an associate professor in legal studies and director of transition, learning and teaching at the university of chester’s law school. she has led on numerous projects relating to assessment and feedback. most recently, she undertook empirical research into moderation and standardisation praxis in the context of undergraduate law programmes. she is a senior fellow of the higher education academy, is an invited speaker at institutions which run senior fellow programmes and a mentor to applicants pursuing this end. she is also an active researcher in private international law, the subject of her phd. community-building through collaborative peer-generated formative assessment: enhancing attainment and assessment literacy the challenge the response recommendations references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special issue 22: compendium of innovative practice october 2021 ________________________________________________________________________ just-in-time, low-tech pandemic cpd using short screencast videos virna rossi ravensbourne university london, uk keywords: screencast; cpd; udl; covid-19. the challenge when the pandemic started, suddenly our previous staff development provision (for instance the pgcert) did not seem that relevant. we needed to provide on-demand – indeed, just-in-time – cpd for the job at hand: the sudden switch to digital teaching and learning. in our case, our very identity as a making art and design university was at stake: studio spaces and materiality are at the core of who we are and how we prompt learning – this is very hard to replicate online. finding out what was needed was the first challenge. i set up a shared google doc asking all staff to offer ‘hot’ pedagogical questions. as i compiled the list of questions and found common threads, i realised that most of them were in fact ‘threshold concepts’ regarding online teaching (land et al., 2018). this meant that they would resonate with a wide variety of colleagues and would cover some of the points where many teachers get stuck when new to online teaching. another challenge was the way those questions should – and could – be addressed when everything was on fire professionally speaking. i was aware there would be issues of access and accessibility, for staff as well as for students. i wanted to produce a set of resources that would directly respond to staff’s hot pedagogical questions and would also model the approach being discussed. the response rossi just-in-time, low-tech pandemic cpd using short screencast videos journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 2 i needed a fast and efficient response. although i could have organised online meetings, written blogs, or created one-pagers, i was looking for a more personal way to reach all staff without forcing them to connect ‘live’. i also wanted to show my face, share a smile, and use a supportive tone of voice. so, on the basis of colleagues’ suggested questions, i set out to very quickly produce a series of five minute screencast videos called ‘fast switch to e-learning’ (i think i would use ‘digital learning’ now). i wanted to talk about practice more than theory but at the same time use the outcome of research-informed current best practice(s). inclusivity and emotional intelligence (mortiboys, 2005) were my main drivers. in both content and mode of delivery, i was determined to promote universal design for learning (udl) principles and practices (lieberman, lytle and clarcq, 2008). to supplement the short asynchronous videos (see table 1), i also organised a few longer, collaborative live webinars on 'a menu of practical lesson activities in e-learning mode', and presented activities for lesson starters, main activities, and lesson closures. table 1. screencast video series ‘fast switch to e-learning’. 1. introduction about the series the basics 2. where do i start from, when switching to e-learning? 3. how do i support students’ emotional wellbeing at this time? 4. how do i set up students for e-learning? it tools 5. which platform should i use for video-conferencing? 6. how do i up my it capabilities to cope with e-learning? adapting teaching and assessment 7. how do i adapt my teaching to e-learning? 8. how do i adapt my assessment to e-learning? 9. how do i prevent plagiarism in e-learning? vle rossi just-in-time, low-tech pandemic cpd using short screencast videos journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 3 10. how do i set up my vle space to support the switch to e-learning? 11. how do i support students’ academic skills development in e-learning mode? e-learning activities 12. what would be good ‘week 1’ activities to start the unit? 13. how can students work in groups and share work in real time? 14. what best practice in feedback can i embed in e-learning? i deliberately chose to take a low-tech approach. in order to produce something which would resonate, reassure, and inspire teachers, within a tight timeframe, i decided that at a time when many were hailing ‘technocracy’ to sort out the new challenges of remote education, i was going to go against the grain and use a low-tech approach. using my kids’ felt tips, i hand-drew mind maps which i then discussed in the short screencast videos. the mind maps guided my video discussion and served as user-friendly onepagers. this provided dual-code access to the resources, which supported various types of colleagues, hence providing a model of udl principles in practice (novac and bracken, 2019). the talking head on the side (myself) helped articulate the ideas and slightly expand on them. this approach was welcomed and resonated with many colleagues. the videos are hosted on my website and have been added to several university teaching and learning platforms. they have also been translated into arabic and swedish and hosted on global websites. the webinars were attended live by nearly 300 colleagues and have been watched by over 1000 viewers each. some colleagues printed the mind-maps to hang around their workspace as reminders. one colleague wrote that she found the videos not only relevant and supportive, but also reassuring because of the way the ideas were presented: she felt there was a human touch due to the talking head over a hand-drawn diagram. my low-tech, dual code approach made her feel that she could also do it, at that difficult time. it was evident that the videos promoted a humanitarian view of education both in the medium and in the content itself. rossi just-in-time, low-tech pandemic cpd using short screencast videos journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 4 recommendations it is imperative to find out from colleagues what their actual cpd needs are. going forward, i have embedded this approach in our wider cpd offer: colleagues articulate their own outcomes at the start of the course, which helps me tailor the course to their needs and gives colleagues agency. it is crucial to ‘walk the walk’ by producing materials which are dual-code, if at all possible, based on udl principles, and emotionally supportive. for example we can make videos with their script, or videos and infographics, or written text with accompanying audio files. providing just in time cpd can be taxing. making the videos was both practically and cognitively challenging. practically, my kids’ felt tips were the wrong hue and started fading. i had to set up a corner of the living room as my recording corner but had no curtains to reduce glare. at times i had to video myself three or four times as i was talking too much and the video was too long; i recorded one of the videos at 2am, as i was determined to release it that day. cognitively, in spite of the time-pressure, i had to ensure i was up to date on current best practice(s) for each question i was addressing, so i spent hours reading and researching for each five-minute video. of course, the intensity at which many of us worked (and overworked) at the start of the pandemic is not healthy and cannot (indeed should not) be sustained long-term. however, my own professional resilience did not happen in a vacuum, but within our collective professional resilience. i asked and received lots of support from many colleagues such as the seda list, twitter, educational chats, and other networks. they provided ideas, feedback, and commendation. while making and disseminating the videos i forged many fruitful professional relationships, which are still going and growing. hence, my final recommendation is: seek support when embarking on a new professional project, it will be both more rewarding and it will result in a distributed effort. references land, r., cousin, g., meyer, j. and davies, p. (2018) 'threshold concepts and troublesome knowledge (3): implications for course design and evaluation', in rust, rossi just-in-time, low-tech pandemic cpd using short screencast videos journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 5 c. (ed.) improving student learning: diversity and inclusivity. oxford: ocsld, pp.53–64. lieberman, l., lytle, r. and clarcq, j. a. (2008) ‘getting it right from the start’, journal of physical education, recreation & dance, 79(2), pp.32-39. https://doi.org/10.1080/07303084.2008.10598132. mortiboys, a. (2005) teaching with emotional intelligence: a step by step guide for further and higher educational professionals. 2nd edn. london: routledge. novac, k. and bracken, s. (2019) ‘introduction: universal design for learning, a global framework for realizing inclusive practice in higher education’, in bracken, s. and novac, k (eds.) transforming higher education through universal design for learning. oxon: routledge, pp.1-8. author details virna rossi is a passionate teacher educator, with 23 years teaching experience in all sectors. since 2016 she has lead the pgcert at ravensbourne university london. she is particularly interested in inclusivity. she is co-creating a book on inclusive learning design with over 80 contributors from all the continents. her motto is 'learn to thrive'. https://doi.org/10.1080/07303084.2008.10598132 just-in-time, low-tech pandemic cpd using short screencast videos the challenge the response recommendations references author details article journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 14: april 2019 ________________________________________________________________________ editorial john hilsdon university of plymouth, uk alicja syska university of plymouth, uk christopher drew teesside university, uk sue eccles bournemouth university, uk andy hagyard university of leeds, uk christina howell-richardson birkbeck, university of london, uk craig morley university of chester, uk gita sedghi university of liverpool, uk we are delighted to announce that this volume of the journal of learning development in higher education marks ten years of the journal’s existence. since its first edition, published in 2009, the journal has seen steady growth and is currently looking to implement new and innovative practices that reflect the exciting developments in the ld community and field of practice, and to broaden our approach beyond the uk. the idea to establish a peer-reviewed academic journal that would host and promote the research of learning developers has its origins in discussions among members of the learning development in higher education network (ldhen) since 2003. a firm intention was announced following setting up of the association for learning development in higher education (aldinhe) in 2007, when an embryonic editorial group began undertaking foundational work for the journal. this was met with considerable enthusiasm from the community and resulted in a steady flow of submissions and offers to review. since 2009, we have published 223 pieces, including 122 papers, 56 case studies, 23 opinion pieces, 7 other articles, and 15 book reviews on a range of topics relevant to ld. we have had contributions from 450 authors representing both long-established members of the ld editorial journal of learning development in higher education, issue 14: april 2019 2 community and new aspiring researchers who have made their name by publishing their work with us. over the years, through the efforts of 18 editors and 13 guest editors, we have published twenty issues of jldhe, including five special editions (on pdp, writing in stem, digital technologies, and peer learning) as well as one representing inspiring work presented at the aldinhe 2018 conference. from now on there will be an annual conference edition of the jldhe. the various papers, case studies, opinion pieces and editorials we have published represent significant practice in defining, analysing and evaluating the ld field, tracing its boundaries, framing and reframing models for practice and reflecting the hybrid, liquid, and contested nature of both ld roles and the discipline itself. we have worked through times of change and paradigm shifts, both cultural and technological, political and institutional, always championing the ld commitment to look at higher education from students’ perspectives and to share good practice. over the years, the journal’s existence has contributed to a significant identity shift among learning developers, from the selfperceived ‘sense of being disempowered, isolated and unheard’ we had reflected on in issue 1 (hilsdon, 2009), to a sense of being a true community of practitioners who support and empower each other in order to forge a stronger ld voice and identity. considering the strength of current scholarship in learning development, we have many reasons to go forward with a sense of optimism and feel confident to try new bold initiatives that will reinvigorate well-established practices. one such initiative is our new way to allocate peer reviewers for submissions to the journal. to create a more dynamic and community-focussed approach, from now on, we will email relevant jiscmail lists (ldhen, seda, eataw) periodically to seek offers from subscribers to act as peer reviewers for specific papers. this will not replace the existing system but will, we hope, improve responsiveness, act to bring in 'new blood', and better inform our communities about the kinds of topics being considered for publication in the jldhe. as this issue is being released, we are also working on our forthcoming ‘academic literacies’ special edition, which is a new and thrilling collaboration by the global forum for english for academic purposes professionals (baleap) and the association for learning development in higher education (aldinhe), to be published in november 2019, with manuscript submissions due on 31 may 2019. this special issue, featuring an introductory article by ursula wingate, will mark twenty years since the publication of mary editorial journal of learning development in higher education, issue 14: april 2019 3 lea and brian street’s seminal paper entitled ‘student writing in higher education: an academic literacies approach’ and aims to stimulate new interest in this still-neglected approach to the development of teaching and learning for the needs of contemporary higher education. the lead editor role was shared by john hilsdon and andy hagyard from 2009 onwards, with other colleagues joining from 2012. lucy rai then took on the lead role from 2016 to 2018. following the appointment of four new editors last year, it was decided to give the role of lead editor a more collaborative character to reflect the complementary creative strengths of our editorial board. to that end, alicja syska of the university of plymouth has now taken the role of co-lead editor and will share principal editorial duties with john. we believe this will further help to steer the journal and continue its successful journey. we acknowledge the hard work of all our editorial board members and copy-editors who have made this issue possible. we also want to express our sincere thanks to the reviewers – an often unsung but vital role – who generously volunteered their time to offer opinions on the articles included in this volume. we are no less grateful to the authors who contributed to this issue and whose willingness to share ideas and best practices ensures the continued success of this journal. lastly, we thank our readers for visiting us online and supporting the work of the journal. we hope you will celebrate with us on our tenth anniversary as we look forward to an exciting future. ********* issue 14 brings together a collection of four papers, discussing ld practices in contexts including the uk, canada and sweden, three case studies, and a book review. the varied perspectives offered provide a range of interesting insights and contributions to the scholarship of learning development. in their autoethnographic study designed to report on the impact that working with student paraprofessionals has had on their learning development practice, jenna olender and michael lisetto-smith of wilfrid laurier university in canada reveal some innovative institutional attempts to increase diversity in peer-to-peer education. the paper examines a canadian university’s response to the government-driven increase in learning development programming to ensure equity and provide effective support for noneditorial journal of learning development in higher education, issue 14: april 2019 4 traditional students. this response included enlisting what the authors call ‘paraprofessional student staff’, meaning trained student employees (who better reflect the existing student diversity) working alongside learning developers to help create a more inclusive, supportive, and welcoming environment for the university’s diverse student body. ultimately, the authors hope to promote autoethnography as a way of interrogating learning development practice with the aim of fostering inclusive environments and avoiding being ‘complicit in reinforcing systems of oppression within higher education’. emily mcintosh and mary barden explore the creation and implementation of the leap (learning excellence achievement pathway) framework at the university of bolton. the paper discusses how leap was designed by auditing and collating ld support across the institution into a single visual, and visible, framework. the authors further outline how this framework enabled closer alignment between curricular and co-curricular student engagement activities, and deeper embedding into the academic curricula. finally, mcintosh and barden outline the positive impact the initiative had on the perception and awareness of ld across their institution. catherine hayes and john anthony fulton give an insight into the implementation of peer assisted student support (pass) and supplemental instruction (si) programme in which postgraduate phd students deliver the scheme to cohorts of msc students. the focus of the study is to explore the potential benefits for both phd students as facilitators and msc student recipients. the phd students’ academic ability and their capacity to articulate key concepts were two areas highlighted in this study. in addition, msc students felt that the intervention prevented feelings of social isolation during the period of their independent learning time. the authors also address the issues to be considered in relation to the wider scaling of this project. eva hansson and jeanette sjöberg of halmstad university, sweden, present a case for greater understanding of students’ digital habits on and off campus in order to better integrate their existing cyber behaviours with the goals of higher education. based on their experience with students enrolled in teacher training programmes, the authors demonstrate how students’ experience in higher education both contributes to developing their digital skills and is shaped by their digital habits. hansson and sjöberg hope to inspire learning development practitioners to reframe the discussion about technology as a ‘positive tool in learning’ by giving greater consideration to students’ existing knowledge editorial journal of learning development in higher education, issue 14: april 2019 5 and experience of digital technology and seeing their digital habits as an asset in higher education. in their case study, ‘unrolling the text: using scrolls to facilitate academic reading’, sandra abegglen, tom burns, david middlebrook and sandra sinfield describe their use of an innovative approach to reading that has been pioneered by middlebrook. suggesting that academics reproduce texts, or extracts of text, in the form of scrolls that can be displayed on large surfaces such as walls may sound unusual but its potential for promoting a collaborative, dialogic approach will be of interest to many. the current re-emergence of attention to academic reading and the argument that this area has been less well-explored by ld than other academic practices, is sure to augment the value of this case study for our readers. in another case study, ‘walking the path of desire’, michelle crowther describes methods used to evaluate a series of study skills workshops and online learning materials created for a cohort of undergraduate students in response to feedback that they had struggled to relate the workshops to their assignment, which was a portfolio of critical reflections. the librarians and academic learning developers who delivered the module evaluated the teaching materials to identify whether online content could improve learning outcomes or whether the workshops and printed sources were more valuable for skills’ development. four routes of engagement were identified and assessed: attendance, accesses of digital lecture capture, evidence of the use of library resources, and the use of the vle. an effective path was defined as one in which the student attained some measure of success in achieving the learning outcomes of the module, as evidenced through their assessed work. the author concludes that blended learning fulfils the needs of a diverse cohort; however, attendance is still the key to success for most students. john stoszkowski and liam mccarthy explore undergraduate students’ perceptions of the learner attributes required for heutagogical learning at two different uk institutions. two final year cohorts, studying an optional module, used collaborative online group blogs to share and discuss relevant resources, as well as their ongoing self-determined learning and practical experiences. each student’s module grade was based on the quality and quantity of their perception in their group blog. module tutors’ role was that of a facilitator as opposed to a provider of content. the study shows that educators need to carefully consider the timescale and intrapersonal background of their students and the existing editorial journal of learning development in higher education, issue 14: april 2019 6 knowledge in order to facilitate effective heutagogical learning. in addition, there is a need for the carefully staged introduction of such approaches over time. the final item in this edition is a review of the book academic success: a student’s guide to studying at university (brick, wilson, wong and herke, 2019) by karen hudson. a significant factor that makes this book attractive is its focus on the needs and perspectives of international students in english-speaking he contexts, and those for whom english may not be a first language. hudson rates the book highly and offers a helpful critical overview which will be valuable to those considering whether to order this text for themselves or their institution, or to recommend it to their students. journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special issue 22: compendium of innovative practice october 2021 ________________________________________________________________________ digital capabilities: from niche to normal andy white cumbria university amanda chapman cumbria university isabel lucas cumbria university keywords: digital transformation; staff development; covid -19. the challenge although a digital capabilities strand, based on the jisc digital capabilities framework (jisc, 2015), had recently been started at the university, many staff had not engaged with the digital agenda and did not have sufficient skills to move their practice online at the point of lockdown. the vast majority of university business was campus-based, with only three pure distance learning degrees out of 330 taught degrees. the jisc framework highlights the skills needed to help staff flourish in a digital environment; however, given the rural nature of our campuses and the lack of success in engaging tutors with distance/online learning, we experienced additional challenges involving connectivity and digital resistance. the overall aim of the project was to digitally-enable staff without overwhelming them by prescribing a core set of technology, along with a set of guiding principles and minimum standards for their use. taking this approach, the result expected was that more digitally resistant staff would have a realistic baseline to work with which could be readily supported by the academic development centre and which would provide a good student experience. for more digitally confident tutors, we hoped it would provide space and support to develop their digital practice beyond the minimum expectations. white, chapman and lucas digital capabilities: from niche to normal journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 2 the response at the academic development centre we moved quickly in march 2020, developing clear expectations for blended learning as our first step and producing a guiding principles and expectations document with suggestions, tips, checklists for teams, and student facing templates (e.g., module learning plan template that made clear what was a/synchronous, expected hours of learning per activity etc). our initial rationale was to keep things simple to not overwhelm. online tools, such as blackboard and pebblepad, had been used to support delivery on, and between, campuses for a number of years, however it was clear some staff felt the need to use a wide range of ‘digital tricks’ to make up for the perceived deficit of online learning. the second step was to streamline the technology options for tutors to ensure that the students had consistency of experience and that tutors could develop their online teaching rather than worry about the ‘right’ technology. a new online classroom platform, collaborate, was purchased from our existing vle provider so some familiarity with the technology was embedded. cpd activity was accelerated with a 220% increase in attendance in the four months of march – june. further, the annual teaching and learning conference drew on tutors with previous online teaching and/or learning experience to share their approaches and motivate colleagues. this was the necessary third step to support understanding of expectations. the cpd we offered had a 3-fold approach: how to use the new live classroom, how to develop pre-recorded material, and how to engage students in this new online world. recommendations the success of this institutional shift hinges on what is retained and carried forward: the digital transformation maturity (marks et al., 2021). some practices have improved during the pandemic and we recognise the need to ensure that staff make continued use of their digital expertise and confidence going forward. white, chapman and lucas digital capabilities: from niche to normal journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 3 among many successes this had led to the vast majority of tutors stating that their confidence in their own digital-based activities to support different learning outcomes has increased by 25 percentage points in the space of a year. the same group of tutors state that their confidence in supporting their students' digital capabilities has increased by 14 percentage points. a senior colleague has stated that the centre is now a “trusted brand” and this is further supported by tutors and senior management who have applauded the approach and the support from the academic development centre which lays a stronger foundation for moving forward at pace with the digital agenda. key lessons learnt through this project are: • have clear, achievable expectations which tutors at any digital level can work with; use a variety of modes to get this out to tutors. use in-house tutor expertise to help produce these expectations so you have champions distributed across the organisation. • engage senior management to ensure an institution-wide approach that can easily be communicated vertically and horizontally and with students. this facilitated greater collaborative working, in particular with it and student services (we are reaping the rewards of that strengthened relationship now with new initiatives that previously would have taken longer to launch). • use cpd to weave in related good practice and requirements. the university as a whole had been building up to meeting the changes to the web accessibility directive (gov.uk, 2018) in september 2020; we incorporated this into the move to online delivery so as not to lose pace. • incorporate regular feedback from stakeholders to capture areas of need and to ensure you can report on impact. for example, we provided cpd sessions called ‘going slowly with…’ to nurture the digitally resistant staff by taking them slowly through a specific process step-by-step. we also regularly benchmark a randomised sample of blackboard sites to inform our on-going cpd plan, check accessibility and to reward teams. • reward teams; recognise good practice and feed this back and upwards. the digital upskilling of staff was already part of our five-year plan but we had struggled with the digitally-resistant (newland and handley, 2016; chambers, mckinney and white, chapman and lucas digital capabilities: from niche to normal journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 4 schmid, 2018). the pandemic accelerated this plan and brought about tangible institutional change (tesar, 2020). going forward we are less prescriptive of the platforms that staff can use with evidencebased decisions made at the programme or subject level. having effective, embedded, accessible, digital delivery and assessment across the curriculum, with staff actively participating, would have seemed a longer-term ambition at the start of 2020 but nearly 18 months on what would have seemed ‘niche’ at the start of 2020 is now becoming ‘normal’. references chambers r., mckinney r., schmid m., beaney p., (2018) ‘digital by choice: becoming part of a digitally ready general practice team’, primary health care, 28(7), pp1-6. doi: https:// doi.10.7748/phc.2018.e1502 gov.uk, understanding accessibility requirements for public sector bodies. available at: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/accessibility-requirements-for-public-sector-websitesand-apps (accessed: 12 july 2021). jisc, digital capabilities framework (2015). available at: https://www.digitalcapability.jisc.ac.uk/what-is-digital-capability/individual-digitalcapabilities/our-digital-capabilities-framework/ (accessed: 8 june 2021). marks, a., al-ali, m., attasi, r., elkishk, a. a. and rezgui, y. (2021) ‘digital transformation in higher education: maturity and challenges post covid-19’, pp.1-10, in rocha, á., ferrás, c., lópez-lópez, p. c. and guarda, t. (eds.) information technology and systems. icits 2021. advances in intelligent systems and computing, 1330. cham: springer. newland, b. and handley, f. (2016) ‘developing the digital literacies of academic staff: an institutional approach’, research in learning technology, 240. doi: https://doi.org/10.3402/rlt.v24.31501 https://www.gov.uk/guidance/accessibility-requirements-for-public-sector-websites-and-apps https://www.gov.uk/guidance/accessibility-requirements-for-public-sector-websites-and-apps https://www.digitalcapability.jisc.ac.uk/what-is-digital-capability/individual-digital-capabilities/our-digital-capabilities-framework/ https://www.digitalcapability.jisc.ac.uk/what-is-digital-capability/individual-digital-capabilities/our-digital-capabilities-framework/ https://doi.org/10.3402/rlt.v24.31501 white, chapman and lucas digital capabilities: from niche to normal journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 5 tesar, m (2020) ‘towards a post-covid-19 “new normality”? physical to social distancing, the move to online and higher education’, policy futures in education, 18(5), pp.556559. doi: https://doi.org/10.1177/1478210320935671 author details andy white is the learning technologies manager in the centre for academic practice enhancement at the university of cumbria, uk. he has strategic oversight of core platforms and responsibility for digital skill development for academic tutors. he has over 20 years' experience in he and is a senior fellow of ahe. amanda chapman is a senior academic developer in the centre for academic practice enhancement at the university of cumbria, uk. she is programme leader for the pgcert learning and teaching in higher education and scheme lead for advancehe fellowships. isabel lucas is the head of centre for academic practice enhancement at the university of cumbria, uk. she has taught in the uk and overseas for over 25 years, holds a number of external roles related to learning, teaching and quality enhancement and is a senior fellow (ahe). https://doi.org/10.1177%2f1478210320935671 digital capabilities: from niche to normal the challenge the response recommendations references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special issue 22: compendium of innovative practice october 2021 ________________________________________________________________________ a conversational framework for learning design (in adverse times) johanna tomczak university of leeds eric bel teesside university keywords: learning design; conversation; collaboration; covid-19. the challenge in this article, we present a summary of a series of exchanges which took place in 20202021 between us – a novice postgraduate researcher (pgr) involved in some undergraduate teaching and an experienced higher education teacher and facilitator of learning (fol). despite the difference in our knowledge of academia, we both faced the same questions when forced to facilitate learning at a distance, which is the starting point of this short piece. this is followed by a reflective account of some of the outcomes of the conversation between us. one of our conclusions was that communicating with each other, even at a distance, enabled us to seek reassurance and develop solutions to our respective questions. another key realisation was that the first stage in responding to adverse situations in a learning and teaching context should not be technological, even at a distance, but a ‘conversational mindset’, which provides a framework for communication and collaboration. this is what the pgr said about the problem that she encountered as a postgraduate student, and also as a tutor, supporting learners at a distance: the challenge for me was finding my way through postgraduate learning, engaging with my supervisors and fellow researchers, and also with learners in seminars that i was asked to facilitate. the sudden absence of direct contact with other members tomczak and bel a conversational framework for learning design (in adverse times) journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 2 of the university community was problematic. i had come to england to build personal and professional networks, and i found myself away from my home country and feeling completely isolated. i was overwhelmed with negative thoughts, and my self-confidence diminished rapidly. i could not figure out how i would support learners at a distance, how i would check their progress and how i would know myself that i was learning, how i could enthuse others when i was struggling with my own motivation. this reflective comment made by the pgr enabled the fol to verbalise what had been, until now, just an intuition: that isolation and the resulting feeling of solitude were real challenges for learners and tutors alike, when studying or working at a distance. in an attempt to address this issue, for the benefit of the pgr, his own practice and that of tutors he trained, the fol went on to ask the following question: ‘what essential features does distance learning and teaching need to incorporate?’. indeed, the difficulty the pgr and the fol both faced, irrespective of their academic experience, was one of disconnection from peers, supervisors and students, as recently reported by many other pgrs in the uk, too (goldstone and zhang, 2021; pitkin, 2020). redefining one’s objectives and sense of purpose was also problematic, as documented in a reflective account recently published by one of us (tomczak, 2021). the response in our conversion, we reacted to the challenge described above differently, but at a conceptual level, our responses were similar. pgr: in my own teaching, i turned spontaneously to whatever technology i was familiar with and which i thought would enable me to replicate the classroom-based behaviours that i had tested when i was still allowed to work on campus. for example, in order to keep conversations going, i used e-mail extensively, and encouraged learners to do so too, to keep in touch with me. as i was experiencing a disconnection from fellow pgrs and my supervisors, i decided not to allow the same to happen to my students. i kept the conversation going, prompted them to tomczak and bel a conversational framework for learning design (in adverse times) journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 3 communicate with, and learn from, each other as if they were together in a physical classroom. fol: i took a similar path. i favoured interactions, be they asynchronous or synchronous. for example, i set learners tasks based on questions, which they were expected to use as prompts in their own time to prepare for synchronous live sessions, during which their proposed answers were discussed. synchronicity is at the heart of my way of thinking about learning and teaching, but i find asynchronous communication can be equally effective, as long as the learners are able to express their thoughts, make them visible to, and have them tested by, others. to me, what matters is to create the conditions for both communication and collaboration to be maintained, whether onor off-line, synchronously or asynchronously. thus, in our conversation, we agreed that teaching is about providing a suitably scaffolded environment, as well as adaptive guidance (wood et al., 1978; salmon, 2011), so that meaningful exchanges between learners, and between learners and tutors, can take place. there is a wealth of literature on the importance of learners’ reflective, active and deep engagement with the content of learning sessions and in their approaches to learning (for example, see ramsden, 2003; bel and mallet, 2006; race, 2015). in fact, beetham and sharpe (2013) suggest that tutors should be clear about the expected nature of this process. they identify three main ways of thinking about ‘how people learn, and the implications for design’ of learning opportunities: ‘associative’, ‘constructive’ and ‘situative’ (beetham and sharpe, 2013, p.221). through our conversation, it appeared that we had both responded to the challenge described above in a manner that combined those three theories into one way of approaching learning design. we structured our teaching into the delivery of small, connected chunks of learning, enabling the learners to move seamlessly from one to the next stage, after having received regular feedback on their progress. more importantly, this learning journey was not designed to be individual, but a social constructive, dialogical experience. thus, as recommended by biggs (1996) and papert (1996), we designed learning tasks that were as collaborative and authentic as feasible, despite the adverse context we were working in. although at a distance, learners were asked to undertake some individual tasks in their own time, at their own pace, followed by small-group tomczak and bel a conversational framework for learning design (in adverse times) journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 4 activities, again, managed by the learners themselves, eventually leading to a synchronous, live, whole-class learning and teaching session, facilitated by the tutor. this process allowed learners to develop a sense of belonging to what wenger et al. (2002) call a ‘community of practice’. recommendations the conversational framework for learning design (in adverse times) described above can be applied to planning and delivering education in the midst of a pandemic or in ‘normal’ times, in a physical setting or at a distance. in this latter case, the use of digital tools may well be of some help, but for both of us, the greatest influencing factor was conceptualising the tutor’s main role as designing connections and sustaining collaboration through conversations. laurillard (2002, pp.77-78) describes this as a learning and teaching experience that is ‘discursive’, ’adaptive’, ‘interactive’ and ‘reflective’, which, for the purpose of this short article, we interpret as: • discursive – ideas discussed between learners and tutors in a safe environment. • adaptive – tutor-mediated linking of different perspectives and concepts. • interactive – stimulating context for learners’ actions and peers’ and tutor’s feedback. • reflective – tutor-supported learners’ evaluation of their own achievement of agreed learning outcomes. thus, as shown by our conversation and through this article, we were able to meet in a ‘happier medium’ to rediscover the joy of connectedness and construct a common understanding and shared response to the challenges we faced. by implementing the above recommendations, conversations between learners, and between learners and tutors, can be maintained and can provide all members with a sense of belonging and nurturing that can only be beneficial to learning and teaching. tomczak and bel a conversational framework for learning design (in adverse times) journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 5 references beetham, h. and sharpe, r. j. (eds.) (2013) rethinking pedagogy for a digital age: designing for 21st century learning. 2nd edn. new york: routledge. available at: https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203078952 (accessed: 21 october 2021). bel, é. and mallet, m. (2006) ‘developing reflection in computing education a teacher's constructionist perspective’, proceedings of world conference on educational media and technology. orlando (usa) 30 june, pp.1763–1769. biggs, j. (1996) ‘enhancing teaching through constructive alignment’, higher education 32, pp.347-364. available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/bf00138871 (accessed: 21 october 2021). goldstone, r. and zhang, j. (2021) ‘postgraduate research students’ experiences of the covid-19 pandemic and student-led policy solutions’, educational review, pp.1-22. available at https://doi.org/10.1080/00131911.2021.1974348 (accessed: 21 october 2021). laurillard, d. (2002) rethinking university teaching a conversational framework for the effective use of learning technologies. 2nd edn. london: routledge. available at: https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315012940 (accessed: 21 october 2021). papert, s. (1996) ‘a word for learning’, in kafai, y.b. and resnick, m. (eds.) constructionism in practice: designing, thinking, and learning in a digital world. london: routledge. pp.9-24. available at: https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203053492 (accessed: 21 october 2021). pitkin, m. (2020) advance he postgraduate research experience survey 2020 global report. york: advance he. available at: https://www.advance-he.ac.uk/knowledgehub/postgraduate-research-experience-survey-2020 (accessed: 21 october 2021). https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203078952 https://doi.org/10.1007/bf00138871 https://doi.org/10.1080/00131911.2021.1974348 https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315012940 https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203053492 https://www.advance-he.ac.uk/knowledge-hub/postgraduate-research-experience-survey-2020 https://www.advance-he.ac.uk/knowledge-hub/postgraduate-research-experience-survey-2020 tomczak and bel a conversational framework for learning design (in adverse times) journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 6 race, p. (2015) making learning happen a guide for post-compulsory education. 3rd edn. london: sage publications ltd. ramsden, p. (2003) learning to teach in higher education. 2nd edn. london: routledge. available at: https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203507711 (accessed: 21 october 2021). salmon, g. (2011) e-moderating: the key to online teaching and learning. 3rd edn. new york: routledge. available at: https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203816684 (accessed: 21 october 2021). tomczak, j. (2021) ‘transforming and being transformed an eclectic learning journey’, sentio 3, pp.90-92. available at: https://sentiojournal.uk/wpcontent/uploads/2021/10/211004-sentio-journal-issue-3-tomczak.pdf (accessed: 21 october 2021). wenger, é., mcdermott, r. and snyder w. (2002) cultivating communities of practice: a guide to managing knowledge. cambridge, massachusetts: harvard business school press. wood, d., bruner, j.s. and ross, g. (1976) ‘the role of tutoring in problem solving’, journal of child psychology and psychiatry, 17, pp.89-100. available at: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1469-7610.1976.tb00381.x (accessed: 21 october 2021). author details johanna tomczak is a postgraduate researcher at the university of leeds, where she studies interhemispheric transfer in bilinguals in the school of psychology. she is an associate fellow of advance he (afhea) and has been involved as a seminar leader in undergraduate teaching since the beginning of her phd. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203507711 https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203507711 https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203816684 https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203816684 https://sentiojournal.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/211004-sentio-journal-issue-3-tomczak.pdf https://sentiojournal.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/211004-sentio-journal-issue-3-tomczak.pdf https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1469-7610.1976.tb00381.x tomczak and bel a conversational framework for learning design (in adverse times) journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 7 éric bel is a principal lecturer in education at teesside university and an associate professor in learning and teaching. he gained his phd from teesside university, during which he researched language teachers’ use of digital technologies. a conversational framework for learning design (in adverse times) the challenge the response recommendations references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special issue 22: compendium of innovative practice october 2021 ________________________________________________________________________ does zoom allow for efficient and meaningful group work? translating staff development for online delivery during covid19 hazel ruth corradi university of bath, uk keywords: covid-19; group work; assessment; feedback; online workshop; jigsaw. the challenge as an academic staff developer, i am responsible for the delivery of a 2.5-hour stand-alone workshop to support probationary lecturers in developing their assessment and feedback practice. the goal of the workshop is both to introduce key ideas and practices that shape assessment and feedback in uk higher education and provide a starting point for participants to develop a reflective case study for their fellowship of the higher education academy (fhea) claim (advance he, 2019), which is a requirement for their probation. the new challenge facing me during the pandemic of making the workshop suitable for teaching on zoom made me evaluate which of my teaching values from previous in-person learning i wanted to embed in the design. i decided i wanted the workshop to be based around group work, as this builds community, and our community is the place where we can build and support the norms of good practice (smyth, 2013). i feel that supporting academics in building cross-university networks benefits their professional opportunities. also, conversations with peers are absolutely required for good mental health, especially when working from home (kember and murphy, 1994, p.179). to address the additional challenge of a large volume of potential content, i decided to embed choice into the design, allowing participants to choose an article to read and discuss with the idea that they may later be able to use it to support their claim (kember and murphy, 1994, p.79). i value choice as it offers a sense of agency in what is a compulsory workshop. also, it allows probationers to focus their corradi does zoom allow for efficient and meaningful group work? translating staff development for online delivery during covid-19 journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 2 development on one aspect of this broad topic so the workshop can be relevant for them at the point they attend (evans and boucher, 2015). as i was designing this in the early autumn of 2020, i was reflecting on both my experience of teaching online workshops and being a participant. i had observed that once in a zoom break-out room, no one has access to the information from the main room, but also that teachers can only send a short line of text to the rooms. consequently, i decided the best approach would be to share the information separately on a different platform. additionally, clarifying tasks seems to be more difficult online as everyone is sent to a room regardless of whether the facilitator has noticed whether the participants know what they should be doing (my experience as a learner!). i wanted to avoid this pitfall by making the plan for the session and the activities available beforehand on a separate platform. the response the design and rationale as my expected group size was 20-30, i picked five topics/articles for the participants to choose from, anticipating four or five groups of four-six people (see figure 1 for topics and figure 2 for workshop schedule). to ensure participants understood the plan, they always had access to the instructions for the activities and the materials; these were created as webpages within msteams as our institution uses office 365. detailed instructions of how to access these resources on msteams were provided with the invite email and participants were encouraged to ensure they could navigate the pages before attending. on the msteams page, participants could sign up to a slot for the topic they wished to discuss. the slot also allocated them a portion of the article to read and in some cases, a team role such as discussion facilitator or group presenter to enable the group to function smoothly with less awkwardness, as recommended by strawson (2012, p.71). i modified the number of sign-up slots for each delivery to match the number of participants to ensure the four key topics were covered. participants were given time during the session to read their portion of the article guided by comprehension and reflective questions to help them synthesise their reading quickly and to act as a focal point (strawson, 2012, p.105). the questions on the msteams shared workspace allowed the groups to pool their ideas. the groups then had 30 minutes to discuss their thoughts from reading the article in their zoom corradi does zoom allow for efficient and meaningful group work? translating staff development for online delivery during covid-19 journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 3 break-out rooms to bring the topic together, following the jigsaw method (strawson, 2012, p.33). as part of this, each group was asked to decide on some key points, or questions, to share with the class. as the facilitator, i visited the group discussions to listen, prompt additional ideas, answer questions, and get to know the participants. trammell and laforge (2017) highlight how being socially present at an online class is important for ensuring students feel engaged in the learning. when we reconvened as a whole class the group presenters informally fed-back the learning from the groups (strawson, 2012, p.50). each group was given about five minutes. i responded briefly to each of these participant reports, highlighted further questions to consider, and pointed out any extra things that others might find useful from the article. in this way, participants were able to share ideas that might be relevant to them in future and discover which of the other articles may be useful for their fhea claim. recommendations my observations from running three of these workshops this year convinced me that the combination of break out rooms on zoom combined with a shared workspace on msteams supported good staff engagement, productive group discussions, and community building. additionally, the element of choice worked synergistically to encourage engagement and ownership of the learning opportunity. my observations have been supported by positive responses to the end of session zoom evaluation quizzes and unsolicited comments on the usefulness of the session. my recommendations stem from my reflections on these observations. 1. providing all the materials and instruction in one place facilitates online group work running smoothly and to time. 2. sharing out tasks within and between the groups allows rich and informed discussions within the break-out rooms and helpful summaries to be returned to the rest of the class. 3. encouraging a small amount of organisation before the session to allow it to run smoothly may be preferred by participants to being required to do preparatory work, such as reading the article beforehand. the organisation allows better use of the workshop time as tasks are engaged with more promptly and in-depth (trammell and laforge, 2017). corradi does zoom allow for efficient and meaningful group work? translating staff development for online delivery during covid-19 journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 4 4. the additional option to digest the plan and start the tasks beforehand if desired makes the session more inclusive as it allows for clarification in advance. from my experience, it is a strength to reflect on our values surrounding classroom practice as well as the practicalities of the learning environment when planning teaching. this has allowed me to model several aspects of effective online teaching as well as allowing the participants to engage deeply with the topic. figure 1. articles for group discussion. topic article authentic assessment villarroel, v., boud, d., bloxham, s., bruna, d. and bruna, c. (2020) ‘using principles of authentic assessment to redesign written examinations and tests’, innovations in education and teaching international, 57(1), pp.38-49. https://doi.org/10.1080/14703297.2018.1564882. fair assessment bloxham, s. hughes, c. and adie, l. (2016) ‘what’s the point of moderation? a discussion of the purposes achieved through contemporary moderation practices’, assessment & evaluation in higher education, 41(4), pp.638-653. https://doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2015.1039932 feedback for learning carless, d. and winstone, n. (2020) ‘teacher feedback literacy and its interplay with student feedback literacy’, teaching in higher education. https://doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2020.1782372. helping students learn from feedback advance he (2016) the developing engagement with feedback toolkit (deft) available at: https://www.advancehe.ac.uk/knowledge-hub/developing-engagementfeedback-toolkit-deft (accessed: 19 august 2021). https://doi.org/10.1080/14703297.2018.1564882 https://doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2015.1039932 https://doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2020.1782372 corradi does zoom allow for efficient and meaningful group work? translating staff development for online delivery during covid-19 journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 5 figure 2. timetable of activities for assessment and feedback workshop sent to participants beforehand. time activity 9.30 introduction 9.45 sign up for group -read paper/resource 10.15 meet with group to discuss questions make notes assign a speaker to feedback to group 10.45 screen break 11.00 4x 8 min presentations (4-5 mins report back 3-4 mins questions) -people write questions in chat 11.40 any other questions, tips on writing for a3 ukpsf 12.00 finish -option to stay behind to ask about a3 ukpsf references advance-he (2019) uk professional standards framework (ukpsf). available at: https://www.advance-he.ac.uk/guidance/teaching-and-learning/ukpsf (accessed: 30 june 2021). evans, m. and boucher, a. r. (2015) ‘optimizing the power of choice: supporting student autonomy to foster motivation and engagement in learning’, mind, brain, and education, 9, pp.87-91. https://doi.org/10.1111/mbe.12073. kane, r., sandretto, s. and heath, c. (2004) ‘an investigation into excellent tertiary teaching: emphasising reflective practice’, higher education, 47, pp.283-310. kember, d. and murphy, d. (1994) 53 interesting activities for open learning courses bristol: technical and educational services ltd. smyth, r. (2003) ‘concepts of change: enhancing the practice of academic staff development in higher education’, international journal for academic development, 8(1-2), pp.51-60. https://doi.org/10.1080/1360144042000277937. https://www.advance-he.ac.uk/guidance/teaching-and-learning/ukpsf https://doi.org/10.1111/mbe.12073 https://doi.org/10.1080/1360144042000277937 corradi does zoom allow for efficient and meaningful group work? translating staff development for online delivery during covid-19 journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 6 strawson, h. (2012) 53 interesting things to do in your seminars and tutorials. 5th edn. wicken: the professional and higher partnership. trammell, b. a. and laforge, c. (2017) ‘common challenges for instructors in large online courses: strategies to mitigate student and instructor frustration’, journal of educators online, 14(1), pp.1-10. author details hazel corradi is an academic staff developer at the university of bath. she is a senior fellow of the hea and supports staff in developing fellowship claims. her background lecturing in biochemistry sparked many interests including finding innovative ways to assess and give feedback, the use of online technology in teaching, and overcoming maths anxiety in non-mathematicians. does zoom allow for efficient and meaningful group work? translating staff development for online delivery during covid-19 the challenge the response the design and rationale recommendations references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 15: november 2019 positioning an academic literacies framework in an eap context: case study of a university pre-sessional course paul breen university of westminster, uk abstract historically, there has been a strong element of crossover between english for academic purposes (eap) and academic literacies approaches, as originally conceptualised by lea and street (1998). however, a recurring cause of concern for the latter has been its perceived lack of focus on pedagogy, with greater emphasis on construction of text (lea, 2004). lillis (2003) highlights another concern being the lack of ‘a design frame’ (kress, 2000) which can harness synergy between theory and practice. as such, the strength of academic literacy from a theoretical perspective can simultaneously be an achilles heel in its practical pedagogic application. consequently, examples of sustained academic literacies approaches in practice are rare. this paper thus argues for eap acting as a fulcrum between theory and practice and provides one instance of enacting academic literacies approaches in the practical context of a pre-sessional course in a post-92 university. therein academic literacies approaches have shaped the design and delivery of an eap curriculum. through presenting a case study of this story, i hope to provide one ‘exemplar’ (shulman, 1986) of integrating pedagogic practice and theory to serve as a model for the future. in doing so, academic literacies can better meet both the practical and theoretical demands of 21st century teaching, learning and educational development. keywords: academic literacies; english for academic purposes; pedagogic research; case study research; pre-sessional courses. background relationship of eap and academic literacy gimenez and thomas (2015, p.30) draw on the work of hyland and hamp-lyons (2002, p.4) to suggest that despite having developed in ‘quite different socio-political contexts’ breen positioning an academic literacies framework in an eap context: case study of a university pre-sessional course 2 eap and academic literacies approaches ‘both aspire to provide students with a more successful educational experience.’ academic literacy as a model is focused on the empowerment of individuals through finding their place within their disciplinary community and understanding the social practices of those disciplines. academic literacy is not simply about the ‘acquisition of a particular set of cognitive skills, which once acquired can be put to use unproblematically in any new context’ (street (1984), gee (1990), and barton (1994), cited by lea, 2004, p.740). the cultural and social practices of each discipline and context is also markedly different (lea, 2004, p.740). within eap there has been a recognition of this and a shift away from generic skills to concentration on the needs of students within specific disciplines. jones and lea (2008) further highlight the natural connection between eap and academic literacies approaches through their innate emphasis on text analysis and text production alongside articulation of stance. despite this, wingate (2012, p.3) argues that ‘normative’ approaches in traditional eap can be out of synch with academic literacies’ ‘oppositional frame’ (lillis and scott, 2007, p.11). indeed, academic literacy has been moulded around a shift away from ‘academic socialisation’ and ‘study skills’ models of delivering and designing eap courses (lea and street, 1998, p.158). however, circumstances often necessitate that eap courses are remedial and skills-driven due to students having low levels of proficiency in the english language to begin with. at the outset of such courses, students’ language is rarely sophisticated enough to achieve what gimenez and thomas (2015) describe as the sociopolitical dimension emphasised by academic literacies. the need to develop language proficiency therefore had to be given major consideration when designing this presessional academic english course for international students. eap and the context of pre-sessional courses hamp-lyons (2011, p.91) has described eap as being a ‘poor relation’ of more ‘specific’ subjects in higher education. others have spoken of it in similar ways. healy (2014, p.1) speaks of the subject having a ‘cinderella status’ whilst breen (2018, pp.1-2) calls it a ‘chameleon discipline’ forever needing to adapt to the needs of others rather than finding breen positioning an academic literacies framework in an eap context: case study of a university pre-sessional course 3 its own identity. unlike academic literacies approaches, there is no single framework for eap teaching because courses are context-specific. in the case of pre-sessionals, courses are largely designed around the language level of students and a particular university’s entrance requirements balanced against the market-driven nature of 21st century uk higher education (turner, 2004). pre-sessional courses therefore occupy the unusual position of being a poor relation in some senses and a fatted calf on the other. essentially these are ‘sheltered courses’ (gilbert, 2013, p.119) that take place over the summer months prior to a september entrance point for international students who have failed to meet the necessary language requirements (alexander et al, 2008). such courses are further pushed to the margins of academia because they are generally seen as ‘commodified, revenue-generating support activity’ outside of the mainstream focus of the institutions in which they operate (ding and bruce, 2017, p.53). at the same time, there are strict checks and balances in place to ensure such courses are regulated and assessed properly. as a result of that, their design needs to meet the same quality assurance standards as all other courses within the uk higher education system. the pre-sessional course in this study in the particular case of this study, the core pre-sessional teaching was and still is delivered in a three month block of 23 hours per week. to satisfy university entrance requirements and visa regulations, students are tested in the four skills of reading, listening, writing and speaking. previously, this course had been delivered in a manner more typical of english for generic academic purposes rather than specific purposes (gilbert, 2013; blue, 1988). as such, it was largely remedial and not meeting the needs of specific disciplines despite this being an expectation of university departments. that caused a serious mismatch along the lines of argyris and schön’s (1974) work on dichotomies between espoused theory and theory-in-action, as detailed in donaghue (2003, p.345). to address this mismatch, the course needed to be more discipline-specific. the situation thus necessitated a theoretical underpinning that could be enacted in practice. breen positioning an academic literacies framework in an eap context: case study of a university pre-sessional course 4 traditionally, many pre-sessional courses have been shaped around the type of ‘academic socialisation’ and ‘study skills’ approaches that lea and street (1998, p.158) warn against. through only focusing on these aspects, students might progress into the academy without being able to decipher the conventions of their disciplines in the critical way that hyland and hamp-lyons (2002), wingate (2012), and gimenez and thomas (2015) speak of. however, without these components, many of today’s students will struggle and this is especially the case in an age of mass recruitment of international students. academic literacies was chosen as the fulcrum through which discipline-specificity could be leveraged on the pre-sessional course. for this to happen, there had to be a practical as well as an ideological aspect (lillis, 2003; lea, 2004) and a realisation that academic literacy is not purely about a focus on discipline specific texts (lillis and scott, 2007). that was particularly important in a context where assessment on pre-sessional courses must be benchmarked in some way to the united kingdom visa and immigration (ukvi) authorities’ stipulated standardised test – international english language testing system (ielts). to satisfy the criteria for this, we had to maintain a system of testing students in this way but we adapted the assessment in such a way that it more closely reflected the practices of disciplines. the programme of study was shaped around a ‘backwards design’ process which identifies learning outcomes first and then designs assessment as evidence of how those outcomes have been achieved (wiggins and mctighe, 2005; fink, 2007). this meant that the ultimate goal of the course was for students not just to complete a set of exams benchmarked to ielts. rather, they had to work towards the completion of a piece of research in their specific disciplines that after a period of scaffolding would lead to the submission of a 1500 word essay as their final writing assignment. similarly, a higher amount of authentic texts and interlinked, contextualised materials were introduced into the curriculum and the assessments (see appendix one for sample of curriculum design). significantly too, for the purposes of theoretical underpinning, we redesigned the course around lea and street’s own assertion that study skills, academic socialisation and academic literacies are not ‘mutually exclusive’ nor should be viewed in ‘a simple linear time dimension’ (1998, p.158). students thus developed all three key breen positioning an academic literacies framework in an eap context: case study of a university pre-sessional course 5 aspects in synch, rather than progressively. finally, as advocated in much of the literature, a digital literacy component was incorporated (jones and lea, 2008; coiro et al, 2008; gilbert, 2013.) interactive approaches to teaching with technologies facilitated ‘a deeper, more essential understanding and mastery of information technology for information processing, communication, and problem solving’ (koehler and mishra, 2009, p.64). digital resources were adapted around a curriculum that reflected the social practices of the university and its disciplinary communities. the virtual learning environment became a place of interaction and not simply a repository for course materials as advocated in much of the literature on blended learning going back to mason’s early work in this field (1998). videos and online lectures became a crucial element of the course, particularly in familiarising students with practices of self-access and autonomous investigation. from a language learning perspective, this also helped facilitate listening skills and improve practice at home. added to this, some lessons were ‘flipped’ in that students had to listen to a short lecture or read a short text prior to the lesson and come to class ready to discuss the material. in this way, students were mirroring and adopting broader practices expected in specific disciplines within the uk higher educational environment. case study of perceived effectiveness of the course creswell defines any case study as ‘a strategy of enquiry’ which involves an in-depth exploration ‘using a variety of data collection procedures over a sustained period’ (2009, p.13) which must be framed in a ‘bounded system’ of time and activity (stake, 1978). there are few systems of activity within higher education as bounded or intensive as a pre-sessional course. in this case, the number of participants in the course afforded us the opportunity for an extensive amount of both quantitative and qualitative data through which the perceived effectiveness of the course could be measured. that information was gained in different ways. the student perspective was gathered from two sources. firstly, general feedback was collected in the form of responses to a set of questions on a survey monkey platform at both mid and end points on the pre-sessional courses. secondly, an important form of triangulation was attained through students being invited to respond to a further research study that i was doing in conjunction with a researcher from another university, relating to international students’ perspectives on breen positioning an academic literacies framework in an eap context: case study of a university pre-sessional course 6 effectiveness of eap courses. through these outlets, a considerable amount of information was collected that provided valuable perspectives and insights on the student voice, but for the purposes of this paper it seems best to look at the course through the eyes of teachers. this is because there were less than twenty teachers as opposed to over two hundred students and the information generated from direct interviews with teachers, as native speakers, could be considered more trustworthy in this situation. responses from the teachers were gathered by means of focus group sessions and individual interviews. that was done in a semi-structured manner in the style stipulated by borg (2006, p.190) where the scope of our discussion was flexible on account of being ‘directed by a set of general themes, rather than specific questions’. this meant that i allowed for conversational exchanges that were professional and serious at the same time (borg, 2006). the aim was ‘to generate plausible accounts’ (silverman, 2005, p.154) rather than steering teachers towards a focus determined by me and not them. these discussions were further triangulated by conversations during the teacher induction and written feedback at the end of the course. main areas of response from the teachers lea and street (1998, p.163) suggest that successful lecturers (in teaching through academic literacies approaches) are those that ‘have spent many years of constructing their own knowledge through their own writing practices in a variety of disciplinary contexts’. yet, in eap, alexander (2010, pp.3-5) aptly describes a situation where people are often recruited at short notice out of necessity rather than qualification. some of these teachers find themselves making a leap from general english teaching to academic english without any formal training and possibly too the absence of thorough academic inductions (alexander, 2010, p.4). that lack of formal teacher education in eap and understanding of discipline-specificity was apparent in feedback, focus group sessions and individual interviews with the teachers in this case. one such respondent echoed a common refrain of ‘but i don’t know about the students’ disciplines’. several of the respondents primarily saw themselves as english teachers knowing what is best for the students in what pierson and borthwick (2010, p.130) breen positioning an academic literacies framework in an eap context: case study of a university pre-sessional course 7 describe as ‘the thick of classroom practice.’ this comes from a tradition within english language teaching of giving primacy to affective factors (tomlinson, 2012) rather than focusing on academic aspects. the knowledge base of english teachers is shaped by methodologies that are reactive and responsive to immediate student needs and in discussions it was obvious that teachers saw the most pressing need as being remedial. a typical argument was that these students ‘need basic language skills’ otherwise we are actually making them more peripheral to the life of the academy and doing the opposite of empowerment through giving them an academic identity. because of the perceived ‘cash cow’ nature of the pre-sessionals, these students were seen as having such low levels of english that they were not always viewed as being capable of achieving higher levels of ‘knowledge telling, transformation and creation’ as described by gimenez and thomas (2015, pp.29-32). others felt that ‘it is our job to teach them’ and ‘to give them strategies for learning that they then go and use in their actual disciplines’. however, for various reasons, some teachers felt that this was fine in theory, but not in practice. one teacher with considerable experience in ielts examining argued very strongly that ‘these students are simply not at the required level’ to acquire an objective of academic literacy that entails a deeper understanding of the meta-language of academic discourse and social practices in their disciplines. in saying this he is echoing an admission by wingate and tribble (2012, p.484) that applications of academic literacy theory seem to best exist in ‘rather privileged contexts.’ this line of thinking fed into a further argument that ‘if we are testing them in a way that is benchmarked to ielts, then why are we not teaching them what they need for those assessments.’ most emphatically, there was an assertion that ‘what they need is general english.’ teachers seemed to be diagnosing the students as suffering what lea and street describe as a ‘pathology of problems’ (1998, p.159) shaped by another teacher’s definition of ‘the level (of student) we’re getting.’ there were further issues that revealed themselves more subtly such as teachers’ discomfort with the practice of discipline-specific eap teaching. student feedback simultaneously confirmed that many teachers interpreted discipline-specificity as the content of the texts students were given. for example, if given a reading related to law, teachers perceived the discipline focus to be upon that particular subject to the extent that one said ‘this is useless when i don’t have any law students in my class’. another spoke breen positioning an academic literacies framework in an eap context: case study of a university pre-sessional course 8 of a political lecture being out of date because it was talking about the run up to britain’s 2016 referendum on membership of the european union. at the same time, in a follow up to these comments, other respondents showed more awareness of the purpose of working with such texts. one experienced teacher argued that ‘the focus isn’t brexit – it’s teaching them to listen to a lecture’ whilst a newer recruit to an eap context pertinently stated that ‘it’s about giving them strategies to listen to an academic lecture like they’ll have to do in their studies, no matter what the topic is.’ from some of the teachers then, i got a sense of failure to grasp the purpose of texts and materials. the disciplinary aspect is introduced by helping students to link the text and the subject to similar areas of their specific studies. unfortunately, not all teachers seemed to be getting that and this message was also coming through in the views of students. for me though i could see the need to move beyond an approach that was based upon what might be described as talk around texts. this suggested that the next stage of developing this pre-sessional was to move it beyond a focus on remedial language work towards a greater integration of disciplinary practices. developing teachers to meet the course needs stevick (1996, p.180) makes the vital point that the teacher remains the central chess piece around which any class is built and this is particularly true of a course intensive and demanding as a 23 hour per week pre-sessional. feedback revealed that teachers were very happy with the resources whether print-based or technological, with the curriculum and with the assessment – except in one case where the latter was described as ‘too academic’. however, there remained a feeling amongst some teachers that it was difficult to understand precise definitions of academic literacy and discipline specificity. they could see what the theory suggested but some, even the more experienced, struggled to enact that as classroom theory-in-action – echoing the concerns of argyris and schön (1974) and donaghue (2003). i thus identified a need to better prepare teachers for the demands of an intensive presessional course shaped around an academic literacies model. this began with the formulation of a ‘teachers’ guide’ focusing as much on pedagogic strategy as on the breen positioning an academic literacies framework in an eap context: case study of a university pre-sessional course 9 traditional approach of questions and answers. following on from this, inductions became more detailed, offering a clear pedagogy to support the ideology of academic literacies – a shift away from a knowledge base of communicative language teaching epistemologies towards greater emphasis on the role of what shulman (1986) recurringly refers to as strategic knowledge within pedagogy. despite being successful for most, these ideas were challenging for some. for example, in the second week of teaching, one less experienced teacher was still reaching for the tried and tested photocopies from an ielts textbook, rather than using the official resources in the study pack of materials provided. however, with some mentoring and advice, this teacher gradually came to understand. on the whole, teachers’ acquisition of a suitable knowledge base for this pedagogic approach did not happen overnight. this supports a long-held belief in the field of teacher education that development cannot be limited to a one-off workshop formula (darlinghammond and richardson, 2009; mcgrath et al, 2011, breen, 2018). in a 2013 paper, i use the analogy of teacher education involving a deep process of intramuscular injection rather than a single shot with a syringe (breen, 2013). this is particularly true in the context of familiarising eap teachers operating on ‘the margins of academia’ (ding and bruce, 2017) with the social practices and diverse disciplines of higher education. however, without doing this, it is impossible for those on said margins to develop the ‘academic world view’ advocated by lea and street (1998, p.163). it is also difficult for them to move away from a skills based deficit model/atomised skills approach to teaching (lea and street, 1998, p.157) unless they have an alternative pedagogy in place that makes sense of their practice. as one teacher stated in the aftermath of the course ‘maybe you need to know what happens at the end before you make sense of why you need to do things’ on an everyday basis. this particular teacher was a good example of somebody reluctant at first to make kirk’s (2012) definition of the ‘leap’ away from general english teaching into teaching english for academic purposes. however, by the end, and particularly after assessment results, this teacher understood the demands of the course and came to realise that ‘i’m not actually helping students even though i thought that was what i was doing’ by substituting academic content for materials deemed more engaging. breen positioning an academic literacies framework in an eap context: case study of a university pre-sessional course 10 conclusion on the whole then, teacher preparation seems to be an essential element in the delivery of courses such as this. as shown throughout this paper, the pre-sessional course that i have described remains a work in progress. there have been elements of academic literacy introduced across a range of areas and teachers have a better, if not yet perfect, understanding of discipline-specificity. awareness of that is essential if teachers are to move towards the levels aspired to by theorists such as wingate (2012) or gimenez and thomas (2015). teaching academic literacies requires an ‘academic world view’ according to lea and street (1998, p.163). such a view is often difficult to conceptualise for those teachers who operate on the margins of academia and are often ‘in service of the larger academic community’ (raimes, 1991, p.243) rather than active participants in disciplinary communities. therefore, this study has not just identified pedagogic needs but also a greater need for eap practitioners to be a part of the mainstream disciplinary communities they integrate students into. this does not just mean knowledge of disciplines themselves but strategic awareness of helping students navigate the practices of those disciplines. eap and academic literacies work well in partnership when teachers are equipped with the knowledge, strategies, and confidence to put the values of each ‘partner’ into practice on an everyday basis. references alexander, o. (2010) ‘the leap into teap: the role of the baleap competency framework in the professional development of new eap teachers’. joint conference iatefl english for specific purposes sig, bilkent university school of english language faculty academic english program, bilkent university, ankara, turkey 18-19 june 2010 [online] available at: http://www.uefap.com/baleap/teap/oa_bilkent.pdf (accessed: 3 november 2019). alexander, o., argent, s. and spencer, j. (2008) eap essentials: a teacher’s guide to principles and practice. reading: garnet publishing. argyris, c., and schön, d. a. (1974) theory in practice: increasing professional effectiveness. san francisco, ca: jossey-bass. http://www.uefap.com/baleap/teap/oa_bilkent.pdf breen positioning an academic literacies framework in an eap context: case study of a university pre-sessional course 11 blue, g. m. (1988) ‘individualising academic writing tuition’, in robinson, p, (ed.) academic writing: process and product. oxford: modern english publications. borg, s. (2006) teacher cognition and language education: research and practice. london: continuum. breen, p. (2013) ‘an intramuscular approach to teacher development in the field of transnational higher education’ in mukjeri, s. and tripathi, p. (eds.) handbook of research on transnational higher education management. hershey, pa: igi global, pp. 317-341. breen, p. (2018) developing educators for the digital age – a framework for capturing teacher knowledge in action. london: westminster university press. coiro, j., knobel, m., lankshear, c. and leu, d.j. (2008) ‘central issues in new literacies and new literacies research’ in coiro, j., knobel, m., lankshear, c. and leu, d.j. (eds.) handbook of research on new literacies. .new york: routledge. pp.1-21. creswell, j. (2009) research design – qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods approaches. london: sage. darling-hammond l., and richardson, n. (2009) ‘teacher learning: what matters?’ educational leadership, 66(5), pp. 46-53. ding, a. and bruce, i. (2017) the english for academic purposes practitioner operating on the edge of academia. cham, switzerland: palgrave macmillan. donaghue, h. (2003) ‘an instrument to elicit teachers’ beliefs and assumptions.’ elt journal, 57(4), pp. 344-351. fink, l.d. (2007) ‘the power of course design to increase student engagement and learning’, peer review, 9(1), pp.13-17. breen positioning an academic literacies framework in an eap context: case study of a university pre-sessional course 12 gilbert, j. (2013) ‘english for academic purposes’, in motteram, g. (ed.) innovations in learning technologies for english language teaching. london: british council, pp. 117-144. gimenez, j. and thomas, p. (2015) ‘a framework for usable pedagogy: case studies towards criticality, accessibility and visibility’, in lillis, t., harrington, k., lea, m. and mitchell, s. (eds.) working with academic literacies: case studies towards transformative practice, anderson, sc: parlor press, pp. 29-44. healy, p. (2014) ‘the baby in the bathwater: a discussion of the role of motivation in teaching tertiary level students’. in breen, p. cases on teacher identity, cognition, and diversity in higher education. hershey, pa: igi global, pp. 371-389. hyland, k and hamp-lyons, l. (2002) ‘eap: issues and directions’, journal of english for academic purposes, 1(1), pp. 1-12. jones, s., and lea, m. r. (2008) ‘digital literacies in the lives of undergraduate students: exploring personal and curricular spheres of practice’, electronic journal of elearning, 6(3), pp. 207-216. kirk, s. (2012, december 9) building e-ap awareness. [blog post] available at: https://theteapingpoint.wordpress.com/2012/12/09/building-e-ap-awareness/ accessed: 3 november 2019. koehler, m., and mishra, p. (2009) ‘what is technological pedagogical content knowledge (tpack)?’ contemporary issues in technology and teacher education, 9(1), pp. 60-70. kress, g. (2000) ‘multimodality’, in cope, b and kalantzis, m. (eds.), multiliteracies. literacy, learning and the design of social futures. london: routledge, pp. 182-202. lea, m.r. and street, b.v. (1998) ‘student writing in higher education: an academic literacies approach’, studies in higher education, 23(2), pp. 157-172. https://theteapingpoint.wordpress.com/2012/12/09/building-e-ap-awareness/ breen positioning an academic literacies framework in an eap context: case study of a university pre-sessional course 13 lea, m.r. (2004) ‘academic literacies: a pedagogy for course design’, studies in higher education, 29(6), pp.739-756. lillis, t. (2003) ‘student writing as' academic literacies': drawing on bakhtin to move from critique to design’, language and education, 17(3), pp.192-207. lillis, t. and scott, m. (2007) ‘defining academic literacies research: issues of epistemology, ideology and strategy’, journal of applied linguistics, 4(1), pp. 5-32. mcgrath, j., karabas, g., and willis, j. (2011) ‘from tpack concept to tpack practice: an analysis of the suitability and usefulness of the concept as a guide in the real world of teacher development’, international journal of technology in teaching and learning, 7(1), pp. 1-23. mason, r. (1998) ‘models of online courses’, aln magazine, 2(2), pp. 1-10. pierson, m., and borthwick, a. (2010) ‘framing the assessment of educational technology professional development in a culture of learning’, journal of computing in teacher education, 26(4), pp. 126-131. raimes, a. (1991) ‘out of the woods: emerging traditions in the teaching of writing’, tesol quarterly, 25(3), pp. 407-430. shulman, l. (1986) ‘those who understand: knowledge growth in teaching’, educational researcher, 15(24), pp. 4-14. silverman, d. (2005) doing qualitative research: a practical handbook. london: sage publications limited. stake, r. e. (1978) ‘the case study method in social inquiry’, educational researcher, 7(2), pp. 5-8 stevick, e. w. (1996) memory, meaning and method. boston, ma: heinle and heinle. breen positioning an academic literacies framework in an eap context: case study of a university pre-sessional course 14 tomlinson, b. (2012) ‘materials development for language learning and teaching’, language teaching, 45(02), pp.143-179. turner, j. (2004) ‘language as academic purpose’, journal of english for academic purposes, 3(2), pp.95-109. wiggins, g. and mctighe, j. (2005) understanding by design. alexandria, va: association for supervision and curriculum development wingate, u. (2012) ‘using academic literacies and genre-based models for academic writing instruction: a ‘literacy journey’, journal of english for academic purposes, 11(1), pp.26-37. wingate, u. and tribble, c. (2012) ‘the best of both worlds? towards an english for academic purposes/academic literacies writing pedagogy’, studies in higher education, 37(4), pp.481-495. appendix one: sample extracts from the curriculum sample from week one: sample from week four: breen positioning an academic literacies framework in an eap context: case study of a university pre-sessional course 15 author details paul breen is a senior lecturer in the university of westminster’s centre for education, teaching and innovation. his research interests are in academic literacies, teacher education and teacher knowledge. he is the author of several academic book publications including developing educators for the digital age, published by university of westminster press and most recently professional writing how to write professionally and successfully, published as part of the studymates series. positioning an academic literacies framework in an eap context: case study of a university pre-sessional course abstract background relationship of eap and academic literacy eap and the context of pre-sessional courses the pre-sessional course in this study case study of perceived effectiveness of the course main areas of response from the teachers developing teachers to meet the course needs conclusion references appendix one: sample extracts from the curriculum author details article journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 14: april 2019 ________________________________________________________________________ walking the path of desire: evaluating a blended learning approach to developing study skills in a multi-disciplinary group michelle crowther canterbury christ church university, uk abstract this case study describes the methods used to evaluate a series of study skills workshops and online learning materials created for a cohort of foundation degree arts and humanities students. the workshops and online content were created in response to feedback from the previous cohort which revealed that students had struggled to relate the workshops to their assignment, which was a portfolio of critical reflections. in order to better understand the disconnect experienced by the students between the module content and the course assessment, it was decided to track the paths of desire taken by the cohort in their learning, and assess whether online content could improve learning outcomes or whether workshops and print sources are more valuable for skills development. quantitative data, such as attendance, vle use and book loans, along with qualitative data from the students’ critical reflections were gathered to track student engagement with material, creating a narrative of the learning journeys of the cohort. findings revealed that online content has a valuable role in supporting success for some students but that attendance at workshops has a strong correlation with portfolio grade and skills development. keywords: blended learning; study skills; curriculum design and development; higher education; widening participation; foundation degrees; arts and humanities. introduction high quality university courses are those which engender independence and autonomy in the learner (ashwin, 2015); however, the ‘massification’ and consequent diversification of crowther walking the path of desire: evaluating a blended learning approach to developing study skills in a multi-disciplinary group journal of learning development in higher education, issue 14: april 2019 2 higher education in recent years have presented challenges for programme teams in designing study skills material that meets the needs of their students. widening participation in higher education has made university degree courses accessible to students with additional learning needs, family commitments and varying educational experiences, therefore sensitive and inclusive course design has become paramount so that hegemonic assumptions of knowledge do not suppress and alienate underrepresented groups (brookfield, 1995). evidence suggests that deeper learning takes place in experiential rather than didactic lecture-based skills development programmes (carbery and hegarty, 2011) and that the contextualised teaching of study skills within programmes is key to student success (wingate, 2006); however, the limitations imposed by timetabling, room sizes and staffing has led to the large-scale adoption of generic induction programmes, which can leave students bewildered and poorly-equipped for study (mery et al, 2012). blended learning programmes can provide solutions to the ever increasing numbers and diversity of students (costello, lenholt and stryker, 2014; raven and rodrigues, 2017) with online material supplementing or replacing generic lectures and providing targeted content to large cohorts (arnold-garza, 2014; hill et al., 2017). in 2018, research england encouraged universities to look at metrics such as visits to the library and the speed of clicks on a website to measure student engagement and success. similarly, ux (user experience) research, which involves systematically investigating the requirements of users, is mapping desire paths around both physical and online spaces (lee et al, 2016; massis, 2018). the concept of the ‘path of desire’ or ‘desire path’, often defined as the easiest route to one’s destination, emerged from the phenomenological methods used by bachelard (1958) in his work the poetics of space. it was decided by the programme team to gather quantitative data, which evidenced the student’s physical and online footprint, as well as qualitative data from the student portfolios as part of a phenomenological investigation into their skills development. delivery in 2017/18, 67 students aged between 17 and 70 on the arts and humanities foundation degree programme at a post-1992 university attended a series of six workshops delivered crowther walking the path of desire: evaluating a blended learning approach to developing study skills in a multi-disciplinary group journal of learning development in higher education, issue 14: april 2019 3 by librarians and academic learning developers as part of an understanding arts and humanities module. the students specialised in either an arts or a humanities subject, with between two to twelve students following one of twelve available pathways. as the university is committed to widening participation to non-traditional students, it admits students with a range of backgrounds, disabilities and complex needs. for this cohort, the number of students with declared disabilities was 24%, 11% higher than on any other course at the university. due to the range of disabilities it was decided to use lecture capture for the module to provide an alternative access route to lecture content. each workshop began with an introductory presentation introducing broad concepts such as digital scholarship and publishing, open information and academic integrity, and was followed by activities. referencing, paraphrasing, plagiarism and the role of plagiarism detection tools were discussed alongside activities about copyright, creative commons and intellectual property rights. there was a firm belief among the programme team that students need a critical understanding of the academic landscape in order to become autonomous learners. it was about putting the ‘why’ into study skills. the session concluded with a youtube video from organisations such as the british library, the national archives, turnitin, and the creative commons movement. the purpose of the videos was to contextualise academic literacies within arts and humanities scholarship, enabling students to think critically about academic research and its place in society and to develop a holistic understanding of why effective and ethical academic literacy is needed. after the workshop, the students had a one-hour seminar with their course tutors in smaller groups to write critical reflections. additional material and activities to reinforce learning were made available on the vle. assessment the learning outcomes of the module were assessed in the form of a portfolio. students wrote a 750 word critical reflection about the workshops, discussing how the sessions had informed their approach to research and identifying which essential resources and facilities would help them to undertake research in their degree pathway in the future. the portfolio included a bibliography comprising a range of academic sources to support their understanding of the module. crowther walking the path of desire: evaluating a blended learning approach to developing study skills in a multi-disciplinary group journal of learning development in higher education, issue 14: april 2019 4 evaluation in order to observe the road most travelled, it was important both to identify but also create paths by which students could develop study skills and devise a mechanism to evaluate them. ethics approval to gather data was obtained from the university’s ethics committee. the four routes of engagement or pathways which were identified were: 1) attendance, 2) accesses of digital lecture capture, 3) evidence of use of library resources (print or electronic), and 4) use of the vle. an effective path was defined as one in which the student attained some measure of success in achieving the learning outcomes of the module, as evidenced through their assessed work. attendance the university’s attendance monitoring system recorded an attendance rate of 61%. for the 46 students who passed the module, the attendance rate was 71%. a spearman's non-parametric correlation was calculated in order to determine the relationship between student attendance and portfolio grade of those who passed the module. the results of this calculation indicated that there was a significant positive correlation between attendance and grade outcome (rs = .52, p<.001, n=46). digital lecture capture the digital lecture capture videos were accessed 45 times in total. these accesses were made by 16 students, representing 24% of the cohort, of whom two-thirds had a higher than average attendance (65%).this indicates that lecture capture was used not only as an alternative to face to face teaching but also as a recall tool. 29 of the accesses took place during the six weeks that the presentations were delivered, and 16 occurred afterwards in the weeks leading up to the hand-in date for the portfolio. thirteen of the 16 students who used lecture capture passed the module. the critical reflections revealed that some students considered lecture capture as vital, citing social anxiety and dyslexia as reasons for listening to the recordings. crowther walking the path of desire: evaluating a blended learning approach to developing study skills in a multi-disciplinary group journal of learning development in higher education, issue 14: april 2019 5 use of library resources library circulation statistics revealed that only two students borrowed the recommended study skills texts and, although both of these students received over 70% for their portfolio grade, they only represent 20% of the students in this grade boundary. the bibliographies and critical reflections in the portfolios suggest a higher level of engagement with the material than the library circulation statistics revealed (27%), indicating that students may have read texts in the library without borrowing them, or obtained required reading from other sources. accesses to the recommended e-book study skills titles increased significantly during the semester (over 120 accesses in october and november). however, this increase was mainly within the humanities subjects. some students expressed a preference for printed books in their critical reflections indicating that there is an appetite for textual resources and a more detailed survey of how they obtained this material would be useful. blackboard usage blackboard analytics revealed that most of the accesses to the vle took place on thursdays (32.21%) which is the day when the workshops took place. this indicates that students were either using the seminar time after the workshop to view content with their group tutors or spending time in the evening engaging with the online content. the next most popular day was wednesday, which could suggest that students were either working with the online content or viewing the presentation slides in advance of the workshop. the mean average time students spent using the vle was 3.01 hours in total over the course of the semester. the mean average for those completing the module was 3.27 hours, rising to 4.20 hours for those passing the module. this equates to 11.66 minutes a week over the 19 weeks from the start of the course until the portfolio submission date. a qualitative analysis was made of the students’ portfolios in order to identify whether or not students had engaged with the online activities. of the 46 students who passed the module, 63% showed some evidence of engagement with the online content through reflections on using recommended websites, databases, study skills tools or reading. a spearman's non-parametric correlation was calculated to determine the relationship between portfolio grade and blackboard use for those who passed the module. the association between the two variables is not significant for those who passed the module, crowther walking the path of desire: evaluating a blended learning approach to developing study skills in a multi-disciplinary group journal of learning development in higher education, issue 14: april 2019 6 and hours spent on blackboard did not significantly enhance learning outcomes (rs = .082, p>.001, n=46). recommendations as a result of the case study, changes were made to the module for the 2018/19 cohort. with attendance identified as the most effective path to success more attention was given to creating dynamic content. presentations were shortened, group work increased, interactive online quizzing introduced and screencasts created. moreover, in recognition that ease of access is at the heart of desire paths, chapters of recommended study skills texts were scanned and added to the blackboard to encourage greater engagement with this material at an earlier stage of the module. blended learning has the potential to empower and transform the lives of students for whom classroom interaction is difficult and allows for greater subject specificity in targeted content. thus, it fulfils the needs of a diverse cohort. however, attendance is still key to success for most students. further research could be undertaken in future cohorts to understand how students develop their academic skills beyond the classroom, looking at class wikis, social media, discussion forums, online modules, and peer to peer support. references arnold-garza, s. (2014) ‘the flipped classroom teaching model and its use for information literacy instruction’, communications in information literacy, 8(1), pp. 722. https://doi.org/10.15760/comminfolit.2014.8.1.161 (accessed: 19 january 2019). ashwin, p. (2015) reflective teaching in higher education. london: bloomsbury. bachelard, g. (1958) the poetics of space. reprint, new york: penguin, 2014. brookfield, s. (1995) becoming a critically reflective teacher. san francisco: jossey-bass. carbery, a. and hegarty, n. (2011) ‘introducing problem-based learning into oneshot information literacy instruction at waterford institute of technology libraries’, https://doi.org/10.15760/comminfolit.2014.8.1.161 crowther walking the path of desire: evaluating a blended learning approach to developing study skills in a multi-disciplinary group journal of learning development in higher education, issue 14: april 2019 7 sconul focus 53(33). available at: https://www.sconul.ac.uk/sites/default/files/documents/9_1.pdf (accessed: 19 january 2019). costello, b., lenholt, r. and stryker, j. (2004) ‘using blackboard in library instruction: addressing the learning styles of generations x and y’, the journal of academic librarianship 30(6), pp. 452-460. available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.acalib.2004.07.003 (accessed: 19 january 2019). hill, t., chidambaram, l. and summers, j.d. (2017) ‘playing ‘catch up’ with blended learning: performance impacts of augmenting classroom instruction with online learning’, behaviour and information technology 36(1), pp. 54-62. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/0144929x.2016.1189964 (accessed: 19 january 2019). lee, y.y., snajdr, e., calvert, l. and smith, a. (2016) journey from subjective to objective: capturing user experience. available at: https://scholarworks.iupui.edu/handle/1805/9198 (accessed: 19 january 2019). massis, b. (2018) ‘the user experience (ux) in libraries’, information and learning science. available at: https://doi.org/10.1108/ils-12-2017-0132 (accessed: 19 january 2019). mery, y., newby, j. and peng, k. (2012) ‘why one-shot information literacy sessions are not the future of instruction: a case for online credit courses’, college & research libraries 73(4), pp. 366-377. available at: https://doi.org/10.5860/crl-271 (accessed: 19 january 2019). raven m. and rodrigues, d. (2017) ‘a course of our own: taking an information literacy credit course from inception to reality. partnership’, the canadian journal of library and information practice and research 12(1). available at: https://doi.org/10.21083/partnership.v12i1.3907 (accessed: 19 january 2019). wingate, u. (2006) ‘doing away with ‘study skills’’, teaching in higher education https://www.sconul.ac.uk/sites/default/files/documents/9_1.pdf https://doi.org/10.1016/j.acalib.2004.07.003 https://doi.org/10.1080/0144929x.2016.1189964 https://scholarworks.iupui.edu/handle/1805/9198 https://doi.org/10.1108/ils-12-2017-0132 https://doi.org/10.5860/crl-271 https://doi.org/10.21083/partnership.v12i1.3907 crowther walking the path of desire: evaluating a blended learning approach to developing study skills in a multi-disciplinary group journal of learning development in higher education, issue 14: april 2019 8 11(4), pp. 457-469. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/13562510600874268 (accessed: 19 january 2019). author details michelle crowther is the learning and research librarian for humanities at canterbury christ church university. her research interests include digital humanities, digitized newspaper collections, victorian periodicals and blended learning. https://doi.org/10.1080/13562510600874268 walking the path of desire: evaluating a blended learning approach to developing study skills in a multi-disciplinary group abstract this case study describes the methods used to evaluate a series of study skills workshops and online learning materials created for a cohort of foundation degree arts and humanities students. the workshops and online content were created in response t... introduction delivery assessment evaluation attendance digital lecture capture use of library resources blackboard usage recommendations references author details article journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 15: november 2019 ________________________________________________________________________ editorial john hilsdon, alicja syska, andy hagyard, sue eccles, christina howellsrichardson, gita sedghi, craig morley, christopher drew, cathy malone, eleanor loughlin, steve briggs, mick kavanagh, sarah brewer, john wrigglesworth this special issue of the journal of learning development in higher education (jldhe) marks two significant events: it is ten years since the establishment of our journal, an important landmark in the evolution of the field of learning development (ld), and twenty years since the publication of mary lea and brian street’s highly influential paper that introduced the concept of ‘academic literacies’ to the field, changing it in a range of ways. the paper, entitled ‘student writing in higher education: an academic literacies approach’ (1998) and published in the journal studies in higher education, has acted as a catalyst, inspiring new theoretical, pedagogical and research initiatives in several countries. it also underpinned the development of a field of inquiry focussing on how language practices affect students’ opportunities for learning and their participation in higher education. in celebration of these two events, we are delighted to present this edition as a collaboration between colleagues in the association for learning development in higher education (aldinhe), baleap the global forum for english for academic purposes (eap) professionals, and the european association of teachers of academic writing (eataw). the origin of the collaboration was a meeting held at the 2017 aldinhe conference. this led to a successful joint baleap/aldinhe event held in essex in 2018, following which a proposal was made to form a joint editorial board. a call for papers was issued in february 2019, which elicited over thirty proposals for this special edition. lea and street’s paper was based on findings from an esrc-funded ethnographic study into the expectations and interpretations of academics and students of undergraduate writing tasks. the research reported that the implicit models of student writing underlying much teaching and assessment practice in universities ‘do not adequately take account of the importance of issues of identity and the institutional relationships of power and authority that surround, and are embedded within, diverse student writing practices across editorial journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 2 the university’ (1998, p. 157). adopting a practices rather than a skills approach, they argued, avoids assuming that ‘the codes and conventions of academia can be taken as given’ and instead calls for ‘a more complex analysis of what it means to become academically literate’ (p.158). as lillis put it, they advocated looking at ‘student writing as a socially situated discourse practice which is ideologically inscribed’ (2003, p. 192). many learning developers, eap practitioners, and others found this stance appealing because it implies both a practical and ethical pedagogy, validating the meanings students bring initially to their learning experience. this means taking account of students’ prior knowledge and their social, cultural and linguistic backgrounds, rather than assuming that only the academically authorised meanings have value. the emerging conception of a new pedagogy based on academic literacies suggested involving students as legitimate participants in curriculum development, in the organisation of teaching and learning activities, as well as in subject specific knowledge creation and research in inclusive and socially relevant heis. the current special edition of the jldhe brings together contributions to practice and research focussing on how students are supported in the development of language and skills for successful study in the increasingly diverse higher education contexts of the twenty-first century. included here are nine papers, four case studies, three opinion pieces, and one literature review bringing together a range of responses to, and examples of the development of, academic literacies since lea and street’s seminal article. the introductory section opens with ‘academic literacies twenty years on: a communitysourced literature review’ by john hilsdon, cathy malone, and alicja syska. this is a somewhat experimental collaboration sourced from across the professional bodies of aldinhe, eataw and baleap. taking lea and street’s 1998 article as a starting point, it brings together 17 contributions organised topically around issues of modality in learning, student identity, and focus on text, before considering implications for further research and practice. this review is a reflexive attempt to capture professional debate and discussion that has emerged in the last two decades that has been explicitly connected with the field of academic literacies. in identifying significant areas of overlap and divergence between different professional bodies, these reviews also act as a springboard into other theories and fields of research. editorial journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 3 one of the foremost thinkers and researchers in the field of academic literacies is theresa lillis. her opinion piece, ‘“academic literacies”: sustaining a critical space on writing in academia’, explores the relationship between academic language and literacy practices and participation in academia, arguing that an academic literacies perspective offers opportunities for practitioners and policy-makers to explore critically some of the (often taken-for-granted) assumptions about academic writing conventions and the ways these embed and impose conditions for participation in knowledge making. she argues that all contributors to he practices, including students, across countries where neo-liberal regimes prevail, can benefit from adopting an academic literacies lens to critique methods of demonstrating, assessing and evaluating learning. this approach suggests utilising lea and street’s notion of academic literacies for creative questioning and development of practice in both the normative and transformative functions of academia. another well-known contributor to the field is ursula wingate. in ‘achieving transformation through collaboration: the role of academic literacies’, wingate presents a particular view of how academic literacies can be transformative. she sees the academic literacies ‘model’ as a perspective for research into students’ writing and pedagogy for writing development practitioners. this implies a different emphasis in the definition of academic literacies than that given by lea and street, where the approach is posited as having potential for pedagogy in general to ‘adequately take account of the importance of issues of identity and the institutional relationships of power and authority’ (1998, p.156) associated with student writing. wingate too argues for wide-ranging transformation; in her view, however, this means concentration on what she calls ‘adequate academic literacy support’ for students via the integration of ‘academic literacy instruction’ using genrebased approaches. setting the context for this special edition in our tenth anniversary year, steve briggs and mick kavanagh discuss a successful one-day joint conference between baleap and aldinhe, held in 2018, which was based on a shared practical and theoretical interest in academic literacies work. this paper encourages further cross-association collaborations between our professional associations and the content of the current issue can be seen, at least in part, as the first fruits of this joint initiative. in their paper, kim mitchell, diana mcmillan and michelle lobchuk seek to move our understanding of writing self-efficacy forward by exploring the relationship between the editorial journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 4 cognitive concept of writing self-efficacy and a socially constructed epistemology of writing. at the heart of their work, ‘applying the “social turn” in writing scholarship to perspectives on writing self-efficacy”, is a proposed synthesis of three constructionist-situated perspectives: activity theory, rhetorical genre theory, and communities of practice. simon williams explores how novice student writers could benefit from a more principled combination of eap and academic literacies approaches to support their development of a balanced voice and achieve fluency in reflective writing. in ‘the appearance of voice: eap and academic literacies approaches to teaching reflective writing’ he argues that as reflective writing increasingly forms part of the assessment of student learning, the balance between the more objective approaches to teaching academic writing (i.e. eap) and academic literacies as an approach that develops students’ subjectivity (i.e. academic literacies) becomes increasingly important. this ‘joined-up’ approach, he argues, can provide the optimum learning environment for novice student writers to develop and achieve reflective writing fluency. sharon mcculloch and tania horak focus on staff in two uk universities who provide writing support to students. they compare the views and identities of eap teachers and learning developers, with the aim of understanding both groups’ perceptions of academic writing. the results of their study suggest a spectrum from autonomous, text-based approaches to academic literacies perspectives on writing, but with some commonalities across all approaches. they suggest sharing good practice and developing a greater understanding of the similarities and differences between the two approaches in order to facilitate greater awareness of what it means to be a professional academic writer and appreciate the range of expertise these two groups bring to their field. john wrigglesworth presents a case study that involves putting the principles of an academic literacies approach to work in an undergraduate academic language module. the paper opens with a thorough exploration of academic literacies and its value in challenging taken-for-granted assumptions in higher education. the author then presents a case study of his own attempts at using academic literacies. the case study challenges the reader to envisage how a genuine attempt to break down institutional power structures in the interests of empowering students as writers might take place in higher education. editorial journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 5 in their paper exploring the notion of ‘third space’ as part of an academic literacies approach, sandra abegglen, tom burns and sandra sinfield describe their experience of designing and delivering an interdisciplinary first-year undergraduate module. they sought to create a participative space in which students can reconceive their identities and academic potential as well as contributing to course and curriculum design. they see this initiative in terms of a rhizomatic model, offering a variety of non-hierarchical entry and exit points for students, many of whom are underprepared for more traditional approaches to university teaching and the learning environment. the connections between how a discipline communicates in texts and how disciplinary knowledge is produced are explored in a paper by bente kristiansen. she argues that promoting student awareness of knowledge domains and discourse communities is vital and he suggests that rhetorical contexts and knowledge-making practices of disciplines can become powerful vehicles for pedagogy. jennifer sizer describes 'textography' (swales, 1998) as a potential approach for practitioners of eap and ld to use in their work with students and staff to promote greater mutual understanding. according to sizer, textography makes use of textual analysis and ethnographic methods of describing communication to enable assessment of students’ needs, as well as helping them to develop their awareness and understanding of language conventions, which may vary widely according to context and usage. lynne gornall writes about using appreciative inquiry to consult students and academics about support for postgraduate international business school students in order to identify preferred modes of support and clarify intersecting professional roles that support change. an explicit academic literacies approach was evaluated most highly by all participants. the reasons given are summarised by linking ideas from communities of practice with a description of learning development practice as fulfilling a brokering function for academics and students. she draws upon previous studies to define brokering in this context as promoting collaboration on work towards change and development, and ‘spanning boundaries’ between subject lecturers, students, and learning developers. similarly, in discussing the links between english for academic purposes and academic literacies approaches, paul breen presents a case study of eap acting as a fulcrum between theory and practice. the study focuses on a three-month pre-sessional course editorial journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 6 designed to help students satisfy university entrance requirements and visa regulations. it illustrates the range of issues arising in discussions of students’ ‘level’ of english and learning needs, as well as varying interpretations by academics of discipline specific language. breen's study adds weight to the argument that eap practitioners need to work more closely with the mainstream disciplinary communities. drawing on lea and street’s academic literacies perspectives and genre theory, philip montgomery, jason sparks and bridget goodman explore how postgraduate students studying social sciences in an english-medium university in kazakhstan develop knowledge and capacity in a range of academic genres. this mixed methods study blends a detailed genre analysis based in the hallidayan concepts of field, tenor and mode alongside pedagogic enquiry into approaches that support successful learning of academic genres. a key finding of their research, which is consistent with lea and street’s theoretical position, is that explicit, accessible feedback, linked to transparency of genre usage in meaning making, contributed to their students’ success. rosella d’alesio and ben martin report on a project designed to help demonstrate the benefits of collaboration between learning developers and subject lecturers. their case study describes how a generic academic literacy framework was developed for this purpose. it was designed to be concise, non-level specific and accommodating of a multiplicity of factors involved in developing academic literacy. they explain how the framework was developed and how it can be evaluated, concluding with a discussion of planned next steps for their project. linda thies and viola rosario present a two-part case study using lea and street’s (1998) paper on academic literacies to inform ways of working collaboratively with a range of partners on embedding academic literacies in course curricula. both studies focused on the development of curricula in selected professional courses in order to increase students’ awareness of disciplinary requirements and to ensure that students develop the academic literacies needed to succeed in their area of study. what differed in these studies was the combinations of project partners and the nature of the partnerships. in her case study, angela rhead highlights academic reading as a troublesome threshold concept for students and teachers alike in he. she adopts a writing retreat format to introduce an exciting teaching innovation at keele university: academic reading retreats. editorial journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 7 these retreats deliver a range of strategies for reading journal articles and provide opportunities for private practice and shared reflections, which can facilitate deep learning about complex epistemological concepts. they open a dialogue within the academic community that helps students better understand the relationship between reading and enquiry, and helps academics better understand their students’ reading challenges. the wide-ranging content of the papers in this special edition demonstrates the diverse, creative and inspiring ways in which academic literacies approaches are being interpreted, explored, and practised. this attests to the fertile and ground-breaking nature of lea and street’s concept and the readiness with which it has been taken up by he researchers, educators and policymakers in uk academia and beyond. those who are interested in the questions of what it means to be academically literate, to participate in higher education, and how best to work with students with diverse needs, will continue to respond to and draw upon this conceptual framework. this special edition adds to this productive and important debate and we believe that all involved can be proud of the work it contains. editorial journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special issue 22: compendium of innovative practice october 2021 when online student numbers double during a pandemic nicholas bowskill university of derby, uk david hall university of derby, uk lucy hutchinson university of derby, uk melody harrogate university of derby, uk keywords: podcasts; pandemic; group work; globalised learning; learning design; covid19. the challenge what can you do when an online professional development module sees student numbers double? what effective but safe changes can you make to course design at short notice when both tutors and participants are working from home? this paper tackles learning design for large online groups during an educational crisis. innovative 21st century teaching is an online professional development module delivered by the university of derby. the aim is to model and promote student-centred learning within a globalised educational environment. participants in this postgraduate module are practising teachers from around the world. the module has been delivered twice in the context of the global pandemic. during the first quarter of 2020, it was delivered to 75 teachers and again in the first quarter of 2021, to 149 teachers across four continents. bowskill, hall, hutchinson when online student numbers double during a pandemic and harrogate journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 2 the response tutoring was done from home on both occasions. one tutor covered the module and three others joined to mark final assessments. key changes for the increased numbers were: • a module podcast. • small group bases. • use of teacher-testimonies via global providers. • reflecting together on educational experiences of the pandemic. a module podcast podcasts can be accessed at anytime and anywhere (ro and villarreal, 2021). use of podcasts can increase efficiency and impact positively on practice (malecki et al., 2019). podcasts improve reflection and support community development when shared in groups (forbes, 2011). participants already create podcasts as part of this module. they give their initial conceptions of 21st century teaching and their podcasts are shared and discussed in social learning forums. this develops digital literacy, creates greater inclusion, and extends the concept of student voice and audio content into collaborative learning. hearing human voices, diverse accents, and different genders in a globally distributed group supports diversity and develops cultural intelligence. for this larger cohort, we added a weekly module podcast created by the tutor to humanise teaching and add value by offering mini-lectures, each lasting six to eight minutes. audio content covered unit topics and overviewed assessment tasks. new episodes were shared on the soundcloud podcasting platform and the audio file was posted on blackboard for those with technical or local access issues. of the 14 episodes produced, numbers one to seven each had over 100 plays on soundcloud. the next four episodes each had over 60 plays and the last three episodes averaged 15 plays; however, the last three weeks do typically see a switch of student attention towards assessments. bowskill, hall, hutchinson when online student numbers double during a pandemic and harrogate journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 3 small group bases large cohorts can depersonalise the experience of learning. for example, massive open online courses (moocs) often experience this phenomenon with difficulties maintaining learning relationships over time (sanz-martínez et al., 2019). membership of groups can increase motivation and provide emotional support (haslam et al., 2009). peer-learning can be an effective development strategy (dawson et al., 2014). for this larger cohort, participants were organised into five online group bases. each group had its own space within each unit and group membership remained constant throughout the module. each group had approximately 30 members selected randomly at the start and listed in the main community forum. groups were large enough to maintain an active dialogue across time zones and, over the 10-week period, they were still manageable for tutoring. participants created and shared a range of materials as part of different unit activities. they discussed content and the experiential activities were evaluated for transfer into participants’ local practice. use of teacher-testimonies via global providers non-governmental organisations (ngos) such as unesco, unicef and the world bank play a key role during educational emergencies, including the covid-19 pandemic. as trusted providers, ngos provided webinars, case-studies, and research for schools around the world coping with closures and disruption during the pandemic. unfortunately, teachers are often too busy or unaware of these resources. we identified specific ngo collections relevant to teaching in the pandemic such as those from oecd. participants were given a set of teacher-testimonies about coping during the pandemic. these self-created videos formed a set of case studies covering a range of contexts and responses. an archived set of webinars for teachers, given by ngos, were also provided in the module. activities required participants to select items relevant to their practice and interests. individuals then shared and explained their choices in groups. this activity connected our https://www.globalteachinginsights.org/channel/2.+share+your+insights/186022973 bowskill, hall, hutchinson when online student numbers double during a pandemic and harrogate journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 4 practitioners with a wider group of teachers hosted by trusted ngos. this raised awareness of the availability and relevance of these resources. participants also experienced a collaborative approach to resource evaluation as a pedagogical model. reflecting on educational experiences of the pandemic resilience is the ability to bounce-back from adversity (smith et al., 2010). the pandemic was an educational, personal, and professional crisis and reflecting together on practitioner-challenges can therefore be a useful resource for teachers’ resilience, practice, and well-being (le cornu, 2013). we added an activity to support participants to discuss experiences of teaching during the pandemic. participants shared what worked and identified common concerns. the activity simultaneously provided diverse coping strategies which had been tested in practice. this supported resilience through sharing, dialogue, and a growing sense of belonging. webinar sessions measured sense of belonging asking participants to respond in the chat box by posting a number between one and five (where one is a strong sense of belonging and five is none), with most posting one or two. opportunities for educators to reflect on their pandemic experience with other professionals are rare. the module provided a safe space for participants to share success stories and offer mutual support. recommendations emails and forum comments suggested the rapid re-design was effective in coping with the doubling of student numbers. we modelled online learning activities while exploring, sharing, and creating digital resources together. we humanised tutoring and personalised learning with a module podcast. several participants reported introducing podcasting into their practice while the course was still running. we supported socialisation with small group bases. we raised awareness and evaluated global resources together. we supported resilience by relating participants’ experiences of teaching during the pandemic with the experience of other practitioners via ngo sites. we reflected collaboratively on content and activities. in short, the re-design worked under the toughest test of a large globally distributed group of educators undergoing a fully online bowskill, hall, hutchinson when online student numbers double during a pandemic and harrogate journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 5 professional development module during a pandemic. above all, we recommend participants create and share digital objects as representations of their views in order to make thinking visible and as an effective means to facilitate discussion and belonging. references dawson, p., van der meer, j., skalicky, j. and cowley, k. (2014) 'on the effectiveness of supplemenetal instruction: a systematic review of supplemental instruction and peer-assisted study sessions literature between 2011-2010', review of educational research, 20(10), pp.1-31. https://doi.org/10.3102/0034654314540007. forbes, d. (2011) 'beyond lecture capture: student-generated podcasts in teacher education', waikato journal of education, 16(1), pp.51-64. available at: https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/44289802.pdf (accessed: 9 september 2021). haslam, s. a., jetten, j., postmes, t. and haslam, c. (2009) 'social identity, health and well-being: an emerging agenda for applied psychology', applied psychology, 58(1), pp.1-23. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1464-0597.2008.00379.x. le cornu, r. (2013) 'building early career teacher resilience: the role of relationships', australian journal of teacher education, 38(4), p.1. available at: https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ej1013933.pdf (accessed: 9 september 2021). malecki, s. l., quinn, k. l., zilbert, n., razak, f., ginsburg, s., verma, a. a. and melvin, l. (2019) 'understanding the use and perceived impact of a medical podcast: qualitative study', jmir med educ, 5(2), e12901. https://doi.org/10.2196/12901. ro, k. and villarreal, j. (2021) 'development of interprofessional collaborative podcasts to introduce electrocardiographic fundamentals', the journal for nurse practitioners, 17(3), pp.326-328. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nurpra.2020.11.002. sanz-martínez, l., er, e., martínez-monés, a., dimitriadis, y. and bote-lorenzo, m. l. (2019) 'creating collaborative groups in a mooc: a homogeneous engagement https://doi.org/10.3102/0034654314540007 https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/44289802.pdf https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1464-0597.2008.00379.x https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ej1013933.pdf https://doi.org/10.2196/12901 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nurpra.2020.11.002 bowskill, hall, hutchinson when online student numbers double during a pandemic and harrogate journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 6 grouping approach', behaviour & information technology, 38(11), pp.1107-1121. https://doi.org/10.1080/0144929x.2019.1571109. smith, b. w., tooley, e. m., christopher, p. j. and kay, v. s. (2010) 'resilience as the ability to bounce back from stress: a neglected personal resource?', the journal of positive psychology, 5(3), pp.166-176. https://doi.org/10.1080/17439760.2010.482186. author details nicholas bowskill is a senior fellow of the higher education academy and senior lecturer in education (udol) at university of derby. his research interests relate to technologysupported pedagogy, constructionist theory, and generative digital practices. david hall is a senior lecturer in education and leads the leadership & management pathway for the ma education programme (online) at the university of derby. he researches educational management in general and has a specific interest in criteriabased assessment using rubrics. lucy alucia hutchinson is a senior fellow of the higher education academy and senior lecturer in education, university of derby online learning (udol). her research interests relate to inclusion, disability, inclusive student engagement in online learning, with a special interest in narrowing the achievement gap as part of inclusion. melody harrogate is a programme leader for the ma education part time on campus, udol, and international partners. she is a senior lecturer in education and leads the leadership & management pathway for the ma education programme on campus at the university of derby. her research includes educational leadership and quality management, and she is especially interested in how we learn, and real world learning. https://doi.org/10.1080/0144929x.2019.1571109 https://doi.org/10.1080/17439760.2010.482186 when online student numbers double during a pandemic the challenge the response a module podcast small group bases use of teacher-testimonies via global providers reflecting on educational experiences of the pandemic recommendations references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special issue 22: compendium of innovative practice october 2021 ________________________________________________________________________ keep calm and carry on with small tweaks: teamwork in the pandemic weijia li university of rochester, new york, usa keywords: teamwork; division of labor; use of tools; local innovations; covid-19. the challenge in march 2020, we pivoted to working remotely, as the pandemic unfolded itself. as one of the offices nested in the teaching and learning centre in a private research university in the united states, our study skills consulting team at the time was made up of four consultants: three full-time graduate students (including me) and a full-time assistant director as the team leader. we were juggling multiple commitments respectively before the pandemic. however, when we were stationed at home, holding appointments with students via zoom, the change revealed issues we previously seemed to handle well, one of which was communication. the timely casual chats had disappeared since we no longer saw each other at the office. for example, in a face-to-face environment, informing a colleague of project updates could take a few minutes. however, doing so via email could take much longer. certainly, discussing over zoom might hasten the process, but that would require additional time and effort to set up such a meeting. consequently, we seemed to have become solely reliant on verbal communication, including emails and weekly zoom meetings. operating remotely largely diminished nonverbal, and put more strain on verbal, communication. meanwhile, online communication, while viable, had influenced our sense of efficiency and progress. the response my doctoral coursework on learning theories and research offered me some tools to brainstorm possible strategies, particularly the notion of activity system (greeno and li keep calm and carry on with small tweaks: teamwork in the pandemic journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 2 engeström, 2013). because the unit of analysis for an activity system is more than for an individual person, it appears an appropriate lens for understanding teamwork. however, an activity system itself does not remain unchanged. on the contrary, there is often timebound development driven by ‘tensions, disturbances and local innovations’ (cole and engeström, 1993, p.8). the pandemic disrupted the ways we used to work together and forced us to re-evaluate and respond. therefore, we developed new practices as our way to respond and adapt to the disruption. in order to strengthen transparency and timeliness in communication, i initially had the idea that we could use a virtual bulletin board to document our work and to-do items. with that, we were able to communicate throughout the week without emailing back and forth to ensure that everyone was on the same page. in addition, we could better prepare for our weekly meetings, knowing what we would be discussing. after i described how this could work, a colleague started a google doc to share among us. it also made it easier for us to keep track of what we had done. as a result, we began to realise and appreciate the benefits of documenting our work. second, i suggested a more specific division of labour (marken, 2008) among team members to optimise efficiency and further reduce confusion in communication. prior to working from home, each consultant (i.e., student employees) held office hours at designated times on weekdays. because our primary duty was conducting one-on-one appointments with students, most of time we operated individually and did some ad hoc work when needed. the latter might continue for a while and naturally go through more than one person. however, when we started working from home, we increasingly felt the need to know ‘who’s doing what’. for example, we delegated among ourselves which departments we each should reach out to for collaboration, which was also reflected on the shared google doc. we were able to dedicate most of our time and effort to creating outreach initiatives, reducing the need to manage the logistics. furthermore, while having a specific division of labour seemed to make us work even more independently, we in fact collaborated more. since 2020, we have witnessed a growing number of requests for virtual workshops and presentations, some of which were recorded. when happening virtually, these events tended to add more pressure to the presenter(s). one observation is that when the audience has not much to focus on visually, other than the slides and the presenter(s), they seem to focus more on the listening. at li keep calm and carry on with small tweaks: teamwork in the pandemic journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 3 least that happened to me. i listened more attentively; however, it was easy for me to lose interest when a presenter did not sound well-prepared. realising that, i started writing scripts for workshops and presentations because i could easily look at the script while presenting without it being noticed on camera. for one thing, the actual delivery felt stressfree, given that we could edit and tweak what we wanted to say in advance. for another, the scripts became artefacts that could be compiled for later. not only were we able to showcase ourselves professionally with quality work, but we were also able to create a pool of resources for ourselves. recommendations our lessons are still relevant in a post-pandemic world, as many institutions plan to return to in-person instruction later this year. although our study skills consulting team remains a small unit, thinking about mediating artefacts, or the tools we use, as well as the division of labour has been helpful. start with tools you have already been using. most likely, you may not need to incorporate new tools but perhaps invent new ways to use them. next, delegate tasks for a clearer division of labour among team members; this creates some structure and the sense of direction that teamwork usually relies on. the pandemic has changed our way of working but also provided food for thought, reflection, and improvement. while uncertainty remains, we will keep reflecting and applying what we have learned to our future work. references cole, m. and engeström, y. (1993) ‘a cultural-historical approach to distributed cognition’, in salomon, g. (ed.) distributed cognition: psychological and educational considerations. cambridge: cambridge university press, pp.1-46. greeno, j. g. and engeström, y. (2013) ‘learning in activity’, in sawyer, r. k. (ed.) the cambridge handbook of the learning sciences. cambridge: cambridge university press, pp.79-96. li keep calm and carry on with small tweaks: teamwork in the pandemic journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 4 marken, j. a. (2008) ‘an application of activity theory’, performance improvement quarterly, 19(2), pp.27-49. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1937-8327.2006.tb00364.x. author details weijia li is a doctoral student in teaching and curriculum at the warner school of education, university of rochester. she is one of the co-authors of the book titled an a to w of academic literacy: key concepts and practices for graduate students, published in march 2021 by the university of michigan press. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1937-8327.2006.tb00364.x keep calm and carry on with small tweaks: teamwork in the pandemic the challenge the response recommendations references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 19: december 2020 ________________________________________________________________________ conversations in writing: a book review of m. healey, k.e. matthews and a. cook-sather (2020) writing about learning and teaching in higher education: creating and contributing to scholarly conversations. north carolina: center for engaged learning claire saunders open university, uk keywords: sotl; scholarship of teaching and learning; academic writing; scholarship; writing for publication. overview the scholarship of teaching and learning (sotl) occupies an uneasy space in the academic research landscape. both defining its nature and purpose and arguing for its inclusion in the wider research agenda of a university have long been challenging tasks for those who want to contribute to discourse about teaching and learning in their own disciplines. in this context, a book about writing that embarks on a mission to encourage ‘scholarly conversations’ in a range of writing genres is welcome. this is what mick healey, kelly e. matthews and alison cook-sather offer us in their new publication, writing and learning about teaching in higher education. making the book open access not only embodies the authors’ own values, but broadens its scope beyond its virtual pages to a wealth of other material via a click of the many links embedded in the text. structure and content the book is a long read with its almost 400 pages, divided into five parts. the first two parts situate it in the context of a particular set of scholarly conversations to which it hopes to contribute. the remaining three parts weave together a neat summary of eleven possible writing genres with a useful set of ‘how to’ chapters that lead the reader through the multi-layered process of producing writing for publication in its many forms. saunders conversations in writing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 19: december 2020 2 the endless potential of the written word is reflected in some of central threads that the authors unravel in the first half of the book. firstly, they argue for the place of writing in initiating and sustaining scholarly conversations. secondly, they connect writing with the development of academic identity, and, finally, they advocate the principles of the writing to learn movement. in so doing, they hold to the view of writing as an exploratory tool, a process of thinking and learning, rather than simply a final, polished product. for me, this sets the book on a solid foundation; my own research on building writing communities in higher education suggests that both process and product should underpin any initiative or encouragement to our colleagues (and ourselves) to write. at times, though, the argument skims over some of the complexities and challenges of writing about teaching and learning that, in reality, make it a good deal harder than the authors acknowledge. my perception is that this is borne from good intentions. the aim, i think, is for the book to serve as a comprehensive volume that both explores some theoretical perspectives on writing and acts as a ‘how to’ guide to getting writing done and getting it published. however, in the end, it felt a little safe and shied away from some uncomfortable truths. the chapter on ‘fostering identity through a values-based approach to writing’ is a case in point. i concur absolutely with the contention that ‘writing about learning and teaching both draws on and can complicate, shape, and reshape our academic identities’ (p.33). but the development of academic identity is bound up in the complex relations between the individual and the institutional and disciplinary communities in which we participate. one of the implications of this is that those of us who want to write about learning and teaching can find ourselves traversing a political minefield. our institutional cultures may not recognise or value this kind of writing and thus the supportive cultures that might allow us to make time and space to write are scarce. i wanted healey, matthews and cook-sather to tackle this head-on; instead the concept of identity was presented as almost entirely unproblematic. more successful are the chapters in the second half of the book, which offer the reader clear and concise guidance for writing texts in a range of genres. the ‘guiding questions’ that are a feature of each chapter are a useful starting point and the acknowledgement that genres overlap and boundaries are blurred prevent this section from feeling too formulaic and over-simplistic. in the same vein, the chapters about submitting work and saunders conversations in writing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 19: december 2020 3 responding to the dreaded peer review offer clear, practical advice and make a welcome plea for constructive comment and kindness on the part of reviewers! final thoughts i was left wondering, though, whether there was a place for being a little more contentious – perhaps for pushing, rather than simply blurring the boundaries. in the end, despite the material on other genres, there is more guidance on the drafting, submission, review and revision of a journal article than any other writing form. and ultimately, despite the range of possibilities apparently available to them, healey, matthew and cook-sather opted for a book – albeit open access – as the conduit for a call for writing that sparks scholarly conversations. i can’t help wondering what kinds of conversation might have exploded had they opted for a blog. perhaps this is the elephant in the room: the book never quite acknowledges the tension between living with the status quo and bravely resetting the landscape by embracing in their entirety the many other forms of writing that might open up our scholarly conversations beyond the confines of our existing academic communities. but this is some challenge – and at least healey, matthew and cook-sather have given us some tools for the task. author details claire saunders is a staff tutor and director of praxis, the centre for scholarship and innovation in the faculty of wellbeing, education and language studies at the open university. her doctoral thesis was entitled, 'building a community of learners in a university: an ethnographic study' and investigated the role of a writing group in developing the academic writing practices of lecturers in a teaching-led university. her ongoing research interests relate to the academic writing practices of both lecturers and students. conversations in writing: a book review of m. healey, k.e. matthews and a. cook-sather (2020) writing about learning and teaching in higher education: creating and contributing to scholarly conversations. north carolina: center for engaged learning overview structure and content final thoughts author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 18: october 2020 a two-step model for integrating creative teaching in higher education nathalie sheridan university of glasgow, uk abstract this paper provides examples of practice demonstrating some underlying principles of translating creative and active pedagogies from school into a higher education context, using a simple two-step model and the concept of creative learning and teaching (jeffrey, 2006). since working in higher education, i sought to translate the principles of creative learning and teaching (jeffrey, 2006) into my praxis. this exercise became particularly prudent when moving into academic development, trying to convey the successful principles underlying my pedagogy to colleagues on the masters in academic practice. the paper will discuss a two-step model i developed: de-contextualizing and then re-contextualizing sometimes complex and intangible learning content to make it more accessible for learners. this will be exemplified by two teaching cases and evidenced with data i collected during my own postgraduate certificate in learning and teaching in higher education, demonstrating how the approach improved student performance and the overall quality of their academic work. these principles could be easily translated into different disciplinary contexts, with different groups of students. keywords: creative learning and teaching; active learning; student transition; student learning development; academic development. sheridan a two-step model for integrating creative teaching in higher education journal of learning development in higher education, issue 18: october 2020 2 background learning development sits in a contested space in terms of its location within ‘remedial’ policies of some institutions; but it can embody the very best of emancipatory practice (sinfield, et al., 2011, p. 61). a reoccurring issue working in learning development is to encourage students to engage with learning opportunities that are above and beyond the mere subject disciplines, instead of taking a reductionist performative approach to their learner journey (biggs and tang, 2011). university is a transitional space, an ‘in-culture’ (sheridan, 2011) that students have to learn to negotiate and understand; a space necessitating new cultural competences. transitioning into university as a first-year student, as a return to study master’s student, or as an international student, thus becomes a complex and challenging notion. for students, the move to university is a personal investment of the cultural capital accrued through school and college education. it is also a significant social displacement, which may be intensified where the student is mature, is the first in their family to attend university, or is from an ethnic group under-represented in the university population (briggs et al., 2012, p. 1-2). briggs et al. (2012) describe transition into university as cultural displacement for students, particularly students from underrepresented groups. universities are not only transitional spaces for students to ‘become’ professionals, educated, and attractive to the job-market (glasgow caledonian university, 2014), but also for university teachers whose professional identities are of perpetual becoming (ashwin, et al., 2015; kidd, 2015). whilst both educators and students are engaged in these identity negotiations, the abovementioned cultural displacement can be particularly acute for vulnerable student groups, such as first-generation students. mckendry et al. (2013) observe that these students make disproportionate use of learning development offers, which does not only aid their academic achievements but can foster a sense of belonging and agency (stebleton, soria and huesman, 2014; richards et al., 2017). however, not only for vulnerable students but sheridan a two-step model for integrating creative teaching in higher education journal of learning development in higher education, issue 18: october 2020 3 for all students transitioning into university, learning development sessions can help the integration of the learners into the university context (lee, 2001). to enable learners to take agency of their learner journeys i introduced principles of creative learning and teaching (jeffrey, 2006) into my higher education pedagogy, with the aim to enable the students to take ownership and control of their academic development. in conjunction with this, i decided to focus my own pgcert course work on this translation of creative pedagogies into higher education. if the students do not understand the relevance of academic development sessions for their learning, they might not engage in these (sheridan, 2011). to create this relevance, i intended to build a bridge for the students between cultural competences for academia and their subject disciplines. the principle of my approach is to de-contextualize the learning-aim from the purely academic skills into a meaningful experience the students could engage with, and negotiate positive learner-identities, subsequently recontextualizing it into the academic context. figure 1. two-step model to elaborate this principle in more detail in university degrees, we often have to convey complex concepts, theories, or principles to our students. approaching teaching from the theorizing viewpoint can make these concepts more inaccessible. so, breaking these concepts down into the underlying principles, and identifying parameters, descriptors, elements of these principles or concepts, and translating these into something tangible sheridan a two-step model for integrating creative teaching in higher education journal of learning development in higher education, issue 18: october 2020 4 (kolb, 2015) or something that students can get hold of and can experiment with, helps to make these principles and concepts more accessible to the students. this is where the ‘de-contextualizing’ of the model takes hold. it creates triggered situational interest, which enhances engagement during class, and has the potential to be carried forward by the learner beyond the classroom setting (symonds et al., 2019). i have established earlier that learning is in the dichotomy of the sense making process between socially mediated—extrinsic, and individual—intrinsic, activity (sheridan, 2011). supporting students in developing their metacognitive skills, and understanding how academic development sessions can enhance their learning, and performance, can enhance their engagement (symonds et al., 2019). with the caveat that the topic of engagement and motivation is more complex than that (for example zepke, 2017; kahu, picton and nelson, 2019; symonds et al., 2019) my research has indicated that establishing relevance (jeffrey, 2006) can enhance not only engagement but feed into the students’ learner identities, enabling them to take ownership of the learning process (sheridan, 2011). in the ‘re-contextualizing’ part of the model it is important to link the deconstructed elements back to the bigger concepts. one could consider this as closing the loop. guiding questions for students could be: ‘so, how does this work?’, ‘what did that do?’, ‘and how does all of what you have just learned, explored, and played with relate to the subject knowledge?’. these questions could be asked directly or used to guide the development of activities and presentations. making the model effective necessitates that the learners understand where a session or intervention sits within the overall course or learning experience. guiding questions for this might be: ‘how does what we are doing in today's lecture or in today's seminar, link to the previous and the upcoming sessions?’, and ‘how does it fit within the overall picture of the whole semester or academic year?’. whilst learning is a complex, personal, and socially mediated process (garner, 2009; claxton, costa and kallick, 2016), it is near to impossible to predict or understand the direction internal processes take in the individual learner. developing the learners’ meta-cognitive skills can make some of these processes more transparent and help the learners to take agency of their learning. sheridan a two-step model for integrating creative teaching in higher education journal of learning development in higher education, issue 18: october 2020 5 being metacognitive can be likened to being more conscious, reflective, and aware of one's progress along the learning path (sawhney and bansal, 2015, p.107). sawhney and bansal (2015) argue for the key role educators play in supporting their learners’ development of these skills. the two-step model outlined here can scaffold this development. academic development sessions aim to support positive identity negotiations of the learners (briggs, et al., 2012) as they are scaffolding the students’ development of literacies as emancipatory practice (sinfield, et al., 2011) by enabling the students to take agency of their learning process. as busseri et al (2010, p. 516) point out, first year students in particular have the need for a “structured supportive context in building personal competencies and exploring new identities”. considering these issues of transition into university, i developed an integrated approach for academic development during the first year at university. this proved an effective form of student learning development aiming to help students to become independent learners, instead of simply offering introduction sessions at the beginning of the year, or on demand sessions throughout the year. i collaborated with the heads of year, and we mapped the curriculum with the learning development tasks to offer meaningful, relevant and real-time sessions throughout the semester. this approach was taken both for the first-year master-level (of a two-year fulltime course) and first year undergraduate courses. methodology i developed a 16 session module for first year undergraduate (level 1) cohorts of diagnostic imaging and radiography students, taught throughout the first academic year. i also taught seven sessions across the first year for master students in life sciences and diagnostic imaging. all learning activities were aligned with the subject specific curriculum and designed in collaboration with module leaders. for instance, sessions about reflective writing were offered two weeks before the students had to hand in their first reflective assignment to allow enough time for the students to implement their learning into the assessment. sheridan a two-step model for integrating creative teaching in higher education journal of learning development in higher education, issue 18: october 2020 6 i obtained ethics approval to evaluate the integrated sessions, as part of my postgraduate certificate in learning and teaching in higher education (pgcert), in which we were tasked to take up a teaching challenge and evaluate our response to it. my challenge was to encourage students to engage with learning development sessions and improve their academic practice. within the scope of this project and the reflection about the activities, i realised that the key principle i applied to all activities could be represented in the two-step model introduced here. we were asked to utilize an action research approach in our project. however, due to the situation, the methodology needed to be adapted and i utilized guerrilla research tactics (grt): grt are influenced by and developed from a combination of participatory action research (kindon, 2008) and unobtrusive research methods (kellehear, 1993), to enhance social research (caldwell, osborne and mewburn, 2013, p. 17). caldwell, osborne and mewburn (2013) suggest that grts can be applied to a wide range of academic disciplines because of the focus on engagement with communities and finding solutions. one of the challenges of the research project was finding how to access the students’ perception about their experience of engaging with the learning strategies. finding a way of improving impact and the students’ understanding of this impact was also difficult. if the students understand the impact engaging with the learning development centre (ldc) workshops has on their academic development, then this will enable them to take more ownership and control of the learning process. subsequently enabling the students to become independent learners (symonds et al., 2019; sawhney and bansal, 2015). designing learning experiences was integrally linked to data collection. for me the key points with guerrilla research tactics were that they were reactionary, as i was able to build a bridge to the participants. for instance, i had planned to analyse the students’ online portfolios, which evidence their professional development, as they would potentially provide a more honest and open reflection on the ldc experience than direct questioning. however, only a couple of students actually mentioned their experience with the ldc in sheridan a two-step model for integrating creative teaching in higher education journal of learning development in higher education, issue 18: october 2020 7 their portfolios. to enable me to gain a better understanding and offer the students another feedback point, i decided to introduce another unobtrusive method for data collection. i offered the students formative feedback on an assignment, which they could volunteer for. again, the volunteering part made reaching participants very difficult. nevertheless, five students sent me a 500-word reflective assignment that analysed their experience with one of the sessions i offered. on one hand, this assignment provided the students with feedback on their reflective writing; on the other hand, it provided me with some understanding about the strengths and weaknesses of their learning experience. starting from a position of having used a research diary, standard course evaluation forms, staff interviews with module leaders from the modules i taught in, student grade marks, and classroom observations, the exploration of guerrilla research methods resulted in utilization of other methods. this included creative feedback designed by the students (sheridan, 2013b), reflective assignments by undergraduate students about their learning experience, eportfolios by master level students about their learning experience, and my own reflective blog. creative learning and teaching and the two-step model the two examples i am using here are to exemplify how the principle of de-contextualizing and re-contextualizing can work in two entirely different settings and were part of my pgcert project. case study one is an example from the first-year undergraduate cohort, and case study two an example from the first-year master’s cohort. i chose these examples to highlight that the model can be applied in different contexts, with students at all levels. my aim was to step away from a deficit discourse about students, the key defining characteristic of which was a culture of victim blaming, either based on individual traits and or a person’s cultural background (davis and museus, 2019). to challenge structural inequities (davis and museus, 2019) in my classroom, one of the approaches i used was to translate potentially unfamiliar institutional culture, processes, or even the language that needed to be used to adhere to the performative rules and expectations within an institution. this enabled the students to take ownership and control of their learning sheridan a two-step model for integrating creative teaching in higher education journal of learning development in higher education, issue 18: october 2020 8 process (jeffrey, 2006), and to make these learning experiences more tangible, so they can come from a point of agency of their learning, within this new learning environment and this new culture. the following discusses two situations based on this concept. the sessions aimed to help students to obtain ownership and control of their learning process, in establishing relevance of the learning content. establishing this relevance was based on using the decontextualize/re-contextualize two-step model. the model is explained in more detail in the case studies. the challenge was to move away from instructional ‘this is how you do university’ to creative learning and teaching approaches. i wanted to enable the students to see the value in academic development sessions for their personal development and their degree, through employing creative pedagogy. i provided a mixture of group work, creative learning strategies, online material, socratic inquiry technique, object-based learning (chatterjee, 2016) , and storytelling techniques (jørgensen, 2018) to contextualize learning, and thus establish relevance of learning content for the learners’ academic and professional development. case study 1: making feedback meaningful i designed the following session, aiming to enable students to understand not only their own perspective, but also that of university staff, about the feedback processes. thus, the process aimed to improve learners’ engagement with feedback and also support them to prepare their assessment by considering how their writing is being assessed. the latter in particular emerged as a significant change of perspective for the students, who used to focus solely on their own perception of their work. divergent thinking (guilford, 1968) was the key aspect addressed during this activity. it literally relates to thinking in all directions and breaking through constraints and expectations imposed by social and cultural structures (acar and runco, 2019). it can be a useful activity for the ‘de-contextualizing’ part of the model. as sun, wang and wegerif (2019) explain there are three cognitive strategies for divergent thinking, where sheridan a two-step model for integrating creative teaching in higher education journal of learning development in higher education, issue 18: october 2020 9 decomposition—as in deconstructing an object, or situation into its parts—is one of these strategies. depending on how the educator develops the ‘re-contextualizing’ aspect of the model this can contain either one or both of the other two cognitive strategies for divergent thinking: ‘association’ and ‘combination and adjustment’ (sun, wang and wegerif, 2019). in the following examples, both of these are used during ‘re-contextualization’ as the students were encouraged to ‘construct connections between similar concepts or objects’ (association) (sun, wang and wegerif, 2019, p.2220) and two or more concepts or objects can be merged or combined into a new one. thus, possible changes can be made to one or more parts or attributes of an object, concept or situation to generate new ideas … (combination and adjustment) (sun, wang and wegerif, 2019, p.2220). one of the issues i observed during previous academic years was that students did not seem to be aware of the complexities of providing feedback to written assignments. while the institution had undertaken significant work in developing and implementing a successful feedback strategy—a culture change, in fact—it remained difficult for the students to take the perspective of academic staff who are marking assignments. thus, students who attended sessions in the ldc regularly indicated confusion about feedback. they would not be able to contextualize and comprehend how their work did not fulfil the passing criteria or learning outcomes. the activity provided the students with a change of perspective and deeper understanding of the feedback process. the structure of the feedback session was as follows. the students were put in groups of three, where each group were given one (latex-free) balloon to inflate and decorate. to pass the balloon academy, each balloon student had to fulfil three essential and one freestyle criteria. the essential criteria were eyes, a mouth and a bowtie, plus one freestyle item. the students had 5 minutes to decorate the balloons with a permanent marker according to these marking criteria. i then asked the groups to pass their balloons to the group to their left. each group had a different balloon. they then had to feed back if the balloon would pass balloon academy based on the provided criteria (sheridan, 2013a). sheridan a two-step model for integrating creative teaching in higher education journal of learning development in higher education, issue 18: october 2020 10 figure 2. balloon decorated according to marking criteria the balloon depicted above (figure 2) was deemed to fail the balloon academy, because it had an eye-patch, contradicting the—initially clear, now clearly vague—instruction of ‘eyes’. the judgement led to an intensive classroom discussion, in which the students immediately brought up issues around equality and diversity. the situation became an important teaching moment, addressing issues around disability, concluding this should not impact the student balloon’s passing of the balloon academy. the feedback exercise here seemed to remove implicit biases students hold when judging their own or others’ work (joughin, boud and dawson, 2019) through the decontextualization of the subject matter, in this case assessment criteria for an upcoming diagnostic imaging exam. another element of the success of this activity (see evaluation below) could be that the de-contexualization of actual assessment and working with proxies (here balloons) made this exercise psychologically safe for the students. whilst psychological safety is a complex term, the element most relevant in this situation would be that the students were not focussing on their own performance relevant to expectations (tsuei et al., 2019) since the expectations are playful and artificial. thus, the peer sheridan a two-step model for integrating creative teaching in higher education journal of learning development in higher education, issue 18: october 2020 11 judgements triggered extensive discussions about inclusion, and impact of additional needs on assessment, as well as gender equality and stereotyping. figure 3. some balloon academy candidates after the students had judged the respective balloons, i drew the students’ attention back onto actual assessment feedback, highlighting that only three simple criteria and one freestyle item had resulted in a significant variety of outcomes. we established that despite this variety, most of the balloons had still passed the academy. the students themselves then commented on how difficult they thought it was to judge if a balloon should pass or not. this feedback was an incentive for me to explain how complex it is for academic staff marking assignments since these have more complex and numerous marking criteria— therefore re-contextualizing the learning exercise into the students’ academic reality. data from my reflective diary shows another side effect. right after the session, the head of year led their own session with the students. in a follow-up phone call, i was asked what i had done with the students. it emerged during this call that the students, who also had to prepare portfolios for the end of the semester, had queued after my colleague’s session to ask about deadlines and marking criteria for these. the portfolios were not mentioned during the feedback session, as hand-in was still several months away. my colleague asserted that the students traditionally would only inquire after the portfolio two weeks before deadline, but not a couple of months in advance. so, it appears that the strategy of de-contextualizing/re-contextualizing enabled the students to take ownership and control of making it relevant to their learning experience. making an abstract concept more sheridan a two-step model for integrating creative teaching in higher education journal of learning development in higher education, issue 18: october 2020 12 tangible and then bringing it back into the academic context had a wider impact on the students’ understanding than i anticipated. case study 2: confidence in giving presentations while the international masters students did struggle with language comprehension, most were professionals in their field, returning to university to progress their professional development (bownes et al., 2017). these students told me they would present in front of peers and employees all the time. they were, however, nervous to present as a form of assessment within the context of their master’s degree in a non-native language. one of the things i noticed when teaching non-native speaking students was that the focus was often on the translation of subject rather than the actual use and structure of language. i wanted to prevent this by designing a learning situation within which the content of the language was de-contextualized from their studies, so the students would be able to focus on the structure and flow of language and how it is used in sense making. thus, they could potentially take ownership and control over the english language as a tool to present their ideas. additionally, language is culture and experiencing language within the culture makes it more accessible to learners (bonvillain, 2019). language here, can change from a mere instrument—which is more or less bluntly used—to meaningful engagement (bastalich, behrend and bloomfield, 2014). i asked the students to meet me in front of the gallery of modern art in glasgow, and if possible, bring smart phones or a camera. i asked the students to explore the temporary ian hamilton finlay exhibition, which was a rich mix of language and imagery. the reason for taking them to this exhibition was to enable the students to experience language differently from the restricted, narrow focus of their text-books and journal articles and to look beyond, which leads back to the three aspects of divergent thinking discussed above (sun, wang and wegerif, 2019). i asked the students to take images or notes of language, words and phrases that stood out to them, in any which way (positively, negatively, or not knowing what it means). the exhibition ‘had the students intrigued’ as i noted in my reflections of the day. in the research diary, i reflected about one interaction in which a student pointed to an abstract painting with dispersed blue letters jotted across it. the student stated that the sheridan a two-step model for integrating creative teaching in higher education journal of learning development in higher education, issue 18: october 2020 13 painting did not make sense to them. so, i inquired if they had read the description next to the painting, which they had not. as the other students overheard our brief conversation this turned into a valuable teaching moment talking about the importance of contextualizing content, and the type of information that would need to be provided depending on the audience (sheridan, 2014). we discussed what their audience would think if they used images and graphics without letting the audience or the reader know what the purpose of the images or graphics were. this was also one of the most common issues i encountered in my students’ writing. they would let the imagery speak for itself without helping their audience to understand how this helps the overall narrative of their arguments. picking up on reflecting-in-action (schön, 2006), and the element of surprise, taking the postgraduate students to the gallery certainly initiated strong learning incentives. during the session, engaging with different forms of text rather than the usual academic literature enabled a much stronger focus on mechanisms of language. i believe offering international students the space to explore language on their own terms, outwith the realm of subject specific literature (which only draws the focus on abilities of language comprehension, and learning subject terms) can increase their engagement with and comprehension of the language. the impact of this activity is highlighted in the following quote from a student’s reflective diary. prior to the session, students had received a mail from the module leader to the effect that the lecture would be delivered at glasgow gallery of modern art (goma) as requested by the tutor. […] a number of assumptions were made on the reason for the choice of the venue among which was the probability that since it was a gallery of "modern " art, the displays were done using powerpoint. all assumptions, however, turned out to be far from the tutor's plans. […] the session turned out to be very helpful to the students as it provided new ideas, which if adopted properly, will ensure a successful powerpoint presentation. random practical sessions are vital to students' understanding of some concepts. prior to the session students would not have expected such an idea but as the session transpired, the students flowed in a relaxed atmosphere and easily made meaning of the session (taken from a student’s reflective assignment, 2014). sheridan a two-step model for integrating creative teaching in higher education journal of learning development in higher education, issue 18: october 2020 14 in a follow-up classroom session, i noted that the students had all signposted their graphics in their powerpoint slides and did not try so hard to use the thesaurus to find sophisticated words but focussed on explaining their slides. further, in an interview with one of the heads of year i was told that the external examiners noted a significant improvement in academic practice in the students’ work, compared to previous years. my colleague related this to the integrated academic development sessions, and the impact these had on the students’ practice. both case studies discussed here highlight how informal learning spaces can be created within a typical hei seminar setting or are available outwith the hei context, such as in local museums and galleries, but valuable to be utilized within the context of teaching in heis. approaching the pedagogical strategies from a creative learning and teaching perspective, means the creation or utilization of informal learning spaces to offer students the opportunity to take agency of the learning process (ownership and control) and understand the contexts of the learning and teaching activities (relevance) to their wider study. evaluation my theoretical background is based on the understanding that we create shared meaning in negotiating with the environment and with one another which aligns with the action research approach employed for the purpose of this evaluation. the processes as described by koshy (2005) begin with a plan, followed by action and observation, a subsequent reflection, and then begin again with a revision of the plan. koshy’s (2005) interpretation is that action research is not only ‘about developing the act of knowing through observation, listening, analysing, questioning’ (p. xiv) but foremost about ‘being involved in constructing one’s own knowledge’ (koshy, 2005, p.14). hence, the approach is aligned with my social constructivist tendencies. however, due to the limited time available for this project, the evaluation only constitutes one iteration of the cycle described: plan, implementation, evaluation and reflection. interestingly, in hindsight, and this is the main reason for finally taking the decision to write this paper, the evidence collected is what i now consider the first part of a much longer sheridan a two-step model for integrating creative teaching in higher education journal of learning development in higher education, issue 18: october 2020 15 and complex process. it provided me with the confidence to pursue my pedagogies further and translate these principles successfully into other and much wider contexts. so much so that i used these to inform the development of postgraduate courses on a masters in academic practice. method triangulation was used within this action research project. the data collection methods were standard course evaluation forms, staff interviews with course leaders, students’ grade marks and observations—in action—during the sessions. i expanded these to ask the students to design creative feedback and offered students the option to participate in reflective assignments. the last method served both as a data gathering tool, and as formative assessment for the students, to trial reflective writing, which constituted a significant part of their summative assessment. the following statement reflects my initial concern that students struggled to see the value in learning development and how this can be changed with the appropriate pedagogies: the topic seemed uninteresting and well known that i did not expect anything revealing or useful from this session. apparently her presentation style was very evocative – i caught myself trying to imagine myself to be engaging with the audience and showing interest and enthusiasm for the topic in the open-ended questions and reflective assignments, the students indicated the impact of the sessions on their confidence indirectly, as the four quotes below demonstrate. whereas the last quote demonstrates not only an overall impact on confidence, but also that the sessions offered the students specific handlungsoptionen1 to take forward. ‘all sessions were beneficial, i would have preferred to have sessions like these before university began’ (taken from student feedback, 2014) ‘helps me understand how to write essays from other modules’ (taken from student feedback, 2014) 1 a rough translation would be course of action. however, in this context implies learning beyond the situational understanding of how to solve a problem. handlungsoption, here implies learning that can be generalised and transferred into other situations. it means to equip the learner with a generic understanding of how to act within certain situations to solve problems, implicit to this is the development of confidence. sheridan a two-step model for integrating creative teaching in higher education journal of learning development in higher education, issue 18: october 2020 16 ‘i had been feeling worried about the upcoming workload and responsibilities besides my revision for exams in april and may. […] after the class … i was happy and confident.’ (taken from student feedback, 2014) ‘during the seminar the computer unit began to malfunction. [name of tutor] dealt with the technical issues extremely well. this gives me more confidence on my own ability to deal with technological problems if any should arise.’ (taken from student feedback, 2014) the grade marks for the reflective assignment showed marked improvement in student grades. one student improved by 30 percent, one by 27, nine students improved by between 10 and 20 percent points, seven students between one and eight percent. only three out of 22 students dropped in their grade marks, one of which fell by 20 percent. to summarise, 18 out of 22 students improved their grade mark and more than half of these by 10 percent or more. to gain more insight into the disparity between the grade marks i conducted an interview with the module leader, who indicated that the regressing marks were from students who had become known by colleagues on the programme for demonstrating a strong lack of engagement across the board, not only in my sessions. they also said that one of the students, who asked for feedback during the formative task, and who is not in this specific table, improved their paper by 40%. the module leader further pointed out that all the students who said that they attended the ldc’s generic workshops on top of my embedded sessions, improved by approximately 20%, indicating that a combination of academic development sessions and agency of the learning process can have an impact on grade marks. feedback from the external examiners was that the first-year cohort was the strongest academically that they had encountered, and they were impressed with the quality of academic standard of the students’ work. the results indicate a positive impact of my integrated academic development sessions on the learners. what i was not able to measure at the time, was self-efficacy. whilst the students were directly asked about how confident they perceived they were, which was a sheridan a two-step model for integrating creative teaching in higher education journal of learning development in higher education, issue 18: october 2020 17 standard question in the course evaluation form, a self-efficacy questionnaire would have provided a better insight into potential change of agency the learners experienced over their learning process. there was not enough qualitative data to confidently identify a pattern, although i saw a trend in improvement of confidence. however, the triangulation of all the data available provides a positive picture of these interventions. conclusions rethinking my approach to teaching academic practice sessions as a learning developer had a significant impact on the students’ experience and success. using the concepts from creative learning and teaching as a framework to design learning activities—keeping in mind the learner—built the bridge between institutional and students’ expectations: aligning these different perspectives, and supporting the students in negotiating meaning within the learning environment. i chose the two case studies out of a range of activities undertaken as part of the pgcert study, because they addressed two typical problems that first year and international students face when transitioning into heis in the uk. further, the activities demonstrate how the creation of informal learning spaces crosses disciplinary divides and can offer the students perspectives to enrich their learning experience. both case studies are also a clear example for my two-step model of de-contextualizing/recontextualizing a learning object or situation. the learning i took from the project has now influenced the development of a course for university lecturers, on a postgraduate programme where i encourage learners (who are university lecturers) to explore these creative learning processes, and the agency of their learners. i have translated the underlying principles for this project, derived from my phd in creative learning (sheridan, 2011), into teaching in higher education since 2010. the pgcert project enabled me to gather some evidence of the impact of these principles. there is more work to be done and more comprehensive research to undertake. the purpose of this paper was to introduce the two-step model of de-contextualizing/recontextualizing as a mechanism to design creative pedagogies and enable learners to develop their ownership and control of their learning. this not only improves the students’ performativity but also improves their confidence, quality of academic work, and can positively influence transferable skills development. sheridan a two-step model for integrating creative teaching in higher education journal of learning development in higher education, issue 18: october 2020 18 references acar, s. and runco, m. a. (2019) ‘divergent thinking: new methods, recent research, and extended theory’, psychology of aesthetics, creativity, and the arts 13(2), pp. 153–158. doi: 10.1037/aca0000231. ashwin, p., boud, d., coate, k., hallett, f., keane, e., krause, k.-l., leibowitz, b., maclaren, i., mcarthur, j., tooher, m. (2015). reflective teaching in higher education. fakenham: bloomsbury publishing plc. bastalich, w., behrend, m. and bloomfield, r. (2014) ‘is non-subject based research training a “waste of time”, good only for the development of professional skills? an academic literacies perspective’, teaching in higher education, 19(4), doi: 10.1080/13562517.2013.860106. biggs, j., & tang, c. (2011). teaching for quality learning at university (4th edition ed.). maidenhead, berkshire: open university press. briggs, a. j., clark, j., & hall, i. (2012). building bridges: understanding student transition to university. quality in higher education, 18(1), 3-21. bonvillain, n. (2019) language, culture, and communication : the meaning of messages. available at: https://books.google.co.uk/books?hl=en&lr=&id=cyykdwaaqbaj&oi=fnd&pg=pp 1&dq=language+is+culture&ots=rapf_604on&sig=f85cqydord9dkiqxxlcwmiom zx4#v=onepage&q=language is culture&f=false (accessed: 18 june 2019). bownes, j. et al. (2017) ‘supporting students in the transition to postgraduate taught study in stem subjects’, journal of perspectives in applied academic practice, 5(2). doi: 10.14297/jpaap.v5i2.280. busseri, m. a., rose-krasnor, l., adams, r. g., polivy, j., pancer, m. s., pratt, m. w., sheridan a two-step model for integrating creative teaching in higher education journal of learning development in higher education, issue 18: october 2020 19 birnie-lefcovitch, s., wintre, m. g. (2010). a longitudinal study of breadth and intensity of activity involvement. journal of research on adolescence, 21(2), 512518. caldwell, g., osborne, l., & mewburn, i. (2013) guerrilla research tactics: alternative research methods. in j. hamilton, & s. carson (ed.), effective supervision of creative arts research degrees symposium. brisbane: queensland university of technology. chatterjee, h. j. (2016) engaging the senses: object-based learning in higher education, engaging the senses: object-based learning in higher education. routledge. doi: 10.4324/9781315579641. claxton, g., costa, a. l. and kallick, b. (2016) hard thinking about soft skills. learning for life. 73(6) davis, l. p. and museus, s. d. (2019) ‘what is deficit thinking? an analysis of conceptualizations of deficit thinking and implications for scholarly research’, ncid currents. university of michigan library, 1(1). doi: 10.3998/currents.17387731.0001.110. garner, j. k. (2009) ‘conceptualizing the relations between executive functions and self-regulated learning’, the journal of psychology, 143(4), pp. 405–426. doi: 10.3200/jrlp.143.4.405-426. glasgow caledonian university. (2014). realworldfutures @cbs. retrieved 06 25, 2014, from http://www.gcu.ac.uk/cbsrealworldfutures/aboutemployability/: http://www.gcu.ac.uk/cbsrealworldfutures/aboutemployability/ (accessed: 25 june 2014). guilford, j.p., 1968. intelligence, creativity, and their educational implications. san diego, calif.: r.r. knapp jeffrey, b. (2006) ‘creative teaching and learning: towards a common discourse and http://www.gcu.ac.uk/cbsrealworldfutures/aboutemployability/ sheridan a two-step model for integrating creative teaching in higher education journal of learning development in higher education, issue 18: october 2020 20 practice’, cambridge journal of education, 36(3), pp. 399–414. doi: 10.1080/03057640600866015. jørgensen, k. m. (2018) ‘spaces of performance: a storytelling approach to learning in higher education’, learning organization. doi: 10.1108/tlo-11-2017-0104. joughin, g., boud, d. and dawson, p. (2019) ‘threats to student evaluative judgement and their management’, higher education research and development. routledge, 38(3), pp. 537–549. doi: 10.1080/07294360.2018.1544227. kahu, e. r., picton, c. and nelson, k. (2019) ‘pathways to engagement: a longitudinal study of the first-year student experience in the educational interface’, higher education. springer netherlands, pp. 1–17. doi: 10.1007/s10734-019-00429-w. kidd, d., 2015. becoming mobius: the complex matter of education. crown house publishing. kolb, d. a. (2015) experiential learning: experience as the source of learning and development. second. upper saddle river, new jersey: pearson education, inc. koshy, v. (2005). action research for improving practice. a practical guide. thousand oaks: paul chapman publishing. lee, v. s. (2001) ‘learning that lasts: integrating learning, development, and performance in college and beyond (review)’, the journal of general education, 50(3), pp. 230–233. doi: 10.1353/jge.2001.0019. mckendry, s. et al. (2013) ‘researching under-represented groups: how to empower students through targeted learning development support’. available at: http://eprints.gla.ac.uk/151017/ (accessed: 30 march 2019). richards, w. et al. (2017) recognition and belonging: engaging first generation students. worcester. available at: http://eprints.worc.ac.uk/5245/1/fgs paper revision mm edit.pdf (accessed: 28 april 2020). sheridan a two-step model for integrating creative teaching in higher education journal of learning development in higher education, issue 18: october 2020 21 sawhney, n. and bansal, s. (2015) ‘metacognitive awareness of undergraduate students in relation to their academic achievement’, the international journal of indian psychology, 3(1), pp. 3135–3138. schön, d. a. (2006). the reflective practitioner. how professionals think in action. aldershot: ashgate publishing limited. sheridan, n.. (2011). exploring creative learning processes of refugee children and their peers—a case study (version 1). figshare. https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.12221807.v1 (accessed: 25 february 2020). sheridan, n. (2013a). feedback fed back (version 1). figshare. https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.12214373.v1 (accessed: 25 february 2020). sheridan, n. (2013b). feedback rules! (version 1). figshare. https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.12220394.v1 (accessed: 25 february 2020). sheridan, n. (2014). radiography, gallery of modern art & international students (version 1). figshare. https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.12923084.v1 (accessed: 05 september 2020). sinfield, s., holley, d., burns, t., hoskins, k., o'neill, p., & harrington, k. (2011). raising the student voice: learning development as socio-political practice. in p. hartley, j. hilsdon, c. keenan, s. sinfield, & m. verity, learning development in higher education (pp. 53-63). basingstoke: micmillan publishers limited. stebleton, m. j., soria, k. m. and huesman, r. l. (2014) ‘first-generation students’ sense of belonging, mental health, and use of counseling services at public research universities’, journal of college counseling, 17(1), pp. 6–20. doi: 10.1002/j.2161-1882.2014.00044.x. sun, m., wang, m. and wegerif, r. (2019) ‘using computer‐based cognitive mapping to improve students’ divergent thinking for creativity development’, british journal of https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.12221807.v1 https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.12214373.v1 https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.12220394.v1 https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.12923084.v1 sheridan a two-step model for integrating creative teaching in higher education journal of learning development in higher education, issue 18: october 2020 22 educational technology. john wiley & sons, ltd (10.1111), 50(5), pp. 2217–2233. doi: 10.1111/bjet.12825. symonds, j. e. et al. (2019) ‘momentary student engagement as a dynamic developmental system’, psyarxiv. doi: 10.31234/osf.io/fuy7p. tsuei, s. h.-t. et al. (2019) ‘exploring the construct of psychological safety in medical education’, academic medicine. nlm (medline), 94(11) (association of american medical colleges learn serve lead), pp. s28–s35. doi: 10.1097/acm.0000000000002897. zepke, n. (2017) ‘higher education research & development student engagement in neo-liberal times: what is missing?’ higher education research and development 37(2) doi: 10.1080/07294360.2017.1370440. author details nathalie sheridan is a lecturer in academic and digital development at the university of glasgow. her first degree is in erziehungswissenschaften (learning sciences, tu dresden) with an mphil (university of glasgow) and phd (university of strathclyde) in education. nathalie has worked in culture and museums education throughout her studies and has been teaching in higher education since 2006. nathalie’s focus is the translation of creative learning and teaching practices into higher education, through active pedagogies and rethinking learning spaces with the aim to improve the student experience and include disenfranchised learners and educators. abstract background methodology creative learning and teaching and the two-step model case study 1: making feedback meaningful case study 2: confidence in giving presentations evaluation conclusions references author details article journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 16: december 2019 ________________________________________________________________________ making it at uni: navigate your way through the first year of your degree a review of bartholomew, s. and withers, j. (2018) making it at uni: navigate your way through the first year of your degree. independently published. rachel webster university of birmingham keywords: student transition; undergraduates; academic skills; university handbook; student experience. overview bartholomew and withers’s book is an accessible and easy to digest guide to university life for prospective undergraduates and students in the first year of their degree. it is organised into two sections: the first half offers advice about what to expect at university and how to successfully integrate, covering topics such as making friends, budgeting, cooking and managing time. the second half focuses on the broad but essential skills needed to succeed academically: reading, writing and referencing. the two authors have a wealth of experience working in higher education so the advice offered is drawn directly from their interactions with students. indeed, a strength of the book is the inclusion of the student perspective through direct quotes or anecdotal accounts. with the ever changing nature of university life, particularly the burden of student debt and the rise in mental health awareness, there is a need to keep university handbooks updated and relevant to the current student experience (dandridge, 2016; centre for global higher education, 2018). there are plenty of general guides to help students adapt to university, palgrave’s the study skills handbook (2013) being one of the most popular. bartholomew and withers’s book contributes to this genre by providing a personalised and friendly tone that aims to anticipate the students’ questions and webster making it at uni: navigate your way through the first year of your degree journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 2 concerns. although the study skills section does not cover new ground, there are several activities aimed at the student that learning developers/skills advisors may find useful for workshops and one-to-ones. structure and content the first chapter addresses some common questions raised by students when contemplating university. for example: ‘am i doing the right thing?’ and ‘am i up to this?’ (p. 11). this section also acknowledges the diversity of the student population and ensures that the experience of the mature or distant learner is also taken into account. although the book largely assumes that the student reader will understand cultural norms, there is plenty of general advice that should be accessible to international students too. the informal tone of the book is established here with the authors encouraging the reader to interact with the book by writing in it, dipping into relevant sections, and taking part in the activities. this strategy of informality attempts to emulate a study skills workshop, where the individual reading experience is transformed into a university-style learning environment. the next chapter uses the comments of existing students (‘i was surprised at how big the classes were’ (p. 17)) to manage expectations and demystify the experience. the differences between college/sixth form education and university are foregrounded, focusing on the importance of independent learning, modes of learning, and assessment. according to margaret weaver (2013), such an understanding of these differences is vital for successful transition. the book also provides an easy to use appendix, which defines common academic terms, in the hope that this will further demystify the language of academia. the book then moves on to explore the social life of a university student. the authors provide helpful tips on how to cultivate successful friendships; students are encouraged to make the most of every opportunity to network. although i would not categorise the relationship between lecturer and student as social, the section on defining lecturers’ roles is useful and will help students to navigate what can often be tricky and unfamiliar relationships. webster making it at uni: navigate your way through the first year of your degree journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 3 chapter four is a rather lengthy one and explores the different ways students can look after themselves at university. it covers healthy eating, food shopping, cleanliness and exercise. there has been a sector-wide recognition that students’ mental health should be better supported by universities with more robust mechanisms put in place (dandridge, 2018). aronin and smith note that university work is one of the biggest triggers for causing stress and other mental health problems in young people (2016). thus the book’s section on wellbeing and mindfulness could perhaps have been extended to offer support in this area and leave out some of the more unnecessary practical advice. indeed, the tone is somewhat didactic in places, e.g. observations about the need to wash regularly and avoid processed food. the next two chapters deal with managing money and time. accruing a large student loan is often a significant barrier facing students when thinking about university, particularly for those from lower socioeconomic backgrounds (callender and mason, 2017). therefore, it is noteworthy that alongside the practical tips on how to budget and save money, this book reframes the student debt as an investment. in regards to time, the focus is on developing as an independent learner and making the most of what appears as ‘free’ time. by exploring different time management strategies (using an information hub, recognising ‘time-suckers’, and using ‘trapped time’ (p. 50, 54-5)), the individual nature of each learner is prioritised. these examples remind learning developers/skills advisors of the importance of offering an array of support strategies to meet individual needs. however, considering the growth of digital software/programs to help manage time (todoist, trello, wunderlist etc.), it is a shame that more examples are not cited. in fact, the importance of supporting students’ digital capabilities as a whole is an underexplored area in the book (jisc, 2018). from chapter 7 onwards, the focus changes to academic skills and shifts gear. although the content will be familiar to learning developers/skills advisors, the authors do bring vast experience and some useful examples to the next few chapters. this is the section most relevant to learning developers/skills advisors; the activities can easily be adapted (with permission) for workshops and one-to-ones. the first section concentrates on developing reading practices that allow students to digest research quickly and efficiently. it is structured around a couple of activities that teach students to read a paragraph for purpose, gradually speeding up their approach as they learn to scan for meaning. in the chapter on writing, the authors take a slightly unusual approach and choose not to focus directly on essay structure or common grammatical errors, but instead on a trickier webster making it at uni: navigate your way through the first year of your degree journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 4 aspect of student writing, the inclusion of research into one’s own writing. through a demonstration of how to quote, summarise and paraphrase someone else’s work, the section is able to cover a lot of useful ground: accuracy, clarity, and sentence structure. towards the close of the chapter, there are a couple of paragraphs on assessment feedback. this is a growing area of interest with many studies recognising that students struggle to implement feedback effectively (boud and molloy, 2013; winston and nash, 2016). therefore, it may have been more beneficial to have a slightly longer section here, including strategies that learning developers/skills advisors use when helping students to engage with feedback. chapter 9 introduces students to the world of referencing, an often bewildering and anxiety-inducing experience for many. although plagiarism is discussed, the chapter chooses not to dwell on the negative aspects of inaccurate referencing, but instead concentrates on why referencing is good academic practice. another simple but effective activity allows students to practise some aspects of the harvard referencing system. a couple of online citation tools are promoted, but perhaps an opportunity is missed to discuss referencing management software that universities often subscribe to (e.g. endnote and refworks). summary in the concluding chapter, the authors acknowledge that there is a lot more to be said in relation to academic skills, but ‘now is not the time for us to overburden you’ (p.86). quite rightly, this handbook deliberately limits its scope, recognising that students are often overloaded with information in their first few weeks. therefore, this handbook provides sufficient guidance to ease transition without overwhelming. although there is little in the way of new content which would make this book essential reading for learning developers/skills advisors, the authors cover some basic points of student life in a friendly and engaging manner; this clearly conveys their commitment to supporting new students in their transition to university. references webster making it at uni: navigate your way through the first year of your degree journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 5 aronin, s. and smith, m. (2016) ‘one in four students suffer from mental health problems’, yougov. available at: https://yougov.co.uk/topics/lifestyle/articlesreports/2016/08/09/quarter-britains-students-are-afflicted-mental-hea (accessed: 4 april 2019). boud, d. and molloy, e. (ed.) (2013) feedback in higher and professional education. london: routledge. callender, c. and mason, g. (2017) ‘does student loan debt deter higher education participation? new evidence from england’, llakes research paper, 58, pp.3-40. available at: https://www.llakes.ac.uk/research-papers (accessed: 4 april 2019). cottrell, s. (2013) the study skills handbook. basingstoke: palgrave. centre for global higher education (2018) ‘graduate indebtedness: its perceived effects on behaviour and life choices – a literature review’. available at: https://www.researchcghe.org/publications/research-findings/research-findingsgraduate-indebtedness-its-perceived-effects-on-behaviour-and-life-choices-aliterature-review/ (accessed: 2 august 2019). dandridge, n. (2018) ‘mental health and wellbeing: a priority’. available at: https://www.officeforstudents.org.uk/news-blog-and-events/our-news-andblog/mental-health-and-wellbeing-a-priority/ (accessed: 5 april 2019). jisc (2015) ‘supporting students’. available at: https://www.jisc.ac.uk/guides/developingdigital-literacies/supporting-students (accessed: 3 april 2019). weaver, m. (2013) ‘student journey work: a review of academic library contributions to student transition and success’, new review of academic librarianship,19, pp. 101-124. winstone, n. e. and nash, r. a. (2016) the developing engagement with feedback toolkit. york, uk: higher education academy. available at: https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/knowledge-hub/developing-engagement-feedbacktoolkit-deft (accessed: 16 april 2019). https://yougov.co.uk/topics/lifestyle/articles-reports/2016/08/09/quarter-britains-students-are-afflicted-mental-hea https://yougov.co.uk/topics/lifestyle/articles-reports/2016/08/09/quarter-britains-students-are-afflicted-mental-hea https://www.llakes.ac.uk/research-papers https://www.researchcghe.org/publications/research-findings/research-findings-graduate-indebtedness-its-perceived-effects-on-behaviour-and-life-choices-a-literature-review/ https://www.researchcghe.org/publications/research-findings/research-findings-graduate-indebtedness-its-perceived-effects-on-behaviour-and-life-choices-a-literature-review/ https://www.researchcghe.org/publications/research-findings/research-findings-graduate-indebtedness-its-perceived-effects-on-behaviour-and-life-choices-a-literature-review/ https://www.officeforstudents.org.uk/news-blog-and-events/our-news-and-blog/mental-health-and-wellbeing-a-priority/ https://www.officeforstudents.org.uk/news-blog-and-events/our-news-and-blog/mental-health-and-wellbeing-a-priority/ https://www.jisc.ac.uk/guides/developing-digital-literacies/supporting-students https://www.jisc.ac.uk/guides/developing-digital-literacies/supporting-students https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/knowledge-hub/developing-engagement-feedback-toolkit-deft https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/knowledge-hub/developing-engagement-feedback-toolkit-deft webster making it at uni: navigate your way through the first year of your degree journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 6 author details rachel webster is an academic transition officer at the university of birmingham. she has a remit around student transition coordinating the pass scheme and delivering academic skills workshops for ugs and pgts. she has a phd in nineteenth-century literature and continues to publish research in this area. making it at uni: navigate your way through the first year of your degree a review of bartholomew, s. and withers, j. (2018) making it at uni: navigate your way through the first year of your degree. independently published. overview structure and content summary references author details article journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 14: april 2019 ________________________________________________________________________ academic success: a student’s guide to studying at university a book review of brick, j., wilson, n., wong, d., and herke, m. (2019) academic success: a student’s guide to studying at university. london: red globe press. karen hudson university of essex, uk keywords: academic communication, culture and convention; knowledge construction; learning; reading; writing; critical thinking; academic voice. overview aimed at students with limited experience of the culture and conventions of englishspeaking universities, this book introduces readers to a wide range of academic communicative practices. it assumes no prior knowledge or experience of the (mostly) unwritten behaviours, attitudes and values required for academic success and provides a comprehensive breakdown of these, clarified throughout with examples, explanations and practical guidance. the book’s scope is broad, rather than deep, and therefore represents a useful and pragmatic introductory text for any student preparing for a transition or return to higher education. the text is underpinned throughout by two recurring themes that are directly transferable into ld practice. the idea that academic knowledge is developed and communicated via debate and argument is directly linked to the notion of ‘academic apprenticeship’ in which students are encouraged to begin participation in active and current disciplinary discourse. structure and content hudson academic success: a student’s guide to studying at university journal of learning development in higher education, issue 14: april 2019 2 the publication is divided into five overarching sections, each dealing with a particular subset of the key features of university study. part one provides a general introduction to university study in english-speaking cultures. chapter one introduces students to some academic conventions that are widely, perhaps implicitly, understood by academic staff, but which are not always explicitly communicated to new students. the chapter lays the foundation for one of the main underpinning concepts of the book: that academic knowledge is developed and communicated via debate and argument, agreement and disagreement, and that this frequently takes place via published texts. students are introduced to the idea that dominant theories and ideas, both current and historical, are subject to challenge and development via this process, and that each discipline may have different communicative practices for this process. the basic features of academic argumentation are outlined with clear and practical examples, which provide a sound basis for further discussion in subsequent chapters. chapter two addresses generic issues of university organisation and structure, including titles, positions, roles and expectations of staff and students. it begins to prepare students for the variety of teaching and learning methods that they are likely to encounter, from lectures, to seminars, tutorials, and ‘flipped classroom’ methods. due acknowledgement is given to the wide range of teaching philosophies that exist among he practitioners, and potentially misguided student expectations with regards to knowledge transmission are well-managed here. ‘academic apprenticeship’ provides a useful analogy for emphasising that students must not only acquire a body of knowledge; they must also develop the critical and analytical skills required to apply this knowledge in a wider context. chapter three focuses on independent learning, emphasising that in the english-speaking world people are considered independent adults from the age of 18, and that this expectation is reflected in the university environment. personal accountability is stressed throughout and the specific skills that underpin this are clearly indicated. particularly useful here is the explicit listing of common areas of student difficulty in managing the transition to higher education (p.25), and practical guidance on how to resolve these. some educators may find the section on learning styles frustrating; while it is acknowledged that there is little empirical evidence to support the alignment of teaching and learning styles, it may have been useful to suggest that, regardless of individual preferences, students may benefit from challenging and developing their capabilities across a wider range of learning resources. hudson academic success: a student’s guide to studying at university journal of learning development in higher education, issue 14: april 2019 3 having prepared readers for the structure and expectations of university learning in part one, part two introduces some practicalities of the university learning environment. chapter four begins with an exploration of academic listening skills. lectures are presented as one of four essential ‘pillars’ on which knowledge and understanding are built. the dependent relationship between lecture attendance and pro-active, independent learning is clearly articulated and students are reminded that lecturers will not provide all of the knowledge and critical understanding required for success. a return to the ‘debate and argument’ and ‘academic apprenticeship’ themes also serves to remind students that they will hear ideas in lectures that differ from those found in their reading material and vice versa, and that their role is to evaluate these in order to establish a position. ld practitioners who undertake classroom teaching as part of their role will find some useful tips here to develop engaging sessions and accessible, effective slides. the next chapter explores academic reading, including common types of text, and an introduction to databases. with a further nod to the ‘debate and argument’ concept, the need to read multiple sources and arguments is reinforced. the 4-s (searching, skimming, selecting, studying) system is recommended, which appears to be generally sound, although perhaps lacking the questioning, review and recall elements of some other models. the technique of identifying and using topic sentences to construct a coherent outline of a topic is well-presented, and revisited in more detail in later chapters. a section on critical reading contains a useful line of questioning that clearly includes the need to compare your texts with the position of other writers in the field, although the supporting example on pp. 47-48 is perhaps a little unclear and potentially confusing for students at the beginning of their academic reading apprenticeship. chapter six deals with tutorials and seminars and seeks to address the common anxieties and misconceptions held by those new to academic study. particularly welcome here is the reassurance that students are not expected to have a fully-formed, authoritative command of their topics in order to successfully participate in these sessions. emphasis throughout is on active and independent preparation, reading, discussion and willingness to seek guidance from a range of academic sources. here, we are all reminded that written academic english is no-one’s native language, and a brief introduction to some key differences between spoken and written academic english is provided in an accessible table format. hudson academic success: a student’s guide to studying at university journal of learning development in higher education, issue 14: april 2019 4 group assignments are the focus of chapter seven, and this book does not trivialise the frustrations frequently expressed towards this form of assessment. nonetheless, the authors present a convincing argument for the graduate attributes that group work can develop, including basic project and people management skills, including culturally competent group interaction. part three introduces concepts of criticality and begins to unpack some of the academic vocabulary with which new students may be unfamiliar. opinion, position and bias are explained, and students are introduced to both the everyday and academic meanings of these words. careful attention is paid to the difference between personal opinion and academic position based on appropriate evidence. chapter nine offers some very pragmatic responses to common student concerns, including how to respond to contradictory evidence and different scholarly positions. this section concludes with a comprehensive and detailed guide on how to evaluate sources, although a more specific definition of ‘grey literature’ (that which is not produced by traditional or identifiable publishers), and its place within academic discourse, would have been welcome here. occasionally, some of the discussion of critical evaluation and analysis may be a little too ambitious for new students with a limited experience of academic convention; however, this is certainly a section that would bear repeated reading at a later stage. part four is dedicated to the use of a range of ‘voices’, including the student’s own. chapters eleven and twelve address the use of expert and student voice, identifying and explicitly naming features of academic writing that are frequently only tacitly known by academic staff. pages 111–114 provide a sample piece of academic writing and accompanying commentary with external and internal voices clearly noted and their purpose explained and grounded in the ‘debate and argument’ concept that underpins the book. the text is very clear on the conventions and practices surrounding the use of voice, particularly that ‘if a statement is not labelled with the names of the writers, it is taken to be the essay writer’s voice’. this discussion lays a firm foundation for the introduction to citation, referencing and academic integrity that follows. chapter thirteen ostensibly covers plagiarism and how to avoid it, although a wider range of academic offences are outlined here. clear examples of plagiaristic and colluding behaviours are given, along with explanations of why these are unacceptable. the chapter focuses mainly on the underlying causes of what frequently appears to be unintentional plagiarism/poor hudson academic success: a student’s guide to studying at university journal of learning development in higher education, issue 14: april 2019 5 academic practice, although more serious academic offences are also discussed. this section would have benefited from a discussion of how effective paraphrasing and summarising underpins academic authorship, and from encouraging students to become familiar with their own institutional policies and provision regarding academic integrity. chapter fourteen returns to the topic of the use and purpose of ‘voice’ in different types of academic texts. the different purposes of several text genres, including textbooks and journal articles, are introduced, and no assumptions are made that students will be familiar with these. the explicit clarification of different genres, along with their styles and features, are likely to prove helpful for students who are beginning to develop their academic reading and writing skills. part four concludes with a more in-depth technical discussion of identity, voice and position that contains a careful and appropriate balance of both encouragement and caution. the authors remind students that their reading has a specific purpose and audience, noting that student writing, in general, needs to retain a formal, academic tone, even if this differs from the tone of their reading material. part five outlines the key features of successful student writing, building on the concepts discussed in previous chapters and linking back to the underpinning theme of knowledge construction via debate and discussion. chapters sixteen and seventeen revisit academic apprenticeship, reassuring students that they will not be expected to write like a professional academic. however, they are reminded of the inevitable evaluation of their ability to use key academic writing concepts in their assessments. the familiar recursive process of pre-planning, task analysis, note-making, organisation, drafting, editing and proofreading is detailed here. techniques for effective argumentation, including the use of topic sentences, clauses and word chains to develop coherent and cohesive paragraphs and arguments, are also outlined and explained. chapter eighteen includes an interesting exploration of how deductive argumentation is highly valued in english-speaking universities, in contrast to the inductive reasoning methods that may be favoured in other educational cultures. a pragmatic approach is taken to this peculiarity; students are reminded again that their writing has both a purpose and an audience, and that successful writing aims to address lecturer expectations and specific learning outcomes. a sample annotated piece of writing on pp.177-179 places prior discussion of topic sentences, generalisations, specific evidence, a range of voices and position statements within a more complete context, and key features of effective writing are clearly presented without resorting to formulaic, rule-based approaches to structure. hudson academic success: a student’s guide to studying at university journal of learning development in higher education, issue 14: april 2019 6 chapters nineteen to twenty-three provide brief, yet insightful overviews of a wider range of the different assignment writing genres that students may encounter, including reports, research reports, reflective writing, blogs and exams. while it is not possible to cover any of these topics in real depth within the scope of this book, the basic requirements of each are outlined, and students are encouraged to think carefully about the use and relative dominance of a range of voices, and to take a critical and analytical approach to a range of problem-solving scenarios, and the making and evaluating of recommendations. the book concludes with a comprehensive glossary of the key academic vocabulary used throughout, and suggestions for further reading, some of which, however, may be of more interest to academic development practitioners than to new students. it is supported by online resources, including a downloadable glossary, and a more extensive and detailed range of practical activities to support student learning. summary overall, this book represents a broad and pragmatic introduction to the fundamentals of university study, and of academic communication, culture and convention. it is very easy to navigate and is clear and accessible, both in the information that it delivers, and the activities designed to support them. it would make ideal pre-sessional reading for students who are not familiar with the practices of the english-speaking university, whether they are international or home students, and is a welcome addition to the study skills repertoire. author details karen hudson is a literacy, language and numeracy tutor in the school of health and social care at the university of essex. academic success: a student’s guide to studying at university a book review of brick, j., wilson, n., wong, d., and herke, m. (2019) academic success: a student’s guide to studying at university. london: red globe press. overview structure and content summary author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special edition: 2018 aldinhe conference, october 2018 editorial christopher drew teesside university, uk sue eccles bournemouth university amanda french birmingham city university, uk andy hagyard university of leeds, uk john hilsdon university of plymouth, uk christina howell-richardson birkbeck, university of london, uk craig morley university of chester, uk lucy rai open university, uk gita sedghi university of liverpool, uk alicja syska university of plymouth, uk this special edition of the journal of learning development in higher education brings together a collection of five papers, two case studies and two opinion pieces based on presentations delivered at the learning development conference organised by aldinhe and hosted at the university of leicester in march 2018. a book review is also included in this issue. in a provocative opinion piece, sunny dhillon (bishop grosseteste university, uk) considers the current focus in uk universities on student mental health and related issues, by asking ‘whose wellbeing is it anyway?’. he adopts an approach informed by biesta’s critical pedagogy and prompts learning developers to ask whether their key role (and that of other educators) is mainly to train students to ‘fit in’ with society – which, in wellbeing terms, he relates to the rhetoric of ‘resilience’ training – or whether it is more important to editorial 2 journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: october 2018 encourage them to question the status quo. in arguing the latter, he suggests that mental distress is an understandable reaction to the many social and economic pressures of contemporary society, and that an educational response that focusses mostly on students’ own responsibilities for their wellbeing ‘exacerbates … social problems by individualising them’. in this edition several authors focus on issues of identity and specifically on how we can understand and work within a professional learning developer identity. in her opinion piece, sarah parkes draws on social theory to write about how charting her own history of working in he and undertaking research has shed light on the role of learning developers as ‘third space’ professionals. this, she argues, despite involving us in contestation about practice, creates unique possibilities for us to ‘comment on and critique the dominant practices and cultures operating within university spaces that inhibit students’ understanding, progression and success’. ian johnson from the university of portsmouth, uk, also writes about the contested nature of learning development professional identities in a paper based on interviews conducted in the field with members of the professional association, aldinhe. he applies theoretical ideas on the situated nature of professionalism to explore both internal and external drivers in professional development of learning developers, concluding that the strong focus on practitioner involvement via aldinhe’s own development and research aspirations offers a way to reconcile some of the conflicting demands. this, he argues, creates spaces for learning developers collectively to influence the future direction of their professional roles. tracy slawson and jason eyre of de montfort university offer a witty and insightful philosophical discussion that comments on the attempts to articulate the boundaries of learning development as a field, practice and modus operandi. drawing on gilles deleuze’s and félix guattari’s (1994) conceptual philosophy, the authors present a lively exploration around the issues of identity, status, values and practices surrounding learning development, demonstrating the problematic nature of clear and distinct professional demarcations as erecting unnecessary boundaries and circumscribing disciplinary territories. the authors conclude that in order fully to recognise learning development we need not pursue its universal form but rather accept its obscure and ambiguous nature by keeping its definitional boundaries flexible and open. editorial 3 journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: october 2018 amanda tinker and pat hill of huddersfield university turn our attention to what they see as a neglected group of university students: second year undergraduates. their paper explores the learning development role in supporting students who transition between first and final years, arguing for a progressive approach to developing a collaborative curriculum that brings together subject specialists and learning developers in an effort to ensure an optimal student journey. through the use of focus groups designed to capture the perceptions of both staff and students – via discussions, poster prompts, and reflections – the authors demonstrate a range of conflicts between students and staff when it comes to academic expectations, autonomy in learning, as well as perceptions of assessment, collaboration and communication. while pointing out the possibilities for learning developers to serve as mediators that bridge gaps in these perceptions, the authors propose progressive learning development as a successful collaborative strategy for embedding the teaching of academic skills without neglecting the ‘forgotten’ second year. james wilkinson of queen mary university, uk makes a case for the importance of teaching that – instead of focusing on delivering knowledge – emphasises students’ competences and motivation by focusing on teaching that increases learner engagement. the paper has a strong self-reflective component that aids in revealing the assumptions that underlie the most widespread teaching orientations including ‘learning facilitation’ and ‘knowledge transmission’, which the author considers the bedrocks of undergraduate student experience. applying gow and kember’s (1993) teaching orientations, selfdetermination theory, and rathje’s theory on cohesion (2007) allows the author not only to promote the principles of student-centred interactive teaching but also to shed light on the practical ways of supporting staff in increasing students’ engagement through enquirybased learning. the learning development team from the university of leicester provide an engaging argument for the value of staff-student partnerships for learning development. alexandra patel, mark van der enden, patsy clarke, frances deepwell, bethany cox, phil marston, and steve rooney present the successes of their digital innovation partnership. the partnership pairs staff and students and encourages them to innovate with digital learning and teaching interventions. the article shows how the partnerships empower students by embracing their enthusiasm and knowledge in digital innovation. the authors close with editorial 4 journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: october 2018 recommendations for other practitioners, making the paper a relevant and thoughtprovoking read for learning developers. in ‘facilitating learning about academic phraseology: teaching activities for student writers’, mary davis and john morley explore how exercises developed using academic phrasebank, an online, open-access compendium of formulaic phrases for academic writers developed at the university of manchester, can be used to help students better understand the nature and role of academic phrases and to improve their own academic writing. they show how learning developers can use structured teaching activities to engage students in understanding how to construct and utilise phrases that will enhance and strengthen their academic writing style, and increase their confidence in writing for academic purposes. this positions the academic phrasebank both as a self-study or quick reference tool available to all students and as a resource that can be utilised by learning developers to structure teaching and learning around the conventions and expectations of academic writing. kim shahabudin, sonia hood, and michelle reid’s case study is an uplifting account of a pre-entry fully online course aimed to ease new undergraduates’ transition into their university. the course was first offered to all incoming year 1 undergraduates in 2017 and although non-compulsory, uptake and completion rates were high. the primary aim of the course is to provide an interactive space where new students are introduced to the university as a community; offering opportunities for practice in the academic skills and literacies of academic communities, and structured discussions with student mentors where incoming students can debate with their new peers. various design features, including flexibility in how participants can access and engage with the course, and working together to work on common tasks, promote a sense of community and familiarity with the ethos of higher education. the course offers a good example of how induction can be extended before entry and throughout the first transition year. a new book by trevor day, success in academic writing (palgrave macmillan) is reviewed in this issue by christopher little from keele university, uk. little judges this textbook to be a useful addition to any learning developer’s library; it raises awareness of both discipline-specific academic writing conventions as well as positing some ‘universal principles that can be shared and used by all disciplines’ in the service of effective and critical writing. the book is aimed mainly at undergraduates but could be useful for editorial 5 journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: october 2018 learning developers and academics generally. topics covered include academic essays, reports, writing for research, avoiding plagiarism, editing and reviewing one’s own writing. we are sad to report that this will be the last edition of the jldhe with lucy rai as one of the editors. lucy has acted as lead editor for the last two and a half years and impressed us with her thoroughness, professionalism and good humour. she continues in her role at the open university and has also been commissioned to write a new book. we wish lucy well and would like to thank her publicly for her great contribution to this journal. lastly, we hope readers will enjoy this edition of the jldhe and invite you to contact us via the journal homepage with any feedback or suggestions. editorial journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 21: september 2021 ________________________________________________________________________ library pedagogies: personal reflections from library practitioners a book review of aston, s. and walsh, a. (eds.) (2021) library pedagogies: personal reflections from library practitioners. huddersfield: innovative libraries press. kimberly davies hoffman university of rochester, ny, usa keywords: teaching pedagogies; libraries; information literacy; professional development; reflective practice overview becoming. this is a book where european and american academic librarians1 discuss their journeys of becoming teachers. many did not pursue librarianship to engage in teaching but found themselves in roles that required instruction, despite a lack of preparation for classroom teaching within their master of library and information science (mlis) programs. in a full circle manner, many of the narrative reflections include stories of the librarians’ beginnings where, as students, they became scholars, and now consider how their teaching influences the success of current students. they reflect on past influences including personal background, key teachers and other figures that served as models, institutions and ways of learning that made an impact, and scholarship in the field of education and librarianship, all of which have formed deep rooted values which ground the basis of pedagogical pathways. 1 not all authors identify as a librarian, but they all work within areas of academic success, which includes teaching information literacy and/or research skills. hoffman library pedagogies: personal reflections from library practitioners journal of learning development in higher education, issue 21: september 2021 2 each narrative is as unique as the librarians themselves and suggests ways in which they teach as evidenced in the way that they write and present their story. meaningful moments in their lives and readings by some of the most influential scholars provide insight into what is of most importance to each librarian and how that manifests itself in their current teaching practice. the reflections are personal and individual. while themes and strategies will begin to connect across the chapters, readers are encouraged to read each of the chapters, in no particular order but to find the titles or author profiles that resonate first and browse the book from there. structure and content the anthology of librarian reflections is broken into three main categories: 1. information literacy instruction at the center of one’s teaching approach. 2. issues of social justice, power, and authority at the core of one’s pedagogical strategies. 3. unique illustrations of other pedagogies and how they are utilised in library settings. in each section, discussions of one-on-one, small group, lecture hall, embedded, one-shot, full credit course and more informal learning community formats surface, laying the land for all the different ways in which librarians teach and how they are able to apply various pedagogies based on the setting. it would be difficult to separate out specific chapters per section to discuss their content, as the reader will uncover important but similar themes, values, experiences, and teaching methods across the different chapters. recurring themes do not detract from the book’s appeal; instead, the repetition of ideas leads to a strengthening of understanding in the various pedagogies. instructional strategies and the why behind them are explained and exemplified in multiple situations, providing a prism-like view of the pedagogies for multidimensional explorations. this is particularly helpful as library professionals at all levels hoffman library pedagogies: personal reflections from library practitioners journal of learning development in higher education, issue 21: september 2021 3 and years of experience have much to gain from the personal reflections. there is something within each of the stories for readers to learn from, reflect upon, and consider for their own practice. following are key highlights that run through the chapters. for easy identification and access to particular themes and ideas, an index at the back of the book is particularly helpful. using metaphors through the authors’ stories, readers are taken into the worlds of the wizard of oz, alice in wonderland, the london tube, various trailways in nature, and into hollywood movies like ferris bueller’s day off and indiana jones and the temple of doom, all with a “suitcase” in hand. the use of metaphor is an effective way to connect the unknown to knowledge that learners already possess. the librarian authors weave in and out of these metaphors to make their points explicit and engage their readers to consider their own frame of reference. metaphors can create visual and memorable imagery so that the ideas can “stick.” for example, in aston’s reference to the wizard of oz, she sees her roles as the translator (i.e. mental connections made by the scarecrow), the guide (i.e. the heart and care of the tin man), and the advocate (i.e. the courage to stand up and roar, like the lion). reference to the tube in overn’s chapter as her metaphor for feeling lost and/or knowing where she’d like to go and what stops to make will resonate well with readers who have experienced the same emotions as both the developing teacher and the students whom they are guiding. furthermore, barker, walsh, piper, and tomlin employ tactile and visual mediums in their teaching where students can represent their ideas in metaphorical ways beyond traditional text. feeling a sense of belonging this idea surfaces early and often in the chapters, as a nod to bell hooks’ notion of “the learning community.” belonging is used and can be read in multiple ways throughout the book. hoffman library pedagogies: personal reflections from library practitioners journal of learning development in higher education, issue 21: september 2021 4 the idea first surfaces in terms of a librarian’s identity and what skills and duties they expect from the role. deep dives into teaching responsibilities were not what some librarians bargained for as they entered the field, and perhaps the scholarship of teaching and learning (sotl) is best left to the university’s learning developers (or a cross between instructional designers and academic support in the u.s.). further, there is internal tension in some of the authors as to whether they are librarians first who happen to teach or teaching librarians as their main focus (chapter by williams). such variation in how they see themselves becomes very personal to which group or field they belong or relate to the most. second, there are sentiments of belonging to, or playing a key part in, the university system. this is both an issue of loyalty and commitment to an institution that has offered multiple opportunities for professional growth and thus the desire to embody the successes of those efforts (chapter by aston) and an issue of playing one’s part in a university that has made teaching its top priority and mandate (chapter by newnham). for students, the feeling that they belong at university or within a learning group is crucial and could ultimately affect their success within the system. multiple chapters address the notion of power and elitism that exist in higher education. these systems were originally designed for one race, one class, one gender, and with one main approach to learning (i.e., filling the students as empty vessels through professors’ knowledge). librarian accounts from their own backgrounds, but particularly from those of their students, paint an imbalanced view of the “student experience.” as a first-generation student, feelings of being lost and alone, of not knowing what to do or where to go to seek help can be paralyzing (chapters by pajewki, english, and wolfenden). for bipoc students (chapter by kalpin prescott), the simple visual of predominantly white faces on campus leads them to believe that they don’t belong or that they won’t be able to succeed. other factors like personality type (e.g. shy, outgoing), socioeconomic status, abilities and age of the learner, or preferred learning style all present a risk in whether or not a learner feels they belong. hoffman library pedagogies: personal reflections from library practitioners journal of learning development in higher education, issue 21: september 2021 5 teaching strategies that involve feminist learning theory (chapters by boutin-cooper, piepmeier, pothecary, and wallis), counter storytelling (chapter by piper), antiracist pedagogy (chapter by kalpin prescott), inquiry-based learning (chapter by mckinney), constructivism, improvisation (chapter by prior), playful learning approaches (chapter by walsh), visual learning methods (chapters by tomlin and piper), universal design (chapters by sclafani and brooks), and e-pedagogies (chapter by wotherspoon) help to combat students’ feelings of isolation or not knowing what they’re doing. within many, if not all, of these methodologies, teacher and student become part of an equalised learning structure where all voices matter, care is taken in the language and actions used, choice is offered to accommodate many individuals’ preferences for learning, and content reflects the interests of the class as a whole and provides real-world interactions and inquiries. where librarians themselves may struggle (or may have struggled) with feelings of belonging, they are careful to adopt pedagogies that bring everyone to the learning table. by placing the students at the center of learning, they increase those students’ chances for academic, social, and digital success through a raised level of confidence and an openness to collaborative scholarly exploration. taking risks many chapters begin with a similar story of a newly minted librarian asked to lead their first instructional session. they follow what they have seen in the past – pointing and clicking through a database screen, rushing through powerpoint slides, and answering their own questions that they have asked of the class. some authors have benefited from prior coursework or experience in instructional practices, but the majority have not. the power of the pedagogical stories is to see where the authors began and where they are currently. what personal values have they recognised as adding value to their teaching approach? what grounded theories have provided comfort and stability in knowing the “why” behind teaching? what have they learned about their students to make specific decisions in how they will care for and interact with them? hoffman library pedagogies: personal reflections from library practitioners journal of learning development in higher education, issue 21: september 2021 6 the stories of trepidation, lack of confidence, and outright “failure” are bolstered by that big leap of faith, that one activity that the authors dared to attempt – close your eyes and hope for the best! the first memorable instance of this is detailed in barker’s chapter where she lugged a heavy suitcase into class and, up until the last moment, deliberated if she would follow the safe, traditional route or take a chance. exposing the students to an unconventional lesson prompted curiosity, engagement, and of course, a deeper level of learning. other authors use a strategy of trial and error in their teaching (chapter by brooks), modeling for students that learning is a process, and “productive failures” indicate that continued, enhanced learning will happen. the development of multimodal projects that leverage non-scholarly formats (e.g. comics, zines) offer students new ways of expressing themselves and the content learned (chapter by piper), as do regular routines of opening and closing “rounds” where every class participant gets a chance to say what they’re thinking (chapter by pothecary). the vulnerability of being truly authentic with oneself and particularly with one’s students is a risk itself (chapter by saylor). hynes focuses his chapter on the value of lecture style, not to buck so many other chapters that highlight the virtues of active learning, constructivism, and other participatory pedagogies but to address a style of teaching that can be equally powerful and that, sometimes, is simply unavoidable. exposing oneself in the center of a lecture hall can be incredibly intimidating, but hynes advocates for the art of being true to your personality and opening up conversations regarding the messier side of information – issues that may not have easy answers and for which the “expert” in the room may not possess complete knowledge. the true experts in areas of social media and internet privacy, for example, are likely to be the students. finally, the book’s authors are to be commended for opening up their hearts and letting their readers into an important, albeit intimate, slice of their world. transparent and deliberate statements of who they are, where they come from, how they have failed, and what more they have to learn connect readers to the different stories, likely shaking their heads in a sense of familiarity. hoffman library pedagogies: personal reflections from library practitioners journal of learning development in higher education, issue 21: september 2021 7 learning from each other with few authors having studied educational theories in their formal mlis coursework, they detail the numerous ways in which they have grown within their teaching roles. as mentioned above, they turn to their experiences as students thinking of how they learned best. they remember the influential professors, the projects that excited them, the feelings that energised them, and the friends and colleagues who have advised them along the way. many, particularly in the uk, have pursued post-graduate certificates/diplomas in education. attendance at institutes, conferences, and countless workshops keep the authors current in new teaching theory and approaches. researching, reading, trialing, and planning from the literature and frameworks across various disciplines help to identify the most influential studies in teaching and learning (as evidenced by the extensive bibliographies following each chapter). sharing and brainstorming with colleagues whether in a library department, a blended office of learning development or other campus service points, or with faculty partners creates a dynamic learning community where the highs, lows, and unknowns of teaching can be discussed. of course, the act of learning from students may be the most powerful professional development of all. this can certainly happen through assessment measures, but the most enriching comes in the form of getting to know one’s students what they think, what they prioritise, how they’re feeling, what interests them most, and what motivates them to learn. the book concludes with two strategically placed chapters. “digital literacy in a post-covid world” was likely included beyond the initial call for participation. it is clear that the different chapters were written before and during the current global pandemic. some authors address the pivot to online education more than others, but it seems necessary to directly address the future of library pedagogy given the life-changing circumstances of the past year. wotherspoon argues that online learning is as important in the academic setting as it should be in the working world. while a global lockdown has disrupted typical ways of schooling in higher education, it has also left many unemployed and struggling financially, looking for ways to re-skill and find new jobs that may depend on one’s emerging digital capabilities. with a hoffman library pedagogies: personal reflections from library practitioners journal of learning development in higher education, issue 21: september 2021 8 different wave of diverse students (e.g. non-traditional, experienced workers, seeking to modernize their skill set), wotherspoon offers many suggestions for ways to maintain the original values of one’s pedagogical approach while adapting from in-person to online, whether synchronous or asynchronous. finally, the culminating chapter focuses on “utlilising coaching to enhance teaching practice.” wolfenden provides the perfect ending to a collection of personal narratives about pedagogical journeys as she encourages readers to now act on what they’ve read and begin to think through their values and how they might apply to teaching strategies. she offers a number of guided worksheets and questions perfect for a deeply personal exercise or an investigation into a team’s potential direction for future shared pedagogical philosophies. questions are open-ended for ourselves or for colleagues we may be coaching. wolfenden further applies the coaching approach to students so that they, too, can realise their potential. summary within the introduction of library pedagogies: personal reflections from library practitioners, editors sam aston and andrew walsh state their aim of “inspiring the reader to reflect upon their own beliefs, values, experiences, and wider pedagogical approaches, in order to write their own personal pedagogies.” the diversity in stories and author experiences are sure to speak to readers where they can’t help but begin to reflect on their current practices. familiar tales, recognisable frameworks, theories, and scholars, and the inspiring success when teachers and students connect as mutually trusted learners will ring true for readers, no matter at what stage they are in their career. for those readers who have thought carefully about their pedagogical approach, there is more to learn from this book. for new librarians who may stand at the center of the lecture hall ready to run the “typical” lesson based on what they have observed for most of their years as a learner, this book may jump-start their learning process so they don’t have to struggle through years of uncertainty and uninspired results. this book adds to the growing literature calling on mlis programs to prioritise formal teacher training, since the majority of library jobs entail teaching and learning, if even on an hoffman library pedagogies: personal reflections from library practitioners journal of learning development in higher education, issue 21: september 2021 9 indirect or one-to-one scale. until then, the personal narratives of library pedagogies contribute another important piece to the scholarly conversation and prompt librarians to reflect and act upon what they’ve read and what they do. author details kimberly davies hoffman is the director of learning initiatives for the river campus libraries at the university of rochester. she has been teaching in a library role since 1997 with the heaviest classroom responsibility happening between 2000-2014 at suny geneseo. her publications and conference presentations focus on issues of librarian professional development, collaborative relationships between faculty and librarians, instructional design in libraries, and most recently, open pedagogical practices. library pedagogies: personal reflections from library practitioners overview structure and content using metaphors feeling a sense of belonging taking risks learning from each other summary author details literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 13: april 2018 neither ‘bolt-on’ nor ‘built-in’: benefits and challenges of developing an integrated skills curriculum through a partnership model james cairns university of sheffield, uk tamara hervey university of sheffield, uk oliver johnson university of sheffield, uk abstract all universities are seeking to develop their students’ skills. typically, they deploy either or both an independent ‘skills’ offering, separate from disciplinary learning (‘bolt-on’); and/or individual academic staff embedding skills assessment in some modules (‘built-in’). what are the drawbacks of ‘bolt-on’ and ‘built-in’? to what extent does a partnership model, involving an integrated and longitudinal skills curriculum, resolve those drawbacks? under what circumstances is this possible? what are the main barriers? we present a case study of a major curriculum development in the school of law at the university of sheffield to argue that the benefits of partnership probably outweigh either ‘bolt-on’ or ‘built-in’. however, some of the enablers and inhibitors associated with contemporary higher education (he) may suggest that ‘built-in’ is more viable. this is not primarily because of the difficulties of engaging academic disciplinary specialists; rather it is better explained by structural and institutional rigidities. we therefore recommend courage to take a long view, to aim high, and to celebrate small successes. keywords: skills; employability; student partnership; reflective practice. cairns et al. neither ‘bolt-on’ nor ‘built-in’: benefits and challenges of developing an integrated skills curriculum journal of learning development in higher education, issue 13: april 2018 2 introduction in 2006, ursula wingate argued that ‘study skills’ should not be ‘bolted-on’ to undergraduate curricula, but ‘built-in’ to substantive disciplinary teaching. she concluded that ‘a realistic and effective approach for universities would be to promote the embedding of skills on a smaller scale, by encouraging academic staff to integrate the development of learning into their teaching’ (wingate, 2006, p.467). we agree with wingate that ‘boltingon’ opportunities for undergraduate students to develop their academic, disciplinary and transferable skills is a profoundly unsatisfactory approach, but we also think that simply relying on the goodwill of individual academics to ‘build in’ skills development misses important opportunities to develop integrated skills curricula through partnership between disciplinary experts, skills learning and teaching experts, and students themselves. in short, we are arguing for neither ‘bolt-on’, nor ‘built-in’, but blended together in partnerships that involve mutual respect for different types of knowledge, experience and expertise. the following case study of a major curriculum development in the school of law at the university of sheffield explores this proposition. the curriculum development we describe involves around 950-1000 undergraduate students each year, and around 100 members of staff, both academic and professional services staff, in the school of law and elsewhere in the university. we provide a reflective analysis of the challenges, pitfalls and successes associated with the design and delivery of such a large-scale partnershipbased learning model. background the ongoing marketisation of the higher education (he) sector in recent years has transformed the term ‘student experience’ into a contested zone that, on the one hand, describes the transformative nature of an undergraduate degree programme and its associated impact on lifelong learning and, on the other, quantifies the value of a degree programme according to a set of basic metrics (brown and carasso, 2013; molesworth et al., 2010; hockings, 2010). at the same time, student recruitment has become the sector’s primary financial driver, placing pressure on academic departments to meet stringent targets and seek opportunities to widen the undergraduate admission base. already highlighted in wingate’s research over 10 years ago, and far from unique to the uk (e.g. pritchard et al., 2015), these pressures have only intensified with the further diversification cairns et al. neither ‘bolt-on’ nor ‘built-in’: benefits and challenges of developing an integrated skills curriculum journal of learning development in higher education, issue 13: april 2018 3 of the he sector in england and wales, alongside the introduction of the teaching excellence framework, with its key performance indicators including student experience, as measured through the national student survey. we replicated wingate’s (2006) search of university websites, also using a randomlychosen sample of 10 pre-1992 and 10 post-1992 universities. we found that all offer some kind of ‘bolt-on’ study skills programmes through bespoke units outside academic departments. writing, note-taking, revision, and oral presentations still top the list of skills being taught this way. in several instances, skills are explicitly linked to future employability. teaching offered is also often explicitly associated with skills not already acquired through secondary education with a focus on transition to the uk he environment and the tacit knowledge associated with its assessment conventions. the limitations of the ‘bolt-on’ approach are well-known (thies, 2012; wingate, 2006; biggs, 2003; durkin and main, 2002) and need only be summarised briefly here. a deficitfocused model associates skills learning with failure, thus often deterring the very students it seeks to reach. students do not perceive stand-alone skills teaching as relevant or transferrable to success on their disciplinary programmes. nor do they consider that nonsubject experts have anything valuable to teach them. above all, the ‘bolt-on’ model ignores the established insights of experiential learning (kolb and fry, 1975; kolb, 2015): learning happens when there are opportunities to act in response to a meaningful problem or challenge; receive (external, peer or self) feedback on that action; and reflect on that process. for all these reasons, the partnership model we recommend adopts an approach that conceptualises the skills at issue as blended with (rather than separate from) a body of knowledge; understands knowledge, skills, and learning as inherently subjectively determined; and above all seeks to develop reflection. context the university of sheffield has made a recent institution-wide shift towards a programmelevel view of student learning that acknowledges the limitations of modular teaching and seeks to improve baseline academic and transferable skills of an increasingly diverse body cairns et al. neither ‘bolt-on’ nor ‘built-in’: benefits and challenges of developing an integrated skills curriculum journal of learning development in higher education, issue 13: april 2018 4 of undergraduate students (chappie and tolley, 2000; fallows and steven, 2000; chadha and nicholls, 2006). in common with several other universities, the university of sheffield has increased both the resourcing and visibility of skills teaching through a bespoke unit, known locally as ‘301’ because of its address at 301 glossop road in the heart of the campus. evidence from the early years of 301’s activity supports existing literature on the limitations of a bolt-on stand-alone skills centre model as an approach that reaches a relatively small proportion of students. deployment of resources on voluntary attendees has a high impact on those individuals, but a limited impact across the institution as a whole. in particular, a key target demographic of middle-achieving home undergraduate students is underrepresented through a voluntary or extra-curricular model of engagement, in spite of the reported prevalence of challenges around assessment literacy and skills development within this group (stevenson and clegg, 2011). further, student perceptions of skills development as part of a wider employability agenda pull against ‘context-transcendent’ perceptions of learning and teaching (kreber, 2010; poole, 2010). evidence from law students suggests low voluntary uptake of skills teaching is explained by the way student identities are rooted in department, disciplinary and professional ‘silos’, creating a barrier to engagement beyond the law school (francis, 2015). given this evidence, collaborations with academic departments, such as sheffield law school, are welcomed by learning developers at 301 as opportunities to bridge the gap between disciplinary and ‘generic’ learning. a collaborative, partnership approach between stand-alone skills centres and academic departments opens the door to a two-way sharing of knowledge and expertise that allows both partners, and students, to benefit (macvaugh et al., 2013; gretton et al., 2015). including students in the partnership offers important insights into lived student experience (dickerson et al., 2015; healey et al., 2014; brown, forthcoming). the partnership model under discussion here attempts to strengthen and build on this triangular relationship between disciplinary experts, learning developers and students to broaden and enrich student and staff perceptions of where and how disciplinary learning takes place. the drive for the partnership model, relatively unusual in a research-intensive university, came from engagement with the literature that demonstrates the benefits of such a model: in other words, the pedagogical design behind the curriculum reform was itself research-led. for this to happen, it was necessary for at least some (senior) academic staff in the relevant disciplinary unit to engage actively with cairns et al. neither ‘bolt-on’ nor ‘built-in’: benefits and challenges of developing an integrated skills curriculum journal of learning development in higher education, issue 13: april 2018 5 the pedagogical literature, both pertaining to the specific discipline of law, and more general. commitments to research-led learning, understood in this way, helped to secure the continued success of the model in its institutional cultural contexts. the development of a new undergraduate curriculum in sheffield law school in response to external professional sector reform (legal services act 2007; legal education and training review, 2013) provided an opportunity for a break from past path dependencies (pierson, 2000; pierson and skocpol, 2002), determining the ways undergraduate law programmes in english research-intensive universities were typically designed. this juncture provided the impetus to bring together skills and knowledge learning in a new unified framework, known as the ‘skills and values spine’ because it is the ‘backbone’ of the curriculum. the spine conceptualises undergraduate law student skills development as rooted in disciplinary and profession-formational reflective practice. the partnership approach was thus embedded from the outset. designing the ‘skills and values spine’: partnership chosen over ‘builtin’ and ‘bolt-on’ the underlying concepts for sheffield law school’s ‘skills and values spine’ are reflection and partnership. a common caricature of discipline-specific academic staff is that they have little understanding of, or respect for, the discipline of pedagogy, or pedagogical expertise. to the extent that this represents some truth, discipline specialists do not always recognise a need for input from specialists in learning development, or a responsibility to teach or assess skills. likewise, students have chosen an academic discipline and, in the case of law, many have chosen a future profession. many of those students believe that only discipline-specific academic staff can teach them what they need or want to know to acquire the skills and knowledge associated with that degree and profession. one of the benefits of partnership over ‘bolt-on’ is the way it helps overcome potential resistance from (some) staff and students. to overcome these potential barriers, we reframe the dynamic as an opportunity for research-led partnership and collaboration. according to this philosophy, all staff (both disciplinary and specialist skills development) and students involved in the spine (and hence, implicitly, in the entire ug curriculum) are conceptualised as co-learners rather than teachers and pupils. cairns et al. neither ‘bolt-on’ nor ‘built-in’: benefits and challenges of developing an integrated skills curriculum journal of learning development in higher education, issue 13: april 2018 6 in order to initiate this process, all academic staff in sheffield law school (around 65 individuals) were involved in initial discussions to identify a list of ‘skills i would like the students to have but which i do not have space/time to teach, give feedback on, or assess in my module’. this mapping process, which also drew on student feedback at a modular level, and focus groups undertaken by the school, helped to highlight gaps in both provision and expertise, and resulted in an early draft of a skills pathway that would draw on both disciplinary expertise and professional skills input into areas including assessment literacy, reflection and employability. with the gaps in coverage and expertise established, it was possible to demonstrate both a pragmatic and a research-led need to draw on existing institutional resource and to build a collaborative ‘task force’ involving both department, student and professional services representation. convincing senior academic staff in the school of the necessity of operating in this way was essential to the development of the model. the spine ‘lead’ (hervey) repeatedly asserted that her competencies and capacities were (and would always be) insufficient to develop the spine alone: the partnership followed as a logical consequence. the skills and values spine was rolled out over the course of a four-year period. after an initial phase in which the broad structure, underlying principles, and outline of content were developed, each subsequent phase was associated with learning in a particular year of the programme. ongoing reflection and review continues, drawing on the expertise of the partners as their respective expertise determines. the perspectives of undergraduate interns, alongside other data from student experiences, informed the design in a recursive process which involved close collaboration with subject specialist staff and staff with particular expertise in skills development from across the university. in keeping with the overall design, every learning event (independent learning hosted through the virtual learning environment (vle), peer-led group learning, tutorial, workshop or lecture) has been co-produced by at least two, and usually three, of the partners. without the partnership, it would have been impossible to develop those learning materials. for example, a lecture and associated independent study on academic written registers for lawyers draws on generic knowledge (such as the ‘fog’ index of complexity (gunning, 1952)), specific examples of law student assessments, and published legal research. the skills and values spine in sheffield law school takes institutional form as three zerocredit, year-long modules, delivered through a structured suite of learning events that support curricular learning on the school’s nine ‘qualifying law degree’ programmes. the cairns et al. neither ‘bolt-on’ nor ‘built-in’: benefits and challenges of developing an integrated skills curriculum journal of learning development in higher education, issue 13: april 2018 7 unit of learning event begins from the individual, and builds up to the whole cohort. guided independent and small peer group learning is hosted on the vle, and begins from ‘intro week’ before formal classes begin. a team of 15-25 level 2, 3 and 4 students are recruited each year by a student-tutor leader (also a student) to support small group peer learning. these student tutors become natural ambassadors for the spine, translating the value of the learning involved to students in younger cohorts. to develop independence, small group tutorials (4-5 students) with discipline-specific staff take place six times in the first year, and twice in each of the second and final years. the school’s existing personal/academic tutoring system was deployed to deliver this aspect of the spine. as staff were required to meet their tutees in any event, there was little increase in staff time costs: the spine simply gives an agenda for those encounters. both transferable (employability) and disciplinary academic skills development, as well as discursive activities on values such as diversity or equality, take place in ‘cafe style workshops’ led by 2-3 staff. to build community, each cohort meets for a weekly lecture series provided by discipline-specific staff, specialist skills development staff with a range of expertise (including, for instance, information technology, research, time management, literacy, numeracy), students (for instance, reporting on research projects undertaken with law firms in other jurisdictions as part of a year abroad), and external speakers from the legal profession. all of the learning events cross-refer each other, the programmes which they support, disciplinary and graduate competencies and capacities, and the ‘skills and values’ of a law graduate from a russell-group institution. they form a unified whole and would be significantly diminished if disaggregated into free-standing events. this means that staff who teach on the programme need to understand not only the specific topics/skills they teach, but also how these fit within the programme as a whole. the overall structure, including the key aspects of skills/values development involved in each element, is encapsulated on a shared spreadsheet, accessible to all staff and students involved. each lecturer is briefed either by the spine lead or the student tutor lead in advance of giving a lecture. the academic/personal tutors are briefed by a full learning objectives document associated with each tutorial. the spine is also regularly discussed in teaching team meetings and – because it covers all programmes – assessment and programme review discussions mandated by qa processes. cairns et al. neither ‘bolt-on’ nor ‘built-in’: benefits and challenges of developing an integrated skills curriculum journal of learning development in higher education, issue 13: april 2018 8 the decision to make attendance at all components of the programme compulsory was based on the need to ensure that all students engaged fully. this was both for qa purposes (some elements of the qa benchmark for law in sheffield’s undergraduate law degrees are only covered in the spine) and to counter the ‘deficit model’ associated with skills teaching by conceptualising the programme of learning as a backbone integral to the success of all students (lea and street, 2006; ganobcsik-williams, 2004). the framing is directed mainly at students. qualitative feedback on the spine suggests that it is effective for a critical mass of students from the beginning of their studies, and that an increasing proportion of students understand the ways in which skills and values learning on the spine supports their modular learning as they progress through their studies. postgraduate students who support the spine’s peer learning invariably understand this framing. ‘zero-credit’ was perceived as essential in order to accommodate professional and discipline-specific degree content, particularly in the bi-disciplinary llb (law and criminology). the data on our case study must be seen in the context of this institutional form: for instance, a persistent minority of student feedback on the programme suggests resentment at being required to undertake learning in the context of a zero-credit module, and at being required to attend. even the label ‘module’ may trigger particular expectations from students or staff, but university qa, timetabling and other systems mean that designating the spine a ‘module’ was a pragmatic way to realise it within the constraints of existing systems and processes. the principal learning outcomes from the spine may be summarised as developing students as reflective independent learners, equipped for employment as law graduates. students are assessed by an annual individual reflection on progress, against a selfdetermined set of aims. students are asked ‘what do you want to get out of your law degree at the university of sheffield?’, by reference to competency statements in the qaa benchmark, and of relevant professional organisations, as well as private sector graduate employers, inside and outside the legal sector. students are guided to conduct an individual competency audit and encouraged to make a concrete plan as to how they will achieve their self-set aims. the programme of learning on the spine is placed in the context of the rest of the university experience. connections and interactions between development of skills and consideration of values within the spine, and ‘for-credit’ learning, as well as extra-curricular activities, are made explicit and constantly stressed. students are explicitly taught about reflective practice in general (kolb, 2015; gibbs, 2013; moon, 2009; schön, 1984) and among lawyers (hinett, 2002; rue et al., 2013; casey, 2014), and cairns et al. neither ‘bolt-on’ nor ‘built-in’: benefits and challenges of developing an integrated skills curriculum journal of learning development in higher education, issue 13: april 2018 9 are encouraged to reflect on their development as they revisit particular disciplinary and transferable skills through the learning activities on the spine. once a year, students reflect formally on their progress towards those aims and are graded fail, pass, merit, or distinction on that reflection. in the first and final years, the grading is by the academic tutor. to develop transferable group work skills, in the second year grading is by peers. students must pass the spine in order to progress to the next year. to date, no student has failed. reflections on and analysis of student and staff perceptions of the model one of the biggest challenges the case study faces is securing sufficient valuable feedback from students or staff as the spine is rolled out in the new curriculum. we supplemented its original questionnaire-based, quantitative approach to evaluation, because less than a third of the first cohort (approximately 100 responses out of 350 students) gave any feedback at all, supplementing it with a more discursive and qualitative student focus group approach after the initial phase of development. we gathered further data during later development phases. this comprises responses from three sets of student focus groups, of around 10-15 students each, and reflections from around a dozen student interns who worked on the three development phases, as well as from staff in semi-structured interviews. the staff data was especially valuable as the staff were the audience for the students’ self-reflective presentations which formed the assessment for the spine. they thus provided a rich source of data on the student experience and learning, demonstrating that students were able to articulate themselves as developing reflective learners. the project has ethics clearance from the university of sheffield’s standard research ethics processes. the analysis below should be approached with these limitations of our data in mind. whilst the absence of a proactive student response to requests for feedback broadly suggests an absence of acute discontent, it also implies a more troubling apathy towards the spine, perhaps stemming from its compulsory zero-credit (i.e. high-commitment, lowstakes) character, but also perhaps relating to a deep-rooted ambivalence towards skillsbased learning. equally, some attempts to have discussions among the staff teaching team have been met with indifference, with only a few members of academic staff cairns et al. neither ‘bolt-on’ nor ‘built-in’: benefits and challenges of developing an integrated skills curriculum journal of learning development in higher education, issue 13: april 2018 10 expressing strongly-felt negative views, mostly about the lectures as a key learning mode in the spine, or expressing views that demonstrated that the staff member was unaware of the totality of the spine (‘why haven’t you included teaching on x?’ ‘we have.’). in the case of both staff and student engagement with the spine there is evidently ongoing work to be done to encourage a sense of shared ownership. each new student cohort must by definition be brought within the partnership, and the student-tutors play a significant ambassadorial role here. this work continues and includes one-to-one engagement with key academic staff, for instance, who lead core modules, or who are programme directors. however, the majority of staff in these roles are already engaged with and committed to the spine. successes students and staff report that the model delivers a reliable baseline of learning in the early weeks of transition from secondary (or further) education for all undergraduate law students: a cohort of 280-400 depending on the year’s intake, from a range of backgrounds, countries and previous educational experiences. students see this part of the curriculum as discipline-specific, rather than generic skills focused, even though all the key ‘bolt-on’ type skills (and others, such as group work) are covered during this initial phase of the programme: i enjoyed the fact that we were introduced to the key concepts of the first year in a fun and engaging manner through the cafe style days for example how we were introduced to the doctrine of judicial precedent. (student questionnaire) however, some students find at least some skills practice challenging: i didn't like the pressure of standing up in front of the whole cohort to answer a question. (student questionnaire) students and staff appreciate the blending of skills-focused learning alongside subjectspecific learning, and especially assessment, in the ‘for-credit’ modules. the quotations below show how the spine’s content supports modular discipline-specific learning. the first refers to the transitional learning of the first two weeks of the programme, which is designed to secure awareness of the attributes of he learning for all students in the cairns et al. neither ‘bolt-on’ nor ‘built-in’: benefits and challenges of developing an integrated skills curriculum journal of learning development in higher education, issue 13: april 2018 11 cohort, irrespective of their previous educational experiences. the second concerns the design of the spine and the ways in which it develops academic, disciplinary, and transferable skills in a way that tracks modular learning and assessment: the opportunity to embed introductory lectures in contract and tort law in the transitional ‘english legal system’ teaching is very welcome. (staff feedback, interview) the topics, lecture and tutorials have been organised in a useful way due to the fact that at times they corresponded to other modules (for example – the wins lecture on how to approach a contract problem question for the purposes of the obligations exam). (student focus group) students prefer lectures giving direct exam advice more than any other type of lecture included in the programme, but learning that integrates student reflection on professional values is also appreciated, as the following exemplifies. the student appreciates lectures explicitly focused on disciplinary assessment styles (‘problem questions and essay questions’), but also the values aspects of the spine, designed to inculcate reflection on the values associated with law graduates: the lectures which explained the appropriate methods to use in order to write effective answers to problem questions and essay questions. i also really enjoyed the lectures on equality and justice, as anything to do with equality and justice really interests me. (student questionnaire) in general, student feedback suggests that the majority of students’ temporal frame is the immediate term, within an atomistic context – how an individual student can graduate with the best possible law degree. there is a generally positive reaction to the spine as preparation for the law degree (40.4% agreeing/strongly agreeing and 29.8% of level 1 students neither agreeing nor disagreeing with this proposition). level 3/4 students (engaged as peer tutors) had a stronger positive reaction: almost all expressed clear understanding of the programme as developing skills needed to succeed in a law degree. a typical sentiment is: cairns et al. neither ‘bolt-on’ nor ‘built-in’: benefits and challenges of developing an integrated skills curriculum journal of learning development in higher education, issue 13: april 2018 12 i really wish we had had this kind of opportunity in my first year to learn about how to apply skills across different modules. it’s helping me now, even though it is a bit too late. (student focus group) around one third of students feel that the spine is preparing them well for their future career; one third feel it is not; and a third neither agree nor disagree. the immediate term focus is stronger in feedback from level 1 than level 2 students, more of whom are also thinking about what will contribute to transferable skills to get a job. moreover, level 1 students in particular tend to think the point of a law degree is narrower than the wide variety of careers available after graduating. the programme thus to some extent engages and inspires students in the interplay of contextual versus ‘context-transcendent’ perceptions of learning and teaching towards the goal of ‘employability, civic responsibility and lifelong learning as general graduate outcomes’ (kreber, 2010, p.7). this is evidenced by an increased engagement among level 1 law school students with additional voluntary skills development opportunities offered by 301, the careers service, english language teaching centre and enterprise unit, suggesting that the spine has had a positive impact on student independence and awareness of the wider university learning environment. in this regard, the spine takes seriously (including through adopting and deploying a single set of skills icons or ‘badges’) the advice that ‘it would be more helpful for students’ long-term development if the skills that are needed for studying effectively at university were presented and taught as the starting point in the development of those skills that are required from graduates. the same categories should be used for skills that are needed for academic study and employability’ (wingate, 2006, p.461). staff in particular appreciated the convergence of research, teaching, and co-curricular opportunities, and the development of the role of ‘personal tutor’ beyond pastoral support, to a relationship that supports the development of disciplinary and transferable skills, and reflective practice: i like that i now know my personal tutees, having had academic interactions with them, rather than ‘how are you doing?’ encounters. (staff interview) cairns et al. neither ‘bolt-on’ nor ‘built-in’: benefits and challenges of developing an integrated skills curriculum journal of learning development in higher education, issue 13: april 2018 13 staff report a high degree of satisfaction with the reflective presentations that form the assessment, as well as with development of core skills by the cohort as a whole. for example, several staff members commented on enhanced written communication skills (e.g. expressed in e-mails) compared to previous cohorts. students welcomed their relationships with tutors, praising the following in the student questionnaire: having chance to go over things with personal tutor. my personal tutor, he's very good. my tutor... has been helpful in the sessions with any difficulties i have faced over the year. outside the department, 301 report a significantly higher engagement of law students with their services than in previous years. this pattern is also found in other ‘external’ university units, in particular the careers service, who are also partners in the development and delivery of the spine. the law school’s approach has attracted attention from across the university, with the partnership approach taken by law having an influence on programme level review in other social science departments, and in the faculties of engineering and medicine and dentistry. one of the key vectors in disseminating information about the law school’s partnership approach is the university’s annual learning and teaching conference, at which students and staff engaged in developing the spine have presented work in progress. where student dissatisfaction was expressed, it was focused on the lectures, suggesting that perhaps students are more keen to ‘learn by doing’ than by passively absorbing information, and that the guided selfand peer-learning elements of the spine are its most successful aspect. above all, in assessing the successes of the spine, we report that students generally engaged with the self-directed learning tasks set, met in their peer groups to undertake guided learning, attended tutorials, cafe-style workshops and lectures, and completed the work: even though none of it was ‘for-credit’: my peers seemed to like it both at the time and in retrospect. (student tutor focus group) cairns et al. neither ‘bolt-on’ nor ‘built-in’: benefits and challenges of developing an integrated skills curriculum journal of learning development in higher education, issue 13: april 2018 14 challenges and limitations students give mixed accounts of their understandings of the relevance of lectures/tutorials and other learning in the spine: lessons (sic) were well structured and planned with engaging material and interesting topics. each stage and lecture seems to be in line with the former. the opportunities given to us to say what we want to be discussed during the next lecture, gives us the opportunity to tell our problems and get solutions. a lot of the content seemed unnecessary, time would have been better spent elsewhere. i thought a lot of the lectures especially the early ones e.g. about the history and diversity of the law school were irrelevant. also i do not find the skills development theme of the tutorials useful. (student questionnaires) as noted above, lectures, and their compulsory nature, along with the non-credit-bearing nature of the spine and its associated workload, were singled out for particular criticism: most lectures were not relevant and was a shame to be the only compulsory lecture when lectures that are examined with credits are not. (student questionnaire) feedback from students, and to some extent from staff, suggests that the aim of blending skills and disciplinary specific learning is difficult to communicate effectively. timetabling and resourcing constraints mean it is not always feasible to map learning in the spine to exactly contemporaneous student learning in ‘for-credit modules’, and this becomes more difficult at level 2 and almost impossible at level 3 because of the optionality of the degree structure at higher levels. in any event, part of the design is to demonstrate how skills learned in the context of one body of (legal) knowledge can be transferred to others. information flow to disciplinary staff can also be a challenge, even where they are in principle willing to draw explicitly on learning in the spine in their modular teaching. the cairns et al. neither ‘bolt-on’ nor ‘built-in’: benefits and challenges of developing an integrated skills curriculum journal of learning development in higher education, issue 13: april 2018 15 scale of the department and staff perception of the multitudinous contemporary pressures on staff time may also be relevant here. given students’ short-term timeframes in respect to their perceived needs (and expressed (dis)satisfaction), this is an insurmountable challenge, because one of the aims is to prepare students for the longer term, even if students themselves are resistant to that preparation (hervey and wood, 2016). to the extent that it refuses to pander only to students’ short-term desires, the model therefore has inbuilt dissatisfaction among some students, which renders it vulnerable at a time when the nss is gaining greater currency. moreover, although staff delivering the spine are requested to make explicit the embedded links to disciplinary learning, and future employability or more general personal development, it is not possible to ensure that this is the case universally across the student experience, as staff ‘buy-in’ to the pedagogical design of the programme varied: had two tutors, for my tutor group and another group in the same session, one tutor did not know what work was set and did not seem to see the relevance of the module whilst the other took it seriously. very conflicting and confusing. (student questionnaire) student-led learning is central to the ethos and the success of the model. the associated reframing of staff and students as co-learners, rather than teachers and pupils, represented an unexpected challenge. the reframing is both for pedagogic and epistemological reasons, discussed above, and also for practical reasons, as in a large research-led law school disciplinary expertise differs significantly between staff. in addition, sheffield law school’s professional strand and its internationalisation strategy meant that commonality of disciplinary expertise could not be assumed even at the level of a jurisdiction or core job function: not everyone in the department has an english law degree, and not everyone is research-active. yet the programme’s success depends upon (almost) everyone in the department tutoring on it, to deliver small group learning experiences. the original design of the spine was to make a virtue out of this diversity of experience, and for all staff to model learning and reflection. the programme thus frames everyone (staff and students alike) as having something to learn, but this feature was read by some staff as implying deficiency in themselves. responding to that perceived vulnerability meant, for instance, that ‘lesson plans’, making explicit the learning objectives for tutorials in great detail, originally designed to be shared with students, are now released to staff only. another related challenge is enabling discipline-specific staff to feel cairns et al. neither ‘bolt-on’ nor ‘built-in’: benefits and challenges of developing an integrated skills curriculum journal of learning development in higher education, issue 13: april 2018 16 sufficiently confident to promote student learning and reflection on what they perceive as (sub)discipline specific values (such as, for instance, equality or ethical lawyering) and generic skills. this challenge again relates to the fact that the epistemological assumptions on which the programme is based (in this case, the constructed nature of knowledge and the indivisibility of skills and knowledge learning) are not shared by all in the academy. the dependence on staff buy-in also affects the sustainability of the spine. while most staff at all career stages are happy to contribute, particularly if they feel suitably enabled to do so by the provision of teaching guides, a small number of senior research-active staff opted out of the programme at an early stage. more seriously, the pressures of student recruitment meant that the original design of the programme involving greater input from academic staff had to be abandoned after the first year. for instance, assessment at level 2 is now through peer assessment, rather than tutor assessment; material in four staff-led tutorials is now delivered through two student-led tutorials supported by two cafe style workshops. paradoxically, the very ways in which the programme relies on a break from past path dependencies mean that its novelty and lack of embeddedness render it vulnerable to pressures to depart from its inherent design when times get tough. the structures and institutional forms which the programme takes (particularly as zero-credit modules) signify dispensability in ways which a true spine (neither ‘bolt-on’ outside the department nor ‘built-in’ at departmental modular level) would not be. conclusions although our argument draws on a single case study, we suggest that, seen in the context of the broader literature on undergraduate skills development, and the general context of he, our conclusions are reasonably generalisable across the sector. we argue there is nothing relevant to our case study that could not be replicated in other disciplinary contexts. in contrast to wingate’s assertion that small scale, modular and discipline-specific ‘built-in’ models are the only ‘realistic and effective approach for universities’ (2006, p.467), a large scale, curriculum-wide intervention, such as our skills and values spine, may be a practical way to achieve a coherent integration of subject-specific knowledge with ‘contexttranscendent’ skills as part of a broad culture shift among students and staff. to the extent cairns et al. neither ‘bolt-on’ nor ‘built-in’: benefits and challenges of developing an integrated skills curriculum journal of learning development in higher education, issue 13: april 2018 17 that it is generalisable, our case study shows some advantages and benefits of a partnership model. all other things being equal, we suggest the best model for undergraduate skills development is neither ‘bolted-on’ by ‘outsiders’ to the academic department, nor ‘built-in’ to the teaching of a minority of self-selecting academic staff. rather, it is a blend of the two, which is also created in partnership with students themselves. but our analysis also reveals barriers to staff and student engagement with the integrated approach and demonstrates that there are significant practical challenges associated with the partnership models. such partnerships are highly vulnerable to the entrenched organising structures and path dependencies of universities, within which the development of authentic cross-service collaboration, and staff-student partnership, can be challenging. the department-wide culture shift necessary for success is largely dependent on individual staff and students being willing, and having capacity and incentives, to champion the benefits. this dependency raises questions of sustainability and transferability of the model, and suggests that the pace of change is likely to be slow. at times of crisis or shortage of resources, therefore, the type of partnership model we advocate is probably insufficiently resilient to pressures from university management structures and outside drivers. however, the very fact that the kinds of partnerships we describe are not embedded in existing academic structures and habits is also a key facet of their success. a combination of circumstantial factors, including personal capital, confidence and employment security, is required to sustain such partnerships, precisely because they are not embedded in existing structures, and in some respects pull against dominant narratives, such as narratives of student satisfaction measured as the student experiences he. partnerships of this type – like all innovations – are therefore precarious and fragile in nature. perhaps wingate is right: maybe we should advocate ‘built-in’ models after all? in the final analysis, and on balance, we disagree. to give up on the significant promise of partnership is unnecessarily defeatist. we suggest, therefore, that several key lessons can be drawn from the experience of designing and delivering our spine. firstly, the way the model drew on well-established types of learning encounters (especially lectures and tutorials), alongside more ‘innovative’ and technology-supported learning, together with its badging as a ‘module’, helps to provide a familiar structure for both student and staff cairns et al. neither ‘bolt-on’ nor ‘built-in’: benefits and challenges of developing an integrated skills curriculum journal of learning development in higher education, issue 13: april 2018 18 participants. secondly, the viability of this structure depends on the enthusiasm and commitment of empowered staff and student ‘champions’ who are committed to a shared pedagogical and epistemological approach. thirdly, at a time of ever-increasing pressure towards short-termism, it is critical to be courageous enough to take the long view. learning benefits may be invisible to evaluation and come later in the degree programme or beyond he, long after student feedback on satisfaction has ceased to be captured. invisibility does not mean learning is not happening. as large institutions, universities are highly path dependent, and change slowly. a major curriculum development will take time to become embedded. with this in mind, it is important to aim high. however, as the overarching vision will inevitably be diluted for all the reasons we have outlined above, celebrate small achievements along the way. acknowledgments the authors are grateful to daniel barrow, nazma begum, louise bishop, jess edwards, leyla gayibova, sarah mccloskey, sabrina rahman, ema silva-dobos, nellie wanyama, lee williams and the many other students and staff at the university of sheffield who supported and continue to support our curriculum development work. we gratefully acknowledge the support of the faculty of social sciences curriculum development fund, the school of law, and both university of sheffield and the university of sheffield enterprise unit. references biggs, j. (2003) ‘aligning teaching for constructing learning’, higher education academy, pp. 1-4. brown, n. (forthcoming) ‘partnership in learning: how staff-student collaboration can innovate teaching’, submitted to european journal of teacher education. brown, r. and carasso, h. (2013) everything for sale? the marketisation of uk higher education. abingdon: routledge. cairns et al. neither ‘bolt-on’ nor ‘built-in’: benefits and challenges of developing an integrated skills curriculum journal of learning development in higher education, issue 13: april 2018 19 casey, t. (2014) ‘reflective practice in legal education: the stages of reflection’, clinical law review, 20(2), pp. 317-354. chadha, d. and nicholls, g. (2006) ‘teaching transferable skills to undergraduate engineering students: recognising the value of embedded and bolt-on approaches’, international journal of engineering education, 22(1), pp. 116-122. chappie, m. and tolley, h. (2000) ‘embedding key skills in a traditional university’, in fallows, s. and steven, c. (eds.) integrating key skills in higher education: employability, transferable skills and learning for life. london: kogan page, pp. 6776. dickerson, c., jarvis, j. and stockwell, l. (2015) ‘staff-student collaboration: student learning from working together to enhance educational practice in higher education’, teaching in higher education, 21(3), pp. 249-265. durkin, k. and main, a. (2002) ‘discipline-based study skills support for first-year undergraduate students’, active learning in higher education, 3(1), pp. 24-39. fallows, s. and steven, c. (2000) ‘building employability skills into the higher education curriculum: a university-wide initiative’, education+training, 42(2), pp. 75-83. francis, a. (2015) ‘legal education, social mobility, and employability: possible selves, curriculum intervention, and the role of legal work experience, journal of law and society, 42(2), pp. 173-201. ganobcsik-williams, l. (2004) a report on the teaching of academic writing in uk higher education. royal literary fund. gibbs, g. (2013) learning by doing: a guide to learning and teaching methods. available at: https://thoughtsmostlyaboutlearning.files.wordpress.com/2015/12/learning-bydoing-graham-gibbs.pdf (accessed: 25 march 2018). https://thoughtsmostlyaboutlearning.files.wordpress.com/2015/12/learning-by-doing-graham-gibbs.pdf https://thoughtsmostlyaboutlearning.files.wordpress.com/2015/12/learning-by-doing-graham-gibbs.pdf cairns et al. neither ‘bolt-on’ nor ‘built-in’: benefits and challenges of developing an integrated skills curriculum journal of learning development in higher education, issue 13: april 2018 20 gretton, s. and raine, d. (2015) ‘student perceptions of embedded employability skills’, higher education academy. available at: https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/system/files/downloads/1.7_sgrettonstudent_perceptions_of_embed_employ_skills.pdf (accessed: 8 september 2017). gunning, r. (1952) the technique of clear writing. new york: mcgraw hill. healey, m., flint, a. and harrington, k. (2014) ‘engagement through partnership: students as partners in learning and teaching in higher education’, higher education academy. available at: https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/system/files/resources/engagement_through_partner ship.pdf (accessed: 8 september 2017). hervey, t. and wood, j. (2016) ‘‘now i understand what you were trying to do, i see that this was the best module i had at university’: student learning expectations reviewed eight years later’, european journal of current legal issues, 22(3) [online]. available at: http://webjcli.org/article/view/505/686 (accessed: 25 march 2018). hinett, k. (2002) developing reflective practice in legal education. coventry: uk centre for legal education. hockings, c. (2010) inclusive learning and teaching in higher education: a synthesis of research. higher education academy report (april). kolb, d.a. (2015) experiential learning: experience as the source of learning and development. 2nd edn. new jersey: pearson. kolb, d.a. and fry, r. (1975) ‘toward an applied theory of experiential learning’, in cooper, c. (ed.) theories of group process. london: john wiley, pp. 33-57. kreber, c. (2010) ‘supporting student learning in the context of diversity, complexity and uncertainty’ in kreber, c. (ed.) the university and its disciplines: teaching and learning within and beyond disciplinary boundaries. abingdon: routledge, pp. 3-18. https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/system/files/downloads/1.7_sgretton-student_perceptions_of_embed_employ_skills.pdf https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/system/files/downloads/1.7_sgretton-student_perceptions_of_embed_employ_skills.pdf https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/system/files/resources/engagement_through_partnership.pdf https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/system/files/resources/engagement_through_partnership.pdf http://webjcli.org/article/view/505/686 http://webjcli.org/article/view/505/686 cairns et al. neither ‘bolt-on’ nor ‘built-in’: benefits and challenges of developing an integrated skills curriculum journal of learning development in higher education, issue 13: april 2018 21 lea, m.r. and street, b.v. (2006) ‘the ‘academic literacies’ model: theory and applications’, theory into practice, 45(4), pp. 368-377. legal education and training review (2013) setting standards: the future of legal services education and training regulation in england and wales. london: ilex, bsb, sra. macvaugh, j., jones, a., and auty, s. (2014) ‘implicit, stand-alone or integrated skills education for undergraduates: a longitudinal analysis of programme outcomes’, journal of further and higher education, 38(6), pp. 755-772. molesworth, m., scullion, r. and nixon, e. (2010) (eds.) the marketisation of higher education and the student as consumer. abingdon: routledge. moon, j. (2009) achieving success through academic assertiveness: real life strategies for today’s higher education students. abingdon: routledge. pierson, p. (2000) ‘increasing returns, path dependence, and the study of politics’, american political science review, 94(2), pp. 251-267. pierson, p. and skocpol, t. (2002) ‘historical institutionalism in contemporary political science’, in katznelson, i. and milner, h.v. (eds.) political science: the state of the discipline. new york and london: norton, pp. 693-721. poole, g. (2010) ‘academic disciplines: homes or barricades’ in kreber, c. (ed.) the university and its disciplines: teaching and learning within and beyond disciplinary boundaries. abingdon: routledge, pp. 50-57. pritchard, r.m.o., klumpp, m. and teichler, u. (2015) (eds.) diversity and excellence in higher education. rotterdam: sense. rué, j., font, a. and cebrián, g, (2013) ‘towards high quality reflective learning amongst law undergraduate students’, quality in higher education, 19(2), pp. 191-209. schön, d.a. (1984) the reflective practitioner: how professionals think in action. new york: basic books. cairns et al. neither ‘bolt-on’ nor ‘built-in’: benefits and challenges of developing an integrated skills curriculum journal of learning development in higher education, issue 13: april 2018 22 stevenson, j. and clegg, s. (2011) ‘possible selves: students orientating themselves towards the future through extracurricular activity’, british educational research journal, 37(2), pp. 231-246. thies, l.c. (2012) ‘increasing student participation and success: collaborating to embed academic literacies into the curriculum’, journal of academic language and learning, 6(1), a15-a31. wingate, u. (2006) ‘doing away with ‘study skills’’, teaching in higher education, 11(4), pp. 457-469. author details james cairns was research assistant on the project and corporate and commercial law llm student. james has interests in curriculum design and legal studies, and is seeking a career as a criminal barrister with a focus on corporate crime. tamara hervey facss pfhea is jean monnet professor of eu law at the university of sheffield. her interests include european union health law, legal research methodologies, equality and diversity law, and legal education. oliver johnson is an academic skills development adviser at 301 student skills and development centre at the university of sheffield. he is a doctor of soviet art history and a specialist in study skills and student learning. neither ‘bolt-on’ nor ‘built-in’: benefits and challenges of developing an integrated skills curriculum through a partnership model abstract introduction background context designing the ‘skills and values spine’: partnership chosen over ‘built-in’ and ‘bolt-on’ reflections on and analysis of student and staff perceptions of the model successes challenges and limitations conclusions acknowledgments references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 13: april 2018 coaching placements and incidental learning – how reflection and experiential learning can help bridge the industry skills gap name philippe crisp, university of chichester, uk abstract in the fields of sports coaching and higher education, there are significant implications related to the delivery and effectiveness of work-based learning (wbl), learning styles and occupational competency. alongside this, similar claims are made throughout the academic and policy literature in both fields about the effectiveness and necessity of improving issues of skill development and employability (see skillsactive, 2010a; skillsactive, 2010b; taylor and garratt, 2010; pegg et al., 2012). this paper therefore examines, in the context of the sports coaching industry’s relevant skills gaps, the learning experiences of a level five cohort who undertook supported coaching placements as part of a placement module. using two focus groups (n=15 and n=13 respectively) the findings demonstrate that it is not only preferential, from the students’ perspective, to engage in wbl but that the coaching placements also helped the students meet many of the wider professional sector’s identified skills gaps. the findings also indicated that it is the student-coaches’ learning through incidental learning (unintentional, yet through the planned placements) that most significantly determined their professional competency. keywords: formative learning; employability; sports coaching; experiential learning; professionalism; incidental learning. introduction there is a current focus within broader policy domains on the development of work-based skills. in the case of sports coaching, the higher education (he) sector, skillsactive (the sector skills council for active leisure, learning and well-being) and uk coaching crisp coaching placements and incidental learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 13: april 2018 2 (previously sportscoachuk [scuk], the advisory body for sports coaching in the uk) are all seeking to create a framework of qualifications, support systems, and endorsement processes that will address what are considered to be significant skills gaps in sports coaching. whilst at first glance these sectors may seem to be independent of each other, the reality is that there is a necessary convergence in their approaches to understanding the issues surrounding sports coaching as a vocation – principally those issues related to what are considered to be significant skills gaps and approaches to professionalism. indeed the central premise of all three sectors, relating to the development of more skilled coaches, is one that is concerned with addressing these issues. it is unsurprising, therefore, that they must work in tandem to address any perceived shortcomings and skills gaps and develop approaches that are complimentary in nature. as a direct consequence of this complimentary approach the use of work-based learning (wbl) is often considered germane to the development of coach education and provision within the he sector (driska and gould, 2014; palermo et al., 2015; kovacs and corrie, 2017). much of wbl is concerned with using reflective practice in order to improve working habits and capacity for reflective working (cox, 2005; hafford-letchfield and bourn, 2011) and it is in this context that this paper is interested. when considering the implications of wbl, one area that requires further examination is the differing contexts within which people learn to coach. of particular note here is the difference between the types of coach learning that people undertake in work-like, volunteer or vocational strands of sports coaching compared to those of students on coaching related he courses (student-coaches, as this paper calls them). for the former, reflection in coaching and the use of formal, informal, and non-formal methods of coach education (to be discussed in more detail later in the paper) usually refer to multiple or perhaps single learning opportunities. these learning opportunities are conventional and occur frequently for coaches (again, coaches operating under work-like, volunteer, or vocational strands) as opposed to student-coaches. a key difference then is that studentcoaches are involved in learning through longer durations (perhaps a week, a month, a semester, a year, or even a day) and that they are also – and often – learning to operate within new professional conventions in relation to professional practice and undertaking work-like responsibilities. crisp coaching placements and incidental learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 13: april 2018 3 hence, whilst acknowledging that there is a broad body of work explaining the use of reflection and bridging skills gaps, this paper seeks to broaden the discourse related to coach education by presenting evidence of how student-coaches can learn with and through others. it does this in three ways: (1) by analysing the way in which studentcoaches feel that they can benefit from wbl; (2) by matching how wider ideas of skills gaps within the coaching sector might be prevented through the use of wbl; (3) through extending existing theoretical approaches within coaching that use the idea of formal, informal, and non-formal coach education, to also using the concept of incidental learning, one that is recognised more in organisational and managerial development. in sum then, the focus of the paper is to explore the best methods for teaching and learning how to coach within the context of wbl. the way the paper is organised is first to define employability and detail government policy on widening participation and the creation of extended educational opportunities. secondly, to outline the structure of uk coaching practice and thirdly, to present a section outlining coach learning, reflective practice, and work placements. the paper then details the methodology that the study undertook before finally undertaking an analysis and discussion of the data. background and rationale employability the term employability itself, whilst not necessarily contested, is certainly capable of illustrating different theoretical perspectives. basic examples of this range from understanding how someone can gain and maintain work, to the process of readying oneself for work over a period of time. it can also be conceptualised through what might be considered a reciprocal relationship through employers and employees (minten and foster, 2009). yet it is often referred to in terms of political will and capital, with direct references and links to broader economic productivity. at time of writing, government policy in the uk regarding the provision of a more skillbased economy insists upon employer engagement within the decision making process for developing and/or choosing which skills or professional standards suit different job sectors (bis, 2010; qaa, 2014; offa, 2015). in relation to this and from the perspective of he, the issue of employability was highlighted as long ago as the robbins report (lord crisp coaching placements and incidental learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 13: april 2018 4 robbins, 1963). also of particular note is that as recent as the latter part of the 1990’s, the kennedy report ‘learning works’ (1997) established the notion that learning should be placed at the centre of the economic and social policy systems within the uk. the rationale that emerged from this report sought to re-establish britain within the changing economic global context through addressing gaps highlighted within skills audits. in addition to this, somewhat more recently there was also a growing realisation of a need to develop a work force containing more workers with graduate skills in order to enhance the nation's qualification base (maher, 2005). the he sector recognised this perceived necessity for greater employability, and indeed, the higher education academy commissioned the enhancing student employability coordination team (esect) and published the ‘pedagogy for employability’ report (esect, 2006) to outline best practice in embedding employability and the political context and pressures on he. several themes presently underscore what we understand as employability in the he sector. some of these are consistent, such as the fact that graduates are expected to possess substantive knowledge, intellectual/critical attributes and a range of skills to reflect the workplace (gibbs, 2012; ford et al., 2015). this, however, presents problems in terms of the sheer amount of information, teaching and learning that needs to take place to meet these expectations, expectations that, in essence, need to bridge both the academic and vocational worlds. inevitably, the process of embedding employability through the he system needs to be current, relevant and reflect the occupation/sector within which students seek to study and then, in all likelihood, seek work within after graduation. in order to meet this combination of work-based understanding and academic requirements, providers often use a holistic educational approach that incorporates both skill training and transferable, higher cognitive, attributes (deeley, 2014; higher education academy, 2016). yet while it is true that the he sector continues to endeavour to develop more skills and address the issue of increasing employability for their students in response to these demands, currently it is also fair to say that there are also additional pressures on the he system. these pressures exist because of austerity measures, low economic growth and higher tuition fees (massey, 2010; pegg et al., 2012; student funding panel, 2015). indeed, the complexity of addressing employability through the he system is now, effectively, underlined by the 2010-2015 coalition government’s re-structuring of the crisp coaching placements and incidental learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 13: april 2018 5 method through which he is funded following lord browne’s recommendations in the independent ‘securing a sustainable future for higher education’ report (browne, 2010) and the subsequent white paper ‘higher education: students at the heart of the system’ (bis, 2011). the recommendations related to the funding of he in these papers have resulted in what many consider to be the development of a more result-oriented, marketled and functionalist oriented system and attitude to education. as a consequence of this there are moves within the he sector to be more pro-active in developing courses that meet national policy objectives whilst simultaneously providing additionality (for example, bolt-on courses or extended placement links) and value for money. in fact gibbs (2012), in his report for the higher education academy (hea) entitled ‘implications of dimensions of quality in a market environment’, specifically explores the nature of quality, provision and satisfaction of he courses that students and more importantly in many respects for the future he landscape, prospective students would like. in sum then, as a result of all of the pressures resulting from the restructuring of he’s government funding, many he institutions have looked to directly embed elements within their programmes that demonstrate the concept of employability. underpinning this emphasis on developing employability is the broader policy context of widening participation. widening participation is generally considered to be an approach that signifies a broader political agenda, being concerned with notions of allowing more people from under-represented groups to participate in learning principally those who would not have normally considered he. more specifically, additional policy directives of the concept of widening participation were intended to develop a more diverse student and academic body for britain (dfes, 2003). this policy context continues to this day, with both the ‘national strategy for access and student success’ (hefce and offa, 2015) and the 2016 white paper ‘success as a knowledge economy: teaching excellence, social mobility and student choice’ (bis, 2016) demonstrating continued government commitment alongside a significant investment in the new higher and degree apprenticeship schemes (universities uk, 2017). as a consequence of this, when we consider the policy context within which widening participation operates in, it can be said that it has distinct strands within both the further education (fe) and he sector (dfe, 2017). underpinning how it works in the two sectors, however, are the aforementioned commonalities of the benefits and advantages of a 'learning society' (kennedy, 1997). crisp coaching placements and incidental learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 13: april 2018 6 uk coaching practice and structure currently, the united kingdom coaching certificate (ukcc) has shaped contemporary approaches to coaching practice. this is effectively an endorsement process that quality assures ngb coaching awards and sets out criteria that assists with standardisation and coherency. this ukcc model looks to conceptualise, chart and offer a pathway to improve coaching expertise. more particularly it complements national vocational qualification (nvq) and national occupational standards (nos) competency-based criteria (taylor and garratt, 2008; taylor and garratt, 2010). nvqs are practical, competency-assessed qualifications that assess underpinning knowledge and skills. they are calibrated against the first five levels of the national qualifications framework (nqf) which recognises the level of qualification within england, wales, and northern ireland (gov.uk, 2016). in the same way, nos are also used to demonstrate underpinning knowledge and to describe what individuals need to know and do to carry out specific job roles and functions. what is of particular note here is that the knowledge necessary to pass nvqs is developed by the awarding bodies and the sector skills councils who determine the content and outcomes of qualifications through the nos themselves (national occupational standards, 2016). in effect, this means that passing the nos demonstrates vocational competency. in much the same way, the ukcc model corresponds to the principles of the nos and as such is an example of a system that measures proficiency through a competency aligned framework. with respect to the nature and function of coaching awards there is also the scuk 4 x 4 model that acknowledges different coaching contexts. more specifically, this model conceptualises the domains of coaching in the following populations and respective coach roles: children’s, participation, performance and elite sectors. whilst not a qualification framework per se, the scuk model serves to inform both wider coaching literature and understanding, as well as the on-going development of coaching awards. in summary, these models currently reflect the desire to modernise coaching that has been expressed by both the conservative and labour governments over the past 30 years through professionalisation (green and houlihan, 2005). yet, despite the creation and promotion of these frameworks for understanding sports coaching, there are still significant skills gaps identified within the uk for the coaching sector (as part of skillsactive’s broader five subsector remit). these include: team working; crisp coaching placements and incidental learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 13: april 2018 7 communication; technical and practical skills; sport specific skills and problem solving (skillsactive, 2009; skillsactive, 2010a; skillsactive, 2010b). furthermore, within skillsactive’s ‘skills priorities for active leisure, learning and well-being: uk summary’ (2009) report, the specific skill gaps within the technical areas of the sport sector (coaching) included initiative and planning. one area that could perhaps additionally be considered to be of particular importance to employers in the sports coaching industry is the nature of soft skills, more specifically in the area of inter and intrapersonal skills. this is already an area that uk coaching (scuk, 2011) highlights as critical in participation and youth coaching, which from the vocational perspective can be evidenced by the fact that instructor and participant relationships were considered to be a “key driver in achieving participation” by skillsactive (2009, p.13). moreover, the uk commission for employment and skills (ukces) stated that “communication skills over technical or practical skills” were considered most important for employers (ukces, 2012, p.50). consequently, and in recognition of these vocational sector demands, it might be argued that new approaches to embedding required skills in he institution sport courses are necessary to meet what is a clear, vocationally relevant and industry-led demand. the work placement approach to incorporating: employability, higher education and coaching practice alongside the call from the workplace for more work specific competencies, there is now the endorsement of foundation degree and undergraduate courses in sports coaching education led by skillsactive, uk coaching and the institute for the management of sports and physical activity (imspa). this calls for demonstrable evidence of not less than 100 (foundation degree) or 150 (undergraduate degree) hours of coaching practice (scuk, 2009; skillsactive, 2018). ideally, according to uk coaching, supported coaching placements and the opportunity for experiential learning to take place should be considered by he institutions in this context of meeting their proposed endorsement process. because of the significance of this it is not unreasonable to assume that supported work placements will, by necessity, become a more frequently used method of assessment and learning within what many envisage as an emerging convergence between he and the workplace. crisp coaching placements and incidental learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 13: april 2018 8 given the potential differences that supported coaching placements may present in contrast to more traditional ‘classroom’ based pedagogy, it is unsurprising that types of learning must be considered when developing best practice for students to bridge the gap between he and employment. thus this research aims to present in the context of learning theories associated with coach education a brief analysis of the major themes and arguments relating to the development of effective learning and relevant vocational competencies that a sports coach is expected to possess. first, given the fact that the context of this paper is based on student-coaches and the best methods for teaching and learning how to coach, it is worth outlining the differences between a teacher (pe) and a coach. similar patterns of complexity and delivery are evident among both teaching and coaching (lyle, 2002; jones, 2006). while both look to improve and enhance specific patterns of learning, fundamental differences are nevertheless evident in the way that they: (a) focus on educational or specialist knowledge with teaching (certainly pe) being seen more as the overall development of the individual, and coaching more as the training and the development of physical skills; (b) the way that they differ in the journey to professional status and qualifications (with teaching taking approximately five years and coaching, at entry level, no more than a few weeks at times). yet, despite these divisions, it is also true that any divide between perceptions of sports coaching and teaching needs to take into account the similarities that exist – in education, teaching, communicating, maintaining positive relationships and how they learn. when considering how coaches learn best, it is worth nothing that central to the idea of coach education is the schema related to sources of coach development and knowledge that cushion et al. (2010) propose. the terms used here are formal coach education, informal coach learning and non-formal coach learning. the first, formal coach education, is principally concerned with the delivery of national governing body awards and official accreditation. as such, this method and source of learning is structured, organised, accredited, assessed and directed. in contrast, informal coach learning is self-directed and uses a range of sources. accordingly, this type of learning is relatively unstructured, nonaccredited and non-assessed. the last learning source that cushion et al. (2010) propose, non-formal coach learning, incorporates a variety of methods such as workshops, small courses and general continuous professional development (cpd). by nature, much of this takes place outside of governing body systems and whilst it can indeed be structured and mediated, it is often self-directed. in reviewing the comparative effectiveness of all three crisp coaching placements and incidental learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 13: april 2018 9 fields, current literature (e.g. irwin et al., 2004; jones at al., 2004; gilbert and trudel, 2006; cushion et al., 2010) suggests that in the domain of adult learning it is informal learning that has a greater impact and importance on the development of coaching practice than that of formal coach education. a good example of this can be found in gilbert and trudel’s (2001) multiple case study of six youth sport coaches. this study found that coaches learn by reflecting on practical coaching experience; hence, both reflection and experience are characterised by them as essential elements of coach education. given the significance of this, it is worth noting just how important the use of reflection and critically appraising one’s own performance is and why it is considered to be so important for developing coaching practice. as an example of this, the work of gilbert et al. (2006), for instance, illustrates the way in which formal and non-formal coaching courses can be seen to hold less value to a coach’s perceived development than everyday coaching experiences. in sum then, it might be said that a particularly important feature of this brief summary of literature is the fact that reflective practice could conceptually connect coach education, theory, and the practice of coaching itself. knowles’ (2005) work, for example, suggests that the use of reflective practice should be inherent within coaching curriculums in order to capitalise coach knowledge and learning. it is in respect of the above viewpoint that the emerging recognition of reflective practice as an instrument in developing practice has taken place. yet critical to the understanding of the importance and capital that reflective practice has in sports coaching education is the concept of professionalism. from what might be considered a somewhat basic level, our understanding of the essence of what may be termed 'professionalism' can potentially be seen through the work of schön (1983; 1987) who saw those capable of utilising technical rationality as: …instrumental problem solvers who select technical means best suited to particular purposes (schön, 1987, p.3). schön additionally saw the construct of professionalism as being couched in artistry, stating that: …artistry is an exercise of intelligence (schön, 1987, p.13) crisp coaching placements and incidental learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 13: april 2018 10 and that proficient professionals seem to possess a repertoire of skills, inherent abilities and competencies. perhaps of most relevance to those interested in the accumulation of knowledge through supported work placements is that schön’s work sees the ability to cycle “through an iteration of moves and appreciations” (1987, p.64) as enabling the development of a new form of inquiry into a multitude of possible outcomes, outcomes that can be read by those professionals who possess a: …range of experiences and knowledge that they can apply to unfamiliar situations (schön, 1987, p.68). in effect, and to clarify his work, this knowledge/experience capital allows practitioners/ ‘artists’ to sequentially engage on a mental level with and through a range of different possibilities and hypotheses. overall, and considering the implications and benefits of developing professionalism, it is unsurprising then that he institutions are using reflective practice as a tool in developing the capabilities of their students – perhaps principally through work placements that, effectively, increase experience and the knowledge ‘capital’ of students. having outlined the literature related to the effectiveness of coach education and the importance of longer term engagement with the craft of coaching itself through developing reflective practice, it is interesting to note also the student perspective on assessments and developing competency through work-based training within he. an example of this can be seen in thurgate and macgregor’s (2009) work. this work analysed the perceptions of a number of health and social care students who undertook work placement training and their findings indicated that the cohort they used as their sample (16) placed a particular premium on how they felt experiential learning helped facilitate a positive effect in their learning. as thurgate and macgregor’s (2009) study admittedly used health and social care as the domain in which they undertook their study, a more appropriate illustration of how sports coaching students might see work placement type assessments is through turner and nelson’s (2009) work. here, they undertook a study in which 10 graduate coaches reflected upon their experiences of an he programme. what might be crisp coaching placements and incidental learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 13: april 2018 11 considered the most significant finding of this study was their assertion that person-centred theory should drive course content. however, an additional and very interesting element within the study was the fact that the graduate coaches felt that an element of their assessments should have had tutors “practically assess their coaching performance and provide specific feedback” (turner and nelson, 2009, p.15). methodology the coaching placement module used for this study was developed with the intention of meeting broader wbl standards and, as such, involved a structured learning experience leading to completion of the module. the module has run in two different guises (due to revalidation and module code/title change) over a nine-year period and the results of this study reflect the 2014-15 delivery. in terms of delivery, the module participants needed to complete two assessments. the first was the submission of a logbook and reflective account and, the second, an assessment of a coaching session in a community or nonuniversity academic setting. both assessment elements contributed 50% of the final mark for the module and the module itself ran for a full academic year. in terms of the practical assessment, the module participants were entitled to two visits from university staff, with the first visit being advisory and formative and the second visit summatively assessed. all research process should be defined by choice (crotty, 2004; lynch, 2010). in this regard, the choice of research process for this study needed to be framed by how best to develop insight into the meanings and values that students attributed to their coaching placements. considering that an interpretivist approach to research seeks to understand human behaviour and human realities, an interpretive research design underpinned this study and the qualitative methodological approach of using focus groups was used (gratton and jones, 2010). advantages of using focus groups are twofold; first, that in accordance with an interpretivist approach to research, they can elicit underlying beliefs and attitudes. secondly, by using a larger group instead of individual interviews, greater discussion and interaction can take place, potentially developing the depth and range of answers (rubin and rubin, 1995; amis, 2005; gratton and jones, 2010). two focus groups were held with the students. the first, a more informal opportunity to discuss the strengths, weaknesses and any particular concerns that the students may crisp coaching placements and incidental learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 13: april 2018 12 have had regarding the module, was held after mid-way through the module (the module consisted of two semesters, so this was just past the half way point of the module). 15 out of the 20 cohort total were involved in this focus group, the second focus group took place at the midway point of the second semester, just past the three quarter point of the module delivery. this second focus group consisted of a short outline of learning styles, coach education and experiential learning – all elements that the students had previously covered through their degree programme. after this brief (10 minute) refresher session, the students were given time to discuss their preferential learning styles and their perceptions of the effectiveness of the module. with a group of 13 participating this time (all who had been in the initial group of 15 for the first focus group), they were split into four groups and given three areas to consider both individually and as a group: (a) their favourite type of learning; (b) the effectiveness of the advisory sessions and (c) the impact of the module on individuals’ development. the groups used flipchart paper to construct mind maps, tables or bullet points of their responses to the broad questions outlined above. the students were encouraged to write down their individual comments and, in particular, to address their individual perceptions of the three areas outlined above and how they might wish to answer them. the essence of using group work to facilitate the session was to try and ensure a more constructive, productive series of answers. feedback was also taken through notes made by the researcher who supported the group work and asked questions. the above process meant that all of the information and everything that was said was written down in order that it might be transcribed. the results were then systematically decoded and categorised, which in turn allowed common patterns and themes to emerge and be made sense of. such a methodological process was much the same as if individual interviews had been undertaken – in that the researcher sought to be able to present ideas that were indicative of/represented a number of responses. the categories that emerged during the first focus group were relatively easily classified into either positive or negative experiences that they had encountered. in the second focus group, the following categories emerged: experiential learning; tutor feedback; skills gaps and incidental learning. crisp coaching placements and incidental learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 13: april 2018 13 results/ discussion first focus group results figure 1. focus group 1 results. positives negatives  experience coaching in a different environment as opposed to course friends.  easy to find placement if you didn’t have one.  assessment easy to understand.  put into practice what we have learnt.  area of interest.  tutor feedback.  opportunity to show our coaching philosophy.  experience.  explore other areas in sport environments.  independent experience.  more coaching in university.  frequency of action sets.  set up placements earlier.  visits to placements before hand ins – same with action sets.  single assessment instead of multiple assessments.  organisation – dates visit. as stated in the methodology section above, the first focus group was intended to act as an informal opportunity to discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the module. as can be seen from the results of the first focus group, the cohort felt that the module had a number of strengths which they felt directly benefited their coaching practice. principally this came through in the responses that highlighted how a different coaching medium, outside of the university, developed experience. the negative elements to the module were considered to be, on the whole, concerned with elements of the teaching practice that were resource constrained – essentially those asking for more support through increased action set facilitation and a quicker commencement of the visits themselves. crisp coaching placements and incidental learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 13: april 2018 14 second focus group results figure 2. focus group 2 results. favourite type of learning the effectiveness of the advisory sessions the impact of the module on individuals’ development learning about work practice  visual.  demonstrations.  observing others.  experimenting with equipment.  i’m allowed to lead full sessions for 1.5 hours and can learn from experience and mistakes.  kinaesthetic.  learn by watching participants (trial and error).  taking notes.  drawing diagrams and drills.  watch others and then do!  get involved!  they let me do things.  reading and writing – developing plans.  having an observer watching my session and going through it with me helped me know the specific areas where i need to improve.  getting formatively assessed and getting feedback.  feedback on areas to improve.  coaching tips/ideas.  key points.  help you give feedback for yourself.  self-analyst role.  the placements all helped with experience of doing it on your own and having to plan to deliver sessions appropriate to the participants.  experienced feedback.  shows your key areas of improvement.  suggests different ways to improve.  seeing other coachesvisual and aiding development.  gives you a stable place to develop your coaching.  improves personal skills –  didn’t have a choice about turning up on time – they did, so i knew i had to.  i thought about how i need to present myself to people not from university.  i learnt that i need to be punctual, arrive early, finish late.  customer services and having people depend on me – something the other coaches and staff would do!  forced to work with others, a good thing – i picked up some crisp coaching placements and incidental learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 13: april 2018 15  learning by doing.  learning while coaching.  improving coaching skills.  sessions more practical.  allows for experimentation.  as someone who learns from reading and writing it is still effective for me when it comes to planning – i love the development.  even as a visual learner, i get the opportunity to watch others.  realising strengths and weaknesses.  learn from each other.  marks and feedback let me know where i actually am.  it’s really important to have your lecturers come and chat with you – they’re the experts and, at the least, we want to learn from them. confidence and personality.  helps you learn coaching specific skills and legislation e.g. equality and child protection.  experiment with coaching styles.  focuses your mind on the task at hand.  the only way to really learn doing it.  they (the formative assessments) are good because you get like key points, even if it is little things like what you’re wearing. even things like that can help, not just for your grading, but in general to be more professional. really good habits.  best way to learn was to hang out with people who do this kind of thing – not just students.  i can’t believe how many little things i picked up from others i was working with, when to get equipment, how to act with others, how to speak to parents.  i think it’s been the best experience for me to really teach me about the real world. crisp coaching placements and incidental learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 13: april 2018 16 experiential learning and tutor feedback the kind of responses generated by the second focus group illustrated that the cohort valued how the module had enabled them to use a range of learning styles. interestingly, whilst their comments such as how they could “experiment” and “get involved” often related to how they could either benefit from a more kinaesthetic type of learning, they also alluded to how other methods of learning were facilitated. of most relevance perhaps is the fact that “watching others” in other environments was considered to be an effective element of the experiential approach. whilst the author acknowledges that the term learning styles is contested, with some pointing out that they are representative of a highly complex system of teaching and learning and that they can change over time, experience, and context (lsrc, 2004), it is interesting to note that these reflections and interpretations of individual learning styles echo the essence of what experiential learning should endeavour to do. this is to give a wide learning experience that enables the students to use their preferred learning styles and, in this instance, also allow for peers to support and learn from each other (byl et al., 2015). in short, experiential learning, as advocated by schön (1987) and other researchers such as groves et al. (2010) and shepherd (2006), advocates a philosophy whereby the learning process is underpinned by significant personal reflection and consequently the personal construction of knowledge. this kind of interpretation, one that sees the use of experiential learning as key to developing competency, can be applied to the results of both focus groups. really, the findings indicated consistency between how the students regarded the construction of their knowledge. for example, when a participant in the first focus group said that the issue of experiencing coaching in a different environment to one which had course ‘friends’ on was important, all of the participants made comments indicating that they were in agreement. in fact, the majority of participants felt that the opportunity to show their coaching philosophy was important to promote independent thinking. as an example, one participant in the first focus group added that the placements allowed them to “put into practice what we have learnt”. indeed, when the results of both focus groups are taken into consideration it would be fair to say that the participants agreed on the following; that the combination of independent experience and tutor feedback facilitated through the modules were key to developing the students’ knowledge and understanding of coaching practice. encouragingly, all the crisp coaching placements and incidental learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 13: april 2018 17 student-coaches seemed aware of the benefits of working with tutors, with one explaining that “it’s really important to have your lecturers come and chat with you – they’re the experts and, at the least, we want to learn from them”. these findings concur with turner and nelson’s (2009) work which advocated that more tutors should practically assess coaching performance. skills gaps and incidental learning while there was a noticeable similarity in the responses of the majority of the research participants in regards to how their experiences of the coaching placements (including the formative assessment process) had changed their coaching practice, the findings additionally indicate how the students perhaps demonstrated some of the key skills considered to be lacking by the uk coaching sector and the sector skills councils. examples of such skills can be seen in the remarks of how the students were “realising strengths and weaknesses”. additionally, comments on “specific areas” where they “need to improve” or how they felt they could “experiment” demonstrate how a more independent approach was undertaken. a more specific example in this fashion is the fact that they had to “plan to deliver sessions appropriate to the participants” and they were “developing a sense of their self-analytical roles”. since problem solving, team working, initiative and planning are part of the significant skills gaps identified within the uk for the coaching sector, and certainly form the basis for what many employers need, it is reasonable to assume that the findings generated here reflect how the modules may well be developing these skills outside of what can be considered traditional, campus based, learning. nevertheless, as noted in the beginning of the paper, there is a nuance that needs to be recognised in the use of using coaching placements in the university sector. what is of note is that students are not just learning how to coach, but additionally how to develop work-like attributes such as leadership, time management and working with others. so perhaps the most significant element of the findings relates to what the students picked up from the people they were working with – professional or volunteer coaches, invariably those that were older, more experienced and well versed in professional practice. examples of this include students stating that they “didn’t have a choice about turning up on time – they did, so i knew i had to”, how one “thought about how i need to present myself to people not from university”, another “learnt that i need to be punctual, arrive crisp coaching placements and incidental learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 13: april 2018 18 early, finish late” and how they were “forced to work with others, a good thing – i picked up some really good habits”. this paper has referred to the use of formal, non-formal and informal learning and this reflects the fact that much of the existing research related to coach learning leans heavily upon this interpretation/framework (cushion et al., 2010). nonetheless, it could be argued that the findings for this paper are not fully explained by this existing body of research which emphasises and assumes a direct, willing engagement with learning. to help us interpret the findings however there is also what is known as ‘incidental’ learning. developed more through the fields of management, organisational and human resource studies, it is ostensibly still an element situated within informal learning. it does, however, have a caveat in that it refers to the manner in which learning takes place as a by-product of other activities – in particular through social situations and interaction between co-workers (marsick and watkins, 1990; le clus, 2011; hyams and sadique, 2014). in short, learners may not be conscious of their learning, in part explained by the way in which the learning was unintentional and as such, incidental (foley, 2004; von treuer et.al., 2011). what is evident from the findings was that the students were influenced, in a context outside of university, by others. this influence extended their approach to professional practice and meets, in a broad fashion, many of the requirements for increased skills within coaching alongside wider work based ones. conclusion: the value of coaching placements in developing industry skills in many respects this paper has suggested that there are three interlinked factors that should underpin he provision in sports coaching outside of what might be considered the elite or performance pathway. the first factor, that government led attitudes and policy decisions favour up-skilling the broader workforce and a drive for employability, is supplemented by the second factor, the broad industry specific call for team working, communication, technical and practical skills, sport specific skills, and problem solving (skillsactive, 2009; skillsactive, 2010a; skillsactive, 2010b). because of the interlinked nature of the first and second factors, the third factor, the university sector’s responsibility to facilitate work experience that is either sought or expected from graduate applicants, crisp coaching placements and incidental learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 13: april 2018 19 should essentially be a product of the interface of the first and second factors. however, and perhaps most significantly, what is of most importance is that the he sector needs to ensure that the net result of their approaches to teaching and learning ends up allowing students to demonstrate the effective, noticeable and evident skills that they have learnt in the ‘classroom’ or other learning environment. the author acknowledges that using just one he institution and a relatively small sample size are limitations of the study. additionally, using cohorts from different sports coaching courses would present a wider field from which to better understand how best students learn in a coaching context. yet from the evidence presented, it might be fair to say that the research undertaken here has shown that the coaching placements completed by the students have had, admittedly from just the student perspective, a significant impact on their learning and performance. overall, this can be shown by their ability to either understand, or indeed demonstrate, a number of the skills identified by skillsactive. in addition to this, a particularly important feature of the student perspectives was the fact that they appreciated the context of experiential learning in comparison to more traditional, campus based learning. furthermore, the facilitated work experience placements seemed to have had tangible benefits in terms of addressing preferential learning styles for the students themselves. what is perhaps of most note, however, is that the evidence also paints a picture whereby students can learn in an unplanned fashion through others who are more experienced. and notably, who are already operating with work-like professional competency and practice. this last comment can be explained through using the concept of incidental learning. whilst this is a concept that is cached within existing notions of coach education through informal learning, it nevertheless can be used here in a fashion that suggests that some developmental processes within coach learning are best facilitated unintentionally yet purposefully through a wide range of experiences and activities outside of university experience. whilst the author is hesitant in trying to simplify the findings and suggestions of the paper in contrast to existing notions of coach education, it is their belief that the paper positions that an argument for a more informal, yet facilitated, learning strategy appears to have been developed – and that the findings and use of incidental learning are complementary crisp coaching placements and incidental learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 13: april 2018 20 to our understanding. if this is the case, then in order to construct a successful model that has employability at its core, the goal of he sports coaching courses that look to develop more vocational, participation led outcomes should use and emphasise facilitated work experience type modules. references amis, j. (2005) ‘interviewing for case study research’, in andrews, d. l., mason, d. s. and silk, m. l. (eds.) qualitative methods in sports studies. oxford: berg publishers, pp. 104-138. bis (department for business innovation and skills) (2010) skills for sustainable growth, strategy document: full report, department for business innovation and skills. available at: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attach ment_data/file/140059/bis-10-1274-skills-for-sustainable-growth-strategy.pdf (accessed: 30 april 2018). bis (department for business innovation and skills) (2016) success as a knowledge economy: teaching excellence, social mobility and student choice, department for business innovation and skills, may. available at: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attach ment_data/file/523546/bis-16-265-success-as-a-knowledge-economy-web.pdf (accessed: 20 april 2018). browne, j. (2010) securing a sustainable future for higher education: an independent review of higher education funding and student finance, department for business, innovation and skills, october. available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/the-browne-report-higher-educationfunding-and-student-finance (accessed: 20 april 2018). byl, e., struyven, k., meurs, p., abelshausen, b., lombaerts, k., engels, n. and vanwing, t. (2015) ‘peer assisted learning as a tool for facilitating social and academic https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/140059/bis-10-1274-skills-for-sustainable-growth-strategy.pdf https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/140059/bis-10-1274-skills-for-sustainable-growth-strategy.pdf https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/523546/bis-16-265-success-as-a-knowledge-economy-web.pdf https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/523546/bis-16-265-success-as-a-knowledge-economy-web.pdf https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/the-browne-report-higher-education-funding-and-student-finance https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/the-browne-report-higher-education-funding-and-student-finance crisp coaching placements and incidental learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 13: april 2018 21 integration’, journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: academic peer learning, november, pp. 1-28. cox, e. (2005) ‘adult learners learning from experience: using a reflective practice model to support work based learning’, reflective practice, 6(4), pp. 459-472. https://doi.org/10.1080/14623940500300517 crotty, m. (2004) the foundations of social research: meaning and perspective in the research process. london: sage publications. cushion, c., nelson, l., armour, k., lyle, j., jones, r., sandford, r. and o’callaghan, c. (2010) coach learning and development: a review of literature, sportscoachuk, january. available at: https://www.ukcoaching.org/sites/default/files/coachlearning-and-dev-review.pdf (accessed: 20 april 2018). dfes (department for education and skills) (2003) the future of higher education, department for education and skills, white paper, january. available at: http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20040117000548/http://www.dfes.gov.uk/ highereducation/hestrategy/ (accessed: 30 april 2018). deeley, s.j. (2014) 'summative co-assessment: a deep learning approach to enhancing employability skills and attributes', active learning in higher education, 15(1), pp. 39-51. https://doi.org/10.1177/1469787413514649 dfe (department for education) (2017) widening participation in higher education, england, 2014/15 age cohort, department for education, august. available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/6351 03/sfr39-2017-maintext.pdf (accessed: 24 october 2017). driska, a. p. and gould, d. r. (2014) ‘evaluating a problem-based group learning strategy for online, graduate-level coach education’, kinesiology review, 3(4), pp. 227-234. https://doi.org/10.1123/kr.2014-0061 https://doi.org/10.1080/14623940500300517 https://www.ukcoaching.org/sites/default/files/coach-learning-and-dev-review.pdf https://www.ukcoaching.org/sites/default/files/coach-learning-and-dev-review.pdf http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20040117000548/http:/www.dfes.gov.uk/highereducation/hestrategy/ http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20040117000548/http:/www.dfes.gov.uk/highereducation/hestrategy/ https://doi.org/10.1177/1469787413514649 https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/635103/sfr39-2017-maintext.pdf https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/635103/sfr39-2017-maintext.pdf https://doi.org/10.1123/kr.2014-0061 crisp coaching placements and incidental learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 13: april 2018 22 esect (enhancing student employability coordination team) (2006) higher education academy learning and employability guide series 1: pedagogy for employability, higher education academy, april. available at: https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/knowledge-hub/pedagogy-employability (accessed: 30 april 2018). foley, g. (2004) ‘introduction: the state of adult education and learning’, in foley, g., (ed) dimensions of adult learning: adult education and training in a global era. maryborough, victoria: allen and unwin, pp. 3-18. ford, n., thackeray, c., barnes, p. and hendrickx, k. (2015) ‘peer learning leaders: developing employability through facilitating the learning of other students’, journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: academic peer learning, november, pp. 1-23. gibbs, g. (2012) implications of ‘dimensions of quality’ in a market environment, higher education academy. available at: https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/system/files/resources/hea_dimensions_of_quality_ 2.pdf (accessed: 20 april 2018). gilbert, w. and trudel, p. (2001) ‘learning to coach through experience: reflection in model youth sport coaches’, journal of teaching in physical education, 21(1), pp. 16-34. https://doi.org/10.1123/jtpe.21.1.16 gilbert, w., côté, j. and mallett, c. (2006) ‘developmental paths and activities of successful sport coaches’, international journal of sport science and coaching, 1 (1), pp. 69-76. https://doi.org/10.1260/174795406776338526 gilbert, w. and trudel, p. (2006) ‘the coach as a reflective practitioner’, in jones, r. l. (ed.) the sports coach as educator: reconceptualising sports coaching. london, routledge, pp. 114-127. https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/knowledge-hub/pedagogy-employability https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/system/files/resources/hea_dimensions_of_quality_2.pdf https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/system/files/resources/hea_dimensions_of_quality_2.pdf https://doi.org/10.1123/jtpe.21.1.16 https://doi.org/10.1260/174795406776338526 crisp coaching placements and incidental learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 13: april 2018 23 gov.uk (uk government) (2018) ‘what qualification levels mean’. available at: https://www.gov.uk/what-different-qualification-levels-mean/list-of-qualificationlevels (accessed: 30 april 2018). gratton, c. and jones, i. (2010) research methods for sports studies. 2nd edn. london: routledge. green, m. and houlihan, b. (2005) elite sport development: policy learning and political priorities. london: routledge. groves, m., bowd, b. and smith, j. (2010) ‘facilitating experiential learning of study skills in sports students’, journal of further and higher education, 34(1), pp. 11-22. https://doi.org/10.1080/03098770903477060 hafford-letchfield, t. and bourn, d. (2011) ‘‘how am i doing?’: advancing management skills through the use of a multi-source feedback tool to enhance work-based learning on a post-qualifying post-graduate leadership and management programme’, social work education, 30(5), pp. 497–511. https://doi.org/10.1080/02615479.2010.505263 hefce and offa (higher education funding council for england and office for fair access) (2014) national strategy for access and student success. london: department for business, innovation and skills. available at: http://www.hefce.ac.uk/sas/nsass/ (accessed: 1 october 2017). higher education academy (2016) framework for embedding employability in higher education, higher education academy. available at: https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/system/files/downloads/embedding-employability-inhe.pdf (accessed: 30 april 2018). hyams, r. and sadique, d. (2014) ‘the value of incidental learning in a multidisciplinary setting’, international journal of clinical legal education, 20(1), pp. 439-460. https://www.gov.uk/what-different-qualification-levels-mean/list-of-qualification-levels https://www.gov.uk/what-different-qualification-levels-mean/list-of-qualification-levels https://doi.org/10.1080/03098770903477060 https://doi.org/10.1080/02615479.2010.505263 http://www.hefce.ac.uk/sas/nsass/ https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/system/files/downloads/embedding-employability-in-he.pdf https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/system/files/downloads/embedding-employability-in-he.pdf crisp coaching placements and incidental learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 13: april 2018 24 irwin, g., hanton, s. and kerwin, d.g. (2004) ‘reflective practice and the origins of elite coaching knowledge’, reflective practice, 5(3), pp. 425-442. https://doi.org/10.1080/1462394042000270718 jones, r. l, armour, k. m. and potrac, p. (2004) sports coaching cultures: from practice to theory. london, routledge. jones, r. l. (2006) ‘how can educational concepts inform sports coaching?’, in jones, r. l. (ed.) the sports coach as educator: re-conceptualising sports coaching. london, routledge, pp. 3-13. kennedy, h. (1997) learning works: widening participation in further education. coventry: the further education funding council. kovacs, l. and corrie, s. (2017) ‘building reflective capability to enhance coaching practice’, the coaching psychologist, 13(1), pp. 4-12. knowles, z., borrie, a. and telfer, h. (2005) ‘towards the reflective sports coach: issues of context, education and application’, ergonomics, 48(11-14), pp. 1711-1720. https://doi.org/10.1080/00140130500101288 le clus, m. a. (2011) ‘informal learning in the workplace: a review of the literature’, australian journal of adult learning, 51(2), pp. 355-373. lord robbins (1963) higher education: report of the committee appointed by the prime minister under the chairmanship of lord robbins. london: her majesty’s stationery office. available at: http://www.educationengland.org.uk/documents/robbins/robbins1963.html lyle, j. (2002) sports coaching concepts: a framework for coaches’ behaviour. abingdon: routledge. lynch, c. (2010) doing your research project in sport. exeter: learning matters ltd. https://doi.org/10.1080/1462394042000270718 https://doi.org/10.1080/00140130500101288 http://www.educationengland.org.uk/documents/robbins/robbins1963.html crisp coaching placements and incidental learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 13: april 2018 25 lsrc (learning and skills research centre) (2004) should we be using learning styles? what research has to say to practice. london: learning and skills research centre. maher, a. (2005) embedding employability in the curriculum: enhancing students career planning skills, higher education academy and the hospitality, leisure, sport and tourism network. available at: https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/knowledgehub/embedding-employability-curriculum-enhancing-students-career-planning-skills (accessed: 21 april 2018). marsick, v. j. and watkins, k. (1990) informal and incidental learning in the workplace, london: routledge. massey, a. (2010) higher education in the age of austerity part two: shared services, outsourcing and entrepreneurship. london: policy exchange. available at: https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/higher-education-in-the-age-of-austerity-sharedservices-outsourcing-and-entrepreneurship (accessed: 27 april 2018). minten, s. and foster, w. (2009) ‘enhancing graduate employability in sport’, in bill, k. (ed.) sport management. exeter: learning matters, pp. 21-33. national occupational standards (2016) what are national occupational standards?. available at: https://www.ukstandards.org.uk/pages/index.aspx (accessed: 20 april 2017). offa (office for fair access) (2015) strategic plan: 2015-2020. available at: https://www.offa.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/offa-strategic-plan-20152020.pdf (accessed: 20 april 2017). palermo, c., chung, a., beck, e.j., ash, s., capra, s., truby, h. and jolly, b. (2015) ‘evaluation of assessment in the context of work-based learning: qualitative perspectives of new graduates’, nutrition & dietetics, 72(2), pp. 143-149. https://doi.org/10.1111/1747-0080.12126 https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/knowledge-hub/embedding-employability-curriculum-enhancing-students-career-planning-skills https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/knowledge-hub/embedding-employability-curriculum-enhancing-students-career-planning-skills https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/higher-education-in-the-age-of-austerity-shared-services-outsourcing-and-entrepreneurship https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/higher-education-in-the-age-of-austerity-shared-services-outsourcing-and-entrepreneurship https://www.ukstandards.org.uk/pages/index.aspx https://www.offa.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/offa-strategic-plan-2015-2020.pdf https://www.offa.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/offa-strategic-plan-2015-2020.pdf https://doi.org/10.1111/1747-0080.12126 crisp coaching placements and incidental learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 13: april 2018 26 pegg, a., waldock, j., hendy-isacc, s. and lawton, r. (2012) pedagogy for employability update, higher education academy. available at: https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/system/files/pedagogy_for_employability_update_20 12.pdf (accessed: 21 april 2018). qaa (the quality assurance agency for higher education) (2014) employer engagement: emerging practice from qaa reviews, quality assurance agency for higher education. available at: http://www.qaa.ac.uk/en/publications/documents/employer-engagement-report.pdf (accessed: 17 october 2017). rubin, h. j. and rubin, i. s. (1995) qualitative interviewing: the art of hearing data. london: sage. schön, d. a. (1983) the reflective practitioner: how professionals think in action. new york: basic books. schön, d. a. (1987) educating the reflective practitioner. san francisco: jossey-bass publishers. scuk (sports coach uk) (2009) draft criteria for endorsement of foundation degree and undergraduate courses in sports coaching. leeds; scuk. (this document is no longer available online). scuk (sports coach uk) (2011) coaching children curriculum, sports coach uk. available at: https://www.ukcoaching.org/sites/default/files/coaching-childrencurriculum.pdf (accessed: 21 april 2018). shepherd, m. (2006) ‘using a learning journal to improve professional practice: a journey of personal and professional self-discovery’, reflective practice, 7(3), pp. 333–348. https://doi.org/10.1080/14623940600837517 skillsactive (2009) skills priorities for active leisure, learning and well-being: uk summary. london: skillsactive. https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/system/files/pedagogy_for_employability_update_2012.pdf https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/system/files/pedagogy_for_employability_update_2012.pdf http://www.qaa.ac.uk/en/publications/documents/employer-engagement-report.pdf https://www.ukcoaching.org/sites/default/files/coaching-children-curriculum.pdf https://www.ukcoaching.org/sites/default/files/coaching-children-curriculum.pdf https://doi.org/10.1080/14623940600837517 crisp coaching placements and incidental learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 13: april 2018 27 skillsactive (2010a) sector skills assessment active leisure, learning and well-being: wales summary report. london: skillsactive. available at: http://www.skillsactive.com/pdf/sector_skills_assessment_summary.pdf (accessed: 21 april 2018). skillsactive (2010b) sector skills assessment 2011: uk report. london: skillsactive. skillsactive (2018) higher education endorsement for sports coach education. available at: http://www.skillsactive.com/endorsement/higher-education-endorsement-forsports-coach-education (accessed: 30 april 2018). student funding panel (2015) an analysis of the design, impact and options for reform of the student fees and loans system in england. london: universities uk. available at: http://www.universitiesuk.ac.uk/policy-andanalysis/reports/documents/2015/student-funding-panel.pdf (accessed: 21 april 2018). taylor, b. and garratt, d (2008) the professionalisation of sports coaching in the uk: issues and conceptualisation. leeds: sports coach uk. available at: https://www.ukcoaching.org/sites/default/files/professionalisation-of-sportscoaching.pdf taylor, b. and garratt, d. (2010) ‘the professionalisation of sports coaching: definitions, challenges and critique’, in lyle, j. and cushion, c. (eds.) sports coaching: professionalisation and practice. edinburgh: elsevier, pp. 99-118. thurgate, c. and macgregor, j. (2009) ‘students' perceptions of undertaking workplace tasks within a foundation degree health and social care’, assessment & evaluation in higher education, 34(2), pp. 149-157. https://doi.org/10.1080/02602930801956893 http://www.skillsactive.com/pdf/sector_skills_assessment_summary.pdf http://www.skillsactive.com/endorsement/higher-education-endorsement-for-sports-coach-education http://www.skillsactive.com/endorsement/higher-education-endorsement-for-sports-coach-education http://www.universitiesuk.ac.uk/policy-and-analysis/reports/documents/2015/student-funding-panel.pdf http://www.universitiesuk.ac.uk/policy-and-analysis/reports/documents/2015/student-funding-panel.pdf https://www.ukcoaching.org/sites/default/files/professionalisation-of-sports-coaching.pdf https://www.ukcoaching.org/sites/default/files/professionalisation-of-sports-coaching.pdf https://doi.org/10.1080/02602930801956893 crisp coaching placements and incidental learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 13: april 2018 28 turner, d. and nelson, l. j. (2009) ‘graduate perceptions of a uk university based coach education programme, and impacts on development and employability’, international journal of coaching science, 3(2), pp. 3-28. ukces (uk commission for employment and skills) (2012) hospitality, tourism and sport sector: sector skills assessment 2012, uk commission for employment and skills, briefing paper, october. available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/hospitality-tourism-and-sport-sectorskills-assessment (accessed: 21 april 2018). universities uk (2017) degree apprenticeships: realising opportunities. london: universities uk. available at: http://www.universitiesuk.ac.uk/policy-andanalysis/reports/pages/degree-apprenticeships-realising-opportunities.aspx (accessed: 21 april 2018). von treuer, k., sturre, v., keele, s. and mcleod, j. (2011) 'an integrated model for the evaluation of work placements', asia-pacific journal of cooperative education, 12(3), pp.195-204. available at: https://www.ijwil.org/files/apjce_12_3_195_204.pdf (accessed: 19 april 2018). author details philippe crisp is a senior lecturer in the institute of sport, university of chichester. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/hospitality-tourism-and-sport-sector-skills-assessment https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/hospitality-tourism-and-sport-sector-skills-assessment http://www.universitiesuk.ac.uk/policy-and-analysis/reports/pages/degree-apprenticeships-realising-opportunities.aspx http://www.universitiesuk.ac.uk/policy-and-analysis/reports/pages/degree-apprenticeships-realising-opportunities.aspx https://www.ijwil.org/files/apjce_12_3_195_204.pdf coaching placements and incidental learning – how reflection and experiential learning can help bridge the industry skills gap abstract introduction methodology results/ discussion first focus group results second focus group results experiential learning and tutor feedback skills gaps and incidental learning conclusion: the value of coaching placements in developing industry skills references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special issue 22: compendium of innovative practice october 2021 ________________________________________________________________________ designing workshops to be sociable rather than remote carmen vallis university of sydney, australia keywords: design workshops; co-design; learning design; online facilitation; covid-19. the challenge my university has a long and proud campus tradition, so the covid-19 lockdown response and ‘pivot’ to remote learning was especially stressful. suddenly demand was high for hands-on support in educational technologies, which was exhausting for academics and support staff alike. rapid shifts in educational policy direction and general uncertainty created extra emotional labour in terms of supporting students and each other (sobel and evans, 2020). despite this, as a team, we knew we had to somehow keep educational design and pedagogy on the agenda. our business co-design team at the university of sydney business school facilitates workshops with academics, students, alumni, and industry professionals to invite multiple perspectives on course designs and to create curriculum change. these co-design workshops also offer academics time and space to reflect on their teaching approaches and often spark academic development. normally, we would organise a bright airy room at a convenient time, card games as icebreakers, plenty of colourful post-it notes and pens, and food and coffee, to create a social and welcoming environment where participants feel comfortable to contribute and critique. without our usual props, and in the middle of a pandemic, our challenge was this: how to engage large groups of people in co-design mediated by technology? the response vallis designing workshops to be sociable rather than remote journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 2 firstly, it meant thinking differently about what is normal and acknowledging that communication may be high or low quality, whether in-person or mediated by technology (stokoe et al., 2021). our homes were now improvised teaching and learning spaces (williamson, enyon and potter, 2020). in universities we were used to categorising education into delivery modes of face-to-face, blended, or online, whereas in reality learning traverses different spaces, time zones, platforms and media, and is about learners and their environments (fawns, 2019). our challenge was to connect with individuals and integrate home into the workshops without intruding on private spaces or co-opting their social media spaces (venn et al., 2020). we had to create a social experience in workshops, within the constraints of university platforms, that was not remote and not normal. what follows is an account of my perspective as a ‘pracademic’, as an educator, learning designer and researcher in education, working in the context of these co-design workshops (netolicky, 2020, p.391). ‘remote’ learning has connotations of being far away from the usual, preferred campus classroom; perhaps of an unemotional experience. instead, our workshops were purposefully reframed as social events and guided by the design thinking principles of empathy and a curious and open mindset (beligatamulla et al., 2019). from experience, we knew educators had their students’ wellbeing at heart and would be influenced by evidence showing a teaching and learning strategy or tool could improve learner experience. the preparation, planning, and research time for my first workshop was about five times as long as the event itself. however, the preparation for subsequent workshops reduced dramatically once the pattern was established. this included the following features, while also welcoming facilitator creativity and improvisation: • a minimum of slides was designed and developed to structure the experience for group interaction. • a detailed run sheet was written with timings and scripts with words of encouragement, and instructions when the content or transition to a new activity was complex. text prompts for common instructions were prepared, ready to cut and paste into the chat. vallis designing workshops to be sociable rather than remote journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 3 • collaborative tools and documents were created with appropriate permissions, including online whiteboards and interaction tools such as polls, word clouds, and q&as. • group formation was considered and configured. • the staging of activities was rehearsed. facilitators logged on early to check audiovisual equipment, shut down unneeded applications and notifications, and open relevant files and browser tabs, ready to share. • mindset was important, which meant being mentally as well as physically present, hydrated, rested (ideally), and excited for the event. recommendations sometimes even the best plans go awry. at times cognitive overload caused disconnects. between managing the unexpected and thinking about how i was communicating, pausing, and fumbling my words, while operating software, i was hyper conscious that participants were waiting and disengaging. in my concern for the operational, i sometimes forgot to involve participants in decisions about how the workshop played out. in co-design this is a critical oversight (drain and sanders, 2019). also, it was challenging, and sometimes impossible to monitor all groups in private breakout rooms, so it was difficult to notice and encourage quiet participants to voice their opinions. few educators have help managing live learning events, even on a large scale. i aimed to manage the experience as a gracious host. when technology inevitably glitched, i called it out, laughed, and moved on. these are real moments all can relate to, and i reminded myself that participants were contending with other more serious challenges in their personal and professional lives. it also helped to let go of an authoritative, formal stance, and talk with participants as friends and equals, whether they were academics, professional colleagues, or students. in the end, learning is about memorable, personal transformation so i did include personal stories and encouraged participants to do likewise if they felt comfortable. workshops tended to work well when i was focused on how participants were feeling rather than my own self-doubts. allowing time for everybody to feel welcome and present was key: for example, i grounded the experience by asking everybody to show an object vallis designing workshops to be sociable rather than remote journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 4 (or choose a virtual background) and describe how it relates to the here and now. i praised all chat, ignoring typos. participants were appreciative. students signalled interest in follow-up co-design workshops and sent unsolicited thanks. another student went one step further and suggested we use this as a process for all subjects. similarly, a business academic emailed to thank our team for making online learning ‘productive’. our team continues to design, refine, and evaluate co-design in such workshops (vallis et al., in-press). in summary, it helped to emphasise the human rather than the remote aspect and pedagogy over technology. as bryant notes, we need to remember the ‘humanity and ambition at the end of the zoom chat or watching the recorded lecture’ (jandrić et al., 2020, p.1100). our team’s experience of co-design mediated by technology is that it can be both intentionally gracious and social, which can help us all to learn better. references beligatamulla, g., rieger, j., franz, j. and strickfaden, m. (2019) ‘making pedagogic sense of design thinking in the higher education context’, open education studies, 1(1), pp.91-105. https://doi.org/10.1515/edu-2019-0006. drain, a. and sanders, e. b-n. (2019) ‘a collaboration system model for planning and evaluating participatory design projects’, international journal of design, 13(3), pp.39-52. fawns, t. (2019) ‘postdigital education in design and practice’, postdigital science and education, 1(1), pp.132-145. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42438-018-0021-8. jandrić, p., hayes, d., truelove, i., levinson, p., mayo, p., ryberg, t., monzó, l. d., allen, q., stewart, p. a., carr, p. r., jackson, l., bridges, s., escaño, c., grauslund, d., mañero, j., lukoko, h. o., bryant, p., fuentes-martinez, a., gibbons, a. and hayes, s. (2020) ‘teaching in the age of covid-19’, postdigital science and education, 2(3), pp.1069-1230. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42438-02000169-6. https://doi.org/10.1515/edu-2019-0006 https://doi.org/10.1007/s42438-018-0021-8 https://doi.org/10.1007/s42438-020-00169-6 https://doi.org/10.1007/s42438-020-00169-6 vallis designing workshops to be sociable rather than remote journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 5 netolicky, d. m. (2020) ‘school leadership during a pandemic: navigating tensions’, journal of professional capital and community, 5 (3/4), pp.391-395. https://doi.org/10.1108/jpcc-05-2020-0017. sobel, k. and evans, l. (2020) ‘emotional labour, information literacy instruction, and the covid-19 pandemic’, journal of learning development in higher education, issue 19, december, pp.1-8. https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.vi19.607. stokoe, e., haddington, p., hindmarsh, j., kohonen-aho, l., oittinen, t., rintel, s. and seuren, l. ‘is communicating in person the “gold standard”? you’re asking the wrong question’, medium, 17 june 2021. available at https://elizabethstokoe.medium.com/is-communicating-in-person-the-gold-standard-youre-askingthe-wrong-question-381a68626c10 (accessed: 20 june 2021). vallis, c., wilson, s., tyrrell, j. and narayan, v. (in press) ‘co-design as professional learning: pulling each other in different directions, pulling together’, in forbes, d. and walker, r. (eds) learning to teach online: continuing professional learning and development for tertiary teachers. singapore: springer nature. venn, e., park, j., andersen, l. p. and hejmadi, m. (2020) ‘how do learning technologies impact on undergraduates’ emotional and cognitive engagement with their learning?’, teaching in higher education, pp.1-18. https://doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2020.1863349. williamson, b., eynon, r. and potter, j. (2020) ‘pandemic politics, pedagogies and practices: digital technologies and distance education during the coronavirus emergency’, learning, media and technology, 45(2), pp.107-114. https://doi.org/10.1080/17439884.2020.1761641. author details carmen vallis is a lecturer in educational development. she leads co-design projects with business academics and a multidisciplinary team at the university of sydney. her expertise is in designing for learning with digital tools, writing, and educational research. https://doi.org/10.1108/jpcc-05-2020-0017 https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.vi19.607 https://elizabeth-stokoe.medium.com/is-communicating-in-person-the-gold-standard-youre-asking-the-wrong-question-381a68626c10 https://elizabeth-stokoe.medium.com/is-communicating-in-person-the-gold-standard-youre-asking-the-wrong-question-381a68626c10 https://elizabeth-stokoe.medium.com/is-communicating-in-person-the-gold-standard-youre-asking-the-wrong-question-381a68626c10 https://doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2020.1863349 https://doi.org/10.1080/17439884.2020.1761641 designing workshops to be sociable rather than remote the challenge the response recommendations references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special issue 22: compendium october 2021 ________________________________________________________________________ ‘can you hear me? are you there?’: student engagement in an online environment karen symons de montfort university, uk keywords: student engagement; invisible learners; active learning; covid-19. the challenge with teaching moving from face-to-face to remote this year, i have struggled with the feeling of ‘teaching into the void’. teaching mathematical content has been particularly challenging, as communicating complex mathematical notation remotely is not easy. i have found myself continually wondering what students are doing ‘behind their screens’ – are they engaging with my sessions and if so, how? the concept of ‘student engagement’ is important, as it is based on the belief that learning improves when students are fully involved in their learning (deslauriers, 2019). this engagement often manifests itself in student participation. given the importance of active learning (freeman et al., 2014; petty, 2021) my goal as a teacher is to enable students to actively explore, engage with and talk about maths. but what does this look like in the online world? how can this be seen or measured? the response in july 2020, i attended a teaching and learning maths online (talmo) event, at which holmes reported that ‘in maths workshops, research findings show that there are high participation rates – even if students are not sharing their answers’ (holmes et al., 2020). this statement filled me with hope, and i decided to investigate this finding by exploring the levels of engagement in my weekly 1st year engineering maths support workshops, at which attendance is optional. i had three measures of engagement available to me: symons “can you hear me? are you there?”: student engagement in an online environment journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 2 • attendance data • chat box comments • feedback questionnaire attendance data figure 1 below shows that the numbers of students choosing to attend the online workshops this year compared to face-to-face last year has increased. this pattern, with the exception of week 7, has continued throughout the year. figure 1. attendance at engineering workshops. this could be due to a number of reasons, such as: attending online is more convenient; students are keen for ‘live’ contact; and students value having the opportunity to benchmark themselves against others. however, although attendance data does offer some measure of engagement, purely in terms of being present, it does not offer any insight into what students are doing once they have arrived. therefore, in order to gain a greater understanding, i analysed the comments made in the chat box. 58 32 33 19 17 19 53 17 13 11 113 68 55 54 48 43 37 45 39 37 0 20 40 60 80 100 120 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 n u m b e r o f s tu d e n ts week attendance at engineering workshops 2019 – 2020 (face to face) 2020 – 2021 (online) symons “can you hear me? are you there?”: student engagement in an online environment journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 3 chat box analysis i analysed the comments from week 3. they were categorised into three types, as shown in table 1: table 1. categories of chat box comments. type of comment percentage of comments, % (total = 101) hello/bye/feedback 36 engagement with mathematical content 55 miscellaneous* 9 *for example: “i can’t hear” (it issues); “where can i find the recording of the main lecture?” (questions about the rest of their course) as well as considering the number of comments, another important aspect is the number of students who made these comments. we do not want one student to comment 101 times! analysis of the chat showed that 73% of the students contributed to the total number of comments, and, more importantly, out of these contributors, 74% commented on mathematical content. this was largely consistent with other weeks, although the percentage of comments related to maths increased (for example, week 10, 72%). these high participation rates were very reassuring; engagement was a lot higher than it felt when teaching. furthermore, a few chat box comments such as ‘[i] get it now’, ‘same here’ and ‘and me’ were from students who did not visibly participate in the session. this prompted me to further consider ‘invisible learners’ – or ‘lurkers’ as they are sometimes referred to (honeychurch et al., 2017). feedback form other than putting on microphones and speaking, and writing in the chat box, what else were students doing? were they doing any maths? did they have the necessary resources, such as calculators? therefore, in week 9, i carried out a survey (see figure 2) to give me further insight into levels of engagement and ‘invisibility’. symons “can you hear me? are you there?”: student engagement in an online environment journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 4 figure 2. in which ways do you engage with these workshops? (32 responses) note: ‘other’ – included working through key resources prior to the session, pre-watching short videos and re-visiting the work again after the session. there was a notable difference in the depth in which students engaged. it ranged from: student a "have a go at the key resource", "pre-watch the videos ","read the chat comments", “read and listen to the teacher’s explanations", "do the questions myself", "copy from the screen", "check the answers on my calculator”, “go through it again” to: student b "read and listen to the teacher’s explanations", "check the answers on my calculator". but what is interesting is that, for both of these students, there would have been no visible participation. this supports holmes’ statement that ‘there are high participation rates – even if students are not sharing their answers’ (holmes et al., 2020). recommendations i have used the analogy of an iceberg (see figure 3) to summarise my findings and thoughts: symons “can you hear me? are you there?”: student engagement in an online environment journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 5 figure 3. the iceberg of engagement. as teachers, we only ever see the tip of the iceberg, whatever the teaching environment. online delivery can result in this tip being diminished, but it is important to realise that ‘beneath the surface’ or ‘behind the screens’ considerable engagement and learning can be taking place. from this i have drawn five recommendations to take forward in my teaching: 1. explicitly expect and encourage engagement, and then you will be more likely to get it. it helps to use names to personalise things, to deflect questions back to other students to answer, and to foster an environment in which getting an answer ‘wrong’ is valuable. 2. acknowledge and reward each attempt to interact and relate this to how beneficial this is for learning; praise every interaction. 3. create interactive learning materials to ensure that there are opportunities for interaction in the session. 4. use timers and build ‘doing’ time into each session, as this is necessary for all the ‘under the surface’ activities to be able to take place. symons “can you hear me? are you there?”: student engagement in an online environment journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 6 5. cut down content to give time to students to process and ‘do’; it is not about what is ‘covered’, it is about the learning that takes place. references deslauriers, l., mccarty, l.s., miller, k., callaghan, k. and kestin, g. (2019) ‘measuring actual learning versus feeling of learning in response to being actively engaged in the classroom’, proceedings of the national academy of sciences, 116(39), pp.19251-19257. available at: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1821936116 (accessed: 4 september 2021). freeman, s., eddy, s.l., mcdonough, m., smith, m.k., okoroafor, n., jordt, h. and wenderoth, m.p. (2014) ‘active learning increases student performance in science, engineering and maths’, proceedings of the national academy of sciences, 111(23), pp.8410-8415. available at: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1319030111 (accessed: 4 september 2021). holmes, h. et al. (2020) ‘encouraging online student participation’. talmo (teaching and learning mathematics online), 10 july. available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gwdzrwvu1cy (accessed: 2 june 2021) honeychurch, s., bozkurt, a., singh, l. and koutropoulos, a. (2017) ‘learners on the periphery: lurkers as invisible learners’, european journal of open, distance and elearning, 20(1), pp.192-212. available at: https://doi.org/10.1515/eurodl-2017-0012 (accessed: 4 september 2021). petty, g. (2021) active learning. available at: https://www.geoffpetty.com/forteachers/active-learning (accessed: 7 june 2021) author details karen symons is a senior lecturer in mathematics support at de montfort university, leicester, uk. she has been an educator for over 30 years, in many different sectors of https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1821936116 https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1319030111 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gwdzrwvu1cy https://doi.org/10.1515/eurodl-2017-0012 https://www.geoffpetty.com/for-teachers/active-learning https://www.geoffpetty.com/for-teachers/active-learning symons “can you hear me? are you there?”: student engagement in an online environment journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 7 education, and her teaching is underpinned by research-informed good educational practice and her own reflective practice. ‘can you hear me? are you there?’: student engagement in an online environment the challenge the response attendance data chat box analysis feedback form recommendations references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special issue 22: compendium of innovative practice october 2021 ________________________________________________________________________ establishing a digital tutoring hub to support students in a virtual space karen kenny, university of exeter, uk keywords: academic personal tutoring; remote support; staff development; covid-19. the challenge the arrival of covid-19 and the measures taken to reduce the spread of the virus meant that we at the university of exeter, in common with colleagues around the globe, immediately moved our teaching online: as face to face teaching stopped, so too did face to face tutoring. our tutoring framework relied on face to face interaction. we could see that a new procedure was essential, and it needed to be rolled out at speed, with training and resources available as quickly as possible. in this paper i will describe how the deployment of microsoft teams, class notebook, and microsoft bookings, as a tutoring ‘hub’, supported academic personal tutors (apts) and their tutees in a virtual space. traditionally the appetite for digital solutions in uk higher education has been slow to evolve; laurillard (2008) suggested that education has been on the brink of digital transformation for decades. the affordances of the various digital tools have been publicised, but for students the ‘lived experience’ of being at university does not fit well with a digital interface, while academics have been slow to take advantage of technological tools, whether due to a lack of training (kenny, 2013), lack of experience, or a deep seated belief in ‘traditional’ pedagogy (aldunate and neussbaum, 2013). the pandemic swept aside such concerns as there was no alternative to operating in a digital space, creating an imperative to redesign what we do to best support our student body (wakefield, 2020). the response kenny establishing a digital tutoring hub to support students in a virtual space journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 2 at the university of exeter, the apt is the first point of contact for students, so we knew that the team of apts had to be equipped with a way to work with their tutees in a safe virtual space. as the covid-19 phenomenon was having serious effects on student wellbeing (montacute and holt-white, 2021) we knew it was essential that appointments could be made, meetings held, and note taking and developmental activities facilitated. we identified a suite of tools which could help us to accomplish this: microsoft bookings to make appointments, teams to provide a virtual space to meet and chat, and class notebook to provide collaborative and private workspace for tutors and tutees. these tools also allowed us to develop the tutoring curriculum to better fit the online space. aware that these tools were new to the university, and to most staff and students, we realised that a training programme was a priority. of course, this too needed to be delivered remotely. a sharepoint space was created to host a series of mini video clips and documents addressing the initial set up of the tools. at the same time a template notebook was developed to inspire use of the notebook, and recorded walkthroughs of the material were produced and stored centrally to allow easy access for all tutors. these support materials were provided in a variety of formats to ensure that our team of tutors were supported in the ways that suited them best. we realised that our students too would need support in using these tools, so conversations were started with our student facing teams to mirror this provision. discussion with student groups highlighted that a key concern was loss of community: student representatives particularly talked about missing ‘corridor conversations’. we could see that the virtual space afforded by teams allowed peer support mechanisms to be developed, later year students sharing their knowledge and experience with first years. this was successfully rolled out in the teams space in several disciplines in 2020-21 and we are encouraging others to adopt this initiative in the coming year. knowing that colleagues were already overburdened with the enormity of moving their teaching online and students were concerned about changes in their university experience, we wanted to make the adoption of these tools as straightforward as possible. a central bank of resources was created to be shared across the institution. as far as possible these resources were crafted from existing tutoring activities. incorporated into kenny establishing a digital tutoring hub to support students in a virtual space journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 3 the notebook were examples of existing good practice, for example, the skills assessment and development tools offered by the academic, personal and professional learning evaluation (apple) form (taylor, 2020) and humanities in a digital world (birkett, ward and jones, 2019). these self-evaluation and evidence building tools work well in an eportfolio. they provide a focus for students to plan their own development, and work with their tutor and tutor group to identify goals and how to achieve them. we could see that our approach was working when these templates were adopted by tutors in different areas of the university. microsoft bookings proved to be a popular means of facilitating tutor/tutee meetings. the ease with which appointments can be made and changed has proved very welcome, with tutors reporting an increase in students taking advantage of one-to-one support. in a survey of students more than 50% said that they wished to retain virtual tutoring. tutors too liked the simplicity afforded by this easy way to make time available to their tutees. recommendations we have seen that through the development of an institution wide solution, in a way which was augmented by the digital tools, we were able to share best practice across disciplinary boundaries. moving forward, we intend to retain the possibilities offered by tutoring in a digital space, such as virtual meetings and using eportfolios to develop skills. we have seen a need for research into our experiences to identify the gains from our response to covid-19 and to inform future practice as well as helping us to better support our students in the future. we have therefore commenced a small-scale project working with staff and students to learn more about their experiences during the response to covid-19. references aldunate, r. and neussbaum, m. (2013) 'teacher adoption of technology', computers in human behavior, 29, pp.519-524. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2012.10.017. birkett, h., ward, r. and jones, s. (2019) humanities in a digital world: education incubator project. unpublished report. exeter: university of exeter. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2012.10.017 kenny establishing a digital tutoring hub to support students in a virtual space journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 4 kenny, k. (2013) teachers' views of the use of technology in the he classroom, unpublished masters dissertation. university of exeter. laurillard, d. (2008) digital technologies and their role in achieving our ambitions for education. london: institute of education. montacute, r. and holt-white, e. (2021) covid-19 and the university experience. available at: https://www.suttontrust.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/covid-19-and-theuniversity-experience.pdf (accessed: 12 march 2021). taylor, e. (2020) 'the 'apple' form as a vehicle for the identification, development and articulation of student skills and attributes', the advance he stem conference 2020, the studio, manchester 28 january. available at: https://www.advancehe.ac.uk/programmes-events/conferences/stemconf20#programme (accessed: 7 february 2021). wakefield, j. (2020) 'universities' move online "must be done the right way"', bbc, 17 may. available at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-52647601 (accessed: 21 may 2021). author details karen kenny is an academic developer at the university of exeter. her main focus is on academic personal tutoring, guiding academics to refine their practice. she is particularly interested in supporting non-traditional students into higher education and helping them to achieve their goals. https://www.suttontrust.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/covid-19-and-the-university-experience.pdf https://www.suttontrust.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/covid-19-and-the-university-experience.pdf https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-52647601 establishing a digital tutoring hub to support students in a virtual space the challenge the response recommendations references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special issue 22: compendium of innovative practice october 2021 ________________________________________________________________________ how my failure to read a play helped my students develop their learning lucinda becker university of reading keywords: student confidence; shakespeare; covid-19 the challenge as a teaching-intensive member of academic staff, i have an active interest in how students can develop their learning skills, particularly in english literature. the pandemic gave me an unexpected opportunity to address a key area of learning development that has always been a challenge amongst my students. in english literature at my university, we teach through lectures and through seminars of around 15 students. these seminars are intended to give space to students trying out new ideas and closely analysing literature. however, too often they are spaces in which many students are silent, passive learners. this is nothing to do with the intelligence of the students, but arises from a missing piece of learning development related to the challenge faced by my students during the pandemic: how to prepare for a seminar. this sounds simple, but for most students it is not. prior to university they are not expected to read a whole new play each week, as we do on the shakespeare module (course) i convene. in their anxiety to get to grips with material quickly, they often go to secondary sources (television, films or study guides) and are flummoxed in the seminar when they are expected to have read the whole play. this can lead to students preferring the comfort of silence to the challenge of responding to questions or discussion points offered by the seminar leader; they feel underprepared and so find it safer to disengage rather than expose what they fear might be a lack of familiarity with the primary text. becker how my failure to read a play helped my students develop their learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 2 the response as the shakespeare module was taught wholly online this year, i took the opportunity to bring together the whole module group (around 50 students in their second year of university) in weekly, online, recorded play readings. there were three student volunteers reading from the module in each session, taking it in turns to read the speeches, and each week we covered one play. attendance at the sessions was voluntary, and they were set up online via blackboard collaborate. the benefit of using this method was that it appeared in students’ timetables and was a familiar online learning activity space for them. it also allowed me to record the sessions and embed them in a blackboard module easily and swiftly. my aim was to achieve three learning development goals: 1. to ensure that students had read the play before the relevant seminar. 2. to help them feel more confident in seminars, as they would know the play. 3. to create an informal, enjoyable learning community throughout lockdown. i think we achieved these goals, with students giving positive feedback on this aspect of the module. the learning community was even better than i had expected; around a quarter of the students had performed in or directed shakespeare plays, and so brought that perspective to the group. this gave us the chance to recognise their previous learning development and feed that into their new learning. the learning community was diverse in geographical origin, and i was at first surprised to find that three students whose first language was not english were keen to take a turn reading the plays. when i complimented their reading after one session, they told me that they had decided to read aloud in the group because the shakespearean language is challenging and so brings with it a sense of trepidation but also satisfaction once it is ‘conquered’ (as they put it). for those students with an auditory (aural) learning preference, this was clearly going to be an especially beneficial experience, and i shared the text on screen to aid visual learners; i noticed that some of the readers were walking around as they read the text, showing a kinaesthetic preference, perhaps. kolb’s work over nearly four decades, becker how my failure to read a play helped my students develop their learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 3 developing the idea of learning styles and the importance of experiential learning, learning by doing, sets up a framework within which this type of activity sits well (kolb, 2015). i also learned two things about myself. as we read the plays together, i noticed elements in the plays that i had never spotted before. by being open and sharing this with students they could recognise that the learning was genuinely shared – i was leading, but that did not mean that i was not learning beside them. i also found that i am not very good at reading plays aloud. in fact, i am fairly disastrous at it. i tend to rush through familiar speeches, and i speak too fast anyway. having assumed that i would always be leading, i then recognised that the students were better readers than i was, and i turned the reading over to them entirely. this made a significant change in our relationship. they were developing learning skills, such as gaining an ear for the language and immersing themselves in a text, in a situation in which they had largely taken over the learning space – i was the assistant who scrolled through the play text onscreen. the students recognised that they were investing more effort than they were used to, as they were taking the lead, and this energised the group. they seemed more ready to proffer their views in our seminars following the play readings, and this reflects tinto’s assertion that 'the more students invest in learning activities [. . .] the higher their level of effort, the more students learn' (tinto, 1997, p.600). once the term was over, i adopted brookfield’s method to reflect on whether this learning experiment had any value beyond the pandemic (brookfield, 2009). my shakespeare students no longer have to bluff their way through a text, so i can be bolder in my learning expectations; their learning confidence has also increased because of this experiment. kahu’s work recognises that ‘satisfaction’ and ‘wellbeing’ are two social factors that promote student engagement and learning, and online reading groups can achieve this – it is the act of sharing a text that seemed to make the difference to these students (kahu, 2013). recommendations i no longer think it matters too much what we are reading online. it is the experience of being together online whilst all sitting in the safe spaces of our homes that fostered the becker how my failure to read a play helped my students develop their learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 4 bravery it must have taken for those students to read a play to their fellow students. this is an innovation that i plan to keep. i will be running online play reading sessions even when we are back on campus. this is partly a practical decision (i want to record the readings, and this is much easier to do through an online session) and partly a personal/pedagogical choice (i know that this works online and am hesitant about taking it offline given the benefits it brings to the students). the gains in terms of making a semi-social learning space online have encouraged me to go further. i intend to read sections of novels and pieces of poetry with students next year, and we will do this online rather than on campus. i am reminded again of the research carried out by tinto, which was some time ago, yet his assertion that ‘the classroom is the crossroads where the social and the academic meet’ (tinto, 1997, p.599) is still relevant. the fact that this classroom is non-traditional and online worked to our advantage. from my observations, my inability to read those plays successfully was a milestone in my relationship with this group of students. we could all recognise that i was not the only expert in the room, and i could see their confidence grow, along with their openness to trying new approaches to the texts in our seminars, which in turn developed their learning skills. whilst i am not, of course, advocating teacher failure as a go-to way to develop learning, i am pleased that, in this case at least, it was part of the key to success. references brookfield, s. (2009) ‘the concept of critical reflection: promises and contradictions’, european journal of social work, 12(3), pp.293–304. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/13691450902945215 (accessed: 5 october 2021). kahu, e.r. (2013) ‘framing student engagement in higher education’, studies in higher education, 38(5), pp.758–773. available at: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/03075079.2011.598505 (accessed: 5 october 2021). kolb, d.a. (2015) experiential learning: experience as the source of learning and development. 2nd edn. upper saddle river, new jersey: pearson education, inc. https://doi.org/10.1080/13691450902945215 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/03075079.2011.598505 becker how my failure to read a play helped my students develop their learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 5 tinto, v. (1997) ‘classrooms as communities: exploring the educational character of student persistence’, the journal of higher education, 68(6), pp.599–623. available at: https://doi.org/10.2307/2959965 (accessed: 5 october 2021). author details lucinda becker is professor of pedagogy in the department of english literature at the university of reading. https://doi.org/10.2307/2959965 how my failure to read a play helped my students develop their learning the challenge the response recommendations references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 16: december 2019 evaluating students’ perceptions of a scenario-situated business communication course siriol lewis university of glasgow, uk abstract research has identified that business students, who are immersed in theoretical concepts, may not be equipped with the skills required to operate successfully in the global workplace in the english medium (evans, 2013). secondly, tasks in business english textbooks tend not to bear much resemblance to those of a work environment (bremner, 2010; evans, 2013). this paper discusses an optional written business communication course open to international postgraduate business school students. although the course is worth ten credits, it can only be used for a separate award, not part of their degree programme. the course focuses on the use of appropriate register, business english vocabulary and intertextuality, as these features have been identified as pivotal to successful written business communication (evans, 2013). a short questionnaire was distributed to the students towards the end of course to elicit their perceptions of the usefulness of the course. consisting of two closed questions and one open question, data was then coded using constructivist grounded theory (mills, birks and hoare, 2014), from which themes emerged providing valuable and unexpected feedback. the primary finding was that the course appeared to have alerted students to the importance of the business writing genre, resulting in an overwhelming request for more instruction. keywords: written business communication; intertextuality; grounded theory. introduction this paper reviews an innovative optional written business communication course open to international postgraduate students at the adam smith business school, university of glasgow. following a request from faculty, a business communication course focusing on speaking skills was established. it quickly became apparent that there was an additional lewis evaluating students’ perceptions of a scenario-situated business communications course journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 2 demand for a written business communication course. needs analysis showed that report writing, formal letters and related employment texts such as curriculum vitae, were identified as areas where students would like assistance. conventions of style and genre were also identified as problematic. successful completion of the course contributes to the university’s graduate award, which seeks to close the gap between academia and employability. however, previous research on business textbooks has revealed a disparity between content and real-life business environments. tasks in business english textbooks are often typical english as a foreign language exercises, which do not reflect genuine business activities (reed, 2011). an additional observation was that the materials typically included in business english publications were based on a priori assumptions rather any rigorous investigation (st john, 1996). other researchers also highlighted the lack of connection between materials and actual tasks in the business environment (bremner, 2010; cheng and cheng, 2010). in his hong kong study, evans (2013) found emails and reports dominated workplace communication, recommending that course designers incorporate such features as unpredictability, problem solving, intertextuality, collaboration and precision in writing. for this to be actualised, the course should be based on simulated and clearly defined role play to facilitate more authentic responses to tasks. hence, this ten-week course is centred around a scenario. students act as interns at a communications company for the first five weeks of the course, and then move to an ‘assessment centre’ for the remaining five weeks. tasks were designed around publicly available information from a telecommunications conglomerate, supplemented by related purposely written non-authentic material. using a task-based learning framework, activities primarily focused on maintaining customer relationships, and writing internal written communications, necessitating register switch and a high degree of intertextuality, which has been identified as crucial to business communication (evans, 2013). intertextuality can pose a challenge for students (bremner and costley, 2018). in particular, the dialogic nature of intertextuality and the amount of assumed and shared knowledge appear problematic. a classroom cannot replicate a workplace and the complex internal relationship structure. bremner (2010) commented that workplace intertextuality can be a positive influence, providing formats and guidelines. students lewis evaluating students’ perceptions of a scenario-situated business communications course journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 3 rarely have access to other connected texts, for example an email chain, reports, press releases and other corporate material. to address this, relevant texts were provided in the course book. however, bremner (2010) also noted that prolific intertextuality can be quite restrictive, and it may be that students feel constrained by the requirement to reuse terminology and collocations. indeed, intertextuality highlighted another unforeseen issue. students were quite anxious about plagiarism due to the necessity to reuse collocations and specific vocabulary from the supplied texts. this reinforced the idea that intertextuality and corporate language are very distinct and necessary features of the genre. the course the course outcomes state that students will be able to demonstrate knowledge and effective use of genre, structure, business vocabulary and register, and to demonstrate intertextual relationships. explicitly, in the first semester the focus is on email and letter writing to different audiences, necessitating register switch. in semester two, the focus is job applications, specifically layout and organisation, sentence-level writing and grammar. opportunities for group work were encouraged, although most writing tasks were individual. assessed individual letter-writing tasks were administered in weeks five and ten, weighted at 40% and 60% respectively. the classes took the form of one two-hour session per week, with the expectation that students would complete tasks out of class and submit texts on a weekly basis via the virtual learning environment. peer feedback was followed by comparison with an exemplar text. the emphasis was very much on students working independently and in groups. exemplars of texts included highlighted features of business english and recycled english from provided texts, thereby encouraging intertextuality, use of synonyms and examples of language of persuasion and inclusion. comparison of students’ work and the exemplar tasks provided opportunities for ‘noticing’ (qi and lapkin, 2001) and facilitated student enquiry concerning synonyms, collocations, and finer semantic distinctions. students were asked to produce ten texts including collaborative reports, internal emails, personal statements, short answer responses, and letters. the first task involved writing an adjustment letter to a dissatisfied customer. relying heavily on supplied texts such as the chairman’s statement, and non-authentic emails, students were encouraged to lewis evaluating students’ perceptions of a scenario-situated business communications course journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 4 promote the company’s declared values, placate and retain the customer, and personalise the response. this proved quite challenging. flowerdew (2010) found in her study that students acknowledged the need to be persuasive but were unsure how to achieve this in writing. to aid the noticing process, tables were included, consisting of questions to evaluate students’ texts in peer feedback, for example: q 4to what extent do the writer and audience share the same knowledge? q 11what politeness markers/hedges are used? q 12[whether the text] achieves suitable tone by using, for example, variety of minimizing adverbs, attitudinal markers, ‘self’ references? (advancing english for business writing course book, 2018-2019, pp.95-96). in week four, the students formed groups and collaboratively wrote a report. workplace roles are usually quite clearly delineated, in contrast to the classroom where the students are on an equal standing. this requires soft skills of teamwork, adaptability, possible conflict resolution and leadership. each group received peer feedback on this report and on a later report. on this second occasion, they wrote reflectively on their experiences of collaboration. in week six, the scenario ‘moved’ from internship to assessment centres. students were required to choose a job from a selection of supplied advertisements, and prepare a personal statement, a curriculum vitae and short answer responses. they were directed to the university’s online careers service and encouraged to make appointments with careers advisers for individual curriculum vitae (cv) writing assistance. feedback was given by peers, and in contrast to the first half of the course, exemplars were not distributed. methodology the questionnaire consisted of two questions on a likert scale, and one open question. the first two questions were constructed to elicit students’ opinions as to whether the course had increased their confidence in business written communication in english and in applying for employment requiring the use of english. 227 international postgraduate business students originally enrolled in the course. degree courses ranged from management, marketing, financial forecasting to international banking. attempts were lewis evaluating students’ perceptions of a scenario-situated business communications course journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 5 made to group students together according to their master’s degrees to facilitate easier timetabling, but most classes were mixed. in total, 161 students completed the course. reasons for attrition might be attributed to timetabling conflicts and increasing workloads on their degree courses. 113 students gave their consent to use their final grades and completed questionnaires. the researcher’s relationship with many of the students should be acknowledged as she had taught four classes comprising around 25% of the cohort. this may have impacted on some of the qualitative data, in terms of a perception of the power imbalance, and perhaps, social desirability bias (king and bruner, 2000). strenuous efforts were made to reassure the participants of their anonymity. the timing of the data collection prior to the final assessment may have also had some bearing on student response or non-response. this was unavoidable due to logistical reasons. results and discussion table 1 below shows the results of the respondents, around 70% of the final cohort. table 1. grades awarded to students who signed consent forms. grade a (excellent) grade b (very good) grade c (good) grade d (satisfactory) grade e (weak) grade f (poor) grade g (very poor) o credit refused 13 59 39 2 these results suggest that the course in its current configuration is accessible and achievable for most students. the first two questions gave the students an opportunity to give feedback on the perceived value of the course in terms of employability. table 2. students’ perceptions of their progress in writing and employability. lewis evaluating students’ perceptions of a scenario-situated business communications course journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 6 76% of students felt that they were confident about writing in professional business contexts, and 62% reported that they felt more confident about applying for jobs which require use of english. the third question was constructed to allow free comment from the students, and as can be seen, the responses were diverse, but with some common emerging themes: question 3: are there any improvements that you feel we could make to the course? for 22 questionnaires, question three either had been left blank (12), or the student had answered ‘no’ to this question (3), or had been very positive (7), for example, ‘the course is perfect, it’s very good, very helpful, i feel confident’. following a constructivist grounded theory coding (mills, birks and hoare, 2014), the remaining 91 responses were coded, extracting key words and themes from the participants’ comments. in contrast to traditional grounded theory, the constructivist approach regards reality as existing only in relation to a ‘specific conceptual scheme, theoretical framework, paradigm, form of life, society or culture’ (bernstein, cited in mills, birks and hoare, 2014, p.109). the researcher’s influence on how the questions are worded, and themes are selected and categorised should be acknowledged. in addition, in the constructivist approach, the participant and the researcher are regarded as co-constructing the data (charmaz and bryant, 2011). this indeed may be more pertinent than usual as the researcher was known to approximately 25% of the cohort. thus, the relationship between the researcher and her own students may be a factor in both the provision and selection of the data. strongly disagree disagree neutral agree strongly agree total 1. i am more confident about writing in professional business contexts. 4 3 20 74 12 113 2. i am more confident about applying for jobs which require the use of english. 4 7 32 55 15 113 lewis evaluating students’ perceptions of a scenario-situated business communications course journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 7 using a framework of initial coding, focused coding, and theoretical coding (charmaz and bryant, 2011), the answers to the open-ended questions were scrutinised for key words, and a list was made, recording frequency. in second level coding, focused coding consisted of grouping keywords and related words together. in the theoretical coding stage, a narrative was constructed by the researcher in order to interpret the findings. this third stage, known as theoretical coding by constructivist grounded theorists in addition to traditional grounded theorists, aims to provide ‘advanced abstractions that provide a framework for enhancing the explanatory power of your storyline and its potential as theory’ (birks and mills, 2011, p.123). ‘an organised whole theory’ (glaser, 1998, p.163), is produced by ‘fracturing the data, and theoretical codes reintegrate these components, weaving the fractured story back together again’ (glaser, 1978, p.72). initial coding omitting unique comments, a catalogue of varied and multiple repeated requests was compiled. the most noteworthy word was ‘more’ in relation to a variety of writing exercises, feedback, formative assessment and help with job applications. other examples include requests for assistance with essay and proposal writing and more report writing opportunities. there were also requests for help with job applications, internships and suggestions that the course should be a training course. focused coding key words and related words were grouped as follows: feedback, examples, business vocabulary, scenario, writing skills, tasks, speaking, and work experience. theoretical coding three distinct categories emerged: an overwhelming request for more of the current course content; requests for additional genre writing; and requests for assistance in genuine employment guidance. it appears that the course has met its stated objectives within the institutional parameters, but that in its present inception, it does not meet the students’ perceptions of their needs. hence, whilst the course can generally be regarded as successful, the data revealed a mismatch between the amount and scope of the current lewis evaluating students’ perceptions of a scenario-situated business communications course journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 8 content and students’ demands. it also has highlighted the lack of connection between traditional business degrees and the skills necessary to be a successful operator in the workplace. a very strong message was that students wanted more feedback. this must be balanced with the marking allocation for a ten-credit course. secondly, there was a resounding demand for more writing practice, more academic writing, more grammar, more vocabulary and more reflective writing. another request was for a more realistic case study, and a wider range of case studies, for example, a specific case study for finance students. ‘case study’ was interpreted by the researcher to mean scenario. interestingly, there were also more requests for speaking opportunities, despite there being frequent group discussions. there is also a separate complementary dedicated speaking course. there were also requests for proposal writing and for academic writing such as essays and dissertations. there are several other academic writing support services available. however, specific genre writing courses for business students such as proposal writing are not currently available and there may be sufficient demand for this to merit further investment and course design. with regard to feedback requesting more help with cvs and job applications, these are not within the remit of the course. there is an integrated careers service in the business school, and this may need to be more explicitly signposted to the students. conclusion it is apparent there is a demand for business communication courses that bridge academia and the workplace. the current course configuration does not meet student needs, rather it seems to have alerted students to the uniqueness of business communication and the disparity between their current language proficiency and this genre. higher education institutions should consider investing in such business communication courses to support their graduates as it appears to be the perception among the students that achieving strong postgraduate degrees from reputable business schools may not be enough. they are cognisant of the need to acquire workplace communicative proficiency in tandem with academic expertise. internship programmes may provide authentic opportunities to glean valuable experience, however, these opportunities are rare. therefore, greater use of scenarios as a learning environment replicating corporate contexts should be considered, lewis evaluating students’ perceptions of a scenario-situated business communications course journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 9 to complement relevant degree courses. this will have the dual result of equipping the students with necessary skills and enhancing current degree courses. for international business students, unambiguity, the significance of intertextuality, and appropriate register are of paramount importance on the global stage. therefore, greater investment in relevant course design may prove beneficial, and increase employability skills and graduate confidence in the workplace. acknowledgements the researcher would like to thank the course designer for his support, and the anonymous reviewers for their constructive feedback. references advancing english for business writing course book. (2018-2019) university of glasgow. birks, m. and mills, j. (2011) grounded theory: a practical guide. london: sage publications. bremner, s. (2010) ‘collaborative writing: bridging the gap between the textbook and the workplace’, english for specific purposes, 29, pp.121-132. bremner, s. and costley, t. (2018) ‘bringing reality to the classroom: exercises in intertextuality’, english for specific purposes, 52, pp.1-12. charmaz, k. and bryant, a. (2011) ‘grounded theory and credibility’, in silverman, d. (ed.) qualitative research. 3rd edn. london: sage publications, pp.291-309 cheng, w. and cheng, p. (2010) ‘correcting others and self-correction in business and professional discourse and textbooks’, in trosborg a. (ed.) pragmatics across languages and cultures. berlin: mouton de gruyter, pp.443-466. lewis evaluating students’ perceptions of a scenario-situated business communications course journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 10 evans, s. (2013) ‘designing email tasks for the business english classroom: implications from a study of hong kong’s key industries’, english for specific purposes, 31, pp.202–212. flowerdew, l. (2010) ‘devising and implementing a business proposal module: constraints and compromises’. english for specific purposes, 29, pp.108–120. glaser, b. g. (1978) theoretical sensitivity. mill valley, ca: sociology press. glaser, b. g. (1998) doing grounded theory: issues and discussions. mill valley, ca: sociology press. king, m. f. and bruner, g. c. (2000) ‘social desirability bias: a neglected aspect of validity testing’, psychology and marketing, 17(2), pp.79–103. mills, j., birks, m., and hoare, k. (2014) ‘grounded theory’, in mills, j. and birks, m. (eds.) qualitative methodology: a practical guide. london: sage publications, pp.107 -122. reed, b. (2011) ‘recent business english publications’, elt journal, 65(3), pp.326-45. st john, m. j. (1996) ‘business is booming: business english in the 1990s’. english for specific purposes, 15(1), pp.3-18. qi, d.s. and lapkin, s. (2001). ‘exploring the role of noticing in a three-stage second language writing task’, journal of second language writing, 10(4), pp.277-303 author details siriol lewis is a lecturer in english for academic study, university of glasgow. evaluating students’ perceptions of a scenario-situated business communication course abstract introduction the course methodology results and discussion initial coding focused coding conclusion acknowledgements references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special issue 22: compendium of innovative practice october 2021 ________________________________________________________________________ building a study community through podcasts during covid-19 julia bohlmann university of glasgow, uk micky ross university of glasgow, uk keywords: covid-19; international students; study community; podcasts. the challenge maintaining community online for us, the main challenge of the pandemic was to maintain the learning community we had established before lockdown. this is a difficult task at the best of times as we teach international undergraduates and postgraduate taught students from all subject areas, with most attendees enrolled on pgt social science programmes. a big concern for us was how we were going to keep our students engaged and confident (kahn et al., 2017; nordman et al., 2020). we knew that the casual and informal conversations that we had with students after face-to-face lectures and workshops played an important role in creating a rapport with them. in those conversations we often reassured students and informally provided solutions for learning problems. the challenge was to move these more casual encounters into the detached and more impersonal online environment. the response podcasts as shared spaces to engage online our response was to create a series of podcasts with, and for, our learning community, that ran alongside our academic writing classes. the podcasts were not standalone events, but closely embedded into our provision in that they rounded up a week’s classes. as one series of classes typically lasts five consecutive weeks at a time, we created a series of five podcasts: bohlmann and ross building a study community through podcasts during covid-19 journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 2 • transitioning into academic study. • reading and writing critically. • literature, plagiarism, and demonstrating criticality. • navigating academic discourse. • semester round-up. the podcasts aired on zoom once a week and were approximately 50 minutes of recording time. the reason for this length was to allow time for the wider conversation to develop, to allow processing and thinking time for our students, and to ensure an inclusive approach with all voices being heard. recordings were then posted as audio and video files, with an accompanying audio-transcript for accessibility, onto the relevant moodle course. aiming for a good flow was important to us to keep student engagement. it seemed easiest to keep this flow when we had a guest speaker as it added variety and brought a new dimension to the podcast. an important feature of our podcasts was that they were recorded with a live student audience; 20 to 50 students attended any live session. in our experience this was fun, informal, and collaborative. there were no slides dictating the direction of travel. the dialogue mirrored an academic debate that included students as collaborators and, in doing so, created an inclusive virtual classroom where transcultural learning could take place (ryan, 2011). to encourage students to participate, we created options to simply listen, contribute by unmuting, contribute by posting a question publicly in the chat, or contribute with a high level of anonymity by messaging us directly during the live podcast. after the live podcast, we posted the recording of the session, with an audio-transcript, to our virtual learning environment, creating provision with synchronous and asynchronous content in line with the principles for a temporary online pivot (nordman et.al., 2020). we aimed to empower our students by adopting a relaxed and informal conversational style, encouraging participation through questions to which we responded directly. this participation allowed learners to direct the flow of the podcast, which, for us, spoke to so much of the fundamentals of what we were trying to achieve in terms of pedagogy. for example, our sessions are active in the sense of dewey’s (1939) fundamental theory on freedom in education as well as dialogic and problem-posing in the nature of freire’s bohlmann and ross building a study community through podcasts during covid-19 journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 3 (1993) critical pedagogy. letting students take part in the podcasts was key as it underlined those principles. the feedback we received from students was really encouraging and heart-warming: • i wanted to personally say i value your hard work and personal effort to keep the academic community together while delivering the sessions. • thank you so much for guiding and accompanying my journey. • i just wanted to drop a line to say hello and thank you and *** for the workshops. i find them not only helpful but caring and providing good company in the way you address them. • very enlightening stuff. • it [the podcast] is the best part of my day. the comments suggest we achieved our aims with the podcasts and created a sense of belonging to, and involvement in, our learning community at the university. they allowed us all to come out of our prescribed roles as teachers and students, instead coming together simply as people having an informal conversation about learning. recommendations when we started podcasting, we did so with little idea about how it would go or what success we would have. it turned out to be a big success for us. and now that we have had a chance to reflect on the experience, we can see why. podcasting as part of teaching and learning engages students because it brings a typically formal discourse into an informal setting. unlike live or recorded lectures, podcasts can quite literally be taken outside of the more formal learning space of the classroom (or the desk at home during the pandemic) and be listened to anywhere. moreover, while students taking notes in a live lecture need to keep pace with the teacher, a podcast can be stopped, repeated, and listened to again and again. the learner has much more control over how and when they are exposed to learning content (rothwell, 2008). in our experience podcasts proved to be an effective way to build and maintain a learning and teaching community online and, as the student feedback suggests, they were effective. bohlmann and ross building a study community through podcasts during covid-19 journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 4 they were also re-energising for us as teachers, as they brought a new dimension to our teaching practice that allowed us to engage with students in an innovative way that also spoke directly to our professional teaching and learning values. an important key to success was to make the podcast seem effortless and informal without it looking aimless. to do this, we recommend the following: • identify potential guests and contact them early. • decide on distinct roles (e.g., chair, timekeeper, chat monitor) in advance and inform guests of their roles. • choose a rough plan over an overly scripted one. • establish a rapport with guests before students arrive. • start with a recap of themes covered that week. • introduce guests and invite students to post questions in the chat. • respond to student questions and integrate them into the debate. • finish by providing take home messages and remind students of upcoming classes. going forward, we will reflect on how to hone the structure and delivery of the podcasts. in particular, we are thinking about how to blend this new (for us) online format with face-toface classes in order to ensure the podcasts’ post-pandemic continuity. references dewey, j. (1939) freedom and culture. new york: kappa delta pi. freire, p. (1993) pedagogy of the oppressed. rev. edn. new york: continuum. kahn, p., everington, l., kelm, k., reid, i. and watkins, f. (2017) ‘understanding student engagement in online learning environments: the role of reflexivity’, educational technology research and development, 65(1), pp.203-218. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11423-016-9484-z. nordmann, e., horlin, c., hutchison, j., murray, j., robson, l., seery, m. k. and mackay, j. r. d. (2020) ‘ten simple rules for supporting a temporary online pivot in higher https://doi.org/10.1007/s11423-016-9484-z bohlmann and ross building a study community through podcasts during covid-19 journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 5 education’, plos computational biology, 16(10), pp.e1008242-e1008242. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1008242. rothwell, l. (2008) ‘podcasts and collaborative learning’, in salmon, g. (ed.) podcasting for learning in universities. maidenhead: open university press. ryan, j. (2011) ‘teaching and learning for international students: towards a transcultural approach’, teachers and teaching: theory and practice, 17(6), pp.631-648. https://doi.org/10.1080/13540602.2011.625138. author details julia bohlmann is an effective learning adviser at the university of glasgow where she advises international students and strives for inclusivity in learning and teaching. she is a fellow of the higher education academy and senior fellow of the university of glasgow’s recognising excellence in teaching framework. her background is in cultural studies and cinema history. micky ross is an effective learning adviser at the university of glasgow. he has a phd in education and is a senior fellow of the higher education academy. he is committed to holistic approaches to learning, education for empowerment and social change, and research and scholarship that explores the learning experience of students in higher education. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1008242 https://doi.org/10.1080/13540602.2011.625138 the challenge maintaining community online the response podcasts as shared spaces to engage online recommendations references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special issue 22: compendium of innovative practice october 2021 ________________________________________________________________________ clas light touch project: scaling up educational co-design process dewa wardak university of sydney, australia sandris zeivots university of sydney, australia andrew cram university of sydney, australia keywords: educational development; co-design; learning design at scale; business education; covid-19. the challenge connected learning at scale (clas) is a significant longitudinal project initiated in 2019 by the university of sydney business school aiming to enhance the learning experience for students in large undergraduate and postgraduate classes. three of us work at business co-design, a team of educational developers, learning designers and media producers, who are among the key drivers of the clas project. before the pandemic, we were working through a co-design process, with eight core subject coordinators for a duration of three semesters, to embed active-learning strategies and connected student participation in relevant and authentic tasks and assessments. covid-19 and the pivot to online teaching challenged us to scale up our clas support system and to develop new codesign strategies that could provide rapid and agile support across more units of study. we no longer had the luxury of working with a small number of core subjects. instead, we were asked to support 36 subjects across five business disciplines within one semester. we termed this the ‘clas light touch’ project as it offered lighter levels of support, resources, and timeline. most subject coordinators we worked with were new to online teaching and faced a steep learning curve, in addition to the anxieties and uncertainties associated with the pandemic and teaching and learning environments. our challenge was wardak, zeivots and cram clas light touch project: scaling up educational co-design process journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 2 thus not only scaling up the technological and pedagogical support, but dealing with the people at the centre of the transition (aitchison et al., 2020). the response throughout the light touch co-design process, we provided two-step support: bespoke workshops and one-on-one consultations. we tailored six workshops for each business discipline to introduce various learning tools (padlet, jamboard), techniques (chunking online content), and approaches (interactive tools, active learning). we followed the workshops with individual consultations with the subject coordinators to prioritise strategies that would most benefit students studying remotely. a ‘light touch’ design checklist was developed where the coordinators could select areas to concentrate on, with a space to add their own focus areas for improvement if the checklist did not cover their needs. the design checklist was informed by stone (2017), who determined three common areas for attention in online education: (1) teacher presence, (2) consistency and quality online curriculum materials and information, and (3) supporting synchronous and asynchronous interactivity. to increase teacher presence in the online environment, with assistance from business co-design media producers, a welcome video was created for each subject. the video helped students to get to know their coordinator and get a clear understanding of subject expectations and requirements. our second area of focus addressed the lack of consistency in online content and information provided to students. at the time of the pandemic most subjects were taught in face-to-face mode and the online learning management system (lms) was used as a resource depository (huber et al. 2020). since lmss were the key drivers of content design, development, and delivery for online learning (rekhari and curran, 2018), an in-house canvas lms template was designed to enhance information engagement and active learning for students. the template was flexible and easy to use in order to lessen the workload and stress for coordinators. the template also delivered a consistent ‘look and feel’ and incorporated prompts for the teaching team to provide important information in a consistent format. for example, the template included a ‘how to study this unit’ page which offered clear details on weekly synchronous sessions, expectations for asynchronous engagement, and how assessments linked to weekly wardak, zeivots and cram clas light touch project: scaling up educational co-design process journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 3 content. our third focus area incorporated online interactivity to foster student engagement and collaboration. this step introduced digital tools and incorporated pedagogical techniques such as tips to orchestrate breakout rooms or design a padlet activity. we evaluated the light touch project through student surveys and teaching staff focus groups. the subject coordinators indicated that they profoundly benefited from the codesign approach and discipline-based workshops, while the individual consultations received overwhelmingly positive feedback. for example, academics stated that workshops introduced various online tools; however, during individual consultations they were able to get tailored advice on which tools would best solve their issues, support their teaching, and be implemented in their classes. the participants stated that only parts of the provided workshops were relevant to them, whereas the consultations were tailored to their specific needs. around 74% (n=308) of students who responded to the survey indicated the lms template was ‘extremely’ or ‘moderately easy’ to navigate. the template, which consisted of a home page and four associated pages, helped students to better engage with content. a further 89% (n=144) of students strongly or somewhat agreed that the welcome video helped them to get to know their lecturers better, while 87% (n=141) believed that the welcome video helped them to understand what to expect from the subjects. although the video may appear as a minor intervention, the evidence shows that it helped students to build stronger connections with their subject coordinators during the online learning. recommendations approaching innovation at scale requires a streamlined process. despite being termed ‘light touch’, the project offered extensive and tailored support to address the unique educational and digital needs of the selected subjects. in a time of uncertainty when academics are under increasing pressure, we learned that professional and emotional support through a tailored consultation process was beneficial and invaluable. the ‘light touch’ checklist functioned as a driver for professional discussions and co-design ideas. the checklist was effective for two reasons: (1) the coordinators could choose or wardak, zeivots and cram clas light touch project: scaling up educational co-design process journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 4 ‘cherry pick’ what they wanted to implement in their units; (2) the checklist provided the teaching team with new ideas to implement in their units. the coordinators also appreciated that the ideas from the checklist were recommended, not forced on them. co-design was a successful approach to scale up educational quality, however not all selected subjects engaged with the process as it was optional. in the future, the subject coordinators should be asked to complete an expression of interest for the ‘light touch’ project to ensure that they are committed to work on improvements and that their needs can be satisfied within the provided support framework. references aitchison, c., harper, r., mirriahi, n. and guerin, c. (2020) ‘tensions for educational developers in the digital university: developing the person, developing the product’, higher education research & development, 39(2), pp.171-184. https://doi.org/10.1080/07294360.2019.1663155. huber, e., mcewan, c., bryant, p., taylor, m., arthers, n. and boateng, h. (2020) ‘learning from a rapid transition to remote emergency teaching: developing a typology of online business education designs’, in gregory, s., warburton, s. and parkes, m. (eds.) ascilite’s first virtual conference. proceedings ascilite 2020 in armidale (pp.119–124). https://doi.org/10.14742/ascilite2020.0142. stone, c. (2017) opportunity through online learning: improving student access, participation and success in higher education, the national centre for student equity in higher education (ncsehe). curtin university, perth. available at: https://www.ncsehe.edu.au/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/cathystone_executivesummary-1.pdf (accessed: 5 june 2021). rekhari, s. and curran, l. (2018) ‘lessons learnt from a university lms transformation: the good, the bad and the ugly’, ascilite open oceans: learning without borders. deakin university, geelong, australia 25-28 november. https://doi.org/10.1080/07294360.2019.1663155 https://doi.org/10.14742/ascilite2020.0142 https://www.ncsehe.edu.au/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/cathystone_executive-summary-1.pdf https://www.ncsehe.edu.au/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/cathystone_executive-summary-1.pdf wardak, zeivots and cram clas light touch project: scaling up educational co-design process journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 5 author details dewa wardak is a lecturer in educational development at the university of sydney business school. she is a fellow of the higher education academy (fhea). with a background in learning sciences, dewa’s interests include educational development for academics, research in networked learning, multimodal approaches to the analysis of learning and teaching environments, and research supervision and mentoring. sandris zeivots is a lecturer in educational development at the university of sydney business school. he investigates how to design and implement innovative learning experiences that are meaningful, engaging, and purposeful. with a professional background in experiential education, sandris explores how to design impactful learning experiences in higher education. andrew cram is a digital education generalist with 20 years of experience in learning design, academic development, learning technologies management, leadership and research. he is currently working at the university of sydney business school as a lecturer in educational development. clas light touch project: scaling up educational co-design process the response recommendations references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special issue 22: compendium of innovative practice october 2021 ________________________________________________________________________ pandemic promenadology: walking for wellbeing in academic life jana fedtke american university of sharjah, uae keywords: walking; wellbeing; promenadology; strollology; covid-19. the challenge due to the covid-19 pandemic, traveling and movement in general have been severely restricted. this has meant that people have been confined to their rooms by themselves or in shared spaces. the pandemic has also presented challenges that have had an impact on learning, such as unstructured time, unfamiliarity with digital tools, lack of motivation, emotional distress linked to learning spaces, caring for ill relatives or friends, or general uncertainty for students and educators. many members of the university community have experienced a sense of fatigue or burnout (pettit, 2021). ainsworth and li (2020) explain the importance of physical activity during a pandemic. in addition, antunes and frontini (2021) highlight the connections between physical activity and mental health. in light of the abrupt shift to emergency online learning, much academic attention has been directed towards remote learning in an effort to cope with these unexpected issues at hand. it is equally necessary to think about one’s wellbeing in the face of the sudden onslaught of excessive demands on students, faculty, and staff. as simple as it sounds, walking can be a vital means of improving both mental and physical wellbeing, while also stimulating a person’s intellectual abilities. even though it cannot necessarily fix the issues that the pandemic has caused, walking can provide a renewed focus on wellbeing and can help manage some of the problems. fedtke pandemic promenadology: walking for wellbeing in academic life journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 2 the response there is a long tradition of scholars who have seen walking as their source of inspiration or wellbeing. danish philosopher, søren kierkegaard, for example, famously advised his niece of the benefits of walking: “above all, do not lose your desire to walk; every day i walk myself into a state of wellbeing and walk away from every illness; i have walked myself into my best thoughts, and i know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it” (cited percy, 1979). here are three practical ways to incorporate walking into academic life that have worked for me during the pandemic: regular walks as pandemic promenadology walking is a science in and of itself. professor martin schmitz, the only chair of promenadology (german: spaziergangswissenschaft = walk + science) in kassel/germany, knows that “it’s all about the concentrated and conscious perception of our environment” (cited deutsche welle, 2007). also known as strollology (burckhardt et al., 2015), the art of observation and reflection while walking can take various forms, for example, personal walks during a pandemic. for teachers, walking can provide a safe space to think about teaching and learning in peace. during my walks, i have observed nature and my surroundings in more detail, but i have also composed my next lesson plans in my mind and conceptualised future research projects. inspiring students to walk instead of constantly sitting at their desks, students can stand up, stretch and walk around in their immediate environment. i have built this into our class time, for example, as a community exercise of as little as three minutes of moving at the very beginning (brainstorming about the topic at hand), in the middle to refresh (reflecting on one specific question related to the subject matter), and once again at the end of a class (simply letting your mind wander and wonder). while it took some practice to get used to this unconventional way of incorporating movement into the classroom, this exercise benefitted both students and the instructor. neuroscientist shane o’mara’s (2020) in praise of walking emphasises the connection between body and brain: “walking makes our minds mobile in a fashion denied other animals” (p. 5). he conceives of walking as a holistic fedtke pandemic promenadology: walking for wellbeing in academic life journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 3 activity which shows that “walking is hugely beneficial for our minds, our bodies and our communities” (p. 5). digital detox walking can also function as much needed exercise in digital detox, aiming for “balance and awareness more than permanent disconnection” (syvertsen and enli, 2019, p. 1269). away from the omnipresent screen, the mind can relax. during the pandemic, i decided to focus on walks that were independent of technology since they promise digital detox: no phone, no music, no films, no messages and no counting steps. instead, i focused on my mind, my imagination, the peaceful environment around me and the rhythm of walking. for people who cannot or do not want to walk, it is equally possible to practise this in a wheelchair, riding a bike, or using other means of transportation. the idea is to observe your surroundings, reflect and relax. recommendations walking will retain its importance after the pandemic. some of the following practices can be applied in a post-pandemic world in similar ways: walking classroom originally introduced at the high-school level, the walking classroom (2021) can also be tailored to students at the college level (biber and heidorn, 2021), as it promotes blended learning and physical activity. walking can, for example, happen during class discussions and/or outside, especially in smaller classes. in larger classes, walking might have to be incorporated into bite-size exercises of 3-5 minutes, in which the learners can brainstorm the issues at hand individually while walking on their own, most likely in their immediate environment. fedtke pandemic promenadology: walking for wellbeing in academic life journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 4 “twalk” (melsig, 2021) another learning space that incorporates walking is the “twalk.” according to melsig (media-enhanced learning special interest group, 2021): a #twalk is a common, structured multi-site learning walk augmented by the use of social media in which all participants act as co-producers of knowledge by addressing ideas and questions together. usually, a #twalk combines a one hour learning walk with a tweetchat made up of about 5 landmark-based discussions, with a new discussion prompt being given to redirect the walk and its focus about every ten minutes. combining learning, walking, and social media, the twalk is a creative way to co-create content while walking. walking meetings to increase physical activity and wellbeing, walking meetings present an alternative to traditional meetings for faculty members, staff discussions, and even office hours. clayton et al. (2015) have shown that walking meetings increase creativity and productivity. the regularity of walking is a simple technique that most people will be able to implement and keep alive in the post-pandemic future. it does not require any funds or special equipment. teachers and students can establish their own version of pandemic promenadology: on your own, with peers, or in small groups, in the classroom, in meetings, during your spare time. deceptively simple, walking has many benefits for one’s physical and mental health. references ainsworth, b. and li, f. (2020) ‘physical activity during the coronavirus disease-2019 global pandemic’, journal of sport and health science, 9(4), pp.291–292. available at: https://dx.doi.org/10.1016%2fj.jshs.2020.06.004 (accessed: 25 august 2021). https://dx.doi.org/10.1016%2fj.jshs.2020.06.004 fedtke pandemic promenadology: walking for wellbeing in academic life journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 5 antunes, r. and frontini, r. (2021) ‘physical activity and mental health in covid-19 times: an editorial’, sleep medicine, 77, pp. 295–296. available at: https://dx.doi.org/10.1016%2fj.sleep.2020.10.007 (accessed 25 august 2021). biber, d.d. and heidorn, j. (2021). ‘tailoring the walking classroom to promote college student engagement’, college teaching 69(3), pp. 169-172. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/87567555.2020.1833177 (accessed: 25 august 2021). burckhardt, l. ritter, m. and schmitz, m. (2015) why is landscape beautiful? the science of strollology. berlin: birkhäuser. available at: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783035604139 (accessed 25 august 2021). clayton, r, thomas, c. and smothers, j. (2015) ‘how to do walking meetings right’, harvard business review. available at: https://hbr.org/2015/08/how-to-do-walkingmeetings-right (accessed: 25 august 2021). deutsche welle (2007) the science of taking a walk. available at: https://www.dw.com/en/the-science-of-taking-a-walk/a-2374179 (accessed: 25 august 2021). melsig (2021) twalk toolkit. available at: https://melsig.shu.ac.uk/melsig/resources/twalktoolkit/?doing_wp_cron=1624468089.1132891178131103515625 (accessed: 25 august 2021). o’mara, s. (2020) in praise of walking – a new scientific exploration. new york: norton books. percy, w. (1979) the existential dane. available at: https://www.nytimes.com/1979/04/01/archives/the-existential-dane-the-dane.html (accessed: 25 august 2021). https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/pmc7560384/ https://dx.doi.org/10.1016%2fj.sleep.2020.10.007 https://doi.org/10.1080/87567555.2020.1833177 https://doi.org/10.1515/9783035604139 https://hbr.org/2015/08/how-to-do-walking-meetings-right https://hbr.org/2015/08/how-to-do-walking-meetings-right https://www.dw.com/en/the-science-of-taking-a-walk/a-2374179 https://melsig.shu.ac.uk/melsig/resources/twalk-toolkit/?doing_wp_cron=1624468089.1132891178131103515625 https://melsig.shu.ac.uk/melsig/resources/twalk-toolkit/?doing_wp_cron=1624468089.1132891178131103515625 https://www.nytimes.com/1979/04/01/archives/the-existential-dane-the-dane.html fedtke pandemic promenadology: walking for wellbeing in academic life journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 6 pettit, e. (2021) ‘faculty members are suffering burnout. these strategies could help’, chronicle of higher education. available at: https://www.chronicle.com/article/faculty-members-are-suffering-burnout-so-somecolleges-have-used-these-strategies-to-help (accessed: 25 august 2021). syvertsen, t. and enli, g. (2019) ‘digital detox: media resistance and the promise of authenticity’, convergence 26 (5-6), pp.1269-1283. available at: https://doi.org/10.1177%2f1354856519847325 (accessed: 25 august 2021). the walking classroom institute (2021) the walking classroom. available at: https://www.thewalkingclassroom.org/ accessed: 25 august 2021). author details jana fedtke is assistant professor of english at the american university of sharjah (united arab emirates). her research and teaching interests include transnational literatures with a focus on south asia; gender studies; and postcolonial literatures. her work has been published in online information review, journal of further and higher education, south asian history and culture, asexualities: feminist and queer perspectives (routledge), and south asian review. https://www.chronicle.com/article/faculty-members-are-suffering-burnout-so-some-colleges-have-used-these-strategies-to-help https://www.chronicle.com/article/faculty-members-are-suffering-burnout-so-some-colleges-have-used-these-strategies-to-help https://doi.org/10.1177%2f1354856519847325 https://www.thewalkingclassroom.org/ pandemic promenadology: walking for wellbeing in academic life the challenge the response regular walks as pandemic promenadology inspiring students to walk digital detox recommendations walking classroom “twalk” (melsig, 2021) walking meetings references author details literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 3: march 2011 preparation for higher education (he): a study of collaborative partnerships in easing the transition to he helen bussell teesside university business school, uk lesley mulcahy teesside university business school, uk abstract this paper reports the second stage of a longitudinal study examining a successful collaborative project delivered through a partnership between institutions. the study evaluates a level 4 module for further education (fe) students delivered jointly by teesside university and a number of partner colleges of further education (cfe) as a ‘spiky profile’. the first phase of the study concentrated on 2006/07 and 2007/08. the research reported here continues the evaluation of the module looking at staff, students and curriculum content for 2008/09, taking into account macro and micro influences. it follows the progression of students from previous cohorts and also examines the scheme’s expansion across the region resulting from the success of the original programme. key points from the findings have been incorporated into a model to highlight the main areas of consideration for collaborative working between fe and higher education (he). keywords: widening participation; partnership; collaboration; transition to he; access. introduction following on from the dearing report, the government has shown a clear commitment to increasing the numbers of students and ensuring higher take up rates by those previously under-represented in higher education (he) (dfius, 2003). in 2000 the government stated that 50% of those between the ages of 18 and 30 should have the opportunity to benefit from higher education by the end of the decade (dfee, 2000). working towards this target bussell and mulcahy preparation for he: a study of collaborative partnerships in easing the transition to he has changed the student body radically. the he initial participation rate for 2006/07 entry stood at 40% (dfius, 2008) with the proportion of uk university entrants from lower socio economic groups moving upwards, albeit marginally (from 29.3% in 2005/6 to 29.8% 2006/7; figures for the north east were 33.1% in 2005/06 and 34.3% in 2006/07 (hesa, 2008)). stuart (2003) has argued that widening participation and fair access is something that no institution can ignore. this was reinforced by john rushford, director of widening participation at the higher education funding council for england (hefce), who stated that widening participation was one of hefce's four core strategic aims and an influential component of policy development in all areas. in the same paper he continued that widening participation would be a key theme in the corporate policies that institutions were developing over the next coming years (rushford, 2004). however, widening participation is not just about increasing numbers it is concerned with ‘changing the class bias of higher education and it is about enabling students to complete their studies successfully’ (stuart, 2003, online). this has had significant implications for both he and fe sectors. aimhigher has demonstrated that progress can be achieved through collaborative work carried out by institutions working in partnership (hefce, 2006). although collaborations can be viewed and interpreted in different ways by different people (buys and bursnall, 2007), there is evidence that collaboration increases the likelihood of organisations reaching a larger population, avoiding duplication of services and improving use of their resources (hastad and tymeson, 1997): educators are finding that one of the most powerful ways to cultivate and nurture diversity in teaching and reach a diversity of students is to combine efforts and expertise with colleagues. (cook and friend 1995, cited kluth and straut, 2003, p.228) studying partnerships between universities, sargent and waters (2004) presented a framework of academic collaboration which proposes that such partnerships go through cycles consisting of specific phases: initiation, clarification (of the project and its goals), implementation (including identification of roles and responsibilities) and completion (together with evaluation of outcomes). collaboration is influenced by interpersonal relationships which develop between the parties and by contextual factors such as the processes introduced, journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 2 bussell and mulcahy preparation for he: a study of collaborative partnerships in easing the transition to he resources and support. interpersonal factors were also found to be the most influential factors in buys and bursnall’s (2007) investigation of university-community collaboration. open communications, characterised by trust, mutual respect, good humour and tolerance, helped to clarify the direction of the partnership and resolve any issues. in recent years there has been an increase in collaborative working practices between partner colleges and universities (jary, 2008). the government policy of mass he has resulted in the rising importance of he provision in colleges of further education (cfe) as a means of widening access, with the consequent development of alternative progression routes and the experience of individual learners as they navigate their way through fe into he (smith and bocok 1999, p.283). if students are brought into a university environment and encouraged to be involved in both the further education (fe) and he process the students will achieve an element of confidence and knowledge of both establishments and their learning experience. such activity breaks down barriers for students and also enhances their academic self concept (asc), defined by bennett (2009) as self-belief in one’s academic competence, self-appreciation of one’s personal worth as a student and self connection with being an undergraduate. michie et al., (2001) suggest that a variety of teaching methods and university organisational arrangements may need to be modified in order to enable low-asc students to attain their full educational potential. preparation for higher education such influencers are reflected in teesside university’s widening participation and community learning strategies (teesside university, 2008) through which a programme has been developed with partner cfes in the region whereby fe students study a level 4 module as part of their level 3 fe course. the notion of studying and being assessed at different levels has been defined as a ‘spiky profile’ (dfius, 2001). for edexcel programmes a ‘spiky profile’ would be a national diploma course at level 3 with some units available at levels 2 or 4. as long as these units do not make up more than 25% of the qualification, the overall qualification will still be at a level 3 btec national standard. this collaborative exercise, initiated by senior management at redcar and cleveland college (rcc), resulted in teesside university business school (tubs) staff developing a 20 credit level 4 module called preparation for higher education (phe) based on a 40 journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 3 bussell and mulcahy preparation for he: a study of collaborative partnerships in easing the transition to he credit level 4 core tubs module, personal development and employability (pde). phe was introduced, on a trial basis with 32 students, in september 2006 and delivered at rcc largely by college staff. an integral element of phe involved students visiting the university campus and joining activities coordinated and delivered by tubs staff alongside year 1 undergraduates. students studying the module received ap(e)l for 20 credits of learning if they proceeded to a tubs programme or equivalent teesside university course. the main focus of phe was to enhance research and coursework skills in preparation for he requirements. a secondary aim was to remove perceived barriers to progressing to he held by some rcc students and consequently encourage more students to apply to university. the module was, therefore, seen as important for the progression of students from rcc and as an element of the widening participation strategies of tubs and teesside university. in addition this project gave tubs and rcc an opportunity to work collaboratively for the benefit of all. during 2007/08 a second cohort participated in phe at rcc and similar modules were introduced at the college in a wider range of disciplines by two other university schools: professional practices (pp) by the school of computing (sc) and principles of evidencebased practice (pebp) by the school of health. other partner colleges were attracted to the scheme so that at september 2009, phe was being offered by five cfes to approximately 500 students. more local colleges (and even an institution in china) are interested in establishing similar programmes utilising the existing module and ways of working. the number of applications to teesside university from the cfes running the module have increased year on year from 2006/07 and the percentage of these converted to acceptances has also increased from 60.97% to 65.47%. these partner colleges figure prominently as feeder institutions to teesside university, ranking 1st, 9th, 12th and 14th (teesside university, 2010). due to the attention being given to phe it was felt that a full module evaluation was required and funding was acquired through the partnership capacity fund. the first stage of this was completed in 2009 focussing on the operation of the spiky profile at rcc and the student experience. strengths of the module and challenges to be addressed were identified and recommendations for future development were presented (see bussell and journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 4 bussell and mulcahy preparation for he: a study of collaborative partnerships in easing the transition to he mulcahy, 2009). the second stage of the evaluation included all the colleges now involved and followed through students who had progressed to he. as there was much similarity between the two stages regarding the findings concerning the student experience, this paper concentrates on the issues around collaboration between partner colleges and teesside university which emerged from the module evaluation. the paper examines the experiences of those involved in this maturing collaborative venture. the aim of this paper is to gain an understanding of key issues and identify practices which require further development to enable the partnership to progress and highlight to other institutions how they might proceed with similar activities. methodology this paper reports on the second stage of a longitudinal study. stage 1 examined cohorts 2006/07 and 2007/08 at one cfe, collecting secondary data and primary data from students and module deliverers. in this second stage relevant students from these cohorts are followed and 2009/10 has been added to the study. as the programme has been taken up by other cfes the study was extended to include three colleges in addition to the original. to see the topic from the perspective of the participant and to understand how and why they come to have this perspective (king, 2004), qualitative interviews and focus groups were used to gather primary data. secondary data was collected from the cfes to enable analysis of the demographic profile of students on the module, pass rates and the destination of those completing the module. applicant and conversion statistics from teesside university were also analysed as well as progression data for relevant students at tubs (teesside university, 2010). to obtain student opinions on the current provision, six focus groups were held with students studying the module. to allow for comparison with previous cohorts and between current providers two groups were held at college a and b, and one each at college c and d. apart from one cfe where only 3 students were completing the module, the groups contained 6-10 students (43 students). students were questioned on information sources related to the modules, their expectations, and module strengths and weaknesses. the decision to progress to he was also explored. the views of the institutions were gathered journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 5 bussell and mulcahy preparation for he: a study of collaborative partnerships in easing the transition to he through in-depth interviews with deliverers in each of the four colleges, the module leader at tubs and senior management at three of the cfes (8 interviews). as well as module strengths and weaknesses, topics discussed with staff included student feedback and the relationship between the cfe and university, particularly with regard to support and administration. to investigate the transition to he, in-depth interviews were carried out with three students who had progressed to he (one in each year of undergraduate study). focus groups and interviews were taped and the data transcribed and analysed by both researchers to ensure inter-relater reliability. to enable comparisons to be made between cfes, a cross-case analysis (huberman and miles, 1998) was carried out on the data. as the student experience has been reported elsewhere (bussell and mulcahy, 2009) the findings below concentrate on the qualitative data collected from staff involved in the collaborative partnership. the key points from the findings have been incorporated into a model to highlight the main areas of consideration for collaborative working between fe and he. findings the introduction of phe has been a great success in terms of partnership take-up and participation, and has provided cfes with an innovative skills module. it has cemented the existing work between the local colleges and the university. moreover, it has been of great benefit in widening participation in he and enhancing students’ asc. it has also proved to be a useful tool in the recruitment and retention of local students for teesside university. colleges are keen to deliver this module and work in partnership with the university, offering the course to increasing numbers of students, which demonstrates how well partners work together: working with the university is good and it is good in a way that it’s not too obtrusive as well. it’s kind of just that mutual respect that, yes, you know what you’re doing so we’ll just let you get on and do it but we’re here if there are any issues. at the initiation stage colleges were very motivated. the original idea to collaborate in delivering the spiky module came from a cfe. as more colleges came on board, at the journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 6 bussell and mulcahy preparation for he: a study of collaborative partnerships in easing the transition to he clarification and implementation stage delivery mode, delivery location, source of tutors, group size and optionality has been customised to suit each college (the decision often driven by resources rather than pedagogy). this indicates the flexibility of this module, but there is consensus that the module is most effective when it is an integral part of the programme taken by all students with some input by university tutors and attendance on the university campus: i think it adds a fantastic amount of value because most of the programmes don’t have an element of study skills in them and so you pinch a bit off your unit to do this but this, i’ve been able to integrate it throughout the programme and so it’s definitely been a benefit, it’s improved 100% for most of them. more times going to the university i think would help...we come to the university. our students get a research centre induction and they get a library card. they feel part of the university...they do an academic essay under academic rigour and relatively strict university guidelines. we take them to the university and they get to use the university resources. the flexibility of the module has been one of the drivers for its growth. it is considered to be more appropriate and adaptable than other skills modules as it covers more transferrable skills and allows time to develop study skills alongside the necessary competences for studying at he level: it can be discreet if you want or it can be embedded as well so it’s the flexibility of it really that’s good. however, its greatest strength is seen to be its role in widening participation in he, emphasising that studying at university is an option for students from an area characterised by long-established work roles and traditional forms of identity where there is no history of family or friends progressing to he; the focus of the module very much the needs of the student. the benefits beyond improving study skills, in raising aspirations, are apparent to tutors and students: journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 7 bussell and mulcahy preparation for he: a study of collaborative partnerships in easing the transition to he in my group none of them have anybody in their family who’ve gone onto degrees. they all have the opinion that universities are for rich intelligent people. now…we’re breaking those barriers down. i probably wouldn’t have come if i hadn’t have done that module...it just really changed my mind. it made it less scary...just being here it did and i’m quite glad it did. a major difference from stage 1 of the study is the improvement in college tutors’ endorsement of the module. while there continues to be differences between colleges in the level of support given to deliverers by their senior management, the scepticism of colleagues evident in our previous research (bussell and mulcahy, 2009) has all but disappeared. however, the module title was a concern in the first stage of the study and is still being raised. although unhappy with the names allocated by the university there is no consensus on a more appropriate label. positioning it as a skills module makes it easier to incorporate into the curriculum, with students seeing it as an integral part of their course rather than an add-on, but this impacts on both staff and students’ understanding of the module aims. the findings demonstrate that the relationship between the university and local cfes is excellent on an interpersonal level, supportive and based on mutual respect. however, the findings show that the parties hold slightly different views. the university appears to have interpreted the relationship as a collaborative one in that the organisations work together but administration sometimes resembles a franchise in that the colleges see themselves having to follow rules and guidelines set down by the university. as the operation is under the university’s higher education business partnership (hebp) banner, the deliverers can see they are part of a partnership. some are content to be junior partners but it is apparent that some feel this should mean working together as equals not imposing one organisation’s systems on another. it is acknowledged that the university’s procedures sometimes improve the process but there exists the implicit assumption that university practices are superior, the ones to be followed. as phe is a university module it is unavoidable that it is processed through university regulations but collaboration requires blended systems as well as blended learning: journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 8 bussell and mulcahy preparation for he: a study of collaborative partnerships in easing the transition to he if you actually discussed assessment, not as in this is how you mark according to our criteria but actually let’s explore the whole issue of assessment. if we looked at it in terms of issues of equality and diversity and the practice of that across fe and he, that would be meaningful. how could we support you? you’ve got this. now that would all be meaningful. the impression of a franchise rather than a true partnership is strengthened when examining learning and teaching strategies. at the start of the academic year the university module leader holds a planning meeting. teaching material and assessments developed by university lecturers are provided to cfe tutors. some items used by partners are made available. tutors tend to use a combination of these plus their own material developing a knowledge partnership between the parties which is seen by them to be a strength of the relationship. for effective partnership, working members have to feel part of a consortium or partnership group. tutors are generally happy with the arrangements but there is a feeling that there should be greater sharing of material and more consultation in course design, questioning the extent that this is a true partnership: are we considered to be academically and intellectually capable and valued and therefore working in partnership? as more organisations are now delivering the module there is variation in how aware management and deliverers are of what is happening throughout the partnership, particularly in terms of best practice. the university stages an annual conference to which all partner colleges are invited, providing an opportunity to meet and discuss new initiatives with colleagues from other institutions and with university staff. also cfe staff are encouraged to attend end of year boards at the university at which this module is discussed to give the partners a voice in progression and award decisions, but most staff (and some managers) consider these meetings to be over long and see little value in their presence. further staff development is left to each partner. the relationship between the university and its partners is, therefore, quite complex. although in some areas the university has very much taken the lead there is a perception that the university is not always fulfilling its side of the partnership: journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 9 bussell and mulcahy preparation for he: a study of collaborative partnerships in easing the transition to he at the beginning of the year there is the expectation and the intent that you’ll come and do all these visits here and you’ll take the students to the library, visit or we’ll get people from the university to come and watch their presentations but they never…the visits didn’t transpire. but that didn’t really affect us. we were just getting on with it. visits to the university campus and input from university lecturers were built into the module specification but the university’s contribution is developing into a regulatory role (supervising content and material and imposing quality systems). from the quote above it can be seen that college staff and management were quite pragmatic about this, acknowledging that to some extent they had created this change in the relationship. for example, some staff are reluctant to bring their students to the university campus viewing the bureaucracy and rearranging timetabled commitments as a greater hurdle than the benefits students may gain. resources played a key role for all parties: if we come down to the university we have to provide cover for our classes. and we have to arrange a bus. and who pays for the bus? branding of the module, its flexibility and growth, combined with a change in the university’s input, is affecting the focus of the module and the working of the partnership. in some colleges phe is seen as just an alternative skills module. it is apparent that the module is most valuable where the parties are working as a team sharing delivery and running sessions on the university campus as originally designed. the resource implications of an increasing number of students visiting the campus has affected this element but, where this has lapsed, it needs to be reintroduced and managed to ensure one of the key benefits of the module, easing student transition to he, is not lost: you just think ‘oh my god, it was ok when there was 15 of them’, you could just come along. with 180 students it’s the logistics of it. that would be a couple of busloads wouldn’t it? a key issue throughout the study is responsibility for resources. the operation of the module relies a great deal on the goodwill of individual tutors. in a partnership there is often the expectation that the other party should provide the means to run the programme effectively. it remains somewhat unclear in this instance where accountability lies. under current funding arrangements the ratio is 75% to cfes and 25% to teesside university, journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 10 bussell and mulcahy preparation for he: a study of collaborative partnerships in easing the transition to he yet the university is usually expected to take the lead. in a time of cut backs in the education budget this matter must be openly addressed and agreed by all parties. ongoing interest in the module would indicate that it is going to expand. this may put pressure on the collaborative nature of the project. the findings show that recent growth is already changing the relationship. the excellent interpersonal bonds which have developed between the parties are likely to be affected as more join the programme and individuals move on. a reliance on the enthusiasm and goodwill of the current team will be insufficient if the benefits of the module are to continue. the original concept of this module has been effectively operationalised by the partners but there is little evidence of a strategic focus which is required to take the project forward. the message from these findings is that in a collaborative venture there should be joint working at all stages. while an attraction of phe for the colleges is its link to the teesside university brand, working within a collaborative framework necessitates a mutual respect, selecting best practice and the most appropriate methods. the main influence on the collaborative process should be knowledge and expertise, wherever this resides. conclusion this study evaluates a module delivered through collaboration between a university and its fe partners. the issues highlighted in the findings demonstrate a successful collaborative partnership which has enabled the original aims of the module to be recognised. key findings from this stage of the research reveal the student experience to be central to the module and all those involved in its operation; this has been achieved through a blended learning approach. colleges are keen to collaborate with the university and be guided as to the learning and teaching approach, quality issues, systems, operationalisation and positioning of the module. systems and operationalsiation provide challenges for both the university and some colleges but offer an opportunity to share best practice across the colleges. although the university is expected to take ownership of the programme, funding (and hence resources) do not automatically follow. this should be reviewed for the future so sufficient support is given to colleges without it being over onerous for the university. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 11 bussell and mulcahy preparation for he: a study of collaborative partnerships in easing the transition to he the flexibility and adaptability of the module has been a driver for its adoption by colleges across the teesside area. colleges could choose how they would prefer to deliver the course which gave them a certain degree of autonomy from the university. however, the essence of the programme must be maintained. for example, college students attending the university to allow them to engage in the student university experience. the success of the module needs to be addressed in future research from the perspectives of both ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ measurements of achievement, quantified and assessed over time. relationships take time to develop and this burgeoning relationship between students, colleges and the university is one to be cultivated. these findings have been incorporated into a collaborative partnership model illustrated in figure 1 below. figure 1. collaborative partnership model. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 12 bussell and mulcahy preparation for he: a study of collaborative partnerships in easing the transition to he the benefits of this module to the student identified in the findings place the student at the centre of the model. for both the university and colleges, student needs are the focus of the learning and teaching strategy which is customised to meet the requirements of students within each partner organisation. it has been shown above how this customisation is achieved through the mode of delivery, resources, quality procedures and systems which are enhanced by staff development and the relationship between the partner institutions (highlighted within the next ring). for successful collaboration the elements in this layer of the model must be driven by student need to maintain the student focus of the venture but also to retain partnership working (and avoid domination by any member). for the partnership to develop and continue in a changing climate, the findings indicate that a strategic focus is required. therefore, the model also takes account of macro environmental factors which impact on the project. in this study the external drivers which emerged were knowledge partnerships, alternative progression routes and retention strategies developed to achieve government and institutional policies of widening participation and increased student recruitment. although not raised by participants in the study, funding has been added to the model as this has become a key issue since this stage of the research was completed for both students and the institutions involved. changes to the funding of he will necessitate innovative projects (such as the example examined here) to encourage participation in he. the strengths of this module and its role in the ever important widening participation agenda remain. the findings show that the strength of the collaboration between teesside university and its partners is that it remains student focussed, particularly in relation to skills development. however, this aspect of the module is gaining predominance over easing student transition to he (which was originally a key aim of the module). this learning objective and the learning and teaching strategy (the second ring in our model) are being affected by the elements in the next layer. mode of delivery is driven more by resources than student need. also, there is less input by university staff and fewer sessions at the university campus. to continue its success this collaborative venture must ensure the student remains at the centre of the learning and teaching strategy. systems and quality are increasingly led by teesside university whereas staff development is left to the colleges. in some areas the university is being seen as the lead rather than as a partner. working in true partnership at this level of our model is essential to maintain effective journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 13 bussell and mulcahy preparation for he: a study of collaborative partnerships in easing the transition to he collaboration. the interaction between partners and excellent relationships are enabling the partners to work together towards achieving the organisational goals highlighted in the fourth ring of our model but it is clear that a long-term strategic focus is required if this is to carry on. the researchers aim to continue with the longitudinal study of this module in order to complete its evaluation. further research will also enable a deeper understanding of collaborative working. in addition they intend to test this model in other examples of fe and he partnerships. references bennett, r. (2009) ‘academic self-concept among business students in a recruiting university: definition, measurement and potential effects’, journal of further and higher education, 33(2), pp. 141-156. bussell, h. and mulcahy, l. (2009) ‘bridging the gap between transition from fe to he: evaluation of a ‘spiky profile’’, higher education academy annual conference. university of manchester 30 june -2 july. buys, n. and bursnall, s. (2007) ‘establishing university-community partnerships: process and benefits’, journal of higher education policy and management, 29(1), pp. 7386. department for education and employment (dfee) (2000) higher education funding for 2001-02 and beyond. available at: http://www.hefce.ac.uk/news/hefce/2000/funding.htm (accessed: 3 march 2011). department for innovation, universities and skills (dfius) (2001) raising standards. london: dius. department for innovation, universities and skills (dfius) (2003) the future of higher education, (cm 5735). london: hmso. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 14 http://www.hefce.ac.uk/news/hefce/2000/funding.htm bussell and mulcahy preparation for he: a study of collaborative partnerships in easing the transition to he department for innovation, universities and skills (dfius) (2008) participation rates in higher education: academic years 1999/2000-2006/2007 (provisional). dius sfr 02/2008. london: dfius. hastad, d.n. and tymeson, g. (1997) ‘demonstrating visionary leadership through community partnerships’, journal of physical education, recreation and dance, 68(5), pp. 45-51. higher education funding council for england (2006) widening participation: a review. london: hefce. higher education statistics agency (2008) performance indicators in higher education. available at: http://www.hesa.ac.uk/index.php/content/category/2/32/129/ (accessed: 4 march 2011). huberman, a.m. and miles, m.b. (1998) ‘data management and analysis methods’, in denzin, n.k. and lincoln, y.s. (eds.) collecting and interpreting qualitative materials. california: sage, pp. 179-210. jary, d. (2008) ‘the continued importance of widening participation’, widening participation and lifelong learning, 10(1), pp. 1-2. king, n. (2004) ‘using interviews in qualitative research’, in cassell, c. and symon, g. (eds.), essential guide to qualitative methods in organizational research. london: sage, pp. 11-22. kluth, p. and straut, d. (2003) ‘do as we say and as we do: teaching and modelling collaborative practice in the university classroom’, journal of teacher education, 54(3), pp. 228-240. michie, f., glachan, m. and bray, d. (2001) ‘an evaluation of factors influencing the selfconcept, self-esteem and academic stress for direct and re-entry students in higher education’, educational psychology, 21(40), pp. 455-72. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 15 http://www.hesa.ac.uk/index.php/content/category/2/32/129/ bussell and mulcahy preparation for he: a study of collaborative partnerships in easing the transition to he rushford, j. (2004) working with institutions to embed participation: discussion paper. available at: http://www.hefce.ac.uk/widen/strategy/ (accessed: 4 march 2011). sargent, l. and waters, l. (2004) ‘careers and academic research collaborations: an inductive process framework for understanding successful collaborations’, journal of vocational behaviour, 64(2), pp. 308–319. smith, d. and bocock, j. (1999) ‘participation and progression in mass higher education: policy and the fhe interface’, journal of education policy, 14(3), pp. 283-299. stuart, m. (2003) widening participation; the changing agenda. hea. available at: http://www.ukcle.ac.uk/resources/directions/previous/issue6/access/ (accessed: 4 march 2011). teesside university (2008) widening participation strategy, 2005-2009. internal document. middlesbrough: teesside university.  teesside university (2010) teesside university registry data on feeder institutions. internal document. middlesbrough: teesside university. author details helen bussell is principal lecturer in marketing at teesside university business school. she leads courses in not-for-profit marketing at undergraduate and postgraduate level and for managers working in the public and third sectors as well as postgraduate research methods. her main research interests are in marketing in the public and third sectors and widening participation. she has published a number of academic papers on consumer behaviour in education and on volunteer recruitment and retention. lesley mulcahy is senior lecturer in marketing at teesside university business school. in partnership with the north east chamber of commerce, she leads teesside university’s fda in leadership and management which won the times higher journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 16 http://www.hefce.ac.uk/widen/strategy/ http://www.ukcle.ac.uk/resources/directions/previous/issue6/access/ bussell and mulcahy preparation for he: a study of collaborative partnerships in easing the transition to he award for outstanding employer engagement initiative 2009/10. her main research interests are leadership, employer engagement and widening participation. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 17 preparation for higher education (he): a study of collaborative partnerships in easing the transition to he abstract introduction preparation for higher education methodology findings conclusion references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special issue 22: compendium of innovative practice october 2021 ________________________________________________________________________ storyboarding and suggestopedia for curriculum re-design isabel lucas university of cumbria amanda chapman university of cumbria keywords: curriculum design; storyboarding; course planning; covid-19. the challenge having successfully moved face-to-face teaching to the online environment in spring 2020, there arose a need to work with tutors to move them from ‘mirroring’ their classroom learning, teaching and assessment (lta) practice (white, 2021) to re-designing their lta practice online for at least a full semester. for many tutors, the sudden move online had been overwhelming, but by summer 2020, tutors were feeling more settled and accustomed to a new way of working. the challenge we faced was how to balance celebration of those early ‘successes’ in online delivery and the resultant increase in tutor confidence whilst supporting tutors in understanding that a new approach was now required. the emergency response had focused on logistics and what was possible at the time; we now needed to look at what works best for learners and the subject. the aim of our project was, therefore, to move tutors away from their emergency lta approach and practices. free from the constraints of timetabling and prescribed contact hours, which had been the main drivers in relation to how teaching was organised precovid, we wanted to support tutors in seeing beyond these constraints and understanding the possibilities for their curriculum and lta when these design elements were no longer present. by carving out time and space in which they could reflect on their curriculum, we aimed to facilitate a stronger, connected curriculum at programme level by drawing on design principles for a distance-learning programme (phipps and merisotis, 2000). lucas and chapman storyboarding and suggestopedia for curriculum re-design journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 2 the driver behind our project was ultimately to instigate fundamental changes and instil creative thinking at the module level which could eventually lead to more sustained programme-level change across disciplines. the response at what was already an anxious time with high demands on tutors, it was clear that any development activity that would involve tutors questioning their existing design and delivery foundations needed to be non-threatening, supportive and reassuring. ideally it would also be short, uplifting and empowering, recognising them as subject specialists. the idea of a creating a storyboard arose from the internally produced guidance for online delivery. in the guidance, we strongly suggested that course teams consider the use of narrative as a way of supporting students’ ability to make connections across a module. there is evidence that building learning around a narrative, creating stories (avraamidou and goedhart, 2017) and using case studies can support memory recall (rybarczyk, 2007; vacek and liesveld, 2020). we experimented with creating our own version of how to build a narrative as a mode of delivery for the session, thus modelling the learning objectives of the session through the mode of delivery, and the session took tutors through the process of creating a storyboard for a module they teach. tutors were asked to have blank paper and coloured pens for the session and to be somewhere quiet. after creating their storyboards, we asked them to send in photographs, and these were widely shared on a padlet. we kept the activity lowtech so that tutors were not intimidated about engaging. importantly, through tightly focused facilitation of the session, the participants were asked to both problematise and solve the issue of how best to deliver their module online. we hoped that this approach would give them a sense of ownership and that they would be inclined to take the outcome forward to move past the ‘emergency’ response towards a more considered approach. drawing on lozanov’s suggestopedia approach (cited richards and rogers, 2001), the facilitators posed questions that supported participants in reflecting on and challenging their own assumptions regarding the most effective way to organise and assess their module. each suggestive question ended with an instruction to draw the answer in their lucas and chapman storyboarding and suggestopedia for curriculum re-design journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 3 storyboard. questions were delivered softly, with all participants on mute to create a relaxing atmosphere. questions related back to previous ones, creating and suggesting their own narrative through forms that assumed good practice in curriculum design: ‘now, take a look again at . . .. how could they be broken down? do that now in a different colour [pause]. look again, how do the broken-down themes connect to each other? why do you think that? draw the connections on your storyboard’. participants were also asked to chunk their modules into ways that made sense for their subject, then consider and challenge the order on their storyboard. there were two main objectives behind the questioning technique used in the session: to encourage different ways of looking at the module and its delivery, and to encourage participants to create a connected curriculum. in addition to this, we hoped participants would find a ‘golden thread’ or narrative that would connect and align chunks, learning outcomes and the assessment (biggs and tang, 2011). following a successful pilot session with law, the storyboarding session was rolled out across the university. the two facilitators noted that most participants, at some point, had a ‘magic moment’, a realisation about an unaligned assessment or ideas about a different order that could scaffold the learning more effectively. feedback was wholly positive, attracting comments about the effectiveness of the technique in making what felt like an overwhelming task into a workable solution. one participant wrote that prior to the session they had felt they were working in ‘a vacuum of ignorance’ but afterwards, they felt they understood the full learner journey. recommendations the immediate benefit of using storyboarding and suggestopedia was that tutors were gently guided towards finding their own solutions to what seemed to them a ‘wicked problem’, that is, how to deliver a programme online that was designed to be delivered face-to-face with little knowledge of online learning or digital skills (rittel and webber 1973). for those considering a similar project, we would recommend the following: lucas and chapman storyboarding and suggestopedia for curriculum re-design journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 4 • ensure that participants have a shared experience to build on. our participants understood what did not work from the emergency move online, and this meant they were motivated to develop their practice and had some knowledge and experience to use as a springboard for further development. • spend time creating an environment which is conducive to reflection in terms of the timing of the session and the choice of facilitator. our academic development team are referred to and recognised as a ‘trusted brand’ and this encouraged participants to be open-minded about a new approach. • acknowledge that curriculum rules are understood differently by different people and subjects. a storyboarding process moves reflections on design away from teaching-led towards a learning-led approach. this means that participants make explicit links between design features that have previously not been considered. the result is a more connected curriculum and greater confidence among tutors in understanding the connections. • suggestopedia as an approach has the potential to bring calm to high-stress/highstakes situations, as it acknowledges expertise and helps participants to channel this. • take time to devise and test out the suggestopedia approach questions; these should gently guide participants to ‘notice’ aspects of curriculum design, encourage them to challenge the status quo and test out a different approach. ensure questions probe in sufficient depth. deliver the questions gently and allow time for participants to think and draw before the next question. • offer a low-tech version so that participants are only dealing with one challenge at a time. microsoft teams was already familiar to our participants as a staff meeting platform, and the use of pen and paper meant their storyboards were personal to them, easy to create, and could be shared via a photo if appropriate. the storyboarding approach has now been embedded into our academic development curriculum design days with programme teams and will remain a useful tool for tutors to re-use as they progress their blended approach to teaching and learning post-pandemic. lucas and chapman storyboarding and suggestopedia for curriculum re-design journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 5 references avraamidour, l. and goedhart, m. (2017) ‘tell me a story: the use of narrative as a learning tool for natural selection’, educational media international, 54(1), pp.20-33. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/09523987.2017.1324361 (accessed: 5 october 2021). biggs, j. and tang, c. (2011) teaching for quality learning at university. 4th edn. new york: mcgraw hill. phipps, r. and merisotis, j. (2000) quality on the line: benchmarks for success in internetbased distance education. available at https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ed444407.pdf (accessed: 8 june 2021). richards, j.c. and rodgers, t.s. (2001) approaches and methods in language teaching. cambridge: cambridge university press. rittel, h.w.j. and webber, m.m. (1973) ‘dilemmas in a general theory of planning’, policy sciences, 4(2), pp.155–169. available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/bf01405730 (accessed: 11 october 2021) rybarczyk, b,j. (2007) ‘tools of engagement: using case studies in synchronous distancelearning environments’, journal of college science teaching, 37(1), pp.31-33. vacek, j. and liesveld, j. (2020) ‘teaching concepts to nursing students using model case studies, the venn diagram, and questioning strategies’, nursing education perspectives, 41(6), pp.373-375. available at: 10.1097/01.nep.0000000000000514 (accessed: 11 october 2021) white, d., (2021) the need for presence not ‘contact hours’. available at: http://daveowhite.com/presence/ (accessed: 8 june 2021). https://doi.org/10.1080/09523987.2017.1324361 https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ed444407.pdf https://doi.org/10.1007/bf01405730 https://doi.org/10.1097/01.nep.0000000000000514 https://eur03.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3a%2f%2fdaveowhite.com%2fpresence%2f&data=04%7c01%7cisabel.lucas%40cumbria.ac.uk%7c55c76deca6644026900508d91609fbda%7cb627db1d99584fd18ea48ac3b27cf00f%7c1%7c0%7c637565054391900966%7cunknown%7ctwfpbgzsb3d8eyjwijoimc4wljawmdailcjqijoiv2lumziilcjbtii6ik1hawwilcjxvci6mn0%3d%7c1000&sdata=h51viniucnwcxbak9itofatmod4ya1tttwcahj03qhc%3d&reserved=0 lucas and chapman storyboarding and suggestopedia for curriculum re-design journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 6 author details isabel lucas is the head of centre for academic practice enhancement at the university of cumbria, uk. she has taught in the uk and overseas for over 25 years, holds a number of external roles related to learning, teaching and quality enhancement, and is a senior fellow (ahe). amanda chapman is a senior academic developer in the centre for academic practice enhancement at the university of cumbria, uk. she is programme leader for the pgcert learning and teaching in higher education and scheme lead for advancehe fellowships. storyboarding and suggestopedia for curriculum re-design the challenge the response recommendations references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special issue 22: compendium of innovative practice october 2021 ________________________________________________________________________ honouring loved ones who have passed: bringing grief into the pedagogical frame during the pandemic farrukh akhtar kingston university, uk keywords: covid-19; grief; bereavement; pedagogy; pedagogical frame; belonging. the challenge it takes discipline to learn: to create a dedicated space in the franticness of our lives in which we can be grounded and focused. this is not easy at the best of times. during a pandemic it is even harder. when that pandemic leads to the loss of loved ones – the very loved ones that acted as a source of support – it is unsurprising if, along with the extinguishing of an important light in our lives, some other vital thing is lost: the vibrant space in which learning took place. as a course leader in a post-1992 university, i am regularly notified about student life events. as the pandemic progressed, i was aware of over 30 students suffering bereavements, predominately from black and minority ethnic (bme) backgrounds. i thought of them studying, grieving at home during lockdown, without the usual buffer of rituals and connections to wider community. hughes (2019) refers to the need to normalise heightened situations, to give the message that we are all in this together. however, it was clear this was not so. it felt like the dead were amassing steadily, with the bell tolling more in some quarters. some students suffered multiple losses within a frighteningly short timeframe, family members dying within weeks of each other, in different parts of the world. notifications grew; students reported their losses, steadily withdrawing. then two exemplary students vanished after suffering bereavements. they did not respond to emails, phone calls, letters, or colleagues’ entreaties. it seemed the academy had no space for grief. it was ‘disenfranchised’ (doka, 1989). akhtar honouring loved ones who have passed: bringing grief into the pedagogical frame during the pandemic journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 2 the whole student group appeared to lack the resources to emotionally reach out to their grieving peers. their expectation was the university should provide this ‘support’. referrals to student counselling felt grossly inadequate. a narrative of rage was developing amongst the students blaming an inflexible and persecutory institution that offered no support. a fairly collegial community was being wrenched apart, leaving me feeling powerless. i was concerned about students’ welfare and wanted to re-assure them that, with time, the resumption of studies was not only possible, but could act as a resource. the response corr (1999) talks of ‘enhancing the concept of disenfranchised grief’ (p.1), embracing it in its broadest sense. it felt imperative to move beyond the normal pedagogical frame, to acknowledge loss, in a powerful show of togetherness and inclusion (goldman, 2017). instead of grief being cast to the side-lines of the academy, we would acknowledge it and give it centre-space, by holding an event for students to celebrate the lives of loved ones who had passed. my thinking was influenced by weller’s (2015) ideas: by taking the smallest steps in acknowledging grief, the wounded part of us feels met. nwoye’s (2005) focus on the role of community in managing grief was also pertinent. whatever students’ faith or cultural background, we would collectively share small acts of remembrance to help us find the way through grief, towards healing. my initial explorations with colleagues met with caution. grief can seem boundless and colleagues rightly expressed concern about creating a safe enough space online. however, they agreed it was worth exploring. there was a risk in taking action, but also one in doing nothing. student engagement and co-production felt essential. all students were invited, 17 registered to attend, and three to contribute. we discussed how they could do this. although time consuming, this process was as important as the event itself, giving agency to students, and hopefully, a message of belonging (hughes, 2019). together, we carefully organised an hour-long online event. akhtar honouring loved ones who have passed: bringing grief into the pedagogical frame during the pandemic journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 3 on the day, the students spoke with quiet dignity about loved ones, sharing stories that sprung to mind. the shared experience of loss united us as we listened and many responded with verbal comments, or through the chat box. loved ones who had passed were brought 'into the room' through our respectful presence. we also celebrated the lives of two faculty staff members who had passed away. there was an open space, in which anyone could speak if they felt moved to, and music. to close, we brought the focus back to the living, to self-care and how small acts of remembrance can help the grief process. there were a couple of silent minutes, in which students could reflect or light a real or virtual candle, closing with music. the hour-long event was incredibly moving. student comments included thanks for a ‘powerful session’ and that it was ‘good to be supported in such times’. there was a sense of gratitude with students commenting on the blessing of shared stories and memories. through the event we all felt deeply connected with each other. in the staff debrief afterwards, one colleague said that the event had been ‘amazing’. another said that it had ‘opened up the kind of learning opportunities possible’. its impact reverberated for some time, gently resourcing and strengthening our fragile learning community. in giving grief centre space, it lost the edges of its ‘otherness’, was more accepted, opening up hope. this shift to hope is important. swartwood et al. (2011) refer to the exchange of hope in online grief communities as a way of validating grief and the move towards healing. recommendations the session emerged from a need to be locally responsive to the whole student experience, to maintain a sense of community. discernment is needed to identify such issues and courage to extend the pedagogical frame to address them. careful planning with trusted colleagues is a must. educators need to ensure that they feel adequately resourced, and are supported in the emotional labour (hochschild, 1983) inevitably involved. akhtar honouring loved ones who have passed: bringing grief into the pedagogical frame during the pandemic journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 4 co-production with students maximises engagement. use of online resources such as polls ensures every student has a voice. however, this does not replace the personal touch. approaching less vocal students builds on their strengths and contributes to inclusivity. our relationship to online learning has been changed forever by the pandemic. this example demonstrates real opportunities to use online tools to strengthen student mental health and to develop community and a greater sense of belonging for all students. references corr, c. a. (1999) ‘enhancing the concept of disenfranchised grief’, omega journal of death and dying, 38(1), pp.1-20. https://doi.org/10.2190/ld26-42a6-1eav-3mdn. doka, k. j. (1989) ‘disenfranchised grief’, in doka, k. j. (ed.) disenfranchised grief: recognizing hidden sorrow. lexington, ma: lexington books, pp.3-11. goldman, l. (ed.) (2017) creating inclusion and well-being for marginalized students: whole-school approaches to supporting children's grief, loss, and trauma. london: jessica kingsley publishers. hochschild, a. r. (1983) the managed heart: commercialization of human feeling. berkeley: university of california press. hughes, g. and spanner, l. (2019) the university mental health charter. leeds: student minds. nwoye, a. (2005) ‘memory healing processes and community intervention in grief work in africa’, australian and new zealand journal of family therapy, 26(3), pp.147-154. https://doi.org/10.1002/j.1467-8438.2005.tb00662.x. swartwood. r. m., veach, p. m., kuhne, j., lee, h. k., ji, k. (2011) ‘surviving grief: an analysis of the exchange of hope in online grief communities’, omega journal of death and dying, 63(2), pp.161-181. https://doi.org/10.2190/om.63.2.d. https://doi.org/10.2190/ld26-42a6-1eav-3mdn https://doi.org/10.1002/j.1467-8438.2005.tb00662.x https://doi.org/10.2190%2fom.63.2.d akhtar honouring loved ones who have passed: bringing grief into the pedagogical frame during the pandemic journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 5 weller, f. (2015) the wild edge of sorrow: rituals or renewal and the sacred work of grief. california: north atlantic books. author details farrukh akhtar is an associate professor at kingston university. she is a national teaching fellow, and author of mastering social work values and ethics (jkp) and preparing the ethical toolkit: balancing rights and responsibilities (palgrave). she has published in the journal of social work practice, writing in practice, working with older people, bmc geriatrics, and others. honouring loved ones who have passed: bringing grief into the pedagogical frame during the pandemic the challenge the response recommendations references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 2: february 2010 that’s writing talk: reflections on the community of practice approach in the academic writing readers group rebecca bell nottingham trent university, uk abstract despite being comprised of ‘academic communities’ higher education often provides colleagues from different disciplines with few opportunities to discuss common practices or concerns. some topics, such as student writing, are so widespread that there is, however, a need for staff to have the opportunity to work collaboratively. a focused community/network provides staff with the opportunity to share good practice and develop new ideas. such a group has been established at nottingham trent university to explore the topic of student writing. this article examines the ‘academic writing readers group’ and discusses the challenges and benefits of using a community of practice approach to the topic of student writing. keywords: academic writing; communities of practice; reading groups; social capital. background the academic writing readers group (awrg) project was originally established in response to increasing staff complaints about poor standards of student writing. during workshop sessions some academics were highlighting that they felt uncomfortable teaching students about academic writing claiming they had little knowledge of the prominent practical approaches and current theoretical developments, such as academic literacies or writing across the curriculum. it became clear that whilst academics were subject specialists, some had little knowledge about academic writing and how to help students develop this aspect of their studies. as part of a team of learning developers based centrally in the university, it became clear that it would be beneficial to provide a forum in which those that were expert or knowledgeable about academic writing could bell that’s writing talk: reflections on the community of practice approach in the awrg interact with those who wished to develop this aspect of their students’ work. thus the initial driver for establishing the group was to provide an opportunity for colleagues to meetand share ideas and practices, whilst being made aware of developments in the field, such as a focus on the transition of writing from further to higher education (foster, bell and salzano, 2008) new ideas and resources in the learning and teaching of academic writing are constantly being developed by experts in the field. however, there is often little scope for teaching staff to engage with and develop these ideas into practical activities to be used in teaching sessions. the awrg attempts to address this by helping staff to access and engage with current literature and research from the field of academic writing. colleagues are then able to examine their own practices of teaching writing in terms of the ideas and developments they have encountered both in the literature and through discussions with their colleagues. who was involved and what happened? the group was established in 2007 and has been running at different frequencies since then; it is transient in nature and colleagues attend as and when they are able. sessions have between 10-15 participants from across the university, including phd students, learner development staff, student support staff and subject specific academics. the sessions are based around a relevant paper from the field which is initially selected by the learner developer (myself) and circulated to those who have registered to attend. the main topics discussed focus on a student academic writing activity or issue. the articles come from numerous disciplines and are written in various styles; previously covered topics have included reading lists (stokes and martin, 2008), the one minute paper (stead, 2005) and written feedback (pitts, 2005). attendees are expected to read the paper and come to the session ready to discuss it. colleagues often suggest papers and themes to be covered by the group including practical sessions which, if appropriate, are developed for future meetings. although attendees are required to undertake a reading to inform the discussion, the sessions operate on a relatively relaxed basis and follow no specific agenda. as facilitator to the group i also draft a number of questions beforehand to encourage and promote debate, although the conversation evolves as attendees see fit. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 2 bell that’s writing talk: reflections on the community of practice approach in the awrg the debates so far have covered numerous areas including: writing in the disciplines (wid) and writing across the curriculum (wac) methodologies and academic literacies, whilst also sharing ideas about specific activities and resources. some discussions prove particularly fruitful: after one meeting discussing lea and street’s (1998) ‘student writing in higher education’ paper attendees continued to debate the issues via e-mail. consequently, the establishment of an online forum on which the group can continue their discussion is being considered. at an institutional level the group may be seen to produce very little. it attracts no funding, conducts minimal research and does not offer a concise answer to the question of how to improve students’ academic writing. the group’s value, however, lies in the networks it creates amongst its members and the social capital and knowledge that is shared through the discussions (woolcock, 2001). the approach is beneficial for learning developers as it helps to highlight which issues of student writing concern staff across the university, enabling centrally based funding and research to be allocated to areas of heightened importance to colleagues. feedback from participants in response to growing interest in the group from external colleagues, an online survey was sent to all staff members who had enquired about or attended an awrg session. this was done to gather more detailed feedback about the group. the findings gave an insight into reasons for attending, the benefits they felt they had gained and any concerns attendees had about the group. those who had expressed an interest but not attended cited lack of time as the main reason for this. the online survey predominantly consisted of short-answer qualitative-based questions which required attendees to think in more detail about their involvement in the group. of those people surveyed, the majority of respondents had attended at least one meeting (58%) with a large number having attended more than once (41%). this is a positive sign indicating that out of those who attended most felt that it was a useful experience and thus participated again. the most surprising finding was perhaps that attendees were not new to the sector: over 82% of respondents had been working in higher education for more than five years, bringing a raft of knowledge and experience to the group. further journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 3 bell that’s writing talk: reflections on the community of practice approach in the awrg questions asked attendees about their motivations for attending and any benefits or issues they had identified. when asked why they attended sessions staff expressed that they liked ‘the opportunity to meet other colleagues involved in the same thing,’ (anon staff member). another motivation was that many of their students ‘find academic writing a real challenge’ (anon staff member). overall the main reasons for attending the sessions included personal interest, concern regarding falling standards, the opportunity to share good practice and networking. colleagues identified the group as a good place to meet and discuss common concerns, whether to create solutions or simply to share ideas – something that is harder to do as individuals. whilst others appreciated the chance to develop – ‘the reading and discussion has broadened my professional knowledge and outlook’ (anon staff member). staff seem to value the opportunity to use the group as part of their own professional development through interaction with their peers. attendees seem to be particularly interested in hearing how colleagues work in other disciplines. participants often mention an activity or resource they use and other attendees then consider how they could adapt it to fit their subject area. the development of generic transferable resources (non-subject specific writing activities) that staff can tailor to their discipline may provide a way of tackling writing support in higher education, as such an approach requires students to learn only one or two key activities that can then be tailored to individual subject areas. the reusable learning objects developed by the rlo cetl (2005) also use this approach, developing a range of generic activities to assist learning in a variety of subjects and although their effectiveness is still being evaluated it seems to be a popular approach. the information gathered from the survey allowed an invaluable insight into not only how the attendees viewed the groups’ purpose but also how the group might develop in the future. a community of practice? the awrg may be conceptualised as having a community of practice approach as it highlights the value and importance of people working together and sharing practice (wenger, 1998). the group unites staff from numerous fields and this multi-disciplinarily approach promotes innovation and development by enabling attendees to gain a better understanding of how colleagues tackle similar problems in differing subjects. this journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 4 bell that’s writing talk: reflections on the community of practice approach in the awrg knowledge is then often used in the development of similar activities in their own subject areas. the group provides a neutral space ‘separate from the pressures of people’s jobs’ (wenger et al., 2002: 61) in which to discuss relevant issues. attendees frequently raise the point that they feel very isolated from colleagues through the strata of schools, colleges, departments and modules. the readers’ group provides one of the few forums in the university where learner development staff and academics can come together and share ideas and concerns. by being able to share their experiences, both receive a greater perspective of the overall student experience which can help in developing their practice. the awrg helps to develop a sense of community through both the physical group and the networks that it nurtures. outcomes and altered practices an important aspect of a community of practice is that it ultimately works towards a common goal and seeks to develop attendees’ practices (wenger, 1998). when asked some of the respondents (31%) stated that they have changed an aspect of their practice as a result of attending a session. this change in practice had occurred in numerous ways ‘i have disseminated some of the information gained to colleagues, and have used some ideas informally in class’ (anon staff response). some attendees have used small writing activities that they discovered at the meetings such as the ‘one minute paper’ or ‘minute writes’ (bean, 2001) in their sessions. a growing interest in the use of such activities instigated the establishment of the writing across the curriculum project which promotes the use of in-class writing, evaluation of which is still underway. many of the respondents stated that they have increased their awareness of the issues and have changed their attitude towards student writing, with some stating that the group had changed them, ‘certainly in terms of awareness, if not actual practice’ (anon staff response). raising awareness is often seen as the first step in change management and therefore whilst there have been relatively few practical changes so far it is hoped that this will increase in the future. despite some colleagues’ interest in the matter, issues of time and resource management restricted their engagement with the topic – ‘i have become aware that there is a whole literature on writing that i could get into if i had the time’ (anon staff member). the views journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 5 bell that’s writing talk: reflections on the community of practice approach in the awrg expressed by attendees reflect a slow but steady culture of change toward the topic of student writing highlighting that some staff are now not only identifying the problems but also beginning to challenge them. summary this article has attempted to demonstrate that the awrg is a highly valuable project that provides a much needed forum for staff to identify, solidify and reflect on their practice. nevertheless, in terms of research and publication the group may appear to be a low value exercise as it seems to produce very little. however, in higher education such networks and informal discussions provide valuable social capital in terms of development and innovation. until recently, the project has not been discussed at conferences, produced papers or resources and activities for use beyond the group. whilst this has created a relaxed environment at the meetings, it creates concern that the group may languish with such a small internal group of participants. it is hoped that by disseminating the project more widely it may engage other colleagues in discussion thus strengthening the group overall. enhancing the group’s profile at a national level may heighten engagement and awareness across the sector (among students and senior management), thus highlighting that the development of academic writing is valued by all those involved. references bean, j. c. (2001) engaging ideas. san francisco: jossey bass. bell, r. (2009) ‘the academic writing readers group’, 4th association for learning development in higher education conference (aldinhe). bournemouth university, bournemouth 12 april. foster, e., bell, r. and salzano, s. (2008) ‘what’s a journal?’, research into the prior learning experiences of students entering higher education. 3rd annual european first year experience conference. wolverhampton 7-9 may. lea, m.r. and street, b.v. (1998) ‘student writing in higher education: an academic literacies approach’, studies in higher education 23(2) pp157-171. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 6 bell that’s writing talk: reflections on the community of practice approach in the awrg pitts, s.e. (2005) ‘’testing, testing…’: how do students use written feedback?’, active learning in higher education 6(3) pp 218 -229. rlo cetl (2005) the cetl for reusable learning objects. online: http://www.rlo-cetl.ac.uk/joomla/index.php (accessed: 4 january 2010). stead, d.r. (2005) ‘a review of the one minute paper’, active learning in higher education 6(2) pp118-131. stokes, p. and martin, l. (2008) ‘reading lists: a study of tutor and student perceptions, expectations and realities’, studies in higher education 33(2) pp113-125. wenger, e. (1998) communities of practice: learning, meaning and identity. cambridge: cambridge university press. wenger, e., mcdermott, r. and snyder, w.m. (2002) cultivating communities of practice. boston, ma: harvard business school press. woolcock, m. (2001) ‘the place of social capital in understanding social and economic outcomes’, isuma canadian journal of policy research 2(10) pp 11-17. author details rebecca bell is a learning and teaching officer based at nottingham trent university. rebecca also works as part of the learnhigher cetl researching and developing academic writing resources. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 7 http://www.rlo-cetl.ac.uk/joomla/index.php that’s writing talk: reflections on the community of practice approach in the academic writing readers group abstract background who was involved and what happened? feedback from participants a community of practice? outcomes and altered practices summary references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special issue 22: compendium of innovative practice october 2021 ________________________________________________________________________ hybrid teaching workshops: upskilling educators to deliver hybrid classes sandris zeivots university of sydney, australia courtney shalavin university of sydney, australia keywords: hybrid teaching; hybrid classes; academic professional development; covid19; pandemic pedagogy. the challenge the covid-19 pandemic has fundamentally challenged teaching and learning practices in higher education. in early 2020, the university of sydney business school joined many other institutions in rapidly pivoting to online teaching in response to social distancing requirements. while online and blended delivery modes were practised pre-pandemic, more traditional face-to-face teaching methods were the ‘norm’. the school’s educators rose to the challenge of delivering most classes online by the end of year. in early 2021, continually changing strategic and financial circumstances posed a new challenge – some courses required delivery in a hybrid mode. hybrid teaching requires an educator to manage on-campus and remote students simultaneously (baker et al., 2020). the majority of staff at the business school had limited experience and understanding of hybrid delivery. the business co-design (bcd) team, a mix of educational developers, learning designers, and learning technologists, was approached to meet the challenge of preparing academic staff for teaching in hybrid mode. two of us – an educational developer and a learning designer from bcd – were tasked with delivering experiential workshops on hybrid teaching that were tailored to the needs of our academic colleagues in the business school. zeivots and shalavin hybrid teaching workshops: upskilling educators to deliver hybrid classes journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 2 the response we facilitated six experiential workshops to inform and prepare educators for hybrid teaching. the aim of the workshops was four-fold: to inform educators of good practice in hybrid teaching; to support educators in the planning and delivery of hybrid classes; to introduce educators to hybrid teaching spaces available in the business school; and to provide at-elbow advice on transforming classes into hybrid mode (cusano, 2018). the workshops were delivered in hybrid mode to simulate the experience of teaching and participating in hybrid classes. workshops ran for 45 minutes and leveraged the videoconferencing tool zoom and available av technologies at the university to blend the virtual and physical environments. we structured the workshops into three stages: overviewing strategies for hybrid teaching and available support at the university; participating in two experiential hybrid activities using padlet and jamboard; and a q&a session with an opportunity for at-elbow advice. we considered the practical implications of our design choices, choosing to keep everything, above all else, simple. we avoided overcomplicated definitions of hybrid teaching and technologies that were not widely available. we chose to showcase two collaborative tools – padlet and jamboard – that were effective at blending the physical and virtual learning environments together, free to use, straight-forward to navigate and implement, and could be employed to engage students with synchronous learning activities. overall, the workshops were well-attended and valuable. a total of 86 educators attended the workshops, with 78 of these participants joining via zoom. the results of an evaluation survey (12% participation rate) indicated that the workshops were well-received. the survey explored participants’ motivations for attending the workshop, prior knowledge of hybrid teaching, and valuable learning obtained in the workshop. survey respondents indicated that they had limited knowledge and experience of teaching hybrid classes prior to attending the workshop. the primary motive for participants’ workshop attendance, cited by respondents to the survey, was to learn about hybrid teaching classes (70%), followed by personal development (50%), and preparation for the eventuality that they would have to teach a hybrid class (40%). all respondents indicated that they learnt multiple skills and strategies, with the most popular being tips for hybrid teaching (90%), how to use interactive tools (80%), strategies for teaching hybrid classes (70%), and how to overcome zeivots and shalavin hybrid teaching workshops: upskilling educators to deliver hybrid classes journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 3 potential challenges with hybrid teaching (60%). valuable learning obtained from the workshop included: useful hints, recommendations that were helpful and well explained, and ‘good general guidance’. survey respondents had concerns about using different tools and spending too much time on technology rather than content and learning, and also wished to learn more about setting up classrooms for hybrid teaching. recommendations delivering workshops in hybrid mode was challenging. workshop participants overwhelmingly chose to attend the workshops online, which in some instances meant that we were delivering to an empty room. it was evident from the survey feedback that some participants were unsure about how to use the physical classroom space in hybrid mode which may have been alleviated if they had attended on campus. after delivering six hybrid teaching workshops for academic staff, we recommend: • encouraging participants to attend face-to-face, if circumstances permit, to ensure they get a feel for how to leverage the physical classroom space in hybrid mode. we observed that in-person attendees particularly benefited from the workshop as they often stayed longer and asked specific questions around the physical learning space, technology, and their individual context. outlining the benefits of face-to-face participation in workshop invitations and promotions may encourage participants to attend in person. • experimenting with workshop delivery to showcase various approaches in hybrid teaching (richardson et al., 2020). over six workshops we tested three different audio and visual input and output options including audio and visual input and output through the teacher’s laptop, audio and visual input and output through available av technologies, and a combination of both options. we trialled these modes and discussed the benefits and challenges directly with participants. in some instances, we invited participants to experience poor audio quality to highlight the importance of clear sound quality. • keeping the workshops simple and tailored. we noticed that attendees were mostly interested in general enquiries about hybrid teaching in case they are required to deliver hybrid classes in the forthcoming semesters. the spectrum of staff attending zeivots and shalavin hybrid teaching workshops: upskilling educators to deliver hybrid classes journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 4 the workshops varied: from academics with no expectations of teaching hybrid classes to those making specific requests about using padlet in a hybrid class scheduled a few hours after the workshop. the last 15-minute q&a section was essential to address the diverse set of enquiries, concerns, and curiosities about hybrid teaching. • that universities employ institution-wide definitions of relevant terms. several enquiries raised a concern about using similar terms such as hybrid, hyflex, blended, and online teaching interchangeably. institution-wide definitions may avoid confusion and foster consistency. references baker, d. m. a., unni, r., kerr-sims, s. and marquis, g. (2020) ‘understanding factors that influence attitude and preference for hybrid course formats’, the e-journal of business education & scholarship of teaching, 14(1), pp.174-188. cusano, c. (2018) vocational instructors experience and practice teaching in the hybrid environment. unpublished phd thesis. walden university. richardson, j. w., lingat, j. e. m., hollis, e. and pritchard, m. (2020) ‘shifting teaching and learning in online learning spaces: an investigation of a faculty online teaching and learning initiative’, online learning, 24(1), pp.67-91. https://doi.org/10.24059/olj.v24i1.1629 author details sandris zeivots is a lecturer in educational development at the university of sydney business school. he investigates how to design and implement innovative learning experiences that are meaningful, engaging, and purposeful. courtney shalavin is a learning designer at the university of sydney business school. her work focuses on technology-enabled work-integrated learning, sustainable learning design, and interactive learning in large classes. https://doi.org/10.24059/olj.v24i1.1629 hybrid teaching workshops: upskilling educators to deliver hybrid classes the challenge the response recommendations references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 21: september 2021 ________________________________________________________________________ harnessing the potential of extracurricular opportunities to enhance graduate employability in higher education maria moxey university of winchester edward simpkin university of winchester abstract this paper addresses the emerging theme in the literature that graduates often do not demonstrate the relevant skills to employers in job applications, interviews and in the workplace, and that heis should harness the potential of extra-curricular opportunities to enhance employability (tchibozo, 2007; griffiths et al., 2017). this study reports on a survey which was distributed to students in voluntary committee roles at one university to garner information around students’ ability to identify the skills gained in their roles that are transferable as employability skills. the students’ level of confidence and readiness to articulate these skills during the job application process was then explored. results suggest that, while students feel as though they are confident and ready to draw on skills developed in extra-curricular voluntary roles, questions could be raised as to whether their ability to identify and articulate them accurately reflects their level of confidence. therefore, a workshop and resource have been created as part of the project to help students be able to recognise and articulate the employability skills gained. keywords: extra-curricular activities; employability; leadership; skills; higher education. introduction it has become increasingly important, since the turn of the century, that students are employable when they leave university (allen et al., 2013; tymon, 2013; griffiths et al., 2017). as the pressure for outcomes increases, tuition fees continue to rise across moxey and simpkin harnessing the potential of extracurricular opportunities to enhance graduate employability in higher education journal of learning development in higher education, issue 21: september 2021 2 western higher education (he), and universities are seen as marketised entities, the issue of graduate employability has become more pressing (milburn-shaw and walker 2017; donald et al., 2018). consequently, universities are exploring ways to enhance student employability and prepare students for the workplace within and outside the curriculum. while it is widely accepted that extracurricular activities (ecas) enhance the student experience, and there is a growing body of literature on their role in aiding the socialisation process and fostering a sense of belonging at university (tieu et al., 2010), their value in enhancing employability is less well-documented (winstone et al., 2020). the literature that does exist indicates that ecas can be beneficial for social networking, developing skills and improving employability (stevenson and clegg, 2011; clark et al., 2015). ecas in he are defined as informal spaces which allow for ‘life-wide learning’ within the student experience and which are not part of the formal degree classification (jackson, 2011; thompson et al., 2013). in this paper, when referring to ecas, the authors are predominantly referring to societies, clubs and voluntary roles and not to activities such as placements, part-time jobs or studying abroad. universities have a wide variety of ecas on offer, including sports clubs, societies, and network groups, most of which are student-led and offer voluntary opportunities such as captain, vice-captain, social secretary and wellbeing officer (thompson et al., 2013). the literature suggests that volunteering in leadership or committee roles in sports teams and societies can enhance employability, yet studies continue to report that many graduates do not possess the necessary skills for the modern workplace (bowers-brown and harvey, 2004; heaton et al., 2008; cumming, 2010; lowden et al., 2011; gedye and beaumont, 2018; prospects, 2018; teng et al., 2019). while students recognise leadership positions can be valuable for employability, evidence suggests they often do not demonstrate the relevant skills to employers in job applications, interviews and in the workplace itself (frankham, 2017). therefore, this paper hopes to address this by enabling students at this university to harness the transferable skills gained through voluntary leadership positions. defining employability when defining employability, there are different stakeholder perspectives to consider, such as the government, employers, heis, students and graduates (tymon, 2013). since these moxey and simpkin harnessing the potential of extracurricular opportunities to enhance graduate employability in higher education journal of learning development in higher education, issue 21: september 2021 3 parties have different priorities and drivers in relation to graduate employability, agreeing on one definition can be challenging. nevertheless, it is commonly accepted that values, attitudes, behaviours and competencies should be incorporated, and therefore the following definitions are useful: employability means that students and graduates can discern, acquire, adapt and continually enhance the skills, understandings and personal attributes that make them more likely to find and create meaningful paid and unpaid work that benefits themselves, the workforce, the community and the economy (oliver, 2015, p.63). the capability of obtaining work, functioning effectively within work; moving between jobs/roles; and having the skills, knowledge and attributes that make this possible (gedye and beaumont, 2018, p.408). oliver’s (2015) definition accounts for the journey that students and graduates undertake to develop personal and professional attributes to help find meaningful employment. gedye and beaumont’s (2018) conceptualisation of employability is particularly useful, as they consider personal factors such as self-efficacy, self-confidence, and self-esteem as moderators for employability, which are helpful when considering students’ readiness to apply for jobs relating to their chosen career paths. contextualising employability and higher education in the uk there are several factors that have contributed towards graduate employability becoming a priority across the he sector, not least the precarious nature of the economy leading to higher unemployment rates and reduced job security (griffiths et al., 2017). as universities have become more accessible (mccaig, 2011), the number of graduates competing for jobs has increased; thus, many graduates are overeducated for their first jobs and do not directly utilise the academic content of their degree (griffiths et al., 2017). under the further education act 1992, polytechnic universities were able to offer accredited degrees, and during the following twenty years, annual tuition fees increased. as tuition fees have increased, so has the pressure on institutions to deliver a better moxey and simpkin harnessing the potential of extracurricular opportunities to enhance graduate employability in higher education journal of learning development in higher education, issue 21: september 2021 4 university experience, as well as ensure social mobility and employability (milburn-shaw and walker, 2017). with the introduction of the teaching excellence and student outcomes framework, and continued emphasis on student outcomes in a marketised education, universities have had to become more accountable for their performance and the service they provide, which has led to increased importance placed on measuring institutional performance through quality assurance, league tables and the national student satisfaction survey (office for students, 2020). league table position is a key indicator of performance in terms of university recruitment, reputation, and employability (frankham, 2017). not only is graduate employment becoming more competitive, but graduates are seemingly underprepared for the world of work, particularly lacking soft skills (tchibozo, 2007; teng et al., 2019). cumming (2010, p.3) notes that ‘a dominant theme emerging is that many graduates lack appropriate skills, attitudes and dispositions, which in turn prevents them from participating effectively in the workplace’. indeed, employers have been raising concerns about the quality of graduates for the last three decades and continue to put pressure on universities to deliver work-ready employees (tymon, 2013; clarke, 2018). employers expect graduates to have the requisite technical and discipline competencies from their degrees and require them to demonstrate a range of broader skills and attributes that include teamwork, communication, leadership, critical thinking, problem solving and often managerial abilities or potential (allen et al., 2013). branine (2008) found that graduate employers are more interested in personal attributes and soft skills than degree classifications, subject, or which university students attended. this demonstrates that employers value transferable skills which are often developed outside the classroom as well as in it. it is evident that employers value someone who has participated in eca whilst at university, with particular emphasis on those who took up roles of leadership or responsibility. allen et al. (2013) state that employers were overwhelmingly positive about the benefits of graduates having engaged in sport whilst at university and the skills and attributes they develop. additionally, employers consider leadership positions, organisational roles, and other positions of responsibility within sports clubs and societies moxey and simpkin harnessing the potential of extracurricular opportunities to enhance graduate employability in higher education journal of learning development in higher education, issue 21: september 2021 5 to be particularly beneficial in providing ‘added value’ (allen et al., 2013). however, it is not enough for graduates to simply list these activities on an application form; employers are looking for graduates who are able to demonstrate why these attributes are important and how they can be utilised in the workplace (allen et al., 2013). students are also becoming increasingly aware of the value of participating in activities outside of the classroom (thompson et al., 2013). in research undertaken to explore student perceptions of learning experiences, when asked to outline eight of their most significant learning experiences, 52% of the experiences described were co-curricular (lackner and martini, 2017). additionally, clark et al. (2015) found that, in the opinion of graduates, eca significantly helped develop employability skills, contributed to their first employment, and enhanced their workplace performance, again demonstrating that there is a prevalent view amongst current students and graduates that eca increases employability. despite this, tymon (2013) found, when students were asked about how employability could be developed at university, that ecas were only identified as valuable by a small minority of the students in the sample. this demonstrates that the value of eca amongst students is unclear and multifaceted, and needs further research. there is an expectation from the government and employers that heis have a responsibility to prepare graduates for work (tymon, 2013). whilst heis cannot be solely accountable for solving this issue, employer dissatisfaction with the attributes of the individuals they recruit from universities cannot be ignored (hesketh, 2000). a solution would be to have a more joined up approach in which more interaction and meaningful discussion exists between employers and heis about how to get students engaging with employability and ready for work. while this issue needs further consideration in future research, the aim of this paper is to take responsibility as an hei and consider the extent to which students can harness the potential of existing eca opportunities at this university to help develop and demonstrate their employability. research method for this small-scale study, a survey was distributed to all students at the university who held positions of responsibility in sports teams, societies and network groups. the survey moxey and simpkin harnessing the potential of extracurricular opportunities to enhance graduate employability in higher education journal of learning development in higher education, issue 21: september 2021 6 was distributed via the student union’s volunteer contact database, and of the 200 students who were invited to participate, 12 undergraduates responded. the survey sought to gather information around motivations for volunteering in roles of responsibility, and to gauge their confidence and readiness to apply skills gained in these roles to the context of employability. the survey questions were as follows: 1. please select whether you are member of a sports team committee, society committee or network committee. 2. what is your leadership role in your society, sports team or network (e.g. captain, chair, social secretary etc.)? 3. why did you run for your role within the society or sports team? please describe your aim and motivation. 4. what skills do you think you have or will have acquired through your role? 5. when you apply for jobs, how confident will you be in explaining your role and skill set gained? 6. what can the university do to help you communicate your leadership role in job interviews or applications? (we really want to know how we can help with your future, so please let us know any ideas you may have). the survey used a combination of quantitative and qualitative questions to obtain information about the participants’ backgrounds in relation to the research question, as well as more detailed responses when required (fowler, 2014). the first two questions were quantitative, and allowed participants to provide contextual information, for example, whether they were in a sports team, society or network group, as well as their role within these groups, and students could select multiple answers if applicable. question 5 utilised a likert scale of responses from ‘completely confident’ to ‘not confident at all’. whilst this question was controlled, it did have some flexibility as it enabled the students to place on a scale how confident they felt. qualitative questions 3, 4 and 6 allowed for in-depth answers via a textbox without providing any choices, giving participants the opportunity to write freely. these questions were intended to garner information around motivations for volunteering in roles of responsibility and to discern whether this was something they saw as valuable that they could use in job applications, cvs and job interviews. question 4 explored participants' moxey and simpkin harnessing the potential of extracurricular opportunities to enhance graduate employability in higher education journal of learning development in higher education, issue 21: september 2021 7 ability to identify skills gained and why they are applicable to employment, while question 6 requested feedback about how the university could help students develop employability. as the research used human participants, it was important to account for key ethical considerations to minimise potential harm. the research received ethical clearance from the university where the research took place, demonstrating that ethical considerations such as preserving confidentiality, informed consent and data protection guidelines have been sufficiently accounted for (christians, 2011). data analysis and research limitations a rigorous approach was taken to analysing the results from the survey. quantitative questions 1 and 5 were analysed based on frequency of occurrence to identify the number of respondents in sports teams, societies and network groups, and their perceived level of confidence. thematic analysis was employed to draw findings from qualitative questions 3, 4 and 6. dominant themes emerged based on frequency of occurrence or if deemed significant based on researcher interpretation and connection to the literature (braun and clarke, 2012). from this, it was possible to draw conclusions around students’ motivations for volunteering in leadership roles, and the employability skills they believe they developed in these positions. the reliability of findings drawn from thematic analysis was ensured through investigator triangulation whereby a second researcher offered a different theoretical perspective, to challenge or corroborate themes (flick, 2007). it should be acknowledged that for question 4, while some participants listed skills gained in leadership positions, such as communication for example, others expanded on the term and gave more detail about the way they used their communication skills in the context of their role. the researchers interpreted this to demonstrate that the respondent understood how this skill is relevant to their role, suggesting that they would be able to articulate this to a potential employer. whilst students were not asked to write an exhaustive list of skills accrued and expand on them as if they were writing a job application, the number of skills identified, and their ability to support the skill with some explanation of how it relates to an employment context, allowed the researcher to draw inferences around participants’ ability to do so. moxey and simpkin harnessing the potential of extracurricular opportunities to enhance graduate employability in higher education journal of learning development in higher education, issue 21: september 2021 8 a survey was deemed an appropriate method for collecting data in this research as time and resources were limited, and surveys are an efficient way of collating data from many participants (fowler, 2014). also, with the study taking place during the covid-19 pandemic, this allowed participants the flexibility to complete the short survey digitally at a time that suited them. with more time and resources, it would be valuable to hold follow-up focus groups with participants to expand on and add context to their survey responses (creswell and clark, 2018). this would provide the opportunity to garner rich and detailed information about their motivations for volunteering, as well as their awareness of skills accrued from eca voluntary positions, and their confidence in applying them in a job application. nevertheless, valuable findings can be drawn from the survey results, particularly as students were given the opportunity to provide qualitative answers via the textbox style design for questions 3, 4 and 6. it was hoped that a short survey would yield a high response rate but whilst all students in relevant leadership positions could participate, the response rate was low, and only included undergraduates. potential explanations are that due to the covid-19 pandemic students’ availability, time, and capacity to prioritise such tasks may have reduced. additionally, due to the benefits of surveys as a research tool, they are commonly used for collecting data among university students, which can result in survey fatigue (porter et al., 2004). another potential explanation is that students are not engaging with the concept of employability, and it is this very suspicion that prompted the research. despite the low response rate, the sample included representatives from all three of the selected eca categories (sports teams, societies and network groups), and consisted of varied committee roles within these groups. findings from this small-scale study may be hard to generalise beyond this university; however, despite the study’s limitations, it is possible to draw findings from the survey results around participants’ awareness of skills accrued in eca volunteering and their confidence in articulating these skills to employers, as well as make recommendations for future research in this area, which are discussed in the following sections. moxey and simpkin harnessing the potential of extracurricular opportunities to enhance graduate employability in higher education journal of learning development in higher education, issue 21: september 2021 9 results and discussion experience in ecas at university, particularly in leadership roles, are of great value to employers (tchibozo, 2007; allen et al.,, 2013). with the wide-ranging leadership opportunities available to students, this is an area that universities can harness to drive the employability of their students, and in doing so, benefit the university’s ranking and reputation in league table performance; something that universities are increasingly looking to prioritise (tymon, 2013). findings can be drawn from the survey around motivations for volunteering in ecas, skills and attributes acquired, and students’ perceived confidence in articulating skills gained in a graduate job application. figure 1 below indicates the number of respondents by activity, and the results demonstrated in figures 2 5 are discussed in the following section. figure 1. number of respondents by activity type. as demonstrated in figure 2, the most common motivation that emerged from the survey was students’ enjoyment or passion for their chosen activity. for instance, ‘i enjoy being part of the society’ and ‘i love being part of a team’. the notion that enjoyment and altruism were the most common motives amongst the students for volunteering in leadership roles corroborates findings from roulin and bangerter’s (2013) study, where most students became involved in ecas for altruistic reasons such as interest or passion. in this study, the theme of altruism was mentioned by six participants as a key motivation for volunteering in committee roles, which is relatively unsurprising since 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 sports team committee society committee network committee other number of respondents by activity type moxey and simpkin harnessing the potential of extracurricular opportunities to enhance graduate employability in higher education journal of learning development in higher education, issue 21: september 2021 10 helping others is implicit within the nature of some roles, such as wellbeing officer. while some respondents were motivated by wanting others to enjoy the activity, for others, it was to support the team’s sustainability and development, with responses such as ‘i want as many others to enjoy it as much as i did’ and ‘i loved the society and wanted to help it grow’, demonstrating that it was important to most that they were helping others, often in varying ways. figure 2. motivations for volunteering in eca. responsibility and challenge appeared four times as another dominant motivation for eca volunteering, demonstrated in figure 2. quotes such as ‘i enjoy the responsibility’, ‘i wanted to be more involved with the decisions’ and ‘to challenge myself in my final year’, all demonstrate positive attitudes and intrinsic motivations for their role. in addition to enjoying the responsibility, a theme that came up twice is the confidence that they would be suited to a position of leadership, for instance, ‘i knew i’d be a good leader’. this demonstrates a strong mindset and someone who would be confident to take up positions of leadership in future job roles; an attitude found to be valuable to employers and demonstrates a willingness to lead (hilliard, 2010; tymon, 2013). an additional motivation for volunteering in eca committee roles is for future job aspirations or cv enhancement. with two mentions, this was the lowest reported motivation, which suggests that most students do not pursue leadership positions with career aspirations or their cv at the forefront of their mind. students mostly volunteer for 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 enjoyment altruism responsibility & challenge career aspirations motivations for volunteering moxey and simpkin harnessing the potential of extracurricular opportunities to enhance graduate employability in higher education journal of learning development in higher education, issue 21: september 2021 11 enjoyment, and only a small number of students in this study were primarily motivated by the potential value on their cvs which supports findings by roulin and bangerter (2011) and thompson et al. (2013). however, this does not mean that students are unaware of the benefits of these leadership positions. indeed, students are increasingly aware that having a degree will not guarantee them a job and realise they should add value to their credentials to gain advantage in the job market (roulin and bangerter, 2013). participation in ecas can be advantageous, as it allows students to demonstrate transferable skills not otherwise visible on their cv due to limited job experience (roulin and bangerter, 2013). the complex nature of students’ motivations would benefit from further qualitative research to explore the intricacies of this issue in more depth. figure 3: skills gained from volunteering in eca figure 3 illustrates the skills participants identified that they had acquired from volunteering in ecas, which are sought after traits among employers (allen et al., 2013). skills with two or more responses are included in figure 3. the most frequent skill mentioned was that of leadership, receiving six mentions, which is consistent with the literature, as leadership is one of the key attributes mentioned by employers as being desirable, and developed through eca involvement (allen et al., 2013). nevertheless, six mentions is relatively low considering that all twelve respondents are in some form of leadership position, even if the role of captain is perhaps more overtly related to leadership than that of a social secretary, for example. this demonstrates that this hei could do more to raise awareness of the potential transferable skills gained from a range of voluntary positions. 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 skills gained from volunteering moxey and simpkin harnessing the potential of extracurricular opportunities to enhance graduate employability in higher education journal of learning development in higher education, issue 21: september 2021 12 as with many attributes mentioned in the survey, leadership was often only listed. however, one respondent stated: ‘leading by example when it comes to sessions and overall behaviour’, which suggests awareness that leadership is important and core to their role. the notion of leading by example in sessions is noteworthy, as most sports team leaders plan and deliver training sessions at this institution, yet very few have referenced it. this is closely related to coaching, which only two respondents mentioned; the example above, and one other who stated that they gained confidence in coaching adults, from new players that have no experience in the sport to seasoned players. it is surprising that only two participants mentioned leading sessions when it is one of the core responsibilities for committee members at this university. again, this indicates the need to raise awareness of the skills developed in the breadth of responsibilities committee members undertake at this institution. figure 3 illustrates that communication was another common skill identified, with five occurrences. while some listed the word, others expanded on the term and gave more detail about the way they used their communication skills in the context of their role. for example, one participant reported: ‘how i communicate to my committee and also members is crucial’. this demonstrates that this respondent understands how this skill is relevant to their role and suggests that if it came to talking about their communication skills in a job application process, they would be able to articulate this. organisational skills are also highly valued by employers (allen et al., 2013), and were mentioned by four participants. once again, they simply listed the word; however, one participant stated: ‘my organisation skills will come to good use’, suggesting that they are thinking about the skills developed in their role in relation to future jobs or careers. a final attribute that was mentioned frequently was approachability and empathy; one participant stated that ‘being approachable for all members’ was a skill they had gained and improved upon in their role. for others, this was a key part of their role, especially the welfare officers, with one participant listing ‘empathy, listening, communication’, demonstrating that approachability was fundamental to their role, as all three skills contribute significantly to being approachable. moxey and simpkin harnessing the potential of extracurricular opportunities to enhance graduate employability in higher education journal of learning development in higher education, issue 21: september 2021 13 other skills that were identified, but only mentioned once, were budget and finance, branding, teamwork, technical radio skills, socialisation, problem solving, social media and marketing and creativity. it is unsurprising that some of these skills received fewer mentions since budget and finance and social media and marketing are role-specific and would not be expected of every volunteer. the participants that did mention these attributes seemingly have a good awareness of the role-specific skills they have developed. whilst students were not asked directly to expand on the skills gained, the fact that some provided more detailed information about these skills and gave examples suggests that they would be better equipped to articulate them in a job interview or on a cv, rather than just list them, which was identified as significant for improving employability (allen et al., 2013). as depicted in figure 4, question 5 explored students’ confidence in articulating their roles on applications or in interviews. five respondents reported that they would be completely confident, while all others stated that they would be fairly confident, which shows that respondents feel reasonably confident when it comes to articulating their roles in job interviews or applications. however, some of the themes from question 6 as well as the themes from questions 3 and 4 suggest that this confidence is perhaps misplaced since they did not articulate the breadth, depth or applicability of their skills. figure 4. confidence in applying skills gained in a job application. the final question was an opportunity to garner feedback from students in relation to how the university can better support students in relation to employability. while some 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 completely confident fairly confident somewhat confident slightly confident not confident confidence in applying skills in a job application moxey and simpkin harnessing the potential of extracurricular opportunities to enhance graduate employability in higher education journal of learning development in higher education, issue 21: september 2021 14 respondents did not feel the need for additional help, some wanted more intervention from the university when it comes to cv writing or looking at future job prospects. two respondents said that they had no idea about how the university could help, and a further two said that they did not think that there was anything more the university could do. only one participant recognised the resources already available: ‘i’m able to place my role on my hear, so other help isn't needed’. the hear is used by the university as a platform for students to record their eca participation. these responses corroborate findings from question 5, as the lack of feedback or the feeling that support is not needed suggests the students are confident enough in their own ability, or that what is already available to them when it comes to career support is sufficient. conversely, other responses suggested some form of intervention from the university in the form of career advice or training is needed for undergraduates. this does not necessarily mean that they are not confident in articulating their role to an employer, but could suggest that they are not as confident as they say they are. training or workshops led by staff was suggested by four people, for example: ‘give us training in our role’, ‘go over with students the basics for a job interview’ and ‘show us how to explain and describe our roles professionally’. these suggestions demonstrate that they are not totally confident and that they would value some extra support from the university around employability. students who said they were confident also said that they would like the university to show them how to explain their role professionally, indicating they are not confident when it comes to articulating their role in a job interview or application. this is also seen in roulin and bangerter’s (2013) study, with most students not including eca involvement on their cvs, yet they were aware that their activities could help them demonstrate soft skills. a final finding, depicted in figure 5, is that the university could better communicate the ways in which voluntary eca roles link to careers; whilst students may be confident in talking about their role, they are not as confident in applying these skills in a work context. while perhaps students were offering suggestions that would benefit others and were not necessarily offering feedback that would help them personally, conclusions drawn from the overall analysis indicate that students are not as confident as they say they are. answers to questions five and six to an extent support this, as does the dominant finding that emerged in the literature that students/graduates do not demonstrate the relevant skills to employers moxey and simpkin harnessing the potential of extracurricular opportunities to enhance graduate employability in higher education journal of learning development in higher education, issue 21: september 2021 15 in job applications, interviews and in the workplace itself (frankham, 2017). findings point to students feeling that the university could be doing more to enhance their readiness to apply for graduate level jobs. figure 5. what the university can do to help enhance employability. project outcome the research project was initiated because staff within the centre for student engagement and employability believed that the university could do more to harness the potential skills gained in voluntary eca leadership positions to enhance employability. conclusions drawn from the survey supported this expectation. this is particularly evident in answers to questions 4 and 6. therefore, a range of staff expertise was utilised to create a workshop and resource which help students to harness the potential transferability of the skills gained through volunteering in ecas and thereby demonstrate that they are work ready in a job application process. the workshop consists of two parts. the students receive a three-part presentation including a briefing by the student union’s vice president, activities on the committee roles available and the responsibilities they entail, an overview of key academic literature 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 career support better communication no help needed no idea what the university can do to help moxey and simpkin harnessing the potential of extracurricular opportunities to enhance graduate employability in higher education journal of learning development in higher education, issue 21: september 2021 16 on the interrelation between employability skills and volunteering in ecas from an academic in student engagement, and some inspiring stories of alumni who have gone on to follow high achieving career paths influenced by their experiences of volunteering in ecas whilst at the university. the second part of the workshop is interactive; participants are given advice from a careers advisor on how to write a job application effectively and are then given a series of job specifications and tasked to consider how they would apply the skills gained in their voluntary roles. time for questions and answers is made available at the end of the session for students to ask advice about specific career paths or transition from he into the world of work. feedback from the workshop was positive, with one student stating: ‘the content was really helpful and i enjoyed it’. another outcome of the study is that a resource has been produced identifying the range of leadership roles and their benefits in relation to employability skills, available on the university intranet and student union website. conclusions results indicate that although students were confident in articulating skills gained through eca volunteering to employers, they did not identify many skills or expand on their transferability to the workplace. findings drawn may not be representative of all universities since the university investigated is comparatively small in relation to the sector, the participants only consisted of undergraduates, and the response rate was low. nevertheless, findings are valuable and contribute towards the growing body of literature on student employability, particularly as the study has provided a model that can be adopted by other universities on a larger scale to investigate this further. future research should aim to conduct interviews with students to garner more detail around their awareness of the potential skills gained through volunteering in eca positions and to discuss their confidence in drawing on them to demonstrate employability. finally, it is also recommended that, using this model, research could be conducted on a larger scale, and by comparing different institutions, it would be possible to draw more generalisable findings around enhancing employability through voluntary committee roles at university. moxey and simpkin harnessing the potential of extracurricular opportunities to enhance graduate employability in higher education journal of learning development in higher education, issue 21: september 2021 17 references allen, k., bullough, s., cole, d., shibli, s. and wilson, j. (2013) the impact of engagement in sport on graduate employability. available at: http://hdl.voced.edu.au/10707/260938 (accessed: 21 may 2021). bowers-brown, t. and harvey, l. (2004) ‘are there too many graduates in the uk?: a literature review and an analysis of graduate employability’, industry and higher education, 18(4), pp.243–254. available at: https://doi.org/10.5367%2f0000000041667538 (accessed: 26 may 2021). branine, m. (2008) ‘graduate recruitment and selection in the uk: a study of recent changes in methods and expectations’, career development international, 13(6), pp.497–513. available at: https://doi.org/10.1108/13620430810901660 (accessed: 26 may 2021). braun, v. and clarke, v. (2012) ‘thematic analysis’, in cooper, h., camic, p.m., long, d.l., panter, a.t., rindskopf, d. and sher, k.j. (eds.) apa handbook of research methods in psychology: quantitative, qualitative, neuropsychological, and biological. research designs, (volume 2). washington dc: american psychological association. available at: https://doi.org/10.1037/13620-004 (accessed: 22 may 2021). christians, c.g. (2011) ‘ethics and politics in qualitative research’, in denzin, n.k. and lincoln, y.s. (eds.) the sage handbook of qualitative research. 4th edn. thousand oaks, ca: sage. clark, g., marsden, r., whyatt, j. d., thompson, l., and walker, m. (2015) ‘”it’s everything else you do…”: alumni views on extracurricular activities and employability’, active learning in higher education, 16(2), pp.133-147. available at: https://doi.org/10.1177/1469787415574050 (accessed: 22 may 2021). clarke, m. (2018) ‘rethinking graduate employability: the role of capital, individual attributes and context’, studies in higher education, 43(11), pp.1923-1937. http://hdl.voced.edu.au/10707/260938 https://doi.org/10.5367%2f0000000041667538 https://doi.org/10.1108/13620430810901660 https://doi.org/10.1037/13620-004 https://doi.org/10.1177/1469787415574050 moxey and simpkin harnessing the potential of extracurricular opportunities to enhance graduate employability in higher education journal of learning development in higher education, issue 21: september 2021 18 available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2017.1294152 (accessed: 16 may 2021). creswell, j.w. and clark, v.l.p. (2018) designing and conducting mixed methods research. london: sage. cumming, j. (2010) ‘contextualised performance: reframing the skills debate in research education’, studies in higher education, 35(4), pp.405-419. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/03075070903082342 (accessed: 22 may 2021). donald, w.e., ashleigh, m.j. and baruch, y. (2018) ‘students’ perceptions of education and employability: facilitating career transition from higher education into the labor market’, career development international, 23(5), pp.513-540. available at: https://doi.org/10.1108/cdi-09-2017-0171 (accessed: 26 may 2021). flick, u. (2007) ‘concepts of triangulation’, in flick, u. (ed.) managing quality in qualitative research. london: sage publications, ltd. fowler, f.j. (2014) survey research methods. 5th edn. london: sage. frankham, j. (2017) ‘employability and higher education: the follies of the “productivity challenge” in the teaching excellence framework’, journal of education policy, 32(5), pp.628-641. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/02680939.2016.1268271 (accessed: 22 may 2021). gedye, s. and beaumont, e. (2018) ‘“the ability to get a job”: student understandings and definitions of employability’, education + training, 60(5), pp.406-420. available at: https://doi.org/10.1108/et-10-2017-0159 (accessed: 22 may 2021). griffiths, k., bullough, s., shibli, s. and wilson, j. (2017) ‘the impact of engagement in sport on graduate employability: implications for higher education policy and practice’, international journal of sport policy and politics, 9(3), pp.431-451. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/19406940.2017.1359648 (accessed: 22 may 2021). https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2017.1294152 https://doi.org/10.1080/03075070903082342 https://doi.org/10.1108/cdi-09-2017-0171 https://doi.org/10.1080/02680939.2016.1268271 https://doi.org/10.1108/et-10-2017-0159 https://doi.org/10.1080/19406940.2017.1359648 moxey and simpkin harnessing the potential of extracurricular opportunities to enhance graduate employability in higher education journal of learning development in higher education, issue 21: september 2021 19 heaton, n., mccracken, m. and harrison, j. (2008) ‘graduate recruitment and development: sector influence on a local market/regional economy’, education + training, 50(4), pp.276-288. available at: https://doi.org/10.1108/00400910810880524 (accessed: 22 may 2021). hesketh, a.j. (2000) ‘recruiting an elite? employers’ perceptions of graduate education and training’, journal of education and work, 13(3), pp.245-271. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/713676992 (accessed: 22 may 2021). hilliard, a.t. (2010) ‘student leadership at the university’, journal of college teaching & learning, 7(2), pp.93-98. available at: https://doi.org/10.19030/tlc.v7i2.93 (accessed: 22 may 2021). jackson, n. (2011) ‘recognising a more complete education through a lifewide learning award’, higher education, skills and work-based learning, 1(3), pp.247–261. available at: https://doi.org/10.1177/1469787415574050 (accessed: 22 may 2021). lackner, c. and martini, t. (2017) ‘helping university students succeed at employment interviews: the role of self-reflection in e-portfolios’, teaching & learning inquiry, 5(2), pp.3-15. available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.20343/teachlearninqu.5.2.2 (accessed: 22 may 2021). lowden, k., hall, s., elliot, d. and lewin, j. (2011) employers’ perceptions of the employability skills of new graduates. available at: https://www.educationandemployers.org/wpcontent/uploads/2014/06/employability_skills_as_pdf_-_final_online_version.pdf (accessed: 26 may 2021). mccaig, c. (2011) ‘access agreements, widening participation and market positionality: enabling student choice?’, in molesworth, m., scullion, r. and nixon, e. (eds.) the marketisation of higher education and student as consumer. abingdon: routledge. https://doi.org/10.1108/00400910810880524 https://doi.org/10.1080/713676992 https://doi.org/10.19030/tlc.v7i2.93 https://doi.org/10.1177/1469787415574050 http://dx.doi.org/10.20343/teachlearninqu.5.2.2 https://www.educationandemployers.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/employability_skills_as_pdf_-_final_online_version.pdf https://www.educationandemployers.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/employability_skills_as_pdf_-_final_online_version.pdf moxey and simpkin harnessing the potential of extracurricular opportunities to enhance graduate employability in higher education journal of learning development in higher education, issue 21: september 2021 20 milburn-shaw, h. and walker, d. (2017) ‘the politics of student engagement’, politics, 37(1), pp.52-66. available at: https://doi.org/10.1177/0263395715626157 (accessed: 22 may 2021). office for students (2020) about the tef. available at: https://www.officeforstudents.org.uk/advice-and-guidance/teaching/about-the-tef/ (accessed: 21 may 2021). oliver, b. (2015) ‘redefining graduate employability and work-integrated learning: proposals for effective higher education in disrupted economies’, journal of teaching and learning for graduate employability, 6(1), pp.56-65. available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.21153/jtlge2015vol6no1art573 (accessed: 22 may 2021). porter, s.r., whitcomb, m.e. and weitzer, w.h. (2004) ‘multiple surveys of students and survey fatigue’, new directions for institutional research, (121), pp.63-73. available at: https://doi.org/10.1002/ir.101 (accessed: 22 may 2021). prospects (2018) graduate unemployment rate lowest in 39 years as skills shortages boost prospects. available at: https://www.prospects.ac.uk/prospects-pressoffice/graduate-unemployment-rate-lowest-in-39-years-as-skills-shortages-boostprospects (accessed 21 may 2021). roulin, n. and bangerter, a. (2013) ‘students’ use of extra-curricular activities for positional advantage in competitive job markets’, journal of education and work, 26(1), pp.21-47. available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13639080.2011.623122 (accessed: 21 may 2021). stevenson, j. and clegg, s. (2011) ‘possible selves: students orientating themselves towards the future through extracurricular activity’, british educational research journal, 37(2), pp.231-246. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/01411920903540672 (accessed: 22 may 2021). tchibozo, g. (2007) ‘extra-curricular activity and the transition from higher education to work: a survey of graduates in the united kingdom’, higher education quarterly, https://doi.org/10.1177/0263395715626157 https://www.officeforstudents.org.uk/advice-and-guidance/teaching/about-the-tef/ http://dx.doi.org/10.21153/jtlge2015vol6no1art573 https://doi.org/10.1002/ir.101 https://www.prospects.ac.uk/prospects-press-office/graduate-unemployment-rate-lowest-in-39-years-as-skills-shortages-boost-prospects https://www.prospects.ac.uk/prospects-press-office/graduate-unemployment-rate-lowest-in-39-years-as-skills-shortages-boost-prospects https://www.prospects.ac.uk/prospects-press-office/graduate-unemployment-rate-lowest-in-39-years-as-skills-shortages-boost-prospects http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13639080.2011.623122 https://doi.org/10.1080/01411920903540672 moxey and simpkin harnessing the potential of extracurricular opportunities to enhance graduate employability in higher education journal of learning development in higher education, issue 21: september 2021 21 6(1), pp.37-56. available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2273.2006.00337.x (accessed: 22 may 2021). teng, w., ma, c., pahlevansharif, s. and turner, (2019) ‘graduate readiness for the employment market of the 4th industrial revolution: the development of soft employability skills’, education + training, 61(5), pp.590-604. available at: https://doi.org/10.1108/et-07-2018-0154 (accessed: 22 may 2021). thompson l.j., clark, g., walker, m. and whyatt, j.d. (2013) ‘”it’s just like an extra string to your bow”: exploring higher education students’ perceptions and experiences of extracurricular activity and employability’, active learning in higher education, 14(2), pp.135–147. available at: https://doi.org/10.1177/1469787413481129 (accessed: 22 may 2021). tieu, t.t., pancer, s.m., pratt, m.w., wintre, m.g.,birnie-lefcovitch, s.,polivy, j. and adams, g. (2010) ‘helping out or hanging out: the features of involvement and how it relates to university adjustment’ higher education, 60(3), pp.343–355. available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10734-009-9303-0 (accessed: 22 may 2021). tymon, a. (2013) ‘the student perspective on employability’, studies in higher education, 38(6), pp.841-856. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2011.604408 (accessed 26 may 2021). winstone, n., balloo, k., gravett, k., jacobs, d. and keen, h. (2020) ‘who stands to benefit? wellbeing, belonging and challenges to equity in engagement in extracurricular activities at university’, active learning in higher education, 16(2), pp.133-147. available at: https://doi.org/10.1177/1469787420908209 (accessed: 16 may 2021). author details maria moxey is a teaching fellow in student engagement in higher education. prior to teaching, her professional background was in university sport, having worked at the http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2273.2006.00337.x https://doi.org/10.1108/et-07-2018-0154 https://doi.org/10.1177/1469787413481129 http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10734-009-9303-0 https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2011.604408 https://doi.org/10.1177/1469787420908209 moxey and simpkin harnessing the potential of extracurricular opportunities to enhance graduate employability in higher education journal of learning development in higher education, issue 21: september 2021 22 university of winchester and the university of brighton. maria’s research interests include sport, identity and belonging in higher education. edward simpkin is a student opportunities researcher in a research associate role at the university of winchester. his educational background is in history, and he was involved in a vast array of extra-curricular activities during his time as an undergraduate student. harnessing the potential of extracurricular opportunities to enhance graduate employability in higher education abstract introduction defining employability contextualising employability and higher education in the uk research method data analysis and research limitations results and discussion project outcome conclusions references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special issue 22: compendium of innovative practice october 2021 ________________________________________________________________________ the challenge of maintaining doctoral student well-being during covid-19 confinement abdelhafid jabri mohammed first university, oujda, morocco keywords: confinement; creative writing; doctoral supervision; online feedback; psychological well-being; covid-19. the challenge as is widely known, doctoral students notoriously rely on their relationship with their supervisors, as it is not only an academic but also a human relationship. ives and rowley (2005, cited mainhard et al., 2009, p.360) confirm that good interpersonal relationships between supervisors and supervisees have a positive impact on the research progress, on student satisfaction, and on the quality of academic feedback. the latter is a significant factor in the student’s success especially when it is ‘specific, timely, positive […] and tailored to the student’ (petty, 2009; paolini, 2015; wiltbank et al., 2019, cited anastasiadis and o’brien, 2019, p.6). in sum, whether doctoral feedback is exclusively in-person (faceto-face) or hybrid (both face-to-face and online), it is a key factor in the success of doctoral students, and of the higher educational system in general, because it might provide useful lessons to foster supervisor/supervisee relationships (conn et al., 2009; hast, 2017). however, complete reliance on asynchronous online communication with my supervisor during the confinement period led to moments of confusion. with the confinement measures taken in 2020 following the emergence of the covid-19 pandemic, the procedure for doctoral students at my university was initially to gain feedback via email. this had advantages like time reduction, cost-effectiveness and easy access to information, yet it was difficult for both supervisors and supervisees due to the decreased quality of communication. in this respect, several studies confirm that technology-based supervision contributes to a decrease in supervisor-student bonding (conn et al., 2009). likewise, oh et al. (2008, cited roberts and wasieleski, 2012) attest that technology, jabri the challenge of maintaining doctoral student well-being during covid-19 confinement journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 2 especially when used in asynchronous ways, increases students’ feelings of social distance. in the absence of face-to-face interaction, i felt confused, as i could not adequately fathom my supervisor’s overall satisfaction with my progress only through email. this confusion led to feelings of loneliness and helplessness. likewise, one of my colleagues underwent the same difficult experience, as he confessed to me that getting face-to-face feedback from his supervisor was much better than getting it via email. with the former he could easily grasp the supervisor’s expectations and degree of satisfaction; with the latter, he also felt confused and lonely. such negative feelings amplified the risk of having poor psychological well-being and failure in one’s academic goals. in this regard, research confirms that ‘poor mental wellbeing can lead to poor productivity and lower levels of commitment to research’ (guthrie et al., 2017, cited buckley et al., 2021, p.3). therefore, the challenge, for both of us, was how to look after our well-being in the face of stress caused by physical distancing added to the other doctoral pressures listed by buckley et al. (2021). the response aware that any doctoral student is a learner who needs to manage, among other challenges, the psychological challenge inherent in any doctoral journey (cantwell et al., 2015, cited devos et al., 2017), i took two major steps. firstly, reaching out to my supervisor was greatly helpful. once we established contact through instantaneous forms of communication (such as phone calls and whatsapp), i became clear-headed about her satisfaction with my progress. to hear her reassuring voice made a big difference in boosting my motivation because its tone communicated her impression and expectations clearly. likewise, exploiting occasional face-to-face academic meetings to exchange our reflections on my research upon deconfinement was equally fundamental to staying on track thanks to verbal and nonverbal communication. in short, prompted by the challenge of looking after my well-being and staying on track in the face of physical distancing barriers, i looked for opportunities to make the most of other avenues of communication. secondly, i sought creative outlets to keep my spirits high. in this regard, creative writing was soothing to me because it was energising and mind-clearing. having a poem published in an american peer-reviewed literary magazine and winning a university poetry jabri the challenge of maintaining doctoral student well-being during covid-19 confinement journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 3 contest helped me overcome the negative emotions caused by overreliance on online asynchronous feedback. in the same vein, organising an online dual poetry event with my aforementioned colleague made room to create a positive state of mind. this is supported by studies which have pointed to the positive effects of poetry writing on psychological well-being. for instance, croom (2014) reports that, for patients with serious psychological issues, ‘engaging in the practice of poetry can positively contribute to one flourishing with greater psychological well-being’ (p.3). in other words, because positive emotions affect well-being (fredrickson, 2006; robinson and von hippel, 2006; vallerand, 2012, cited in croom, 2014), and because practising poetry creates positive emotions in doctoral students by relieving their stress, promoting self-understanding and filling feelings of emptiness (chan, 2003, cited croom, 2014), practising poetry contributes to psychological well-being (croom, 2014). to sum up, in addition to other avenues of communication when necessary, writing poetry contributed remarkably to maintaining my psychological wellness during the confinement period. recommendations the following recommendations might guarantee successful maintenance of psychological well-being on the doctoral journey during periods of crisis. to begin with, doctoral students and their supervisors should prioritise face-to-face meetings. in-person meetings are crucial because they spare supervisees’ unnecessary negative feelings associated with the exclusive use of asynchronous ways. but when online feedback is the only solution, it should be both asynchronous (via email) and synchronous (through video and audio meetings). in this light, increasing the quality of supervisory interaction by seeking new ways to communicate feedback is highly important, as confirmed by a study by devos et al. which revealed that doctoral students are part of a more complex network of interactions and that the quality of this interaction ‘help[s] them cope in case of difficulties’ (2017, p.67). next, seeking creative outlets such as poetry writing when stressed or in distress may positively enhance the well-being of doctoral students, as it may shift their focus from negative ideas to positive ones. the beauty of poetic language, the musicality of poetic recitation, and the sense of accomplishment from creative writing may positively affect their temper. however, in addition to these recommendations, doctoral students need to take into account other considerations. as devos et al. (2017) highlight, whether jabri the challenge of maintaining doctoral student well-being during covid-19 confinement journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 4 their doctoral topics are interesting to them (that is, whether they make sense to them), and whether they already have some earlier counterproductive habits such as procrastination and perfectionism, highly determine their decision to complete or quit a doctoral program (p.68). therefore, doctoral students should keep in mind not only the nature of supervisory communication and the role of creative outlets, but also their interest in the topic and their counter-productive habits. with this mentality, they will undoubtedly increase their well-being and their ability to cope with other significant challenges during periods of crisis. references anastasiadis, s. and o’brien, j. (2019) ‘an exploration of taught master’s student perceptions of uk dissertation supervision’, journal of learning development in higher education, 0(16), pp.1-38. available at: https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.v0i16.490 (accessed: 1 october 2021). buckley, c., saetnan, e., gerber, a., cheetham, j., price, t., kenyani, j. and greaves, a. (2021) ‘impact of writing workshops on doctoral student wellness’, journal of learning development in higher education, (20), pp.1-24. available at: https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.vi20.593 (accessed: 1 october 2021). conn, s.r., roberts, r.l. and powell, b.m. (2009) ‘attitudes and satisfaction with a hybrid model of counselling supervision’, journal of educational technology & society, 12(2), pp. 298-306. available at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/jeductechsoci.12.2.298 (accessed: 1 october 2021). croom, a.m. (2014) ‘the practice of poetry and the psychology of wellbeing’, journal of poetry therapy, 28(1), pp.21-41. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/08893675.2015.980133 (accessed: 1 october 2021). devos, c., boudrenghien, g., van der linden, n., azzi, a., frenay, m., galand, b. and klein, o. (2017) ‘doctoral students’ experiences leading to completion or attrition: a matter of sense, progress and distress’, european journal of psychology of https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.v0i16.490 https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.vi20.593 https://www.jstor.org/stable/jeductechsoci.12.2.298 https://doi.org/10.1080/08893675.2015.980133 jabri the challenge of maintaining doctoral student well-being during covid-19 confinement journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 5 education, 32(1), pp.61-77. available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10212-016-0290-0 (accessed: 1 october 2021). hast, m. (2017) ‘supporting student transition to higher education feedback: an evaluation of an online feedback training approach’, journal of learning development in higher education, 0(12), pp.1-15. available at: https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.v0i12.438 (accessed: 1 october 2021). mainhard, t., van der rijst, r., van tartwijk, j. and wubbels, t. (2009) ‘a model for the supervisor-doctoral student relationship’, journal of higher education, 58(3), pp.359-373, available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-009-9199-8 (accessed: 1 october 2021). roberts, j.a. and wasieleski, d.m. (2012) ‘moral reasoning in computer-based task environments: exploring the interplay between cognitive and technological factors on individuals' propensity to break rules’, journal of business ethics, 110(3), pp. 355-376. available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-011-1196-z (accessed: 1 october 2021). author details abdelhafid jabri is a doctoral student in the faculty of letters, humanities and arts at mohammed first university, oujda, morocco. his research interests centre on moral and environmental philosophy in fiction but also on their applications in higher education. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10212-016-0290-0 https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.v0i12.438 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-009-9199-8 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-011-1196-z the challenge of maintaining doctoral student well-being during covid-19 confinement the challenge the response recommendations references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special issue 22: compendium of innovative practice october 2021 ________________________________________________________________________ the use of virtual drop-in sessions during covid-19 as a means to increase engagement with learning development ed bickle bournemouth university, uk stephanie allen bournemouth university, uk marian mayer bournemouth university, uk keywords: covid-19; online teaching; virtual drop-in sessions; student engagement; learning development. the challenge our learning development (ld) team, located within a post-92 university, is a small research-active group of academics with an extensive range of teaching and learning experience. our student-centred approach aims to develop students’ core academic skills. this is typically achieved through face-to-face tutorials and lectures. however, the covid19 pandemic required us to adapt our teaching to fit a fully online model. with the rapidly imposed move to online teaching, the team reflected on how we could effectively increase our engagement with students, given the importance of developing a community between students and faculty (khan et al., 2017) within an online teaching environment. stone and springer (2019) suggest that providing a supportive and engaging online environment helps to reduce the difficulties faced with online teaching. we therefore decided to create, for the first time, globally accessible, multi time-zone virtual drop-in sessions, replacing our existing provision of pre-bookable and walk-in tutorials. due to lockdown restrictions, we were acutely conscious that students may be feeling isolated: virtual drop-in sessions offered an ideal way for them to touch base with university staff. in the traditional on campus environment, students frequently walked into bickle, allen and mayer the use of virtual drop-in sessions during covid-19 as a means to increase engagement with learning development journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 2 our office with a question relating to their academic work, which could be answered there and then. we designed virtual drop-in sessions as a way of replicating this environment virtually. we originally planned to provide weekly one-hour zoom sessions, alternating between tuesdays and thursdays, staffed by two members of the team, to allow us to move to break-out rooms if required. sessions were announced on the faculty student portal on mondays, outlining their purpose as well as timings. students were made aware that they could drop into the sessions at any point within the hour. after a brief introduction, the sessions became student-led, in that they were encouraged to ask any questions concerning their academic work. questions outside our remit were signposted to the relevant people/departments. students were dealt with in order of arrival. a breakout room was created if we felt that a private conversation was required, or if the query was likely to be time consuming. in terms of risk, we were conscious of factors such as ‘zoom burnout’, academic workloads, technological issues, and the personal and professional impacts of covid-19. the response we sought to create a relaxed, open-door, student-led session, to provide reassurance to students (hayman et al. 2020). whilst we acknowledge russell’s (2013) caution that this approach may limit or restrict enquiries, we believed this was appropriate in such challenging circumstances. whilst roberts (2015) found some evidence that the voluntary nature of drop-in sessions could lead to students having little motivation to attend, we believed that we were enabling students to take ownership of their learning. however, in early sessions we observed that several students attended believing the session to be mandatory, potentially based on their understanding of the wording of the weekly message sent to students. whilst we addressed this on a session-by-session basis with those students present, we also reflected on the wording of our weekly message, exploring ways that the message could make the differentiation more explicit. we found that by adapting our written message and making this clear at the start of each session, bickle, allen and mayer the use of virtual drop-in sessions during covid-19 as a means to increase engagement with learning development journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 3 the number of students attending on the premise of the session being compulsory gradually reduced. the other main issue we faced was the number of sessions we ran each week and their timings. we decided to offer greater flexibility, increasing sessions from weekly to three/four per week, at more varied times to allow greater choice and access. we also experimented with session times to accommodate international students in different time zones. attendance varied from an occasional empty session to those with 10-15 students attending. students presented a range of questions, most of which were readily answered, suggesting that the sessions were an effective use of our time and theirs. recommendations having provided these sessions for an academic year we offer the following reflections. drop-in sessions are an ideal format for addressing issues requiring minimal time to resolve, for example, how to reference a particular source, or where to locate materials such as reading lists. more complex issues still benefit from personalised one-to-one, hour-long sessions. one of the positive outcomes of the sessions has been that students have gone on to book individual sessions, with the drop-ins acting as a form of stepping stone to more focused, personalised sessions. students have also shared knowledge, for example about hand in dates or supporting materials located on the faculty’s vle, mediated by us where necessary. this has enhanced peer-to-peer learning and added to individual students’ sense of confidence and belonging. it has also provided students with the opportunity to touch base with members of the academic community, or ‘lurk’ as an observer, with several returning once they understood the space they were in. in-session feedback from students suggests that they have particularly benefited from asking assignment-specific questions, which often led to clarification or interpretation, as well as querying general issues of referencing and academic conventions, and receiving pastoral encouragement to continue writing. the successful drop-in sessions are now embedded into our practice. when we return to campus we will explore how we can continue to offer these valuable sessions in what will bickle, allen and mayer the use of virtual drop-in sessions during covid-19 as a means to increase engagement with learning development journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 4 be a mixed mode of delivery. for colleagues considering offering drop-in sessions (on campus or online) as part of their ld provision, we make the following suggestions: • be explicit in student messaging about the purpose of the drop-in sessions, particularly around their voluntary nature, as well as the scope. whilst we considered tailoring sessions to a particular topic or cohort, on reflection, the opendoor policy of the sessions, in which we avoided imposing any restrictions or barriers, was one of the drop-ins’ attractions. • ensure the sessions are adequately staffed. where possible we began each session with two members of staff present. this allows for the creation of breakout rooms, for example to search for resources to respond to a particular query whilst the other member of staff maintained conversations with students. this approach also allowed for one member of staff to leave the session part way through if the numbers present were manageable for one person. • be flexible. this means reviewing the provision on a regular basis, considering which days/times facilitate the highest level of attendance. the covid-19 pandemic gave the ld team an opportunity to review our practice and create innovative ways of engaging with students in a virtual world. within a challenging environment it has been both rewarding and encouraging to develop a new intervention that has had such a positive impact on our students’ experience. references hayman, r., coyles, a., mellor, a. and wharton, k. (2020) ‘the role of personal tutoring in supporting the transition to university: experiences and views of widening participation sport students’, journal of learning development in higher education, issue 18, october, pp.1-29. https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.vi18.591. khan, a., egbue, o., palkie, b. and madden, j. (2017) ‘active learning: engaging students to maximize learning in an online course’, electronic journal of e-learning, 15(2), pp.107-115. https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.vi18.591 bickle, allen and mayer the use of virtual drop-in sessions during covid-19 as a means to increase engagement with learning development journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 5 roberts, f. (2015) ‘student views of using e-learning tools to facilitate independent learning of anatomy and physiology’, journal of learning development in higher education, issue 9, july, pp.1-22. https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.v0i9.269. russell, j. (2013) ‘running drop-in advice services in a university setting’, international journal of clinical legal education, 19, pp.383-394. https://doi.org/10.19164/ijcle.v19i0.37. stone, c. and springer, m. (2019) ‘interactivity, connectedness and “teacher-presence”: engaging and retaining students online’, australian journal of adult learning, 59(2), pp.146-169. author details ed bickle has been a lecturer in learning development at bournemouth university since 2017. he has extensive experience in widening participation research and his primary interests lie in the lived experiences of widening participation students, and phenomenological research methodologies. steph allen is a senior lecturer in learning development. her roles encompass that of a blended professional, involved in teaching, research, and third leg activities. prior to he, she worked in the fe and adult education sector. she is particularly interested in academic integrity, student experience, learning environments, assessment design, and educational gains. steph graduated from the university of southampton with a doctorate in education and holds a raft of professional and academic credentials including sfhea. marian mayer is a principal academic, leading a small team of learning development practitioners at bournemouth university. her research interests include transformative education, widening participation, the student experience, he policy, and student retention and success. marian’s praxis is deeply embedded in learning development research and education practice. https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.v0i9.269 https://doi.org/10.19164/ijcle.v19i0.37 the use of virtual drop-in sessions during covid-19 as a means to increase engagement with learning development the challenge the response recommendations references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 19: december 2020 ________________________________________________________________________ how improvisation techniques can support researchers with the development of public speaking skills nicola grayson university of manchester jessica napthine-hodgkinson university of manchester abstract through the presentation of a workshop entitled ‘enhancing public speaking skills using improvisation techniques’ this case study will argue that improvisational techniques can disrupt the seriousness of researcher development training to release stress and provide a cathartic space for researchers to develop skills and support one another. the landscape of researcher support is traditionally a serious terrain, and the impacts of the pressures faced by researchers are well documented (evans et al., 2018). opportunities for researchers to work together and support one another are relatively rare, yet research has shown that peer-topeer support benefits them immensely (boud and lee, 2007). in 2018, the university of manchester library reviewed its researcher development programme and adopted a new approach that emphasises the value of researchers working in a community with peers both within and outside of their subject area. the workshop exemplifies this approach, as it encourages researchers to support one another to develop public speaking skills in a way that is innovative, fun and enjoyable. attendees work together in a space where the freedom to fail offers them a cathartic release from the pressures of perfection. as a result, researchers can reframe their worries into opportunities to connect with one another and grow and this empowers them to build confidence in their ability to engage with others in dialogue about their research. grayson and napthine-hodgkinson how improvisation techniques can support researchers with the development of public speaking skills journal of learning development in higher education, issue 19: december 2020 2 keywords: researcher development; improvisation; fun, public speaking; anxiety; community; playful learning. introduction ‘i got my actors to make faces, insult each other, always to leap before they looked, to scream and shout and misbehave in all sorts of ingenious ways... in normal education everything is designed to suppress spontaneity, but i wanted to develop it’ (johnstone, 1979). the spirit of disruptive spontaneity is key to what makes improvisation such a powerful tool for helping researchers overcome their anxiety about public speaking. improvisation exercises reframe failure not as something to be ashamed of, but as an opportunity to learn and grow. this reframing of failure is gaining momentum in the sphere of researcher development (see whitnall and hurley, 2019), but it is still a relatively new approach. for the same reason that we all struggle with public speaking, researchers report feelings of anxiety and dread when faced with the prospect of presenting their work to others at conferences or events. yet it is crucial for researchers to gain feedback and justify their work before seeking to publish; it is a necessary (and very useful) part of the research process. the fear of being asked a question that they cannot answer in front of their peers and the embarrassment at the physiological reactions to nerves (such as blushing, stumbling over words or struggling for correct academic phrasing) are all common worries attached to the prospect of public speaking which can be a barrier to career and research progression. members of the research community are also particularly prone to the psychological phenomenon referred to as ‘imposter syndrome’ − feelings of inadequacy that persist despite evidence of success (kearns, 2015). add this to anxiety about public speaking, and the barriers increase; the risk is that when opportunities arise for researchers to share their ideas and gain valuable feedback, nerves may prevent them from fully participating in, and benefiting from, these experiences. anxiety about public speaking also leads to increased self-awareness, and this can seriously hamper individuals from connecting with their audiences (daly et al., 1989). grayson and napthine-hodgkinson how improvisation techniques can support researchers with the development of public speaking skills journal of learning development in higher education, issue 19: december 2020 3 researcher development support for presentation skills at the university of manchester (uom) has traditionally focused on structuring work effectively, practising the presentation and projecting the voice. these are all things that individuals are expected to work on by themselves in order to create a good impression and avoid making mistakes. in the newly developed workshop entitled ‘enhancing public speaking skills using improvisation techniques’, actions which could lead to ‘mistakes’ in another context are instead presented as opportunities for growth, as researchers work together to support one another to reenvisage the presentation as a dialogue. in doing this, the hierarchy of responsibility for speaking becomes levelled, the power dynamic is adjusted, and ‘presenters’ must reframe their interaction with the audience as a creative ‘back and forth’ rather than one-way communication in which they receive nothing in return. public speaking itself is thereby also reframed as a dialogue between presenter and audience, which helps to combat the fear of being judged. in a one-way ‘presentation’ the presenter is vulnerable to critique from the audience, but in a two-way ‘dialogue’, both parties contribute to shaping discussion; responsibility is thereby released and the presenter becomes an equal party in the exchange rather than one who is subject to critique and scrutiny. the reframing means that the prospect of public speaking no longer induces such fear, it is instead an opportunity for a new and rewarding experience in which speakers can enrich their ideas in order to move forward in their research (see dweck, 2008 on the value of a growth mind-set approach to learning). there is little evidence to date on the value of using improvisational techniques in order to release stress, encourage fun and enable researchers to work on practical skills in a community with others to benefit their personal and professional development. in order to contribute to this area, we have sought to document the work we have undertaken at the uom library, in the hope that those who desire to adopt such techniques in their own work should experience the same positive responses. context: the guiding principles which shape our programme of support the workshop ‘enhancing public speaking skills using improvisation techniques’ is part of the uom library’s my research essentials (mre) researcher development programme. mre is a grayson and napthine-hodgkinson how improvisation techniques can support researchers with the development of public speaking skills journal of learning development in higher education, issue 19: december 2020 4 blended offer of support which includes open online resources, ‘open to all’ face-to-face workshops and events, and a ‘bespoke’ programme of support requested by specific schools, departments or faculties. the core audience for mre are postgraduate researchers (pgrs), who comprise 72% of our audience, research and university staff, who comprise 25%, and a small number of postgraduate taught (master’s) students (3%). the researcher population at the uom is approximately 6,000, with around 2,000 research staff and, on average, around 4,000 postgraduate researchers each year. the mre programme was subject to review in 2018; the library wanted to build on some of the pedagogical and evaluation expertise developed through coordination of its undergraduate-focused programme, my learning essentials (mle), for mre in order to ensure quality and to promote best practice (see blake et al., 2019 on the impact of mle on student attainment). in summary, the changes made to mre involved expanding the range of support on offer whilst also aligning with the work done centrally at the uom as part of an ofs funded pgr mental health and wellbeing project. a new set of principles was agreed by all key stakeholders (within the library and the university wide researcher development group, which comprises representatives from each of the faculties, careers and staff learning development), to guide the creation of a new content for mre. the principles are as follows: ● is there a demonstrated need for this support? the need can be identified by researchers themselves or by the university, for example, with respect to policy requirements such as ref (research excellence framework) eligibility. ● is the library the best place to deliver or host this support? if the support clearly falls under the remit of one of the faculties, then the answer is ‘no’, but if it relates to an area that would benefit from being open to all, then the mre team can consider it. ● is support delivered in a way that is inclusive and accessible? this is a quality assurance measure to ensure equality of access to support and resources for all uom researchers. ● is the delivery of this support sustainable? from a resource point of view, can the library deliver or sustain the support? ● does the delivery of support promote a sense of community amongst researchers? it is this addition to the mre approach which constitutes the biggest grayson and napthine-hodgkinson how improvisation techniques can support researchers with the development of public speaking skills journal of learning development in higher education, issue 19: december 2020 5 shift in focus for the programme. in order to address some of the well-documented difficulties that pgrs and research staff face (particularly in relation to mental health and wellbeing (see evans et al., 2018), this question is designed to ensure that mre support makes the most of any opportunities to enhance the researcher experience. it recognises the value and power of community as a tool to combat isolation, and its inclusion means that any new content must include provision for researchers to support one another, work together and share experiences to move the uom’s research culture forwards in a positive way. a review of mre attendee feedback from the academic year 2018/2019 revealed that researchers were asking for more support in areas such as academic writing, presentation skills and coping with stress. the public speaking workshop was one of the ways in which the library responded to these requests. it was piloted as a masterclass in communication skills for the postgraduate researcher representatives (pgr reps) in summer 2019 before becoming a part of our regular programme of events. the goal in trialling this workshop with the reps was to address the fear and anxiety they reported about speaking up for their peers at committees and meetings which contained senior members of staff. the reps (many of whom were from minority groups which are underrepresented at the university) reported feeling very nervous about the prospect of speaking up in meetings. they felt intimidated by the seniority of some staff members and reported that they would ‘freeze up’ and not contribute ideas, even if they had them. the objective was to try a different approach to public speaking, which acknowledged the fear that is attached to this activity. the workshop provided attendees with techniques to embrace spontaneity and encouraged them to participate in activities which required them to ‘reframe’ what they perceived as ‘serious high stakes situations’ into ‘positive opportunities’ to add to and build upon the ideas of others. the pilot workshop was well received and became part of mre’s regular programme of events. in response to the feedback gathered, it has evolved through a series of iterations; attendees asked for more time to practise the skills covered and for more support with networking skills, so this was built into the session (see hattie and timperley, 2007 on the importance of responding effectively to feedback). a workshop was also scheduled before the university’s annual pgr summer showcase (where researchers can present posters and grayson and napthine-hodgkinson how improvisation techniques can support researchers with the development of public speaking skills journal of learning development in higher education, issue 19: december 2020 6 practise explaining their research to ‘judges’ and attendees with the chance to win prizes) in order to ensure that support was clearly anchored to the practical challenges faced by the mre audience. the mre programme is led by a learning developer (with a background in theoretical philosophy) who worked with the library’s teaching and learning team to devise the guiding principles which inform the mre programme’s content. the team used their experience of design, delivery, coordination and evaluation of support to inform the review of mre and to implement changes. the enhancing public speaking skills... workshop was developed and delivered by a member of library staff who is also an experienced improvisation facilitator; she has previously used improvisation techniques to create and deliver confidence-building workshops in community settings, and for the association of university administrators. the facilitator developed the session to ensure that any opportunities for peer-to-peer interaction and support were utilised in line with mre’s new emphasis on the importance and value of community. the partnership resulted in a fortuitous merging of expertise in relation to improvisation techniques (with a particular focus on authenticity in delivery), philosophy (and the use of approaches advocated by, for example, simone de beauvoir, in relation to combating imposter syndrome; see de beauvoir, 1963) and pedagogical approaches familiar to the field of learning development, which include, but are not limited to: ● using feedback to effect change (see hattie and timperley, 2007). ● using facilitation to empower learning (see blake and illingworth, 2015 for how this has been successfully implemented at the uom). ● peer mentoring and the use of peer support (see andrews and clark, 2011 on the value of this). ● the use of a ‘release of responsibility model’ in workshops across the programme (when possible) to enable attendees to take ownership of, and responsibility for, their own learning (see fisher and frey, 2013 on this approach). grayson and napthine-hodgkinson how improvisation techniques can support researchers with the development of public speaking skills journal of learning development in higher education, issue 19: december 2020 7 methods: key themes, goals and objectives behind the techniques the key objectives that the enhancing public speaking skills using improvisation techniques workshop was designed to address are set out below: ● preparation for public speaking. ● developing a positive attitude. ● connecting with an audience or peers. ● becoming more concise in speech. ● showing passion and enthusiasm. ● embracing failure as an opportunity for growth. the objectives communicate the goals of using the improvisational techniques, and table 1 below sets out the exercises used, each objective they relate to, how they are conducted, and the benefits they have in supporting attendees with the development of public speaking skills. table 1. the improvisational exercises used and their objectives. exercise objective outline benefit warm up: lemon face, pumpkin face preparation for public speaking contraction of facial muscles into the face that would be pulled when biting into a sour lemon followed by stretching of muscles into a wide, open face akin to a carved pumpkin. alternating quickly between the two faces warms up the facial muscles and helps attendees to prepare for speech. it also makes attendees laugh and acts as an icebreaker to set a playful tone for further interactions warm up: breathing exercise preparation for public speaking guided breathing in for the count of four, holding the breath for the count of four, then exhaling for the count of four. attendees experience the calming effects of deep breathing and are encouraged to do this when they are feeling nervous. warm up: vocal exercises preparation for public speaking a theatrical, exaggerated yawn, making a loud, short 'ha' sound, thinking about the noise originating in the abdomen and pushing up out of the mouth. yawning helps to lower the larynx and relieve tension around the throat, which in turn allows the production of a richer, more resonant voice (boone and macfarlane, grayson and napthine-hodgkinson how improvisation techniques can support researchers with the development of public speaking skills journal of learning development in higher education, issue 19: december 2020 8 1993). the ‘ha’ exercise encourages movement of the diaphragm to support vocal production to make the voice stronger and more commanding. warm up: mental agility exercises preparation for public speaking embracing failure naming the days of the week in order going around the table. then following the same pattern but with the order of the days reversed. this encourages attendees to disrupt their usual thinking patterns, which makes them more responsive to others. the pattern goes wrong as it gets more complex, but this makes attendees laugh and helps them to embrace failure. yes but… yes and developing a positive attitude in groups, attendees plan an event as chosen by the group, e.g. a wedding. each time an attendee offers a suggestion, another attendee must counter with a reason why that will not work. the planning then continues but instead of rejecting ideas, attendees are encouraged to accept and add to each suggestion. repeated negative responses mean that no ideas are developed and therefore planning is stunted, which feels frustrating, but then the exercise focuses on accepting and adding to suggestions, which fosters a positive and collaborative mindset. it reframes public speaking as an opportunity to discuss ideas. make your garden grow connecting with an audience or peers a volunteer is invited to take on the role of the sun, everyone else is asked to be a flower in their garden. the sun has to speak for one minute on any topic and during this time, they have to make eye contact with all of the flowers in their garden. if the sun is shining on them the flowers must ‘bloom’ (by spreading their hands, arms or even standing up), conversely, if there is no eye contact, they must start to wither and shrink in their seats. ‘gamifying' something one finds uncomfortable may help to make it less daunting (fleming et al. 2017). it gives attendees the chance to practise making eye contact to help them feel more comfortable when presenting or networking. say more with less becoming more concise with speech in their own time, attendees can practise a section of their presentation that is five minutes in length, then they rework it to fit into three minutes, then again into one minute, then 30 this helps attendees to identify the key points they want to make, so they can adapt their presentation to focus on the core messages. it helps to make a speech more dynamic grayson and napthine-hodgkinson how improvisation techniques can support researchers with the development of public speaking skills journal of learning development in higher education, issue 19: december 2020 9 seconds, then 10 seconds. try not to speed up delivery − the final round should just have key words. and less like a script. networkin g exercise connecting with an audience or peers during the halfway refreshment break attendees are set a variety of challenges, for example: ● beat three other people in rock, paper, scissors. ● find two people with a sporty hobby. why do they love it? ● find someone with a different star sign to you and look at today’s horoscope − is it accurate? attendees practice networking in a comfortable, accepting environment. the ‘challenges’ allow them to focus on a task rather than any feelings of anxiety. commit to the bit showing passion and enthusiasm in their own time attendees can: ● practise the speech and try varying the pace or volume of their voice. ● try delivering it with different emotional expressions, for example, excited, serious, as if confiding in someone. ● try a different style, for example, shakespearean, gangster, musical. these techniques help attendees to cultivate their own authentic style of delivery. repetition will also better equip attendees to remember their speech without it becoming stale as they become accustomed to constantly adapting and refining it. your time to shine connecting with an audience or peers. showing passion and enthusiasm each attendee is given an unusual topic such as 'pickles from around the world' or 'the possibility of unicorns'. they are then invited to deliver a oneminute talk, and the audience applauds each talk. this allows attendees to take an important step in their public speaking journey. it demonstrates to the speaker that they are capable of engaging an audience and creates a positive experience of public speaking for them to build on in future. underlying the objectives outlined above, there are some key themes of improvisation, which also informed the way that the workshop was designed and delivered. these are explained below. grayson and napthine-hodgkinson how improvisation techniques can support researchers with the development of public speaking skills journal of learning development in higher education, issue 19: december 2020 10 emphasising the power of positivity and playfulness the ‘yes and’ approach disrupts negative thought patterns by encouraging an initial response of acceptance rather than rejection, and thereby prompts attendees to build on an idea in a positive way. lisa m. barker notes in the findings of her 2017 study that her subject, a teacher who had undertaken a 10-week improvisation course, found that the ‘yes and...’ tenet had a positive impact on how he engaged in discussion with students. he mentions a dynamic feeling of ‘flow’ as the dialogue moves back and forth, and each respondent feels compelled to acknowledge and build upon the other’s contributions in a symbiotic way. when reframed in this way, public speaking becomes transposed from a daunting prospect, in which the speaker has to face a sea of strangers perceived as waiting to judge them, to an opportunity to offer up ideas to spark further discussion, as others are given a chance to contribute. in this vein, questions from the audience are no longer received as potential criticisms; they are accepted as further opportunities to build upon the foundation created by the speaker. this allows for a more dialogic experience and a greater exploration of the topic being discussed. throughout the workshops, attendees were encouraged to share their own experiences and to ask questions to cement their experience of public speaking as comprising elements of give and take rather than being monologic. in process: an improviser’s journey, mary scruggs writes about her experience of improvisation and its playful approach: ‘the games i learned laid a foundation of playfulness, creativity, spontaneity and connection to others’ (scruggs and gellman, 2008). the playful aspect of improvisation encourages attendees to engage with one another and to be more ‘present’ in the exercises covered during the session. the intention behind modelling this experience within the session is that attendees will be able to recreate those feelings of connection and playfulness (nørgård, et al., 2017) in their future work. connecting authentically in a safe space improvisation exercises provide a safe space for a prospective presenter to try out speaking to an audience to make the most of the chance to connect when the opportunity to present their work arises. as long-running improvisation company, the second city, puts it: ‘improv classes are a great way to gain confidence and feel more comfortable speaking to a group of grayson and napthine-hodgkinson how improvisation techniques can support researchers with the development of public speaking skills journal of learning development in higher education, issue 19: december 2020 11 people. after all, your fellow members are in the same boat as you, so you don’t have to worry about feeling silly or scared of failure’ (the second city, 2020). feeling safe and comfortable speaking to an audience comes with experience, and each public speaking activity chips away at the feelings of apprehension and anxiety about the unknown. attendees moved from speaking in small groups in a structured exercise, through one-on-one networking challenges, to finally delivering a speech to an audience of their peers. rubin et al. (1997) found that students who participated in a communication course perceived their levels of ‘communication apprehension’ to be significantly lower by the end of the course. when speakers are able to make a connection, they can see that their audience is engaged in listening to them and the feelings of anxiety start to dissipate. the reassurance this brings can help speakers to relax; they are less likely to look and sound tense, and in turn the way that they conduct themselves is more appealing to an audience, as they can express themselves more fully through their voice and body language. authenticity is a key element of improvisation (grieve, 2020) and is a theme that runs throughout the workshop. being true to oneself when speaking to an audience is crucial, as, no matter how fantastical the setting, the audience enjoys seeing someone react honestly in the moment. when speakers relax and enjoy themselves, the audience does too, so attendees were encouraged to channel their nervousness into excitement (see brooks, 2014 on the benefits of this) to allow their passion for their subject to infuse their delivery. results and feedback so far, eight face-to-face workshops have been delivered and the average attendance was 14 people per session, which is higher than the average attendance for researcher support across mre (approximately nine people per session), and the total number of attendees was 110. we surveyed all those who attended and received 31 responses (a survey response rate of 28%). 100% of those who responded said that they found the session engaging, 90% said they found it useful and 90% said they would incorporate what they had learnt into their work. attendees commented via a post-session survey that the atmosphere in the session was grayson and napthine-hodgkinson how improvisation techniques can support researchers with the development of public speaking skills journal of learning development in higher education, issue 19: december 2020 12 ‘friendly’ and ‘comfortable’ despite the affiliation of public speaking with anxiety; they noted that activities were engaging and useful, and they enjoyed the ‘gamification’ of networking and the fun approach to tackling nervousness in relation to public speaking. attendees also reported that working with others on this skill was very valuable to them and that it was useful to ‘practise public speaking and to share common fears and issues with other people’ (anonymous feedback received through the mre survey). i was apprehensive about attending this session, but really enjoyed it in the end [...] lots of really good practical takeaways, e.g. gamifying networking and breaking presentations down into key sections by reducing the time to summarise. thank you. (anonymous feedback received through the mre survey) the above quote is representative of much of the feedback that we received from the attendees. it reflects the feelings of anxiety related to public speaking that the session aimed to address, and it is reassuring that attendees not only had positive experiences of feeling comfortable in the workshop, but that they were also able to identify practical elements that would be of use to them in the future. although they were initially apprehensive, many attendees fed back that they had enjoyed the session, which indicates that it may have helped them to reframe their worries in relation to public speaking into something more positive. the workshop has also been highly recommended and publicly endorsed by attendees, for example: ‘absolutely brilliant practical advice for public speaking newbies, avoiders, or old hands’ (senior business change manager, hannah white, taken from twitter with the author’s permission). the popularity of the workshop means that the sessions are regularly oversubscribed; for three of the eight face-to-face sessions we had enough attendees on the waiting list to schedule and fill another workshop straight away (the popularity and over-subscription are factors which have also continued since we moved the workshop online in response to the coronavirus pandemic in march 2020). in terms of constructive feedback, numerous attendees suggested that the workshop should be longer so that they had time to actually apply some of the techniques, such as those in the exercise ‘say more with less’ to their own presentations. the mre programme and the postsession survey are designed with the view that workshops will always be iterative so that they grayson and napthine-hodgkinson how improvisation techniques can support researchers with the development of public speaking skills journal of learning development in higher education, issue 19: december 2020 13 can be adapted to the changing needs of the mre audience. feedback is therefore reviewed regularly, and when it is safe to return to face-to-face teaching, this session will be reworked to ensure that attendees have time to apply the techniques to their own work. conclusion the popularity of the workshop and the feedback received demonstrate the importance and value of using an innovative approach to support researchers to work in community to develop a practical skill in an environment in which they can laugh together if things go wrong. although this is a reversal of how researchers traditionally experience failure, the stress released through the realisation of their worst fears serves to help them discover techniques to deal with anxiety around public speaking in a cathartic way. encouraging researchers to support each other means that they can reframe their approach to public speaking together, viewing it not as a source of dread, but as an opportunity to engage in an important dialogue about their ideas. the workshop thereby disrupts negative associations and feelings of anxiety to empower attendees to speak with confidence and authenticity. the experience of developing and delivering the workshop mirrored many of the fears that our attendees experience in relation to public speaking: nervousness about our unconventional approach, uncertainty about whether the audience would connect with the content, and a certain amount of imposter syndrome in relation to whether the workshop would be accepted as a legitimate form of researcher support. however, both the formal feedback (from the mre post-session survey) and the informal feedback (of enthusiastic attendees who participated in the sessions and recommended them to others) has demonstrated that the workshop was well received and it is now valued as part of uom’s wider programme of researcher development support. the next step for the workshop is to adapt the content for online delivery, and this is not without its challenges. perhaps the greatest challenge concerns how to retain a sense of connection with our attendees whilst being physically distant from one another. we are investigating the use of interactive elements of video conferencing and exercises are being grayson and napthine-hodgkinson how improvisation techniques can support researchers with the development of public speaking skills journal of learning development in higher education, issue 19: december 2020 14 adapted so that they are relevant to the ‘new normal’ in which most talks and conferences will take place online for 2020-2021. a blog post and short video introduction will accompany synchronous (live) sessions delivered via video conferencing to provide asynchronous support for learners in different time zones. the mode of delivery may have changed, but the focus on reframing one’s approach to ensure authentic delivery, to build confidence, to engage an audience and to channel positivity when speaking in public will remain the same. references andrews, j. and clark, r. (2011) peer mentoring works! how peer mentoring enhances student success in higher education. engineering education research group, aston university. available at: https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/system/files/aston_what_works_final_report_1.pdf (accessed: 30 nov 2020). barker, l.m. (2018) ‘improvisational theatre in teacher learning about facilitating discussion: exercising pedagogical presence’, action in teacher education, 41(1), pp.43–60, https://doi.org/10.1080/01626620.2018.1535460. blake, j. r. s., grayson, n. and karamalla-gaiballa, s. (2019) ‘investigating impact: exploring the effect of “open” support on student success’, journal of learning development in higher education, 0 (16), available at: https://journal.aldinhe.ac.uk/index.php/jldhe/article/view/540. blake, j. and illingworth, s. (2015) ‘interactive and interdisciplinary student work: a facilitative methodology to encourage lifelong learning’, widening participation and lifelong learning, 17(2), pp.108–118, https://doiorg.gate3.library.lse.ac.uk/10.5456/wpll.17.2si.107. https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/system/files/aston_what_works_final_report_1.pdf https://doi.org/10.1080/01626620.2018.1535460 https://journal.aldinhe.ac.uk/index.php/jldhe/article/view/540 https://journal.aldinhe.ac.uk/index.php/jldhe/article/view/540 https://journal.aldinhe.ac.uk/index.php/jldhe/article/view/540 https://doi-org.gate3.library.lse.ac.uk/10.5456/wpll.17.2si.107 https://doi-org.gate3.library.lse.ac.uk/10.5456/wpll.17.2si.107 grayson and napthine-hodgkinson how improvisation techniques can support researchers with the development of public speaking skills journal of learning development in higher education, issue 19: december 2020 15 boone, d.r. and mcfarlane, s.c. (1993) ‘a critical view of the yawn-sigh as a voice therapy technique’, journal of voice, 7(1), pp.75–80, https://doi.org/10.1016/s08921997(05)80114-6. boud, d. and lee, a. (2007) ‘“peer learning” as pedagogic discourse for research education’, studies in higher education, 30(5), pp.501–516, https://doi.org/10.1080/03075070500249138. brooks, a.w. (2014) ‘get excited: reappraising pre-performance anxiety as excitement’, journal of experimental psychology: general, 143(3), pp.1144–1158, doi: 10.1037/a0035325. daly, j.a., vangelisti, a.l. and lawrence, s.g. (1989) ‘self-focused attention and public speaking anxiety’, personality and individual differences, 10(8), pp.903-913, https://doi.org/10.1016/0191-8869(89)90025-1. de beauvoir, s. (1963). memoirs of a dutiful daughter. s.l.: penguin. dweck, c.s. (2008) mindset: the new psychology of success. new york: ballantine books. evans, t.m., bira, l., gastelum, j.b., weiss, l.t. and vanderford, n.l. (2018) ‘evidence for a mental health crisis in graduate education’, nature biotechnology, 36(3), pp.282–284, https://doi.org/10.1038/nbt.4089. fisher, d. and frey, n. (2013) better learning through structured teaching. alexandria, va: ascd. fleming, t.m., bavin, l., stasiak, k., hermansson-webb, e., merry, s.n., cheek, c., lucassen, m., lau, h.m., pollmuller, b. and hetrick, s. (2017), ‘serious games and gamification for mental health: current status and promising directions’, frontiers in psychiatry, 7 (215), doi: 10.3389/fpsyt.2016.00215. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0892-1997(05)80114-6 https://doi.org/10.1016/s0892-1997(05)80114-6 https://doi.org/10.1080/03075070500249138 https://doi.org/10.1037/a0035325 https://doi.org/10.1016/0191-8869(89)90025-1 https://doi.org/10.1038/nbt.4089 https://dx.doi.org/10.3389%2ffpsyt.2016.00215 grayson and napthine-hodgkinson how improvisation techniques can support researchers with the development of public speaking skills journal of learning development in higher education, issue 19: december 2020 16 grieve, r. (2020) stand up and be heard: taking the fear out of public speaking at university. london: sage publications. hattie, j. and timperley, h. (2007) ‘the power of feedback’, review of educational research, 77(1), pp.81–112, https://doi.org/10.3102/003465430298487. johnstone, k. (1979) impro: improvisation and the theatre; with an introduction by irving wardle. new york: theatre arts books. kearns, h. (2015) the imposter syndrome: why successful people often feel like frauds. adelaide, south australia: thinkwell. nørgård, r.t., toft-nielsen, c. and whitton, n. (2017) ‘playful learning in higher education: developing a signature pedagogy’, international journal of play, 6(3), pp.272–282, https://doi.org/10.1080/21594937.2017.1382997. rubin, r.b., rubin, a.m. and jordan, f.f. (1997) ‘effects of instruction on communication apprehension and communication competence’, communication education, 46(2), pp.104–114, https://doi.org/10.1080/03634529709379080. scruggs, m. and gellman, m.j. (2008) process: an improviser’s journey. evanston, ill.: northwestern university press. the second city (2020) reasons to join an improv class. available at: https://www.secondcity.com/reasons-join-improvclass/#:~:text=improv%20classes%20are%20a%20great (accessed: 27 nov 2020). whitnall, d. and hurley, u. (2019) ‘fail live encouraging failure freedom within pgr communities’, vitae researcher development international conference 2019, birmingham 16-17 september. https://doi.org/10.3102/003465430298487 https://doi.org/10.1080/21594937.2017.1382997 https://doi.org/10.1080/03634529709379080 https://www.secondcity.com/reasons-join-improv-class/#:~:text=improv%20classes%20are%20a%20great https://www.secondcity.com/reasons-join-improv-class/#:~:text=improv%20classes%20are%20a%20great grayson and napthine-hodgkinson how improvisation techniques can support researchers with the development of public speaking skills journal of learning development in higher education, issue 19: december 2020 17 author details dr nicola grayson is a learning developer with expertise in measuring impact and researcher development. she is a senior fellow of the higher education academy and works as an associate lecturer teaching philosophy in addition to supporting the design, delivery and evaluation of the university of manchester library’s learning programmes. jessica napthine-hodgkinson is a research services officer with expertise in research data management and training development. she is a fellow of the association of university administrators and is an experienced facilitator specialising in applied improvisation within higher education. how improvisation techniques can support researchers with the development of public speaking skills abstract introduction context: the guiding principles which shape our programme of support methods: key themes, goals and objectives behind the techniques emphasising the power of positivity and playfulness connecting authentically in a safe space results and feedback conclusion references author details article journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 15: november 2019 ________________________________________________________________________ what we talk about when we talk about writing: exploring how english for academic purposes teachers and learning developers conceptualise academic writing sharon mcculloch university of central lancashire, uk tania horák university of central lancashire, uk abstract two main groups of staff currently provide writing support to students in british universities. these staff typically enter their roles from a range of professional backgrounds and, consequently, may hold different professional identities and understandings of what academic writing is. although there is a body of research on teacher identity and on lecturers’ conceptualisations of writing, few studies have compared the views and identities of english for academic purposes (eap) teachers and learning developers. the current study set out to investigate whether these two groups perceive academic writing in similar or different ways, and why. we undertook a small-scale study, interviewing eight participants at two universities, half from a post-1992 institution and the others from a research-intensive, high-ranking university. while participants varied in their definitions of writing, common themes emerged, lying on a spectrum from an autonomous, text-based, to an academic literacies perspective on writing. to establish the influences on these perspectives, we investigated the participants’ sense of identity as an academic writer, how they learned writing themselves and any influences on them from theory. neither the eap teachers nor the learning developers identified strongly as academic writers, despite all holding postgraduate qualifications and some having published their writing. most reported little to no training in how to write academically themselves, and few mentioned any theoretical stance in their approach to helping students. although some clustering around particular conceptualisations of writing was observed, we did not find strong evidence that the participants belong to two different ‘tribes’. mcculloch and horák what we talk about when we talk about writing: exploring how english for academic purposes teachers and learning developers conceptualise academic writing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 2 keywords: english for academic purposes; learning developers; academic writing; identity; academic literacies. introduction the reader may have spotted our ‘repurposing’ of the title of two well-known books, namely haruki murakami’s what i talk about when i talk about running (2009), the title of which is borrowed from raymond carver’s collection of short stories what we talk about when we talk about love (1992). we wish to continue in this vein of literary theft, better termed as intertextuality (kristeva, 1980), by exploring a key question that runs through both the aforementioned books, that of whether, when discussing a commonly-used concept, we are all talking about the same thing. in our case, this is neither running nor love, but academic writing. our research explores the perspectives of two groups of staff who support university students with their academic writing. both authors, having worked as eap (english for academic purposes) teachers and also learning developers, were interested in the extent to which these roles reflect different understandings of academic writing. in other words, whether eap teachers and learning developers perceive academic writing in similar or different ways and why. we suspected that the staff in these two groups typically have distinct professional backgrounds, trajectories and training, and may therefore conceptualise academic writing differently (wingate and tribble, 2012). such differences would likely then be manifested in how they support emergent academic writers. we wondered whether, although they share a similar purpose to support students in academic writing, their different job roles, work location, professional identity, and other related factors may make them two different academic ‘tribes’ (becher and trowler, 2001). if that were the case, we wondered whether lessons could be learnt on both sides by gaining insights into the beliefs and practices of the other tribe. this study aimed to investigate how valid our intuition was. background mcculloch and horák what we talk about when we talk about writing: exploring how english for academic purposes teachers and learning developers conceptualise academic writing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 3 writing support for students at universities in the uk generally falls into two separate strands with different aims and approaches: preor in-sessional teaching of eap on the one hand, and workshops or one-to-one tutorials led by learning development staff on the other (wingate and tribble, 2012). these two strands of writing support typically differ in terms of the types of students they target, the ways in which the support is provided, and the associated bodies of literature that inform them. eap and learning development may have arisen in response to different demands but increasingly the two operate simultaneously within institutions, and the boundaries between them may be somewhat blurred. for instance, learning developers may be asked to run generic workshops on elements of academic writing such as referencing that might traditionally have come under the umbrella of eap. likewise, eap teachers may include in their classes aspects of academic literacies more commonly associated with learning development, such as discussions of disciplinary norms. in this sense, the pedagogies of the two groups of professionals might overlap somewhat but what is not known is the extent to which their fundamental understandings about academic writing converge or diverge. it seems likely that the two groups could benefit from a better understanding of each other’s approaches and a move towards sharing best practice. it is not unusual for the eap strand of writing support to be aimed at international students, taught in multi-disciplinary groups by eap teachers in a classroom setting. this teaching context and target demographic may mean that greater emphasis is placed on english as a linguistic system in the writing support they receive. eap pedagogies have been informed by genre theory, systemic functional linguistics, and research on academic discourse (swales, 1990; hyland, 2004), which have shed light on aspects of academic texts such as the use of reporting verbs (shaw, 1992) and coherence and cohesion (halliday and hasan, 1989). this focus on textual features has been criticised by lillis and scott (2007) and others for failing to take account of the diversity of writing even within a single discipline or the contested nature of practices such as citation. for instance, research has shown that lecturers in the same discipline or even the same department may not agree on appropriate use of source materials in their students’ writing (chandrasoma et al., 2004). the focus on text in much eap teaching has also drawn criticism (lea and street, 1998; prior, 1998; lillis and scott, 2007) for implying that becoming a ‘good’ academic writer is simply a matter of mastering certain linguistic mcculloch and horák what we talk about when we talk about writing: exploring how english for academic purposes teachers and learning developers conceptualise academic writing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 4 techniques, and for tending to see writing as politically neutral, uncontroversial and divorced from its socio-cultural context. in contrast to the ‘autonomous’ model of literacy with which eap is associated (street, 1995), in which literacy is conceived of as a set of skills that are easily and unproblematically transferable between contexts, the theoretical underpinning of learning development tends to come from an academic literacies perspective. this is associated with a ‘socio-cultural’ model of literacies (gee, 1991). this model sees writing not as a set of technical skills but as a set of meaning-making practices situated within particular social contexts (lea and street, 1998; barton and hamilton, 2000). the use of ‘literacies’ in the plural emphasizes the diversity of communication practices (goodfellow, 2005) that are entangled within the concept of academic writing, including power relationships and the close link between writing and identity formation (ivanič, 1998; haggis, 2004; macaro and wingate, 2004; gourlay, 2009). such a theoretical perspective focuses not only on writing itself and the resultant texts but also on the ideologies, values and social context surrounding academic writing and what these mean to the writer. learning developers also differ from eap practitioners in terms of the target students and context in which they usually work. learning developers typically work with both ‘home’ and international students, often in one-to-one consultations which may enable more in-depth discussion of an individual’s goals around writing. several studies (leki, 1995; leedham, 2015; tuck, 2015) have investigated tutors’ conceptualisations of academic writing but these have tended to focus on subject lecturers rather than eap teachers or learning developers, who are largely missing from this body of literature (ding and bruce, 2017). one recent exception is jacobs (2015), who interviewed both disciplinary and academic literacies lecturers in south africa about their understandings of concepts such as academic socialisation, academic skills and academic literacies. jacobs found that few lecturers saw their discipline as a site of contested power relations and many focused on enabling students to use grammatically correct english. however, the professional profiles and roles of ‘academic literacies’ lecturers in the south african context may well differ from those of eap teachers and learning developers in the uk and it is important to understand how the views of the latter two groups may complement each other in order to maximise the affordances of each approach. leedham (2015), for example, has suggested that eap teachers could benefit from adopting some mcculloch and horák what we talk about when we talk about writing: exploring how english for academic purposes teachers and learning developers conceptualise academic writing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 5 academic literacies approaches in order to extend their understanding of what makes ‘good’ academic writing, but to our knowledge, no studies have attempted to compare the views and approaches of these two groups of professionals directly. exploring these issues and reviewing the literature therefore led us to the following two research questions: 1. how do eap teachers and learning developers conceptualise academic writing? 2. what influences their conceptualisation? methodology our study was a small-scale, exploratory study to test our initial inkling regarding the two different groups of staff discussed above. data collection we interviewed eight participants currently working at two universities in the north of england. these two institutions were chosen partly out of convenience since we had professional contacts in both, and partly to facilitate comparison of two types of university. four participants were based at university a, a post-1992 institution (i.e. one of the group of british institutions that gained university status in 1992, having previously been a technical institute or polytechnic college offering vocational qualifications rather than degrees), with a strong widening participation agenda, attracting students who had not experienced the conventional route through the education system. according to university a’s strategy, almost 18% of its full-time first degree students came from ‘low participation neighbourhoods’ in 2016-17 (university a, access and participation plan 2019-2020). consequently, there is a high proportion of working-class students. the other four participants were based at university b, a research-intensive, high-ranking university, attracting more middle-class students. according to university b’s website, more than one third of its research is ranked as ‘world leading’, and three separate british university guides rank it among the top 10 universities in the uk. university b recruited less than 10% of its full-time first degree students from low participation neighbourhoods in 2016-17 (university b, access and participation plan 2019-2020). mcculloch and horák what we talk about when we talk about writing: exploring how english for academic purposes teachers and learning developers conceptualise academic writing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 6 the participants fell into two categories: the first included those mostly involved in teaching international students and typically having an efl and subsequently an eap background in their career profile. their job titles varied from tutor to associate tutor/lecturer, and we have labelled them ‘eap teachers’ for the purposes of this study. the job titles held by learning developers in the uk also vary widely, and include academic skills tutor, learning advisor, academic developer, etc. for the purposes of this study, we labelled them ‘learning developers’. this applied to staff based within, or assigned to work primarily with, specific schools or faculties to provide study support for students from specific disciplinary backgrounds (e.g. engineering, medicine, humanities). table 1 summarises the study’s participants. table 1. participants’ job roles and institutions. eap teachers (eap) learning developers (ld) university a (post-1992) eap1a ld1a eap2a ld2a university b (research intensive) eap1b ld1b eap2b ld2b as regards the participants’ professional backgrounds, the eap teachers had all started out teaching efl (english as a foreign language); one had taught primarily in her home country before coming to the uk, the others had worked in various teaching posts both in the uk and abroad. efl teaching had taken up the majority of their working lives before moving into eap. the learning developers were more varied in their profiles. they had studied subjects such as modern languages, psychology, education and science at undergraduate level and had worked in other fields (including research, secondaryand primary-level teaching, and the public sector) before their current role. only one had some experience of university-level teaching in their subject area (and still held this role concurrently with her ld role). the participants were selected through purposive and convenience sampling, in that we initially approached contacts we knew in these two professions, who we knew to be working in one of the above roles. this approach was accompanied by an element of mcculloch and horák what we talk about when we talk about writing: exploring how english for academic purposes teachers and learning developers conceptualise academic writing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 7 snowball sampling, asking our contacts to put us in touch with further potential participants in our target institutions. potential participants were included if they were currently working in a post with primary responsibility for supporting students in academic writing. of those approached, a total of eight were available and willing to be interviewed. all the participants were female. this was not intentional but reflected the gender balance of professionals working in the target institutions and the availability of participants at the time of the data collection. interviews were chosen as the most appropriate method of eliciting information about participants’ own conceptualisations of academic writing, since other methods, such as questionnaires, are not amenable to collecting data about such complex matters as one’s understanding of what academic writing is and one’s professional identity. moreover, kvale’s interpretation of interviews as ‘inter-views’ (1996), or tools for seeing into a phenomenon, is appropriate for exploratory studies such as this, where, within the framework of our research questions, we wished to look at participants’ conceptualisations of writing, not look for specific features. we recognise that using a single instrument to collect data has its limitations. however, as we were interested in participants’ personal viewpoints and understandings, rather than, say, their actual practices in the classroom, we did not use other methods such as observations. all participants signed consent forms agreeing to our use of the data for research purposes and confirming that they understood that all the data would be fully anonymised. participants were informed of the general nature of our enquiry (perceptions of academic writing) but not of the potential influence of their roles or other factors we discussed, in order to avoid bias. we later fed back preliminary findings through presentations for their professional teams, at which we discussed the study more fully with the participants. we conducted one semi-structured interview with each participant at their workplace in a quiet location where they could speak freely. interviews were audio recorded and lasted an average of 35 minutes each (see appendix a for the interview schedule). each researcher interviewed half of our participant group, randomly assigned. interview questions focused on four main areas, as follows:  role: we asked participants what they did on a day to day basis to see how they characterised their work. mcculloch and horák what we talk about when we talk about writing: exploring how english for academic purposes teachers and learning developers conceptualise academic writing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 8  professional identity: we asked participants how they located themselves in terms of professional identity in order to gain an emic perspective on the purpose of their role.  definitions: as academic writing itself is a complex, contested phenomenon, we asked the participants to share their personal definition of academic writing. as discussed above, writing can be described via various paradigms and we wanted to ascertain which of these our participants most aligned to, consciously or otherwise.  influences: in order to understand what influenced their current approach to supporting students, we asked participants about their own experiences as an academic writer, including which genres, disciplines and writing processes they were most familiar with and how they had learnt these. we also asked about any training they had received and any theoretical concepts they drew on. data analysis each researcher listened to the audio data carefully several times. we carried out thematic coding whereby key points and concepts were identified and time stamps for these were noted systematically for easy return and retrieval. coding was carried out independently, then compared, and instances of ambiguity or disagreement were discussed in order to reach agreement. key episodes were then discussed and grouped into common themes. we compared our lists of themes and combined them into a single list of instances in the data, which we felt addressed each research question. we also discussed the most telling and compelling ways of talking about academic writing. we then listened once more to the interviews and agreed together the most important of these key emergent points. having established main themes, we then listened again to our interviews to undertake negative case analysis (marshall and rossman, 2006), searching for data that contradicted what we felt to be our main findings.. findings and discussion independent analysis of episodes in the interviews and discussion of their significance yielded a series of findings, which we felt satisfactorily addressed our research questions. these are discussed below in relation to each research question in turn. mcculloch and horák what we talk about when we talk about writing: exploring how english for academic purposes teachers and learning developers conceptualise academic writing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 9 research question 1: how do the participants conceptualise academic writing? in order to establish the extent to which eap teachers and learning developers conceptualise academic writing in the same ways, we first present some examples of the interviewees’ definitions of academic writing. while participants varied in their definitions, certain common themes emerged. these conceptualisations could be seen to lie on a spectrum from, at one end, a more text-based perspective, focusing mainly on textual features such as formality and style, to, at the other end, an academic literacies perspective, focusing on writing as closely linked to one’s self and personal identity. they included the following:  it is about formality, e.g. ‘it's not jokey writing – it's formal’ (ld2b) and also noted in similar terms by ld1a, ld1b, eap2b.  it is a specific style of writing, e.g. ‘academic writing is a stylised piece of writing that is aimed at particular audiences’ (ld2b) and ‘it's a very particular style of writing – very succinct, very precise’ (ld1a).  it is about rules and conventions, e.g. ‘it's buying into the conventions of academia really, isn't it?’ (ld2a) or ‘[it’s about] knowing the rules and conventions of referencing for example’ (eap2b).  it is about reader/audience expectations, e.g. ‘[it is] what i expect to read when i open an academic book’ (eap1a) or ‘[it is something that would] tick the boxes and fulfil criteria that would be expected’ (eap2b).  it is about presenting arguments and ideas, e.g. 'academic writing in a uk anglo culture is asking ostensibly students to show they can think critically i suppose and logically organise a sequence of argumentation according to greek rhetorical forms of argumentation’ (eap1b) and ‘you need to take your opinion on a subject and turn it into an academic argument by reading the experts and supporting it’ (ld1a).  it is about expressing one’s own scholarly voice, e.g. ‘you definitely can put your own ideas and voice across’ (ld2b). mcculloch and horák what we talk about when we talk about writing: exploring how english for academic purposes teachers and learning developers conceptualise academic writing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 10 entirely without prompting from the interviewers, most of the participants used metaphors to talk about academic writing. one eap teacher described academic writing as a set of components that ticks predetermined boxes: so i suppose i break academic writing down into components, which if adhered to would produce something that looks like an academic essay. it may not be particularly insightful, but it would tick the boxes and would fulfil criteria that would be expected (eap2b). this metaphor characterises academic writing as a highly decontextualised product that can be evaluated in terms of a checklist of essential features. it stands alone, disconnected from disciplinary subject matter, the text’s purpose and the writer’s identity. another eap teacher at the same university described academic writing in a similar way, as a process of jumping through hoops to demonstrate competence: i would look at the requirements of the particular department or the particular group who was assessing what that writer has to do. so i would, in a sense, define it in terms of what that writer is required to do to jump through the hoops in order to be thought a competent writer (eap1b). this definition of writing is, again, fairly instrumental, focusing on academic writing mainly as a means to an end. both these comments include the concept of the writer being judged against externally-set expectations and they are similar to casanave’s (2002) notion of ‘writing games’ in that they foreground the rule-based and highly conventional aspects of academic writing. one of our participants who worked as a learning developer described academic writing as learning a new language or translating: learning a new language is how i describe it to the students. . . . i always tell them that i'm from [city], and . . . i need to translate things from academic writing into [city] so that i can understand it, get my head around it and really understand it before i can then translate it back into academic writing (ld1a). mcculloch and horák what we talk about when we talk about writing: exploring how english for academic purposes teachers and learning developers conceptualise academic writing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 11 while academic discourse is often described as nobody’s first language (bourdieu and passeron,1984; hyland, 2016), in this case our participant was talking about translation in terms of issues of class, translating from a local vernacular into academic discourse, and back again. this metaphor spoke of transition of the self. another powerful metaphor that a learning developer used to define academic writing was as follows: it's also like giving them the keys to a new kingdom, to say this is your introduction to the world of academia. this is how you access knowledge; this is how you create knowledge (ld2a). this metaphor is also concerned with transition or movement from one world to another. it also echoes lillis and scott’s (2007) characterisation of academic literacies as being potentially transformative by facilitating access to powerful knowledge. these metaphors reveal two main conceptualisations of academic writing, one seeing it as a means of displaying one’s credentials in terms of mastery of textual features and the other placing far greater emphasis on writing as a socially situated vehicle for personal development. it is worth noting that these metaphors may reflect how our participants themselves viewed academic writing, but they may also express an element of empathy with the challenges facing their students, describing academic writing from the student perspective. the latter two metaphors came from learning developers, which does, prima facie, suggest that this ‘tribe’ sees writing as embedded within a socio-cultural, academic literacies perspective, more than was the case for the eap teachers. however, there were also instances in the data of the eap tutors foregrounding the role of social context in writing, and learning developers discussing writing in terms of rules and conventions. for example, one eap teacher, when asked to define academic writing, replied: ‘i suppose i always look at it politically’ (eap1b), and one learning developer defined writing partly in terms of following conventions: ‘you need to follow certain conventions and those are the conventions of academic writing’ (ld2b). overall, we found a diversity of understandings, with most of the participants providing nuanced descriptions of academic writing, which often touched upon both textual features mcculloch and horák what we talk about when we talk about writing: exploring how english for academic purposes teachers and learning developers conceptualise academic writing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 12 and contextual or ideological aspects of writing. few appeared to see academic writing as any sort of monolithic entity. having established how our participants talked about academic writing, we discuss below the factors that may have influenced these conceptualisations. research question 2: what influenced these views of writing? to investigate this question, we asked our participants about their own academic writing, how they had learned it, and which, if any, theories or concepts influenced their practice. identifying as an academic writer we know that writing plays an important role in student identify formation (haggis, 2004; gourlay, 2009) and that academic writing lies close to the heart of professional academics’ identity (tusting et al., 2019), so it is reasonable to assume that it might play a similar role in the professional identity of those who teach or otherwise support students to develop their academic writing. we therefore asked our participants about their own academic writing in order to explore the extent to which they saw themselves as academic writers in terms of identity or expertise and how this might influence their practice. we were rather surprised to find that most claimed to do very little or no academic writing currently. when asked, ‘do you do or have you done any academic writing?’, answers included: ‘no, not a sausage’ (eap2b); ‘other than my ma, no’ (eap2a); ‘not much and i’m not very good at it’ (ld1b). only two participants, both learning developers, reported being active academic writers, having published ‘a couple of papers’ (ld2b) and responding: ‘i’ve done a bit’ (ld2a). most participants did not identify themselves as academic writers and tended to reject the notion of being experts. while all of our participants were qualified to master’s level and two had phds (ld2b and ld1a), and thus had all done what we, as researchers, consider academic writing in the past, none of them mentioned this in relation to this question, aside from the ‘other than my ma’ comment above. this may suggest they undervalued their own previous academic writing while they were academics-intraining, and equated academic writing with professional publication. their stance was rather puzzling, given that academic writing of all sorts lies at the heart of their everyday working lives. mcculloch and horák what we talk about when we talk about writing: exploring how english for academic purposes teachers and learning developers conceptualise academic writing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 13 research demonstrates how important the publishing of scholarly work is to academics (mcculloch, 2017), including eap teachers (davis, 2018). despite this, davis (2018) has found that eap teachers face various obstacles to publishing, including lack of time and institutional support. indeed, several of our participants (eap2a, eap2b and ld2b) mentioned lacking time but wanting to do more academic writing. similar issues likely face many learning developers too, given that they are frequently positioned as ‘professional services’ staff rather than academics (hilsdon, 2010). it may therefore be that although academic writing was important in the work of our participants, unless this was published in disciplinary journals, they did not feel ready to claim the identity of an ‘academic writer’. only two of our participants (ld2a and ld2b) had published their writing and this might account for the reluctance of the others to see themselves as expert writers. learning writing we asked participants about their own experience of learning academic writing since this is likely to influence their views and approaches to supporting their students. for many of our participants, their experience of doing an ma had been a turning point in their understanding of academic writing and its wider purpose. some (eap2b and ld2b) mentioned the guidance of a specific mentor or supervisor who gave them feedback on their writing. others talked about ‘picking it up’ or learning from colleagues ‘through my job’ (eap1b) and some claimed not to have learned how to do academic writing. most participants’ views on how they learned academic writing fit with an academic socialisation understanding of literacy as something learned informally, through a form of apprenticeship (lea and street, 1998). in this sense our participants felt that they learned mainly through the process of writing as novices, rather than through any formal ‘teaching’ or study. this style of learning and the lack of formal qualification in writing could possibly have been a contributing factor to the lack of a clear identity as a writer or an ‘expert’ in academic writing. our participants’ writing identities may be somewhat rhizomic, in the sense discussed by deleuze and guattari (1987), in that they may be characterised by multiple interlinked points rather than having a clear main root and direction of growth. writing identities may be subject to change, shaped by the various roles our participants play, relationships they form and communities of practice they move in (french, 2019). lack of influence from theory mcculloch and horák what we talk about when we talk about writing: exploring how english for academic purposes teachers and learning developers conceptualise academic writing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 14 lastly, we also explored the extent to which participants drew on theories and concepts in the fields of learning, eap, literacy or literacies, in the hope of ascertaining whether they aligned themselves to any particular schools of thought. however, very few mentioned any theoretical stances at all, even when asked directly. this might suggest, in support of ding and bruce (2017), that their current practice has developed more through experiential learning (green and powell, 2005) than through the direct influence of theoretical knowledge or training. it is true that, while the majority of eap teachers have mas in tesol, applied linguistics or education, relatively few have undertaken specific eaporiented training through which an eap-specific theoretical underpinning to their practice might have been developed (fitzpatrick et al., 2019). instead, many take up their first eap posts after completing qualifications and gaining experience in general tefl (teaching english as a foreign language) (campion, 2016). likewise, there is no single route into the field of learning development, nor an established pre-entry qualification (murray and glass, 2010), which might enable practitioners to draw on a common set of theories. without doubt, although there has been a proliferation of research in the field of eap and learning development over the past 20 years or so (wingate and tribble, 2012), there remains, according to ding and bruce (2017, p.118), something of a ‘schism’ between the research base and the day-to-day practice of eap professionals. it may therefore be that our participants did not engage a great deal with research literature or theory. those theories that our participants did mention sat within a socio-cultural paradigm, a specific example being biggs’s constructive alignment (1996), rather than eap, academic literacies or writing theories per se. the perceived relevance of socio-cultural context a further factor that emerged as shaping participants’ conceptualisations of academic writing was the perceived interrelationship between text and context. all the participants talked about text but only some also discussed context, for example seeing academic writing as a vehicle for instigating change by developing critical thinking. two eap teachers (eap1a and eap2a) talked about their approach to supporting students with writing mainly in terms of the mechanics of writing, such as teaching classic essay structure, developing appropriate vocabulary and understanding genre or enabling specific, short-term gains in the form of improved grades on essays, through improving mcculloch and horák what we talk about when we talk about writing: exploring how english for academic purposes teachers and learning developers conceptualise academic writing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 15 punctuation and sentence structure. while we cannot discount the possibility that they also saw social context as important to writing, but happened not to foreground this aspect of their work, these participants’ focus on textual and linguistic elements of writing does suggest an understanding of academic writing as in line with a relatively autonomous model of literacy (street, 1995). in contrast, some participants could not dissociate academic writing from aspects of the socio-cultural context such as students’ lives, aims and barriers to their learning. when asked how they went about supporting students with academic writing, some participants (ld1a and ld1b) talked about helping them to develop their cultural capital (bourdieu, 1986), confidence and life chances. this suggests that, although they did not draw explicitly on theories relating to the role of identity and power relations in academic writing, they nevertheless saw writing as embedded within, and shaped by, social forces. in a similar vein, two participants, both learning developers (ld1a and ld2a), explicitly talked about their understanding of writing as highly situated, and about the transformational power of education discussed above. it is notable that they were learning developers at the post-1992 institution, which, as discussed earlier, has a pronounced widening participation agenda, with many students arriving via non-traditional routes, arguably without the cultural capital of most students at the higher-ranking university. working with such students may lead learning developers to appreciate the effects of one’s wider sociopolitical context on one’s writing. in this sense, some participants saw greater complexity in academic writing than others, taking account of wider contextual issues and characterising these as relevant factors in supporting students with their writing. returning to our initial feeling that eap teachers and learning developers might belong to different tribes, we drew together the data from the four sub-themes discussed above, namely the participants’ conceptualisations of writing, the way they had learned to write themselves, the theoretical frameworks they drew on in discussing writing, and the extent to which they saw the socio-cultural context as relevant to writing. this enabled us to look at each participant’s interview as a whole to gauge the extent to which their comments overall reflected a broadly autonomous view of literacy (street, 1995) as a mainly textual, de-contextualised phenomenon, or a broadly socio-cultural view of academic writing as socially-embedded and highly contextualised. if a participant foregrounded features of text such as rules of essay structure, conventions, and academic style in their interview as a mcculloch and horák what we talk about when we talk about writing: exploring how english for academic purposes teachers and learning developers conceptualise academic writing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 16 whole, we placed them at the ‘autonomous’ end of the spectrum shown in figure 1, and if they talked more about class, identity, voice, and power, for example, we placed them at the other end. figure 1. participants placed on a spectrum according to how strongly their comments reflected an autonomous or socio-cultural perspective on academic writing. figure 1 shows that, while there is some clustering of eap teachers at the ‘autonomous’ end of the scale and learning developers at the 'socio-cultural' end, the pattern is not completely linear. in other words, in this small group of participants, the two professional groups do not fall clearly into two different ‘tribes’ in terms of their overall conceptualisation of academic writing. however, the two ‘extreme’ ends of the spectrum in figure 1 do provide some evidence of different ways of thinking about academic writing. the two participants who talked least about the issues around the socio-cultural context of writing were eap tutors, while the two who saw these issues as most relevant to academic writing were both learning developers; but in the middle, a diversity of views was present. as discussed above, the two universities at which our participants worked differed in terms of the type of students they attracted. as already stated, university a was a post-1992 institution with a higher proportion of ‘widening participation’ and working-class students. conversely, university b, with its higher ranking in league tables, had a generally more middle-class intake. it is possible that understandings of academic writing might be shaped in part by the types of students and institutional context in which one works. for example, mcculloch and horák what we talk about when we talk about writing: exploring how english for academic purposes teachers and learning developers conceptualise academic writing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 17 those working with students from a widening participation background might see issues of class and power as more relevant, so might tend to hold views of writing more informed by an academic literacies paradigm than those at university b. if this were the case, we would expect participants from university b to cluster around one end of the spectrum but figure 1 above shows that there is no clear clustering of participants based on their employing institution. conclusions in reporting our results, we are mindful of the small sample in this study and must be cautious in drawing conclusions and suggesting generalisability to other cases. however, we have no reason to suspect atypicality (mason, 2002) of our participants, other than the lack of male participants, and can thus assume a certain degree of transferability to other staff in similar positions. overall, the findings do not provide strong evidence that the participants make up two different tribes. eap teachers and learning developers in this sample talked about writing in relatively similar ways, usually discussing both textual features and socio-cultural factors, albeit to different extents. neither group drew heavily on the scholarly literature on academic writing or saw theory as a significant influence on their practice. instead, most described the experience of learning to write as students with the support of a supervisor, tutor or mentor as the biggest influence on their understanding of academic writing. one of the most surprising findings was that neither the eap teachers nor the learning developers identified strongly as academic writers or experts in writing, despite all holding postgraduate qualifications and some having published their writing in peer-reviewed journals, even though the nature of their posts meant they discussed academic writing in all forms, not just professional publication, on a daily basis. ‘an academic writer’ seemed to have a rather specific meaning for them. it may be that, as french (2019) suggests, greater critical awareness of the various ways that their own writing experiences inform their identity would benefit both eap teachers and learning developers in terms of claiming their disciplinary space. mcculloch and horák what we talk about when we talk about writing: exploring how english for academic purposes teachers and learning developers conceptualise academic writing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 18 a larger sample would be needed to draw firm conclusions, but it is possible that the mixed professional experience of this group of participants may have influenced their beliefs about writing. for example, several participants had worked in both eap teaching and learning development roles in their career, which might have led them to see writing within a broader context. future studies could include more eap teachers with an efl background but no learning development experience, or eap teachers working for private providers attached to universities, to explore whether these factors might also influence their views. beyond the experience of the individual, other explanations for the finding that these two groups of professionals do not constitute two different tribes might lie in the changing nature of higher education in the uk. increased internationalisation and massification (tusting et al., 2019) may mean that distinctions between the needs of international and home students are becoming less clear, leading to a blurring of the boundaries between the roles of staff supporting them. by shedding light on what we talk about when we talk about academic writing, we can raise awareness among staff who support academic writing about the range of conceptualisations that exist, all of which may be valid for the range of student circumstances that pertain in universities today. enabling staff to locate their practice within this complexity may also facilitate the sharing of good practice. for example, eap teachers may benefit from the greater awareness of how students’ lives as a whole influence their writing, and learning developers may benefit from the type of meta-linguistic awareness that eap teachers typically have to enable them to talk about issues that may pertain to students’ writing such as the use of cohesive devices or reporting verbs. secondly, a re-evaluation of professional identities in the field, a process kick-started by the november 2018 joint conference by baleap and aldinhe, the professional organisations of eap teachers and learning developers respectively, may facilitate greater awareness of the range of ways in which one can be a professional academic writer, and the range of expertise these two groups bring to their field. future studies investigating these issues with larger populations at a wider range of research sites would of course be useful, as would an examination not only of the two mcculloch and horák what we talk about when we talk about writing: exploring how english for academic purposes teachers and learning developers conceptualise academic writing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 19 professional groups’ conceptualisations of academic writing, but also their practices, both in supporting students and in their own writing. references barton, d. and hamilton, m. (2000) ‘literacy practices’, in barton, d. hamilton, m. and ivanič, r. (eds) situated literacies. london and new york: routledge, pp.7-15. becher, t. and trowler, p. (2001) academic tribes and territories: intellectual enquiry and the culture of disciplines. 2nd edn. buckingham: open university press. biggs, j. (1996) ‘enhancing teaching though constructive alignment’, higher education, 32(3), pp. 347-364. bourdieu, p. (1986) ‘the forms of capital’, in richardson, j. (ed) handbook of theory and research for the sociology of education. westport, ct: greenwood, pp.46-58. bourdieu, p. and passeron, j.c. (1994) ‘introduction: language and relationship to language in the teaching situation’, in bourdieu, p., passeron, j.c. and de saint martin m. (eds.) academic discourse: linguistic misunderstanding and professorial power. cambridge: polity, pp.1-34. campion, g. c. (2016) ‘“the learning never ends”: exploring teachers’ views on the transition from general english to eap’, journal of english for academic purposes, 23, pp.59-70. carver, r. (1992) what we talk about, when we talk about love. 4th edn. london: vintage books. casanave, c. (2002) writing games: multicultural case studies of academic literacy practices in higher education. abingdon: routledge. chandrasoma, r., thompson, c. and pennycook, a. (2004) ‘beyond plagiarism: transgressive and nontransgressive intertextuality’, journal of language, identity mcculloch and horák what we talk about when we talk about writing: exploring how english for academic purposes teachers and learning developers conceptualise academic writing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 20 and education, 3(3), pp.171-193. available at: https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327701jlie0303_1 (accessed:16 may 2019). davis, m. (2018) ‘“if you don’t write yourself, on what grounds can you offer advice about writing to others?” the importance and multiple impacts of publishing by teachers of academic writing’, journal of academic writing, 8(2), pp.4-35. available at: https://doi.org/10.18552/joaw.v8i2.459 (accessed: 29 may 2019). deleuze, g and guattari, f. (1987) a thousand plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. ding, a. and bruce, i. (2017) the english for academic purposes practitioner: operating on the edge of academia. basingstoke, uk: palgrave macmillan. fitzpatrick, d., costley, t. and tavakoli, p. (2019) ‘what do we mean by eap teachers? reflections on practice, pedagogy and professional development’. paper presented at the baleap annual conference, leeds university, england, 12-14 april 2019. available at: https://www.baleap.org/event/baleap-2019-leeds/damian-fitzpatrickand-tracey-costley-what-do-we-mean-by-eap-teachers (accessed: 16 may 2019). french, a. (2019) ‘academic writing as identity-work in higher education: forming a “professional writing habitus”’, studies in higher education, available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2019.1572735 (accessed: 6 april 2019). gee, j. (1991) ‘socio-cultural approaches to literacy (literacies)’. annual review of applied linguistics, 12, pp.31-48. goodfellow, r. (2005) ‘academic literacies and e-learning: a critical approach to writing in the online university’, international journal of educational research, 43(7-8), pp. 481-494. available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijer.2006.07.005 (accessed: 22 april 2019). gourlay, l. (2009) ‘threshold practices: becoming a student through academic literacies’, london review of education 7(2), pp.181-192. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327701jlie0303_1 https://doi.org/10.18552/joaw.v8i2.459 https://www.baleap.org/event/baleap-2019-leeds/damian-fitzpatrick-and-tracey-costley-what-do-we-mean-by-eap-teachers https://www.baleap.org/event/baleap-2019-leeds/damian-fitzpatrick-and-tracey-costley-what-do-we-mean-by-eap-teachers https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2019.1572735 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijer.2006.07.005 mcculloch and horák what we talk about when we talk about writing: exploring how english for academic purposes teachers and learning developers conceptualise academic writing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 21 green, h. and powell, s. (2005) doctoral study in contemporary higher education. maidenhead: srhe and open university press. haggis, t. (2004) ‘meaning, identity and “motivation”: expanding what matters in understanding learning in higher education?’, studies in higher education, 29(3), pp. 335-352. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/03075070410001682538 (accessed: 22 april 2019). halliday, m. k. and hasan, r. (1989) language context and text: aspects of language in a social semiotic perspective. 2nd edn. oxford: oxford university press. hilsdon, j. (2010) ‘what is learning development?’ in hartley, p., hilsdon, j., keenen, c., sinfield, s. and verity, m. (eds.) learning development in higher education. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan, pp.13-27. hyland, k. (2004) disciplinary discourses: social interactions in academic writing. michigan: university of michigan. hyland, k. (2016) academic publishing: issues and challenges in the construction of knowledge. oxford: oxford university press. ivanič, r. (1998) writing and identity: the discoursal construction of identity in academic writing. amsterdam: john benjamins. jacobs, c. (2015) ‘opening up the curriculum: moving from the normative to the transformative in teachers’ understandings of disciplinary literacy practices’, in lillis, t., harrington, k., lea, m. and mitchell, s. (eds.) working with academic literacies: case studies towards transformative practice. fort collins, colorado: the wac clearinghouse and parlor press, pp.131-141. kristeva, j. (1980) desire in language: a semiotic approach to literature and art. new york: columbia university press. https://doi.org/10.1080/03075070410001682538 mcculloch and horák what we talk about when we talk about writing: exploring how english for academic purposes teachers and learning developers conceptualise academic writing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 22 kvale, s. (1996) interviews: an introduction to qualitative research interviewing. thousand oaks, ca: sage publications. lea, m. r. and street, b. v. (1998) ‘student writing in higher education: an academic literacies approach’, studies in higher education, 23(2), pp.157-172. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079812331380364 (accessed: 22 april 2019). leedham, m. (2015) ‘learning from lecturers: what disciplinary practice can teach us about “good” student writing’, in lillis, t., harrington, k., lea, m. and mitchell, s. (eds.) working with academic literacies: case studies towards transformative practice. fort collins, colorado: the wac clearinghouse and parlor press, pp.163–174. leki, i. (1995) ‘coping strategies of esl students in writing tasks across the curriculum’, tesol quarterly, 27(4), pp. 235-260. lillis, t. m. and scott, m. (2007) ‘defining academic literacies research: issues of epistemology, ideology and strategy’, journal of applied linguistics, 4(1), pp.5-32. macaro, e. and wingate, u. (2004) ‘from sixth form to university: motivation and transition among high achieving state-school language students’, oxford review of education, 30(4), pp. 467-488. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/0305498042000303964 (accessed: 30 may 2019). marshall, c. and rossman, g. b. (2006) designing qualitative research. 4th edn. london: sage. mason, j. (2002) qualitative researching. london: sage. mcculloch, s. (2017) ‘hobson’s choice: the effects of research evaluation on academics’ writing practices in england’, aslib journal of information management 69(5), pp. 503-515. available at: https://doi.org/10.1108/ajim-12-2016-0216 (accessed: 14 april 2019 ). https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079812331380364 https://doi.org/10.1080/0305498042000303964 https://doi.org/10.1108/ajim-12-2016-0216 mcculloch and horák what we talk about when we talk about writing: exploring how english for academic purposes teachers and learning developers conceptualise academic writing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 23 murakami, h. (2009) what i talk about when i talk about running. london: vintage. murray, l. and glass, b. (2010) ‘learning development in higher education: community of practice or profession?’ in hartley, p., hilsdon, j., keenen, c., sinfield, s. and verity, m. (eds.) learning development in higher education. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan, pp.28-38. prior, p. (1998) writing/disciplinarity: a sociohistoric account of literate activity in the academy. mahwah, mj: lawrence erlbaum. shaw, p. (1992) ‘reasons for the correlation of voice, tense, and sentence function in reporting verbs’, applied linguistics, 13(3), pp.302-319. street, b. (1995) social literacies: critical approaches to literacy development, ethnography and education. london: longman. swales, j. m. (1990) genre analysis: english in academic and research settings. cambridge: cambridge university press. tuck, j. (2015) ‘“doing something that’s really important”: meaningful engagement as a resource for teachers’ transformative work with student writers in the disciplines’, in lillis, t., harrington, k., lea, m. and mitchell, s. (eds.) working with academic literacies: case studies towards transformative practice. fort collins, colorado: the wac clearinghouse and parlor press, pp.195–204. tusting, k., mcculloch, s., bhatt, i., hamilton, m. and barton, d. (2019) academics writing: the dynamics of knowledge creation. abingdon: routledge. wingate, u. and tribble, c. (2012) ‘the best of both worlds? towards an english for academic purposes writing pedagogy’, studies in higher education, 37(4), pp. 481495. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2010.525630 (accessed: 9 october 2018). https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2010.525630 mcculloch and horák what we talk about when we talk about writing: exploring how english for academic purposes teachers and learning developers conceptualise academic writing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 24 author details sharon mcculloch is a senior lecturer at uclan, where she leads the university’s presessional and study overseas programmes. she has previously worked as both an eap tutor and a learning developer. her research interests include academic literacies, eap, and academic and professional writing. tania horák is a senior lecturer at uclan (uk) teaching on efl teacher training programmes and is currently course leader of ma in tesol and applied linguistics. she has previously worked in elt in the uk, the czech republic, bangladesh and lithuania. her research interests lie in academic writing and also foreign language testing. mcculloch and horák what we talk about when we talk about writing: exploring how english for academic purposes teachers and learning developers conceptualise academic writing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 25 appendix: interview schedule participant’s role what’s your job title? what do you do? what does your typical day look like? participant’s understanding of writing how would you personally define academic writing? do you or have you done – do any academic writing yourself? if so, what sort? (genres, disciplines, processes, etc.) how did you learn how to do academic writing? what influenced you? participants’ experience / background what’s your (professional) background? what qualifications/training did you have to prepare you for your role? if any. does that inform what you do with your students, and if so, how? what else does? does your own experience of writing and learning to write inform what you do with your students, and if so, how? theories drawn on are there any particular theories/schools of thought/concepts you draw on to inform your work on academic writing? can you give an example of how you use these in your professional practice? close is there anything you thought i’d ask which i haven’t? is there anything else you think might be relevant to this study? do you have any other questions? what we talk about when we talk about writing: exploring how english for academic purposes teachers and learning developers conceptualise academic writing abstract introduction background methodology our study was a small-scale, exploratory study to test our initial inkling regarding the two different groups of staff discussed above. data collection data analysis findings and discussion research question 1: how do the participants conceptualise academic writing? research question 2: what influenced these views of writing? conclusions references author details appendix: interview schedule participant’s role participant’s understanding of writing participants’ experience / background theories drawn on close journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special issue 22: compendium of innovative practice october 2021 ________________________________________________________________________ building a values-based community of practice in nursing sciences during the covid-19 pandemic debbie holley bournemouth university, uk anne quinney bournemouth university, uk john moran bournemouth university, uk keywords: covid-19; values-based; assessment and feedback; confidence-building; blended learning. the challenge delivering a rigorous nursing and midwifery council (nmc) accredited academic and professional curriculum is complex; the government call for final year student nurses to fast-track their degree completion and enter clinical practice six months early as a response to the pandemic added a further challenging dimension. distinctive features of teaching and learning in this department of nursing science are a curriculum built on the theory of humanisation (todres, galvin and holloway, 2009) and valuesbased teaching and learning (shulman, 2005; crookes, else and lewis, 2020), informed by wenger’s (1999) communities of practice. this underpinning philosophy informed the support mechanisms introduced to support this complex scenario of online study and rapid pandemic-related deployment into clinical practice. as traditional nurse education has involved high levels of face-to-face content both on campus and in clinical settings (horsfall, cleary and hunt, 2012), few staff had experience or expertise in delivering online learning. however there was an in-house theoretical base to draw upon in developing theories of blended learning (hutchings, quinney and galvin, 2014; hutchings and quinney, 2015). a rapid transition was needed to not simply move content online for our cohort of unexpectedly distanced learners, but to design interactive holley, quinney and moran building a values-based community of practice in nursing sciences during the covid-19 pandemic journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 2 and engaging materials. coupled with this, assessment practices were required to change to be in line with online teaching and learning. we drew upon the body of knowledge offered by learning development in this ‘tilt to online’ (quinney et al., 2017; nordmann et al., 2020), and this developed confidence in staff unfamiliar with this mode of delivery. the response the work of biggs (1999) on constructive alignment, and conole and wills (2013) on learning design informed the range of different interventions we provided in order to support staff as learners. we report here on two initiatives which supported staff in making adjustments to teaching and learning strategies. the corona virus teachinar set up in the university’s virtual learning environment, brightspace, was delivered as a radio station ‘chat show’ on a daily basis, building the academic community. the second initiative supported efforts to make assessment and feedback changes more accessible to staff, delivered through a renewed focus on creating resources for our nationally acclaimed ‘assessment & feedback toolkit’. by sharing opportunities for redesign through formal and informal channels, staff awareness of the options was built. our learning designs needed to offer scaled-up and sustainable interventions and feature a supportive and inclusive approach which recognised the rapid learning required of academic staff in this unfamiliar teaching and learning context. the teachinar hosted live discussions, shared good pedagogic design, demonstrated how to use online learning tools, provided demonstrations in situ, and provided a ‘safe space’ for staff to try new approaches and build confidence. adding all staff to the unit enabled easy access through everyone’s brightspace ‘landing pages’, ensuring prominence and accessibility. the familiar design and layout removed the need for staff to become competent in using another platform, replicating the familiar layout and content of a unit of study, which modelled the student experience. a popular feature was an informal daily chat hosted by the faculty learning technologist and the academic project lead. this drew on laurillard’s 2002 work on conversational frameworks in order to listen to, reassure, and inspire staff, whilst modelling and reinforcing new practices. holley, quinney and moran building a values-based community of practice in nursing sciences during the covid-19 pandemic journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 3 our technology/pedagogic response was underpinned by vygotsky’s (1978) conceptualisation of the zone of proximal development which had informed previous developments in blended learning (hutchings, quinney and galvin, 2014; hutchings and quiney 2015). vygotsky’s ideas support socially constructed learning, especially when mediated by technology. we were influenced by cook (2010) who proposed an extension of vygotsky's concepts to explain how learners collaborate, using tools to mediate learning (mobile phones, augmented reality, language). this approach underpinned the technology-mediated problem solving where learners (in this case staff) participated in new contexts for learning. the assessment and feedback toolkit provided a further support mechanism which articulated ‘the why’ by setting out theories and principles, particularly on assessment design (including: nicol and mcfarlane-dick, 2006; hounsell, xu and tai, 2007; boud et al., 2010; bearman et al., 2016) and not simply ‘how to’ move assessment online. the toolkit was developed in-house, and available to the wider academic community as an open access resource (quinney, holley and luce, 2019). it contained continually updated materials on well-established topics pertinent to the pandemic – for example, on moving exams online – with weekly blog content spotlighting sections of content. this promoted resources that were both relevant and sustainable, regardless of the adjustments required in response to the pandemic. the change in practice enabled in this way has led to longer term creative and authentic assessment strategies, rather than just being a temporary adjustment. encouraging staff to make creative and authentic adjustments to assessment and feedback was operationalised through a combination of live and recorded webinars, tailored to specific discipline context where requested, and expert masterclasses facilitated by our in-house expert (quinney) with an international visiting professor (hounsell). the faculty learning technologist highlighted the importance of rapid adaptations to institutional change for management practices and confidence building: ‘the usual change barriers were removed and left us no choice but to adapt, we will be able to offer our students a wider variety and ‘blend’ as we move more confidently between different learning spaces in the future’. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10494820.2015.1128206 holley, quinney and moran building a values-based community of practice in nursing sciences during the covid-19 pandemic journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 4 recommendations a. work in partnership: partnering with university-wide initiatives led by the centre for fusion learning, innovation and excellence provided a broader range of expertise and formats for support and development, including informal masterclasses run by leading academics and input from the wider learning technology team. these sessions enabled staff to learn with and from people from a wide range of academic programmes.this combination of discipline-specific and broader inter-disciplinary content created a richer learning environment and provided ongoing connections beyond programme teams and departments. b. look beyond the short-term: the combination of strategies informed by longstanding teaching and learning theories and new knowledge provided a sustainable set of resoures to change teaching and learning practices beyond the necessary pandemic adjustments. c. personalised approach: a focus on individual staff needs as well as institution needs though a supportive humanised approach enabled staff to share concerns and develop confidence. this approach drew upon the community of practice approach advocated by wenger. d. share the learning: further dissemination was achieved through a range of platforms, including individual and institution blogs and social media such as twitter, enabling ideas to be shared, adapted and adopted more widely, whilst learning from peers in different heis, including as part of an assessment design sprint with jisc about innovation in assessment at a time of change (holley 2020a) and a wonkhe blog (holley 2020b). this local initiative thus gained momentum and informed learning beyond the department, faculty, and institution. e. repeat and reinforce. the success of these two examples will be reinforced by continuing to provide opportunities for staff to talk through concerns or challenges, develop further confidence, and increase expertise as we move to a blended/hybrid learning scenario. references holley, quinney and moran building a values-based community of practice in nursing sciences during the covid-19 pandemic journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 5 bearman, m., dawson, p., boud, d. j., bennett, s., hall, m. and molloy, e. k. (2016) ‘support for assessment practice: developing the assessment design decisions framework’, teaching in higher education, 21(5), pp.545-556. biggs, j. (2003) teaching for quality learning at university. milton keynes: shre and open university press. boud, d. and associates (2010) assessment 2020: seven propositions for assessment reform in higher education. www.assessmentfutures.com (accessed: 9 august 2021). cook, j. (2010) ‘mobile phones as mediating tools within augmented contexts for development’, international journal of mobile and blended learning, 2(3), pp.1-12. https://doi.org/10.4018/jmbl.2010070101. conole, g. and wills, s., (2013) ‘representing learning designs – making design explicit and shareable’, educational media international, 50(1), pp.24-38. https://doi.org/10.1080/09523987.2013.777184. crookes, p. a., else, f. and lewis, p. (2020) signature pedagogies: an integrative review of an emerging concept in nursing education. faculty of science, medicine and health papers: part b. available at: https://ro.uow.edu.au/smhpapers1/1085 (accessed: 9 august 2021). holley, d (2020a). jisc policy panel: the assessment (re) design sprint. jisc, 9 april 2020. holley, d (2020b) ‘remote learning means we need to radically rethink assessment’, 19 march 2020. available at: https://wonkhe.com/blogs/remote-learning-means-weneed-to-radically-rethink-assessment/ (accessed: 9 august 2021). horsfall, j., cleary, m. and hunt, g. e. (2012) ‘developing a pedagogy for nursing education-teaching’, nurse education today, 32(8), pp.930-933. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nedt.2011.10.022. http://www.assessmentfutures.com/ https://doi.org/10.4018/jmbl.2010070101 https://doi.org/10.1080/09523987.2013.777184 https://ro.uow.edu.au/smhpapers1/1085 https://wonkhe.com/blogs/remote-learning-means-we-need-to-radically-rethink-assessment/ https://wonkhe.com/blogs/remote-learning-means-we-need-to-radically-rethink-assessment/ https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nedt.2011.10.022 holley, quinney and moran building a values-based community of practice in nursing sciences during the covid-19 pandemic journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 6 hounsell, d., xu, r. and tai, c. m. (2007) blending assignments and assessments for high-quality learning (scottish enhancement themes: guides to integrative assessment, no.3). gloucester: quality assurance agency for higher education. available at: https://www.enhancementthemes.ac.uk/docs/ethemes/integrativeassessment/guide-no-3---blending-assignments-and-assessments-for-high-qualitylearning.pdf?sfvrsn=712cf981_6 (accessed: 12 august 2021). hutchings, m. and quinney, a. (2015) ‘the flipped classroom, disruptive pedagogies, enabling technologies and wicked problems: responding to the “bomb in the basement”’, electronic journal of elearning, 13(2), pp.106-119. hutchings, m., quinney, a., and galvin, k. (2014) ‘negotiating the triple helix: harnessing technology for transformation’, in yáñez, t. a, rodriguez, o. s. and griffiths, p. (eds) proceedings of the 9th international conference on e-learning. valparaiso, chile, 26-27 june. valparaiso: academic conferences and publishing international limited, p.76. laurillard, d. (2002) rethinking university teaching: a conversational framework for the effective use of learning technologies. london: routledge. nicol, d. and macfarlane-dick, d. (2006) ‘formative assessment and self-regulated learning: a model and seven principles of good feedback practice’, studies in higher education, 31(2), pp.199-218. https://doi.org/10.1080/03075070600572090. nordmann, e., horlin, c., hutchison, j., murray, j. a., robson, l., seery, m. k. and mackay, j. r. d. (2020) ‘10 simple rules for supporting a temporary online pivot in higher education’, psyarxiv preprints. available at: https://psyarxiv.com/qdh25/ (accessed: 9 august 2021). quinney, a., holley, d. and luce, a. (2019) ‘from assessment of learning to assessment for learning: leading assessment policy change supported by and assessment & feedback toolkit’, aldinhe learning development conference. exeter university, exeter 15-17 april. https://www.enhancementthemes.ac.uk/docs/ethemes/integrative-assessment/guide-no-3---blending-assignments-and-assessments-for-high-quality-learning.pdf?sfvrsn=712cf981_6 https://www.enhancementthemes.ac.uk/docs/ethemes/integrative-assessment/guide-no-3---blending-assignments-and-assessments-for-high-quality-learning.pdf?sfvrsn=712cf981_6 https://www.enhancementthemes.ac.uk/docs/ethemes/integrative-assessment/guide-no-3---blending-assignments-and-assessments-for-high-quality-learning.pdf?sfvrsn=712cf981_6 https://doi.org/10.1080/03075070600572090 https://psyarxiv.com/qdh25/ holley, quinney and moran building a values-based community of practice in nursing sciences during the covid-19 pandemic journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 7 quinney, a., lamont, c., holley, d. and biggins, d. (2017) ‘embedding the value of learning by extending professional boundaries’, journal of learning development in higher education, issue 12, november, pp.1-14. https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.v0i12.417. shulman, l. s., (2005) ‘signature pedagogies in the professions’, daedalus, 134(3), p.52. todres, l., galvin, k. t. and holloway, i. (2009) ‘the humanization of healthcare: a value framework for qualitative research’, international journal of qualitative studies on health and well-being, 4(2), pp.68-77. https://doi.org/10.1080/17482620802646204. vygotsky, l. s. (1978) mind in society: the development of higher psychological processes. cambridge ma: harvard university press. wenger, e. (1999) communities of practice: learning, meaning, and identity. cambridge: cambridge university press. author details anne quinney is the academic lead for assessment and feedback in the centre for fusion learning, innovation and excellence at bournemouth university. she has particular interests in curriculum design, blended learning, and assessment and feedback policy, and writes and presents extensively on these subjects. anne shares her expertise by teaching on the pgcert in academic practice. debbie holley is the professor of learning innovation in the department of nursing sciences at bournemouth university. her expertise lies with blending learning to motivate and engage students with their learning inside /outside the formal classroom, at a time and place of their own choosing. within health, she offers evidence-based practice in the development and evaluation of simulation and digital health applications. https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.v0i12.417 https://doi.org/10.1080/17482620802646204 holley, quinney and moran building a values-based community of practice in nursing sciences during the covid-19 pandemic journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 8 john moran is the faculty learning technologist for the faculty of health and social sciences (fhss) at bournemouth university. based in the centre for fusion learning, innovation and excellence, he leads on innovation in health, and is an expert in health simulation, 360 filming, and virtual realities. building a values-based community of practice in nursing sciences during the covid-19 pandemic the challenge the response recommendations references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special issue 22: compendium of innovative practice october 2021 ________________________________________________________________________ adapt and thrive: student engagement on a business and economics foundation year programme during covid-19 gerald dampier university of surrey, uk keywords: covid-19; student engagement; foundation year; learning development. the challenge one significant feature of the first sudden lockdown (march 2020) was the immediate downward impact on attendance and engagement in the hastily convened online sessions that followed. this was noted both across the university as a whole and on the foundation year programme to which i am attached in a full-time capacity as a learning developer, providing embedded subject-specific development input to the whole cohort. as a course team with a relatively high student:staff ratio (approximately 1:25) and with 115 students, we were mindful of the impact that low levels of engagement could have on student achievement (newman-ford et al., 2008). we were concerned about the implications for the new ‘hybrid’ learning context launched in september 2020, with the likely prospect of further fully-online provision. with these issues in mind we designed a robust, researchinformed approach to fostering student engagement. the response the fully embedded nature of my learning developer role within a small teaching team (4.7 fte) allows me to push student-centred and inclusive approaches to learning and teaching on the programme from curriculum design stage onwards. the shifts to hybrid and online interactions provided opportunities to influence programme priorities, with levels of student engagement in mind. dampier adapt and thrive: student engagement on a business and economics foundation year programme during covid-19 journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 2 defining ‘engagement’ is not necessarily straightforward, but establishing a shared understanding of the term was important. for 2020-21 we introduced it as a concept to students and stressed its importance from welcome week onwards, drawing on the definition by krause and coates (2008) of student engagement as ‘the extent to which students are engaging in activities that higher education research has shown to be linked with high-quality learning outcomes’ (p.493), across academic, non-academic, and social elements. anticipating disruption to the non-academic and social realms for this year, we particularly stressed academic indicators such as attendance, submission of formative work, communication with staff and classmates, and engagement with personal tutors. the course team overtly recorded attendance and treated this as a potential indicator of engagement and a factor in achievement. various studies have established correlations between attendance and achievement: particularly relevant to our context in both level and subject area is the one by halpern (2007) of first-year business students. this year (non-) attendance became an agenda item for weekly staff meetings and enabled the implementation of a more nuanced, multi-pronged pastoral follow-up policy than previously. low attendees received communications from course tutors, faculty administration, and the university’s student success team, depending on the frequency of absence. around 20 students were identified as low engagers at different stages, and only four of these remained significantly detached by the programme end. as learning developer, i was able to influence the nature of personal tutor meetings. these were previously inconsistent, with some tutors working with students one-to-one and others inviting students to ‘opt-in’ to group meetings of 15 or more. i drew tutors’ attention to relevant literature, such as briggs, clark and hall (2012), which stresses the importance in transition of small group and one-to-one interactions between students and academic staff, and grey and osborne (2018), which notes the contribution of such encounters to student belonging, retention, and success. students were set a nonassessed written reflection task on their motivations for joining the programme, designed to allow them to share academic and/or more personal information with the personal tutor, intended to inculcate a sense of personal connection with the university: 85% of students submitted this. one-to-one meetings with personal tutees began from week three. these were not time-consuming (15 minutes per semester, although some needed re-scheduling, sometimes more than once). while not all tutors bought into the approach until semester dampier adapt and thrive: student engagement on a business and economics foundation year programme during covid-19 journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 3 two, it was noticeable from then that students no longer commented that they did not know their personal tutor. in the absence of much of the usual face-to-face contact that students benefit from under normal circumstances both inside and outside class, the year-long group assessed module took on particular significance and was noticeably uncompromised by the move from hybrid to fully online. failures of group work were significantly fewer this year than previously, perhaps because of the combination of effective structure, support, and the lack of alternative social activity; students were quick in conversational feedback to identify this task as enjoyable and successful both on an academic and a social level. the wider benefits reflected those identified by the eberly centre (2021), whose report highlights how ‘positive group experiences … contribute to student learning, retention and overall college success’, i.e., beyond either the module or programme itself. further results, in terms of the performance indicators identified above, were pleasing. formative work was submitted at levels above previous years, e.g., by 77% of students on the research project module. a ‘snapshot’ of live online attendance early in semester 2 shows all seminar groups with 70+%, and several in the 80-100% range. these figures are significant not only for being slightly higher than previously but also because attendance and engagement were reported as positive across all foundation streams in contrast with widespread concerns on many programmes at levels 4-6. reasons for this difference across year groups are not entirely clear but a connection with the student-centred and scaffolded nature of learning and teaching on the foundation programmes generally would seem plausible. recommendations the approaches outlined above were largely honed in response to pandemic conditions and informed by learning development, but are widely transferrable. these included agreeing a workable definition of ‘engagement’ with staff and students in the hybrid context, using an evidence-informed approach to emphasise interactions between personal tutors and students, student-to-student communication in group-work, and tightening approaches to responding to absence. it is important to note (newman-ford et al., 2008) that while ‘attendance’ should not be equated directly with ‘engagement’, nondampier adapt and thrive: student engagement on a business and economics foundation year programme during covid-19 journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 4 attendance is nonetheless a possible indicator of disengagement and teams should address concerns with a structured approach. learning developers can help ensure that individual students’ communications with staff, other students, and the institution are effective. for us this meant personal tutors being proactive in contacting students, then reporting back if a response was not forthcoming; module tutors supporting group-work and being willing to respond to patterns of absence by contacting students in a timely manner; for the team as a whole to coordinate nuanced responses to absence, i.e., through a mixture of concern and ‘strong words’, involving other university services when appropriate. overall, our experience suggests that teaching teams need to respond to context. learning developers can recognise times of change as opportunities to influence engagement levels, especially when such roles are well embedded. adaptability is important: while many of the practices established in the pandemic are sound and sustainable, further change may be necessary when social and non-academic dimensions of universities grow again. references briggs, a. r. j., clark, j. and hall, i. (2012) ‘building bridges: understanding student transition to university’, quality in higher education, 18(1), pp.3-21. https://doi.org/10.1080/13538322.2011.614468. eberly centre (2021) what are the benefits of group work? available at: https://www.cmu.edu/teaching/designteach/design/instructionalstrategies/groupprojec ts/benefits.html (accessed: 24 may 2021). grey, d. and osborne, c. (2018) ‘perceptions and principles of personal tutoring’, journal of further and higher education. available at: http://ray.yorksj.ac.uk/id/eprint/3417/ (accessed: 24 may 2021). halpern, n. (2007) ‘the impact of attendance and student characteristics on academic achievement: findings from an undergraduate business management module’, https://doi.org/10.1080/13538322.2011.614468 https://www.cmu.edu/teaching/designteach/design/instructionalstrategies/groupprojects/benefits.html https://www.cmu.edu/teaching/designteach/design/instructionalstrategies/groupprojects/benefits.html http://ray.yorksj.ac.uk/id/eprint/3417/ dampier adapt and thrive: student engagement on a business and economics foundation year programme during covid-19 journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 5 journal of further and higher education, 31(4), pp.335-349. https://doi.org/10.1080/03098770701626017. krause, k. and coates, c. (2008) ‘students’ engagement in first‐year university’, assessment & evaluation in higher education, 33(5), pp.493-505. https://doi.org/10.1080/02602930701698892. newman‐ford, l., fitzgibbon, k., lloyd, s. and thomas, s. (2008) ‘a large‐scale investigation into the relationship between attendance and attainment: a study using an innovative, electronic attendance monitoring system’, studies in higher education, 33(6), pp.699-717. https://doi.org/10.1080/03075070802457066. author details gerald dampier is a teaching fellow in learning development at the university of surrey. he is employed within the academic skills and development function of the library and learning services and attached full-time to the foundation year programme in business, management and economics. https://doi.org/10.1080/03098770701626017 https://doi.org/10.1080/02602930701698892 https://doi.org/10.1080/03075070802457066 adapt and thrive: student engagement on a business and economics foundation year programme during covid-19 the challenge the response recommendations references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 17: may 2020 ______________________________________________________________________ making the transition to master’s dissertation writing: evaluating the impact of a dissertation writing course on pgt students’ confidence melanie crisfield brunel university london, uk abstract the transition from undergraduate to postgraduate taught (pgt) studies has received increasing focus over the past decade as universities and educators have recognised that master’s students do not necessarily begin their studies equipped with the academic skills necessary to succeed (o’donnell et al., 2009; bunney, 2017; mcpherson et al., 2017). research on postgraduate research (pgr) students demonstrates that thesis writing courses improve students’ confidence in their abilities (larcombe et al., 2007; fergie et al., 2011), but to date, the transition from writing for module assessments to master’s dissertation writing remains largely unstudied. this paper evaluates the effectiveness of a short master’s dissertation writing course − delivered at a british university in the 2017-18 and 2018-19 academic years − on improving students’ confidence in their writing abilities, as reported in pre-course and post-course writing self-evaluations. in both years that the course was offered, there was a significant increase in reported confidence between the first session and the final session, and thematic analysis of open-ended questions demonstrated that students enrolled on the course to improve their knowledge of and confidence in academic writing and left the course having met these goals. this paper confirms that dissertation writing support designed for pgt students can have a positive impact on students’ confidence in their writing abilities, and thus help support them in making the transition to dissertation writing. keywords: academic writing; dissertation writing; master's students; pgt students; writing in transition; academic skills support; writing and confidence. crisfield making the transition to master’s dissertation writing: evaluating the impact of a dissertation writing course on pgt students’ confidence journal of learning development in higher education, issue 17: may 2020 2 introduction in recent years, there has been a growing awareness that pgt students have specific transition needs and that they are not necessarily equipped with the academic skills they need for a master’s programme (o’donnell et al., 2009; tobbell and o’donnell, 2013b; bunney, 2017; mcpherson et al., 2017; coneyworth et al., 2019). for many postgraduate students, there may be a disconnect between what they are expected to achieve and knowing how to achieve it (fergie et al., 2011). this disconnect may, in part, be a result of differences in the information educators think students need and the information the students themselves think they need (symons, 2001). the assumption that pgt students are prepared for a new level of study may lead educators to overlook opportunities to develop and implement specific support systems for pgt students (o’donnell et al., 2009). the increased interest in pgt transition has focused primarily on the initial transition into postgraduate study, but there is a lack of research to date on the transition from module assessment to the master’s dissertation. the master’s dissertation is the most autonomous piece of work a pgt student will undertake (bamber et al., 2019), but many students are not fully aware of the stages of research and writing for a dissertation (zuberskerritt and knight, 1986), which may have an impact on both the final submission and on students’ confidence in their ability to undertake and complete the dissertation process. writing courses concerned with writing skills such as criticality, structure and argument, as opposed to subject knowledge, have been useful in developing the abilities and confidence of pgr students (larcombe et al., 2007; fergie et al., 2011). this type of course can be situated within both self-efficacy theory and communities of practice theory because these courses provide the opportunity for students to develop their skills and their self-belief in those skills (bandura, 1997) through the practice of dissertation writing techniques with a group of peers who are all going through the same process (wenger, 1998). given that the master’s dissertation is not simply an extension of the undergraduate dissertation (o’donnell et al., 2009), targeted dissertation writing courses may also be useful for pgt students. the purpose of this research is therefore to examine the usefulness of a dissertation writing course for pgt students by: crisfield making the transition to master’s dissertation writing: evaluating the impact of a dissertation writing course on pgt students’ confidence journal of learning development in higher education, issue 17: may 2020 3 • evaluating self-reported confidence levels in academic writing preand postcourse. • discussing the students’ self-reported motivations for joining the course and the value they felt the course had for them. literature review in the past decade, there has been an increasing focus on the specific transition needs of pgt students in uk universities. recent studies have challenged the assumption that postgraduate students have mastered the academic skills necessary to successfully complete their degrees (alsford and smith, 2013; tobbell and o'donnell, 2013a, 2013b; bunney, 2017). this assumption may arise from the notion that pgt studies are simply ‘more of the same’ following the completion of an undergraduate degree, or that it is a straightforward step to the next level (o’donnell et al., 2009, p.27); however, a student’s academic skills may not transfer as smoothly as anticipated if the student has a gap between their undergraduate and postgraduate studies, if they are moving into a new discipline (o’donnell et al., 2009), if they are international students coming from a different higher educational culture (alsford and smith, 2013), or if they have specific learning difficulties, all of which may create challenges and stress when students are not supported adequately. universities may also assume a degree of homogeneity amongst their pgt students − particularly in terms of level of academic skill or degree of preparedness for a higher level of study − that no longer exists (o’donnell et al., 2009). rather, there is increasing diversity among pg cohorts (coates and dickinson, 2012; bunney, 2017), as widening access policies (tobbell and o’donnell, 2005) and international recruitment encourage greater participation in higher education. pgt students want recognition that their level study is different to that of undergraduates (o’neill et al., 2007; alsford and smith, 2013), and that many of the challenges they face are based on the higher academic expectations of their degrees (coneyworth et al., 2019). this is particularly true when it comes to master’s level academic writing, which, in comparison with undergraduate writing, requires a more sophisticated demonstration of crisfield making the transition to master’s dissertation writing: evaluating the impact of a dissertation writing course on pgt students’ confidence journal of learning development in higher education, issue 17: may 2020 4 criticality, originality, argument and structure. mcpherson et al. (2017) found that pgt students experience stress and anxiety in response to not knowing how to approach coursework at a higher level and not understanding precisely what master’s level writing entails. writing skills are a concern for many pgt students (symons, 2001), and the short duration of their course (typically one year of full-time study) means that the need for specialised support for pgt students is more immediately pressing (bownes et al., 2017). formalised and targeted support initiatives for pgt students are therefore needed in order to assist with the transition from undergraduate to postgraduate studies. although the need for specific transition support for pgt students has been recognised in recent literature (tobbell and o'donnell, 2013a, 2013b; bunney, 2017; coneyworth et al., 2019), this is generally focused on the transition into pgt, and there has been little research to date on the transition from module assessment to writing the master’s dissertation, which may be a result of universities’ assumptions regarding the academic readiness of master’s students (o’donnell et al., 2009) and the relatively recent expansion of research into this level of study. the master’s dissertation is the most substantial piece of autonomous work that pgt students will undertake (bamber et al., 2019), but this level of autonomy can be challenging. tobbell and o'donnell (2013b) found that postgraduate students viewed independent learning as ‘being left alone to struggle’ (p.7) rather than as a space to think and develop critical enquiry. supervisor time is limited (larcombe et al., 2007), and the majority of pgt students conduct their research and complete their dissertations over the summer, when they and academic staff are more likely to be off campus, which can make accessing support services more difficult. this challenging situation is compounded by the fact that, although pgt students often anticipate their need for guidance on writing at master’s level (west, 2012), many of them are not aware of the stages of research and writing for their dissertation, and thus focus more on the technicalities of writing rather than on analysis and argument (zuber-skerritt and knight, 1986). even if pgt students were successful undergraduates, they may find this transition difficult or challenging (tobbell et al., 2010; bownes et al., 2017), which necessitates the development of dissertation writing provision specifically for master’s students to help support this transition. crisfield making the transition to master’s dissertation writing: evaluating the impact of a dissertation writing course on pgt students’ confidence journal of learning development in higher education, issue 17: may 2020 5 when dissertation writing support focuses on writing skills such as criticality, structure and argument, rather than subject-specific content, it allows students to work in a community of peers who are all undertaking the same process and to evaluate and increase their confidence in their own skills (larcombe et al., 2007; fergie et al., 2011). research has found that pgt students consider identity and confidence to be very important (littleton and whitelock, 2005), and a lack of confidence in their skills may cause students to question their right to be on their course, which leads to increased anxiety (mcpherson et al., 2017). a writing course focused on identifying and developing strategies to overcome the specific challenges of the dissertation may, therefore, have a positive impact on students’ overall dissertation writing experience. this type of writing-specific support combines the development of practical skills within a peer group with the development of confidence in those skills and is thus grounded in both communities of practice theory and self-efficacy theory. communities of practice theory revolves around social participation, in which members are learning by doing, giving meaning to the techniques and theory they are being taught, becoming more confident, and creating a community of others who are engaging in the same process (wenger, 1998). learning is not solely an individual activity, but a larger social one as well (tobbell and o’donnell, 2005). learning, therefore, involves participating in new practices such as dissertation writing, and this participation can be supported by working within a community (tobbell and o’donnell, 2013a). focusing on pgt students specifically, and creating an environment in which they are practising dissertation writing skills, enables students to become active participants within a community and develop their identities as writers (wenger, 1998). self-efficacy theory focuses on developing individuals’ belief in their skill sets and their ability to apply their skills in different contexts, thereby making them more resilient when confronted with new challenges (bandura, 1997). participation in activities that help students develop their academic writing skills is linked to the increased selfefficacy of those students (callinan et al., 2018), and experiencing success in academic writing can lead to an increase in self-efficacy (murray et al., 2008), but that success must be made clear to students to help them evaluate their progress. by asking students to reflect upon their learning experiences (fergie et al., 2011) and to evaluate their confidence levels before and after a writing course (larcombe et al., 2007), students are gauging their belief in their ability to complete their dissertation (bandura, 1997) based on skills they developed during the writing course. this form of reflection is important in crisfield making the transition to master’s dissertation writing: evaluating the impact of a dissertation writing course on pgt students’ confidence journal of learning development in higher education, issue 17: may 2020 6 helping students develop the confidence needed to undertake the dissertation because perceived self-efficacy is not about whether an individual has a specific set of skills, but whether they believe they do (bandura, 1997). dissertation writing courses therefore allow students to develop the necessary writing skills and to reinforce their ability to implement these skills through active, community-based practice of writing techniques. to date, there has been limited research on dissertation writing courses, and published studies examine the effectiveness of these courses for doctoral students (larcombe et al., 2007; fergie et al., 2011) rather than pgt students. the aim of this study, therefore, is to evaluate the impact of a practical dissertation writing course designed specifically for pgt students by analysing students’ motivations for joining the course, the impact of the writing course on students’ confidence in their writing abilities, and the value the course had for the students. methodology course structure the writing course was delivered by a central department of a uk university that provides academic skills support to all students at the university, regardless of course, level of study or background. the course was run in the spring term of 2017-18 and 2018-19 and was composed of four two-hour sessions taught over two weeks: • session 1: critical thinking and writing. this is a foundational session that covers the fundamentals of academic writing by discussing and practising critical thinking and writing. • session 2: critically analysing and evaluating literature. this session focuses primarily on how to construct a critical and effective literature review by engaging with, critiquing and synthesising literature. • session 3: critical discussion. this session explores the development of a critical argument using evidence and observations from the students’ own research, and how to link these results and observations to published literature. crisfield making the transition to master’s dissertation writing: evaluating the impact of a dissertation writing course on pgt students’ confidence journal of learning development in higher education, issue 17: may 2020 7 • session 4: managing your dissertation. this session covers the management of the dissertation process including understanding procrastination, strategies for working with one’s supervisor and tools for combatting writer’s block. to be relevant and practical, skills development must integrate learning tasks alongside teaching and must provide the opportunity for feedback (bunney, 2017). thus, the writing course sessions were taught as practical workshops, with a high degree of participation that gave the students the opportunity to implement the techniques they had been taught in an environment that allows for questioning, exploration and feedback. participants the writing course was open to all pgt students in one college at the university, and students were invited to register via email. in both years, students from the business school represented the majority of participants, which was expected given that this department has the highest student numbers in the university. other departments represented were the law school, english literature, anthropology, journalism, politics, and education. in both years, there was an expected decline in the number of attendees between the first and the fourth sessions. this is largely an issue of scheduling for those who attended two or more sessions, as some students had conflicts with lectures or seminars, exams, work, or childcare. in 2017-18, 15 students (13 female and 2 male) attended session 1, and 8 students (7 female and 1 male) attended session 4. all of the 2017-18 students who attended the final session attended at least three of the four sessions, and all of them attended session 1. in 2018-19, 23 students (15 female and 8 male) attended session 1 and 10 students (8 female and 2 male) attended session 4. of those who attended session 4, two of them had been unable to attend session 1 and thus were not eligible to participate in this study. the remaining 8 students who attended session 4 also attended session 1 and at least three of the four sessions. crisfield making the transition to master’s dissertation writing: evaluating the impact of a dissertation writing course on pgt students’ confidence journal of learning development in higher education, issue 17: may 2020 8 data collection and analysis a mixed-methods approach was used in this study, which yielded a range of responses via quantitative questions and detailed qualitative responses to questions surrounding students’ motivations for joining the course and the benefits they had gained from the course. this approach provides a more in-depth analysis of the impact of the writing course, which is valuable given the limited research on writing courses for pg students generally and the lack of focus on these courses for pgt students specifically. confidence measures in order to assess students’ confidence in their writing abilities, students were asked to rate their confidence levels using a 5-point likert scale in nine areas of academic writing: 1. i can critically evaluate evidence and demonstrate its importance to my reader. 2. i can use a range of sources effectively to support my argument. 3. i can construct and maintain an academic argument. 4. i can consider different points of view or options for exploring a particular problem/question. 5. i can structure my writing to communicate my ideas effectively. 6. i can engage with my sources effectively. 7. i can write critically rather than descriptively. 8. i can write in an academic style appropriate to my discipline. 9. i can reference my work appropriately. writing confidence measures were drawn from cottrell (2013) and aligned with the content taught on the writing course. students completed the pre-course self-evaluation at the beginning of session 1, and the post-course self-evaluation at the end of session 4. the same confidence measures were used on the pre-course and post-course selfevaluations. responses were anonymous, and pre-course confidence responses were not returned to the students at the end of the course for comparison; however, students were encouraged to take a picture of the pre-course confidence measure responses on their phones if they wanted to compare their progress. crisfield making the transition to master’s dissertation writing: evaluating the impact of a dissertation writing course on pgt students’ confidence journal of learning development in higher education, issue 17: may 2020 9 the preand post-course confidence measures for each year were compared in spss to determine if there was a significant increase in confidence levels between the beginning and the end of the course. all self-evaluations from both years were used in the data analysis. because of the small sample sizes, the data were not normally distributed and were thus tested with a wilcoxon signed rank test, which is appropriate for comparing non-parametric data which are measured on two separate occasions (pallant, 2010). qualitative measures the pre-course self-evaluation included three open-ended questions: 1. what are the key areas of academic writing that you would like to improve on? 2. what prompted you to register for this course? 3. what do you hope to gain from this course? the post-course self-evaluation included three open-ended questions: 1. what was the most useful part of this course for you? 2. what changes would you suggest we make to this course in the future? 3. would you recommend this course to other students? qualitative questions were analysed using thematic analysis to identify and explore themes and sub-themes in the students’ responses, particularly in relation to what they hoped to gain and what they had found most useful. two overarching themes emerged from the analysis: confidence in and knowledge of academic writing. within these, there were five major sub-themes that link the two main themes: critical thinking and writing; writing the literature review; structuring the dissertation; creating an argument; and practical group work. given the small sample size, the use of qualitative analysis software, such as nvivo, was not necessary, and the analysis was conducted manually. ethical considerations this study was approved by the university’s research ethics committee. to ensure anonymity, no identifying information such as name, student id number, or course was crisfield making the transition to master’s dissertation writing: evaluating the impact of a dissertation writing course on pgt students’ confidence journal of learning development in higher education, issue 17: may 2020 10 associated with any of the pre-course or post-course self-evaluations. all eligible students agreed to participate in this study. participants signed an informed consent form and were given hard copies of the participant information sheet. self-evaluations and responses to open-ended questions were digitised following the completion of the course each year, and the hard copies securely destroyed. data are stored on a password protected computer accessible only to the researcher. data will be kept for ten years then securely destroyed. all gdpr regulations for the storage and protection of data have been followed. discussion quantitative analysis revealed a statistically significant difference (p<0.01) between the pre-course (median 3.00 for both 2017/18 and 2018/19) and post-course (median 4.00 for 2017/18 and 4.50 for 2018/19) self-evaluation scores for both years, indicating that participants found the course useful in increasing their confidence in their writing abilities (figure 1). the anonymous nature of the self-evaluations and the open-ended questions means that individual student responses cannot be traced from pre-course to post-course. therefore, when student responses are included in the discussion, no participant number will be assigned, but the academic year the response comes from will be given. crisfield making the transition to master’s dissertation writing: evaluating the impact of a dissertation writing course on pgt students’ confidence journal of learning development in higher education, issue 17: may 2020 11 two themes emerged from the analysis of the qualitative data: writing knowledge and confidence in writing skills. these themes are, for many of the students, interdependent, and thus cannot be separated for the purposes of this discussion. for this discussion, confidence in writing is defined as a student’s belief in their ability to follow conventions of academic writing such as critical evaluation, the development and support of an argument, crisfield making the transition to master’s dissertation writing: evaluating the impact of a dissertation writing course on pgt students’ confidence journal of learning development in higher education, issue 17: may 2020 12 and logical structure. knowledge of academic writing is defined as understanding the way in which these conventions work and how they are applied. an actual or perceived lack of knowledge can have a strong impact on an individual’s ability to apply that knowledge (bandura, 1997), and if students believe themselves to be ineffective academic writers, this may have a negative impact on their performance (west, 2012). self-efficacy theory thus informs the underlying, and often explicitly referenced, motivations that students had for joining the writing course – the knowledge they had or believed they had, and their confidence in their abilities based on that knowledge – and the basis for the writing course itself. the aim of the course was to equip students with effective writing skills and the confidence to apply those skills during the dissertation process (bandura, 1997). within both themes, four major sub-themes were identified from both the pre-course and post-course self-evaluations: critical thinking and writing, writing the literature review, structuring the dissertation, and creating an argument. a fifth sub-theme, practical group work, emerged from the responses in the post-course self-evaluation. although an interest in working within a community of peers was not explicitly or implicitly identified by students in the pre-course self-evaluation, communities of practice theory (wenger, 1998) was purposefully built into the course through the use of practical group activities focusing on dissertation writing skills. this final sub-theme is thus a reflection of the students’ enactment of this theory, and a recognition that the practice of this theory had a positive impact on their experience. because dissertation writing is a process rather than a series of discrete tasks, the qualitative sub-themes and the quantitative results cannot be discussed individually. skills needed for critical writing, for example, contribute to an effective literature review, which contributes to the structure and the overall argument of a dissertation. likewise, students’ perception of their ability to implement these skills can have an effect on their writing process. thus, the discussion of the quantitative results and the qualitative sub-themes will be conducted as a whole to demonstrate the impact of the course. for both years, the primary motivation for joining the writing course was concern about academic writing, particularly critical thinking and writing skills. the concerns the students expressed regarding their ability to think and write critically reflect the issues raised in the crisfield making the transition to master’s dissertation writing: evaluating the impact of a dissertation writing course on pgt students’ confidence journal of learning development in higher education, issue 17: may 2020 13 literature regarding the assumption that pgt students will enter their course equipped with the academic skills necessary for master’s level study (o’donnell et al., 2009; tobbell and o'donnell, 2013b; bunney, 2017). the expected depth of knowledge is greater at pgt level (bamber et al., 2019) and master’s students are aware that their level of study is different (alsford and smith, 2013). this awareness was articulated by two students from the 2018-19 course, who were hoping to improve their skills in ‘writing critically at the masters level’ and to gain a ‘better understanding of writing at a higher academic level’. critical thinking, and thus critical writing, needs to be ‘explicitly and consciously taught’ (halpern, 1998, p.454), but if pgt study is assumed to be an extension of undergraduate study (o’donnell et al., 2009), then master’s students may not be receiving the critical thinking and writing instruction they require to complete their dissertation. the impact of this explicit instruction is demonstrated by the increase in students’ confidence in their ability to write critically rather than descriptively (measure 7), which was, for both years, the largest increase between the pre-course and post-course self-evaluations (figure 1). a 2018-19 student indicated that the most useful part of the course for them was that ‘it gave a lot of practical tips to address challenges i have with academic writing (eg. critical writing)’. these results suggest that pgt students do require instruction in these fundamental aspects of academic writing, which will help equip them with the skills necessary to complete their dissertations. for many students, the first direct application of critical writing to the dissertation is the literature review, which requires clear, logical critical analysis of existing research to justify their own research problem. the literature review was identified as motivation for joining the course by several students across both years, which was not unexpected given the uncertainties graduate students often have in understanding the concept (bruce, 1994), scope (bruce, 2001), and focus (kwan, 2008) of a literature review. all of the confidence measures can be applied to skills required for writing a literature review (figure 1), and both years showed a significant increase pre-course and post-course, which indicates that students perceived a positive impact on their ability to complete this chapter. following the course, students from both years identified the literature review session (session 2) specifically as being the most helpful part of the course. the timing of this session is especially relevant because many of the students were in the process of crisfield making the transition to master’s dissertation writing: evaluating the impact of a dissertation writing course on pgt students’ confidence journal of learning development in higher education, issue 17: may 2020 14 researching for or writing the review and were thus able to immediately apply the skills developed during the course to their writing. student concern about the literature review is also linked to uncertainty about how to structure the dissertation, both at the chapter level and as a whole, as well as identifying and sustaining an argument. structure and argument were often, but not always, identified together as reasons for enrolling on the writing course, which was best expressed by a 2017-18 student who sought ‘clear guidance on how to structure and lay out my arguments in my dissertation’. the frequency with which one or both of these sub-themes were identified in the pre-course self-evaluations suggests that pgt students need explicit communication regarding what is expected of their work (heussi, 2012), and supports the need for universities not to assume that pgt students arrive fully prepared for this higher level of study (o’donnell et al., 2009). both of these sub-themes were incorporated throughout sessions 1 to 3 and following the course, students reported an increase in confidence for measure 3 (‘i can construct and maintain an academic argument’) and measure 5 (‘i can structure my writing to communicate my ideas effectively’) (figure 1). although many of the students on the course were writing a ‘typical’ five-chapter dissertation, and most of them had completed undergraduate dissertations, their concerns about structure and argument before the course and the increased confidence in their abilities regarding these measures indicates that pgt students need specific support in developing these skills. the practical nature of the course had the benefit of allowing the students to work within a community of their peers (wenger, 1998), which may also help reduce the stress and anxiety pgt students feel about their work (mcpherson et al., 2017) by highlighting the fact that they are not alone in the questions or concerns that they have. completion of academic assignments is often impacted by fear (west, 2012), but by participating in group exercises, students were learning by doing and giving meaning to the techniques they were being taught, which can help students develop confidence in their abilities (bandura, 1997; wenger, 1998). a 2018-19 student emphasised the importance of this group work by identifying that the most useful part of the course was the ‘exercises exemplifying the actual practical situations/certain things that can happen throughout the process of the dissertation’. the group activities help participants shape each other’s experiences of meaning (wenger, 1998) by allowing them to discuss ideas and solutions, crisfield making the transition to master’s dissertation writing: evaluating the impact of a dissertation writing course on pgt students’ confidence journal of learning development in higher education, issue 17: may 2020 15 and to ‘apply what we were being shown, and also remember the important information/tips better’ (2018-19 student). even a short-lived community of practice may decrease the sense of isolation pgt students may feel (tobbell and o’donnell, 2013a) by allowing them to develop their writing skills and increase their confidence in their ability to complete their dissertations. the higher expectation for academic work at the master’s level (coneyworth et al., 2019) and the independent nature of the master’s can be challenging (bamber et al., 2019). this may be particularly true of the dissertation, which is largely conducted during the summer months when modules are not running, and academics and other students are often away. writing courses have been shown to help improve student confidence in their writing (zuber-skerritt and knight, 1986; larcombe et al., 2007; fergie et al., 2011), and a number of students who registered for this writing course were hoping to gain ‘confidence to finish [the] dissertation’ (2018-19 student) because they were uncertain of their ‘abilities to write effectively and academically’ (2018-19 student). the writing course was designed around the practice of writing the dissertation, which gives the students ‘authentic mastery experiences’ (bandura, 1986, p.239) in an environment in which they could receive feedback and guidance. the goal of this practical writing course was to build the students’ self-efficacy beliefs, and although the sample size was small, the significant increase in all confidence measures between the pre-course and post-course self-evaluations, and the qualitative feedback on the course, indicate that this goal was met. a 2018-19 student left the course ‘feeling more confident and clear about what i need to do and how i need to do it’. this increase in confidence may help build resilience when faced with challenges (bandura, 1997), which may be beneficial in helping students complete a large and independent research project. conclusion the master’s dissertation represents a substantial piece of independent work, but there is little research regarding dissertation writing support for pgt students. previous studies (larcombe et al., 2007; fergie et al., 2011) demonstrate that specific thesis writing instruction for pgr students is effective in improving writing skills and increasing confidence. with the growing understanding that master’s study is not simply an extension of undergraduate study (o’donnell et al., 2009), it is important to understand how pgt crisfield making the transition to master’s dissertation writing: evaluating the impact of a dissertation writing course on pgt students’ confidence journal of learning development in higher education, issue 17: may 2020 16 students can be supported in the transition to writing a dissertation. this study evaluated the results of a four-session master’s dissertation writing course run in 2017-18 and in 2018-19. the goal of the course was to improve the students’ writing skills and increase their confidence in their ability to complete their dissertations. in both years, there was a significant increase in the students’ self-reported confidence in their writing skills. despite the small sample size, the results suggest that the writing course achieved its aims by helping students develop their master’s level writing skills and increase their confidence in those skills. this study measured increases in confidence from the beginning to the end of the writing course, but not across the whole dissertation process. the longer-term impact of the course for the students is therefore not known, and future research investigating how this confidence helps sustain students throughout the process would be beneficial so as to develop more extensive dissertation support structures. this study has a small sample size and participants were recruited from only one college in the university, so the results may not be generalisable across different disciplines or institutions. furthermore, the content of the writing course itself may not be applicable to other fields in which the dissertation is structured differently; however, the outcomes indicate that transition pedagogies designed for pgt students (bunney, 2017) are effective in supporting their specific academic writing needs. future work on dissertation writing courses for pgt students would benefit from larger sample sizes, and from both including students from a broader range of disciplines and developing courses that are specific to particular disciplines. this would allow for a comparison between generic writing skills instruction and discipline-specific writing skills instruction, which in turn may help identify where there are common areas of concern for students, and where those areas of concern are related to particular fields. more work is needed in developing and evaluating dissertation writing transition support for master’s students in order to better understand the writing needs of this particular level and to best support them in successfully completing their dissertations references alsford, s. and smith, k. (2013) ‘case study 23: transition into postgraduate study, crisfield making the transition to master’s dissertation writing: evaluating the impact of a dissertation writing course on pgt students’ confidence journal of learning development in higher education, issue 17: may 2020 17 university of greenwich, london’, taught postgraduate student experience: transition to master’s level study. collection of international, uk and scottish case studies, pp. 75–77. bamber, v., choudhary, c.j., hislop, j. and lane, j. (2019) ‘postgraduate taught students and preparedness for master’s level study: polishing the facets of the master’s diamond’, journal of further and higher education, 43(2), pp. 236–250. doi: 10.1080/0309877x.2017.1359502. bandura, a. (1997) self-efficacy: the exercise of control. new york: w.h. freeman and company. bownes, j. et al. (2017) ‘supporting students in the transition to postgraduate taught study in stem subjects’, journal of perspectives in applied academic practice, 5(2), pp. 3–11. doi: 10.14297/jpaap.v5i2.280. bruce, c. s. (1994) ‘research students’ early experiences of the dissertation literature review’, studies in higher education, 19(2), pp. 217–229. doi: 10.1080/03075079412331382057. bruce, c. s. (2001) 'interpreting the scope of their literature reviews: significant differences in research students’ concerns’, new library world, 102(4/5), pp. 158–165. bunney, d. (2017) ‘facilitating the transition to postgraduate studies: what can we learn from the first year experience?’, journal of academic language & learning, 11(1), pp. 23–38. callinan, c.j., van der zee, e. and wilson, g. (2018) 'developing essay writing skills: an evaluation of the modelling behaviour methods and the influence of student-self efficacy', journal of further and higher education, 42(5), pp.608–622. doi: 10.1080/0309877x.2017.1302564. coates, n. and dickinson, j. (2012) ‘meeting international postgraduate student needs: a programme-based model for learning and teaching support’, innovations in education and teaching international, 49(3), pp. 295–308. doi: 10.1080/14703297.2012.703018. coneyworth, l., jessop, r., maden, p. and white, g. (2019) ‘the overlooked cohort? – improving the taught postgraduate student experience in higher education’, innovations in education and teaching international, doi: 10.1080/14703297.2019.1617184. cottrell, s. (2013) the study skills handbook. 4th edn. london: palgrave. fergie, g., beeke, s., mckenna, c. and creme, p. (2011) ‘“it’s a lonely walk”: supporting crisfield making the transition to master’s dissertation writing: evaluating the impact of a dissertation writing course on pgt students’ confidence journal of learning development in higher education, issue 17: may 2020 18 postgraduate researchers through writing’, international journal of teaching and learning in higher education, 23(2), pp. 239–245. halpern, d. f. (1998) ‘teaching critical thinking for transfer across domains: disposition, skills, structure training, and metacognitive monitoring.’, american psychologist, 53(4), pp. 449–455. doi: 10.1037/0003-066x.53.4.449. heussi, a. (2012) ‘postgraduate student perceptions of the transition into postgraduate study’, student engagement and experience journal, 1(3), pp. 1–13. doi: 10.7190/seej.v1i3.52. kwan, b.s.c. (2008) ‘the nexus of reading, writing and researching in the doctoral undertaking of humanities and social sciences:implications for literature reviewing’, english for specific purposes, 27(1), pp. 42–56. doi: 10.1016/j.esp.2007.05.002. larcombe, w., mccosker, a. and o’loughlin, k. (2007) ‘supporting education phd and ded students to become confident academic writers: an evaluation of thesis writers’ circles’, journal of university teaching & learning practice, 4(1), pp. 54–63. littleton, k. and whitelock, d. (2005) ‘the negotiation and co-construction of meaning and understanding within a postgraduate online learning community’, learning, media and technology, 30(2), pp. 147–164. doi: 10.1080/17439880500093612. mcpherson, c., punch, s. and graham, e. (2017) ‘transitions from undergraduate to taught postgraduate study: emotion, integration and belonging’, journal of perspectives in applied academic practice, 5(2), pp. 42–50. doi: 10.14297/jpaap.v5i2.265. murray, r., thow, m., moore, s. and murphy, m. (2008) 'the writing consultation: developing academic writing practices', journal of further and higher education, 32(2): pp.119–128. doi: 10.1080/03098770701851854 o’donnell, v. l.,tobbell, j., lawthom, r. and zammit, m. (2009) ‘transition to postgraduate study: practice, participation and the widening participation agenda’, active learning in higher education, 10(1), pp. 26–40. doi: 10.1177/1469787408100193. o’neill, m., o'donnell, v.l., tobbell, j. and lawthom, r. (2007) ‘transition to postgraduate study: does practice reflect policy?’, the 2nd socio-cultural theory in educational research and practice conference: theory, identity and learning, university of manchester, manchester 10-11 september. pallant, j. (2010) spss survival manual: a step by step guide to data analysis using ibm spss. 4th edn. maidenhead: mcgraw-hill education. crisfield making the transition to master’s dissertation writing: evaluating the impact of a dissertation writing course on pgt students’ confidence journal of learning development in higher education, issue 17: may 2020 19 symons, m. (2001) ‘starting a coursework postgraduate degree: the neglected transition’, changing identities: language and academic skills conference, university of wollongong, australia, 29-30 november. available at: learning.uow.edu.au/las2001/unrefereed/symons.pdf. tobbell, j. and o’donnell, v. l. (2005) 'theorising educational transitions: communities, practice and participation', conference on sociocultural theory in educational research and practice. university of manchester, manchester 8th-9th september. tobbell, j. and o’donnell, v. l. (2013a) ‘transition to postgraduate study: postgraduate ecological systems and identity’, cambridge journal of education, 43(1), pp. 123– 138. doi: 10.1080/0305764x.2012.749215. tobbell, j. and o’donnell, v. l. (2013b) ‘entering postgraduate study: a qualitative study of a neglected transition’, international journal for cross-disciplinary subjects in education, 4(1) pp. 1052-1059. tobbell, j., o’donnell, v. and zammit, m. (2010) ‘exploring transition to postgraduate study: shifting identities in interaction with communities, practice and participation’, british educational research journal, 36(2), pp. 261–278. doi: 10.1080/01411920902836360. wenger, e. (1998) communities of practice: learning, meaning, and identity. cambridge: cambridge university press. west, a. (2012) ‘formative evaluation of the transition to postgraduate study for counselling and psychotherapy training: students’ perceptions of assignments and academic writing’, counselling and psychotherapy research, 12(2), pp. 128–135. zuber-skerritt, o. and knight, n. (1986) ‘problem definition and thesis writing: workshops for the postgraduate student’, higher education, 15(1), pp. 89–103. author details melanie crisfield is an academic skills adviser at brunel university london, specialising in academic writing, particularly in dissertation writing. she is a fellow of the higher education academy and an aldinhe certified practitioner. she is also currently the aldinhe conference lead and a member of the steering group. making the transition to master’s dissertation writing: evaluating the impact of a dissertation writing course on pgt students’ confidence abstract introduction literature review methodology course structure participants data collection and analysis ethical considerations discussion conclusion references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 18: october 2020 ________________________________________________________________________________ the role of personal tutoring in supporting the transition to university: experiences and views of widening participation sport students. rick hayman northumbria university, uk andy coyles northumbria university, uk karl wharton northumbria university, uk antony mellor northumbria university, uk abstract despite the large and diverse cohorts annually recruited to higher education sport programmes in the uk, research exploring sport students’ experiences of transitioning into university is very limited. this study was conducted in response to several years of low retention and progression rates across first year sport degree programmes at a post-92 university in the uk. through focus groups, the study explored the role played by the personal tutor in supporting effective transition of recently enrolled first year sport students from widening participation backgrounds. most noticeably, the main contributory factors were found to be the nurturing of social integration and use of student-centred personal tutoring approaches to do so. the study further outlined how many widening participation sport students enter university with negative previous personal tutoring experiences and have limited understanding and misguided expectations of the role. the collective findings provide academic colleagues and university management with evidence of one model of effective support for a successful transition into university. practical implications for widening participation students studying both sport and other degree subjects are presented, as are future research avenues and study limitations. hayman, coyles, wharton and mellor the role of personal tutoring in supporting the transition to university: experiences and views of widening participations sport students. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 18: october 2020 2 keywords: higher education; personal tutoring; social integration; sport students; transition; widening participation. introduction in the united kingdom (uk), widening participation (wp) has become an established component of the government’s political drive in addressing inequality of access to higher education (he) for underrepresented student groups. the agenda has achieved relative success over recent decades across the uk university sector, as evidenced by significant growth in student numbers entering he from non-traditional and socio-economically disadvantaged backgrounds. this includes those classified as vocational, mature, parttime or disabled learners, and those coming from low income households or deprived neighbourhoods (younger et al., 2018). uk universities are now fully committed to wp and fair access, and for many, this is an integral part of their student recruitment (jones and lau, 2010). in england for example, application rates for 18-year-olds living in areas with historically low he participation rates increased to the highest recorded levels in 2018 (universities uk, 2018). however, an unfortunate consequence of the escalating size, diversity and profile of modern-day student populations has been the significant rise in university withdrawal rates during the first 12 months of enrolment (tinto, 2012; christie et al., 2013; kahu and nelson, 2018). transitioning into university for many students across multiple subject disciplines, but especially those from wp backgrounds, failing to overcome both social and academic barriers to he can overshadow the many opportunities a high quality university education can offer (bennet et al., 2007; gale, 2011; devlin, 2013). successful university transition is reflective of newly arrived students feeling they have settled promptly, confidently and happily, made new friends and networks, and developed a sense of belonging and identity with peers and hayman, coyles, wharton and mellor the role of personal tutoring in supporting the transition to university: experiences and views of widening participations sport students. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 18: october 2020 3 academic staff (wilcox et al; 2005; farhat et al., 2017). however, a substantial research base clearly demonstrates how many find adjusting to social and academic demands as being a problematic and challenging aspect of early university life (pillay and ngcobo, 2010; lee and gawson, 2011; murtagh, 2012; turner et al., 2017). evidence also suggests how new he students are more likely to disengage, underachieve and ultimately withdraw from their studies if they feel unsupported and when their expectations are not fully met or only partially addressed (bennett et al., 2007; leese, 2010; byrne et al., 2012; thomas, 2012). it is also important to remember how many first-year undergraduates, including those studying sport programmes, have only ever experienced school and further education learning environments where numbers are typically much smaller, study is more structured and tutor-led, fewer teaching staff may be involved and where groups are small enough for everybody to know each other reasonably well (allin et al., 2017). strong evidence further demonstrates how these students, and particularly those from wp backgrounds, lack sufficient understanding of what he level learning entails (gamache, 2002; lowe and cook, 2003; allin et al., 2017), and that many enter their studies feeling underprepared and overwhelmed by the teaching and assessment methods they are likely to encounter (allin et al., 2017; fahrat et al., 2017). it is further well established that large numbers lack confidence and struggle with the sudden shift towards independent learning, have limited experience of collaborative learning and are initially hesitant to ask for guidance and support from academic staff (murtagh, 2010; thomas, 2012; hockings et al., 2018; mcmillan, 2013). part-time, mature and working-class students are also known to find it more difficult when transitioning into he and have higher non-completion rates than those from traditional backgrounds (tinto, 2010; rubin, 2012). the study by gill (2019) is one of the few to have explored the thoughts, feelings and perceptions of sports students on their forthcoming transition into university. key study findings were that many expected to face numerous academic and social barriers upon entry, including increased workloads, difficulty completing assessments to expected hayman, coyles, wharton and mellor the role of personal tutoring in supporting the transition to university: experiences and views of widening participations sport students. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 18: october 2020 4 standards and failing to become more independent learners. hayman et al. (in press) examined the expectations, motivations, anticipated challenges and concerns of 334 first year sport degree students who had recently enrolled at an english post-92 university. notable results included a significant shift towards vocational entry qualifications, the dominance of expectations around employability and a general lack in confidence to successfully integrate, both socially and academically. overall, such findings emphasise how newly arriving students, including those studying sport, are now entering he with multiple uncertainties, fears and concerns about transition, workload, independence and responsibility. this seems especially the case for those entering from wp backgrounds, who may require even greater guidance and support as they transition into he and acclimatise to day-to-day student life. the university personal tutoring role the benefits of personal tutoring in he are widely acknowledged throughout the literature for their positive impact on a number of student satisfaction, engagement and attainment outcomes (watts, 2011; hagenauer and violet 2014; mcfarlane, 2016; yale, 2019). such benefits include supporting the transition from school or college into he, reinforcing learning in core academic modules, promoting the development of transferable skills, improving student retention and progression, helping to build self-confidence, social integration and sense of belonging, plus improving emotional well-being, student-staff relationships, career awareness and employability (neville, 2007; kim and sax, 2009; evans, 2013; ross et al., 2014; stork and walker, 2015). it is widely acknowledged that personal tutors have a multifaceted and integral role to play in the academic, personal and professional development of their students, with robust approaches helping the latter to feel part of a learning community where support is readily available (race, 2010). primarily, they are responsible for providing a personalised approach to university life, which is often lost when students are part of large departments and schools where they can often feel isolated and remote. they also play a leading role in assisting students to better understand factors which contribute to successful student experience and can hayman, coyles, wharton and mellor the role of personal tutoring in supporting the transition to university: experiences and views of widening participations sport students. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 18: october 2020 5 provide appropriate guidance, either directly or by signposting, to specialist student support and welfare services available within a university (ghenghesh, 2018). academic staff have long reported on the lack of formal personal tutor training opportunities and the additional workload associated with the role (barlow and antoniou, 2007; watts, 2011; mcfarlane, 2016). they have expressed particular concern about the complex boundaries between academic and pastoral aspects of the personal tutoring role, where interpretations between individual tutors may differ, thus potentially leading to inconsistencies in student experience (luck, 2010; gubby and mcnab; 2013). these findings suggest that regular professional development opportunities should be provided for all personal tutors so they can help their tutees adapt and cope within their new learning environments. the findings of studies across various disciplines, including medicine, pharmacy and nursing, demonstrate how students perceive effective personal tutors as being approachable, enthusiastic, accessible, non-judgemental, good at signposting to other services, effective communicators and listeners, personable, caring and encouraging (smith, 2008; race, 2010; calcagno et al., 2017; ghenghesh, 2018; yale, 2019). in their study exploring student nurses’ personal tutor experiences, braine and parnell (2011) found the majority of responses to be mostly positive, but some respondents also felt the need for additional contact time, and guidance with personal development planning. the study by laycock and wisdom (2009) found effective personal tutoring played a contributing factor in raising student retention levels, whilst owen (2002) highlighted how students liked and considered it good practice to maintain the same personal tutor at all stages of their university life. more recently, mcfarlane (2016) found those students who interacted more frequently with their personal tutor than their peers encountered higher satisfaction and progression rates. many students have mixed experiences of personal tutoring, sometimes viewing it as disorganised and poorly integrated within the curriculum (hixenbaugh et al., 2006). there is also evidence within the literature demonstrating how undergraduate students lack a general understanding of core personal tutor roles and responsibilities (myers, 2008), and hayman, coyles, wharton and mellor the role of personal tutoring in supporting the transition to university: experiences and views of widening participations sport students. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 18: october 2020 6 feel uncertainty over who best to approach when encountering academic and/or personal issues (basset et al., 2014). stephen et al. (2008) reported how after an initial introductory meeting in first year induction, some undergraduate students had no further contact with their personal tutor during the whole of their university education. we also know that students can feel intimidated by their personal tutor, thus tending to have irregular contact with them (malik, 2000), and that they do not always fully understand the tutor’s value, both in the present and future, in supporting their academic success, providing references and offering career guidance (gubby and nicole, 2013; ghenghesh, 2018) research context the transition into he involves a complex process of change, which some students manage more successfully than others (briggs et al., 2012; richardson and tate, 2013; taylor and harris-evans, 2018; gravett, 2019). it is now well recognised in the literature that students entering he from non-traditional backgrounds especially may struggle to adapt to a new he environment (e.g. reay, et al., 2010; allin et al., 2017). yet, despite the large and diverse cohorts annually recruited to he sport programmes in the uk, the proposed study will be the first to explore their experiences and views of transitioning into university. this small exploratory study was conducted at a university in england (hereafter referred to using the pseudonym rm). rm has long encountered retention issues with first year sport student cohorts, especially those characterised as having entered from widening participation backgrounds. a significant proportion of newly arriving rm sport cohorts now enter from backgrounds not typically considered traditional. examples include those who commute daily, enter with vocational qualifications, are from low income families, are the first in their family to enter he or who come from neighbourhoods where he is not a common destination (crosling, et al., 2008; turner et al., 2017). wp and fair access are high priorities at rm and they are instrumental in the university’s approach to attracting talented and high-quality students regardless of background (rm 2020-21 to 2024-25 access and participation plan). the rm personal tutoring system has hayman, coyles, wharton and mellor the role of personal tutoring in supporting the transition to university: experiences and views of widening participations sport students. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 18: october 2020 7 been designed to play an integral part in the academic, personal and professional development of all its students. key personal tutor roles and responsibilities are to publicise and communicate their contact details, office hours and meeting arrangements to each of their tutees so they are aware of how and when they can make contact and meet personally. within the sport department, a strong emphasis has been placed on better supporting newly arrived students to settle and adapt by developing their social integration and creating a sense of engagement and belonging in their new learning community. for example, staff and their tutees establish a relationship and get to know each other at the very start of their university life by undertaking a range of team building and practical sport activities together during programme induction. the personal tutor also monitors their tutees’ academic progress and provides support for those who are not progressing satisfactorily through regular face to face meetings. as far as possible, the personal tutor allocated in year one will stay with the same student throughout their time at rm, thus allowing for an effective and longstanding professional relationship of support to be developed. this is particularly important when it comes to completing reference requests for further study or job applications. if a member of staff changes role or leaves rm, a ‘hand over’ of tutees to the new personal tutor occurs. students are made aware well in advance of any change to their personal tutor and are able to request to change if they wish from the one allocated, without having to provide reasons. as the role can involve complex issues when dealing with students, a range of short personal tutor training courses are available. these include ‘building positive relationships’, ‘responding to student’s academic concerns’, ‘preparing and delivering feedback’ and ‘presenting your best self’. personal tutor related activities are also embedded into a core year one module to raise the currency and significance of the role with students. theoretical framework and study aims alexander astin (1984) proposed a student engagement theory based on student ‘involvement’, which he defined as ‘the amount of physical and psychological energy that hayman, coyles, wharton and mellor the role of personal tutoring in supporting the transition to university: experiences and views of widening participations sport students. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 18: october 2020 8 the students devotes to the academic experience’ (astin, 1984, p. 297). the theory, which has made a significant contribution to student engagement literature, policy and practice, proposes that the more students feel academically and socially involved, the better their overall learning experience will be and the less likely they are to drop out or fail. thus, within the context of student involvement theory, a highly involved student is one who devotes considerable effort to studying, spends time on campus, participates actively in student organisations and interacts frequently with other students and academic staff. alternatively, a typically uninvolved student will show signs of neglecting their studies, spend little time on campus, abstain from extracurricular activities and have infrequent contact with fellow students and academic staff (astin, 1999). over the past three decades, a range of studies have both supported and disputed various components of this body of work. for example, the theory has received criticism for the general and basic assumptions it proposes about involvement plus its heavy emphasis on only traditional, full-time and residential students from north america. furthermore, the relevance of the theory to those entering he from non-traditional backgrounds, including mature, part-time, wp, disabled and working students is uncertain and warrants further scrutiny and investigation. the recent growth in personal tutoring research across the he sector has been well received and is an encouraging step forward. however, criticism has been made of the heavy emphasis on atheoretical studies undertaken with small sample sizes from traditional backgrounds across a narrow range of disciplines (e.g., nursing). therefore, using student involvement theory (astin, 1984) as a guiding theoretical framework, the primary objective of this study was to investigate the role played by personal tutors in supporting effective transition of recently enrolled first year wp sports students at rm. methods focus groups were the chosen data collection tool in this qualitative study because they enable the gathering then questioning of several individuals about their attitudes to, hayman, coyles, wharton and mellor the role of personal tutoring in supporting the transition to university: experiences and views of widening participations sport students. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 18: october 2020 9 experiences of and thoughts on a specific concept or topic (leung & savithiri, 2009). key strengths include their flexible nature and opportunity for multiple voices to be heard simultaneously. they have become a popular investigative technique in recent years across several subjects, including health (banerjee et al., 2019) and sport (fedderson et al., 2020). previous research by yale (2019) also employed focus groups to explore first year undergraduate psychology students’ personal tutoring experiences. each focus group was completed at a convenient time and location for all consenting participants. in all cases, this was within a safe, private and comfortable room within the rm campus. when undertaking qualitative research, it is important that the interviewer quickly builds trust and rapport with interviewees, so they feel reassured and relaxed to freely discuss topics they feel appropriate. the lead author has an established background in undertaking qualitatively based research within he settings, which he used to aid the process of establishing a positive and empathetic bond with participants (patton, 2002). he had also lived the wp university student experience himself, which provided valuable insight and understanding into likely barriers and vulnerabilities faced by the participants. the focus group questions were pilot tested by four wp second year undergraduate sports students who each had experience of engaging with the rm personal tutor process. this confirmed an approximate completion time of 40 minutes, with all wording and terminology considered appropriate and understandable for first year cohort students. four face-to-face focus groups, each comprising between seven and nine participants and lasting from 35 to 50 minutes, took place over a five-day period in december 2018. every attempt was made to guide participants through a series of open-ended questions which probed their experiences and views of personal tutoring and the consequent role it had played in supporting their transition into rm. the first and second authors undertook the role of facilitators rather than interviewers in each focus group, freely encouraging participants to interact with each other and to assist them in conveying their unique experiences. to ensure participants felt at ease to share personalised and exclusive accounts, each focus group started with an informal discussion about primary motivations for attending rm and their highlights thus far (rapley, 2004). immediately prior to the focus groups commencing, the first author reminded all participants how there were no hayman, coyles, wharton and mellor the role of personal tutoring in supporting the transition to university: experiences and views of widening participations sport students. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 18: october 2020 10 correct or incorrect answers and that everyone’s contributions were important, even if they did not match those of others present. sample during late november 2018, all newly arrived first year undergraduate sports students were invited to participate in the study. once institutional ethical clearance was granted, an initial recruitment email briefly outlining the study aims, objectives, inclusion criteria and procedures to follow, along with participant information sheet and consent form, were communicated via the online blackboard portal. this specifically explained how the research team were wishing to recruit and then interview participants in small focus groups, who were categorised in one or more of the following wp student criteria: (1) first generation (2) commuter (3) btec entry qualification. (the business and technology education council (btec) is a vocationally based qualification which enables students to gain skills and knowledge in their subject area, then apply them in real-life and applied scenarios.) a self-selecting sampling approach was adopted, which resulted in 32 (male = 14; female = 18; mean age = 19.2) eligible full-time first year undergraduate sport students agreeing to participate in the study. the majority (77%) were the first from their immediate family to attend university. 88% had completed a btec sport qualification (either at college or school sixth form). over half (63%) were residing at home and commuting daily into university. all consenting participants were assigned numerical pseudonyms to protect anonymity and were free to withdraw from the study at any time without providing any reasons. no participant was reimbursed for their time or travel. analysis each focus group was recorded, transcribed verbatim and subjected to the thematic analysis guidelines published by braun and clarke (2006). example focus group questions hayman, coyles, wharton and mellor the role of personal tutoring in supporting the transition to university: experiences and views of widening participations sport students. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 18: october 2020 11 included ‘can you give some examples of what personal tutor experiences you have found useful?’ and ‘are there any benefits you feel have come from your personal tutor?’. to gain further insight, supplementary probing was employed. examples included ‘why was that so specifically useful?’, ’what other ways could this have been undertaken?’, ‘why do you think it made you feel this way?’ and ‘when did you start to appreciate what had happened?’. this ad-hoc questioning approach ensured participant centeredness, making it possible to follow up conversations where appropriate (lincoln and gubba, 1985). a copy of all focus group questioning schedules used in the study are available on request from the first author. all four scripts were read multiple times by the first and second authors, with notes reflecting theme statements and their meanings placed within margins. the same authors then independently annotated each interview transcript with their personalised thoughts and interpretations of the data. thematic coding employed an inductive approach to allow for lower order themes to be derived. there were some minor discrepancies between the two separate coding results, but all were discussed and promptly resolved. primary associations and connections based on similarities and patterns between derived themes were made, resulting in the generation of four main themes. once finalised, direct quotes representing each theme were selected. the final analysis stage involved developing written accounts from identified themes which were reviewed and redrafted several times. findings the findings are presented under four key themes which reflect the experiences and views of participants in the study. participant and focus group (fg) numbers are presented in parentheses (e.g., p1, fg1 reflects participant 1 in focus group 1). the personal tutor as a lynchpin for social integration all participants felt their rm personal tutor had positively supported their transition into university. when probed further, the majority discussed having felt persistently anxious hayman, coyles, wharton and mellor the role of personal tutoring in supporting the transition to university: experiences and views of widening participations sport students. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 18: october 2020 12 and daunted at the very prospect of staring university. several talked at length about their worries of ‘not fitting in’, ‘making no friends’ and ‘feeling isolated’. i had a real fear of not settling in at all when i first arrived. i was so nervous over the summertime and lead up to starting. (p3, fg1) i remember i was feeling really stressed when i first arrived at university about not making friends with anyone or being able to cope with the work. (p6, fg4) but the social support their personal tutor provided during their early months of studying at rm played a significant role in alleviating such challenges and concerns. when asked to elaborate further, some talked openly about the friendly and personalised welcoming they encountered. i am very grateful for the time and effort they (personal tutor) gave in the first few days when i was feeling a bit low and down in the dumps. (p8, fg1) from my first day, they (personal tutor) made me feel welcome and just seemed to go out of their way to help me settle in by introducing me to other lecturers and people on my course.(p2, fg2) they (personal tutor) asked me about how i ended up at university and what type of things i liked doing and came across as such a nice bubbly person who wanted to help me fit in. (p6, fg2) as focus groups progressed, participants continued to talk positively about their rm personal tutor in multiple ways. it was particularly noticeable how their reassuring, trusting, and caring approaches to personal tutoring were very well received and made positive lasting impressions. this particularly helped in supporting participants to feel more settled, better integrated and that they belonged as part of rm from the very beginning of their studies. hayman, coyles, wharton and mellor the role of personal tutoring in supporting the transition to university: experiences and views of widening participations sport students. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 18: october 2020 13 i was really struggling in the first couple of weeks and missing friends at home, so i went to speak with my personal tutor and they told me how they had felt exactly the same when they went to university and that really helped to cheer me up. (p5, fg1) i was feeling a bit apprehensive after the first week so i went to see my personal tutor and they were so helpful and reassuring and sat me down and explained how this was natural and i would settle just fine and get to know people. (p2, fg4) several went on to discuss further how their personal tutor had supported them to build networks and form friendships with a variety of people across rm, including fellow peers and academic staff. the following quotes demonstrate the positive impact of these actions and how they actively supported their social integration into university life. during the induction week, i got to know my personal tutor and their other students who were new like me and i am friends with some of them now and we spend time together on campus and we even go training together sometimes. (p2, fg3) when i first met my personal tutor at induction, they took an early interest in me and the other students in our group and kept asking questions about us all and making us laugh. (p6, fg3) the need for student centred tutoring participants talked favourably about their encounters of student-centred personal tutoring at rm and the important role it had played in supporting their transition into he. it was especially noticeable how such approaches supported them in feeling gradually more confident, prepared and connected, both socially and academically. they fully respected and valued their rm personal tutor and the range of activities and roles they undertook. hayman, coyles, wharton and mellor the role of personal tutoring in supporting the transition to university: experiences and views of widening participations sport students. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 18: october 2020 14 i can pretty much talk to my personal tutor anytime i need about anything and they help and show an interest in me rather than it just being one of their jobs. (p5, fg1) my relationship with my personal tutor is great. they are easy to talk to and someone who comes across as if they did not have to be there for me when i need them but more like they want to spend time with me. (p9, fg1) i would say my personal tutor is on my level, like they are approachable and show they care about me. (p4, fg2) i find i can speak with them (personal tutor) easily and they understand what i am talking about. (p7, fg3) all participants felt generally comfortable in approaching their rm personal tutor for guidance and direction concerning both academic and non-academic matters. the informal, relaxed and reassuring nature of open-door student-led ‘drop in’ appointments were very popular. such an approach helped participants to establish close contact relationships with their personal tutor and led to them feeling progressively more engaged with daily rm life. i have a good bond with my personal tutor and feel comfortable in going to ask them questions if i am too sure about somethings like referencing or part of a lecture i did not fully understand. (p2, fg2) mine (personal tutor) often messages me out of hours just saying they are always there if i need to chat through anything which is thoughtful and kind and motivates me to want to do well. (p8, fg2) my personal tutor has an open-door policy which is a good thing and nice and relaxed so i do not have to book and have flexibility. (p6, fg3) hayman, coyles, wharton and mellor the role of personal tutoring in supporting the transition to university: experiences and views of widening participations sport students. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 18: october 2020 15 rm personal tutors were complimented for being empathetic, helpful, caring, humorous and highly organised. their kind demeanour and ability to motivate and include participants from the very start of their post enrolment rm experience was firmly established, as was their ability to recognise and celebrate the achievements of all, regardless of background. after the first personal tutor meeting, i left feeling i mattered and liked how they gave me a bit of background on their family and hobbies which gave off a nice impression. (p6, fg1) they (personal tutor) have helped me in making the jump from college to being more independent at university and the belief that i was not going to struggle. (p3, fg3) they heard i was keen to complete my next coaching qualification and took interest in why i decided to do so and where would it take place. (p5, fg4) they (personal tutor) have an interest in what i do in and out of university and this makes me want to go and see them for a chat rather than have to go and see them and for it to be very formal. (p6, fg4) the influence of negative pre-university personal tutoring experiences some participants entered rm having encountered negative previous personal tutoring experiences within the school and college system. several openly described their frustrations and reasons to why they had previously disengaged with the personal tutor role. it was like college tutors were contacting everyone saying we should book a meeting with them to see how things were going but it was all a bit forced and like they had only been told to make contact by the managers which put me off. (p7, fg1) hayman, coyles, wharton and mellor the role of personal tutoring in supporting the transition to university: experiences and views of widening participations sport students. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 18: october 2020 16 going to see your personal tutor was not taken so seriously by anybody in my college, so i only ever arranged a few meetings over the two years i was there. (p3, fg2) my personal tutor at college went on maternity leave and so i was allocated a new one but i could not find that new person and then it changed again in the matter of a few weeks, so that was a complete nightmare. (p5, fg2) my college personal tutor shared an office with some other staff and i once went to see them with an issue i wanted to speak about in private but these other people were working at their desks so i did not end up mentioning the real reason i wanted to see them about. (p6, fg4) participants deemed the personal tutor role in school and college settings to be excessively formal, often disorganised and insufficient in appropriately supporting them for a life in he. many disliked the traditionally directive and tutor-led models of personal tutoring they received. several participants talked about their struggles in trying to develop a positive rapport and connection with their personal tutor. i met with my personal tutor at college only once because i did not really hit it off with them. (p1, fg2) i had someone as a personal tutor at college who made me feel like i was coming across as an inconvenience when i asked them for a meeting. (p2, fg1) i had made my mind up after the first meeting that i was not so bothered about using my personal tutor because it all just seemed like i had to go there to tick a box and talk about things we had done in other classes. (p2, fg2) hayman, coyles, wharton and mellor the role of personal tutoring in supporting the transition to university: experiences and views of widening participations sport students. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 18: october 2020 17 the personal tutor system at college was not that good for me as it was quite matter of fact and concentrated on things like making sure i was attending and submitting work on time. (p6, fg2) mistaken expectations and understanding of the personal tutor role participants had limited knowledge about the very concept of personal tutoring upon their arrival at rm. many were unaware of the multiple support mechanisms the role provides and the positive impact it can have upon their academic, personal and professional development. the majority had distorted views and expectations about the personal tutor role. for example, several had always fully anticipated their personal tutor to be freely available to support with any issues they faced, especially those relating to summative assessment and attendance. i think personal tutors should be willing to speak to students no matter when or what time of day we need them. (p3, fg1) i came here (rm) thinking that lessons should be attended but a meeting with your personal tutor looked as more voluntary and only needed if you have a problem. (p5, fg2) i found at college i was having to meet with them (personal tutor) but did not know what i was supposed to say or talk about. (p2, fg3) several discussed how their early rm personal tutoring experiences were positive, which differed considerably from previous experiences within school and college settings. many explained how they entered rm sceptical about the role. when probed further, they explained having become previously accustomed to only ever approaching their personal tutor for academic related issues, of which most were assessment support related. in college, i only really went to see her (personal tutor) for academic reasons and mainly to get help on assessments. (p7, fg2) hayman, coyles, wharton and mellor the role of personal tutoring in supporting the transition to university: experiences and views of widening participations sport students. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 18: october 2020 18 i viewed my personal tutor as the first point of contact in terms of getting assessment support and sorting any problems, like helping you with completing work. (p8, fg2) i have only ever contacted them (personal tutor) when i was struggling and wanted some advice about assignments. (p2, fg2) i saw my college personal tutor as someone who was there to give assessment advice. (p3, fg3) i would get in touch with my personal tutor sometimes only when i needed some help for an assessment. (p4, fg3) participants also discussed the importance of sufficiently educating newly arriving student cohorts from the very start of their rm experience about the aims and objectives of the university personal tutoring system and to reinforce it as they pass through their programme of studies. i first met my personal tutor in the induction week and we talked about what was expected from me in terms of responsibility and how i should be in close contact with them all through the time of my degree because they could help me get work experience and provide references. (p1, fg7) the session i had with my personal tutor in freshers was good as it set out what they were there for and some of the things they could help me with. (p4, fg4) discussion to our knowledge, this study was the first which specifically explored the role played by personal tutoring in supporting the transition of first year wp sport students into he. the hayman, coyles, wharton and mellor the role of personal tutoring in supporting the transition to university: experiences and views of widening participations sport students. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 18: october 2020 19 findings from a large research body across several subject disciplines clearly demonstrate how wp background students have historically encountered multiple challenges and difficulties in both entering and succeeding in he (reay et al., 2010). most notably, factors relating to social integration including difficulties in making new friends, adjusting to university culture and struggling to cope with homesickness are prominent in the decision to leave or remain at university in the first few months post enrolment (thomas, 2012; alliin et al., 2017). our findings in this study demonstrated how rm undergraduate sport programmes continue to recruit a varied demographic of learners, including large numbers from non-traditional, first generation and vocational backgrounds, of which many no longer leave home but instead commute daily into university. a key finding of this study was how student-centred personal tutoring approaches played a leading role in helping first-year wp sport students to gain confidence, feel settled and reassured, to integrate socially with peers and academic staff and become familiarised with university culture. it was notable how personal tutoring acted as a key support mechanism in enhancing the first-year university transitioning experience. we found most participants to be strategic learners on entry (e.g., assessment focussed) and wanting relaxed, friendly, informal discussions with personal tutors on an ad-hoc and open-door policy basis. they wanted the same personal tutor across the whole student life cycle and particularly liked getting to know them, both professionally (e.g., awareness of their research expertise) and nonprofessionally (e.g., insight into current and previous hobbies, sports played and coaching commitments). participants expected frequent and immediate access to their personal tutor, and for them to be approachable and effective communicators, enthusiastic towards them as individuals, to teach them regularly and to provide frequent and high quality assessment support and guidance when necessary, all features highlighted previously by race (2010). another key finding was the need for newly arriving sport students to be sufficiently educated about the very concept of university level personal tutoring and the consequent impacts it can have on satisfaction and achievement. this study illustrates astin’s student involvement theory by demonstrating how sport students from wp backgrounds can better transition into university with an effective personal tutor, who not only assists with academic study questions, but also helps them hayman, coyles, wharton and mellor the role of personal tutoring in supporting the transition to university: experiences and views of widening participations sport students. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 18: october 2020 20 acculturate to university. students felt socially and academically engaged, and generally happy and settled within their new surroundings. they especially wanted to interact frequently with their personal tutor and utilise the tutor’s specific knowledge to support their transition into university. a characteristic specific to sport students is that many are/have been used to being coached or mentored in their respective sport which often goes above and beyond their sporting environment, hence sport clubs are social fabric of local communities (eime et al., 2013). this might transfer into the academic environment where they would be in favour of such a relationship with a significant other (e.g. their personal tutor) but further research is needed on this. several implications for personal tutors to support effective transitioning of wp sports students into he emerged from the study. firstly, they should expose them to regular opportunities to enhance sociability in welcoming and reassuring environments. the focus of this personalised approach should be on supporting students to build relationships, seek out connections and develop a sense of belonging with their course and academic peers, both within and outside of formal curriculum settings. student centred approaches to personal tutoring are highly recommended as they can help learners to feel valued, understood and part of university life from day one. ensuring students do not feel daunted by their personal tutor, and that they are sufficiently educated on the role and its value are also essential. we further propose that students should be made fully aware of how their personal tutor can assist them to better understand factors which contribute to successful student experience and to provide appropriate guidance, either directly or by signposting, to appropriate advice and support available within a university. therefore, a useful strategy may be to provide targeted professional development activities for academic staff. this will enable them to further develop explicit awareness of their role as a personal tutor and to fully appreciate how it extends much beyond the traditional view of seeing students only when issues arise (yale, 2019). this study was not without limitations. although the recall period was short, we relied on retrospective recollections to explore participant’s experiences and views of personal hayman, coyles, wharton and mellor the role of personal tutoring in supporting the transition to university: experiences and views of widening participations sport students. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 18: october 2020 21 tutoring, which may be liable to lapses of memory. focus groups were conducted relatively early in each student’s personal tutoring experience, and the short study period may have limited the likelihood of encountering negative factors. the power relationship of tutors to students may have also played an influencing factor in the largely positive nature of findings. participants may have chosen not to disclose any negative comments or concerns. validation of participant accounts with those from their personal tutor would have been advantageous. the sample was homogenous, thus limiting generalisability of findings. data collection occurred relatively early (week 10) in the participants’ he life, hence, follow up focus groups at the end of year one may have unearthed further important findings. it is important to note how all rm personal tutors are allocated sufficient capacity within their workloads to undertake the role, thus providing valuable time for them to sustain regular face to face and online contact with their tutees. this approach appears successful in strengthening the relationships and rapport initially formed during induction and early stages of the academic year. self-selection bias plus failure to provide participants with opportunity to corroborate the accuracy of their personal tutoring experiences through member checking were further study weaknesses. nevertheless, the study findings provide a firm foundation for future personal tutoring research to build upon. for example, longitudinal studies utilising regular semi-structured interviews and self-report diaries would enable participants to discuss their personal tutoring experiences frequently over extended time periods (e.g., every 4-6 months). such research may help to identify any key differences between those who encounter a successful transition into university with those who do not. conclusion the he sport discipline is one which continues to recruit high numbers of wp students annually from diverse backgrounds. this study fills a gap in the literature and provides evidence on the role played by the personal tutor in supporting the transition of first year wp sport students into a post-92 uk university. astin’s theory was found to be a useful hayman, coyles, wharton and mellor the role of personal tutoring in supporting the transition to university: experiences and views of widening participations sport students. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 18: october 2020 22 starting point to frame and explore engagement and involvement of the whole student cohort. most noticeably, the main contributory factors to a successful transition were the promotion of social integration through student-centred personal tutoring approaches. additionally, our findings are the first to suggest that participants entered he with negative previous personal tutoring experiences from school and college, which created a very distinct set of student expectations. in our experience, tutors devoted some considerable time and energy re-setting these. it appears personal tutors’ sustained efforts to establish rapport with tutees were strongly influenced by their sport coaching backgrounds. this is an important finding and has implications for university leadership teams who may consider drawing consciously on the practices of coaching to underpin future personal tutoring policy and procedures. the collective study findings provide personal tutors working within and outside of sport subjects with evidence of how one subject group effectively supported the transition of a diverse student population into university. longer term benefits may include improved retention and progression outcomes, increased proportions of students obtaining good honours awards, enhanced student satisfaction and improved employability rates. acknowledgements the authors wish to thank all consenting participants for their time, generosity and insight throughout the data collection period. author details dr rick hayman is the health and life sciences faculty director for access and participation at northumbria university. mr andy coyles is a senior lecturer with the department of sport, exercise and rehabilitation at northumbria university. hayman, coyles, wharton and mellor the role of personal tutoring in supporting the transition to university: experiences and views of widening participations sport students. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 18: october 2020 23 mr karl wharton is head of subject for sport development, sport management and sport coaching within the department of sport, exercise and rehabilitation at northumbria university. dr antony mellor is the engineering and environment faculty director for student satisfaction and engagement at northumbria university. references astin, a. (1984) ‘student involvement: a developmental theory for higher education’, journal of college student personnel, 25, pp. 297-308. allin, l., coyles, a. and hayman, r. (2017) ‘exploring social integration of sport students during the transition to university’, journal of perspectives in applied academic practice, 5, pp. 31-36. astin, a. (1999) ‘student involvement: a developmental theory for higher education. journal of college student development, 40, pp. 518-529. banerjee, s., semper, k., skarparis, k., naisby, j., lewis, l., cucato, g., mills, r., rochester, m. and saxton, j. (2019) ‘patient perspectives of vigorous intensity aerobic interval exercise prehabilitation prior to radical cystectomy: a qualitative focus group study’, disability and rehabilitation. 14, pp. 1-8. barlow, j. and antoniou, m. (2007) ‘room for improvement: the experiences of new lecturers in higher education’, innovations in education and teaching international, 44, pp. 67-77. basset, j., gallagher, e. and price, l. (2014) ‘personal tutors’ responses to a structured system of personal development planning: a focus on feedback’, journal for education in the built environment, 9, pp. 22-34. hayman, coyles, wharton and mellor the role of personal tutoring in supporting the transition to university: experiences and views of widening participations sport students. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 18: october 2020 24 bennet, r., kottasz, r. and nocciolino, j. (2007) ‘catching the early walker: an examination of potential antecedents of rapid student exit from business related undergraduate degree programs in a post-1992 university’, journal of further and higher education, 31, pp. 347-364. braine, m. and parnell, j. (2011) ‘exploring student perceptions and experiences of personal tutors’, nurse education today, 31, pp. 904-910. braun, v. and clarke, v. (2006) ‘using thematic analysis in psychology’, qualitative research in psychology, 3, pp. 77-101. briggs, a., clark, j., and hall, i. (2012) ‘building bridges: understanding student transition to university’ quality in higher education, 18, pp. 3-21. byrne, m., flood, b., hassall, t., joyce, j., montano, j., gonzalez, j. and tournagermanou, e. (2012) ‘motivations, expectations and preparedness for higher education: a study of accounting students in ireland, the uk, spain and greece’, accounting forum, 36, pp. 134-144. calcagno, l., walker, d. and grey, d. (2017) ‘building relationships: a personal tutoring framework to enhance student transition and attainment’, student engagement in higher education journal, 1, pp. 88-99. crosling, g., thomas, l. and heagney, m. (2008) improving student retention in higher education: the role of teaching and learning. london: routledge. devlin, m. (2013) ‘bridging socio-cultural incongruity: conceptualising the success of students from low socio-economic status backgrounds in australian higher education’, studies in higher education, 38, pp. 939-949. hayman, coyles, wharton and mellor the role of personal tutoring in supporting the transition to university: experiences and views of widening participations sport students. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 18: october 2020 25 eime, r., young, j., harvey, j., charity, m. and payne, w. (2013) ‘a systematic review of the psychological and social benefits of participation in sport for children and adolescents: informing development of a conceptual model of health through sport’, international journal of behavioral nutrition and physical activity, 10, pp 98-119. evans, j. (2013) ‘personal tutor support from the start reduces student attrition’, nursing standard, 27, pp. 6. farhat, g., bingham, j., caulfield, j. and grieve, s. (2017) ‘the academics project: widening access and smoothing transitions for secondary school pupils to university, college and employment’, journal of perspectives in applied academic practice, 5, pp. 23-30. gale, t. (2011) ‘expansion and equity in australian higher education: three propositions for new relations’, discourse: studies in the cultural politics of education, 32, pp. 669685. gamache, p. (2002) ‘university students as creators of personal knowledge: an alternative epistemological view’, teaching in higher education, 7, pp. 277-293. ghenghesh, p. (2018) ‘personal tutoring from the perspectives of tutors and tutees’, journal of further and higher education, 42, pp. 570-584. gubby, l. and nicole, m. (2013) ‘personal tutoring from the perspective of the tutor’, capture, 4, pp. 7-16. hagenauer, g. and volet, s. (2014) ‘teacher-student relationship at university: an important yet under-researched field’, oxford review of education, 40, pp. 370-388. hayman, r., coyles, r. and allin, l. (in press) ‘the profile of higher education sport students in england: implications for successful transition and effective teaching and learning practice’, innovative practice in higher education. hayman, coyles, wharton and mellor the role of personal tutoring in supporting the transition to university: experiences and views of widening participations sport students. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 18: october 2020 26 hixenbaugh, p., pearson, c. and williams, d. (2006) ‘student perspectives on personal tutoring: what do students want?’, in: thomas l and hixenbaughp (eds) personal tutoring in higher education. (pp. 45-56). stoke-on-trent: trentham books. hockings, c., thomas, l., ottaway, j. and jones, r. (2018) ‘independent learning: what we do when you are not there’, teaching in higher education, 23, pp. 145-161. jones, n. and lau, a. (2010) ‘blending learning: widening participation in higher education’, innovations in education and teaching international, 47, pp. 405-416. kim, y. and sax, l. (2009) ‘student-faculty interaction in research universities: differences by student gender, race, social class, and first-generation status’, research in higher education, 50, pp. 437-459. laycock, m. and wisdom, j. (2009) ‘personal tutoring in higher education where now and where next? a literature review and recommendations’, staff and educational development association, seda specials. leese, m. (2010) ‘bridging the gap: supporting students into higher education’, journal of further and higher education, 34, pp. 239-251. lincoln, y. and gubba, e. (1985) naturalistic inquiry. london: sage. lowe, h. and cook, a. (2003) ‘mind the gap: are students prepared for higher education?’, journal of further and higher education, 27, pp. 53-76. luck, c. (2010) ‘challenges faced by tutors in higher education’, psychodynamic practice: individuals, groups and organisations, 16, pp. 273-287. leung, f. and savithiri, r. (2009). ‘spotlight of focus groups’, canadian family physician, 55, pp. 218-219. hayman, coyles, wharton and mellor the role of personal tutoring in supporting the transition to university: experiences and views of widening participations sport students. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 18: october 2020 27 malik, s. (2000) ‘students, tutors and relationships: the ingredients of a successful student support scheme’, medical education, 34, pp. 635-641. mcfarlane, k. (2016) ‘tutoring the tutors: supporting effective personal tutoring’, active learning in higher education, 17, pp. 77-88. myers, j. (2008) ‘points for debate: is personal tutoring sustainable? comparing the trajectory of the personal tutor with that of the residential warden’, teaching in higher education, 13, pp. 607-611. mcmillan, w. (2013) ‘transition to university: the role played by emotion’, european journal of dental education, 17, pp. 169-176. murtagh, l. (2010) ‘they give us homework! transition to higher education: the case of initial teacher training’, journal of further and higher education, 34, pp. 405-418. murtagh, l. (2012) ‘enhancing preparation for higher education’, practitioner research in higher education, 6, pp. 31-39. neville, l. (2007) ‘the personal tutor’s handbook’ basingstoke: palgrave macmillan. owen, m. (2002) ‘sometimes you feel you’re in niche time: the personal tutor system a case study’, active learning in higher education 3, pp. 7-23. patton, m. (2002) qualitative research and evaluation methods. thousand oaks: sage. pillay, a. and ngcobo, h. (2010) ‘sources of stress and support among rural based first year university students: an exploratory study’, south african journal of psychology, 49, pp. 234-240. hayman, coyles, wharton and mellor the role of personal tutoring in supporting the transition to university: experiences and views of widening participations sport students. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 18: october 2020 28 race, p. (2010) making personal tutoring work. leeds: leeds met press. rapley, t. (2004) ‘interviews’, in seale, c., gobo, g., gubrium j. and silverman, d. (eds.), qualitative research practice, (pp.15-33). london: sage. reay, d., crozier, g. and clayton, j. (2010) ‘fitting in or standing out: working-class students in uk higher education’, british educational research journal, 36, pp. 107124. ross, j. head. k., king, l. perry, p. and smith, s. (2014) ‘the personal development tutor role: an exploration of student and lecturer experiences and perceptions of that relationship’, nurse education today, 34, pp. 1207-1213. rubin, a. (2012) statistics for evidence-based practice and evaluation. belmont, california: cengage learning. smith, e. (2008) personal tutoring: an engineering subject centre guide. york: higher education academy. stephen, d. o’connell, p. and hall, m. (2008) ‘going the extra mile firefighting or laissez faire? re-evaluating personal tutoring relationships within mass higher education’, teaching in higher education, 13, pp. 449-460. stork, a. and walker, b. (2015) becoming an outstanding personal tutor: supporting learners through personal tutoring and coaching. northwich: critical publishing. thomas, l. (2012) building student engagement and belonging in higher education at a time of change: a summary of findings and recommendations from the what works? student retention & success programme. paul hamlyn foundation and the higher education academy. hayman, coyles, wharton and mellor the role of personal tutoring in supporting the transition to university: experiences and views of widening participations sport students. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 18: october 2020 29 tinto, v. (2012) ‘moving from theory to action: a model of institutional action for student success’, in a. seidman (ed.), college student retention: formula for student success (2nd ed.). plymouth: rowman & littlefield. turner, r., morrison, d., cotton, d., child, s., stevens, s., nash, p. and kneale, p. (2017) ‘easing the transition of first year undergraduates through an immersive induction module’, teaching in higher education, 22, pp. 805-821. watts, t. (2011) ‘supporting undergraduate nursing students through structured personal tutoring: some reflections’, nurse education today, 31, pp. 214-218. wilcox, p., winn, s. and fyvie‐gauld, m. (2005) ‘it was nothing to do with the university, it was just the people: the role of social support in the first‐year experience of higher education’, studies in higher education, 30, pp. 707-722. yale, a. (2019) ‘the personal tutor-student relationship: student expectations and experiences of personal tutoring in higher education’, journal of further and higher education, 43, pp. 533-544. younger, k., gascoine, l., menzies, v. and torgerson, c. (2018) ‘a systematic review of evidence on the effectiveness of interventions and strategies for widening participation in higher education’, journal of further and higher education, 42, pp. 132. the role of personal tutoring in supporting the transition to university: experiences and views of widening participation sport students. abstract introduction transitioning into university the university personal tutoring role research context theoretical framework and study aims methods sample analysis findings the personal tutor as a lynchpin for social integration the need for student centred tutoring the influence of negative pre-university personal tutoring experiences mistaken expectations and understanding of the personal tutor role discussion conclusion acknowledgements author details references journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special issue 22: compendium of innovative practice october 2021 ________________________________________________________________________ maintaining a clinical learning environment for medical students during a pandemic kirsty morrison harrogate district hospital, uk sally west harrogate district hospital, uk kathryn hogg harrogate district hospital, uk keywords: medical education; hdft; clinical skills; osce; clinical placement; covid-19. the challenge we are a team of ward-based clinical teachers based at a district general hospital in the north of england. our role as ward based clinical educators is to support medical students on their placements and to help them achieve their objectives, focussing mainly on thirdyear medical students, coaching them in clinical and practical skills. we offer hourly oneto-one sessions with guidance and feedback, sign off the students’ ward-based assessments, and help them to prepare for their osce exam. as a result of the pandemic, the challenge we faced was how to adapt the third-year placements to ensure that students received a comprehensive learning experience. we had to balance this with the demands of the hospital and changes in the configuration of services that occurred because of the trust’s response to the pandemic. each placement consists of 18 students equally divided between medicine, general surgery, and elderly care. the placements were five weeks long, starting in september 2021, with five placement rotations spaced over the academic year. we identified four particular challenges that required addressing in order for us to deliver an effective placement. morrison, west and hogg maintaining a clinical learning environment for medical students during a pandemic journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 2 the first challenge was preventing the potential for overcrowding on the wards. the health and safety executive’s (2021) advice was that where social distancing cannot be maintained, the number of people should be kept to a minimum. there were already issues with too many students on a multi-speciality ward; this was worsened with the growing need for covid-19 speciality wards and the cancelations of elective surgeries. this resulted in 12 students being based on the same ward, instead of being spread out over two wards and two theatres suites. the second challenge regarded student safety and mental health. the stressors created by epidemics is well documented (son et al., 2020), and we were conscious of the effects for students coming into the clinical environment during the pandemic. papapanou et al. (2021) have shown that students’ mental health was of critical importance during this challenging period. pre-pandemic, we had scheduled initial, mid-, and end of placement interviews with students; in view of this finding, we were determined that these would continue. the third challenge was the withdrawal of access to the student common room as social distancing could not be maintained there. this removed access to the noticeboard, therefore communication with the students was hampered. the fourth and final challenge was the issue of students self-isolating at home. we were conscious of the impact of this lost placement time and tried to find ways we could offer some support to isolating students. the response to overcome the overcrowding on the wards we formalised timetables and grouped the students into pairs. we contacted other speciality wards and departments to ask if they could accommodate students on an allocated time/day; as such we were able to place each pair into different clinical areas and thus reduce the number of students assigned to the ward each day. this provided broader exposure to the specialities, which was something that students had stated had been lacking pre-pandemic. to coincide with our interviews, we adapted our trust’s health risk assessment, and asked the students to complete this on induction, discussing any concerns or health issues identified. to date we have been able to ensure that any placement related anxieties were addressed, and that plans have been implemented to help manage them. we were allocated an android mobile device which opened up the possibility of using communication platforms such as whatsapp. we gained consent from the students to use their mobile numbers and created morrison, west and hogg maintaining a clinical learning environment for medical students during a pandemic journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 3 speciality specific whatsapp groups. this proved a huge success as students were able to communicate with each other and the ward-based teacher team easily. they were also able to use this platform to secure individual sessions with us. we also used the free version of the miro app, a virtual noticeboard, and shared placement information on there. due to our roles being word-based we were limited in what we could offer the students who were isolating. we emailed web links that aided their self-study and ensured they were on microsoft teams for the group teaching sessions offered. recommendations when we were first tasked with the challenge of adapting the medical students’ placement, we were understandably overwhelmed. however, we learned that this could in fact be a catalyst for unforeseen opportunities, a realisation that continues to affect our work today. the timetables have enabled the students to feel part of the team and have ensured all aspects of their learning objectives have been addressed. ensuring we continue to provide our individual support to the students has been of paramount importance, particularly in these uncertain times, bearing in mind how overwhelmed students often feel on placement. we missed having access to the student common room, especially as this acted as a facilitating environment for discussion and reflection. the general medical council (gmc, 2019) state that ‘taking time to reflect on experiences that have made you think or question your ideas or values is important for your individual wellbeing and development as a professional’; for this to occur in future, it is imperative that the common room is reintroduced. we found that the use of whatsapp has helped with the dissemination of information and has also acted as a platform for the students to communicate with the rest of their placement group. this helped to bridge a gap in communication; we will be keeping this option for future groups in the hope that it can be enhanced with the use of the student common room as social distancing restrictions relax. ultimately, we found that there was no alternative we could provide to replace the clinical placement, despite sharing certain learning resources. we ensured that we spoke with students who had missed elements of their placement on their return and prioritised their morrison, west and hogg maintaining a clinical learning environment for medical students during a pandemic journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 4 learning objectives as much as possible. papapanou et al. (2021) suggest that, despite best intentions, there are certain elements of the placement experience which cannot be successfully replaced by digital technology. our role as clinical supervisors, for example, was inevitably constrained in ways that we could not fully overcome. overall, we have learnt that by embracing the challenge we faced, we have found a better way of providing a comprehensive placement for students. we took advantage of the camaraderie that was evident at the beginning, forging better relationships with other departments, and this has introduced more variety into the placements. this has been verified by the feedback the university has recently provided and it therefore supports us in maintaining these changes. references health and safety executive (2021) social distancing to make your workplace covidsecure. available at: https://www.hse.gov.uk/coronavirus/social-distancing/unableto-social-distance.htm (accessed: 23 june 2021). general medical council (2019) the reflective practitioner a guide for medical students. available at: https://www.gmc-uk.org/education/standards-guidance-andcurricula/guidance/reflective-practice/the-reflective-practitioner---a-guide-formedical-students (accessed: 23 june 2021). papapanou, m., routsi, e., tsamakis, k, fotis, l., marinos, g., papaioannou, t., tsiptsios, d., smyrnis, n., rizos, e. and schizas, d. (2021) ‘medical education challenges and innovations during covid-19 pandemic’, postgraduate medical journal. https://doi.org/10.1136/postgradmedj-2021-140032. son, c., hedge, s., smith, a., wang, x. and sasangohar, f. (2020) ‘effects of covid-19 on college students’ mental health in the united states: interview survey study’, journal of medical internet research, 22(9). https://doi.org/10.2196/21279. https://www.gmc-uk.org/education/standards-guidance-and-curricula/guidance/reflective-practice/the-reflective-practitioner---a-guide-for-medical-students https://www.gmc-uk.org/education/standards-guidance-and-curricula/guidance/reflective-practice/the-reflective-practitioner---a-guide-for-medical-students https://www.gmc-uk.org/education/standards-guidance-and-curricula/guidance/reflective-practice/the-reflective-practitioner---a-guide-for-medical-students https://doi.org/10.1136/postgradmedj-2021-140032 https://doi.org/10.2196/21279 morrison, west and hogg maintaining a clinical learning environment for medical students during a pandemic journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 5 author details kirsty morrison, sally west, and kathryn hogg are ward-based clinical teachers at harrogate district hospital and honorary tutors at leeds institute of medical education. they are registered nurses who educate, assess, and support medical students from leeds institute of medical education, focusing mainly on the third-year students but they also help support the fourthand fifthyears when required. maintaining a clinical learning environment for medical students during a pandemic the challenge the response recommendations references author details article journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 14: april 2019 a participatory action research study on the impact of peer assisted student support (pass) and supplemental instruction (si) by international phd students catherine hayes university of sunderland, uk john anthony fulton university of sunderland, uk abstract using a participatory action research (par) approach, this evaluative research study gives an insight into the implementation of a pilot study of a newly implemented peer assisted student support (pass) and supplemental instruction (si) programme. the focus of the study involved six postgraduate phd students delivering a pass/si scheme to cohorts of msc public health, msc nursing and msc psychosis and complex mental health interventions students, all undertaking their final dissertations.the study was used to illuminate the degree to which pass and si were perceived to impact on the overall student experience as part of a quality enhancement initiative. findings of the study revealed that the programme had positively impacted on both pass/si leaders and participants of the scheme, who reported increased confidence and an increased sense of social inclusion and belonging to the institution respectively. being facilitated by students who had experienced the same academic pathway was perceived to have widened networking opportunities and to have positively impacted on the capacity of the participants and leaders to build relationships and prepare skills of direct relevance to the requirements of an employer such as teamwork and initiative. keywords: peer assisted student support; supplemental instruction; postgraduate education; participatory action research; student experience. hayes and fulton a participatory action research study on the impact of peer assisted student support (pass) and supplemental instruction (si) by international phd students journal of learning development in higher education, issue 14: april 2019 2 contextual background to learning gain and pass/si research from 2015 revealed there were several pre-existing definitions and conceptualisations of the term ‘learning gain’. it was characterised in the report and operationally defined for the purposes of this small scale study, by the relative improvement in employability, knowledge and skills. it also has relevance to the temporality of learning gain, which can be measured between two distinct points in time (mcgrath et al, 2015). however, learning gain is only one of many measures or metrics of the overall higher education student experience. this study provides a mechanism of contextualising and framing learning gain in postgraduate study in terms of the developmental opportunities available to students, which may directly impact on their relative employability and acquired transferable skill sets upon completion of their programmes generally and research specifically. this rand report (mcgrath et al, 2015) also highlighted that learning gain ought not to be considered in terms of being a sole determinant of the quality of higher education that students experience and that ‘quality of learning enhancement’, (operationally defined for the purposes of this study as moving to the introduction of additional interventions to intentionally enhance the level of student experience), has to be regarded as relative to missions to improve for example transferable employability, the capacity to be creative or innovative or diverse enough to respond and adapt quickly to change (mcgrath et al, 2015). the emphasis of this study is therefore to focus on the potential benefits gained from the implementation of a pass/si intervention from both postgraduate and international perspectives. one of the researchers (catherine hayes, [ch]) undertook formal training with lund university, sweden (certified si-pass leader training, april 2016). it is this specific recognised model of pass/si, which was implemented in practice in this study. distinguishing features of learning gain for postgraduate students postgraduate master of science student cohorts from the health team at the university of sunderland have a shared project module which necessitates minimal attendance and provides one to one supervisory support. for many students this has historically been the most socially isolating element of their study in relation to available opportunities for social interaction and ongoing dialogue with their peers on either an academic or social level. the vast majority (96%) of students are nigerian and working with these particular hayes and fulton a participatory action research study on the impact of peer assisted student support (pass) and supplemental instruction (si) by international phd students journal of learning development in higher education, issue 14: april 2019 3 students was acknowledged as an ideal opportunity to pilot a learning enhancement project specifically designed to support them a) in consolidating and sharing discourse about the academic work they had already undertaken, and b) enhanced levels of social interaction with their peer groups and others. this observation is not unique to the university of sunderland and the evidence base is indicative of the impact of academic and social isolation and the contributory impact it has on student dissatisfaction, suboptimal achievement rates and ultimately withdrawal. from the relatively limited amount of literature available in the context of implementation of pass/si at postgraduate level, it is apparent that a clear infrastructure of support is necessary (evans, 2015). this is something for exploration and illumination at a socio-cultural level if we are to challenge western ethnocentric approaches to educational support and delivery. action research projects in this field have been slow to materialise since the initial identification of the need to counter isolation and improve academic and social interaction as long ago as a quarter of a century (salmon, 2002; conrad, perry and zuber-skerritt, 1992). in common with previously reported studies it was evident that intervention in the form of a learning enhancement would need to be initiated by academic staff and advocated for implementation as part of learning gain for phd students who had once been students on the programme themselves (conrad and zuber-skerritt, 1995). background literature and rationale for design of the pilot pass/si programme the purpose of the case study was to annotate how features of the pilot peer assisted student support (pass) and supplemental instruction (si) programme impacted on the student experience of both doctoral (phd) and masters (msc) degree students (boud, cohen and sampson, 2014; ali and evans, 2013). the pass and si pilot intervention was designed with an awareness of the cultural and social links that masters students already had with fellow nigerian students, now undertaking phd level study, who had previously experienced the same msc programmes. it focused on the feedback that the phd students had originally given on their experience of modules across the programme, where they had identified challenging areas of study in relation to the applied research methods and project management module, a direct precursor to their final dissertation (applied practice project module). this was positively regarded by students as they perceived that their opinions of the programme mattered and that measures were being actively taken to hayes and fulton a participatory action research study on the impact of peer assisted student support (pass) and supplemental instruction (si) by international phd students journal of learning development in higher education, issue 14: april 2019 4 address helping them with challenging areas of study. it was also hoped that this would develop an identifiable culture of support for research students where capacity for social and academic networking between cohorts of students could be enhanced and facilitated as something that could potentially contribute to learning gain in the advent of the implementation of the proposed teaching excellence framework (tef). in terms of the potential for maximising learning gain, the concept of ‘learning gain’ was something that academic staff engaged in the execution of the pilot felt that pass/si could potentially actively contribute to in relation to the future implementation of the teaching excellence framework (tef). postgraduate communities of practice by definition the use of community of practice is established and characterised by a group of people engaged in fundamental processes of collective learning. this is normally within the context of a specific domain and practical interventions are iteratively improved by the dynamics of human interaction (wenger, 2010). in the context of the pass/si system which was made operational in the context of postgraduate provision, these domains are characterised by: domain: the domain within this study is postgraduate healthcare education. this educational context provided an ideal opportunity for reciprocity of msc and phd students. phd students who voluntarily opted to engage in the development of a postgraduate pass/si system. community: the community are the phd students who provide pass/si to msc students in the context of a learning enhancement opportunity, which encourages developmental understanding of underpinning research methodologies and project management skills. practice: whilst the defined community as a collective, belong to the healthcare education domain, the discipline of health has such a diversity of applied contexts that practice within each area can be very distinctive. the shared collective approach to learning about research in practice though, was the focus of the pass/si intervention. hayes and fulton a participatory action research study on the impact of peer assisted student support (pass) and supplemental instruction (si) by international phd students journal of learning development in higher education, issue 14: april 2019 5 construction of pass/si training models a fundamental feature of any pass/si training model has to be the potential of the approach in enhancing the overall student experience in relation to the learning experiences of individual students and how this impacts on their level of motivation and commitment to achieve and maximise their potential. seminal research has long highlighted the distinct link between the degree to which student motivation and overall attainment is impacted upon by learning environments and contexts within which students can develop higher order thinking skills and their capacity for autonomous, proactive engagement in specific learning goals. this is rooted in self determination theory (ryan and deci, 2000) which posits that the extent to which any student is motivated to attain a personal academic goal is exponentially linked to their engagement in the student experience. the model of pass/si implemented in this study was designed to facilitate the development of student capacity for autonomous thinking and competence. phd students as peer assisted student support facilitators the issue of facilitating learning via the use of peers is a longstanding issue in higher education, although little research exists on the development of integrated pass/si models in the context of postgraduate provision. from a discipline specific perspective the original interventions stemmed from the work of vygotsky (1978) and piaget (1976) and characterised social constructivist approaches to learning in an array of learning contexts. the phd students in this social context served to: 1. enhance learning in the field of health research. 2. focus attention on the need to be goal oriented, persistent, resilient and motivated to succeed in the context of their dissertation modules. 3. provide exemplary input into an academic field in which they had already succeeded through their own motivation and commitment. gazula et al (2016) highlighted the value of reciprocity between givers and recipients of pass/si interventions and this was significant to this study since the phd students had already experienced the same educational programme as the msc students, having progressed into study for their higher degrees in previous academic years. this mutual shared experience meant that the phd students were credible proponents of the need to hayes and fulton a participatory action research study on the impact of peer assisted student support (pass) and supplemental instruction (si) by international phd students journal of learning development in higher education, issue 14: april 2019 6 remain motivated and committed in the dissertation module which is often perceived to be the most challenging aspect of the programme for most msc students. research methodology this study implemented a participatory action research (par) approach as an overarching interpretivist methodological framework. it adopted qualitative methods (focus groups and semi-structured interviews) to evaluate the perceived experiences of students who engaged in the pass/si activities introduced as a pilot exercise for postgraduate msc and phd students. the approach offered a mechanism for the integration of concurrent and iterative conceptual planning, implementation and ongoing evaluation in the development of student learning enhancement. a par was selected in relation to the potential evolution of new knowledge via critical reflection on action (mctaggart, nixon and kemmis, 2017). in the context of this study, this involved:  planning a specific additional change to the educational experience students have (i.e. the introduction of the pass/si intervention to postgraduate provision).  developing the pass/si system, implementing it in practice and then formally evaluating it.  integrating a mechanism of critical reflexivity and iterative and ongoing improvement to the pass/si intervention.  further integration of evaluative insight and re-development and implementation. this par approach afforded the researchers an opportunity to identify a specific issue for address within the context of student learning experiences and to build this into the social co-construction of new knowledge in with these students. the aim of this was to translate collective emergent theoretical perspectives and findings from the study into innovative approaches into the comparatively new context of postgraduate pass/si provision. it can be posited that since knowledge is socially co-constructed in the context of a specific values system of postgraduate he provision that this research approach encourages increasing levels of discourse around how students learn as well as what they learn in terms of disciplinary content. the approach also led to acknowledgement of the relevance of social interaction and served as a reminder that education is a social science, regardless of signature pedagogy and discipline. hayes and fulton a participatory action research study on the impact of peer assisted student support (pass) and supplemental instruction (si) by international phd students journal of learning development in higher education, issue 14: april 2019 7 design and implementation of the pass/si pilot programme the pilot programme was designed with the broad aims of:  investigating whether recently published principles of pass and si could be effectively transferred and applied to this relatively specific context of provision in higher education.  consolidating the existing knowledge base that students had gained as a result of attending the module ‘applied research methods and project management’.  providing a social forum for students to engage with their peer group beyond the context of classroom based study as a means of reducing the sense of social isolation many previous students from the same stage of the programme had reported.  promoting the concept of socially inclusive collaborative experiential learning as a valuable adjunct to autonomous academic study. curriculum design of the pass / si programme prior to commencement of the project the researcher undertook formal supervisory training in peer assisted student support/supplemental instruction, which ensured that awareness of the difference between teaching and facilitation could be established (van der meer, spowart and hart, 2013).the phd students were then pass/si trained and equipped with the time and resources to undertake the pilot study. they were paid as associate tutors in the si sessions as a means of making them accountable for their work with students in terms of learning content and delivery (burgess, van diggele and mellis, 2015). they were not paid for engaging in the social activities. it was important that all students involved recognised the intrinsic potential worth the programme was perceived to have from the perspective of the academic staff involved and the students who had agreed to be pass/si facilitators during the pilot programme (cusick et al, 2015). overall, students from both cohorts regarded the programme as a positive experience and acknowledged this element of a quality enhancement initiative as something that added value to their learning journeys (mccartney, 2016; carbone et al, 2015). an adaptation of this approach was made as a mechanism of providing a series of six learning consolidation sessions on: hayes and fulton a participatory action research study on the impact of peer assisted student support (pass) and supplemental instruction (si) by international phd students journal of learning development in higher education, issue 14: april 2019 8 1. philosophical underpinnings of approaches to research methods. 2. referencing and citation techniques. 3. undertaking qualitative data analysis. 4. undertaking quantitative data analysis. 5. constructing a research report/dissertation. 6. disseminating research workshop. alongside this the students were given the opportunity to attend a series of six writing retreat days, where the students could independently work on their own projects in the company of their peers, where they were free to socially engage, share concerns about their projects and be mentored by the six phd students, who formed buddy groups. finally a series of six free social events were organised in the form of beach walking, trips and social gatherings where students could integrate in social interaction and dialogue about their work, alongside having an opportunity to develop friendship groups which could be sustained around campus. findings and evaluation of pilot pass/si project two focus groups were undertaken to capture the group dynamics of pass/si instruction (the phd students, who became focus group a) and pass/si participation (the msc students, who became focus group b). focus groups were a means of capturing the dynamic interpersonal relationships within and between two distinct academic groups (msc students and phd students). it actively enabled their contribution to the co-construction of knowledge and streamlined discussions of topics and concepts that could be embedded back into academic curricula across the institution and lead to potential transferability between representative signature pedagogies. the captured dynamic between the msc and phd students as a consequence of the research approach adopted, led to the illumination of many agreed standpoints by students in their focus groups (forsyth, 2014). each focus group lasted 45 minutes and was conducted with a ratio of 1 phd student to 6 msc students, which reflected the construction of the pass/si model. data analysis braun and clarke’s (2006) six-phase approach to thematic analysis was adopted as a hayes and fulton a participatory action research study on the impact of peer assisted student support (pass) and supplemental instruction (si) by international phd students journal of learning development in higher education, issue 14: april 2019 9 systematic, yet recursive, approach to inductive qualitative analysis. in accordance with recommendations of the process, data was not viewed in a linear fashion and ideas were extracted as they emerged during the process of interpretation (often after visiting and re-visiting particular focus group transcripts), and the researchers proceeded to the next phase where appropriate. the establishment of the most salient themes from the study were established using quirkos (quirkos limited,scotland), a commercial qualitative analysis software package tool, which enabled the overlap and predominance of key themes to be visually represented and prioritised for the discussion and findings of the research. phase one this entailed familiarisation with the data set where the researchers immersed themselves in the data collected via extensive reading and re-reading of the transcribed information from the data collection. this was a process undertaken by two researchers where a consensus could be reached between those themes independently found to be most commonly occurring. phase two data was coded: this involved creating and identifying themes that came from analysis of the data sets. this subsequently guided analysis and provided a systematic approach at a semantic and conceptual level, which could be mapped against extant published literature. this was achieved by manually coding every data item and completed by the two researchers involved, collating every element together so that it could be independently checked for inclusion in the overall findings by both. phase three this entailed exploring the data for the specific themes identified in phase two of the data analysis, defined in accordance with braun and clark (2006) as ‘coherent and meaningful patterns in the data’ of direct relevance to the research aim. if a theme emerged from more than 10% of respondents, it was deemed to be meaningful to the study. its coherence was judged on the basis of non-ambiguous articulation of student perceptions. the authors attributed the degree of diversity in the questions asked to the fact that 100% of respondents contributed to at least four themes. hayes and fulton a participatory action research study on the impact of peer assisted student support (pass) and supplemental instruction (si) by international phd students journal of learning development in higher education, issue 14: april 2019 10 phase four this stage involved reviewing the emergent themes. it provides a means of checking that these are relevant to the data extracts when they are taken in abstraction from the complete data set. phase five providing a definitive theme for each one that has emerged from the study entails defining the overall findings so that each can be individually examined. phase six analysing the themes relative to one another in terms of their rate of occurrence and writing up the findings in relation to this. this involved merging analytical narratives and examining this in relation to the existing published evidence base. following phase six of the data analysis, data were entered into quirkos, which facilitated the authors in identifying the most salient themes from this phase of the research study. this also revealed distinct overlap between all themes and enabled us to present our findings without having to prioritise them in rank order. as such we present them as being equal but different, each necessitating individual consideration of relevance to proposed implementations of pass/si schemes in practice. discussion and findings the six most salient emergent themes from the study were: 1. dialogic connection students from both focus groups valued how pass/si had enabled them to extend their reach in entering active dialogue with each other about their work and its developmental progression. this was seen as an important means of ensuring that approaches and motivations to study remained energized, with a broader sense of connection socially and professionally to others in their cohorts. 2. student identity and belonging hayes and fulton a participatory action research study on the impact of peer assisted student support (pass) and supplemental instruction (si) by international phd students journal of learning development in higher education, issue 14: april 2019 11 students from both focus groups commented on the sense of belonging they felt both institutionally and to their respective academic cohorts as a result of the programme. the phd students commented that, because this was paid employment they were engaging with, they had felt a sense of accountability for their contribution to learning enhancement, which they believed would be a valuable addition to their developing curricula vitae. 3. reciprocal reassurance and confidence building all students felt reassured to be able to meet other students from the same stage of study regularly, instead of seeing them in isolated social situations, where often their project work would not be the topic of conversation. 4. self-belief and aspiration the phd students in particular said that undertaking a facilitator role in the pass/si system had enabled them to build confidence in working with others, which in turn enhanced their self-belief and focused their aspirational vision for working beyond the context of their doctoral studies (williams and reddy, 2016). 5. purposeful learning through facilitation rather than teaching msc students as a collective, believed that the consolidation of learning across areas of the curriculum that were academically challenging, via further facilitation rather than more formalised teaching sessions, was a very beneficial approach (choy, delahaye and saggers, 2015; cook-sather, bovill and felten, 2014). 6. cultural support and widening inclusion for others 96% of the students engaged in either pass/si as facilitators or recipients were nigerian. the cultural ethos and shared experiences that were evident in this dynamic were positively received by all students, regardless of nationality, as a means of extending social circles with other students with whom they may never have had the opportunity to meet and engage with outside the classroom setting. this was warmly welcomed and many students commented that the contextual setting of the pass/si sessions had enabled them to form lasting friendships with others as a result (bennett, o’flynn and kelly, 2015). hayes and fulton a participatory action research study on the impact of peer assisted student support (pass) and supplemental instruction (si) by international phd students journal of learning development in higher education, issue 14: april 2019 12 conclusion this pilot study of pass/si delivered by phd students to msc students revealed the progressive development of an academic culture of reciprocity and support for student cohorts. this occurred both in relation to the learning development of the phd students as pass/si facilitators and for the msc student recipients, who felt that the intervention prevented feelings of social isolation during the period of their independent learning time. in particular, the integration of social activities across the scheme ensured a means of developing the social interrelationships between peer group learners at the institution. this particularly impacted upon student morale and motivation at what was perceived to be a challenging time. students thought this challenge came from and was characterised by extensive preparation, critical thinking and the write-up of a lengthy dissertation. being able to maintain and develop a dialogue of support during periods of time which could otherwise have been potentially isolating for msc students, was reported to have made a significant difference to both. the phd students felt that being able to conduct the pass/si system with a degree of functional autonomy within the institution had become an indicator of esteem. the process of facilitation further consolidated their own learning; they felt valued by the academic staff, whose work they were consolidating and reinforcing, and their own confidence in the context of their personal academic development grew. their academic ability and their capacity to articulate key concepts were two areas highlighted. if pass/si is to be implemented across the whole faculty of health sciences and wellbeing, rather than in a relatively small academic area such as health, at the university, then several issues need to be addressed in relation to wider scaling of this project. the pass/si intervention could potentially be applied to other disciplines and student groups in the institution as a mechanism of promoting the immediacy of the need for holistic academic integration, sense of belonging and student wellbeing, regardless of its impact on academic achievement. this has obvious and potentially positive wider implications for the holistic health and wellbeing of every student. pragmatically though, implementation of a pass/si scheme necessitates considerations, both strategically and operationally. these are identifiable across specific areas. initially it would be necessary to establish a viable mechanism of being able to financially sustain hayes and fulton a participatory action research study on the impact of peer assisted student support (pass) and supplemental instruction (si) by international phd students journal of learning development in higher education, issue 14: april 2019 13 the payment of facilitators. potentially this could form part of an employer/employee relationship between the institution and the phd students, tangibly acknowledging, rewarding and making them formally accountable for their work. integrating mechanisms for students to express a preference for particular types of pass/si could also be a significant consideration. linked to this would have to be the implication of the context and setting of informal learning for all students. relation to the contextual significance of pass/si this study provided evidence that the processes were perceived to provide an element of learning gain and this was evident through the demonstrably increased social cohesion, learning development of the phd facilitators and the msc students. in relation to this it is important to remember the aim of these sessions is to support learning in the context of a social and welcoming environment where inclusivity and belonging matter. typical examples of this include whether the sessions are delivered at institutional or in home based settings, as depending on the context of delivery then communities of practice may differ in relation to their personal and professional impact. embedding the programme within and between different academic programmes, such as that seen between msc and doctoral level students might not always be potentially transferable in terms of the experience that students have gained. an example of this is the context of undergraduate provision, where more traditional approaches to pass and si, as predominantly separate entities may be better suited and aligned with both the need and the demand for provision of learning support. the recognition that the best students do not always make the best facilitators is also paramount to a successful scheme delivery. this has implications for processes of recruitment and retention of pass/si facilitators. the value placed upon those who are most reflective and reflexive in their approach to conveying experience and strategies for supporting others as they learn, is of extreme value and one which ought to be stressed at an operational level where students are being recruited to deliver pass/si schemes. finally, reinforcing the need for students to consider the level of their commitment to becoming a pass/si facilitator requires clear academic leadership in practice. this is to enable the support of students who volunteer to deliver the scheme as they seek also to effectively balance commitment to their own doctoral studies. hayes and fulton a participatory action research study on the impact of peer assisted student support (pass) and supplemental instruction (si) by international phd students journal of learning development in higher education, issue 14: april 2019 14 whilst this is a relatively small study, the authors are hopeful that it might encourage other academic developers to consider the potential impact of trialling differing approaches to the delivery of pass/si schemes in their own academic practice. ethical approval formal ethical approval for this study was obtained from the university of sunderland ethics committee. references ali, a. and evans, p. (2013) ‘multi-resource peer assisted learning in postgraduate setting: a pilot study’, journal of the college of physicians and surgeons pakistan, 23(4), pp. 251-256. bennett, d., o’flynn, s., and kelly, m. (2015) ‘peer assisted learning in the clinical setting: an activity systems analysis’, advances in health sciences education, 20(3), pp. 595-610. boud, d., cohen, r., and sampson, j. (eds.) (2014) peer learning in higher education: learning from and with each other. routledge. braun, v. and clarke, v. (2006) ‘using thematic analysis in psychology’, qualitative research in psychology, 3(2), pp. 77-101. burgess, a., van diggele, c., and mellis, c. (2015) ‘students as facilitators in a teacher training program: motivation for leadership roles’, advances in medical education and practice, 6, pp. 615. carbone, a., ross, b., phelan, l., lindsay, k., drew, s., stoney, s., and cottman, c. (2015) ‘course evaluation matters: improving students’ learning experiences with a peer-assisted teaching programme’, assessment & evaluation in higher education, 40(2), pp. 165-180. hayes and fulton a participatory action research study on the impact of peer assisted student support (pass) and supplemental instruction (si) by international phd students journal of learning development in higher education, issue 14: april 2019 15 choy, s., delahaye, b. l., and saggers, b. (2015) ‘developing learning cohorts for postgraduate research degrees’, the australian educational researcher, 42(1), pp. 19-34. conrad, l. and zuber-skerritt, o. (1995) ‘reaching more postgraduate students’, in conrad, l., and phillips, l.a. (eds.) reaching more students. griffith university, queensland: griffith institute for higher education, pp. 313–322. conrad, l., perry, c., and zuber-skerritt, o. (1992) ‘alternatives to traditional postgraduate supervision in the social sciences', starting research – supervision and training, griffith university, queensland: griffith institute for higher education, pp. 112–115. cook-sather, a., bovill, c., and felten, p. (2014) engaging students as partners in learning and teaching: a guide for faculty. john wiley & sons. cusick, a., camer, d., stamenkovic, a., and zaccagnini, m. (2015) peer assisted study sessions for research trainees. journal of peer learning, 8(1), pp. 18-33. evans, h. (2015) ‘international postgraduate students and peer learning’, journal of pedagogic development, 5(3). forsyth, k. d. (2014) ‘lessons learned in developing new postgraduate medical specialist training programs for australia and new zealand’, the medical journal of australia, 201(9), pp. 511-512. gazula, s., mckenna, l., cooper, s., and paliadelis, p. (2017) ‘a systematic review of reciprocal peer tutoring within tertiary health profession educational programs’, health professions education, 3(2), pp. 64-78. glass, c. r. and westmont, c. m. (2014) ‘comparative effects of belongingness on the academic success and cross-cultural interactions of domestic and international students’, international journal of intercultural relations, 38, pp. 106-119. hayes and fulton a participatory action research study on the impact of peer assisted student support (pass) and supplemental instruction (si) by international phd students journal of learning development in higher education, issue 14: april 2019 16 mccartney, m. (2016) ‘peer+ peer = increased learning’, science, 351(6268), pp. 38-39. mcgrath, c.h., guerin, b., harte, e., frearson, m., and manville, c., (2015) learning gain in higher education. santa monica, ca: rand corporation us, pp 46-57. mctaggart, r., nixon, r., and kemmis, s. (2017) ‘critical participatory action research’, in the palgrave international handbook of action research. palgrave macmillan us, pp. 21-35. piaget, j. (1976) ‘piaget’s theory’, in piaget and his school. springer berlin heidelberg, pp. 11-23. ryan, r. m. and deci, e. l. (2000) ‘self-determination theory and the facilitation of intrinsic motivation, social development, and well-being’, american psychologist, 55(1), pp. 68. salmon, g. (2002) ‘mirror, mirror, on my screen –exploring online reflections’, british journal of educational technology, 33(4), pp. 379-391. van der meer, j., spowart, l., and hart, s. (2013), ‘we need support too’: providing postgraduate peer support’, the student engagement handbook: practice in higher education. emerald group publishing, pp. 313-330. vygotsky, l. s. (1978) ‘mind in society: the development of higher mental process’, cambridge; harvard university press, pp. 81-82 wenger, e. (2010) ‘communities of practice and social learning systems: the career of a concept’, in blackmore, c. (ed.) social learning systems and communities of practice. springer, london, pp.179-198. williams, b. and reddy, p. (2016) ‘does peer-assisted learning improve academic performance? a scoping review’, nurse education today, 42, pp. 23-29. hayes and fulton a participatory action research study on the impact of peer assisted student support (pass) and supplemental instruction (si) by international phd students journal of learning development in higher education, issue 14: april 2019 17 author details catherine hayes is an associate professor of health professions pedagogy at the university of sunderland, a visiting professor of higher education pedagogic practice at the university of cumbria, and a visiting professor of higher education at liverpool hope university. john fulton is an associate professor of practice based research and director of postgraduate research at the university of sunderland. a participatory action research study on the impact of peer assisted student support (pass) and supplemental instruction (si) by international phd students abstract using a participatory action research (par) approach, this evaluative research study gives an insight into the implementation of a pilot study of a newly implemented peer assisted student support (pass) and supplemental instruction (si) programme. the... contextual background to learning gain and pass/si distinguishing features of learning gain for postgraduate students background literature and rationale for design of the pilot pass/si programme postgraduate communities of practice construction of pass/si training models phd students as peer assisted student support facilitators research methodology design and implementation of the pass/si pilot programme curriculum design of the pass / si programme findings and evaluation of pilot pass/si project data analysis discussion and findings conclusion ethical approval references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 20: march 2021 ________________________________________________________________________ using padlet in instructional design to promote cognitive engagement: a case study of undergraduate marketing students lucy gill-simmen royal holloway, university of london abstract this case study illustrates the incorporation of padlet to support a learning task designed to promote student engagement. padlet was introduced as a digital technology platform in an undergraduate marketing class for an assessment where the stakes are considered low, that is, a formative assessment. the previous cohort had declared it difficult to engage with the original assessment, which took the form of a 1000-word written piece. to facilitate interest and motivation in the task, padlet was introduced with the assumption that students would engage more with a task if a technology-based instructional design was implemented. this case study examines the use of padlet to provide a platform for literacy beyond the written text, aimed to increase effort and cognitive engagement. selfreported results indicate that students find a task supported by the use of padlet deeply cognitively engaging. padlet, as illustrated in this case study, could be used in either an inperson or online learning environment. keywords: padlet; online learning tools; cognitive engagement; teaching and learning. introduction engagement is characterised by three dimensions: cognitive, emotional and behavioural. the concept of cognitive engagement draws on the idea of investment and includes students’ willingness to invest and exert effort in learning (fredricks et al., 2004). for decades, technology has been known to operate as a hook which motivates students to participate through sustained interest and cognitive engagement (kuh and hu, 2001; mo, gill-simmen using padlet in instructional design to promote cognitive engagement: a case study of undergraduate marketing students journal of learning development in higher education, issue 20: march 2021 2 2011; schindler et al., 2017). laird and kuh (2005) identified a strong positive relationship between using information technology for educational purposes and involvement in effective educational practices such as active and collaborative learning. with the use of technology, students’ feelings of autonomy and cognitive engagement are elevated through being given an alternative method to explore a topic and to represent their understanding (blumenfeld et al., 2006). furthermore, visual representation generated through various modes of ict helps learners to internalize knowledge and to learn better than through more traditional methods of representation such as written work (dewitt et al., 2015). to promote engagement with an individual formative assessment task ̶ a low-stakes learning scenario ̶ a digital assessment was introduced. padlet was chosen as a tool to support the task given that it affords knowledge development and construction, content aggregation and organization and offers a multi-user interface. such padlet capabilities enable flexible learning, support autonomy, and have the potential to support the active engagement of students in the learning process (park, 2013). in light of the recent shift in many he institutions to a blended learning approach, the use of platforms as collaborative and engaging learning tools in instructional design is gaining traction (shinde, 2020). this case study examines the use of padlet as a platform for a formative assessment analysing a chosen industry. background with most students bringing a smartphone or other mobile device to class, web 2.0 technologies present opportunities to improve learner engagement (ellis, 2015). as computer-based technology has permeated the education sector, its use in effectively promoting student engagement has attracted much attention in higher education due to its association with a number of positive academic outcomes (schindler et al., 2017). particularly in light of the recent shift to a blended learning approach, universities that fail to effectively integrate technology into the learning experience may miss opportunities to improve student outcomes. one of the key findings in the literature on technology implementation is the power that technology has in engaging students in relevant learning, gill-simmen using padlet in instructional design to promote cognitive engagement: a case study of undergraduate marketing students journal of learning development in higher education, issue 20: march 2021 3 particularly evidenced by the use of technology in increasing student motivation and participation (schindler et al., 2017). light et al. (2009, cited in bree, 2017) suggest that technology is important as a means of encouraging or supporting learning, provided it has added value for the learner. digital applications have been shown to have the power to engage and motivate learners, and in fact have the potential to increase academic achievement from the perspective of both the students and the educators (courville, 2011; dervan, 2014). many technology enthusiasts argue that gen-z learners are ‘digital natives’ with sophisticated technology knowledge and skills which can potentially be harnessed for better learning engagement inside the classroom. however, how to gather information and navigate an abundance of sources still needs to be learned since academic digital literacy skills are distinct from those required in daily life to use technology socially (gurung and rutledge, 2014). cognitive engagement includes the amount of effort students are willing to put into a task and also how long they are willing to work on it (corno and mandinach, 1983; richardson and newby 2006). according to scott and walczak (2009), the richness of multimedia technology goes so far as to stimulate the senses, thereby encouraging cognitive engagement. understanding of cognitive engagement can be furthered by distinguishing amongst behaviours on a continuum between deep and shallow engagement (greene and miller, 1996). students who exhibit behaviours that allow them to master academic work are seen to have deep cognitive engagement, whilst students who exhibit behaviours such as purely rote memorization and rituals that they perceive will help them to do well without developing mastery of the material are demonstrating shallow engagement. in the context of this case study, the use of technology to support a task promoting deep cognitive engagement was proposed and measured using student self-reporting. case study on a second-year undergraduate in-person marketing strategy course at a uk public research university, a difference across the cohort of 400 students was noted in terms of academic ability, learning approach, motivation for and confidence in learning, willingness to participate, spoken and written fluency, and work ethic. the cohort comprised students gill-simmen using padlet in instructional design to promote cognitive engagement: a case study of undergraduate marketing students journal of learning development in higher education, issue 20: march 2021 4 aged 20-22 years with a variety of nationalities – uk 55%, eu 25%, and international 20%. in addition, it was noted, both through personal observation and through student evaluation, how difficult it had been for students in previous cohorts to engage with written tasks for an individual formative assessment. the original individual formative assessment method on the module was a written 1000-word industry analysis. given the nature of the analysis, requiring the use of a number of analytical frameworks, a previous cohort said they found it difficult to write about the industry and that it would be easier to show their findings in tables and diagrams and in a more visual way. students described the assessment as ‘boring’ and ‘hard to know how to write using the appropriate business level writing style’. an engaging assessment should meet the needs of a culturally and educationally diverse student population without compromising academic standards, instead improving opportunities for all students to demonstrate their acquisition of the learning outcomes. more specifically, the aims of an engaging assessment are to fairly evaluate students’ ability to meet learning outcomes, to be accessible to all students, to provide every student with an equal opportunity to demonstrate their achievement, to support student engagement and learning, and to address the needs of a diverse student population (hockings, 2010). to meet the requirements of an engaging assessment, the original formative assessment was replaced with a more active and blended learning experience designed to motivate students to exert more effort in a low-stakes situation. to promote engagement, padlet was identified as the most appropriate digital technology since the wide variety of media supported by padlet provides a particularly rich environment for engaging in today's complex information environment (table 1). table 1. padlet features. padlet features impact on learning collaboration through a multi-user interface. flexible and versatile for collaborative content sharing, collective knowledge development and construction. provision for blogging, discussion and social bookmarking for twitter, facebook, slack • provides tutor, self and peer assessment capabilities. • allows for synchronous or asynchronous collaboration. • stimulates collaborative discussion and reiterative learning. • accommodates opportunity for autonomy, competence and relatedness gill-simmen using padlet in instructional design to promote cognitive engagement: a case study of undergraduate marketing students journal of learning development in higher education, issue 20: march 2021 5 • promotes learner engagement. • collaborative as well as independent use. wide aesthetic appeal. choices of wallpaper, typography and themes to fit a variety of writing styles from sticky notes to essays. different layouts convey information as a square board, a feed of information, or as an open canvas. • promotes visual learning and sense stimulation through the visual pin-board feature. • encourages increased time spent on task through opportunities to showcase content in a variety of ways. • improves information assimilation capacity and promotes intrinsic curiosity. wide variety of media and file types supported. multiple formatting options, allowing learners to upload files, post images, documents, videos, music and embed any web-based content. • engages full spectrum of digital literacies. • provides opportunities for learners to readily build and represent knowledge through multi-media capabilities. • attached links and files appear with a stimulating contextual preview thus focusing learners’ attention. • opportunity to scatter, group, and connect content allows for visual representation of information, synthesis and analysis in a variety of ways. apps for most devices. provides accessibility anywhere, anytime with instant updates and responses in real time • multiple points of access promote user interest and promotes higher levels of self-pacing • increases motivation to engage • encourages instant participation task at the start of the module, students were fully briefed on the objective of the assessment, which was to research and develop an industry analysis and to present key findings about the industry as a series of ideas on a padlet wall. students were required to choose a brand of interest and to conduct an analysis of the marketing environment for the industry sector in which the brand operates. this served as a formative exercise for a subsequent summative marketing plan for their chosen brand. specifically, students were required to conduct a macro and micro analysis of the chosen industry and to present a synthesis of the current situation of the industry using specific taught analytical frameworks. as such, the remit for the assessment mirrored that of the former written assessment and assessment outcomes remained largely unchanged with the exception of additional assessment outcomes: technology utilisation and use of graphics and pictures. gill-simmen using padlet in instructional design to promote cognitive engagement: a case study of undergraduate marketing students journal of learning development in higher education, issue 20: march 2021 6 students were provided with a marking rubric in advance. the rubric highlighted the five assessment criteria: 1. organization and presentation of analyses, 2. content and accuracy of analysis, 3. technology utilisation, 4. use of graphics and pictures, 5. writing and grammar. to introduce the use of padlet as the chosen platform for their assignment, the class was shown the video how to use padlet, and students were instructed to go to padlet.com and then click on ‘make a padlet’, after which their wall was ready for use. students were encouraged to make some modifications to their wall, such as giving it a title, changing the background image, giving the wall a unique web address, and changing the display of posts. they were shown how to add to their wall by typing, pasting links, adding pictures, image and audio or video clips. students were required to develop their padlet over a period of five weeks, and the workshop instructors (four in total) had access to the padlets in order to monitor and offer support in response to student progress or lack of progress. students were asked to share the link to their padlet wall with a fellow student in the group, who was required to make comments and to provide peer feedback halfway through the five-week period. each week, students were required to work on their padlet based on material taught in weekly lectures and workshops. the aim of the assignment was for students to delve deeper into a class-related topic, thoroughly research it (by reading articles and reviewing videos and websites), selectively summarize and assemble the most useful resources into a creative, engaging, and logically organized padlet. after five weeks, students exported their links to their final padlet to an inbox in moodle (virtual learning environment) for assessment purposes. the padlets were graded, and formative feedback provided in line with the rubric. limitations sometimes associated with padlet, such as limited editing features, preference for short tasks, difficulties with scrolling and difficulty organizing vast amounts of ideas, were not deemed to be challenges specific to this task (dewitt and koh, 2020). methodology immediately following submission of the padlet assessment, students were asked to fill in a short questionnaire on google forms to self-report the extent to which they estimated their own levels of cognitive engagement (greene, 2015). the cognitive engagement scale https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uuzcil8qcym gill-simmen using padlet in instructional design to promote cognitive engagement: a case study of undergraduate marketing students journal of learning development in higher education, issue 20: march 2021 7 developed by greene and miller (1996) was adopted, and five items were adapted from the scale and reworded to specifically refer to the set padlet task. sub-scales of deep cognitive engagement with the task were measured, specifically self-regulation, deep strategy use and persistence. the questions were developed according to the sub-scales and measured using the following items: planning and organisation of ideas, developing information in new ways, introduction of new ideas, extra reading to enhance understanding of concepts, and continuous checking of ideas. the questionnaire comprised five questions on a likert scale from 1 to 5, where 1 equates to strongly agree and 5 to strongly disagree. 320 students filled out the anonymous questionnaire and provided informed consent to share the results. the questionnaire link was made available through the virtual learning environment, moodle. it was made clear that completion of the survey was not compulsory. responses were transferred from google forms to microsoft excel 2013 for analysis. findings the survey findings are shown in table 2. it is apparent that on all cognitive engagement measurements, over 60% of participants self-reported that they either strongly agreed or agreed with the item measured. students particularly strongly agreed or agreed (78%) that they checked their understanding of the industry-related concepts as they went along. similarly, 75% of students either strongly agreed or agreed that, when preparing the padlet, they tried to combine different pieces of information from the course material in new ways. it was clear that padlet as a tool encouraged curiosity and provided the opportunity to present information in a new way providing an overall deeply cognitive learning experience. table 2. cognitive engagement with the padlet task (n = 320). measurement item strongly agree/agree neutral disagree/strongly disagree when approaching the padlet task, i planned out and organised my ideas based on how i wanted my padlet to look 70% 25% 5% gill-simmen using padlet in instructional design to promote cognitive engagement: a case study of undergraduate marketing students journal of learning development in higher education, issue 20: march 2021 8 when preparing my padlet, i tried to combine different pieces of information from the course material in new ways 75% 20% 5% when preparing my padlet, i tried to introduce interesting new ideas of my own 60% 27% 13% when preparing my padlet, if i did not understand a concept i came across, i did some further reading so i could understand it better 68% 18% 14% when preparing my padlet, i checked my understanding of the industry-related concepts as i went along 78% 17% 5% discussion the overall aim of the case study was to find a way to encourage students to engage more deeply with a formative assessment. given that previous cohorts had mentioned that they did not engage optimally with a written task, it was decided to design the task in a more engaging and creative way, and to introduce a technology to support creativity and flexibility, thus promoting greater student engagement in the task at hand. in the survey, 60% of students self-reported that they agreed or strongly agreed that they found the task cognitively engaging at a deep level across all measured items. areas where cognitive engagement appeared to be particularly high were in checking understanding of specific concepts and in attempting to combine different pieces of information in new ways. the evidence points towards the suitability of padlet in supporting a learning design for cognitive engagement. it provided an engaging learning environment by allowing for higher levels of self-pacing, multi-modal representation, multiple points of access, collaborative discussion and reiterative learning. this success in facilitating cognitive engagement supports findings from the literature which suggest that learning technologies, when used effectively, can play a key role in stimulating curiosity and interest and in facilitating and sustaining engagement (arnone et al., 2011). given the students’ active use of padlet outside of timetabled hours, our case study also strengthens fisher’s (2017) view that padlet is an easy-to-use technology and can be applied to engage students in a number of ways both inside and outside of the classroom. furthermore, based on the cognitive engagement demonstrated, this case study offers a worthy approach to overall assessment for learning, not solely for formative purposes as demonstrated here. gill-simmen using padlet in instructional design to promote cognitive engagement: a case study of undergraduate marketing students journal of learning development in higher education, issue 20: march 2021 9 reflection and future practice what was presented here was an evidence-based scenario in which padlet, an online elearning tool, could be used as an aid in a task designed to promote deep cognitive engagement amongst students. it was the experience of the module team that, given padlet’s ease of use, the task was seamless and easy to manage from an educator perspective. as such, this should encourage educators to seek ways to innovate in their teaching methods and to consider ways in which technologies can be employed pedagogically to promote learning and engagement. the case also promotes exploring what other technologies could be used to support tasks designed to promote engagement or, alternatively, how the use of technologies might be used to support pedagogies of information representation and autonomous study, which, in themselves, serve as drivers of cognitive engagement (smiley and anderson, 2011). padlet could also be used for other practices and to support other pedagogies. for instance, padlet has been shown to improve the teacher-student relationship, increase motivation and self-esteem, and provide teachers with an alternative mode of communicating with students beyond the classroom (rashid et al., 2019). furthermore, regarding the recent shift to online teaching and a blended learning approach, padlet lends itself well to this new climate, specifically given its potential for effective use in online, face-to-face, synchronous and asynchronous settings. in addition, research has linked not only cognitive engagement to important educational outcomes such as student persistence in learning, satisfaction and academic achievement, but also behavioural and emotional engagement (henrie et al., 2015). thus, in future it would be useful to examine the use of digital technologies to support tasks to potentially promote all three types of student engagement. on reflection, the introduction of a student-friendly technology intervention is a worthy cause to facilitate engagement on the part of students given the already prevalent role of technology in the lives of students today. however, it is important to note that technology can be used superficially and in ways which are of no added value to students; thus, it is vital to ask the question of whether the incorporation of technology into instructional design is an enabler or a distraction. gill-simmen using padlet in instructional design to promote cognitive engagement: a case study of undergraduate marketing students journal of learning development in higher education, issue 20: march 2021 10 reservations as to whether padlet allows for the same level of analysis and synthesis associated with a written assessment were alleviated since students adequately demonstrated their ability to visually represent their chosen industry in a holistic way, indicating how both macro and microenvironment analyses of the industry impact the firm’s position. after the module, many students commented that they had enjoyed the padlet task, and some had continued to use padlet for other projects. it would be useful to evaluate the impact on the summative assessment and to examine whether a more cognitively engaging formative assessment leads to a higher success rate in the summative assessment. in summary, educators should feel free to explore ways in which digital technologies can be introduced to support learning design which facilitates engagement, motivation and participation, and above all achievement of learning outcomes. references arnone, m.p., small, r.v., chauncey, s.a. and mckenna, h.p. (2011) ‘curiosity, interest and engagement in technology-pervasive learning environments: a new research agenda’, educational technology research and development, 59(2), pp.181-198. available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11423-011-9190-9 (accessed 28 march 2021). blumenfeld, p., kempler, t. and krajcik, j. (2006) ‘motivation and cognitive engagement in learning environments’, in sawyer, k. (ed.) cambridge handbook of the learning sciences. new york: cambridge university press, pp.475–488. bree, r.t. (2017) ‘incorporating augmented reality to enrich student learning’. journal of learning development in higher education, 12, pp.1-12. available at: https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.v0i12.400 (accessed 28 march 2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11423-011-9190-9 https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.v0i12.400 gill-simmen using padlet in instructional design to promote cognitive engagement: a case study of undergraduate marketing students journal of learning development in higher education, issue 20: march 2021 11 corno, l. and mandinach, e.b. (1983) ‘the role of cognitive engagement in classroom learning and motivation’, educational psychologist, 18(2), pp.88-108. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/00461528309529266 (accessed 28 march 2021). courville, k. (2011) ‘technology and its use in education: present roles and future prospects’, recovery school district technology summit, baton rouge, louisiana 6-8 june. available at: https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ed520220.pdf (accessed 28 march 2021). dervan, p. (2014) ‘increasing in-class student engagement using socrative (an online student response system)’, all ireland journal of higher education, 6(3), pp.180193. available at: https://ojs.aishe.org/index.php/aishe-j/article/view/180 (accessed 28 march 2021). dewitt, d., and koh, e. h. (2020) ‘promoting knowledge management processes through an interactive virtual wall in a postgraduate business finance course’, journal of education for business, 95(4), 255-262. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/08832323.2019.1635977 (accessed 28 march 2021). dewitt, d., alias, n. and siraj, s. (2015) ‘collaborative learning: interactive debates using padlet in a higher education institution’, journal of educational technology & society, 17(1), pp. 89-101. available at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/jeductechsoci.17.1.89 (accessed 28 march 2021). ellis, d. (2015) ‘using padlet to increase student engagement in lectures’, european conference on elearning. hatfield, uk 29-30 october. available at: https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/228140577.pdf (accessed 28 march 2021). fredricks, j. a., blumenfeld, p. c. and paris, a. h. (2004) ‘school engagement: potential of the concept, state of the evidence’, review of educational research, 74(1), pp.59109. available at: https://doi.org/10.3102%2f00346543074001059 (accessed 28 march 2021). https://doi.org/10.1080/00461528309529266 https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ed520220.pdf https://ojs.aishe.org/index.php/aishe-j/article/view/180 https://doi.org/10.1080/08832323.2019.1635977 https://www.jstor.org/stable/jeductechsoci.17.1.89 https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/228140577.pdf https://doi.org/10.3102%2f00346543074001059 gill-simmen using padlet in instructional design to promote cognitive engagement: a case study of undergraduate marketing students journal of learning development in higher education, issue 20: march 2021 12 fisher, c. d. (2017) ‘padlet: an online tool for learner engagement and collaboration’, academy of management learning and education, 16(1), pp.163-165. available at: https://doi.org/10.5465/amle.2017.0055 (accessed 28 march 2021). greene, b.a. (2015) ‘measuring cognitive engagement with self-report scales: reflections from over 20 years of research’, educational psychologist, 50(1), pp.14-30. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/00461520.2014.989230 (accessed 28 march 2021). greene, b. a. and miller, r. b. (1996) ‘influences on achievement: goals, perceived ability, and cognitive engagement’, contemporary educational psychology, 21(2), pp.181192. available at: https://doi.org/10.1006/ceps.1996.0015 (accessed 28 march 2021). gurung, b. and rutledge, d. (2014) ‘digital learners and the overlapping of their personal and educational digital engagement’, computers & education, 77, pp.91-100. available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2014.04.012 (accessed 28 march 2021). henrie, c.r., halverson, l.r. and graham, c.r. (2015) ‘measuring student engagement in technology-mediated learning: a review’, computers & education, 90, pp.36-53. available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2015.09.005 (accessed 28 march 2021). hockings, c. (2010) inclusive learning and teaching in higher education: a synthesis of research. available at: https://www.advance-he.ac.uk/knowledge-hub/inclusivelearning-and-teaching-higher-education-synthesis-research (accessed 28 march 2021). kuh, g.d. and hu, s. (2001) ‘the relationships between computer and information technology use, selected learning and personal development outcomes, and other college experiences’, journal of college student development, 42(3), pp.217-232. https://doi.org/10.5465/amle.2017.0055 https://doi.org/10.1080/00461520.2014.989230 https://doi.org/10.1006/ceps.1996.0015 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2014.04.012 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2015.09.005 https://www.advance-he.ac.uk/knowledge-hub/inclusive-learning-and-teaching-higher-education-synthesis-research https://www.advance-he.ac.uk/knowledge-hub/inclusive-learning-and-teaching-higher-education-synthesis-research gill-simmen using padlet in instructional design to promote cognitive engagement: a case study of undergraduate marketing students journal of learning development in higher education, issue 20: march 2021 13 available at: https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2001-06432-003 (accessed 28 march 2021). laird, t.f.n. and kuh, g.d. (2005) ‘student experiences with information technology and their relationship to other aspects of student engagement’, research in higher education, 46(2), pp.211-233. available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11162-0041600-y (accessed 28 march 2021). light, g., calkins, s. and cox, r. (2009) learning and teaching in higher education: the reflective professional. london: sage publications ltd. mo, s. (2011) ‘evidence on instructional technology and student engagement in an auditing course’, academy of educational leadership journal, 15(4), pp.149-158. available at: https://www.abacademies.org/articles/aeljvol15no42011.pdf (accessed 28 march 2021). park, s.w. (2013) ‘the potential of web 2.0 tools to promote reading engagement in a general education course’. techtrends, 57(2), pp.46-53. available at: https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s11528-013-0645-1.pdf (accessed 28 march 2021). rashid, a.a., yunus, m.m. and wahi, w. (2019) ‘using padlet for collaborative writing among esl learners’, creative education, 10(3), pp.610-620. available at: https://doi.org/10.4236/ce.2019.103044 (accessed 28 march 2021). richardson, j.c. and newby, t. (2006) ‘the role of students' cognitive engagement in online learning’, american journal of distance education, 20(1), pp.23-37. available at: https://doi.org/10.1207/s15389286ajde2001_3 (accessed 28 march 2021). schindler, l.a., burkholder, g.j., morad, o.a. and marsh, c. (2017) ‘computer-based technology and student engagement: a critical review of the literature’, international journal of educational technology in higher education, 14(1), pp.1-28. available at: https://doi.org/10.1186/s41239-017-0063-0 (accessed 28 march 2021) https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2001-06432-003 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11162-004-1600-y https://doi.org/10.1007/s11162-004-1600-y https://www.abacademies.org/articles/aeljvol15no42011.pdf https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s11528-013-0645-1.pdf https://doi.org/10.4236/ce.2019.103044 https://doi.org/10.1207/s15389286ajde2001_3 https://doi.org/10.1186/s41239-017-0063-0 gill-simmen using padlet in instructional design to promote cognitive engagement: a case study of undergraduate marketing students journal of learning development in higher education, issue 20: march 2021 14 scott, j.e. and walczak, s. (2009) ‘cognitive engagement with a multimedia erp training tool: assessing computer self-efficacy and technology acceptance, information & management, 46(4), pp.221-232. available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.im.2008.10.003 (accessed 28 march 2021). shinde, j. (2020) ‘faculty experiences of delivering blended learning courses’, in mishra, s. and panda, s. (eds.) technology enabled learning: policy, pedagogy and practice. burnaby: the commonwealth of learning, pp.71-84. smiley, w. and anderson, r. (2011) ‘measuring students' cognitive engagement on assessment tests: a confirmatory factor analysis of the short form of the cognitive engagement scale’, research & practice in assessment, 6, pp. 17-28. available at: https://www.rpajournal.com/measuring-students-cognitive-engagement-onassessment-tests-a-confirmatory-factor-analysis-of-the-short-form-of-the-cognitiveengagement-scale/ (accessed 28 march 2021). author details lucy gill-simmen is a senior lecturer in marketing. she is a senior fellow of the higher education academy and is the program director for royal holloway, university of london, kaplan, singapore. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.im.2008.10.003 https://www.rpajournal.com/measuring-students-cognitive-engagement-on-assessment-tests-a-confirmatory-factor-analysis-of-the-short-form-of-the-cognitive-engagement-scale/ https://www.rpajournal.com/measuring-students-cognitive-engagement-on-assessment-tests-a-confirmatory-factor-analysis-of-the-short-form-of-the-cognitive-engagement-scale/ https://www.rpajournal.com/measuring-students-cognitive-engagement-on-assessment-tests-a-confirmatory-factor-analysis-of-the-short-form-of-the-cognitive-engagement-scale/ using padlet in instructional design to promote cognitive engagement: a case study of undergraduate marketing students abstract introduction background case study task methodology findings discussion reflection and future practice references author details the business school academic skills unit at the university of huddersfield has, since september, looked at various ways of using social networking tools to support learners, develop their skills and create learning communities journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 2: february 2010 creating learning communities: three social software tools dr amanda tinker university of huddersfield, uk gillian byrne university of huddersfield, uk christine cattermole university of huddersfield, uk introduction i have always imagined the information space as something to which everyone has immediate and intuitive access, and not just to browse, but to create. (berners-lee, 1999: 169) use of the web today, particularly amongst young people, is now more social and participative. collectively known as web 2.0, freely available tools have emerged that facilitate communication, user-generated content and social connectivity. facebook and myspace have become the most popular forms of this kind of online activity and networks are formed around all kind of interest and issues whether they are political, educational, professional or hobbies. in a recent survey of 500 students, 80% claimed that they regularly use social networking tools to communicate with peers (jisc, 2008). this pervasive use of web 2.0 technology for everyday interaction has yet to see its potential fully recognised and integrated into higher education pedagogy. despite 73% of students using such tools to ‘discuss coursework’ and 75% of these students recognising their value for enhancing learning, only 25% were encouraged to use such social software by academic staff (jisc, 2008). this raises the question as to whether web 2.0 technology can promote social learning within educational contexts and how this might be realised in practice. mason and rennie (2008) whilst pointing to the popularity amongst the student body of web 2.0 technology acknowledge that making use of these tools educationally may not be tinker, byrne and cattermole creating learning communities: three social software tools journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 2 without its issues. many students may be quick adopters of this new technology, however, academics may not be so fast and trends may complicate institutional adoption of any one tool (mason and rennie, 2008). what is also worth considering is that not all of our students can be classed as prensky’s (2001: 1) ‘digital natives’ (currant et. al., 2008). however, the popularity of these tools and their pervasive nature within society makes them of interest to the educational community. thus, in a bid to harness this creativity, energy and sociability, the academic skills tutors (asts) at the university of huddersfield have been exploring web 2.0 technologies to investigate how such tools might enhance teaching and learning. this paper introduces practical examples of social software tools; how these are currently used to foster learning communities and promote academic development. three distinct social software tools are discussed (del.icio.us, pbwiki and ning), illustrating current use of these with students and their initial evaluation. social bookmarking: collaborative resource sharing web 2.0 software has opened up an opportunity for ‘learning activities’ that encourage students to become interactive with others (dotsika and patrick, 2006). social bookmarking sites, such as del.icio.us (http://delicious.com/), allow the user to search and ‘tag’ suitable resources to add to a personal webpage which can be built up quickly and shared with others. however, where traditional forms of metadata use hierarchical structure, del.icio.us employs a ‘…controversial new form of metadata, the folksonomey’ [tag], although users are reminded of ‘previously deployed tags’ to help them arrange the urls in a suitable manner (alexander 2006: 34). the increase of user contribution and ‘engagement with content promotes a sense of community, empowerment and ownership’ which not only increases the ‘resource bank’ but elevates student motivation (boulos and wheeler, 2007: 4). bookmarks can be shared with colleagues and students but the uniqueness of this system is that anyone can access the bookmark from any computer, unlike the ‘favourites’ system currently used by many users. del.icio.us allows the user to build up a collection of records that are available publicly and where additional sites and links, or other interesting bookmarks, can be added to the collection for individual use or shared with others for example, resources on essay planning/writing. http://delicious.com/ tinker, byrne and cattermole creating learning communities: three social software tools journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 3 the academic skills team was seeking to provide access to recommended learning development resources within a web environment. rather than use a static webpage to which only the tutors contributed and students passively consumed, a more dynamic and interactive approach was preferred. another consideration was the university of huddersfield’s devolved (as opposed to centralised) learning development provision, with academic skills tutors (asts) based within individual schools and campuses, each having their own subject specific needs. del.icio.us provided a suitable platform for tailoring resources to particular subject disciplines, whilst retaining the benefits of network connectivity to other subject areas. over the summer of 2007, the asts tagged (bookmarked) web pages using del.icio.us. the bookmarks were labelled with significant words (tag) and contained explanatory commentary and guidance to aid students. consequently, each tutor has developed their own del.icio.us list of annotated and tagged resources, which can be interlinked with lists from other tutors; these became live in september 2007. the use of del.icio.us is actively promoted to staff and students during induction sessions, through publicity materials (including the team website and vle) and is integrated within individual student tutorials, email communications and relevant group sessions. following the introduction of del.icio.us by the academic skills team, a small scale evaluation study was undertaken by the ast at the oldham campus. a naturalistic paradigm of qualitative data collection formed the basis of the study, since it provided a rich insight into the students’ experience. in order to establish the validity of the data, the scope of the study involved a range of methods for example, a focus group, observations and the monitoring of del.icio.us link usage. the aim of the study was to encourage students to investigate and use the tag collection, created by the ast at the oldham campus (figure 1). students were introduced to the social bookmark tool del.icio.us by the ast; the students were encouraged to register with the service, personalise their own delicious page while engaging and constructing new tags. an email message was sent to the students which contained a hyperlink to the ast’s delicious page. a focus group was formed since it was felt that it presented a comprehensive system of participative research to discuss, influence and share aspects of the resource. in addition a number of full time students agreed to be observed individually as they interacted with the resource. furthermore, since each tag on the ast’s del.icio.us tinker, byrne and cattermole creating learning communities: three social software tools journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 4 page illustrates to what degree someone (a registered user) has considered a tag useful, the number of occurrences provided an indication of the tag’s use. figure 1. a screen shot of del.icio.us page. the response from the focus group regarding social bookmarking was a positive one. a particular comment revealed that ‘…using delicious tags helped me to become much more organised.’ further elicited from the focus group was that the ‘…time saved is sometimes used looking at other ‘interesting’ things’. however, the observations generated insignificant data, since each student explored the tags purposefully and with confidence. students generally employed specific tags to a subject rather than investigating other tags that were perhaps related. by march 2008, 67 tags on the oldham campus tutor’s page were available offering url links to information ranging from ‘academic essay writing’ to ‘oxford law’. the extent to which the tags had been bookmarked ranged quite significantly; the most common ‘english for academic purposes’ had 80 users bookmark the tag, followed by ‘punctuation’ with 64 users’ tagging it. however, what was significant was that a number of tags had not been bookmarked at all. the indices used by del.icio.us to record the frequency of bookmarking, in some part, form the evaluation of the perceived worth by users of the tags. this raised concerns in respect of whether students understood how to use del.icio.us, whether students were aware of the resource regardless of the promotional tinker, byrne and cattermole creating learning communities: three social software tools journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 5 activities and whether the tag categorisation was ambiguous since different tags can emerge for the same concept. however, the ease with which users can register with del.icio.us is straightforward and the creation of individual pages and deploying tags is easy. therefore, in terms of individual and educational use, social bookmarks have the potential to bring together users with common interests, hence having some time-saving value. wikis: fostering collaboration wikis are an asynchronous communication tool, allowing users to create multimedia content collaboratively, with wikipedia (http://www.wikipedia.com) being the most famous example. since 2007, the ast in the school of art, design and architecture has explored the use of wikis to encourage effective team working, collaborative research and writing amongst first year textile craft undergraduates. the textile craft students were engaged in an academic skills module, involving substantial teamwork to research and produce a group presentation about a textile artist and reflect upon this experience. wikis were introduced in response to a prevalent theme within previous student reflections: a recognised need by students for more effective organisation and communication. students were often in different course groups, having different timetables, and found it difficult to meet as a team. as previously demonstrated, students are actively engaged with social software for everyday communication; however, the question was whether this could be extended to encompass and promote social learning and collaboration as a team. rather than use the wiki provided by our institutional blackboard vle, which at the time lacked the visual capabilities that would appeal to art and design students and their research interests, it was decided to use the web 2.0 pbwiki (http://pbwiki.com/), using the vle as the gateway to this application. a pbwiki was created by the tutor for each team (42 students, 11 teams); students can view other team wikis but can only edit their own with an allocated password. in addition to the team password, students also provide their own username, which is displayed if they edit the wiki, allowing a tutor to note individual contributions. each wiki page also has access to an archival history, allowing a tutor to track progressive development of the wiki and students to access and revert to earlier versions of a page, if they so wish. from past experience, when wikis were first suggested http://www.wikipedia.com/ http://pbwiki.com/ tinker, byrne and cattermole creating learning communities: three social software tools journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 6 as an option within the module with unsurprisingly very little uptake, it was felt important to integrate the wiki into the module delivery and assessment (see table 1). table 1. relationship between module and use of the wiki. example module sessions wiki activity introduction to module and ‘getting to know your team’ writing individual profiles on wiki front page, team photographs and what they hope to achieve in the module; team visit to art exhibition and writing collaborative exhibition review (see figures 2 and 3) team work and team building establishing team ground rules, area for team meeting notes and actions time management and project planning developing team project plan academic research space to collate research findings for team project harvard referencing collaborative creation of reference list oral presentations powerpoint slides can be uploaded onto the wiki for team collaboration and editing reflective writing area on the wiki with questions to prompt reflection on teamwork project and process although structured and integrated, students were encouraged to customise their wiki to ‘make it their own’, changing ‘skins’, incorporating different colour schemes, images and additional wiki pages (see figures 2 and 3 for example wiki pages). tinker, byrne and cattermole creating learning communities: three social software tools journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 7 figure 2. wiki front page. figure 3. team building through collaborative exhibition review. the wiki is not directly assessed, primarily due to the content being held by an external party, yet it is integrated. as part of their reflective assignment, students are asked to evaluate the role of the wiki in supporting their teamwork and, from this academic year, include relevant screenshots to evidence their teamwork process. qualitative analysis of these student reflections and a feedback questionnaire identified both positive and negative aspects. students found the wiki a valuable space for storing and sharing their research and exchanging ideas; this peer learning also appeared particularly valuable in facilitating a greater understanding of referencing techniques: tinker, byrne and cattermole creating learning communities: three social software tools journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 8 ...great way to store information especially the harvard referencing i had to make for all the images and information used. the main reason we worked well together was we used the wiki to communicate our research. providing an organisational framework for their teamwork was another important aspect: it gave us a structure to help plan and organise ways of approaching the task. there is no doubt that the wiki was a big factor in our good organisational skills for this project. we kept referring back to the team plan. this helped us structure our meetings and kept us on target. students also found that they worked more efficiently as a team, discouraging duplication of effort: …stopped us looking at the same websites more than once. moreover, as the students were using the wiki in the first term of their first year undergraduate course, they enjoyed viewing each other’s wikis to learn about and learn from their peers, aiding cohort integration and transition: …a good idea to get us started and introduced to each other. helped you learn more about your class mates. it was interesting to look at [other] groups’ work. however, despite these successes, due to limited internet access, some students found it difficult to contribute regularly. this may also be due to the nature of the textile craft course, with its studio bias, providing less opportunity and facilities for computer access. other students, despite recognising the potential of the wiki and the tutor emphasising that tinker, byrne and cattermole creating learning communities: three social software tools journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 9 is was a supplementary (not replacement) tool, still preferred the immediacy of email, text or face-to-face communication: …found pbwiki to be a little more complicated and meeting up was much more appropriate and constructive. furthermore, the asynchronous nature of the wiki may have discouraged participation amongst some, allowing only one student at one time to edit and contribute. the potential of additional synchronous tools, such as etherpad (http://etherpad.com/), is currently being explored to allow a more dynamic interaction in ‘real time’. this year, one team of students began to address this issue themselves by creating their own facebook group with a link from the wiki and vice versa; the wiki was used as the shared research repository and the facebook group for quicker communication (arranging team meetings etc.). other issues include the need for equal participation (a perennial issue in many team work projects) and learnability; as previous research has shown (currant, et. al., 2008. although students may regularly use social software, a new tool (particularly when used in a different learning context) may present a learning curve, requiring more training than might be expected. overall, the wiki has been found valuable for tutors in making the teamwork process more visible, allowing monitoring of student progress and early identification of any participation issues. similarly, as a repository, the students also have a record of their collaborative research and teamwork process, which can form the basis for their reflection and identification of learning. however, a wiki cannot create a successful team and it is not a panacea for all. as one successful team noted, its role is to ‘consolidate’. social networking: creating learning communities social networking software enables groups of people with shared interests to collaborate and share electronic data in many forms. ning (http://www.ning.com) is a free site that allows the creation of a network easily and quickly. the network can be either public (anyone with access to the web can view and join the network) or private (members are by invitation only and the site is password protected) and the administrator can edit content and prohibit members as necessary and appropriate. since september 2008 the business school academic skills tutors (bsasts) at the university of huddersfield have been http://etherpad.com/ http://www.ning.com/ tinker, byrne and cattermole creating learning communities: three social software tools journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 10 exploring ways in which ning can be used to create learning communities. this exploration has involved using ning to create a student-led learning community based on the issue of referencing and plagiarism and additionally to provide a collaborative writing tool that could be utilised in a structured manner during taught sessions. the bsast’s first use of social networking software has been as part of a wider project that seeks to prevent plagiarism by using technology to up-skill the student and was inspired by the university of bradford’s successful use of ning to create their social network develop me! (university of bradford, 2008). the project’s aim is to create a variety of technological approaches to the teaching and learning of the principles of harvard referencing, addressing the individual needs of all business school students with diverse learning styles. a range of technologies have been utilised both in formal teaching and informal learning situations including blackboard, voting pads and a social network entitled academic matters, hosted on ning (figure 4). figure 4. academic matters ning. academic matters provides links to information about referencing, recent contemporary examples of plagiarism in music and other media, videos and discussion forums. it was created to provide an alternative, informal, student space in which learners could share their ideas and concerns about this issue. as such, it highlights for students that plagiarism is not only a concern for universities but also one for industry and popular culture. in this tinker, byrne and cattermole creating learning communities: three social software tools journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 11 way it was hoped that the subject would be made more accessible for students and that academic matters would engender a student-led social learning community. it was decided, in this first use of the technology, that the network be private to lessen the burden of monitoring the site for inappropriate user-generated content. all of the business school students, some 4000, were invited during the first few weeks in term one. this was a lengthy and time consuming activity that resulted in a delay between students being told about the network during induction and them receiving their invitation email. take up and activity was very low; with 54 students signing up. a second invitation created a further 25 members. although an invitation-only approach would appear to be the safest option and one that protects both students and institutions, it is not without its issues, one of which is that where a site remains private members are invited via a mass, software-generated email. as a consequence the invitation email is in danger of becoming ‘lost’ amongst the many others that web users regularly receive in the form of spam. further, the recipient is unable to view and assess the network prior to registration. this has been identified as a possible barrier to engagement; however, making a site public is also problematic, as the possibility of inappropriate participation makes rigorous monitoring of the site advisable (currant, 2009). another issue with the invitation-only approach is that tutors, more often than not, only have access to university email addresses and many students choose to use personal email, rarely checking their university accounts. in response to the lower than expected participation level it was decided to make the site more prominent by embedding it within the university’s vle, blackboard, but to make it public so that no invitation email was necessary. in this way it was hoped that students would be more likely to view the site and participate. as previously discussed, although the evidence is clear that students are readily utilising web 2.0 technology to organise their social lives, it remains unclear whether they can or indeed want to make the transition from using these tools for entertainment to engaging with them within an educational context (hoare, 2007; minocha, 2009). the evidence seems to suggest a confused and complex picture as although students appear to use web 2.0 informally to discuss their courses (ipsos mori on behalf of jisc, 2007; jisc, 2007), they are not necessarily comfortable doing so within a formal context. ‘as one lecturer recently found out, it is easier to join with the herd and discuss this week’s coursework online within facebook …than to try and get the students to move across to the institutional vle’ (anderson, 2007: 21). however, following students into their online space is not always welcomed either (hoare, 2007). in tinker, byrne and cattermole creating learning communities: three social software tools journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 12 an effort to bridge this gap between a standardised approach that can be afforded by using a vle and the students’ desire for privacy and control over their own online space, the decision was made for bsasts to minimise their own presence on the site but to employ a student ambassador to encourage and manage participation. this resulted in a slight increase in student participation and membership now stands at 92. literature would suggest that social networks need a critical mass in order to be successful and to generate their own momentum (minocha, 2009). barriers to reaching this point can involve privacy issues, a reluctance to use new tools and a blurring of personal and academic boundaries (minocha, 2009). the use of academic matters is still in its infancy and it is hoped that the decision to make the site public will positively impact on participation as there will be no delay in the second year of its use between new students hearing about the tool during induction and their being able to access it. future research will include examining usage statistics generated by google analytics (http://www.google.com/analytics/en-gb/) and student evaluation feedback. the latter, in particular, will hopefully provide insight into the site’s usability, its perceived value and students’ support needs in its use. in contrast to this, the bsasts explored a more structured use of ning during a bridging course, which is traditionally run during the second week in september. this is a four day intensive course which covers reading, writing, research and presentation skills and is attended by foundation and hnd students transferring on to degree courses. here the ning (figure 5) was utilised to facilitate collaborative writing. the site was divided into sections that represented the different chapters of a dissertation and the students were set the task of writing a mini-dissertation on the topic of the conventions of academic writing. the site was again private but was introduced to the students, along with explicit training in its use and then utilised extensively by both staff and students during taught sessions. the students were therefore supported in their use of the technology. this formal use of the tool proved successful and students were positive about the technology in their evaluation feedback: easy to learn with technology used. it was good and different trying out the new technology; it broke the day up well. http://www.google.com/analytics/en-gb/ tinker, byrne and cattermole creating learning communities: three social software tools journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 13 it was attracting my attention to keep working and not to be bored. figure 5. bridging course ning. tinker, byrne and cattermole creating learning communities: three social software tools journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 14 it would seem that when comparing the two approaches, structured, embedded and nonstructured and non-embedded, that the bsasts experiences of the use of web 2.0 technology concurs with literature that suggests that the shift from entertainment to education is not always an easy one and that familiarity with the technology cannot be assumed (minocha, 2009; currant, et. al., 2008). in particular it would seem that the use of web 2.0 technology is more successful where it is explicitly supported and linked to assessment. tinker, byrne and cattermole creating learning communities: three social software tools journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 15 conclusion this paper has demonstrated how three web 2.0 tools are being explored in supporting social learning within higher education. with an increase in both independent and collaborative learning, the use of technology in learning and the way information is constructed and consumed, social software affords an opportunity for users to locate, assemble and create a range of information suitable to their individual needs and, more significantly, enables them to share this with others. however, web 2.0 technology use is still relatively new within educational domains, with little data available to define the true evaluative expediency. although there appears to be a clear potential for such tools in contributing and sharing resources, facilitating teamwork collaboration and communication, and creating learning communities, their full realisation still remains in transition. despite students using web 2.0 tools, such as facebook, for social purposes, it cannot be assumed that all students are able or even willing to engage in this same way within an educational context. the experience and evaluation to date suggests that the technology is most positively received when appropriately integrated and embedded within teaching, ideally within relevant modules and linked to assessment. in so doing, students may begin to recognise the value for themselves and their own educational development within a collaborative learning community. references alexander, b. (2006) ‘web 2.0: a new wave of innovation for teaching and learning?’, educause review 41(2) pp 32-44. anderson, p. (2007) ‘what is web 2.0? ideas, technologies and implications for education’, jisc technology and standards watch, february. online: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/publications/publications/twweb2.aspx [accessed: 4 november 2008]. berners-lee, t. (1999) weaving the web: the past, present and future of the world wide web by its inventor. london : orion business. http://www.jisc.ac.uk/publications/publications/twweb2.aspx tinker, byrne and cattermole creating learning communities: three social software tools journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 16 boulos, m.n.k. and wheeler, s. (2007) ‘the emerging web 2.0 social software: an enabling suite of sociable technologies in health and health care education’, health information and libraries journal 24(1) pp 2-23. currant, b. (2009) ‘support me! develop me! enhancing the student experience and engaging with users before they arrive’, learnhigher website launch. university of leeds, leesd 23 january. currant, n., currant, b., whitfield, r. and hartley, p. (2008) defining ‘generation y’: towards a new typology of digital learners. online: http://www.elp.ac.uk/downloads/defining %20generation%20y%20bradford.pdf (accessed: 4 november 2008). dotsika, f. and patrick, k. (2006) ‘towards the new generation of web knowledge’, the journal of information and knowledge management systems 36(4) pp 406-422. hoare, s. (2007) 'students tell universities: get out of myspace!' the guardian, 5 november. online: http:www.guardian.co.uk/education/2007/nov/05/link.students (accessed: 28 january 2009). ipsos mori on behalf of jisc (2007) great expectations of ict: how higher education institutions are measuring up. online: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/publications/documents/studentexpectations.aspx (accessed: 20 february 2009). jisc (2007) secure personal institutional and inter-institutional repository. online: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/programmes/digitalrepositories/spiresurvey. pdf (accessed: 26 july 2008). jisc (2008) great expectations of ict: how he institutions are measuring up. press release, 12 june. online: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/news/stories/2008/06/greatexpectations.aspx (accessed: 28 january 2009). http://www.elp.ac.uk/downloads/defining http://www.jisc.ac.uk/publications/documents/studentexpectations.aspx http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/programmes/digitalrepositories/spiresurvey.pdf http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/programmes/digitalrepositories/spiresurvey.pdf http://www.jisc.ac.uk/news/stories/2008/06/greatexpectations.aspx tinker, byrne and cattermole creating learning communities: three social software tools journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 17 mason, r. and rennie, f. (2008) e-learning and social networking handbook: resources for higher education. oxford: routledge ltd. minocha, s. (2009) a study on the effective use of social software by further and higher education in the uk to support student learning and engagement (final report). uk: jisc. online: http://kn.open.ac.uk/public/getfile.cfm?documentfileid=14865 (accessed: 2 december 2009). prensky, m. (2001) ‘digital natives, digital immigrants’, on the horizon, mcb university press 9(5) pp 1-6. university of bradford (2008) develop me! online: http://developme.ning.com/ (accessed: 18 february 2009). author details amanda tinker, gill byrne and christine cattermole are academic skills tutors in the schools of art, design and architecture; business; and oldham campus at the university of huddersfield which has a devolved model of learning development provision: dr amanda tinker has a degree in english language and linguistics and msc. in library and information science. she is learning development team leader within her school, a chartered librarian and fellow of the higher education academy. she completed her phd in information retrieval, classification and library systems in 2006. since 2002, she has focused her teaching and research interests within the field of learning development. gill byrne has a degree in english studies and an msc in multimedia and education. she has worked in education for 12 years, beginning by teaching english literature, english language and study skills on an access to he course before moving into higher education and learner development 3 years ago. she is a qualified dyslexia support tutor. http://kn.open.ac.uk/public/getfile.cfm?documentfileid=14865 http://developme.ning.com/ tinker, byrne and cattermole creating learning communities: three social software tools journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2: february 2010 18 christine cattermole is the academic skills tutor at university campus oldham, a campus of the university oldham. she has a degree in business and law, masters in business management, a pgce and dyslexia support and she is currently completing an msc in multimedia and e-learning. her work in education has been teaching as and a level law, business studies and ict, and business and it, and law for access to higher education before moving into learning development. creating learning communities: three social software tools introduction social bookmarking: collaborative resource sharing wikis: fostering collaboration social networking: creating learning communities conclusion references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special issue 22: compendium of innovative practice october 2021 ________________________________________________________________________ teaching academic software via youtube videos in the covid19 pandemic: potential applications for learning development lee fallin university of hull, uk keywords: learning development; youtube; software instruction; software training; online video; covid-19. the challenge the skills team at the university of hull not only facilitate learning development support, but also support the development of information, digital, research, and visual literacies. an important part of the team’s remit is the support of core academic and research software packages, including bibliographic management tools like endnote and refworks as well as data analysis packages like nvivo and spss. these software packages are shown to have a significant positive impact on academic and research productivity, especially when individuals are trained to use the software (basak, 2015). this is because software can automate time-consuming processes, increase researcher efficiency (basak, 2015), and perform computations that are nearly impossible without software. furthermore, the skills team’s support of this software allows a holistic service to be offered to students and staff. it also provides the opportunity to embed learning development throughout the service. for example, bibliographic software workshops consider the academic practices around citations. this supports students to develop their knowledge of how to cite and, more importantly, the reasons they need to. another example can be seen in supporting the use of microsoft word for writing – highlighting how effective use of the review ribbon can support proofreading and how the navigation pane can support revision. these examples show how skills team software support is never abstracted from the literacy practices they support. the covid-19 pandemic, however, presented a significant problem. traditional instruction for software was reliant on face-to-face courses based in computer rooms (kalpokaite and fallin teaching academic software via youtube videos in the covid-19 pandemic: potential applications for learning development journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 2 radivojevic, 2020). this is not easily translated online. whereas face-to-face classes allow instructors to move around the classroom and check-in on individual students or help those falling behind, online synchronous teaching does not have this affordance. it requires screen sharing or breakouts, which disrupt the flow of a class or require additional instructors to manage. in face-to-face classes, students can use their own computer while also watching the instructor’s demonstration. unless students have two screens, this is impossible to achieve in a live online class, especially with the added challenge of connection speed and the potential for technical problems (kalpokaite and radivojevic, 2020). the response to continue offering the software support service, the skills team decided to expand the use of video. the team had always previously produced the workshop content for the university library’s youtube account, but the pandemic provided the perfect opportunity for this to become a primary outlet, as opposed to something worked on in spare time. we chose youtube as it is a familiar platform offering ease of access across different devices. videos are well suited for software instruction in comparison to synchronous online sessions as users can play, pause, and rewind as needed. it also allows more in-depth content to be covered as time is more flexible (walker, row and dolence, 2007), allowing us to go beyond what would be covered in a two-hour workshop. this is because it provides optionality in learning. a student could, for example, skip the endnote video if they only use in-text citation formats. they could then use that time to learn of more advanced aspects of the software. while videos were not a new format for the skills team, their usage really exploded in the pandemic (see figure 1). this was not because the team produced more videos. in fact, the youtube channel published 100 videos in 2018, compared to 101 videos of similar length in 2020. moreover, it was due to a substantial increase in video views, with the significant increase correlating to the start of the first lockdown in the uk. this applied to both old and new videos, although more recent videos performed better. interestingly, there was no significant dip in viewing over summer. this potential reflects the delayed progression of many students due to personal circumstances in the pandemic or suspended assessments by institutions (watermeyer et al., 2021). even though there were fallin teaching academic software via youtube videos in the covid-19 pandemic: potential applications for learning development journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 3 periods of more regular face-to-face operation between the lockdowns, video popularity has remained high. figure 1. youtube views (august 2019–may 2021). recommendations software instruction as an approach to develop academic literacies has always been an important aspect of the skills team’s work. i was concerned that the covid-19 pandemic put this aspect of our service at risk, especially given the challenges of delivering this support synchronously. however, as demonstrated above, the production of youtube videos has enabled this to continue. it is no surprise that other studies (rodríguez-moreno et al., 2021) have advocated using youtube to improve students’ digital literacies. research has also shown that youtube can support students to develop simple skills and enhance student engagement (fleck et al., 2014; almobarraz, 2018). despite this, the videos the skills team had produced for the university library’s youtube channel did not come into frequent use until the covid-19 pandemic and the associated lockdowns. the fact that this usage did not drop when campus access returned leads me to think it will continue to be a significant part of the skills team’s provision moving forwards. online videos are more than just a mechanism to ensure the service continued. they offered students the flexibility to access support any time, any day. youtube videos can also be watched, paused, and re-watched as required by students – even after they graduate. 0 1000 2000 3000 4000 5000 6000 7000 8000 9000 ju ly 2 0 1 9 a u g u st 2 0 1 9 s e p te m b e r 2 0 1 9 o ct o b e r 2 0 1 9 n o v e m b e r 2 0 1 9 d e ce m b e r 2 0 1 9 ja n u a ry 2 0 2 0 f e b ru a ry 2 0 2 0 m a rc h 2 0 2 0 a p ri l 2 0 2 0 m a y 2 0 2 0 ju n e 2 0 2 0 ju ly 2 0 2 0 a u g u st 2 0 2 0 s e p te m b e r 2 0 2 0 o ct o b e r 2 0 2 0 n o v e m b e r 2 0 2 0 d e ce m b e r 2 0 2 0 ja n u a ry 2 0 2 1 f e b ru a ry 2 0 2 1 m a rc h 2 0 2 1 a p ri l 2 0 2 1 m a y 2 0 2 1 lockdown 1 fallin teaching academic software via youtube videos in the covid-19 pandemic: potential applications for learning development journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 4 when considering what comes next, i am interested in further experimenting with the use of video for learning development. in addition to supporting software, there is the potential to support more traditional learning development literacies like critical thinking. so far, i have taken the opportunity to trial this through a series of seven youtube videos (university of hull, 2020). while these videos are still a new resource, the usage pattern of these videos has grown monthly since they were first published in july 2020. i have also used them in my own practice, sending them to students ahead of an appointment. this has allowed us to focus appointment time on contextualising such academic literacies into the students’ own disciplinary context. on this basis, i think video support may have an exciting place in learning development, helping us focus on more quality encounters with students. references almobarraz, a. (2018) ‘utilization of youtube as an information resource to support university courses’, the electronic library, 36(1), pp.71-81. https://doi.org/10.1108/el-04-2016-0087. basak, s. k. (2015) ‘analysis of the impact of nvivo and endnote on academic research productivity’, international journal of educational and pedagogical sciences, 9(9), pp.3237-3242. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1109862. fleck, b. k., beckman, l. m., sterns, j. l. and hussey, h. d. (2014) ‘youtube in the classroom: helpful tips and student perceptions’, journal of effective teaching, 14(3), pp.21-37. https://doi.org/10.1108/el-04-2016-0087. kalpokaite, n. and radivojevic, i. (2020) ‘teaching qualitative data analysis software online: a comparison of face-to-face and e-learning atlas.ti courses’, international journal of research & method in education, 43(3), pp. 296-310. https://doi.org/10.1080/1743727x.2019.1687666. rodríguez-moreno, j., ortiz-colón, a. m., cordón-pozo, e. and agreda-montoro, m. (2021) 'the influence of digital tools and social networks on the digital competence https://doi.org/10.1108/el-04-2016-0087 https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1109862 https://doi.org/10.1108/el-04-2016-0087 https://doi.org/10.1080/1743727x.2019.1687666 fallin teaching academic software via youtube videos in the covid-19 pandemic: potential applications for learning development journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 5 of university students during covid-19 pandemic', international journal of environmental research and public health, 18(6), pp.2835. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph18062835. university of hull (2020) critical thinking & writing [video workshop]. available at: https://libguides.hull.ac.uk/workshops/video-critical (accessed: 18 may 2021). walker, t. b., row, j. s. and dolence, t. (2007) ‘teaching and supporting endnote at the university of tennessee: designing online alternatives to high demand classes’, the electronic journal of academic and special librarianship, 8(2). available at: teaching and supporting endnote at the university of tennessee: designing online alternatives to high demand classes (unl.edu) (accessed: 29 june 2021). watermeyer, r., crick, t., knight, c. and goodall, j. (2021) ‘covid-19 and digital disruption in uk universities: afflictions and affordances of emergency online migration’, higher education, 81(3), pp.623-641. https://doi.org/10.1007%2fs10734-020-00561-y. author details lee fallin is an academic and library specialist (learning developer) at the university of hull with a specialism in academic and digital literacies. his research interests focus on the intersections between education and geography, inclusive of physical and digital spaces. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph18062835 https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1078&context=ejasljournal https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1078&context=ejasljournal https://doi.org/10.1007%2fs10734-020-00561-y teaching academic software via youtube videos in the covid-19 pandemic: potential applications for learning development the challenge the response recommendations references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special issue 22: compendium of innovative practice october 2021 ________________________________________________________________________ private online channels and student-centred interaction james mcmenamin university of applied sciences and arts, switzerland marie-thérèse rudolf von rohr university of applied sciences and arts, switzerland keywords: online learning; student-centred interaction; emergency remote teaching; learning communities; covid-19. the challenge in 2020, online teaching became mandatory at our institution, the university of applied sciences and arts (uas), northwestern switzerland, due to the covid-19 pandemic. as lecturers of english for professional and academic purposes at the school of engineering, we faced the challenge of adapting our heavily interactionand group-work based language courses for an emergency remote teaching setting (hodges et al., 2020). as regards technological measures, the uas chose to supplement our traditional learning management system (lms), moodle, with web-conferencing software, webex and zoom. however, despite our initial relief to still be able to teach, some drawbacks associated with the use of these conferencing tools quickly surfaced. spoken or written interactions were lost when webex or zoom sessions were closed or the internet connection was lost. furthermore, due to the technical affordances of webex and zoom, our sessions tended to be teacher-centred in the sense that they were always started by teachers, and it appeared that no spontaneous student-student interactions took place. in fact, as far as we could see, whether student-student interactions were to occur was entirely dependent on what group work teachers had planned for a particular lesson. ironically, we found the use of electronic media for online content delivery, instead of making teaching and learning more individualised and learner-centred, brought us back to a challenge we had faced before covid-19, namely the difficulty of facilitating meaningful student-student interactions inside and outside of class time. interaction is key to learning, even more so mcmenamin and rudolf von rohr private online channels and student-centred interaction journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 2 for second language acquisition (tran, 2018), and a sense of community needs to be fostered to increase the effectiveness of any course (darby and lang, 2019; lave and wenger, 2019). the response through a survey conducted by the student council at the school, it came to our attention that students enjoyed using the collaborative platform microsoft teams. to accommodate students’ preferences, we decided therefore to rely entirely on teams to organise and host online courses in the autumn semester of 2020. in our view, teams offered an interface which had an advantage over other solutions, in that ‘a team’ resembled a virtual room where students could enter at any time and either chat or set up an online meeting. in addition, the chat rooms of online meetings in teams would automatically be retained after class had finished, unlike with zoom or webex. we also set up customised channels for group work within a team, in which students could hold independent meetings, which we had not previously been able to do. as was perhaps to be expected, our use of teams did not lead to an overnight revolution in our teaching. class meetings were still initiated and closed by us. however, we gradually discovered that teams offers some unexpected advantages over webex and zoom. below is a brief and non-exhaustive list of developments that we view as relevant to student-student interaction: • drag-and-drop file sharing and chat functionality make for uncomplicated sharing of information synchronously and asynchronously. • students seem to enjoy using emojis and gifs to quickly comment on other students’ posts, encouraging further interaction and keeping the mood light. • in particular, the use of private channels (online rooms available only to certain individuals) enabled students to share data within groups, offering an independent online location for personal interactions during class and asynchronously. for example, in one case, a pair of students met outside class to practise for an upcoming oral examination. in another context, students used the chat function of their private channels to compare notes and exchange solutions during a reading comprehension task. mcmenamin and rudolf von rohr private online channels and student-centred interaction journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 3 • once the software has been set up and started, no further login procedure was required. • any word document uploaded to the files section of teams can, in the manner of a google doc, be edited by all group members, making it easy to set up collaborative tasks. recommendations in our view, student-student interaction can be facilitated in various ways and is not necessarily linked to the use of a single tool. however, the need for student-student interaction should be considered a crucial factor when planning online classes (means, murphy and bakia, 2014; darby and lang, 2019). our key insights here are: a) students will form online communities and groups to solve problems jointly if they are assigned collaborative tasks and have their own virtual room (private channel) where they can meet independently. b) group chats and documents which students can collaboratively edit can increase interactivity during online classes, and the option of referring to them after class benefits both teachers and students. c) students find it easier to use one collaborative platform than a combination of lms and conferencing tools. despite our generally positive experiences working with teams, it is not a panacea, and it is not the intention of this short paper to present it as such. for one thing, teams cannot replace all the functionalities of moodle, which can be used to specifically plan, enhance, and implement the learning process. moreover, moodle is open-source and as such, does not share student data with a large us corporation, as might be the case with teams. this criticism cannot be taken lightly, yet we felt that the advantages outweighed said concerns in a time of crisis. at present, the use of teams is limited to a small handful of teachers at our institution. because we are using it ‘at our own risk’ in the sense that it is not supported by our it department, it is unlikely that many teaching colleagues will abandon webex or other supported web conferencing solutions. we would argue that features such as private mcmenamin and rudolf von rohr private online channels and student-centred interaction journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 4 channels and chat functionality tend to foster student-centred interaction, which is key to learning (darby and lang, 2019; lave and wenger, 2019). therefore, such features should be more widely implemented in conferencing tools, and not limited to proprietary software such as teams. references darby, f., and lang, j. m. (2019) small teaching online applying learning science in online classes. san francisco: wiley brand. hodges, c., moore, s., lockee, b., trust, t., and bond, a. (2020) the difference between emergency remote teaching and online learning. available at: https://er.educause.edu/articles/2020/3/the-difference-between-emergency-remoteteaching-and-online-learning (accessed: 4 may 2021). lave, j., and wenger, e. (2019) situated learning: legitimate peripheral participation (30th printing). cambridge: cambridge university press. means, b., murphy, r., and bakia, m. (2014) learning online what research tells us about whether, when and how. new york: routledge. tran, h. q. (2018) ‘language alternation during l2 classroom discussion tasks’, in filipi, a. and markee, n. (eds.) conversation analysis and language alternation. amsterdam: john benjamins publishing company, pp.165-182. author details james mcmenamin is a lecturer of english for specific academic purposes. his research interests include the use of technology to create online learning communities. marie-thérèse rudolf von rohr is a lecturer of english for specific academic purposes. her fields of interests include interpersonal pragmatics, online learning, and studentcentred interaction. https://er.educause.edu/articles/2020/3/the-difference-between-emergency-remote-teaching-and-online-learning https://er.educause.edu/articles/2020/3/the-difference-between-emergency-remote-teaching-and-online-learning private online channels and student-centred interaction the challenge the response recommendations references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special issue 22: compendium of innovative practice october 2021 ________________________________________________________________________ powerful conversation for learning karen clark university of hertfordshire, uk joy jarvis university of hertfordshire, uk amanda yip university of hertfordshire, uk keywords: conversation; inclusion; dialogue; community; social presence; covid-19. the challenge the challenge we faced was how to enact online an inclusive, critical, and practical approach to teaching for university educators on a postgraduate certificate in learning and teaching. we were adapting three-hour face-to-face workshops for a multi-disciplinary cohort in a module addressing the nature of the higher education student experience. participants themselves were facing significant extra work and new demands at home. we wanted to avoid zoom fatigue and didactic online delivery and maintain the camaraderie and collegiality usually identified as key benefits of the face-to-face workshops. those studying included international staff stranded abroad, many completely new to the university, who had never met colleagues in person or even visited campus. module assessment involved a challenging collaborative small-group project plus an individual element of extension work. this cohort of 40+ staff connected with a network of hundreds of students facing enormous disruption in their own study and personal lives. if we could get the design right we could support colleagues in supporting their students through learning in an unprecedented period of disruption. clark, jarvis and yip powerful conversation for learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 2 the response we began with the idea that, ‘taking a critical approach to teaching requires us actively to gather ways of looking at it beyond our personal standpoint’ (jarvis and clark, 2020, p.23). each learner brings their own experience, values, and beliefs about lecturing and we wanted to acknowledge, and consider these together. so, we created time for dialogue in which real narratives from seminar and lecture rooms could emerge and be collectively explored. assumptions could be noticed and probed, useful studies suggested and practical actions identified. we wanted to show ourselves taking this approach in our own teaching and we scheduled one-hour weekly conversations sandwiched between individual preparation and post-session group consolidation – a flipped approach (bergman and sams, 2012), with special emphasis on reflection (baker, 2002). the community of inquiry (coi) framework with its emphasis on critical reflection and discourse also shaped our design (garrison, 2017). by ‘conversation’ we intended attentive dialogue between and among tutors and participants which could ‘open up judgments and assumptions’ (bohm, 1996, p.46), creating space for an exchange in which new ideas and understanding would emerge. we recorded short conversations among ourselves after each online session to make our thinking visible. we encouraged everyone to complete a critical incident questionnaire to capture and lay hold of their own learning and keep us in touch with how things were working (brookfield, 2017). the results of these reflections and post-session group activities were used to inform planning and were fed back before the next sequence began. the linchpin of the design was the hour together where we sought to model the benefits of purposeful conversation about teaching. we generally began with an input of a few minutes which picked up preparatory work. prompts included introductions from the teaching team, visiting colleagues, and student advocates as different dimensions of inclusion were explored. sometimes we stayed as a large group, inviting participation oneby-one by using microphones or typing in the chat; in other sessions we split quickly into smaller rooms with specific questions to consider and bring back to a plenary. postsession work was gathered through discussion threads or walls. clark, jarvis and yip powerful conversation for learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 3 keen, from the outset, to nourish social presence in a community of inquiry (garrison, 2017), we invited participants to join tutors in creating introductory slides about themselves. these were compiled and shared. we always opened our online classroom early for ‘coffee and chat’; garrison acknowledges the need for this varied dialogue, including social conversation, in order to build trust and respect. cohort diversity is a great strength, and indeed resource, and we tried to encourage appreciation of this with a focus on the discipline of noticing (mason, 2002) and work on compassionate group interaction (gilbert, 2017). we hoped that participants would build a conversational approach into their own working contexts. as baker notes, learning occurs when ‘candid and respectful conversations among people involved in similar situations can be an ongoing norm’ (2002, p.102). from the outset, groups of three or four participants were working on what was to be an assessed enquiry into the ethnicity awarding gap at our institution and within the wider sector. assessment is undoubtedly a pressure, but it also recruits energy and focus and for most proved a bonding task which created collegial ties stretching beyond the module. in our final session we encouraged reflection on the module experience and while one or two participants found things to be a little ‘light on content’, the majority responded well to the format which illuminated for them the power of diversity. in the words of one rapporteur: ‘we all praised how, although we initially thought the one hour sessions were just scratching the surface of complex topics, we were actually encouraged to expand our own thoughts and opinions – sometimes even without realising it!’ recommendations • integrate your design: try to articulate everything around a coherent path. we planned a semester-long conversation about inclusive practice – we spoke together about ourselves and our histories, ways to interact compassionately, barriers implicit in our ways of working, assumptions (for example about race, language, introversion, and ways to teach). our assessment had the same focus and we tried to signpost how key themes were playing out in our time together. • be available: arrive early, leave slowly, offer many chances to talk and spend as much space in these as you can listening. be prepared to be wrong and adapt. clark, jarvis and yip powerful conversation for learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 4 • be explicit: be clear about what you are doing and why. you won’t convince everyone but the more you explain your choices the more likely you are to keep learners with you. • build in reflection: planning time to do this each week together meant we could notice what was happening and respond. organisation is important and responsiveness needs to be part of it. participants should also be encouraged to see the importance of personal reflection for learning. • be prepared to feel out of control: flipping the learning and planning for learner autonomy can feel like letting go. trust your learners. references baker, a. (2002) ‘receptive spaces for conversational learning’, in baker, a., jensen, p. and kolb, d. (eds.) conversational learning: an experiential approach to knowledge creation. london: quorum books, pp.101-124. bergman, j. and sams, a. (2012) flip your classroom. oregon: international society for technology in education. bohm, d. (1996) on dialogue. london: routledge. brookfield, s. d. (2017) becoming a critically reflective teacher. 2nd edn. san francisco: jossey-bass. garrison, r. d. (2017) e-learning in the 21st century. 3rd edn. new york: routledge. gilbert, t. (2017) ‘when looking is allowed: what compassionate group work looks like in a uk university’, in gibbs, p. (ed.) the pedagogy of compassion at the heart of higher education. cham, switzerland: springer, pp.187-202. jarvis, j. and clark, k. (2020) conversations to change teaching. st albans: critical publishing. clark, jarvis and yip powerful conversation for learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 5 mason, j. (2002) researching your own practice: the discipline of noticing. abingdon: routledge. author details karen clark is a learning and teaching specialist working with staff from across the university to enable their continuing professional development. her disciplinary background is in law and her interests include inclusive practice, student staff partnership, and compassionate approaches to teaching, in particular collaborative groupwork. amanda yip is a learning and teaching specialist working across the institution. her disciplinary background is computer science and her interests include inclusive curricula, eliminating the awarding gap for bme students, and research to improve the experience of commuting students. joy jarvis works with new and experienced colleagues from a range of disciplines as they explore and build their teaching practice. in her role as professor of educational practice she supports internal and external colleagues to research learning and teaching. powerful conversation for learning the challenge the response recommendations references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 20: march 2021 ________________________________________________________________________ should learning developers provide instruction in the use of metadiscourse? samantha king university of northampton abstract metadiscourse is the language writers use to guide their readers through their texts and organise their arguments. this can take the form of phrases, for example, ‘this essay will discuss’, or ‘in conclusion’, or individual words such as ‘firstly’ or ‘therefore’. this study aims to determine how undergraduate students develop their use of metadiscourse over their first two years of study at a uk university and to investigate whether use of metadiscourse is related to the grade that a text receives from subject tutors. to achieve this, a corpus of summative written assignments was collected from 67 undergraduates studying a health discipline. this is the writing that we as learning developers are most closely involved with: assignments written as part of a course of study. the assignments were analysed using software developed for the field of corpus linguistics to identify how students used metadiscourse. the results of this study suggest that including explicit instruction in learning development sessions in the use of some aspects of metadiscourse could be of value. this supports an ‘academic literacies’ (lea and street, 1998) approach in that it recognises the need to make clear the implied assumptions that surround academic writing and the inherent variation between disciplines. keywords: metadiscourse; student writing; corpus analysis; academic discourse. introduction one of the roles of learning development is to help students acquire the writing conventions of academia and one of the ways that writers realise the functions of academic writing is by using metadiscourse. metadiscourse has been defined as ‘discourse about discourse or communication about communication’ (vande-koppel, 1985, king should learning developers provide instruction in the use of metadiscourse? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 20: march 2021 2 p.83) and the reason for its significance is that it makes a text ‘reader friendly’ (cheng and steffensen, 1996, p.154), thus facilitating comprehension. two key functions of metadiscourse are to guide readers through a text and to organise and develop the writer’s arguments (hyland, 2005). this includes the use of phrases such as ‘this essay will discuss’ or ‘in conclusion’, or individual words such as ‘firstly’ or ‘therefore’. there is evidence that undergraduate essays containing a higher frequency of such metadiscoursal features achieve higher marks due to the increased readability of the essays and the greater consideration of the reader’s needs. this is largely based on two studies: the first carried out with non-native speaking students in english for academic purposes (eap) classes (intaraprawat and steffensen, 1995), and the second involving native-speaking undergraduates attending a ‘composition class’, a class which teaches generic academic writing and mainly features non-subject specific argumentative essays (cheng and steffensen, 1996). neither of these situations are representative of the writing that we as learning developers are most closely involved with, i.e., formative and summative assignments. this study makes a contribution by targeting summative assignments written by native english speakers. the motivation for the study was pedagogic; if an increased awareness of the reader’s needs, as evidenced by metadiscourse use, is shown to lead to greater student success, there would be clear value in learning developers providing support to students in this area. this study of metadiscourse use in student writing was undertaken in 2019. it looked at how students’ use of metadiscourse varied between different genres of assignment and how students developed their use of metadiscourse between their first and second years of university education. an additional aim of this study was to determine whether there is a relationship between metadiscourse use and writing success as measured by the grade an assignment receives. this study uses a corpus analysis of aspects of metadiscourse in the writing of undergraduates studying a health discipline at a british university. this discipline is considered a ‘hard’ as opposed to a ‘soft’ discipline (becher and trowler, 2001). in hard disciplines, for example, sciences, writing tends to focus more on information and procedure whereas in soft disciplines, for example, humanities, writing tends to express king should learning developers provide instruction in the use of metadiscourse? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 20: march 2021 3 opinions and build arguments (hardy and friginal, 2016, p.123). here i report on those findings of the study which i believe will be of interest to learning developers. metadiscourse metadiscourse has been described as a ‘fuzzy’ category of language (ädel, 2006, p.4; hyland, 2017, p.17). there are two elements to the fuzziness. firstly, and noncontroversially, metadiscourse can be realised by a wide range of lexical features from single words to sentences (hyland, 2017, p.18). the second element concerns which rhetorical functions can be considered metadiscoursal and is subject to much debate. several researchers have proposed taxonomies (e.g., vande koppel, 1985; crismore and farnsworth, 1990; mauranen, 1993; hyland, 2005; ädel, 2006) but one that has been widely adopted is that of hyland (2005). as this enables a degree of comparison with previous studies, this was the taxonomy adopted for this study, specifically hyland’s category of interactive metadiscourse as that includes the rhetorical functions concerned with how writers use metadiscourse to help the reader navigate the text. this is my primary research interest. table 1. hyland’s taxonomy of interactive metadiscourse (hyland 2004, p.139). category function examples interactive resources help to guide reader through the text transitions express semantic relation between main clauses in addition; but; thus; and frame markers refer to discourse acts, sequences, or text stages finally; to conclude; my purpose is to endophoric markers refer to information in other parts of the text noted above; see fig.; in section 2 evidentials refer to sources of information from other texts according to x; (y, 1990); z states code glosses help readers grasp meanings of content namely; e.g.; such as; in other words king should learning developers provide instruction in the use of metadiscourse? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 20: march 2021 4 in this study, hyland’s (2004) category of code glosses has been sub-categorised into exemplifiers and reformulations (hyland, 2007). this study introduces a third sub-category, abbreviations, as this type of reformulation was salient in the health corpus but was not explicitly mentioned in hyland’s taxonomy. the category of endophoric markers has been sub-categorised into linear and non-linear, depending on whether they refer to parts of the text itself (linear) or to items outside the text such as figures or appendices (non-linear) (cao and hu, 2014). one category was excluded from the study: evidentials. how to reference the work of others is routinely part of academic writing skills sessions, and as a result the use of evidentials is already well explored. methodology data collection and preparation a corpus (collection of texts) of summative assignments was collected from 67 students: 31 students in their second year of study and 36 in their third year, which was 74% of the total cohort. the students were all female and were all native speakers of english. as they were all native speakers, there was no need to account for any variation due to levels of english proficiency. the students each contributed three assignments which were completed between 2016 and 2019: a first year (level 4) essay, a second year (level 5) essay, and a second year (level 5) case study. (n.b. the results of the analysis comparing the essay genre with the case study genre are not reported here.) word counts for the assignments varied between approximately 1500 and 2500 words and all the assignments had received a pass, with grades awarded ranging from a to d. it was decided to exclude assignments which did not reach the standard of a pass as metadiscourse use will not compensate for a lack of subject-related content. ethics approval for the study was granted by the university and all participants gave informed consent. the assignments collected were anonymised and stored securely in accordance with data privacy regulations. king should learning developers provide instruction in the use of metadiscourse? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 20: march 2021 5 the use of a relatively large sample of student academic writing gives results that are more generalisable than those of a small-scale qualitative study. the level 4 essay subcorpus consisted of 173,543 words and the level 5 essay sub-corpus was smaller at 140,527 words. to investigate whether there was a relationship between metadiscourse use and the grade an assignment received two additional sub-corpora were created, one containing level 4 and 5 assignments which were graded above 65% (76,824 words), and a second containing those graded 51% and below (70,798 words). the proportion of level 4 and 5 assignments were comparable in each. using these criteria identified the highest graded sixth and the lowest graded sixth of the assignments and provided a suitable balance between obtaining sub-corpora of sufficient size to allow reliable analysis and maintaining a large enough differential between grades awarded to reveal any salient differences in metadiscourse use. the sizes of these sub-corpora compare favourably with published corpus-based metadiscourse studies, which generally range from 50,000 to 160,000 words (e.g., gardezi and nesi, 2009; shaw, 2009; noble, 2010; zhang, 2016). all sub-corpora should therefore be of sufficient size to yield reliable results. it should be noted that the larger size of the higher-graded sub-corpus compared to the lower-graded sub-corpus is due to the difference in required word count for the different assignments and is not related to the grade awarded. in fact, the average assignment word length exceeded the specified word count by 7% in the higher-graded sub-corpus and 6% in the lower-graded sub-corpus, a difference unlikely to be statistically significant. data analysis although metadiscourse is a functional category which can be realised structurally by both words and phrases, it is common in corpus linguistic research to use words or very brief phrases as search terms to identify instances of metadiscourse in a corpus (e.g., hyland and tse, 2004; ädel, 2006). this is considered reasonable as a large proportion of the linguistic features used to realise metadiscourse are adverbials, of which approximately 70% are single words (biber et al., 1999, p.769). first, the target lexical items for the study needed to be identified. as is common practice (e.g. hyland and tse, 2004; ädel, 2006; aull and lancaster, 2014), target lexical items within each category were initially identified by manual inspection of a small sample of king should learning developers provide instruction in the use of metadiscourse? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 20: march 2021 6 assignments. this initial list was supplemented by several lexical items commonly used to perform the chosen metadiscoursal functions, such as ‘secondly’, to mitigate the risk that the sample was unrepresentative. the final list of target lexical items is shown in the appendix. the list of target lexical items is neither expected nor intended to retrieve every instance of metadiscourse present in the corpus. it does, however, contain a similar number of target lexical items to other comparable studies (e.g., ädel, 2006, p.98; aull and lancaster, 2014, p.176) and should therefore return informative results. once the list of target lexical items was finalised, each of the sub-corpora were searched for those items using the concordancer in wordsmith tools 5 (scott, 2007). once identified, concordance lines were manually inspected to exclude those uses which were not metadiscoursal. this is illustrated below using ‘overall’. as an adverbial (example (1)), it functions as a frame marker, introducing a conclusion: (1) ‘overall’, it is clear that there are many risks to joanna’s pregnancy. as an adjective (example (2)) it functions as a modifier, is not metadiscoursal, and is thus excluded from the study: (2) … must be given due consideration when assessing her ‘overall’ wellbeing. when lexical items occurred more than 50 times in a sub-corpus, an overall estimate of the proportion of metadiscourse use for that item was obtained by examining a random sample of 50 concordance lines, a common approach in corpus linguistics (e.g. hyland, 2004). differentiating metadiscoursal use from non-metadiscoursal use for some transition markers was problematic: for example, in deciding whether ‘in addition’ was adding experiential information (non-metadiscoursal) or adding to an argument (metadiscoursal). rather than risk introducing errors into the data, it was decided to exclude those transition markers whose function was frequently ambiguous. this led to transition markers signalling addition being excluded from the study. some frequently used items such as ‘but’ and ‘so’ were also excluded to allow the study to be completed in the time available. therefore, in considering the findings of this study, it must be remembered that the list of king should learning developers provide instruction in the use of metadiscourse? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 20: march 2021 7 transition markers included was not exhaustive (see appendix). a future analysis may investigate the frequency of transition markers without differentiating between metadiscoursal and non-metadiscoursal use. inspection of the concordance lines showed several instances where lexical items had been used incorrectly. these instances were included as they signalled an intention of the author to use metadiscourse and the error was usually restricted to using an incorrect word from the same metadiscourse category, for example, by using a connective (transition marker) inappropriately. the study takes no account of lexical items which have been misspelled as these were not retrieved by the search. the effect of this cannot be quantified but is expected to be small due to the prevalence of spell checkers. to facilitate comparison, frequencies of target lexical items were normalised to frequency per 10,000 words. multi-word items such as ‘as a result’ were treated as a single unit. to test whether any differences obtained were statistically significant, the log likelihood test (rayson, 2008, p.527) was applied to the actual frequencies. differences were considered significant if the log likelihood was 3.84 or above (p < 0.05). for differences which were significant, the effect size was calculated (rayson, n.d.) in the form of %diff (gabrielatos and marchi, 2012) to give a measure of the size of the difference. findings and discussion metadiscourse use in student writing before discussing differences detected between sub-corpora of student writing, it is useful to consider the characteristics of the corpus as a whole. the findings are summarised in table 2 and are detailed in the appendix. the most frequently used metadiscoursal features were code glosses and transition markers, which is consistent with previous research on both student and expert academic writing (hyland and tse, 2004). considering the categories of code gloss, this study found more reformulation than exemplification. this is typical of a hard discipline (hyland, 2007, p.273) and is contrary to the situation in soft disciplines, where exemplification is more common than reformulation (hyland, 2007; yüksel and kavanoz, 2018). this is most likely due to the increased need in the hard disciplines to define and explain specific details clearly. king should learning developers provide instruction in the use of metadiscourse? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 20: march 2021 8 the most common form of reformulation in the current study was abbreviation, all in parentheses, and mostly taking the form of initialisms and acronyms referring to organisations and technical medical terms and procedures, for example, national health service (nhs). the large number of organisations is indicative of the degree of regulation and external oversight to which the discipline is subject. the number of abbreviations related to technical terms and procedures would be expected to be replicated in other scientific disciplines. table 2. frequency of metadiscourse in the health corpus by category. category frequency per 10,000 words code glosses exemplifiers 22.56 reformulators 6.46 reformulators abbreviations 25.58 total 54.60 transition markers similarity 0.74 contrast/concession 15.78 consequence 12.65 total 29.17 endophoric markers linear 8.00 non-linear 3.78 total 11.78 frame markers sequence 1.59 announce goals 4.98 label stages 2.39 total 8.96 king should learning developers provide instruction in the use of metadiscourse? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 20: march 2021 9 examination of a sample of abbreviations used demonstrated that students frequently did not follow the accepted guideline for using abbreviations, namely that on its first occurrence a term should be written in full followed by the abbreviation in parentheses and that on subsequent occasions the abbreviation should be used alone (bailey, 2018, p.187). in over 25% of cases, students frequently reformulated the full term with an abbreviation in parentheses despite not subsequently reusing the term. this may be because, in practice, it is the abbreviation which is in common use, as in example (3): (3) observations will be … documented on the newborn early warning trigger and track (newtt) chart. by stating the abbreviation, although superfluous for writing style, students are demonstrating and claiming membership of their disciplinary community. of other reformulations, two-thirds were in parentheses. often, these reformulations provided a definition, see example (4), a rewording of a technical term in less specialised language, see example (5), or a statistic, see example (6). (4) … if these are within normal range (6-8mmol/l) … (5) if diabetic nephropathy (chronic loss of kidney function) is present … (6) the majority of all users of the scheme (68%) were aged 15-17 … while reformulations such as examples (4) and (6) provide a solution to integrating necessary numerical data into a narrative sentence structure, reformulations such as example (5) would be unlikely to appear in a non-pedagogic genre. the student is concerned with using the terminology of the discipline, but is equally concerned with demonstrating to the reader, i.e. the tutor, that the terminology is understood. placing reformulations in parentheses is a practice common in hard disciplines (hyland, 2007). it can also be seen as a sensible strategy in a pedagogic genre where word counts are strictly limited, as providing code glosses in parentheses requires fewer words than incorporating the code gloss into a sentence. king should learning developers provide instruction in the use of metadiscourse? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 20: march 2021 10 the remaining reformulators each occurred with a frequency of less than 0.5 per 10,000 words. this indicates significant underuse when compared with the published articles investigated by hyland (2007), particularly in the use of ‘i.e.’, which accounts for 25% of the reformulators used in published articles (hyland, 2007, p.273). in this study, ‘i.e.’ was used in only 5% of texts, and its unabbreviated counterpart, ‘that is’, was used only once. this suggests students would benefit from a wider repertoire of reformulators. over 80% of the exemplifications were performed by one lexical item, ‘such as’, with the next common item, ‘for example’, being used on a further 14% of occasions. this preference is consistent with both student writing and expert academic writing, although the dominance of ‘such as’ is less pronounced in other contexts (yüksel and kavanoz, 2018). in expert writing, the use of ‘e.g.’ is almost as common as ‘for example’ (hyland, 2007, p.278), whereas in the health corpus, the use of e.g. accounts for only just over 1% of exemplificators. transition markers of contrast and consequence were similarly prevalent with a frequency of nearly 16 and nearly 13 per 10,000 words respectively. markers of similarity were rarely used with a frequency of less than one word per 10,000, although this category contained a smaller number of lexical items. the students showed a strong preference for ‘however’ to mark contrast. while this preference for ‘however’ has previously been found in both student writing (gardner and han, 2018, p.870) and expert writing (aull and lancaster, 2014), the strength of the preference is much more marked in this study, with ‘however’ being used to mark contrast in 70% of occurrences. the situation is similar with markers of consequence in that the marker ‘therefore’ was used on over 80% of occasions. this suggests that this is another area where students could enlarge their lexical resources. the frequency of endophoric markers and frame markers is low compared with the findings of hyland and tse (2004). this is not unexpected as several researchers (e.g. bax et al., 2019) have commented that the frequency of these features increases with text length and at 2,000 words, a typical text in the health corpus is significantly shorter than the dissertations and theses investigated by hyland and tse (2004). king should learning developers provide instruction in the use of metadiscourse? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 20: march 2021 11 the non-linear endophoric markers all occur in the texts for one of the three assignments, referring the reader to an appendix which was a compulsory element. the linear endophoric markers, however, are in large part expressions where the text itself is referred to (see example (7)), which occurred at a frequency of 6 per 10,000 words, or just over one per text. (7) the vulnerable group chosen for this ‘essay’ are teenagers. the large majority of these expressions occur in the early stage of the assignment as part of a sentence announcing goals, as in example (8). (8) this ‘essay’ will discuss local and national public health initiatives… williams (1990, p.128) cautions against these text-referential expressions, preferring more sophisticated means of communicating aims. the assignment of agency to the text is, however, a common strategy to avoid self-mention (tang and john, 1999) and occurs in this study in over 80% of assignments, using items such as ‘essay’, ‘assignment’ and ‘report’. whether self-mention should be discouraged when announcing goals is debateable. given the findings above, it is unsurprising that just over half of the frame markers used in the current study were used to announce goals. frame markers signalling the labelling of stages and sequencing were much rarer, with a frequency of just under 4 per 10,000 words. sequencing features occurred at a frequency of 0.36 per text and only 55% of students chose to signal their conclusion with an explicit marker, such as ‘in conclusion’, ‘to conclude’ or ‘overall’. these very low frequencies could suggest a lack of coherence and a lack of awareness of the readers’ needs. alternatively, it is possible that the highly prescriptive assignment briefs supplied to the students influenced the students’ belief that explicit guidance to signpost readers through the assignment, in the form of metadiscourse, was superfluous as the intended reader, the tutor, would be familiar with the direction and stages of the assignment. it should be noted that the assignment briefs frequently directed students to provide an explicit statement of the goals of the assignment, which most probably encouraged a high proportion of (interestingly, not all) students to include this. king should learning developers provide instruction in the use of metadiscourse? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 20: march 2021 12 when looking at the corpus as a whole, it appears that metadiscourse use is consistent with that of a hard discipline, with some typical features such as the heavy use of parentheses for reformulations. this suggests that the students have to a large extent been successful in adopting the practices of their academic discourse community. there is, however, a paucity of frame markers to signpost readers through the assignment, which could impact coherence. in addition, there is scope for providing pedagogic intervention to increase the range of metadiscourse markers available to the students, particularly to mark code glosses and markers of contrast and consequence. metadiscourse use and level comparing metadiscourse use between level 4 and level 5 essays allows the development of academic writing during the course of a student’s university career to be investigated. overall, level 5 texts contained significantly more metadiscourse markers than level 4 texts (p<0.01), although the magnitude of the difference was modest (see table 3). this suggests students are successful in assimilating the academic writing conventions which they are exposed to and is consistent with other studies which found that first year undergraduates underused both code glosses and some transition markers when compared with both more experienced student writers and expert writers (aull and lancaster, 2014). table 3. comparison of metadiscourse use between the level 4 essays and level 5 essays. level 4 essay freq. per 10,000 words level 5 essay freq. per 10,000 words effect size %diff code glosses exemplifiers 24.14 23.20 reformulators** 4.90 7.47 52.55 reformulators abbreviations** 12.85 24.41 89.95 total 41.89 55.08 king should learning developers provide instruction in the use of metadiscourse? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 20: march 2021 13 transition markers similarity 0.69 0.57 contrast/concession** 12.85 16.22 26.26 consequence 9.80 11.95 total 23.34 28.75 endophoric markers linear 7.84 7.47 non-linear 0.00 0.00 total 7.84 7.47 frame markers sequence 1.67 1.07 announce goals** 3.63 6.33 74.46 label stages* 1.73 2.92 68.78 total 7.03 10.32 overall total** 80.10 101.62 32.10 * difference significant at p<0.05 ** difference significant at p<0.01 the largest increase was seen with the use of abbreviations. this could reflect a higher informational load at level 5 or a greater awareness among students of the need to include information and references to outside agencies in their assignments. considering other code glosses, the frequency of reformulations increased from level 4 to level 5 but at a much lower level. this increase was due to an increase in other markers of reformulation such as ‘i.e.’, ‘is where’, and the use of parentheses. this indicates a broadening of the students’ lexical resources in this area. this broadening was not apparent with exemplifications: both level 4 and level 5 essays remained heavily reliant on ‘such as’ and ‘for example’. . the variation in the use of transition markers was most noticeable for markers of contrast. there was a moderate increase at level 5, driven by an increase in the use of ‘however’. while this does indicate that a broadening of the student’s lexical repertoire from level 4 is not apparent, it demonstrates that students at level 5 are developing their ability to take king should learning developers provide instruction in the use of metadiscourse? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 20: march 2021 14 into account a wider range of viewpoints by comparing and contrasting information and sources (aull and lancaster, 2014), as in example (9): (9) fasting for long periods should be discouraged […] ‘however’ this could present a religious and ethical issue for women who observe these practices during ramadan. consequence markers did not increase significantly in frequency from level 4 to level 5 and both sub-corpora showed a marked preference for ‘therefore’. there was a small increase in formality, however, with the second most popular consequence marker changing from ‘this means’ at level 4 to ‘thus’ at level 5. this is a small effect, however, as despite being the second most popular markers, these items represent barely 10% of occurrences. frame markers which announce goals and label stages were significantly more frequent in the level 5 essays. this indicates more attention being paid to coherence and to guiding the reader. it is still the case, however, that only two-thirds of students at level 5 chose to mark their conclusions explicitly. although more students at level 5 announced their goals, this was increasingly formulaic. at level 4, seven assignments (10%) included a phrase which followed the structure: this essay/assignment will discuss/be discussing/look at/ explore/highlight/explain … at level 5, this had increased to 22 assignments (33%) with 16 preferring the verb ‘discuss’. it seems likely that this increase is in response to an intervention in some form from academic staff. the general increase in use of code glosses, frame markers, and transition markers with increasing level of study points to an increasing development in academic writing skills and a gradually widening repertoire of lexical items in most areas. these factors demonstrate the students’ ability to adopt the conventions and requirements of the academic discourse community in their writing as they spend time as part of that community. nevertheless, in several areas the progress could be hastened by targeted pedagogic intervention. king should learning developers provide instruction in the use of metadiscourse? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 20: march 2021 15 metadiscourse use and grade variation within the cohort was examined by comparing the higher-graded and lowergraded sub-corpora. there was no significant difference in the overall quantity of metadiscoursal features found in the assignments given a higher grade and those given a lower grade (see table 4). within categories, the one significant difference was in the use of reformulators. table 4. comparison of metadiscourse use between the lower-graded and highergraded sub-corpora. lower-graded subcorpus freq. per 10,000 words higher-graded subcorpus freq. per 10,000 words effect size %diff code glosses exemplifiers 20.48 24.86 reformulators** 4.38 9.24 111.07 reformulators abbreviations 25.28 25.38 total 50.14 59.49 transition markers similarity 0.56 1.30 contrast/concession 11.72 14.58 consequence 16.24 15.36 total 28.53 31.24 endophoric markers linear 9.60 10.80 non-linear 2.82 3.77 total 12.43 14.58 frame markers sequence 4.24 3.25 announce goals 8.05 7.42 label stages 2.54 2.99 total 14.83 13.67 king should learning developers provide instruction in the use of metadiscourse? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 20: march 2021 16 overall total 105.94 118.97 * difference significant at p<0.05; ** difference significant at p<0.01 there was a more frequent use of parentheses in the higher-graded sub-corpus. in the lower-graded sub-corpus, parentheses were used 23 times for reformulation and this rose to 48 times in the higher-graded sub-corpus. the higher-graded sub-corpus contained many more examples of technical terms being explained (16 compared with 3), as in example (10), and more specifications (8 compared with 4), as in example (11). it is possible that this is due to an increased awareness of either the needs of the reader for elaboration, or the need to demonstrate knowledge, and may have contributed to the higher grades obtained. (10) neonatal hyperbilirubinaemia ‘(jaundice)’ is a common condition … (11) this is important as early feeding ‘(within the first hour of birth)’ is essential … several researchers (e.g. intaraprawat and steffensen, 1995; cheng and steffensen, 1996) reported that writers receiving higher grades not only used metadiscourse more frequently, but also used a wider range of lexical items to do so. there is little evidence to support that in this study; the range of lexical items used was similarly narrow in both subcorpora. from this study, there is little evidence that an awareness of the reader and ability to create an argument, evidenced by metadiscourse, results in a student conveying their propositional content more successfully leading to the award of a higher grade. the reality seems to be that findings from studies in eap or from writing centres should be applied with caution to the context of this study. it is possible that in hard disciplines such as the health discipline, which are heavily evidence based and require students to demonstrate knowledge and understanding, the rhetorical functions realised through metadiscourse are less important than they may be in a soft discipline. the more frequent use of reformulations in essays given a higher grade underlines this emphasis on demonstrating understanding and consequently, should be a pedagogic focus. king should learning developers provide instruction in the use of metadiscourse? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 20: march 2021 17 conclusions the development of student writing between level 4 and level 5 was shown by the significant but modest increase in the metadiscoursal features found. this is indicative of the writers’ growing awareness of the need to engage with a range of views, and the need to guide the reader, both in understanding and navigating the text. there was, however, very little difference in the use of metadiscoursal features between assignments receiving the highest grades and those receiving the lowest, contrary to the findings of previous studies. whether this holds true in a wider range of disciplines would be worthy of further investigation. one area where the students differed from student academic writers in other contexts was in their overreliance on a small number of lexical items, particularly for code glosses and transition markers of consequence. while it is fully appreciated that metadiscourse is only one aspect of successful writing, the findings of this study suggest that there would be value in providing students with targeted activities in two areas. the first is in using metadiscourse to help guide the reader through the text. students should be encouraged to explore the relationship between the writer and the reader, ideally during students’ early terms at university, identifying the needs of the reader when approaching an unfamiliar text. students could explore successful texts, identifying those metadiscoursal aspects which contribute to their effectiveness. this could allow students to identify the importance of using, for example, frame markers to sequence their texts and label their stages. secondly, students should be introduced to a broader range of lexical resources to perform metadiscoursal functions, particularly for code glosses and transition markers. this could be achieved by providing model sentences using a range of vocabulary that students could refer to while writing. this could be supplemented by interactive online activities giving students an opportunity to rewrite sentences using alternative lexical items. learning developers are in an ideal position to provide such learning opportunities, ideally embedded within teaching programmes so that the features specific to each discipline can be explored. king should learning developers provide instruction in the use of metadiscourse? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 20: march 2021 18 appendix. actual number of metadiscoursal occurrences in the health corpus of each lexical item included in the study. category no. of occurrences category no. of occurrences code glosses 2512 endophoric markers 542 exemplifiers 1038 linear 368 such as 844 earlier 7 example (excl, 'for') 8 above 25 examples 7 essay 221 for example 143 care study 19 e.g. 13 case study 8 (* 17 discussed 25 for instance 6 below 4 as follows 2 reformulators 297 aforementioned 4 labelled 1 assignment 25 specifically 16 previously 26 thought of 1 report 2 referred to as 18 introduction 0 precisely 1 namely 1 non-linear 174 which is 23 appendix 174 is where 15 ; 5 frame markers 412 : 1 sequence 73 (* 200 following 25 i.e. 10 initially 1 that is 1 then 7 this means 4 lastly 9 king should learning developers provide instruction in the use of metadiscourse? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 20: march 2021 19 firstly 12 reformulators abbreviations 1177 numbering (1, 2, 3…) 4 (* 1177 finally 13 secondly 2 transition markers 1342 similarity 34 likewise 4 announce goals 229 again 16 discuss 105 similarly 9 discussed 44 equally 5 explained 3 outlined 2 contrast and concession 726 discussion 21 yet 9 focus on 39 alternatively 5 focus(s)ed on 5 on the other hand 10 focus(s)ing on 7 conversely 13 focus(s)es on 1 in contrast 4 introduction 1 nevertheless 13 conclusion 1 however 514 although 108 label stages 110 even though 8 to conclude 43 though 7 in conclusion 50 despite 34 overall 17 in spite of 1 consequence 582 therefore 481 as a result 13 thus 34 for this reason 12 which means 2 king should learning developers provide instruction in the use of metadiscourse? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 20: march 2021 20 this means 25 consequently 15 references ädel, a. (2006) metadiscourse in l1 and l2 english. amsterdam: john benjamins. aull, l. l. and lancaster, z. (2014) 'linguistic markers of stance in early and advanced academic writing: a corpus-based comparison', written communication, 31(2), pp.151-183. available at: https://doi.org/10.1177/0741088314527055 . bailey, s. (2018) academic writing: a handbook for international students. 5th edn. abingdon: routledge. bax, s., nakatsuhara, f. and waller, d. (2019) ‘researching l2 writers’ use of metadiscourse markers at intermediate and advanced levels’, system, 83, pp.79– 95. available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.system.2019.02.010. becher, t. and trowler, p. (2001) academic tribes and territories: intellectual enquiry and the cultures of disciplines. 2nd edn. buckingham: society for research into higher education and open university press. biber, d., johansson, s., leech, g., conrad, s. and finegan, e. (1999) longman grammar of spoken and written english. london: longman. cao, f. and hu, g. (2014) ‘interactive metadiscourse in research articles: a comparative study of paradigmatic and disciplinary influences’, journal of pragmatics, 66, pp.1531. available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2014.02.007 . cheng, x. and steffensen, m. s. (1996) ‘metadiscourse: a technique for improving student writing’, research in the teaching of english, 30(2), pp.149–181. available at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/40171358 (accessed: 14 january 2019). https://doi.org/10.1177/0741088314527055 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.system.2019.02.010 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2014.02.007 https://www.jstor.org/stable/40171358 king should learning developers provide instruction in the use of metadiscourse? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 20: march 2021 21 crismore, a. and farnsworth, r. (1990) ‘metadiscourse in popular and professional science discourse’, in nash, w. (ed.) the writing scholar: studies in academic discourse. london: sage, pp.118-136. gabrielatos, c. and marchi, a. (2012) ‘keyness: appropriate metrics and practical issues’, corpus-assisted discourse studies: more than the sum of discourse analysis and computing? cads international conference 2012. university of bologna, italy 13-14 september. gardezi, s. a. and nesi, h. (2009) ‘variation in the writing of economics students in britain and pakistan: the case of conjunctive ties’, in charles, m., pecorari, d., and hunston, s. (eds.) academic writing: at the interface of corpus and discourse. london: continuum, pp.236–250. gardner, s. and han, c. (2018) ‘transitions of contrast in chinese and english university student writing’, educational sciences: theory and practice, 18(4), pp.861–882. available at: https://doi.org/10.12738/estp.2018.4.0067. hardy, j. a. and friginal, e. (2016) ‘genre variation in student writing: a multi-dimensional analysis’, journal of english for academic purposes, 22, pp.119–131. available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jeap.2016.03.002. hyland, k. (2004) ‘disciplinary interactions: metadiscourse in l2 postgraduate writing’, journal of second language writing, 13(2), pp.133–151. available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jslw.2004.02.001 . hyland, k. (2005) metadiscourse. london: continuum. hyland, k. (2007) ‘applying a gloss: exemplifying and reformulating in academic discourse’, applied linguistics, 28(2), pp.266–285. available at: https://doi.org/10.1093/applin/amm011 . hyland, k. (2017) ‘metadiscourse: what is it and where is it going?’, journal of pragmatics, 113, pp.16-29. available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2017.03.007 . https://doi.org/10.12738/estp.2018.4.0067 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jeap.2016.03.002 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jslw.2004.02.001 https://doi.org/10.1093/applin/amm011 king should learning developers provide instruction in the use of metadiscourse? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 20: march 2021 22 hyland, k. and tse, p. (2004) ‘metadiscourse in academic writing: a reappraisal’, applied linguistics, 25(2), pp.156-177. available at: https://doi.org/10.1093/applin/25.2.156 . intaraprawat, p. and steffensen, m. s. (1995) ‘the use of metadiscourse in good and poor esl essays’, journal of second language writing, 4(3), pp.253–272. available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/1060-3743(95)90012-8 . lea, m. r. and street, b. v. (1998) ‘student writing in higher education: an academic literacies approach’, studies in higher education, 23(2), pp.157–172. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079812331380364 . mauranen, a. (1993) ‘contrastive esp rhetoric: metatext in finnish-english economics texts’, english for specific purposes, 12, pp.3–22. noble, w. (2010) ‘understanding metadiscoursal use: lessons from a “local” corpus of learner academic writing’, nordic journal of applied linguistics, 9(2), pp.145–169. available at: https://doi.org/10.35360/njes.221 . rayson, p. (2008) ‘from key words to key semantic domains’, international journal of corpus linguistics, 13(4), pp.519–549. available at: https://doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.13.4.06ray rayson, p. (no date) log likelihood and effect size calculator. available at: http://ucrel.lancs.ac.uk/llwizard.html (accessed: 17 august 2019). scott, m. (2007) ‘wordsmith tools version 5’. liverpool: lexical analysis software. shaw, p. (2009) ‘linking adverbials in student and professional writing in literary studies: what makes writing mature’, in charles, m., pecorari, d., and hunston, s. (eds.) academic writing: at the interface of corpus and discourse. london: continuum, pp. 215–235. https://doi.org/10.1093/applin/25.2.156 https://doi.org/10.1016/1060-3743(95)90012-8 https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079812331380364 https://doi.org/10.35360/njes.221 https://doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.13.4.06ray https://doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.13.4.06ray king should learning developers provide instruction in the use of metadiscourse? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 20: march 2021 23 tang, r. and john, s. (1999) ‘the “i” in identity: exploring writer identity in student academic writing through the first person pronoun’, english for specific purposes, 18, pp.s23-s39. available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/s0889-4906(99)00009-5 . vande-koppel, w. (1985) ‘some exploratory discourse on metadiscourse’, college composition and communication, 36, pp.82–93. available at: https://doi.org/10.2307/357609 . williams, j. m. (1990) style: toward clarity and grace. chicago: university of chicago press. yüksel, h. g. and kavanoz, s. (2018) ‘dimension of experience: metadiscourse in the texts of novice non-native, novice native and expert native speaker’, advances in language and literary studies [online], 9(3), pp.104-112. available at: https://doi.org/10.7575/aiac.alls.v.9n.3p.104. zhang, m. (2016) ‘a multidimensional analysis of metadiscourse markers across written registers’, discourse studies, 18(2), pp.204–222. available at: https://doi.org/10.1177/1461445615623907 . author details samantha king has been a learning development tutor at the university of northampton since 2018. prior to this, she gained several years’ experience as an eap lecturer in higher education, and taught english as a foreign language to teenagers and adults in f.e. colleges, the community, and the workplace. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0889-4906(99)00009-5 https://doi.org/10.2307/357609 https://doi.org/10.2307/357609 https://doi.org/10.7575/aiac.alls.v.9n.3p.104 https://doi.org/10.1177/1461445615623907 should learning developers provide instruction in the use of metadiscourse? abstract introduction metadiscourse methodology data collection and preparation data analysis findings and discussion metadiscourse use in student writing metadiscourse use and level metadiscourse use and grade conclusions appendix. actual number of metadiscoursal occurrences in the health corpus of each lexical item included in the study. references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special edition: 2018 aldinhe conference, october 2018 driving learning development professionalism forward from within ian johnson university of portsmouth, uk abstract current conceptions view professions as negotiable, transient territories which are shaped by the discourses that describe them. the voices which influence how a profession evolves arise from both within and outside it. theories on professionalism have been rigorously applied to teaching and academia. learning development exists within both spheres, yet its complex growth patterns have resulted in a fragmented and less theorised sense of professional identity. the rationales which create and fund learning development roles lean towards a model of fixing ‘deficits’ in students and their work; meanwhile, learning development’s professional association, aldinhe, rejects those same deficit premises. in this article, using a theoretical framework and terminology from evans (2008; 2011), i analyse the differences between those states of professionalism ‘demanded of’ and ‘enacted by’ learning developers. by coding various external and internal documents which frame job roles, i deduce how the two ‘professionalisms’ interact to resolve their inherent tensions; i identify a point of coalescence around learning development as a niche for mediation and demystification. i also explore how learning developers believe their profession can best evolve and sustain, via community-internal voices in literature and a survey of 14 aldinhe members. findings suggest that learning development remains a unique and valued activity, to which professional identity is attached. however, a precise sense among the aldinhe community of what ‘equals’ a professional learning developer remains debated. more coherent is the community’s wish to see its values (learning development) permeate across the wider higher education landscape. keywords: learning development; professionalism; identity; perceptions; working practices; academic literacies. johnson driving learning development professionalism forward from within journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: october 2018 2 introduction this article investigates the current and potential future professionalism of learning development in uk higher education (he). i am employed as a learning developer and am a member of the association for learning developers in higher education (aldinhe); thus, i write from and give value to a community-insider perspective, as well as investigating the views of other interested groups. such exploration adds to debates about evolving the field amid a climate of rapid change (webster, 2015; buckley and briggs, 2017). in addition, it brings into focus the core values of aldinhe (aldinhe, 2018a). i argue that those values should remain as visible as possible to students navigating the constant flux within the he landscape. historically, millerson (1964) and freidson (1999) have theorised that professions’ statuses should be benchmarked against a set of universal traits. however, such models are argued to have been superseded (evetts, 2014) when considered in light of the rapid and ongoing changes to higher education. as collini (2017) sets out, today’s he climate is characterised by marketisation, massification and measurement of the student experience, such as through the teaching excellence framework (tef). given that type of landscape, evetts advocates that professions should now be framed not through traits but as shifting, contested territories shaped by the discourses that describe them. such discourses are influenced by outside groups (mcclelland, 1990; evetts, 2014) such as managers, academics and students. yet as insiders with powerful collective values, learning developers can also exert influence. this article asks: ‘how can we best do that?’ with discourse negotiation firmly in mind, i use evans’ (2008) model of ‘reified states of professionalism’, originally applied to schoolteachers (evans, 2011), as a theoretical framework through which to analyse learning development. evans (2008, p.8) recognises both ‘demanded’ and ‘enacted’ states of professionalism which inform each other. the demanded professionalism is filtered through individual and collective values to reach its enacted form, which in turn impacts the future demands. to contextualise, learning developers are agents over aspects of their current and future practice despite the presence of external expectations; this picture resonates with recent portrayals of learning development as operating within a contested space (hilsdon, 2017, 2018). in this paper, i use ‘learning development’ in a wide sense to encompass work directly involving the core values of aldinhe (2018a). five such values emerged from the johnson driving learning development professionalism forward from within journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: october 2018 3 aldinhe 2017 conference community keynote, namely: ‘working alongside students to make sense of and get the most out of higher education; making he inclusive through emancipatory practice, partnership working and collaboration; adopting and sharing effective ld practice within the he community; commitment to scholarly approach and research related to ld; and critical self-reflection, on-going learning and a commitment to professional development’ (aldinhe, 2018b). the process of arriving at the values means that they can be taken to represent a convergence of the community’s opinion. that said, i am mindful that ‘learning development’ blankets many more roles than the narrower job title ‘learning developer’ and that this diversity reduces the likelihood of opinions completely agreeing. however, a premise for this article is that, to some extent, an internal consensus exists concerning the core values: that they are entailed by ‘learning development’ and embodied by its practitioners. aims and rationale this article investigates learning development’s niche within the professional landscape of academia. i use secondary and small-scale primary research to tackle two key questions: 1. how do external and internal viewpoints on the professional status of learning development compare? 2. assuming learning developers want strong professional recognition, then for what do we want to be recognised? firstly, i summarise ideas from the literature based on professionalism, he and learning development. next, for the first question, i compare internal and external perceptions of learning development job roles via document coding and analysis. for the second question, i have an exploratory goal of stimulating further debate and discussion more than reaching definitive answers. i gathered views from a survey of learning developers at the 2018 aldinhe conference. in asking ‘professionally recognised for what?’, key questions surround whether learning development might most beneficially be established as its own discipline (samuels, 2013), or within the ‘third space’ between academics and johnson driving learning development professionalism forward from within journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: october 2018 4 professional services staff (whitchurch, 2008, p.3), or among a broader professional group of higher educators (macfarlane, 2011). the route taken has profound implications for how future students will perceive the essence of learning development. student perceptions are affected by multitudinous factors, some controlled institutionally and some individually. the former include the ways in which universities name, locate and discuss our role (murray and glass, 2011). these variables affect students’ decisions about whether, why and how to access services. variables in the latter category, such as the pedagogic approaches adopted, represent ‘enacted’ professionalism (evans, 2008). these factors will shape students’ perceptions of the gains available via our services. aligning student perceptions with our own would involve fostering the understanding that learning developers embody ‘academic literacies’ principles (lea and street, 1998) as captured in the aldinhe core values (aldinhe, 2018b). specifically, we wish to dispel student notions of themselves or their work as deficit-based as a problem to be fixed. that represents a challenging task within a neo-liberal educational climate which can jar against those values (hilsdon, 2018). however, it is vital that we continue to strive. where students perceive gains, feel satisfied and give feedback which reflects that, the opportunity for learning development to sustain and evolve is enhanced (murray and glass, 2011; verity and trowler, 2011). this article spotlights some key debates around the best use of our strategic influence towards that outcome. literature review changing trends in professionalism to assess the professional status of learning developers, i start by considering the evolution of the term ‘professionalism’. attempts to model professions gained traction in the 1960s; shaped within sociological thought, the models sought to identify several professional traits (robson, 2006; evetts, 2014). millerson (1964) identified six: a knowledge base; established training and education routes; a sense of responsibility; an ethical code; altruistic spirit; and high autonomy. as the models were applied to teaching, the traits were subsumed into three categories: ‘knowledge’, ‘service/responsibility’ and ‘autonomy’ (hoyle and john, 1995; robson, 2006; sexton, 2007). johnson driving learning development professionalism forward from within journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: october 2018 5 trait-based theorists averred that when an occupation could demonstrate these characteristics, it gained ‘professionality’ (evans, 2008). in turn, involved professionals could create specialised niches, from within which they could control the occupation. opinions are split as to whether internal control is desirable. freidson (1999) argues that it creates altruistic behaviour, while a more cynical standpoint holds that it can instead encourage self-serving action designed to preserve elite status (johnson, 1972; larson, 1977). today, the more pertinent question concerns not whether internal control is desirable, but even possible. in older models, the trait ‘autonomy’ implied internal control. however, robson (2006) views autonomy as subservient to the neo-liberal buzzword of ‘accountability’ in uk-based he. elsewhere, accountability-based professionalism is named as ‘managerial’ (apple, 2000; whitty, 2006), ‘performative’ (ball, 2000; wilkins, 2011), ‘incorporated’ (hatcher, 1994; day et al, 2006) or ‘governmental’ (beck, 2008). such framings, for neal and morgan (2000) and williams (2008), result from the word ‘professional’ now being applied to everyone, rather than demarcating a specialism. as such, trait-based models are arguably unfit for present purposes. taking this line, evetts (2014, p.40) states that professions are now framed by the language that commonly describes them: the professionalism ‘discourse’. a discourse view sees professions as territories that are disputed, negotiated and shifted longitudinally (ozga and lawn, 1981). evans’ (2008 and 2011) model as a theoretical framework a form of professionalism shaped by policy discourse from above was evident in evans’ (2011) study on schoolteachers. evans (2011) identified three ‘dimensions of professional being’, termed ‘behavioural’, ‘attitudinal’ and ‘intellectual’ (p.855). to the dimensions, she mapped each of the government’s 41 ‘professional teacher standards’ (training and development agency, 2007). her picture showed a heavy weighting towards behaviours, leading to a description of ‘lop-sided’ professionalism (p.861). therein, concerns with adhering to methods outweigh those regarding underpinning values or theory. however, for evans, this outsider viewpoint is not the full picture. evans utilised her 2008 model to argue that the professionalism demanded of teachers would undergo significant character change before being enacted. evans (2011) added two further professionalisms: ‘as prescribed’, to reflect the perceptions of analysts such as academics; and ‘as johnson driving learning development professionalism forward from within journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: october 2018 6 deduced’, to account for how the profession portrays itself externally. for evans, the key components of professionalism are inter-related, as i have summarised graphically in figure 1. figure 1. visual representation of reified states of professionalism, adapted from ideas in evans (2008). viewed through this multi-layered model, teachers’ professionalism-as-demanded is filtered through individual values (‘professionality’) and collective values (‘professional culture’) to reach the enacted version (evans, 2011). the relationship can also act bidirectionally to influence future demands. wilkins (2011) offered a real-life view of the process in finding that newly-qualified schoolteachers could reconcile the inevitability of big-picture accountability with feelings of autonomy behind the classroom door. evans’ (2011) model has resonance for my study; in learning development terms, it aligns with hilsdon’s (2017) portrayal of a negotiated field where institutional, collective and individual agency interact to produce professional practice. that space is perhaps best explored after first moving outwards to the broader professional landscape of academia. johnson driving learning development professionalism forward from within journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: october 2018 7 professionalism and academia perkin (1969, p.227) identified academia as ‘the key profession’. his trait-based model situated academics at the forefront of disciplinary fields, as controllers of the knowledge generated by research and disseminated to future professionals through teaching. in a replication 45 years later, shattock (2014) showed powerfully how each professional trait used by perkin had been eroded. examples include reductions to: the extent and content of research within contracts; the authority of professional bodies; job security; the societal value of knowledge produced inside academia versus outside; and influence on educational policy (shattock, 2014). one explanation is the increased policymaking focus on education as an economic more than social enterprise (collini, 2017). on this note, stronach et al (2002, p.109) discussed academics as being caught between ‘ecologies of practice’ and ‘economies of performance’, mirroring the wider shift towards conceiving professions as shaped by discourses rather than traits. academics, then, face professional identity uncertainties. in relation, a body of literature (barnett, 2003; clarke, hyde and drennan, 2013; harris, 2005; kogan, 2000; lewis, 2014; nixon, 2008; williams, 2008) broadly coalesces on two points. the first is that academics can no longer identify as professionals through their access to disciplinary knowledge alone, yet would also resist teaching credentials being central to their professional identity. the second is that academic professionalism is, therefore, best re-imagined as an altruistic endeavour towards students and society. using that conception, williams (2008) argues that agendas founded both on service and morals can be satisfied simultaneously. academic professionalism is often described as fragmented. macfarlane (2011, p.59) explores how generalist academic roles have been ‘unbundled’ into specific individual focuses such as tuition, management or quality control. macfarlane describes as ‘paraacademics’, those whose roles straddle a previously clear-cut divide between academics and administrators, elsewhere termed ‘the third space’ (whitchurch, 2008, p.3). in a position consistent in subsequent literature (kolsaker, 2014; lewis, 2014; veles and carter, 2016), whitchurch emphasises that third space roles are filled both by academics and former administrators. she believes that by traversing the borders of the third space, both groups can aid career progression and institutional goals. kolsaker’s (2014) interviews at a mid-sized uk university only partly support whitchurch’s point, in johnson driving learning development professionalism forward from within journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: october 2018 8 highlighting the growing autonomy and satisfaction felt by professional services staff, but a converse notion of de-professionalisation among academics. an interesting argument from kolsaker (2014) is that while academia’s roles are fragmenting, their intended outcomes are converging. the point of unison is perhaps the need to satisfy both service-based and moral-based agendas. the two conceptions may appear initially paradoxical; the first pre-supposes education as serving economic ends, and the second as serving social ends. application of evans’ (2008) model (see figure 1) helps to resolve the paradox. it could be argued that in the filtration process between the demanded and enacted professionalisms, the economic view gradually meets and coexists with the social view. professionalism and learning development where does this leave learning development within today’s uncertain he landscape? hilsdon (2011) compiled a history of learning development’s emergence and evolution, of which a few points seem most salient. foundations lie in intellectual traditions concerning how students learn (marton, hounsell and entwistle, 1984) and how pedagogy responds (gibbs, 1977). however, job roles created since the 1990s and often termed ‘learning support’ have been rationalised and funded by different agendas, namely widening participation (hilsdon, 2011) and student retention and experience (hill and tinker, 2013). murray and glass (2011) found substantial inconsistencies in how universities locate, name and discuss learning development practice, with profound implications for professional status. however, from early accounts of such roles (wolfendale and corbett, 1996) to more recent ones (hilsdon, 2017), external perceptions of students as having deficits to be remedied have been steadfast. in explaining the growth of the learning development in higher education network (ldhen), hilsdon (2011) elucidates that involved professionals gradually united under the values of learning development. somewhat ironically, those values reject the deficitbased premises responsible for job creation. instead, learning development draws upon the academic literacies model (lea and street, 1998) to problematise: johnson driving learning development professionalism forward from within journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: october 2018 9 …the complex codes and conventions that students must negotiate to become accomplished players in the academy … the ways in which issues of meaningmaking and identity are implicated, not just in student writing, but in teaching and learning more generally. (ivanic and lea, 2006, p.112). intrinsic to the above quote is an understanding that academia speaks its own language, which, for lillis (2001), is likely to alienate students. hilsdon (2017) argues that bridging the gaps that cause such alienation is the chief responsibility assumed by learning developers. the result is a professional status which chimes internally with notions of mediation and demystification. in that conception, i imagine a slightly different ‘third space’ as a bridge between students’ worlds inside and outside the university. my earlier claim, theoretically grounded in evans’ (2008) model, was that service-based external conceptions of education will intersect with internal morally-based conceptions, and reconcile in the enacted professionalism. the evolution of ‘learning support’ into ‘learning development’ is a microcosm of that process. yet interestingly, hilsdon’s (2017) analysis of learning developers’ viewpoints reveals feelings that the reconciliation requires us to use ‘stealth’ and ‘subversion’ by working among, but sometimes quietly against, more hegemonic voices. this raises a question concerning the longer-term viability of such strategic acts within an increasingly marketised he sector. perhaps a more coherent professional identity will be required to ensure sustainability. the possible nature of a joined-up identity motivated my second research question. for what, i wondered, would learning developers like professional recognition? as a starting point, samuels (2013) argued that a more cohesive status required learning development to seek recognition less as a ‘movement’ (p.4) and more as a subject discipline. in defining ‘discipline’, samuels cited becher (1989), who characterised disciplines as socially organised ‘tribes’ occupying epistemologically organised ‘territories’. on both notes, samuels believed that learning development should prioritise forging links to institutional discourses and research on how students learn and outlined a blueprint towards doing so. many of samuels’ (2013) recommendations were continuations, for example maintaining associations with widening participation and retention agendas and cultivating a status as intermediaries with human interest in students. samuels also made two suggestions johnson driving learning development professionalism forward from within journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: october 2018 10 requiring greater progress: that learning development should establish an epistemologically-coherent research voice and tailored certification routes. the actions were benchmarked against those of the staff and educational development association (seda), whose primary focus is to: “promote innovation and good practice in higher education [among staff]” (seda, n.d.). samuels (2013) praised the greater progress made by seda, while attributing that largely to its establishment 14 years prior to aldinhe. however, one outcome of using educational development as a model could be an eventual coalescence of the two groups, the merits of which divides opinions (gibbs, 2009). i became interested in establishing how learning developers would now view samuels’ blueprint with the benefit of five years’ hindsight. several of samuels’ suggestions have doubtless seen progress. notably, in 2018 aldinhe launched an independent certified practitioner (cep) recognition scheme at two levels (briggs, 2018; briggs, carter, koulle and rafferty, 2018) as well as identifying ld-related research among its five values. crucially, however, samuels’ (2013) paper is premised on disciplinary establishment being the preference. that stance could now be questioned, especially given the erosion of disciplinary belonging as a barometer for professional identity (williams, 2008). conversely, the third space model attaches importance to disciplinary boundaries being beneficially crossed, not used to delimit responsibilities (whitchurch, 2008). discovering learning developers’ viewpoints is, therefore, a key objective of my second research question. methods to apply the different ‘professionalisms’ imagined by evans (2008, 2011) to learning development, and compare them, i selected three documents which frame its activity from different standpoints. firstly, for ‘demanded’ professionalism, i used a convenience sample of the role and person descriptors of a learning development job advertisement. the advert was produced in a post-1992 institution, whose primary model for learning development, including the job advertised, is departmentally-based. that model is neither uncommon nor most typical among the many found in the uk (murray and glass, 2011). i recognise, however, that the job description is likely to bear the hallmarks of the specific johnson driving learning development professionalism forward from within journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: october 2018 11 role and university concerned, marking an acknowledged limitation to my research. findings may be indicative of the wider situation but there would doubtless be benefit in further research which samples a cross-section of institutions’ job descriptions to gain a fuller picture. the second document was the uk professional standards framework (ukpsf) (higher education academy, 2011). as an independent gatekeeping document for teaching fellowships, the ukpsf represents an analytical ‘prescribed’ framing of professionalism (evans, 2011). thirdly, i selected aldinhe’s (2015) ‘ld-maps’, in effect a community role specification of learning development activities, for a viewpoint on the ‘deduced’ professionalism (evans, 2011) presented to the wider world. i adopted the coding procedures that evans (2011) used to illustrate teachers’ professionalism. as mentioned, evans established three dimensions of professional being: behavioural, attitudinal and intellectual. she explained how the teacher standards were mapped to these, using the example: “recognise and respect the contribution that … [various parties make to children’s development…]” (p.860). the two command verbs, recognise and respect, meant this standard was double-categorised: respect to the ‘attitudinal’ dimension, and recognise to the ‘intellectual’. evans noted that recognise may also map to a ‘behaviour’, but in unpicking the standard she perceived a request for a more intellectual recognition. evans preferred to single-classify each command verb, although observing that it was not always possible. on that note, another documented example is “communicate effectively with children …” (p.860), mapped as a behaviour despite recognition that attitudes are also inherent. evans (2011) recognised that often the behaviour was made more transparent in performance standards than the underpinning attitude or intellect, with a likely corresponding skew in results. i replicated these coding procedures to classify each descriptor in my three selected documents (see appendix 1 for a sample). coding was sometimes complex, for example in: “identify gaps in resource availability and, under guidance, research, develop and evaluate high-quality resources” (university role descriptor 9). four processes were requested, necessitating at least four categorisations. identify, evaluate and develop, as tangible actions, each mapped to the ‘behavioural’ dimension. meanwhile, i double-coded research as ‘intellectual’ and ‘behavioural’, as the descriptor implies both intellectual engagement and material action. this example has been deliberately included to demonstrate how i treated complex instances, although many descriptors could be more johnson driving learning development professionalism forward from within journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: october 2018 12 straightforwardly single-mapped. in both evans’ (2011) processes and my replication, subjectivity was mitigated by making direct lexical links between the command verbs, the context within which they were used, and the three dimensions. it is acknowledged that subjectivity would have been further reduced, had i elected to use a second coder and check inter-rater reliability; however, this was not possible within the timescale of the project. to investigate the internal perspective on the professionalism of learning development, i devised eight multiple choice questions. these formed a real-time polling activity, using polleverywhere, with a convenience sample (denscombe, 2010) of 14 attendees at my professionalism workshop at the 2018 aldinhe conference (johnson, 2018). delegates were informed that the ideas generated may, anonymously, contribute to a written paper reporting on the session, and given the option to opt-out verbally, which no participant took up. all those polled were aldinhe members, therefore identified with ‘learning development’ although not necessarily as ‘learning developers’. all responses were anonymised instantly and appeared aggregated on-screen. the results were discussed in breakout groups then collectively. i made notes about key emergent themes. due to the small sample size, the results represent a snapshot of the wider range which will exist within the aldinhe community. results and discussion 1. how do internal and external perspectives on the professional status of learning development compare? figure 2 shows the results of the coding activity. from these different pictures of the professionalisms of learning development, various observations are prudent. the ukpsf, representing prescribed professionalism, is fairly evenly spread in attaching 42% of its criteria to intellect, 21% to attitudes and 37% to behaviours. by comparison, the demanded professionalism in the job advertisement mirrors evans’ (2011) lop-sided picture for schoolteachers, in elevating behaviours to 72%, almost double their role in the ukpsf, and reducing attitudes to 6%. a possible explanation is that a ‘performative’ professionalism (ball, 2000) has been uncovered in the job specification. such framings are concerned chiefly with accountability, which is made most explicit through expected behaviours (ball, 2000). evans’ (2011) point that the behavioural dimension tends to johnson driving learning development professionalism forward from within journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: october 2018 13 permeate more readily into descriptors than the subtler underpinning values and knowledge – adds caution to the explanation. figure 2. learning development as variously professionalised. equally of interest, the aldinhe community role descriptors, representing deduced professionalism, align closely with the role specification. there is one minor difference: in the aldinhe document, a 6% swing is present from behaviours to intellect, hinting at the learning development community’s wish for a higher level of intellectual recognition than currently given. the finding must be taken with some caution, in line with the earliermentioned limitation of the demanded professionalism having been derived from analysis of one job advert. the role of intellect may also account for the aldinhe descriptors yielding a very different picture to the ukpsf. the ukpsf applies to all staff with teaching responsibilities, of whom a majority will have research (therefore, ‘intellect’) as explicit within their job roles. in my poll, only 21% of learning development participants reported research as a paid work component, while an additional 50% reported themselves as research-active outside of their salaried responsibilities. these results provide both positivity that the community 72% 37% 66% 6% 21% 6% 22% 42% 28% 0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90% 100% demanded (job advert) prescribed (ukpsf) deduced (aldinhe role-spec) p e r c e n ta g e (o f to ta l c o d e s a ll o c a te d t o d o c u m e n t) view of ld professionalism figure 2: learning development as variously professionalised behavioural attitudinal intellectual johnson driving learning development professionalism forward from within journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: october 2018 14 recognises the importance of growing a research culture (samuels, 2013; aldinhe, 2018) and frustration that the view is only sporadically mirrored institutionally. if learning development and the ukpsf are to align more closely, a greater role for research in the demanded professionalism would be required. while again, gaining a fuller picture of demanded professionalism based on analysis of more job adverts could add weight to the point, the gap between the ‘intellect’ percentages on the aldinhe community job description and the ukpsf is itself telling. the similarity between the demanded and deduced professionalisms indicates clearly that the discourses from above and within have intersected (evetts, 2014) to a perhaps unexpected extent. although not uncovering the directionalities present within that process, the results seem to highlight a reconciliation between autonomy and accountability of the type wilkins (2011) observed in teachers. it is noteworthy, however, that the aldinhe community role descriptors illuminate only our open-to-the-public presentation of the role, not the reality of its delivery (hoyle and wallace, 2007). located as that is behind the classroom or office door, enacted professionalism (evans, 2008) is occluded from ready quantification. it is perhaps better accessed by investigating the views of learning developers, to which i now turn. 2. for what do learning developers want professional recognition? the first three of my poll questions substantiated the finding (murray and glass, 2011) that the wide disparity in job titles associated with ‘learning development’ has sustained. 73% of my respondents had ‘development’ in titles; for comparison, ‘learning’ was in 38%, ‘academic’ in 31% and ‘skills’ and ‘support’ each in 9%. the result is seemingly in keeping with how aldinhe members would want to enact their professionalism: removed from the semantic association with deficits of words like ‘skills’ and ‘support’ (lea and street, 1998; wingate, 2006). i also attempted to establish the most common words which finished job titles, themselves an indicator of professional status and salary grade (murray and glass, 2011). despite my giving considerable forethought to the multiple-choice options (tutor, advisor, lecturer, officer, assistant, librarian and specialist), the most selected response, at 36%, was ‘other’. the result highlights starkly that our professional titles remain disparate. johnson driving learning development professionalism forward from within journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: october 2018 15 regrettably, software limitations and my non-anticipation of the result meant the lack of a supplementary gap-fill question to unpack what ‘other’ stood for. regarding institutional location, and in parallel with murray and glass’ (2011) finding, 62% of respondents stated that their university offered primarily centrally-based learning development, most commonly in libraries, compared to 16% operating mainly departmental provision, and 23% with both models equally. respondents were also asked which activity occupied the largest proportion of their time. the highest response at 43% was one-to-one appointments, with 36% selecting embedded teaching and 21% nominating institution-wide activities. this result is interesting when compared to murray and glass’ (2011) findings. although they do not provide comparable statistics, they allude (p.29) to embedded and institutional work being, at the time, far more peripheral than one-to-one appointments and workshops. my own results suggest that while one-to-one work retains the biggest share of time spent, learning development is slowly becoming more embedded into course provision and institutional agendas, as per samuels’ (2013) recommendation. finally, to probe directly how learning developers might like to be professionally recognised, respondents were asked: “with which professional identity would you most associate yourself?” the results are shown in figure 3. figure 3. with which of these professional identities would you most associate yourself? johnson driving learning development professionalism forward from within journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: october 2018 16 the selections are telling, in that 57% selected ‘learning developer’ and 29% ‘academic professional’, with no respondents primarily associating with ‘third space professional’ or ‘higher educator’. it is therefore evident that the distinct identity of ‘learning developer’ (not only the broader ‘learning development’) retains high importance among practitioners. i must acknowledge some slight limitations to this question. firstly, some practitioners may associate with several of the identity options. secondly, that the question included the word ‘would’ which meant it could be read ambiguously as either requesting the person’s current reality or their hypothetical wish. the polling activity allowed these concerns to emerge in real-time and would lead me to reconsider the phrasing if repeating the research. despite these points, as was my intention, the inclusion of the word ‘you’ did place the onus more on an internal interpretation than one externally imposed. therefore, the results support a reasonable conclusion that learning development has not been subsumed within a bigger whole but remains important as something in and of itself. however, the subsequent discussion underlined the complexity in understanding what that ‘something’ is. the notion that learning development should strive for disciplinary recognition either alone (samuels, 2013) or as a part of ‘academic literacies’ (respondent comment) proved problematic. the basis given, crucially, was, as one respondent commented, the lack of a subject base through which degree status can be conferred, itself seen as a precursor to academic disciplinary identity. the discussion progressed to question whether learning development is close to having a subject base. the base, concerned with pedagogy in higher education, was discussed as being increasingly visible on programmes such as degree apprenticeships and postgraduate certificates in education. the teaching of such programmes belongs within the traditional remit of ‘educational development’ although their presence in the ld-maps document (aldinhe, 2015) suggests links with learning development also. gibbs (2009) and rust (2009) have claimed that the two groups’ agendas are converging. if accepting that position in combination with samuels’ (2013) call for institutional alignment, then there is merit in learning development involvement on such programmes. as well as the profile it gives learning developers, our involvement creates opportunities for programmes to capture student-centred nuances to which we often enjoy the greatest access. above all, the group discussion illuminated the feeling that learning development is most visible as a set of core values and behaviours, which centred for one respondent on being johnson driving learning development professionalism forward from within journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: october 2018 17 ‘a non-judgemental space’. in the group, those considerations outweighed the need for ‘learning developers’ to strive for a common professional identity. i found the point of interest here to be that although in the poll, no participants selected ‘third space’ as a preferred professional identity, the group discussion emphasised the need to traverse boundaries (whitchurch, 2008) in the pursuit of cross-curricular learning development. this appears paradoxical until it is understood that respondents regarded the values, more than the people involved, as needing to cross boundaries. substantiating this finding fully would require the viewpoints of a larger sample of aldinhe members, which would represent beneficial future research. conclusions this study firstly sought to discover how external and internal perspectives on the professional identity of learning development compared. evans’ (2008, 2011) model of reified states of professionalism was used to show a professionalism ‘demanded’ of learning developers which is associated with agendas of widening participation, retention, skills and deficit-fixing. learning developers themselves, as expressed in aldinhe’s (2018) values, have a different belief set concerned with demystification of academic conventions as an emancipatory bridge between students’ worlds inside and outside university. given all of that, it seems unsurprising that learning development has been positioned within a contested operational space (hilsdon, 2017). however, as demanded professionalism undergoes filtration through individual and collective values, a point of convergence has been identified around delivering a morally-founded ‘service’ to students. this, i have argued, largely allows reconciliation between stakeholders’ views, and creates space for learning developers to influence the future direction of our professional roles. a stronger and more coherent research voice for learning development may be vital in allowing that influence to be heard. when comparing the aldinhe community’s descriptors of job-role activity to those in the ukpsf, there was a noticeably reduced relative level of reference to ‘intellect’ in the internal descriptors. this was noted as a probable outcome of the small role played by research in ld-based roles compared to fully academic roles, a result corroborated in the poll by only 21% of those learning developers johnson driving learning development professionalism forward from within journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: october 2018 18 present declaring research as a paid responsibility. encouragingly, however the aldinhe (2018) community values include an explicit role for research, illustrating it as a priority that we wish to champion. conclusions to the second question of ‘professionally recognised for what?’ are, unsurprisingly, somewhat inconclusive. due to the fragmented fashion in which learning development has grown, and the eclectic group of staff skillsets associated with it (webster, 2015), such a final note may have been likely from the outset. however, there have been valuable gains from the exercise. the strongest consensus to emerge is that aldinhe members wish to be professionally known for embodying learning development values, a view which mirrors the set-up of the cep and celp practitioner recognition schemes (aldinhe, 2018b). the need to be visible and understood, and in so doing, to allow those values to permeate into the wider academic community, has also proven key. that led some within the group discussion to suggest that if learning development became universal among academics, then learning developers would become less necessary. such a reality remains controversial and probably distant. for now, the key to enhancing visibility at the institutional level may be to work closely with influential staff outside of learning development, to ask and to challenge: ‘what works here?’ (verity and trowler, 2011). towards that, involvement in degree apprenticeships/pgcert programmes in higher education was discussed as one possible route. the niche carved out by and for learning development staff generally allows reconciliation between those professionalisms demanded of and enacted by us. some doubt has been cast on whether, in the future, that parity can be maintained with all things remaining equal, or whether a more cohesive sense of our precise professional identity would be beneficial. therefore, growing the collective voice of aldinhe in relation to the issues raised remains critical, towards which i hope this paper provides a starting point. johnson driving learning development professionalism forward from within journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: october 2018 19 acknowledgements the author wishes to acknowledge laura barclay and gordon scruton, two peers who took the time to read drafts of the article in great depth and gave me valuable feedback which didn’t shy away from constructive criticism, as well as convincing me that carrying on with writing the piece was worthwhile. references apple, m. (2000) ‘can critical pedagogies interrupt rightist policies?’, educational theory, 50(2), pp.229-254. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1741-5446.2000.00229.x association for learning development in higher education (aldinhe) (2015) ld-maps: learning development mapped against professional standards (ukpsf). available at: https://aldinheprofdev.files.wordpress.com/2010/10/ld-maps-aug-2015.pdf (accessed: 3 september 2018). association for learning development in higher education (aldinhe) (2018) about the association for learning development in higher education. available at http://www.aldinhe.ac.uk/about/ association for learning development in higher education (aldinhe) (2018b) aldinhe recognition scheme. available at http://www.aldinhe.ac.uk/development/ ball, s. (2000) ‘performativities and fabrications in the education economy: towards the performative society’, australian educational researcher, 27(2), pp. 1-23. https://doi.org/10.1007/bf03219719 barnett, r. (2003) beyond reason: living with ideology in the university. buckingham: society for research into higher education. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1741-5446.2000.00229.x https://aldinheprofdev.files.wordpress.com/2010/10/ld-maps-aug-2015.pdf http://www.aldinhe.ac.uk/about/ http://www.aldinhe.ac.uk/development/ https://doi.org/10.1007/bf03219719 johnson driving learning development professionalism forward from within journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: october 2018 20 beck, j. (2008) ‘governmental professionalism: re-professionalising or deprofessionalising teachers in england?’, british journal of educational studies, 56(2), pp. 119-143. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8527.2008.00401.x briggs, s. (2018) ‘development of the aldinhe recognition scheme: certifying the ‘learning developer’ title’, journal of learning development in higher education, issue 13, april, pp. 1-11. available at: http://journal.aldinhe.ac.uk/index.php/jldhe/article/view/461/pdf (accessed: 3 september 2018). briggs, s., carter, a., koulle, k. and rafferty, v. (2018) ‘an introduction to the aldinhe certified practitioner (cep) recognition scheme’, aldinhe 2018: the learning development conference. university of leicester, england 26-28 march. buckley, c. and briggs, s. (2017) ‘community keynote: defining the future of learning development’, aldinhe 2017: the learning development conference. university of hull, england 10-12 april. clarke, m., hyde, a. and drennan, j (2013) ‘professional identity in higher education’, in kehm, b.m. and teichler, u. (eds.) the academic profession in europe: new tasks and new challenges. london: springer, pp. 7-21. collini, s. (2017) speaking of universities. london: verso. day, c., kington, a., stobart, g. and sammons, p. (2006) ‘the personal and professional selves of teachers: stable and unstable identities’, british educational research journal, 32(4), pp. 601-616. https://doi.org/10.1080/01411920600775316 denscombe, m. (2010) the good research guide. 4th edn. maidenhead: open university press. evans, l. (2008) ‘professionalism, professionality and the development of education professionals’, british journal of educational studies, 56(1), pp. 20-38. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8527.2007.00392.x https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8527.2008.00401.x http://journal.aldinhe.ac.uk/index.php/jldhe/article/view/461/pdf https://doi.org/10.1080/01411920600775316 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8527.2007.00392.x johnson driving learning development professionalism forward from within journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: october 2018 21 evans, l. (2011) ‘the ‘shape’ of teacher professionalism in england: professional standards, performance management, professional development and the changes proposed in the 2010 white paper’, british educational research journal, 37(5), pp. 851-870. https://doi.org/10.1080/01411926.2011.607231 evetts, j. (2014) ‘the concept of professionalism: professional work, professional practice and learning’, in billett, s., harteis, c. and gruber, h. (eds.) international handbook of research in professional and practice-based learning. springer, dordrecht, pp. 29-56. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-8902-8 gibbs, g. (1977) can students be taught how to study? higher education bulletin, 5, pp. 197-218. gibbs, g. (2009) ‘developing students as learners – varied phenomena, varied contexts and a developmental trajectory for the whole endeavour’, journal of learning development in higher education, issue 1, february, pp. 1-12. available at: http://journal.aldinhe.ac.uk/index.php/jldhe/article/view/30/14 (accessed: 4 september 2018). freidson, e. (1999) ‘theory of professionalism: method and substance’, international review of sociology, 9(1), pp. 117–129. https://doi.org/10.1080/03906701.1999.9971301 harris, s. (2005) ‘rethinking academic identities in neo-liberal times’, teaching in higher education, 10(4), pp. 421-433. https://doi.org/10.1080/13562510500238986 hatcher, r. (1994) market relationships and the management of teachers, british journal of the sociology of education, 15(1), pp. 41-61. https://doi.org/10.1080/0142569940150103 higher education academy (hea) (2011) the uk professional standards framework for teaching and supporting learning in higher education. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/01411926.2011.607231 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-8902-8 http://journal.aldinhe.ac.uk/index.php/jldhe/article/view/30/14 https://doi.org/10.1080/03906701.1999.9971301 https://doi.org/10.1080/13562510500238986 https://doi.org/10.1080/0142569940150103 johnson driving learning development professionalism forward from within journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: october 2018 22 https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/system/files/downloads/uk_professional_standards_f ramework.pdf (accessed: 3 september 2018). hill, p. and tinker, a. (2013) ‘integrating learning development into the student experience’, journal of learning development in higher education, 5, march, pp. 118. available at: http://journal.aldinhe.ac.uk/index.php/jldhe/article/view/172 (accessed: 3 september 2018). hilsdon, j. (2011) ‘what is learning development?’, in hartley, p., hilsdon, j., keenan, c., sinfield, s. and verity, m. (eds.) learning development in higher education. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan, pp. 13-27. hilsdon, j. (2017) ‘problematising learning development’, aldinhe 2017: the learning development conference. university of hull, england, 10-12 april. hilsdon, j. (2018) ‘learning development: pedagogy, principles and progress’, aldinhe 2018: the learning development conference. university of leicester, england, 2628 mar. available at: https://www.slideshare.net/jhilsdon/hilsdon-keynote-aldinhe2018 (accessed: 3 september 2018). hoyle, e. and john, p. (1995) professional knowledge and professional practice. london: cassell. hoyle, e. and wallace, m. (2007) ‘educational reform: an ironic perspective’, educational management, administration and leadership, 35(1), pp. 9-25. https://doi.org/10.1177/1741143207071383 ivanic, r. and lea, m. (2006) ‘new contexts, new challenges: the teaching of writing in uk higher education’, in ganobcsik-williams, l. (ed.) teaching academic writing in uk higher education. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan, pp. 6-15. johnson, i. (2018) ‘learning development and professionalism: driving ourselves forward’, aldinhe 2018: the learning development conference. university of leicester, england, 26-28 mar. https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/system/files/downloads/uk_professional_standards_framework.pdf https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/system/files/downloads/uk_professional_standards_framework.pdf http://journal.aldinhe.ac.uk/index.php/jldhe/article/view/172 https://www.slideshare.net/jhilsdon/hilsdon-keynote-aldinhe-2018 https://www.slideshare.net/jhilsdon/hilsdon-keynote-aldinhe-2018 https://doi.org/10.1177/1741143207071383 johnson driving learning development professionalism forward from within journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: october 2018 23 johnson, t. (1972) professions and power. oxon: routledge. kogan, m. (2000) ‘higher education communities and academic identity’, higher education quarterly, 54(3), pp. 207-216. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2273.00156 kolsaker, a. (2014) ‘relocating professionalism in an english university’, journal of higher education policy and management, 36(2), pp. 129-142. https://doi.org/10.1080/1360080x.2013.861053 larson, m. (1977) the rise of professionalism. berkeley: university of california press. lea, m. and street, b. (1998) ‘student writing in higher education: an academic literacies approach’, studies in higher education, 23(2), pp. 157–72. https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079812331380364 lewis, k. (2014) ‘constructions of professional identify in a dynamic higher education sector’, perspectives: policy and practice in higher education, 18(2), pp. 43-50. https://doi.org/10.1080/13603108.2014.914107 lillis, t. (2001) student writing: access, regulation, and desire. oxon: routledge. macfarlane, b. (2011) ‘the morphing of academic practice: unbundling and the rise of the para-academic’, higher education quarterly, 65(1), pp. 59-73. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2273.2010.00467.x marton, f., hounsell, d. and entwistle, n. (1984) the experience of learning: implications for teaching and studying in higher education. edinburgh: scottish academic press. mcclelland, c. (1990) ‘escape from freedom? reflections on german professionalization 1870-1933’ in burrage, m. and torstendahl, r. (eds.) the formation of professions: knowledge, state and strategy. london: sage, pp. 97-113. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2273.00156 https://doi.org/10.1080/1360080x.2013.861053 https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079812331380364 https://doi.org/10.1080/13603108.2014.914107 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2273.2010.00467.x https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2273.2010.00467.x johnson driving learning development professionalism forward from within journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: october 2018 24 millerson, g. (1964) the qualifying associations: a study in professionalization. london: routledge. murray, l. and glass, b. (2011) ‘learning development in higher education – community of practice or profession?, in hartley, p., hilsdon, j., keenan, c., sinfield, s. and verity, m. (eds.) learning development in higher education. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan, pp. 28-39. neal, m. and morgan, j. (2000) ‘the professionalization of everyone? a comparative study of the development of professions in the united kingdom and germany’, european sociological review, 16(1), pp. 9-26. https://doi.org/10.1093/esr/16.1.9 nixon, j. (2008) towards the virtuous university: the new bases of academic professionalism. abingdon: routledge. ozga, j. and lawn, m. (1981) teachers, professionalism and class: a study in organised teachers. lewes: falmer press. perkin, h. (1969) key profession: the history of the association of university teachers. new york: augustus m kelley. robson, j. (2006) teacher professionalism in further and higher education. oxon: routledge. rust, c. (2009) ‘opinion piece: a call to unite in a common cause’, journal of learning development in higher education, 1, february, pp. 1-5. available at: http://journal.aldinhe.ac.uk/index.php/jldhe/article/view/24 (accessed: 3 september 2018). samuels, p. (2013) ‘promoting learning as an academic discipline’, journal of learning development in higher education, 5, march, pp. 1-22. available at: http://journal.aldinhe.ac.uk/index.php/jldhe/article/view/146 (accessed: 3 september 2018). https://doi.org/10.1093/esr/16.1.9 http://journal.aldinhe.ac.uk/index.php/jldhe/article/view/24 http://journal.aldinhe.ac.uk/index.php/jldhe/article/view/146 johnson driving learning development professionalism forward from within journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: october 2018 25 sexton, m. (2007) ‘evaluating teaching as a profession – implications of a research study for the work of the teaching council’, irish educational studies, 26(1), pp. 79-105. https://doi.org/10.1080/03323310601125310 shattock, m. (2014) ‘can we still speak of there being an academic profession?’, history of education, 43(6), pp. 727-739. https://doi.org/10.1080/0046760x.2014.964008 staff and educational development association (seda). (n.d.) supporting and leading educational change. available at: https://www.seda.ac.uk/ (accessed: 3 september 2018). stronach, i., corbin, b., mcnamara, o., stark, s. and warne, t. (2002) ‘towards an uncertain politics of professionalism: teacher and nurse identities in flux’, journal of education policy, 17(1), pp. 109-138. https://doi.org/10.1080/02680930110100081 training and development agency for schools (2007) professional standards for teachers. london: tda publications. veles, n. and carter, m.a. (2016) ‘imagining a future: changing the landscape for third space professionals in australian higher education institutions’, journal of higher education policy and management, 38(5), pp. 519-533. https://doi.org/10.1080/1360080x.2016.1196938 verity, m. and trowler, p. (2011) ‘looking back and into the future’, in hartley, p., hilsdon, j., keenan, c., sinfield, s. and verity, m. (eds.) learning development in higher education. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan, pp. 241-252. webster, h. (2015) “trust me, i’m a professional” – what do learning developers profess? aldinhe 2015: the learning development conference. southampton solent university, england, 30 march – 1 april. whitchurch, c. (2008) ‘shifting identities and blurring boundaries: the emergence of third space professionals in uk higher education’, higher education quarterly, 62(4), pp. 377–396. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2273.2008.00387.x https://doi.org/10.1080/03323310601125310 https://doi.org/10.1080/0046760x.2014.964008 https://www.seda.ac.uk/ https://doi.org/10.1080/02680930110100081 https://doi.org/10.1080/1360080x.2016.1196938 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2273.2008.00387.x johnson driving learning development professionalism forward from within journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: october 2018 26 whitty, g. (2006) ‘teacher professionalism in a new era’, paper presented at the first annual lecture of the general teaching council for northern ireland. belfast, march. available at: http://www.gtcni.org.uk/publications/uploads/document/annual%20lecture%20paper .pdf (accessed: 3 september 2018). wilkins, c. (2011) ‘professionalism and the post-performative teacher: new teachers reflect on autonomy and accountability in the english school system’, professional development in education, 37(3), pp. 389-409. https://doi.org/10.1080/19415257.2010.514204 williams, k. (2008) ‘troubling the concept of the ‘academic profession’ in 21st century higher education’, higher education, 56(5), pp. 533-544. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-007-9109-x wingate, u. (2006) ‘doing away with ‘study skills’’, teaching in higher education, 11(4), pp. 457-469. https://doi.org/10.1080/13562510600874268 wolfendale, s. and corbett, j. (1996) opening doors: learning support in higher education. london: cassell. author details ian johnson is a learning developer of three years' experience in the school of education and sociology at university of portsmouth. prior to that, ian's background included teaching eap, esol and adult literacy. http://www.gtcni.org.uk/publications/uploads/document/annual%20lecture%20paper.pdf http://www.gtcni.org.uk/publications/uploads/document/annual%20lecture%20paper.pdf https://doi.org/10.1080/19415257.2010.514204 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-007-9109-x https://doi.org/10.1080/13562510600874268 johnson driving learning development professionalism forward from within journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: october 2018 27 appendix 1 example of my coding process using the ld-maps (aldinhe, 2015) document johnson driving learning development professionalism forward from within journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: october 2018 28 appendix 1 – duplicate black and white copy example of my coding process using the ld-maps (aldinhe, 2015) document johnson driving learning development professionalism forward from within journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: october 2018 29 driving learning development professionalism forward from within abstract introduction aims and rationale literature review changing trends in professionalism evans’ (2008 and 2011) model as a theoretical framework professionalism and academia professionalism and learning development methods results and discussion 1. how do internal and external perspectives on the professional status of learning development compare? 2. for what do learning developers want professional recognition? conclusions acknowledgements references author details appendix 1 appendix 1 – duplicate black and white copy journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special issue 22: compendium of innovative practice october 2021 ________________________________________________________________________ collaborating on a creative solution to teach creativity to business students dewa wardak university of sydney, australia abdul razeed university of sydney, australia jane thogersen university of sydney, australia eve guerry university of sydney, australia keywords: creativity; analytics; business; museum; object-based learning; covid-19. the challenge we are sharing our experience of co-designing a large new core unit of study for a master of commerce program at an australian university, and the challenges introduced by the covid-19 pandemic. the unit was designed to teach postgraduate business students about creativity and analytics and to emphasise that both mindsets are complementary and necessary graduate attributes. students often think that a creative mindset means you must be born creative. there is also a myth that creative people are not analytical, but the truth is that creativity is enhanced, guided, and validated by data and analytics (gibbons, 2019). there is constant dynamic movement between what one sees in the data and how the data reframes creativity. our main challenge was dealing with covid-19 restrictions and designing a blended solution as more than 70% of our students were enrolled remotely due to the closure of the borders between australia and other countries. more than 2000 students were enrolled on this unit in semester one, 2021, and this added to the complexity of how to offer a connected experience at scale to students learning remotely. wardak, razeed, thogerson and guerry collaborating on a creative solution to teach creativity to business students journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 2 the response we define creativity as both novel and useful (stein, 1953; barron, 1955). our aim was to emphasise that creativity is not just in the students’ minds and that their material environment and creative practices are important for developing creative solutions in business. the educational developer (first author) co-designing this unit sought a creative solution to teach students about creativity in business and thus instigated collaboration with the on-campus chau chak wing museum to design an object-based-learning (obl) workshop for students. obl is a student-centred approach which aids the acquisition of subject specific skills, cross-disciplinary knowledge, practical observational, and other transferable skills (chatterjee and hannan, 2016). the unit coordinator (second author) handled the design and logistical aspects, including training teaching staff, and led the collaboration with the two academic engagement curators at the museum (the third and fourth authors). this was a new and innovative way to teach business students about creativity and a first collaboration between the business school at the university of sydney and a museum. the collaboration with the museum offered a novel opportunity to activate creativity through interaction with the objects around us. the solution involved designing an obl workshop for the students at the museum. our blended format included six two-hour tutorial classes for the onsite face-to-face students and 53 tutorial classes for remote online students. the face-to-face and online students did not attend any synchronous classes together. obl involves deep observation and multi-sensory engagement with physical objects, so the scalability and the blended delivery format provided a particular challenge. to manage the scale, the face-to-face students only visited the museum for half their tutorial time (one hour) and the remote students engaged in digital obl. digital objects were pre-selected and links to the online catalogue and 3d digital models were provided for the students to access during the tutorials. although engaging with physical objects is different to engaging with digital objects, both offer opportunities for learning. engaging in digital obl has certain benefits, for example digital objects have links to contextual information, which can stimulate thinking on related topics, offer the potential for collaboration of larger numbers of students with the same objects in real time (frost, 2009), and it allows the close inspection of objects for which size, state of preservation, and/or toxicity could make them otherwise inaccessible (mclaughlin et al., 2000). in some cases, the digital objects provide an entirely different experience, such as engaging with 3d objects as digital models. wardak, razeed, thogerson and guerry collaborating on a creative solution to teach creativity to business students journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 3 the museum’s academic engagement curators designed and ran the obl activities with the onsite students in the museum learning studios. they also designed activities to engage the remote students in obl using the museum’s digital objects catalogue. as the remote classes were delivered by the unit coordinators and tutors, training was provided to introduce the teaching team to obl and obl-delivery online. the facilitators began the session with short and fun activities designed to activate deep looking and communication across boundaries. working in small groups, students were then presented with five seemingly disconnected artworks, artefacts and specimens; for example, an early twentieth-century slide-rule, an abstract painting, a massim ancestor figure, a bronze thumb from an ancient greek life-size statue, and an eastern brown snake specimen collected in the mid-nineteenth century. utilising their powers of observational analysis and creativity, students worked collaboratively to develop a narrative that connected the objects in an unexpected and engaging way. each group then presented their creative output to the class. in the debrief at the end of the session, students were encouraged to reflect upon their process and how the activity acted as a meeting point for analytical and creative approaches. recommendations although creative and analytical mindsets are often perceived as opposing, taking a multidisciplinary approach to curriculum design can foster smoother integration between the two mindsets. our blended learning approach to the design of this workshop allowed students to engage in obl activities regardless of their onsite or offsite enrolment modes (teo, kim and jiang, 2020). when designing innovative blended activities, particularly under the constraints of the pandemic, thorough consideration of multiple aspects is important, including student learning and engagement, logistics, technology implementation, and clear communication between all stakeholders (zhang and dang, 2020). careful thought in instructional design has been shown to be an important determinant of student success, perceived usefulness of the activities, and ease of use (liu et al., 2010). museum curatorial work is a highly analytical and creative process, and this particular museum is a case study in interdisciplinarity. here, different disciplines collide to explore https://www.sydney.edu.au/museums/collections_search/?record=ecatalogue.103133 https://www.sydney.edu.au/museums/collections_search/?record=ecatalogue.68678 https://www.sydney.edu.au/museums/collections_search/?record=ecatalogue.85749 https://www.sydney.edu.au/museums/collections_search/?record=ecatalogue.38073 https://www.sydney.edu.au/museums/collections_search/?record=ecatalogue.38073 https://www.sydney.edu.au/museums/collections_search/?record=ecatalogue.28831 wardak, razeed, thogerson and guerry collaborating on a creative solution to teach creativity to business students journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 4 challenging and creative ideas through art, objects, and specimens spanning thousands of years and covering areas and cultures across the globe. incorporating a museum obl experience acted as a disruptor for students, initially placing them in unfamiliar territory and removing the standard support structures that they find in a traditional accounting classroom. the obl activities encouraged students to see the value in different experiences and perspectives (teamwork) and prompted discussion among their peers to form well-rounded and creative output. obl as a pedagogy is particularly effective for group work and skill development in empathy, communication, observation, analysis, deductive reasoning, problem solving, and creative and critical thinking; all wonderfully transferrable skills for future employment. objects, whether strange or familiar, ‘have the power to inspire, inform, excite and educate’ (chatterjee, 2010, p.181), and we aim to strengthen the online obl experience to ensure that this is as meaningful and impactful as the on-campus sessions. access to a virtual museum tour, an expanded collection of digital 3d models and better access to high resolution imaging will improve the online obl learning experience for future cohorts. references barron, f. (1955) ‘the disposition toward originality’, the journal of abnormal and social psychology, 51, pp.478–485. http://doi.org/10.1037/h0048073. chatterjee, h. j. (2010) ‘object-based learning in higher education: the pedagogical power of museums’, putting university collections to work in teaching and research – proceedings of the 9th conference of the international committee of icom for university museums and collections (umac). berkeley, usa 10-13 september, pp.179-182. available at: https://edoc.hu-berlin.de/bitstream/handle/18452/9349/chatterjee.pdf (accessed: 5 may, 2021) chatterjee, h. j. and hannan, l. (eds.) (2016) engaging the senses: object-based learning in higher education. new york: taylor and francis. http://doi.org/10.1037/h0048073 https://edoc.hu-berlin.de/bitstream/handle/18452/9349/chatterjee.pdf wardak, razeed, thogerson and guerry collaborating on a creative solution to teach creativity to business students journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 5 frost, o. c. (2009) ‘when the object is digital: properties of digital surrogate objects and implications for learning’, in r. parry (ed.) museums in a digital age. 1st edn. abingdon: routledge, pp.72-85. gibbons, s. (2019) ‘why you can't choose between creativity and data’, forbes, 9 may. available at: https://www.forbes.com/sites/serenitygibbons/2019/05/09/why-youcant-choose-between-creativity-and-data/?sh=5341d955291c (accessed: 7 may 2021). liu, y., li, h. and carlsson, c. (2010), ‘factors driving the adoption of m-learning: an empirical study’, computers & education, 55(3), pp.1211–1219. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2010.05.018. mclaughlin, m. l., sukhatme, g., shahabi, c., hespanha, j., ortega, a. and medioni, g. (2000) ‘the haptic museum’, in conference proceedings eva 2000: electronic imaging & the visual arts. florence, italy 27-31 march. available at: https://infolab.usc.edu/docsdemos/eva2000.pdf (accessed: 5 may 2021). stein, m. i. (1953) ‘creativity and culture’, the journal of psychology: interdisciplinary and applied, 36, pp.311–322. http://doi.org/10.1080/00223980.1953.9712897. teo, t. s. h., kim, s. l. and jiang, l. (2020) ‘e-learning implementation in south korea: integrating effective-ness and legitimacy perspectives’, information systems frontiers, 22, pp.511-528. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10796-018-9874-3. zhang, y. g. and dang, m. y. (2020) ‘understanding essential factors in influencing technology-supported learning: a model toward blended learning success’, journal of information technology education: research, 19, pp.489-510. https://doi.org/10.28945/4597. author details dewa wardak is a lecturer in educational development at the university of sydney business school. she is a fellow of the higher education academy (fhea). with a https://www.forbes.com/sites/serenitygibbons/2019/05/09/why-you-cant-choose-between-creativity-and-data/?sh=5341d955291c https://www.forbes.com/sites/serenitygibbons/2019/05/09/why-you-cant-choose-between-creativity-and-data/?sh=5341d955291c https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2010.05.018 https://infolab.usc.edu/docsdemos/eva2000.pdf http://doi.org/10.1080/00223980.1953.9712897 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10796-018-9874-3 https://doi.org/10.28945/4597 wardak, razeed, thogerson and guerry collaborating on a creative solution to teach creativity to business students journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 6 background in learning sciences, dewa’s interests include educational development for academics, research in networked learning, multimodal approaches to the analysis of learning and teaching environments, and research supervision and mentoring. abdul razeed is a lecturer in the discipline of accounting at the university of sydney business school. abdul has co-authored two academic books and a case study. he teaches across both the undergraduate and postgraduate programs. his passion lies in developing and continually innovating in large core units. abdul has been nominated several times for the wayne lonergan teaching award has also consistently won awards for tutoring at the university of sydney business school. jane thogersen is academic engagement curator at the university of sydney’s chau chak wing museum. she has a background in museology, especially historical and cultural material, and has extensive experience in activating collections for life-long learning. she is particularly interested in utilising diverse collections to form unexpected and enriching connections for learning, teaching and research. eve guerry is academic engagement curator at the university of sydney’s chau chak wing museum. eve has a background in archaeology, egyptology and museum education. she has been designing and implementing curriculum-linked object-based learning programs into teaching and research for over fifteen years, including strategies for multi-modal interdisciplinary engagement with museum collections. collaborating on a creative solution to teach creativity to business students the challenge the response recommendations references author details article journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 15: november 2019 ________________________________________________________________________ partners in a changing dance: embedding academic literacies in unit and course curricula linda carol thies deakin university, australia viola rosario deakin university, australia abstract this paper presents a two-part case study that used the seminal lea and street (1998) paper on academic literacies to inform ways of working collaboratively with a range of partners on embedding the development of academic literacies in course curricula. the two projects that make up the case study were funded by an australian government response to a greater linguistic, social and cultural diversity of students enrolling in australian universities (australian commonwealth government, 2009a). both projects focused on the development of curricula in selected professional courses in order to increase students’ awareness of the requirements of their chosen discipline, and ensure that they acquire the academic literacies needed to succeed in their area of study. what differed is the combinations of project partners and the nature of the partnerships. the case study presents the collaborative work of numerous project partners including language and learning advisers (llas) and subject lecturers (sls) in first identifying and defining academic literacies relevant to each course, and then implementing different teaching and learning practices to integrate the development of academic literacies in course curricula. using the analogy of an ever-changing dance, the paper suggests that the degree of success and the sustainability of curriculum renewal projects depends on numerous interrelated factors, and that it may not be possible to enact academic literacy development by following set dance steps. awareness, sensitivity and flexibility are important in bringing the dance to life. keywords: embedded academic literacies; curriculum development; case study; student diversity; collaboration; inclusive curriculum. thies rosario partners in a changing dance: embedding academic literacies in unit and course curricula journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 2 introduction much has been written over the last few decades about the need for university teaching staff and students to appreciate the difference between generic study skills and the literacy practices and professional discourse of specific disciplines (moore and hough, 2005; wingate, 2006; lillis and scott, 2007). in a seminal paper, lea and street (1998) detail the differences between these two perspectives, and propose an alternative approach, attentive to academic literacies and the conflicted and contested nature of writing practices. they outline three different but overlapping approaches to student literacy development in academic settings: study skills, academic socialisation, and academic literacies. they describe the academic literacies approach as one that: . . . views the institutions in which academic practices take place as constituted in, and as sites of, discourse and power. it sees the literacy demands of the curriculum as involving a variety of communicative practices, including genres, fields and disciplines. from the student point of view a dominant feature of academic literacy practices is the requirement to switch practices between one setting and another, to deploy a repertoire of linguistic practices appropriate to each setting, and to handle the social meanings and identities that each evokes (lea and street, 1998, p.159). their paper details the struggle students experience in understanding the way meaning is constructed in different disciplines, and the failure of university tutors to provide feedback on students’ writing that acknowledges and helps to clarify communicative practices in specific disciplines. explaining that students need to adapt to the literacy practices of different disciplines, they point out that these practices may be influenced by power imbalances, epistemological issues and students’ identities. lea and street (1998) contend that students are also faced with the challenge of gaining some sense of agency or identity within their discipline, and suggest that a recognition of the impact of power imbalances on students can help change teaching and learning practice. they include a key recommendation from their original research, which is to adopt an academic literacies perspective as the focus for research aiming to interrogate teaching and learning practices and institutional policy. thies rosario partners in a changing dance: embedding academic literacies in unit and course curricula journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 3 the case study presented here describes the complex ways in which language and learning advisers (llas) partnered in two curriculum design and development projects in an ever-changing dance with subject lecturers (sls) and a range of support teams to implement an academic literacies perspective in two curriculum design and development projects across four faculties. as lead dancers in these projects, language and learning advisers likened the need to be flexible to the challenges of mastering different dance steps, to keep in step with dance partners, and to be aware of the need to change partners on the dance floor and dance styles in time with the music. as such, the projects illustrate the different and varying experiences of working in partnerships and the need to adapt and change in order to develop embedded academic literacies curricula responsive to different disciplines, teaching teams and student cohorts. an academic literacies approach can inform curriculum development, including embedded academic literacies development, but the ways in which it is enacted may vary depending on the broader political climate and more institution-specific issues, which mcwilliams and allan (2014) summarise under the headings of logistics, student demographics and discipline specific considerations. we suggest that effective curriculum development of student academic literacies also relies on the capacity of llas and sls to work collaboratively. as in a dance, curricular change offers opportunities to cross the floor to partner with different groups working on curriculum development across the university in a flexible way, and with an awareness and sensitivity to various factors, such as faculty and institutional initiatives and funding opportunities. the dance analogy helps highlight the complexity of working collaboratively with different partners in order to achieve curricular change: responding to different collaborative approaches adopted by the project partners, sharing leadership, the importance of sometimes changing partners, and recognising and acknowledging the various contributions of other dancers. the academic literacies we identified using the mapping exercise we describe varied according to the nature of the assessment task and the discipline; just as in a dance, participants offer different interpretations of prescribed dances. we suggest that, just as dancers need to sustain energy and enthusiasm, effective curricular change requires collaboration and commitment over a lengthy period of time. background to the two projects thies rosario partners in a changing dance: embedding academic literacies in unit and course curricula journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 4 while our partners in the dance sometimes changed, one constant through both projects was our partnership with students. the two projects that make up the case study were initiated in response to a greater diversity of students entering australian universities as a result of the globalisation of higher education, an increase in entry pathways and the australian government’s policy of widening access (australian commonwealth government, 2009b; varghese, 2013; norton 2016). they were funded through the high education participation and partnerships program (heppp), an australian government initiative introduced with the specific aim of increasing the success of students of lowsocioeconomic status backgrounds (australian commonwealth government, 2009b). the literature outlines the needs of students from diverse backgrounds, including lower stocks of social and cultural capital, lower levels of previous education attainment, lower aspirations and levels of competence in english language and a higher need for personal and academic support (bourdieu, 1986; james, 2002; young, 2004; coates and krause, 2005; james, 2007; priest, 2009; hunter, 2019). the lea and street (1998) paper provided the rationale and academic literacies theory underpinning these projects. however, while the introduction of heppp initiatives acknowledged the likelihood that students from diverse backgrounds would have considerably higher needs, academic literacies theory represents a movement away from a deficit model, which focuses on teaching instrumental skills. the main focus in these projects was therefore on the socialisation of all students into the discourses of their disciplines and – more broadly – into academia. we stepped gently to invite all students to the dance. this diversity of students’ cultural and language backgrounds, socioeconomic status, age, and professional aspirations prompted a greater focus on student needs and the development of curricula that respond to those needs. the key response to student diversity, which could be implemented at an institutional level, involved better integration or embedding of academic literacies within course curricula. the academic literacies projects presented here demonstrate the tension between funding, which highlights the needs of certain student cohorts, and the aim of developing curricula that respond to the learning needs of all students. the overall objective of the projects was to take an inclusive approach to ensure that all students, local or international, irrespective of their stock of cultural capital, were empowered to understand the underpinning requirements of university assignments, pass assessment tasks, successfully complete their course and thies rosario partners in a changing dance: embedding academic literacies in unit and course curricula journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 5 graduate ready to enter the world of work in their chosen profession. as such, the project briefs were also seen as contributing to a university-wide process of curricular renewal. the projects were conducted at an australian university with approximately 44,000 students enrolled in 2012, across four campuses, three of which are in regional areas, and approximately 28% of students studying wholly online (deakin university, 2013). course enrolment increased to approximately 67,500 in 2018 and, as such, the diversity within the student cohort also increased (deakin university, 2018). at the commencement of the first project the university was engaged in a course enhancement process, which included a review of unit and course learning outcomes, and how these contribute to students’ achievement of graduate attributes. all faculties conducted some professional development sessions as part of this review and the enhancement process was driven by faculty associate deans, teaching and learning. this gave us an opportunity to partner with a range of colleagues working on curriculum development. the first academic literacies project involved close collaborations in four key undergraduate courses: early childhood education, social work, information technology and health, and was overseen by one of the faculty associate deans, teaching and learning. the second project, which was a new iteration on the original theme, focused on management units in business and law, and the continuing work in early childhood education. both projects took an inclusive approach to embedding academic literacies in course curricula in order to ensure the development of the skills and literacies students require to achieve academic success. embedding academic literacies in course curricula the literature describes various approaches to embedding the development of academic literacies in curricula (chanock et al., 2012; johnson et al., 2015). this type of curricular enhancement has been planned and delivered in a variety of different ways in higher education institutions over at least the last two decades (maldoni and lear, 2016). a common initial step involves defining academic literacies and constructing academic literacies frameworks. these frameworks may include mapping the academic literacies required to successfully complete assessment tasks in one unit of study. however, curriculum development may also take a course level focus, such as including online modules in a course site or in a specific core unit that all students enrolled in a course are required to complete (thies et al., 2014; minogue et al., 2018). a case study presented by thies rosario partners in a changing dance: embedding academic literacies in unit and course curricula journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 6 johnson et al. (2015) describes a university-wide academic literacies framework for the development of students’ communication skills across different courses. the academic literacies identified and mapped using specific frameworks will therefore differ. as with the variety of ‘dances’ and different interpretive dance styles, academic literacies curricula may have very different content and can be presented and delivered in a variety of ways. some frameworks have been developed, which identify what could be termed ‘key academic literacies’ (harper, 2011; mcwilliams and allan 2014). mcwilliams and allan (2014) identify academic literacies such as ‘critical thinking, database searching, familiarity with academic conventions such as referencing, use of formal register and the ability to manipulate a range of genres’ (p.1). another definition by chanock et al. (2012) is that academic literacies are seen as ‘oral, social and electronic ways of dealing with knowledge as well as print literacies’ (p.1). the focus of both projects presented here was on the academic literacies needed for students to succeed in assessment tasks. the diagram below (figure 1) was used to demonstrate the link between academic skills and literacies that need to be developed through assessment tasks in the context of the university-wide curricular renewal process, which focused on graduate learning outcomes (jolly, 2001). figure 1. university curriculum renewal process (based on jolly, 2001). thies rosario partners in a changing dance: embedding academic literacies in unit and course curricula journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 7 the project also drew on the academic literacy development framework put forward by harper (2011), which highlights eight facets of academic literacies relevant to the completion of assessment tasks (reading, recording, reviewing, responding, researching, relating, reporting and referencing), and five developmental levels that describe increasing competence through iterative development across the course. the project participants had to ‘keep in step’ with the chosen dance style by discussing and agreeing on which academic literacies were most relevant for inclusion in unit or course curricula, and how students could demonstrate their capabilities or competence in these literacies. different understandings of the nature of academic literacies add to the complexity of attempts to incorporate the explicit teaching of academic literacies in the delivery of units. in introducing both projects to teaching teams, the llas presented the aim of embedding academic literacy development in course curricula as providing learning experiences that build students’ understanding of different literacy practices, their ability to switch to different ways of thinking and writing in different disciplines, and awareness of the varying ways that they are developing as learners. during the initial project planning stage, llas suggested that academic literacies theory could be used to inform both the design of the curriculum and the approaches to teaching. both projects focused on developing a shared understanding of academic literacies theory, embedded academic literacies curricula, and how project members could contribute to curriculum development. gustafsson et al. (2011) describe this shared understanding of contributions to curriculum development as bringing together different pedagogical knowledge by integrating content and language. they explain the content knowledge of subject specialists as including the discipline’s epistemology, conventions, values and assumptions, while llas have a knowledge of applied linguistics and can talk about the discourse of the subject in a way that clarifies its use for students. therefore, recognition of these varying contributions meant that while llas often adopted the role of lead dancer, our steps had to be quite delicate, and we often deferred to sls and course coordinators in the decision making process. the use of the term ‘embedded’ in relation to curriculum development can be quite contentious in that it is seen as suggesting that there are certain literacies that are external to more valued discipline knowledge. this reflects the contested view that teaching generic academic skills or study skills using what has been described as a ‘bolted on’ approach will be sufficient for students to learn the literacy practices of their discipline (wingate, thies rosario partners in a changing dance: embedding academic literacies in unit and course curricula journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 8 2006). the limitations of this ‘bolted-on’ approach are well documented, and include students’ perception that additional sessions offered are remedial and/or irrelevant to learning in their discipline (durkin and main, 2002; lea and street, 2006; thies, 2012; cairns et al., 2018). the development of a shared understanding between project partners included recognition of the value of embedding literacies development in unit and courses curricula rather than expecting students to attend additional generic academic skills workshops. there is also a need to embed academic literacies into the curricula in a seamless way so that students perceive them as fundamental elements of discourse in their discipline. however, while students may perceive these academic literacies as an integral part of their developing knowledge, they also need to take a broader perspective of the context of their performance, to develop a metacognitive approach to their learning and to reflect on their achievement of course learning outcomes. in the projects presented here this was achieved through providing students with a self-reflective tool to encourage reflection on the development of their own academic literacies over at least one year of their study. delivery of curricula can include the traditional methods of lectures and tutorials, interactive online learning activities and/or team teaching by literacy and discipline specialists. the projects presented here aimed for a flexible response to each disciplinary context and adopted a variety of different approaches to delivery. these approaches were informed by assessment of student needs, the academic literacies mapped by individual project teams, the unique characteristics of the discourse community and in some instances the logistics and timing of delivery. there was a strong focus on inclusive online development in the learning management system. the project coordinators used academic literacies theory as the starting point for course or unit team discussion. figure 2 was presented to project partners during professional development sessions and as an online resource. it shows how the academic literacies model builds on older models for a more encompassing understanding of student learning (lea and street, 1998). figure 2. from study skills to academic literacies (lea and street, 1998, p.172). thies rosario partners in a changing dance: embedding academic literacies in unit and course curricula journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 9 curricular renewal: barriers and facilitators while much research has been done using an academic literacies perspective since the lea and street (1998) paper was published, a critique of the theory as originally presented is that it did not include any teaching design framework or detailed pedagogy (lillis, 2003; wingate and tribble, 2012). this suggests that there is much to learn about how curriculum design can support students to move towards communicating effectively within their discipline and/or understanding ‘the hidden rules of the game’. there are many explanations provided as to why an embedded approach to academic literacies curriculum development has not been adopted more widely (moore and hough, 2005; jones, 2008). jones (2008) highlights barriers to curriculum development, including the complexity of defining academic skills and literacies, which are not necessarily observable or measurable, and the fact that academics may therefore not understand the nature of these literacies and may lack experience and confidence in teaching them. lea (2004) does suggest principles of course design based on the academic literacies model and a list of limitations of planning and implementation, which are illustrated using one case study of an online course for postgraduate students. however, again, this does not provide clear links between academic literacies and teaching and learning activities in the mainstream higher education classroom. in likening this process to a dance, it would seem that there is no single dance style or set of steps that guarantee the success of such course design. in developing embedded academic literacies curricula, project partners need to adapt to the thies rosario partners in a changing dance: embedding academic literacies in unit and course curricula journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 10 circumstances within their institution, adopt processes, and establish partnerships that will best progress project aims. in the introduction to a book entitled working with academic literacies: case studies towards transformative practice the editors (lillis et al., 2016, p.3) suggest that the series of case studies and critical reviews included in the book provide some answers to questions such as ‘how do we work with an academic literacies approach’ and ‘how does the transformative approach look in practice?’. they argue that one rationale for the publication of these articles was the existence of a gap between the understanding of researchers and practitioners regarding responses to these questions. the overall message of this book is that these case studies contribute to an understanding of: . . . contemporary approaches to language and literacy, in particular, how to design policy, curriculum, assessment and pedagogy which engage with a commitment to ‘transformation’ – rather than solely induction or reproduction – and indeed, to examining what we understand by ‘transformation’ in contemporary higher education (p.5). reflection on the two projects presented here does provide some insights into the key areas detailed in this text (lillis et al., 2016), such as teaching practices, pedagogies, resources and responses to institutional policies. a number of different interrelated factors are needed in order to facilitate curricular renewal that incorporates students’ development of academic literacies. while it has been suggested that a whole-of-institution approach and top-down support are essential if curricular change is to be sustained, bottom-up input and involvement is also key to innovative curriculum renewal and enactment (kift, 2009; thies, 2014; mcwilliams and allan, 2014). as such, collaborative curriculum development must be supported by policy and formal structures that promote engagement at multiple levels within the university, as well as ways of working across faculty, department and professional area boundaries. these suggested ways of working imply the need for collaboration between various practitioners, and much of the literature focuses on the importance of team-based approaches to curriculum design (healey et al., 2013; burrell et al., 2015; minogue et al., 2018). thies rosario partners in a changing dance: embedding academic literacies in unit and course curricula journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 11 as with any dance performance, all partners in the routine need to be confident that they are seen as key contributors and that their contribution is recognised and valued. murray and nallaya (2016) contend that a systematic embedding process relies on collaboration between language and learning specialists and academic staff, while goldingay et al. (2016) emphasise the importance of team members being involved in a structured process of reflective practice, which could contribute to an ongoing action research cycle, including planning, acting, observing and reflecting. a shared understanding, including a shared vocabulary, has already been highlighted as one of the key components of a collaborative approach, and this is best achieved by the provision of professional development programmes and sufficient time for staff to be fully engaged (thies, 2016; goldingay et al. 2016). mcwilliams and allan (2014) emphasise the importance of a student-centred or autonomous learner focus in order to promote students’ self-efficacy and an ability to think critically about their learning, both in terms of discipline content and an ability to communicate their knowledge. finally, while the mapping of academic literacies across units is seen as a first stage in developing curricula (willison and o’regan, 2007; willison et al., 2010; harper, 2011), bath et al. (2007) argue that a curriculum development process must include ongoing review, change and renewal. drawing on the dance metaphor, this argument for change and renewal suggests the need for a number of lead dancers, and an additional need for these leaders to sustain energy levels and enthusiasm. while the interrelated factors outlined above are not definitive, they do provide an indication of the complexity of developing curricula in an integrated and incremental way. project 1: developing academic literacies curricula the overall aim of the first project, which spanned a three-year period, was to develop embedded academic literacies curricula in units across a number of courses in order to increase student success rates. funding was allocated to teams in the selected undergraduate courses, and a group of core units in the faculty of health. ethics approval was granted for collaborative research evaluation. this included reflections by the llas coordinating the project as well as separate ethics approval for each course team. there was also funding for a part-time research assistant to contribute to evaluation of the thies rosario partners in a changing dance: embedding academic literacies in unit and course curricula journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 12 project. the project was coordinated by two llas, who initially worked with associate deans,teaching and learning, and course teams to identify which subjects to focus on, and then defined a theoretical basis, provided practical frameworks, developed curricula and planned project evaluation. the project began with a full day seminar introducing the project, with two additional full day seminars for the different course teams to share project outcomes. there was a working group for each subject or series of subjects with one lla coordinator in each group. a number of other llas were co-opted to support resource development. as there was some funding for course team involvement and the project was being led by one of the faculty associate deans, teaching and learning, the nominated course teams were keen to capitalise on the opportunity to review their curricula. the introductory whole day seminar was an excellent networking opportunity, and provided teams with the opportunity to make decisions regarding how they would begin the collaborative curriculum development process. this involved setting up meeting times to progress the mapping of academic literacies of assessment tasks in specific units. the starting point for each working group was to identify the key academic literacies needed to successfully complete assessment tasks. the framework used for this mapping exercise also required identification of those literacies already being supported or scaffolded, and those that were not taught or included in the curriculum. the aim was to create curricula that best suited the discipline and the teaching team. as could be predicted, each working group responded differently, based on a range of different issues, such as the logistics of delivery of the subject, assessment of student need, discipline considerations, and recommendations of subject review processes. figures 3 was used to begin and progress the mapping of academic literacies and support the development of learning resources to scaffold assessment tasks in specific units. figure 3. facets of academic literacy (based on harper, 2011). thies rosario partners in a changing dance: embedding academic literacies in unit and course curricula journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 13 because the focus was on resource development to support student success, llas revised the terminology used in the academic literacy framework proposed by harper (2011) to more closely align with existing resources available for students to create the ‘facets of academic literacies’. while terms like ‘finding information’ and ‘reading and note taking’ could be seen simply as study skills, taking an academic literacies approach in this project, llas and sls worked together to redefine the nature of these core skills in the context of assessment tasks and course learning outcomes and developed online resources specific to different units in different disciplines (figure 4). figure 4. academic literacy resources in the online environment. thies rosario partners in a changing dance: embedding academic literacies in unit and course curricula journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 14 the focus across the courses was on developing shared understandings between sls and llas about the nature of the academic literacies that students were expected to develop in each assessment task, beyond basic study skills, in order to develop an awareness of the specific literacy practices involved and scaffold the socialisation of students into their discipline. this led to a collaborative identification of a second layer of the metacognitive skills required in academic engagement, including self-management and reflection. figure 5 illustrates how additional literacies (facets) were identified and introduced into the mapping exercise during discussions with teaching teams. thus, the model we used expanded to invite reflection on other skills implicit in assessment tasks, and led to an awareness of different ways in which reflection is enacted in disciplines as varied as information technology, early childhood education and social work, to respond to external professional and disciplinary requirements that pull on and shape course curricula. figure 5. broader facets of academic literacy. thies rosario partners in a changing dance: embedding academic literacies in unit and course curricula journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 15 it was important to keep in step with our partners. to progress the project, regular working group meetings were planned and chaired by the lla project coordinators, and as the programme was being enacted across four different campuses these were often video link or skype meetings. these meetings, the additional showcasing of resources at course team meetings, and joint conference presentations, provided an incentive for continuing collaboration. the project coordinators sought to include the ‘student voice’ in resources such as video clips with short accounts of students’ experiences of studying in the different disciplines. students involved in peer mentoring programmes were also invited to attend pd sessions, and to contribute to presentations as members of a panel. as the project progressed the research assistant met regularly with the lla project coordinators, and also contacted all team members individually so that they could have input into the research evaluation, which also provided support for ongoing collaboration. meeting outcomes and actions were shared with all working group members. in this first project, llas and course teams worked in tight partnerships with sls, and also invited students into the academic dance. funding changes in the second project led to new partnerships and what could be described as a widening of the dance. project 2: inclusive education and staff capacity building reflection self manage ment other?? thies rosario partners in a changing dance: embedding academic literacies in unit and course curricula journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 16 the inclusive curriculum and capacity building project was a shorter reprise of the original three-year project and had a different momentum. it was also government funded through heppp, but was conducted over a single year. while this project built on the recommendations from project 1, there was a greater emphasis on staff capacity building, with a focus on inclusive education and the embedding of essential academic and digital literacies and career development into undergraduate curricula. a key aim was sustainability beyond the life of the project. the project was managed by the equity and diversity area of the university, and project partners included language and learning advisers (llas), liaison librarians, careers advisers, the institute of koorie education, an inclusive curriculum design practitioner as well as co-opted members of academic teaching teams. the project brought together some of the partners from earlier heppp projects, and while staff who had been involved in project 1 saw this as a continuation of their previous work, there was a need to initiate different ways of engaging academic teaching teams, some of whom were new to the project. much of the embedded academic literacies work in this project was done in collaboration with sls in the faculty of business and law. working with units in the school of management, the project team reviewed assessment tasks and marking criteria in a first year and second year unit to ensure clarity and accessibility. a range of customised online learning resources, which included models of writing and teaching resources for tutorials, were then created in order to scaffold assessment tasks. each unit at this university has an online site and the sites for these two management units included resources that focused on the stages or facets of academic writing. the management lecturers, liaison librarians (lls) and llas presented jointly in at least two lectures and llas offered further feedback on assignment writing in ‘drop in with a draft’ sessions. llas and lls also participated in unit online discussion boards. additional sessions on analysing the question and structuring the assignments were offered to students studying totally online using blackboard collaborate. as these curricular changes were being made across two years of a course, there was a need to factor in students’ development of academic literacies over a two-year period, and to sequence the resources to support this development. the early childhood education (ece) team continued to develop a course site – ‘the early childhood education learning hub’, which presented a number of different modules on specific academic literacies. all staff and students studying ece had access to this site and links to these resources were included in individual ece unit sites. thies rosario partners in a changing dance: embedding academic literacies in unit and course curricula journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 17 the final module was on reflective learning, and included a self-reflection tool on students’ development of academic literacies, which students were required to complete at different times during their study. professional development was a key feature of this second project, with the overarching aim being for staff to gain an understanding of the principles of inclusive education. inclusive education aligns with good teaching practice and refers to curriculum design that incorporates multiple means of representation, expression and action and student engagement (morgan and houghton, 2011). this approach takes into account student diversity and involves engaging students in learning that is relevant and accessible (gale, 2010). one component of this professional development was for staff to gain a shared understanding of how a focus on academic literacies in curriculum development could contribute to inclusive education. face-to-face professional development sessions involved presentations from project 1 teams in order to showcase academic literacies curriculum development, and these sessions involved participation by both ongoing and sessional staff teaching in the targeted units. professional development videos were created with lecturers in management for use at the faculty level and to highlight the work of llas across the university. in addition, the inclusive design practitioner offered group pd sessions and individual support for curriculum development. the widening of the dance to include additional partners in project 2 meant that a collaborative approach between all members of the working group was more complicated. both the manager and lead for this project were from the university’s equity and diversity unit. while this structure contributed to information sharing across different heppp projects, the inclusion of what seemed to be an intermediary or additional planning process made collaboration more complex. there was a need for meetings of the larger project team and smaller working groups, which meant that the workload for all team members was increased, and the shortened length of this project often meant that the time period to plan and implement curricula was unrealistic. while the smaller working groups continued to collaborate, there was insufficient time to develop more complex structures to support collaboration across the project team. to call on the dance metaphor, the dancers continued the dance, but needed new choreography in order to dance with the larger team. thies rosario partners in a changing dance: embedding academic literacies in unit and course curricula journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 18 despite the challenges described above, the project achieved its stated aims, which were to build staff capacity to adopt sustainable approaches to embedding academic literacies, career development and principles of inclusive education in course design. the project team was ‘highly commended’ in the vice chancellor’s award for teaching excellence recognising the wide range of partners involved, the collaborative nature of the project and the project’s impact on teaching and learning at the university level. the llas and sls produced a joint presentation at national conferences (thies et al., 2013a; thies et al., 2013b), as well as presentations at the university’s teaching and learning conferences. lessons learnt: what remains when the dance is done? the evaluation data from both the projects is not presented here, but can be found in previous papers (thies et al., 2014; thies, 2016). the data supports a conclusion that students perceived these approaches as having enhanced their learning and contributed to their understanding of the ways to research, think, write, question and practise in their discipline. feedback from the staff confirmed that they believed that the collaborative approach and opportunity to reflect had enriched curricula and teaching practice across the university in a number of different ways. some project initiatives could be said to contribute to deep student learning or a movement towards a transformative approach, including incorporating the student voice into all professional development sessions, and the inclusion of different models of students’ self-reflection on the development of their academic literacies. the experience of the project partners also confirmed that university staff who contribute to course development should be aware of possible barriers and facilitators to such curricular change as previously outlined, and make strategic choices depending on national political decisions, availability of funding and the current policy directions of their individual higher education institution. for these reasons, the ideal of a ‘one size fits all’ model may be elusive: instead, practitioners will need to demonstrate a willingness to be flexible and innovative in order to achieve curricular change. as it is now several years since the completion of these projects it is timely to ask ‘what is the legacy of these projects?’ and ‘in what way have these projects contributed to future directions?’ like dancers in a constantly moving dance, our roles as llas in the two projects that make up this case study required an awareness of the environment and sensitivity to changing project partners. our experiences highlight the importance of simultaneously thies rosario partners in a changing dance: embedding academic literacies in unit and course curricula journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 19 being aware of the broader political context, working within the scope of university initiatives and focusing on the specific learning and teaching needs of students and staff in different disciplines. while the funding for these projects came from heppp and was aimed at social inclusion, the university was in the process of a major course enhancement process. we took advantage of this synergy to link academic literacy development to the implementation of graduate attributes in course curricula, the processes of australian qualifications framework (aqf) accreditation and course reaccreditation, as well as the academic promotion process. as these were the key factors driving a focus on improved teaching and learning approaches, this broader approach opened up the space for us to offer new perspectives. the use of an academic literacies approach ensured that our focus was squarely on improving learning and teaching outcomes and on the many-faceted needs of all learners. as llas we took the view that learning from one team in one discipline could be shared and adapted to different units and courses in a recursive process, and could have an impact at the institutional level. a dedicated conference strand in the university teaching and learning conference 2012 contributed to shared learning from the first project, as did research publications jointly authored by llas and sls. ‘the guide to developing academic literacies in your course curriculum’ created as part of the staff capacity building imperative of the second project is currently being redeveloped in a university-wide professional development site on ‘curriculum development for teaching staff’. the ‘facets of academic literacy’ (figures 3 and 5) are included in ‘the guide’. there has been a wider impact of these projects than we expected when we first commenced the dance. the reusability of learning objects created as part of the projects is an essential factor. to some extent, the resources developed as part of the projects have ‘gone wild’. a video about the academic skills and literacies needed for assessment tasks has been used in several units; the resources built in the management unit sites have been adapted by sls in other units in the faculty of business and law; the videos developed to support the use of the eportfolio tool for reflection in the school of it project have been used at the institutional level to support reflection in several disciplines. although the course sites developed for the bachelor of social work had become out of date as previous unit chairs involved in the project have left the university, there is an intention to reuse the videos presenting student voices in a future development of the thies rosario partners in a changing dance: embedding academic literacies in unit and course curricula journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 20 course site. similarly, a tool for students’ self-reflection on their development of academic literacies originally presented on the bachelor of early childhood education course site has been re-developed for use in other courses. while this awareness of the larger picture helped ensure that the projects contributed to curricular renewal, we are aware of the way in which changes in staff can impact on sustainability. a number of outcomes have been sustained, but there is a need to qualify the value and likelihood of ongoing sustainability of some of these outcomes. for example, different pedagogical knowledge shared by collaborating teams is sometimes lost through staff changes. continuing use of online learning resources can also place a burden on llas and sls to review and revise. it is encouraging to note that structural changes within the institution mean that llas have now taken on faculty liaison roles, working more closely with sls, as a way of making a broader contribution to the strategic goals of the university. as part of this wider approach, a new ‘transition toolkit’ project that provides exemplars of resources, such as learning activities, which teaching teams can draw upon in scaffolding the development of academic literacies at the first-year level, will draw on some of the work done in the two projects. there may be scope for further development of resources, like the tools to support self-reflection, to contribute to students’ reflection on achievement of course learning outcomes (clos). as initially suggested in this paper, the leaders of an academic literacies approach need to be innovative in seeking ways to sustain these outcomes. for example, as the federal government moves away from supporting low ses background students, heppp funding will not be available, so one imperative will be to explore other funding sources and/or to identify other ways of prioritising time for collaborative curriculum development. conclusion the twin projects that make up this case study illustrate some of the enabling factors for using an academic literacies perspective to help drive curricular change. the success of most components of the projects (and failure of some) was largely dependent on the level of collaboration between different project partners, and this collaboration aimed to foster a shared understanding of language, theoretical frameworks, and pedagogical approaches. comparing some aspects of the collaborative approach in this case study to a dance has helped us recognise the complexity of the performance as well as the facilitators and thies rosario partners in a changing dance: embedding academic literacies in unit and course curricula journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 21 barriers to curricular change. the case study also demonstrates how academic literacies theory can be used as the rationale for curricular design and teaching practice. adopting different approaches and mapping frameworks to identify, define and explain the academic literacies privileged in the discourse of specific disciplines represents, a movement away from the basic dance pattern of a focus on generic academic skills. the major objective of raising student awareness of the academic requirements within their discipline area, as well as in the broader university context, was achieved through adopting curricula that best suited the discipline and teaching team. this included the development of online resources and learning activities for students, team teaching by llas and sls, and resources and professional development sessions with a focus on staff capacity building. a movement towards a transformative approach – where students start to understand the ‘hidden rules of the game’ and explore issues of power and identity – was more challenging. the projects contribute to an understanding of different ways of approaching curriculum design using an academic literacies perspective. however, the manner in which this curricular change might be enacted will not only be contingent on policy directions at the national and institutional level, but even more so on priorities at the faculty or department level of individual higher education institutions. a spectacular dance performance is contingent on the flexibility of the dancers – sometimes dancing in sync and sometimes individually, sometimes taking the lead and sometimes following, able to perform different dance styles and, most importantly, sustaining high energy levels until the curtain call. similarly, the movement towards academic literacies’ best practice will require enthusiasm, commitment, flexibility, and an ability to keep in tune with broader political imperatives, while working collaboratively with a range of key players across the university to keep pace with the needs of new waves of students. references australian commonwealth government. (2009a) transforming australia’s higher education system. canberra: commonwealth of australia. available at: http://www.deewr.gov.au/highereducation/documents/pdf/additional%20report% http://www.deewr.gov.au/highereducation/documents/pdf/additional%20report%20-%20transforming%20aus%20higher%20ed_webaw.pdf thies rosario partners in a changing dance: embedding academic literacies in unit and course curricula journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 22 20-%20transforming%20aus%20higher%20ed_webaw.pdf (accessed: 20 february 2010). australian commonwealth government. (2009b) speech by lisa paul, ‘transforming australia’s higher education system’. canberra: commonwealth of australia. available at: https://docs.education.gov.au/documents/transforming-australiaseducation-system-speech-lisa-paul-november-2009 (accessed: 1 june 2015). bath, d. smith, c. stein s. and swann, r. (2007) ‘beyond mapping and embedding graduate attributes: bringing together quality assurance and action learning to create a validated and living curriculum’, higher education research and development, 23(3), pp.313-328. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/0729436042000235427 (accessed: 1 may 2019). bourdieu, p. (1986) ‘the forms of capital’, in richardson, j.g. (ed.), handbook of theory and research for the sociology of education (trans. richard nice). new york: greenwood press. burrell, a., cavanagh, m., young, s. and carter, h. (2015) ‘team-based curriculum design as an agent of change’, teaching in higher education, 20(8), pp.753-766. available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2015.1085856 (accessed: 1 may 2019). cairns, j. hervey, t. and johnson, o. (2018) ‘neither ‘bolt-on’ nor ‘built-in’: benefits and challenges of developing an integrated skills curriculum through a partnership model’, journal of learning development in higher education, issue 13, april, available at: https://journal.aldinhe.ac.uk/index.php/jldhe/article/view/435 (accessed: 30 may 2019). chanock, k., horton, c., reedman, m. and stephenson, b. (2012) ‘collaborating to embed academic literacies and personal support in first year discipline subjects’, journal of university teaching and learning practice, 9(3), available at: http://ro.uow.edu.au/jutlp/vol9/iss3/3 (accessed: 9 may 2016). http://www.deewr.gov.au/highereducation/documents/pdf/additional%20report%20-%20transforming%20aus%20higher%20ed_webaw.pdf https://docs.education.gov.au/documents/transforming-australias-education-system-speech-lisa-paul-november-2009 https://docs.education.gov.au/documents/transforming-australias-education-system-speech-lisa-paul-november-2009 https://doi.org/10.1080/0729436042000235427 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2015.1085856 https://journal.aldinhe.ac.uk/index.php/jldhe/article/view/435 http://ro.uow.edu.au/jutlp/vol9/iss3/3 thies rosario partners in a changing dance: embedding academic literacies in unit and course curricula journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 23 coates, h. and krause k. l. (2005) ‘investigating ten years of equity policy in australian higher education’, journal of higher education policy and management, 27(1), pp.35-47. deakin university. (2013) annual report. available at: https://www.deakin.edu.au/aboutdeakin/strategic-direction?_ga=2.132708297.673047362.15709405521750931484.1561700617 (accessed: 20 may 2016). deakin university. (2018) annual report. available at: https://www.deakin.edu.au/aboutdeakin/strategic-direction?_ga=2.132708297.673047362.15709405521750931484.1561700617 (accessed: 1 may 2019). durkin, k. and main, a. (2002) ‘discipline-based study skills support for first year undergraduate students’, active learning in higher education, 3(24) pp.24-39. available at: https://doi.org/10.1177%2f1469787402003001003 (accessed: 1 may 2019). goldingay, s., hitch, d., carrington, a. and rosario, v. (2016) ‘transforming roles to support student development of academic literacies: a reflection on one team’s experience’, reflective practice: international and multidisciplinary perspectives, 17(3). available at https://doi.org/10.1080/14623943.2016.1164682 (accessed: 1 may 2016). gustafsson, m., eriksson, a., raisanen, c., stenberg, a., jacobs, c., wright, j., wyrleybirch, b. and winberg, c. (2011) ‘collaborating for content and language integrated learning: the situated character of faculty collaboration and student learning’, across the disciplines, 8(3). http://wac.colostate.edu/atd/clil/gustafssonetal.cfm (accessed: 26 may 2016). harper, r. (2011) academic literacy development framework. university of canberra: academic skills centre. healey, m., bradford, m., roberts, c. and knight, y. (2013) ‘collaborative discipline-based curriculum change: applying change academy processes at department level’, https://www.deakin.edu.au/about-deakin/strategic-direction?_ga=2.132708297.673047362.1570940552-1750931484.1561700617 https://www.deakin.edu.au/about-deakin/strategic-direction?_ga=2.132708297.673047362.1570940552-1750931484.1561700617 https://www.deakin.edu.au/about-deakin/strategic-direction?_ga=2.132708297.673047362.1570940552-1750931484.1561700617 https://www.deakin.edu.au/about-deakin/strategic-direction?_ga=2.132708297.673047362.1570940552-1750931484.1561700617 https://www.deakin.edu.au/about-deakin/strategic-direction?_ga=2.132708297.673047362.1570940552-1750931484.1561700617 https://www.deakin.edu.au/about-deakin/strategic-direction?_ga=2.132708297.673047362.1570940552-1750931484.1561700617 https://doi.org/10.1177%2f1469787402003001003 https://doi.org/10.1080/14623943.2016.1164682 http://wac.colostate.edu/atd/clil/gustafssonetal.cfm thies rosario partners in a changing dance: embedding academic literacies in unit and course curricula journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 24 international journal for academic development, 18(1), pp.31-44. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/1360144x.2011.628394 (accessed: 10 may 2016). hunter, f. (2019) ‘government raises concerns over foreign uni students english skills’, sydney morning herald, 10 may. james, r. (2002) ‘socioeconomic background and higher education participation: an analysis’, department of education, science and training: canberra. available at: http://www.cshe.unimelb.edu.au/research/equity/docs/eip02_5.pdf (accessed: 1 may 2016). james, r. (2007) ‘social equity in a mass, globalised higher education environment: the unresolved issue of widening access to university’, series 2007. available at http://www.cshe.unimelb.edu (accessed: 16 january 2016). johnson, s., veitch, s. and dewiyanti, s. (2015) ‘a framework to embed communication skills across the curriculum: a design-based research approach’, journal of university teaching and learning practice, 12(4). available at: http://ro.uow.edu.au/jutlp/vol12/iss4/6 (accessed: 16 january 2016). jolly, l. (2001) ‘implementing graduate attributes, graduate attributes fact sheet 1.10’, the value added career start program. university of queensland, brisbane. available at: http://www.vacs.uq.edu.au/final/1_10.pdf (accessed: 4 august, 2011). jones, j. (2008) ‘generic attributes: an agenda for reform or control’, changing identities. available at: https://learning.uow.edu.au/las2001/selected/jones_2.pdf (accessed: 1 may 2016). kift, s. (2009). ‘articulating a transition pedagogy to scaffold and to enhance the first year student learning experience in australian higher education. final report for altc senior fellowship program’. altc resources. available at: http://www.altc.edu.au/resources-first-year-experience-kift-2009 (accessed: 16 january 2016). https://doi.org/10.1080/1360144x.2011.628394 http://www.cshe.unimelb.edu.au/research/equity/docs/eip02_5.pdf http://www.cshe.unimelb.edu/ http://ro.uow.edu.au/jutlp/vol12/iss4/6 http://www.vacs.uq.edu.au/final/1_10.pdf https://learning.uow.edu.au/las2001/selected/jones_2.pdf http://www.altc.edu.au/resources-first-year-experience-kift-2009 thies rosario partners in a changing dance: embedding academic literacies in unit and course curricula journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 25 lea, m. and street b. (1998) ‘student writing in higher education: an academic literacies approach’, studies in higher education, 23(2), pp.157-172. lea, m. (2004) ‘academic literacies: a pedagogy for course design’, studies in higher education, 29(6), pp.739-756. lea, m. and street, b. (2006) ‘the academic literacies model: theory and applications’, theory into practice, fall, 45(4), pp.368-377. lillis, t. (2003) ‘an “academic literacies” approach to student writing: drawing on bakhtin to move from critique to design’, language and education, 17(3), pp.192-207. lillis, t., harrington, k., lea m. and mitchell, s. (2016) working with academic literacies: case studies towards transformative practice. the wac clearinghouse, parlour press, colorado. lillis, t. and scott, m. (2007) ‘defining academic literacies research: issues of epistemology, ideology and strategy’, journal of applied linguistics. available at: https://doi.org/10.1558/japl.v4i1.5 (accessed: 5 may 2012). maldoni, a. and lear, e. (2016) ‘a decade of embedding: where are we now?’, journal of university teaching and learning practice, 13(3). available at: http://ro.uow.edu.au/jutlp/vol13/iss3/2 (accessed: 5 june 2018). mcwilliams, r. and allan, q. (2014) ‘embedding academic literacy skills: towards a best practice model’, journal of university teaching and learning practice, 11(3). available at: http://ro.uow.edu.au/jutlp/vol11/iss3/8 (accessed: 4 may 2016). minogue l., murphy, c. and salmons, k. (2018) ‘embedding learning development: a model for collaborative practice’, journal of learning development in higher education, issue 13, april. available at: http://journal.aldinhe.ac.uk/index.php/jldhe/article/view/443 (accessed: 3 june 2019). https://doi.org/10.1558/japl.v4i1.5 http://ro.uow.edu.au/jutlp/vol13/iss3/2 http://ro.uow.edu.au/jutlp/vol11/iss3/8 http://journal.aldinhe.ac.uk/index.php/jldhe/article/view/443 thies rosario partners in a changing dance: embedding academic literacies in unit and course curricula journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 26 moore, t. and hough, b. (2005) ‘the perils of skills: towards a model of integrating graduate attributes into the discipline’, in milnes, s. (ed.) critiquing and reflecting: las profession and practice. proceedings of the language and academic skills in higher education conference, 24-25 november. canberra: the australian national university. available at: http://www.aall.org.au/sites/default/files/las2005/moore_hough.pdf (accessed: 1 may 2016). morgan, h. and houghton, a. (2011) ‘inclusive curriculum design in higher education: considerations for effective practice across and within subject areas’, higher education academy, york, uk. available at: https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/resources/detail/inclusion/disability/inclusive_curricul um_design_in_higher_education (accessed: 22 october 2015). murray, n. and nallaya, s. (2016) ‘embedding academic literacies in university program curricula: a case study’, studies in higher education, 41(7), pp.1296-1312. available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2014.981150 (accessed: 2 may 2019). norton, a. (2016) mapping australian higher education 2016, grattan institute report. available at: https://grattan.edu.au/report/mapping-australian-higher-education2016/ (accessed: 1 june 2019). priest, a. (2009) ‘i have understanding as well as you: supporting the language and learning needs of students from low socio-economic status background’, journal of academic language and learning, 3(2), a1-a12. available at: http://journal.aall.org.au/index.php/jall/article/view/95/69 (accessed: 2 february 2016). thies, l. (2012). ‘increasing student participation and success: collaborating to embed academic literacies into the curriculum’, journal of academic language and learning, 6(1), a15-a32. available at: http://journal.aall.org.au/index.php/jall/article/view/127 (accessed: 6 february 2012). http://www.aall.org.au/sites/default/files/las2005/moore_hough.pdf https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/resources/detail/inclusion/disability/inclusive_curriculum_design_in_higher_education https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/resources/detail/inclusion/disability/inclusive_curriculum_design_in_higher_education http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2014.981150 https://grattan.edu.au/report/mapping-australian-higher-education-2016/ https://grattan.edu.au/report/mapping-australian-higher-education-2016/ http://journal.aall.org.au/index.php/jall/article/view/95/69 http://journal.aall.org.au/index.php/jall/article/view/127 thies rosario partners in a changing dance: embedding academic literacies in unit and course curricula journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 27 thies, l., rosario, v., goldingay, s., nipperess, s., coldwell-neilson, j. and shang, g. (2013a) ‘embedding academic literacies: the challenges of measuring success’, aall conference, melbourne, november. thies, l. rosario, v. goldingay, s. wishart, l. (2013b) ‘how reflecting collaborativley helps us support academic literacies development in two disciplines’, aall conference, melbourne, november. thies, l. wallis, a. turner, a. wishart, l. (2014) ‘embedded academic literacies curricula: the challenges of measuring success’, journal of academic language and learning, 8(2), a43-a59. available at: http://journal.aall.org.au/index.php/jall/article/view/301 (accessed: 24 may 2014). thies, l. (2016) ‘building staff capacity through reflecting on collaborative development of embedded academic literacies curricula’, journal of university teaching and learning practice, 13(5) [online]. available at: https://ro.uow.edu.au/jutlp/vol13/iss5/19/ (accessed: 22 december 2016). varghese, n. v. (2013) ‘globalization and higher education: changing trends in cross border education’, analytical reports in international education, 5(1), pp.7-20. willison, j., le lievre, k. and lee, i. (2010) ‘making research skill development explicit in coursework, final report’, australian government department of education employment and workplace relations: australian learning and teaching counsel. willison, j. and o'regan, k. (2007) ‘commonly known, commonly not known; a framework for students becoming researchers’, higher education research and development, 26(4), pp.393-409. wingate, u. (2006) ‘doing away with study skills’, teaching in higher education, 11(4), pp.457-469. wingate, u. and tribble c. (2012) ‘the best of both worlds? towards an english for academic purposes/academic literacies writing pedagogy’, society for research http://journal.aall.org.au/index.php/jall/article/view/301 https://ro.uow.edu.au/jutlp/vol13/iss5/19/ thies rosario partners in a changing dance: embedding academic literacies in unit and course curricula journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 28 into higher education. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2010.525630 (accessed: 1 may 2016). young, j. (2004) ‘becoming different: accessing university from a low socio-economic community barriers and motivators’, systemic practice and action research, 17(5), pp.425-469. author details linda carol thies is a language and learning adviser at the warrnambool campus of deakin university. she is particularly interested in the development of students’ academic literacies through an inclusive approach to curriculum development. email: linda.thies@deakin.edu.au. viola rosario remains interested in collaborative curriculum design and online development to support learning, though she has now retired from her role as a language and learning adviser at the burwood campus of deakin university. email: viola.rosario.lla@gmail.com. https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2010.525630 mailto:linda.thies@deakin.edu.au mailto:viola.rosario.lla@gmail.com partners in a changing dance: embedding academic literacies in unit and course curricula abstract introduction background to the two projects embedding academic literacies in course curricula project 2: inclusive education and staff capacity building lessons learnt: what remains when the dance is done? conclusion references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special issue 22: compendium of innovative practice october 2021 ________________________________________________________________________ teaching and learning under emergency remote, online conditions: ‘let’s connect’ with our students shalini dukhan university of the witwatersrand, gauteng, south africa keywords: affective domain; lecturer practice; student learning; covid-19 the challenge in the swift move from in-person lectures to online learning, most universities hurriedly composed resources which helped lecturers move content online and supported students with access to the online environment (le grange, 2020). however, little attention went towards online measures to help lecturers gain insight into the students’ comprehension of content. having insight into the students’ foundational knowledge, on which lecturers build is considered part of good pedagogic practice (biggs and tang, 2007). moreover, less attention was focused on the affective domain and the creation of a social space for lecturers and students to connect in; this has particular relevance for large, first-year classes who are new to this academic environment. thus, while the technical aspects of enabling students to access the online content received consideration, areas associated with the affective and cognitive domains needed responsiveness. as a lecturer, i wanted my first years to know that i was available for them even if our physical interaction was limited. my concern with the move to the online platform was that i was not able to easily identify concepts my students found challenging. during the inperson lectures, the mannerisms of the students and questions that they posed gave an indication of their understanding, and this helped to shape instruction. this communication was limited in the online environment, where pre-recorded lectures became the norm and discussion forums were a place only a few students ventured. one focus of this article is to provide a way in which lecturers can establish contact with students in large online classes, and the other focus is to propose a way for lecturers to identify the cognitively challenging concepts that students experience on the course. dukhan teaching and learning under emergency remote, online conditions: ‘let’s connect’ with our students journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 2 noddings’ (2005) seminal work forms the basis of the ‘pedagogy of care’. this framework highlights the centrality of the affective domain which influences pedagogic praxis as it explains the importance of our response as lecturers to our students. the lecturers’ responsiveness within the online environment could provide students with a sense of support at a time when there is limited in-person contact (rose and adams, 2014). there is, however, a dearth of literature on whether this notion is justified for the large, first-year classes. the response in 2021 i moved my teaching from in-person lectures to the online environment. to establish a connection with my class of 522 biology first-years, and to identify conceptual challenges that they experienced with the content, i constructed a document entitled ‘let’s connect’. this document, provided in the first week, consisted of six questions, and for the five weeks that followed, i provided different sets of a maximum of three questions (examples below). the document was provided online every monday, and the deadline for submission was the following monday, the students’ response was voluntary. to get to know my students i gave the following statements to them in week 1: • tell me about yourself • my personal and/or academic goal this year is to… • i think a typical day this year will involve … • my fears for this course/year are … • my expectations of myself in this course are … • i hope my lecturer … over the weeks that followed this document focused on uncovering the content that students had difficulty understanding. the following stems were posed: • i didn't understand this material that was covered this week … dukhan teaching and learning under emergency remote, online conditions: ‘let’s connect’ with our students journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 3 • summarise the most important concepts of the week as concisely as you can. write this out as if you were explaining it to someone with little biological background… • this is what my lecturer thought i knew but i actually don't have this knowledge for the work that was covered this week … the question which probed the students’ expectations of assessments was: • if you were the lecturer, what questions would you ask to find out whether the students understood the most important material for this week? the main affirmation for the value of the ‘let’s connect’ document came from the class representatives, who reported that the responses the class received helped them better understand the layout of topics and how they should work with the material that was provided online. 90.8% (n=474) of the class responded in the first week; this decreased to 40.1% (n=213) by the final week. an advantage of this initiative is that usually during an inperson 45-minute lecture, i would receive about five questions from the class, but with the let’s connect document, i received questions from an average of 57.9% (n=302) of the class per week. students were using this opportunity to deepen their understanding. considering that first years come from a variety of school backgrounds, i achieved an understanding of what their foundational knowledge was for gateway concepts for the course and used this to personalise my lecture presentations. recommendations first years need to feel part of the learning environment for quality engagement to occur. lecturers need to find ways to create a space for this connection between the students and lecturer within the online learning environment. the let’s connect document provided a space for meaningful conversation. this type of initiative could assist the lecturer to create a more enriched learning environment based on the needs of the students. the drawback was the intensive time and effort it took to establish this line of communication with the students. to circumvent this problem, i divided the class list into two, and, on a rotational basis, responded to each half on alternate weeks. based on the content of the dukhan teaching and learning under emergency remote, online conditions: ‘let’s connect’ with our students journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 4 responses, i provided the class with feedback on common areas of concern. going forward, i will allocate students to small groups of about five students each. once students have completed the let’s connect document individually, they could discuss their responses within their group, and a group representative could then list the key responses and concerns. this collated response could then be sent to me. during class i will provide general feedback based on their response as a cohort and show how these are addressed in the lecture structure. thereby students should still feel heard and be aware of the connection that exists between them and the lecturer. references biggs, j. and tang, c. (2007) teaching for quality learning at university: what the student does. new york, ny: mcgraw-hill. rose, e. and adams, c. (2014) ‘“will i ever connect with the students?” online teaching and the pedagogy of care’, phenomenology & practice 8(1), pp. 5-16. available at: https://doi.org/10.29173/pandpr20637 (accessed: 7 september 2021). le grange, l. (2020) ‘could the covid-19 pandemic accelerate the uberfication of the university?’ south african journal of higher education 34(4) 1-10. available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.20853/34-4-4071 (accessed: 7 september 2021). noddings, n. (2005) the challenge to care in schools: an alternative approach to education. 2nd edn. new york: teachers college press. author details shalini dukhan is a senior lecturer in the school of animal, plant, and environmental sciences at the university of the witwatersrand, gauteng, south africa. her present teaching focuses on cell biology and microscopy at the undergraduate level. her postgraduate supervision and research interests are in examining factors that impact on the development of science identity among biology students and how this influences their https://doi.org/10.29173/pandpr20637 http://dx.doi.org/10.20853/34-4-4071 dukhan teaching and learning under emergency remote, online conditions: ‘let’s connect’ with our students journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 5 learning approaches and academic achievement. she is also involved in projects which explore how teaching practices that incorporate indigenous knowledge improve the students’ access to learning science. teaching and learning under emergency remote, online conditions: ‘let’s connect’ with our students the challenge the response recommendations references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special issue 22: compendium of innovative practice october 2021 ________________________________________________________________________ learning by engaging: connecting with our students to keep them active and attentive in online classes lynn gribble university of new south wales, australia janis wardrop university of new south wales, australia keywords: engaging; student connection; emojis; covid-19. the challenge our challenge was to take a large postgraduate course, comprised of 90% international students, online while maintaining student engagement. the course was based on constructivist principles (after piaget, 1973, and vygotsky, 1978), requiring the students to actively engage in their learning with a mix of activity-based workshops (rather than tutorials) and large group case study discussion (rather than lectures). as a commencing course in the programme, one of the central missions of our course is to encourage and equip students to be successful in a learning environment that requires greater engagement and self-regulatory behaviour. many of these students have previous experience with largely didactic approaches to learning, where the teacher at the front of the room is the expert to be listened to. now the challenge we confronted was not just the familiar one of introducing students to a more active and engaged method of learning but of doing so in an online classroom. we also knew that access to technology and reliable internet connections would be additional issues that we would need to accommodate. the response we wanted our students to have the opportunity to have a voice in the classroom and to interact and engage with us and the materials as they would in a face-to-face environment. their personal context was equally important as many students would have been gribble and wardrop learning by engaging: connecting with our students to keep them active and attentive in online classes journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 2 experiencing anxiety, along with a sense of loss and dislocation, irrespective of whether than had returned to their home country as the pandemic hit or were now effectively marooned in australia (salmi, 2020; mushquash and grassia, 2021). hence building a sense of community and connection within the cohort was an imperative. quickly we turned our attention to using tools within our learning management system (lms), moodle, or any system that could be deployed through a one click link. this was to ensure that the student cognitive load to learn was not consumed by learning, using, or accessing complex technology (moore, 1993). to provide students with a sense of connection and engagement within the cohort we delivered classes synchronously. while students were encouraged to participate in discussions using microphone and video, it was quickly apparent that (for whatever reason) they were more confident contributing via the chat function. thus, the online chat function replaced the in-person classroom discussions allowing us to maintain the interactive and iterative approach to learning that is a feature of constructivist approaches. within the chat panel, emojis created the opportunity to welcome and acknowledge each student quickly as they arrived and departed. more importantly they helped break down the pre-conceived formal barriers of teacher and student, building an informal and safe learning environment where students developed the confidence to ask questions and voice their opinions (albeit in the chat box), as they would during a face-to-face class. anecdotal feedback from students suggests they appreciated the approach. as we teach multiple subjects, students now look for these practices when they next meet us. furthermore, students are encouraging other teachers to employ similar tactics. the use of emojis is familiar to the students and part of the language they use when texting friends informally. by using emojis we can bring their language into the classroom and reduce the formality. we encouraged the use of emojis in the chat function as a feedback channel, since the students could and would quickly send an emoji to let us know if they understood or had questions and to indicate how they were feeling as classes started and ended. as a feedback mechanism, teachers issued stars for good answers, coffees for supporting others, and constellations of stars for exemplary answers; the talking head was given to any well-considered answer. gribble and wardrop learning by engaging: connecting with our students to keep them active and attentive in online classes journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 3 in order to keep students engaged we recognised that asking them to do things focused them on the lesson at hand and kept them busy interacting with us. interactively using polls via the socrative® platform enabled us to support students emotionally and initiate conversations about their needs and concerns. rather than merely measuring conceptual understanding of course material, we measured student sentiment enabling us to provide emotional support in a time when students may have felt disconnected or lost in their digital learning environment. the poll data was ‘mine-able’, meaning we could ensure our communications during and following class spoke to their reported needs and concerns. these polls ask students to respond to questions with multiple choice answers, such as ‘i’m lost’, ‘i’m confident’, or ‘i think i’m okay’. recommendations technology does not have to be faceless or emotionless. it can enable connection and engagement, but it must match and start where the student is. emojis are easily accessible, while teaching to ‘cut and paste into the chat box’ and encouraging students to participate in an open dialogue during class is easy to integrate into the framework of your class. keeping the student’s attention can be achieved through expectations of interaction. by extending the use of polls beyond their traditional use of content confirmation to realtime pulse checks of student engagement and emotional commitment to learning we were able to build a culture of care through acknowledging the student and their unique situation. reflecting on how we would interact in a face-to-face classroom, we encourage the use of tools, already available in existing lms technology, to provide interactive opportunities. these are simple to use and can be enacted just as you might ask ‘hands up …’. in a physical classroom we look for twitches and phone scrolling to provide feedback on engagement; online, we monitor the speed of response rates when polling as well as the chat functions to keep the students interacting. while the students might now be keyboard warriors, they are not faceless and emotionless; they are waiting to be drawn into text-style conversation and interaction with you just as they are with their peers. references gribble and wardrop learning by engaging: connecting with our students to keep them active and attentive in online classes journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 4 moore, m. j. (1993) ‘three types of interaction’, in harry, k., john, m. and keegan, d. (eds.) distance education theory. new york: routledge, pp.19–24. mushquash, a. r. and grassia, e. (2021) ‘coping during covid-19: examining student stress and depressive symptoms’, journal of american college health, https://doi.org/10.1080/07448481.2020.1865379. piaget, j. (1973) main trends in psychology. london: allen and unwin. salmi, j. (2020) covid’s lessons for global higher education. available at: https://www.luminafoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/covids-lessons-forglobal-higher-education.pdf (accessed: 22 june 2021). vygotsky, l. s. (1978) mind in society: the development of higher psychological processes. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. author details lynn gribble (sfhea) has taught management to large classes of master of business administration and master of commerce students for 15 years and is a leader in online learning. she has pioneered the use of voice recordings, audience response platforms, and learning analytics to personalise every interaction with her students, increasing both their engagement and learning outcomes. janis wardrop (sfhea) is an academic leader, educational change agent, and commentator on management education, and business ethics and governance. with 15 years’ experience in academia as both lecturer, programme leader, and manager, her expertise lies in adopting a holistic approach to curriculum design. she is committed to providing unsw students with the best educational outcomes to establish themselves as global leaders. https://doi.org/10.1080/07448481.2020.1865379 https://www.luminafoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/covids-lessons-for-global-higher-education.pdf https://www.luminafoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/covids-lessons-for-global-higher-education.pdf learning by engaging: connecting with our students to keep them active and attentive in online classes the challenge the response recommendations references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 15: november 2019 ________________________________________________________________________ textography as a needs analysis and research tool for english for academic purposes and learning development practitioners jennifer sizer university of portsmouth, uk abstract the purpose of this paper to introduce textography as a useful method for english for academic purposes (eap) and learning development (ld) practitioners to fill gaps in subject-specific knowledge and understanding. textography is a research method that may be new to many practitioners. textography combines textual analysis, usually associated with eap, and ethnographic methods, often associated with ld, to investigate contexts, texts and practices. eap and ld practitioners can use textography with accessible texts as initial needs analysis before reviewing literature or as a more in-depth, long-term research tool. keywords: practitioner research; textography; ethnography; textual analysis; practice; context. introduction it is widely accepted that academic literacy practices vary between, and even within, contexts and disciplines (russell et al., 2005; lillis and tuck, 2016). therefore, students require multiple academic literacies or understanding of associated practice(s), cultural norms, values, genres, and expectations of their discipline and context (becher and trowler, 2001; neumann, 2001; basturkmen, 2003; archer, 2006; jacobs, 2007; trowler et al., 2014; flowerdew and costley, 2017). street et al., (2015) strongly suggest academic literacies, and practitioners working within academic literacies, should be working towards making these multiple literacies visible. sizer textography as a needs analysis and research tool for english for academic purposes and learning development practitioners journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 2 however, developing a greater understanding of the varying, often implicit, demands across diverse contexts/disciplines can be challenging for practitioners working within english for academic purposes (eap) /learning development (ld). firstly, available research may not be relevant for the students’ subject of study. the research may be too generic and feature an english for general academic purposes approach (egap) (blue, 1988). this egap approach is also reflective of the study skills model that assumes knowledge of academic writing can be transferred unproblematically between contexts (lea and street, 2006). generic research featuring these approaches includes coxhead’s (2000, p. 213) original ‘academic word list’ that claimed to cover ‘all’ academic subjects. coxhead and others have since advocated more specificity in academic writing research (hyland, 2002b, 2002a, 2017; coxhead, 2011). despite these calls, academic writing research has some underrepresented subject areas. academic disciplines such as business have higher numbers of students (nearly 350,000 enrolments in the uk in 2017/18 according to hesa, 2019), so texts are more abundant and may feature more frequently in academic writing studies. in contrast, some academic disciplines, e.g. creative arts and design, have smaller numbers of students (around half the number of business enrolments in 2017/18 according to hesa, 2019). this may result in fewer researchable student texts, particularly in subject areas with fewer students and/or higher frequency of student texts which can be difficult to incorporate into corpus research e.g. multimodal texts. this may explain the absence of arts and design texts from many corpora including british academic written english (bawe) corpus (coventry university, 2019) and corpus research including coxhead’s academic word list. practitioners may have difficulty in locating relevant research, particularly for subject areas with fewer students, texts/research studies. alternatively, practitioners may discover research that appears superficially relevant for the subject but may find contextual factors have a significant impact on practice(s) and texts. academic literacies research often features ethnography, which can provide highly contextualised academic writing studies (lillis, 2008; street et al., 2015). this can be a strength if working in a similar context, but contextual factors can be difficult to identify, particularly when working with a less familiar subject area. texts produced by students may superficially appear to be from one subject area but may also be influenced by the sizer textography as a needs analysis and research tool for english for academic purposes and learning development practitioners journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 3 context: linguistic context, university structures/management, academic specialisms, and interdisciplinarity of some courses. multilingual, plurilingual, or bilingual academic contexts may have significant impacts on textual practices and production even within similar disciplines/subjects (see curry’s work, e.g. lillis and curry, 2006). in terms of structure, for historical and logistical reasons courses may be aligned in several divergent university structures. for example, some contexts may place a subject such as architecture within creative faculties and subsequent texts may be more art and design based. other universities may place architecture within science faculties and subsequent texts may be more engineering based. academics working within specific disciplines or subject areas may also have diverse specialisms resulting in diverse identities and texts, for example, see archer's (2006) work on engineering identities and posters. conversely, academics may share a narrow field of specialism within the subject area which may further impact texts and practices. one strategy to ensure research relevance is for eap and ld practitioners to conduct subject-specific research within their own contexts. however, this can seem a daunting challenge, particularly in terms of financial and time commitments, for many colleagues for whom research is not an explicit/paid element of their job role (see commentary on role of research for ld and eap practitioners from johnson, 2018; sizer, 2019a). i suggest one solution for practitioners is performing a subject-specific and contextual needs analysis using textography. needs analysis is defined here as establishing the contextual situation through textual analysis of the target situation (dudley-evans and st john, 1998). textography as an initial needs analysis tool provides practitioners with opportunities to explore lesser-known subject areas through accessible texts within their own contexts. textography as a research method provides an in-depth highly contextualised study of texts and practices within a specific subject. textography textography brings together research methods often utilised by both eap and ld practitioners. textography blends linguistics research involving textual analysis with academic literacies research featuring a ‘strong ethnographic orientation’ (street et al., 2015, p. 395). ergo, textual analysis with ethnography becomes textography. lillis and sizer textography as a needs analysis and research tool for english for academic purposes and learning development practitioners journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 4 scott (2007) suggest academic literacies research can involve investigating the ‘nature of academic writing in different sites’ (p. 9). similarly, the aim of textography is to research academic writing within a specific context. textography history the first recorded use of the term textography was in 1998 by john swales. swales is well-known for his text-based research within eap (swales, 1990, 2000, 2003). however, swales’ site-based textographic study brought textual analysis and ethnography together to investigate three academic communities (including his own community) within one university building. swales (1990, p. 1) described his textography as ‘something more than a disembodied textual or discoursal analysis, but something less than a full ethnographic account’. paltridge (2008, p. 11) describes a textography’s aim as examining the ‘contextualization’ and the ‘situatedness’ of written texts and textual practices and get an ‘inside view of the worlds in which the texts are written’ (paltridge et al., 2012, p. 992). in the editor’s introduction of swales’ ‘other floors, other voices: a textography of a small university building’ bazerman describes swales wandering the context collecting texts and discovering distinct textual practices, ‘cultures and ways of life’ (bazerman, 1998, p. ix-x). swales (1998) collected a variety of texts e.g. memos, cvs, journal articles, minutes, signs, and notes in order to explore the culture, community and context. firstly, swales (1998) used archival research to explore the history of the university building and three communities within the building: the herbarium, the computing resource site, and the english language institute. this archival research was combined with photographs of the context and its texts to provide a ‘pictorial sense of the building’ (paltridge, 2008, p. 11). the use of photography is well established in ethnographic research (see work by schwartz, 1989; pink, 2012, 2013; heng, 2017;) and in academic literacies research (ingle and yakovchuk, 2015). swales (1998, p.26) also collected texts representing ‘routine business’ of the three communities, such as memos, signs, and other correspondence, as well as longer written texts more closely associated with academic communities such as; journal articles, monographs, and floras from the herbarium. alongside collecting and photographing texts, swales also observed the communities and made field notes of observations (swales, 1998). swales then reassembled the texts to sizer textography as a needs analysis and research tool for english for academic purposes and learning development practitioners journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 5 create textual histories (swales, 1998). these textual histories provided a narrative for subsequent interviews but were not necessarily examples of narrative enquiry which often involve participants writing their own personal narratives, (see hale at al., 2007). finally, swales then interviewed the participants. swales (1998) found differing voices, texts, and textual practices in the three contexts/cultures. subsequently, swales defined two of the contexts as distinct ‘place discourse communities’: a group of people who work together and use a range of genres that have evolved during the existence of their community (paltridge, 2008). swales’ textography represented a step away from more traditional textual analysis and often purely etic approach from an outsider researcher perspective external to the community being researched (lillis, 2008) which is often associated with linguistics and eap research. swales’ textography explores situated writing practices and texts in the context using a more emic approach from an insider writer perspective (lillis, 2008) using ethnographic methods within his own academic community. in addition, swales included other academic communities providing opportunities for a more ‘emic/etic approach’ exploring relationships between insiders’ and outsiders’ views (street, 2012, p. 41) and allowing for comparisons between communities. textography benefits one of the major benefits for practitioners using textography as needs analysis is contextual relevance. this focus on context is often achieved through photography and observation of texts and practice in-situ during site-based studies. lillis (2008, p. 354) claims there is ‘growing recognition for the need to focus on the context of writing’. lillis and tuck (2016) also emphasise this need ‘for ethnographic methodologies which facilitate analysis of texts as part of contexts’ (p. 39). in this paper, i suggest textography as a research method that answers these calls (lillis and scott, 2007; lillis, 2008; lillis and tuck, 2016). textography as a research method combines textual analysis of contextualised-writing and ethnography (swales, 1998). this method can be helpful for both learning developers and eap practitioners, not only to investigate the context, but also to place equal emphasis on both texts and practices of specific communities at university (see equilateral triangles (figure 1 and figure 2) below). sizer textography as a needs analysis and research tool for english for academic purposes and learning development practitioners journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 6 figure 1 figure 2 attempts to research a community’s context, texts and practices together via textography also counteracts some of the criticisms levelled at research emphasising just one of these elements. the focus of much eap research is on texts (lillis and tuck, 2016) through corpus linguistics, systemic functional linguistics, genre analysis, and discourse analysis (ding and bruce, 2017). expert analysis of texts alone uses a more ‘etic’ outsider perspective and can often ignore the text’s audience and authors and resulting practices (lillis and tuck, 2016). in contrast to text-focused eap research, academic literacies practice context text textography practice context text eap ld textual analysis ethnography sizer textography as a needs analysis and research tool for english for academic purposes and learning development practitioners journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 7 research focusses on the ‘interpreters’ of the text (ding and bruce, 2017, p. 79) or ‘producers and meaning makers’ (lillis and tuck, 2016, p. 41). academic literacies research avoids a myopic focus on texts and instead claims a ‘wider-lens’ view which challenges textual bias by shifting focus away from texts, towards practices ( lillis and scott, 2007; ding and bruce, 2017, p.78). for learning developers, informed by academic literacies, the principal research methodology for investigating practice is often ethnography (lillis and scott, 2007). however, lillis and scott (2007) warn that ethnographies’ focus on practice at the expense of texts could result in detailed textual analysis disappearing from academic literacies research. lea and street (1998, p. 160) emphasise the ‘importance of understanding both texts and practices’ and lillis and scott (2007) call for research ‘to bring the text back into the frame’ (p. 22). lillis and tuck (2016) also highlight calls from lillis (2008) and hyland (2002a) for research methods that enable more holistic accounts including both texts and practices. pérez-penup (2019) goes further and suggests using textography can strengthen ethnographic data with textual analysis. textography uses since swales’ original work, textography has been used to investigate a broad range of contexts, practices, and texts. textography as a highly contextualised study of situated writing practices can help practitioners identify relevant research and resources/gaps in literature within a specific, potentially less familiar, subject area. textography has been used to illuminate textual practices of academics, students, and practitioners within specific academic contexts. less charted territories swales’ original textography provided an in-depth account of three communities with different disciplines within a shared context. one of the communities, the herbarium, had very little literature on texts and textual practices. swales was able to use discourse and genre analysis to identify key features of unique specialised texts produced by the herbarium such as floras and monographs. swales’ time spent in the herbarium also allowed him to go beyond pure textual analysis and explore the context in more detail and observe textual practices in action. swales has since published a follow-up study of sizer textography as a needs analysis and research tool for english for academic purposes and learning development practitioners journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 8 herbarium texts and claims such texts ‘remain little known to those who study the more general discourses of the academic and research world’ (mccarty and swales, 2017, p. 561). following swales, a number of research studies featuring textography have also focussed on subject areas with less associated research such as art history (seloni, 2014) and librarianship (pérez-penup, 2019). other textographic research has featured subjects with less associated research and also unique or unusual texts for example visual and performing arts, including subject-specific texts such as practice-based doctoral theses (paltridge et al., 2012; ravelli et al., 2013; starfield at al., 2014), art, and design, including subject-specific texts such as exegesis (paltridge, 2004, 2008). swales’ and other previously mentioned textographers’ subsequent interviews with participants about their textual histories and features of texts encouraged implicit textual practices to become visible and shared with a wider audience, including eap and ld practitioners, via published research. in order to make textual and contextual practices of a specific discipline more explicit, eap and ld practitioners can use textography as an initial needs analysis tool. the results of this needs analysis can then be used to find relevant literature or continue research to fill a gap in the literature, as in textographies previously mentioned. in addition, needs analysis, via textography, can be small-scale, short-term and even unobtrusive research by focussing on accessible contexts, texts, and practices. unobtrusive textographic research can involve collecting accessible texts from the context using photography and ethnographic observations (sizer, 2019b). eap and ld practitioners can collect a range of accessible texts to create a detailed picture of a discipline’s context and likely textual practices:  accessible physical texts within the discipline’s context (building): signs, leaflets, handouts.  accessible institutional texts about discipline: unit/course descriptors, assessment guidelines, reading lists, course/subject marketing publications, e.g. leaflets, website, social media.  accessible electronic texts via discipline’s virtual learning environment: lecture slides, discussion boards, suggested reading, external examiner/inspection reports, course/unit feedback. sizer textography as a needs analysis and research tool for english for academic purposes and learning development practitioners journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 9  accessible electronic texts authored by discipline’s academics: academic biographies (often on website and research portal) journal articles, other articles e.g. the conversation, phd theses via the british library’s ‘e-theses online service’ (ethos), academics’ social media/blogs.  accessible electronic texts authored by discipline’s students: example dissertations within the discipline (often held by university library and other external examples may be accessible via ethos), examples of student work within the discipline (often shared with external examiners/students using virtual learning environment/hei’s dissertation repository and other external examples may be accessible via bawe and other corpora). this focus on accessibility can also negate the need for permission from texts’ authors/audiences, not only minimising timeframe but also reducing the need for ethical approval from universities. freedom to research a discipline’s context, texts, and practices without involving participants can be a liberating and fast way to extend knowledge, particularly for colleagues discouraged from participating in research. the accessibility of electronic texts may also allow for a virtual textography investigating contexts such as a distance learning course as featured in souza's (2012) textography. virtual textography may also be helpful for practitioners interested in less accessible academic communities or contexts such as university courses involving placements such as medical courses. virtual textography can also be used as a needs analysis before gaining access to a less accessible context, such as in another country or outside academia such as schools, colleges, or training centres, e.g. english for military or aviation industry. the information gathered from this needs analysis can then be compared to other available literature on less-accessible contexts. academic textography most published textographies feature subject-specific university contexts with some focus on texts for and by academics within the discipline. swales’ (1998) textography collected a wide variety of texts including those authored by academics such as journal articles. swales combined genre analysis of academic texts with ethnographic interviews and sizer textography as a needs analysis and research tool for english for academic purposes and learning development practitioners journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 10 found the contexts had textual, temporal, and spatial differences. pérez-penup's (2019) textography took a similar approach to swales. through analysis of texts and interviews, pérez-penup (2019) found a great deal of intertextuality, or relationships, between texts. the textography had a similar focus to lillis and curry's (2006) academic literaciesinformed work on multilingual scholars. swales and pérez-penup's textographic research showcases successful examples of eap and ld practitioners working with academics in different disciplines to make textual practices within the context visible. academics as participants in research is one strategy eap and ld practitioners can use in order to move towards collaboration with disciplines and subject experts (dudley-evans and st john, 1998) and move away from handmaiden or waiter roles merely serving or cooperating with the needs of the individual disciplines and wider university (raimes, 1991; dudley-evans and st john, 1998; hyland, 2006). identifying and recruiting academics as participants in textography research can be challenging, not only due to the perceived role of eap/ld practitioners, but also due to disciplinary variations such as research methods. subject/discipline experts are not language nor literacies experts and may find research methods and associated jargon from other disciplines, particularly some linguistic terminology, difficult to navigate. textography’s combination of a variety of methods: textual analysis (often featuring more quantitative data, e.g. corpus linguistics) alongside ethnography (photographing texts in context, observing textual practices, and interviewing participants) may make the research more relevant and participation more appealing for some subject/discipline experts. textography has the versatility to incorporate a wide range of textual analysis methods and ethnographic methods to fit the context and subject of study. this could include, for example, focus groups in business contexts to discuss and reflect on textual practices and textual products, or could incorporate multimodal text analysis in contexts where visual literacy is important such as creative arts, journalism, engineering, and medicine. (archer, 2006; thompson, 2019). including research methods familiar to the participant, researcher and area researched may even enhance understanding and engagement with academic literacies research. the fusion of methods associated with eap (textual analysis) and methods associated with ld (ethnography) also provides further opportunities for collaboration with other sizer textography as a needs analysis and research tool for english for academic purposes and learning development practitioners journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 11 colleagues. future collaborative textographic projects could include working with other ld and eap practitioners and other colleagues at the same institution to investigate the same subject area. alternatively, other future research projects could involve colleagues coming together from similar contexts at different universities comparing texts and practices from the same subject/discipline area, perhaps via crowd-sourced corpora. student textography the academic textographies from swales and pérez-penup provided an in-depth contextual investigation of the academic texts from a specific subject area. however, much of the focus was on journal articles and other texts by academics with a notable absence of texts from students (swales, 1998). this would seem to perpetuate the deficit model, in which the academics are experts and students are novices, and journal articles are writing models for students to emulate ( lillis and scott, 2007; jacobs, 2015; lillis et al., 2015; lillis and tuck, 2016;). other textographies focussed more on texts for and by students rather than academics within the context. most of these textographies included texts authored by students. lontoc's (2014) textography included draft and final submissions of student essays as well as classroom observations and focus groups with teachers in a high school in the philippines. lontoc’s research, like pérez-penup (2019), used discourse analysis to investigate identity but instead focused on students. paltridge's (2006) textography also included textual analysis of student essays and ethnographic data from teachers to highlight textual practice. paltridge’s study also included multimodal textbooks and interviews with examiners about expectations and requirements for exams. alongside colleagues in australia, paltridge also conducted a further textography including students’ practice-based doctoral theses (paltridge et al., 2012; ravelli et al., 2013). they used textual analysis and ethnographic interviews to discuss the macrostructure of multimodal theses including a visual or performative component. seloni's (2014) textography featured multimodal texts from art history to investigate macrostructure and included drafts and other texts from the same authors promoting opportunities to explore intertextuality and textual practices. future student textographies could also foster collaboration and working with rather than working for students. students participating in textography can also collect texts within sizer textography as a needs analysis and research tool for english for academic purposes and learning development practitioners journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 12 contexts through photo-ethnography (mannion and ivanič, 2007) collect texts through a ‘do-it-yourself-corpus’ (charles, 2012) perform their own auto-ethnographic observations reflecting on their subject’s textual practices. textographies could also incorporate more creative ethnographic research methods for students studying creative subjects, such as participant self-portraits (gourlay, 2009), and annotated maps/floor plans of context (mannion and ivanič, 2007). practitioner textography in addition to in-depth contextual research on another discipline, textography can also be used by practitioners to investigate and reflect on their own discipline and associated context, practices and texts. to some extent, swales (1998) used an auto-textographic approach by analysing his own texts and those of his colleagues working within the same context: the english language institute. souza's (2012) auto-textography collected and reflected on online multimodal texts she shared with a virtual discourse community both, as a distance learner, and as a teacher. januin and stephen's (2015) textography reflected on own practices and student texts during an eap course in malaysia. alafnan's (2016) textography also used an auto-textography approach but emphasised one institution-wide community, rather than disciplinary community, connected through shared textual practices and business communication. this auto-textography collected examples of ‘routine business’ (swales, 1998) which alafnan analysed for shared genres and combined with his own reflections on texts and practices. other textographies have focussed on texts produced by the context and community in the form of textbooks. both textbook textographies used genre analysis of multimodal textbooks alongside ethnographic interviews with teachers and suggested ways in which textbooks could be improved for students and teachers at indonesian and chinese universities (wahyudi, 2014; zhu et al., 2016). practitioner textographic research can be a helpful reflection tool in order to investigate own practices and texts within own context and discipline. practitioner textographies also provide opportunities to promote transformative practice through change in own and others’ practice and texts (jacobs, 2015), rather than a more normative approach of reporting the textual practices of others in another context. sizer textography as a needs analysis and research tool for english for academic purposes and learning development practitioners journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 13 conclusion textography can be used by eap/ld practitioners to produce highly contextualised studies of a discipline’s texts and practices. this type of study provides practitioners with subject-specific knowledge that is both contextually relevant and holistic through the inclusion of both texts and practices. practitioners can use textography as an initial method for needs analysis in order to explore contexts and collect texts, either accessible texts or texts requiring permission, and practices of an area which practitioners are less familiar with. textographic results can make a specific subject’s textual practices more visible and indicate relevant literature and materials to support students studying within the subject area and context. results may also indicate a literature gap to be filled through further research with and within the community. textographies can be very versatile in terms of text collection: accessible texts for unobtrusive research, electronic texts for virtual research, and multimodal texts for research with subjects requiring visual literacy. textographies can also investigate subject areas from varying perspectives through the inclusion of texts for and by academics and texts for and by students. finally, textography can be used by practitioners themselves to reflect on own context, texts, and practices and encourage transformative practice. references alafnan, m. a. (2016) 'textography: a multidimensional applied genre analysis of business writing in an educational institute', journal of applied linguistics and language research, 3(6), pp. 264–294. archer, a. (2006) 'a multimodal approach to academic “literacies”: problematising thevisual/ verbal divide', language and education, 20(6), pp. 449–462. basturkmen, h. (2003) 'specificity and esp course design', relc, 34(1), pp. 48–63. sizer textography as a needs analysis and research tool for english for academic purposes and learning development practitioners journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 14 bazerman, c. (1998) editor’s introduction. in other floors, other voices : a textography of a small university buildingpp. xi-x. new jersey: lawrence erlbaum associates inc. becher, t. and trowler, p. r. (2001) academic tribes and territories. buckingham: open university press. blue, g. (1988. individualising academic writing tuition. in c. robinson, pauline (ed.), academic writing: process and product, elt documents 129. reading: british council. available at: http://teachingenglish.britishcouncil.org.cn/sites/teacheng/files/elt-14 screen_0.pdf#page=102 [accessed: 2 july 2019] charles, m. (2012) 'proper vocabulary and juicy collocations: eap students evaluate doityourself corpus-building', english for specific purposes, 31, pp. 93–102. coventry university. (2019). (bawe) british academic written english corpus. available at: from https://www.coventry.ac.uk/research/research-directories/current projects/2015/british-academic-written-english-corpus-bawe/ [accessed: 01 july 2019]. coxhead, a. (2000) 'a new academic word list', tesol quarterly, 34(2), pp. 213-238. coxhead, a. (2011) 'the academic word list 10 years on: research and teaching implications', tesol quarterly, 45(2), pp. 355–362. ding, a. and bruce, i. (2017) the english for academic purposes practitioner operating on the edge of academia. cham: springer international publishing. dudley-evans, t. and st john, m. j. (1998) developments in english for specific purposes a multi-disciplinary approach. cambridge: cambridge university press. sizer textography as a needs analysis and research tool for english for academic purposes and learning development practitioners journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 15 flowerdew, j., and costley, t. (2017) discipline-specific writing : theory into practice. abingdon: routledge. gourlay, l. (2009) 'threshold practices: becoming a student through academic literacies', london review of education, 7(2), pp. 181–192. hale, a., snow-gerono, j. and morales, f. (2008) 'transformative education for culturally diverse learners through narrative and ethnography', teaching and teacher education, 24, pp. 1413–1425. heng, t. (2017) visual methods in the field photogpraphy for the social sciences. abingdon: routledge. hesa. (2019) higher education student statistics: uk, 2017/18 subjects studied. retrieved from https://www.hesa.ac.uk/news/17-01-2019/sb252-higher-education student-statistics/subjects hyland, k. (2002a) 'genre: language, context, and literacy', annual review of applied linguistics, 22, pp. 113–135. hyland, k. (2002b) 'specificity revisited: how far should we go now? english for specific purposes', 21, pp. 385–395. hyland, k. (2006) 'the ‘ other ’ english: thoughts on eap and academic writing', the european english messenger, 2(15), pp. 34–88. hyland, k. (2017) 'english in the disciplines: arguments for specificity', esp today, 5(1), pp. 5–23. ingle, j. and yakovchuk, n. (2015) writing development, co-teaching and academic literacies: exploring the connections. in t. lillis, k. harrington, m. r. lea, and s. mitchell (eds.), working with academic literacies. anderson: parlor press. sizer textography as a needs analysis and research tool for english for academic purposes and learning development practitioners journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 16 jacobs, c. (2007) 'towards a critical understanding of the teaching of discipline-specific academic literacies: making the tacit explicit', journal of education, 41, pp. 59-81. jacobs, c. (2015) opening up the curriculum: moving from the normative in teachers’ understanding of disciplinary literacy practices. in t. lillis, k. harrington, m. r. lea, & s. mitchell (eds.), working with academic literacies. anderson: parlor press. januin, j. and stephen, j. (2015) 'exploring discourse competence elements in eap class presentations through document and ethnographic analyses', procedia-social and behavioral sciences, 208, pp. 157–166. johnson, i. p. (2018)'driving learning development professionalism forward from within. journal of learning development in higher education' available at: https://journal.aldinhe.ac.uk/index.php/jldhe/issue/view/27 [accessed: 1 july 2019]. lea, m. r. and street, b. v. (2006) 'the academic literacies model: theory and applications', theory into practice, 45(4), pp. 368–377. lillis, t. (2008) 'ethnography as method, methodology, and “deep theorizing.”' written communication, 25(3), pp. 353–388. lillis, t. and curry, m. j. (2006) 'professional academic writing by multilingual scholars: interactions with literacy brokers in the production of english-medium texts', written communication, 23(1), pp. 3–35. lillis, t., harrington, k., lea, m. and mitchell, s. (2015) working with academic literacies: case studies towards transformative practice. anderson: parlor press. lillis, t. and scott, m. (2007) 'defining academic literacies research: issues of epistemology, ideology and strategy', journal of applied linguistics, 4(1), pp. 5–32. lillis, t, and tuck, j. (2016) academic literacies: a critical lens on writing and reading in the academy. in k. hyland and p. shaw (eds.), the routledge handbook of sizer textography as a needs analysis and research tool for english for academic purposes and learning development practitioners journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 17 english for academic purposes (pp. 30–43). abingdon: routledge. lontoc, g. (2014) transcribing, translating, and (re) constructing identities: the great cultural divide between us and them (researching across languages and cultures a collection of reflective pieces providing an unusual insight into how doctoral students engage in multilingual and intercultural research no. 1). available at: https://www.uea.ac.uk/documents/595200/0/care+working+paper.pdf#page=37 [accessed: 02 july 2019]. mannion, g. and ivanič, r. (2007) 'mapping literacy practices: theory, methodology, methods', international journal of qualitative studies in education, 20(1), pp. 15– 30. mccarty, r. and swales, j. m. (2017) 'technological change and generic effects in a university herbarium: a textography revisited', discourse studies, 19(5), pp. 561– 580. neumann, r. (2001) disciplinary differences and university teaching. studies in higher education, 26(2), pp. 135–146. paltridge, b. (2004) the exegesis as a genre: an ethnographic examination. in l. ravelli and r. a. ellis (eds.), analysing academic writing. london: continuum. paltridge, b. (2006) 'beyond the text: a textography of chinese college english writing', university of sydney papers in tesol, 2(2), pp.149–165. paltridge, b. (2008) 'textographies and the researching and teaching of writing',iberica, 15, pp. 9–24. paltridge, b., starfield, s., ravelli, l. j. and tuckwell, k. (2012) 'change and stability: examining the macrostructures of doctoral theses in the visual and performing arts', journal of english for academic purposes, 11(4), pp. 332–344. sizer textography as a needs analysis and research tool for english for academic purposes and learning development practitioners journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 18 paltridge, b., starfield, s., ravelli, l. and nicholson, s. (2012) 'doctoral writing in the visual and performing arts: two ends of a continuum', studies in higher education, 37(8), pp. 989-1003. pérez-penup, l. (2019) potentialities of textography to research the construction of authorial identity by professional academic non-native writers of english in the ‘soft sciences. in c. calle martínez and s. madarova (eds.), focus on learning: contribution to the field of esp. universidad camilo josé cela. available at: https://repositorio.ucjc.edu/bitstream/handle/20.500.12020/840/focus on learning.pdf?sequence=1#page=39 [accessed 03 july 2019]. pink, s. (2012) the visual in ethnography: photography, videos, cultures and individuals. in j. hughes (ed.), sage visual methods. london: sage publication. pink, s. (2013) doing visual ethnography (3rd ed.). london: sage publication. raimes, a. (1991) instruction balance: from theories to practices in the teaching of writing. in georgetown university round table on languages and linguistics (gurt) 1991. washington dc: georgetown university press. available at https://books.google.co.uk/books?hl=en&lr=&id=gzgwszdlvo0c&oi=fnd&pg=pa23 8&dq=butler+stance+raimes&ots=pbhpfgn3bk&sig=goabkkkw5bpfzhen2kgnm ybxgne#v=onepage&q=butler&f=false [accessed: 02 july 2019]. ravelli, l., paltridge, b., starfield, s. and tuckwell, k. (2013) 'extending the notion of ‘text’: the visual and performing arts doctoral thesis', visual communication, 12(4), pp. 395–422. russell, d. r., lea, m., parker, j., street, b. and donahue, t. (2005) exploring notions of genre in academic literacies and writing across the curriculum approaches across countries and contexts. in a. bonini and d. figueiredo (eds.), genre in a changing world. west lafayette: parlor press. sizer textography as a needs analysis and research tool for english for academic purposes and learning development practitioners journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 19 schwartz, d. (1989) 'visual ethnography: using photography in qualitative', qualitative sociology, 12(2), pp. 119-154. seloni, l. (2014) '"i’m an artist and a scholar who is trying to find a middle point": a textographic analysis of a colombian art historian’s thesis writing', journal of second language writing, 25, pp. 79–99. sizer, j. (2019a) 'is teaching eap a profession? a reflection on eap’s professional status, values, community and knowledge', professional and academic english, june(52), pp. 1–44. available at: http://www.uefap.com/esp-sig/journals/esp sig journal issue-52.pdf [accessed: 01 july 2019]. sizer, j. (2019b) unobtrusive textography of a university building as an innovative research method. leeds: baleap 2019 conference. available at: https://baleap2019.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/baleap-programme.pdf [accessed: june 01 2019]. souza, v. v. s. (2012) 'a textography of the complex process of learning and teaching online', estudos anglo-americanos, 37, pp. 10–30. available at: http://www.nexos.ufsc.br/index.php/reaa/article/view/1614/1137 [accessed: july 01 2019]. starfield, s., paltridge, b. and ravelli, l. (2014) 'researching academic writing: what textography affords', international perspectives on higher education research, 10, pp. 103–120. street, b. (2012) new literacy studies. in m. grenfell, d. bloome, c. hardy, k. pahl, j. rowsell, and b. v. street (eds.), language, ethnography, and education: bridging new literacy studies and bourdieu. abingdon: routledge. street, b., lea, m. r. and lillis, t. (2015) revisting the question of transformation in academic literacies: the ethnographic imperative. in t. lillis, k. harrington, m. r. . lea, and s. mitchell (eds.), working with academic literacies. anderson: parlor press. sizer textography as a needs analysis and research tool for english for academic purposes and learning development practitioners journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 20 swales, j. m. (1990) genre analysis : english in academic and research settings. cambridge: cambridge university press. swales, j. m. (1998) other floors, other voices: a textography of a small university building. new jersey: lawrence erlbaum associates inc. swales, j. m. (2000) 'languages for specific purposes', annual review of applied linguistics , 20, pp. 59–76. swales, j. m. (2002) genre analysis english in academic and research settings. cambridge: cambridge university press. swales, j. m. (2003). is the university a community of practice? in applied linguistics and communities of practice : selected papers from the annual meeting of the british association for applied linguistics, cardiff university, september 2002 (p. 220). british association for applied linguistics, in association with continuum. available at: https://books.google.co.uk/books?hl=en&lr=&id=ckfzlolxgnwc&oi=fnd&pg=pa203 &dq=swales+community+of+practice&ots=9scsukibl8&sig=onuvtychkbbjilmgbq a7tmndiek#v=onepage&q=swales community of practice&f=false [accessed: june 01 2019]. thompson, d. s. (2019) understanding how students across the disciplines read images. in reading across the disciplines: studies in sotl. murray: murray state university. trowler, p., saunders, m. and bamber, v. (2014) tribes and territories in the 21st century. abingdon: routledge. sizer textography as a needs analysis and research tool for english for academic purposes and learning development practitioners journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 21 wahyudi, r. (2014) 'textbook evaluation and ethnography as method', english for specific purposes world, 15(44). available at: https://www.academia.edu/10432983/wahyudi_r._2014_._new_insights_of_esp_f rom_indonesian_islamic_university_lessons_from_textbook_evaluation_and_eth nography_as_method_english_for_specific_purposes_world_44_15_1-23 [accessed: 01 july 2019]. zhu, h., ren, w. and han, z. (2016) 'the impact of marketization on the communication of chinese academicians: a genre analytical perspective', critical discourse studies, 13(5), pp. 467–484. author details jennifer sizer is a senior lecturer in english for academic purposes (eap) and presessional course leader in the school of languages and applied linguistics at the university of portsmouth. textography as a needs analysis and research tool for english for academic purposes and learning development practitioners abstract introduction textography textography history textography benefits textography uses less charted territories academic textography student textography practitioner textography conclusion references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 13: april 2018 embedding learning development; a model for collaborative practice laura minogue st mary’s university, twickenham, uk carole murphy st mary’s university, twickenham, uk kim salmons st mary’s university, twickenham, uk abstract in 2016, the learning development team at st mary’s university was awarded a prize for teaching excellence for its report on 'the collaborative delivery of embedded academic skills development programmes within subject modules’. the report detailed the planning and delivery of embedded activities across schools in which academic skills were tailored to subject specific module content. the success of the report resulted in long-term investment in the learning development team and positioned embedded academic learning as an integral part of the university’s corporate plan. this paper presents the results of a small-scale research study to evaluate an embedded academic skills module in criminology and sociology delivered at level 4. the impact of this embedded module has been measured through semi-structured interviews with students, the subject lecturer and learning development lecturer. the final self-evaluation assessment was also analysed to understand more fully how students had developed over the course of the module. results clearly demonstrate that embedding academic skills into the criminology and sociology programme had an impact on student confidence, belonging and retention. the outcome is an 'impact-tested' accredited skills module that can be adapted and used by other learning development teams. keywords: academic literacies; embedded skills; learning development; collaborative practice. minogue et al. embedding learning development; a model for collaborative practice journal of learning development in higher education, issue 13: april 2018 2 introduction as wingate has identified, university cohorts have changed significantly since the early 1990s ‘with a larger share of students from non-traditional backgrounds’ (2006, p.457). many of these students feel unprepared for higher education and do not perceive themselves to have the appropriate skills for success (gamache, 2002; haggis, 2006). as the academic literacies model acknowledges: learning in higher education involves adapting to new ways of knowing (lea and street, 1998, p.158). lecturers have implicit knowledge about their discipline which needs to be made explicit to students. students need to acquire not just knowledge about their discipline but the right skills to engage with and make sense of the core language and discourses. traditionally learning development has focused specifically on widening participation (wp) students. at st mary’s university twickenham, where the research was conducted, two thirds of the entire cohort 2016-2017 were wp (4,110 out of 6,135) with the first year cohort alone comprising nearly 72% wp students (3,800 out of 3,967). in the past, universities have attempted to accommodate these students by providing study skills as separate bolt-on sessions; the ‘deficit’ model. however these sessions, which are often drop-in or extra-curricular, have proved ineffective as they separate study skills from the process and content of learning (wingate, 2006). more importantly, making these sessions extra-curricular tends to position study skills as a remedial activity for referred students who are ‘failing’ (cottrell, 2001, p.40). instead of separating skills from content it is more effective for subject lecturers and learning development lecturers to work together to design, deliver and assess modules; an approach increasingly recognised and advocated by researchers (wingate et al., 2011; thies, 2012). there has been a growing consensus that skills need to be embedded in the curriculum in this way, making them available to all students and ideally subject to assessment (cottrell, 2001; wingate, 2006). the advantage of embedding skills into the curriculum is that all students are exposed to learning development opportunities. since it is often only the more able students who pro-actively seek extra-curricular guidance minogue et al. embedding learning development; a model for collaborative practice journal of learning development in higher education, issue 13: april 2018 3 (durkin and main, 2002), embedded literacy skills enable lecturers to access the hard to reach students. embedding literacy skills in such a way that students acquire both content knowledge and the relevant tools for understanding is essential and can impact significantly on confidence. although the need for embedded literacy provision for students has been widely acknowledged (cottrell, 2001; wingate, 2006; black and rechter, 2013; mcwilliams and allan, 2014), there is still limited take up in many universities. this paper presents an embedded skills module designed and delivered through a successful partnership between learning development and the subject specialist lecturers (criminology and sociology). the skills and experience plus the collaborative working relationship between both lecturers were crucial in developing the module and in ensuring positive outcomes for students. this module is one of a few that have been incorporated into the core curriculum at st mary’s university, twickenham. context and design of skills module the embedded skills module was delivered in the school of arts and humanities in the first semester of level 4 (september to december 2016). the module was compulsory for those studying single honours criminology and sociology (16 in total) and was offered as an option module for students on the sociology programme. the module was delivered to a total of 33 students and taught over 30 hours as a two-hour weekly seminar/interactive lecture carrying a value of 20 credits. included within this was: a week delivered by the library and the technology enhanced learning team; a ‘reading week’; a tutorial week; and a week delivered by careers. the remainder was made up of independent study and guided learning. the core aim of the module was to introduce students to studying criminology and sociology with an emphasis on the specific skills and approaches necessary for successful study. the objectives were as follows: 1. illustrate how to find, use and evaluate criminological and sociological resources including legislation, books, journals, statistics, media and web sources. minogue et al. embedding learning development; a model for collaborative practice journal of learning development in higher education, issue 13: april 2018 4 2. develop criminological and sociologically informed critical thinking, practical and conceptual skills. 3. provide a regular and directed forum for the free exchange of criminological/sociological ideas and sharing of relevant information. 4. provide a structured opportunity for the development and enhancement of essential academic skills required to successfully complete a degree in criminology and sociology. the need for a skills module was identified by the programme director for criminology and sociology in 2015. during her 14 years of experience as a lecturer in higher education (he), she had noted an increasing lack of preparedness amongst students for study in an he context. this was reflected in poor writing and evaluation skills which affected student confidence and may have impacted on retention. the content of the study skills module was loosely guided by the publication ‘criminology skills’ (finch and fafinski, 2012). this publication identified key skills such as: reading, note-taking, time management, personal learning development, writing skills, grammar and punctuation, integrating quotations, referencing, and evaluation of media, statistics and internet sources. these were delivered using subject content with the objective of developing critical and evaluative skills. rather than embed the study skills into an existing module, the programme director for criminology authorised and validated a new credit bearing module (designed in collaboration with the learning development lecturer for arts and humanities) and this was launched as a pilot with the view to writing similar subject-specific modules on other programmes in arts and humanities. the module is worth 20 credits and is taken as one of six modules in the first year, leading to an award of 120 credits overall if all modules are passed. assessment criteria the module was assessed using formative and summative methods. the first formative assessment was a 250 word ‘introduction to the critical review’ which formed part of the summative assessment: a 750/1000 word critical review (40%) due at the end of the first reading week. the second assignment was an ‘evaluation of web sources’ (50%) and a ‘self-evaluation of learning’ (10%) due at the end of the semester. each week students were assigned reading tasks in preparation for the following week (guided learning). minogue et al. embedding learning development; a model for collaborative practice journal of learning development in higher education, issue 13: april 2018 5 schedule of delivery week one: introduction/basic academic skills: reading, note taking, asking questions, selfevaluation. week two: library and tel (technology enhanced learning department). week three: writing skills: grammar/punctuation/academic style. week four: understanding critical evaluation and skills for writing a critical review. (formative assessment: to write a 250-word introduction to a critical review). week five: feedback session using peer review on introduction to critical review. week six: reading week. individual tutorials with the subject lecturer and learning development lecturer. week seven: careers presentation. week eight: researching and evaluating media and web sources. week nine: understanding different mediums for feedback and using feedback on formative and summative assignments to feed forward to the next assignment. week ten: statistics. week eleven: analysing the assignment question (evaluating web sources). tackling the assignment (self-evaluation assessment). week twelve: plagiarism and referencing; individual tutorials. week thirteen: individual tutorials. method of delivery the sessions were delivered by either the learning development lecturer or the subject lecturer and, on six of the weeks, the lecturers delivered together. the collaborative nature of the teaching delivery reflects research showing that there is a need for an ‘integrated relationship between writing and knowledge construction’ in study skills modules (somerville and crème, 2005, p.18) and this can only be achieved through ‘substantial liaison with the teaching staff’ (durkin and main, 2002, p.27). this need to relate study skills to subject content is a response to research indicating that decontextualizing study skills away from the subject area negates ‘the purpose of what [the student is] doing’ (gamache, 2002, p.278). furthermore, students are more engaged when they understand that study skills are part of their holistic subject learning and directly related to their discipline: minogue et al. embedding learning development; a model for collaborative practice journal of learning development in higher education, issue 13: april 2018 6 findings from research seem to suggest that there is not a single academic discourse community with unified standards and expectations but rather that every specific discipline has its own conventions, values and practices. (angelova and riazantseva, 1999, p. 93, cited in durkin and main, 2002, p. 26). the students were given a module handbook and access to module resources on the virtual learning page (mymodules). presentations were used to structure the sessions with integrated group work and individualised feedback sessions. in week one, the students were asked to fill in a self-evaluation questionnaire asking them to identify their strengths and weaknesses. the self-evaluation was revisited in week ten when the students were assigned a summative assessment piece which asked them to reflect and evaluate their progress. this reflective exercise was not only used to develop the students’ ability to evaluate their own learning within the module but to enable them to consider reflection as a part of their academic development throughout their university experience and beyond (somerville and crème, 2005). the first thirty minutes of each session covered the specific area of study for that week. for example, in week one on note taking and reading, strategies for both were presented and then the students were asked to engage in a reading and note taking session. students had a choice of two texts: debbie taylor’s ‘women: work and domestic responsibility’ and mark e. mishkind’s ‘a man and his sense of self’ (both texts are contained in giddens, 1995, human societies: a reader). having had the opportunity to read both, the students were later asked to choose which of the two texts they would like to evaluate for their summative critical review (assessment one). in preparation for the sessions, the students were required to read chapters of the key text, finch and fafinski (2012). in week three (‘how to write’), the students were asked to complete a formative assessment exercise on spelling, punctuation and sentence construction using a range of on-line and paper based tools. in week four (‘critical thinking’), a combination of presentation, question and answer sessions and a formative exercise where students had to write the introduction to their critical review were employed. the students were then asked to create a draft of the critical review for the following week, which would be peer-reviewed. there were some drawbacks with this method of formative assessment in that not all the students completed the drafts. this made the peer review and the one-to-one feedback sessions (in class) difficult to conduct. minogue et al. embedding learning development; a model for collaborative practice journal of learning development in higher education, issue 13: april 2018 7 the lower than usual attendance for this week (22 students) indicated that those students who had not attempted the draft may have decided not to attend. this resulted in not all students receiving formative feedback. in week nine there was a class feedback/feedforward session which restated and reminded the students of the implicit aims of the module. students were encouraged to reflect carefully on their feedback and to use it explicitly when planning and writing future assignments. the guiding principle of this work was the development of confidence in the student. as identified by stankov et al. (2014), confidence is the key, non-subject based, indicator of achievement. week nine of the module was redesigned after marking the critical review (assessment one) as it became clear that students were struggling with referencing. although this had been discussed in week one, a deeper and more guided approach was clearly necessary. this was combined with a discussion on plagiarism. weeks eight and ten focussed on the first part of the second summative assessment (‘2a. evaluation of media statistics/web sources’). this primarily comprised presentations and question and answer sessions with group work on sourcing relevant websites. on reflection it was decided that, for this session to be the most effective it can be, future classes would take place in the computer room to enable students to research sources live. although many students bring their laptops into classes, a lecturer-guided approach on an interactive screen would prove more engaging and relevant for the students. attendance the sessions were delivered between 4pm and 6pm on a tuesday as interactive lectures and workshops over 12 weeks. the timing is significant because the skills module was timetabled directly after a three hour sociology module, which was compulsory for all students. there were concerns about the impact on attendance, which did not transpire and attendance was consistently high. week two was delivered by the library and the technology enhanced learning team; weeks six and twelve were a reading week and a tutorial week. week seven was delivered by the careers department. this meant there were nine weeks of lectures. over the nine teaching weeks attendance averaged at 26 students per week. the highest week was week four with attendance of 32 out of 33 and the lowest was week ten with 19 students in attendance. students were emailed if they did minogue et al. embedding learning development; a model for collaborative practice journal of learning development in higher education, issue 13: april 2018 8 not attend lectures. this module had a significantly higher attendance than other sociology modules in previous years. evaluation and impact the study skills module was evaluated through semi-structured interviews with the students, an interview with both the subject lecturer and learning development lecturer and analysis of the self-evaluation assessment. as this module was run as a pilot study, it was not possible to compare marks with the previous year’s cohort. however, although it would have been possible to compare the critical review with a similar assignment taken on a criminology module the previous year, it was decided that the necessity to evaluate variables such as qualification upon entry and wp status would complicate the research study and dilute the focus of the project. it was decided therefore that the impact of the criminology and sociology skills module would be measured through three key areas: semi-structured interviews with the single honours criminology students (16 out of the 33 cohort); the comments and grades from the self-evaluation assessment; and a semistructured interview with the subject lecturer and learning development lecturer. ethical approval was received from the university to conduct this research and participating students consented to share the findings. an average grade mark was also obtained by comparing the first assignment (critical review) with the results for section b of the second assignment (self-evaluation). these two assignments were chosen for evaluation because they were both marked by the learning development lecturer. the average mark for the critical review, which was submitted in week 7, was 50.25% while the average mark for the self-evaluation, handed in during week 13, was 62.37%. the marking criteria was judged by the student’s engagement with the ‘implicit aims’ of the module (1-6) and their ability to understand their development as learners and the need to develop strategies for continuous self-reflection. in the process of marking these assignments, it became clear that a unique marking criteria may have to be developed for future delivery of the module for the purposes of including not only the ‘objectives’ of the module but the ‘implicit aims’ as well. in terms of impact, it was clear that students had benefitted from the skills and expertise of both the subject and learning development lecturer and were highly appreciative of the minogue et al. embedding learning development; a model for collaborative practice journal of learning development in higher education, issue 13: april 2018 9 module, acknowledging that the skills gained were an excellent foundation for university study which had significantly enhanced their confidence. apart from academic skills, another related advantage of the module was the benefit of discussing work, or as one student put it: ‘sharing ideas and stuff’. students reported that whereas previously they had been ‘scared’ to share, they now realised the learning advantages of ‘reading other peoples’ work and people reading my work’. collaborating as a group facilitated an understanding of the need to get ‘in the right mindset’ for academic work as well as developing key metacognitive skills such as ‘mapping out’ essay structure. one student added that in most seminars and lectures they just ‘go in and out’ without talking to their peers, but in the skills module, ‘we were more of a group’. the self-evaluation assignment more specifically reflected the students’ awareness of their skills development: time management was referred to in terms of an improved ability to juggle academic study, work and other commitments, as well as a realisation that assignments should be started as early as possible. some students also demonstrated an increased awareness of their motivation levels and how they could facilitate this by minimising distractions (e.g. phones, social media etc.) and focusing on getting in to the right ‘mindset’ for studying. students realised that the skills they were acquiring were transferable beyond the module itself and that the module enabled them to orientate themselves at university. overall, the module contributed to student confidence and their sense of belonging and there is some evidence to show impact on retention. in a similar module which ran in the academic year 2015-2016, three out of 21 students withdrew. however, the embedded skills module in 2016-2017 lost just one out of 33 students. conclusion the embedded skills module for criminology and sociology is an example of a highly successful collaboration between learning development and the subject lecturer in sociology. the module has been confirmed as a validated core module for criminology and has positioned learning development as a normal part of student development at st mary’s rather than a remedial provision for failing students. from a student perspective, the research showed that confidence had improved considerably and that, overall, minogue et al. embedding learning development; a model for collaborative practice journal of learning development in higher education, issue 13: april 2018 10 students were less fearful of academic work. the sense of belonging engendered by group work seemed additionally to make students feel more settled and ready for academic work. both of these factors may have contributed to the lower attrition rate on this module. references black, m. and rechter, s. (2013) ‘a critical reflection on the use of an embedded academic literacy program for teaching sociology’, journal of sociology, 49(4) pp. 456-470. https://doi.org/10.1177/1440783313504056 cottrell, s. (2001) teaching study skills & supporting learning. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan. durkin, k. and main, a. (2002) ‘discipline-based study skills support for first-year undergraduate students’, active learning in higher education, 3(1), pp. 24-39. https://doi.org/10.1177/1469787402003001003 finch, e. and fafinski, s. (2012) criminology skills. oxford: oxford university press. gamache, p. (2002) ‘university students as creators of personal knowledge: an alternative epistemological view’, teaching in higher education, 7(3), pp. 277-294. https://doi.org/10.1080/13562510220144789 giddens (1995) human societies: a reader. cambridge: polity press. haggis, t. (2006) ‘pedagogies for diversity: retaining critical challenge amongst fears of ‘dumbing down’’, studies in higher education, 31(5), pp. 521-535. https://doi.org/10.1080/03075070600922709 lea, m. r. and street, b. v. (1998) ‘student writing in higher education: an academic literacies approach’, studies in higher education, 23(2), pp. 157-172. https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079812331380364 https://doi.org/10.1177/1440783313504056 https://doi.org/10.1177/1469787402003001003 https://doi.org/10.1080/13562510220144789 https://doi.org/10.1080/03075070600922709 https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079812331380364 minogue et al. embedding learning development; a model for collaborative practice journal of learning development in higher education, issue 13: april 2018 11 mcwilliams, r. and allan, q. (2014) ‘embedding academic literacy skills: towards a best practice model’, journal of university teaching and learning practice, 11(3), pp. 120. available at: http://ro.uow.edu.au/jutlp/vol11/iss3/8/ somerville, e. m. and creme, p. (2005) ‘asking pompeii questions: a co-operative approach to writing in the disciplines’, teaching in higher education, 10(1), pp. 1728. https://doi.org/10.1080/1356251052000305507 stankov, l., morony, s. and lee, y. p. (2014) ‘confidence: the best non-cognitive predictor of academic achievement?’, educational psychology, 34(1), pp. 9-28. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01443410.2013.814194 thies, l.c. (2012) ‘increasing student participation and success: collaborating to embed academic literacies into the curriculum’, journal of academic language and learning, 6(1), pp.15-31. wingate, u. (2006) ‘doing away with ‘study skills’’, teaching in higher education, 11(4), pp. 457-469. https://doi.org/10.1080/13562510600874268 wingate, u., andon, n. and cogo, a. (2011) ‘embedding academic writing instruction into subject teaching: a case study’, active learning in higher education, 12(1), pp. 6981. https://doi.org/10.1177/1469787410387814 author details laura minogue is a learning development lecturer in the directorate of learning and teaching at st mary’s university, twickenham. dr carole murphy is a senior lecturer in criminology and sociology in the school of arts and humanities at st mary’s university, twickenham. dr kim salmons is a programme director and a learning development lecturer in the directorate of learning and teaching at st mary’s university, twickenham. http://ro.uow.edu.au/jutlp/vol11/iss3/8/ https://doi.org/10.1080/1356251052000305507 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01443410.2013.814194 https://doi.org/10.1080/13562510600874268 https://doi.org/10.1177/1469787410387814 embedding learning development; a model for collaborative practice abstract introduction assessment criteria schedule of delivery method of delivery attendance evaluation and impact conclusion references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special issue 22: compendium of innovative practice october 2021 ________________________________________________________________________ video feedback in english for academic purposes: building connections with international students while learning online jade kimberley university of nottingham international college chiara matthews university of nottingham international college vanessa smith university of nottingham international college jo leech university of nottingham international college key words: feedback; video feedback; screencast feedback; higher education; connection; digital literacy; covid-19. the challenge the transition to online teaching and learning in higher education called upon practitioners to investigate new ways to support and connect with their students. it also prompted a wave of investment in training on learning technologies, inspiring experimentation when communicating asynchronously with learners. the loss of face-to-face classroom interaction elicited concerns over levels of engagement and motivation, as it became clear that students at our pathways college would complete their programme of study online and would not return to a physical classroom. a clear link had been established demonstrating the significant impact of attendance and engagement on meeting learning outcomes, so measures were required to ensure student success and maintain the levels of support offered in college. additionally, the increased working demands of transitioning online meant that any measures taken would need to avoid extra tasks on top of an already heavier workload for teaching staff. all teaching was taking place synchronously, and so it was felt that stronger connections with students should be forged asynchronously, for example, when giving feedback on written work. the aims were to increase engagement, provide support and encouragement kimberley, matthews, smith, leech video feedback in english for academic purposes: building connections with international students while learning online journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 2 via verbal and non-verbal cues not present in text feedback, and to complete the feedback process in a more timely and efficient manner, in turn developing tutors’ digital literacy. the response a small group of tutors decided to experiment with providing video feedback on english for academic purposes (eap) and project formative assessments. this was in the form of screencasts, both with and without a webcam window in which the tutor was visible. tutors provided comments as they scrolled through the assessment, highlighting areas using the cursor. studies have reported that students respond positively to video feedback (mccarthy, 2015; espasa et al., 2019; bahula and kay, 2020; cunningham and link, 2021). this is partly attributed to the conversational cues and paralinguistic features absent in text feedback (ajjawi and boud, 2017; ryan, 2020), but which through video present a means of social interaction (mahoney et al., 2019; lowenthal et al., 2020; ryan, 2020). students also consider this mode of delivery more personalised (mccarthy, 2015; anson et al., 2016; bahula and kay, 2020), and tutors concurred with this. while video feedback is, in essence monologic, learners consider it conversational (borup et al., 2015; anson et al., 2016), although there have been calls for more efforts to be made to produce feedback that opens up a dialogue (mahoney et al., 2019). as students would have an opportunity for an online tutorial after video feedback was released, it was hoped that it would start an ongoing conversation as their projects developed. there is also evidence to suggest that this mode of feedback can help to strengthen the relationship between tutor and student (anson et al., 2016; espasa et al., 2019; bahula and kay, 2020; ryan, 2020), and form connections, especially important during the pandemic (lowenthal et al., 2020; cunningham and link, 2021). this was a common aim among tutors, who wanted to mimic the one-to-one tutorials students would usually have in college and offer a similar experience to students starting their course later in the term. video feedback was also seen as an opportunity to emphasise important aspects of the students’ work and draw attention to areas for development. kimberley, matthews, smith, leech video feedback in english for academic purposes: building connections with international students while learning online journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 3 some students initially reported that they liked the video format, while others said they would prefer it together with text that they could refer back to more easily. when one tutor asked if her class would like to receive video feedback on their next assessment, they indicated a preference for feedback in an email, as they felt this was clearer. given the effort made to foster a deeper connection and provide better one-to-one support, this surprised tutors and prompted reflection and curiosity. recommendations there were several learning points from this experiment. studies have suggested that drawbacks to video feedback include downloading large files and not having clear instructions on how to access recordings (mccarthy, 2015; bahula and kay, 2020; davies et al., 2020). the linear nature of video feedback can also lead to time-consuming reviewing to locate certain comments (bahula and kay, 2020), although a screencast which scrolls through a written assessment could help to avoid this. a significant conclusion from this process, therefore, was the need for clear guidance on how to retrieve feedback, along with using software which facilitated ease of access (including lms or vle integration, where possible). another notable reflection is that, while one-to-one online support is invaluable in the current educational climate, there may be no realistic substitute for face-to-face delivery and tutorial support in person. it was felt that video feedback was the closest tutors could get to face-to-face interaction, but the amount of time students spend in online lessons can lead to over-exposure and fatigue (lowenthal et al., 2020). although video recordings are asynchronous and accessed when convenient, they essentially contribute to more screen time, which may be undesirable. while teaching staff have taken the pivot to online learning as an opportunity to develop their skills involving learning technology, levels of digital literacy varied at the start of the pandemic (liu et al., 2020), and this continues to be the case. it is essential that if video feedback is adopted, all staff are given the appropriate support and training to develop competence and confidence in this area. one goal of our experiment was to save time kimberley, matthews, smith, leech video feedback in english for academic purposes: building connections with international students while learning online journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 4 compared with writing comments (cunningham and link, 2021), but evidence suggests creating videos can be more time-consuming (mccarthy, 2015; davies et al., 2020), and it is likely that digital literacy plays a role in this. research specifically concerning video feedback is less common than that on text feedback, but rarer still are feedback studies involving learners who are not studying in their first language (mccarthy, 2015; bakla, 2020). bakla (2020) notes that international students are reluctant to engage with video feedback because it is unfamiliar to them, which suggests a need to coach students on how to access, interpret and engage with their feedback to help them adjust to receiving it in a different format. students’ listening skills in the target language should also be considered, as lower level learners may struggle with listening and watching simultaneously. consequently, more substantive research is called for, in which international student feedback is gathered to understand perceptions of video feedback and the reasons behind them. using different feedback modalities is feasible across the higher education sector, but care must be taken to support educators in developing competencies, providing clear instructions for access, listening to recipients’ feedback and making adaptations so that feedback is meaningful and encouraging, and motivates learners to improve their work. references ajjawi, r. and boud, d. (2017) ‘researching feedback dialogue: an interactional analysis approach’, assessment & evaluation in higher education, 42(2), pp.252-265. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2015.1102863 (accessed: 22 june 2021). anson, c., dannels, d., laboy, j. and carneiro, l. (2016) ‘students’ perceptions of oral screencast responses to their writing: exploring digitally mediated identities’, journal of business and technical communication, 30(3), pp.378-411. available at: https://doi.org/10.1177/1050651916636424 (accessed: 22 june 2021). https://doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2015.1102863 https://doi.org/ https://doi.org/10.1177/1050651916636424 kimberley, matthews, smith, leech video feedback in english for academic purposes: building connections with international students while learning online journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 5 bahula, t. and kay, r. (2020) ‘exploring student perceptions of video feedback: a review of the literature’, 13th annual international conference of education, research and innovation (iceri2020) proceedings, pp. 6535-6544. available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.21125/iceri.2020.1398 (accessed: 22 june 2021). bakla, a. (2020) ‘a mixed-methods study of feedback modes in efl writing’, language learning and technology, 24(1), pp.107-128. available at: https://doi.org/10125/44712 (accessed: 22 june 2021). borup, j., west, r. and thomas, r. (2015) ‘the impact of text versus video communication on instructor feedback in blended courses’, educational technology research and development, 63, pp.161-184. available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11423-015-9367-8 (accessed: 22 june 2021). cunningham, k. and link, s. (2021) ‘video and text feedback on esl writing: understanding attitudes and negotiating relationships’, journal of second language writing, 52, 100797. available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jslw.2021.100797 (accessed: 22 june 2021). davies, j., davies, l., conlon, b., emerson, j. hainsworth, h. and mcdonough, h. (2020) ‘responding to covid-19 in eap contexts: a comparison of courses at four sinoforeign universities’, international journal of tesol studies, 2(2), pp.32-51. available at: https://doi.org/10.46451/ijts.2020.09.04 (accessed 23 june 2021). espasa, a., mayordomo, r., guasch, t. and martinez-melo, m. (2019) ‘does the type of feedback channel used in online learning environments matter? students' perceptions and impact on learning’, active learning in higher education, pp.1-15. available at: https://doi.org/10.1177/1469787419891307 (accessed: 22 june 2021). liu, q., geertshuis, s. and grainger, r. (2020) ‘understanding academics’ adoption of learning technologies: a systematic review’, computers and education, 151, 103857. available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2020.103857 (accessed: 22 june 2021). http://dx.doi.org/10.21125/iceri.2020.1398 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11423-015-9367-8 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jslw.2021.100797 https://doi.org/10.46451/ijts.2020.09.04 https://doi.org/10.1177/1469787419891307 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2020.103857 kimberley, matthews, smith, leech video feedback in english for academic purposes: building connections with international students while learning online journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 6 lowenthal, p., borup, j., west, r. and archambault, l. (2020) ‘thinking beyond zoom: using asynchronous video to maintain connection and engagement during the covid-19 pandemic’, journal of technology and teacher education, 28(2), pp.383-391. available at: https://www.learntechlib.org/primary/p/216192/ (accessed 1 may 2021). mahoney, p., macfarlane, s. and ajjawi, r. (2019) ‘a qualitative synthesis of video feedback in higher education’, teaching in higher education, 24(2), pp.157-179. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2018.1471457 (accessed: 22 june 2021). mccarthy, j. (2015) ‘evaluating written, audio and video feedback in higher education summative assessment tasks’, issues in educational research, 5(2), pp.153-169. available at: http://www.iier.org.au/iier25/mccarthy.pdf (accessed 2 may 2021). ryan, t. (2020) ‘designing video feedback to support the socioemotional aspects of online learning’, educational technology research and development, 69, pp.137-140. available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11423-020-09918-7 (accessed: 22 june 2021). author details jade kimberley is an academic leader at the university of nottingham international college. she is a senior fellow of advance he and a senior certified member of the association for learning technology. her research interests include digital literacies, continuous professional development and innovations in technology enhanced learning. chiara (kiki) matthews is an academic manager at the university of nottingham international college, where she leads on an extended english and skills programme. she is interested in promoting student success by developing language skills and knowledge of academic conventions. https://www.learntechlib.org/primary/p/216192/ https://doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2018.1471457 http://www.iier.org.au/iier25/mccarthy.pdf https://doi.org/10.1007/s11423-020-09918-7 kimberley, matthews, smith, leech video feedback in english for academic purposes: building connections with international students while learning online journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 7 vanessa smith is an english language and study skills tutor, and eap coordinator at the university of nottingham international college. she is interested in improving student engagement in online learning spaces. jo leech is an english language, research & study skills tutor at the university of nottingham international college, with a specific interest in learner motivation and engagement. video feedback in english for academic purposes: building connections with international students while learning online the challenge the response recommendations references author details research project (report writing, 2007-08) journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 2: february 2010 more than just having the right headings: supporting students’ report writing michelle reid university of reading, uk abstract we tend to assume that report writing is more straightforward than essay writing and that it varies greatly between academic disciplines in he. however, there is relatively little research on reports as an academic genre of writing. consequently, the university of reading, as part of the learnhigher cetl, conducted a series of qualitative interviews with subject academics from a range of departments in order to investigate their needs when supporting student report writing. this research shows that report writing varies not only between subjects but often within modules in the same subject, and it also encompasses a far wider range of informative writing. these findings highlight the need to consider the audience and purpose of each report, to emphasise the reasons behind the formal structure of reports, and to show reports as a means of formalising and communicating a research process, rather than only a series of structural characteristics. this research has also informed the creation of adaptable report writing resources freely available on the learnhigher website. keywords: report writing; learning development; genre; informative writing. introduction: scarcity of report writing research and resources there is comparatively little support for report writing, either for students or for academic staff at he level, in contrast to other genres of academic writing like essays. indeed, it has been noted that report writing is ‘one of the most problematic study-skills areas in which to work out how and what to advise students to do to develop their approaches’ (race, 2001: 62). this is perhaps because reports are regarded as highly discipline specific with the reid more than just having the right headings: supporting students’ report writing requirements of style and form being determined by the discipline, hence not widely applicable outside that field. this is reflected in the common types of report writing guides aimed at students – they often focus on the wider process of scientific or technical writing as a whole, such as barrass’ very thorough scientists must write (2002), or they are discipline specific, like harris’ designing and reporting experiments in psychology (2002). even the most comprehensive and inclusive guides, for example, williams’ writing reports: developing writing (1995) and van emden’s and easteal’s report writing (1993), tend to favour one particular style of report, with williams slanted towards management reports, and van emden and easteal concentrating on technical and management reports. from our experience as learning developers, we assume that types of reports vary greatly between departments and that many departments, not just those covering science subjects, require their students to write reports as part of their assessments. however, there is relatively little existing research to confirm these professional observations. in order to investigate these assumptions, the study advice team at the university of reading, as part of the learnhigher centre for excellence in teaching and learning (cetl), conducted research with subject academics into their needs when supporting students who write reports. this research provides the beginnings of an evidence base on report writing as an academic genre and has helped develop resources to enhance student report writing. learnhigher is a network of 16 partner institutions researching and developing peer-reviewed resources for 20 different learning areas. the university of reading is responsible for the learning area of report writing (as well as the learning area of time management) and we have adopted an action research approach to investigate three main research questions: • what does it mean to describe report writing as an academic genre? • what are the similarities and differences between reports in different disciplines? • in which areas of report writing do students experience particular difficulties, and how can they be best supported to develop their practices? this paper reports on the results of the second phase of our research which aimed to identify academics’ needs when supporting student report writing. it also aimed to gather qualitative data on what distinguishes reports as an academic genre of writing. the final journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2, february 2010 2 reid more than just having the right headings: supporting students’ report writing aim of this project was to use the findings of the research to inform the production of report writing resources. in the first phase of research conducted by kim shahabudin in 2006-07 we held focus groups with students which showed that our existing central study advice report writing guides needed to be redesigned to be more attractive, lively, and targeted. however, when we trialled a briefer, tri-folded leaflet called ‘ten top tips for better report writing’ in response to this feedback, we found that it was difficult to engage subject academics in helping to embed the resource in their courses and in giving us opportunities to promote the leaflet to their students. the difficulty we had in engaging academics in our ‘ten top tips’ project led us to realise, ‘there was a need to spend more time developing relationships of trust with academic staff, canvassing their opinions more fully, and working on ways of providing resources suitable for embedded teaching’ (shahabudin and turner, 2007). this need to develop a relationship of trust with academics is particularly relevant to report writing resources because subject academics can be reluctant to promote generic guides and workshops on reports as they assume generic resources are not sufficiently specific for their discipline. therefore, we wanted to create closer links with subject academics by involving them as consultants in our research and by enabling them to influence the development of report writing resources they could embed in their subject teaching. methodology: use of resources to engage subject academics initial contact with academics was made through a brief email questionnaire and an online survey which was posted to a teaching staff mailing list. we asked the academics what types of reports their students write and what aspects of report writing their students struggle with most. although the response rate to this questionnaire was lower than we had hoped (10 respondents), the replies were from a wide range of departments (from law to cybernetics). the academics who replied welcomed the opportunity to discuss report writing in more depth. as one respondent wrote, ‘i struggled to know what support students needed in this aspect...so would be very keen to hear what you learn from this survey’. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2, february 2010 3 reid more than just having the right headings: supporting students’ report writing we followed this questionnaire with a series of semi-structured interviews with the respondents, as well as a range of other academics from departments that set reports as assignments. semi-structured interviews were selected because we wished to investigate how reports function as a genre of academic writing. in walker’s study of teaching engineering reports using genre theory, she highlights the semi-structured interview as the most valuable research method for identifying report writing genre characteristics in their social context (1999: 14). this is because, in order to understand the report genre as a socially created communication form, detailed, qualitative insights of those experts who define, maintain, and monitor the genre are needed. in order to persuade subject academics to be interviewed, we used our report writing resources as a way of attracting them to our project and as a means of giving ‘added value’ in return for their time. in response to our first phase of action research, we had redesigned our range of study guides into more targeted, shorter guides in an eyecatching a5 format. this responded to students’ previous criticisms of our old-fashioned a4 report writing guides and their relative lack of enthusiasm for our ‘top tips’ leaflet. the redesigned guides also incorporated the feedback from the initial questionnaire with academics. we contacted academics informing them of the new a5 guides and seeking their evaluations of the resources. the time pressures on academic staff, and the increased number of evaluation activities in higher education, has taught us to maximise the benefit gained from any one research activity. consequently, the semi-structured interviews served multiple aims: 1) to disseminate our learnhigher resources and gain evaluations of our report writing guides; 2) to understand how academics perceive reports as an academic genre; and 3) to investigate what academics see as students’ greatest needs in report writing. in contrast to the difficulty in engaging academics with the online questionnaire, we had a far more enthusiastic response to our request for interviews. this is because we had already established a relationship with these academics. moreover, we demonstrated that their feedback had a direct result on the resources we produce. we were addressing their concerns by offering them resources which could provide potential solutions to the issues they faced when supporting student report writing. in addition, the timing and method of research also played a role; the interviews were held at the end of the summer term just after coursework had been marked, so issues of effective writing were at the forefront of journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2, february 2010 4 reid more than just having the right headings: supporting students’ report writing many academics’ minds. it also seemed that academics were more willing to talk about their experiences of teaching than respond to online questionnaires. it is likely that they perceived the interviews as less of a burden on their time because they were similar to the ongoing informal interactions they have with colleagues which form a vital part of their professional development and the advancement of teaching and learning in their departments. consequently, the semi-structured interviews helped academics regard us as peers rather than as separate study advisers. we interviewed a total of 12 academics from 7 departments. the questions focussed on: • what kinds of reports are students asked to do on the course/in the department? • do they have assignments which require other forms of factual or informative writing? • where do you recommend students to get advice on report writing? • what defines good report writing? • what are the areas students have problems with when writing reports? • what are your first impressions of our report writing study guides? • what other resources would you find useful for report writing? results and discussion differences in report writing within and between subjects the responses from our interviews with academics showed that there are considerable differences in the types of reports between departments, for example a field report in agriculture, a lab write-up in psychology, and a technical report in cybernetics. more importantly, our research showed that students are being asked to write a number of different types of reports on one course, often within a single module, for example an introductory module to animal science may require a student to write reports on field visits, a report reviewing a journal article, and scientific reports demonstrating different research methods. this is also the case for modules in subjects like geography and archaeology. these findings reinforce the need for students to pay close attention to their specific briefs whenever they are asked to write a report. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2, february 2010 5 reid more than just having the right headings: supporting students’ report writing however, academics state that although they give precise and detailed instructions in the brief, students have difficulty following them. this is perhaps because the instructions for writing a report are not isolated in the brief but in a complex interaction of many different texts. for example, in a report for a field visit to a nature reserve on an ecology module, the brief was broken down into ‘broad aim’, ‘objective and assessment’, ‘points to include’ and ‘activities to undertake’. it is also common that a brief is accompanied by a longer breakdown of what the report is expected to include, as well as a marking criteria that is specific to that report. all these different texts constitute the varied academic discourse that students have to negotiate in their subject. this complex interaction of texts means that students are not merely ‘writing up’ the record of an investigation, visit or experiment. they are actively engaged in interpreting the discourse of their chosen academic field and understanding the language and methods required for this subject. carter et al. (2004: 399) identify 12 different texts associated with writing a lab report, ranging from the lab manual for the course outlining the experiment to the graded report returned to the students with the markers’ comments. these all contribute to the ‘genre set’ of related texts which inform the act of writing a report. the finished report is only one of these many texts with which students have to engage in order to develop their understanding of an academic subject. as carter et al. explain in relation to the lab report: as a genre set, we understand the lab report not simply as an isolated discourse act (the write-up to be done after the main work of the lab is finished), but as a complex of interrelated discourse acts used to advance the same overall goal of helping students learn science (2004: 399). this could be applied to all reports. as students at the university of reading are being asked to write multiple types of report in a single module, it shows that the main aim is not for students to learn how to write each type of report and the formal differences between them, but to use the report writing process as a means of inducting students into their academic discipline and the types of thought processes, knowledge, language and research methods appropriate to that discipline. consequently, students need to be encouraged not to see briefs merely as a list of instructions, but to interpret briefs as part of the wider discourse of their subject, some of journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2, february 2010 6 reid more than just having the right headings: supporting students’ report writing which may be implicit and not obvious to novices in the discourse community. for example, a brief for a social work report may ask students to ‘refer to their own practice and relevant social work theories’. this apparently simple instruction involves a complex process of comparing and contrasting two very different types of evidence (empirical observations and academic theories). such a process may be straightforward and obvious to an initiate in the discipline, as it underpins the academic verification of the social work profession. however, it can be frustratingly opaque to a student who is unfamiliar with the purpose of theory and also unsure if their professional experience counts as evidence. when writing reports, students need to identify what type of report they are being asked to write (field, lab, business, technical etc). however, this is not as important as being able to identify the research methods appropriate to that report, and also understand the discipline-specific discourse used to explain these methods and approaches. reports as an aspect of informative writing in addition to the differences between reports, our research shows that students are being asked to submit a far wider range of written assignments than just reports or essays. a number of academics responded to our interviews by saying they set assignments such as portfolios, reflective accounts, literature reviews, and factsheets. they identified these assignments as ‘falling broadly’ within the area of report writing. although these are not called ‘reports’, they share a number of key features with reports: • they have a specific purpose and are aimed at a specific audience; • they have a formal structure, often with headings or bullet points; • they are focused on reporting the results of research or an investigation; • they aim to inform the audience of the key findings of the research. this finding confirms our own professional observations; in the last few years an increasing number of students have been coming to see study advice about assignments which have detailed instructions and a formal structure broken up into sections but which are not clearly defined as a ‘report’, hence students are not sure where to start or what kind of writing is required. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2, february 2010 7 reid more than just having the right headings: supporting students’ report writing as a result of our research we named this broad category ‘informative writing’. the emphasis on informative communication was a main feature which linked all these different forms of written assignment – they are written for a specific audience and for a specific purpose. the term ‘informative’ draws attention to the audience being informed and the overall aim of the information. our choice of term was confirmed by contrasting it with the term ’expository writing’ used by parkinson in her study of scientific literacy. she argues that that being proficient in the discourse of a specific subject (in her case science) requires an ‘acquisition of a range of literacies...rather than acquisition of skills or grammatical form’ (2000: 369). this emphasis on a network of literacies, as opposed to a fixed set of skills or formal qualities, is valid. however, parkinson identifies reports as part of a range of literacies which all involve ‘expository writing’ (2000: 380). the term ‘expository writing’ emphasises setting forth an explanation, so it focuses on the internal content and object of the writing, not its purpose. our findings show that it is perhaps more productive to see report writing as a part of a range of literacies which all require ‘informative writing’ with the focus placed on who is being informed, of what, and why. when producing report writing resources we need to be aware that reports are part of this wider range of literacies known as ‘informative writing’. in order for our resources to be applicable to students engaged in the wider range of informative writing assessments in higher education they need to place emphasis on being able to identify the audience of the writing, and the purpose of the writing. report structure as ordered communication, not formal characteristics subject academics identified the structuring of reports as a key area where students needed support. they found the main issue was not that students failed to organise their reports into the correct sections or headings (e.g. introduction, method, results discussion, conclusion), but that students did not have a logical order of points within the sections. academics commented that students did not seem to appreciate the purpose of the report structure. they simply treated headings as sections to be filled in, as opposed to stages in the communication of a research process. this was particularly evident when the sections of a report were not specified in the brief, so students found it difficult to deduce what sections were best to include. it was also evident when students were switching between reports which had different formal conventions (e.g. between a lab report which does not journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2, february 2010 8 reid more than just having the right headings: supporting students’ report writing require a literature review and a longer technical report which does need a review of background literature). the majority of academics we interviewed said they wanted reports to be correctly structured but they did not want to be prescriptive in specifying only a single structure and order for organising all reports. this was true in the more vocational courses such as real estate and planning, where the academics said that, when students enter into employment, each real estate firm will have their own preferred format for reports. therefore, it is important that students understand the rationale behind the way a report is formatted to communicate information, as opposed to slavishly following a model. the desire to avoid being prescriptive about report structure was also true in less explicitly vocational subjects, such as psychology and cybernetics. academics wanted students to ‘design’ their reports, just as they would design an experiment, as opposed to following a set of headings. this perception of a report’s structure as a means of communicating information further confirms the view that reports are a socially constructed genre determined by the needs of a specific discourse community, as opposed to a set of formal characteristics (see carter et al., 2004; marshall, 1991; walker, 1999). as sheehan and flood state: more than an organizational structure, a genre embodies and articulates a particular social understanding about how a community interprets and responds to recurring rhetorical situations. therefore, mastering a genre requires more than simply choosing the right ‘format’ and lining up a report ‘structure’ with the elements of a rhetorical situation. rather, mastering the genre requires one to understand the social, political, and ethical reasons particular communities study and respond to recurring situations in their workplace (1999: 24). however, students are new initiates into these research communities, so often the formal structure of the report is the only tacit evidence they have of the complex assumptions governing the way these communities function. an assumption that often remains tacit is that academics use reports as a means of creating a conventional order out of a complex research process. the formality of the report genre is a necessary response to often difficult, iterative and serendipitous journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2, february 2010 9 reid more than just having the right headings: supporting students’ report writing investigations. the report itself is a means of shaping and managing the non-linear research process. as sheehan and flood argue in relation to engineering project reports: [students] use the genre to impose a conceptual structure on an indeterminate situation, creating order in an otherwise fluid space. then students learn how to interpret the situation through the genre to determine appropriate issues and information worth pursuing as they work towards their purpose (1999: 24). a number of researchers have noted the parallels between the scientific method and the structure of a report (marshall, 1991; willmot et al., 2003). however, swales makes the important observation that a report, and its more developed form, the research article, are not narratives of the research process, but ‘reconstructions’ (1990: 175). he notes that investigations, experiments and empirical research are often prone to serendipity. for example, a result is found by accident and the whole purpose and rationale of the investigation are reversed and reconstructed to suit the findings (1990: 118). this is true of empirical research, but it is also true of reports involving secondary research. the iterative mapping process of searching for journal articles and books then analysing the relationships between their findings is very different to the ordered and prioritised summary of the findings found in a report. williams offers a more accurate analogy when she compares the stages in a report to the learning cycle of ‘do, reflect, form principles, plan’ (1995: 41). as she says, ‘you can see why the report is an attractive form of writing for student assignments: it places on record the learning process’ (williams, 1995: 43). however, in reality the cyclical learning process as experienced by students is often highly individual and uneven, in contrast to the regular and generalised form imposed by a report structure. consequently, reports are rarely straightforward accounts of an investigation; they are a means of organising the outcomes of the investigative process. the difficulty that students have in structuring reports perhaps indicates a difference in expectations and expertise between the novices of a discourse community (students) and the more proficient experts of that community (academics). when students come to study advice, they are often anxious about getting the report structure correct and making sure they have included the appropriate information in each section of their report. yet academics want students to understand why a report is structured in a certain way, not to slavishly follow a set model. it may be, however, that academics are so accustomed to using reports as a means of reconstructing a research process that it has become journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2, february 2010 10 reid more than just having the right headings: supporting students’ report writing naturalised; they have an implicit understanding of the artificial order it imposes on any investigation, which they fail to make explicit in instructions to students. this suggests that students may need to have more opportunities to evaluate and understand reports as a means of communication in their subject, for example, students could be asked to compare the similarities and differences between the conceptual order of a report, and the research process it reconstructs. reports as a synthesis of writing styles and the need to plan reports a number of the academics we interviewed suggested the difficulty students have with structuring reports is related to time management. some students do not leave sufficient time to plan their reports, hence this contributes to the confused order of points within each section. this demonstrates the integral importance of time management to all forms of academic writing; allowing sufficient time for planning and redrafting. however, the lack of planning may also be due to students perceiving reports as simply ‘writing up’, hence they see no need for planning, only recounting what they did. in addition, some students may regard the overall formal structure of a report (the imrd model – introduction, method, results, discussion) as a sufficient plan. nevertheless, the complexity and individuality of every report indicates that there may be a need for students to plan each section in more detail. far from simply being ‘writing up’, a report often involves a synthesis of different types of research methods, analytical thinking and different styles of writing. for example, in his investigation of scientific reports, braine identified that ‘they require a mixture of activities such as summary, paraphrase, seriation, description, comparison and contrast, cause and effect, interpretation and the integration of mathematical and scientific data into a text’ (cited in parkinson, 2000: 372). these different activities correspond to different sections of a report such as precise summarising in the abstract, expository description in the methodology, and discursive analysis in the discussion. the differing writing styles are linked to the different communicative purposes of each section. moreover, some of the longest and most complex sections, such as the introduction and the discussion, involve a synthesis of research methods, for example the need to integrate secondary reading with empirical research. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2, february 2010 11 reid more than just having the right headings: supporting students’ report writing the academics we interviewed indentified the abstract, discussion, and conclusion sections as the ones which students find the most challenging. interestingly, these are usually the parts of a report that the audience read first in order to judge whether the report is relevant. they are the sections that involve the most challenging forms of writing using higher-level abilities such as analysis and selection. there is a need to write selectively in the abstract. academics note that students tend to write too much in an abstract and describe things that the audience know already (e.g. in surveying reports students often describe the size and position of a building when the client is already very familiar with these details of their own building). as a result of including this unnecessary description, students do not have sufficient room to summarise the key methods and findings of their report. this form of selective writing depends on an awareness of the audience’s needs. however, abstracts are normally the last part of a report to be written, so students may have lost sight of their intended readers. it could help to remind students to refer back to their brief and consider their audience when writing the abstract. in the discussion section, academics would like students to link their findings with the findings in the background literature, and assess whether they confirm or challenge these previous studies. the academics we interviewed described this in various ways such as ‘critical synthesis of data’, ‘triangulating different evidence’, or ‘linking what they found in the field with the secondary literature’. they also compare these discursive writing practices with those used in essays. however, when asked, most academics do not make this similarity with essay writing explicit to their students. it may be that with a complex writing task like a discussion, students need the chance to deduce the necessary requirements by analysing similar examples. this would be a more active learning process than being given a fixed list of requirements for a discussion section. indeed, when using a genre-based approach to teaching report writing, marshall states that it is far more effective to allow students to ‘discuss examples and arrive at a consensus on the principles to be used in their writing’ (1991: 6). by evaluating examples of the writing required, students are encouraged ‘to use basic principles of communication to decide how to write their reports’ (marshall, 1991: 6). the majority of academics interviewed said they would like students to make definite recommendations based on the report findings. some academics suggested that students journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2, february 2010 12 reid more than just having the right headings: supporting students’ report writing were reluctant to make definite recommendations because they did not have confidence in their own findings or were not aware that the audience expected a judgement based on their expertise. the need to make recommendations in a conclusion is closely linked with having an understanding of the needs and requirements of the audience reading the report. by the time they come to write their conclusion, students may be focussed on the need to finish their report. consequently, they may overlook the original audience for their writing and be less likely to make specific recommendations aimed at that audience. it suggests that students need to ask themselves ‘what does my audience want to find out from reading this report?’ at each stage of writing. these findings suggest that reports are a more complex form of writing than they initially seem. the academics we interviewed stressed the need for reports to be written in a clear and simple manner, but perhaps this emphasis on clarity disguises the complexity and range of writing required. it may help to highlight the important difference between a report needing to be clear and simple, and it being easy and straightforward to write. the best reports often communicate clearly to the audience because the author has taken the necessary time for the complex thinking and planning process involved behind the clear writing. overlap between reports and dissertations many of the academics in our study emphasised the overlap between reports and dissertations, especially in the sciences and social sciences. academics viewed dissertations as the culmination of the various research methods, experiment design, and understanding of the subject learned during the course, often through the process of writing reports. although the academics we interviewed did not explicitly describe it as such, the dissertation is one of the final chances for an undergraduate to demonstrate their competency and initiation into the discourse community of their subject. academics noted that students often had trouble transferring the appropriate research methods and skills (such as literature searches) from the reports they have written to their final year dissertations. this is perhaps because dissertations are perceived by many students as something large, intimidating, and ‘other’, as opposed to a logical progression in their learning. it may also be because the modular structure of the courses separates journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2, february 2010 13 reid more than just having the right headings: supporting students’ report writing the dissertation in a module or unit of its own, hence isolating it from the ongoing learning process. the difficulty in relating what has been learned from writing reports to dissertations may also be related to the earlier observation that students do not tend to ‘design’ their reports, but instead would like a fixed model to follow. however, a detailed prescriptive structure is not possible for a dissertation, as the structure evolves in conjunction with the design of the project. this is supported by observations from academics who note that students refine their title, project and chapter outline in an ongoing, integrated process. although this is how it happens, students rarely approach it in this integrated way; it is only through experience that they come to understand how changes to the chapter outline will result in changes to the purpose of the project and vice versa. this supports sheehan and flood’s recommendation that ‘the report genre should be taught as a tool for invention, not merely as an organizational pattern or formula’ (1999: 24). an interesting model for seeing reports as a means of invention and a creative process is ashby’s ‘how to write a paper’ (2005) which uses the idea of a ‘concept sheet’ as a means of planning a report in a way that aids invention and design. ashby’s concept sheet is an idea derived from engineering design in which the whole report is represented by separate blocks on a large sheet of paper, with the links between sections, figures, references, and research questions shown in colour-coded or visual form (figure 1): figure 1. (ashby, how to write a paper, 2005: 8.) journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2, february 2010 14 reid more than just having the right headings: supporting students’ report writing it acts as a more structured form of mind-map or spider diagram tailored to the needs of report writing. the visual form helps foreground the design process and the development of the report as a project, not just as a ‘write-up’ after the research is completed. it would also be useful for people whose learning styles favour graphical, diagrammatic and visual forms of communication. conclusion the research conducted with subject academics at the university of reading has shown that reports are a more complex academic genre than implied by their common description as simple, clear and concise writing. the formal structure of a report provides a means of conceptually ordering the research process; it is more than a series of sections and headings to follow. students can be initiated into the research communities served by reports by being helped to understand how the structure of reports serves different functions in communicating information to the audience, rather than just being a set of requirements to fulfil. for students to negotiate the literacies required to write reports, they need to be supported in identifying the audience and purpose of their reports. in response to these findings, we have refined our existing report writing study guides and developed a series of adaptable report writing workshops on topics ranging from identifying the audience and purpose of a report, to using graphical data. these workshops contain activities and exercises that can be tailored to the needs of individual subjects by adding examples specific to that subject. they can also be delivered as part of a generic learning development program. the workshops aim to help students understand the communication process involved in writing a report – who the report is written for, and why – as opposed to just fulfilling the formal, structural requirements. all these report writing resources can be found on the learnhigher report writing pages. the learnhigher cetl is also in the process of producing a series of online video resources for delivering learning development workshops and report writing features as one of these guides. this research and the resulting resources show how reports involve a more complex and varied writing process than we, and our students, may assume. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2, february 2010 15 reid more than just having the right headings: supporting students’ report writing the author of this paper would like to thank dr kim shahabudin and dr judy turner who conducted the first phase of research on which this second stage of research was based, and for their ongoing support in completing this project. learnhigher report writing resources for tutors: www.learnhigher.ac.uk/learningareas/reportwriting/enhancingstudentreportwriting.htm learnhigher report writing video resource (part of a series of video resources on a range of learning areas): www.learnhigher.ac.uk/videoresources/ an award winning suite of resources which gained 3rd place in the prestigious jorum learning and teaching awards 2009. references ashby, m. (2005) how to write a paper (6th edn). online: www.grantadesign.com/userarea/teachingresource/writeapaper.htm (accessed: 10 november 2009). barrass, r. (2002) scientists must write (2nd edn). london: routledge. carter, m., ferzli, m. and wiebe, e. (2004) ‘teaching genre to english first-language adults: a study of the laboratory report’, research in the teaching of english 38(4) pp 395-419. harris, p. (2002) designing and reporting experiments in psychology (2nd edn). maidenhead: open university press. marshall, s. (1991) ‘a genre-based approach to the teaching of report-writing’, english for specific purposes 10 pp 3-13. parkinson, j. (2000) ‘acquiring scientific literacy through content and genre: a themebased language course for science students’, english for specific purposes 19 pp 369-387. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2, february 2010 16 http://www.grantadesign.com/userarea/teachingresource/writeapaper.htm reid more than just having the right headings: supporting students’ report writing race, p. (2001) the lecturer’s toolkit. london: routledge. shahabudin, k. and turner, j. (2007) developing resources for report writing in higher education: an action research approach. learnhigher cetl. online: www.learnhigher.ac.uk/learningareas/reportwriting/projectsandresearch.htm (accessed: 10 november 2009). sheehan, r.j. and flood, a. (1999) ‘genre, rhetorical interpretation, and the open case: teaching the analytical report’, ieee transactions on professional communication 42(1) pp 20-31. swales, j. m. (1990) genre analysis: english in academic and research settings. cambridge: cambridge university press. van emden, j., and easteal, j. (1993) report writing (2nd edn). london: mcgraw hill. walker, k. (1999) ‘using genre theory to teach students engineering lab report writing: a collaborative approach’, ieee transactions on professional communication 42(1) pp 12-19. williams, k. (1995) writing reports: developing writing. oxford: oxford centre for staff development, oxford brookes university. willmott, j.r., clark, r.p. and harrison, t.m. (2003) ‘introducing undergraduate students to scientific reports’, bioscience education e-journal 1. online: www.bioscience.heacademy.ac.uk/journal/vol1/beej-1-10.aspx (accessed: 10 november 2009). author details michelle reid is a study adviser and learning development researcher at the university of reading. she is responsible for researching the learning area of report writing as part of the learnhigher cetl. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2, february 2010 17 http://www.learnhigher.ac.uk/learningareas/reportwriting/projectsandresearch.htm http://www.bioscience.heacademy.ac.uk/journal/vol1/beej-1-10.aspx more than just having the right headings: supporting students’ report writing abstract introduction: scarcity of report writing research and resources methodology: use of resources to engage subject academics results and discussion differences in report writing within and between subjects reports as an aspect of informative writing report structure as ordered communication, not formal characteristics reports as a synthesis of writing styles and the need to plan reports overlap between reports and dissertations conclusion references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special issue 22: compendium of innovative practice october 2021 ________________________________________________________________________ reconceptualising learning and teaching staff development at strathclyde: supplementing formal provision with informal spaces sean morrissey university of strathclyde, uk katy savage university of strathclyde, uk keywords: covid-19; academic development; professional identity; blended learning; online learning; peer support for staff. the challenge the sector-wide pivot to blended/online learning in response to the covid-19 pandemic brought with it innumerable challenges and opportunities. as members of an educational development team at the university of strathclyde – a research intensive university – we were tasked with supporting staff throughout the institution to respond quickly to these challenges and embrace the opportunities of blended/online learning. across the sector, new directions in professional educational development often draw influence from the work of lave and wenger (1991) in focussing on the informal, situated aspects of professional development. this can include ‘opportunities […] for informal discussions and shared work’ (e.g., trowler and knight, 2000) and activities like mentoring (e.g., boeren et al., 2015), ‘professional dialogues’ (e.g., feiman-nemser, 2001), and practice sharing. where technology is concerned however, vaughan and garrison’s (2006) suggestion, that professional development for online learning tends to focus on operational capabilities rather than digital literacies for educators (e.g., higher education academy, 2017), remains a poignant one. drawing on insights from the literature, we recognised that our response at strathclyde did, indeed, need to address key operational competencies. developing an online morrissey and savage reconceptualising learning and teaching staff development at strathclyde: supplementing formal provision with informal spaces journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 2 programme requires a different set of staff skills, compared with face-to-face delivery (hixon et al., 2018). lu, todd and miller have described the digitalisation of teaching as a ‘paradigm shift’, akin to ‘learning a new language’ (lu, todd and miller, 2011). our questions in this regard included: how to help teaching staff acquire the knowledge and capabilities required to develop high quality, evidence-informed, flexible student experiences, and how to leverage the experience of ‘early adopters’ and disseminate good practice. yet, from an ‘affective’ perspective, the literature indicated that the implementation of new technologies in teaching can also precipitate a loss of control, which can lead to paralysis and disrupt the ‘professional identities’ of staff (alvarez, 2008). many colleagues faced additional pressures during the first wave of the pandemic, including (but by no means restricted to), work-life balance, job-security, health concerns, and so on. in the educational development team, we cared deeply about this because we were experiencing many of these challenges first-hand. we had many years’ experience of offering flexible development opportunities at strathclyde, with peer-support networks (e.g. savage et al., 2021) being a particular area of focus. however, the impact of the pandemic on staff in an affective sense motivated us to develop a rich and diverse programme of support and development that included formal training and cpd opportunities – informal spaces for peer support and mechanisms for sharing good practice and disseminating experiences. the response from march 2020, the academic development team at strathclyde initiated a programme of workshops on blended/online learning design for programme leaders across the university. recognising that we, ourselves, were programme leaders, we ‘put our money where our mouth was’ and redesigned the modules on our pgcert to accommodate fully online study. we also worked with a team of ‘early adopters’ to create self-paced online cpd opportunities on topics such as flipped classes, learner agreements, and engaging audiences online. morrissey and savage reconceptualising learning and teaching staff development at strathclyde: supplementing formal provision with informal spaces journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 3 we also initiated a mailing list, for staff to pose questions, highlight experiences, and offer mutual support, and a blog. the blog quickly became an opportunity for staff to reflect more deeply on their experiences of technology-enhanced learning and to share good practice with others. these formal activities were supplemented by drop-in sessions and a ‘teachers’ lounge’ to promote staff well-being. our participation in an advance he good practice grant (savage et al., 2021) project during this period also led to the reinvigoration of a number of peer support networks that had been dormant. the teachers’ lounge was regularly attended by a member of staff who had joined the university immediately after the closure of campus. this provided a valuable place for that member of staff to ask questions, meet colleagues, and feel a sense of belonging in a group of likeminded peers. similarly, the drop-in sessions functioned as spaces for professional dialogue amongst teaching staff. often participants would bring challenges to the sessions, which ranged in scope from the development of online teaching activities to the use of virtual learning environments to deliver assessment and feedback. these problems were then worked through collectively, leading to the provision of novel solutions, reflection on action, and practice sharing. recommendations between march and july 2020, we tracked around 1400 direct engagements across all of these resources. while the impact of informal provision can be notoriously difficult to quantify, our evaluation of these activities pointed to a number of tangible benefits. by supporting staff in developing specific skills in digital education, our colleagues told us that their motivation and enthusiasm for teaching online increased. a survey of peer-support network participants during the first wave of the covid-19 pandemic also found that around 60% of participants made changes to their teaching as a direct result of their participation in one or more network(s). new relationships with colleagues and a sense of belonging similarly emerged as key outcomes of this diverse staff development programme. https://strath.pagetiger.com/psn/tools morrissey and savage reconceptualising learning and teaching staff development at strathclyde: supplementing formal provision with informal spaces journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 4 the informal activities, in particular, provided valuable opportunities for the educational development team to keep a finger on the pulse of staff and evolve the programme accordingly. by early 2021, for example, in response to growing concerns about staff wellbeing, we decided to implement a new programme of cpd activities called ‘keeping well, teaching well’. similarly, a weekly programme of micro-cpd was initiated earlier this year due to the admission of many colleagues in these informal spaces that they were ‘beginning to neglect their own professional development’. clearly, the overwhelmingly positive response to our new programme of staff development activities was, in part, due to a surge of enthusiasm from teaching staff across the university, not to mention the necessity of learning new skills to pivot online. however, the number of engagements from staff remains high vis-à-vis the months and years pre-covid19. by offering them a responsive and differentiated programme, staff involved in learning and teaching at strathclyde seem to have to have appreciated an approach that respects their individual needs and the diversity of our staff community. in conclusion, the education development team at strathclyde recommends the benefits of a dynamic blend of formal and informal spaces for professional development. in particular, drop-in sessions, peer support networks, and coffee lounges were particularly impactful for staff during the first wave of the pandemic. these spaces supported the well-being and resilience of teaching staff, promoted learning and development, and fostered the building of meaningful, collaborative relationships in the face of uncertainty and change. a programme comprised of these elements offers a sustainable way forward for academic development. references alvarez, r. (2008) ‘examining technology, structure and identity during an enterprise system implementation’, information systems journal, 18(2), pp.203-224. boeren, e., lokhtina-antoniou, i., sakurai, y., herman, c. and mcalpine, l. (2015) ‘mentoring: a review of early career researcher studies’, frontline learning research, 3(3), pp.68-80. https://doi.org/10.14786/flr.v3i3.186. https://doi.org/10.14786/flr.v3i3.186 morrissey and savage reconceptualising learning and teaching staff development at strathclyde: supplementing formal provision with informal spaces journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 5 feiman-nemser, sharon (2001) ‘helping novices learn to teach: lessons from an exemplary support teacher’, journal of teacher education, 52(1), pp.17-30. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022487101052001003. higher education academy (2017) digital literacies. available at: https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/knowledge-hub/digital-literacies (accessed: 1 april 2021). hixon, e, barczyk, c., buckenmeyer, j. and feldman, l. (2018) ‘mentoring university faculty to become high quality online educators: a program evaluation’, online journal of distance learning administration, 14(5), pp.2011. lave, j. and wenger, e. (1991) learning in doing: social, cognitive, and computational perspectives. situated learning: legitimate peripheral participation. cambridge: cambridge university press. lu, m., todd, a. and miller, m. (2011) ‘creating a supportive culture for online teaching: a case study of a faculty learning community’, online journal of distance learning administration, 14(3), pp.84-93. https://doi.org/10.1080/14703297.2014.910129. knight, p. t. and trowler, p. r. (2000) ‘department-level cultures and the improvement of learning and teaching’, studies in higher education, 25(1), pp.69-83. https://doi.org/10.1080/030750700116028. savage, k., morrissey, s., willison, d., guccione, k. and zike, j. (2021) peer support networks: fostering a sense of belonging. available at: https://strath.pagetiger.com/psn/tools (accessed: 3 june, 2021). vaughan, n. and garrison, d. r. (2006) ‘how blended learning can support a faculty development community of inquiry’, journal of asynchronous learning networks, 10(4), pp.139-152. author details https://doi.org/10.1177/0022487101052001003 https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/knowledge-hub/digital-literacies https://doi.org/10.1080/14703297.2014.910129 https://doi.org/10.1080/030750700116028 morrissey and savage reconceptualising learning and teaching staff development at strathclyde: supplementing formal provision with informal spaces journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 6 sean morrissey (fhea) is an academic developer at the university of strathclyde. he leads the learning and teaching pathway within strathclyde’s credit-bearing pgcap and pgclthe programmes. sean’s scholarship interests include digital empowerment for educators and students, assessment for learning in higher education, digital storytelling, and social media for impact. he is actively involved in research, consultancy, and knowledge exchange projects, and leads a programme of staff peer support networks at strathclyde. katy savage (sfhea) is the academic director and development lead for learning and teaching at strathclyde university. her scholarship interests centre around the enhancement of learning and teaching within areas including student transitions in higher education, students as partners in academic development, innovative delivery methods (such as moocs and other blended/online pedagogies), use of lego serious play in higher education, and leadership development in the higher education learning and teaching context, publishing her work and presenting at conferences where appropriate. reconceptualising learning and teaching staff development at strathclyde: supplementing formal provision with informal spaces the challenge the response recommendations references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 16: december 2019 editorial christopher drew swinburne university, australia andy hagyard university of leeds, uk john hilsdon university of plymouth, uk christina howell-richardson birkbeck, university of london, uk eleanor loughlin durham university, uk cathy malone sheffield hallam university, uk craig morley manchester university, uk gita sedghi university of liverpool, uk alicja syska university of plymouth, uk this edition of the journal of learning development in higher education comes at a significant juncture for us as three of our colleagues, john hilsdon, sue eccles and chris drew are stepping down from the editorial board. john was the journal’s founding editor, whose role in shaping the journal was pivotal. he leaves behind very large shoes to fill! the contributions of sue, who served as an editor for four years, and chris, who gave us an international perspective, were enormously valued as well – both brought distinctive voices to the journal and will be greatly missed. there are clear signs that jldhe will continue to grow and thrive, however. we are delighted to welcome two new editors to the team: cathy malone from sheffield hallam university and eleanor loughlin from durham university. both cathy and eleanor bring editorial with them a wealth of expertise, ample experience in higher education, and much passion for learning development. in addition, alicja syska and gita sedghi will now co-lead the journal and work tirelessly to ensure its continued success and uphold its hard-earned reputation in the field. the broad scope of material in this issue is a testament to the creativity and originality of thinking represented by our learning development community. we bring you four articles that built on papers presented at the association for learning development in higher education (aldinhe) annual conference in exeter, in april 2019; seven articles investigating a range of issues, from teaching practices and methodologies to different communities and cultures of practice; as well as two case studies and one book review. in a paper entitled ‘once there was a learning developer’, steve rooney of the university of leicester reflects on a workshop he ran at the 2019 aldinhe conference exploring the role of parables in stimulating debate and critical reflection in higher education. parables are not intended to offer explanations, rooney argues; rather, they contain ‘expectationconfounding qualities’, which nonetheless make us consider perspectives other than the ones we are most familiar with. it is this provocation to look anew at a situation, not necessarily to find its solution, for which rooney suggests parables are most useful. in another paper initially presented at the conference, helen jamison and julie nolan investigate students’ transition into university. they evaluate the impact of a pre-entry module developed to support undergraduate students at edge hill university. in addition to the reports of high level of satisfaction with the module, quantitative and qualitative data revealed some links between pre-entry activity and successful transition. the module can be seen as an example of how effective pre-entry courses can be when it comes to reducing student anxiety, setting inspirational role models, creating a sense of belonging, increasing student engagement levels and supporting retention. jennie blake, nicola grayson, and sami karamalla-gaiballa report on their investigation into the impact of ‘open’ support delivered at the university of manchester via the library’s my learning essentials skills programme (mle). assessing the impact of sessions open to all students can be more difficult that those embedded in curricula and the authors used a number of approaches, including attendance data, participants’ responses (both immediate and deferred), interviews, and degree classifications. the data they collected editorial suggest that engagement with the mle programme made a significant positive impact on undergraduate attainment. while the authors see the study as exploratory in nature, its results contribute a positive affirmation to the discussions surrounding the value of learning development support. the last paper in this conference section, katharine stapleford’s ‘the ldhen hive mind’, offers a major contribution to debates on the role and professional identity of learning developers in higher education (ldhen). setting aside the lack of a substantial literature on the topic and variability in the institutional roles of learning developers, katharine has developed a creative and insightful methodology. this methodology involved analysing six months of user-generated discourse on ldhen through the conceptual lens of social identity theory. this approach allowed her to draw out commonalities in professional culture, providing a more richly nuanced insight into the role of the learning developer than accounts based in an institutionally based analysis of qualifications and job descriptions. laura woods, richard dockery and alison sharman discuss the process and findings of a collaborative project between huddersfield university’s library and student guidance service. using ux research techniques, the team explored computing undergraduates’ study habits and perceptions of support services. the holistic scope of the project resulted in wide-ranging insights and recommendations including raising awareness of the student guidance service and the academic sources, and support available through the library, introducing a formal peer mentoring system and considering commuter and mature students when timetabling. the authors also recognise areas that would benefit from further research. the article by dyanne escorcia and mayilin moreno presents an interesting analysis of the ways university lecturers teach and assess writing. the authors identify three different profiles of teachers’ practices for teaching and assessing writing: transmitting, assessing, and non-adherence profiles. the article implicitly prompts readers to reflect upon their own teaching practices and, moreover, on how the teaching and assessment of writing fit within the role of the twenty-first century higher education practitioner. alex forsythe, emir demirbag and jasmine warren evaluate the impact of psychliverpool, an online blog open to psychology students across four universities in central merseyside. independent of modular credit or evaluation systems, the studenteditorial edited blog is aimed at supporting student discourse and increasing engagement in the academic community. free text feedback collected from contributors and readers was evaluated using automated text analysis. this indicates that the blog not only enhances networking and a sense of community but also enables exploration and evaluation leading to insights and increased confidence and motivation. pauline bremner and audrey laing’s research aims to explore, evaluate and identify any mismatch between degree learning outcomes and employability skills. it also proposes specific strategies to address identifiable skills gaps. focusing on the views of fashion management alumni, the study highlights gaps in digital skills as well as gaps in professional/group skills that some alumni felt were missing from their university education. the research also notes the importance of digital skills in the workplace from the employers’ point of view. while the paper focuses on fm alumni and employers, because of the creativity and management that are core to this course, the findings are relevant across many related management and creative industries university courses. stephanos anastasiadis and justin o’brien explore students’ experiences and expectations of dissertation supervision on a taught master’s programme, which is a relatively under-researched area. the context of their project is a multi-cultural, uk based business school, with a high proportion of international students studying alongside eu and uk students. the authors go into their question in some depth through drawing together a thorough review of the literature and empirical data collected in focus groups and questionnaires. their inquiry indicates, firstly, that students both expect supervisor engagement and respond well to it; and, secondly, that provision of consistent supervision on theory and method can markedly improve students’ overall learning and satisfaction. in their paper, maria kukhareva, anne lawrence, katherine koulle and nazlin bhimani explore the value of using special collections in the classroom to promote higher order thinking processes. in three case studies they describe how special collections were used in different learning development contexts and offer their initial reflections on the process and outcomes of their approach. jessica hancock’s article investigates an innovative way of teaching dissertation writing that involves using online videos. shifting the information-based content of postgraduate workshops to online videos allowed for designing more activity-based sessions that follow editorial the flipped-classroom approach. watching these short films before writing sessions not only created space for more personalised approach in the classroom but also facilitated deep learning; in addition, they were beneficial to off-campus students. this teaching method was met with a positive student assessment and hancock recommends it as an effective way of teaching dissertation writing to postgraduate students, as long as the students are fully briefed regarding its purpose and benefits. similarly, the case study by karin johnstone, samantha thomas, and nathan dodzo investigates the use of online videos to provide students with learning development support in a range of academic skills at the university of northampton. the usage statistics show that these videos are more widely used than other content such as pdf documents. however, videos that were created by staff had poor technical quality and were ‘talking heads’, which, rather than encourage active learning, may result in passive engagement. the project embedded academic skills into a module in a creative way; students were asked to remake the videos as part of their assessment. this process increased student participation and representation in learning development content. in her case study, siriol lewis presents an analysis of a recent course that attempts to bridge the gap between academia and the workplace. the article focuses on the importance of genre, tone and register shift for students transitioning from academia to workplaces. this study’s themes contribute well to an ongoing discussion taking place within the journal on workforce readiness for students. finally, a book review of making it at uni: navigating your way through the first year of your degree by sally bartholomew and jodi withers concludes this issue. rachel webster presents this slim volume, aimed at new and prospective students, as a guide to university life. it is divided into two sections: the first providing advice about settling in, making friends, budgeting, cooking and managing time; the second suggesting ways to build the skills needed to succeed academically. according to webster, the book provides an honest analysis of the value of this recent text for learning developers. she highlights that the text’s value is in presenting important foundational knowledge in an accessible way. learning developers may therefore find it a useful reference when developing their own accessible and engaging learning materials. editorial we hope that in this impressive collection of articles, our subscribers and all readers will find material that is thought provoking and stimulating, to inspire and to delight. with very best wishes for the festive season, the jldhe editorial board journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 17: may 2020 ________________________________________________________________________ changing the face of academic skills workshops sheryl mansfield university of northampton abstract the flipped approach offers flexibility in the way students learn and was adopted within learning development workshops to improve academic skills. academic skills are predominantly taught using passive content, however the flipped approach looks to change the emphasis and provide active opportunities to understand taught knowledge. the sessions were delivered alongside self-paced online, asynchronous content to scaffold academic skills and feed-forward guidance to inform summative assessment preparation. the objective was to assess the effectiveness of the flipped approach in delivering academic skills. a cohort of 50 first year students completed three face-to-face academic skills sessions together with the asynchronous content. each were themed to develop different academic skills using subject specific examples. attendance data was collected and a survey was used to evaluate the asynchronous content and measure the self-perceived academic confidence levels of students. to measure the success of the flipped approach this data was analysed together with the number of attempts at each e-tivity and the formative and summative grades. results demonstrated those who attended two or more sessions (57.7% +/1.43) had a significantly higher summative score (p=0.041) than those who attended 1 or less (51.7% +/2.73). the summative grades and the number of attempts at the asynchronous content demonstrated a positive linear relationship for e-tivity 1 to 3. overall the academic confidence improved in nearly a third of all students for each e-tivity and 17 students (54.8%) stated that they preferred the flipped approach in developing their academic skills. this emphasises that the flipped approach is an effective method to improve summative grades and deliver academic skills. keywords: flipped classroom; active learning; academic skills; asynchronous. mansfield changing the face of academic skills workshops journal of learning development in higher education, issue 17: may 2020 2 introduction academic skills or study skills includes a range of different topics from “manage yourself” (price and maier, 2007), referencing (hitch et al., 2012), to writing and thinking critically (gunn et al., 2011). the development of these skills is fundamental for students’ success in higher education (blythman and orr, 2002; macvaughan et al., 2014). thus, ensuring that academic skills are incorporated into modules is vital (hill and tinker, 2018) and doing so will improve learners’ awareness of the expectations (harwood and hadley, 2004), especially at the start of a university course. generally, academic skills sessions are taught face-to-face either in a workshop or during a one-to-one environment (murray and nallaya, 2016). this research looks to change the face of the academic skills workshop and offer different modes of interaction with academic skills material. it is hoped that this holistic approach of teaching academic skills will improve academic confidence in students and offer guidance for learning at level 4 and beyond (hill and tinker, 2018). although research highlights that academic skills content will work best if presented with subject specific content (appleton, 2005) there is limited research highlighting the most effective pedagogical approach to use (munn and small, 2017). this research project evaluates subject specific academic skills sessions using the flipped approach and its effectiveness. a detailed plan was proposed in collaboration with a learning development tutor and the subject team to incorporate the sessions in accordance with the assessments and learning objectives of the module. a series of face-to-face sessions totalling two hours and asynchronous activity was designed to enhance academic skills development. the main objective for this approach was to address the lack of understanding in the fundamental basics of academic writing which included formal writing style, structure and use of evidence. the approach was chosen to allow exploration of the knowledge learned in the asynchronous content by completing practical activities face-to-face. the research involved a vocational subject area with practical based learners within the faculty of health and society. it was hoped that the research would also extend to improving achievement grades in the assessment. defining the reason for non-achievement is beyond the scope of this article. mansfield changing the face of academic skills workshops journal of learning development in higher education, issue 17: may 2020 3 however, the link between academic confidence and performance has been explored using self-efficacy perceptions. flipped classroom the benefit of the flipped approach allows students to explore the content learnt prior to the classroom and examine these concepts in a student-centred environment. bergmann and sams (2007) cited an advantage of this approach: time within the classroom can be given to guiding and practising the knowledge. this can promote an environment which allows students to regulate their own learning and be independent learners (lage et al., 2000; bergmann and sams, 2007; wilson, 2013) which is important for academic skills development. the methodology of this research used a flipped approach with students completing previews of content before attending face-to-face sessions. the face-to-face sessions were active and used to effectively problem-solve, discuss, and complete interactive classroom activities (hao, 2016), blending the online content into a practical format. carr et al. (2015) emphasise that active learning is a very broad concept related to an extensive range of learning strategies. this approach moves the information transition outside the classroom, supporting the session with activities for active and social learning, and utilising preor post classroom activities (abeysekera and dawson, 2014). this concept allowed the learning development tutor to support the learning process within the classroom rather than just dispensing knowledge. hooks’ (2010) chapter ‘to lecture or not’ outlines that misunderstandings can occur within large lectures as listeners often project what they heard rather than what was said. this flipped classroom content was in the form of structured e-tivities using padlet and xerte software. e-tivities are scalable tasks that can be found on a range of different platforms (salmon, 2013). the padlet resource was used to enable collaboration within the class: the features of the software allow small groups to produce a multimedia post improving engagement in an activity (garnham and betts, 2018). fisher (2017) promotes that the anonymity allows students to feel more comfortable contributing to discussions in the form of a written post. the xerte was used to create interactive e-tivities due to its accessibility which mansfield changing the face of academic skills workshops journal of learning development in higher education, issue 17: may 2020 4 is integrated into the software (van hoorebeek et al., 2009). xerte is an open source suite of tools (koohang et al., 2011) developed in 2008 by the university of nottingham. the browserbased tools allowed learning materials to be developed quickly and easily (university of nottingham, 2008) and offered a range of interactive designs. content was developed to ensure that students interacted with the knowledge taught to help promote recall (rice et al., 2019). for example, using drag and drop activities within the software as a mini formative assessment. academic confidence measuring undergraduate confidence is problematic, measuring academic skills confidence at level 4; when the expectations are ambiguous is even harder. bandura (1997) defines selfefficacy as one way of defining beliefs of a person's competence. using this definition and relating it to an academic context could help to define the term academic confidence. previous studies support that students’ self-efficacy beliefs about their capabilities influence their academic achievement (bandura, 1977). bartimote-aufflick et al. (2016) discussed selfefficacy in an academic environment as having a strong association with outcomes of students (mattern and shaw, 2010). valentine et al. (2004) suggested that educational outcomes and attitude could be shaped by a self-exploration of feelings and beliefs. conversely, research has shown that students are often poor at predicting their own ability (dunning et al., 2004; chevalier et al., 2009; price et al., 2011) as similar skills are required to judge their own performance as to succeed (hacker et al., 2000). there are obvious issues which are inherent with the nature of self-assessment (falchikov and boud, 1989,). yet nicholson et al. (2013) maintain that students who are confident in their own ability will perform better and take responsibility for their own learning (ryan and deci, 2000). allowing opportunities at institutions to engage in self-assessment of academic skills could be helpful to improve success (reed et al., 2011). measuring the self-efficacy perceptions could be a useful tool for students to clarify their ability. price et al. (2011) advocate that academic skills should be pre-tested, prior to any instruction, to act as a stimulus for increased engagement and to promote additional skill-building opportunities once a skill deficit has been identified. to understand the impact of the flipped approach on students’ academic confidence, this method mansfield changing the face of academic skills workshops journal of learning development in higher education, issue 17: may 2020 5 was adopted and levels of perceived academic confidence pre and post sessions were measured. methods procedure a cohort of 50 first year students completed three academic skills sessions in addition to the content for a module (table 1). the first 30-minute face-to-face session delivered within the first week introduced the support offered at the institution with regards to academic skills and then introduced the padlet task in preparation for the subsequent sessions. the session informed the cohort how to access the on-line task and defined the small group activity required. this linked to reading an article and placing a reflection onto a padlet. the e-tivity content was also introduced, and an expectation given that these were to be complete before the second face-to-face session. the second 60-minute face-to-face session in week two reflected on the e-tivities and developed skills to build an effective argument using the reflections gathered on the padlet. all content delivered (online and face-to-face) was designed to support the formative and summative assessments. the final 30-minute face-toface session in week five focussed on feedback from the formative assessments to feedforward information to support the summative assessment. mansfield changing the face of academic skills workshops journal of learning development in higher education, issue 17: may 2020 6 table 1. a table outlining the flipped delivery completed in the research. content week 1 week 2 f o rm a ti v e a s s e s s m e n t w e e k 4 week 5 s u m m a ti v e a s s e s s m e n t w e e k 8 asynchronous post session activity completed as group work to reflect on an article using padlet. pre-learning e-tivities 1 to 5 to support face-toface session. e-tivities 1 to 5 still available for repeated attempts. face-to-face learning development introduction and skills used to read an article (30 minutes). session incorporated activities on structure, academic writing and building an effective argument (60 minutes). feedback session to feed forward to the summative assessment (30 minutes). the asynchronous e-tivities were designed using the versatile and interactive content of the xerte toolkit 2.0. these were designed as five e-tivities which incorporated formative assessments within tasks to check understanding. they were themed into developing different academic skills and the content written demonstrated subject specific examples. these included e-tivity 1: time management, e-tivity 2: assessment structure, e-tivity 3: writing an essay, e-tivity 4: writing a paragraph, and e-tivity 5: notetaking. these were presented as a separate learning unit within the module's virtual learning environment. to allow freedom in accessing each e-tivity they were not aligned sequentially, and all were made available to complete at the same time. attempts were unlimited to allow students to access the content throughout the module. the number of attempts were recorded to help identify if there was a relationship with perceived academic confidence. on the first page of each e-tivity a clear outline and an approximate time in minutes were listed to help highlight the knowledge and length of time it would take to complete. mansfield changing the face of academic skills workshops journal of learning development in higher education, issue 17: may 2020 7 figure 1. taken from writing an essay xerte demonstrating the interactive content to ensure that learners are actively learning content delivered within the asynchronous material. data analysis to define the success of the asynchronous component, performance data was analysed and evaluated. data relating to the number of attempts and scores within the e-tivities from the cohort was recorded. the number of attempts at each e-tivity was divided into 3 categories: 0 attempts, 1-5 attempts, and 6+ attempts. all students who had attempted the content demonstrated a graded score for the formative elements within the e-tivity. all students with graded scores were counted as an attempt as there was evidence to suggest interaction with the e-tivity. student consent was given for the formative and summative grades to be analysed. this was used to measure the success of the asynchronous component and the flipped approach. after each face-to-face session attendance data was collected; attendance was categorised into attending two or more sessions or one or less. to measure the success of the approach this data was analysed together with the number of attempts at each e-tivity, self-reported academic confidence and the formative and summative grades. results were evaluated to demonstrate an understanding of the benefits of the approach in academic skills delivery. mansfield changing the face of academic skills workshops journal of learning development in higher education, issue 17: may 2020 8 a survey was used to evaluate the asynchronous content and measure the academic confidence levels of students utilising both qualitative and quantitative questions. no qualitative comments were made by the students on the survey. the survey was conducted within a workshop; students not in attendance were offered an online version to complete. a total of 31 students completed the survey (62% response rate). participation in the study was voluntary and the students who completed the survey had the option of having their data withdrawn from the research project upon request. the survey provided scores on students' academic confidence in the different academic skills abilities prior and post completion of asynchronous activity. the survey also asked students to provide preferred methods of developing academic skills and to evaluate the workshops and all e-tivities. the selfperceived academic confidence levels of students and summative grades were used to measure the success of the flipped approach in delivering academic skills. results attendance as expected, those who attended more sessions achieved better results. those who attended two or more sessions (57.7% +/1.43) had a significantly higher summative score than those who attended 1 or less (51.7% +/2.73), (48), t=2.102, p=0.041 (figure 2). even though the students who attended two or more sessions had a higher formative grade the improvement to the summative grade was greater. this demonstrated a significant improvement from the starting point of each student and added value to the summative scores of those who attended. this emphasises that the flipped approach is effective at improving summative grades. mansfield changing the face of academic skills workshops journal of learning development in higher education, issue 17: may 2020 9 figure 2. mean summative and formative grades for students who attended one or less face-to-face sessions and two or more face-to-face sessions. attempts at asynchronous content an overall total of 1,239 attempts were recorded for all five e-tivities. the majority of attempts 66% (n=818) were completed before the formative assessment date and 34% (n=421) of all attempts were completed between the formative and the summative assessment hand in date. this demonstrates that students reviewed the content to help inform their writing prior to and after the formative submission, thus acting to support the learning process for both the formative and summative assessments. although the e-tivities lacked a sequential element the number of attempts declined as the e-tivities progressed. 35% of the total number of attempts were completed on e-tivity 1, 28% on e-tivity 2, 20% on e-tivity 3, 9% on e-tivity 4 and 8% on e-tivity 5. impact on summative grade the number of attempts on each e-tivity and summative grade were investigated. for e-tivity 1 to 3 data showed a positive linear trend: as the number of attempts increased, the summative grades increased (table 2). the last two e-tivities did not demonstrate the same pattern due to the decline in the number of attempts. for e-tivity 4 students with no attempts showed a mean summative grade of 53% (+/-9.42) n=12; those with attempts between 1 to 5 mansfield changing the face of academic skills workshops journal of learning development in higher education, issue 17: may 2020 10 times showed a mean summative grade of 57.3% (+/9.5) n= 35; 6+ attempts showed a mean summative grade of 53% (+/4.36) n=3. for e-tivity 5 students with no attempts showed a mean summative grade of 54.9% (+/-9.24) n=15; those with attempts between 1 to 5 times showed a mean summative grade of 56.7% (+/9.57) n= 34; 6+ attempts showed a mean summative grade of 51% n=1. table 2. mean and standard deviation of the summative assessment grades and number of attempts for each e-tivity. attempts e-tivity 1 m (sd) e-tivity 2 m (sd) e-tivity 3 m (sd) 0 50% (4.70) n = 6 50% (4.7) n = 6 50% (3.98) n = 7 1 – 5 54.8% (3.09) n = 14 54.3% (2.64) n = 17 56.6% (1.95) n = 26 6+ 57.8% (1.33) n = 30 58.4% (1.36) n = 27 57.6% (1.75) n = 17 academic confidence the measure of self-perceived confidence before and after each e-tivity was measured to define if students’ self-perceived academic confidence had improved. each student was asked to rate themselves before and after each e-tivity using a five-point scale (1 = very poor, 3 = average, 5 = excellent). the self-perceived academic confidence in each skill was recorded before and after each e-tivity, 62% (31 students) completed the survey (table 3). overall the academic confidence improved in nearly a third of all students in each e-tivity. caution should always be exercised when interpreting self-perceived ratings (castells et al., 2015) especially when the sample size is small. however, the e-tivities have been shown to improve some students’ academic confidence which highlights that the asynchronous content was effective. students who perceived themselves as poor, average, and good all showed improvements demonstrating that a range of student abilities improved their academic skills. mansfield changing the face of academic skills workshops journal of learning development in higher education, issue 17: may 2020 11 table 3. the level of self-perceived confidence of students before each e-tivity and the percentage (number of students) who improved their confidence after each e-tivity. (n=31) did the e-tivity improve students’ overall confidence student rated as poor before e-tivity and improved confidence post e-tivity student rated as average before etivity and improved confidence post etivity student rated as good before e-tivity and improved confidence post e-tivity e-tivity 1 35.5% (n=11) 25% (n=1) 54.4% (6) 26.7% (n=4) e-tivity 2 35.5% (n=11) 60% (n=3) 50% (n=4) 22.2% (n=4) e-tivity 3 29% (n=9) 33.3% (n=2) 20% (n=2) 35.7% (n=5) e-tivity 4 30% (n=9) 33.3% (n=1) 54.5% (n=6) 14.3% (n=2) e-tivity 5 25.8% (n=8) 100% (n=1) 50% (n=5) 15.4% (n=2) the preferred methods of developing academic skills were recorded. two students (6.5%) stated asynchronous content only, 12 students (38.7%) stated face-to-face only, and 17 students (54.8%) stated a mixture of both. this suggests that students preferred the active pedagogy of the flipped approach to develop their academic skills. discussion bishop and verleger (2013) define the flipped method as a two-part educational technique with interactive group learning activities inside the classroom, and direct computer-based content outside the classroom. this technique was adopted for the research as it had been suggested that students prefer this method to traditional lecturing formats (lage et al., 2000; strayer, 2012) which can only benefit academic skills teaching. in addition, this pedagogy offered to improve self-efficacy (chyr et al., 2017) and encouraged students to take responsibly for their own studies and become independent learners. although it is still ambiguous whether it is the flipped component or the active part of the classroom which causes this shift (jenson et al., 2015) the method demonstrates higher learning experience satisfaction than the traditional lecture (forsey et al., 2013; baepler, walker and driessen, 2014). using the active pedagogy of the flipped approach offered similar benefits as well as positively affecting academic achievement endorsed by other researchers (lage et al., 2000; mansfield changing the face of academic skills workshops journal of learning development in higher education, issue 17: may 2020 12 bergmann and sams, 2007; chuthapisith, et al., 2009; wilson, 2013). the academic skills knowledge in the flipped design allowed the opportunity for the students to ask questions of the content learnt asynchronously, in the classroom. this research agrees with the metaanalysis conducted by jenson et al. (2015) who investigated student exam performance using the flipped learning method. although vigilance should be taken when interpreting quantitative results from a meta-analysis (fagard et al., 1996), exam results improved by 6% in sessions where students actively participated compared to those recorded in a traditional lecture style format (jenson et al., 2015). therefore, it can only be an advantage to use this method in academic skills teaching to demystify the expectations of writing at undergraduate level. attendance this research concluded that students who attended two or more sessions had a 6% significantly higher summative score than those who attended one or less. even though students who attended two or more sessions had a higher formative score the improvement to the summative score was greater in the group who attended two or more sessions. this significant difference in the summative grade emphasises the importance of attendance in the approach even though there were only two hours of face-to-face contact. the flipped method allowed the tutor to support the learning process within the classroom rather than just dispensing knowledge. chen et al. (2014) commented that a collaborative experience is facilitated by changing the classroom from a passive lecture to one that utilises the flipped method. students can perceive academic skills as predominately tutor led activity therefore it is advantageous to shift to an approach which will facilitate individual learner needs (smith et al., 2012). farmer (2018) endorses that the flipped approach will be more successful using passive content to complete an active task than one that relies on the dissipation of passive content. it also helped that the content used in the sessions were subject specific and designed to incorporate the assessment. attempts at asynchronous content isolating the number of attempts at each e-tivity compared to the summative grade did not demonstrate a significant difference which may have be due to the low number of participants mansfield changing the face of academic skills workshops journal of learning development in higher education, issue 17: may 2020 13 within the study. however, the improvement which spans a grade boundary confirms that this approach in academic skills teaching could offer positive outcomes for students. the reason for the number of attempts improving the summative scores could have been due to the fact that students viewed the asynchronous content on a number of occasions in order to fully understand the knowledge. the number of attempts demonstrated that the students found value in the content which could have been for a number of reasons. chuthapisith et al. (2009) demonstrated a significant difference in the higher retention performance and level of enjoyment in students using the xerte and flashmacromedia when comparing students who received the same information via a leaflet. this helps to understand that the use of this type of media tool had advantages which could have been due to its interactivity in addition to the integrated formative assessments. previous research using online learning to develop academic skills demonstrated that students completed two to four attempts to ensure they answered the questions correctly (gunn et al., 2011). this could justify the frequency of attempts for each student as each etivity had a series of formative assessment tasks. large amounts of attempts could also be due to students wanting to recall the subject specific content as this was the main transition of academic skills knowledge rendering the classroom as the place to practically apply the content learnt from the e-tivities. however, the data capture from the software was limited as only the number of attempts completed and the last attempted performance score was recorded. therefore, an attempt would be registered once the software had been opened which does not automatically mean that the content had been attempted each time. it was anticipated that some students may have opened the content and read the details surrounding the task and closed the application as they did not have sufficient time to complete it, thus registering an attempt. to avoid counting attempts of student who had not interacted with the software, students registering attempts and showing performance data were used. more exploration of the students’ interaction with the asynchronous material needs to be made as the survey did not investigate the platform the students chose to complete the content or verify the number of attempts. although it does highlight that offering academic skills asynchronously is accessible and students interacted with the material. mansfield changing the face of academic skills workshops journal of learning development in higher education, issue 17: may 2020 14 impact on summative grade the largest difference in assessment grade was seen in the students who attempted e-tivities six or more times which could be down to students continuing to review the learning material which cemented their understanding. it also supports that the active classroom content is as important as the asynchronous content. another explanation for the difference in summative grades when compared to those who did not attempt the e-tivities could be that those students who conformed to the teaching method are more motivated and studious regardless of the pedagogical approach. due to the placement of each session the research failed to demonstrate a significant difference between formative and summative grades. it is perceived that as the sessions incorporated skills to inform students’ academic writing, the sessions helped to elevate the formative grade. students are not clear of the boundaries or expectations of academic writing (harwood and hadley, 2004) therefore demystifying the expectations could have benefitted the formative scores.. the research showed that 66% (n=818) of attempts on the asynchronous resources were completed before the formative assessment submission date and 34% (n=421) of all attempts were completed between the formative and the summative submission date. the focus on the sessions were to inform students prior to the summative assessment using the formative assessment as the vehicle. however, the benefits to the formative assessment results have not been explored within the parameters of this research as there was not a valid benchmark embedded prior to the formative assessment. other variables such as tutor feedback could have impacted on the summative grade with students gaining an understanding of the application of the academic skills as well as the flipped impact. therefore, the research was not designed to suggest there would be a difference in the formative and summative grades. academic confidence although there was a decline in the number of attempts at each e-tivity as the e-tivities progressed this same relationship was not demonstrated in the academic confidence scores of students. this implies that although the attempts declined in number the perceived confidence levels gained remained static demonstrating that a third of students’ perceived mansfield changing the face of academic skills workshops journal of learning development in higher education, issue 17: may 2020 15 levels of confidence improved. the improvement of confidence could be a result of the pedagogical approach adopted in the research. this is further endorsed by sander and sanders’ (2006) research which suggested that the university experience will affect selfesteem, and this will in turn affect academic performance. having the confidence to succeed at higher education is important and using the flipped approach can only compliment academic skills teaching. the success of the flipped approach was confirmed by most students (53.3%) preferring a mixture of both online and face-to-face sessions to develop their academic skills. this agrees with the findings in a study by pye et al. (2015) who found that 53% of students perceived that online systems maximised their classroom learning. the use of the flipped learning approach adopted for the research used software which was multifunctional and could be utilised pre, post, and during sessions (harris, 2011). the inclusivity of the software (hockings et al., 2012) was a benefit and the predominance of the text-based format (harris, 2011) allowed transmission of academic skills content to be asynchronous which was later developed through the face-to-face sessions. the students who attempted a greater number of online activities and attended all sessions improved their confidence more than those who had engaged less. interestingly, the confidence was gained more in the face-to-face sessions rather than the number of attempts on the asynchronous content. this suggests that if a student did not attend face-to-face sessions their perceived academic confidence was gained solely through the asynchronous content. the asynchronous content used to complement the flipped approach allowed students to control their learning habits and complete the tasks in their own time (kamal and radhakrishnan, 2019). delivering academic skills using the flipped approach relies on a change of culture. freeman et al. (2014) suggest that active learning should be promoted as a preference rather than supporting an empirically validated practice, thus encouraging a culture which matures into a setting allowing students a comfortable environment to clarify information (lage et al., 2000). this approach feels the most natural form to transmit academic skills. rosinski and peeples, (2012) found that active pedagogies which purposively integrate interaction between students and tutors are more likely to create successful academic writers. the aspects of this research did not explore the impact of the delivery method on retention but freeman et al. (2014) mansfield changing the face of academic skills workshops journal of learning development in higher education, issue 17: may 2020 16 suggest that this method positively affects retention with active learning classes holding onto a higher proportion of lower ability learners than traditional lectures. conclusion this research explored the effectiveness of the flipped approach in delivering academic skills. the results found that students had a significantly higher summative score if they attended two or more sessions than those who attended 1 or less. the summative grades and the number of attempts for e-tivity 1 to 3 demonstrated a positive linear relationship. overall, the academic confidence improved in nearly a third of all students for each e-tivity. this emphasises that the flipped approach is an effective method to improve summative grades and deliver academic skills. the content used asynchronously was meaningful and explored using a student-centred approach in the face-to-face sessions. the asynchronous material was active and had formative tasks to help students recall the information in the classroom. it was designed to be accessible and allow unlimited attempts. when designing academic skills asynchronously this research recommends that the content needs to be versatile and be able to be used both as a pre-learning and post-learning activity as students accessed this content in large numbers in both formats. it is also important that students see relevance in the activity therefore the research was designed to embed within curriculum and use subject specific content. this will then help promote attendance of the face-to-face sessions and compliance in completing the asynchronous content. more research into the delivery of academic skills using the flipped approach within larger cohorts should be investigated. additional recommendations from this research are that concept and expectations need to be explained to the cohort at the start of the module and subject specific content is used to deliver academic skills material. this will help to ensure adherence to asynchronous content and attendance at all face-to-face sessions which in turn could benefit the summative grades of students. references mansfield changing the face of academic skills workshops journal of learning development in higher education, issue 17: may 2020 17 abeysekera, l., and dawson, p. (2014) ‘motivation and cognitive load in the flipped classroom: definition, rationale and a call for research’, higher education research and development 34(1), pp.1-14. appleton, l. (2005) ‘examination of the impact of information-skills training on the academic work of health studies students: a single case study’, health information and libraries journal 22(3), pp.164-172. baepler, p., walker, j. d. and driessen, m. (2014) ‘it’s not about seat time: blending, flipping, and efficiency in active learning classrooms’, computers and education. doi: 10.1016/j.compedu.2014.06.006 [accessed: 21 oct 2019]. bandura, a. (1977) ‘self-efficacy: toward a unifying theory of behavior change’, psychological review, 84, pp.191-215. bandura, a. (1997) self-efficacy: the exercise of control. new york: freeman. bartimote-aufflick, k., bridgeman, a., walker, r., sharma, m. and smith, l. (2016) ‘the study, evaluation, and improvement of university student self-efficacy’, studies in higher education, 41(11), pp.1918–1942. bergmann, j. and sams, a (2007) flip your classroom: reach every student in every class every day. eugene: international society for technology in education. bishop, j. and verleger, m. (2013) ‘testing the flipped classroom with model-eliciting activities and video lectures in a mid-level undergraduate engineering course’, proceedings frontiers in education conference, fie, pp.161-163. doi: 10.1109/fie.2013.6684807 [accessed: 21 oct 2019]. mansfield changing the face of academic skills workshops journal of learning development in higher education, issue 17: may 2020 18 blythman, m. and orr, s. (2002) ‘joined up policy: a strategic approach to improving retention in the uk context’, journal of college student retention 3(3), pp.231-242. carr, r., palmer, s. and hagel, p. (2015) ‘active learning: the importance of developing a comprehensive measure’, active learning in higher education, 16(3), pp.173-186. doi: 10.1177/1469787415589529 [accessed: 09 dec 2019]. chen, y., wang, y., kinshuk and chen, n. s. (2014) ‘is flip enough? or should we use the flipped model instead?’ computers education 79, pp.16-27. chevalier, a., gibbons, s., thorpe, a., snell, m. and hoskins, s. (2009) ‘students’ academic self-perception’, economics of education review, 28. doi: 10.1016/j.econedurev.2009.06.007 [accessed: 21 oct 2019] chuthapisith, j., dimambro, b. and doody, g. (2009) ‘effectiveness of a computer assisted learning (cal) package to raise awareness of autism’, biomedcentre medical education 9(12), pp.1-6. chyr, w.l., shen p. d., chaing, y.l., lin, j.b. and tsai, c.w. (2017) ‘international forum of educational technology & society exploring the effects of online academic help-seeking and flipped learning on improving students’ learning’, source: journal of educational technology & society, 20(3), pp.11-23. doi: 10.2307/26196116 [accessed: 11 nov 2019]. dunning, d., heath, c. and suls, j. m. (2004) ‘flawed self-assessment implications for health, education, and the workplace’, psychological science in the public interest, supplement, 5(3), pp.69-106. doi: 10.1111/j.1529-1006.2004.00018.x [accessed: 21 oct 2019] fagard, r. h., staessen, j. a. and thijs, l. (1996) ‘advantages and disadvantages of metanalysis approach’, journal of hypertension supplement, 14(2), pp.9-12. mansfield changing the face of academic skills workshops journal of learning development in higher education, issue 17: may 2020 19 falchikov, n. and boud, d. (1989) ‘student self-assessment in higher education: a metaanalysis’, review of educational research, 59(4), pp.395-430. doi: 10.3102/00346543059004395 [accessed: 21 oct 2019]. farmer, r. (2018) ‘the what, the how and the why of flipped classroom’, innovative practice in higher education, 3(2), pp.14-31. fisher, c. d. (2017) ‘padlet: an online tool for learner engagement and collaboration’, academy of management learning & education, 16(1), pp.163-165. doi: 10.5465/amle.2017.0055 [accessed: 08 dec 2019]. forsey, m., low, m. and glance, d. (2013) ‘flipping the sociology classroom: towards a practice of online pedagogy’, journal of sociology, 49(4), pp.471-485. doi: 10.1177/1440783313504059 [accessed: 08 dec 2019]. freeman, s., eddy, s.l., mcdonough, m., smith, m. k., okoroafor, n., jordt, h. and wenderoth, m. p. (2014) ‘active learning increases student performance in science, engineering and mathematics’, proceedings of the national academy of sciences of the united states of america, 111(23), pp.8410-8415. garnham, w. a. and betts, t. (2018) ‘the padlet project: transforming student engagement in foundation year seminars’, compass: journal of learning and teaching, 11(2). doi: 10.21100/compass.v11i2.714 [accessed: 09 dec 2019]. gunn, c., hearne, s. and sitbthorpe, j. (2011) ‘right from the start: a rationale for embedding academic literacy skills in university courses’, journal of university and learning practice, 8(1), pp.1-12. hao, y. (2016) ‘exploring undergraduates’ perspectives and flipped learning readiness in their flipped classrooms’, computers in human behaviour, 59, pp.82-92. mansfield changing the face of academic skills workshops journal of learning development in higher education, issue 17: may 2020 20 hacker, d.j., bol, l., horgan, d. d. and rakow, e. a. (2000) ‘test prediction and performance in a classroom context’, journal of educational psychology, 92(1), pp.160-170. harris, d. (2011) ‘presentation software: pedagogical constraints and potentials’, journal of hospitality, leisure, sports and tourism education 10(1), pp. 72-84. harwood, n. and hadley, g. (2004) ‘demystifying institutional practices: critical pragmatism and the teaching of academic writing’, english for specific purposes 23, pp. 355-377. hill, p. and tinker, a. (2018) ‘making the second year count: embedding learning development in a progressive student journey’, journal of learning development in higher education, 10(14), pp.1-25. hitch, d., goldingay, s., hosken, n., lamaro, g., macfarlane, s., nihill, c., ryan, j. and farrugia, d. (2012) ‘academic skills and beyond: a resource based approach to support student success in higher education’, journal of academic language and learning, 6(2), pp.29-41. hockings, c., brett, p. and terentjers, m. (2012) ‘making a difference: inclusive learning and teaching in higher education through an open educational resource’, distance education, 33(1), pp.237-252. hooks, b. (2010) ‘teaching critical thinking: practical wisdom’. abingdon: routledge. jenson, j. l., kummer, t. a. and godoy, p.d.m. (2015) ‘improvements from a flipped classroom may simply be the fruits of active learning’, life sciences education, 14(5), pp.1-12. kamal, a. and radhakrishnan, s. (2019) ‘individual learning preferences based on personality traits in an e-learning scenario’, education and information technologies, 24(1), pp. 407-435. mansfield changing the face of academic skills workshops journal of learning development in higher education, issue 17: may 2020 21 koohang, a., floyd, k. and stewart, c. (2011) ‘design of an open source learning objectives authoring tool: the lo creator’, interdisciplinary journal of e-learning and learning objects, 7, pp.111-123. lage, m. j., platt, g. j. and tregila, m. (2000) ‘inverting the classroom: a gateway to creating an inclusive learning environment’, journal of economic education, 31(1), pp.30-43. macvaughan, j., jones, a. and auty, s. (2014) ‘implicit, stand alone or integrated skills education for undergraduates: a longitudinal analysis of programme outcomes’, journal of further and higher education, 38(6), pp.755-772. mattern, k. and shaw, e. (2010) ‘a look beyond cognitive predictors of academic success: understanding the relationship between academic self-beliefs and outcomes’, journal of college student development, 51(6), pp.665-678. munn, j. and small, j. (2017) ‘what is the best way to develop information literacy and academic skills for first year health science students? a systematic review’, evidence based library and information practice, 12(3), pp.56-94. murray, n. and nallaya, s. (2016) ‘embedding academic literacies in university programme curricula: a case study’, studies in higher education, 41(7), pp.1296-1312. doi: 10.1080/03075079.2014.981150 [accessed: 06 mar 2018]. nicholson, l., putwain, d., connors, l. and hornbe-atkinson, p. (2013) ‘the key to successful achievement as an undergraduate student: confidence and realistic expectations?’ studies in higher eductaion, 38(2), pp.285-298. price, g. and maier, p. (2007) effective study skills, unlock your potential. harlow: pearson. price, r., becker, k., clark, l and collins, s. (2011) ‘embedding information literacy in a firstmansfield changing the face of academic skills workshops journal of learning development in higher education, issue 17: may 2020 22 year business undergraduate course’, studies in higher eductaion, 36(6), pp.705-718 doi: 10.1080/03075071003725350 [accessed: 22 oct 2019]. pye, g., holt, d., salzman, s., bellucci, e. and lombardi, l. (2015) ‘engaging diverse student audiences in contemporary blended learning environments in australian higher business education: implications for design and practice’, australian journal of information systems, 19, pp.1-20. reed, m.j., kennett, d.j., lewis, t. and lund lucas, e. (2011) ‘the relative benefits found for students with and without learning disabilities taking a first-year university preparation course’, active learning in higher education, 12(2), pp.133-142. rice, p., beeson, p. and blackmore-wright, j. (2019) ‘evaluating the impact of a quiz question within an educational video’, techtrends, 63(5), pp.522-532. doi: 10.1007/s11528-019-00374-6 [accessed: 09 dec 2019]. rosinski, p. & peeples, t. (2012) ‘forging rhetorical subjects: problem-based learning in the writing classroom’, composition studies, 40(2), pp.9-33. ryan, r. m. and deci, e. l. (2000) ‘self-determination theory and the facilitation of intrinsic motivation, social development, and well-being.’, american psychologist, 55(1), pp.6878. doi: 10.1037/0003-066x.55.1.68 [accessed: 20 sep 2019]. salmon, g. (2013) e-tivities. 2nd edn. abington: taylor and francis. sander, p. and sanders, l. (2006) ‘understanding academic confidence’, psychology teaching review, 12(1), pp.29-41. smith, j., groves, m., bowd, b. and barber, a. (2012) ‘facilitating the development of study skills through blended learning approach’, international journal of higher education, 1(2), pp.108-117. mansfield changing the face of academic skills workshops journal of learning development in higher education, issue 17: may 2020 23 strayer, j. f. (2012) ‘how learning in an inverted classroom influences cooperation, innovation and task orientation’, learning environments research, 15(2), pp.171-193 doi: 10.1007/s10984-012-9108-4. [accessed: 09 dec 2019]. university of nottingham (2008) the xerte project, university of nottingham [online] available at: https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/xerte/toolkits.aspx [accessed: 25 may 2018]. valentine, j. c., dubois, d. l. and cooper, h. (2004) ‘the relation between self-beliefs and academic achievement: a meta-analytic review’, educational psychologist, 39(2), pp.111-133 doi: 10.1207/s15326985ep3902_3. [accessed: 22 oct 2019]. van hoorebeek, m., walker, s. and dermo, j. (2009) ‘analysing the parameters of the duty of reasonable adjustment to facilitate access to e-learning resources’, multicultural education and technology journal, 3(3), pp.227-241. doi: 10.1108/17504970910984899 [accessed: 24 oct 2019]. wilson, s.g.c. (2013) ‘the flipped class: a method to address the challenges of an undergraduate statistics course’, teaching of psychology 40(3), pp.193-199. changing the face of academic skills workshops abstract introduction flipped classroom academic confidence methods procedure data analysis results attendance attempts at asynchronous content impact on summative grade academic confidence discussion attendance attempts at asynchronous content impact on summative grade academic confidence conclusion journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special issue 22: compendium of innovative practice october 2021 ________________________________________________________________________ the apron challenge: embodied and creative learning online and at a distance. tom burns london metropolitan university john desire london metropolitan university janet gordon london metropolitan university sandra sinfield london metropolitan university keywords: embodied learning; creative classrooms; reflective practice; cohort identity; online learning; covid-19. the challenge the playful experimenters full of curiosity who are not afraid to break the rules, invent new ones and explore new territories, are stepping into the limelight (nerantzi, 2019). facilitating student learning (fsl) is the first module in our postgraduate certificate in learning and teaching in higher education (pgcert). typically, six of the seven sessions are delivered face-to-face (f2f) and one online. it is designed to be a highly creative, ludic module (sinfield et al., 2019) that ‘de-schools’ (illich, 1970) and ‘unschools’ (holt 1977; 1981) participants, helping to disrupt normative expectations of education, teaching, learning and assessment. with the recent covid-19 lockdown policies, rather than hope for the return of f2f teaching, we decided to deliver the module totally online. given that most of our students are staff new to uk university teaching, and unexpectedly delivering their first teaching completely online, we wanted our module to stand beside them, to help and encourage. we wanted to design, and for participants to experience, that learning itself is not just a cognitive process, but is experiential, emotional, social, interpersonal and embodied (wenger-trayner, 2014; clughen, 2017). burns, desire, gordon, sinfield the apron challenge: embodied and creative learning online and at a distance journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 2 fsl itself is a course that is informed and shaped by learning development values (aldinhe, 2021). our philosophy is that to facilitate learning you have to work in partnership with students, and they in partnership with each other, to make transparent the (contested) forms and processes of academia and to rehearse empowering strategies that promote higher learning (angelo, 1993). in fsl, staff experience creative processes that enable them to participate actively, powerfully and with agency in their own learning. in this way, we argue that our module is designed to ‘de-colonise’ pedagogy by shaking up notions of what university is and what it can become. the challenge that we were attempting to address in this online iteration of the module was how, virtually and in creative and dialogic ways, we could build a cohort ready to experiment playfully (winnicott, 1971) with their own teaching, learning and assessment approaches. we wanted our staff-as-students to ‘be with’ (nancy, 2000) each other, reinforcing the embodied experience, and we wanted to start the process before our participants began the module itself. the response we undertook a complete overhaul and re-design of the module, opening ourselves up to different ways of conceptualising the curriculum. whereas previously each f2f session would harness play, collage making, drawing, free writing and other forms of emergent and playful practice, we had to work out how much of this we would try to recreate in ‘class’ via our virtual learning environment and how much might now need to happen in the student’s home, alone. we needed to capture that emergence, that potentiality, online. but before that, we wrestled with how to build bonding and belonging (leathwood and o’connell, 2003) and an embodied sense of the fsl learning process itself, even before the students arrived. previously, our colleague, simone maier, had developed a ‘jeans to study apron’ activity, in which the making process allowed her to think about preparing herself for study. we decided to adopt that as an induction challenge for our students, with alternatives that would allow everybody to participate and succeed, so our students could make a study space, object or the apron: burns, desire, gordon, sinfield the apron challenge: embodied and creative learning online and at a distance journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 3 make a study apron (see example video): find a large old pair of jeans or similar transform the jeans into a study apron something that makes you feel like a proper student. share the process/product in the class padlet. whichever challenge was accepted, we asked for a picture and a few words posted to the class padlet, and asked participants to read and respond to posts from classmates before the first class. we evaluated this activity by reading the participants’ weekly reflective blogs and by discussing it directly in class. we also reflected on the activity ourselves, exploring the class padlet to see how people had responded, noticing the creativity and variety of the ways that they had engaged with the challenge. some wrote poetry instead of making an apron; others made more than one sort of study space and shared all of them. ironically the person who actually made the study apron was the most overtly sceptical of the task itself: “really? how is this going to help me with my teaching skills?” she was the one who then plunged in with energy, excitement and frustration. this person had made an apron and shared it with the class on the padlet for this activity along with a link to her reflective blogpost on the whole experience. she was angry with herself; she had rushed in too quickly, had made numerous mistakes; she had produced a terrible apron and was a terrible person. this is the value of embodied practice; it unleashes insights that theory alone could not reveal. discussing the passion experienced by this participant not only reassured her that her participation had been valuable and powerful, it also provided a useful talking/learning point for the group. recommendations this paper reflects on how we set participants up to positively experience a learningdevelopment-inspired staff pgcert module. our challenge was to lead them into a creative, embodied and playful experience, even though they would be studying online and at a distance. the ‘apron challenge’ was not just a throwaway one-off icebreaker, but a https://youtu.be/ty_ztnpoep4 burns, desire, gordon, sinfield the apron challenge: embodied and creative learning online and at a distance journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 4 synecdoche for the module itself: playful, collaborative, supportive, embodied and online. the processes provoked movement from individual cognitive, creative, haptic, multimodal experiences to a collective, reflective and dialogic experience. by ‘being with’ in creative and embodied ways, students started to get to know each other even before the first virtual class, and that continued into virtual engagement and reflection in and out of class. the class was challenging and disruptive of preconceived ideas of academic practices, but in exploratory, discursive and emergent ways. the module stood with and beside the students, and they with each other. we would encourage others to design similar creative, collaborative and embodied activities in their own online spaces. encourage students to get up and move around. set up a scavenger hunt. ask participants to find an object that represents their thoughts on the topic. require them to ‘make, do, share, discuss’ before, during and after class. being creative in the online learning and teaching space can be as embodied and powerful as in face-to-face classes if we reimagine our blended practice not just as an emergency response to a pandemic, but as collaborative dancing on the edge. references aldinhe (2021) association of learning development in higher education. available at: https://aldinhe.ac.uk/ (accessed: 6 may 2021). angelo, t.a. (1993) ‘a “teacher's dozen”: fourteen general, research-based principles for improving higher learning in our classrooms, aahe bulletin, 45(8), pp.3-7. available at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/237489105_a_teacher's_dozenfourteen_general_research-based_principles_for_improving_higher_learning (accessed: 29 july 2021) clughen, l. (2017) ‘editorial’, in clughen, l. and willis, j. (eds) creative academic magazine: role of the body in creative processes & practices. available at: https://www.creativeacademic.uk/uploads/1/3/5/4/13542890/cam8.pdf (last downloaded: 12th may 2021). https://aldinhe.ac.uk/ https://www.researchgate.net/publication/237489105_a_teacher's_dozen-fourteen_general_research-based_principles_for_improving_higher_learning https://www.researchgate.net/publication/237489105_a_teacher's_dozen-fourteen_general_research-based_principles_for_improving_higher_learning https://www.creativeacademic.uk/uploads/1/3/5/4/13542890/cam8.pdf burns, desire, gordon, sinfield the apron challenge: embodied and creative learning online and at a distance journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 5 holt, j. (1977) growing without schooling. available at: https://www.johnholtgws.com/growing-without-schooling-issue-archive/ (accessed: 23 june 2021). holt, j. (1981) teach your own: a hopeful path for education. new york: delacorte press/seymour lawrence. illich, i. (1970) de-schooling society. new york: harper and row. leathwood, c. and o'connell, p., (2003) “‘it's a struggle”: the construction of the “new student” in higher education’, journal of education policy, 18(6), pp.597-615. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/0268093032000145863 (accessed 29 july 2021). nancy, j. (2000) being singular plural. stanford, ca: stanford university press. nerantzi, c. (2019) ‘the playground model revisited: a proposition for playfulness to boost creativity in academic development’ in james, a. and nerantzi, c. (eds) the power of play in higher education: creativity in tertiary learning. cham: springer international publishing ag. sinfield, s., burns, t. and abegglen, s. (2019) ‘becoming playful: the power of a ludic module’ in james, a. and nerantzi, c. (eds) the power of play in higher education: creativity in tertiary learning. cham: springer international publishing ag. wenger-trayner, e. (2014) ‘learning in landscapes of practice: recent developments in social learning theory’, aldinhe annual conference 2014: learning development spaces and places. university of huddersfield, april 2014. winnicott, d.w. (1971) playing and reality. london: tavistock. https://www.johnholtgws.com/growing-without-schooling-issue-archive/ https://doi.org/10.1080/0268093032000145863 burns, desire, gordon, sinfield the apron challenge: embodied and creative learning online and at a distance journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 6 author details tom burns, john desire, janet gordon and sandra sinfield are senior lecturers in the centre for professional and educational development at london met, with a special focus on teaching, learning and assessment practices face-to-face and online that ignite student curiosity, harness creativity and develop power and voice. the apron challenge: embodied and creative learning online and at a distance. the challenge the response recommendations references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 20: march 2021 ________________________________________________________________________ skills for business and management a book review of sedgley, m. (2020) skills for business and management. london: red globe press. hazel messenger london metropolitan university keywords: business; management; study skills. overview this text in the macmillan study skills series provides specific advice for business and management students. the book is designed around five key areas relevant to the discipline: independent learning, time management, academic reading, academic writing and group working. the author brings a wealth of experience in supporting learning development in a university school of management to this publication. although the title suggests the text will support business and management skills, the emphasis is on learning and preparation for assessments in these subject areas rather than on their practice in the workplace. the book is organized in five sections, each developing one of the five key areas: independent learning, time management, academic reading, academic writing and group working. there is no indication of the level that the text is aimed at, which suggests it may be interpreted widely. as with many texts associated with study skill development, finding a suitable one is often a matter of personal preference. this text may find its way onto library shelves, available for the individual student, but it could be more useful in the armoury of the subject module lecturer or academic mentor, as they would then be able to customise the content to suit their own teaching or support needs at any level. messenger skills for business and management journal of learning development in higher education, issue 20: march 2021 2 structure and content the text opens by considering the distinctiveness of business and management studies and provides justification for the five sections that form the main body of the text. engaging with this chapter and the first section on self-management could provide an effective prerequisite for any business and management course or study level, as it would provide a common ground for academic focus during the ‘induction’ period that is so often dominated by administrative concerns. in particular, this first section emphasises the significance of self-belief and self-motivation, also indicating the crucial role played by focused reflection in their development. helpfully, this section also makes reference to university support services, something that is often absent from study skills texts. the second section, academic research, consists of two chapters: searching for relevant texts and efficient reading strategies. the first chapter provides the reader with resources that will support their ability to explain business and management practice through the lens of theory. as with all of this text, extensive use is made of quotes from business and management students, and opportunities to undertake reflection or focused activities. it is widely accepted that students often find reading and finding relevant texts challenging, so providing tips here on using sources of information like lecture slides, and unpacking assessment tasks, are particularly helpful. the second chapter in this section provides detailed guidance on developing effective reading strategies. the approaches discussed include identifying the reason for reading, making notes, and then extending notes through further research. mention is made of visual note-making, and it is a pity that this could not be extended further, no doubt because of publisher restrictions, as this has been demonstrated to be a particularly memorable form of supporting students’ study skill development (mills, 2019). in the third section, martin sedgley provides the reader with four chapters relating to academic writing: essentials of academic writing, understanding referencing, critically analytical writing and reflective writing. each of these sections provides specific examples and opportunities to practise. with a strong focus on grammar, including sentence and paragraph structure, as well as the use of vocabulary, it is this section that could be of particular use to the academic tutor or mentor who is less used to unpacking the detail of critical expression and enabling the student to identify areas for development. a particularly strong chapter is the one on reflective writing, as this topic is one that deserves messenger skills for business and management journal of learning development in higher education, issue 20: march 2021 3 attention for long-term development. reflection is often achieved at quite a shallow level, and taking the reader through strategies to develop more depth of reflection is a valuable exercise. it could have been useful in this section to include more on the way in which writing may develop from description through analysis to critical evaluation, and to provide links to resources relating to the use of vocabulary, which are widely available. similarly, attention to the different forms of writing (beyond essay writing) relating to business and management practice could have been included, for example, report writing. the fourth section, communication, mainly deals with groupwork and delivering presentations, both essential areas in business and management education but both contentious in terms of learning and assessment, as they provide students with a minefield of tripwires. these two chapters unpack many potential difficulties, including conflict and personal style, and provide valuable resources for consciously promoting learning development through their operation. having a focus on ‘the ability to work effectively with others’ provides clear justification for the detail included, for example, assigning tasks associated with personality style preferences. it was disappointing, however, to see intercultural difference used for the example of conflict as the prevalence of cultural diversity in business and management courses is one of their biggest strengths. the final chapter in this section, delivering effective presentations, gives practical tips on engaging an audience, using voice and non-verbal communication to convey a message, and the design of visual resources. again, opportunities and activities are provided to support learning and reflect on the practice of others. the final section, personal development planning, consists of just one chapter, making the most of your learning journey. it seems a pity that this chapter is positioned at the end of the book, as the valuable information and resources it contains could have been effectively positioned at the beginning, alongside chapter 1. there are some areas that deserved more attention, for example, digital skills, their use and development; work-related learning and assessment; interpreting numerical data and using feedback to develop learning progress. more emphasis on these topics would be relevant to a text that aims to provide ‘skills for business and management’. messenger skills for business and management journal of learning development in higher education, issue 20: march 2021 4 summary as indicated in the opening remarks, it is suggested here that this text would provide valuable support for academic staff, academic mentors and learning designers who could use the content to promote learning development in their own contexts. it could provide the supportive backbone for a particular course, so that students become familiar with the style that is expected of them. references mills, e. (2019). the art of visual notetaking: an interactive guide to visual communication and sketchnotes. mission viejo, ca: quarto publishing group usa inc. author details dr hazel messenger is a senior lecturer, management in the guildhall school of business and law at london metropolitan university. she has held roles as an educational developer and undergraduate and postgraduate course leader, and has extensive experience of working with international partners. her research interests include curriculum design, effective pedagogies for development, leadership of transnational partnerships, and creativity in research. skills for business and management a book review of sedgley, m. (2020) skills for business and management. london: red globe press. overview structure and content summary references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special issue 22: compendium of innovative practice october 2021 ________________________________________________________________________ locating opportunities for building digital confidence in staff rachel bancroft nottingham trent university, uk rosemary pearce nottingham trent university, uk rachel challen nottingham trent university, uk david jeckells nottingham trent university, uk joseph kenney nottingham trent university, uk keywords: covid-19; digital confidence; teaching online; digital skills; online learning; learning technology. the challenge the pandemic is often described as being a catalyst for the rapid acceleration of existing trends in higher education, including more digital, flexible, and inclusive approaches to education (hastings, 2020). as a team that helps teaching staff achieve pedagogical aims with the help of learning technologies, we have experienced our own micro-versions of this shift, especially around digital confidence. our team, based in the school of arts and humanities, has long been working towards a model of supporting and guiding staff to take ownership of their online learning content and digital tools used in learning and teaching. the pandemic hastened this shift, resulting in colleagues with various levels of prior confidence and experience adapting to digital ways of facilitating learning and teaching. the jisc 2020 digital insights survey acknowledged a heightened need for ‘investment to support [staff] to develop these digital skills and enable them to teach with confidence and innovation’ (feldman, 2020, p.3). however, digital capabilities are often spoken about in the same breath as digital confidence without exploring whether confidence might require bancroft, pearce, challen, jeckells and kenney locating opportunities for building digital confidence in staff journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 2 its own approach (for example, greener and wakefield, 2015; newland and hanley, 2016). supporting the development of digital capabilities and literacies in this time has been key, but our experience suggests that this is not enough if staff do not have the confidence to feel in control and supported if, for example, the technology for a learning activity should fail them. our challenge concerned the team needing to be both a springboard and safety net for staff who found themselves suddenly navigating the dizzying heights of online and blended learning. the response encouraging a community of practice confidence was identified as a key priority in the initial stages of the move to flexible delivery, and this enabled us to seek and exploit opportunities to build digital confidence across our practice right from the start. we took advantage of the strengths of being a school-based team with strong relationships with colleagues, and the mutual familiarity that brings, and used this to encourage an online community of practice (wenger, 1998; lock, 2006). we instigated this immediately and employed two key strategies. timely support with peers firstly, we created a school-wide online microsoft teams space where we held frequent drop-in support sessions. while the drop-in was to allow staff to ask us any questions about learning technologies, there were many who told us they came solely for the feeling of connection and the opportunity to learn from the questions of their peers. hearing others’ questions highlighted that they were not alone in struggling with unfamiliarity and uncertainty, and we encouraged staff to ‘buddy up’ with one another to build confidence with using new tools and approaches. over time, as confidence grew, we saw staff use this space to give advice to others based on their own experiences and learning. bespoke training secondly, we developed a programme of training to support the move to flexible learning, including topics like hosting online sessions and facilitating group work, with opportunities for confidence-building integrated throughout. in addition to offering advice and bancroft, pearce, challen, jeckells and kenney locating opportunities for building digital confidence in staff journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 3 demonstrations about effective online learning, we increasingly asked attendees to collaborate on a problem that uses their own expertise as educators. this facilitates the building of confidence through providing opportunities to receive positive feedback from colleagues, framing staff as experts. it also provides space to gain confidence in a lowstakes, supported environment prior to using new tools and approaches with students. the success of these approaches has had visible impact, in that colleagues have developed the confidence to begin exploring technology in more complex and positive ways, and increasingly involve us in the development of new pedagogical approaches for online teaching. staff now engage in discussions around online learning across the university and beyond, confidently sharing their experience with others. they now regularly feature on our blog and digital confidence became particularly evident through a dramatic increase in their contributions at a recent annual institution-wide event on flexible and online learning. recommendations through a process of reflecting on the different ways we have aimed to build digital confidence since the pandemic began, we identified three distinct thematic strands which help to articulate our approach. welcoming we aim to help staff feel comfortable and prepared when attending our sessions, to help people to engage more confidently with new concepts. we circulate information about the session beforehand, ensuring attendees understand the level of participation expected of them, and begin with an informal ‘corridor question’ to build rapport and ease into a session where sharing of experiences and ideas is paramount. empowering we emphasise to staff that their pedagogical insight is not only relevant, but key in the online learning environment. we challenge the notion that this mode of teaching is only for those who consider themselves ‘tech-savvy’, and gently push back whenever staff preface their questions with a variation of ‘this might be a stupid question, but…’. we make it clear bancroft, pearce, challen, jeckells and kenney locating opportunities for building digital confidence in staff journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 4 that if they are struggling with something, there is a good chance that someone else is too, so their questions are always helpful. we also highlight any technology failures that occur during our workshops and draw attention to how we handle them in real time. in combination, these approaches allow staff to recognise that issues they experience are a normal part of using technology for learning and can be experienced by anyone. this recognition is a key step to believing that their problems can be overcome and building confidence in their ability to overcome them. sharing and reflecting we have found that sharing and reflecting are inextricable from each other in our context. moving into a post-pandemic future, we do not want staff to lose sight of the huge progress and innovations they have made. a programme of encouraging the sharing of practice benefits other staff but has also proved to be a useful mechanism for staff reflection and the refinement of their own ideas (sandoff et al., 2018). this emphasis on sharing now runs through our training, drop-in sessions, and our blog, each of which provide a forum for staff to articulate their experiences. references feldman, p. (2020) ‘foreword from paul feldman’, teaching staff digital experience insights survey: 2020 uk higher education (he) survey findings, p3. available at: https://repository.jisc.ac.uk/8184/1/teaching%20dei%20he%20report%202020%2 0v1.4.pdf (accessed: 3 june 2021). greener, s. and wakefield, c. (2015) ‘developing confidence in the use of digital tools in teaching’, electronic journal of e-learning, 13(4), pp.260-267. available at: https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ej1062118 (accessed: 22 june 2021). hastings, j. (2020) ‘covid-19 could be a catalyst for a more supportive, inclusive education’, wonkhe, 18 june. available at: https://wonkhe.com/blogs-sus/covid-19could-be-a-catalyst-for-a-more-supportive-inclusive-education/ (accessed: 1 june 2021). https://repository.jisc.ac.uk/8184/1/teaching%20dei%20he%20report%202020%20v1.4.pdf https://repository.jisc.ac.uk/8184/1/teaching%20dei%20he%20report%202020%20v1.4.pdf https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ej1062118 https://wonkhe.com/blogs-sus/covid-19-could-be-a-catalyst-for-a-more-supportive-inclusive-education/ https://wonkhe.com/blogs-sus/covid-19-could-be-a-catalyst-for-a-more-supportive-inclusive-education/ bancroft, pearce, challen, jeckells and kenney locating opportunities for building digital confidence in staff journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 5 lock, j. v. (2006) ‘a new image: online communities to facilitate teacher professional development’, journal of technology and teacher education, 14(4), pp. 663-678. newland, b. and hanley, f. (2016) ‘developing the digital literacies of academic staff: an institutional approach’, research in learning technology, 24. https://doi.org/10.3402/rlt.v24.31501 sandoff, m., nilsson, k., apelgren, b., frisk, s. and booth, s. (2018) ‘reflecting on and articulating teaching experiences: academics learning to teach in practice’, international journal of higher education 7(6). https://doi.org/10.5430/ijhe.v7n6p139. wenger, e. (1998) communities of practice: learning, meaning, and identity. cambridge: cambridge university press. author details rachel bancroft is head of the learning and teaching support unit based in the school of arts and humanities at nottingham trent university. rachel is currently particularly interested in inclusive and accessible approaches to online, blended, and remote learning, and digital confidence and wellbeing. rosemary pearce is a learning development manager in the learning and teaching support unit based in the school of arts and humanities at nottingham trent university, and has an interest in staff development and digital pedagogies. rachel challen is the learning, teaching, and staff development manager in the school of arts and humanities at nottingham trent university. rachel is interested in promoting innovative, active, and collaborative pedagogies for advancing resilience and confidence in online and blended teaching. david jeckells is the learning and teaching technology manager in the learning and teaching support unit based in the school of arts and humanities at nottingham trent university, and has an interest in the online user experience and processes for engagement and learning. https://doi.org/10.3402/rlt.v24.31501 https://doi.org/10.5430/ijhe.v7n6p139 bancroft, pearce, challen, jeckells and kenney locating opportunities for building digital confidence in staff journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 6 joseph kenney is a learning technologist in in the learning and teaching support unit based in the school of arts and humanities at nottingham trent university, and has an interest in student engagement tools and digital skills and confidence. locating opportunities for building digital confidence in staff the challenge the response encouraging a community of practice timely support with peers bespoke training recommendations welcoming empowering sharing and reflecting references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special issue 22: compendium of innovative practice october 2021 ________________________________________________________________________ msc student voices about learning together in an online academic conversation club: a collaborative student project anita fromm university of hertfordshire, uk bolatito adigun-lawal university of hertfordshire, uk stella akinmoju university of hertfordshire, uk nnenna onyenucheya university of hertfordshire, uk frederick otchere university of hertfordshire, uk victoria udeh university of hertfordshire, uk keywords: active listening; oral paraphrasing; online synchronous communication; covid-19. the challenge conversations, to interact with others and exchange ideas, are important in higher education. the sudden shift to online learning caused by the covid-19 pandemic has reduced opportunities for face-to-face conversations at universities in britain (dost et al., 2020) and has led to students experiencing stress and isolation (carolan, et al., 2020). it has been a difficult learning experience for many first-year students. even in classrooms, many students do not participate as much as might be expected (fromm, 2018). this may be because of shyness, which can be viewed positively or negatively (ollin, 2008; akinbode, 2015). in online learning, grondin et al. (2019) maintain that communication difficulties are exacerbated because of poor connectivity and less noticeable non-verbal language. fromm, adigun-lawal, akinmoju, msc student voices about learning together in an online onyenucheya, otchere, and udeh academic conversation club: a collaborative student project journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 2 the response to mitigate some of the difficulties mentioned above for groups of students, the tutor (first author) volunteered to facilitate online academic speaking clubs for groups of international students at a university in england. the aim of the clubs was to create speaking opportunities outside course content sessions to boost confidence in speaking, discuss ideas, improve participation, and make friends. to this end, the tutor decided to focus the teaching on active listening (al) and oral paraphrasing (op). al can enhance group relations and empathy (gordon, 1951; bodie et al., 2013; 2015; 2016). op is a common conversation technique (machi, 2018) and can help to clarify understanding in the workplace (whitcomb and whitcomb, 2013). al and op can be effective together in counselling conversations (kuhn et al., 2018). teaching in the clubs focused on developing these skills in an academic and friendly online synchronous environment using zoom™. the students in one of the club groups contributed to this research themselves; in that this was a participatory action research project that was arranged in two cycles. the first cycle explains and practises al and op in six one-hour meetings. these skills are related to lectures and texts that the students choose to discuss during the sessions. after one of the breakout rooms, a student explained: ‘we took turns to paraphrase the paragraph orally using synonyms and our own words to then discuss and analyse it’. the second cycle of four two-hour meetings revises al and op and culminates in the students participating in a student-led small-scale qualitative research project about their learning of al and op. as students volunteered to attend the club outside lecture time, no preparation for the sessions or research project was set so the whole project took place during club meetings. this article focuses on the one club group, where both cycles have been completed. ethics approval and programme lead permission were granted for the tutor, with an approved amendment to include the five participants who had consented to involvement. fromm, adigun-lawal, akinmoju, msc student voices about learning together in an online onyenucheya, otchere, and udeh academic conversation club: a collaborative student project journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 3 participants the five first-year msc pre-registration nursing participants were aged between 26 and 36; four female and one male; four nigerian and one ghanaian. english has been the principal language used throughout their education. they all arrived in england during lockdown in autumn 2020. here it should be emphasised that none had met another tutor or student at the university in person until their first hospital practice placement in april 2021. the tutor inspired, guided, and taught the students (participants). the students’ project in breakout rooms, participants worked out the research question: to what extent, if any, do msc nursing students at a university in england actively listen and orally paraphrase in synchronous online classes during covid-19 restrictions? this was conducted in may 2021 using a questionnaire consisting of open questions, written and circulated within the group only. thinking about qualitative methodology and analysis took place in breakout rooms in the last two meetings with minimum guidance. the students wrote the findings and discussion collaboratively in breakout rooms at the end of the final meeting, which took about two hours with a couple of short intervals for tutor support and tips. findings and discussion (in participants’ own words) many issues arise with online learning that do not occur with in-person lectures. many respondents reported issues with connectivity and a lack of face-to-face contacts. distractions such as performing domestic tasks, interruptions from other online participants, and distractions from children at home, among others, made it difficult for some to concentrate. several tactics were used by some respondents to reduce distractions. one person noted wearing headphones, another said they had to turn off notifications, and still another respondent kept their camera on all the time to keep awake. fromm, adigun-lawal, akinmoju, msc student voices about learning together in an online onyenucheya, otchere, and udeh academic conversation club: a collaborative student project journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 4 oral paraphrasing is another approach that students can use to get the most out of lectures, whether they are in person or online. students were able to understand and comprehend lecture subjects covered in online lectures, analyse various research papers, and avoid plagiarism when writing academic essays by using oral paraphrasing. in conclusion, oral paraphrasing is beneficial to listening more actively; it enhances communication between students when in breakout rooms, and subsequently also helps writing skills. students’ recommendations (in participants’ own words) we would recommend using active listening and oral paraphrasing in online synchronous learning. recommendations the students’ recommendations are interesting because it confirms the tutor’s idea that al and op enhance communication and, most probably, participation. the tutor had not anticipated that op would help with subsequent writing skills. for the tutor, organising meeting times and preparation was challenging in terms of time. the students’ findings suggest that active listening and oral paraphrasing can create speaking and learning opportunities in a supportive environment online. al and op appear to enhance online communication between group members in breakout rooms. the breakout rooms enabled the students to have conversations together without the tutor listening in, but the tutor could be consulted when required. it should be noted that the students were learning to communicate in an online environment and were learning how to research for their masters for the first time. some points in their findings relate to other online difficulties asked in the questionnaire. in conclusion, al and op can be beneficial techniques to use in online communication but their use in higher education requires further research. fromm, adigun-lawal, akinmoju, msc student voices about learning together in an online onyenucheya, otchere, and udeh academic conversation club: a collaborative student project journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 5 references akinbode, a. (2015) ‘the quiet learner and the quiet teacher’, link, 1(2). available at: https://www.herts.ac.uk/link/volume-1,-issue-2/the-quiet-learner-and-the-quietteacher (accessed: 1 june 2021). bodie, g. d., vickery, a. j. and gearhart, c. c. (2013) ‘the nature of supportive listening, i: exploring the relation between supportive listeners and supportive people’, international journal of listening, 27(1), pp.39-49. https://doi.org/10.1080/10904018.2013.732408. bodie, g. d., vickery, a. j., cannava, k. and jones, s. m. (2015) ‘the role of “active listening” in informal helping conversations: impact on perceptions of listener helpfulness, sensitivity, and supportiveness and discloser emotional improvement’, western journal of communication, 79(2), pp.151-173. https://doi.org/10.1080/10570314.2014.943429. bodie, g. d., cannava, k. e. and vickery, a. j. (2016) ‘supportive communication and the adequate paraphrase’, communication research reports, 33(2), pp.166-172. https://doi.org/10.1080/08824096.2016.1154839. carolan, c., davies, c. l., crookes, p., mcghee, s. and roxburgh, m. (2020) ‘covid 19: disruptive impacts and transformative opportunities in undergraduate nurse education’, nurse education in practice, 46, pp.102807-102807. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nepr.2020.102807. dost, s., hossain, a., shehab, m., abdelwahed, a. and al-nusair, l. (2020) ‘perceptions of medical students towards online teaching during the covid-19 pandemic: a national cross-sectional survey of 2721 uk medical students’, bmj open, 10(1), pp. e042378-e042378. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjopen-2020-042378. fromm, a. (2018) ‘speaking the target language outside the classroom in friendship groups: a comparative study of international and local modern language foreign https://www.herts.ac.uk/link/volume-1,-issue-2/the-quiet-learner-and-the-quiet-teacher https://www.herts.ac.uk/link/volume-1,-issue-2/the-quiet-learner-and-the-quiet-teacher https://doi.org/10.1080/10904018.2013.732408 https://doi.org/10.1080/10570314.2014.943429 https://doi.org/10.1080/08824096.2016.1154839 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nepr.2020.102807 https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjopen-2020-042378 fromm, adigun-lawal, akinmoju, msc student voices about learning together in an online onyenucheya, otchere, and udeh academic conversation club: a collaborative student project journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 6 students with a focus on employability’, link, 3(2). available at: https://www.herts.ac.uk/link/volume-3,-issue-2/speaking-the-target-languageoutside-the-classroom-in-friendship-groups-a-comparative-study-of-internationaland-local-modern-foreign-language-students-with-a-focus-on-employability (accessed: 1 june 2021). gordon, t. (1951) ‘group centered leadership and administration’, pp. 320-383, in rogers, c. (ed.) client-centered therapy: its current practice, implications and theory. london: constable. grondin, f., lomanowska, a. m. and jackson, p. l. (2019) ‘empathy in computer‐ mediated interactions: a conceptual framework for research and clinical practice’, clinical psychology: science and practice, 26(4). https://doi.org/10.1111/cpsp.12298. kuhn, r., bradbury, t. n., nussbeck, f. w. and bodenmann, g. (2018) ‘the power of listening: lending an ear to the partner during dyadic coping conversations’, journal of family psychology, 32(6), pp.762-772. https://doi.org/10.1037/fam0000421. machi, s. (2018) ‘paraphrasing the "other": connecting participants in japanese conversation’, journal. faculty of humanities, 67, pp.39-53. available at: https://jwujp.academia.edu/saekomachi/papers (accessed 1 june 2021). ollin, r. (2008) ’silent pedagogy and rethinking classroom practice: structuring teaching through silence rather than talk’, cambridge journal of education, 38(2), pp.265280. https://doi.org/10.1080/03057640802063528. whitcomb, c., and whitcomb, l. (2013) effective interpersonal and team communication skills for engineers. hoboken: wiley. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118514283. author details anita fromm is widening participation champion in the school of health and social work and visiting lecturer in academic skills in the centre of academic english at the https://www.herts.ac.uk/link/volume-3,-issue-2/speaking-the-target-language-outside-the-classroom-in-friendship-groups-a-comparative-study-of-international-and-local-modern-foreign-language-students-with-a-focus-on-employability https://www.herts.ac.uk/link/volume-3,-issue-2/speaking-the-target-language-outside-the-classroom-in-friendship-groups-a-comparative-study-of-international-and-local-modern-foreign-language-students-with-a-focus-on-employability https://www.herts.ac.uk/link/volume-3,-issue-2/speaking-the-target-language-outside-the-classroom-in-friendship-groups-a-comparative-study-of-international-and-local-modern-foreign-language-students-with-a-focus-on-employability https://doi.org/10.1111/cpsp.12298 https://doi.org/10.1037/fam0000421 https://jwu-jp.academia.edu/saekomachi/papers https://jwu-jp.academia.edu/saekomachi/papers https://doi.org/10.1080/03057640802063528 https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118514283 fromm, adigun-lawal, akinmoju, msc student voices about learning together in an online onyenucheya, otchere, and udeh academic conversation club: a collaborative student project journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 7 university of hertfordshire. here she is working towards her doctorate in education. bolatito adigun-lawal, stella akinmoju, nnenna onyenucheya, frederick otchere, and victoria udeh are msc students in fields of nursing. msc student voices about learning together in an online academic conversation club: a collaborative student project the challenge participants the students’ project findings and discussion (in participants’ own words) students’ recommendations (in participants’ own words) author details literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 3: march 2011 academic writing masterclasses: ‘shared live editing’ in a group gavin fairbairn leeds metropolitan university, uk (this opinion piece is part one of two – the second part will appear in issue 4 of the jldhe) i spend a great deal of time in one-to-one support of developing writers – both undergraduate and postgraduate students, and colleagues who are writing for publication. (fairbairn and winch, 1996; fairbairn and fairbairn, 2005; canter and fairbairn, 2006) in each case i aim to facilitate the development of a clearer, more informative and more engaging style, partly by drawing attention to places where the writers in question are factually mistaken, and to aspects of their topic that they have failed to address adequately. even more importantly, however, i try to help them to improve their ability as writers by commenting on the structure and presentation of their work – drawing attention to places where it is unclear or poorly argued, and to places where they have made mistakes in their use of language, which spoil the sense of what they are trying to communicate. i should make clear that i am not talking about a pedantic insistence on grammatical correctness, if there is such a thing, but merely on the need to attend, at the most basic level, to whether what is written says what the author thinks it says, and sometimes, even whether it makes any sense at all. for more than a dozen years i have found that by far the best way of helping people to grow the skills and disciplines necessary if they are to write clearly and effectively, is to offer such help in the context of a supportive and nurturing group, in which the participants engage in ‘shared live editing’ of texts. i find such groups to be good places in which to offer individual support for learning about academic writing. typically, during a meeting, we will work on one or more draft texts written by participants – which may be whole essays or articles, but may be shorter passages, or even single paragraphs. i use a data projector or large computer screen to allow the whole group to view the text ‘live’, as i help the author to edit and shape it, in a way that is rather similar to the musical masterclass in fairbairn academic writing masterclasses: ‘shared live editing’ in a group which players are helped to develop their performances by a teacher, in front of an appreciative audience. the ‘performances’ on which we focus in live editing sessions are the texts that participants bring with them. one reason that working in a group in which everyone has the opportunity to work with other people’s texts is a helpful way of enabling the development of writing skills, is that it is always easier to detect problems in other people’s writing than it is to detect them in one’s own. partly this is because when you are working with your own text, familiarity with what you wanted to say can lead to a situation in which, rather than reading what is in front of your eyes, you ‘read’ what you wanted to say, in other words the idea that was in your head, rather than what you actually committed to print. that is why i urge students and colleagues to develop the habit of trying always to read their work as if it was written by someone else. in addition i try to persuade them that if they want to be a writer, they should read their own work out loud as often as possible, because doing so makes it much more difficult to avoid noticing that what you have written fails to make sense. reading out loud slows our reading down; forces us to read every word, and makes it easier two notice when we have used the wrung woods, or have misspeled or missed words out. and since when we read out loud we have to take breath every so often it also helps us to spot places where sentences are longer than they might be or are badly punctuated so that by the time we get to the end of them we are absolutely gasping for breath so that we hopefully come to the conclusion that we should split them up a bit more. after almost twenty five years of working on the development of academic writing, i am increasingly convinced that learning to read what one has written as if it was written by someone else, and with a view to offering a critical appraisal, is the single most important skill that academic authors must learn, whether they are professionals or students. such skill allows you more easily to edit your attempts at writing down the ideas that have either formed or are forming in your mind; it is easy to develop, though it involves making a leap of faith into thinking that it is ok to acknowledge that what you have written is less good than it could be – and perhaps, that it is literary (and sometimes even literally) nonsense. in line with my belief about the benefits of reading out loud, one important element in my live editing sessions is that i like to get the protagonist (the person whose text we are focusing on) to read sections out loud, so that their written performance becomes public through the spoken word as well as through the medium of print. this gives these sessions journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 2 fairbairn academic writing masterclasses: ‘shared live editing’ in a group some similarity to an approach to the teaching of writing described by fishman et al. (2005, p.226) who write that ‘immediate and face-to-face performance encourages active participation and collaboration’. in live editing sessions, participants are invited to offer comments on the protagonist’s work, with the proviso that they must aim to be supportive and enabling. as a result, they almost inevitably show their appreciation of her efforts, sharing what they like about her work as well as identifying problems and suggesting possible ways of improving her text. in order to achieve this situation, it is important to make clear at the outset, that shared live editing sessions are not intended to provide an opportunity to engage in the bloodsport of criticising one another’s writing skill or style, but an opportunity to develop together as writers. in my experience, engaging with students and with colleagues in the live editing of texts is the most fruitful and least painful way of helping them to develop their skills as writers. one reason for this is that rather than offering advice about how text might be improved, and leaving the writer to work out for herself how to do it, live editing involves sitting beside her and working out together how her text might be improved. as i have already hinted, ‘live editing’ involves working with text on screen, where it has the opportunity to grow and change in response to the discussion i conduct with those present. when i am live editing, i like to ‘drive’ the computer – partly because i textprocess quickly and fluently. but partly it is because doing so allows me to model certain aspects of the creation and modification of text by careful reading and interrogation of what is already written and by ‘auditioning’ changes and additions to see whether, once they are in-situ, they help to make the text clearer. working live with a student’s or colleague’s text in a writing masterclass ensures that it grows and changes and transforms, as we discuss the problems or weaknesses that i think i detect; that they think they detect, and that the other group members think they detect. perhaps even more importantly, the protagonist’s text also changes and grows as a result of praise and encouragement in relation to aspects of the text that work well. when i am editing my own work, i always begin by ‘marking up’ a printed copy, because i find that reading what i have written on paper makes it is easier to avoid the mistake of fooling myself into believing that it is clear and well argued, even when it isn’t, than trying journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 3 fairbairn academic writing masterclasses: ‘shared live editing’ in a group to read it on screen. generally speaking, as well as writing corrections on the printed page, i also annotate it with comments about what has to be done, and often with gestures at how more significant changes – insertions and major re-wordings – might look. after that i turn to the computer and deal with corrections and minor changes, before beginning to work on the more important improvements i want to make. rather than trying to work out precisely how an unclear, longwinded or over complicated sentence might be changed, before making the necessary changes on screen, i like to play with possibilities on screen, until eventually after successive modifications, i come up with a version that satisfies me (or at any rate, that satisfies me for the moment, because i often find that at the next reading through, it becomes obvious that more changes are necessary). by ‘playing with possibilities’ i mean trying out lots of different ways of addressing problems – adding and taking away text; rephrasing; restructuring sentences and paragraphs. sometimes i will copy a paragraph or larger chunk of text into a new document and play with it there, both, because that way it is easier to revert to the original if necessary, and because separating it from the text in which it is embedded somehow makes it easier to work on. for those who, like me, engage in it, this playing with text will seem obvious. however, in my experience surprisingly few people actually engage in it, perhaps because they are afraid of losing their way, or perhaps because they have poorly developed keyboard skills. or perhaps it is just that they are so afraid of the possibility of losing the forms of words they have already put down, that they would rather ‘freeze’ them, than run the risk of losing them in the process of attempting to find a better form. i aim to encourage developing writers to play with text as much as possible and to develop skill in spotting forms of words that not only ‘sound good’, but successfully communicate what they want to say. shared live editing is particularly useful with groups of postgraduates whether they are at the stage of developing the proposals for their research projects, or developing the text of their theses; and with colleagues who are working on articles intended for publication. however, it is just as useful for undergraduate students in, for example, the context of a tutorial session aimed at helping students to focus on writing as a way of developing their understanding of ideas. the texts that participants offer up for public scrutiny in a live editing session may be at a variety of stages of development. sometimes they are already rather advanced; in such cases the protagonist may choose to circulate a printout of his ‘performance’ beforehand, journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 4 fairbairn academic writing masterclasses: ‘shared live editing’ in a group so that when he asks to focus on a particular section, the members of the group know how it relates to the piece as a whole. on the other hand, a protagonist may want to work on a piece that is in a rudimentary state, or even on what lamott (1994) refers to as a ‘shitty first draft’; working on early drafts can be helpful in reassuring inexperienced authors that getting something down in print, however uncertain, can be a helpful staging post in the development of a finished text. indeed, i often work with text that has not even been drafted before the session and is brought along as nothing more than an embryonic imagining in its author’s mind. this can also be very productive. the way in which mistakes are addressed during shared live editing is particularly worthy of mention because they are sometimes the source of a great deal of humour as protagonist and participants alike collapse in fits of giggles as they begin, for example, to spot the stylistic ‘tics’ that characterise a particular author’s work (and we all have such tics; one of mine is the overuse of semi-colons). now having one’s mistakes spotted and laughed over in public could be traumatic were it not for the fact that such sessions almost always turn into joyously happy and supportive places, in which both learners and experienced authors can rest assured that mistakes are not taken as a sign of weakness and stupidity, but rather as a sign of ordinariness. nonetheless, lest participants should be put off by the idea of exposing their weakness to their peers, i always introduce the idea of live editing by offering something that i have written myself as the first subject for attention. sometimes i use text that i have downgraded from a finished piece – from a published article say, by making changes that pepper it with a range of mistakes. but sometimes i use text that is genuinely at an early stage of development because that way i can be sure to provide participants with a feast of examples of all kinds of errors and all kinds of problems, as i attempt, in front of an audience, to find the best way to say what i want to say, or even to decide what i want to say. shared live editing groups are a good vehicle for the development of writing skills because over the course of a series of sessions, each person in a group has the opportunity to receive support in developing not only his or her text, but his or her skills as a writer. not only that, but when it is their text the group is working on, they receive individual support for their learning, not only from the teacher, but from their peers. my enthusiasm for this way of working on academic literacy is thus formed out of my experience of seeing it work, journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 5 fairbairn academic writing masterclasses: ‘shared live editing’ in a group as well as from my belief that it is an economical way of supporting students and professional academics as developing writers. references canter, d. and fairbairn, g. (2006) becoming an author: advice for academics and other professionals. buckingham: open university press. fairbairn, g.j. and winch, c. (1996) reading, writing and reasoning. 2nd edn. milton keynes: open university press. fairbairn, g. and fairbairn, s. (2005) writing your abstract: a guide for would-be conference presenters. tollard royal, wiltshire: aps publishers. fishman, j., lunsford, a., mcgregor, b. and otuteye, m. (2005) ‘performing writing, performing literacy’, college composition and communication, 57(2), p.224-52. lamott, a. (1994) bird by bird: some instructions on writing and life. new york: doubleday. author details gavin fairbairn is professor of ethics and language at leeds metropolitan university, whose work in both areas is underpinned by his belief in the value of storytelling. in the past, after a career in special education and many years as a teacher educator, he was professor of professional development in nursing and midwifery at the university of glamorgan, then professor of education at liverpool hope. his research and professional activity is focused in two areas: applied ethics and philosophy, especially in relation to health, social care and reconciliation after conflict, and the development of academic and professional writing. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 6 academic writing masterclasses: ‘shared live editing’ in a group references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special issue 22: compendium of innovative practice october 2021 ________________________________________________________________________ maintaining quality assessment practices under emergency remote online conditions shalini dukhan university of the witwatersrand, gauteng, south africa keywords: assessment practices; cheating; plagiarism; covid-19. the challenge dishonest academic practices such as plagiarism increased among undergraduates when teaching, learning and assessment moved onto the online learning management system during lockdown; this was especially the case for developing world contexts like south africa (nwosu and chukwuere, 2020). based on their observation of increased instances of dishonest practices among biology undergraduates, this article documents some of the techniques lecturers at the university of the witwatersrand (wits), south africa, used in an attempt to maintain quality assessment practices that facilitated learning in higher education. like most south african universities, the biology department at wits university had conducted assessments as closed-book, timed examinations that were written in person. the swift move to assessing students online during the covid-19 pandemic left both students and lecturers unprepared for a different mode of assessment. often the students’ completion of online assessments under emergency remote conditions came into question, and concerns were raised by lecturers with regard to increased instances of dishonest academic practices (nguyen et al., 2020). some students had only basic skills in navigating the online learning management system and generally needed more time to fully adapt (le grange, 2020). there were concerns that this lack of experience could have caused the increase in dishonest academic practices observed among undergraduates. the biology lecturers’ observations of increased instances of academic dishonesty led to their deliberating how they could assess students online while minimising opportunities for dukhan maintaining quality assessment practices under emergency remote online conditions journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 2 dishonesty and mistakes. assessments under the new online conditions required lecturers to radically adapt their pedagogical practices (hsu, 2021). we did this by considering and formulating questions that engaged students in relating theory to practice and therefore focused more on the application of knowledge than memorisation and recall. the key question addressed here is ‘considering the move to the online platform under emergency conditions, what measures can be used to ensure quality assessment practices that reduce opportunities for dishonest academic practices such as plagiarism?’. the response constructive alignment requires alignment between the curriculum, learning outcomes, teaching activities and assessment practices (biggs and tang, 2007). we sought to respond to the challenge of online assessment by employing techniques that encouraged students to critically reflect on their understanding as they constructed responses to the assessment questions. the application-type questions that we designed were mostly scaffolded for first years while second and third years were challenged to think at higherorder cognitive levels, as illustrated by the examples below. the types of questions presented below stemmed from my experiences during 2020 and 2021, and from discussions with colleagues on what worked for them. although the assessment practices provided here emerged from the context of biology, many of the examples could also be applied to different disciplines. we provided assessment questions that allowed the students an opportunity to express their views by writing from a stance related to a particular role. these views were informed by the content covered during the course. example: in 500 words, provide your view from a biomedical standpoint on whether there is a benefit to invest in the development of a vaccine against covid-19. dukhan maintaining quality assessment practices under emergency remote online conditions journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 3 we also provided links to readings and other guiding instructional questions to help students reflect on their responses so that they could establish their positions based on scientific thought. this scaffold was considered important since first-year students may not necessarily have the required training to voice their position based on scientific arguments. we posed more cognitively challenging questions for second and third-year students. these students were challenged to think about how the content in the curriculum tied in with topical biology concepts related to covid-19. example: write an essay on the significance of lockdown on environmental pollution. instructions were provided to indicate that students needed to construct an argument by thinking about different and contrasting perspectives as they considered their standpoint. this question included a highly specific task-set, the answer to which would not be easily accessed, for example by internet search. we envisaged that this would force students to reflect on the knowledge they had gained during the course rather than allowing them to ‘cut and paste’ from other sources. the following type of question added some variety to the usual type of assessment format that students were exposed to on written assessments and allowed the students the opportunity to be creative in their response to the assessment. example: construct a 3-d model of a cell using play dough. take two or three photographs of your model from different views. attach these images for evaluation in your response to the assessment. we incorporated other questions that assessed students while supporting their development of skills in reading for comprehension and critiquing a subject area. these tasks were based on probing questions linked to the students’ reading and analysis of a journal article. questions were presented to students to help them reflect at different cognitive levels. dukhan maintaining quality assessment practices under emergency remote online conditions journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 4 example identify the main argument and supporting lines of evidence for articles ‘x’, ‘y’, and ‘z’. based on the arguments posed, and considering the content covered on this topic over this semester, substantiate your viewpoint on the impact of these areas for our south african context. this type of question brought together different topics covered over the course. to encourage student reflection through the duration of the course, they received the question at the start of the course and then built towards their response as they covered each topic. it is important to be inclusive and acknowledge the diversity that may exist within a class, so in order to do this, students were given a choice of questions for assessment and could select one based on their own cultural experiences. example: provide the common and cultural names and identification methods for some indigenous medicinal plants in our local contexts. what medicinal significance do these examples have for the society in which they are used? recommendations when different types of questions, as illustrated above, are used as tools for assessment, it is possible to engage students to reflect creatively and critically. this can especially be encouraged when topical contextual and global issues, like the effects of the covid-19 pandemic, are included as part of the assessment. these opportunities encourage students to apply theory to practice and thus facilitate their application of knowledge. this process, therefore, enables authentic learning opportunities, and when students are stimulated to consider curricular content within the scope of ‘real-life’ issues, their interest can motivate their learning. this motivation helps to mitigate issues around academic dishonesty when they tackle assessments, and avoidance of dishonest academic practices in online assessments is fundamental to providing a quality learning experience and qualification. dukhan maintaining quality assessment practices under emergency remote online conditions journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 5 references biggs, j. and tang, c. (2007) teaching for quality learning at university: what the student does. new york, ny: mcgraw-hill. le grange, l. (2020) ‘could the covid-19 pandemic accelerate the uberfication of the university?’ south african journal of higher education 34(4) 1-10. available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.20853/34-4-4071 (accessed: 7 september 2021). hsu, j.l. (2021) ‘promoting academic integrity and student learning in online biology classes’, journal of microbiology and biology education 22(1) 1-7. available at: https://dx.doi.org/10.1128%2fjmbe.v22i1.2291 (accessed: 18 october 2021). nguyen, j.g., keuseman, k.j. and humston, j.j. (2020) ‘minimize online cheating for online assessments during covid-19 pandemic’, journal of chemical education, 97(9), pp.3429–3435. available at: https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.jchemed.0c00790 (accessed: 18 october 2021). nwosu, l.i. and chukwuere, j.e. (2020) ‘the attitude of students towards plagiarism in online learning: a narrative literature review’, gender & behaviour 18(1) pp.1467514688. available at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/343471863_the_attitude_of_students_to wards_plagiarism_in_online_learning_a_narrative_literature_review (accessed 18 october). author details shalini dukhan is a senior lecturer in the school of animal, plant, and environmental sciences at the university of the witwatersrand, gauteng, south africa. her present teaching focuses on cell biology and microscopy at the undergraduate level. her postgraduate supervision and research interests are in examining factors that impact on the development of science identity among biology students and how this influences their learning approaches and academic achievement. she is also involved in projects which http://dx.doi.org/10.20853/34-4-4071 https://dx.doi.org/10.1128%2fjmbe.v22i1.2291 https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.jchemed.0c00790 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/343471863_the_attitude_of_students_towards_plagiarism_in_online_learning_a_narrative_literature_review https://www.researchgate.net/publication/343471863_the_attitude_of_students_towards_plagiarism_in_online_learning_a_narrative_literature_review dukhan maintaining quality assessment practices under emergency remote online conditions journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 6 explore how teaching practices that incorporate indigenous knowledge improve the students’ access to learning science. maintaining quality assessment practices under emergency remote online conditions the challenge the response recommendations references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special issue 22: compendium of innovative practice october 2021 ________________________________________________________________________ challenges and serendipities: group working under conditions of social distancing and dual modes of delivery sam hopkins university of surrey, uk shelini surendran university of surrey, uk keywords: covid-19; biosciences; foundation; hyflex; teamwork; group work. the challenge as part of a bioscience foundation year, where our students were expected to be on campus for certain activities unless they had specific extenuating circumstances, it was vital that students who were online at the same time had an equitable and undiminished experience to those in class. in our foundation year, group work capabilities are a key learning outcome. we all know how vital group work can be to the learning experience (riebe, girardi and whitsed, 2016) and there is evidence that it can be enhanced using technology and social media (crook, 2013). but how effective is group work when some students are online and others are in the classroom? walker et al. (2020) discuss the importance of interpersonal team processes, including communication, managing different personalities, and developing trust and commitment to the team, as key to good group work. whilst this is possible online, as demonstrated by falls et al. (2014), it may be easier in person. the challenge of giving the same group work experience for students in class as for those joining us online was not always successful in our experience. this short piece will focus on three approaches to the above challenge and discuss the reasons we took these approaches, what worked in our context, what did not, and why we believe this to be the case. we will end on a short set of recommendations that we will be taking forward in our teaching practice. hopkins and surendran challenges and serendipities: group working under conditions of social distancing and dual modes of delivery journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 2 the response we were determined to keep aspects of group work despite social distancing and some students attending online and so we got creative. we tried to tackle this in three different ways within our course: 1. we had students in the room and online doing the same tasks at the same time. 2. we ran separate sessions for those online to attempt to give them a similar experience to those in the classroom. 3. we moved the whole session online. in cases where we had students in the classroom at the same time as online, we found the type of activity informed its success. for example, writing tasks where students were introduced to an idea and then asked to write a paragraph using the idea worked well as all students could do the same task and there was little group interaction required. students in class could ask questions in the room and students online would unmute their microphones and ask questions over the speakers. if the task required group work, students online were put into breakout rooms, and this was where the session would often not be as successful. students did not enjoy breakout rooms and, as teaching staff, we often got the impression they had sat in silence whilst their peers in class had been discussing the topic enthusiastically. students online were reluctant to turn their webcams on, which possibly put them at a disadvantage as it could limit their feelings of co-presence and ability to see non-verbal cues when working in their group (kozar, 2016). other teachers (saldanha, et al., 2021) suggest an online etiquette session early in the course and this may have helped with students realising breakout rooms were part of their course and establishing the expectation of participation. where tasks were wholly based around group work or there was a need for special equipment or materials, it was not feasible to run the session as above and we had to find another way. in such cases, we split the class and ran separate in-person and online sessions in an attempt to improve student experience. an example of this was a predator prey activity where 250 deer cards and 50 wolf cards get thrown into a ‘forest’ to simulate a predator/prey model. in class, we created packs of these cards for groups to use to do hopkins and surendran challenges and serendipities: group working under conditions of social distancing and dual modes of delivery journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 3 their counts and draw the graphs. in class this worked well, students could do the activity in their group in a safe, socially distanced manner, and they could see in real-time and be actively involved in chucking the cards and working together to count the number of surviving deer. viewing the class, it seemed a fun experience; the students chucked the cards, made errors, and problem solved whilst discussing how the model worked. we then held a separate online session where students directed a member of staff in what to do with the forest and cards. here the online session was not the noisy, fun experience the students in the room had, as it felt like the presence of a staff member dampened down the student interactions. the difficulties of running two separate modes of delivery could mean that students could be given separate educational experiences, and, in this instance, it felt like this was the case. students in person could have the opportunity to conduct the activity through discovery learning, inspiring risk-taking and learning through trial and error (bicknell-holmes and hoffman, 2000). students in class had the advantage of working together in small groups to experience the game style activity in reality, whereas the online class did not have the same dynamic learning experience. this is not just our experience and is echoed by other teachers (kemp and grieve, 2014). the final solution to this challenge was to hold the entire class online for activities that did not require any special resources. an example of this was a series of journal clubs. in these sessions each group was given a different journal article to read and critique. we considered it important that all members of the group could attend the journal club and thought it would be a poor experience if half the group were online and half in person. moving the entire session online allowed equity but also meant that all students could ‘sit together’, facing each other (something that would have been difficult in a covid-19 safe classroom) to discuss the journal article. we believe this approach only worked because the groups were very small (six-eight) and so students felt comfortable turning on their cameras and getting involved with the discussion; as noted above, there were other instances, in larger groups, where student were much more reluctant to get involved. recommendations we realise that we are not making any big recommendations but merely reflecting on the situation, our challenge, and how we made the best of it. this experience has made us unpick many of our ‘known truths’ around the way we teach and forced us to innovate to hopkins and surendran challenges and serendipities: group working under conditions of social distancing and dual modes of delivery journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 4 give the students the best experience we could. going forward, we plan to take aspects of what we have done this year and develop it further for the future. in some instances, covid-19 has made our approach stronger, and our plan moving forward is to capture these new ideas and use them. sometimes the new approach has not worked and in these cases, we will use ours’ and others’ experience to develop new strategies in our teaching. our one recommendation, then, would be to not wait for a global pandemic to interrogate and innovate with teaching but to adopt this approach on a more systematic basis and challenge those ‘known truths’. references bicknell‐holmes, t. and hoffman, p. s. (2000) ‘elicit, engage, experience, explore: discovery learning in library instruction’, reference services review, 28(4), pp.313322. https://doi.org/10.1108/00907320010359632. crook, c. (2013) ‘varieties of togetherness in learning’, in andriessen, j., baker, m. and järvelä, s. (eds.) affective learning together social and emotional dimensions of collaborative learning. hoboken: taylor and francis, pp.41-49. falls, i., bahhouth, v., chuang, c. m., and bahhouth, j. (2014) ‘factors influencing students’ perceptions of online teamwork’, sage open, 4(1), pp.1-9. https://doi.org/10.1177/2158244014525415. kemp, n. and grieve, r. (2014) ‘face-to-face or face-to-screen? undergraduates' opinions and test performance in classroom vs. online learning’, frontiers in psychology, 5, pp.1278–1278. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01278. kozar, o. (2016) ‘perceptions of webcam use by experienced online teachers and learners: a seeming disconnect between research and practice’, computer assisted language learning, 29(4), pp.779-789. https://doi.org/10.1080/09588221.2015.1061021. https://doi.org/10.1108/00907320010359632 https://doi.org/10.1177/2158244014525415 https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01278 https://doi.org/10.1080/09588221.2015.1061021 hopkins and surendran challenges and serendipities: group working under conditions of social distancing and dual modes of delivery journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 5 riebe, l., girardi, a., and whitsed, c. (2016) ‘a systematic literature review of teamwork pedagogy’, higher education: small group research, 47(6), pp.619-664. https://doi.org/10.1177/1046496416665221. saldanha, k., currin-mcculloch, j., muskat, b., simon, s. r., bergart, a. m., mesbur, e. s., guy, d., chilwalo, n. b., seck, m. m., tully, g., lind, k., lee, c. d., hall, n. and kelly, d. (2021) ‘turning boxes into supportive circles: enhancing online group work teaching during the covid-19 pandemic’, social work with groups, 44(3), pp.1-18. https://doi.org/10.1080/01609513.2021.1910110. walker, e. r., lang, d. l., caruso, b. a. and salas-hernández, l. (2020) ‘role of team dynamics in the learning process: a mixed-methods evaluation of a modified teambased learning approach in a behavioral research methods course’, advances in health sciences education: theory and practice, 25(2), pp. 383-399. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10459-019-09931-3. author details sam hopkins is a teaching fellow in learning development on the biosciences foundation year at the university of surrey and a fellow of the hea. sam has a background in biology and learning development. shelini surendran in a teaching fellow on the biosciences foundation year at the university of surrey and a fellow of the hea. she is interested in playful learning and flipped learning. she has experience working in primary schools, colleges, and university. she has a phd in nutrigenetics and a pgce. https://doi.org/10.1177/1046496416665221 https://doi.org/10.1080/01609513.2021.1910110 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10459-019-09931-3 challenges and serendipities: group working under conditions of social distancing and dual modes of delivery the challenge the response recommendations references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special issue 22: compendium of innovative practice october 2021 ________________________________________________________________________ get me outta here! motivating online learners with digital escape rooms lucy gill-simmen royal holloway, university of london, uk keywords: motivation; online learning; digital escape rooms. the challenge in education, motivation has been identified as a key determinant of learning (lim, 2004). it is used to explain the attention and effort students dedicate to particular learning activities (brophy, 2013). studies have shown that learner motivation has an impact on a number of key learning outcomes such as persistence (vallerand and bissonnette, 1992), retention (lepper and cordova, 1992), achievement (eccles, 1983), and course satisfaction (fujita-starck and thompson, 1994). although motivation is critical in any learning environment, it is particularly so in an online environment (mullen and tallentrunnels, 2006). motivation is particularly important in online classes as students must work alone, have little face-to-face interaction with the instructor or peers, and frequently encounter ambiguous learning situations (sankaran and bui, 2001). following the introduction of a flexible learning model at a uk public research university, online learning became a necessity on an undergraduate marketing strategy course. with the exception of one hour of in-person teaching and a one hour synchronous online session, students were required to work their way independently through a series of learning activities provided on the virtual learning environment (vle), moodle. this presented me with the challenge of ensuring a class of 450 students would be motivated to engage and participate in the learning activities on the vle to achieve the required learning outcomes for the course. the course was designed as a series of five two-week ‘blocks’ to run over the ten week semester. each block covered a stage in the strategic planning process. not only was it important for students to engage in all the learning gill-simmen get me outta here! motivating online learners with digital escape rooms journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: october 2021 2 materials for each block to ensure learning outcomes were met but also that they studied the blocks in chronological order to fully understand the strategic planning ‘journey’. besides course delivery, my role thus became to manage learner motivation. specifically, the objective was to increase motivation levels with a view to engendering positive outcomes, such as increased effort, persistence, and enhanced performance (buckley and doyle, 2016). specifically, the challenge i needed to address was to design an activity for continuity, with an element of incentivisation, to motivate the student to the next stage. the response gamification in education rose to popularity in the early 2010s and may be defined as ‘using game-based mechanics, aesthetics and game thinking to engage people, motivate action, promote learning, and solve problems’ (kapp, 2012, p.10). there is evidence that games and gamification can positively influence intrinsic motivation by providing students with autonomy, relatedness and competence (coller and shernoff, 2009; barata et al., 2013). there are a number of ways in which gamification can be incorporated into instructional design through quizzes, competitions, badges, and leader boards (dichev and dicheva, 2017). the mode of gamification that i chose was a digital escape room. as i was seeking an activity that encouraged continuity, this approach seemed ideal, since by nature, an escape room incentivises the participant to progress from one room to another to fully escape. in addition, digital escape rooms not only facilitate an active learning environment but also encourage participation, maximize motivation, and enhance learning (borrego et al., 2017). in particular, research has shown three outcomes of digital escape rooms that concern the affective domain: engagement, motivation, and satisfaction (makri, vlachopoulos and martina, 2021). i designed the digital escape room experience using google forms (you can also use onenote). five sections of the google form were used, each section serving as a ‘room’ gill-simmen get me outta here! motivating online learners with digital escape rooms journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: october 2021 3 (figure 1.) each room required knowledge and understanding of the corresponding teaching block to crack the codes required to escape. in each of the five sections, four problems were presented for the student to solve (appendix 1). each correct answer served as a code to ‘unlock’ one lock in the room. the answer to the problem, puzzle, or clue was in the form of a word, a series of letters, or a number. response validation was used to check the answer, and if it was correct, the student could move to the next ‘lock’ and eventually escape the room. if students entered an incorrect answer in the answer field, then a message was displayed saying ‘incorrect’. the questions and puzzles were specifically designed around the learning activities in the block and the answers could not be found elsewhere. if students were struggling to crack the code, they were encouraged to email the instructor to ask for a clue. from analysis of the metrics on google forms, 72% of students started the activity and 67% of the students managed to fully make their escape. the student evaluation for the course suggested students found the digital escape room ‘fun’ and ‘enjoyable’. one student declared: ‘i loved the escape room, it was really fun, i kept going to get to the final clue and was psyched when i got out!’ figure 1. cover page marketing strategy digital escape room in google forms. gill-simmen get me outta here! motivating online learners with digital escape rooms journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: october 2021 4 the recommendations this activity worked well as shown here in the online environment for individual work but this could work equally well in a hybrid or face-to-face class. i would have liked to have seen a higher percentage of students participate. this could be achieved by making participation more rewarding by adding a competitive element. extrinsic motivational factors and achievement based rewards, such as praise, promotion, recognition, competition, time constraints, game grading, ‘victory signs’, leader boards, and bonus points, go a long way in stimulating users to participate. rewards should not be the sole reason for completing the game process, but they can serve as a supplemental incentive for students. winning is an intrinsic motivation for learning (mullen and tallent-runnels, 2006). prizes could therefore be awarded to students who escape first under timed conditions. looking ahead, i plan to keep the escape room activity embedded in the course to encourage asynchronous participation. i will however improve the design by adding more images and more of a storytelling narrative throughout to make it more enticing. since very few students asked for clues and therefore dropped out of the activity, i plan to incorporate clues in to the activity itself to save students from having to email me. besides its effectiveness in stimulating motivation and engagement, the digital escape room also has the ability to foster valuable skills such as teamwork, leadership skills, creative thinking, and communication (lópez-pernas et al., 2019). it can easily be adapted as a collaborative exercise to build team-working skills either online or offline and to develop a greater sense of community amongst leaners. although, i approached the design in a simple manner given time and resource constraints, this basic approach serves as a useful starting point. by adding more images, videos and narrative, the exercise can be made more engaging. although time consuming, digital escape rooms are easy to set up and there are resources available online and instructions on youtube on how to do this. gill-simmen get me outta here! motivating online learners with digital escape rooms journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: october 2021 5 references barata, g., gama, s., jorge, j. and gonçalves, d. (2013) ‘engaging engineering students with gamification’, 5th international conference on games and virtual worlds for serious applications (vs-games). bournemouth university, poole 11-13 september. ieee, pp.1-8. https://doi.org/10.1109/vs-games.2013.6624228. borrego, c., fernández, c., blanes, i. and robles, s. (2017) ‘room escape at class: escape games activities to facilitate the motivation and learning in computer science’, jotse, 7(2), pp.162-171. https://doi.org/10.3926/jotse.247. brophy, j. e. (2013). motivating students to learn. new york: routledge. buckley, p. and doyle, e. (2016) ‘gamification and student motivation’, interactive learning environments, 24(6), pp.1162-1175. https://doi.org/10.1080/10494820.2014.964263. chen, k. c. and jang, s. j. (2010) ‘motivation in online learning: testing a model of selfdetermination theory’, computers in human behavior, 26(4), pp.741-752. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2010.01.011. coller, b. d. and shernoff, d. j. (2009) ‘video game-based education in mechanical engineering: a look at student engagement’, international journal of engineering education, 25(2), pp.308. dichev, c. and dicheva, d. (2017) ‘gamifying education: what is known, what is believed and what remains uncertain: a critical review’, international journal of educational technology in higher education, 14(1), pp.1-36. https://doi.org/10.1186/s41239-0170042-5. eccles, j. (1983) ‘expectance, values, and academic behaviors’, in spence, j. t. (ed.) achievement and achievement motives: psychological and social approaches. san francisco: freeman, pp.75-146. https://doi.org/10.1109/vs-games.2013.6624228 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2010.01.011 gill-simmen get me outta here! motivating online learners with digital escape rooms journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: october 2021 6 fujita-starck, p. j. and thompson, j. a. (1994) ‘the effects of motivation and classroom environment on the satisfaction of non-credit continuing education students’, air 1994 annual forum paper. available at: https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ed373646 (accessed: 8 august 2021). kapp, k. m. (2012) the gamification of learning and instruction: game-based methods and strategies for training and education. san francisco: john wiley & sons. lepper, m. r. and cordova, d. i. (1992) ‘a desire to be taught: instructional consequences of intrinsic motivation’, motivation and emotion, 16(3), pp.187-208. https://doi.org/10.1007/bf00991651. lim, d. h. (2004) ‘cross cultural differences in online learning motivation’, educational media international, 41(2), pp.163-173. https://doi.org/10.1080/09523980410001685784. lópez-pernas, s., gordillo, a., barra, e. and quemada, j. (2019) ‘examining the use of an educational escape room for teaching programming in a higher education setting’, ieee access, 7, pp.31723-31737. https://doi.org/10.1109/access.2019.2902976. makri, a., vlachopoulos, d. and martina, r. a. (2021) ‘digital escape rooms as innovative pedagogical tools in education: a systematic literature review’, sustainability, 13(8), pp.45-87. https://doi.org/10.3390/su13084587. mullen, g. e. and tallent-runnels, m. k. (2006) ‘student outcomes and perceptions of instructors' demands and support in online and traditional classrooms’, the internet and higher education, 9(4), pp.257-266. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.iheduc.2006.08.005. sankaran, s. r. and bui, t. (2001) ‘impact of learning strategies and motivation on performance: a study in web-based instruction’, journal of instructional psychology, 28(3), p.191. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/09523980410001685784 gill-simmen get me outta here! motivating online learners with digital escape rooms journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: october 2021 7 https://www.thefreelibrary.com/impact+of+learning+strategies+and+motivation+on +performance%3a+a+study...-a079370574 (accessed: 8 august 2021). vallerand, r. j. and bissonnette, r. (1992) ‘intrinsic, extrinsic, and amotivational styles as predictors of behavior: a prospective study’, journal of personality, 60(3), pp.599620. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-6494.1992.tb00922.x. appendix 1: sample problem set virtual escape room problem set – room 1 undo the first lock in the digital escape room. question: what are the four major steps in designing a customer-driven marketing strategy? now take the first letter of each step (all caps) and this is the code you need to unlock lock 1 of the escape room. answer: stdp undo the second lock in the digital escape room. question: what is the missing word here? this whole word (all caps) will unlock the second lock. ‘brand equity is a set of brand ______ and liabilities linked to a brand name and symbol, which add to or subtract from the value provided by a product or service.’ answer: assets undo the third lock in the digital escape room. gill-simmen get me outta here! motivating online learners with digital escape rooms journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: october 2021 8 question: what are the answers to the following mcqs? take the letters of the answers to the following mcqs in order (all caps) and this is the code you need to unlock the third lock. 1) which of the following is a significant challenge presented by the product life cycle? a) increased expenses b) increased competition c) new product development d) evaluation of results 2) which of the following is a common reason for new product failure? a) incorrect estimation of the market size b) low product development costs c) ineffective social marketing campaigns d) low selling prices of products 3) which of the following is true with regard to price? a) historically, price has had the least perceptible impact on buyer choice. b) price is the least flexible element in the marketing mix. c) unlike product features and channel commitments, prices cannot be changed quickly. d) price is the sum of all the values that customers give up to gain the benefits of having a product. 4) the sets of firms that supply companies with the raw materials, components, parts, information, finances, and expertise needed to create products or services are known as ________. a) retailers b) upstream partners c) distributors d) downstream partners answer: cadb undo the fourth lock in the digital escape room. gill-simmen get me outta here! motivating online learners with digital escape rooms journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: october 2021 9 what are the four marketing concepts? take the first letter of each (five letters in total as one concept is two words) and this is the code you need to unlock the fourth lock. get this right, and you’ll get to the next room! hint: sustainable marketing calls for meeting the present needs of consumers and businesses while also preserving or enhancing the ability of future generations to meet their needs. the marketing concept recognizes that organizations thrive from day to day by determining the current needs and wants of target group customers and fulfilling those needs and wants more effectively and efficiently than the competition. the societal marketing concept considers the future welfare of consumers while the strategic planning concept considers future company needs. answer: smssp author details lucy gill -simmen is a senior lecturer in marketing. she is a senior fellow of the higher education academy and is director of education strategy at royal holloway, university of london. get me outta here! motivating online learners with digital escape rooms the challenge the response the recommendations references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special issue 22: compendium of innovative practice october 2021 ________________________________________________________________________ adapting community-focused writing support for researchers to synchronous online delivery nicola grayson university of manchester, uk anna theis university of manchester, uk keywords: community; research; synchronous; asynchronous; writing; covid-19. the challenge prior to march 2020, my research essentials (mre), the university of manchester (uom) library’s researcher development programme followed a blended offer of face-to-face and online support. creating a sense of community has always been at the heart of the mre programme’s pedagogical approach (see grayson and napthine-hodgkinson, 2020) and the problems faced by our core audience (postgraduate researchers (pgrs)) have been well-documented (see (thomson, 2020)). mre was built on a philosophy designed to combat feelings of imposter syndrome and isolation by encouraging researchers to work together and envisage themselves as part of a research community (beauvoir, 1963). at the start of the pandemic, most of the uom’s immediate response was geared towards undergraduates. a survey of pgrs revealed worries about finances, difficulties conducting research, and the impact of the pandemic on completion. pgrs reported struggling with increased amounts of stress as family members fell ill (or died) and for those with additional caring responsibilities it was hard to find time to write, even when they felt able to. the first stage of our challenge, therefore, was how to reach our audience and retain the mre’s integral focus on creating a sense of community when we had to operate in a virtual space. the uom library set up a virtual teaching group (vtg) to ensure a unified approach across its learning programmes. its objective was to provide guidance to address the grayson and theis adapting community-focused writing support for researchers to synchronous online delivery journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 2 needs and demands of learners, and to advocate an approach which recognises that there are challenges and barriers to accessing online support, e.g., different time zones and access to technology (see our vtg blog post to find out more: virtual teaching and support. an approach developed by teaching… | by library for educators | medium). the vtg worked with pedagogical guidance from critical educator jesse stommel who outlined an approach to online teaching and support very early on in the pandemic: [at] this moment, we should start by designing for the least privileged, most marginalized students, the ones with the least access […] we have to build for asynchronous, design real points of entry for students who can’t be physically present at a particular time or in specific ways (stommel, 2020). the second stage of our challenge concerned how to negotiate a tension between responding to the unique demands of our research audience (who needed time and space to connect) whilst ensuring parity of access to resources through an emphasis on asynchronous support. we wanted to retain our community focused approach and trial ‘live’ sessions, but we needed to ensure the support we offered was inclusive and open to all in the manner outlined above. the response we volunteered our shut up and write (suaw) sessions as a case study for the vtg citing these sessions as an example of where a synchronous element was necessary, in line with mre’s community focused approach. before the pandemic, face-to-face suaws were run by our student team (paid student members of staff, some of whom are pgr) to utilise peer-to-peer support. during the pandemic, we used insights from our student team to gain a sense of what was specifically needed (and not needed) for synchronous support. members of the team had attended a variety of online events quite early on and they helped us frame our support appropriately so that we did not put pressure on researchers to be productive but instead sought to offer an online space where attendees could carve out time to focus and connect with and support one another. we used their experiences to word our offer carefully. https://foreducators.medium.com/virtual-teaching-and-support-1be25054a7f https://foreducators.medium.com/virtual-teaching-and-support-1be25054a7f grayson and theis adapting community-focused writing support for researchers to synchronous online delivery journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 3 using suaw as a case study allowed us to trial online, synchronous delivery and to reconnect with our audience. it meant we could let researchers know that we were still here for them, assess their current needs and signpost them to further support, and they could connect with one another to positively reinforce their identity as part of a research community. during the pilots we regularly reviewed attendance and feedback data (from surveys) and recorded anecdotal feedback. we used this to adapt the sessions as required so that the support was iterative and relevant. the pilot sessions gave us the flexibility to do this so that we could then take suaw back to the vtg and report on what worked, the challenges, the amount of resources required, and what we might change going forwards. the pilots were a success; we were able to demonstrate that community-focused, ‘live’ support was needed and that we could run it a considered, inclusive way across the library’s other programmes. to ensure that support was available for those who could not attend live sessions we set up an mre blog (my research essentials – medium). we worked with the student team to create a suaw post outlining the rationale behind the sessions and the strategies we use (introducing online shut up and write sessions | by mre blog | my research essentials | medium). we updated this so that our audience could benefit from any tips and signposting that occurred in the live sessions. we also varied the times and dates of live sessions to build flexibility into our schedule and changed our administrative processes so that preand post-session emails linked to and highlighted the asynchronous support. our approach influenced writing support delivered through the uom’s centre for academic and researcher development (card) and we agreed to deliver support on alternate weeks, working in partnership to cross-promote each other so that researchers always had access to their community and the chance for focused writing time. the careful language we used (which emphasised connection over productivity) was utilised for many other events and our emphasis on creating a sense of community inspired the creation of a series of ‘together’ sessions run by our multi-award-winning sister programme (my learning essentials) which are aimed at a much wider audience. https://medium.com/my-research-essentials https://medium.com/my-research-essentials/introducing-online-shut-up-and-write-sessions-c4c5baa7be8f https://medium.com/my-research-essentials/introducing-online-shut-up-and-write-sessions-c4c5baa7be8f grayson and theis adapting community-focused writing support for researchers to synchronous online delivery journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 4 recommendations the pilot suaws were very well attended, and attendees have asked us to continue offering them online going forwards. running the sessions as pilots enabled us to demonstrate that ‘live’ teaching could be offered in an inclusive way if it is accompanied by (and informs the creation of) asynchronous support. the pilot-status allowed us the flexibility to try things out and adapt sessions based on our experiences and attendee feedback. it was useful to combine our experiences with card and to work with pgrs both in our student team and in the sessions to gain a holistic understanding of the impact the pandemic was having on our audience. we actively encouraged them to shape the support so that it was relevant to the ever-changing climate, and we could create a better experience for our attendees. co-creating the synchronous and asynchronous support with the student team was integral; they helped us to frame it effectively, they reviewed data, shared advice, co-delivered sessions, and recorded feedback to ensure that researchers’ current needs were being addressed. we learnt that you need to advocate for your audience whilst aligning with best practice in relation to inclusivity and accessibility. we knew that researchers needed to connect and that live sessions might offer them a space to do this, but we had to ensure that those who could not attend had equal access to support and advice. our key take-away message is that online synchronous sessions need to be accompanied by asynchronous supporting resources to ensure inclusivity and access for all. this way, those who cannot attend live sessions can still benefit from the content discussed and from knowing that they have been carefully considered as an equally important part of the community. references beauvoir, s. de. (1963) memoirs of a dutiful daughter. harmondsworth: penguin. grayson and theis adapting community-focused writing support for researchers to synchronous online delivery journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 5 grayson, n. j., blake, j. and stock, m. (2018) 'the co-creation of exam support: students as partners in the research, planning, design and quality assurance of learning resources', journal of educational innovation, partnership and change, 4(1). https://doi.org/10.21100/jeipc.v4i1.767. grayson, n. and napthine-hodgkinson, j. (2020) ‘how improvisation techniques can support researchers with the development of public speaking skills’, journal of learning development in higher education, issue 19, december, pp.1-17. https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.vi19.611. stommel, j. [@jessifer] (2020). ‘a static recording of a synchronous zoom conversation doesn’t really count as “asynchronous” learning...’ [twitter] 21 may. available at: https://twitter.com/jessifer/status/1263579427088162816 (accessed: 10 june 2021). thomson, b. (2020) ‘it's now beyond doubt: we need to reimagine the way research works’, wellcome. available at: https://wellcome.org/news/its-now-beyond-doubtwe-need-reimagine-way-research-works (accessed: 10 june 2021). university of manchester library student team (2020) ‘introducing online shut up and write sessions’, medium. available at: https://medium.com/my-researchessentials/introducing-online-shut-up-and-write-sessions-c4c5baa7be8f (accessed: 10 june 2021). university of manchester library teaching, learning and students team (2020) ‘virtual teaching and support’, medium. available at: https://foreducators.medium.com/virtual-teaching-and-support-1be25054a7f (accessed: 10 june 2021). author details nicola grayson is a learning developer at the university of manchester and works as a lecturer in philosophy at manchester metropolitan university. she joined the editorial https://doi.org/10.21100/jeipc.v4i1.767 https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.vi19.611 https://twitter.com/jessifer/status/1263579427088162816 https://wellcome.org/news/its-now-beyond-doubt-we-need-reimagine-way-research-works https://wellcome.org/news/its-now-beyond-doubt-we-need-reimagine-way-research-works https://medium.com/my-research-essentials/introducing-online-shut-up-and-write-sessions-c4c5baa7be8f https://medium.com/my-research-essentials/introducing-online-shut-up-and-write-sessions-c4c5baa7be8f https://foreducators.medium.com/virtual-teaching-and-support-1be25054a7f grayson and theis adapting community-focused writing support for researchers to synchronous online delivery journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 6 board of the journal of learning development in higher education in 2020. her areas of expertise include widening access to education, researcher development, and measuring the impact of learning interventions. nicola has a postgraduate certificate in higher education and is a senior fellow of the higher education academy. she is passionate about the pursuit of knowledge and supporting others on their learning journey. anna theis is a librarian at the university of manchester. she teaches across the library’s teaching programmes and her areas of expertise include information literacy, researcher development, and facilitating peer learning. anna manages the library’s student team ensuring that the student voice is incorporated across library services. anna is a fellow of the higher education academy and an active member of the chartered institute of library and information professionals. as a committee member she runs events for the academic and research libraries north west members’ network. the challenge the response recommendations references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special issue 22: compendium of innovative practice october 2021 ________________________________________________________________________ sell them what they want; give them what they need: managing tensions and competing expectations in live online lecturer development workshops martin compton university college london keywords: academic development; online; cpd; workshops; compassion; pedagogy of care; modelling; metacognition; covid-19. the challenge as an academic developer i connect with colleagues on many different levels: as tutor, as kindred spirit, as collaborator, as co-creator and sometimes (albeit often reluctantly) as ‘agent’ of the institution. there are sensitivities consequent of these diverse relationships and tensions when the needs and wishes of academic staff do not align with institutional priorities (land, 2001). this can be further complicated when training requests focus on practices that do not align with a developer’s professional values, expertise, experience or, most importantly, the research evidence. these tensions were magnified and intensified once the implications of covid-19 became apparent. a gap in central learning technology support (unusual for a teaching-focussed university in the uk), and the necessary rapid roll-out of new software, only added to the anxiety. i and close colleagues had extensive experience teaching and assessing online, including running one of the university’s only fully online programmes, so we were quick to identify a key issue: the completely understandable, almost intuitive, compulsion amongst colleagues to want to translate conventional teaching practices into online contexts. this was coupled with an assumption at senior leadership level that the core need was technical rather than pedagogic training instead of both of these. for example, many assumed that tools like microsoft teams and zoom should host scheduled lecture slots, and that didactic delivery in live, online sessions was an appropriate approach when campuses closed. furthermore, but very much part of the same mindset, were the assumptions about how, when and with what students would be accessing both live and compton sell them what they want; give them what they need: managing tensions and competing expectations in live online lecturer development workshops journal of learning development in higher education, compendium issue: october 2021 2 asynchronous content as part of the ‘emergency pivot’ online. my conundrum was this: how could we address the real and pressing demands this emergency presented whilst not ignoring what research tells us about the ‘when’ and ‘how’ of online learning (means et al., 2014)? above all, how could i design support that assuaged anxiety and was also authentic and compassionate, enabling colleagues to support their students with adequate pedagogic, inclusivity and technical awareness? the response a key part of the answer would be in the design of live sessions that sat alongside the selfstudy materials we had created. the live sessions included formally scheduled workshops, ‘guest’ invites to programme teams, ‘lunch and learn’ sessions at faculty and departmental level and almost constant one-to-one and small group consultancy reaching an unprecedented number of colleagues. anxiety amongst teaching colleagues and their managers ranged from mildly perturbed to quite panicky, and a clamour for fundamentals and ‘top tips’ under a collective ‘how to’ banner meant there were strong drivers obligating us to support the technical upskilling and help fulfil the biggest perceived need. above all, was a need to accommodate all this but somehow double up the time when connecting with colleagues to talk about essential pedagogy and learning design. the live, online sessions that i designed or co-designed therefore had a number of principles that were key to their success: 1. frame events in ways that address the most pressing anxieties. most events were built around specific activities (e.g. ‘hosting live teaching in microsoft teams’). it would have been counterproductive, arrogant even, to dismiss these wishes and, in fact, the one workshop i did run that foregrounded values in the title (‘compassionate responses to emergency remote teaching’) attracted far fewer sign-ups than others. 2. centre compassion for both colleagues and students. by adopting and referencing a ‘pedagogy of kindness’ (denial, 2020), every session included provocations, questions, data and narrative accounts that pushed thinking and dialogue towards rationales for not losing sight of existing personal, professional compton sell them what they want; give them what they need: managing tensions and competing expectations in live online lecturer development workshops journal of learning development in higher education, compendium issue: october 2021 3 and institutional values of inclusivity. opportunities for connecting on a human level were central to the design. 3. model practice for higher impact rather than taking a theoretical focus. examples of this include use of advance organiser techniques such as a selection of opinion-based questions to answer or an interactive graphic to read or explore to foreshadow core concepts. i nudged with at least two friendly reminders about engaging with these short, reflective or cognitive activities ahead of the session. this helped to demonstrate the importance of orienting students to the ‘where’ and ‘how to get there’ of a teaching event, as much as orienting to content and modelling this pedagogic approach. 4. resist the ‘click here; click there’ training approach. feedback was almost universally positive across the broad range of events. where there was criticism, it was in terms of colleagues ‘needing’ or ‘wanting’ someone to show them exactly what to do in those live events. such an ineffective one-size-fits-all model felt inappropriate in those contexts (compton and almpanis, 2018), though we did compensate with one-to-one support and self-access guides too. 5. be open about and rationalise pedagogic approach. ‘you may be expecting a “how to” session, but we’re approaching it like this because…’ and this, in turn, was what we encouraged colleagues to do with their students. 6. exploit opportunities for meta level discussion throughout. ‘did you notice how i used emojis at the start?’ ‘how did i encourage colleagues to contribute?’ ‘what techniques have i used to …?’. 7. create and rationalise supportive spaces. no recording; optional camera use; range of ways of participating; nurturing connections. recommendations the above principles are recommendations for scaled (emergency or otherwise) approaches to development events for teaching staff. workshops and other live events, like teaching, can be much more effective when there is liberty in the instructional design to include dialogue, share ideas and anxieties, and explore the approaches that are being modelled. promoting in-session reflection and metacognition is perhaps an obvious technique but is undermined by a tendency towards one-size-fits-all training approaches to compton sell them what they want; give them what they need: managing tensions and competing expectations in live online lecturer development workshops journal of learning development in higher education, compendium issue: october 2021 4 development, especially in the case of pricey, bespoke, mandatory e-learning packages. my biggest recommendation is more of a plea to university leaders: whether in a crisis or not, do not lose sight of the evidence base and opportunities to realise a more inclusive and compassionate approach to learning, teaching and assessment design. aligned with this is the need to invest in development, support and training. the most expensive estate and flashiest kit is worth very little if the space and technology use is not supported by appropriate training and evidence-informed thinking. references compton, m., and almpanis, t. (2018) ‘one size doesn’t fit all: rethinking approaches to continuing professional development in technology enhanced learning’, compass: journal of learning and teaching, 11(1). available at: https://doi.org/10.21100/compass.v11i1.708 (accessed: 30 july 2021). denial, c. (2020) ‘a pedagogy of kindness’, in stommel, j., friend, c. and morris, s.m. (eds.). critical digital pedagogy: a collection. washington, d.c.: hybrid pedagogy inc, pp.212-218. land, r. (2001) ‘agency, context and change in academic development’, international journal for academic development, 6(1), pp.4-20. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/13601440110033715 (accessed: 30 july 2021). means, b., bakia, m. and murphy, r. (2014) learning online: what research tells us about whether, when and how. new york: routledge. author details martin compton is an associate professor working in the central academic development unit (the arena centre for research-based education) at ucl. he works closely with the faculty of life science, but his work, which focuses on digital education, is crossinstitutional. he previously worked at the university of greenwich in the educational https://doi.org/10.21100/compass.v11i1.708 https://doi.org/10.1080/13601440110033715 compton sell them what they want; give them what they need: managing tensions and competing expectations in live online lecturer development workshops journal of learning development in higher education, compendium issue: october 2021 5 development unit where he oversaw taught lecturer development courses, digital education initiatives and the university cpd offer. sell them what they want; give them what they need: managing tensions and competing expectations in live online lecturer development workshops the challenge the response recommendations references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special issue 22: compendium of innovative practice october 2021 ________________________________________________________________________ a partnership approach to pandemic policy: building student confidence in the wake of covid-19 cara chittenden (formerly of) university of exeter, uk penny h. c. dinh cardiff university, uk; (formerly of) university of exeter, uk beverley hawkins university of exeter, uk rob freathy university of exeter, uk pete vukusic university of exeter, uk keywords: covid-19; student partnerships; higher education policy; higher education leadership; student voice; student experience. the challenge the ‘co-creation’ with students of curricula and learning experiences is well researched within learning development (bryson, 2016; mercer-mapstone, 2020), but less is written about how to engage students in co-developing the policies underpinning their learning and its outcomes. the covid-19 pandemic has given universities a chance to reflect on new ways to embrace student partnership. at the university of exeter, student representatives contributed to the university’s pandemic response, for example, codeveloping new digital learning and teaching principles and support for those self-isolating. yet, as the pandemic took hold, students sensed a loss of control over their academic outcomes as living, working, and learning took on new forms (aucejo et al., 2021; means and neisler, 2021). this translated into genuine concern about grade outcomes and, consequently, futures beyond graduation. chittenden, dinh, hawkins, freathy and vukusic a partnership approach to pandemic policy: building student confidence in the wake of covid-19 journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 2 ramsden (2008) advocates for a partnership model where students actively contribute to decisions that shape their experiences, but university-student partnerships are shaped by institutional cultures (carey, 2018) and a higher education context which positions students as consumers, which white (2016) argues could undermine the authority of expert educators to design effective learning experiences. the university had to ensure confidence in the robustness of degree quality and also protect students’ achievements from the impact of the pandemic. here, we discuss how student union sabbatical officers, activist groups, and university education leaders worked together to develop a policy to build students’ trust in their degree results and encourage their continued efforts to learn in exceptional circumstances. the response in february/march 2020, discussions began between university leaders and sabbatical officers campaigning for a policy to account for the consequences of the pandemic on learning outcomes. the resulting ‘no-detriment policy’ harnessed the data expertise of the university’s many academic specialists and professional services teams, and led many other institutions to adopt a systematic approach to protecting students from pandemic impacts. the policy involved a ‘benchmark’ based on a student’s grades accumulated to date across 2019-2020, below which the credit-weighted average of their results would not fall. during 2020-21, a benchmark was not possible because all completed assessments were impacted by the pandemic. vocal student campaign groups, student union sabbatical officers and university leaders developed an evidence-based ‘no-disadvantage guarantee’ to address differences in individual student circumstances. this necessitated many impassioned discussions over a short timeframe, during which all stakeholders navigated the diversity of experience, expectations, and contested power relations that characterise a higher education community. the policy was an outcome in itself, but its creation also enhanced the depth of, and confidence in, student partnership and co-creation now in place at the university. below, drawing on the lessons learned, we offer three recommendations that enable students to chittenden, dinh, hawkins, freathy and vukusic a partnership approach to pandemic policy: building student confidence in the wake of covid-19 journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 3 act as agents for change in designing effective policies that support their learning and attainment – beyond the classroom. recommendations keep talking as tim smit has suggested, ‘we talk about all the bad stuff, but how it doesn’t have to be bad’ (smit, 2020, cited smith, 2020). partnership is an iterative process and the nodisadvantage guarantee evolved gradually, through many, many meetings and challenging conversations. cara chittenden, president of the falmouth and exeter students’ union, explains: after initial communications were released regarding the policies making up the nodisadvantage guarantee, many students were still concerned that these policies did not address their own circumstances and feared that individually-impacted students could slip through the net. we communicated this to the policy makers at the university, and helped develop a more robust exceptional circumstances application process for these students. this flexibility and reactivity to student feedback was great. diversifying and enhancing communications shaw et al. note that institutions can struggle to roll out engagement opportunities across wider student bodies (2012). this issue was heightened by the complex and time-sensitive nature of the challenge. some students found communications about the policy development confusing and inaccessible, and did not understand how exam boards made decisions about degree outcomes. as well as sending email updates, student and university leaders took part, together, in social media messaging and student ‘town hall’ q&a sessions, making consultation and conversation accessible to all students, not just student leaders or those in elected and privileged positions. other recommendations include: chittenden, dinh, hawkins, freathy and vukusic a partnership approach to pandemic policy: building student confidence in the wake of covid-19 journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 4 • sharing more detail about how degrees are awarded – including how exam boards function, degree outcomes are calculated, and what types of data will be used to identify how the pandemic impacted students’ learning. • consider the timing of messages – the team learned not to share important messages on fridays to avoid increasing student anxiety over the weekend. inclusion, patience, and trust at times, it was challenging to convey to students that non-immediate action does not mean ‘no’; some requests or decisions require further consultation and/or identification of algorithmic, or other, mechanisms for implementing policy. this required all stakeholders to: • role-model constructive dialogue during discussions. student union sabbatical officers often faced the most vocal criticism from students. by openly giving space to different views and considerations, university leaders enabled student leaders to advocate better for students in crisis situations. • adopt an inclusive approach to consultation, by inviting student activist and campaign groups into conversations rather than working only with union-affiliated representatives. these practices enabled the university to develop policies that became sector leading in protecting student outcomes. we hope learning from this experience can enable the postpandemic university to embrace ‘pedagogies of partnership’ (pauli, raymond-barker and worrel, 2016; brailas, koskinas and alexias, 2017) in ways that extend beyond curriculum content, to the processes, policies, and ways of working that shape and support inclusive education outcomes. universities need to operate partnerships in ways that recognise the power relations embedded in such dialogue (carey, 2018). using the above practices may mitigate white’s (2016) caution that ‘students as partners’ approaches undermine trust and collaboration between university educators and students and, in so doing, incorporate into the learning development landscape the co-design of underpinning policies that build student trust and confidence in their experiences. chittenden, dinh, hawkins, freathy and vukusic a partnership approach to pandemic policy: building student confidence in the wake of covid-19 journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 5 references aucejo, e. m., french, j., araya, m. p. u. and zafar, b. (2020) ‘the impact of covid-19 on student experiences and expectations: evidence from a survey’, journal of public economics, 191, p.104271. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jpubeco.2020.104271. brailas, a., koskinas, k. and alexias, g. (2017) ‘teaching to emerge: toward a bottom-up pedagogy’, cogent education, 4(1), p.1377506. https://doi.org/10.1080/2331186x.2017.1377506. bryson, c. (2016) ‘engagement through partnership: students as partners in learning and teaching in higher education’, international journal for academic development, 21(1), pp.84-86. https://doi.org/10.1080/1360144x.2016.1124966. carey, p. (2018) ‘the impact of institutional culture, policy and process on student engagement in university decision-making’, perspectives: policy and practice in higher education, 22(1), pp.11-18. https://doi.org/10.1080/13603108.2016.1168754. mercer-mapstone, l. (2020) ‘the student–staff partnership movement: striving for inclusion as we push sectorial change’, international journal for academic development, 25(2), pp.121-133. https://doi.org/10.1080/1360144x.2019.1631171. pauli, r., raymond-barker, b. and worrell, m. (2016) the impact of pedagogies of partnership on the student learning experience in uk higher education. project report. york: higher education academy. ramsden, p. (2008) the future of higher education teaching and the student experience. available at: http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20121212135622/http://www.bis.gov.uk/a ssets/biscore/corporate/docs/h/he-debate-ramsden.pdf/ (accessed: 19 september 2021). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jpubeco.2020.104271 https://doi.org/10.1080/2331186x.2017.1377506 https://doi.org/10.1080/1360144x.2016.1124966 https://doi.org/10.1080/13603108.2016.1168754 https://doi.org/10.1080/1360144x.2019.1631171 http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20121212135622/http:/www.bis.gov.uk/assets/biscore/corporate/docs/h/he-debate-ramsden.pdf http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20121212135622/http:/www.bis.gov.uk/assets/biscore/corporate/docs/h/he-debate-ramsden.pdf chittenden, dinh, hawkins, freathy and vukusic a partnership approach to pandemic policy: building student confidence in the wake of covid-19 journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 6 shaw, n., rueckert, c., smith, j., tredinnick, j. and lee, m. (2017) ‘students as partners in the real world: a whole-institution approach’, international journal for students as partners, 1(1), pp.1-8. https://doi.org/10.15173/ijsap.v1i1.3079. smith, n. (2020) ‘“there’s a whole world of ignorance out there”: sir tim smit, ceo, the eden project’, engineering and technology, 23 april. available at: https://eandt.theiet.org/content/articles/2020/04/there-s-a-whole-world-of-ignoranceout-there-sir-tim-smit-ceo-eden-project/ (accessed: 19 september 2021). white, m. (2018) ‘student partnership, trust and authority in universities’, educational philosophy and theory, 50(2), pp.163-173. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2016.1153451. author details cara chittenden is a graduate of the university of exeter's penryn campus. she was awarded a first-class ba in english, before going on to serve one term as the falmouth and exeter students' union's president exeter, for the academic year 2020/2021. cara now works at oxford university press as an academic partnerships representative. penny dinh is a postgraduate student in educational studies at cardiff university as part of the esrc wales doctoral training partnership. penny served two consecutive terms, from 2019 to 2021, as vp education at university of exeter students' guild after earning a first-class bsc in psychology from the university of exeter. beverley hawkins is associate dean education at the university of exeter business school, and associate professor of leadership/organisation studies. at the start of the pandemic beverley was associate academic dean for students, jointly responsible for delivering the university's response to covid-19 to support the student learning experience. rob freathy is the academic dean for students and dean of the faculty of taught programmes at the university of exeter. he is also a professor of education in the university’s graduate school of education. https://doi.org/10.15173/ijsap.v1i1.3079 https://eandt.theiet.org/content/articles/2020/04/there-s-a-whole-world-of-ignorance-out-there-sir-tim-smit-ceo-eden-project/ https://eandt.theiet.org/content/articles/2020/04/there-s-a-whole-world-of-ignorance-out-there-sir-tim-smit-ceo-eden-project/ https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2016.1153451 chittenden, dinh, hawkins, freathy and vukusic a partnership approach to pandemic policy: building student confidence in the wake of covid-19 journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 7 pete vukusic is the associate academic dean for students at the university of exeter and was previously associate dean for education in the university’s college of engineering, mathematics and physical sciences. he is also a professor of biophotonics in the university’s school of physics. a partnership approach to pandemic policy: building student confidence in the wake of covid-19 the challenge the response recommendations references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special issue 22: compendium of innovative practice october 2021 ________________________________________________________________________ connecting during times of disconnection: student-teacher partnerships in co-designing online learning caelan rafferty university of queensland, australia kelly e. matthews university of queensland, australia keywords: covid-19; students as partners; online learning; co-design. the challenge caring, uncertainty, and a lack of time months had passed since we had last spoken face-to-face: the brightly-lit lecture theatres, the aroma of freshly-brewed coffee at the nearby café, and the incessant chatter of our crowded campus that we took for granted, distant, faded memories. instead, we found ourselves locked away in our homes, on beds and kitchen tables, connected via our scheduled zoom call before disconnecting. like most students and staff of australia’s higher education community, we had been fundamentally disrupted from our ‘normal’ ways of interacting, having had to rapidly develop new, digital teaching and learning identities. indeed, the movement from using technologies as a supplement for being together oncampus pre-pandemic to engaging and interacting with each other online was marked by considerable stress, anxiety, and a dwindling supply of time and energy during 2020 (vayada, matthews and liang, 2020). we, as strong advocates of ‘students as partners’ practices, thus found ourselves doubting our capacity to engage in meaningful partnership as our professional and student lives collided with our personal lives during covid-19 (like many others, see matthews et al., 2020). yet, in spite of our doubts, we, the authors and one other student, decided to try by re-designing a second-year education course as an external, online course together. it was to be the start of a partnership where we agreed and disagreed, laughed, and shared ideas and frustrations. rafferty and matthews connecting during times of disconnection: student-teacher partnerships in co-designing online learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 2 for each author, this series of moments crystallised the centrality of partnership in teaching and learning praxis, for while it took time and energy when we were deficient in both, the process energised, motivated, and most importantly, connected us. another relationship supported by our process was a connection with the students of the course; a connection which the teacher could not nurture, at times, alone. while our partnership ultimately explored the alignment of pedagogy, curriculum, and assessment within the course to ensure coherence, we wish to share with you a snapshot of our pedagogical considerations. our story will thus focus on our meeting process and the rationale behind the development of our student-led videos. the response designing together our co-design journey began with a short zoom meeting – a staple of the times – and, like the beginning of any partnership, it started with a conversation. indeed, after kelly, the academic, had briefly outlined the course – a mainly self-directed, external online course with weekly workshops – and the core learning objectives, we then focused on brainstorming together potential online learning activities using the experiences of the student partners, maggie and caelan, who had had first-hand exposure to online learning in their first semester. following our brainstorming, we settled on developing three activities: (i) short (approx. 10 minutes long), informal (made using zoom without editing) videos featuring a conversation between the student partners where they would discuss the textbook content from their unique perspective (e.g., what they found to be important/interesting/hard to understand/misleading, etc.) (the ‘student-led videos’). (ii) quizzes. (iii) discussion questions. rafferty and matthews connecting during times of disconnection: student-teacher partnerships in co-designing online learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 3 moreover, we agreed that each learning activity was to be developed every time new content was introduced into the course. with this shared understanding, we then parted ways with a view to reconvening the following week to outline our progress. however, when we all met again two days later we had questions for each other. as maggie and caelan had started to create the videos, they soon began to doubt their understanding of the content and so sought clarification. likewise, kelly, having watched the first set of videos, wondered whether they could be structured differently to better motivate the students. these questions were to be the focus of our second, much-earlierthan-anticipated, meeting. and, following its conclusion, we resolved to tweak aspects of our approach while abandoning others. having several unanticipated meetings was to be the norm moving forward on not only the content, but also on deeper, foundational issues like student motivation and learning ethics. thus, while these meetings ultimately proved to be highly time-consuming, they were also highly entertaining and therapeutic as we laughed at our bloopers, followed generative tangents, and shared frustrations. as for our student-led videos, they were not only a core component of our partnership effort, they were also a central element of the proposed learning activities. indeed, the development of the videos assisted both maggie and caelan in contextualising the content for developing the quizzes and kelly in identifying potential roadblocks her students might face come the start of the teaching semester. what is more, this was not their most compelling feature. through these videos, maggie and caelan modelled the kinds of conversations kelly wanted her own students to engage in online via their peer learning communities (consistent groups of four students working together weekly). by having the student partners feature as the creators and narrators of the videos, kelly wanted to legitimise her students as knowledge-holders in her classroom. in letting the student partners take ownership, kelly sought to demonstrate that she trusted her students to not only take charge of their own learning but to teach others as well. overall, feedback for the course was largely positive as shown by the universityadministered student evaluation survey results in figure 1 which reveals results well rafferty and matthews connecting during times of disconnection: student-teacher partnerships in co-designing online learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 4 above the university average and the highest kelly has received (to date). additionally, student feedback on the respective learning activities, collected via weekly, self-evaluation polls, was equally positive. students’ results in progressively developed assessment tasks also improved across the semester as did students’ skills in accurately self-assessing, demonstrating clearly to us the strengthens in linking partnership in classrooms with feedback and assessment design (matthews et al., 2021). figure 1. university-administered student evaluation survey. recommendations partnership as a way forward our partnership experience has reaffirmed our belief in the value of creating shared spaces for dialogue and co-design that engenders recognition between students and staff (aquarone et al., 2020). within these spaces, we believe partners should embrace shared responsibility for connecting learning, teaching, and assessment to foster meaningful rafferty and matthews connecting during times of disconnection: student-teacher partnerships in co-designing online learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 5 learning interactions in co-designed classes (matthews, lawrie and taptamat, 2021). forging such partnerships will require a commitment by all partners to both personal and intellectual honesty and recognition that undertaking these processes will take time and energy. by doing so, we will be best placed to chart a sustainable, inclusive way forward as we transition away from remote emergency online education and reconnect postpandemic. references aquarone, f., nehéz-posony, l., anwar, p. r., salam, s., koutsouri, e., kim, m. and boodai, y. (2020) ‘we’re trying to do things differently’: the challenges of relationships and recognition in higher education. london: centre for public policy research, kcl. matthews, k. e., cook-sather, a., godbold, n., healey, m. and rafferty, c. (2020) learner-teacher partnership in times of covid-19: a community poll to share practices and perspectives [online poll]. brisbane: university of queensland. available at: https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/uq:66db0d8 (accessed: 10 may 2021). matthews, k. e., lawrie, g. and taptamat, n. (2021) teaching changes due to covid-19: uq survey results and case studies. brisbane: university of queensland. available at: https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/uq:294f1e7 (accessed: 14 may 2021) matthews, k. e., tai, j., enright, e., carless, d., rafferty, c. and winstone, n. (2021) ‘transgressing the boundaries of “students as partners” and “feedback” discourse communities to advance democratic education’, teaching in higher education, pp.1-15. https://doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2021.1903854. vayada, p, matthews. k .e. and liang, y. (2020) ‘we are all in it together’, higher education research and development society of australasia connect, 42 (3), pp. 15-15. available at: https://www.herdsa.org.au/sites/default/files/herdsa%20connect%20%20spring%202020.pdf (accessed: 10 may 2021). https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/uq:66db0d8 https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/uq:294f1e7 https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/uq:294f1e7 https://doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2021.1903854 https://www.herdsa.org.au/sites/default/files/herdsa%20connect%20-%20spring%202020.pdf https://www.herdsa.org.au/sites/default/files/herdsa%20connect%20-%20spring%202020.pdf rafferty and matthews connecting during times of disconnection: student-teacher partnerships in co-designing online learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 6 author details caelan rafferty is a former student from the university of queensland. at uq, caelan was involved in shaping uq’s ‘students as partners’ (sap) model from 2017 (until 2020) when he joined the uq sap committee and pilot projects as an undergraduate. caelan has engaged in several uq sap projects, is a co-editor for the international journal for students as partners (ijsap), and has co-facilitated the international sap institute (in 2019). kelly e. matthews is an associate professor and internationally recognised sap practitioner/researcher from the university of queensland. kelly is a co-editor for the international journal for students as partners (ijsap), has co-facilitated at the international sap institute (in 2016, 2018, and 2019), has given 30+ talks on sap inter/nationally, and is a leader of the australian ‘sap network’ with 800+ members. connecting during times of disconnection: student-teacher partnerships in co-designing online learning the challenge caring, uncertainty, and a lack of time the response designing together recommendations partnership as a way forward references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special issue 22: compendium of innovative practice october 2021 ________________________________________________________________________ lectures in lockdown: trying to rescue the lecture as event paul o’kane central saint martins college, university of the arts london, uk keywords: covid-19; lectures; lockdown; live; recorded; sage. the challenge . . . anxiety concerns the physical presence of the lecturer in front of his or her students: their gestures, movements, facial expressions, and eye contact. students using recordings will miss much of this, while lecturers may need to inhibit action to accommodate fixed cameras. (crook, 2015). come the 2020 lockdown, and teaching online, the opportunity to stride about, sage-like (king, 1993) in front of students, extending my research, here, now, ‘live’, was severely curtailed – neutered in fact. my colleagues and i discussed how to continue delivering our fine art critical studies lectures. a majority decided to pre-record them, giving students a chance to view in their own time before attending a staffed, online q&a. i was never quite satisfied with this decision, fearing it would cramp our style and thus stifle students’ enthusiasm (a concern previously illuminated in an article by brack and cowling titled ‘how digital natives are killing the sage on stage’ (2015)). watching first attempts at pre-recorded lectures i was impressed by the well-organised materials suitably paced for students to digest, but nervous about the deadpan delivery we tended to make to a passively waiting camera. i feared that, lacking the real audience and live lecture we tended to sound more wooden and didactic. so, how could i try to rescue the event-ful qualities of the live lecture while embracing the generous new resource provided by the pre-recorded lecture? o’kane lectures in lockdown: trying to rescue the lecture as event journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 2 the response . . . to enthuse and inspire students through their liveness and the physical presence of the lecturer in real time and space. (french and kennedy, 2017, p.647) when my turn came to supply a lecture, i accessed strategies accumulated while working as a writer, lecturer, artist, and musician, plus as a reader of gilles deleuze’s philosophy of event (1993) and joe moran’s first you write a sentence (2019). i decided to deliver only the first draft of my lecture, written, as usual, in fountain pen on paper, a live event in itself, while more aware than usual that the live-ness of this event had to be retained. i allowed a greater degree of self-reflexivity than usual into the writing, knowing this makes it more ‘live’ and implicitly requires the audience to also be ‘present’, engaging in a way more akin to theatre, performed music, or poetry reading. next, i prepared myself to video-record only the first reading of my first written draft, again welcoming the self-imposed pressure of denying myself any remaking.1 this might all sound solipsistic but i believe it concurs with what french and kennedy mean when they say ‘engaging lecturers do not merely present factual information; they develop a narrative around the subject matter’ (2017, p.647), only here ‘narrative’ and ‘subject matter’ became fused by self-reflexivity. recommendations penson argues that lectures need to be reconceived as ‘a learning event’ (penson, 2012, cited french and kennedy, 2017, p.645). this was not the first time i had written or lectured in an event-ful and self-reflexive way, but it was the first time i’d had a clear reason to do so and made what i was doing so clear to myself and my audience. i took risks and publicly invited – via the q&a – immediate critical responses. i had some good feedback. one student said it was ‘very poetic’ which led me to believe that they had, probably for the first time, considered the ‘weight’, value, particularity, and provenance of the words used in a lecture. meanwhile, a colleague told 1 see biesenbach, london and eamon, video acts (2002), a millennial curation of early home video use by studio artists. o’kane lectures in lockdown: trying to rescue the lecture as event journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 3 me it was ‘a work of art’, echoing richard gunderman who describes a great lecture as a work of art, and ‘a kind of dance, in which lecturer and listeners watch, respond to, and draw energy and inspiration from each other’ (gunderman, 2013). such praise suggests that, rather than allow online, pre-recorded lecturing to become more wooden and less ‘live’, we might use this opportunity to shift recorded lectures into a more spontaneous, productive, and valuable mode. i would therefore advise lecturers to think both of their recording and the drafting of their text as event-ful and event-ual. this self-imposed pressure should make recording more exciting for audience and lecturer alike.2 there is much talk in our students’ world that is lively but of little value, and so, if we are privileged to lecture, we should uphold and adapt the special value of the lecturer, prove the value of our presence, mark the event, and share the worth of every word as well as respecting the value of the time and attention of our audience. i would thus advise those whose recorded lectures might seem ‘wooden’, to look into aspects of our lives and practices that involve some performative element, and draw across, into our lecturing, any lessons and skills regarding performance and events that might have been learned while, for instance, acting, poetry-reading, drawing, playing a musical instrument, or even participating in a sport. the recorded, online lecture need not be diametrically opposed to, nor a compromised version of, the real live lecture. rather, we might cultivate an innovative middle ground by recording online lectures that are as event-ful or event-ual as we can make them, and that regard their writing, their recording, and their viewing as live events. if so, we might be able to reinterpret and thereby concur with jonathan wolff’s claim that: for as long as the lecture is regarded as better than internet-based learning, it will survive on a substantial scale. and wherein lies its superiority? . . . it is live. it is real. it is put on with you in mind, even if you are one of a large crowd. . . . somehow live learning can be open and transformative in a way that transcends its educational function. maybe one day we'll work out how to do this better some other way. for the moment, while internet technology, if used well, can certainly enhance university 2 there may in fact be a parallel conversation within writings that discuss theories of music recording, which can notoriously misrepresent and knock the life out of music that works wonderfully on stage. o’kane lectures in lockdown: trying to rescue the lecture as event journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 4 teaching, and provide smooth access to excellent education for those unable to attend university, it is too early to write the lecture's obituary. (wolff, 2013). references biesenbach, k., london b. and eamon, c. (2002) video acts: single channel works from the collections of pamela and richard kramlich and new art trust. long island city, n.y.: p.s.1 contemporary art center. brack, c. and cowling, m. (2015) ‘how digital natives are killing the sage on stage’, the conversation, 6 may. available at: https://theconversation.com/how-digital-nativesare-killing-the-sage-on-the-stage-39923 (accessed: 13 august 2021). crook, c. (2015) ‘should all university lectures be automatically recorded?’, the conversation, 8 april. available at: https://theconversation.com/should-alluniversity-lectures-be-automatically-recorded-39158, (accessed: 14 august 2021). deleuze, g. (1993) the fold, leibniz and the baroque. london: the athlone press. french, s. and kennedy, g. (2017) ‘reassessing the value of university lectures’ teaching in higher education, 22(6), pp.639-654. https://doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2016.1273213. gunderman, r. (2013) ‘is the lecture dead?’, the atlantic, january 29. available at: http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/01/is-the-lecture-dead/272578/ (accessed: 26 november 2015). king, a. (1993) ‘from sage on the stage to guide on the side’, college teaching, 41(1), pp.30-35. available at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/27558571?origin=jstor-pdf (accessed: 26 june 2021). moran, j. (2019) first you write a sentence. london: penguin. https://theconversation.com/how-digital-natives-are-killing-the-sage-on-the-stage-39923 https://theconversation.com/how-digital-natives-are-killing-the-sage-on-the-stage-39923 https://theconversation.com/should-all-university-lectures-be-automatically-recorded-39158 https://theconversation.com/should-all-university-lectures-be-automatically-recorded-39158 https://doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2016.1273213 http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/01/is-the-lecture-dead/272578/ https://www.jstor.org/stable/27558571?origin=jstor-pdf o’kane lectures in lockdown: trying to rescue the lecture as event journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 5 penson, p. e. (2012) ‘lecturing: a lost art’, currents in pharmacy teaching and learning 4(1), pp.72-76. wolff, j. (2013) ‘it's too early to write off the lecture’, the guardian, 24 june. available at: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2013/jun/24/university-lecture-still-bestlearning (accessed: 13 august 2021). author details paul o’kane is an artist and writer, lecturing on art and culture at central saint martins college. paul is a founding member of eeodo artists’ publishers and a long-standing member of aica (international association of art critics). he has published a series of artists’ books, and numerous articles, essays, and reviews for leading journals and magazines, including third text and art monthly. paul’s research, writing, and lecturing is rooted in fine art but always informed by a broader cultural field and a historical model. paul is currently preparing a book on history in contemporary art for routledge. https://www.theguardian.com/education/2013/jun/24/university-lecture-still-best-learning https://www.theguardian.com/education/2013/jun/24/university-lecture-still-best-learning lectures in lockdown: trying to rescue the lecture as event the challenge the response recommendations references author details literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 3: march 2011 engaging students in enhanced academic transitions – a case of online study skills resource spice (student pre-arrival induction for continuing education) dr monika foster edinburgh napier university, uk abstract a traditional induction may not always be best suited to the needs of increasingly diverse student groups on study programmes. research shows (cook et al., 2006; burley et al., 2009; shofield and sackville, 2006) that an extended induction which allows for a steady development of skills is more suitable for international and direct entry college students. additionally, there is evidence that students respond well to new technologies that allow for a more interactive and relationship-building approach (pringle et al., 2008), while learning from peers seems to help engage new students in learning (lowe and cook, 2003). this case study introduces online study skills resource ‘spice’ (student pre-arrival induction for continuing education) designed to assist international students and students coming as direct entry students from colleges to the university. it provides a rationale for the development of the resource and examples of some of its features. the study then attempts to evaluate the effectiveness of the resource through feedback from students and tutors, and offers suggestions for further development of the resource. keywords: induction; online; study skills; international students. introduction one of the major drives for initiatives such as spice (student pre-arrival induction for continuing education), which is the subject of this study, is the rising proportion of foster engaging students in enhanced academic transitions – a case of online study skills resource spice international students entering uk higher education (he) and the impact on the support for students pre-arrival and during study in the uk. uk higher education institutions (heis) have been attracting increasing numbers of international, non-eu students to study on both undergraduate and postgraduate programmes, including collaborative programmes overseas. according to the latest hesa figures, 10.5% of all students in higher education in the uk were international students (hesa, 2010). students from china and india accounted for nearly one third of all non-eu domicile students at uk heis in 2008/9, with indian students’ numbers increasing by 31.5% in 2008-2009 (hesa, 2010). needs of international students there has been a fair amount of research with these two groups of students to inform programme designers and tutors, particularly in respect of how former educational experiences affect the way students engage with the new learning and teaching environment. patricia and dawson’s research in 2004 with chinese and indian students on postgraduate programmes at thames valley university, london, points that chinese students are educated in a non-interactive environment, where they are expected to master the knowledge and present it at examinations with little interaction built in the courses of study (patricia and dawson, 2004). the students are used to all materials being laid out by the tutor, usually with one textbook per subject and expect the tutor/university to take responsibility for leading learning. similarly, research with indian students at sheffield hallam university (burley et al, 2009) reveals a gap between an expectation of independent learning from students in uk he and the study habits students bring with them, such as an emphasis on rote learning and limited skills to enquire, synthesise and present knowledge. this indicates that it is crucial not only to recognise the study skills students bring on arrival to the uk but to use this knowledge to develop new skills which are crucial for successful study on programmes in uk he. extended induction with steadily growing numbers of non-eu students, many coming on short courses (e.g. one year long) through articulation agreements, it seems vital to ensure that the students blend well into the uk education system through effective and meaningful induction. this leads to the second drive for the development of spice which is based on emerging trends in supporting students during induction. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 2 foster engaging students in enhanced academic transitions – a case of online study skills resource spice increasingly, attention is given to a wider context of transition from one academic context to another, rather than an induction event at the start of the programme. shofield and sackville (2006) view induction as having three parts: academic, social and administrative. cook et al. (2006) propose ‘extended induction’ which is about ‘a longer assimilation of new students into the ways in which the institutions operate’ (cook, 2006, p.7). furthermore, huczynski and buchanan (2007) propose induction as a three stage socialisation process including pre-arrival, encounter and metamorphosis stages. research on induction by white and carr (2005) found that, at the encounter stage, social integration may be slow which may impact on the metamorphosis stage when students do not feel a sense of belonging to the programme group. this in turn may block the key intention of induction, which is to welcome and help students adapt. use of technology in induction technology offers the opportunity to meet some of these shortcomings. online induction can help see induction as a process, not as an event. palloff and pratt (2007) believe the aim of the induction process is to maximise the educational potential for both the online classroom and online student. lowe and cook (2003) recognise that induction is ‘a process instead of an event and should be designed to promote peer group and staff/student interaction as well as academic preparation’ (lowe and cook, 2003, p.75). in this view, induction allows for learning communities to be built and evolve, familiarise the students with the ‘new rules’ and get a feel for uk higher education (murphy, 2008). examples of web based inductions in the university of glasgow, pringle et al. (2008) aimed to develop web-based material to support international students prior to and during the study. the findings from focus groups with students who used the materials indicated that students benefited from them, mainly as an opportunity to compare expectations about learning and teaching and the reality. the materials allowed students to consider changes to their own learning styles prior to transition to the university of glasgow. the university of southampton developed an ‘arrive uk’ induction course that has been offered to students since 2005 (watson, 2008). ‘arrive uk’ is delivered for five weeks prior to study at southampton and it utilises a range of technologies. it is developed using the virtual learning platform, moodle. it includes a variety of podcasts and videos which can be downloaded by the students. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 3 foster engaging students in enhanced academic transitions – a case of online study skills resource spice summary an extended induction which recognises students’ prior learning and teaching background, takes care of students’ expectations and the development of effective, academic study skills is proposed in response to growing numbers of students from overseas. it can be greatly enhanced by technology which offers an opportunity to build a relationship with the student. additionally, students’ perspective, for example from their peers who have already experienced study in the uk, helps personalise the induction and appeal to new students. the challenge in 2008/9, 24% of students at edinburgh napier university were international and from more than one hundred countries. the top two countries students came from to study at edinburgh napier university were china (1,609 students) and india (644 students) (edinburgh napier university, 2008). edinburgh napier has also more than 1,200 students studying overseas through collaborative partnerships with institutions such as city university in hong kong (edinburgh napier university, 2007). the university addresses the issue of a diverse student population on their programmes through staff conferences to disseminate good practice and projects like spice to explore new, innovative ways of supporting students in academic transition. the need for a prearrival induction was identified on the ba hospitality management programme. the course has large numbers of direct entry indian students (approximately 100+ per year). students on the programme come from colleges in india as direct entry students to third year. they encounter a number of challenges related to the differences in academic cultures, different sets of expectations of university students in the uk and living, and studying in a new country. as the students typically spend just under a year in the uk, the standard induction is too short, happens too late (post-arrival) and cannot address the breadth of the new skills and awareness that need to be assimilated by the students. another challenge is a cultural preference to rely on peers who already study in the uk to provide academic and pastoral support rather than utilising central university support and information available during induction and study in the uk. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 4 foster engaging students in enhanced academic transitions – a case of online study skills resource spice aims the aim of the project was to enhance induction by developing early skills and awareness before study in the uk. furthermore, it was to engage students in the process of transition to a new learning environment by using peer voice and providing tasks which make students reflect on their study habits and prepare for the requirements of study in the uk. engaging students an underlying principle to achieve the above aims and objectives was to work closely with the students to ensure the outcome is appealing to new students and welcoming them to their new learning and teaching context. according to edward (2003), for students to succeed in their education, they must be ‘motivated, accustomed to the university culture and feel part of the university community’ (edward, 2003, p.223). there were two ways students were involved in the spice project: through individual and group interviews with students already studying at edinburgh napier university (altogether over 70 students) and through focus groups with students in india preparing to arrive to the uk (altogether 56 students). below are examples of what students in edinburgh said on the following topics. contact hours (used to underpin activities in ‘are you ready for university?’ part): in india, the college starts at 8, ends by 6 pm so we have 10-12 hours of college course a day so you go on studying and getting things in your head. but here, the programme, if students come 6-9 hours a week, that’s enough, sufficient to give you knowledge, give you the basic idea to give you the degree. (in india) we need the knowledge in, all we need is the knowledge you get into your head, that’s it. and here, i was first confused, you should have the initiative, you should take the initiative, you should have the courage to go about it and show your knowledge. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 5 foster engaging students in enhanced academic transitions – a case of online study skills resource spice approach to study (used to underpin a section ‘time a precious resource’ in ‘edinburgh napier study skills’ part): it is a major leap for students coming from india. they come here to work and to study, these are the 2 aims. okay, but their priority lies with work – i know the priority should be study. you get the opportunity to work and that’s good, but you can’t make that your priority, the priority is study. if you forget that, that’s wrong. you can’t forget that, you can’t skip lectures and tutorials like that and go on and on. the value of using of webct /time management (intranet) (to be included in ‘using available resources’ in ‘edinburgh napier study skills’ part): (differences in it use for study in india) actually in india, we used not even 30% of it for study. it is more formal there but not very practical. because your tutors give you everything and you see them all the time, no need to use it a lot. here you have to use it to know what’s happening and do your assessment. also, it saves you time to ask questions or wait until someone tells you. so it helps you, it’s beneficial once you learn how to use it a lot. working in groups (to underpin section ‘working with others’ in ‘edinburgh napier study skills’ part): (about differences in working in groups) we have little experience of working in groups and, even if we do, it’s quite informal only, for talking about something. here, the groups have a specific task, they are professional, they are formally run. so that’s quite different, but you need to learn how to do it, how to work in a group. otherwise, you can be very disappointed and disappoint others. assessment (used for section ‘giving credit where it’s due’ in the ‘academic writing’ part): the first assessment here is the first time i did anything like this, writing an essay or a report, analysing literature, writing a case study. i don’t know how i am supposed to go about it, and what will be the marks, and if i fail, what happens then. so, this made me very nervous and confused. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 6 foster engaging students in enhanced academic transitions – a case of online study skills resource spice in india, we didn’t use the reference rule that much. first time you do it, you need to take a lot of time with every sentence, how do you need to give your reference, and what needs to be done to do it well. a selection of student voices was included in the resource to help new students identify themselves with the new experience and to emphasise the message ‘this is what happened to me and i used the following strategies to overcome it, you can do it too!’. the resource was piloted with students in india who were preparing to come to edinburgh napier in the following year. during focus groups, students discussed the activities and described their hopes and fears about study abroad and what they think may be useful for them. some of the comments from the focus groups are included below: we know little about what is awaiting for us in edinburgh so this is very useful for us to make us less anxious. the change from what we do now is going be very big but we know our colleagues who are in edinburgh now did this and they do well so it makes us feel better about trying ourselves. a lot of the activities are completely new to me, i want to know more about them and how to do well at napier. the students in india noted that the student voices were more detailed in their account of studying and living in edinburgh, and more focused on the academic skills than the advice they tend to get from their peers. outcomes the outcome of the one and a half year project is a pre-arrival induction resource. spice is driven by students sharing their experiences with their peers so ‘by students and for students’ is very much the motto of the resource. spice was partially funded by tesep (transforming and enhancing the student experience through pedagogy) and partially by internal faculty funding at edinburgh napier university. the pilot project was developed for journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 7 foster engaging students in enhanced academic transitions – a case of online study skills resource spice 3rd year direct entry indian students on the ba hospitality management programme. it has now been used by two cohorts of students in india (n=387 students) studying on the edinburgh napier programme. spice content has been structured into four strands as illustrated below in figure 1. figure 1. structure of spice. spice includes an introduction to being a university student in the uk; key academic study skills including planning, time management, team work, individual work, library skills; academic writing skills including referencing, plagiarism, essay and report writing, case studies; and a selection of activities to enhance presentation skills. unique features of spice include being student and task driven. upon completing an activity, students receive feedback which is generated automatically from the bank of feedback and answers. the feedback and the comments from the students are used to affirm the student’s expectations of the university and direct to the right study habits. reports on journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 8 foster engaging students in enhanced academic transitions – a case of online study skills resource spice students’ progress can be generated as well as a detailed overview of activities students failed to complete/undertake. below are examples of activities from each of the four parts of spice: 1. are you ready for university? what will teaching and learning be like at uni? at uni, sumit found subjects more challenging than at college. what do you think some of the differences might be at uni? write your answer in the box then read sumit’s comments below. then move on to the second part of the activity. sumit says … “i think self study is very important over here, because essays are all about your self-study. it’s all what you have learned and you have to show that you have learned that thing. so if you have done a self study, and you see the past essays, if you talk to your lecturers then you succeed. i feel lucky i’ve been to a uk university that has lecturers more flexible than lecturers in india. you can approach them at any time and they are ready to help you. they help me a lot.” 2. edinburgh napier study skills 2.1 forward planning for uni study here is an example of a typical timetable for a college student studying in india. 9am10am 10am11am 11am12pm 12pm1pm 1pm2pm 2pm3pm 3pm4pm 4pm5pm 5pm6pm monday classes lunch classes tuesday classes lunch classes wednesday classes lunch classes thursday classes lunch classes friday classes lunch classes saturday classes lunch classes sunday now look at the typical timetable below for 3rd year direct entry students on the edinburgh napier university ba hospitality management programme. each trimester, students undertake 3 study modules, each module having a value of 20 credits. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 9 fo jou ster engaging students in enhanced academic transitions – a case of online study skills resource spice rnal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 10 compare and contrast the amount of teaching time a student gets on a study programme at edinburgh napier with the amount received on your course in your college in india. at uk universities like edinburgh napier, there is an emphasis on independent learning. a 20-credit module is allocated a notional 200 hours of study. approximately 60 of these may be attendance, but the rest – at least 140 hours – is self-directed study. so, for 3 study modules on the 3rd year ba hospitality management programme at edinburgh napier, you will be expected to give no less than 420 hours of self study per trimester. so, how many hours of self study do you need to do each week on the ba hospitality management programme? let’s do the calculations and see: total amount of time a student needs to spend on independent study over a 15-week trimester (based on 7 hours class time per week): 600 hours – 105 hours 495 hours per trimester average amount of time a student needs to spend on independent study each week 495 hours ÷ 15 weeks 33 hours per week so, the bottom line is that, students need to find time to fit in around 33 hours of self-study time every week during a trimester. that’s a lot to fit in, but it gets easier with time! the next table shows the total amount time each week that you must allocate for class time and study time for each of the 3 study modules. fortunately, you are able to decide for yourself how and when you want to study, so you can also use your free time in the evenings and on weekends for study if you want to. 9a m 10 am 10 am 11 am 11 am 12 pm 12 pm 1p m 1p m -2 pm 2p m -3 pm 3p m -4 pm 4p m -5 pm 5p m -6 pm m on tsm0911 hospitality business development (lecture) tsm09104 service management (lecture) tsm0911 hospitality business development (tutorial) tu e tsm09111 hospitality supervision & training skills (lecture) tsm09111 hospitality supervision & training skills (tutorial) w ed th ur s fr i tsm09104 service management (tutorial) s at s un ster engaging students in enhanced academic transitions – a case of online study skills resource spice rnal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 11 9am-10am 10am-11am 11am-12pm 12pm-1pm 1pm-2pm 2pm-3pm 3pm-4pm 4pm-5pm 5pm-6pm monday lunch tuesday lunch wednesday module 1: class time & self study time lunch module 2: class time and self study time thursday lunch friday module 3: class time & self study time lunch module 3: class time & self study time saturday sunday a student on the ba hospitality management programme says ... “the first day when we joined this uni, the first day they gave us all our assignments so we have 3 or 4 months to make all the assignments so we have enough time to make them, but ... how to approach them is the main issue.” deadlines, deadlines, deadlines!!! this is a typical 3rd year ba hospitality management assessment hand-in schedule for trimester 1. module name week 1 week 2 week 3 week 4 week 5 week 6 week 7 week 8 week 9 week 10 week 11 week 12 week 13 week 14 week 15 tsm09101 hospitality business development 2000word essay exam tsm09104 service management 3000word essay exam tsm09111hospitality supervision & training skills 2500word case study report 1000-word learning log report group delivery of a training session 1000word group report fo jou foster engaging students in enhanced academic transitions – a case of online study skills resource spice as you can see, sometimes more than one assessment is due to be handed in around the same time. you’ll need to use your 33 hours of weekly study time in different ways at different times for different assessment types required for each of your study modules to make sure that you can meet all your hand-in deadlines on time. having a degree of flexibility in your weekly schedule is the key, so make sure you leave time for study on your timetable. do not take a part time job that doesn’t allow you to study and prepare for assessments! students say... read what krish and kaveri have to say about their assignments and exams... krish krish says: “yes, i had to plan ahead because in india we had to study a lot compared to here. here, we have maybe one or two exams in two semesters, where in india we have 5 or 6 exams. we have assignments for each and every subject, exams for each and every subject so the pressure is more. again, you have to plan that out, you have to plan that out but things like sending a rough draft to a teacher. so again, you put everything on the subject of your assignment you still don’t know if it’s right or wrong.” kaveri says: “the main thing is just go on reading, reading. the students, most of them, they don’t read. ... read it, if you read it you understand, that’s it. and you have sources everywhere, and just write it in your own words you will answer the question, you will make your assignment better, as well as that will benefit your exams. and time is very less here, so that uses your time too. that’s the best thing.” kaveri 3. academic writing skills 3.1 analysing the essay question: instruction words essay assignments set by your tutors can often seem rather complex. understanding the question is essential to ensure that the essay you submit for assessment actually answers the question asked. the secret to answering an essay question is to start by identifying and understanding the key ‘instruction words’ within the question. below are three examples of essay questions set by the tutors on modules tsm09101 (hospitality business development) and tsm09106 (food & wine in society) in academic year 2009/10. the key instruction words in each question have been highlighted and underlined. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 12 foster engaging students in enhanced academic transitions – a case of online study skills resource spice “hospitality managers and marketers need relevant, accurate, current and reliable information to be able to make effective decisions about the future of the business” (bowie & buttle, 2004). critically evaluate this point of view within the context of a type of hospitality business of your choice. discuss how eating and drinking habits and cuisine styles (either in the uk or in your native country) have been influenced by factors such as immigration, travel, and the media. investigate why restaurants close down in the uk at the rate of one per two weeks. in the activity below, match each ‘instruction word’ in the left-hand column by writing the appropriate word in the relevant box in the middle column. when you have finished, read the feedback for this activity in the student feedback guide. instruction words meaning examine in detail consider the evidence or arguments and make a judgement about the merits, point out faults explain and give different views about something, then give your own opinion based on sound evidence examine the evidence and decide on the value of something, make a judgement about it, based on sound evidence make very clear by giving examples evaluate illustrate outline analyse criticise discuss give a short description of the main points students say... read what krish has to say about understanding the question... krish krish says: “when i came over here, i learned how to read essay questions. so, every time we are told to read the question properly so you know which are your key words, and once you consider the question properly, you can understand by yourself these are the specific words.” 4. presentation skills presentation assessment criteria all students on the ba hospitality management study programme will give oral presentations as part of the assessment process. it is important that you find out in advance what assessment criteria will be used. this will help you to plan and give a more effective presentation. some possible assessment criteria are listed below with descriptions of what is expected for each one. presentation assessment criteria what does this involve? teamwork division of material amongst the group members. evidence of group practice. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 13 foster engaging students in enhanced academic transitions – a case of online study skills resource spice presentation assessment criteria what does this involve? organisation division of material amongst the group members. evidence of group practice. argumentation clear research focus. good selection of ideas and evidence used. language accuracy appropriate structure and vocabulary used. research evidence of research having been undertaken. appropriateness of choice of sources. clarity of communication clear explanations of technical terms used clear, with clear pronunciation. content appropriateness of both the amount and the level of the materials used. visual aids used to support the message of the presentation. academic requirements appropriate register, and acknowledgement of sources. below are the assessment criteria that were used during academic year 2009/10 for the group oral presentation assignment given to students to assess the team’s performance on the tsm09107 live project study module. tsm09107 live project: oral presentation assessment criteria quality of oral and visual communication and delivery; ability to make a professional persuasive business pitch as a team; choice and clarity of content; introduction and conclusion to presentation; ability to answer questions students say... read sumit’s thoughts on how presentations help to build your confidence... sumit says: “in presentation i try to think about positives only, not negatives because this makes you increase your confidence in you. and we learn from mistakes, we make mistakes once and even second time. by the third time, you are perfect in that. my tutors taught me how to look at my mistakes in a good way.” sumit how effective is spice? early results suggest that students who have used spice are more confident about their studies, have more specific expectations about their new learning and teaching context, approach tutors for help more readily rather than wait until problems arise, show a positive journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 14 foster engaging students in enhanced academic transitions – a case of online study skills resource spice attitude towards attending lectures and participating in tutorials, and perform better in assessments (in order to sustain this claim, academic results are going to be examined at the end of 2010/11 academic year). overall, there is a marked difference in students’ approach to learning after using spice. anecdotal evidence from working closely with the programme team confirms the benefits. a survey of tutors on the programme who work with students who completed spice is planned to take place in autumn 2011 to ascertain these claims. the tutors in india who work with students during the preparation for study at edinburgh napier were asked for their opinions about spice and its effectiveness. all twelve tutors commented on the usefulness of spice to introduce students to life and study at edinburgh napier and pointed to the high value of students being able to consider their current study skills and develop effective skills for study at edinburgh napier. tutors and students in india offered some suggestions for the contents including more information about edinburgh and the university; a range of student voices, not just indian students, tasks covering more skills, and a link to a social network to enhance communication between students in edinburgh and india. some of the suggestions were subsequently included in spice. the wider range of student voices, tasks, and a link to a social network will be included in the final version of spice. the one concern expressed by the tutors was about finding time to use spice with students. in the indian context, students have classes from 9 am to 5 pm every day, with no space left for additional activities. two solutions were put forward to either (1) shorten the duration of some of the classes to fit one 2 hour class weekly based on spice throughout year 2 or (2) to teach spice in trimester 2 of year 2 (may – september) when the teaching workload is not as heavy. as a result, a 2 hour weekly class called ‘effective study skills’ has been added to the trimester 2 timetable. it has been co-designed by colleagues from edinburgh napier and colleges in india to ensure there are realistic expectations about what can be achieved. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 15 foster engaging students in enhanced academic transitions – a case of online study skills resource spice learning points the key success of spice is in working very closely with students and tutors in edinburgh napier university and colleges in india to establish the core skills the students need to succeed in their study. the students were encouraged to contribute actively to the contents of the resource by giving their opinions about what should be included, the main challenges they faced and the solutions they developed. the students chose the main parts of spice, they were asked to sample the activities and give feedback, choose the pictures for spice and even the name of the resource. the students frequently commented on the value of ‘being involved’ in a university project. ways forward spice was a pilot and the feedback from the project will enable the development of the final resource for all international and direct entry students from colleges. spice is not a new initiative and not the only initiative of such kind in uk he. however, through careful work with students and programme teams, lessons from the pilot and stress on developing skills, spice promises to be an effective pre-arrival support resource. currently spice is hosted and operated within edinburgh napier university therefore login to spice cannot be shared. work is under way to upgrade the interface and functionality of spice to make it more user-friendly and to enable better tracking of student progress. additionally, a wider range of student voices and tasks, expanding the core and subject specific skills and including a social network link to napier facebook are being developed. it is hoped that the outcome will be two parallel streams of spice: international and college. this work is due to be completed by april/may 2011. further work may include developing a postgraduate route to attract other groups of students. also, work with students to evaluate and provide comments on the resource is planned for 2011. this would also help further enhance the student-led feature of spice. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 16 foster engaging students in enhanced academic transitions – a case of online study skills resource spice references burley, k., walton, j.r., and uruchurtu, e. (2009) enhancing the learning experience of post-graduate students from the indian sub-continent. available at: http://www.eair.nl/forum/vilnius/pdf/601.pdf (accessed: 7 february 2011). cook, a., macintosh, k.a. and rushton, b.s. (eds.) (2006) supporting students: early induction. coleraine: university of ulster. edinburgh napier university (2007) annual review 2007. edinburgh: edinburgh napier university. edinburgh napier university (2008) facts & figures 2009/2010. available at: http://www.napier.ac.uk/aboutus/factsandfigures/documents/facts%20figures%20 2009-10.pdf (accessed: 7 february 2011). edward, n.s. (2003) ‘first impressions last: an innovative approach to induction’, active learning in higher education, 4(3), pp.226-42. higher education statistics agency (hesa) (2010) students in higher education institutions 2008/09. press release 144. available at: http://www.hesa.ac.uk/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1668&itemid =161 (accessed: 7 february 2011). huczynski, a. and buchanan, d. (2007) organizational behaviour. 6th edn. harlow: prentice hall. lowe, h. and cook, a. (2003) ‘mind the gap: are students prepared for higher education’, journal of further and higher education, 27(1), pp.53-76. murphy, j. (2008) ‘designing an induction programme for a blended learning postgraduate program in health informatics’, imia conference: building worldwide capacity for the health informatics workforce. buenos aires, argentina 27-28 october. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 17 http://www.eair.nl/forum/vilnius/pdf/601.pdf http://www.napier.ac.uk/aboutus/factsandfigures/documents/facts%20figures%202009-10.pdf http://www.napier.ac.uk/aboutus/factsandfigures/documents/facts%20figures%202009-10.pdf http://www.hesa.ac.uk/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1668&itemid=161 http://www.hesa.ac.uk/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1668&itemid=161 foster engaging students in enhanced academic transitions – a case of online study skills resource spice palloff, r.m. and pratt, k. (2007) building online communities: effective strategies for the virtual classroom. san francisco: john wiley and sons, inc. patricia, a. and dawson, c. (2004) the induction needs of international students at postgraduate level. available at: http://www.llas.ac.uk/materialsbank/mb080/lo_3/lord_business_sc.pdf (accessed: 7 february 2011). pringle, g., fischbacher, m. and williams, a. (2008) assisting international students to manage their transition to uk academic culture. available at: http://www.universitas21.com/tandl/papers/thu3.pdf (accessed: 7 february 2011). shofield, m. and sackvile, a. (2006) student induction – from event to entitlement. available at: http://www.edgehill.ac.uk/solstice/researchanddissemination/documents/studentind uction-fromeventtoentitlement2005.pdf (accessed: 7 february 2011). watson, j. (2008) ‘enhancing the experience of the international student: a pre-arrival online preparatory course, blending technologies and introducing life and study in the uk’, proceedings of the third international blended learning conference. hatfield, uk 18-19 june. university of hertfordshire, pp. 124-131. white, s.a. and carr, l.a. (2005) brave new world: can we engineer a better start for freshers?’, frontiers in education 2005. proceedings of the 35th annual conference. indianapolis 19-22 october, pp. 26-31. author details dr monika foster is a senior lecturer and senior teaching fellow at edinburgh napier university. she was awarded the title of visiting professor by shandong university of finance in china. her research interests lie in enhancing the international student experience and collaborative research partnerships overseas. email: m.foster@napier.ac.uk. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 18 http://www.llas.ac.uk/materialsbank/mb080/lo_3/lord_business_sc.pdf http://www.universitas21.com/tandl/papers/thu3.pdf http://www.edgehill.ac.uk/solstice/researchanddissemination/documents/studentinduction-fromeventtoentitlement2005.pdf http://www.edgehill.ac.uk/solstice/researchanddissemination/documents/studentinduction-fromeventtoentitlement2005.pdf mailto:m.foster@napier.ac.uk engaging students in enhanced academic transitions – a case of online study skills resource spice (student pre-arrival induction for continuing education) abstract the challenge aims engaging students outcomes 2.1 forward planning for uni study 3.1 analysing the essay question: instruction words how effective is spice? learning points references watson, j. (2008) ‘enhancing the experience of the international student: a pre-arrival online preparatory course, blending technologies and introducing life and study in the uk’, proceedings of the third international blended learning conference. hatfield, uk 18-19 june. university of hertfordshire, pp. 124-131. author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special issue 22: compendium of innovative practice october 2021 editorial: prioritising wellbeing through community and connection alicja syska university of plymouth this section of the compendium opens with a powerful and moving reminder that the covid-19 pandemic was not just a disruption, an inconvenience, and a challenge, but a devastating force that has had a profound impact on individual lives. our students were often affected in unimaginable ways, including losing loved ones, losing their grounding and emotional resources, losing their confidence and social connections. supporting students in the midst of all this loss, grief, withdrawal, and a sense of disenfranchisement in academia, required a lot of courage and a willingness to get hurt, but in the case of our authors, the impact of action and their willingness to give agency to students produced a beautiful event that validated grief, brought a sense of connection, and opened up hope. this theme of uncertainty, anxiety, and disconnection, and the deep need to address it in an empathetic, kind, and supportive way permeates all the reflections. authors of these pieces propose solutions such as adopting a pedagogy of kindness by connecting via audio and video messaging instead of email; co-constructing modules by listening to the student voice; creating compassionate spaces; and normalising learning challenges. other initiatives demonstrate ingenuous attempts to make links between physical and mental health by encouraging walking for wellbeing, and efforts to acknowledge students’ social needs by creating opportunities for networking and social interaction. but for staff to be able to support students’ wellbeing, they first had to look after themselves and one another. here, educational developers’ role was critical. in the reflections shared in this section, authors report on initiatives such as setting up a weekly teachers’ lounge, creating targeted wellbeing programmes, and providing a virtual space for a ‘free-wheeling’ tea break designed to foster connection while not adding to the already very real burden of online meetings. whether supporting staff or students, these editorial journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 authors propose thoughtful, caring responses to a crisis they were never trained to deal with and which stretched their own resources to the limit before they were able to find a productive rhythm in their work and life. journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special issue 22: compendium of innovative practice october 2021 ________________________________________________________________________ providing affective and supportive video feedback in a multidisciplinary unit during the pandemic abdul razeed university of sydney, australia pat norman university of sydney, australia kristna gurney university of sydney, australia keywords: feedback; feedforward; covid-19; multidisciplinary; affective; supportive. the challenge a new core unit of study in a master of commerce program brought together creative and analytical mindsets. with 70% of students enrolled remotely during the pandemic, our challenge became one of encouraging students to engage creatively during the first half of the unit. we identified the need to provide feedback that has both an emotional effect (i.e., is affective) and is supportive to increase engagement between socially isolated faculty and students. we needed to develop a way to provide feedback at scale (2000 students) that worked for students onand off-campus. video feedback offered us a means to achieve these ends. this postgraduate unit was designed to challenge traditional views that we are either rightbrained (creative) or left-brained (analytical) (shmerling, 2017). to challenge this notion, we sought to create an authentic assessment schedule that was both interactive and supportive, where students engaged with creativity in the first half of the unit and analytics in the second. one way we addressed this challenge while supporting creative and analytic thinking was through innovative approaches to feedback. our view of feedback in this paper can be understood as ‘feedforward’, which hounsell et al. (2008, p.54) articulate as well-timed feedback designed to improve future assessments and student learning. razeed, norman and gurney providing affective and supportive video feedback in a multidisciplinary unit during the pandemic journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 2 additionally, hattie and timperley (2007) noted that providing feedback early and carefully capitalises on the effectiveness of the feedback. we chose video feedback as it provides nonverbal cues and is more affective than text feedback (kaplan-rakowski, 2021). video feedback also reduces the perceived distance between marker and student, involving speech that serves a social function rather than simply conveying information (thomas, west and borup, 2017), a trait crucial during the pandemic to connect students and foster a sense of supportiveness. in addition, henderson and phillips (2015) found that students perceive video feedback as clearer, more supportive, more constructive, and enabling more reflectiveness. students also prefer video feedback over other feedback modes (mahoney, macfarlane and ajjawi, 2019). finally, asynchronous video can also increase engagement between socially isolated faculty and students (lowenthal et al., 2020). the response enrolled students developed a creative concept initially and, as a group, developed a business case at the end of the semester to bring together the creative and analytic concepts they learned throughout the unit. the 2000 students enrolled in the unit eventually formed 500 groups to work on the business case. in week five, comprehensive text feedback was provided to a creative question. in week seven, we decided to offer video feedforward (hounsell et al., 2008) to support student groups in the crucial phase of choosing which data would support their creative question. this would have a significant impact on the success of their business case. a collaboration between teams from the university library and the unit coordinator ensued. we based our collaboration in a creative ‘maker space’ in the library. the creative space consisted of 3d printing, modelling, and presentation tools (including a digital wall and a podcast studio). we aimed to ensure accessibility and offer affective feedback to students regardless of the mode of study. the academic liaison librarian for business, the assistant manager of this creative space, and the peer learning advisers (plas) who supported other students in the space, came together to provide a series of pre-recorded videos introducing the creative space in the library. this was embedded into the university’s learning management system (lms). https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13562517.2018.1471457 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11423-020-09897-9#ref-cr10 razeed, norman and gurney providing affective and supportive video feedback in a multidisciplinary unit during the pandemic journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 3 student groups were invited to submit questions in week six covering various areas, including research, data, referencing, 3d printing and modelling, presentations, podcasting, and other domains. in week seven, the liaison librarian, the assistant manager, and the unit coordinator used the video recording studio to record a series of videos answering the submitted questions. student groups submitted over 400 questions in the areas noted above. students benefited from our team’s expertise and learned from the questions posed by other groups. we tailored our feedback specifically to help students improve the quality of the business case that they would put forward. recommendations we created seven videos grouped into research, data, referencing, 3d printing and modelling, presentations, podcasting, and other domains. these videos consolidated and presented our feedback to the students. each video averaged around 45 minutes in length. students have, on average, watched each video feedback five times compared with an average of just once in other modules. students enrolled remotely also viewed these videos comparatively more than those on campus. additionally, students overwhelmingly felt the video feedbacks were valuable. one student commented: ‘it is a good opportunity to learn something about creativity in such a systematic way, and i think lots of things are very useful for my future. it is also quite interesting that we have group projects engaging students to think and talk altogether’ (mid-year student survey). providing timely feedback to improve future assessments and student learning enabled a supportive environment for students to engage with the unit's content. unlike written feedback, our experience with video feedback felt more like a conversation with our students. video-based feedback further allowed us to personalise this feedback to better engage students enrolled in different study modes during the pandemic. video feedback created a space for plas, liaison librarians, and course lecturers to speak about common questions. in addition, videos were accessible to both on and off-campus students, provided a consistent learning experience, and built credibility with the wider faculty. drawing on our collective strengths in content, teaching and learning pedagogy and how https://student-surveys.sydney.edu.au/staff/results/uss/report.cfm?key=fft361608&summ=0&type=or&comments=1#3078900 https://student-surveys.sydney.edu.au/staff/results/uss/report.cfm?key=fft361608&summ=0&type=or&comments=1#3078900 https://student-surveys.sydney.edu.au/staff/results/uss/report.cfm?key=fft361608&summ=0&type=or&comments=1#3078900 razeed, norman and gurney providing affective and supportive video feedback in a multidisciplinary unit during the pandemic journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 4 best to access and use resources, the partnership between unit staff and library staff provided a proactive platform to support students. perhaps most significantly, it demonstrated the value and possibilities of a multidisciplinary collaboration between faculty and library staff. while the videos involved a significant time contribution, we note that the content in the videos would also be relevant for future cohorts. by inviting students to submit questions in advance, our team gained an insight into the kinds of learning resources that might better prepare prospective students for these kinds of assessments, developing an expanded set of learning objects for all students, informed by the common queries that emerged with this cohort. video feedback thus provided us a powerful tool to bridge individual feedback and make this relevant to a wider cohort. hence, we will be making these available even earlier in subsequent semesters. references hattie, j. and timperley, h. (2007) ‘the power of feedback’, review of educational research, 77(1), pp.81-112. https://doi.org/10.3102/003465430298487. henderson, m. and phillips, m. (2015) ‘video-based feedback on student assessment: scarily personal’, australasian journal of educational technology, 31(1), pp.51-66. https://doi.org/10.14742/ajet.1878. hounsell, d., mccune, v., hounsell, j. and litjens, j. (2008) ‘the quality of guidance and feedback to students’, higher education research and development, 27(1), pp.5567. kaplan-rakowski, r. (2021) ‘addressing students’ emotional needs during the covid-19 pandemic: a perspective on text versus video feedback in online environments’, educational technology research and development, 69(1), pp.133136. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11423-020-09897-9. lowenthal, p., borup, j., west, r. and archambault, l. (2020) ‘thinking beyond zoom: using asynchronous video to maintain connection and engagement during the https://doi.org/10.3102/003465430298487 https://doi.org/10.14742/ajet.1878 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11423-020-09897-9 razeed, norman and gurney providing affective and supportive video feedback in a multidisciplinary unit during the pandemic journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 5 covid-19 pandemic’, journal of technology and teacher education, 28(2), pp. 383-391. mahoney, p., macfarlane, s. and ajjawi, r. (2019) ‘a qualitative synthesis of video feedback in higher education’, teaching in higher education, 24(2), pp.157-179, https://doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2018.1471457. shmerling, r. (2017) right brain/left brain, right? available at: https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/right-brainleft-brain-right-2017082512222 (accessed: 1 may 2021). thomas, r. a., west, r. e. and borup. j. (2017) ‘an analysis of instructor social presence in online text and asynchronous video feedback comments’, the internet and higher education, 33, pp.61-73, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.iheduc.2017.01.003. author details abdul razeed is a lecturer in the discipline of accounting at the business school. abdul completed his phd at the university of sydney. abdul has co-authored two academic books, a case study, and a number of journal articles. he teaches across both the undergraduate and postgraduate programs. his passion lies in developing and continually innovating in large core units. pat norman is an academic liaison librarian at the university of sydney library. he has been a tutor, learning adviser, and librarian at universities for eight years. he also teaches practitioner research methods in the school of education and social work, and his phd thesis explored teacher professional ethics and policy enactment. kristna gurney is assistant manager at the university of sydney library. she has coordinated the library’s technology spaces and peer learning advisor team for the last 3 years with a focus on student engagement and support. https://doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2018.1471457 https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/right-brainleft-brain-right-2017082512222 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.iheduc.2017.01.003 providing affective and supportive video feedback in a multidisciplinary unit during the pandemic the challenge the response recommendations references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special issue 22: compendium of innovative practice october 2021 ________________________________________________________________________ learning to learn online: creating an open-access learning development platform jodie calleja canterbury christ church university, uk silvina bishopp-martin canterbury christ church university, uk keywords: covid-19; online learning; blended learning; learning design; student engagement; student feedback. the challenge ln 2018, learning development (ld) at canterbury christ church university (cccu) followed a mixed-delivery approach, mainly focusing on individual tutorials and embedded sessions in academic programmes. the generic offer of blackboard resources was limited to a static repository, a collection of materials including powerpoints and pdfs which lacked interactivity and opportunities to apply and evaluate learning. in 2019, the learning skills team (lsteam), made up of faculty-aligned librarians and learning developers, began considering methods for upgrading their online repository. this was in response to analytics revealing the resource was primarily used to book tutorials, indicating students’ limited interaction with self-directed learning materials (calleja, 2020a). the project coincided with a substantial growth in digital technologies for e-learning and greater needs to harness these innovations to enhance online/blended learning (phillips, mcnaught and kennedy, 2012, p.9). as lockdowns began in 2020, the need to provide students with quality online learning resources grew, exacerbated by increasing requests from programmes for materials on online learning skills and effective online research. the challenge involved finding a short-term solution in response to the pandemic, whilst also considering a long-term approach to e-learning. special consideration was given to identifying: a structured model of content delivery (panigrahi, srivastava and sharma, calleja and bishopp-martin learning to learn online: creating an open-access learning development platform journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 2 2018); a suitable platform for ld content (francis et al., 2019); methods to engage and assess learning (castle and mcguire, 2010). the modules needed to be appropriate to our diverse student groups (cccu, 2021a), be inclusive of different learning needs and account for accessibility regulations (central digital and data office, 2018). furthermore, the new platform, the learning skills hub (lshub) (cccu, 2021b), needed to be available in advance of the 2020/21 academic year to support the university’s blended learning strategy (cccu, 2021c). the response the lsteam proposed wordpress to host the lshub due to its open-access capabilities, allowing access to resources beyond our institution. the design approach involved identifying themes and ‘chunking’ content to improve engagement and understanding, in line with a micro-learning pedagogy that delivers content in short manageable segments of learning (major and calandrino, 2018, p.2). this approach was applied through hoffman and ritchie’s (1998) icare (introduction, content, assessment, reflection and extension) model, offering a consistent structure to page design, with consideration to universal design for learning (cast, 2021). using this model as a template for all pages would offer students opportunities to practise, reflect on their learning, and extend that learning via links to further resources. the lsteam published 20 online modules by august 2020, grouped according to qaa’s (2014) he qualification levels. lshub pages have been viewed over 36000 times, over six months (image 1), making it cccu’s most popular non-course specific learning platform. the analytics identify level 4 modules as the most visited (image 2), echoing the notion of the first year at university as a key moment of transition in the student journey (christie et al., 2016). the extensive use of the modules also demonstrates a positive change in user journey in comparison to the use of resources housed in blackboard repository; greater numbers of students now access asynchronous modules rather than tutorials, which indicates that independent learning opportunities have improved ease of access and interest in development. the conclusion is further supported through student feedback (image 3), with most respondents reporting the modules are useful, pitched at the right level, and boost confidence in the target skills. calleja and bishopp-martin learning to learn online: creating an open-access learning development platform journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 3 image 1. google analytics of all user stats for the lshub, 01/12/2020-31/05/2021. image 2. google analytics of all user stats for the lshub, level 4 modules, 01/12/2020-31/05/2021. calleja and bishopp-martin learning to learn online: creating an open-access learning development platform journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 4 image 3. microsoft forms feedback for lshub modules 17/09/2021-31/05/2021. however, there were initially significant challenges promoting the purpose and application of the project to decision-makers, leading to delays in both project approval and access to funding for an appropriate platform. in addition, wordpress presented difficulties meeting accessibility regulations, due to imposed university limitations on licensing, which impacted on the ability to embed diverse and accessible content types. furthermore, as a new and innovative project, there was no budget to purchase applications, which led to relying on free software with limited accessibility functions and design options. as the project was required to meet a short turnaround (calleja, 2020b), quality assurance processes were not robust, resulting in some inconsistencies in module length, tone, and style. recommendations by releasing resources, the lshub has transformed institutional perspectives of ld, supported by significant user engagement data and positive feedback from staff and students. the lshub has increased the visibility of the lsteam and the recognition of academic skills development as an integral part of academic success (magyar, mcavoy and forstner, 2011). as a result of this success, the team is now acknowledged in promotional materials for current/prospective students, as well as staff guidance calleja and bishopp-martin learning to learn online: creating an open-access learning development platform journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 5 documents. additionally, lshub modules have been incorporated into assignment briefs, and tutors are beginning to signpost specific modules in assessment feedback, to build opportunities to feed-forward. the prominence and use of the lshub have led to further collaborations with academic and professional service staff to provide tailored e-learning modules, which will now shape the direction of travel of this project. formal quality assurance processes, including student reviews, have recently been implemented, offering the lsteam and collaborators greater input concerning module development and design. from 2021/2022, the lshub will become the central platform for all non-course content learning opportunities, to develop a coherent, comprehensive, and high-quality e-learning offer. this will coincide with the platform’s imminent move to the university website, a change which will offer greater flexibility in content development, improve quality and ensure accessibility. the recent appointment of a student project assistant will allow the lsteam to continue to measure success and engagement over the summer 2021. research will also be conducted in 2021/22 on the impact of lshub as an embedded learning tool. on reflection, a similar project is viable with adjustments taken from our lessons learned. we would recommend spending greater time in mapping a similar e-learning platform, using a project management model; developing quality assurance processes from the start; consulting with stakeholders across the university to anticipate long-term development and promote interest in collaborations; gathering wider support for ld curriculum integration using innovative practices. references cast (2021) the universal design for learning guidelines. available at: https://udlguidelines.cast.org/binaries/content/assets/udlguidelines/udlg-v22/udlg_graphicorganizer_v2-2_numbers-yes.pdf (accessed: 2 june 2021). calleja, j. (2020a) learning skills platform overview. internal hei report. unpublished. calleja, j. (2020b) learning skills project brief. internal hei report. unpublished. https://udlguidelines.cast.org/binaries/content/assets/udlguidelines/udlg-v2-2/udlg_graphicorganizer_v2-2_numbers-yes.pdf https://udlguidelines.cast.org/binaries/content/assets/udlguidelines/udlg-v2-2/udlg_graphicorganizer_v2-2_numbers-yes.pdf calleja and bishopp-martin learning to learn online: creating an open-access learning development platform journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 6 canterbury christ church university (2021a) learning and teaching strategy 2015-22. available at: https://www.canterbury.ac.uk/learning-and-teachingenhancement/docs/learning-and-teaching-strategy-2015-2022.pdf (accessed: 3 june 2021). canterbury christ church university (2021b) learning skills hub. available at: https://blogs.canterbury.ac.uk/ccculearningskills/ (accessed: 7 june 2021). canterbury christ church university (2021c) key blended learning principles at canterbury christ church university. available at: https://cccu.canterbury.ac.uk/project-2020-21/documents/learning-andteaching/blended-learning-principles-2021.pdf (accessed: 8 june 2021). castle, s. r. and mcguire. c. j. (2010) ‘an analysis of student self-assessment of online, blended, and face-to-face learning environments: implications for sustainable education delivery’, international education studies, 3(3), pp.36-40. central digital and data office (2018) understanding accessibility requirements for public sector bodies. available at: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/accessibility-requirementsfor-public-sector-websites-and-apps (accessed: 1 june 2021). christie, h., tett, l., cree, v. e. and machine, v. (2016) ‘it all just clicked: a longitudinal perspective on transitions within university’, studies in higher education, 41(3), pp. 478–490. https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2014.942271. francis, k., troop, m., salter, j., parahoo, r., costanzo, l. and desmarais, s. (2019) ‘scribe hero: an online teaching and learning approach for the development of writing skills in the undergraduate classroom’, online learning, 23(2), pp.217-234. hoffman, b. and ritchie, d. c. (1998) teaching and learning online: tools, templates, and training. available at: https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ed421092.pdf (accessed: 4 june 2021). magyar, a., mcavoy, d. and forstner, k. (2011) ‘if only we knew what they wanted: bridging the gap between student uncertainty and lecturers' expectations’, journal https://www.canterbury.ac.uk/learning-and-teaching-enhancement/docs/learning-and-teaching-strategy-2015-2022.pdf https://www.canterbury.ac.uk/learning-and-teaching-enhancement/docs/learning-and-teaching-strategy-2015-2022.pdf https://blogs.canterbury.ac.uk/ccculearningskills/ https://cccu.canterbury.ac.uk/project-2020-21/documents/learning-and-teaching/blended-learning-principles-2021.pdf https://cccu.canterbury.ac.uk/project-2020-21/documents/learning-and-teaching/blended-learning-principles-2021.pdf https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2014.942271 calleja and bishopp-martin learning to learn online: creating an open-access learning development platform journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 7 of learning development in higher education, issue 3, march, pp.1-18. https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.v0i3.68. major, a. and calandrino, t. (2018) ‘beyond chunking: micro-learning secrets for effective online design’, florida distance learning journal, 3(13), pp.1-5. available at: https://nsuworks.nova.edu/fdla-journal/vol3/iss1/13 (accessed: 2 june 2021). panigrahi, r., srivastava, p. r. and sharma, d. (2018) ‘online learning: adoption, continuance & learning outcome a review of literature’, international journal of information management, 43, pp.1-14. phillips, r., mcnaught, c. and kennedy, g. (2012) evaluating e-learning. suffolk: taylor and francis. qaa (2014) the frameworks for higher education qualifications of uk degree-awarding bodies. available at: https://www.qaa.ac.uk/docs/qaa/quality-code/qualificationsframeworks.pdf (accessed: 2 june 2021). author details jodie calleja is the learning development manager at canterbury christ church university and holds a pgce 11-18, ma education, and fhea. her passion is for widening participation through technology and online learning. jodie holds cep status and is an active member of the aldinhe learnhigher and peer mentoring working group. she is also studying for a phd, applying foucauldian discourse analysis to investigate marginalisation within streams of veganism. silvina bishopp-martin is the learning developer for all education programmes at canterbury christ church university. she has an ma in tesol, has achieved celp status, is a fellow of the hea and a certified cmi coach and mentor. her research interests include peer-mentoring, academic literacies, critical eap, and ld professionalism and identity. silvina is a member of the aldinhe research & development and peer mentoring working groups. she is currently undertaking a phd on learning development professional identity and its place in academia. https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.v0i3.68 https://nsuworks.nova.edu/fdla-journal/vol3/iss1/13 https://www.qaa.ac.uk/docs/qaa/quality-code/qualifications-frameworks.pdf https://www.qaa.ac.uk/docs/qaa/quality-code/qualifications-frameworks.pdf learning to learn online: creating an open-access learning development platform the challenge the response recommendations references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special issue 22: compendium of innovative practice october 2021 ________________________________________________________________________ adopting a pedagogy of kindness alison gilmour the open university keywords: compassion; trust; online and distance learning; embedding wellbeing; covid19. the challenge responding to the context of the covid-19 pandemic, as an academic developer in a centralised learning and teaching unit and an associate lecturer in the social sciences, i understood that my students and i were plunged into a period of uncertainty, with many unknowns, disruption, and potential anxiety. the uniquely shared context intensified my focus on kindness as a pedagogical practice, with compassion shaping approaches to building equitable relationships and trust to support the ‘circumstances under which learning could happen’ (denial, 2020, p. 213). this informed my approach as an academic developer supporting colleagues adapting to online learning, but also in ‘walking the walk’ as an associate lecturer at the uk’s largest distance-learning university, the open university. even for students anticipating studying through distance-learning, the pandemic presented challenges not to be underestimated. the university’s supported distance model moved to fully online study with face-to-face classes cancelled. awareness that the pandemic may compound the existing inequalities (gilmour, 2020; 2021) experienced by widening participation students sharpened my focus on adopting a pedagogy of kindness (denial, 2020), which manifested in a focus on fostering connection and nurturing a sense of agency and compassion amongst my students as we journeyed through the pandemic, as an approach to embedding wellbeing in the curriculum. proponents of embedding wellbeing in the curriculum (houghton and anderson, 2017; hughes and spanner, 2019) recognise that responsibility for student wellbeing does not rest solely with dedicated student support expertise, but also with teachers, a critical and constant component of the gilmour adopting a pedagogy of kindness journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 2 student experience (hughes, 2020). as the pandemic unfolded, i purposefully sought to support wellbeing through my pedagogical practice. the response connecting seeking to narrow ‘transactional distance’ (moore, 1997) and foster connection, rather than text-based communication between classes, i made greater use of video and audio, particularly in welcoming students, supporting a sense of cohort identity and belonging, and relating to my students. i wanted them to perceive me as approachable, and found it easier to humanise communications using audio and video. colleagues commented that my enthusiasm in a welcome video, proactive motivational communications (simpson, 2012) and ‘good luck’ messages before the final assignment, conveyed emotional support more overtly than text-only communication, some sharing with their students. i had students refer to such messages when contacting me. co-constructing rather than 'telling' when setting expectations at the start of a module, i typically adopted an approach of ‘telling’ and seeking alignment with my expectations, rather than more openly exploring viewpoints, guided by equity and trust. a pedagogy of kindness recognises students as active classroom partners (denial, 2020); therefore, i used the mentimeter student response system to explore student viewpoints on forum discussions and netiquette, perspectives on staff and student contributions, and the shared responsibilities of all in this participatory space. this informed a staff and student co-owned ‘forum netiquette’ for asynchronous discussion forum participation. similarly, i created a ‘stop, start, continue’ (danley, 2019) mid-module exercise in which students did not simply tell the teaching team their views, but reflected on their engagement, responsibilities and things they personally would stop, start and continue doing. the pandemic had the potential to create disconnection, so such opportunities to hear the student voice were important in building trust and supporting students to consider their agency. gilmour adopting a pedagogy of kindness journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 3 compassionate spaces it is important to create space for new social science students to explore challenging social issues, including divergent perspectives. the mentimeter student response system was used pre-class to engage students with module content, but also to provide the opportunity to consider their agency in building a respectful classroom, what they would do to contribute and how they expected to be treated by others. resulting discussions recognised different contexts from which students joined classes, expressions of empathy, and students assisting the participation of peers. for example, students became voluntary chat champions to ensure peers were heard regardless of mode of participation: i know that niraj is not using the microphone but can i read his comment out for the group? in ways i had not experienced previously, student behaviour indicated an evolving sense of themselves as active agents in building a respectful and compassionate classroom aligned with gilbert’s (2017) concept of compassion-focused pedagogy and developing microcommunication skills of compassion, through which students notice and act on the distress of others or inequity. normalising challenge to build classes as equitable and supportive spaces, i used role-modelling vulnerability and use of language to normalise challenge in learning, not least during a pandemic, and provided the space to say ‘i don’t know’ or ‘i’m finding this difficult’. all mentimeter activities included options to anonymously select, i don’t know. using video and audio messages, i reflected openly on my learning challenges (writing my first essay, grappling with referencing, navigating a virtual learning environment). i also openly expressed finding the second uk lockdown difficult. this was modelling a very human experience – normalising and demonstrating my openness to discussing and supporting others navigating challenges – and contributing to ‘psychological safety’ (hughes, 2020). recommendations the pandemic, and adopting a pedagogy of kindness, helped ascertain my sphere of influence in supporting wellbeing in the curriculum through relational approaches that foster connections, support participation, advocate compassion, and encourage my gilmour adopting a pedagogy of kindness journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 4 students as learners with agency. student participation in online classes and pre-class polls was high, with greater in-class interaction between students, evidence of microcommunication skills of compassion, and more outside-of-class engagement with my students than in 12 years of teaching at the university. is this just being a good teacher? perhaps, but the pandemic heightened my focus on wellbeing in ways that are fruitful for future practice. in taking a wellbeing lens on your teaching practice you may ask: • how do you build connections with students at a distance, particularly at the start of a module? • how do you support open staff and student co-construction, ensuring the student voice shapes the current module presentation? • how do you model your experience of challenge – in learning or beyond? • how do you develop student micro-communication skills of compassion? a pedagogy of kindness is arguably more potent for learning developers, who do not have the continuity of working with students throughout a module and focused on fostering open learning environments, with students comfortable asking questions and exploring challenges. • consider using pre-session video or audio messages to humanise communications and foster approachability. • with new students, co-constructing expectations or a class contract is a priority – pre-class or in-class – and can encourage compassionate and respectful learning spaces beyond teacher-led expectations. • all of this supports a space for exploring the navigation of challenge, strengthened by modelling your experiences to students. this can nurture approachability and possibly encourage students to request support in future or recommend it to peers. gilmour adopting a pedagogy of kindness journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 5 references danley, a. (2019) ‘using “start, stop, and continue” to gather student feedback to improve instruction’, in denoyelles, a., albrecht, a., bauer, s. and wyatt, s. (eds.), teaching online pedagogical repository. orlando, fl: university of central florida center for distributed learning. available at: https://topr.online.ucf.edu/using-start-stop-andcontinue-to-gather-student-feedback-to-improve-instruction/ (accessed: 13 august 2021). denial, c. (2020) ‘a pedagogy of kindness’, in stommel, j., friend, c. and morris, s.m. (eds.) critical digital pedagogy: a collection. washington. d.c.: hybrid pedagogy inc, pp. 212-218. gilbert, t. (2017) ‘when looking is allowed: what compassionate group work looks like in a uk university’, in gibbs, p. (ed.) the pedagogy of compassion at the heart of higher education. uk: springer, pp. 189-202. gilmour, a. (2021) let’s talk about webcams, and a pedagogy of kindness’, compass: journal of learning and teaching 14(2). available at: https://doi.org/10.21100/compass.v14i2.1177 (accessed: 12 august 2021). gilmour, a. (2020) ‘an inclusive approach to the ‘virtual campus’ – keeping student experiences in focus’, greenwich learning and teaching blog, university of greenwich. available at: https://blogs.gre.ac.uk/learningteaching/2020/03/30/inclusive-approach-to-the-virtual-campus/ (accessed: 12 august 2021). houghton, a. and anderson, j. (2017) embedding mental wellbeing in the curriculum: maximising success in higher education. york: higher education academy. available at: https://www.advance-he.ac.uk/knowledge-hub/embedding-mentalwellbeing-curriculum-maximising-success-higher-education (accessed: 7 june 2021). https://topr.online.ucf.edu/authors/angela-danley https://topr.online.ucf.edu/using-start-stop-and-continue-to-gather-student-feedback-to-improve-instruction/ https://topr.online.ucf.edu/using-start-stop-and-continue-to-gather-student-feedback-to-improve-instruction/ https://doi.org/10.21100/compass.v14i2.1177 https://blogs.gre.ac.uk/learning-teaching/2020/03/30/inclusive-approach-to-the-virtual-campus/ https://blogs.gre.ac.uk/learning-teaching/2020/03/30/inclusive-approach-to-the-virtual-campus/ https://www.advance-he.ac.uk/knowledge-hub/embedding-mental-wellbeing-curriculum-maximising-success-higher-education https://www.advance-he.ac.uk/knowledge-hub/embedding-mental-wellbeing-curriculum-maximising-success-higher-education gilmour adopting a pedagogy of kindness journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 6 hughes, g. (2020) supporting student wellbeing through curriculum design and delivery. available at: https://lta.hw.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/guide-no20_supportingstudent-wellbeing-through-curriculum-design-and-delivery.pdf (accessed: 7 june 2021). hughes, g. and spanner, l. (2019) the university mental health charter. leeds: student minds. available at: https://www.studentminds.org.uk/uploads/3/7/8/4/3784584/191208_umhc_artwork.p df (accessed: 12 august 2021). moore, m. (1997) ‘theory of transactional distance’, in keegan, d. (ed.) theoretical principles of distance education. new york: routledge, pp. 22-38. simpson, o. (2012) supporting students for success in online and distance education. 3rd edn. new york: routledge. author details alison gilmour is an associate professor in higher education learning and teaching at the university of greenwich and a part-time associate lecturer with the open university. her expertise is in the enhancement of teaching practice in blended learning contexts, supporting student engagement in dispersed learning communities, and embedding wellbeing in the curriculum. https://lta.hw.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/guide-no20_supporting-student-wellbeing-through-curriculum-design-and-delivery.pdf https://lta.hw.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/guide-no20_supporting-student-wellbeing-through-curriculum-design-and-delivery.pdf https://www.studentminds.org.uk/uploads/3/7/8/4/3784584/191208_umhc_artwork.pdf https://www.studentminds.org.uk/uploads/3/7/8/4/3784584/191208_umhc_artwork.pdf adopting a pedagogy of kindness the challenge the response connecting co-constructing rather than 'telling' compassionate spaces normalising challenge recommendations references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special issue 22: compendium of innovative practice october 2021 ________________________________________________________________________ home alone? creating accessible, meaningful online learning spaces to teach academic writing to doctoral students vera leberecht keywords: teaching academic writing; doctoral writing; synchronous online teaching; covid-19. the challenge the teaching of academic writing has seen disruptive changes since the covid-19 pandemic began. most prominently it signalled a need to turn to remote teaching at very short notice. here, i share my experience as a self-employed academic writing teacher for doctoral students in germany and its neighbouring countries. in my writing workshops, rather than conveying knowledge or teaching techniques, i seek to support early career researchers as they explore what constitutes good academic writing in their research fields, expand their competencies, and develop their professional identities as members of their respective scientific communities (on writing as a social, embodied practice see: kamler, 2008; lee and aitchison, 2009; aitchison and guerin, 2014; kamler and thomson, 2014). in my sessions i aim to create low-threshold, meaningful learning experiences that involve interacting with and learning from peers, working on real-life tasks, and being present as human beings with minds, emotions, and bodies (immordino‐yang and damasio, 2007; immordino-yang and gotlieb, 2017). another important aspect is the focus on participants’ resources and on solutions rather than problems (bamberger, 2015; oades et al., 2017; middendorf, 2019). when the pandemic forced me to move my support online, i wanted to retain my successful hands-on, interactive, personal approach but this created three main challenges: how could i transfer a successful analog approach online while still taking seriously the participants’ specific needs as academic professionals? how could i ensure the writing workshop stayed as accessible as possible and kept its sense of live presence/character? how could leberecht home alone? creating accessible, meaningful online learning spaces to teach academic writing to doctoral students journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 2 i support participants to reflect, interact, and connect as adult learners who do not just need and want to learn but also to contribute their own experiences and expertises (knowles, hilton iii and swanson, 2015)? the response to transfer as many qualities of a long-standing, well-evaluated teaching format to the online environment as possible, i took three major decisions: i wanted to deliver live (synchronous) sessions that felt real to the participants and that used simple technology. i decided early to focus on synchronous training to engage participants in multiple ways (cognitive, social, visual, bodily-kinesthetic, etc. see: gardner, 2011; rapanta et al., 2020). the resulting shared live online space fostered a sense of togetherness, even though group members were not in the same physical room. i was visibly present in our virtual room during the whole workshop, even during small-group work. this availability and accessibility contributed to a focused atmosphere and was noted as a positive by participants. in addition, it enabled me to join small groups to answer questions and assist in technical/technological troubleshooting. students reported that they appreciated my approach as it complemented the asynchronous, written forum discussions and feedback (e.g., on moodle or blackboard) offered by other colleagues. i wanted my online teaching to have qualities which made it feel as real as its on-site counterpart. i reinforced this through the use of analogue objects and materials (flipchart, books, prompt cards) to complement digital whiteboards, slides, online resources, etc. i also encouraged participants to use long-hand writing (mueller and oppenheimer, 2014; morehead, dunlosky and rawson 2019; oppenheimer, 2019) for note-taking and other writing tasks. to ensure that participants could focus on content and meaningful interaction (turkle, 2017), i usually chose the simplest technical solution available. i did this in order to keep the training accessible for doctoral students, whose situations are traditionally precarious (consortium for the national report on junior scholars, 2021), and who were deprived of leberecht home alone? creating accessible, meaningful online learning spaces to teach academic writing to doctoral students journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 3 the institutional infrastructure they could formerly rely on (e.g., modern computers, broadband, etc.) when forced to work from home. during the workshop, students spent considerable time on synchronous writing tasks (e.g, free writing, writing sprints, storytelling, and mind-mapping). during individual tasks, they could choose to stay visibly present to strengthen the community of writers, or to find another workplace. in small groups, they gave and received peer feedback on drafts produced on the same day, or in advance, and discussed individual challenges and useful writing strategies. breaks could also be spent together in break-out rooms created for informal, relaxed interaction with peers. participants really appreciated the steps i took to retain my hands-on approach with its focus on connecting with fellow human beings (‘i was underestimating the importance of dialogue and feedback, i'll try to communicate more with my colleagues’, 28 july 2020). they may have been at home, but they were not alone. the practical tasks i gave them were useful for creating an atmosphere of deeper thinking and playful experimentation in their writing (‘i no longer fear writing. i now find writing playful’, 8 september 2020; ‘handwriting: this increased the output during the writing sessions a lot for me’, 15 january 2021). students reported feeling even more productive after the online sessions; attending a workshop virtually from the comfort zone of one’s desk might make it easier to just sit down and write than when in an unfamiliar classroom. recommendations when i developed more routine and confidence, after the initial turmoil of adapting to online teaching, i realised that effective teaching depends on many factors. as an educational professional, i wanted to create live, synchronous environments where young academics with diverse backgrounds could enter the professional conversation and connect with me, each other, and themselves – wherever possible. i did not want to teach writing skills but to empower young people in the academy (perisortiz and lindahl, 2015; rodríguez-gómez and ibarra-sáiz, 2015). to reach this goal, i leberecht home alone? creating accessible, meaningful online learning spaces to teach academic writing to doctoral students journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 4 addressed multiple intelligences (armstrong, 2009; gardner, 2011), i used humour (powell and andresen, 1985) and a fair share of pragmatism (silvia, 2018). to sum it up, the real question is not whether we teach on-site or online, but what kind of teaching we provide (ross, bayne and lamb, 2019; bayne et al., 2020). educators are constantly challenged to reflect on who they are, and who and what they care about. what do you want your students to take away from your class? once we are aware of our own motivations and foundations, we can create the learning/teaching environments that best suit us and our learners – whether we meet in the physical or virtual world. references aitchison, c. and guerin, c. (eds.) (2014) writing groups for doctoral education and beyond: innovations in practice and theory. london: routledge. armstrong, t. (2009) multiple intelligences in the classroom. 4th edn. alexandria: ascd. bamberger, g. g. (2015) lösungsorientierte beratung. 5th edn. weinheim: beltz. bayne, s., evans, p., ewins, r., knox, j. and lamb, j. (2020)the manifesto for teaching online. cambridge: mit press. consortium for the national report on junior scholars (2021) 2021 national report on junior scholars. statistical data and research findings on doctoral students and doctorate holders in germany. overview of key results. available at: https://www.buwin.de (accessed: 10 june 2021). gardner, h. e. (2011) frames of mind: the theory of multiple intelligences. 3rd edn. new york: basic books. immordino‐yang, m. h. and damasio, a. (2007) ‘we feel, therefore we learn: the relevance of affective and social neuroscience to education’, mind, brain, and education, 1(1), pp.3-10. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1751-228x.2007.00004.x. https://www.buwin.de/ https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1751-228x.2007.00004.x leberecht home alone? creating accessible, meaningful online learning spaces to teach academic writing to doctoral students journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 5 immordino-yang, m. h. and gotlieb, r. (2017) ‘embodied brains, social minds, cultural meaning: integrating neuroscientific and educational research on social-affective development’, american educational research journal, 54, pp.344s-367s. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199357376.013.9. kamler, b. (2008) ‘rethinking doctoral publication practices: writing from and beyond the thesis’, studies in higher education, 33(3), pp.283-294. https://doi.org/10.1080/03075070802049236. kamler, b. and thomson, p. (2014) helping doctoral students write: pedagogies for supervision. 2nd edn. london: routledge. knowles, m. s., holton iii, e. f. and swanson, r. a. (2015) the adult learner: the definitive classic in adult education and human resource development. 8th edn. london: routledge. lee, a. and aitchison, c. (2009) ‘writing for the doctorate and beyond’, in boud, d. and lee, a. (eds.) changing practices of doctoral education. london: routledge, pp.8799. middendorf, j. (2019) lösungsorientiertes coaching: kurzzeit-coaching für die praxis. 2nd edn. wiesbaden: springer fachmedien. morehead, k., dunlosky, j. and rawson, k. a. (2019) ‘how much mightier is the pen than the keyboard for note-taking? a replication and extension of mueller and oppenheimer (2014)’, educational psychology review, 31(3), pp.753-780. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10648-019-09468-2. mueller, p. a. and oppenheimer, d. m. (2014) ‘the pen is mightier than the keyboard: advantages of longhand over laptop note taking’, psychological science, 25(6), pp.1159-1168. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797614524581. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199357376.013.9 https://doi.org/10.1080/03075070802049236 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10648-019-09468-2 https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797614524581 leberecht home alone? creating accessible, meaningful online learning spaces to teach academic writing to doctoral students journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 6 oades, l. g., steger, m., delle fave, a. and passmore, j. (eds.) (2017) the wiley blackwell handbook of the psychology of positivity and strengths-based approaches at work. chichester: john wiley & sons. oppenheimer, d. (2019) ‘the relative advantages and disadvantages of paper and digital media in education’, impact. journal of the chartered college of teaching, 8. available at: https://impact.chartered.college/article/the-relative-advantagesdisadvantages-paper-digital-media-education/ (accessed: 10 june 2021). peris-ortiz, m. and lindahl, j. m. m. (eds.) (2015) sustainable learning in higher education. berlin: springer. powell, j. p., and andresen, l. w. (1985) ‘humour and teaching in higher education’, studies in higher education, 10(1), pp.79-90. https://doi.org/10.1080/03075078512331378726. rapanta, c., botturi, l., goodyear, p., guàrdia, l. and koole, m. (2020) ‘online university teaching during and after the covid-19 crisis: refocusing teacher presence and learning activity’, postdigit sci educ, 2, pp.923–945. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42438020-00155-y. rodríguez-gómez, g. and ibarra-sáiz, m. s. (2015) ‘assessment as learning and empowerment: towards sustainable learning in higher education’, in peris-ortiz, m. and lindahl, j. m. m. (eds.) sustainable learning in higher education. berlin: springer, pp.1-20. ross, j., bayne, s. and lamb, j. (2019) ‘critical approaches to valuing digital education: learning with and from the manifesto for teaching online’, digital culture and education, 11(1), pp.22-35. available at: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5cf15af7a259990001706378/t/5dea73f08c35 4b64fb152aae/1575646198702/cover-merged.pdf (accessed 10 june 2021). silvia, p. j. (2018) how to write a lot: a practical guide to productive academic writing. 2nd edn. washington: american psychological association. https://impact.chartered.college/article/the-relative-advantages-disadvantages-paper-digital-media-education/ https://impact.chartered.college/article/the-relative-advantages-disadvantages-paper-digital-media-education/ https://doi.org/10.1080/03075078512331378726 https://doi.org/10.1007/s42438-020-00155-y https://doi.org/10.1007/s42438-020-00155-y leberecht home alone? creating accessible, meaningful online learning spaces to teach academic writing to doctoral students journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 7 turkle, s. (2017) alone together: why we expect more from technology and less from each other. new york: basic books. author details vera leberecht studied linguistics, intercultural communication and theology in germany and finland. she worked at maastricht university language centre for several years, first as a teacher for academic writing, then as a head of department of the english section. in 2008, she left the university to start her own training and consulting business. she is passionate about empowering professionals to communicate with reason and resonance, in academia and beyond. home alone? creating accessible, meaningful online learning spaces to teach academic writing to doctoral students the challenge the response recommendations references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special issue 22: compendium of innovative practice october 2021 ________________________________________________________________________ the chameleon approach to change: adapting to new educational conditions laura davies duke kunshan university, china joseph davies duke kunshan university, china keywords: change management; communities of practice; covid-19; faculty support; sinoforeign university. the challenge disruption, displacement and the sudden shift to online learning with china at the forefront of the global pandemic, institutions based there led the way in shifting teaching and learning online at short notice. although online teaching and learning is not a new phenomenon, the speed with which change was required, coupled with the stressors and anxiety of the pandemic, led to a set of circumstances requiring resilience, skill development, and mutual understanding from stakeholders. furthermore, at this sino-us joint venture university, the shift to online learning came mid-way through courses, with faculty, staff, and students dispersed for the chinese new year holiday. consequently, the challenge of supporting dispersed faculty to survive and thrive, whilst providing the best possible higher education (he) experience during the pandemic emerged. a community of practice (cop) constitutes a group of people with a shared concern for a topic, craft, or profession (wenger, 1998) which arises out of learning, and involves participation (including conversations and reflections) and reification (including artefacts, documents, processes, and methods) (wenger, 2010). with specific reference to our own english for academic purposes (eap) cops comprising internal eap faculty and external eap faculty at other sino-joint venture institutions, we examine shared participation and davies and davies the chameleon approach to change: adapting to new educational conditions journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 2 reification to derive a 9-point framework for supporting faculty adapting to sudden educational change. the response micro-level and macro-level reflective collaboration internally and externally, eap faculty adapted to the pandemic differently, and there was much to learn from within our cops. although there is a body of literature supporting both change management and online learning, pundyke (2020) notes that existing educational change management theories are not designed for crisis management or use at short notice. furthermore, shah (2012) recommends peers talk, share, and collaborate, at micro-level (peers and course groups) as well as at macro-level (institution or sector-wide) to help minimise negative impacts on faculty wellbeing. therefore, the authors collaborated with internal and external eap faculty peers to develop cops that acted as faculty support networks. initially, author a and four internationally-dispersed internal eap faculty colleagues, decided to work collaboratively for the remainder of the semester, pooling resources, materials, and wellbeing tips. weekly zoom meetings, regular email, and group-chat conversations were used to maximise efficiency, collectively develop pedagogy and learning resources and mentally support one another (see l. davies et al., 2020 for more details). at the end of the academic year, macro-level collaborative reflections were carried out amongst six teachers from five eap courses, across four sino-foreign universities based in china, working towards a variety of written and oral based learning objectives. through collaborative reflection, comprised around three specific written prompts, we shared areas of good practice, and the key challenges faced when transforming eap courses to online delivery at short notice in our respective contexts. using shared written reflective documents and combining these reflections into a comparative paper, we were able to share the cop’s experiences internally and with the wider eap community to further support faculty during ongoing times of change (see j. davies et al., 2020 for more details). davies and davies the chameleon approach to change: adapting to new educational conditions journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 3 recommendations 9-point chameleon framework based on these microand macrolevel reflections about our rapid shift to online teaching, we have highlighted the key takeaways from our cops and compiled a user-friendly framework to support higher education practitioners faced with sudden uncertainty, crisis, or change. the 9-point chameleon framework (see table 1), as the name suggests, is designed to be flexible, and adaptable for different educational contexts. table 1. 9-point chameleon framework for faculty support when adapting to sudden educational change. factor explanation c communicate communicate with colleagues and communities of practice regularly and openly. collaborate and form teams to share and divide tasks and responsibilities where possible. connect with your scholarly community as time allows (conferences, working groups, chats). h humanise be kind, supportive and responsive to learner and peer needs, interests and capabilities, and your own! try personalising teaching materials and class input to show you care/help reduce learner anxiety. be patient and understanding of others’ circumstances. a assess assess the needs of your learners in this new educational context. evaluate what has changed and how this will impact your learners. assess your own capabilities operating under these new conditions – you must first survive, before you can thrive. assess the needs of your colleagues, offer expertise, and support where you can. m motivate motivate students by delivering classes in a positive and dynamic way that inspires learners to take part. develop tasks that appeal to various learning preferences and provide opportunities for autonomous learning. motivate yourself and your team through regularly checking in with peers and developing a community of practice. davies and davies the chameleon approach to change: adapting to new educational conditions journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 4 e engage actively encourage student engagement with your course and their wider interests where possible to promote a shared sense of community. enable students to meta-cognitively reflect on their learning and progress to set regular learning goals. where possible, facilitate group work, peer support and utilise different feedback methods (peer review, voice and video feedback) to promote academic and peer engagement and a sense of connectedness. l localise strongly consider the contextual norms and expectations of the local teaching environment. familiarise yourself with restrictions that students, colleagues, or you may face if geographically dispersed, and ensure online tools and resources are appropriate and available to all who need them. e evolve as internal and external, personal and professional needs and circumstances change, ensure to plan for flexibility, allowing for evolving needs. scaling back may be necessary. o (be) open be open to new ideas, trial new tools and techniques. use change as a learning and development process for teachers and students. n negotiate regularly consult and discuss with learners and peers about their changing needs and expectations while studying and working in a new environment. ensure course workloads are manageable for both students and yourself, and be willing to adapt if necessary. re-evaluate priorities. it is hoped that as educators progress from emergency to online and hybrid instruction (hodges et al., 2020), practitioners can draw upon this framework for course enhancement and faculty wellbeing support. additionally, as the pandemic-stimulated restrictions on international mobility continue to disrupt and reshape education globally, the future remains uncertain. not only pandemics, but global political shifts, climate, and technological change can all impact the education sector – particularly within transnational education contexts. consequently, the sector needs to be prepared for sudden change. we therefore conclude that although there is no one-size-fits-all approach to successful sudden online transition, davies and davies the chameleon approach to change: adapting to new educational conditions journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 5 willingness to experiment using the chameleon framework as a baseline for adaptation and faculty support can be beneficial for practitioners, and in turn, for students and he institutions. references davies, j. a., davies, l. j., conlon, b. m., emmerson, j., hainsworth, h. and mcdonough, h. g. (2020) ‘responding to covid-19 in eap contexts: a comparison of courses at four sinoforeign universities’, international journal of tesol studies, 2(2), pp.32-51. https://doi.org/10.46451/ijts.2020.09.04. davies, l. j., chiocca, e. s., hiller, k. e., campbell, m. and naghib, s. (2020) ‘transformative learning in times of global crisis: reflections on collaborative working practice’, cea critic, 82(3), pp.218-226. https://doi.org/10.1353/cea.2020.0036. hodges, c., moore, s., lockee, b., trust, t. and bond, a, (2020) the difference between emergency remote and online learning, 27 march. available at: https://er.educause.edu/articles/2020/3/the-difference-between-emergency-remoteteaching-and-online-learning (accessed: 1 june 2021). pundyke, o. s. (2020) ‘change management in higher education: an introductory literature review’, perspectives: policy and practice in higher education, 24(4), pp.115120. https://doi.org/10.1080/13603108.2020.1809545. shah, m. (2012) ‘the importance and benefits of teacher collegiality in schools: a literature review’, procedia-social and behavioral sciences, 46, pp.1242-46. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/s1877042812014115 (accessed: 25 october 2021). wenger, e. (1998) communities of practice: learning, meaning and identity. new york: cambridge university press. https://doi.org/10.46451/ijts.2020.09.04 https://doi.org/10.1353/cea.2020.0036 https://er.educause.edu/articles/2020/3/the-difference-between-emergency-remote-teaching-and-online-learning https://er.educause.edu/articles/2020/3/the-difference-between-emergency-remote-teaching-and-online-learning https://doi-org.ezproxy.lancs.ac.uk/10.1080/13603108.2020.1809545 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/s1877042812014115 davies and davies the chameleon approach to change: adapting to new educational conditions journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 6 wenger, e. (2010) ‘communities of practice and social learning systems: the career of a concept’, in blackmore, c. (ed.) social learning systems and communities of practice. berlin: springer verlag and the open university, pp.179-198. author details laura j. davies is the assistant director of eap and lecturer of english language at duke kunshan university. she holds an ma in tesol with applied linguistics and a delta, specialising in higher education english language teaching management. she is also a senior fellow of the higher education academy (sfhea). her current research focuses on intercultural engagement, student identity, and course design. joseph a. davies is lecturer of english language at duke kunshan university. he holds an ma in tesol with applied linguistics, a delta, and senior fellowship of the higher education academy (sfhea). his current research focuses on feedback literacy and eap pedagogy within sino-foreign higher education contexts. the chameleon approach to change: adapting to new educational conditions the challenge disruption, displacement and the sudden shift to online learning the response micro-level and macro-level reflective collaboration recommendations 9-point chameleon framework references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special issue 22: compendium of innovative practice october 2021 editorial: students as partners in course delivery gita sedghi university of liverpool the concept of students as partners has attracted increased attention in higher education during the last decade. healey et al. (2014) describe students as partners as ‘a relationship in which all involved – students, academics, professional services staff, senior managers, students’ unions, and so on – are actively engaged in and stand to gain from the process of learning and working together’. as strong advocates of ‘students as partners’ practices, the writers in this section of the compendium found themselves in a difficult situation when trying to engage in genuine and meaningful partnership with students during the pandemic. the key challenge they faced was how to involve students in dialogue about online and blended modules as they were being developed, rather than after they were delivered. the mechanisms for student feedback in existing quality assurance processes were not adequate for the emergency redesign of modules. in this crisis, universities also seemed to be less successful at assuring students of the quality education they were receiving. the pieces in this section show us how educators enabled and empowered students to cocreate design and delivery solutions that worked for them while respecting the boundaries of the institutional limitations. developing informed reflection skills that relied on students’ active involvement rather than merely attending sessions and taking notes was more difficult than ever. course provision is a complex endeavour requiring thorough planning of learning objectives, pedagogies, classroom procedures, materials, and assessment. moving these to a different mode of delivery takes time, effort, and relevant training, none of which were available during the rapid switch to online teaching due to covid-19. the coronavirus pandemic gave universities a chance to reflect on new ways to embrace student partnership. students contributed to vital aspects of the university’s pandemic response, including developing new digital learning and teaching principles, guidance for editorial journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 blended learning, and support for those self-isolating. this section of the jldhe compendium showcases the educators and learning developers’ initiatives to co-create curricula with students and engage them in co-developing the policies underpinning their learning and its outcomes. the authors of the papers that follow draw on the lessons learned and recommend ways that enable students to act as agents of change in designing effective strategies to support their learning and attainment – beyond the classroom. the partnership approach to designing and assuring the quality of education provides an effective and constructive way to build trust in online and other novel or changed ways of doing things. the pandemic showed how emphasising communication with the students and giving them some agency in making decisions around transition create a comfortable learning environment that may mitigate the effects of uncertainty and stress. when the students had clear explanations of how the classes would run and what issues may arise, they felt less stressed and overwhelmed with the new technologies and class procedure adaptations. treating students as design partners does not mean giving students a free choice, but it does mean giving them a choice and honouring it. references: healey, m., flint, a. and harrington, k. (2014) engagement through partnership: students as partners in learning and teaching in higher education. york: the higher education academy. journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 16: december 2019 ________________________________________________________________________ special collections as a catalyst for flexible pedagogical approaches: three case studies maria kukhareva university of bedfordshire anne lawrence university of bedfordshire katherine koulle ucl institute of education nazlin bhimani ucl institute of education abstract university special collections are increasingly being recognised as a valuable pedagogical resource in higher education teaching and learning. the value of historical artefacts as a cross-disciplinary tool to promote higher order thinking processes such as criticality, questioning and narrative construction is well-established in the museum education literature and is gaining increasing attention in teaching and learning development. in this paper, we present three case studies in which we explore the application of special collections in a range of learning development contexts in order to help students engage with their discipline and discipline-specific higher order skills. our case studies are explorative in the sense of ‘trialling’ the use of historical artefacts in the classroom, to inform our next steps and the development of our method. we conclude with our reflections on the process and outcomes of our explorations in order to inform our practice and that of other educators looking to apply this method. keywords: flexible pedagogies; special collections; historical artefacts; museum education; academic writing; information literacy; narrative enquiry. kukhareva et al. special collections as a catalyst for flexible pedagogical approaches: three case studies journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 2 introduction flexible pedagogical approaches can take different forms. in this paper, we present three case studies that advocate the broader use of university special collections as a flexible pedagogical resource aimed at enhancing students’ learning and development. the case studies are 'works in progress' − elements of pedagogical practice that act as an exploration of the application of special collections. we are on a journey of discovery, continually refining this method within teaching and learning development. the origin of this article lies in an exploratory workshop for teaching staff which we facilitated at bedfordshire. grounded in object-based learning, visual literacy and museum education, the workshop provided a space to explore the versatility of special collection artefacts for teaching subject-specific material and relevant academic competencies. high levels of interest and positive feedback from the participants encouraged us to develop the concept further, across two institutions. here we share insights from this exploration, in particular around the design and the implementation of the method. it is important to clarify that, rather than evaluating a completed research project, we present our paper from a ‘practitioner angle’, focusing on our continuing explorations of developing and refining a new teaching method from our own observations, as our method, and student feedback. the three case studies focus on our engagement with students across three disciplines (business studies, education studies, music education), and three levels of study (foundation, final year undergraduate, postgraduate), and are written from three different practitioner perspectives (educational developer, librarian, academic writing senior teaching fellow). this variation provided us with valuable insights in terms of further adapting the method. our main aim is to explore and develop a teaching method which could help students engage with their discipline or discipline-specific skills through an unexpected, possibly surprising, medium: historical images and objects. by inviting our students to 'trial' the use of the artefacts in the classroom, we aimed to acquire information to inform our next steps. further explanation of this process is discussed in our method section below. the reader will notice that our models share a common thread: authenticity of the artefacts as a catalyst for students' curiosity and engagement, criticality, argument construction, kukhareva et al. special collections as a catalyst for flexible pedagogical approaches: three case studies journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 3 reflexivity and own subjectivity, and transferability of thinking. each case study, however, has its own 'leading' focus. the first focusses on questioning as a way to own positionality and narrative enquiry, the second on critical analysis and information literacy, and the third explores criticality in academic writing. we have deliberately preserved the variations in underpinning approaches to be helpful to a broad range of educators. special collections across and beyond disciplines museum and university special collections are increasingly looked upon with interest by higher education educators as a helpful, and perhaps, surprising teaching resource. there seems to be a 'coming together’ of museum education and higher education practice, with historical artefacts being recognised as powerful tools for promoting higher order thinking. german and harris (2017) point to the ‘agile’ function of museum objects in encouraging students’ engagement with a broad range of topics, from discipline-specific (material, history, use) to interdisciplinary (the same object could be explored from the point of view of anthropology, creative writing, history, microbiology), and even beyond the disciplines at the level of cross-disciplinary academic practice that underpins learning (interrogation, critical thinking). hardie (2015) offers inspiring examples from her art and design practice, which promotes meaning making and experiential learning through interrogation of objects and images. other accounts have also been provided around the value of special collections for cross-disciplinary pedagogies (carini, 2016; yaco et al., 2016). chatterjee and hannan (2015) provide a comprehensive overview of both theory and practice around object-based learning in higher education and its rich potential for helping students develop critical and abstract thinking, creativity, and research skills in a variety of disciplines, from art and design to biosciences, music and education. there are multiple reasons behind these cross-disciplinary developments. the everchanging landscape of higher education drives institutions towards creativity and innovation through crossand inter-disciplinary collaborations at the level of research, programmes and instruction (jacob, 2015). our main task as educators is, arguably, to provide our students with opportunities to prepare for what brandt and eagleman (2017) refer to as 'creativity economy', where ‘the only thing that allows us to face these accelerating changes [is] cognitive flexibility[...] we absorb the raw materials of experience kukhareva et al. special collections as a catalyst for flexible pedagogical approaches: three case studies journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 4 and manipulate them into something new [...] reaching beyond the facts [...] we master what is, and envisage what-ifs’ (brandt and eagleman, 2017, p.8). in other words, there is an increasing value placed on developing the ‘skill of transfer’ (gibbs, 2014, p.3), an ‘adaptive expertise [...] where the context learning is intended to transfer into is new and different in important respects but where you nevertheless expect your graduates to cope better than others’. we want to equip our students with approaches and ways of thinking, which they can adapt and apply to a range of contexts and scenarios. interdisciplinary instruction has the potential to support students in enhancing their higher order cognitive ability, including critical thinking, bias recognition and working with ambiguity (vess and linkon, 2001; repko, 2007). with this in mind, we see the flexibility of special collections as twofold. on one hand, special collections provide our students with an opportunity to practice cognitive flexibility and develop the skill of transferring creative solutions to unfamiliar contexts. abstract thinking and critical analysis, imagination and creativity, reflection and learning transfer are central to both engaging with the discipline and graduate employability (universities uk, 2015; ual, 2018). on the other hand, the collections present themselves as a flexible resource, which can be adapted to suit a range of disciplines, topics and study levels. current literature on special collections draws on a range of pedagogical theory; there are strong connections with kolb’s (1984) experiential learning, multisensory learning (morrison, 2015), curiosity, and museum-based learning (vitelli, 2014; chatterjee and hannan, 2015; hardie, 2015; german and harris, 2017). we draw on this literature to suggest that well-established practices in museum and arts-based education, such as interrogating objects and images, meaning making and critical reflection, have potential to enhance mastery of important academic practices. we also extend the understanding of special collections to flexible ‘post-disciplinary’ pedagogy (ryan and tilbury, 2013), whereby the artefacts are used to promote development of academic practices that not only underpin, but also go beyond the discipline, specifically: critical thinking, information literacy, questioning and positionality. these practices may present a challenge for both lecturers (to teach effectively) and students (to articulate, and to clearly demonstrate), as they rely on abstract (and kukhareva et al. special collections as a catalyst for flexible pedagogical approaches: three case studies journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 5 subjective) processes that underpin learning (johnston et al., 2011; brown, 2014; dunne, 2015). the discourse around criticality, questioning and narrative construction as the foundation for engaging with historical artefacts, as well as their role in relation to the process of critical and aesthetic enquiry, are well developed in the museum education literature (see, for example, raney, 1999; bevan and xanthoudaki, 2008; german and harris, 2017) and slowly gaining momentum in teaching and learning development in higher education. furthermore, the discourse around visual pedagogy and intertextuality (see, for example, moss, 2010; rifà‐valls, 2011) provides a useful frame of reference for our work, in which both visual and verbal language are approached as 'text'. in this sense, the language born out of the interaction between objects and images (and/or verbal text) can supply learners with meaningful contextualisation for their process of enquiry. indeed, it may at first seem counterintuitive to use sensory and visual methods as a way to connect with new knowledge within a text-centred discipline, while most of the academic processes and outputs gravitate currently towards text (see, for example, raney, 1999; chatterjee et al., 2015). yet engaging with objects and images can make thinking, exploring, making connections, analysing and imagining – processes that are difficult to capture – tangible and more visible (see dunne, 2015). it also fosters a dynamic learning environment, fuelled by excitement and curiosity – what hardie (2015) refers to as ‘the power of wow’. this type of innovative instruction can also be challenging; as bateson (2001) puts it: ‘at the centre of any tradition, it is easy to become blind to alternatives’ (p.73). in relation to interdisciplinarity specifically, there is evidence that interdisciplinary pedagogical methods can produce exciting results. for example, a study by jasani and saks (2013) illustrates how art can be used to help medical students develop observation skills in clinical diagnosis. four themes identified in jasani and saks's analysis centre around subjective terminology, scope of interpretations, speculative thinking and use of visual analogies. so, by encouraging our students to consciously reflect on their ‘ways of looking’ and ‘ways of seeing’ objects and images from our special collections, we encourage our students to further develop their critical eye and skill of interpretation, and then find intertextual ways of transferring these approaches to the subject knowledge. kukhareva et al. special collections as a catalyst for flexible pedagogical approaches: three case studies journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 6 special collections 'three ways' the collections utilised in the case studies are the bedford physical education archive (university of bedfordshire, 2018) and the bernarr rainbow collection at the ucl institute of education. we highlight the collections' versatility through applying three different frames: teaching and learning enhancement, information literacy and academic writing. we see the ‘post-disciplinary’ (ryan and tilbury, 2013) potential of special collections, as we work across and alongside specific disciplines in our professional roles. our method our method is a pedagogical approach grounded in object-based learning in museums and higher education (chatterjee and hannan, 2015; german and harris, 2017). this article provides a snapshot in time of us exploring this method, as it is understood in artsbased disciplines, with discourse around deconstruction, necessary reiterations and outputs (see, for example, nelson, 2013; skains, 2018). our exploration is ongoing, and this snapshot depicts our initial practitioner observations and experiences, and the process of adapting and refining our pedagogical method. our process maps deconstruct the scaffolding of activities and processes in our sessions; our reiterations use archives across different disciplines, levels and topic areas; our output is our case studies. the method needed to be adaptable in order to embed it into teaching across different disciplines, and at different levels of study. two consistent methodological aspects have been the phased introduction of objects and the questioning technique, both used to encourage interaction, reflection-in-action, and reflection-on-action (grushka et al., 2005).the explorative design was shared with the students from the start; the experimental, 'beyond-the-discipline' nature of the activity was explained in order to encourage active participation and to request verbal consent. student feedback was collected at the end of each session, through post-it notes, around three themes: what went well, what did not, and what was surprising (in a couple of words). post-its are an accessible tool, bringing further interactivity and allowing gathering of feedback without kukhareva et al. special collections as a catalyst for flexible pedagogical approaches: three case studies journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 7 contributing to 'survey fatigue' (see, for example, peterson and barron, 2007). the nature of the feedback ensured brevity, anonymity and activity-specificity. the themes arising from student responses provided insights in addition to our observations and feedback from academic peers at development workshops. the development workshops were initially delivered by two of the current authors; the third author of this paper participated in one of the workshops and subsequently collaborated with the two practitioners to develop and adapt the method to be trialled in each of our areas of practice. we co-designed the scaffolding and questioning techniques and the three feedback prompt questions for each session. after each session or ‘iteration’ we shared our own insights and those of our students. the insights from both peers and students, along with our own observations, helped inform our practice further, and we modified the method accordingly after each iteration. student feedback was consistent with our own observations, and these insights and further steps for development are discussed in the 'reflections and observations' section. to illustrate the process of designing, refining and implementing the method, we developed the following concept map (figure 1): figure 1. process of method design kukhareva et al. special collections as a catalyst for flexible pedagogical approaches: three case studies journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 8 the process illustrated above is still ongoing. below we share our initial experiences, observations and insights through three case studies – one from each of our specific practitioner perspectives. case study 1: using special collections to encourage questioning and narrative enquiry: an educational development perspective focus on: questioning, narrative enquiry, subjectivity, positionality as an educational developer, my interest was in ‘trying out’ the special collections approach for the purposes of discipline-specific teaching, in this case, in education studies. the method was offered to two groups of final year undergraduates (thirty students in each group, working in groups of five). the activity aimed to create a space for the participants to practice questioning techniques as a ‘driver’ for narrative enquiry, as part of preparation for their dissertation project. the importance of questioning as a higher cognitive skill, and even as an ‘art’ has been highlighted in the literature (doering and pekarik, 1996; phillips and duke, 2001; yang et al., 2005). the dialogical, critical and reflexive nature of questioning can be used to direct enquiry − not only into a topic, but also into the learner’s own positionality (and how subjectivities may impact the narrative construction). parallels with socratic questioning and guided self-discovery can be made here (paul and elder, 2008). in particular, mezirow's (2003) concept of 'communicative learning' is helpful, in which questioning encourages ‘critique of the assertion itself’ (p.8). formulating research questions and ‘unpacking’ the research topic is an area that students may find challenging (anderson and arsenault, 2005). the students were asked to create possible narratives around sets of artefacts: photographs, sports equipment, journals (see process map 1). starting with the artefacts that presented fewer potential cues (relatively abstract photographs), each following object could be more easily interpreted (a threedimensional object). the last object contained most identifiable information, including text (journals). kukhareva et al. special collections as a catalyst for flexible pedagogical approaches: three case studies journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 9 process map 1. special collections as a catalyst for questioning and narrative building (bedford physical education archive, university of bedfordshire special collection). process map 1: special collections as a catalyst for questioning and narrative building (credit: bedford physical education archive, university of bedfordshire special collection) step 2. collaborative inquiry. another artefact added. question and explore possible connections between the two photographs. what scenarios are emerging? step 3. collaborative inquiry. a physical object is added to the set. now, consider the three artefacts together. go back to your initial questions. can you answer any? go back to your scenarios. what story is emerging? does the new artefact confirm, or confuse your assumption? how? why? step 5. final interpretations and narrative presentations. discussion: ways of seeing and questioning. application for developing research questions and narrative construction. reflection. how does your narrative look now? at which point did it start taking this shape? what helped you make that decision? which questions were the most helpful? which questions got answered? which ones didn’t? reflection. share questions with the group. what did you ask? are there different / similar questions? why did you ask this? kukhareva et al. special collections as a catalyst for flexible pedagogical approaches: three case studies journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 10 as ‘not all learning is “learning to do” but […] understanding […] the meaning of what others communicate’ (mezirow, 2003, p.204), it was made clear to the students that ‘ways of seeing’ and ‘ways of knowing’ would be encouraged (not only 'what?', but also 'what if?'). it was important to help the students connect with their individual creativity, thinking disposition and positionality – to elicit possible meanings, interpretations and narratives. the observed effect was a dynamic and collaborative process of iteration and reiteration, which manifested through ‘layering' of interpretations, forming into narratives. encouraging multiple reiterations promotes ‘possibility thinking’ and creates negotiated meanings (dillon and howe, 2003). as the workshop was designed to support students’ thinking around a possible dissertation topic, and the articulation of research questions, it was important to make sure this connection, and the transferability was not lost. the students were asked to identify aspects of questioning and narrative building, which could be used to ‘interrogate’ their chosen topic area, as well as to identify, and critique, their own positionality. the activity resulted in a variety of narratives and interpretations that comprised an amalgamation of the students’ own experiences, imaginations, and factual information – addressing both the ‘content’ (breadth) and the ‘meaning’ (depth) (polkinghorne, 2006). feedback from the students indicated that they found the activity engaging and enjoyable; the value of working with authentic artefacts was mentioned; the interaction with peers and sharing of analytical experiences was valuable; some students were positively surprised by their own creativity. reflecting on the observation of students’ interactions and engagement during the session and their feedback, the ‘scaffolding’ approach to ‘layering’ the information (by presenting the artefacts one after another; and encouraging reflection after each stage) seemed to support students in practising their metacognitive skills (see, for example, holton and clarke, 2006) and encouraged the process of collaborative enquiry. kukhareva et al. special collections as a catalyst for flexible pedagogical approaches: three case studies journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 11 case study 2: using special collections to encourage criticality: an information literacy perspective focus on: critical thinking, information literacy, textual interrogation, argumentation for librarians, communicating the value of information literacy as a lifelong research skill is a challenge due to the fleeting nature of our contact with the students. the demonstration of practical research skills is an established practice, but this does not necessarily lead to better equipped students (walsh, 2018). using objects to scaffold this learning, as arnoldfoster et al. (2015) discuss, is a way for librarians to be further involved in the development of students, for them to impart ‘skills of transfer’ (p.3) in a memorable and engaging way, utilising the active learning pedagogical approach (gibbs, 2014). ‘information literacy’ is defined as ‘the ability to think critically and make balanced judgements about any information we find and use’ (cilip, 2018). the artefacts used in this session were similar to case study 1; by using objects that were not immediately related to their subject, students could question and critically evaluate information whilst demonstrating their ‘intellectual humility’ (acrl, 2016, p.7) – they acknowledge their own experience may lead to limitations, but remain open minded to other perspectives and interpretations. the session was offered to three groups of around 30 foundation year business students (level three), split into groups of between three and five, and the aim was to encourage them to develop the skills they require to thrive during undergraduate study (see qaa, 2014, level descriptors). the workshop helped to identify a process of establishing common themes and presenting a summary argument − vital for undergraduate study (van gelder, 2015). the session required students to interpret the artefacts and make links between them, before repeating the process with academic resources (see process map 2). as discussed above, the historical artefacts were not specific to the students’ own discipline. the academic sources that students would be expected to utilise (for example journal articles), were all subject-related and this allowed us to observe whether students were able to transfer the processes and skills in which they engaged when exploring the objects to discipline-specific enquiry. kukhareva et al. special collections as a catalyst for flexible pedagogical approaches: three case studies journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 12 the groups seemed initially cautious but became more engaged with the objects through the scaffolding of the questioning processes and explorative activities, echoing the acrl framework, which values ‘developing […] new investigative methods’ (acrl, 2016, p.7) and encourages students to have an open mind, criticality, flexibility and creativity (acrl, 2016). all students started from an assumed ‘level playing field’ (since the objects were unfamiliar and not immediately related to the specific discipline), which encouraged them to draw on their own backgrounds and skills to interpret the information. during the contextualisation stage, in which students moved to evaluating academic sources, skilful facilitation was needed in order to explain how the processes engaged in when exploring the artefacts could be transferred. this aspect of our method may be challenging for the facilitator to navigate − it was important to keep reminding the students that they should avoid focusing narrowly on the specifics, and instead focus on themes. this challenge enabled an unscheduled but frank discussion about how to strategically read literature. the initial questioning activity was useful, and some students did grasp that they were learning lifelong skills. the limitations of the session from the student perspective, as evidenced in their feedback, were the length of time in which to read the literature when using subject material, repetitiveness of the task cycle, and a perception of lack of relevance to their subject or assignment work. overall, though, the feedback was positive, and the atmosphere in the room was energetic, demonstrating that students seemed to enjoy learning through a new and innovative technique – this was also explicitly stated in their feedback. kukhareva et al. special collections as a catalyst for flexible pedagogical approaches: three case studies journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 13 process map 2: special collections as a catalyst for critical enquiry and information literacy (credit: bedford physical education archive, university of bedfordshire special collection) process map 2: special collections as a catalyst for critical enquiry and information literacy (credit: bedford physical education archive, university of bedfordshire special collection) acrl guidelines: information literate persons can “formulate questions for research based on information gaps or reexamination of existing, possibly conflicting, information” (acrl, 2016, p. 7) acrl: draw conclusions based on analysis and interpretation of information (acrl, 2016, p. 7) step 2. groups discussed their questions. were they the same or different? why? step 3. additional artefacts were added, one at a time, every 3-4 minutes. groups asked to think if the questions they generated could be applied to the additional objects, and if they could identify common themes. step 5. the process was repeated, but with academic sources. the sources were a journal article, news article, government legislation all themed around workplace policy on uniforms, which added both academic and subject context. kukhareva et al. special collections as a catalyst for flexible pedagogical approaches: three case studies journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 14 it can be argued that information literacy is a basic human right, as it enables and empowers (ifla, 2015). an activity that incorporates artefacts can address the challenges of teaching one-off sessions by making the content and the meaning more memorable and emphasising the transferability of research skills and critical thinking. this method helps students to view research skills as something beyond their curriculum − as a ‘postdisciplinary’ (ryan and tilbury, 2013) transferable competency, rather than just a set of processes that they can learn to enhance their academic progression. case study 3: special collections as a catalyst for criticality and creativity in reviewing literature: an academic writing perspective focus on: literature review, criticality, academic writing in academic writing development, genre and text analysis are common pedagogical approaches (see, for example, wingate, 2012); however, writing processes are often abstract, tacit and ‘opaque’ (gourlay, 2009). we therefore sought to ‘awaken’ some of the possible processes involved in critically reviewing literature using historical artefacts from the bernarr rainbow special collection at the ucl institute of education library. two workshops were developed by the special collections librarian and senior teaching fellow in academic writing for postgraduate music education students – one in 2017 (20 participants), and one in 2018 (25 participants) which was a revised repeat of the earlier workshop, based on collaborative reflections with the authors of this paper and feedback received on the earlier ‘iteration’. in the earlier iteration, student feedback revealed that some of the instructions during the scaffolding of the activities may have been unclear, and it was important to clarify the non-prescriptive and interpretative approach to exploring the objects and their possible connections. student feedback also indicated that more time devoted to the ‘transfer’ reading and writing activities would have been beneficial, and timings were therefore also adapted. the activities and stages of the session can be seen in process map 3 below. kukhareva et al. special collections as a catalyst for flexible pedagogical approaches: three case studies journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 15 process map 3: special collections as a catalyst for criticality and creativity in reviewing literature (credit: bernarr rainbow collection, ucl institute of education library) process map 3: special collections as a catalyst for criticality and creativity in reviewing literature (credit: bernarr rainbow collection, ucl institute of education library) step 2. collaborative inquiry and further exploration. additional images and physical artefacts added. each table is given a group of artefacts – these are grouped together by theme (e.g. teaching singing using handsigns, boys choirs, conversational teaching, foundations of music etc.). participants are encouraged to explore connections between artefacts and to the initial image, in order to ignite the ‘research imagination’ (hart, 1998). group discussion and reflection on group interpretations. followed up with ‘revealing’ of origin of artefacts. reflection. share questions with the group. are questions similar or different? what do they say about your educational / professional background and your biases? step 3. collaborative enquiry and ‘detective work’ (hardie, 2015). how might all the artefacts piece together? can there be more than one interpretation? what is missing to help you make connections, disconnections and draw conclusions? where are the ‘silences’? what is not being said. what is missing? what do you still want to know and why? step 5. reflection on the processes engaged in during the previous steps. what processes/ senses were ‘awakened’ when exploring the artefacts? which verbs / action phrases could be used to describe the processes you engaged in during the task? (e.g. analysing, evaluating, synthesising, delving) step 4. present one interpretation of the artefacts per group (2 minutes). step 6. linking and application to literature review research and writing processes. how do the processes identified in step 5 relate to process of researching and reviewing literature? what is the value of historical inquiry in the processes of academic researching and writing? how are these processes identified in your reading? how can they be demonstrated in your writing? kukhareva et al. special collections as a catalyst for flexible pedagogical approaches: three case studies journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 16 the artefacts included images representing the history of music education and historical texts on music education and pedagogy. each group was given an initial image to examine individually before the phased introduction of additional images to explore and discuss as a group. the aim was to simulate some of the questioning processes involved in critically reviewing literature and activate the participants’ own meaning-making and creative processes in order to ignite the ‘research imagination’ (hart, 1998). the activity concluded with participants presenting a summary of their interpretation of the artefacts. in the post-task reflection, participants discussed how criticality might be demonstrated in researching and reviewing literature: situating themselves and thereby foregrounding their own voices and experiences, going beyond describing what is said in the literature, synthesising ideas and perspectives, making new meanings, considering new options that remain under the surface. for example, one group noted that their questions on the initial artefact corresponded with their professional backgrounds and research interests (see process map 3); some of the participants had questions about the pedagogical approaches to music being depicted, whilst others discussed social indicators such as dress and gender. based on our observations during the session and students’ verbal and written responses, the historical artefacts awakened the learners’ curiosity in a unique way partly because of the ‘unfamiliarity’ of the objects – the opportunity to ‘play detective’ was highlighted in student feedback, and students were able to draw parallels with the research and reviewing process. there was a ‘buzz’ around the room as artefacts were revealed, and the associated connections, disconnections and silences were explored (hardie, 2015). using artefacts in this way, underpinned by principles of object-based learning (robyns, 2001; carini, 2016), also helped to develop students’ critical information literacies by considering questions about what the object was, when and why it was created, and how it was used or could be used in the present time, taking into consideration the wider contexts. thus, students were constructing knowledge through their experiences of exploring (unfamiliar) objects (chatterjee et al., 2015), which, we argue, simulates some of the possible processes involved in critically reviewing literature. kukhareva et al. special collections as a catalyst for flexible pedagogical approaches: three case studies journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 17 our case study highlights the pedagogical value of historical artefacts beyond disciplinary learning and how they could be used to activate processes of critical enquiry, synthesis, independent thought, meaning making and creativity. for academic writing development specifically, we observed the potential of exploring abstract concepts and processes through interdisciplinary and post-disciplinary means alongside traditional text-based approaches. as discussed above, exploration of the objects seemed to help make these concepts more tangible and highlight the underpinning ‘discovery’ nature of literature reviewing. exploring these concepts and processes in practical ways that illuminate criticality, creativity and meaning making preceding the written ‘end product’, may help to reinforce the idea that creating and constructing knowledge is a core purpose of academic writing. outcomes, reflections and lessons learnt our case studies serve as a snapshot of how a pedagogical method can be designed and explored through application, with peers and students, to inform further development. our main aim was to explore – through our own practitioner observations and informal student feedback − whether and how interaction with historical artefacts can support students in engaging with the topic material, through a method that seemingly sits outside the immediate disciplinary boundaries. our work highlights the flexible nature of special collections as a pedagogical resource, adaptable for a range of disciplines, levels and learning outcomes. the artefacts acted as a catalyst for participants' curiosity, reflexivity and sense of subjectivity; the unusual nature of the images and objects and the method of working with them was mentioned as something memorable, surprising, as a positive feature of the workshop (‘something different’). our examples are in no way definitive or exhaustive in terms of the potential of special collections. what our experiences and observations showed, however, is that careful planning and ‘dynamic teaching’ (chatterjee and hannan, 2015) play a vital role in the successful running of a workshop that incorporates special collections. indeed, in order for the students to harness the 'skills of transfer', we need to make visible the import of the transferable characteristics between contexts, so that ‘the intellectual and practical kukhareva et al. special collections as a catalyst for flexible pedagogical approaches: three case studies journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 18 processes involved are pretty much the same’ (gibbs, 2014, p.2). we observed that the artefacts can make the process of exploration more visible and tangible; it is important to encourage students to notice what they have just done, and how. once that process of own enquiry is captured and visualised, it can then be deconstructed and re-applied to the context of the subject-related task. this was evidenced when students were required to transfer processes and skills used in exploring the objects to a discipline-specific text/writing-based task; we observed that students were able to ‘replicate’, amend and apply the processes and skills to fit the target context within the sessions. ‘layering’ the questions and instructions in stages and allowing time for reflection are key (see process maps). if time is limited, fewer elements of the presented activities may be used. another observation was that students at the start of their academic journey may benefit from more detailed instruction, while higher level students will be more selfdirected. it is important to clarify that we argue for the pedagogical value of special collections based on our initial observations, experiences and informal student feedback. in the next stage of our exploration, we will look to explicate this value through further longitudinal exploration of how students apply what is learnt through interrogating artefacts to further discipline-specific learning. based on our initial exploration, we would like to echo the words of roth (2014) and vitelli (2014), and suggest that special collections can and should be like libraries: accessible to students and supporting their learning. references acrl (2016) framework for information literacy in higher education. available at: http://www.ala.org/acrl/sites/ala.org.acrl/files/content/issues/infolit/framework_ilhe. pdf (accessed: 19 june 2019). anderson, g. and arsenault, n. (2005) fundamentals of educational research. 2nd edn. london: routledge. http://www.ala.org/acrl/sites/ala.org.acrl/files/content/issues/infolit/framework_ilhe.pdf http://www.ala.org/acrl/sites/ala.org.acrl/files/content/issues/infolit/framework_ilhe.pdf kukhareva et al. special collections as a catalyst for flexible pedagogical approaches: three case studies journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 19 arnold-foster, k., reynolds, r. and smith, r. (2015) ‘co-developing a scaffolding structure for doctoral collections-based research at the university of reading’, in chatterjee, h. and hannan, l. (eds.) engaging the senses: object-based learning in higher education. london: routledge, pp.159-176. bateson, m. (2001) composing a life. new york, ny: grove press. bevan, b. and xanthoudaki, m. (2008) ‘professional development for museum educators: unpinning the underpinnings’, the journal of museum education, 33, pp.107-119. brandt, a. and eagleman, d. (2017) the runaway species: how human creativity remakes the world. edinburgh: canongate books. brown, a. (2014) ‘how students make sense of criticality skills in higher education’, practitioner research in higher education, 9(1), pp.4-17. carini, p. (2016) ‘information literacy for archives and special collections: defining outcomes’, portal: libraries and the academy, 16(1), pp.191–206. chatterjee, h. and hannan, l. (eds.). (2015) engaging the senses: object-based learning in higher education. london: routledge. chatterjee, h., hannan, l. and thomson, l. (2015) ‘an introduction to object-based learning and multisensory engagement’, in chatterjee, h. and hannan, l. (eds.) engaging the senses: object-based learning in higher education. london: routledge, pp.1-18. cilip (2018) cilip definition of information literacy 2018. available at: https://infolit.org.uk/definitions-models/ (accessed: 19 june 2019). dillon, p. and howe, t. (2003) ‘design as narrative: objects, stories and negotiated meanings’, the international journal of art and design, 22(3), pp.289-296. https://infolit.org.uk/definitions-models/ kukhareva et al. special collections as a catalyst for flexible pedagogical approaches: three case studies journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 20 doering, z. and pekarik, z. (1996) ‘questioning the entrance narrative’, the journal of museum education, 21(3), pp.20-23. dunne, g. (2015) ‘beyond critical thinking to critical being: criticality in higher education and life’, international journal of educational research, 71, pp.86-99. german, s. and harris, j. (2017) ‘agile objects’, journal of museum education, 42(3), pp.248-257. gibbs, g. (2014) 53 powerful ideas all teachers should know about: transferable skills rarely transfer (idea number 3, may 2014). available at: https://www.seda.ac.uk/resources/files/publications_147_3%20transferable%20skill s%20rarely%20transfer.pdf (accessed: 17 december 2018) gourlay, l. (2009) ‘threshold practices: becoming a student through academic literacies’, london review of education, 7(2), pp.181-192. grushka, k., hinde-mcleod, j. and reynolds, r. (2005) ‘reflecting upon reflection: theory and practice in one australian university teacher education program’, reflective practice, 6(1), pp.239-246. hardie, k. (2015) wow: the power of objects in object-based learning and teaching. available at: https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/system/files/kirsten_hardie_final.pdf (accessed: 17 december 2018). hart, c. (1998) doing a literature review: releasing the social science imagination. london: sage. holton, d. and clarke, d. (2006) ‘scaffolding and metacognition’, international journal of mathematical education in science and technology, 37(2), pp.127-143. ifla (2015) beacons of the information society: the alexandria proclamation on information literacy and lifelong learning. available at: https://www.seda.ac.uk/resources/files/publications_147_3%20transferable%20skills%20rarely%20transfer.pdf https://www.seda.ac.uk/resources/files/publications_147_3%20transferable%20skills%20rarely%20transfer.pdf https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/system/files/kirsten_hardie_final.pdf kukhareva et al. special collections as a catalyst for flexible pedagogical approaches: three case studies journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 21 https://www.ifla.org/publications/beacons-of-the-information-society-the-alexandriaproclamation-on-information-literacy (accessed: 19 june 2019). jacob, w. (2015) ‘interdisciplinary trends in higher education’, palgrave communications, 1(15001). jasani, s. and saks, n. (2013) ‘utilizing visual art to enhance the clinical observation skills of medical students’, medical teacher, 35(7), pp.1327-1331. johnston, b., ford, p., mitchell, r. and myles, f. (2011) developing student criticality in higher education: undergraduate learning in the arts and social sciences. london: continuum international publishing group. kolb, d. (1984) experiential learning: experience as the source of learning and development. englewood cliffs, nj: prentice hall mezirow, j. (2003) ‘how critical reflection triggers transformative learning’, in jarvis, p. and griffin, c. (eds.) adult and continuing education: major themes in education, vol. iv teaching learning research. london: routledge, pp.199-214. morrison, e. (2015) ‘immersive and somatic learning: a summary of creative-based practice as a method for higher education’, in chatterjee, h. and hannan, l. (eds.) engaging the senses: object-based learning in higher education. london: routledge, pp.207-224. moss, j. (2010) ‘understanding visual and intertextual approaches in pedagogical and curriculum research: a pretext’, international journal of inclusive education, 15(4), pp.379-388. nelson, r. (2013) practice as research in the arts: principles, protocols, pedagogies, resistances. london: palgrave macmillan paul, r. and elder, l. (2008) ‘critical thinking: the art of socratic questioning, part iii’, journal of developmental education, 31(3), pp.34-35. https://www.ifla.org/publications/beacons-of-the-information-society-the-alexandria-proclamation-on-information-literacy https://www.ifla.org/publications/beacons-of-the-information-society-the-alexandria-proclamation-on-information-literacy kukhareva et al. special collections as a catalyst for flexible pedagogical approaches: three case studies journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 22 peterson, e. and barron, k. a. (2007) ‘how to get focus groups talking: new ideas that will stick’, international journal of qualitative methods, 6(3), pp.140-144. phillips n. and duke m. (2001) ‘the questioning skills of clinical teachers and preceptors: a comparative study’, journal of advanced nursing, 33(4), pp.523–529. polkinghorne, d. (2006) ‘narrative configuration in qualitative analysis’, international journal of qualitative studies in education, 8(1), pp.5-23. qaa (2014) uk quality code for higher education. available at: https://www.qaa.ac.uk/quality-code (accessed: 19 june 2019). raney, k. (1999) ‘visual literacy and the art curriculum’, journal of art & design education, 18(1), pp.41-48. repko, a. f. (2007) ‘interdisciplinary curriculum design’, academic exchange quarterly, 11(1). available at: https://go.galegroup.com/ps/anonymous?id=gale%7ca165912657&sid=googlesc holar&v=2.1&it=r&linkaccess=abs&issn=10961453&p=aone&sw=w (accessed: 19 june 2019). rifà-valls, m. (2011) ‘experimenting with visual storytelling in students' portfolios: narratives of visual pedagogy for pre‐service teacher education’, the international journal of art and design education, 30(2), pp.293-306. robyns, m. (2001) ‘the archivist as educator: integrating critical thinking skills into historical research methods instruction’, the american archivist, 64(2), pp.363-384. roth, m. (2014). ‘ukiyo-e to emoji: museums and the digital age’, digital humanities summer school, oxford, uk, july. available at: http://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/ukiyo-eemoji-museums-digital-age (accessed: 19 june 2019). https://www.qaa.ac.uk/quality-code https://go.galegroup.com/ps/anonymous?id=gale%7ca165912657&sid=googlescholar&v=2.1&it=r&linkaccess=abs&issn=10961453&p=aone&sw=w https://go.galegroup.com/ps/anonymous?id=gale%7ca165912657&sid=googlescholar&v=2.1&it=r&linkaccess=abs&issn=10961453&p=aone&sw=w http://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/ukiyo-e-emoji-museums-digital-age http://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/ukiyo-e-emoji-museums-digital-age kukhareva et al. special collections as a catalyst for flexible pedagogical approaches: three case studies journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 23 ryan, a. and tilbury, d. (2013) flexible pedagogies: new pedagogical ideas. available at: https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/system/files/resources/npi_report.pdf (accessed: 19 june 2019). sconul (2011) the sconul seven pillars of information literacy core model for higher education. available at: https://www.sconul.ac.uk/sites/default/files/documents/coremodel.pdf (accessed: 19 june 2019). secker, j. and coonan, e. (2011) a new curriculum for information literacy. available at: http://www.dspace.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/244638 (accessed: 19 june 2019). skains, r. l. (2018) ‘creative practice as research: discourse on methodology’, media practice and education, 19(1), pp.82-97. ual (2018) creative attributes framework. available at: http://www.arts.ac.uk/aboutual/teaching-and-learning/careers-and-employability/creative-attributes-framework/ (accessed: 19 june 2019). universities uk (2015) higher education in england: provision, skills and graduates. available at: https://www.universitiesuk.ac.uk/policy-andanalysis/reports/documents/2016/higher-education-in-england-provision-skills-andgraduates.pdf (accessed: 19 june 2019). university of bedfordshire (2018) bedford physical education archive. online. https://archiveshub.jisc.ac.uk/search/archives/87ba2990-92fe-3183-82502d8f7d6ff976 (accessed: 12 december 2018). van gelder, t. (2015) ‘using argument mapping to improve critical thinking skills’, in davies, m. and barnett, r. (eds.) the palgrave handbook of critical thinking in higher education, new york, ny: palgrave macmillan, pp.183-192. vess, d. and linkon, s. (2001) ‘navigating the interdisciplinary archipelago: the scholarship of interdisciplinary teaching and learning’, in huber, m. t. and morreale, https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/system/files/resources/npi_report.pdf https://www.sconul.ac.uk/sites/default/files/documents/coremodel.pdf http://www.dspace.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/244638 http://www.arts.ac.uk/about-ual/teaching-and-learning/careers-and-employability/creative-attributes-framework/ http://www.arts.ac.uk/about-ual/teaching-and-learning/careers-and-employability/creative-attributes-framework/ https://www.universitiesuk.ac.uk/policy-and-analysis/reports/documents/2016/higher-education-in-england-provision-skills-and-graduates.pdf https://www.universitiesuk.ac.uk/policy-and-analysis/reports/documents/2016/higher-education-in-england-provision-skills-and-graduates.pdf https://www.universitiesuk.ac.uk/policy-and-analysis/reports/documents/2016/higher-education-in-england-provision-skills-and-graduates.pdf https://archiveshub.jisc.ac.uk/search/archives/87ba2990-92fe-3183-8250-2d8f7d6ff976 https://archiveshub.jisc.ac.uk/search/archives/87ba2990-92fe-3183-8250-2d8f7d6ff976 kukhareva et al. special collections as a catalyst for flexible pedagogical approaches: three case studies journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16: december 2019 24 s. p. (eds.) disciplinary styles in the scholarship of teaching and learning: exploring common ground, washington, dc: aahe/carnegie foundation for the advancement of teaching, pp.87-106. vitelli, g. (2014) ‘thinking with objects: the ashmolean museum’s university engagement programme in the oxford academic community’, in jandl, s. s. and gold, m. s. (eds.) a handbook for academic museums: vol. 3, cambridge, ma: museumetc, pp.65-81. walsh, a. (2018) the librarian’s book on teaching through games and play. estonia: innovative libraries. wingate, u. (2012) ‘using academic literacies and genre-based models for academic writing instruction’, journal of english for academic purposes, 11(1), pp.26-37. yaco, s., brown, c. and konrad, l. (2016) ‘linking special collections to classrooms: a curriculum-to-collection crosswalk’, the american archivist, 79(2), pp.417-437 yang y., newby t. and bill r. (2005) ‘using socratic questioning to promote critical thinking skills through asynchronous discussion forums in distance learning environments’, american journal of distance education, 19(3), pp.163–181. author details maria kukhareva is the head of organisational development at the centre for learning excellence, university of bedfordshire. anne lawrence is an academic librarian and space manager at the university of east anglia. katherine koulle is a senior teaching fellow at the ucl institute of education academic writing centre. nazlin bhimani is the research support & special collections librarian at the ucl institute of education. special collections as a catalyst for flexible pedagogical approaches: three case studies abstract introduction special collections across and beyond disciplines special collections 'three ways' our method case study 1: using special collections to encourage questioning and narrative enquiry: an educational development perspective case study 2: using special collections to encourage criticality: an information literacy perspective case study 3: special collections as a catalyst for criticality and creativity in reviewing literature: an academic writing perspective outcomes, reflections and lessons learnt references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special issue 22: compendium of innovative practice october 2021 ________________________________________________________________________ when the flipped classroom disappoints: engaging students with asynchronous learning alicja syska university of plymouth, uk keywords: flipped classroom; asynchronous learning; student engagement; covid-19. the challenge moving teaching online meant designing synchronous and asynchronous activities that would allow as many students as possible easy access to learning. a lot of educational support was available from the start of this emergency pivot, and much of the early advice recommended asynchronous teaching (brown university, 2020) as a form of flipped classroom, or even encouraged refusal to do synchronous teaching altogether (barrettfox, 2020). what we all quickly realised was that it takes more time to teach online than it does in a standard classroom. interactions flow less naturally, creating longer pauses between contributions; moving between breakout rooms and the main room can be messy; late arrivals and technical difficulties cause interruptions; not to mention student reluctance to participate or unmute/turn on the camera. it also takes more time to build rapport online, especially in the context of learning development sessions, which lack continuity across a semester or academic year. as a result, i found myself not being able to deliver the same amount of instruction and interaction as i was used to. the most logical solution to this problem was to draw on my experience of subject teaching and introduce the flipped classroom (mazur, 1997; talbert, 2017). the response syska when the flipped classroom disappoints: engaging students with asynchronous learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 2 creating asynchronous materials to be followed by synchronous sessions seemed like a perfect response to the new reality of online delivery. being a hybrid practitioner, both a lecturer and a learning developer, i had already adopted this approach in my subject specialism, both in person and online. i pre-recorded my lectures and collated them into xerte learning objects, with the help of the university of nottingham resources. the materials i created consisted of short powerpoint presentations, combined with visual plates overlaid with voiceovers, short tasks, and activities. in my subject specialism, the approach worked very well, as the xertes naturally replaced traditional lectures. i therefore decided to adopt this pedagogy to the context of my learning development workshops. the advantages seemed manifold. students could not only engage with my xerte resources in their own time but could also keep returning to them as needed. investing the time to create them promised to free my precious synchronous session time to custom deliver according to specific student needs and offer more opportunities for questions, clarification, and in-depth explorations of particular aspects of writing, making the sessions more relevant to the participants. it motivated me to create a range of short videos on different aspects of writing, which i then combined into particular configurations to serve specific cohort needs. for example, if a session was to address the issues involved in critical analytical writing, i would include videos on the general principles of academic writing, critical thinking, and building an argument, interspersed with activities testing students’ understanding, as well as links to further support and an opportunity to provide feedback. overall, i created 24 such learning objects. my plan sounded perfect. if you have seen the meme created by renea frey on pandemic pedagogy as a horse (ball, 2020), i was ready to saddle it from behind. the urgently created resources may not have been perfect, but they followed all the available advice on creating online teaching materials: the videos were short and simple, they were linked together with meta-instruction, and included exercises. the xertes were shared with students via their lecturers who disseminated the link in advance of the session. students were asked to engage with them and note any questions or themes for further elaboration. and then real teaching happened. the live sessions were meant to target specific issues but most students came unprepared – they either did not watch the resources or had engaged with them only superficially. their individual needs had often not been defined before the session even though it was timed around their deadlines. most cameras were https://xerte.org.uk/index.php/en/ https://kairos.technorhetoric.net/24.2/loggingon/index.html syska when the flipped classroom disappoints: engaging students with asynchronous learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 3 off and active participation was limited, with the success of a workshop highly dependent on the cohort dynamic. i was aware that distance learning had been shown to increase student passivity (rakes and dunn, 2010) and requires much higher levels of intrinsic motivation (deci and ryan, 2000). i was not prepared, however, for the extent to which i would have to become the sole engine in the effort to engage participants. the initial failures and disappointments were perhaps inescapable, but served as a good reminder of our vulnerability as teachers. as freire put it, ‘making mistakes is . . . part of the discovery process. . . . error is precisely what makes us learn’ (2007, p.31). over time, i developed a range of different strategies, with the most successful one guided by the principle ‘give them what they want’, as i capitulated and delivered more content synchronously. in the age of numbers and metrics, the approach may seem like a success. the 24 learning objects were accessed 1,423 times, although it is not possible to determine the level of engagement with them. 61 students provided feedback, rating the xertes with a mean of 4.5 out of 5 stars, with the great majority finding the materials useful, informative, and easy to apply. when it came to feedback for the synchronous sessions, the most enthusiastically received were either those where cohort dynamic ensured participation or those where, in the absence of student preparation, i (re)delivered the content of the xertes. it made little difference whether i used online tools, such as whiteboard, zoom polls, and quizzes or miro boards – it was the student preparation aspect that seemed decisive. my dependence on the flipped classroom was my mistake. recommendations adapting the principle of the flipped classroom to online learning development teaching left me with mixed feelings. the initial overarching personal reaction was one of disappointment. a lot of work went into the creation of these resources, a lot of dedication and excitement even, and this enthusiasm was quickly snuffed out and led to much soulsearching. ultimately, i embraced this disappointment and let it bring me ‘to ground’ (whyte, 2019, p.50) so i could experience a productive transformation. syska when the flipped classroom disappoints: engaging students with asynchronous learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 4 the fact is that although the flipped classroom did not work in these workshops, students did use the resources after the sessions, with the majority of the aforementioned 1,423 clicks registered afterwards. so ultimately, the xertes fulfilled their role as a form of asynchronous learning, if not as the ‘pre-work’ element of the flipped classroom. while this aligns with some pre-pandemic findings about the use of videos for flipped teaching in learning development sessions (taylor, 2015; hancock, 2019), what i did not appreciate at the time was the extent of online fatigue, the alienation experienced by many students, and the reluctance to engage with anything extra on top of the basic requirements of a module. the experience exposed my inadequate understanding of flipped learning in the emergency online learning development context. as talbert (2021) warns us, the usual assumptions do not apply, especially when it comes to the concept of ‘class time’. what we need to be prepared for is disengagement (and resist interpreting it as a sign of nonlearning), while keeping in mind the aims of the session, because it is accomplishing them that ensures success. references ball, c. (2020) ‘logging on’, kairos: a journal of rhetoric, technology, and pedagogy, 24.2 (spring). available at: https://kairos.technorhetoric.net/24.2/loggingon/index.html (accessed: 10 june 2021). barrett-fox, r. (2020) ‘please do a bad job of putting your courses online’. available at: https://anygoodthing.com/2020/03/12/please-do-a-bad-job-of-putting-your-coursesonline/ (accessed: 10 june 2021). brown university (2020) ‘asynchronous strategies for inclusive teaching’, the harriet w. sheridan center for teaching and learning. available at: https://www.brown.edu/sheridan/asynchronous-strategies-inclusive-teaching (accessed: 10 june 2021). https://kairos.technorhetoric.net/24.2/loggingon/index.html https://anygoodthing.com/2020/03/12/please-do-a-bad-job-of-putting-your-courses-online/ https://anygoodthing.com/2020/03/12/please-do-a-bad-job-of-putting-your-courses-online/ https://www.brown.edu/sheridan/asynchronous-strategies-inclusive-teaching syska when the flipped classroom disappoints: engaging students with asynchronous learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 5 deci, e. l. and ryan, r. m. (2000) ‘the “what” and “why” of goal pursuits: human needs and the self-determination of behavior’, psychological inquiry, 11(4), pp.227–268. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327965pli1104_01. freire, p. (2007 [1970]) pedagogy of the oppressed. new york: continuum. hancock, j. c. (2019) ‘“it can’t be found in books”: how a flipped-classroom approach using online videos can engage postgraduate students in dissertation writing’, journal of learning development in higher education. issue 16, december, pp.1-27. https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.v0i16.485. mazur, e. (1997) peer instruction: a user's manual series in educational innovation. upper saddle river, nj: prentice hall. rakes, g. c. and dunn, k. e. (2010) ‘the impact of online graduate students’ motivation and self-regulation on academic procrastination’, journal of interactive online learning, 9, pp.78–93. available at: http://www.ncolr.org/jiol/issues/pdf/9.1.5.pdf (accessed: 10 june 2021). talbert, r. (2017) flipped learning: a guide for higher education faculty. sterling, va: stylus publishing, llc. talbert, r. (2021) ‘is flipping an online course possible? (throwback)’, robert talbert blog, 16 april. available at: http://rtalbert.org/is-flipping-an-online-course-possiblethrowback/ (accessed: 10 june 2021). taylor, a. (2015) 'flipping great or flipping useless? a review of the flipped classroom experiment at coventry university london campus', journal of pedagogic development, 5(3), pp.57-65. available at: https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/30317388.pdf (accessed: 2 july 2021). university of nottingham (no date) the xerte project. available at: https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/xerte/resources.aspx (accessed: 10 june 2021). https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327965pli1104_01 https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.v0i16.485 http://www.ncolr.org/jiol/issues/pdf/9.1.5.pdf http://rtalbert.org/is-flipping-an-online-course-possible-throwback/ http://rtalbert.org/is-flipping-an-online-course-possible-throwback/ https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/xerte/resources.aspx syska when the flipped classroom disappoints: engaging students with asynchronous learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 6 whyte, d. (2019) consolations: the solace, nourishment and underlying meaning of everyday words. edinburgh: canongate books. author details alicja syska is a learning development advisor at the university of plymouth, where she also teaches u.s. history and visual culture. she has a ph.d. in american studies from saint louis university, usa, is a senior fellow of advance he, an aldinhe certified leading practitioner, and an si/pass supervisor. her research interests include using visual methods in teaching, developing academic writing within disciplines, and fostering ld publishing and scholarship. when the flipped classroom disappoints: engaging students with asynchronous learning the challenge the response recommendations references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special issue 22: compendium of innovative practice october 2021 ________________________________________________________________________ google earth as a resource for remote teaching: an application to crime scene investigation katie davidson university of strathclyde, glasgow keywords: google earth; remote teaching; technology enhanced learning; covid-19. the challenge covid-19 has posed a number of challenges for higher education institutions at all levels, especially for programmes that are heavily focused on practical work. i am part of a team that teaches a forensic science course which has many major practical elements that are essential to the students’ skill development and understanding. the last 18 months have really encouraged thinking outside the box in terms of how to transition this practical face to face teaching into remote learning, whilst still meeting the course requirements and meeting the learning objectives set. this unique situation has provided a platform to experiment and explore learning development and pedagogical practice. a key area within forensic science is crime scene investigation and management, and one of our flagship activities on the course is a mock outdoor crime scene. under normal circumstances, the students would attend multiple laboratory sessions and face-to-face tutorials to learn and develop key examination techniques and gain a clear understanding of how to approach different types of crime scene. in line with the university covid-19 restrictions, it was established that the preparation for the crime scene exercise would now consist of recorded lecture content and a live online workshop to ensure student engagement and consolidation of information. therefore, the challenge presented was being able to adapt and develop content for effective remote delivery that also aligned with the learning objectives, provided students with an engaging learning experience, and gave them an opportunity to demonstrate key professional skills. davidson google earth as a resource for remote teaching: an application to crime scene investigation journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 2 this motivated me to develop an innovative way of teaching so that i could effectively adapt the content to align with remote learning, and still provide the students with the required learning experience in an online workshop setting. i began researching online resources to see what was readily available that i could implement in my teaching and discovered a number of programmes and software designed to engage students, most of which came with a fee attached. it also became clear that there was a lack of research on and application of technology and software in a remote forensic education setting, specifically for crime scene investigation. my goal was to design an activity that students could not only engage with in real time, but also have as a learning resource in future. i discovered an article by thompson (2020), who used free, open access software called twine to adapt the traditional lecture model into an interactive learning experience with a non-linear narrative. i was impressed by the clear focus on student decision making and the level of engagement created, both of which were key aims for my content. this, combined with inspiration from a virtual blood pattern analysis experience developed using immersive 360° panoramic film (nichols-drew, 2018), influenced the discovery and application of google earth to create a virtual crime scene scenario as a remote teaching resource. the response my department was fortunate enough to obtain a university licence for a newly developed app called “crime scene assistant”, which has been created by forensic practitioners to provide forensic awareness to first responders at a crime scene, such as paramedics and police officers (https://crimesceneassist.com/). the app offers advice on best practice and guidance for scene preservation, recovery and documentation, and provides useful checklists for key decisions made at the scene. our forensic students were given access to the app for a year as a learning and revision tool that can be used from their mobile phones at home and on campus. therefore, i decided to develop an interactive resource, incorporating use of the app, that would support the theoretical crime scene content and create an engaging experience in which the students could demonstrate problem-solving skills and critical thinking in evaluating a scenario and making informed evidence-based decisions. https://crimesceneassist.com/ davidson google earth as a resource for remote teaching: an application to crime scene investigation journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 3 at this stage i discovered google earth projects, a free, remotely accessible resource which is designed to create presentations that include markers, information slides and images, primarily for giving travel tips and advice. google earth projects allows the creation of customised maps with a narrative that can include photos, videos and external resources, allowing you to develop a tailored, interactive experience. i then transferred my crime scene scenario into this format to create a virtual crime scene, resulting in increased interactive content that students could engage with. screenshots from the project can be seen in figure 1 below, demonstrating the application of presentation slides, customised map creation, and images and information boxes to deliver the content. this format also provided me with the opportunity to tailor the content to suit different levels of students, both undergraduate and master’s, to meet the required learning objectives. figure 1. screenshots of the google earth project virtual crime scene workshop. my google earth virtual crime scene consisted of an investigative narrative of how a crime scene investigator approached and managed a crime scene, which the students could follow and then evaluate using the guidance and advice from the crime scene assistant app. this activity involved a combination of observation and caseand problem-based learning pedagogy through group work and discussions, which allowed the students to davidson google earth as a resource for remote teaching: an application to crime scene investigation journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 4 develop their problem solving and critical thinking skills, collaboration and communication skills, and observational skills (shukla, 2021). this was delivered to both undergraduate and postgraduate students, with class sizes of 25 and 58 respectively. students were then put into groups of between five and seven to complete the activities during the workshop. the workshop was a success, and the students were very engaged with the content and delivered effective group discussions and feedback on the scenario. they enjoyed the opportunity to learn in a different way and stated that it was a great supporting activity and tool that assisted in developing their learning and understanding of future practical elements of the course. it also provided an opportunity to engage with their classmates and to develop their team working and presentation skills, which are key elements of the course. this group work allowed students to collaborate and discuss their thoughts and opinions, therefore applying their critical thinking and problem-solving skills. recommendations while this workshop was developed for remote teaching, i believe it is an effective resource for both remote and in classroom delivery and has the potential to be used in a number of different formats and tailored to different levels of education. whilst the class sizes i delivered the workshop to were reasonably small, this could be scaled up for larger classes and be delivered in multiple sessions. however, i feel that the smaller working groups were more beneficial for student participation and engagement. feedback obtained highlighted that the students enjoyed the opportunity for group discussions and also the case scenario format, which allowed them to evaluate information and ask questions. therefore, google earth could be utilised to facilitate practical learning opportunities and learning development in a number of thematic areas, supporting key student skills such as problem solving, critical thinking, collaboration and communication. there is scope for this approach to be used to support forms of assessment in future, as it encompasses the understanding and application of knowledge as well as problem solving and critical thinking skills, providing a move away from more traditional examination. i feel incorporating technology and variety in assessment is key to learning development and creates a more inclusive learning experience. davidson google earth as a resource for remote teaching: an application to crime scene investigation journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 5 this concept could be developed further with the inclusion of more interactive content, for example external links to information and data that could be applied to the scenario or introducing the concept of virtual reality as effectively demonstrated by mayne and green (2020). using this kind of platform, in combination with other available technology and software, maximises opportunities for engagement both in and out of the classroom environment. this mode of teaching practice has a positive impact on student learning and understanding, as it incorporates the continuous development of learning technology and targets key professional skills that students need to be exposed to. as stated above, there is also the capacity to incorporate this teaching practice into assessment and feedback modules, which creates an innovative way of assessing student understanding. this new approach to teaching and learning has motivated me to review other areas of my teaching to see how similar practice can be applied to develop more inclusive and flexible learning experiences. references mayne, r. and green, h. (2020) ‘virtual reality for teaching and learning in crime scene investigation’, science & justice, 60(5), pp.466-472. available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scijus.2020.07.006 (accessed: 17 august 2021). nichols-drew, l. (2018) ‘the cube: an immersive blood pattern analysis experience’, eafs 2018 triennial conference, lyon, france, 27-31 august. shukla, r.k. (2021) ‘a new systematic approach of teaching and learning of forensic science for interdisciplinary students: a step towards renovating the forensic education system’, forensic science international: synergy, 3. available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.fsisyn.2021.100146 (accessed: 17 august 2021). thompson, t. (2020) ‘choose your own murder: non-linear narratives enhance student understanding in forensic science education’, forensic science international: synergy, 2, pp.82-85, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.fsisyn.2020.01.009 (accessed: 17 august 2021). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scijus.2020.07.006 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.fsisyn.2021.100146 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.fsisyn.2020.01.009 davidson google earth as a resource for remote teaching: an application to crime scene investigation journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 6 author details katie davidson is a teaching assistant on the msc forensic science course within the department of pure and applied chemistry at the university of strathclyde in glasgow. drawing on her previous experience as a forensic examiner, her areas of teaching include crime scene investigation and management, blood pattern analysis, and trace evidence examination. her research interests include technology enhanced learning and student engagement in higher education, with a keen focus on developing and creating innovative teaching practice to enhance student experience. google earth as a resource for remote teaching: an application to crime scene investigation the challenge the response recommendations references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 15: november 2019 ___________________________________________________________________ creating an academic literacy framework to enhance collaboration between learning developers and subject academics rosella d’alesio swansea university ben martin swansea university abstract as learning developers, we are constantly engaging with subject lecturers to discuss the learning needs of our students. this case study describes the creation of an academic literacy framework designed to engage subject lecturers and improve collaboration between them and the learning development team in order to develop the academic skills of students. our aim was to create a tool that would achieve three complementary goals:  help subject lecturers pinpoint where their students are placed along a spectrum of skills.  allow lecturers to request, and/or learning developers to recommend, skills sessions at the most appropriate time.  allow the learning development team to identify gaps in provision. we used our experience as learning developers together with existing frameworks and schema to create a generic academic literacy framework for all disciplines. because we perceived the he level descriptors to be unsuitable for our needs, we aimed to create a framework that was not tied to specific levels. once the framework was drafted, it was shared with other learning developers and subject academics to assess its suitability. this process provided results that confirmed we were moving towards an overall consensus and that the framework was fit for purpose. keywords: academic literacy framework; study skills; curriculum design; embedded skills; higher education; student experience. d’alesio and martin creating an academic literacy framework to enhance collaboration between learning developers and subject academics journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 3 background as members of a team of learning developers, we deliver general academic skills courses that are open to the whole student body (level 3 foundation to level 7 master’s and phd students) as well as conducting one-to-one student consultations. we also work within colleges to provide embedded skills or bolt-on provision. we realised that there was a lack of understanding among subject lecturers of the potential benefits of collaborating with us. therefore, we wanted a tool to help us in this endeavour and set ourselves the following goals for the framework. it had to be:  clear to understand.  easy to use.  of meaningful benefit to both students and staff. in addition, we took the view that, for this framework, we had to work from an academic literacies approach in which academic socialisation and study skills are incorporated ‘into a more encompassing understanding of the nature of student writing within institutional practices’ (lea and street, 1998, p.158). for this reason, we decided not to base the framework on existing he level descriptors, as our experience told us that these are not always representative of the true nature of a student’s competence in academic skills. we wanted to provide academics with a tool that clearly allows them to see where their students are with regard to their academic skills on a particular learning journey, where they need to be, and how that gap can be bridged using our expertise. furthermore, we wanted to ensure that students are able to master and communicate their knowledge in a meaningful way beyond the confines of their academic spaces. a final aim was that the framework would address alternative means of assessment, such as presentations, and how students could be prepared for them. issues and priorities some of the issues we faced and priorities we decided on are outlined in this section. our experience as learning developers within he tells us that students are not always where we and subject lecturers think they should be on their learning and skills development d’alesio and martin creating an academic literacy framework to enhance collaboration between learning developers and subject academics journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 4 pathway. thus, there was a problem deciding how we would make distinct differences between hefce level descriptors. skills acquisition is not necessarily linear, and it could be argued that acquiring skills and developing skills are quite distinct processes − the first is about gaining knowledge of the skill; the second is practising that skill. students do not arrive at university equipped with the same skills, and this scenario is unlikely to change given the current tendency towards admitting students with lower entry tariffs as part of widening participation or for other reasons (adams, 2019). even in the rare case that students are homogenous and share the same starting point, their journey is often unpredictable, and individuals will travel at different speeds through the various stages. given this, we estimated that subject academics might not be able to easily identify where their students are on any given continuum of study skills acquisition. it was for this reason that an early discussion among the working group creating the framework was titled ‘where are your students?’ (d’alesio et al., 2018) and has driven much of what we have achieved. it was also for this reason that a cognitive approach based on a revised bloom’s taxonomy (krathwohl, 2002) was our guide, as subject academics would be familiar with this approach. one clear priority for us was that the framework should address the fact that students might, for example, have strong writing skills but not be able to recognise and create arguments, or have strong critical thinking skills but be lacking in knowledge of academic vocabulary. it was also a priority for us that academics understood that we had moved away from a deficit approach model that was outdated, not valuable and insensitive. finally, we wanted to ensure that the document catered for students of all levels. literacy development might be ‘something that all students encounter as they shift from secondary school into postsecondary education’ (lea and street, 2006, p.369), but skills development also continues throughout the academic journey. we aimed to cater for all students by including knowledge creation, peer review and contributing to knowledge dispersal, thus acknowledging the needs of students conducting research or development work. another issue we faced was ensuring that we were clear in our intentions but without giving so much detail that stakeholders would be deterred from using the tool. we felt that many of the frameworks we looked at suffered from this problem. therefore, we decided to group academic skills into three broad overarching dimensions that together covered all d’alesio and martin creating an academic literacy framework to enhance collaboration between learning developers and subject academics journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 5 the areas necessary, namely: learning, communicating, and evaluating and conceptualising arguments. these skills encompassed both written and verbal communication. this seems to be a strength of the framework because, for learning developers, the framework is intuitive to use and it embodies what we teach in distinct, yet easy to understand spheres. a major challenge we faced was not just what to include but what to exclude. we deliberately did not include any form of digital or information literacy as these are not within the remit of what we deliver and in our institute are delivered by other stakeholders. we also excluded mathematical and assessment literacies as we deemed them not to be within our sphere of expertise. finally, we hoped that the framework would act as a management tool, a check to help us identify gaps in our own provision. we envisaged that this could come about in two ways: firstly, subject academics requesting specific sessions we did not already provide, and secondly, from matching the courses and workshops we currently offer to each of the areas of the framework. process initially we assumed that an academic literacy framework already existed that would suit our needs or which could be modified if necessary. we looked at a number of existing academic skills and literacy frameworks to help us form an idea of what we wanted to achieve and more importantly to understand what we did not want. through our experience of eap, we were already familiar with baleap’s ‘can-do’ framework (baleap, 2013), an extremely useful and detailed breakdown of discrete academic skills required at master’s level and, as demonstrated by smith and thondhlana (2015), just as useful at undergraduate level. however, we realised that even if we adapted such a document, our subject academics were unlikely to consult such a detailed text, no matter how useful. we also looked at the ‘academic literacy development framework’ (harper, 2011), but we found it was not one that we could map easily against our provision; while we learning developers could appreciate the discrete skills detailed, we estimated that the subject academics with whom we worked would not be as concerned with the detail. the d’alesio and martin creating an academic literacy framework to enhance collaboration between learning developers and subject academics journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 6 academic literacy writing framework spiral (allen et al., 2011) posed two main challenges for us: firstly, it only considered academic writing skills, while we very much wanted to include verbal communication, and secondly, it prescribed what students needed at levels 4 through to 7. as already noted, we wanted to avoid prescriptive level descriptors, as we already know that many higher education students are not so easy to categorise. unable to find what we wanted, we set other models aside and decided to create our own. we were now clear that it needed to be a continuum of skills with clearly defined parameters, while also being a practical, usable document. we devised a matrix with an x axis labelling the learner stages, which we initially categorised as engaged learner, developing learner, autonomous learner and contributing learner, and a y axis labelling the academic skills group (learning, communicating, and evaluating and conceptualising arguments). figure 1. extract from the academic literacy framework: learning and reflective practice from draft 2 [see appendix 2 for complete version] learning and reflective practice aware of a range of learning techniques such as reflective practice, time management, memory, revision, reading and notetaking, and can respond to feedback. beginning to understand concepts behind learning techniques. developing a recognition of personal learning needs through incorporation of feedback. uses concepts, reflects and actively seeks feedback to create own learning strategies to meet personal learning needs. refines learning strategies through reflection. helps others develop their own learning strategies and engage with feedback within their community of practice. d’alesio and martin creating an academic literacy framework to enhance collaboration between learning developers and subject academics journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 7 once the skills for each section had been outlined, we conducted a mapping exercise to match our courses and workshops to the vectors we had created (see figure 2 for a snapshot). figure 2. example of provision mapped against academic literacy framework. learning communicating evaluating and conceptualising arguments quoting and paraphrasing academic vocabulary reading study hacks grammar basics presentation skills public speaking post graduate research writing critical thinking literature review advanced academic writing doctoral writing group the next stage was to seek feedback from critical friends. we used the draft version in meetings with academics looking to embed our provision in their courses. the response was overwhelmingly positive; they fed back that seeing the skills laid out in this way allowed them to clearly pinpoint the needs of specific groups at specific moments. as we had anticipated, the needs of students at a particular level did not all fall in the same band, reinforcing our decision to move away from level descriptors. we also obtained feedback from lecturers and asked them to critically comment on the document. we collated this feedback and took a revised version to conferences. we did this twice, first to the swansea salt learning and teaching conference and then an amended version to the aldinhe conference in exeter (appendix 1 and 2 respectively). at both conferences, our objectives were twofold: 1. to explore whether our descriptions of the different stages of learning were clear and logical enough that it could be ‘reverse engineered’, i.e. could it be put back together if all levels and descriptors of levels were separated? 2. to discuss the following topics:  what are the strengths of this framework?  what are the weaknesses of this framework? d’alesio and martin creating an academic literacy framework to enhance collaboration between learning developers and subject academics journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 8  is this framework helpful for you? if so, how? in what ways can you envisage using it?  would you use it when advising students and/or if a student came to you for help?  is this framework helpful for your students? if so, how?  are there any changes you would make? please explain. feedback our first objective was almost universally met. the framework, which had been cut into pieces, was put back together like a jigsaw in the way we had designed it, showing that our description of the skills, and the progression of levels was logical. however, this did generate healthy discussion about how appropriate it might be for universal use. one of the outcomes of this discussion was to remove the x-axis labelling. we had deliberately stayed away from levels, stages or steps and instead tried to name the level of learner. however, it seems that these labels were distracting or inaccurate (for example, there was much discussion over whether a learner should be called engaged or novice), and on reflection we decided that they added no value to the framework, as they are merely labels. as it was correctly pointed out, are not all learners developing learners and are we not all developing in what we do? regarding our second objective, the following main points come from discussion with other learning developers and subject academics. strengths  great for students.  avoids deficit model of student help – good for stronger students too.  shows learning as it should be – continually evolving.  very useful as a formative learning framework that can be used to situate someone's learning and their progression in learning. d’alesio and martin creating an academic literacy framework to enhance collaboration between learning developers and subject academics journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 9  provides programme directors with some useful benchmarks which might be mapped against the embedding of academic skills provision in programmes.  formalises the process that will keep teachers on track and provide the students with a better understanding of their learning process and what to expect. gaps/weaknesses  disengaged/novice/uninformed learners are not considered but are perhaps the students who need the most help.  too much jargon, e.g. ‘academic register’. students will find the jargon difficult to understand. especially those students for whom english is not their first language. discussion and next steps the discussions we have had about the framework have been positive overall. there were many comments − both positive and negative − about its suitability for students. heartening though it was to hear that this would be useful for students, at this stage we were designing it for academics; designing for students will be a separate task at a future date. regarding the main weaknesses, we felt that the weakest students are provided for but that the student must be ‘engaged’ to progress. perhaps doing away with those labels, as described above, will solve that issue. with regard to the technical terms, we feel that subject academics would understand the concepts. it is our intention to create a student version of the framework, and this must be achieved with input from students to make it suitable for students to use. currently, the framework is one-dimensional. we feel there is scope to develop it into an online artefact where clicking on certain vectors would lead to another layer of information. moving into the new academic year, we intend to use the tool with academic staff who engage with us regarding new skills provision. to date, there has been interest from other institutes, and it would be interesting to explore how they have adapted the framework. we would also be interested in working with colleagues to develop the project further by d’alesio and martin creating an academic literacy framework to enhance collaboration between learning developers and subject academics journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 10 sharing the framework with other learning development teams and receiving feedback on the implementation of the framework within their institutes. references adams, r. (2019) ‘universities told to be more flexible about pupils’ a-level results’, the guardian, 1 may. available at: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2019/may/01/universities-told-to-be-moreflexible-about-pupils-a-level-results (accessed 18 november 2019). allen, r., lundie hill, k., jarvis, j., lawrence, e., roberts, a., solly, d. and woodward, j. (2011) the academic writing/feedback cycle: an exploration through collaborative staff/student research. available at: http://www.studynet1.herts.ac.uk/ltic.nsf/teaching+documents/c50f4c9ff3478c0 f80257e96004cf993/$file/the%20academic%20writingfeedback%20cycle%20and%20exploration%20through%20collaborative%20staffstudent%20research%20(aroberts).pptx (accessed 18 november 2019). baleap (2013) baleap can do framework: competency statements for international students (master’s level). available at: https://www.baleap.org/wpcontent/uploads/2016/04/can_do_framework__with_sample_activities_april_2013. pdf (accessed 18 november 2019). d’alesio, r., tanguay, e., chartier, n. and yeandle, h. (2018) ‘where are your students?’, salt conference. swansea university, swansea 18 july. harper, r. (2011) academic literacy development framework. university of canberra; academic skills centre. available at: http://www.aall.org.au/clpd/aall2011/downloads/ppts/harper_aldf.pdf (accessed 18 november 2019). https://www.theguardian.com/education/2019/may/01/universities-told-to-be-more-flexible-about-pupils-a-level-results https://www.theguardian.com/education/2019/may/01/universities-told-to-be-more-flexible-about-pupils-a-level-results http://www.studynet1.herts.ac.uk/ltic.nsf/teaching+documents/c50f4c9ff3478c0f80257e96004cf993/$file/the%20academic%20writing-feedback%20cycle%20and%20exploration%20through%20collaborative%20staff-student%20research%20(aroberts).pptx http://www.studynet1.herts.ac.uk/ltic.nsf/teaching+documents/c50f4c9ff3478c0f80257e96004cf993/$file/the%20academic%20writing-feedback%20cycle%20and%20exploration%20through%20collaborative%20staff-student%20research%20(aroberts).pptx http://www.studynet1.herts.ac.uk/ltic.nsf/teaching+documents/c50f4c9ff3478c0f80257e96004cf993/$file/the%20academic%20writing-feedback%20cycle%20and%20exploration%20through%20collaborative%20staff-student%20research%20(aroberts).pptx http://www.studynet1.herts.ac.uk/ltic.nsf/teaching+documents/c50f4c9ff3478c0f80257e96004cf993/$file/the%20academic%20writing-feedback%20cycle%20and%20exploration%20through%20collaborative%20staff-student%20research%20(aroberts).pptx https://www.baleap.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/can_do_framework__with_sample_activities_april_2013.pdf https://www.baleap.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/can_do_framework__with_sample_activities_april_2013.pdf https://www.baleap.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/can_do_framework__with_sample_activities_april_2013.pdf http://www.aall.org.au/clpd/aall2011/downloads/ppts/harper_aldf.pdf d’alesio and martin creating an academic literacy framework to enhance collaboration between learning developers and subject academics journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 11 krathwohl, d.r. (2002) ‘a revision of bloom's taxonomy: an overview’, theory into practice, 41(4), pp.212-218. lea, m.r. and street, b.v. (1998) ‘student writing in higher education: an academic literacies approach’, studies in higher education, 23(2), pp.157-172. lea, m.r. and street, b.v. (2006) ‘the" academic literacies" model: theory and applications’, theory into practice, 45(4), pp.368-377. sconul working group on information literacy (2011). the sconul seven pillars of information literacy: core model for higher education. available at: https://www.sconul.ac.uk/sites/default/files/documents/coremodel.pdf (accessed 18 november 2019). smith, a. f. and thondhlana, j. (2015) ‘the eap competencies in a group case study project as revealed by a task analysis’, journal of english for academic purposes, 20, 14-27. author details rosella d'alesio is the academic success programme director for the centre of academic success at swansea university. ben martin is a study skills lecturer in swansea university’s centre for academic success. https://www.sconul.ac.uk/sites/default/files/documents/coremodel.pdf d’alesio and martin creating an academic literacy framework to enhance collaboration between learning developers and subject academics journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 12 appendix 1 the academic literacy framework first draft engaged learner developing learner autonomous learner contributing learner learning aware of techniques begin to understand concepts and why assessment methods are used; developing recognition of personal learning needs motivated students who use concepts to create own learning strategies; meet personal learning needs honing learning strategies communicating structure – ideas clearly separated; relevance; logical progression voice – accurate use of language and use of appropriate academic register structure – developing a range of structural devices and methods of presenting ideas while maintaining flow voice – develop rhythm and use of conventions to enhance communication; voice becoming appropriate for audience structure – clear and logical intention behind structural decisions voice – moves beyond accuracy to skilled selection of language; command of disseminating research to a range of audiences; being an active member of the academic community d’alesio and martin creating an academic literacy framework to enhance collaboration between learning developers and subject academics journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 13 language and rhythm; range of rhetorical devices. voice suitable for audience evaluating identify an argument and appropriate sources analyse and evaluate arguments; use a range of sources to support the argument create sound and cogent arguments; identify gaps in research contribute new knowledge to the field d’alesio and martin creating an academic literacy framework to enhance collaboration between learning developers and subject academics journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 14 appendix 2 the academic literacy framework second draft engaged novice learner developing learner autonomous learner contributing learner learning and reflective practice aware of a range of learning techniques such as reflective practice, time management, memory, revision, reading and notetaking, and can respond to feedback. beginning to understand concepts behind learning techniques. developing a recognition of personal learning needs through incorporation of feedback. uses concepts, reflects and actively seeks feedback to create own learning strategies to meet personal learning needs. refines learning strategies through reflection. helps others develop their own learning strategies and engage with feedback within their community of practice. communicating structure – ideas clearly separated; relevant, with logical progression appropriate to task. voice – accurate use of language and appropriate academic register. structure – developing a range of structural devices and approaches to presenting ideas while maintaining flow. voice – developing rhythm and use of conventions to enhance communication. voice becoming appropriate for specific audiences. structure – clear and logical intention behind structural decisions. voice – moves beyond accuracy to skilled command of language and rhythm; uses a range of rhetorical devices. adapts voice according to specific audiences. disseminates original and genreappropriate research to a range of audiences; is an active member of the academic community. evaluating and conceptualising arguments recognises appropriate sources. identifies arguments within these sources. summarises to draw own conclusion. locates and uses a range of sources. analyses and evaluates arguments within these sources. uses sources to make and support arguments. identifies gaps in research. creates sound and cogent arguments. provides informed feedback on arguments to students and/or peers. produces materials that contribute to the academic debate in the field. creating an academic literacy framework to enhance collaboration between learning developers and subject academics abstract background issues and priorities process feedback strengths gaps/weaknesses discussion and next steps references author details appendix 1 the academic literacy framework first draft appendix 2 the academic literacy framework second draft journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special issue 22: compendium of innovative practice october 2021 ________________________________________________________________________ object handling workshops in an online teaching environment jessica clarke university college london keywords: object handling; group work; interactive seminars; covid-19. the challenge the move to an online teaching environment in autumn 2020, created a significant challenge in the delivery of a specific first-year undergraduate history module taught at my university. the module was designed to introduce students to the key concepts of space, place and material culture. in ‘normal’ academic years, the students were required to visit physical sites and cultural organisations around london (including museums, archives, libraries) and to participate in classes that were based around group work and hands-on activities. one of the most challenging seminars to adapt was the object handling workshop in week three of the module. object-based learning is multisensory engagement with material culture, be it artefacts, manuscripts, or archival items, and, as such, is intended to be an interactive learning experience for the students (chatterjee et al., 2015; chatterjee and kador, 2021). in previous years, the aim of the workshop was to have the students (15 in total) engage tactilely with material culture, which would encourage them to think critically about objects as historical sources (romanek and lynch, 2008; hannan et al., 2013). during the seminar, the students would have been put into groups and given a selection of objects to handle and discuss. they would then have been asked to identify each object based solely on their observation of its physical characteristics. my aim with the online version of this session was to adapt the original workshop so that the students still encountered material culture from a practical perspective. as has been made clear by recent studies into the effectiveness of online teaching (gonzalez et al., 2020; hodges et al., 2020), when online lessons are carefully planned and enthusiastically clarke object handling workshops in an online teaching environment journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 2 delivered, they can be just as effective as in-person teaching. for this session, i was keen to maintain the active learning aspect of the original workshop so that the students would work together and develop their own ideas prior to the identification of each object. so, whilst students would not get a tactile experience, they would still have exposure to artefacts in a way that would require speculation and stimulate discussion. the response after some discussion with colleagues, i decided to create a handout with images of six different objects that were difficult to identify without additional information. to ensure that everyone had access to the images, i made them digitally available 15 minutes before the lesson. i did not, however, circulate them earlier than this, as i wanted to ensure that the students came to the images without previously having studied them. in selecting the images, i aimed to choose a variety of objects which all had physical characteristics that would stimulate debate. the six objects selected were as follows: an 18th century token from the vauxhall pleasure gardens, with a barely visible inscription; a piece of whale bone which had signs of being used as part of ship repairs, found near greenland dock in london; a bone stylus also found in the london docklands; an ornamental mouse from the top of a roman lamp; the top of a medieval pottery drinking flask; and a set of georgian wig curlers. the objects were thus not united by any factor other than their visual interest and the challenge of determining their origin and function. using zoom breakout rooms, i divided the class into three groups and gave them four minutes per image (30 minutes overall) to discuss the possible identification of each object. using the ‘send to all’ function of the breakout rooms, i told the whole class to change image every four minutes. during the activity, i moved between breakout rooms, encouraging the students to identify visual clues that might suggest each object’s date, use and material. then, to conclude the session, we had a class discussion during which i asked the groups to reveal their clarke object handling workshops in an online teaching environment journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 3 identification of each object and give their reasoning. i then shared what each object was, using powerpoint slides with additional images that contextualised each object. this feedback portion of the session illustrated the variety of interpretations that could be offered for a single object and encouraged further discussion about the reliability of material culture as a historical source. this brought the discussion back to the compulsory reading that the students had been set (riello, 2009), which encouraged them to think about the historical narratives in which material culture can be embedded. these discussions were lively, with the majority of the class participating, which indicated that the students were both enjoying the session and engaging with the intended learning outcomes. recommendations one of the benefits of teaching this workshop online, rather than in person, was being able to use zoom breakout rooms to divide up the class. this allowed each group to discuss without overhearing the other, and, as a result, when the class came back together, the students benefited from hearing a diverse range of opinions and approaches. my first recommendation for the adaptation of object handling workshops, therefore, would be to make full use of the new online teaching tools. by taking advantage of the tools offered by zoom, it was possible to create a session that was highly engaging, despite it being very different from the in-person equivalent. indeed, the success of this adapted workshop was clearly demonstrated by the enthusiasm and participation of the students (on the importance of first-year seminar participation during the pandemic, see hauck et al., 2020). from my observation of the individual group discussions, it was clear that the students appreciated having a session that approached historical sources from a new and refreshing angle. moreover, a second recommendation would be to allow the improvements made to online seminars to filter back through to in-person teaching in the future. something that emerged from this workshop, for example, was a discussion of the context in which some of the objects were found. this was prompted by several of the images showing the object in its clarke object handling workshops in an online teaching environment journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 4 original findspot rather than its display context. this is a conversation that was not always possible during in-person sessions, where the objects were seldom provided with any contextual data. when we return to in-person teaching, i aim to ensure that this discussion of context is regularly incorporated into the seminar. although they were not able to handle the objects directly, the session still encouraged students to treat material culture critically. no doubt colleagues in any discipline which deals with material culture can also experiment with alternative ways of teaching object handling activities, as what is lost in terms of actual touch can be compensated for and enhanced with new methods of approach and delivery. references chatterjee, h.j., hannan, l. and thomson, l. (2015) ‘an introduction to object-based learning and multisensory engagement’, in chatterjee, h. j. and hannan, l., (eds.) engaging the senses. object-based learning in higher education. new york: routledge, pp.1-18. chatterjee, h.j. and kador, t. (eds.) (2021) object-based learning and object-based wellbeing. exploring material connections. new york: routledge. gonzalez, t., de la rubia, m.a., hincz, k.p., comas-lopez, m., subiratas, l., fort, s. and sacha, g.m. (2020) ‘influence of covid-19 confinement on students’ performance in higher education’, plos one, 15(1), pp. 1-23. available at: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0239490 (accessed: 3 september 2021). hannan, l., duhs, r. and chatterjee, h. (2013) ‘object-based learning: a powerful pedagogy for higher education’, in boddington, a., boys, j. and speight, c. (eds.) museums and higher education working together. challenges and opportunities. farnham: ashgate publishing company, pp. 159-168. hauck, a.a., ward, c., persutte-manning, s.l. and vaughan, a.l. (2020) ‘assessing firstyear seminar performance with college engagement, academic self-efficacy, and https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0239490 clarke object handling workshops in an online teaching environment journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 5 student achievement,’ journal of higher education theory and practice, 20(4), pp.88-101. available at: https://doi.org/10.33423/jhetp.v20i4.2988 (accessed: 3 september 2021). hodges, c., moore, s., lockee, b., trust, t. and bond, a. (2020) ‘the difference between emergency remote teaching and online learning’, educause, pp. 1-15. available at: https://er.educause.edu/articles/2020/3/the-difference-between-emergencyremote-teaching-and-online-learning (accessed: 3 september 2021). riello, g. (2009) ‘things that shape history. material culture and historical narratives’, in harvey, k. (ed.) history and material culture. a student’s guide to approaching alternative sources. london: routledge, pp. 27-50. romanek, d. and lynch, b. (2008) ‘touch and the value of object handling: final conclusions for a new sensory museology’, in chatterjee, h.j. (ed.) touch in museums: policy and practice in object handling. oxford and new york: berg. pp. 275-286. author details jessica clarke is a senior postgraduate teaching assistant in the history department at university college london and an associate fellow of the higher education academy. https://doi.org/10.33423/jhetp.v20i4.2988 https://er.educause.edu/articles/2020/3/the-difference-between-emergency-remote-teaching-and-online-learning https://er.educause.edu/articles/2020/3/the-difference-between-emergency-remote-teaching-and-online-learning object handling workshops in an online teaching environment the challenge the response recommendations references author details literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 3: march 2011 simulating practice to enhance learning for 14-16 year old health and social care students karen murrell thames valley university, uk abstract this paper will present an evaluation of the use of simulated practice in the education of 14-16 year old students who are interested in pursuing a career in health care. currently there is much emphasis on the recruitment and retention of the best available candidates into the health and social care professions. however, ensuring that prospective students have a full understanding of the professional and educational requirements of their chosen career is an ongoing challenge. using simulation in health care education provides an opportunity to practise skills and consider professional issues in a risk-free learning environment that closely resembles the realities of practice. a simulated practice session was developed and piloted with a group of students who were undertaking the first year of the diploma in health and social care. the simulation session entitled ‘edith’s rights’ addressed many aspects of practice that were integral to the curriculum. this included: infection control; health and safety in clinical setting; privacy and dignity; nutritional assessment; physical care needs and communication skills. students’ confidence and perception of ability to apply theory to practice were assessed prior to and after the simulation session. data was also collected following the simulation session about the quality of the learning experience. analysis of the data demonstrated that simulation can support preparation for practice and assist in the application of theory to practice. students reported that using simulation in this way had given them a clearer idea of the professional role and educational challenges of the career that they were about to embark on. these findings will have implications for health and social care educators who are considering, or using, simulation to prepare students for entering a health care career. keywords: simulated practice; professional practice; nursing. murrell simulating practice to enhance learning for 14-16 year old health and social care students background with the current emphasis on recruitment and retention of the best available candidates into health and social care, there is a desire to develop a range of innovative apprenticeship programmes to attract, support and prepare suitable staff for entry to professional training (darzi, 2008). academic staff involved with one such apprenticeship programme, the btec first diploma in health and social care for 14-16 year olds delivered in collaboration with thames valley university (tvu) in london, decided to introduce simulated practice as part of the learning experience to improve understanding of and preparation for professional practice among the candidates. supporting students for entry and engaging in higher education (he) is essential if recruitment and retention is to be effective, as students will have greater understanding of the unique challenges for learning in he as well as the relevant professional and practice issues (hilsdon, 2008). this case study outlines the planning and subsequent evaluation of the simulation aspect of the programme, by reviewing the effect on student confidence, student learning and preparation for professional practice. the examining body for the diploma recommends that all students undertake 50 hours of related work experience during the course to consolidate their learning and enable them to complete practical based assignments. due to the young age and limited experience of the students, it was considered that preparation for practice using simulation sessions could enhance the subsequent learning within the work placement and contribute to their understanding of professional roles in health and social care. introducing simulation into the programme also enabled the students to be exposed to a variety of clinical experiences in a controlled and safe environment. the simulations were not seen as a replacement for work experience but rather as a valuable addition which could enhance learning by giving students the opportunity to develop practical skills, put theory taught in the classroom setting into practice, and receive positive and constructive feedback, which is not always possible in a busy workplace. what is simulation? mcgaghie (1999) has defined simulation as a person, device or set of conditions made to resemble clinical practice as closely as possible which provide risk-free opportunities to journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 2 murrell simulating practice to enhance learning for 14-16 year old health and social care students practice clinical skills and develop clinical judgement. students are required to respond to situations as they would in the real environment, usually in real time. debriefing and feedback on performance are crucial to the process. application and integration of knowledge, skills and critical thinking are required and students are active participants (mcgaghie, 1999). the use of simulation and simulators has a relatively long history in medical education and more recently it is being considered as a desirable component of education programmes across all health care professions (darzi, 2008; nmc, 2007). advantages associated with the use of simulation include: real-time interactive experiences and participation in clinical situations; practice within a safe and controlled environment; outcomes that can be standardised allowing repetition, reliability and reproducibility; experience of a wide variety of scenarios, adaptable to multiple learning strategies and learning styles (allinier et al., 2006; issenberg et al., 2005). another advantage of simulation is that it enables students to practise a variety of skills in an environment where there is no fear of making harmful mistakes, which is supported in a systematic review of simulation in pre-registration nursing (laschinger et al., 2008). tvu has a fully equipped simulation centre, which has been designed to simulate health and social care environments and is staffed by nurse educators who are experienced in delivering structured simulation within a range of preand post-registration healthcare programmes. extending the use of simulation to programmes for 14-16 year olds was seen as an ideal opportunity to improve the learning experience for these future preregistration health and social care students as well as promote recruitment of better prepared candidates in the future. developing the scenario the next stage of the project was to map the initial simulation to the learning outcomes of the programme. this identified several areas that the simulations could be based around: communication, infection control, care value base and care needs. a simulation session was prepared that focussed on the care value base and also incorporated communication skills, infection control, health and safety in practice, privacy and dignity (see outline of scenario below). journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 3 murrell simulating practice to enhance learning for 14-16 year old health and social care students the simulation scenario – edith’s rights the students spent the term learning about the care value base and their learning had been checked in a variety of ways so the tutors were confident that they understood the concepts and values involved. they had also covered communication skills and infection control. it was decided therefore to test the students’ knowledge in this simulation by asking them to take the part of a healthcare worker in a nursing home so they were able to demonstrate the practical application of the values. student notes for edith’s rights ‘edith smith is an 85 year old lady who is a resident in the nursing home where you work as a care worker. you have just come on duty when you hear her calling you from the day room. you go to see her and she has been sick and is still feeling very unwell and fears she will be sick again. she is very upset and agitated. you are a health care assistant and your responsibility now is to care for edith and maintain her rights in accordance with the care value base. elsie is edith’s friend who sits next to her in the day room. elsie is very concerned that edith is sick and wants to know what is going on. she keeps asking you questions about edith and wanting to help you. she is very concerned that edith will miss her lunch as she thinks edith needs to eat something’. the students worked in pairs and were expected to assist edith to clean up and change her clothes, whilst considering what they had been taught about infection control. they were also expected to use the screens to give her privacy. they were expected to observe health and safety procedures in relation to cleaning the vomit off the floor. when challenged by elsie they should have considered confidentiality regarding edith’s condition. in order to evaluate the effectiveness of the simulation, self-assessment of confidence using a 5 point likert scale (figure 1) was measured before and after the session (see figure 2 for table of results). student perception of preparation for practice was also evaluated after the session. data from the simulation session was also submitted as evidence to the internal verifier as part of the assessment for the unit. student reflections following the simulation sessions were recorded in individual learning plans to inform future learning in practice placements. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 4 murrell simulating practice to enhance learning for 14-16 year old health and social care students figure 1. confidence questionnaire for edith’s rights. strongly disagree somewhat disagree neither agree nor disagree somewhat agree strongly agree i feel confident that i know how to show my patient respect i feel confident that i know how to maintain my patient’s dignity i feel confident that i know how to treat my patient as an individual i feel confident that i know how to maintain my patient’s privacy i feel confident that i know how to protect my patient from harm i feel confident that i know how to give my patient access to information about themselves i feel confident that i can communicate with my patient using their preferred form of communication i feel confident that i can promote my patient’s independence i feel confident that i can help my patient make choices about their care i feel confident that i can promote my patient’s rights i feel confident that i can effectively communicate with my patients i feel confident that i can maintain my patient’s confidentiality journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 5 murrell simulating practice to enhance learning for 14-16 year old health and social care students figure 2. students’ self-rating of confidence. 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 c on fid en ce l ev el r es pe ct d ig ni ty t re at a s in di vi du al p riv ac y p ro te ct fr om h ar m a cc es s to in fo rm at io n c om m un ic at e in de pe nd en ce p at ie nt c ho ic es p at ie nt r ig ht s c om m un ic at io n sk ills c on fid en tia lit y af ter, not conf ident af ter, confident bef ore , not conf ident bef ore , confident students ' self-rating of confide nce in unde rtak ing ediths right care value s be fore and after sim ulation evaluation the findings from the fourteen sets of quantitative responses fell into two key areas: supporting and promoting learning and putting theory into practice. supporting and promoting learning although the results do not prove that there has been an increase in learning, four of the fourteen responses commented specifically regarding the positive effects on their learning. for some it confirmed for them what they already knew: it was good to see that i know how to keep confidentiality. it was good to practise calming a patient, i was surprised that i could do it. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 6 murrell simulating practice to enhance learning for 14-16 year old health and social care students others identified that participating in simulation could help them with future learning: i can now see what i need to learn. it would be good to have more time after session to plan our learning needs for next time. ‘it would be good if we could watch each other so we could see how others do it – we could learn more. three of the fourteen students wanted to watch each other next time, which we can try to do, although prescott and garside (2009) report that not all students appreciate this. theory to practice whilst the simulation is not the same as ‘real’ practice experience, it was hoped that the experience would prepare the students effectively for their subsequent placement. eleven of the fourteen students reported that they felt better able to link theory to practice following the session: i will always remember the importance of cleanliness. reminded me about communication and how to talk to edith. for some the realism of the simulation helped them to link theory to practice: making it so real so we know what it would be like. discussion following the simulation some students reported feeling less confident in their ability to link theory to practice. a possible reason for this situation is that when faced with the reality of having to apply theory to practice, most students realised that it was not as easy as they thought. this suggests that the students had an increased awareness of the practical journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 7 murrell simulating practice to enhance learning for 14-16 year old health and social care students difficulties inherent in applying theory to practice and is supported by the findings of moule et al. (2008) who found that simulation is shown to enable students to demonstrate ability to apply learning into practice. one area where the group reported feeling they had lost most confidence following the simulation was in their ability to maintain the patient’s privacy and dignity. this could be because students were unsure of how to do this due to inexperience or could have been because the patient’s situation was undignified and the students may not have known how to cope with it. several of the students were aware that they should have used the screens to give edith privacy but didn’t do so; this could have been nervousness on the part of the student or unfamiliarity with the equipment. in the case of confidentiality, the post-simulation drop in confidence could have been because the majority of the students unfortunately made the mistake of telling edith’s friend what was wrong with her. interestingly all the students who did this knew they had acted inappropriately and commented on what they would do differently next time as part of the debriefing. even negative effects of the simulation experience can be turned into positive ones by sensitive and supportive feedback (nicol, 1999). following the simulation, whilst playing the part of the carer, some students reported feeling nervous and anxious. this was partly due to the unfamiliarity of the experience. however, they also commented on how much they enjoyed it and how they felt they were able to identify the care values from participating in the simulation. this finding is also identified by dahl (1984) who argues that learning through simulation is exciting and enjoyable and therefore the retention of information is greater. although the students were fully briefed regarding the simulation and the staff felt they had covered the learning adequately prior to the session, some students felt they would have benefitted from more time in the simulation centre prior to this session. this may have reduced anxiety levels and given them more opportunity to become familiar with the equipment and surroundings. the results may also not truly reflect the students’ confidence as the format of the questionnaires was unfamiliar to them and, due to their age, they were inclined to tick the answers that they thought the tutors wanted to see rather than how they actually felt. this could have possibly been avoided if the questionnaires had been anonymous throughout the entire process. another limitation of journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 8 murrell simulating practice to enhance learning for 14-16 year old health and social care students the pilot evaluation was the small number of students included and the subjective nature of their feedback. conclusion this evaluation set out to explore the use of simulation for 14-16 year old health and social care students in relation to transferring theory into practice and developing an understanding of the professional role. the detailed feedback from the students suggests the cohort enjoyed the experience of the simulation and demonstrated application of theory to practice. although for some participating in the simulation decreased their confidence, they were able to participate in a safe environment and then reflect on this in a structured way, therefore learning from the experience. as a result of this positive evaluation discussions will continue in collaboration between the university and local schools and colleges in relation to increasing the use of simulation in this programme and others that are offered to this age group. the potential benefits of introducing simulation into this programme for 14-16 year olds that are interested in careers in health and social care, are that students taught this way may have a greater understanding of the nature of health and social care professions and the use of evidence to support practice. following this successful simulation session, plans have been made to increase simulation with this student group (and those in a similar age group), by identifying and planning appropriate opportunities across all relevant programmes with secondary school and further education (fe) colleagues. this could help to improve recruitment, progression and subsequent retention of appropriate students into health and social care professions, and is thus entirely congruent with the overall objectives behind the 14-16 year old diplomas. the simulation was a far better means of teaching health care than power point presentations like other unis. if i was going into health care i would come here because you learn so much about health and safety in clinical practice. (a college student after exposure to the simulation) journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 9 murrell simulating practice to enhance learning for 14-16 year old health and social care students references allinier, g., hunt, b., gordon, r. and harwood, c. (2006) ‘effectiveness of intermediate – fidelity simulation training technology in undergraduate nursing education’, journal of advanced nursing, 54(3), pp. 359-369. dahl, j. (1984) ‘structured experience: a risk free approach to reality based learning’, journal of nursing education, 23(1), pp. 34-37. darzi, a. (2008) high quality care for all: nhs stage review final report. london: department of health. hilsdon, j. (2008) a contribution to the innovative, university, science and skills committee inquiry: ‘students and universities’ from the association for learning development in higher education (aldinhe). university of plymouth. available at: www.aldinhe.ac.uk/students_and_universities_inquiry_aldinhe_submission.pdf (accessed: 23 march 2011). issenberg, s., mcgaghie, w., petrusa, e., lee, g. and scalese, r. (2005) ‘features and uses of high-fidelity medical simulations that lead to effective learning: a beme systematic review’, medical teacher, 27(1), pp. 10-28. laschinger, s., medves, j., pulling, c., mcgraw, r., waytuck, r., harrison, m.b. and gambeta, k. (2008) ‘effectiveness of simulation on health professional students’ knowledge, skills, confidence and satisfaction’, international journal of evidence based healthcare, 6(3), pp. 278-302. mcgaghie, w. (1999) ‘simulation in professional competence assessment: basic considerations’, in takien, a., mcguire, c. and mcgaghie, w. (eds.) innovative simulations for assessing professional competence. university of illinois, chicago: department of medical education, pp. 7-22. moule, p., wilford, a., sales, r. and lockyer, l. (2008) ‘student experiences and mentor views of the use of simulation for learning’, nurse education today, 28(7), pp. 790797. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 10 http://www.aldinhe.ac.uk/students_and_universities_inquiry_aldinhe_submission.pdf murrell simulating practice to enhance learning for 14-16 year old health and social care students nicol, m. (1999) ‘is simulation the answer?’, in nicol, m. and glen, s. (eds.) clinical skills in nursing, the return of the practical room? basingstoke: macmillan, pp. 13-24. nursing and midwifery council (2007) simulation and practice learning project. london: nmc. prescott, s. and garside, j. (2009) ‘an evaluation of simulated practice for adult branch students’, nursing standard, 23(22), pp. 35-40. author details karen murrell rgn msc is a freelance teacher in health and social care at farnborough college of technology and central college london. karen was formerly head of simulation at thames valley university. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 11 simulating practice to enhance learning for 14-16 year old health and social care students abstract background what is simulation? developing the scenario the simulation scenario – edith’s rights evaluation theory to practice discussion conclusion references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special issue 22: compendium of innovative practice october 2021 ________________________________________________________________________ a personal reflection on doctoral student progression during the covid-19 pandemic nomathemba ndlovu flinders university, adelaide, australia keywords: doctoral student progression; covid-19. the challenge in 2018, i enrolled as a doctoral student aiming to develop an attendee satisfaction measurement tool for the zimbabwean exhibition industry. having survived the upheaval of two international relocations in the first 18 months of my candidature, my progression was threatened by the abrupt covid-19-induced closure of my university in march 2020. while some universities quickly digitalised their teaching methods and doctoral supervision, universities in zimbabwe grappled with inequalities and access to affordable and consistent internet connectivity for both staff and students (taru, 2020). my university did not have the requisite technology and digital tools to facilitate learning or to provide alternatives for administrative meetings that were traditionally held face-to-face. i also felt uncertain about the future of the exhibition industry itself. nationwide lockdowns had resulted in the mass cancellation of the annual face-to-face business events in zimbabwe that i was investigating, and other countries were already re-defining the design and execution of business events in the wake of covid-19 (schulz, 2020). these additional factors meant that a delay in submission would affect my research results. with universities in other countries also hamstrung by the lack of capacity to facilitate digital migration (watermeyer et al., 2021), it was tempting to find comfort in the fact that i was not alone. however, the reality was that, as a self-funded student investigating a rapidly changing industry, remaining in the same institution or extending my candidature were not options. my challenge was how to ensure the timely completion of my doctorate when the technological infrastructure and examination capacities of higher education institutions in zimbabwe were so heavily compromised. ndlovu a personal reflection on doctoral student progression during the covid-19 pandemic journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 2 the response with my current university unable to give me the support i needed to complete my studies, i sought external solutions. the first was to transfer to a university with the technology, tools, infrastructure and reputation to enable me to complete. to identify options, i reached out to my supervisors, as they were at other universities, to see if i could transfer there. i concurrently explored transferring to institutions that fellow phd students referred me to. off this base, i then did further research on the reputation of these institutions to assess how receptive they were to remote students and to see whether they had suitable supervisory staff with expertise in my topic. i then narrowed my search down to those with hassle-free admissions procedures and affordable fee structures. without understating the hours of careful comparison and deliberation, i used a combination of objective criteria such as global university rankings and the more subjective, but relatable, former student reviews to make the final selection of the university i decided to transfer to. second, i reached out to my academic support network. navigating the transition to a new university showed me that, while i thought i was no stranger to progressing my studies remotely, i had underestimated the need for additional emotional and moral support structures to get me across the finish line. though prior research has established the relationship between strong social networks and doctoral attrition (ali and kohun, 2007), the impact of the pandemic spotlighted the rising importance of writing workshops on student wellbeing (buckley et al., 2021). convening a weekly online writing club to connect with fellow students helped me to ward off the overwhelming feelings of isolation and selfdoubt. i also reached out to an even larger online community of scholars on various academic social networking fora and virtual writing rooms to keep me motivated. lastly, i strengthened my inner resolve to complete my studies. indeed, it was risky to change institutions so far into my candidature, and many students would not even consider this course of action. from the research on motivation and self determination theory (ryan and deci, 2000), it stood out that what differentiates students who progress in such times of adversity is the strength of their internal motivation (rahiem, 2021). these students were resilient, disciplined and goal oriented, propelled by parental, societal or religious expectations to ensure their doctoral progression in the very same environment ndlovu a personal reflection on doctoral student progression during the covid-19 pandemic journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 3 that others found debilitating (boone et al., 2020). i knew that it would take resilience and drive to continue with my studies and adapt my research to respond to the changes that were taking place in the exhibition industry. recommendations adopting the gibbs (1988) reflective learning cycle and a personal narrative style, i hope that this reflection offers some practical solutions to doctoral students striving to complete their phds in the face of the challenges such as those presented by the pandemic. firstly, i recommend that, if working within their current institution is not facilitating progression, doctoral students should not be afraid to look elsewhere for help. they should use their research skills to find institutions that will support their needs and be bold enough to take the leap if it is necessary. theories of trans-nationalism and deterritorialisation have been successfully applied in universities to provide innovative technology-based solutions for synchronous and asynchronous doctoral supervision (brabazon, 2017). students need no longer be limited to a narrow set of options or fear that they cannot have meaningful engagement and build relationships with their supervisors. secondly, i recommend that doctoral students reach out to academic social networks to smoothen the transition to a new institution. during the pandemic, some have grappled with anxiety, feelings of grief, stigmatisation, discrimination, isolation and demotivation, which manifested as mental health concerns and attrition from doctoral programmes (hamza et al., 2020). in the drive to complete my studies, i did not fully appreciate the toll that adjusting to a new institution would have on me all while juggling caring responsibilities for three young boys who were learning from home, but i drew such strength from the 24-hour availability of the online academic network, and it provided me with a sustainable, holistic support structure. lastly, i recommend that students remain committed to knowledge creation in spite of adversity. this may mean finding unconventional solutions or being flexible in adapting their research focus in line with the new reality, if that is what is needed to finish. my resolve to keep going yielded positive outcomes, the highlight being the successful ndlovu a personal reflection on doctoral student progression during the covid-19 pandemic journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 4 completion of my thesis within three years and subsequent graduation. my story shows that, while resilience is an indispensable ingredient of overall success, doctoral progression in a pandemic is hinged on an enabling digital infrastructure and supportive academic networks. references ali, a. and kohun, f. (2007) ‘dealing with social isolation to minimise doctoral attrition: a four stage framework’. international journal of doctoral studies, 2, pp.33-49. available at: https://doi.org/10.28945/56 (accessed: 20 october 2021). boone, s.c., de charon, l., hill, m., preiss, a., ritter-williams, d. and young, e. (2020) ‘doctoral student persistence and progression: a programme assessment’, journal of applied research in higher education, 12(4) pp.753-765. available at: https://doi.org/10.1108/jarhe-07-2019-0192 (accessed: 20 october 2021). brabazon, t. (2017) ‘5 minutes to hell. time to tell the truth. the disintermediated doctoral student’, fast capitalism, 14(1). available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.32855/fcapital.201701.014 (accessed: 20 october 2021). buckley, c.a., saetnan, e.r., gerber, a., cheetham, j., price, t.a.r., kenyani, j. and greaves, a.m. (2021) ‘impact of writing workshops on doctoral student wellness’, journal of learning development in higher education, 20 pp.1-24. available at: https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.vi20.593 (accessed: 1 june 2021). gibbs, g. (1988) learning by doing: a guide to teaching and learning methods. further education unit. oxford polytechnic: oxford. hamza, c.a., ewing, l., heath, n.l. and goldstein, a.l. (2020) ‘when social isolation is nothing new: a longitudinal study psychological distress during covid-19 among university students with and without pre-existing mental health concerns’, canadian https://doi.org/10.28945/56 https://doi.org/10.1108/jarhe-07-2019-0192 http://dx.doi.org/10.32855/fcapital.201701.014 https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.vi20.593 ndlovu a personal reflection on doctoral student progression during the covid-19 pandemic journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 5 psychology, 62(1), pp.20–30. available at: https://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1037/cap0000255 (accessed: 20 october 2021). rahiem, m.d.h. (2021) ‘remaining motivated despite the limitations: university students' learning propensity during the covid-19 pandemic, children and youth services review, 120, pp.1-14. available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.childyouth.2020.105802 (accessed: 1 june 2021). ryan, r.m. and deci, e.l. (2000) ‘self-determination theory and the facilitation of intrinsic motivation, social development and well-being’, american psychological association. 55(1) pp.68-78. available at: https://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1037/0003066x.55.1.68 (accessed: 20 october 2021). schulz, b. (2020) ‘could pandemic permanently change las vegas convention industry’. las vegas review-journal. available at: https://www.reviewjournal.com/business/conventions/could-pandemic-permanentlychange-las-vegas-convention-industry-2063185/ (accessed: 20 october 2021). taru, j. (2020) digital tragedy: doing online teaching in zimbabwe during the pandemic. available at: https://www.coronatimes.net/digital-tragedy-zimbabwe-pandemic/ (accessed: 1 june 2021). watermeyer. r., crick, t., knight, c and goodall, j. (2021) ‘covid-19 and digital disruption in uk universities: afflictions and affordances of emergency online migration’, higher education, 81, pp.623–641. available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734020-00561-y (accessed: 1 june 2021). author details nomathemba ndlovu is a marketing specialist and phd graduate at flinders university, adelaide, australia. her research interests are in customer satisfaction and experience https://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1037/cap0000255 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.childyouth.2020.105802 https://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1037/0003-066x.55.1.68 https://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1037/0003-066x.55.1.68 https://www.reviewjournal.com/business/conventions/could-pandemic-permanently-change-las-vegas-convention-industry-2063185/ https://www.reviewjournal.com/business/conventions/could-pandemic-permanently-change-las-vegas-convention-industry-2063185/ https://www.coronatimes.net/digital-tragedy-zimbabwe-pandemic/ https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-020-00561-y https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-020-00561-y ndlovu a personal reflection on doctoral student progression during the covid-19 pandemic journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 6 design in the exhibition industry. she is committed to disseminating african research paradigms to new audiences. a personal reflection on doctoral student progression during the covid-19 pandemic the challenge the response recommendations references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special issue 22: compendium of innovative practice october 2021 ________________________________________________________________________ moving hands-on anatomy teaching online: a reflection on creative solutions claire timmins university of strathclyde, uk keywords: anatomy; active learning; creativity; minecraft; covid-19. the challenge as part of any uk-based pre-registration speech and language therapy programme, all students are expected to gain knowledge and understanding of general anatomy and physiology, along with specifics related to speech and language production and processing (rcslt, 2021). although immensely important, it is often a challenging subject due to both the amount of information to learn and the methods of teaching (singh et al., 2019). while traditionally the teaching of anatomy is presented as a set of lectures and rote learning by students, there have been increased attempts to innovate within this area, particularly in allied health subjects such as occupational health and speech and language therapy teaching where there is less access to laboratories and cadavers. this has included the use of creative, active, and flipped learning techniques designed to engage and increase positive learning responses from students (skinder-meredith, 2010; martin, bessell and scholten, 2014; zimanyi, emtage and megaw, 2019). on the bsc hons speech and language pathology programme at the university of strathclyde, anatomy and physiology teaching has recently focused on the use of active learning techniques to promote deep learning of complex material. active learning strategies are positively received by anatomy students, improving performance and attitudes (entezari and javdan, 2016), and are shown to reduce the gap between nonacademic and academic student outcomes (zimanyi, emtage and megaw, 2019). the particular active learning strategy used in this case was the creation of paper and clay anatomical models to help students to understand the complex structures of the brain, head, and larynx. students create clay models of the tongue and paper models of the timmins moving hands-on anatomy teaching online: a reflection on creative solutions journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 2 larynx, and work with mannequin heads and felt, to learn about facial muscles. this creative approach to learning is positively received, and student evaluations often highlight how much they learn from these activities and how surprised they are to actually enjoy studying anatomy. with the move to full-time online learning in 2020-21, the challenge was how to maintain these important active learning tasks and ensure the same level of engagement and learning as in in-person teaching. the response prior to the start of the teaching semester, all 44 first-year students enrolled in the anatomy and physiology module were emailed a ‘crafting shopping list’ that suggested different items to purchase if they wished to take part in any anatomy craft tasks (scissors, glue, cardboard, clay). importantly, students were assured that this was not compulsory and other means of learning would be provided if they should not or could not purchase the materials. during the initial weeks of teaching, students were tasked to create their models before each class and add to a padlet board (padlet.com) to share with fellow students and teaching staff. this allowed for students to work in their own time but to still receive individual feedback. while this was a good way to engage the students, i wanted to investigate digital tools that could provide a way to craft models as a group, and allow some real-time interaction. computer games have increasingly been used in the teaching of anatomy and have been demonstrated to result in significant improvements in student performance (moro, phelps and stromberga, 2020). this led to the introduction of minecraft: education edition as a part of our online classes. minecraft is a multiplayer building game (mojang, 2021) where users engage in a virtual 3d environment. the education platform is a game-based learning platform (mojang, 2021) and has been used across the globe for teaching many different topics (nebel, schneider and rey, 2016). prior to anatomy classes a minecraft world was created. students were then invited to join the minecraft world at the end of the scheduled class (as an additional learning timmins moving hands-on anatomy teaching online: a reflection on creative solutions journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 3 experience). once in the minecraft world, each student was directed to build different anatomical models (see figure 1). not only did this allow students to create something digitally while learning about relative size and structure of the intended model, it also allowed for a different style of staff-student interaction. figure 1. image of student created skulls in minecraft education edition. during these sessions, the instructor could walk around the models and interact with these by adding signs next to the model (see figure 2). a chat function was also provided allowing for group feedback throughout the session. figure 2. image of signs created in minecraft education edition showing interaction between student and tutor. while not all students engaged with this task, the minecraft: education edition platform appears to be a suitable online alternative for engaging students with creative tasks such as building anatomical models. student feedback via module evaluation was very positive in response to this activity and those that engaged were highly motivated (continuing to engage with the platform beyond allocated class time). no specific feedback was timmins moving hands-on anatomy teaching online: a reflection on creative solutions journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 4 requested regarding the use of minecraft in this instance, but a scoping project is planned to investigate how to establish and encourage engagement with this platform in the future. there were a few challenges involved in this approach. while running minecraft: education edition students found their laptops unable to run any other programmes; this meant that tutor communication with students trying to access the platform was not entirely successful. therefore along with wi-fi constraints, not all students were able to engage with the platform. once the students had successfully entered the world, a small amount of training was required for those new to minecraft. recommendations both padlet and minecraft: education edition allowed students to continue to engage with the creative anatomy tasks throughout the online delivery of 2020-21 teaching. although not all students completed the tasks, more students could access padlet due to its ease of accessibility (open continually), being embedded within the virtual learning environment, and requiring minimal digital skills (photographing and uploading). minecraft: education edition was very successful with students who already knew the platform and those keen to engage with digital learning tools. however, it did appear to be a challenge for those not so familiar and less motivated to engage. if considering minecraft: education edition for future teaching activities, plans for training and supporting access to the platform should be developed along with attempts to address the challenge of motivating students who are not interested in the use of digital learning tools (gabriel, hütthaler and nader, 2019). references entezari, m. and javdan, m. (2016) ‘active learning and flipped classroom, hand in hand approach to improve students learning in human anatomy and physiology’, international journal of higher education, 5(4), pp.222-231. http://doi.org/10.5430/ijhe.v5n4p222. http://doi.org/10.5430/ijhe.v5n4p222 timmins moving hands-on anatomy teaching online: a reflection on creative solutions journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 5 gabriel, s., hütthaler, m. and nader, m. (2019). minecraft for teaching craft, design and technology in primary school. reading: academic conferences international limited. http://doi.org/10.34190/gbl.19.026. martin, k., bessell, n. and scholten, i. (2014) ‘the perceived importance of anatomy and neuroanatomy in the practice of speech-language pathology’, anatomical sciences education, 7(1), pp.28-37. http://doi.org/10.1002/ase.1377. mojang (2021) minecraft: education edition. available at: https://education.minecraft.net (accessed: june 10, 2021). moro, c., phelps, c. and stromberga, z. (2020) ‘utilizing serious games for physiology and anatomy learning and revision’, advanced physical education, 44, pp.505-507. https://doi.org/10.1152/advan.00074.2020. nebel, s., schneider, s. and daniel rey, g. (2016) ‘mining learning and crafting scientific experiments: a literature review on the use of minecraft in education and research’, journal of educational technology & society, 19(2), pp.355-366. available at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/jeductechsoci.19.2.355 (accessed: 10 june 2021). rcslt (2021) curriculum guidance for the pre-registration education of speech and language therapists. available at: https://www.rcslt.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/rcsltcurriculum-guidance-march2021.pdf (accessed: 10 june 2021). singh, k., bharatha, a., sa, b., adams, o. p. and majumder, m. a. a. (2019) ‘teaching anatomy using an active and engaging learning strategy’, bmc medical education, 19(149). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12909-019-1590-2 skinder-meredith, a. e. (2014) ‘innovative activities for teaching anatomy of speech production’, anatomical sciences education, 3(5), pp.234-243. https://doi.org/10.1002/ase.173. http://doi.org/10.34190/gbl.19.026 http://doi.org/10.1002/ase.1377 https://education.minecraft.net/ https://doi.org/10.1152/advan.00074.2020 https://www.jstor.org/stable/jeductechsoci.19.2.355 https://www.rcslt.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/rcslt-curriculum-guidance-march2021.pdf https://www.rcslt.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/rcslt-curriculum-guidance-march2021.pdf https://doi.org/10.1186/s12909-019-1590-2 https://doi.org/10.1002/ase.173 timmins moving hands-on anatomy teaching online: a reflection on creative solutions journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 6 zimanyi, m. a., emtage, n. f. and megaw, p. (2019) ‘redesigning first year anatomy and physiology subjects for allied health students: impact of active learning strategies’, international journal of innovation in science and mathematics education, 27(8), pp.36-48. http://doi.org/10.30722/ijisme.27.08.004 author details claire timmins is a senior teaching fellow in speech and language pathology. she is a senior fellow of the higher education academy and currently director of teaching and learning for the school of psychological sciences and health at the university of strathclyde. http://doi.org/10.30722/ijisme.27.08.004 moving hands-on anatomy teaching online: a reflection on creative solutions the challenge the response recommendations references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special issue 22: compendium of innovative practice october 2021 moving learning and teaching in higher education (lthe) online: can we have the cake and eat it too? giorgia pigato, the university of exeter, uk keywords: covid-19; teaching assistants training; online professional development; online communities of learning. the challenge the academic development team design and deliver the learning and teaching in higher education (lthe) course at the university of exeter. the course is aimed at postgraduates who intend to work as teaching assistants, educators on research-only contracts, and professional services staff who facilitate learning. it is mandatory for postgraduates who teach (ptas). prior to march 2020 lthe consisted of: stage 1, a full day workshop, and stage 2, four half-day sessions, all delivered face-to-face. typically, around 300 students per academic year engaged with the course. in 2020 we had to re-design the entire course to be online by early september. a specific challenge for this type of course is that, although attending lthe is great for development and opens work opportunities, it is rarely a priority for participants whose focus is either on their phd or full-time employment. lack of time and resources affected some of the choices we made and a project that would usually have taken at least a year was put together in a few months. we had to guarantee the high-quality pedagogy of the previous years but in a completely new mode. we needed to make sure that we did not try to replicate face-to-face teaching models but took advantage of the benefits that flexible delivery could offer. • we met the specific needs of educators new to teaching in he. pigato moving learning and teaching in higher education (lthe) online: can we have the cake and eat it too? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 2 • we gave participants an understanding of how to provide an active, stimulating, student-centred learning experience. • participants had opportunities to reflect. • we did all of this using a learner-centred approach. having a sense of belonging, relationship building, and trust strongly influence learner emotions (mcgill, beetham and gray, 2016); therefore we wanted to foster a sense of community, support, and compassion, especially because many participants are in the early stages of their careers. the response because online teaching is not simply moving your existing content onto a vle, we redesigned the course following the university learning model, especially created for the move online and inspired by abc learning design (abc-ld.org). we aimed at offering maximum flexibility and ease of access to all and we decided that: • students could enrol any time and could proceed at their own pace. • there would be opportunities to get to know each other and collaborate, for example, by adopting icebreakers and tools such as an online forum, menti, padlet, and notebook. • the tutors recorded short, informal videos to make the approach more personal and welcoming. • we also added regular short quizzes so that students could check their learning, and we could keep track of engagement. a priority for us at all times was expressing empathy in the virtual environment via announcements, posts, and videos as we felt it created a bond between staff and student in these exceptional and isolating circumstances (brown and mccall, 2021). these tools foster engagement and peer discussion, and they afford variety as well. but also, the programme allows participants to test these digital tools and choose those appropriate to their teaching context. pigato moving learning and teaching in higher education (lthe) online: can we have the cake and eat it too? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 3 what was the feedback? one major advantage was how inclusive online delivery was. we believe this is the reason behind increased enrolment. participation is very high; we now have 545 registrations compared to 300 in a regular year. the end of course feedback was also very positive: 4.03 out of 5 which is in line with previous years. participants noted that they had signed up for the course previously but then had been unable to attend or finish it because of other commitments. most commented that picking up the course anytime they wanted was invaluable. and some said they thought the flexibility was great, but they missed being with people and were afraid of becoming too accustomed to work on their own, with one comment being: ‘i guess we want to have the cake and eat it!’ mid-way through the year, the students’ feedback was that they missed live interaction and meeting others. we decided to set-up optional teams meetings, with the aim of getting people together. we had some prompts for discussion but planned to have breakout rooms where participants could get to know each other and talk freely. these were widely advertised but, to our great surprise, very few people participated. we had to assume that participants, like everybody else, had to be selective in what to attend, and that they did not want to engage online all the time. this is an area we intend to explore further in the coming academic year. the variety of tools and the tutors’ videos were also highly rated. recommendations we cannot stress enough how much this category of students appreciated the flexibility afforded by this format and therefore we will not go back to total in-person delivery. this experience has given us the chance to reflect on flexible practice, revisit ways that learning communities can support each other, and reconsider what teaching face-to-face means as well as our role as developers and tutors. we are still in the process of finalising the course for next year but, so far, this is what we are planning: we will deliver most of the course asynchronously, in particular the compulsory sections. however, we will also offer synchronous sessions, some online and some in person, as this is something noted in the feedback. to cite brown and mccall: ‘meaningful human pigato moving learning and teaching in higher education (lthe) online: can we have the cake and eat it too? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 4 interaction is the foundation stone of all positive educational practice’ (2021, pp.5-9). we want the students to become more autonomous, but we still have limited resources. to achieve this we will offer more structure at the start, help them to set goals, and make and monitor plans. this is especially important when entering a new or different learning context and we should make clearer how they could engage in learning (macaskill and taylor, 2010). we have created a list of essential and possible changes and we will follow these criteria based on capacity. we are also exploring joining forces with other staff and delivering fewer, longer tutorials to a wider audience. we aim to create more opportunities for meaningful dialogue and feedback, and be proactive in seeking communication, utilising live meetings and other check in opportunities. after all, regular catch ups with supportive tutors are key to motivation (mcgill, beetham and gray, 2016). this might not be attainable straight away; we hope that the tweaks mentioned above will help us strike a balance between interaction, convenience of asynchronous study, and limited resources. online learning can, without a doubt, remove many barriers to learning, especially time and geography barriers (burge, campbell gibson and gibson, 2011) but we should not assume all challenges are resolved because of it. now, even more than before, we will strive to deliver pedagogy that is suitable for any mode and for all. references abc learning design, sprint design your courses and programs in just 90 minutes. available at: https://abc-ld.org (accessed: 10 september 2021) brown, g. and mccall, v. (2021) ‘community, adaptability, and good judgement: reflections on creating meaningful, sustainable pedagogy in uncertain times’, developing academic practice, pp. 5-9. https://doi.org/10.3828/dap.2021.3. burge, e., campbell gibson, c. and gibson, t. (2011) flexible pedagogy, flexible learning: notes from the trenches of distance education. edmonton: au press. macaskill, a. and taylor, e. (2010) ‘the development of a brief measure of learner autonomy in university students’, studies in higher education, 35(3), pp.351-359. http://doi.org/10.1080/03075070903502703. https://abc-ld.org/ https://doi.org/10.3828/dap.2021.3 http://doi.org/10.1080/03075070903502703 pigato moving learning and teaching in higher education (lthe) online: can we have the cake and eat it too? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 5 mcgill, l., beetham, h. and gray, t. (2016) what makes a successful online learner? findings of the digital student online learners’ expectations and experiences of the digital environment. available at: https://www.qub.ac.uk/directorates/media/media,992744,smxx.pdf (accessed: 15 august 2021) author details giorgia pigato (fhea) is an associate academic developer at the university of exeter where she is the module lead for lthe and supports best practices in teaching. she has been teaching pedagogy and foreign languages for over 20 years in a wide range of educational settings. https://www.qub.ac.uk/directorates/media/media,992744,smxx.pdf moving learning and teaching in higher education (lthe) online: can we have the cake and eat it too? the challenge the response what was the feedback? recommendations references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special issue 22: compendium of innovative practice october 2021 ________________________________________________________________________ transitioning from emergency remote teaching to quality online delivery: an irish professional development perspective darina m. slattery university of limerick keywords: emergency remote teaching; professional development; quality; online teaching; training; technology. the challenge as was the case in most higher education institutions, the university of limerick (ul) moved to emergency remote teaching overnight in march 2020. as an academic who specialises in online education and runs professional development workshops in that area, i wanted to help colleagues who were unprepared for online teaching. as ul is predominantly an on-campus institution, anyone who was not already teaching online was faced with a steep learning curve, while also dealing with health concerns, working from home, and possibly home schooling. in addition to not being ready, some staff were not enthusiastic about teaching online (cutri et al., 2020). about a year before the pandemic, ul established an informal community of practice called the learning technology forum (ltf), of which i am a member. once the pandemic started, we (the ltf) started planning professional development (pd) initiatives that would help staff transition from face-to-face delivery to remote teaching, in a matter of days. some members of the ltf offered to run workshops on specific tools, whereas others focussed on the pedagogy of teaching online. while our first challenge was to help staff become comfortable with remote teaching in spring 2020, our second challenge was to help them develop better quality online courses (hodges et al., 2020), for the 2020/21 academic year. slattery transitioning from emergency remote teaching to quality online delivery: an irish professional development perspective journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: october 2021 2 the response before the pandemic, i had been delivering two-day on-campus workshops on how to design and develop online programmes (slattery, 2021). this workshop had been designed for small programme teams and was not scalable for an entire university. once the pandemic began, i decided to customise the workshop into two 2.5-hour webinars, to facilitate online participation. the first webinar covered course planning and design, and the second covered course delivery and evaluation. revamping an interactive face-to-face workshop into two webinars proved challenging, partly because i had to omit content that i would normally cover. i also had a much larger audience and therefore could not customise the content to any particular discipline. nonetheless, the webinars covered essential topics that anyone new to online teaching should consider, such as: • how to write learning outcomes, • how to align assessment with outcomes, • how to choose appropriate technology, • how to facilitate online activities, and • how to evaluate the quality of an online course. (gagné et al., 2004; salmon, 2013; sheffield hallam university, 2014; slattery, 2021; suny, 2018). the ltf offered most of the live training in july 2020 and posted all the recorded sessions online to facilitate asynchronous viewing. good attendance figures and engagement during my two webinars (over 150 bookings for the live events and over 160 asynchronous viewings) suggest that participants valued the fact that i am an online teacher, as well as a subject-matter expert. as anxiety about using technology is often a factor in reluctance to use technology (johnson et al., 2012), i also made sure to talk about the challenges i encounter as an online teacher, to reassure attendees that issues are normal, and to be expected. as we approached the autumn semester, we learned through informal feedback that many staff still felt overwhelmed, some staff had developed bad practices, and others did not know which training resources to consult. one solution we devised slattery transitioning from emergency remote teaching to quality online delivery: an irish professional development perspective journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: october 2021 3 was to develop a new blog series addressing some strategies and practices that staff found particularly challenging, while also directing readers back to the training resources we developed earlier in the year. i contributed a three-part blog posting, which outlined the following tried-and-trusted strategies for ensuring quality online delivery (slattery, 2020): • use tools consistently and effectively, • use synchronous tools when you need to facilitate two-way interaction, • engage students on a regular basis, • break larger groups into smaller groups, • offer guidance and supplementary resources, • encourage students to log in every day, and do the same yourself, • be clear about expectations, • avoid information overload, and • organise the forums. my blog posting had the highest overall viewings (1,607 combined page views) when compared with the other blog postings in the series. the other blog postings covered other useful topics, including how to promote academic honesty, how to create a visually appealing virtual learning environment (vle) site, and how to improve student-teacher communication online. recommendations while the anecdotal and email feedback we have received about our recent pd initiatives has been very positive, we now need to consider how we can meet the ongoing needs of colleagues and students. as i write this article, we have just finished the spring 2021 semester, which mostly took place online. given the prevailing number of cases nationally and the possible emergence of new covid-19 variants, we are being advised to plan for on-campus delivery in autumn 2021, but also to be prepared for online delivery, should the need arise. as we have already developed a substantial repository of training resources, we have decided to focus our summer 2021 training schedule on the following areas: • showcasing ‘what’s new?’ in supported tools and technologies, slattery transitioning from emergency remote teaching to quality online delivery: an irish professional development perspective journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: october 2021 4 • upskilling people who might not have taught since the start of the pandemic, • upskilling people who might have developed poor online practices during the pandemic, • upskilling people about the importance of accessibility and universal design for learning, • facilitating curriculum design, and • facilitating improved student engagement. in the first half of 2021, i led the consultation phase of a campus wide vle review, to identify and acquire a new vle for ul. once we reach the vle adoption phase, we plan to use the new vle to bring everyone on board—not just the innovators and early adopters, but also those who are still reluctant to use technology (rasheed et al., 2020; rogers, 2003). we will demonstrate how their recently developed skills will serve them well as they adapt to new technologies, and that pedagogy should always drive technology use, not the other way around (boettcher & conrad, 2016). we will use survey data gathered during the vle review to identify training gaps and technology requirements. for example, staff are requesting training in multiple formats (including print), better collaboration tools, vle templates to ensure consistency, and better vle integration with tools such as microsoft teams. cutri et al (2020) refer to the ‘sparked enthusiasm’ caused by the forced move online. if there is any upside to the pandemic from a teaching and learning point of view, it is that more people are now aware of the affordances that technology can facilitate in teaching and learning (limperos et al., 2015). references boettcher, j. v., and conrad, r.-m. (2016) the online teaching survival guide. 2nd edn. san francisco, ca: jossey-bass. cutri, r. m., mena, j. and whiting, e. f. (2020) ‘faculty readiness for online crisis teaching: transitioning to online teaching during the covid-19 pandemic’, slattery transitioning from emergency remote teaching to quality online delivery: an irish professional development perspective journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: october 2021 5 european journal of teacher education 43(4), pp, 523-541. doi: 10.1080/02619768.2020.1815702 (accessed: 3 august 2021). gagné, robert m., wager, walter w., golas, katherine c., and keller, john m. (2004) principles of instructional design. 5th edn. belmont, ca: wadsworth. hodges, c., moore, s., lockee, b., trust, t., and bond, a. (2020) the difference between emergency remote teaching and online learning. available at: https://er.educause.edu/articles/2020/3/the-difference-between-emergencyremote-teaching-and-online-learning (accessed: 3 august 2021). johnson, t., wisniewski, m. a., kuhlemeyer, g., isaacs, g., and krzykowski, j. (2012) ‘technology adoption in higher education: overcoming anxiety through faculty bootcamp’, journal of asynchronous learning networks, 16(2), pp. 6372. available at: https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ej971045.pdf (accessed: 3 august 2021). limperos, a. m., buckner, m. m., kaufmann, r., and frisby, b. n. (2015) ‘online teaching and technological affordances: an experimental investigation into the impact of modality and clarity on perceived and actual learning’, computers & education, 83, pp. 1-9. available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2014.12.015 (accessed: 3 august 2021). rasheed, r. a., kamsin, a., and abdullah, n. a. (2020) ‘challenges in the online component of blended learning: a systematic review’, computers & education, 144, pp. 1-17. available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2019.103701 (accessed: 3 august 2021). rogers, e. m. (2003) diffusion of innovations. 5th edn. new york: free press. salmon, g. (2013) e-tivities: the key to active online learning, 2nd edn. london and new york: routledge. https://doi.org/10.1080/02619768.2020.1815702 https://er.educause.edu/articles/2020/3/the-difference-between-emergency-remote-teaching-and-online-learning https://er.educause.edu/articles/2020/3/the-difference-between-emergency-remote-teaching-and-online-learning https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ej971045.pdf https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2014.12.015 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2019.103701 slattery transitioning from emergency remote teaching to quality online delivery: an irish professional development perspective journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: october 2021 6 sheffield hallam university (2014) teaching approaches menu. available at: https://tinyurl.com/y5b27ln3 (accessed: 3 august 2021). slattery, d. m. (2021) duo workshop overview. available at: https://staff.ul.ie/slatteryd/sites/default/files//duo_workshop_overview.pdf (accessed: 03 august 2021). slattery, d. m. (2020) ‘9 tried-and-trusted strategies for quality online delivery’, quick tips for teaching online [online], available: https://www.ul.ie/ltf/newscentre/news/quick-tips-teaching-online-9-tried-and-trusted-strategies-qualityonline-delivery (accessed: 3 august 2021). suny (2018) the suny online course quality review rubric oscqr, 3rd edition (2018). available at: https://oscqr.suny.edu/ (accessed: 3 august 2021). author details darina slattery is a senior lecturer at the university of limerick (ireland), where she teaches graduate courses on e-learning and instructional design and runs professional development workshops for faculty in the area of online programme development. she is president of the ieee professional communication society (procomm) and an alumna of the institute for emerging leadership in online learning (ielol). darina’s research interests include online learning/ e-learning, virtual teams, learning analytics, and the professional development of online teachers. https://tinyurl.com/y5b27ln3 https://staff.ul.ie/slatteryd/sites/default/files/duo_workshop_overview.pdf https://www.ul.ie/ltf/news-centre/news/quick-tips-teaching-online-9-tried-and-trusted-strategies-quality-online-delivery https://www.ul.ie/ltf/news-centre/news/quick-tips-teaching-online-9-tried-and-trusted-strategies-quality-online-delivery https://www.ul.ie/ltf/news-centre/news/quick-tips-teaching-online-9-tried-and-trusted-strategies-quality-online-delivery https://oscqr.suny.edu/ transitioning from emergency remote teaching to quality online delivery: an irish professional development perspective darina m. slattery university of limerick journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 15: november 2019 ‘academic literacies’: sustaining a critical space on writing in academia theresa lillis professor emeritus in english language and applied linguistics at the open university abstract in this paper, i briefly track the emergence and foci of academic literacies as a field of inquiry, summarising its contributions to understandings about writing and meaning making in academia. writing from my specific geohistorical location in the uk, i foreground the importance of early key works that encapsulated concerns about deficit orientations to students’ language and literacy practices (e.g. ivanič, 1998; lea and street,1998). i also underline the transnational dimension to the development of academic literacies which has helped drive forward intellectual debates about the relationship between academic language and literacy practices, and participation in academia. i argue that academic literacies provides an important space for critically exploring what are often taken-forgranted assumptions about the nature and value of academic writing conventions, and the ways these (both assumptions and conventions) impact on opportunities for participation in knowledge making. this critical thinking space continues to serve as an intellectual resource for researchers, teachers and students in contemporary neo-liberal higher education, where regimes of evaluation are super-normative, even in (or because of) a context of super-diversity, that is increased mobility of peoples and semiotic practices. academic literacies as praxis necessarily involves straddling both normative and transformative orientations (lillis and scott, 2007) or what hall (1992) refers to as the ‘academic’ and ‘intellectual’ dimensions to academia. keywords: academic writing; literacy practices; writing pedagogy; writing research. lillis ‘academic literacies’: sustaining a critical space on writing in academia journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 2 introduction my aim in this paper is to briefly outline what i see as the contribution of academic literacies over the past 20 years to understandings about writing in the academy. tracking the emergence and foci of academic literacies and its future relevance to both theory and practice, i argue that academic literacies provides an important space for critically exploring what are often taken-for-granted assumptions about the nature and value of academic writing conventions for participation in knowledge making. such a critical thinking space continues to serve as an intellectual resource for researchers, teachers and students in a neo-liberal higher education, where regimes of evaluation are supernormative, even in (or because of) a context of super-diversity, that is increased mobility of peoples and semiotic practices. academic literacies: my specific geo-historical-institutional location the relatively small field that has come to be known as ‘academic literacies’ in the uk emerged from a specific historical-institutional context: the expansion of higher education and the increased participation of both ‘local’ and ‘international’ students. the former development was part of an official ‘widening access’ agenda and represented a move away from a highly exclusive system in the uk, in which the participation rate of 18–20 year-olds was still only 15 per cent in the 1980s. current figures stand at 44% of people aged between 18 and 20; ‘international students’ constitute 19% of the student population overall (universities uk, 2017; hesa, 2018). the shift away from a university premised on the participation of a small, elite and (on the surface at least) relatively homogeneous student population put the spotlight on issues of diversity − of students’ experiences of life, learning, of language, literacy and semiotic practices − and made visible a significant gap between students and the academy in terms of understandings and expectations (one long-since documented example of the clearly non-homogenous nature of academia is gender  see for example jeap special issue on gender and academic writing 2018, 32). this gap included the mismatch between the language and literacy practices valued by the academy and the practices in which many students engaged (for overviews, see lillis and scott, 2007; lillis, 2014; lillis and tuck, 2015). the specific historical-institutional context of ‘widening access’ in the uk served as an imperative for explorations of what it means to https://www.universitiesuk.ac.uk/facts-and-stats/data-and-analysis/documents/patterns-and-trends-2017.pdf https://www.hesa.ac.uk/news/11-01-2018/sfr247-higher-education-student-statistics/numbers lillis ‘academic literacies’: sustaining a critical space on writing in academia journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 3 write in academia; at the same time, i think that such explorations indexed a context in which many teachers, researchers and students were hungry for articulations of academic literacy experiences that connected in richer ways with daily lived academic practice. research publications began to appear which offered accounts of students’ experiences of writing in higher education and tutor-student relations around writing. such research was mostly carried out by teacher-researchersi driven by pedagogic concerns, but in putting the spotlight on students’ experience of writing (and usually implicit practices of writing pedagogy) research made visible conventional practices of the academy, including disciplinary discourses and academic rhetorical traditions (e.g. street, 1996; ivanič, 1998; lea and street, 1998; candlin and hyland, 1999; jones et al., 1999; lea and stierer, 2000; lillis, 1997, 2001; turner 2011, 2018). as the field grew in labour (reflected in published outputs, conferences, seminars) and intellectual confidence, the lens widened to include a focus on the everyday writing of academics (lea and stierer, 2009), disciplinary teachers’ perspectives on their engagement with students’ writing (tuck, 2018), professional writing (rai, 2004) academic writing for publication (lillis and curry, 2010) and digitally mediated literacy practices inside and outside the academy (lea and jones, 2011; coleman, 2012; goodfellow and lea, 2013). the key contribution of academic literacies over the past twenty years has been to make visible dimensions to academic writing which often tend to be ignored including the following:  the gap in assumptions and understandings between students and tutors about academic writing conventions and the value of such conventions for knowledge making (e.g. ivanič, 1998; jones et al., 1999; lillis, 2001; lea, 2004).  the problematic assumption that it is relatively straightforward to teach and learn literacy practices nested in academia (e.g. lea and stierer, 2000; scott, 2017), and that ‘academic writing’ – apparently once learned − is transferable from one context to another (e.g. ivanič, 1998; lea and street, 1998; ivanič et al., 2009).  the importance of identiy/ies (real, aspirational, changing over time) in the academic writing of students, teachers, professionals (e.g. rai, 2004; lillis and curry, 2010; mcmullan, 2017; tuck, 2018). lillis ‘academic literacies’: sustaining a critical space on writing in academia journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 4  the need to challenge a deficit approach and shift the emphasis away from what writers ‘can’t do’ towards a focus on the range of semiotic practices in which writers do engage (or wish to engage) alongside an exploration of institutional ideologies underpinning conventions of knowledge making (e.g. lea and street, 1998; turner, 2017; lillis, 2018).  the importance of opening up debate about the epistemological value of dominant as well as alternative/marginal discursive and rhetorical practices and possible consequences for participation in academia (e.g. english, 2011; mckenna, 2012; 2015). there is evidence to indicate that questions raised by academic literacies work, whilst clearly working from institutional and disciplinary margins, has made some impact on more dominant frames of reference, for example study skills in higher education (e.g. haggis, 2003); eap (e.g. harwood and hadley, 2004; harvey and stocks, 2017); and sfl (e.g. coffin and donohue, 2012). academic literacies as social practice: a framework of transnational connection the phrase ‘academic literacies’ has been in use with different specific meanings in different contexts (see discussion lillis and scott, 2007) but is widely used to signal a critical and social practice perspective on writing and reading in the academy. this emphasis on academic writing as a social practice involving issues of power and identity had/s of course been articulated by teacher-researchers in the uk who did/do not use the term in the uk (e.g. ivanič, 1998) and from a number of different geo-historical disciplinary traditions, for example, in the usa, horner and lu (e.g. 1999), in france, delcambre and donohue (e.g. 2015), in argentina, carlino (e.g. 2013), in chile, avila reyes (e.g. 2017), in peru, zavala (e.g. 2009), in south africa, thesen (e.g. 1997) to name just a few scholars. however, the use of the phrase in the 1998 publication by lea and street consolidated its intellectual currency in configuring the field locally and transnationally for the many scholars who were dissatisfied with dominant pedagogical and institutional approaches to student writing. the lea and street paper fulfilled three important scholarly functions: lillis ‘academic literacies’: sustaining a critical space on writing in academia journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 5 1. the plural ‘academic literacies’ explicitly indexed the field of “new literacy studies” and street’s robust critique of “autonomous” approaches to literacy. rather than the dominant position on literacy as autonomous – whereby literacy is viewed as a single and universal phenomenon with assumed cognitive as well as economic benefits – street argued for what he called an ideological model of literacy – whereby the focus is on acknowledging the socioculturally embedded nature of literacy practices and the associated power differentials in any literacy related activity (street, 1984). 2. it opened up routes of intellectual inquiry that differed from the available normative approaches − including academic approaches − with which many scholars were dissatisfied, drawing on practitioner experience (e.g. lea, 2004). 3. it helped create a theoretically and empirically robust position from which to articulate the nature of existing available frameworks for thinking about academic writing (e.g. as study skills, eap) and to challenge the prevailing ideology of deficit. (n.b: these points are adapted from lillis et al., 2015.p.8). the phrase ‘academic literacies’ has helped mediate intellectual transnational conversations about academic writing (as illustrated, for example, in russell et al., 2009; lillis et al., 2015; scott, 2017.), in particular, i would argue, fostering rich conversations between scholars in the uk and south africa. whilst operating out of radically different socio-institutional conditions and bound by complex and troublesome post-colonial histories, teacher-researchers have been discussing their shared concerns through publications and virtual, as well as face to face, encounters for the past twenty years. one obvious reason for the rich and sustained engagement between scholars in the two sites is that the widening access agenda in higher education emerged at a similar moment in time but also the importance attached in both contexts to the relationship between power, identity and linguistic/semiotic resources (e.g. thesen, 1997; angelil-carter, 1998; mckenna, 2004; thesen and van pletzen, 2006; kapp, 2012; paxton and frith, 2014; coleman, 2016). given the official policy of multilingualism (11 official languages) and strongly evident traditions of multimodal meaning making in south africa, the issue of exactly how multiple linguistic and semiotic resources can be used as resources for learning and academic work evinces an urgency which is sometimes lacking in uk based research. lillis ‘academic literacies’: sustaining a critical space on writing in academia journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 6 work in south africa has more recently directed uk academic literacies thinking by theorising student and scholarly writing in the context of globalisation and internationalisation, raising questions about what blommaert (2010) refers to as ‘placed resources’ in a contemporary higher education premised on neoliberal polices of globalisation. within the context of globalisation and mobility of students, scholars and their semiotic resources, risk is highlighted as a highly significant dimension to agency, writing and knowledge making: what will and can be said in writing? using which semiotic resources? what are the consequences for individuals, research teams, institutions and nations? (see, for example, thesen and cooper, 2014). academic literacies: a concern with transformation the epistemology of language and literacy as social practice in academic literacies has always been inflected by an ideology of transformation. of course, exactly what is meant by transformation is an issue of ongoing debate (see, for example, the different perspectives of harrington, lea, lillis and mitchell, in lillis et al., 2015 pp.8-17), and it tends to be co-opted in different ways in different geo-historical (see, for example, thesen and van pletzen, 2006 for south africa). but in broad terms, ‘transformation’ is used in academic literacies to signal a contrast with the dominant normative orientation to academic writing (and indeed to writing in general, see lillis, 2013) where the emphasis is on standard language(s), a relatively static notion of academic conventions and the imperative to socialise (explicitly or implicitly) students into practices, increasingly dictated by rigid evaluative regimes (lillis, 2018 ). a transformative orientation involves us asking questions about the intellectual value of dominant academic writing conventions and orientations to language and literacy, and the ways in which these shape opportunities for participation in − rather than simply access to − academia. transformation in terms of a research orientation to writing can be summarised as a shift away from a sole or primary focus on the text – what horner calls the ‘textual bias’ (1999) − towards the ethnographic study of practices. methods adopted in academic literacies typically involve a combination of observation of the practices surrounding the production lillis ‘academic literacies’: sustaining a critical space on writing in academia journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 7 of texts – rather than focusing solely on written texts – as well as participants’ perspectives on the texts and practices. transformation with regard to pedagogy and policy represents particular challenges because as teacher-researchers we are necessarily bound to the evaluative regimes we often criticise. in order to underline the necessary importance attached to both the normative and the transformative, i include here an extract from a paper mary scott and i wrote some 15 years ago: the ideological stance towards the object of study in what we are calling ‘academic literacies’ research can be described as explicitly transformative rather than normative. a normative approach evident for example in much eap work can be summarised as resting on the educational myths that kress (2007) describes: the homogeneity of the student population, the stability of disciplines, and the unidirectionality of the teacher-student relation. consonant with these myths is an interest to ‘identify and induct’: the emphasis is on identifying academic conventions – at one or more levels of grammar, discourse or rhetorical structure or genre – and on (or with a view to) exploring how students might be taught to become proficient or ‘expert’ and developing materials on that basis (for examples, see flowerdew, 2000; swales and feak, 2004). a transformative approach in contrast involves an interest in such questions but in addition is concerned with: a) locating such conventions in relation to specific and contested traditions of knowledge making; b) eliciting the perspectives of writers (whether students or professionals) on the ways in which such conventions impinge on meaning making; c) exploring alternative ways of meaning making in academia, not least by considering the resources that (student) writers bring to the academy (lillis and scott, 2007, pp.12-13, bolding added) criticism of academic literacies often seems to: a) ignore the fact that academic literacies teacher-researchers necessarily engage with normative practices as part of their/our daily work in academia (also evident in publications, as above; see also, for example, coffin et al., 2002); b) fail to acknowledge that a transformative approach is necessary both in order to understand writers’ practices and desires and in order to open up meaning/knowledgemaking spaces. there is also some conflation by some critics of academic literacies lillis ‘academic literacies’: sustaining a critical space on writing in academia journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 8 between texts and textualist, with some researchers conflating the textualist critique (referred to above) with a presumed lack of interest in texts (e.g. wingate and tribble, 2012). a concern with academic writing necessarily involves a concern with academic writing as textual product − but textual product as nested within/constitutive of a particular social practice. but it is of course challenging to develop ways of working with academic writing which enacts a transformative orientation in pedagogy, curriculum design and pedagogy. examples of how teacher-researchers are working with academic literacies in enacting a transformative − in addition to a normative − stance is illustrated in an open access book which arose directly in response to the following questions: 1. what does working with academic literacies mean ‘in practice’? 2. how can the transformative approach argued for in academic literacies’ theorizing be instantiated in practice(s)? 3. in developing a transformative approach, how might work in academic literacies usefully draw on and engage with other approaches to writing? the phrase ‘working with’ is used to underline academic literacies as a heuristic and resource for praxis (as articulated, for example, by gimenez and thomas, 2015) not as a specified programme to be implemented in policy and pedagogy. as tuck argues, academic literacies, although practitioner-led, has never been about developing pedagogical guidelines and blueprints but about a creating a design space for “questioning and change” (mitchell and evison, 2006), a critical and dialogic approach which can sit within a range of different institutional and curricular locations (tuck, 2012, p.116, translated from french original) and, as mitchell articulates, this is a design space which is always open to further questioning: ‘any transformative goal is never finalized; being socially, politically, ideologically constructed, what counts as “good” or “better” is always rightly the object of further scrutiny’ (mitchell, 2015, p.17). lillis ‘academic literacies’: sustaining a critical space on writing in academia journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 9 contributions in the book, working with academic literacies: case studies towards transformative practice (lillis et al., 2015) include work by 61 scholars from 11 national contexts and a wide range of disciplinary fields – including medicine, engineering, photojournalism, nursing, economics − at both underand post-graduate levels. the very different contributions illustrate ways in which teacher-researchers are working with academic literacies as praxis, organised under four main sections: transforming pedagogies of academic writing and reading; transforming the work of teaching; transforming resource, genres and semiotic practice; transforming institutional framings of academic writing (lillis et al., 2015). academic literacies: sustaining a critical space in strongly evaluative regimes in concluding this brief overview, i want to argue that academic literacies provides a space for exploring, understanding and questioning what it means to do academic writing/to be an academic writer in contemporary academia and necessarily involves a reflexivity on our part to question our assumptions and practices as well as our safe disciplinary and pedagogical anchors (see, for example, turner, 2012). this can be an uncomfortable space to inhabit: not, from my experience, when working with student-writers who seem to appreciate the opportunity to openly discuss, for example, conventions and their feelings about them, whilst at the same time working within those conventions and/or working out where to push at the boundaries, but rather from a rigidity within academic practices which seems to lead too easily to an acceptance of the evaluative regimes we work within as if these were self-evidently valid and meaningful. this is not surprising. rigid orientations towards writing in all domains − what it is, should be, is and does − continue to be very powerful (see lillis and mckinney, 2013). creating questioning spaces about academic work − including writing − continues to be important in a higher education which is currently dominated by a neoliberal agenda characterised by the marketisation of all aspects of academic labour, including labour around writing (see discussion by neculai, 2018) and a particular brand of globalisation, where increased diversity of peoples, experiences and semiotic practices is matched not lillis ‘academic literacies’: sustaining a critical space on writing in academia journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 10 by an increased valuing of diversity but by ever more rigid systems of evaluation (of students, of scholars as in, for example, the ref in the uk). the more we see the academic world – as a socio-political and economic system – being ‘concentrated’ into one unified competitive industry, the more we can expect ‘rationalized’ mononormativity to prevail (blommaert in conversation with horner, 2017, p.14) as teacher-researchers working within the institution of academia, interested in not only teaching the rules of the game but in questioning how these rules enable or constrain particular kinds of knowledge making and participation, we necessarily inhabit a normativetransformative space. this echoes in some ways stuart hall’s distinction between ‘academic’ and, what he calls, ‘deadly serious intellectual’ work: the former is necessarily conservative, anchoring our teaching and research to institutional structures, practices and ideologies, the latter is necessarily open, a critical space where we are always grappling to understand, theorise and act, always, to use hall’s words, ‘wrestling with the angels’ (hall, 1992, p.281). as teacher-researchers participating in academia, we have a responsibility to enable writers to practise successfully academic writing within existing rhetorical conventions − to work within what worsham, drawing closely on hall, refers to as the ‘relatively narrow and policed goals and interest of a given discipline’ (olson and worsham, 2003, p.7). however, we also have a responsibility to explore how historically dominant and alternative conventions enable and constrain different kinds of intellectual, emotional, aesthetic and ethical work, and thus particular kinds of participation in knowledge-making practices. i see working within/across the transformative-normative as a necessary given of my academicintellectual existence. lillis ‘academic literacies’: sustaining a critical space on writing in academia journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 11 references angelil-carter, s. (ed) (1998) access to success. literacy in academic texts. cape town: university of cape town press. avila reyes, n. (2017) ‘postsecondary writing studies in hispanic latin america: intertextual dynamics intellectual influence’, london review of education, 15(1). available at: https://doi.org/10.18546/lre.15.1.03 blommaert, j. (2010) the sociolinguistics of globalisation. cambridge: cup. blommaert, j. and horner, b. (2017) ‘mobility and academic literacies: an epistolary conversation’, london review of education, 15(1). candlin, c. and hyland, k. (eds.) (1999) writing: texts, processes and practices. london: longman. carlino, p. (2013) ‘alfabetización académica diez años después’, rmie, 18(57), pp.355381. coffin, c. and donohue, j. (eds) (2012) ‘special issue, contributions from systemic functional linguistics and academic literacies’, journal of english for academic purposes, 11(1). coffin, c., curry, m.j., goodman, s., hewings, a., lillis, t. and swann, j. (2002) teaching academic writing: a toolkit for higher education. london: routledge. coleman, l. (2012) ‘incorporating the notion of recontextualisation in academic literacies research: the case of a south african vocational web design and development course’, higher education research and development, 31(3), pp.325-338. coleman, l., (2016) ‘asserting academic legitimacy: the influence of the university of technology sectoral agendas on curriculum decision-making’, teaching in higher education, 21(4), p.381–397. https://doi.org/10.18546/lre.15.1.03 lillis ‘academic literacies’: sustaining a critical space on writing in academia journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 12 delcambre, i. and donohue, t. (2015) ‘what’s at stake in different traditions? les littéracies universitaires and academic literacies’, in lillis, t, harrington, k., lea, m. and mitchell, s. (2015). (eds) working with academic literacies: case studies towards transformative practice, parlor press, perspectives on writing series. open access publication available at https://wac.colostate.edu/books/perspectives/lillis/ pp. 227-236. english, f. (2011) student writing and genre: reconfiguring academic knowledge. london: bloomsbury. gimenez, j. and thomas, p. (2015) ‘a framework for usable pedagogy: case studies towards accessibility, criticality and visibility’, in lillis, t, harrington, k., lea, m. and mitchell, s. (2015). (eds) working with academic literacies: case studies towards transformative practice, parlor press, perspectives on writing series. open access publication available at https://wac.colostate.edu/books/perspectives/lillis/ goodfellow, r. and lea, m. r. (2007) challenging e-learning in the university: a literacies perspective. maidenhead, berkshire, uk: society for research into higher education/open university press/mcgraw hill. haggis, t. (2003) ‘constructing images of ourselves? a critical investigation into 'approaches to learning' research in higher education’, british educational research journal, 29(1), pp.89-104. hall, s. (1992) ‘cultural studies and its theoretical legacies’, in grossberg, l., nelson, c. and treichler, p. (eds) cultural studies. new york and london: routledge, pp.277294. harvey, s. and stocks, p. (2017) ‘when arts meet enterprise: transdiciplinarity, student identities and eap’, london review of education, 15(1). available at https://doi.org/10.18546/lre.15.1.05 . https://wac.colostate.edu/books/perspectives/lillis/ http://www.academia.edu/689658/student_writing_and_genre_reconfiguring_academic_knowledge https://wac.colostate.edu/books/perspectives/lillis/ https://doi.org/10.18546/lre.15.1.05 lillis ‘academic literacies’: sustaining a critical space on writing in academia journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 13 harwood, n. and hadley, g. (2004) ‘demystifying institutional practices: critical pragmatism and the teaching of academic writing’, english for specific purposes, 23(4), pp.355-377. hesa (2018) higher education student statistics: uk, 2016/17 student numbers and characteristics. available at: https://www.hesa.ac.uk/news/11-01-2018/sfr247higher-education-student-statistics/numbers (accessed: 20 november 2019). horner, b. (1999) ‘the birth of basic writing’, in horner, b. and lu, m. z. (eds.) representing “the other”: basic writers and the teaching of basic writing. urbana, il: ncte, (pp. 3-29). horner, b. and lu, m.z (1999) representing “the other”: basic writers and the teaching of basic writing. urbana, il: ncte. ivanič, r. (1998) writing and identity. amsterdam, john benjamins. ivanič, r., edwards,r., barton, d., martin-jones, m., fowler, z., hughes, b., mannion, g.,miller, k., satchwell, c. and smith, j. (2009) improving learning in college: rethinking literacies across the curriculum. london: routledge. jones, c., turner, j. and street, b. (eds.)(1999) student writing in the university: cultural and epistemological issues. amsterdam: john benjamins. kapp, r. (2012) ‘students’ negotiations of english and literacy in a time of social change’, journal of advanced composition, 32(3–4), pp.591-614. lea, m. (1994) ‘i thought i could write until i came here’, language in a changing europe, clevedon: baal and multilingual matters. lea, m. r. (2004) ‘academic literacies: a pedagogy for course design’, studies in higher education, 29(6), pp.739-756. https://www.hesa.ac.uk/news/11-01-2018/sfr247-higher-education-student-statistics/numbers https://www.hesa.ac.uk/news/11-01-2018/sfr247-higher-education-student-statistics/numbers https://www.researchgate.net/publication/263851258_kapp_r_2012_students%27_negotiations_of_english_and_literacy_in_a_time_of_social_change_jac_323-4_591-614?_iepl%5bviewid%5d=imrtztftwj09kykwlwr5jahg&_iepl%5bprofilepublicationitemvariant%5d=default&_iepl%5bcontexts%5d%5b0%5d=prfpi&_iepl%5btargetentityid%5d=pb%3a263851258&_iepl%5binteractiontype%5d=publicationtitle https://www.researchgate.net/publication/263851258_kapp_r_2012_students%27_negotiations_of_english_and_literacy_in_a_time_of_social_change_jac_323-4_591-614?_iepl%5bviewid%5d=imrtztftwj09kykwlwr5jahg&_iepl%5bprofilepublicationitemvariant%5d=default&_iepl%5bcontexts%5d%5b0%5d=prfpi&_iepl%5btargetentityid%5d=pb%3a263851258&_iepl%5binteractiontype%5d=publicationtitle lillis ‘academic literacies’: sustaining a critical space on writing in academia journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 14 lea, m. and stierer, b. (eds.) (2000) student writing in higher education: new contexts. buckingham: society for research into higher education. lea, m. and street, b. (1998) ‘student writing in higher education: an academic literacies approach’, studies in higher education, 23(2), pp.157-172. lea, m. r. and jones, s. (2011) ‘digital literacies in higher education: exploring textual and technological practice’, studies in higher education, 36(4), pp.377-395. lea, m. and stierer, b. (2009). ‘lecturers’ everyday writing as professional practice in the university as workplace: new insights into academic literacies’, studies in higher education, 34(4), pp.417-428. lillis, t. (1997) ‘new voices in academia? the regulative natuire of academic writing conventions’, language and education, 11(3), pp.182-199. lillis, t. (2001) student writing: access, regulation, desire. london, routledge. lillis, t. (2011) ‘legitimizing dialogue as textual and ideological goal in academic writing for assessment and publication’, arts and humanities in higher education 10 (4), pp.401-32. lillis, t. (2013). the sociolinguistics of writing. edinburgh: eup. lillis, t. (2014) ‘academic literacies’, in leung, c. and street, b. (eds.) routledge handbook of english language studies. london: routledge, pp.361-375. lillis, t. (2018) ‘resistir regímenes de evaluación en el estudio del escribir: hacia un imaginario enriquecido’, signo y pensamiento, 36(71), pp.66-81. lillis. t (forthcoming) ‘¿academic literacies: intereses locales, preocupaciones globales? academic literacies: local interests, global concerns?’, in avila reyes, n. (ed.) contribuciones multilingües a la investigación en escritura: hacia un intercambio académico igualitario (multilingual contributions to writing research: towards an equal academic exchange). lillis ‘academic literacies’: sustaining a critical space on writing in academia journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 15 lillis, t, harrington, k., lea, m. and mitchell, s. (2015). (eds). working with academic literacies: case studies towards transformative practice, parlor press, perspectives on writing series. open access publication. available at: https://wac.colostate.edu/books/perspectives/lillis/ lillis, t. and curry, m.j. (2010) academic writing in a global context, london: routledge. lillis, t. and mckinney, c. (eds.) (2013) ‘special issue: writing’, journal of sociolinguistics. 17(4). lillis, t. and tuck, j. (2015) ‘academic literacies: a critical lens on writing and reading in the academy’, in hyland, k. and shaw, p. (eds) the routledge handbook of english for academic purposes. london/new york: routledge, pp.30-43. lillis, t. and scott, m. (2007) ‘defining academic literacies research: issues of epistemology, ideology and strategy’, journal of applied linguistics, 4 (1), pp. 5-32. mckenna, c. (2012) ‘digital texts and the construction of writerly spaces: academic writing in hypertext’, pratiques: litteracies universitaires: nouvelles perspectives, 153(4), pp.211-229. mckenna, c. (2015) digital writing as transformative: instantiating academic literacies in theory and practice, in lillis, t, harrington, k., lea, m. and mitchell, s. (eds) working with academic literacies: case studies towards transformative practice, parlor press, perspectives on writing series. open access publication available at https://wac.colostate.edu/books/perspectives/lillis/ mcmullan, j. (2017) ‘becoming a researcher: re-inventing writing spaces’, journal of english for academic purposes, 32, pp. 21-31. mitchell, s. (2015) ‘open-ended transformation: ethnographic lens and a suspicious tendency’, in lillis, t, harrington, k., lea, m. and mitchell, s. (eds) working with academic literacies: case studies towards transformative practice, parlor press, https://wac.colostate.edu/books/perspectives/lillis/ https://wac.colostate.edu/books/perspectives/lillis/ lillis ‘academic literacies’: sustaining a critical space on writing in academia journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 16 perspectives on writing series. open access publication available at https://wac.colostate.edu/books/perspectives/lillis/ mitchell, s. and evison, a. (2006) ‘exploiting the potential of writing for educational change’, in ganobcsik-williams l. (ed.) teaching academic writing in uk higher education: theories, practices and models. hampshire: palgrave macmillan, pp. 68-84. neculai, c. (2018) 'on the privatisation of academic writing development: a post-eataw 2017 provocation'. journal of academic writing 8 (2). available at: http://elearning.coventry.ac.uk/ojs/index.php/joaw/article/view/531 paxton, m. and frith, v. (2014) ‘implications of academic literacies research for knowledge making and curriculum design’, higher education, 67(2), pp.171-182. rai, l. (2004) ‘exploring literacy in social work education: a social practices approach to student writing’, social work education, 23(2) pp. 149-162. russell, d. r., lea, m., parker, j., street, b. and donahue, t. (2009) ‘exploring notions of genre in “academic literacies” and “writing across the curriculum”: approaches across countries and contexts’, in bazerman, c. bonini, a. and figueiredo, d. (eds.) genre in a changing world. fort collins, co: the wac clearinghouse/parlor press, pp. 395-423. available at: https://wac.colostate.edu/books/perspectives/genre/ scott, m. ed. (2017) ‘special issue: academic literacies’, london review of education, 15(1). available at: https://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/ioep/clre/2017/00000015/00000001 street, b. (1984) literacy in theory and practice. cambridge: cup. street, b. (1996) ‘academic literacies’, in baker, j., clay, c.and fox, c. (eds.) challenging ways of knowing in english, mathematics and science. london: falmer press. https://wac.colostate.edu/books/perspectives/lillis/ http://e-learning.coventry.ac.uk/ojs/index.php/joaw/article/view/531 http://e-learning.coventry.ac.uk/ojs/index.php/joaw/article/view/531 http://oro.open.ac.uk/28338 http://oro.open.ac.uk/28338 https://wac.colostate.edu/books/perspectives/genre/ https://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/ioep/clre/2017/00000015/00000001 lillis ‘academic literacies’: sustaining a critical space on writing in academia journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 17 thesen, l and cooper, l. (eds.) (2014) risk in academic writing. postgraduate students, their teachers and the making of knowledge. bristol: multilingual matters, pp.1-27. thesen, l. and van pletzen, e. (eds) (2006) academic literacy and the languages of change, london: continuum. thesen, l. (1997) ‘voices, discourse and transition: in search of new categories in eap’, tesol quarterly, 31(3), pp.487–511. tuck, j. (2012) ‘academic literacies: débats et développements actuels’, recherches en didactiques, les cahiers theodile, 14, pp.159–173. tuck, j. (2018) academics engaging with student writing: working at the higher education textface, london: routledge. turner, j. (2011) language in the academy. cultural reflexivity and intercultural dynamics. bristol: multilingual matters. turner, j. (2012) ‘academic literacies: providing a space for the socio-political dynamics of eap’, journal of english for academic purposes, 11 (1), pp.17-25. turner, j. (2018) on writtenness.the cultural politics of academic writing. london: bloomsbury. universities uk (2017) patterns and trends in uk higher education. available at: https://www.universitiesuk.ac.uk/facts-and-stats/data-andanalysis/documents/patterns-and-trends-2017.pdf (accessed: 20 november 2019). wingate, u. and tribble, c. (2012) ‘the best of both worlds? towards an english for academic purposes/academic literacies writing pedagogy’, studies in higher education, 37(4), p.481-95. worsham, l. and olson, g. (2003) ‘introduction’, in worsham, l. and olson, g. (eds.) critical intellectuals on writing. albany: state university of new york press. http://oro.open.ac.uk/49859 http://oro.open.ac.uk/49859 https://www.universitiesuk.ac.uk/facts-and-stats/data-and-analysis/documents/patterns-and-trends-2017.pdf https://www.universitiesuk.ac.uk/facts-and-stats/data-and-analysis/documents/patterns-and-trends-2017.pdf lillis ‘academic literacies’: sustaining a critical space on writing in academia journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 18 zavala, v. (2009) ‘¿quién está diciendo eso?: literacidad académica, identidad y poder en la educación superior’, en kalman, j. and street, b.v. (eds.), lectura, escritura y matemáticas como prácticas sociales. diálogos con américa latina, méxico, siglo xxi/ crefal, pp. 348-363. author details theresa lillis is professor emeritus in english language and applied linguistics at the open university. her research interest in writing across a range of academic, professional and everyday domains of practice centres on the politics of production and participation. address for correspondence: wels, the open university, walton hall, milton keynes mk7 6aa, uk. email: theresa.lillis@open.ac.uk. i the issue of giving a label to who we are is far from straightforward and whilst hugely important is not within the scope of this paper. labels are often linked to our conditions of service but vary historically, from institution to institution, even within institutions. how we refer to ourselves may vary over time, even in the course of a day, depending on the specific role we choose (or are required) to occupy institutionally. in this paper i use teacher-researchers throughout to signal people working in academia who have a commitment to pedagogy (whether referred to for example, as teacher, tutor, language/writing specialist, learning developer) and research (used in the broadest terms, including those who engage in substantial empirical research projects, as well as those who engage in ongoing exploration of their/own practice). mailto:theresa.lillis@open.ac.uk ‘academic literacies’: sustaining a critical space on writing in academia abstract introduction academic literacies: my specific geo-historical-institutional location academic literacies as social practice: a framework of transnational connection academic literacies: a concern with transformation academic literacies: sustaining a critical space in strongly evaluative regimes references author details literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 3: march 2011 ‘if only we knew what they wanted’: bridging the gap between student uncertainty and lecturers’ expectations anna magyar university of east anglia, uk daniel mcavoy university of east anglia, uk kathrin forstner university of east anglia, uk abstract it is increasingly accepted that the development of the academic writing required to succeed in higher education (he) is most effective when embedded within the discipline in which students are studying and when integrated with formal teaching. the many initiatives and programmes discussed in this journal suggest a variety of models and collaborations in the move from generic study skills to the integration of writing in the disciplines. as a contribution to this, we discuss the evaluation of an academic writing development module for masters students in the school for international development at the university of east anglia (uea). the module was devised collaboratively by the learning developer, subject specialist and postgraduate research students from the department. it was delivered by postgraduate research students, who also participated in its evaluation. the evaluation led to changes not only in the writing module itself but to the main masters programme. we argue that the postgraduate research students played a key role in these changes and that through dialogue between students and the department, academics who were only peripherally involved nonetheless gained insights about the students’ experience, potentially informing their future practice. keywords: writing development research; academic literacies; disciplinary writing; writing in the disciplines; international students; student writing; collaborative learning development; postgraduate writing mentors; peer learning. magyar, mcavoy and forstner bridging the gap between student uncertainty and lecturers’ expectations introduction writing is central to assessment in uk higher education (he), in what candlin and plum (1999, p.197) call ‘the ineluctable integration of writing with the display of disciplinary knowledge’; it is therefore also central to student success. thus there is no such thing as ‘academic writing’ but rather students are required to write in a variety of genres and text types. there are significant differences in academic conventions and styles across disciplines (swales, 1990; 2000) and cultures/languages (duszak, 1996; golebiowski and liddicoat, 2002). discourses (including academic discourse) are argued to be ‘connected with displays of identity’ (gee, 1990, p.155). thus success also means ‘representing yourself in a way valued by your discipline, adopting the values, beliefs and identities which academic discourses embody’ (hyland, 2006, p.22). in response to this, there is a move away from generic provision and teaching of ‘academic writing skills’ to embedding writing in the disciplines (bailey, 2010; ganobcsik-williams, 2003). the emergence of academic literacies research (lea and street, 1998; 1999) has contributed to a more nuanced approach to understanding these contextually and culturally shaped social practices. it has also helped to challenge deficit discourses around student writing (lillis and scott, 2007). insights on how writing is intricately linked to other academic practices underline how essential learning development is as a field of enquiry. for example, the ‘different language and semiotic practices associated with the requirements of different genres in academic contexts’ (lea and street, 2006, p.371); notemaking as an empowering practice (hoskins and sinfield, 2007); and the potentially alienating language of ‘assignment briefs, marking criteria, feedback, lectures, tutorials and even learner support’ (bowstead, 2009, p.5). although ‘the responsibility for supporting learning rests ultimately with teachers in the disciplines’ (bailey, 2010, p.1), learning developers continue to play a role in instigating, promoting and developing writing in the disciplines (e.g. queen mary’s thinkingwriting project www.thinkingwriting.qmul.ac.uk). clearly, in complex contexts such as higher education institutions (heis), how and when to offer writing development and who should design and deliver this provision, will depend on a variety of contextual factors: the department, its disciplinary and pedagogical culture and relationships; its student cohort; the wider institutional culture in terms of teaching and learning, prior practices and relationships; availability of resources; the expertise and interests of the learning developer and where learning development is situated within the institution. the brevity of one year journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 2 http://www.thinkingwriting.qmul.ac.uk/ magyar, mcavoy and forstner bridging the gap between student uncertainty and lecturers’ expectations masters programmes is a further factor influencing how and when the embedding of academic writing can take place. in their discussion of models and processes of embedding writing, blake and pates (2010, p.5) identify four stages, from generic writing workshops taught by learning developers to an embedded approach led by the subject specialist in which writing is integrated with the discipline. the academic writing module we discuss here fits into the ‘embedding’ stage in that discipline specific writing practice was offered using the course materials and assignments as much as possible. the module was intended as developmental rather than remedial or a ‘preventive fix’ (gibson and myers, 2010), although as we discuss later, student perceptions of such programmes as remedial was a barrier to participation. before discussing the evaluation in more depth, we introduce the school of international development (dev) and its students and give an overview of the module. the academic writing module: origins and beginnings at uea while most programmes may not assess students exclusively through written assignments, in dev, written assignments play a major part. taught masters students are required to submit on average four 2500 word assignments in the first semester, four in the second semester and a 10,000 word dissertation at the end of august/summer. student success in dev is therefore predicated on the acquisition of the particular discourses and rhetorical styles that characterise this field of enquiry. dev is also an interdisciplinary department, drawing postgraduate students from a wide range of disciplines. thus there is no easily definable ‘tribe’ (belcher, 1989) into which students can be acculturated. the module was established in response to a concern that a significant number of masters students (i.e. students on taught postgraduate masters programmes) in dev were not sufficiently prepared to meet the demands of academic writing in a uk masters programme. as a result they might not effectively demonstrate their intellectual capability and understanding in their assessed written assignments. there was particular, although not exclusive, concern regarding dev’s increasing cohort of international masters students (‘international’ students as used here excludes students from north america, australia and new zealand). in common with other institutions across the uk, a significant proportion of students on taught masters programmes at university of east anglia (uea) are journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 3 magyar, mcavoy and forstner bridging the gap between student uncertainty and lecturers’ expectations international. in dev the proportion was 53% in 2009, 60% if one adds students from the eu. in 2009/10 students came from 46 different countries, compared with 41 in 2008/9. at this stage we did not consider a more embedded approach (blake and pates, 2010, p.5). anecdotally it was felt that lecturers would view any involvement as an added burden to their already heavy workload. a subject specialist who had responsibility for undergraduate skills development became consultant and collaborator in the designing of the programme and evaluation. the decision was taken that postgraduate research students (pgrs) in dev would be involved in planning and would lead and run the sessions. in addition, the learning developer was keen to introduce peer assisted learning to uea, having encountered ucl’s writing learning mentor programme (http://www.ucl.ac.uk/calt/acp/wlm.htm) in which pgrs – in collaboration with lecturers in their departments – offer a supplementary provision aimed at supporting students with their writing within the discipline (crème and mckenna, 2008). as far as we know, the academic writing mentor module at uea is the first which focuses exclusively on masters students. four pgrs were identified as potential mentors and were invited to a two-day training in which they were introduced to an academic literacies approach to writing development. this was provided by the learning developer and fortnightly peer supervision sessions carried on throughout the academic year. a teaching fellowship funded by the higher education funding council for england (hefce) enabled us to evaluate the programme. at the time of writing, the dev academic writing programme is about to be offered for the third year, beginning in and integrated with induction week. in the second year of the writing module, in-sessional english language sessions were offered to masters students with 6.5 ielts scores or less in any of the four skills (reading, writing, speaking, listening), with the idea of following up the writing sessions with more language focused activities, using the same or similar discipline specific texts and materials. this model had its difficulties – some purely practical – and for the coming year, the team is working closely with the in-sessional language coordinator to offer language sessions which meet the needs of the students more effectively within the constraints of a masters degree. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 4 http://www.ucl.ac.uk/calt/acp/wlm.htm magyar, mcavoy and forstner bridging the gap between student uncertainty and lecturers’ expectations the programme in 2008-09 in autumn 2008, group tutorials (90 minutes each) were offered over a period of eight weeks. each mentor devised a plan for the sessions, which they discussed during the supervision meetings. during the first session, students were asked to talk about the problems they faced in relation to academic writing. this discussion formed the basis for planning subsequent sessions, covering structuring an assignment, referencing, notemaking, reading and constructing an argument. during the second semester, four parallel 90-minute sessions were offered over a period of six weeks. the following topics were covered: assignment feedback, analysing assignments, effective reading, referencing, and avoiding plagiarism. in addition, several sessions were organised to support students in the dissertation process. this included a dissertation workshop providing parallel sessions for students in the different masters strands (economics, gender and development, environment). each session was run by a mentor and supported by lecturers. adjustments were made to the second semester programme based on student and tutor feedback. firstly, the programme was opened to all masters students in the school (not just international students or those previously identified as ‘needing support’). secondly, the groups were organised not on the basis of their skills level but according to student availability. this was in response to previous timetable clashes and a request to ‘mix’ students with different abilities to promote peer support. thirdly, one of the tutors was assigned the role of programme coordinator in order to ensure consistency in the provision of writing skills support across tutorial groups. the appointment of a coordinator provided both continuity and coherence. she was pivotal in creating a suite of discipline specific resources, a dissertation guide and a writing guide for the school, and since she was then asked to organise induction in the following academic year, went on to incorporate into induction week many of the lessons learnt from running the skills programme in respect of the key challenges which students feel hold them back from performing as well as they might. in response to student feedback, individual tutorials were introduced after easter. students could sign up for a 30 minute slot to get individual support in relation to their academic journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 5 magyar, mcavoy and forstner bridging the gap between student uncertainty and lecturers’ expectations writing (such as understanding feedback given on assignments, planning new assignments, thinking about their dissertations). a total of 10 such slots were available per week, over a period of 10 weeks. in july/august, group tutorials were organised to provide support during the dissertation process. these focused on the following three themes: analysing/interpreting data; writing and structuring the dissertation; editing and proofreading the dissertation. the one-off workshops were attended by as many as 120 students out of the 140 students on the taught masters programme in the academic year 2008-09 with about 70 students attending at least one tutorial group and/or one-to-one tutorials. research questions and evaluation methods the research questions that guided the evaluation were: 1. what did the students and tutors feel were the strengths and weaknesses of the module and what recommendations did they have to improve it? 2. in what ways did the students feel that the module enhanced their learning experience at uea? 3. in what ways did the students feel the module increased their confidence in writing and their understanding of the discipline? monitoring and evaluation were integrated into the module from the start in the following ways: • two online surveys were created for students to complete, one half-way through the programme and one at the end. • semi-structured interviews were conducted with students in the summer term. • mentors were asked for a brief report at the end of each session describing the activities of the session, reflecting on what worked and what did not and recording important comments/reactions of the students. • students were asked to contribute comments on post-its or other media relevant to their learning experiences. • periodic observations of sessions were carried out by academic staff. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 6 magyar, mcavoy and forstner bridging the gap between student uncertainty and lecturers’ expectations • informal conversations with lecturers were held in the summer term. • fortnightly peer supervision attended by the mentors, the learning developer and subject specialist provided opportunity for continuous monitoring of the programme. given the significant proportion of students speaking english as an additional language, a reflection on the inter-related roles played by language proficiency, academic literacy and cultural practices in writing development at masters level became part of the evaluation process. benefits students’ ongoing feedback and suggestions were used for the programme’s improvement. they also gave us a better understanding of the huge transition many students were making in studying at masters level in the uk. group tutorials the group sessions were seen as beneficial in several respects. firstly, it was easier to ask questions in a small group. problems and solutions could be shared. in fact, helping to solve other people’s problems built confidence. advice and guidance from these sessions was seen as time saving and was particularly helpful for general issues such as structuring an essay or dissertation and preparing for exams. analysing assignments and working on specific essay questions was found to be the most useful, as they often found working out what the question was asking very difficult. the most useful group activity from the student point of view was critiquing/reviewing each other’s work. this taught them a great deal about how to do critical writing and structure their work. south asian and african students did not have much problem with their english but were unfamiliar with the british style of academic writing. for example, they found writing the article review during induction week very difficult as they had no idea how to tackle it. thus they felt that the writing they submitted was not a fair reflection of their understanding of the course, their language or intellectual ability. the writing skills programme was journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 7 magyar, mcavoy and forstner bridging the gap between student uncertainty and lecturers’ expectations therefore invaluable for introducing them to writing genres in dev, to use of evidence and citation, to developing an argument and paragraphing. twenty students who completed the first online survey (71 per cent) found the group sessions useful or very useful: the session really helped me to improve my essay writing. issues of critical and analytical writing improved my skills. the peer review of short paragraphs we did in the session were also very helpful and they helped me to come up with some good essays. very useful, for example, i'm an international student, at beginning, i don't know how to write reference and how to avoid plagiarism. if i didn't participate in this program, i would not write my essay in right way. the sessions helped me the most for structuring the essays. i reckon i was very lucky to have ‘mary’ as a tutor. i've had a lot of english classes for the sake of academic writing during last term and even before the term began, but it was through ‘mary’ that i learned to apply those theories of academic writing into my actual essays. for example, i referred to the handout 'essay structure' that she distributed, when i worked on structuring short essays. the benefits of peer learning were made stark by the experience of one japanese student who said that she was shocked at how difficult the course was and could not understand the content at all. she thought about leaving since it was a waste of money if she could not understand anything. what changed her mind was talking to other students who had the same experience, and attending the writing skills programme, in which she could see that she was not alone with her problems. one-to-one tutorials while group tutorials were viewed as confidence boosting and reassuring, individual tutorials gave an opportunity to address specific questions and students felt they were able to take what they learnt into subsequent assignment writing. these tutorials were seen as invaluable for getting tips on improving assignments and choosing topics. this was an journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 8 magyar, mcavoy and forstner bridging the gap between student uncertainty and lecturers’ expectations opportunity to ask anything the students wanted and get detailed responses on, for example, how to build structure or on their essay plans and again, the value of mentors as peers, and therefore being more approachable was highlighted by the following comment: i wish to continue one to one session in summer time or upon request of students, a tutor can come to university and give advice…because i sometimes hesitate to ask lecturers a question when i feel it might be too simple or silly to them. the advantage of the mentors was – as one student put it – ‘they know we have problems because they are students like us’. on several occasions, the pgr tutors were able to mediate between the students and lecturers, for example, over an assignment that had confused several students. criticisms the programme was viewed by some as ‘remedial’ and therefore these students (invariably international) were reluctant to attend. this was fuelled by the fact that students who struggled with english had been told they had to attend. initially there was concern that groups would get too big so many home students were discouraged from attending. some of the criticisms were not directed at the module as such but at the whole experience of attending a masters course. one student suggested that she would have liked more exposure to disciplinary knowledge during her pre-sessional course while another felt they would have liked content-based rather than skills-based sessions for those ‘who have problems with even understanding their own subjects from the lectures or reading […it] sounds stupid but this was what happened to myself and several other friends i know of’. another student felt that in light of their high fees they should be offered more dedicated support and for others the number of contact hours did not fit with their notion of a ‘taught’ course. some students tended to see the group tutorials as a tolerable substitute for what they really wanted, namely one-to-one tutorials. one student commented that although it was comforting to know there was support and that you were not alone with your problems, one to one sessions were better because ‘everyone has different questions and they [the other journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 9 magyar, mcavoy and forstner bridging the gap between student uncertainty and lecturers’ expectations students] will hate you for asking questions and taking up the tutor’s time’. the problems are brought to the classroom, she explained, but ‘we are all foreigners, we are not fluent, we are not familiar with the system’. these comments indicate a number of things. firstly, that ‘international students’ are not a homogenous group but rather have diverse perceived needs, motivation and expectations. secondly, the comments highlight the challenge in he of helping students to engage with the language, disciplinary knowledge and academic literacy that is required in he. thirdly, there is the tendency for students (and educators) to try to address these separately and the difficulties of doing so. despite the intention of the module to be embedded in the content of the course, the students saw the sessions as ‘skills’ driven. this may have been because of the dominance of the skills model in he teaching and learning culture and to the tension between skills and content. lecturers may feel uneasy when pgrs focus too much on content as they see this as their territory, the curriculum tending to focus exclusively on content, leaving the skills development to ‘extra-curricular remediation’ (gourlay and greig, 2007). concluding summary while the perceived improvements are encouraging, it is difficult to establish a baseline from which to compare improvements across years. the module enhanced the student experience of studying and contributed to the continuing improvement of teaching and assessment in dev. several students attributed their increased marks to the module and anecdotally, dev’s examination board expressed surprise at the marked improvement of some students. unfortunately, the perception remained that the module was for 'weak' students and for those struggling with english, which put off some students who had been strongly advised to attend. at the same time, many students who had not been invited to attend, wished to do so and home students who attended felt they benefited. overall, many of the criticisms relate to the how, when and who delivers writing development and suggest that for students to fully engage, an entirely embedded approach is needed. for international students, attendance on ‘pre-sessional’ courses adds to the complex question of where, at what point and how best to prepare students for studying at masters level. comments about the overlap between what they were doing in journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 10 magyar, mcavoy and forstner bridging the gap between student uncertainty and lecturers’ expectations these sessions and work they had done in their pre-sessional language programmes highlights the complex intersection between language and academic literacy demands and the need to create highly contextualised academic literacy development – preferably embedded in the curriculum – so that students feel that they are learning their subject whilst improving their writing (mitchell, 2009). however, within the particular institutional constraints and time constraints of the dev masters programme, the module has worked. it has also led to other changes which have contributed to a less remedial approach to writing development in the department. self-selection or placement tests? addressing language issues and developing academic literacy on a one year course (effectively in 24 weeks of teaching) is clearly a challenge. while some international students may struggle because of insufficient fluency in english, the lack of familiarity with the norms and values of their new institution is likely to be a more universal experience (carroll and ryan, 2005). as familiarity and understanding grow, language becomes less of an issue. for others, their command of english may simply be insufficient to handle the conceptual complexity of their chosen subject and particularly, writing at this level of study. for a significant group it seemed to be a combination of both. to address these different dimensions, students were grouped according to how they performed linguistically and conceptually in a written task set at the beginning of the year. however, the nature of the task meant that it was not possible to differentiate between students whose writing was ‘bad’ because they did not understand what was expected and those who were struggling with english. on the other hand, students who may have performed well in the short written task, faced similar challenges when required to write extended assignments and felt they were missing out from the provision. in addition, this approach to selecting participants for the programme may have contributed to sending out the wrong signal in that the programme was perceived as ‘remedial’. it was decided that what was needed for the following year was more of a separation between academic literacies (which it would be assumed that all students could benefit from) and english language, where students with scores of 6.5 or less in any of the four journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 11 magyar, mcavoy and forstner bridging the gap between student uncertainty and lecturers’ expectations skills would be likely to benefit significantly from english language sessions. whilst it was felt that it was imperative to detect as soon as possible those students who were likely to struggle, whatever task was set to do this, it should not assume too much knowledge of the discipline or the ability to tackle a particular kind of academic task. on the other hand, it was decided that it should be formative, by introducing them to key concepts and in providing useful feed forward for students to take into the start of the academic year. it was also felt that the aim of the activity and the assessment criteria used would need to be made very explicit. thus, the short writing task was replaced by an online ‘comprehension and writing’ task based on an international development text. the aim was to alert lecturers to any likely difficulties students might have with reading (since the course is very reading intensive) but also help students themselves identify their own areas of weakness in terms of academic skills, encouraging them to take responsibility for their own learning (for diagnostic procedures, see bonanno, 2002). the academic writing module was introduced to the students during induction week and all masters students were invited to attend the sessions, regardless of how they performed in the online task. alongside this, students speaking english as an additional language and who had not achieved a minimum level in ielts of 7.0 completed an additional language diagnostic test. based on their result they were allocated to language support sessions which ran over the first half of the semester. there were some misgivings about making this test compulsory. firstly, whether or not ielts 6.5 is sufficient for a masters degree, the admissions criteria for many departments across the uk, including the international school of development, is 6.5 and international students come to study having been implicitly told that their english is ‘good enough’ to study in a uk university. in the end, students were told that while 6.5 ielts was an acceptable level of english, if they really wanted to do well and make the most of their studies, continuing to improve their english alongside their studies was highly recommended. what we learnt the programme and the evaluation process resulted in a number of outcomes which have enhanced the learning of the masters students and we hope will continue to do so for future cohorts. we have a better understanding of the distinction between the challenges journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 12 magyar, mcavoy and forstner bridging the gap between student uncertainty and lecturers’ expectations of meeting the expectations and assumptions of masters level study (affecting all students) and the challenges of studying in a second language (affecting many international students). our concern has been to avoid segregation and facilitate integration between international and home students as much as possible by focussing on their common concerns and by providing opportunities for mutually beneficial exchanges of skills and knowledge. a more interactive induction programme has now been set up which allows students to explore their expectations and the expectations of the uk he system, and how teaching and learning are organised (e.g. assessment, feedback, marking system). we became aware of the impact of the increasing use of blackboard in making resources accessible and communication of various kinds from lecturers to students. this has implications for students who may not be familiar with this environment. international students commented on the excess of written materials both on blackboard and hard copy comparing to the more personal channels of communication and face-to-face interactions they were used to. more thorough hands-on introduction to blackboard and to the library was incorporated the following year. it became apparent that students who did not have difficulties with english – many of the african students for example – were struggling with a huge gap in terms of the academic culture in the uk and the implicit assumptions underpinning the expectations and assessment criteria. many lacked experience of independent research, for example, due to lack of resources in their home institution and/or limited access to the internet, and were therefore unfamiliar with online research journals – which play such a central role in the independent research masters students are expected to carry out in the uk. we gained insights into the specific challenges masters students face in this particular department, and a feedback loop between the mentors and the faculty enabled some difficulties to be pre-empted. for example, it became apparent that a particular assignment was causing many students difficulties, so the lecturer produced explicit guidelines for, and an example of, the kind of text they were being asked to write. discipline specific resources were created for use in future tutorials with future cohorts of students (e.g. analysing questions, identifying arguments, paraphrasing, referencing). a writing guide was written for the masters programme which goes some way towards making explicit the perhaps implicit writing conventions that lecturers teaching on the masters programme expect of students. more attention is being given to the wording of assignments and of the journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 13 magyar, mcavoy and forstner bridging the gap between student uncertainty and lecturers’ expectations assignment tasks. lecturers perhaps do not always appreciate that students can struggle with the variety of assignments they are asked to write (see nesi et al., 2008 for research on genres of assessed student writing in uk he). for example, in the school of international development, students have to write reports, concept notes, research proposals, critical reviews and case studies. a significant and indirect benefit of the programme was that because the masters students saw the pgr mentors as peers, students raised issues they felt unable to voice directly to faculty members and the mentors in turn were able to liaise with lecturers, thus providing an invaluable feedback loop for the latter. during the second semester, the pgr tutors gave a presentation to the head of school, outlining their recommendations for improving the student experience overall in the school and opening the way for a programme better integrated into the masters programme itself. conclusions in the context of diverse and changing organisational practices, programmes and curricula that characterise the uk’s heis, a responsive and flexible approach to embedding academic writing is needed. we argue that involving pgrs in both the design and the delivery of writing development within the discipline is an approach which is responsive and flexible. unlike learning developers, pgrs have the disciplinary familiarity – they are insiders to some extent. on the other hand, students are more likely to perceive pgrs as ‘one of us’. straddling two worlds, they can act as a bridge between the students and the lecturers, and contribute to the ongoing curriculum development and reflection of the department itself. pgrs bring a unique perspective as ‘novice’ insiders. because they are students and perceived as such by the taught masters students, interactions are likely to be less encumbered by power issues that may arise with lecturers who ultimately assess their work. learning developers also play a vital role, bringing their expertise and knowledge of resources, helping pgrs to adapt resources or providing feedback in the development of resources and activities. lastly, the aim has to be for all subject specialists to work closely with the pgrs. without the endorsement and involvement of subject specialists, these writing programmes are likely to be seen as ‘remedial’ by the students. conversely, a shift in culture is needed not just from remedial to preventative but from journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 14 magyar, mcavoy and forstner bridging the gap between student uncertainty and lecturers’ expectations writing development as need to writing development as entitlement (may and bridger, 2010) references bailey (2010) ‘the role and efficacy of generic learning and study support: what is the experience and perspective of academic staff?’, journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2, february, pp. 1-14. belcher, t. (1989) academic tribes and territories: intellectual inquiry and the cultures of disciplines. milton keynes: society for research in higher education and open university press. blake, r. and pates, j. (2010) ‘embedding report writing workshops into an undergraduate environmental science module through a subject specialist and learning developer partnership’, journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2, february, pp. 1-17. bonanno, h. (2002) ‘standing the test of time: revisiting a first year diagnostic procedure’, proceedings from the 6th pacific rim conference, first year in higher education. university of canterbury, christchurch, new zealand 8-10 july. bowstead, h. (2009) ‘teaching english as a foreign language – a personal exploration of language, alienation and academic literacy’, journal of learning development in higher education, issue 1, february, pp. 1-10. candlin, c. and plum, g. (1999) ‘engaging with challenges of interdiscursivity’, in candlin, c. and hyland, k. (eds.) writing: texts, processes and practices. london: addison wesley longman limited, pp. 193-217. carroll, j. and ryan, j. (2005) teaching international students: improving learning for all. london: routledge farmer. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 15 magyar, mcavoy and forstner bridging the gap between student uncertainty and lecturers’ expectations creme, c. and mckenna, c. (2008) 'creating a space for writing: ucl's writing and learning mentor programme', writing development in higher education conference. glasgow 25-27 june. duszak, a. (ed.) (1996) culture and styles in academic discourse (trends in linguistics: studies and monographs). berlin: mouton de gruyter. ganobcsik-williams, l. (ed.) (2006) teaching academic writing in uk higher education. houndmills: palgrave macmillan, pp. 6-15. gee, j.p. (1990) social linguistics and literacies: ideology in discourses. new york: falmer. gibson, m. and myers, j. (2010) ‘the fragmented route to a whole institution approach to integrating learning development: reporting on a work in progress’, journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2, february, pp. 1-10. golebiowski, z. and liddicoat, a. (2002) ‘the interaction of discipline and culture in academic writing, literacy in academic contexts’, australian review of applied linguistics, 25(2), pp. 59-72. gourlay, l. and greig, j. (2007) avoiding plagiarism, developing identities: responsibility, academic literacies and the curriculum. case study for jiscpas. hoskins, k. and sinfield, s. (eds.) (2007) notemaking literature review. available at: http://learning.londonmet.ac.uk/tltc/learnhigher/resources/notemaking.html (accessed: 23 march 2011). hyland, k. (2006) english for academic purposes: an advanced resource book. london: routledge. lea, m. and street, b. (1998) ‘student writing in higher education: an academic literacies approach’, studies in higher education, 11(3), pp. 182-99. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 16 http://learning.londonmet.ac.uk/tltc/learnhigher/resources/notemaking.html magyar, mcavoy and forstner bridging the gap between student uncertainty and lecturers’ expectations lea, m. and street, b. (1999) ‘writing as academic literacies: understanding textual practices in higher education’, in candlin, c. and hyland, k. (eds.) writing: texts, processes and practices. london: longman, pp. 62-81. lea, m. and street, b. (2006) ‘the ‘academic literacies’ model: theory and applications’, theory into practice, 45(4), pp. 368-377. lillis, t. and scott, m. (2007) ‘defining academic literacies research: issues of epistemology, ideology and strategy’, journal of applied linguistics, 4(1), pp. 5-32. may, k. and bridger, h. (2010) developing and embedding inclusive policy and practice in higher education. the higher education academy. mitchell, s. (2009) ‘‘now you don’t see it; now you do’: writing made visible in the university’, the roles of writing development in higher education and beyond: european association for the teaching of academic writing. coventry university, england 30 june-2 july. nesi, h., gardner, s., thompson, p., wickens, p., forsyth, r., heuboeck, a., holmes, j., hindle, d., ebeling, s., leedham, m. and alsop, s. (2008) an investigation of genres of assessed writing in british higher education: full research report esrc end of award report. res-000-23-0800. swindon: esrc. swales, j. (1990) genre analysis: english in academic and research settings. cambridge: cambridge university press. swales, j. (2000) language for specific purposes. annual review of applied linguistics, 20, pp. 59-76. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 17 magyar, mcavoy and forstner bridging the gap between student uncertainty and lecturers’ expectations author details anna magyar has been working as a learning developer at the university of east anglia with responsibility for international students. she is a research fellow in the school of education and her current research interests are the geopolitics of academic writing and the internationalisation of higher education. daniel mcavoy is a lecturer in the school of international development at uea and has recently joined academia after 15 years work in various international aid agencies. he teaches on the politics of international peace-building and intervention, and facilitates the school of development's academic and professional key skills programme. kathrin forstner has recently completed her phd in dev. at the time of the project she worked as associate tutor and coordinator of the writing development programme in the school of international development, where she is now a lecturer. her research interests include rural development, gender, community-based tourism, and women’s organisations. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 18 ‘if only we knew what they wanted’: bridging the gap between student uncertainty and lecturers’ expectations introduction the academic writing module: origins and beginnings at uea the programme in 2008-09 research questions and evaluation methods benefits group tutorials one-to-one tutorials criticisms concluding summary self-selection or placement tests? what we learnt conclusions references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special issue 22: compendium of innovative practice october 2021 editorial: embodied learning in an online world alicja syska university of plymouth one of the greatest challenges the pandemic brought to the forefronts of the educators’ minds across the globe was the reality of experiential and embodied learning, which often requires kinetic and tactile involvement with objects, places and spaces, alongside discursive in-class engagements. merleau-ponty’s reminder that ‘rather than a mind and a body man [sic] is a mind with a body, a being who can only get to the truth of things because its body is, as it were, embedded in those things’ (2004, p. 43) has never rung more true than when we were denied this embodied experience and became separated by (often blank) screens, increasingly relying on technology. ironically, it was technology that we had little choice but use to either mimic or reinvent this embodied experience. in this section of the compendium, our writers-educators report on how they had to deal with the most literal aspects of what we understand as embodied learning experience. to them, it was not just about broadening our thinking about teaching by acknowledging that our bodies matter and that privileging cognitive and abstract learning may limit students’ educational experiences. indeed, the challenges for these authors involved recreating activities such as handling physical objects to teach about history and material culture; reinventing play, collage making, and drawing in teacher training; reprioritising the body when teaching positive psychology and while delivering lectures to the screen; rethinking hands-on instruction of anatomical structures and performing cadaveric dissections in medicine; as well as redesigning hospital placements, mock crime scenes and intercultural field trips. what you will see in these reports is a fabulous range of approaches and an inspiring creativity with which these authors responded to the very particular challenges they faced. what they demonstrate is that objects can be replaced with well-designed handouts; real archives with virtual trips to these archives; discursive interactions with interactive digital editorial journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 resources; outward-reaching strategies with inward body-based approaches; lecturing ‘to the screen’ with lecturing ‘through the screen’ (morris, 2020); physical dissections with 3d models and videos; clay and paper anatomy with minecraft modelling; mock crime scenes with virtual crime scenes; and intercultural field trips with virtual field trips. for some educators, it was possible to retain the bodily/experiential element through home tasks at the expense of the shared experience involved in creating synchronously, while others used social distancing regulations to improve their processes and provide access to physical learning spaces such as museums for a limited number of learners. together, what these pieces show is that playful experimentation, openness to creative ways of teaching, and dialogic approaches can result in a student experience that is not detached but embodied, and which encourages exploration and agility. even if most authors conclude that there are no viable alternatives to certain embodied learning activities, they all admit that they made unusual and productive discoveries about the disruptive potential of the online pivot to challenge both their students’ and their own normative expectations and conventional thinking around education. references: merleau-ponty, m. (2004 [1948]) the world of perception. london and new york: routledge. morris, s.m. (2020) ‘teaching through the screen and the necessity of imagination literacy’, sean michael morris blog. 3 december. available at https://www.seanmichaelmorris.com/teaching-through-the-screen-and-the-necessityof-imagination-literacy/ (accessed 10 october 2021). https://www.seanmichaelmorris.com/teaching-through-the-screen-and-the-necessity-of-imagination-literacy/ https://www.seanmichaelmorris.com/teaching-through-the-screen-and-the-necessity-of-imagination-literacy/ journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special issue 22: compendium of innovative practice october 2021 ________________________________________________________________________ remote learning might be new, but how we can learn best is not carrie hanson mcgill university, canada alexander liepins mcgill university, canada keywords: learning strategies; skills development; student success; remote learning; metacognition; covid-19. the challenge is learning significantly different in a remote environment? as part of our institution’s teaching and learning center, our team provides interactive workshops for students on learning skills, metacognition, time management, learning in your second (or third) language, a wealth of different study tactics, including how and when to use them, and more. we believe anyone can learn anything and we strive to help students learn better through our programming and resources, which are grounded in research on learning capacity building and the scholarship of teaching and learning. before terms like social distancing, remote learning, and zoom fatigue became part of our common vocabulary – namely before march 2020 – our programming was primarily centered around in-person learning experiences in an active learning classroom and facilitated by trained graduate student assistants. while we also offered a couple webinars through zoom, they were the exception. just as for instructors and students, we needed to adapt when in-person support became impossible. our more specific challenge concerned what exactly we might need to change to fit with the new reality of the remote teaching and learning context. we asked ourselves, how different, really, is remote learning from learning in general? are we facing a crisis of content? will the strategies that worked for students before no longer apply? after wrestling with this as hanson and liepins remote learning might be new, but how we can learn best is not journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 2 a team, our answer was no. apart from leveling-up on new tools and technology, and adjusting to working fully from home, we had experience with what we needed to know and do to support students’ academic success in the ways that we could. the response shifting format while understanding our strengths there were several aspects to our approach. in transitioning from in-person to remote delivery, we adapted activities to make effective use of available technologies with student engagement features and leveraged these tools as mediator factors for fostering student engagement in learning (major, 2015). we also made adjustments to our promotional materials to help clarify, communicate, and reinforce their relevance for students as remote learners. for example, one of our foundational sessions for orientation – and based around mcguire’s framework for learning skills development (2015) – became ‘strategies for remote learning success’. this session is designed to run for hundreds of first-year students, so the activities, such as polling, were already tailored to suit larger groups, and easily transferred over to zoom. in another workshop entitled study smart, principles of effective course design (wiggins and mctighe, 2006) were drawn upon to get students engaged in thinking about aligning their learning goals with the optimal study tactic by using annotation on shared content, rather than pen and paper. overall, the core lessons, including goals and the message around metacognitive learning approaches that these workshops continue to champion, did not significantly change because of these adaptations. the exception to this was the addition of one slide to highlight how remote learning can put increased emphasis on the importance of autonomy in the learning process, along with the recommendation of creating an effective study space at home so long as other spaces are inaccessible. along with the few changes and adaptations to how we deliver our work as learning strategy practitioners, we further strove to be empathetic in our understanding of the difficult situations students found themselves in over the last year and several months. this directly informed our emphasis that they probably did not need to completely overhaul their approach to learning in a remote environment. we remained committed to instilling the importance of regularly checking in on what is and is not working and adapting where necessary as a viable hanson and liepins remote learning might be new, but how we can learn best is not journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 3 metacognitive strategy (winne and hadwin, 1998) that learners can put into practice in any context. fortunately for our approach, students did not seem to need too much convincing. participation in sessions was high when compared to previous terms and feedback for these workshops was positive, which we were happy to see as consistent with expectations on our part. in our post-workshop feedback forms, respondents overwhelmingly indicated that they planned to implement something they had learned in our workshop(s). this kind of commitment to a behavioral change is what we strive for, and hope bears real fruit for the students’ longer-term learning and success! recommendations consistency and collaboration we are not saying ‘remote learning isn’t that different from learning in general’. students have spent over a year being directly or indirectly reminded of the difficulties – getting and staying motivated, feeling disconnected, adapting to new ways of being in spaces; the list goes on. these are very real challenges that students continue to face. after all, so much is different, even over a year later. but when we are talking about how students can learn best, what has changed? if you need to memorise material, try some recall strategies. if you have a question, ask it – you will be better off. if you favor accountability, set a study goal or form a (virtual) study group. so, we are saying that in the face of so much upheaval in all our lives, how a student can learn best has not changed. our advice to others is remain committed to what you know works and explore different mediums to deliver that message to students. for us, it was transitioning to a webinar-based delivery model, supplemented with web resources that were also shared with instructors, so that they could direct their students to them. further, our position within a teaching and learning center has continued to be critical to the outcomes of our work, since we have been able to seamlessly align our learning skills frameworks with messaging and support for instructors. especially during the transition into and through remote teaching and learning, information was constantly evolving, but we were well-suited to keep up with it and align with hanson and liepins remote learning might be new, but how we can learn best is not journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 4 it. so, if you are not already exploring collaborations or connections with your own institution’s teaching and learning centre, we recommend this as a viable way forward, especially after experiencing the remote context. references major, c. h. (2015) teaching online: a guide to theory, research, and practice. baltimore: johns hopkins university press. mcguire, s. y. (2015) teach students how to learn: strategies you can incorporate into any course to improve student metacognition, study skills, and motivation. sterling, virginia: stylus publishing, llc. wiggins, g. p. and mctighe, j. (2006) understanding by design. upper saddle river, n.j.: pearson education. winne, p. h. and hadwin, a. f. (1998) ‘studying as self regulated learning’, in hacker, d. j., dunlosky, j. and graesser, a. c. (eds.) metacognition in educational theory and practice. mahwah, n.j.: l. erlbaum associates, pp. 277-304. author details carrie hanson is a skills development officer supporting undergraduate student learning at mcgill university’s teaching and learning services. she received a ba from carleton college in minnesota in 2016 and completed her mist from mcgill university in 2019. alexander liepins is the associate director of student learning and development in teaching and learning services at mcgill university. he received his ba from wisconsin lutheran college in 2009, his ma from memorial university of newfoundland in 2011, and his phd from the university of ottawa in 2017. remote learning might be new, but how we can learn best is not the challenge is learning significantly different in a remote environment? the response shifting format while understanding our strengths recommendations consistency and collaboration references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special issue 22: compendium of innovative practice october 2021 ________________________________________________________________________ putting community first: supporting (a)synchronous interaction and belonging in online learning ian garner queen’s university, kingston, canada lindsay heggie queen’s university, kingston, canada keywords: online learning; belonging; community; academic success; covid-19. the challenge student academic success services (sass) is a writing centre and learning strategies unit that supports the 24,000 students at queen’s university in kingston, canada. we do not directly support faculty’s pedagogical development and instructional design. instead, we provide students with academic skills and writing support through workshops, appointments, and drop-in sessions and groups. sass’s mission is as much about students’ lives as their learning experiences. we believe that supporting students’ sense of belonging and community are central to academic success (for example, bliuc, et al., 2011; strayhorn, 2012; reynolds et al., 2017; suhlmann et al., 2018), and help them persist in the face of challenges (hoffman et al., 2002; strayhorn, 2012). developing a sense of belonging leads to feelings of community, and community boosts success. the abrupt transition to online learning in march 2020 threatened to hit our communitybuilding mission hard. gone were the shared spaces and sites of interaction. gone were the opportunities for structured writing groups, workshops and drop-in programmes. gone were the chance meetings, the reassuring nods of a classmate, and the safety in numbers of the typical learning community. worse still, gone were the opportunities to identify students who struggled to engage in the community at a large institution. heggie and garner putting community first: supporting (a)synchronous interaction and belonging in online learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 2 our first remote efforts were hardly community-centric. we churned out reams of videos, handouts and semi-interactive modules to be completed asynchronously and alone. in our attempts to make resources available, and worried that live events would exclude students abroad, we focused on self-led and asynchronous content that had no opportunities for interaction or discussion. students soon began to report that they felt alone and removed from the scholarly community and that their motivation was flagging. the response without the time or money for large-scale solutions, we sought cheaper, simpler ways to foster community and belonging through a sense of shared time, place and support. our approach, which draws on research from higher education and innovations from learning development and writing centres and student affairs departments at queen’s and beyond, may help meet the central human needs of belonging and community (strayhorn, 2012). it might even improve on some more costly solutions in the university context. from mid-autumn 2020 on, we have strived to include multiple, smaller opportunities for interaction and therefore community-building in every part of our work. for example: • video lectures were sent to course instructors with suggestions for discussion questions; a live, recorded q&a with the chance to pre-submit questions often followed. • interactive online tutorials – built using the inexpensive rise articulate e-learning platform (an online course creation tool which cost us approximately $450 usd per year) – were revised to embed free third-party elements such as padlets and google jamboards where students could publicly share their ideas, opinions and responses to learning. • we asked student volunteers to run ‘study with me’ instagram live events (live footage of a person studying; lee et al., 2021) and online zoom study halls (in which student leaders talked through their study processes as attendees worked on their own material, answered questions and chatted with each other). these events introduced ‘informal social learning spaces’ (out-of-class spaces where learning heggie and garner putting community first: supporting (a)synchronous interaction and belonging in online learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 3 takes place and where increased belonging and completion of academic work mutually reinforce one another (matthews et al., 2011). • we added a second informal social learning space – an entirely new online weekly study hall component, emulating instagram live events via zoom – to our mentor programme for students who performed poorly in first semester. • we turned our graduate drop-in programme into an online community to reduce student isolation. we held twice-weekly live check-ins, created a repository of resources, and facilitated discussion via microsoft teams. students participated in scheduled ‘cameras on, microphones off’ writing blocks to increase accountability and focus, and support self-regulated behaviour (lee et al., 2021). staff members provided one-to-one writing and academic skills support. even if learners could not be together in person, our students were offered constant ways to connect, question and discuss, and to see others doing the same thing. we saw how virtual community interaction led to self-reported learning benefits immediately: • instagram live events were attended by over 100 students – an improvement on our traditional in-person programming. • an interactive rise articulate module, which included embedded padlets for discussion, was completed by 94% of enrolled students. 100% of students surveyed rated the module as ‘very’ or ‘extremely useful’, commenting on how the interactive activities were central to ‘increasing my confidence’ and ‘engaging me’. students willingly engaged in the discussion tasks by thoughtfully sharing and reacting to ideas – counter to anecdotal suggestions that students would avoid optional tasks. • graduate students praised the ‘positive invitations and supportive considerations for learning and engagement’ of our online group writing space. reflections reminding ourselves that even small gains would add up, and offering flexible, constant and responsive forms of community engagement, proved effective. interventions such as ours might be overshadowed by expensive solutions, but our work offers agility. we can heggie and garner putting community first: supporting (a)synchronous interaction and belonging in online learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 4 make rapid refinements to our programming in response to the pandemic’s latest challenge—and, indeed, can do so after its end. our approach offers multiple ways to engage in scholarly community for students with accessibility needs and for those who may not feel comfortable participating in discussions or life at a traditional research university. our increasingly diverse population, who bring unique backgrounds and situations that affect engagement in their studies and scholarly community, were therefore well served by our approach. we are not experts in tech, and we do not have a big budget for this work. to continue tailoring our approach and keeping up with changes in society, we must keep apprised of students’ ever-shifting needs. at sass, we are instituting a yearly review of new, free technology and interactive options as they reflect student community engagement. as part of the annual review process, we hope to be more mindful of training and development resources consumed in implementing new technologies. by continually planning, we will keep ahead of the curve and avoid panicked sprints in response to future challenges. no matter what lies ahead, ‘return to normal’ is not our intention. we are creating a new normal. we encourage others working in the field of learning development to collaborate to find ways to construct (in)formal learning spaces that transcend and connect virtual and physical spaces. doing so need not be expensive, and our initial data suggest that students may embrace a hybrid online/in-person experience, especially where institutions choose to adopt such learning approaches. acknowledging that our students wish to belong to and be part of a community is essential to improving both lives and learning experiences. references bliuc, a.m., ellis, r.a., goodyear, p. and hendres, d.m. (2011) ‘understanding student learning in context: relationships between social identity, perceptions of the learning community, approaches to learning and academic performance’, european journal heggie and garner putting community first: supporting (a)synchronous interaction and belonging in online learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 5 of psychology of education, 23(3), pp.417–433. available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10212-011-0065-6 (accessed: 6 september 2021). hoffman, m., richmond, j., morrow, j. and salomone, k. (2002) ‘investigating “sense of belonging” in first-year college students’, journal of college student retention: research, theory & practice, 4, 227–256. available at: https://doi.org/10.2190%2fdryc-cxq9-jq8v-ht4v (accessed: 6 september 2021). lee, y., chung, j.j.y., song, j.y., chang, m. and kim, j. (2021) ‘personalizing ambiance and illusionary presence: how people use “study with me” videos to create effective studying environments’, proceedings of the 2021 chi conference on human factors in computing systems, 355, 1-13. available at: https://doi.org/10.1145/3411764.3445222 (accessed: 6 september 2021). matthews, k.e., andrews, v. and adams, p. (2011) ‘social learning spaces and student engagement’, higher education research and development, 30(2): 105-120. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/07294360.2010.512629 (accessed: 6 september 2021). reynolds, k.j., lee, e., turner i., bromhead, d. and subasic, e. (2017) ‘how does school climate impact academic achievement? an examination of social identity processes’, psychological science, 38(1):135-152. available at: https://doi.org/10.1177%2f0143034316682295 (accessed: 6 september 2021). strayhorn, t. (2012) college students’ sense of belonging: a key to educational success for all students. london: routledge. suhlmann, m., sassenberg, k., nagengast, b. and trautwein, u. (2018) ‘belonging mediates effects of student-university fit on well-being, motivation, and dropout intention’, social psychology, 49(1), pp.16-28. available at: https://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1027/1864-9335/a000325 (accessed: 6 september 2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10212-011-0065-6 https://doi.org/10.2190%2fdryc-cxq9-jq8v-ht4v https://doi.org/10.1145/3411764.3445222 https://doi.org/10.1080/07294360.2010.512629 https://doi.org/10.1177%2f0143034316682295 https://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1027/1864-9335/a000325 heggie and garner putting community first: supporting (a)synchronous interaction and belonging in online learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 6 author details ian garner is manager (outreach) at student academic success services (queen’s university). he completed his phd at the university of toronto and has taught languages at school and university level. he has published translations and research in various journals and popular publications, and a book manuscript based on his doctoral work is due for release in 2022. lindsay heggie is an academic skills and writing specialist at student academic success services (queen’s university) and holds a phd in cognitive studies of education from queen’s university. her publications and research focus on reading development, especially those critical skills children need to become accurate, fluent readers with good comprehension. putting community first: supporting (a)synchronous interaction and belonging in online learning the challenge the response reflections references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special issue 22: compendium of innovative practice october 2021 editorial: adapting assessment and feedback strategies gita sedghi university of liverpool assessment should be aligned with courses’ aims and module learning outcomes and used to improve student learning; therefore, constructive and timely feedback is essential for effective learning. during the pandemic, the transition to online learning and teaching called upon practitioners to investigate new ways to support and connect with their students. since student engagement became a dilemma, assessment played an instrumental part in measuring student learning and participation to inform teachers and students of classroom learning. consequently, feedback became even more crucial to mitigate learning gaps. this section highlights the challenges learning developers and educators encountered to facilitate a supportive online learning community to allow students to benefit from each other’s insights and create accessible and flexible assessments to help diverse cohorts. it showcases various assessment and feedback methods implemented to foster student engagement. however, the increased working demands of transitioning online meant that any measures taken did not add extra tasks on top of the already heavier workload for teaching staff. the authors explain the challenges of using etools to find suitable platforms for their activities while demonstrating the need to be mindful that etools dictate neither the pedagogy nor the development of assessment. since the chosen pedagogical approach directly influences learning, the educators ensured that online and active assessment pedagogy was not compromised. the reflections in this section present a range of initiatives that authors applied in response to the challenges brought by covid-19. they demonstrate how crucial it is to ensure that assessments are authentic, with student perceptions of authenticity being vital and contributing significantly to the completion of learning outcomes. pre-recorded videos to prepare for exams, collaborative student support network, video feedback, evaluation skills developed through the group evaluation activity, vlog, minimising academic editorial journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 dishonesty issues and online peer-feedback are examples of activities to foster more meaningful assessment and feedback. the authors exhibit several ideas for the creation of authentic assessments to support online and active learning, increase student engagement and provide learners with a platform to demonstrate their skills. there are a number of recommendations for educators in this section, including providing opportunities for students to engage in assessment design and to test their own ability to reach module learning outcomes by replicating summative assessment; giving timely feedback to improve future performance and student learning to enable a supportive environment for students to engage with the course content. using different feedback modalities is feasible across the higher education sector, but care must be taken to support educators in developing competencies, providing clear instructions for access, listening to recipients’ feedback and making adaptations so that feedback is meaningful and encouraging, motivating learners to improve their work. educators must ensure that pedagogy takes priority; the tools should allow staff to support learning and develop resources that remain authentic to the agreed approach. journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special issue 22: compendium of innovative practice october 2021 ________________________________________________________________________ authentic assessment during covid-19: an australian postgraduate computing degree program example rabiul hasan university of sydney, australia sabina cerimagic university of sydney, australia keywords: assessment design; assessment transformation; covid-19; emergency remote learning; change management. the challenge this case study outlines the challenges faced during the covid-19 pandemic in relation to transforming assessment design. it focuses on a core study unit with an approximate class size of 300 students in the master of information technology (mit) degree programme at an australian university. when the covid-19 outbreak first affected our education delivery in march 2020, we had little time to plan and transform assessments, instead addressing emergency remote learning (khlaif, salha and kouraichi, 2021). with very short-notice (fewer than two weeks), we were expected to update our unit of study outline, including the redesign of different types, modes, and implementation of assessment. in addition to this challenge, change management was a crucial issue in our micro-level decision-making because we had already published the course outline and were about to start face-to-face delivery of classes and tutorials. we had insufficient information on unit delivery plans and assessment implementation options, including whether to go online for the entire semester or only the first half. about 80% of the students enrolled in the unit of the study were based overseas, and many of them experienced border closures or travel restrictions (champagne and granja, 2021) around the beginning of semester one in march 2020. moreover, it was challenging to decide on the right tools to implement assessments apart from using canvas (our university’s lms). hasan and cerimagic authentic assessment during covid-19: an australian postgraduate computing degree program example journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 2 we had inadequate information on the constraints associated with the available tools, including their usability and accessibility. the most critical challenge in the transformation of our teaching was the design of the assessments in crisis. studies suggest that authentic assessment activities connect classroom learning to real-world experiences (ashford-rowe, herrington and brown, 2014; villarroel et al., 2020), reflect practical task situations (palm, 2008; fook and sidhu, 2010; villarroel et al., 2018; sotiriadou et al., 2020; karunanayaka and naidu, 2021), and demonstrate students’ capability to analyse and synthesise the tasks in meaningful contexts (swaffield, 2011; ashford-rowe, herrington and brown, 2014). however, as part of our emergency response in the midst of the pandemic, quickly creating authentic assessment online was challenging, especially with reduced staffing resources and an uncertain environment where both students and staff were under increasing amounts of stress. the response in the process of designing assessments, we first reviewed existing assessment contexts within the unit of study. it helped us to strategise change implementation and management and make informed decisions on different assessment perspectives in which change was necessary. as the study unit was built into authentic assessments for face-to-face delivery to keep students motivated and engaged (ellis et al., 2020; villarroel et al., 2020; schultz et al., 2021; sokhanvar, salehi, and sokhanvar, 2021) and to support them to develop graduate qualities for employability (villarroel et al., 2018; karunanayaka and naidu, 2021), we wanted to mirror this approach and retain good practice in relation to authentic assessments (joy cumming and maxwell, 1999) for the move online. we had set all assessments online using synchronous and asynchronous participation methods depending on the nature of the assessment. we either changed specific assessment types or removed them where required. we reviewed all assessments of the unit, including online quizzes, in-class tests, individual and group assignments, presentations, and the final exam. we selected a few in-class tests and converted them to assignment-oriented assessments requiring a file submission from a student or group using the canvas system. in terms of assessment distribution, we designed some of them hasan and cerimagic authentic assessment during covid-19: an australian postgraduate computing degree program example journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 3 to accommodate a delay in implementation in the first six weeks of the 13-week semester to allow students time to settle down before actively engaging with their study. giving students more time to start doing the assessments was necessary because many of them had to go through a tough time preparing for a good start of the semester, maintaining their mental health and well-being during the covid-19 outbreak. thus, we offered flexible time in the commencement of some assessments to support their learning in crisis. regarding assessment design, we constructed assessments based on real-world scenarios and case analyses. we implemented them online, requiring students to use critical thinking and analytical skills because these are vital components of the unit's learning outcomes and the university’s graduate qualities. we removed multiple-choice questions (mcqs) and short answer questions (saqs) in the unit of study to give the students a taste of challenges in real-life contexts. however, we did not remove the final exam because our school has a practice whereby most units must have a final exam to offer individual students an exam experience. the exam must carry at least about half of the total weightage of the study unit. designing an online take-home final exam offered opportunities for students to reflect real-world context and classroom knowledge and respond to analytical and self-reflective questions. we continually improved authentic assessment design and implementation by analysing what went right and what did not in the unit of study as the pandemic progressed. recommendations while adhering to wider university policy with the final exam, we still made the most of the freedom to ensure authentic assessment. we suggest that educators strive to produce assessments that are engaging, considerate, have synchronous and asynchronous features and focus on real-life scenarios. we also recommend that the authentic assessment strategy serve the purposes of the unit of study and be supported by a balanced alignment between learning activities, assessments, and learning outcomes, aiming to create real-world impact by producing authentic graduate qualities. we realised that adequate support and resources from the faculty level education design team and the university’s central educational innovation team in transforming assessments during emergency circumstances is crucial. to design an authentic hasan and cerimagic authentic assessment during covid-19: an australian postgraduate computing degree program example journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 4 assessment, one should have educational leadership and a desire to ensure that the unit of study contributes to graduate employability (sotiriadou et al., 2020; villarroel et al., 2020). future research on assessment design, especially in a postgraduate computing degree program or stem domain, may encompass the findings from this case study to better design assessments that reflect the complex challenges of real-world activities. references ashford-rowe, k., herrington, j. and brown, c. (2014) ‘establishing the critical elements that determine authentic assessment’, assessment & evaluation in higher education, 39(2), pp.205-222. https://doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2013.819566. champagne, e. and granja, a. d. (2021) ‘how the covid-19 pandemic may have changed university teaching and testing for good’, the conversation, 6 april. available at: https://theconversation.com/how-the-covid-19-pandemic-may-have-changeduniversity-teaching-and-testing-for-good-158342 (accessed: 1june 2021). ellis, c., van haeringen, k., harper, r., bretag, t., zucker, i., mcbride, s. and saddiqui, s. (2020) ‘does authentic assessment assure academic integrity? evidence from contract cheating data’, higher education research & development, 39(3), pp.454469. https://doi.org/10.1080/07294360.2019.1680956. fook, c. y. and sidhu, g. k. (2010) ‘authentic assessment and pedagogical strategies in higher education’, journal of social sciences, 6(2), pp.153-161. https://doi.org/10.3844/jssp.2010.153.161. joy cumming, j. and maxwell, g. s. (1999) ‘contextualising authentic assessment’, assessment in education: principles, policy & practice, 6(2), pp.177-194. https://doi.org/10.1080/09695949992865. karunanayaka, s. p. and naidu, s. (2021) ‘impacts of authentic assessment on the development of graduate attributes’, distance education, 42(2), pp.231-252. https://doi.org/10.1080/01587919.2021.1920206. https://doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2013.819566 https://theconversation.com/how-the-covid-19-pandemic-may-have-changed-university-teaching-and-testing-for-good-158342 https://theconversation.com/how-the-covid-19-pandemic-may-have-changed-university-teaching-and-testing-for-good-158342 https://theconversation.com/how-the-covid-19-pandemic-may-have-changed-university-teaching-and-testing-for-good-158342 https://theconversation.com/how-the-covid-19-pandemic-may-have-changed-university-teaching-and-testing-for-good-158342 https://doi.org/10.1080/07294360.2019.1680956 https://doi.org/10.3844/jssp.2010.153.161 https://doi.org/10.1080/09695949992865 https://doi.org/10.1080/01587919.2021.1920206 hasan and cerimagic authentic assessment during covid-19: an australian postgraduate computing degree program example journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 5 khlaif, z. n., salha, s., and kouraichi, b. (2021) ‘emergency remote learning during covid-19 crisis: students' engagement’, education and information technologies, 123. https:/doi.org/10.1007/s10639-021-10566-4. palm, t. (2008) ‘performance assessment and authentic assessment: a conceptual analysis of the literature’, practical assessment, research, and evaluation, 13(1), p.4. https://doi.org/10.7275/0qpc-ws45. schultz, m., young, k., gunning, t. k. and harvey, m. l. (2021) ‘defining and measuring authentic assessment: a case study in the context of tertiary science’, assessment & evaluation in higher education, pp.1-18. https://doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2021.1887811. sokhanvar, z., salehi, k. and sokhanvar, f. (2021) ‘advantages of authentic assessment for improving the learning experience and employability skills of higher education students: a systematic literature review’, studies in educational evaluation, 70, p.101030. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.stueduc.2021.101030. sotiriadou, p., logan, d., daly, a. and guest, r. (2020) ‘the role of authentic assessment to preserve academic integrity and promote skill development and employability’, studies in higher education, 45(11), pp.2132-2148. https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2019.1582015. swaffield, s. (2011) ‘getting to the heart of authentic assessment for learning’, assessment in education: principles, policy & practice, 18(4), pp.433449. https://doi.org/10.1080/0969594x.2011.582838. villarroel, v., bloxham, s., bruna, d., bruna, c. and herrera-seda, c. (2018) ‘authentic assessment: creating a blueprint for course design’, assessment & evaluation in higher education, 43(5), pp.840-854. https://doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2017.1412396. villarroel, v., boud, d., bloxham, s., bruna, d. and bruna, c. (2020) ‘using principles of authentic assessment to redesign written examinations and tests’, innovations in https://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10639-021-10566-4 https://doi.org/10.7275/0qpc-ws45 https://doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2021.1887811 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.stueduc.2021.101030 https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2019.1582015 https://doi.org/10.1080/0969594x.2011.582838 https://doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2017.1412396 hasan and cerimagic authentic assessment during covid-19: an australian postgraduate computing degree program example journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 6 education and teaching international, 57(1), pp.38-49. https://doi.org/10.1080/14703297.2018.1564882. author details rabiul hasan is a lecturer and unit of study coordinator in the school of computer science at the university of sydney. rabiul’s research areas include curriculum redesign, change management, and health informatics. sabina cerimagic is a senior lecturer and deputy academic director of the business codesign (bcd) team, at the sydney business school, at the university of sydney. sabina’s main research areas are: educational pedagogy, project management, change management, leadership and motivation, cross-cultural project management and training, curriculum redesign, curriculum renewal through design thinking, systems thinking, designbased research, higher education pedagogy and technology integration. https://doi.org/10.1080/14703297.2018.1564882 authentic assessment during covid-19: an australian postgraduate computing degree program example the challenge the response recommendations references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special issue 22: compendium of innovative practice october 2021 ________________________________________________________________________ moving an english course online in four days: better safe tatiana golechkova new economic school, moscow, russia keywords: emergency remote teaching; stress reduction; student agency; supportive learning environment; covid-19. the challenge in spring 2020 educators found themselves in a situation that has been described as emergency remote teaching (hodges et al., 2020). in russia the situation with covid-19 was developing so rapidly during spring 2020 that higher education institutions had to transfer their courses from face-to-face, on-campus delivery to fully online delivery in a matter of days. at our institution, we had four days. this timeframe presented a real challenge: how could we continue supporting our masters’ students on an english as a foreign language (efl) course in a new online environment that was only vaguely familiar to us? course provision is a complex endeavour requiring thorough planning of learning objectives, pedagogies, classroom procedures, materials, and assessment. moving these to a different mode of delivery takes time, effort, and relevant training, none of which were available within the four days before our online classes were due to begin. it was quite obvious that it was impossible to move all components of the course online while maintaining the high level of provision the university requires. the response swift transition: where to begin golechkova moving an english course online in four days: better safe journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 2 when faced with this challenge, i decided not to do the impossible, but instead to focus on the students and the learning environment. with the levels of stress already soaring due to social and economic instability amid the pandemic, it did not seem reasonable to add to it by introducing spontaneous course adaptations. what seemed important was ensuring that students felt psychologically safe and in control during this abrupt shift, at least within our course. indeed, we were guided by the sense that high levels of life stress are unlikely to be conducive to learning (shields et al., 2019; matos fialho et al., 2021) and students tend to perform better when they take charge of their own learning (christenson, reschly and wylie, 2012). following the principles of constructivist pedagogies (vygotsky and kozulin, 1989; powell and kalina, 2009), i decided to build knowledge of this new mode gradually within our community and attempt to make sense of the online learning and assessment together with the students (wolverton, 2018), after i had established a supportive and inclusive learning environment. to establish a comfortable learning environment for my students that would mitigate the effects of uncertainty and stress caused by the pandemic, i planned and introduced two sets of measures within my efl course. firstly, i placed an emphasis on communication with the students giving them some agency in taking transition decisions; secondly, i made sure they knew where to look for help in case of a problem, so that they felt supported in our new virtual classroom. the first group of measures involved communication and agency. in the four days before the shift, we were lucky to have one face-to-face class, in which we discussed the change. i also encouraged students to share their concerns about it and asked them to take an active role in adapting our course to the emergency online delivery. these included negotiating assessment schedule, format of class materials (google docs, padlet, and word or pdf files), ways to submit homework (email, google drive, university learning management system lms), time and length of breaks during online classes, additional group communication channels (social networks or messengers), and online platforms for synchronous teaching (university-supported bluejeans and zoom). one of the crucial questions was assessment. since march was mid semester with most assignments and assessment practices already implemented, i felt the need to assure the golechkova moving an english course online in four days: better safe journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 3 class that as many of them would remain unchanged as the new mode could allow. the students were involved in deciding whether they wanted to follow the previously approved assessment schedule or to wait until proctoring practices were in place at the institutional level, which would inevitably mean delays. as a result, some groups decided they could trust each other to do in-class assessment without proper proctoring so that the tests were not delayed until the end of the semester, other groups felt more comfortable waiting. overall, guided by my observations and informal student feedback, we kept changes in the course procedures to the minimum, followed previous scheduling agreements, and involved the class in decisions whenever possible. this provided my students a much-needed sense of stability and control of the situation in those uncertain times. the other important aspect of facilitating the emergency transition was ensuring that the students felt psychologically safe. it largely involved drawing their attention to solutions to potential problems. it seemed when the students had clear explanations of how the classes were going to run and what issues may arise, they felt less stressed and overwhelmed with the new technologies and class procedure adaptations. one example is challenges with tasks in breakout rooms. to make sure students felt supported, i explained each task, copied prompts into the chat, and regularly reminded students about the zoom ‘ask for help’ function. additionally, we agreed to create telegram messenger chats for situations that required our prompt attention, e.g., technical issues. the chats complemented standard communication over institutional lms and email. these chats worked well as an emergency communication channel, as they were available on multiple devices and could operate with unstable connection. they also involved the group with helping each other, unlike more formal email communication with one recipient. recommendations support and agency my decision to focus on student agency and supportive learning environment instead of devising a thorough plan of moving each course component to the online mode proved beneficial to the students. my observations and a short student survey showed that despite the stressful overnight change of course delivery mode, students felt psychologically safe in golechkova moving an english course online in four days: better safe journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 4 the first weeks, which enabled us to gradually negotiate and adapt our classroom procedures and assessment, after which we were able to focus again on learning in a new remote class. based on my experience of managing a change in an extremely limited time, i would recommend starting by reducing stress levels, ensuring a supportive environment and encouraging students to play an active role in decision-making, and only then proceeding to pedagogical adaptations. my masters’ students found the following helpful: effective communication with the instructor, explicit change management, and involvement in course adaptation decisions. it seems that when students feel psychologically safe and in control, they are more receptive to learning, even if not all course components are adapted to the online mode of delivery. overall, this emergency transition to remote teaching and learning appeared to be a powerful learning development experience for the whole team, as it provided an opportunity to promote students’ self-sufficiency, autonomy, flexibility, and responsibility for, and active participation in, learning. references christenson, s. l., reschly, a. l., and wylie, c. (eds.) (2012) the handbook of research on student engagement. new york: springer science. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-46142018-7. hodges, c., moore, s., lockee, b., trust, t. and bond, a. (2020) ‘the difference between emergency remote teaching and online learning’, educause review, 27, pp.1-12. available at: https://er.educause.edu/articles/2020/3/the-difference-betweenemergency-remote-teaching-and-online-learning (accessed: 5 june 2021). matos fialho, p. m., spatafora, f., kühne, l., busse, h., helmer, s. m., zeeb, h., stock, c., wendt, c. and pischke, c. r. (2021) ‘perceptions of study conditions and depressive symptoms during the covid-19 pandemic among university students in germany: results of the international covid-19 student well-being study’, frontiers in public health, 9, p.674665. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpubh.2021.674665. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-2018-7 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-2018-7 https://er.educause.edu/articles/2020/3/the-difference-between-emergency-remote-teaching-and-online-learning https://er.educause.edu/articles/2020/3/the-difference-between-emergency-remote-teaching-and-online-learning https://doi.org/10.3389/fpubh.2021.674665 golechkova moving an english course online in four days: better safe journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 5 powell, k. c. and kalina, c. j. (2009) ‘cognitive and social constructivism: developing tools for an effective classroom’, education, 130, pp. 241-250. shields, s. g., ramey, m. m., slavich, g. m. and yonelinas, a. p. (2019) ‘determining the mechanisms through which recent life stress predicts working memory impairments: precision or capacity?’, stress, 22(2), pp.280-285. https://doi.org/10.1080/10253890.2018.1556635. vygotsky, l. s. and kozulin, a. (1989) thought and language. cambridge, ma: mit press. wolverton, c.c., (2018) ‘utilizing synchronous discussions to create an engaged classroom in online executive education’, international journal of management in education, 16 (2), pp.239-244. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijme.2018.03.001. author details tatiana golechkova is assistant professor in the department of humanities and foreign languages, the new economic school, moscow, russia. she holds a phd in cognitive linguistics and a cambridge delta. she has broad experience of teaching english for academic and specific academic purposes to undergraduate and graduate students, as well as academics. her areas of special interest include strategies for effective academic communication, developing learning autonomy, and genre features of english academic texts. https://doi.org/10.1080/10253890.2018.1556635 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijme.2018.03.001 https://www.nes.ru/tatiana-golechkova moving an english course online in four days: better safe the challenge the response swift transition: where to begin recommendations support and agency references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special issue 22: compendium of innovative practice october 2021 ________________________________________________________________________ using padlet as a pedagogical tool ameera ali york university, toronto, canada keywords: padlet; student engagement; interactive participation; online learning; covid19. the challenge the past year has been unprecedented with regard to the swift shift to remote teaching and learning in higher education institutions. as a tutorial instructor of approximately 50 students on a third-year sociology course, the shift for me involved transitioning my tutorials from a face-to-face environment to a virtual one. the objective of the tutorial space is to further dissect lecture content and course material, draw connections between concepts, and engage in critical and analytical discussions in a highly interactive manner. in my physical tutorial space, student participation often materialised through the use of flow charts, sticky notes and other various tools used to organise and convey information. these tools facilitated student participation by enabling them to learn and create knowledge in a visually engaging and interactive manner. my challenge now was to recreate a remote learning environment which would support and foster similar forms of engagement for students. the response rather than moving tutorials onto our course learning management system (lms), i strove to provide a platform that mimicked our physical tutorial space in a visually appealing manner; i found this to be achievable through the use of padlet. padlet is a tool through which users can create posts that others can engage with, akin to a digital bulletin board. padlet has been shown to enhance student effort, motivation, participation, learning and cognitive engagement (gill-simmen, 2021), all of which are critical to learning ali using padlet as a pedagogical tool journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 2 development in a tutorial environment. padlet is not a new tool; however, its full efficiency has truly become apparent in the emergency transition to online learning. through using padlet, i also felt that i could effectively implement young and wilson’s (2000) ideas, connections, extensions (ice) approach to learning, as students would be able to take ideas from the course, connect them to their socio-cultural contexts, and extend this information to their own lived experiences and the lives of their colleagues in an engaging and digitally interactive manner. padlet invites students to engage in a fun, meaningful way, which sparks interest and involves both social and academic elements – key facets of student engagement (payne, 2017) which are critical in enhancing learning development. i used padlet in three different ways. in the first week of our remote learning dynamic, i created a padlet using the wall format, which allows students to create posts in a brick-like layout of different sizes. in this particular activity, i asked my students to create a post connecting a course concept to an element of their individual lives and/or socio-cultural contexts, which is a key objective of sociological learning. their posts were spread out beautifully over the padlet for all students to engage with. padlet was an ideal tool here, as it facilitated learner autonomy, competence and relatedness (gill-simmen, 2021). in our second week, i created a padlet using the canvas format, which required students to create a post responding to an initial sociology-based query that i had posed to them and then engage with one another’s posts. the canvas format was ideal for the activity, as it connected students’ responses to one another with arrows whereby they could visually see the comparative elements of their posts. padlet, here, fostered both independent and collaborative learning engagement (deni and zainal, 2018; gill-simmen, 2021) and allowed students to make direct connections between their and their colleagues’ contributions, through which they drew on critical similarities and distinctions. finally, in our third week, i asked students to pose a critical course-focused query as a takeaway from our course to which their classmates were to respond. for this, i created a padlet using the shelf format, which allows users to create content in a series of columns; this can be thought of as akin to a forum thread, albeit a more visually appealing one. queries appeared as separate entries, and each post had several responses from ali using padlet as a pedagogical tool journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 3 students beneath. through this, students were able to classify and connect content while the visual representation of the information facilitated an engaging way of creating, organising, synthesising and analysing the material (gill-simmen, 2021). through the alternative means of representation that i was able to facilitate through padlet, i noticed that student participation increased, as they were able to interact through multiple means of action, engagement and expression, which seemingly improved their interest and engagement (smith, 2012). i noticed that students who had formerly expressed ambivalence towards participating in our face-to-face tutorials were now actively engaging and were able to directly interact with their peers. i chose to make this a very student-led space; however, i did engage with students’ posts occasionally so as to ensure instructor presence in the learning environment (rapanta et al., 2020). padlet ensured a highly interactive learning environment, in which students were able to create content, engage with material and participate in critical discussions, both synchronously and asynchronously. when i spoke informally to students afterwards, they said that they had found padlet simple and engaging to use. in particular, they mentioned that the padlets made following conversations and responding to one another easier and more enjoyable than in an lms, as the content was more visually appealing and easier to access. they appreciated that each ‘thread’ was visible in one place, and that they were not required to go in and out of forums to engage with other topics. moreover, students seemed to appreciate the ease with which they were able to embed media into their posts. the ‘lifetime’ availability of the content created also fostered reiterative learning (gill-simmen, 2021) and served as a useful repository for preparing for the course’s final exam. recommendations my experience with using padlet as a pedagogical tool was certainly a positive one. padlet is especially useful, as students need not create an account and can participate and ask questions anonymously, which can foster uninhibited critical engagement (deni and zainal, 2018). for assessment, padlet can also be used to assess students’ writing skills ali using padlet as a pedagogical tool journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 4 (jong and tan, 2021) and allows for students to ‘grade’ one another’s posts with a numeric score, which can foster peer assessment (adachi et al., 2018), a caveat that i would like to emphasise is that i had a maximum of 25 students in each of my two tutorials; thus, using padlet in my experience was very feasible. this may be more challenging in a larger course. moreover, there are certain accessibility features that are still in the process of being supported by padlet, which may pose an accessibility limitation for some students. in sum, however, i found this to be a very effective tool to utilise in remote learning contexts. references adachi, c., tai, j.h.m. and dawson, p. (2018) ‘academics’ perceptions of the benefits and challenges of self and peer assessment in higher education’ assessment & evaluation in higher education 43(2), pp.294-306. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2017.1339775 (accessed: 13 september 2021). deni, a.r.m. and zainal, z.i. (2018) ‘padlet as an educational tool: pedagogical considerations and lessons learnt’, proceedings of the 10th international conference on education technology and computers, pp.156-162. available at: https://doi.org/10.1145/3290511.3290512 (accessed: 13 september 2021). gill-simmen, l. (2021) ‘using padlet in instructional design to promote cognitive engagement: a case study of undergraduate marketing student’, journal of learning development in higher education, (20). available at: https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.vi20.575 (accessed: 13 september 2021). jong, b. and tan, k.h. (2021) ‘using padlet as a technological tool for assessment of students' writing skills in online classroom settings’, international journal of education and practice, 9(2), pp.411-423. available at: https://doi.org/10.18488/journal.61.2021.92.411.423 (accessed: 13 september 2021). https://doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2017.1339775 https://doi.org/10.1145/3290511.3290512 https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.vi20.575 https://doi.org/10.18488/journal.61.2021.92.411.423 ali using padlet as a pedagogical tool journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 5 payne, l. (2017) ‘student engagement: three models for its investigation’, journal of further and higher education, 43(5), pp.641-657. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/0309877x.2017.1391186 (accessed: 13 september 2021). rapanta, c., botturi, l., goodyear, p., guàrdia, l. and koole, m. (2020) ‘online university teaching during and after the covid-19 crisis: refocusing teacher presence and learning activity’, postdigital science and education, 2(3), pp.923-945. available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/s42438-020-00155-y (accessed: 13 september 2021). smith, f.g. (2012) ‘analyzing a college course that adheres to the universal design for learning (udl) framework’, journal of the scholarship of teaching and learning, 12(3), pp.31-61. available at: https://scholarworks.iu.edu/journals/index.php/josotl/article/view/2151 (accessed: 13 september 2021). young, s.f. and wilson, r.j. (2000) assessment and learning: the ice approach. winnipeg: portage & main press. author details ameera ali is currently a post-doctoral researcher in york university’s teaching and learning centre, the teaching commons. her current research is informed by principles of accessibility, equity, diversity and inclusion, and investigates university students’ experiences of teaching and learning. https://doi.org/10.1080/0309877x.2017.1391186 https://doi.org/10.1007/s42438-020-00155-y https://scholarworks.iu.edu/journals/index.php/josotl/article/view/2151 using padlet as a pedagogical tool the challenge the response recommendations references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special issue 22: compendium of innovative practice october 2021 ________________________________________________________________________ keeping well, teaching well: supporting staff wellbeing katy savage university of strathclyde, uk sean morrissey university of strathclyde, uk keywords: covid-19; teacher wellbeing; education development; staff cpd. the challenge as an education development team, our initial responses to supporting staff in the pandemic were inevitably and completely focused on supporting staff in the pivot to online and blended learning. however, as time went on and there were no signs of ‘normality’ returning our ‘read’ of staff needs and requirements began to change. we saw staff wellbeing emerge as a need that was increasingly important to address. staff were speaking to us openly about feeling and experiencing symptoms of stress, working increasing hours to keep up with their workload, having less time to focus on family, and the difficulties of keeping themselves well in an effort to ‘keep up’. they were telling us that many of the work challenges they were experiencing during the pandemic were contributing to stress, discomfort, and exhaustion. what they described were signs of the ‘exhaustion funnel’, a concept developed by asberg that is explored by williams and penman (2011, p.212) and shown below in figure 1. figure 1. the exhaustion funnel (williams and penman, 2011). savage and morrissey keeping well, teaching well: supporting staff wellbeing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 2 the authors note that as we get busier, we let go of what nourishes and energises us in favour of what seems to be important. as stressors increase, we let go of more and more, so that as we funnel down to exhaustion, all that remains are stressors. this model of exhaustion and professional burnout needs to be read in the light of recent research findings about the positive links between teacher attrition and burnout (madigan and kim, 2021). this research highlights a key risk to teacher performance and underlines that teacher wellbeing needs to be supported and protected. in terms of institutional context, staff wellbeing was a clear priority and a number of institutional supports were in place such as a wellbeing hub and non-working friday rest days during lockdown (now meeting-free fridays). while institutional and some wider supports (hughes, 2020) were available to support student wellbeing, the education development team saw teacher wellbeing as an institutional and sector priority that needed and deserved attention. the response teachers’ lounge our initial response to noticing the need for staff wellbeing support was to introduce a weekly teachers’ lounge. this was a space for staff to come along and enjoy a cup of coffee and a chat. it built on our growing expertise in developing peer networks as a means of supporting staff (savage et al., 2021). our vision was to support staff by creating a space for them to come together informally with like-minded peers to identify and take responsibility for their developmental needs and plan how these might be addressed. evaluation through informal dialogue with staff revealed that this strategy was successful in creating a safe and supportive space for staff. in fact, one regular participant recently told me: ‘that one half hour in the week was sometimes the only thing that kept me hanging on and got me through’. keeping well, teaching well driven to build on the existing success of the teachers’ lounge and armed with the developmental needs staff told us about in the teachers’ lounge, we set to create a more specific and targeted programme to address the wellbeing needs of staff involved in savage and morrissey keeping well, teaching well: supporting staff wellbeing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 3 learning and teaching. our institution does not have a specific ‘wellbeing team’ for staff and the message from our executive team is that wellbeing is everyone’s responsibility. the first iteration of this programme explored topics either directly related to wellbeing or to a teaching style that can be introduced or re-imagined to support wellbeing, see table 1 below. table 1. staff cpd programme: keeping well, teaching well. staff cpd programme: keeping well, teaching well topics format time wu wei teaching (reis, 2021) (the art of allowing students space online to learn), assessment and feedback, physical activity, boundaries in learning and teaching, mental health, and mindfulness in learning and teaching. short input at outset and then explored how that topic or teaching style can be put into practice or reworked to enhance wellbeing. ten-week block of weekly 1.5h sessions. participant evaluations showed how well received this series was and we achieved our aim of reaching beyond those participants who routinely attend education development sessions. approximately 20 staff attended each session and comments from participants included: • ‘[i liked the emphasis on] the importance of taking care of myself to deal with stress and anxiety. liked prioritisation of the breath and movement activities to counter our ways of working’. • ‘some useful tips for balancing work/life, and a couple of techniques which i could use with students’. our second ten-week iteration of this programme is still in progress: see table 2 below. savage and morrissey keeping well, teaching well: supporting staff wellbeing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 4 table 2. staff cpd programme: staying well, teaching well. staff cpd programme: staying well, teaching well topics format time topics from spring programme, plus qi gong, guided meditation, and mindfulness and creativity with a local artist. plus digital wellbeing, i.e., ‘top tech tips to improve your teaching and support your wellbeing’. two final open sessions titled ‘from keeping well to staying well’ to encourage staff to consider how to maintain their wellbeing in the longer term. as above with the addition of ‘try something new’ sessions to find new and helpful ways of supporting their wellbeing. ten-week block of weekly 1.5h sessions. recommendations for an education development team, there was some risk associated with focusing on wellbeing. however, we gained institutional support and the response from staff (through evaluations and conversations we have had with them) has confirmed and validated that this programme was timely and supportive. our learning from this programme leads us to recommend the following to others considering similar approaches: savage and morrissey keeping well, teaching well: supporting staff wellbeing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 5 • teacher attrition is positively linked to burnout and so teacher wellbeing is important, and staff need and deserve the opportunity to discuss this openly and directly within a supportive and solution-focused space. • staff need safe and supportive spaces to discuss and develop responses to challenges they experience. • offering staff opportunities to experience a variety of ways to support wellbeing is helpful; staff were willing to ‘try something new’ and were positive about incorporating new techniques into future wellbeing plans. • in discussing their own wellbeing and practices to support wellbeing, learning and teaching staff apply their learning to the classroom and use what they have learned to support student wellbeing, supporting a whole university wellbeing approach. • informal discussion time is important. part of the success of these sessions is around the way they were structured: short developmental input, followed by a larger portion of time to discuss as a whole group or in small breakout groups how the learning can be implemented to support wellbeing. references hughes, g. (2020) be well, learn well. 1st edn. london: red globe press. madigan, d. and kim, l. (2021) ‘towards an understanding of teacher attrition: a metaanalysis of burnout, job satisfaction, and teachers’ intentions to quit’, teaching and teacher education, 105, p.103425. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tate.2021.103425. reis, c. (2021) wu wei video connect @ xjtlu. [online] connect.xjtlu.edu.cn. available at: https://connect.xjtlu.edu.cn/view/view.php?t=j7ojecfkbeirwhgxzpcx (accessed: 31 august 2021). savage, k., morrissey, s., willison, d., guccione, k. and zike, j. (2021) peer support networks: fostering a sense of belonging. available at: https://strath.pagetiger.com/psn/tools (accessed: 11 june 2021). williams, m. g. and penman, d. (2011) mindfulness: the eight-week meditation programme for a frantic world. london: hachette digital. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tate.2021.103425 savage and morrissey keeping well, teaching well: supporting staff wellbeing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 6 author details katy savage is the academic director and development lead for learning and teaching at strathclyde university. katy’s overarching goal as a practitioner is to improve student learning through supporting academic professional learning and teaching staff to have confidence, be bold and innovative in their approaches, to find their voice, and to realise their leadership potential. katy’s key interests lie in the use of staff peer networks to support academic development, course and class design, and leadership in learning and teaching. sean morrissey has a phd in sociology and a master of research (mres) from the university of aberdeen. he leads strathclyde’s pgcert, learning and teaching in higher education programme and his research interests include digital capabilities, peer support networks, and pedagogy and practice in online/blended learning. keeping well, teaching well: supporting staff wellbeing the challenge the response teachers’ lounge keeping well, teaching well recommendations references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special issue 22: compendium of innovative practice october 2021 ________________________________________________________________________ the challenges of copyright education and the covid-19 pandemic as a catalyst for change alison gilmour the university of greenwich, uk irene barranco garcia the university of greenwich, uk keywords: copyright education; digital literacy; blended learning; collaboration; virtual learning environment; covid-19. the challenge the enduring challenge of copyright education for uk universities includes who is responsible, how best to engage staff, and what content should be explored (morrison, 2018), with academic staff described as a potentially ‘challenging audience’ (secker and morrison, 2016, p.222) the nature of copyright education is that, '[f]or many academic staff, getting to grips with a complex beast such as the cla [copyright licensing agency] licence and all the rules and regulations related to scanning material is anathema’ (secker and bell, 2010, p.166). academic colleagues may perceive copyright as a barrier and have concern with infringing rules and the search for definitive answers, which can lead to a focus on training in copyright education. the covid-19 pandemic exacerbated such challenges. the uk lockdown in spring 2020 and the closure of our university of greenwich (uog) campuses, saw a move to online and blended delivery dependent on enhanced use of our moodle-based virtual learning environment (vle). in our traditional campus-based model of teaching and learning, use of the vle typically mirrored practice not uncommon in many universities: a repository of module information, lecture recordings, and lecture notes (farrelly, raftery and harding, 2018). within a blended model, we anticipated moodle’s use as a site for asynchronous and synchronous learning, with academics responsible for designing learning and content creation and curation. this is contingent on developed digital literacies, including copyright gilmour and barranco garcia the challenges of copyright education and the covid-19 pandemic as a catalyst for change journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 2 literacy (todorova et al., 2014, cited secker, morrison and nilsson, 2019), particularly given evidence that suggests it may be ‘far easier to infringe copyright in the online environment’ (secker and morrison, 2016, p.211). this position was echoed in a 2017 uog survey of academic staff (chauhan and willett, 2019). through summer to autumn 2020, teaching colleagues requested support in using online conferencing technology, moodle, and third-party content in online teaching. the implications for copyright fuelled a need to support staff copyright literacies in the context of blended learning and questions of best approach. the response in supporting teaching colleagues to prepare for the 2020-21 academic year, alison gilmour conceptualised a package of support – adjusting to blended learning environments (able) – including a moodle self-paced course and associated workshops. developing able in eight weeks necessitated: a) integrating varied support for teaching practice, including copyright literacy; and b) different expertise informing able design and delivery including learning and teaching enhancement academics and academic-related colleagues from student wellbeing, information technology, and library services. as we were then lecturer in higher education learning and teaching (academic enhancement) and collaborations, compliance and copyright manager (library services), respectively, our roles typically involved supporting academics but in separate departments. our expertise was perceived as distinct, with learning and teaching support characterised as ‘developmental’ and copyright education as more ‘training’ oriented. our openness to collaborate through able, resulted in conversations revealing a shared goal to integrate copyright education into learning and teaching support. we co-authored online content for the able self-paced moodle course for teaching staff and focused on making digital content available, including supporting use of online sources and e-books when developing reading lists, utilising the university’s scanning service, and raising awareness of copyright when using third-party content online. gilmour and barranco garcia the challenges of copyright education and the covid-19 pandemic as a catalyst for change journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 3 we came to recognise our shared ethos that support should not take a training-oriented approach focused on top-down copyright compliance. instead, a developmental approach focused on personal and professional judgement aligned with learning and teaching ambitions may better engage colleagues in interpreting, translating, and applying copyright legislation and good practice. we therefore co-designed workshops informed by our mix of copyright and learning and teaching expertise. the workshops focused on introducing colleagues to central aspects of copyright legislation and practice through discussion of learning and teaching scenarios in a bended context. a central aim was encouraging teaching staff to think about their ambitions – relative to learning design and use of their course moodle site – and supporting staff to negotiate ‘risks’ (secker, morrison and nilsson, 2019) associated with copyright in their professional context. it was crucial to explore existing licenses and the possible use of exceptions in the uk copyright act to support colleagues in exerting professional judgement in the use of third-party content online, and to encourage them to think about use of materials such as open educational resources (oers). the workshop design was participative; discussion-based activities, focused on authentic scenarios in moving teaching to online and blended contexts, were combined with open discussion. emerging questions during the open discussions revealed the strength in codesign and combined expertise facilitating, as copyright and pedagogical issues came together. asking ‘how do i locate oers?’ led to discussion about ‘why oers?’, ‘for what purpose?’, and ‘what does this mean for your students’ learning?’. such conversations went beyond supporting colleagues with copyright ‘information’ or ‘training’, through situating digital literacies within exploration of pedagogical practice. there was richness in participants recognising the importance and potential of copyright relevant to their pedagogical ambitions in a blended context. as well as the quality of discussions and feedback, the workshops had significantly higher levels of participation than pre-pandemic copyright-focused workshops. recommendations our approach to copyright education for academics who teach has altered as a result of the pandemic; in terms of how you engage staff with copyright education, and who is gilmour and barranco garcia the challenges of copyright education and the covid-19 pandemic as a catalyst for change journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 4 responsible for such support. our approach was strengthened by collaborative expertise in terms of focus, design, and quality of engagement. for universities grappling with copyright education, we would recommend: 1) responsibility for digital capabilities and copyright education specifically, should not be seen as the sole preserve of information technology or library services colleagues. embedding elements of copyright education in teaching and learning professional development activities and contexts (including programmes such as postgraduate certificates in higher education, practical teaching courses or professional development workshops) is important to emphasise the relevance and connection between learning design, pedagogy, and copyright. 2) co-designing participatory sessions exploring relevant copyright legislation and possible educational exceptions, in the context of meaningful decisions academics are making regarding teaching and learning, strengthens engagement and encourages colleagues to exhibit professional judgement in making decisions about copyright relevant to their context. 3) utilising opportunities to model the embedded nature of copyright and digital skills and literacies more broadly. through co-designing the support offered we modelled that issues of pedagogy are not distinct from copyright education. additionally, within workshops, we used examples from our able moodle course to discuss our decisionmaking as educators with regards learning design, content, and copyright. our collaboration during the covid-19 pandemic was a catalyst, facilitating a different institutional approach to copyright education. exploring the legality and exceptions in the law in educational contexts remained but was integrated with supported reflection on desired pedagogy in a blended context. in doing so we pushed away from narrow conceptions of information literacy skills development and compliance-driven copyright training towards more integrated approaches to teaching development in an increasingly digital world. references gilmour and barranco garcia the challenges of copyright education and the covid-19 pandemic as a catalyst for change journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 5 chauhan, v. and willett, p. (2019) ‘academics’ experience of copyright: a case study of teaching at the university of greenwich’, global knowledge, memory and communication, 68(6/7), pp.601-616. https://doi.org/10.1108/gkmc-01-2019-0010. farrelly, t., raftery, d. and harding, n. (2018) ‘exploring lecturer engagement with the vle: findings from a multi-college staff survey’, irish journal of technology enhanced learning, 3(2), pp.11-23. https://doi.org/10.22554/ijtel.v3i2.41. morrison, c. (2018) ‘copyright and digital literacy: rules, risk and creativity’, in reedy, k. and parker, j. (eds.) digital literacy unpacked: part ii. learning in a digital world. london: facet publishing, pp. 97-108. https://doi.org/10.29085/9781783301997.009. secker, j. and bell, m. (2010) ‘copyright? why would i need to worry about that? the challenges of providing copyright support for staff’, legal information management, 10(3), pp.166-170. https://doi.org/10.1017/s1472669610000654. secker, j. and morrison, c. (2016) copyright and e-learning: a guide for practitioners. 2nd edn. london: facet publishing. secker, j., morrison, c. and nilsson, i. (2019) ‘copyright literacy and the role of librarians as educators and advocates: an international symposium’, journal of copyright in education and librarianship, 3(2), pp.1-19. https://doi.org/10.17161/jcel.v3i2.6927. author details alison gilmour is an associate professor in higher education learning and teaching at the university of greenwich and a part-time associate lecturer with the open university. her expertise is in the professional development of academic practice, the enhancement of teaching practice in blended learning contexts, supporting student engagement in dispersed learning communities, and embedding wellbeing in the curriculum. irene barranco garcia is the collaborations, compliance and copyright manager within information and library services at the university of greenwich. she is the university’s https://doi.org/10.1108/gkmc-01-2019-0010 https://doi.org/10.22554/ijtel.v3i2.41 https://doi.org/10.29085/9781783301997.009 https://doi.org/10.1017/s1472669610000654 https://doi.org/10.17161/jcel.v3i2.6927 gilmour and barranco garcia the challenges of copyright education and the covid-19 pandemic as a catalyst for change journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 6 technical expert in copyright, copyright licensing, and intellectual property rights. her work involves offering support and advice to academic and professional services colleagues on access to, and use of, resources as well as supporting collaborative partnership student and staff access to resources. the challenges of copyright education and the covid-19 pandemic as a catalyst for change the challenge the response recommendations references farrelly, t., raftery, d. and harding, n. (2018) ‘exploring lecturer engagement with the vle: findings from a multi-college staff survey’, irish journal of technology enhanced learning, 3(2), pp.11-23. https://doi.org/10.22554/ijtel.v3i2.41. author details literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 3: march 2011 students as partners in blending learning paul brett university of wolverhampton, uk glynis cousin university of wolverhampton, uk abstract in this paper we argue for university pedagogies to be in tune with the ways in which many of the present generation of students interact with technologies. we propose that the technical expertise and the novel modes of being which are characteristic of this generation offer radical pedagogic possibilities for growing learner engagement. in making this proposal, we suggest a reconfiguration of curriculum design in order to foreground students’ expertise with technology, particularly web 2.0. we propose that these capabilities be deployed in partnership with academics. the paper maps out the conceptual terrain and reports on the first cycle of action research projects which have been designed to trial the reconfiguration we suggest. early findings indicate seven particular and differential ways in which students have profited from this reconfiguration, most notably through the use of peer-led facebook groups as a hub and a means of peer support. an earlier version of this paper was presented at the seventh international conference on networked learning, aalborg, denmark, 3rd and 4th may 2010. keywords: student control; web 2.0; social networking; diversity and widening participation; blended learning; curriculum design; new generation learners; partnerships between academics and students. brett and cousin students as partners in blending learning introduction – reconfiguring power in blended learning the reconfiguration of the relationship between students, teachers and technologies we propose affects four, related, 180° changes to the power axes of blended learning. namely that: (i) the choice and ownership of the technologies used should be the learners; (ii) this choice be from common, freely available, student understood technologies which are in the public domain; (iii) that the decisions about what technological learning opportunities are rendered are taken by students in partnership with academics; and (iv) that the production of these opportunities be done by incentivised students. the rationale there are three imperatives determining these reconfigurations. firstly, integration of the use of technology in higher education (he) courses is inconsistent and lacks reach (newland et al., 2006; sharpe et al., 2006, p.62; lingard, 2007). the barriers to staff use of virtual learning environments (vle) have remained constant over four universities and colleges information systems surveys, dating back to 2002. reported in order of frequency these are: lack of time; lack of academic staff knowledge; lack of money; institutional culture; lack of support staff; lack of recognition for career development; lack of academic staff development; and lack of incentives (browne et al., 2008, p.27). we suggest that the solution to this is held with our students, rather than staff. next, with the changed nature of the network, characterised as web 2.0, universities are destined to chase forever their tail in keeping up with and exploiting technological advances with their possible learning potentials. student skill sets invite a different way of chasing. the impact of web 2.0 on he is yet to be realised, or completely understood, although studies of the use of collaborative web 2.0 tools are well underway e.g. minocha (2009) and trentin (2009) with wikis, kerawalla et al. (2009) with blogs, hemmi et al. (2009) with weblogs and wikis, and cann (2008) with social networking tools. there has also been useful discussion of the tensions which may arise (dohn, 2008; ryberg, 2008) when such tools are used to support institutional learning. add to this the changes in connectivity which see near ubiquitous student ownership of mobile web-enabled devices. this forms another constitutive part of the new generation of learners’ worlds (see traxler journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 2 brett and cousin students as partners in blending learning 2009 for an overview). later, we discuss our action research into how student-led use of web 2.0 software contributes to enhanced support for student learning. thirdly, and somewhat contentiously, are the different cognitive skills characteristics of our younger learners, variously typified as ‘digital natives’ (prensky, 2001), ‘new millennium learners’ (ceri, 2008), ‘transliterate’ (fearn, 2008) and ‘generation m’ (cvetkovic and lackie, 2009). the ceri report on new millennium learners (2008) usefully synthesises the research into the impact of engagement with technology. it characterises the findings as both controversial and provisional. the report states that ‘in those areas of cognitive ability which relate directly to educational performance such as abilities related to…information processing, reflective and critical thinking, creativity and, in general, metacognitive skills…’ (ceri, 2008, p.7) there are no conclusive findings. however, the report concludes that in cognitive skills development ‘…visual-spatial skills, the flynn effect (nonverbal intelligence), memory skills, and to a lesser extent multitasking’ (ceri, 2008, p.8) there is conclusive evidence to suggest that technology use influences these capacities. clearly, many of our learners are able to multi-task with a variety of different technologies, expert at accessing and controlling information, preferring the pictorial to text, adept at socialising virtually, and always connected to the network. while these findings remain disputed in relation to the effects of technology on cognitive development, clearly this generation of students is immersed in communication technology in ways that were not available to former generations. it is precisely this immersion that supports the case for the power reconfigurations outlined above. we believe that the radical inversion of both the locus of responsibility, from teacher to student with teacher, and from institutionally owned technology to that which is student chosen, has the potential to transform the quality of current learning. academics’ awareness of the vibrant network landscape and its associated tools is likely to be less well developed than that of most students, who should be able to select and use appropriate technologies which may have greater functionality than our vle. but many need help in doing so. while our students are acquiring the skills of transliteracy, fearn (2008) observes: journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 3 brett and cousin students as partners in blending learning …many academics are in essence illiterate…most would admit it, even taking a certain pride in their part-removal from the world of e-communication. this matters if they find their teaching relationship with hyper-transliterate students breaking down because of an inability to communicate fully with one another. what do all the above suggest for our conceptions of curriculum design and e-learning as an aspect of the blending of our students’ learning? we finish with a brief outline of the action research which explores our hunch that establishing curriculum design partnerships between students and teachers will ensure: a) that we fully profit from the expertise and ways of learning of our students; b) that we move with the technology; and c) that the partnerships reconfigure teacher-student relationships, increasing the meaningfulness of the learning for a diverse student population. student as partners in blended learning curriculum design and learning activities: action research, an initial exploratory study rationale our action research addresses these pressing issues of growing discord between students and academics, particularly in relation to the diverse groups coming into our universities for whom, according to hockings et al. (2007), there is already a fragile relationship with traditional academe. in exploring the transfer of responsibility for selection and managing technology, we see our research as building on cann’s (2008, p.2) aim ‘to develop new practical strategies for deployment of “…loosely coupled teaching" involving web 2.0 tools to facilitate and promote personal development planning and lifelong learning’. we are also building on early explorations of the nature of the tensions and deficits which may arise (dohn, 2008; ryberg, 2008) when institutions appropriate social networking technologies, and the suggestion by melville (2009, p. 9) that: higher education has a key role in helping students refine, extend and articulate the diverse range of skills they have developed through their experience of web 2.0 technologies. it not only can, but should, fulfill this role, and it should do so through a partnership with students to develop approaches to learning and teaching. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 4 brett and cousin students as partners in blending learning context our project was configured to enact the four, 180° changes to the operation of blended learning’s curriculum design and learning activities, described above. it involved a second year, semester two, computer studies module managing is and it, which had 64 students enrolled, and a first year semester two applied sciences module health and disease, which had 216 students enrolled. each had a different member of academic staff and a diverse student population, typical for our institution. as with most universities, the academics at wolverhampton are responsible for the design of the ‘e’ learning support side of the blended learning in modules and for the implementation and technical rendering of these choices. unsurprisingly, the levels of sophistication they bring to this task vary enormously, with some using the institutional vle as a simple repository of course documentation to others offering rich forms of e-learning. our change intervention is designed to leap over this variation by placing the authority to choose the technologies and their application to learning in the hands of partnered students. the ‘action’ part of our action research centres on two key change interventions across these two modules. we appointed two student ‘e-champions’ for the managing is and it module and three for the larger health and disease module, in consultation with their module tutor, whose prior consent we secured. these e-champions were briefed to shape and lead ‘e’ support for their module colleagues, in partnership with the module leader. we gave them £75 each as some form of recognition of the work they would do. the selection process required that e-champions apply for the position and their involvement had the same status as a volunteer in any peer supported scheme. their appointment and their role was announced in the class by the module leader. so what did we find? our evidence came from six sources, namely: what they did; an analysis of progression; an analysis of the facebook exchanges; a survey of the students on the module; and interviews with lecturers and with the five student e-champions. what did the student e-champions do and produce? both e-champion teams created closed facebook groups and invited colleagues to join in the classes. tutors and the researchers were asked to join and did, but they did not post. the health and disease team set up a blog, wrote some extra learning materials, and with the module leader wrote formative assessment questions with answers. the managing is journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 5 brett and cousin students as partners in blending learning and it module tried twitter. both sets of e-champions attempted to video record the taught sessions and post their links, but experienced insurmountable problems and this was abandoned in week 3. both also researched and posted additional sources of information through links from the facebook groups. the e-champions also had regular meetings with the module leaders. what evidence is there that these activities engaged students? in the health and disease module of the enrolled 216 students, 47.5% joined the studentled facebook group. there were 129 entries in this, with 26 posts on the facebook wall from students other than the e-champions. it is not possible to know how many students read these interchanges. there were 18 posts to the discussion area of facebook. interestingly, the e-champions used this area of facebook to document their interactions with the module leader and to describe what they were doing. eight links to sources of additional information, notes and formative assessment questions were posted. they set up a blog. it was used to distribute: (i) a glossary of complex terms; (ii) formative assessment questions with answers; and (iii) extra learning materials on one of the module’s topics, all researched and written by the e-champions. in the managing is and it module, 21 of the 64 enrolled students (33%) joined the facebook group. there were 29 entries with posts from 7 students other than the e-champions on the facebook wall. there were 10 posts to four topics on the discussion area of facebook. these were attempts to start discussions by the e-champions. the e-champions were also were given a forum in the module’s vle, to which they made 16 posts with links to extra resources. there were no replies to their posts. the twitter group attracted only 7 followers and was discontinued after 7 tweets. analysis of progression there are promising signs that the intervention can make a difference to pass and progression rates. when compared with past patterns of achievement the module health and disease exhibited a 10% increase in pass rates. in the managing is and it module progression and achievement stayed the same as previous years. from their own testimonies, the intervention certainly increased the e-champions’ engagement in learning. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 6 brett and cousin students as partners in blending learning ‘a’ grades were attained by the two managing is and it e-champions and by those in the health and disease module. facebook exchanges – analysis of the interactions the richest data source came from our analysis of the facebook exchanges. we have generated seven categories, each showing a different type of learning support, from our analysis of the interchanges and postings in the student-led facebook groups. these are described below with examples taken verbatim from the facebook posts. 1. creating, extending and sharing learning content both sets of e-champions used the role and the facebook space to create and provide additional learning content. an example of student e-champion (stec) created content is: stec 3: hi, this is blog created by e-champions that will the glossary of some complex terms which you might have come across in you lectures. it will be available through this link for a week. http://... other content sources were supplied through links: stec 2: if you are interested in finding out more about the security in cloud computing. read ... the health and disease e-champions researched the topic of epidemiology in depth, typed up notes and made them available via a link on facebook. the managing is and it e-champions were given their own forum in the vle which they used to post 16 links to additional learning content. these links were viewed on 265 occasions by 38 of the students, with 26 students not viewing any of these posts. none of these additional sources of learning content would have been made available without the e-champions. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 7 brett and cousin students as partners in blending learning 2. mediating between students and staff the e-champions evolved into mediators between their peers and teaching staff. this process was supported in facebook: stec 3: hello students, i just wanted to say for the student who stated that they would like to have more clear explanations on the graphs and diagrams that were presented in dr. xxx 's lecture, i have sent a message to him regarding this and hopefully he should reply back soon and i will let you all know what he says. as another example: stec 1: questions from lecture 4 16/03/10 these are the questions that have come from the students regarding the prevention and treatment lecture on 16/03/10.those of you who did not put academic questions forward but actual questions on ideas for this module i will put forward to dr. xxx and then i will give feedback to everyone on what they were and what the lecturers had to say about them. this mediation benefited the staff as well (discussed below). 3. peer support to fill in gaps in understanding of content there were interchanges where students posted specific questions on aspects of the module content. for example: student x: in dr xxx’s 1st lecture there is a slide titled fat (triacylglycerol) i'm struggling making sense of it. is it stating glycogen is 6x as energy dense or fat? is it referring to calories? im curious as other sources are claiming fat is 9x as energy dense. can someone please explain. as another example: student d: hello guys, can anyone answer to the questions below pls? 1,from the alphabetical list below, which is the correct order of the levels of protein structure? a. hexagonal b. primary c. quaternary d. secondary e. tertiary f. ziggurat… journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 8 brett and cousin students as partners in blending learning to which the stec 2 replied: stec 2: hi, dear friend, primary structure of protein refers to the sequence of amino acid in the polypeptide chain that makes up protein. the structure and shape of entire protein chain makes secondary, tertiary and so on… we wonder what would have happened to such questions without the facebook group? however, this also raises a couple of questions. what if the e-champions had replied incorrectly, and were the posters just being lazy? it might be that students are more willing to share concerns or understanding gaps with fellow students, than directly with staff. the use of a student-led and owned social network space, rather than an institutionally owned technology may also have assisted sharing of such knowledge deficits. 4. peer support to fill in the gaps in understanding of administration processes posts with questions about administration procedures from the students and proactive, partnering posts about required administration actions from the e-champions were present in both facebook groups. for example: student q: anyone know how we submit the front sheet if we have done the assignment in powerpoint…? stec 4: see if you can convert your powerpoint file onto word…a lot of students are having similar problems. where would such questions have been asked without the facebook page? as another proactive example: stec 2: the swot analysis presentation from fdm is tomorrow for those of you attending contact placement office for details. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 9 brett and cousin students as partners in blending learning 5. creating formative assessment learning activities the health and disease e-champions took it upon themselves to create multiple choice questions for a couple of topics in their module, in partnership with the module tutor. these were created in word and made downloadable from another website (as facebook does not support the posting of word documents), with the link posted in the facebook group. they supplied the answers the following week. for example: stec 4: hello all, as promised we are working alongside with the module team to get this group going. we have created a bolg which is up for a week. there are some questions which you can do as a homework. answers to these questions will be posted next week. their reasons for doing this are in the student interview section, below. obviously this would have been a rich resource, but we do not know how many students engaged with it. this is an excellent example of a partnership, with the e-champions defining the need and supplying the technical expertise, and the academic assuring the quality of the formative assessment. 6. rescuing peers and supporting each other some students shared their personal situations, concerns and needs in facebook posts. as examples: student k: oh my god this page is a godsend!!! …i’ve been unwell and missed some lectures so this is brilliant!! keep up the good work :) student f: hi, i didn't know about this group until the message on wolf. it's great coz i am missing a few lectures due to illness :( but if you could keep posting it would help me loads! and it's great revision :). experiences were posted and shared, for example: stec 4: do any of you suffer from the syndrom of feeling shy to ask questions during lectures, for fear of looking stupid in front of everyone, even though you have no clue in the world what the past hour was all about? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 10 brett and cousin students as partners in blending learning student y: … it happens but i personally do not mind because i have to ask those questions as part of my learning. i do think that the lectures gets more interesting when students ask questions. being able to share personal fears and issues is likely to be a first step in their resolution. student e-champions and peers may be able to suggest solutions, but many may well need professional interventions. 7. sharing ideas about how to learn the students also shared their views on what helped them learn, and with the support of the academic, what would be helpful approaches to learning. for example, after meeting the lecturer stec 1 posted: stec 1: the point here is that the lecturers want us students to be encouraged to do background/further reading around the subjects. student d advised on the use of the facebook group page that: student d: … it's just a case of offering that help really, if you offer that help you will find there will be a lot more regular users. try it out by setting up a few topics on lets say bacteria and viruses and see if people use them...i know i will lol. the e-champions solicited ideas about what would help learning, for example: stec 4: we are welcome and eager to hear any suggestions from yourselves of how your learning can be improved through the use of the various technologies available if need be you can contact … and fed the replies into their meetings with lecturers. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 11 brett and cousin students as partners in blending learning survey of the students on the module responses to open-ended questions in an e-survey sent to all module participants asking for responses to the student e-champion initiative were very poor. however, we could only find one student, from the 17 responders, who confirmed the jisc learner experiences project (2007) findings that students do not like to mix their personal virtual space with their study virtual space. here is the comment: i don’t think it’s a good idea, cos facebook is more or less for entertainmenet it is not nice to have studies and entertainment in one place. this difference between the studies may be due to the more recent addition of facebook settings to afford all users greater privacy. more positive comments were: facebook is a good use for practical write ups and tutorials; facebook has really helped…because class mates have submitted questions and answered; there was a time when i got stuck with my practical write ups but facebook came to the rescue. responses to a question about the use of student e-champions were positive and identified specific ways in which they had helped: …being able to ask any questions i had and learning from other questions that other students asked and…having other students available to discuss the module with. students also said they appreciated the sharing of lecture notes. interviews with lecturers and the student e-champions the module leaders liked the mediating role the e-champions played between themselves and the students, for example: journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 12 brett and cousin students as partners in blending learning they created a better dialogue with the students and were a conduit for more discussions and two-way interactions with the students. the e-champions were most successful in eliciting for the class a list of troublesome points which they wished me to clear up. one module leader articulated three benefits of the partnership. these were: i) that they were ‘icing on the cake’, and whilst they had not saved him any time, they had supplemented the learning on the module in a way which he wouldn’t have been able to; ii) that seeing the facebook discussions gave him more of a ‘feel’ for his students and their progress, enabling him to adjust his teaching; and that, iii) he felt that his students appeared more willing to raise and communicate questions, problems, issues about their learning in the facebook space, than they were directly to him. the other module leader thought that his e-champions got a bit carried away in creating new materials and suggested in future there should be a clearer brief and more joint planning. both module leaders felt that the intervention added value and are willing to proceed to a further cycle of experimentation. the five student e-champions all reported that they: i) had achieved more on the module than they would have if they had not been e-champions; (ii) would have liked more time; (iii) enjoyed the role; (iv) were at times dismayed by the apathy of their peers; and (v) felt that the e-champion role was acceptable to their peers. recruiting students in roles such as peer assisted mentor, or in our case e-champions, always raises ethical questions about privileging some students over others. so long as the selection is fair and transparent, the advantages of participating in schemes such as ours are no different to those gained from student volunteering generally (see for instance the peer assisted scheme in manchester http://www.campus.manchester.ac.uk/tlso/studentsaspartners/) where benefits to the students include increased academic performance. some students elected to engage with the e-champions and others did not and this also reflects differential learner engagement generally. what adds to the ethical complexity in our case is that unlike peer assisted learning schemes such as those in bournemouth (http://pal.bournemouth.ac.uk/index.html) and manchester, our e-champions are part of the cohort they are supporting, and are empowered to choose the supportive technology. our ongoing action research continues to be alert to this complexity. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 13 http://www.campus.manchester.ac.uk/tlso/studentsaspartners/ http://pal.bournemouth.ac.uk/index.html brett and cousin students as partners in blending learning discussion we return to the four, interconnected, 180º changes for the ‘e’ side of blended learning provision which we suggested at the start. (i) the choice and development of technologies used can be made by learners. (ii) this choice can be from common, freely available, student understood technologies which are in the public domain. this study shows that web 2.0 spaces which are familiar to, and were thus chosen by the e-champions were equally, or more, useful technologies, than vles. indeed maybe they are more likely to engage our students across a wider range of useful learning related activities than institutionally owned ones. for example, no posts to either vle forum, yet a large number of posts to facebook groups. why was this? it might have been because the facebook group was set up, owned and directed by peers they felt less judged, and it replicated informal situations. it is also likely that the use of facebook blurred the boundaries between the social and formal learning on-line spaces. where there was a functionality which facebook could not support, the e-champions easily found other suitable technologies, and posted links to them. the increased learner engagement as compared to the vle, the variety of new types of peer-peer and partnership generated learning activities, and that the technologies used were cost neutral, all make a strong argument for the use of free, student understood and led, web 2.0 technologies to house ‘e’ support. this is a key finding, and one that contradicts dohn (2008) and ryberg (2008) who reported tensions when institutions infiltrated students’ virtual social spaces. it is likely explained by the recent, enhanced privacy settings implemented by facebook, which subsequently allowed users much tighter control over who is able to access their personal information therein. no learning activities that can be created in a vle or an e-portfolio, cannot equally be provided using free technology. this has beneficial cost implications for institutions, regarding software licenses, software and hardware support, together with staff development. the analysis concurs with hemmi et al.’s (2009, p.1) findings of ‘…a range of student and tutor perspectives which show that these technologies have significant potential as new collaborative, volatile and challenging environments for formal learning’. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 14 brett and cousin students as partners in blending learning (iii) the creation of technological support can be done by students in partnership with academics. (iv) that the production of these opportunities be done by incentivised students. the melville report ‘higher education in a web 2.0 world’ (2009, p.7) suggests many of the changes in ‘e’ support which our project has enacted, specifically the nature of partnership in the ‘e’ enterprise, ‘…where each recognises and values the others’ expertise and works together to capitalise on it’. this study shows that such a partnership can work to the benefit of learner and academic. many of the learning opportunities created in this project resulted from the instinct and instigation of the student e-champions and were generated from their leadership of a virtual space. they additionally formed a communication channel between staff and students which, whilst not a technical role, improved communication flows and enabled teaching to be adjusted and problems to be addressed. we would argue that the learning leadership, control, decisions, and nature of ‘e’ support be placed with students, working in tandem with academics. conclusion our analysis of facebook gave us and their tutors a window into the habitus (bourdieu and passeron, 1977) of our students. in other words, it made clear to us a set of dispositions held by the students, namely a keenness to get things right, to expand their learning, to get closer to the tutors and to share their hesitancies, knowledge gaps and questions. the mediating role of the e-champions proved particularly useful in bringing together the worlds of the academic and that of the students. importantly, our intervention showed students’ willingness to accept the structured peer support of the e-champions and the willingness of academics to give up a measure of control to the e-champions. we are encouraged to progress our exploration with further action research cycles. key modifications will involve a facilitated design event with tutors and e-champions attending together to include a revised evaluation strategy. we will also need to address the evidence that the digital divide is more likely to affect the poorest sections of our society (fearn, 2008) rather than our student body, but we cannot take this for granted. moreover, a good number of university students do not typify the generation we have described, being older or in subjects where the emphasis is on working with hand rather than with mouse. we will also need to be mindful of: i) how institutions would deal with journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 15 brett and cousin students as partners in blending learning unacceptable interactions in publicly owned spaces; ii) the lack of student e-champion awareness of productive pedagogical applications of technology; and iii) with e-champions, the issue of possible factually erroneous posts. to summarise, we have argued for a paradigm shift in the shaping of student learning to take account of peer-peer and teacher-peer partnerships beyond those owned, supervised and instigated by institutions (e.g. pal at bournemouth university), the free and familiar technologies, and the changing nature of our student bodies’ skills. our first action research results prompt us to continue our explorations and we hope that our report encourages others to replicate our thrust. references bourdieu, p. and passeron, j.c. (1977) reproduction in education, society and culture. richard nice (tr.). london: sage publications. browne, t., hewitt, r., jenkins, m. and walker, r. (2008) survey of technology enhanced learning for higher education in the uk. ucisa. available at: http://www.ucisa.ac.uk/publications/tel_survey.aspx (accessed: 10 february 2011). cann, a.j. (2008) web 2.0 comes of age: disintermediation and the long tail in higher education. available at: http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/resources/detail/events/annualconference/2008/ann_c onf_2008_alan_cann (accessed: 10 february 2011). centre for educational research and innovation (2008) new millennium learners. initial findings on the effects of digital technologies on school-age learners. available at: http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/39/51/40554230.pdf (accessed: 11 february 2011). cvetkovic, v. and lackie, r. (2009) teaching generation m: a handbook for librarians and educators. new york: neal-schuman publishers inc. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 16 http://www.ucisa.ac.uk/publications/tel_survey.aspx http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/resources/detail/events/annualconference/2008/ann_conf_2008_alan_cann http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/resources/detail/events/annualconference/2008/ann_conf_2008_alan_cann http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/39/51/40554230.pdf brett and cousin students as partners in blending learning dohn, n.b. (2008) ‘knowledge 2.0 – tensions and challenges for education’, proceedings of the 6th international conference on networked learning. halkidiki, greece 5-6 may. available at: http://www.networkedlearningconference.org.uk/past/nlc2008/abstracts/pdfs/bond erup_dohn_650-657.pdf (accessed: 11 february 2011). fearn, h. (2008) ‘grappling with the digital divide’, times higher education supplement, 14 august, (online). available at: http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=403135 (accessed: 11 february 2011). hemmi, a., bayne, s. and land, r. (2009) ‘the appropriation and repurposing of social technologies in higher education’, journal of computer assisted learning, 25, pp. 19–30. hockings, c., cooke, s. and bowl, m. (2007) ‘academic engagement within a widening participation context – a 3d analysis’, teaching in higher education, special issue: diversity and commonality in higher education, 12(5-6), pp. 721-734. jisc (2007) learners’ experiences report. available at: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/elp_learnerexperience (accessed: 11 february 2011). kerawalla, l., minocha, s., kirkup, g. and conole, g. (2009) ‘an empirically grounded framework to guide blogging in higher education’, journal of computer assisted learning, 25(1), pp. 31-42. lingard, l. (2007) why don’t all lecturers make use of vles? what can the so-called ‘laggards’ tell us? available at: http://clt.lse.ac.uk/reportspubs/reportlingardfinal.pdf (accessed: 11 february 2011). melville, d. (2009) higher education in a web 2.0 world: report of committee of enquiry into the changing learner experience. available at: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/publications/heweb20rptv1.pdf (accessed: 9 february 2011). journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 17 http://www.networkedlearningconference.org.uk/past/nlc2008/abstracts/pdfs/bonderup_dohn_650-657.pdf http://www.networkedlearningconference.org.uk/past/nlc2008/abstracts/pdfs/bonderup_dohn_650-657.pdf http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=403135 http://www.jisc.ac.uk/elp_learnerexperience http://clt.lse.ac.uk/reportspubs/reportlingardfinal.pdf http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/publications/heweb20rptv1.pdf brett and cousin students as partners in blending learning minocha, s. (2009) a study on the effective use of social software by further and higher education in the uk to support student learning and engagement. available at: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/projects/effective-use-of-social-software-ineducation-finalreport.pdf (accessed: 11 february 2011). newland, b., jenkins, m. and ringan, n. (2006) ‘academic experiences of using vles: overarching lessons for preparing and supporting staff’, in o’donoghue, j. (ed.) technology supported teaching and learning: a staff perspective. london: information science publishing, pp. 34-50. prensky, m. (2001) ‘digital natives, digital immigrants’, on the horizon 9(5). lincoln: ncb university press. ryberg, t. (2008) ‘challenges and potentials for institutional and technological infrastructures in adopting social media’, proceedings of the 6th international conference on networked learning. halkidiki, greece 5-6 may available at: http://www.networkedlearningconference.org.uk/past/nlc2008/abstracts/pdfs/ryber g_658-665.pdf (accessed: 11 february 2011). sharpe, r., benfield, g., roberts, g., and francis, r. (2006) the undergraduate experience of blended e-learning: a review of uk literature and practice. available at: http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/assets/york/documents/ourwork/research/literature_re views/blended_elearning_full_review.pdf (accessed: 11 february 2011). traxler, j. (2009) students and mobile devices: choosing which dream. available at: http://repository.alt.ac.uk/643/1/alt-c_09_proceedings_090806_web_0288.pdf (accessed: 11 february 2011). trentin, g. (2009) ‘using a wiki to evaluate individual contribution to a collaborative learning project’, journal of computer assisted learning, 25, pp. 43-55. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 18 http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/projects/effective-use-of-social-software-in-education-finalreport.pdf http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/projects/effective-use-of-social-software-in-education-finalreport.pdf http://www.networkedlearningconference.org.uk/past/nlc2008/abstracts/pdfs/ryberg_658-665.pdf http://www.networkedlearningconference.org.uk/past/nlc2008/abstracts/pdfs/ryberg_658-665.pdf http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/assets/york/documents/ourwork/research/literature_reviews/blended_elearning_full_review.pdf http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/assets/york/documents/ourwork/research/literature_reviews/blended_elearning_full_review.pdf http://repository.alt.ac.uk/643/1/alt-c_09_proceedings_090806_web_0288.pdf brett and cousin students as partners in blending learning author details dr paul brett is head of blended learning at university of wolverhampton and a ntf. he leads a team of five blended learning advisors, based in the institute for learning enhancement. he has published extensively on the use of technology to enhance learning and was the first chair of the heads of e-learning forum (helf). professor glynis cousin is director of the institute for learning enhancement. she was previously a senior advisor at the higher education academy and has worked in adult, community and higher education. her recent book researching learning in higher education has just been published by routledge. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 19 students as partners in blending learning introduction – reconfiguring power in blended learning the rationale student as partners in blended learning curriculum design and learning activities: action research, an initial exploratory study rationale context what did the student e-champions do and produce? what evidence is there that these activities engaged students? analysis of progression facebook exchanges – analysis of the interactions 1. creating, extending and sharing learning content 2. mediating between students and staff 3. peer support to fill in gaps in understanding of content 4. peer support to fill in the gaps in understanding of administration processes 5. creating formative assessment learning activities 6. rescuing peers and supporting each other 7. sharing ideas about how to learn survey of the students on the module interviews with lecturers and the student e-champions discussion conclusion references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 24 september 2022 towards ‘employability 3.0’: from practice to praxis constantine manolchev university of exeter allen alexander university of exeter ruth cherrington university of exeter abstract in addition to higher learning, universities are expected to also ‘do’ employability and help students transition from education to employment. accordingly, a wide range of approaches have emerged and we, as academics, dedicate substantial efforts to designing and implementing attractive employability offerings for our degree programmes. we spend considerably less time (and have considerably less time to spend) reflecting on whether these provisions are truly transformational. brazilian philosopher and educator, paulo freire, argued that this transformation can only be achieved through praxis. as a combination of action and reflection into an act of radical agency, praxis is authentic at both the individual and social level. praxis is the self-determined creation of one’s own future, while accepting accountability to fellow human beings. in this opinion piece, we contend that praxis should be placed at the heart of employability of the future – employability 3.0. we propose that employability 3.0 should incorporate, but also go beyond current best practices such as cross-curriculum ‘connectedness’ and the ‘embeddedness’ of community of practice learning. it should be a programme of active learning and reflection which enables students to rewrite their futures by improving their wellbeing, employment prospects and place in society. key words: employability; community of practice; connectedness; organisational learning; praxis. manolchev, alexander, cherrington towards ‘employability 3.0’: from practice to praxis journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 2 introduction research-led learning is central to our russell group institution’s undergraduate degree programme, which we jointly teach. reflection is also a staple part of our assessment strategy, with students frequently evaluating their academic and workplace performance, individual and group work, successes, and mistakes. we facilitate learning and practice through careful student socialisation and transfer of knowledge within communities of practice (lave and wenger, 1991), with members inside and outside of the institution: external partners, other universities, and business incubators. although we share this approach with several other uk universities, and although this enables us to signal best practice in achieving graduate outcomes, we feel this is not yet a complete outline of employability of the future. in this opinion piece, we briefly consider how employability 2.0 (bridgstock, 2020) is currently implemented by universities, and show how brazilian philosopher and educator, paulo freire’s (1972), radical notion of praxis can help us move forward. is ‘doing’ employability enough? advance he, a british higher education sector charity and professional membership scheme, has been tracking a steady increase in employability scholarship. ranging from conceptual framings of employability (fung, 2017) to case studies of best practice (norton and dalrymple, 2020), there has been a proliferation of published studies –187 between 2012 and 2016 (artess et al., 2017), and a three-fold increase to 580 over the 2016 2021 period (dalrymple et al., 2021). the established and generally accepted approach to ‘doing’ employability currently places the onus on individual practices and seeks to encourage a trajectory of personal development towards aspirational job outcomes (tholen, 2015). this is enabled by the external environment (e.g. labour market conditions) and access to social capital (e.g. personal connections, alumni networks) (rees, 2021). however, those factors can also serve as barriers to employment, and employability scholars have been instrumental in highlighting issues with persistent graduate unemployment and employment traps in precarious work (menon et al., 2018). manolchev, alexander, cherrington towards ‘employability 3.0’: from practice to praxis journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 3 researchers have also expressed concerns about employability practices. for instance, these practices have been described as supporting neoliberal performance management initiatives, such as the uk’s teaching excellence framework (tef), as well as research and impact quality audits aimed at improving efficiency and adding value (hall, 2019). scholars have argued that employability provisions have been deficient in accounting for a range of diverse student backgrounds (luckett and naicker, 2016), or protecting students from exploitation (in cases where student internships are used to gain free labour) (morrison, 2020). such readings regard employability initiatives as being predominantly about ‘getting to the front of the queue’ (dfe, 2021, p.23) and graduate outcomes, rather than lifelong learning aimed at attaining a range of critical skills and experiences (scott and willison, 2021). one way of remedying this is to shift the focus away from graduate outcomes and towards developing the skills and experiences which enable those outcomes. this, according to paulo freire (1972), is not only a better pedagogic approach, but can allow students to lead better and more fulfilling lives. what is more, freire advocated that learning in all its forms should go beyond a transactional exchange, in which academics feel their purpose is to ‘pour’ knowledge and experience into learners who, in turn, must ‘absorb’ it. instead, learning is an intentional process of ongoing reflection and action, enabled by critical thinking and supported by moral values in the service of social justice. it is only through reflection and action that learners can lead a life of self-determination, that is, a life of praxis (see, for example, gadotti, 1996; smith, 2011). yet, praxis is not simply practice, or action. action for its own sake can single-mindedly repeat past mistakes and reproduce existing inequalities. neither is praxis an over-reliance on reflection, which, without action, is ‘verbalism’ or ‘idle chatter’ (freire, 1972, p. 68). indeed, both must be present for an individual to achieve separation from their immersive circumstances, and through this, the distance and perspective (de castro, 2015), required for self-improvement (see, for example, smith, 2011). current higher education contexts have required universities to busy themselves in the ‘doing’ of employability, for instance, by putting in place interventions to improve student performance and build ‘career capital’ (kozhevnikov, 2021). however, we believe that freire would challenge us to move employability discourses further, from ‘practice’ and towards ‘praxis’, with the purpose of enabling students to overcome socio-cultural barriers manolchev, alexander, cherrington towards ‘employability 3.0’: from practice to praxis journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 4 and oppressions, towards rewriting their future and not just ‘reproducing the past’ (giroux, 2011, p. 716). the question is, has employability scholarship and the advent of ‘employability 2.0’ (bridgstock, 2020) enabled us to achieve this? some benefits and limitations of employability 2.0 comprehensive reviews of employability provision in uk universities, such as dalrymple et al. (2021) and norton and dalrymple (2020), outline a fragmented terrain. these authors suggest that employability has been applied as a measure of student career readiness, future career goal setting, and portfolios of skills and personal attributes. employability may be implemented through part-time or year-long placements as a means of growing students’ social capital and enhancing career prospects (ucas, 2020). in the 24 institutions of the russell group, employability encompasses ‘hands off’ provisions offered by career services, specific modules focused on career-development skills, and ‘awards’ achieved through partnerships with external organisations (farenga and quinlan, 2016). some higher education institutions, for example the university of derby, buxton, include ‘virtual’ placements, whereby online learning platforms are used to simulate environments and skill-building scenarios with the help of tutors and virtual external advisors but without the need to join an actual organisation (dfe, 2021). others, including our own institution, also focus on developing entrepreneurial skills in partnership with business incubators. such provisions show some headway being made towards the achievement of a ‘connected curriculum’, defined as six, interconnected dimensions of learning (fung, 2017). those include (1) collaborations between students and academics; (2) researchinspired learning being at the centre of module and programme design; (3) connecting assessment with real-world topics; (4) clear links between learning within the lecture theatre and learning during placements; (5) authentic assessments which have significance for a diverse audience and, finally, (6) creating an experience which connects students and their wider, student communities this connectedness, enabled by the digital context of modern working environments, signals what the australian government’s department of education, skills and employment (bridgstock, 2020), views as ‘graduate employability 2.0’ linking ‘learning, work and career’ through digital tools (e.g. crowdsourcing and platform sites) and social media (e.g. linkedin). manolchev, alexander, cherrington towards ‘employability 3.0’: from practice to praxis journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 5 in this way, employability 2.0 is enabled through student participation in communities of practice (cop) (lave and wenger, 1991), which provide the foundation for organisational learning, the latter being a topic captivating scholarly attention since the 1950s (easterbysmith et al., 2002). despite the variety of conceptual domains and debates surrounding it, there is broad agreement that organisational learning is the study of how individual meaning-making enables the emergence of group knowledge, how this group knowledge is converted into behaviour norms, how existing members practise them, and how new members are socialised into them. however, cops enable not only knowledge, but offer opportunities for participation, support, and feedback through which new entrants can ‘learn the ropes’ (elkjaer, 2004; hatmaker et al., 2011). as a vibrant illustration, the employability provisions of our undergraduate programme reflect several of the connectivity principles behind employability 2.0 as outlined above. delivered at the university’s penryn campus, which benefits from a small cohort of students (between 150-200 per year), researching academics offer students placement opportunities on their research projects (connectivity principle 1). we currently have students on two of our european social funded projects: one helping businesses in south west england build higher-level skills in their workforce, and the other working with small and medium-sized enterprises to support the region’s transition to a zero-waste, circular economy. both projects allow undergraduates (currently second and final year) to organise, co-design and deliver workshops, connecting the programme with placement learning by working on real-life problems (principle 4). this engagement with external organisations enables us to create practical case studies, for use in our own modules (principle 2). for example, we have a waste-based case study contributing to our secondyear module on the circular economy, which challenges students to consider disposal solutions for compressed, personal-protective equipment (ppe) waste, produced in tonnes by a local hospital. this case study also aligns with principle 3, as it is a current project undertaken by a small, product design business in the south west. guided by us and the business owner, students have been exploring ways to repurpose this ppe waste material, so it can float buoy chains in a busy local harbour. this has ecological importance, as it encourages seagrass regrowth, shown to be a better absorber of carbon dioxide than tropical rainforests manolchev, alexander, cherrington towards ‘employability 3.0’: from practice to praxis journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 6 (see, for example, un environment programme, 2019). the work is also practically and commercially assessed in terms of whether the company can implement the solution, which fits, but also goes beyond, principles 5 and 6. indeed, creating, and embedding students within, a wider cop is a key priority for us, so we ensure our employability provisions go beyond one specific programme. we wish to socialise (see brown and duguid, 1991) students, not just in one undergraduate degree – ours – but the wider campus community, thus achieving an overarching sense of ‘togetherness’ (mäkinen, 2021). one such initiative is the use of hackathons in a multidisciplinary event, co-delivered with the law school. hackathons are usually day-long problem-solving events, typically associated with the technology industry but implemented across a variety of sectors, including education (keenan and manolchev, 2021). we codesigned our first hackathon event, impact 2020, during lockdown, and used it as a means of connecting business and law students online. we have delivered two hackathons to date (in 2020 and 2021), with partners from the local food and hospitality industry and with input from business owners and lecturers. providing students with access to entrepreneurs in residence and entrepreneurship funding opportunities through our partnership with a business incubator (setsquared), as discussed above, is a logical continuation of our cop focus. our campus has a unique feature in that it is shared with another university, which enables students on our programme to partner with learners, not only from other disciplines, but from another institution, and pursue their entrepreneurial projects. a particularly successful initiative has been an authentic asian food import business, which existed for three years (until the onset of the covid-19 pandemic). such provisions are examples of connectedness, and they allow us to implement employability 2.0 as understood in the current literature. however, they are not sufficient conditions for us to be able to demonstrate that we have achieved the praxis (as opposed to the doing, or practice) of employability. praxis needs to combine both intentional action and reflection in a transformational learning experience. consequently, employability 3.0 needs to be embedded, not only in a geographic context (as we have done with our south west partnerships), but also in a historic one, enabling students to gain awareness of struggles within their own social group, struggles which may contain all the challenges and manolchev, alexander, cherrington towards ‘employability 3.0’: from practice to praxis journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 7 intersectional complexity of gender, class, race and other conditions (glass, 2001, p. 16) and which have exerted a formative impact on students’ lives, whether overtly or covertly. there is a greater urgency to this than universities may realise. the department for education’s 2021 report, ‘employability programmes and work placements in uk higher education’, acknowledges the absence of diversity data, per student group. this absence is likely to mask the uneven impact of financial pressures on students with different intersectional characteristics, as well as how well specific individual needs are met during each placement in terms of workload, supervision and so on (dfe, 2021). students from marginalised groups may require further support in the context of employability 3.0 initiatives, in order to achieve freire’s ideal of praxis as active and reflective but also transformational learning. accordingly, employability 3.0 needs to address, not only the practicalities of learning as a process of information management, but must also help students overcome feelings of shame or stigma on account of previous experiences (see fung, 2017). these considerations must become the goal of employability of the future, and we conclude the final section of our opinion piece with brief horizon scanning towards employability 3.0. sketching ‘employability 3.0’ one of the debates in the literature on organisational learning is around the degree and pace of change, whether it should radically transform organisational practices, or rather, keep updating existing policies and processes (hong et al., 2006). this debate connects with research proposing that communities of practice (cop) enable actors to transform their contexts by actively participating in them (cook and yanow, 1993). the gap which we have identified, both from a freirean pedagogical lens and through our review of employability best practice reports, is that intersectional characteristics offer uneven capacity for such transformation. this suggests the need for employability 3.0 to extend its support for both the learner and the individual behind the learner. such an undertaking requires a careful balance between activities and experiences designed to help students go outside of their comfort zones but without causing harm. manolchev, alexander, cherrington towards ‘employability 3.0’: from practice to praxis journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 8 capturing data on employability outcomes for disadvantaged student groups, and using this data in annual employability programme reviews, would be a valuable starting point. this would enable extended and targeted interventions and support in a distributed way – by utilising the full cop of academics, external partners and career services, and connectedness to the full range of online resources. such an individualised approach is not without challenges. the department for education reports broad agreement on the need for employability provisions to develop (rather than signal the development of) human capital but stops short of suggesting how that might happen, simply acknowledging that ‘there are different mechanisms going on at different parts of the labour market’ (dfe, 2021, p. 91). we believe that employability 3.0 should be tasked with understanding these different mechanisms and taking them into account; it should help students chart their own course – at work, in society and within their own lives. acknowledgements we would like to thank the anonymous reviewers and the journal editor for their steer, suggestions and challenges, which helped to focus our arguments and guided us to build a more comprehensive theoretical foundation for our propositions. references artess, j., mellors-bourne, r. and hooley, t. (2017) employability: a review of the literature 2012-2016. available at: https://www.advance-he.ac.uk/knowledgehub/employability-review-literature-2012-2016 (accessed: 28 july 2022). bridgstock, r. (2020) graduate employability 2.0: enhancing the connectedness of learners, programs and higher education institutions. australian government department of education, skills and employment. available at: https://ltr.edu.au/resources/fs15-0241_bridgstock_report_2020.pdf (accessed: 28 july 2022). https://www.advance-he.ac.uk/knowledge-hub/employability-review-literature-2012-2016 https://www.advance-he.ac.uk/knowledge-hub/employability-review-literature-2012-2016 https://ltr.edu.au/resources/fs15-0241_bridgstock_report_2020.pdf manolchev, alexander, cherrington towards ‘employability 3.0’: from practice to praxis journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 9 brown, js. and duguid, p. (1991) ‘organizational learning and communities-of-practice: toward a unified view of working, learning and innovation’, organization science, 2(1): pp.40–57. available at: https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2.1.40 (accessed: 28 july 2022). cook, s. d. and yanow, d. (1993) ‘culture and organizational learning’, journal of management inquiry, 2(4), pp.373-390. available at: https://doi.org/10.1177/105649269324010 (accessed: 28 july 2022). dalrymple, r., macrae, a., pal, m. and shipman, s. (2021) employability: a review of the literature 2016-2021. advance he. available at: https://www.advancehe.ac.uk/knowledge-hub/employability-review-literature-2016-2021 (accessed: 28 july 2022). de castro, l.s.v. (2015) critical pedagogy and marx, vygotsky and freire: phenomenal forms and educational action research. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan. department for education (dfe) (2021) employability programmes and work placements in uk he. available at: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attach ment_data/file/1035200/employability_programmes_and_work_placements_in_uk_ he.pdf (accessed: 28 july 2022). easterby‐smith, m., crossan, m. and nicolini, d. (2002) ‘organizational learning: debates past, present and future’, journal of management studies, 37(6), pp.783-796. available at: https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-6486.00203 (accessed: 28 july 2022). elkjaer, b. (2004) ‘organizational learning: the ‘third way’’, management learning, 35(4), pp.419-434. available at: https://doi.org/10.1177/1350507604048271 (accessed: 28 july 2022). farenga, s. and quinlan, k. (2016) ‘classifying university employability strategies: three case studies and implications for practice and research’, journal of education and https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2.1.40 https://doi.org/10.1177/105649269324010 https://www.advance-he.ac.uk/knowledge-hub/employability-review-literature-2016-2021 https://www.advance-he.ac.uk/knowledge-hub/employability-review-literature-2016-2021 https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1035200/employability_programmes_and_work_placements_in_uk_he.pdf https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1035200/employability_programmes_and_work_placements_in_uk_he.pdf https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1035200/employability_programmes_and_work_placements_in_uk_he.pdf https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-6486.00203 https://doi.org/10.1177/1350507604048271 manolchev, alexander, cherrington towards ‘employability 3.0’: from practice to praxis journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 10 work, 29(7): pp.767-787. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/13639080.2015.1064517 (accessed 28 july 2022). freire, p. (1972) pedagogy of the oppressed. london: penguin. fung, d. (2017) a connected curriculum for higher education. ucl press. available at: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/1558776/1/a-connected-curriculum-for-highereducation.pdf (accessed: 28 july 2022). gadotti, m. (1996) pedagogy of praxis: a dialectical philosophy of education. new york: suny press. giroux, h.a. (2010) ‘rethinking education as the practice of freedom: paulo freire and the promise of critical pedagogy’, policy futures in education, 8(6), pp.715-721. available at: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.2304/pfie.2010.8.6.715 (accessed: 28 july 2022). glass, r.d. (2001) ‘on paulo freire’s philosophy of praxis and the foundations of liberation education’, educational researcher, 30(2), pp.15-25. available at: https://doi.org/10.3102%2f0013189x030002015 (accessed: 28 july 2022). hall, r. (2019) ‘on authoritarian neoliberalism and poetic epistemology’, social epistemology, 33(4): pp.298-308. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/02691728.2019.1638985 (accessed: 28 july 2022). hong, j.f.l., easterby‐smith, m. and snell, r.s. (2006) ‘transferring organizational learning systems to japanese subsidiaries in china’, journal of management studies, 43(5), pp.1027-1058. available at: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.14676486.2006.00628.x (accessed: 28 july 2022). hatmaker, d.m., park, h.h. and rethemeyer, r.k. (2011) ‘learning the ropes: communities of practice and social networks in the public sector, international public management journal, 14(4), pp.395-419. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/10967494.2011.656051 (accessed: 28 july 2022). https://doi.org/10.1080/13639080.2015.1064517 https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/1558776/1/a-connected-curriculum-for-higher-education.pdf https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/1558776/1/a-connected-curriculum-for-higher-education.pdf https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.2304/pfie.2010.8.6.715 https://doi.org/10.3102%2f0013189x030002015 https://doi.org/10.1080/02691728.2019.1638985 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-6486.2006.00628.x https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-6486.2006.00628.x https://doi.org/10.1080/10967494.2011.656051 manolchev, alexander, cherrington towards ‘employability 3.0’: from practice to praxis journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 11 keenan, c. and manolchev, c. (2021) ‘‘hacking’ the pandemic: turning online work challenges into learning with impact’, journal of learning development in higher education, (22). available at: https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.vi22.784 (accessed: 28 july 2022). kozhevnikov, a. (2021 ‘career capital in global versus second-order cities: skilled migrants in london and newcastle’, human relations, 74(5), pp.705-728. available at: https://doi.org/10.1177%2f0018726720952857 (accessed: 28 july 2022). lave, j. and wenger, e. (1991) situated learning: legitimate peripheral participation. cambridge: cambridge university press. luckett, k. and naicker, v. (2016) ‘responding to misrecognition from a (post)/colonial university’, critical studies in education, 60(2): pp.187-204. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/17508487.2016.1234495 (accessed: 28 july 2022). mäkinen, e.i. (2021) ‘power and knowledge negotiations in a collectivity of practice: from peripheralization to epistemological suspicion’, management learning, 53(3), pp. 502-524. available at: https://doi.org/10.1177%2f13505076211036970 (accessed: 28 july 2022). menon, m.e., argyropoulou, e. and stylianou, a. (2018) ‘managing the link between higher education and the labour market: perceptions of graduates in greece and cyprus’, tertiary education and management, 24(4): pp.298-310. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/13583883.2018.1444195 (accessed: 28 july 2022). morrison, a. (2020) ‘social justice in a market order: graduate employment and social mobility in the uk’, critical studies in education, 61(5): pp.611-626. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/17508487.2018.1553794 (accessed: 28 july 2022). norton, s. and dalrymple, r. (eds.) (2020) enhancing graduate employability: a case study compendium, advance he. available at: https://s3.eu-west2.amazonaws.com/assets.creode.advancehe-documenthttps://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.vi22.784 https://doi.org/10.1177%2f0018726720952857 https://doi.org/10.1080/17508487.2016.1234495 https://doi.org/10.1177%2f13505076211036970 https://doi.org/10.1080/13583883.2018.1444195 https://doi.org/10.1080/17508487.2018.1553794 https://s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/assets.creode.advancehe-document-manager/documents/advance-he/advhe_case%20study%20compendium_1580461724.pdf https://s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/assets.creode.advancehe-document-manager/documents/advance-he/advhe_case%20study%20compendium_1580461724.pdf manolchev, alexander, cherrington towards ‘employability 3.0’: from practice to praxis journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 12 manager/documents/advancehe/advhe_case%20study%20compendium_1580461724.pdf (accessed: 28 july 2022). rees, s. (2021) ‘re-imagining employability: an ontology of employability best practice in higher education institutions’, teaching in higher education, 26(5): pp.663-678. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2019.1670637 (accessed: 28 july 2022). scott, f.j. and willison, d. (2021) ‘students’ reflections on an employability skills provision’, journal of further and higher education, 45(8), pp.1118-1133. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/0309877x.2021.1928025 (accessed: 28 july 2022). smith, m.k. (2011) what is praxis? in the encyclopaedia of informal education. available at: https://infed.org/mobi/what-is-praxis/ (accessed: 28 july 2022). tholen, g. (2015) ‘what can research into graduate employability tell us about agency and structure?’, british journal of sociology of education, 36(5): pp.766-784. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/01425692.2013.847782 (accessed: 28 july 2022). ucas (2020) four reasons why you should do a placement year. available at: https://www.ucas.com/connect/blogs/four-reasons-why-you-should-do-placementyear (accessed: 28 july 2022). un environment programme (2019) seagrass: the secret weapon in the fight against global heating. available at: https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/story/seagrasssecret-weapon-fight-against-global-heating (accessed: 28 july 2022). author details constantine manolchev is a senior lecturer and programme director for the bsc business at the university of exeter business school. he researches worker experiences and critical pedagogy practice. https://s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/assets.creode.advancehe-document-manager/documents/advance-he/advhe_case%20study%20compendium_1580461724.pdf https://s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/assets.creode.advancehe-document-manager/documents/advance-he/advhe_case%20study%20compendium_1580461724.pdf https://doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2019.1670637 https://doi.org/10.1080/0309877x.2021.1928025 https://infed.org/mobi/what-is-praxis/ https://doi.org/10.1080/01425692.2013.847782 https://www.ucas.com/connect/blogs/four-reasons-why-you-should-do-placement-year https://www.ucas.com/connect/blogs/four-reasons-why-you-should-do-placement-year https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/story/seagrass-secret-weapon-fight-against-global-heating https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/story/seagrass-secret-weapon-fight-against-global-heating manolchev, alexander, cherrington towards ‘employability 3.0’: from practice to praxis journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 13 ruth cherrington is at the university of exeter business school and works across several research projects supported by the european structural and investment funds (esif) that address the intersecting topics of innovation, circular economy, and skills development. her research focuses on the relationship between resources, business, and the environment. allen alexander is a senior researcher at the university of exeter business school, investigating the role that innovation and knowledge-based capabilities play in enabling a transition toward the circular economy (ce). a senior fellow of the higher education academy, allen currently leads modules on social & technological innovation and project management. towards ‘employability 3.0’: from practice to praxis abstract introduction is ‘doing’ employability enough? some benefits and limitations of employability 2.0 sketching ‘employability 3.0’ acknowledgements references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 24 september 2022 ________________________________________________________________________ a new bloom – adding ‘collaborate’ to bloom’s taxonomy richard f heller university of newcastle, australia university of manchester, uk abstract there are a number of opportunities for collaboration, within and between universities, locally, internationally, with industry and with other education providers. university graduates are likely to be placed in a work environment where collaboration is required. collaboration within higher education institutions has been shown to enhance student learning, and collaborative learning to improve student outcomes. a proposal has been made to add ‘collaborate’ to bloom’s taxonomy of educational objectives, to emphasise the importance of collaboration and to encourage its inclusion in the educational process and assessment. collaborate is sited between ‘apply’ and ‘analyse’ in the revised bloom’s taxonomy hierarchy, and the new version named the new bloom. this opinion piece expands on the concept and adds the specific objective of ‘work or share with others’ with keywords ‘share, cooperate, reciprocate, achieve consensus’. it also offers a nonhierarchical representation of the taxonomy, with collaborate as an important feature of each of the other components. adding collaborate to bloom’s taxonomy is recommended to emphasise the importance of collaboration and its contribution to each of the other components of the taxonomy. keywords: collaborate; bloom’s taxonomy; new bloom; educational outcomes. introduction this opinion piece expands on a proposal (heller, 2022) to add ‘collaborate’ to bloom’s taxonomy, to emphasise the importance of collaboration and to encourage its inclusion in the processes of higher education and its assessment. heller a new bloom – adding ‘collaborate’ to bloom’s taxonomy journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 2 why collaborate? there are a number of opportunities for collaboration, within and between universities, locally, internationally, with industry and with other education providers. university graduates are likely to be placed in a work environment where collaboration is required. collaboration within higher education institutions has been shown to enhance student learning (kezar, 2005), and there is considerable evidence that collaborative learning improves student outcomes (laal and ghodsi, 2012; scager et al., 2016). networks of universities usually collaborate on research, but there are examples of how educational outcomes can be met by unlocking the power of collaboration (joo et al., 2019; suny coil center; european consortium of innovative universities). an oecd report encourages international collaboration to support the future of higher education (oecd, 2019) and the international commission on the futures of education tells us that ‘pedagogy should be organized around the principles of cooperation, collaboration, and solidarity.’ (unesco, 2021) the dangers of competition rather than collaboration in education include unnecessary duplication of courses, and failure to embrace best practice as each institution develops its own variant rather than building on success. most important is the failure to consider the whole ecosystem, as providers compete rather than come together to meet local, national or global educational needs (mintz, 2019). the covid-19 pandemic has highlighted some wonderful examples of scientific collaboration across institutions, starting with the open publication of the genetic sequence of the sars coronavirus to facilitate the development of tests and vaccines (foley, 2021). digital opportunities for collaboration the digital economy has offered many opportunities for collaboration, as is emphasised in the oecd report (oecd, 2019). the creation and sharing of open educational resources (unesco, 2017) is an example of the way in which information can be shared online to allow collaboration rather than competition. as online education becomes increasingly heller a new bloom – adding ‘collaborate’ to bloom’s taxonomy journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 3 utilised in the educational process, either in full or in hybrid models, the potential for collaboration increases. a proposed new model for the higher education sector (heller, 2022) is enabled by a pivot to online education, as is the field of networked learning (networked learning editorial collective, 2021) – both of these approaches include collaboration as a key feature. teaching collaboration if we accept that there are benefits from collaboration within and between universities, as well as with other players, it would make sense to both teach collaboration to university students and provide opportunities that would facilitate collaboration. there are a number of structural and organisational ways in which collaboration can be facilitated. however, unless collaboration is taught and assessed, it is unlikely to assume importance in the university setting. in order to emphasise the importance of including collaboration in our teaching, the suggestion was made (heller, 2022a) to add collaboration to bloom’s taxonomy, and this commentary expands on that idea. laurillard (laurillard’s conversational framework) includes collaboration as one of her learning types, and she has also indicated how online technology can support collaboration (laurillard et al., 2018). bloom’s taxonomy bloom’s taxonomy has been in use for many years to help us define the outcomes we might expect at various levels of learning. bloom devised his taxonomy of learning in 1956 (bloom et al., 1956) and it was revised in 2001 (anderson et al., 2001; krathwohl, 2002). among the modifications in the revision was a change in the terms from nouns to verbs, to indicate that the taxonomy reflects actions. in the pyramidal hierarchy, the 2001 version starts with ‘remember’ and rises to ‘create’ as the highest order skill. this classification has been very important in defining expected educational outcomes. for example, master’s degrees might extend to the ‘analyse’ and ‘evaluate’ levels, and phds to ‘create’ the highest level. heller a new bloom – adding ‘collaborate’ to bloom’s taxonomy journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 4 collaboration does not appear in either version, although a further revision to a digital taxonomy did add collaboration as a separate element, and gave an example of collaboration in the use of digital tools for sharing within the ‘applying’ rubric (churches, 2008). since that paper was written, there have been major advances in the availability of digital software to facilitate collaboration. adding ‘collaborate’ to bloom’s taxonomy the suggestion to add collaboration as a key component in a further revision to bloom’s taxonomy has been made and this new version termed the new bloom (heller, 2022a). the new bloom adds the term ‘collaborate’ and places it between ‘apply’ and ‘analyse’ (figure1). figure 1. bloom’s taxonomy, the revised bloom’s taxonomy and the new bloom. heller, 2022a, creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ heller a new bloom – adding ‘collaborate’ to bloom’s taxonomy journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 5 further detail on the taxonomy the vanderbilt university center for teaching is among others who have expanded the revised bloom’s taxonomy to include more detail in order to help the educational process by defining specific objectives and keywords (armstrong, 2010). it might be worth a short digression on terminology. bloom titled his taxonomy as relating to educational objectives, although they are not formulated in the way we usually term educational objectives today. they can be thought of as cognitive levels of complexity, or levels of thinking (as in figure 1). figure 2 shows the additions of specific objectives with keywords to help with the design and assessment of educational activities. figure 2. bloom’s revised taxonomy with specific objectives and keywords – from vanderbilt university center for teaching. vanderbilt university center for teaching (armstrong, 2010) creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) a similar approach for the new bloom, is to suggest that a specific educational objective for ‘collaborate’ would be ‘work or share with others’ with keywords ‘share, cooperate, reciprocate, achieve consensus’ as shown in figure 3. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ heller a new bloom – adding ‘collaborate’ to bloom’s taxonomy journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 6 figure 3. the new bloom with specific objectives and keywords for collaborate. the hierarchy bloom’s concept was for a hierarchy of categories from lower to higher. to show that it is a high-level skill, ‘collaborate’ is placed above ‘apply’ and before ‘analyse’. each part of the pyramid should inform the next part, so you have to remember to be able to understand, understand to be able to apply, and so on. placing ‘collaborate’ before ‘analyse’, ‘evaluate’ and ‘create’ indicates the importance of collaboration in achieving each of these outcomes. however, it is open to debate as to whether a distinct hierarchical approach is appropriate, and certainly collaboration might also benefit each of the other stages. even remembering, placed at the lowest end of the hierarchy, might benefit from collaborative learning, which is a recognised educational strategy (baloche and brody, 2017). for this reason, figure 4 represents the taxonomy in a non-hierarchical structure, and places ‘collaborate’ in the centre to show that it is an important feature in each of the other components of the revised bloom’s taxonomy. figure 4 also includes the specific objectives and keywords, expanded from those suggested by vanderbilt to include those for ‘collaborate’. heller a new bloom – adding ‘collaborate’ to bloom’s taxonomy journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 7 figure 4. non-hierarchical depiction of the new bloom including specific objectives and keywords. adapted from heller, 2022a and vanderbilt university center for teaching (armstrong, 2010). creative commons attribution 4.0 international licenses (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) new bloom in practice there are a number of factors which have been shown to relate to the effectiveness of collaboration in the educational setting, such as group size and composition, as well as how students might work together to tackle the types of tasks given to them (scager et al., 2016). group-based problem-based learning and peer-to-peer learning are good examples. concern has been expressed (eizadirad, 2019) that traditional assessment methods http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ heller a new bloom – adding ‘collaborate’ to bloom’s taxonomy journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 8 emphasise competition at the expense of collaboration, so formative and summative assessment should include grading for collaboration through pair or group projects, while respecting and rewarding individual contributions, and/or the demonstration of the use of collaborative tools. the terms used – share, cooperate, reciprocate, achieve consensus – might help inform such activities. individual educators will want to add to or subtract from these terms. an editorial introduced a special journal issue to showcase many examples of collaboration in higher education (abegglen et al., 2021). online learning provides many opportunities for collaboration (hammond, 2017; koris et al., 2021). the term online collaborative learning theory and the community of inquiry models have each been coined to provide both theoretical underpinnings and practical methods for student and student/teacher collaboration (bates, 2019). in the online setting, discussion groups provide a basis and can be structured to maximise learning outcomes. peer-to-peer reflection and commentary might also be assessed and graded. conclusion adding ‘collaborate’ to bloom’s taxonomy is recommended to emphasise its importance and its contribution to each of the other components of the taxonomy. the new bloom is designed to stimulate opportunities for learning how to collaborate in the higher education setting and beyond. references abegglen, s., burns, t., and sinfield, s. (2021) ‘editorial: collaboration in higher education: partnering with students, colleagues and external stakeholders’, journal of university teaching & learning practice, 18(7), pp.1-6. available at: https://ro.uow.edu.au/jutlp/vol18/iss7/01/ (accessed: 5 september 2022). anderson, l.w., krathwohl, d.r., airasian, p.w., cruickshank, k.a., mayer, r.e., pintrich, p.r., raths, j. and wittrock, m.c. (eds). (2001) a taxonomy for learning, teaching, https://ro.uow.edu.au/jutlp/vol18/iss7/01/ heller a new bloom – adding ‘collaborate’ to bloom’s taxonomy journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 9 and assessing: a revision of bloom’s taxonomy of educational objectives (complete ed.). new york: longman. armstrong, p. (2010) bloom’s taxonomy. vanderbilt university center for teaching. available at: https://cft.vanderbilt.edu/guides-sub-pages/blooms-taxonomy/ (accessed: 10 july 2022). baloche, l. and brody, c.m. (2017) ‘cooperative learning: exploring challenges, crafting innovations’, journal of education for teaching, 43(3), pp.274-283. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/02607476.2017.1319513 (accessed: 5 september 2022). bates, a.w. (2019) teaching in a digital age: chapter 4.4: online collaborative learning. available at: https://opentextbc.ca/teachinginadigitalage/chapter/6-5-onlinecollaborative-learning/ (accessed: 10 july 2022). bloom, b.s., englehart, m.d., furst, e.j., hill, w.h. and krathwohl, d.r. (1956) the taxonomy of educational objectives, the classification of educational goals, handbook 1: cognitive domain. new york: david mckay company inc. churches, a. (2008). bloom's taxonomy blooms digitally. available at: https://www.techlearning.com/news/bloom39s-taxonomy-blooms-digitally (accessed: 10 july 2022). european consortium of innovative universities. available at: https://www.eciu.org/ (accessed: 10 july 2022). eizadirad, a. (2019) ‘decolonizing educational assessment models’, in eizadirad, a., decolonizing educational assessment. cham: palgrave macmillan, pp. 203-228. available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27462-7 (accessed: 5 september 2022). foley, c. (2021) ‘professor who tweeted the coronavirus genome, paving the way for new vaccines, scoops major australian science award’, the conversation, 4 november. available at: https://theconversation.com/professor-who-tweeted-the-coronavirushttps://cft.vanderbilt.edu/guides-sub-pages/blooms-taxonomy/ https://doi.org/10.1080/02607476.2017.1319513 https://opentextbc.ca/teachinginadigitalage/chapter/6-5-online-collaborative-learning/ https://opentextbc.ca/teachinginadigitalage/chapter/6-5-online-collaborative-learning/ https://www.techlearning.com/news/bloom39s-taxonomy-blooms-digitally https://www.eciu.org/ https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27462-7 https://theconversation.com/professor-who-tweeted-the-coronavirus-genome-paving-the-way-for-new-vaccines-scoops-major-australian-science-award-171208 heller a new bloom – adding ‘collaborate’ to bloom’s taxonomy journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 10 genome-paving-the-way-for-new-vaccines-scoops-major-australian-science-award171208 (accessed: 10 july 2022). hammond, m. (2017) ‘online collaboration and cooperation: the recurring importance of evidence, rationale and viability’ education and information technologies, 22, pp.1005–1024. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10639-016-9469-x (accessed: 5 september 2022). heller, r.f. (2022). the distributed university for sustainable higher education. singapore: springer. available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-6506-6 (accessed: 5 september 2022). heller, r.f. (2022a) ‘solutions’, in heller, r.f., the distributed university for sustainable higher education. singapore: springer. available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/978981-16-6506-6_3 (accessed: 5 september 2022). joo, j., selingo, j.j., and alamuddin, r. (2019) unlocking the power of collaboration: how to develop a successful collaborative network in and around higher education. available at: https://doi.org/10.18665/sr.312001 (accessed: 5 september 2022). kezar, a. (2005) ‘redesigning for collaboration within higher education institutions: an exploration into the developmental process’, research in higher education, 46, pp.831–860. available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11162-004-6227-5 (accessed: 5 september 2022). koris, r., palmer, z. and oswal, s. (2021) ‘empowering cross-disciplinary learning through online collaboration among students and faculty from business english, website building, and accessible design fields, journal of university teaching & learning practice, 18(7), pp.112-134. available at: https://ro.uow.edu.au/jutlp/vol18/iss7/08/ (accessed: 5 september 2022). https://theconversation.com/professor-who-tweeted-the-coronavirus-genome-paving-the-way-for-new-vaccines-scoops-major-australian-science-award-171208 https://theconversation.com/professor-who-tweeted-the-coronavirus-genome-paving-the-way-for-new-vaccines-scoops-major-australian-science-award-171208 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10639-016-9469-x https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-6506-6 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-6506-6_3 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-6506-6_3 https://doi.org/10.18665/sr.312001 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11162-004-6227-5 https://ro.uow.edu.au/jutlp/vol18/iss7/08/ heller a new bloom – adding ‘collaborate’ to bloom’s taxonomy journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 11 krathwohl, d.r. (2002) ‘a revision of bloom’s taxonomy: an overview’, theory into practice, 41 (4), pp.212-218. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15430421tip4104_2 (accessed: 5 september 2022). laal, m. and ghodsi, s.m. (2012) ‘benefits of collaborative learning’, procedia social and behavioral sciences, 31, pp.486–490. available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sbspro.2011.12.091 (accessed: 5 september 2022). laurillard’s conversational framework. the 6 learning types – abc learning design. available at: (https://abc-ld.org/6-learning-types/) (accessed: 10 july 2022). laurillard, d., kennedy, e., charlton, p., wild, j. and dimakopoulos, d. (2018) ‘using technology to develop teachers as designers of tel: evaluating the learning designer’, british journal of educational technology, 49, pp.1044-1058. available at: https://doi.org/10.1111/bjet.12697 (accessed: 5 september 2022). mintz, s. (2019) ‘creating a more collaborative higher education ecosystem’, inside higher ed, 17 january. available at: https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/higher-edgamma/creating-more-collaborative-higher-education-ecosystem (accessed: 10 july 2022). networked learning editorial collective (nlec) (2021) ‘networked learning: inviting redefinition’, postdigital science and education, 3, pp.312–325. available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/s42438-020-00167-8 (accessed: 5 september 2022). oecd (2019) how international collaboration can help build the future of education. available at: https://issuu.com/oecd.publishing/docs/international_collaboration___future_of_education (accessed: 10 july 2022). scager, k., boonstra, j., peeters, t., vulperhorst, j., and wiegant. f. (2016) ‘collaborative learning in higher education: evoking positive interdependence’, cbe—life sciences education, 15(4). available at: https://doi.org/10.1187/cbe.16-07-0219 (accessed: 5 september 2022). https://doi.org/10.1207/s15430421tip4104_2 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sbspro.2011.12.091 https://abc-ld.org/6-learning-types/ https://doi.org/10.1111/bjet.12697 https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/higher-ed-gamma/creating-more-collaborative-higher-education-ecosystem https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/higher-ed-gamma/creating-more-collaborative-higher-education-ecosystem https://doi.org/10.1007/s42438-020-00167-8 https://issuu.com/oecd.publishing/docs/international_collaboration_-__future_of_education https://issuu.com/oecd.publishing/docs/international_collaboration_-__future_of_education https://doi.org/10.1187/cbe.16-07-0219 heller a new bloom – adding ‘collaborate’ to bloom’s taxonomy journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 12 suny coil center. collaborative online international learning (coil). available at: https://coil.suny.edu/ (accessed: 10 july 2022). unesco (2017) open educational resources. available at: https://en.unesco.org/themes/ict-education/oer (accessed: 10 july 2022). unesco (2021) international commission on the futures of education. reimagining our futures together: a new social contract for education. available at: https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000379707 (accessed: 10 july 2022). author details richard heller is emeritus professor at the university of newcastle, australia and the university of manchester, uk. he has 50 years of higher education experience in medicine and public health. as professor of public health in manchester he established the university’s first online master’s degree. he founded and coordinated peoples-uni to build public health capacity in developing countries at low cost, through online learning. his recent open access book is the distributed university for sustainable higher education. https://coil.suny.edu/ https://en.unesco.org/themes/ict-education/oer https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000379707 http://peoples-uni.org/ https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-981-16-6506-6 a new bloom – adding ‘collaborate’ to bloom’s taxonomy abstract introduction why collaborate? digital opportunities for collaboration teaching collaboration bloom’s taxonomy adding ‘collaborate’ to bloom’s taxonomy further detail on the taxonomy the hierarchy new bloom in practice conclusion references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 24 september 2022 ________________________________________________________________________ a book review of khan, k., gurbutt, d. and cragg, r. (2022) changes in the higher education sector: contemporary drivers and the pursuit of excellence. london: anthem press. retha schwanke north-west university, south africa keywords: advance he; educational theory; teaching excellence; teaching excellence framework; student-centred. overview teaching excellence is becoming increasingly important in higher education institutions (heis) around the world. in a more competitive environment, where students have the power to research and choose the institution they want to attend, proven teaching excellence can be a powerful draw. in many of these institutions it has also necessitated a gradual shift from an emphasis on research excellence, to accommodate career progression paths based on teaching excellence. in this book various aspects of teaching excellence are discussed, from common measurements thereof to what exactly it constitutes and how to improve on it. even though the focus is mainly on the united kingdom context, it is an informative text that can be valuable in any setting. structure and content the authors contextualise the topic in the preface by referring to the importance of life-long learning, and the role of higher education (he) therein. the term ‘teaching excellence’ is schwanke a book review of khan, k., gurbutt, d. and cragg, r. (2022) changes in the higher education sector: contemporary drivers and the pursuit of excellence. london: anthem press. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 2 introduced as a vital element in encouraging continued learning through fulfilling learning experiences of students in he. it is defined as the way in which the aspects of learning and learner experience are combined, leading to more effective teaching. this idea forms the premise for the rest of the book, which is a dual-purpose exploration of the origin and development of the field of teaching excellence on the one side, and an explanation of some of the key metrics through which teaching is commonly measured and evaluated on the other. lastly, there is a focus on innovative methodologies that can be utilised to develop/enhance teaching excellence. the first chapter starts by emphasising the need for teaching excellence in he, as a way for institutions to be more attractive to students in a competitive environment. the matter of what exactly is meant by teaching excellence is raised, as it can mean different things for different heis, and even for students as beneficiaries, depending on the context. following this contextualisation, a comprehensive overview of the he environment in the uk is provided with specific reference to funding, policy, the impact of teaching excellence, student experience, and academic progression. the second chapter focuses on the premise that teaching excellence is an expectation, and not necessarily a definition of what defines teaching excellence. this premise ties into the concept of face validity, as students are increasingly viewed as customers. within this framework it is then essential to ensure customer satisfaction, which is what heis aim for with teaching excellence. thereafter a critical overview is given of the different instruments which may be used as part of the value assessment of he in the uk, including the teaching excellence framework (tef), national student survey (nss), and league tables. the significance of inclusivity as part of teaching excellence is discussed, highlighting the importance of increasing access and participation of underrepresented groups, and stating the broader importance of encouraging learning participation among all students. chapter three attempts to define what constitutes teaching excellence and provides an overview of the advance he (2011) framework of core knowledge and professional values in terms of teaching areas of activity. although a section is provided on how teachers become effective at teaching, readers would be better served by going directly to chapter four where schwanke a book review of khan, k., gurbutt, d. and cragg, r. (2022) changes in the higher education sector: contemporary drivers and the pursuit of excellence. london: anthem press. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 3 these aspects are discussed in a more detailed and nuanced manner. after this section the distinctions between teaching excellence, teaching expertise and scholarship of teaching are investigated. although it is found that no clear distinction can be drawn between these categories, the authors do present an argument for continued engagement with educational theory and reflective practice in advancing personal teaching excellence. the chapter ends by highlighting the importance of educators being familiar and comfortable with e-learning and technology use in today’s environment. chapter four expands on the previous chapter by exploring specific methodologies for improving teaching excellence, including continued engagement with educational theory, the importance of student-centred learning approaches, and the value that can be added through the use of flipped classrooms, technology-enabled learning, and gamification techniques. this discussion constitutes a refreshingly realistic look at what can be accomplished with these methodologies, while creating awareness of the limitations of each. in the last chapter the significance of teaching excellence is emphasised, while the inherent problematic nature thereof is also noted with specific reference to the seemingly unacknowledged role of learning in the equation. the book ends with some final thoughts on the importance of improving digital technology in heis, and the role of the student. summary the text provides a valuable overview of the notion of teaching excellence. the strength of this exploration lies in the detailed description of the tensions and influences within the field of teaching excellence, especially concerning what is measured, by whom, and why. the importance of teaching excellence is explained, and some key methodologies that can lead to the improvement of teaching excellence are highlighted. however, there is also some terminology that is used very loosely in this exploration. one example is the cursory references to ‘learning styles’, which are linked to teacher-centred and student-centred approaches. this illustrates a simplistic approach to the concept, without schwanke a book review of khan, k., gurbutt, d. and cragg, r. (2022) changes in the higher education sector: contemporary drivers and the pursuit of excellence. london: anthem press. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 4 regard for the complexities related to it as discussed by coffield et al. (2004, p.118-125), santo (2006, p.73), zajacova (2013, p.1790), and zarrabi (2020, p.23). since this book is intended to provide a broad understanding of the field, the aforementioned should not be regarded as problematic. the book is still a great resource for anyone looking to gain a broad understanding of the field of teaching excellence and can be used as a starting point for further exploration. references advance he (2011), ukpsf dimensions of the framework. available at: https://perma.cc/ut89-lwdn (accessed: 1 august 2022). coffield, f., moseley, d., hall, e. and ecclestone, k. (2004) learning styles and pedagogy in post-16 learning: a systematic and critical review. london: learning and skills research centre. santo, s. a. (2006) ‘relationships between learning styles and online learning: myth or reality?’, performance improvement quarterly, 19(3), pp.73-88. zajacova, b. (2013) ‘learning styles in physics education: introduction of our research tools and design’, procedia: social and behavioral sciences, 106, pp.1786-1795. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sbspro.2013.12.201. zarrabi, f. (2020) ‘investigating the relationship between learning style and metacognitive listening awareness’, international journal of listening, 34, pp.21-33. https://doi.org/10.1080/10904018.2016.1276458. https://perma.cc/ut89-lwdn https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sbspro.2013.12.201 https://doi.org/10.1080/10904018.2016.1276458 schwanke a book review of khan, k., gurbutt, d. and cragg, r. (2022) changes in the higher education sector: contemporary drivers and the pursuit of excellence. london: anthem press. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 5 author details retha schwanke is a lecturer in academic literacy at north-west university, where she has been helping first-year students develop their academic literacy for more than 15 years. her research interests include academic literacy, assessment and moderation in higher education, course design and evaluation, first-year acculturation, learning autonomy, multimodal course design, and self-directed learning. a book review of khan, k., gurbutt, d. and cragg, r. (2022) changes in the higher education sector: contemporary drivers and the pursuit of excellence. london: anthem press. overview structure and content summary references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 24 september 2022 ________________________________________________________________________ spaces and places in online learning: perspectives from students and staff richard reynolds central saint martins, uk tim sokolow central saint martins, uk abstract this paper is based on work carried out during the first six months of 2021, a year into the covid-19 pandemic and a time by which the practices of online learning and teaching had become familiarised and – to some extent – even standardised in our institution, as in most others. we are chiefly concerned here with the online teaching space as a social space: as an environment designed to give agency to staff and students and to facilitate interactions that adhibit learning and teaching. how suitable are the environments that we have created to achieve such outcomes? is it reasonable to describe the environments in which we learn and teach online as ‘spaces’, using the same word (and in virtually the same sense) used to describe the familiar physical teaching spaces of bricks-and-mortar locations? our primary research involved bringing learners, teachers and digital specialists together within online learning spaces, and inviting the students present to represent their experiences of the virtual space, using simple analogue tools – coloured pens and paper. the results of these workshops form the basis for this paper. in using these analogue methods to capture responses to a digital environment, we planned to step away from habitual online behaviours, and to capture personal and even emotional responses to digital experiences. in our conclusion, we attempt to formulate some explanations for the emotionally-inflected nature of these representations of digital learning spaces. using ideas from psychogeography, approaches taken from the study of place (augé, 1995), social-actor theory (emirbeyer and mische, 1998) and pedagogic theory (gourlay, 2014, 2021; wenger-trayner, 2014), we question the status of the online learning environment as a social space and its consequent impact on teaching and learning. keywords: digital; space; psychogeography; non-place; agency. reynolds and sokolow spaces and places in online learning: perspectives from students and staff journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 2 introduction: psychogeography in the online learning space psychogeography is the study of how geography affects human emotions (debord, 1981, p.5). the techniques of psychogeography, originally developed to study the effects of urban spaces on human emotions, have expanded to embrace ex-urban and – more recently – virtual spaces (for example, elias, 2010; white and le cornu, 2011; bullingham and vasconcelos, 2013; sylaiou, chountasi and lagoudi, 2018). as the psychogeographer luke bennett has observed, ‘the affective relationship between the arrangement of things in space and the experience of place remains a central trope of psychogeographical account writing’ (2015, p.70). if we accept that the online environment has an emotional effect on the individual, exactly as a physical environment does, then psychogeography – when allied to parallel approaches and discourses – becomes a tool for investigating individual responses to online experiences, such as those encountered in learning. in their influential paper of 2011, white and le cornu build on prensky (2001) to link the experience of the internet as a place (not a space) with the acquisition of a digital identity, in which people become – in their nomenclature – a ‘digital resident’. they suggest that place ‘is primarily a sense of being present with others. a sense of social presence’ (2011, p.7). their distinction between digital visitors and residents is gounded in the social (and thus affective and emotional) dimension of individual online behaviours – and through employing a deeply-embedded geographical metaphor. elias (2010) goes further, explicitly linking the online learning space to the practices of psychogeography. she bases her argument on the work of debord, and cites examples taken from second life as literal instances of online dérive practice.1 elias grounds her psychogeography in the experience of the human body in space, linking online experience with the physical technologies that support it, while noting that the internet ‘should be seen in very specific instances as an analogue to real urban space that provides new opportunities for detournement and dérive’ (2010, p.831-832). 1 second life is an online role-playing game. https://secondlife.com/; a dérive is an unplanned journey through a landscape, typically urban, in which participants drop their everyday concerns and let themselves become absorbed by the experiences and encounters that occur. https://secondlife.com/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/city reynolds and sokolow spaces and places in online learning: perspectives from students and staff journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 3 likewise, sylaiou, chountasi and lagoudi (2018) discuss hybrid flâneur and internet mapping practices that blur the boundaries between online and offline psychogeography. dzardanova et al. (2021) conclude their study of power and student compliance with authority in immersive vr learning spaces by noting ‘the overall ability of a virtual setting to be as impactful, if not more, emotionally, and psychologically [as physical spaces]’ (2021, p.18). using the tools of psychogeography to investigate virtual spaces subverts physical/virtual binary distinctions, while acknowledging the primacy of the body as the site of self and identity in both physical and digital spaces. gourlay challenges the concept of the ‘idealized free-floating human subject’ (2021, p.64), which she characterises as the product of a neo-liberal vision of internet freedom, which discounts or disregards offline lived experience. kinsley (2013) makes a similar point when he suggests that ‘in opposing “the virtual” and “the real” we either oppose technically mediated experience to other forms of experience, or we oppose our technical life to other, apparently “natural”, forms of existence’ (p.15). gourlay, rejecting the real/virtual binary, advocates moving ‘towards a more diverse, looser conception of engagement which takes in what is going on around the screen, as opposed to treating the screen as a narrow portal for a particular type of performance’ (2021, p.70). this last quote sheds light on several of our own student drawings, which situate their internet connection and screen amongst the physical artefacts of daily life. students’ online learning identities – including their engagement with group learning and representations of the self within digital learning spaces – has been discussed, by (among others) bullingham and vasconcelos (2013), gordon (2014), gourlay (2014), byl et al. (2015), savin-baden et al. (2015), hansson and sjöberg (2018), shahabudin, hood and reid (2018), crowther (2019), johnstone, thomas and dodzo (2019), dennis et al. (2020), gourlay (2021), gourlay et al. (2021a) and gourlay et al. (2021b). but the nature of these digital spaces themselves – in which such interactions occur – has been less acutely studied. online learning spaces have no front or back, and no empty seats. most of the cues that spell out power and authority have apparently disappeared. cameras can be switched off, thwarting the panoptic gaze. visible body language can be completely absent. yet it seems reynolds and sokolow spaces and places in online learning: perspectives from students and staff journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 4 that a space has emerged behind our computer screens that reproduces the power relationships of the physical world. the skeuomorphic designs of the early years of the personal computer must be part of the story.2 the graphical user interface (or gui) of apple computers was central to their success: the ‘home’ icons with pitched house-roofs in spaces where it never rains, the equipment of the office including folders, files and a waste bin, and the index finger cursor to command with – all these have played a part in transplanting preconceptions about space into the virtual spaces ‘behind’ our screens. when we inhabit these online spaces as learners and teachers, their psychogeography can be construed as an absurd parody of the power relationships of the physical world. panels within online rooms display participants in strict role-based hierarchies; participants can literally be muted, infantilising them in the process – a situation which is exacerbated when permission to speak requires raising a (skeuomorphic) hand. behind this simulated familiarity is a void, where students’ sense of place can easily become dis-located. our research has exposed or highlighted a split between those who conceptualise their bodies and their physical surroundings as an integral part of the online learning space depicted, and those who convey the experience of an event taking place outside physical space and even time – gourlay’s ‘idealized free-floating human subject’. it is noteworthy that neither of these positions implies a binary online/offline distinction: both are – in their different ways – attempts to make sense of the online and offline aspects of a single social experience. the research design students across our college (undergraduate and postgraduate) were invited to participate in a short series of open-access online workshops, which were entitled ‘the psychogeography of online learning spaces’. interested members of staff were also invited. using blackboard collaborate (the platform most widely used by our university), we asked participants to represent in analogue form the psychogeography of this learning 2 ‘skeuomporphic’: retaining ornamental cues and attributes that played a functional role in an earlier design. reynolds and sokolow spaces and places in online learning: perspectives from students and staff journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 5 space: to become online psychogeographers and to map their personal experiences. two standalone one-hour workshops were offered, and a representative mix of undergraduate and postgraduates from a range of art and design disciplines participated. a third workshop drew a mix of learners, teachers and digital specialists. attendance at the workshops averaged 11-12 participants. all participants gave consent to their words and images being used in future published research. the workshops were recorded. blackboard collaborate has much of the same functionality as gotomeeting, teams, zoom and other online conferencing tools. but blackboard is arguably more hierarchical than platforms such as zoom, which were originally conceived for use in conferencing and social situations. for example, users of blackboard collaborate must be assigned the role of participant, presenter or moderator – with concomitant powers and privileges within the shared virtual space (participants having the least, moderators the most). as a gesture to promote a feeling of equality, all members of these psychogeographic workshops (students and staff) were given moderator status on request. after an opening introduction to the method and purpose of the workshops, the participatory exercises began with a request to portray the spatial and power relationships within the online classroom. analogue drawing was used to depict and comment on the digital experience from a purposefully non-digital perspective. conversations were held during the workshops around the intended meaning of the images. thus, drawings could be influenced both by the discussion of the participant’s own work, and by the conversations around the output and input of others. outline of results the responses varied widely, but could be categorised broadly into two distinct types. one type of illustration (discussed under illustrating appearances) involved the depiction of the participants’ physical situation, seated in front of their computer screen. such images involved a degree of literal representation – however stylised – and might also partially employ a non-literal symbolic language. reynolds and sokolow spaces and places in online learning: perspectives from students and staff journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 6 a quite different response to the exercise was to create a purely diagrammatic or symbolic representation of the entire space (or spaces) under consideration. these diagrammatic responses eliminate the juncture between physical and virtual spaces, as everything is rendered in the same formal language in a construct that intertwines and unifies the representation of virtual and physical experience. there were also participants who rendered the psychogeographic space holistically, but as one organised skeuomorphic image, symbol or complex visual metaphor. some depictions of this kind involve the projection of the participant into a landscape of the mind where commonsense notions of space and identity no longer apply. these hybrid depictions – rendering the virtual and physical world as one unified environment – are discussed below. we attempt to draw some conclusions from the various ways in which online and physical spaces have been rendered in these workshops. we draw upon theories of psychogeography, place, skeuomorphism and social agency to suggest ways in which the historical development of the internet and its user interfaces have shaped both students’ and teachers’ ability to engage with the virtual spaces in which they teach and learn. illustrating appearances the first group of illustrations attempt with varying degrees of literalness to depict what a participant might actually see, both on their own device and also in the physical space around them. these depictions are – naturally – fraught with symbolic overtones, but they proceed outwards from the immediate visual experience of the workshop, understanding the participant’s virtual space via its impact and influence on their own physical space. reynolds and sokolow spaces and places in online learning: perspectives from students and staff journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 7 a gateway into the virtual world figure 1. figure 1a. figure 1 is a clear and literal rendition of the participant’s workspace: a desk, a computer screen, a mouse and the other paraphernalia. the computer screen becomes the window or gateway into the virtual world. the participant has shared their point of view and thus reynolds and sokolow spaces and places in online learning: perspectives from students and staff journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 8 placed themselves within a psychogeographic domain that lies outside a shared learning environment, which is hinted at but not fully depicted. as the student commented: ‘i feel a detachment between me and the screen. i can turn off my mic and i can turn off my camera and what you are going to see is just my data and not myself. it’s like an avatar of me, not me’. the icons – the talking heads – shown in the rectangle representing the screen are a literal transcription of what one sees during an online class. the sketch has faithfully captured how the talking heads are lined up by the software code, with the participant who is speaking given the largest space on the screen. in the online environment of blackboard collaborate power and authority (the power inherent in being the one who speaks) is automatically translated into increased screen-size. this same participant’s second sketch – in response to a request to depict the power relationships in this virtual environment – has produced a multiplication of the basic situation: a line of three participants, all encased within the chassis of their computers (figure 1a). the participant remains in their safe space, and the other attendees remain in their cells. as the student commented: ‘the reality continues behind this window [of the computer screen]. . . . power is in the people watching. because i have the power to go out of the session and to make it end, i feel less responsibility to be part of it.’ outside the shared environment figure 2 reynolds and sokolow spaces and places in online learning: perspectives from students and staff journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 9 figure 2a figure 2 represents a more stylised reading of the same perceived situation. this scene resembles a teacher facing a class (figure 2), but in fact it is the participant (labelled ‘me’ in figure 2a) who is isolated from the group and is seated in front of their screen. but although ‘me’ sits outside the shared environment, this rendition affords a visualisation of a shared space inside or behind the computer screen. and inside this shared space there is a network connecting the other participants. but the network is an elementary one, a ‘bus’ network in which all devices join a central cable. such networks are no longer favoured by it administrators due to the high risk of failure and the low volume of network traffic they can carry. there is also hierarchy hinted at by the shorter or longer lines that connect the various individuals. some are placed inside a rectangular space labelled ‘mods’ (i.e. moderators). these ‘mods’ are grouped in a privileged central position. but there also seems to be a hierarchy of closeness to the screen (frequency or confidence in speaking?) that operates alongside the binary division of moderators/others. reynolds and sokolow spaces and places in online learning: perspectives from students and staff journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 10 illustrating the online experience a very different set of outcomes begin from a holistic depiction of the entire event, rather than as a portrayal of what an individual participant experiences. bubbles figure 3 figure 3 seems to position every member of the workshop on a basis of equality. there may be subtle distinctions of rank in these grey circular forms – which resemble searchlights perhaps – but any distinctions of role or importance appear secondary to the apparent similarity of all these elements. there do appear – on close inspection – to be certain fenced off areas (such as the top left or bottom right), and one could tentatively interpret these as the location of the workshop moderators. some of the circular forms are shaded, whilst others are barely more than outlines. but what these visual distinctions might represent in terms of power or agency within the online classroom is left undefined. reynolds and sokolow spaces and places in online learning: perspectives from students and staff journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 11 this participant has found a way to convey the sense of closeness and simultaneous isolation that online teaching events can provoke. this huddling implies a characteristic response to the agoraphobia that can be engendered by online spaces. participants are tightly jammed together, yet appear to have no impact on each other – no interactions. there is a strong sense of a bounded self, existing within a constrained though largely unstructured space. the impression of lights shining into one’s eyes conveys the feelings of generalised anxiety that so many students report from their online learning experiences. as this student commented, ‘in the online learning space, people appear and disappear without leaving any trace’. in discussion, this participant identified the forms as bubbles. bubbles featured in numerous drawings throughout the series of workshops: they suggest a fleeting and precarious experience, the focus on a short-lived present that can characterise online experience (see augé, 1995, below). bubbles also determine what is inside and what is outside: they can be seen as protection. bubbles became synonymous with protective isolation in the context of covid-19, of being apart, and of being apart-together in a social bubble. bubbles can offer physical and architectural security: as sloterdijk notes ‘they protect themselves from the terror of the bottomless, of the infinitely expanded space, through the utopian yet pragmatic erection of a global greenhouse intended to offer modern living in the open’ (2011, pp.21-22). hidden power figure 4 reynolds and sokolow spaces and places in online learning: perspectives from students and staff journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 12 figure 4 is diagrammatic or symbolic, representing the structure of the workshop holistically. the participant is reticent about their point of view: they seem to be both everywhere and nowhere within the space depicted. the participants are positioned at the circumference of what could be read as a round table. yet there is the ghost of a hierarchy still visible, as one of the circles representing the members of the workshop is labelled ‘t’ and another ‘r’ (referencing the two researchers), demarcating them from their anonymous companions. but hierarchy invites resistance. as the student commented: ‘with online learning spaces, tutors have no control at all. the control is in the students, because we can leave the session. we can do anything at all without being seen’. figure 5: a buzz-saw reynolds and sokolow spaces and places in online learning: perspectives from students and staff journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 13 more disturbing in its expression of power-relationships is figure 5. we see an escalator, transporting participants up a steep slope to a platform or stage, from which contributions to the class or workshop are made. the escalator is depicted in a jagged style, suggestive of the teeth of a buzz-saw. the virtual environment is rendered in stark blacks and reds, with jagged edges and harsh spotlights trained on participants who have attained the privileged space at the summit of the escalator. the illustration captures the double anxiety of being ignored (never permitted to ride the escalator to the privileged space above) and the anxiety of participation (the spot-lit space above is harshly-lit, jagged and stressprovoking in every way). discussion with the creator of figure 5 confirmed that their image was not intended as specific representation of our workshop, but as a distillation of 12 months’ experience of online learning. the creator acknowledged that our own workshop was not overtly hierarchical, but emphasised the powerful residue of emotion that hierarchical experiences of online learning had left behind. interpreting these experiences a key topic that emerged in these workshops was the effect of isolation on a student’s sense of belonging, and thus their sense of empowerment and agency in class. as the creator of figure 5 expressed it: ‘when you are in a physical classroom, you can see to your left or right, and read other students’ body language, and gauge when is the moment to speak, to ask a question. in a virtual environment, there are none of those cues…’. this statement echoes comments from teaching staff about the absence of body-languagebased cues when speaking to an online student cohort. it also reminds us that even a traditional one-to-many lecture is a shared psychogeographic space, with non-verbal cues constantly passing between lecturer and audience. the online space nullifies this rich flow of information. this situation is further exacerbated when a student elects to turn their camera off. workshop participants have a justifiable right to privacy, and camera use should be optional. having a camera switched on can be seen as evidence of ableism. however, turning a camera off can be construed as a passive-aggressive behaviour. anonymity is a key factor in determining how students interact in online learning. even if anonymity is reynolds and sokolow spaces and places in online learning: perspectives from students and staff journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 14 preserved, chat or similar written messages remain permanently present and viewable. although rightly heralded as improving accessibility for those challenged by speaking aloud, chat functions can disadvantage students who need time to formulate and articulate ideas in writing, including international and neurodiverse learners. none of these factors work to facilitate a state of shared social presence. several of these illustrations highlight the illusory nature of the student cohort (or ‘body’) in an online environment. there is no physical student ‘body’ in such an environment – there is only a group of individuals and devices, connecting to the online event. figures 1, 2, 3, and 5 all emphasise the isolation of the individual learner from the group. classrooms, workshops and studios that are regularly used by the same body of students for the same type of activity acquire over time the personality of those that occupy them. posters and student work are attached to the walls. objects made by students persist in the space, inflecting it with their energy. chairs, tables, and other items of furniture move around, adopting familiar and recurring patterns. yesterday’s dead coffee-cup is still visible on the windowsill, as today’s class commences. online learning and teaching spaces acquire none of this vernacular history. they are bare and neutral every time a class commences. online ‘rooms’ lack the sophisticated spatial memory of a physical environment: the collective narrative linking events in a physical classroom to a time before and a time after. the dead coffee cup on the windowsill reminds everyone that yesterday the lecturer was thirsty or tired and drank a cup of coffee – and the evidence of that human event is still visible and present in our classroom. through the accumulation of such tactile memories, a classroom or a studio becomes a place, and can thus become a shared space. it is shared because its collective evolution is owned by all concerned. such a classroom becomes a place in the sense that augé employs the term, in contra-distinction to the transient ‘non-places’ that he characterises. if a place can be defined as relational, historical and concerned with identity, then a space which cannot be defined as relational, or historical, or concerned with identity will be a non-place (augé, 1995, p.63). augé is speaking of physical non-places: airport lounges, railway coaches, motorway service stations. the history of the internet could be understood as a sustained effort to reynolds and sokolow spaces and places in online learning: perspectives from students and staff journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 15 create places from non-places: to occupy and domesticate a frontier that possesses a superlative quality of otherness. it is, in reality, just a binary digital soup: as vidler observes, ‘for what is spatial after all, about an endless string of 0’s and 1’s . . . displayed on a screen without depth’ (2000, p.231). these student representations stress the absence of any personal investment in online learning spaces. returned to over and again, they remain transactional spaces uninflected with individual or collective identities. as augé writes, ‘what reigns there is actuality, the urgency of the present moment’ (1995, p.83). hence the addiction to skeuomorphism, to domesticate online spaces with familiar symbolism, to (apparently!) transform spaces into places. but such skeuomorphism is deeply transactional. it exists primarily to enable users to navigate online spaces, and to acquire an online persona – a digital ‘twin’ as real as our body is real in the physical realm. in such situations, we may experience a dissociative fugue, a mental state in which we lose our sense of identity. the psychiatric diagnostic manual dsm-5 defines the dissociative fugue as a state of ‘bewildered wandering’ (american psychiatric association, 2014). figures 1 and 2 depict a physical space over which the student enjoys a high degree of agency: the desk at which they work and on which their computer rests. but this space is separate from the shared space depicted ‘behind’ the computer screen – a complex or contested space over which they have no direct control. this shared online space lacks the familiar classroom cues (‘in a physical classroom, you can . . . read other student’s body language’). we may refer to spaces such as blackboard collaborate or zoom as classrooms, but that does not make them resemble physical classrooms, where students’ repertoires of responses to familiar teaching situations are learned and iterated (see seifert and sutton, 2007; horne-martin, 2009; pritchard, 2015). in ‘what is agency’, emirbeyer and mische characterise agency as emergent in specific contexts and situations. social actors acquire agency by interaction with the totality of circumstances surrounding them. social actors . . . routinely construct simplifying models by means of which they characterize recurrent aspects of persons, relationships, contexts, or events. [social actors reynolds and sokolow spaces and places in online learning: perspectives from students and staff journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 16 recognise] the ‘sameness’, ‘likeness’, or ‘analogy’ of an emerging experience with those of the past. (emirbeyer and mische, 1998, p.979). this analysis fits well with siefert and sutton’s stress on the importance of recurrent and recognisable cues in teaching and learning situations: many class activities take on communication patterns that class members learn to expect without even being reminded. . . . a lecture, for example, has a particular participation structure: students are responsible for listening, for raising a hand to speak. (2007, p.1). the classroom situation is a very powerful recurrent context: one we experience when we first go to school, which survives in recognisable forms through to postgraduate study. the classroom context can survive a wholesale and skeuomorphic translation into a completely different environment (‘the online classroom’). the apparent success of this translation (the power of the underlying model) generates a misleading sense of familiarity and therefore a confusing set of cues and expectations. emirbeyer and mische emphasise the complexity of relationships between past experience and access to agency in evolving situations: social actors not only identify similarities between past and present types of experiences; they also locate these typifications in relation to other persons, contexts, or events within matrices composed of socially recognized categories of identity and value . . . to locate correctly where given experiences fit within them and thus keep social relationships working along established lines. (1998, p.980). thus, the ‘online classroom’ proposes – through its skeuomorphic imagery and nomenclature – a set of contexts and cues which appear to reproduce familiar experiences of education. but the behaviours that these cues and contexts demand are categorically different. for example, to raise a physical hand in a physical classroom is a communicative gesture loaded with nuances from preceding contexts. this simple action can be performed impulsively, decisively, languidly, eagerly, tentatively, nervously, ironically and so on. in a physical classroom, a lecturer will recognise not just the fact that a student has raised their hand, but will also understand a whole set of signifiers by the manner in which the hand has been raised. reynolds and sokolow spaces and places in online learning: perspectives from students and staff journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 17 as emirbeyer and mische suggest ‘emergent situations thus [call] for increasingly reflective and interpretive work on the part of social actors’ (1998, p.994). in the emergent non-place of an online classroom (at best, a non-place that is striving to become a place), the purpose of the non-place (learning) cannot be readily disentangled from the emergence of identity and agency within this new environment. as augé observes: . . . the word ‘non-place’ designates two complementary but distinct realities: spaces formed in relation to certain ends (transport, transit, commerce, leisure) and the relations that individuals have with these spaces. although the two sets of relations overlap to a large extent, and in any case officially (individuals travel, make purchases, relax), they are still not confused with one another; for non-places mediate a whole mass of relations, with the self and with others, which are only indirectly connected with their purposes. (1995, p.76). identity and agency must be mediated within new learning spaces before such spaces can be trusted to play their role in achieving students’ purposes. but the icons and signs that mediate these spaces into places have been constructed from the transactional nonplaces of internet commerce, intermingled with skeuomorphic cues from the physical classroom. small wonder that confusion reigns. conclusion as wenger has remarked, ‘the negotiation of identity is the key issue in education today’ (2014). the negotiation of a student’s learning identity and (eventually) the achievement of agency in online learning spaces is a task for which both learners and teachers have been ill-prepared. during march and april of 2020, when universities across the uk were moving their teaching online, there was an understandable focus on the mechanics of the process: achieving technical competence on whatever platform was being used. at the pedagogic level, there was a general understanding that online learning should not mean replicating what would be attempted in a physical classroom. nevertheless, the rapidity with which universities were obliged to move their learning online meant that there was little opportunity to reflect on the learning space itself, or explore its characteristic networks and relationships. reynolds and sokolow spaces and places in online learning: perspectives from students and staff journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 18 the computer screen is neither a picture nor a window, although we habitually treat it as either or both. in physical space, we control our own bodies. our lack of agency over others is a part of what makes them ‘other’. in virtual space, we have no body. we are manipulators of a shared environment, as is manifest in collaborative online spaces and interactive tools such as mural (2022) or padlet (2022).3 as vidler observes, ‘between contemporary virtual space and modernist space there lies an aporia formed by the autogenerative nature of the computer programme, and its real blindness to the viewer’s presence’ (2001, p.8). ‘presence’ – in a shared social space such as mural or padlet – can be defined by the trace a participant has left behind. when facilitating synchronous online learning, it is supremely tempting to envisage the computer as a large box which contains the class or classroom inside. but this is an illusion: there is no one, and no space, ‘inside’ the computer. everyone is remotely present, and everyone is alone – as the drawings from our workshops testify. to quote a student participant, ‘we’re the centre of our own little worlds, but we’re connected within this wider environment’. we need a new vocabulary, to enable us to move on from the skeuomorphic constructs that hamper our online interactions. the task of conceiving such spaces is beyond the scope of this article: we can only begin to speculate about them. such spaces might not resemble physical classrooms or lecture theatres at all. they might more closely resemble the spaces that we currently think of as recreational – social media platforms. they could be composed of lines and points of intersection: paths, routes, crossroads and meeting points – deleuze and guattari’s multiply interconnecting rhizomes (1988).4 meeting places and points of intersection are conspicuous by their absence in our participants’ drawings. such spaces could facilitate new kinds of interaction, and not just mimic interactions from the physical world. they could become places, not spaces, and could embody their own vernacular memories. they would acquire a past – and therefore, perhaps, a brighter future. 3 mural is an interactive online tool that allows groups or teams to think and collaborate visually and in real time to solve problems. padlet is an interactive online notice board that can be used to post notes onto a common page. 4 the rhizome is a metaphor frequently used by deleuze and guattari to describe decentralised and nonlinear networks in which any point has the potential to be connected to any other point. reynolds and sokolow spaces and places in online learning: perspectives from students and staff journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 19 references american psychiatric association (2014) dsm-5tm guidebook: the essential companion to the diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders. 5th edn. washington: american psychiatric publishing. augé, m. (1995) non-places: an introduction to supermodernity. london: verso. bennett, l. (2015) 'incongruous steps towards a legal psychogeography’, in richardson, t. (ed.) walking inside out: contemporary british psychogeagraphy. london and new york: rowan and littlefield, pp.59-72. bullingham, l. and vasconcelos, a. c. (2013) ‘the presentation of self in the online world: goffman and the study of online identities’, journal of information science, 39(1), pp.101-112. https://doi.org/10.1177/0165551512470051. byl, e., struyven, k., abelshausen, b., meurs, p., vanwing, t., engels, n. and lombaerts, k. (2015) ‘the potential of peer assisted learning as a tool for facilitating social and academic integration’, journal of learning development in higher education. special edition: academic peer learning, november, pp.1-28. https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.v0i0.343. crowther, m. (2019) ‘walking the path of desire: evaluating a blended learning approach to developing study skills in a multi disciplinary group’, journal of learning development in higher education. issue 14, april, pp.1-8. https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.v0i14.475. debord, g. (1981) ‘introduction to a critique of urban geography’, in knabb, k. (ed.) (1981) situationist international anthology. oakland: bureau of public secrets. p.5. deleuze, g. and guattari, f. (1988) a thousand plateaus. capitalism and schizophrenia 2. trans. massumi, b. london: the athlone press. https://doi.org/10.1177%2f0165551512470051 https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.v0i0.343 https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.v0i14.475 reynolds and sokolow spaces and places in online learning: perspectives from students and staff journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 20 dennis, c., abbott, s., matheson, r. and tangney, s. (2020) flexibility and pedagogy in higher education: delivering flexibility in learning through online learning communities. leiden: brill. dzardanova, e., kasapakis v., gavalas, d. and sylaiou, s. (2021) ‘virtual reality as a communication medium: a comparative study of forced compliance in virtual reality versus physical world’, virtual reality, 21 august. available at: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10055-021-00564-9 (accessed: 15 may 2022). elias, a. j. (2010) ‘psychogeography, détournement, cyberspace’, new literary history, 41(4), pp.821-845. https://doi.org/10.1353/nlh.2010.0033. emirbeyer, m. and mische, a. (1998) 'what is agency?', american journal of sociology, 103(4), pp.962-1023. https://doi.org/10.1086/231294. gordon, n. (2014) flexible pedagogies: technology-enhanced learning. london, hea. gourlay, l. (2014) ‘editorial’, research in learning technology, 22, p. 24720. https://doi.org/10.3402/rlt.v22.24720. gourlay, l. (2021) ‘“there is no 'virtual learning”: the materiality of digital education’, journal of new approaches in educational research, 10(1), pp.57-66. https://doi.org/10.7821/naer.2021.1.649. gourlay, l., littlejohn, a., oliver, m. and potter, j. (2021a) ‘lockdown literacies and semiotic assemblages: academic boundary work in the covid-19 crisis’, learning, media and technology, 15 march. https://doi.org/10.1080/17439884.2021.1900242. gourlay, l et al. (2021b) ‘networked learning in 2021: a community definition’, postdigital science and education, 3, pp.326-69. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42438-021-00222-y. hansson, e. and sjöberg, j. (2019) ‘making use of students’ digital habits in higher education: what they already know and what they learn’, journal of learning https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10055-021-00564-9 https://doi.org/ https://doi.org/10.1353/nlh.2010.0033 https://doi.org/10.1086/231294 https://doi.org/10.3402/rlt.v22.24720 https://doi.org/10.7821/naer.2021.1.649 https://doi.org/10.1080/17439884.2021.1900242 https://doi.org/10.1007/s42438-021-00222-y reynolds and sokolow spaces and places in online learning: perspectives from students and staff journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 21 development in higher education. issue 14, april, pp.1-20. https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.v0i14.489. horne-martin, s. (2009) ‘environment behaviour studies in the classroom’, journal of design and technology education, 9(2), pp.77-89. johnstone, k., thomas, s. and dodzo, n. (2019), ‘investigating the feasibility of coproduction of digital media with students’, journal of learning development in higher education. issue 16, december, pp.1-11. https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.v0i16.520. kinsley, s. (2013) ‘the matter of “virtual” geographies’, progress in human geography, 38(3), pp.364-384. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132513506270. ‘mural’ (2022) available at: https://www.mural.co/ (accessed: 3 march 2022). ‘padlet’ (2022) available at: https://en-gb.padlet.com (accessed: 3 march 2022). prensky, m.(2001) ‘digital natives, digital immigrants’, on the horizon, 9(5). available at: http://www.marcprensky.com/writing/prensky%20%20digital%20natives,%20digital%20immigrants%20-%20part1.pdf (accessed: 15 may 2022). pritchard, c. (2015) ‘mentoring in the writing café: identity, belonging and ownership’, journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: academic peer learning, november, pp.1-20. https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.v0i0.305. savin-baden, m., gourlay, l., tombs, c., steils, n., tombs, g. and mawer, m. (2015) ‘situating pedagogies, positions and practices in immersive virtual worlds’, curve, january. available at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/249001023_situating_pedagogies_positio ns_and_practices_in_immersive_virtual_worlds (accessed: 25 august 2021). https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.v0i14.489 https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.v0i16.520 https://doi.org/10.1177%2f0309132513506270 https://www.mural.co/ https://en-gb.padlet.com/ http://www.marcprensky.com/writing/prensky%20-%20digital%20natives,%20digital%20immigrants%20-%20part1.pdf http://www.marcprensky.com/writing/prensky%20-%20digital%20natives,%20digital%20immigrants%20-%20part1.pdf https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.v0i0.305 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/249001023_situating_pedagogies_positions_and_practices_in_immersive_virtual_worlds https://www.researchgate.net/publication/249001023_situating_pedagogies_positions_and_practices_in_immersive_virtual_worlds reynolds and sokolow spaces and places in online learning: perspectives from students and staff journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 22 seifert, k. and sutton, r. (2007) contemporary educational psychology. wikibooks. available at: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/contemporary_educational_psychology (accessed: 29 july 2021). shahabudin, k., hood, s. and reid, m. (2018) ‘right time, right space? developing an online transition course for new undergraduates’, journal of learning development in higher education. special edition: 2018 aldinhe conference, pp.1-14. https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.v0i0.469. sloterdijk, p. (2011) bubbles: spheres 1. london: mit press. sylaiou, s, chountasi, m. and lagoudi, e. (2018) ‘towards a digital age: psychogeography and the hybrid flâneur’, interartive: a platform for contemporary art and thought. walking art/walking aesthetics special issue. available at: https://walkingart.interartive.org/2018/12/towards-a-digital-age (accessed: 10 april 2022). vidler, a. (2001) warped space: art, architecture and anxiety in modern culture. london: mit press wenger-trayner, e. (2014) ‘learning in landscapes of practice: recent developments in social learning theory’, aldinhe annual conference 2014: learning development spaces and places. university of huddersfield, huddersfield 14-16 april. white, d. and le cornu, a. (2011) ‘visitors and residents: a new typology for online engagement’, first monday: peer reviewed journal on the internet, 16(9). available at: https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v16i9.3171 (accessed: 15 may 2022). author details richard reynolds is joint head of academic support at central saint martins, and course leader of the ma applied imagination course. his research interests include the study of space and psycho-geography in pedagogic practice, and the omnipresence of the superhero in contemporary culture. http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/contemporary_educational_psychology https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.v0i0.469 https://walkingart.interartive.org/2018/12/towards-a-digital-age https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v16i9.3171 reynolds and sokolow spaces and places in online learning: perspectives from students and staff journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 23 tim sokolow is joint head of academic support at central saint martins. he is a practising artist. his research interests also include the study of space and psychogeography in pedagogy, and the development of digital techniques for tracking and evidencing learning gain in arts education. spaces and places in online learning: perspectives from students and staff abstract introduction: psychogeography in the online learning space the research design outline of results illustrating appearances a gateway into the virtual world illustrating the online experience bubbles hidden power interpreting these experiences conclusion references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special issue 22: compendium of innovative practice october 2021 ________________________________________________________________________ an alternative to clapping for the nhs: online support for nhs placement students anna judd-yelland university of bedfordshire keywords: remote drop-in; healthcare students; undergraduate transition into he; specialist academic skills support; covid-19. the challenge i will report on the experiences of the first-year undergraduate healthcare student intake of 2020/21 and how we adapted the face-to-face (f2f) drop-in service for students from two schools using a specialist academic skills team approach. these students were provided with pre-recorded lectures to watch, webinars to attend and lots of guided learning to ‘just get on with’. as a learning developer (ld), supporting assignment writing skills, i will reflect on what we learnt from the process, and how we overcame barriers to learning. ali (2020) argues that the key ingredients for success in switching to online integrated learning are resources, staff readiness, confidence, student accessibility and motivation. it is well documented that within a university context, anonymity is a barrier to establishing new learner identity, and students need to develop peer and lecturer relationships to feel a sense of belonging (scanlon, et al., 2007; eberlie and hobrecht, 2021). previous cohorts, despite also having moved to emergency online learning, had pre-established friendships, social networks and relationships with lecturers. our intake of 2020/21 knew no one, lacked day-to-day interaction with other students and staff, and had little opportunity to develop their networks, identify new academic expectations and develop a sense of belonging. judd-yelland an alternative to clapping for the nhs: online support for nhs placement students journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 2 the response czerkawski and lyman’s (2016) design framework for fostering online engagement emphasises the need for synchronous interaction, collaboration and opportunities for feedback when designing online learning experiences. walker and koraleski’s (2020) study found that although there was a reduction in affective engagement, there was an increase in cognitive engagement, and overall learners engaged better with synchronous remote content than with asynchronous content during the rapid online transition. specifically, they found that learners preferred participation in breakout rooms with lecturers, engaging with active learning via polls (73%) and chat (64%). abou-khalil et al. (2021) also found that 49% of the student responses in their study identified synchronous q&a as the most engaging learner-instructor strategy. they also reported that the most effective learner-learner engagement strategy was group chat to discuss course-related issues. breakout rooms facilitated learners’ asking and answering questions of each other and the lecturer in real time to clarify assessment requirements, discuss reading lists and tackle drug calculation practice questions. using a synchronous learner-to-learner and learner-to-instructor interaction approach, we adapted our pre-covid-19 multidisciplinary f2f drop-in service to be remote. the f2f drop-in had been a well-used student-centred service with high levels of student engagement. workload planning was also a factor; drop-ins required minimal teaching preparation time from an already busy team. we offered weekly remote drop-in sessions to the intake of 2020/21 healthcare students. we scheduled sessions to fit around nursing, our biggest cohort with over 200 students. remote drop-in sessions mirrored the f2f drop-in in their ability to be responsive to students’ needs. collaborate was used as the virtual classroom of choice in my institution and is a tool student were already familiar with. we used breakout rooms to deliver a multi-discipline academic skills approach involving librarians, numeracy tutors, computer skills trainers and assignment support tutors. students could move between breakout rooms and have a multitude of queries addressed, listen to other students’ questions and support each other in a small group environment, maximising learner-learner engagement. although attendance was voluntary, regular attendees were able to develop relationships maximising learner-learner and learnerjudd-yelland an alternative to clapping for the nhs: online support for nhs placement students journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 3 instructor engagement. students dialled into sessions via phones whilst on nhs placements, an unexpected outcome that challenged my thinking regarding how students on placement integrate the academic demands of their course. there were higher levels of engagement within sessions compared to structured webinars for the same cohorts. we witnessed the development of engagement and belonging between students and a core group of regular attendees in all four breakout rooms. in effect, they had informally created a community of practice (wenger, 1998). students’ feedback reported developing knowledge, confidence and identity, most prominent in maths, where attendees reported developing skills in drug and fluids calculations. one student reported that without the additional support she would have dropped out. mature learners who were home-schooling their children reported that they were able to pop into sessions according to home demands. more efficient use of teaching time was also observed as the drop-in reported 95 hours staff time = 239 student queries answered. the risk for us was opening the sessions to all healthcare students simultaneously and managing students’ expectations without knowing which courses and how many students would attend. the drop-in was much better received by some courses than others. weekly attendance fluctuated anywhere between zero and 40 students. tracking student attendance by number and type of query and course was something we did not get right straight away. as lds, we were too focused on which specialist service students used, and only when requested by a midwifery lecturer did we realise we could not account for attendance by course. this was easily addressed, and we started to track by course too. we identified that the initiative was unable to directly address any barriers students experienced to digital inclusion. reflecting on the data, we could say that students on courses with higher ucas tariffs were less engaged with online drop-in sessions. although this could account for the variation in attendance according to course witnessed in the remote drop-in, without more detailed research and analysis of the student demographic and student experience, it is not possible to conclude that ucas tariff alone contributed to higher numbers of students attending from nursing over other healthcare courses. judd-yelland an alternative to clapping for the nhs: online support for nhs placement students journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 4 recommendations i would recommend running remote drop-in services for placement students on a multicampus hei to provide academic skills support and maintain academic links with students on clinical placements. this could be targeted to support specific assessments before submission and offered to students at all levels. enlisting the support of an additional ld to greet students, filter students into breakout rooms by enquiry type, and track student attendance would ensure a smoother student experience and enable richer insights into the impact on student retention and engagement – something i felt we were not able to achieve and would also recommend. this case study has aimed to illustrate to what extent providing a remote academic skills drop-in was able to enhance student engagement and academic skills support to nhs undergraduate students transitioning into he. a key factor in its success was the established collaborative relationships within the specialist ld team involved, our detailed knowledge of the course requirements, and the prior six months experience of learning about remote delivery. this experience put us in a position in which we were prepared to take risks. without these factors, the transition to remote drop-in would not have been possible or enjoyable for staff or students. references abou-khalil, v., helou, s., khalifé, e., chen, m.a., majumdar, r. and ogata, h. (2021) ‘emergency online learning in low-resource settings: effective student engagement strategies’, education sciences, 11(1): 24. available at: https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci11010024 (accessed 18 august 2021). ali, w. (2020) ‘online and remote learning in higher education institutes: a necessity in light of covid-19 pandemic’, higher education studies, 10(3), pp.16-25. available: https://doi.org/10.5539/hes.v10n3p16 (accessed: 18 august 2021). czerkawski, b.c. and lyman, e.w. (2016) ‘an instructional design framework for fostering student engagement in online learning environments’, techtrends, 60, p.532–539. https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci11010024 https://doi.org/10.5539/hes.v10n3p16 judd-yelland an alternative to clapping for the nhs: online support for nhs placement students journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 5 available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11528-016-0110-z (accessed: 18 august 2021). eberlie, j. and hobrecht, j. (2021) ‘the lonely struggle with autonomy: a case study of first-year university students’ experiences during emergency online teaching’ computers in human behaviour. 121 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2021.106804 scanlon, l., rowling, l. and weber, z. (2007) ‘“you don’t have like an identity ... you are just lost in a crowd”: forming a student identity in the first-year transition to university’, journal of youth studies, 10(2), pp.223 -241. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/13676260600983684 (accessed: 18 august 2021). walker, k. and koraleski, k. (2020) ‘student and instructor perceptions of engagement after the rapid online transition of teaching due to covid-19’, natural sciences education, 50(1), pp.1-10. available at: https://dx.doi.org/10.1002%2fnse2.20038 (accessed: 18 august 2021). wenger, e. (1998) communities of practice: learning, meaning and identity. cambridge: cambridge university press. author details anna judd-yelland has been a learning developer at the university of bedfordshire for the past seven years. she is a fellow of the higher education academy and has also been awarded aldinhe certified practitioner status. she works predominantly with the schools of nursing and healthcare practice to develop students’ academic literacy skills. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11528-016-0110-z https://doi.org/10.1080/13676260600983684 https://dx.doi.org/10.1002%2fnse2.20038 an alternative to clapping for the nhs: online support for nhs placement students the challenge the response recommendations references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 15: november 2019 the appearance of voice: eap and academic literacies approaches to teaching reflective writing simon williams university of sussex, uk abstract the increasingly common requirement for higher education courses to include reflective writing as part of assessment practices places additional demands on novice writers. complex and self-referential assessment criteria mean that students on foundation and pre-sessional courses in particular find it hard to decode and match descriptors, and to balance subjectivity and critical analysis. english for academic purposes (eap), the most widely adopted approach to teaching academic writing in higher education, prioritises objectivity, and teaches students to recognise generic patterns of text organisation – though it seldom includes reflective writing itself as a genre. in contrast, the less familiar teaching approach of academic literacies explores students’ subjectivity, more obviously relevant to reflection, often through the development of an authentic narrative voice. as in other forms of academic writing, voice in reflective writing can be seen as a construct. it conveys a persona via the narrative, and an ethos via its specialised content. however, unlike other forms of academic writing, the persona in reflective writing must simultaneously communicate the author’s private and public self. with the purpose of developing students’ persona, an academic literacies intervention in two transition courses invited students to complete a piece of timed writing in response to an autobiographical prompt. compared with the eap writing produced by the same student cohorts, the autobiographical writing contained a clear persona and consistent ethos. the assessed reflective writing later produced by the students showed little change, however, particularly in its handling of ethos. the findings suggest that teachers of reflective writing need simultaneously to develop students’ ability to communicate a credible persona and to handle a specialised ethos of formal academic content. a more principled combination of the two approaches, eap and academic literacies, could best provide the optimum learning environment for novice student writers to develop a balanced voice and achieve reflective writing fluency. williams the appearance of voice: eap and academic literacies approaches to teaching reflective writing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 2 keywords: reflective writing; eap; academic literacies; voice; ethos; persona; narrative. introduction for the first day of my masters course in applied linguistics, students were asked to write a short paper introducing themselves and describing their formative experience of second language learning. i decided to explore my ambivalent feelings about learning welsh as an adolescent in east wales. the exercise felt risky as i noticed that the particular values i held at secondary school were different from those i held on that first day of postgraduate study. as a piece of autobiography, the task was more intimate than any form of academic writing that i had been asked to produce until then. like other forms of academic writing though, it was difficult and challenging; and it ended with a recognition of identity change – from a rebellious teenager with a strictly instrumental view of language learning to a novice professional with a more dispassionate interest in languages. reflective writing is now a commonplace form of assessment in higher education, regardless of subject discipline (mccarthy, 2011). it most frequently takes the form of learning journals (boud, 2001; moon, 2006; cowan, 2014) or one-off explorations of the process lived through in producing a particular piece of work (killion and todnem, 1991; grushka et al., 2005). in formative situations, an additional demand is for the writer to produce a plan for change, applying insights gained from the reflective activity in preparation for some future work. the purpose and orientation of reflection at tertiary level has thus moved from a simple reflection on a past event or process (dewey, 1933) to reflection during an ongoing event or process, e.g. trainee teaching (boud, 1990), to reflection for a future event or process (schön, 1987). with the current concern of higher education institutions to maintain or improve their positions in league tables and respond to relatively low rankings for assessment and feedback in the national student survey, reflection, whose insights can be applied to future assessment and feedback, has become a priority. furthermore, the need for reflecting with foresight in this way occurs earlier in the student’s career – in the first or foundation year and during rather than at the end of a course or module – and entails student writers: (1) being self-critical and (2) self diagnosing for improvement. however, the reflective writing of novices often falls short of identifying and exploring a discrete number of features in depth and producing insights on williams the appearance of voice: eap and academic literacies approaches to teaching reflective writing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 3 which to base practical follow-up resolutions. the absence of a recognised generic structure and the provision of a specific focus also makes it difficult for these writers to locate problems and demonstrate criticality. their main challenges are therefore to display insight and to formulate appropriate plans of action in a convincing and coherent form. a general response to these problems has been to include some form of scaffolding for novice writers (coulson and harvey, 2013). examples of scaffolding vary from the suggestion that the writer organise their reflection in sections that mirror the stages of gibbs’ (1988) reflective cycle to supplying writing stems that the writer can complete and expand on. however, as these scaffolding examples suggest, it is impossible to separate students' reflective writing from the pedagogic contexts that it is produced in (boud and walker, 1998); and factors such as the purpose of the reflection – whether it is formative or summative – the rubric, the marking criteria, and the teaching approach may all shape the final product. the two most usual teaching and learning approaches to literacy at uk higher education institutions are english for academic purposes (eap) and academic literacies, each with a radically different potential for teaching students the production of reflective writing. the teaching of writing and academic study skills on transition courses tends to privilege the eap model, inducting the student into the desired community of practice (lave and wenger, 1991), and students are generally keen to subscribe to the formal conventions taught in the course content in order to earn membership of the community. however, the conflict between the desire to conform to academic study advice, such as to disengage from emotion, and the need in the case of reflective writing to assess personal responses and acknowledge affective reaction, e.g. to tutor feedback, often results in confusion in navigating the two. in contrast with say the discursive essay, reflective writing is not widely recognised as an academic genre (shum et al., 2017). it is absent from generic examples in hyland (2008) and swales (1990), although ‘reflective writing for personal development’ is included as a genre in nesi and gardner (2012). in addition, reflective writing is rarely taught or practised in eap classes. some of the reasons for its omission might be timetabling constraints or the wish to avoid students' adoption of textbook or other in-class examples as prescriptive models. an informal survey of popular eap course books (chazal and mccarter, 2012; chazal and rogers, 2013; williams the appearance of voice: eap and academic literacies approaches to teaching reflective writing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 4 argent and alexander, 2014; oshima and hogue, 2016; bailey, 2017) revealed no material on reflective writing. study guides (race, 2003; cottrell, 2019) contained brief sections on writing reflection and cottrell (2017) has a chapter on reflection (‘chapter 12, critical reflection’, pp. 187-210). only gillett et al. (2009), a resource book rather than a course book, defines reflection as an eap genre (gillett et al., 2009). whilst it is also concerned with genre (russell et al, 2009), the academic literacies approach is seen as a distinct approach to teaching student writing in higher education, not least for its transformative agenda (lea and street, 1998; lillis and turner, 2001; lillis, 2003; lea and street, 2006; lillis and scott, 2007; lillis and tuck, 2016), which facilitates new identities in student writers, and often works through narrative exercises. the academic literacies approach places the individual at the centre of power relations. it encourages the student to work through autobiographical free writing to develop an authentic voice and self-insight similar to those sought in reflective writing (see alterio and mcdrury, 2003), effectively constructing new identities (see table 1). the academic literacies approach is simultaneously seen as superordinate to eap (‘a theoretical framework for eap’: turner, 2012) and hyponymic to it (‘an “approach” to eap’: coffin and donohue, 2012). compared with eap, the academic literacies movement in higher education is less widely adopted, though the practice of reflective writing fits quite naturally in its remit. academic literacies’ enthusiasm for autobiographical writing offers a transferable chronological structure for reflective writing. its focus on the writer as agent, and on authenticity rather than artifice – content rather than style (see elbow, 2007) – facilitates the development of a writer’s persona, as discussed below. table 1. synergies between eap, academic literacies and reflective writing (based on wingate and tribble, 2012). eap academic literacies reflective writing object of interest text practice meaning-maker emphasis making the writer invisible the writer’s relationships with experience and knowledge the writer’s relationships with experience and knowledge agenda normative transformative transformative williams the appearance of voice: eap and academic literacies approaches to teaching reflective writing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 5 this paper claims that a combination of eap and academic literacies approaches can supply the means for students to see differences between their work and more conventional academic models and to express those differences and their resolution in a voice comprising the two most widely recognised expressive elements, ethos and persona. it is particularly concerned with reflective writing for assessment purposes, although the intervention reported was developmental, and much of the discussion might apply to either purpose. the paper is organised as follows. a general review of reflective practice in higher education is followed by a section on voice. the central section of the paper reports on an analysis of reflective writing data including marking criteria, rubrics and examples of reflections in response to eap and ac lit prompts. the final section consists of a discussion and concluding remarks. background reflective writing since the importance of reflection to learning development was first highlighted by dewey (1933), there has been general agreement about its efficacy for both learning and praxis (kolb, 2015). the more recent discrimination of reflective activity into three distinct functions – reflection on, reflection in, and reflection for a product, event or process – has increased its reputation as a life skill that facilitates transition learning, e.g. within foundation and pre-sessional courses, and given particular prominence to reflection for action (killion and todnem, 1991; grushka et al, 2005). the dual purpose of reflecting for action is likely to contribute to improvements in general learning as well as student retention and employability. yet, a paradox exists between the reflective model most widely used in higher education (viz. gibbs, 1988) and students’ willingness to engage with key aspects of the reflective cycle, e.g. recognising and exploring their response to a particular event (lew and schmidt, 2011). recent versions of the reflective cycle have reduced its scope further by rendering it memorable but opaque in its generality (see rolfe et al.’s (2011) adaptation of borton’s (1970) model: what? – so what? – what next?) and making it even more challenging for students to engage and report. it is necessary to go back to dewey (1933) for two distinct features of the reflective cycle more recently neglected: problem recognition and alternative concept formation (e.g. miettinen, 2010) (see figure 1). however, novice writers may not recognise problems, and williams the appearance of voice: eap and academic literacies approaches to teaching reflective writing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 6 they may be unable or unwilling to articulate them, unless they are given scaffolding in the form of external intervention (vygotsky, 1986; cheyne and tarulli, 2005), and concepts and lexis with which to analyse and describe the problems. scaffolding and feedback can help novices to take an objective stance and to notice disjuncts between their writing and that of the community of practice they aspire to join. figure 1. dewey’s model of reflective thought and action (based on mietinnen, 2010, p. 65). voice ‘voice’ is a highly contested term within academic writing (atkinson, 2001; hirvela and belcher, 2001; ivanič and camps, 2001; matsuda, 2001; prior, 2001; helms-park and stapleton, 2003; hyland, 2005; matsuda and tardy, 2007; zhao and llosa, 2008; matsuda and jeffery, 2012; sancho guinda and hyland, 2012; tardy, 2012; stock and eik-nes, 2016; yoon, 2017; zhao, 2017). for example, some specialists in second language (l2) writing see seminal work by elbow (1994) as problematic (e.g. helms-park and stapleton, 2003; zhao and llosa, 2008) in its notion of voice, which they associate with western individualism. although the association has been problematized by prior (2001) and indeed by elbow himself (elbow, 1999; 2007), specialists in l2 student writing (e.g. ivanič, 1998; lehman, 2018) prefer alternative work on voice by cherry (1988). cherry argues that a writer’s voice has a number of distinct characteristics, chief of which are ethos and persona; and the ambiguity of the word ‘appearance’ in the title of this paper – to suggest at the same time how voice looks and how it makes an entry in a writer’s work – is williams the appearance of voice: eap and academic literacies approaches to teaching reflective writing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 7 intended to reflect cherry’s distinction between the two qualities of voice. in arguing for the distinction of ethos and persona as elements of voice, cherry (1988) notes that the two terms come from different traditions, ethos from aristotle, persona from a later literary tradition, ‘[referring] originally to a device of transformation and concealment on the theatrical stage’ (elliott, 1982 p. 21 quoted in cherry, 1988, p. 256). persona is therefore a similar concept to dramaturgical ‘role’ and may be glossed as ‘the roles authors create for themselves in written discourse given their representation of audience, subject matter, and other elements of context’ (cherry, 1988, pp. 268-269). it carries a much more general sense of the author as a person. ethos, on the other hand, comprises ‘a set of characteristics … that will enhance the writer’s credibility’ (cherry, 1988, p. 268). one of its elements is phronesis or ‘practical wisdom’ (cherry, 1988, p. 253), which itself depends on the mastery of two other types of knowledge, episteme and techne (beckett et al., 2002; eisner, 2002; saugstad, 2002; birmingham, 2004; hawk, 2004; schryer et al., 2005). for aristotle, the three forms of knowledge – episteme, techne and phronesis – were incremental (eisner, 2002). it stands to reason that before novice writers can be expected to show phronetic knowledge, they first have to become proficient in epistemic and technical forms, akin to a musician that has to learn notation and practise technique before becoming an interpretive performer. in reflective writing, the first two knowledge forms, episteme and techne, would include the ability to select and discriminate formal elements of writing for further analysis. in fact, although cherry (1998) suggests a continuum from ethos (‘writer’s “real” self’) to persona (‘writer’s “fictional” self’) (p. 265), he also raises the possibility of each having an ‘area of overlap’ (p. 263), and therefore its own cline. for example, a convenient way of understanding the nature of ethos in the context of academic writing is by reference to bakhtin’s (1981) notion of heteroglossia, i.e. the simultaneous presence of competing varieties of language within a single text. novice academic writer’s recycling of random academic terminology is an example of heteroglossia and represents extreme social ethos; and the opinionated all-style no-content expression of form represents extreme individual persona. no matter that other writers have emphasised the dialogic nature of voice (ivanič, 1998; matsuda, 2001; prior, 2001), it remains the case that reflective writing requires the individual voice as well as the social. it is not surprising that some l2 student writers find problematic the requirement to produce academic writing that is not only social williams the appearance of voice: eap and academic literacies approaches to teaching reflective writing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 8 but simultaneously personal and analytical. although the implicit expectation that writers express themselves confidently, openly and opinionatedly may seem an impossibility for novice writers, the ancient greek philosophers offer a way to address the difficulty through rhetorical techniques for simulating it (elbow, 2007). contemporary academic writing specialists such as ivanič (1998), who understands persona as ‘social role’ and ethos as comprising ‘particular personal qualities’ (p. 90) (see also tardy’s (2012) social voice and individualised voice), have adopted cherry’s distinction. ivanič argues that, as aspects of identity, both ethos and persona are discoursally constructed, though she reports difficulty in associating particular textual features with ethos in her data, which comprised the academic essays of eight second and third-year undergraduate students. instead, she finds that most of her examples better fit the notion of persona. perhaps hyland (2002), in his study of authorial identity in academic writing, succeeds in a mundane sense where ivanič failed. hyland’s data, which he explicitly compares with ivanič’s (1998), consisted of 64 undergraduate project reports, a corpus of 240 research articles, student focus groups and interviews with supervisors. by contrasting the use of the first person pronoun in the student texts with those in the research articles, i.e. by identifying textual examples of ethos, hyland assesses ‘the extent to which a writer intrudes into a text’ (hyland, 2002, p.1092) to accomplish a range of writerly functions such as stating their goal, though this is clearly a rather particular, formal understanding of intrusion. although lehman (2018) does not formally define voice in her study, she acknowledges the transformative approach of academic literacies authors to academic writing and follows ivanič (1998), matsuda (2001) and prior (2001) in combining ethos and persona, seeing them as mutually constitutive but separate. in lehman’s model of academic writer’s voice, ethos represents ‘voice as content’ and persona ‘voice as form’. together, or separately, they constitute the ‘depersonalised voice’ and the ‘text’ (lehman, 2018, p. 137). for lehman, all three voices – individual, collective and depersonalised – produce authorial presence in the text. following lehman, in this paper, ethos is defined as the reader’s impression of socially marked content spoken or written about – here, academic concepts (e.g. ‘i now recognise the importance of postponing the creation of an essay draft until the structure and flow of relevant ideas have been considered’, from the first assessed reflection of a foundation student, student a). persona is the character assumed by the williams the appearance of voice: eap and academic literacies approaches to teaching reflective writing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 9 writer, e.g. through the reactions reported in the following account from the first assessed reflection of another foundation student, student b: i realised that academic writing would be more complex in this subject because i have to read articles which sometimes have a lot of psychology jargon and statistics, so i don’t particularly enjoy them – there isn’t an article that gives a straight answer to say that something is proven or disproven, and there’s always an argument presented or that could be had, which makes it difficult to get answers quickly. (foundation student b’s first assessed reflection). the central section of the paper examines key notions in the reflective writing marking criteria of a foundation level module and a summer pre-sessional (sps) course; and features of reflective writing texts produced under eap and academic literacies conditions. its purpose is to illustrate the similarities and differences between the reflective writing criteria represented in the marking schemes and the writing produced under different conditions by the students, with a view to suggesting some accommodation of criteria, rubric and reflection in the construction of a credible writer’s voice. study participants 58 transition students took part in the study. 28 reported english as a second language (l2) and were studying on a five-week university sps course. the l2 students were in two classes, 14 in each class, and had all maintained full attendance since the course started. one class comprised five men and nine women: 11 chinese, two taiwanese, and one saudi student. the majority of students (11) were registered for an msc in mathematics, nine for corporate and financial risk management and two for financial mathematics; two others for data science; and one for it with business and management. the other class comprised eight men and six women: 13 chinese and one saudi student. the majority of those students (11) were also registered for an msc in mathematics, again mostly corporate and financial risk management; two others for engineering and design; williams the appearance of voice: eap and academic literacies approaches to teaching reflective writing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 10 and one for informatics. the students were in their earlyto mid-twenties. 30 students reported english as a main language and were home students, i.e. had completed secondary schooling in the uk, and were studying an academic development module as part of a foundation year psychology course. they were in two classes, 16 in one, 14 in the other. the classes were timetabled in three-hour slots on alternate weeks and approximately 9-10 students attended each class most weeks. one class comprised three men and thirteen women, the other one man and thirteen women. the students were in their late-teens or early twenties, therefore rather younger than the sps students. all participants consented to the anonymised use of their data for research purposes. data the data for the study included the following:  reflective writing marking criteria (sps and foundation)  personal narrative (intervention) (27 sps students and 17 foundation students)  reflection on researched essay writing process (28 sps students)  reflection on the process of preliminary essay writing preparation (30 foundation students) the reflective writing marking criteria were published in the handbooks for the sps course and the foundation’s academic development module and were available to tutors and students. for the two cohorts, the intervention of the author took the form of a prompt eliciting a personal narrative of how the writer had come to specialise in their subject. examples were collected from the two classes in each of the two cohorts. the reflective writing asked of the sps students was a ‘self-evaluation’ of their researched essay process and it was worth a notional 5% of the total essay mark. the researched essay formed a quarter of the final assessment for the course, in the late summer, before the students began their formal degree course, usually a masters. the foundation students studying the academic development module were required to write a reflection on each piece of assessed work, five in all, and the reflection itself formed part of the assessment. in the present study, examples were collected of the reflections accompanying the first piece of assessed work, completed early in the academic year. the chosen examples of williams the appearance of voice: eap and academic literacies approaches to teaching reflective writing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 11 reflective writing are representative of the wider data. assessment criteria a content analysis (gläser and laudel, 2013) of reflective writing assessment criteria for the academic development module of the foundation course, where it was not self referential (e.g. ‘reflective thinking and self-reflection exceeds expectations’), revealed a number of concepts employed as diagnostic criteria: ‘insight’, ‘critical engagement’, ‘alternative perspectives’, ‘exploration of the role of self’, ‘clear author’s voice’ and ‘reference to theory’ (academic development module handbook, 2018–2019). a similar approach to the self-evaluation criteria of the sps course (academic essay guide, 2018) discovered two concepts: ‘awareness of strengths and weaknesses’, and ‘future development needs’ (pre-sessional student handbook, 2018, pp. 30-32). whilst some of the notions of ‘insight’, ‘reference to theory’, ‘critical engagement’, and ‘alternative perspectives’ will be familiar to novice writers as objective academic approaches to the work of other writers, others – such as the application of ‘insight’, ‘critical engagement’, and ‘alternative perspectives’ to the writer’s own work, not to mention ‘exploration of the role of self’ and ‘clear author’s voice’ – may be alien and confusing to the novice reflector. these discursive and iterative intra-actions require the objectification of the self and the self-authored texts. and even if the requisite distancing is achieved, the writer may become aware of a wider audience – the marker or tutor. whilst supposedly written for the writer self, the self reflection must simultaneously establish a relationship with the hardly known reader. perhaps the presence of the alien reader prevents the reflection from remaining a meditation, and the addition of future development needs provides a functional external dimension to the otherwise internal exercise. although the sps academic essay writing marking criteria include a separate column on author voice (under the heading, ‘critical engagement and development of appropriate author voice’, pre-sessional student handbook, 2018, pp. 27-29 and 33-35), the academic development module of the foundation course contains a set of reflective writing assessment criteria that is quite separate from its general assessment criteria for written work. however, only the sub-section for clarity, structure and expression and then only the williams the appearance of voice: eap and academic literacies approaches to teaching reflective writing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 12 60-69% band refers to ‘author’s voice’: ‘the author’s voice is clear’. in other bands in the same section, the notion of clarity alone seems to stand in for ‘voice’ (academic development module handbook, 2018–2019). rubrics (1) sps and academic development module autobiographical reflection an academic literacies style autobiographical reflection was elicited as class work from the four groups of students. it took the form of timed writing (15 minutes) with the instruction to ‘write about the key moments in your life that led to your choice of subject at university’, followed by three prompts: • what happened? • who was involved? • how did the experience influence you? (2) sps self-evaluation the rubric for the self-evaluation of the researched academic essay on the sps course simply states the possibility that a given list of questions could help the student in the process: from writing this essay: • what have i learned about my language use? … and nine other questions (see appendix for complete list) (academic essay guide, 2018) from the present perfect in the first seven prompts to the reference to ‘will do’ and ‘next time’ in the eighth, it is possible to discern a movement in time. however, the reversion to the present tense in the ninth and tenth question prompts (though 10 refers to improvement) means that building a narrative structure on them is more opaque. there was no recommended word count for the sps self-evaluation. (3) academic development module williams the appearance of voice: eap and academic literacies approaches to teaching reflective writing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 13 the first of a series of five reflections over the academic development module of the foundation course accompanied the submission of a small number of preparatory tasks (essay question analysis, mind map, and selection of and comment on four sources). the rubric instructed students to reflect, in approximately 100 words, on the learning process of the whole assignment. students could select from an additional five prompts that traced the chronological evolution of the assignment process: in the process of completing this assignment i learned … what i realised about academic writing was … because what i found most difficult was … because i think the strength of this submission is … because in order to improve future pieces of academic writing i will attempt to … (academic development module handbook, 2018–2019) it is noticeable from the verbs that the prompts supply the skeleton of a process: -ed/was … is … will, enabling the construction of a narrative voice. example reflections (1) sps autobiographical reflection the following response by an sps student to the autobiographical prompt shows a clear sense of self and author voice. to be honest, i’m not the one who chose that subject. at the very beginning, i was not interested in studying abroad. so i told my agency that they could pick any reasonable major as long as it related to media but with a name including ‘journalism’, my ba major. that was a total mistake. this major was too different for me. it was a huge challenge. now i know i should be well prepared before doing things, otherwise there is no second chance to make a choice. i got myself into a dangerous situation where i might not have graduated in time because i hadn’t checked all the information myself but just trusted my unprofessional agent. but then i decided to keep calm and try to avoid being afraid of the challenge that i faced. all i need to do is give my full attention to study and gain that ‘digital journalism’ masters degree as well as i can. williams the appearance of voice: eap and academic literacies approaches to teaching reflective writing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 14 (sps student a’s personal narrative, july, 2018; some details changed to protect anonymity) the intimate and confessional detail of the writer’s account creates a strongly agentive persona and the circumstantial detail combines to construct an equally strong ethos. however, the topic, choice of academic subject, is broader than in most academic assessed reflections (similarly, in the msc business communication skills module, the reflective writing descriptor for content 50-59%: ‘may be quite descriptive – (a narrative) rather than a critical reflection’, assessment criteria for business communication skills (reflective writing), n.d.). the question is how the writer could transfer the strengths to a more conventional academic reflection. another student from the same class conveys a similarly clear sense of self and author voice in response to the autobiographical prompt in a narrative that evidences reflection in the first and final paragraphs: in my undergraduate degree, i chose about the educational mathematic. i think i can be a good teacher at that time. however, when i really got a job to be a junior high school student, i thought it maybe not suit for me. then i got a chance to change my work as a employer in picc, which is a finical company. at that time, my work is to collect and correct some information about customer’s car and his traffic accident records. then i gave the information which is treatment to my partner so that they can customize a special insurance plan to the customer. in this process, i experience many new things. first of all, the information data is to big so you must spend a lot of time on pairing and checking. then to some old customers who had a few of traffic accident records, we can give them a concessional rate to attract them to still select our insurance. on the other hand, to some customers which had bad records, they will have some limit. (sps student b’s personal narrative, july, 2018) (2) sps self-evaluation williams the appearance of voice: eap and academic literacies approaches to teaching reflective writing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 15 the sps question prompts yielded the following example from student a: i thought the introduction and conclusion are not that important at the beginning of pre-sessional course. during the course, i found it essential to write a good introduction and conclusion because the introduction is the section that you can put forward the background and your argument about the topic and if it is not that attractive, readers might lose their interest to continue reading, meanwhile, conclusion is the section that you can summarise supportive material to enhance your idea. furthermore, main body should be organized in a logical structure and give full details of what you are going to explain, otherwise, readers might feel confused. now my approaches to using important sources are as listed: 1. go to the library. search key words to find out the book that related to your assignment. 2. search sources through online library in our university’s website. if the book you want have electronic copy, you could download it to you own devices without charge. there is no need to go to the library. 3. seek sources in the internet. if you need up-to-date information, internet is the best choice. the future academic writing must be full of challenge. if i need help, i think i would probably seek help from my classmates first. if the problem is too difficult to solve, maybe the skills hub, academic development tutorial and work shops are available for us to choose, not to mention that we could ask our tutors for help. i think i would practise more paraphrase and stop quoting directly from sources. do more brainstorm and critical thinking, cause it is so important in uk’s academic atmosphere. that is what i can think of how to improve myself in the next assignment. (sps student a’s self-evaluation, july, 2018, my underlinings) the writer responds to the instructions to evaluate work on the essay, and the underlined williams the appearance of voice: eap and academic literacies approaches to teaching reflective writing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 16 words refer to four of the prompts (see appendix). the repeated reference to the generic ‘you’ and unorthodox list format remove some of the agency from the writer and create a more distant persona. nonetheless, the writer refers to a number of academic study concepts, such as paraphrasing, quoting, brainstorming, and critical thinking, so constructing ethos, to identify some general preparation for future assignments, the first two of which – paraphrasing and the avoidance of direct quotations – can be inferred to apply to the writer. the other two areas – brainstorming and critical thinking – appear to implicitly contrast with a different academic culture and are less sharply identified as needful practice for the writer. further examples of recycled input occupy the first paragraph of sps student b’s self evaluation: during 5-weeks pre-sessional writing course, i have learnt many knowledges about writing academic essay. an academic essay should have its introduction, main body, conclusion and references. particularly, in the introduction, the most importance thing is the gap between problems and research. a clear gap can make readers understand the reason why you wrote the essay. then, the arguments with author’s voice should be clearly so that readers can find out the main topic easily. what’s more, i learn lots of reporting verbs which can help me to point out my opinion and the skills about searching more information from the literature by reading the references given by the authors. yet the content of the second paragraph reveals a stronger persona as this student prescribes the ‘study [of] some [financial] knowledge such as corporate finance’ as a means of making progress. in my first draft, i knew that i had some problems in organizing my written work such as the link between each paragraphs and sections and my arguments were hiding in the middle of paragraphs which make tutors ignored it. so in my final essay, i try my best to solve these problems. i write a topic sentences with my arguments at the beginning of each paragraphs and make a conclusion in each section. but i think the part of model introduction is a little bit long and boring and the part of my analysis should be increased in my final essay. i think it is a little bit williams the appearance of voice: eap and academic literacies approaches to teaching reflective writing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 17 difficult for me because the limit of words and my knowledge about finance. therefore, i will begin to study some finical knowledge such as corporate finance during my master’s degree courses and find some support of my academic writing in the website or the school skill hub. i think i can improve my structure and put more proportion on my own work in the next essay in the future. (sps student b’s self-evaluation, july, 2018) (3) academic development module autobiographical reflection the same autobiographical prompt administered on the sps course elicited the following response from one of the foundation students. with its use of subject-specific vocabulary (e.g. ‘mental health problems, symptoms and treatment’ and ‘atypical experience’) and strong authorial voice (e.g. ‘i can recognise retrospectively’ and ‘i began to see the vast array of applications’), the writing is rich in ethos and persona. psychological ideas and approaches to experience and emotion have been a point of interest to me since perhaps the beginning of adolescence a time at which others around me of my age began to become aware of the development of their feelings and attitudes in relation to the arrival of new, significant experiences – such as starting secondary school and overcoming conflicts in newly-formed interpersonal relationships. i can recognise retrospectively that i had a budding fascination for exactly why others responded to certain difficulties in ways different to me and other people around them, it was around the age of twelve that i first learned about mental health problems, symptoms and treatment of such and was intrigued by this seemingly unusual but predictable vulnerability that humans have to develop illness in a form separate from that which is physical. the decision to study psychology at gcse level pushed this interest further as i began to see the vast array of applications that psychology can have, both in the realms of atypical experience and that which is relevant to everyday life for almost everyone. a-level psychology became disheartening as the structure and content was not as expansive as many of us would have liked, though this did not dampen my intrigue and i considered at this point that a psychology-relevant career might suit my future self best. it is a subject that i was always content with exploring during my own free time, through williams the appearance of voice: eap and academic literacies approaches to teaching reflective writing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 18 for example reading literature created by psychologists – both fiction and non-fiction – a desire that no other academic subject has managed to provoke in me. (foundation student a’s personal narrative, october, 2018) with its first-person pronouns and mixture of stative and dynamic verbs, student c’s first paragraph conjures strong intentionality and a vivid persona but the ethos is less consistent. okay so, basically i thought i was going to be a swimmer for ages, but i wasn’t good enough to be olympic, so focused on drama, music and english at school: parents told me to get academic background, picked psychology a-level found human behaviour fascinating, no longer interested in english (actually hated it a level) so changed my mind and decided to pursue psychology at uni, with hopes of helping mental health issues in the performing industry (if i don’t become a famous actor/singer beforehand). (foundation student c’s personal narrative, october, 2018) (4) academic development module, first reflection the chronological nature of the academic development module prompts leant some narrative structure to the reflections that students produced, although the more insightful submissions comprised more than the suggested 100-word target. in the following example from student a, underlined words and phrases respond to the prompts, though not in a predictable way. by completing stage one of the assignments i learnt that firstly, before you even begin the research process you must establish what the question is asking you to do. i found the pqrs [parts, question words, relevance, structure] strategy very useful as it allowed me to recognise two important parts of the essay and the judgement i would need to make. further, by highlighting the importance of directive words such as 'justify', it meant that i focused equal attention to this part of the question, where previously my mind would be stuck mainly on 'do dreams really williams the appearance of voice: eap and academic literacies approaches to teaching reflective writing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 19 mean anything?' [the essay question]. however, i had difficulty in narrowing down which words went in the 'relevant' category. this and other steps made me realise that i struggle with being concise. this is something that i would like to work on in the future. the thing i found most useful was the mind map as it enabled me to organise my ideas and to recognise links between my ideas. it was helpful to visually see these links. i think a strength of this submission is that it takes you through a step by step process. this makes the preparation less overwhelming, while also encouraging you to take a more critical and thorough approach. (foundation student a’s first assessed reflection, october, 2018, my underlinings) much like the sps student’s autobiographical reflection in (1), the student’s incorporation and adaptation of the prompts and use of the first person helps to create a balance between ethos and persona. the detail of the ‘struggle’ and approval of visualisation contribute to the sense of a writer with some agency. ethos is constructed through lexis such as ‘pqrs’ and ‘directive words’ and it is clear from the underlining that the scaffolding prompts combine to form a narrative persona, weakened only by the inclusion of ‘you’ in the first and last two sentences, perhaps where the writer was more self conscious of their task. the prompts work harder to provide the cohesion in foundation student c’s shorter reflection. the superficial coherence they provide, supported by the student’s linguistic fluency, barely disguises the similarity in ethos with sps student b’s self-evaluation above. in this assignment process, what i realised about academic writing was that it is a much lengthier and carefully planned process that i initially thought, with all the research and background reading to form a solid argument with weight. what i found most difficult is finding relevant sources that related directly to the question, but that relates to what i think is the strength of the submission, which is the wide range of psychological approaches i considered in answering the question. to improve future academic writing pieces i will attempt to explore the counter argument further, to avoid producing a biased essay. (foundation student c’s first assessed reflection, october, 2018) williams the appearance of voice: eap and academic literacies approaches to teaching reflective writing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 20 the similarity of voice between sps student b’s self-evaluation and foundation student c’s first assessed reflection illustrate how persona alone is insufficient to construct credible reflective writing; the fact that the confident expression of ethos is also necessary provides support for a dual approach to teaching the genre of reflection in academic writing, as discussed in the next section. discussion and conclusion the concept of voice as ethos vs persona offers a lens through which to view the composition process of reflective writing. lehman’s (2018) model of authorial self representation in academic text (p. 52) employs the notions of ethos and persona as the subject positions that the author occupies and the writer’s social roles respectively. the fluency and coherence of responses to autobiographical prompts often results in writing that is persuasive in these respects. here, the positioning of the writer’s social role is clear; the audience is addressed and invoked, and consequently both ethos and persona are successful. in lehman’s (2018) model of academic writer’s voice (p. 143), however, ethos and persona are conceived as discoursally marked by interactional features such as hedges and attitude markers (ethos) or as metadiscourse or signalling such as transitions and code glosses (persona). in contrast, ethos (the writer’s ‘real’ self) in novice reflective writing is generally not a convincing representation, though persona can be more successful. more helpful is to understand the reasons for the lack of conviction and credibility, which is likely to be the result of an inconsistent representation of the self, created by a mixture of personas, the effect of multi-voicing, or heteroglossia. the listing and liberal use of special terms like ‘resources’, ‘lecture’, and ‘note-taking’, ‘vocabularies, grammar and idioms’ in the sps student’s self-evaluation above are imports from course material and classroom experiences. rather than representing ‘the extent to which a writer intrudes into a text’ (hyland, 2002, p. 1092), the extract illustrates the extent to which text intrudes into the writer’s persona. it is an example of the writer borrowing the verbal accessories of a discourse community to claim authenticity. in contrast, the prompts given in the academic development rubric enabled the foundation students to construct a more cohesive and williams the appearance of voice: eap and academic literacies approaches to teaching reflective writing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 21 coherent voice; ethos and persona are more consistent in the semi-narrative of the first assessed reflection above. although neither student cohort, sps nor foundation, had former experience of writing reflectively, it may be that the largely east asian students of the sps course found introspection especially problematic, associating it with western individualism. for example, chan (1999) notes the confucian-derived ‘self-effacement’ of chinese culture, its emphasis on the concrete, and the ‘non-development of abstract thought’ (p. 299). in any case, the extracts are a reminder that a form-based understanding of writer identity, as in hyland (2002), is insufficient for analysing and assessing reflective writing. for students who are not given such prompts, or who find difficulty in selecting economically from the target discourse community, a principled approach might be to encourage a sense of self through autobiographic prompts to establish an authentic persona. the student would be incentivised to transfer the narrative approach to reflection, observing themselves from within, as in the lived experience of the autobiographic account, and objectively reference alternatives, thus establishing a convincing ethos. neither eap nor academic literacies approaches appears to be completely successful with novice writers of reflection. a hybrid to the scaffolding of reflective writing, starting with autobiography and developing a critical analytic approach via tutor comment and peer discussion, would more likely attain the end points in dewey’s (1933) model of a solution and a new concept, leading to a transformed identity. it is unsurprising that the novice writer can feel alienated when faced with an array of academic conventions. the realisation that for many from non-academic backgrounds the alienation felt was a manifestation of a power imbalance that required re-calibration gave rise to the academic literacies movement. practitioners in the academic literacies movement teach novice writers to become aware of differences between their past selves and the new communities they seek to join, as expressed in new and exotic forms of literacy. students are invited to write about themselves. however, eap steers a determinedly objective course, fixing on conventions rather than exceptions, and the text rather than the individual. the nature of reflection necessitates a constant shifting of focus and address between emic – here, the internal perspective of the individual writer, and etic – the interpretation of an outside observer as the writer imagines it, and a self-appraisal of williams the appearance of voice: eap and academic literacies approaches to teaching reflective writing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 22 the writer’s thoughts and sensations. through its transformative agenda, the academic literacies approach enables deep, rather than surface, learning, encouraging through gestalt, i.e. the alternating viewpoint of details and wholes, the instability that leads, in dewey’s (1933) model, to revision and change. by playing with perspectives, the novice writer is able to alight on a problem to investigate. revision and change enable new concept formation, leading to the gyration and evolution of dewey’s reflective cycle rather than its simple closure. as i discovered in my first attempt at writing reflection in an academic setting, the scaffolding of autobiographic narrative is a potential enabler for novices to develop the necessary writer’s voice and more convincingly transition to confident reflective writing. acknowledgements i would like to thank the editors and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions. references academic development module handbook (2018–2019) foundation years programme. university of sussex. academic essay guide (2018) sussex centre for language studies. university of sussex. alterio, m. and mcdrury, j. (2003) learning through story telling in higher education: using reflection and experience to improve learning. london: kogan page. argent, s. and alexander, o. (2014) access eap: frameworks. reading: garnet. assessment criteria for business communication skills (reflective writing) (n.d.) sussex centre for language studies. university of sussex. atkinson, d. (2001) reflections and refractions on the jslw special issue on voice. journal of second language writing, 10, pp. 107-124. williams the appearance of voice: eap and academic literacies approaches to teaching reflective writing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 23 bakhtin, m. m. (1981) the dialogic imagination: four essays. holquist, m. (ed.) emerson, c. and holquist, m. (trans.) texas: university of texas. bailey, s. (2017) academic writing: a handbook for international students. 5th edn. london: routledge. beckett, d., agashae, z., and oliver, v. (2002) ‘forum: just-in-time training: techne meets phronesis’ journal of workplace learning, 14(8), pp. 332-339. birmingham, c. (2004) ‘phronesis: a model for pedagogical reflection’, journal of teacher education. 55(4), pp. 313-324. borton, t. (1970) reach, touch, and teach: student concerns and process education. cambridge, ma: mcgraw-hill. boud, d. (1990) ‘assessment and the promotion of academic values’, studies in higher education, 15(1), pp. 101-111. boud, d. (2001) ‘using journal writing to evidence reflective practice’, new directions for adult and continuing education, 90, pp. 9-17. boud, d. and walker, d. (1998) ‘promoting reflection in professional courses: the challenge of context’, studies in higher education, 23(2), pp. 191-206. chan, s. (1999) ‘the chinese learner a question of style’, education and training, 41(6), pp. 294-304. chazal, e. and mccarter, s. (2012) oxford eap: a course in english for academic purposes. upper intermediate. oxford: oxford university press. chazal, e. and rogers, l. (2013) oxford eap: a course in english for academic purposes. intermediate. oxford: oxford university press. williams the appearance of voice: eap and academic literacies approaches to teaching reflective writing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 24 cherry, r. (1988) ethos versus persona: self-representation in written discourse. written communication, 5, pp. 251-276. cheyne, j. a. and tarulli, d. (2005) ‘dialogue, difference and voice in the zone of proximal development’, in daniels, h. (ed.) an introduction to vygotsky. 2nd edn. london: routledge, pp. 122-144. coffin, c. and donohue, j. p. (2012) ‘academic literacies and systemic functional linguistics: how do they relate?’, journal of english for academic purposes, 11, pp. 64-75. cottrell, s. (2017) critical thinking skills. 3rd edn. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan. cottrell, s. (2019) the study skills handbook. 5th edn. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan. coulson, d. and harvey, m. (2013) ‘scaffolding student reflection for experiencebased learning: a framework’, teaching in higher education, 18(4), pp. 401413. cowan, j. (2014) ‘noteworthy matters for attention in reflective journal writing’, active learning in higher education, 15(1), pp. 53–64. dewey, j. (1933) how we think: a restatement of the relation of reflective thinking to the educative process. boston, ma: d. c. heath. eisner, e. w. (2002) ‘from episteme to phronesis to artistry in the study and improvement of teaching’, teaching and teacher education,18, pp. 375-385. elbow, p. (1994) introduction. in elbow, p. (ed.) landmark essays on voice and writing, david, ca: hermagoras press, pp. xi-xlvii. elbow, p. (1999) ‘individualism and the teaching of writing: a response to vai ramanathan and dwight atkinson’, journal of second language writing, 8, pp. 327-338. elbow, p. (2007) ‘voice in writing again: embracing contraries’, college english, 7, pp. williams the appearance of voice: eap and academic literacies approaches to teaching reflective writing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 25 168-188 [online]. available at: https://scholarworks.umass.edu/eng_faculty_pubs/7 (accessed: 1 november 2019). gibbs, g. (1988) learning by doing: a guide to teaching and learning methods. oxford: further education unit, oxford polytechnic. gillett, a., hammond, a., and martala, m. (2009) inside track: successful academic writing. harlow: pearson longman. gläser, j. and laudel, g. (2013) ‘life with and without coding: two methods for early stage data analysis in qualitative research aiming at causal explanations’, forum qualitative sozialforschung/forum: qualitative social research, 14(2), pp. 1–24. grushka, k., hinde-mcleod, j., and reynolds, r. (2005) ‘reflecting upon reflection: theory and practice in one australian university teacher education program’, reflective practice, 6(1), pp. 239–246. hawk, b. (2004) ‘toward a post-techne-or, inventing pedagogies for professional writing’, technical communication quarterly, 13(4), pp. 371-392. helms-park, r. and stapleton, p. (2003) ‘questioning the importance of individualized voice in undergraduate l2 argumentative writing: an empirical study with pedagogical implications’, journal of second language writing, 12, pp. 245-265. hirvela, a. and belcher, d. (2001) ‘coming back to voice: the multiple voices and identities of mature multilingual writers’, journal of second language writing, 10, pp. 83-106. hyland, k. (2002) ‘authority and invisibility: authorial identity in academic writing’, journal of pragmatics, 34, pp. 1091-1112. hyland, k. (2005) ‘stance and engagement: a model of interaction in academic discourse’, discourse studies, 7(2), pp. 173-192. hyland, k. (2008) ‘genre and academic writing in the disciplines’, language teaching, https://scholarworks.umass.edu/eng_faculty_pubs/7 https://scholarworks.umass.edu/eng_faculty_pubs/7 williams the appearance of voice: eap and academic literacies approaches to teaching reflective writing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 26 41(4), pp. 543-562. ivanič, r. (1998) writing and identity: the discoursal construction of identity in academic writing. amsterdam, philadelphia: john benjamins. ivanič, r. and camps, d. (2001) ‘i am how i sound: voice as self-representation in l2 writing’, journal of second language writing, 10, pp. 3-33. killion, j., and todnem, g. (1991) ‘a process of personal theory building’, educational leadership, 48(6), pp. 14–17. kolb, d. a. (2015) experiential learning: experience as the source of learning and development. 2nd edn. upper saddle river, nj: pearson education. lave, j. and wenger, e. (1991) situated learning: legitimate peripheral participation. cambridge: cambridge university press. lea, m. and street, b. v. (1998) ‘student writing in higher education: an academic literacies approach’, studies in higher education, 23(2), pp. 157-172. lea, m. and street, b. v. (2006) ‘the ‘academic literacies’ model: theory and applications’, theory into practice, 45(4), pp. 368-377. lehman, i. m. (2018) authorial presence in english academic texts: a comparative study of student writing across cultures and disciplines, berlin: peter lang. lew, m. d. and schmidt, h. g. (2011) ‘self-reflection and academic performance: is there a relationship?’, advances in health sciences education, 16(4), pp. 529-545. lillis, t. (2003) ‘student writing as ‘academic literacies’: drawing on bakhtin to move from critique to design’, language and education, 17(3), pp. 197-207. lillis, t. and scott, m. (2007) ‘defining academic literacies research: issues of epistemology, ideology and strategy’, journal of applied linguistics, 4(1), pp. 5-32. williams the appearance of voice: eap and academic literacies approaches to teaching reflective writing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 27 lillis, t. and tuck, j. (2016) ‘academic literacies: a critical lens on writing and reading in the academy’, in hyland, k. and shaw, p. (eds.) the routledge handbook of english for academic purposes. london: routledge. lillis, t. and turner, j. (2001) ‘student writing in higher education: contemporary confusion, traditional concerns’, teaching in higher education, 6(1), pp. 57-68. matsuda, p. k. (2001) ‘voice in japanese written discourse: implications for second language writing’, journal of second language writing, 10, pp. 35-53. matsuda, p. k. and jeffery, j. v. (2012) ‘voice in student essays’, in hyland k., and sancho-guinda c., (eds.) voice and stance in academic writing. new york: palgrave macmillan. matsuda, p. k. and tardy, c. m. (2007) ‘voice in academic writing: the rhetorical construction of author identity in blind manuscript review’, english for specific purposes, 26, pp. 235-249. mccarthy, j. (2011) ‘reflective writing, higher education and professional practice’, journal for education in the built environment, 6(1), pp. 29-43. miettinen, r. (2010) the concept of experiential earning and john dewey’s theory of reflective thought and action, international journal of lifelong education, 19(1), pp. 54-72. moon, j. a. (2006) learning journals: a handbook for reflection, practice and professional development. 2nd edn. abingdon: routledge. nesi, h. and gardner, s. (2012) genres across the disciplines: student writing in higher education. cambridge: cambridge university press. oshima, a. and hogue, a. (2016) longman academic writing series 4: essays. 5th edn. white plains, ny: pearson. williams the appearance of voice: eap and academic literacies approaches to teaching reflective writing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 28 pre-sessional student handbook (2018) sussex centre for language studies. university of sussex. prior, p. (2001) ‘voices in text, mind, and society: sociohistoric accounts of discourse acquisition and use’, journal of second language writing, 10, pp. 55-81. race, p. (2003) how to study: practical tips for university students. oxford: blackwell. rolfe, g., jasper, m., and freshwater, d. (2011) critical reflection in practice: generating knowledge for care. 2nd edn. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan. russell, d. r., lea, m., parker, j., street, b., and donahue, t. (2009) ‘exploring notions of genre in ‘academic literacies’ and ‘writing across the curriculum’: approaches across countries and contexts’, in bazerman, c., bonini, a., and figueiredo, d. (eds.) genre in a changing world: perspectives on writing, colorado: wac clearinghouse/parlor press, pp. 459-491. sancho guinda, c. and hyland, k. (2012) ‘introduction: a context-sensitive approach to stance and voice’, in hyland, k. and sancho guinda, c. (eds.) stance and voice in written academic genres, basingstoke: palgrave macmillan. saugstad, t. (2002) ‘educational theory and practice in an aristotelian perspective’, scandinavian journal of educational research, 46(4), 373-390. schön d. a. (1987) educating the reflective practitioner. san francisco: josseybass. schryer, c. f., lingard, l., and spafford, m. m. (2005) ‘techne or artful science and the genre of case presentations in healthcare settings’, communication monographs, 72(2), pp. 234-260. shum, s. b., sándor, á., goldsmith, r., bass, r., and mcwilliams, m. (2017) ‘towards reflective writing analytics: rationale, methodology and preliminary results’, journal of learning analytics, 4(1), pp. 58-84. williams the appearance of voice: eap and academic literacies approaches to teaching reflective writing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 29 stock, i. and eik-nes, n. l. (2016) ‘voice features in academic texts – a review of empirical studies’, journal of english for specific purposes, 24, pp. 89-99. swales, j. (1990) genre analysis. cambridge: cambridge university press. tardy, c. m. (2012) ‘current conceptions of voice’, in hyland, k. and guinda, c. s. (eds.) stance and voice in written academic genres, basingstoke: palgrave macmillan. pp. 34-48. turner, j. (2012) ‘academic literacies: providing a space for the socio-political dynamics of eap’, journal of english for academic purposes, 11, pp. 17-25. vygotsky, l. (1986) thought and language. cambridge, ma: mit press. wingate, u. and tribble, c. (2012) ‘the best of both worlds? towards an english for academic purposes/academic literacies writing pedagogy’, studies in higher education, 37(4), pp. 481-495. yoon, h-j. (2017) ‘textual voice elements and voice strength in efl argumentative writing’, assessing writing, 32, pp. 72-84. zhao, c. g. (2017) ‘voice in timed l2 argumentative essay writing’, assessing writing, 31, pp. 73-83. zhao, c. g. and llosa, l. (2008) ‘voice in high-stakes l1 academic writing assessment: implications for l2 writing instruction’, assessing writing, 13, pp. 153-170. author details simon williams is a tutorial fellow at the sussex centre for language studies at the university of sussex. williams the appearance of voice: eap and academic literacies approaches to teaching reflective writing journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15: november 2019 30 appendix self evaluation the following questions may help you to write an evaluation of your work. from writing this essay  what have i learned about my language use?  what have i learned about using information sources?  what have i learned about reading and note-taking?  what have i learned about constructing an argument?  what have i learned about structuring my written work?  what have i learned about organising my time?  what have i learned about how to get the most out of tutorials?  what things will i do differently next time?  what do i feel more confident about?  what do i need to improve? (academic essay guide, 2018) simon williams abstract introduction table 1. synergies between eap, academic literacies and reflective writing (based on wingate and tribble, 2012). background reflective writing figure 1. dewey’s model of reflective thought and action (based on mietinnen, 2010, p. 65). study participants data assessment criteria rubrics example reflections discussion and conclusion acknowledgements references author details appendix self evaluation journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special issue 22: compendium of innovative practice october 2021 editorial: innovations in teaching and course delivery alicja syska university of plymouth how do you deliver a lecture when you can’t see your audience? how do you create enjoyable learning communities, connect with your students, and capture their imagination? how do you help your learners overcome the confined spaces of their rooms and the sense of containment and isolation felt when separated from others? how do you make literature matter when people around you are dying and news flashes about the pandemic induce desperation and panic? how do you motivate students, monitor their engagement, help them work in groups? how do you adapt to unprecedented increases in participants’ numbers on a course? how do you adjust your resources and cope with change? these are the questions our authors had to answer and innovate around to ensure not only smooth and effective but also compelling and inspiring delivery of their specialist courses in the face of the forced move to remote learning. this section brings together the reflections of academic tutors and lecturers who strove to identify and implement the most effective ways of delivering teaching in their disciplines. the range of specialisms among the authors is remarkable: here we have representatives of arts and humanities, english literature and psychology, bioscience and biology, teacher training and marketing. regardless of the discipline, they all display the same commitment, ingenuity and resilience in responding to the unwelcome disruption. a fine art lecturer decides to teach with short stories while an english literature professor turns to the theme of the sixteenth century plague for its transformative possibilities and reassurance in a time of crisis. reading together with students, seeking engagement through regular feedback, and watching lectures ‘live’ as a unified cohort prove to be as effective as carefully designing group work or motivating students to engage with course material by challenging them to ‘escape’ topical rooms by demonstrating and testing their knowledge. when participants’ number double due to the pivot to online delivery, teaching student centred learning can still be achieved by diversifying assignments, restructuring editorial journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 cohorts to prevent depersonalised learning experience, and encouraging reflection to promote wellbeing and resilience. all the authors make insightful observations about the learning activities they tested and the experiences they gained by responding to their particular teaching challenges. some reflected on their long held assumptions about what works well in education while others recognised the transformative potential of seemingly undesirable modifications and interventions. the recommendations they make for other practitioners will be invaluable in rethinking, redesigning, and changing the direction of future university practice. journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 18: october 2020 ________________________________________________________________________ an evaluation of a translation intervention to raise awareness of employability skills gained from higher education. tom lowe university of winchester, uk abstract the challenge of ensuring that graduates of higher education are employable has become a pedagogical issue for teaching colleagues at universities worldwide. employability, as a theme, has changed the general environment of higher education (frankham, 2017, p.632) and is strongly emphasised on degree programmes’ planning for desired outcomes (moore and morton, 2017, p.591). this paper reports on an evaluation of an intervention that was conducted with eight final year (level 6) students from multiple disciplines to investigate to what extent a translation exercise can raise student awareness of employability skills gained through their higher education experience. this study shows that through a skills translation exercise, students’ ability to highlight their graduate skills, which align to personal specification skills such as communication, organisation, and business acumen, increased. this paper reports on an intervention that was valued by the participants as having a positive impact on their understanding of their own employability and explores how translating discipline specific skills through short conversations can have relevance in the pressurised world of higher education. keywords: employability; student success; skills; higher education. background ‘employability’ and ‘student success’ have become key phrases that describe desired outcomes for university graduates. these notions have gained increasing traction in higher education institutions (heis) across the united kingdom (uk), due to increased governmental and policy pressure (bis, 2009; department for education, 2017; office for students, 2018). this increased level of focus has come at a time in higher education lowe an evaluation of a translation intervention to raise awareness of employability skills gained from higher education journal of learning development in higher education, issue 18: october 2020 2 where increasing change is occurring, including increased student numbers, changes to the student loan structures, and an increasingly diverse student body (lea, 2015, p.5). universities, and, more specifically, their courses, are under increasing pressure to ensure graduates meet the priorities of employers and their workforce needs (department for business, energy and industrial strategy, 2017). alongside governmental pressure, students are one of the key drivers for an outcome based higher education system. recent research from unite (2017) and universities uk (2017) outline that the top reason students invest their time in higher education is to raise their employability to attain a graduate job. as the cost for higher education has shifted from the taxpayer to the students, the emphasis on student experience and student success has increased (thomas, 2012). the majority of students surveyed by hongkong and shanghai banking corporation (hsbc) and national union of students (nus, uk) now have an even higher expectation of universities than those who attended before them (nus/hsbc, 2011, p.7). the commodification of higher education exerts a considerable pressure on academics today; this is compounded by increased marketisation and the model of ‘students as consumer’ in western higher education (levy, little and whelan, 2011, p.2). the green paper of 2015 states an aim to drive universities to evolve and modernise for contemporary industries, describing graduates who have the desired skills as ‘what employers want’ (bis, 2015, p.31). often, this agenda is referred to as the ‘skills gap’ concept, viewing the challenge of curriculum design as one of seeking to ‘bridge the gap’ between the domain of education and the workplace (moore and morton, 2017, p.604). heis and employers have often created lists of graduate skills, attributes, or hallmarks, and described them as being the ‘soft skills’ that graduates will possess following a degree level education (yorke, 2006; oliver, 2015; university of portsmouth, 2016; dunne, 2017). target jobs, an example of a recruitment site used by graduates, lists examples of these desired skills. this list provided the focus for this study, which both communicates and encourages students to ‘religiously record the skills you gain’ for future applications (target jobs, 2017). these skills are listed below and will be explored in this paper through the intervention with students to evaluate whether there is a need to translate discipline specific skills into the skills listed below. the students were also asked to evaluate the translation process through a survey to assess whether they perceived the lowe an evaluation of a translation intervention to raise awareness of employability skills gained from higher education journal of learning development in higher education, issue 18: october 2020 3 process to have had value. by translation, this study means a conversion which brings understanding of something from one form or medium into another in the same language, to make a meaning of a word more accessible and comprehensive. the skills on which the study focused, as identified by target jobs (2017, are listed below: 1. commercial awareness (or business acumen). 2. communication. 3. teamwork. 4. negotiation and persuasion. 5. problem solving. 6. leadership. 7. organisation. 8. perseverance and motivation. 9. ability to work under pressure. 10. confidence. this research aimed to highlight that students already possess the skills sought after by employers and that students are only missing the opportunity to translate their discipline specific skills into more flexible graduate attributes (dunne, 2017). the research was conducted through a trial intervention with eight final year (level 6) students from multiple disciplines, to assess whether a translation exercise would raise awareness of skills and then to evaluate the student experience of this exercise. this study sought to empower the value of the curriculum through making its learning outcomes flexible to raise the employability of graduates. this study offers an alternative to longer, or more expensive, interventions and instead explored how translating discipline specific skills through short conversations may have both relevance and impact in a pressurised higher education world. literature review ‘employability’ both drives and causes debate within the skills discourse, with the literature united that the term employability is unclear and subjective (tymon, 2013). oliver states lowe an evaluation of a translation intervention to raise awareness of employability skills gained from higher education journal of learning development in higher education, issue 18: october 2020 4 that employability is about enabled graduates who are equipped for the working world (oliver, 2015), while wright and jeffries-watt relate employability to values, attributes, and behaviour, which may all change as a result of university experience, including improved resourcefulness (wright and jeffries-watts, 2017, p.152). hunter et al. refer to ‘student success’ rather than employability, stating that the key to student success is complicated and includes a differing combination of factors beyond ability and motivation (hunter, tobolowsky and gardoner, 2010, p.30). ‘student success’ has featured heavily in new uk policy relating to higher education with the teaching excellence and framework incorporating the words ‘student outcomes’ into its title, as the metrics to measure teaching excellence now include graduate outcomes (office for students, 2020). hillage and pollard (1998) define employability as a movement through the labour market and the ability to gain, maintain, and obtain new employment. yorke (2006) enhances the skills discourse through describing employability as a set of achievements improving the probability of employment, with pegg et al. (2012) describing employability as a set of attributes that improve the probability of success. tymon (2017) agrees, showing that it is skills and attributes that are the factors which constitute the overall employability of individuals. as discussed above, much of the discourse surrounding employability focuses on the skills, or the graduate attributes, agenda. oliver (2015) re-works yorke’s (2006) definition of employability to mean that students and graduates can discern, acquire, adapt, and continually enhance their skills whilst in a higher education setting. these ‘soft skills’, also known as ‘generic skills’, are transferable, non-discipline specific skills that may be achieved through learning and can be applied in study, work, or life contexts (nghia, 2017). however, the transferability of these ‘core’ and ‘key’ skills gained in higher education is often assumed and heis have to develop students’ awareness of these skills (yorke, 2006; oliver, 2015; dunne, 2017). the emergence of the general skills agenda referred to as ‘twenty-first-century skills’ include abilities such as communication, critical thinking, and teamwork (moore and morton, 2017, p.592; nghia, 2017, p.25), which are similar to those seen adapted by the target jobs list above (target jobs, 2017). lowe an evaluation of a translation intervention to raise awareness of employability skills gained from higher education journal of learning development in higher education, issue 18: october 2020 5 despite ongoing debate about whether they can and should, most heis include the development of employability skills within their curricula, quality documents, and even recruitment material (tymon, 2017).the target jobs skills outlined above now feature in many programmes where these attributes are embedded in learning and regulated in vocational programmes (strampel and lewis, 2016, p.23). however, smith and trevor (2015, p.47) caution that the adoption of learning outcomes in higher education brings the potential danger of these becoming formal and rigid, with students having to demonstrate their learning through what they can do, which is hard to sum up in verbally described learning outcomes. some degrees have graduate employment at their heart with a strong vocational focus (frankham, 2017), such as the university of winchester’s programmes in primary education, digital media design, and event management; however, employability can often be an add-on to less vocational programmes. another major theme within the critical literature features research around the power of reflection to raise awareness and the realisation of skills gained to enhance employability (lackner and martini, 2017). dunne (2017) outlines reflection as a powerful tool for increasing employability, stating that students need the opportunities and the spaces to critically evaluate the quality of their own work. lackner and martini (2017) state that selfreflection is important in preparation for interviews and job applications. inspired by the reflection agenda, personal development planning (pdp) has emerged as a major area of activity, which relies heavily on self-regulated learning (srl), personal monitoring, and managing one’s own cognitive processes (strampel and lewis, 2016, p.23). in recent years, e-portfolios have taken pdp online to enhance employability and are recognised as being a powerfully effective activity as they can be used to raise aspirations through goal setting (strampel and lewis, 2016). many heis run several activities for employability and enhancement reasons, which have also been identified as aligning with skills development and general engagement in the hei (kuh, laird and umbach, 2004; kuh, 2007). standardly, these activities offer one-toone support where heis employ careers advisors who are sector specialists and are empowered to run cross-institution activities or specific events per programme. this oneto-one advice system is where the translation process could already exist; however, the lowe an evaluation of a translation intervention to raise awareness of employability skills gained from higher education journal of learning development in higher education, issue 18: october 2020 6 usefulness of these sessions has not been widely evaluated in the literature. furthermore, not all students interact with careers advisors, so many will pass through higher education without a conversation or intervention to help them raise awareness and translate their skills. pascarella and terenzini (2005) argue that interactions with staff play independent and positive roles in persistence, development of career relevant skills, career choice, cognitive development, reflective thinking, and moral reasoning. it takes time and effort for graduates to ‘translate’ and ‘transform’ the knowledge and skills they have learnt in universities into working contexts (tran, 2015, p.211), yet not all students are necessarily strategic enough to make use of these services, especially if their career path is not clear. rationale for this research study, tran’s reference to ‘translating’ was evaluated, by running an intervention which translates students’ discipline specific skills into the employer’s description of skills, such as those outlined by target jobs (target jobs, 2017). this intervention took place with final year students to help further understand student awareness of the flexibility of their learning outcomes to the job market (tran, 2015, p.211). as outlined above, reflection drives advances in employability through articulation and evidencing transferable skills (dunne, 2017; lackner and martini, 2017). however, this study wishes to take this one step further and add translation onto reflection. many of the interventions discussed in the literature above rely on financial or high time investment from the government, institution, or student, all of which also require oversight and strategy. the intervention in this study would ask the academic personal tutor/mentor to take responsibility for the personal attribute development of students. this study will focus on more tangible and vocational skills through a conversation that could be adapted to already operating tutorials, which are often for academic and pastoral purposes only (tymon, 2017). this evaluation aims to outline whether a short intervention lasting less than an hour could have the potential to enhance skills awareness through translating consciously aware discipline skills into employer sought skills, similar to those outlined by target jobs (2017) above, so students may become more able to convey their abilities in applications and interviews. lowe an evaluation of a translation intervention to raise awareness of employability skills gained from higher education journal of learning development in higher education, issue 18: october 2020 7 research design for this evaluation, it was concluded that a mixed research method of semi-structured interviews along with an evaluation survey would be used. the method of semi-structured interviews allowed the researcher to be flexible and adapt following the questions of the interview. the intervention involved a single one-hour interview with participants covering the four stages. an interview (stage 1), was conducted to explore students’ perceptions of their skills gained from university, followed by the student completing likert scale responses to target jobs’ top 10 demanded skills by graduate employers (stage 2). these two exercises were followed by a translation conversation (stage 3). the evaluation was then completed by the student completing the target jobs likert scale on paper, including a feedback question on their experience of a translation conversation (stage 4). both paper surveys were conducted without the researcher viewing them until after the session, with the researcher stepping away from the interview table while the participants completed stage 2 and stage 4. the paper surveys were put in a sealed envelope until after the interview to allow the translator/facilitator to remain unbiased and to ensure the participant was comfortable. the research design is summarised in table 1 below. for the participants of the study, final year (level 6) students were chosen to take part in the intervention through a snowballing method. first year (level 4) or second year (level 5) students were not chosen as they would have had less exposure to a curriculum, therefore the ability to reflect on the whole degree would be less in-depth. students from other educational levels, for example in further education, were not accessible to the researcher so therefore not used. graduates were also not included in the study as they are more likely to have high exposure to the working world and more awareness of their applicable skills, as well as each having diverse experiences. ethics approval was attained prior to the study in line with the university of winchester’s ethics guidelines and processes (university of winchester, 2014). table 1. research method. research method lowe an evaluation of a translation intervention to raise awareness of employability skills gained from higher education journal of learning development in higher education, issue 18: october 2020 8 stage 1: interview questions research tools: 1) please state your home faculty: 2) why did you choose to come to study at university? 3) what do you consider to be your main outcome or goal as a result of completing your degree? 4) what skills do you feel you have gained from your degree for future employment? stage 2: pre-intervention survey research tools: likert scales for target jobs’ top 10 skills [researcher does not see the responses] stage 3: intervention research tools: conduct translation skills conversation with student where the researcher has a conversation based on the interview response to questions 4 (stage 1) stage 4: post-intervention survey research tools: questionnaire of likert scales for target jobs’ top 10 skills with additional question to be completed by hand: how did you find the skills translation process? [researcher does not see the responses] lowe an evaluation of a translation intervention to raise awareness of employability skills gained from higher education journal of learning development in higher education, issue 18: october 2020 9 two comparative surveys, which the evaluation was based upon, were conducted in stage 2 and 4, following the translation conversation, and allowing for comparison. this consisted of a list of the 10 target job skills with a question at the beginning instructing the participant to ‘please answer the questions below circling how much you feel you gained the below skills from your degree (1 = strongly disagree and 10 = strongly agree)’. then, an open field was chosen for the final evaluation of the experience of the intervention in stage 4 (see table 2 below). all surveys were kept in numbered envelopes referring to the participant’s number for the duration of the primary research before being entered into a database analysis system. participants to conduct the study, the researcher disseminated an internal call on the university’s internal student portal asking for participants (students) in their final year, to volunteer to take part in a short skills reflection interview taking one hour of their time. the interviews took place at one of the catering outlets on campus. it was felt that as this was a one-toone, relatively personal intervention, it was most appropriate to conduct this study in a public place to allow the participant to feel comfortable with the knowledge that they could withdraw at any time from the study. a £20 voucher per participant was used as an incentive and the opportunity was advertised through the university online portal. the participants also signed a participant consent form prior to the research commencing. for this study, eight participants were recruited. all participants completed the full study, and none chose the option to withdraw. details of the participants per faculty are outlined below (table 2). table 2. faculty and number of participants. faculty number of participants arts 3 business, law and sport (bls) 2 lowe an evaluation of a translation intervention to raise awareness of employability skills gained from higher education journal of learning development in higher education, issue 18: october 2020 10 education, health and social care (ehsc) 1 humanities and social science (hss) 2 findings stage 1: why higher education? the participants were asked why they chose to come to university, to benchmark the sample of participants against recent literature and reports outlining that a high proportion of uk students now come to higher education to strategically secure graduate employment (unite, 2017; uuk, 2017). participant 1 (bls) stated they ‘didn’t feel quite mentally challenged if that makes sense’ explaining that their occupation prior to higher education was ‘bit dull’ and that they ‘didn’t feel like i was progressing anymore’, indicating that they sought more intellectual challenge. participant 8 (bls) suggested they thought similar, stating that their apprenticeship did not ‘excel me as far as i thought it might’, identifying business admin as the discipline of interest and desiring more of a challenge. participant 6 (hss) stated that partly their ‘family members wanted me to go’ because they ‘knew i had to get a degree in something’ as ‘it helps advance careers, um, and start at a higher position’, so, ‘it wasn’t just for the pursuit of academic knowledge’; but, they chose the subject of history because they enjoyed it. similarly, participant 3 (hss) stated that ‘the course, like, seemed really interesting’ but also that they sought higher education ‘to broaden, like, my horizons’ for more opportunities in the future. participant 7’s (ehsc) attraction to higher education was also strategic, stating that originally they wished to become teacher and they had chosen to return to education as a mature student. participant 2 and 4, who were both in the faculty of the arts, were less certain about why they chose university, explaining that, basically ‘all of my friends came’, that at their ‘school it’s advertised as like the right thing to do’, and that they were not ‘very sure what i wanted lowe an evaluation of a translation intervention to raise awareness of employability skills gained from higher education journal of learning development in higher education, issue 18: october 2020 11 to go onto’. participant 5 (arts), however, stated that they ‘wanted to gain more skills in the area’ they wanted to go into and to ‘have the experience of living independently’. overall, six out of the eight participants stated some form of strategic reason or outcome-based motivation for study at higher education, based on learning, a challenge, unlocking future employment, or gaining new skills. perceived outcome of higher education? this point of enquiry deliberately built on the literature asking the participants to state their main outcome or goal of completing their degree. in reflection of the above, where only 25% of the participants did not give an outcomes-based reason for higher education study, the researcher was interested to see if these students would continue the trend. participants 6 (hss), 7 (ehsc), and 8 (bls) all referred to graduate or ‘better positions’ with participant 6 (hss) referring to a ‘higher wage’ in a company and participant 7 (ehsc) stating that their decision to come to university ‘was literally just to get a job, which i couldn’t [get] without a degree.’ interestingly, aligning with strayhorn (2015)’s language surrounding ‘student success’, participant 8 refers to ‘obtaining a role in an organisation that i recognise as successful’. participant 2 (arts) stated that a ‘job in a sector’ where they would have ‘a career’ they liked would be the main desired outcome. participant 4 (arts) did not agree, stating that ‘social skills’ were a main outcome, developed through experiences of working with ‘diverse people’. participant 5 (arts) also spoke about skills like independence, living by themselves, and having the confidence to speak. interestingly, participant 1 (bls), did not refer to a graduate job or a specific career and stated a more traditional view of university outcomes, identifying greater criticality or a ‘new perspective’. participant 3 (hss) did state that a ‘decent job’ was a desired outcome, yet also reasoned that more traditional higher education was associated with expecting that they would become ‘more wholesome as a person.’ perceived skills gained lowe an evaluation of a translation intervention to raise awareness of employability skills gained from higher education journal of learning development in higher education, issue 18: october 2020 12 the final part of the interview in stage one was intended to explore the participants’ perception of the skills that they had gained from higher education study, to benchmark the kind of words used in comparison to the skills referred to by target jobs and the other literature above (target jobs, 2017). the participants and the referenced skills are listed in the table below, with some analysis following: table 3. summarised list of skills stated in answer to stage 1, question 4. participant no. referenced skills participant 1 (bls) organisation; critical thinking; writing skills; speed reading; research. participant 2 (arts) practical film skills; equipment knowledge and application; script writing; leadership skills; organisation; time management; planning. participant 3 (hss) communication skills; academic skills; writing skills; mathematics; life skills. participant 4 (arts) social skills; enhanced work ethic towards learning. participant 5 (arts) confidence; clarity; people skills; lowe an evaluation of a translation intervention to raise awareness of employability skills gained from higher education journal of learning development in higher education, issue 18: october 2020 13 participant 6 (hss) analysis; presenting an argument; critical thinking; reasoning; working with limited knowledge. participant 7 (ehsc) critical thinking; different perspectives; different approaches; organisation. participant 8 (bls) organisational skills; communications skills; teamwork; people skills. the skills outlined above are the first responses to the question asking the participants what skills they felt they gained from their degree alone. a large portion of the skills raised are attributes that can be often seen on programme documents relating to learning outcomes (smith and trevor, 2015), such as criticality of different perspectives and certain discipline specific skills such as writing and practical skills. this was expected, as these students were currently being tutored on these courses. of the 35 skills referenced above by the students, only four (mathematics; academic skills; practical film skills; equipment knowledge and application) can be argued to be discipline specific, though with further analysis below, this number increases. when further analysing the 35 skills above, 20 of these skills referred to academic programmes of study and 15 skills referred to the wider higher education experience. this is useful to assess as it shows the students perceive that the majority of skills gained from their university experience are directly linked to their academic course, in contrast to wider, more general skills like time management or communication. therefore, at this stage in the analysis, there is scope for raising awareness through the following translation exercise. for example, participants would refer to skills in an academic sense such as: ‘everything that kind of relates to research or writing’ (participant 1 (bls)), ‘well i learnt a lot of skills, lowe an evaluation of a translation intervention to raise awareness of employability skills gained from higher education journal of learning development in higher education, issue 18: october 2020 14 like a lot of practical skills about film’ (participant 2 (arts)), and ‘it’s made me have a better work ethic, um, so i can learn things a lot quicker as well like new concepts’ (participant 4 (arts)). general skills such as teamwork and organisation were referred to more generally in the context of the entire higher education journey, with participants referring to ‘organisational skills and kind of how to manage my time and how to plan my time as well’ (participant 2 (arts)) and ‘working in teams, but not just the ability to work in teams, but value what other people bring to it as well’ (participant 8 (bls)). this was considered in the next phases of the study when the participants were asked about their perceived skills strength against the general target jobs list. stage 2: pre-intervention skills survey the second stage of the research asked the participants to fill in 1-10 likert scales of the target jobs skills list to assess their perception of their existing skills prior to the intervention. the weighted average of each students’ responses preand post intervention are shown in figure 1. assessing the results produces some initial observations. first, for the majority of the skills (9 out of 10), perceived possession is high with all skills apart from ‘commercial awareness (or business acumen)’ rating six and above on average. ‘commercial awareness’, referring to an awareness of business general knowledge is certainly the most ambiguous of these skills, and could be seen as less relatable to disciplines in the humanities or arts. certain skills scored highly with the weighted average agreeing that they possess the skills of ‘communication’, ‘perseverance and motivation’, and ‘confidence’, scoring 8/10 and above pre-intervention. these high scores are not a surprise as those exact skills, or similar surrounding organisation or work ethic, were referenced in stage one by many of the participants (participants: 1 (bls), 2 (arts), 3 (hss), 4 (arts), 7 (ehsc), 8 (bls)). the remaining skills all scored between 7 and 8, showing a reasonably high self-awareness of these skills. therefore, pre-intervention, the participants on average agreed that they possessed the majority of the skills, yet with some space for increases post-intervention. stage 3: translation process lowe an evaluation of a translation intervention to raise awareness of employability skills gained from higher education journal of learning development in higher education, issue 18: october 2020 15 as stated above, the translation conversation was inspired by tran who outlined that students do not always possess the ability to ‘translate’ their skills to potential employers post-secondary education (tran, 2015). the researcher for this study performed the role of the translator of skills to help the participants potentially raise their awareness/transferability of the skills derived from their programme. the researcher was aware of the students’ academic faculty of study and had conducted the interview questions in stage 1, but otherwise had no knowledge of the participant. the researcher also had not seen the responses to the first likert scale of target jobs’ skills as they were not present during this stage and the paper survey was put away in an envelope following completion (stage 2). the researcher used motivational and persuasive language when translating each of the skills. often the researcher would have to improvise and adapt conversation for the students’ academic faculty, as some programmes with a more vocational focus were more likely to align with the skills list. one consideration is that this project relied heavily upon the translation facilitator: if one was to consider widening this intervention with multiple individuals across a course, or hundreds of colleagues across an entire education institution, it cannot be guaranteed that all colleagues would have the personal skills suitable for the process. there was also no standard translation order or script, therefore this might present some difficulty when transferring this intervention. stage 4: post-intervention skills survey stage 4 offered an opportunity to evaluate the intervention by using the same target jobs’ list of likert scales for a second time. again, for this process, the researcher left the interview table to avoid adding pressure to the participants completing this task. the overall weighted averages of the responses (preand postintervention) are shown in figure 1 below. figure 1. weighted averages of entire sample preand postintervention. lowe an evaluation of a translation intervention to raise awareness of employability skills gained from higher education journal of learning development in higher education, issue 18: october 2020 16 as shown in the table above, each of the skills has shown an increase, with students responding that they felt their understanding of the skillset they had acquired through their degree had increased as a result of the translation exercise. the increase on average per skills was by 1.163 points on the likert scale and the highest increase in skills awareness came from ‘commercial awareness (or business acumen)’ with a weighted average increase of 2.5 points. this has already been noted to be one of the more ambiguous skills for students who are not on a business or private sector vocational course. out of the skills featured, all ten have increased, which shows that the translation conversation has had an impact with this small sample size (see table below for weighted average differences). table 4. difference in weighted average preand posttranslation conversation (intervention). skills weighted average difference preand postintervention 1.commercial awareness (or business acumen) 2.5 2. communication 0.87 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 li k e rt s ca le r e sp o n se ( 1 s tr o n g ly d is a g re e 1 0 s tr o n g ly a g re e ) target jobs 2017 10 top skills required by employer weighted average pre and post intervention pre intervention post intervention lowe an evaluation of a translation intervention to raise awareness of employability skills gained from higher education journal of learning development in higher education, issue 18: october 2020 17 3. teamwork 1.25 4. negotiation and persuasion 1.13 5. problem solving 0.87 6. leadership 1.13 7. organisation 0.63 8. perseverance and motivation 0.87 9. ability to work under pressure 1.38 10. confidence 1 looking further at the skills that saw the largest increase, which were ‘commercial awareness (or business acumen)’ and ‘ability to work under pressure’, it was of interest to see if any patterns existed across the participants from different faculties/academic disciplines. detailed graphs for these two skills of each individual are included below (figure 2 and figure 3). figure 2. response for ‘commercial awareness (or business acumen)’ averages of total sample preand postintervention. the ‘commercial awareness (or business acumen)’ skill needed the most translation in the exercise as it initially appears to be a skill that pertains to courses relating to the private 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 1 bls 2 arts 3 hss 4 arts 5 arts 6 hss 7 ehsc 8 bls li k e rt s ca le r e sp o n se ( 1 s tr o n g ly d is a g re e 1 0 s tr o n g ly a g re e ) participant number and faculty commercial awareness (or business acumen) [pre intervention] commercial awareness (or business acumen) [post intervention] commercial awareness (or business acumen) lowe an evaluation of a translation intervention to raise awareness of employability skills gained from higher education journal of learning development in higher education, issue 18: october 2020 18 business sector. the perception of this skill can be seen in the responses of the participants from the faculty of the arts and humanities and social sciences, with three participants (3 (hss), 4 (arts) and 6 (hss)) completing the pre-intervention with a score of 3 or lower. every participant apart from participant 8 (bls) and 2 (arts) showed an increase post-evaluation, most notably the two participants from humanities and social sciences showed an increase of 4 and a more substantial 8. although this is a small sample, hss participants did show benefit from the intervention. however, drawing conclusions from the other faculties is difficult, as the bls and arts participants varied in their responses and unfortunately the single participant from the faculty of education health and social care makes general conclusions unreliable as there is only one individual. figure 3. response for ‘ability to work under pressure’ averages of total sample pre and postintervention. the average for the skill ‘ability to work under pressure’ is drawn from certain faculties with the largest increases coming from participants 4 (arts) (increase from 6 to 9) and 5 (arts) (increase from 4 to 8), which suggests there is a need for a translation exercise that raises the awareness of their transferable skills in this area for these disciplines/faculties. these two responses alone have made this skill the second highest increase post-intervention, 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 1 bls 2 arts 3 hss 4 arts 5 arts 6 hss 7 ehsc 8 bls li k e rt s ca le r e sp o n se ( 1 s tr o n g ly d is a g re e 1 0 s tr o n g ly a g re e ) participant number and faculty ability to work under pressure [pre intervention] ability to work under pressure [post intervention] ability to work under pressure lowe an evaluation of a translation intervention to raise awareness of employability skills gained from higher education journal of learning development in higher education, issue 18: october 2020 19 as the other participants have noted minor increases of one or two points on the likert scale (participants 1 (bls), 2 (arts), and 7 (ehsc)), or not at all (participants 3 (hss), 6 (hss), and 8 (bls). stage 4: feedback on translations process at the end of stage 4, an open field question was included asking the participants ‘how was your experience of this process, as a means to raise awareness of skills gained from your degree course/programme?’ all eight participants wrote a response to this question. the feedback on the process was largely positive with participants stating that the conversation helped them ‘look at the listed skills in a different light’ suggesting that they ‘became more aware of the meaning of the different skills’ (participant 1 (bls)). participant 3 reported a heightened awareness, stating that they felt ‘like i have gained a lot more from my degree other than a psychology and criminology degree’ (participant 3 (hss)). the process was identified as a useful means to learn how to draw examples and use language appropriately (participants 4 (arts) and 6 (hss)). participant 6 spoke about how it was ‘good … to have these terms explained’ (participant 6 (hss)) and participant 7 agreed expressing a positive experience which had helped them ‘realise skills are better than i thought by explaining what i’ve learnt to put into practice’ (participant 7 (ehsc)). participant 7 also stated how the conversation was ‘very helpful in terms of how to interpret/re-word/put across skills to prospective employers in relation to the work needed for a degree’ (participant 7 (bls)). this aligned with participant 8 who said ‘conversations like this can help with positive thinking. if i were to think alone about my skillset, it may be more limited and less creative’ (participant 8 (bls)). finally, participant 8 stated that the process had helped their ‘knowledge of how you can promote yourself for employability. particularly relevant to the negotiation/persuasion skills’, and they commended ‘the researcher [who] brought a new perspective to this for me’ (participant 8 (bls)). interestingly, participant 4, who showed the least difference preand postintervention, stated that they already felt quite ‘self-aware of my skills as i’d already approached careers’, neatly confirming the introduction to this study, which assumed that translation lowe an evaluation of a translation intervention to raise awareness of employability skills gained from higher education journal of learning development in higher education, issue 18: october 2020 20 exercises were already occurring in careers services. only one response participant did not feedback positivity on the process, instead stating that their ‘own self-doubt can get in the way of what i’m capable of’ (participant 5 (arts)), which could be a reflection on their confidence following the translation conversation. limitations as stated throughout this study, the sample size of this intervention is small, consisting of only eight final year student participants, therefore the conclusions cannot reflect the entire institution. the study would have to be repeated with a wider portion of students, hopefully reaching the number of the population deemed desirable by bryman who asks for 30% of the population to create a more reliable sample and conclusion (bryman, 2015, p.225). it can be argued that the contexts and experiences of higher education for individual students, who are each on different courses, are too different to compare due to the sheer amount of variables which are not accounted for in this study (neuman, 2012, p.95). reviewing any aspect of the student experiences or gain from higher education is complex, with several variables influencing results, and this study was specific to winchester’s context (antonucci, 2013). it is also important to consider the situation of the participant when completing this evaluation. as noted in the methodology, the researcher felt that it was important to ensure the student felt comfortable in the study by ensuring they were well informed of the study and conducting the intervention in a public place. however, the participant could have felt persuaded in the intervention to answer positively, picking up the motivations behind the research, or that they needed to show confidence about their skills even if such confidence was lacking (neuman, 2012, p.95). it is worth considering that positive responses are more common in personal questions, as an example of positive acquiescence (bryman, 2015, p.228). it is also a probability that likert scales of random answers lower reliability (yates, 2003, p.93). the study lacked a control group to compare the overall findings to, making this an isolated small study. lowe an evaluation of a translation intervention to raise awareness of employability skills gained from higher education journal of learning development in higher education, issue 18: october 2020 21 one common variable of this study was the translation facilitator, who was the same individual across all eight participants. however, it must be recognised that this individual would have brought their own personal attributes to this process. as stated in the reflection of the translation process section above, the facilitator drew upon personal skills such as persuasion, motivation, improvisation, and an accessible manner, which could have enhanced the opportunity for the student to gain greater understanding from the process. if this process is used on a wider scale, more translation facilitators would be required and therefore the personal skill sets of those individuals would differ and this could mean the outcome of the translation intervention could be different. conclusions this small intervention followed the terminology of tran who argued that it takes time and effort for graduates to ‘translate’ and ‘transform’ the knowledge and skills they have learnt in higher education into a working context (tran, 2015, p.211). the study highlighted that following the intervention the participants’ perception of their gain in these skills from their degree had increased. skills awareness increased across all eight participants, with the highest increase and impact of the intervention falling on the previously lowest scoring skill ‘commercial awareness (or business acumen)’. this research paper suggests that there is a space for translating discipline specific skills into the skills listed above through a translation exercise. the above findings have outlined that possible students may communicate their academic disciplinary skills gained from their degree rather than more general skills that could be asked for by employers. this study has also offered an intervention that could have a notable influence on the students’ journeys and enhance opportunities in graduate employment life, raising awareness through reframing skills which students already possess. finally, the intervention met its target of creating a time efficient intervention, taking less than one hour per participant, therefore offering a shorter employability action for heis. references lowe an evaluation of a translation intervention to raise awareness of employability skills gained from higher education journal of learning development in higher education, issue 18: october 2020 22 antonucci, l. (2013) ‘comparative research in higher education studies: considering the different levels of comparison and emerging mythological challenges’, in huisman, j. and tight, m. (eds.) theory and method in higher education research. london: emerald group publishing, pp. 1-19. bryman, a., (2015) social research methods. oxford: oxford university press. department for business, energy and industrial strategy (2017) industrial strategy: building a britain fit for the future. available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/industrial-strategy-building-a-britain-fitfor-the-future (accessed: 14 june 2020). department for business, innovation and skills (bis) (2009) skills for growth: the national skills strategy. available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/skills-forgrowth-the-national-skills-strategy (accessed: 14 june 2020). department for business, innovation and skills (bis) (2015) higher education: success as a knowledge economy white paper. available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/higher-education-success-as-aknowledge-economy-white-paper (accessed: 14 june 2020). department for education (2017) higher education and research act 2017. available at: http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2017/29/contents/enacted (accessed: 14 june 2020). dunne, j. (2017) ‘working placement reflective assessments and employability enhanced through highlighting graduate attributes’, journal of teaching and learning for graduate employability, 8(1), pp.40-59. frankham, j. (2017) ‘employability and higher education: the follies of the ‘productivity challenge’ in the teaching excellence framework’, journal of education policy, 32(5), pp.628-641. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/industrial-strategy-building-a-britain-fit-for-the-future https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/industrial-strategy-building-a-britain-fit-for-the-future https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/skills-for-growth-the-national-skills-strategy https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/skills-for-growth-the-national-skills-strategy https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/higher-education-success-as-a-knowledge-economy-white-paper https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/higher-education-success-as-a-knowledge-economy-white-paper http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2017/29/contents/enacted lowe an evaluation of a translation intervention to raise awareness of employability skills gained from higher education journal of learning development in higher education, issue 18: october 2020 23 hager, p. (2006) ‘nature and development of generic attributes’, in graduate attributes, learning and employability. springer, dordrecht, pp. 17-47. hillage, j. and pollard, e. (1998) employability: developing a framework for policy analysis. london: department for education. hunter, m., tobolowsky, b. and gardoner, j. (2010) helping sophomores succeed: understanding and improving the second year experience. chichester: john wiley & sons. kuh, g.d. (2007) ‘what student engagement data tell us about college readiness’, peer review, 9(1), p.4. kuh, g.d., laird, t.f.n. and umbach, p.d. (2004) ‘aligning faculty activities & student behavior: realizing the promise of greater expectations’, liberal education, 90(4), pp.24-31. lackner, c. and martini, t. (2017) ‘helping university students succeed at employment interviews: the role of self-reflection in e-portfolios’, teaching & learning inquiry, 5(2), pp.3-15. lea, j. (ed.) (2015) enhancing learning and teaching in higher education: engaging with the dimensions of practice. milton keynes: open university press. levy, p., little, s. and whelan, n. (2011) ‘perspectives on staff-student partnerships in learning, research and educational enhancement’, in little, s. (ed.) staff-student partnerships in higher education. london: bloomsbury publishing. moore, t. and morton, j. (2017) ‘the myth of job readiness? written communication, employability, and the “skills gap” in higher education’, studies in higher education, 42(3), pp.591-609. lowe an evaluation of a translation intervention to raise awareness of employability skills gained from higher education journal of learning development in higher education, issue 18: october 2020 24 neuman, w.l. (2012) basics of social research: qualitative and quantitative approaches. cambridge: pearson. national union of students [nus], hsbc (2011) nus/hsbc student experience full report. available at: https://www.nus.org.uk/pagefiles/12238/nus-hsbcexperience-report-web.pdf (accessed: 14 june 2020). nghia, t. (2017) ‘developing generic skills for students via extra-curricular activities in vietnamese universities: practices and influential factors’, journal of teaching and learning for graduate employability, 8(1), pp.40-59. office for students (2018) securing student success: regulatory framework for higher education in england. available at: https://www.nus.org.uk/pagefiles/12238/nushsbc-experience-report-web.pdf (accessed: 14 june 2020). office for students (2020) what is the tef? available at: https://www.officeforstudents.org.uk/advice-and-guidance/teaching/about-the-tef/ (accessed: 14 june 2020). oliver, b. (2015) ‘redefining graduate employability and work-integrated learning: proposals for effective higher education in disrupted economies’, journal of teaching and learning for graduate employability, 6(1), pp.56-65. pascarella, e.t. and terenzini, p.t. (2005) how college affects students (vol. 2). san francisco: jossey-bass. pegg, a., waldock, j., hendy-isaac, s. and lawton, r. (2012) ‘pedagogy for employability’, advance he. available at: https://www.advance-he.ac.uk/knowledgehub/pedagogy-employability-2012 (accessed: 14 june 2020). https://www.nus.org.uk/pagefiles/12238/nus-hsbc-experience-report-web.pdf%20%20(accessed:%2014%20june%202020). https://www.nus.org.uk/pagefiles/12238/nus-hsbc-experience-report-web.pdf%20%20(accessed:%2014%20june%202020). https://www.nus.org.uk/pagefiles/12238/nus-hsbc-experience-report-web.pdf https://www.nus.org.uk/pagefiles/12238/nus-hsbc-experience-report-web.pdf https://www.officeforstudents.org.uk/advice-and-guidance/teaching/about-the-tef/ https://www.advance-he.ac.uk/knowledge-hub/pedagogy-employability-2012 https://www.advance-he.ac.uk/knowledge-hub/pedagogy-employability-2012 lowe an evaluation of a translation intervention to raise awareness of employability skills gained from higher education journal of learning development in higher education, issue 18: october 2020 25 strampel, k. and lewis, a. (2016) ‘personal development planning and eportfolios in speech pathology: staff and student perceptions’, journal of teaching and learning for graduate employability, 7(1), pp.22-41. strayhorn, t.l. (2015) student development theory in higher education: a social psychological approach. london: routledge. thomas, l. (2012) ‘building student engagement and belonging in higher education at a time of change: a summary of findings and recommendations from the what works? student retention and success programme’, paul hamlyn foundation. available at: http://lizthomasassociates.co.uk/commuter_students.html (accessed: 14 june 2020). tran, t. (2015) ‘is graduate employability the “whole-of-higher-education-issue”?’, journal of education and work, 28(3), pp.207-227. tymon, a. (2013) ‘the student perspective on employability’, studies in higher education, 38(6), pp.841-856. unite (2017) student resilience: unite students insight report. available at: http://www.unite-group.co.uk/sites/default/files/2017-03/student-insight-report2016.pdf (accessed: 14 june 2020). university of portsmouth (2016) students’ responsibilities: hallmarks of a portsmouth graduate. available at: https://www.port.ac.uk/about-us/structure-andgovernance/our-people/studentsresponsibilities#:~:text=our%20graduates%20will%3a&text=be%20intellectually%2 0curious%2c%20embrace%20challenges,current%20and%20emerging%20digital %20technologies. (accessed: 14 june 2020). university of winchester (2014) research and knowledge exchange ethics policy. winchester: university of winchester. http://lizthomasassociates.co.uk/commuter_students.html http://www.unite-group.co.uk/sites/default/files/2017-03/student-insight-report-2016.pdf http://www.unite-group.co.uk/sites/default/files/2017-03/student-insight-report-2016.pdf https://www.port.ac.uk/about-us/structure-and-governance/our-people/students-responsibilities#:~:text=our%20graduates%20will%3a&text=be%20intellectually%20curious%2c%20embrace%20challenges,current%20and%20emerging%20digital%20technologies. https://www.port.ac.uk/about-us/structure-and-governance/our-people/students-responsibilities#:~:text=our%20graduates%20will%3a&text=be%20intellectually%20curious%2c%20embrace%20challenges,current%20and%20emerging%20digital%20technologies. https://www.port.ac.uk/about-us/structure-and-governance/our-people/students-responsibilities#:~:text=our%20graduates%20will%3a&text=be%20intellectually%20curious%2c%20embrace%20challenges,current%20and%20emerging%20digital%20technologies. https://www.port.ac.uk/about-us/structure-and-governance/our-people/students-responsibilities#:~:text=our%20graduates%20will%3a&text=be%20intellectually%20curious%2c%20embrace%20challenges,current%20and%20emerging%20digital%20technologies. https://www.port.ac.uk/about-us/structure-and-governance/our-people/students-responsibilities#:~:text=our%20graduates%20will%3a&text=be%20intellectually%20curious%2c%20embrace%20challenges,current%20and%20emerging%20digital%20technologies. lowe an evaluation of a translation intervention to raise awareness of employability skills gained from higher education journal of learning development in higher education, issue 18: october 2020 26 universities united kingdom [uuk] (2017) education, consumer rights and maintaining trust: what students want from their university. available at: http://www.universitiesuk.ac.uk/policy-and-analysis/reports/pages/what-studentswant-from-their-university.aspx (accessed: 14 june 2020). yorke, m. (2006) employability in higher education: what it is-what it is not (vol. 1). york: higher education academy. available at: https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/knowledge-hub/employability-higher-education-whatit-what-it-not (accessed: 14 june 2020). author details tom lowe is the head of student engagement and employability at the university of winchester where he programme-leads the masters in student engagement in higher education. http://www.universitiesuk.ac.uk/policy-and-analysis/reports/pages/what-students-want-from-their-university.aspx http://www.universitiesuk.ac.uk/policy-and-analysis/reports/pages/what-students-want-from-their-university.aspx https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/knowledge-hub/employability-higher-education-what-it-what-it-not https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/knowledge-hub/employability-higher-education-what-it-what-it-not an evaluation of a translation intervention to raise awareness of employability skills gained from higher education. abstract background literature review rationale research design participants findings stage 1: why higher education? perceived outcome of higher education? perceived skills gained stage 2: pre-intervention skills survey stage 3: translation process stage 4: post-intervention skills survey stage 4: feedback on translations process limitations conclusions references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 26: special edi issue february 2023 ________________________________________________________________________ ©2023 the author(s) (cc-by 4.0) readiness assessments, portfolio and peer support – a panacea for achieving the edi agenda and student engagement? a reflection and preview ogechi ohadomere coventry university, uk keywords: higher education; edi; teaching styles; international students, attainment gap. having taught and supported international students in higher education (he) for several years, i continually observe the uniqueness and dynamism of every new cohort. my role spans being an induction tutor to offering pastoral support as an academic and personal tutor (apt) lead, a module leader, an academic conduct officer, and a course director. i know you will say – isn’t that so much to do? well, it is. however, these roles have offered me the opportunity to appreciate the diversity that exists within higher education in the uk and reiterates the need for equality and inclusion within my teaching practice. the advance he’s (2020) equality, diversity and inclusion (edi) agenda advocates support for all students irrespective of who they are and where they come from, a call to minimise the widening attainment gap which was actually negatively impacted during the covid-19 pandemic (goudeau et al., 2021). teaching and learning during the covid-19 pandemic the covid-19 pandemic struck, and there were a flurry of activities within the higher education sector, rewriting modules and converting content/activities for online delivery to ensure a minimal negative impact. at this time, innovations and diverse teaching styles emerged – from online, asynchronous, synchronous, flexible and flipped learning (ogamba, 2021) – all in a bid to ensure students were not disadvantaged. as time went on, and the pandemic was being controlled, more innovations emerged which prompted more teaching and learning terminologies around hy-flex and hybrid, and students being ohadomere readiness assessments, portfolio and peer support – a panacea for achieving the edi agenda and student engagement? a reflection and preview journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 2 offered choices as to how they wished to study (so much to learn for academic staff too!). however, there was no doubt the pandemic brought in so many innovative practices which now support the equality, diversity, and inclusion (edi) agenda, and even offer the opportunity for working professionals and full-time parents to engage in study. however, with all these innovations, it appeared there was a group of students who were massively disadvantaged – particularly international students from lowand middle-income countries (lmic) (rashid and yadav, 2020). international students and the attainment gap studying in the uk as an international student is not new; however, having to study from one’s home country having previously opted to study on campus is not entirely normal. some challenges noted were internet connectivity challenges, economic and financial risks, unstable electricity, unconducive learning environments, geographical differences and time zones (adedoyin and soykan, 2020). this situation was created by the pandemic, which affected visa applications, travel, student engagement, teaching and learning. having observed the rate of student engagement between 2020 and mid-2022, and noted feedback from student surveys i carried out, there is evidence that, although the innovative practices around teaching and learning have been one of the excellent innovations within the teaching and learning development, it has widened the attainment gap and, rather than individuals feeling included, they have felt excluded (goudeau et al., 2021). the question thus should be: with all the diverse innovations around teaching and learning development, do we all feel included? this calls for further research. what did we do, including work in progress? working in an institution whose strategic framework is centred on inclusion, flexibility and authentic learning, ensuring a high rate of student engagement and positive student experience is paramount and top of the list (coventry university, 2015). well, we innovated, as expected of academics! ohadomere readiness assessments, portfolio and peer support – a panacea for achieving the edi agenda and student engagement? a reflection and preview journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 3 • the portfolio module: pre-covid, my colleague and i had already started thinking about strategies to ensure that we minimise the attainment gap and improve employability skills. in the course periodic review/approval, we introduced a new portfolio module meant to guide, support and track the students’ journey from the beginning to completion of the course. it supports students in setting smart goals and action plans from enrolment, while linking them to the course learning outcomes and employers’ need. this has ensured that students are clear on their goals and begin to actively engage in the course curricular and extracurricular activities from the outset. • the readiness assessment: due to travel restrictions, many (international) students could not arrive in person for induction sessions and classes at the beginning of their programme. hence, we set up a readiness assessment to help us identify individual student needs as soon as they enrol. then we share the outcome with a team of ‘success coaches’, who then support the students to adapt and minimise any gap that could be created by late enrolment and arrival. • the peer support approach: we started the peer support approach as co-creation with older students to support new students at induction sessions based on the themes that the students themselves have identified to discuss to ensure that, in real time, we are able to address identified challenges rather than using feedback from current students to address past issues and then use it for new students. although these practices appear to have yielded positive results in terms of improving student engagement, i am on the path to conduct empirical research to explore the following: • from student voices, what exactly do international students say are the major challenges that hinder their engagement and attainment right from enrolment to achieving the module/course learning outcomes? • what is the impact of the above innovations/strategies on student engagement, attainment and achievement? ohadomere readiness assessments, portfolio and peer support – a panacea for achieving the edi agenda and student engagement? a reflection and preview journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 4 due to limited space, i cannot provide the step-by-step details of the process and strategies we implemented in the above. however, i am very happy to be contacted by those interested in hearing more. i am also open to collaborations on research to explore the above questions. in summary, not only have i thought about student engagement and minimising attainment gaps, i have also championed embedding the sustainable development goals (sdgs) within teaching and learning with a focus on sdg 4 and 10 (united nations, 2022), as they are linked to quality education and reducing inequalities. i was just having a conversation with my daughter on creating an awareness of the sdgs, and her response was: ‘2030 to achieve these? that’s almost impossible’. my response: ‘we can all do something individually and collectively to help rather than wait for time to run out’, and that is what i do daily in my teaching and professional practice as a way to embed the edi agenda and minimise the attainment gap. i hope this inspires you to reflect on and review your practice, especially around edi in the context of international students in he. references adedoyin, o.b. and soykan, e. (2020) ‘covid-19 pandemic and online learning: the challenges and opportunities’, interactive learning environments, pp.1-13. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/10494820.2020.1813180 (accessed: 25 august 2022). advance he (2020) the importance of edi in higher education. available at: https://www.advance-he.ac.uk/guidance/governance/governance-andedi/importance-edi-higher-education (accessed: 29 august 2022). coventry university (2015) 2030 group strategy. available at: https://www.coventry.ac.uk/the-university/about-coventry-university/2030-groupstrategy/ (accessed: 25 august 2022). https://doi.org/10.1080/10494820.2020.1813180 https://www.advance-he.ac.uk/guidance/governance/governance-and-edi/importance-edi-higher-education https://www.advance-he.ac.uk/guidance/governance/governance-and-edi/importance-edi-higher-education https://www.coventry.ac.uk/the-university/about-coventry-university/2030-group-strategy/ https://www.coventry.ac.uk/the-university/about-coventry-university/2030-group-strategy/ ohadomere readiness assessments, portfolio and peer support – a panacea for achieving the edi agenda and student engagement? a reflection and preview journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 5 goudeau, s., sanrey, c., stanczak, a., manstead, a. and darnon, c. (2021) ‘why lockdown and distance learning during the covid-19 pandemic are likely to increase the social class achievement gap’, nature human behaviour, 5, 12731281. available at: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-021-01212-7 (accessed: 21 december 2022). ogamba, i. (2021) ‘rapid re-design of a postgraduate taught module for asynchronous delivery on the futurelearn platform’, journal of learning development in higher education, (22). available at: https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.vi22.791 (accessed: 25 august 2022). rashid, s. and yadav, s.s. (2020) ‘impact of covid-19 pandemic on higher education and research’, indian journal of human development, 14(2), 340–343. available at: https://doi.org/10.1177/0973703020946700 (accessed: 21 december 2022). united nations (2022) do you know all 17 sdgs? available at: https://sdgs.un.org/goals (accessed: 29 august 2022). author details ogechi ohadomere is a senior lecturer and course director in healthcare leadership and management at coventry university, uk and a fellow of advanced he, uk. she is skilled in coaching and mentoring individuals, managing and planning resources in health, and leads the portfolio module. her research interests are in leadership, inclusive practices, wellbeing and health promotion, and she is currently researching the impact of the learning environment on developing the leadership capabilities of early career healthcare leaders and managers. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-021-01212-7 https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.vi22.791 https://doi.org/10.1177/0973703020946700 https://sdgs.un.org/goals ohadomere readiness assessments, portfolio and peer support – a panacea for achieving the edi agenda and student engagement? a reflection and preview journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 6 licence ©2023 the author(s). this is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (cc-by 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. see http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. journal of learning development in higher education (jldhe) is a peer-reviewed open access journal published by the association for learning development in higher education (aldinhe). journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special issue 22: compendium of innovative practice october 2021 ________________________________________________________________________ working in partnership to deliver a skills course to social work apprentices: avoiding technological determinism chad mcdonald manchester metropolitan university, uk rebecca parry the open university, uk keywords: apprentices; collaboration; discussion-led; technology; covid-19. the challenge in this case study, we discuss how we worked in partnership as learning developers to support first-year students completing a new undergraduate social work apprenticeship. our focus is on our work with the second cohort of students, who started their programme in january 2021—nearly a year into the covid-19 pandemic. we had taught on the programme during its inaugural year in 2020, when teaching rapidly moved online due to the pandemic. the initial move online was very much a process of trial and error; some teaching strategies that worked well on campus could not be replicated online. for example, microsoft teams—the video-conferencing software we used—emphasised a single presenter, which hampered the organic development of student-tutor interactions. in addition, we felt the online environment encouraged information giving, which jarred with the discussion-centred approach we had emphasised in our previous teaching. reflecting on our experiences in 2020, we challenged ourselves to explore with the second cohort how we could foreground dialogue in an online space to encourage student-led learning. specific factors influenced our plans. the students had one day a week available for university study, as the rest of their week was devoted to work-based learning. this constrained the amount of time available for us to work with them. all the students were mature learners; some of them had not studied formally since completing their gcses in secondary school. they needed to write a 3,000-word reflective essay of mcdonald and parry working in partnership to deliver a skills course to social work apprentices: avoiding technological determinism journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 2 degree standard within eight weeks of starting their apprenticeship. our aim was to support the students in developing their knowledge and skills so they could confidently undertake this assignment. we were asked to work with the students during seven compulsory academic skills sessions. the embedding of skills sessions to help students’ transition into university-level study has grown as part of the widening participation agenda in higher education (e.g., boyle et al., 2019; cairns et al., 2018; minogue et al., 2018). however, academic skills sessions have been criticised for dictating vague, non-transferrable ‘top tips’ to students (wingate, 2006; 2015), and such approaches can reinforce academic writing as being implicitly white, male and anglocentric (dippold, 2019; sperlinger et al., 2018). remote teaching could be seen to exacerbate some of these concerns. richards and pilcher (2020), for instance, polemically argue that online delivery can further entrench study skills as a key pillar of neo-liberalism in higher education. live online sessions and asynchronous resources can present challenges for the discussion-led teaching of academic skills. microsoft teams had greatly improved by early 2021. however, it still foregrounded the presenter’s screen when sharing slides, which did not feel conducive to discussion-based teaching. at the same time, asynchronous resources can imply that suggested models and strategies are the only solution. this issue can be compounded by a lack of direct interaction between the learning developer and students, meaning that recorded materials can appear as the embodiment of the banking model of education (freire, 2005). the nature of the apprentices’ programme meant we had limited time to work with them directly. our challenge required us to shape how we used the available technology to ensure that it did not determine our approach or limit opportunities for discussion-led academic skills development. the response collaboration underpinned our response. as learning developers, we worked with the module co-ordinator to plan how we would support the students. collectively we identified mcdonald and parry working in partnership to deliver a skills course to social work apprentices: avoiding technological determinism journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 3 the intended learning outcomes and how we could employ synchronous and asynchronous methods in an interconnected way. while the two learning developers taught three and four sessions respectively, session planning was undertaken collaboratively and enhanced by the module co-ordinator’s subject-specific expertise. this approach helped us to consider the implications of our ideas and how we could try to avoid possible pitfalls with online teaching to maximise opportunities for discussion. we jointly reflected on each session, repeatedly challenging each other to articulate how our sessions and related asynchronous activities were helping students to achieve specific learning outcomes. this approach helped to avoid technological determinism (kirkwood, 2014); it was vital that our students’ needs took centre stage, rather than the technology. we combined the use of asynchronous and synchronous opportunities to encourage student-led learning. each week we met with the students for 90 minutes in a live session using microsoft teams. our discussions were informed by activities the students had completed prior to the sessions, such as writing short texts or completing research tasks. these activities encouraged the students to reflect on their own study strategies and acted as a springboard for the live sessions, highlighting that the asynchronous materials were part of the learning rather than the learning itself. our work emphasised the partnership between the learning developers and students, as both brought suggestions to the sessions. the students were able to develop their own strategies through sharing and responding to ideas and concerns raised by the group. early in the term, for instance, we considered the sources social workers use in their practice, focusing on legal frameworks, workplace policies and academic texts. in the subsequent asynchronous activity, the students identified sources for their assignment, which they shared in the next live session. this sequential approach provided space for the students to discuss the range and credibility of sources, alongside the challenge of synthesising materials. this example emphasises how our response encouraged the shared exploration of ideas, foregrounding the centrality of dialogue for learning (alexander, 2020). mcdonald and parry working in partnership to deliver a skills course to social work apprentices: avoiding technological determinism journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 4 recommendations our response to the pandemic—an event that has forced us all to keep our distance—was to emphasise the importance of partnerships. collaborative session development requires time for learning developers and academic colleagues to share and discuss ideas. while there are always a multitude of competing pressures, we feel it is vital that these opportunities for discussion are at the core of learning developers’ practice. working together forced us to clearly articulate what we were setting out to do. we repeatedly asked ourselves: what is the key learning and how can we bring it about? our students will always guide the answer to this question. in foregrounding our students’ needs, we believe we avoided the trap of technological determinism. we did not present prescriptive expectations or set formulas to our students. instead, we provided our students with opportunities to share their perspectives to make sense of their learning. in reflecting on the engagement with the sessions, we felt that this was valued by the students. internal metrics focusing on the students’ perceptions of this module—as well as their assignment results—were exceptionally positive. further research on student perceptions would be informative and may form the basis of a longer paper in due course. in the meantime, the module co-ordinator’s feedback emphasised that our support was ‘crucial’ in giving the students ‘scope’ and the ‘confidence to tackle their first assignment’. in learning from the pandemic, we recommend the reaffirmation of dialogue and collaboration at the heart of learning development. acknowledgements the authors sincerely thank rachel hek and susie mclagan for supporting our collaborative work on the social work apprenticeship programme. we also thank the apprentices for providing stimulating discussion during our sessions together. mcdonald and parry working in partnership to deliver a skills course to social work apprentices: avoiding technological determinism journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 5 references alexander, r. (2020) a dialogic teaching companion. london: routledge. boyle, j., ramsay, s. and struan, a. (2019) ‘the academic writing skills programme: a model for technology-enhanced, blended delivery of an academic writing programme’, journal of university teaching and learning practice, 16(4), pp.1-12. available at: https://ro.uow.edu.au/jutlp (accessed: 11 june 2021). cairns, j., hervey, t. and johnson, o. (2018) ‘neither “bolt-on” nor “built-in”: benefits and challenges of developing an integrated skills curriculum through a partnership model’, journal of learning development in higher education, 0(13), pp.1-22. available at: https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.v0i13.435 (accessed: 7 october 2021). dippold, d. (2019) ‘developing the global graduate: how first year university students narrate their experiences of culture’, language and intercultural communication, 19(4), pp.313-327. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/14708477.2018.1526939 (accessed: 7 october 2021). freire, p. (2005) pedagogy of the oppressed. translated by m. b. ramos. new york: continuum. kirkwood, a. (2014) ‘teaching and learning with technology in higher education: blended and distance education needs “joined-up thinking” rather than technological determinism’, open learning, 29(3), pp.206-221. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/02680513.2015.1009884 (accessed: 7 october 2021). minogue, l., murphy, c. and salmons, k. (2018) ‘embedding learning development; a model for collaborative practice’, journal of learning development in higher education, (0)13, pp.1-11. available at: https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.v0i13.443 (accessed: 7 october 2021). https://ro.uow.edu.au/jutlp https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.v0i13.435 https://doi.org/10.1080/14708477.2018.1526939 https://doi.org/10.1080/02680513.2015.1009884 https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.v0i13.443 mcdonald and parry working in partnership to deliver a skills course to social work apprentices: avoiding technological determinism journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 6 richards, k. and pilcher, n. (2020) ‘study skills: neoliberalism’s perfect tinkerbell’, teaching in higher education. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2020.1839745 (accessed: 7 october 2021). sperlinger, t., mclellan, j. and pettigrew, r. (2018) who are universities for? re-making higher education. bristol: bristol university press. wingate, u. (2006) ‘doing away with “study skills”’, teaching in higher education, 11(4), pp.457-469. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/13562510600874268 (accessed: 7 october 2021). wingate, u. (2015) academic literacy and student diversity: the case for inclusive practice. bristol: multilingual matters. author details chad mcdonald is a senior academic and study skills tutor in the learner development team at manchester metropolitan university. he previously taught academic skills at the university of chester, and he has a background in supporting students in their transition to studying in higher education. rebecca parry was recently appointed as an associate lecturer in social sciences at the open university. she was previously an academic skills adviser at the university of chester. prior to teaching in higher education, rebecca taught english language and literacy skills in further education, and she has been involved in widening participation in education for over twenty years. https://doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2020.1839745 https://doi.org/10.1080/13562510600874268 working in partnership to deliver a skills course to social work apprentices: avoiding technological determinism the challenge the response recommendations acknowledgements references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 20: march 2021 ________________________________________________________________________ reviewing the effect of student mentoring on the academic performance of undergraduate students identified as ‘at risk’ chris s. maharaj university of the west indies, st. augustine, trinidad and tobago erik blair university of west london margo burns university of the west indies, st. augustine, trinidad and tobago abstract this paper outlines an early intervention programme based upon the belief that being proactive rather than reactive increases a student’s academic and social success. twentyone students from a cohort of 40 who were identified as being ‘at risk’ participated in a threesession mentoring programme. grade-point averages (gpas) were recorded preand post intervention, for both the intervention group and those who did not participate in the programme. results are interpreted through the lens of attribution theory – in which outcomes are related to how perceived challenges are addressed. the results show that, on average, the gpas for those who received mentoring improved by 35% between semester 1 and semester 2, whereas the non-intervention group only increased their gpas by an average of 15%. keywords: mentoring; grade-point average; attainment; attribution theory. introduction admission to undergraduate programmes primarily revolves around an academic evaluation of potential students based upon standardised national tests. this reliance on standardised maharaj, blair and burns reviewing the effect of student mentoring on the academic performance of undergraduate students identified as ‘at risk’ journal of learning development in higher education, issue 20: march 2021 2 measures means that interviews, designed to identify the challenges a student may face, are rarely used as part of the admission process (lowe and johnston, 2008). new students face many challenges (jemal, 2012), and intervention programmes can improve students’ academic success (morisano et al., 2010); therefore, it is important to examine the means of support for students identified as being ‘at risk’ so as to evaluate whether they can help increase student engagement and attainment (cedefop, 2020). early intervention programmes are based upon the belief that being proactive rather than reactive increases a student’s academic and social success. research supports this premise (foss et al.; 2014, zhang et al., 2014; harmening and jacob, 2015), particularly when proactive or early-intervention programmes address common challenges such as time management, study habits, skill development in self-regulation, and critical thinking (kausar, 2010; gentry, 2012; 2014). for students to successfully navigate programme-related challenges, both academic advising (promoting retention) and mentoring (promoting selfefficacy) are needed (johnson, 2007; crocker et al., 2014). loddick and coulson (2020) found that the impact of learning development tutorials on students was ‘not just student attainment, but also how it improves their confidence and engagement in their studies’ (p.21). further, early intervention programmes that provide opportunities for discussions about concerns beyond academic issues create stronger faculty-student relationship bonds and have a positive impact on student well-being, academic success and retention rates (armstrong, 1996; johnson, 2007; gentry, 2012; foss et al., 2014; harmening and jacob, 2015). this paper relates the experiences of implementing an early-intervention mentoring programme for undergraduate mechanical engineering students at a caribbean university. undergraduate engineering students often struggle with balancing academic and psychosocial needs (awe, 2005; gentry, 2012; 2014) and may benefit from early intervention mentoring that encompasses both advising and mentoring; therefore, this cohort is an ideal sample for understanding the possible impact of mentoring. within the fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (stem), the literature tends to focus on the key overarching debates: the underrepresentation of women (fox, 2001; england and li, 2006; sax, 2008) and the underrepresentation of people of colour maharaj, blair and burns reviewing the effect of student mentoring on the academic performance of undergraduate students identified as ‘at risk’ journal of learning development in higher education, issue 20: march 2021 3 (linley and george-jackson, 2013; fouad and santana, 2017). in addressing these important issues, mentoring has focused on approaches that address stereotypes, low aspirations, structural racism, and structural bias. for example, chesler and chesler (2002) looked at peer, multiple and collective mentoring of female engineering students, and mccoy et al., (2015) unpicked the various biases of attempting ‘colorblind mentorship’. however, this particular intervention was not intended to address some of these overarching concerns, but to examine a more local issue – students with low grades. it was for this reason that a broad learning development approach was applied and that is why a broad theoretical approach (attribution theory) was used in this study. mentoring the capacity to address challenges associated with student well-being (social, emotional, physical and spiritual), and an ability to manage a variety of commitments, are linked to students’ academic success and identity development (armstrong, 1996; kausar, 2010; harmening and jacob, 2015), as well as their capacity to purposefully engage with academic faculty (gentry, 2012; crocker et al., 2014). the traits associated with subjective well-being include emotional stability, desire for control, and private collective self-esteem (deneve and cooper, 1998). self-esteem is facilitated when there are opportunities to build self-confidence via effort, persistence and skills accrual (katz, 1993). increased self-confidence may, in turn, lead to a willingness to engage in more social activities, which can then lead to the development of a stronger support system. there are two broad approaches used in higher education to enhance student well-being: academic advising and mentoring. both of these interventions are recognised methods for increasing faculty-student interaction (komarraju et al., 2010) and are designed to create opportunities for discussing challenges associated with adjusting to university life and wellbeing (awe, 2005; johnson, 2007). while many different definitions of academic advising and mentorship can be found in the literature, the general consensus is that the role of the advisor is to guide the student through an institution’s academic requirements, whereas a maharaj, blair and burns reviewing the effect of student mentoring on the academic performance of undergraduate students identified as ‘at risk’ journal of learning development in higher education, issue 20: march 2021 4 mentor acts as a developer of skills, encouraging students to reach their full potential (eby et al., 2007; eby et al., 2008; decker et al., 2014). whilst academic advising is associated with facilitating academic success (young‐jones et al., 2013), mentoring programmes have greater success in creating ongoing positive faculty-student relationships − especially when these are built upon addressing predetermined challenges and motivation identified through admission surveys or observations of programme-based student cohorts (lipton et al., 2003; gentry, 2012; harmening and jacob, 2015). mentoring, when used as an intervention method, has been shown to benefit students (shelton, 2003). in addition to academic achievement, mentoring has a positive influence on behaviour, attitude, health, interpersonal relationships, motivation and career progression (eby et al., 2008). campbell and campbell (2007) suggests a positive correlation between time spent on mentoring and the potential benefits of mentoring. shelton (2003) found that students who persisted in a nursing programme perceived significantly greater psychological and functional faculty support than students who withdrew, and similar results regarding retention were found in a study on retaining female engineering students which found that mentoring in the first two years of a programme increased student retention rates (awe, 2005). mentors act as guides, teachers, counsellors and skill developers (eby et al., 2007) and use the process to build trust with the student. zachary (2000) describes mentoring as ‘a process of engagement’ with a focus on ‘the learner, the learning process, and learning’ (p. xviii). acting as a guide requires an open-minded, open-ended, questioning process aimed at identifying and addressing specific challenges. mentoring, as an early intervention method, consists of both a functional role, with faculty assisting students to develop their professional skills (mullen, 2007), and a psychosocial, or emotional, function concentrating on rolemodelling which promotes self-worth and competence. in her study on student-faculty interaction, shelton (2003, p.339) found that students who perceived faculty as ‘approachable, respectful and available for frequent interaction outside the classroom’ reported greater academic self-confidence. results from a study conducted by zhang et al. maharaj, blair and burns reviewing the effect of student mentoring on the academic performance of undergraduate students identified as ‘at risk’ journal of learning development in higher education, issue 20: march 2021 5 (2014) on the impact of an early intervention programme, also support a proactive and person-centred approach using developmental advising (mentoring) techniques. research on mentoring suggests that informal mentoring which is not managed, structured or officially recognised and often not sanctioned by the institution is more effective than formal assigned mentoring (crocker et al., 2014). mullen (2007) found informal mentoring of graduate students produced stronger and more purposeful relationships than those produced through formal mentoring. however, in institutionally structured systems, such ad hoc approaches can be difficult to quantify and working below the radar of institutional frameworks also means that there is little wider support (mcintosh and bardon, 2019). therefore, mentoring has the potential to impact student outcomes, but other, wider, factors also determine the success of the mentoring programme itself. other significant challenges to mentoring include ensuring that mentors, in their interactions with mentees, facilitate the exchange of knowledge/experiences, provide an atmosphere for creative dialogue (arsenijević et al., 2020) and do not try to simply impose their will. the research context the purpose of this paper is to review the impact of a quasi-informal early intervention mentoring programme on the grade-point average (gpa) and course failure rates of 21 undergraduate mechanical engineering students at a caribbean university who were defined as academically ‘at risk’. the goal of the intervention was to improve student grades. the underlying assumption was that an improved student gpa could redound in improved future success (academic and overall well-being) for the student during and after university. at the university under study, students enrolled in any undergraduate or graduate programme are required to attend an academic advising session prior to registering for courses. advising is different for each programme, and the advisor may be an administrative assistant or a faculty member. students in the mechanical and manufacturing engineering department are assigned a specific advisor according to their level (1, 2 or 3) in the programme. academic advising sessions initiated at the start of each academic year are designed to guide students maharaj, blair and burns reviewing the effect of student mentoring on the academic performance of undergraduate students identified as ‘at risk’ journal of learning development in higher education, issue 20: march 2021 6 through course selection and registration. occasionally students may have failed a prerequisite course necessitating realignment of the student’s progress through a programme. once the educational aspects of the advising process are completed, the contact between the advisor and the student typically ends. when students perceive that further help is needed to realign coursework or to navigate the administration system, they may again seek guidance from the advisor. it is, of course, tricky to determine the number of students who need help in relation to those who come forward seeking help. many students may not actually come forward, and research in the field of student mental wellness suggests that those students with the greatest need are less likely to come forward (wilson and deane, 2010; gould et al., 2004). however, the academic advising sessions are presented as student-friendly and student-focused so as to offer the greatest chance of engagement. the advisor guides the student through the institution’s educational processes, but the programme is not designed to address challenges associated with academic success, well-being or in creating strong faculty-student relationships. such concerns are broadly deemed to be the remit of student services, where there is support for academic writing skills, and services associated with addressing financial, medical and psychosocial needs are offered. in addition to the academic advising session, the university organises a year-long set of activities for all new undergraduate and graduate students. activities include orientation events, a university administration orientation, a forum for parents/guardians, workshops on developing practical study habits, workshops on health and well-being, and an orientation for commuting students. while students are encouraged to attend and participate in the scheduled events, these are not mandatory, and there is no formal mentoring process introduced as part of the university’s sanctioned first-year activities (mentoring in this context is defined as a faculty-student relationship created through assignment of the student to a specific faculty member who academically advises and provides psychosocial support). undergraduate and graduate engineering programmes at the university, including those in mechanical and manufacturing engineering, are clustered under the faculty of engineering. the undergraduate engineering programmes are three years in length, and most students maharaj, blair and burns reviewing the effect of student mentoring on the academic performance of undergraduate students identified as ‘at risk’ journal of learning development in higher education, issue 20: march 2021 7 enter directly from secondary school. most first-year engineering students are under the age of 19 and may be living away from home for the first time. student residences are available − providing a support system – however, students are not required to live on campus. admission to the faculty of engineering is based solely upon academic standing. there is no interview step included in the admission process, limiting institutional knowledge of the potential challenges students may face. once admitted, students find that programmes within the faculty use a combination of coursework and final examinations as assessment methods. completion of a capstone or final project is required during the last year of study, which allows the student to demonstrate acquisition of the knowledge, skills and attitudes expected of a graduating engineering student. students receive a grade for each course which converts into a gpa scheme ranging from 0 (lowest) to 4.3 (highest). at the end of the first semester of the academic year 2014-2015, a higher than expected failure rate was reported in the mechanical engineering programme. other than academic advising, which addressed course selection, no pre-existing intervention method was used to support engineering students at academic risk. the failure rates suggested that the academic advising process was not broad enough to address many challenges associated with academic failure − where failure has been found to have both dispositional factors, such as an individual student’s characteristics (confidence, attitude, beliefs etc.), and situational factors regarding their wider environment (health, family, accommodation etc.) (ajjawi et al., 2019). an alternative early intervention method to address academic challenges, student retention and overall student well-being was needed. the mechanical engineering faculty met to discuss their observations of challenges faced by students. a list of nine challenges emerged. a review of the literature on challenges faced by engineering students provided overall themes in which to cluster the items. these challenges were then juxtaposed with five themes drawn from the work of armstrong (1996), harmening and jacob (2015), and kausar (2010). these themes are relationships, time management, psychosocial well-being, learning environment, and intrinsic motivation. based upon the initial list of challenges and themes, a series of questions was developed (see table 1). maharaj, blair and burns reviewing the effect of student mentoring on the academic performance of undergraduate students identified as ‘at risk’ journal of learning development in higher education, issue 20: march 2021 8 table 1. challenges, themes and questions. challenge list theme questions asked 1. concentration in class 2. class attendance 3. exercise and regularity 4. motivation to learn 5. relationship issues 6. study outside class 7. health concerns 8. sleep time 9. commute time relationships • how would you describe your relationship with family and friends? time management • do you live on campus or commute? • how far do you have to commute? • what methods or technologies do you use to manage your time? psychosocial well-being • what sports, co-curricular or student guild activities are you engaged in? • do you have any health issues that might hinder your academic progress? • do you have any financial issues? • are you working either on or off campus? • how much sleep do you get each night? • tell me about your eating habits. learning environment • how many hours are you studying outside the classroom? • are you attending every class? • what distractions are you noticing when in class? • what assessments are you struggling with? intrinsic motivation • do you feel ready to learn the course content? • what motivates you to study? • what learning activities motivate you? methodology a quasi-informal early-intervention mentoring programme was implemented during the second semester of the academic year 2014-2015. the mentoring process focused on students who had been identified as academically ‘at risk’ at the end of the first semester. maharaj, blair and burns reviewing the effect of student mentoring on the academic performance of undergraduate students identified as ‘at risk’ journal of learning development in higher education, issue 20: march 2021 9 this particular academic year was used for this study, as it included a higher than average failure rate, and the term ‘at risk’ describes students who are considered, through faculty review, to have a higher probability of failing academically. specifically, for this study, an ‘at risk’ student would have failed at least one course in the previous semester (before the mentoring intervention). the intervention drew on research associated with mentoring and with attribution theory (martinko, 2018), which is ‘centered upon the belief that retrospective causal attributions have bearing on present and future motivation and achievement’ (awe, 2005, p.2). attribution theory explains the difference in motivation between high and low achievers and particularly emphasises that failure is not a result of bad luck or poor exam design, but instead is related to how perceived challenges are addressed. attribution theory can be used as the foundation for building an early intervention based upon examining students’ self-perceptions about their abilities and efforts as they navigate their course of studies. forty students from a mixed student cohort comprising level 1 and level 2 were identified as ‘at risk’ at the end of their first semester. students were invited to undertake a mentoring programme. it should be noted that this was the last cohort to receive one-to-one mentoring. subsequent cohorts were supported through group mentoring. further analysis of whether one-to-one or group mentoring are more suitable interventional tools is not yet complete; therefore, this paper only reports on the one-to-one intervention. twenty-two students volunteered to participate in the intervention, but one student dropped out, leaving a final group of 21 students in the mentoring intervention. as this was a self-selecting intervention, the non-volunteering students were not pursued to engage with the mentoring programme, but a watchful eye was maintained on their overall progress, and permission was obtained to use their data as part of the control group. degree awards at the university range from a first-class honours (highest) to a pass degree (lowest). the identified students represented a range of grade-point averages from 0.14 to 2.93, suggesting that 10 might attain a lower second-class honours degree (gpa 2.002.99), that 14 were on track for a third-class honours degree (gpa 1.50-1.99), seven were likely to be awarded a pass degree (gpa 1.00-1.49), and that the remaining eight might fail maharaj, blair and burns reviewing the effect of student mentoring on the academic performance of undergraduate students identified as ‘at risk’ journal of learning development in higher education, issue 20: march 2021 10 altogether (gpa < 1.00). table 2 provides an overview of the gpas of the mentored and nonmentored cohorts, and their mean gpas of 1.78 and 1.71, respectively, show that the two cohorts were similar (with no significant difference in their initial mean scores). table 2. gpa of students identified as ‘at risk’. mentored cohort non-mentored cohort 0.14 0.55 0.25 0.78 0.51 student dropped out 1.03 0.58 1.06 0.72 1.14 0.86 1.42 0.99 1.53 1.14 1.58 1.14 1.62 1.40 1.74 1.55 1.76 1.58 1.81 1.63 1.91 1.66 2.07 1.74 2.49 1.80 2.67 1.93 2.74 2.07 2.83 2.49 2.74 2.82 2.93 mean mentored group gpa 1.78 mean non-mentored group gpa 1.71 mean gpa of all students ‘at risk’ 1.74 early intervention mentoring programme a three-session early intervention programme was implemented for the participating students. during the first session the mentor met with each student for 30 to 60 minutes. drawing on attribution theory, the guiding questions (see table 1) were used to help students identify the causal attributions of their current status. from this review, specific challenges were identified, and solutions recommended. some students were referred to medical or maharaj, blair and burns reviewing the effect of student mentoring on the academic performance of undergraduate students identified as ‘at risk’ journal of learning development in higher education, issue 20: march 2021 11 counselling services depending upon need and based upon the university’s referral process. student responses, solutions and referrals were recorded. based upon responses and required referrals, an action plan with solutions was developed for each student, without a formal contract (as the mentoring process was designed to build trust between the faculty member and student rather than create an institutionally-oriented procedure). an example of solutions in an action plan for one particular student (designated ‘s’ in the study) included reducing the occurrence of sleeping during class time by ensuring adequate night-time sleep was obtained; sitting in the class in a position where distractions due to chatter from friends and others was minimised; engaging in some form of exercise (weight lifting was chosen) every two days, and spending approximately 2 hours per day in study time with a study group. students were advised to schedule a second appointment if they required additional support prior to the ‘check-in’ session. the second mentoring session was a mid-semester ‘check-in’ designed to keep students on track and follow up on the recommended solutions. the session was also designed to continue building a strong faculty-student relationship. additional recommendations and referrals were made if required. a maximum of 60 minutes was allocated per session. student responses, solutions and referrals were recorded. the third and final session was an end-of-semester mentoring session centred on the student’s progress, including the utilisation of recommended solutions. this session, which occurred prior to the exam period, allowed for the reinforcement of study and time management techniques discussed in previous sessions. as needed, additional referrals were initiated using the university’s referral process. a maximum of 60 minutes was allocated per session. student responses, solutions and referrals were recorded. measuring success for the purpose of this study, two broad measures of success were adopted: (1) a positive change in gpa, and (2) a reduction in course failure. in further examining these measures, improvements in the results of students (n=21) who had undertaken the intervention were maharaj, blair and burns reviewing the effect of student mentoring on the academic performance of undergraduate students identified as ‘at risk’ journal of learning development in higher education, issue 20: march 2021 12 examined in relation to the overall outcomes of all students identified as ‘at risk’ (n=39). student strategies for success were also examined. armstrong (1996, p.2) asks an important question in her work on engineering student course load: ‘is the only measure of success an ability to pass engineering exams?’. whilst this intervention was primarily outcome focused, using gpa as a key measure, gpa was always seen as a proxy for wider success (which is harder to quantify) where it has been found that academic achievement is positively related to emotional and psychological wellbeing (gräbel, 2017). findings participating students completed the three intervention mentoring sessions. in relation to the measures of success, there was clear evidence of an overall positive change in gpa and a reduction in course failure. the participants had previously failed at least one course; however, this failure rate was significantly reduced following the intervention (see table 3). the overall pre-intervention gpa average for the 21 intervention students was 1.78 and their overall post-intervention gpa was 2.40, representing a positive overall change of 0.62 – moving the mean score for this group from being in the middle of the range for the award of a third class honours degree to the middle of the range for the award of a lower second class degree (one whole classification higher). of the 21 students, 18 had an increase in their gpa (three of whom had increases above 1.5), and three participants saw a drop in their gpa in semester 2. this drop was most evident in the lowest student percentile whereas increases in gpa were more evenly distributed across the cohort. whilst the average increase in gpa was 0.68, the student with the lowest gpa at the start had an increase of 0.69 and the student with the highest initial gpa had an increase of 1.33. maharaj, blair and burns reviewing the effect of student mentoring on the academic performance of undergraduate students identified as ‘at risk’ journal of learning development in higher education, issue 20: march 2021 13 table 3. mentor advice and impact on individual participants gpa and course failures. student semester 1 identified challenges mentor advice semester 2 gpa courses taken courses failed r e la tio n s h ip s t im e m a n a g e m e n t p s y c h o s o c ia l l e a rn in g e n v iro n m e n t in trin s ic m o tiv a tio n ac-attend classes cl-reduce course load fs-increase family support st-set study schedule sg-study group rd-reduce distractions dl-decrease leisure time asacademic support lo-use course syllabus ie-increase exercise ts-use travel time to study tt-reduce travel time le-sit closer to front of class gsgoal setting ns-no solution eq-use exam questions sw-stop work ps-increase social activities is-increase sleep gpa courses taken courses failed a 0.14 5 4 ✓ ✓ ac; cl 0.83 5 3 b 0.25 5 2 ✓ rd; fs 0.21 5 4 c 0.72 5 3 ✓ ✓ rd; cl 1.59 5 2 d 0.99 6 3 ✓ ✓ ✓ ac; dl 1.35 5 3 e 1.14 4 2 ✓ fs 3.21 5 0 f 1.14 6 3 ✓ as 1.10 5 1 g 1.40 6 2 ✓ ✓ ✓ cl; lo; le 1.96 5 1 h 1.55 5 2 ✓ ✓ ✓ sw; ps 2.70 6 1 i 1.58 6 1 ✓ ✓ ✓ cl; ts; ie 2.02 6 1 j 1.63 6 2 ✓ ✓ ie; gs 2.54 5 0 k 1.66 4 2 ✓ ✓ st; ie 2.30 6 1 l 1.74 6 1 ✓ ✓ sg; st 2.06 6 2 m 1.80 3 1 ✓ ✓ ✓ lo; eq 3.31 3 0 n 1.93 6 1 ✓ is 2.55 6 1 o 2.07 5 1 ✓ ✓ as 2.46 6 1 p 2.49 6 1 ✓ ✓ is; tt; st 2.62 6 0 q 2.74 6 1 ✓ ✓ ✓ is; sg; dl 1.93 6 1 r 2.82 6 1 ✓ ✓ ✓ le; st; gs 3.05 6 0 s 2.93 4 1 ✓ ✓ rd; is; sg; ie 4.26 5 0 t 0.86 5 1 ✓ st 1.95 5 0 u 0.58 3 2 ✓ eq 2.45 4 0 for the non-participating students who were deemed to be ‘at risk’ at the end of semester 1, gpas at the start ranged from 0.55-2.83 and the semester two gpas ranged from 0.5-3.23. one student in this group had an increase of over 1.5, one showed no improvement, and four had decreased gpas. the average gpa for the non-intervention group in semester one was maharaj, blair and burns reviewing the effect of student mentoring on the academic performance of undergraduate students identified as ‘at risk’ journal of learning development in higher education, issue 20: march 2021 14 1.71 and 1.96 at the end of semester 2, showing an average increase of 0.25. from this we can see that the mentored cohort increased their gpa by an average of 35% whereas the non-mentored group only increased by 15% (see table 4). table 4. mean gpas of mentored and non-mentored students ‘at risk’. mean semester 1 gpa mean semester 2 gpa mean gpa increase mentored cohort 1.78 2.40 0.62 (35%) non-mentored cohort 1.71 1.96 0.25 (15%) the mentoring sessions revealed that the biggest challenge faced by the participating students related to the learning environment, with 16 of the 21 participants identifying barriers such as issues with transport to and from university, poor study habits, low personal goals, and a perceived lack of academic support. to address these challenges the four main pieces of advice offered were that students should set study schedules, increase levels of exercise, increase sleep, and reduce course load. the advice to set study schedules was offered to five students, who all made significant improvements in their gpas. guidance on reducing course workload seemed like good pragmatic advice and was offered to four students (all of whom increased their gpas); however, only one of these students actually reduced their course workload. very little advice was offered with regard to relationships, and this might be a function of the mentor being an academic rather than a counsellor. surprisingly, very little advice was offered on the concept of time management − previous work (adams and blair, 2019) had identified that engineering staff and students in this particular context felt time management was a particular area of weakness. psychosocial challenges were identified among ten of the participants, and advice to them concentrated on dealing with reducing distractions, reducing workload and creating a better work-life balance. advice linked to intrinsic motivation was also offered to ten students and tended to focus on study skills, goal setting and increased levels of exercise. this advice shows a balance between the physical and the pragmatic, and highlights some of the limitations of a self-selecting mentoring study that is focused on maharaj, blair and burns reviewing the effect of student mentoring on the academic performance of undergraduate students identified as ‘at risk’ journal of learning development in higher education, issue 20: march 2021 15 guidance and support rather than on creating formalised plans that students should follow. other limitations of this study relate to the unknown – where other external factors that were outside of the intervention’s control may have had an impact of the students. loddick and coulson (2020) similarly found that attending learning development tutorials had a positive impact on student attainment levels but found it hard to attribute causality due to the range of unknown external factors that influence student development. however, the overall trend and the overall scale of improvement after this mentoring intervention does suggest a level of causality. similarly, there may be individual factors that are hard to track and assess. for example, whilst discussions in the mentoring sessions generated targets relating to students increasing their level of exercise and sleep, it is not possible to see any direct quantitative outcomes from these strategies. it is also important to reflect on the practicality of introducing such schemes. this intervention involved a lot of one-to-one support, and whilst the results are evident, the process was unsustainable. this meant that subsequent iterations of the programme involved group mentoring. the questioning approach, outlined by attribution theory, was still used in these group sessions, and improvements were also seen in gpas; however, the multi-faceted context of group mentoring makes it harder still to assign specific credit for increases in gpa. further, because students tended to be offered two or three strategies, it is not possible to unpick which specific strategies had any specific impact. rather, it is better to suggest that, based on the overall gpa outcomes, the intervention as a whole was successful. conclusion determining the attributes linked to past successes and failures may be a useful tool for students as they navigate current challenges (workload, inflexible curriculum, and changes in content delivery and assessment) associated with poor academic progress (awe, 2005). mentoring based on a series of questions that guide students towards self-discovery of the reasons for current failures versus past successes can help students to make the changes needed to improve their academic performance. the quality and focus of the mentoring does not seem to be as important as the actual mentoring process itself. perhaps implementing a maharaj, blair and burns reviewing the effect of student mentoring on the academic performance of undergraduate students identified as ‘at risk’ journal of learning development in higher education, issue 20: march 2021 16 mentoring scheme conveys the implicit message to students that they are valued and should be supported. the positive changes in the participating students’ gpas and the reduction in course failures, as presented in this paper, suggest a successful overall intervention based upon a mentoring process. similar overall findings have been reported elsewhere. in a study of 339 mentored undergraduates, matched and compared to un-mentored students for gender, ethnicity and gpa, campbell and campbell (1997) found that after a year of mentoring, students earned higher gpas (2.45 vs 2.29), completed more units of study (9.33 vs 8.49) and had a lower dropout rate (14.5% vs 26.3%). other studies also show a positive correlation between mentoring and academic achievement (anderson, 1995; gentry, 2012; terenzini et al., 1996). however, it should be noted that within the data there were still instances of student regression, and further work is needed to establish the specific reasons for such outcomes. a number of factors are key to understanding how students who have been identified as ‘at risk’ might best be supported in attaining more positive future outcomes, and assisting students in shifting from a self-defeating to a self-enhancing attributional style can be beneficial for maintaining student self-confidence and addressing retention rates (fishman and husman, 2017). in this case, the focus was on engineering students, but the strategies suggested during the mentoring programme were not engineering-specific, covering topics that would be relevant to students in any subject area, suggesting that introducing a similar mentoring scheme is likely to show benefits for all students. in implementing similar mentoring schemes it is worth considering that students are likely to base future decisions on past outcomes (awe, 2005; martinko, 2018), that the development of critical thinking skills involves focused academic support, and that students are at particular risk when trying to balance their studies and external factors (gentry, 2012; 2014). the intervention outlined in this paper used attribution theory as a means of developing a mentoring programme that used questioning as a tool for examining students’ selfperceptions of their abilities. this approach included both a functional and an emotional role, with primary emphasis on the functional aspects of mentoring. this intervention adds to the maharaj, blair and burns reviewing the effect of student mentoring on the academic performance of undergraduate students identified as ‘at risk’ journal of learning development in higher education, issue 20: march 2021 17 current literature on the impact of mentoring and expands the knowledge base by showing how focused questions to ‘at risk’ students can help them to see retrospective causal attributions and use these as the foundation for setting specific targets that that will help them in their studies. this particular mentoring programme was small scale and local to one department, but it is important to consider how successful interventions might be scaled up into an institutional framework so that learning development can be seen as a built-in mechanism rather than a bolt-on one (mcintosh and barden, 2019). in this particular department, scaling up the process involved moving from one-to-one mentorship to group mentorship, but wider, context-specific approaches should be explored. without intervention it is still possible (as the evidence here shows) for students to increase their levels of attainment; however, there is evidence in this study that such increases are greatly enhanced through mentoring. references adams, r.v. and blair, e. (2019) ‘impact of time management behaviors on undergraduate engineering students’ performance’, sage open, 9 (1), pp.1-11, https://doi.org/10.1177%2f2158244018824506. ajjawi, r., boud, d., zacharias, n., dracup, m. and bennett, s. (2019) ‘how do students adapt in response to academic failure?’ student success, 10 (3), pp.84-91, https://doi.org/10.5204/ssj.v10i3.1403. anderson, g.n. (1995) ‘mentors and proteges: the influence of faculty mentoring on undergraduate academic achievement’, meeting of the association for the study of higher education, orlando, florida, 2-4 november. available at: https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ed400761.pdf (accessed: 3 january 2021). https://doi.org/10.1177%2f2158244018824506 https://doi.org/10.5204/ssj.v10i3.1403 https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ed400761.pdf maharaj, blair and burns reviewing the effect of student mentoring on the academic performance of undergraduate students identified as ‘at risk’ journal of learning development in higher education, issue 20: march 2021 18 arsenijević, o., podbregar, i. and šprajc, p. (2020) ‘determinants of successful business student mentoring in higher education: fundamental or a fad?’, international journal of economics and law, 28 (1) udc: 378-057.175. armstrong, j. (1996) ‘workload in engineering courses and how to reduce it’, 8th annual conference of the australasian association for engineering education, sydney, australia 6-9 december. available at: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.398.9732&rep=rep1&type=p df (accessed: 3 january 2021). awe (2005) overview: attribution theory. available at http://aweonline.org/attributionweb_03_22_05_001.pdf (accessed: 3 january 2021). campbell, t.a. and campbell, d.e. (1997) ‘faculty/student mentor program: effects on academic performance and retention’, research in higher education, 38 (6), pp.727742, https://doi.org/10.1023/a:1024911904627. campbell, t.a. and campbell, d.e. (2007) ‘outcomes of mentoring at‐risk college students: gender and ethnic matching effects’, mentoring & tutoring, 15 (2), pp. 135-148, https://doi.org/10.1080/13611260601086287. cedefop (2020) identification of learners at risk of early. available at: https://www.cedefop.europa.eu/da/toolkits/vet-toolkit-tackling-earlyleaving/intervention-approaches/identification-learners-risk-early-leaving (accessed: 3 january 2021). chesler, n.c. and chesler, m.a. (2002) ‘gender‐informed mentoring strategies for women engineering scholars: on establishing a caring community’, journal of engineering education, 91 (1), pp.49-55, https://doi.org/10.1002/j.2168-9830.2002.tb00672.x. http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.398.9732&rep=rep1&type=pdf http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.398.9732&rep=rep1&type=pdf http://aweonline.org/attributionweb_03_22_05_001.pdf https://doi.org/10.1023/a:1024911904627 https://doi.org/10.1080/13611260601086287 https://www.cedefop.europa.eu/da/toolkits/vet-toolkit-tackling-early-leaving/intervention-approaches/identification-learners-risk-early-leaving https://www.cedefop.europa.eu/da/toolkits/vet-toolkit-tackling-early-leaving/intervention-approaches/identification-learners-risk-early-leaving https://doi.org/10.1002/j.2168-9830.2002.tb00672.x maharaj, blair and burns reviewing the effect of student mentoring on the academic performance of undergraduate students identified as ‘at risk’ journal of learning development in higher education, issue 20: march 2021 19 crocker, r.m., kahla m. and allen, c. (2014) ‘fixing advising: a model for faculty advising.’ research in higher education journal 26. decker, p.j., durand, r., ayadi, f., whittington, e. and kirkman, d. (2014) ‘self-assessment of management competencies and intention to change’, academy of educational leadership journal, 18 (4), pp. 129-147. deneve, k.m. and cooper, h. (1998) ‘the happy personality: a meta-analysis of 137 personality traits and subjective well-being’, psychological bulletin, 124 (2), pp.197229, https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.124.2.197. eby, l.t., rhodes, j.e. and allen, t.d. (2007). ‘definition and evolution of mentoring’, in allen t.d. and eby, l.t. (eds.) the blackwell handbook of mentoring: a multiple perspectives approach. oxford: blackwell publishing, pp.7-20. eby, l.t., allen, t.d., evans, s.c., ng, t. and dubois, d.l. (2008) ‘does mentoring matter? a multidisciplinary meta-analysis comparing mentored and non-mentored individuals’, journal of vocational behavior, 72 (2), pp. 254-267, https://dx.doi.org/10.1016%2fj.jvb.2007.04.005. england, p. and li, s. (2006) ‘desegregation stalled: the changing gender composition of college majors, 1971-2002’, gender and society, 20 (5), pp. 657-677, https://doi.org/10.1177%2f0891243206290753. fishman, e.j. and husman, j. (2017) ‘extending attribution theory: considering students’ perceived control of the attribution process’, journal of educational psychology, 109 (4), pp. 559-573, https://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1037/edu0000158. foss, k.a., foss, s.k., paynton s. and hahn, l. (2014) ‘increasing college retention with a personalized system of instruction: a case study’, journal of case studies in education, 5. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.124.2.197 https://dx.doi.org/10.1016%2fj.jvb.2007.04.005 https://doi.org/10.1177%2f0891243206290753 https://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1037/edu0000158 maharaj, blair and burns reviewing the effect of student mentoring on the academic performance of undergraduate students identified as ‘at risk’ journal of learning development in higher education, issue 20: march 2021 20 fouad, n.a. and santana, m.c. (2017) ‘scct and underrepresented populations in stem fields: moving the needle’, journal of career assessment, 25 (1), pp.24-39, https://doi.org/10.1177%2f1069072716658324. fox, m. f. (2001) ‘women, science, and academia: graduate education and careers’, gender & society, 15 (5), pp.654-666, https://doi.org/10.1177%2f089124301015005002. gentry, r. (2012) ‘making college a success by assessing and navigating candidates' study habits’, research in higher education journal, 18. gentry, r. (2014) ‘sustaining college students' persistence and achievement through exemplary instructional strategies’, research in higher education journal, 24. gould, m.s., velting, d., kleinman, m., lucas, c., thomas, j.g. and chung, m. (2004) ‘teenagers' attitudes about coping strategies and help-seeking behavior for suicidality’, journal of the american academy of child & adolescent psychiatry, 43 (9), pp. 11241133, https://doi.org/10.1097/01.chi.0000132811.06547.31. gräbel, b.f. (2017) the relationship between wellbeing and academic achievement: a systematic review. unpublished master’s thesis. university of twente. harmening, d.s. and jacob, s.a. (2015) ‘institutional factors that positively impact first-year students' sense of well-being’, journal of case studies in education, 7. jemal, j. (2012) ‘assessing major adjustment problems of freshman students in jimma university’, ethiopian journal of education and sciences, 7 (2), pp. 1-14. johnson, w.b. (2007) ‘student-faculty mentorship outcomes’, in allen, t.d. and eby. l.t (eds.) the blackwell handbook of mentoring: a multiple perspectives approach. oxford: blackwell publishing, pp.189-210. https://doi.org/10.1177%2f1069072716658324 https://doi.org/10.1177%2f089124301015005002 https://doi.org/10.1097/01.chi.0000132811.06547.31 maharaj, blair and burns reviewing the effect of student mentoring on the academic performance of undergraduate students identified as ‘at risk’ journal of learning development in higher education, issue 20: march 2021 21 katz, l.g. (1993) ‘all about me: are we developing our children's self-esteem or their narcissism?’ american educator: the professional journal of the american federation of teachers, 17 (2), pp. 18-23. kausar, r. (2010) ‘perceived stress, academic workloads and use of coping strategies by university students’, journal of behavioural sciences 20 (1), pp. 31-45, https://scinapse.io/papers/2188512843. komarraju, m., musulkin s. and bhattacharya, g. (2010) ‘role of student–faculty interactions in developing college students' academic self-concept, motivation, and achievement’, journal of college student development, 51 (3), pp. 332-342, https://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1353/csd.0.0137. linley, j.l. and george‐jackson, c.e. (2013) ‘addressing underrepresentation in stem fields through undergraduate interventions’, new directions for student services, 144, pp.97102, https://doi.org/10.1002/ss.20073. lipton, l., wellman b.m. and humbard, c. (2003) mentoring matters: a practical guide to learning-focused relationships, sherman, ct: miravia, lcc. lowe, d.b. and johnston, a.j. (2008) ‘engineering admissions criteria: focusing on ultimate professional success’, wace/acen asia pacific conference, sydney, australia, 30 september 3 october. available at: file:///c:/users/sarah/downloads/engineeringadmissionscriteriafocusingonultimateprof essionalsuccess-lowejohnston2008.pdf (accessed: 3 january 2021) martinko, m. (2018) attribution theory: an organizational perspective. boca raton: routledge. https://scinapse.io/papers/2188512843 https://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1353/csd.0.0137 https://doi.org/10.1002/ss.20073 file:///c:/users/sarah/downloads/engineeringadmissionscriteriafocusingonultimateprofessionalsuccess-lowejohnston2008.pdf file:///c:/users/sarah/downloads/engineeringadmissionscriteriafocusingonultimateprofessionalsuccess-lowejohnston2008.pdf maharaj, blair and burns reviewing the effect of student mentoring on the academic performance of undergraduate students identified as ‘at risk’ journal of learning development in higher education, issue 20: march 2021 22 mccoy, d.l., winkle-wagner, r. and luedke, c.l. (2015) ‘colorblind mentoring? exploring white faculty mentoring of students of color’, journal of diversity in higher education, 8 (4), pp..225-242, http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/a0038676. morisano, d., hirsh, j.b., peterson, j.b., pihl, r.o. and shore, b.m. (2010) ‘setting, elaborating, and reflecting on personal goals improves academic performance’, journal of applied psychology, 95 (2), pp. 255-264, https://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1037/a0018478. mullen, c.a. (2007) ‘naturally occurring student-faculty mentoring relationships: a literature review’, in allen, t.d. and eby. l.t (eds.) the blackwell handbook of mentoring: a multiple perspectives approach. oxford: blackwell publishing, pp.119-138. loddick, a. and coulson, k. (2020) ‘the impact of learning development tutorials on student attainment’, journal of learning development in higher education. plymouth, uk, (17). available at: https://journal.aldinhe.ac.uk/index.php/jldhe/article/view/558 (accessed: 9 october 2020). mcintosh, e. and barden, m. (2019) ‘the leap (learning excellence achievement pathway) framework: a model for student learning development in higher education’, journal of learning development in higher education. plymouth, uk, 0(14). available at: https://journal.aldinhe.ac.uk/index.php/jldhe/article/view/466 (accessed: 5 october 2020). sax, l.j. (2008) the gender gap in college: maximizing the developmental potential of women and men. san francisco: jossey-bass. shelton, e.n. (2003) ‘faculty support and student retention’, journal of nursing education, 42 (2), pp. 68-76, https://doi.org/10.3928/0148-4834-20030201-07. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/a0038676 https://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1037/a0018478 https://journal.aldinhe.ac.uk/index.php/jldhe/article/view/558 https://journal.aldinhe.ac.uk/index.php/jldhe/article/view/466 https://doi.org/10.3928/0148-4834-20030201-07 maharaj, blair and burns reviewing the effect of student mentoring on the academic performance of undergraduate students identified as ‘at risk’ journal of learning development in higher education, issue 20: march 2021 23 terenzini, p.t., pascarella, e.t. and blimling, g.s. (1996) ‘students' out-of-class experiences and their influence on learning and cognitive development: a literature review’, journal of college student development 37 (2), pp.149-162. wilson, c.j. and deane, f.p. (2010) ‘help-negation and suicidal ideation: the role of depression, anxiety and hopelessness’, journal of youth and adolescence 39 (3), pp.291-305, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10964-009-9487-8. young‐jones, a.d., burt, t.d., dixon, s. and hawthorne, m.j. (2013) ‘academic advising: does it really impact student success?’, quality assurance in education 21 (1), pp.719, https://doi.org/10.1108/09684881311293034. zachary, l. (2000) the mentor's guide: facilitating effective learning relationships. san francisco, ca: jossey-bass. zhang, y., fei, q., quddus, m. and davis, c. (2014) ‘an examination of the impact of early intervention on learning outcomes of at-risk students’, research in higher education journal, 26 (10), pp. 1-12. author details chris maharaj is senior lecturer in materials and manufacturing in the department of mechanical and manufacturing engineering at the university of the west indies, st. augustine, trinidad and tobago. his present teaching and research interests are in alternative use of waste materials, mechanical design optimization, failure analysis, component life assessment, asset management, innovation management, and enhancing student motivation. erik blair is senior lecturer in higher education research and practice at the university of west london. he has been an educator for over twenty years and has taught in various https://doi.org/10.1007/s10964-009-9487-8 https://doi.org/10.1108/09684881311293034 maharaj, blair and burns reviewing the effect of student mentoring on the academic performance of undergraduate students identified as ‘at risk’ journal of learning development in higher education, issue 20: march 2021 24 universities in the uk and overseas. he is interested in contextual and sociological aspects of education, and his teaching is underpinned by good educational practice as espoused in the literature as well as through his own reflective practice. margo burns was the director of the centre for excellence in teaching & learning at the university of the west indies, st. augustine, trinidad and tobago. dedication to margo burns drs blair and maharaj dedicate this study to the late dr margo burns. dr maharaj had the great pleasure of working with dr burns on several projects. if he had only one word to describe her, it would be generous. she was generous with her time, knowledge and kindness. dr maharaj will aim to keep the memory of dr burns alive through the reciprocation of this generosity. reviewing the effect of student mentoring on the academic performance of undergraduate students identified as ‘at risk’ abstract introduction mentoring the research context methodology early intervention mentoring programme measuring success findings conclusion references author details dedication to margo burns journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 24 september 2022 the process of adapting an online induction course to support distinct student cohorts kirsty mcintyre university of glasgow jennifer o’neill university of glasgow abstract successful student transition into higher education is fundamental for student retention and future success. we have previously adapted a freely available online induction course to meet the needs of incoming medicine (mbchb) students. this case study outlines the process of further developing this course in response to student feedback and adapting a new version to support a distinct cohort of students studying life sciences (bsc) degrees. both courses were united in the aim to equip incoming students with an awareness of digital skills and key contacts for support and further training. however, each course was tailored to the specific requirements of the students it was designed to support. we evaluated student engagement with each course using course completion data and analytics. we observed that medicine students were highly engaged with the course initially, with most students (92%) completing the course. conversely, life sciences students engaged poorly with the course initially (17% completion) but returned to it throughout the academic year to access materials relevant to academic skills development, in part due to prompting from academic staff. we recommend that adopters of this course, or those like it, ensure that courses are designed to meet the specific needs of students. good time management is essential in ensuring that course implementation deadlines are met and that student input is incorporated into course design. we suggest that course coordinators consider how they might promote engagement with induction materials, both initially and throughout the academic year. mcintyre and o’neill the process of adapting an online induction course to support distinct student cohorts journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 2 keywords: transition; induction; digital literacy; digital skills context entry into higher education (he) marks a period of transition for incoming students. during this transition, students often experience ‘considerable change’ (yorke, 2000, p.2) as they ‘shift from one state of understanding, development, and maturity to another’ (hussey and smith, 2010, p.156). it is therefore anticipated that support provided during the induction period may be crucial in ensuring continuance and in promoting overall attainment. this premise may be particularly relevant to science, technology, engineering and maths (stem) students. bernacki et al. (2019) suggest that stem student preparedness to undertake study in he may be directly linked to academic achievement. this also reflects the findings of an earlier study by the national audit office (2007) which suggests that stem students demonstrate higher rates of non-continuation compared to non-stem students, indicating that such students may benefit from additional academic support. according to current literature, there is reason to believe that facilitating successful transitions – such as through bespoke online induction courses – may not only promote continuance but may also provide support to aid overall attainment (osborne and gallacher, 2007; gale and parker, 2014). whilst there is renewed emphasis upon the importance of such ‘transitions’, there remains little consensus upon a single definition (o’donnell et al., 2016). gale and parker (2014) propose three broad conceptualisations of ‘transition’ in he: ‘transition as an induction’, ‘transition as development’ and ‘transition as becoming’ (gale and parker, 2014, p.735). ‘transition as an induction’ (gale and parker, 2014) relates specifically to the first year of study which o’donnell et al. describe as a ‘distinct, discrete period of time at the beginning of a student’s higher education journey’ (o’donnell et al., 2016, p.6). ‘transition as development’ relates to a process of development throughout the he journey, rather than pertaining to a specific timeframe. finally, ‘transition as becoming’ relates to transition as a part of life, which is unique to the individual and so, is without universal consensus (gale and parker, 2014). if ‘transition as an induction’ and ‘transition as development’ are accepted as the most relevant conceptualisations of transition within he (gale and parker, 2014), then we can assume that students will require specific support during the induction into the first year of their mcintyre and o’neill the process of adapting an online induction course to support distinct student cohorts journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 3 undergraduate (ug) study and, subsequently, as they ‘develop’ into postgraduate (pg) students (yorke, 2000, p.2; hussey and smith, 2010, p.156). furthermore, in light of the shift towards remote or blended learning models in response to the covid-19 pandemic, ‘transitions as induction’ may involve greater emphasis on digital literacy and proficiency in navigating online learning environments. it has been demonstrated that increasing digital skills awareness in the induction phase is important in supporting successful transitions and improving students’ perceived preparedness (mcintyre, 2021). this case study reflects upon our experiences of adapting and implementing an online induction course to support stem students. it builds upon the premise outlined in hussey and smith (2010) that when developing transitional support, it is important to recognise the diversity that exists in both the student body as a whole and ‘...in the way in which they make transitions’ (p.155). accordingly, our online induction courses were created to meet the perceived needs of two student cohorts entering distinct programmes of study: ug medicine (mbchb), and ug life sciences (bsc). course development in 2019 we designed, implemented, and evaluated the utility of an online induction course in assisting year 1 medicine (mbchb) students’ transition into he (mcintyre, 2021). this course was adapted from the digital skills awareness course created by the bloomsbury learning exchange (ble) (bloomsbury learning exchange, no date). we chose the course from the ble because it had a modular design and was available under creative commons licensing, which made it straightforward to import into our virtual learning environment (vle), moodle, and then adapt to suit our specific needs. the aim of the online induction course was to increase students’ awareness of the digital skills required during their studies, whilst also raising awareness of discipline-specific concepts such as professionalism. students maintained access to the online induction course throughout the academic year. there was high engagement with the 2019 version of the course, and our research indicated that most students (66.2%, 88/133 students) considered the induction course beneficial for supporting their transition to medical school. furthermore, we found that a high proportion of students mcintyre and o’neill the process of adapting an online induction course to support distinct student cohorts journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 4 surveyed (90.9%, 121/133) agreed or strongly agreed that completing the online induction course gave them a sense of the professional expectations of them as a medical student (mcintyre, 2021). subsequently, staff from the wider college of medical, veterinary and life sciences were interested in extending the scheme to support their students transitioning into ug programmes. the first author ran a short practical workshop and information session for interested colleagues across the college during which participants began the process of editing cloned versions of the induction course to meet their students’ needs. as a result of this workshop, colleagues in the school of life sciences decided to develop a school-specific induction course for students transitioning into year 1 life sciences (bsc) programmes. we removed or rearranged and recombined aspects of the course, to meet the requirements of the distinct student cohorts (see table 1 for a comparative course overview). we held regular staff meetings during the development phase via microsoft teams where we reviewed each other’s courses, discussed changes, and offered support. additionally, programme leaders across the school of life sciences were consulted to identify the key digital skills students should be made aware of ahead of their life sciences studies. r programming software and microsoft office packages (particularly excel) were identified as important and were duly incorporated into the school of life sciences’ course. the fourth unit – ‘life sciences at glasgow’ – provided bespoke information that was not covered elsewhere, such as a wide range of course contacts, details of future curricular options, and information about study abroad opportunities. mcintyre and o’neill the process of adapting an online induction course to support distinct student cohorts journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 5 table 1. overview of the components of the mbchb online induction course and life sciences digital awareness course as launched in september 2020.  course title online induction course digital skills awareness course enrolled students undergraduate medicine (mbchb) students undergraduate life sciences (bsc) students launch date 5th september 2020 (week 0 minus 1) 14th september 2020 (week 0) title summary of content title summary of content unit 1 getting started assistive technology, working with files, office applications and finding information online, included an introduction to subject-specific resources (e.g. anatomy.tv and clinicalkey). getting started in the school of life sciences virtual orientation and welcome (e.g. tour of campus, welcome videos), accessibility, working with office applications, included subject-specific content (e.g. r programming), searching for information online. 2 learning and communicating online  virtual learning environment (moodle), communications (e.g. discussion forums, email) lecture capture and using zoom. learning online accounts, access (e.g. to wifi), online learning environments (e.g. moodle, microsoft teams), video resources, remote lectures and note-taking, online assessment. mcintyre and o’neill the process of adapting an online induction course to support distinct student cohorts journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 6 3 access, sharing and safety  accounts, access (e.g., to wifi) and logins, social media and sharing. communicating online communications (e.g. online forums), social media guidance, online group work tips, safety online, digital health. 4 getting organised note-taking, referencing and digital wellbeing. life sciences at glasgow introduction to key staff, introduction to the curriculum, professionalism, and expectations, ‘a day in the life’ (of a scientist/ life sciences student) feature. 5 medicine at glasgow introduction to key staff, curriculum overview, virtual reality tour of university medical school building, introduction to professionalism and our expectations of our students. n/a n/a mcintyre and o’neill the process of adapting an online induction course to support distinct student cohorts journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 7 finally, student feedback gathered in the 2019/2020 academic year was used to inform the development of the two online induction courses. students told us that they liked content to be presented in a range of formats, such as short written excerpts, short videos, and links to additional information. we also noted that students were particularly interested in the quotes provided by existing students – a generic aspect of the ble course template. we chose to recruit current year 2 medicine students and recent life sciences graduates to provide bespoke quotes relating to their experiences and advice, and to record short vlogs which could be embedded in the course. current ug medicine students explored themes of professionalism, study skills and student wellbeing, whilst the life sciences graduates addressed the use of technology to support learning, communication, and academic skills (table 1). we anticipated that this content would improve engagement. in both instances, development of the online courses in the 2020/2021 academic year was challenging due to timing and additional pressures brought on by the covid-19 pandemic. however, course dissemination and completion were unaffected by the pandemic. implementation medicine students were sent an email invitation to self-enrol on the online induction course one week before ‘week 0’ (15th september 2020, freshers’ week). the school of life sciences experienced delays in opening access to their course due to pending ethics committee approval and a last-minute decision to transfer the course from an external moodle server to an internal server. the decision to move the course to an internal server was made so that students would have access to the course in subsequent years of study at the university. staff enrolled life sciences students in week 0 of the academic year – which was the same week that students had access to their academic courses, with teaching due to commence the following week. if we were conducting this process again, we would set an explicit timetable of deadlines, agree on the course host site, and apply for ethical approval, earlier in the process. mcintyre and o’neill the process of adapting an online induction course to support distinct student cohorts journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 8 data collection in all cases, completion was encouraged but not required for course credits or academic progression. at the end of each unit there was a quiz. students were awarded a course certificate by obtaining 100% in all four (life sciences) or five (medicine) end-of-unit quizzes (table 1). student engagement with each online induction course was monitored using completion data (i.e. number of students achieving 100% in each endof-unit quiz) and moodle logs, to establish how often students were accessing the resources and information contained within the course. all students enrolled on an induction course were invited to complete a feedback survey at the time of completion (appendices 1-2). a previously described survey, used to evaluate medicine students’ perceptions of the online induction course (mcintyre, 2021), was adapted for this purpose. our aim in collating this information was to investigate student engagement with each course by comparing the two cohorts, and to examine the usefulness of online induction courses for incoming ug students. this study was approved by the university of glasgow college of medical, veterinary and life sciences ethics committee (application numbers: 200190117 and 200190002) and all data were handled in line with uk general data protection regulation (uk gdpr) requirements. findings student engagement with the induction courses there were 347 medicine and 744 life sciences students enrolled on the relevant course at the start of the academic year. of those life sciences students, 668 (90%) students were year 1 entrants and 76 (10%) were ‘direct entry’ students progressing straight into year 2. student engagement with each version of the online induction course is summarised in table 2. 92% of medicine students completed the course by mcintyre and o’neill the process of adapting an online induction course to support distinct student cohorts journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 9 achieving 100% in each end-of-unit quiz whereas 17% of life sciences students completed their version of the course. table 2. student engagement with the online induction course. degree programme enrolled accessed the course completed the course (scored 100% in each end of unit quiz) medicine 347 334 (96%) 318 (92%) life sciences 744 505 (68%) 127 (17%) most page hits, (69,974 in total), on the medicine online induction course were recorded between the release date (5th september 2020) and week 1 (20th september 2020), (see table 3). the school of life sciences course had 2,959 page hits between course release (14th september 2020) and week 1 (table 3). student page hits to the relevant courses ‘before week 1’ include logs up to and including 20th september 2020. in semester 1 there were 4,110 and 13,187 page hits by medicine and life sciences students, respectfully. there was less engagement with the courses in semester 2 (from 1st january 2021), with 88 hits by medicine students and 380 by life sciences students. table 3. student logs recorded on the online induction course. number of course page hits by students degree programme before week 1 semester 1 semester 2 medicine 69,974 4,110 88 life sciences 2,959 13,187 380 these data indicate that medicine students were highly engaged with the online induction course in the period between the course launch date and the start of the semester. however, there was limited engagement with the course thereafter, which suggests that medicine students did not use the online induction course as a resource to support their transition to he beyond the initial transition period. conversely, overall engagement (proportion of students accessing and completing the course) with the life sciences course was poor. however, data drawn from moodle logs suggest that those mcintyre and o’neill the process of adapting an online induction course to support distinct student cohorts journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 10 students who did access the course, continued to return to it throughout the academic year and engaged particularly well with the ‘unit 1’ section (table 1). our study data do not provide a strong basis for determining why there were differential levels of engagement amongst the student cohorts, however, we can surmise that the higher levels of engagement demonstrated by the school of medicine cohort were likely to be multi-factorial. the medicine cohort had to actively self-enrol on the course which required visiting the induction course page, whereas the life science students were auto-enrolled, requiring those students to take definitive steps to demonstrate ownership of their own learning behaviours from the outset (see conley and french, 2014 in bernacki et al., 2020 p.767). studies suggest that high-achieving students possess greater ability to regulate their own learning (isaacson and fujita, 2006). whilst the literature demonstrates that medicine students often develop the ability to selfregulate, it would be interesting to consider whether this cohort of vocational students are more likely to possess such self-regulatory abilities so early on in their studies (cho et al., 2017). by comparison, life science students were instructed to access the course later than the medicine cohort – at which stage they had academic commitments to fulfil. however, life sciences staff re-emphasised their course in january, which likely increased engagement. our findings pertaining to this cohort suggest that successful engagement may be facilitated through ‘nudging’. this can provide a signpost so that students are directed towards supportive resources throughout the semester and can help to develop self-learning skills. nudges have been shown to promote engagement with e-learning resources in a healthcare professionals’ context (piotrkowicz et al., 2020), and to promote active video watching in undergraduate students more broadly (dimitrova and mitrovic, 2021). further scrutiny of course logs reveals that life sciences students were returning to the course to access information on referencing, library skills, r programming software and searching for information online. students’ development of relevant knowledge, understanding, and skills just one aspect of successful transition (hussey and smith, 2010) may therefore be better supported by mcintyre and o’neill the process of adapting an online induction course to support distinct student cohorts journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 11 creating opportunities to nudge or re-direct students to the course at relevant points in the academic year. student perceptions of the induction courses the survey of incoming medicine students received 185 responses (53% of enrolled students). this contrasted with the school of life sciences survey for which we received 47 responses (6% of enrolled students). we asked survey respondents about their experiences of completing the course, and aspects that influenced their participation with it. responses from both medicine and life sciences students suggested that student engagement with the course would have been higher had students had greater awareness of the course, and earlier access to it, before the start of the semester (see example quotes in table 4). taken together, these responses indicate that strong communication of the course commencement is a key future consideration. students told us that they participated in the course to help ease their transition into university and to alleviate stress. students were also keen to get information on how the covid-19 pandemic would impact their experience. respondents said that they found the induction course intuitive and helpful in terms of course content. these results provide insights into what motivates students to engage with the course and indicate that the information provided was meaningful to students. table 4. student perceptions of the induction courses. example quotes awareness of the online induction course ‘[…] i was only aware of this course after uni had started due to the sheer volume of emails i get daily into my student email so was somewhat rushed in completing it’ (life sciences student). mcintyre and o’neill the process of adapting an online induction course to support distinct student cohorts journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 12 ‘i received an email about this course, however this was midway through september, after i had already started’ (life sciences student). ‘there was no clear communication regarding the course and how to enroll [sic] – i only found out about it through other applicants’ (medicine student). ‘i did not participate in the programme because i was not aware that it was taking place’ (life sciences student). ‘i wish i had taken part in this course because it sounds as though it would have been very beneficial.’ (life sciences student) reasons for participation ‘i participated to ensure i was up to date with all new policies from the university given the recent changes resulting from covid-19 [sic]’ (medicine student). ‘it [is] quite a big jump from school to university and i think the fact everything [is] online hasn’t helped to ease any stress. i participated in this course to see if i could relieve some stress’ (life sciences student). ‘i wanted to have a firm understanding of all the online platforms that are going to be used during semester one, before starting the course, as i didn’t want a lack of knowledge of the systems to cause a problem with my education’ (medicine student). positive experiences of the online induction course ‘i found this induction course very helpful and it has made me feel more confident before starting year 1’ (medicine student). ‘the induction course was well organized and easy to use and therefore encouraged engagement’ (medicine student). mcintyre and o’neill the process of adapting an online induction course to support distinct student cohorts journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 13 ‘i was interested to see information that may help me with digital learning. i wasn’t aware of onenote and i might use it now to organise my notes as it seems helpful. thanks’ (medicine student). ‘i think the course was very informative, i would not make any more recommendations.’ (life sciences student) ‘in terms of engagement the short videos from the 2nd year medical students were useful and were a much more interesting way of learning than simply reading’ (medicine student). negative experiences of the online induction course ‘some of the videos were difficult to access on my device’ (medicine student). ‘overall, i found the course quite easy to follow and engaging. however, there were a few times that i felt some of the information was quite general, or covering knowledge that would have been acquired by most students prior to the induction course’ (medicine student). ‘i would have liked if moodle was introduced at the start of the course as i believe it is the most crucial component to my learning (life sciences student) ‘some parts were very helpful but some parts felt very long’ (medicine student). ‘i found the glasgow specific information very helpful, but covered a lot of the other content when attending university previously’ (medicine student). mcintyre and o’neill the process of adapting an online induction course to support distinct student cohorts journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 14 digital badges (life sciences only) ‘certificate seems more rewarding’ (life sciences student). ‘[s]trongly dislike the idea of digital badges [as] university is not a game [and] badges imply its some kind of points system to pass opposed to helping you get adjusted to university’ (life sciences student). course completion and certification all students were awarded certificates for completing the online induction course (by achieving 100% in all end-of-unit quizzes). medicine students were encouraged to upload their certification as part of an nhs e-portfolio which would contribute to professional development. staff recognised that this may have provided an additional motivating factor for medicine students to complete the course. since there was no corresponding portfolio available to life sciences students, staff explored whether the use of digital skills badges would enhance motivation in this cohort by adding a degree of gamification to the course. gamification – the use of game elements in non-gaming contexts has been explored as a means of enhancing engagement in stem subjects, albeit without consensus as to its impact (ortiz rojas et al., 2016). we asked life sciences students whether digital badges, linked to attainment and reported on their he transcripts, would have influenced their participation in the course. contrary to expectations, students appeared to prefer the certification system (table 4). concluding remarks we found it challenging to coordinate course development and integration within our existing curricula. collaboration was required at a departmental and university level to ensure that there was no duplication of work for staff or students. a lack of awareness of deadlines and time required to implement ethical approval led to delays in the roll out mcintyre and o’neill the process of adapting an online induction course to support distinct student cohorts journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 15 of one of our courses which could have been avoided through improved means of communication. our experiences align with previous studies which suggest that improved communication between staff would be beneficial (devis-rozental and clarke, 2021). it is, however, also recognised that this came at a time when all academic staff were navigating the difficulties and uncertainties of teaching during the early stages of the covid-19 pandemic. whilst the majority of life sciences students accessed the induction course (68%), few students completed it (17%). it is therefore clear that offering a certificate alone did not promote course completion in this cohort. moreover, the response to the survey from life sciences students was poor (6%). further work is required to understand how we might promote overall engagement with the course, as well as alternative means of collating feedback. overall, participants were satisfied with the induction course; they particularly valued the opportunity to ‘try out’ moodle and learn more about digital resources. suggestions were made for more information on how to study, an example timetable, and practical considerations such as how to organise their time or whether to buy textbooks. these recommendations will be implemented in future iterations of the course. it is important that the structure and content of the induction courses continues to be flexible, to adapt to the current needs of the students they are designed to support. principles for creating online induction materials we have successfully adapted a publicly available digital skills awareness course (bloomsbury learning exchange, no date) into bespoke induction courses to support traditional induction activities for our ug medicine and life sciences students. this case study contributes to our understanding of how, and why, students engage with transition support across two ug programmes. our findings provide a basis for scholars mcintyre and o’neill the process of adapting an online induction course to support distinct student cohorts journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 16 who seek to implement their own online induction courses, and we have identified the following key recommendations: • allow time for course development and feedback. o e.g. have you identified colleagues with expertise in learning technologies or course design to provide feedback or guidance? o do you want to evaluate your course, and do you require ethical approval to do so? • adapt induction courses to the needs of the incoming cohorts. o have you considered whether your students are ug or pg and how this may impact prior experiential learning, knowledge, and support needs (poobalan et al., 2021)? • tailor induction courses to include student input. o are there opportunities to include past-student quotes, video blogs and recommendations? • tailor induction materials to the specific cohort needs to promote engagement. o have you identified cohort-specific software or professional guidelines for inclusion? • provide ample time for students to engage with the course. o have you factored in time for students to engage around their existing work and/or caring responsibilities? • scaffold engagement with the course throughout the academic year. o have you contemplated running the course alongside academic skills development sessions? • identify a cohort-specific means of incentivisation. o is gamification, certification, or a link to professional development likely to influence engagement amongst your cohort? o can you create opportunities to ‘nudge’ students to engage with your course? mcintyre and o’neill the process of adapting an online induction course to support distinct student cohorts journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 17 references bernacki, m. l. vosicka, l.,utz, j. c. and warren, c.b. (2019) ‘effects of digital learning skill training on academic performance of undergraduates in science and mathematics’, journal of educational psychology, 113(6), pp. 1107-1125. https://doi.org/10.1037/edu0000485 bernacki, m. l. vosicka, l. and utz, j. c. (2020) ‘can a brief, digital skill training intervention help undergraduates “learn to learn” and improve their stem achievement?’ journal of educational psychology, 112(4), pp. 765–781. https://doi.org/10.1037/edu0000405 bloomsbury learning exchange (no date) digital skills awareness courses – bloomsbury learning exchange. available at https://www.ble.ac.uk/digitalawareness.html (accessed: 11 june 2020). cho, k. k., marjadi, b., langendyk, v. and hu, w. (2017), ‘the self-regulated learning of medical students in the clinical environment a scoping review’, bmc medical education, 17(112), https://doi.org/10.1186/s12909-017-0956-6 devis-rozental, c. and clarke, s. (2021) ‘he staff’s attitudes and expectations about their role in induction activities’, journal of learning and development in higher education, 21, https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.vi21.659 dimitrova, v. and mitrovic, a. (2021) ‘choice architecture for nudges to support constructive learning in active video watching’, international journal of artificial intelligence in education https://doi.org/10.1007/s40593-021-00263-1 https://doi.org/10.1037/edu0000485 https://doi.org/10.1037/edu0000405 https://www.ble.ac.uk/digitalawareness.html https://doi.org/10.1186/s12909-017-0956-6 https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.vi21.659 https://doi.org/10.1007/s40593-021-00263-1 mcintyre and o’neill the process of adapting an online induction course to support distinct student cohorts journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 18 gale, t. and parker, s. (2014) ‘navigating change: a typology of student transition in higher education’, studies in higher education, 39(5), pp. 734-753. https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2012.721351 hussey, t. and smith, p. (2010) ‘transitions in higher education’, innovations in education and teaching international. 47(2), pp. 155-164. https://doi.org/10.1080/14703291003718893 isaacson, r. and fujita, f. (2006) ‘metacognitive knowledge monitoring and selfregulated learning’, journal of the scholarship of teaching and learning, 6(1), 39–55. mcintyre k. (2021) ‘bridging the gap: implementation of an online induction course to support students’ transition into first year medicine [version 2]’, mededpublish, 9(193), https://doi.org/10.15694/mep.2020.000193.2 national audit office. (2007) staying the course: the retention of students in higher education. london: the stationery office. available at https://www.nao.org.uk/reports/staying-the-course-the-retention-of-students-inhigher-education/ (accessed: 28 august 2022) o’donnell, v.l., kean, m. and stevens, g. (2016) student transition in higher education. concepts, theories and practices. higher education academy (hea). available at https://www.advance-he.ac.uk/knowledge-hub/student-transitionhigher-education-university-west-scotland-uws (accessed: 16 august 2022) ortiz rojas, m. e., chiluiza, k. and valcke, m. (2016) ‘gamification in higher education and stem: a systematic review of literature’, edulearn: 8th international conference on education and new learning technologies, valencia. pp. 6548– 6558. available at http://hdl.handle.net/1854/lu-8542410 (accessed: 7 september 2021) https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2012.721351 https://doi.org/10.1080/14703291003718893 https://doi.org/10.15694/mep.2020.000193.2 https://www.nao.org.uk/reports/staying-the-course-the-retention-of-students-in-higher-education/ https://www.nao.org.uk/reports/staying-the-course-the-retention-of-students-in-higher-education/ https://www.advance-he.ac.uk/knowledge-hub/student-transition-higher-education-university-west-scotland-uws https://www.advance-he.ac.uk/knowledge-hub/student-transition-higher-education-university-west-scotland-uws http://hdl.handle.net/1854/lu-8542410 mcintyre and o’neill the process of adapting an online induction course to support distinct student cohorts journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 19 osborne, m. and gallacher, j (2007) ‘an international perspective on researching widening access’, pp 3–16, in obsborne, j., gallacher, j, crossan, b.(eds.) researching widening access to lifelong learning: issues and approaches in international research. london: routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203300305-1 piotrkowicz a., dimitrova, v., hallam, j. and price, r (2020) ’towards personalisation for learner motivation in healthcare: a study on using learner characteristics to personalise nudges in an e-learning context’, adjunct publication of the 28th acm conference on user modeling, adaptation and personalization, pp. 287– 292. https://doi.org/10.1145/3386392.3399290 poobalan, a., barrow, j. and cleland, j. (2021) '"i had no idea the university offered"…: the support needs of postgraduate taught students ', mededpublish. 10(121) https://doi.org/10.15694/mep.2021.000121.1 yorke, m. (2000) ‘smoothing the transition into higher education: what can be learned from student non-completion?’, journal of institutional research. 9(1) pp. 35-47. available at http://www.aair.org.au/app/webroot/media/pdf/jir/journal%20of%20institutional %20research%20in%20australasia%20and%20jir/volume%209,%20no.%201 %20may%202000/yorke.pdf (accessed: 28 july 2021) https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203300305-1 https://doi.org/10.1145/3386392.3399290 https://doi.org/10.15694/mep.2021.000121.1 http://www.aair.org.au/app/webroot/media/pdf/jir/journal%20of%20institutional%20research%20in%20australasia%20and%20jir/volume%209,%20no.%201%20may%202000/yorke.pdf http://www.aair.org.au/app/webroot/media/pdf/jir/journal%20of%20institutional%20research%20in%20australasia%20and%20jir/volume%209,%20no.%201%20may%202000/yorke.pdf http://www.aair.org.au/app/webroot/media/pdf/jir/journal%20of%20institutional%20research%20in%20australasia%20and%20jir/volume%209,%20no.%201%20may%202000/yorke.pdf mcintyre and o’neill the process of adapting an online induction course to support distinct student cohorts journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 20 appendix 1 mbchb induction course 2020-21 participant information you are being invited to take part in a research study. before you decide, it is important for you to understand why the research is being done and what it will involve. please take time to read the following information carefully and discuss it with others if you wish. ask us if there is anything that is not clear or if you would like more information. by completing the questionnaire you will be considered to be consenting to the study. background to this study we have designed an online induction course to support new medical students in their transition into higher education and/or the undergraduate medical school. the purpose of this study is to investigate the attitudes and experience of current medical students as to their perception of this induction course, and if/how they see the potential for this course to be improved. why am i being asked to participate? you have been asked to take part as you are a 1st year medical student. it is up to you to decide whether or not to take part in this study. a decision not to participate will not affect your grades in any way. what will happen if i decide to take part? if you take part, you will be asked to fill out a short online questionnaire on your experiences of the new online induction course. the questionnaire will take no longer than 15 minutes to complete. the completed questionnaires will be analysed to see if any common themes emerge. the information we gather will give us a better understanding of how students view the induction course and may help in future course design. are there any benefits or risks involved? although there is no specific benefit to taking part in the study, completing the questionnaire may allow you to reflect on your experiences, which you may find helpful. what will happen to my data if i take part? researchers from the xxx collect, store and process all personal information in accordance with the general data protection regulation (2018). you will not be asked to disclose any personally identifiable information. all data will be stored in electronic format on secure password-protected computers. the data will be stored in archiving facilities in line with the xxx retention policy of up to 10 years. after this period, further retention may be agreed or your data will be securely destroyed in accordance with the relevant standard procedures. your rights to access, change or mcintyre and o’neill the process of adapting an online induction course to support distinct student cohorts journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 21 move the information we store may be limited, as we need to manage your information in specific ways in order for the research to be reliable and accurate. you can find out more about how we use your information from xxx. how will the results be communicated? it is anticipated that the results of the study will be presented both internally and externally and submitted for publication in the appropriate literature. no-one will be identifiable from the information presented. the project has been reviewed by the xxx ethics committee. if you have any questions or concerns about the research feel free to contact the organiser of the study: xxx. thank you for taking time to read this information sheet. demographics please don't select more than 1 answer(s) per row. please select at least 1 answer(s). not at all slightly moderately very extremely how prepared did you feel about entering the medical programme? mcintyre and o’neill the process of adapting an online induction course to support distinct student cohorts journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 22 use of the induction course i have participated in the mbchb induction course required i have completed the mbchb induction course by scoring 100% in the five end-of-unit quizzes. required mcintyre and o’neill the process of adapting an online induction course to support distinct student cohorts journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 23 online induction course please rate how much you agree or disagree with the following statements required please don't select more than 1 answer(s) per row. please select at least 6 answer(s). strongly disagree disagree neutral agree strongly agree the induction course assisted my transition to medical education the induction course covered all the information i needed before starting the course the level and amount of information given in the course was appropriate for me since completing the course, i feel confident using moodle completing the course gave me a sense of the professional expectations of me as a medical student i would use / have used the induction course as an additional resource to core medical teaching during semester 1 mcintyre and o’neill the process of adapting an online induction course to support distinct student cohorts journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 24 online induction course please rate the components of the induction course in terms of how helpful you found them required please don't select more than 1 answer(s) per row. please select at least 9 answer(s). not at all helpful somewhat helpful extremely helpful short videos overall written content links to additional resources quizzes (units 1-4) professionalism quiz (unit 5) introduction to moodle/using moodle introduction to key staff introduction to the medical curriculum general information about xxx virtual reality tour of the xxx how likely is it that you would recommend this course to another student starting first year? required please don't select more than 1 answer(s) per row. please select at least 1 answer(s). 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 not at all likely extremely likely free text questions the purpose of this questionnaire is to gather general feedback on the online induction course. we do not wish to capture any personally identifiable information or information related to personal circumstances. students are reminded to avoid sharing such information when responding to this questionnaire. mcintyre and o’neill the process of adapting an online induction course to support distinct student cohorts journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 25 what information (if any) would you like to see included in the induction course? please explain your answer and suggest what additions (if any) end of survey thank you for your time. thank you for completing this survey the research team would like to thank you for your participation in this survey. mcintyre and o’neill the process of adapting an online induction course to support distinct student cohorts journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 26 appendix 2: xxx digital skills awareness course 2020-21 page 1: participant information you are being invited to take part in a research study. before you decide, it is important for you to understand why the research is being done and what it will involve. please take time to read the following information carefully and discuss it with others if you wish. ask us if there is anything that is not clear or if you would like more information. by completing the questionnaire you will be considered to be consenting to the study. background to this study we have designed an online digital skills awareness course to support new xxx students in their transition into higher education. the purpose of this study is to investigate the attitudes and experience of current students as to their perception of this digital skills awareness course, and if/how they see the potential for this course to be improved. why am i being asked to participate? you have been asked to take part as you are a xxx student. it is up to you to decide whether or not to take part in this study. a decision not to participate will not affect your grades in any way. what will happen if i decide to take part? if you take part, you will be asked to fill out a short online questionnaire on your experiences of the new online induction course. the questionnaire will take no longer than 15 minutes to complete. the completed questionnaires will be analysed to see if any common themes emerge. the information we gather will give us a better understanding of how students view the digital skills awareness course and may help in future course design. are there any benefits or risks involved? mcintyre and o’neill the process of adapting an online induction course to support distinct student cohorts journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 27 although there is no specific benefit to taking part in the study, completing the questionnaire may allow you to reflect on your experiences, which you may find helpful. what will happen to my data if i take part? researchers from the xxx collect, store and process all personal information in accordance with the general data protection regulation (2018). you will not be asked to disclose any personally identifiable information. all data will be stored in electronic format on secure password-protected computers. the data will be stored in archiving facilities in line with the xxx retention policy of up to 10 years. after this period, further retention may be agreed or your data will be securely destroyed in accordance with the relevant standard procedures. your rights to access, change or move the information we store may be limited, as we need to manage your information in specific ways in order for the research to be reliable and accurate. you can find out more about how we use your information from xxx. how will the results be communicated? it is anticipated that the results of the study will be presented both internally and externally and submitted for publication in the appropriate literature. no-one will be identifiable from the information presented. the project has been reviewed by the xxx ethics committee. if you have any questions or concerns about the research, you can contact the organiser of the study: xxx thank you for taking time to read this information sheet. mcintyre and o’neill the process of adapting an online induction course to support distinct student cohorts journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 28 author details kirsty mcintyre is a lecturer in the school of medicine, dentistry and nursing at the university of glasgow. she has a postgraduate diploma in academic practice and phd in placental physiology. jennifer o’neill is a lecturer in the school of medicine, dentistry and nursing at the university of glasgow. she is a fellow of the higher education academy and has a phd in medical law and ethics. the process of adapting an online induction course to support distinct student cohorts abstract context course development implementation data collection findings student engagement with the induction courses student perceptions of the induction courses course completion and certification concluding remarks principles for creating online induction materials references appendix 1 mbchb induction course 2020-21 participant information demographics use of the induction course online induction course online induction course free text questions thank you for completing this survey appendix 2: xxx digital skills awareness course 2020-21 page 1: participant information author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special issue 22: compendium of innovative practice october 2021 editorial: supporting staff through change cathy malone middlesex university london staff development teams routinely focus on supporting others to innovate and collaborate to improve learning and teaching, examining what can be done to facilitate reflection and present staff development in ways that reach across the whole campus. during the pandemic these teams were tasked with the challenge of rapid technical upskilling of both themselves and teams they worked with, as large staff groups used to high levels of face to face contact moved their courses online. at the same time there was a need to maintain quality of provision in terms of maintaining a high degree of interactivity in order to create an engaging student experience. many of the usual challenges of staff development were writ large by the pandemic: there was an urgent need to undertake professional development, learn rapidly how to teach in an online environment when staff themselves were time poor and under pressure from the myriad of additional pandemic demands that home working brought with it, particularly for women employed in he (kovarovic et al., 2021). while many challenges felt familiar, the experience of the pandemic for many authors brought with it a dramatic increase in engagement and appetite for all forms of cpd. as many of the papers here attest, our colleagues were hungry for development in spite of the increased demands on their time. the situation we confronted as a sector demanded innovative responses from large diverse staff groups. in these papers authors unpick precisely what is required to support and develop the cognitive and social capacity to collaborate in the pandemic. they also identify the components and prerequisites for innovation in terms of technical competence, feelings of autonomy and relatedness that together contribute to motivation to innovate (averill and major, 2020). regarding technical upskilling, several authors stress the importance of avoiding the exclusive focus on operational and technical matters and the importance of acknowledging the scale of the paradigm shift that the sector experienced in moving wholesale online. editorial journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 many staff teams and authors returned to the work of wenger (1999) and revisited communities of practice (cop) as vehicles for staff development, and we see how this concept is refreshed and developed with some creativity adapted for an online pandemic context. the core features of academic communities of practice remained as spaces where ‘academics can engage in discussions of informal and situated leaning to share experiences of what worked and what didn’t’ (anderson, 2020, p.461). what was new was adapting to create these spaces in an online context. in this collection of papers we see development teams establish with some ingenuity online spaces and opportunities for sharing and collaboration at the level of online networks, developing radio shows, blogs, informal cafes and drop ins, workshops organised to support individual and peer reflection. this collection also provides detailed accounts from teams themselves engaged in their own journeys of shared structured reflection and autonomous development, confronting what worked and what didn’t. read together these papers demonstrate the resilience of staff, and the capacity of teams to work together engaging in sustained critical reflection to both ‘embrace the reset’ (robinson 2020) and face these challenges with considerable resources of ingenuity and creativity. references: anderson, v. (2020) ‘a digital pedagogy pivot: re-thinking higher education practice from an hrd perspective’, human resource development international, 23:4, 452-467, https://doi.org/10.1080/13678868.2020.1778999. averill, r., and major, j. (2020) ‘what motivates higher education educators to innovate? exploring competence, autonomy, and relatedness – and connections with wellbeing’, educational research, 62:2, 146-161, https://doi.org/10.1080/00131881.2020.1755877. kovarovic, k., dixon, m., hall, k., and westmarland, n. (2021) ‘the impact of covid-19 on mothers working in uk higher education institutions’, report for research england https://doi.org/10.1080/13678868.2020.1778999 https://doi.org/10.1080/00131881.2020.1755877 editorial journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 https://www.dur.ac.uk/resources/lets.network/mothersinheandcovid19reportbymamsnetworkjune2021.pdf (accessed 22 october 2021). robinson, s. (2020) ‘a global reset of education’, prospects 49,7-9, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11125-020-09493-y. wenger, e. (1999) communities of practice: learning, meaning, identity. cambridge, cup. https://www.dur.ac.uk/resources/lets.network/mothersinheandcovid-19reportbymamsnetworkjune2021.pdf https://www.dur.ac.uk/resources/lets.network/mothersinheandcovid-19reportbymamsnetworkjune2021.pdf https://doi.org/10.1007/s11125-020-09493-y journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 26: special edi issue february 2023 ________________________________________________________________________ ©2023 the author(s) (cc-by 4.0) an in-depth and fascinating insight to decolonising the he curriculum book review: tran, d. (2021) decolonizing university teaching and learning: an entry model for grappling with complexities (london: bloomsbury academic). donna gundry arts university plymouth, uk keywords: higher education; decolonisation; university; teaching and learning. overview this highly fascinating read looks at the relationship between curriculum, pedagogy, staff, and students under the lens of decolonisation. it demonstrates at every turn how to facilitate learning using wide-reaching concepts that support those in education, pulling together research and information on this topic to support those working, studying, developing, and researching within higher education. this text examines academic practices including lectures and their content, going beyond looking at reading lists and assessment criteria, by drawing on the experiences and impact of the covid-19 lockdown. it really feels like this text has delved deep into the make-up and design of higher education to review its relationship with equality and assess how the institution can be decolonised. it focuses on all aspects of how equality, or the lack of it, impacts on learners' development in higher education, by drawing on students' experiences to provide greater knowledge and understanding. its aim is to create an equal culture and environment for individuals to thrive and develop. this text provides a sense of pulling this topic together in a coherent and timely manner and uses this to demonstrate how students can learn most effectively within the sector. this book is very much a critical developmental dialogue, with conversations and discussions still taking place. yet it could also act as an agent for change, addressing an issue that the book demonstrates exists within every aspect of higher education. a key objective of the text is to highlight the benefits of decolonisation gundry an in-depth and fascinating insight into decolonising the he curriculum journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 2 within teaching and learning, for both staff and students, rather than offering a resolution or answer to the issue. this book is not afraid to make strong suggestions on how higher education needs to move forward, with the suggestion at one point being its complete dismantling and rebuilding to be more inclusive. reading the voices of students within the text brings a sense of realism to the book – this is not just theory – creating an approachable and personal read, one which is more relatable to those working within the learning context of higher education. organisations and individuals that seek to create a change in culture in terms of decolonisation will find this a highly relevant read. structure and content one of the strengths of the text is how it varies between discussing decolonisation as a topic, subject, movement, process, or an agenda: at times the chapter authors combine multiple facets to define and support decolonisation. the text acknowledges that it is not a reference guide to all resources on the topic, but it does reflect an extensive body of work. though this is a relatively recent topic of discussion, there is an extensive breadth of work included within the text which provides a full and broad critical dialogue regarding the topic of decolonisation within education. a rich variety of content adds to the narrative and the text takes a global approach to the situation. the book references the covid-19 lockdowns and how academic institutions needed to quickly adapt delivery to online teaching; however, as it points out, the move to online teaching needed to be considerate of the students as individuals, ensuring needs were met within a digital environment. the book employs two key principles: firstly, critical race theory (crt), a wide reaching, cross-disciplinary theory which examines how the media and legislation, as well as social and political movements, are shaped by both race and ethnicity. founded in america in the 1970s, more recently this theory has come under some criticism (delgado and stefancic, 2012). secondly, it uses traac, which stands for teaching, relationship, activity and assessment, and content. though traac has been used before in connection to decolonisation and teaching in higher education (p.232), in this context the model provide some meaningful prompts to help instigate deeper reflections of, and conversations around, decolonisation by way of supporting colleagues to start a productive dialogue. https://paperpile.com/c/yrkuea/963l https://paperpile.com/c/yrkuea/963l https://paperpile.com/c/yrkuea/ppvo gundry an in-depth and fascinating insight into decolonising the he curriculum journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 3 chapter one opens with a broad conversation of decolonisation within the curriculum and chapter two sets out the principles for good development. while chapter two did feel like a slight divergence from the main topic of conversation, the second part of the chapter provided an interesting context and advocated authentic discussions on the topic of decolonisation. this chapter, and the rest of the book, upholds the belief that it is okay to ask questions and acknowledges there will be a variety of views. the text advocates having a safe space to embrace potentially difficult conversations. though a side-line to the initial topic of discussion, it is this chapter that i would be most likely to recommend for others to read, given the case studies from students: this felt impactful and had the widest relevancy. having introduced traac and its complexities within chapter three here there is a detailed and thorough outline introducing the model and its merits. the remaining five chapters each takes one element of traac to support decolonisation within a higher education context. chapter seven looks at the topic of trust between students and academics and the impact this can have on the power dynamics of a classroom, which can be addressed, as suggested, by different teaching approaches. chapter eight summarises the implementation of traac across a variety of disciplines. summary the book moves between talking about language and curriculum content to technology and how this can support decolonisation. at points it widens the conversation to cover the topic of belonging within an educational institution and the time old conversation of engagement with the institution by working alongside students and creating a positive experience of higher education. the text encompasses a plethora of topics that need to be addressed to support the decolonisation of higher education and facilitating learning, from staff's unconscious bias to the hierarchy within a classroom, to the lack of representation of members of the bame community in the senior leadership teams. having sections written by students makes the book an incredibly holistic account of working towards equality, furthering the concept of students facilitating and shaping their own learning. overall, a wealth of knowledge, experience and devotion has gone into the writing; every possible avenue has been explored and reflected upon in order to support learning development. the book strikes a hopeful and ambitious tone, looking for widespread and gundry an in-depth and fascinating insight into decolonising the he curriculum journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 4 radical change to higher education systems, supporting both academics, professional services staff, and students. references delgado, r. and stefancic, j. (2012) critical race theory: an introduction. 2nd edn. new york: new york university press. author details donna gundry is the head of library services at the country's newest university, arts university plymouth. she has over a decade of experience within higher education libraries and has seen the pedagogy changes that have arisen during this time. this resulted in her achieving both her cilip fellowship in 2020 and senior hea fellowship in 2022. she is an active member of the equality, diversity and inclusion committee and recently presented her departmental projects connected to decolonisation at both swrls and arlis annual conferences in 2022. licence ©2023 the author(s). this is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (cc-by 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. see http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. journal of learning development in higher education (jldhe) is a peer-reviewed open access journal published by the association for learning development in higher education (aldinhe). journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special issue 22: compendium of innovative practice october 2021 ________________________________________________________________________ from emergency remote teaching to hybrid nuflex: a collaborative approach to developing faculty into learning designers rachel c. plews northeastern university, usa michael sweet northeastern university, usa lindsey sudbury northeastern university, usa will malan northeastern university, usa clair waterbury northeastern university, usa jesse savage northeastern university, usa erin provensal northeastern university, usa maximo chavez northeastern university, usa keywords: hyflex; covid-19; resilient teaching; faculty development. the challenge in the spring of 2020, nearly all universities faced the unprecedented challenge of moving to emergency remote teaching during the covid-19 pandemic. northeastern university introduced hybrid nuflex as their approach to ensuring academic continuity for students while attempting to welcome as many students as possible back to campus for a typical residential university learning experience in autumn 2020. this approach required a shift in thinking from plews, sweet, sudbury, malan, waterbury, from emergency remote teaching to hybrid nuflex: a collaborative savage, provensal and chavez approach to developing faculty into learning designers journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 2 emergency remote teaching to a more intentionally planned design that would provide an equitable learning experience for both on-ground and remote learners. in addition to thinking about content delivery, faculty members also needed to familiarise themselves with the technologies they would be using in the physical space to connect all learners during class time. therefore, our main challenge was to support faculty members in adapting their course design and delivery to reach all learners regardless of teaching modality. we viewed this challenge as a triad consisting of general pedagogical challenges, the integration of various technologies for course design and delivery (e.g., canvas, zoom, and other platforms), and the challenge of learning how to use the hardware in the physical classrooms (e.g., camera and microphone systems). layered on top was the learning and development challenge of turning faculty, many of whom had only taught in traditional face-to-face courses prior to autumn 2020, into learning designers, when the disruption of the pandemic diminished their available energy and attention. the response in response to this triad of challenges, the center for advancing teaching and learning through research (catlr) academic technologies (at), and digital university solutions (digiu) worked together to develop a survey for students and faculty about their experiences in the autumn 2020 term, analyse the results, and deliver a series of back in the classroom bootcamp workshops that targeted areas of concern. we delivered 16 sessions in december 2020 and january 2021 with a total of 239 participants. the first two hours of the three-hour bootcamp consisted of a workshop on active learning, an overview of the platforms needed for a successful class using at, and a demonstration from digiu on the features of the classroom technology. these components align with the need for both support on design and support on delivery, the defining characteristic of the hyflex teaching modality (beatty, 2019; smith, maiden and abinader, 2019). during the last hour of the bootcamp, faculty were assigned to work in pairs along with an instructional assistant in the specific nuflex design room that they would be teaching in during the semester to experiment and try out what they learned with a peer. plews, sweet, sudbury, malan, waterbury, from emergency remote teaching to hybrid nuflex: a collaborative savage, provensal and chavez approach to developing faculty into learning designers journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 3 recommendations our recommendations are divided into two categories – recommendations that are focused on supporting course (re)design that is resilient across modalities and recommendations for cross-unit collaborations on faculty support initiatives. recommendations for supporting resilient course design hybrid flexible (hyflex) learning design evolved from traditional online learning (mainly asynchronous interactions) and blended approaches (synchronous activities in addition to asynchronous content). the hyflex design, built on the principles of learner choice, equivalency, reusability, and accessibility, allows students to choose whether to attend classes face-to-face or online, synchronously, or asynchronously (beatty, 2019). while this flexibility is often cited as one of the main benefits for students (talbert, 2020; kohnke and moorhouse, 2021), it also requires a shift in how the faculty member approaches course design and delivery. this shift can be considered similar to the flipped classroom approach, which represents a change in how we think about the use of time for teaching and learning. knowledge transfer, which traditionally takes place during a face-to-face lecture, now occurs asynchronously prior to a synchronous class session where time is used for activities requiring higher level thinking skills including consensus-building, question-and-answer sessions, peer review, collaborative project work, and presentations (hutchings and quinney, 2015; farmer, 2018; boettcher and conrad, 2021). for our approach to course design recommendations, itemised below, we combined what has been shared about hyflex delivery with survey data from students about what was and was not working for them during the autumn semester. 1. propose solutions that will permit a seamless pivot between modalities as often as needed. the hyflex principle of equivalency tells us that learning objectives should be the same regardless of modality, while instructional objectives may shift based on plews, sweet, sudbury, malan, waterbury, from emergency remote teaching to hybrid nuflex: a collaborative savage, provensal and chavez approach to developing faculty into learning designers journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 4 participation mode or delivery modality (beatty, 2019). this aligns with talbert’s (2020) recommendation that we can no longer focus on one modality (face-to-face or online) when supporting faculty course design. 2. use the learning management system as a consistent platform for course materials, resources, and communication for learners. the lms is a great ‘home base’ for courses in any modality and a consistent structure and presence will help to facilitate any pivots during the semester. we recommended that faculty consider recording their courses and including the recordings along with any files or resources covered in the class session. all assessments were also integrated into the canvas course, with the week’s work aggregated into a module with due dates included. this helps students stay on track without in-classroom cues. 3. encourage faculty members to identify ways to build a sense of community and belonging for learners. as faculty members are designing their courses, it is increasingly important for them to consider using synchronous polling, chat, and breakout room group activities to help students remain connected regardless of modality or an unanticipated pivot. garrison (2009) tells us that in addition to teaching presence and cognitive presence, social presence is an essential part of any educational experience. in addition to our recommendations on meeting the pedagogical challenges faced by faculty members, we considered feedback from faculty on the bootcamp support model to improve future support initiatives. this feedback indicated that their levels of confidence for teaching in the nuflex modality grew after attending the session. the participants most valued the balance of application of active learning strategies to the nuflex context as well as the hands-on experience in real classroom settings. based on these findings and our experiences as facilitators, when developing and managing cross-unit collaborations, we recommend that learning designers and support teams identify the related challenges and provide one integrated solution to address them. to encourage faculty to adopt new practices, focus on the impact these changes might have on student learning, providing evidence to support the practices. finally, because universities may plews, sweet, sudbury, malan, waterbury, from emergency remote teaching to hybrid nuflex: a collaborative savage, provensal and chavez approach to developing faculty into learning designers journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 5 struggle with standardising technology across their many classrooms, we recommend that instructors are offered practise with the specific type of room in which they would be teaching. references beatty, b. j. (2019) hybrid-flexible course design: implementing student directed hybrid classes. provo, utah: edtech books. boettcher, j. v. and conrad, r. m. (2021) the online teaching survival guide: simple and practical pedagogical tips. san francisco, ca: john wiley & sons. farmer, r. (2018) ‘the what, the how and the why of the flipped classroom’, innovative practice in higher education, 3(2), pp.14-31. garrison, d. r. (2009) ‘communities of inquiry in online learning’, in rogers, p., berg, g., boettcher, j., howard, c., justice, l. and schenk, k. (eds.) encyclopedia of distance learning. 2nd end. hershey, pa: igi global, pp. 352-355. http://doi:10.4018/978-160566-198-8.ch052. hutchings, m. and quinney, a. (2015) ‘the flipped classroom, disruptive pedagogies, enabling technologies and wicked problems: responding to “the bomb in the basement”’, electronic journal of e-learning, 13(2), pp.106-119. kohnke, l. and moorhouse, b. l. (2021) ‘adopting hyflex in higher education in response to covid-19: students’ perspectives’, open learning: the journal of open, distance and e-learning, pp.1-14. https://doi.org/10.1080/02680513.2021.1906641. smith, t., maiden iii, e. and abinader, m. (2019) ‘using students’ perceptions of online teaching and learning to inform faculty development’, international journal on elearning, 18(3), pp.301-330. http://doi:10.4018/978-1-60566-198-8.ch052 http://doi:10.4018/978-1-60566-198-8.ch052 https://doi.org/10.1080/02680513.2021.1906641 plews, sweet, sudbury, malan, waterbury, from emergency remote teaching to hybrid nuflex: a collaborative savage, provensal and chavez approach to developing faculty into learning designers journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 6 talbert, r. (2020) research report: experiencing the hyflex model. available at: https://rtalbert.org/research-report-experiencing-the-hyflex-model/ (accessed: 24 september 2021). author details rachel plews is an associate director in the center for advancing teaching and learning through research (catlr) at northeastern university. rachel has over 15 years experience working as both a faculty member and an educational developer in higher education in the us and in europe. her interests are in online learning, adult and lifelong learning, and the scholarship of teaching and learning (sotl). michael sweet is director of design and integration in the center for advancing teaching and learning through research (catlr) at northeastern university. catlr supports educators of every kind across the global network of northeastern campuses as they evolve and innovate in their teaching practices. michael is drawn to the structures and experience of peer-powered learning: from team-based learning in the classroom, to workshops and discussions that build authentic community, to year-long scholarship of teaching and learning (sotl) educator cohort programs. lindsey sudbury is director of academic technologies at northeastern university where she works to support the evolution of a learning environment that is responsive to teaching and learning needs. her interests include connected systems, university technology governance, accessibility, and supporting technology-enabled learning experiences filled with a variety of meaningful and purposeful engagements. will malan is an adult educator with a penchant for creating meaningful, memorable experiences. his roots are in penn state’s shaver’s creek environmental center, where he taught all ages about the natural world. will now focuses on the corporate environment, instructing on principles that help employees grow and gain skills that improve their daily life. https://rtalbert.org/research-report-experiencing-the-hyflex-model/%3e plews, sweet, sudbury, malan, waterbury, from emergency remote teaching to hybrid nuflex: a collaborative savage, provensal and chavez approach to developing faculty into learning designers journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 7 clair waterbury is the assistant director of teaching and learning with technology in academic technologies at northeastern university. clair has over 15 years of experience in higher education and k-12 education, specialising in instructional technology and learning analytics. jesse savage is an academic instructional technologist on the academic technologies team at northeastern university with 15 years of experience in technology and media. his area of interest is working with faculty to leverage technology in the classroom to enhance the student experience, creating thoughtful and creative content through digital media, and prospecting new technologies. erin provensal is an academic instructional technologist at northeastern university. her passions include using technology to enhance the learning experience through thoughtfully integrating technologies into teaching, training, and online learning. maximo chavez is a digital solutions analyst who works with his team to create content and knowledge for the northeastern community. his interests include testing new software/hardware and promoting solutions for a greater digital experience. https://nam12.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3a%2f%2facademictechnologies.northeastern.edu%2f&data=04%7c01%7cr.plews%40northeastern.edu%7c18170325a75d456b6be208d9803a03c4%7ca8eec281aaa34daeac9b9a398b9215e7%7c0%7c0%7c637681808922676037%7cunknown%7ctwfpbgzsb3d8eyjwijoimc4wljawmdailcjqijoiv2lumziilcjbtii6ik1hawwilcjxvci6mn0%3d%7c1000&sdata=lin7rq%2b6hzlvg6zeztdhiswjgu0qouv3bnjnz7m09xi%3d&reserved=0 from emergency remote teaching to hybrid nuflex: a collaborative approach to developing faculty into learning designers the challenge the response recommendations recommendations for supporting resilient course design references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special issue 22: compendium of innovative practice october 2021 ________________________________________________________________________ learning to stream and streaming to learn stevie prickett university of cumbria keywords: performance; creative technologies; streaming; covid-19. the problem how do you assess productions on performing arts programmes if there is no audience? this was a significant problem facing me and my colleagues within the performing arts department when returning to a blended learning model at the beginning of the 20/21 academic year. planning had taken place over the summer for the delivery of skills or seminar-based modules but the uncertainty over government guidance meant we were creating multiple, increasingly complex contingencies for solutions that might never be needed. the specific problem was that we had level 5 and 6 students on four performing arts programmes who were due to undertake performance projects with guest directors and choreographers. the modules were designed to assess the students’ ability to perform for an audience. in addition, students had to engage in group creative practice to demonstrate integration of practical skills in their live performance. the problem was, therefore, how to create a model of delivery and assessment which allowed the students to develop the skills necessary to meet module learning outcomes through live performance with no audience present. the response an agreed strategy to protect the student learning experience was to explore the possibility of live streaming performances. this necessitated a skills exchange and new collaborative prickett learning to stream and streaming to learn journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 2 partnership between staff from performing arts, film and tv and technical services. on being tasked with leading the project across the year, using an action research model, my primary concerns were: • ensuring the students still had a live performance experience. • maintaining a model in which work was assessed live not through filmed outcomes. • working with existing technologies and equipment within the institute of the arts to develop a new model of engaging with audiences. • taking learning from the performance modules to develop and enhance online teaching approaches and improve student engagement. • creating a model of delivery and assessment which would require minimal revision in response to changing government guidance. failing to engage with a new form of delivery would compromise the student experience, deny them live performance experience, and fail to provide opportunities to test and develop the skills they had been progressing during their time on their programmes. in addition, the project had the potential to develop a new range of skills and experiences responsive to and suitable for the emerging industry environment. it would also allow student work to reach a more geographically diverse audience and develop an artistic archive of the work across the year. it also had the potential for cross discipline collaboration and learning for both staff and students. initial conversations revolved around the resourcing of equipment, space, time, virtual platforms and staffing. four performances across the year were highlighted as case studies which could each test a different engagement with streaming. in choosing these productions, i had to consider where the ‘liveness’ existed in each of the different models of working. it was also possible to increase the creative and technical complexity from one project to the next in response to the learning. the performances were: • dance production – streamed live with a single camera feed in auditorium. students assessed on live performance. • musical theatre production – filmed and edited for broadcast. students assessed on performance during filming. prickett learning to stream and streaming to learn journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 3 • drama production – filmed as live with multi-camera set up in multiple sets. students assessed on live performance during filming. • acting performance – devised show streamed live from a multi-camera set-up. students assessed on performance for camera in the live stream. the first production was devised for a traditional theatre set up, but from then on the works were created with the understanding they were never meant to be performed to an audience in situ. issues arising included: maintaining social distancing guidance during rehearsal and performance, no sharing of props, guidance on the setting up and operation of technical equipment, and a second national lockdown. this second lockdown became easier to negotiate, as i could adapt projects designed for remote viewing rather than needing to be reactive at short notice. the project was beneficial to both staff and students. staff were able to collaborate with colleagues in new creative ways and were also upskilled in the use of technology and equipment. students had access to new models of performance which they would not have covered in a traditional academic year. staff and students collaborated to find creative solutions to technical and performance demands. for me, it also raised the question of notions of ‘liveness’. student feedback on their learning has been positive. there was initially a sense of compromise when they were performing to an empty theatre and a feeling that they were not getting the full live performance experience. however, students became enthused when working on a production when streaming was always the intended outcome and felt they were learning new skills which were relevant and applicable to a changing professional workplace. recommendations as the project progressed, it became apparent that a new learning environment was being created. staff members were gaining experience of new models of streamed performance work, software such as obs (open broadcaster software, a free and open source software for video recording and live streaming), and modes of engagement that are prickett learning to stream and streaming to learn journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 4 commonplace on streaming platforms such as youtube, discord and twitch. students were utilising and learning new performance and technical skills in a new medium. designing the project for remote/virtual audiences and for a different media reduced the students’ perception of online delivery as lesser than face-to-face. this in turn improved student engagement and the value they placed on the learning they were undertaking. the project did not try to transplant an existing model to a new medium, but designed a new model tailored to the possibilities and restrictions of live streaming. this supports the idea that we ‘should aim for hybrid learning, designing for optimum synergy between online learning and teaching interventions’ (daniel, 2016, no pagination). this model also helped to minimise complex contingencies for delivery. engagement with these new technologies does not require the rejection of old systems, but finding ways to integrate the two. there is then the possibility of being live and virtual simultaneously for both us and our students. this model of working brings its own challenges requiring further exploration, especially around how learning is experienced and embedded. what this project has highlighted is that online delivery works better when we design and tailor according to the medium. students are more engaged as the learning is embedded and enhanced by the medium and is not a substitute for what they could get in a face-toface environment. it also allows the online delivery to support the face-to-face learning and vice versa, an approach supported by pre-covid research which found that ‘improving approaches to learning and teaching online leads to enhancements in face-to-face learning environments’ (peacock et al., 2012, p.1278). in addition to sharing knowledge and skills, continued collaboration with colleagues from other departments allows discipline specialists to develop new and innovative models of delivery together. individual projects can then be a valuable learning opportunity for students from different programmes. moving forward, i would suggest understanding what each medium is capable of to equip ourselves with a wider range of skills and resources to enhance delivery, exploring which format is most suitable when, and shaping delivery so both online and face-to-face feel apposite and synchronous. by designing in this way, we are asking ‘not which is the best prickett learning to stream and streaming to learn journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 5 method overall, but: what are the most appropriate conditions for using face-to-face, blended or fully online learning?’ (bates, 2015, p.370). the learning we have done this year has given us discipline-specific knowledge and demonstrates a need for flexibility and responsiveness in the design of online learning environments. references bates, a.w. (2015) teaching in a digital age: guidelines for designing teaching and learning. available at: http://opentextbc.ca/teachinginadigitalage/ (accessed: 3 june 2021). daniel, j. (2016). making sense of blended learning: treasuring an older tradition or finding a better future. available at: https://teachonline.ca/tools-trends/blended-learningsuccessful-design-delivery-and-student-engagement/making-sense-blendedlearning-treasuring-older-tradition-or-finding-better-future (accessed: 1 october 2021). peacock, s., murray, s., dean, j., brown, d., girdler, s. and mastrominico, b. (2012) ‘exploring tutor and student experiences in online synchronous learning environments in the performing arts’, creative education, 3, pp.1269-1280. available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.4236/ce.2012.37186 (accessed: 1 october 2021). author details stevie prickett has worked as a theatre maker and performer for over 20 years and is currently lecturer in dance and physical theatre at the university of cumbria. his research interests include interdisciplinary practice and engaging with creative technologies in the creation and teaching of performing arts. http://opentextbc.ca/teachinginadigitalage/ https://teachonline.ca/tools-trends/blended-learning-successful-design-delivery-and-student-engagement/making-sense-blended-learning-treasuring-older-tradition-or-finding-better-future https://teachonline.ca/tools-trends/blended-learning-successful-design-delivery-and-student-engagement/making-sense-blended-learning-treasuring-older-tradition-or-finding-better-future https://teachonline.ca/tools-trends/blended-learning-successful-design-delivery-and-student-engagement/making-sense-blended-learning-treasuring-older-tradition-or-finding-better-future http://dx.doi.org/10.4236/ce.2012.37186 learning to stream and streaming to learn the problem the response recommendations references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special issue 22: compendium of innovative practice october 2021 ________________________________________________________________________ building relationships in the ‘cyber abyss’: learning from engagement failures clare brown university of glasgow, uk keywords: collaboration; pedagogy of care; belonging; covid-19. the challenge establishing constructive and collaborative relationships with subject teaching staff and students is a key element of learning development (ld) practice, but became hugely challenging when starting in a newly-created ld post on the cusp of the first uk lockdown. working primarily with one-year, part-time, access to he students, in a department that had not previously had internal ld input, awareness-raising and relationship-building were initially my key priorities. however, the shift online meant navigating this tricky professional ‘third space’ (whitchurch, 2008; johnson, 2018) of ld from the static isolation of my makeshift home-office. this stifled my capacity for enthusiastic networking, compounded by subject-teaching staff’s saturation with the challenges of the online pivot that left them little room to contemplate other innovations. my challenge, therefore, was not so much adapting to online delivery as attempting to establish ld provision in a context focused on technical solutions, tutor online training, and assessment review. achieving the all-important collaboration and buy-in from subject teaching staff (thies, 2012; mcwilliams and allan, 2014) was challenging in this crisis situation. how, then, could i get support to students? how could i communicate and build relationships with students when forging the staff relationships that would enable me to be present in their classes was not a departmental priority? the response brown building relationships in the ‘cyber abyss’: learning from engagement failures journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 2 despite believing that integrating and embedding ld into subject teaching is most effective for students (harris and ashton, 2011; macwilliams and allan, 2014), these circumstances pushed me to attempt constructing relationships with students outside the classroom. influenced by ideas of playfulness in learning (tanis, 2012; whitton, 2018) i decided i would light-heartedly promote myself to students online, thereby becoming familiar and opening opportunities to engage informally and non-hierarchically with them. this startingpoint would, i hoped, address student anxiety over entering the ‘cyber abyss’ of online learning (st clair, 2015), which remains an issue even as many more interactions occur online (lischer, safi and dickson, 2021). it would also encourage the sense of belonging required for student success (strayhorn, 2012). from this foundation, i would then run a series of synchronous academic literacy workshops that students would attend on the basis of an established relationship of trust (morris, 2018). to this end, i set up a padlet board where i introduced myself with ‘fun facts’ that changed weekly, and invited students to introduce themselves too. i added a photograph that i judged would be disarming and increase the sense that i was an approachable human being (bali, 2020). we are, after all, called upon as educators and mediators to show up as fully human ourselves, to engage not only in a pedagogy of care for our students (bali, 2020) but one of vulnerability (mershon, 2018) whereby we risk revealing ourselves as flawed and messy beings. the padlet was augmented by regular messages on the virtual leaning environment (vle), adopting a light, friendly, and supportive tone to encourage students to engage or seek support. projecting an authentic self online is difficult, however, and encouraging others to engage with that self is even harder: my efforts fell flat, with just one student out of 250 posting their own introduction and none responding to my vle messages. it came as no surprise given this lack of engagement that my miniseries of in-house ld sessions had a very low uptake, despite many students expressing a desire for academic writing support, both anecdotally at the time and in end-of-year surveys. naively, i had taken the advice that ‘you cannot downplay the impact of a friendly face!’ (burns and sinfield, 2004, p.49) in ld interactions to apply even where that face is encountered in an impersonal, asynchronous online setting. instead, i learned that engaging students in a personable, playful way might not work without a prior relationship, brown building relationships in the ‘cyber abyss’: learning from engagement failures journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 3 even a minimal one: visibility and trust are not achieved through online posts or opportunities alone. these do not replicate a learning developer entering a class as an embodied person in relation to others, who, by their presence within the discipline, is afforded contextual, rather than generic or remedial, relevance (cairns, hervey and johnson, 2018). from this dual standpoint of embodiment and legitimacy within the curriculum, the learning developer is better able to open up an emancipatory third space (abegglen, burns and sinfield, 2019) for students. students must be viewed ‘as whole human beings with complex lives and experiences rather than simply as seekers after compartmentalised bits of knowledge’ (hooks, 1994, p.15). this rejection of compartmentalisation includes the overlap of student and home identities (that has been particularly great in the last year), but also the integration of subject knowledge and ld. my response to the challenge of relationship-building focused on forging those personal links with the classroom, trying to bypass the need for collaboration with subject teaching staff which could be perceived as a burden on them. in so doing, it failed to meet the ld needs of students (confirmed by students’ course feedback), to represent the integral value of ld in the classroom, or to demonstrate the potential for collaboration to unburden subject staff (harris and ashton, 2011). recommendations from these experiences, i draw two recommendations. one is to have the courage to enter the spaces where students already are, despite local and institutional conceptions of where learning developers ‘should’ be or fears that teaching staff are too busy to contemplate our presence. being visible there enables us to open the emancipatory third space of ld and facilitate student growth in a way that we cannot from the outside. inside/outside need not be binary options, however. even if ld is not fully integrated or embedded, brief appearances of a learning developer in classes can help bridge the gap between subject teaching and ld provision, especially if set alongside active promotion by subject staff. the second, longer term, recommendation is that if well-intentioned ld activities on the margins fail to engage students effectively, this failure can be repurposed as local evidence for the need to integrate academic literacies in subject teaching. as long as brown building relationships in the ‘cyber abyss’: learning from engagement failures journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 4 learning developer identities remain misunderstood and contested, how our failures are presented to resource-allocators and departmental decision-makers truly matters. references abegglen, s., burns, t. and sinfield, s. (2019) ‘it’s learning development, jim – but not as we know it: academic literacies in third space’, journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15, november, pp.1-19. https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.v0i15.500. bali, m. (2020) ‘pedagogy of care: covid-19 edition’, reflecting allowed: maha bali’s blog about education [blog]. available at: https://blog.mahabali.me/educationaltechnology-2/pedagogy-of-care-covid-19-edition/ (accessed: 2 june 2021). burns, t. and sinfield, s. (2004) teaching, learning & study skills: a guide for tutors. london: sage. cairns, j., hervey, t. and johnson, o. (2018) ‘neither “bolt-on” nor “built-in”: benefits and challenges of developing an integrated skills curriculum through a partnership model’, journal of learning development in higher education, issue 13, april, pp.122. https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.v0i13.435. harris, a. j. and ashton, j. (2011) ‘embedding and integrating language and academic skills: an innovative approach’, journal of academic language and learning, 5(2), a73-a87. available at: https://journal.aall.org.au/index.php/jall/article/view/158 (accessed: 28 july 2021). hooks, b. (1994) teaching to transgress: education as the practice of freedom. london: routledge. johnson, i. (2018) ‘driving learning development professionalism forward from within’, journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: 2018 aldinhe conference, october, pp. 1-29. https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.v0i0.470. https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.v0i15.500 https://blog.mahabali.me/educational-technology-2/pedagogy-of-care-covid-19-edition/ https://blog.mahabali.me/educational-technology-2/pedagogy-of-care-covid-19-edition/ https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.v0i13.435 https://journal.aall.org.au/index.php/jall/article/view/158 https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.v0i0.470 brown building relationships in the ‘cyber abyss’: learning from engagement failures journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 5 lischer, s., safi, n. and dickson, c. (2021) ‘remote learning and students’ mental health during the covid-19 pandemic: a mixed-method enquiry’, prospects. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11125-020-09530-w. mcwilliams, r. and allan, q. (2014) ‘embedding academic literacy skills: towards a best practice model’, journal of university teaching & learning practice, 11(3). available at: https://ro.uow.edu.au/jutlp/vol11/iss3/8 (accessed: 9 june 2021). mershon, k. (2018) ‘a pedagogy of vulnerability’, craft of teaching in the academic study of religion [blog]. available at: https://craftofteachingreligion.wordpress.com/2018/10/22/a-pedagogy-ofvulnerability/ (accessed: 20 may 2021). morris, s. m. (2018) ‘on presence, video lectures, and critical pedagogy’, in morris, s. m. and stommel, j. (eds.) an urgency of teachers: the work of critical digital pedagogy. hybrid pedagogy. available at: https://criticaldigitalpedagogy.pressbooks.com/chapter/on-presence-video-lecturesand-critical-pedagogy/ (accessed: 8 october 2021). st clair, d. (2015) ‘a simple suggestion for reducing first-time online student anxiety’, journal of online learning and teaching, 11(1), pp.129-235. available at: https://jolt.merlot.org/vol11_no1.html (accessed: 2 june 2021). strayhorn, t. l. (2012) college students' sense of belonging: a key to educational success for all students. 1st edn. new york: routledge. tanis, d. j. (2012) exploring play/playfulness and learning in the adult and higher education classroom. unpublished phd thesis. the pennsylvania state university. thies, l. (2012) ‘increasing student participation and success: collaborating to embed academic literacies into the curriculum’, journal of academic language & learning, 6(1), pp.15-31. available at: https://journal.aall.org.au/index.php/jall/article/view/127 (accessed: 9 june 2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11125-020-09530-w https://ro.uow.edu.au/jutlp/vol11/iss3/8 https://craftofteachingreligion.wordpress.com/2018/10/22/a-pedagogy-of-vulnerability/ https://craftofteachingreligion.wordpress.com/2018/10/22/a-pedagogy-of-vulnerability/ https://criticaldigitalpedagogy.pressbooks.com/chapter/on-presence-video-lectures-and-critical-pedagogy/ https://criticaldigitalpedagogy.pressbooks.com/chapter/on-presence-video-lectures-and-critical-pedagogy/ https://journal.aall.org.au/index.php/jall/article/view/127 brown building relationships in the ‘cyber abyss’: learning from engagement failures journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 6 whitchurch, c. (2008) ‘shifting identities and blurring boundaries: the emergence of third space professionals in uk higher education’ higher education quarterly, 6(4), pp. 377-396. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2273.2008.00387.x. whitton, n. (2018) ‘playful learning: tools, techniques, and tactics’, research in learning technology, 26. https://doi.org/10.25304/rlt.v26.2035. author details clare brown is the access and skills co-ordinator in widening participation and lifelong learning at the university of glasgow. as a learning developer, she has worked across undergraduate and taught postgraduate levels, but has a particular interest in working with students entering, or seeking to enter, higher education. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2273.2008.00387.x https://doi.org/10.25304/rlt.v26.2035 building relationships in the ‘cyber abyss’: learning from engagement failures the challenge the response recommendations references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 24 september 2022 ________________________________________________________________________ advancing the understanding of the flipped classroom approach with students' perceptions of the learning environment: variation between academic disciplines hilary k. y. ng hong kong metropolitan university, hong kong paul l. c. lam the chinese university of hong kong, hong kong abstract abundant research supports the benefits of the flipped classroom approach on learning outcomes. yet how students evaluate the flipped learning environment remains largely unknown. the present study aims to investigate 1) the students’ perceptions of their flipped learning and 2) whether disciplinary differences can be observed in students’ perceptions. drawing upon the theoretical framework outlined in brame (2013), our findings illustrated that students (n = 407) from different disciplines do vary their evaluation of the flipped learning environment. those whose academic disciplines related to the application of knowledge evaluated the four components – exposure, incentive, assessment, and activities – more positively than those whose academic disciplines focus more on theoretical exploration. it is noteworthy that how subject knowledge is developed does not influence perception of the flipped learning environment. such findings can supplement the traditional outcome-based approach of flipped classroom research by understanding the learning environment. all in all, the findings can point to practical and theoretical implications for designing a flipped classroom environment, highlighting the needs in designing the learning environment. keywords: flipped classroom; academic disciplines; learning environment; student evaluation. ng and lam advancing the understanding of the flipped classroom approach with students' perceptions of the learning environment: variation between academic disciplines journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 2 introduction the flipped classroom approach is an instructional strategy that reverses in-class teaching and learning activities (lage, platt and treglia, 2000). the flipped classroom approach is growing in popularity in face-to-face settings (davies, dean and ball, 2013; mason, shuman and cook, 2013; ng et al., 2020) and even in fully virtual environments (hew et al., 2020). although sometimes the differences in learning outcomes between the flipped and non-flipped students are not statistically significant (e.g., davies, dean and ball, 2013; mason, shuman and cook, 2013), the positive effect of the flipped classroom approach on learning performance is convergently demonstrated across different empirical studies (e.g., nouri, 2016; tomas et al., 2019; wang and zhu, 2019; gong, yang and cai, 2020). beyond empirical studies, chen et al. (2018) meta-reviewed the examination scores of 9,026 students from numerous studies, including four randomised controlled trials, 19 quasi-experimental studies and 23 cohort studies. their meta-analytic results revealed that students who attended a flipped course showed higher examination scores and course grades than those in traditional lecture-based practice, as well as changes in examination scores compared to traditional lecture-based practice. in addition to the direct effect of flipped classrooms, factors that moderate the beneficial effect of the flipped classroom approach on learning outcomes have attracted research interest. these factors include academic disciplines (cheng, ritzhaupt and antonenko, 2018; al-samarraie, shamsuddin and alzahrani, 2019), time of lesson (cheng, ritzhaupt and antonenko, 2018), the ratio of flipped and traditional lessons of a course (ng and lam, 2020), and changes in instructors (ng et al., 2020). the success of the flipped classroom approach can be attributed to its rationale for transforming the learning process. in a flipped class, the learning activities that traditionally occurred inside the classroom are now moved before the class and vice versa (lage, platt and treglia, 2000). in this way, the learning can be started before the regular class time, and valuable class time can be allocated for the in-depth learning activities. thus, the flipped classroom approach holds not only the promise of enhancing learning outcomes but also enriches the learning environment. here we refer to the learning environment, learning processes and learning outcomes (lepo) framework (phillips, mcnaught and kennedy, 2010) to define the learning environment in a broader sense: ng and lam advancing the understanding of the flipped classroom approach with students' perceptions of the learning environment: variation between academic disciplines journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 3 its characteristics include the campus setting, the structure of the degree program and the student’s individual units of study. . . it specifies the content and resources (both traditional and electronic) which support this design. it also encompasses physical and virtual spaces, and the nature of the technology-enhanced environment. in addition, the learning environment specifies the teacher’s design of the learning and assessment activities which will facilitate the learning processes undertaken by students. . . . at one level, the learning environment might specify the overarching activities and context of a unit of study over a semester, including the learning objectives, assessment activities and deadlines, and content to be covered. at a different level, the learning environment might specify the design of a computer simulation which covers a conceptually difficult area. (phillips, mcnaught and kennedy, 2010, p.5). the learning environment itself is designed by the teachers and the development team and is a medium for students to work in. it is designed to achieve the desired learning outcomes and the intended learning objectives (phillips, mcnaught and kennedy, 2010). the design of the learning environment can be described in detail but it is important to evaluate whether the instructional approach is well-designed. therefore, in addition to the traditional focus on the overall learning outcomes, research on the flipped classroom approach should also focus on studying the learning environment. moreover, the theoretical roots, such as student-centred learning and active learning, also support the importance of the learning environment of the flipped classroom approach. student-centred learning intends to cultivate students to become autonomous and independent learners by providing opportunities for students to take full responsibility for their learning process in deciding what and how they want to learn (rogers, 1983; lea, stephenson and troy, 2003; o’neill and mcmahon, 2005; lam et al., 2021). likewise, active learning advocates the active participation of students in the learning activities so that they can learn by doing, experimenting, and trying (prince, 2004). both studentcentred learning and active learning highlight the need to provide a learning environment where students can actively participate and take more responsibility during the learning process. thus, the investigation of the flipped classroom approach should not only focus on the overall learning performance but also on the learning environment. ng and lam advancing the understanding of the flipped classroom approach with students' perceptions of the learning environment: variation between academic disciplines journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 4 in contrast to the widely investigated overall learning outcomes (e.g., chen et al., 2018; gillette et al., 2018), the understanding of the flipped learning environment is growing but remains insufficient and unsystematic. persky and mclaughlin (2017) provided useful suggestions for teachers designing a flipped learning environment. yet, students’ perceptions of the flipped learning environment remain largely unknown. such perceptions should be particularly useful for teachers designing the curriculum of the flipped classroom approach. it is expected that students in a positively evaluated learning environment would be more motivated and more engaged in the learning activities. hence, the objective of the present project is to investigate how students perceive the flipped learning environment and whether their perception and evaluation of the flipped learning environment varies by academic discipline. the theoretical framework of the flipped learning approach brame (2013) provided a theoretical framework to investigate students’ evaluation of the flipped learning environment. the framework spelled out that the flipped classroom approach should consist of four different components – exposure, incentive, assessment, and activities. the exposure component denotes the essential features of providing learning opportunities to students before the regular class time. these learning opportunities can also be provided without digital technology, such as through pre-class readings. such learning opportunities enable students to master the foundation knowledge before the class and, more importantly, increase students’ learning autonomy so that they can learn according to their schedule and level of understanding (foertsch et al., 2002; davies, dean and ball, 2013). the incentive component reflects the necessity to motivate students to engage in pre-class learning in the flipped classroom approach. the philosophy of the flipped classroom approach restructures the entire learning process by moving the learning of foundation knowledge to before the in-class time, thus requiring students to not only learn the basic materials before the class but also to attend the class with good preparation for ng and lam advancing the understanding of the flipped classroom approach with students' perceptions of the learning environment: variation between academic disciplines journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 5 participating in the in-class learning activities. hence, the techniques to motivate students to participate in the entire learning process are important in flipped learning. the assessment component captures the importance of assessing students’ understanding of the flipped classroom approach. similar to traditional lecture-based learning, assessments assigned for students to complete during and after the learning process could assess students’ level of understanding. beyond this, the inclusion of preclass assignments in the flipped classroom approach, such as online quizzes and worksheets, could help students pinpoint their areas of weakness during their preparation for the class. the results obtained from these formative assessments could help students focus on these areas for improvement before class and could help teachers to focus on these areas during the lessons. hence, the assessments can provide useful information for both teachers and students. the activities component describes the final feature of the in-class learning activities in the flipped classroom approach. the philosophy of the flipped classroom approach started with the mastering of basic knowledge before the classroom through students’ selflearning, thus leaving valuable class time for in-depth learning activities that promote higher-level learning. there is a wide range of learning activities available, such as peer discussion (khanova et al., 2015), role play (critz and knight, 2013), and simulation (schaffzin, 2016). the rationale for teachers choosing the classroom learning activities is to focus on deepening students’ understanding and to help them use their skillsets to apply the knowledge. these four components specify the content, resources, and learning activities in the flipped classroom approach, describing the common components in the learning environment that teachers could pay attention to when designing the course (phillips, mcnaught and kennedy, 2010). brame (2013) provided an important framework to help understand the flipped learning environment. the first aim of the present project is to investigate the flipped learning environment with brame’s (2013) theoretical model. the four components – exposure, incentive, assessment, and activities – are required to naturally vary in importance according to the teaching purposes. for example, distributing readings is more relevant for the pre-class learning activity of a writing class, whereas watching videos is more relevant for a listening class. these variations may partly explain ng and lam advancing the understanding of the flipped classroom approach with students' perceptions of the learning environment: variation between academic disciplines journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 6 why the findings on the flipped classroom approach do not all show significant improvement (e.g., davies, dean and ball, 2013; mason, shuman and cook, 2013). the results could possibly be improved by forming a supporting team with expertise in the flipped classroom approach. the supporting teams could ensure that the teaching practice can fulfil the basic requirements of the flipped classroom approach by giving suggestions on the curriculum design of the flipped learning environment. the possible disciplinary differences the second aim of this project is to investigate whether academic disciplines influence students’ perception of the flipped learning environment. although there is a limited understanding of the relation between academic discipline and flipped learning environment, various studies have illustrated that learning outcomes vary across disciplines (cheng, ritzhaupt and antonenko, 2018; al-samarraie, shamsuddin and alzahrani, 2019; hew et al., 2021). for instance, the subgroup analysis conducted by chen et al. (2018) showed that the advantage of the flipped classroom approach was mainly observed in medical, pharmacy, and science education studies, but not in nursing education and other disciplines in health science education. hence, it is also possible that students from different academic disciplines differ in their perception of the flipped learning environment. specifically, if the nature of the subject aligns with the rationale of the flipped classroom approach, it would be easier to boost the learning performance and students’ perception of the learning environment. all in all, the present project intends to go beyond the existing dominant approach of investigating the effectiveness of the flipped classroom approach using course learning outcomes. the present project intends to advance the understanding of the flipped classroom approach by investigating students’ perceptions of the flipped learning environment. meanwhile, the present project also explores whether the academic disciplines play a part in influencing the flipped learning environment. specifically, we adopt biglan’s (1973) model to classify academic disciplines. his work has received continuous interest (e.g., becher, 1994; jones, 2011; lam et al., 2014; fedi et al., 2021; salto, 2021; shin et al., 2021). scholars usually adopt his model to classify the academic disciplines as any combination of soft versus hard, pure versus applied, and life versus ng and lam advancing the understanding of the flipped classroom approach with students' perceptions of the learning environment: variation between academic disciplines journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 7 non-life. the soft versus hard classification focuses on the epistemological characteristics, in which hard disciplines indicate the use of a single paradigm in defining the research hypothesis, content, and method and soft disciplines indicate multiple paradigms. the pure versus applied classification focuses on the application value, in which pure disciplines focus on theoretical exploration and applied disciplines focus on applying knowledge to the real world. finally, life versus non-life disciplines focuses on the object of study, in which life disciplines study living organisms and non-life disciplines study nonliving organisms. the first two, soft versus hard (how the subject knowledge is developed) and pure versus applied (how much the subject knowledge is practical), are more relevant to the teaching pedagogies and instruction method because of their close relations with the core of the subject knowledge. moreover, the focus of pure versus applied is closely matched with the rationale of the flipped classroom approach, in which both of them relate to the value of learning by application. thus, we adopt the classification of soft versus hard and pure versus applied in the present project. the study background the data used in this paper is part of a large collaborative project in hong kong that intended to promote the flipped classroom approach in higher education. an interuniversity network was established among five government-funded universities in hong kong, including the chinese university of hong kong, the city university of hong kong, the education university of hong kong, the hong kong baptist university, and the hong kong polytechnic university. as each course has its own requirement and curriculum needs, a supporting team was formed in each university to recruit teachers and provide institutional-based support for the flipped classroom. this supporting team with expertise in the flipped classroom approach can ensure that all the practices are of similar standard and can be easily adopted while balancing the teaching needs. the supporting teams met regularly to share experience and offered guidelines on how to flip the course to the participating teachers, including advice on curriculum design. the team guided the teachers in adopting the flipped classroom approach as the instruction method so that it would satisfy the requirement of the flipped classroom approach but also suit the needs and purpose of teaching practice. for example, a series of workshops guiding teachers on how to produce pre-class content and in-class interaction to meet the requirement of the ng and lam advancing the understanding of the flipped classroom approach with students' perceptions of the learning environment: variation between academic disciplines journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 8 flipped classroom approach was provided. the supporting team also provided video editing services to ensure that the learning videos used for flipped learning were of similar quality, minimising the impact of video quality on learning outcomes (mcgivney-burelle and xue, 2013). method there were 407 valid responses for this project collected in the fall semester of the academic year 2018/19. these valid responses were gathered from students who attended courses taught by the participating teachers in the project. they were from diverse disciplines, including the faculty of business (20.1%), faculty of education (6.9%), faculty of engineering (14.5%), faculty of science (21.9%), and faculty of social science (36.6%). although teachers have freedom in the way they design the curriculum with the flipped classroom approach, almost all the courses provided videos with tests or quizzes on digital systems as pre-class learning materials. the students filled in a survey on the flipped learning environment after their flipped learning experience. before collecting the information, the survey was developed and validated by a panel of experts consisting of researchers on the topic and experienced professors. the survey consisted of following four measures. the first was a 4-item measure on exposure, comprising the items ‘the materials are interesting’, ‘the materials motivate me to learn more’, ‘the materials are helpful to prepare me for in-class activities’, ‘i feel comfortable to study the materials before class’. the second was a 3-item measure on incentive, comprising the items ‘the reasons for the flipped classroom style in this course are clearly explained’, ‘i understand the potential benefits of the flipped classroom style’, and ‘i have more control over my study with the flipped classroom style’. the third was a 3-item measure on activities, comprising the items ‘the activities clarify important concepts in this course’, ‘the activities help me apply what i have learnt in pre-class activities’, and ‘i am engaged with the in-class activities’. the last one was a 3-item measure on assessment, comprising the items ‘the assessments acknowledge my efforts in the learning process’, ‘the assessments require me to do more on creating, analysing, or evaluating the subject matter’, and ‘i receive sufficient feedback on the assessments’. responses anchored on a 5-point likert scale (1) to (5). these items were aggregated to ng and lam advancing the understanding of the flipped classroom approach with students' perceptions of the learning environment: variation between academic disciplines journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 9 form a composite score of exposure, incentive, assessment, and activities. the higher the values, the higher the extent that the students endorse these components. the reliabilities of all four components were satisfactory: cronbach’s α = .84 for exposure, cronbach’s α = .80 for incentive, cronbach’s α = .78 for activities, cronbach’s α = .79 for assessment. results we first followed the classification of biglan (1973) to classify the academic disciplines as pure (n = 238) and applied (n = 169). the pure disciplines include courses from the faculty of science and the faculty of social science, whereas the applied disciplines include courses from the faculty of education, the faculty of engineering, and the faculty of business. then we computed the mean and standard deviation of the four components: exposure, incentive, activities, and assessment (see table 1). in general, students whose academic discipline belonged to applied were consistently rated higher in exposure (m = 3.67, sd = .66), incentive (m = 3.66, sd = .73), activities (m = 3.71, sd = .70), and assessment (m = 3.67, sd = .67) than those whose were from pure subjects. next, we conducted independent sample t-tests to compare the means of these components. results indicated that the differences were all significant among the pure and applied academic disciplines, regardless of exposure (t (405)= -4.19, p < .001), incentive (t (405)= -3.07, p < .01), activities (t (405)= -3.40, p < .01), and assessment (t (405)= -4.01, p < .001). following biglan (1973), we also classified the academic disciplines as soft (n = 259) and hard (n = 148). examples of soft disciplines include courses from the faculty of social science, the faculty of education, and the faculty of business, while the hard disciplines include courses from the faculty of science and the faculty of engineering. the independent t-test indicated that the two academic disciplines on the four components does not differ significantly with exposure (t (360.58)= .11, p = .92), incentive (t (405)= 1.03, p = .30), activities (t (405)=.33, p = .74), and assessment (t (362.68)= -.88, p = .38) (see table 2). for the sake of simplicity, the general results are summarised in table 3. ng and lam advancing the understanding of the flipped classroom approach with students' perceptions of the learning environment: variation between academic disciplines journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 10 table 1. independent sample t-test for the learning environment for the pureapplied classification. variable m sd t exposure -4.19 *** pure (n = 238) 3.38 .71 applied (n = 169) 3.67 .66 incentive -3.07 ** pure (n = 238) 3.44 .70 applied (n = 169) 3.66 .73 activities -3.40 ** pure (n = 238) 3.47 .69 applied (n = 169) 3.71 .70 assessment -4.01 *** pure (n = 238) 3.38 .75 applied (n = 169) 3.67 .67 note. m and sd represent mean and standard deviation. * p < .05, ** p < .01, *** p < .001. ng and lam advancing the understanding of the flipped classroom approach with students' perceptions of the learning environment: variation between academic disciplines journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 11 table 2. independent sample t-test for the learning environment for the soft-hard classification. variable m sd t p-value exposure .11 .92 soft (n = 259) 3.50 .76 hard (n = 148) 3.50 .61 incentive -1.03 .30 soft (n = 259) 3.50 .74 hard (n = 148) 3.58 .67 activities .33 .74 soft (n = 259) 3.58 .75 hard (n = 148) 3.55 .61 assessment .88 .38 soft (n = 259) 3.48 .79 hard (n = 148) 3.54 .63 note. m and sd represent mean and standard deviation. ng and lam advancing the understanding of the flipped classroom approach with students' perceptions of the learning environment: variation between academic disciplines journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 12 table 3. summary of the overall findings. components of the flipped learning environment applied versus pure discipline soft versus hard discipline exposure, incentive, activities, assessment the applied disciplines are significantly higher than the pure disciplines. there are no significant differences between soft and hard disciplines. general discussion the present project attempts to enrich the understanding of the process of the flipped learning approach. specifically, the project investigates students’ perceptions of the flipped learning environment and whether and how their academic disciplines affect students’ evaluation of the flipped learning environment. the present project revealed that students from different academic disciplines differed in their perception of the learning environment when the flipped classroom approach was incorporated. it is noteworthy that the practical value of the academic disciplines does matter in the students’ perception of the flipped learning environment, while the epistemological characteristics of the academic disciplines do not matter. students who were studying in an academic discipline that emphasises the application of abstract knowledge evaluated the four components – exposure, incentive, assessment, and activities – of the flipped classroom approach more positively than those who were studying in an academic discipline that emphasises theoretical explorations. in contrast, students who were studying in the disciplines that emphasise a single paradigm or multiple paradigms were found to evaluate the four components similarly. the following paragraphs discuss the possible underlying reasons for the differences obtained in each of the components. the first component is exposure, in which students were required to master the foundation concept before the class. students from the academic disciplines that emphasise the application of knowledge rated the pre-class learning opportunity more favourably than those from the pure disciplines. this illustrated that students in the applied disciplines ng and lam advancing the understanding of the flipped classroom approach with students' perceptions of the learning environment: variation between academic disciplines journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 13 tended to view the opportunity of pre-class learning more favourably than in the pure disciplines. one possible reason is that the knowledge of the pure disciplines may be too abstract for students to learn on their own before class. rather, learning the abstract theory could be easier with the explanations of the teachers during a traditional face-toface lecture. in contrast, students in both soft and hard disciplines also had similar perceptions of the opportunities to conduct pre-class learning. the second component is incentive. the flipped classroom approach is rooted in active learning, in which how teachers motivate students to prepare for the class and participate in the in-class learning activities is of utmost importance. the findings showed that students from the applied disciplines rated the incentive component more positively than those from the academic disciplines emphasising theoretical exploration, whereas no such difference was found in the soft and hard disciplines. it can be explained by the matches between the nature of the academic disciplines and the rationale of the flipped classroom approach. learning how to apply the learning materials could be easier to match with the flipped classroom learning activities, which, in turn, may motivate students from the applied disciplines to learn with the flipped classroom approach. for example, students in the applied disciplines may be more motivated to learn in the flipped classroom approach when the teachers provide the opportunity for them to master the foundation knowledge and allocate all the class time for applying the theories. for example, teachers who teach science-related disciplines could distribute the learning materials on concepts and theory before class and allow students to focus on laboratory experiments during the lesson. moreover, it should be noted that scores are the most common form of incentive adopted. teachers in the current project usually assigned 5 to 20% of the final score to encourage students to conduct pre-class learning, even though extrinsic incentives may not always be the most effective measure. the third component of the flipped learning experience is the inclusion of the assessment. students from the academic disciplines that emphasise the application of knowledge evaluated the assessment more positively than those from the pure disciplines, whereas the soft and hard did not show this difference. it may be that students from the applied disciplines are used to and welcome formative assessments throughout their academic study. ng and lam advancing the understanding of the flipped classroom approach with students' perceptions of the learning environment: variation between academic disciplines journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 14 the final component in brame’s framework (2013) is activities. students from the academic disciplines that emphasise applying the learnt concepts perceived the activities component in the flipped classroom approach more positively than those whose disciplines emphasise theoretical exploration. perhaps the difficulties of mastering abstract knowledge in the pure disciplines impact the effectiveness of the in-class learning activities. specifically, pure disciplines emphasised the abstract understanding of theories, while applied disciplines applied knowledge in real-life situations. it is also possible that the learning activities in the applied disciplines can be more interesting with a wider range of options than those in the pure disciplines and thus are more suitable to learn with the flipped classroom approach. for example, pure disciplines usually involve peer discussion, but applied disciplines can have a wider selection of collaborative tasks, including role-play and simulation. in contrast, no significant difference was observed between soft and hard disciplines. it is interesting to note that students’ presentations were the most popular inclass activities among the courses in the project. in sum, the findings showed that practical value (pure versus applied) but not the development process (soft versus hard) of the subject knowledge influences students’ perceptions of the flipped learning environment. perhaps, the applied disciplines trained students to learn by applying the concept (which is more practical) rather than focusing on theoretical exploration (which is more abstract). they knew they had mastered the concept when they knew how to apply the learnt concept to solve real-life problems, and thus students from the applied disciplines favoured more in the application of knowledge. the flipped classroom approach allocated time for the in-depth learning activities, which were usually related to the application of knowledge. hence, the rationale of the flipped classroom approach showed an excellent fit with the principle of applied disciplines that emphasise the application of the learnt concept. beyond this, the flipped classroom approach can offer an instructional method for the applied disciplines to arrange the class time more effectively, thus providing more opportunities for students to apply the learnt concepts. therefore, it is not surprising that students from the applied disciplines were more inclined to learn with the flipped classroom approach. yet, the single or multiple paradigms of the academic disciplines did not vary significantly along the entire teaching process. ng and lam advancing the understanding of the flipped classroom approach with students' perceptions of the learning environment: variation between academic disciplines journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 15 practical implication the present project showed that students in different academic disciplines had varied perceptions of the flipped learning environment. such findings demonstrate the implications for teachers across different disciplines when adopting the flipped classroom approach in their teaching practice. the level of difficulty of the pre-class learning materials may influence students learning. it is reasonable that the outcome may not be good if arranging overly complicated or overly abstract pre-class learning materials for the students to learn independently. besides, the learning materials should be more concrete and concise for students to master the foundation knowledge before the class. moreover, our experience told us that joint effort from the teachers and the support teams could reduce the difficulties in providing the preclass materials which are mainly videos and in the preparation work of the flipped classroom approach. the findings suggested the importance of applicability of knowledge in the flipped classroom approach. when designing the curriculum, teachers could consider placing the focus on turning abstract knowledge into practical, concrete, and solid knowledge. the learning objectives could be less focused on understanding and more on application. in setting the assessment method, students could be asked to apply the concept in explaining the natural phenomenon or the societal events that are more relevant to the students’ daily lives. using psychology in the faculty of social science as an example, assessment could be on writing a reflective paper on applying the theories for selfreflection. in setting the learning activities, focus should be on the application of knowledge. another example uses chemistry in the faculty of science. the learning activities of a chemistry class could be on understanding the properties of metals in reallife. instead of telling the students that the window frame is made of aluminium, teachers could ask students to test the chemical and physical properties of the window frame. limitations and future directions while the present project provided important groundwork for understanding the flipped learning environment, a few caveats and recommendations should be noted. first, the ng and lam advancing the understanding of the flipped classroom approach with students' perceptions of the learning environment: variation between academic disciplines journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 16 present project conducted an investigation in five out of nine government-funded universities in hong kong with teachers and students from diverse academic disciplines. provided that the popularity of the flipped classroom approach increases across the world, future research could triangulate the findings in other cultural groups. the scale used in the present project was based on the collaborative efforts of researchers and professors with literature support, and its reliability was satisfactory. due to resource constraints, we had not conducted a pilot test for the scale. future research could further validate and test the developed instruments across cultures. the use of a validated scale as part of a larger quantitative study would be useful in understanding the nomological network of the flipped learning environment. future research could also adopt a broader range of methods to collect further evidence from the learning environment to supplement the existing focus on learning outcomes, such as qualitative research design to yield a more sophisticated understanding of this interesting phenomenon or the big-data strategy in understanding the learning environment. while quantitative studies would be useful in drawing generalisations, qualitative studies such as interviewing or conducting focus groups would be useful to obtain a more in-depth understanding of the effect of the learning environment and perceptions of the learning process. in fact, both teachers and students can be interviewed. while the former can provide insight into their rationale and design of the learning environment, the latter can explain their perceptions of the learning environment. we suggest that future research investigates the relationship between learning environment and learning outcomes, though there is already theoretical support for this relationship. it is possible that the flipped learning environment could be the mechanism to explain the insignificant findings of the flipped classroom approach, or that the flipped learning environment could be a moderating factor influencing the effect of the flipped classroom approach on learning outcomes. additional evidence could also be adopted to understand the most influential factors among the flipped learning environments. such investigation could directly provide insight to the teachers in identifying the most critical factor when designing the flipped classroom approach. the critical factor may also be possible for other instructional methods, and thus holds the promise to benefit the educational research in a broader sense. it would be advantageous to provide empirical evidence on such a relationship. it will help enrich the learning experience and learning outcomes because the learning environment designed and specified by the teaching practitioners is highly modifiable. ng and lam advancing the understanding of the flipped classroom approach with students' perceptions of the learning environment: variation between academic disciplines journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 17 the present project revealed that students’ perception of the learning environment of the flipped classroom approach varies between different academic disciplines. future research could also investigate the disciplinary differences of the flipped classroom approach. yet, as in other cross-disciplinary research, it is a challenge to minimise the effect of confounding variables while testing the disciplinary differences. an overly stringent control will dilute the disciplinary difference and it would not even be possible in a real-life educational context to fulfil the diverse needs of curriculums and institutions, especially in the variable of assigning scores for pre-class learning. future research could consider testing the disciplinary differences with the control of a more standardised scoring system. such understanding has promising potential for curriculum design using the flipped classroom approach, which in turn provides insights into maximising the benefit of the flipped classroom approach. all in all, the current research provides evidence for the study of the learning environment. in fact, another important area that would benefit from future research is the investigation of how to persuade teachers to overcome the challenges of adopting the flipped classroom approach. when flipping a classroom, teachers are usually required to shift their mindset, such as adopting a new role of facilitator in the classroom (lage, platt and treglia, 2000) and redesigning their curriculum (kim et al., 2014). future research could further this line of research to persuade teachers to adopt the flipped classroom approach in their classes. conclusion to conclude, our study advanced the understanding of both the flipped classroom approach from the learning environment perspective and how academic disciplines influence students’ perceptions of the learning environment. in general, students from applied disciplines rated the components of the flipped classroom higher. the results are not intended to discourage educators who teach pure disciplines to give up on the flipped classroom approach. instead, when adopting the flipped classroom approach to teach pure disciplines, some practical modifications can be made. for example, instead of focusing on applying the learnt concept, other in-depth teaching and learning activities can be provided for the students from the pure disciplines, such as mathematics (bhagat, ng and lam advancing the understanding of the flipped classroom approach with students' perceptions of the learning environment: variation between academic disciplines journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 18 chang and chang, 2016; hodgson et al., 2017), language literacy (wang, 2016), and politics (jenkins, 2015). in this way, students from both the pure and applied disciplines can benefit from the flipped classroom approach to make class time more valuable and effective. declaration availability of data and materials the datasets used and analysed during the present project are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request. funding this work was supported in part by the university grants committee funding scheme for teaching and learning related proposals (2016–2019 triennium) awarded to the second author by the university grants committee. acknowledgments the authors would also like to thank all the staff, teachers, and students for their contribution to this project. references al-samarraie, h., shamsuddin, a. and alzahrani, a. i. (2019) ‘a flipped classroom model in higher education: a review of the evidence across disciplines’, educational technology research and development, 68, pp.1017-1051. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11423-019-09718-8. becher, t. (1994) ‘the significance of disciplinary differences’, studies in higher education, 19, pp.151-161. https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079412331382007. bhagat, k. k., chang, c. n. and chang, c. y. (2016) ‘the impact of the flipped classroom on mathematics concept learning in high school’, educational technology & society, 19, pp.134-142. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11423-019-09718-8 https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079412331382007 ng and lam advancing the understanding of the flipped classroom approach with students' perceptions of the learning environment: variation between academic disciplines journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 19 biglan, a. (1973) ‘the characteristics of subject matter in different academic areas’, journal of applied psychology, 57, pp.195-203. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0034701. brame, c. (2013) ‘flipping the classroom’, vanderbilt university center for teaching. available at: http://cft.vanderbilt.edu/guides-sub-pages/flipping-the-classroom/ (accessed: 28 june 2022). chen, k. s., monrouxe, l., lu, y. h., jenq, c. c., chang, y. j., chang, y. c. and chai, p. y. c. (2018) ‘academic outcomes of flipped classroom learning: a meta-analysis’, medical education in review, 52, pp.910-924. https://doi.org/10.1111/medu.13616. cheng, l., ritzhaupt, a. d. and antonenko, p. (2018) ‘effects of the flipped classroom instructional strategy on students’ learning outcomes: a meta-analysis’, education technology research and development, 67, pp.793-824. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11423-018-9633-7. critz, c. m. and knight, d. (2013) ‘using the flipped classroom in graduate nursing education’, nurse educator, 38, pp.210-213. https://doi.org/10.1097/nne.0b013e3182a0e56a. davies, r. s., dean, d. l and ball, n. (2013) ‘flipping the classroom and instructional technology integration in a college level information systems spreadsheet course’, educational technology research and development, 61, pp.563-580. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11423-013-9305-6. fedi, a., la barbera, f., de jong, a. and rollero, c. (2021) ‘intention to adopt proenvironmental behaviors among university students of hard and soft sciences: the case of drinking by reusable bottles’, international journal of sustainability in higher education, 22, pp.766-779. http://doi.org/10.1108/ijshe-08-2020-0320. foertsch, j., moses, g., strikwerda, j. and litzkow, m. (2002) ’reversing the lecture/homework paradigm using eteach web-based streaming video software’, https://doi.org/10.1037/h0034701 http://cft.vanderbilt.edu/guides-sub-pages/flipping-the-classroom/ https://doi.org/10.1111/medu.13616 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11423-018-9633-7 https://doi.org/10.1097/nne.0b013e3182a0e56a https://doi.org/10.1007/s11423-013-9305-6 http://doi.org/10.1108/ijshe-08-2020-0320 ng and lam advancing the understanding of the flipped classroom approach with students' perceptions of the learning environment: variation between academic disciplines journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 20 journal of engineering education, 6, pp.267-274. https://doi.org/10.1002/j.21689830.2002.tb00703.x. gillette, c., rudolph, m., kimble, c., rockich-winston, n., smith, l. and broedel-zaugg, k. (2018) ‘a meta-analysis of outcomes comparing flipped classroom and lecture’, american journal of pharmaceutical education, 82, pp.433-440. https://doi.org/10.5688/ajpe6898. gong, d., yang, h. h. and cai, j. (2020) ‘exploring the key influencing factors on college students’ computational thinking skills through flipped-classroom instruction’, international journal of educational technology in higher education, 17, pp.1-13. https://doi.org/10.1186/s41239-020-00196-0. hew, k. f., jia, c., gonda, d. e. and bai, s. (2020) ‘transitioning to the “new normal” of learning in unpredictable times: pedagogical practices and learning performance in fully online flipped classrooms’, international journal of educational technology in higher education, 17, pp.1-22. https://doi.org/10.1186/s41239-020-00234-x. hew, k. f., bai, s., huang, w., dawson, p., du, j., huang, g., jia, c. and thankrit, k. (2021) ‘on the use of flipped classroom across various disciplines: insights from a second-order meta-analysis’, australasian journal of education and technology, 37, pp.132-151. https://doi.org/10.14742/ajet.6475. hodgson, t. r., cunningham, a., mcgee, d., kinne, l. and murphy, t. j. (2017) ‘assessing behavioral engagement in flipped and non-flipped mathematics classrooms: teacher abilities and other potential factors’, international journal of education in mathematics, science and technology, 5, pp.248-261. jenkins, s. (2015) ‘flipping the introductory american politics class: student perceptions of the flipped classroom’, ps: political science and politics, 48, pp.607-611. https://doi.org/10.1017/s1049096515000840. jones, w. a. (2011) ‘variation among academic disciplines: an update on analytical frameworks and research’, journal of the professoriate, 6, pp.9-27. https://doi.org/10.1002/j.2168-9830.2002.tb00703.x https://doi.org/10.1002/j.2168-9830.2002.tb00703.x https://doi.org/10.5688/ajpe6898 https://doi.org/10.1186/s41239-020-00196-0 https://doi.org/10.1186/s41239-020-00234-x https://doi.org/10.14742/ajet.6475 https://doi.org/10.1017/s1049096515000840 ng and lam advancing the understanding of the flipped classroom approach with students' perceptions of the learning environment: variation between academic disciplines journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 21 khanova, j., roth, m. t., rodgers, j. e. and mclaughlin, j. e. (2015) ‘student experiences across multiple flipped courses in a single curriculum’, medical education, 49, pp.1038-1048. https://doi.org/10.1111/medu.12807. kim, m. k., kim, s. m., khera, o. and getman, j. (2014) ‘the experience of three flipped classrooms in an urban university: an exploration of design principles’, internet and higher education, 22, pp.37-50. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.iheduc.2014.04.003. lage, m. j., platt, g. j. and treglia, m. (2000) ‘inverting the classroom: a gateway to creating an inclusive learning environment’, the journal of economic education, 31, pp.30-43. https://doi.org/10.2307/1183338. lam, p. l. c., ng, h. k. y., tse, a. h. h., lu, m. and wong, b. y. w. (2021) ‘elearning technology and the advancement of practical constructivist pedagogies: illustrations from classroom observations’, education and information technologies, 26, pp.89101. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10639-020-10245-w. lea, s. j., stephenson, d. and troy, j. (2003) ‘higher education students' attitudes to student-centred learning: beyond 'educational bulimia?’, studies in higher education, 28, pp.321-334. https://doi.org/10.1080/03075070309293. mason, g. s., shuman, t. r. and cook, k. e. (2013) ‘comparing the effectiveness of an inverted classroom to a traditional classroom in an upper-division engineering course’, ieee transactions on education, 56, pp.430-435. https://doi.org/10.1109/te.2013.2249066. mcgivney-burelle, j. and xue, f. (2013) ‘flipping calculus’, primus, 23, pp.477-486. ng, h. k. y. and lam, p. (2020) ‘how the number of lessons flipped influence the overall learning effectiveness and the perceptions of flipped learning experiences?’, interactive learning environment. https://doi.org/10.1080/10494820.2020.1826984. https://doi.org/10.1111/medu.12807 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.iheduc.2014.04.003 https://doi.org/10.2307/1183338 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10639-020-10245-w https://doi.org/10.1080/03075070309293 https://doi.org/10.1109/te.2013.2249066 https://doi.org/10.1080/10494820.2020.1826984 ng and lam advancing the understanding of the flipped classroom approach with students' perceptions of the learning environment: variation between academic disciplines journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 22 ng, h. k. y., lam, p., chan, k., leung, h. and lai, s. (2020) ‘flipping the classroom: will the changes of teachers influence learning outcomes?’, proceedings of the 2020 4th international conference on education and elearning. https://doi.org/10.1145/3439147.3439156. nouri, j. (2016) ‘the flipped classroom: for active, effective and increased learning – especially for low achievers’, international journal of educational technology in higher education, 13, pp.1-10. https://doi.org/10.1186/s41239-016-0032-z. o’neill, g. and mcmahon, t. (2005) ‘student-centred learning: what does it mean for students and lecturers’, emerging issues in the practice of university learning and teaching. aishe. persky, a. m. and mclaughlin, j. e. (2017) ’the flipped classroom – from theory to practice in health professional education’, american journal of pharmaceutical education, 81, pp.1-11. https://doi.org/10.5688/ajpe816118. phillips, r. a., mcnaught, c. and kennedy, g. (2010) ‘towards a generalised conceptual framework for learning: the learning environment, learning processes and learning outcomes (lepo) framework’, in herrington, j. and hunter, w. (eds.) proceedings of the 22nd annual world conference on educational multimedia, hypermedia & telecommunications, toronto, canada 28 june-2 july. ed-media, pp.2495-2504. prince, m. (2004) ‘does active learning work? a review of the research’, journal of engineering education, 93(3), pp.223-231. https://doi.org/10.1002/j.21689830.2004.tb00809.x. rogers, c. r. (1983) freedom to learn for the 80's. columbus, oh: charles e. merrill. salto, d. j. (2021) ‘do academic disciplines matter? an analysis of organizational responses to the accreditation of graduate programs by field of study and sector’, higher education. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-021-00789-2. https://doi.org/10.1145/3439147.3439156 https://doi.org/10.1186/s41239-016-0032-z https://doi.org/10.5688/ajpe816118 https://doi.org/10.1002/j.2168-9830.2004.tb00809.x https://doi.org/10.1002/j.2168-9830.2004.tb00809.x https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-021-00789-2 ng and lam advancing the understanding of the flipped classroom approach with students' perceptions of the learning environment: variation between academic disciplines journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 23 schaffzin, k. t. (2016) ‘learning outcomes in a flipped classroom: a comparison of civil procedure ii test scores between students in a traditional class and a flipped class’, the university of memphis law review, 46, pp.661-693. shin, j. c., huang, j. w., lee, j. k. and an, y. (2021) ‘localization of social science research in selected academic disciplines in south korea’, current sociology, pp.118. https://doi.org/10.1177/00113921211048528. tomas, l., evans n. s., doyle, t. and skamp, k. (2019) ‘are first year students ready for a flipped classroom? a case for a flipped learning continuum’, international journal of educational technology in higher education, 16(5), pp.1-22. https://doi.org/10.1186/s41239-019-0135-4. wang, k. and zhu, c. (2019) ‘mooc-based flipped learning in higher education: students’ participation, experience and learning performance’, international journal of educational technology in higher education, 16(1), pp.1-18. https://doi.org/10.1186/s41239-019-0163-0. wang, y.-h. (2016) ‘could a mobile-assisted learning system support flipped classrooms for classical chinese learning?’, journal of computer assisted learning, 32, pp.391-415. https://doi.org/10.1111/jcal.12141. author details hilary k. y. ng is an assistant professor at school of education and languages, hong kong metropolitan university (formerly known as the open university of hong kong). she is continuously developing her expertise across social psychology, cross-cultural psychology, educational science, and educational technology. as a multi-disciplinary scholar, her recent work has been published in numerous ssciand scopus-indexed journals. paul lai chuen lam is an associate professor at the centre for learning enhancement and research, the chinese university of hong kong. he has extensive interest and https://doi.org/10.1177/00113921211048528 https://doi.org/10.1186/s41239-019-0135-4 https://doi.org/10.1186/s41239-019-0163-0 https://doi.org/10.1111/jcal.12141 ng and lam advancing the understanding of the flipped classroom approach with students' perceptions of the learning environment: variation between academic disciplines journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 24 experience in teaching and learning principles, case-based teaching and learning, webassisted teaching and learning, and evaluation of elearning and mlearning. he also has experience in designing educational tools. ureply (http://web.ureply.mobi) is a classroom student response system developed under his supervision. advancing the understanding of the flipped classroom approach with students' perceptions of the learning environment: variation between academic disciplines abstract introduction the theoretical framework of the flipped learning approach the possible disciplinary differences the study background method results general discussion practical implication limitations and future directions conclusion declaration availability of data and materials funding acknowledgments references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special issue 22: compendium of innovative practice october 2021 ________________________________________________________________________ ‘hacking’ the pandemic: turning online work challenges into learning with impact caroline keenan university of exeter constantine manolchev university of exeter keywords: learning design; experiential learning; hacks; learning community; covid-19. the challenge the challenge presented by the pandemic and its effect on everyone in university education was acute. our students in the law and business schools at the university of exeter were thrust into physical isolation and anxiety, away from their expectation of learning as an on-campus, social and timetabled endeavour. although the transition to online delivery mitigated against fundamental disruption to learning, our students struggled with motivation, distractions and anxiety, exacerbated by the need for some to work across different time-zones (baber, 2020; wildman et al., 2020). we academics also faced a myriad of challenges (gomes et al., 2020). locked out of our offices and missing our students and colleagues, we were talking to dark screens from our kitchen tables. we felt that we were losing our identity as educators and becoming crisis managers. we needed to move away from patterns of interaction characterised by worry and lack of engagement, to return to the joyful collective endeavour of learning. the challenge we encountered was situated in the learning experience of our undergraduate students; however, we feel that the pedagogic value of our intervention transcends disciplinary boundaries and can be successfully applied to blended delivery in a more general educational context. keenan and manolchev ‘hacking’ the pandemic: turning online work challenges into learning with impact journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 2 the response inception before lockdown, we had talked about creating a hackathon (termed ‘impact’ for its intended outcomes and stylised in capitals) for our second year students. although on different degrees run by our respective departments – specifically, a bsc business, an llb law and business, and a bbl in business law – our students share a number of modules in their second year. we had intended to use the hackathon to establish a supportive learning community, yet we now hoped it would also serve as a pedagogic device (bernstein, 2000), that is, a means of transmitting knowledge and re-contextualising learning in a digital environment. hackathons are well established in the field of computer programming (maaravi, 2020) and involve participants working intensely in small groups, over a short time period, towards a technological solution to a problem (porter et al., 2017). their use has gradually become more pluralistic, entering many other disciplines (artiles and wallace, 2013). this has seen a broadening of the definition of hackathons to ‘creative marathons’ with a ‘learn-buildshare mantra’ (goodman and radu, 2020) that are time-limited, group-based and problem-solving (tauberer, 2017). in addition to being hosted by governments, ngos, businesses, museums and libraries (turner et al, 2021), hackathons are an ideal tool for educators. they can build a 'hobby space' for idea creation outside of other academic pressures, such as assessments (artiles and wallace, 2013). this liberates students from a 'fear to fail' environment, developing an engaging and creative atmosphere that is likely to lead to effective student learning. students work with each other to build their skills beyond 'toy' problems and produce valued solutions to them. this intense period of shared goals and experiences outside of the normal routine creates an instant community amongst participants. hackathons reinforce students’ belief in themselves, each other and their discipline, making them the ultimate win-win educational event (munro, 2016). preparation we first needed an identity for our hackathon, and with it a problem for our students to ‘hack’. for the hackathon to be an effective ‘reset’ button for us, the ‘problem’ under consideration had to be real and immediate, link to the subjects they were studying – law keenan and manolchev ‘hacking’ the pandemic: turning online work challenges into learning with impact journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 3 and business – and allow students to reach new solutions collaboratively. the name had to signal utility, whilst the context had to feature a range of challenges and issues, inviting problem solving. we chose the food and drink industry, which has been severely impacted by the coronavirus pandemic (oecd, 2020; uk parliament, 2020), and asked businesses in the region for problems our students could ‘hack’. we selected three: rick stein, wild harbour and swannacott manor. all were looking for ways to 'put their services out there' in the new, online-only context. our students, who were studying marketing and client-focused, transactions, were perfect for the task. delivery impact was organised around the four common characteristics of hackathons (lara and lockwood, 2016, p. 486): • ‘participants are organized into small groups that work intensely’. we created 28 interdisciplinary teams, allocating each to one of four business challenges. we cleared their timetables of other classes and assessment deadlines to enable students’ exclusive focus. • ‘a short time frame in which the project is taken from concept to prototype. our students had five days from the release of their challenge to present a video ‘pitch’ of their solution to the business involved and face questions by the judging panel on the final day. • ‘a centralized location where teams meet, work, and share resources’. we created a dedicated moodle page containing all the information for the week, including briefs of the task, timetables and links, information about the businesses involved and the workshops we were holding. in the absence of physical meeting spaces, we created private channels for each group in microsoft teams (a familiar system, within the university by then). • ‘support provided by organizers and sponsors’. during the week student groups met with their business ‘client’ to understand their needs beyond the problem brief provided. they also had skills workshops, links to additional resources, and access to academic and technical helpdesks. keenan and manolchev ‘hacking’ the pandemic: turning online work challenges into learning with impact journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 4 result hackathons create an instant community full of energy and engagement (porter et al, 2017). the word 'fun' was used repeatedly by students, businesses and colleagues during the week. our student groups presented original and, in some cases, dazzling ideas. the businesses involved gave individual feedback, finding usable ideas in each pitch. we all shared the unique positive experience of those five days. impact is definitely here to stay. recommendations if trying something similar, we recommend that you: • start online. although thinking it was ‘plan b’, working online freed us from geographic and timetabling constraints to plan a week that fulfilled our objectives, with the right collaborators. • then blend. link the space to the learning, for example, the ideal space for collaboration was ms teams, but campus is better for skills workshops. • make it compulsory, but market it as an opportunity. it cannot be a choice to take part, as this is an unfamiliar part of the curriculum, but be serious in your efforts to inform and excite students about what they will take part in. • recognise the value of a diverse staff team in planning. • timetabling. arrange it at a time during the academic year when there is a dip in energy. • use every type of learning resource to ‘scaffold’ learning. house them in a dedicated online space. • show you take students seriously. link it explicitly to their learning, their professional development and give them a chance to shine. • create an event that you enjoy. it is why we all came into teaching in the first place. keenan and manolchev ‘hacking’ the pandemic: turning online work challenges into learning with impact journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 5 references artiles, j. a. and wallace, d. r. (2013) ‘borrowing from hackathons: overnight designathons as a template for creative idea hubs in the space of handson learning, digital learning, and systems re-thinking’, weef 2013 cartagena, available at: https://acofipapers.org/index.php/eiei/article/view/1434/1439 (accessed: 15 july 2021). baber, h. (2020) ‘determinants of students’ perceived learning outcome and satisfaction in online learning during the pandemic of covid-19’, journal of education and elearning research, 7(3), pp.285-292. available at: https://doi.org/10.20448/journal.509.2020.73.285.292 (accessed 24 august 2021). bernstein, b. (2000) pedagogy, symbolic control and identity. revised edn. oxford: rowman & littlefield publishers. gomes, m., manolchev, c., nyfoudi, m. and pustelnikovaite, t. (2020) ‘is it all “zoom and gloom” for higher education?’, futures of work, available at: https://futuresofwork.co.uk/2020/05/07/is-it-all-zoom-and-gloom-for-highereducation-reflections-in-the-midst-of-a-pandemic/ (accessed: 10 july 2021). goodman, t. and radu, a.i. (2020) ‘learn-apply-reinforce/share learning: hackathons and ctfs as general pedagogic tools in higher education, and their applicability to distance learning’ (arxiv pre-print), available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.13140/rg.2.2.21810.43205 (accessed: 24 august 2021). lara, m. and lockwood, k. (2016) ‘hackathons as community-based learning: a case study’, techtrends, 60, pp.486–495. available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11528016-0101-0 (accessed: 24 august 2021). maaravi, y. (2020) ‘using hackathons to teach management consulting’, innovations in education and teaching international, 57(2), pp. 220-230. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/14703297.2018.1563868 (accessed 24 august 2021). https://acofipapers.org/index.php/eiei/article/view/1434/1439 https://doi.org/10.20448/journal.509.2020.73.285.292 https://futuresofwork.co.uk/2020/05/07/is-it-all-zoom-and-gloom-for-higher-education-reflections-in-the-midst-of-a-pandemic/ https://futuresofwork.co.uk/2020/05/07/is-it-all-zoom-and-gloom-for-higher-education-reflections-in-the-midst-of-a-pandemic/ http://dx.doi.org/10.13140/rg.2.2.21810.43205 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11528-016-0101-0 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11528-016-0101-0 https://doi.org/10.1080/14703297.2018.1563868 keenan and manolchev ‘hacking’ the pandemic: turning online work challenges into learning with impact journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 6 munro, d. (2015) ‘hosting hackathons a tool in retaining students with beneficial side effects’, journal of computing sciences in colleges, 30(5), pp 46–51. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/14703297.2018.1563868 (accessed 24 august 2021). oecd (2020) food supply chains and covid-19: impacts and policy lessons. available at: https://www.oecd.org/coronavirus/policy-responses/food-supply-chains-andcovid-19-impacts-and-policy-lessons-71b57aea/ (accessed 24 august 2021). porter, e., bopp, c., gerber ,e. and voida, a. (2017) ‘reappropriating hackathons: the production work of the chi4good day of service’, proceedings of the 2017 chi conference on human factors in computing systems, denver colorado, usa 6-11 may. available at: https://doi.org/10.1145/3025453.3025637 (accessed 13th july 2021). tauberer, j. (2017) how to run a successful hackathon. available at: https://hackathon.guide/ (accessed: 13 july 2021). turner, a.j., hardin, c.d. and berland, m. (2021) ‘hackathons and ‘i’dentities: museum visitor identities in other informal learning environments’, visitor studies, (ahead of print), pp.1-19. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/10645578.2021.1925505 (accessed: 16 july 2021). uk parliament (2020) effects of covid-19 on the food supply system. available at: https://post.parliament.uk/effects-of-covid-19-on-the-food-supply-system/ (accessed 24 august 2021). wildman, j.l., nguyen, d.m., duong, n.s. and warren, c. (2021) ‘student teamwork during covid-19: challenges, changes, and consequences’, small group research, 52(2), pp.119-134. available at: https://doi.org/10.1177%2f1046496420985185 (accessed 24 august 2021). https://dl.acm.org/toc/jcsc/2015/30/5 https://dl.acm.org/toc/jcsc/2015/30/5 https://dl.acm.org/toc/jcsc/2015/30/5 https://doi.org/10.1080/14703297.2018.1563868 https://www.oecd.org/coronavirus/policy-responses/food-supply-chains-and-covid-19-impacts-and-policy-lessons-71b57aea/ https://www.oecd.org/coronavirus/policy-responses/food-supply-chains-and-covid-19-impacts-and-policy-lessons-71b57aea/ https://dl.acm.org/doi/proceedings/10.1145/3025453 https://dl.acm.org/doi/proceedings/10.1145/3025453 https://doi.org/10.1145/3025453.3025637 https://hackathon.guide/ https://doi.org/10.1080/10645578.2021.1925505 https://post.parliament.uk/effects-of-covid-19-on-the-food-supply-system/ https://doi.org/10.1177%2f1046496420985185 keenan and manolchev ‘hacking’ the pandemic: turning online work challenges into learning with impact journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 7 author details caroline keenan is the director of education for the university of exeter law school in cornwall. she is an inter-disciplinary researcher, examining how people use and understand law in action. her current research projects are interdisciplinary, working particularly with colleagues in the business school, academic development and the tel team and focussing on learning design for inclusive practice and widening participation. constantine manolchev is a programme director for the university of exeter business school in cornwall. he is interested in the ‘dark side’ of organisations: violence, bullying, harassment and negative acts. constantine also researches the wider, neoliberal labour market contexts in which organisations are situated focusing especially on precarious work. ‘hacking’ the pandemic: turning online work challenges into learning with impact the challenge the response inception preparation delivery result recommendations references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special issue 22: compendium of innovative practice october 2021 ________________________________________________________________________ we're all in the same boat: humanising teaching and learning experiences as a way to achieve engaging and interactive online provision julia kotula arts university bournemouth kizzy beaumont arts university bournemouth keywords: covid-19; online teaching; student engagement; teacher inhibitions; confidence building; teacher self-perceptions. the challenge before the pandemic, academic skills sessions at arts university bournemouth (aub) – a specialist arts university – were designed to support creative, visual, and kinesthetic learners. as seasoned learning developers, we were aware that teaching and learning activities need to be inclusive, to respect all students’ learning differences, but also relevant, to ensure students engage with them to ‘construct meaning’ (biggs, 2003; souleles, 2013). idea sharing, encouraging spontaneous remarks, and kinesthetic activities were the foundation of academic skills sessions pre-pandemic. hence, workshops were interactive, implementing negotiated content via initial needs analysis (nunan, 1988), scaffolded activities, and discussion of students’ comprehension of assignments (hogan, nastasi and pressley, 1999). with the sudden transition to online provision, our expertise in face-to-face teaching was challenged. our usual approach with which we felt comfortable, i.e. a3 paper, markers, group discussions, and peer review, suddenly felt impossible to replicate. it became challenging to translate the face-to-face mode of interactivity into a virtual setting and some sessions turned into didactic lectures. the barrier in the form of the screen was tangible, especially in open workshops where the converging of students from various programmes could have led to them wanting to be anonymous and mute. this was kotula and beaumont we're all in the same boat: humanising online teaching and learning experiences as a way to achieve engaging and interactive online provision journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 2 possibly due to overall anxiety (simamora, 2020), for example about completing assignments online (aristovnik et al., 2020), but also because of the lack of confidence in remote online study (martin, stamper and flowers, 2020). additionally, inhibitions when participating in online discussion, both for students and us, seemed to be a significant barrier (zhan and mei, 2013; muthuprased et al., 2021). the physical interactivity of our workshops had disappeared, which shook our confidence as our professional training and practice relied on this modus operandi. discursive, engaging study skills workshops now seemed unlikely, but we felt this was something which students and staff needed to attempt to maintain normality and a familiar space to feel comfortable in. this ambition and desire to maintain normality and familiarity within our sessions to support students' academic development meant that we felt we needed to appear competent in online teaching. we did not want to show our own doubts and inhibitions and so put-up a façade of expertise rather than humanising our practice and acknowledging we were all in the same boat. our initial thought was that if we maintained our professional demeanours, it would reassure the students that they could continue their studies in a familiar manner. however, what we did not realise was that our own false perception of our role as ‘experts’, and our expectation that we should be consummate professionals in online teaching, made it a challenging task. this was due to not being able to acknowledge our own struggles with online working, which prevented us from creating open dialogue with the students. as a result, this led to didactic, perceived-as-expert provision rather than transparent and engaging sessions. the response we have become aware that the idea of an ‘expert’ teacher is not necessarily a useful concept in enhancing students’ learning (lachner, jarodzka and nückles, 2016). however, this was a hard notion to move away from when our day-to-day lives were thrown offbalance due to the pandemic. our instinct, as learning developers, was to try to show students this did not need to impact on their learning and experience. we admit now that our initial thoughts around ‘professionalism’ and being the ‘expert’ did not align with the well-researched concept of ‘teaching presence,’ whereby direct instruction and facilitating discourse are conducive to active and successful learning (anderson et al., 2001; stone kotula and beaumont we're all in the same boat: humanising online teaching and learning experiences as a way to achieve engaging and interactive online provision journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 3 and springer, 2019). certainly, focusing on being a ‘present teacher’ has been more effective than worrying about potentially unprofessional situations, such as a cat or child coming into shot or seamlessly moving between screens or slides. gradually, continuous reflection on practice and student needs and reframing our own perceptions of our roles helped us to promote interaction and student engagement. allowing ourselves to drop our consummate professional demeanours, by showing our human side working within our homes and our inexperience in teaching online, helped us to strike a balance between seriousness and approachability. using the ‘go to’ teaching enhancement methods such as peer observations (race, 2009), weekly team reflective sessions, and student feedback (hazari and schnorr, 1999; mandouit, 2018), we assessed what worked and what did not. feedback for online sessions showed that the key to supporting engagement and building confidence was the student ability to complete activities within the sessions. this led us to understand that this would require dedicating more time for which we needed to become at ease with silence and our inability to monitor the completion of tasks. we allowed for more flexibility with built-in options for students to choose the most relevant task from a series of scaffolded activities and to work independently. there was a marked difference in feedback between term one and two, with the beginning of term two being the commencement of our new approach. in term one, 70% of surveyed students gave a comment regarding suggestions for improvement; in term two, this dropped to 28%. recommendations growing in confidence enabled us to experiment with additional strategies to increase interactivity, allowing more time for tasks which required it. some of our most successful steps forward were the simplest: starting each session with a relatable question which would help students to find common ground, e.g., ‘what stops you from writing?’, or experimenting with shorter (five-ten minutes) and longer (30-45 minutes) tasks, completed individually and within groups. such activities include: • mind mapping of initial thoughts on an assignment before undertaking paired discussion and encouraging the sharing of mind maps within the chat function. kotula and beaumont we're all in the same boat: humanising online teaching and learning experiences as a way to achieve engaging and interactive online provision journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 4 • undertaking free writing activities around assignment topics or sharing a tweet of an essay’s main argument. • using the poll functions to generate confidence levels in key areas of academic practice, opening the discussion once students can see the results. • analysing a paragraph or essay structure in breakout rooms in terms of criticality, academic sources, and coherence before allowing for a whole group discussion in the main room. in our pursuit of creating meaningful student learning experiences, we learned an important lesson: humanising the experience by acknowledging and admitting that the transition to online learning and teaching was challenging to everyone involved helped us change our perceptions of our roles as learning developers. accepting the silent moments in the sessions and lowering the expectations that we should be the perfect presenters resulted in increased confidence and evolved practice, and, in turn more engaging, relaxing, and interactive sessions. references anderson, t., rourke, l., garrison, d. r. and archer, w. (2001) ‘assessing teaching presence in a computer conferencing context’, journal of asynchronous learning networks, 5(2), pp.1-17. aristovnik, a., keržič, d., ravšelj, d., tomaževič, n. and umek, l. (2020) ‘impacts of the covid-19 pandemic on life of higher education students: a global perspective’, sustainability, 12(20), p.8438. https://doi.org/10.3390/su12208438. biggs, j., (2003) ‘aligning teaching for constructing learning’, in higher education academy. available at: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/john-biggs3/publication/255583992_aligning_teaching_for_constructing_learning/links/5406f fe70cf2bba34c1e8153/aligning-teaching-for-constructing-learning.pdf (accessed: 8 june 2021). https://doi.org/10.3390/su12208438 https://www.researchgate.net/profile/john-biggs-3/publication/255583992_aligning_teaching_for_constructing_learning/links/5406ffe70cf2bba34c1e8153/aligning-teaching-for-constructing-learning.pdf https://www.researchgate.net/profile/john-biggs-3/publication/255583992_aligning_teaching_for_constructing_learning/links/5406ffe70cf2bba34c1e8153/aligning-teaching-for-constructing-learning.pdf https://www.researchgate.net/profile/john-biggs-3/publication/255583992_aligning_teaching_for_constructing_learning/links/5406ffe70cf2bba34c1e8153/aligning-teaching-for-constructing-learning.pdf kotula and beaumont we're all in the same boat: humanising online teaching and learning experiences as a way to achieve engaging and interactive online provision journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 5 hazari, s. and schnorr, d. (1999) ‘leveraging student feedback to improve teaching in web-based courses’, the journal, 26(11), pp.30-38. hogan, k., nastasi, b. k. and pressley, m. (1999) ‘discourse patterns and collaborative scientific reasoning in peer and teacher-guided discussions’, cognition and instruction, 17, pp.379-432. https://doi.org/10.1207/s1532690xci1704_2. lachner, a., jarodzka, h. and nückles, m. (2016) ‘what makes an expert teacher? investigating teachers’ professional vision and discourse abilities’, instructional science, 44(3), pp.197-203. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11251-016-9376-y. mandouit, l. (2018) ‘using student feedback to improve teaching,’ educational action research’, 26(5), pp.755-769. https://doi.org/10.1080/09650792.2018.1426470. martin, f., stamper, b. and flowers, c. (2020) ‘examining student perception of readiness for online learning: importance and confidence’, online learning, 24(2), pp.38-58. https://doi.org/10.24059/olj.v24i2.2053. muthuprasad, t., aiswarya, s., aditya, k. s. and jha, g. k. (2021) ‘students’ perception and preference for online education in india during covid-19 pandemic’, social sciences & humanities open, 3(1), p.100101. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssaho.2020.100101. nunan, d., (1988) ‘principles for designing language teaching materials’ guidelines: a periodical for classroom language teachers, 10(2), pp.1-24. race, p. and leeds beckett teacher fellows (2009) using peer observation to enhance teaching. leeds: leeds met press. simamora, r. m., (2020). ‘the challenges of online learning during the covid-19 pandemic: an essay analysis of performing arts education students’, studies in learning and teaching, 1(2), pp. 86-103. https://doi.org/10.46627/silet.v1i2.38. https://doi.org/10.1207/s1532690xci1704_2 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11251-016-9376-y https://doi.org/10.1080/09650792.2018.1426470 https://doi.org/10.24059/olj.v24i2.2053 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssaho.2020.100101 https://doi.org/10.46627/silet.v1i2.38 kotula and beaumont we're all in the same boat: humanising online teaching and learning experiences as a way to achieve engaging and interactive online provision journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 6 souleles, n., (2013) ‘the evolution of art and design pedagogies in england: influences of the past, challenges for the future’, international journal of art & design education, 32(2), pp. 243-25. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1476-8070.2013.01753.x. stone, c. and springer, m. (2019) ‘interactivity, connectedness and “teacher-presence”: engaging and retaining students online’, australian journal of adult learning, 59(2), pp.146-169. zhan, z. and mei, h., (2013) ‘academic self-concept and social presence in face-to-face and online learning: perceptions and effects on students' learning achievement and satisfaction across environments’, computers & education, 69, pp.131-138. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2013.07.002. author details julia kotula has been an eap practitioner for many years and has recently extended her practice to providing learning development support to students of creative subjects. her expertise includes teaching academic literacies inclusively to students across all levels at university, teaching eap, and providing support to students with dyslexia and co-occurring difficulties. her long-existing interests are multilingualism, developing academic writing and critical thinking skills, and the emotional side of studying. more recently she has also become interested in specific learning difficulties and their impact of learning. kizzy beaumont works in learning development, supporting students in developing their academic practice. she gained her pgce in 2014 and has recently been awarded senior fellowship of the higher education academy. as a study skills tutor at aub, she provides one-to-one academic support, co-delivers open academic practice workshops, and develops and delivers course-specific sessions across a range of programmes. throughout her academic career, one of her main focuses has been developing programmes, sessions and resources to support and encourage student's engagement with their curriculum. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1476-8070.2013.01753.x https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2013.07.002 we're all in the same boat: humanising teaching and learning experiences as a way to achieve engaging and interactive online provision the challenge the response recommendations references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special issue 22: compendium of innovative practice october 2021 ________________________________________________________________________ performing community: an online tea break as a radical act carina buckley solent university, southampton, uk keywords: community; connectedness; covid-19; workplace culture. the challenge solent learning and teaching institute (slti) occupies the top floor of solent university library; a suite of offices and a kitchen filled with houseplants and sunlight. responsible for guiding and supporting all online, face-to-face, and blended learning and teaching activities of the university, the institute is comprised of four teams: learning and teaching, instructional design, the learning technologies advisors, and the systems developers. working practices, environment, and dispositions have conspired over time to coalesce individual trips to the kitchen into a communal tea break. this informal gathering around 10am each day allowed members of disparate teams that did not work together day by day to get to know each other better, making it easier for them to collaborate effectively on projects such as curriculum development, problem solve any issues lecturers might be having, and share concerns about students. productivity also benefitted, in that if there were non-work-related news/photos/ideas they wanted to share, they would ‘save it for the tea break’. despite the value of the morning tea break, recognised in business – as in our own experience – as essential for networking, reduced stress levels, and relationship development (sharma, 2020), my manager confronted me with figures of working hours lost over a week, suggesting it ‘didn’t look good’. what did not look good to me was an l&t space without a community. how could we talk to our staff and students about belonging and co-creation when we did not do it ourselves? team a tends to work closely with team b and team c, team d works only with team b, and other configurations are rare, meaning those people were unlikely to see each other buckley performing community: an online tea break as a radical act journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 2 formally; interactions tend to be more ad hoc. in the physical space, this sufficed. anything that brings people together and maintains them in dynamic relation can be termed ‘social glue’ (churchill, 2010), and the morning tea break acted as that glue. the move to lockdown disrupted that relation and we required an alternative means of keeping the group together: alternative glue. without the ability to pass by an office door or a help desk, a team’s relations can come unstuck, not through deliberate neglect, but rather a gentle fading away from lack of use. it is the casual conversation that drives workplace culture, supported by ‘informal awareness’ (neustaedter, 2020) – knowing what people are up to, how they are, what their mood is, and therefore whether they are available, approachable, or likely to need support in turn. the response when we were sent home in march 2020, without knowing when we would be back, we left a social hub that had become an important means for keeping in touch with a wider reach into the rest of the university community. our solution was an online tea break. a 30minute meeting invitation titled ‘daily catch-up’ sent to everyone in slti gave them the option to join a 10am meeting online (at first in zoom, and then later in teams). more intentional than a casual drift into the kitchen, this online tea break attempted to recreate its physical equivalent by being marked out for informal conversation – the social glue that would keep us functioning together, even when apart. and unlike other meetings, which are characterised by start and end times, agendas and speakers, this one was entirely voluntary, open-ended, free-wheeling, and flexible. sometimes it started at 10am, sometimes at 10:20am, or, not at all. sometimes it lasted a few minutes, enough for two people to check in with each other; sometimes it lasted hours, the three or four people present choosing to work alone together in a simulation of the office environment. it carried no obligation to attend, only the opportunity to see a different face. it became the open door passed in the corridor. the lack of certainty over who would be there each day, if anyone, lent a temporary air that marked it out from the burden of other online meetings. freedom to ignore the meeting counterbalanced the new online demands we faced. buckley performing community: an online tea break as a radical act journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 3 it also represented freedom of another kind. for a shared, regular, semi-formalised tea break is a radical act in a performative environment. my manager’s concerns derived from a focus on measurable outputs (olssen and peters, 2007), and a devaluing of ‘nonmonetary values’ (del cerro santamaria, 2019 p.1), i.e., those values centred on community, collaboration, and connection, which the tea break embraced and strengthened. as he could not measure the benefit of the conversations quantitatively, he assumed there were no benefits. the neoliberal university similarly confronts its staff as ‘units of resource whose performance and productivity must constantly be audited so that it can be enhanced’ (shore and wright, 1999, cited in ball, 2012, p.18), an attitude that cannot help but impact upon our social relations (ball, 2012). by taking time out for conversation that might be professionally useful but was not designed that way, we held onto the humanity that allows us to relate better to the people we support. recommendations although a timetabled meeting lacks the spontaneity of a casual encounter in the corridor or the convenience of a question called across the office, the online tea break nevertheless gave space for casual conversation and connection. importantly, it also signified the importance of that space and protected it, in amongst the pressures we faced during an uncertain period. this ethos has spread into our working practices, with ‘checking-in’ at the start of meetings becoming a regular feature and a more task-based approach to the day replacing the traditional time-based one. so successfully has our team culture evolved, the tea break is no longer required. ultimately, taking the opportunity to spend casual, informal time with colleagues is not about increasing productivity or networking. it is about social relations within the wider community, seeing the humanity in others, and being seen in return. recommendations for your own online tea break: • give space to the informal. • remember good working relationships take time to build – so give that time. • keep these meetings optional. nobody likes enforced fun. buckley performing community: an online tea break as a radical act journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 4 references ball, s. (2012) ‘performativity, commodification and commitment: an i-spy guide to the neoliberal university’, british journal of educational studies, 60(1), pp.17-28. available at: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41427693 (accessed: 9 june 2021). churchill, e. f. (2010) ‘introduction: social glue’, in willis, k. s., roussos, g., chorianopoulos, k. and struppek, m. (eds.) shared encounters. dordrecht: springer, pp.229-233. del cerro santamaría, g. (2019) ‘a critique of neoliberalism in higher education’, oxford research encyclopedias, education. https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190264093.013.992 neustaedter, c. (2020) the importance of informal conversation when working from home. available at: https://medium.com/@carman_neustaedter/the-importance-ofinformal-conversation-when-working-from-home-877a9f9776b0 (accessed: 9 june 2021). olssen, m. and peters, m. a. (2007) ‘neoliberalism, higher education and the knowledge economy: from the free market to knowledge capitalism’, journal of education policy, 20(3), pp.313-345. https://doi.org/10.1080/02680930500108718. sharma, p. (2020) the benefits of taking coffee breaks at work. available at: https://thriveglobal.com/stories/the-benefits-of-taking-coffee-breaks-at-work/ (accessed: 9 june 2021). author details carina buckley is the instructional design manager at solent university, where she is responsible for the on-going development of the vle as an innovative, engaging and http://www.jstor.org/stable/41427693 https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190264093.013.992 https://medium.com/@carman_neustaedter/the-importance-of-informal-conversation-when-working-from-home-877a9f9776b0 https://medium.com/@carman_neustaedter/the-importance-of-informal-conversation-when-working-from-home-877a9f9776b0 https://doi.org/10.1080/02680930500108718 https://thriveglobal.com/stories/the-benefits-of-taking-coffee-breaks-at-work/ buckley performing community: an online tea break as a radical act journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 5 inclusive teaching and learning space, a task made possible only with the support and efforts of her excellent team. performing community: an online tea break as a radical act the challenge the response recommendations references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special issue 22: compendium of innovative practice october 2021 ________________________________________________________________________ a reflection on students’ self-regulated learning and the role of the academic skills advisor during covid-19 alexandra read university of suffolk, uk keywords: academic skills; self-regulated learning; virtual classroom; covid-19. the challenge our university is a newer institution embedded in the heart of the local community and focused on widening participation. the student body is made up of approximately 5,000 students, with a high percentage of first generation and mature students. my role as an academic skills advisor (asa) is to support all students in developing the skills needed to succeed in their course, and i am specifically aligned to support the academic needs within the school of health and sports sciences. in march 2020, universities across the uk were forced to close physical campuses to protect staff and students from the threat of covid-19. this resulted in my role rapidly shifting from face-to-face (f2f) support into the online world of video calls, emails, and virtual classrooms. the biggest impact on the student/asa relationship, was that we were now infringing on each other’s private worlds; with cats walking across keyboards, children being home-schooled, or the postman at the door. inevitably, and understandably, the biggest challenge i faced was how to effectively support stressed and emotionally drained students through virtual means. when conducing f2f tutorials on campus, students’ academic needs are often clear: assignment planning, writing structure, referencing, critical thinking, etc. however, the rapid shift in modes of learning due to the pandemic, left not only the students facing unknown learning experiences, but also posed a dilemma for myself, as i too was unaware of how to effectively support students’ academic needs in this situation. however, video calls created new opportunities for me to discovery how students’ academic needs had read a reflection on students’ self-regulated learning and the role of the academic skills advisor during covid-19 journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 2 changed. it gave us a glimpse into each other worlds, breaking down previously unseen barriers and enabled more personal discussions. whether this was compliments on bookshelves in the background or a child interrupting to wave hello; these conversation starters led us to have more personal and shared experiences. students were struggling to engage with learning as they had a plethora of other worries: managing caring responsibilities, fears and sometimes grief due to covid-19, and many with anxieties about completing placements on ‘the front line’ in health care roles. covid-19 presented them with study environments that were isolating them from friends, family, and peers due to lockdowns or were chaotic with the demands of busy households, both of which left students no choice but to try to develop and adapt self-regulated learning (s-rl) strategies to cope. i received a high volume of requests for academic support from health students who were at various stages of completing their dissertations. they expressed the feeling that they had been ‘left to get on with it’ or did not know where to start, in addition to sharing the impact of poor emotional and mental wellbeing on their motivation to study. it appeared they were seeking practical support and advice to help motivate and manage their studies, while navigating challenges such as confinement, home schooling, caring responsibilities, and placements, some of which were on high-risk covid-19 wards. they required a quick solution to support their s-rl while completing dissertations to ensure they did not risk developing ‘suboptimal learning tactics’ (jovanović et al., 2017, p.75); students who feel under pressure are likely to quickly adopt new but incompetent s-rl strategies resulting in poor outcomes. the response the initial step was to decide what form of academic support could be implemented to specifically target these students’ needs in completing their dissertations. this was done by drawing upon research from jansen et al. (2019, pp.3-4) who explain that academic interventions will differ in ‘cognitive activities’ depending on the student’s stage in higher education. students in the early years of study require a higher level of cognitive tasks and instructional advice, whereas students in later stages require support rather than instruction (jansen et al., 2019, p. 4). therefore, i recognised that my role in this specific academic intervention was one of facilitating students’ s-rl. read a reflection on students’ self-regulated learning and the role of the academic skills advisor during covid-19 journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 3 secondly, it was understood that establishing successful s-rl techniques is not an isolated process but rather relies on numerous intrinsic factors such as self-awareness, personal strengths, weakness, adaptability, and self-motivation (zimmerman, 2002, pp.656). in addition, external factors highlighted by bryan such as ‘culture, class, gender, mental health and well-being’ also hold a significant importance in this engagement process (2015, pp.26-7). for these reasons, it was vital to acknowledge the internal and external factors that these students were experiencing in order to provide a successful solution that would both facilitate students’ motivation and help them engage effective s-rl. this was done through maslow’s (1943) hierarchy of needs (figure 1), in which an individual must have all their needs met, at each level in order to reach self-actualisation or, in this situation, successfully complete their dissertations. figure 1. maslow’s hierarchy of needs. (1943, in jordan, 2008, p.156). in the first instance, i applied this framework as a tool to identify and understand how, at each level, the pandemic was impacting their ability to engage s-rl to complete their dissertation (self-actualisation), through lack of physical, psychological, and emotional needs. the effects of not ‘having basic physiological, social and emotional needs reasonably satisfied’, according to bryan (2015, p.27) is a significant factor in students’ ability or inability, to engage in learning. this process then enabled me to develop a workshop that could facilitate support at each level, to ensure the students could complete their dissertations. the ‘write here, write now’ workshop was delivered via virtual classroom, for two hours at various times. prior to the session, students received a presession plan to create their own aims/targets. the session itself was structured around a read a reflection on students’ self-regulated learning and the role of the academic skills advisor during covid-19 journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 4 time management technique of 25 minutes self-directed work, with 10-15 minute interval breaks to engage with myself and peers, ending the session with reflection and next steps. recommendations through applying both jansen et al.’s (2019) research and maslow’s (1943) hierarchy of needs, i was able to plan and consider how ‘write here, write now’ could provide the solution the students needed to successfully engage their s-rl. breaking this down specifically regarding each level: • physiological and safety: the pre-session plan encourages students to ensure they have refreshments to hand before the start of the workshop, and prompts students to consider how to create a productive environment. • love, belonging, and self-esteem: the virtual classroom advocates a safe space where students can interact with peers, fostering a sense of belonging, and receive support and encouragement. • cognitive and aesthetic: the workshop is designed to facilitate students to engage pre-existing s-rl and models how to implement these skills independently, alongside the opportunity to participate in activities to help stimulate creativity. ultimately, the response of facilitating a workshop to target a group of students who were struggling emotionally, mentally, and physically to engage s-rl resulted in the successful completion of dissertations in these unprecedented times. the recommendations are based on the consideration given to the wider factors that can impact students’ ability to engage in s-rl and how applying a holistic framework such as maslow’s can be a tool to embed this approach into workshop design. references bryan, c. (2015) ‘enhancing student learning’, in lea, j. (ed.) enhancing learning and teaching in higher education. engaging with the dimensions of practice. maidenhead: open university press, pp.20-53. read a reflection on students’ self-regulated learning and the role of the academic skills advisor during covid-19 journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 5 jansen, r. s., van leeuwen, a., janssen, j., jak, s. and kester, l. (2019) 'self-regulated learning partially mediates the effect of self-regulated learning interventions on achievement in higher education: a meta-analysis', educational research review, 28, pp.1-20. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.edurev.2019.100292. jordan, a. (2008) approaches to learning. maidenhead: open university press. jovanović, j., gǎsević, d., dawson, s., pardo, a. and mirriahi, n. (2017) ‘learning analytics to unveil learning strategies in a flipped classroom’, internet and higher education, 33, pp.74-85. available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.iheduc.2017.02.001. zimmerman, b. j. (2002) ‘becoming a self-regulated learner: an overview’, theory into practice, 41(2), pp. 64-70. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15430421tip4102_2. author details alexandra read is an academic skills advisor within the department of library and learning services at the university of suffolk, with knowledge and experience of supporting children, young people, and adult learners with sends and splds. she has a particular interest in developing an inclusive he practice that supports all students from diverse and widening participation backgrounds. in addition, alexandra is keen to continue with her professional development through reflective practice, evidenced based research projects, and collaborations with professionals across a variety of heis. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.edurev.2019.100292 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.iheduc.2017.02.001 https://doi.org/10.1207/s15430421tip4102_2 a reflection on students’ self-regulated learning and the role of the academic skills advisor during covid-19 the challenge the response recommendations references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special issue 22: compendium of innovative practice october 2021 ________________________________________________________________________ pivoting academic skills support online: a critical reflection on practice julie nolan edge hill university helen jamieson edge hill university keywords: academic skills; online pivot; critical reflection; covid-19. the challenge in response to covid-19 in march 2020, universities across the higher education (he) sector pivoted their teaching, learning and support online. as a team of academic skills advisors (asas) at a northwest united kingdom (uk) university who support students with a range of academic skills, including academic writing and information literacy, we too made the pandemic pivot. in march 2021 we needed to start planning for the coming year. in this paper we discuss our critical reflection on relocating our academic skills support fully online and consider how these reflections will help shape our future provision. the response we adopted brookfield’s critical reflection model (2017) – an evidence-based approach – to frame our reflections. this model offered four lenses for critical reflection (figure 1). nolan and jamieson pivoting academic skills support online: a critical reflection on practice journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 2 figure 1. brookfield’s four lenses model (2017). personal experience brookfield (2017) argues that it is important to include personal stories or anecdotes in any critical reflection, and that reflection can be useful as a ‘collective enterprise’. six months after moving our academic skills support online, our asas reflected, both individually and collectively, on how their approach to the delivery of skills support had changed. key considerations included: • difficulties measuring student engagement online. • the challenge of balancing activities and interactions online. • the importance of communities of practice and colleagues’ support. • a need to upskill the team (digital skills and learning technologies). • moving support created an opportunity to improve accessibility and promote an inclusive learning environment in some areas of provision. • impact on time and resource implications. students’ eyes obtaining student feedback can be challenging; however, a student-facing evaluation framework was already embedded within our existing practice, and we were easily able to broaden our usual feedback mechanisms. as well as more formal mechanisms, informal • theoretical scholarly literature • our 'critical friends' experiences • feedback on how they experience learning • self-reflection as learners and as practicing teachers personal experience students' eyes theory colleagues' perceptions nolan and jamieson pivoting academic skills support online: a critical reflection on practice journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 3 student feedback received during appointments, webinars, via email and across our social media channels was also collated and synthesised. whilst brookfield (2017) argues that the most important pedagogic knowledge we need as practitioners is an awareness of how students experience learning, he also recognises the ‘dangers of taking student definitions at face value’. key findings, in addition to a general appreciation that support remained available and accessible, included: 1-2-1 appointment feedback: • 100% satisfied with the structure and content of online appointments. • 93.8% satisfied or very satisfied with the appointment being online. • 25% would prefer in person, 25% would prefer online, and 50% would like both options to choose from. webinar feedback: • several students commented on the benefits of re-watching sessions. • 81% agreed or strongly agreed that the webinar content stimulated their learning. • 82% agreed or strongly agreed that the webinar was useful for their course. colleagues’ experiences as 2020 ended, we invited academic colleagues to feed back on our virtual support. brookfield (2017) describes ‘critical friends’ as being at the heart of the reflective process. he suggests that talking to colleagues helps practitioners to ‘check, verify or reframe assumptions’ and ‘offer multiple perspectives’ (brookfield, 2017). whilst we remain mindful that the overall ‘gratitude’ for continued support will have had an impact on associated feedback, key findings included: • online support had been ‘flexible’, ‘accessible’, ‘well planned’ and ‘valuable to [their] students’. • ‘facilitators [asas] had great personalities and presence, … so important given the virtual nature of the sessions’. nolan and jamieson pivoting academic skills support online: a critical reflection on practice journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 4 • their ‘students were fully engaged, and staff were very encouraging and supportive’. • the option to receive support/content synchronously, asynchronously or via a combination of the two was welcomed, and this often led to further discussions around a ‘combination’ approach. • developmental feedback suggested including more ‘activity’ or ‘practical tasks’, to allow students to practise what they were learning (most notably around referencing). theoretical literature brookfield (2017) describes theory as a way to test our understanding and to combat ‘group think’ (brookfield, 2017). whilst a lot has been written about online learning as a concept, there is much less published and peer reviewed literature around pivoting academic skills support. what we discovered in the literature fell into five key themes which will help inform our future practice: • digital inequality: different levels of access to technology, equipment, software and hardware, and varying confidence in seeking support (jisc, 2020a; lambie and law, 2020; nordmaan et al., 2020; raaper and brown, 2020). • misconceptions about digital skills: the assumption that students have the necessary skills and competencies for learning online and learning to navigate the different technologies and platforms, alongside the wide range of new terminology, can be confusing for students (adedoyin and soykan, 2020; jisc, 2020b; lambie and law, 2020; watermeyer et al., 2021). • importance of student as partners: involving students in decision making processes ensures their digital experience delivers what they need and shapes the digital landscape for future students (jisc, 2020a; jisc, 2020b; whelehan, 2020; jackson, 2020; 2021). • inclusive learning design: whilst the addition of technology does not automatically improve learning design, content and presentation, it does provide an opportunity to consider doing things differently; therefore, it is vital to keep good pedagogy at the nolan and jamieson pivoting academic skills support online: a critical reflection on practice journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 5 heart of learning design, with technology used to enhance (not drive) the learning experience (cast, 2018; adedoyin and soykan, 2020; jisc, 2020a; jisc, 2020b; neves and hewitt, 2020; nordmaan et al., 2020; watermeyer et al., 2021). • creating a sense of belonging: the lack of a physical ‘university space’ impacts on students’ self-discipline, wellbeing and sense of belonging; universities need to consider how to create a sense of community and belonging when delivering teaching and support online (stadtfeld et al., 2019; elmer et al., 2020; hodges et al., 2020; nordmaan et al., 2020; raaper and brown, 2020; lederer et al., 2021; pownall et al., 2021). recommendations brookfield’s four lenses (2017) provided a robust framework for us to critically reflect on our pivot online successfully. this model enabled us to understand the challenges and implications faced by the asas, but equally the importance of having an established community of practice and supportive team ethos. we learned a lot about student preferences and expectations about their learning, which helped us clearly map out our future without making assumptions about students’ needs. receiving developmental feedback and advice from our academic colleagues, who had also moved fully online, was invaluable to our practice and delivery development. and through our evaluation and findings we can contribute to the gap in the literature on pivoting academic skills support online. other practitioners may wish to clearly map out an evaluation plan to ascertain what feedback they wish to gather, and from where, before embarking on this model. we would also recommend allowing ample time to synthesise and analyse the data. references adedoyin, o.b. and soykan, e. (2020) ‘covid-19 pandemic and online learning: the challenges and opportunities’, interactive learning environments, pp.1-13. nolan and jamieson pivoting academic skills support online: a critical reflection on practice journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 6 available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/10494820.2020.1813180 (accessed: 18 october 2021). brookfield, s. (2017) becoming a critically reflective teacher. 2nd edn. san francisco: jossey-bass, pp.61-77. cast (2018) the udl guidelines. available at: https://udlguidelines.cast.org/ (accessed: 13 march 2021). elmer, t., mepham, k. and stadfeld, c. (2020) ‘students under lockdown: comparisons of students' social networks and mental health before and during the covid-19 crisis in switzerland’, plos one, 15 (7). available at: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0236337 (accessed: 12 january 2021). hodges, c., moore, s., lockee, b., trust, t. and bond, a. (2020) ‘the difference between emergency remote teaching and online learning’, educause review. available at: https://er.educause.edu/articles/2020/3/the-difference-between-emergency-remoteteaching-and-online-learning (accessed: 12 january 2021). jackson, a. (2020) ‘the expectation gap: students’ experience of learning during covid-19 and their expectations for next year’, wonkhe. available at: https://wonkhe.com/blogs/the-expectation-gap-students-experience-of-learningduring-covid-19-and-their-expectations-for-next-year/ (accessed: 12 january 2021). jackson, a. (2021) ‘the expectation gap ii: students’ experience of learning during covid19 and their expectations for next year’, wonkhe, 3 february. available at: https://wonkhe.com/blogs/the-expectation-gap-ii-students-hopes-for-learning-andteaching-in-the-next-normal/ (accessed: 13 march 2021). jisc (2020a) student digital experience insights survey 2020: uk higher education (he) survey findings. available at: https://www.jisc.ac.uk/sites/default/files/student-dei-hereport-2020.pdf (accessed: 12 january 2021). https://doi.org/10.1080/10494820.2020.1813180 https://udlguidelines.cast.org/ https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0236337 https://er.educause.edu/articles/2020/3/the-difference-between-emergency-remote-teaching-and-online-learning https://er.educause.edu/articles/2020/3/the-difference-between-emergency-remote-teaching-and-online-learning https://wonkhe.com/blogs/the-expectation-gap-students-experience-of-learning-during-covid-19-and-their-expectations-for-next-year/ https://wonkhe.com/blogs/the-expectation-gap-students-experience-of-learning-during-covid-19-and-their-expectations-for-next-year/ https://wonkhe.com/blogs/the-expectation-gap-ii-students-hopes-for-learning-and-teaching-in-the-next-normal/ https://wonkhe.com/blogs/the-expectation-gap-ii-students-hopes-for-learning-and-teaching-in-the-next-normal/ https://www.jisc.ac.uk/sites/default/files/student-dei-he-report-2020.pdf https://www.jisc.ac.uk/sites/default/files/student-dei-he-report-2020.pdf nolan and jamieson pivoting academic skills support online: a critical reflection on practice journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 7 jisc (2020b). learning and teaching reimagined: change and challenge for students, staff and leaders. available from: https://www.jisc.ac.uk/sites/default/files/ltr-reportchange-and-challenge-for-students-staff-and-leaders-aug-2020.pdf (accessed: 12 january 2021). lambie, i. and law, b. (2020) ‘teaching online during a pandemic: pedagogical skills transfer from face to face support to online synchronous support provision’, proceedings of the 19th european conference on e-learning, glasgow, 28-30 october. available at: https://researchonline.gcu.ac.uk/ws/portalfiles/portal/42976118/lambie_i._law_b._ 2020_teaching_online_during_a_pandemic_pedagogical_skills_transfer_from_face _to_face_support_to_online_synchronous_support_provision.pdf (accessed: 20 february 2021). lederer, a.m., hoban, m.t., lipson, s.k., zhou, s. and eisenberg, d. (2021) ‘more than inconvenienced: the unique needs of u.s. college students during the covid-19 pandemic’, health education & behavior, 48(1), pp.14-19. available at: https://doi.org/10.1177%2f1090198120969372 (accessed: 13 march 2021). neves, j. and hewitt, r. (2020) student academic experience survey 2020. available at: https://www.hepi.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/the-student-academicexperience-survey-2020.pdf (accessed: 12 january 2021). nordmaan, e., horlin, c., hutchinson, j., murray, j., robson, l., seery, m.k. and mackay, j.r.d. (2020) ‘ten simple rules for supporting a temporary online pivot in higher education’, plos comput biol 16(10), e1008242. available at: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1008242 (accessed: 12 january 2021). pownall, m., harris, r. and blundell-birtill, p. (2021) ‘supporting students during the transition to university in covid-19: 5 key considerations and recommendations’, psychology learning and teaching. available at: https://doi.org/10.1177/14757257211032486 (accessed: 18 october 2021). https://www.jisc.ac.uk/sites/default/files/ltr-report-change-and-challenge-for-students-staff-and-leaders-aug-2020.pdf https://www.jisc.ac.uk/sites/default/files/ltr-report-change-and-challenge-for-students-staff-and-leaders-aug-2020.pdf https://researchonline.gcu.ac.uk/ws/portalfiles/portal/42976118/lambie_i._law_b._2020_teaching_online_during_a_pandemic_pedagogical_skills_transfer_from_face_to_face_support_to_online_synchronous_support_provision.pdf https://researchonline.gcu.ac.uk/ws/portalfiles/portal/42976118/lambie_i._law_b._2020_teaching_online_during_a_pandemic_pedagogical_skills_transfer_from_face_to_face_support_to_online_synchronous_support_provision.pdf https://researchonline.gcu.ac.uk/ws/portalfiles/portal/42976118/lambie_i._law_b._2020_teaching_online_during_a_pandemic_pedagogical_skills_transfer_from_face_to_face_support_to_online_synchronous_support_provision.pdf https://doi.org/10.1177%2f1090198120969372 https://www.hepi.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/the-student-academic-experience-survey-2020.pdf https://www.hepi.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/the-student-academic-experience-survey-2020.pdf https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1008242 https://doi.org/10.1177/14757257211032486 nolan and jamieson pivoting academic skills support online: a critical reflection on practice journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 8 raaper, r. and brown, c. (2020) ‘the covid-19 pandemic and the dissolution of the university campus: implications for student support practice’, journal of professional capital and community, 5 (3/4), pp.343-349. available at: https://doi.org/10.1108/jpcc-06-2020-0032 (accessed: 20 february 2021). stadtfeld, c., vörös, a., elmer, t., boda, z. and raabe, i.j. (2019) ‘integration in emerging social networks explains academic failure and success’, proceedings of the national academy of sciences, 116(3), pp.792-797. available at: https://dx.doi.org/10.1073%2fpnas.1811388115 (accessed: 13 march 2021). watermeyer, r., crick, t., knight, c. and goodall, j. (2021) ‘covid-19 and digital disruption in uk universities: afflictions and affordances of emergency online migration’, higher education, 81(3), pp.623–641. available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-020-00561-y (accessed: 13 march 2021). whelehan, d.f. (2020) ‘students as partners: a model to promote student engagement in post-covid-19 teaching and learning’, aishe, 12 (3). available at: https://ojs.aishe.org/index.php/aishe-j/article/view/479 (accessed: 12 january 2021). author details julie nolan is acting head of student engagement: library and learning services at edge hill university. helen jamieson is acting head of digital learning technologies: library and learning services at edge hill university. https://doi.org/10.1108/jpcc-06-2020-0032 https://dx.doi.org/10.1073%2fpnas.1811388115 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-020-00561-y https://ojs.aishe.org/index.php/aishe-j/article/view/479 pivoting academic skills support online: a critical reflection on practice the challenge the response personal experience students’ eyes colleagues’ experiences theoretical literature recommendations references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special issue 22: compendium of innovative practice october 2021 ________________________________________________________________________ facilitating student engagement in online discussions through self-organisation elena ončevska ager saints cyril and methodius university in skopje, north macedonia keywords: student engagement; self-organised learning; online learning; teacher education; motivation; positive psychology; covid-19 the challenge as a teacher educator at a university in north macedonia – a small, developing european country – i provide initial teacher training to pre-service teachers (psts) of english as a foreign language. this involves observing and discussing, in small groups, lessons delivered by the psts in actual school contexts. the psts share any salient moments from the lesson (for example, a student misbehaving) and seek to understand the chosen classroom episode more fully by using relevant literature to support their arguments. my role is to moderate the discussion, joining in only when needed. developing informed reflection skills, however, relies on active involvement on the part of the psts, rather than merely attending sessions and taking notes, as the psts have suggested they are accustomed to on other modules. i find myself, therefore, needing to work against the established institutional culture to get the psts actively involved in their own learning. student passivity has always been an issue in my teacher education classroom, with only a few (out of 10-15) psts regularly taking part in the course discussions and projects. this is despite course participation directly feeding into their course mark. covid-19 further exacerbated student passivity as teaching and learning moved online. psts were increasingly reluctant to take the floor, perhaps also due to the not very obvious turn-taking norms online sometimes resulting in awkward silences. this was coupled with most psts choosing not to turn their video camera on, which took away the little body language that ončevska ager facilitating student engagement in online discussions through self-organisation journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 2 online teaching makes available in the first place. some psts were not responsive even when called upon. i felt i needed to take action to help my psts engage. the response my first point of reference was the literature on motivation and positive psychology. ryan and deci’s (2000) self-determination theory posits that motivated behaviour relies on meeting three basic psychological needs: competence (being able to experience success when dealing with the environment), autonomy (a sense that one is granted freedom to interact with the environment) and relatedness (a sense of being connected to other people in one’s environment). positive psychology defines wellbeing as comprising five aspects: positive emotions, involvement in what we do, relationships with other people, the meaning we take from life and a sense of accomplishment in life (seligman, 2011). putting these two theories side by side, there seemed to be a strong underlying motif: motivation and happiness, more generally, seem to depend on the success resulting from our active, autonomous involvement with the tasks and with the people in our lives. how does one encourage student involvement in online academic discussions so as not to rely on pst self-selection? holec (1981) suggests that students can exercise autonomy regarding various aspects of the course: its aims, content, methodologies and assessment. i decided to tweak the course methodologies so as to make less room for myself on the course, and more for the psts, by giving them autonomy in moderating some of our sessions. i later became aware of engaging students through partnerships (healey et al., 2014), not only with regard to what goes on in the classroom, but also beyond it, for example, in curriculum design and our own research projects. i invited a pst group who appeared bonded and mature enough to self-organise to moderate their own discussion in the way i moderate it for them; this time, however, i would not be present at all in the virtual room. they enthusiastically embraced the challenge, recorded and shared their session. watching their session, i found it refreshing to see the group visibly more talkative than usual, laughing, using colloquialisms and a relaxed body language. most of the psts took part in the discussion, even the shyest ončevska ager facilitating student engagement in online discussions through self-organisation journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 3 ones, whom i seldom (if ever) hear in class. the silences between the psts’ turns appeared less uncomfortable than in our regular sessions. i was very pleased to see them discuss most of the points that i would have liked to see raised. once i reviewed their session, i shared my comments on their work with them, encouraging group reflection on the experience. the students appeared to welcome the change in the format of moderation, suggesting that they would be happy to adopt it again. some were concerned about their informal communication, even though i do not insist on any formality in my sessions. others were concerned about the absence of a formal discussion moderator; however, it was apparent to me that one or two psts had spontaneously assumed that role, and quite successfully. not all the groups i approached with a suggestion to self-organise were as enthusiastic, though. to make sure they were not stressed by the prospect, i offered a “weaker” form of student involvement to them. i delegated tasks before the session and assigned different students to moderate different parts of the groups’ discussions, with me acting as: (a) a student, joining in the discussion as and when, making suggestions and/or comments. (b) an observer, taking notes during the discussion and joining in at the end of the session or, if time was short, sharing my comments at a later date. these psts, too, welcomed the change in discussion format and suggested they would be interested in further explorations of self-organised learning. my psts got to experience first-hand the challenge of dealing with long silences and blank screens in online discussions – an experience which has the potential to help them re-think their own communication choices and perhaps develop empathy for and/or solidarity with the teacher educator. recommendations self-organisation is easily adaptable to a range of educational contexts as it does not require any special provisions. my experiments with it suggest that my psts were able ončevska ager facilitating student engagement in online discussions through self-organisation journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 4 and, depending on group maturity, willing to engage in different forms of self-organised learning, thus tapping into important motivational and wellbeing resources. while i only made changes to my course methodologies, there is scope for student involvement at other course levels (for example, aims, content and/or assessment) as well as beyond the course (for example, curriculum development and/or research). it is worth consulting students about their preferred levels of involvement; they appreciate the trust and the ensuing responsibility that drive self-organised learning, which is hopefully more enjoyable and longer lasting. references healey, m., flint, a. and harrington, k. (2014). engagement through partnership: students as partners in learning and teaching in higher education. york: the higher education academy. holec, h. (1981) autonomy and foreign language learning. oxford: pergamon. ryan, r. m. and deci, e. l. (2000) ‘self-determination theory and the facilitation of intrinsic motivation, social development, and well-being’, american psychologist. 55 (1), 6878. available at: https://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1037/0003-066x.55.1.68 (accessed: 10 august 2021). seligman, m. (2011) flourish. london: nicholas brealey. author details elena ončevska ager is associate professor at saints cyril and methodius university, north macedonia. she teaches language teacher education courses, and her research interests include mentoring, motivation, professional wellbeing and teacher/learner agency. https://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1037/0003-066x.55.1.68 facilitating student engagement in online discussions through self-organisation the challenge the response recommendations references author details jldhe submission october 2021 (final, full) journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special issue 22: compendium of innovative practice october 2021 _______________________________________________________________________ inwards, together: an inner-resourcing u-turn deena shaffer x/ryerson university, canada diana brecher x/ryerson university, canada keywords: metacognition; somatic; embodiment; mindfulness; pendulation; covid-19. the challenge our challenge was to offer students something screen-free to support their academic and personal wellbeing and to utilise their self-reliance. we were driven to help in some way – via curriculum, resources, and strategies – during the prolonged covid-19 pandemic and its associated isolation, loneliness, digital dependence, and fragmentation. we felt compelled to explore how thriving at the heart of our professional programmes might still be possible, even if only in micro-moments, given the covid-19 context. we wondered what we could suggest that students could turn to independent of time zones, literal bandwidth, and space constraints. this led us to incorporate inner-resourcing strategies into our nationally recognised programme, thriving in action (tia). tia began just over four years ago at x/ryerson university in toronto, canada, where it has so far supported more than 1,000 students and spawned a community of practice involving colleagues in 35 canadian post-secondary institutions. in its original form, tia welcomed students from all years and programmes who self-identified as academically or personally struggling into a semester-long cohort to learn positive psychology essentials, like selfcompassion and gratitude, intertwined with integrative learning strategies. while many core aspects remain, what has changed is an enhanced commitment to offer students ever-ready, somatic approaches to well-regulate, refocus, and re-embody. shaffer and brecher inwards, together: an inner-resourcing u-turn journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 2 the response thriving in action became thriving at home, offered synchronously via zoom to students keen to learn how to cope, and to learn well. metacognition remained a key underpinning: that ‘awareness above the subject matter’ (chick, 2013, para. 3) and ‘supervisory thinking’ (handel, 2020, para. 3), help us work through ‘the muddiest point’ (tanner, 2012, p.116) and become more consciously aware of how learning is happening (mcguire, 2015). but metacognitive strategies were not enough, and maybe not altogether possible, in the face of covid-19’s collective trauma. tia had offered tips like stacking to form new habits (wood, 2019), enacting gratitude to support mood, and immersion in nature to hone concentration (kaplan, 1995) for more effective note-taking. thriving at home provides these same proven strategies alongside grounding bodyand breathbased techniques. the pandemic-prompted shift resembles a uturn, a move from tia’s more external practices to thriving at home’s inner ones. these new strategies tap into students’ own capacities, requiring nothing beyond a students’ own presence here and now – no data, no office hours, no appointment. in this u-turn towards somatic and sensory strategies to soften, soothe, and ease, we explored what counts as a learning strategy. we centred embodiment, ‘critical for well-being’ (berila, 2016, p.33), recognising that ‘we learn through our bodies and spirits as much as through our minds’ (cajete, 1994, p.31). for example, we taught pendulation (levine and frederick, 1997) to notice, feel, and remedy when we are stuck or overwhelmed and to sway, like a pendulum, back into a state of restoration. we also outlined the impacts of the vagus nerve, drawing on the insights of polyvagal theory (porges, 2011), reminding students of the dynamic dance we are each in, every day, between the dorsal vagal state of shut down, the sympathetic state of mobilised and primed to take action, and the ventral vagal state of feeling steady and safe to engage in relationship and integration. we spoke to the ebb and flow of bodies’ physiological resilience, namely what readiness to learn feels like, aiming for a balance between being ‘not too revved up. not too shut down, regulated, relational, rational, and reflective . . . recover[ing] capacities of learning shaffer and brecher inwards, together: an inner-resourcing u-turn journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 3 and growth’ (graham, n.d., p.2). alongside pendulation and polyvagal pedagogy, sleep became another foremost learning strategy, not pushed to the outer edges of the day if, only, and after finishing schoolwork, but as a primary insistence. sleep, after all, enables our ability to absorb experiences and consolidate them as memories, facilitates the transition of memories from shortto long-term storage, and leads to a threefold upping of creative problem-solving (walker, 2019). breath-work in the form of beneficial pacing of our inhales and exhales (bullock, 2019) became another key strategy in students’ expanding toolkit of holistic learning strategies; we practised a steady, even rhythm of breathing in for a count of four and then out, and as a grounding salve to rising panic, we practised holding breaths to re-nourish mental focus and calm agitation. we also practised sense-based anxiety reduction techniques, like noticing and naming five nearby items to see, four to touch, three sounds, two smells, and one taste, all to pierce through rumination and re-inhabit the body. we practised intentional, constructive rest postures, like placing legs up on a wall or on a chair, to stimulate pendulation away from being always-on, activated, and adrenaline-fuelled. we practised tracing our fingers, as well as clenching and unclenching our fists, in sync with the breath. we practised experimenting with self-calming techniques that tap into the mammalian caregiving system, like cupping palms on cheeks or hands over heart, and we practised accessible slow stretch routines to better hear our inner yearning for rest, relaxation, hydration, and laughter. from heart rate variability interventions to pranayama offerings, we enfolded these myriad, somatic, micro-resilience (john, 2017) strategies and techniques as learning strategies. each helped thriving at home students to feel bodily feedback – fatigue, dehydration, panic, avoidance – and to respond skilfully. recommendations thriving at home students articulated that they had previously viewed movement, sleep, and even breath-awareness as luxuries, secondary to schoolwork at best. now, their learning strategy repertoires overflowed with nourishing, embodied, always-available approaches that shaffer and brecher inwards, together: an inner-resourcing u-turn journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 4 directly support metacognition, efficiency, productivity, reflection, and growth mind-set, and that place wellbeing at the centre of learning. having students prioritise these strategies as necessary, rather than nice-to-have, amongst their list of weighty to-dos has been tricky. we will continue to intersperse these somatic approaches from herein. based on our learning, we recommend that learning developers, and educators more broadly, rethink what gets silo-ed out or excluded from education development work, and aim to broaden what has traditionally been thought of as a metacognitive or learning strategy; perhaps broaden your suggestions, searches, and scholarly work to incorporate elemental, ever-ready, holistic dimensions. consider making your own u-turn and tenderly attend to the wisdom of your own breath and the feedback of your own body and go from there. references berila, b. (2016) integrating mindfulness into anti-oppression pedagogy: social justice in higher education. new york: routledge. bullock, g. b. (2019) ‘what focusing on the breath does to your brain’, greater good science center, 31 october. berkeley: greater good in action. available at: https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/what_focusing_on_the_breath_does_to_yo ur_brain#:~:text=a%20recent%20study%20in%20the,pay%20attention%20to%20our% 20breath.&text=prior%20research%20shows%20that%20paced,and%20regulate%20t he%20nervous%2 0system (accessed: 25 october 2021). cajete, g. (1994) look to the mountain: an ecology of indigenous education. durango: kivaki press. chick, n. (2013) metacognition. vanderbilt university center for teaching. available at: https://cft.vanderbilt.edu/guides-sub-pages/metacognition/ (accessed: 9 june 2021). graham, l. (n.d.) practical treatment strategies to foster post-traumatic growth [training https://cft.vanderbilt.edu/guides-sub-pages/metacognition/ shaffer and brecher inwards, together: an inner-resourcing u-turn journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 5 transcript]. national institute for clinical application of behavioral medicine. available at: https://s3.amazonaws.com/nicabm-stealthseminar/posttraumaticgrowthshortcourse+/transcript/video7.pdf (accessed: 28 october 2021). handel, d. (2020) ‘the power of metacognition in everyday life’, the learning scientists, 2 april. available at: https://www.learningscientists.org/blog/2020/4/2-1 (accessed: 25 october 2021). john, b. s. (2017) micro-resilience: minor shifts for major boosts in focus, drive, and energy. nashville: center street. kaplan, s. (1995) ‘the restorative benefits of nature: toward an integrative framework’, journal of environmental psychology, 15(3), pp.169-182. https://doi.org/10.1016/02724944(95)90001-2. levine, p. a. and frederick, a. (1997) waking the tiger. healing trauma: the innate capacity to transform overwhelming experiences. berkeley: north atlantic books. mcguire, s. y. (2015) teach students how to learn: strategies you can incorporate into any course to improve student metacognition, study skills, and motivation. sterling: stylus publishing, llc. porges, s. w. (2011) the polyvagal theory: neurophysiological foundations of emotions, attachment, communication, and self-regulation. new york: w.w. norton & company. tanner, k. d. (2012) ‘promoting student metacognition’, cbe—life sciences education, 11, pp.113-120. https://doi.org/10.1187/cbe.12-03-0033. walker, m. (2019) sleep is your superpower [video]. ted conferences. available at: https://www.ted.com/talks/matt_walker_sleep_is_your_superpower?language=en (accessed: 25 october 2021). https://s3.amazonaws.com/nicabm-stealthseminar/posttraumaticgrowth-shortcourse+/transcript/video7.pdf https://s3.amazonaws.com/nicabm-stealthseminar/posttraumaticgrowth-shortcourse+/transcript/video7.pdf https://www.learningscientists.org/blog/2020/4/2-1 https://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1016/0272-4944(95)90001-2 https://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1016/0272-4944(95)90001-2 https://doi.org/10.1187/cbe.12-03-0033 http://www.ted.com/talks/matt_walker_sleep_is_your_superpower?language=en shaffer and brecher inwards, together: an inner-resourcing u-turn journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 6 wood, w. (2019) good habits, bad habits: the science of making positive changes that stick. new york: farrar, straus and giroux. author details deena kara shaffer is co-author of the thriving in action academic flourishing intervention, adjunct sociology faculty, and psychology lecturer at x/ryerson university. deena is the president of the learning specialists association of canada. a former learning strategist for students with disabilities, and a skilled certified high school teacher, deena offers an equityguided, research-driven, and health-promoting approach. deena holds a doctorate in naturebased pedagogy; is a trained yoga, restorative yoga, and mindfulness meditation teacher; is a published poet (the grey tote, véhicule press, 2013); and is also the owner of awakened learning integrative coaching and consulting. diana brecher is a clinical psychologist at x/ryerson university, where she has been a therapist, supervisor, and director for more than 30 years. diana teaches graduate-level psychology courses at oise/ut and x/ru. diana’s long-standing interest and certification in positive psychology culminated in the development of thriveru, a comprehensive, campuswide resilience-based training program for students, faculty and staff, and the co-development of thriving in action. diana has offered resilience training to patients and staff at sunnybrook hospital, north york general hospital, toronto’s university health network, and espanola regional hospital and health centre. https://www.awakenedlearning.ca/ https://www.awakenedlearning.ca/ inwards, together: an inner-resourcing u-turn the challenge the response recommendations references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 26: special edi issue february 2023 ________________________________________________________________________ ©2023 the author(s) (cc-by 4.0) embedding employability into the curriculum: five recommendations to improve widening participation students’ graduate employability tom lowe university of portsmouth, uk abstract ensuring students succeed during and beyond their degree, no matter their background, ethnicity, disability or demographic has been outlined in the mission of the english higher education regulator, the office for students (office for students, 2018). additionally, there are endless strategies, agendas, research projects and discussions around improving equality, diversity and inclusion (edi) within universities, yet there is less literature relating to edi activity relating to graduate employability. this paper argues that the areas where greater attention is required within edi is the work of academics and careers support services, to enhance graduate outcomes, through the development of core employment and recruitment skills (underwood, 2022), through embedding professional literacies into the curriculum. from making parallels with strategies to support academic literacies, this paper argues that certain employability development elements should be embedded into the core assessed curriculum of degrees, to support all students in developing their professional literacies. keywords: employability; equality, diversity & inclusion; widening participation; graduate outcomes. introduction ensuring students succeed during and beyond their degree, no matter their background, ethnicity, disability or demographic has been outlined in the mission of the english higher education regulator, the office for students (office for students, 2018). additionally, there are endless strategies, agendas, research projects and discussions around improving lowe embedding employability into the curriculum: five recommendations to improve widening participation students’ graduate employability journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 2 equality, diversity and inclusion (edi) within universities, yet there is one area of the office for students’ criteria (access; success; progression) where the literature is thinner: edi activity relating to graduate employability (progression). there are many shared barriers and disadvantages faced by widening participation students, where the opportunities offered to students to improve their employability are unevenly distributed and, therefore, scarcely available to underrepresented students; and the market-oriented concept of employability damages non-traditional students. (rodríguez, gonzález-monteagudo and padilla-carmona, 2021, p.134). this paper argues that particular development interventions could have great potential for impacting disadvantaged groups. simply signposting job vacancies and running careers fayres, alongside a continuous focus upon ‘skills’, will not be impactful unless core knowledge application and exposure to experiences are addressed in a similar approach to ensure student success through academic skills development for academic literacies (lea, 2004). this paper argues that the areas where attention is required within edi is in the work of academics and careers support services, to enhance graduate outcomes with the development of core employment and recruitment skills (underwood, 2022) through embedding professional literacies into the curriculum. context of widening participation in higher education particular focus upon widening participation in uk higher education began with an emphasis on access to higher education (moore, sanders and higham, 2013). outreach, support and role model activities have increased the diversity of students across the last 50 years (lea, 2015), with ongoing developments to address accessibility gaps in demographics for many elite universities and disciplines. particular interventions include additional orientation and welcome days for students with autism (university of worcester, 2022), targeted outreach activities when recruiting from certain backgrounds (such as military children, see hall, mccullouch and lawrence, 2022) and direct recruitment pathways for black, asian and minority ethnic students at elite institutions (trinity college, university of cambridge, 2021). although the work is by no means complete, similar activities have been matched with work to support student success during degree study, where curriculum and support services have been enhanced to ensure students who sit lowe embedding employability into the curriculum: five recommendations to improve widening participation students’ graduate employability journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 3 outside ‘traditional’ student journeys and demographics can still progress through their degrees. case studies of enhancement include support development programmes for certain student demographics (bracken and novak, 2019), targeted staffing for certain student groups and initiatives to support muslim students with exam flexibility during ramadan (islam, lowe and jones, 2019). these efforts are not just led by policy makers and universities, but also by students who have called for enhancements through liberation campaigns for greater inclusion for minority students on campuses (see rhodes must fall, ahmed, 2020; reclaim the night, university of manchester students’ union 2022), supported by wider societal movements to decolonise the curriculum (morreira et al., 2020). graduate employability the english higher education regulator, the office for students, is supercharging its accountability through performance measures in the english he sector. this has been done through imposing target measures of minimum percentage outcomes for cohorts of graduates across every provider, no matter their grade level of entry or status, with penalties threatened of £500,000 for undeveloped areas of ‘poor’ student outcomes. these measures, known at the b3 measures of registrations, place emphasis on numerous measures, including ‘success’ retention measures, which assess progression from one level of study to the next, and completion of degrees (office for students, 2022a). they include ‘progression’ measures, assessing the ‘graduate outcomes’ of individual degrees/students through a nationally commissioned graduate outcomes survey (hesa, 2022). these metrics, which also include ‘access’ enrolment demographic data, do not only look at overall percentage, but also assess the demographics of those students for ‘gaps’, where early assessments have highlighted considerable gaps across all indicators, from ‘access’, to ‘success’, to ‘progression’ (office for students, 2022a). these measures are referred to as ‘attainment/awarding gaps’, where institutions are tasked with addressing these inequalities to improve outcomes for notable student groups such as disabled, black, asian and minority ethnic, and working-class males (ross et al., 2018). students from less-advantaged backgrounds face barriers when applying to graduate level work due to bias and discrimination, but also do not necessarily have the networks, social lowe embedding employability into the curriculum: five recommendations to improve widening participation students’ graduate employability journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 4 capital or parental guidance, to support with such activities as job applications, cv writing and to discuss graduate options. this paper makes the argument that there is a need to embed core employment skills into the curriculum so a higher percentage of students are exposed to such employability development activities, and particularly, learning is ensured for students from widening participation backgrounds. if these targets are not met, projected fines for non-improvement in english higher education (office for students, 2022b), have catalysed an increased sector focus on widening participation in student and graduate employability services. embedding the basics of employability into the curriculum many learning development teams were founded on the need to support, develop and train academic writing, research and referencing techniques (aka academic literacies). subsequent professions, services and careers have followed, producing such brilliant communities of practice as the association of learning developers in higher education (aldinhe, 2022) and research in fields such as academic literacies and learning development. the need to embed academic literacies skills and professional literacies such as essay structuring, training on research ethics, and academic practice relating to research, is clear within our sector. universities and their degrees now prioritise academic skills with resources and time in the curriculum to ‘train’ these practices for student success (retention, completion and attainment), to prevent drop out, poor academic practice and degree failures. to make such activities mandatory, degrees have often gone beyond making time in the curriculum, to creating academic skills assessments to ensure mandatory student engagement with these activities. most students require these trainings at different levels based on prior assessment experiences in prior study, yet the parallel skills needed later for job applications, interview practice and research professionals are not yet necessarily given the same attention in curriculum (bradley, 2021). speaking from a usa context, hirudayaraj argues that there is an ‘urgent need to look beyond creating access for first generation students to creating opportunities for them in a globalized knowledge-based economy’, where the core curriculum could create such an opportunity (2012, p.8). indeed, universities on the whole provide well supported careers and employability services, yet where employability related content features in the taught and assessed curriculum is not yet equal across individual disciplines. this has led many to lowe embedding employability into the curriculum: five recommendations to improve widening participation students’ graduate employability journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 5 call for a need to embed employability into the curriculum (bradley, 2021; saunders, 2022), although in non-vocational programmes, this is still emerging and underdeveloped. there is an urgent need to embed certain employability development elements into the core assessed curriculum of degrees, to support widening participation students in particular, as well as all students in their professional literacies. widening participation students are more likely to be first in family, from low-participation in university background communities, and/or from a demographic where there is societal inequality. there are core employment skills required for any graduate to be hired, no matter their background, transferable skills or ability, and to succeed in the graduate recruitment market. like being able to structure an essay, researching appropriate resources and following academic practices, employment skills are similar in societal consistency and are a parallel necessity which are perhaps missed. these recommendations have been drawn from my experience as head of employability at a small-medium english university 2018-22, as well as literature that emphasises the need for students to be able to translate their university experiences for job applications (dunne, 2017; lowe, 2020), the need to embed employability into the curriculum (daubney, 2021) and the importance of career choice following university (bradley, priego-hernández and quigley, 2022). the following five recommended actions are one suggestion to ensure employability skills are embedded into the curriculum. all of these could be implemented through structured support sessions, mandatory assessments, and constructive feedback so these may be mastered as part of the core student journey. five recommendations to improve widening participation students’ graduate employability: 1) the ability to write a job application/personal statement to a personal specification, with tangible examples. 2) the ability to write a graduate cv, with knowledge of how to adapt it for different roles. 3) the ability to answer interview questions with tangible examples and expansion. 4) the knowledge of diverse careers beyond the ‘visible societal careers’ (such as teacher, health professional or service sector) to give a broad choice of options for each graduate. lowe embedding employability into the curriculum: five recommendations to improve widening participation students’ graduate employability journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 6 5) at least one tangible experience beyond degree study, such as a placement or extra-curricular activity. conclusion there is an urgent need to embed the above areas of professional skills development into the curriculum, not only through ‘dropped in’ timetabled sessions, but in engaging activities and whole units of study, and, as with academic skills noted above, building these into summative assessments. when consulting with course teams on embedding employability, more courses are beginning to replace some essays with job application assessments, presentations with business pitches, and seminars with job interview practice. although making the above requirements mandatory may seem an extreme step, and perhaps far from the purpose of many degrees (frankham, 2017), it can be argued that the main reason students go to university in the uk remains gaining some form of graduate outcome (hepi and unite, 2017; uuk, 2017; ucas, 2021). students from lessadvantaged backgrounds do not necessarily have the networks, social capital, parental guidance or even knowledge to train and take advantage of the above. more privileged, perhaps ‘traditional’, students of higher socio-economic backgrounds, have influence from family and peers to either support such applications or arrange such experiences. expecting all students to access services beyond the curriculum without prompt is no longer possible, particularly for time poor students who are part-time or have a substantial commitment beyond their studies, such as caring, childcare and/work. this paper has argued that it is time to make room in the curriculum to assess, support and facilitate employment skills if universities truly wish to support equality, diversity and inclusion in universities across the entire student journey and beyond. references ahmed, a. k. (2020) ‘#rhodesmustfall: how a decolonial student movement in the global south inspired epistemic disobedience at the university of oxford’, african studies review, 63(2), pp.281-303. lowe embedding employability into the curriculum: five recommendations to improve widening participation students’ graduate employability journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 7 association for learning developers in higher education (2022) what is learning development? available at: https://aldinhe.ac.uk/#:~:text=learning%20development%20in%20higher%20educa tion%20is%20the%20practice%20of%20working,challenging%20academic%20prac tices%20and%20conventions (accessed: 18 august 2022). bracken, s. and novak, k. (eds.) (2019) transforming higher education through universal design for learning: an international perspective. london: routledge. bradley, a. (2021) ‘putting the employ into employability’, wonkhe, 22 june. available at: https://wonkhe.com/blogs/putting-the-employ-into-employability/ (accessed: 18 august 2022). bradley, a., priego-hernández, j. and quigley, m. (2022) ‘evaluating the efficacy of embedding employability into a second-year undergraduate module’, studies in higher education, pp.1-13. https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2021.2020748. daubney, k. (2021) ‘teaching employability is not my job!: redefining embedded employability from within the higher education curriculum’, higher education, skills and work-based learning, 12(1), pp.92-106. https://doi.org/10.1108/heswbl-072020-0165. dunne, j. (2017) ‘working placement reflective assessments and employability enhanced through highlighting graduate attributes’, journal of teaching and learning for graduate employability, 8(1), pp.40-59. https://doi.org/10.21153/jtlge2017vol8no1art616. frankham, j. (2017) ‘employability and higher education: the follies of the “productivity challenge” in the teaching excellence framework’, journal of education policy, 32(5), pp.628-641. https://doi.org/10.1080/02680939.2016.1268271 . hall, m., mccullouch, j. and lawrence, k. (2022) ‘service children in education: a review of the literature from five countries’, widening participation and lifelong learning, 24(1), pp.53-85. https://doi.org/10.5456/wpll.24.1.53 . https://aldinhe.ac.uk/#:~:text=learning%20development%20in%20higher%20education%20is%20the%20practice%20of%20working,challenging%20academic%20practices%20and%20conventions https://aldinhe.ac.uk/#:~:text=learning%20development%20in%20higher%20education%20is%20the%20practice%20of%20working,challenging%20academic%20practices%20and%20conventions https://aldinhe.ac.uk/#:~:text=learning%20development%20in%20higher%20education%20is%20the%20practice%20of%20working,challenging%20academic%20practices%20and%20conventions https://wonkhe.com/blogs/putting-the-employ-into-employability/ https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2021.2020748 https://doi.org/10.1108/heswbl-07-2020-0165 https://doi.org/10.1108/heswbl-07-2020-0165 https://doi.org/10.21153/jtlge2017vol8no1art616 https://doi.org/10.1080/02680939.2016.1268271 https://doi.org/10.5456/wpll.24.1.53 lowe embedding employability into the curriculum: five recommendations to improve widening participation students’ graduate employability journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 8 higher education policy institute [hepi] and unite (2017) reality check: a report on university applicants’ attitudes and perceptions. available at: https://www.hepi.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/reality-check-reportonline1.pdf (accessed: 23 january 2023). higher education statistics agency (2022) he graduate outcomes data. available at: https://www.hesa.ac.uk/data-and-analysis/graduates (accessed: 18 august 2022). hirudayaraj, m. (2011) ‘first-generation students in higher education: issues of employability in a knowledge-based economy’, online journal for workforce education and development, 5(3), p.2. islam, m., lowe, t. and jones, g. (2018) ‘a “satisfied settling”? investigating a sense of belonging for muslim students in a uk small-medium higher education institution’, student engagement in higher education journal, 2(2), pp.79-104. lea, j. (2015) enhancing learning and teaching in higher education: engaging with the dimensions of practice. new york: mcgraw-hill education. lea, m. r. (2004) ‘academic literacies: a pedagogy for course design’, studies in higher education, 29(6), pp.739-756. https://doi.org/10.1080/0307507042000287230. lowe, t. (2020) ‘an evaluation of a translation intervention to raise awareness of employability skills gained from higher education’, journal of learning development in higher education, issue 18, october, pp.1-26. https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.vi18.576. moore, j., sanders, j. and higham, l. (2013) literature review of research into widening participation to higher education. report to hefce and offa. aimhigher research & consultancy network. available at: https://www.offa.org.uk/wpcontent/uploads/2013/08/literature-review-of-research-into-wp-to-he.pdf (accessed: 23 january 2023). morreira, s., luckett, k., kumalo, s. h. and ramgotra, m. (2020) ‘confronting the complexities of decolonising curricula and pedagogy in higher education’, third https://www.hepi.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/reality-check-report-online1.pdf https://www.hepi.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/reality-check-report-online1.pdf https://www.hesa.ac.uk/data-and-analysis/graduates https://doi.org/10.1080/0307507042000287230 https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.vi18.576 https://www.offa.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/literature-review-of-research-into-wp-to-he.pdf https://www.offa.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/literature-review-of-research-into-wp-to-he.pdf lowe embedding employability into the curriculum: five recommendations to improve widening participation students’ graduate employability journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 9 world thematics: a twq journal, 5(1-2), pp.1-18. https://doi.org/10.1080/23802014.2020.1798278 . office for students (2018) securing student success: regulatory framework for higher education in england. available at: https://www.officeforstudents.org.uk/publications/securing-student-successregulatory-framework-for-higher-education-in-england/ (accessed: 8 december 2022). office for students (2022a) condition b3: baselines for student outcomes indicators. available at: https://www.officeforstudents.org.uk/media/490d884f-03aa-49cf-907d011149309983/condition_b3_baselines.pdf (accessed: 18 august 2022). office for students (2022b) access and participation plans. available at: https://www.officeforstudents.org.uk/advice-and-guidance/promoting-equalopportunities/access-and-participation-plans/ (accessed: 18 august 2022). rodríguez, m. a. t., gonzález-monteagudo, j. and padilla-carmona, t. (2021) ‘employability and inclusion of non-traditional university students: limitations and challenges’, iafor journal of education, 9(1), pp.133-151. ross, f. m., tatam, j. c., hughes, a. l., beacock, o. p. and mcduff, n. (2018) ‘the great unspoken shame of uk higher education: addressing inequalities of attainment’, african journal of business ethics, 12(1). https://doi.org/10.15249/12-1172. saunders, m. (2022) ‘we’re doing engagement on careers and employability all wrong’, wonkhe, 9 june. available at: https://wonkhe.com/blogs/were-doing-engagementon-careers-and-employability-all-wrong/ (accessed: 18 august 2022). trinity college, university of cambridge (2021) ‘new access initiative for year 10 black students’, 18 january. available at: https://www.trin.cam.ac.uk/news/new-accessinitiative-for-year-10-black-students/ (accessed: 18 august 2022). https://doi.org/10.1080/23802014.2020.1798278 https://www.officeforstudents.org.uk/publications/securing-student-success-regulatory-framework-for-higher-education-in-england/ https://www.officeforstudents.org.uk/publications/securing-student-success-regulatory-framework-for-higher-education-in-england/ https://www.officeforstudents.org.uk/media/490d884f-03aa-49cf-907d-011149309983/condition_b3_baselines.pdf https://www.officeforstudents.org.uk/media/490d884f-03aa-49cf-907d-011149309983/condition_b3_baselines.pdf https://www.officeforstudents.org.uk/advice-and-guidance/promoting-equal-opportunities/access-and-participation-plans/ https://www.officeforstudents.org.uk/advice-and-guidance/promoting-equal-opportunities/access-and-participation-plans/ https://doi.org/10.15249/12-1-172 https://doi.org/10.15249/12-1-172 https://wonkhe.com/blogs/were-doing-engagement-on-careers-and-employability-all-wrong/ https://wonkhe.com/blogs/were-doing-engagement-on-careers-and-employability-all-wrong/ https://www.trin.cam.ac.uk/news/new-access-initiative-for-year-10-black-students/ https://www.trin.cam.ac.uk/news/new-access-initiative-for-year-10-black-students/ lowe embedding employability into the curriculum: five recommendations to improve widening participation students’ graduate employability journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 10 ucas (2021) where next? what influences the choices school leavers make? available at: https://www.ucas.com/file/435551/download?token=vudidvfh (accessed: 18 august 2022). underwood, j. (2022) ‘assessment can have a big impact on graduate employability’, wonkhe, 17 february. available at: https://wonkhe.com/blogs/assessment-canhave-a-big-impact-on-graduate-employability/ (accessed: 18 august 2022). universities united kingdom [uuk] (2017) education, consumer rights and maintaining trust: what students want from their university. available at: https://dera.ioe.ac.uk//29420/ (accessed: 23 january 2023). university of manchester students’ union (2022) what is reclaim the night? available at: https://umsu.unioncloud.org/reclaimthenight (accessed: 15 november 2022). university of worcester (2022) support for autistic students: the disability and dyslexia service. available at: https://www.worcester.ac.uk/about/news/academicblog/support-for-autistic-students-the-disability-and-dyslexia-service.aspx (accessed: 18 august 2022). author details tom lowe is a senior lecturer in higher education, where his research includes student engagement in development of education, embedding employability into the curriculum and belonging. tom is also the chair of raise (researching, advancing and inspiring student engagement), a network of over 1,000 stakeholders in higher education interested in developing student engagement. licence ©2023 the author(s). this is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (cc-by 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author https://www.ucas.com/file/435551/download?token=vudidvfh https://wonkhe.com/blogs/assessment-can-have-a-big-impact-on-graduate-employability/ https://wonkhe.com/blogs/assessment-can-have-a-big-impact-on-graduate-employability/ https://dera.ioe.ac.uk/29420/ https://umsu.unioncloud.org/reclaimthenight https://www.worcester.ac.uk/about/news/academic-blog/support-for-autistic-students-the-disability-and-dyslexia-service.aspx https://www.worcester.ac.uk/about/news/academic-blog/support-for-autistic-students-the-disability-and-dyslexia-service.aspx lowe embedding employability into the curriculum: five recommendations to improve widening participation students’ graduate employability journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 11 and source are credited. see http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. journal of learning development in higher education (jldhe) is a peer-reviewed open access journal published by the association for learning development in higher education (aldinhe). journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special issue 22: compendium of innovative practice october 2021 editorial: using technology to enhance online learning cathy malone middlesex university london at the outset of the pandemic during the switch to emergency remote teaching there appeared to be a widespread misconception that the challenge facing the he sector was primarily technological and the shift to online delivery simply required finding an appropriate digital translation of what was delivered face to face. the papers in this short section all explore uses of technology in a fine grained manner while refuting the simplistic technicist assumptions about learning, or that simple translation between modes of delivery is either desirable or possible. the authors here frame their challenges in terms of social learning: how do you measure and assess performance to an audience when all the theatres have closed? how do you maintain informal dialogic spaces for learning as a team or with your students when you can no longer meet? posing questions which prioritise learning seems to have freed the authors here to be ambitious in addressing these challenges and galvanised teams to explore new technology to discover and create new online spaces through streaming and podcasting. there is a sense of course deconstruction and reconstruction in the papers throughout this section where authors strip courses down to core elements and drivers in order to examine how best they can be reconstituted online. this process elicited a detailed evaluation of features and affordances for various online programmes (including zoom, teams and articulate rise, and combinations of these). this process also re-engaged authors in pedagogical theory (laurillard and social constructivism are repeatedly mentioned), where theory is used as a means of sense making in a volatile environment. it seems fitting to finish a section focusing on technology with a case study of a team working with dispersed groups of refugee learners facing significant digital poverty. there are a number of implications here regarding platform use, privacy and safety that will resonate with many tutors with a commitment to inclusive online delivery. once again the editorial journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 authors demonstrate some considerable ingenuity in the adaptations they make to the challenges facing them. perusing these papers, it is evident that the challenge of covid was at the same time an opportunity that engaged the authors of these pieces in live collaborative learning with their peers, and what began as a technological challenge became a route to a richer space for learning for staff and students alike. references: hodges, c., moore, s., lockee, b., trust, t., and bond a. (2020) ‘the difference between emergency remote teaching and online learning’, educause review. available at: https://er.educause.edu/articles/2020/3/the-difference-between-emergency-remoteteaching-and-online-learning (accessed: 22 october 2021). https://er.educause.edu/articles/2020/3/the-difference-between-emergency-remote-teaching-and-online-learning https://er.educause.edu/articles/2020/3/the-difference-between-emergency-remote-teaching-and-online-learning journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 24 september 2022 ________________________________________________________________________ decolonising learning development through reflective and relational practice julia bohlmann university of glasgow, uk abstract the decolonising the curriculum (dtc) movement questions the very values we take for granted as learning developers. if our role is to develop academic literacies and support students to succeed in the curriculum as it is, can we as learning developers be decolonisers? this opinion piece argues that we can and should. it outlines where we can integrate the dtc agenda into our work through reflective and relational practice. the piece stresses the importance of reflection about our role as practitioners within a colonial higher education system and of relating to our students as individuals by learning their names and breaking barriers to participation with rapport and community building activities. keywords: decolonising the curriculum; reflective practice; relational practice; inclusion; academic literacies. introduction the decolonising the curriculum (dtc) movement questions the very values we take for granted as educators. it questions our identity, the knowledge we have internalised and are committed to reproduce, the way we teach our students and how we assess them (shahjahan et al., 2021). in so doing, dtc also questions our role as learning developers. certainly, our work provides an important access point to higher education, particularly to students from non-traditional backgrounds. working specifically with international students, my professional practice as a learning developer often is about explaining why we – in the european-north american context – value such things as intellectual ownership, persuasive writing and active learning. learning development to me then is akin to a translation practice: i translate academic culture and conventions and support international bohlmann decolonising learning development through reflective and relational practice journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 2 students to better meet the expectations of the (western) academy. but i grapple with the limitations and duplicity of this remit, especially in light of the dtc movement. as long as learning development aligns with and extends the (official and hidden) curriculum, it replicates colonial values such as individualism, competitiveness, striving for originality, the preference of the written over the spoken word – just to name a few. in other words, we provide students with the key to access, but not the tools to ‘dismantle[,] the master’s house’ (lorde, 1984, p.106). our role as learning developers within the dtc movement then is contradictory. if our role is to develop academic literacies by training students to conform to dominant reading and writing conventions, can we at the same time be decolonisers? if our role is to support students to succeed in the curriculum as it is, can we really be part of the dtc movement? this opinion piece argues that we can and that we should. while we might not be in a position to change the structures within which we work, there are two key areas where we can make a difference in our everyday practice: first, by reflecting on our identity as educators, and second, by acknowledging our students as individuals. ‘decolonising the teaching and learning in al [academic literacies] starts with the al practitioner the person in the mirror’ (brian sibanda) recognising the person in the mirror means becoming aware and accepting our inherent ‘complicity in coloniality’ (sibanda, 2021). it might not be a position we have chosen consciously as it is dictated by our role within higher education. yet this position is real and acknowledging it is to recognise the academic literacies paradigm as an ‘apprenticeship to western rhetorical norms and ways of thinking, writing and talking.’ (sibanda, 2021) we would do well not to attach any judgement to this set of arrangements as it will only end in repressed feelings of guilt that serve no one. coloniality is a reality in higher education, and we happen to be part of it. self-awareness and reflexivity about who we are as educators is an opportunity to move the dtc agenda into learning development. within their respective contexts of the us and canada, lee et al. (2017) and page (2021) advocate for the development of intercultural pedagogy, a practice that begins with a recognition of how we have been shaped by our own academic culture and subject disciplines. page argues that a central component of this is ‘understanding personal biases and adjusting . . . ways of teaching and relating to bohlmann decolonising learning development through reflective and relational practice journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 3 be increasingly sensitive to diversity’. such reflexivity can bring about an important shift in the relationship to our students, even if ‘the basic structure of the curriculum is maintained’ (page, 2021a). knowledge about ourselves, our disciplines and culture aside, there is also a lot of mileage in the way we approach our students. do we see them? do we address them respectfully? do we embody acceptance? ‘people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel’ (maya angelou) this often-cited quote speaks to dtc in learning development because it relates to the impact we have as people, no matter what we teach or try to develop in our students. learning development is a deeply relational practice. it is not (just) about us; it is about our students. if we see students as individuals, they will respond positively. moreover, seeing students for who they are beyond national stereotypes (choi, 2019) and racist stigmas (owusu-kwarteng, 2020) sends a powerful message, not just to them but to other students and educators. as learning developers, however, it can be difficult to get to know our students. we are not in the same position as subject lecturers who can build relationships with their students over the course of a semester or an entire degree programme. our encounters are more transient; we might only meet a student once. still, investing in getting to know students is an important step in understanding their challenges and identifying appropriate strategies to support them (page, 2021b). one way to do this is to learn their names, a simple act shown to foster inclusion and a sense of belonging (o’brien, leiman and duffy, 2014). online pronunciation tools and wider reaching campaigns, such as name safety pledges and initiatives to unearth naming practices in different cultures can assist in consolidating such initiatives (university of warwick, 2022). many of our students come from backgrounds that rob them of confidence or simply do not prepare them to navigate the (western) higher education environment. as educators who occupy a similarly marginal position, we know how difficult it is to break down barriers to participation. engaging marginalised students and making them feel part of what is going on in the classroom and the academy more widely needs careful planning. for those of us bohlmann decolonising learning development through reflective and relational practice journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 4 who have the opportunity to teach groups of students, this can be achieved by establishing an inclusive class environment. lee et al. suggest a list of approaches that can support this even in one-off classes or tutorials, for instance, sharing our own learning experiences and providing opportunities for students to share theirs, not assuming that all students come from the same learning tradition and giving ‘time for quiet writing and organization of thoughts before open discussion begins’ (2017, p.103) for speakers of english as a foreign language. breaking down barriers also means improving the relationship between different groups of students. arkoudis (2010) developed a framework to reduce the distance between domestic and international students in australia by listing steps to scaffold interaction from using initial icebreakers to facilitating learning communities. at the university of glasgow, a colleague and i managed to create a community among dissertation students from diverse backgrounds by adding informal elements, such as live podcasts and writing incubators, to our more formal classes (bohlmann and ross, 2021). integration does not just happen; it requires us to develop an awareness of who our students are as individuals and the conscious removal of barriers standing in the way of their full participation in higher education. for some of this work we need to reach out and create wider networks at our institutions and beyond. the anti-racist curriculum project in scotland is an example of a cross-institutional initiative that through collaboration has been able to produce its first outputs and guidelines that can be consulted by educators across the sector (arc, advance he, 2021). can learning developers be decolonisers? some questions should never be answered ‘no’, and this must be one of them. above i have outlined two key areas where we as learning developers can enact the dtc agenda, even if we have no sway over the official curriculum or only see our students sporadically. the first key area is knowing ourselves: decolonising starts with reflecting on our role as practitioners within a colonial higher education system. where do we stand? and can we help our students find their own position within, or in relation to, this value system? the second key area is getting to know our students: decolonising means acknowledging our students as individuals and actively including them through rapport and community building activities. these initiatives and conscious tweaks to our practice might not look like much and will go unnoticed if we do not shout about them. but not all things are quantifiable and that is a good thing too. it might just be that we are a little bit happier with the person in the mirror. bohlmann decolonising learning development through reflective and relational practice journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 5 references advance he (2021) anti-racist curriculum project guide. available at: https://www.advance-he.ac.uk/anti-racist-curriculum-project/project-guide (accessed 19 august 2022). angelou, m. (2014) ‘maya angelou quotes: 15 of the best’, the guardian, 29 may. available at: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/may/28/maya-angelou-infifteen-quotes (accessed: 31 august 2018). arkoudis, s. (2010) finding common ground: enhancing interaction between domestic and international students. strawberry hills, nsw: australian learning and teaching council, university of melbourne, and centre for the study of higher education. available at: https://melbournecshe.unimelb.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0010/2297206/findingcommonground _web.pdf (accessed: 22 july 2022). bohlmann, j. and ross, m. (2021) ‘building a study community through podcasts during covid-19’, journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22, october, p.1-5. https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.vi22.698 choi, l. j. (2019) ‘the identity (re)construction of international students in the process of academic literacy acquisition’, teaching in higher education, 26(4), pp.527-540. https://doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2019.1657398. lee, a., felten, p., poch, r. k., solheim, c. and o’brien, m. k. (2017) teaching interculturally: a framework for integrating disciplinary knowledge and intercultural development. sterling, virginia: stylus publishing, llc. lorde, a. (1984) sister outsider: essays and speeches. trumansburg, ny: crossing press. o’brien, m. t., leiman, t. and duffy, j. (2014) ‘the power of naming: the multifaceted value of learning students’ names’, qut law review, 14(1), pp.114-128. available at: https://lr.law.qut.edu.au/article/view/544 (accessed: 22 july 2022). https://www.advance-he.ac.uk/anti-racist-curriculum-project/project-guide https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/may/28/maya-angelou-in-fifteen-quotes https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/may/28/maya-angelou-in-fifteen-quotes https://melbourne-cshe.unimelb.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0010/2297206/findingcommonground_web.pdf https://melbourne-cshe.unimelb.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0010/2297206/findingcommonground_web.pdf https://melbourne-cshe.unimelb.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0010/2297206/findingcommonground_web.pdf https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.vi22.698 https://doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2019.1657398 https://lr.law.qut.edu.au/article/view/544 bohlmann decolonising learning development through reflective and relational practice journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 6 owusu-kwarteng, l. (2020) ‘“studying in this england is wahala (trouble)”: analysing the experiences of west african students in a uk higher education institution’, studies in higher education, 46(11), pp.2405-2416. https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2020.1723528. page, c. (2021a) foundations of intercultural teaching. vancouver: kwantlen polytechnic university. available at: https://kpu.pressbooks.pub/foundationsofinterculturalteaching/ (accessed: 22 july 2022). page, c. (2021b) getting to know your international students. 2nd edn. vancouver: kwantlen polytechnic university. available at: https://kpu.pressbooks.pub/internationalstudents/ (accessed: 22 july 2022). shahjahan, r. a., estera, a. l., surla, k. l. and edwards, k. t. (2021) ‘“decolonizing” curriculum and pedagogy: a comparative review across disciplines and global higher education contexts’, review of educational research, 92(1), pp.73-113. https://doi.org/10.3102/00346543211042423. sibanda, b. (2022) non-violent pedagogical perspectives in decolonising academic literacy. available at: https://www.saaalp.com/post/non-violent-pedagogicalperspectives-in-decolonising-academic-literacy (accessed: 22 july 2022). university of warwick (2022) say my name library. available at: https://warwick.ac.uk/services/dean-of-students-office/community-valueseducation/saymyname/projectdetails/library/ (accessed: 22 july 2022). author details julia bohlmann is an academic development adviser at the university of glasgow where she has previously worked as learning adviser for international students. through her advisory and educational practice, she developed an interest in intercultural pedagogy and anti-racist education. she aims to evoke the same in the academics and professionals she https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2020.1723528 https://kpu.pressbooks.pub/foundationsofinterculturalteaching/ https://kpu.pressbooks.pub/internationalstudents/ https://doi.org/10.3102/00346543211042423 https://www.saaalp.com/post/non-violent-pedagogical-perspectives-in-decolonising-academic-literacy https://www.saaalp.com/post/non-violent-pedagogical-perspectives-in-decolonising-academic-literacy https://warwick.ac.uk/services/dean-of-students-office/community-values-education/saymyname/projectdetails/library/ https://warwick.ac.uk/services/dean-of-students-office/community-values-education/saymyname/projectdetails/library/ bohlmann decolonising learning development through reflective and relational practice journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 7 advises and is co-leader of a decolonising the curriculum community of practice at the university of glasgow. decolonising learning development through reflective and relational practice abstract introduction ‘decolonising the teaching and learning in al [academic literacies] starts with the al practitioner the person in the mirror’ (brian sibanda) ‘people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel’ (maya angelou) references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special issue 25: aldinhe conference proceedings and reflections october 2022 peer reviewing as community building alicja syska university of plymouth, uk presentation abstract peer reviewing is unquestionably the cornerstone of scholarly activity. it is universally seen as one of the very few ways we have to ensure that what gets published has been subjected to rigorous scrutiny by peers. entering into this dialogue with other experts in the field is of tremendous benefit to authors, even if it hurts sometimes. but it is also so much more than that: peer reviewing helps us develop our own research and thinking capabilities, improve our criticality, and hone the skill of providing constructive feedback. not only do we not need a phd to do it, but we can also use it for our own professional development. peer reviewing is an act of service that makes us a better, stronger, and more resilient academic community. like all acts of service, it relies on the good that is in us: being generous with time and personal resources, being committed to helping others, having a sense of reciprocal responsibility, feeling a constant desire to learn, and being open to dialogic exchange with authors and editors. i believe it is this dialogic exchange that brings us together as a community. in this mini keynote, i posited that the more we review, the closer we become to the ideas that we share, and to each other. as co-lead editor of the journal of learning development in higher education (jldhe), the questions i was interested in exploring included: 1. how do we ensure that every voice feels valued in peer review? 2. how do we encourage sharing diverse perspectives to achieve better publishing outcomes? 3. how do we attract peers to reviewing and use their goodwill to build a strong, proud, and sustainable scholarly community in learning development? syska peer reviewing as community building journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 2 community response alicja syska’s emphasis upon peer review as a form of constructive dialogue enabling a strong and sustainable scholarly community resonated for attendees at her session. it has been brought to life, too, in the innovative process of collaborative writing and editing used to create this edition of the jldhe. as the community reflections below indicate, discussion of the session’s three questions enabled the community to enter a conversation that facilitated transformation of their own understanding of peer review and energised them to participate within the process as part of the jldhe community: the session made me think differently about the peer review process. the emphasis on a supportive and community-based approach that promotes dialogue is so refreshing, and quite different from previous experiences of peer review that many of us may have had. finding out about the more open way of working and the support available for peer reviewers means that i would certainly feel encouraged to participate in the future. this was a much-needed session, particularly for potential new reviewers hesitantly sitting on the periphery pondering whether to jump in the peer review pool and get wet or stay dry on the water’s edge. talking through the perceived concerns around being a peer reviewer gave opportunity to reflect on personal perceptions and experiences of peer reviewing and being reviewed. having had this opportunity to discuss, and reflect, i have been motivated and feel encouraged to add my name to the reviewers’ list. i really appreciated the emphasis on supporting new reviewers, providing constructive feedback to writers, and the sense of community building within our field of learning development through the jldhe reading club. this is a very innovative and different approach to publishing, and makes the process much more accessible, transparent, and justifiable in terms of the time and effort needed to publish and/or take part in the reviewing process. author’s reflections syska peer reviewing as community building journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 3 the day before i was to deliver this keynote someone on twitter called out peer review as resembling a dating app. it resonated with a lot of people, including myself, because peer review does at times seem to work like one. you submit your carefully written ‘profile’, wait to be lovingly embraced for a very long time (during which you cannot ‘date’ anyone else), and you still might get ‘swiped left’ as a desk rejection or utterly destroyed by reviewer 2, whose ideal type is far removed from what you see in your mental mirror. for many, this is not a positive experience, although i do concede evidence shows that ‘matches made in heaven’ are also possible. nonetheless, at the journal of learning development in higher education, we do everything we can to resist this negative model. we do not want to build a ‘dating app’; we want a community building app, where peer reviewing is an act of service that brings out the best in us and makes us feel closer to each other. so ultimately, the question i posed to the participants in my three roundtable discussions was: how do we build a better (peerreviewing) app? all three session rounds were interesting and compelling in different ways, as each group of participants had a different dynamic, but they all brought similar issues to the fore: mainly, the obstacles that stop us from engaging with peer review as a scholarly service. it will be of no surprise to anyone that the key obstacle was ‘time’ – a commodity hard to secure in he and even harder to commit to acts of service. the second one, very much linked with time, was ‘value’ – peer review is simply not perceived as an activity yielding high returns. with limited recognition, it must rely on our generosity and ability to see the hidden rewards (learning from and helping others, professional development, contribution to the growth of the field). other concerns, from the perspective of the recipients of peer review, included the perception of hierarchy and power, which often results in lack of fairness to authors who have to navigate impossible demands from conflicting feedback. lastly, some participants were concerned that they may not be equipped to offer peer review, as they did not see themselves as clear ‘experts’ in the field, but rather novices in need of support. to those concerns, we have some answers at the jldhe. when it comes to recognition, we have introduced reviewer of the year awards (with the fabulous lee fallin and samantha ahern being our first winners this year). we also encourage our reviewers to set up a profile on publons and evidence their work there. we open our calls for peer review syska peer reviewing as community building journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 4 to the entire ld community on the ldhen jiscmail list, not only to widen our reach but also to inspire engagement. our editors then work closely with peer reviewers and support them in the process. for example, we offer new reviewers the position of third or fourth reviewer, to minimise the burden of making the ‘right’ decision; we share the (anonymous) reviews with all reviewers so they can see it as a developmental activity; and we engage in dialogue, which provides feedback and opportunities for further development. finally, in a serendipitous response to one of the participants who suggested having a forum to discuss articles published by the journal, we run a reading club that does exactly that – so i was really pleased to see that our actions align with our community’s needs and expectations. the roundtable talks were a fabulous opportunity not only to discuss what stops us from engaging in peer review but also to share the initiatives jldhe has been implementing in order to improve the experience for everyone involved in the process. there were more ideas from the participants that we will consider, such as introducing authors’ reflections on peer review and authors’ responses to the peer review forms, so watch this space! i was also really pleased to hear many attendees expressing a renewed interest in peer reviewing and i look forward to developing these relationships and working with these new reviewers in future. i will finish this reflection with the words that stuck with me the most: steph allen said we are like ‘angels dancing on pinheads’. i know that the phrase has a dark underlying meaning – supposedly referring to pointless academic debates with no intrinsic value (whose historical roots have been questioned, however) – but as she expressed it, it does convey something compelling: peer reviewing as community building is a delicate work that takes vision, persistence, and imagination, with no guarantees for success. and we at the jldhe are willing to take on the challenge. further resources jldhe reading club: https://journal.aldinhe.ac.uk/index.php/jldhe/readingclub ldhen jiscmail list: https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?a0=ldhen acknowledgments https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?a0=ldhen https://journal.aldinhe.ac.uk/index.php/jldhe/readingclub https://journal.aldinhe.ac.uk/index.php/jldhe/readingclub https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?a0=ldhen syska peer reviewing as community building journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 5 thank you to all the contributors who shared their reflections and enriched our insight into this conference presentation and its impact on the audience. special thanks go to steph allen from bournemouth university, emma kimberley from the university of northampton, and victoria yuskaitis from the university of southampton. author details alicja syska is a hybrid academic, combining roles in learning development with lectureships in education and history at the university of plymouth. she is a senior fellow of advance he and a certified leading practitioner of ld. her research interests include writing in disciplines, blended learning, student perceptions of their university experience, community building through writing, and the development of ld as a discipline. she serves as co-lead editor of the journal of learning development in higher education. peer reviewing as community building presentation abstract community response author’s reflections further resources acknowledgments author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special issue 22: compendium of innovative practice october 2021 compendium of innovative practice: learning development in a time of disruption editorial alicja syska university of plymouth when covid-19 first eclipsed our collective consciousness in early 2020, few people could predict how long it would last and what toll it would take on the he sector across the globe. initially, we sought deliverance in technology, revelled in online quizzes, fumbled with our video cameras and desperately tried to remember to unmute ourselves. high on adrenaline and in true entrepreneurial spirit, we created countless digital resources, explored new teaching approaches, and stretched our creativity in order to adapt to this crisis mode. it took a while before we realised that what seemed like a temporary disruption would in fact force us to rethink the way we work, teach, learn, socialise, and relate to each other. the aim of this compendium was to capture that moment of disruption. as the ‘pandemic fatigue’ (haktanir at al., 2021) began to slow us down and the world started racing to return to some kind of ‘normal’, we in the jldhe were racing to gather the immediate and unmediated stories that would reflect on this unique moment, still almost ‘in action’ rather than ‘on action’ (schön, 1991). we issued a call for submissions in april 2021 and by the june deadline had responses from over a hundred authors. we enlisted 114 reviewers, most of whom commented on multiple submissions, who helped us select and guide the final 102 articles to publication. the brief for the authors was simple: (1) present the challenge you faced, cared about, and decided to address; (2) explain how you responded to it; (3) make recommendations based on the lessons learnt from the experience. all submissions had to follow this 3-part structure and conform to the unforgiving 1,000 word limit. we must say that colleagues’ response to this call surpassed all our expectations. when we looked at all the submissions, clear themes emerged. some authors report on their battles to adapt their learning development practices while others tell stories of editorial journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 challenges encountered in teaching within specific disciplines. a good number of reflections focus on student engagement and student and staff wellbeing, while others are interested in assessment and feedback, students as partners, and the experience of doctoral researchers. we have authors who tell their tales of discovering and grappling with new technologies and those who bring our attention back to the body. finally, there is substantial preoccupation with staff support and institutional change. the emerging themes naturally lent themselves to distinct sections of this compendium, each prefaced by an editorial that introduces its topical essence and reflects on the authors’ approaches. what emerges from all these compendium articles is an absolutely astounding range of individual and institutional responses, reflections and recommendations for future educational practice. they show what was important to us and what we struggled with; how much faith we put in tools and technology and how we established connections through kindness and compromise; what flaws we discovered in the system and what radical solutions we were prepared to risk to humanise ours and our students’ experience. they are also written in different styles and from different perspectives. as a result, the collection is very eclectic and at times perhaps even disorderly. it was challenging to organise and we heatedly debated what theme each article belonged to while agonising over the need to avoid specious designations where multiple possibilities emerged. the eleven categories we created at times are obvious and at times might seem forced. the readers must forgive us as this mammoth task was never going to produce consistent, predictable and ordered results. instead, we shamelessly (for this is the essence of learning development work after all!) welcome you into this playful, messy and creative world of educators who generously and enthusiastically share their resourcefulness, ingenuity, and love for working with students in he. crucially, many of the contributions in this volume do not simply report on their responses to the online pivot but raise profound questions about what it means to teach and learn in emergency conditions, what impact such crises can have on our physical and mental health, and how we might use this disruption to shift our pedagogic assumptions about what ‘works best’ and how to turn vulnerability into strength. what all of them reveal is that even when violently thrown off course, confined to our rooms and screens, and seemingly challenged beyond our imagination, we can still see in this collective catastrophe a silver lining and turn apparent limitations into opportunity. what seems like a disconcerting state of personal and institutional disintegration can in fact be understood as an element of editorial journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 personal and institutional development. as the polish psychiatrist kazimierz dąbrowski (1964) demonstrated in his theory of ‘positive disintegration’, states of crisis and disequilibrium should be seen as positive signs because they accelerate our growth; if ‘successfully navigated’, they become an opportunity for positive change and a catalyst that allows us to become ‘the best version of ourselves’ (schläppy, 2019). the role of this upheaval thus should be to help us restructure the existing and often unhelpful patterns of working, teaching, and learning in order to lift us higher on the level of professional and personal development. this compendium is a clarion call to adopt this productive approach to the impact of the pandemic. as always with an undertaking of this size and scope, there are scores of people who not only support the effort but actually roll up their sleeves and make it happen. my first thanks go to the three exceptional co-editors – gita sedghi, cathy malone, and nicola grayson – who believed in my mission for the compendium from the start and who worked tirelessly to coordinate multiple submissions, often stepping in to review, mentor, and perform never-ending little tasks in a complex editorial flow. it is you who made this compendium happen. our copyeditors – harriet newnes, sarah taylor, laura barclay, and ricky lowes – were as indefatigable in their positive responses to our incessant requests for copyediting; we are so grateful for your professionalism, attentiveness, and collegiality. our technical editor andy hagyard helped us avert various crises and shape the volume ensuring consistency and quality. finally, our deepest gratitude goes to all the reviewers who offered their comments, suggestions, and support to our authors. without your enthusiasm and willingness to review sometimes multiple papers and to generously give your time and share your expertise, this compendium would not have been what it is. a silent but heartfelt round of applause thus goes to the following reviewers: aileen breed hanrahan alan hayes alex liepins alexandra pitt alicja syska alison gilmour alistair irons ameera ali amy west anne elizabeth davey annie bryan arina cirstea beth moran bridget goodman camila devis-rozental carina buckley carlene barton caroline havery cathy malone celeste mclaughlin christie pritchard claire mcavinia claire pike craig morley david heading deborah breen deryn verity editorial journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 eleanor loughlin emily forster erika corradini eva shackel faith dillon-lee fiona elsted gemma stansfield geoffrey hughes gita sedghi hazel messenger ian paul johnson isabel lucas jacqui bartram jamie rundle jane nodder jane turner jiani liu john parkin john smith josta heyligers joy igiebor julia bohlmann karen angus-cole karen clark karen kenny kate coulson katerina loukopoulou katharine stapleford katy jones kevin merry kim m. mitchell kimberly hoffman laurie walden lee fallin letizia gramaglia linda weinberg liz wilding lucinda becker lucy gill-simmen luis pereira lynn gribble małgorzata drewniok margaret rachael scott maria kukhareva mary jacob matt hardy neil ford neil kramm nicky turnbull nicola clarke nicola meryl pallitt nkaepe olaniyi peggy murphy peter hartley qian zhang ralitsa b. kantcheva rebecca cohen robert ping-nan chang rosemarie mcilwhan sabina cerimagic samantha aston samantha jane ahern samantha thomas sara bird sarah honeychurch sarah wolfenden scott farrow sharon perera silvina bishopp-martin simon a williams simon strange siobhan hawke sophie leslie stacey mottershaw steph doehler stephen mark rutherford steve peters stevie prickett susan halfpenny tamsin kilner teeroumanee nadan vicky collins victoria elizabeth mann victoria rafferty virna rossi weijia li zoe enstone we are very proud of what this compendium says about our community and hope that our readers will find in it a source of inspiration, information and encouragement. on behalf of the editorial board, alicja syska editorial journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 references: dąbrowski k. (1964) positive disintegration. boston, ma: little brown. haktanir, a., can, n., seki, t., kurnaz, m. f. and dilmaç, b. (2021) ‘do we experience pandemic fatigue? current state, predictors, and prevention’, current psychology, 112. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-021-02397-w. schläppy, m. l. (2019) ‘understanding mental health through the theory of positive disintegration: a visual aid’, frontiers in psychology, 10:1291. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.01291. schön, d. a. (1991). the reflective practitioner: how professionals think in action. aldershot: ashgate publishing ltd. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-021-02397-w https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.01291 journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 24 september 2022 ________________________________________________________________________ improving student engagement using video-enabled activitybased learning: an exploratory study of stem preparatory education in the united arab emirates (uae) mohammad zeidan khalifa university, abu dhabi xinhua huang anhui university of science and technology, china ling xiao royal holloway, university of london, uk ruikun zhao khalifa university, abu dhabi abstract student engagement is often described as ‘the holy grail of learning’ (sinatra, heddy and lombardi, 2015, p.1). higher education educators have been implementing different pedagogical approaches to promote active learning with the aim of improving student engagement. this paper proposes an activity-based learning approach with the use of educational video to promote student engagement. we evaluate whether such an approach could improve student learning and engagement with stem subjects e.g., chemistry and physics, from three perspectives: motivation, engagement, and academic performance. we surveyed 136 stem preparatory programme students to conduct qualitative and quantitative analyses. the main findings support using the video-enabled activity-based learning (abl) approach to promote student engagement within classes and for future study. moreover, the anova tests results demonstrate the significant differences in the students’ academic performance with the use of video-enabled abl. the p-value of the chemistry session is 0.0016, and 0.00075 for the physics session. this study also contributes to stem education by providing insightful and practical guidance on how to effectively use scientific educational videos to enhance stem education. furthermore, this uae-based exploratory case study has been conducted in the context of middle eastern students’ learning behavior which adds an interesting cultural dimension. zeidan, huang, xiao and zhao improving student engagement using video-enabled activitybased learning: an exploratory study of stem preparatory education in the united arab emirates (uae) journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 2 keywords: activity-based learning; stem preparatory education; student engagement; video-enabled. introduction while stem student enrollment and motivation have declined in many western countries (young et al., 2018; freeman, marginson and tytler, 2019), the emirate youth council prioritises the enrollment of young people in stem disciplines and the pursual of lifelong learning and skills (strategy and pwc, 2022). it is widely acknowledged that over the last 50 years, the economic development of the uae has been largely achieved through its oil revenue and expatriates. to enable further economic growth outside the hydrocarbons sector and create a competitive knowledge-based economy, the uae government is determined to transform its higher education system so that its citizens will be competitive in the global knowledge-based economy, creating over 30 institutions of higher learning in the past 15 years (wenr, 2018). however, the uae is facing a challenge to change from an education system where most students study non-technical majors to one with substantial science and engineering graduates (wagie and fox, 2006). one of the effective ways to encourage students to choose science subjects is to enrol secondary education graduates in university preparatory programmes. the preparatory programme is known as the foundation year in the western education system and has the same purpose, i.e., to develop academic and non-academic skills and make it easier to get started at university. it is an extra year of study that leads to a full degree programme. students will also have the chance to improve their english language skills. more than 60% of the universities run preparatory or stem programmes in the uae with more than 50,000 students enrolled every year; the progression rate is 65% based on the case study university’s 2021-2022 data, which matches the national level, so one of the biggest challenges is how to maintain/enhance the retention and progression rate. student engagement is often labelled as the ‘holy grail of learning’ (sinatra, heddy and lombardi, 2015, p.1). however, the recent findings (as seen in wester et al., 2021; wu and teets, 2021; huang and wang, 2022) alarmingly report a significant decrease in zeidan, huang, xiao and zhao improving student engagement using video-enabled activitybased learning: an exploratory study of stem preparatory education in the united arab emirates (uae) journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 3 engagement with students after covid-19 due to the change in learning environment, i.e., from in-person to online or blended learning. students nowadays are always connected to screens, computers, tv, games, youtube, etc. this motivates us to integrate multimedia teaching sources such as educational videos to develop various activities to promote student engagement with studying stem courses. susantini, faizah and suryanti (2016) claim that educational videos are one of the tools that teachers can use as to facilitate learner-teacher interactions. using video-enabled activities does not mean teachers are putting their classes on ‘autopilot’ mode. in fact, teachers still supervise the process, checking the quality of the videos and how much is serving the material of the subject through carefully designed activities. more specifically, we designed the case study stem courses, chemistry and physics, where key concepts and theories are not delivered in a didactic way but through a series of activities enabled by videos. this exploratory study was undertaken at a stem preparatory programme within a leading uae university. the designed learning activities include acquiring knowledge, investigating and collaborating, and reflecting and evaluating learning. educational videos are used in the whole process to facilitate various activities in the hope of promoting student engagement. the pedagogic design, therefore, focuses on transforming passive learning into active learning. this paper evaluates the effectiveness of using a video-enabled activity-based learning approach to promote students' learning and engagement in three aspects: students’ motivation, engagement and academic performance. findings and results gained from qualitative and quantitative analysis allow us to contribute to addressing the challenges facing stem preparatory education. the contribution of this paper is threefold: 1. it contributes specifically to the extant literature regarding the utility of activity-based learning. the use of educational video facilitates collaborative and interactive learning activities which could motivate students to engage in active learning. 2. it more generally reveals the breadth and depth of motivation and engagement that students ascend when learning stem through video-enabled active-based learning (abl) approach. this approach offers students flexibility and the opportunity to learn the subject knowledge in a way that appealed to them at their own pace. consequently, students tended to become more engaged in the learning process and developed independent learning in the process. zeidan, huang, xiao and zhao improving student engagement using video-enabled activitybased learning: an exploratory study of stem preparatory education in the united arab emirates (uae) journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 4 3. the case study of the authors’ own approach is discussed in detail and is designed to illustrate the activity-based learning approach. the findings may be of interest to colleagues contemplating applying video-enabled abl to their stem education. this paper is organised as follows: the second section provides a theoretical and conceptual framework of the motivations for using video-enabled activity-based learning in stem education. the third section describes the research design and methodology of this study. the analysis and findings of students’ evaluation are then presented. the final section concludes the paper and outlines recommended future research opportunities emanating from this study. theoretical and conceptual framework constructive alignment and activity-based learning in the last few decades, there have been urgent calls for active learning experiences that place the student at the centre of learning, rather than accepting students as passive listeners, to address the issue of poor student engagement (machemer, 2007). freeman et al. (2014) demonstrated that active learning could lead to increases in examination performance that would raise average grades. panko et al. (2007) defined activity-based learning (abl) as a learning process in which students are constantly engaged rather than passively receiving information. based on the abl, teachers should set up a series of activities which align learners’ activities to learning outcomes. these activities should develop students’ interest, motivation, engagement, behaviour, and intellectual capacity in the subject (aina, 2013). anwar (2019) highlights that the active learning method is different from the traditional method of teaching. firstly, abl is set up so students actively participate and become involved in the learning rather than sit as passive listeners in the classroom. secondly, abl provides students with an opportunity to collaborate in a positive learning environment which helps them to learn effectively. the key to achieving a successful abl is to involve students in various interactive activities set up by the teachers in the classroom. these activities are used to connect educators and learners. biggs’s (2013) famous constructive alignment framework cleverly brings the teachers’ set-up and learners’ activities together: ‘constructive alignment' starts with the notion that the learner constructs his or her zeidan, huang, xiao and zhao improving student engagement using video-enabled activitybased learning: an exploratory study of stem preparatory education in the united arab emirates (uae) journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 5 own learning through relevant learning activities. the teacher's job is to create a learning environment that supports the learning activities appropriate to achieving the desired learning outcomes. (biggs, 2013, p.1). according to constructive alignment, a good teaching system aligns teaching methods and assessments to learning activities so that all aspects of the system are supporting students’ learning. since all learning activities are designed to meet the desired learning outcomes, the learners find it difficult to escape from learning appropriately. figure 1 illustrates the teaching system that we have designed based on constructive alignment. the case study university’s stem preparatory programme equips students with both academic and non-academic life-long learning skills to successfully embark on undergraduate courses. the main learning outcome of the combined physics, mathematics, and chemistry courses is for students to develop a good understanding of the physics and chemistry concepts, theory, and law to prepare them to undertake and excel in the sciences and engineering subject upon completion of the preparatory programme. the physics and chemistry courses in this case study use lectures, laboratories, and a common project as an introduction to the material, with active learning and problem solving to emphasise subject knowledge. from the students’ perspective, ‘constructive’ refers to the idea that students construct knowledge and skills through relevant learning activities themselves. teachers cannot impart knowledge to students, but are simply catalysts for learning (biggs, 2013). this idea perfectly aligns to the constructivist learning theory which underpins the abl. zeidan, huang, xiao and zhao improving student engagement using video-enabled activitybased learning: an exploratory study of stem preparatory education in the united arab emirates (uae) journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 6 figure 1. application of constructive alignment in stem preparatory programme. pedagogic consideration of blended-learning: using audio-video teaching materials a blended learning approach has been adopted by most universities across the world in response to the covid-19 pandemic. this approach has no doubt reshaped traditional pedagogic approaches to mitigate the impact of covid-19. however, the blended and/or online learning approach has been criticised for its possible adverse impact on student engagement. for example, wester et al. (2021) examined how the shift in the learning environment from in-person to online, because of covid-19, has impacted undergraduate stem student engagement. they reported a drastic decline in student engagement and their positive attitudes toward science. wu and teets (2021) focus on examining undergraduate student engagement in chemistry. they concluded that the decreases in motivation and self-regulation occurred in part because the historic pandemic event made it more difficult to focus on studies in a self-regulated environment. it is crucial for us to review and introduce innovative pedagogy in order to enhance student engagement. the traditional passive lectures using materials such as whiteboards and notes have been repeatedly proven to fail to retain students’ interest (zhao, 2019; deslauriers et, al., 2019). stem preparatory programme learning outcomes concepts, theory and laws of physical and video-enabled teaching & learning activities assessment & feedback zeidan, huang, xiao and zhao improving student engagement using video-enabled activitybased learning: an exploratory study of stem preparatory education in the united arab emirates (uae) journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 7 in recent years, the science classroom has been revolutionised by new educational media such as hands-on experimental tools, multimedia teaching and learning materials, computer simulation of chemical and physical processes, and adaptive learning software catering to students’ learning abilities. in general, learners prefer to engage with exercises and activities in which they feel more confident. challenging activities can lead a high percentage of learners thinking that they are not able to learn or understand and could result in them losing interest in the subject (sawyer, 2014). for learning science subjects such as physics and chemistry, the question is how can we create a supportive environment to support those who are not engaged with the subject and at the same time continue to deepen engaged students’ interest in the subject? for learning to take place in physics/chemistry teaching, two things are imperative: subject knowledge and learners’ interactions. subject knowledge consists of theory, principles, and laws of physics and chemistry. these are pre-determined by the learning outcomes when the courses are designed. using audio-video materials in the classroom is nothing new. audio-videos were used in world war ii as a training tool for soldiers, and since that time educators have recognised the power of such tools in capturing learners’ attention and using it to increase their motivation and enhance their learning experience. the development of digital technology has opened new ways for education to develop, such as online education, with the flexibility to learn at a time that suits the learner and the place. with such changes academics are compelled to change their way to approach their students and ways of delivering their subjects, rebecca battes from minnesota state university says: ‘if we think about our students not being like us, not learning like us, not having the same motivations like us, then we start to imagine where they could be, and we can actually reach them more easily’ (kober, 2015, p.53). in a face-to-face environment, students have better chances to actively engage with the content by interacting with their fellow peers, their teaching assistant, or the instructor. creating the same active learning experience beyond class becomes a challenge. with the technology, we can now reimagine the same online learner, but with a twist: the student is now actively engaging with the video lecture through prompted questions. the interactive video keeps the students' attention and supports them in their learning endeavours. zeidan, huang, xiao and zhao improving student engagement using video-enabled activitybased learning: an exploratory study of stem preparatory education in the united arab emirates (uae) journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 8 the ability to use teaching technology beyond the classroom means that learning can occur anywhere, and at any time. educators are purposeful about establishing online locations and forums for their students to share ideas and concepts with each other. providing public spaces on the internet, like a class blog and videos, offers a focused area where students can gather thoughts and ideas around a single subject. these spaces and education tools can engage students outside the classroom. also, students show the ability to use new vocabulary because of education video usage; such things are considered an advantage for students when english is their second language (sawyer, 2014), which is the case in this study. video-enabled activity-based learning framework based on the above theoretical framework and pedagogy consideration, we designed the following video-enabled activity-based learning framework. in summary, learning is divided into four activities for each topic. a) knowledge acquiring activity (in-class or/and online) students acquire knowledge through lecture videos typically there will be one bitesize video introducing the main concepts and other videos explaining the main issues of the topic. videos are curated via an online-platform, playposit (formerly known as educanon). playposit is a web and chrome-based platform which helps instructors to create or modify video content from popular sites such as youtube and vimeo, among several others. using this platform, students can attempt real-time questions such as multiple-choice questions which have been pre-loaded to the video to make the learning more interactive. b) collaborative activity (in-class) students collaborate on given tasks. teachers provide clear instructions and an overview of the task for learners. the tasks could include discussing the main concepts, theory and laws involved in the topic; numerical calculation practice; investigating an in-depth issue of the topic. this process is student-led and teachers act as facilitators. students could access relevant videos which may help them to develop collaborative work. zeidan, huang, xiao and zhao improving student engagement using video-enabled activitybased learning: an exploratory study of stem preparatory education in the united arab emirates (uae) journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 9 c) evaluation and learning check activities (after-class): students will be given a brief such as homework, and a laboratory report to work on after the class to consolidate their understanding. this is to evaluate if students have achieved learning outcomes. some of the tasks are set up in the video so that students can revisit the educational videos to accomplish the assigned tasks. through the dashboard of the video platform playposit teachers can get data about students’ performance on the embedded assessment items. d) reflection and feedback activities (in-class and/or online) recap and review what has been learned and relate it to the next topic. teachers provide oral feedback to students in class and summative feedback is given through a powerpoint added to videos at the appropriate section. this will help students to understand what they have done well and what to improve in the future. figure 2. video-enabled activity-based learning framework. 1. aquire lecture videos ( in-class and/or playposit) 2. collaborate discuss investigate, practise, produce (in-class) 3. evaluate learning check (in-class and/or playposit) 4.recap and preview (in-class and/or playposit) zeidan, huang, xiao and zhao improving student engagement using video-enabled activitybased learning: an exploratory study of stem preparatory education in the united arab emirates (uae) journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 10 methodology and research design methodology the participants of this study were a group of foundation programme students at one of the top-rated universities in uae. they are mainly enrolled in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (stem) courses. the case study university offers stem courses including physics, chemistry, and mathematics which are delivered to students via different sessions by various lecturers. the focus of this study is to examine the effectiveness of the use of bite-size, i.e., 10-15 minutes, of educational video-enabled activity-based learning in terms of improving student learning engagement and performance. the video-enabled activities are designed to be completed during the course contact hours, i.e., in-class and/or as part of students’ independent learning hours, i.e., after class. students are not expected to invest extra time beyond the course study time, although some students may decide to consolidate their learning by spending more time revisiting the video-enabled activities. the chosen videos have been modified to be fitted into the courses, i.e., chemistry and physics, in this study according to their syllabus and learning outcomes. each video has a group of questions related to a specific concept, theory, or law of physics and chemistry. we add real-time questions, such as multiple-choice questions, to help students to pause and progress. the students can always rewind to find the answer they need. adding pauses at regular intervals is a great way to break up a long session of narration. it also helps to prevent students from zoning out, encouraging them to watch and listen more actively. the questions have been embedded at different intervals during the video; they have been given a 10-point score each but are not summative assessments for the courses. these formative assessments can encourage students to apply subject knowledge acquired from the videos and promote an active learning experience for students in an online environment. furthermore, within the playposit platform instructors can obtain analytical information related to students’ scores, attending/watching the video, and whether they watched the video completely or stopped somewhere (students cannot fast-forward any of the videos). the final product, the interactive video, is what playposit calls a ‘bulb’. through a dashboard, teachers can get data about students' usage and performance within the embedded assessment items. these data then could be used to further develop discussion and investigation during classes. zeidan, huang, xiao and zhao improving student engagement using video-enabled activitybased learning: an exploratory study of stem preparatory education in the united arab emirates (uae) journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 11 research design this study uses a simple version of blended learning, which combined digital content such as video clips or educational activities with face-to-face classroom learning. blended learning typically still requires the physical presence of the instructor and students in a classroom but gives the student some control over their time and space of learning, via elearning teaching. the idea of using this version of blended learning is not to curtail the importance of the instructor, but to provide other ways for instructors to use digital technologies to support learning. this study conducts qualitative and quantitative analyses based on the survey and questionnaire results. first, a paper-based questionnaire was constructed to explore the perceptions of students using scientific-educational video to develop abl. secondly, this study applies the analysis of variance (anova) test to examine the statistical significance of the difference in students’ performance. the student performance was measured by the end-of-term test results. tests were carried out at the end of the semester, and we compared the test results between the groups of students who accessed the video and the groups who did not have access to the video depends on the instructors’ choice. ethical approval to undertake the research was granted by the faculty’s ethics committee. the questionnaire was distributed to, and collected from, students by a member of staff unrelated to the module and students were informed that their participation in the research was voluntary, their responses and comments would be anonymous, and that they could withdraw from the study at any time. students were encouraged to be honest in their answers. consent was received from all 126 students. results and discussion questionnaire and survey results we surveyed 136 stem preparatory programme students and received 126 valid responses (where 52 were from the chemistry course and 74 were from physics). we assessed the perception of using educational video by asking the ten questions (5-point scale where 5=strongly agree and 1=strongly disagree) seen in appendix 1. table 1 and 2 presents the students’ perceptions of chemistry and physics, respectively. the tables show the questions asked in the survey in this study about using the educational video to facilitate learning activities. zeidan, huang, xiao and zhao improving student engagement using video-enabled activitybased learning: an exploratory study of stem preparatory education in the united arab emirates (uae) journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 12 table 1. questionnaire data of chemistry teaching first semester-2020 (total sample size: 52). the survey questions at the end of the semester strongly agree agree not sure disagree strongly disagree compared to traditional teaching 11 26 12 3 0 motivation 10 25 11 6 0 connecting outside classroom 11 27 8 4 2 review lecture material 17 27 4 2 2 take notes 5 7 14 17 9 scientific language 11 20 15 6 0 practise solving problem 17 26 6 1 2 concentration 10 25 12 5 0 replace the book 7 9 16 12 8 video length 16 29 4 3 0 total voting 115 221 102 59 23 table 2. questionnaire data of physics teaching first semester-2020 (total sample size 74). the survey questions at the end of the semester strongly agree agree not sure disagree strongly disagree compared to traditional teaching 41 22 8 1 2 motivation 31 32 10 0 1 connecting outside classroom 41 28 4 1 0 review lecture material 48 20 4 1 0 take notes 5 7 24 24 14 scientific language 16 42 16 0 0 practise solving problem 41 29 4 0 0 zeidan, huang, xiao and zhao improving student engagement using video-enabled activitybased learning: an exploratory study of stem preparatory education in the united arab emirates (uae) journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 13 concentration 26 43 3 2 0 replace the book 14 9 25 20 6 video length 35 29 9 1 0 total voting 298 261 107 50 23 figure 3. survey data of chemistry teaching 1st semester 2020. 0 5 10 15 20 25 30 c o m p a re d t o t ra d it io n a l t e a ch in g m o ti v a ti o n c o n n e ct in g o u ts id e c la ss ro o m r e v ie w l e ct u re m a te ri a l t a k e n o te s s ci e n ti fi c la n g a u g e p ra ct ic e s o lv in g p ro b le m c o n ce n tr a ti o n r e p la ce t h e b o o k v id e o l e n g th s tu d e n t r e sp o n se question category stongly agree agree not sure disagree zeidan, huang, xiao and zhao improving student engagement using video-enabled activitybased learning: an exploratory study of stem preparatory education in the united arab emirates (uae) journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 14 figure 4. survey data of physics teaching 1st semester 2020. in summary, tables 1 and 2 and figures 3 and 4 evidence that the students are in favour of the scientific videos involved in teaching chemistry and physics subjects. physics classes in particular found the scientific videos prepared by the instructors were a great help to their engagement. detailed discussion is presented in the subsequent sub-section. analysis and discussions of survey and questionnaire results malina, nørreklit and selto (2011) claim that students' motivation for learning activities determines their level of engagement. when students pursue an activity because they want to learn and understand (self-oriented), rather than solely wanting to obtain a good grade or satisfy their parents, their engagement is more likely to be full and thorough. table 1 shows that compared to traditional didactic teaching using only a whiteboard, the video-enabled abl significantly increased students’ motivation, i.e., 85% of the physics students strongly agreed or agreed, and 71% of the chemistry session agreed. in addition, the use of videos also improved the student engagement with the subject study outside the classroom, i.e., 93% of physics students strongly agreed or agreed, and 73% chemistry 0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45 50 c o m p a re d t o t ra d it io n a l t e a ch in g m o ti v a ti o n c o n n e ct in g o u ts id e c la ss ro o m r e v ie w l e ct u re m a te ri a l t a k e n o te s s ci e n ti fi c la n g a u g e p ra ct ic e s o lv in g p ro b le m c o n ce n tr a ti o n r e p la ce t h e b o o k v id e o l e n g th s tu d e n t r e sp o n se question category stongly agree agree not sure disagree stongly disagree zeidan, huang, xiao and zhao improving student engagement using video-enabled activitybased learning: an exploratory study of stem preparatory education in the united arab emirates (uae) journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 15 session agreed. one student commented that ‘the interactive videos helped me to recall the course material more distinctly, the videos were like private tutorial sessions can be accessed when it needed repeatedly [sic]’. in addition, ‘the conversational style of the video is closer to personalise the conversation rather than using formal language’. this comment echoes the findings of brame (2016) which suggests that the use of language in learning has a great impact on developing a relationship with the presenter and increases student engagement with the subject. fredricks’ (2004, with blumenfeld and paris; 2014) studies have shown that if students do not consider a learning activity worthy of their time and effort, they might not be motivated, or engaged in a satisfactory way. hence, it is essential that students perceive activities as being meaningful and relevant. table 1’s results (strongly agree and agree combined in each percentage) show 93% of physic students and 85% of chemistry students found using educational videos helpful for reviewing lecture material. furthermore, 93% of physics and 70% of chemistry students strongly agreed or agreed that video-enabled abl helped them to focus on the main concepts. one of the merits of using video-enabled learning is that students could have more autonomy with controlling their learning pace, i.e., they could freely move backwards or skip and select important sections to review. this allows students to revisit the key concepts at any time and stay focused. using playposit in this study provided many of these options, such as, trimming any extra or unrelated parts of the video and adding questions to alert learners to certain parts of the material. this helps the learner focus on the main contents of the subject, and makes it easier for them to revise the material. problem-solving is one of the most important skills for stem students as they construct knowledge through solving problems. students often find solving complex problems that require multiple steps a challenge. nevertheless, problem-solving skills do not develop spontaneously. as educators, it is important that we create a classroom environment in which students are problem solvers. using the supporting educational videos when discussing solving problems will provide students with the guidelines to analyse the question and use it as a reference while they are trying to practise solving more problems without the teacher present. learning activities, i.e., a) knowledge acquiring and b) collaborative activities as described above are designed to encourage students’ problemsolving. this study finds that video-enabled abl is supportive in terms of developing zeidan, huang, xiao and zhao improving student engagement using video-enabled activitybased learning: an exploratory study of stem preparatory education in the united arab emirates (uae) journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 16 students’ problem-solving skills. as seen in table 1 and figure 3, the majority of students strongly agree and agree (94% and 83% in physics and chemistry sessions respectively), that educational videos are as effective tools for practising solving problems. this could build students’ confidence and improve their performance in comparison to other students who were not exposed to the same videos for the same subjects. as instructors our primary goal is to deliver syllabus, and we could not always accommodate each student’s need during scheduled class time. there is always a need to create opportunity for students to discuss the materials in more depth outside class time. hence, the video-enabled abl also could promote deep-learning and address the needs of weaker students who could not fully grasp the subject knowledge within the limited class time. the learning activities c) evaluation and self-check and d) reflection as described above are designed to support and/or stretch students. the evaluation of students’ academic performance provides further evidence of whether the video-enabled abl enhances their test results. this will be presented and discussed in the next section using statistical tests. anova test of students’ performance we examined and compared students’ performance in chemistry and physics tests. there were 20 class groups across the stem programme and different tutors made their personal choices regarding usage of videos. anova test results in chemistry whether learning truly takes place will be reflected in students’ academic achievement (kola, 2013; aravind, 2016). we compared the results of students’ test results between the groups with access to videos (n=57) and without videos (n=63). the full mark for the chemistry test was 33%. the average of classes without the video was 24.0397 and the number of classes with videos was 27.4298, as shown in table 3. anova testing was conducted to determine if the mean difference is significant. the statistics show there was a significant effect of scientific videos on students in the test performance. the value of f (1,119) = 10.50 and p value= 0.0016 indicates that the null hypothesis (i.e., that there is no difference) is rejected. zeidan, huang, xiao and zhao improving student engagement using video-enabled activitybased learning: an exploratory study of stem preparatory education in the united arab emirates (uae) journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 17 table 3. anova: single factor test on chemistry session. summary groups count sum average variance without 63 1514.5 24.0397 38.7202 with 57 1563.5 27.4298 26.1736 anova source of variation ss df ms f p-value f crit between groups 343.9299 1 343.9299 10.4966 0.0016 3.9215 within groups 3866.37 118 32.76585 total 4210.3 119 anova test results in physics we examined students’ test results between the groups with videos access to videosenabled learning n= 79) and without access to videos (n=104). the results are presented in table 4: the average for classes without the video was 17.9952 and for classes with videos was 22.0823. similarly with the chemistry classes, the statistics show the scientific videos had a significant effect on students in the test performance. the value of f (1,182) = 11.7483 and value of p = 0.00075 indicates the null hypothesis is rejected. table 4. anova single factor test on physics session. summary groups count sum average variance without 104 1871.5 17.9952 72.099 with 79 1744.5 22.0823 53.0476 anova source of variation ss df ms f p-value f crit between groups 749.958 1 749.958 11.7384 0.00075 3.8933 within groups 11563.96 181 63.8893 zeidan, huang, xiao and zhao improving student engagement using video-enabled activitybased learning: an exploratory study of stem preparatory education in the united arab emirates (uae) journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 18 total 12313.92 182 in summary, anova results showed that the mean test results for both the chemistry and physics students were higher with the use of scientific videos. the anova results indicated that the integration of scientific videos improved students’ performance in learning regardless of the specific subject. anova testing was carried out on data from both stem1 and 2 sections, (physics in stem1 and chemistry in stem2). the average score of the session with video-enabled abl implemented is higher than the other sections in both chemistry and physics regardless of course levels. the p-value was calculated as less than 0.05 (5%), so the null hypothesis is rejected which suggests the difference in students’ performance is statistically significant. conclusion the shift from in-person to online and/or blended-learning due to the pandemic has brought more challenges in terms of keeping students engaged in a different learning environment. to improve the learning and progression of science subjects such as physics and chemistry, instructors need to complement not replace traditional (in-class) learning. we should also appreciate and value students’ desire to use digital technologies and help them to embrace the new learning methods. the findings of this study suggest that video-enabled abl could provide significant improvements in student engagement and academic performance. however, the sole use of educational videos itself will not have magical results. the key is to use these videos to develop activities to foster better interaction and self-directed learning. the framework proposed in this study facilitates stem educators to implement video-enabled abl. however, this exploratory study relates to only one cohort of students at one institution and so is limited in scope. the authors plan to extend the level of tuition required for scientific videos and further research will be carried out to develop the student’s perceptions questionnaire and repeat the survey to make the results more generalisable. additionally, focus groups or interviews could be undertaken to obtain a deeper understanding of students’ views on this novel approach. students’ performance comparison was undertaken on two types of classes, with or without videos. therefore, there might be other zeidan, huang, xiao and zhao improving student engagement using video-enabled activitybased learning: an exploratory study of stem preparatory education in the united arab emirates (uae) journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 19 factors to explain the difference in their test results. notwithstanding the limitations of this work, the findings suggest that students do perceive using scientific video-enabled abl is effective to promote engagement in learning stem. hence, the findings of this paper will be of relevance to academics involved in stem education and those interested in the application of scientific videos to engage students with stem curriculum. disclosure of potential conflicts of interest the authors certify that they have no affiliations with or involvement in any organisation or entity with any financial, non-financial or non-financial interest in the subject matter or materials discussed in this manuscript. references anwar, f. (2019) ‘the effect of activity-based teaching techniques on student motivation and academic achievement’, journal of education and educational development, 6(1), pp.154-170. available at: https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ej1216784.pdf (accessed: 7 january 2022). aravind, v. r. (2016) ‘video and multimedia in physics education’, engineering and science communication, 1(1), pp.1-12. biggs, j. (2003) aligning teaching for constructing learning. available at: https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/sites/default/files/resources/id477_aligning_teaching _for_constructing_learning.pdf (accessed: 7 january 2022). brame, c. j. (2016) ‘effective educational videos: principles and guidelines for maximizing student learning from video content’, cbe life sciences education, 15(4). https://doi.org/10.1187/cbe.16-03-0125. deslauriers. l, mccarty, l. s., miller, k., callaghan, k. and kestin. g. (2019) ‘measuring actual learning versus feeling of learning in response to being actively engaged in the classroom’, proceedings of the national academy of sciences, 116(39), pp.19251-19257. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ej1216784.pdf https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/sites/default/files/resources/id477_aligning_teaching_for_constructing_learning.pdf https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/sites/default/files/resources/id477_aligning_teaching_for_constructing_learning.pdf https://doi.org/10.1187/cbe.16-03-0125 zeidan, huang, xiao and zhao improving student engagement using video-enabled activitybased learning: an exploratory study of stem preparatory education in the united arab emirates (uae) journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 20 fredricks, j. a. (2014) eight myths of student disengagement: creating classrooms of deep learning. los angeles: corwin. fredricks, j. a., blumenfeld, p. c., and paris, a. h. (2004) ‘school engagement: potential of the concept, state of the evidence’, review of educational research, 74(1), pp.59-109. https://doi.org/10.3102/00346543074001059. freeman, b., marginson, s. and tytler, r. (2019) ‘an international view of stem education’, in sahin, a. and mohr-schroeder, m. (eds.), stem education 2.0: myths and truths--what has k-12 stem education research taught us?, leiden, the netherlands: brill, pp.350-363. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004405400_019. freeman, s., eddy, s. l., mcdonough, m., smith, m., okoroafor, n., jordt, h. and wenderoth, m. p. (2014) ‘active learning increases student performance in science, engineering, and mathematics’, proc. natl. acad. sci. u.s.a., 111, pp.8410-8415. huang, y. and wang, s. (2022) ‘how to motivate student engagement in emergency online learning? evidence from the covid-19 situation’, high education. available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-022-00880-2 . kober, n. (2015) reaching students: what research says about effective instruction in undergraduate science and engineering. board on science education, division of behavioral and social sciences and education. washington, dc: the national academies press. kola, a. (2013) ‘integration of ict into physics learning to improve students’ academic achievement: problems and solutions’, open journal of education, 1, pp.117-121. https://doi.org/10.12966/oje.07.01.2013. machemer, p. l. (2007) ‘student perceptions of active learning in a large crossdisciplinary classroom’, active learning in higher education: the journal of the institute for learning and teaching, 8(1), pp.9-29. https://doi.org/10.3102/00346543074001059 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-022-00880-2 zeidan, huang, xiao and zhao improving student engagement using video-enabled activitybased learning: an exploratory study of stem preparatory education in the united arab emirates (uae) journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 21 malina, m. a., nørreklit, h. s. o., and selto, f. h. (2011) ‘lessons learned: advantages and disadvantages of mixed-method research’, qualitative research in accounting & management, 8(1), pp.59–7. panko, m., kenley, r., davies, k., piggot-irvine, e., allen, b., hede, j. (2005) learning styles of those in the building and construction sector. auckland: unitec new zealand. playposit. available at: https://go.playposit.com/ (accessed: 5 august 2022). sawyer, r. k. (2014) the cambridge handbook of the learning sciences. 2nd edn. cambridge: cambridge university press. sinatra, g. m., heddy, b. c. and doug lombardi (2015) ‘the challenges of defining and measuring student engagement in science’, educational psychologist, 50(1), pp.113. https://doi.org/10.1080/00461520.2014.1002924. strategy and pwc (2022) the trends shaping the uae’s youth sector after the covid-19 pandemic. available at: https://www.strategyand.pwc.com/m1/en/ideationcenter/research/2021/future-of-youth/future-of-youth-in-the-uae-english.pdf (accessed: 10 july, 2022). susantini, e., faizah, u., and suryanti, s. m. (2016) ‘developing educational video to improve the use of scientific approach in cooperative learning’, journal of baltic science education, 15(6), pp. 725–737. wagie, d. a., and fox, w. h. (2006) ‘transforming higher education in the united arab emirates (uae): contributing to social progress and the new economy’, the international journal of learning: annual review, 12, pp.277-286. wester, e. r., walsh, l. l., arango-caro, s. and callis-duehl, k. l. (2021) ‘student engagement declines in stem undergraduates during covid-19: driven remote learning’, journal of microbiol biol education, 22(1). https://doi.org/10.1128/jmbe.v22i1.2385. https://go.playposit.com/ https://doi.org/10.1080/00461520.2014.1002924 https://www.strategyand.pwc.com/m1/en/ideation-center/research/2021/future-of-youth/future-of-youth-in-the-uae-english.pdf https://www.strategyand.pwc.com/m1/en/ideation-center/research/2021/future-of-youth/future-of-youth-in-the-uae-english.pdf https://doi.org/10.1128/jmbe.v22i1.2385 zeidan, huang, xiao and zhao improving student engagement using video-enabled activitybased learning: an exploratory study of stem preparatory education in the united arab emirates (uae) journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 22 word education news and review (wenr) (2018) education in the united arab emirates. available at: https://wenr.wes.org/2018/08/education-in-the-united-arab-emirates (accessed: 10 july, 2022). wu, f. and teets, t. s. (2021) ‘effects of the covid-19 pandemic on student engagement in a general chemistry course’, journal of chemical education, 98(12), pp.36333642. https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.jchemed.1c00665. young, a., wendel, p., esson, j. and plank, k. (2018) ‘motivational decline and recovery in higher education stem courses, international journal of science education, 40, pp.1-18. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/09500693.2018.1460773. zhao, r. k. (2019) ‘an examination of effectiveness of different approaches to teaching quantitative methods at undergraduate level in higher education’, international journal of management and applied science, 5(10), pp. 45-51. appendix questionnaire: student's feedback survey/chemistry 1. i enjoy learning stem02 chemistry using educational videos compared to the traditional method with just white board 1. strongly disagree 2. disagree 3. not sure 4. agree 5. strongly agree ………………………………………………………………………………………………… 2. i find learning stem02-chemistry (stoichiometry & precipitation reaction) more motivating with chemistry educational videos 1. strongly disagree 2. disagree 3. not sure 4. agree 5. strongly agree ………………………………………………………………………………………………… 3. i find stem02-chemistry educational videos are enough for me that i do not need to take notes during lecture time https://wenr.wes.org/2018/08/education-in-the-united-arab-emirates https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.jchemed.1c00665 https://doi.org/10.1080/09500693.2018.1460773 zeidan, huang, xiao and zhao improving student engagement using video-enabled activitybased learning: an exploratory study of stem preparatory education in the united arab emirates (uae) journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 23 1. strongly disagree 2. disagree 3. not sure 4. agree 5. strongly agree ………………………………………………………………………………………………… 4. educational stem02-chemistry videos help me concentrated on the main concepts of the subject 1. strongly disagree 2. disagree 3. not sure 4. agree 5. strongly agree ………………………………………………………………………………………………… 5. i find stem02-chemistry educational videos keep me engaged with the course outside the classroom 1. strongly disagree 2. disagree 3. not sure 4. agree 5. strongly agree ………………………………………………………………………………………………… 6. i find educational videos a useful way to review the course material 1. strongly disagree 2. disagree 3. not sure 4. agree 5. strongly agree ………………………………………………………………………………………………… 7. i find educational videos improve my scientific english language because of the captions provided and clear audio 1. strongly disagree 2. disagree 3. not sure 4. agree 5. strongly agree ………………………………………………………………………………………………… 8. problem solving stem02-chemistry educational videos very helpful solving problem practise with guidance 1. strongly disagree 2. disagree 3. not sure 4. agree 5. strongly agree ………………………………………………………………………………………………… 9. the length of the stem02-chemistry videos was acceptable 1. strongly disagree 2. disagree 3. not sure 4. agree 5. strongly agree ………………………………………………………………………………………………… 10. educational videos could be a good tool to replace books 1. strongly disagree 2. disagree 3. not sure 4. agree 5. strongly agree zeidan, huang, xiao and zhao improving student engagement using video-enabled activitybased learning: an exploratory study of stem preparatory education in the united arab emirates (uae) journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 24 any further comments you may have: selected example chemistry learning videos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zxqp80fvhjo&t=288s (balancing chemical equations). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k5vsijzgnsc (chemical reactions types). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bltnuzbs2ja&t=329s(chemical reactions stoichiometry). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zixtpudzlp8 (empirical and molecular formula from percent composition). author details mohammad zeidan is a senior lecturer in physics in the college of arts and sciences at khalifa university, abu dhabi, united arab emirates. xinhua huang is an associate professor in the school of materials, science and engineering, anhui university of science and technology, huainan, anhui province, p. r. china. ling xiao is a senior lecturer in finance. she is a senior fellow of the uk higher education academy and is the programme director for bsc accounting and finance at royal holloway, university of london. ruikun zhao is a senior lecturer in chemistry in the college of arts and sciences at khalifa university, abu dhabi, united arab emirates. he is also a fellow of the uk higher education academy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zxqp80fvhjo&t=288s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k5vsijzgnsc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bltnuzbs2ja&t=329s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zixtpudzlp8 improving student engagement using video-enabled activity-based learning: an exploratory study of stem preparatory education in the united arab emirates (uae) abstract introduction theoretical and conceptual framework constructive alignment and activity-based learning pedagogic consideration of blended-learning: using audio-video teaching materials video-enabled activity-based learning framework a) knowledge acquiring activity (in-class or/and online) b) collaborative activity (in-class) c) evaluation and learning check activities (after-class): d) reflection and feedback activities (in-class and/or online) methodology and research design methodology research design results and discussion questionnaire and survey results analysis and discussions of survey and questionnaire results anova test of students’ performance anova test results in chemistry anova test results in physics conclusion disclosure of potential conflicts of interest references appendix questionnaire: student's feedback survey/chemistry author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 23 march 2022 ________________________________________________________________________ student engagement and voice in higher education: students’ perceptions xiaomei sun university of edinburgh, uk deborah holt university of edinburgh, uk abstract there has been intense debate about student engagement and student voice in higher education institutions in the past decade or so. most of the discussion has been theoretical or based on a cause-and-effect research design. with the aim of gathering student perspectives on student voice and its related mechanisms, this study collected the voice of 13 students, the majority of whom were international students, from one uk university. participants include undergraduate (n=1), postgraduate taught (n=7), and phd (n=5) students who voluntarily agreed to have an online interview with the researcher, a phd intern of the student voice team. findings indicate that participants have an overall positive and supportive view of student voice mechanisms at this institution, although some understandings are not adequate or accurate. participants’ attitudes towards some commonly used communication channels indicate that they prioritise an interactive and dynamic tool to initiate dialogue with the university. suggestions are put forward for managerial strategies for a sustainable and inclusive student voice mechanism. keywords: student engagement; student voice; higher education; university-student dialogue. introduction for more than a decade, focus on student engagement has been ubiquitous in higher education research, practice, and policy making (gourlay, 2017; green, 2019), regarded as directly related to student attendance and retention rates at higher education sun and holt student engagement and voice in higher education: students’ perceptions journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 2 institutions (macfarlane and tomlinson, 2017). this marketised perspective of student engagement led to the contentious analogy between student and customer (cuthbert, 2010). related to this customer rhetoric, neoliberal discourse of student engagement (zepke, 2015) has been critiqued by some scholars as too narrow and limiting a perspective. in response, broader interpretations of the term arose from more eclectic ideologies, for example, the social and psychological view (lawson and lawson, 2013) and the holistic view which highlight, but are not restricted to, student motivation and expectations (kahu, 2013). frequently intertwined with student engagement, student voice is another buzzword related to student agency, autonomy, and the university-student partnership (toshalis and nakkula, 2012; zepke, 2018). to enable student voice to be heard, four elements are required: space, voice, audience, and influence (lundy, 2007). in this process, distribution of information is of central importance, covering aspects such as timeliness and means of communication (bols, 2012; isaeva et al., 2020). in other words, dialogic rather than one-way communication, with the student being spoken with rather than for, could be regarded as the key element of student voice initiatives (fielding, 2004b; hall, 2017; pearce and wood, 2019). this paper focuses on students’ perspectives on student voice and the relevant mechanisms of an education school in the uk. based on the perceptions, we established the argument that to accommodate diversity in students’ preferences and expectations, higher education institutions need to provide multiple, interactive, and dialogic channels to ensure the student voice is heard and responded to. literature review relevant literature concerning student engagement and student voice highlights the importance of an agentic and dialogic approach to engagement, which necessitates a dynamic two-way communication between students and the institution. lundy’s (2007) four elements of student voice – space, voice, audience, and influence – serve as the theoretical framework for the current research design. student engagement student engagement is a ‘nebulous and contentious’ term which is open to multiple interpretations (macfarlane and tomlinson, 2017, p.7). a narrow interpretation of the term is that student involvement in academic activities and their learning outcomes is indicative sun and holt student engagement and voice in higher education: students’ perceptions journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 3 of an education institution’s teaching quality. this further impacts student enrolment and retention rates at the institution (krause and coates, 2008; xerri, radford and shacklock, 2018). a broader understanding, as the widely cited definition states, is that student engagement is ‘the time and effort students devote to activities that are empirically linked to desired outcomes of college and what institutions do to induce students to participate in these activities’ (kuh, 2009, p.683). this definition emphasises both students’ and the institution’s contribution to the co-construction of student experience, development, and success (wolf-wendel, ward and kinzie, 2009; trowler, 2010). however, the prevalent use of the term, especially for the purpose of institutional reputation building and marketisation, leaves student engagement critiqued as reflective or representative of neoliberal discourse, espousing performativity and accountability in the name of assuring education quality (zepke, 2015; 2018). in a more inclusive and comprehensive manner, kahu (2013) summarised different interpretations of student engagement under four categories: the behavioural, psychological, socio-cultural, and holistic perspectives. these four perspectives encompass the macro level (socio-political and cultural contexts), the meso level (institutional policy making and practice), and the micro level (students’ psychological and behavioural dimensions). the holistic perspective corroborates zepke’s (2018) advocacy of a ‘life-wide and lifelong understanding’ of student engagement, which approaches the concept from the students’ standpoint with a wider vision (p.435). more specifically, students’ active and consistent engagement could enhance their learning motivation, sense of belonging, and confidence in the university-student partnership (isaeva et al., 2020). furthermore, student engagement is closely related to students’ selfefficacy, emotions, belonging and well-being, all of which influence student development holistically and individually (kahu and nelson, 2018). student voice the two concepts, student engagement and student voice, are inextricably intertwined, as demonstrated by elassy’s (2013) interpretation of student engagement: ‘the roles that students should take and the power that they have to obtain to feel that their voice is heard’ (p.165). compared with student engagement, student voice places more emphasis on student agency, highlighting the active roles they could play in governance and policyrelated decision making (zepke, 2018), as well as active citizenship building (toshalis and nakkula, 2012). nevertheless, the ‘managerialist rhetoric’ places student feedback within an existing system which hears what is meaningful to the way the ‘machine’ currently runs sun and holt student engagement and voice in higher education: students’ perceptions journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 4 but without the opportunity for transformational change (young and jerome, 2020). such rhetoric constrains students from making a full and active commitment and renders them more likely to conform to, and accommodate, the dominant discourse (bragg, 2007; wisby, 2011). essentially and conceptually, student voice as an ‘agentic approach to engagement’ should go beyond managerial purposes and instrumental objectives (e.g., passing courses and gaining employment) (zepke, 2018, p.442). one way to involve students as people rather than ‘bearers of results and measurable outcomes’ is by promoting student-initiated dialogue with the institution (fielding, 2004a, p.210). as previously mentioned, lundy’s (2007) four elements of student voice are: • space: students have the opportunity to express their views. • voice: students are facilitated to express their views. • audience: students’ opinions are listened to. • influence: students’ views are responded to and acted on. this means, to enable student voice to be heard and function, the following questions need to be answered: where could students express their voice? what assistance is available? who is the listener? how could student voice effect change? student-university dialogue to make student voice a bi-directional dialogue rather than a one-way system, studentinitiated talk is essential (hall, 2017). in other words, student voice initiatives should be dialogic (pearce and wood, 2019). in the realm of higher education, the student-university dialogue engages students as ‘discussants rather than recipients’ (fielding, 2004a, p.201), making space for what students think is important, rather than merely according to an institution’s agenda (okupe and medland, 2019). meanwhile, the notion of ‘speaking with rather than for’ underlines the importance of having students as co-researchers who share reciprocal responsibilities with the university to construct a democratic and transformative environment (fielding, 2004b, emphasis in original). the alacrity with which the institution provides a response to student feedback impacts the trust the students place in the feedback system (li and de luca, 2014). however, maintaining a student-staff dialogue is not as simple as engaging and listening to students. there needs to be engagement from sun and holt student engagement and voice in higher education: students’ perceptions journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 5 staff who need to understand the purpose and uses of student voice. for this, staff concerns about performativity and accountability may need to be addressed. student voice in the form of national surveys is powerful as it allows comparison between universities and ratings in league tables (shah, cheng and fitzgerald, 2017). due to marketisation, students have the power. their voice can bring in consumers or drive them away. staff can feel that they are always subject to observation and scrutiny, to the extent, as okupe and medland (2019) claim, that lecturers can perform for students, giving them what they want to get a good ‘score’ rather than doing what is pedagogically most appropriate for the learning outcomes. recent studies concerning student engagement and student voice have mostly been based on a ‘simplistic cause and effect research design’ (macfarlane and tomlinson, 2017, p.9), or a qualitative design which seeks patterns from the data, which may lead to a situation in which the minority voice is ignored or subject to the ‘big picture’ (canning, 2017). a recent qualitative interview study addressed the topic of building universitystudent partnership through initiating interactive dialogues (isaeva et al., 2020). this study collected data from 27 students at an estonian university about their views on the university-student dialogue. findings indicate that students demonstrate an overall positive attitude towards this type of dialogue while many issues remain to be clarified and reexamined to fully engage students in this mechanism. although this study foregrounds students’ perspectives, it is still quality-assurance-oriented, basically serving the purpose of improving the quality and competitiveness of the institution, rather than asking ‘if the students could define it, what might student voice look like, and why?’ (hall, 2017, p.181). one aim of the current study is to answer this question, along with other questions concerning students’ attitudes and expectations of student voice mechanisms. methodology research questions in order to interpret and approach the concept of student voice from students’ perspectives, this study explores 13 university students’ thoughts and perceptions, including one undergraduate (ug) student, seven postgraduate taught (pgt) students, and five phd students. the interview questions centred on student voice and the existing sun and holt student engagement and voice in higher education: students’ perceptions journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 6 or desirable channels to make student voice heard and responded to. the definition of student voice was deliberately left open so as not to exclude any concepts of student voice which participants might have. specifically, this study aims to answer the following questions: 1. how do students in this uk university perceive student voice? 2. what are university students’ attitudes towards the existing student voice mechanisms? 3. what suggestions do students have regarding making student voice better heard and responded to? research context this study was carried out in a russell group university in which listening and responding to the student voice plays an important part in university policy. as part of the scheme of the university’s strategy 2030 and consistent with qaa expectations, this policy reinforces the university’s commitment to working in partnership with students to ensure ‘students are central to governance and decision making’, ‘quality assurance and enhancement’, and that students have opportunities to ‘become active participants in their learning’ and in the ‘collaboration between students and staff’ (student voice policy). in this university-wide policy, dialogue about teaching, learning, and wider student experience is highlighted and regarded as integral to the quality assurance of the institution. mechanisms available to facilitate this dialogue include: • course feedback: all courses offer at least two opportunities for students to provide feedback. • student–staff liaison committee: programme representatives work in partnership with staff to improve the quality of the student experience. • student panel: participation enables students to provide feedback on specific issues and to shape service design and delivery. • ‘have your say’ mailbox: students may post comments about specific issues and summaries of comments are published on the university website. in addition, live student voice sessions are held by the school throughout the year to enable students to express their voice and receive an immediate response. sun and holt student engagement and voice in higher education: students’ perceptions journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 7 this study’s researcher is a phd student and an intern in the student voice team in the university’s education school. three months’ working experience as a phd student engenders insider and outsider perspectives, which may contribute to the richness of data interpretation. the student voice project and intern supervisor is co-author of this paper as part of a student–staff collaboration to shape co-construction of student voice mechanisms within the institution. participants random sampling was adopted for participant recruitment in order to hear some ‘serendipitous or ephemeral’ voices which are no less valuable than those collected by academic and managerial departments (canning, 2017). an invitation email for recruiting participants to an online interview (one-to-one or in group) was sent to 2993 education school students through various channels. in total, 14 students replied to the invitation email, one expressing appreciation for the school’s initiative to hear students’ voices. the other 13 voluntary participants (see details in table 1) expressed their willingness to have the interview, including one ug student, seven pgt students, and five phd students. this low response rate indirectly reflected students’ attitudes towards or lack of interest in student voice mechanisms at ug level. the majority of the respondents (85%) were international students and this figure is close to the percentage of international students in the pgt and phd programmes – 70%. considering the disproportionate sampling (provided it is random and there is no incentive for participant recruitment), the findings are not necessarily representative of the student body of the institution. table 1. background information about participants. coded name interview form gender program level language used in the interview p1 one-to-one male ug chinese p2 email female pgt english p3 one-to-one female phd english p4 one-to-one female pgt chinese p5 one-to-one female phd chinese p6 one-to-one female phd chinese sun and holt student engagement and voice in higher education: students’ perceptions journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 8 p7 focus group female pgt chinese p8 focus group female pgt english p9 one-to-one female pgt english p10 one-to-one female phd chinese p11 one-to-one female pgt chinese p12 one-to-one female pgt english p13 one-to-one female phd english data collection and analysis we wished to come to a shared understanding of student voice with participants and in order to achieve this it was necessary to minimise preconceptions and keep the data collection process open (malseed, 2004). rigidly structured data gathering tools can influence participant responses, causing the researcher to miss data that participants consider important (jones, 2004; holt, 2019). this research sought detail so that it might have greater impact (barbour, 2006), and consequently used semi-structured interviews to collect data (holt, 2019; malseed, 2004). in order to create a relaxing and comfortable environment for participants, ‘online chat’ was used in the invitation email as the form of communication. in effect, the online communication took three forms based on participants’ preferences: individual (ten participants), group (two participants), and email survey (one participant who chose this option to preserve anonymity). in the interviews, students were firstly asked to raise any questions before the interview began. since the researcher’s first language is chinese and chinese participants accounted for 85% of the total, the interviews were conducted in english with six participants and in chinese with seven participants, according to participants’ preferences. each interview lasted appropriately 30 minutes; the length of time needed to gain participants’ essential understanding but not burdensome considering the intense academic pressure on them. with the permission of each participant, all the interviews were audio recorded. when the data were transcribed, the participants were coded to provide anonymity. data analysis followed the six steps of thematic analysis (braun and clarke, 2006). we familiarised ourselves with the data by transcribing the interviews manually. then transcripts were closely read to find initial codes of interest and relevance to research sun and holt student engagement and voice in higher education: students’ perceptions journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 9 questions. through building connections among initial codes, emergent themes were identified. subsequently, themes were reviewed and the following final themes were identified: students’ perceptions of student voice, students’ attitudes towards some common channels of communication, and students’ suggestions for making voice better heard and responded to. these are used as subheadings in the findings section. findings students’ perceptions of student voice participants demonstrated an overall positive attitude towards the concept and mechanism of student voice (sv) as part of a higher education institution’s drive to improve student experience, engagement, and satisfaction. participants interpreted sv as a system for making demands and suggestions, expressing thoughts and getting feedback, and making appeals and complaints. participants perceived the purpose to be ‘to have the full picture from students themselves of what they want’ (p10), ‘in a more purposeful and organised manner’ (p2). notwithstanding the positive perceptions, there emerged some narrow understandings or even misunderstanding of sv as a university-wide policy which encompasses various student feedback mechanisms (e.g., course enhancement questionnaires and student representation system). one participant mistook sv for an organisation similar to a student union and expressed his intention of ‘running for it if there’s any opportunity’ (p1). another participant narrowly interpreted sv as a channel for collecting ‘student feedback on curriculum and course design’ (p7). overall, participants demonstrated their support for this overarching mechanism which was perceived to make their ‘thoughts valued’ (p4). one phd student specifically stated that by participating in some surveys, she hoped to ‘let them continue on that path of really checking in with students’ (p10). when asked what channels for making their voice heard participants were aware of, replies varied considerably across programmes. for postgraduate taught (pgt) students, the main channel was their personal tutor (pt), followed by a course organiser. some workshop tutors were also seen as friendly and supportive in terms of offering help with study and life problems. for phd students, supervisors were their first resort for assistance or guidance. the student union or student representatives were seen as other channels via which to raise concerns. for undergraduate (ug) students, the programme director sun and holt student engagement and voice in higher education: students’ perceptions journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 10 plays an important role in solving various problems or directing problems to a specific division of sv mechanism. in addition, some wellbeing services were mentioned by participants across programmes (e.g., chaplaincy and advice place) as helpful and effective. regarding factors that constrain participants from making their voice heard, the most common answer given was study-related issues, among which a prominent concern was the fear of being marked down if they reported something negative about workshop tutors who were usually the marker of the course assignment. one participant recalled an unpleasant experience she encountered: i disliked one workshop tutor because she could give us little guidance . . . actually, the whole class disliked this tutor. we even had some conflicts with her in class . . . we thought of reporting it to the course organiser . . . but i had the fear that if my name was revealed, the tutor might mark me down . . . so we decided to bear it rather than report it. (p6) the details of their responses suggest that participants held a concept of student voice that was about reporting problems and difficulties, rather than as a dialogue through which they could have an impact on their own experience. there was no mention of student voice as a way to identify strengths or explain what was working well. students’ attitudes towards some common channels of communication student representatives (reps) as part of the university-wide student representation system are available for students across programmes. however, the majority of participants expressed their limited knowledge of, and interaction with, their representatives. one participant gave the reason that ‘they [reps] lack a network to organise students’ (p12). corroborating this comment, one participant who used to be a rep admitted that ‘there were not many things to do’ (p13). a pgt student gave some detailed explanations for her unwillingness to approach reps: i don’t want to tell my thoughts to reps because i don’t know them. i would find someone who knows me to confide in. this is something personal, and i will not easily disclose it to someone i don’t know, maybe due to the lack of sun and holt student engagement and voice in higher education: students’ perceptions journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 11 trust. (p11) in contrast, one phd student said she would reach out to reps for help for the reason that ‘they are colleagues and cohort, so it’s easier to share with them . . . and they’re sort of going through (the problems) as well’ (p10). attitudes towards email as a means of alerting students to sv opportunities varied dramatically, but one common point was made by most participants: there are too many emails. one student (not one of the participants) responded to the invitation email calling for participants with this comment: ‘there are so many surveys. my god. what do they all even mean?’ aligned with this opinion, one phd student provided detailed feedback: we just ended with emails all the time. personal, research, different things we are involved with. it is so easy to get lost, or just you see an email from the university but you don’t actually open it or read it at all. . . . it can be quite overwhelming considering the amount of email i get sometimes. (p10) in contrast with the complaint about the overwhelming amount of email, some participants regarded email as ‘the fastest, most effective and time-saving method’, and senders could remain anonymous if they wanted to report something sensitive (p2). among all the emails, weekly roundup, the school’s main channel for informing students about sv opportunities, seemed to receive least attention. a phd student said: ‘i just don’t have the time to really read it closely or engage with it’ (p10). a pgt student gave some reasons: it’s even less attractive than a paper newspaper. i won’t read it through. . . . i don’t think it’s relevant to me. i’m just an international student, staying here for one year. how could it have anything to do with me? (p7) consistent with the conceptualisation of sv as a way to get problems solved, participants spoke of whom they approached for support. for pgt students, the pt was regarded as the ‘first choice’ (p8) and ‘the most general way’ (p11) to gain ‘neutral and timely’ support (p4), and they thought their pts may direct the problem to ‘other channels of support’ (p6). nonetheless, pts were not always available because they were ‘taking responsibility for a sun and holt student engagement and voice in higher education: students’ perceptions journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 12 lot of other things’ (p12), and thus ‘unable to reply to emails in time’ (p2). due to their tight schedule, some pts organised group chats rather than one-to-one sessions, which made tutees ‘unwilling to express their inner voice in front of many people’ (p11). students’ suggestions for making student voice better heard and responded to participants’ suggestions on how to make student voice better heard and responded to could be categorised into two groups. first, one-to-one format was the most desirable. the channel of response was not as important as the one-to-one form of communication, be it email, teams, text message, or phone call, as long as the reply was direct and therefore impactful. second, giving a timely response was regarded as essential. students would be dissatisfied if they received delayed responses or saw no action taken. several participants mentioned that publicity of student voice-related services, preferably during induction, was essential and needed further improvement. several participants made the suggestion that there should be synchronous channels for students to have ‘online chats’ (p6) or ‘live sessions’ (p7) to make their voice heard and responded to promptly and more effectively. one gave such details: i prefer what we’re doing right now, one-to-one talk. i think sometimes if we write something, our meaning tends to be less explicit than if we just talk and see each other, with body language, eye contact and facial expression. that will convey or deliver more information. it could better solve the problem. (p12) different voices emerged on this topic. one participant expressed her hope for a channel where students could be ‘anonymous and feel safe to give any feedback’ (p9). in summary, students’ perceptions of sv were generally positive although their understanding of it was relatively limited and partial, which reinforces the necessity of improving the publicity of sv policy and related feedback mechanisms. although students across programmes showed slightly different preferences for communication channels to express their voice, the suggestions they made for further improvement of this system favoured an interactive and individualised communication platform where students could initiate a student-university dialogue whenever needed. sun and holt student engagement and voice in higher education: students’ perceptions journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 13 discussion distribution of information partly related to hall’s (2017) question, ‘if the students could define it, what might student voice look like, and why?’ (p.181), this study provides some students’ interpretations of sv and their speculated rationale for it. overall, participants regarded sv as a systematic and purposeful mechanism whereby students could report problems, make appeals, and give suggestions. the general understanding demonstrates a certain degree of awareness of governance and citizenship building (toshalis and nakkula, 2012; zepke, 2018). however, the findings reveal that some participants presented narrow or mistaken interpretations of sv. these misconceptions indicate a need to ensure that students are better informed of the aims and functions of sv. this finding corroborates that of another qualitative study which showed that clarification of some institutional arrangements, contextual features, and students’ roles and responsibilities was a precondition for constructing an effective university-student dialogue (isaeva et al., 2020). the present study also shows that there is a particular need to identify and address misconceptions that deter students from expressing their voice, as for those participants who decided to ‘bear’ their dissatisfaction rather than risk being marked down even though they knew the marking was ‘anonymised’. this suggests that sv mechanisms in the school are not yet co-constructed between staff and students. if student voice were an open and genuine dialogue between students and staff (young and jerome, 2020), both would have a shared understanding of the purpose, rationale, and methods of sv mechanisms within their institution. another important issue was the amount of information distributed to students. the majority of participants reported that too many emails could only overwhelm them and make them ‘get lost’ (p10). in such cases, they would most probably ignore them. interlinked with the issue of quantity, the timing of information dissemination is also of great importance. participants believed that those disseminating information should take student context into consideration when deciding when to do so. this study itself was a victim of poor timing, due to reasons beyond our control such as the difficulty recruiting ug participants for this study evidenced. as revealed by the only ug participant, they had finished the academic year when the invitation email was sent out, which might explain why only two ug students (of 1292 invited) responded, and only one of these actually participated in the study. okupe and medland (2019) advocate staff and students coconstructing an evaluative process at the start of each programme. this requires teachers sun and holt student engagement and voice in higher education: students’ perceptions journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 14 and students to be ‘self-aware, reflective, and adaptive’ (okupe and medland, 2019, p.273), and this approach may help address some of the dissatisfaction and misconceptions raised by participants of the current study. form of communication although the university has been implementing the student voice policy to engage students and enhance their experience, some initiatives are not taken up or fully appreciated by students. a case in point is the weekly news roundup, collated to reduce the number of emails students receive. most participants admitted that they rarely read it because there was too much information in it, some of which seemed irrelevant to them. this phenomenon could be explained by the notion that one-way communication has its limitations regarding engaging students and promoting interaction (isaeva et al., 2020). in other words, bi-directional dialogue (hall, 2017) or dialogic communication (pearce and wood, 2019) is essential for active student engagement and effective university-student partnership. this certainly explains why students did not attend the live student voice sessions held by the school in welcome week and throughout the year to provide opportunities for students to express their voice and receive an immediate response. participants actually suggested the school do this very thing. however, the challenge remains: if students are not reading communications, how does the school let them know about these live opportunities. this finding again foregrounds the importance of constructing a dialogic student voice mechanism. a preference for a diverse range of communication tools is evident among participants in the present study. while most participants complained about the huge amount of email, one participant valued the use of email, choosing to participate in the research by email rather than interview to preserve anonymity. another example of diverse opinions on communication channels was participants’ different attitudes towards student reps. some, especially pgt students, demonstrated awareness of a student representation system but knew little about their reps, including who they were. this finding mirrors that of another study conducted with nine reps from different universities: ‘reps are positioned differently to other students’ (young and jerome, 2020, p.702). therefore, to what extent reps can represent student voice is a question worth further discussion. however, for phd students, reps might be more helpful considering that they mainly turn to supervisors only for academic purposes. these divergent views on channels of communication indicate that sun and holt student engagement and voice in higher education: students’ perceptions journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 15 using ‘various ways to communicate different types of information’ is a workable solution (isaeva et al., 2020, p.93). one of the concerns raised about student voice is that mechanisms to collect this, particularly questionnaires, risk producing ‘a monolithic, coherent and homogenous student voice, resulting in a misguided conceptualisation of the students’ experience’ (okupe and medland, 2019, p.262). thus it is essential that the diversity of student needs and perspectives is taken into consideration when devising student voice mechanisms. students need multiple ways for them to share their voices, so that the mechanism does not exclude or marginalise any voices and so that the needs and feedback of particular groups such as mature students, ethnic minorities, or students with additional support needs can be identified and responded to (young and jerome, 2020). similarly, as our findings reveal, it is ineffective to have such diversity of sv channels, if students do not know about them. thus, universities also need to find a range of ways to communicate with students about the student voice mechanisms. one way to increase engagement and raise student awareness of these, is to have systematic, regular and timely reports back to students on the key themes, actions and responses arising from their feedback (li and de luca, 2014; shah, cheng and fitzgerald, 2017). strengths and limitations of the study limitations of the current study include the disproportionate number of participants across programme levels. due in part to random sampling, ug students are under-represented compared to postgraduates, and therefore the voice of this group of students is minimal, but provides an impetus for future research. it is also worth mentioning that a large proportion of the participants were international students, which was roughly proportional to the actual percentage of international students in the pgt and phd programmes. we were not looking for international students’ perceptions in particular when designing the study. the unexpected results in a sense add to very limited literature on the topic of international students and sv. we make no claims to the representativeness of the participants, but instead aim for the study to open the conversation so more research can be done to verify whether similar sentiments are experienced across the sector. although arising from a staff student partnership, this project has not explored staff perspectives which, if sv is seen as a partnership and dialogic process, are essential to sun and holt student engagement and voice in higher education: students’ perceptions journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 16 the creation of a sustainable, meaningful, and inclusive sv process in which both staff and students are engaged. whilst this is a small-scale study from mostly pg students in a faculty of one uk university, we believe that its findings might be utilised to inform relevant policy making across institutions. conclusion the impact of this study lies in the revelation of students’ perspectives regarding the interpretation of student voice, how they want their voice to be heard, and what they expect from the institution to improve sv mechanisms. the findings indicate that participants held a generally positive orientation towards sv, recognising the institution’s good intention and efforts to collect students’ opinions, expectations, and problems. however, some participants demonstrated a narrow or erroneous understanding of sv, which illustrates the importance of effective, accessible information distribution, including the explanation of sv and its related mechanisms (isaeva et al., 2020). exemplifying the diversity of student voices and underlining the need to capture this diversity, participants gave some common responses in some areas, but differed in others. one shared opinion was the complaint about too many emails, among which, ironically, was the weekly news roundup intended to reduce emails to students and ignored by most participants. this common feedback again highlights the significance of appropriate quantity and means of information distribution. specifically, an overabundance of information may overwhelm students, and one-way communication may not engage students as intended. conversely, dialogic and live communication was suggested by participants as more effective and efficient. these areas require organisational attention for managerial improvement. moreover, varied attitudes towards student reps and personal tutors indicate that the availability of multiple and complementary communication channels is essential to meet differing student preferences in communication styles and orientations (isaeva et al., 2020). one of the main implications of this study is that institutions could enhance sv mechanisms through establishing multiple communication paths to offer an interactive and dialogic channel between students and the institution, without excluding or marginalising any voices. individuality in sv practice, research, and analysis should be highlighted to avoid interpretation of student silence as passivity or unwillingness to engage. the findings sun and holt student engagement and voice in higher education: students’ perceptions journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 17 of this study will reinforce to policy makers and staff seeking to engage with student voice that timing, and avoiding information overload, can considerably influence student engagement which in turn determines students’ willingness and ability to make their voice heard. references barbour, r. s. (2006) introducing qualitative research a student guide to the craft of doing qualitative research. london: sage. bols, a. (2012) ‘student views on assessment’, in clouder, l. (ed.) improving student engagement and development through assessment: theory and practice in higher education. new york: routledge, pp.4-18. bragg, s. (2007) ‘“student voice” and governmentality: the production of enterprising subjects?’, discourse: studies in the cultural politics of education, 28(3), pp.343358. http://doi.org/10.1080/01596300701458905. braun, v. and clarke, v. (2006) ‘using thematic analysis in psychology’, qualitative research in psychology, 3(2), pp.77-101. http://doi.org/10.1191/1478088706qp063oa. canning, j. (2017) ‘conceptualising student voice in uk higher education: four theoretical lenses’, teaching in higher education, 22(5), pp.519-531. http://doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2016.1273207. cuthbert, r. (2010) ‘students as customers?’, higher education review, 42(3), pp.3-25. elassy, n. (2013) ‘a model of student involvement in the quality assurance system at institutional level’, quality assurance in education, 21(2), pp.162-198. http://doi.org/10.1108/09684881311310692. fielding, m. (2004a) ‘“new wave” student voice and the renewal of civic society’, london review of education, 2(3), pp.197-217. http://doi.org/10.1080/01596300701458905 http://doi.org/10.1191/1478088706qp063oa http://doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2016.1273207 http://doi.org/10.1108/09684881311310692 sun and holt student engagement and voice in higher education: students’ perceptions journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 18 https://doi.org/10.1080/1474846042000302834. fielding, m. (2004b) ‘transformative approaches to student voice: theoretical underpinnings, recalcitrant realities’, british educational research journal, 30(2), pp.295-311. http://doi.org/10.1080/0141192042000195236. gourlay, l. (2017) ‘student engagement, “learnification” and the sociomaterial: critical perspectives on higher education policy’, higher education policy, 30(1), pp.23-34. http://doi.org/10.1057/s41307-016-0037-1. green, w. (2019) ‘engaging students in international education: rethinking student engagement in a globalized world’, journal of studies in international education, 23(1), pp.3-9. http://doi.org/10.1177/1028315318814197. hall, v. (2017) ‘a tale of two narratives: student voice—what lies before us?’, oxford review of education, 43(2), pp.180-193. http://doi.org/10.1080/03054985.2016.1264379. holt, d. (2019) primary school teacher’s responsibility to promote positive mental health. unpublished phd thesis. university of edinburgh. available at: https://era.ed.ac.uk/handle/1842/35639 (accessed: 6 february 2022). isaeva, r., eisenschmidt, e., vanari, k., and kumpas-lenk, k. (2020) ‘students’ views on dialogue: improving student engagement in the quality assurance process’, quality in higher education, 26(1), pp.80-97. http://doi.org/10.1080/13538322.2020.1729307. jones, s. (2004) ‘depth interviewing’, in seale, c. (ed.) social research methods: a reader. london: routledge, pp.257-260. kahu, e. (2013) ‘framing student engagement in higher education’, studies in higher education, 38(5), pp.758–773. http://doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2011.598505. kahu, e. r. and nelson, k. (2018) ‘student engagement in the educational interface: understanding the mechanisms of student success’, higher education research & https://doi.org/10.1080/1474846042000302834 http://doi.org/10.1080/0141192042000195236 http://doi.org/10.1057/s41307-016-0037-1 http://doi.org/10.1177/1028315318814197 http://doi.org/10.1080/03054985.2016.1264379 https://era.ed.ac.uk/handle/1842/35639 http://doi.org/10.1080/13538322.2020.1729307 http://doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2011.598505 sun and holt student engagement and voice in higher education: students’ perceptions journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 19 development, 37(1), pp.58-71. http://doi.org/10.1080/07294360.2017.1344197. krause, k. l. and coates, h. (2008) ‘students’ engagement in first-year university’, assessment & evaluation in higher education, 33(5), pp.493-505. http://doi.org/10.1080/02602930701698892. kuh, g. d. (2009) ‘the national survey of student engagement: conceptual and empirical foundations’, new directions for institutional research, (141), pp.5-20. http://doi.org/10.1002/ir.283. lawson, m. and lawson, h. (2013) ‘new conceptual frameworks for student engagement research, policy and practice’, review of educational research, 83(3), pp.432-479. http://doi.org/10.3102/0034654313480891. li, j. and de luca, r. (2014) ‘review of assessment feedback’, studies in higher education, 39(2), pp.378-393. https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2012.709494. lundy, l. (2007) ‘“voice” is not enough: conceptualising article 12 of the united nations convention on the rights of the child’, british educational research journal, 33(6), pp.927-942. http://doi.org/10.1080/01411920701657033. macfarlane, b. and tomlinson, m. (2017) ‘critiques of student engagement’, higher education policy, 30(1), pp.5-21. http://doi.org/10.1057/s41307-016-0027-3. malseed, j. (2004) ‘straw men: a note on ann oakley’s treatment of textbook prescriptions for interviewing’, in seale, c. (ed.) social research methods: a reader. london: routledge, pp.267-268. okupe, a. and medland, e. (2019) ‘pluralising “student voices”: evaluating teaching practice’, in lygo-baker, s., kinchin, i., and winstone, n. (eds.), engaging student voices in higher education. cham: springer international publishing ag, pp.261277. pearce, t. c. and wood, b. e. (2019) ‘education for transformation: an evaluative framework to guide student voice work in schools’, critical studies in http://doi.org/10.1080/07294360.2017.1344197 http://doi.org/10.1080/02602930701698892 http://doi.org/10.1002/ir.283 http://doi.org/10.3102/0034654313480891 http://doi.org/10.1080/01411920701657033 http://doi.org/10.1057/s41307-016-0027-3 sun and holt student engagement and voice in higher education: students’ perceptions journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 20 education, 60(1), pp.113-130. http://doi.org/10.1080/17508487.2016.1219959. shah, m., cheng, m., and fitzgerald, r. (2017) ‘closing the loop on student feedback: the case of australian and scottish universities’, high education, 74(1), pp.115-129. http://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-016-0032-x. toshalis, e. and nakkula, m. (2012) motivation, engagement and student voice. jobs for the future. available at: https://www.howyouthlearn.org/pdf/motivation%20engagement%20student%20voi ce_0.pdf (accessed: 13 october 2021). trowler, v. (2010) ‘student engagement literature review’, the higher education academy, 11(1), pp.1-15. wisby, e. (2011) ‘student voice and new models of teacher professionalism’, in czerniawski, g. and kidd, w. (eds.) the student voice handbook: bridging the academic/practitioner divide. bingley: emerald publishing limited, pp.31-44. wolf-wendel, l., ward, k., and kinzie, j. (2009) ‘a tangled web of terms: the overlap and unique contribution of involvement, engagement and integration to understanding college student success’, journal of college student development, 50(4), pp.407-428. http://doi.org/10.1353/csd.0.0077. xerri, m. j., radford, k., and shacklock, k. (2018) ‘student engagement in academic activities: a social support perspective’, higher education, 75(4), pp.589-605. http://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-017-0162-9. young, h. and jerome, l. (2020) ‘student voice in higher education: opening the loop’, british educational research journal, 46(3), pp.688-705. http://doi.org/10.1002/berj.3603. zepke, n. (2015) ‘what future for student engagement in neo-liberal times?’, higher education, 69(4), pp.693-704. http://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-014-9797-y. zepke, n. (2018) ‘student engagement in neo-liberal times: what is missing?’, higher http://doi.org/10.1080/17508487.2016.1219959 http://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-016-0032-x https://www.howyouthlearn.org/pdf/motivation%20engagement%20student http://doi.org/10.1353/csd.0.0077 http://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-017-0162-9 http://doi.org/10.1002/berj.3603 http://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-014-9797-y sun and holt student engagement and voice in higher education: students’ perceptions journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 21 education research & development, 37(2), pp.433-446. http://doi.org/10.1080/07294360.2017.1370440. author details xiaomei sun is an associate tutor at the university of edinburgh where she teaches research methods and language education courses. her research interests include extensive reading in l2, children’s literature, english teacher training and development. her recent research appears in tesol journal, the language learning journal, and innovation in language learning and teaching. deborah holt is lecturer in health and wellbeing and mental health promotion at the university of edinburgh. her recent publications include the books promoting positive mental health in the primary school and metacognition in the primary classroom, both published by routledge. http://doi.org/10.1080/07294360.2017.1370440 student engagement and voice in higher education: students’ perceptions abstract introduction literature review student engagement student voice student-university dialogue methodology research questions research context participants data collection and analysis findings students’ perceptions of student voice students’ attitudes towards some common channels of communication discussion distribution of information form of communication strengths and limitations of the study conclusion references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special issue 22: compendium of innovative practice october 2021 ________________________________________________________________________ teaching writing online: technology means more writing, more interactivity tzipora rakedzon technion – israel institute of technology, israel keywords: covid-19; academic writing; online learning; stem education. the challenge writing requires individual work, but it can also benefit from group interaction and instruction (hanson, loose and reveles, 2020). therefore, to support our stem (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) phd students, the graduate writing course is compulsory. as writing should be learned not just by listening but by doing, our course had a workshop structure, i.e., an interactive lecture with in-class writing exercises. this allowed students to consult with the lecturer or other students in real-time. however, in march 2020, the covid-19 pandemic forced the university, one week before our spring semester began, to go online. the main challenge became – how could this interactive workshop format be preserved online? the first feeling was panic: where do i start; how should i prepare? as a lecturer and the head of the academic writing program at my university, i had wanted to create my own online materials for our graduate stem academic writing course. however, i had never found the time, and now i needed such materials right away. at first, i let the idea sink in – even though time was short. my plan was to create material for my phd students that (a) could be used in future semesters and (b) would create an interactive online writing experience: after all, we did not know how long the pandemic would last. the response rakedzon teaching writing online: technology means more writing, more interactivity journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 2 planning the lectures: at that point, i decided that for each of the 13 lectures, i would record key parts of the lessons in 10-20 minute videos. i created 20 videos, with lessons having one or two videos with a total viewing time of no more than 20 minutes in a one-hour class. moreover, all lessons were recorded so they could be watched again. then, i was able to organise my weekly live lessons according to my then five-stage final plan: • live group discussion. • send students to watch the video. • give students a task(s), follow their progress on the shared file, and continue only when most students finished. • return to plenary to review the task live. • continue with an online live lecture. this plan was designed to fulfil my main goal of keeping students active, allowing them to work on in-class exercises at their own pace (lapitan jr et al., 2021), and easing the students’ experience by using a consistent lesson format. the semester was crazy, but this format seemed to be paying off. i could tell students were doing well just by seeing their work on the shared file on a weekly basis. in the regular classroom, classwork and homework exercises are reviewed together during the lesson – meaning only a small handful of students would share answers. here, every student shared answers and received feedback. assessing the lectures: i surveyed the students mid-semester, and results were similar to previous research (e.g., schlenz et al., 2020; nguyen et al., 2021): of the 58 students who answered, almost 45% would prefer to have this writing course online and 33% would prefer a combination of in-class and online lectures. this showed the positive impact of the online course, most likely due to two factors: the amount of individual writing produced and rakedzon teaching writing online: technology means more writing, more interactivity journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 3 assessed during the online lecture and the age of the students. phd students are older and more disciplined; many were young parents who benefited from this flexibility of remote study. students also appreciated the interactivity and convenience of the online lesson (e.g., harris and martin, 2012). almost 80% of students said they liked the combination of pre-recorded videos with online live discussion: ‘the option to have recorded videos i can watch in my free time, or several times’; ‘the recorded videos are very focused on the main topics, while the online discussions help in general understanding and expansion of the theme’. comments also showed the success of the shared file in engaging students in weekly exercises, as students liked ‘the progress i see in my writing each week’ and ‘the online file … so we can learn from others' mistakes’. beyond insights on exactly what worked, the survey also showed the weaknesses of the online writing course. the most frequent criticism can be summarised by: ‘there are many different platforms used during class, it makes confusion and stress’. this was partially solved simply by waiting for students to undergo the ‘learning curve’ in using online platforms. recommendations looking back on the past four online semesters, i think there are several lessons to be learned. firstly, listen to your students about the use of technology. their suggestion about too many platforms was correct; however, i have not yet found one platform to suit all my needs. i do recommend choosing user-friendly platforms and keeping the number to a minimum. i also noticed that as time progressed, the various online formats became easier. in general, both using and choosing the appropriate technology is an ongoing challenge for both students and instructors (lapitan jr et al., 2021). secondly, try to provide as much interaction as possible (nguyen et al., 2021). writing lessons require actual writing and feedback – which is easier online. this may include, for example, mixing shared files, live discussions, and smaller group discussions in breakout rooms. rakedzon teaching writing online: technology means more writing, more interactivity journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 4 thirdly, listen and share with your staff. i allowed my staff, the wonderful lecturers who teach the academic writing course with me, to tackle the online format as they chose. this means i offered support and materials, but i did not pressure them to change. consequently, in the first semester some lecturers simply gave the same in-class lecture on zoom. subsequently this changed: several teachers made their own videos, some used my videos, and some used shared files. the bottom line is: share material, and leave room for training, patience, individual expression, and preference (lapitan jr et al., 2021). overall, going forward it would be ideal to have a hybrid format of the writing course, with some lessons online and others in-class. another option could be to offer exclusively online or in-class groups. i believe both formats should try and keep the main benefits of the online course: shared files, allowing students to write more and receive more feedback, and use of videos, enabling repeated viewing. in the end, it may sound strange, but i am thankful that i had the opportunity that was forced upon us to develop the online version of the writing course. references hanson, j., loose, w. and reveles, u. (2020) ‘a qualitative case study of all-but-dissertation students at risk for dissertation noncompletion: a new model for supporting candidates to doctoral completion’, journal of college student retention: research, theory & practice. https://doi.org/10.1177/1521025120910714. harris, h. s. and martin, e. w. (2012), ‘student motivations for choosing online classes’, international journal for the scholarship of teaching and learning, 6(2). https://doi.org/10.20429/ijsotl.2012.060211. lapitan jr, l. d., tiangco, c. e., sumalinog, d. a. g., sabarillo, n. s. and diaz, j. m. (2021), ‘an effective blended online teaching and learning strategy during the covid-19 https://doi.org/10.1177/1521025120910714 https://doi.org/10.20429/ijsotl.2012.060211 rakedzon teaching writing online: technology means more writing, more interactivity journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 5 pandemic’, education for chemical engineers, 35, pp.116-131. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ece.2021.01.012. nguyen, t., netto, c. l., wilkins, j. f., bröker, p., vargas, e. e., sealfon, c. d., puthipiroj, p., li, k. s., bowler, j. e., hinson, h. r., pujar, m. and stein, g. m. (2021) ‘insights into students’ experiences and perceptions of remote learning methods: from the covid19 pandemic to best practice for the future’, frontiers in education, (6), p.91. https://doi.org/10.3389/feduc.2021.647986. schlenz, m. a., schmidt, a., wöstmann, b., krämer, n. and schulz-weidner, n. (2020) ‘students’ and lecturers’ perspective on the implementation of online learning in dental education due to sars-cov-2 (covid-19): a cross-sectional study’, bmc medical education, 20(1), pp.1-7. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12909-020-02266-3. author details tzipora rakedzon serves as the coordinator and a lecturer of graduate academic writing in the department of humanities at the technion – israel institute of technology. she has been teaching a variety of writing and communication courses for over 20 years. tzipora received her phd at the technion in science communication at the department of education in technology and science. she is also a lecturer and the coordinator of the english programme at the guangdong technion in china. her research deals with assessing written skills in academic and popular science writing. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ece.2021.01.012 https://doi.org/10.3389/feduc.2021.647986 teaching writing online: technology means more writing, more interactivity the challenge the response recommendations references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special edition 25: aldinhe conference proceedings and reflections october 2022 ________________________________________________________________________ performing communi-tea carina buckley solent university, uk presentation abstract the morning tea break performs several useful and evidence-based functions, in providing a space for networking and exchanging information, for building relationships, and for reducing stress. however, in a higher education context predicated on outputs and performance, the time spent in talking to colleagues over a cuppa is often considered a wasteful indulgence, and even harder to organise meaningfully with our post-covid hybrid patterns of working. in an audit culture, how can the qualitative value of social relations be recognised, cultivated and strengthened, so that we might all benefit from the productivity that inevitably follows? questions: 1. how do we make space in our week to get to know each other as people? 2. what are the best methods for developing and maintaining a collaborative workplace community for hybrid workers? 3. is coffee ever an acceptable substitute for tea? community response question 3 should be: is tea ever an acceptable substitute for coffee! in response to the previous contributor – i agree – coffee every time! :) i think aldinhe should lobby for a compulsory tea time in all institutions! this session highlighted an important consideration about the value of informal chats in the workplace as a way to enhance relationships and wellbeing, and encouraging collaborative working. as the author suggested, this is something that often goes under the buckley supporting student writing and other modes of learning and assessment: a staff guide journal of learning development in higher education special issue 25: october 2022 2 radar but it is actually an important part of work life, so it was great to have a discussion. this was a wonderful opportunity to pause and reflect on why stopping for an informal break over a cuppa/coffee is in my opinion so vital. during the pandemic, i actually really enjoyed working from home in almost every way – i was more productive, had a better work life balance and could easily access tea just a few short steps away from my desk! the only thing i really missed was those serendipitous conversations with colleagues which i found impossible to have online. these moments allow us to connect with the people we work alongside, beyond our projects and to do lists. so many ideas and collaborative projects have come out of an initial lightbulb moment over a cuppa its power should not be underestimated! i think its importance has been emphasised though covid-19 where we have lost this face-to-face activity. in a wider sense, i have really missed the informal discussions with colleagues; as a learning developer i find i often ask colleagues for their viewpoint and that has been harder with covid. i think it is also important to acknowledge that the same can be said for students too. it is no coincidence that the returning to learning programme, which my colleague helen briscoe has developed to support students who have had a break in their learning, is always well stocked with refreshments! asking students to open up, share concerns, look for advice is always easier over an informal cup of tea (coffee for helen) and some biscuits. as individuals and communities move towards more hybrid ways of interacting in the workplace than was the case before the covid-19 pandemic, a variety of physical and virtual spaces are increasingly being explored and used in combination for their different affordances. navigating these spaces is both challenging and exciting. for example, our team have frequent informal chats in the office, but also a regular scheduled time offcampus immediately prior to our cop (academic skills advisors only) (approx. every 6 weeks). we meet for breakfast/coffee and a catch up before the official cop meeting takes place. the opportunity to meet off-campus has been a positive experience, and with new team members starting recently, has also been invaluable in building those relationships outside of a formalised work setting. during covid we established a whole-team online coffee morning every week on a wednesday at 11am, and again this was a very informal buckley supporting student writing and other modes of learning and assessment: a staff guide journal of learning development in higher education special issue 25: october 2022 3 drop-in. this has fallen by the wayside with the return to more office-based working; however, it was a bright spot in the middle of the week when we all felt removed from our colleagues, and missing regular interactions. whether online or offline, these informal chats have continued to nurture positive working relationships, and many inspired ideas, projects or ways of approaching challenges have developed out of these settings, rather than formal work-based meetings. one point i would like to make is that for me, it is an informal, organic process as opposed to something that should/needs to be formalised. the discussion helped me to realise that formalising these interactions does not often work well and can feel quite artificial. i am lucky to work in an institution where informal chatting over tea (or more likely coffee!) is not only recognised as important, but actively encouraged. it was discouraging to hear about barriers preventing this in some workplaces. with a seemingly ever-growing focus on wellbeing in the workplace, allowing time for a tea and chat seems like an easy win. i was surprised at how many other lds in the discussion did not have similar experiences at their institutions. i wonder whether this is reflective of the culture of institutions. i work in a relatively small, campus-based university, known for its strong sense of community. having taken part in this discussion, i do feel that the values of my institution are reflected in my team’s ability to build relationships and network informally, knowing that our managers see the value in these exchanges and ultimately encourage them. author’s reflections i enjoyed opening this topic up for conversation, mainly because it is one of those areas of working life that go relatively under the radar, but which can nevertheless carry significance for an individual’s experience of that working life. as such, i was really pleased to see every chair taken on each iteration, and also that the conversation each time was so different, as this means different things to different people. these conversations certainly opened up my own thinking about the subject. i see that i have noted words like sense-making, serendipity and developing trust, which must be understood within both formal and informal contexts, the subtext carried within those, and buckley supporting student writing and other modes of learning and assessment: a staff guide journal of learning development in higher education special issue 25: october 2022 4 the institutional culture that shapes it all. ultimately, i think my conclusion was that these moments outside of formal work, yet still within a work context are a way – amongst many other ways – of extending our own expertise through connections with others, and that therefore allow us to leverage the expertise of those others. why not do that over a cuppa? one delegate suggested – possibly half-joking – that we need to do a workshop called the art of taking a break. whether she was joking or not, i intend to get in touch with her and follow this up. never has it felt more necessary or more welcome! acknowledgments thanks are extended to all members of the community that have engaged with the conference or these proceedings in some way. thank you to the following community members for their contributions to this particular paper: helen briscoe (edge hill university), claire olson (edge hill university) and katie winter (university of surrey). author details carina buckley is currently instructional design manager at solent university, responsible for the on-going development of the vle as a student-centred, active and inclusive learning space. her research interests broadly connect to collaboration and community, and have evolved recently to explore ideas around leadership and professional identity. she serves as the treasurer for aldinhe and also sits on the steering group for the international consortium of academic language and learning developers (icalld). following a phd in archaeology in 2006, she has since added advance he principal fellow and certified leading practitioner in learning development to her post-nominals. performing communi-tea presentation abstract questions: community response author’s reflections acknowledgments author details literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 4: march 2012 dissertation question time: supporting the dissertation project through panel discussion emily danvers brunel university, uk abstract the dissertation is an experiential process analogous with a ‘journey’ from research question to final submission. it is a journey which is rarely straightforward and a form of assessment that raises a number of pedagogical issues. for the majority of undergraduates, the dissertation is the most substantial and self-directed assessment they will undertake at university. at brunel university, this is predominantly supported within academic departments by research methods tuition and individual or group supervision. however, as learning developers based in a central department, we find a substantial part of our workload involves supporting students through the research process individually and within small group workshops. yet we feel a line must be drawn between us providing information and guidance without overlapping into a supervisory relationship nor, indeed, comprising the independent nature of the project. this led us to question the effectiveness of our provision and consider new ways of delivering teaching and support. this case study evaluates the use of a panel discussion workshop, dissertation question time, as a method of support for the dissertation journey. it takes as its focus an analysis of the experiences of two students who attended the workshop and their reflections on how best the challenges of the dissertation journey can be supported. the resulting discussion suggests the role learning developers could potentially have within this. keywords: dissertation, panel discussion, advice giving, supervisor chaos and cosmos in the dissertation journey research into dissertations and autonomous learning suggests that successful independent study provides intellectual rewards and a boost to academic confidence danvers dissertation question time (todd et al., 2004; chan, 2001; walsh and vandiver, 2007; garde-hansen and calvert, 2007). however the process of conducting research can also be characterised by feelings of ‘chaos’ and ‘cosmos’ where students are both anxious and inspired by the project (siln, 2003). whilst students are provided with handbooks and subject specific guidance, and many undertake taught research skills modules or lectures in preparation for the dissertation, for some it can still feel like unfamiliar territory, with students then looking for ‘reliable maps’ to guide them through (webster et al., 2000). this is exacerbated because the nature of the undergraduate dissertation also varies widely between insitutions and subjects and within academic schools/departments. there is also considerable variation between supervisors’ understanding of even common terms like ‘analysis’ that are currently widely used in the assessment of student dissertations (webster at el., 2000). indeed, whilst the supervisor/supervisee relationship plays a crucial part in facilitating this journey this can be problematic, with often little formal training for supervisors in how to effectively support undergraduate research and with many supervisors feeling an equal sense of waves of cosmos and chaos about the research process (todd et al., 2006; pearson and brew, 2002). learning development and the dissertation students’ experiences of cosmos and chaos in the dissertation journey are likely to be felt by a number of parties within a higher education institution – from supervisors to administrative staff. the context for this study is ask academic skills, a centrally based learning development department at brunel university which provides online and print resources, individual advice and small group workshops to support students’ skills development. in the 2010 -11 academic year, 26% of our overall provision was given for dissertation related advice to undergraduates and postgraduates. it is entirely appropriate that the supervisory relationship and formal training in research methods occurs within academic departments. the individualistic nature of each project makes it difficult for a central service to do so effectively. rather, our aim is to provide dissertation skills support that complements existing provision. yet the question of how this works in practice is one that we continually reflect upon are we there as a replacement for ineffective supervisors or just to provide a second opinion and how can we attempt to do this when the range of topic areas presented to us is so broad? journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 2 danvers dissertation question time the approach: dissertation question time garde-hansen and calvert (2007) stress the importance of collaborative methods for supporting undergraduate research as opposed to traditional dissertation supervision, using the case study of a student-led research conference. the authors recommend a number of approaches for developing an undergraduate research culture, including group discussion workshops. dissertation question time was an attempt to create such an informal arena for discussion, while allowing the input of voices from a range of subjects and perspectives. the workshop consisted of a panel of students, academic staff and an academic skills advisor discussing questions from students on any aspect of the dissertation project. this case study will discuss feedback from students attending the dissertation question time workshop and then reflect on the dissertation journey of two attendees in more detail. through the analysis of this model it will explore issues relating to the supervisory relationship, the challenges of independent learning and the effectiveness of teaching and advice to support the dissertation journey. feedback from dissertation question time the first dissertation question time ran in february 2010 as part of a week of academic skills workshops. it was also filmed and published on youtube as a free-standing learning resource (ask, 2010). positive feedback from the workshops and videos led to it being repeated as part of a dissertation writing week for taught postgraduates in may 2010. during the workshop, the student attendees submit their question to any member of the panel and the students on the panel are particularly encouraged to lead the discussion. to encourage participation, students were invited to submit questions beforehand and these were distributed to the audience. in both workshops, these prompts led quickly to open discussion. the main themes that arose from the students attending the sessions involved issues over the relationship with the supervisor, confusion over structure/format and time management. attendees were sent an online feedback form and respondents were invited to join a focus group to discuss the following themes: journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 3 danvers dissertation question time • does the dissertation process raise questions that are not answered through formal teaching and supervision? what (or who) is most effective as a support for that journey? • do students find the dissertation question time format useful and why? seventeen students attended the first dissertation question time and 16 the second. of the 81% who completed a feedback form, 93% rated the workshop as good/useful or excellent/very useful. comments included: • ‘great to see the presentation of different opinions’. • ‘a friendly, free discussion’. • ‘useful to share experiences from students’. while feedback was positive, students did not expand on how they experienced the dissertation journey or reflect in detail on methods of teaching and support. in order to gather this rich data, two students took part in a semi-structured focus group, discussing their experiences of dissertation question time and their own dissertation writing practice. focus group both students involved in the discussion had attended the may 2010 workshop and were studying postgraduate courses in engineering. neither had completed an undergraduate degree in the uk. student a was a home student who returned to study engineering design after over 20 years in industry and selected his dissertation topic based on his previous work experiences. student b was an international student studying mechanical engineering, who worked as part of a larger research project where the research topic (although not the question itself) was provided. both students saw their postgraduate research as having a practical, commercial application and intended to pursue engineering careers, as opposed to further research. both saw the most challenging part of the research process as formulating and focusing the research question, ‘it seems easy…but exactly what i’m supposed to do…that was hard’ ( student a), but felt supported enough by their supervisor and colleagues to confidently accomplish further stages of the research alone. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 4 danvers dissertation question time they chose to attend ask sessions, including dissertation question time for generic advice on structure and format and for useful tips on the research process itself: ‘i came to find out how to structure the report…back home it was just communicating your own thought process, it was not a literature review and everything’ (student b). neither student knew of specific departmental guidance on the detailed structure of the written report but one student accessed previous dissertations to ‘get a flavour of what is required’ (student a) and ‘it is up to me only to go and check what is expected of a good report’ (student b). the self-directed nature of the project proved challenging, ‘assignments are one thing but writing a small book about your project is another’ (student b), but again felt that the challenge was one they could cope with. they found the dissertation question time format useful for providing general advice about research: ‘the challenge facing everyone is the same...it is useful to see the thought process of others’ (student b) and ‘it helped to get us started, otherwise it is like finding a needle in a haystack’ (student a). although an engineering student was on the panel, the individualistic nature of the project was raised as an issue ‘insights are really useful but if it is not specific to your branch, you do get lost’ (student b) and running a similar format within each subject area/department was felt to be the ideal solution. both had very good relationships with their supervisors ‘the best point of support is the supervisor’ (student b) which they felt was the key to successful research. this potentially affected their responses to questions on learning from others as they felt able to approach their supervisor for the majority of queries but ‘not for small things…there is no point wasting his time with silly questions’ (student a). student b preferred to work alone ‘i’m not a group kind of guy. i work best quietly and alone. it disrupts my thinking’, whereas student a enjoyed group work and often sought informal support and advice from colleagues. both felt that their research topic was so specific that it was difficult to get useful subject advice from few people apart from their supervisor ‘when you move to the dissertation, it is very focused, very specific, it [group work] is harder’ (student a). when they encountered problems with their dissertation both would initially try and solve problems themselves and then depending on the question would approach the supervisor ‘if [they] drew a blank’ (student b). they felt that for detailed subject queries, other colleagues could not help. however, they both did seek advice from colleagues about more generic and experiential aspects of the dissertation such as managing time and staying focused: ‘i spoke to friends about their experiences…the fact that there isn’t enough time and a lot of time to wander off and lose focus’ (student a), and ‘i spent a lot journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 5 danvers dissertation question time of time getting distracted on a topic. i asked a colleague back home and he helped me to clarify it’ (student b). towards the end of the focus group, the students were shown the youtube video of the first dissertation question time. they were asked how useful they found the advice and also how useful they found the videos as a resource. both were generally positive about the advice given in the session as a useful way to start research but were less keen on the videos as a standalone resource. they experienced frustration at not being active in the session ‘i would like time to criticise the comments and advice. this needs discussion and dialogue’ (student a). this reiterates the importance of being present in the session and the session being a discussion of experience and ideas, rather than a one-way presentation. discussion and conclusion several key themes emerged from the discussion above and these will be broadly discussed in relation to the identified key questions. does the dissertation process raise questions that are not answered through formal teaching and supervision? what (or who) is most effective as a support for that journey? the main themes that arose from the students attending the sessions were the relationship with the supervisor, confusion over structure/format and time management. while many of these questions can be addressed in a supervisory relationship, the generic nature makes them suitable topics for ask to provide advice, support and resources for. informal panel discussion potentially overcomes the remedial attitude towards skills teaching where the experienced tutor is ‘helping’ or ‘fixing’ the problem of the student. the fact that the advice in the workshop came mostly from students instigated a more conversational and participatory learning environment, aligned to garde-hansen and calvert’s (2007) concept of collaborative methods for teaching undergraduate researchers. however, advice from the staff on the panel was also valued highly and it is difficult to distinguish here whether it is peer advice, or just informal advice, that students found valuable. the session was clearly well received and the informal advice-giving an effective method, but it would be interesting to see the impact of a student-only panel upon journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 6 danvers dissertation question time students’ feedback from the session to make some more conclusions as to the use of peer learning in this context. because the dissertation is seen by many as a highly individual project, it can be difficult to provide advice that students deem specific enough for their learning needs. this issue was apparent in the focus group discussions where student b felt that although the peer tutor was from the same academic school and subject as them, the specific nature of his research meant he found it hard to relate the answers to his topic area. however, he found the discussion of general research approaches from the panel reassuring and interesting. therefore the advice was valuable in the way for which the session was intended: support that complements subject specific provision, but makes no attempt to replace it. responses from attendee feedback also indicated that students wanted a wider panel of both staff and students, with student b asking for ‘at least one student from each school’. do students find the dissertation question time format useful and why? positive feedback from those who attended the sessions suggests that this is a useful format for providing advice about the dissertation. the students in attendance had the opportunity to ask questions of their peers and academic staff in a relatively informal setting in line with topping’s (2005) definition of the benefits of peer learning. from the point of view of a central service, it was relatively simple to organise and it is in a format that complements, rather than replicates, the supervisory relationship. it also overcomes a potential challenge of providing generic dissertation workshops centrally that do not always effectively meet the specific learning requirements of variant courses; instead of a ‘how to’ workshop, this session is led by the students in an open, questioning format. we consistently look for ways to provide a high quality central service to complement academic programmes. our preference is to provide a workshop within schools where we can tailor the content more effectively, but the central service, particularly individual advice, remains significant and important. the informal dissertation question time suits the pedagogical style of a research project, in that although it is specific in nature, the experiences of doing a project are shared by the majority of others (time management in particular) and sharing these experiences in the hope that others learn from them is beneficial. indeed, in 2012 we still run dissertation question time and feedback remains overwhelmingly positive. although the sample is too small to make definitive pedagogical journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 7 danvers dissertation question time conclusions and further exploration with larger groups of students must be pursued, it suggests a positive trend towards this format that has positive implications for supporting undergraduate and postgraduate researchers at brunel and through central support departments elsewhere. references ask (2010) dissertation question time. [online video] available at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ifoumy9eyh4 (accessed: 22 january 2012). chan, v. (2001). learning autonomously: the learners' perspectives. journal of further and higher education 25, 3 , 285-300 garde-hansen, j. and calvert, b. (2007) ‘developing a research culture in the undergraduate curriculum’, active learning in higher education, 8(2), pp. 105-166. pearson, m. and brew, a. (2002) ‘research training and supervision development’, studies in higher education, 27(2), pp. 135-50. silén, c. (2001). between chaos and cosmos – a driving force for responsibility and independence in learning. in the power of problem based learning, problarc, the 3rd asia pacific conference on pbl, 9–12 december 2001. the university of newcastle, australia todd, m., bannister, p. and clegg, s. (2004) ‘independent inquiry and the undergraduate dissertation: perceptions and experience of final year social science students’, assessment and evaluation in higher education, 29(3), pp. 335-355. todd, m., smith, k. and bannister, p. (2006) ‘supervising a social science dissertation: staff experiences and percerptions’, teaching in higher education, 11(2), pp. 161173. topping, k. (2005) ‘trends in peer learning’, educational psychology, 25(6 ), pp. 631-645. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 8 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ifoumy9eyh4 danvers dissertation question time walsh, j., & vandiver, d. (2007). project. journal of faculty development , 21, 117-211 webster, f., pepper, d. and jenkins, a. (2000) ‘assessing the undergraduate dissertation’, assessment and evaluation in higher education, 25(1), pp. 71-80. author details emily danvers has led the academic skills department at brunel university since 2009. as well as being responsible managing the department, she teaches academic and research skills across a breadth of courses at brunel and currently acts as an academic skills representative for the business school. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 9 dissertation question time: supporting the dissertation project through panel discussion abstract chaos and cosmos in the dissertation journey learning development and the dissertation the approach: dissertation question time feedback from dissertation question time focus group does the dissertation process raise questions that are not answered through formal teaching and supervision? what (or who) is most effective as a support for that journey? do students find the dissertation question time format useful and why? author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special issue 22: compendium of innovative practice october 2021 ________________________________________________________________________ engaging students in online workshops using articulate rise zara hooley de montfort university emily forster de montfort university andrew browne university of strathclyde keywords: learning development; online delivery; interactive workshop; academic writing; statistics support; articulate rise; covid-19. the challenge in this paper we discuss our experiences of teaching interactive, in-curriculum learning development sessions on statistics and academic writing. during the transition to online learning prompted by the pandemic, our challenge was how to replicate the interactive, participatory activities that would normally occur in a face-to-face session. in online sessions, many questions seemed to go unasked, and only one or two students verbally participated. as a result of this, many of our group activities were not immediately transferable to the online environment. the response we needed to create more opportunities for students to participate in ‘learning by doing’ (race, 2014), as students are more likely to learn if they are actively engaged in the session. we wanted to maintain peer-to-peer work where possible, due to the clear learning benefits (tullis and goldstone, 2020). in addition, we wanted to make the most of the online environment. we therefore needed to find a simple, sharable vehicle for housing hooley, forster, browne engaging students in online workshops using articulate rise journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 2 content, presenting on screen, and creating interactive activities while encouraging peerto-peer work. articulate rise is software designed to create online courses. it enabled us to use varied ways of presenting information – prose, bullet points, images, videos and labelled graphics (see figure 1). we were thereby able to replicate face-to-face activities including card sorting activities, flip cards, and quizzes. it is an online tool, which made it easy to access anywhere, and we could share courses we had created with other members of the team to promote collaboration. the platform is designed for asynchronous delivery. however, we used it as a synchronous activity tool. an advantage is how easy it is to create activities such as flashcards and labelled graphics, and you can embed videos. figure 1. creating a course using blocks. to lead the sessions, we screen-shared our version of the materials through microsoft teams. we also shared a weblink to the published course allowing students to open their own version in an additional window. throughout the workshop, students were asked to switch to their own screen and participate in the activities, and then return to the group screen and contribute to the group discussion verbally or in chat. following this we would then model an example or discuss the feedback. during statistics teaching, we found that giving students the opportunity to practise solving the problems embedded in the rise course before they were asked to share their ideas promoted participation (devaney, 2010). more students contributed when we ran the session this way, compared to when we delivered it using powerpoint. the provision of a series of short activities, which included card sorting activities, flip cards, and quizzes, allowed us to pace the session well and oversee activities to keep students on task (utts et al., 2003; mills and raju, 2011). hooley, forster, browne engaging students in online workshops using articulate rise journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 3 in our face-to-face academic writing classes, we had previously used card sequencing activities for students to order their writing process, and they would complete this activity in small groups. the discussion between the students as they moved the cards around and justified their position, was often the most useful part of the activity. it gave us the opportunity to hear what the students thought about writing as they reflected on the process. articulate rise allowed us to replicate this exercise and retain the valuable discussion (see figure 2), albeit after the student had completed the sequence. one issue was that rise enables a sequencing activity, but with only a ‘right or wrong’ answer. we overcame this by using the rubric to explain that there were no right or wrong answers and that we were more interested in how students justified their choices. we would issue the activity link and then ask students to write the word ‘done’ in the chat box when they had completed the activity. we would then move them into smaller breakout rooms and ask them to discuss their process. before moving them, we posed a few key questions such as ‘do you think essay writing really is a linear process?’. figure 2. card sorting activity. hooley, forster, browne engaging students in online workshops using articulate rise journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 4 in the breakout rooms, the students discussed the questions, but often used the chat box function rather than turning cameras and microphones on. after this, we would move them back to the main room and model a writing process, posing reflective questions throughout, and asking for comments in the chat box. the discussions that took place in the breakout rooms did not reach the same depth as those we had observed live in the pre-covid environment but were still useful. sessions on academic writing are often more effective if they directly relate to the specific assignment that students are currently working on. when students are learning online, they have access to the internet and their devices during the session. in a session on writing your first essay at university, we decided to use this as a positive feature of the session and got students to actively make a start on their assignment to maximise the relevance of the session. we had previously published a number of web based study skills guides in articulate rise on topics such as essay writing. these had resources such as an essay planning template as well as quizzes and activities. the session ran in the form of an online ‘treasure hunt’, which took the students through the process of planning and writing, with them periodically going to find resources that would help them with their assignment. the aim was to help them learn how to navigate the library website and to provide them with standalone resources that they could access for further guidance when they were working independently (including two articulate rise resources). on reflection, getting students to look for the resources themselves worked well as they were helping each other in the chat, finding the resources together and supporting one another recommendations it was possible to replicate some of the interactivity and peer-to-peer support in our faceto-face teaching through the use of the sharable resources we created in rise, but we found that interaction needs to be more structured and supported than it would be in a https://www2.library.dmu.ac.uk/dolores/87872/essaywriting/content/index.html#/ hooley, forster, browne engaging students in online workshops using articulate rise journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 5 face-to-face session. giving students the chance to participate in activities in real time, and then to discuss them together, did improve participation in the online sessions. a possible improvement we could implement in the future would be to allow students more control over how they interact, for example by introducing breakout rooms defined by communication preference: room 1 = microphone on, room 2 = chat only. using a technique like this, which works with students’ preferences, could lead to a more comfortable and open discussion. our key advice is this: make the most of the online format by including things you might not be able to do in a face-to-face session. the online environment opens up a range of immediate resources for learning activities. the creation of the courses also provides the students with a resource they could return to in an asynchronous manner, in order to support their learning outside the session. references devaney, t.a., (2010) ‘anxiety and attitude of graduate students in on-campus vs. online statistics courses’, journal of statistics education, 18(1). available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/10691898.2010.11889472 (accessed: 21 october 2021). gewin, v. (2020) ‘into the digital classroom’, nature, 580, no. 7802, pp.295-296. available at: https://media.nature.com/original/magazine-assets/d41586-020-008967/d41586-020-00896-7.pdf (accessed: 21 october 2021). mills, j.d. and raju, d. (2011) ‘teaching statistics online: a decade's review of the literature about what works’, journal of statistics education, 19(2). available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/10691898.2011.11889613 (accessed: 21 october 2021). race, p. (2014) making learning happen: a guide for post-compulsory education. 3rd edn. london, sage. https://doi.org/10.1080/10691898.2010.11889472 https://media.nature.com/original/magazine-assets/d41586-020-00896-7/d41586-020-00896-7.pdf https://media.nature.com/original/magazine-assets/d41586-020-00896-7/d41586-020-00896-7.pdf https://doi.org/10.1080/10691898.2011.11889613 hooley, forster, browne engaging students in online workshops using articulate rise journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 6 tullis, j.g. and goldstone, r.l. (2020) ‘why does peer instruction benefit student learning?’, cognitive research, 5(15). available at: https://doi.org/10.1186/s41235020-00218-5 (accessed: 21 october 2021). utts, j., sommer, b., acredolo, c. maher, m.w. and matthews, h.r. (2003) ‘a study comparing traditional and hybrid internet-based instruction in introductory statistics classes’, journal of statistics education, 11(3). available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/10691898.2003.11910722 (accessed: 21 october 2021). author details zara hooley is a senior lecturer in learning development at de montfort university. emily forster is a senior lecturer in learning development at de montfort university. andrew browne was a lecturer in statistics at de montfort university. he is now a teaching fellow in statistics at the university of strathclyde. https://doi.org/10.1186/s41235-020-00218-5 https://doi.org/10.1186/s41235-020-00218-5 https://doi.org/10.1080/10691898.2003.11910722 engaging students in online workshops using articulate rise the challenge the response recommendations references author details literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 4: march 2012 tmi – too much information: creating employability skills resources – enabling students to develop an effective interface with a client professor anne hill birmingham city university, uk simon spencer birmingham city university, uk nicola bartholomew birmingham city university, uk abstract employers identify challenges when attempting to wean graduate employees from behaviours instilled through the process of assessment. when required to offer advice to the new organisation’s clients, graduates may convey information that is factually correct but extending beyond what is really needed, thus providing their client with tmi – ‘too much information’. opportunities for students to develop transferable skills should be integral to curriculum design to better meet the needs of employers and clients. birmingham city university collaborated with employers to create a toolkit of resources encouraging development of better skills. this paper focuses on one element of this toolkit, reviewing the problems in conveying ‘too much’ information in four different contexts. construction of the resources and their implementation within the classroom has been evaluated at undergraduate and postgraduate levels, establishing their useability across a wide range of disciplinary fields. we can reveal that the resources provide value in supporting the development of transferable skills when embedded within contextualised teaching sessions. keywords: communication, skills, employability, transferability hill, spencer and bartholomew tmi – too much information: creating employability skills resources introduction creating future-proof graduates was one of nine projects selected in the first round of a new scheme in the higher education academy’s (hea) national teaching fellowship scheme (ntfs) in 2006-2007. the scheme awarded up to £200,000 to realise a project which would have wide applicability in the higher education sector. the project was based at birmingham city university, one of the post-1992 universities, and was led by a team comprising two national teaching fellows and academics with the support of a doctoral research assistant for part of the project. the project team reported progress to the hea and to a project board, a body made up of employers, representatives from university faculties and university central services including the students’ union. the board also included partners from other further and higher education institutions and other interested organisations, including the centre for recording achievement and one of the hea subject centres, and provided an objective sounding board to the project team. student feedback at the team’s own institution (then uce birmingham, 2006) led us to believe that the most effective way to encourage the development of employability skills in students was to enable them to discover and develop these skills through critical exploration within their own learning and professional contexts (palmer, 1998; biggs 1999, cited spiller, 2005). the project produced a number of resources which we argue support deeper learning and the development of transferable skills, through the development of a range of resources, using high and low levels of technology in their creation. the materials became available for use and adaptation to the full range of academic disciplines from december 2009 and are available at www2.bcu.ac.uk/futureproof. this paper reviews the development of, testing and evaluation of tmi, one of the created resources which uses a set of critical incident triggers to demonstrate the relevance and significance of an issue common across many disciplines, and support students to become aware of the potential for them to create a communication barrier with future clients and consider how they might address this when the situation arises. identification of the specific skills gap yorke and knight (2002) identified a number of constructs for employability in higher education, any of which would enable a good graduate to ‘stay in the race’ (brown 2002, journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 2 http://www2.bcu.ac.uk/futureproof hill, spencer and bartholomew tmi – too much information: creating employability skills resources cited yorke and knight, 2002). throughout the creating future-proof graduates project, the team focused on the construct which embedded the materials within the curriculum, to provide opportunities for students to develop, practise and reflect upon a varied range of ‘employability’ skills (morton et al., 2009; hill et al., 2009). critical incidents have often been used in the health educational field (lockyer et al., 2005). as such incidents normally occur in the workplace, these incidents were created in partnership with employers to reflect real world scenarios. critical incidents can prove a useful addition to teaching repertoires as they engage learners in ways other teaching approaches do not as they make possible more opportunities for students to become self aware and self developmental. the incidents act as triggers which may be used to spark exploration of issues, often by facing students with dilemmas or ethically challenging behaviours, and these, supported by discussion, debate and other activities, encourage the deep learning process. knight and colleagues (2002, p.2) suggested it was useful to focus on a few ‘employability skills’ and to ‘bombard’ students with as many opportunities to practise as possible. simulations have a role in providing suitable environments for such practice, especially where students are given the time and space to be reflective, as suggested by schön (1987). a scoping review of research into the employability skills gap was carried out by the project team. the institute of directors (iod) briefing (2007) said employers found most graduates were unprepared for employment and highlighted that employability skills were perceived by employers as more important than subject specific skills. the association of graduate recruiters (agr) argued that: much more effort needs to be made...to get the message across that going to university and coming out with a 2.1…is not enough to land a graduate level job. you have to develop your skills and experience…21st century graduates need to demonstrate to employers that they can ‘hit the ground running’. (daily mail, 30 january 2007). following the scoping exercise, the project team conducted in-depth interviews with students, graduates, employers and academic staff to understand the individual perception and/or experience of ‘graduate employability’. the interviews were exploratory and aimed journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 3 hill, spencer and bartholomew tmi – too much information: creating employability skills resources to elicit areas of difficulty which, in the early stages in the workplace, were relevant to graduates’ development as professionals. employers and graduates were questioned regarding the most important employability skills. it became obvious that there were some clear overlaps between graduates’ and employers’ views: • literacy: writing for diverse audiences. • personal attributes: developing assertiveness (saying ‘no’). • people related skills. • dealing with shocking situations (what to do when a theoretical model fails). • career related: finding out what they do not want to do; understanding the profession and knowing how to go about finding information. these findings were compared to the range of secondary sources which also identified people related communication skills, as for example archer and davison (2008) who discovered employers rated this skill as the most important, but which was ranked only 16th in terms of the actual abilities of new graduates to manage. therefore one of the resources was planned to focus on communication with clients and tmi was born. the rationale behind tmi with the employer partners to the project raising the issue of developing good communication skills, it was recognised that even though the work students covered in their course provided the knowledge, there remained concerns at how this was then communicated to clients. students often garner a great deal of information and feel that they must communicate this knowledge, ensuring that the person they are working with can understand the technicalities of their situation. however, employers suggested that the skill of selecting the right information for the right circumstances is one of the keys to effective communication. in this scenario, using the modern ‘text speak’ acronym ‘tmi’, the vision for the critical incident was a series of triggers where new graduates are providing information to a client. the information is always technically correct, but it raises a series of questions: journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 4 hill, spencer and bartholomew tmi – too much information: creating employability skills resources • is this appropriate information to give the client at this time? • is it meeting the needs of the client? • what information is appropriate to provide at a given time? • how could a new graduate gauge what approach would best serve the client and improve communication? students can be quite blinkered in their attitudes to generic information, resisting seeing the appropriateness of a subject unless it has direct links to the subject of their degree. this is sometimes why multi disciplinary working can be difficult to implement, as students find it quite problematic to transfer their knowledge and experiences from one setting to another (berryman, 1991). yet both practitioners and academics know that many skills are transferable, and that in the workplace subject specific information can be useful, but being able to communicate beyond disciplinary boundaries is essential. part of our task was to support students in changing their views of the world, helping them to realise that there is more to skills than just having the explicit knowledge and rules (brown et al., 1989). to demonstrate both the transferability of the tmi phenomenon and the need for responses which would meet the needs of clients in as wide a range of situations as possible, it was originally envisaged that a number of scenarios would be recorded and students would be able to start by selecting the scenario closest to their own disciplinary field, then later be able to see how the situation is mirrored in other contexts. in reality, however, time and resources meant paring the scenarios down to four, with their focus in the areas of social housing, radiography, web design and education. these were felt to demonstrate the wide relevance of the issue across disciplines. creating the resources according to beetham (1997), ict, if used imaginatively, can enhance the student’s experience of learning. given that the project team had already used video clips to develop some of the other critical incidents within the overall project and animation had been used to develop another, it was envisaged that in this case the scenarios could be devised as a series of photo ‘strip cartoons’ (still images with recorded voice-overs) to maximise accessibility and demonstrating an alternative medium for presenting materials. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 5 hill, spencer and bartholomew tmi – too much information: creating employability skills resources it was planned to create a range of scenarios applicable across social sciences, education, health, technical and business studies, giving wide multidisciplinary coverage and transferability of use. as previously stated, four scenarios were completed, although the fourth scenario (visiting a web designer to try to improve the marketing for a small business) was the last to be developed and therefore was not evaluated, although interest in using this scenario in the design disciplines means it will be used and evaluated in the future. creating the tmi resource began with the premise that students learn best when they have fun (wentzel and wigfield, 1998). to link the scenarios one actress experienced a communication barrier with each of the ‘new’ professionals, creating a humorous counterpoint to the serious message conveyed by the resources, as she moves from interface to interface, encountering our new graduates in a variety of settings, experiencing their desire to communicate what they knew about the situation, but taking little account of her needs. thus the four scenarios have the same ‘client’: • she visits a housing office when her home is under threat because of her husband’s redundancy. • she attends her teenaged son’s school for a parents’ evening. • she has a hospital appointment for a barium enema. • she makes an appointment with a web designer to discuss a site for a new business venture. in each case, the information supplied by the new graduate in their professional role as housing officer, teacher, radiographer and web designer is factually correct and thoroughly explained, but the use of jargon and the need of the new graduate to get over their share of the information take precedence over the needs of the client. following each interaction there is a short clip recorded with the client, establishing how she felt about the encounter and what her needs had actually been. the project team were keen to engage students in the creation of the resources and employed students to act, photograph and record the first scenario, the visit to the housing office. in the tmi resource the client was a professional actress who was an alumni of the university. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 6 hill, spencer and bartholomew tmi – too much information: creating employability skills resources just having four scenarios does not minimise the transferability of the resource but may limit how many others want to use it, given what has been said (berryman, 1991) about the sometimes blinkered approach of students (and some staff). having said all this, once the concept was available to demonstrate, it has become relatively simple to create new subject specific scenarios as scripts which could be acted by students in their classrooms or by staff using something as simple as powerpoint animations, with or without audio accompaniments. guidance on how to use the materials and suggested exercises, and how to prepare students for activities such as listening skills and role plays, have been produced following the evaluation of the material used in a series of classrooms during the testing of the created resources, and are all available through the website. using and testing the materials classroom interaction prompted by the trigger clips has included discussions about the way the new graduate focused the attention on the information they knew and what might have been more appropriate, and, working in groups, students have rewritten and role played the scenarios in what they saw as a more appropriate way, providing reasoning for their choices. adult motivation and learning are enhanced if the learning context and materials are authentic and relevant to the student’s needs, especially if knowledge can be immediately applied (caffarella 2002, cited winning et al., 2004). it would also be possible to help students step into the client’s shoes by showing the scenarios from outside their own discipline, where they would be recipients of the information, as if they were clients rather than imagining themselves as the professional. therefore, as suggested by brown et al. (1989), the way this resource was used could support teachers in helping change students’ views of their world and their roles. the resources have been tested at birmingham city university with postgraduate and undergraduate housing students in the school of social sciences, with trainee teachers in the school of secondary and post-compulsory education, and with radiography students. the evaluation process continues as others from outside the university have begun to use the resources, and the resource has been embedded within new classes and continues to receive positive reactions with students. for example, out of 87 respondents attending presentations about the project as a whole, 55% said they were likely to use or adapt tmi, journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 7 hill, spencer and bartholomew tmi – too much information: creating employability skills resources and feedback indicated that participants found the resources ‘easy to adopt to suit individual institutions needs’ and that it was ‘great to know i can make the resource context specific’. evaluating the testing of the tmi resource with trainee teachers scenario 1 – the parents’ evening a group of 17 trainee drama teachers undertaking their initial teacher training, which includes some study at master’s level, was the first to evaluate this resource within a classroom session. the session comprised a set of activities focused around the tmi scenario. these activities opened with a discussion on parents’ and teachers’ expectations of the meeting, typically held in schools, concerning the progress of individual pupils. it is a statutory requirement that schools make provision for this consultation with parents but, as is made clear in the tmi scenario, parents and teachers can have different agendas. the discussion was in two parts and considered the expectations of both teachers and parents separately. this was followed by watching the tmi scenario on dvd, then using the transcript to revise the content, and concluded with a role play session where the trainee teachers had the opportunity to create their own version of the parents’ meeting which sought to bring together the different agendas in a mutually satisfactory way. using a pro forma questionnaire, trainee teachers were invited to reflect on the usefulness of the different aspects of the exercise in the context of their training and preparation for becoming a teacher (from 1 ‘not very useful’ to 4 ‘very useful’). table 1. median of ratings for the activities in the taught session – trainee teachers. a. discussion b. discussion c. dvd d. transcript e. role play median 3 3 4 3 4 the following comments explain some of the ratings. in eight of the comments given by the students, the opportunity to practise in the role play was perceived as a very useful activity and emphasised. two students also commented on the dvd and that it was useful to have an illustration of a poor meeting. overall, the session as a whole was praised by the group. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 8 hill, spencer and bartholomew tmi – too much information: creating employability skills resources explicit comments given by individual student participants – trainee teachers: • the role play was a very effective method to consolidate my learning from the session. • allowed me to discuss potentially difficult scenarios in a safe environment. • useful to think about communicating to parents and practise it. • the role play enabled me to think more specifically about what i would say. • it was extremely useful how not to conduct such a meeting…then struggle our way through conducting a hypothetical meeting. • very useful insight and practice into parents' evening and the process needed to be successful. in terms of considering the appropriateness of activities to accompany the dvd, it was suggested that role play was a very useful activity. however, it is possible that this was due to the context since the group evaluating the resource consisted of graduates in drama and related disciplines training to teach drama in schools. notwithstanding the group’s familiarity with role play as a vehicle for learning and their evident appreciation of the opportunities it afforded for individuals to ‘practise in a safe environment’, the discussion surrounding the dvd and the evaluation of the role play exercise also provided useful insights into the trainee teachers’ understanding of the wider issues. for example, exploring the notion of teachers and parents having separate agendas for their meetings illustrates the need to ‘make the tacit explicit’ (russell and loughran, 2007, p.5). similarly, testing the materials also allowed the group to recognise the danger they faced in subconsciously believing that because information existed, it was required by the client. whilst this lies at the very heart of the tmi project, the actual danger is that, in the case of the parents’ evening scenario, the information that is ultimately ‘too much’ has been generated by the teacher as a result of sustained hard work. the sub-text of the conversation was that the client should acknowledge this fact. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 9 hill, spencer and bartholomew tmi – too much information: creating employability skills resources evaluating the testing of the tmi resource with housing students scenario 2 – a housing crisis the mixed cohort of 27 full and part time housing students started the session with a discussion of their approaches to clients and communication, followed by watching the dvd. in this case students viewed the subject specific scenario but were then asked to ‘put themselves in the client’s shoes’ by watching one of the other scenarios. following discussions about the impact of being a client, they worked in pairs to create their own role plays of a more appropriate set of responses, some of which were demonstrated to the rest of the class. the students shared their experiences from work. the majority of the students in this group were mature and exhibited having some familiarity and experience with the issue presented to them. the group was mixed in the levels of experience of the workplace. the dvd presenting a simulation of a housing crisis was shown and discussed. also, to illustrate the perspective from another viewpoint, the group was shown scenario 3, the patient and radiographer situation at the hospital. viewing these scenarios provided a different context from which students could begin to experience and understand the client’s perspective. following discussions about the impact of being a client, the students were given the original housing scripts and worked in pairs to create their own role plays of a more appropriate set of responses, some of which were demonstrated to the rest of the class. table 2. median of ratings for the activities in the taught session – housing. a. group discussion b. dvd on housing c. dvd hospital d. working with scripts e. role play median 4 3 3 3 3 table 2 above indicated that the discussion with peers, especially that between part time, experienced students and those without experience, was the most useful activity in the session. the remaining activities were perceived as useful to set the scene and raise awareness that communications need to be tailored to suit the needs of clients. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 10 hill, spencer and bartholomew tmi – too much information: creating employability skills resources explicit comments given by individual student participants – housing: the students’ comments on the session referred to this being useful as a whole. students particularly highlighted the benefits of exploring and reflecting on assumptions and clients’ reactions: • ...very useful, i saw different ways of dealing with people. • good session, provided insight into how housing professionals can approach situation making assumptions. • i feel that my confidence, skills and knowledge have been increased by studying theory and has widened my repertoire on which i can draw and apply in the workplace. evaluating the testing of the tmi resource with radiography students scenario 3 – the hospital appointment another variation in the use and delivery of the resources is identified within the context of the radiography trial. this trial used the hospital appointment scenario which relates to a barium enema, an examination which is routinely undertaken within radiology departments. the trial gathered feedback from a large group of level 4 diagnostic radiography students and so the resource was highly contextualised. the scenario was introduced as a ‘patient information film’, developed by a fictional media company. the student group were asked to review the resource in terms of its applicability to practice and in so-doing they were prompted to consider both factual and communication issues. the radiography trial undertaken within a large lecture theatre did not use role play as an activity but, as with the other trials, it engaged students in paired discussions following the dvd. the paired discussions were then shared with the whole class and key issues were identified and summarised by the tutor. the activity preceded a wider lesson about the examination in question, thus providing an opportunity to incorporate different learning and teaching methods to meet the needs of a variety of learning styles. students rated the aspects of the session as follows: journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 11 hill, spencer and bartholomew tmi – too much information: creating employability skills resources table 3. median of ratings for the activities in the taught session – radiography. a. dvd b. discussions in pairs c. negatives and positives median 3 3 3 many of the students in this group had not attended clinical placement within a radiography department at this point and many who had attended admitted that they still had limited experience in talking to patients in this context. previous feedback from clinical practice also suggested that some students would have valued more preparation before seeing the examination in practice. this resource, used as part of a wider examinationspecific lesson plan, clearly meets a learning need by preparing students for radiography practice, but importantly helps them to empathise, and therefore communicate effectively, with vulnerable patients. explicit comments given by individual student participants – radiography: • the dvd assisted in showing how not to communicate with patients and the effects. • more emphasis on exactly what to say, and ask the patient. • ...being a radiographer isn’t just reading guidelines and understanding them or not just discussing your experience but to put all that in practice. • learning from others, discussing experiences and the theory and guidelines are all important. • what to say and what not to say was useful. developing confidence in dealing with clients in addition to evaluating the value of the various components of the teaching sessions, students were asked about their confidence in dealing with clients before and after the sessions. their responses were analysed to establish whether the students perceived the sessions, previous experience, or other sources as crucial in their level of perceived confidence. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 12 hill, spencer and bartholomew tmi – too much information: creating employability skills resources tmi education (parents’ evening) on both occasions, before and after, the students related their confidence in dealing with a particular issue (parents) to their own experience, or lack of experience in schools. only one student commented that they had ‘observed and attended a parents' meeting’. however, after the session, despite the limited practical experience in schools, some students were able to reflect on and identify specific areas needing improvement. for example, one student was able to acknowledge their limited experience and how this may impact on communications with parents: ‘not enough experience of assessment and parent interaction to feel prepared to discuss progress with parents’. tmi housing work-based experience is clearly an important learning opportunity for students, enabling the acquisition of contextualised knowledge and skills. when considering the housing group, the majority had gathered considerable work experience and it may therefore come as no surprise that there was no perceivable change in their level of confidence when interacting with customers, neither before nor after the activity: i have good knowledge of homelessness, excellent interviewing skills and i always prepare myself prior to an interview. having experience of working in housing helps put everything into perspective that you learn in the classroom. nevertheless, reflection, conceptualisation and experimentation is an important element of the experiential learning cycle (kolb, 1984) and the tmi activities provide students with opportunities to reflect on their own practice, discuss concepts with tutors and peers, and experiment through role-play. in this way, pre-conceived ideas may be changed through shared experiences which may then inform future practice. tmi radiography the radiography student group demonstrated varied levels of experience in clinical practice. prior to the tmi activity, the students showing the lowest level of confidence had journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 13 hill, spencer and bartholomew tmi – too much information: creating employability skills resources not yet attended work placement and this group ultimately showed the biggest increase in confidence following the teaching session. as with housing, the radiography students who had attended work placement and had been active in preparing patients for clinical examinations demonstrated the highest levels of confidence. however, some students revealed that attendance on placement did not necessarily yield good results. one student commented that in their experience: ‘if the department was busy, good communication with patients might suffer’. another commented that they had anticipated that the role of communicating with the patient to prepare them for the examination would have been allocated to administrative staff. students did feel that it was important to have ‘help from the radiographers on how to prepare patients’ and the session helped raise an awareness that ‘patients might be anxious’, thus reinforcing the need to develop effective communication skills to prepare the patient and alleviate concerns. conclusion the tmi problem is a multi disciplinary issue and employers have reported that it is one we could address with students before they enter the workplace and start dealing with clients. the resources created through the project provided useful triggers for other activities. from a training perspective, the tmi materials also provided a very valuable opportunity to assess the students in their journey towards meeting professional competencies. some of these competencies refer to directly related skills, such as a professional’s ability to communicate appropriately with a range of stakeholders. other competencies relate to less tangible, yet equally important, aspects of professionalism, such as the demonstration of appropriate values and attitudes. it is clear that the use of these materials can contribute significantly to our students’ knowledge and understanding and, in terms of metacognition, to their ability to reflect on their own professional development. in summary, these findings demonstrate that this resource, when embedded into a contextualised teaching session dealing with wider issues of communication, has a value in supporting the development of the transferable skill of selecting the information which is appropriate to the needs of the client needing the advice of our new graduates. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 14 hill, spencer and bartholomew tmi – too much information: creating employability skills resources references archer, w. and davison, j. (2008) graduate employability: what do employers think and want? london: council for industry and higher education. beetham, h. (1997) supporting further and higher education: towards a critical e-learning research and practice. jisc e-learning programme. berryman, s. (1991) solutions. washington dc: national council on vocational education. brown, j., collins, a. and duguid, p. (1989) ‘situated cognition and the culture of learning’, educational researcher, 18(1), pp. 32-42. daily mail (2007) ‘the grade, graduates aren’t worth hiring’, 30 january (mail online). available at: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-432321/the-grade-graduatesarent-worth-hiring.html (accessed: 30 march 2012). hill, a., popovic, c., lawton, r., eland, j., morton, n., curzon, r., eastcott, d. and tomas, c. (2009) 'using critical incidents to create learning pathways between the real world and places of learning: findings from a 2 year funded project aimed at improving understanding and capability in key employability skills', the international journal of learning, 16(12), pp. 157-170. institute of directors (2007) skills briefing, graduate employability skills. london: iod. knight, p. and esect colleagues (2002) briefings on employability 3: the contributions of learning, teaching and assessment and other curriculum projects to student employability. york: ltsn generic centre and esect. kolb, d. (1984) experiential learning: experience as the source of learning and development.1st edn. new jersey: prentice hall. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 15 http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-432321/the-grade-graduates-arent-worth-hiring.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-432321/the-grade-graduates-arent-worth-hiring.html hill, spencer and bartholomew tmi – too much information: creating employability skills resources lockyer, j., gondocz, s.t. and thierge, r.l. (2005) ‘innovations in continuing education, knowledge translation: the role and place of practice reflection’, journal of continuing education in the health professions, 24(1), pp. 50-56. morton, n., curzon, r., hill, a., tomas, c., popovic, c., lawton, r. and eland, j. (2008) 'the creative dynamic: innovative solutions to teaching transferable skills in the classroom', inted2009 proceedings cd. valencia, spain 9-11 march. available at: http://www.iated.org/inted2009/ (accessed: 29 march 2012). palmer, p.j. (1998), the courage to teach: exploring the inner landscape of a teacher's life, san francisco, jossey-bass russell, t. and loughran, j.j. (eds),(2007), enacting a pedagogy of teacher education: values, relationships and practices, london,routledge schön, d.a. (1987) educating the reflective practitioner. san francisco, ca: josey-bass. spiller p. (2005) ‘teaching as a focused conversation: the use of incentive based preparation exercises’, innovation in education and teaching international, seda, 42(4), pp. 305-312. uce birmingham (2006) students speak up. dvd, uce birmingham. wentzel, k.r. and wigfield, a. (1998) 'academic and social motivational influences on students' academic performance', educational psychology review, 10(2), pp. 155175. winning, t., skinner, v., townsend, g., drummond, b. and kieser, j. (2004) ‘developing problem-based learning packages internationally: an evaluation of outcomes’, innovations in education and teaching international, 41(2), pp. 125-144. yorke, m. and knight, p. (2002) ‘employability through the curriculum’, tertiary education and management, 8(4), pp. 261-276. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 16 http://www.iated.org/inted2009/ hill, spencer and bartholomew tmi – too much information: creating employability skills resources author details professor anne hill is based in the faculty of education, law and social sciences, birmingham city university where she was a senior learning and teaching fellow and is a programme director for the suite of undergraduate housing programmes. she is a national teaching fellow and was a member of the project team which developed and delivered the higher education academy funded national teaching fellowship project creating future-proof graduates'. she led the development and realisation of tmi too much information, which was one of eight resources created for this project. nicola bartholomew is a senior academic in the school of health and social care and is senior learning and teaching fellow for the faculty of health at birmingham city university. nicola was a content creator for tmi – too much information, one of eight resources created for the creating future-proof graduates project for the national teaching fellowship project strand at the higher education academy simon spencer is the deputy head of the school of education in the faculty of education, law and social sciences at birmingham city university. he is course director for the pgce secondary education in the faculty of education, law & social sciences at birmingham city university. simon was a content creator for tmi – too much information, one of eight resources created for the creating future-proof graduates project for the national teaching fellowship project strand at the higher education academy journal of learning development in higher education, issue 4: march 2012 17 tmi – too much information: creating employability skills resources – enabling students to develop an effective interface with a client abstract introduction identification of the specific skills gap creating the resources using and testing the materials evaluating the testing of the tmi resource with trainee teachers scenario 1 – the parents’ evening evaluating the testing of the tmi resource with housing students scenario 2 – a housing crisis evaluating the testing of the tmi resource with radiography students scenario 3 – the hospital appointment developing confidence in dealing with clients tmi education (parents’ evening) tmi housing tmi radiography conclusion references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special issue 22: compendium of innovative practice october 2021 ________________________________________________________________________ facilitating informal spaces and discussions in the online environment (not always) about assessments matthew mesley university of plymouth, uk keywords: online environment; informal learning; assessments; learning spaces; covid19. the challenge during 2021/21, online delivery and support became the norm for learning development practitioners. for some students the online environment in zoom or teams was the primary directed learning space in which subject content and development support was delivered. this has resulted in students having fewer opportunities to take advantage of peer-to-peer discussions, or to meet and interact collaboratively in informal learning spaces – spaces that students increasingly tend to find vital to their learning (beckers et al., 2015). traditionally, informal learning spaces can describe specifically designed areas, such as those found in university libraries, learning centres, or computer rooms, social spaces, or cafes. they can also include the learning which might take place in ad hoc spaces, such as the corridors before or after a seminar and in-between breaks. within these definitions, informal learning is often limited to ‘student learning outside of designated class time’ (matthews, andrews and adams, 2011, p.107). however, definitions of formal and informal learning spaces have often been contested, and with the shift from teaching in a physical context to an online environment, the line between these spaces is increasingly blurred (colley et al., 2003). clearly informal learning spaces can act as a bridge or as a transition to and from formal learning and comprise a continuum of different learning experiences ranging from informal to formal (sefton-green, 2004; eurat, 2010). as the last year has demonstrated, they can also extend to informal activities online, such as planned breakout sessions or informal conversations and chat. mesley facilitating informal spaces and discussions in the online environment (not always) about assessments journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 2 with this in mind, i wanted to see how these informal or non-formal spaces could be structured (or be encouraged to develop organically) in an online learning environment, and how they might be facilitated. as a learning developer who teaches academic writing – a subject that students are often apprehensive about – i wanted to explore how to carve out informal learning opportunities so that students could ask questions, express the difficulties they face, and articulate any anxieties they have regarding forthcoming assessments. indeed, at a time when many students’ mental health is suffering (norton, 2021), i wanted to create a space where they could express their thoughts and feelings about their assessments, and hopefully also share tips and suggestions between themselves. in other words, i wanted to encourage discussions which became part of the problem-solving process in which students work out what they need to do for a particular assessment, or how to go about a specific task. i recognise that such informal learning spaces are not a panacea, and that there might be a tendency to romanticise them (berman, 2020). however, informal online spaces can enrich the overall learning experience, and act as a buffer against formal online environments such as learning management systems, providing students with new ways to share ideas, collaborate, and learn (czerkawski, 2016). the response my main solution for incorporating informal spaces was to begin the majority of my sessions with an exercise using the breakout room feature on zoom, in which students were asked to talk about their forthcoming assignment. sometimes i would ask specific questions, such as what problems or challenges they might foresee with a particular assignment, or what had they found useful in the past in tackling previous assignments. the rationale was: (i) to allow them an opportunity to talk to their peers; (ii) to test – without my presence intruding – for themselves their understanding of what they needed to do with an assignment; and (iii), begin, if they had not already begun, to view their assignment as a process which would need to be broken down into parts. this exercise sought to recapture the informal learning spaces or moments pre-covid-19, while at the same time guiding the conversation towards the learning developer’s pedagogic ‘bread and butter’: a more rounded understanding of their assignment. mesley facilitating informal spaces and discussions in the online environment (not always) about assessments journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 3 as i ‘jumped’ into breakout rooms, i noticed that conversations sometimes took a different direction than was planned. for instance, groups of students might focus on a particular question over another; or the question may have shifted, or a different discussion about their assessment begun. for example, if the assessment instructions were viewed as unclear, students discussed what they thought the assessment was actually asking of them, rather than considering what challenges they might face. in so doing, i reflected that students appeared to be reassured by these conversations; a collective understanding of an assignment was formed which then successfully anchored the broader session – this was frequently on academic writing, using evidence, or critical analysis – to the students’ own understanding of the assessment instructions and criteria. furthermore, i noticed that students appeared to appreciate that i had – to use one student’s expression – ‘allowed’ discussion of the assignment. there was clearly a recognition that this kind of space, in which students could ask questions or articulate any uncertainties between themselves, were few and far between, particularly if lecturers expected the process of understanding to take place outside of the formal online environment (magyar, mcavoy and forstner, 2011). recommendations even though my response was initially more intuitive than planned, the positive response from students highlighted the need for this kind of space. it also benefited me, particularly with cohorts i was unfamiliar with, as it gave me a snapshot of current anxieties and a guide to their comprehension of future assessments. in other words, it offered a lens into how students thought about, and would start to tackle, their assignments. in a couple of sessions, the identification of any obstacles or barriers they would face was in fact integral to their assessment; thus, the space both allowed for the articulation of their concerns and clarified how the problems they faced needed to be incorporated or reflected upon within their assessment. further, the online environment highlighted how essential this kind of space was, and that potentially this had been overlooked in the rush to move learning online. personally, i may also have taken these spaces for granted in my previous teaching. as such, my main recommendation would be that we reflect, collectively and individually, on how we might mesley facilitating informal spaces and discussions in the online environment (not always) about assessments journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 4 be able to incorporate and harness this kind of space in face-to-face sessions, or indeed what might work best by being kept online. as suggested, this kind of space likely already occurs within face-to-face environments, but could be enhanced and acknowledged further. other questions are worth considering too. how do we plan for these spaces in our sessions? is the very potential rooted in offering up the time and space, rather than incorporating this formally into our work? i would argue that it is useful to guide or facilitate this space, while at the same time being willing to adapt. moving forward, i would also suggest thinking about how we can best evaluate these spaces. finally, might more be said about the value of this type of learning in comparison to the delivery of formal learning, and how can the wider learning developer community benefit from this type of approach? references beckers, r., van der voordt, t. j. m. and dewulf, g. (2015) ‘a conceptual framework to identify spatial implications of new ways of learning in higher education’, facilities, 33(1/2), pp.2-19. https://doi.org/10.1108/f-02-2013-0013. berman, n. (2020) ‘a critical examination of informal learning spaces’, higher education research & development, 39(1), pp.127-140. https://doi.org/10.1080/07294360.2019.1670147. colley, h., hodkinson, p. and malcom, j. (2003) informality and formality in learning: a report for the learning and skills research centre. learning and skills research centre 2003. available at: https://core.ac.uk/reader/91282?fbclid=iwar0l0rl7ll86igv94dpp-gtifxv_qpthxq4qn4y_urryfznnt81vyyymby (accessed: 9 june 2021). czerkawski, b. c. (2016) ‘blending formal and informal learning networks for online learning’, international review of research in open and distributed learning, 17(3), pp.138-156. available at: https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ej1102701.pdf (accessed: 10 june 2021). https://doi.org/10.1108/f-02-2013-0013 https://doi.org/10.1080/07294360.2019.1670147 https://core.ac.uk/reader/91282?fbclid=iwar0l0r-l7ll86igv94dpp-gtifxv_qpthxq4qn4y_urryfznnt81vyyymby https://core.ac.uk/reader/91282?fbclid=iwar0l0r-l7ll86igv94dpp-gtifxv_qpthxq4qn4y_urryfznnt81vyyymby https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ej1102701.pdf mesley facilitating informal spaces and discussions in the online environment (not always) about assessments journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 5 eurat, m. (2004) ‘informal learning in the workplace’, studies in continuing education, 26(2), pp.247-273. https://doi.org/10.1080/158037042000225245. magyar, a., mcavoy, d. and forstner, k. (2011) ‘“if only we knew what they wanted”: bridging the gap between student uncertainty and lecturers’ expectations’, journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3, march, pp.1-18. https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.v0i3.68. matthews, k. e., andrews, v. and adams, p. (2011) ‘social learning spaces and student engagement’, higher education research & development, 30(2), pp.105-120. doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/07294360.2010.512629. norton, a. (2021) ‘making student mental health a priority’. available at: https://www.officeforstudents.org.uk/news-blog-and-events/blog/making-studentmental-health-a-priority/ (accessed: 5 june 2021). sefton-green, j. (2004) literature review in informal learning with technology outside school, futurelab series 2004.7. available at: http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/41609 (accessed: 11 june 2021). author details matthew mesley is a learning development advisor at the university of plymouth and currently works with students from the faculty of health. in a former life he was a medieval historian, and has written on medieval miracles, sex and gender, jewish-christian relations, and the crusades. he has an mphil from the university of cambridge, a ph.d. from the university of exeter, and is a fellow of advance he. https://doi.org/10.1080/158037042000225245 https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.v0i3.68 https://doi.org/10.1080/07294360.2010.512629 https://www.officeforstudents.org.uk/news-blog-and-events/blog/making-student-mental-health-a-priority/ https://www.officeforstudents.org.uk/news-blog-and-events/blog/making-student-mental-health-a-priority/ http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/41609 facilitating informal spaces and discussions in the online environment (not always) about assessments the challenge the response recommendations references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special issue 22: compendium of innovative practice october 2021 ________________________________________________________________________ co-creating quality: moving he forwards in partnership with students sarah dyer university of exeter, uk lisa harris university of exeter, uk keywords: co-creation; student partnerships; culture change; online learning; covid-19. the challenge the challenge we faced was how to engage students in dialogue about online and blended modules as they were being developed, rather than after they were delivered. the mechanisms for student feedback in existing quality assurance processes were not adequate for the emergency re-design of modules for the 2020/21 academic year. quality assurance requires he providers to engage students individually and collectively through mechanisms such as collecting feedback at module or programme level and working with course representatives and student unions. these processes are broadly retrospective, reviewing what has happened to inform what should happen next. they are also introspective, by which we mean that they look inward in their framing of quality and speak to or reassure internal he audiences (universities and their regulators). in a time of crisis, we have seen that quality assurance has been less successful at reassuring those outside the sector, such as politicians, parents, or indeed students themselves, of the quality of education that universities are providing. it was important to create forums for meaningful dialogue. we see meaningful dialogue as having empathy at its core, being willing and able to explore different perspectives, and being beneficial to all involved. we were particularly concerned about the broad-brush representations that were circulating in the media of online education as somehow compromised or impoverished (dyer and harris, 2020). the assumption that quality suffers when we teach online, meaning that we can neither provide good education, nor dyer and harris co-creating quality: moving he forwards in partnership with students journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 2 the sense of connection and community that made effective learning possible through more traditional methods, is not evidenced by our own experience or by research (see for example, the innovating pedagogy report 2021, pp.36-39). we believe that a partnership approach to designing and assuring the quality of education provides an effective and constructive way to build trust in online and other novel or changed ways of doing things. the response the university has employed a group of 69 recent graduates as full-time members of staff (digital learning developers, or dlds) along with 119 current students (digital learning assistants, or dlas). distributed across all six colleges, the dlds are supporting teaching staff with the re-development of their modules for online learning, and the dlas are providing feedback on the changes from a student perspective. while the student voice has always been acknowledged, the level of investment in these roles has provided an essential bridge between academic staff, learning developers, and students. it has enabled the practice of having students as partners during what is becoming an extended period of significant change and uncertainty. both dlds and dlas have current or very recent experience of being students and can provide that perspective in a far more direct and meaningful way than more traditional consultation through, for example, committee meetings or feedback surveys. recognising the importance of documenting the changes we’ve made, and to invite wider conversations, we set up a blog with our student dlas as co-editors. our objective was to help counteract the prevailing negativity around online learning by providing an evidencebased narrative of resilience, challenge, innovation, and opportunity from across the institution. however, we also found the process of educators and dlas working side by side as editors fostered a deep and sustained partnership and mutual learning. we held weekly meetings to source new stories and track progress. the students have been able to take control and claim ownership through their roles as writers and editors, while applying their energy and enthusiasm as navigators and translators of experiences from the wider student body. as a result, they have gained employability skills, deepened their expertise, and extended their own digital presence. they have investigated what staff have dyer and harris co-creating quality: moving he forwards in partnership with students journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 3 found challenging about teaching online, what has been enjoyable, and how students are preparing for a very digital future in terms of work, life, and learning. they have commented on the ways in which their official roles build a sense of appreciation and being valued, and how leading by example and encouraging their peers to share their own stories can contribute to growing trust between educators and students. recommendations a collaborative approach such as this, developing authentic student partnerships in the (re)design of education, can help us start to rebuild trust (davidson and katopodis, 2020). universities must examine and innovate their mechanisms for assuring their quality of education. in the pandemic we have seen a breakdown of trust which damages both individual student learning and experience and the he sector’s social and political settlement. we recommend that quality assurance processes are designed to inform ongoing and future orientated questions and challenges and that they are designed to speak to real stakeholders (students, potential students, parents, and others). there are many models that could be adapted, such as citizens' juries. we propose writing and editing as processes for building meaningful partnership between learning developers, educators, and students. these are activities which are authentic to the he context. they create conditions for learning and are mutually beneficial to those involved. through editing, students were able to direct attention to what they saw as meaningful. they evaluated and provided commentary. a blog is an inclusive forum for university students, any student who chooses is able to contribute, and all are able to read the contributions of others. in conclusion the student voice embedded within the blog can be in the vanguard of the emerging new normal for education, rather than being applied retrospectively through more traditional quality assurance channels. by coordinating and communicating the stories of staff and students working in partnership we can collectively challenge the narrative of deficit and strive to replace it with one that speaks of resilience, trust, and authenticity. in turn this helps to build a more positive and forward looking narrative around the development of our educational priorities beyond the pandemic. dyer and harris co-creating quality: moving he forwards in partnership with students journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 4 references davidson, c. and katopodis, c. (2020) ‘trust your students to be active participants in their learning’, times higher education, 26 june. available at: https://www.timeshighereducation.com/blog/trust-your-students-be-activeparticipants-their-learning (accessed: 26 july 2021). dyer, s. and harris, l. (2020) ‘let’s take the remote out of online learning’, wonkhe, 16 october. available at: https://wonkhe.com/blogs/lets-take-the-remote-out-of-onlinelearning/ (accessed: 26 july 2021). kukulska-hulme, a., bossu, c., coughlan, t., ferguson, r., fitzgerald, e., gaved, m., herodotou, c., rienties, b., sargent, j., scanlon, e., tang, j., wang, q., whitelock, d. and zhang, s. (2021) innovating pedagogy 2021: open university innovation report, 9. milton keynes: the open university. author details sarah dyer is the director of the exeter education incubator. lisa harris is the director of digital learning at the university of exeter business school. https://www.timeshighereducation.com/blog/trust-your-students-be-active-participants-their-learning https://www.timeshighereducation.com/blog/trust-your-students-be-active-participants-their-learning https://www.timeshighereducation.com/blog/trust-your-students-be-active-participants-their-learning https://www.timeshighereducation.com/blog/trust-your-students-be-active-participants-their-learning https://wonkhe.com/blogs/lets-take-the-remote-out-of-online-learning/ https://wonkhe.com/blogs/lets-take-the-remote-out-of-online-learning/ https://wonkhe.com/blogs/lets-take-the-remote-out-of-online-learning/ http://www.open.ac.uk/blogs/innovating/ co-creating quality: moving he forwards in partnership with students the challenge the response recommendations references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 26: special edi issue february 2023 ________________________________________________________________________ ©2023 the author(s) (cc-by 4.0) developing an equity lens: the experience of creating a professional framework for coaches and mentors enya-marie clay the open university, uk lynne o’neil the open university, uk janet lindley the open university, uk helen williams the open university, uk jo blissett the open university, uk abstract the following is a collective practitioner reflection on creating a coaching and mentoring professional framework for a pilot student support service that focuses on delivering targets in the institutional access and participation strategy. both coaching and mentoring are increasingly recognised as support mechanisms which can bring about change for social justice (shoukry and cox, 2018). as learning development practitioners, we are working within a specialist coaching and mentoring service which seeks to remove student inequalities. therefore, working to create a professional framework which addresses this directly has been valuable. we share our journey in the hope that other learning development practitioners will consider an equity lens to critically reflect on their work and join a conversation to develop anti-oppressive practice in student support further. keywords: coaching and mentoring; equity lens; widening participation; student support; professional framework; anti-oppressive practice. clay, o’neil, lindley, williams and blissett developing an equity lens: the experience of creating a professional framework for coaches and mentors journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 2 organisational context our team of coaches and mentors deliver support to students as part of a wider institutional aim to achieve equity in student experiences and outcomes. this tailored support takes place in both one-to-one and group settings – typically over the course of a module. like other learning developers, as coaches and mentors we are ultimately seeking to ‘legitimise’ the different skills, experiences, and knowledge our students have and ‘widen opportunity, not participation’ (aldinhe, 2022). working within the coaching and mentoring space, our professional practice is also necessarily aligned to the standards and competencies set out by bodies such as the international coaching federation (icf). in this project, we reflected critically on how to bring this into dialogue with learning development roles in higher education (he), and anti-oppressive practice more broadly. more specifically, we aimed to: • establish coaching and mentoring for equity in he for practitioners from a range of professional backgrounds (evans and lines, 2014). • identify core skills and competencies to support student equity whilst remaining open to different approaches (ives, 2008). • recognise societal context and the impact of interventions beyond study (spencer, 2021). • centre our learning from students and ensure our practice is ‘anti-oppressive’ in that it is designed to foreground student narratives, stories, and experiences (hooks, 1994, cited valcarlos et al., 2020). our approach we looked outwards to existing frameworks set out by the international coaching federation (icf, 2022), the european coaching and mentoring council (emcc global, 2022), and beyond (cox, bachkirova and clutterbuck, 2014; megginson and clutterbuck, 2015; passmore and sinclair, 2020; passmore, 2021), as well as those within the coaching and mentoring continuum (clutterbuck, 2014; thedman, 2018). although equitable practice is considered in the literature, equity was neither centrally embedded into these frameworks nor had they been created with this in mind. the benefits of using clay, o’neil, lindley, williams and blissett developing an equity lens: the experience of creating a professional framework for coaches and mentors journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 3 coaching and mentoring approaches in mutuality have been largely discussed in the context of staff development in education, rather than as a student-facing approach (hobson and van nieuwerburgh, 2022). we turned to our institution’s equality, diversity, and inclusion (edi) work to contextualise our practice which provided a foundation for the ‘why’ of what we wanted to achieve. it became clear that an institutional commitment to meaningful, equitable change was key, as was a readiness to listen to marginalised voices and stories. without this, coaching and mentoring approaches may risk encouraging individual adaptation to inequitable structures instead of challenging and supporting change (shoukry, 2016; tichavakunda, 2019). our collective experience working with students to-date had showed us the value of: • holding space for deep storytelling. • validating students’ lived experiences. • being comfortable with uncertainty. • advocating for students. • reflecting upon biases and privileges. • communicating challenges and feeding back to communities of practice, the institution, and systems to effect change. this desk exercise showed the value of: • a person-centred approach (joseph, 2006). • flexibility and adaptiveness to individual needs (clutterbuck, 2014; megginson and clutterbuck, 2015). • acknowledging practitioner privilege (terry, 2021; chiu, 2022) and bias (orange et al., 2019). • a coaching and mentoring continuum recognising student and practitioner needs (sheath, 2013). this further encouraged our resolve to reframe coaching and mentoring practice through an ‘equity lens’. clay, o’neil, lindley, williams and blissett developing an equity lens: the experience of creating a professional framework for coaches and mentors journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 4 an equity lens an equity lens is needed to recognise that coaching is not neutral (shoukry and cox, 2018) and to avoid a potential ‘deficit’ approach (campbell and mckendrick, 2017; bhopal and pitkin, 2020, p.541). we explored the use of ‘equity coaching’ in alternative contexts such as public health interventions (terry, 2021), the criminal justice system, and primary/secondary education. in he, an equity lens for coaching and mentoring focussed on developing managers and leaders (bocala and holman, 2021; vlachopoulous, 2021; mathew and hakro, 2022), and student interventions such as peer coaching (andreanoff, 2016) or online group coaching (algozzini, 2017). the equity lens made explicit the social justice motivations behind coaching and mentoring. this proactive inclusionary and equalising stance draws from emancipatory (western, 2012; shoukry, 2016), anti-racist (roche and passmore, 2021; roche and passmore, 2022), and anti-oppressive approaches, to transform traditional coaching and mentoring. having contextualised the framework in our own institution’s edi work and the wider he landscape, as well as in the equity work being undertaken in the coaching and mentoring sector, we then turned towards building our ‘what’ and ‘how’. reflecting on ‘what’ we do and how to embed this into our framework involved critical self-evaluation of our practice and our service, giving us a foundation for creating an approach that would work effectively for our aims. as an outcome, we created a coaching and mentoring continuum which emphasises the mutuality of both skillsets and how these can be used fluidly to adapt to student need. next, we turned to the ‘how’ of our framework: how does this continuum operate and facilitate ongoing anti-oppressive practice? key to answering these questions is the team’s adoption of a person-centred approach that enables deep storytelling while using supportive challenge to create change. we are also increasingly attuned to the power of language and dominant western discourses, identity, and intersectionality (blaisdell, 2018). clay, o’neil, lindley, williams and blissett developing an equity lens: the experience of creating a professional framework for coaches and mentors journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 5 barriers and future considerations this process challenged normative approaches, recognised gaps in the literature and held a mirror up to our own practices. further considerations to develop this work include: • championing the student voice in the framework’s development and our practice. • learning from others offering equity-based coaching and mentoring in he. • reflecting on our team’s diversity and lived experiences. we are now at the point of compiling the framework and preparing it for presentation. the next stage of our process is wider consultation with practitioners, stakeholders, and – most importantly – our students. concluding reflections creating this framework has given us the opportunity to connect our values, practice, and purpose, and to unite them under an approach that places equity at its heart. it is a framework that is functional, exploratory, and anti-oppressive; and that seeks to meet the need of practitioners and stakeholders. collaboratively creating a framework by reflecting on our practice and putting this under an equity lens has been a challenging but rewarding process. it continually enhances our work as practitioners, contributes to our community of practice, and will help to develop the service. we hope our reflections encourage other learning developers to view their own practice through an equity lens and share their experiences with the wider community of practice. references algozzini, l. c., gabay, v. l., voyles, s. d., bessolo, k. and batchelor, g. (2018) ‘breaking the code: barriers affecting inclusive thinking-hetl scotland 2017’, journal of applied research in higher education, 10(2), pp.118-129. https://doi.org/10.1108/jarhe-04-2017-0031. https://doi.org/10.1108/jarhe-04-2017-0031 clay, o’neil, lindley, williams and blissett developing an equity lens: the experience of creating a professional framework for coaches and mentors journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 6 andreanoff, j. a. (2016) ‘the impact of a peer coaching programme on the academic performance of undergraduate students: a mixed methods study’, journal of learning development in higher education, special issue, april, pp.1-27. https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.v0i0.358. association for learning development in higher education (2022) manifesto for learning development. available at: https://aldinhe.ac.uk/about-aldinhe/ (accessed: 28 november 2022). bhopal, k. and pitkin, c. (2020) ‘“same old story, just a different policy”: race and policy making in higher education in the uk’, race ethnicity and education, 23(4), pp.530547. https://doi.org/10.1080/13613324.2020.1718082. blaisdell, b. (2018) ‘beyond discomfort? equity coaching to disrupt whiteness’, whiteness and education, 3(2), pp.162-181. https://doi.org/10.1080/23793406.2019.1569477. bocala, c. and holman, r. (2021) ‘coaching for equity demands deeper dialogue’, educational leadership, 78(6). available at: https://www.ascd.org/el/articles/coaching-for-equity-demands-deeper-dialogue (accessed: 13 september 2022). campbell, l. a. and mckendrick, j. h. (2017) ‘beyond aspirations: deploying the capability approach to tackle the under-representation in higher education of young people from deprived communities’, studies in continuing education, 39(2), pp.120-137. https://doi.org/10.1080/0158037x.2017.1293630. chiu, l. (2022) 'conceptualising allyship for coaching to promote social change', international journal of evidence based coaching and mentoring, (s16), pp.40-54. https://doi.org/10.24384/ajww-ce78. clutterbuck, d. (2014) everyone needs a mentor. 5th edn. london: cipd. cox, e., bachkirova, t. and clutterbuck, d. (2014) the complete handbook of coaching. 2nd edn. london: sage publications ltd. https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.v0i0.358 https://aldinhe.ac.uk/about-aldinhe/ https://doi.org/10.1080/13613324.2020.1718082 https://doi.org/10.1080/23793406.2019.1569477 https://www.ascd.org/el/articles/coaching-for-equity-demands-deeper-dialogue https://doi.org/10.1080/0158037x.2017.1293630 https://doi.org/10.24384/ajww-ce78 clay, o’neil, lindley, williams and blissett developing an equity lens: the experience of creating a professional framework for coaches and mentors journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 7 emcc global (2022) thought leadership and development: mentoring. available at: https://www.emccglobal.org/leadership-development/leadership-developmentmentoring/ (accessed: 31 august 2022). evans, c. and lines, d. (2014) ‘“which hat do i say i’m wearing?”: identity work of independent coaching practitioners’, european journal of training and development, 38(8), pp.764-779. https://doi.org/10.1108/ejtd-11-2013-0125. hobson, a. j. and van nieuwerburgh, c. j. (2022) ‘extending the research agenda on (ethical) coaching and mentoring in education: embracing mutuality and prioritising well-being’, international journal of mentoring and coaching in education, 11(1), pp.1-13. https://doi.org/10.1108/ijmce-11-2021-0099. international coaching federation (2022) all things coaching. available at: https://coachingfederation.org/about (accessed: 31 august 2022). ives, y. (2008) ‘what is “coaching”? an exploration of conflicting paradigms’, international journal of evidence based coaching and mentoring, 6(2), pp.100-113. available at: https://radar.brookes.ac.uk/radar/items/ed490c36-e4c1-4263-ad7b24cc99b97b04/1/ (accessed: 18 august 2022). joseph, s. (2006) ‘person-centred coaching psychology: a meta-theoretical perspective’, international coaching psychology review, 1, pp.47-54. available at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/242684265_personcentred_coaching_psychology_a_metatheoretical_perspective/link/5d27311492851cf44079a466/download (accessed: 12 september 2022). mathew, p. and hakro, a. (2022) ‘coaching in a higher education institution in the middle east: reflections on the obstacles and the way forward’, international journal of evidence based coaching and mentoring, 20(1), pp.66-82. https://doi.org/10.24384/6zcb-sc80. https://www.emccglobal.org/leadership-development/leadership-development-mentoring/ https://www.emccglobal.org/leadership-development/leadership-development-mentoring/ https://doi.org/10.1108/ejtd-11-2013-0125 https://doi.org/10.1108/ijmce-11-2021-0099 https://coachingfederation.org/about https://radar.brookes.ac.uk/radar/items/ed490c36-e4c1-4263-ad7b-24cc99b97b04/1/ https://radar.brookes.ac.uk/radar/items/ed490c36-e4c1-4263-ad7b-24cc99b97b04/1/ https://www.researchgate.net/publication/242684265_person-centred_coaching_psychology_a_meta-theoretical_perspective/link/5d27311492851cf44079a466/download https://www.researchgate.net/publication/242684265_person-centred_coaching_psychology_a_meta-theoretical_perspective/link/5d27311492851cf44079a466/download https://www.researchgate.net/publication/242684265_person-centred_coaching_psychology_a_meta-theoretical_perspective/link/5d27311492851cf44079a466/download https://doi.org/10.24384/6zcb-sc80 clay, o’neil, lindley, williams and blissett developing an equity lens: the experience of creating a professional framework for coaches and mentors journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 8 megginson, d. and clutterbuck, d. (2015) further techniques for coaching and mentoring. oxford: routledge. orange, t., isken, j., green, a., paranchini, n. and francois, a. (2019) ‘coaching for equity’, the learning professional, 40(6), pp45-49 available at: https://learningforward.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/coaching-for-equity.pdf (accessed: 12 september 2022). passmore, j. (ed.) (2021) succeeding as a coach: insights from the experts. shorehamby-sea: pavilion publishing and media. passmore, j. and sinclair, t. (2020) becoming a coach: the essential icf guide. shoreham-by-sea: pavilion publishing and media. roche, c. and passmore, j. (2021) racial justice, equity and belonging in coaching. henley-on-thames: henley business school. available at: https://assets.henley.ac.uk/v3/fileuploads/racial-justice-equity-and-belonging-incoaching.pdf (accessed: 2 november 2021). roche, c. and passmore, j. (2022) ‘anti-racism in coaching: a global call to action’, coaching: an international journal of theory, research & practice, pp.1-18. https://doi.org/10.1080/17521882.2022.2098789. sheath, j. (2013) ‘the education and training of career coaches’, journal of the national institute for career education and counselling, 30, pp.39-45. https://doi.org/10.20856/jnicec.3007. shoukry, h. (2016) ‘coaching for emancipation: a framework for coaching in oppressive environments’, international journal of evidence based coaching and mentoring, 14(2), pp.15-30. available at: https://radar.brookes.ac.uk/radar/file/5d592ac5-2f544b23-bde2-8e279137f19f/1/vol14issue2-paper-02.pdf (accessed: 19 april 2022). shoukry, h. and cox, e. (2018) ‘coaching as a social process’, management learning, 49(4), pp.413-428. https://doi.org/10.1177/1350507618762600. https://learningforward.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/coaching-for-equity.pdf https://assets.henley.ac.uk/v3/fileuploads/racial-justice-equity-and-belonging-in-coaching.pdf https://assets.henley.ac.uk/v3/fileuploads/racial-justice-equity-and-belonging-in-coaching.pdf https://doi.org/10.1080/17521882.2022.2098789 https://doi.org/10.20856/jnicec.3007 https://radar.brookes.ac.uk/radar/file/5d592ac5-2f54-4b23-bde2-8e279137f19f/1/vol14issue2-paper-02.pdf https://radar.brookes.ac.uk/radar/file/5d592ac5-2f54-4b23-bde2-8e279137f19f/1/vol14issue2-paper-02.pdf https://doi.org/10.1177/1350507618762600 clay, o’neil, lindley, williams and blissett developing an equity lens: the experience of creating a professional framework for coaches and mentors journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 9 spencer, d. (2021) ‘understanding the coaching experiences of non-traditional students in higher education in the uk’, international journal of evidence based coaching and mentoring, (s15), pp.84-95. https://doi.org/10.24384/00v3-nm61. terry, p. e. (2021) ‘crossing the empathy chasm: unpacking a knapsack full of unearned advantage’, american journal of health promotion, 35(5), pp.604–608. https://doi.org/10.1177/08901171211011266. the open university (2020) ou access and participation plan 2020/21-24/25. milton keynes: the open university. available at: https://www.open.ac.uk/about/wideningparticipation/sites/www.open.ac.uk.about.wi deningparticipation/files/files/ou%20access%20and%20participation%20plan%20 2020-2025(1).pdf (accessed: 31 august 2022). thedman, j. (2018) coaching and mentoring in action: additional approaches, tools and techniques. london: the education and training foundation. available at: https://repository.excellencegateway.org.uk/otla-ap-guidecoachingmentoringaction-final_01.11.18.pdf (accessed: 31 august 2022). tichavakunda, a. (2019) ‘an overdue theoretical discourse: pierre bourdieu’s theory of practice and critical race theory in education’, educational studies, 55(6), pp.651666. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131946.2019.1666395. valcarlos, m. m., wolgemuth, j. r, haraf, s. and fisk, n. (2020) ‘anti-oppressive pedagogies in online learning: a critical review’, distance education, 41(3), pp.345360. https://doi.org/10.1080/01587919.2020.1763783. vlachopoulos, d. (2021) ‘organizational change management in higher education through the lens of executive coaches’, education sciences, 11(6), p.269. https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci11060269. western, s. (2012) coaching and mentoring: a critical text. london: sage publications ltd. https://doi.org/10.24384/00v3-nm61 https://doi.org/10.1177/08901171211011266 https://www.open.ac.uk/about/wideningparticipation/sites/www.open.ac.uk.about.wideningparticipation/files/files/ou%20access%20and%20participation%20plan%202020-2025(1).pdf https://www.open.ac.uk/about/wideningparticipation/sites/www.open.ac.uk.about.wideningparticipation/files/files/ou%20access%20and%20participation%20plan%202020-2025(1).pdf https://www.open.ac.uk/about/wideningparticipation/sites/www.open.ac.uk.about.wideningparticipation/files/files/ou%20access%20and%20participation%20plan%202020-2025(1).pdf https://repository.excellencegateway.org.uk/otla-ap-guide-coachingmentoringaction-final_01.11.18.pdf https://repository.excellencegateway.org.uk/otla-ap-guide-coachingmentoringaction-final_01.11.18.pdf https://doi.org/10.1080/00131946.2019.1666395 https://doi.org/10.1080/01587919.2020.1763783 https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci11060269 clay, o’neil, lindley, williams and blissett developing an equity lens: the experience of creating a professional framework for coaches and mentors journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 10 author details enya-marie clay joined the personal learning advisor team at the open university in 2021. enya trained as a career leader and worked in further education as a careers lead and librarian. she has worked in higher education in various student-facing widening participation roles with a focus on student engagement, mentoring, and tutoring. enya holds a master of letters researching the ethics of holocaust representation in children’s literature from newcastle university, and a level 6 certificate in careers leadership (rgg associates). enya’s key interests include improving accessibility and equity within education and inspiring a love of learning through creative and collaborative approaches. lynne o’neil is an associate certified coach (acc) who has four years’ experience coaching and mentoring. she specialises in work with students and those who are neuro diverse. lynne has over 20 years’ experience teaching and lecturing in the education sector where she has led on equality, diversity, and inclusion. she has a master’s degree in special educational needs. her work provides ongoing supportive relationships that help people produce results in their lives and careers. through a range of psychological models and schools of thought she provides individuals with self-awareness tools to action change and recognise potential. janet lindley joined the personal learning advisor team at the open university in january 2021. she trained as a career coach, completing the postgraduate diploma in career management at birkbeck, university of london and is a registered career development professional of the career development institute. she has a strong interest in coaching approaches that support social justice, in particular recognising the impact of wider networks and systems on an individual. helen williams started her career as a geography teacher in secondary schools in bradford just over twenty years ago. following this she worked in a consultancy, coaching, and management capacity within a local authority, the nhs, and teach first. committed to life-long learning in the service of supporting and developing others, she holds a ma in special educational needs, pgdip hr management, pgcert healthcare leadership, and an ilm level 5 certificate in mentoring and coaching. clay, o’neil, lindley, williams and blissett developing an equity lens: the experience of creating a professional framework for coaches and mentors journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 11 jo blissett has over 20 years’ experience as a human resources and learning development professional. as a staff development coach, she saw first-hand how individuals benefit from coaching; jo has taken this knowledge and experience into higher education. she delivers a variety of coaching and mentoring activities to support student development. in 2010 she qualified as a career coach, completing the postgraduate qualification in careers guidance (qcg). jo joined the open university as a personal learning advisor in 2021. she is passionate and determined to address structural, process, and opportunity inequalities that affect students in higher education. licence ©2023 the author(s). this is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (cc-by 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. see http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. journal of learning development in higher education (jldhe) is a peer-reviewed open access journal published by the association for learning development in higher education (aldinhe). journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special issue 25: aldinhe conference proceedings and reflections october 2022 leadership in learning development: who and how? carina buckley solent university, uk presentation abstract learning development (ld) as a profession is predicated upon the values of collaboration and partnership, sharing practice and critical self-reflection. working within this ethos, it can be difficult to recognise ourselves as leaders – particularly when the idea of leadership is often tied to line management, and promotion often results in movement out of learning development altogether. how, then, do we recognise leadership in learning development, much less embrace it for ourselves? this presentation outlined findings, derived from interviews with 20 self-selecting members of the ld community, about conceptions and perceptions of leadership in ld. it examined what leadership looks like and who can be a leader by exploring learning developers’ conceptions of professional identity and networking, and confidence in those areas. the aim was to show delegates that the role of a leader has much in common with the values of ld, making it open to anybody with a purpose, a goal, and values. in so doing i posited that this is connected to the theme of wellbeing, as, if we feel recognised and valued for our work, then we are likely to be happier. i hoped to demonstrate that all learning developers have the capacity to be recognised and valued for their leadership. community response the audience comments in this section show that a major impact of the session was to create confidence amongst the learning developers who attended in their capacity to aspire to leadership. this confidence came partly from the richer understanding of what constitutes leadership in the ld environment which carina buckley's presentation opened up, looking beyond a narrow view of leadership as authority and distinguishing it from management. it also arose from the opportunity to take part in a discussion where ld leadership was a focus. that discussion is continued within this community response, buckley leadership in learning development: who and how? journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 2 where carina provides further reflections in response to attendees’ comments. the overall impression throughout this dialogue is that we are taking part in the kind of facilitatory conversation that learning developers strive for in their encounters with students and that is an object lesson in how ld values and approaches can be seen as leadership in action. (initials are used to identify participants’ contributions below.) anon the session provided useful insight into what leadership looks like in the ld profession. it was interesting to think about how this model of leadership differs from other, arguably, more conventional forms of leadership, particularly in its emphasis on facilitating collaboration and a sense of partnership between colleagues. this contrast has been described in terms of a distinction between ‘leadership’ and ‘management’; with the latter being more associated with containment and control than with growth. by providing a valuable summary of how to lead in this profession, the research offers pointers for career planning for anyone hoping to move towards a leadership role. finally, this study contributes to the growing body of knowledge about the profession of ld and the professionalisation process, which will help to further establish ld as a mainstay of uk higher education. it will be exciting to see additional findings emerge from further explorations of the data. cb responds: the idea of management as containment and leadership as growth certainly came out in the interview data. there were two senses of the term ‘growth’: one related to networks and connections, and the other to personal development – of self, and of others. a leader – in ld, if not elsewhere – is someone who seeks to grow collaborations and partnerships and also looks to help others grow similarly. this form of leadership can be confidently regarded as a defining feature of ld. cp the session provided valuable insights into how ld teams can collaborate in building their leadership skills. at the heart of these insights was the vision of leadership as a lateral trajectory that spreads (like a spider web) rather than an upwards trajectory that climbs (like a triangle). this ‘spider web model’ of leadership could be used by managers, leaders or colleagues to support those who are new to ld to understand that they have the agency to demonstrate leadership. buckley leadership in learning development: who and how? journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 3 the spider web model raises interesting questions about what a leadership programme based on this approach would look like, and even, how far leadership can be taught. it seems quite possible that intrinsic factors like confidence and motivation would influence leadership practices. if so, can everyone aspire to being an effective leader, or are some people naturally more inclined to being exceptional leaders than others? my own understanding of leadership has been greatly enhanced by being part of a community group which has been exploring the meaning of leadership in ld. a comparable approach by aldinhe fostering dialogue and understanding across the wider ld community could involve the highlighting of examples of leadership within the community. this could include the nomination of people for their leadership practices and the showcasing of their work. these exemplars might demonstrate to other ld practitioners that one does not necessarily have to be in a position of power in order to be a leader. cb responds: these are such interesting ideas. i think opening people up to the idea of their own agency, and their capacity for leadership, is crucial in the development of a confident profession, and a leadership programme that would support this would make a major contribution. i have no doubt that confidence – to reach out and speak up – and motivation – to go beyond, perhaps, what is expected – are vital factors in the pursuit (whether directed or more unintentional) of leadership practices. so, it is possible that not everyone can be an effective leader because not everyone would want to be. i do know for sure how much i have benefitted from the conversations and experiences shared by the members of aldinhe’s relatively new leadership community of practice and am definitely keen for them to continue. i am always keen to welcome new voices too, so anyone interested in joining us is welcome to contact me for more information no leadership or management experience required or expected. alongside these conversations, i would be very interested in taking forward the idea of a more formal showcasing of leadership in the community. this could inspire others to see what is possible and what is achievable. https://aldinhe.ac.uk/networking/communities-of-practice/leadership-cop/ buckley leadership in learning development: who and how? journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 4 jb figure 1. jb visual summary and reflection. cb responds: quite apart from the honour of getting the bartram treatment this year, what i love about this visual is that the person (yes, me, but i take it as representing all learning developers) is at the centre of their professional activity. i see the ld leader as being in the middle of a network of connections, actions and outputs, through which her voice can be carried further and more effectively. i also appreciate that it is not an easy position to take, particularly when the most obvious promotion routes are those out of the field. however, i believe that our voices do matter, and the more loudly they are heard, and the more confident we are in what we have to say, the more that situation is likely to change. as they say: watch this space! sh leadership has always been of interest to me. this session (and associated work) has made me consider key questions around leadership: for example, what is a leader and how do we demonstrate leadership? these questions have long been debated, in buckley leadership in learning development: who and how? journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 5 conjunction with questions about the differences between leadership and management. as someone who feels i am both a leader and a manager, i often find management tasks take priority but fail to move us forwards. leadership, in my view, is more forward looking: having a vision, acting as a role model and advocating for the service. in this way anyone within a team can show leadership but the vision needs to be clear and shared for it to be effective. i agree with the advice that we need to do more to ensure people know what we are doing, make key connections and get noticed. some of these behaviours are perhaps challenging (self-promotion, for example, sits uneasily with many of us) but as a profession we do need to do more of this and see this form of ‘promotion’ as key to our professional development and the profession itself. central to this is the ‘evidence’ of impact; a difficult challenge we have often grappled with. the session provided lots of food for thought. leadership is a key area for our profession going forwards, and i look forward to hearing more, and being involved, if possible. cb responds: the idea of putting ourselves forward and talking about our work is one that makes many people feel uncomfortable, almost like we are showing off, or suggesting we know best in a way that sits at odds with our values. from conversations at previous conferences i know many learning developers are uncomfortable with being called ‘experts’, whilst acknowledging they do indeed have expertise. yet if no one knows about that expertise, we will never be called upon to share it – we have to take responsibility ourselves. so perhaps reframing it, not as self-promotion but as making connections, is the best way forward. it is about meeting new people, and sharing ideas and experiences. in that way, naturally and organically (even if somewhat strategically), we can get to know colleagues and they can get to know us and, more importantly, what we know and what we can offer. sr i really appreciated how this session laid out the tensions between more established views of leadership (and what ‘leaders’ are typically believed to spend their time doing) and the character and ethos of ld, which tends towards collaboration and a certain suspicion of fixed hierarchies. the session provided some fascinating, and frequently very resonant, insights into how learning developers themselves conceptualise and practise leadership within their respective roles and institutional contexts. buckley leadership in learning development: who and how? journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 6 particularly interesting was the notion which came out in both the discussion and the presentation of carrying the ethos and agenda of ld into more formal senior roles which do not necessarily have a predominantly ld remit. it would be fascinating to hear more about this phenomenon, which i suspect – given the professional and promotional structure of higher education – is quite common. relatedly, and given the implicit (and sometimes explicit) critique of dominant models of leadership that often runs through discussions of leadership within the ld community, it would be interesting to explore relationships between the outcomes of this project and the field of critical leadership studies. although i know little about critical leadership or management studies, a google search confirms that these are both emerging fields gaining more adherents and an enhanced profile. cb responds: critical leadership studies would be a fascinating comparison and certainly one i would be keen to pursue. i found it helpful to read the overview to critical leadership in the sage handbook of leadership (bryman et al., 2011), which outlines its driving principle of challenging the norms and dynamics of ‘traditional’ leadership roles, and even how leadership can be conceived, with the reminder that all such norms and dynamics are socially constructed. it might also be a useful tool for helping leaders in ld to speak the ‘language’ of those more formal, senior roles, and thus help us carry forward our practices more effectively. hb this session had a real impact upon my own confidence as a learning developer. recognising the possibility (and importance) of being a leader in small areas of practice (which makes success more achievable), rather than considering role progression as the only way to become a leader, was invaluable. a lightbulb moment came when i realised the distinction between leadership and management within the ld role; these were elements i had previously conflated in my mind. the session provided powerful reminders of the value of regular, achievable ways to demonstrate leadership (such as speaking up, joining in, making connections, achieving post-nominals). the session inspired me to feel much more confident and enthusiastic about actively seeking to share innovative projects and good practice i am involved in. and i will definitely be seeking to achieve more post-nominals! buckley leadership in learning development: who and how? journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 7 i think imposter syndrome plays a major role in learning developers feeling that they are not or cannot be leaders. the confidence i gained from the session has changed my perception of being a leader from something i would rather avoid, to something i would be proud to be recognised for. perceptions of leadership in ld is an important area of research and i very much look forward to reading more of carina’s findings. cb responds thank you so much for this huge boost to my own confidence! i am so glad you left the session feeling this way. for me, that says so much more about success in research than any number of publications (although they are of course very nice). in the leadership community of practice we did touch on imposter syndrome, and wondered whether or not it was simply the discomfort that comes with learning and the unfamiliarity of a new role. i would be really happy if this research can start opening up possibilities for people in their own minds. that would be a fantastic achievement. author’s reflections this was my first in-person presentation for three years, and it made me realise how much i have missed the buzz that comes from sharing ideas with others, especially ideas that i have come to care so much about, as well as being able to pick up and act on the nuanced responses that are often obscured behind a screen. making connections with people and building on those connections is not just what my research is about – it is how i prefer to operate as well, which might be another reason i have enjoyed this so much. i also got to experience the amazing flash of insight that comes when you begin a sentence without quite knowing how it will end – always an exciting moment! suddenly, a line formed itself in my mind and i knew it not only had to be the last line i spoke of my presentation, but it also captured perfectly how i envisaged leadership in learning development. the very act of talking created meaning for me, and, as soon as i sat down, i drew two small shapes: a triangle, to represent traditional views of leadership, and a pentagonal spider’s web with a dot inside, which better encapsulates how i see leadership in ld: a network of relations between equals. the first is probably best exemplified in ulrich et al (2008), which equates leadership with strategic vision, executing change, https://aldinhe.ac.uk/networking/communities-of-practice/leadership-cop/ https://aldinhe.ac.uk/networking/communities-of-practice/leadership-cop/ buckley leadership in learning development: who and how? journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 8 building an effective team, developing a career and, contributed by koestenbaum (2002), ‘greatness’. this view is oriented towards climbing up a hierarchy and pulling others up with you, and frankly sounds like a lot of lonely work. i discovered yukl’s (2013) ideas around distributed and participative leadership in conversation with one of this workshop’s attendees, when she was carrying out research for her phd, and it opened my eyes to the possibilities of what leadership could be. suddenly there was a different model for thinking about what i did and how i did it, and those ideas have evolved since then into what i presented at this conference. as much as i enjoyed the act of presenting, therefore, it was one small moment in a whole process of discovery that has not yet ended. i have more data to explore, more of other people’s experiences and perspectives to make sense of, and more threads to follow. i cannot help but feel that this is almost a metaphor of leadership itself – always more places to go, and always more to create, develop, integrate and transform. the questions i was asked during the session showed that this feeling is not unique to me. people are inherently interested in other people, and those questions were all essentially about the kind of person that could be a leader, and their connections and relations with others. there is still so much to do and i have no concerns about drawing a line under any of it; as far as i am concerned, this is a conversation that could run and run and run. next steps and additional questions this presentation gave me the opportunity to present my initial findings from my research. i still have a little more thematic analysis to undertake; i do not anticipate that changing my findings radically but then again, i do not want to make any assumptions about that. my next step will then be to write this up for publication, once i have decided where to publish. i think as this is so obviously talking to learning developers i will submit to jldhe, but i am conscious also of the need to expand the conversation beyond the immediate community. it will be a good challenge to develop these ideas in a way that will be of use and interest to those outside of ld. perhaps this is where critical leadership theory could come in. i would also like to collate some stories of leadership, to illustrate all the possible ways in which it can be enacted within ld. what does leadership really look like in this kind of role? are you doing it already, without realising? i think this could be a valuable resource buckley leadership in learning development: who and how? journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 9 and perhaps there is a space for it on the aldinhe website. the first cop meeting of the new year is booked in too, so i am looking forward to more conversations around what leadership means. acknowledgements thank you to the following members of the community for their contributions: chenée psaros (cp), queen mary, university of london; helen briscoe (hb), edge hill university; sonia hood (sh), university of reading; steve rooney (sr), aston university; and an anonymous contributor (anon). special thanks to jacqui bartram (jb), university of hull, for the visual reflection on this presentation. carina would also like to extend grateful thanks to all of those colleagues who so generously gave their time and thoughts as research participants and in doing so made this presentation possible! references bryman, a., collindon, d., grunt, k., jackson, b. and uhi-bien, m. (eds.) (2011). the sage handbook of leadership. los angeles: sage. koestenbaum, p. (2002). leadership: the inner side of greatness. a philosophy for leaders. san francisco: jossey-bass ulrich, d., smallwood, n. and sweetman, k. (2008). the leadership code: five rules to lead by. boston, ma: harvard business review press yukl, g. (2013). leadership in organizations (8th ed.) harlow: pearson author details carina buckley is currently instructional design manager at solent university, responsible for the ongoing development of the vle as a student-centred, active and inclusive learning space. her research interests broadly connect to collaboration and community, and have evolved recently to explore ideas around leadership and professional identity, particularly buckley leadership in learning development: who and how? journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 10 within learning development. she is an advocate for the power of writing and collaboration, and co-hosts the learning development project podcast with alicja syska. she serves as the treasurer for aldinhe and also sits on the steering group for the international consortium of academic language and learning developers (icalld). following a phd in archaeology in 2006, she has since added advance he principal fellow and certified leading practitioner in learning development to her post-nominals. leadership in learning development: who and how? presentation abstract community response author’s reflections next steps and additional questions acknowledgements references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special issue 22: compendium of innovative practice october 2021 ________________________________________________________________________ face-to-face teaching changed too! perspectives on the transition from large to small group teaching and learning from graduate teaching assistants daniel tinnion edge hill university thomas simpson edge hill university mitchell finlay edge hill university keywords: reflection; reflective practice; covid-19; small-group; teaching; learning; higher-education. the challenge the covid-19 pandemic presented many challenges to teaching and learning. one challenge that has received particular attention is the move from face-to-face teaching to an online approach, particularly how technology may have impacted such a transition (carrillo and flores, 2020, crawford et al., 2020). however, the subtle challenges which arose for any face-to-face teaching that continued have received less attention. for example, government restrictions meant smaller student groups in the face-to-face classroom, which in turn required extensive changes to standard approaches to teaching. as graduate teaching assistants (gtas) on an applied, science-based course, the problem presented was how to plan and deliver highly interpersonal and interactive laboratory-based sessions to the small groups (≤10) whilst constrained by covid-19 restrictions. where teaching in larger groups is often viewed as more teacher-centred, teaching smaller groups is predominantly learner-centred and keeps the student in an active mode (saiyad et al., 2018). pre-covid, the teaching duties of gtas were mostly characterised by large group sessions in which the key challenge was how to convey information to many individuals simultaneously, with relatively little consideration given to addressing everyone tinnion, simpson, finlay face-to-face teaching changed too! perspectives on the transition from large to small group teaching and learning from graduate teaching assistants journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 2 separately. during the pandemic, the challenge instead became how to promote the interactivity that is inherent in small group teaching (saiyad et al., 2018). this would require that we devote more time to engaging with students individually than is typical in large-group teaching (walton, 1997). covid-19 also necessitated many new safety considerations and, as such, the number of tools available to deliver in this manner was reduced. however, before participating in this process, we all agreed that the opportunity to better engage with students was at the very least valuable in terms of providing both parties with some increasingly rare social interaction and offering us, as gtas, the opportunity to focus on teaching in a less familiar context. in short, the problem was: how do we facilitate engaging small group sessions whilst also considering any limitations due to covid-19 safety measures? the response as gtas facing the same general challenges and with the same students, albeit within the context of our own sub-discipline, we agreed that it was beneficial to collaborate to produce a framework for engaging our students in small groups once this scenario was better understood. jones (2007) defines small group learning as a group of learners displaying three characteristics: active participation, a specific task, and reflection. although participation is unlikely to be equal across all students, successful small group learning requires all members to engage and participate. pre covid-19, typical laboratory sessions could be said to adhere to these characteristics well, asking that students adopt roles in even smaller groups to guide one of their peers through an exercise performance test, often directly linked to the lecture material in some way. unfortunately, covid-19 measures reduced laboratory sessions to practical demonstrations with a single student. this could have created several problems that directly oppose effective small group teaching (jaques, 2003). using the following structure, we tried to encourage engagement and keep many of the qualities of a typical laboratory session: 1. brief introduction to the laboratory material and demonstration of task summarise the key concepts to provide foundations towards a greater understanding and establish a specific task (see: jones, 2007). this is seen as the only portion that could be somewhat teacher-centred. tinnion, simpson, finlay face-to-face teaching changed too! perspectives on the transition from large to small group teaching and learning from graduate teaching assistants journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 3 2. questionnaire using kahoot! students use interactive software to answer a range of multiple-choice questions and receive a score based on speed and accuracy. this step aids in identifying which students may/may not require more assistance. additionally, quieter students can also engage at their own level whilst more confident individuals can still thrive, that is, through friendly competition. this replaces observations that cannot be made without the flexible movement of the group. 3. teacher-led demonstration teacher uses a student to demonstrate a particular test, for example, performing an ecg. to structure discussion alongside teacher ‘points’, kahoot! questions are periodically introduced to maintain active involvement and guide the relative attention we may choose to give a particular aspect. what needs work? what is well understood? 4. using a ‘spot-the-difference’ type game following the demonstration, the teacher uses a pre-recorded video or a set of true or false statements as examples to test students (in smaller groups) on how well they understood and retained what they observed. students first discuss in small groups and then the outcome is discussed as a collective, allowing students to aid each other with minimal input. for the teacher this stage is the opportunity to tidy up everyone’s understanding and bring the group to a good overall level. success in this regard should naturally allow students to reflect on the learning that has occurred and/or may need to occur. recommendations this is an example of how we responded to a very specific issue that arose during the covid-19 pandemic and provides a highly practical process that may be used to overcome similar issues. whilst the framework itself has great utility, it is the less obvious lessons that have been learned at this unique time that hold the most value. broadly, we were able to see that, amongst all the bells and whistles, teaching and learning can always be condensed into a handful of simple ideas (race, 2003); an idea that has held true during the pandemic. perhaps more novel in this article though, is the tinnion, simpson, finlay face-to-face teaching changed too! perspectives on the transition from large to small group teaching and learning from graduate teaching assistants journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 4 value of collaborating with similarly (in)experienced teachers to confront an obstacle to quality teaching. theoretically, collaborating on a project such as a lesson can allow the exchange of teaching ideas and experiences, discussion of teaching practices, the ability to provide each other with feedback and participate in further changes to teachers’ cognition and/or behaviour (meirink et al., 2007). in our group, one individual drew on a previous experience to suggest the use of kahoot! to engage the entire group without lecturing them and where the ability to reorganise students into smaller groups, aiming to promote more individual-level discussion is unavailable, given covid-19 restrictions. following the first use of the framework, discussion arose around how else we may motivate the rest of the group to remain active, and so another member of the group proposed that kahoot! could also be used flexibly after trying it themselves. furthermore, some members of the group found that ‘spot-the-difference’ with a video was too easy for certain sessions and a deeper dive into the students’ understanding was needed. in response, we agreed that in certain cases, true or false statements could be used instead or simultaneously. condensed into a single recommendation we would ultimately advise that all teachers, especially those of a similar experience level, make greater use of collaboration. in this example, we were able to arrive at very simple solutions to the problems presented, irrespective of the complexity of covid-19, simply by having the desire to do well and the willingness to allow others to help us do so. references carrillo, c. and flores m.a. (2020) ‘covid-19 and teacher education: a literature review of online teaching and learning practices’, european journal of teacher education, 43(4), pp. 466-487. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/02619768.2020.1821184 (accessed: 9 august 2021). crawford, j., butler-henderson, k., rudolph, j., malkawi, b., glowatz, m., burton, r., magni, p. and lam, s. (2020) ‘covid-19: 20 countries' higher education intraperiod digital pedagogy responses’, journal of applied learning & teaching, 3(1), https://doi.org/10.1080/02619768.2020.1821184 tinnion, simpson, finlay face-to-face teaching changed too! perspectives on the transition from large to small group teaching and learning from graduate teaching assistants journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 5 pp.1-20. available at: https://doi.org/10.37074/jalt.2020.3.1.7 (accessed: 9 august 2021). jaques, d. (2003) ‘teaching small groups’ bmj, 326(7387), pp.492-494. available at: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.326.7387.492 (accessed: 9 august 2021). jones, r.w. (2007) ‘learning and teaching in small groups: characteristics, benefits, problems and approaches’, anaesthesia and intensive care, 35(4), pp.587-592. available at: https://doi.org/10.1177%2f0310057x0703500420 (accessed: 9 august 2021). meirink, j.a., meijer, p.c. and verloop, n. (2007). ‘a closer look at teachers’ individual learning in collaborative settings’, teachers and teaching: theory and practice, 13(2), pp.145-164. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/13540600601152496 (accessed: 9 august 2021). race, p. (2003) ‘learning in small groups’, the higher education academy. available at: https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/system/files/resources/id475_learning_in_small_grou ps_race.pdf (accessed: 9 august 2021). saiyad, s., mishra, s.k., rimal, h., george, c. and kaur, g. (2018) ‘teaching and learning through large and small groups’, journal of research in medical education & ethics, 8(1), pp. 24-29. available at: https://doi.org/10.5958/22316728.2018.00048.3 (accessed: 9 august 2021). walton, h. (1997) ‘small group methods in medical teaching’, medical education, 31(6), pp.459-464. available at: https://doi.org/10.1046/j.1365-2923.1997.00703.x (accessed: 9 august 2021). author details daniel tinnion is a phd researcher and graduate teaching assistant in sport and exercise science (physiology and nutrition) at edge hill university. https://doi.org/10.37074/jalt.2020.3.1.7 https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.326.7387.492 https://doi.org/10.1177%2f0310057x0703500420 https://doi.org/10.1080/13540600601152496 https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/system/files/resources/id475_learning_in_small_groups_race.pdf https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/system/files/resources/id475_learning_in_small_groups_race.pdf https://doi.org/10.5958/2231-6728.2018.00048.3 https://doi.org/10.5958/2231-6728.2018.00048.3 https://doi.org/10.1046/j.1365-2923.1997.00703.x tinnion, simpson, finlay face-to-face teaching changed too! perspectives on the transition from large to small group teaching and learning from graduate teaching assistants journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 6 thomas simpson is a phd researcher and graduate teaching assistant in sport and exercise science (psychology) at edge hill university. mitchell finlay is a phd researcher and graduate teaching assistant in sport and exercise science (biomechanics) at edge hill university. face-to-face teaching changed too! perspectives on the transition from large to small group teaching and learning from graduate teaching assistants the challenge the response recommendations references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special issue 22: compendium of innovative practice october 2021 ________________________________________________________________________ facilitating connections and supporting a learning community: together samantha aston university of manchester michael stevenson university of manchester padma inala university of manchester keywords: community learning; online community; learning online; pomodoro technique; covid-19 the challenge faced with the comprehensive move to learning online, the university of manchester library’s teaching and learning team took some time to reflect on existing online support and define an approach to what, and how, we would provide new learning opportunities for our students. the team worked with colleagues across the library and university to develop a fully online approach based on good practice by drawing upon our previous experience. this included a host of online resources, an existing online learning student-base through the university of manchester worldwide, and a previously developed open, online course to help students develop the skills for online learning. the philosophy underpinning our approach to teaching design over the past year was inspired by jesse stommel’s thoughts about asynchronous teaching: we have to build for asynchronous, design real points of entry for students who can’t be physically present at a particular time or in specific ways. this can (and should) intersect with more traditional synchronous face-to-face approaches [. . . ] [at] this moment, we should start by designing for the least privileged, most marginalised students, the ones with the least access (stommel, 2020). aston, stevenson, inala facilitating connections and supporting a learning community: together journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 2 we embodied this approach by creating new asynchronous materials to provide equitable provision for all students. we remained mindful of students’ lack of connection, sense of community and peer support, which the library’s my learning essentials (mle) face-toface workshops typically fostered (blake and illingworth, 2015). anecdotally we were hearing that students were missing informally connecting with their peers – those serendipitous interactions and connections in a physical space that build a sense of community and belonging, such as before and after lectures and tutorials, or in mle workshops. the ‘academic and assessment’ aspects of collaborative learning were rightly prioritised via our asynchronous offer; however, we recognised the need to support the ‘social and psychological’ aspects of learning as well (laal and ghodsi, 2012). we began to ask ourselves how we could create spaces for students to do this virtually, and synchronously, while demonstrating our care for a community that we would normally be so close to, when we felt so far away (bali, 2020). the response approaching this challenge, we acknowledged that the pedagogy used in an in-person setting would not translate directly to online settings, but we could still apply mle’s core principles: skills-focused, collaborative, open to all, and making best use of the technology available. rather than converting all of our on-campus workshops into webinars, we wanted to ensure that the space we created was welcoming, connected learners with one another and the library team, and had a focus on community. our solution was a ‘study together’ series. an online time and space for students to come together and work on academic tasks – including reading, writing, finding information and revising – that would reach across disciplines and programmes. it was intended to bring students together, add structure to their schedules, and provide dedicated time to focus on their individual academic work alongside their peers. we could not replicate our usual warm welcome, with tea, coffee and biscuits, but we could provide friendly faces and the opportunity to connect with others at spaced out intervals. we purposefully did not call aston, stevenson, inala facilitating connections and supporting a learning community: together journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 3 them workshops when deciding on how we might be able to create a sense of community by bringing students together. our sessions were writing together, searching together and revising together (with reading together in development). each together session runs for 2 hours, and the design is grounded in the shut up and write model used with our researchers in which we have successfully made use of the pomodoro technique (kneen et al., 2020). we experimented by using some new elements not previously used for mle sessions. we made greater use of preand post-session blog posts and surveys to help students understand what to expect and to set their agendas. the student team also contributed to sessions by sharing their lived experience, knowledge and advice. the together series was partly successful. 174 students attended across 33 sessions. from feedback we know that it provided much needed interaction between students and gave many of them motivation to apply themselves to study, often delivering tangible outcomes from their time with us. feedback on the sessions suggested that studying with other learners at a specified time, with facilitators on hand, helped many students to avoid feelings of procrastination and/or demotivation. for example: this has been an extremely helpful session! i managed to do a lot more effective work and got all my questions answered. thanks everyone! (student, searching together) not all sessions were well attended, particularly revising together in semester 2. this could be due to factors such as timing and communication, and is being reviewed. managing expectations proved tricky in searching together, with difficult questions from individuals conducting systematic reviews. feedback from staff indicated less need for some of the together series to have pre-session surveys, citing low engagement, possibly due to students being unsure of what they wanted or needed to know until they were in attendance. allowing students the opportunity to share these thoughts at the start as well as throughout the session instead could also help encourage and increase ‘on camera’ and ‘on mic’ engagement. aston, stevenson, inala facilitating connections and supporting a learning community: together journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 4 recommendations our move to online teaching was careful and informed, but it happened more quickly than we would have liked or imagined. we are now considering how the together series will fit into a future, post-covid-19 offer. we will continue to create spaces where students can feel connected to each other and the support provided by the library and its people in order to nurture the university community going forward (hooks, 2003, p.130). overarchingly, we have learnt that how we approach a challenge is as important as what we do to address that challenge. our key learning points are: 1. stopping to assess and scrutinise what is already in place in order to inform what can be done is crucial. 2. a robust philosophy sets the values and beliefs within the team, supporting the response to a problem. 3. experimenting requires belief in that philosophy. references bali, m. (2020) pedagogy of care: covid-19 edition. available at: https://blog.mahabali.me/educational-technology-2/pedagogy-of-care-covid-19edition/ (accessed: 7 june 2021). blake, j. and illingworth, s. (2015) ‘from the outside in: bringing student engagement to the centre’, widening participation and lifelong learning, 17(2), pp.108-118. available at: https://doi.org/10.5456/wpll.17.2si.107 (accessed: 9 august 2021). hooks, bell. (2003) teaching community: a pedagogy of hope. new york: routledge. kneen, s., opebiyi, f. and theis, a. (2020) ‘shut up and pivot: moving writing support online’, northern collaboration 2020 virtual conference. durham university, durham, uk 18-19 november. available at: https://www.academiclibrariesnorth.ac.uk/northern-collaboration-2020 (accessed: 7 june 2021). https://blog.mahabali.me/educational-technology-2/pedagogy-of-care-covid-19-edition/ https://blog.mahabali.me/educational-technology-2/pedagogy-of-care-covid-19-edition/ https://doi.org/10.5456/wpll.17.2si.107 https://www.academiclibrariesnorth.ac.uk/northern-collaboration-2020 aston, stevenson, inala facilitating connections and supporting a learning community: together journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 5 laal, m. and ghodsi, s.m. (2012) ‘benefits of collaborative learning’, procedia social and behavioral sciences, 31, pp.486–490. available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sbspro.2011.12.091 (accessed: 9 august 2021). stommel, j. [@jessifer] (2020) a static recording of a synchronous zoom conversation doesn’t really count as “asynchronous” learning... [twitter]. available at: https://twitter.com/jessifer/status/1263579433358761984 (accessed: 7 june 2021). author details sam aston sfhea celp is a learning developer at the university of manchester. sam collaborates with staff and students to design and embed strategies for learning across the organisation to enable students to develop their academic practices. michael stevenson is a teaching and learning librarian at the university of manchester. michael teaches and supports students and researchers across a broad range of information literacy topics. padma inala is a teaching and learning librarian at the university of manchester. padma develops and delivers teaching to students and researchers to support their information literacy and academic skills. her particular area of interest is in supporting online/distance learners. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sbspro.2011.12.091 https://twitter.com/jessifer/status/1263579433358761984 facilitating connections and supporting a learning community: together the challenge the response recommendations references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special issue 22: compendium of innovative practice october 2021 ________________________________________________________________________ simulating cadaveric dissection with virtual resources during covid-19 in an undergraduate anatomy science programme ourania varsou university of glasgow, uk michelle welsh university of glasgow, uk keywords: anatomy; dissection; skills-based learning; technology enhanced learning and teaching; virtual learning; covid-19. the challenge many undergraduate degrees involve practice-based learning which teaches not only the technical skill itself, but also offers an opportunity to further develop subject-specific theoretical knowledge, as well as more transferable skills like teamwork and communication. typically, in undergraduate human anatomy education, practice-based learning entails some degree of hands-on cadaveric dissection. this allows learners to develop technical skills (knowing how to correctly use equipment, identifying/cutting anatomical structures), whilst also expanding their anatomical knowledge and appreciating normal anatomical variation that may be absent in illustrations. additionally, dissection can foster discipline-independent professional skills such as teamwork, communication, coping skills, ethical awareness, and respect (ghosh, 2017). due to covid-19, we had to find an alternative online method to deliver practice-based learning in our bachelor of science in anatomy. loss of this teaching could negatively impact on the student experience through: 1) missed opportunity for students to learn subject-specific knowledge, 2) reduced acquisition of subject-specific technical and transferable/professional skills (qaa, 2019), 3) negatively affecting student grades as dissection consolidates students’ theoretical knowledge (abdellatif, 2020), 4) impacting graduates’ future career options, especially in vocations/training/further studies requiring technical skills. varsou and welsh simulating cadaveric dissection with virtual resources during covid-19 in an undergraduate anatomy science programme journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 2 during the pandemic, we needed to ensure our online alternative taught subject-specific knowledge, whilst also addressing the other skills students develop during on-campus practice-based learning. as a range of different disciplinary programmes include similar practice-based teaching, our goal in this article is to plant the seeds for critical dialogues around what learning developers need to incorporate in virtual learning resources and to consider what online educational practices developed during covid-19 are pedagogically beneficial to retain in the post-pandemic setting. the response to replicate the practice-based lab experience online, we aimed to minimise the cognitive load of delivering similar information from multiple platforms (leppink and van den heuvel, 2015), so we combined two commercial e-resources: a 3d real-time virtual anatomy atlas with videos of human cadaveric dissections. the atlas allows interactive exploration of anatomical structures, thus better simulating the active learning of dissection; however, it lacks anatomical variation and is less representative of real-life experience. conversely, the videos provide realistic cadaveric anatomy and an indirect appreciation of dissection technical skills, but allow the students to be more passive (laurillard, 2002). we embedded these e-resources into our existing teaching material (lab manuals) aiming to substitute on-campus dissection with alternative online approaches, whilst also enhancing pre-existing learning activities through the use of the interactive atlas (puentedura, 2006). this approach was important to achieve our programme ilos, while transitioning oncampus practice-based learning online. student access is a fundamental component for successful technology engagement (bennett, 2014), therefore we ensured that all e-resources were embedded in a dedicated page for each teaching session in our virtual learning environment, promoting an immersive learning journey (laurillard, 2002). in a survey of our year three students (61% (23/38) response rate; ethics number: 200200083), all respondents were able to access the e-resources, with comments such as: ‘they were embedded on the relevant lectures in moodle which i found very useful as all the relevant information was easy to access’. varsou and welsh simulating cadaveric dissection with virtual resources during covid-19 in an undergraduate anatomy science programme journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 3 on-campus practice-based learning sessions normally stimulate development of transferable/professional skills including communication, teamwork, and ethical awareness but using these e-resources as independent online learning tools made it difficult to replicate this experience. therefore it was also important that we incorporated the eresources into our online live teaching sessions to allow students to work in groups to discuss what they were seeing, providing a more interactive experience, and helping them to develop communication and interpersonal skills. the use of cadaveric videos also meant the students were exposed to the ethical considerations of human dissection; openly discussing the use of cadavers in groups provided an opportunity to actively reflect on this experience which students might not otherwise have recognised. recommendations we believe these resources supported student learning of the subject-specific knowledge with 83% of our students reporting that the atlas was useful for online learning of gross anatomy compared to 61% for the videos. this difference might reflect the more interactive nature of the atlas compared to passive engagement with videos. despite this, we believe that returning to on-campus laboratories will be preferable to develop technical and transferable/professional skills that are challenging to fully simulate online, even with diverse virtual resources. 78% of our survey participants indicated a preference for keeping the atlas as part of on-campus teaching, with less being favourable towards the videos (57%). in future, combining on-campus labs with the use of a 3d atlas might promote better understanding of anatomical information and improve long-term knowledge retention beyond that of isolated on-campus sessions (peterson and mlynarczyk, 2016). the e-resources could be useful for pre-laboratory work, helping students better prepare for these and thus gain more from their on-campus experience (nordmann et al., 2020). for example, they could provide a gentle introduction to cadavers allowing first-time learners to overcome any potential anxiety or ethical concerns around exposure to human cadavers and help them prepare for dissection. based on our experience, the use of virtual resources to replicate on-campus practicebased lab experience only partially met all the learning requirements for our students to support their learning and future employability. both e-resources clearly supported subjectspecific knowledge student learning, whether these were used independently by students varsou and welsh simulating cadaveric dissection with virtual resources during covid-19 in an undergraduate anatomy science programme journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 4 or as part of an interactive class learning experience. however, neither demonstrated reallife anatomical variation which would be present in on-campus lab experience. although the videos went some way to demonstrate technical skills, such as correct use and handling of equipment with knowing how to cut anatomical structures, we do not believe that passively observing these could replace the hands-on active experience from the lab. similarly, neither e-resource used independently is likely to help students develop the transferable/professional skills such as teamwork and communication, but integrating them into online live sessions where students join staff and peers to interact with these resources offers an opportunity to acquire and develop such skills. finally, the videos offered an inactive exposure to human cadavers which, whilst it cannot replace students gaining hands-on experience with a body and the coping skills, ethical awareness, and respect that this experience fosters, can form the basis for discussions around these topics. with increasing student numbers and shortage of access to on-campus lab space and cadavers, these e-resources could provide a complementary resource to aid anatomy teaching if thoughtfully integrated into courses. acknowledgments we would like to thank dr vicki dale for providing general comments about the structure and style of our manuscript. note: part of this work was presented, as a short talk, at the 14th annual university of glasgow learning and teaching conference in june 2021 and, as a flash talk, at the anatomical society summer meeting in july 2021. references abdellatif, h. (2020) ‘time spent in practicing dissection correlated with improvement in anatomical knowledge of students: experimental study in an integrated learning program’, cureus, 12(4), p.e7558. https://doi.org/10.7759/cureus.7558. https://doi.org/10.7759/cureus.7558 varsou and welsh simulating cadaveric dissection with virtual resources during covid-19 in an undergraduate anatomy science programme journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 5 bennett, e. (2014) ‘learning from the early adopters: developing the digital practitioner’, research in learning technology, 22, p.21453. https://doi.org/10.3402/rlt.v22.21453 ghosh, s. k. (2017) ‘cadaveric dissection as an educational tool for anatomical sciences in the 21st century’, anatomical sciences education, 10(3), pp.286-299. https://doi.org/10.1002/ase.1649. laurillard, d. (2002) rethinking university teaching: a conversational framework for the effective use of learning technologies. london: routledge. leppink, j. and van den heuvel, a. (2015) ‘the evolution of cognitive load theory and its application to medical education’, perspectives on medical education, 4(3), pp.119127. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40037-015-0192-x. nordmann, e., horlin, c., hutchison, j., murray, j. a., robson, l., seery, m. k. and mackay, j. r. (2020) ‘ten simple rules for supporting a temporary online pivot in higher education’, plos comput biol, 16(10), p.e1008242. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1008242. peterson, d. c. and mlynarczyk, g. s. (2016) ‘analysis of traditional versus three‐ dimensional augmented curriculum on anatomical learning outcome measures’, anatomical sciences education, 9(6), pp.529-536. https://doi.org/10.1002/ase.1612. puentedura, r. r. (2006) transformation, technology, and education [blog post]. available at: http://hippasus.com/resources/tte/ (accessed: 7 june 2021). qaa (2019) subject benchmark statement: biomedical sciences [online resource]. available at: https://www.qaa.ac.uk/docs/qaa/subject-benchmarkstatements/subject-benchmark-statement-biomedicalsciences.pdf?sfvrsn=2bf2c881_12 (accessed: 7 june 2021). author details https://doi.org/10.3402/rlt.v22.21453 https://doi.org/10.1002/ase.1649 https://doi.org/10.1007/s40037-015-0192-x https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1008242 https://doi.org/10.1002/ase.1612 http://hippasus.com/resources/tte/ https://www.qaa.ac.uk/docs/qaa/subject-benchmark-statements/subject-benchmark-statement-biomedical-sciences.pdf?sfvrsn=2bf2c881_12 https://www.qaa.ac.uk/docs/qaa/subject-benchmark-statements/subject-benchmark-statement-biomedical-sciences.pdf?sfvrsn=2bf2c881_12 https://www.qaa.ac.uk/docs/qaa/subject-benchmark-statements/subject-benchmark-statement-biomedical-sciences.pdf?sfvrsn=2bf2c881_12 varsou and welsh simulating cadaveric dissection with virtual resources during covid-19 in an undergraduate anatomy science programme journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 6 ourania varsou is a lecturer in anatomy at the school of life sciences, university of glasgow. ourania’s research includes imaging with a strong focus on ultrasound, clinically applied anatomy, and scholarship of teaching and learning. michelle welsh is a senior lecturer in anatomy at the school of life sciences, university of glasgow. michelle’s research has focussed on reproductive biology and embryology as well as scholarship of teaching and learning. the challenge the response recommendations acknowledgments references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 27 april 2023 ________________________________________________________________________ ©2023 the author(s) (cc-by 4.0) better together: innovative learning and authentic connections in the online space book review: abegglen, s., neuhaus, f. and wilson, k. (eds.) (2022) voices from the digital classroom: 25 interviews about teaching and learning in the face of a global pandemic. calgary: university of calgary press. carina buckley solent university, uk keywords: community; learning technologies; online learning; innovation; student engagement. in the early months of 2020, as one country after another went into lockdown, like the lights turning off in a house, room by darkened room, those of us not working on healthcare’s front line retreated to our homes and to isolation. or did we? the teaching and learning online network (talon) emerged during that time as a hub for sharing resources and knowledge to support the shift to online learning, to compile ideas for approaches, and to give updates and themed readings in monthly newsletters. quickly, the focus expanded to the people in the network and the university of calgary, its home, before reaching out further – to the wider global learning and teaching community, beyond the confines of the digital space. one result is this remarkable book. each chapter draws on the experiences of a total of 27 members of the dispersed talon community, interviewed via zoom in the first year of the pandemic: half at the time of the emergency pivot, and the rest once we had returned, deliberately, to online teaching in the new academic year. buckley better together: innovative learning and authentic connections in the online space journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 2 gathering lecturers and professors, academic developers, learning designers, learning technologists, librarians, and graduate students, drawn from a range of subject disciplines and professional services, the chapters capture a snapshot of life shifted online for those already fully immersed and confident in technology, and those who were brand new to it. the first half of the book tends to typify the innovation and experimentation of those first few months, everyone focused on ensuring their students continued to be able to learn even while sometimes struggling to manage the plethora of tools available. deeper issues emerge too, around social justice and ‘who sets the norms of the digital environment’ (maha bali, p.139), the importance of sharing expertise and experience and having guidance at the right time, and even what higher education is for. as time – and the book – moves on, the message evolves towards a greater appreciation of the challenges faced, although this is less to do with the technological aspects and more about what tom burns calls ‘the humane aspect of university’ (p.53). and this forms the driving message of the book: the value of partnership working, whether that is staff and students, students with students, or colleagues within or across institutions, summed up by jane macfarlane: ‘the human experience is all part of the learning process. . . . we learn better when we’re together’ (p.92). technology, as the title suggests, plays a large part in the book, but very much in the vein of white, white and borthwick’s observation that ‘technologies and their social contexts of use have a complex and co-constructive relationship’ (2021, p.164). as such, it is evident that this is not a book about technology-enhanced learning, or a review of digital tools. several interviews highlight the challenge of negotiating social presence, one of the community of inquiry’s three interlinking elements (along with teaching presence and cognitive presence) that converge to create a ‘collaborative constructivist educational experience’ (vaughan, cleveland-innes and garrison, 2013, p.11). it does provide some useful advice for those keen to engage students in online learning spaces: set manageable and collective expectations, choose tools you’re comfortable with, keep the learning goals in mind, and transform existing materials rather than directly translate them into a new mode of buckley better together: innovative learning and authentic connections in the online space journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 3 delivery. it also recognises the challenges of learning and teaching online, in the difficulty of accessing the ‘rich mixture’ of different forms of dialogue that occur face-to-face (charlie smith, p.86), and how we have not yet managed to tap into the affordances of technology for the informal connections that can add so much meaning to a learning experience. however, this is a positive book, recounting inspiring and creative ways for connection, for presence and authenticity, and for co-construction, all of which demonstrate clearly how constraints can stimulate and support innovation, and how online teaching can resolutely have community at its heart: as one interviewee notes, ‘i found i could [build a strong relationship with my students] by creating a supportive atmosphere built on trust and respect. . . . the pandemic . . . pulled us in the same direction’ (lisa silver, p.219). it is also a beautiful book, the typography and layout designed to reflect the interplay between the text and the screen, and between 2d and 3d. this is carried through in the middle section, comprising colour portraits of all the interviewees, taken on zoom by a professional photographer and arranged in physical context to give again that mesh of the real and the virtual, and providing a humanising and personalising touch that lifts the whole book. as many of these educators sought to do themselves, these portraits have taken the person out of the computer and given them a tangible presence. the reflections that close each chapter, which characterise the patience we had to learn to live with, add most value to the book. written a year after each initial interview, these update the reader on the interviewees’ position and outlook. the majority of voices recognise the opportunities the pandemic wrought for learning and teaching, and indeed, ‘emancipation depends on a new blueprint where what is possible, perceptible and palpable is redrawn’ (quinn, 2010, p.64). the outlook for higher education, in these interviews, remains upbeat, even if it can seem difficult to imagine sometimes how we might achieve our goals, or hold off those developments we are less keen on. voices from the digital classroom shows us that amongst the range of responses and the diversity of experiences, we are united by more than divides us: a common sense of care and buckley better together: innovative learning and authentic connections in the online space journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 4 connection, sharing and community. leaving the last word to interviewee rujuta nayak, ‘we are all holding each other’s hands and . . . doing what we can’ (p.155). references quinn, j. (2010) learning communities and imagined social capital. london: continuum. vaughan, n. d., cleveland-innes, m. and garrison, d. r. (2013) teaching in blended learning environments: creating and sustaining communities of inquiry. athabasca: au press. white, s., white, s. and borthwick, k. (2021) ‘blended professionals, technology and online learning: identifying a socio-technical third space in higher education’, higher education quarterly, 75, pp.161-174. https://doi.org/10.1111/hequ.12252. author details carina buckley is currently instructional design manager at solent university, responsible for the on-going development of the vle as a student-centred, active and inclusive learning space. her research interests broadly connect to collaboration and community and have evolved recently to explore ideas around leadership and professional identity. she serves as the treasurer for aldinhe and also sits on the steering group for the international consortium of academic language and learning developers (icalld). following a phd in archaeology in 2006, she has since added advance he principal fellow and certified leading practitioner in learning development to her post-nominals. licence ©2023 the author(s). this is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (cc-by 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. see http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. journal of learning https://doi.org/10.1111/hequ.12252 buckley better together: innovative learning and authentic connections in the online space journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 5 development in higher education (jldhe) is a peer-reviewed open access journal published by the association for learning development in higher education (aldinhe). better together: innovative learning and authentic connections in the online space book review: abegglen, s., neuhaus, f. and wilson, k. (eds.) (2022) voices from the digital classroom: 25 interviews about teaching and learning in the face of a global pandemic. calgary: university of calgary press. references author details licence journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special issue 22: compendium of innovative practice october 2021 ________________________________________________________________________ rapid re-design of a postgraduate taught module for asynchronous delivery on the futurelearn platform ikedinachi ogamba coventry university, uk keywords: asynchronous learning design; content acquisition; active learning; futurelearn; covid-19. the challenge the module under discussion is a component for a health management master’s degree at a uk university, which attracts international students from various healthand managementrelated backgrounds. pre-pandemic, it was taught through a series of faceto-face lectures and seminars, and delivered three times yearly with an average class size of 90 students per cohort. although the university moved teaching and learning online at the onset of the covid-19 lockdown, these were mainly synchronous classes taught through bigbluebutton on moodle, zoom, and ms teams. therefore, little consideration was given to other changes to students’ and tutors’ personal, familial, social, economic, and environmental circumstances, which complicated the transition to online learning and homeworking. some of these circumstances include electricity and internet connectivity issues, sharing computer devices and disruption from household members, lack of convenient learning space, other demands on time schedules, and multitasking on other chores while learning online (adedoyin and soykan, 2020). the situation created barriers to fully engaging in synchronous classes, which saw a drop in students’ participation. the recruitment of new intakes for may 2020, september 2020, and january 2021 included mostly international students who started studying from their various home countries due to the travel restrictions. hence, learners’ geographical differences and time zones was another major challenge for scheduling sessions to suit all. ogamba rapid re-design of a postgraduate taught module for asynchronous delivery on the futurelearn platform journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 2 therefore, beyond the traditional online synchronous lecture sessions, there was the need to enhance both the pedagogy and the virtual learning environments to adapt to the challenges of online learning during the covid-19 pandemic. the response between april and may 2020 there was a rapid redesign of the module, to support asynchronous delivery, through a collaborative approach involving a team of module tutors, online learning designers, and media technologists. the futurelearn platform was chosen to offer students the benefits of flexible learning, access to teaching materials anywhere anytime, as well as the pedagogical benefits of active learning with tutors and peers (owston, york and murtha, 2013; waha and davis, 2014). futurelearn is a popular vle for massive open online courses (moocs) which has been used by some universities in the teaching and awarding of online degree programmes and microcredentials. the design process started with a breakdown of the module structure through the application of constructive alignment (biggs and tang, 2011) to mapping out the module learning outcomes, indicative content, and the semester’s ten weeks of lecture and seminar topics, and formative and summative assessments. related weekly topics were paired to create two-week-long short courses with their relevant module level outcomes, content, and learning activities mapped, resulting in a total of five futurelearn short courses. these were further developed using a detailed storyboarding process to map out each short course (young and perović, 2016). the conversational framework (laurillard, 2012) was utilised in the design process and uniquely applied using a two-prong approach: ‘content acquisition development’ and ‘active learning tasks development’. corresponding to constructionism pedagogy (laurillard, 2020), this two-pronged approach was introduced to provide an online learning environment in which to develop and integrate concepts and practices from the tutors, learners, and their peers, to replace the usual face-to-face delivery of lectures and seminars/workshops. ogamba rapid re-design of a postgraduate taught module for asynchronous delivery on the futurelearn platform journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 3 content acquisition development acquisition is one of the major learning activities within the conversational framework, which requires the learner to read, watch, and/or listen, in order to develop concepts (laurillard, 2012). text, images/diagrams, audio/podcast, and videos were used in a combination of lecture and seminar styles, grounded in evidence from theory and practice to design concept delivery (figure 1). figure 1. content acquisition development overlap. active learning task development to support the content acquisition, active learning tasks were embedded to encourage inquiry, discussion, collaboration, practice, and production activities among learners (laurillard, 2012). ogamba rapid re-design of a postgraduate taught module for asynchronous delivery on the futurelearn platform journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 4 in each step/topic on the futurelearn short courses content is acquired through reading, watching, and/or listening. this is then followed by one or more active learning task, undertaken individually with peers and/or tutors using the comment section or other formats – including discussion questions, debate, comparative analysis, reflection, peerreview, collaborative writing/annotation, quiz, padlet activities, etc. (figure 2, based on the work of laurillard (2012)). figure 2. active learning activities following each futurelearn content acquisition step/topic. through the two-prong approach, this redesign provides an integration of lectures (content acquisition materials) with seminar/workshop activities (active learning tasks) into one platform. primarily, the asynchronous nature enables both educators and students to cope with the challenges of teaching and learning during the heat of the pandemic. moreover, it offered students the benefits of flexible learning and open and on-going access to learning materials. ogamba rapid re-design of a postgraduate taught module for asynchronous delivery on the futurelearn platform journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 5 the module evaluation feedback from students was very positive with 100%, 89%, and 95% overall satisfaction in the first, second, and third run respectively. however, some qualitative comments raised issues on the task overload and the need for live and face-toface classes. recommendations 1. application of conversational framework in designing asynchronous teaching and learning activities would benefit from the two-pronged approach involving a combination of content acquisition materials with complementary active learning tasks. 2. the use of a storyboard and module/course mapping process helps to see the whole picture and ensure consistency throughout the futurelearn course content design. in addition, a collaboration (co-creation) approach would enrich the story boarding and design thinking process. 3. the tutor/designer must know their target students’ needs. while many students engaged well with the use of the futurelearn platform, others preferred live sessions as they had registered to study face-to-face. hence, future design may be more relevant for students who opt for blended and/or online learning. 4. due to the rapid nature of the redesign, sense check was conducted by learning designers. however, in hindsight, students’ views are needed to enhance the design process. 5. while the use of futurelearn promotes asynchronous facilitation of teaching and learning, there is a risk of additional workload for both tutors and students. although workload estimation is difficult to predict in designing and delivery, it is important to prevent burnout or disengagement. 6. during the delivery process, tutors could supplement both content acquisition and active learning tasks on futurelearn with external online collaborative tools, links, and updates using interactive comments and pinned post functions in relevant steps. also, where possible, it is beneficial to provide opportunity for live interactive sessions to foster a sense of belonging among learners. ogamba rapid re-design of a postgraduate taught module for asynchronous delivery on the futurelearn platform journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 6 references adedoyin, o. b. and soykan, e. (2020) ‘covid-19 pandemic and online learning: the challenges and opportunities’, interactive learning environments, pp.1-13. https://doi.org/10.1080/10494820.2020.1813180. biggs, j. b. and tang, c. (2011) teaching for quality learning at university. maidenhead: mcgraw hill education and open university press. laurillard, d. (2012) teaching as a design science: building pedagogical patterns for learning and technology. new york and london: routledge. laurillard, d. (2020) ‘the significance of constructionism as a distinctive pedagogy’, in tangney, b., rowan byrne, j. and girvan, c. (eds.) constructionism 2020: proceedings of the 2020 constructionism conference. university of dublin, dublin 26-29 may. dublin: trinity college, university of dublin, pp.29-37. owston, r., york, d. and murtha, s. (2013) ‘student perceptions and achievement in a university blended learning strategic initiative’, the internet and higher education, 18, pp.38-46. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.iheduc.2012.12.003. waha, b. and davis, k. (2014) ‘university students’ perspective on blended learning’, journal of higher education policy and management, 36(2), pp.172-182. https://doi.org/10.1080/1360080x.2014.884677. young, c. and perović, n. (2016) ‘rapid and creative course design: as easy as abc?’. procedia-social and behavioral sciences, 228, pp.390-395. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sbspro.2016.07.058. author details ikedinachi ogamba is an assistant professor and director of msc global healthcare management at coventry university, uk. he has a broad experience of leading the design https://doi.org/10.1080/10494820.2020.1813180 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.iheduc.2012.12.003 https://doi.org/10.1080/1360080x.2014.884677 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sbspro.2016.07.058 ogamba rapid re-design of a postgraduate taught module for asynchronous delivery on the futurelearn platform journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 7 and delivery of learning and teaching in higher education, and leadership and management experience in global health and development practice. he is a senior fellow of hea, with sotl interests in design, innovation, e-learning, and inclusive and authentic curriculum. rapid re-design of a postgraduate taught module for asynchronous delivery on the futurelearn platform the challenge the response content acquisition development recommendations references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special edition 25: aldinhe conference proceedings and reflections october 2022 ________________________________________________________________________ 'beyond the crisis’: accepting and adapting to the virtual academic skills workshop laura key leeds beckett university, uk presentation abstract this lightning talk examined the journey taken to re-create and co-construct the academic skills workshop programme on offer at leeds beckett university, an interactive and inclusive online classroom adapted due to the impact of covid-19. a 'learning on the go' and 'trial and error' approach involving continuous evaluation was adopted for the creation of the programme, which was informed by staff and student feedback. the approach helped move this new and varied programme beyond the crisis point of covid-19 towards a more robust online presence for future purpose. key considerations helping to shape the programme included creating a sense of community and belonging online, co-creating a curriculum that addressed student feedback and needs, and responding to student wellbeing as well as academic skills development. this resulted in the redevelopment of an entire workshop programme, offered to students via bb collaborate. sixteen workshops were rewritten as one-hour interactive webinars, asynchronous materials and resources were provided for 24/7 availability, and a central sign-up service was offered via the institute's myhub interface. already established principles in online learning were taken into account during the development process (anderson, 2008; nguyen, 2015). these adaptations saw a twofold increase in student participation during 2020-2021 (1,107 students, 53%) compared to 2018-2019 (410 students, 20%) and 2019-2020 (562 students, 27%). learnings and successes from this project ranged from being adaptable and available, and offering different formats for learning where webinars were a feature, to seeing online learning as normal. challenges that continue to be pondered are the value of face-to-face classrooms vs online, creating more 'on-demand' learning resources, blog posts, podcasts, and study modules available 24/7 for self-directed learning. key 'beyond the crisis’: accepting and adapting to the virtual academic skills workshop journal of learning development in higher education special issue 25 october 2022 2 the presentation hoped to share our experience as a team, but also to offer an opportunity to hear about broader thoughts and experiences relating to academic skills webinar delivery at he institutions since the covid-19 pandemic began. community response the systematic process of redesigning the team’s open programme workshops with a view to online delivery clearly acknowledges that the differences between in-person ld workshops, on the one hand, and webinars on the other, go beyond the ‘surface’ element of delivery space, and into more complex distinctions related to pedagogical approaches, learning strategies and environments. this resonates with my own experience of coordinating a similar programme of workshops at my institution. though initially we took an emergency response approach, pivoting to online delivery within weeks to ensure we continued to provide a service to our students, we had a similar experience of ‘trial and error’ with regards to almost every aspect of developing our virtual workshops – from session design and software options to accessibility and engagement. we were supported throughout the process by the incredibly positive response from our students, reflected not only in booking and attendance statistics (a sharp increase in 20/21 after the pivot to online delivery as compared to previous face-to-face delivery), but also in their feedback, which acknowledged our efforts despite inevitable failings. these examples, and others shared by colleagues, clearly demonstrate that in the context of the pandemic, ld practitioners were quick to respond to the challenge, take initiative in finding new ways to support students, and often provided examples of good practice at institutional level. while questions about the most appropriate and inclusive delivery mode/s continue to represent a key concern for ld practitioners and became a prominent theme of the conference, i feel these lessons in conjuring responsive, student-oriented pedagogical solutions will be equally important in the future. the presenter’s experience of shifting instruction online mirrored my own, despite it taking place in another sector, which suggests that the challenges may be common and lead to a shift in expectations and the development of a ‘new normal’. the big question is how do we take ‘the good stuff’ from the covid-19 experience and make sure we use it effectively going forward? the ability to be flexible and adaptable for key 'beyond the crisis’: accepting and adapting to the virtual academic skills workshop journal of learning development in higher education special issue 25 october 2022 3 all has been a great achievement. similarly, we have had to be creative and put in an enormous amount of work. i have seen a wide range of ‘adaptations’ or ‘lack of adaptations’ when we were all thrown into the virtual world. at the initial stage, we were all operating in ‘pilot mode’. the majority of educators had limited experience working completely remotely or delivering completely online. we all did the best we could initially. what has been interesting to see is how educators have continued to develop the virtual learning environment. we must consider what has worked well and we should not shy away from virtual delivery, taking away the learnings gained. this presentation truly reflected the best of a rapid adaptability to virtual delivery and a key desire to learn and develop further, using experiences gained. next steps and additional questions what are the most appropriate and inclusive delivery modes in the post-pandemic world? what should the ‘new normal’ look like? what do we take with us from the crisis, and what do we want to leave behind? what are the necessary skills that lds should develop that favour adaptability and flexibility for changing environments? author’s reflection the community response to this lightning talk was very thought-provoking, raising questions about academic skills delivery modes and the future of hybrid learning. it was clear that my presentation tapped into more general uncertainty in the sector about what we can take from the pandemic situation, and which elements of the crisis we might want to leave behind. the general consensus was that time and thought need to be put into the development of ld programmes that take the best elements of online learning forward – for example, flexibility, accessibility and transportability. deidre casey’s (2020) work on the pandemic as providing resilience in the face of any potential future disruptions to face-toface learning is an interesting read in this respect. concentrating specifically on ld workshops, it was useful to hear how colleagues from other institutions have experienced similar challenges and successes with online delivery and that the online workshop seems to be becoming a staple of ld programmes more key 'beyond the crisis’: accepting and adapting to the virtual academic skills workshop journal of learning development in higher education special issue 25 october 2022 4 widely, even if face-to-face is still offered. this adds weight to lbu’s commitment to keeping the workshops online in the first instance. clearly, statistics, feedback and review processes all need to be embedded in the aim to deliver sessions that are not only academically valuable to the student body, but are also a useful addition (in terms of staff time and effort) to the institution in question. another matter to be borne in mind is the risk of heightening digital inequalities with a move to online or hybrid learning (belluigi et al., 2020), and any movement towards increased use of digital technologies must therefore be taken with caution and in conversation with students so that feasibility is considered. being part of the lightning talk session was enlightening, as there were clear synergies between the presentations – especially in terms of institutions being at something of a crossroads with decisions over the most suitable balance between face-to-face and online delivery. upon reflection, it is probable that we need an entire calendar year under ‘normal’ (i.e. not restricted by pandemic regulations) circumstances before we can gain a more accurate picture of what ld teaching might look like in the longer term, both at my university and across the sector. what is certain is that both staff and programmes will need to develop a degree of flexibility to ensure that online and hybrid learning meets the requirements of students and heis alike – and this will necessitate further learning, which can be fostered successfully through continued inter-institutional collaboration. references anderson, t. (2008) the theory and practice of online learning. edmonton: au press. belluigi, d., czerniewicz, l., khoo, s., algers, a., buckley, l.a., prinsloo, p., mgqwashu, e., camps, c., brink, c., marx, r., wissing, g. and pallitt, n., (2020) ‘“needs must?” critical reflections on the implications of the covid 19 “pivot online” for equity in higher education’, digital culture and education. available at: https://www.digitalcultureandeducation.com/reflections-on-covid19/needs-must (accessed: 28 september 2022). casey, d. (2020) ‘emergency pivot to online academic learning support: crisis or opportunity?’, all ireland journal of higher education, 12(3), pp.1-3. available at: https://www.digitalcultureandeducation.com/reflections-on-covid19/needs-must key 'beyond the crisis’: accepting and adapting to the virtual academic skills workshop journal of learning development in higher education special issue 25 october 2022 5 https://ojs.aishe.org/index.php/aishe-j/article/view/519 (accessed: 21 october 2022). nguyen, t. (2015) ‘the effectiveness of online learning: beyond no significant differences and future horizons’, merlot online journal of learning and teaching, 11(2), pp.309-319. available at: https://jolt.merlot.org/vol11no2/nguyen_0615.pdf (accessed: 21 october 2022). acknowledgments thank you to all the contributors who shared their reflections and enriched our insight into this conference presentation and its impact on the audience. special thanks go to arina cirstea from de montfort university, anne-marie langford from the university of northampton and patricia perlman-dee from the university of manchester. author details laura key has worked in he for over a decade, holding roles at the universities of manchester and liverpool and the university centre at bradford college, before joining the library academic support team at leeds beckett university in 2018. it was during her studies for a phd in american literature that laura first became interested in teaching pedagogy, and she counts resource development as one of her strengths in her present role of academic skills tutor. laura’s recent achievements include the co-development of the leeds beckett essay x-ray tool (funded by the university’s centre for teaching and learning) and she is also an advancehe fellow (fhea). https://ojs.aishe.org/index.php/aishe-j/article/view/519 https://jolt.merlot.org/vol11no2/nguyen_0615.pdf 'beyond the crisis’: accepting and adapting to the virtual academic skills workshop presentation abstract community response next steps and additional questions author’s reflection references acknowledgments author details literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 3: march 2011 investigation of the relevance of the notion of a threshold concept within generic learning development work carol edwards university of leicester, uk abstract since the term ‘threshold concept’ was applied within economics (meyer and land, 2003), its relevance has been demonstrated within disciplines ranging from biology (taylor, 2006); to communication, culture, and media (cousin, 2006); accounting (lucas and mladenovic, 2006); and philosophy (booth, 2006). grasping a threshold concept has been described as ‘…opening up a new and previously inaccessible way of thinking about something’ and gaining ‘…a transformed internal view of subject matter, subject landscape, or even world view’ (meyer and land, 2006a, p.3). in previous issues of this journal, rust (2009) and cousin (2010) have proposed that, by highlighting the relevance of threshold concepts within the course content of academic disciplines, we can support learning development work by academics within their departments. cousin (2010) suggests that our acknowledgement of this particular contribution that academics can make to learning development work, may pave the way for more collaborative relationships between learning developers and academics. if threshold concepts are of such widespread relevance, and can be such powerful learning tools, it would be a shame if their potential were to be explored solely within academic disciplines. this article therefore swivels the spotlight back onto the field of generic learning development, and investigates the relevance of the notion of a threshold concept to study skills development across, rather than solely within, the academic disciplines. keywords: threshold concept; learning development; academic skills; study skills consultation; troublesome knowledge; cross-disciplinary. edwards investigation of the relevance of the notion of a threshold concept within generic learning development work the learning development consultation the one-to-one learning development consultation involves close engagement between individual students and learning developers, so this may provide the context in which threshold concepts can be most easily identified. while each consultation is individualised, there is a broad collection of explanations/advice that seems to be disproportionately useful for many students, across many disciplines. once such learning is supported within the consultation, students can become empowered to make significant steps forward in their academic effectiveness. is it possible that elements in this collection could usefully be termed threshold concepts within learning development? the vignette in box 1 describes the case of an international student who booked a consultation after a previously lengthy period of troubled feelings. relevant, accessible, and timely explanation of the particular requirements and styles of academic writing in the uk enabled this student to make huge progress. this suggests that something akin to threshold concepts exists within the routine work of learning development. box 1. an international student came for a consultation three months into his masters course. he was extremely upset. from being a top student in his home country, he was now failing assignments. he didn’t know what had gone wrong. all he could think of was to leave the course, waste family money, and go home with no qualification. the consultation provided a safe place in which to express his concerns openly and confidentially. he was supported in grasping three threshold concepts relating to academic writing: the importance of the exact title; the meaning of critical writing; and how argument can inform structure. the student called two months later to say that he had gained two a grades and a distinction in his next three assignments. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 2 edwards investigation of the relevance of the notion of a threshold concept within generic learning development work table 1 offers some candidates for the label of ‘threshold concept’ within learning development. they are all typical ideas that we work on with students. individually, these ideas may appear relatively simple, perhaps even obvious, nevertheless, each can be very powerful when worked through, understood, and put into practice effectively by a student for the first time. you don’t have to read every book on the reading list the exact referencing format does actually matter the most important thing is the title of the assignment, and every single message within that title interpretations are not necessarily right or wrong, but are supported or unsupported to a certain extent by the evidence move from such phrases such as ‘the fact that’ ‘we know that’ and ‘clearly’, to phrases like ‘there is strong evidence that’ and ‘this suggests that’ you can’t revise every hour of the day. there will be unproductive time. be realistic and build this into your plans mnemonics can be used to remind you of a series of questions or processes as well as a series of facts it can be more useful to practise creating detailed essay plans, than writing full essays take control of what you want to look for in the literature; don’t just wade in and try to make notes on everything if you critique your own approach it is positive evidence of your critical skills rather than simply evidence of failure crossing out is positive: the more you edit out poor writing, the better your draft can become writing is an important part of the thinking process, not a postscript to it liminality itself as a way of living during part of the doctoral process table 1. some potential threshold concepts that feature frequently within one-to-one learning development consultations. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 3 edwards investigation of the relevance of the notion of a threshold concept within generic learning development work this article considers the nature of the learning development work that takes place within one-to-one consultations, and compares this against the five defining characteristics of threshold concepts suggested by meyer and land (2003, pp.4-9). these characteristics are: ‘troublesome knowledge’ associated with grasping the concept; and, once grasped, that the concept is ‘transformative’; ‘integrative’; ‘bounded’; and ‘irreversible’. troublesome knowledge meyer and land (2003, p.10) suggest that threshold concepts within an academic discipline can feel problematic or ‘troublesome’ for learners. within learning development we tend instead to be dealing with troublesome processes, rather than troublesome knowledge. these processes can represent significant challenges for some students, at certain points in their academic careers, and the resulting problems can have serious consequences if not explicitly addressed. for example, a student may want to discuss: • how to write an essay, not what to put in it; • how to approach revision, rather than what to revise; and • how to prepare for a literature review, rather than what specific texts to read. within a discipline, a student’s progress on a specific aspect of a topic can even be brought to a halt by the failure to grasp a particular threshold concept. within learning development, the impact of failure to grasp a threshold concept tends to impair a student’s performance of a certain element of academic practice across a range of situations, rather than bringing their work to a halt. they may, for example, still be able to pass exams or assignments in all of their subjects, but they may perform well below their potential across the board because of limitations in: the effectiveness in their revision process; their notemaking process; their level of critical writing; or their time-management. perkins (1999) suggests that troublesome knowledge can appear counter-intuitive, alien, or incoherent. examples of this within learning development are: • to be more effective in revision it’s actually best not to plan to revise solidly from 611pm; • to do adequate background reading: no you don’t have to read all the books on the reading list; journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 4 edwards investigation of the relevance of the notion of a threshold concept within generic learning development work • if you criticise aspects of your own research, it is evidence that you are taking a critical approach, rather than simply evidence of failure. within the consultation, a student is offered a metaphorical safety net into which they can fall, and where they can voice their difficulties confidentially. the learning developer has invariably met the situation before; is not criticising or judging; and crucially is not panicking! tension associated with the troublesome nature of the process can be defused, and constructive progress through the threshold can begin. the concepts suggested above may not be inherently difficult to understand, but they are difficult in a different and equally challenging way. they can relate to long-held attitudes, or to behaviour that has been learned and practised over time. they can be implicit within a student’s academic practice, rather than anything that they are particularly aware of. these factors contribute to the difficulty students can have in identifying, evaluating, and solving their problems for themselves, and to the difficulty they can have in making changes once the problems have been identified. transformative despite their apparent simplicity, working through such threshold concepts can be powerfully transformative for students who are supported in grasping the advice and integrating it into their academic practice. efklides’ (2006, p.61) work in this field shows that ‘even small changes in the phrasing or in the context of the task may have an effect on meta-cognitive experiences’. the vignette in box 1 is an example of such a seemingly disproportionate transformation. work on threshold concepts within departments involves supporting students to move through a ‘portal’ (meyer and land, 2006a, p.3) to a new level of conceptual understanding. within one-to-one learning development consultations we are often supporting students in gaining a new perspective on an old challenge, for example notemaking. gaining this new perspective can prompt a crucial shift in attitude and approach to an academic process, rather than a new conceptual understanding. in the case of notemaking it could be the shift from: wading into the reading and taking comprehensive but unmanageable volumes of notes; to planning in advance the different kinds of material you journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 5 edwards investigation of the relevance of the notion of a threshold concept within generic learning development work are looking for, then reading with more purpose, and making more selective and relevant notes. integrative the candidate threshold concepts suggested in table 1 relate to processes that are already inherently integrated across a student’s academic work. progress through one threshold can therefore facilitate progress across an already integrated set of skills. this is different from meyer and land’s (2003, p.4) description of integration within academic discipline, whereby grasping a threshold concept exposes ‘the previously hidden interrelatedness of something’. within learning development, grasping a threshold concept can allow a student to improve the performance of an existing skill, such as essay writing, that is already integrated, but which was previously operating ineffectively and letting him or her down. bounded meyer and land (2003, p.5) describe boundedness as, ‘possibly often (though not necessarily always)’ a feature. an example within an academic discipline is the specific meaning, and therefore boundedness, of the concept ‘elasticity’ within economics (reinmann and jackson, 2006, p.116); a word that has a different meaning in other contexts. potential threshold concepts within generic learning development work tend to be of crossdisciplinary relevance rather than bounded. there is reasonably clear demarcation within the one-to-one consultation, between the students’ content-related knowledge, and their generic academic skills. the consultation will focus on the latter, to support students’ development and effective use of the former (edwards, 2009). students themselves are responsible for applying the generic learning gained within a one-to-one consultation in a way that fits with the requirements of their own academic discipline. such meta-cognitive practice, of grasping, transferring, and effectively applying new learning, is an important academic skill in itself (billing, 2007). so, contrary to the boundedness of discipline-based threshold concepts, working across discipline boundaries is a key aspect of threshold work within learning development. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 6 ed jou wards investigation of the relevance of the notion of a threshold concept within generic learning development work rnal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 7 irreversible the ideal image may be of students who, having grasped a threshold concept, can never go back to their previous more limited level of understanding. within learning development, a student may step forward through a threshold in discussions with a learning developer, and experience a revelation about, for example, how to draw boundaries around their background reading. actually putting that into routine and effective practice, on their own, is a further step in the challenge, and may involve several steps backward as well as forward. within learning development, therefore, working through a threshold tends to signal the beginning of a period of change and development, rather than the switching on of an irreversible process. working through a discipline-specific threshold concept may also, however, involve a period of adjustment while the student learns to work with their new understanding. the primary difference between the two may be in the kind of work that a student is doing as he or she grasps and begins to use a threshold concept. in the case of a disciplinespecific threshold concept, the main challenge tends to be to gain an intellectual understanding of the concept. within generic learning development, the main challenge tends to be, firstly to appreciate the relevance of a new perspective on some aspect of their academic practice; and secondly to change their problematic, and perhaps ingrained, existing academic practice. the degree to which either of these kinds of change can be irreversible relates to the different nature of the change taking place. table 2 summarises the similarities and differences suggested above, between threshold work in a discipline-specific, and a generic learning context. the five key characteristics of a threshold concept are relevant in cases of both similarity and of difference. wards investigation of the relevance of the notion of a threshold concept within generic learning development worked journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 8 working through a threshold within an academic discipline working through a threshold within a one-to-one learning development consultation troublesome knowledge difficulty in grasping a specific, challenging, concept within the content of a discipline. student’s progress on a specific topic may be brought to a halt by the failure to grasp a particular threshold concept. difficulty in performing an academic process to a sufficiently high standard. student’s progress unlikely to be brought to a halt by such a failure; instead they may underperform in a certain aspect of academic practice across a range of assignments, experiments, exams, presentations, or discussions. transformative can be hugely transformative once grasped and put into practice effectively. tends to relate to grasping an understanding of a concept. can be hugely transformative once grasped and put into practice effectively. tends to relate to gaining a new perspective on a problem process. integrated once grasped, the threshold concept can be quickly integrated with existing knowledge. already integrated within the student’s academic practice: grasping it can facilitate more effective practice across an already integrated skill-set. bounded potentially bounded within the specific discipline or sub-discipline. inherently unbounded, and widely applicable within and across disciplines. irreversible potentially irreversible. potentially irreversible. table 2. comparison of working through a threshold within an academic discipline, and within a one-to-one learning development consultation, against five key features of a threshold concept listed by meyer and land (2003). edwards investigation of the relevance of the notion of a threshold concept within generic learning development work the doctoral process the doctoral process is an interesting landscape within which to identify generic threshold concepts. kiley (2009) and trafford and leshem (2009) identify the liminal state as having particular relevance for doctoral candidates. i suggest that spending a certain amount of time in a liminal state may be a defining characteristic of the doctoral process, and that realisation and acceptance of this may represent a threshold concept in itself. doctoral study involves in-depth focus on a highly specific substantive element within a discipline, where students may work so close to the frontier of knowledge that they may even be involved with the discovery of new discipline-specific threshold concepts. however, it also requires their demonstration, to a high standard, of a wide range of generic academic skills. it is this requirement that enables learning developers to provide effective support for doctoral students within one-to-one consultations. margaret kiley (2009, p.298-9) identified the following threshold concepts within the doctoral process: ‘argument or thesis, supported by defensible evidence’; ‘the concept of theory as underpinning research and being an outcome of research’; and ‘the concept of a framework as a means of locating or bounding the research’. similarly, trafford and leshem (2009) report the many generic aspects of ‘doctoralness’ rather than disciplinespecific knowledge that often let doctoral candidates down in their theses and vivas. so, while doctoral study clearly involves work through discipline-specific threshold concepts, it also involves work through several important generic learning thresholds. discussion meyer and land (2003, p.9) suggest that the term ‘threshold concept’ may be more appropriate within disciplines ‘where there is a relatively greater degree of consensus on what constitutes a body of knowledge’. in areas where this is not so easy, they suggest that development in ‘ways of thinking and practising also constitutes a critical threshold function in leading to a transformed understanding’. thresholds in learning development relate primarily to ways of thinking and practising within an academic community, rather than to subject-specific knowledge. meyer and land (2006b, p.23) also write about the point where a student ‘becomes conscious of the fact that they are, or are beginning to think like, an accountant, chemist, economist, historian’. a student also needs to think and journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 9 edwards investigation of the relevance of the notion of a threshold concept within generic learning development work write like a competent member of a wider academic community. this is the terrain of learning development. the five characteristics of a threshold concept listed by meyer and land (2003) appear to be highly relevant to the generic as well as to the discipline-specific context. two of them seem to work in a similar way in both contexts. the idea of troublesome knowledge within an academic discipline links easily with troublesome process within learning development; and in both contexts, progress through a threshold may be irreversible. the other three characteristics are still highly relevant in the generic context, but they tend to operate differently. threshold processes within learning development can be hugely transformative, but tend to relate to the gaining of a new perspective on a troublesome process, rather than to grasping an understanding of a particular academic concept. a learning development threshold also tends to be already integrated and inherently unbounded in its application, rather than discipline-specific and a step towards new integration. another important difference between the two contexts, is in the nature of the work required to work through the threshold. previously identified discipline-specific threshold concepts tend to be clearly academically challenging, yet the ideas in table 1 appear to be fairly simple to understand. similarly, the generic thresholds identified by kiley (2009) within the doctoral process appear fairly straightforward to understand. the difficulty, however, lies not in their understanding, but in their acknowledgement and appreciation, followed by their effective application, which invariably involves significant changes to previously ingrained behaviour. conclusion this article has investigated the relevance of the notion of a threshold concept within generic learning development work. the five key characteristics of threshold concepts were examined individually against the kind of troublesome processes typically discussed in one-to-one learning development consultations. all five characteristics appear to be highly relevant to this work, but there are important differences in the way that some of them operate, and in the nature of the work involved to make progress through a journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 10 edwards investigation of the relevance of the notion of a threshold concept within generic learning development work threshold. these differences do not, however, weaken the case for the relevance of threshold concepts within learning development. instead, identification and further analysis of these differences can support the strengthening of the theory, by pushing it to extend explicitly into generic learning development as well as into additional academic disciplines. references billing, d. (2007) ‘teaching for transfer of core/key skills in higher education: cognitive skills’, higher education, 53(4), pp. 483-516. booth, j. (2006) ‘on the mastery of philosophical concepts: socratic discourse and the unexpected ‘affect’’, in meyer, j. and land, r. (eds.) overcoming barriers to student understanding: threshold concepts and troublesome knowledge. london: routledge, pp. 173-181. cousin, g. (2006) ‘threshold concepts, troublesome knowledge and emotional capital: an exploration into learning about others’, pp. 134-147, in meyer, j. and land, r. (eds.) overcoming barriers to student understanding: threshold concepts and troublesome knowledge. london: routledge. cousin, g. (2010) ‘neither teacher-centred nor student-centred: threshold concepts and research partnerships’, journal of learning development in higher education, 2, february, pp. 1-9. available at: http://www.aldinhe.ac.uk/ojs/index.php?journal=jldhe&page=article&op=view&path%5b%5 d=64&path%5b%5d=41 (accessed: 22 february 2011). edwards, c. (2009) ‘the role of the student development service in academic support within the 21st century university’. internal paper. leicester: student development, university of leicester. efklides, a. (2006) ‘metacognition, affect, and conceptual difficulty’, in meyer, j. and land, r. (eds.) overcoming barriers to student understanding: threshold concepts and troublesome knowledge. london: routledge, pp. 48-69. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 11 http://www.aldinhe.ac.uk/ojs/index.php?journal=jldhe&page=article&op=view&path%5b%5d=64&path%5b%5d=41 http://www.aldinhe.ac.uk/ojs/index.php?journal=jldhe&page=article&op=view&path%5b%5d=64&path%5b%5d=41 edwards investigation of the relevance of the notion of a threshold concept within generic learning development work kiley, m. (2009) ‘identifying threshold concepts and proposing strategies to support doctoral candidates’, innovations in education and teaching international, 46(3), pp. 293-301. lucas, u. and mladenovic, r. (2006) ‘developing new ‘world views’: threshold concepts in introductory accounting’, in meyer, j. and land, r. (eds.) overcoming barriers to student understanding: threshold concepts and troublesome knowledge. london: routledge, pp. 148-159. meyer, j. and land, r. (2003) threshold concepts and troublesome knowledge: linkages to ways of thinking and practising within the disciplines. occasional report 4, may 2003, etl project. available at: http://www.etl.tla.ed.ac.uk/docs/etlreport4.pdf (accessed: 22 february 2011). meyer, j. and land, r. (2006a) ‘threshold concepts and troublesome knowledge: an introduction’, in meyer, j. and land, r. (eds.) overcoming barriers to student understanding: threshold concepts and troublesome knowledge. london: routledge, pp. 3-18. meyer, j. and land, r. (2006b) ‘threshold concepts and troublesome knowledge: issues of liminality’, in meyer, j. and land, r. (eds.) overcoming barriers to student understanding: threshold concepts and troublesome knowledge. london: routledge, pp. 19-32. perkins, d. (1999) ‘the many faces of constructivism’, educational leadership, 57(3), pp. 6-11. available at: http://www.scribd.com/doc/32920521/perkins-the-many-facesof-constructivism (accessed: 22 february 2011). reinmann, n. and jackson, i. (2006) ‘threshold concepts in economics: a case study’, in meyer, j. and land, r. (eds.) overcoming barriers to student understanding: threshold concepts and troublesome knowledge. london: routledge, pp. 115-133. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 12 http://www.etl.tla.ed.ac.uk/docs/etlreport4.pdf http://www.scribd.com/doc/32920521/perkins-the-many-faces-of-constructivism http://www.scribd.com/doc/32920521/perkins-the-many-faces-of-constructivism edwards investigation of the relevance of the notion of a threshold concept within generic learning development work rust, c. (2009) ‘opinion piece: a call to unite in a common cause’, journal of learning development in higher education, 1, february, pp. 1-5. available at: http://www.aldinhe.ac.uk/ojs/index.php?journal=jldhe&page=article&op=view&path %5b%5d=24&path%5b%5d=11 (accessed: 22 february 2011). taylor, c. (2006) ‘threshold concepts in biology: do they fit the definition?’, in meyer, j. and land, r. (eds.) overcoming barriers to student understanding: threshold concepts and troublesome knowledge. london: routledge, pp. 87-99. trafford, v. and leshem, s. (2009) ‘doctorateness as a threshold concept’, innovations in education and teaching international, 46(3), pp. 305-16. author details carol edwards works as an adviser and resource developer in the learning development team within student development at the university of leicester. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 13 http://www.aldinhe.ac.uk/ojs/index.php?journal=jldhe&page=article&op=view&path%5b%5d=24&path%5b%5d=11 http://www.aldinhe.ac.uk/ojs/index.php?journal=jldhe&page=article&op=view&path%5b%5d=24&path%5b%5d=11 investigation of the relevance of the notion of a threshold concept within generic learning development work abstract the learning development consultation troublesome knowledge transformative integrative bounded irreversible the doctoral process discussion conclusion references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special issue 22: compendium of innovative practice october 2021 editorial: adapting core features of learning development: skills and writing support gita sedghi university of liverpool one of the core features of learning developers’ work is to support students to develop their academic skills and reach their fullest academic potential. these skills include academic writing and reading, presentation skills, time management, independent learning and critical thinking. in addition to this hands-on academic support, learning developers create resources to enhance learning and teaching, and provide opportunities for independent learning. unsurprisingly, the disruption wrought by covid-19 presented ld colleagues across uk institutions and globally with a range of challenges when designing their teaching provision for studying online. although many effective approaches to learning that are often used in online educational spaces were already available at the start of this emergency pivot (e.g. flipped classroom), the authors in this section quickly found that not everything could be easily adapted, let alone delivered as before. striking the right balance between synchronous and asynchronous delivery, maintaining student engagement, shifting pedagogic approaches, and rethinking the existing forms of delivering academic support were the key challenges that had to be addressed by these practitioners. learning developers essentially had to reconsider their role as academic advisors, providers of one-to-one tutorials, instructors in writing, and facilitators of cutting edge learning environments in the face of multiple difficulties brought about by unfamiliar modalities. their efforts reflected on here demonstrate that conversations, interactions with others, and unencumbered opportunities to exchange ideas are essential in higher education, but online settings can undermine these ideal conditions. as grondin et al. (2019) point out, communication difficulties can be exacerbated in online learning because of poor connectivity and less noticeable non-verbal language. many issues that do not occur as much in in-person teaching arise in online contexts, including digital poverty, distractions from children at home, and interruptions from other online participants. editorial journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 the following compendium pieces bring together the initiatives and strategies the educators reflecting here used to overcome the challenges posed by the online pivot. a digital tutoring hub was created to support students who missed interactions and corridor conversations, and active listening and oral paraphrasing techniques were used in online communication. virtual spaces on various platforms allowed peer support mechanisms to be developed, and e-portfolios provided a focus for students to plan their own development and work with their tutor and tutor group to identify goals and achieve them. online academic speaking clubs were established to mitigate the international students’ difficulties, with the sessions boosting students’ confidence in speaking, discussing ideas, improving participation and making friends. as learning developers across the globe reconsidered their approaches to teaching and to formal and informal learning spaces, they also humanised their students’ learning experience. the authors have made several recommendations to deal with unknown situations and inadequate understanding of online learning in an emergency setting. for example, they advocate using youtube to improve students’ digital literacies, simple study skills and engagement. online videos offer students the flexibility to access support any time, any day. transitioning to a webinar-based delivery model, supplemented with web resources that are also shared with instructors, is another initiative to make effective use of available technologies with student engagement features, and to leverage these tools as mediating factors for fostering student engagement in learning. references: grondin, f., lomanowska, a. m. and jackson, p. l. (2019) ‘empathy in computer‐ mediated interactions: a conceptual framework for research and clinical practice’, clinical psychology: science and practice, 26(4). https://doi.org/10.1111/cpsp.12298. https://doi.org/10.1111/cpsp.12298 journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 26: special edi issue february 2023 ________________________________________________________________________ ©2023 the author(s) (cc-by 4.0) ‘to teach in varied communities not only our paradigms must shift but also the way we think, write, speak’ (hooks, 1994): creating resources to address the bame awarding gap orlagh mccabe manchester metropolitan university, uk eileen pollard manchester metropolitan university, uk abstract in this brief communication, the authors reflect on the development of a suite of online resources to address the black, asian and minority ethic (bame) awarding gap in higher education. they consider the sector, allyship and relational pedagogy to explain the approach of these publicly accessible staff-facing resources. keywords: bame awarding gap; bell hooks; inclusive curricula; relational pedagogy what do we mean by an ‘inclusive curriculum’? what are ‘belonging’ and ‘belongingness’? how do we shift how we think, write and speak about them? and how do we create resources to address these huge questions? the sector-wide acknowledgment of an awarding gap between black and white students has rightly prompted a reimagining of what inclusion and belonging mean and what they might mean. the ability to develop a ‘sense of belonging’ (smith, 2017) is evidenced as having a significant effect on learners’ motivation and self-esteem (ulmanen et al., 2016). and black, asian and minority ethic1 students and international students report that they 1 like bhopal and pitkin (2020) and others we use the terms bame and bme ‘to refer to individuals from black british, black african, british indian, pakistani and bangladeshi, chinese and those from other non-white backgrounds, official terms used in the census (2011)’. similarly, we are ‘aware of the limitations of the term, particularly that bme individuals are not a homogenous group, but it remains a useful designation in a field such as higher education in which white mccabe and pollard ‘to teach in varied communities not only our paradigms must shift but also the way we think, write, speak’ (hooks, 1994): creating resources to address the bame awarding gap journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 2 experience exclusion, marginalisation and even discrimination while studying in higher education (uuk and nus, 2019; ehrc, 2019). across the he landscape, there has been a significant push to promote curricula that are accessible to learners from a diverse range of backgrounds. one catalyst for this has been the office for students (ofs) consultation (2021-22) on new conditions to reduce the disparity of difference in completion, continuation and progression outcomes. for example, key performance measure four maps the gap in degree outcomes between white students and black students. this measure indicates that black students are awarded proportionately fewer firsts and 2:1s than their white peers. while there has been some closing of the gap for those students receiving a 2:1, the gap for those receiving firsts has significantly increased (ofs, 2022). instances of good practice include the university of leeds anti-racism toolkit and ‘why is my curriculum white?’ (university college london, nd). previous work by nona mcduff at kingston university london (kingston university, 2017) on an inclusive curriculum framework, used to facilitate dialogue between staff and students, had significant impact too, as will the anti-racism lab, a worldwide hub for research on decolonisation and anti-racism hosted by the university of alberta. it is widely acknowledged that students experience multiple and intersecting inequalities which can have an effect on their retention, progression and overall experience in he (runnymede trust, 2015; 2018; hesa, 2019; advance he race equality charter, phase one and phase two, 2019; 2020; hepi, 2021). as audre lorde famously wrote, ‘there is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives’ (1982, cited blackpast, 2012), a quote we cite on our inclusive curriculum webpage. and for students who are bame and studying in a second language or away from their home country, the implications can be significant, especially when faced with other challenges, such as language barriers, lack of a sense of belonging or difficulty forming relationships with tutors and peers. relational pedagogy challenges the individualised approach to knowledge acquisition yet acknowledges the value that recognition of ‘self’ and ‘other’ have in this process (murphy identities remain dominant’ (544). other terms include global ethnic majority (gem) and black and people of colour (bpoc). mccabe and pollard ‘to teach in varied communities not only our paradigms must shift but also the way we think, write, speak’ (hooks, 1994): creating resources to address the bame awarding gap journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 3 and brown, 2012; bovill, 2020). as bovill explains, relational pedagogy therefore ‘puts relationships at the heart of teaching and emphasises that a meaningful connection needs to be established between teacher and students as well as between students and their peers, if effective learning is to take place’ (2020, p.3). curricula designed to embed a relational approach can therefore encourage practice that incorporates interaction between learner and teacher and learner to learner, as well as promoting relationships between individuals, facilitating pedagogic practice that can aid the creation of a sense of belonging. notably, interpersonal relationships can have a profound effect on the development of a learner’s sense of belonging (gillen-o’neel, 2019) and on them making connections with tutors and peers, which can result in increased engagement. in january 2022, the university teaching academy were tasked with providing resources to support academics in addressing the bame awarding gap. focusing on inclusion (as action on the part of staff) rather than belonging (as the anticipated feeling in students), one key aspect of this work was the development of an intersectional toolkit for academics across three interlinked webpages: • addressing awarding gaps • inclusive curriculum • internationalisation through developing these interlinked publicly accessible resources, we realised that we had to rationalise the relationship between, for example, inclusive curriculum and its role in addressing awarding gaps. we decided that inclusive curriculum was one potential tool colleagues could use, alongside others, such as getting to know their students and promoting positive classroom cultures (relational pedagogy). thinking carefully about awarding gaps also made us realise that we needed a separate webpage for colleagues to think about strategies for supporting their international students, as, even though there are overlaps with the experiences of racialised home students, equally there are differences and/or additional challenges. working across a large institution with over 1,500 academic staff, our resources needed to be flexible to suit a range of different contexts and disciplines. during their development, we were also cognisant of our white homogeneity and lack of heterogeneity, which raised https://www.mmu.ac.uk/about-us/professional-services/uta/reducing-awarding-gaps https://www.mmu.ac.uk/about-us/professional-services/uta/inclusive-curriculum-toolkit https://www.mmu.ac.uk/about-us/professional-services/uta/internationalisation https://sway.office.com/c9dddardbisq297z?ref=link&loc=play mccabe and pollard ‘to teach in varied communities not only our paradigms must shift but also the way we think, write, speak’ (hooks, 1994): creating resources to address the bame awarding gap journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 4 issues around representation and privilege. in this context, a focus on ‘allyship’ played a huge role in justifying the approach taken (diangelo, 2019). in addition to this, open dialogue between colleagues and students became a significant feature of the creative process, one that has been transformative in understanding privilege and its role within racial injustice (lee, 2017). the next step will be to evaluate, over the subsequent academic year, whether or not these resources have helped academic colleagues shift how they think, write and speak so as to teach in varied communities more effectively. references advance he (2019, 2020) race equality charter. available at: https://www.advancehe.ac.uk/equality-charters/race-equality-charter (accessed: 7 november 2022). bhopal, k. and pitkin, c. (2020) ‘“same old story, just a different policy”: race and policy making in higher education in the uk’, race ethnicity and education, 23(4), pp. 530-547. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/13613324.2020.1718082 (accessed: 23 october 2022). blackpast, b. (2012) (1982) audre lorde, “learning from the 60s”. available at: https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/1982-audre-lorde-learning-60s/ (accessed: 7 november 2022). bovill, c. (2020) co-creating learning and teaching: towards relational pedagogy in higher education. st albans: critical publishing. diangelo, r. (2019) white fragility: why it's so hard for white people to talk about racism. london: penguin. gillen-o’neel, c. (2019) ‘sense of belonging and student engagement: a daily study of firstand continuing-generation college students’, research in higher education, 62, pp. 45-71 available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11162-019-09570-y (accessed: 4 november 2022). https://www.advance-he.ac.uk/equality-charters/race-equality-charter https://www.advance-he.ac.uk/equality-charters/race-equality-charter https://doi.org/10.1080/13613324.2020.1718082 https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/1982-audre-lorde-learning-60s/ https://doi.org/10.1007/s11162-019-09570-y mccabe and pollard ‘to teach in varied communities not only our paradigms must shift but also the way we think, write, speak’ (hooks, 1994): creating resources to address the bame awarding gap journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 5 equality and human rights commission (ehrc) (2019) tackling racial harassment: universities challenged. available at: https://www.equalityhumanrights.com/en/publication-download/tackling-racialharassment-universities-challenged (accessed: 7 november 2022). higher education policy institute (hepi) (2021) the commission on race and ethnic disparities report and disaggregating bame in higher education. available at: https://www.hepi.ac.uk/2021/04/26/the-commission-on-race-and-ethnic-disparitiesreport-and-disaggregating-bame-in-higher-education/ (accessed: 7 november 2022). higher education statistics agency (hesa) (2019) higher education student data 2019/20. available at: https://www.hesa.ac.uk/news/09-02-2021/he-student-data201920 (accessed: 7 november 2022). kingston university (2017) kingston university wins guardian university award for teaching excellence. https://www.kingston.ac.uk/news/article/1810/04-apr-2017kingston-university-wins-guardian-university-award-for-teaching-excellence/ (accessed: 7 november 2022). lee, c.d. (2017) ‘an ecological framework for enacting a culturally sustaining pedagogy’ in paris, d. and alim, h.s. (eds.) culturally sustaining pedagogies: teaching and learning for justice in a changing world. new york: teachers college press, pp. 261-273. murphy, m. and brown, t. (2012) ‘learning as relational: intersubjectivity and pedagogy in higher education’, international journal of lifelong education, 31(5) pp. 643-654. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/02601370.2012.700648 (accessed: 4 november 2022). https://www.equalityhumanrights.com/en/publication-download/tackling-racial-harassment-universities-challenged https://www.equalityhumanrights.com/en/publication-download/tackling-racial-harassment-universities-challenged https://www.hepi.ac.uk/2021/04/26/the-commission-on-race-and-ethnic-disparities-report-and-disaggregating-bame-in-higher-education/ https://www.hepi.ac.uk/2021/04/26/the-commission-on-race-and-ethnic-disparities-report-and-disaggregating-bame-in-higher-education/ https://www.hesa.ac.uk/news/09-02-2021/he-student-data-201920 https://www.hesa.ac.uk/news/09-02-2021/he-student-data-201920 https://www.kingston.ac.uk/news/article/1810/04-apr-2017-kingston-university-wins-guardian-university-award-for-teaching-excellence/ https://www.kingston.ac.uk/news/article/1810/04-apr-2017-kingston-university-wins-guardian-university-award-for-teaching-excellence/ https://doi.org/10.1080/02601370.2012.700648 mccabe and pollard ‘to teach in varied communities not only our paradigms must shift but also the way we think, write, speak’ (hooks, 1994): creating resources to address the bame awarding gap journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 6 office for students (ofs) (2021-22) key performance measures. available at: https://www.officeforstudents.org.uk/about/key-performance-measures/ (accessed: 7 november 2022). smith, s. (2017) ‘exploring the black and minority ethnic (bme) student attainment gap: what did it tell us? actions to address home bme undergraduate students’ degree attainment’, journal of perspectives in applied academic practice, 5(1), pp. 48-57. available at: https://doi.org/10.14297/jpaap.v5i1.239 (accessed: 4 november 2022). ulmanen, s., soini, t., pietarinen, j. and pyhalto, k. (2016) ‘students’ experiences of the development of emotional engagement’, international journal of educational research, 79, pp. 86-96. available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijer.2016.06.003 (accessed: 7 november 2022). university college london (no date) why is my curriculum white? available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dscx4h2l-pk (accessed: 23 october 2022). university of alberta (no date) anti-racism lab. available at: https://antiracismlab.artsrn.ualberta.ca/ (accessed: 4 november 2022). university of leeds (2002) anti-racism toolkit. available at: https://cers.leeds.ac.uk/projects/the-anti-racism-toolkit/ (accessed: 4 november 2022). universities uk and national union of students (uuk, nus) (2019) black, asian and minority ethnic student attainment at uk universities #closing the gap. available at: https://www.universitiesuk.ac.uk/policy-andanalysis/reports/documents/2019/bame-student-attainment-uk-universities-closingthe-gap.pdf (accessed: 7 november 2022). https://www.officeforstudents.org.uk/about/key-performance-measures/ https://doi.org/10.14297/jpaap.v5i1.239 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijer.2016.06.003 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dscx4h2l-pk https://antiracism-lab.artsrn.ualberta.ca/ https://antiracism-lab.artsrn.ualberta.ca/ https://cers.leeds.ac.uk/projects/the-anti-racism-toolkit/ https://www.universitiesuk.ac.uk/policy-and-analysis/reports/documents/2019/bame-student-attainment-uk-universities-closing-the-gap.pdf https://www.universitiesuk.ac.uk/policy-and-analysis/reports/documents/2019/bame-student-attainment-uk-universities-closing-the-gap.pdf https://www.universitiesuk.ac.uk/policy-and-analysis/reports/documents/2019/bame-student-attainment-uk-universities-closing-the-gap.pdf mccabe and pollard ‘to teach in varied communities not only our paradigms must shift but also the way we think, write, speak’ (hooks, 1994): creating resources to address the bame awarding gap journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 7 author details orlagh mccabe is a senior lecturer in academic development and programme leader for the postgraduate certificate in learning and teaching in higher education (pgclthe) at the university teaching academy, manchester metropolitan university. eileen pollard is a senior lecturer in academic development with responsibility for personal tutoring at the university teaching academy, manchester metropolitan university. licence ©2023 the author(s). this is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (cc-by 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. see http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. journal of learning development in higher education (jldhe) is a peer-reviewed open access journal published by the association for learning development in higher education (aldinhe). journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 26: special edi issue february 2023 ________________________________________________________________________ ©2023 the author(s) (cc-by 4.0) ‘not as a temporary fluke but as standard’: realising the affordances of hybrid and online teaching for inclusive and sustainable education martin compton university college london, uk alex standen university college london, uk ben watson university college london, uk abstract 84.5% of disabled students (disabled students uk, 2022) reported that the continuation of online or distance learning and teaching options post-pandemic would be beneficial. while concerns about quality of experience, isolation, wellbeing, access to technology and poor pedagogy in online and hybrid interactions are legitimate and must form part of decisionmaking, so too must considerations about the affordances of these ways of working and teaching. framed around inclusive practice, and flexibility and sustainability drivers to enhance belonging, community and collaboration, we argue there are imperatives for us to learn the hard lessons of the pandemic and to listen to the voices of those who benefitted from changes in how and where teaching and assessment happened, especially in terms of so called ‘hybrid’ teaching. our argument is framed by reflections on our own institution’s approach to hybrid teaching and working, the literature on experiences of remote learning during the pandemic, and – most centrally – the experiences and perspectives of students with disabilities. keywords: hybrid; hyflex; online education; disability; inclusion; accessibility. compton, standen and watson ‘not as a temporary fluke but as standard’: realising the affordances of hybrid and online teaching for inclusive and sustainable education journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 2 introduction according to disabled students uk, 84.5% of disabled students reported that the continuation of online or distance learning and teaching options post-pandemic would be beneficial (p.8, 2022). attainment gaps narrowed between white and global majority students, students without and with disabilities, and in the female to male achievement gap in upper awards between 2018-19 and 2019-20 (snelling, 2022). additionally, in a large proportion of universities in the uk, fully online and hybrid meetings remain common, reflecting a culture shift in working practices that appears to represent a ‘new normal’. despite this, there are pressures on universities to eschew ‘online tutoring’ (somerville, 2022; turner, 2022). we believe that this lack of nuance in what both ‘in-person' and ‘online’ teaching might entail risks a failure to realise the ongoing benefits of the ‘unexpected silver lining’ that universities uk report is a consequence of the rapid and unprecedented shift online of 2020 (snelling, 2022). in this article, we draw on our roles supporting academic development and digital accessibility in a large research-intensive university to focus on one aspect of the possible digital future of higher education (he). we argue that an inclusive, sustainable and flexible provision should actively consider the affordances of what we are calling ‘hybrid teaching’, by respecting the value of all learning interactions. the comprehensive and timely mit report (2022) on the lessons they learned in covid-19 sees positivity in teaching and assessment outcomes that were both 'scripted' and 'unscripted': the creativity and ingenuity brought out over the past year by the necessity of finding ways to engage with students and support group interactions, thinking anew about what works and why, when we could not just teach the way we always have, is sure to bear fruit in the long term. (mit, 2022, p.4). background despite some limited interest and experimentation prior to the pandemic with ‘hybrid flexible’ or ‘hyflex’ teaching (both terms relating to simultaneous in-person and online attendance compton, standen and watson ‘not as a temporary fluke but as standard’: realising the affordances of hybrid and online teaching for inclusive and sustainable education journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 3 options), in which choice was a key feature of both design and, crucially, a flexible ethos (beatty, 2019), it was rarely used (kohnke and moorhouse, 2021). that is until the postlockdown, but still in-covid-19 period, when it evolved as an approach to cope with ongoing infections, lockdowns overseas and travel restrictions. as it evolved in multiple ways across the world, several terms emerged in addition to hyflex: ‘blended synchronous’, ‘mixed/ dual mode’, ‘multimodal’ ‘concurrent teaching’. most common appears to have been ‘hybrid’ teaching, perhaps to distinguish an emergency and reactive approach from a fully planned, by-design approach. indeed, our own institution adopted the term ‘basic hybrid’ to emphasise the anticipated limitations and as an expectation management strategy for both staff and students. we equipped over 300 rooms with ‘basic hybrid’ teaching capabilities. at its most basic, this was little more than improved in-room audio and an ability to live stream. most rooms, however, had two-way audio/video using either zoom or microsoft teams as the principal interface, and upgrades focusing on adding this software to existing lectern set-ups with camera and microphone installations were prioritised. opportunities to improve the experience for staff and all students using new technologies such as multiple screens, ceiling mounted omnidirectional microphones and telepresence robots were a dream but are very much within the realms of possibility looking ahead. training materials and workshops emphasised the constraints and pushed the necessity for support in the form of an additional online or in-room assistant or ‘co-pilot’ (compton, 2021). whilst many colleagues adopted this approach, others preferred to separate teaching to in-person and online cohorts, and others focused on asynchronous supplementary material for those unable to attend in-person. hybrid may have proved at times incredibly vexing for staff, but in addition to successes in enabling ongoing connection and contact for institutional meetings, it was simultaneously an invaluable lifeline, potentially offering greater control, agency and empowerment to disabled students in particular (disabled students’ commission, 2021). compton, standen and watson ‘not as a temporary fluke but as standard’: realising the affordances of hybrid and online teaching for inclusive and sustainable education journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 4 inclusion, access and accessibility in he we manage and control information, with research, dissemination, teaching and assessment just some of our information exchange channels. we are obligated by law (the equality act 2010 and the public sector bodies [websites and mobile applications] accessibility regulations 2018) but more, we hope, by building shared values as a sector, to enable easier access to that information and to develop frameworks for producing and sharing it. this means, for example, that resources are not only produced and checked with accessibility in mind, but that learning experiences and assessments which utilise new technologies to extend the reach of our education will do so in such a way as to ensure that no-one is left behind. information and systems that are accessible may be driven by legal compliance, but improvements in access, availability and information retrieval also help better adaptation to future ways of teaching and learning. these principles reach into how (and where) teaching happens. progress made during the pandemic offers an opportunity to produce a proactive and more inclusive legacy, where information exchange is smoothed by ever-improving technical solutions (hector, 2020). yet, while many in he continue to embrace hybridity and remote access for aspects of business such as conferences and meetings, there are tendencies to forget some of the successes in terms of teaching and assessing. in our view, we should aim to create more of an information ‘swiss army knife’ for the accessibility, usability, and business advantages this would bring. a clear commitment to inclusive design says a lot about the organisations we represent, has great potential for students both with and without disabilities, and represents how we want all our staff and students across intersections to be fully involved: there is growing recognition of the issues and challenges of intersectionality and the multiple factors that influence students, including different equality characteristics, and issues relating to social class or other widening-access considerations. each of these can, and does, combine with issues of disability (williams et al., 2019, p.4). compton, standen and watson ‘not as a temporary fluke but as standard’: realising the affordances of hybrid and online teaching for inclusive and sustainable education journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 5 while recognising the many challenges that face uk he in the post-pandemic era, disabled students uk’s (2022) report highlights the importance of retaining positive advancements made as a result of the pandemic and the pivot to online and hybrid delivery. despite protective legislation, disabled students have historically been marginalised in academic settings, and the report argues that in some ways this continued during the pandemic: only 23% of the disabled students surveyed received the disability support that they required during this time. in other ways, however, accessibility has taken leaps forward. a few institution-wide changes, such as routine recordings of lectures, have given enormous benefits to disabled students as well as to other groups. the lived experience of inaccessible learning is perhaps best witnessed by a disabled student, where many of the things that would have enabled them to keep up with their ma studies were delivered almost overnight as the pandemic unfolded: i chose to study part time due to my health condition, but because of scheduling i [spent] three days a week on campus. this included some really long days . . . forcing me to spend days recovering afterwards. i asked . . . to access one of my lectures via recordings for my health. . . . it took many months before recordings were . . . approved, and by that time the module had finished, and forcing myself to go onto campus so often had exhausted me to the point of worsening my condition. i had no choice but to leave the degree. a couple of months later the pandemic hit and suddenly everyone was accessing their education online. . . . i hope that in the future the disabled community will look back at my experience of improved access to education not as a temporary fluke but as standard. (‘daisy’).1 1 personal correspondence from student, shared with permission. compton, standen and watson ‘not as a temporary fluke but as standard’: realising the affordances of hybrid and online teaching for inclusive and sustainable education journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 6 hybrid teaching options fully online and hybrid teaching are unquestionably challenging without investment in infrastructure, training and human resources, but experiences such as daisy’s should prompt us to open a dialogue about what we are able to offer and how we might better reflect the ongoing reality of real-world hybridity. in our discussions with colleagues about hybrid teaching experiences, we found that those who had successfully adopted hybrid approaches argued that it offered possibilities for effective collaboration, problem-based learning and critical thinking. recommendations for hybrid learning in the literature suggest that educators exploit opportunities to open dialogue with students about their learning via different media and encourage students to make informed decisions about the pros and cons of different modalities (detyna et al., 2021). when scaffolded with conversations that engage students with the rationale of this approach, these activities can be transformative for student learning. it might promote future-facing thinking, greater self-awareness, the ability to deal with uncertainty – all competencies defined under an education for sustainable development (esd) agenda as ‘empower[ing] individuals to reflect on their own actions, taking into account their current and future social, cultural, economic and environmental impacts’ (advance he, 2021). belonging, community and collaboration increasingly, ‘belonging’ is being discussed alongside questions of equity, diversity and inclusion in he (capper and mcvitty, 2022; west, 2022), a consequence of the experiences of studying and working during covid-19 and associated with students’ self-assessed mental health (jackson, 2022). even pre-pandemic, belonging was already being linked to student retention and success (jackson, 2022). one common assumption is, of course, that a sense of belonging was lost during remote and hybrid learning and working, and that it is something that universities need to ensure students regain. however, recent research into experiences of learning during the pandemic does not necessarily support that picture. kohnke and moorhouse (2021) explored students’ perspectives of hyflex teaching and found that, when technologies were well leveraged and compton, standen and watson ‘not as a temporary fluke but as standard’: realising the affordances of hybrid and online teaching for inclusive and sustainable education journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 7 collaborative work was carefully scaffolded, there could be community, interaction and engagement between the learners: during collaborative activities, everyone seemed to have a presence. . . . this perception was something both in-class and online learners mentioned in the interviews: completing activities online made them ‘feel as a group’ and ‘not separated’. (kohnke and moorhouse, 2021, p.239). alongside the recommendation to think carefully about how tools that enable synchronous collaboration (such as document creation, post walls, polling and anonymous questioning) could best be utilised in hybrid settings, the authors propose pairing face-to-face and remote students when designing teaching and assessment activities, to strengthen belonging in dualmode situations (kohnke and moorhouse, 2021). in our own discussions about experiences of hybrid teaching, the social side of learning came through as a strong theme, centring on how community can be built, how space for informal conversations might need to be curated, and how positive lessons from covid-19 around daily touch points, virtual common rooms and uses of chat channels must continue to feature in hybrid settings. we acknowledge how challenging this can be, but when well facilitated, hybrid spaces can contain not just one place in which an individual can belong, but multiple possibilities for this. conclusion he achieved something unprecedented and remarkable during the covid-19 lockdowns. it may have been clunky, flawed, inconsistent, and not as good as planned and fully-resourced online education, but it showed that where there was a will, driven by an abled majority, there was a way. the immediate post-lockdown period demonstrated similarly that although beautifully resourced hyflex rooms were generally out of financial and logistical scope, hybrid options could be enabled swiftly and relatively cheaply. we are therefore concerned that compton, standen and watson ‘not as a temporary fluke but as standard’: realising the affordances of hybrid and online teaching for inclusive and sustainable education journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 8 current debates about modality and affordances of hybrid approaches lack nuance and are shutting out the voices of students, particularly those with disabilities. looked at more broadly, options for hybrid learning connect closely with existing esd goals such as those defined in unesco’s sustainable development goal four (united nations, n.d.) centring accessibility, inclusivity and lifelong learning. esd is defined by the qaa as, ‘a lens that permits us to look critically at how the world is and to envision how it might be, and equips us to deliver that vision’ (qaa, 2021). imperfections in these emergency responses are being trumpeted as final and winning arguments. we acknowledge the flaws and resourcing implications, but call on he providers to review access, inclusion and sustainability policies and ask, ‘why shouldn’t flexibility in modality be a reasonable adjustment?’ we should look positively at the possibilities of flexible modalities and commit to investing in spaces and programmes. where he is adapting to hybrid working, what is preventing us from being open to improving the experiences of staff and students through hybrid modalities for teaching? even during the ‘hybrid year’ we learnt so much that improved how we interacted. however, none of these possibilities will be realised if we close down the debate with simplistic, ableist and one-sided arguments. references advance he (2021) education for sustainable development guidance. available at: https://www.advance-he.ac.uk/knowledge-hub/education-sustainable-developmentguidance [accessed: 13 november 2022]. beatty, b. j. (2019) hybrid-flexible course design: implementing student-directed hybrid classes. edtech books. available at: https://edtechbooks.org/hyflex [accessed: 13 november 2022]. https://www.advance-he.ac.uk/knowledge-hub/education-sustainable-development-guidance https://www.advance-he.ac.uk/knowledge-hub/education-sustainable-development-guidance https://edtechbooks.org/hyflex compton, standen and watson ‘not as a temporary fluke but as standard’: realising the affordances of hybrid and online teaching for inclusive and sustainable education journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 9 capper, g. and mcvitty, d. (2022) ‘belonging inclusion and mental health are all connected’, wonkhe, 15 february. available at: https://wonkhe.com/blogs/belonging-inclusionand-mental-health-are-all-connected/ [accessed: 13 november 2022]. compton, m. (2021) ‘the hybrid/ hyflex co-pilot: flying by the seat of your pants’, 1 october. available at: https://reflect.ucl.ac.uk/mcarena/2021/10/01/the-hybrid-hyflex-co-pilotflying-by-the-seat-of-you-pants/ [accessed: 13 november 2022]. detyna, m., sanchez-pizani, r., giampietro, v., dommett, e. j. and dyer, k. (2022) ‘hybrid flexible (hyflex) teaching and learning: climbing the mountain of implementation challenges for synchronous online and face-to-face seminars during a pandemic’, learning environments research, pp.1-15. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10984022-09408-y. disabled students’ commission (2021) annual report 2021: enhancing the disabled student experience. advance he. available at: https://s3.eu-west2.amazonaws.com/assets.creode.advancehe-document-manager/documents/advancehe/advhe_dsc_state%20of%20the%20nation_1611157499.pdf [accessed: 13 november 2022]. disabled students uk (2022) ‘going back is not a choice: accessibility lessons for higher education’, 15 march. available at: https://disabledstudents.co.uk/not-a-choice/ [accessed: 13 november 2022]. hector, m. (2020) arriving at thriving: learning from disabled students to ensure access for all. london: policy connect. available at: https://www.policyconnect.org.uk/research/arriving-thriving-learning-disabled-studentsensure-access-all [accessed: 13 november 2022]. jackson, a. (2022) ‘what have we learnt about student belonging and inclusion?’, hepi. available at: https://www.hepi.ac.uk/2022/05/23/student-belonging-and-inclusion/ [accessed: 13 november 2022]. https://wonkhe.com/blogs/belonging-inclusion-and-mental-health-are-all-connected/ https://wonkhe.com/blogs/belonging-inclusion-and-mental-health-are-all-connected/ https://reflect.ucl.ac.uk/mcarena/2021/10/01/the-hybrid-hyflex-co-pilot-flying-by-the-seat-of-you-pants/ https://reflect.ucl.ac.uk/mcarena/2021/10/01/the-hybrid-hyflex-co-pilot-flying-by-the-seat-of-you-pants/ https://doi.org/10.1007/s10984-022-09408-y https://doi.org/10.1007/s10984-022-09408-y https://s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/assets.creode.advancehe-document-manager/documents/advance-he/advhe_dsc_state%20of%20the%20nation_1611157499.pdf https://s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/assets.creode.advancehe-document-manager/documents/advance-he/advhe_dsc_state%20of%20the%20nation_1611157499.pdf https://s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/assets.creode.advancehe-document-manager/documents/advance-he/advhe_dsc_state%20of%20the%20nation_1611157499.pdf https://disabledstudents.co.uk/not-a-choice/ https://www.policyconnect.org.uk/research/arriving-thriving-learning-disabled-students-ensure-access-all https://www.policyconnect.org.uk/research/arriving-thriving-learning-disabled-students-ensure-access-all https://www.hepi.ac.uk/2022/05/23/student-belonging-and-inclusion/ compton, standen and watson ‘not as a temporary fluke but as standard’: realising the affordances of hybrid and online teaching for inclusive and sustainable education journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 10 kohnke, l. and moorhouse, b. l. (2021) ‘adopting hyflex in higher education in response to covid-19: students’ perspectives’, open learning: the journal of open, distance and e-learning, 36(3), pp.231-244. https://doi.org/10.1080/02680513.2021.1906641. mit (2022) report of the ad hoc committee on leveraging best practices from remote teaching for on-campus education. available at: https://tll.mit.edu/wpcontent/uploads/2022/10/leveragingbestpracticesreportaug9.pdf [accessed: 13 november 2022]. qaa (2021) education for sustainable development. available at: https://www.qaa.ac.uk/quality-code/education-for-sustainable-development [accessed: 21 september 2022]. snelling, c. (2022) ‘lessons from the pandemic: making the most of technologies in teaching’, universities uk, 3 november. available at: https://www.universitiesuk.ac.uk/what-we-do/policy-and-research/publications/lessonspandemic-making-most [accessed: 13 november 2022]. somerville, e. (2022) ‘universities in ‘covid fantasy land’ as they stubbornly stick to online tutoring’, the telegraph, 1 april. available at https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/04/01/universities-still-teaching-online-amidpressure-transparent/ [accessed: 13 november 2022]. turner, c. (2022) ‘tell new students how much teaching is done online, universities warned’, the telegraph, 18 february. available at: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/02/18/universities-could-made-say-muchteaching-online/ [accessed: 13 november 2022]. united nations (undated) sustainable development goal 4. available at: https://sdgs.un.org/goals/goal4 [accessed: 13 november 2022]. https://doi.org/10.1080/02680513.2021.1906641 https://tll.mit.edu/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/leveragingbestpracticesreportaug9.pdf https://tll.mit.edu/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/leveragingbestpracticesreportaug9.pdf https://www.qaa.ac.uk/quality-code/education-for-sustainable-development https://www.universitiesuk.ac.uk/what-we-do/policy-and-research/publications/lessons-pandemic-making-most https://www.universitiesuk.ac.uk/what-we-do/policy-and-research/publications/lessons-pandemic-making-most https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/04/01/universities-still-teaching-online-amid-pressure-transparent/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/04/01/universities-still-teaching-online-amid-pressure-transparent/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/02/18/universities-could-made-say-much-teaching-online/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/02/18/universities-could-made-say-much-teaching-online/ https://sdgs.un.org/goals/goal4 compton, standen and watson ‘not as a temporary fluke but as standard’: realising the affordances of hybrid and online teaching for inclusive and sustainable education journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 11 west, j. (2022) ‘belonging: why it is the next step on the equity, diversity and inclusion ladder’, times higher education, 28 april. available at: https://www.timeshighereducation.com/campus/belonging-why-it-next-step-equitydiversity-and-inclusion-ladder [accessed: 13 november 2022]. williams, m., pollard, e., takala, h. and houghton, a. m. (2019) review of support for disabled students in higher education in england. brighton: office for students. available at: https://www.officeforstudents.org.uk/media/a8152716-870b-47f2-8045fc30e8e599e5/review-of-support-for-disabled-students-in-higher-education-inengland.pdf [accessed: 13 november 2022]. author details martin compton is associate professor (teaching) working in the central academic development unit (the arena centre for research-based education) at ucl. he works closely with the faculty of life sciences but his work, which focuses on digital education, is crossinstitutional. he previously worked at the university of greenwich in the educational development unit where he oversaw taught lecturer development courses, transnational education faculty support, digital education initiatives and the university cpd offer. alex sanden is associate professor (teaching) in the arena centre for research-based education in university college, london (ucl). alex is responsible for arena's academic development programme, which includes workshops and courses for colleagues from early career academics through to education leaders, and specific provision for doctoral supervisors and personal tutors, amongst others. her research interests include postgraduate research student development and student–supervisor relationships and she has recently published on the doctoral education environment in italy. ben watson is the head of digital accessibility at university college london. he has experience of working across all uk education sectors to improve the physical and digital https://www.timeshighereducation.com/campus/belonging-why-it-next-step-equity-diversity-and-inclusion-ladder https://www.timeshighereducation.com/campus/belonging-why-it-next-step-equity-diversity-and-inclusion-ladder https://www.officeforstudents.org.uk/media/a8152716-870b-47f2-8045-fc30e8e599e5/review-of-support-for-disabled-students-in-higher-education-in-england.pdf https://www.officeforstudents.org.uk/media/a8152716-870b-47f2-8045-fc30e8e599e5/review-of-support-for-disabled-students-in-higher-education-in-england.pdf https://www.officeforstudents.org.uk/media/a8152716-870b-47f2-8045-fc30e8e599e5/review-of-support-for-disabled-students-in-higher-education-in-england.pdf compton, standen and watson ‘not as a temporary fluke but as standard’: realising the affordances of hybrid and online teaching for inclusive and sustainable education journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 12 accessibility of education organisations. he led the opera (opportunity, productivity, engagement, reducing barriers, achievement) project which reconsidered approaches to learning and teaching, digital systems and assistive technologies at the university of kent and was recognised with a times higher education award for outstanding support for students. ben is one of the founding chairs of the further and higher education digital accessibility working group (fhedawg). licence ©2023 the author(s). this is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (cc-by 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. see http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. journal of learning development in higher education (jldhe) is a peer-reviewed open access journal published by the association for learning development in higher education (aldinhe). journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 23: march 2022 ________________________________________________________________________ engaging students online: an analysis of students’ motivations for seeking individual learning development support arina cirstea de montfort university abstract in the context of increased concerns about student engagement across the higher education sector, which have intensified subsequent to the rapid transition to online delivery in march 2020, this small-scale research project aimed to explore the motivations for student engagement in self-selecting learning development (ld) online tutorials. the study used a mixed methods approach, including an online survey (n=43) and online interviews (n=5). the sample comprised undergraduate and postgraduate volunteers recruited from a pool of ld tutorial users (n=390) within the project timeframe (october 2020-april 2021). the generalisability of findings is limited by the low response rate as well as age bias. the main driver for engagement reported was participants’ limited confidence in their own academic writing abilities, which was consistently linked to attainment. engagement was further motivated by a range of perceived impacts, including improved confidence, awareness of academic conventions, and higher grades. in this context, the main challenge was limited availability of support. participants reported a generally positive attitude towards online delivery. qualitative data from both the survey and interviews were further investigated using a discourse analysis framework. one key finding was that the path to ld engagement is often mediated by academic authority figures, who may exert a significant impact on learner self-views. key recommendations for learning developers include maximising the potential of lessons learned from the enforced pivoting to online delivery to underpin the developmental dimensions of ld, with the ultimate goal of promoting learner confidence and growth. keywords: learning development tutorials; one-to-one support; student engagement; online learning; covid-19. cirstea engaging students online: an analysis of students’ motivations for seeking individual learning development support journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 2 introduction engaged students have consistently been found to achieve better academic outcomes than their peers (reyes et al., 2012; bond et al., 2020). in this context, whilst student engagement has been at the forefront of educational research and practice for the past 15 years (lowe and el hakim, 2020), significant questions are yet to be resolved, with recent research calling for a more careful conceptualisation of the term. in a recent review of 243 studies on student engagement, bond et al. (2020) found that ‘few. . . provided a definition. . .and less than half were guided by a theoretical framework’ (p.1). this study will adopt the position that student engagement is a complex term which can be best viewed as a meta-construct encompassing a set of behavioural, emotional and cognitive dimensions (henrie et al., 2015). behavioural engagement is often linked with observable behaviours such as attendance, completion of tasks or interaction with others. as behavioural engagement is more easily quantifiable, it tends to dominate both research and policy to the detriment of less visible, but equally important dimensions (bond et al., 2020). for example, it could be argued that none of these behaviours advance learning unless underpinned by cognitive engagement, which refers to the mental effort that learners make to develop knowledge and skills. furthermore, educational psychologists have shown that the motivation to undertake this effort often relies on emotional engagement (reyes et al., 2012; mega et al., 2014), which encapsulates feelings about personal learning such as excitement, frustration or boredom, as well as the sense of belonging to a learning community. this study does not aim to enforce distinctions between these complementary and often overlapping aspects of engagement (bond et al., 2020), but rather to dwell on this tripartite conceptual perspective to examine self-reported motivations for engagement in learning development (ld) tutorials at a uk university. in doing this, the study hopes to advance ld practice and pedagogy by providing a more in-depth understanding of learners’ support seeking motivations, which can inform a range of student engagement interventions. alongside its broader focus on engagement, the study explores student responses to technology-mediated learning in the specific context of the covid-19 crisis. even in the cirstea engaging students online: an analysis of students’ motivations for seeking individual learning development support journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 3 pre-covid era, scholars such as henrie et al. (2015) had called for further research into student engagement with online learning experiences, highlighting that traditional approaches devised to measure face-to-face engagement cannot be adequately transferred to this context. more recently, researchers investigating the pivot to online delivery in response to the global pandemic have identified a number of specific challenges. these included students’ negative response to online learning – both affective and behavioural (bao, 2020; tang et al., 2020) – communication barriers (bao, 2020) and the enhanced risk of ‘shallow’ learning experiences (bryson and andres, 2020). all of these render the impetus to investigate the specific mechanisms of student engagement in the current online learning context even more pressing. another problematic area in student engagement research is the persistent bias towards large-scale quantitative approaches (bond et al., 2020). this trend might have been determined by institutional and broader sector pressures, which require engagement data to be unequivocally linked to objective outcome measures. however, effective ld practice pivots around an understanding of ‘each student’s context and background’ (mcintosh and barden, 2019, p.4) as well as individual learning practices and needs. to address these concerns, this study adopts a mixed methods, predominantly qualitative approach, including a discourse analysis framework adapted from goodfellow (2005) to probe further into individual learner experiences and identities. research aim the aim of this project is to develop a more in-depth understanding of the drivers for student engagement with online ld tutorials at a uk university. it is expected that the findings can be used to inform promotion of support to students, as well as boost student engagement with a more diverse range of learning opportunities, including independent study resources. the following objectives have been derived from this research aim: cirstea engaging students online: an analysis of students’ motivations for seeking individual learning development support journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 4 • to identify what reasons students provide for their decision to book one-to-one online ld tutorials. • to analyse student responses using (1) descriptive statistical analysis, (2) thematic analysis and (3) a discourse analysis framework. • to derive recommendations for ld practice. discourse analysis framework to provide a more in-depth investigation into the subtle mechanisms of student engagement with an online writing resource, goodfellow (2005) turns to a discourse analysis framework from gee (2005). gee (2005, p.21) defines discourse as the individual use of language and behaviour to enact any form of ‘socially recognizable identity’, and refers to the specific mechanisms through which language performs this as ‘reality-building tasks’. goodfellow (2005, p.487) finds three of gee’s ‘building tasks’ particularly relevant to his analysis of student reflections on online engagement. these categories refer to how students use their words to enact (1) ‘identities’, or their self-views, (2) ‘social goods’, that is individuals and networks associated with status and power, and (3) ‘sign systems and knowledge’, which include any language varieties or claims to knowledge that are privileged over others. by adopting these focal points, goodfellow’s approach is able to move beyond the surface dimensions of engagement and into the subtle drivers and belief systems that underpin its subtler dimensions – the cognitive and the emotional. therefore, this study relies on a framework adapted from goodfellow’s work to tease out the relationships between: 1) students’ communication of their own identities as learners. 2) their positioning within a set of academic power structures. 3) their perspectives on academic literacies and knowledge systems. cirstea engaging students online: an analysis of students’ motivations for seeking individual learning development support journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 5 in unpicking these categories, the study also makes reference to a further ‘building task’ of language borrowed from gee (2005, p.32), that of ‘significance’, which refers to the way in which words are used to render certain aspects of experience more significant than others. methods the study used a mixed methods approach, consisting of an online survey and an online interview. the survey was created and distributed using microsoft forms and included both closed and open-ended questions. online interviews with a duration of approximately 15 minutes were conducted, recorded and transcribed via microsoft teams. automatically generated transcripts were then manually checked and anonymised. a semi-structured interview format was used to provide participants with the opportunity to provide more indepth responses to the project’s research questions. it was hoped that by deploying a simple, partly quantitative, questionnaire, the research would overcome issues around survey fatigue (van mol, 2017), whereas the qualitative tools will provide the opportunity to collect richer data from those respondents willing to engage. context and recruitment ld services are available to all registered students and alumni at this uk university. at the time the study was conducted, the ld tutorial offer consisted of 30-minute individual online appointments to support with ‘writing, study skills and academic practice’, as advertised via the library website. users could opt for an ‘email tutorial’, with written feedback to be provided within 24 hours, or a ‘live online tutorial’, with feedback provided synchronously. the criterion for inclusion in the study was users having booked an ld tutorial within a 7month period (october 2020-april 2021). according to data extracted from tutorial booking forms, during this period, 1,080 bookings were made by 390 individual users, who were emailed an invitation to complete an online survey and/or take part in an online interview. the data collection window remained open for approximately 6 weeks from the date of the initial invitation, and a reminder was cirstea engaging students online: an analysis of students’ motivations for seeking individual learning development support journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 6 emailed before the closing date, a technique which has been proven effective in boosting response rates (van mol, 2017). the online survey recorded a total of 43 responses, and six users responded to the invitation to take part in an interview (see appendix 1 for demographic data). one participant withdrew after their interview was scheduled, without providing a reason. therefore, the final interview sample consisted of five participants. generalisability to interrogate the generalisability of findings, the demographic characteristics of the study sample were compared to those of the ld user population at this institution (appendix 1). the validity of this comparison is limited by the fact that, on account of institutional processes and data protection procedures, the most recent higher education statistics agency (hesa) verified data available at the time of writing reflected the academic year 2017/18. however, a 5-year overview of retrospective data (2013-2018) showed consistent trends with regard to the selected characteristics. the average age of respondents in the study sample was higher than that of ld selfselecting users at this institution, including a significantly higher percentage of students in the over-24 age group. the study sample also had a larger proportion of postgraduate research students, which correlates with this age range. this suggests caution needs to be taken when extending study findings to younger students. while a much smaller number of males than females were included in both the survey and interview samples, a similar gender bias is reflected in the broader population of ld users. this gender distribution aligns with previous research findings that females are more likely than males to seek ld support (reeves, 2018). as regards the characteristic of disability, while a number of participants reported one or more disabilities, the corresponding percentage is slightly lower in the sample than in the ld user population. these limitations of the study sample, and in particular the low response rate and age bias, should be taken into account when considering these findings in the context of the wider student population. generalisability is further limited by the fact that the study is cirstea engaging students online: an analysis of students’ motivations for seeking individual learning development support journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 7 based exclusively on voluntary participation and self-reporting. while the recruitment invitation was emailed to all users booking an ld tutorial within a 7-month period, no incentives were offered for participation other than the opportunity to potentially inform future provision, so it was interesting to note the higher response rate from the over-24 age group. this could indicate that more mature students are less likely to be affected by survey fatigue, and more likely to take a proactive attitude towards shaping teaching and learning. despite these limitations, the data collected provide a valuable insight into the online learning experiences of respondents. data analysis the quantitative data collected through the survey were extracted and investigated using microsoft excel tools. the qualitative data from both survey and interviews were coded using the nvivo 12 pro software. in stage one of data analysis, a thematic approach was used to identify self-reported motivations for engagement in online ld tutorials. in stage two, a discourse analysis framework (adapted from goodfellow, 2005 and gee, 2005) was applied to further probe the factors underpinning student-identified motivations. ethical considerations the project received ethical approval from the university hls research ethics committee. participation in the research was voluntary, and the recruitment email was accompanied by a participant information sheet. as the online survey was fully anonymous, consent was collected through the first survey question (mandatory). interview participants were asked to sign and return a participant consent form. the research also protects participant confidentiality by presenting the data collected in a fully anonymised form. results and discussion the survey began with a multiple-choice question on motivations for tutorial booking, therefore likely to elicit initial reflections on behavioural dimensions of engagement. respondents were instructed to select all applicable answers (table 1): cirstea engaging students online: an analysis of students’ motivations for seeking individual learning development support journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 8 table 1. top drivers for booking a tutorial (n=43, multiple options allowed). 1. i was looking to improve my writing 38 2. i was looking to improve my grades 26 3. feedback received on my work 26 4. advice from ld/library staff 16 5. advice from module lecturer or similar 14 6. i needed support with my disability or learning difference 6 all survey participants who reported a disability or learning difference highlighted disability support as part of their motivation for booking a tutorial. in a follow-up open-ended question, respondents were asked to indicate the most important of the options previously selected, which was expected to stimulate references to other dimensions of engagement. the majority of respondents opted for either ‘looking to improve my writing’ or ‘looking to improve my grades’. one participant explained how these two aspects are correlated: the most important is looking to improve my grades. with this mindset, everything else will follow. if you want to improve your grades, you would find ways to improve your writing and clarify feedback received on my work. (survey) this confirms suggestions from previous literature that ‘the development of a student’s writing ability has come to be seen as practically synonymous with the acquisition of knowledge’ (goodfellow, 2005). one participant explicitly related their seeking support to a lack of confidence about the standard of work produced: to get feedback on the current standard of my work, it is very hard to know where you are at and how to improve it. (survey) these responses unequivocally illustrate how student support-seeking behaviour is complexly supported by a nexus of interlinked emotional and cognitive motivations. more specific areas for support seeking (table 2) broadly correlate to domains of ld provision mapped in previous studies (e.g. gibbs, 2009): cirstea engaging students online: an analysis of students’ motivations for seeking individual learning development support journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 9 table 2. key areas of support seeking (n=43, multiple options allowed). 1. structure 34 2. criticality 27 3. academic style 25 4. proofreading/grammar 20 5. research methods 14 6. avoiding plagiarism 9 similar reasons for booking tutorials were reported by interview participants, with some additionally mentioning anxieties around having english as a second language. most interview participants referred in some detail to lack of confidence in the standard of writing produced, with one participant reflecting that ‘sometimes i don’t know what i don’t know’ (interview 2), which is why she valued the support from the ld tutor in helping identify any problem areas. all of these engagement stimuli hint at the role of ld in helping students ‘make sense of learning activities and academic practices’ (hilsdon, 2011, p.14). furthermore, motivations referencing disabilities or limited exposure to academic culture foreground the potential of ld provision to support students with ‘marginal learner identities’ in achieving their goals in he (mcintosh and barden, 2019, p.4). perceived impact most survey respondents and all interview participants further motivated their engagement through qualitative comments on the positive impact of ld online tutorials. 38 out of 43 survey respondents described this impact in generic terms, using words such as ‘helpful/helped’ (22 references), ‘useful’ (4 references), ‘efficient’ (3 references), ‘excellent’ (3 references), or even ‘perfect’ (2 references): i've been out of education for over 20 years, each session has provided me with some useful support information. (survey) impact on learning was explicitly referenced in all five interviews and by five out of 43 survey participants: cirstea engaging students online: an analysis of students’ motivations for seeking individual learning development support journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 10 i learned many, many things which i didn't know before. if i didn't attend… tutorial, i wouldn't know even 5% of what i learned. i am so grateful for this… support…it is so…perfect. (interview 2) confidence boosting was also explicitly referenced by four interview and three survey respondents: it was easy to understand how to improve and gave me confidence to write better. (survey) one survey participant further stated that tutorial attendance had a positive impact on their wellbeing, describing the time spent in tutorials as ‘therapeutic’. impact on attainment while feedback was not explicitly sought on the impact of tutorial engagement on academic outcomes, attainment was mentioned as one of the main motivations for booking a tutorial. consequently, the generic impact statements outlined above can arguably provide some evidence of respondent perception that tutorials had a positive effect on their academic attainment. five respondents (one interview, four survey) explicitly reported that ld support helped improve their grades: all of my lecturers provided me good feedback that helped me improve my papers or assessments. i learned new things along the way and i received good marks from the subjects i sought advise. (survey) furthermore, 90% of survey respondents agreed that, based on their current experience of online tutorials, they were either very likely (80%) or likely (10%) to book another tutorial. 88% of survey respondents rated their overall experience as excellent (59%) or good (29%), with the remaining 12% selecting a rating of ‘average’. cirstea engaging students online: an analysis of students’ motivations for seeking individual learning development support journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 11 feedback feedback has long been acknowledged to be a crucial teaching and learning tool (biggs and tang, 2007), implying that perceived quality of feedback can, in turn, influence student engagement. 38 out of 43 survey respondents, and all interview respondents, provided comments on the quality of tutorial feedback, which all included positive generic evaluations. a number of respondents identified specific features of feedback such as ‘constructive’ (2 references), ‘clear/easy to understand’ (2 references) and ‘relevant’ (1 reference). these features are recognised in the literature as the key characteristics of effective feedback (e.g. brookhart, 2008; gikandi et al., 2011). ld lecturers were described using words such as ‘supportive’ (5 references), ‘knowledgeable’ (2 references) and ‘non-judgmental’ (1 reference): i honestly think all… are excellent-ever so ready to reach out to offer help and support beyond one's expectations. (survey) in terms of specific approaches to feedback, one interview respondent linked the effectiveness of tutorials to tutors’ ability to highlight strengths as well as areas for improvement. two other interviewees referred to learning by example/tutor modelling the revision of drafts as highly effective tutoring tools. the benefits of being provided with a tutor-written record of feedback were highlighted by one survey and two interview respondents. one survey respondent was highly appreciative of video feedback. the main suggestion for improvement was that more time was needed for concerns to be explained and fully addressed in tutorials (eight references). one interview respondent suggested that tutorial time would be used more efficiently if tutors reviewed the work submitted in advance and used the live tutorials only to share and discuss feedback. one survey respondent indicated their preference for more detailed rather than synoptic feedback. these findings clearly indicate a need for flexibility in the tutorial encounter, in acknowledgement of learners’ diverse needs and preferences; consequently, a genuinely effective, inclusive ld provision would need to include multiple forms of feedback and/or cirstea engaging students online: an analysis of students’ motivations for seeking individual learning development support journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 12 delivery, as well as the opportunity for flexible timing. whilst meeting all these criteria could potentially require considerable resources, the student voices in this research suggest that impact would also be significant, covering a range of key areas of learner development, from enhanced academic outcomes to heightened wellbeing. barriers to engagement the main barriers to engagement reported by both survey and interview participants were availability and convenience of tutorial slots. with regard to delivery mode, a greater number of survey participants stated that they prefer online tutorials to face-to-face tutorials (table 3). interview participants used the opportunity to express more nuanced preferences, acknowledging the benefits of both options. of these, one remote-learning participant expressed a decisive preference for online delivery, whereas three others stated a preference for face-to-face tutorials. table 3. delivery preference (survey data). prefer online tutorials 18 (42%) prefer face to face tutorials 13 (30%) no preference 9 (21%) no answer 3 (7%) the main extrinsic benefits of online tutorials were seen as access and convenience, including overcoming barriers to behavioural engagement such as distance learning, commuting, work commitments, health problems and caring responsibilities. some respondents referred to the specific benefits of online learning in the context of the pandemic, such as feeling ‘safer’ (survey) and avoiding travel, with one participant highlighting that online tutorials have been a ‘lifeline’ during the coronavirus lockdown (interview 5). intrinsic advantages described by some participants included improved clarity and efficiency, due to being ‘shown everything clearly online’ (survey) or having a tutor-produced record of feedback, which was regarded as an effective learning tool as well as time-saving. cirstea engaging students online: an analysis of students’ motivations for seeking individual learning development support journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 13 the participants also identified barriers to engagement in online tutorials that can be linked to behavioural as well as cognitive dimensions. the most important of these were connection issues and being more easily distracted. benefits of in-person tutorials focused in particular on emotional engagement, including ‘better communication and clarity’ (survey) through interpersonal contact, use of facial expressions and body language. a survey participant justified their preference for inperson tutorials by the fact that ‘direct talking to a person is more natural than using technology’. an interview participant explained their preference in terms of their temperament, describing themselves as a ‘people’s person’ (interview 5). another interview participant alluded to the potential of in-person tutorials to build a better rapport with the tutor, which she linked to the concept of ‘social capital’. interestingly enough, participants who reported reluctance to engage in face-to-face tutorials also referred to emotional dimensions of support seeking, such as being ‘embarrassed’ and ‘shy’ (survey). a number of participants stated that the quality of ld tutorials remained the same, or improved, with the transition to online delivery: right now it's just excellent… i really like everything that the library or you offered for this online. even during the lockdown, i still feel it’s very efficient. it doesn’t make any differences in terms of the time, the waiting time or… the support or the efficiency during the session. it's all worked very well. (interview 3) alternatively, some participants stated they had not experienced a face-to-face tutorial, which arguably limits their ability to provide a reliable comparative perspective between online and in-person delivery. notwithstanding, these responses clearly suggest the potential of online delivery modes to enhance inclusivity and thus address some gaps of in-person ld provision. discourse analysis framework findings a discourse analysis framework can shed further light on the engagement dimensions outlined above, by scanning the language used by participants for traces of the subtler cirstea engaging students online: an analysis of students’ motivations for seeking individual learning development support journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 14 mechanisms that triggered their choices. this framework is particularly pertinent to the analysis of interview data, where respondents were involved in a spontaneous conversational exchange, but the qualitative survey data were also included. yet, it should be pointed out that the more rigid nature of the survey form may have inhibited choice of vocabulary and linguistic structures, which would limit the relevance of analysis. as previously stated in the methods section, the analysis centred around three discursive categories: learner identity, perceptions of authority and power, and representations of academic literacies and disciplinary knowledge. learner identities most participants represented their own identity as learners in negative terms, as lacking in confidence, ability and knowledge. one interview participant expressed this as ‘i don’t know what i don’t know’ (interview 2). interestingly, in reference to the impact of tutorials, most participants were able to refer to their learning in positive terms, such as having learned ‘many many things (interview 2)’, as well as developing understanding, confidence and skills during their learning journey: really i can say you really helped me to understand how to articulate my writing. especially how to …what to put in a paragraph… things like that… when i came at [university name] i really didn't know very well how to do it. (interview 3) it was concerning to note that the study sample, which included a significant proportion of advanced level students (postgraduate research), persistently conveyed associations between support seeking and weakness or deficit: i didn't have any reason to book a [ld] tutorial…until i was advised because of my poor academic writing. (interview 5) over the past decade, ld scholars have consistently worked to disassociate ld from deficit discourses, instead promoting its developmental dimension, focused on mediating learner independence (e.g. hilsdon, 2011; mcintosh and barden, 2019). however, these debates have been carried out predominantly from an institutional or disciplinary cirstea engaging students online: an analysis of students’ motivations for seeking individual learning development support journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 15 perspective. these findings suggest that to address this goal, further attention needs be paid to students’ perception of ld support. power structures a significant number of survey respondents linked their engagement in ld tutorials to advice from markers/disciplinary lecturers and library/ld staff (see table 1 above). the input of the supervisor was mentioned by one interview respondent: the reason i booked a [ld] tutorial was following supervision during the covid period. and [supervisor] suggested because of my academic writing is weak. (interview 5) the extract above illustrates how, in the process of referral or signposting, staff come to be seen as authority figures, with an impact on students’ perceptions of themselves, their abilities and their needs. a similar process is depicted by another respondent in relation to a writing development consultant: i remember one of the ladies, she’d had an american education, and she explained to me … american writing style or american phrases or even spelling, it's not recognised here, and i think because she understands where i came from and that made me feel i wanted to master my british vocabulary. (interview 3) at the same time, some comments on the rapport built with the ld tutor showed evidence of a more balanced power dynamic, as represented by such phrases as ‘share all my problems’ (survey), have a ‘conversation’ (survey), ‘mutual understanding’ (survey), ‘share all my thoughts and feelings and points of view’ (interview 5). whilst one of the main goals of ld remains supporting students to ‘make sense of academic and professional practices’ (mcintosh and barden, 2019), this goal can be at risk if students fail to see the role of ld staff as facilitators of teaching and learning, regarding them instead as academic gatekeepers. this theme prompts the need for learning developers to actively reflect on our position within a concatenation of institutional power structures and consistently work on empowering learners to become partners in teaching cirstea engaging students online: an analysis of students’ motivations for seeking individual learning development support journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 16 and learning. one way in which this can be achieved is by developing not just students’ awareness of, but also critical engagement with, different knowledge systems and associated writing practices. knowledge systems respondents referred to a range of features which they represented as ‘significant’ (gee, 2005, p.32) markers of good quality academic writing. this theme was more prevalent in the interview than the survey data, potentially due to the fact that the interview format is conducive to richer information sharing. features that were portrayed as most significant included critical analysis (4 references), using evidence (3 references), appropriate structure (3 references), relevance to set purpose (2 references), style (2 references) and flow (2 references). two participants shared their understanding and application of ‘critical writing’: giving evidence and analyse… it. so i think i understand critical writing (interview 2) but now when i'm writing i would say what is the topic sentence? what is the voice of …experts? where is my comments? conclusion? (interview 4) while the interview 2 extract explains the structure of critical writing by resorting to widelyused terms such as description and analysis, the interview 4 extract makes some recognisable references to an in-house model which relies on three components, or ‘voices’: (1) the tour guide voice (introducing the topic of discussion); (2) the expert voice (integrating evidence from literature), and (3) the critical voice (critical comments on this evidence/concluding remarks). the language used indicates the respondents regard these approaches as significant in the development of good quality writing, as well as feeling confident in explaining them back to the interviewer, who is also a member of the ld team. one participant regarded competent use of british academic language as a significant marker of successful transition from an american to a uk higher education context: cirstea engaging students online: an analysis of students’ motivations for seeking individual learning development support journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 17 british words and phrases. that's the classical beautiful language that i want to master. (interview 3) overall, this theme evidenced that most participants were able to identify key academic writing expectations for their level and context but had limited level of confidence in applying these conventions in their own writing practice, and/or independently evaluating their outputs. this resonates with all three dimensions of engagement – cognitive, emotional and behavioural – and can potentially be sustained through an emphasis on active writing and hands-on approaches in ld sessions. at the same time, such a practical focus could encourage students towards a more critical engagement with academic and disciplinary conventions, which, as previously stated, could, in turn, boost their confidence and independence. conclusion overall, the study participants reported that the main driver for behavioural engagement in ld tutorials was lack of confidence in their academic writing abilities, which were perceived as interlinked with overall academic attainment. this corroborates suggestions from previous literature that writing skills have come to dominate uk he assessment (goodfellow, 2005). both survey and interview participants further explained their motivation for tutorial engagement through reference to a range of positive learning impacts, including better understanding of academic writing conventions, enhanced levels of confidence, and improved academic outcomes. therefore, the data collected provide compelling evidence of the role of one-to-one ld tutorials in supporting students in feeling ‘engaged and empowered in their learning community’, which bond et al. (2020, p.3) describe as a core element of engagement as well as a key predictor of both short and long-term achievement. to maximise this impact as well as bolster learner independence, the most popular areas of support seeking identified (see table 2) can be used to inform the organisation and more effective promotion of the ld self-study provision. these priority areas could also be relevant to the design of curricular as well as co-curricular teaching and learning activities. cirstea engaging students online: an analysis of students’ motivations for seeking individual learning development support journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 18 the data collected also indicate a generally positive response to online delivery. this provides a different perspective to a number of early covid-era studies (bao, 2020; tang et al., 2020), which identified widespread negative attitudes to online delivery among their student samples. in the current project, qualitative comments clearly show a preoccupation with the availability and effectiveness of support rather than the delivery mode per se. both survey and interview respondents associated online delivery with a range of intrinsic as well as extrinsic benefits, with 42% of survey respondents identifying online delivery as their preferred tutorial method, and further 21% showing no delivery preference. these findings support the view that an enhanced level of online tutorial delivery (as compared to pre-covid provision) can complement and enhance in-person delivery. in particular, online delivery can be effective in removing access barriers for students with a preference for remote study due to location, complex commitments or health conditions. scrutinising these data through a discourse analysis framework further revealed that ld engagement is frequently mediated by academic authority figures, who can exert a significant impact on learner confidence and autonomy. therefore, the most challenging task for learning developers remains to sustain flexible, learner-responsive provision, underpinned by effective partnerships with both learners and staff stakeholders, and consistently informed by the developmental dimensions of ld. in view of the study limitations, in particular sample bias and reliance on student self-reported data, further research focused on alternative samples and methods would be beneficial in endorsing and refining these findings. references bao, w. (2020) ‘covid-19 and online teaching in higher education: a case study of peking university’. human behaviour and emerging technology, 2(2), pp.113-115. available at: https://doi.org/10.1002/hbe2.191 (accessed: 16 december 2021). biggs, j.b. and tang, c. (2007) teaching for quality learning at university: what the student does. maidenhead: society for research into higher education and open university press. https://doi.org/10.1002/hbe2.191 cirstea engaging students online: an analysis of students’ motivations for seeking individual learning development support journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 19 bond, m., buntins, k., bedenlier, s., zawacki-richter, o. and kerres, m. (2020) ‘mapping research in student engagement and educational technology in higher education: a systematic evidence map’, international journal of educational technology in higher education, 17(2). available at: https://doi.org/10.1186/s41239-019-0176-8 (accessed 18 may 2021). brookhart, s.m. (2008) how to give effective feedback to your students. alexandria, va: ascd. bryson, j.r. and andres, l. (2020) ‘covid-19 and rapid adoption and improvisation of online teaching: curating resources for extensive versus intensive online learning experiences’, journal of geography in higher education, 44(4), pp.608-623. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/03098265.2020.1807478 (accessed: 16 december 2021). gee, j.p. (2005) an introduction to discourse analysis: theory and method. 2nd edn. new york and london: routledge. gibbs, g. (2009) ‘developing students as learners – varied phenomena, varied contexts and a developmental trajectory for the whole endeavour’, journal of learning development in higher education, 1. available at https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.v0i1.30 (accessed: 10 june 2021). gikandi, j.w., morrow, d. and davis, n.e. (2011) ‘online formative assessment in higher education: a review of the literature’, computers and education, 57(4), pp.23332351. available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2011.06.004 (accessed: 16 december 2021). goodfellow, r. (2005) ‘academic literacies and e-learning: a critical approach to writing in the online university’, international journal of educational research, 43(7-8), pp.481-494. available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijer.2006.07.005 (accessed: 16 december 2021). https://doi.org/10.1186/s41239-019-0176-8 https://doi.org/10.1080/03098265.2020.1807478 https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.v0i1.30 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2011.06.004 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijer.2006.07.005 cirstea engaging students online: an analysis of students’ motivations for seeking individual learning development support journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 20 henrie, c.r., halverson, l.r. and graham, c.r. (2015) ‘measuring student engagement in technology-mediated learning: a review’, computers & education 90, pp.36-53. available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2015.09.005 (accessed: 16 december 2021). hilsdon, j. (2011) ‘what is learning development?’, in hartley, p., hilsdon, j., keenan, c., sinfield, s., and verity, m. (eds.) learning development in higher education. london: palgrave, pp.13-27. lowe, t. and el hakim, y. (eds) (2020) a handbook for student engagement in higher education: theory into practice. london: routledge. mega, c., ronconi, l. and de beni, r. (2014) ‘what makes a good student? how emotions, self-regulated learning and motivation contribute to academic achievement’, journal of educational psychology, 106(1), pp.121-131. available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/a0033546 (accessed: 16 december 2021). mcintosh, e. and barden, m.e. (2019) ‘the leap (learning excellence achievement pathway) framework: a model for student learning development in higher education’, journal of learning development in higher education 14. available at: https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.v0i14.466 (accessed: 18 may 2021). reeves, a. (2018) ‘where are the male students? exploring gender-based differences in help-seeking behaviour linked to learning development provision’, association of learning development in higher education (aldinhe) conference. university of leicester, leicester, 26-28 march. reyes, c.r., brackett, m.a., rivers, s.e., white, m. and salovey, p. (2012) ‘classroom emotional climate, student engagement and academic achievement’, journal of educational psychology 104(3), pp.700-712. available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/a0027268 (accessed: 16 december 2021). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2015.09.005 http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/a0033546 https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.v0i14.466 http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/a0027268 cirstea engaging students online: an analysis of students’ motivations for seeking individual learning development support journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 21 tang, t., abuhmaid, a.m., olaimat, m., oudat, d.m., aldhaeebi, m. and bamanger, e. (2020) ‘efficiency of flipped classroom with online-based teaching under covid-19’, interactive learning environments. available at https://doi.org/10.1080/10494820.2020.1817761 (accessed: 26 may 2021). van mol, c. (2017) ‘improving web survey efficiency: the impact of an extra reminder and reminder content on web survey response’, international journal of social research methodology 20(4), pp.317-27. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/13645579.2016.1185255 (accessed: 10 december 2021). author details arina cirstea is senior lecturer in the centre for learning and study support (class) at de montfort university. she was supported in completing this research project by a sabbatical fellowship granted by the university’s centre for academic innovation. she is also a fellow of hea. appendix 1: demographic data 1.a age age under 18 18-24 over 25 survey 1 (2%) 10 (23%) 31 (75%) interview not collected ld self-selecting (2017/18*) 5 (0.2%) 1560 (70%) 668 (29.8%) 1.b gender distribution gender female male other survey 34 (81%) 8 (19%) 0 interview 4 (80%) 1 (20%) 0 https://doi.org/10.1080/10494820.2020.1817761 https://doi.org/10.1080/13645579.2016.1185255 cirstea engaging students online: an analysis of students’ motivations for seeking individual learning development support journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 22 ld self-selecting (2017/18*) 1708 (77%) 525 (23%) n/a 1.c disability profile disability yes no disability reported prefer not to say survey 6 (14%) 35 (81%) 2(5%) interview 1 (20%) 4 (80%) 0 ld self-selecting (2017/18*) 648 (29%) 1585 (71%) n/a disability type dyslexia/spld medical condition other survey 3 (7%) 3 (7%) 0 interview 0 0 1 (20%) ld self-selecting (2017-18*) 348 (15.5%) 51 (2.3%) 249 (11.2%) 1.d level of study level undergraduate pg taught research survey 34 (79%) 6 (14%) 3 (7%) interview 3 (60%) 0 2 (40%) ld self-selecting (2017-18*) 1919 (86%) 252 (11%) 65 (3%) *self-selecting ld data are collected, processed and then hesa-verified, a process which has been delayed during the covid-19 crisis; data were extracted from the most recently available dashboards at the time of writing: tableau (2019) self-selecting provision engagement dashboard 1314 to 1718 [restricted institutional access] (accessed 18 may 2021). engaging students online: an analysis of students’ motivations for seeking individual learning development support abstract introduction research aim discourse analysis framework methods context and recruitment generalisability data analysis ethical considerations results and discussion perceived impact impact on attainment feedback barriers to engagement discourse analysis framework findings conclusion references author details appendix 1: demographic data literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 3: march 2011 educators in universities need to be researchers rather than priests of cargo cults dave burnapp university of northampton, uk abstract the concept of cargo cults, although hotly disputed, was originally developed to describe the effects of interfacing cultures which possessed very different technologies and methods of production. the concept has previously been used to describe in a figurative manner a distinction between science and pseudoscience, the latter being typified by not following a method of scientific integrity, including scrutiny of claims. here the analogy is adapted to justify a claim that educators at universities need to be actively involved in research in order to demonstrate to their students that the knowledge which is expected, accepted, and respected in universities is subject to constant debate, is often ambiguous, and is never completed. keywords: cargo cult; research; epistemology; pseudoscience; internationalisation of higher education. the outline for this paper began to take shape when in conversations with professors at two different universities, on two separate occasions in a matter of just a few weeks, the concept of cargo cults was used to describe the links between teaching and researching. the phenomena of cargo cults had been used figuratively more than 30 years ago by feynman (1974) to describe a distinction between science and what he labelled pseudoscience, and his article will be glossed below. here, however, the analogy with cargo cults is going to be used for a different purpose: to support a claim that educators at universities, including teachers and educational developers, should themselves be actively involved in research in order to be able to demonstrate to their students the kind of knowledge which is the very stuff of university life. knowledge in the university context is characterised by constant refinement and change, it is produced by ongoing research burnapp educators in universities need to be researchers rather than priests of cargo cults rather than being a received and completed product, hence educators should themselves be active researchers and should induct students to researching processes. the consequence of this is to encourage students themselves to become learners-asresearchers (healey and jenkins, 2009). the concept of cargo cults (new world encyclopedia contributors, 2008) was developed to describe behaviours which emerged in several places, particularly in oceania, at a time of early contact between different cultures. at the time of this contact the members of one culture relied on exploiting resources in their immediate environment to craft their technology. the items which were made, including buildings, canoes, baskets, clothing, fishing equipment, mats, musical instruments, and utensils such as pots, were produced from easily available materials including wood of various kinds (applying an encyclopaedic knowledge of which wood was most suitable for any specific purpose), clay, shells, and various fibres. of equal significance was the public nature of the acts of production of these goods: canoes, houses, pots and so on were openly made as part of observable daily life, hence the origin of these artefacts could be seen clearly. within the community some people were acknowledged to be experts in certain tasks, but in general the technologies used were known to all and accessible to all. in contrast the goods brought in by outsiders – most notably goods such as the airplanes used by the american forces during the second world war – were not only made of materials which were not immediately recognisable, but the technological processes which had contributed to their production were neither visible nor easily imaginable. a deeper and more complex analysis of what have been called cargo cults challenges this description (kaplan, 1995) and this critique will be returned to later, but for the purposes of introducing the analogy this simple description will suffice. according to the originators of the concept of cargo cults, the new goods must have seemed to those observing them for the first time to have come from a mysterious source. the goods were desirable and appeared to be freely available to the outsiders, so various cargo cults then emerged as people sought to unlock the secrets of access to these goods; access which was attempted by imitating the observable behaviour of the outsiders which seemingly had made them fit to receive the fruits of cargo. this included marching and drilling with bamboo rifles in imitation of the american forces, construction of airstrips by clearing jungle, and the creation of various rituals in imitation of christian rites. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 2 burnapp educators in universities need to be researchers rather than priests of cargo cults feynman’s article, initially a speech given at caltech but reproduced many times since then, describes how science emerged from earlier magical understandings of the workings of the world via a process of eliminating those ideas which could not be substantiated. true science is associated with scientific integrity, of reporting and publishing both what did not work as well as the results you had hoped for: yet despite this feynman described being overwhelmed by the volume of beliefs which continued to be held about things which had not been proven, for example, concerning unidentified flying objects. feynman also described how unproven beliefs, which he labelled witchdoctor remedies, influenced mainstream activities, using as examples theories concerning teaching reading skills to children, and experimental methods in the treatment of criminals: ‘we obviously have made no progress – lots of theory, but no progress’ (feynman, 1974, p.10). the author’s primary interest is linked to researching the internationalisation of higher education, and the interfacing of students from one culture of learning with the expectations of institutions of another culture. it is true that there are a growing number of universities which claim to be transforming themselves into fully internationalised institutions, and which report how they have set out to celebrate a diversity of learning approaches. but even this internationalised stance should itself be seen as a description of one specific culture of learning, which itself involves a set of expectations about what constitutes knowledge and hence what are appropriate behaviours. indeed it would be difficult to conceive of a university which does not have a firmly rooted stance about the nature of knowledge and hence expected patterns and sets of behaviours of learners and teachers. it is equally possible to apply this argument beyond the topic of internationalisation, as this issue of addressing students’ expectations concerning the nature of learning relates to all newcomers entering universities. in order to assist students in their quest to make sense of the expectations of university life it is necessary to link the observable conventions, for example, the behaviours required in seminar discussions or the expected formats of different forms of assessments, to deeper understandings of just what knowledge is taken to be within this setting. hence it can be argued that for all students previously immersed in the procedures of secondary education, the move into higher education involves encountering a new culture of learning just as challenging as it is for those moving from one country to another. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 3 burnapp educators in universities need to be researchers rather than priests of cargo cults within the uk, by investigating the ‘the framework for higher education qualifications in england, wales and northern ireland’ (qaa, 2008) it is possible to see that rather than just being concerned with standards, which is how the qaa describes the framework, it can equally be seen as a set of descriptions of a specific epistemology; a description of what constitutes legitimate knowledge in universities, what are the appropriate behaviours in establishing and extending that knowledge, and what are the various roles and behaviours expected in these settings. according to this framework, what is expected, accepted, and respected in universities includes systematic understanding of concepts and topics students are studying, with a specific mention of ideas and current research at the forefront of the discipline. yet beyond this students also need to demonstrate ‘an appreciation of the uncertainty, ambiguity and limits of knowledge’ (qaa, 2008, p.19). the framework then describes how holders of university degrees should be able to use and apply their learning, for example to extend their knowledge and to critically evaluate arguments, and to deal with incomplete data. three of the most salient features emerging from this understanding of knowledge are: it lacks the security of agreed and established facts (it is limited, it has ambiguity and uncertainty); it is characterised by change (it has a forefront, it is amended by current research); and it is contested, as arguments must be made and critically evaluated. this, then, is a description of knowledge as a process which students need to be engaged with, rather than as a product, ready-made which arrives from elsewhere. this understanding of knowledge, lacking the security of agreed facts and being characterised by change and contestability, can be contrasted with other understandings which figure knowledge as concerning a body of established facts, a canon of fixed items to be recalled and which have been approved by the authority of appearing in textbooks. such a view could be seen to be restricted to the starting place of the description in the qaa framework: ‘a systematic understanding of key aspects of their field of study, including acquisition of coherent and detailed knowledge’ (qaa, 2008, p.18), before the descriptors move on to deeper aspects. earlier it was pointed out that it is important to distinguish between objects which appear as finished articles and those where the processes of production are observable, or at least imaginable. to link this analogy back to the argument being made here; for students to appreciate the evolving, disputed, and often tenuous claims of competing theories and models in their topic area, for them to recognise that critical evaluation rather than journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 4 burnapp educators in universities need to be researchers rather than priests of cargo cults uncritical recall is the expected behaviour in university settings, then they need to be in situations where knowledge is being created in an observable way within their community (what was described earlier as ‘the public nature of the acts of production’), rather than to see knowledge as something concrete and complete, appearing from elsewhere in the sanctioned form of text books. although it is often pointed out that for most people there are things which they accept without fully understanding, for example, the inner workings of computers remain unknown to many users, such workings are imaginable technologies rather than mysteries, so computers are not held to be of magical origin. earlier this article presented a rather naïve view of cargo cults, but it should be seen that this view is – as with all topics worthy of study at university – contested and debated: critical thinkers and post-colonial theorists now dismiss the whole concept as a western projection of primitiveness on non-european cultures. in a similar way this article and feynman’s article both adapt the concept, but each uses it to create different analogies; so the concept remains in currency, but it is characterised by the uncertainty and ambiguity described earlier, tenuously held, to be re-examined constantly. this, it could be argued, is what distinguishes a university from earlier levels of education, and hence what should distinguish a university educator from a school teacher. there is no doubt that all people involved in education at all levels should engage in reflective practice, in continuing personal development, and in various degrees of action research (mcniff, 2002), as this is essential for ongoing professional development and personal growth. in universities, however, the nature of the knowledge which is being dealt with on a daily basis means that academics need to engage with the process – the debates, disputes, and uncertainties – of knowledge creation within their subject areas in order to allow their students to see at first hand the status of such knowledge: feynman’s criticism of pseudoscience was a criticism of the lack of the critical process rather than of the truth value of the claims being made. university educators need to be able to describe their ongoing research to their students, to map the development of their own thinking. learning developers are increasingly able to create the forums for technology enhanced learning programmes where participation in the process of knowledge creation is facilitated, for example, via webinars and social networking using virtual learning environments, and in this way presentations which are given at conferences can also be made available to students. increasingly students are themselves being called upon to carry out research: ‘the task now is to reinvent or reinvigorate the curriculum to ensure that journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 5 burnapp educators in universities need to be researchers rather than priests of cargo cults all undergraduate students in all higher education institutions should experience learning through and about research and inquiry’ (healey and jenkins, 2009, p.6). in these ways knowledge should be seen as something being created here and now, within this community, rather than being a received product from unknown sources. hence the title of this article: university educators need to be researchers rather than priests of cargo cults. references feynman, r.p. (1974) ‘cargo cult science’, engineering and science, 37(7), pp.10-13. healey, m. and jenkins, a. (2009) developing undergraduate research and inquiry. york: hea. kaplan, m. (1995) neither cargo nor cult: ritual politics and the colonial imagination in fiji. durham: duke university press. mcniff, j. (2002) action research for professional development. 3rd edn. [online]. available at: http://www.jeanmcniff.com/ar-booklet.asp (accessed: 31 august 2010). new world encyclopedia contributors (2008) 'cargo cult', new world encyclopedia [online]. available at: http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/cargo_cult?oldid=678589 (accessed: 31 august 2010). qaa (2008) the framework for higher education qualifications in england, wales and northern ireland [online]. available at: http://www.qaa.ac.uk/academicinfrastructure/fheq/default.asp (accessed: 31 august 2010). author details dave burnapp has lived and taught in many countries, and is now at northampton business school, the university of northampton. he is a national teaching fellow journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 6 http://www.jeanmcniff.com/ar-booklet.asp http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/cargo_cult?oldid=678589 http://www.qaa.ac.uk/academicinfrastructure/fheq/default.asp burnapp educators in universities need to be researchers rather than priests of cargo cults and focuses his research on aspects of the internationalisation of higher education. he is author of ‘getting ahead as an international student (berkshire: open university press). e-mail: dave.burnapp@northampton.ac.uk. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 7 mailto:dave.burnapp@northampton.ac.uk educators in universities need to be researchers rather than priests of cargo cults abstract references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 24 september 2022 ________________________________________________________________________ interrogating a collaborative instructional approach to academic literacy: the missing link in supporting students’ language learning kum khuan tang national university of singapore, singapore derek wong national university of singapore, singapore gek ling lee national university of singapore, singapore abstract in covid-19’s ‘new normal’ academics have been urged to tear down subject silos and approach teaching collaboratively with renewed interest and increased urgency. an example of this can be found in curriculum-integrated academic literacy instruction which is based on the collaboration between language and content instructors. case studies frequently report barriers to engaging content instructors in supporting students’ language learning. however, the internal conflicts of language instructors are under-represented: little is known about their subjective experiences and emotions as they go about negotiating and accommodating a collaborative instructional approach. this paper undertakes a narrative inquiry into three language instructors’ stories of teaching discipline-specific academic literacy. in bringing to the fore their reflexive voices on authority, agency and feelings of student resistance, it explores themes around identity and collaboration and underlines a critical missing link that mediates faculty collaboration and student learning. humanising faculty development and venturing into scholarly enquiry are then proposed as potential ways to empower language instructors to manage the emotional complexities in their collaborative engagements. keywords: academic literacy; curriculum integration; faculty collaboration; language learning; narrative inquiry. tang, wong and lee interrogating a collaborative instructional approach to academic literacy: the missing link in supporting students’ language learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 2 introduction despite a wealth of research attesting to the promise that a collaborative instructional approach to academic literacy holds for advancing students’ learning and success (e.g., jacobs, 2013; zappa-hollman, 2018), partnership models continue to be a topic of recent interest in the field of learning development (cairns, hervey and johnson, 2018). one reason for continued interest concerns the ‘significant practical challenges associated with the partnership models’ (cairns, hervey and johnson, 2018, p.17), a notable challenge being ‘barriers to staff and student engagement with the integrated approach’ (p.17). following a relatively long history of close to four decades of published research on a content-language instructional partnership model, the model has continued to receive interest in the united kingdom and singapore (e.g., murray and nallaya, 2016; jaidev and chan, 2018; wingate, 2018; wu, lee and chan, 2018). continued interest in deepening an understanding of the barriers to faculty collaboration to optimise student learning is further justified as universities around the world are urged to tear down subject silos as they move forward into a post-covid-19 world and to equip students with the competency to solve complex real-world problems that defy single-discipline solutions (tan, 2020). the partnership model that is the focus of this paper relates to the collaboration between language instructors (e.g., english for academic purposes or eap professionals) and content instructors (e.g., disciplinary subject specialists). according to wingate (2018), a collaborative instructional approach to academic literacy involves a partnership between language and content instructors to help students ‘learn the genres and associated literacy conventions of their disciplines’ (p.353). such an approach is important because of its transformative potential: it is believed that the integration of academic literacy support into study programmes has ‘the potential to lead to changes in instructional policies and practices that in turn will lead to improvements in the student experience’ (wingate, 2019, p.4). a crucial premise for the transformative potential is the belief that if content instructors were supported by eap staff who as english language experts are better able to articulate literacy requirements and demystify such tacit knowledge for students, then students could be provided with the greatest opportunity of success in their academic literacy development (wingate, 2018). research on collaborative academic literacy instruction has identified three main degrees of collaboration between language and content instructors: namely, cooperation, tang, wong and lee interrogating a collaborative instructional approach to academic literacy: the missing link in supporting students’ language learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 3 collaboration and team-teaching (dudley-evans, 2001). these degrees are mainly differentiated by the intimacy of both parties in the partnership. cooperation often suggests some initial involvement of the content instructors, such as in curriculum planning; collaboration involves a more sustained cooperation between both content and language instructors in materials development; team-teaching extends the collaboration to the codelivery of instruction. various terms have also been used to depict different methods of collaboration, such as discipline-specific and embedded literacies, but they may not be consistently used across the literature as authors often use these terms while leaving unclear ‘what contributions the eap/learning specialists and the subject lecturers make in the collaboration. . . [and] to what extent literacy instruction was embedded in the curriculum’ (wingate, 2018, p.354). regardless, critical to the collaborative model is the relationship between both parties prior to developing the instructional materials and the recognition of the expertise of both. recent studies have identified the benefits and challenges of collaborative academic literacy instruction. although increased student interest and motivation in academic literacy learning is often reported as a key benefit (e.g., zhang et al., 2017), studies have cited the lack of reciprocal collaboration from content instructors, and their deficit knowledge and appreciation of language in relation to disciplinary content as frequent barriers to staff engagement (wingate, andon and cogo, 2011; ng et al., 2014; murray and nallaya, 2016; jaidev and chan, 2018). what appears to be under-represented is the perspective of the language instructors who taught the programmes. we argue that the language instructors’ perspective is a significant omission that needs to be addressed in the interest of advancing a more holistic understanding of the barriers to staff engagement. such an understanding is important for student learning as teaching staff play a mediating role in interpreting, translating, adapting and communicating the collaborative instructional approach to students, and critically influence its impact (tan, heng and ratnam-lim, 2017). our assumption here is that a process-oriented understanding of staff engagement in realising the collaborative approach is as important as an outcomes-based assessment of the promise and value of partnership models that most case studies in the literature have sought to undertake. this paper contributes to vocalising the silent voice by analysing the narratives of three language instructors (also the authors). our research question is thus defined: what are the experiences and tang, wong and lee interrogating a collaborative instructional approach to academic literacy: the missing link in supporting students’ language learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 4 attitudes of language instructors who taught a collaborative instructional approach to academic literacy? our study is anchored in a theory of symbolic interactionism (blumer, 1969) which views instructional practice as ‘an emergent phenomenon’ (ashwin, 2009, p.72) that develops from instructors’ exchange and negotiation of experiences and attitudes. according to this view, instructors’ actions and decisions arise from the meanings they ascribe to their experiences. these attitudinal meanings are shared, negotiated and reflected upon in a social and interpretive process that gives rise to action. it is expected that our insights into language instructors’ experiences and their interpretations (attitudes) will contribute to a more holistic appreciation of the barriers to staff engagement as well as a more nuanced understanding of the mediating forces that influence student learning and success under a collaborative instructional approach to academic literacy. methodology: narrative inquiry the methodology employed in this qualitative, interpretive study was narrative inquiry. this was considered the most appropriate methodology because narrative data are experientially-oriented and always interpretive at every stage (phillion and he, 2007; kim, 2016). they reveal the attitude of the narrator and the meanings they ascribe to themselves, their surroundings, their lives and lived experiences and those of others (alvermann, 2000). they also have the potential to reveal a wealth of insight into and nuanced understandings of the complexity of literacy learning and teaching in context (phillion and he, 2007). narrative inquiry has not been applied extensively to research on collaborative literacy instruction as there seems to have been a greater interest in capturing the more objective outcomes of curriculum-integrated programmes, rather than the subjective experiences of stakeholders. by applying narrative inquiry to understand the subjective experiences of one such group – language instructors – we hope to shed new light in this area of research and provide insight into the barriers to staff engagement as initially discussed by cairns, hervey and johnson (2018). the narrators are the authors of this paper. we are language instructors who support the english language and academic literacy needs of undergraduate students in a large and comprehensive university in singapore. our department offers a range of courses on tang, wong and lee interrogating a collaborative instructional approach to academic literacy: the missing link in supporting students’ language learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 5 academic and professional communication to serve the needs of both undergraduate and postgraduate students. although the department has had a relatively long history of almost 43 years, a collaborative instructional approach to academic literacy has only begun to be undertaken in some courses recently, beginning from 2013. the department relies on about 46 full-time and 79 part-time language instructors to deliver its courses. it does not currently employ graduate teaching assistants. deployment of language instructors to courses is generally rotational. team-teaching, where content and language instructors co-teach in the same classroom, is not the norm at the time of writing this paper. both kum khuan tang (kk) and gek ling lee (gl) teach on a core module on critical thinking and writing for undergraduates from the college of design and engineering. the module is led by kk who collaboratively developed it with a partner department from the college – the institute for engineering leadership. the degree of partnership may be considered as collaboration, following dudley-evans’ (2001) distinctions, and involves the co-authoring of instructional and assessment materials. content instructors from the partner department provided the case studies to be discussed and written about in the module. they also provided the theoretical framework and concepts to be used in case study analysis. derek wong teaches on a core module on exploring science communication for undergraduates from the faculty of science. the module is developed in partnership with content instructors whose involvement was confined to liaisons regarding information on course content – they provided the readings to be discussed with students. however, instructional and assessment materials in this course are solely the work of the language instructors. the degree of collaboration here is therefore less intimate than in gl’s course, and may be considered cooperative (dudley-evans, 2001). kk was involved in materials development in the first three iterations of this course when he was previously deployed to this course as one of its language instructors. to elicit the experiences of language instructors who taught a collaborative instructional approach, we collected narratives on critical moments in our practice. the collection process began with tang sending an invitation to wong and lee to participate in this research. the invitation set out a brief research context, a broad research aim, a tentative research timeline, and a beginning reading list which included wingate (2018) and tang, wong and lee interrogating a collaborative instructional approach to academic literacy: the missing link in supporting students’ language learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 6 halquist and musanti (2010). it also contained a prompt inviting authors to recall and recount a critical incident in their teaching of a collaborative instructional approach and to consider why and how it was critical. suggestions about length and style were also loosely made. authors wrote up their narratives independently over a month, after which they exchanged and read the narratives and were free to probe each other for clarification or elaboration. the narratives produced totalled 3,166 words. analysis the narratives were analysed in two main steps: first, to uncover salient experiences that constituted the narrators’ accounts of critical incidents; and second, to discern the attitudinal meanings or interpretations that they ascribe to their experiences. the analysis was undertaken by the first author and subsequently reviewed and validated by the second and third authors. critical incident analysis was first applied to gain insight into our narrated experiences and to facilitate interpretation in our data (halquist and musanti, 2010). this involved identifying any one or more of the following: an everyday event that stood out, vivid happenings that were considered significant or memorable, a problematic situation that presented itself as a unique case and promoted reflection, or highly charged moments and episodes that had enormous consequences for personal change and development. we also looked for interpretive comments about what made the incident critical and how it affected the narrator. attitudinal meanings were then extracted from narrative data using the attitude sub-system of martin and white’s (2005) appraisal theory as our analytical framework. attitude is a linguistic resource that enables writers to express their interpretations of people, events, and other phenomena using words of judgement, appreciation, or affect. the following examples are drawn from the data: • ‘being regarded as a con artist, a disciplinary outsider and intruder, an accomplice in a huge timewasting conspiracy, and a jobs program beneficiary?’ (judgement). • ‘the mathematicians’ stories told in the chapter could be rather difficult to relate for people who are not passionate about mathematics’. (appreciation). tang, wong and lee interrogating a collaborative instructional approach to academic literacy: the missing link in supporting students’ language learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 7 • ‘i had to comprehend each model or lens, then to see how it fitted in. . . . all this i had to learn by discovery’. (affect). martin and white’s (2005) attitude sub-system provided the conceptual criteria for our further analysis and interpretation of experiences, helping us to avoid the danger of a ‘single story’ and ensure that our analysis remained data-driven. the attitudinal meanings thus extracted were subsequently compared to discern common themes that represented language instructors’ interpretations of their collaborative instructional experiences. findings this study set out to answer the research question: what are the experiences and attitudes of language instructors who taught a collaborative instructional approach to academic literacy? in the ensuing sections, we present what we found from our analysis of critical incidents regarding the narrators’ salient experiences. we then report the dominant attitudes that emerged from our further analysis of the interpretive (attitudinal) meanings that narrators ascribed to their experiences. experiences kk’s critical moment in leading and teaching a collaboratively developed course on critical thinking and writing for undergraduate engineers came when he discovered, to his surprise, that the re-contextualised course did not find resonance with many students and tutors – they had found the skills unhelpful, uninteresting, and unfamiliar. in his view, they regarded the disciplinary-specific approach as less meaningful than a general ‘study skills’ one, and even thought it contrived and a waste of time. some challenged the qualification and credibility of language instructors to teach and assess writing on technical subject matter. the critical moment was of significance to him because it made him question if the time and effort invested into the collaborative endeavour, together with whatever purported benefits that came with it, was worth the physical and emotional labour, and whether the course could have been better if left alone, without the collaborative reform. tang, wong and lee interrogating a collaborative instructional approach to academic literacy: the missing link in supporting students’ language learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 8 gl recalled her critical moment as her first time teaching on kk’s course. even though she had come to this course armed with three decades of experience as a university educator and seven years leading and teaching similar courses, she experienced a steep learning curve as she had to learn the new course’s disciplinary frameworks, often succeeding at being only one or a few steps ahead of her students. she also had to make sense of how those frameworks related to the overall course structure and learning outcomes, the engineering discipline and profession, and to language teaching and learning. while she gained some pleasure from that discovery process, she also noted initial frustrations when grappling with the disciplinary lenses, content and the discipline. derek recounted the critical moment of a routine lesson in science communication that discussed a book chapter on mathematicians’ historical fascination with the riemann hypothesis, an important and unsolved problem in the field. however, the discussion was, to his surprise, met with disinterested silence, quite unlike the active discussions that preceded that chapter. through his survey research and reflection, he gathered that the mathematics chapter had not been as engaging because there were very few mathematics majors in his class. moreover, prior knowledge on the distribution of prime numbers was needed to appreciate it, and perhaps this was too esoteric. this moment of surprise encouraged him to enquire, experiment, and adapt to find the strategies appropriate for bringing out his teaching points with regard to genre awareness for his students. however, his agency was limited by a feeling that language instructors had to use the book chapters that were handed down to them because they were decided by the content instructors. adaptation efforts were also limited by the fact that he was not privy to the content instructors’ rationale for their prescriptions. furthermore, as both he and the module convenor were latecomers to the course, they were not involved in the cooperative liaisons that took place in the early stages of planning and designing the module. attitudes undermined confidence or authority gl felt insecure when she had to learn and discover disciplinary content and frameworks that were adopted in her course as she went about teaching them to her students: ‘i was only ever one or at most three steps ahead of the students. . . in mastering the course content’. tang, wong and lee interrogating a collaborative instructional approach to academic literacy: the missing link in supporting students’ language learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 9 kk felt that his qualification and credibility as a faculty member of his department (celc) of language instructors to teach and assess the content and frameworks was challenged by students who much preferred that such subject matter be left to their content instructors: students also challenged the authority of celc teachers to teach or assess their writing through disciplinary content. one remarked that their other engineering modules shared similar traits and gave more technical context into critical thinking and every other learning objective of this module. another described the module as ‘a complete waste of students’ time. . . . celc people have no clue when it comes to engineering and so why should they be grading assignment 2?’ agency: threat or opportunity? derek felt his agency as a language instructor to adapt disciplinary content to the needs and interests of his students to be limited in part by his lack of knowledge of what the content instructors had in mind for content selection: the original intent for choosing these book chapters might not have been known. . . but since we may not be intuitively familiar with the nature of some of the materials, discovering the way to understand students’ needs with regard to the materials could also be harder. he also felt his agency to be limited by a sense of obligation to accept the content instructors’ selections and to use them in his teaching. similar feelings were shared by gl who felt obliged to learn about the content and discipline, and appreciate their relevance and significance: the book chapters are handed down to us by the collaborating faculty. as a part of the collaboration, we have to use them. . . . we felt we had to use the materials given to us because it was decided by subject experts. (derek). tang, wong and lee interrogating a collaborative instructional approach to academic literacy: the missing link in supporting students’ language learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 10 i had to comprehend each model or lens, then to see how it fitted in with the course by itself and also together with the overall course structure and learning outcomes. all the while, also picking up an appreciation of the engineering profession, insight into the discipline and understanding of how a language teacher could contribute to engineering education. . . . all this i had to learn by discovery. (gl). however, derek also felt the discipline-specific nature of the course afforded autonomy to his teaching in both research and practice: although the above depicts difficulties in teaching, i generally find teaching this course a rewarding experience. despite the material’s limitation as i see it, the mode of collaboration has allowed me to enquire, experiment, and adapt so as to find the strategies appropriate for bringing out my teaching points with regards to genre awareness for my students. but i suppose this could go both ways. . . . i could not help but wonder if flexibility in delivery is necessary if not vital to address the diverse and varying thoughts and interaction that arise in the classroom. resistance from students kk felt resistance from his students towards the way content and language have been integrated in his course: to my (and our) surprise, the re-contextualization of critical thinking from the ‘general’ to the ‘specific’ did not find resonance with many students. as one remarked, curtly and tersely, ‘not interesting, not useful, not critical at all’. another called ours ‘a poorly disguised english language module’. yet another recommended that the module be renamed ‘to sound less deceptive’. it is not a good feeling for a well-meaning educator to be reduced overnight to a con artist. these were quite grave allegations. derek felt passive resistance from his students who did not take well to a content selection in his course: tang, wong and lee interrogating a collaborative instructional approach to academic literacy: the missing link in supporting students’ language learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 11 the mathematics chapter has not been particularly popular in my classes. . . . some students revealed that they did not like the mathematics book chapter in the survey, but they kept their opinions to themselves in the lesson. . . . the reason behind this could be [that] having to say ‘no’ in the classroom on a topic that is new probably requires authority and agency that students have yet to possess. discussion our study sought to voice the perspective of language instructors who teach curriculumintegrated academic literacy by eliciting their experiences and interpretations of those experiences. what we have found expands our knowledge about the ‘barriers to staff and student engagement with the integrated approach’ (cairns, hervey and johnson, 2018, p.17) in two significant ways. first, that the challenges language instructors face do not just come from content instructors’ lack of appreciation for the importance of language in disciplinary learning, or their lack of competence in articulating literacy requirements, but they also come from within, namely the crisis of identity and the emotional labour that come from having to teach unfamiliar content and confront resistance from students. such internal struggles, while commonly dismissed by academic leaders as an ‘individual’ matter, need to be addressed as they constitute teachers’ implicit theories about a collaborative instructional approach and implicate students’ academic performance (hargreaves, 2005; deng, 2021). second, although this study did not enquire directly into barriers to student engagement, it is possible to glimpse in kk and derek’s interpreted experiences what those barriers may be, namely preferring a ‘bolt-on’ model over ‘built-in’ and partnership models (cairns, hervey and johnson, 2018) of literacy instruction and reservations about content instructors’ selections for literacy activities. together, these barriers attest to the significant practical challenges in the lived reality of collaborative approaches that are hard to refute despite prolific research suggesting them to be ultimately the best form of pedagogy for students. probing these barriers and foregrounding their emotional dimension does not suggest that we are undermining student learning because, according to goh (2014), teachers’ commitment, confidence and competence are contingent on their need for authenticity, independence and finding meaning being satisfied, and in considering the affective factors that influence their performance, they are taking the first steps in empowering themselves to manage the complexities in their work. tang, wong and lee interrogating a collaborative instructional approach to academic literacy: the missing link in supporting students’ language learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 12 in presenting a critical view of collaborative approaches as experienced by language instructors in this study, we are not suggesting that they should settle for something less or stop striving for closer communication with content instructors through dialogue and policy. but neither are we suggesting dudley-evans’ (2001) team-teaching to be the one and only destination for everyone. as cairns, hervey and johnson (2018) concede, partnership models critically require the courage to take the long view. however, in many institutions, there are just not enough resources for language instructors to have time to become familiar with possibly a lot of subjects and win their collaborators’ and students’ recognition of their expertise. what our research has suggested is that less intimate models such as cooperation need not be a lesser approach to advancing students’ learning: derek noted that the integrated curriculum he taught provided his students with much input in rhetorical structures and strategies and enabled them to experience the complex considerations behind making and adapting genre decisions. he also found teaching the course a personally rewarding experience as it encouraged him to enquire, experiment, and adapt his teaching to students’ needs. such genre knowledge and practices, and differentiated learning, would appear to have more profound benefits than increased motivation and deepened engagement with content arising from contextualised learning (jaidev and chan, 2018) as observed in higher degrees of collaboration. further studies may be useful for illuminating the differences in effects between different degrees of collaboration. one suggestion that might allay language instructors’ internal struggles is to provide ‘some level of socialisation. . . into the partner discipline’ (wingate, 2018, p.359). this would hopefully help language instructors gain familiarity and confidence with the disciplinary content with which they would be engaging their students. however, faculty training can only address language instructors’ ‘deficit’ content knowledge in a symptomatic way. it can neither address their feelings of obligation in relation to the prescribed content nor impart to them, in gl’s words, ‘an appreciation of the engineering profession, insight into the discipline and understanding of how a language instructor could contribute to engineering education’. according to rachayon (2020), it may be possible for language instructors to be successful dwellers in an unfamiliar content space, but they will need to possess a positive attitude towards disciplinary content, be interested in the subject and be willing to learn more. this suggests that a more asset-based approach to selecting staff that tang, wong and lee interrogating a collaborative instructional approach to academic literacy: the missing link in supporting students’ language learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 13 considers language instructors’ enthusiasm and commitment to a collaborative instructional approach may be a more sustainable way forward than faculty training alone. such an approach would go beyond socialising language instructors into less familiar content spaces to humanising their development, reinforcing their agency and sense of dignity while alleviating their loss of meaning and personal journey (devis-rozental, 2018). apart from humanising faculty development, another way to manage language instructors’ emotional complexities may be to go beyond collaborative instruction to ‘a collaborative scholarship approach. . . [that is] led by the eap practitioner’ (godfrey and whong, 2020, p.23). it has been argued that venturing into scholarly enquiry is the most powerful way of gaining the content instructors’ perspective while allowing language instructors to take the lead from a privileged position in developing the metalanguage for describing textual and linguistic features in student writing. conclusion the experiences of english language instructors who taught a collaborative instructional approach to academic literacy suggest that feelings of undermined confidence or authority, constrained agency, resistance from students, and obligation constitute barriers to staff engagement. it is important to acknowledge their subjectivities rather than dismiss them as an individual matter as these attitudes render a collaborative model precarious and fragile and adversely affect student learning. while we acknowledge that intimate collaboration between language and content instructors to develop students’ academic literacies is a noble aspiration, we do not think it has to be the same destination for all instructors and institutions: first, as our study has shown, less collaborative approaches did not suggest opportunities for student learning to have been severely short-changed; second, we believe that the destination is as important as the journey taken to get there, and considerations about the ends need to be balanced against the means just as the gains need to weighed against the costs. it would be quite unfortunate if the students learned but their teachers lost their sense of self-worth and identity. our study also illustrates the value of enquiring into instructors’ practice-based interpretations to render a more holistic appreciation of collaborative academic literacy instruction. to return to wingate’s (2019) point about the transformative potential of a collaborative instructional approach, we tang, wong and lee interrogating a collaborative instructional approach to academic literacy: the missing link in supporting students’ language learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 14 therefore argue that considering instructors’ attitudes is one way in which such potential may be harnessed. references alvermann, d. e. (2000) ‘narrative approaches’, in kamil, m. l., mosenthal, p. b., pearson, p. d. and barr, r. (eds.) handbook of reading research: volume 3. mahwah, nj: erlbaum, pp.123-139. ashwin, p. (2009) analysing teaching-learning interactions in higher education: accounting for structure and agency. london: continuum. blumer, h. (1969) symbolic interactionism: perspective and method. englewood cliffs, new jersey: prentice-hall. cairns, j., hervey, t. and johnson, o. (2018) ‘neither “bolt-on” nor “built-in”: benefits and challenges of developing an integrated skills curriculum through a partnership model’, journal of learning development in higher education, issue 13, april, pp.122. https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.v0i13.435. deng, s. (2021) ‘exploration of teacher agency in the implementation of the esp language education policy in a chinese university’, theory and practice in language studies, 11(3), pp.302-307. https://doi.org/10.17507/tpls.1103.10. devis-rozental, c. (2018) developing socio-emotional intelligence in higher education scholars. london: palgrave. dudley-evans, t. (2001) ‘team-teaching in eap: changes and adaptations in the birmingham approach’, in flowerdew, j. and peacock, m. (eds.) research perspectives on english for academic purposes. cambridge: cambridge university press, pp.225-238. godfrey, j. and whong, m. (2020) ‘a collaborative scholarship model of eap research and practice’, in whong, m. and godfrey, j. (eds.) what is good academic writing? https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.v0i13.435 https://doi.org/10.17507/tpls.1103.10 tang, wong and lee interrogating a collaborative instructional approach to academic literacy: the missing link in supporting students’ language learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 15 insights into discipline-specific student writing. london: bloomsbury academic, pp. 9-29. goh, c. c. (2014) ‘foreword’, in cheung, y. l., selim, b. s. and park, k. (eds.) advances and current trends in language teacher identity research. abingdon: routledge, pp. xii-xiv. halquist, d. and musanti, s. i. (2010) ‘critical incidents and reflection: turning points that challenge the researcher and create opportunities for knowing’, international journal of qualitative studies in education, 23(4), pp.449-461. https://doi.org/10.1080/09518398.2010.492811. hargreaves a. (2005) ‘the emotions of teaching and educational change’, in hargreaves, a. (ed.) extending educational change. dordrecht: springer, pp.278-295. jacobs, c. (2013) ‘academic literacies and the question of knowledge’, journal for language teaching, 47(2), pp.127-140. https://doi.org/10.4314/jlt.v47i2.7. jaidev, r. and chan, p. (2018) ‘embedding communication in the disciplines: a tale of two faculties’, innovation in language learning and teaching, 12(3), pp.199-211. https://doi.org/10.1080/17501229.2016.1156685. kim, j. (2016) understanding narrative inquiry: the crafting and analysis of stories as research. los angeles: sage. martin, j. r. and white, p. r. r. (2005) the language of evaluation: appraisal in english. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan. murray, n. and nallaya, s. (2016) ‘embedding academic literacies in university programme curricula: a case study’, studies in higher education, 41(7), pp.12961312. https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2014.981150. ng, k. l., deng, x., zhang, s., chng, y. z. m., chua, t. c., koh, l. l., sim, x. j., aryadoust, v. and chan, c. y. e. (2014) ‘effectiveness of new science https://doi.org/10.1080/09518398.2010.492811 https://doi.org/10.4314/jlt.v47i2.7 https://doi.org/10.1080/17501229.2016.1156685 https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2014.981150 tang, wong and lee interrogating a collaborative instructional approach to academic literacy: the missing link in supporting students’ language learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 16 communication course: a preliminary report’, asian journal of the scholarship of teaching and learning, 4(4), pp.196-205. phillion, j. and he, m. f. (2007) ‘narrative inquiry and elt research’, in cummins, j. and davison, c. (eds.) international handbook of english language teaching. boston, ma: springer, pp.1003-1016. rachayon, s. (2020) ‘a language teacher in the esp classroom: can we be a successful dweller in this strange and uncharted land?’ english language teaching, 13(9), pp.119-124. tan, e. c. (2020) ‘universities need to tear down subject silos’, the straits times, 10 september. available at: https://www.straitstimes.com/opinion/universities-need-totear-down-subject-silos (accessed: 12 may 2022). tan, k. h. k., heng, m. a. and ratnam-lim, c. (eds.) (2017) curriculum leadership by middle leaders: theory, design and practice. abingdon: routledge. wingate, u. (2018) ‘academic literacy across the curriculum: towards a collaborative instructional approach’, language teaching, 51(3), pp.349-364. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0261444816000264. wingate, u. (2019) ‘achieving transformation through collaboration: the role of academic literacies’, journal of learning development in higher education, issue 15, november, pp.1-9. https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.v0i15.566. wingate, u., andon, n. and cogo, a. (2011) ‘embedding academic writing instruction into subject teaching: a case study’, active learning in higher education, 12(1), pp.6981. https://doi.org/10.1177%2f1469787410387814. wu, s. m., lee, s. h. and chan, e. c. y. (2018) ‘faculty cooperation in teaching academic literacy using popular science texts: a case study’, teaching and learning inquiry, 6(2), pp.29-49. https://doi.org/10.20343/teachlearninqu.6.2.4. https://www.straitstimes.com/opinion/universities-need-to-tear-down-subject-silos https://www.straitstimes.com/opinion/universities-need-to-tear-down-subject-silos https://doi.org/10.1017/s0261444816000264 https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.v0i15.566 https://doi.org/10.1177%2f1469787410387814 https://doi.org/10.20343/teachlearninqu.6.2.4 tang, wong and lee interrogating a collaborative instructional approach to academic literacy: the missing link in supporting students’ language learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 17 zappa-hollman, s. (2018) ‘collaborations between language and content university instructors: factors and indicators of positive partnerships’, international journal of bilingual education and bilingualism, 21(5), pp.591-606. https://doi.org/10.1080/13670050.2018.1491946. zhang, s. q., chng, m., ng, k. l., wu, s. m. and chan, e. c. y. (2017) ‘enhancing the communicative competence of science undergraduates through the use of popular science: a perspective from the students’, asian journal of the scholarship of teaching and learning, 7(2), pp.30-57. author details kum khuan tang teaches academic writing and argumentation at the centre for english language communication, national university of singapore. his research interest is in the knowledge base of language teacher education in higher education. derek wong teaches scientific communication at the centre for english language communication at the national university of singapore. he sees writing as an important tool to mediate critical thinking, and is interested in innovating genre-based pedagogy. gek ling lee is a senior lecturer at the centre for english language communication, national university of singapore. she is interested in what makes language learning enjoyable and meaningful to students in academic english, professional communication and critical thinking, writing and speaking. https://doi.org/10.1080/13670050.2018.1491946 interrogating a collaborative instructional approach to academic literacy: the missing link in supporting students’ language learning abstract introduction methodology: narrative inquiry analysis findings experiences attitudes discussion conclusion references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 27 april 2023 ________________________________________________________________________ ©2023 the author(s) (cc-by 4.0) designing for student wellbeing: challenging assumptions about where our students learn david biggins bournemouth university, uk debbie holley bournemouth university, uk abstract student wellbeing has been foregrounded during the recent covid-19 pandemic but this is broad brush and contested with different models being followed across the sector. one aspect of concern is the extent to which access to the technology institutions require students to use contributes to additional stress. a student survey (n=30) in one uk hei revealed the ‘hidden spaces’ where students learn, and the findings indicate that the formal institutional virtual learning environment (vle), with its sophisticated learning analytics, did not fully capture the student experience. this work was followed up with a digital wellbeing survey (n=172) and, by drawing together the two datasets, we report on a more nuanced student experience. initial findings indicate a schism between formal and informal spaces where students learn, especially within our institutional reporting of students working online. examples include students using their own preferred tools such as whatsapp, trello, and slack to communicate outside the formal channels; these behaviours thereby devalue the validity of the vle datasets that student-facing staff are encouraged to use for decision-making. this paper offers insights into accessing and interpreting data in ways that are more useful for academics, learning developers, and learning designers, and suggests ways in which we can effectively frame student support by putting the ‘real’ student experience at the centre of our practice. keywords: student wellbeing; analytics; hidden learning spaces; technostress. biggins and holley designing for student wellbeing: challenging assumptions about where our students learn journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 2 introduction hathaway’s seminal work suggested that ‘the main barrier to effective instructional practice is lack of information’ (1985, p.1). the growth in the availability of data, coupled with the evolution of systems to collate and present information means that we can now obtain potentially useful information about the learner and learning process which can inform our education practice. this study focusses on one uk hei and explores how and where our students access their study information. in addition, it examines where and how students work with each other, and identifies potential areas of stress built into the traditional virtual learning environment (vle) structure. this comment from a second year, male nursing student is typical of the responses received about students’ experiences during the covid19 pandemic: i have found the teaching can be poor and [i am] not able to interact with students and tutors[;] moreover information isn't clear and [isn’t] accessible. moreover key information has been missed by the teaching teams and not much support given. this study explores students’ decisions about how best to support their own learning and examines the implications these choices have on a) students’ digital wellbeing and b) the institution’s understanding of their decisions. it comprises an initial pilot study (n=30), then the findings were analysed, and the literature was reviewed to develop a conceptual framework which underpinned the main survey (n=172). the subsequent survey thereby builds upon the pilot with the inclusion of additional questions about student wellbeing and digital stress in the light of the covid-19 pandemic. the search for hidden learning spaces recent analysis of the vle at our institution has evaluated the association between the unit outcome in terms of the final mark with usage of the vle across different units/disciplines. making use of random forest algorithms, a machine learning technique that uses multiple decision trees to classify and highlight associations within the data (ibm, 2020), the findings have been counterintuitive for they suggest that vle usage has only a weak correlation with final marks. a key finding was that many units were not designed with learning analytics in mind, understandable given the recent introduction in our biggins and holley designing for student wellbeing: challenging assumptions about where our students learn journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 3 institution, and this no doubt explains some of the variance. however, even those units which did leverage a broader range of vle functionality failed to display strong predictive ability. of great surprise was the low correlation between vle content usage and unit outcomes and this was to such an extent that the random forest algorithm would often omit content completion from its predictive models. that students were passing units despite limited use of the vle and the tutor supplied content led us to conclude that student learning was taking place but that some/much of this was happening outside the vle and outside institutional planning, oversight, and control. shoufan (2019) identified the reasons why students use resources such as youtube and it became clear that there are a range of non-formal, social learning spaces inhabited by and used only by students. the search for these hidden learning spaces had begun. literature review students’ experiences of online learning during the pandemic have been subject to much scrutiny. digital equity has been foregrounded, and the office for students (ofs) digital poverty report (2020) challenged assumptions that ‘all’ students were able to access the technologies and systems required for study. of the students surveyed, 52% reported their learning was impacted by slow or unreliable internet connections; 71% reported lack of quiet study space, with 22% severely impacted (18% were impacted by lack of access to computer, laptop, or tablet). of concern was the 4% of students for whom no internet access was possible; this equates to 104,000 students across english heis. unsurprisingly, the stresses of online expectations brought to the fore narratives of loneliness and isolation, with 52% of students surveyed by the ‘student minds’ mental health charity (2021) reporting this as a key area that impacted their wellbeing. the study further identified key ‘fracture points’ showing that the burden fell unequally across the student body, with 10% reporting a positive impact on their mental health and wellbeing and 74% reporting concerns about their mental health. it can be seen from this report, and the citizens advice ‘life through the lockdown report’ (2021), that individuals from lowincome households, ethnic minorities, and people with disabilities are disproportionally impacted as they cannot afford an internet connection that is fit for purpose. two reports from the office for national statistics (2021; 2022) on digital inequalities highlight the issues in school attainment across the sector, and specifically highlight the biggins and holley designing for student wellbeing: challenging assumptions about where our students learn journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 4 obstacles faced by young people leaving care settings. the pandemic saw a widening of disadvantage with 20% of students struggling with access to online learning and those particularly impacted were black, asian and minority ethnic students, those from poorer backgrounds, care leavers, students with caring responsibilities, and students with disabilities (nus 2020). in terms of students seeking support, the nus survey reported that 82% of students seek support from friends and family online, however only 18% are looking for self-help for wellbeing through digital apps; our own analysis also shows that students did not make their way to central resources online, nor access the array of ‘digital’ wellbeing apps available to them. a mckinsey & company report (heitz et al., 2020) looked at the next stages for the sector and highlighted the imperative for institutions to address students’ social, emotional, and human needs as a precursor to offering effective online study. developing and nurturing students’ sense of ‘belonging’ to their cohort, their disciplines, and to the community at large requires significant adjustment of our previous on-campus practices. the seminal work by robinson et al. (2015) clearly identifies the themes highlighted in the charity/policy reports and policy documents that frame this paper. the work emphasises the significance of digital inequalities across a broad range of individual and macro-level domains. factors determining inequality include life course, gender, race, and class, as well as health care, politics, economic activity, and social capital. in highlighting the concerns of a digitalised society and its impact in leaving people behind, helsper (2021) points to the relevance of digital gains viewed through the lens of tangible outcomes in everyday lives. her corresponding fields model is a powerful tool that theorises the contextual paths of the individual and calls for a meso-level social exploration of the processes as drivers of digital inequalities. such tools cannot be seen in isolation but need to be embedded within scholars’ ongoing research in digital inequity, or, as helsper terms it, socio-digital inequalities. these concepts have been amplified in calls for global rights for all to become digitally literate through collaborations linking public and private rebuilding of a connected society (alvarez, 2021), and reflected through the embodiment of these principles in the recently revised eu digital competence framework (vuorikari, kluzer and punie, 2022). biggins and holley designing for student wellbeing: challenging assumptions about where our students learn journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 5 post-pandemic, the student academic experience survey (2022) included an additional question series on undergraduate experiences of online/face-to-face delivery. kernohan and dickenson, reflecting upon the survey, point to the continuing mental health issues affecting students and comment that anxiety is epidemic here where 4 in 10 students are self-reporting high anxiety, with trans, lgb+, nonbinary, black and international students all significantly above the average, and that [is] showing up as an important factor in non-continuation risk. (2022). the charity, student minds, has a series of publications pertaining to student mental health (co-production, the role of academic tutors, lgbtq+ intersectionality). killen and langercrane, in their report for jisc, identify technologies as key to the government ‘levelling up’ agenda and as crucial to ensure no one is digitally excluded and excellent online education is framed as powerful, engaging, flexible, and enabling through access to high quality resources (2021). however, undertaking studies of where and how our students learn are not straightforward. in an age of learner analytics (la), one of the most significant ‘new’ topics in higher education (tsai et al., 2020; khalil, prinsloo and slade, 2022; mutimukwe et al., 2022), the potential benefits to student outcomes are a key part of many new vle purchases. the benefits of la are widely recognised in the literature as improving learning outcomes for students, promoting goal-oriented behaviours, increasing the awareness of strengths and weaknesses, creating actionable insights for learners, assisting with student retention, and improving unit delivery by staff (ifenthaler and yau, 2020; killen and langercrane, 2021; kleimola and leppisaari, 2022; susnjak, ramaswami and mathrani, 2022). while there are identified benefits from la, improving the learning outcomes of students through the use of information on their engagement/performance during learning module/unit delivery (pardo, ellis and calvo, 2015; persico and pozzi, 2015; ferguson and clow, 2017) successful implementation can be challenging and, as a result, the literature relating to success is sparse (macfadyen, 2022). literature does however contain cautionary notes for those attempting to deploy learning analytics which are categorised in four areas in table 1. biggins and holley designing for student wellbeing: challenging assumptions about where our students learn journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 6 table 1. limitations of learning analytics. area issues authors institutional strategy and infrastructure ▪ institutions need a clear vision for la. ▪ senior leadership is required. ▪ many institutions see la as a tool for institutional management. ▪ institutions need to have the capability to capture students’ digital footprints across their systems. ▪ institutions need to make good use of vle tools to provide a valid basis for data analysis. ▪ institutions need to be able to collate diverse datasets into a connected whole. colvin et al. (2017); ferguson and clow (2017); becker et al. (2018); tsai et al. (2020); guzmánvalenzuela et al. (2021). deployment and implementation ▪ there are multiple frameworks available to institutions. ▪ the accuracy of predictive analysis. ▪ if units are changed, comparisons with previous years are invalid. ▪ ethical use of data. ▪ an institution’s use of la is linked to their maturity in la. ▪ a student accessing the vle or engaging with technology enhanced learning (tel) tools does not mean that learning is taking place. ▪ la ignores learner characteristics, teaching pedagogies, and subjectspecific individualities. ▪ personalised learning strategies are ignored in preference to ‘one size fits all’ la paradigm. colvin et al. (2017); ferguson and clow (2017); corrin et al. (2019); hernández-leo et al. (2019); foster (2021); kollom et al. (2021); lim et al. (2021); biggins, holley and supa (2022); kaliisa, kluge and mørch (2022). biggins and holley designing for student wellbeing: challenging assumptions about where our students learn journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 7 ▪ how la outcomes are perceived, interpreted, and acted upon by stakeholders need to be standardised and personalised. ▪ heterogeneous data is required to provide a more holistic view of student learning of which only a part takes place within the vle. engagement by staff and students ▪ student engagement with la is influenced by their trust in the organisation, concerns about privacy, understanding of la, what they will gain, and their willingness to share personal information. ▪ staff engagement with la is influenced by understanding of la, appreciation of metrics, intervention methods and training. ferguson et al. (2016); wasson, hanson and mor (2016); kaliisa, kluge and mørch (2022). impact ▪ the benefits of la have been difficult to demonstrate. viberg et al. (2018); tsai et al. (2020); macfadyen (2022). a limitation of learning analytics that is inherent in table 1 is that the source learning data must be accessible in order for it to be analysed. any learning data that is not accessible is ignored. the problem with this approach is that the decisions that are drawn from the visible learning information may be flawed if the data is incomplete. method following stake (1995), the work is presented as an instrumental case study, where a particular case (students in a single institution) is examined to give insights into an issue (where they go to learn). the surveys capture both quantitative and qualitative data, and the qualitative data is analysed to develop themes. to capture data, we selected a survey biggins and holley designing for student wellbeing: challenging assumptions about where our students learn journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 8 questionnaire. the choice of a questionnaire was further strengthened because it offers the possibility for other institutions to run the same survey and thereby to build a view across the he sector. questionnaire data (both qualitative and quantitative) was collected using the jisc online surveys (jos) tool and was accessible by a url link that was given to students via announcements in the vle. undergraduate and postgraduate students across all four faculties of the institution were invited to participate. the pilot questionnaire was completed in academic years 2019-2020 and received ethics approval, it was used to test the questionnaire and identify flaws that could be rectified before the main study (hassan, schattner and mazza, 2006). the main, institution-wide questionnaire then took place in academic years 2020-2021 and 2021-2022. the questionnaire comprised five sections: 1. profile data: information on the level of study and gender. 2. participant’s confidence in using technology: this was captured using a five-point likert scale (unaware; aware; practiced; competent; expert). 3. internet access and engagement with vle tools: this was sought using a frequency likert scale (for the internet access) and a difficulty likert scale (in respect to engagement with vle tools). 4. supporting student learning: this section offered a free-text box, and asked for three things that staff could do to better support student learning. 5. learning in a pandemic: this section used a free text box to capture how students felt about learning in a pandemic. the open-source analysis and visualisation programming language and environment r is widely used in research (braun and murdoch, 2021; brennan, 2021; vidoni, 2021; staples, 2022) and was the basis for all the data analysis for this study. the data was extracted from jos in csv file format and imported into a r markdown report (r studio, 2022). the benefit of using a r markdown document is that the source data is not altered and instead, the transformations performed on the data are visible, transparent, and repeatable (oana, schneider and thomann, 2021; rimal, 2021). functions in r were used to prepare tabulations and visualisations for the response to each question so that these could be reviewed and discussed by the team. data cross-tabulations were created in the r biggins and holley designing for student wellbeing: challenging assumptions about where our students learn journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 9 markdown document and statistical tests were applied (anova and t-tests) which enabled supported conclusions to be generated. the data set for the questionnaire is open access and available from the bournemouth university data repository, bordar. results: pilot study the pilot study questionnaire was completed by final year undergraduate students in a computing department (n= 30), characterised as being predominantly young, white, and male. key themes which emerged from the pilot study are listed below: • confidence using technology. the most frequent response was ‘expert’ in the areas of computer use (63%), smartphones (67%), social media (43%), and the internet (67%). this contrasted sharply with the use of the vle where only 13% reported expertise. the most frequent response for vle use was ‘competent’ (67%). when it came to using the vle, respondents reported that component access was either easy or very easy in all areas except accessing the unit schedule. • frequency of access to the vle. the most frequent response was 2-3 times per week (53%). • access to materials. when asked how learning materials were accessed, core materials were either ‘frequently’ (43%) or ‘very frequently’ (40%) accessed via the vle as were assessment materials (very frequently 60%) but these percentages were lower when accessing supplementary materials where the most frequent response was ‘sometimes’. • learning materials from peers. accessing materials from peers displayed more uniform distribution variation. 25% of students reported accessing core material from peers on a frequent or very frequent basis. 80% of students accessed youtube for learning materials frequently or very frequently. figure 1 shows that core materials are shared with peers sometimes or frequently (both 24%) and that men shared proportionately more than women. • improvement suggestions. in response to the question asking for improvement suggestions, a wide range of responses were received. one student noted the different use of the vle by staff, saying ‘some parts of the course used [the vle] effectively, and others really didn't. some professors barely used it at all, and some biggins and holley designing for student wellbeing: challenging assumptions about where our students learn journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 10 of their content was difficult to follow, while others used huge quantities of content providing many ways to learn’. this variation in how the materials were presented was echoed by another respondent who requested ‘a more unified format for learning materials’. based upon the literature and the findings, a conceptual map was developed, this is shown in figure 1 below. figure 1. conceptual map. figure 1 comprises four components. the students and their wellbeing are located in the top left quadrant. to their right are their peers who are connected to them either face-toface or online. the inter-student learning that takes place here is not visible to institutions and is thus termed the ‘hidden learning’ spaces. the institutional space, made up of staff and the vle, is represented at the bottom of the map. learning analytics are closely connected to the institutional learning environment and draws insights from it. the fourth component, in the middle of the map, is internet-mediated communications. this biggins and holley designing for student wellbeing: challenging assumptions about where our students learn journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 11 demonstrates that many interactions between institutions and students are reliant on this medium of communication, and it therefore becomes a vital element in the system, taken for granted when it operates as expected but a source of frustration and stress when it does not. building on the pilot study and the conceptual map, the questionnaire was re-run, with two questions focused on student wellbeing added. results: institutional study the second questionnaire attracted 172 responses. this institutional survey encompassed all four faculties and students from first year undergraduates to master’s level. the responses were combined with the pilot results to give an institutional view (n=202). 59% of respondents were female and 38% male. most respondents (35%) were first year students, 29% second year, 21% final year, and 15% were master’s students. the broader range of students who completed the second questionnaire led to a wider range of responses and subsequent additional themes, addressed below: • confidence using technology. the most frequent response for computer use, smart phones, social media, and the vle was ‘competent’ (range from 43% (social media) to 61% (vle). across all the technology dimensions, master’s students who, at our institution are predominantly international students, reported lower levels of confidence compared to undergraduate students who are mostly uk nationals. there were no significant differences across genders. figure 2 shows confidence levels in the vle by year of study. an ‘awareness’ level was reported by one first year and, surprisingly by one final year student but it is possible that this student had only recently transferred to our institution. figure 2 also shows that the proportions of confidence are unaffected by the year of study. our expectation was that confidence in the vle would grow with experience as undergraduates in particular repeatedly use the vle in their studies, but this was not seen in the data. our study shows students selecting to use their own technologies and view the vle as a formal, institutional space and place little value in developing skills in this area. biggins and holley designing for student wellbeing: challenging assumptions about where our students learn journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 12 figure 2. confidence using the vle by year of study. • access to materials. access to the vle components was reported to be easy or very easy for every component; learning materials, 78%; assessment materials, 75%; recorded material, 65%. the data shows the expected but barely discernible result that vle components are easier to use as experience grows during undergraduate studies. no gender or faculty differences were noticed in this section of the questionnaire responses. core materials were accessed frequently (43%) or very frequently (44%) from the vle, mirroring the pattern in the pilot questionnaire. a similar pattern was noted for access to assignment materials with the mode being very frequently (45%). • materials from peers. the uniform pattern related to accessing core and assessment material from peers was not seen in the second questionnaire. instead, the most frequent answer was rarely (33%). the second questionnaire also showed a lower reliance of youtube. the most frequent response was frequently (36%). women reported a greater frequency of access to youtube for learning materials than men. figure 3 shows the frequency of access to youtube. the percentage increase in the pink bars shows how the proportion of female usage increases in line with the increase in the frequency of access. biggins and holley designing for student wellbeing: challenging assumptions about where our students learn journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 13 figure 3. youtube access by frequency and gender, 100% stacked bar chart. • accessing the internet. these were new questions prompted by covid-19. the responses showed that 74% of students owned their own device with ownership not affected by year of study. a good internet connection was frequently reported by 60% of students. only 18% enjoyed a consistently good connection (that is, a consistent and robust connection, enabling all groupwork and all other required work to be completed without delay or interruption). • wellbeing. many students commented on the negative effects of online learning on their mental health. one student responded that ‘the lack of personal aspect has been really damaging to my mental health and has been very lonely’. our themed analysis earlier illustrated the connections between poor mental health and physical health, motivation, relationships, social anxiety, and feelings of isolation. the positive effects of having peer and social networks were highlighted. one student described the need for, but also the difficulty of, forming social networks during lockdowns, saying ‘it did make it more difficult to interact with peers and build a system to help one another’. • learning in a pandemic. this question created 147 responses that could be separated in a minority of positive and majority negative responses. positive responses included how it was easier to obtain a good grade during the pandemic, fewer distractions, the improved use of technology by the institution, the flexibility to learn from anywhere, growth of the resilience and adaptability of students, more biggins and holley designing for student wellbeing: challenging assumptions about where our students learn journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 14 time to study due to reduced travel time and some appreciation for the extra effort and support from staff. the last positive was unusual because the level of support and understanding from the institution was more frequently seen as a negative. many commented on the loss of interaction with staff and peers, isolation, distractions, and sometimes poor-quality connections that blighted the learning experiences. one student spoke for many when she said she had ‘not enjoyed learning during pandemic, do not feel engaged in the course at all, very detached and do not gain any enjoyment through online learning’. many commented on the difficulty in keeping up with the communication coming from the institution with some students missing key information. • institutional support. the final question asked students to rate the institutional support during the pandemic on a scale of 1 (low) to 10 (high). the mean score was 6/10. there were no gender differences. master’s students were the group which rated the institution most highly (6.8) and second year students gave the lowest score of 5.4. discussion from the survey results and preceding analysis two key themes were identified: students and their wellbeing and students and their preferred study spaces. our students and their wellbeing central to this study are students and their digital wellbeing. the question asking students to reflect on learning during a pandemic elicited responses from 90% of respondents. textual analysis of the responses identified frequent use of words including ‘hard’, ‘harder’, ‘negative’, ‘difficult’, as well as ‘family’ and ‘home’, reflecting the nus report (2020) as well as the work by the citizens advice bureau (cab, 2021). the difficulty faced by many institutions to quickly convert face-to-face modes of delivery to purely online delivery and the effect this had on students was summarised by one student who said, ‘i have been spending too much time online and on my computer and the organisation in some units has been poor’. biggins and holley designing for student wellbeing: challenging assumptions about where our students learn journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 15 many students perceived a drop in the quality of teaching, especially where courses contained a high level of practical or teamwork. an increase in social anxiety and the difficulty of making friends also appeared frequently in the responses as highlighted by student minds’ work on student mental health (2021). while most of the comments in this section were negative and many were very negative, a few highlighted the positive aspects of the pandemic in terms of time saved in commuting, being forced to be an independent learner, and technology skills and confidence acquired. the mixed effects of the pandemic were summarised by one student who wrote ‘it has helped me as i have children at home. however, i feel i would be more productive based at uni’. these findings very much reflect the national literature on the intersectionality of bame, lgbtq+, disability, and social class. the data suggests these groups are negatively impacted and alongside more robust access to the digital (external driver), more considered and more inclusive and considered learning design is a necessity (internal driver). technostress is not a new concept, its origins are in the work of brod (1984) who wrote about the ways in which computer anxiety could manifest itself in our individual orientation to time, communication models, and interpersonal relationships. his work did nuance technostress into both positive and negative aspects of technology, however, during the pandemic the term was utilised to garner information about the negative aspects of technology usage. this negative use of the term has been picked up and used in official documentation, framing the survey work of the mental health charity, student minds (2021), the office for students (2020), and the office for national statistics’ quarterly reports on the student experience (2021; 2022). this question was included in our survey, linked to wellbeing, and provoked a strong response rate of 80%. while some respondents reported not feeling any affects from technostress, most students demonstrated a high awareness of the dangers of technostress. many responses gave examples of the actions taken to limit technostress (walks, breaks, days away from the computer, and designated time off screen). however, there were many responses chronicling the negative aspects of spending so much time with technology and the difficulty of dealing with technostress. one respondent commented ‘i try and go on walks to get outside but it doesn’t really help.’ another generator of technostress was reported to be the reliability of the technology and people’s ability to use it. one person notes that ‘i try and get help – from the it dept, my biggins and holley designing for student wellbeing: challenging assumptions about where our students learn journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 16 kids, a local computer guy – i know it saves time and angst to get help sooner rather than later if i can’t do something or something isn’t working’. the outcomes of technostress were reported to be low motivation, a difficulty focusing, an increased tendency to procrastinate, isolation, anxiety, and a great deal of frustration. comments that the institution was doing enough to recognise this problem and/or help students to deal with it did not appear frequently in the responses. in the responses to the questions on learning in a pandemic and technostress, students were not confident of the institution’s ability to respond effectively to the pandemic. it could be inferred from such comments that this had a detrimental effect on students’ wellbeing. reflecting on a year of study online and how the ‘learning curve was very steep’, one respondent concluded that ‘my digital well-being was seriously stressed many times!’ in common with all institutions, we sought to ramp up the resources available to students and signposted both staff and students to relevant support on many occasions. one of the final questions asked respondents to comment on whether the institution was doing enough to support students, using a scale of 1 (no) to 10 (yes). answers ranged between 1 and 10. the mean score was 5.8 out of 10; for further nuance the qualitative feedback was revisited, and, when asked about access to any of the available resources, 68% reported not accessing the wellbeing resources. the wellbeing of students needs to be paramount. however, it is clear from the study that well-intentioned institutional responses did not fulfil the needs of students at times of stress. technostress is an issue for staff as well as the student body, and there is well documented literature highlighting its impact on university teachers work performance; li and wang (2021) point to techno overload as one technostress factor having a significant negative influence on their work performance. staff and student concerns about technostress need to move from the domain of it, and institutions need to take a holistic approach in developing strategies to support all stakeholders. a broader perspective for institutions is offered by biggins, holley and supa (2022), with their digital learning maturity model. this model identifies the key drivers and solutions for digital enhancement. our students and their preferred study spaces reflecting on the conceptual map in figure 1 which identifies the key components underpinning students’ selection of preferred study spaces, the role of social networks and biggins and holley designing for student wellbeing: challenging assumptions about where our students learn journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 17 peers is foregrounded. our findings clearly demonstrate the reliance of students on their networks and peers for part of their learning; and in doing so they access a wide range of ‘apps’. these are the hidden learning spaces, invisible to academics and to the algorithms of learner analytics. against a challenging and contested background vle engagement is seen a proxy for student engagement and/or wellbeing. however, this study shows that a far more nuanced approach is needed to fully understand where the stress points are for students. the vle is conceptually separated from the student internet mediated learning experiences, and some students are choosing to ‘opt out’ of vle communication tools where they can be tracked, measured, and monitored. further work is therefore required to determine whether it is the usability of alternative ‘apps’ which students find attractive, or whether they dislike, for example, the surveillance regime. learner analytics packages are sold to institutions with assurances about the validity, reliability, and robustness of the data. this small-scale study challenges these assumptions, and from the analysis, it is now possible pick up the nuances and complexities of interpreting and understanding the data. our students are far more creative and innovative outside the formal learning spaces offered by vles. our identification of hidden learning spaces raised issues of institutional acceptance of third-party tools and systems, the scope of institutional policy and guidance, data privacy issues, copyright concerns, staff appreciation, student wellbeing, and learning design. thus, many institutions, when seeking a single point of ‘truth’ about student learning through analytics packages may, in fact, be making decisions on flawed and inaccurate metrics. in the jisc student digital experiences insights survey, the student experiences during the period are labelled as ‘pivotal’ in an academic year that changes the landscape of he forever (killen and langer-crane, 2021). however, the societal inequalities remain, and despite a clear evidence base, it is disappointing that some learners remain socio-digitally excluded as defined by helsper, and along the wider lines identified by robinson et al. (2015). conclusion post covid-19 student research surveys (ofs; ons; jisc) are still far from offering us a holistic picture across the sector, and what an institutional case study can offer are insights into a rich and complex set of experiences locally that are mirrored in the contemporary national data sets. models of, and commitment to, whole institution building, are essential, biggins and holley designing for student wellbeing: challenging assumptions about where our students learn journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 18 as is investing in an equitable digital future powered through staff and student co-creation. potential solutions are offered in the institutional strategic mapping of student co-creation digital partnerships, such as those advocated by biggins, holley and supa (2022); wider societal solutions are suggested by the reframing of the digital narrative suggested by helsper (2021) who calls for more nuanced approaches in the addressing of socio-digital inequalities. students have excellent suggestions to make about how those who support their learning can offer optimal support. suggestions for improvement asked staff to be ‘more mindful’, better ‘support students’, ‘have better communication with students’, and ‘better contact with the academic advisor’, sentiments and language that were completely absent from the 2019 pilot. some themes were common and included requests to improve the quality of materials, and the timely release and recording of lectures. many comments focused on the experiences of online learning and the difficulties experienced in interacting and learning in a virtual learning environment, especially where the perceptions were that staff were expecting students to use and access tools that they themselves had not mastered. the limitations of this work are the small samples and the wide range of respondents within the sample, yet there are useful insights for future learning. it is clear that students value our expertise and guidance yet find it frustrating that we are unable to use some of the digital tools we advocate for them. they are supplementing their learning from a wide range of sources as the content we provide is supplied on a platform that is not intuitive to use. in terms of digital health and wellbeing, students display a mature appreciation of the potential hazards of technostress and the care of their own wellbeing. what students requested the most from us as supportive members of staff in he was for us to ‘listen better, empathise more, and provide more support’. good practice in learning development shows that partnership working can overcome some of the technological, cultural, and social barriers experienced by students. this study has identified the different spaces where our students are opting to meet their peers, collaborate, and learn. a challenge for us all, moving forwards, is to develop our own technological skillset so that we can effectively support students wherever they choose to learn. biggins and holley designing for student wellbeing: challenging assumptions about where our students learn journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 19 references advance he (2022) student academic experience survey. available at: https://www.advance-he.ac.uk/knowledge-hub/student-academic-experiencesurvey-2022 (accessed: 18 february 2023). alvarez jr., a. v. (2021) ‘rethinking the digital divide in the time of crisis’, globus journal of progressive education, 11(1), pp.26-28. becker, s. a., brown, m., dahlstrom, e., davis, a., depaul, k., diaz, v. and pomerantz, j. (2018) nmc horizon report: 2018 higher education edition. available at: https://cit.bnu.edu.cn/docs/2018-09/20180918163624337480.pdf (accessed: 18 february 2023). biggins, d., holley, d. and supa, m. (2022) ‘from tools to wellbeing: a proposed digital learning maturity model (dlmm)’, 16th international technology, education and development conference: inted2022 proceedings. online 7-8 march. iated digital library, pp.4687-4696. https://doi.org/10.21125/inted.2022.1235. braun, w. j. and murdoch, d. j. (2021) a first course in statistical programming with r. cambridge: cambridge university press. brennan, p. (2021) ‘data visualization with the programming language r’, the biochemist, 43(5), pp.8-14. https://doi.org/10.1042/bio_2021_174. brod, c. (1984) technostress: the human cost of the computer revolution. reading, mass.: addison-wesley. citizens advice bureau (2021) life through lockdown: what citizens advice data tells us about the year everything changed, march. available at: https://www.citizensadvice.org.uk/global/citizensadvice/covd19%20data%20trends/citizens%20advice_life%20through%20lockdown%20(1). pdf (accessed: 18 february 2023). https://www.advance-he.ac.uk/knowledge-hub/student-academic-experience-survey-2022 https://www.advance-he.ac.uk/knowledge-hub/student-academic-experience-survey-2022 https://cit.bnu.edu.cn/docs/2018-09/20180918163624337480.pdf https://doi.org/10.21125/inted.2022.1235 https://doi.org/10.1042/bio_2021_174 https://www.citizensadvice.org.uk/global/citizensadvice/covd-19%20data%20trends/citizens%20advice_life%20through%20lockdown%20(1).pdf https://www.citizensadvice.org.uk/global/citizensadvice/covd-19%20data%20trends/citizens%20advice_life%20through%20lockdown%20(1).pdf https://www.citizensadvice.org.uk/global/citizensadvice/covd-19%20data%20trends/citizens%20advice_life%20through%20lockdown%20(1).pdf biggins and holley designing for student wellbeing: challenging assumptions about where our students learn journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 20 colvin, c., dawson, s., wade, a. and gasevic, d. (2017) ‘addressing the challenges of institutional adoption’, handbook of learning analytics, 1, pp.281-289. corrin, l., kennedy, g., french, s., buckingham shum, s., kitto, k., pardo, a., west, d., mirriahi, n. and colvin, c. (2019) the ethics of learning analytics in australian higher education. available at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/332263485_the_ethics_of_learning_ana lytics_in_australian_higher_education_discussion_paper_prepared_by?e nrichid=rgreq-a9442f19d110372a98e526367e519370xxx&enrichsource=y292zxjqywdlozmzmji2mzq4nttbuzo3nduynda5mdy0m zi1mtramtu1ndy5mdy4njkzma%3d%3d&el=1_x_2&_esc=publicationcoverpdf (accessed: 18 february 2023). ferguson, r., brasher, a., clow, d., cooper, a., hillaire, g., mittelmeier, j. and vuorikari, r. (2016) research evidence on the use of learning analytics: implications for education policy. seville: joint research centre. https://doi.org/10.2791/955210. ferguson, r. and clow, d. (2017) ‘learning analytics: avoiding failure’, educause review online, 31. available at: http://oro.open.ac.uk/50385/3/50385.pdf (accessed: 18 february 2023). foster, k. (2021) ‘paving the road for the future of data analytics’, jisc, 5 november. available at https://www.jisc.ac.uk/blog/paving-the-road-for-the-future-of-dataanalytics-05-nov-2021 (accessed: 21 february 2023). guzmán-valenzuela c., gómez-gonzález c., tagle a. r. and lorca-vyhmeister a. (2021) ‘learning analytics in higher education: a preponderance of analytics but very little learning?’, international journal of educational technology in higher education, 18(1), pp.1-9. https://doi.org/10.1186/s41239-021-00258-x. hassan, z. a., schattner, p. and mazza, d. (2006) ‘doing a pilot study: why is it essential?’ malaysian family physician: the official journal of the academy of family physicians of malaysia, 1(2-3), p.70. available at: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/pmc4453116/ (accessed: 21 february 2023). https://www.researchgate.net/publication/332263485_the_ethics_of_learning_analytics_in_australian_higher_education_discussion_paper_prepared_by?enrichid=rgreq-a9442f19d110372a98e526367e519370-xxx&enrichsource=y292zxjqywdlozmzmji2mzq4nttbuzo3nduynda5mdy0mzi1mtramtu1ndy5mdy4njkzma%3d%3d&el=1_x_2&_esc=publicationcoverpdf https://www.researchgate.net/publication/332263485_the_ethics_of_learning_analytics_in_australian_higher_education_discussion_paper_prepared_by?enrichid=rgreq-a9442f19d110372a98e526367e519370-xxx&enrichsource=y292zxjqywdlozmzmji2mzq4nttbuzo3nduynda5mdy0mzi1mtramtu1ndy5mdy4njkzma%3d%3d&el=1_x_2&_esc=publicationcoverpdf https://www.researchgate.net/publication/332263485_the_ethics_of_learning_analytics_in_australian_higher_education_discussion_paper_prepared_by?enrichid=rgreq-a9442f19d110372a98e526367e519370-xxx&enrichsource=y292zxjqywdlozmzmji2mzq4nttbuzo3nduynda5mdy0mzi1mtramtu1ndy5mdy4njkzma%3d%3d&el=1_x_2&_esc=publicationcoverpdf https://www.researchgate.net/publication/332263485_the_ethics_of_learning_analytics_in_australian_higher_education_discussion_paper_prepared_by?enrichid=rgreq-a9442f19d110372a98e526367e519370-xxx&enrichsource=y292zxjqywdlozmzmji2mzq4nttbuzo3nduynda5mdy0mzi1mtramtu1ndy5mdy4njkzma%3d%3d&el=1_x_2&_esc=publicationcoverpdf https://www.researchgate.net/publication/332263485_the_ethics_of_learning_analytics_in_australian_higher_education_discussion_paper_prepared_by?enrichid=rgreq-a9442f19d110372a98e526367e519370-xxx&enrichsource=y292zxjqywdlozmzmji2mzq4nttbuzo3nduynda5mdy0mzi1mtramtu1ndy5mdy4njkzma%3d%3d&el=1_x_2&_esc=publicationcoverpdf https://doi.org/10.2791/955210 http://oro.open.ac.uk/50385/3/50385.pdf https://www.jisc.ac.uk/blog/paving-the-road-for-the-future-of-data-analytics-05-nov-2021 https://www.jisc.ac.uk/blog/paving-the-road-for-the-future-of-data-analytics-05-nov-2021 https://doi.org/10.1186/s41239-021-00258-x https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/pmc4453116/ biggins and holley designing for student wellbeing: challenging assumptions about where our students learn journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 21 hathaway, w. e. (1985) ‘hopes and possibilities for educational information systems’, information systems conference. available at: https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ed253560 (accessed: 21 february 2023). heitz, c., laboissiere, m., sanghvi, s. and sarakatsannis, j. (2020) ‘getting the next phase of remote learning right in higher education’, mckinsey & company. available at https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/public-sector/our-insights/gettingthe-next-phase-of-remote-learning-right-in-higher-education (accessed: 18 february 2023). helsper, e. (2021) the digital disconnect: the social causes and consequences of digital inequalities. london: sage publications. hernández-leo, d., martinez-maldonado, r., pardo, a., muñoz-cristóbal, j. a. and rodríguez-triana, m. j. (2019) ‘analytics for learning design: a layered framework and tools’, british journal of educational technology, 50(1), pp.139-152. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjet.12645. ibm (2020) random forest. available at: https://www.ibm.com/cloud/learn/random-forest (accessed: 18 february 2023). ifenthaler, d. and yau, j. y. k. (2020) ‘utilising learning analytics to support study success in higher education: a systematic review’, educational technology research and development, 68(4), pp.1961-1990. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11423-020-09788-z. kaliisa, r., kluge, a. and mørch, a. i. (2022) ‘overcoming challenges to the adoption of learning analytics at the practitioner level: a critical analysis of 18 learning analytics frameworks’, scandinavian journal of educational research, 66(3), pp.367-381. https://doi.org/10.1080/00313831.2020.1869082. kernohan, d. and dickenson, j. (2022) ‘anxious students want to us to help them spend time with and learn with each other’, wonkhe, 9 june. available at https://wonkhe.com/blogs/anxious-students-want-to-us-to-help-them-spend-timewith-and-learn-with-eachother/ (accessed: 18 february 2023). https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ed253560 https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/public-sector/our-insights/getting-the-next-phase-of-remote-learning-right-in-higher-education https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/public-sector/our-insights/getting-the-next-phase-of-remote-learning-right-in-higher-education https://doi.org/10.1111/bjet.12645 https://www.ibm.com/cloud/learn/random-forest https://doi.org/10.1007/s11423-020-09788-z https://doi.org/10.1080/00313831.2020.1869082 https://wonkhe.com/blogs/anxious-students-want-to-us-to-help-them-spend-time-with-and-learn-with-eachother/ https://wonkhe.com/blogs/anxious-students-want-to-us-to-help-them-spend-time-with-and-learn-with-eachother/ biggins and holley designing for student wellbeing: challenging assumptions about where our students learn journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 22 khalil, m., prinsloo, p. and slade, s. (2022) ‘a comparison of learning analytics frameworks: a systematic review’, lak22: 12th international learning analytics and knowledge conference. online, usa 21-25 march. https://doi.org/10.1145/3506860.3506878. killen, c. and langer-crane, m. (2021) ‘student digital experience insights survey’, jisc. available at: https://www.jisc.ac.uk/reports/student-digital-experience-insightssurvey-2020-21-uk-higher-education-findings (accessed: 18 february 2023). kleimola, r. and leppisaari, i. (2022) ‘learning analytics to develop future competences in higher education: a case study’, international journal of educational technology in higher education, 19(1), pp.1-25. https://doi.org/10.1186/s41239-022-00318-w. kollom, k., tammets, k., scheffel, m., tsai, y., jivet, i., muñoz-merino, p. j., morenomarcos, p. m., whitelock-wainwright, a., calleja, a. r., gasevic, d., kloos, c. d., drachsler, h. and ley, t. (2021) ‘a four-country cross-case analysis of academic staff expectations about learning analytics in higher education’, the internet and higher education, 49. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.iheduc.2020.100788. li, l. and wang, x. (2021) ‘technostress inhibitors and creators and their impacts on university teachers’ work performance in higher education’, cognition, technology & work, 23(2), pp.315-330. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10111-020-00625-0. lim, l. a., dawson, s., gašević, d., joksimović, s., pardo, a., fudge, a. and gentili, s. (2021) ‘students’ perceptions of, and emotional responses to, personalised learning analytics-based feedback: an exploratory study of four courses’, assessment & evaluation in higher education, 46(3), pp.339-359. https://doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2020.1782831. macfadyen, l. p. (2022) ‘institutional implementation of learning analytics: current state, challenges, and guiding frameworks’, in lang, c., friend wise, a., merceron, a., gaševic, d. and siemens, g. (eds.) the handbook of learning analytics. 2nd edn. vancouver: solar. https://doi.org/10.1145/3506860.3506878 https://www.jisc.ac.uk/reports/student-digital-experience-insights-survey-2020-21-uk-higher-education-findings https://www.jisc.ac.uk/reports/student-digital-experience-insights-survey-2020-21-uk-higher-education-findings https://doi.org/10.1186/s41239-022-00318-w https://doi.org/10.1016/j.iheduc.2020.100788 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10111-020-00625-0 https://doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2020.1782831 biggins and holley designing for student wellbeing: challenging assumptions about where our students learn journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 23 mutimukwe, c., viberg, o., oberg, l.m. and cerratto-pargman, t. (2022) ‘students' privacy concerns in learning analytics: model development’, british journal of educational technology, 53(4), pp.932-951. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjet.13234. national union of students (2020) covid-19 and students survey report. available at: https://www.nusconnect.org.uk/resources/covid-19-and-students-survey-report (accessed: 18 february 2023). oana, i. e., schneider, c. q. and thomann, e. (2021) qualitative comparative analysis using r: a beginner's guide. cambridge: cambridge university press. office for national statistics (2021) ‘consistency needed: care experience students and higher education’, insight, 9 april. available at: https://www.officeforstudents.org.uk/publications/consistency-needed-careexperienced-students-and-higher-education/ (accessed: 18 february 2023). office for national statistics (2022) ‘schools, attainment and the role of higher education’, insight, 13, april. available at: https://www.officeforstudents.org.uk/media/24ac9501-234f-4f34-bf44edb13e5282c5/insight-brief-13-schools-attainment-and-the-role-of-highereducation.pdf (accessed: 18 february 2023). office for students (2020) ‘“digital poverty” risks leaving students behind’, 3 september. available at: https://www.officeforstudents.org.uk/news-blog-and-events/press-andmedia/digital-poverty-risks-leaving-students-behind (accessed: 18 february 2023). pardo, a., ellis, r. a. and calvo, r. a. (2015) ‘combining observational and experiential data to inform the redesign of learning activities’, in proceedings of the fifth international conference on learning analytics and knowledge. new york 16-20 march. new york: association for computing machinery, pp.305-309. https://doi.org/10.1145/2723576.2723625. persico, d. and pozzi, f. (2015) ‘informing learning design with learning analytics to improve teacher inquiry’, british journal of educational technology, 46(2), pp.230248. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjet.12207. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjet.13234 https://www.nusconnect.org.uk/resources/covid-19-and-students-survey-report https://www.officeforstudents.org.uk/publications/consistency-needed-care-experienced-students-and-higher-education/ https://www.officeforstudents.org.uk/publications/consistency-needed-care-experienced-students-and-higher-education/ https://www.officeforstudents.org.uk/media/24ac9501-234f-4f34-bf44-edb13e5282c5/insight-brief-13-schools-attainment-and-the-role-of-higher-education.pdf https://www.officeforstudents.org.uk/media/24ac9501-234f-4f34-bf44-edb13e5282c5/insight-brief-13-schools-attainment-and-the-role-of-higher-education.pdf https://www.officeforstudents.org.uk/media/24ac9501-234f-4f34-bf44-edb13e5282c5/insight-brief-13-schools-attainment-and-the-role-of-higher-education.pdf https://www.officeforstudents.org.uk/news-blog-and-events/press-and-media/digital-poverty-risks-leaving-students-behind https://www.officeforstudents.org.uk/news-blog-and-events/press-and-media/digital-poverty-risks-leaving-students-behind https://doi.org/10.1145/2723576.2723625 https://doi.org/10.1111/bjet.12207 biggins and holley designing for student wellbeing: challenging assumptions about where our students learn journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 24 r studio (2022) r markdown. available at: https://rmarkdown.rstudio.com/ (accessed: 18 february 2023). rimal, y. (2021) ‘reproducible academic writing and interactive data visualization using r markdown (r programming flex-dashboard: flex_dashboard packages’, in singh rathore, v., dey, n., piuri, v., babo, r., polkowski, z. and tavares, j. m. (eds.) rising threats in expert applications and solutions. singapore: springer, pp.603615. https//doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-6014-9_73. robinson, l., cotten, s. r., ono, h., quan-haase, a., mesch, g., chen, w., schulz, j., hale, t. m. and stern, m. j. (2015) ‘digital inequalities and why they matter’, information, communication & society, 18(5), pp.569-582. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2015.1012532. shoufan, a. (2019) ‘estimating the cognitive value of youtube's educational videos: a learning analytics approach’, computers in human behavior, 92, pp.450-458. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2018.03.036. stake, r. e. (1995) the art of case study research. thousand oaks, ca: sage. staples, t. l. (2022) ‘expansion and evolution of the r programming language’, arxiv, 2208.12382. https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2208.12382. student minds (2021) university mental health: life in a pandemic. available at: https://www.studentminds.org.uk/lifeinapandemic.html (accessed: 18 february 2023). susnjak, t., ramaswami, g. s. and mathrani, a. (2022) ‘learning analytics dashboard: a tool for providing actionable insights to learners’, international journal of educational technology in higher education, 19(1), pp.1-23. https://doi.org/10.1186/s41239-021-00313-7. tsai, y. s., rates, d., moreno-marcos, p. m., muñoz-merino, p. j., jivet, i., scheffel, m., drachsler, h., kloos, c. d. and gašević, d. (2020) ‘learning analytics in european https://rmarkdown.rstudio.com/ https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-6014-9_73 https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2015.1012532 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2018.03.036 https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2208.12382 https://www.studentminds.org.uk/lifeinapandemic.html https://doi.org/10.1186/s41239-021-00313-7 biggins and holley designing for student wellbeing: challenging assumptions about where our students learn journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 25 higher education – trends and barriers’, computers & education, 155, p.103933. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2020.103933. viberg, o., hatakka, m., bälter, o. and mavroudi, a. (2018) ‚the current landscape of learning analytics in higher education’, computers in human behavior, 89, pp.98110. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2018.07.027. vidoni, m. c. (2021) ‘software engineering and r programming: a call for research’, r j., 13(2), p.600. available at: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/melinavidoni/publication/358583892_software_engineering_and_r_programming_a_call _for_research/links/620d90716c472329dced9b1a/software-engineering-and-rprogramming-a-call-for-research.pdf (accessed: 21 february 2023). vuorikari rina, r., kluzer, s. and punie, y. (2022) ‘digcomp 2.2: the digital competence framework for citizens with new examples of knowledge, skills and attitudes’, econpapers, jrc128415. available at: https://econpapers.repec.org/paper/iptiptwpa/jrc128415.htm (accessed: 21 february 2023). wasson, b., hanson, c. and mor, y. (2016) ‘grand challenge problem 11: empowering teachers with student data’, in eberle, j., lund, k., tchounikine, p. and fischer, f. (eds.) grand challenge problems in technology-enhanced learning ii: moocs and beyond. cham: springer, pp. 55-58. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-12562-6_12. author details david biggins is a senior lecturer at bournemouth university and senior fellow of advancehe. david worked as a technology enhanced learning theme leader and academic learning designer where he developed a tel toolkit, contributed to the design, deployment, and staff training for a new vle, and led projects in staff skills development, curriculum design, the learning culture, and other institution-wide initiatives. a particular interest for david is the use of data to promote student success, learning analytics, and data visualisation. david’s praxis has developed through his interactions with the ld community and his research is frequently presented at aldinhe conferences. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2020.103933 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2018.07.027 https://www.researchgate.net/profile/melina-vidoni/publication/358583892_software_engineering_and_r_programming_a_call_for_research/links/620d90716c472329dced9b1a/software-engineering-and-r-programming-a-call-for-research.pdf https://www.researchgate.net/profile/melina-vidoni/publication/358583892_software_engineering_and_r_programming_a_call_for_research/links/620d90716c472329dced9b1a/software-engineering-and-r-programming-a-call-for-research.pdf https://www.researchgate.net/profile/melina-vidoni/publication/358583892_software_engineering_and_r_programming_a_call_for_research/links/620d90716c472329dced9b1a/software-engineering-and-r-programming-a-call-for-research.pdf https://www.researchgate.net/profile/melina-vidoni/publication/358583892_software_engineering_and_r_programming_a_call_for_research/links/620d90716c472329dced9b1a/software-engineering-and-r-programming-a-call-for-research.pdf https://econpapers.repec.org/paper/iptiptwpa/jrc128415.htm https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-12562-6_12 biggins and holley designing for student wellbeing: challenging assumptions about where our students learn journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 26 debbie holley is professor of learning innovation at bournemouth university. a national teaching fellow and a principal fellow of advancehe, she is a passionate educator, with expertise in learning design and blending learning to engage a diverse student body. supporting student writing, drawing on creative practice in her own teaching, and influencing the teaching of others aligns her practice with the ld community, where she regularly presents and supports the annual conference, contributes to the #take5 blog series, and formerly served on the aldinhe national steering group. her research in simulation, augmented reality, and immersive worlds reality influence national policy. licence ©2023 the author(s). this is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (cc-by 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. see http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. journal of learning development in higher education (jldhe) is a peer-reviewed open access journal published by the association for learning development in higher education (aldinhe). designing for student wellbeing: challenging assumptions about where our students learn abstract introduction the search for hidden learning spaces literature review method results: pilot study results: institutional study discussion our students and their wellbeing our students and their preferred study spaces conclusion references author details licence journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special issue 22: compendium of innovative practice october 2021 editorial: responding to the needs of doctoral researchers nicola grayson university of manchester the challenges faced by doctoral students during the course of their studies are well documented, particularly in relation to issues of isolation, wellbeing and mental health. these issues were further exacerbated by the pandemic and the subsequent lockdowns. many researchers felt adrift from their usual support networks and had to motivate themselves to write whilst grappling with caring responsibilities, having to alter the scope of their research, worrying about future prospects, and of course, coping with the loss of loved ones. this section of the compendium presents two key perspectives on supporting doctoral students, which confirm and enhance one another. the first three papers set out how those who support researchers adapted their content and approach to take into account the specific needs of their audience in relation to the pandemic. we see commonalities here in terms of creating and emphasising an all-important sense of community. those supporting researchers took bold steps to advocate for their audience, providing online spaces for them to connect with one another to share their experiences, to reflect on their writing, and to feel less alone. you will read about how live, synchronous shut up and write sessions supported doctoral students to carve out time to write whilst anchoring this support to asynchronous materials that could be accessed anytime and from anywhere. you will read how a self-employed academic writing teacher for doctoral students in germany and neighbouring countries sought to replicate a tried and tested hands-on, analogue approach to keep participants engaged and add an extra dimension of reality to online support, which sought to recreate and connect researchers with the face to face support they missed. you will also read of how those enrolled on a professional doctorate in education were provided with online spaces which allowed them to create cross-cohort and transnational groups, and how they formed supportive subgroups in addition to those facilitated by their learning providers. editorial journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 you will read about the importance of simple conversations for connecting researchers with their peers as their identity begins to shift from student to teacher. to confirm and validate some of the approaches set out by support providers, you will then read accounts written by doctoral students themselves. the first of these communicates the impact the pandemic had on the researcher’s all important relationship with their supervisor, it sets out how they overcame the challenges of online, asynchronous communication and how, by reaching out to peers and seeking creative outlets, they got the support they needed to keep going. finally, you will read about the challenges faced by a doctoral student in zimbabwe and gain insight into how the challenges of the pandemic impacted researchers in a developing country where the digital infrastructure of he institutions could not cope as effectively with the ‘online pivot’. you will hear how this researcher sought to cope with the challenges of working on an area that was subsumed by the pandemic and the role that academic networks and online writing support played in supporting this student to make a bold transition to a new institution in order to complete their studies. overall, the papers in this section provide a fascinating insight into the world of postgraduate researchers and the impact the pandemic had on those who support them. they demonstrate that everything from doctoral students’ ability to work on their projects, maintain productivity and sustain good working habits, as well stay connected to their networks and institutions was affected, but the authors’ creative solutions and their ability to see the silver lining generated solutions that may even be extended beyond the emergency response. journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special issue 25: aldinhe conference proceedings and reflections october 2022 reading in the digital age sarah robin lancaster university, uk elizabeth caldwell lancaster university, uk helen hargreaves lancaster university, uk presentation abstract in 2019, learning developers at lancaster university were awarded funding by aldinhe to conduct a small project into how students read (hargreaves et al., 2022a). we explored students’ perspectives and practices around reading academic texts in digital format. we analysed how students manage their digital reading, how they interact and engage with texts on-screen, and what influences their choices related to text format. one output of this project is an interactive online resource (see hargreaves et al., 2022b) based upon insights gained from our students and we would like to present parts of this resource to the aldinhe community (see figure 1). figure 1. flipcards and scenarios (see robin, 2022). https://xerte.lancaster.ac.uk/play.php?template_id=2214#page1 robin, caldwell and hargreaves reading in the digital age journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 2 community response an excellent discussion and demonstration, stressing the importance of placing an emphasis on reading, as well as writing. i shall certainly be looking out for this tool as a learnhigher resource. for me, it highlighted how students who use copy and paste can inhibit their understanding and retention of information. it has caused me to question whether using copy and paste is a technique to be challenged or discouraged and how this might be achieved. i also eagerly anticipate the tool on learnhigher. i think it is interesting that we move away from hard copy books, printouts etc. we generally assume “technology” means more inclusive. it would be interesting to hear from widening participation students, specifically how they find the digital vs “old school” reading and the benefits/concerns they have with digital “reading”. authors’ reflections we gained some useful feedback from this session. this included questions around our usage of note-taking and note-making, and further information on how these terms have differing meanings, or connotations, for some. we incorporated this thinking into our resource, and made some changes. we also found this session particularly reaffirming as the response was largely very positive with several participants showing enthusiasm, not only for the resource, but our article and wider work too. developing our resource and showcasing it at the conference helped deepen our awareness of the importance of issues around digital reading for students, learning developers and other staff in he. getting it ready for the conference and thinking about how to demonstrate it to others, also helped with our organisation of some of the pages and decisions on how to edit parts of the resource. we also valued the opportunity to talk about the resource with the community that we will share it with. robin, caldwell and hargreaves reading in the digital age journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 3 acknowledgements thanks are extended to all members of the community that have engaged with the conference or these proceedings in some way. thank you to the following community members for their contributions to this particular paper: laura kay (leeds beckett university), anne-marie langford (university of northampton) and patricia perlman-dee (university of manchester). references hargreaves, h., robin, s. and caldwell, e. (2022a) ‘student perceptions of reading digital texts for university study’, journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24, september. https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.vi24.817. hargreaves, h., caldwell, e., robin, s. and king, m. (2022b) reading for your studies [xerte resource]. available at: https://xerte.lancaster.ac.uk/play.php?template_id=2214 (accessed: 21 october 2022) robins, s. (2022) reading in print and in digital: strategies and choices, learnhigher. available at: https://aldinhe.ac.uk/teaching-learning/reading-in-print-and-in-digitalstrategies-and-choices/ author details sarah robin is a learning developer at lancaster university. she works primarily with postgraduate students in lancaster’s management school supporting students with academic writing, managing peer mentoring and co-creating teaching materials for programmes throughout the school. her research interests include student agency and voice, inclusivity and curriculum design. https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.vi24.817 https://xerte.lancaster.ac.uk/play.php?template_id=2214 https://aldinhe.ac.uk/teaching-learning/reading-in-print-and-in-digital-strategies-and-choices/ https://aldinhe.ac.uk/teaching-learning/reading-in-print-and-in-digital-strategies-and-choices/ robin, caldwell and hargreaves reading in the digital age journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 4 elizabeth caldwell, fhea, celp, is the learning developer for the faculty of health and medicine at lancaster university. in addition to her learning development work, beth is an active multi-disciplinary researcher with current projects centred on health communication in children’s literature. helen hargreaves is learning developer for eap (english for academic purposes) at lancaster university, where she runs a range of language development opportunities for students at all levels, including one-to-ones, workshops and short courses. reading in the digital age presentation abstract community response authors’ reflections acknowledgements references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special edition 25: aldinhe conference proceedings and reflections october 2022 ________________________________________________________________________ supporting student writing and other modes of learning and assessment: a staff guide sandra abegglen university of calgary, canada tom burns london metropolitan university, uk sandra sinfield london metropolitan university, uk presentation abstract academic writing in higher education (he) is a contested practice freighted with meaning, never more so than for widening participation students, still placed as ‘outsiders’ and often left feeling unwelcome and ‘un-voiced’. ironically, as molinari (2022) argues, universities were originally more diverse in form and content, not heavily ‘literate’ but oral, discursive and creative. as he has become ostensibly more ‘open’, the system has become more normative, more formally rule-bound, more ‘written’ – and hence more exclusive. a recent example in the uk is the office for students’ (adams, 2021) attack on inclusive assessment, pushing instead for more emphasis on spelling, punctuation and grammar. alongside this tension, many in the learning development (ld) community feel that discipline academics do not see the ‘teaching’ of academic writing as part of their pedagogic and assessment repertoire, preferring to send students to learning developers (lds) ‘to be fixed’. however, academics and lds engaged in discussion and free writing (elbow 1998; 1999) on this topic at a london met learning and teaching conference presented views that were more nuanced and sympathetic. there was a deep appreciation of the ‘real’ work that academic writing does with and for students, but also a sense that they did not know how to build writing into their practice(s). and so was born this staff guide: a playful, creative and yet intensely practical guide for academic staff who want to empower their students to write – often, playfully, experimentally – on their way to ‘becoming’, and becoming academic. presenting the guide in the resource showcase abegglen, burns, sinfield supporting student writing and other modes of learning and assessment: a staff guide journal of learning development in higher education special issue 25: october 2022 2 allowed us to highlight the continuing centrality of writing. lecturers and university staff can use it to engage students in ‘writing to learn’ rather than ‘learning to write’. community response writing is a fundamental practice in academia, integral to our professional identities yet also challenging in the way that success in writing is often based on how well the author conforms to certain expectations of what ‘good’ academic writing looks like (french, 2020). as staff are challenged in their writing identities, so too are students, trained from their arrival at university to produce essays and reports without necessarily learning why, or how, to enjoy the process or even that it can be enjoyable! i was particularly inspired by the concept of writing as play and making writing pleasurable for students, and would love to see more work like this. i found the concept of writing to learn, as opposed to learning to write, powerful and provocative, as i consider the focus of my own practice to be encouraging students to learn to write. it is a mantra i’m going to take away with me for sure. however, writing is a process and can be used as a learning tool. this has challenged my emphasis and made me question my approach. i think the emphasis on learning to write can encourage students to have a confrontational approach to writing, particularly if this is the main way their knowledge is judged. writing is not a neutral activity but a socially-situated one that can act as a method of enquiry into the self (park, 2013). i wonder what would happen if students were shown and taught how to love writing and treat it as a thinking tool, and to see it as an opportunity rather than something to fear. that partly comes down to how writing is presented to students, both in conversation in the classroom or during a tutorial, and quite literally in what it looks like. ‘writing to learn’, as a resource, looks so engaging that i am genuinely excited to get stuck in and read through! it is refreshingly clear and fun, and the best kind of student co-creation in the way the design and feel of the book were handed over to the student illustrator, who created something cohesive with a clear and consistent style. i love the way this guide looks. it is reminiscent of a children’s book, in the best way, with the white space, the large clear font and the beautiful, memorable illustrations add something special to the whole. it is as far from a abegglen, burns, sinfield supporting student writing and other modes of learning and assessment: a staff guide journal of learning development in higher education special issue 25: october 2022 3 textbook as it is possible to imagine. in short, it is both creative and pragmatic, and reflects the exciting possibilities inherent in the writing process. thanks for making it open access. next steps and additional questions i find the part on other modes of assessments especially useful. considering there is not too much literature on it, are there any good resources you can recommend on authentic assessment that explore alternative modes? authors’ reflection the ‘academic writing’ of university students occupies contested ground freighted with meaning about the writer, who they are, their potential and what they might become. writing is ‘dangerous’, particularly for those marginalised groups new to he – widening participation students – who feel particularly unwelcome in academia. thus, students need help, not just to overcome their fear of writing, but to positively discover the pleasure of exploratory writing. this, coupled with concerns about plagiarism and essay mills, makes it more urgent to find spaces in the curriculum to discover that writing can be a learning process that gives students voice and agency, that places them powerfully within their own learning (abegglen et al., 2017). hence our colourful and playful guide for staff on integrating 'writing to learn' in the classroom (abegglen et al., 2021), now freely available through creative commons. the purpose of the guide is to help academics discover fresh energy when supporting students with their writing. we want to reveal in practical, real and creative ways that writing is a thinking process and that we, as instructors, also benefit when we create spaces for generative and exploratory writing that enable our students to develop as confident academic writers and confident academics. students will flourish if academics set meaningful and valuable writing tasks, as well as other more multimodal forms of assessment. rather than ‘dumbing down’ we need to ‘scale up’ our challenge levels, whilst ensuring that students are appropriately scaffolded, supported and developed on their route to mastery. we need to harness the fact that students are provoked by their curiosity, by the opportunity to have their say, and by their perception of the task’s value. they know the difference between being invited into their epistemic community/ies and abegglen, burns, sinfield supporting student writing and other modes of learning and assessment: a staff guide journal of learning development in higher education special issue 25: october 2022 4 being asked to ‘regurgitate’ their learning. the onus is on all academics to set those challenging, provocative tasks. in the guide we have drawn on our extensive work with widening participation students and instructors, and our engagement with the literature from the writing and learning development communities, to highlight that writing really is more than a skill or set of skills to master. we need to move beyond a focus on the mechanics of writing, a preoccupation with spelling, punctuation and grammar (important as these are for final draft writing), to develop a love of writing and to initiate students into their epistemic communities. it also illustrates that there are opportunities to widen assessment practice. although multimodal assessments may never entirely replace the essay, they can de-centre its dominance, whilst at the same time, adopting more creative approaches overall can work to transform academic writing into a more inclusive and consciously learning process. hence, the guide is more than a ‘how to’ book but rather a stepping stone to rethink academic praxis and pedagogy. as part of our own commitment to the power of the ludic, we worked with a first-year design student to bring alive the ideas across the text. hence the images – and the white space – and (we hope) the overarching sense of joy and possibility encapsulated in the guide and beyond, in its audience, in its readers, and in practice. the guide can be downloaded for free: https://prism.ucalgary.ca/handle/1880/113457. to date, it has been viewed an amazing 3,145 times, with 2,400 downloads. feedback, and comments more generally, have been overwhelmingly positive, with many valuing the https://prism.ucalgary.ca/handle/1880/113457 abegglen, burns, sinfield supporting student writing and other modes of learning and assessment: a staff guide journal of learning development in higher education special issue 25: october 2022 5 reminder that academic writing can be powerfully, more positively and more playfully developed, and that it can be taught ‘differently’. we encourage everyone to run writing workshops/weeks/years and set up free writing sessions in which students experience writing as thinking/learning as opposed to the alienated (and alienating), judged one-draft writing that they tend to engage in. we can all encourage students to take ownership of their learning through a variety of active learning modes and diverse writing and meaning-making activities. and we can develop writing in a variety of ways: by scaffolding reading, by encouraging blogging to learn, by setting provocative, open essay questions, and by setting more multimodal tasks, in which students seem more naturally to engage in the selection, revision and editing processes that we also want them to engage in with their writing. writing should not be a ‘trick’, something with which we catch students out or judge them as deficient. academic writing is a process through which to develop and participate in academia. references abegglen, s., burns, t. and sinfield, s. (2017) ‘“really free!”: strategic interventions to foster students' academic writing skills, journal of educational innovation, partnership and change, 3(1), pp.251-255. available at: https://doi.org/10.21100/jeipc.v3i1.589 (accessed: 21 october 2022). abegglen, s., burns, t. and sinfield, s. (2021) supporting student writing and other modes of learning and assessment: a staff guide. prism. available at: https://prism.ucalgary.ca/handle/1880/113457 (accessed: 21 october 2022). adams, r. (2021, oct 10) ‘universities in england “failing to mark down students” for poor writing skills’, the guardian, 10 october. available at: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2021/oct/07/universities-failing-to-markdown-students-for-poor-writing-skills (accessed: 21 october 2022). elbow, p. (1998) writing without teachers. 2nd edn. oxford: oxford university press. https://doi.org/10.21100/jeipc.v3i1.589 https://prism.ucalgary.ca/handle/1880/113457 https://www.theguardian.com/education/2021/oct/07/universities-failing-to-mark-down-students-for-poor-writing-skills https://www.theguardian.com/education/2021/oct/07/universities-failing-to-mark-down-students-for-poor-writing-skills abegglen, burns, sinfield supporting student writing and other modes of learning and assessment: a staff guide journal of learning development in higher education special issue 25: october 2022 6 elbow, p. (1999) ‘using the collage for collaborative writing’, composition studies, 27(1), pp.7-14. available at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/43501417 (accessed: 21 october 2022). french, a. (2020) ‘academic writing as identity-work in higher education: forming a “professional writing in higher education habitus”’, studies in higher education, 45(8), pp.1605-1617. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2019.1572735 (accessed: 21 october 2022). molinari, j. (2022) what makes writing academic: rethinking theory for practice. london: bloomsbury. park, g. (2013) ‘“writing is a way of knowing”: writing and identity’, elt journal, 67(3), pp.336–345. available at: https://doi.org/10.1093/elt/cct012 (accessed: 21 october 2022). acknowledgments thank you to all the contributors who shared their reflections and enriched our insight into this conference presentation and its impact on the audience. a big shout out, as always, to our students and special thanks to laura key from leeds beckett university, anne-marie langford from the university of northampton, katie winter from the university of surrey, lee fallin from the university of hull, joshua thorpe from the university of stirling, sandie donnelly from cumbria university, ebba brooks from the university of salford, and laura niada from the university of westminster for their feedback and reflections. author details sandra abegglen (@sandra_abegglen) is a researcher in the school of architecture, planning and landscape (sapl) at the university of calgary, canada, where she explores online education, and learning and teaching in the design studio. she has published widely on emancipatory learning and teaching practice, creative and playful pedagogy, and remote education. find her personal website at: https://sandra-abegglen.com/ https://www.jstor.org/stable/43501417 https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2019.1572735 https://doi.org/10.1093/elt/cct012 https://eur03.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3a%2f%2fsandra-abegglen.com%2f&data=05%7c01%7ccarina.buckley%40solent.ac.uk%7ce6a65c1c068c44f2c36408da9ca9294d%7cd684e4cd491a4577bf33546478d72e3c%7c0%7c0%7c637994547629848575%7cunknown%7ctwfpbgzsb3d8eyjwijoimc4wljawmdailcjqijoiv2lumziilcjbtii6ik1hawwilcjxvci6mn0%3d%7c3000%7c%7c%7c&sdata=xcdk3fdlvoiehc5rrddt%2bil99vxeio%2fk94cuqgrqpnm%3d&reserved=0 abegglen, burns, sinfield supporting student writing and other modes of learning and assessment: a staff guide journal of learning development in higher education special issue 25: october 2022 7 tom burns (@levellerb) is a senior lecturer in the centre for professional and educational development at london metropolitan university, developing innovations with a special focus on praxes that ignite student curiosity, and develop power and voice. he is co-author of teaching, learning and study skills: a guide for tutors (2004) and essential study skills: the complete guide to success at university (5th edition, 2022). sandra sinfield (@danceswithcloud) is a senior lecturer in education and learning development in the centre for professional and educational development at london metropolitan university and one of the co-founders of the association for learning development in higher education (aldinhe). sandra is interested in creativity as liberatory and holistic practice in higher education; she has developed theatre and film in unusual places, and inhabited secondlife as a learning space. supporting student writing and other modes of learning and assessment: a staff guide presentation abstract community response next steps and additional questions authors’ reflection references acknowledgments author details literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special edition: researching pdp practice, november 2010 what role can pdp play in identity development and confidence building in non-traditional students? carina buckley university of portsmouth, uk abstract the purpose of this paper is to explore the development of a positive learning identity in students, within the context of communities of practice. it considers the role of personal development planning (pdp) in building confidence in inexperienced learners through its use as a tool for transition, engagement and achievement, and its emphasis on learning communities and peer support. it is illustrated by a case study of fda early years care and education students, who have been using the professional development unit (pdu), an online accredited unit developed by the cetl foundation direct as a version of pdp for work-based learners. the paper concludes that three aspects of the pdu act together as a forum for the exchange and development of ideas, and in doing so support the growth of learning communities that work to affirm the individual. guided and structured reflection, beginning with a benchmark statement and ending with a 360-degree review, is used as a means for aspiration building, and for marking the distance travelled. social mechanisms are put in place via the discussion boards of the university vle for confidence building through identification with a valued group and the use of peers as a learning resource. finally, the fluid boundaries between the workplace and the university, represented as three overlapping circles of self, theory and practice, allow for integrated learning and the introduction of the familiar into the unfamiliar. the pdu is therefore demonstrated here to be a safe area of the curriculum that supports the development and confidence of the new uncertain learner. key words: widening participation; community; peer support; identity; confidence; reflection. buckley what role can pdp play in identity development and confidence building in non-traditional students? introduction the government policy of widening participation (wp) has at its heart a greater accessibility of higher education (he) to ‘a new constituency of learners’ (macdonald and stratta, 2001, p.250), through the promotion of ‘successful participation in he to everyone who can benefit from it’ (hefce, 2009, p.18). often defined by what they are not, this constituency of ‘non-traditional’ students instead encompasses a diverse cross-section of society, increasingly challenging the hegemony of the more common school leaver (hesa, 2010) through the on-going wp agenda (hefce, 2009). the absorption of these students represents a change in university culture, with those who were once a minority group gradually becoming the norm. however, the emphasis remains on their enrolment in higher education, rather than on their learning needs once they are there. this situation is illustrated by a recent study (macdonald and stratta, 2001) indicating that lecturers and teaching staff tend to resist the classification of non-standard students as a group according to their prior educational experiences or social context. while this is argued to maintain a form of equality of treatment for all students, regardless of background, it overlooks the differences that can impact upon the student experience. for older people, often in full time employment, frequently with family commitments and unused to the academic demands of formal education, accessing a programme of study is only the first barrier to overcome. without a sense of legitimacy as a student and the feeling of belonging inherent as a valued member of the university community, engagement and subsequent achievement can suffer (kember et al., 2001). by resisting the pedagogical and institutional change required, teaching staff can therefore inadvertently render these students invisible (bamber and tett, 2000). ‘identity’ can be understood as the way in which individuals perceive and understand themselves. as such it is a personal construct, but can also be contextualised within a social structure. consequently, as people move through different social groups, the way they understand themselves and the behaviour that entails will change according to the situation (stets and burke, 2000). this is closely linked to feelings of self-esteem and selfefficacy, and is known to be more successful when an individual’s sense of identity in each situation is tied to social relationships (hogg et al., 1995). taking these ideas into the classroom would help new students to connect to their peers and adapt faster to their status as a student. this process has been mediated through personal development journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 2 buckley what role can pdp play in identity development and confidence building in non-traditional students? planning (pdp), as exemplified by the professional development unit (pdu) developed by the cetl foundation direct, and used by fda early years care and education (fda eyce). its three principle aspects of reflection, community and integration together provide a safe area of the curriculum for the new student to engage, develop and achieve. the key measure is how far students are able to appreciate the overlap between each of the three areas and their contribution to each other. this will be investigated through student reviews and reflections, conducted as part of the requirements of the pdu. by reporting on their confidence and sense of community, students may help to indicate their integration onto the course and subsequent understanding and acceptance of themselves as a learner. becoming a student widening participation has redefined the student, discursively opening up the term to a broad range of constructions. nevertheless, the prominence given to the idea of the independent learner is one which can be inappropriate for most of those students drawn in by the net of broader access (leathwood and o’connell, 2003). learning, if it is to be successful, must recognise the contribution of all facets of the individual’s life out of the classroom, and their impact on what happens in the classroom (bamber and tett, 2000). particularly for those students who do not have recent experience of education, or who perhaps might have had negative experiences, the acknowledgement of the broader context of their lives is a way to successfully embed learning, valuing all that they bring with them (appleby and bathmaker, 2006).learning is contextual, encompassing the context in which learning takes place and the context in which a person becomes a learner by adopting a student identity (o’donnell and tobbell, 2007). however, this context may also be characterised by ambiguity and uncertainty, since many new students are faced with the challenging of assumptions that have previously gone unquestioned (bamber and tett, 2000). helping students to integrate effectively is not merely a matter of establishing the opportunity to study; the social and personal complexities of becoming and being a learner – particularly a part-time learner, as experienced by the fda eyce students here – must also be taken into account (castles, 2004). these ideas are illustrated well by the students’ benchmark statements; their first piece of work for the degree: journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 3 buckley what role can pdp play in identity development and confidence building in non-traditional students? i am a registered childminder and also a mother. both of these roles play an important part of my life. i first got into childcare as i have children of my own. i only started my current job in a pre-school in february 2008 and have decided to go head first into developing my limited knowledge of the early years. the skills i do have come from doing the job, not from formal education, as i have no qualifications in childcare. i have worked within the field of childcare for 23 years and have seen many developments in practice and approaches to the needs of children 0-5 years. i am keen to develop this knowledge by having the opportunity to reflect on my own and others’ practice, but most of all to be within an environment where i can relate the theory to my practice. i am anxious to learn about the social implications and theories regarding children’s learning as i have first hand exposure to many deprived economic and social environments through my travels and home in south africa. by focusing on the individual, but also taking into account their social context, the pdu helps students understand themselves by providing a place to explore their commitments, values and goals, and the consistency and coherence between beliefs, choices and actions (adams and marshall, 1996). for the new student, entry into a university-based social group is the first step in the development of a salient ‘learner’ identity. by interacting with others as students, each individual gains the opportunity to adopt the practices and values of a learner through membership of the group, and in doing so take on a new perspective of themselves in light of these emergent social relations. , however, the process can be complex and potentially fraught with anxiety, as the discontinuities entailed in a move into he can threaten the new student’s sense of self and actively prevent recognition of the self as a learner (johnson and robson, 1999). to overcome this, the learning environment is an important factor in its provision for the sharing of experience, learning from peers, and accessing support when needed (fagerberg and kihlgren, 2001). as one student expressed it, ‘a community of learning, to me, is what going to university is all about; we have our own little community within the classroom, all different people from different backgrounds, learning off each other’. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 4 buckley what role can pdp play in identity development and confidence building in non-traditional students? the professional development unit one solution proposed here is the creation and maintenance of a micro-context in which this integration can be guided and managed on an institutional level, but supported by student learning communities. the online professional development unit (pdu) was developed specifically for foundation degree students, with these needs and problems in mind. it is an accredited unit delivered via the university vle but integrated into the curriculum, and runs throughout the entire degree, with students earning 20 credits for each of the three part-time years. as work-based, part time, mature learners, the foundation degree students discussed here do not fit into the standard undergraduate model as they have often extensive knowledge of workplace practice and proficiency to bring into the classroom and apply to the learning situation. nevertheless, they share the goal of university education to develop as independent learners through active teaching that harnesses all senses and media (cottrell, 2008). the students enrolled on the fda eyce, typically women aged between 30-45 years (within a range of 18-55 years), would benefit from a learner-centred approach at the heart of a supportive environment which respects and draws upon the skills and knowledge acquired in the workplace and the home (herman and kirkup, 2008). the pdu is a site for the integration of work, study and personal life within a community of supportive peers, thus enabling the emergence of a learning identity. as a scaffold for the self, it provides a rationale for the linking of learning activities to personal growth and transformation. the pdu has its origins in the progress files recommended by the dearing report in 1997 (ncihe, 1997) and formally introduced by the qaa four years later (qaa, 2001). as well as a transcript of marks, the report envisaged a role for formalised reflection, review and planning, helping students – and by extension those who teach them – to ‘improve links between formal and informal learning and…value what they can do as well as what they know’ (ncihe, 1997, para. 9.47). pdp has suffered since its introduction from a lack of firm definition (buckley, 2008), with a multiplicity of meanings to encompass enabling critical reflection, promoting independent learning, developing employability skills, and increasing student awareness of how and why they are learning (clegg, 2004). within this, pdp can be delivered through specific skills modules, the personal tutor system, portfoliobased organisation or embedding within the course, amongst others, adding to the differences in interpretation, understanding and implementation (clegg and bradley, journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 5 buckley what role can pdp play in identity development and confidence building in non-traditional students? 2006). however, its status as an amorphous concept nevertheless makes it readily adaptable to circumstances. it is therefore configured here as a holistic process, designed to facilitate and ease the transition into higher education by harnessing these ideas around identity development and using them in the classroom. the unit acts as a forum for the exchange and development of ideas in three areas: within the self; with peers and colleagues; and between the workplace, university and home. this is achieved through individual activities and tasks, and by making full use of the vle’s discussion boards. each area is located within an overarching discursive framework that promotes reflection, thereby supporting autonomy by focussing the curriculum on the student and their learning and, indeed, recognising the individual as a student. to accomplish this, the pdu begins with a benchmark statement within the first three weeks of the first term. it is modelled on barnett and coate’s (2005) conceptualisation of curricula, based in turn on the three domains of learning: self, theory and practice. in doing so, it actively and explicitly embraces all the knowledge a new student brings to the course, whether tacit, formal, experiential or practical, and validates who they are, what they have done, and their presence on the degree. the fluid boundaries engendered through the use of this diagram (figure 1) allow for the movement of knowledge and expertise between the workplace and university, giving access to the familiar in the midst of that which is new and uncertain, and reinforcing the application of theory to practice. figure 1. the three circles model of self, theory and practice (adapted from barnett and coate, 2005). journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 6 buckley what role can pdp play in identity development and confidence building in non-traditional students? the benchmark takes a pragmatic approach, in that students are asked to consider each of the three areas in turn and how they contribute to the learning to be done and the goals involved in completion of the fda eyce. they are guided in the writing of their benchmark, which is structured around the mapping of their existing approach to practice against job-specific professional standards, their existing knowledge against the subjects to be covered over the degree, and their personal values and aspirations. through this, and the opportunity it affords to set out the path that initially led the student onto the fda eyce and where they hope it will take them, they are helped to think about how their practice and their knowledge impacts upon, and is impacted by, their ideals and beliefs. in this way, they do not begin the degree as a blank canvas, since the benchmark draws attention to existing knowledge and prior experience. as valuable as this process is, the pdu deepens it further by adding a reflexive component. the benchmark statement comes to act, through an ongoing cycle of reflection and review at various points in the pdu, as a marker of the distance travelled. in its role as a starting point, students are able to see how far they have come in terms of academic ability and overall goals: i am a nursery nurse. i have gained some knowledge and experience in working with all ages from 3 months to 5 years. i already have a btec in early years, and would like to extend my knowledge and improve my skills as an early years practitioner. since starting the degree i have already gained confidence and knowledge, due to working alongside a very supportive team. i hope i will achieve my goal of becoming a proprietor of a successful pre-school. i am an early years assistant in a reception class. i enrolled on the course to develop my knowledge of early years and improve my skills in the workplace. on a personal level i am hoping to improve my academic skills as it has been a while since i last studied. i would also like to become more confident in my ability to clearly express my thought and ideas. the future could involve a teaching career. i have been a pre-school leader for three years. i have always wanted more, but didn’t know what, and am hoping the fda will fill the void in my life. i have enjoyed meeting lots of people all in similar shoes to me. i hope that the fda makes me a more confident person who is able to stand up to confrontational people. i would use the acquired knowledge to bring about positive changes, for example to make a more pleasant environment for children and staff. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 7 buckley what role can pdp play in identity development and confidence building in non-traditional students? all fda eyce students from all three years were asked, via a short questionnaire, to name the aspect of the pdu they liked the most (a response rate of approximately 80% resulted in a dataset of 63 students). reflection was highlighted by these students as a specific, named activity within the pdu, through its end of year reviews based on the three circles model, and its emphasis throughout on the importance of reflection in learning to integrate workplace practice and university study. the status of reflection as an activity of increasing merit and use seems apparent in the answers given, with 82% of all third years singling out reflection as their preferred element of the pdu, in comparison to just 21% of first years. whereas the first year students commented that reflection was a useful way of letting off tensions by writing about opinions and feelings, by the third year this had moderated to an appreciation of its contribution to self-awareness and subsequent benefits to practice. it seems that the importance and usefulness of reflection is increasingly recognised and appreciated by fda eyce students as they progress through their degree. moreover, the reflective process, beginning with the benchmark statement, is a tool for aspiration and confidence building. by placing the learner and their prior experience within the context of the course aims and outcomes, and linking them to practice, they are established as valid members of the university. building a learning community the benchmark process helps students to articulate their reasons for being on the course and, as such, prepares them for becoming part of a learning community. the pdu, through its delivery online and its structure around the three learning domains, is able to act as a common hub around which individuals can share and discuss ideas on course assignments, workplace practice and their experiences with each. it is the ideal location for peer support, using social mechanisms as a means for creating a sense of belonging and ameliorating feelings of difference. for women learners in particular, empowerment and confidence are major aspects of the learning experience (morgan and holly, 1994), and to be positioned within a supportive network can aid this. communities of practice work best when they focus on the shared knowledge of participants, rather than a particular task to be completed (kayler and weller, 2007). for students unsure of their place in an academic environment, this has the added benefit of allowing them to express their work-based expertise and bring the familiar into an unfamiliar domain. by taking part in discussion, journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 8 buckley what role can pdp play in identity development and confidence building in non-traditional students? participants are able to negotiate and construct meaning through mutual recognition of each other as a practitioner (handley et al., 2006through membership of this community, they are able to explore shared and varying traits in their experience, challenge assumptions and define collective understandings (guldberg and pilkington, 2006). learning therefore is intrinsically related to identity (o’donnell and tobbell, 2007): i really enjoy working within a group. we have created our own mini dictionary of knowledge which everyone seems to be enjoying sharing; what and how they practice within their own settings. i find it beneficial as it widens my knowledge too. for community involvement of this kind to lead to learning, it must be meaningful and valued (tinto, 1997). the pdu contributes meaning and value through structured discussions, beginning with an assessed exercise during the first semester. the first of four related tasks asks students to think about four theoretical ideas or practice-based principles they have learnt since starting the course, to post them to their online discussion groups of around six people, and to contribute on at least one other posting. the second element focuses on how each new piece of learning has affected or may affect practice, with their discussion board postings including evidence from their line manager or mentor, and consideration of the issues raised. finally, the personal sphere is addressed in terms of any changes to personal values, ambitions and goals, but this may be kept private. those that have chosen to share often relate their feelings to an event at work, for example: i think we sometimes make life so complicated for ourselves that simple ideas are not valued and get overlooked. one thing i've learnt on this course is to stand back sometimes and get the whole picture, not what is just in front of my eyes. i discuss reflection with colleagues, and some are now accepting it and others still struggle with the concept – some people need to be told what to do and others to be encouraged to think and reflect on their own. children are being pushed into meeting targets they are not ready to meet. i find myself looking at these children and ask myself: what’s going on? journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 9 buckley what role can pdp play in identity development and confidence building in non-traditional students? each of these three tasks prepares the students for the syndicate activity by structuring reflection and discussion around each of the three domains of learning. the main aim of the assessment is for each group to negotiate and collaborate in producing a ‘top ten’ list of suggestions or findings that would benefit someone new joining the course. these tips might include resources, initiatives, methods relating to practice, and so on; there are no limitations posed (lyons and buckley, 2009). although producing these tips is a useful resource to feed back into the pdu, it is the process entailed in this assignment that is of most value, rather than the product. being a legitimate member of a community involves taking part in the negotiations through which meaning is constructed (moore, 2006), as conversation between practitioners contributes to and changes the situational understandings of practice and the workplace (tillema and orland-barak, 2006). the pdu, with its emphasis on discussion and collaboration, attempts to bring that professional knowledge-sharing from the workplace into academia, and the results of this study indicate that students respond well to it. just over half of all first year respondents on fda eyce reported that they found the discussion boards to be their favourite feature of the pdu, specifically for sharing views, learning about others’ opinions and having the opportunity to put across their own thoughts. participation in discourse therefore stimulates both learning and identity development, through the enrichment of student understanding and acceptance by peers (kayler and weller, 2007). this idea is exemplified by the finding that 82% of first years felt that there was a strong sense of community on their course, a number that rose to 97% for the second years. this year group identified the benefits of discussion boards as the possibilities for reflecting on practice with others and the use of peers as an additional learning resource. interestingly, third year students, in marked contrast to previous years, express a specific preference for direct face-to-face discussion over asynchronous, online contact. in line with the theoretical ideas above, it is posited here that online-mediated discussions on the pdu are appropriate for forming groups and instigating relationships in a safe environment for first years, but by the time they have progressed to the third year, the community of peers has developed in such a way that direct conversation has become the more suitable medium. the final element of the pdu, and the last piece of assessed work for students on fda eyce, is a 360° review, which aims to bring together the three aspects of self, theory and journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 10 buckley what role can pdp play in identity development and confidence building in non-traditional students? practice. each student is asked to hand a questionnaire to around twelve people, including their line manager, mentor, work colleagues, student colleagues and clients/customers/trainees (where appropriate), to gain feedback on their practice, knowledge and professionalism. the student, having completed a questionnaire themselves, analyses the feedback to compare their own perceptions of their performance with those of the people they have asked, providing an objective basis to an end-of-degree appraisal of their progress and development in the three domains of learning. their final review indicates that this integration is often successful, as these excerpts demonstrate: i have been able to see the progression within myself, developing from someone lacking in confidence, unsure whether she would complete the course, to someone who is now able to hold her head high and role model the knowledge and expertise that has been gained through this foundation degree. i am a better person for it and this will reflect in my practice, which in turn will feed through my staff, the children and the parents. on a personal level i know the training i have undertaken has enabled me to grow in confidence in all aspects of my role as a practitioner and team leader. i have developed in-depth knowledge and understanding of early years. during my three years i have developed special interests in how boys learn. i have taken this interest into my setting. overall this course has enabled me to develop my confidence and passion in early years. i will be able to use what i have learnt to not only support me in my career but also with my future studies. i have already been able to support my staff team with training, guiding and motivating them to improve what we provide as a nursery, ensuring every child has a positive start. attending lessons at university has given me opportunities to network with other students and share expertise as well as develop my confidence when speaking in public. while the pdu has proven to be a valuable addition to the fda eyce course, it is not perfect. despite being an accredited unit, many students still perceive it to be an added workload on their course, rather than being fully integrated like any other unit. its online delivery gives it an outsider status separate from the rest of the degree, regardless of its linkages to the other units studied, while for many members of the course, coordinating journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 11 buckley what role can pdp play in identity development and confidence building in non-traditional students? online work with colleagues was not always easy. a new iteration of the pdu is currently being planned that will hopefully manage these issues better in the future. there is also a possibility for the pdu to extend beyond its present scope of non-traditional students, as one of its main benefits could be argued to be the exposure to students of a multiplicity of perspectives and viewpoints. students are helped through this to understand that expertise does not consist of the possession of particular items of knowledge, but rather develops gradually and continuously as part of the learning process (zimitat, 2007). there is little doubt that the ‘situated understandings’ (tillema and orland-barak, 2006, p.593) derived from the pdu have helped mature and uncertain learners integrate into university by making use of their personal backgrounds and tacit knowledge, but these conversations can be useful for any student on any degree. conclusion the pdu has acted as a supported and supportive social mechanism for fda eyce students, offering the means by which the individual might gain validation of the self as a student and a sense of belonging through membership of a valued professional community. the fluid boundaries represented by the three overlapping circles of self, theory and practice answer the need to acknowledge and integrate all facets of the learner’s life. through the benchmark statement, the new student is not faced with the need to reject or ignore all else that they are, but rather is encouraged to draw upon it and feed back into it throughout the degree. the recognition of the whole person gives value to existing skills and embeds new learning into the broader context from which each student comes. anxiety for students embarking on a new programme of study is often centred around the unknown and the unfamiliar (johnson and robson, 1999), so the permission given by the pdu to refer to and rely upon what is already known and familiar can be a source of great reassurance. furthermore, the dual approaches of reflection and community work together to reinforce student confidence and each person’s sense of legitimacy as a member of the university. a learner identity can potentially be developed through affinity with a valued group, and a focus on the individual as someone who has valuable knowledge to contribute to the learning community. the aspiration-building capacities of the benchmark statement, together with the confidence-building mechanisms of the discussion boards, work to position each new student within a learning community, journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 12 buckley what role can pdp play in identity development and confidence building in non-traditional students? so that they might better engage with their studies and their practice, and experience the transformative power of learning. acknowledgement this paper is an outcome of the national action research network on researching and evaluating personal development planning and e-portfolio practice project (2007-2010). the project was led by the university of bolton in association with the university of worcester and centre for recording achievement, and in national collaboration with the university of bedfordshire, bournemouth university and university of bradford. the project was funded by the higher education academy, national teaching fellowship project strand. more details about the project can be found at: http://www.recordingachievement.org/research/narn-tree.html. references adams, g.r. and marshall, s.k. (1996) ‘a developmental social psychology of identity: understanding the person-in-context’, journal of adolescence, 19(5), pp. 429-442. appleby, y. and bathmaker, a.m. (2006) ‘the new skills agenda: increased lifelong learning or new sites of inequality?’, british educational research journal, 32(5), pp. 703-717. bamber, j. and tett, l. (2000) ‘transforming the learning experiences of non-traditional students: a perspective from higher education’, studies in continuing education, 22(1), pp. 57-75. barnett, r. and coate, k. (2005) engaging the curriculum in higher education. maidenhead: open university press. buckley, c. (2008) pdp: from introduction to present. available at: http://www.learnhigher.ac.uk/download-document/564-pdplitreview.htm (accessed: 21 may 2010). journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 13 http://www.recordingachievement.org/research/narn-tree.html http://www.learnhigher.ac.uk/download-document/564-pdplitreview.htm buckley what role can pdp play in identity development and confidence building in non-traditional students? castles, j. (2004) ‘persistence and the adult learner: factors affecting persistence in open university students’, active learning in higher education, 5(2), pp. 166-179. clegg, s. (2004) ‘critical readings: progress files and the production of the autonomous learner’, teaching in higher education, 9(3), pp. 287-298. clegg, s. and bradley, s. (2006) ‘models of personal development planning: practice and processes’, british educational research journal, 32(1), pp. 57-76. cottrell, s. (2008) the study skills handbook. 3rd edn. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan. fagerberg, i. and kihlgren, m. (2001) ‘experiencing a nurse identity: the meaning of identity to swedish registered nurses two years after graduation’, journal of advanced nursing, 34(1), pp. 137-145. guldberg, k. and pilkington, r. (2006) ‘a community of practice approach to the development of non-traditional learners through networked learning’, journal of computer assisted learning, 22(3), pp. 159-171. handley, k., sturdy, a., fincham, r. and clark, t. (2006) ‘within and beyond communities of practice: making sense of learning through participation, identity and practice’, journal of management studies, 43(3), pp. 641-653. hefce (2009) strategic plan 2006-11. available at: http://www.hefce.ac.uk/pubs/hefce/2009/09_21/09_21.pdf (accessed: 9 march 2010). herman, c. and kirkup, g. (2008) ‘learners in transition: the use of eportfolios for women returners to science, engineering and technology’, innovations in education and teaching international, 45(1), pp. 67-76 hesa (2010) students and qualifiers data tables. available at: http://www.hesa.ac.uk/index.php?option=com_datatables&itemid=121&task=show_ category&catdex=3 (accessed: 12 january 2010). journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 14 http://www.hefce.ac.uk/pubs/hefce/2009/09_21/09_21.pdf http://www.hesa.ac.uk/index.php?option=com_datatables&itemid=121&task=show_category&catdex=3 http://www.hesa.ac.uk/index.php?option=com_datatables&itemid=121&task=show_category&catdex=3 buckley what role can pdp play in identity development and confidence building in non-traditional students? hogg, m.a., terry, d.j. and white, k.m. (1995) ‘a tale of two theories: a critical comparison of identity theory with social identity theory’, social psychology quarterly, 58(4), pp. 255-269. johnson, s. and robson, c. (1999) ‘threatened identities: the experiences of women in transition to programmes of professional higher education’, journal of community and applied social psychology, 9(4), pp. 273-288. kayler, m. and weller, k. (2007) ‘pedagogy, self-assessment and online discussion groups’, educational technology and society, 10(1), pp. 136-147. kember, d., lee, l. and li, n. (2001) ‘cultivating a sense of belonging in part-time students’, international journal of lifelong education, 20(4), pp. 326-341. leathwood, c. and o’connell, p. (2003) ‘‘it’s a struggle’: the construction of the ‘new student’ in higher education’, journal of education policy, 18(6), pp. 597-615. lyons, f. and buckley, c. (2009) ‘the foundation direct way to personal development planning’, in strivens, j. (ed.) personal development planning. lichfield: fdf, pp. 25-39. macdonald, c. and stratta, e. (2001) ‘from access to widening participation: responses to the changing population in higher education in the uk’, journal of further and higher education, 25(2), pp. 249-258. moore, e. (2006) ‘you tell all the stories’: using narrative to explore hierarchy within a community of practice’, journal of sociolinguistics, 10(5), pp. 611-640. morgan, a. and holly, l. (1994) ‘adult change and development: the interactions of learning with people’s lives’, in gibbs, g. (ed.) improving student learning: theory and practice. oxford: the oxford centre for staff development, pp. 127-135. ncihe (1997) higher education in the learning society. london: hmso. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 15 buckley what role can pdp play in identity development and confidence building in non-traditional students? o’donnell, v.l. and tobbell, j. (2007) ‘the transition of adult students to higher education: legitimate peripheral participation in a community of practice?’, adult education quarterly, 57(4), pp. 312-328. qaa (2001) guidelines for he progress files. available at: www.qaa.ac.uk/academicinfrastructure/progressfiles/guidelines/progfile2001.pdf (accessed: 1 april 2008). stets, j.e. and burke, p.j. (2000) ‘identity theory and social identity theory’, social psychology quarterly, 63(3), pp. 224-237. tillema, h. and orland-barak, l. (2006) constructing knowledge in professional conversations: the role of beliefs on knowledge and knowing’, learning and instruction, 16(6), pp. 592-608. tinto, v. (1997) ‘classrooms as communities: exploring the education character of student persistence’, journal of higher education, 68(6), pp. 599-623. zimitat, c. (2007) ‘capturing community of practice knowledge for student learning’, innovations in education and teaching international, 44(3), pp. 321-330. author details carina buckley is the learning skills tutor at southampton solent university. the research for this paper was carried out whilst she was a learning support tutor at the university of portsmouth’s cetl foundation direct. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 16 http://www.qaa.ac.uk/academicinfrastructure/progressfiles/guidelines/progfile2001.pdf what role can pdp play in identity development and confidence building in non-traditional students? abstract introduction becoming a student the professional development unit building a learning community conclusion acknowledgement references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 23 march 2022 ________________________________________________________________________ a systematic approach to designing english for very specific academic purposes materials tailored to a specific course in the main subject of a higher degree joe greenwood abstract this research looks at an area of materials design where little research has previously been conducted: english for very specific academic purposes (evsap). the research looks at related literature in eap, esp and esap, conducts a multi-stakeholder needs analysis, and incorporates the students into the materials design process itself. an analysis of the assignment brief and an interview with the unit lead of the chosen course in digital marketing were conducted, to identify aspects of academic writing and individual teaching activities that were beneficial to the course. the data gained from the interview were then used to create a questionnaire, which was distributed to students for completion. the data from the questionnaire were then processed into units of time; these units were then used to create the material’s structure. discussion of how to construct a framework for evsap materials design is included, as well as the completed framework itself and a rationale for its format. finally, the conclusion discusses the scope and limitation of the model, such as its application in other contexts or with different cohort sizes. keywords: english for very specific academic purposes; materials design; embedded learning development; needs analysis. introduction context there is often little provision for english language input for specific assignments at higher education (he) institutions in the uk. there is arguably a gap in the teaching input, which can leave students without the academic english needed to achieve certain assignment greenwood a systematic approach to designing english for very specific academic purposes materials tailored to a specific course in the main subject of a higher degree journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 2 objectives. this research aims to design a framework, which can be utilised to conduct a multi-stakeholder needs analysis and collect and analyse data to inform learner development (ld) materials design, to provide embedded sessions in a subject course to ensure the students have the english language input they need to complete very specific assignment objectives in he. this aims to be a targeted, specific approach to materials design and has been called english for very specific academic purposes (evsap). the university this research took place in is a he institute based in the north-west of england. it offers ld sessions with the aim of improving students’ academic writing skills and integrating these skills into their assignments. these sessions are available to all students, home and international, from foundation to phd levels. another facet of the ld provision is to deliver bespoke ‘embedded’ sessions into courses across all faculties. these sessions are developed when a faculty unit lead (ul) requests embedded sessions for a cohort of students, targeted to develop students’ skills to succeed in a particular assessment. the ul will usually have highlighted areas for development in a cohort’s academic writing capabilities, which may limit their success in the assessment. this research aims to develop a framework that can be used to design materials for these embedded sessions. background the unit chosen as the site for this research was from an msc in digital marketing. the unit mainly comprises of research methods and is focused on digital marketing strategies. the ul responsible for the design and delivery of the unit requested ten hours of ld sessions, broken into five two-hour sessions. these were delivered on tuesday afternoons for five consecutive weeks. the research took place in june and july 2019, with delivery taking place in october and november 2019. the cohort numbered 32 students and the lessons were delivered to the entire group simultaneously. at the time of conducting the research, the ratio of native to non-native speakers of english in the cohort was not known. the unit’s assignment brief (ab) (see appendix 1) tasks students with writing a nine-page strategic digital marketing communications report for an organisation of their choice. it contains several specific objectives and requires a concise and logical structure. the ul identified that some focused academic writing input would benefit the entire cohort, so requested the embedded ld sessions. greenwood a systematic approach to designing english for very specific academic purposes materials tailored to a specific course in the main subject of a higher degree journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 3 guiding questions 1) how can a multi-stakeholder needs analysis be conducted systematically to ascertain the needs, lacks, wants and preferences of the cohort? 2) how can data gained from the cohort be utilised to inform the content and structure of the embedded sessions? 3) what is the best process to produce a broadly applicable framework for evsap session design? literature review exploration of esp english for specific purposes (esp) provision is often utilised to allow learners to achieve specific language goals, usually within a defined professional field. esp has been defined by the following three characteristics: 1) meeting the specific needs of the learners. 2) making use of the underlying methodology and activities of the field. 3) being centred on language appropriate to these activities in terms of grammar, lexis and register (strevens, 1988, cited dudley-evans and st. john, 1998). esp provision is designed for learners who are learning to communicate in a specific professional field (anderson, 2014), such as engineers, doctors or diplomats. it is important to analyse the main differences in content, delivery and outcome that esp offers, as this will help develop understanding of how evsap might be different to esp. task-based learning (tbl) could be used as an example. in duncker’s candle, learners are given a candle, some drawing pins and a box of matches. they are then tasked with lighting the candle and allowing it to burn without wax dripping onto the floor or table. in an esp course the teacher should carefully consider what language aspects of this task are the most relevant to the class. construction engineers, for example, might consider the verbs, the language to discuss order and sequence or the skill of rebutting a suggestion. when discussing esp courses two aspects of the learner are axiomatic: the purpose and the disciplinary subject (harding, 2007). it is this sense of immediately equipping the esp greenwood a systematic approach to designing english for very specific academic purposes materials tailored to a specific course in the main subject of a higher degree journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 4 learner to deal with these two aspects of their situation that differentiates esp from general english courses, where the subjects focused on might differ from activity to activity. this element of esp, a focus on the subject language, is reflected in the design of the evsap sessions, where the focus is digital marketing. exploration of eap hyland (2018) argues that the role of eap is to familiarise the student with the relevant communicative conventions needed by apprentice members of the target community. however, eap teaching is not always specifically correlated to the curricula, pedagogy or assessments students may encounter at an institution. its role is assumed to be general skills preparation. anthony (1997, p.9) defined eap as ‘the portion of the curriculum which prepares students for gainful involvement in study situations’. in this definition, the phrase ‘study situations’ is key. this implies a focus on the educational aspect, rather than the ‘workplace’ skills esp emphasises. this focus on the educational aspect is also a defining feature of evsap. there have been criticisms of the effectiveness of eap. benesch (2001, p.115) labelled eap a service course to the official academic course, and turner (2004, p.96 cited in anderson, 2014) criticises eap for leading to a ‘short-cut mentality’, with students assuming eap will allow them to succeed in their course of study without considering the investment of time and effort it takes to succeed in the field itself. consequently, carkin (2005) identified a sub-division of eap entitled ‘english for specific academic purposes’ (esap). exploration of esap esap focuses on developing language skills specific to a particular field of study. detailing some of the key aspects of esap, enongene (2013, p.59) states ‘esap emphasises higher order skills, student development, and authentic text and features while working within specific epistemological traditions associated with different disciplines’. one key differentiation from eap in this explanation is the use of authentic text. text that relates to the field of study would not be used in the more general eap. conversely, in esap this aspect of specificity is a determining factor in course design and content (hyland, 2006). greenwood a systematic approach to designing english for very specific academic purposes materials tailored to a specific course in the main subject of a higher degree journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 5 the above provides a definition of esap, but it is important to consider what function it serves in a he context to decide what elements of it are useful for evsap course design. anderson (2014) argues that an esap course should run parallel to the subject course but maintain its own integrity as a course. esap materials must serve the dual purpose of improving students’ english skills, whilst still developing their subject knowledge. this bears similarities to this study’s evsap context: the course will be delivered in tandem to subject delivery. this shows some clear similarities between esap and evsap; however, evsap materials must be more targeted: to improve a student’s ability to complete a specific assignment to a high level. ensuring esap materials meet these criteria will provide learners with exposure to real language and its use in context. for example, a group of nurses presented with material containing an authentic interaction between a nurse and a patient, will gain far more from studying the discourse patterns here than from material not related to nursing. another persuasive factor for using authentic materials in esap is student motivation. guariento and morley (2001) posit that extracting information from authentic texts in the target language can provide motivation: as learners are interested in the area, they will engage more with the material. consequently, using authentic materials to scaffold learning in esap is vital, and this aspect of materials design should be incorporated into evsap. the rationale for evsap as previously stated, the ld team deliver central workshops and short courses sessions, which are voluntary, but wingate (2006) argues central provision can separate study skills from the content of the course and reduce its effectiveness. many researchers (wingate, andon and cogo, 2011; cottrell, 2001) cite the importance of subject lecturers and learning developers collaborating to design ld materials. this embedded approach means the sessions are compulsory to all students from a specific cohort and are targeted to their needs. consequently, the whole cohort is exposed to targeted learning development opportunities (minogue, murphy and salmons, 2018). this research utilises the embedded approach, as the ul is part of the needs analysis. as the sessions this research focuses on are embedded, there are similarities to esp, and the focus being on academic language development bears similarities to eap. the fact that these sessions aim to greenwood a systematic approach to designing english for very specific academic purposes materials tailored to a specific course in the main subject of a higher degree journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 6 develop the students’ skills to succeed in a specific assignment creates the need for an evsap focus. this research aims to develop a framework for the creation of these evsap materials. methodology multi-stakeholder needs analysis a needs analysis examines what the learners already know and what they are required to know (macalister and nation, 2011). to inform the design of the materials, a multistakeholder needs analysis was undertaken. the stakeholders were the ul and the students. several steps were taken, and the order these are completed in was critical, as the results of each stage provided content and focus for the next: 1) analysis of the assignment brief. this ascertained the assignment objectives, which allowed the evsap materials contents to be decided on. this was done first to inform the questions and areas of discussion for stage two. 2) interview with the ul. the ul was a key stakeholder, as they knew the skills the students needed to develop. the information collected in this stage was used to break the core material contents down into individual teaching activities. 3) questionnaire distributed to students. in this context the questionnaire was distributed to the previous year’s cohort, who had undertaken the same assignment. analysis of assignment brief units of progression, or units of analysis, are recommended for curriculum design (crookes and long, 1993; coxhead, 2000). the embedded sessions will be delivered in five, two-hour slots with multiple topics covered, so breaking the contents into units is a logical step. the first stage of deciding on these units was to analyse the assignment brief (ab). the learning outcomes, the instructions, and elements such as a sample assignment structure were looked at to decide on the materials’ content. due to the brevity of this article, a full analysis of the ab is not included. however, an example of the approach taken to an extract of the ab (figure 1) is below. figure 1. excerpt from the assignment brief. greenwood a systematic approach to designing english for very specific academic purposes materials tailored to a specific course in the main subject of a higher degree journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 7 an important element of an academic assignment is structure. figure 1 illustrates that two clear sections are required. reports are often highly structured and read (2019) recommends utilising headings and numbered sections to ensure clarity. with two distinct sections, and multiple aspects in each, using clear headings and numbers will be essential. in summary, the analysis of the assignment brief allowed the aspects of academic writing needed to be identified. these were then used in the following tick-box activity and interview with the ul, to ascertain how to break the aspects down into individual teaching activities. interview with unit lead the aim of the interview was to ascertain the aspects of academic writing the ul thought the students needed to develop, and to begin to break down aspects of academic writing into individual teaching activities. firstly, a tick-box was created. some core aspects of academic writing were put into the grid. these core aspects were decided by analysis of the assignment brief, and the researcher’s own teaching experience. each aspect was in a row, and the row had selection options. selecting zero meant that the ul did not think the students needed any development in that aspect of academic writing and selecting five meant they needed extensive development. the ul was then informed that they had ten ‘points’ to allocate across the whole table, with a tick in the ‘0’ column using zero points, and a tick in the ‘5’ column using five points. the ul was then asked to complete the tickbox activity. the results are below in figure 2. figure 2. tick-box activity completed by ul. greenwood a systematic approach to designing english for very specific academic purposes materials tailored to a specific course in the main subject of a higher degree journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 8 0 1 2 3 4 5 assignment structure ✓ using evidence ✓ writing critically ✓ using appropriate register ✓ grammar e.g. tenses, syntax ✓ punctuation ✓ the purpose of the tick-box activity was to use the ul’s opinions to inform decisions on how much teaching time to allocate to each aspect of academic writing. the results of the tick-box activity were cross-referenced against the results of question one of the questionnaire for a final decision to be made on how much time to allocate to each aspect of writing. the aims of the interview were to go through the tick-box activity, and ask questions about each of the core aspects, to try to identify how these could be broken down into individual teaching activities. an example breakdown of one of the core aspects is shown below. the ul was asked what development they thought the students needed on writing critically. they replied: the first aspect is actually criticality in terms of being able to select the right type of evidence for the recommendations you are making. secondly, when you’re writing a report, you have to be strategically critical of the information you provide to the client. based on this answer, two teaching activities were chosen to be placed in the questionnaire: identify techniques used to be critical, and practise critically analysing an greenwood a systematic approach to designing english for very specific academic purposes materials tailored to a specific course in the main subject of a higher degree journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 9 organisation. these were chosen based on the researcher’s previous teaching experience. this method of discussion with the ul was used to choose all the individual teaching activities to place within the questionnaire. questionnaire design and distribution following the analysis of the ab and the interview with the ul, a questionnaire was distributed to ascertain students’ perceptions of the assignment and the aspects of writing they found challenging. a quantitative questionnaire was chosen to increase response rate, as dornyei and taguchi (2010) advise against aiming to gather qualitative data with a questionnaire, claiming open ended questions innately involve a superficial and relatively brief engagement with the topic. using a close-ended questionnaire decreased the completion time, therefore eliciting a higher response rate. an ‘other (please specify below)’ was included in questions two to eight (figure 4 and 8). this allowed respondents to include qualitative data to allow them to express views they could not otherwise include in closed questions. the entire questionnaire can be seen in appendix 3. a simple questionnaire, taking five to ten minutes to complete was chosen, to maximise the number of responses. the questionnaire was completed in a tutorial with the ul present, who was available to explain any language or elements in the questionnaire the respondents were unsure of. a likert scale was chosen as the response option, as it allows each response to carry equal likelihood of being selected (skehan,1989). an image of the constructed likert scale is below in figure 3. the first question aimed to ascertain how challenging respondents found each of the core aspects of academic writing identified previously. figure 3. questionnaire q1 showing likert scale format. greenwood a systematic approach to designing english for very specific academic purposes materials tailored to a specific course in the main subject of a higher degree journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 10 each of the subsequent questions took one aspect, for example ‘writing critically’, and aimed to find out how helpful respondents would have found the selection of activities designed to develop their ability to complete that aspect of academic writing in the report to a high standard. these teaching activities came from analysis of the assignment brief and interview with the ul. an image of the example likert scale question on writing critically is below in figure 4. the same format was applied to questions two to eight. figure 4. questionnaire q5 showing likert scale format. greenwood a systematic approach to designing english for very specific academic purposes materials tailored to a specific course in the main subject of a higher degree journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 11 results of the questionnaire to code the data, numerical values had to be applied to each response option. in this research, these values were assigned to the responses prior to distribution, and the value hidden from respondents. they are labelled ‘rank value’. as all questions have the same number of response options, the same values were assigned for each question. for q1, ‘not challenging at all’ received a value of ‘1’ and ‘extremely challenging’ a value of ‘4’. for q2 to q8 ‘not at all helpful’ received a value of ‘1’ and ‘extremely helpful’ received a value of ‘4’. see figures 5 and 6 below. figure 5. rank value of response options. greenwood a systematic approach to designing english for very specific academic purposes materials tailored to a specific course in the main subject of a higher degree journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 12 figure 6. rank value of response options. when statistically analysing the results of the questionnaire, the mean rank was the crucial element to consider, because the mean rank (mr) would indicate how challenging or helpful respondents would have found each option. for example, if all the respondents selected ‘extremely challenging’ for q1.1 (figure 5 above) the mr would be 4. as there were 15 respondents to the questionnaire, if 10 selected ‘extremely challenging’ and 5 selected ‘very challenging’, the mr would be 3.666. this data was vital because this would allow clear conclusions to be drawn regarding what aspects of the assignment the respondents found challenging, and what input activities they would have found helpful. a high mr for q1.1 means that the respondents found that aspect of the assignment challenging. for analysis purposes, statistical values have been assigned to the likert scale responses as indicated in figures 7 and 8 below. the standard deviation was also considered; however, due to a lack of variance in the standard deviation, this was not included in this write up. the statistical values assigned are indicated in red. figure 7. statistical values assigned to answer options for q1. 2 1 3 4 greenwood a systematic approach to designing english for very specific academic purposes materials tailored to a specific course in the main subject of a higher degree journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 13 figure 8. statistical values assigned to answer options for q2. analysing the data the questionnaire was distributed to twenty-eight students in total. 15 completed the questionnaire, which represented a 53.5% response rate. figure 9 below shows each question, which is broken down into question categories. the column on the right-hand side shows the mr for all question categories. figure 9. responses to q1 showing mean rank of responses. 1) consider the following aspects of academic writing, and select how challenging you found each aspect of academic writing. question category mean rank 1.1) assignment structure 2.33 1.2) using evidence 2.6 1.3) using critical thinking and analysis of a business report 2.73 1.4) writing critically 2.6 1.5) using appropriate register 1.73 1.6) grammar 1.87 1.7) punctuation 1.33 4 3 1 2 greenwood a systematic approach to designing english for very specific academic purposes materials tailored to a specific course in the main subject of a higher degree journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 14 as can be seen from figure 9, ‘using critical thinking and analysis of a business report’ (1.3) had the highest mr. this means respondents found this aspect of the assignment the most challenging. 1.3 is followed closely by ‘using evidence’ and ‘writing critically’. then there is a slight drop to ‘assignment structure’. beneath these aspects of academic writing, there is a steep drop-off to ‘using appropriate register’ and ‘grammar’, with ‘punctuation’ having the lowest mr. the mean rank results are illustrated in a pie chart in figure 10 below as a percentage of the total mean rank value selected by respondents. figure 10. percentage of the total mean rank each aspect earned. the mean rank for each aspect of writing will be calculated against the total time on the course. as it is a ten-hour course, the amount of teaching time, that will be dedicated to each aspect of academic writing is illustrated in the bar chart below (figure 11). the percentages are rounded to the nearest 0.25 hour as this was considered a workable unit of time in the lesson. figure 11. bar chart showing percentage of mean rank in minutes of total time. 15% 17% 18%17% 12% 12% 9% q1) % of the total mean rank each aspect earned. assignment structure using evidence using critical thinking and analysis with a business report writing critically using appropriate register grammar punctuation greenwood a systematic approach to designing english for very specific academic purposes materials tailored to a specific course in the main subject of a higher degree journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 15 q2-8) data presentation the same process used for q1 was used to code q2-8. the pie chart for q2 is shown below in figure 12, and q3-8 are in appendix 4 as they follow the same procedure. as no respondents made use of the ‘other-please specify below’ option, there is no qualitative data to analyse, so this answer option can be ignored. this leaves four teaching activities for each aspect of academic writing. the bar charts and each pie chart show the amount of time that will be spent on each teaching activity. any teaching activities that came out with less than fifteen minutes were discarded, as they were not considered useful enough teaching activities by the respondents. q2) reflecting on your response to question one, how helpful would you have found the below teaching activities on assignment structure? figure 12. pie chart and bar chart showing coding of mean rank to minutes. 0 0.25 0.5 0.75 1 1.25 1.5 1.75 2 assignment structure using evidence using critical thinking and analysis with a business report writing critically using appropriate register grammar punctuation hours hours greenwood a systematic approach to designing english for very specific academic purposes materials tailored to a specific course in the main subject of a higher degree journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 16 summary of the analysis the table in appendix 5 summarises how long will be spent on each teaching activity, based on results. as can be seen in appendix 5, there is a 0.75 hour disparity between the 10-hour course total, and the 9.25-hour total of the activities. this is due to the activity times being rounded to the nearest 0.25 hours. therefore, an 8-to 10-minute plenary will be built into the end of each of the five sessions. the slight time cushion will also assist with absorbing any activities which run slightly over time. discussion collecting quantitative data from the students, on what teaching activities they would have found helpful to complete the assignment, was a valuable activity. it allowed the data to be processed as numerical values. these numerical values could then be converted into units of time, which were used to build the embedded sessions. based on the data collected, a plan for the sessions was developed, and can be seen in appendix 6. as can be seen from the course plan in appendix 6, there are a small number of activities from appendix 5 omitted, as they can be covered in combination with other activities. for example, the two proofreading activities specified within ‘register’ and ‘grammar’ in the questionnaire have been combined. 21% 21% 30% 28% q2) % of total mean rank re-ordering paragraphs from a completed report writing paragraphs using a set structure report writing practise writing introductions and conclusions 0 15 30 45 60 re-ordering paragraphs from a completed report writing paragraphs using a set structure report writing practise writing introductions and conclusions minutes on each teaching activity minutes greenwood a systematic approach to designing english for very specific academic purposes materials tailored to a specific course in the main subject of a higher degree journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 17 framework design figure 13 shows the first two steps taken in evsap materials design, both of which involve an intrinsic choice by the materials designer. for the purposes of this framework, an intrinsic choice is defined as any decision that can be made solely by the researcher applying the framework and requires no third-party participation. literature can be consulted, but the decision must be made solely by the materials designer. in the framework, these tasks will be presented inside figure 13. figure 13. decisions made by the materials designer. the stages represented in figure 14 are extrinsic tasks which need to be completed by the materials designer in collaboration with key stakeholders, such as the students or ul. in the framework, these tasks will be presented inside figure 14. figure 14. extrinsic action to be completed by the materials designer. figure 15 shows the complete framework for evsap materials design. due to the systematic nature of the framework, where steps are applied in sequence, a flow chart format has been chosen. this format allows the practitioner applying the framework to follow the steps. figure 15. framework for evsap materials design. • analyse assignment brief • analyse relevant literature • semi-structured interview • tick-box activity • questionnaire to distribute to students greenwood a systematic approach to designing english for very specific academic purposes materials tailored to a specific course in the main subject of a higher degree journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 18 greenwood a systematic approach to designing english for very specific academic purposes materials tailored to a specific course in the main subject of a higher degree journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 19 conclusions evaluation of findings in evaluating the findings of this research, one element of evsap materials design stands out as being arguably the most crucial: needs analysis. almost certainly, this is linked to the specificity of the goals for evsap materials, as evsap materials are designed to help students perform well in a specific objective. as the objectives are so specific, the needs analysis of evsap materials design should be extremely detailed, to best develop the skills the individual students need to achieve their common goals. this research collected data from two key stakeholders: the ul and the students. the order the data was collected in was vital. this data led to the creation of an informed data collection instrument, the questionnaire. the questionnaire content drew on the researcher’s own experience, analysis of the assignment brief and an interview with a key stakeholder, the ul. when the questionnaire data was analysed, a clear picture of the students’ needs was produced. this level of detail in the data collection and the order in which it was completed, was crucial to complete a needs analysis that matched the specificity of evsap materials design. the importance placed on the order of the data collection also informed the design of the framework. a flowchart was chosen, to help highlight the need for tasks to be completed sequentially. scope and limitations as the framework was designed with the intention of being applicable to other materials design contexts, it is necessary to evaluate any limitations the framework may have. there are a wide variety of contexts in which the framework can be used. to apply the framework, and design evsap materials, the following conditions need to be present: • an assignment brief, to ascertain goals and objectives. • a member of staff, such as an academic who teaches the cohort, or the ul, to collect data and make broad preliminary decisions about needs and course content. • a relevant student cohort. this could be a cohort who have previously sat the assessment, or the cohort who will sit the assessment. this is to identify detailed needs, which are necessary to inform course content and teaching activities. greenwood a systematic approach to designing english for very specific academic purposes materials tailored to a specific course in the main subject of a higher degree journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 20 if the above conditions are present, the framework can be applied. other variables, such as student numbers and assignment format may alter the way the framework is applied, but they should not fundamentally affect its effectiveness. for example, larger student numbers would simply mean there would be more data to analyse. if multiple uls are involved with the project, it might also be necessary to conduct an interview with all of them to gain a more reliable picture of the assessment. if the assignment contains spoken elements, such as a presentation, then the core aspects contained in the questionnaire and the teaching activities would change, but the framework could still be applied. the framework is designed to allow a practitioner to follow a set process and achieve data that will allow them to design materials suitable for an evsap context. this research focused on a post-graduate programme. this could have been a factor as to why the ‘simpler’ aspects of academic writing, such as utilising punctuation correctly and varying sentence structures, scored low levels of importance with the students. however, if the chosen subject course was a level three foundation course, then the framework would still be applicable. analysis of the assignment brief and the interview with the ul might lead to different questionnaire contents, but ultimately the students can still self-select the aspects they identify needing development in. the framework arguably has limitations. if the embedded sessions had limited length, it would be hard to justify the time spent on the data collection and analysis. these embedded sessions totalled ten hours, but a recommended minimum length could be six hours, to justify the time spent on data collection and analysis. the framework could still be partially applied; perhaps analysis of the assignment brief and an interview with the ul would give sufficient detail to construct a course which would be beneficial to the cohort. recommendations for further research ultimately, further research needs to be done to evaluate the framework. long (1984) distinguishes between process/product evaluations. a process evaluation can focus on the process of learning and teaching, and a product evaluation looks at the product or result of learning and teaching. in this context, a product evaluation focusing on the results of the assignment may not be suitable, as there are variables such as the subject content which would mean it would be hard to judge the impact of the embedded sessions. a process greenwood a systematic approach to designing english for very specific academic purposes materials tailored to a specific course in the main subject of a higher degree journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 21 evaluation focusing on the students’ response to the learning and teaching would be suitable, as data on what aspects of the sessions they found valuable could be gained. this kind of evaluation will be undertaken in a future application of the framework. due to the covid-19 pandemic and the shift to remote learning, the framework was not applied in the academic year 2020-21. the next step in the research will be to apply the framework to other courses in the academic year 2021-22. the long-term goal would be to request other academics at universities around the world to apply the framework in relevant contexts. once these results are analysed, the impact of the framework could be assessed, and necessary developments made. then, a strategy for a wider application, both nationally and internationally could be created. references anderson, r. (2014) ‘a parallel approach to esap teaching’, procedia social and behavioral sciences, (136) pp.194-202. anthony, l. (1997) ‘english for specific purposes: what does it mean?’, on-cue, 5(3), pp.9-10. benesch, s. (2001) critical english for academic purposes: theory, politics, and practice. mahwah: new jersey. carkin, s. (2005) english for academic purposes. mahwah: new jersey. cottrell, s. (2001) teaching study skills and supporting learning. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan. coxhead, a. (2000) ‘a new academic word list’, tesol quarterly, 34, pp.213-238. crookes, g. and long, s. (1993) tasks in a pedagogical context: integrating theory and practice. clevedon: multilingual matters. greenwood a systematic approach to designing english for very specific academic purposes materials tailored to a specific course in the main subject of a higher degree journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 22 dornyei, z. and taguchi, t. (2010) questionnaires in second language research: construction, administration, and processing. 2nd edn. new york: routledge. dudley-evans, t. and st. john, m. (1998) developments in english for specific purposes: a multi-disciplinary approach. cambridge: cambridge university press. enongene, e. e. (2013) ‘english as a foreign language at the university of yaounde 1: attitudes and pedagogic practices’, english language teaching, 6(3), pp.103-114. gillham, b. (2008) developing a questionnaire. 2nd edn. london: continuum. guariento, w. and morley, j. (2001) ‘text and task authenticity in the efl classroom’, elt journal, 55(4), pp.347-353. harding, k. (2007) english for specific purposes. oxford: oxford university press. hyland, k. (2006) english for academic purposes: an advanced resource book. new york: routledge. hyland, k. (2018) ‘sympathy for the devil? a defence of eap’, language teaching, 51(3), pp.383-399. long, m. h. (1984) ‘process and product in esl program evaluation’, tesol quarterly, 18(3), pp.409-425. macalister, j. and nation, i. s. p. (2011) language curriculum design. new york: routledge. minogue, l., murphy, c. and salmons, k. (2018) ‘embedding learning development; a model for collaborative practice’, journal of learning development in higher education, issue 13, april, pp.1-11. https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.v0i13.443. read, s. h. (2019) academic writing skills for international students. london: red globe press. https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.v0i13.443 greenwood a systematic approach to designing english for very specific academic purposes materials tailored to a specific course in the main subject of a higher degree journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 23 skehan, p. (1989) individual differences in second-language learning. london: edward arnold. strevens, p. (1988) ‘esp after twenty years: a re-appraisal’, esp: state of the art (13) turner, j. (2004) ‘language as academic purpose’, journal of english for academic purposes, 3(2), pp.95-109. wingate, u. (2006) ‘doing away with “study skills”’, teaching in higher education, 11(4), pp.457-469. https://doi.org/10.1080/13562510600874268. wingate, u., andon, n. and cogo, a. (2011) ‘embedding academic writing instruction into subject teaching: a case study’, active learning in higher education, 12(1), pp.6981. https://doi.org/10.1177/1469787410387814. author details joe greenwood currently works in the learner development team at manchester metropolitan university, where his main responsibility is designing and delivering short courses designed to develop students’ academic writing skills. after several years teaching english as a foreign language in various countries, joe returned to the uk and began working in he in 2019. holder of an ma tesol and applied linguistics and a pg dip tesol, joe is currently working towards his phd by published works. his research centres around needs analyses, their creation and application. appendices 1. extract from assignment brief. unit title: mmc route ‘strategy for integrated communications’ & ft man met route ‘strategy for digital’ unit code: 5u7z0003 core: y level: 7 https://doi.org/10.1080/13562510600874268 https://doi.org/10.1177/1469787410387814 greenwood a systematic approach to designing english for very specific academic purposes materials tailored to a specific course in the main subject of a higher degree journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 24 assignment title: mmc route strategy for integrated communications & ft man met route strategy for digital assignment unit leader: jeff mccarthy contact details: 0161 247 6751 jeff.mccarthy@mmu.ac.uk room 6.31 submission date: ft mmu route: 11.01.19 mmc learning route: 17.06.19 feedback return date: 08.02.19 feedback return date: 15.07.19 submission instructions: electronic upload for mmc & man met ft feedback return information: sent to student electronically assignment task: see brief for details unit learning outcomes assessed. 1. create an integrated digital communications strategy for an organisation 2. review current marketplace and digital communications capabilities of the organisation 3. set a vision and goals for how the organisation communicates digitally early career/ world class professional skills (plos) being assessed or developed/assessed. assessed: • plo 1: our postgraduates will apply critical thinking to the analysis of situations, draw appropriate conclusions and make recommendations for action. • plo 2: our postgraduates will be effective communicators developed: • plo 3: our postgraduates will apply a critical and reflective awareness of sustainability and ethical issues. [discussed in workshops and lectures, e.g. gdpr, critical success factors) 2. tick-box activity used with unit lead. mailto:jeff.mccarthy@mmu.ac.uk greenwood a systematic approach to designing english for very specific academic purposes materials tailored to a specific course in the main subject of a higher degree journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 25 greenwood a systematic approach to designing english for very specific academic purposes materials tailored to a specific course in the main subject of a higher degree journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 26 3. questionnaire distributed to students. greenwood a systematic approach to designing english for very specific academic purposes materials tailored to a specific course in the main subject of a higher degree journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 27 greenwood a systematic approach to designing english for very specific academic purposes materials tailored to a specific course in the main subject of a higher degree journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 28 greenwood a systematic approach to designing english for very specific academic purposes materials tailored to a specific course in the main subject of a higher degree journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 29 greenwood a systematic approach to designing english for very specific academic purposes materials tailored to a specific course in the main subject of a higher degree journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 30 greenwood a systematic approach to designing english for very specific academic purposes materials tailored to a specific course in the main subject of a higher degree journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 31 4. pie charts showing student responses and activity time. q3) reflecting on your response to question one, how helpful would you have found the below teaching activities on using evidence? q4) reflecting on your response to question one, how helpful would you have found the below teaching activities on using critical thinking and analysis with a business report? q5) reflecting on your response to question one, how helpful would you have found the below teaching activities on writing critically? 19% 22% 30% 29% q3) % of total mean rank when and how to directly quote or paraphrase when and how to summarise evidence when and how to synthesise evidence how to extract useful evidence from a text 0 15 30 45 60 when and how to directly quote or paraphrase when and how to summarise evidence when and how to synthesise evidence how to extract useful evidence from a text minutes on each teaching activity minutes 25% 26%26% 23% q4) % of total mean rank practise analysing communication challenges for an organisation techniques to identify new communications techniques for an organisation practise creating critical success factors for an organisation's marketing communications supporting an argument with appropriate academic or industry evidence 0 15 30 45 60 practise analysing communication challenges for an… techniques to identify new communication… practise creating critical success factors for an… supporting an argument with appropriate… minutes on each teaching activity minutes greenwood a systematic approach to designing english for very specific academic purposes materials tailored to a specific course in the main subject of a higher degree journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 32 q6) reflecting on your response to question one, how helpful would you have found the below teaching activities on using appropriate register? q7) reflecting on your response to question one, how helpful would you have found the below teaching activities on grammar? 19% 22% 30% 29% q5) % of total mean rank looking at models of criticality identifying techniques used to be critical identifying the language used to be critical practise critically analysing an organisation 0 15 30 45 60 looking at models of criticality identifying techniques used to be critical identifying the language used to be critical practise critically analysing an organisation minutes on each teaching activity minutes 19% 26% 28% 27% q6) % of total mean rank techniques to avoid using the first person 'i' and the third person 'we' expanding suitable academic expression practising effective descriptive writing to analyse a case study practise proofreading work to identify and fix issues with register 0 15 30 45 60 techniques to avoid using the first person 'i' and the… expanding suitable academic expression practising effective descriptive writing to analyse a case… practise proofreading work to identify and fix… minutes on each teaching activity minutes greenwood a systematic approach to designing english for very specific academic purposes materials tailored to a specific course in the main subject of a higher degree journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 33 q8) reflecting on your response to question one, how helpful would you have found the below teaching activities on punctuation? 5. breakdown of activity timings. activity time (minutes) 23% 28%21% 28% q7) % of total mean rank looking at issues with syntax (word order) and how to avoid these working on accurate and consistent tense usage in reports practise constructing different sentence types practise proofreading 0 15 30 45 60 looking at issues with syntax (word order) and how to… working on accurate and consistent tense usage in reports practise constructing different sentence types practise proofreading minutes on each teaching activity minutes 22% 26%26% 26% q8) % of total mean rank apostrophe usage activities practise using commas correctly report specific punctuation e.g. bullet points reviewing other forms of punctuation e.g. hyphens, elipsis etc. 0 15 30 45 60 apostrophe usage activities practise using commas correctly report specific punctuation e.g. bullet points reviewing other forms of punctuation e.g.… minutes on each teaching activity minutes greenwood a systematic approach to designing english for very specific academic purposes materials tailored to a specific course in the main subject of a higher degree journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 34 assignment structure re-ordering paragraphs from a completed report. 15 writing paragraphs using a set structure. 15 report writing practise. 30 writing introductions and conclusions. 30 total time: 90 using evidence when and how to directly quote or paraphrase. 15 when and how to summarise evidence. 15 when and how to synthesise evidence. 30 how to extract useful evidence from a text. 30 total time: 90 using critical thinking and analysis with a business report practise analysing communication challenges for an organisation. 30 techniques to identify new communication techniques for an organisation. 30 practise creating critical success factors for an organisation's marketing communications. 30 supporting an argument with appropriate academic or industry evidence 15 total time: 105 writing critically looking at models of criticality. 15 identifying techniques used to be critical. 30 identifying the language used to be critical. 30 practise critically analysing an organisation. 30 total time: 105 using appropriate register techniques to avoid using the first person 'i' and the third person 'we'. 15 expanding suitable academic expression. 15 greenwood a systematic approach to designing english for very specific academic purposes materials tailored to a specific course in the main subject of a higher degree journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 35 practising effective descriptive writing to analyse a case study. 15 practise proofreading work to identify and fix issues with register. 15 total time: 60 grammar looking at issues with syntax (word order) and how to avoid these. 15 working on accurate and consistent tense usage in reports. 15 practise constructing different sentence types. 15 practise proofreading. 15 total time: 60 punctuation apostrophe usage activities. 0 practise using commas correctly. 15 report specific punctuation e.g. bullet points. 15 reviewing other forms of punctuation e.g. hyphens, ellipsis etc. 15 total time: 45 total time of whole course in minutes/hours 555 minutes/9.25 hours 6. possible course structure. activity time (minutes) lesson 1: report structure, introductions and conclusions. analysing your question. 20 writing introductions. 15 writing paragraphs using a set structure. 30 re-ordering paragraphs from a completed report. 30 writing conclusions. 15 closing and recap. 10 greenwood a systematic approach to designing english for very specific academic purposes materials tailored to a specific course in the main subject of a higher degree journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 36 total time: 120 lesson 2: using evidence. how to extract useful evidence from a text. 30 when and how to summarise evidence. 15 when and how to directly quote or paraphrase. 15 when and how to synthesise evidence. 30 supporting an argument with appropriate academic or industry evidence. 20 closing and recap. 10 total time: 120 lesson 3: critical analysis of business report and looking at case studies. phrases for identifying new communication techniques for an organisation. 30 practise analysing communication challenges for an organisation. 30 practise creating critical success factors for an organisation's marketing communications. 30 working on accurate and consistent tense usage in reports. 20 closing and recap. 10 total time: 120 lesson 4: writing critically. looking at models of criticality. 20 identifying techniques used to be critical. 30 identifying the language used to be critical. 30 practise critically analysing an organisation. 30 closing and recap. 10 total time: 120 lesson 5: writing concisely, proofreading and punctuation. looking at issues with syntax (word order) and how to avoid these. 15 practise constructing different sentence types. 15 report specific punctuation e.g. bullet points. 15 reviewing other forms of punctuation e.g. hyphens, ellipsis etc. 15 greenwood a systematic approach to designing english for very specific academic purposes materials tailored to a specific course in the main subject of a higher degree journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 37 techniques to avoid using the first person 'i' and the third person 'we'. 15 expanding suitable academic expression. 15 practising effective descriptive writing to analyse a case study. 15 practise proofreading work to identify and fix issues with register. 15 total time: 120 total time of whole course in minutes/hours 555 minutes/9.25 hours a systematic approach to designing english for very specific academic purposes materials tailored to a specific course in the main subject of a higher degree abstract introduction context background guiding questions literature review exploration of esp exploration of eap exploration of esap the rationale for evsap methodology multi-stakeholder needs analysis analysis of assignment brief interview with unit lead questionnaire design and distribution results of the questionnaire analysing the data q2-8) data presentation q2) reflecting on your response to question one, how helpful would you have found the below teaching activities on assignment structure? summary of the analysis discussion framework design conclusions evaluation of findings scope and limitations recommendations for further research references author details appendices 1. extract from assignment brief. 2. tick-box activity used with unit lead. 4. pie charts showing student responses and activity time. 5. breakdown of activity timings. 6. possible course structure. journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 26: special edi issue february 2023 ________________________________________________________________________ ©2023 the author(s) (cc-by 4.0) let’s get visible: evidence-based interventions aimed at supporting, empowering and celebrating student-parents in higher education andrea todd university of chester, uk abstract this paper analyses the findings of a two-stage small-scale research project investigating the needs of undergraduate students with dependent children (‘student-parents’) studying in a post-1992 university. the findings of stage 1 of the study, using data from semistructured interviews with student-parents, show that student-parents need two things from their institution: a sense of belonging and flexibility. in stage 2, a questionnaire survey was used to explore the impact of two interventions piloted during the 2021-22 academic year to address the stage 1 findings. the paper then presents the next steps in this project: cocreation, with students, of systems designed not only to make visible our student-parent community but also to support, empower and celebrate their identities as student-parents. keywords: student-parents; mature students; student mothers; widening participation; access and participation. introduction although the population of students with dependent children is increasing in postsecondary institutions (briegel et al., 2021), they are ‘relatively invisible in the policy and physical spaces of universities’ (moreau and kerner, 2015, p.4). the widening participation and lifelong learning agendas of successive governments over the past two decades have encouraged higher education applications from non-traditional student groups such as student-parents, but ‘the lack of concern’ for this cohort ‘has remained a constant’, with them being ‘ignored or only briefly mentioned in central government reports and speeches’ todd let’s get visible: evidence-based interventions aimed at supporting, empowering and celebrating student-parents in higher education journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 2 (moreau, 2014, p.2). policies at governmental and institutional level are aimed at encouraging entry into university, but little attention is afforded to retention and progression once there (marandet and wainwright, 2009; moreau, 2014). comparatively few measures have been introduced at institutional level to help student-parents deal with challenges they may experience during their journey through university (mcgivney, 2003), which is a significant oversight given that this journey is geared to the needs of students without caring responsibilities (burke, 2006). student-parents are invisible at national and institutional level. the higher education statistics agency does not require institutions to collate data on the family circumstances of their students (moreau and kerner, 2015), and generally institutions do not take it upon themselves to gather this data. like ghosts, student-parents slip into the university system and can remain unidentified and unsupported throughout their whole university journey, their ‘unique needs unmet’ (briegel et al., 2021, p.1). this invisibility can lead to studentparents slipping out of higher education as silently as they slipped in, but the lack of consistent data collection on student-parents means that it is not possible to see how many either enter or drop out of higher education (moreau, 2014). as far back as 2002, calls were made to better understand the experiences and needs of non-traditional students (reay et al., 2002), and this was followed by a flurry of studies exploring student-parents’ experiences and making recommendations for change (e.g. mcgivney, 2003; moss, 2004; waller, 2006; alsop et al., 2008; nus, 2009; marandet and wainwright, 2009; marandet and wainwright, 2010; wainwright and marandet, 2010; moreau and kerner, 2012; hinton-smith, 2012; stone and o’shea, 2013). in moreau’s 2014 stimulus paper for the leadership foundation, institutional recommendations were again made to address the needs of student-parents who were still expected to fit into the mould of a ‘traditional’ student (moreau, 2014), which for the purposes of this article refers to the ‘default construction of the university student as carefree’ (moreau and kerner, 2015, p.215). whilst further research since 2014 has explored the experiences of studentparents (e.g. brooks, 2015; moreau and kerner, 2015; o’shea, 2015; sallee, 2015; mallman and lee, 2016; parr, 2017; dickson and tennant, 2018; stone and o’shea, 2019; scharp et al., 2020; webber and dismore, 2020; briegel et al., 2021), there is no evidence in the literature or elsewhere of moreau’s recommendations having been heeded todd let’s get visible: evidence-based interventions aimed at supporting, empowering and celebrating student-parents in higher education journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 3 in any deliberate or organised way. several recent studies have focused on the impact of covid-19 on student-parents (arowoshola, 2020; lin et al., 2021; savage, 2021; bogossian, 2021; nikiforidou and holmes, 2022) and underline the need to support this cohort of students at the institutional level. the aims of this research project were to understand what student-parents need from their institution to help them succeed, to devise evidence-based methods of meeting these needs at the departmental level, and to gauge student-parents’ responses to these interventions with a view to taking them forward in conjunction with student-parents themselves. the discussion that follows explores the findings of this two-stage research project and aims to fill a gap in our understanding of what departments, faculties and institutions can do to make our student-parent population visible, supported and empowered. stage 1: what student-parents need from their university methods for stage 1 of the research project, following receipt of ethical approval, i conducted semistructured interviews with six student-parents during june and july of 2021. this sample is self-selecting, as these individuals responded to an email call to all law school students (circa 300) to participate in the study. the research project was conducted within the law school, as this is the department within which i teach. i had received anecdotal reports from student-parents within the cohort about their struggles during the initial covid-19 lockdown period in 2020 and was keen to explore these experiences further with a view to understanding how best to support this demographic at departmental and institutional level. all six participants in stage 1 of the study are female, and table 1 provides their details by pseudonym. todd let’s get visible: evidence-based interventions aimed at supporting, empowering and celebrating student-parents in higher education journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 4 table 1. profile of students interviewed during stage 1. annie beth eleanor helen lucy sarah age 36 31 38 41 36 23 number of children 1 1 1 2 1 1 age of child(ren) 5 5 6 10, 14 7 3 mode of study full time full time part time full time full time full time lone or coparent co-parent co-parent co-parent co-parent co-parent co-parent level of study 6 6 5 5 4 5 also working? no yes yes yes yes no this action research study (arnold and norton, 2018) employed an inductive approach, helping the researcher to understand what is happening in practice (saunders et al., 2012) and involving the collection of data and the subsequent emergence of theory and meaning (stokes and wall, 2014). all six interviews were conducted via video call on microsoft teams to enable student-parents to more easily participate in the research project given their commitments at home. open questions were used to encourage participants to think deeply about their responses and to enable them to provide rich biographical descriptions. the focus of the questions discussed in the current paper was to gather views on the needs of student-parents and how these could be met by the department and/or institution. the questions used to prompt discussion during the interviews were as follows: 1. what support do you feel student-parents need from their university and/or their department to succeed in their studies? 2. how and when do you find time for your university work? 3. what are the biggest challenges of being a parent studying at university? 4. what were the biggest challenges of the covid-19 year (defined broadly as from spring 2020 until summer 2021)? 5. what were the benefits (if any) to studying online during the covid-19 year? todd let’s get visible: evidence-based interventions aimed at supporting, empowering and celebrating student-parents in higher education journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 5 using the flow model expounded by miles and huberman (1994), interview transcripts were thematically coded manually, given the manageable size of the data set, to identify patterns both within and across interviews (braun and clarke, 2006). it is accepted that one limitation of this study is its small scale: it can be challenging to engage with an ‘invisible’ cohort and given there is no provision at institutional level to gather data on student-parents, it is not possible to know what percentage of the law school’s cohort these participants represent. however, whilst the sample size is small, there are themes emerging which chime with some of those apparent in the literature explored above, and given this similarity, it is submitted that the findings, and subsequent interventions, can assist departments and institutions in their consideration of how best to support their student-parent population. results and discussion the findings from stage 1 demonstrate the foundational elements that the student-parents interviewed feel must be present to enable them to succeed at university. this is illustrated by figure 1. despite the participants in stage 1 of the study caring for children of differing ages, and one of the six participants studying part-time rather than full-time, the commonality in the themes raised by the participants was striking. figure 1. foundations enabling student-parent success at university. todd let’s get visible: evidence-based interventions aimed at supporting, empowering and celebrating student-parents in higher education journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 6 flexibility it is widely recognised in the literature that a major struggle student-parents (studentmothers in particular) must contend with is finding both the time and the space to dedicate to their studies (see, for example, moss, 2004; gouthro, 2006; stone and o’shea, 2013; webber and dismore, 2020). a 2015 nuffield report published by the university of warwick (lyonette et al., 2015) found, unsurprisingly, that student mothers need greater flexibility than non-parents, and, as thomas et al. (2021) note, this is more difficult to achieve in a physical environment than a digital one. the dual role of student and parent often requires ‘skilful planning and juggling’ (moreau, 2014, p.4), and this is certainly borne out by participants’ comments in this study. all participants made reference to the challenges and frustrations of finding time to devote to their studies and the need to be ‘regimented’ (helen) in their planning of both their studies and family life. participants identified the importance of temporal flexibility around assessment deadlines for when circumstances outside of their control, but linked to their children, arise: if your child’s ill you might need an extension, so having those flexible deadlines [can be] really helpful. (annie) having tutors […] that you can just message and just say at any time ‘look, i'm really struggling’ or ‘sorry my child’s poorly, i just need a little bit of time’ (beth) three students reported being loathe to use the institutional extensions policy and only doing so in extraordinary circumstances: i had not used [the extension system] but in third year with covid, it was such a lifesaver because it meant that i didn't feel like everything was […] out of control. (annie) [my child] was ill, and then i was just shattered, and i didn't want to get an extension, but i thought ‘i'm going to have to’. (sarah) helen described attempts to balance home and student life as a ‘juggling game’, explaining that she fits in studying ‘round the kids […] in the evening, the weekends, todd let’s get visible: evidence-based interventions aimed at supporting, empowering and celebrating student-parents in higher education journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 7 wherever it needs to be’, whilst beth and annie expanded on how they found time to devote to their studies when the university was open for in-person sessions pre-pandemic: while [my daughter]'s been in school and at the after school club that gave me between nine and half four […] to sort of juggle things to get things done […] but i'd try and do a lot of this stuff as well after she'd gone to bed. (beth) i would use the time between lectures and seminars and go to the library and do work there, and then i would often do it when [my son] had gone to bed. (annie) four of the five participants reported that the ability to watch pre-recorded lectures online during lockdown was of significant tangible benefit, enabling them to use their scarce time more wisely. annie reported that she would ‘sort of binge them’, and lucy explained the benefits of being able to work at a time to suit her: ‘it can be done at 8:00pm if that's the only time i can do it’. beth extolled the benefit of not having to be in a particular place: ‘it allowed more time to focus on what i actually needed to do rather than having to travel all the way there and then get ready and then sit down […] and then have to come home’. this study reveals that student-parents appreciate being able to manage the time and place of their own learning activities. this should not be confused with wanting to access everything online; indeed, participants stated how important they felt it was to be able to come onto campus for seminars, as it enabled them to use the library between taught sessions and to socialise with peers which they were unable to do in the evenings due to childcare. in other words, student-parents wanted to make the best use possible of their time. belonging support and understanding all participants noted that they felt student-parents needed to feel supported and/or understood to succeed at university, both in respect of the need for staff to appreciate the challenges of student-parenthood, and to demonstrate empathy with their circumstances. sarah provided an example of her interaction with her personal tutor the previous year: i was crying my eyes out on the first day of dropping her off at nursery. my [personal tutor] is dave and i remember telling dave ‘oh i’m so sad’, and he's not the most emotional, and he was like ‘ah, she’ll be ok’. (sarah) todd let’s get visible: evidence-based interventions aimed at supporting, empowering and celebrating student-parents in higher education journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 8 helen’s response was reminiscent of the invisibility narrative around student-parents: just support. just, you know, a conversation. simple conversation really. i feel, being mature, we just take a back burner because we’ve been there, you know, we’ve lived life, but i just feel that we just need a bit of a push in the right direction. (helen) lucy and annie both referenced the emotional toll being a student-parent can take, and how a sensitive approach from staff can temper this: i think just having that understanding or support, so if [my child] wasn't well and i couldn't come in […] i don't feel like i'd be frowned upon or looked down on. […] you're not worrying as much because you've got that support. (lucy) just, i suppose, more emotional support really. [my module tutor was] a huge support system for me, and i'm not quite sure i’d have made it through third year without [them]. (annie) several qualitative studies indicate a high proportion of student-parents considering leaving university (moreau and kerner, 2012), and comments such as those made by annie reflect the importance of having support ‘on the ground’ from understanding staff when times are tough. small interventions have the capacity to make a huge impact, potentially changing the course of a student-parent’s path and assisting with retention and progression. reassurance and connection participants recounted a sense of disconnection with the traditional student cohort within the law school, eloquently expressed by lucy: having a child and being older, you look at everything differently anyway, and you speak to people who definitely don't, and you’ve got a different outlook of how it should be, i think. (lucy) there were also reports of a rupture in lines of communication with fellow ‘traditional’ students: todd let’s get visible: evidence-based interventions aimed at supporting, empowering and celebrating student-parents in higher education journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 9 a lot of my [university] friends don't have kids. […] there’s group chats and stuff […] but it's not [relevant to me]. (sarah) i’d speak to the other people, but there was only one of them that was another parent as well […] so it was a bit more difficult. (beth) in their 2010 study, reay et al. (2010, pp.117-118) identified how ‘self-doubt and anxiety around learning was gendered. it was women more than men who felt that they did not really deserve to be in higher education’. two participants in this study referred directly to experiencing imposter syndrome, with annie expressing this as meaning ‘feeling that you don’t belong, feeling that you can’t do it all’. eleanor elaborated on this feeling, but provided some hope, explaining: [in] first year i felt like: ‘what am i doing here? i've made a huge mistake’. but after […] i met a few friends and spoke to other people, it helped because i needed to see familiar faces for that reassurance and recognition. to think ‘yeah, you can do this’. (eleanor) this chimes with the findings in savage’s (2021) study of eight student-mothers in one australian university, in which participants reported that making a connection with other student-parents created a sense of belonging and an environment whereby they could ‘vent frustrations, ask questions or get support’ (savage, 2021, p.12). two participants in this study independently suggested a support group for studentparents. interestingly, both were somewhat reticent to put forward the idea and implied that it may be embarrassing in some way: if there was like, not a club because that sounds a bit cliché, but maybe something like a parent platform that like-minded people can maybe, i don't know, just thrash around a few ideas or even to talk about problems that they've come across. (eleanor) maybe some sort of a society or group, but then i think it could be a bit cheesy. (sarah) these findings make clear that if student-parents feel connected, reassured and understood, their sense of belonging will increase, and if provided with flexibility, they will better manage the line between being a parent and being a student. institutions can play a todd let’s get visible: evidence-based interventions aimed at supporting, empowering and celebrating student-parents in higher education journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 10 role in enabling this sense of belonging by making sure their student-parent population is visible not only to staff but also to fellow students in similar circumstances. the interventions set out in the next section were designed to address these findings. outcome of stage 1: two evidence-based interventions before considering the interventions themselves, it is necessary to underline one recurring theme that appeared in every interview during stage 1 of the research study: studentparents are driven to succeed by their children. this is unsurprising, as this phenomenon has been widely documented across the decades (see, for example, reay et al, 2002; leathwood and o’connell, 2003; marandet and wainwright, 2010). however, the usefulness of this finding is that it provides a ‘hook’ to ensure that the potential for studentparents seeing any interventions as ‘cheesy’ (sarah) or a ‘cliché’ (eleanor) is minimised, and thus that take-up of interventions is maximised. we can capitalise on our studentparents’ motivations: their children. intervention 1: the personal tutor project the personal tutor project involved allocating student-parents to a dedicated personal tutor at the beginning of their level 4 studies. in the absence of any obligation for institutions to gather information on this cohort, this pilot entailed allocating incoming students who were aged 25 or over to a personal tutor group headed up by the author of this paper. this was not an exact science, but of the six students allocated to this group, five were indeed student-parents. induction activities for the student-parent tutor group in september 2021 varied slightly from the induction that was rolled out to the remainder of the tutor groups. the first personal tutor meeting for the student-parents group involved the personal tutor introducing herself and her children. this was followed by an invitation for the student parents to introduce themselves and their children, to discuss their childcare arrangements and to share how they planned to deal with balancing study and home life (and, in some circumstances, work) during the coming year. the personal tutor also explained that the department would, wherever possible, be understanding of students’ parental roles, and todd let’s get visible: evidence-based interventions aimed at supporting, empowering and celebrating student-parents in higher education journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 11 details were provided about how seminar groups could be swapped to facilitate fewer days travelling to campus. in a later session during the first week, the personal tutor explained in detail the rules relating to extensions and deferrals, so they were made aware of the flexibility available to them at this early stage (which is arguably too early for traditional students). personal tutor catch-up chats during autumn and spring were also used to discuss childcare and how best to balance assessment deadlines with parental responsibilities. intervention 2: student-parents support group a student-parents support group was set up for law school students as a direct result of contributions from participants in stage 1 of the study. i created a microsoft teams site and added the four students who had taken part in stage 1 of the study and who were still students within the department. the group was named student parents and carers enhanced support (spaces), an acronym decided upon by the members of the support group themselves, which speaks to the headspace that many student parents feel they do not often have. within its first few days, spaces posts included: • students with very young children sharing their feelings of guilt at using a nursery setting, with fellow students (with school-age children) providing validation of these feelings but noting the sacrifice was worthwhile. • discussions around not knowing where to start, with secondand third-year students spurring on and congratulating their first-year colleagues for starting their university journey. in early october, i placed calls via the department’s main teams site for new members of spaces. eight further student-parents identified themselves and joined the group. correspondence on the site during october concentrated on introducing each other (the author included) to our children by way of sharing photographs, with discussion comparing children’s ages, temperaments, and childcare arrangements. the benefit of the teams group is that it does not take too much time or effort to be involved and to give support to fellow members, given the ability, on the go (via phone), to ‘like’ (with a thumbs-up reaction) or ‘love’ (with a heart reaction) the posts that are made on the site. i initiated todd let’s get visible: evidence-based interventions aimed at supporting, empowering and celebrating student-parents in higher education journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 12 posts at october half term, christmas, february half term, world book day and mothers’ day in march, and in may when the main assessment period was approaching. often these posts concentrated on congratulating the student-parents for their achievements thus far in the year and prompted discussion of holiday childcare, as well as the sharing of photographs (for example, of our children dressed up on world book day). during july, the site was used to share an early draft of the overall timetable for the coming year, with a message (coinciding with many schools requesting parents to make wrap-around childcare choices for next year by the end of july) reminding students that they would be able to swap seminar groups once the institutional timetable was available from 1 september. the spaces group is designed to be a positive platform for celebration, enabling studentparents to take pride in their achievements, to openly celebrate their children in a supportive environment, and to feel supported and understood by their department and their fellow student-parents. the site has also proven to be a useful and efficient forum for answering student-parents’ practical queries. for example, on one occasion a first-year student posted a query relating to the childcare grant, and within ten minutes a third-year student had responded with practical advice. stage 2: feedback on interventions and next steps methods for stage 2 of the project, following ethical approval, an anonymous survey questionnaire was distributed via the microsoft teams student-parent support group that was set up to respond to the findings of stage 1 of the study. the aim of this survey was to gather student feedback on the interventions put in place following stage 1 of the study, and to seek their views on how support for student-parents could be developed further. of the twelve students participating in the support group, five individuals completed the survey. of these, four were female and one male. as the survey was anonymous (to encourage frank feedback), it is not possible to identify whether those responding to the stage 2 survey also participated in stage 1 of the study. all participants responding to the survey have been allocated a pseudonym for identification purposes: amelia, ceri, dinah and erin for the respondents identifying as female, and brendan for the male respondent. the survey asked a series of dichotomous questions around the respondents’ perceptions of todd let’s get visible: evidence-based interventions aimed at supporting, empowering and celebrating student-parents in higher education journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 13 the spaces group and the importance, and function, of the personal tutor role in supporting student-parents. it also provided space for students to elaborate on their responses via free text, thus allowing the collection of both quantitative and qualitative data. all survey data was manually analysed, calculating the frequency of each dichotomous question selected and thematically coding the responses to open questions. results and discussion feedback and next steps: spaces 100% of respondents agreed that it had been helpful to be a part of spaces. echoing thomas et al.’s (2021) findings that online support groups were important in ‘reinforcing role identity as both student and parent’ (thomas et al., 2021, p.8), participants underlined the sense of shared experience that spaces brought them: it's been lovely to have other student parents to talk to, to share experiences and the stresses of completing a degree. (amelia) just seeing that other people also have the same struggles. (brendan) knowing that i am not alone gives me hope. (ceri) you definitely feel like you are not the only person going through the journey. (erin) participants all noted the supportive nature of spaces, with support coming primarily from fellow students within the group rather than the tutor moderator. amelia thought the best thing about spaces was ‘making new friends and having a laugh’, whilst brendan and ceri both valued the sense of feeling supported, with ‘the support offered by other students’ (brendan) and ‘always receiving support through busy exam periods’ (ceri) being identified as their ‘best bits’. dinah reflected that it had been ‘a nice space to get to know other students who have family and children relying on them whilst studying too’, whilst brendan shared that he ‘speak[s] on a regular basis, daily, with members of the group’. todd let’s get visible: evidence-based interventions aimed at supporting, empowering and celebrating student-parents in higher education journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 14 these results show that spaces has enabled student-parents to feel supported and understood, providing them with a sense of reassurance and connection. the group has thus provided them with a sense of belonging, which was identified above as one of the two foundations enabling student-parent success. when asked how they saw spaces developing in 2022-23, all five respondents mentioned meeting up in person, with three (amelia, erin, brendan) mentioning meeting for coffee/a meal without children, and two suggesting children’s involvement: go out for […] events in [town] for example [the theatre] with the kids all together to create that social bond with the other students, which may be great throughout the year as it’d be a great support. (ceri) maybe a start of year or end of year meet up, children […] welcome too. (dinah) however, part of the beauty of spaces is that it allows student-parents to access support in an uncomplicated way, at a time and in a space that is most convenient to them, as ceri notes: the group is always accessible, through teams someone will always respond [to] the question asked. as [my] parenting schedule is very busy, it’s great to have online access, as face to face meetings may be difficult for some. (ceri) when taking forward these suggestions into the coming year, it will be vital therefore to retain the easy-access online group as the main focus of support, with in person events and meetings being an optional extra. a further area for development identified by participants is the provision of mentoring and aspiration building activities. erin suggested ‘a student parent mentor […] specifically for parents, by parents’, whilst brendan highlighted the potential for ‘postgraduate success stories, […] talks from mature or parent postgraduates that we can get inspiration from’. these will also be taken forward into next year, with the remit and frequency of these activities, as well as the format and frequency of in-person events, being devised by spaces members themselves. todd let’s get visible: evidence-based interventions aimed at supporting, empowering and celebrating student-parents in higher education journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 15 feedback and next steps: personal tutor allocation some of the members of spaces had been allocated to the level 4 ‘student-parent’ personal tutor group when they arrived at the university in 2021-22, but some members were from previous years’ random allocations. as such, it was not possible to garner feedback directly on the 2021-22 personal tutor pilot within stage 2 of the project. however, participants were asked for their views on how personal tutoring fits with student-parent needs, and these findings will shape the future of the personal tutor project. 100% of participants felt it is important for universities to know that their students are parents, and 100% of participants also agreed that it would be useful for this information to be provided to the university prior to their studies commencing. all participants linked their responses to tutors’ ability to better support and understand their students, with dinah noting ‘i think it’s crucial that this kind of information is shared so that [personal tutors] can support accordingly and relate more to the student’, and erin explaining that ‘it would allow [the personal tutor] to better understand the individual’s needs’. to take the personal tutor project forward, therefore, in the absence of any institutional requirement for students to self-identify as student-parents, incoming students will be asked in departmental pre-induction communications to identify themselves so that they can be added, if they wish, to the student-parent personal tutor group and to spaces. some individuals may choose not to self-identify, but the findings of this study demonstrate that it is important to give students the option to do so. the responses to two final questions will further help mould the personal tutor project for the coming year. firstly, participants were asked what they would include if they were writing the job description of a personal tutor. all underlined the importance of support and understanding for student-parents (expressed succinctly by dinah as ‘someone who understands the journey we are on’), and two specifically mentioned child illness or emergency as being at the forefront of their minds. secondly, when asked what universities can do, or do better, to accommodate their student-parents, the theme of temporal and spatial flexibility (identified during stage 1 of the study) came up again. amelia and dinah’s comments reflect the feelings of the cohort: todd let’s get visible: evidence-based interventions aimed at supporting, empowering and celebrating student-parents in higher education journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 16 there were weeks this year where i would drive 30 mins for 3 seminars on 3 different days, 2 around school run time so needing to utilise childcare but also not getting any funding for childcare. personally, if i had 3 seminars on one day it’s financially beneficial even if paying childcare. […] making it clearer that you can switch seminars […] where needed. (dinah) give special deadlines for assignments and exams. this has been very challenging for me. (amelia) the ideal would be for institutional central services teams to exercise discretion with regards to extensions and deferrals when the reason relates to the student’s child(ren), and to provide tailored timetables for student-parent needs. however, changing processes at institutional level takes time, and where immediate action is needed, it is more realistic to make changes at the departmental level. as such, the suggestions made by participants in this study will inform a toolkit for the coming academic year to assist personal tutors in their support of student-parents, to include sharing with personal tutees during induction (and reinduction) the detailed rules relating to requesting a change to seminar sets and regarding extensions and deferrals. savage (2021) recommends giving extensions to student-parents automatically. however, this could prove dangerous. when students roll over their assessment deadlines without the benefit of a discussion with a member of staff who has a holistic view of the student’s individual circumstances and the assessment landscape for the entire year, they could find themselves with a bunching of assessments at the end of the year. this may simply cause further stress at a later point and may make it difficult to then succeed in assessment. it is suggested that a better approach is to ensure that a detailed discussion is held and that an informed decision is made in conjunction with the personal tutor. conclusion it is ‘beholden’ (scott et al. 1996, p.252) on higher education institutions to explore ways to ameliorate the difficulties encountered by widening participation students such as studentparents. it is our duty to do more to enable them to stay and to succeed within our institutions, and, as such, further investigation into the value of ‘multiple levels of intervention’ for student-parents is warranted (briegel et al., 2021, p.4). the evidencebased interventions outlined in this paper have made a difference to the experiences of the todd let’s get visible: evidence-based interventions aimed at supporting, empowering and celebrating student-parents in higher education journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 17 participants in this small-scale study by increasing their visibility, and thus feelings of support and belonging, within the cohort of student-parents itself and amongst law school colleagues. there is more to do in educating colleagues in the needs of student-parents to enable consistent support between colleagues and to facilitate the provision of personal tutor support by members of staff other than the author, but this marks the start of one department’s commitment to their student-parent cohort. most studies on student-parents’ experiences concentrate on a small number of students or a single institution. we need more data to be able to make a national change. as moreau (2014, p.13) pointed out almost a decade ago, ‘a first step would be for hesa to require that universities collect data on students’ family circumstances’ to ‘allow the quantification of student parents’ presence in higher education’. no changes have yet been made at the national level, so for the moment the burden is upon departments, faculties and institutions to gather this data for themselves to inform their support of their student-parent cohort. by taking a deliberate and affirmative approach to studentparenthood, we can make this mighty cohort not only visible but supported, understood, empowered and celebrated. references alsop, a., gonzalez-arnal, s. and kilkey, m. (2008). ‘the widening participation agenda: the marginal place of care’, gender and education, 20(6), pp.623–637. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/09540250802215235 (accessed: 20 january 2023). arnold, l. and norton, l. (2018) action research: practice guide. available at: https://www.advance-he.ac.uk/knowledge-hub/action-research-practice-guide (accessed: 20 january 2023). arowoshola, l. (2020). ‘medical education engagement during the covid-19 era a student parents perspective’, medical education online, 25(1), 1788799. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/10872981.2020.1788799 (accessed: 23 january 2023) https://doi.org/10.1080/09540250802215235 https://www.advance-he.ac.uk/knowledge-hub/action-research-practice-guide https://doi.org/10.1080/10872981.2020.1788799 todd let’s get visible: evidence-based interventions aimed at supporting, empowering and celebrating student-parents in higher education journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 18 bogossian, t. (2021) ‘“i can’t get the practical hours”: care, course choice and role conflict among student-mothers in higher education in scotland’, revista de sociología de la educación-rase, 14 (2), pp.157-170. available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.7203/rase.14.2.16896 (accessed: 20 january 2023). braun, v. and clarke, v. (2006) ‘using thematic analysis in psychology’, qualitative research in psychology, 3(2), pp.77-101. available at: https://doi.org/10.1191/1478088706qp063oa (accessed: 20 january 2023). briegel, m., jakubec, s., shippey-heilman, a., bruce, p. (2021) ‘supporting the well-being of student who are parents’, academia letters, article 3300. available at: https://doi.org/10.20935/al3300 (accessed: 20 january 2023). brooks, r. (2015) ‘social and spatial disparities in emotional responses to education: feelings of ‘guilt’ among student-parents.’ british educational research journal, 41 (3), pp.505–519. available at: https://doi.org/10.1002/berj.3154 (accessed: 20 january 2023). burke, p.j. (2006) ‘men accessing education: gendered aspirations’, british educational research journal, 32(5), pp.719–733. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/01411920600895759 (accessed: 20 january 2023). dickson, m. and tennant, l. (2018) ‘“the accommodation i make is turning a blind eye”: faculty support for student mothers in higher education’, studies in continuing education 40 (1): pp.76–97. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/0158037x.2017.1392296 (accessed: 20 january 2023). gouthro, p.a. (2006) ‘a critical feminist analysis of the homeplace as learning site: expanding the discourse of lifelong learning to consider adult women learners’, international journal of lifelong education, 24(1), pp.5-19. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/026037042000317310 (accessed: 20 january 2023). hinton-smith, t. (2012) lone parents’ experiences as higher education students. niace. http://dx.doi.org/10.7203/rase.14.2.16896 https://doi.org/10.1191/1478088706qp063oa https://doi.org/10.20935/al3300 https://doi.org/10.1002/berj.3154 https://doi.org/10.1080/01411920600895759 https://doi.org/10.1080/0158037x.2017.1392296 https://doi.org/10.1080/026037042000317310 todd let’s get visible: evidence-based interventions aimed at supporting, empowering and celebrating student-parents in higher education journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 19 leathwood, c. and o’connell, p. (2003) ‘“it’s a struggle”: the construction of the “new student” in higher education’, journal of education policy, 18(6): pp.597–615. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/0268093032000145863 (accessed: 23 january 2023). lin, h.c., zeanah, p.l., olivier, d.f., bergeron, m.m., lui, c.h. (2021) ‘responding to the pressing yet unrecognized needs of student-parents amid the covid-19 pandemic’, journal of american college health, 70(8), pp.2276-2280. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/07448481.2020.1870474 (accessed: 20 january 2023). lyonette, c., atfield, g., behl, h., gambin, l. (2015) tracking student mothers’ higher education participation and early career outcomes over time: initial choices and aspirations, he experiences and career destinations. final report. institute for employment research, university of warwick, coventry. available at: https://www.nuffieldfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/tracking-studentmothers%e2%80%99-higher-education-participation-and-early-career-outcomesover-time-initial-choices-and-aspirations-he-experiences-and-careerdestinations.pdf (accessed: 23 january 2023). mallman, m. and lee, h. (2016) ‘stigmatised learners: mature age students negotiating university culture’, british journal of sociology, 37(5), pp.684–701. https://doi.org/10.1080/01425692.2014.973017 (accessed: 20 january 2023). marandet, e. and wainwright, e. (2009) ‘discourses of integration and exclusion: equal opportunities for university students with dependent children?’ space and polity, 13(2), pp.109–126. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/13562570902999775 (accessed: 20 january 2023). marandet, e. and wainwright, e. (2010). ‘invisible experiences: understanding the choices and needs of university students with dependent children’, british educational research journal, 36(5), pp.787-805. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/01411920903165595 (accessed: 20 january 2023). https://doi.org/10.1080/0268093032000145863 https://doi.org/10.1080/07448481.2020.1870474 https://www.nuffieldfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/tracking-student-mothers%e2%80%99-higher-education-participation-and-early-career-outcomes-over-time-initial-choices-and-aspirations-he-experiences-and-career-destinations.pdf https://www.nuffieldfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/tracking-student-mothers%e2%80%99-higher-education-participation-and-early-career-outcomes-over-time-initial-choices-and-aspirations-he-experiences-and-career-destinations.pdf https://www.nuffieldfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/tracking-student-mothers%e2%80%99-higher-education-participation-and-early-career-outcomes-over-time-initial-choices-and-aspirations-he-experiences-and-career-destinations.pdf https://www.nuffieldfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/tracking-student-mothers%e2%80%99-higher-education-participation-and-early-career-outcomes-over-time-initial-choices-and-aspirations-he-experiences-and-career-destinations.pdf https://doi.org/10.1080/01425692.2014.973017 https://doi.org/10.1080/13562570902999775 https://doi.org/10.1080/01411920903165595 todd let’s get visible: evidence-based interventions aimed at supporting, empowering and celebrating student-parents in higher education journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 20 mcgivney, v. (2003) staying or leaving the course. leicester: niace. miles, m.b. and huberman, a. m. (1994) qualitative data analysis: an expanded sourcebook. thousand oaks, ca: sage. moreau, m.p. (2014) ‘towards the family-friendly university? research evidence on student parents and implications for higher education policies’, stimulus paper series, leadership foundation for higher education. available at: https://s3.euwest-2.amazonaws.com/assets.creode.advancehe-documentmanager/documents/lfhe/asset_images_docs/research_resources/research/stimulu s_papers/2014/moreau_family_friendly_university.pdf_1572865902.pdf (accessed: 20 january 2023). moreau, m.p. and kerner, c. (2012) supporting student parents in higher education: a policy perspective. available at: https://www.nuffieldfoundation.org/sites/default/files/files/moreau%20student%20pa rent%20report%20-%20full%20report%20october%202012.pdf (accessed: 20 january 2023). moreau, m.p. and kerner, c. (2015) ‘care in academia: an exploration of student parents’ experiences’, british journal of sociology of education, 36(2), pp.215-233, available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/01425692.2013.814533 (accessed: 20 january 2023). moss, d. (2004) ‘creating space for learning: conceptualizing women and higher education through space and time’, gender and education, 16(3), pp.283–302. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/09540250042000251452 (accessed: 20 january 2023). nikiforidou, z. and holmes, s. (2022) ‘student parents or parent students in lockdown pandemic? a third space approach’, journal of family issues, vol. 0(0) 1–16 https://doi.org/10.1177/0192513x211067524 (accessed: 20 january 2023). https://s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/assets.creode.advancehe-document-manager/documents/lfhe/asset_images_docs/research_resources/research/stimulus_papers/2014/moreau_family_friendly_university.pdf_1572865902.pdf https://s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/assets.creode.advancehe-document-manager/documents/lfhe/asset_images_docs/research_resources/research/stimulus_papers/2014/moreau_family_friendly_university.pdf_1572865902.pdf https://s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/assets.creode.advancehe-document-manager/documents/lfhe/asset_images_docs/research_resources/research/stimulus_papers/2014/moreau_family_friendly_university.pdf_1572865902.pdf https://s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/assets.creode.advancehe-document-manager/documents/lfhe/asset_images_docs/research_resources/research/stimulus_papers/2014/moreau_family_friendly_university.pdf_1572865902.pdf https://www.nuffieldfoundation.org/sites/default/files/files/moreau%20student%20parent%20report%20-%20full%20report%20october%202012.pdf https://www.nuffieldfoundation.org/sites/default/files/files/moreau%20student%20parent%20report%20-%20full%20report%20october%202012.pdf https://doi.org/10.1080/01425692.2013.814533 https://doi.org/10.1080/09540250042000251452 https://doi.org/10.1177/0192513x211067524 todd let’s get visible: evidence-based interventions aimed at supporting, empowering and celebrating student-parents in higher education journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 21 nus (2009) meet the parents: the experience of students with children in further and higher education. available at: https://www.nusconnect.org.uk/resources/meet-theparents-the-experience-of-students-with-children-in-further-and-higher-education2009 (accessed: 20 january 2023). o’shea, s. (2015) ‘“i generally say i am a mum first...but i’m studying at uni”: the narratives of first-in-family, female caregivers transitioning into an australian university’, journal of diversity in higher education, 8(4), 243–257. available at: https://doi.org/10.1037/a0038996 (accessed: 20 january 2023). parr, j. (2017) identity and education: the links for mature women students. aldershot: ashgate publishing. reay, d., ball, s. and david, m. (2002) ‘it’s taking me a long time but i’ll get there in the end: mature students on access courses and higher education choice’, british educational research journal, 28(1), pp.5–19. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/01411920120109711 (accessed: 20 january 2023). reay, d., crozier, g. and clayton, j. (2010). ‘“fitting in” or “standing out”: working-class students in uk higher education’, british educational research journal, 36(1), pp.107–124. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/01411920902878925 (accessed: 20 january 2023). sallee, m.w. (2015) ‘adding academics to the work/family puzzle: graduate student parents in higher education and student affairs’, journal of student affairs research and practice, 52(4), pp. 401-413. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/19496591.2015.1083438 (accessed: 20 january 2023). saunders, k., lewis, p. and thornhill, a. (2012) research methods for business students. essex: pearson. savage, s. (2021) ‘the experience of mothers as university students and pre-service teachers during covid-19: recommendations for ongoing support’, studies in https://www.nusconnect.org.uk/resources/meet-the-parents-the-experience-of-students-with-children-in-further-and-higher-education-2009 https://www.nusconnect.org.uk/resources/meet-the-parents-the-experience-of-students-with-children-in-further-and-higher-education-2009 https://www.nusconnect.org.uk/resources/meet-the-parents-the-experience-of-students-with-children-in-further-and-higher-education-2009 https://doi.org/10.1037/a0038996 https://doi.org/10.1080/01411920120109711 https://doi.org/10.1080/01411920902878925 https://doi.org/10.1080/19496591.2015.1083438 todd let’s get visible: evidence-based interventions aimed at supporting, empowering and celebrating student-parents in higher education journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 22 continuing education. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/0158037x.2021.1994938 (accessed: 20 january 2023). scharp, k.m., cooper, r.a., worwood, j.v. and dorrance hall, e. (2020) “there’s always going to be uncertainty”: exploring undergraduate student parents’ sources of uncertainty and related management practices. communication research, 48(7), pp.1059–1084. available at: https://doi.org/10.1177/0093650220903872 (accessed: 20 january 2023). scott, c., burns, a. and cooney, g. (1996) ‘reasons for discontinuing study: the case of mature age female students with children’, higher education, 31(2), pp.233-253. available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/bf02390446 (accessed: 20 january 2023). stokes, p. and wall, t. (2014) research methods. basingstoke, uk: palgrave macmillan. stone, c. and o’shea, s. (2013) ‘time, money, leisure and guilt: the gendered challenges of higher education for mature-age students’, australian journal of adult learning, 53(1), pp.95–116. available at: https://ro.uow.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1193&context=sspapers (accessed: 20 january 2023). stone, c.m.m. and o’shea, s.e. (2019) ‘my children… think it’s cool that mum is a uni student: women with caring responsibilities studying online’, australasian journal of educational technology, 35(6), pp.97–110. available at: https://doi.org/10.14742/ajet.5504 (accessed: 20 january 2023). thomas, l., talbot, c.v. and briggs, p. (2021) ‘the digital lives of student mothers: a consideration of technologies that support or erode the student/parent boundary’, international journal of human-computer studies, 154, article 102689. available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijhcs.2021.102689 (accessed: 20 january 2023). https://doi.org/10.1080/0158037x.2021.1994938 https://doi.org/10.1177/0093650220903872 https://doi.org/10.1007/bf02390446 https://ro.uow.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1193&context=sspapers https://doi.org/10.14742/ajet.5504 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijhcs.2021.102689 todd let’s get visible: evidence-based interventions aimed at supporting, empowering and celebrating student-parents in higher education journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 23 wainwright, e. and marandet, e. (2010) ‘parents in higher education: impacts of university learning on the self and the family’, educational review, 62(4), pp.449-465. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/00131911.2010.487643 (accessed: 20 january 2023). waller, r. (2006) ‘“i don’t feel like ‘a student’, i feel like ‘me’!”: the over‐simplification of mature learners’ experience(s)’, research in post-compulsory education, 11(1), pp.115–130. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/13596740500508019 (accessed: 20 january 2023). webber, l. and dismore, h. (2020) ‘mothers and higher education: balancing time, study and space’, journal of further and higher education, 45(6), pp.803–817. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/0309877x.2020.1820458 (accessed: 20 january 2023). author details andrea (andy) todd is a senior fellow of the hea and associate professor of active citizenship at the university of chester law school. since writing this article, andy has produced an eight-step toolkit to assist institutions in identifying, supporting and celebrating student-parents. the toolkit is available on the website of the united kingdom advising and tutoring association: https://www.ukat.ac.uk/media/1886/supporting-studentparents-toolkit-andy-todd-jan-2023.pdf. licence ©2023 the author(s). this is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (cc-by 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. see http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. journal of learning development in higher education (jldhe) is a peer-reviewed open access journal published by the association for learning development in higher education (aldinhe). https://doi.org/10.1080/00131911.2010.487643 https://doi.org/10.1080/13596740500508019 https://doi.org/10.1080/0309877x.2020.1820458 https://www.ukat.ac.uk/media/1886/supporting-student-parents-toolkit-andy-todd-jan-2023.pdf https://www.ukat.ac.uk/media/1886/supporting-student-parents-toolkit-andy-todd-jan-2023.pdf journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special issue 22: compendium of innovative practice october 2021 ________________________________________________________________________ pivoting pgt dissertation provision for online learning: our response, reflections, and recommendations elina koristashevskaya university of glasgow, uk stuart j. purcell university of glasgow, uk keywords: student engagement; dissertation writing; cognitive load; q&a sessions; covid-19. the challenge as for many colleagues across academic institutions, the disruption wrought by covid-19 presented us with a range of challenges when designing our teaching provision for the 2019-20 summer semester (ali, 2020; crawford et al., 2020). our summer postgraduate taught (pgt) dissertation development and writing classes are optional and open to all pgt students in arts and social sciences disciplines, typically drawing a cohort of c.200 students per session. historically these classes have been delivered in a didactic lecture format, with hour-long, face-to-face sessions taking place on campus throughout may, june, and july. with the university closing to staff and students at the end of march in response to the pandemic, we were posed with three key challenges in pivoting this provision for online learning. firstly, our conversion of the didactic, hour-long lectures to an online format had to account for the distinct pedagogical requirements of online teaching (choe et al., 2019) in terms of both content selection and delivery. we wanted to maintain an equal level of student engagement while striking a balance between the synchronous and asynchronous delivery of the classes, as well as ensuring that our new lesson plan accounted for general attention decline (wilson and korn 2007; young, robinson and alberts, 2009) and the increased pressures of multimedia learning (choe et al., 2019). secondly, to cater for the size of student cohort our classes routinely draw, our new online delivery model also had koristashevskaya and purcell pivoting pgt dissertation provision for online learning: our response, reflections, and recommendations journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 2 to be effective at scale without sacrificing the essential elements that have made the classes so successful and popular among pgt dissertation students in the past. and thirdly, we wanted to create additional opportunities for students to engage with the content following each class, as it became clear that the online delivery format required a different approach to the brief, open q&a which previously concluded our in-person classes. the response in response to the key challenges identified above, we developed a new, three-phase delivery model for our classes: a lecture, a practical exercise, and a q&a session. each discrete phase was designed to last approximately 30 minutes, with the entire online session taking 1 hour and 30 minutes, replacing the hour-long, in-person lecture format (figure 1). figure 1. class structure slide inserted at the start of each session. this approach aimed to reduce the cognitive load of online delivery by streamlining each phase of the session to fulfil distinct roles of the learning process, allowing us to design ‘learning tasks’ that correspond to different ‘cognitive’ activities (leppink, 2017, p.387). while the lecture component encompassed the key content we wanted to communicate to the students, the practical exercise and q&a components represented the kind of koristashevskaya and purcell pivoting pgt dissertation provision for online learning: our response, reflections, and recommendations journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 3 cognitive ‘rehearsal’ activities that help ensure the retention of key content in longer-term memory (atkinson and shiffrin, 1968). the exercises focused on the key stage of the dissertation covered in the lecture, such as formulating a research question (figure 2) or interrogating an abstract (figure 3). to avoid any ‘extraneous cognitive load (ecl)’ that did not contribute to this learning activity (leppink, 2017, p.386), the effective learning advisers (elas) delivering the class turned off their cameras and microphones during the exercise phase, leaving the instructions on screen and allowing students to work independently on the tasks. figure 2. practical exercise for session 1.1: understanding your research topic and formalising your research question. figure 3. practical exercise for session 2.1: critical research as a process. koristashevskaya and purcell pivoting pgt dissertation provision for online learning: our response, reflections, and recommendations journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 4 in addition to providing rehearsal activities to aid knowledge retention, the exercises also functioned as ‘guiding questions’ (traver, 1998) that ‘help students review learning content, check their comprehension, [and] stimulate critical thinking’ (thai, de wever and valcke, 2017, p.116). in the final phase of the session, students used zoom’s chat function to submit questions arising from both the lecture and practical exercise, which were answered live by the elas in dialogue with the students. students engaging with the classes asynchronously via the recorded lecture components and practical exercises posted on moodle could also benefit from the q&a component by posting their questions in our weekly q&a forum for elas to answer. in both cases, the format allowed for students to receive feedback either immediately or shortly after attempting the questions, which has been reported as ‘critical’ to achieving ‘higher learning performance’ (thai, de wever and valcke, 2017, p.116). these q&a sessions have perhaps best demonstrated the success of the model, exceeding our expectations on all accounts. the volume and range of questions from students consistently reflected both their attentiveness in class and their understanding of the material, while the practical exercise encouraged students to put their learning into practice and reflect on the lecture content, thus allowing them to make the most of the q&a component. koristashevskaya and purcell pivoting pgt dissertation provision for online learning: our response, reflections, and recommendations journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 5 recommendations the feedback gathered from pgt dissertation students following our online pivot was overwhelmingly positive, with 95% of the 116 respondents stating that the classes were ‘useful’ or ‘very useful’. this encouraging result confirmed that our approach to online delivery had not reduced the quality of our provision, which was further evidenced by the consistently high attendance and engagement levels throughout the classes. however, despite this positive feedback, we wanted to continue building on our initial online delivery model to more effectively utilise the unique potential of the online format. for example, we expanded the q&a component, which we now run as a live panel session that is recorded alongside the lecture sessions. a further change was to allow students to post their questions anonymously in advance of the q&a, which has been shown to promote engagement from students less likely to engage in in-person lectures (rabe-hemp, woollen and humiston, 2009). the most notable change, however, was the move to a ‘panel’ format, with multiple elas and teaching assistants taking part in each q&a to discuss the topics and questions raised by the students. the panel format makes for a more engaging recording, as well as creating a more informal atmosphere to encourage questions from students in the live class. while elements of this approach could be replicated in in-person teaching, the ability for students to submit questions anonymously and to have multiple speakers take part in the live panel without having to be physically present draws on the unique capabilities of online delivery. consequently, our final recommendation is to move forward by drawing on the strengths of the online delivery format, rather than focusing on replicating in-person teaching online. references ali, w. (2020) ‘online and remote learning in higher education institutes: a necessity in light of covid-19 pandemic, higher education studies, 10(3), p.16. https://doi.org/10.5539/hes.v10n3p16. atkinson, r. and shiffrin, r. (1968) ‘human memory: a proposed system and its control processes’, in spence, k. and spence, j. (eds.) the psychology of learning and https://doi.org/10.5539/hes.v10n3p16 koristashevskaya and purcell pivoting pgt dissertation provision for online learning: our response, reflections, and recommendations journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 6 motivation: advances in research and theory, vol. 2. new york: academic press, pp.89-195. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0079-7421(08)60422-3. choe, r. c., scuric, z., eshkol, e., cruser, s., arndt, a., cox, r., toma, s. p., shapiro, c., levis-fitzgerald, m., barnes, g. and crosbie, r. h. (2019) ‘student satisfaction and learning outcomes in asynchronous online lecture videos’, cbe—life sciences education, 18(4), ar55. https://doi.org/10.1187/cbe.18-08-0171. crawford, j., butler-henderson, k., rudolph, j., malkawi, b., glowatz, m., burton, r., magni, p. a. and lam, s. (2020) ‘covid-19: 20 countries’ higher education intraperiod digital pedagogy responses’, journal of applied learning and teaching, 3(1), pp.9-28. https://doi.org/10.37074/jalt.2020.3.1.7. leppink, j. (2017) ‘cognitive load theory: practical implications and an important challenge’, journal of taibah university medical sciences, 12(5), pp.385-391. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jtumed.2017.05.003. rabe-hemp, c., woollen, s. and humiston, g. s. (2009) ‘a comparative analysis of student engagement, learning, and satisfaction in lecture hall and online learning settings’, quarterly review of distance education, 10(2), pp.207-218, pp.250-252. thai, n. t. t., de wever, b. and valcke, m. (2017) ‘the impact of a flipped classroom design on learning performance in higher education: looking for the best “blend” of lectures and guiding questions with feedback’, computers & education, 107, pp.113126. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2017.01.003. traver, r. (1998) ‘what is a good guiding question?’ educational leadership, 55(6), pp.7073. wilson, k. and korn, j. h. (2007) ‘attention during lectures: beyond ten minutes’, teaching of psychology, 34(2), pp.85-89. https://doi.org/10.1080/00986280701291291. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0079-7421(08)60422-3 https://doi.org/10.1187/cbe.18-08-0171 https://doi.org/10.37074/jalt.2020.3.1.7 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jtumed.2017.05.003 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2017.01.003 https://doi.org/10.1080/00986280701291291 koristashevskaya and purcell pivoting pgt dissertation provision for online learning: our response, reflections, and recommendations journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 7 young, m. s., robinson, s. and alberts, p. (2009) ‘students pay attention! combating the vigilance decrement to improve learning during lectures’, active learning in higher education, 10(1), pp.41-55. https://doi.org/10.1177/1469787408100194. author details elina koristashevskaya is the effective learning adviser for the college of social sciences at the university of glasgow. she has developed and delivered courses in academic writing and development for undergraduate and postgraduate students, including a comprehensive dissertation writing programme. her research experience includes academic enhancement, assessment and feedback practice, technology enhanced learning, and corpus linguistics. stuart j. purcell is the effective learning adviser for the college of arts at the university of glasgow. he currently lectures on most degrees across the college and has developed and delivered a range of academic writing and research courses for both undergraduate and postgraduate students. his research experience includes academic development, criticality, literature, and media studies. https://doi.org/10.1177/1469787408100194 pivoting pgt dissertation provision for online learning: our response, reflections, and recommendations the challenge the response recommendations references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special issue 22: compendium of innovative practice october 2021 ________________________________________________________________________ contact, connection, and communication: online community building on a professional doctorate karen smith university of hertfordshire, uk keywords: online communities; professional doctorate; research supervisor development; doctoral researchers; covid-19. the challenge the doctoral journey is long and arduous; it is often perceived as lonely (janta, lugosi and brown, 2014). students on professional doctorates experience additional challenges associated with being experienced professionals, mature, and part-time, all of which can contribute to feelings of isolation, both academically and socially (hutchings, 2017). to counter such isolation, the structure and strong cohort culture of our professional doctorate in education (edd) develops a community of doctoral researchers. while the focus here is on a professional doctorate, community building is equally important to others engaged in professional learning, for example, students on vocational courses, particularly those with a placement and those taking continuing professional development courses while working. the edd programme has always valued the cohort experience for motivation and development, recognising the importance of edd researchers physically meeting in a space different to their professional context to share their professional concerns and the challenges of their research with their peers. these facilitated sessions are complemented with concurrent supervisory team support and a centrally provided researcher development programme. when the edd extended its reach overseas, the same significance was placed on meeting face-to-face, with short, intensive uk staff visits overseas, and longer study trips to the uk by the transnational students. smith contact, connection, and communication: online community building on a professional doctorate journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 2 this edd, then, was never envisaged as an online programme; how would a programme that was so committed to the benefits of face-to-face community building weather a pivot online? in this piece, i share my reflections, as edd director, on that pivot. the response from the outset, our virtual edd community was fostered through contact. as edd director, i reached out to our whole edd community via email more frequently. this increased contact arose initially from necessity, as updates needed to be shared regarding, for example, ethics protocols, supervisory arrangements, and forthcoming sessions, including the planned conference. the contact was neither scheduled nor systematic, but responsive, and cognisant of challenging and changing times. our next move was to provide spaces for online connection. the edd conference, scheduled for early in the first uk lockdown, was redesigned for online delivery. asynchronous discussion boards allowed edd researchers to share and comment on prerecorded presentations, while a series of separate meeting rooms provided somewhere to discuss the keynote that was delivered synchronously. meeting rooms, during two online writing retreats, offered an alternative space to connect between periods of individual writing. facilitated by members of the edd team, but not necessarily the researchers’ supervisors, these spaces sought to offer a supportive environment for writing. with increased confidence and experience, we extended our approaches to developing communication within and across the edd community. the functionality of the online meeting platform allowed groups to be formed more flexibly and feasibly than when meeting face-to-face, with different configurations of edd cohorts coming together, facilitating cross-cohort and cross-national discussions. within those sessions the opportunities for communication, which are a pillar of the edd, were re-created, but in more dynamic ways using interactive tools to stimulate debate and meeting platform features (breakout rooms, chat function) to encourage discussion. to foster social interaction and communication, more time and online spaces were offered during study sessions to share in a cup of tea, take part in a christmas quiz, and have post-session socials. the online environment also supported the development of the edd supervisor community, through newer supervisors’ briefings and the edd supervisor reading group – smith contact, connection, and communication: online community building on a professional doctorate journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 3 these online meetings provided flexibility for staff who sit not only within our school, but also across the university and beyond. while the reaction to the pivot online was reactive rather than planned, this combination of contact, connection, and communication online has helped foster and develop the edd community during these challenging times. recommendations moving the edd online was an example of ‘emergency remote’ researcher development. the necessary move to working online, and the development of our skills, has shown the benefits that online provision can bring in terms of cohering and then supporting a community of doctoral researchers and their supervisors. although reactive, our response to the pivot was grounded in the pedagogical principles that have long shaped the edd. while the technological solutions we employed relied on current and mainstream tools, they met our immediate needs. the small steps made to foster our edd community virtually have been shown elsewhere to help develop online doctoral communities (berry, 2019), and online communities more widely (liu et al., 2007). a key benefit of being online was the ease with which groups could be formed, not just pre-existing cohort groups, but also cross-cohort and transnational groups, thus expanding the community and enabling cross-pollination in what liu et al. call classwide interaction (2007, p.21); here, this became programme-wide. working with cohort groups online is important because they give rise to other ‘supportive subgroups’ (berry, 2017, p.45) and we should continue to encourage researchers to create their own supportive groups, which are not staff facilitated, for social and academic support (including spaces to support writing). while some subgroups within the edd develop organically (e.g., cohort messaging groups), support could be provided to facilitate further research student-led cross-cohort communication within the edd to complement the developing institution-wide online postgraduate research community. supervisors also benefitted from the more accessible online groups. these opportunities should continue as they help to sustain the communities of practice that contribute to research supervisor development (hill and vaughan, 2018) and could be extended to smith contact, connection, and communication: online community building on a professional doctorate journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 4 include others who support researcher development, such as information specialists and career development and wellbeing support staff. through social media, the online environment offers further opportunities to extend networks across and outside the university, fostering disciplinary and practice communities, and responding to the challenge of peripherality often experienced by edd researchers (vigurs, 2016). this is an area i intend to develop. having the opportunity to reflect on these experiences and engage with research and scholarship around online community development has enabled me to validate some decisions we made in the moment, and has opened up areas for further consideration and development. given our positive experiences online, we will adopt more hybrid approaches to support our edd community in the future. this will be done intentionally, for, as lui et al. note ‘communities cannot develop on their own without careful planning, continued support, and intentional tasks and activities’ (2007, p.22). acknowledgements thank you to all those i work with on the edd (the edd team, supervisors, and researchers) and for their engagement in our edd community. references berry, s. (2017) ‘student support networks in online doctoral programs: exploring nested communities’, international journal of doctoral studies, 12, pp.33-48. https://doi.org/10.28945/3676. berry, s. (2019) ‘teaching to connect: community-building strategies for the virtual classroom’, online learning, 23(1), pp.164-183. http://dx.doi.org/10.24059/olj.v23i1.1425. hill, g. and vaughan, s. (2018) ‘conversations about research supervision: enabling and accrediting a community of practice model for research degree supervisor https://doi.org/10.28945/3676 http://dx.doi.org/10.24059/olj.v23i1.1425 smith contact, connection, and communication: online community building on a professional doctorate journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 5 development’, innovations in education and teaching international, 55(2), pp.153163. https://doi.org/10.1080/14703297.2017.1406388. hutchings, m. (2017) ‘improving doctoral support through group supervision: analysing face-to-face and technology-mediated strategies for nurturing and sustaining scholarship’, studies in higher education, 42(3), pp.533-550. https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2015.1058352. janta, h., lugosi, p. and brown, l. (2014) ‘coping with loneliness: a netnographic study of doctoral students’, journal of further and higher education, 38(4), pp.553-571. https://doi.org/10.1080/0309877x.2012.726972. liu, x., magjuka, r. j., bonk, c. j. and lee, s-h. (2007) ‘does sense of community matter? an examination of participants' perceptions of building learning communities in online courses’, quarterly review of distance education, 8(1), pp.924. vigurs, k. (2016) ‘using twitter to tackle peripherality?: facilitating networked scholarship for part-time doctoral students within and beyond the university’, fusion journal, 8, pp.1-22. available at: http://fusion-journal.com/using-twitter-to-tackle-peripheralityfacilitating-networked-scholarship-for-part-time-doctoral-students-within-andbeyond-the-university/ (accessed: 20 july 2021). author details karen smith is reader in higher education in the school of education at the university of hertfordshire. her research focuses on how higher education policies and practices impact on those who work and study within universities. she is currently the director of the university’s professional doctorate in education. karen also leads collaborative research and development in her school, where she engages in externally funded research and evaluation and supports the development of scholarly educational practice through practitioner research. https://doi.org/10.1080/14703297.2017.1406388 https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2015.1058352 https://doi.org/10.1080/0309877x.2012.726972 http://fusion-journal.com/using-twitter-to-tackle-peripherality-facilitating-networked-scholarship-for-part-time-doctoral-students-within-and-beyond-the-university/ http://fusion-journal.com/using-twitter-to-tackle-peripherality-facilitating-networked-scholarship-for-part-time-doctoral-students-within-and-beyond-the-university/ http://fusion-journal.com/using-twitter-to-tackle-peripherality-facilitating-networked-scholarship-for-part-time-doctoral-students-within-and-beyond-the-university/ contact, connection, and communication: online community building on a professional doctorate the challenge the response recommendations acknowledgements references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special issue 22: compendium of innovative practice october 2021 ________________________________________________________________________ instructional design for live online teaching: using mnemonics to support a udl-centred approach kevin l. merry de montfort university keywords: universal design for learning; remote virtual teaching; synchronous learning and teaching; covid-19 the challenge covid-19 has caused an abrupt shift in the way that higher education teaching staff design and deliver their teaching. stemming from an emergency need to keep things going during the spring 2020 lockdown in the uk, learning shifted online, initiating the mass adoption of remote virtual teaching. for many, teaching live sessions online was a novel experience, with few staff possessing the experience or skills to deliver effective online education (kozimor, 2020). as such, ensuring that staff possess the capability to deliver live online sessions competently and in a consistent fashion, has been of principle concern for academic developers during the pandemic. in 2016, de montfort university (dmu) in the uk adopted universal design for learning (udl) as its institution-wide approach to learning, teaching and assessment due to its considerable learner diversity. for example, approximately 54% of dmu students come from a black, asian and minority ethnic (bame) background, and there are more than 3,000 international students representing more than 130 countries. furthermore, around 20% of students have a declared disability. as such, a long-standing institutional priority has been the need to ensure an accessible and inclusive learning experience for its diverse community of learners. covid-19 has increased the importance of this priority. central to the adoption of udl at dmu has been an approach to instructional design that blends the udl principles of engagement, representation, and action and expression (rose, 2000), with important pedagogic characteristics including active and interactive learning, collaboration between students, immediate feedback (schneider et al., 2018) and merry instructional design for live online teaching: using mnemonics to support a udl-centred approach journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 2 constructive alignment (biggs, 2011). as such, a key challenge in responding to the pandemic has been to ensure that staff can competently deliver live online teaching sessions that maintain the pedagogic characteristics underpinning the udl approach described above. the response to ensure that live online teaching sessions reflect the aforementioned pedagogic characteristics, and taking into account the fact that few staff possessed well-developed skills in relation to delivering live online sessions, a quick guide to designing/delivering live online teaching based on the mnemonic patterns? was created. patterns? stands for pre-work, alignment, technology, teamwork, engage/evaluate, rewind, no barriers, support and questions? patterns? was created in response to covid-19 as a tool for supporting staff to design and deliver live online teaching which possesses the key pedagogic characteristics of the udl approach. detail on patterns? can be found in table 1. table 1. the patterns? quick guide to supporting learner mastery during live online virtual learning sessions. effective learning and teaching happens in patterns? pre-work • have you reminded/encouraged your students to engage with any pre-work including a pre-recorded screencast or other resource ahead of your live online session? alignment • does your live online session have clear learning outcomes? • does it have activities that reflect the outcomes? • does it have a mechanism for checking understanding? technology • have you checked that whatever technology you are using is functioning properly by testing it ahead of the session? merry instructional design for live online teaching: using mnemonics to support a udl-centred approach journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 3 • are you aware of any challenges your students may face with the technology? teamwork • are there opportunities for group work, collaboration and peer review/feedback in your live online session? engage/evaluate are there opportunities for: • active learning (e-tivities) • self-assessment • choice of activity • engagement with multimedia (videos, images etc.) • student feedback rewind • is there an opportunity for students to review the session through a recording, summary notes, a wiki, blog, discussion forum or other resource? no barriers • are your learning resources presented in modifiable formats and do they conform to inclusive and accessible practices (font styles and sizes, colours, background colours, images, use of glossaries where appropriate)? support • have you provided students with your contact details and details of when and how to contact you for further support following the session? ? • are you checking understanding with questioning? • are there regular opportunities for student questions? merry instructional design for live online teaching: using mnemonics to support a udl-centred approach journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 4 since launching in april 2020, about 1,000 staff have accessed patterns? as a screencast or downloadable quick-guide. anecdotal feedback from users has been positive. specifically, users appeared to benefit from the way in which patterns? enabled them to intentionally include important udl pedagogic considerations in the design of their live online teaching. such considerations related to engaging students through collaboration, active and interactive learning, and enabling student choice and autonomy, with users citing the teamwork and engage/evaluate aspects as particularly helpful. some users reported that their initial attempts at delivering live online teaching at the start of lockdown, largely consisted of replicating the approach used in face-to-face (f2f) classes, requiring them to use their own judgements as to what would work well in supporting learning in an online environment, with less attention paid to engaging students through active and interactive learning and collaboration. patterns? appeared to be helpful in avoiding such practices, with users reporting that they were able to use patterns? as a checklist of important considerations when designing and delivering live sessions online, supporting an intentional approach to online instructional design and delivery. users also reported that patterns? was easy to remember due to its mnemonic qualities. recommendations an important strength of patterns? is its checklist-type quality, enabling important udl pedagogic characteristics relating to engagement, such as active and interactive learning, collaboration and choice, to be intentionally designed into live online sessions. effective implementation of such practices, especially collaboration, can be challenging when teaching online (sandars et al., 2020). hence, intentional learning design, in which opportunities to maximise student engagement, collaboration and activity are intentionally designed into teaching, appears to be an important factor in the effective delivery of online education (major, 2014; dunkle and yantz, 2020; o’keefe et al., 2020; sandars et al., 2020), bridging the gap between emergency remote instruction and online learning (kozimor, 2020). such considerations may be especially important in relation to merry instructional design for live online teaching: using mnemonics to support a udl-centred approach journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 5 attenuating critical barriers to effective online learning such as social interaction (shawaqfeh et al., 2020; shrivastava et al., 2021), which is especially challenging when students learn at a physical distance (singh, 2018; aguilera-hermida, 2020). subsequently, patterns? appears to support an intentional approach that is more consistent with deliberate online learning than emergency remote instruction (kozimor, 2020), with potential benefits for social interaction through increasing opportunities to embed important udl characteristics including engagement, collaboration and activity. in terms of recommendations, when teaching in a virtual environment, colleagues should strive to use approaches that support carefully constructed, deliberate online instruction, rather than recreating unchanged f2f teaching practices in digital format. patterns? represents such an approach. a second strength of patterns? is its mnemonic qualities. mnemonics support the quick organisation of information, which can enhance learning and subsequent recall, as well as prompt and guide learners to employ explicit strategies (cast, 2018; conderman, 2020). intentionally designing important pedagogic characteristics into teaching is undoubtedly made easier by following an explicit strategy like patterns? hence, the mnemonic quality of patterns? may be central to its usefulness when intentionally planning the transition to live online teaching. according to the centre for applied special technology (cast, 2018), mnemonics support maximisation of the generalisability and transfer of learning, featuring prominently in their udl guidelines (2018). colleagues are required to generalise and transfer the information in patterns? into their own teaching contexts, which they have managed successfully, demonstrating another key benefit of the mnemonic approach. in terms of recommendations, if teaching is to be transitioned from f2f to live online quickly, then a mnemonic such as patterns? can support staff to effectively embed important udl pedagogic characteristics into their live online teaching in multiple contexts. merry instructional design for live online teaching: using mnemonics to support a udl-centred approach journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 6 references aguilera-hermida, a.p. (2020) ‘college students’ use and acceptance of emergency online learning due to covid-19’, international journal of educational research open, 1, p.100011. available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijedro.2020.100011 (accessed: 9 august 2021). biggs, j.b. (2011) teaching for quality learning at university: what the student does. 4th edn. new york: mcgraw-hill education. cast (2018) universal design for learning guidelines version 2.2. available at: http://udlguidelines.cast.org (accessed: 9 august 2021). conderman, g. (2020) ‘mnemonics: a fun and effective way to remember’, kappa delta pi record, 56(3), pp.139-142. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/00228958.2020.1770008 (accessed: 9 august 2021). dunkle, k.m. and yantz, j.l. (2020) ‘intentional design and implementation of a “flipped” upper division geology course: improving student learning outcomes, persistence, and attitudes’, journal of geoscience education, 69(1), pp.55-70. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/10899995.2020.1787808 (accessed:9 august 2021). kozimor, m.l. (2020) ‘editor’s comment: three teaching takeaways from the covid-19 pandemic’, teaching sociology, 48(3), pp. 181-183. available at: https://doi.org/10.1177/0092055x20931953 (accessed: 9 august 2021). major, c.h. (2014) teaching online: a guide to theory, research and practice. baltimore: john hopkins university press. o'keefe, l., rafferty, j., gunder, a. and vignare, k. (2020) ‘delivering high-quality instruction online in response to covid-19: faculty playbook’, online learning consortium. available at: http://olc-wordpressassets.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/2020/05/faculty-playbook_final-1.pdf (accessed: 9 august 2021). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijedro.2020.100011 http://udlguidelines.cast.org/ https://doi.org/10.1080/00228958.2020.1770008 https://doi.org/10.1080/10899995.2020.1787808 https://doi.org/10.1177/0092055x20931953 http://olc-wordpress-assets.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/2020/05/faculty-playbook_final-1.pdf http://olc-wordpress-assets.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/2020/05/faculty-playbook_final-1.pdf merry instructional design for live online teaching: using mnemonics to support a udl-centred approach journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 7 rose, d. (2000) ‘universal design for learning’, journal of special education technology 15(3), pp.45-49. available at: https://doi.org/10.1177/016264340101600208 (accessed: 9 august 2021). sandars, j., correia, r., dankbaar, m., de jong, p., goh, p.s., hege, i., masters, k., oh, s.y., patel, r., premkumar, k. and webb, a. (2020) ‘twelve tips for rapidly migrating to online learning during the covid-19 pandemic’, mededpublish, 9, pp.1-13. available at: https://doi.org/10.15694/mep.2020.000082.1 (accessed: 9 august 2021). schneider, j.l., ruder, s.m. and bauer, c.f. (2018) ‘student perceptions of immediate feedback testing in student centered chemistry classes’, chemistry education research and practice, 19(2), pp.442-451. available at: https://doi.org/10.1039/c7rp00183e (accessed: 9 august 2021). shawaqfeh, m.s., al bekairy, a.m., al-azayzih, a., alkatheri, a.a., qandil, a.m., obaidat, a.a., al harbi, s. and muflih, s.m. (2020) ‘pharmacy students perceptions of their distance online learning experience during the covid-19 pandemic: a crosssectional survey study’, journal of medical education and curricular development, 7(1), pp.1-9. available at: https://doi.org/10.1177/2382120520963039 (accessed: 9 august 2021). shrivastava, g., ovais, d., and arora, n. (2021) ‘measuring the walls of communication barriers of students in higher education during online classes’, journal of content, community and communication, 13(7), pp. 263-272: available at: https://www.amity.edu/gwalior/jccc/pdf/jun_22.pdf (accessed: 9 august 2021). singh, m. (2018) ‘value of face-to-face interactions between clinician-educators and patients or students to improve health care education’, jmir human factors, 5(2), p.e15. available at: https://dx.doi.org/10.2196%2fhumanfactors.9859 (accessed: 9 august 2021). https://doi.org/10.1177/016264340101600208 https://doi.org/10.15694/mep.2020.000082.1 https://doi.org/10.1039/c7rp00183e https://doi.org/10.1177/2382120520963039 https://www.amity.edu/gwalior/jccc/pdf/jun_22.pdf https://dx.doi.org/10.2196%2fhumanfactors.9859 merry instructional design for live online teaching: using mnemonics to support a udl-centred approach journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 8 author details kevin l. merry is the head of academic development at de montfort university. an award winning teacher, kevin has a number of research interests including learning for mastery, universal design for learning (udl), instructional design, and emotional intelligence in learning and teaching. instructional design for live online teaching: using mnemonics to support a udl-centred approach the challenge the response recommendations references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special issue 22: compendium of innovative practice october 2021 ________________________________________________________________________ challenges, chances and a café: connecting with refugee english language learners susan stetson-tiligadas deree, the american college of greece, greece jane mandalios deree, the american college of greece, greece keywords: covid-19; refugee education; synchronous learning. the challenge refugee learners face significant challenges to accessing educational opportunities. some may have had their learning disrupted when they had to leave their home country, while others may not have had access to educational opportunities in their home country either. the program leaders of the ma in teaching english to speakers of other languages (tesol) program at a greek private college had partnered with the greek council for refugees (gcr) to design and deliver english language classes for refugees taught by student volunteers from the ma tesol program. the philosophy was to expand on services offered by the gcr through its pyxida program, which provides greek language classes, social support, and employment counselling to registered refugees. five cohorts started in early 2020 in classroom spaces at the gcr in downtown athens, allowing teachers and learners to meet twice a week, and were due to finish in april. the first country-wide lockdown due to covid-19 came in mid-march 2020. however, the pyxida english classes had been designed for fully face-to-face delivery, and the collaboration had no funding, with the work being done on an entirely voluntary basis. it had already been a challenge to design a program for language learning in this under-resourced context, but when the lockdown occurred, the pyxida english language classes were completely halted. the broader social justice issues surrounding access to technology being stetson-tiligadas and mandalios challenges, chances and a café: connecting with refugee english language learners journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 2 spotlighted around the world – with those who have marching on and those who have not being left behind – was playing out with the pyxida classes, which could not easily switch to emergency remote teaching (hodges et al., 2020) through synchronous online lessons. the english classes would need to be completely redesigned for online delivery. consequently, no english language classes were offered in fall 2020 for the pyxida learners. in december 2020, we tried to reimagine how the language learning experience could take place online given the various challenges that already existed, plus the new challenges from covid-19. for example, data privacy issues surrounding refugee learners’ personal information precluded the possibility of creating accounts, even for free lms platforms such as google classroom. also, for online learning, the learning device available to most refugee learners is the cell phone (smyser, 2019), which brings with it issues of screen size and wi-fi connection among others. the learners were in diverse locations and, as was the case before, no funding meant that we could not use electronic course books for the lessons. opportunities for developing learners’ reading and writing skills were therefore significantly impacted. the response with these challenges in mind, we redesigned and developed the courses as the online english café, a programme for 30 hours of synchronous language instruction: one hour three times a week using zoom. adding ‘café’ to the title was a way to highlight that the lesson topics would be things people often talk about when they meet at cafés and that we speak and listen to others in a café conversation – as opposed to reading or writing, which would be more difficult to practise with the refugee learners in this context. the speaking and listening focus was supported using a lexical syllabus, which emphasises ‘a common core of notions/functions, useful for all communicative goals’ (robinson, 2009, p.297), and which also affords flexibility in sequencing. using zoom meant that learners could receive one stable link to access their course without being obliged to create a new account and could attend from any location using only their first names. stetson-tiligadas and mandalios challenges, chances and a café: connecting with refugee english language learners journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 3 two rounds of online english café classes were provided with volunteer teachers leading five cohorts each time, reaching over 50 learners. class attendance occurred through a combination of individual cell phone use and, at the refugee centres, multiple learners using a shared laptop. both ways worked well but each had their constraints; very small screens as a primary learning tool in the former case and seating at a distance from the screen in the latter. while some learners never missed a lesson, attendance did fluctuate due the highly changeable day-to-day context of the refugees. additionally, learners’ limited language level coupled with small screen size meant that it was not effective to have learners try to use the annotation tools in zoom or type in the chat box, for example. the speaking and listening focus did help overcome the issue of screen size but impacted learner agency in the case of multiple learners sharing one laptop, where it is not feasible for each one to come to the laptop and input written answers from a practical standpoint or from the point of view of covid-19 restrictions. regarding learning resources in a resource-disadvantaged context, all the materials were either originally created or curated from open educational resources (oers) or other free online resources, such as youtube videos. overall, the gcr, learners, and teachers all had positive reactions to the courses, which provided regular opportunities for cross-cultural exchange. in fact, one volunteer teacher commented, ‘i’m not just teaching. i’m being taught’. . recommendations there are several recommendations to share from the online english café experience. one is to provide teacher training for the instructors. being familiar with online tools from a learner’s perspective is different to using the tools as a teacher. in our case, specific training on using the annotate tools in zoom was helpful. secondly, design learning with a small screen size in mind. this means text on slides should be large, and teachers should know how to use browser tools to enlarge an entire website to make text bigger for both cell phone and laptop viewing. consider using oers, for example, from the british council (https://learnenglish.britishcouncil.org/) or american english (www.americanenglish.state.gov). oers work to reduce inequalities stemming from access to https://learnenglish.britishcouncil.org/ http://www.americanenglish.state.gov/ stetson-tiligadas and mandalios challenges, chances and a café: connecting with refugee english language learners journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 4 information (jones and bridges, 2016). many learners lack access to published materials such as course books and to devices that are effective for learning. asylum seekers and other learners may be reluctant to expand their digital footprint. therefore, it is important to create a learning environment that increases access and respects privacy. perhaps most importantly, leverage the benefits of being online to expand access to learning. online delivery enabled us to reach greater numbers of learners in multiple locations in refugee camps as well as learners in a shelter for unaccompanied minors. we plan to continue the online english café even when restrictions are lifted while also broadening our in-person classes for families and school-age children. thus, we can provide opportunities for learners beyond covid-19 and beyond classroom borders. references hodges, c., moore, s., lockee, b., trust, t. and bond, a. (2020) ‘the difference between emergency remote teaching and online learning’, educause review, 27 march. available at: https://er.educause.edu/articles/2020/3/the-difference-betweenemergency-remote-teaching-and-online-learning (accessed: 28 july 2020). jones, m. and bridges, r. (2016) ‘equity, access, and the digital divide in learning technologies: historical antecedents, current issues, and future trends’, in rushby, n. and surry, d. (eds.) the wiley handbook of learning technology. chichester: wiley blackwell, pp.330-334. robinson, p. (2009) ‘syllabus design’, in long, m. and doughty, c. (eds.) handbook of language teaching. malden, ma: wiley blackwell, pp.294-310. smyser, h. (2019) ‘adaptation of conventional technologies with refugee language learners: an overview of possibilities’, in sengupta, e. and blessinger, p. (eds.) language, teaching, and pedagogy for refugee education. bingley: emerald publishing limited, pp.125-139. https://er.educause.edu/articles/2020/3/the-difference-between-emergency-remote-teaching-and-online-learning https://er.educause.edu/articles/2020/3/the-difference-between-emergency-remote-teaching-and-online-learning stetson-tiligadas and mandalios challenges, chances and a café: connecting with refugee english language learners journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 5 author details susan stetson-tiligadas has over 20 years of language teaching experience in europe and the us and currently teaches in the eap and ma in tesol programmes at deree the american college of greece. she holds a doctorate in education with a specialisation in instructional design for online learning. her research interests are in learner motivation, cognitive load, and teacher training. jane mandalios teaches undergraduate and graduate applied linguistics at deree the american college of greece. she has also taught at tertiary level in libya and dubai, teaching efl/esl, esp, eap, and composition. her professional interests include curriculum and materials development, assessment, translanguaging, and information literacy. she holds a doctorate in tesol from exeter university. challenges, chances and a café: connecting with refugee english language learners the challenge the response recommendations references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 22: compendium october 2021 keep learning in a pandemic: podcasts for learning development conversations and informal learning alicja syska university of plymouth matthew mesley university of plymouth keywords: podcasts; asynchronous learning; informal learning; conversation; covid-19. the challenge the learning development (ld) team at the university of plymouth comprises three ld advisors who support student learning across three respective faculties. as such, we form a constellation of separate entities with similar aims but individual approaches to what we do. before march 2020, informal exchanges across our desks sufficed to maintain a sense of continuity in what we do as a team, but the covid-19 pandemic induced move to working from home limited our ability to talk to each other. initially, we ameliorated this situation by holding regular team meetings on zoom. we discussed the pleasures and pains of online teaching, its challenges and frustrations, our accomplishments and discoveries, and all the observations we made in our workshops and tutorials with students. we soon realised that ld is more than what we teach, but students rarely get access to this informal aspect of our work. indeed, those areas that could be particularly beneficial to students often fell outside the learning aims of our taught sessions or might only be touched upon in passing. a few questions thus presented themselves: how do we communicate these aspects of our practice? how do we continue the conversation of ld outside our teaching sessions in ways that are not bound by prescriptive or intentional approaches? the response our answer was to do a podcast. podcasting has been used in higher education since 2004 (rosell-aguilar, 2007) and in 2010 was predicted to become fully integrated into syska and mesley keep learning in a pandemic: podcasts for learning development conversations and informal learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 2 online learning (edirisingha et al., 2010). this prediction was based on empirical evidence that demonstrated its positive impact not only on student learning but also on staff engagement. as an avid enthusiast of podcasts, one of us was already keen on developing this pedagogy, and the combination of this long-standing interest, the newly arisen need, and encouragement from other practitioners (bohlman and ross, 2021) emboldened us to take the plunge. after making some initial decisions regarding hosting (in partnership), frequency (first weekly, then bi-weekly), and online platforms (itunes, youtube, and university intranet), much of what we decided to do in the podcast evolved gradually in the first few episodes. we would begin by introducing ourselves, the podcast, and the topic under discussion. after this, we might orientate the listener by situating the theme within its historical context or highlighting why the subject was worth discussing. it soon became apparent that it worked better if our conversation was not scripted, but instead guided by particular themes, topics, or even questions. this gave the episode a sense of structure or coherence, but we were careful not to be too strict here; opportunities for unprompted elements or reflections were common. we wanted to make listeners feel like they were listening to a conversation, which sought to inform and educate, but at the same time was not too didactic. other elements also arose organically; for example, early on, one of us suggested an object of the week segment, and from the beginning we also talked about how we might include guests. the latter we felt would be particularly important in offering listeners different perspectives, but also at a basic level it would help foster further connections within and beyond our team, and potentially challenge us to think about our practice in new and different ways. only later would we discover communities of practice such as podcasting for pedagogic purposes, which provide valuable advice and support. we named the podcast keep learning to reinforce the message that learning happens all the time, and to emphasise its lifelong quality. it was clear that we were learning in action too; to paraphrase tom vanderbilt (2021), we did not know what we were doing but we were doing it anyway. we hoped that our openness to admit not to know all the answers would encourage students to let go of the tyranny of perfectionism and embrace the messiness of learning, especially in the new and challenging context of blended delivery. http://podcastingforpp.pbworks.com/w/page/17364568/frontpage https://www.youtube.com/channel/ucylqxyxalyaizcbczunqf0a syska and mesley keep learning in a pandemic: podcasts for learning development conversations and informal learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 3 recommendations we admit that initially we created the podcast for ourselves, to fill the gaps that remote working opened in our practice. we did not publicise it to our students, there was no plan to use it strategically for ld instruction, and we had no fixed target audience (the podcast was not aimed at a particular cohort but at all interested students at the university of plymouth, including independent learners). we also were naive to the statistics: out of over two million podcasts on apple’s directory, 25% cease after episode one (arendale, 2021), so it would take us time to discover that commitment and effective collaboration are key. the advantages of podcasting were, however, clear from the start. due to their accessibility, we expanded our reach as learning developers beyond our workshops and tutorials. the podcasts humanised us and made our voices and faces familiar to those who would otherwise have few chances to meet us. we sometimes reacted to themes with different emotions or with humour, something that might ordinarily get lost in ‘normal’ ld conversations. in a way, we blurred the line between formal and informal learning and further amplified the concept of the third space (whitchurch, 2008). the themed episodes also created a bank of resources on a number of varied topics, which students could return to in their own time. we hope in future to augment and focus more on students' sense of belonging, for instance by involving students and recording for live audiences. we feel that the podcast has allowed us to communicate in a way that goes beyond academic instruction, but we could certainly build upon this further. in particular, we would like to explore how we might harness the podcast as a way of cultivating community (wrather, 2016). in this respect, we can help to reduce post-pandemic anxiety and contribute to building a relational, more humane, educational ecosystem. we do not hesitate in recommending podcasting as part of learning developers’ practice and have some recommendations for new podcasters: ● have a partner to record with, ● don’t be intimidated by technology, ● reach out to people beyond your team, syska and mesley keep learning in a pandemic: podcasts for learning development conversations and informal learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 4 ● have a goal for each episode but don’t script it, ● allow for emotion and humour, ● and don’t fuss over editing – imperfections are permitted. podcasting is all about thinking outside the box and allowing ourselves to consider different ways of communicating our expertise and articulating our field. the latter is particularly important if ld is to become more formalised or academic – we need to still be able to talk in different registers and to connect to students in ways untethered from academic discourse. references: arendale, d. (2021) ‘using podcasting for leader development: anywhere, anytime’, iapl june webinar, 10 june. bohlmann, j., and ross, m. (2021) ‘building an online study community through weekly podcasts at the university of glasgow’, scotheld winter 2021 conference, 22 january. edirisingha, p., hawkridge, d. and fothergill, j. (2010) ‘a renaissance of audio: podcasting approaches for learning on campus and beyond’, european journal of open, distance and e-learning, 1. available at: https://openaccess.city.ac.uk/id/eprint/1339/1/a%20renaissance%20of%20audio%2 0podcasting%20approaches%20for%20learning%20on%20campus%20and%20bey ond_article.pdf (accessed: 15 june 2021). rosell-aguilar, f. (2007) 'top of the pods – in search of a podcasting "podagogy" for language learning', computer assisted language learning, 20(5), pp.471-492. https://doi.org/10.1080/09588220701746047. vanderbilt, t. (2021) beginners: the joy and transformative power of lifelong learning. london: atlantic books. https://openaccess.city.ac.uk/id/eprint/1339/1/a%20renaissance%20of%20audio%20podcasting%20approaches%20for%20learning%20on%20campus%20and%20beyond_article.pdf https://openaccess.city.ac.uk/id/eprint/1339/1/a%20renaissance%20of%20audio%20podcasting%20approaches%20for%20learning%20on%20campus%20and%20beyond_article.pdf https://openaccess.city.ac.uk/id/eprint/1339/1/a%20renaissance%20of%20audio%20podcasting%20approaches%20for%20learning%20on%20campus%20and%20beyond_article.pdf https://doi.org/10.1080/09588220701746047 syska and mesley keep learning in a pandemic: podcasts for learning development conversations and informal learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 5 whitchurch, c. (2008) ‘shifting identities and blurring boundaries: the emergence of third space professionals in uk higher education’, higher education quarterly, 62(4), pp.377-396 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2273.2008.00387.x. wrather, k. (2016) ‘making “maximum fun'' for fans: examining podcast listener participation online’, radio journal: international studies in broadcast & audio media, 14(1), pp.43-63. https://doi.org/10.1386/rjao.14.1.43_1. author details alicja syska is a learning development advisor at the university of plymouth, where she also teaches u.s. history and visual culture. she has a ph.d. in american studies from saint louis university, u.s.a., is a senior fellow of advance he, an aldinhe certified leading practitioner, and an si/pass supervisor. her research interests include using visual methods in teaching, developing academic writing within disciplines, and fostering ld publishing and scholarship. matthew mesley is a learning development advisor at the university of plymouth and currently works with students from the faculty of health. in a former life he was a medieval historian, and has written on medieval miracles, sex and gender, jewish-christian relations, and the crusades. he has an mphil from the university of cambridge, a ph.d. from the university of exeter, and is a fellow of advance he. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2273.2008.00387.x https://doi.org/10.1386/rjao.14.1.43_1 keep learning in a pandemic: podcasts for learning development conversations and informal learning the challenge the response recommendations references: author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special issue 25: aldinhe conference proceedings and reflections october 2022 ________________________________________________________________________ to embed, not to embed, how to embed ian johnson university of portsmouth, uk presentation abstract the embeddedness of learning development (ld) within the delivery of academic courses is emerging in my doctoral research as a key mediator of how the value of ld work is perceived by its stakeholders. embedding might be best thought of as ‘epistemological alignment’ between learning developers and academic disciplines: that is, working with the lecturers longitudinally to co-design and co-deliver. maldoni and lear (2016) describe this model as ‘embedded, integrated and co-taught’. learning developers may be embedded in other ways (e.g., physical location, operational or line management) but this does not necessarily equate to embedded provision; it could still operate in practice as a ‘bolt-on’ rather than an integrated element of students’ learning. in my research, embeddedness is discussed highly positively by learning developers across the uk, as well as other stakeholders, yet is grossly undersold in the terms through which universities publicly frame their ld provision on their websites. this mini-keynote, and the discussions that followed, explored practitioners’ experiences of embedding work at their higher education institutions to work towards a richer understanding of good practice. the three discussion prompts were: 1. to what extent is ld work embedded at your workplace? 2. what benefits and challenges (including surprising ones) have you encountered around embedding? 3. based on your experiences, what good practice advice would you give about embedding ld work? johnson to embed, not to embed, how to embed journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 2 community response while the subject of embedding learning development has been widely debated, ian johnson’s session provided a welcome opportunity for attendees to discuss their own understanding, experiences and challenges with learning developers from other universities. 1) sharing terminology, experience and practice first of all, i could have discussed this topic for hours! i am the lead on embedded teaching in my team and it is an area we are currently developing. hearing the different stages colleagues and institutions are at with this was fascinating and comforting – to know we are all on this journey together. that ian provided definitions of relevant terms such as ‘embedded’ and ‘integrated’ was really useful, enabling me to reflect on how much of our ‘embedded’ offer is in truth embedded or whether we are using the label to think more broadly. some attendees reflected upon why it might be that universities tend not to publicly promote that learning development is embedded in their courses. one argued that the lack of public promotion of embedded learning development did not necessarily indicate that universities do not see it as integral to ld, but might rather be because ‘embedding is intended to make ld an integral and seamless – and therefore unpublicised – element of a student's academic experience’. another observed: it was really helpful to hear how different practitioners were approaching embedding learning development, and to learn more about various models for this. one of the reasons embedding may not be prominently displayed on websites and promotional materials is because of concerns about over-promising provision; our team, for instance, can’t deliver embedded learning development content to every department, as our team simply isn’t big enough. we are instead prioritising specific departments, targeting students who repeatedly visit the academic skills hub and need more specialist intervention. examples of challenges experienced by attendees – posing questions that the ld community can respond to with the generosity regularly evident on the ldhen jiscmail list https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?a0=ldhen johnson to embed, not to embed, how to embed journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 3 – highlighted the complexity of implementing effective embedded ld approaches within widely differing learning environments: in libraries & collections at king’s college london we have worked with a number of ways of embedding learning development into student modules. for example, we include direct and targeted access to e-learning at a relevant point in the module’s online teaching materials. another approach we have taken more recently is to embed a library-run forum into a taught module, to act as a support for students at a specific point in their learning. the students are instructed that the forum will be running during a set time period during which librarian-instructors will be available to respond to questions. the librarians and module tutor all saw this as a good thing, of clear benefit to the students, and a valuable element of the learning development for that module. the students thought otherwise. we have tried this twice and each time, despite cajoling from the tutor, we did not receive a single query. where are we going wrong? ● is it an activity that isn’t wanted or needed? ● is it coming at the wrong time in the module? ● is it the wrong kind of support? ● is it too public? ● have we failed to communicate its benefits? ● are we mistaken about its benefits? these and other questions are something we must consider before embarking on further embedded learning of this kind. perhaps the issue is that this is an approach one could call ‘embedded-lite’, more ‘bolt-on’ than ‘built-in’ as mentioned above. if the librarians had a more substantial presence in the module a forum might work as a supplement to a more developed relationship between students, tutors and librarian-instructors. 2) recommendations for further discussion the session highlighted a demand for more community discussions and exchanges on the topic of embedding learning development: johnson to embed, not to embed, how to embed journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 4 a really useful session addressing what i see as something of vital importance to learning development: how to embed effectively? i found it useful to hear how others address it. the discussion is something that needs to be an ongoing process. i would have welcomed the session being a full paper or a workshop as i think there was certainly enough content. i would have liked more time in this session as well; it seemed as though relationship-building was a significant factor for many participants, and i would have liked to hear more about how others have overcome this barrier, as it is something we struggle with too. in his reflections on the session, ian johnson goes on to identify how such productive discussions might be facilitated through the aldinhe network. author’s reflection giving this session as a mini-keynote proved very worthwhile. it was well attended on all three iterations, indicating there is extensive interest in embedding in the ld profession. this is despite the fact that it seems to be an almost interminable debate on which our progress is quite slow. similar conversations may well have been happening 15 years ago. while many of the attendees to my sessions were relatively new learning developers, who appeared to value the opportunity to discuss and discover more about embedding, it also attracted delegates who are strategically responsible for embedding in their institutions. these mainly came from the ld side, but in some cases were academic colleagues who said they went away from the sessions with fresh ideas about how a properly embedded learning developer could help them. this mix of participants led to rich collaborative discussions within the groups. they seemed to draw out that the more a learning developer is truly embedded (in the sense in which maldoni and lear (2016) define it), the more effective the work is. many of the delegates felt they were embedded on others’ terms and in an ad-hoc way, leading sometimes to a feeling of being built-in in name, bolt-on in nature. this resonated with me, as someone who has experienced this situation and gradually developed the confidence to johnson to embed, not to embed, how to embed journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 5 say, ‘no, not like that, but yes, if it’s like this ….’. indeed, an interesting debate point that emerged was whether the interim stage of having to embed on others’ terms is a necessary step to something better afterwards, or whether bad embedding is worse than no embedding. what came through clearly was that meaningful embedding requires departmental and/or institutional commitment, time, resource and willpower, and it can be hard to achieve this combination. in the discussions, embedding also meant different things to different people. to some, it was about being physically located and managed within an academic department. for others, none of that applied, yet they achieved a form of embedding by thinking and working with their disciplines, even without being located there. the second form seemed to appeal to several of the delegates, perhaps because it allowed them to maintain roles which were clearly distinct from disciplinary ‘teaching’, whilst still achieving a sense of relevance to staff and students within disciplinary departments. what also emerged is that the picture across the uk is mixed. since the survey documented by murray and glass (2011), it seems there is a move towards ld being embedded, yet at different rates in different places. wherever it happens, after trialling and reflecting on the more embedded approach, it is largely seen as a positive step by all parties. yet it does not seem to be something that universities shout about or regard as integral to the work of a learning developer. the extent to which it occurs is still very much dependent on the local relationships between the people involved. next steps in line with several attendees’ comments, i too would have liked the mini-keynotes to be longer, or to have delivered the session as a longer workshop, as fruitful discussions had to be cut off early. i will think about developing the session into a longer aldinhe ld@3 webinar to meet that demand and further foster community discussions on these questions and i welcome collaborations, through that or other forums, with others who have a keen interest. i plan to publish more work on embedding ld within the next couple of years, including the results of a survey conducted as part of my doctoral research. giving this mini-keynote https://aldinhe.ac.uk/research/facilitate-a-webinar/ johnson to embed, not to embed, how to embed journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 6 was invaluable in crystallising some of my thinking about how i want to write about the topic within the context of my phd thesis, currently in its late stages of development. i hope to continue the work of harnessing the collective hive-mind of aldinhe around these ideas, so that this mini-keynote hopefully represents the beginnings of an open and continuing dialogue between us. acknowledgments thank you to all the contributors who shared their reflections and enriched our insight into this conference presentation and its impact on the audience. special thanks go to jonathan koestlé-cate from king’s college london, emily webb from the university of leeds, and victoria yuskaitis from the university of southampton. references maldoni, a. and lear, e. (2016) ‘a decade of embedding: where are we now?’, journal of university teaching and learning practice, 13(3), pp.1-22. https://doi.org/10.53761/1.13.3.2 murray, l. and glass, b. (2011) ‘learning development in higher education: community of practice or profession?’, in hartley, p., hilsdon, j., keenan, c., sinfield, s. and verity, m. (eds) learning development in higher education. basingstoke, palgrave macmillan, pp. 28-39. author details ian johnson is a learning developer of seven years in education and sociology at university of portsmouth. he established aldinhe’s research community of practice in spring 2020 and has coordinated and grown it since. ian’s research interests include academic literacies, collaborative writing, feedback on assessments, and embedding of ld work. his doctoral thesis (in progress) spotlights how various stakeholders articulate the value of ld work. from the findings, ian seeks to suggest how the ld profession can https://doi.org/10.53761/1.13.3.2 johnson to embed, not to embed, how to embed journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 7 frame itself coherently and resonantly, and thus advocate for an understanding of the work which increases its credibility and sustainability within academia. to embed, not to embed, how to embed presentation abstract community response 1) sharing terminology, experience and practice 2) recommendations for further discussion author’s reflection next steps acknowledgments references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 26: special edi issue february 2023 ©2023 the author(s) (cc-by 4.0) dyslexia in higher education: enhancing student belonging and overcoming barriers to achievement through communities of practice karen welton arts university plymouth, uk abstract feeling that they belong is a crucial part of a student's learning journey which impacts enjoyment, attainment and retention. dyslexic students can feel isolated within their diagnosis and do not openly discuss their inherent challenges and strengths, often due to previous educational and/or social misconceptions. in the united kingdom, with a professional diagnosis, tailored support for this specific learning difference (spld) may be sought through government funding known as disabled students’ allowance (dsa). however, many dyslexic students remain undiagnosed, or do not wish to disclose, and this, combined with a reduction in dsa funding in 2015, has negatively impacted the achievement and affinity of this cohort. although as a result of this funding cut higher education institutions became legally responsible for making reasonable adjustments to their teaching practices, this broad-brush approach does not support dyslexic students in understanding the many intricacies associated with this spld, or how to navigate their learning in a higher education context. to bridge this gap, and help like-minded students share ideas to help others whilst also developing their own skills and confidence, i initiated a community of practice (cop). after a year of fortnightly meetings, a group of empowered individuals, who had a much deeper understanding of what being dyslexic meant, emerged with newfound confidence, having connected and collaborated with neurologically similar people. keywords: dyslexia; community of practice; belonging; confidence; achievement; empowered. welton dyslexia in higher education: enhancing student belonging and overcoming barriers to achievement through communities of practice journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 2 introduction nieminen and pesonen (2022, p.2) assert that, ‘disabilities and neurodiversity are commonly understood as deficits in one’s studying, as personal tragedies that hinder one from productivity and timely graduation’; this negatively impacts students’ sense of belonging and marginalises them from the academy. this is a global challenge, since ‘current estimates indicate that 35 million americans have a learning disability (ld), and dyslexia is by far the most diagnosed among all lds’ (zablotsky et al., 2019, cited in richardson, 2021, p.125). when referring to dyslexia in a uk higher education context, jacobs et al.’s (2022) recent study states ‘findings suggest that higher education institutions need to create an inclusive learning environment that effectively supports this underrepresented group. this will break down barriers to learning and help students succeed academically’. although this is something that many institutions strive to do through inclusive teaching practices, a community of practice (cop) can be an effective way of bringing like-minded students together to share ideas, learn new methods of working and connect on a level that may not be easily achievable between dyslexic and non-dyslexic individuals. the rationale for initiating a community of practice there is an above average number of dyslexic students studying at the creative higher education institution i work at (hesa, 2022). during six years as a learning development advisor i have witnessed, predominantly during one-to-one academic skills sessions, the incredible strengths that many of these students have, not despite their dyslexia, but because of it (eide and eide, 2011). these strengths include increased spatial awareness, determination, big picture thinking, problem solving, creativity, visual thinking, communication the list could go on (west, 2022). but, i have also shared tears, theirs and mine, when discussing their previous educational experiences and subsequent social and emotional barriers to learning. jacobs et al. (2022, p.11) explain the damage these experiences and barriers have on students’ sense of self as the ‘data indicates that negative connotations that surround dyslexia had an impact on student’s self-image and identity, indicating participants feel ostracised in their academic environments’. with sunken shoulders and heavy hearts, these amazingly talented students are frequently welton dyslexia in higher education: enhancing student belonging and overcoming barriers to achievement through communities of practice journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 3 lacking in confidence and isolated within their dyslexia diagnosis, something which often continues throughout their university level study and beyond. recent research studies evidence that students’ higher levels of motivation and self-confidence, together with improved academic engagement and achievement, are linked to a greater sense of belonging (pedler, willis and nieuwoudt, 2021, p.398). this sense of belonging can be created through the development of a non-hierarchical cop, which aims to empower students to foreground and communicate their individuality, and as a result of this empowerment acts as a platform to help non-dyslexics understand different ways of thinking. this is not dissimilar to nieminen and pesonen’s views on anti-ableist pedagogies where, ‘through a communal approach, every student can participate and contribute as their own personal and diverse selves, as disabledness is framed not as a deficit but as a crucial lens to examine the world that the whole community can learn from’ (2022, p.6). however, without improving the understanding of dyslexia for those who are dyslexic, and subsequently improving their confidence, there is less chance that they will feel empowered enough to be a part of this dialogue. individual learning development support can be very effective for dyslexic students, particularly good quality disabled students’ allowance (dsa) study skills support, which can not only improve academic achievement, but also positively impacts how students view themselves (johnson et al., 2019; kelly and erwin, 2022). however, no amount of text book reading, training course attendance, or qualifications achieved, can artificially create that real sense of belonging when amongst like-minded peers who truly understand your lived experience because it resembles theirs (pedler, willis and nieuwoudt, 2021). i spent some time thinking about how this gap could be bridged. i was aware of how transformational being a member of a research cop was to my understanding of research related intricacies and how being a part of this research community had positively impacted my confidence. so, in may 2021 i initiated a cop at my institution to provide an informal and supportive environment within which dyslexic students could interact and share experiences connected to dyslexia and higher education. the invitation was not just for those who had a formal diagnosis, but also to students who suspected they might be dyslexic, since many students do not become aware of this until they reach a higher education level (packer, 2020). welton dyslexia in higher education: enhancing student belonging and overcoming barriers to achievement through communities of practice journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 4 the effectiveness of communities of practice for dyslexic students in 2020-22, as the covid-19 pandemic continued to impact the uk, teaching remained remote, so for the first five months the cop met for one hour, fortnightly, online. whilst my initial invitation had attracted interest from twenty-seven students, the first meeting was attended by six students spanning foundation to postgraduate level study. although numbers were lower than anticipated, to say it was a success would be an understatement. my role was to facilitate their discussions, which was just as well because after introductions i could hardly get a word in edgeways! students initially shared experiences; this was the first time any of them had openly discussed ‘their dyslexia’ and they were clearly encountering a sense of shared understanding. they touched upon lack of confidence, self-esteem and the sense of shame at being dyslexic, which was often socially constructed from educational and/or family/peer misconceptions. it boosted their morale to hear other dyslexic narratives and it was at this point i became aware of, as wegner and nückles (2015), cited in tummons (2015, pp. 18-19) assert, cops as ‘provision[s] of authentic opportunities for students to engage in practice, and to talk about that practice, as a precondition for meaningful learning’. students were beginning to get a sense of who they really were and how, armed with this knowledge, they might navigate the challenges that a higher education environment imposes. in addition to more generalised difficulties relating to reading, writing, organisation, processing and memory, these challenges not only include, as maccullagh, bosanquet and badcock (2016) assert, ‘taking lecture notes…following lecture slides…auditory and visual distractions in lecture theatres and other learning spaces…[lecturers] speaking style…format of recorded lectures...assessment methods’, but also a lack of knowledge about dyslexia by peers, and university staff responsible for ensuring an inclusive learning environment (jacobs et al., 2022). some of the strengths associated with dyslexia were unconsciously mentioned which were sometimes unique to a particular individual, and combined with discussions around co-occurring neurodivergence, this highlighted that, just as we are all different as people, so is each person’s experience of dyslexia. prior to our first meeting i invited students to upload ideas to a virtual bulletin board called padlet outlining what they wanted to gain from the cop and what they thought they could give to help others, to ensure that when facilitating the conversations during meetings they were relevant to their requirements. this also helped me to think of some provocation welton dyslexia in higher education: enhancing student belonging and overcoming barriers to achievement through communities of practice journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 5 questions to encourage discussion around some of the particular topics they had highlighted: academic reading and writing, communication of ideas, presentations, employment, dsa support, assistive technology, life skills and the perception of others. in addition to introductions and getting to know each other, the first meeting also focused on their reading challenges and the strategies they used, or could use for students new to higher education, including suggestions from my experience of supporting dyslexic students in relation to critical academic reading. at the end of the meeting some students expressed that it would have been really useful to have had access to this type of shared community at the outset of their higher education journey. this is something that will be offered at the start of each new academic year, with existing members of the community ready and willing to embrace new members and help them navigate the unfamiliar, and often difficult, higher education landscape. achievements and future plans since the initial meeting in may 2021, we have continued to meet regularly. students dip in and out of the meetings depending on their schedule, but they remain strongly bonded with interdisciplinary collaborations and a new student union society amongst their shared achievements. they have more exciting projects in the pipeline, and with their newfound confidence they feel empowered embracing and enjoying their studies. the barriers may never completely be overcome, but as learning developers we can help build the bridges to belonging and community in higher education. although this paper focuses on cops for students with dyslexia, there is every reason to believe that similar communities would be beneficial to the achievement, integration and belonging of other marginalised groups of students facing barriers in higher education, for example, students who have english as a second or other language (esol). references eide, b.l. and eide, f.f. (2011) the dyslexic advantage – unlocking the hidden potential of the dyslexic brain. london: hay house uk ltd. welton dyslexia in higher education: enhancing student belonging and overcoming barriers to achievement through communities of practice journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 6 hesa (2022) who’s studying in he?: personal characteristics (detailed disability and ethnicity breakdowns). available at: https://www.hesa.ac.uk/data-andanalysis/students/whos-in-he/characteristics (accessed: 30 august 2022). jacobs, l., parke, a., ziegler, f., headleand, c. and de angeli, a. (2022) ‘learning at school through to university: the educational experiences of students with dyslexia at one uk higher education institution’, disability and society 37(4), pp. 662-683. https://doi.org/10.1080/09687599.2020.1829553 johnson, c., rossiter, h., cartmell, b., domingos, m. and svanaes, s. (2019) evaluation of disabled students’ allowances. london: dfe. available at: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attach ment_data/file/915042/evaluation_of_disabled_students_allowances.pdf (accessed: 30 august 2022). kelly, d.r. and erwin, v.m. (2022) ‘specific learning difficulty tutors: direct support for navigating disabilities and the university environment’, disability and society. https://doi.org/10.1080/09687599.2022.2114882 maccullagh, l., bosanquet, a. and badcock, n.a. (2016) ‘university students with dyslexia: a qualitative exploratory study of learning practices, challenges and strategies’, dyslexia: an international journal of research and practice 23(1), pp. 3-23. https://doi.org/10.1002/dys.1544 nieminen, j. h. and pesonen, h. v. (2022). ‘anti-ableist pedagogies in higher education: a systems approach’, journal of university teaching & learning practice 19(4). available at: https://ro.uow.edu.au/jutlp/vol19/iss4/08/ (accessed: 22 october 2022). packer, r. (2020) ‘dyslexia in higher education’, sen journal for special educational needs [online]. available at: https://senmagazine.co.uk/content/education/7943/dyslexia-in-higher-education/ (accessed: 30 august 2022). https://www.hesa.ac.uk/data-and-analysis/students/whos-in-he/characteristics https://www.hesa.ac.uk/data-and-analysis/students/whos-in-he/characteristics https://doi.org/10.1080/09687599.2020.1829553 https://doi.org/10.1080/09687599.2020.1829553 https://doi.org/10.1080/09687599.2020.1829553 https://doi.org/10.1080/09687599.2020.1829553 https://doi.org/10.1080/09687599.2020.1829553 https://doi.org/10.1080/09687599.2020.1829553 https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/915042/evaluation_of_disabled_students_allowances.pdf https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/915042/evaluation_of_disabled_students_allowances.pdf https://doi.org/10.1080/09687599.2022.2114882 https://doi.org/10.1080/09687599.2022.2114882 https://doi.org/10.1080/09687599.2022.2114882 https://doi.org/10.1080/09687599.2022.2114882 https://doi.org/10.1080/09687599.2022.2114882 https://doi.org/10.1080/09687599.2022.2114882 https://doi.org/10.1002/dys.1544 https://doi.org/10.1002/dys.1544 https://doi.org/10.1002/dys.1544 https://doi.org/10.1002/dys.1544 https://doi.org/10.1002/dys.1544 https://doi.org/10.1002/dys.1544 https://doi.org/10.1002/dys.1544 https://doi.org/10.1002/dys.1544 https://ro.uow.edu.au/jutlp/vol19/iss4/08/ https://senmagazine.co.uk/content/education/7943/dyslexia-in-higher-education/ welton dyslexia in higher education: enhancing student belonging and overcoming barriers to achievement through communities of practice journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 7 pedler, m.l., willis, r. and nieuwoudt, j.e. (2021) ‘a sense of belonging at university: student retention, motivation and enjoyment’, journal of further and higher education 46 (3), pp. 397-408. https://doi.org/10.1080/0309877x.2021.1955844 richardson, g. (2021) ‘dyslexia in higher education’, educational research and reviews 16(4), pp. 125-135. https://doi.org/10.5897/err2021.4128 tummons, j. (2018) learning architectures in higher education: beyond communities of practice. london: bloomsbury. west, t.g. (2022) ‘dyslexic strengths in times of adversity’, asia pacific journal of developmental differences 9(2), pp. 194-203. available at: https://www.das.org.sg/images/publications/apjdd/vol9no2/apjdd-9-2-2022west.pdf (accessed: 20 october 2022). author details karen welton is a learning development adviser at arts university plymouth. she has a particular interest in dyslexia and is passionate about raising awareness of neurodiversity from a 360° perspective, not just the challenges which are often fixated upon within the educational and wider community. her masters in education thesis explored her understanding of dyslexia, her role, and the skills she needed to successfully support dyslexic students at a higher education level. licence ©2023 the author(s). this is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (cc-by 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. see http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. journal of learning development in higher education (jldhe) is a peer-reviewed open access journal published by the association for learning development in higher education (aldinhe). https://doi.org/10.1080/0309877x.2021.1955844 https://doi.org/10.1080/0309877x.2021.1955844 https://doi.org/10.1080/0309877x.2021.1955844 https://doi.org/10.1080/0309877x.2021.1955844 https://doi.org/10.1080/0309877x.2021.1955844 https://doi.org/10.1080/0309877x.2021.1955844 https://doi.org/10.1080/0309877x.2021.1955844 https://doi.org/10.1080/0309877x.2021.1955844 https://doi.org/10.5897/err2021.4128 https://doi.org/10.5897/err2021.4128 https://doi.org/10.5897/err2021.4128 https://doi.org/10.5897/err2021.4128 https://doi.org/10.5897/err2021.4128 https://doi.org/10.5897/err2021.4128 https://doi.org/10.5897/err2021.4128 https://doi.org/10.5897/err2021.4128 https://www.das.org.sg/images/publications/apjdd/vol9no2/apjdd-9-2-2022-west.pdf https://www.das.org.sg/images/publications/apjdd/vol9no2/apjdd-9-2-2022-west.pdf http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special issue 22: compendium of innovative practice october 2021 ________________________________________________________________________ challenges of running online exams and preventing academic dishonesty during the covid-19 pandemic luke peh lu chang singapore university of social sciences, singapore sabina cerimagic university of sydney, australia sheila conejos singapore university of social sciences, singapore keywords: online proctoring; open book assessment; academic honesty; covid-19. the challenge the unprecedented and unexpected changes caused by covid-19 called for innovative solutions to address online assessment challenges to ensure academic integrity. this reflection looks at two universities from asia and australia, comparing how they addressed the challenges of conducting online assessments and related issues brought about by covid-19. both universities have converted their on-campus assessment to online assessments during the pandemic and will continue with this in the post covid-19 period. the challenges that university a experienced included: • occurrence of several whistle-blowing cases, where students informed the school that their classmates were colluding on whatsapp groups or video communications such as zoom. • students outsourcing their assignments to ‘ghost-writers’ or plagiarising heavily from websites such as coursehero or chegg, which provided model answers for their assignments. • student concerns regarding stability in online exam delivery and privacy trepidations. peh, cerimagic and conejos challenges of running online exams and preventing academic dishonesty during the covid-19 pandemic journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 2 similarly, the challenge for university b was how to run online exams and how to minimise the occurrence of academic dishonesty in the face of a significant rise in the number of cases reported in 2020, indicating a total of 5,172 incidents (36.9% assessments). the response university a was able to roll out its virtual classes swiftly and put some online examination assessment strategies in place. the university adopted timed online assignments (toa) in place of in-campus exams to promote and monitor academic integrity. for high-stake exams requiring professional certifications from accreditation bodies, such as the fire safety management course, proctoring software, such as proctoru, was incorporated with video analytics used to invigilate the exam proceedings. cases where students’ behaviour was suspicious, such as showing roving eyes or moving out of reach of the camera, were flagged out to faculty. in numerous instances, students were called up for investigation or explanation through video communications such as zoom (thiagarajan et al., 2020). since the toa is a contingency and stop-gap measure and is not fool-proof in terms of the credibility of assessment robustness, the lecturers were instructed to set more challenging, open-book styled toas to make colluding or cheating more complex and more detectable or evident. in addition, data analytics were used to identify students who significantly outperformed based on expectations. some countermeasures were undertaken for level 1 courses that are considered susceptible to cheating, such as: a) a list of students with toa marks higher than continuous assessments was sent to their respective head of programmes to run the toa against the ai programme (e.g., plagscan1). b) students suspected of cheating were invited for oral exams to demonstrate their comprehension and competency. c) other applications which assist in detecting plagiarism and cheating that involves ghost-writers (plagscan, neoneuro and ouriginal) were used. these applications 1 website link for proctoring software: plagscan https://www.plagscan.com/en/. peh, cerimagic and conejos challenges of running online exams and preventing academic dishonesty during the covid-19 pandemic journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 3 trace similarities and see the usage of specific or foreign words and changes in style (e.g., tonality, sentence structure, expression, argumentation, grammar, and format). university b utilised the proctoring software atomic jolt and proctoru to facilitate digital exam conversion and to supervise remote invigilated and non-invigilated exams between 2020 and mid-2021. in addition, canvas (the university’s learning and management system (lms)) was used to deliver digital examinations with external proctoring. the transition to online exams included: • the conversion of paper exams. • re-scheduling of online exams. • delivery of online exams (on-campus, remote, invigilated/non-invigilated). • policy changes. • changes to classroom layout. the university found when working with learning development that it was important to build in and emphasise academic integrity in the modules (rundle, curtis and clare, 2019). for example, students are educated about academic dishonesty and the consequences of cheating before exams are run. all students must complete the academic honesty education module at the beginning of the semester aside from attending academic integrity consultations with the library’s peer learning advisors who provide student advice on referencing issues. regarding the concerns over stability in exam delivery and privacy trepidations raised by students, university b chose proctoru and atomic jolt due to their ability to deliver a working online examination solution in a brief timeframe. the university also piloted cadmus in 2021, a user-friendly platform that can be used for assignments and exams, which integrates easily with canvas. cadmus helps academics design authentic, learningcentred assessments with templates; the platform also offers a scaffolded assessment experience. additionally, cadmus offers learning analytics at every level: from individual student data to faculty-level reporting. before students sit their exam using cadmus, learning developers and academics work together to set up a practice exam in cadmus, where students are taken through cadmus peh, cerimagic and conejos challenges of running online exams and preventing academic dishonesty during the covid-19 pandemic journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 4 to familiarise themselves with the platform; this practice also allows learning developers to iron out any technical issues before the actual exam is run. furthermore, university b moved away from final exams and instead staggered assessments throughout the semester, with more frequent and smaller assessments. this ensured that students received more frequent feedback and knew how they performed, enabling them to improve during the semester (cerimagic and khanna, 2020). recommendations during the pandemic, converting courses to online teaching and preparing online assessments using proctoring software was time-consuming. academic dishonesty was a real challenge, especially when the team dealing with this issue was understaffed. both universities experienced challenges in maintaining academic integrity in the context of online assessment, even with the use of technology and other policing strategies. the use of proctoring software to roll out and manage online exams to prevent plagiarism and collusion during the pandemic had a few substantial limitations (smith et al., 2017; cerimagic and hasan, 2019), including insufficient question types, inadequate analysis, lack of collaborative question bank function, and limited applicability to assessments that are more analytical or technical. proctoring software offers some benefits but exploring learning development strategies that will improve online assessments and provide alternative solutions that prevent academic dishonesty is still a better option. learning development plays a significant role in ensuring academic integrity for online assessments aside from proctoring software. for instance, there is the need to develop authentic online evaluations that should include scenario-based questions or introduce case studies that require a higher order of thinking and avoid questions that need a listing of answers. references cerimagic, s. and hasan, r. (2019) ‘online exam vigilantes at australian universities: student academic fraudulence and the role of universities to counteract’, universal peh, cerimagic and conejos challenges of running online exams and preventing academic dishonesty during the covid-19 pandemic journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 5 journal of educational research, 7(4), pp.929-936. https://doi.org/10.13189/ujer.2019.070403. cerimagic, s. and khanna, p. (2020) ‘transforming assessment: critical reflections around resolving tensions between assessment for learning and of learning’, australasian society for computers in learning in tertiary education (ascilite), 2020 conference. university of new england, armidale, nsw 30 november-1 december. rundle, k., curtis, g. j. and clare, j. (2019) ‘why students don’t engage in contract cheating’, frontiers in psychology. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.02229. smith, e., clarke, l., carmona, p. and cerimagic, s. (2017) ‘academic fraudulence in online degrees and exams at australian universities’, international journal of research and development organization, 3(2), pp.108-119. thiagarajan, l. b., zhi, l. j., peh, l. c. l. and low, w. p. (2020) ‘continuing stem education amid disruption due to pandemic’, elearning forum asia 2020. the chinese university of hong kong, hong kong 7-8 december. author details luke lu chang peh is the vice dean of the school of science and technology, singapore university of social sciences. he is responsible for the quality assurance and accreditation of his school’s programmes in the engineering, ict & digital media, and built environment clusters. his research interests are in integrated digital delivery and smart buildings. he co-authored ‘a review and scientometric analysis of global building information modelling (bim) research in the architecture, engineering and construction (aec) industry’ and won the best paper award from the buildings journal. sabina cerimagic is a senior lecturer and deputy academic director of the business codesign (bcd) team, at the sydney business school, at the university of sydney. sabina is supervising the bcd team and working closely with the team to ensure that agreed projects are delivered on time, to a high-quality standard, on budget and to the agreed project specifications. her main areas of research are: project management, change https://doi.org/10.13189/ujer.2019.070403 https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.02229 peh, cerimagic and conejos challenges of running online exams and preventing academic dishonesty during the covid-19 pandemic journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 6 management, leadership and motivation, cross-cultural project management and training, curriculum redesign, curriculum renewal through design thinking, systems thinking, designbased research and pedagogy in education and technology integration. sheila conejos is a senior lecturer and head of programme of the bsc facilities management, bsc facilities and events management, and graduate diploma in facilities management programmes of the school of science and technology in the singapore university of social sciences. sheila has more than 25 years of both professional and academic experience as a trained architect, urban planner, forensic architect, urban/building conservator, facility manager, and professional and sustainable development specialist. she is an active researcher and has published two books, a book chapter, and in a number of journals related to sustainable development and architecture. challenges of running online exams and preventing academic dishonesty during the covid-19 pandemic the challenge the response recommendations references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special issue 22: compendium of innovative practice october 2021 ________________________________________________________________________ pandemic perceptions: redefining the presence and value of one-to-one interactions and learning development in troublesome times heather barker university of surrey robert walsha university of surrey keywords: learning development perceptions; online learning; one-to-one interactions; hybrid learning; student engagement; covid-19. the challenge needing to react swiftly to the implications of lockdown, moving our learning development service (comprising academic skills and development, and maths and statistics advice) online felt relatively straightforward considering that virtual appointments had been offered pre-covid. despite significantly increasing one-to-one appointments to help students adjust, uptake was minimal from the original lockdown to the end of academic year 201920. we recognised the important role that learning development (ld) should play in helping students to successfully transition to unexpected learning contexts. anticipating potential factors affecting student learning engagement – ranging from technology to wellbeing concerns, as encapsulated by gillis and krull (2020) – our concerns included how we could: • maximise engagement with ld in a disrupted educational environment. • recreate and maintain informal and constructive relationships online for one-to-one interactions. barker and walsha pandemic perceptions: redefining the presence and value of one-to-one interactions and learning development in troublesome times journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 2 an emerging consideration was whether we could capitalise on this learning disjuncture to encourage students to be more open to rethinking their relationship with and approaches to learning. the response a priority was ensuring that support and guidance were visible and, in the changed context, remained relevant and accessible (raaper and brown, 2020). plans to enhance access to the service via a ‘one-stop shop’ module in the university’s virtual learning environment (vle) were accelerated by the pandemic, and this went live at the beginning of the 2020/21 academic year. having an online focal point undoubtedly raised the service’s profile, not least with increased appointment bookings (which had already been picking up from summer 2020). the initial lockdown provided a spur to simplify and make our supporting guidance on how to make the most of an appointment more visually engaging. our aim was to better articulate learning expectations before, during and after sessions, driven by a desire to both improve clarity generally and address specifics to engaging successfully in the virtual/covid context. this guidance somewhat recontextualised the instructional aspect of ‘teaching presence’ for effective online learning identified in the community of inquiry (coi) framework (garrison et al., 2000). whilst this framework primarily focuses on teaching, social and cognitive presence when engaging students asynchronously online, and did not directly inform the design of our interactions, we have nevertheless found it helpful to consider its relevance as part of the process of rationalising and making sense of our online synchronous experiences. we found that being clearer about the learning design, purpose and expectations of virtual one-to-ones helped to better define students’ participatory role. hosting the revised guidance on the vle may have contributed to a noticeable increase in students’ self-regulation (zimmerman, 2002) in proactively managing their appointments, for example, cancelling or notifying us when unable to attend, in contrast with pre-covid times, when failure to attend was more commonplace. additionally, critical to the success of our online appointments was a design imperative to create a safe, welcoming space for students in challenging times, one in which to explore barker and walsha pandemic perceptions: redefining the presence and value of one-to-one interactions and learning development in troublesome times journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 3 concerns and (re)connect with learning experiences (raaper and brown, 2020). positive connections seemed to be established, through email communication preand postsession and via informal conversations at the beginning of appointments, laying the foundations for constructive engagement. sharing experiences of coping with the pandemic circumstances appeared to encourage empathetic and thoughtful exchanges, with students responding well to the idea that we were also learning significantly from these interactions. perhaps dialogue was aided by seeing each other’s names on screen; it certainly resonated in post-session feedback, in which students frequently mentioned their tutor by name, for example, ‘charles was really helpful and positive’, ‘logan really helped me to see where i could improve sections of my writing’ and ‘ororo was so patient and lovely to talk to’. these factors may have empowered students’ ‘social presence’, as per the coi framework (garrison and arbaugh, 2007; cleveland-innes, 2020), whereby establishing a sense of trust in the interaction elevated the quality of engagement, something the team consistently observed throughout 2020-21.the immersive online experience seemed conducive to creating a culture of mutual learning exchange, with the virtual environment feeling more equitable in comparison to its physical equivalent – less hierarchical due to the informality of the appointment setting when working from home (murray et al., 2020). conversely, appointments afforded greater privacy in contrast with the potential distractions experienced in the physical space on campus. students demonstrated increased self-efficacy (zimmerman, 2000) in shaping conversations, for example, by bringing ideas and possible solutions and using the appointment to sound these out. naturally, issues of confidence and uncertainty remained, but these were often matched by an increased ability to engage meaningfully and constructively, in some respects demonstrating the ‘cognitive presence’ aspect of the coi framework (garrison and arbaugh, 2007; cleveland-innes, 2020), possibly because of the enhanced sense of ‘safe space’. this became a foundation upon which to explore threshold concepts (meyer et al., 2010) related to the students’ approaches to learning, given their greater openness to unpacking difficult aspects and willingness to change perceptions. the value of one-to-one interactions for engendering revelatory, breakthrough moments is well understood in ld, but online this seemed both more frequent and deepseated. it seems plausible, in the covid context, that many may have valued our one-tobarker and walsha pandemic perceptions: redefining the presence and value of one-to-one interactions and learning development in troublesome times journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 4 ones as a substitute for the loss of some of the more social dimensions of learning, such as impromptu peer support. evidence from post-appointment surveys confirms extremely positive experiences, most significantly in comments reflecting affective and emotional value (e.g., from content analysis, ‘made to feel comfortable’, ‘listened to’, ‘stress-reducing’, ‘confidence-building’, ‘patient’, ‘understanding’, ‘kind’, ‘calming’, ‘reassuring’, ‘friendly’, ‘encouraging’, ‘nonjudgmental’). this appears to validate efforts to design an engaging, constructive online environment as a response to pandemic-induced disjunctures. recommendations in making recommendations, we recognise the variations in ld practice across the sector. in our specific context, creating a strong vle presence proved invaluable in enhancing accessibility and engagement, where hitherto service information had been dispersed and difficult to locate. the module was designed holistically, interlocking all aspects of service provision, resources and discussion forums; whilst focusing on appointments, the design of these ran hand-in-hand with considering the whole. going forward, it will be important for services to continue to evaluate their provision. beyond the pandemic, or as we learn to better adapt within it, will our students continue to value interactions in such emotional and affective terms? we should aim to ensure we do not lose the focus, intensity and positivity of engagement experienced during the pandemic, while finding ways to reach learners who may have disengaged. in the context of moving to dual forms of delivery (in our case prioritising online sessions but reinstating a face-to-face ‘second tier’ option), we would recommend a comparative analysis of provision to explore how positive experiences in each setting could be adapted to enhance the other. as stated, we found it helpful to reconceptualise aspects of the coi theoretical framework to the synchronous one-to-one context as an exercise in rationalising our approach. although there has been some research into using the framework for virtual one-to-ones barker and walsha pandemic perceptions: redefining the presence and value of one-to-one interactions and learning development in troublesome times journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 5 (stenbom et al., 2016), we would suggest that the pedagogy of online one-to-one ld in higher education is ripe for further investigation. references cleveland-innes, m. (2020) ‘the community of inquiry theoretical framework, designing collaborative online and blended learning’, in beetham, h. and sharpe, r. (eds.) rethinking pedagogy for a digital age: principles and practice of design. 3rd edn. new york: routledge, taylor & francis group, pp.85-102. garrison, d.r. and arbaugh, j.b. (2007) ‘researching the community of inquiry framework: review, issues, and future directions’, internet and higher education, 10, pp. 157-172. available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.iheduc.2007.04.001 (accessed: 25 august 2021). garrison, d.r., anderson, t. and archer, w. (2000) ‘critical inquiry in a text-based environment: computer conferencing in higher education’, the internet and higher education 2(2-3), pp. 87-105. available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/s10967516(00)00016-6 (accessed: 25 august 2021). gillis, a. and krull, l.m. (2020) ‘covid-19 remote learning transition in spring 2020: class structures, student perceptions, and inequality in college course’, teaching sociology, 48(4), pp. 283-299. available at: https://doi.org/10.1177/0092055x20954263 (accessed: 25 august 2021). meyer, j.h.f., land, r. and baillie, c. (eds.) (2010) threshold concepts and transformational learning. sense publishers: rotterdam. murray, c., heinz, m., munday, i., keane, e., flynn, n. connolly, c., hall, t. and macruairc, g. (2020) ‘reconceptualising relatedness in education in ‘distanced’ times’, european journal of teacher education, 43(4), pp. 488-502. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/02619768.2020.1806820 (accessed: 25 august 2021). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.iheduc.2007.04.001 https://doi.org/10.1016/s1096-7516(00)00016-6 https://doi.org/10.1016/s1096-7516(00)00016-6 https://doi.org/10.1177/0092055x20954263 https://doi.org/10.1080/02619768.2020.1806820 barker and walsha pandemic perceptions: redefining the presence and value of one-to-one interactions and learning development in troublesome times journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 6 raaper, r. and brown, c. (2020) ‘the covid-19 pandemic and the dissolution of the university campus: implications for student support practice’, journal of professional capital and community, 5(3/4), pp. 343-349. available at: https://doi.org/10.1108/jpcc-06-2020-0032 (accessed: 25 august 2021). stenbom, s., jansson, m. and hulkko, a. (2016) ‘revising the community of inquiry framework for the analysis of one-to-one online learning relationships’, the international review of research in open and distributed learning, 17(3), pp.36– 53. available at: https://doi.org/10.19173/irrodl.v17i3.2068 (accessed: 25 august 2021). zimmerman, b.j. (2000) ‘self-efficacy: an essential motive to learn’, contemporary educational psychology, 25, pp. 82–91. available at: https://doi.org/10.1006/ceps.1999.1016 (accessed: 25 august 2021) zimmerman, b.j. (2002) ‘becoming a self-regulated learner: an overview’, theory into practice, 41(2), pp. 64–70. available at: https://doi.org/10.1207/s15430421tip4102_2 (accessed: 25 august 2021) author details heather barker is teaching fellow in learning development (information literacy) at the university of surrey. her current interests are in the holistic development of learners’ academic and information literacies, with a particular focus on engaging with generation z. robert walsha is head of learning development at the university of surrey. his current areas of interest include exploring ways to rethink how learning development can more holistically engender genuinely responsible, informed and confident learners. https://doi.org/10.1108/jpcc-06-2020-0032 https://doi.org/10.19173/irrodl.v17i3.2068 https://doi.org/10.1006/ceps.1999.1016 https://doi.org/10.1207/s15430421tip4102_2 pandemic perceptions: redefining the presence and value of one-to-one interactions and learning development in troublesome times the challenge the response recommendations references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 26: special edi issue february 2023 ________________________________________________________________________ ©2023 the author(s) (cc-by 4.0) listening works: using the listening rooms methodology to explore diversity emma heron sheffield hallam university, uk helen j. parkin sheffield hallam university, uk abstract this case study presents how two innovative methods have been used at a uk university to explore the lived experiences of minoritised groups. the listening rooms project collects data through friendship conversations between friends, and places key stakeholders with the audience and influence to affect change at the heart of the data analysis process. using these methods creates safe spaces for minoritised groups to share their lived experiences in a meaningful and empowering way. here, we describe how the project has learned from the experiences of bame students, lqbtq+ staff and students, disadvantaged males, and female employees to create a better place to study and work. the study found distinct differences in the themes covered between cohorts despite fairly consistent conversation ‘prompts’, but also some common themes such as the need for better role models for minoritised groups and better training and guidance in challenging negative behaviours. the study concludes that listening, using these methods, provides a depth of understanding of the lived experiences of minoritised groups, resulting in real and impactful change. keywords: listening; qualitative research methods; minoritised groups; equality, diversity and inclusion heron and parkin listening works: using the listening rooms methodology to explore diversity journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 2 introduction knowing more about how individuals really experience university affords us an opportunity to appreciate, understand and better celebrate the many dimensions of equality, diversity and inclusion. capturing lived experiences gives us a better chance of bringing about meaningful and effective change precisely because our practices are based on authentic evidence. one large northern university, driven by its mission to be a genuinely inclusive institution for employees and students alike, has been heavily involved in work on student and staff equality, diversity and inclusion (edi) matters, from responding to the regulatory requirements of the access and participation plan and working towards charter mark status (stonewall, athena swan, and race equality charter) through to exploring courselevel experiences and curriculum design through subject or discipline edi lenses. whilst these types of pursuits are perhaps not particular to this specific university, what makes this institution different from others is its adoption of an innovative methodology deliberately designed to listen better to the everyday voices and experiences of its staff and students, allowing them to share, in a safe space, their lived reality of being from a minoritised group, including bame students, lgbtq+ staff and students, disadvantaged males, and female employees. in effect, this method has been used to give those groups the necessary institutional focus both to acknowledge their lived experience and also, crucially, to support positive change. our listening method has proved successful in terms of individuals feeling authenticated in their experiences and ‘changemakers’ feeling legitimated through their immersion in real voice data. this case study reveals how data collection and analysis (through friendship listening and democratic data immersion, respectively) has enabled exploration, celebration and/or resolution of edi matters. key findings and recommendations undertaken in the past few years are shared. method the listening rooms project (parkin and heron, 2022) comprises two novel and innovative methods for collecting and analysing qualitative data at scale, and is employed widely to explore the experiences of minoritised groups in order to affect positive change. heron and parkin listening works: using the listening rooms methodology to explore diversity journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 3 the combination of these two methods is driven by kline’s (1999) values of equality, respect and inclusion, with the resultant approach a fitting way of addressing issues of inclusion, diversity and equality in higher education (he). the project has full ethics approval at the host institution. data collection friendship pairs undertake a guided, recorded conversation without a researcher present (heron, 2020). early discussions with the project lead (for example, an edi lead in a department) determine the nature of these conversations through the development of prompt cards. participants are invited to ‘bring a friend' and together the pair complete a consent form and an equality monitoring form and are given the opportunity to ask questions of the research team before embarking on the conversation. the necessary ‘kit’ needed for these conversations comprises six prompt cards, a timer and a recording device. the participants work their way through the set of cards over an hour and, when completed and before departing, each fill in a debrief form sharing their views of the method. data analysis round table analysis (parkin and heron, 2022) identifies key stakeholders and invites them to a collaborative thematic exploration of the data set. during round table analysis, the facilitator will guide the stakeholder group to identify priorities for discussion in order to generate an evidence base for the development of findings and recommendations. the sessions are action focused – stakeholders co-create findings and recommendations on the understanding that these are realistic, achievable, and within their sphere of influence in order to generate real, positive change. exploration of the experiences of minoritised groups is a challenging area, particularly when the ‘researcher’ is not part of the minoritised group. it could be argued that ‘outsider’ researchers have a limited understanding of the factors affecting the lived experiences of minoritised groups. for this reason, round table analysis seeks to include stakeholders from the minoritised group in heron and parkin listening works: using the listening rooms methodology to explore diversity journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 4 question so that they can bring their lived experiences to the table and contextualise some of the experiences shared during the listening rooms conversations. listening rooms projects exploring equality, diversity and inclusion black, asian and minority ethnic (bame) students sector evidence tells us that there is a serious attainment gap between bame students and their white counterparts, with pre-pandemic statistics showing a 13% attainment gap (universities uk, 2019). this case study uses the term bame, which is consistent with sector reporting, notably in the race equality charter (advance he, 2022). addressing this gap is a key priority for universities, and research to understand the causes is an important part of addressing and reducing the gap. as a result, this university used the listening rooms method to listen to its bame students, with the findings from the research being used to inform the development of its race equality charter, aiming to help develop cultural and systematic improvements to racial disparities for its staff and students. participants this listening rooms project listened to the experiences of 23 friendship pairs from one academic department. nine stakeholders attended the round table analysis. findings and recommendations the main themes emerging from this project were confidence, success and understanding the lived experiences of bame students. students derived confidence from their peers and particularly from those who share their lived experiences and backgrounds. they also recognised the importance of a variety of experiences to develop a sense of belonging and feelings of happiness, including but not limited to, sports societies, academic groups, and social media: the people that you surround yourself with, really affect and have an impact on your confidence big time. and events as well, oh god yes. […] i think what you learn from those difficult times makes you stronger and helps you to know where you're going. heron and parkin listening works: using the listening rooms methodology to explore diversity journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 5 to support students with this, the study recommended that students be provided with opportunities to engage with role models and alumni who reflect the lived experiences and backgrounds of students and can share stories of success. sharing students’ stories with the wider student body could also help to validate feelings and experiences, and create a stronger sense of community. students experienced microaggressions in a number of environments, with some students having encountered difficulties obtaining employment because of their name: say when it comes to applying for jobs, for instance. we have both experienced this, like applying for the same jobs. me being a white british female, i was sort of accepted and you found it difficult because your first name is [redacted]. working with employers through employability fairs to raise awareness of unconscious bias could lead to positive changes in recruitment practices. there was also recognition that white privilege exists, and that bame individuals would face difficulties that their white peers would never experience. the study recommended promotion of inclusive practices and acknowledgement of the ‘white advantage’ through curriculum and structure, and that the promotion of existing positive bystander materials could support the student community in challenging negative behaviours. lesbian, gay, bi, trans and queer (lgbtq+) the lgbtq+ steering group at the university sought a better understanding of lgbtq+ (stonewall, 2022) staff’s lived experiences, informing an lgbtq+ action plan and the university’s equality objectives in order to move towards a more inclusive workplace. in addition, the students’ union sought to ensure that every student experienced fair treatment, equally, without fear of discrimination. participants these projects explored lgbtq+ staff’s (six pairs) and students’ (four pairs) experiences. six stakeholders attended the round table analysis for the student project and seven for the staff project. heron and parkin listening works: using the listening rooms methodology to explore diversity journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 6 findings and recommendations for staff, the main themes emerging from their friendship conversations were about the impact of heteronormative views and the notions of ‘identity’ and ‘belonging’. staff shared many positive experiences of working at the university and feeling confident and comfortable to be their authentic selves amongst colleagues, but there was a sense that there was more work to be done across the university to achieve a more inclusive culture. staff shared experiences of heteronormative assumptions that are regularly made: what affects my sense of belonging? other people’s assumptions, constant assumptions. i think we’ve covered that, probably, but their kind of, like you said, straight, cis, white assumptions about how the world is and how it operates, and everyone’s experienced that. the study recommended that people be encouraged to consider the importance of language and unlearn the gendered biases of language, potentially through a relaunch of the university’s lgbtq+ network. it was also recommended that workshops and training be provided to encourage all staff to actively reflect on and address their biases against the lgbtq+ community through engagement with, and demonstration of, equality objectives and institutional values. there were some examples where staff had had experiences of homophobia and microaggressions, and while some of these behaviours were challenged and managed through appropriate processes and practices, some behaviours remained unchallenged: i think allyship has been passive. i think people feel unconfident challenging, or knowing what is homophobic behaviour, and i feel like the university doesn’t have a clear grip of what to do in a situation where that happens. i think it’s quite difficult to work out exactly what you’re supposed to do if you want to raise an issue. the study recommended raising awareness of how to challenge inappropriate behaviours and promotion of existing edi training through an improved new starter induction programme and through wider staff development programmes such as the university's leadership programme. heron and parkin listening works: using the listening rooms methodology to explore diversity journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 7 student participants discussed mental health issues within the lgbtq+ community, and it was apparent that many of the participants had experienced their own mental health challenges: at that point, when i started, happiness very much did look like being free of anxiety and being free of depression because just that in itself was ecstatic for me, not feeling like shit all the time. the study acknowledged that there was a need to review current wellbeing provision at the university with regard to support for mental and sexual health for the lgbtq+ community. discussion around ‘risky behaviours’ such as drug-taking was prevalent, although further research to explore this issue is necessary for the university to respond appropriately for different cohorts of students. i used substance abuse as a response to my trauma, when i was late teens, early 20s and that was more alcohol and party drugs, and it was happy happy, happy, i wasn’t sitting in my room with a bottle of whisky crying, but it was let’s just pound this into oblivion. the study also revealed a need for safe spaces for the lgbtq+ community that are not focused on alcohol, and recommended that the university and the students’ union work together to develop such spaces. disadvantaged male students disadvantaged males, defined as males from areas of low higher education participation, low household income or low socioeconomic status (office for students, 2018), were identified as a priority cohort for this university and listening rooms were employed to explore their experiences. given ‘[a]ccess and participation plans set out how higher education providers will improve equality of opportunity for underrepresented groups to access, succeed in and progress from higher education’ (office for students, 2018), the listening rooms findings have informed the development of actions in the university's own access and participation plan. participants heron and parkin listening works: using the listening rooms methodology to explore diversity journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 8 this listening rooms project listened to the experiences of 13 friendship pairs. fourteen stakeholders attended the round table analysis. findings and recommendations this cohort of students held a wide variety of views on what success looked and felt like, and such discussions suggested that he needed to ‘open up’ the conversation on success and reframe failure to be a more normalised part of the student journey. the study recommended open discourse on notions of success and failure, particularly through meetings with personal tutors. social mobility and the ‘bettering of oneself’ was a strong theme for this cohort. aspirations were very high and there was a belief that anything can be achieved with hard work, echoing blower’s (2020) belief that the disadvantaged have high aspirations: it’s about the time and effort you put into it. the time and effort you put into something personally beats all of the skill and stuff. like if you have a mindset of where you want to be, no one should stop you from getting there or doing that thing. reframing discourse in the sector about aspirations for disadvantaged males to challenge the existing narrative was recommended. this cohort looked to role models but also saw themselves as role models, although many suffered imposter syndrome. embracing the power of the existing cohort as role models to encourage further participation in he was recommended. part-time working was often an everyday necessity for this cohort but was perceived as a barrier to their success. this data set showed what skills these students had gained from their part-time work, and in particular, there was strong evidence of increased confidence: i think jobs help massively. i became more confident when i started doing pub work, waitressing and bar work, because you are forced into a situation where you have to make conversation with people, you also have to deal with complaints and things like that and it’s really good character building and it does bring out a lot of confidence in you. heron and parkin listening works: using the listening rooms methodology to explore diversity journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 9 exploring ways in which the university could embrace the skills developed through parttime work as part of the curriculum was seen as highly beneficial. female employees in order to address gender inequality, the university was committed to achieving the transformed charter (previously the athena swan charter). to identify and address barriers to progression that affect women, the listening rooms project explored female employee experiences across the university. participants this listening rooms project listened to the experiences of five friendship pairs. eight stakeholders attended the round table analysis. findings and recommendations analysis focused on career progression, career development and ‘dominant behaviours’. participants expressed concern over the loss (and subsequent absence) of women in senior roles at the university, in particular at university leadership team level, resulting in a distinct lack of role models. it was felt that strong female role models were, in fact, missing at all levels of the university: since i started at [the university] it has been leaking women in leadership like crazy. like women at senior staff grade seem to leave this place really quickly. in terms of career progression and development, women felt that their ability to work parttime was limited by overwhelming workloads meaning that they felt they needed to work more hours to get the job done. this often led to women increasing their hours against their wishes so that they got paid for the additional hours that they needed to work: i returned to work part-time and on both occasions, i ended up increasing my hours initially just by them creeping up, and you're doing more work but then being offered more hours and thinking, well, i may as well because i'm doing them anyway so why not get paid for them? i personally find part-time work difficult to manage. heron and parkin listening works: using the listening rooms methodology to explore diversity journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 10 women also felt that working part time had a negative impact on their opportunities for career progression. participants articulated a desire to achieve a good work/life balance, with some more able to achieve this than others. good management practices were felt to make a significant difference to staff experiences: i think that it’s quite hard to see opportunities for progression for people who aren’t able to work full-time. i don’t see many jobs that seem easily – that appear to be suitable for part-time work so, yeah. i think that feel a bit of a challenge to me. there was a belief that how certain behaviours were received (and accepted/rejected) differed depending on whether the behaviour was displayed by a man or a woman: i've had incidences where there's maybe been a male in the department who asks those challenging questions, plays devil's advocate and the manager at the time has said, oh, we need to invite that person in to the meeting because he's got all these great ideas and he stirs things up and he gets us thinking whereas the female has done similar the same manager has, oh, you know, what can we do about her? creating space for conversations around behavioural expectations and how these differed for men and women was seen as necessary through the development of internal programmes. creation of a clear framework for how negative behaviours are challenged and addressed was felt to be a gap that needed addressing. conclusion for groups of students and staff from minoritised groups, these methods offer real potential. participants involved in providing data valued the opportunity to be heard: [the method] helped to feel more comfortable and open to telling the truth. it feels as though you actually care. for stakeholders involved in the round table analysis sessions, this was an empowering method to affect positive change: heron and parkin listening works: using the listening rooms methodology to explore diversity journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 11 it made me realise that we are sitting on a huge amount of knowledge and understanding of our students that you cannot see in the metrics. whilst all these projects used a consistent set of themed prompt cards, the discussions were very different between cohorts. for example, discussion around the importance of part-time working alongside study was common in conversations with disadvantaged males but missing from other cohorts. similarly, unprompted discussion around ‘risky behaviours’ such as drug taking were prevalent in the lgbtq+ student conversations and completely absent from all other cohorts. this shows us that the methods allow participants to explore themes which are important to them and share experiences in ways that other methods may not allow. there were also some consistencies between each of these cohorts, such as discussions around (a lack of) role models and the need to challenge negative behaviours. this shows that application of good inclusive practices such as robust guidance and training on positive bystander action and deployment of diverse role-models in a variety of contexts can have benefits for all minoritised groups, and as such these recommendations have been implemented at the university to good effect. table 1. summary of findings and recommendations. findings recommendations black, asian and minority ethnic confidence is derived from peer groups and those who share lived experiences. provide opportunities to engage with role models and alumni who reflect lived experiences. sense of belonging is developed through variety of experiences and engagement with wider social opportunities validate feelings and experiences through sharing students’ stories. microaggressions were experienced in a number of environments. raise awareness of unconscious bias in a variety of contexts within and outside of the university. recognition that white privilege exists. promotion of inclusive practices and acknowledgement of the ‘white advantage’ through curriculum and structure. lgbtq+ awareness of heteronormative views and notions of ‘identity’ and belonging’. raise awareness of the importance of language and unlearn the gendered biases of language. heron and parkin listening works: using the listening rooms methodology to explore diversity journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 12 many positive experiences of working at the university but a sense that more could be done to achieve a fully inclusive culture. provision of workshops and training on equality objectives and institutional values. some staff had experiences homophobia and microaggressions. raise awareness of how to challenge inappropriate behaviours and promotion of existing edi training. students experienced a variety of mental health challenges. review current wellbeing provision for mental and sexual health in the lqbtq+ community. the study also revealed a need for safe spaces for the lgbtq+ community that are not focused on alcohol. the university and the students’ union to work together to develop safe, inclusive spaces on campus. disadvantaged males this cohort of students held a wide variety of views on what success looked and felt like. to enable open discourse on notions of success and failure, particularly through personal tutoring. social mobility and the ‘bettering of oneself’ was a strong theme for this cohort. aspirations were very high. reframing discourse in the sector about aspirations for disadvantaged males to challenge the existing narrative. this cohort looked to role models but also saw themselves as role models, although many suffered imposter syndrome. embrace the power of the existing cohort as role models to encourage further participation in he. part-time working was necessary for this cohort but perceived as a barrier to their success. explore ways in which the university could embrace the skills developed through part-time work as part of the curriculum. female employees participants expressed concern over lack of women in senior roles at the university, in particular at university leadership team level. explore ways to increase visibility of women at all levels of responsibility. women felt that their ability to work part-time was limited by overwhelming workloads. provision of mentoring and coaching for women, with a focus on managing workloads. there was a belief that how certain behaviours were received (and accepted/rejected) differed depending on whether the behaviour was displayed by a man or a woman. creating space for conversations around behavioural expectations and how these differed for men and women. heron and parkin listening works: using the listening rooms methodology to explore diversity journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 13 references advance he (2022) race equality charter. available at https://www.advancehe.ac.uk/equality-charters/race-equality-charter (accessed: 6 october 2022). blower, a. (2020) navigating the aspiration trap: white working-class students and widening access to higher education. available at https://www.sunoutreach.org/news/navigating-the-aspiration-trap-white-workingclass-students-and-widening-access-to-higher-education/ (accessed: 19 july 2022). heron, e. (2020) ‘friendship as method: reflections on a new approach to understanding student experiences in higher education’, journal of further and higher education, 44(3), pp. 393-407. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/0309877x.2018.1541977 (accessed: 4 november 2022). kline, n (1999) time to think. listening to ignite the human mind. london: cassell illustrated. office for students (2018) access and participation plans. available at https://www.officeforstudents.org.uk/advice-and-guidance/promoting-equalopportunities/access-and-participation-plans/ (accessed: 19 july 2022). parkin, h. and heron, e. (2022) ‘innovative methods for positive institutional change: the listening rooms project and student and staff “voice”’, educational developments 23(3). available at: https://shura.shu.ac.uk/30849/ (accessed: 6 november 2022) stonewall (2022) list of lgbtq+ terms. available at https://www.stonewall.org.uk/helpadvice/information-and-resources/faqs-and-glossary/list-lgbtq-terms (accessed: 4 november 2022). universities uk (2019) black, asian and minority ethnic student attainment at uk universities: #closingthegap. available at https://www.universitiesuk.ac.uk/sites/default/files/field/downloads/2021-07/bamestudent-attainment.pdf (accessed: 19 july 2022). https://www.advance-he.ac.uk/equality-charters/race-equality-charter https://www.advance-he.ac.uk/equality-charters/race-equality-charter https://www.sunoutreach.org/news/navigating-the-aspiration-trap-white-working-class-students-and-widening-access-to-higher-education/ https://www.sunoutreach.org/news/navigating-the-aspiration-trap-white-working-class-students-and-widening-access-to-higher-education/ https://doi.org/10.1080/0309877x.2018.1541977 https://www.officeforstudents.org.uk/advice-and-guidance/promoting-equal-opportunities/access-and-participation-plans/ https://www.officeforstudents.org.uk/advice-and-guidance/promoting-equal-opportunities/access-and-participation-plans/ https://shura.shu.ac.uk/30849/ https://www.stonewall.org.uk/help-advice/information-and-resources/faqs-and-glossary/list-lgbtq-terms https://www.stonewall.org.uk/help-advice/information-and-resources/faqs-and-glossary/list-lgbtq-terms https://www.universitiesuk.ac.uk/sites/default/files/field/downloads/2021-07/bame-student-attainment.pdf https://www.universitiesuk.ac.uk/sites/default/files/field/downloads/2021-07/bame-student-attainment.pdf heron and parkin listening works: using the listening rooms methodology to explore diversity journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 14 author details emma heron is the head of teaching and learning enhancement in the college of social sciences and arts at sheffield hallam university. her portfolio covers teaching quality and student engagement, and she co-leads listening rooms across and beyond sheffield hallam university. helen j. parkin is a senior lecturer in research, evaluation and student engagement. she is responsible for conducting research into and evaluation of student experience and engagement across sheffield hallam university. she co-leads listening rooms alongside emma. licence ©2023 the author(s). this is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (cc-by 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. see http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. journal of learning development in higher education (jldhe) is a peer-reviewed open access journal published by the association for learning development in higher education (aldinhe). journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special edition 25: aldinhe conference proceedings and reflections october 2022 ________________________________________________________________________ innovative approaches to sustainability skills development: a crowd-sourcing workshop iain cross london school of hygiene and tropical medicine, uk alina congreve independent researcher, uk presentation abstract there is currently significant interest in how students are taught about climate change in higher education. students in subjects from law and chemistry, to fashion and business, are looking at climate risks, how to deal with uncertainty and the need for more systemic approaches. the work of learning developers has arguably tended to prioritise ‘traditional’ academic skills (such as academic writing, referencing, information searching and numeracy). however, there is a growing expectation from students, government and employers that graduates develop a range of advanced skills, such as project management, data visualisation and problem solving. these skills will help students actively contribute to building a more sustainable and equitable future. this challenges learning developers to find new and innovative ways to support students’ learning, as they acquire these skills that are increasingly expected in society. the aim of this interactive workshop was for the learning developers participating to be empowered to engage with these changes in their own institutions. much of the facilitated discussion looked at new approaches to learning development that support education for sustainability. it comprised a series of mini-presentations of case-studies derived from original research into teaching climate change including 35 in-depth interviews. the workshop drew on the presenters’ research to crowdsource solutions from the learning developer community to key challenges. how can we foster creativity, innovation and systemic thinking in graduates? how can advanced skills for sustainability be scaffolded in the university curriculum? the workshop is designed to be of interest to learning cross and congreve innovative approaches to sustainability skills development: a crowd-sourcing workshop journal of learning development in higher education special issue 25: october 2022 2 developers with experience in supporting education for sustainability, and those new to the topic. workshop design and delivery the session began by us introducing ourselves and what drew us to the issue. after a gap of two years of meeting in person, we designed and delivered the session to be highly interactive and to encourage all the participants to engage with the activities. to frame the discussion and to spark ideas, we began with a short presentation, drawing key examples from our research. these examples briefly examined some of the diverse disciplines which are including climate change as part of their curriculum to illustrate the range of approaches across different degree programmes and in contrasting institutions. in the first activity, which lasted 20 minutes, the participants reflected on the case studies to identify how learning developers can support the development of students' high-level skills to engage in sustainability and climate change and be effective change agents, regardless of their disciplinary setting. participants were sitting on tables focused on the groups’ chosen skill (project management, data management and digital skills) and considered learning activities that develop that skill across a range of disciplines. we then gave a short presentation about scaffolding sustainability skills. our research has shown that scaffolding higher-level skills throughout degrees is vital to ensure students are well-prepared for working on live projects and with external stakeholders. we illustrated this through sharing examples of a partnership approach involving a real-world, workbased assessment. we also shared some of the problems caused for students and learning developers by a lack of scaffolding in degree programmes. the second group activity built on this, focusing on scaffolding skills to engage in live projects. in this activity, the participants in the workshop explored how the learning activities they designed in the first activity can be embedded across different levels of study. they focused on applying the principle of scaffolding, by exploring how much, and what type, of support is required in the early stages of a degree and how this can be gradually reduced as students progress through their studies. it reflected the varied work of learning developers: with individual students who seek advice; and working with subject academics and student groups. this part of the session highlighted the importance of a cross and congreve innovative approaches to sustainability skills development: a crowd-sourcing workshop journal of learning development in higher education special issue 25: october 2022 3 joined-up approach to curriculum development, and provided participants with ideas for how they can contribute towards embedding sustainability skills across a degree programme. at the end of this activity we returned to plenary discussion to share key points from each table and to engage in a facilitated ‘what next?’ conversation. this was to identify mutual areas of interest among the group and to consider how to take forward the thinking in the session to be of wider benefit to the learning development community. participants were encouraged to articulate what their needs were and what materials and resources they would find most useful. community response ‘for my institution, integrating social justice, sustainability and zero-carbon initiatives is a requirement of all curricula. as learning developers, this is something we not only need to respond to, but something we need to support. i really enjoyed this session and the activity that iain and alina had prepared as it paved a way forwards for this. my only disappointment was that the session would have benefitted from more attendees to share ideas but this is something very much out of your control.’ ‘the session was a very useful forum for sharing and hearing ideas on developing activities with a sustainability/climate crisis focus. the best part for me was that some of those discussions carried on outside the session and have led to making contacts for sharing practice and ideas with lders from other universities. i’d love to see more of how ld (learning developers) can engage with these issues that cut across disciplines.’ the following summarises the responses generated by the workshop participants: activity 1: developing advanced skills. reflect on the skill that you have chosen, and consider what approaches are effective for building this skill among students? group 1 (data management and digital skills) cross and congreve innovative approaches to sustainability skills development: a crowd-sourcing workshop journal of learning development in higher education special issue 25: october 2022 4 ● what do you already know? ● where are you confident or strong (unpick confidence vs. competence)? ● what’s your goal? ● what are your assessment criteria / criteria for success? understanding the brief ● what tools / resources might help you? (facilitating self-help strategies e.g. youtube ● what have you already accessed? ● what device or software do you have? group 2 (project management) ● what is project management ● what is the project? ● context – aspect of sustainability skills – teamwork? organization? ● thought experiment if not managed ● what will your role be? who will you manage and what are their roles? ● political – philosophy of approach… pre-figurative…. ● what skills could you bring ● have you ever been a leader? can you reflect on past experiences? ● project management skills audit – strengths etc. activity 2: scaffolding advanced skills. scenario 1 – a student comes to you for help with a piece of work requiring the skill allocated to you table. what reflective questions and other learning development strategies would you use to help that student? scenario 2 – an academic has identified a need for a group session relating to your tables’ skill. what would a session run by you as a learning developer look like? what activities might you use to enable all students to develop that skill? group 1 (data management and digital skills) cross and congreve innovative approaches to sustainability skills development: a crowd-sourcing workshop journal of learning development in higher education special issue 25: october 2022 5 if teaching a tool, more likely to lab-based or online ● doing / practice the actual tool ● using own device (nightmare to deliver but works!) ● relevant practice tasks aligned to learning / assessment ● demo[nstration] if teaching capabilities rather tools: ● need to be conscious of inequities if students choosing different tech ● ethics, risks, values explored ● challenge of our capacity to keep learning new tools ● infographics / data visualisations ● teach transfer of learning – not every tool ● digital preservation ● open tech and interoperability to avoid loss ● open data ● carbon cost of digital tech and devices ● citizen science tools / practices ● teamworking online group 2 (project management) ● where are you now? what do you think you need to get to? ● work in pairs ● trying a role ● students’ passions – research / lead ● tasks e.g. switching lights off, plastic / kettle [usage] – posters? ● reflecting on how did it go editorial comments this presentation is innovative as it draws attention of our learning development community, to build climate change awareness and sustainability skills into our practices, alongside efforts elsewhere in our institutions. the workshop was well received, and the cross and congreve innovative approaches to sustainability skills development: a crowd-sourcing workshop journal of learning development in higher education special issue 25: october 2022 6 summary of the workshop is a well-written and useful resource. it outlines the need to not silo off learning development to academic skills only spheres and in fact, embrace new areas such as transferable skills development, and wider societal awareness. this is an important discussion for the learning development community, perhaps alongside academic course leaders and employability services, regarding where these critical skills development activities sit in the modern university. as noted in the participant reflections, integrating sustainability into curricula has served to raise awareness and profile and yet it remains a theme that has received limited attention across the sector since winter et al (2015) explored ways forward. this raises the question whether the need to respond to covid 19 has shifted focus, just at the point when, as the presenters state, there is growing interest in he around how students are taught about climate change. authors’ reflection for both of us, it was the first time that we attended an aldinhe conference and one of the first face-to-face conferences we had participated in after the pandemic. when we saw that education for sustainability was one of the conference themes we took the opportunity to build on our research about teaching climate change. we had already begun to consider how learning developers might engage with climate change in an ld@3 online session and blog. we felt the conference would be a great opportunity to engage more with the learning developer community: not only through our own session but by attending other workshops and talks to think about synergies with other topics. the keynote presentation from wray irwin set the scene clearly about the importance of the sustainability agenda for all graduates. student interest in environmental issues, and their desire both to see more teaching about sustainability and for their institutions to model sustainable practices is a good example of the ‘changemaker’ philosophy in action. we felt this framed our contribution to the conference well as a key issue in higher education. however, we noticed from the conference agenda that there were few other sessions engaging in the theme of sustainability. this in itself is an interesting reflection why has the issue not yet gained higher prominence among learning developers? there have been recent high-profile publications from advance he and the quality assurance agency (2021) on education for sustainability teaching, on-going interest in teaching sustainability from student groups (e.g. sos 2021) and the international cop26 climate conference in cross and congreve innovative approaches to sustainability skills development: a crowd-sourcing workshop journal of learning development in higher education special issue 25: october 2022 7 the uk. it also marks seven years since winter and associates (2015) published their paper on the links between education for sustainability and learning development in jldhe. winter and associates (2015) argue that by identifying the similarities between the two disciplines such as emphasis on critical thinking, disciplinary ways of knowing, and belief in the value of embedded approaches there is potential for increased collaboration and the development of innovative practices. in the immediate term, the limited engagement perhaps reflected the disruption caused by covid-19 and the urgent demands to move support online and supporting students’ wellbeing. yet there is little evidence since 2015 that the learning development community has embraced thinking about education for sustainability. a search of literature published since winter and associates (2015) in jldhe found no papers on the theme; the one citation of winter and associates in jldhe referenced their definition of learning development. a reflection from one of our workshop participants notes disappointment with relatively modest attendance at our session, and contributes to our reflection that the learning developer community take steps to more positively embrace education for sustainability in their practice. during the discussions in our workshop, one theme that emerged was around learning developers adopting an environmentally sustainable approach to their own practice. it was noted by participants that typical approaches to ld use a lot of paper and physical resources. there is an opportunity for lds to model more sustainable behaviours themselves. we thought this was encouraging, because it shows a willingness to engage with the sustainability agenda and awareness of the impact of their own professional practice. however, we would reflect back with caution that it equipment and online ld that maybe used as a ‘green’ alternative to paper carries its own embodied carbon footprint. a broader contribution to sustainable approaches to ld need to go beyond this to equipping students with the skills to engage in sustainability. our workshop highlighted that education for sustainability requires learning developers to adapt to supporting students in a range of advanced and complex skills that are not traditionally part of learning developers work. during the activities, participants focused on two skills that we had identified as important for teaching about climate and sustainability (cross & congreve, 2021). in activity 1, they worked up approaches that they would take as a learning developer to develop students’ data management and digital skills, and project management skills. the suggestions from the two groups are shown in the audience reflections section. the two groups highlighted approaches such as: critically cross and congreve innovative approaches to sustainability skills development: a crowd-sourcing workshop journal of learning development in higher education special issue 25: october 2022 8 reflective questions; analysing past experiences; skills audits; and independent learning. we note that these approaches to supporting students are not unique to sustainability and are very much part of every-day ld practice. our overall reflection here is that there is great potential for lds to contribute significantly to education for sustainability by using well-established and current approaches. climate change and other sustainability challenges can help lds frame skills development, highlighting to students the value of advanced skills for their future careers and adding authenticity and relevance to examples. in activity 2, participants were asked to design sessions to deliver to individual students and whole classes. this reflects the two distinct ways learning developers work with students. we framed this discussion around scaffolding, as we were interested in seeing how lds could envisage developing higher-order skills over time. our previous work had suggested that effective scaffolding was essential for enabling students to apply higherorder skills to their assignments. group 2 suggested some sustainability-focused projects that students could undertake to develop their project management skills, and reflected on the opportunity to move students to different group roles (e.g. leader, researcher) to explore their strengths. group 1 highlighted some of the challenges that lds would encounter when developing digital skills such as: students using their own devices; equity of access to hardware and software; use of free and open software and data; and the ongoing challenge of learning new technology. the thoughts of both groups suggest lds would benefit from professional development around sustainability skills, in particular in the digital space. workshop participants also emphasised the need for ways of sharing good practice that co-embeds sustainability and ld work, resources that are lacking at the moment. our final reflection on the session is, in effect, a call for action. the growing interest in education for sustainability throughout higher education means that this is critical moment for learning developers. learning developers are uniquely placed to make important contribution to the debates about how best to equip students with the skills they need to help address key societal challenges. our discussions so far suggest that learning developers can embed sustainability skills in their current practices, and engaging with climate change in their university is an opportunity to reaffirm the value of effective learning development in their institution. we hope this session will form the basis of cross and congreve innovative approaches to sustainability skills development: a crowd-sourcing workshop journal of learning development in higher education special issue 25: october 2022 9 growing interest from learning developers in supporting their institutions respond to the climate crisis and sustainability action. acknowledgements thank you to all the contributors who shared their reflections and enriched our insight into this conference presentation and its impact on the audience. special thanks go to lee fallin from the university of hull and emma kimberley at the university of northampton. references qaa and advance he (2021) education for sustainable development guidance. available at https://www.qaa.ac.uk/quality-code/education-for-sustainable-development. students organising for sustainability (2021) climate change tracker. available at https://www.sos-uk.org/research/climate-change-tracker. winter, j., barton, g., allison, j. and cotton, d. (2015) ‘learning development and education for sustainability: what are the links?’, journal of learning development in higher education, (8). doi: 10.47408/jldhe.v0i8.256. author details iain cross is associate professor in education development at the london school of hygiene and tropical medicine, prior to which he was associate dean for learning and teaching at st mary’s university, twickenham. he is involved in projects around assessment, digital skills, and sustainability. alina congreve is an experienced academic with over 18 years’ experience in higher education. currently an independent consultant on research, policy analysis and education https://www.qaa.ac.uk/quality-code/education-for-sustainable-development https://www.sos-uk.org/research/climate-change-tracker cross and congreve innovative approaches to sustainability skills development: a crowd-sourcing workshop journal of learning development in higher education special issue 25: october 2022 10 design, she is committed to supporting students’ development of problem-solving, innovation, collaboration and creative thinking. innovative approaches to sustainability skills development: a crowd-sourcing workshop presentation abstract community response editorial comments authors’ reflection acknowledgements references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 27 april 2023 ________________________________________________________________________ ©2023 the author(s) (cc-by 4.0) assessing the benefits of online formative assessments on student performance daniel king technical university dublin, ireland abstract this paper investigates the impact of online formative assessments on students’ performance in an introductory accounting module. the online formative assessments were objective tests and a regression model was developed to test the relationship between formative assessment usage and exam performance. the statistical analysis shows a significant correlation between formative assessment usage and examination performance while controlling for different variables. these findings lead to the conclusion that formative assessments are useful tools that can support students’ learning. implications and recommendations for further research are covered. keywords: formative assessment; online assessment; objective tests; accounting; learning support. introduction the covid-19 pandemic resulted in the closure of many university and college campuses (sangster, stoner and flood, 2020). the measures implemented to prevent the spread of covid-19 resulted in many universities ‘pivoting’ online; replacing their on-campus activities with online teaching and learning. this transition to online teaching and learning was already underway but the pandemic accelerated this trend. online education environments are often associated with benefits such as increased accessibility and reduced education costs (reyneke, shuttleworth and visagie, 2021). however, online education can also lead to significant challenges such as a lack of student engagement. this lack of engagement can be even more pronounced when a technically king assessing the benefits of online formative assessments on student performance journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 2 difficult subject such as accounting is being delivered online to non-accounting students. as opdecam and everaert (2022) highlight, accounting is a challenging subject, and without practice of the material, it is often difficult for students to master and retain the fundamental concepts and techniques. this paper investigates the impact of formative assessment on exam performance in an introductory accounting module. formative assessments are focused on the development of learning (vionea, 2018, p.10), they are broadly accepted as good classroom practice (schildkamp et al., 2020), and are a highly valuable part of teaching (einig, 2013). one of the key benefits of formative assessment is that it enables the gathering of evidence about student learning and can be used as a guide to support students (schildkamp et al., 2020). however, findings show that some theories concerning the virtues of using formative assessments have yet to be revealed in practice (wu and jessop, 2018, p.1019). also, given the growing view that formative assessments can be considered and described as mere ‘optional extras’ (mccallum and milner, 2021) it is important to investigate their value. pachler et al. (2010) recommend a refocussed emphasis on online formative assessment while vionea (2018) also upholds the value of using this type of formative assessments. in light of this evidence base, this paper aims to investigate the potential for online formative assessments to specifically support student learning. in this study the online formative assessments used were objective tests (tests that have a right or wrong answer so they can be marked objectively) which included multiple choice questions (mcqs) and arithmetic questions. current virtual learning environments (vles) allow for a variety of options in preparing and presenting both mcqs and arithmetic questions so these options were utilised. background  the study was carried out during the second semester of the 2020/21 academic year and involved first-year undergraduates enrolled on an introductory accounting module as part of a larger management degree programme. the students had commenced the undergraduate programme directly after completing their secondary education in may 2020. only students who took the end of semester examination in may 2021 are included in the study and the introductory accounting module is a core/compulsory module on the king assessing the benefits of online formative assessments on student performance journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 3 management degree programme. during this semester, the module was delivered entirely online and the biggest problem reported by students in relation to studying online was the level of stress experienced (sangster, stoner and flood, 2020). the stress-inducing factors identified included the fact that there was no face-to-face interaction (as all teaching had moved online), the increased workload, and the lack of interaction with a ‘university community’. even without these issues, as opdecam and everaert (2022) observe, there is an abrupt transition between secondary school and higher education in terms of atmosphere and expectations. it is particularly important to note that in this module the topics build upon one another in a sequential way. it is extremely difficult to comprehend a new topic if a topic covered earlier has not been fully understood. i believed that students would benefit from a structured study and revision regime to help them to progress. to address this issue, five online formative assessments were set up that corresponded to the five teaching units on this module’s vle. in using online formative assessments, i created a scaffold for the learning process and through feedback students could gain insight into their own learning progress (voinea, 2018, p.8). the provision of a clear structure is of tremendous importance for students engaged in online learning (sangster, stoner and flood, 2020) and the online formative assessments were set up so that students could take each one as many times as they required. in addition to the formative assessment, there were two summative assessments during the semester and a final summative exam at the end. this paper investigates whether the use of the online formative assessments helped to increase students’ performance in the end of semester exam and is carried out using data analysis and regression modelling. the investigation allows me to draw conclusions in respect to the impact of online formative assessments on students’ performance in the summative exam. literature review  assessment  assessment is at the heart of formal higher education, it is a core component of effective learning and can be described as any process that appraises an individual's knowledge, understanding and skills (gikandi, morrow and davis, 2011). according to sambell (2016) king assessing the benefits of online formative assessments on student performance journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 4 assessment exerts a major influence on students’ approaches to study in higher education and can be used to effectively promote learning (marriott and lau, 2008). educationalists are becoming more aware of the need for assessment tools, which could be used to actively promote and enhance learning rather than merely to measure it via assessment and grading (issac and jacob, 2010). marriott and lau (2008) point out that assessments can serve a variety of purposes including evaluation, feedback, motivation, and student learning, and, according to sambell (2016), assessment is an important factor in enabling students to develop as learners. researchers have been advocating a shift in he assessment culture so that assessment should be considered as a way to promote learning rather than simply to measure it and there is widespread recognition of the need for approaches to assessment which focus specifically on stimulating and improving student learning. summative assessment summative assessment is a formal method to evaluate learning through comparison with a standard or benchmark and often takes the form of a unit or module test. marriott and lau (2008) state that the compulsory nature of summative assessments means that they are often used as a performance indicator to gauge the learner's success in meeting the assessment criteria. whilst well respected and widely employed, the summative nature of this type of assessment can conversely be regarded as having little intrinsic value when it comes to supporting learning. summative assessment alone provides limited opportunity for student development or grade improvement as learning is essentially assessed through a single submission of work such as an end of semester exam. formative assessment  formative assessment (also termed ‘assessment for learning’) can take place at any point within a course or module and it thereby provides students with feedback that can improve, accelerate, and enhance learning (marriott and lau, 2008). formative assessment also provides lecturers with feedback on how topics and content are being received by their students. across a variety of education settings, formative assessment is used as an effective classroom intervention for improving student learning outcomes. king assessing the benefits of online formative assessments on student performance journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 5 schildkamp et al. (2020) state that, although there is still no clear consensus on what the term ‘formative assessment’ encompasses it is broadly accepted as good classroom practice for teachers. the core unifying characteristic of formative assessment is the focus on gathering evidence about student learning and using this evidence to guide further development. schildkamp et al. (2020) argue that formative assessment is a key component in the support of student learning and that the provision of feedback is crucially important (gipps, 2005; einig, 2013; schildkamp et al., 2020). ozan and kincal (2018) argue that formative assessment is at the very centre of the concept of feedback. formative feedback is information transmitted to students that allows or encourages them to improve their learning as they go. the outcome of any formative assessment should be one that ultimately helps improve learning by familiarising students with the levels of learning required, informing them about any gaps in their understanding, and providing feedback they can use to shape the direction of learning (evans, zeun and stainer, 2014). formative assessments come in different forms and online assessments are becoming increasingly popular. online assessments have the advantage that students can use them according to their own preferred ways of learning, e.g., take them in their own time, repeat them on multiple occasions, and receive feedback immediately. gaining immediate feedback after each exercise is of utmost importance as this positively affects students’ engagement with the learning process (blondeel, everaert and opdecam, 2022, p.310). einig (2013) argues that feedback has the biggest impact on students’ learning when given directly after the assessment. online assessment advances in information technology (it) are having a dramatic impact on the delivery and assessment of higher education courses with virtual learning environments (vle) and computer aided assessments (caa) now being commonplace (marriott and lau, 2008). research by einig (2013) and mcnulty et al. (2015) found that participation in online formative assessments can have a positive impact on student performance and the literature shows that regular usage of online mcqs for assessment purposes are associated with improved examination performance (massoudi et al., 2017). in higher education, however, emphasis continues to be placed on summative assessment with formative assessment receiving less attention, despite its crucial role in promoting and supporting student learning. pachler et al. (2010) recommends a refocused emphasis on king assessing the benefits of online formative assessments on student performance journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 6 online formative assessment in order to create learner and assessment centred learning environments. methodology introduction this study uses data collected from the delivery of an introductory accounting module during the second semester of the academic year 2020/21. during this year delivery was totally online and the students included in this study were first-year undergraduate management students. the accounting module logically divided into five units/topics (which were available to students on the vle) and, to enhance student engagement, a series of five online formative assessments (based on objective tests) which aligned with the five topic/units of the module were developed. as highlighted earlier, there were also two summative assessments and a final examination. although the final examination was not based on objective tests, the objective tests used in the formative assessment were largely based on past examination questions that were adapted. this was to ensure that the formative assessments were well aligned and to help students feel prepared for their final examination. this type of alignment can lead to beneficial influences on student performance (blondeel, everaert and opdecam, 2022, p.310). the students could attempt each formative assessment as many times as they wished and after each attempt the results were issued to the students as a percentage. students also received detailed feedback on their tests alongside solutions to all the questions. impact on examination performance. the vle offers a range of tools to monitor students’ use of the formative assessments and these tools were used to track which assessments were completed by individual students and whether there was a link between completion rates and exam performance. furthermore, to assess the impact of formative assessments on results, a regression model was developed. in line with this paper’s objectives examination performance (‘exam’) was used as the dependent variable and to test the impact of formative assessments a variable called ‘form’ was introduced. this variable took the value of ‘0’ king assessing the benefits of online formative assessments on student performance journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 7 (form=0) if no formative assessments were attempted up to a value of ‘5’ (form=5) if all the formative assessments were attempted. other variables which could potentially have an impact on attainment were ‘controlled’ for in this study. firstly, attendance at the weekly lectures was included in the model. all firstyear undergraduate students had their attendance monitored by the university as it is believed that attendance has an impact on engagement and examination performance. therefore, a dummy variable ‘attendance’ is included in the model. secondly, it is likely that prior academic achievement could have an impact on the examination performance (potter and johnston, 2006; opdecam and everaert, 2022). the students had not studied accounting before coming to university, so the average of their first semester results was used as a measure of academic performance. it was expected that students’ results in the first semester would be closely correlated to results in the introduction to accounting module. to control for this, the variable prior is included. finally, previous studies (potter and johnston, 2006; opdecam and everaert, 2022) have indicated that gender could have an impact on academic performance. this is a contested issue as some studies indicate no significant relationship between gender and performance (byrne and flood, 2008) yet others argue that gender has a significant effect on academic performance (garkaz, banimahd and esmaeili, 2011). according to opdecam and everaert (2022) the differing impacts of gender on academic performance may be explained by the different learning approaches of the students’ study effort and the format of the assessment. therefore, a variable called ‘gender’ is included in the analysis to control for its potential effect. a value of ‘0’ was included for male students and ‘1’ for female students. thus, the hypothesised model is as follows: exam = β0 + β1 form + β2attendance + β3prior+ β4gender + ε results/findings background information during this semester, all teaching had moved online because of the covid-19 pandemic. as can be seen from table 1 below, 105 students sat the final exam, and the average mark (mean) was 59%. of the 105 students 33 were male (31%) and 72 (69%) were king assessing the benefits of online formative assessments on student performance journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 8 female. attendance information was available for all 105 students as was prior academic performance. table 1. descriptive statistics. variable n min % max% mean standard deviation exam 105 8 90 59 18.17 n % male 33 31% female 72 69% attendance 105 prior academic performance 105 students use of formative assessments as discussed, there were five online formative assessments which aligned with the five topics/units of the module. table 2 shows the number of students completing each formative assessment throughout the semester. the first formative assessment was completed by 79% of the students however this dropped to 57% for the second and to approximately 47% for third and fourth formative assessments. the final formative assessment dropped to 39%. this pattern is consistent with other studies which also report declining usage of online formative assessments (massoudi et al., 2017, p.15). table 2. number of students completing the formative assessments. formative 1 formative 2 formative 3 formative 4 formative 5 number of students attempti ng each formati ve assessment 83 60 49 50 41 percentage of total attempti ng each formati ve assessment 79% 57% 47% 48% 39% regression results the results of the regression analysis are presented in table 3. king assessing the benefits of online formative assessments on student performance journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 9 the t-test statistic was used to determine the correlation between the dependent variable (examination performance/exam) and the independent variables. a high t-value indicates a high correlation while a low t-values indicated low correlation. a positive coefficient indicates that as the value of the independent variable increases the mean of the dependent variable also tends to increase and vice versa. the results of the regression analysis indicate that formative assessment usage is indeed positively correlated to examination performance (t = 3.37; coefficient = +3.74). as expected, prior academic performance also has a statistically significant positive impact on examination performance (t= 4.64; coefficient = +86.3). generally, any t-value greater than +2 or less than – 2 is acceptable therefore, gender (t = -0.85) and attendance (t = 1.16), seem to have little or no statistically significant influence on examination performance. table 3. regression results. exam = β0 + β1 form + β2attendance + β3prior+ β4gender + ε coefficients standard error t stat intercept 3.744065599 10.53837526 0.355279206 formative attempts 3.457610661 1.026349941 3.368841875 attendance grade -9.620226822 8.262458438 -1.16432983 prior academic achievement 86.30091766 18.58368954 4.643906555 gender -2.740137221 3.228503766 -0.84873286 to further investigate the association between formative assessment completion rates and grades in the final exam the correlation coefficient (r) between formative assessments attempts and mean/average mark in the final summative exam was calculated. as can be seen from table 4, 15 students attempted only one formative assessment (form = 1) and achieved an average mark in the final exam of 50.8%. 18 students attempted all five of the formative assessments (form = 5) and achieved an average mark of 74.5%. table 4 indicates a high positive relationship between formative assessment attempts and examination grade (correlation = 0.91). a slightly unusual result is that the 11 students who attempted no formative assessments (form = 0) achieved a higher average grade than that achieved by the 15 students who attempted one formative assessment (form = 1). a further analysis revealed that four students out of the eleven who did not attempt any king assessing the benefits of online formative assessments on student performance journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 10 of the formative assessments (form = 0) achieved relatively high grades and brought the average up. table 4. range of grades in final exam. variables n mean mark (%) exam 105 58.9 formative assessment attempts form = 5 18 17.1% 74.5 form = 4 19 18.1% 65.3 form = 3 18 17.1% 56.9 form = 2 24 22.9% 52.2 form = 1 15 14.3% 50.8 form = 0 11 10.5% 51.6 n = 105 100% the correlation coefficient (r) between formative assessments attempts and mean/average mark in the final exam is 0.91. discussion and conclusion summary this study has illustrated that formative assessments using objective tests can be effective learning tools. as the objective tests were based on past examination questions, the formative assessments were well aligned with the summative assessments and students were aware of what they had to do to succeed in the module. also, the objective tests provided immediate feedback to students, which helped them to identify areas of weakness and helped to guide them in their studies. in addition, this study indicates a high positive relationship between formative assessment attempts and examination grade, but it is important to point out that correlation does not imply causation. it is possible that hard working and engaged students would have king assessing the benefits of online formative assessments on student performance journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 11 achieved high marks in the final examination even if they had not attempted the formative assessments. however, students generally value the features of online formative assessments, such as the provision of instant feedback, the opportunity to work at their own pace and the identification of areas in which they need to improve (einig, 2013). furthermore, einig (2013) found that virtually all students perceived formative assessments as being useful while mccallum and milner (2021) report that formative assessments encouraged students to work consistently throughout the semester. they also argue that if students perceive a benefit from the formative assessments, then this is likely to lead to greater engagement (mccallum and milner, 2021). in conclusion, formative assessments have been shown to be a useful support to students’ learning and they provide a structured exercise regime that allows students to revise and practise the material discussed in the lectures. limitations this study has some limitations, which are indicative of areas for possible future research. while the study resulted in some interesting findings and indicated a positive correlation between formative assessment attempts and examination performance, it is not possible to draw definitive conclusions as to whether or not there is a causal relationship between formative assessment and examination performance. additional research into this area, such as the use of interviews or focus groups, could provide further insights into this relationship. another limitation is that this study controlled for three variables in the regression analysis: attendance, prior academic achievement, and gender. there may be further factors influencing students’ performance that were not measured in this study such as personal motivation, effort, ambition, and so on. also, it is impossible to identify which aspect of the objective tests led to the positive results. it could have been the formative feedback, or it could be that the formative assessments simply encouraged students to spend more time revising and practising the material. further research could thus attempt to identify additional factors influencing students’ performance as well as further investigating the impact of objective tests as compared to king assessing the benefits of online formative assessments on student performance journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 12 other types of formative assessment. it is possible that qualitative methods like interviews or focus groups could provide further insights and a deeper understanding of how students use objective tests to support their learning and to outline the specific aspects of these tests that students find particularly useful. references blondeel, e., everaert, p. and opdecam, e. (2022) ‘stimulating higher education students to use online mid-term take-home tests’, assessment & evaluation in higher education, 47(2), pp.297-312. https://doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2021.1908516. byrne, m. and flood, b. (2008) ‘examining the relationships among background variables and academic performance of first year accounting students at an irish university’, journal of accounting education, 26(4), pp.202-212. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jaccedu.2009.02.001. einig, s. (2013) ‘supporting students' learning: the use of formative online assessments’, accounting education, 22(5), pp.425-444. https://doi.org/10.1080/09639284.2013.803868. evans, d., zeun, p. and stainer, r. (2014) ‘motivating student learning using a formative assessment journey’, journal of anatomy, 224, pp.296-303. garkaz, m., banimahd, b. and esmaeili, h. (2011) ‘factors affecting accounting students' performance: the case of students at the islamic azad university’, social and behavioural sciences, 29(2), pp.122-128. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sbspro.2011.11.216. gikandi, j. w., morrow, d. and davis, n. e. (2011) ‘online formative assessments in higher education: a review of the literature’, computers & education, 57, pp.23332351. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2011.06.004. gipps, c. (2005) ‘what is the role for ict-based assessment in universities?’, studies in higher education, 30(2), pp.171-180. https://doi.org/10.1080/03075070500043176. https://doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2021.1908516 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jaccedu.2009.02.001 https://doi.org/10.1080/09639284.2013.803868 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sbspro.2011.11.216 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2011.06.004 https://doi.org/10.1080/03075070500043176 king assessing the benefits of online formative assessments on student performance journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 13 issac, b. and jacob, s. (2010) ‘effects of online mcq tests on student learning’, in iskander, m., kapila, v. and karim, m. a. (eds.) technological developments in education and automation. springer, dordrecht, pp.403-408. marriott, p. and lau, a. (2008) ‘the use of on-line summative assessment in an undergraduate financial accounting course’ journal of accounting education, 26, pp.73-90. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jaccedu.2008.02.001. massoudi, d., koh, s., hancock, p. j. and fung, l. (2017) ‘the effectiveness of usage of online multiple-choice questions on student performance in introductory accounting’, issues in accounting education, 32(4), pp.1-17. https://doi.org/10.2308/iace-51722. mccallum, s. and milner, m. (2021) ‘the effectiveness of formative assessment: student views and staff reflections’, assessment & evaluation in higher education, 46(1), pp.1-16. https://doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2020.1754761. mcnulty, j. a., espiritu, b. r., hoyt, a. e., ensminger, d. c. and chandrasekhar, a. j. (2015) ‘associations between formative practice quizzes and summative examination outcomes in a medical anatomy course’, anatomical sciences education, 8(1), pp.37-44. https://doi.org/10.1002/ase.1442. opdecam, e. and everaert, p. (2022) ‘effects of a summer school on formative and summative assessment in accounting education’, journal of accounting education, 58. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jaccedu.2022.100769. ozan, c. and kincal, r. (2018) ‘the effects of formative assessment on academic achievement, attitudes toward the lesson and self-regulation skills’, educational sciences: theory & practice, 18(1), pp.85-118. pachler, n., daly, c., mor, y. and mellar, h. (2010) ‘formative e-assessment: practitioner cases’, computers & education, 54(3), pp.715-721. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2009.09.032. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jaccedu.2008.02.001 https://doi.org/10.2308/iace-51722 https://doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2020.1754761 https://doi.org/10.1002/ase.1442 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jaccedu.2022.100769 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2009.09.032 king assessing the benefits of online formative assessments on student performance journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 14 potter, b. and johnston, c. (2006) ‘the effect of interactive on-line learning systems on student learning outcomes in accounting’, journal of accounting education, 24, pp.16-34. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jaccedu.2006.04.003. reyneke, y., shuttleworth, c. c. and visagie, r. g. (2021) ‘pivot to online in a post-covid19 world: critically applying bsce 5e to enhance plagiarism awareness of accounting students’, accounting education, 30(1), pp.1-21. https://doi.org/10.1080/09639284.2020.1867875. sambell, k. (2016) ‘assessment and feedback in higher education: considerable room for improvement?’, student engagement in higher education journal, 1(1). sangster, a., stoner, g. and flood, b. (2020) ‘insights into accounting education in a covid-19 world’, accounting education, 29(5), pp.431-562. https://doi.org/10.1080/09639284.2020.1808487. schildkamp, k., van der kleij, f., heitink, m., kippers, w. and veldkamp, b. (2020) ‘formative assessments: a systematic review of critical teacher prerequisites for classroom practice’, international journal of educational research, 103. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijer.2020.101602. voinea, l. (2018) ‘formative assessment as assessment for learning development’, journal of pedagogy, 1, pp.7-23. https://doi.org/10.26755/revped/2018.1/7. wu, q. and jessop, t. (2018) ‘formative assessment: missing in action in both research-intensive and teaching focused universities?’, assessment & evaluation in higher education, 43(7), pp.1019-1031. https://doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2018.1426097. author details daniel king is lecturer in financial management at technological university dublin (tu dublin). lecturing in financial accounting, management accounting and financial management to undergraduate and postgraduate students in tu dublin, he is also a year https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jaccedu.2006.04.003 https://doi.org/10.1080/09639284.2020.1867875 https://doi.org/10.1080/09639284.2020.1808487 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijer.2020.101602 https://doi.org/10.26755/revped/2018.1/7 https://doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2018.1426097 king assessing the benefits of online formative assessments on student performance journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 15 tutor for the ba in tourism management. he is an external examiner for south east technological university (setu), the first technological university in south-east ireland. daniel has written and presented many papers in the areas of financial and management accounting and accounting education at national and international conferences. licence ©2023 the author(s). this is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (cc-by 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. see http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. journal of learning development in higher education (jldhe) is a peer-reviewed open access journal published by the association for learning development in higher education (aldinhe). assessing the benefits of online formative assessments on student performance abstract introduction background  literature review  assessment  summative assessment formative assessment  online assessment methodology introduction impact on examination performance. results/findings background information students use of formative assessments regression results discussion and conclusion summary limitations references author details licence journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 24 september 2022 ________________________________________________________________________ a home away from home: building an organic online support community for chinese students using wechat xue zhou queen mary university of london, uk peter wolstencroft liverpool john moores university, uk abstract traditional university support structures have generally been predicated on a ‘one size fits all’ approach that stresses a mechanistic, bureaucratic approach. support is transactional in nature with students accessing it only when needed. support focuses on both individual tutorial and centralised mechanisms which have proved effective for only some students. this paper proposes an organic student support system that is based around five features: agility in the environment, a tutor-student partnership, informal two-way communication, a studentled community, the inclusion of a knowledge-hub. the student support system in this article is based around chinese students at a large uk university who felt disenfranchised by the current support mechanisms, so an alternative model was set up using the group-based instant-messaging social media platform, wechat. the findings of surveys and interviews with chinese students demonstrated that the featured organic student support system proved extremely successful and is something that could be replicated with other groups of students in the future in uk higher education. keywords: organic; student support system; community; wechat. introduction in april 2020, the chinese government offered all chinese students in the uk a package to help combat the threat of covid-19. in this package, masks, washing gel and medicine were zhou and wolstencroft a home away from home: building an organic online support community for chinese students using wechat journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 2 all provided free of charge. at one large university in the uk, over 1200 students registered for the package, a number that illustrated the scale of the problem of displaced students. these students were stranded far from home and with the switch to remote studying becoming a necessity, they were without many of their support networks that they had come to rely on. although the covid-19 pandemic acted as a catalyst for the introduction of the organic support network described in this article, it was not the sole, or indeed even the main reason for its existence. whilst it can be argued that university support for students has evolved significantly since the 1992 further and higher education act (department of education, 1992), with heis now offering a multitude of services for their students (including well-being advice, help with visas, policies, academic support and financial advice), this tends to operate on a ‘one size fits all’ basis (huang and turner, 2018). if students need support, it is undoubtedly the case that it is available, but it can be difficult to navigate through the maze of mechanisms, especially given the general nature of much that is available (liu et al., 2017). communication is often carried out in a variety of ways including use of a virtual learning environment, email, social media, the student’s union, the international office and class representatives. this means that students can become confused and, if information is not consistent, receive contradictory messages (lane et al., 2019). communication is often perceived to be slow and lacking in any human relationship as the size of universities means that it is rare for students to be allocated one person for support (lane et al., 2019). requests for information or support become a transactional relationship rather than a human one. these difficulties are exacerbated for international students who have to navigate an educational system that is different to the one that they are used to; they are also likely to have different needs to their uk counterparts as their frames of reference are rooted in their home country. whilst some nationalities are comparatively well represented in uk universities, for other students there are likely to be very few students from their home country where they are studying which can increase the loneliness felt. chinese students, as the biggest proportion of the international students, expressed their anxiety that they were not able to go to the campus as usual and worried that there was limited communication with peers and lecturers, and felt extremely concerned about their study and life. they stressed zhou and wolstencroft a home away from home: building an organic online support community for chinese students using wechat journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 3 their desire for an internet-based support network with first-hand information and instant replies from academics and administration. this article will explore how the traditional, mechanistic student support networks at one university have been replaced by an organic network which was originally targeted at chinese students but can be made applicable for any group of students. background and literature review changing he landscape there has been a significant change in the uk higher education landscape since the passing of the further and higher education act (1992). this act led to an increase in the number of students attending university but also a change in the demographic makeup of the cohort. as an illustration of this, in 1994, 271,000 ucas applications were accepted compared to 533,000 in 2018 (bolton, 2020). in short ‘we have gone from a higher education system that serves only a narrow band of people, to a broader, more diverse and more open system’ (bis, 2016, p.7). whilst in many ways these changes have been welcomed as broadening education to include more people, it also created challenges for establishments whose support networks could not cope with the increased numbers and the diversity of students (kearney, stanley and blackberry, 2018). support networks within uk universities have traditionally focused on making sure that there was someone on hand to provide academic and emotional support for students (lusk and fearful, 2014). this is usually done in a centralised manner that asks the student to take the lead when they need help. support systems are advertised but as a general rule the first move needs to be made by the student, so although there is general agreement for the need to have these systems in place (peach, 2005), their use is limited by the requirements of the student. students have long complained about the support offered, a problem exacerbated if the student is classed as ‘non-traditional’, a point made by nichols (2010). this is applicable to a range of different groups; grebennikov and skaines (2009) noted how the gender of the student affected their view but what was common to many studies was that formalised zhou and wolstencroft a home away from home: building an organic online support community for chinese students using wechat journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 4 support systems were valued less highly than support from peers (cahill, bowyer and murray, 2014). international students support one group that struggles to access support is international students (menzies, baron and zutshi, 2015) as not only are they managing the transition to university, but they are doing it without their social and cultural support structures (andrade, 2006). the uk is a popular destination for international university study, with nearly 500,000 international students. out of those, 120,000 are chinese (hesa, 2020). the main reason for this is that they believe that the uk higher education learning experience could help them secure a good job in the competitive chinese market (li, 2013). there is a perception that the innovative, practical and personalised education undertaken in he in the uk not only provides students with a wide range of academic knowledge, but also enhances higher-order soft skills including problem solving and critical thinking, which are required and valued by today’s employers (brooks, waters, and pimlott‐wilson, 2012). however, studying abroad creates great challenges for students who come from various culture backgrounds. uk universities recognise these needs and provide students with a range of interventions to help students to adjust to the new environment (simmons, 2013). these include support with finance, academic coaching, mental health and health services, all of which have a positive impact on student retention (nichols, 2010). universities have also started to use different social media sites and apps as a complementary strategy to support students in their academic and personal life (gomes et al., 2014). this support tends to be better received and viewed as more convenient than traditional face-to-face support by students who have grown up surrounded by technology (prensky, 2010). the use of social media is often seen as a key method of supporting students who often use it as a means to build and develop a social network in the host country (hjorth, 2011). research shows that social media can be used as a successful academic tool to build a community and create a sense of belonging to ease international students’ own anxiety (ryan, magro and sharp, 2011). students, especially those who come from collective cultures where group https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13639080.2018.1436751?casa_token=56sh7kxwptgaaaaa:gt6jseb147exyh2l1spsodynta-g4zyfqjqammvozvlmfpa7cas3ma_rb2rduvqyjg5f9-yduzrf https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13639080.2018.1436751?casa_token=56sh7kxwptgaaaaa:gt6jseb147exyh2l1spsodynta-g4zyfqjqammvozvlmfpa7cas3ma_rb2rduvqyjg5f9-yduzrf zhou and wolstencroft a home away from home: building an organic online support community for chinese students using wechat journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 5 support is viewed as more important than individual personalised support, need a sense of community. however, whether existing social media support services are suitable for these needs is questionable (roberts and dunworth, 2012). chinese students are used to high-context communication (jaeger and buz, 2018), which is used not only to exchange information, but also for relationship development. students prefer to receive procedural information and regulation from unofficial and personal channels such as private messages or a social media platform. in contrast uk institutions generally implement low-context communications (jaeger and buz, 2018) which focus on the accuracy of the information, and which are often delivered in the written format (e.g., the course handbook). the differences between these two communication systems generates great obstacles for chinese students (scudamore, 2013). such situations can get worse when the organisation is not aware of cultural differences and uses inappropriate communication strategies. mcwhorter (2014) suggests that the media and context used is key to the decoding of the message: for example, chinese students’ lesser emphasis on text and the greater emphasis on visual clues (known on wechat as ‘stickers’) to ascertain emotional responses to events (zhou, hentschel and kumar, 2017) is something which is not generally used in the uk. traditional mechanistic support systems to address the challenges described above, various support systems are put in place in uk higher education, most of which might be described as mechanistic in nature (lindsay, downs and dunn, 2003). the traditional support networks within most universities have revolved around a personal tutoring system which helps to build the resilience of students (brewer et al., 2019). within the university that is the subject of this paper, this was known as the academic personal tutoring system (apt). on arrival, students were allocated a tutor who was a student’s first point of contact for all academic matters. academic tutors are the most popular support service used by the student, and this is based on the perception that academic tutors are more approachable, and students value the informal nature of their relationship with the academic tutor (walsh, larsen and parry, 2009). for pastoral issues, the apt would signpost the relevant professional service. group sessions of around 30 were zhou and wolstencroft a home away from home: building an organic online support community for chinese students using wechat journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 6 used which led to a situation where students would find it difficult to share concerns. the apt did not necessarily teach the students so there was no relationship built between them. attendance at these sessions was low and the perception was that they added little to the student experience. apts often had little knowledge beyond academic matters and staff often felt undervalued and lacking in confidence with less training and time to respond to complex problems beyond the academic (cindy and johnson, 2019). it is worth noting that students sought pastoral support from friends on their course and family members more frequently than the professional support service on campus (walsh, larsen and parry, 2009). all support services were used less than expected irrespective of age or other demographic, as students felt less comfortable with the formal nature of interaction (walsh, larsen and parry, 2009). within this university, these issues were addressed by the introduction of a coaching system with the idea of working in partnership with students. coaches (who were supposed to be academic members of staff noted for their expertise in support) were available for students to discuss issues with and to offer support where necessary. whilst this system was designed to build on the idea that students tend to ask academics they trust for support (wolstencroft, calver and hudson, 2019), the reality was that due to the size of most universities, students struggled to see the same person and often had to wait before support was available. the lack of personal relationships and the lag in support meant that our original 1200 students were not supported as well as they could be, with questions going unanswered and their anxiety building up. organic support systems as we have seen, traditional support networks are not always an appropriate way of ensuring that the needs of international students are met. in part this is because what is used tends to be mechanistic in nature and lacks any agility (burns and stalker, 1961). while they might work for some students, for others, and especially those who are some distance away from home, an alternative approach is needed which is more flexible. this calls for a more organic system (burns and stalker, 1961) which can be far more receptive to the needs of those who need support and react to events (gerster, dremel and kelker, 2019). an organic based structure and culture can provide a competitive advantage to the organisation (wei, samiee zhou and wolstencroft a home away from home: building an organic online support community for chinese students using wechat journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 7 and lee, 2013) as well as being more agile in terms of its form and its communication approaches. wechat support group the support group that is the focus of this paper was set up in march 2020 with eight members on the chinese social media platform, wechat. wechat is an instant-messaging application, allowing users to send words, emojis and pictures and to make audio/video calls. users can also form a wechat group with a maximum 500 members. the popularity of wechat in china and its features, including a translation function and search engine, made it the ideal choice to support chinese students remotely. numbers grew rapidly due to ‘word of mouth’ and after four weeks over 350 members were part of the network. students were drawn to the group by the chance to speak their home language as well as the opportunity to interact directly with academics (at the time of writing there are six academics and one senior leader in the group) and get instant answers. at the start of the group, academics stimulated debate and discussion by including discussions regarding life in the uk, questions about concepts discussed on students’ courses, implication of new policies and even the best place to purchase eggs in the city during a time of scarcity. in addition to this, traditional chinese customs such as giving out ‘lucky bags’ were used, and these proved popular amongst students with students feeling reassured by them and understanding the cultural significance. with the intention being to develop a harmonious and supporting community on the wechat group, from the start a number of rules were stressed: • no discussion of politics. • no abusive or bad language. • no adverts. anyone who broke these rules would be removed from the group. the result was that the group operated in a supportive manner with few disagreements. at the start, academics found that they had to answer a large volume of questions, but the amount of input needed declined as the group became more established and members started helping each other. zhou and wolstencroft a home away from home: building an organic online support community for chinese students using wechat journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 8 methodology data was collected in may 2020 via an online survey and online interviews. firstly, an online questionnaire invitation was distributed to all 350 students in the wechat group. in the survey, participants were required to indicate their perception of the usefulness of the wechat support group, as well as their opinions on the traditional student support network. a total of 77 respondents completed all questions in the online survey, representing a response rate of 22%. in addition to the questionnaires, 23 interviews were carried out (schedule available on request) and the interview explored the initial themes in more depth. the sample selected represented a cross-section of participants in the wechat group and included students who had returned home and those who were unable to. each interview was conducted via microsoft teams and was audio recorded. students were asked to reflect on their experiences in using the wechat students’ support group during the pandemic. the interview questions were as follows: 1. what are the differences of perceived usefulness between the traditional western supporting system and culture-specific social supporting apps? 2. how to gain a high-level sense of community? the recordings were 15-45 mins long and transcribed using otter.ai, an artificial intelligencebased transcription service, and both authors checked the accuracy of the transcription manually afterwards. spss was used to analyse the quantitative data (e.g., the descriptive statistics of the participants’ demographics). a mean score was computed to evaluate the usefulness of wechat during the pandemic. thematic analysis (guest, macqueen and namey, 2011) was used to analyse the qualitative data collected through the interview. findings and discussion the demographic profile of the sample selected for this study showed that 32.5% of respondents identified as male (67.5% as female), whilst 92.2% were aged between 19 and zhou and wolstencroft a home away from home: building an organic online support community for chinese students using wechat journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 9 24 (7.8% were 25-30). 81.8% were final-year undergraduate students whilst 62.3% believed they were fluent in english. 24.7% of students viewed themselves as confident in digital literacy skills; 33.8% were neither confident nor not confident. 41.5% thought that they were not confident, although what is interesting is that this is very much a perception of the students and tutors viewed them as far more confident. most did not use more traditional ‘western’ forms of social media such as facebook or instagram. the averaged data from the questionnaire is below; this was graded on a 7-point scale with 7 being the most positive answer. figure 1. students’ perception on the usefulness of the wechat. we have broken down the findings using thematic analysis and identified five key themes (see figure 2) that we will investigate in detail. each theme leads to a separate conclusion and identifies features of a successful support network for these students. all five features need to be present for the system to be viewed as an organic student support system. 5.2 5.46 5.44 5.81 5.6 5.48 5.21 5.44 5.58 5.48 4.8 4.9 5 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5 5.6 5.7 5.8 5.9 1. i feel that students in this wechat group care about each other 2. i feel that i am encouraged to ask questions in this group 3. i feel that this wechat group is like a family 4. i feel that it is easy to get help when i have a question 5. i feel that i am not isolated in this wechat group 6. i feel that my educational needs are being met in this group 7. i feel that i can rely on others in this group 8. i feel that i am given ample opportunities to learn 9. i feel confident that others will support me in this group 10. i feel that this group do promote a desire to learn zhou and wolstencroft a home away from home: building an organic online support community for chinese students using wechat journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 10 figure 2: organic student support system. the importance of a tutor-student partnership the importance of a partnership was stressed by many students. this involved having direct access to academics and leaders and being able to ask questions or make suggestions. although partnerships between the two groups is often stressed by universities, the reality is rather different (wolstencroft, calver and hudson, 2019). communication between the two groups tends to be rather stilted with poorly attended office hours and emails (where there is often a 48-hour turnaround period) being the chosen method of communication. where other forms are present, for example staff-student consultative committees, these are classed as partnerships, however they meet infrequently and resemble a more transactional partnership unlike an online community where the partnership is more obvious, immediate and deeper. one student put this very clearly: ‘this group will help me understand more information from the university especially as information is delivered by university lecturers, it is more official’ (interviewee 2). this view of wechat as an official channel contrasted with previous attempts to support students where engagement was very low. wechat enhanced the quality of communication by improving trust in the relationship by facilitating quick responses and a known medium. this was confirmed by another student: ‘the participation is high as everyone uses wechat on a daily basis and this will allow us to have better communication between lecturers and students’ (interviewee 15). zhou and wolstencroft a home away from home: building an organic online support community for chinese students using wechat journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 11 the relationship with lecturers was seen as crucial; ‘you feel very close to the lecturers’, as one student put it, and it also gave them access to more than one source of information: ‘i can talk directly to some teachers and get an instant response, there are different teachers such as leader a and teacher a who can explain the messages in a different way to make it clearer’ (interviewee 6). this contrasts with the more mechanistic tutoring or coaching systems where the focus was on one-to-one support. it allowed students to access greater psychological comfort as they were reassured by the support offered and also the fact that senior members of staff were present in the group; this reassurance confirms the work of gomes et al. (2014). some addressed issues to one teacher in particular which seems to confirm the importance of the relationship students have with lecturers (wolstencroft, calver and hall, 2019). the partnership element comes across strongly in the findings. students talked about how they were supported by each other (a theme which will be explored later on) but also how they felt a connection to teachers due to the enhanced communication. one student put this succinctly: ‘wechat is highly used by asian students so that they can receive the message instantly and it increases the connection with teachers through group communication’ (interviewee 17). reversing this, it was valued by teachers who could ensure messages were passed directly to students, something that is particularly important during a time of a pandemic. we should not neglect the reverse argument with some students praising the social aspect – ‘i can see many classmates who i would never know before and i can add their account as my wechat friend and send them instant messages’ (interviewee 14) – but also understand the limitations of the mechanism: ‘i do not think that this group can enhance my social network, except as a study group or study professional discussion’ (interviewee 9). in terms of the first feature of an organic student support system, wechat formed ‘tutorstudent partnership[s]’, where tutor and students work as a team, based on a trusting zhou and wolstencroft a home away from home: building an organic online support community for chinese students using wechat journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 12 relationship, with the aim of solving problems and supporting the academic and pastoral needs of students. informal two-way communication is very important one of the biggest attractions about using the support group was that students were able to use their native language to communicate. returning to mcwhorter (2014), it is vital that the correct media is used and by using one the students are familiar with, they felt comfortable and able to ask questions, thus creating far less anxiety. wechat is used extensively for social messaging and the difference between it and more traditional forms of university communication are explained clearly by one respondent: ‘since i am in china, it is not easy for me to have access to facebook and twitter. emails and moodle are fine, but it is not that much convenient. it's more like a boss sending messages to employees’ (interviewee 5). this differentiation between formal and informal channels and the coding that this entails (jaeger and buz, 2018) is exacerbated by the volume of communication received as mentioned by many of our respondents: . . . students are also concerned with the overloaded email they received; therefore they won’t check all the emails in detail. . . . and most of the emails we usually received are not useful emails (interviewee 22). this deluge of emails is something that mitigates against the success of any message that universities attempt to give when it comes to support: ‘sometimes, i received more than 30 emails a day, and i could not tell which email is more important, it takes ages to check one by one’ (interviewee 14). other students mentioned the culture shift needed for them in terms of making sure that they checked communications constantly, something that was already engrained in wechat (hjorth, 2011). zhou and wolstencroft a home away from home: building an organic online support community for chinese students using wechat journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 13 the informality of the group helps students to engage with both peers and lecturers and to feel as though they are supported (ryan, magro and sharp, 2011). wechat’s translate function enables participants to express themselves rather more fully than they might be able to if limited to english. there is also a higher level of informality in a platform such as this, with stickers used to convey emotion in a more imaginative but easily identifiable way. this was illustrated by two students: • ‘it is more convenient to communicate with lecturers as you can use voice message written message or videos. email is too complicated and sometimes the lecturers can forget to reply, on wechat they always reply’ (interviewee 11). • ‘i would like to get some useful information about my study and sometimes i have confusions about the message, but i can ask and get a quick response in the wechat group’ (interviewee 16). this speed of response and informality were major attractions. clearly it depends on the individual academic as to the speed of response, but students reported far quicker replies on wechat. whilst this was seen as a positive, there were a small number of dissenting voices when students were asked about the benefits of this form of communication with a minority concerned that if there were too many non-academic issues discussed, it would be difficult to filter the important information: ‘for most of the chinese students, they would repeatedly check the information from wechat daily, but sometimes too much information or text might result in students neglect[ing] the genuinely useful information’ (interviewee 20). in terms of the second feature of an organic student support system, wechat facilitated ‘informal two-way communication’, using the right digital language to communicate with students with the aim of breaking down barriers, increasing the reach of communication, removing unnecessary hierarchical systems and enhancing both communication to students and the ability of students to ask questions. creation of a knowledge hub zhou and wolstencroft a home away from home: building an organic online support community for chinese students using wechat journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 14 whilst communication from universities tend to be mechanistic in nature (burns and stalker, 1961), this support network is designed to create a repository of knowledge that students are able to use without having to refer to academics. if you ask any lecturer, they will say that there are a number of standard questions that are asked on a regular basis and this is replicated online. using wechat’s search facility, you are able to look for previous answers to your question. this takes pressure away from academics and also encourages students to become self-sufficient. after a short period of time, academics only had to respond to questions which referred to areas that had not already been covered. this was mentioned by many of our respondents and is best illustrated by this final year student: ‘i found the most useful point of this wechat group is the search function. even if the teacher could not reply instantly, if the question has been asked by other colleagues and the problems are being solved, i could benefit from their discussion’ (interviewee 12). in effect, what was happening was that students were becoming less reliant on teachers and were becoming more independent. the knowledge discussed was not just limited to individual support but also encompassed all aspects of academic life, as can be ascertained from these quotes from two students studying in their final year: • ‘especially during the period of writing the report, many students (including me) borrowed many academic books in the library, because of the epidemic situation they cannot be returned in time. so these teachers are also particularly enthusiastic to help us to contact the heads of relevant departments’ (interviewee 6). • ‘tutor also shared the information on how to find a job and the companies which are looking for graduate interns, which was very helpful’ (interviewee 7). these two examples might not fall into the traditional category of academic support, but these queries are part of a wider sense of belonging which helps students feel as though they are not alone (lusk and fearful, 2014). as the group matured, other students in the group started to help. students shared documents relating to revision notes that had been created, how to reference assignments and even how students could book flights home after the chinese government introduced the zhou and wolstencroft a home away from home: building an organic online support community for chinese students using wechat journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 15 ‘five one’ policy (which meant that each chinese airline could only fly one route, once a week to any one country. other airlines could fly one flight a week to one city in china): ‘wechat group is good for our study because it is more efficient than emails and other support systems. if someone has questions, he can get the solutions from wechat group quickly because not only professors, but also colleagues would answer him’ (interviewee 11). this feeling of belonging and the sense of community is explored later but what it helped to contribute is a feeling that there was a true two-way communication system in place with everyone helping each other: ‘i think the wechat group chat is very useful. it can improve the efficiency of information communication and correct mistakes. students and teachers can discuss and learn effectively. students can help each other’ (interviewee 5). it also helped foster the spirit of everyone working together: using email to contact my lecturer, my problem can be solved, but the answer could not be shared with the other students. within the wechat group, i realised a lot of students have the same questions, and the lecture[r] answered the questions, i don’t need to ask again. (interviewee 22). some students shared their experiences on the quarantine process in china, and reminded the rest of the students on what to prepare when they are going back home, again helping build a hub of knowledge. in terms of the third feature of an organic student support system, wechat enables ‘creation of a knowledge hub’ and creates a bank of knowledge that students can browse to answer their questions without having to refer to any other sources. agile response what has become clear is the importance of a support system that is organic and also flexible enough to deal with the needs of a particular group. a feature of an organic structure is that it is reactive to both its external environment and the demands of members. this contrasts with zhou and wolstencroft a home away from home: building an organic online support community for chinese students using wechat journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 16 the traditional university support systems which tend to be static in nature and responsiveness is limited by regulations and the scale of modern universities. this means that the ‘one size fits all’ structures might well be useful for some but organic structures are more useful when dealing with either particular groups, or alternatively if they need to react to events. this responsiveness might well be termed as being ‘agile’ given the system’s ability to adapt. this agility refers to many aspects of its structure. our first quote shows how it can adapt to the chinese cohort: ‘for chinese students these tools (facebook, twitter and emails) are not familiar’, so on the surface this agility refers to the tools used, but it also relates to the psychological element that lusk and fearful (2014) have described. one participant talked about the importance of that element: ‘this group provides me with great academic support and mental insurance during covid-19. i feel not neglected by the university’ (interviewee 13). that feeling of having a responsive, agile system that is there to support you, permeated many of the answers. often students mentioned one element where they needed help but then linked that to the wider sense of being supported and belonging: ‘i got the news about the cancellation of july graduation ceremony; i can start to plan my internship earlier’ (interviewee 18). others referred to things which had been organised to help support students: ‘[the] chinese union is also in the group to help us who are left in uk [and] could not buy the flight tickets back home. i got my rescue package provided by chinese embassy from the union as well’ (interviewee 7). what comes across is the breadth of support that is requested by students and how in traditional structures all these demands would be difficult to accommodate. a quick review of some of questions illustrates this: • ‘my classmates invited me and i expected it to solve problems such as the graduation ceremony during quarantine’ (interviewee 9). • ‘i am expecting more indication about coursework from my tutors’ (interviewee 19). zhou and wolstencroft a home away from home: building an organic online support community for chinese students using wechat journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 17 • ‘it is a platform that can support chinese students, for me it has a more psychological effect’ (interviewee 23). this is just a small section of the issues raised which illustrate the need for agility. in terms of the fourth feature of an organic student support system, wechat offered ‘agile response’, creating a community that is flexible, rapid and responsive enough to adapt to the external environment, any changes, any situations and the needs of its internal members whilst maintaining sight of its end goals. a student-led community drawing together the discussion above, what is clear is that a key feature of any organic student support system is a sense of community. this was something that was mentioned in a previous study (university of sheffield, 2017) and is replicated here. many of the quotes mention support from peers as well as tutors and the creation of a knowledge hub is another indication of a community-based approach. instead of a group of individuals, the support system operates in the way a community operates. this means that members have shared goals and values and they operate in a cooperative manner. the key transition is one from a broadly hierarchical structure where communication comes down the organisation to one that is far more proactive. this means that members help and support each other when faced with adversity, which creates a more equal community, almost like a family, which people like to be part of. this means that it can perpetuate after the initial purpose for joining it has been fulfilled. some students explicitly mentioned this feature: ‘when the moment my problem [late submission concern] is answered in this group, i feel this is a community i can trust and [rely] on’ (interviewee 1). others linked the community to the pandemic that was part of the external landscape: ‘some students also shared important information on where to get the toilet paper, flours and pasta zhou and wolstencroft a home away from home: building an organic online support community for chinese students using wechat journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 18 [during covid-19, these things were in short supply for a period of time], which is always helpful’ (interviewee 15). what was interesting is the extent to which the community became more than just a source of academic support in a short space of time. some students reinforce the concept of community by way of a specific example: ‘i asked the question on how to print the transcript of my result, there are more than 10 students help me with the question, i feel supported’ (interviewee 8). whilst this was one specific example, others talk about the wider benefits of the community. these include a sense of belonging when many miles from home – ‘we will share food from our hometown, which makes us feel very close and warm. tutors often check on our situation and provide a lot of support’ (interviewee 13) – and also a sense of a common purpose. the sense of a family that came through in the quantitative results was eloquently summed up by one student: tutors and students also sent wechat lucky bags to engage the group, i really appreciated that. and i also like the fact that nobody is allowed to put any advertisement in the group, we are strongly bound together because we are a family not for other commercial purpose. (interviewee 7). whatever their motivation for seeking help however, it is the words of another participant that resonate the most: ‘we can discuss our problems and sort them together’. in terms of the fifth feature of an organic student support system, wechat created a ‘studentled community’: the creation of a community where students are able to help and support each other rather than always being reliant on outside help. conclusions and moving forward zhou and wolstencroft a home away from home: building an organic online support community for chinese students using wechat journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 19 what this research has illustrated is that the traditional student support systems used within the uk higher education system are no longer fit for purpose. the tutor system, founded as it was in an age when universities catered for a very different student body, represents a mechanistic network that lacks the flexibility needed for many students. universities were asked by the 1992 further and higher education act to work flexibly and meet the needs of the student body, a point reinforced by the recent creation of the office for students, however, in the majority of cases support mechanisms are transactional in nature with students having to make the first step. what this has meant is that a significant number of students do not feel supported. prime amongst groups who have struggled to engage have been chinese students who are used to a system that stresses quick, two-way communication between students and lecturers. there is an emphasis on the relationship between lecturers and students, a point that has been stressed by other groups of students (wolstencroft, calver and hall, 2019). the ‘one size fits all’ approach does not cater for all students and although some universities have attempted to foster supportive relationships via a coaching approach, this has not always been successful due to the bureaucratic nature of universities and the multiple needs of students. what we are proposing is an alternative way of supporting students that is both agile to needs and can be linked to a wider web of support. it recognises the heterogeneity of the student body and is one where the basic principles can be transferred to a range of different groups. the support system is organic in nature as it lacks the bureaucracy inherent in the more mechanistic systems used. the five features identified need to be present for the system to work but what is also important is that the choice of media is crucial. in our example, wechat has been used successfully due to the familiarity participants have with it, but other forms may be relevant for differing groups. other social media platforms such as whatsapp, facebook, or instagram could also be adopted for the group of students, who might use these apps on a daily basis. the exact design of the system depends on the student body, but what we can conclude is that social media based organic student support systems can certainly support a broader range of students. zhou and wolstencroft a home away from home: building an organic online support community for chinese students using wechat journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 20 a key feature that has shone through is that it is vital to have a sense of community within the organic support system and when looking at the future this is something that could be explored further. the use of more flexible technology such as wechat work could ensure that more students are involved whilst peer-assisted learning might well help to create the community. however, several limitations should be noted. firstly, this study used a case study method, and the sample used is from a group of chinese students studying in the same uk university, therefore the findings may not be generalisable to fit all students. however, given the similarities of students’ needs in finding more efficient and personalised support (prowse, ruiz vargas and powell, 2021), we expect that there might be some generalisation of these findings to cover students who are supported with group-based instant-messaging applications. secondly, the participants for both the survey and interview are voluntary, which might raise the risk of bias towards the efficiency and usefulness of the social media based organic support system. references andrade, m. s. (2006) ‘international students in english-speaking universities: adjustment factors’, journal of research in international education, 5(2), pp.131-154. https://doi.org/10.1177/1475240906065589. bis (2016) ‘success as a knowledge economy: teaching excellence, social mobility and student choice’, department for business innovation and skills, may. available at: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachme nt_data/file/523546/bis-16-265-success-as-a-knowledge-economy-web.pdf (accessed: 31 july 2022). bolton, p. (2020) ‘higher education student numbers’, house of commons library, 13 march. available at: https://dera.ioe.ac.uk/35257/1/cbp-7857.pdf (accessed: 31 july 2022). https://doi.org/10.1177/1475240906065589 https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/523546/bis-16-265-success-as-a-knowledge-economy-web.pdf https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/523546/bis-16-265-success-as-a-knowledge-economy-web.pdf https://dera.ioe.ac.uk/35257/1/cbp-7857.pdf zhou and wolstencroft a home away from home: building an organic online support community for chinese students using wechat journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 21 brewer, m. l., van kessel, g., sanderson, b., naumann, f., lane, m., reubenson, m. and carter, a. (2019) ‘resilience in higher education students: a scoping review’, higher education research & development, 38(6), pp.1105-1120. https://doi:org/10.1080/07294360.2019.1626810. brooks, r., waters, j. and pimlott‐wilson, h. (2012) ‘international education and the employability of uk students’, british educational research journal, 38(2), pp.281-298. https://doi:10.1080/01411926.2010.544710. burns, t. and stalker, g. m. (1961) the management of innovation. london: tavistock. cahill, j., bowyer, j. and murray, s. (2014) ‘an exploration of undergraduate students’ views on the effectiveness of academic and pastoral support’, educational research, 56(4), pp.398-411. http://doi.org/10.1080/00131881.2014.965568. department for education (1992) further and higher education act. london: hmso. gerster, d., dremel, c. and kelker, p. (2019) ‘how enterprises adopt agile structures: a multiple-case study’, 52nd hawaii international conference on system sciences. grand wailea, maui, hi 8-11 january. http://doi.org/10.24251/hicss.2019.596. gomes, c., berry, m., alzougool, b. and chang, s. (2014) ‘home away from home: international students and their identity-based social networks in australia’, journal of international students 4(1), pp.2-15. https://doi.org/10.32674/jis.v4i1.493. grebennikov, l. and skaines, i. (2009) ‘gender and higher education experience: a case study’, higher education research & development, 28(1), pp.71-84. https://doi.org/10.1080/07294360802444370. guest, g., macqueen, k. and namey, e. (2011) applied thematic analysis. thousand oaks, ca: sage publications. https://doi:org/10.1080/07294360.2019.1626810 https://doi:10.1080/01411926.2010.544710 https://doi.org/10.1080/00131881.2014.965568 http://doi.org/10.24251/hicss.2019.596 https://doi.org/10.32674/jis.v4i1.493 https://doi.org/10.1080/07294360802444370 zhou and wolstencroft a home away from home: building an organic online support community for chinese students using wechat journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 22 higher education statistics agency (2020) ‘he student data’, hesa. available at: https://www.hesa.ac.uk/data-and-analysis/students/where-from (accessed: 28 july 2022). hjorth, l. (2011) ‘still mobile: cross-generational sns usage in shanghai’, in wilken, r. and goggin, g. (eds.) mobile technologies and place. new york, ny: routledge. huang, r. and turner, r. (2018) ‘international experience, universities support and graduate employability: perceptions of chinese international students studying in uk universities’, journal of education and work, 31(2), pp.175-189. http://doi:org/10.1080/13639080.2018.1436751. jaeger, t. f. and buz, e. (2018) ‘signal reduction and linguistic encoding’, in fernández, e. m. and cairns, h. s. (eds.) the handbook of psycholinguistics. oxford: wileyblackwell, pp.38-81. kearney, j., stanley, g. and blackberry, g. (2018) ‘interpreting the first-year experience of a non-traditional student: a case study’, student success, 9(3), pp.13-23. http://doi.org/10.5204/ssj.v9i3.463. lane, m., moore, a., hooper, l., menzies, v., cooper, b., shaw, n. and rueckert, c. (2019) ‘dimensions of student success: a framework for defining and evaluating support for learning in higher education’, higher education research & development, 38(5), pp.954-968. http://doi.org/10.1080/07294360.2019.1615418. li, z. (2013) ‘a critical account of employability construction through the eyes of chinese postgraduate students in the uk’, journal of education and work, 26(5), pp.473-493. http://doi.org/10.1080/13639080.2012.710740. lindsay, a., downs, d. and dunn, k. (2003) ‘business processes—attempts to find a definition’, information and software technology, 45(15), pp.1015-1019. http://doi:10.1016/s0950-5849(03)00129-0. https://www.hesa.ac.uk/data-and-analysis/students/where-from https://doi.org/10.1080/13639080.2018.1436751 https://doi.org/10.1080/07294360.2019.1615418 zhou and wolstencroft a home away from home: building an organic online support community for chinese students using wechat journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 23 liu, d. y. t., bartimote-aufflick, k., pardo, a. and bridgeman, a. j. (2017) ‘data-driven personalization of student learning support in higher education’ in peña-ayala, a. (ed.) learning analytics: fundaments, applications, and trends. studies in systems, decision and control. cham: springer, pp.143-169. lusk, c. and fearful, a. (2015) ‘supporting students in higher education: results and recommendations following a paradigm shift within a scottish ancient’, studies in higher education, 40(6), pp.1107-1127. http://doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2014.881338. mcwhorter, j. (2014) the language hoax: why the world looks the same in any language . oxford: oxford university press. menzies, j. l., baron r. and zutshi, a. (2015) ‘transitional experiences of international postgraduate students utilising a peer mentor programme’, educational research, 57(4), pp.403-419. http://doi.org/10.1080/00131881.2015.1091202. nichols, m. (2010) ‘student perceptions of support services and the influence of targeted interventions on retention in distance education’, distance education, 31(1), pp.93-113. http://doi.org/10.1080/01587911003725048. peach, d. (2005) ‘ensuring student success: the role of support services in improving the quality of the student learning experience’, studies in learning, evaluation, innovation and development, 2(3), pp.1-15. available at: https://eprints.qut.edu.au/44161/ (accessed: 31 july 2022). prensky, m. (2010) teaching digital natives: partnering for real learning. thousand oaks: corwin press. prowse, a., ruiz vargas, v. and powell, s. (2021) ‘design considerations for personalised supported learning: implications for higher education’, journal of further and higher education, 45(4), pp.497-510. https://doi.org/10.1080/0309877x.2020.1789915. https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2014.881338 https://doi.org/10.1080/00131881.2015.1091202 http://doi.org/10.1080/01587911003725048 https://eprints.qut.edu.au/44161/ https://doi.org/10.1080/0309877x.2020.1789915 zhou and wolstencroft a home away from home: building an organic online support community for chinese students using wechat journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 24 roberts, p. and dunworth, k. (2012) ‘staff and student perceptions of support services for international students in higher education: a case study’, journal of higher education policy and management, 34(5), pp. 517-528. https://doi.org/10.1080/1360080x.2012.716000. ryan, s. d., magro, m. j. and sharp, j. h. (2011) ‘exploring educational and cultural adaptation through social networking sites’, journal of information technology education: innovation in practice,10(1), pp.1-16. https://doi.org/10.28945/1346. scudamore, r. (2013) ‘engaging home and international students: a guide for new lecturers’, the higher education academy. available at: https://cdn.southampton.ac.uk/assets/imported/transforms/contentblock/usefuldownloads_download/1eab6d741a214f79a30464c60e296a28/scudam ore%20(2013)%20engaging%20home%20and%20international%20students.pdf (accessed: 28 july 2022). simmons, l. d. (2013) ‘factors of persistence for african american men in a student support organisation’, the journal of negro education, 82(1), pp.62-74. https://doi.org/10.7709/jnegroeducation.82.1.0062. university of sheffield (2017) ‘exploring the use of ‘wechat’ as a social media tool to engage chinese students’, ukcisa. available at: https://www.ukcisa.org.uk/research-policy/resource-bank/resources/105/using-wechat-to-engage-chinese-students (accessed: 28 july 2022). walsh, c., larsen, c. and parry, d. (2009) ‘academic tutors at the frontline of student support in a cohort of students succeeding in higher education’, educational studies, 35(4), pp.405-424. https://doi.org/10.1080/03055690902876438. wei, y., samiee, s. and lee, r. p. (2014) ‘the influence of organic organizational cultures, market responsiveness, and product strategy on firm performance in an emerging market’, journal of the academy of marking science, 42, pp.49-70. http://doi.org/10.1007/s11747-013-0337-6. https://doi.org/10.1080/1360080x.2012.716000 https://doi.org/10.28945/1346 https://cdn.southampton.ac.uk/assets/imported/transforms/content-block/usefuldownloads_download/1eab6d741a214f79a30464c60e296a28/scudamore%20(2013)%20engaging%20home%20and%20international%20students.pdf https://cdn.southampton.ac.uk/assets/imported/transforms/content-block/usefuldownloads_download/1eab6d741a214f79a30464c60e296a28/scudamore%20(2013)%20engaging%20home%20and%20international%20students.pdf https://cdn.southampton.ac.uk/assets/imported/transforms/content-block/usefuldownloads_download/1eab6d741a214f79a30464c60e296a28/scudamore%20(2013)%20engaging%20home%20and%20international%20students.pdf https://doi.org/10.7709/jnegroeducation.82.1.0062 https://www.ukcisa.org.uk/research--policy/resource-bank/resources/105/using-wechat-to-engage-chinese-students https://www.ukcisa.org.uk/research--policy/resource-bank/resources/105/using-wechat-to-engage-chinese-students http://doi.org/10.1007/s11747-013-0337-6 zhou and wolstencroft a home away from home: building an organic online support community for chinese students using wechat journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 25 wolstencroft, p., calver, k and hudson, f. (2019) ‘“you’re not like a real professor”: informalising and personalising support in uk higher education’, advance he teaching and learning conference. newcastle 2-4 july. zhou, r., hentschel, j. and kumar, n. (2017) ‘goodbye text, hello emoji: mobile communication on wechat in china’, in mark, g. and fussell, s. (eds.) chi’17: proceedings of the 2017 chi conference on human factors in computing systems. new york: association for computing machinery, pp.748-759. https://doi.org/:10.1145/3025453.3025800. author details xue zhou is an associate professor in the school of business and management, queen mary university of london. she is also qm academy fellow, leading various innovative pedagogical projects. her major research interests lie in the area of digital education, crosscultural adjustment and innovative teaching. peter wolstencroft works at liverpool business school, liverpool john moores university, where he combines researching educational leadership with being part of the slt of a thriving school. peter has co-authored a bestselling textbook for new teachers as well as books and articles about a wide range of education-related topics. https://dl.acm.org/doi/proceedings/10.1145/3025453 https://dl.acm.org/doi/proceedings/10.1145/3025453 https://doi.org/10.1145/3025453.3025800 a home away from home: building an organic online support community for chinese students using wechat abstract introduction background and literature review changing he landscape international students support traditional mechanistic support systems organic support systems wechat support group methodology findings and discussion the importance of a tutor-student partnership informal two-way communication is very important creation of a knowledge hub agile response a student-led community conclusions and moving forward references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special issue 25: aldinhe conference proceedings and reflections october 2022 ________________________________________________________________________ grow your academic resilience claire olson edge hill university, uk helen briscoe edge hill university, uk maisie prior edge hill university, uk presentation abstract grow your academic resilience is a 60-minute interactive workshop aimed at equipping edge hill university students with practical tools to nurture their academic resilience, or their ability to deal with academic challenges and setbacks (martin and marsh, 2008). the session helps students recognise the qualities of a growth as opposed to fixed mindset (dweck, 2006), and supports them to feel confident in dealing constructively with feedback. students are encouraged to identify strengths they already possess and consider the skills they need to achieve their academic goals. research demonstrates that resilience is an attribute that positively impacts student wellbeing, engagement, and academic achievement (turner, scott-young and holdsworth, 2017). consequently, we believe universities play a key role in developing the resilience of students, therefore introducing students to this concept at the earliest opportunity is paramount. feedback from students and academics to date has been positive and we are aiming to grow the number of sessions we deliver. our objective at aldinhe 2022 was to deliver an adapted session and elicit feedback from our peers for future development. participants took part in a 45-minute workshop as university students. alongside this, commentary was provided discussing the nature of the activities. finally, workshop participants were given 15 minutes to share their experiences and offer any constructive suggestions. resources were shared with participants, alongside presentation notes. olson, briscoe and prior grow your academic resilience journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 2 session plan: 1. fixed vs. growth mindset quiz. 2. grow your academic resilience (bespoke worksheet). 3. your feedback plan. the session addresses the following learning outcomes: • understanding what it means to be academically resilient. • recognising a growth mindset. • discovering practical tools to nurture your resilience. • dealing confidently with feedback. community response figure 1. visual reflection from session chair j bartram. two broad themes emerged from the audience's reflections: the importance of embedding teaching around resilience into learning development work and the role of emotions in academic work. olson, briscoe and prior grow your academic resilience journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 3 learning developers are frequently privy to a direct, unvarnished picture of students’ struggles around feedback. we work in a context of pure support: no grades or judgement are applied, only teaching and academic development. the incorporation of resilience as an aspect of learning developers’ support ‘would be useful and empowering’, particularly when it comes to dealing with feedback. as one audience member noted, when we ‘see students in tutorials where they have had negative feedback, a big part of the job is helping them to realise that they can overcome problems’. opportunities to employ teaching around resilience and growth mindset are embedded in daily practice of learning development work with students, not distinct from our practice of supporting students. emotions play an important role in academic work, facilitating things like engagement (weiss, 2000) and motivation (dweck, 2006). students may experience strong feelings about the feedback their academic work receives. shields (2015) found that these emotions were related to students’ identities as learners, shaped by their prior educational experiences, the significance they ascribed to the feedback, and their beliefs about themselves as learners. he noted that tutors and learning developers had the opportunity to ‘induce the positive activating emotions needed for learning’ (p. 622) by addressing these experiences and identities. this is particularly important because students build resilience not individually, but through interactions with their environment (e.g., school, family, community, culture) – these interactions do not create resilience, but make resilience more likely to occur (ungar, 2012). as learning developers, we may see direct evidence of that growth: [t]here is a pattern in academic resilience introspectively as a learner and observed when mentoring. when the learner sees that i am genuine rather than being polite about the strengths within their work, the learner starts to build resilience and believe in their own strengths. but this is always after the first interaction, and i think this might be a kind of pre-resilience period where the learner is deciding if the interaction was genuine or generic. some people need more sessions before they trust but once this period is over, i feel that visible change in academic resilience grows. that ability to trust and be academically vulnerable allows growth. vulnerability also plays a role in the feedback-feelings cycle; as an audience member reflected, a ‘combination of aspects of mindset, resilience, [and] vulnerability all feel a powerful mix for student support’. emotions, then, are not an individual experience that olson, briscoe and prior grow your academic resilience journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 4 one must learn to control or damp down, but a natural part of learning and something that changes and develops in interactions with others, as students build self-efficacy in academic contexts. as one audience member noted, learning developers have an opportunity to reframe struggle as unconscious growth, shifting perspective from a deficit model to a strengths model when it comes to negative emotions (kort, reilly and picard, 2001). authors’ reflections this session was designed to experience and reflect on a workshop we delivered to students. despite all our preparation, on the day a tech issue meant that we were without cameras until five minutes before our workshop began! this added to our stress levels immediately prior to presenting. nerves were high beforehand; whilst we knew our presentation inside out, we could not fully prepare for the questions. imposter syndrome was also lurking in there somewhere too, particularly as this was the first conference any of us had presented at post-covid-19 and we were all feeling a little bit out of practice. like many other skills, resilience is one that can develop or atrophy with lack of use. we received lots of engagement with the activities which prompted some interesting discussion too. trying something different worked well, and we were glad we opted to utilise padlet rather than relying on using the zoom chat box. considering we were initially nervous about receiving questions, we relished the opportunity to be asked about our work and received some insightful questions which will help us develop further too. on reflection, we all agreed that there were a lot of benefits to co-delivery of a conference workshop. discussion was about the research we had carried out together (along with the resulting student workshop which we had developed), which meant that it was great to also be able to work on this as a team. as is the case with our students it seems that peer support certainly enhanced our resilience as a team. there was a profound sense of relief following our workshop, along with positive feelings, this was also a real opportunity to put our own resilience skills into practice! olson, briscoe and prior grow your academic resilience journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 5 next steps the following week we were pleased to be approached by several attendees who had enjoyed our presentation and had requested further information. the whole aldinhe community were incredibly welcoming and the experience of delivering has strengthened us as a team and really increased our confidence levels, and motivation to do it all again next year. acknowledgements special thanks to jacqui bartram, university of hull, who created visual reflections, as well as to cathy malone, university of leeds, and lindsay heggie, queen’s university, and the many anonymous contributors to the padlet discussion on the day and subsequent contributions to this final piece. references dweck, c. s. (2006) mindset: the new psychology of success. how we can learn to fulfil our potential. new york: random house. kort, b., reilly, r. and picard, r. (2001) ‘an affective model of interplay between emotions and learning: reengineering educational pedagogy-building a learning companion’, in okamoto, t., hartley k. r. and klus, j. p. (eds.) ieee international conference on advanced learning technology: issues, achievements and challenges. madison, wisconsin august 6-8, pp.43-48. martin, a. j. and marsh, h. w. (2008) ‘academic buoyancy: towards an understanding of students’ everyday academic resilience’, journal of school psychology, 46(1), pp.53-83. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jsp.2007.01.002. shields, s. (2015) ‘“my work is bleeding”: exploring students’ emotional responses to firstyear assignment feedback’, teaching in higher education, 20(6), pp.614-624. https://doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2015.1052786. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jsp.2007.01.002 https://doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2015.1052786 olson, briscoe and prior grow your academic resilience journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 6 turner, m., scott-young, c. m. and holdsworth, s. (2017) ‘promoting wellbeing at university: the role of resilience for students of the built environment’, construction management and economics, 35(11-12), pp.707-718. https://doi.org/10.1080/01446193.2017.1353698. ungar, m. (ed.) (2012) the social ecology of resilience: a handbook of theory and practice. springer, new york. weiss, r. (2000) ‘emotion and learning’, training and development, 54(11), pp.44-48. author details claire olson is an academic skills advisor at edge hill university. with almost 20 years of experience working within education and training, claire has had held a variety of roles within museums and galleries, further education, and most recently in higher education. having joined edge hill university in 2016, claire currently teaches and supports students with their academic writing via embedded sessions, workshops, and one-to-one appointments. claire holds a ba in art history, an ma in museum studies, a postgraduate certificate in teaching in higher education, and is a fellow of the higher education academy. helen briscoe has supported students in higher education institutions for over 20 years. she currently works as an academic skills advisor at edge hill university, where she delivers academic writing support through embedded teaching sessions, workshops, webinars, and one-to-ones. helen has also previously worked as a learning facilitator, mentoring students with a range of complex mental health needs throughout their time at university. helen has a passion for academic integrity and has recently created an innovative referencing and academic integrity toolkit, which sits within edge hill university’s uniskills offer, and is designed to support both students and staff. maisie prior is an academic skills advisor at edge hill university, where she teaches academic writing and information literacy through a mix of embedded lectures, workshops, and one-to-one tutorials. before working in higher education, she trained as a secondary school teacher of modern foreign languages, having previously taught english across a https://doi.org/10.1080/01446193.2017.1353698 olson, briscoe and prior grow your academic resilience journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 7 variety of ages in spain and italy. maisie holds a postgraduate diploma in education (with qualified teacher status), a postgraduate certificate in teaching in higher education, and is a fellow of the higher education academy. grow your academic resilience presentation abstract community response authors’ reflections next steps acknowledgements references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special issue 25: aldinhe conference proceedings and reflections october 2022 ________________________________________________________________________ student wellbeing and technostress: critical learning design factors david biggins bournemouth university, uk debbie holley bournemouth university, uk presentation abstract in higher education, student wellbeing is now the responsibility of all of us. during the covid-19 pandemic, the pivot by universities to online learning positioned technology as a panacea, and saw students being signposted to digital resources for digital skills and wellbeing support. with digital wellbeing taking on new dimensions, the presentation provided a timely moment to consider how technostress impacts our students. our use of the concept, technostress, is derived from the student minds report (2021) entitled ’life in a pandemic’. it refers to the stress experienced by students when using technology within higher education, given the sector's expectations of their technical abilities. our paper reported on the results of a digital health and wellbeing survey (n=103) with surprising responses from 80 students to the survey question about technostress. the findings indicate students feel let down by teaching staff who struggle with the mediating tools of their online trade – technology – and show little empathy for those they teach. mcdougall and potter (2018) argue that human-centred approaches, prioritising staff and students’ immediate and lifelong wellbeing rather than the mere use of digital tools, are key to success in developing policies for student wellbeing. the presentation focused on the issues identified by students and shared their suggested solutions. the findings indicate that the formulaic approaches offered by academic staff to students in response to their digital health and wellbeing challenges, to ‘go there to be fixed’, will chime with learning developers championing student support as emancipatory practice. attendees were invited to reflect on their own experience of technostress during the covid-19 pandemic and share their considerations as to how to widen understanding biggins and holley student wellbeing and technostress: critical learning design factors journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 2 of this phenomenon. the presentation concluded by recommending an integrated model for framing student wellbeing underpinned with exceptional learning design and considered the optimum on a continuum for the use of technological tools. community response david biggins and debbie holley’s discussion of their study stimulated attendees’ reflections on multiple layers of technostress experienced by students and staff. attendees contributed insights from their lived experiences of learning with technology and, as educators, adapting to developing and facilitating learning with technology. this led to rich responses from the community, arranged thematically, offering personal and wider considerations for learning development and higher education. 1) lived experiences of educators’ challenges in using technology for learning a contributor offered another perspective of teachers’ struggles to use technology from their earlier learning experiences: this presentation was of particular interest to me, especially as a student whose academic learning ran parallel to the advancement of technology. in my school years, i witnessed first-hand the issues with integrating technology into the classroom. in my first years of schooling the number of computers in our school was in the single digits, and whiteboards were the norm. by the time i left for secondary school, this had increased to a computer lab and smartboards in every classroom. this study echoes an issue that is indicative of a larger problem: often staff are not trained on the tools they are expected to use to teach. even before the advent of touchscreens, my teachers were having issues: ‘you have to press the button in the corner to make it full screen!’, was something of a mantra for many of my secondary school lessons. a learning developer empathised with students, while questioning whether academic staff do not care for their wellbeing. contributing their own experience during the pandemic, biggins and holley student wellbeing and technostress: critical learning design factors journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 3 they highlighted the potential for misunderstandings amid the challenges of learning and teaching online: technostress is something i have been acutely aware of for some time. for example, as a learning developer working with students online, four hours with the camera on me is infinitely more stressful than four hours face-to-face. so, i’m not surprised that students feel it too. the point about students feeling like lecturers care less about them and are less approachable online does feel like a fallacy – i think teachers went out of their way with what, in many cases, was a pretty poor technological skillset at the point of the ‘pivot’, to upskill and think about their methods of engaging students very quickly. a student at our university memorably roasted the technical abilities of the academic staff in their department while i collected my click and collect shopping from him at asda in the height of the first lockdown. shame that there were these feelings of ‘them and us’. i wonder how much teachers appearing not to care was the result of us really not knowing what to do, or how to seem to care, when faced with a load of blank boxes on zoom and feeling like we were talking to a void. for some attendees, the session was a welcome opportunity to consider how their own experiences were shared by other teaching teams within other universities, and it stimulated thoughts for how they and their university might adapt their learning design to enhance student wellbeing: the session highlighted several aspects for me. one was that the frustrations my students encounter with the vle are not unique to our university. there are solutions, but with issues such as workload those changes may be difficult or take quite a bit of time to make! i really liked what was said about considering the pedagogy behind why we use certain tools online, or the impact the choices have on learning. i’m going to be keeping that in the forefront of my mind as i design an online course. the session also reminded me again of the need to personally connect with students to make them feel seen. as was pointed out, this can be difficult in large cohorts, but, for example, for an online module i teach that supports nurses with their academic english, i feel i could fairly easily make time in the schedule to meet students one-to-one earlier on to build that connection that may be harder in a group with cameras often off. thank you! biggins and holley student wellbeing and technostress: critical learning design factors journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 4 as another attendee noted, biggins and holley shared their findings in a time of transition when universities are once more adapting how they use technology, and the wider ramifications this entails, following the rapid transition to online learning in 2020: very useful to identify commonalities in our challenges and issues – as well as the positives that have been identified with the emergency pivot to online. it will be interesting to see how the sector and how individual institutions navigate and steer their way to a ‘new normal’ and what effect their chosen ‘blend’ will have on recruitment. however, it was noted that amid students’ requests for assistance some academic responses long familiar to learning developers continued throughout the pandemic: the part about students being sent to ld to be ‘fixed’, vs. us wanting to badge it as emancipatory practice, is achingly familiar! i think progress is being made about it, slowly, though. 2) a need for institutional responses to balance the convenience and challenges of technology while the study highlighted the convenience of online learning for some students, the finding that the lack of support for learning digital skills contributed to their stress had resonance for attendees’ experiences of different educational settings: licences for software can easily exceed thousands of pounds in costs, and often the features that are being paid for are not used to their fullest extent, if at all. as mentioned by the study, when it comes to using this software, students are often expected to just ‘get on with it’. due to the large sums of money involved, finite budgets, and licensing often being done in annual increments, it can, also, be extremely difficult to change software that is not performing adequately. from first-hand experience, schools can often neglect students’ user experience (ux), how it feels for students when interacting with a product, and their user interface (ui), the touchpoints a student interacts with, when selecting software to biggins and holley student wellbeing and technostress: critical learning design factors journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 5 benefit their students’ learning. this study exposed an interesting split in expectations of students for software they are expected to use: students either wanted software to be intrinsically easy to use, or to be provided training on the specific software. it would be useful to know if the split varied in different courses and faculties, particularly between more technology focussed courses and courses with a non-technical focus. this split is interesting because it represents a common debate in the ux and ui communities over whether ease-of-use should be prioritised over functionality. whilst there are no easy solutions for this split, staff responsible for the procurement of software should keep these competing schools of thought in mind. when biggins and holley invited session attendees to offer their students’ views of online learning (see figure 1), attendees highlighted similar mixed perceptions. this indicates the complexity of students’ experiences of technology-led learning design in many universities, and the necessity of enhancing students’ wellbeing and learning experiences while offering convenience and choice: it was fascinating to see the student responses you had collected and shared with us. i wonder how we can balance these students’ experiences of ‘technostress’ and potential negative impacts on their learning with their desires for the convenience of online delivery? some institutions seem to think it’s best to just take away the choice for online almost entirely, with the perspective that learning and engagement are simply ‘better’ in person. but as your presentation showed (and this certainly aligns with our learning development team’s own data and anecdotal feedback from students), there is a very wide variety of student desires and needs when it comes to learning (e.g., pace/timing of course, accessibility of materials, etc.). students want (or need) options/choice, and many want convenience even if they don’t see it as best for their engagement. how can we support students to get the most out of even the most ‘convenient’ options without sacrificing learning, social connection, etc.? the mentimeter poll of potential solutions to technostress (figure 2), completed by the session attendees, indicates that rather than students needing to go ‘over there to be biggins and holley student wellbeing and technostress: critical learning design factors journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 6 fixed’, staff and institutional leadership should take a positive lead on enhancing their skills and provision: as you suggested in your presentation, this will come down to learning design – but as the menti poll was, i think, getting at, we need institutional leadership to see the value in up-skilling both students and staff in the areas of digital competencies, and, i would say, digital learning/teaching skills, rather than seeing those areas as something temporary and restricted to ‘covid times’. whilst students may have an environmental advantage over staff, this is by no means an excuse to be complacent. based on the results of this study, it is clear to me that staff need more training to increase their digital confidence and technical proficiency. as stated in the study, too much training revolves around specific actions within software. i believe a more holistic and pedagogic approach is necessary, one that teaches these underlying transferable technical skills that students will have picked up. training materials and tutorials make assumptions about a user’s underlying knowledge of the technical aspects of the software and will skip over fundamentals to teach the software-specific knowledge. this is not the responsibility of the software vendors to fix, in fact the opposite is true, education providers should be sure that their staff demonstrate a baseline level of technical proficiency and knowledge. 3) next steps and additional questions the presentation raised a number of questions from attendees for further research: another interesting point highlighted by the study was that staff consistently believe that students are more technically proficient than them. again, this would be useful to see broken down by subject area to see how specific courses affect this perception. i believe this to be a side effect of many current students having grown up with technology, it being an inherent part of their lives throughout their developing years. however, i would be interested to see if current teenagers show less transferable technical knowledge due to the increased prevalence of closedbox technology with simplified optioneering that allows only for limited (mostly cosmetic) user changes. technology available throughout the 2000’s and early biggins and holley student wellbeing and technostress: critical learning design factors journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 7 2010’s was on the whole much more open to user changes and promoted a technical curiosity that leads to the development of these transferable skills. overall, i found this presentation extremely interesting; it raised several very good points about technology’s integration into education that, as of yet, the majority of education providers have failed to solve. the transition to remote learning has been challenging on all fronts, and both students and staff are continually learning new ways to use technology to their benefit. however, this presentation correctly identifies a long-standing problem with staff proficiency that has been exacerbated by the current conditions. to further build on this study, a per-subject breakdown of their results would be interesting to see, and i believe could lead to some interesting conclusions about different subject areas. additionally, a larger sample size would lead to further useful conclusions being drawn. authors’ reflection the content for our presentation came from a student questionnaire. this is a link to an empty version of the questionnaire so that you can see what was asked: https://bit.ly/aldinhe22. the link is active until the next aldinhe conference in 2023 or by request to the authors. the questionnaire consisted of six sections, with the main headings derived from the literature we summarised in our presentation. the six sections focused on: 1. student demographics: for example, year of student, sex, and faculty. 2. technology access and awareness questions, using five-point likert-type response questions: for example, phone, social media, and the vle. 3. ease of access to vle components, using five-point likert-type questions. 4. where students accessed learning materials. 5. an open-text question about how staff could better support students. 6. a section on learning during a pandemic, asking how students had been affected, their response to technostress, and the extent to which the institution supported students. students were also asked if they had accessed the institution’s wellbeing resources. https://bit.ly/aldinhe22 biggins and holley student wellbeing and technostress: critical learning design factors journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 8 for this presentation we chose to focus on student wellbeing and the impact technostress had on their learning experience. our research reported nuances in students’ responses to technostress. respondents showed a clear understanding of the dangers of technostress and gave examples of actions taken, for example, taking walks, breaks, days away from the computer, and designated time off-screen. the negative effects of technostress were reported to be low motivation, difficulty focusing, an increased tendency to procrastinate, isolation, anxiety, and a great deal of frustration. students’ expectations were not met in terms of the institution’s ability to respond effectively to the pandemic; a particular area of concern was the impact on their learning. in common with all institutions, our own institution ramped up the resources available to students and signposted them to staff and students in many places and on many occasions. our findings showed that students in general ignored the available resources, with 68% reporting that they did not access the wellbeing resources. we were keen to engage with our attendees and selected the audience response application, mentimeter, a tool used by many institutions to gather instant feedback about the positive and negative aspects of online learning. figure 1 shows an extract of some of the responses. figure 1. students' thoughts on online learning. from research undertaken by the authors into the use of learning in a digital environment, a digital learning maturity model (dlmm) has been developed (biggins, holley and supa, biggins and holley student wellbeing and technostress: critical learning design factors journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 9 2022). from this model and its research, we extracted seven factors that were perceived to be important in order to gain the view of the attendees on their relative priority. the attendees were asked to rank the seven factors by priority (figure 2). the items are listed in descending order of priority. figure 2. ranking of the factors in digital learning. reflecting on the attendees’ ranking of the seven factors, it was not surprising that the least important factor was technical training for students. there is a belief that students have a broad range of well-developed technical abilities and the attendees’ responses reflected this. however, our survey of students demonstrated that their digital skills are often strong only in certain areas such as social media and the use of mobile technologies. in areas where higher education staff think students are strong, for example in the use of the vle and the tools typically deployed in learning environments, this is not the case, and it is in these areas that students report technostress. ranking staff training as a priority is an interesting priority, and we think this is due to the comments we identified as student frustration with us being unable to effectively use the tools which we ask them to use! many surveys, including the jisc student survey (2021) and the nss’s free text comments (2022), flag up student dissatisfaction. however, many institutions do not offer staff the time to develop enhanced skills, and there are many biggins and holley student wellbeing and technostress: critical learning design factors journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 10 demands on staff time. the other responses and their ranking broadly reflect the priorities from our questionnaire. the learning development community have the student experience central to their whole ethos, and where this presentation can assist is by offering a student experience evidence base with which to underpin the excellent, locally contextualised initiatives as we start a new academic year. it is clear that students value academic expertise and guidance yet find it frustrating that we are unable to use the digital tools we advocate. in terms of digital health and wellbeing, students display a mature appreciation of the potential hazards of technostress and the care of their own wellbeing; they are partners in their learning, and there is much to be learned from their experiences. the most requested feedback item from students completing the survey was a call for academic staff to ‘listen better, empathise more, and provide more support for students’. collaborative research we would be interested to talk to any institution willing to run the same/similar survey at their own institution and to use the information collected in collaborative research or a future aldinhe presentation. acknowledgments thank you to all the contributors who shared their reflections and enriched our insight into this conference presentation and its impact on the audience. special thanks go to lauren cross from royal university in calgary, canada, and jack pendlebury from the university of plymouth. thank you to everyone who attended our session and contributed via chat and mentimeter. biggins and holley student wellbeing and technostress: critical learning design factors journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 11 references biggins, d, holley, d and supa, m. (2022) from tools to wellbeing: a proposed digital learning maturity model (dlmm). available at: https://library.iated.org/view/biggins2022fro (accessed: 20 october 2022). jisc student survey (2021) student digital experience insights survey 2020/21: uk higher education findings. available at: https://www.jisc.ac.uk/reports/student-digitalexperience-insights-survey-2020-21-uk-higher-education-findings (accessed: 20 october 2022). mcdougall, j. and potter, j. (2018) ‘digital media learning in the third space’, media practice and education, 20(1), pp.1-11. https://doi.org/10.1080/25741136.2018.1511362. nss (2022) national student survey: nss. available at: https://www.officeforstudents.org.uk/advice-and-guidance/student-information-anddata/national-student-survey-nss/nss-data-provider-level/ (accessed: 20 october 2022). student minds (2021) university mental health: life in a pandemic. available at: https://www.studentminds.org.uk/lifeinapandemic.html (accessed: 20 october 2022). further reading advance he (2022) student academic experience survey. available at: https://www.advance-he.ac.uk/knowledge-hub/student-academic-experiencesurvey-2022 (accessed: 20 october 2022). holley, d and biggins, d. (2021) ‘#take5 #65 wellbeing: the chasm between students’ expectations and institutional provision’, take 5, 25 november. available at: https://lmutake5.wordpress.com/2021/11/25/take5-65-wellbeing-the-chasmhttps://library.iated.org/view/biggins2022fro https://www.jisc.ac.uk/reports/student-digital-experience-insights-survey-2020-21-uk-higher-education-findings https://www.jisc.ac.uk/reports/student-digital-experience-insights-survey-2020-21-uk-higher-education-findings https://doi.org/10.1080/25741136.2018.1511362 https://www.officeforstudents.org.uk/advice-and-guidance/student-information-and-data/national-student-survey-nss/nss-data-provider-level/ https://www.officeforstudents.org.uk/advice-and-guidance/student-information-and-data/national-student-survey-nss/nss-data-provider-level/ https://www.studentminds.org.uk/lifeinapandemic.html https://www.advance-he.ac.uk/knowledge-hub/student-academic-experience-survey-2022 https://www.advance-he.ac.uk/knowledge-hub/student-academic-experience-survey-2022 https://eur02.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3a%2f%2flmutake5.wordpress.com%2f2021%2f11%2f25%2ftake5-65-wellbeing-the-chasm-between-students-expectations-and-institutional-provision%2f&data=04%7c01%7cdholley%40bournemouth.ac.uk%7c1ea8cd578d054674575e08d9b0060da0%7cede29655d09742e4bbb5f38d427fbfb8%7c0%7c0%7c637734363167369754%7cunknown%7ctwfpbgzsb3d8eyjwijoimc4wljawmdailcjqijoiv2lumziilcjbtii6ik1hawwilcjxvci6mn0%3d%7c3000&sdata=5wkpxxmjonc6mutmwpkgmopjqpelni%2btrtzahwxx9yw%3d&reserved=0 biggins and holley student wellbeing and technostress: critical learning design factors journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 12 between-students-expectations-and-institutional-provision/ (accessed: 20 october 2022). kernohan, d. and dickenson, j. (2022) ‘anxious students want to us to help them spend time with and learn with each other’, wonkhe, 9 june. available at https://wonkhe.com/blogs/anxious-students-want-to-us-to-help-them-spend-timewith-and-learn-with-eachother/ (accessed: 20 october 2022). author details david biggins is a lecturer in the business school of bournemouth university. a senior fellow of advancehe, david focuses on improving learning approaches and outcomes for students through the collection, analysis, and communication of quantitative data. debbie holley is professor of learning innovation at bournemouth university. a national teaching fellow and a principal fellow of advancehe, she is a passionate educator with expertise in learning design and blending learning to motivate and engage a diverse student body. her research interests in digital, augmented, and immersive worlds influence national policy through her published work, keynote addresses, and policy articles. https://eur02.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3a%2f%2flmutake5.wordpress.com%2f2021%2f11%2f25%2ftake5-65-wellbeing-the-chasm-between-students-expectations-and-institutional-provision%2f&data=04%7c01%7cdholley%40bournemouth.ac.uk%7c1ea8cd578d054674575e08d9b0060da0%7cede29655d09742e4bbb5f38d427fbfb8%7c0%7c0%7c637734363167369754%7cunknown%7ctwfpbgzsb3d8eyjwijoimc4wljawmdailcjqijoiv2lumziilcjbtii6ik1hawwilcjxvci6mn0%3d%7c3000&sdata=5wkpxxmjonc6mutmwpkgmopjqpelni%2btrtzahwxx9yw%3d&reserved=0 https://wonkhe.com/blogs/anxious-students-want-to-us-to-help-them-spend-time-with-and-learn-with-eachother/ https://wonkhe.com/blogs/anxious-students-want-to-us-to-help-them-spend-time-with-and-learn-with-eachother/ student wellbeing and technostress: critical learning design factors presentation abstract community response 1) lived experiences of educators’ challenges in using technology for learning 2) a need for institutional responses to balance the convenience and challenges of technology 3) next steps and additional questions authors’ reflection collaborative research acknowledgments references further reading author details literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 3: march 2011 fanning the flames of non-conformity james derounian university of gloucestershire, uk abstract this opinion piece argues that higher education is, and should be, about the systematic encouragement of independent thought, action and non-conformity, but that various forces act against these intentions. the author issues a rallying cry for the re-ignition of the flames of non-conformity…as a contribution to the future wellbeing of higher education. keywords: non-conformity; academic assertiveness; independent thought; co-production of learning. introduction higher education, according to the quality assurance agency for higher education (qaa) should ‘place learning at the heart of university practice – learning about, with and from students’ (kay et al., 2010, p.9). but the author contends that this aspiration often falls short and mutates in to impoverished learning for students. in this short article i want to argue for the conscious and deliberate promotion of student non-conformity in their learning. my arguments are supported by academics and practitioners. for example the late, great, martin luther king jnr argued as far back as 1963 that this ‘hour in history needs a dedicated circle of transformed nonconformists...the saving of our world from pending doom will come, not through the complacent adjustment of the conforming majority, but through the creative maladjustment of a nonconforming minority’ (king, 1963, pp. 27-28). without such questioning of the status quo we’d still believe that the earth lies at the centre of the universe, and creationism, not darwinism, would provide our worldview. derounian fanning the flames of non-conformity sally feldman (2008, p.27), a dean of faculty at westminster university puts the case eloquently ‘in praise of derring-do. of daredevils. of mavericks and risk-takers and chancers and wild cards. because to be dangerous and fearless goes hand in hand with genius and without it we’re stuck...if there’s one quality i hope our students will hang on to, it is courage in the face of wimpishness and cravenness’. the academic researcher jenny moon (2009, p.4) captures this dangerous but potentially constructive capability and argues that higher education should foster ‘academic assertiveness’. she defines this as ‘a set of emotional and psychological orientations and behaviours that enable a learner appropriately to manage the challenges to the self in the course of learning and their experiences in formal education and personal development work’ (moon, 2009, p.4). assertiveness embraces facets such as finding an appropriate ‘voice’ through which to engage in debate and critical thinking; and a ‘willingness to challenge, to disagree and to seek or accept a challenge’ (moon, 2007, p.6). this approach fits squarely with aspirations for university education that hones critical faculties, and certainly – in the social sciences – with notions of contested ideas. from my own field of local governance, for example, there are disagreements, disputes and contradictory or diverging evidence in relation to the pros and cons of participatory (by the people for the people) as opposed to representative (elected politicians) democracy. postmodernists emphasise the plurality of truth – claiming that there is no truth absolute but a series of truths and valid perspectives. postmodernism ‘doesn't lament the idea of fragmentation, provisionality, or incoherence, but rather celebrates that’ (klages, 2003, online). or put another way: the postmodernist's premise is ‘that no definite terms, boundaries, or absolute truths exist’. so my contention is that by fostering individual students’ non-conformity we, as teachers, are equipping them for life and work in a messy, disordered, rapid, ever-changing and complicated world. ronald barnett supports this approach. in his article ‘supercomplexity and the university’ (1998, p.154) he argues that education must cause ‘disturbance in the minds and in the being of students’ in order to enable them to ‘live at ease with this perplexing and unsettling environment’ and help them ‘make their own positive contributions to this supercomplex world’. he describes the educational mission as ‘enabling individuals to act purposively in an environment where all bets are off, where everything is uncertain and where everything is challengeable’ (barnett, 2000, p.419). this perspective also leads in to the co-production of learning and knowledge, which is a joint responsibility and undertaking for student and lecturer. in terms journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 2 derounian fanning the flames of non-conformity of medical research morris et al. (no date, p.8) explain this co-production of learning ‘moving on through shared understanding’. clearly academics don’t have all the answers! or even know the questions to ask! collaboration with our students may (initially) be uncomfortable and a sort of voyage without chart and compass, but it can harness the talents, knowledge and skills of both parties and thereby extend the light of understanding. again, from my own field of community engagement, i have sought contributions from students already engaged in work with local authorities, projects, programmes, policy development and community regeneration. why should i rehearse the arguments of a community development officer when there are several in the classroom or online who are better equipped to do the job? it’s also a great opportunity to draw graduates back in to teaching first degree and postgraduate students. this offers another aspect of non-conformity – practitioner inputs to academic teaching via student placements, live projects, shadowing, guest lectures and field visits. in this way students can make sense of theory and practice, and synthesise differing perspectives to reach their own conclusions. barriers...and opportunities so where are the obstacles to encouraging non-conformity and questioning in higher education? well for a start there are (undergraduate) assignment briefs that may be highly prescriptive. where the lecturer ‘calls the shots’ and (mixing my metaphors!) the student ‘jumps through the hoops’. a way out of this may be to open out the assessment briefs: for example in one of my final year modules (‘contemporary governance’) students ‘examine in detail two different perspectives on a contested issue affecting a specific local community of place or interest and relevant to community governance and/or sustainable communities. in other words you present a debate between at least two opposing parties’ (derounian, 2010, p.12). so students can select the topic, the location and the opposing factions to explore. closed and open book exams will present a similar issue in terms of questions posed by the assessor that the student must engage with in order to pass. then there are concerns about curriculum coverage. if a course or module is delivered over say 12-15 weeks of a semester, then opportunities to diverge from the structure and content may undermine, or be viewed by staff (and recipients) to do so, the coherence or journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 3 derounian fanning the flames of non-conformity academic integrity of a course of study. one counter to this can be in the form of ‘independent study’ modules of all hues – including dissertations, projects, placements, consultancy reports and ‘live project’ scrutiny; plus tutorial and seminar discussions. the use of online communication, through virtual learning environments (vles) like moodle and blackboard and more recently web2.0 technologies can be used to foster ‘out of the box’ contributions – (in my experience) some students feel a lot happier setting down views online, than in person/face-to-face. there may be staff concerns about loss of control, and uncertainty about where unexpected and challenging student contributions may lead. similarly from students, there might be doubts about ‘value for money’ and suspicion that they are being asked to make up for lecturer deficiency of knowledge, with their own research, insights and contributions. lecturers need to adapt to the idea of being first amongst equals as opposed to the expert and fount of all knowledge. there may also be subjects where questioning and nonconformity can be less appropriate than others...as a social scientist i simply don’t know how appropriate my argument is to ‘hard sciences’ like medicine, mathematics and so on...but i do think that at least the attempt or thinking about the encouragement of questioning and blind conformity is worthwhile. this is something that jd bernal, the marxist philosopher of science, understood very well when he argued that the scientist should be citizen first and scientist second. differing views and perspectives can be used as a basis for reflection – on what are we doing, why are we doing it, and how could it be improved? and finally... the furtherance of non-conformity also promotes self-reliance: as the unitarian wayne arnason (cited unitarian universalist association, 1993, #698) has said, ‘take courage friends. the way is often hard, the path is never clear, and the stakes are very high. take courage. for deep down, there is another truth: you are not alone. i am not alone. we are not alone. and together, we are enough’. in similar vein mahatma gandhi challenges us to be active rather than passive citizens: ‘be the change you want to see in the world’ (potts, 2002). journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 4 derounian fanning the flames of non-conformity acknowledgement the author would like to acknowledge the comments received from his colleague, martin jenkins (university of gloucestershire). potts, m. w. (2002) ‘arun gandhi shares the mahatma's message’ india west [san leandro, california] vol. xxvii, no. 13 p. a34 references barnett, r. (1998) ‘supercomplexity and the university’, social epistemology: a journal of knowledge, culture and policy, 12(1), pp. 43–50. barnett, r. (2000) ‘university knowledge in an age of supercomplexity’, higher education, 40(4), pp. 409-422. derounian, j.g. (2010) contemporary governance (module guide 2010-11). cheltenham: university of gloucestershire. feldman, s. (2008) ‘clear and present danger’, the times higher education, 4 december, p.27 (online). available at: http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=404598&sectioncode= 26 (accessed: 22 february 2011). kay, j., dunne, e. and hutchinson, j. (2010) rethinking the values of higher education – students as change agents? gloucester: qaa. available at: http://www.qaa.ac.uk/students/studentengagement/studentschangeagents.pdf (accessed: 22 february 2011). king, m.l. (1963) strength to love. philadelphia: fortress press. klages, m. (2003) postmodernism. university of colorado at boulder. available at: journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 5 http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content%7edb=all%7econtent=a794258418%7efrm=titlelink http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=404598&sectioncode=26 http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=404598&sectioncode=26 http://www.qaa.ac.uk/students/studentengagement/studentschangeagents.pdf derounian fanning the flames of non-conformity http://www.colorado.edu/english/courses/engl2012klages/pomo.html (accessed: 22 february 2011). moon, j. (2007) critical thinking requires academic assertiveness. bristol: subject centre for education escalate. available at: http://escalate.ac.uk/3726 (accessed: 22 february 2011). moon, j. (2009) making groups work: improving group work through academic assertiveness in higher education and professional development. bristol: subject centre for education escalate. available at: http://escalate.ac.uk/downloads/5413.pdf (accessed: 22 february 2011). morris, p., o’neill, f., armitage, a., lane, r., symons, j., dalton, e., gaines, m., katz, a. and reed, j. (no date) moving from tokenism to co-production: implications of learning from patient and community voices in developing patient centred professionalism. available at: http://www.cihm.leeds.ac.uk/new/wpcontent/uploads/2009/05/penny_morris.pdf (accessed: 22 february 2011). potts, m. w. (2002) ‘arun gandhi shares the mahatma's message’ india west [san leandro, california] vol. xxvii, no. 13 p. a34. unitarian universalist association (1993) singing the living tradition: #698. north america: unitarian universalist association. author details james derounian is principal lecturer in community development and local governance, and a national teaching fellow, at the university of gloucestershire in the department of natural and social sciences. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 6 http://www.colorado.edu/english/courses/engl2012klages/pomo.html http://escalate.ac.uk/3726 http://escalate.ac.uk/downloads/5413.pdf http://www.cihm.leeds.ac.uk/new/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/penny_morris.pdf http://www.cihm.leeds.ac.uk/new/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/penny_morris.pdf fanning the flames of non-conformity introduction barriers...and opportunities and finally... acknowledgement references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 23 march 2022 ________________________________________________________________________ supporting university staff to develop student writing: collaborative writing as a method of inquiry sandra abegglen university of calgary, canada tom burns london metropolitan university, uk sandra sinfield london metropolitan university, uk abstract there is a feeling in the learning development community – and in academia more generally – that discipline staff see the academic writing of students as a problem better ‘fixed’ by others. however, staff at a writing workshop held within a learning and teaching conference revealed positions that were more nuanced, inflected, compassionate and ‘responsible’ than this. writing collaboratively around the words produced by staff at our workshop, led to new insights into ways that staff could support student writing as an emergent practice. we decided to collect and share the many ways that discipline staff might be encouraged to harness writing in their own curriculum spaces: a staff guide on supporting writing and other forms of learning and assessment emerged. in this paper we discuss collaborative writing as a method of inquiry as we explore the contested terrain of academic writing, challenge the notion of ‘writing skills’, and model a more emergent form of exploratory writing. keywords: collaborative writing; writing as inquiry; writing workshop; mark making; exploratory process; writing in the curriculum. introduction students these days – they can’t write… abegglen, burns and sinfield supporting university staff to develop student writing: collaborative writing as a method of inquiry journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 2 the academic writing of university students occupies contested ground freighted with meaning – and controversy. this is particularly true for widening participation students, who may be discouraged to attend university by social, cultural, economic or institutional barriers (storan and allen, 2005) – i.e., those who feel particularly unwelcome in academia. arguably, the prevailing focus on ‘skills’, the disentangling of ineffably intertwined academic processes into reified things that people conceptualise, articulate, and treat as isolated practices that can be developed outside the formal curriculum, can become part of the problem for students (see also len holmes’ challenge to the notion of skills per se (2000) and kate hoskins (2008a; 2008b) on academic reading). treating a holistic practice like academic writing as a set of decontextualised skills – and the academic as a homunculus with a toolkit – arguably damages the ways that we as academics support students with their writing development, and thus contributes to both staff and students being disempowered (see also lillis et al., 2015a). change is necessary not just in reconceptualising ‘skills’, but also in re-thinking writing as an emancipatory academic practice – for our students, and perhaps also for us academics who find writing a struggle, and who find making space for research and writing even more of a battle. we initiated our search for meaningful change with respect to writing development at a learning and teaching (l&t) conference, where we held a writing workshop primarily for discipline staff who de facto teach students to write, and handle student concerns and fears with respect to academic writing. in the workshop we engaged in free writing and dialogue on the topic of academic writing. the staff responses were nuanced, revealing apprehension of writing per se as social practice, as initiation into epistemic communities, and as part of the work of becoming an academic. our initial idea was to collaboratively write an academic paper on these different attitudes; what we actually did was to write a book, our staff writing guide: supporting student writing and other methods of learning and assessment (abegglen, burns and sinfield, 2021a), that suggests many different ways of integrating productive writing practices and projects into the curriculum. abegglen, burns and sinfield supporting university staff to develop student writing: collaborative writing as a method of inquiry journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 3 following on from the production of this text, we engaged in a meta-reflective activity, thinking, through collaborative writing and visual modes (abegglen, burns and sinfield, 2021b), about the various processes which we had moved through to produce the text. we wanted to explore in depth the power of collaborative writing. the outcome was twofold: a recent higher education research group (herg) webinar on the topic of collaborative writing as a method of inquiry (gale and bowstead, 2013) and this article. in both we hope to outline the benefits of taking a ‘different’ approach to writing, in terms of our own research and writing as academics, and in terms of integrating writing teaching within disciplinary practices and curriculum spaces. in this article we summarise the key arguments from our work and invite readers to take part in a writing activity. by doing so, we aim to inspire them to approach writing differently – more powerfully – and stimulate new collaborative writing projects for the learning development (ld) community. what is academic writing? writing is mark making, an act of expression and communication (abegglen, burns and sinfield, 2018). it is a sensory and physical experience (although less so online). it is also a metaphorical process, carrying something across from thinking to paper: making one’s mark in the world – leaving a print or an imprint on the landscape. mark making allows us to communicate with other people, helping them to understand our ideas or gain an insight into how we feel and what we know. writing is not just a linguistic or semantic activity but a sociopolitical one, especially for those, like our students, who are typically placed as educational outsiders and definitely not invited to leave their mark on academia (burns, sinfield and holley, 2004; reay, david and ball, 2005). one could then argue that writing, and especially academic writing, is more than a means to an end: it is an engagement with your epistemic community; it is playing with ideas, theoretical concepts and research findings; it is finding one’s voice. however, academic writing is usually conceptualised as something to master, culminating in a final text. rather than fostering development, it becomes a gatekeeper, creating an obfuscatory and abegglen, burns and sinfield supporting university staff to develop student writing: collaborative writing as a method of inquiry journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 4 exclusionary academia, shutting out those students not familiar with academic discourse and customs (lillis, 2001). in our teaching and research practice, we acknowledge that scaffolding academic writing is tricky. especially, as lillis (2001) argues, when student language is made visible and problematised but the language of discourse and the pedagogical practices in which they are embedded remain invisible, taken as ‘given’. thus, students need a powerful introduction into the writing of their epistemic communities, but also help to overcome their fear of writing, in ways that do not label them as ‘deficit’. students need spaces in which to experience that writing can be a learning process that gives them voice and agency, that places them powerfully within their own learning and within academia (abegglen, burns and sinfield, 2017). it is a learning process that might even bring them rewards, pleasure and joy. arguably, all those that teach academic writing also benefit from embracing processes that enable students to positively discover the pleasure of writing (murray, 1972). sadly, as colleagues across different institutions attest, the typical experience of writing for academic staff themselves is as contested as it is for students. thus, we argue that we need to challenge – disrupt – the way that academic writing itself is apprehended by academic staff and students alike (see lillis et al., 2015a; lillis et al., 2015b; journal of learning development in higher education, 2019). we need to resist the too-soon focus on grammar and style, and highly prescriptive, formal, ‘right answer’ academic writing, and instead create curriculum spaces where students can write to learn rather than learn to write. in our guide, we include many activities for staff to use to encourage playful writing; in giving themselves permission to approach writing differently in the curriculum, staff, too, might (re)discover the joy of writing. in the following, we outline an activity (adapted from a #creativehe webinar) which acts as a synecdoche or metonym for a more exploratory approach to academic writing. the activity has two parts: part a asks participants to find and use random words; part b invites a revisiting of those words to develop an argument. it disrupts in a playful and embodied way the internalised notion that we need to ‘marshal’ our words before we start writing. undertaking the activity takes participants through an experience of writing as exploration – abegglen, burns and sinfield supporting university staff to develop student writing: collaborative writing as a method of inquiry journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 5 as a journey towards emergent meaning – rather than a pinning down of the butterfly. encouraging staff to write with ‘found’ words is designed to illustrate how writing may be liberating. it also acts as an introduction to the processes that we illustrated in our staff writing guide (abegglen, burns and sinfield, 2021a). as you engage with this article, we invite you to undertake the activity also. activity: part a prompt: if you can, please get up, move around and find 10-15 words – from book spines, in a magazine, by glancing at the detritus on your desk. (two minutes). now using all those words, and only those words, compose a poem, a sentence or a paragraph on academic writing. (five minutes). if you write in a google doc (or a similar), you are creating a document that can be collaboratively edited and shared. challenging views of writing in our staff writing guide, and in our work more generally, we used the work of molinari (2017) on the threshold concepts of academic writing as a lens to explore the opinions shared by the staff in the l&t workshop which initiated our thinking about academic writing. we found that molinari (2017) helped us refocus on the ontological and epistemological functions of writing that speak to all the aspects of the writing process. her argument is that there are 37 possible threshold concepts of academic writing with the key, but perhaps the most surprising, ones being: ● it is a social and rhetorical activity involving knowledge-making. ● it speaks to situations through recognisable forms, representing the world, events, ideas and feelings whilst being open to interpretation. ● it enacts and creates identities and ideologies. abegglen, burns and sinfield supporting university staff to develop student writing: collaborative writing as a method of inquiry journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 6 ● it is not an end in itself. ● all writers have more to learn (molinari, 2017). murray (1972), in the vein of molinari, calls writing a ‘process of discovery’, a way to learn about and evaluate the world as well as a method of communication. together, these conceptualisations of writing suggest that successful academic writing practices are more than showing what you have learned about the subject: they are a way of learning about the subject. for molinari (2017) academic writing is essentially about knowledge-making; it is social and open to interpretation. it is not about closure. this was the starting point of our thinking, illuminating how ‘writing to learn’ differs from writing what you have learned. the latter is the typical view of assessment: it is a way of measuring what people know. taking these arguments forward, the teaching of writing, including by discipline staff, needs to move beyond testing and searching for the right answers. it needs to initiate students into their (new) epistemic community. the writing tasks and activities need to be challenging (gossferich, 2016), provoke creativity, pique curiosity and encourage social activity. writing is a process of investigation, discovery and thinking – as demonstrated by molinari’s (2017) threshold concepts of writing, as well as the arguments of writing in the disciplines/writing across the curriculum movement(s) (murray, 1972). ideas need to simmer before they are ready to be served (elbow, 1981; 1998). collaborative writing the threshold concepts of academic writing and the notion of writing across the curriculum underscore its dialogic nature. for us, the authors of this paper, (academic) writing has become a collegiate exploratory endeavour that we harness in our teaching and in our research. we argue for writing to be seen as a collective activity, disrupting the primacy in academia of the single author text and the single author perspective. farkas (1991) offers four definitions of collaborative writing: abegglen, burns and sinfield supporting university staff to develop student writing: collaborative writing as a method of inquiry journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 7 ● when two or more people jointly compose the complete text of a document. ● when two or more people contribute components of a document. ● one or more people modifying, editing and or/reviewing the document of one or more persons. ● one person working interactively with one or more people and drafting a document based on the ideas of the person or more persons. we love these diverse but complementary ways of describing collaborative writing: collaborative writing offers a powerful transgressive alternative to academic silos and isolation. it resists the constraints, on thought patterns, on thinking, on linguistics, that the idealised single author/academic text both conjures up and creates: it does feel that there’s a emancipatory aspect to that concept that i found really exciting; i think it allows, or it allowed me in my own writing, not to feel that i had to follow this linear style of academic writing, it allowed me to follow the way the writing was taking me rather than me imposing a sort of linearity upon my writing. . . . the collaborative writing . . . allowed you to explore ‘lines of flight’ in response to each other’s writing. (bowstead in gale and bowstead, 2013, p.4). these arguments are not new: roland barthes (1975) disrupts the notion of the auteur – the single author – and the single project. mikhail bakhtin (1981) promotes heteroglossia and the power of the voices at the margins. lev vygotsky (1934) argues that through others, we become ourselves. harnessing these notions proactively in our practice created the space for us to discover a variety of ways that we can help students to jointly develop confidence in their own writing. let us return to our emergent writing activity. activity: part b prompt: please go back to your creative piece on academic writing. abegglen, burns and sinfield supporting university staff to develop student writing: collaborative writing as a method of inquiry journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 8 make it more playful: highlight, underline, colour, add pictures . . . to deepen arguments and spark further ideas about academic writing. if you are doing this as you read this article, respond to what you have just read about writing. if you are composing in a google doc, share the piece of writing with other people and ask them to add their thoughts. debrief the zig zag is the lightning bolt spark of creation and the ‘cross cutting path from one conceptual flow to another’ (mazzei and mccoy, 2010, p.505) this activity is designed to be collaborative, taking participants through a form of zig zag inquiry: an emergent, cooperative exploration of a topic. the point is not the gathering of individual responses, but creating the opportunity to be inspired and influenced by the thoughts of others. it is shared, collaborative writing in action. it acts as a live, embodied demonstration of what can be achieved when we approach writing as emergent, as exploration and as process. even if undertaken alone, as you the reader might have done, it models a writing process that can start with the spark of creation: unpredictable, undisciplined, anti-disciplinary and non-static. our l&t workshop and herg seminar participants, as well as our students, have really enjoyed this activity for the playful way it made them reflect on their attitudes and approaches to writing. participants experienced writing as exploratory and creative; a far cry from the tightly constructed formal academic piece that might be an end goal but that should never be the starting point of ‘thinking through writing’. this is illustrated by the word poems created by our staff participants, using words they spotted from their desks: abegglen, burns and sinfield supporting university staff to develop student writing: collaborative writing as a method of inquiry journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 9 universities are a garden full of secrets and insights about our planet, where you can discover your own story on the go it’s the spiritus and power of education, it’s an orchestra, an opera! academic writing: ceremony, feeling lost between useful and vertigo, the experience of nonsense and the dominion aflame, visit the assassins. i wandered lonely as a salmon bulgar wheat salad wondered lonely as well about academic writing when all at once i saw a crowd a host of golden carry on dvds fluttering in the breeze of pages of books on ‘how to’ that were never read. drawing it all together a special benefit of collaborative writing as inquiry (gale and bowstead, 2013) is that it is refractive rather than reflective. it disrupts the undisturbed, common sense and day-to-day pattern of thinking. this is the way we three write together. whenever we engage in collaborative writing as part of our own action research processes, we open a google doc and plunge in. we ‘free write’ thoughts, ideas, observations, descriptions, opinions and references. we write synchronously and asynchronously. we return frequently to our document, going over what we have contributed, finding patterns, good quotes and key points; after a while, as bowstead (2011) says, we go where the writing takes us, instead of finding what we were already looking for. we start to see what is emerging as a key theme or set of themes. we then edit – shift text around – cut and extend. we engage in sustained collaborative writing to produce a formal written piece on a given topic, based on our joint expertise and findings. experiencing the power and potential of exploratory writing for ourselves so powerfully in our own work, allowed us to see even more vividly that the teaching of writing as a mechanical process usually addressed in decontextualised moments (sum up an argument – learn how to use a quote – use the spell check – avoid plagiarism at all costs) removes the point and the power of writing itself. abegglen, burns and sinfield supporting university staff to develop student writing: collaborative writing as a method of inquiry journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 10 the proof of this is our playful staff guide, the herg seminar and this case study, together with other creative and playful writing activities. what next – or where next we invite you, the ld community, to share with us your own writing experiences and your own writing tips so this may become a new piece of research – and potentially a collaborative guide on liberatory practice to promote academic writing by academics for academics. references abegglen, s., burns, t. and sinfield, s. (2017) ‘“really free!”: strategic interventions to foster students' academic writing skills’, journal of educational innovation, partnership and change, 3(1), pp.251-255. abegglen, s., burns, t. and sinfield, s. (2018) ‘drawing as a way of knowing: visual practices as the route to becoming academic’, canadian journal for studies in discourse and writing/rédactologie, 28, pp.173-185. https://doi.org/10.31468/cjsdwr.600. abegglen, s., burns, t. and sinfield, s. (2021a) supporting student writing and other modes of learning and assessment: a staff guide. calgary: prism. abegglen, s., burns, t. and sinfield, s. (2021b) ‘dialogic montage: reflecting on playful practice in higher education’, journal of play in adulthood, 3(2), pp.82-95. https://doi.org/10.5920/jpa.843. bakhtin, m. m. (1981) the dialogic imagination: four essays by m. m. bakhtin, trans. by emerson, c. and holquist, m. ed. by holquist, m. austin: university of texas press. http://journals.sfu.ca/cjsdw/index.php/cjsdw/article/view/600 http://journals.sfu.ca/cjsdw/index.php/cjsdw/article/view/600 https://doi.org/10.31468/cjsdwr.600 https://doi.org/10.5920/jpa.843 abegglen, burns and sinfield supporting university staff to develop student writing: collaborative writing as a method of inquiry journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 11 barthes, r. (1975) the pleasure of text, trans. by miller, r. new york: hill and wang. bowstead, h. (2011) ‘coming to writing’, journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3, march, pp.1-19. https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.v0i3.128. burns, t., sinfield, s. and holley, d. (2004) ‘outsiders looking in or insiders looking out? widening participation in a post-1992 university’, in satterthwaite, j., atkinson, e. and martin, w. (eds) the disciplining of education: new languages of power and resistance. stoke on trent: trentham books, pp.137-152. elbow, p. (1998) writing without teachers. 2nd edn. oxford: oxford university press. elbow, p. (1981) writing with power: techniques for mastering the writing process. oxford: oxford university press. farkas, d. k. (1991) ‘collaborative writing, software development, and the universe of collaborative activity’, in lay, m. m. and karis, w. m. (eds.) collaborative writing in industry: investigations in theory and practice. amityville: baywood, pp.13-30. gale, k. and bowstead, h. (2013) ‘deleuze and collaborative writing as a method of inquiry’, journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6, november, pp.1-15. https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.v0i6.222. gossferich, s. (2016) ‘writing centres as the driving force of program development: from addon writing courses to content and literacy integrated teaching’, journal of academic writing, 1(1), pp.41-58. https://doi.org/10.18552/joaw.v6i1.218. holmes, l. (2000) ‘reframing learning: performance, identity and practice’, critical contributions to managing and learning: 2nd connecting learning and critique conference. lancaster university, lancaster july. available at: http://www.reskill.org.uk/papers/lanc00.html (accessed: 24 november 2021). https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.v0i3.128 https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.v0i6.222 https://doi.org/10.18552/joaw.v6i1.218 http://www.re-skill.org.uk/papers/lanc00.html http://www.re-skill.org.uk/papers/lanc00.html abegglen, burns and sinfield supporting university staff to develop student writing: collaborative writing as a method of inquiry journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 12 hoskins, k. (2008a) ‘online literature review: “critical reading skills for students; an evolving literature review”’, litreview pbworks. available at: http://litreview.pbworks.com/w/page/18059710/frontpage (accessed: 20 november 2021). hoskins, k. (2008b) ‘literature review’, onlinelitreview blogspot, 17 january. available at: http://onlinelitreview.blogspot.com/2008/01/reflection-on-structure-blog-entry.html (accessed: 20 november 2021). journal of learning development in higher education (2019) special edition: academic literacies, issue 15, november. available at: https://journal.aldinhe.ac.uk/index.php/jldhe/issue/view/29 (accessed: 23 november 2021). lillis, t. (2001) student writing, access, regulation, desire. london: routledge. lillis, t., harrington, k., lea, m. r. and mitchell, s. (eds.) (2015a) working with academic literacies: case studies towards transformative practice. parlor press. available at: https://open.umn.edu/opentextbooks/textbooks/312 (accessed: 11 february 2022). lillis, t., harrington, k., lea, m. and mitchell, s. (2015b) ‘introduction’, in lillis, t. harrington, k. lea, m. r. and mitchell, s. (eds.) working with academic literacies: case studies towards transformative practice. parlor press. available at: https://open.umn.edu/opentextbooks/textbooks/312 (accessed: 19 november 2021). mazzei, l. a. and mccoy, k. (2010) ‘thinking with deleuze in qualitative research’, international journal of qualitative studies in education, 23(5), pp.503-509. https://doi.org/10.1080/09518398.2010.500634. molinari, j. (2017) ‘what makes our writing academic?’, regenring17 conference. nottingham trent university, nottingham 21 june. http://litreview.pbworks.com/w/page/18059710/frontpage http://onlinelitreview.blogspot.com/2008/01/reflection-on-structure-blog-entry.html https://journal.aldinhe.ac.uk/index.php/jldhe/issue/view/29 https://open.umn.edu/opentextbooks/textbooks/312 https://open.umn.edu/opentextbooks/textbooks/312 https://doi.org/10.1080/09518398.2010.500634 abegglen, burns and sinfield supporting university staff to develop student writing: collaborative writing as a method of inquiry journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 13 murray, d. (1972) ‘teach writing as a process not a product’, the leaflet, 71(3), pp.11-14. reay, d., david, m. e. and ball, s. j. (2005) degrees of choice: class, race, gender and higher education. stoke-on-trent: trentham books. storan, j. and allen, l. (2005) ‘widening participation: a rough guide for higher education providers’, action on access. available at: https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/system/files/widening_participation_roughguide_for_edu cation_providers.pdf (accessed: 18 november 2021). vygotsky, l. (1934) thinking and speech. edited and translated in part by e. hanfmann and g. vakar, and in part by n. minnick. massachusetts: mit press. author details sandra abegglen is a researcher in the school of architecture, planning and landscape at the university of calgary where she explores learning and teaching in the design disciplines as the project lead of talon. sandra has an msc in social research and a ma in learning and teaching in higher education. she has over eight years’ experience as a senior lecturer in education studies. her research interests are in online education, creative learning and teaching, mentoring, visual narratives, identity and qualitative research methods. she has published widely on emancipatory learning and teaching practice, and playful pedagogy. tom burns is a senior lecturer in education and learning development in the centre for professional and educational development at london metropolitan university, developing innovations with a special focus on praxes that ignite student curiosity, and develop power and voice. tom is a member of the #creativehe community and is always interested in theatre and the arts and their capacity for holistic practice. tom is co-author of teaching, learning and study skills: a guide for tutors, and essential study skills: the complete guide to success at university (5th edition, forthcoming 2022). https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/system/files/widening_participation_roughguide_for_education_providers.pdf https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/system/files/widening_participation_roughguide_for_education_providers.pdf abegglen, burns and sinfield supporting university staff to develop student writing: collaborative writing as a method of inquiry journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 14 sandra sinfield is a senior lecturer in the centre for professional and educational development at london metropolitan university. she is the co-author of teaching, learning and study skills: a guide for tutors, and essential study skills: the complete guide to success at university (5th edition, forthcoming 2022). sandra is a member of the #creativehe community and one of the co-founders of the aldinhe. sandra is interested in creativity as emancipatory practice in higher education, has integrated creative practice into the curriculum and has designed and led a variety of creative learning events for both students and academic staff. supporting university staff to develop student writing: collaborative writing as a method of inquiry sandra abegglen university of calgary, canada tom burns london metropolitan university, uk sandra sinfield london metropolitan university, uk abstract there is a feeling in the learning development community – and in academia more generally – that discipline staff see the academic writing of students as a problem better ‘fixed’ by others. however, staff at a writing workshop held within a learning a... keywords: collaborative writing; writing as inquiry; writing workshop; mark making; exploratory process; writing in the curriculum. introduction students these days – they can’t write… the academic writing of university students occupies contested ground freighted with meaning – and controversy. this is particularly true for widening participation students, who may be discouraged to attend university by social, cultural, economic or... treating a holistic practice like academic writing as a set of decontextualised skills – and the academic as a homunculus with a toolkit – arguably damages the ways that we as academics support students with their writing development, and thus contrib... we initiated our search for meaningful change with respect to writing development at a learning and teaching (l&t) conference, where we held a writing workshop primarily for discipline staff who de facto teach students to write, and handle student con... following on from the production of this text, we engaged in a meta-reflective activity, thinking, through collaborative writing and visual modes (abegglen, burns and sinfield, 2021b), about the various processes which we had moved through to produce ... what is academic writing? writing is mark making, an act of expression and communication (abegglen, burns and sinfield, 2018). it is a sensory and physical experience (although less so online). it is also a metaphorical process, carrying something across from thinking to paper... one could then argue that writing, and especially academic writing, is more than a means to an end: it is an engagement with your epistemic community; it is playing with ideas, theoretical concepts and research findings; it is finding one’s voice. how... in our teaching and research practice, we acknowledge that scaffolding academic writing is tricky. especially, as lillis (2001) argues, when student language is made visible and problematised but the language of discourse and the pedagogical practices... arguably, all those that teach academic writing also benefit from embracing processes that enable students to positively discover the pleasure of writing (murray, 1972). sadly, as colleagues across different institutions attest, the typical experience... in the following, we outline an activity (adapted from a #creativehe webinar) which acts as a synecdoche or metonym for a more exploratory approach to academic writing. the activity has two parts: part a asks participants to find and use random words;... activity: part a prompt: if you can, please get up, move around and find 10-15 words – from book spines, in a magazine, by glancing at the detritus on your desk. (two minutes). now using all those words, and only those words, compose a poem, a sentence or a paragraph on academic writing. (five minutes). if you write in a google doc (or a similar), you are creating a document that can be collaboratively edited and shared. challenging views of writing in our staff writing guide, and in our work more generally, we used the work of molinari (2017) on the threshold concepts of academic writing as a lens to explore the opinions shared by the staff in the l&t workshop which initiated our thinking about ... ● it is a social and rhetorical activity involving knowledge-making. ● it speaks to situations through recognisable forms, representing the world, events, ideas and feelings whilst being open to interpretation. ● it enacts and creates identities and ideologies. ● it is not an end in itself. ● all writers have more to learn (molinari, 2017). murray (1972), in the vein of molinari, calls writing a ‘process of discovery’, a way to learn about and evaluate the world as well as a method of communication. together, these conceptualisations of writing suggest that successful academic writing pr... taking these arguments forward, the teaching of writing, including by discipline staff, needs to move beyond testing and searching for the right answers. it needs to initiate students into their (new) epistemic community. the writing tasks and activit... collaborative writing the threshold concepts of academic writing and the notion of writing across the curriculum underscore its dialogic nature. for us, the authors of this paper, (academic) writing has become a collegiate exploratory endeavour that we harness in our teach... farkas (1991) offers four definitions of collaborative writing: ● when two or more people jointly compose the complete text of a document. ● when two or more people contribute components of a document. ● one or more people modifying, editing and or/reviewing the document of one or more persons. ● one person working interactively with one or more people and drafting a document based on the ideas of the person or more persons. we love these diverse but complementary ways of describing collaborative writing: collaborative writing offers a powerful transgressive alternative to academic silos and isolation. it resists the constraints, on thought patterns, on thinking, on lingu... it does feel that there’s a emancipatory aspect to that concept that i found really exciting; i think it allows, or it allowed me in my own writing, not to feel that i had to follow this linear style of academic writing, it allowed me to follow the wa... these arguments are not new: roland barthes (1975) disrupts the notion of the auteur – the single author – and the single project. mikhail bakhtin (1981) promotes heteroglossia and the power of the voices at the margins. lev vygotsky (1934) argues tha... let us return to our emergent writing activity. activity: part b prompt: please go back to your creative piece on academic writing. make it more playful: highlight, underline, colour, add pictures . . . to deepen arguments and spark further ideas about academic writing. if you are doing this as you read this article, respond to what you have just read about writing. if you are composing in a google doc, share the piece of writing with other people and ask them to add their thoughts. debrief the zig zag is the lightning bolt spark of creation and the ‘cross cutting path from one conceptual flow to another’ (mazzei and mccoy, 2010, p.505) this activity is designed to be collaborative, taking participants through a form of zig zag inquiry: an emergent, cooperative exploration of a topic. the point is not the gathering of individual responses, but creating the opportunity to be inspired ... our l&t workshop and herg seminar participants, as well as our students, have really enjoyed this activity for the playful way it made them reflect on their attitudes and approaches to writing. participants experienced writing as exploratory and creat... universities are a garden full of secrets and insights about our planet, where you can discover your own story on the go it’s the spiritus and power of education, it’s an orchestra, an opera! academic writing: ceremony, feeling lost between useful and vertigo, the experience of nonsense and the dominion aflame, visit the assassins. i wandered lonely as a salmon bulgar wheat salad wondered lonely as well about academic writing when all at once i saw a crowd a host of golden carry on dvds fluttering in the breeze of pages of books on ‘how to’ that were never read. drawing it all together a special benefit of collaborative writing as inquiry (gale and bowstead, 2013) is that it is refractive rather than reflective. it disrupts the undisturbed, common sense and day-to-day pattern of thinking. this is the way we three write together. whe... the proof of this is our playful staff guide, the herg seminar and this case study, together with other creative and playful writing activities. what next – or where next we invite you, the ld community, to share with us your own writing experiences and your own writing tips so this may become a new piece of research – and potentially a collaborative guide on liberatory practice to promote academic writing by academics... references abegglen, s., burns, t. and sinfield, s. (2017) ‘“really free!”: strategic interventions to foster students' academic writing skills’, journal of educational innovation, partnership and change, 3(1), pp.251-255. abegglen, s., burns, t. and sinfield, s. (2018) ‘drawing as a way of knowing: visual practices as the route to becoming academic’, canadian journal for studies in discourse and writing/rédactologie, 28, pp.173-185. https://doi.org/10.31468/cjsdwr.600. abegglen, s., burns, t. and sinfield, s. (2021a) supporting student writing and other modes of learning and assessment: a staff guide. calgary: prism. abegglen, s., burns, t. and sinfield, s. (2021b) ‘dialogic montage: reflecting on playful practice in higher education’, journal of play in adulthood, 3(2), pp.82-95. https://doi.org/10.5920/jpa.843. bakhtin, m. m. (1981) the dialogic imagination: four essays by m. m. bakhtin, trans. by emerson, c. and holquist, m. ed. by holquist, m. austin: university of texas press. barthes, r. (1975) the pleasure of text, trans. by miller, r. new york: hill and wang. bowstead, h. (2011) ‘coming to writing’, journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3, march, pp.1-19. https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.v0i3.128. burns, t., sinfield, s. and holley, d. (2004) ‘outsiders looking in or insiders looking out? widening participation in a post-1992 university’, in satterthwaite, j., atkinson, e. and martin, w. (eds) the disciplining of education: new languages of pow... elbow, p. (1998) writing without teachers. 2nd edn. oxford: oxford university press. elbow, p. (1981) writing with power: techniques for mastering the writing process. oxford: oxford university press. farkas, d. k. (1991) ‘collaborative writing, software development, and the universe of collaborative activity’, in lay, m. m. and karis, w. m. (eds.) collaborative writing in industry: investigations in theory and practice. amityville: baywood, pp.13-30. gale, k. and bowstead, h. (2013) ‘deleuze and collaborative writing as a method of inquiry’, journal of learning development in higher education, issue 6, november, pp.1-15. https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.v0i6.222. gossferich, s. (2016) ‘writing centres as the driving force of program development: from add-on writing courses to content and literacy integrated teaching’, journal of academic writing, 1(1), pp.41-58. https://doi.org/10.18552/joaw.v6i1.218. holmes, l. (2000) ‘reframing learning: performance, identity and practice’, critical contributions to managing and learning: 2nd connecting learning and critique conference. lancaster university, lancaster july. available at: http://www.re-skill.org.u... hoskins, k. (2008a) ‘online literature review: “critical reading skills for students; an evolving literature review”’, litreview pbworks. available at: http://litreview.pbworks.com/w/page/18059710/frontpage (accessed: 20 november 2021). hoskins, k. (2008b) ‘literature review’, onlinelitreview blogspot, 17 january. available at: http://onlinelitreview.blogspot.com/2008/01/reflection-on-structure-blog-entry.html (accessed: 20 november 2021). journal of learning development in higher education (2019) special edition: academic literacies, issue 15, november. available at: https://journal.aldinhe.ac.uk/index.php/jldhe/issue/view/29 (accessed: 23 november 2021). lillis, t. (2001) student writing, access, regulation, desire. london: routledge. lillis, t., harrington, k., lea, m. r. and mitchell, s. (eds.) (2015a) working with academic literacies: case studies towards transformative practice. parlor press. available at: https://open.umn.edu/opentextbooks/textbooks/312 (accessed: 11 february ... lillis, t., harrington, k., lea, m. and mitchell, s. (2015b) ‘introduction’, in lillis, t. harrington, k. lea, m. r. and mitchell, s. (eds.) working with academic literacies: case studies towards transformative practice. parlor press. available at: ht... mazzei, l. a. and mccoy, k. (2010) ‘thinking with deleuze in qualitative research’, international journal of qualitative studies in education, 23(5), pp.503-509. https://doi.org/10.1080/09518398.2010.500634. molinari, j. (2017) ‘what makes our writing academic?’, regenring17 conference. nottingham trent university, nottingham 21 june. murray, d. (1972) ‘teach writing as a process not a product’, the leaflet, 71(3), pp.11-14. reay, d., david, m. e. and ball, s. j. (2005) degrees of choice: class, race, gender and higher education. stoke-on-trent: trentham books. storan, j. and allen, l. (2005) ‘widening participation: a rough guide for higher education providers’, action on access. available at: https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/system/files/widening_participation_roughguide_for_education_providers.pdf (accessed: 1... vygotsky, l. (1934) thinking and speech. edited and translated in part by e. hanfmann and g. vakar, and in part by n. minnick. massachusetts: mit press. author details sandra abegglen is a researcher in the school of architecture, planning and landscape at the university of calgary where she explores learning and teaching in the design disciplines as the project lead of talon. sandra has an msc in social research an... tom burns is a senior lecturer in education and learning development in the centre for professional and educational development at london metropolitan university, developing innovations with a special focus on praxes that ignite student curiosity, and... sandra sinfield is a senior lecturer in the centre for professional and educational development at london metropolitan university. she is the co-author of teaching, learning and study skills: a guide for tutors, and essential study skills: the complet... literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 3: march 2011 getting students engaged phil race visiting professor: university of plymouth, and higher education consultant based in newcastle-upon-tyne abstract this short article homes in on seven straightforward factors which underpin student learning, and proposes some practical tactics we can use to address these factors in ways which can optimise student engagement in higher education. reference is also made to assessment and feedback – which students say (for example in the uk national student survey) are relatively unsatisfactory elements of their experience of higher education, and the tactics proposed in this article address such concerns. keywords: student engagement; student experience; learning development. introduction we live and work in challenging times. now that it seems certain (post browne, 2010) that the fees students pay for their higher education experience will double (or worse), we can’t be surprised that the emphasis on ‘the student experience’ of higher education will intensify. whether students are saddling themselves with ever-increasing amounts of debt to afford that higher education experience, or whether it is parents who foot the bill, the spotlight continues to focus ever more sharply on student satisfaction, alongside all available measures of the quality of student engagement in higher education. we already have league tables in which the reflection of the student experience as gained from the national student survey features prominently. and with diminishing budgets for teaching, class sizes are likely to continue to grow – in those disciplines where higher education survives least scathed. so how can we meet the challenge of ‘getting students engaged’? race getting students engaged ‘engagement’ is, however, not a one-way street. students need to be engaged with us, and we need to find better ways of engaging with them, to help them to engage better with the curriculum they experience, and thereby invest in their success. so what kinds of learning development will help us – and our students – to square up to the challenges facing us? it is already clear that we can’t leave it all to technology. e-engagement won’t solve the problems – students clearly voice their expectations that they want to engage with their lecturers and tutors, not just with keyboards and websites. they can engage with technology without ever paying tuition fees. technology is indeed a powerful tool, but learning needs to happen in brains and doesn’t lend itself to being measured in broadband speeds, or other factors simply relating to the availability or flow of mere information. einstein said ‘learning is experience – everything else is just information’. he also said ‘it is simply madness to keep doing the same thing, and expect different results’. so to enhance student engagement in our rapidly changing higher education context, we need to be ready to try new things. ‘learning development is what higher education is arguably about. we have, however, for too long pursued dated and flawed ways of thinking about learning, as i argue at length in making learning happen (race, 2010) where i propose seven straightforward factors underpinning successful learning, as a result of asking over 100,000 people direct questions about their learning (good and bad) over the last couple of decades. those who know my work on this will recognise the factors as: 1. wanting to learn. 2. taking ownership of the need to learn. 3. learning by doing – practice, trial and error, repetition and experience. 4. learning through feedback – praise, criticism, seeing the results, developing confidence. 5. making sense of what is being learned – getting one’s head round it (carefully avoiding the word ‘understanding’, which defies useful description and continues to develop over a lifetime). 6. deepening learning by communicating it – explaining to others, coaching others, teaching others. 7. making informed judgements – assessing one’s own evidence of achievement and that of others – selfand peer-assessment. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 3 race getting students engaged in this article, i suggest that in our mission to engage students and enhance the student experience, we can address each and every one of these seven factors in a purposeful and convergent way. i will take each factor in turn, and propose briefly three things we can set out to do to transform the student experience. 1. wanting to learn a) we need to face up to the fact that an important part of our job is to ‘warm up’ students’ desire to learn successfully. our job is no longer simply to make it possible for students to succeed, we need to help them to desire success. b) we need to accept that there are some things that are trickier than others when it comes to ‘wanting to learn’. most subjects have their tough bits (‘troublesome knowledge’ or ‘threshold concepts’) where the want to learn is easily eroded. we need to share with students that these challenges are worth meeting. c) we need to engage in dialogue with students so that we can keep track of their ‘want’ to learn, and respond accordingly when it wanes. end-of-module feedback questionnaires are far too late to find out how students’ motivations are going, as indeed are end-of-programme national student survey data. 2. taking ownership of the need to learn a) we need to become much better at articulating the targets for students. intended learning outcomes can – and should – help us to achieve this, when expressed clearly in language students can make sense of. we need to continually explain the evidence of achievement that we are going to be looking for in assignments, exam questions, and other assessment contexts. we need to demystify the targets, not veil them. b) we need to address the ‘so what?’ in students’ minds. regarding each expectation regarding evidence of achievement of the outcomes, we need to have ready answers for students’ questions such as ‘what’s in this for me?’, ‘what’s the point of this exactly?’, and ‘why should i bother with this?’. c) we need to approach teaching as a bid to ‘make learning happen’ for students. it’s not enough to be masterful in the mere content being addressed. the key process is about helping students to get a grip on the content, so that they can in due course demonstrate convincingly that they have achieved the learning outcomes. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 4 race getting students engaged 3. learning by doing – practice, trial and error, repetition and experience a) we need to care more for what we get students to do, and worry less about what we do in our teaching sessions. for example, lectures need to involve students in trying things out, on their own and with each other, so that they begin to get their heads around complex ideas, rather than just go away with notes of what’s in our minds about those ideas. b) we need to help students to value the experience of getting things wrong then finding out why, and working towards getting them right. we need to help students to move away from getting things wrong being equated with failure. c) we need to help students to see that ultimately it’s ‘what they do’ that is the pathway to their qualifications, and not merely the amount of information they’ve stashed away on their laptops, in their files or in their heads. assessment measures what students do with their pens, voices, hands and so on – and is often a poor measure of what’s in their heads. 4. learning through feedback – praise, criticism, seeing the results, developing confidence a) we know from the national student survey in the uk that feedback is just about the least satisfactory element of the student experience of higher education. it comes too late, and (they say) isn’t very useful at helping them. we need to stop doing the things that don’t work, and start doing other things which may work better. b) we need to make sure that feedback is a dialogue between ourselves and students, and not just a vain monologue from us to them (and too late anyway). c) we need to maximise the potential of students getting feedback from each other, and giving feedback to each other, as ways of helping them to become much better at learning from feedback, and also helping them become more self-sufficient rather than depending on trying to please us. 5. making sense of what is being learned – getting one’s head round it a) we need to face up to the fact that we can’t do this for our students – they have to do this for themselves. that said, we need to do everything in our power to create journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 5 race getting students engaged the opportunity for them to really engage with the subject matter they are learning, so that they feel that they are gaining real mastery of it through their efforts. b) we need to re-focus assessment so that we are seen to be valuing the extent to which students have made sense of topics, rather than merely measuring their fluency at regurgitating information about the subject matter they have learned. c) we need to diversify assessment so that we’re not just measuring (for example) what students can do with a pen in an exam room, or with their keyboards while writing essays and reports. we need to be better at triangulating our assessment processes to converge on how well they’ve got their heads around what they’ve learned. 6. deepening learning by communicating it – explaining to others, coaching others, teaching others a) we need to move students away from the belief that they are competing with each other, and toward the realisation that they can help each other to deepen their learning by talking about what they’re learning, arguing about it, and discussing it. b) we need to remind students that the measure of their learning is ultimately what they can communicate about what’s in their heads, and that lots of practise communicating can maximise their potential to give of their best in assessmentrelated contexts such as exams and coursework. c) we need to convince students that they can learn even more from each other than they can from us – especially when there’s one of us and hundreds of them. 7. making informed judgements – assessing one’s own evidence of achievement and that of others – selfand peer-assessment a) we know from the data from the national student survey in the uk that assessment is another of the least satisfactory elements of the student experience of higher education. we need to face up to the fact that students don’t know how it really works, because it’s something that’s ‘done to them’. we need to get them doing it. b) we need to realise that for students assessment is ‘the sharp end’ of learning – the climax to which learning needs to lead. we need to get away from the ‘sudden death surprises’ of assessment, and prepare students systematically to show their optimum potential in each and every assessment context. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 6 race getting students engaged c) we need to use selfand peer-assessment to help students to engage with their learning all the way through their studies, instead of assessment being something different at the end of some studying. long gone are the days when a university degree was the passport to a life’s career or vocation. we need to use assessment to train students to continue to be lifelong learners, assessing their own ongoing achievements as a natural part of learning. as you will have seen in this discussion, student engagement depends on getting students engaged! but it also depends on us adjusting the things which we do, to cause that engagement to occur, rather than us simply to do our best at teaching and hope that they will do their best at learning. addressing the factors which underpin successful learning is a way in to making both teaching and learning work optimally in the challenging environment we all face in higher education today. references browne, j. (2010) securing a sustainable future for higher education: an independent review of higher education funding and student finance. available at: http://www.bis.gov.uk/assets/biscore/corporate/docs/s/10-1208-securingsustainable-higher-education-browne-report.pdf (accessed: 11 february 2011). race, p. (2010) making learning happen. 2nd edn. london: sage. author details phil race is a visiting professor at the university of plymouth, and emeritus professor of leeds metropolitan university. supposedly retired now, he lives in newcastle upon tyne, when not on trains and planes to everywhere else to run sessions on assessment, learning and teaching! he is also a national teaching fellow and a senior fellow of the higher education academy. details of his work and beliefs (and loads of downloads) are available at his website www.phil-race.co.uk journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 7 http://www.bis.gov.uk/assets/biscore/corporate/docs/s/10-1208-securing-sustainable-higher-education-browne-report.pdf http://www.bis.gov.uk/assets/biscore/corporate/docs/s/10-1208-securing-sustainable-higher-education-browne-report.pdf http://www.phil-race.co.uk/ getting students engaged 1. wanting to learn 2. taking ownership of the need to learn 3. learning by doing – practice, trial and error, repetition and experience 4. learning through feedback – praise, criticism, seeing the results, developing confidence 5. making sense of what is being learned – getting one’s head round it 6. deepening learning by communicating it – explaining to others, coaching others, teaching others 7. making informed judgements – assessing one’s own evidence of achievement and that of others – selfand peer-assessment references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special issue 25: aldinhe conference proceedings and reflections october 2022 talon: hybrid education sandra abegglen university of calgary, canada clément bret university of calgary, canada fabian neuhaus university of calgary, canada krisha shah university of calgary, canada kylie wilson university of calgary, canada figure 1. the talon poster presented at aldcon22 presentation abstract talon – the teaching and learning online network – is a university of calgary project made possible by the richard parker initiative (rpi). talon is a hub for critical discussion of new and emerging education approaches and tools. born in the early stages of the pandemic, shortly following the shutdown of in-person classes across the globe, we seek to document the ongoing changes within higher education and share thoughts, ideas, and experiences about online, blended and hybrid abegglen, bret, neuhaus, wilson and shah talon: hybrid education journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 2 education. talon's initiatives include a-z resources, monthly newsletters, interviews with academic professionals and students, in-person activations and various publications. combined, the projects serve as an interactive lexicon for remote teaching and learning. we keep the academic community informed about current developments in the virtual classroom and connected through discussion. questions such as: what are the opportunities and challenges with hybrid education? what equipment is needed for effective blended learning? how can face-to-face, online, and other 'out of class' activities be integrated to foster student success? what assessment methods work well in a hybrid classroom? is hybrid learning the future of education? – are addressed and discussed. find out more on taloncloud.ca community response poster sessions at conferences can often be overlooked, fitted in among the presentations and workshops which take priority for many delegates. yet a lively and engaged poster session can be a real enhancement to the programme, offering nugget after concentrated nugget of knowledge and experience. this session offered a broad range of subjects to engage with. for example, we discussed the value of how rephrasing apps, such as wordtune.com, paraphrasing-tool.com and quillbot.com, can positively support especially non-english speakers to overcome linguistic barriers, within a learning development framework that constantly reminds students how to use such digital tools effectively whilst maintaining academic integrity. we also saw the outcomes of research into reading strategies on reading behaviour and comprehension, with the message that exploring knowledge in he requires time to digest and sink in. this is comparable in a way to susan cain’s (2013) quiet: the power of introverts in a world that can't stop talking. reading strategies such as skimming, scanning and deep reading each have their value, and could be applied by students at different stages of approaching a text – we just have to help them understand how to use them. https://taloncloud.ca/ abegglen, bret, neuhaus, wilson and shah talon: hybrid education journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 3 sharing ideas, resources and experience is at the heart of talon, and this poster presentation showed us the power of community and networks. the need to be linked somehow to others was made evident by the isolation and disconnection wrought by the successive lockdowns of the covid-19 pandemic, and to have had such a response as this network is incredible. talon is valuable not just for the resources it brings together but for the concept of a hybrid community it presents, one in which not just the teaching and learning but also the people are located in blended spaces. how to do this meaningfully and effectively will be an on-going conversation, as it is seems that we will never return to pre-covid modes of being together. we have learnt too much to disregard some of the innovations that emerged, and experienced too much to want to lose some of the developments we have collectively made in building connections. to have all of this not only documented but also actively curated and pursued is hugely valuable, and it will be exciting to see this develop in the future. author reflection hybrid (or blended) learning has gained momentum through the covid-19 pandemic, with many higher education institutions being forced to deliver their sessions flexibly. talon aims to better understand what supports (and hinders) learning in these ‘mixed’ spaces. aldcon22 provided an opportunity for us to reflect on our current and past work in this area. the poster created represents this with a digital reference to the physical world using everyday tools to translate the digital to the physical. included is also a link to our recent pop-up intervention: hybrid community. the aim of the pop-up was to understand, engage with and activate the calgary (ca) community and its highly diverse fabric by creating a hybrid space for conversation. talon used a series of word games to engage the (local) community both online and offline. the team further experimented with blended installations that linked the digital and physical. one involved twitter data projected on a wall in the partnering pay-what-you-can thrift store with visitors being invited to respond on site to the projection. another one involved a drawing robot that brought pre-programmed words and patterns from the virtual world to ‘live’ with visitors being able to take pieces of those drawings away as postcards, with the encouragement to ‘send a message’ to family and friends. together with other interventions, the hybridity of the pop-up allowed us to reach beyond the local neighbourhood into the virtually networked communities of the city. https://taloncloud.ca/media-events-hybrid-community abegglen, bret, neuhaus, wilson and shah talon: hybrid education journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 4 our takeaway from this project and our work in general is that opportunities for collaboration, co-creation and connectivity are needed, especially in this challenging postpandemic time, and that we need to urgently explore how to best bring together online and offline experiences for healthier (learning) communities. next steps moving forward, talon would like to highlight the importance of considering what happens in the in-between spaces, the places where the physical and virtual collide, especially for the students. blended learning is often considered as mixed-mode instruction, an approach to education that combines online educational materials and opportunities for interaction online with physical place-based classroom methods. however, with the advancement of educational technologies and software, and in particular the emergence of artificial intelligence, there is a need to develop a more comprehensive understanding of what it means to teach and learn in hybrid environments, settings where the ‘real’ and ‘virtual’ are merged. technology is no longer an add-on, but a dominating part of education. a possible starting point could be to define what a hybrid classroom might mean, for both students and faculty. key to this is the application of ethical thinking to the practical concerns of technology. what we urgently need are principles to guide new advances in educational technology – and technology more generally to account for the social dimension of technological systems and practices. developing a technological pedagogy means moving beyond the discussion of what technology can and cannot do and rather to consider what we want technology for in learning and teaching, and why. we encourage faculty and students to join the discussion – to voice their hopes and concerns – for an inclusive, co-created educational future: @talon_cloud #educationhyp acknowledgements the authors would like to thank robert ping-nan chang, university of the arts london, for sharing reflections on the presentations and contributing to this article. abegglen, bret, neuhaus, wilson and shah talon: hybrid education journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 5 references cain, s. (2013) quiet: the power of introverts in a world that can’t stop talking. london: penguin author details sandra abegglen is a researcher in the school for architecture, planning and landscape at the university of calgary, and the project lead for talon. her research interests are in online education, creative learning and teaching, mentoring, visual narratives, identity and qualitative research methods. clément bret is a graduate of and associate researcher in the school of public policy at the university of calgary. he is also a part of the nextcalgary (https://nextcalgary.ca/) and talon teams, supporting public facing activities. fabian neuhaus is an associate professor at the university of calgary with the school of architecture, planning and landscape. he is the research lead for the richard parker initiative, and the principal investigator for talon and nextcalgary. krisha shah is a graduate student in the master of planning programme at the school of architecture, planning, and landscape, university of calgary. krisha joined the talon team as graduate assistant researcher in january 2022, and leads the social media and outreach activities. kylie wilson is a graduate student in the master of architecture programme at the school of architecture, planning, and landscape, university of calgary, and a graduate assistant researcher with talon focusing on publications. talon: hybrid education presentation abstract community response author reflection next steps acknowledgements references author details undergraduate students’ perceptions of personal development planning (pdp) journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special edition: researching pdp practice, november 2010 from cats to roller-coasters: creative use of posters to explore students' perceptions of pdp james davey university of central lancashire (uclan), uk peter lumsden university of central lancashire (uclan), uk abstract as in many other uk institutions, the implementation of personal development planning (pdp) has been varied across the university of central lancashire (uclan). this is due to a number of factors, including a limited understanding by staff of the underlying principles of reflection and their own personal development as practitioners. in the past, workshops with staff on pdp were often met with resistance and poor attendance. as an alternative, we have sought student perceptions of pdp, in the hope that these could be used to engage and influence members of staff. year one students from ten different courses were given a session on pdp at the end of which they produced posters representing their perceptions of pdp for their course. the terms in these posters were coded and placed in appropriate categories then ranked to allow for comparisons between groups. individual priorities for immediate action were captured on post-it notes. a year later the same students were surveyed once again and individual perceptions were captured by a questionnaire. groups were shown their original poster and asked to create a new poster in the light of a year's experience. first years’ posters had elements of theoretical frameworks for pdp, with about half showing an idea of progressive development over time; posters from second years were less theoretical and instead reflected real-life experiences, with fewer terms but more extensive wording, and less focus on stages of development and forward planning. second year students also showed evidence of engaging in pdp at an individual level with many reporting achievements in aspects such as time management which they had mentioned in year one. we conclude that students are able to recognise lumsden and davey from cats to roller-coasters: creative use of posters to explore students’ perceptions of pdp their development needs, and their achievements, but that the planning element of pdp is less well recognised. keywords: pdp; student perceptions; posters; reflection; personal development; situated learning. pdp in context – engaging staff although the current agenda around pdp dates back to the dearing report of 1997 (dearing, 1997) a historical glance indicates that in some ways we have come full circle. writing in the 19th century, newman noted that ‘uk higher education has placed considerable emphasis on the personal development of its students’ (brennan and shah, 2003). today the role of many universities has broadened from a singular focus on research and teaching to also include widening access and enhancing employability (bloxham et al., 2007). so newman’s concept of personal development has become important again, not least as one way of increasing retention of ‘non-traditional students’ (warren, 2003, cited in bloxham et al., 2007). however, despite external drivers to have pdp implemented across all universities by 2006 (clegg and bradley, 2006), implementation has been varied. one of the barriers has been staff’s own approach to their own continuing personal and professional development (cppd) because, according to stefani (2005, p.4), ‘academic staff do not see the ‘reward’ for engaging in cpd’. if staff have problems engaging in reflective practices this reduces the perceived rewards of helping students engage in pdp (stefani, 2005). as a result, staff do not intuitively embrace the concept of pdp. it can also be seen as an additional activity, creating extra work (moir et al., 2006), and /or which takes up teaching time. the fact that pdp could be perceived as the result of external influences is well described by moir et al. (2006, p.1): the danger with such prescriptive approaches is that pdp may come to be seen as an imposition rather than something integral to the higher education experience. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 2 lumsden and davey from cats to roller-coasters: creative use of posters to explore students’ perceptions of pdp it is possible that these negative views and feelings are communicated to students which would inevitably reduce the likelihood of their engaging with pdp in a meaningful way. during my time as an educational developer, several attempts have been made to engage staff in discussion of pdp, mainly through departmental and faculty workshops. however, these sessions have been met with poor attendance and sometimes with resistance from staff. to demystify the idea of pdp we operationalised the concept in terms of five elements – self awareness, reflection, action planning, team/group work, and career planning (lumsden, 2005) – and this deconstruction has now been taken forward across the university. as elsewhere, pdp practices vary across courses and schools. in some it is assessed and is considered to be part of the course, others offer incentives to engage in pdp, while for others the personal tutor has a key role in guiding students in pdp practices. thus there is a mixture of embedded and bolt-on approaches. whilst there has been evidence of some changes in practice taking place, the dissemination/sharing of good pdp practices is limited. because of the resistance and lack of engagement of staff and the limited sharing of practice taking place, an alternative approach was considered. rationale for the new approach this study began with a pdp session with a group of first year bioscience students in 2007, and resulted in the production of a series of posters of pdp. on becoming part of the narn (national action research network – researching and evaluating pdp and e-portfolios) project it seemed an opportunity to extend this approach to other courses, and then to see if these visual images proved effective in engaging staff in discussion and thinking about their practice. aside from using the material as an aid for staff development, we were interested to see how students’ perceptions evolved over time. we therefore revisited the same cohorts of students in their second year, repeating the activity. here we report on this approach to soliciting the views and perceptions of pdp of students on different courses and at different levels, and present an analysis of the responses. we will report on how this material has subsequently been used in staff development sessions. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 3 lumsden and davey from cats to roller-coasters: creative use of posters to explore students’ perceptions of pdp method in the first part of the study, first year undergraduates, mainly attending courses in the faculty of science, were recruited during a pre-organised pdp session. students gave informed verbal consent that the work they were about to produce could be used as data in a national research project. next they were given a hand-out defining and describing the five elements of pdp referred to earlier (lumsden, 2005), and a short presentation on pdp and emotional intelligence. following the presentation, students were placed in groups of three to five and carried out a skills audit. the outcomes of this exercise were discussed, collated and displayed on a flip-chart/white board. finally, the groups were given the task of representing their ideas and perceptions about pdp, focusing on where and how the various elements might occur and be supported during their time at uclan. these representations were in the form of posters drawn on flipchart paper using marker pens. at the end of the session students also wrote on individual post it notes, stating ‘one thing i am going to do/address as a result of today’. a year later the same students were revisited. they filled out a short questionnaire to assess whether their expectations of pdp had been met, exceeded, or not met. they were then shown their posters from the first year, asked ‘in the light of a year’s experience, how would you amend/update that poster?’, and they then produced new posters. a form of textual analysis – grounded theory (strauss, 1987) – was conducted on the data. for each course the terms from all the posters were collected and entered into a single table. these terms were then placed into categories with a single underlying theme. successive readings and re-classifying reduced the data to ten categories, shown in table 1. the courses included in the analysis were archaeology, biomedical sciences, biosciences, building services, forensic science, pharmacy, retail management and foundation degree (fd) health and social care. the number of posters varied depending on the size of cohort, for example, fourteen from first year forensic science students, and just one from second year health students. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 4 lumsden and davey from cats to roller-coasters: creative use of posters to explore students’ perceptions of pdp table 1. categories used to describe terms from posters. category brief description (examples of terms used by students) personal personal growth; self-confidence academic note taking; referencing skills team/group work ability to work in group situations; team building career planning work experience; pre-registration reflection swot; skills audit action planning help with revision; if something is unclear inform the teacher social/support friends; meet new people academic support tutors; the ‘i’ requests approachable staff; extra skill options complaints more organisation from uclan; repetitive teaching topics for each group of posters from a course we ranked the categories by frequency of appearance of the terms. the top category accounted for about 25% of the terms; the second category for a further 20%, and the third category for another 15%, and we have restricted our analysis to these top three. appearance of posters the way in which first year students represented their idea of pdp in the posters varied. a few simply followed the explanation sheet given to them, which gave the qaa (2009) definition of pdp and the five terms identified by lumsden (2005) as constituting pdp, which were: self-awareness, reflection, action planning, team/group work, and career planning. they recapitulated these terms as five sections on the poster. others drew a more complex diagram, with a combination of text and images. this was the most common type of representation; most contained an element of progression, or were a type of mind map. a small number of students represented their perceptions wholly pictorially; although these often lacked detail of specific activities, they were quite powerful in conveying a sense of purpose. we were surprised at how mature some of the content of the first year posters were, and what a comprehensive view they presented of pdp even at such an early stage of journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 5 lumsden and davey from cats to roller-coasters: creative use of posters to explore students’ perceptions of pdp their course. we had over 50 posters from each of the year groups, so here we have only been able to present a sample. figure 1 contains representative examples of the posters from first year students from four different courses: a) and c) are of the ‘diagram’ type, with a clear sense of progression and development of both academic and personal skills. posters b) and d) are of the ‘mind-map’ type, with b) showing slightly more sophistication in its structure, and greater depth in the number of elements and detail. for example, on time keeping d) talks about ‘lecture and seminar deadlines’, b) simply mentions ‘diary’ and ‘start early’. poster a was from first year biosciences students. this poster has a strong sense of progression through the years of their course, as did just over half of the posters from this group. it gives desirable academic and personal achievements at the top and bottom of the poster, and shows a clear sense of increasing independent learning through the three years, culminating in career-focused activity. poster b was produced by students studying forensic science, and resembles a brain shower/mind map. two of the five main groupings are categorised as ‘academic’ (writing and computer skills); two others are termed ‘social’ (social skills and enjoy uni), and the fifth is ‘personal’ (time management). the posters from other forensic science students were similar, with just under half incorporating some idea of progression through years one, two and three. poster c was from a cohort of mature students on day-release from their jobs, studying building services. this poster resembles a crosshair, with widening, concentric circles signifying years one, two and three. there is a rational progression of items shown, e.g. report writing in year one, analytical skills in year two, and leadership/management in year three. it has also been divided into sections: work, personal, university, and workshops, and indicating in which sector different developments might occur. similar concepts were seen in the other posters of this group. poster d was created by students in archaeology and, as with other posters from this group, has a stronger emphasis on personal qualities such as motivation and confidence, as well as personal organisation and time-keeping. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 6 lumsden and davey from cats to roller-coasters: creative use of posters to explore students’ perceptions of pdp journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 7 figure 1. sample from pdp posters collected from first year students (2008) studying a) biosciences, b) forensic science, c) building services, d) archaeology. d c b a lumsden and davey from cats to roller-coasters: creative use of posters to explore students’ perceptions of pdp the posters from second year students were different from the first years’ in that a wider range of words or terms were used, there was clear evidence of learning from experience, a strong sense of personal development, and in several cases some value judgements identifying positive and negative experiences. the representation of progression through the years of the course was less marked than was the case with first years, in that there was less formal structuring into sections. the use of theoretical terms relating to a further education (fe) setting, or taken from the explanatory handout, were replaced by words relating to real life experiences: ‘learn from mistakes’; ‘don’t leave things ‘til the last minute’; ‘need to manage stress’. likewise, the wording does reveal that there is also some – possibly subconscious – action planning in evidence. phrases such as ‘start essays sooner’, ‘revise more’, ’if finding a topic difficult, dedicate more time to it’, ‘discuss problems with tutor’, ‘attend career workshops’, and ‘attend bpsa conferences’, could all be taken as instances of action planning, in that they are specific actions that have been articulated. four representative posters from second year students, from the same courses as represented in figure 1 are shown in figure 2, to illustrate these points. poster aa, from students studying biosciences, features a swan, which carries a positive message. it has been drawn on a line, showing education leading to a career, and therefore with some sense of progression. terms such as ‘constructive criticism from which you can learn’, and ‘discovering personal attributes through team work’ illustrate a deeper level of selfawareness than in first year students, and this development of words/phrases is seen in all of the posters of this group. poster bb was from the same forensic science students who drew the ‘pdp cat’ in their first year, and it has an identical structure. it is holding fewer balloons and has fewer terms, but more has been written on each, consistent with the overall trend noted above. poster cc was from the building services students and is very visual, with each year represented by a different section of a rollercoaster. this poster also gives a key and written terms according to perceptions of good or bad, e.g. a good point is ‘more respect from colleagues’ and a bad point is ‘tough assignments’. all the other posters from these students also used pictures and for these students there was a strong sense of progression; images included ladders and a roadway to illustrate this. these students seemed to have a clear grasp of the principles of pdp; the posters reflected both successes to date and an awareness of what they still had to achieve, although this was in broad terms with less detail of specific skills. poster dd was from archaeology students. as with others in this group, it is a very personal account but has more emphasis on journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 8 lumsden and davey from cats to roller-coasters: creative use of posters to explore students’ perceptions of pdp academic development, compared with a stronger emphasis on social support seen in their first year posters. it also has some examples of action planning, with statements like ‘organise a study group’; ‘learn to use new technology’; and ‘talk to family and friends’. quantitative analysis of posters examining the ranking of categories of words and phrases for posters from first year students revealed that across all eight courses, just three categories accounted for the highest rank position: ‘personal’ (in five courses), ‘academic’ (in two courses), and ‘social/support’ (the latter was unique to archaeology). when the second ranked category was included, a further category, ‘action planning’, appeared, and if the third rank category was included, the ‘reflection’ category appeared, but only for retail management and health and social care. there seems to be a degree of commonality of perception across courses, and this is related to the context of pdp, rather than the processes involved. there is also some evidence of course-specific cohesion, for example, archaeology students from a small cohort of around twelve to fifteen, even at this early stage of the academic year, had spent some weeks together carrying out field work in a location away from the university. in year two, five categories were represented in the top rank, with either ‘career planning’ or ‘action planning’ appearing in the top three for all the courses, and ‘reflection’ ranked either first or second for three courses. ‘personal’ or ‘academic’ still featured but only appeared six times in the top two categories overall, compared with twelve times for first year students. this seems to suggest that there is a deepening awareness of what is involved in pdp, with a move towards a process focus, although this is still somewhat limited. however, aspirational terms relating to ‘career’ or ‘action planning’ are being used, for example, ’more idea/information on career opportunities’ rather than a focus on specific activities to engage in. about 20% of the posters mentioned cvs and the majority of these were in pharmacy, where ‘career planning’ was the first category, indicating the strong emphasis on professional development in this school. there is evidence here of an early emergence of situated practice (becher and trowler, 2001) in terms of student perceptions in individual disciplines. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 9 lumsden and davey from cats to roller-coasters: creative use of posters to explore students’ perceptions of pdp journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 10 figure 2. pdp posters collected from second year students (2009) studying aa) biosciences, bb) forensic science, cc) building services, dd) archaeology. dd   b    cc aa bb   b   lumsden and davey from cats to roller-coasters: creative use of posters to explore students’ perceptions of pdp individual responses post-it notes (year 1) the post-it notes were coded into the same categories as were the posters. interestingly, just five categories were sufficient to fit the data. a detailed analysis was carried out on five of the courses and included first year groups from both 2008 and 2009 (the sessions with first year students were repeated in 2009). the results are shown in table 2. perhaps the most striking result is that on all of these courses the ‘personal’ category accounted for between 70% and 80% of the words or terms used; although this category was ranked first in the posters for five out of the eight courses, it did not account for more than 25% of the terms there. on the post-it notes, the most commonly used words or phrases related to time management, followed by confidence and motivation. these concepts are clearly recognised as personal priorities by first year students. table 2. frequency of statements on post-it notes from first year students. course (and number of notes) categories and frequency (%) of occurrence personal academic social/support career planning negative (= complaint) biosciences 2008 (98) 66 10 11 6 8 biosciences 2009 (37) 79 11 11 0 0 pharmacy 2008 (71) 82 14 3 0 3 retail man. 2008 (18) 72 28 0 0 0 retail man. 2009 (19) 79 21 0 0 0 building services 2009 (23) 74 22 4 0 0 archaeology 2009 (10) 80 20 0 0 0 journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 11 lumsd jou en and davey from cats to roller-coasters: creative use of posters to explore students’ perceptions of pdp rnal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 12 questionnaire responses (year 2) of 189 responses, 105 indicated that their expectations of pdp had been met, 74 said they had not been met, and four that they had been exceeded. the comments made were more extensive than the short phrases on the first year post-it notes, and instead of coding these, we have looked at them across all courses in terms of positive perceptions (expectations met) or negative perceptions (expectations not met). examples of statements from those who said expectations had been met are given below. biomedical science students: • learned to become responsible and be able to organise lessons/assignments, hand in assignment on deadline. • self-awareness has improved because i am better at time management. i reflect on each task i have to do and work at how i will do it. i action plan each task i am given by writing a list. i update my cv when i achieve new skills and qualifications. bioscience students: • not all work done at last minute; have begun to start assignments early. have used library more. passed first year with decent grades. pharmacy students: • improved time management. good team work. career planning has improved since summer placement. • we are constantly told to reflect on our learning and how we can put anything we have learnt into practice. building services students: • i have got better at time management and i am more active in groups, and i have finally started to learn the guitar. • i am now able to manage my time more effectively and complete tasks by deadlines. i have become more confident when giving presentations than i was last year. lumsd jou en and davey from cats to roller-coasters: creative use of posters to explore students’ perceptions of pdp rnal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 13 what these comments seem to show is a strong sense of personal growth – selfawareness, self-confidence, and improvement in skills such as time management and selforganisation. for students who reported that expectations were not met, one of three scenarios seems to apply: 1) some students do understand the principle of pdp and are aware that they are not managing to do it; 2) others have not engaged with the ideas at all; and 3) some sense a problem with the way in which pdp has been undertaken on their course: • not as organised as last year. there are too many assignments all at once so it’s difficult to stay on top. but still trying to learn and understand what is going on with time. (scenario 1) • achieved well last year. since then pressure and disorganisation has meant the pdp expectations have gone downhill. (scenario 1) • pdp did not stick in my memory. as it did not seem to be of any relevance at the time. ( scenario 2) • don’t really know what to do for it. different lecturers giving conflicting comments. (scenario 2) • was never properly explained how to do pdp, there was no way to know what to do. (scenario 3) discussion this work has shown that while student understanding of pdp in a strictly formal sense may be limited, there is clear evidence of a deepening of their engagement in various aspects of personal development as they progress from first to second year. the content of their posters showed a greater maturity in year two: the representations were less reliant on the pdp framework given to them and there was more evidence of activities, such as reflection and action planning, which contribute to the process of pdp rather than just the context. the ranking of categories also supports this. words and phrases in the ‘personal’ and ‘academic’ categories were less prevalent in the year two posters, while those in the ‘action planning’ and ‘reflection’ categories were more prevalent than in the year one posters. savory (2007), commenting on the findings reported by clegg (2006), reached a similar conclusion – while first year students were concerned with practical lumsden and davey from cats to roller-coasters: creative use of posters to explore students’ perceptions of pdp study issues, third year students were engaged with reflection on skills and approaches to learning. reassuringly this is also in line with the perspective of employers: 'most employers put strongest emphasis on the process of pdp rather than the documented outcomes' (edwards, 2005, p.3). a deepening engagement in personal development was also to be discerned in the individual responses elicited through post-it notes (year one) and questionnaires (year two). for first years there was a very strong focus on, and awareness of, need in the area of personal effectiveness, such as time management, motivation and self-confidence. by the second year these same students were able to recognise achievements in these areas. comments from second years also provided evidence of progress in other aspects of pdp – reflection, self-awareness and group-work. although less easy to discern, the fact that achievements were recognised could indicate that action planning had taken place; further, some of the specific wording on second years’ posters constituted identified actions to be taken. we have been reassured that students are recognising their development needs, and their achievements, and that this is despite the fact that most students reported that they had had little, if any, guidance on pdp from their own tutors. powell (2010), in this volume of the journal of learning development in higher education, reports that staff view the individual elements of pdp more positively than they do the term pdp itself, and we suspect that the term pdp may no longer be helpful in achieving the ends for which it was originally introduced. students probably have a similarly negative view of the term. in a survey, moir et al. (2006) found that fewer than 25% of students felt that pdp was beneficial to their academic studies, while slightly more said that the reflection was beneficial. our experience is that if it is explained, then most students do understand the principles of pdp, and indeed many of the comments suggested that they would value more time being devoted to this area. our approach, of using posters as a research tool, actually seems to have been successful in encouraging learning, and might be useful in other situations. it can be seen as firmly based in situated learning theory (lave and wenger, 1991), in that we introduced the students (novices) to pdp, and through getting them to work together on defining pdp, interacting and engaging with each other and the tutors (experts), we communicated pdp concepts and language to help them move towards being masters of pdp. as they journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 14 lumsden and davey from cats to roller-coasters: creative use of posters to explore students’ perceptions of pdp become more expert in pdp, they are less reliant on our framework and are developing their own framework (which fits within the wider concepts of pdp). within this view, knowledge is dynamically constructed as we perceive what is happening to us and as we talk and move in social situations (clancy, 1995). so, although they might not formally articulate this development as pdp, students are actually learning the associated language and the associated pdp activities and processes through their own experiences, and through collaboration with each other. thus they are slowly moving towards becoming experts themselves and being able to take charge of their own personal development. an extension of this study to final year students could therefore have a dual benefit, providing a further opportunity for students to actively and consciously engage in a review of their personal development (a learning benefit); and secondly, to reveal the perceptions of final year students and whether there has been a further development from their second year (a research benefit). this will complete a longitudinal study of student perceptions of pdp and the further insights gained will provide valuable information to share with staff, and which in turn we hope will inform and enhance their practice. acknowledgement this paper is an outcome of the national action research network on researching and evaluating personal development planning and e-portfolio practice project (2007-2010). the project was led by the university of bolton in association with the university of worcester and centre for recording achievement, and in national collaboration with the university of bedfordshire, bournemouth university and university of bradford. the project was funded by the higher education academy, national teaching fellowship project strand. more details about the project can be found at: http://www.recordingachievement.org/research/narn-tree.html. we are grateful to colleagues from the project for stimulating discussions. we are also grateful to derek heim, school of psychology, uclan, for advice on the presentation of data. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 15 http://www.recordingachievement.org/research/narn-tree.html lumsden and davey from cats to roller-coasters: creative use of posters to explore students’ perceptions of pdp references becher, t. and trowler, p. (2001) academic tribes and territories. 2nd edn. buckingham: open university press. bloxham, s., cerevkova, a. and waddlelove, c. (2007) ‘embedding personal development planning within a web-ct supported module – a collaborative venture’, practitioner research in higher education, 1(1), pp. 3-9. brennan, j. and shah, t. (2003). access to what? converting educational opportunity into employment opportunity [final report]. london: centre for higher education research and information. available at: http://oro.open.ac.uk/6554/ (accessed: 29 september 2009). clancey, w. (1995) ‘a tutorial on situated learning’, in self, j (ed.) proceedings of the international conference on computers and education, taiwan. charlottesville va: aace, pp. 49-70. clegg, s. andbradley, s. (2006) ‘models of personal development planning: practice and processes’, british educational research journal, 33(1), pp. 57-76. dearing, r. (1997) report of the national committee of inquiry into higher education. available at: http://www.leeds.ac.uk/educol/ncihe/ (accessed: 28 may 2010). edwards, g. (2005) connecting pdp to employer needs and the world of work. york: hea. available at: http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/assets/york/documents/resources/resourcedatabase/i d71_connecting_pdp_to_employer_needs.pdf (accessed: 9 november 2010). lave, j. and wenger, e. (1991) situated learning: legitimate peripheral participation. new york: cambridge university press. lumsden, p. (2005) ‘building personal development planning into the curriculum’, planet, 15, pp.33-35 [online]. available at: http://www.gees.ac.uk/planet/p15/pl.pdf (accessed 1 may 2010). journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 16 http://oro.open.ac.uk/6554/ http://www.leeds.ac.uk/educol/ncihe/ http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/assets/york/documents/resources/resourcedatabase/id71_connecting_pdp_to_employer_needs.pdf http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/assets/york/documents/resources/resourcedatabase/id71_connecting_pdp_to_employer_needs.pdf http://www.gees.ac.uk/planet/p15/pl.pdf lumsden and davey from cats to roller-coasters: creative use of posters to explore students’ perceptions of pdp moir, j., di domencio, c., vertigans, s. and sutton, p. (2006) perceptions of personal development planning in sociology and social science: the scottish higher education context. york: higher education academy. available at: http://www.csap.bham.ac.uk/media/com_projectlog/docs/40_s_06.pdf (accessed: 9 november 2010). powell, j. (2010) ‘useful or just another fad? staff perceptions of personal development planning’, journal of learning development in higher education, special edition [online]. available at: http://www.aldinhe.ac.uk/ojs/index.php?journal=jldhe (accessed: 3 october 2010). quality assurance agency (2009). personal development planning: guidance for institutional policy and practice in higher education. available at: http://www.qaa.ac.uk/academicinfrastructure/progressfiles/guidelines/pdp/pdpguide. pdf (accessed: 3 october 2010). savory, j. (2007) ‘i never thought how i learn, just that i learn ……’ an evaluation of the impact of embedding personal development planning (pdp) processes and the effect on independent learning. salford: university of salford. available at: http://www.ece.salford.ac.uk/proceedings/papers/34_07.pdf (accessed: 1 may 2010). stefani, l. (2005) pdp/cpd and e-portfolios: rising to the challenge of modelling good practice. auckland: university of auckland. available at: http://74.125.155.132/scholar?q=cache:yxsfagxzfp0j:scholar.google.com/+lorrain e+stefani+2005&hl=en&as_sdt=2000 (accessed: 21 january 2010). strauss, a. (1987) qualitative analysis for social scientists. cambridge, england: cambridge university press. author details james davey is a former undergraduate neuropsychology student at uclan and is now working at uclan as a research assistant. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 17 http://www.c-sap.bham.ac.uk/media/com_projectlog/docs/40_s_06.pdf http://www.c-sap.bham.ac.uk/media/com_projectlog/docs/40_s_06.pdf http://www.aldinhe.ac.uk/ojs/index.php?journal=jldhe http://www.qaa.ac.uk/academicinfrastructure/progressfiles/guidelines/pdp/pdpguide.pdf http://www.qaa.ac.uk/academicinfrastructure/progressfiles/guidelines/pdp/pdpguide.pdf http://www.ece.salford.ac.uk/proceedings/papers/34_07.pdf http://74.125.155.132/scholar?q=cache:yxsfagxzfp0j:scholar.google.com/+lorraine+stefani+2005&hl=en&as_sdt=2000 http://74.125.155.132/scholar?q=cache:yxsfagxzfp0j:scholar.google.com/+lorraine+stefani+2005&hl=en&as_sdt=2000 lumsd jou en and davey from cats to roller-coasters: creative use of posters to explore students’ perceptions of pdp rnal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 18 peter lumsden has a phd in plant science and was an active researcher in the field of flowering and photoperiodism for 20 years. he is currently an academic developer within the learning development unit at uclan. his particular interests are in feedback, pdp and the use of coaching approaches throughout he. from cats to roller-coasters: creative use of posters to explore students' perceptions of pdp abstract pdp in context – engaging staff rationale for the new approach method appearance of posters quantitative analysis of posters individual responses post-it notes (year 1) questionnaire responses (year 2) discussion acknowledgement references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 27 april 2023 ________________________________________________________________________ ©2023 the author(s) (cc-by 4.0) on academia, critical pedagogy and ‘coming out’ as a third space practitioner eileen pollard manchester metropolitan university, uk abstract this opinion piece situates the practice of an experimental module i taught as an academic – chester retold: unspoken stories, put into words – within some theories of ‘community learning’.1 community learning is understood here to articulate and enact a combination of concepts taken from critical pedagogy (hooks, 1994; freire, 2018), experiential learning (gibbs, 1988; kolb, 2015) and learning development (webster, 2017). it is also informed, like all teaching, by the author’s own personal life and learning experiences within, and without, ‘communities’. the practice of chester retold made a contribution to all these theoretical fields, but in particular perhaps a conscious intervention into critical pedagogy and an unconscious one into the third space (whitchurch, 2013; lisewski, 2021), beginning with learning development. keywords: community learning; critical pedagogy; experiential learning; learning development. introduction during chester retold, my undergraduates studied storytelling alongside participants from the community of chester. the module achieved excellent academic results and outstanding student feedback and one participant commented movingly: ‘i’ve learnt that i can take my experiences – even negatives – and do something expressive and beautiful and positive with them’. but did the involvement of the public, of people from chester, make this ‘community learning’? does that intersect with widening participation, access 1 as its creator and module leader, i ran chester retold twice at the university of chester (2018-2019). pollard on academia, critical pedagogy and ‘coming out’ as a third space practitioner journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 2 and inclusion? does it foster ‘belonging’, the watchword of he today? is it the same as ‘communities of practice’ (wenger, 2000), a term much more widely used and understood? to frame these questions, this opinion piece will reflect on the development of my teaching practice and my recent move from academia into the third space, beginning with learning development and continually moving forwards.2 for example, was what i was doing on chester retold actually learning development, more ‘at home’ in the third space? the module certainly utilised peer learning in a community setting and emphasised ‘experience’ over traditional notions of ‘content’. the change of direction to learning development allowed me to look back at my journey differently and begin to see that i was always operating at the edges of my disciplinary margins. helen webster has succinctly described the ‘losing control’ element of learning development sessions in an entry on her rattus scholasticus blog (2017). and as a new study skills tutor, i too found that the shift away from content definitely made the space for learning more democratic because the ‘content’ had to come from the students themselves. the power is more balanced because, as my colleague said recently, it constitutes ‘turning it over to them’ (reeve, 2021). in my previous life, teaching disciplinefocused content, students often took the role of more passive learners, unknowing believers in the idyll of the hierarchical learning-as-information model. the lecturer (me) would stand at the front and, as if by magic, pour the knowledge into the students (them). chester retold necessarily reversed this expectation and part of what interests me now is that this reversal is the premise for effective learning development too. does this reflection therefore allow for a thinking through, not just of ‘community learning’ as a distinct practice, but also its synergies with widening participation and learning development? interestingly, perhaps importantly, learning development itself has its roots in the widening of access to uk he in the 1990s (dearing, 1997) and therefore, in a way, it began with the ‘community’. so, what can we learn from repositioning an example of ‘innovative’ practice within the available theory? what kind of ‘community learning’ was it? and how did this practice overlap consciously with critical pedagogy and unconsciously with learning development? there are of course more questions here than can be answered in an opinion piece, but broadly i will consider how chester retold emerged from my previous educational and 2 i have since been appointed as an academic developer, but i have chosen to publish this opinion piece on chester retold as it stands, capturing, as it does, my sense of the lasting impact on me of my time as a learning developer. pollard on academia, critical pedagogy and ‘coming out’ as a third space practitioner journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 3 teaching experiences, some existing theories and frameworks to outline where it sits within those matrices, and the connection to learning development. where did chester retold come from? writing autoethnographically, as bell hooks explains, is a way of making yourself vulnerable, to dismantle the status of ‘the teacher’ and facilitate better reflection (hooks, 1994). therefore, i will acknowledge here some of the difficult experiences in my own life that have shaped my practice. the understanding of how and why we teach the way we do can be reached genealogically (the method) and written up autoethnographically (the result). both aspects of such an examination are present here.3 i attended a comprehensive school in a deprived, rural area and, educationally, it is surprising i have achieved all i have. my inspiration was my mother returning to education as a mature student at the age of forty when i was just nine. during half-term, i attended lectures with her. and on one occasion, during a lecture about d. h. lawrence, a lecturer avoided saying the word ‘sex’ throughout the whole lecture in case it attracted my attention while i obliviously read a pocketbook on aeroplanes. my initial experience of teaching being altered depending on who-is-in-the-room! but mainly university life continued as normal around me, students wore vibrant-coloured doc marten boots and interesting clothes and dyed their hair – often cut short if women and grown long if men. in brief, it was a galaxy away from my oppressive experiences at school as the only ‘gender queer’ child in any year group.4 widening access is therefore why i work in he at all and in some ways it saved my life. similarly, hooks wrote of encountering paulo freire and how his approach to pedagogy saved her; she understood, and indeed lived, the complex synergies between education and realising freedom. initially, my first experiences of teaching were within widening participation itself, specifically, access to literacy and books. as an undergraduate, i 3 this work also aligns with the first of stephen brookfield’s four lenses: our autobiographies as learners (1998). 4 i was (and am) a tomboy. i was so androgynous, i was (and am) frequently misgendered. throughout my twelve years at school then college, someone asked me if i was ‘a boy or a girl’ at least once every single day. i wanted the freedom of being a boy, but mainly i just wanted to be ‘me’ without being harassed. no teacher or adult ever attempted to stop this widespread and targeted bullying. pollard on academia, critical pedagogy and ‘coming out’ as a third space practitioner journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 4 worked part-time as a volunteer for the get into reading project across merseyside. the first reading group i facilitated was in a community centre in kensington, a particularly deprived area of liverpool. we read the book aloud each week so that everyone could participate, whether they could read it themselves or not. a simple approach that meant everyone could become involved in both the story and the discussion. this formative experience of ‘teaching’ was a key influence and had a profound and lasting effect on me as a teacher because if literacy is not a barrier to inclusion, nothing should be. and this was also the beginning of learning-by-doing, but the truly ‘experiential’ aspect of my practice came through my postgraduate certificate in academic practice (pgcap) some years later, shortly after finishing my phd. several of the teachers who influenced me the most on that course were themselves influenced by david kolb and graham gibbs. my next epiphany was storying sheffield, which i encountered when applying for academic jobs. it was an undergraduate module that gave students the opportunity to learn alongside people from the sheffield community. thus, when i was appointed as a lecturer at the university of chester and i was encouraged to foster links with the recently established arts hub, storyhouse, i used the storying sheffield model as my inspiration.5 i wrote a module that would be taught on campus and at storyhouse for undergraduates and members of the chester community: i created chester retold. i was asked to do it, but really it was the crystallisation of everything i had learnt and come to value about teaching up until that point. teaching to transgress: education as the practice of freedom on the front cover of bell hooks’ teaching to transgress there is an illustration of a ladder with the words, la escalera, written underneath: spanish for stairs, stepladder, ladder, escape.6 the image and the words are the iconography of critical pedagogy, which is defined helpfully by richard millwood as: ‘an educational movement, guided by passion and principle, to help students develop consciousness of freedom, recognize authoritarian 5 i have previously acknowledged this key influence in ‘building compassion capacity: chester retold and storyhouse, a case study’ (pollard, 2018). this pedagogical case study on the first year of chester retold explores the importance of the storyhouse setting and the community dimension to both the innovatory nature of the module and its success. it also examines the role of the edge-of-the-seat activities utilised, since chester retold took an experiential, learning-by-doing approach (gibbs, 1988). 6 the picture and la escalera is what my (spanish speaking) friend saw when i showed the book to her. pollard on academia, critical pedagogy and ‘coming out’ as a third space practitioner journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 5 tendencies, and connect knowledge to power and the ability to take constructive action’ (2013). it is of course inextricably linked to freire’s seminal, pedagogy of the oppressed.7 yet this reflection draws on hooks’ reading of freire: know your students; make your classroom exciting; the best teachers transgress boundaries.8 from a political perspective, chester retold was attempting to achieve this kind of change, however small: change in administrative terms, as well as for access to, and within, teaching and to address inclusion and engagement – all key concerns of critical pedagogy.9 the module tried to educate all its students explicitly about inclusion, inequality, social breadth, privilege and power, by bringing together groups with differential access to the means of freedom. it was dialogic and co-operative and not based on either a paternalist model of me ‘telling’ the students how to be or indeed the students ‘telling’ each other. in this sense, the module itself, its existence and teachings, constituted a form of constructive action, potentially even social justice on a tiny scale, by enabling the forming of these relationships and bonds. but genuine learning development opens minds and hearts in just this way too because learning to study is not about knowing it is about being. and because it does not sit neatly within disciplinary or institutional structures, learning development has to exist within a space where it is always necessarily, ‘a movement against and beyond boundaries’ (hooks, 1994, p.12). this is exactly the sort of teaching that hooks celebrates as enabling transgression, and therefore change. and as a result, what i am doing now, and what began with my venture into learning development, is what hooks would call ‘self-actualization’. unconsciously perhaps, i began this work, this shift outside the parameters of academic teaching with chester retold, but i only recognised it as such when i stepped-out-of-my-lane and started to teach as a learning developer. being in the third space allows for a consideration of all the many silos of academic life; practitioners operating at or in the margins like this cannot always comment explicitly on what they see, but it will always nonetheless inform their practice – and their story. 7 although, as catherine bovill (2020) points out, it was henry giroux who actually ‘coined the term critical pedagogy for a major critique of existing approaches to teaching’ (p.12). 8 i first came across hooks’ teaching to transgress when i was preparing a tedx on chester retold, which was entitled ‘teaching english using compassion’ (pollard, 2020). 9 i had to really fight to be allowed to have ‘community students’ enrolled on the module with a waiver for the standalone module fee. it involved going higher and higher up the administrative hierarchy, until i was dealing directly with the registrar. standalone modules are prohibitively expensive, even when they are ‘taken without credit’, as was the case on chester retold. pollard on academia, critical pedagogy and ‘coming out’ as a third space practitioner journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 6 becoming a learning developer as a ‘recovering academic’ in july 2021, i left academia and began what i playfully refer to as my ‘recovery’. taking up a post in learning development helped me reflect on how my background and affinity with critical pedagogy were always leading me here. as mentioned at the beginning, webster, herself an ex-academic, wrote of the equality affected by the loss of control needed for learning development classes. and when i produced a podcast on critical pedagogy as a learning developer (pollard, 2021), i also realised how obscured my values were from those in my life when i had been an academic. people listened to my podcast and declared how pleased they were with the direction my work was taking now: i both did and did not know what they meant. it had been the direction my work had always taken, but moving into learning development, for me at least, spotlighted my own egotism and brought instead a more democratic approach to the fore – allowing others to see for the first time where i was coming from, all along. acknowledgements this opinion piece has gone through many drafts and iterations and has taken me years to finish, partly because it marks a final leave-taking from my life as an english literature academic. i wish to both acknowledge and thank all my ‘fellow travellers’ of the university of chester, english department. the thinking behind this piece owes a debt of gratitude to the learner development team at manchester metropolitan university. with especial thanks to my magical colleague, dr jenny reeve, who read an earlier, much less coherent version of this piece, and gave me the boost i needed to continue with it. finally, last but certainly not least, i wish to thank all the participants on chester retold, especially those from fallen angels dance theatre and live! cheshire, who took such a risk by joining us and joining in. this opinion piece is dedicated to the memory of one of those community students, mike noakes, who incredibly sadly is no longer with us and without whom my experience of the module would have been far less rich. pollard on academia, critical pedagogy and ‘coming out’ as a third space practitioner journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 7 references bovill, c. (2020) co-creating learning and teaching: towards relational pedagogy in higher education. st albans: critical publishing. brookfield, s. (1998) ‘against naïve romanticism: from celebration to the critical analysis of experience’, studies in continuing education, 20(2) pp.127-142. https://doi.org/10.1080/0158037980200202. dearing, r. (1997) ‘higher education in the learning society’, the national committee of enquiry into higher education. available at: http://www.educationengland.org.uk/documents/dearing1997/dearing1997.html (accessed: 20 december 2022). department of english, university of chester (nd) chester retold project. available at: https://www1.chester.ac.uk/english/study/why-study-us/chester-retold-project (accessed: 26 august 2022). friere, p. (2018) pedagogy of the oppressed. trans. m. b. ramos. new york: bloomsbury academic. gibbs, g. (1988) learning by doing: a guide to teaching and learning methods. london: further education unit. hooks, b. (1994) teaching to transgress. new york and abingdon: routledge. kolb, d. a. (2015) experiential learning: experience as the source of learning and development. 2nd edn. new jersey: pearson education. lisewski, b. (2021) ‘teaching and learning regimes: an educational developer’s perspective within a university’s top-down education policy and its practice architectures’, international journal for academic development, 26(2) pp.176-189. https://doi.org/10.1080/1360144x.2020.1831505. https://doi.org/10.1080/0158037980200202 http://www.educationengland.org.uk/documents/dearing1997/dearing1997.html https://www1.chester.ac.uk/english/study/why-study-us/chester-retold-project https://doi.org/10.1080/1360144x.2020.1831505 pollard on academia, critical pedagogy and ‘coming out’ as a third space practitioner journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 8 millwood, r. (2013) learning theory. holistic approach to technology enhanced learning. available at: https://blog.richardmillwood.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/learningtheory.pdf (accessed: 26 august 2022). pollard, e. (2018) ‘building compassion capacity: chester retold and storyhouse, a case study’, journal of perspectives in applied academic practice, 6(3), pp.75-82. available at: https://jpaap.ac.uk/jpaap/article/view/369/522 (accessed: 26 august 2022). pollard, e. (2020) teaching english using compassion. ted. available at: https://www.ted.com/talks/eileen_pollard_teaching_english_using_compassion (accessed: 26 august 2022). pollard, e. (2021) ‘critical pedagogy’, a critical thought. learner development, manchester metropolitan university [online audio]. available at: https://soundcloud.com/user-349121495/critical-pedagogy-with-dr-eileen-pollard (accessed: 26 august 2022). webster, h. (2017) ‘losing control: student-led sessions’, rattus scholasticus. available at: https://rattusscholasticus.wordpress.com/2017/10/05/losing-control-student-ledsessions/ (accessed: 26 august 2022). wenger, e. (2000) ‘communities of practice and social learning systems’, organization, 7(2), pp.225-246. whitchurch, c. (2013) reconstructing identities in higher education: the rise of third space professionals. new york: routledge. author details eileen pollard is a senior lecturer in academic development in the university teaching academy at manchester metropolitan university. she previously taught english literature at the university of chester before working as a learning developer. she has published on pedagogy and her tedx on chester retold has received over 10,000 views. https://blog.richardmillwood.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/learning-theory.pdf https://blog.richardmillwood.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/learning-theory.pdf https://jpaap.ac.uk/jpaap/article/view/369/522 https://www.ted.com/talks/eileen_pollard_teaching_english_using_compassion https://soundcloud.com/user-349121495/critical-pedagogy-with-dr-eileen-pollard https://rattusscholasticus.wordpress.com/2017/10/05/losing-control-student-led-sessions/ https://rattusscholasticus.wordpress.com/2017/10/05/losing-control-student-led-sessions/ pollard on academia, critical pedagogy and ‘coming out’ as a third space practitioner journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 9 licence ©2023 the author(s). this is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (cc-by 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. see http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. journal of learning development in higher education (jldhe) is a peer-reviewed open access journal published by the association for learning development in higher education (aldinhe). on academia, critical pedagogy and ‘coming out’ as a third space practitioner abstract introduction where did chester retold come from? teaching to transgress: education as the practice of freedom becoming a learning developer as a ‘recovering academic’ acknowledgements references author details licence journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special issue 25: aldinhe conference proceedings and reflections october 2022 ________________________________________________________________________ effects of reading strategies on reading behaviour and comprehension: implications for teaching study skills sarah j. white university of leicester, uk shi hui wu university of leicester, uk fawziah s. qahtani university of leicester, uk kayleigh l. warrington nottingham trent university, uk faye o. balcombe university of leicester, uk kevin b. paterson university of leicester, uk presentation abstract we summarised the findings of our esrc funded project ‘revealing the implications of reading strategy for reading behaviour and comprehension’. the research employed eyetracking methods, such as measuring when and where the eyes move to reveal what is processed during reading and skimming. experiments that include manipulations of text characteristics help reveal how reading strategies affect comprehension of text. our findings have important implications for teaching reading strategy study skills. we are excited to engage those working in learning development to explore the implications of our findings for study skills teaching and to inform our programme of research. discussion prompts: 1. guidance/approaches to teaching reading skills (especially related to skimming and scanning). white, wu, qahtani, warrington, balcombe and paterson effects of reading strategies on reading behaviour and comprehension: implications for teaching study skills journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 2 2. discuss whether the findings from our project fit with the guidance/approaches being used to teach reading skills. 3. effects of reading strategies on learning and decision making: identifying further research questions with potential for application within (and collaboration with) the field of learning development. poster key points: • our research uses eye movement recordings to examine how the mechanisms underlying reading are modulated by readers’ goals (reading for comprehension vs. skimming for gist). • eye movement behaviour is different during skimming as compared to careful reading: words (especially short words) are more likely to be skipped, there are shorter word reading times and there is less re-reading of previous text. • comprehension is poorer during skimming compared with more careful reading for comprehension. this could be due to: words being omitted from comprehension (when sequences of words are skipped); limited reanalysis of text to resolve incomplete comprehension; limited time for integration of concepts within the text; limited time for integration of the text with prior knowledge. • our research can help to clarify common misconceptions about rapid reading and inform guidance for reading skills. specifically, readers need to be aware that skimming can result in only superficial comprehension, and that it is important to allocate more time for reading (including re-reading) when comprehension is critical. white, wu, qahtani, warrington, balcombe and paterson effects of reading strategies on reading behaviour and comprehension: implications for teaching study skills journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 3 figure 1. conference poster. white, wu, qahtani, warrington, balcombe and paterson effects of reading strategies on reading behaviour and comprehension: implications for teaching study skills journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 4 community response these community reflections were contributed by three members of the community. these reflections have been presented as original, unedited content from the community. this was a really interesting keynote. reading is something i don’t think is given enough attention – we focus mainly on critical reading but actually have very little information and few resources for students to understand how they physically read and especially around skimming, scanning or reading quickly. we like to think students are reading entire books critically and carefully, but in reality, that is not happening and is not possible. we need to ensure students understand when skimming or scanning is appropriate but also the dangers and problems. developing a toolkit for scanning/skimming would be really great to share with students as it is a definite gap currently. i will be taking these ideas forward and looking at my reading workshops to edit and integrate this learning. i agree with the comments above about reading being an often under-explored area of academic practice. this keynote, and the research it was based on, provided a timely and important corrective to some of the ‘advice’ on reading – especially when it comes to reading more efficiently. as several participants noted, the pseudo-scientific claims contained within much popular guidance (promising to enhance reading speed and accelerate comprehension) is popular precisely because it does speak to perceived needs among students. learning developers are often well-placed to mediate the tensions between these needs and the false promises and unhelpful advice so widely available. for these reasons, it is really encouraging to see how keen prof. white and colleagues are to work with the aldinhe community to ensure the insights from the research project can be put to practical, educational use. if this is to be effective, i suggest it needs to be situated within a broader conversation with students concerning the varied purposes for academic reading, what these purposes mean for how different types of text should be approached, the assumed role of the he student as a ‘critical’ reader etc. i enjoyed engaging with this keynote speaker, and i agree that this is an under-researched topic. i particularly like how the above commentator terms the ‘pseudo-scientific claims’ associated with popularised reading guidance – and this is certainly a problem. however, i sometimes think the issue here is one of context. i have no doubt that ‘speed reading’ and other reading approaches may have their place. at the same time, i do not think this place white, wu, qahtani, warrington, balcombe and paterson effects of reading strategies on reading behaviour and comprehension: implications for teaching study skills journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 5 is higher education. i think you can speed read some business minutes before a meeting with some success, but that would not work with a journal article ahead of a seminar. in our approach to reading, we must be mindful that there are multiple contexts in which any given strategy may be used. it is also fair to recognise that students might not appreciate this – and speed reading is an attractive concept. i have been able to use this attraction in my practice by offering speed reading workshops, but using them as an opportunity to critically appraise the practice. in doing so, students can build an appreciation of what it is and where it can be used – hopefully, also acknowledging this will not work for academic reading. authors’ reflections conference participants reported that their students skim read and that some use rapid reading apps. conference participants reported that they try to challenge these behaviours sensitively, helping students to appreciate the value of reading in more depth. however, although there are established resources available for teaching critical and active reading, conference participants reported that there are minimal resources available for teaching students about skimming and scanning. in addition, not all participants were aware that speed reading is a misnomer (there is a speed-accuracy trade-off (rayner et al., 2016)). therefore, it is important to help learning developers understand the effects of rapid reading on comprehension, and to equip them with knowledge of the science that can help debunk common misconceptions. conference participants suggested creating a ‘toolkit’ for learning developers that would support teaching about how skimming affects comprehension. one conference participant noted that it is hard to teach reading skills because it is difficult for advisors to observe the approaches that students are taking, and it is difficult for students to observe good practice (students rarely see academics reading). an online toolkit could include videos of eye tracking recordings to demonstrate different reading behaviours, and to provide starting points for discussion about how reading strategies affect comprehension. more information about our research (including a video for young adults) is available on our project webpage: https://le.ac.uk/esrc-reading-goals-project. https://le.ac.uk/esrc-reading-goals-project white, wu, qahtani, warrington, balcombe and paterson effects of reading strategies on reading behaviour and comprehension: implications for teaching study skills journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 6 acknowledgements thanks are extended to all members of the community that have engaged with the conference or these proceedings in some way. thank you to the following community members for their contributions to this particular paper: emily webb (university of leeds), steve rooney (aston university) and lee fallin (university of hull). references rayner, k., schotter, e. r., masson, m. e. j., potter, m. c. and treiman, r. (2016) ‘so much to read, so little time: how do we read, and can speed reading help?’, psychological science in the public interest, 17, pp.4-34. https://doi.org/10.1177/1529100615623267 further reading fitzsimmons g., jayes, l. t., weal, m. j. and drieghe, d. (2020) ‘the impact of skim reading and navigation when reading hyperlinks on the web’, plos one, 15(9), e0239134. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0239134. just, m. a. and carpenter, p. a. (1987) ‘speed reading’, in just, m. a. and carpenter, p. a. (eds.) the psychology of reading and language processing. newton, ma: allyn and bacon, pp.425-452. lennox, r., hepburn, k., leaman, e. and van houten, n. (2020) ‘“i’m probably just gonna skim”: an assessment of undergraduate students’ primary scientific literature reading approaches’, international journal of science education, 42(9), pp.1409-1429. https://doi.org/10.1080/09500693.2020.1765044. liu, z. (2005) ‘reading behavior in the digital environment: changes in reading behavior over the past ten years’, journal of documentation, 61, pp.700-712. https://doi.org/10.1108/00220410510632040. https://doi.org/10.1177/1529100615623267 https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0239134 https://doi.org/10.1080/09500693.2020.1765044 https://doi.org/10.1108/00220410510632040 white, wu, qahtani, warrington, balcombe and paterson effects of reading strategies on reading behaviour and comprehension: implications for teaching study skills journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 7 wohl, h. and fine, g. a. (2017) ‘the active skim: efficient reading as a moral challenge in postgraduate education’, teaching sociology, 45, pp.220-227. https://doi.org/10.1177/0092055x17697770. author details sarah white is a professor of experimental psychology in the school of psychology and vision sciences at the university of leicester. sarah’s research focuses on eye movement control during reading. shi hui wu is a research associate in the school of psychology and vision sciences at the university of leicester. shi hui's research interests include language comprehension, production, and eye movement behaviour during reading. fawziah qahtani is a phd student in the school of psychology and vision sciences at the university of leicester. fawziah's research focuses on effects of reading goals on sentence integration. kayleigh warrington is a lecturer in the school of social sciences at nottingham trent university. kayleigh's research investigates the mechanisms underlying reading and language understanding. faye balcombe is a phd student in the school of psychology and vision sciences at the university of leicester. faye's research focuses on eye movement behaviour during reading. kevin paterson is a professor of experimental psychology in the school of psychology and vision sciences at the university of leicester. kevin's research focuses on the cognitive mechanisms involved in reading. https://doi.org/10.1177/0092055x17697770 effects of reading strategies on reading behaviour and comprehension: implications for teaching study skills presentation abstract discussion prompts: poster key points: community response authors’ reflections acknowledgements references further reading author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special issue 25: aldinhe conference proceedings and reflections october 2022 bridges and barriers to developing visual literacy jacqui bartram university of hull, uk presentation abstract as learning developers, we are generally confident supporting academics and students with developing criticality and academic writing skills. however, communication today is multimodal and increasingly visual so our support is expanding to include developing visual literacy, i.e. approaching visual sources critically and using visuals to communicate effectively. both the uk quality code for higher education (qaa, 2014) and many individual subject benchmark statements require students to be able to communicate ‘in a range of formats’ and to ‘non-specialist audiences’ – and yet not all students seem to have the opportunities to learn how to do so effectively, despite these national and disciplinary requirements. this presentation reported on the findings from research undertaken as part of an edd that explored the extent of visual literacy development across an institution and what further enablers and obstacles exist that influence a student’s ability to develop the skills needed to effectively communicate in a visually rich landscape (see bartram, 2021). the research began with an institution-wide audit of 1,725 module specifications that categorised each module as explicitly, implicitly, potentially or not apparently developing visual literacy. this audit indicated that choice of degree is the first major bridge or barrier to developing visual literacy that a student may face. only three subjects had the opportunity to develop both critical and creative visual literacy skills in a good proportion (>25%) of their modules (film, media and digital design; engineering and geography; earth and environmental science), two more had a similar number of opportunities to develop only critical skills (history; american studies) and likewise with creative skills (biology and environmental science; english and creative writing) – but the majority had only modest or low numbers of modules with opportunities to develop any visual literacy skills. interviews with academic staff teaching on modules representing all the above bartram bridges and barriers to developing visual literacy journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 2 categories then considered why visual literacy is or is not developed. barriers were identified such as resistance to change, lack of staff experience/confidence in teaching and assessing visual communication, and student expectations of assessments. the research found many bridges, such as the increase in public communication assignments to improve employability and the need for more inclusive assessments. it concluded that most barriers could be minimised by providing a range of sample assessment rubrics which emphasise assessment of visual elements. the findings have implications for learning developers who may need to support both students and academics who are not confident developing a new set of academic skills that take them out of their logocentric comfort zone. community response jacqui bartram’s presentation was extremely well attended and received, with its impact evident both at the conference itself and in the written responses from the community. these engaged responses show the extent to which her research switched on a lightbulb for many learning developers, for some illuminating a gap in their practice and for others helping them see that they have been teaching visual literacy without realising it. the level of engagement, reflection, and resolutions to change practice evidences that visual literacy is a fertile area for learning development practitioners. what did attendees learn from the presentation? jacqui’s work raised awareness of the need for and the benefits of visual literacy, and its relevance to learning development. several comments endorsed her argument that visual literacy is becoming more and more essential to the ways in which students learn, are assessed, and interact with the world: “this session highlighted to me the importance of visual literacy to modern multimodal communication. although i would argue that communication has always been multimodal, it has intensified and become more complex and layered. it was also argued that while students are seen as visually literate, this is an assumption and there is a lack of criticality about how true it is in practice. there are gaps in the perceived necessity for visual literacy education and in the confidence of students.” bartram bridges and barriers to developing visual literacy journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 3 “this presentation made me realise just how important visual communications are, both to us and to our students. i use images frequently in my own teaching but never really reflect on why this is and how to convey the value to students. as jacqui mentioned in her presentation, i think i am guilty of assuming that visual literacy is something that is developed organically and is particularly easy for our students who use social media frequently.” “i was very interested to find out the published standards of visual literacy (acrl, 2011) and i note the different levels of engagement with visual content (‘view’, ‘use’, ‘produce’); these can be very useful conceptual tools for the design of visual learning and assessment tasks, and for establishing links to other learning outcomes. i fully support that visual literacy encourages criticality and creativity, and that students would benefit from the opportunities it allows for authentic practice.” “in all honesty i had not thought about module specifications and whether they addressed components of visual literacy before, but i did know that academic departments were becoming more inclined to throw assessments into modules which included creating posters and presentations without giving students the skills to complete them. it was interesting to see the numbers of module specifications which were mapped to the acrl standards of visual literacy that jacqui used. i like the fact jacqui is having the conversations within her institution and seeing some shift in the use of images and sparking discussions with colleagues.” jacqui responded by encouraging anyone looking to introduce visual literacy into their practice to start with reflection: “more thoughtfulness on the use of visuals is definitely the first step!” she picked up, too, on the importance of effective conversations in influencing others’ practice, observing: “you are right to point out that one of the major benefits of my research is the conversations it has started with colleagues within my own institution – where i obviously have the most influence. this idea of leading through influencing others rather than by top-down authority reminds me of carina buckley’s conclusions in her ‘leadership in learning development’ session at this conference [editor note: see corresponding article in this issue]. i hope that learning developers may bartram bridges and barriers to developing visual literacy journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 4 themselves have discussions about widening the literacies supported within their own institutions, drawing on the research evidence my study provides.” another attendee took the time to reflect back on her own and her students’ experiences, and how more support for visual literacy would have helped them: “this presentation triggered for me several reflections on the role and importance of developing visual literacy with our students. as a student of archaeology (some time ago now), i frequently found myself needing to support my essay-style assignments with visuals. in addition, visual documentation of artefacts, excavation contexts etc. was a core part of my practical training and subsequent work, but never a skill i found explicitly taught or assessed in modules. anecdotally, it may be relevant to add here that a key correction in my thesis was a request to make a set of figures more ‘user friendly’! so, looking back, i cannot help but wonder how more targeted development of my visual literacy might have affected the ways i choose to communicate. “i then made a connection with questions we recently received from students during a series of dissertation-focused webinars: the questions had to do with presentation of results. visual literacy in this context would involve making decisions on which graph is best, how to organise a table, how to represent a process in an infographic, selecting impactful images, and so on. as a bonus, it can save a lot of precious words within the word-count limits!” jacqui welcomed these “great examples” of students’ experiences and reflected that this “highlights that visual literacy is not something new, but something that just needs a more specific spotlight shining on”. what examples have attendees shared from their own practice? “i often use visual imagery (and spend a lot of time trying to find the right image) to get my point across both in synchronous and asynchronous resources development. metaphor and threshold concepts can often help with students’ learning and visual literacy adds another layer to their development if these are well bartram bridges and barriers to developing visual literacy journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 5 represented. jacqui’s research supports how important this kind of literacy is and how to support students’ multimodal communication skills.” a colleague from the university of hull described how “immensely impactful” jacqui’s work has already been on her own practice, and how integral it now is to how they teach and support students: “as demonstrated in her paper, visual literacy is a core component of our support offering, and at hull we see it as an aspect of our role as learning developers. this is important as i feel we are beginning to see the death of the essay. assessments are diversifying as a response to subject benchmark statements, emerging literacies, the 4th industrial revolution, the designing out of plagiarism/unfair means and the delivery of competency-based education. i believe that to stay relevant, learning developers need to be ready to respond to this. we cannot focus on support with writing alone.” jacqui responded with further encouragement for the learning development community to take up this challenge: “thank you for highlighting the changing nature of assessment and the need for us, as learning developers, to ensure we are able to support students in less traditional assignment formats. i appreciate that this may be daunting to those of us who have come to this profession due to our expertise in the written word, but the underlying concepts of communication and criticality are the same with visual and textual communication. the language may be different but it is one that we are all capable of mastering in my opinion.” what do attendees intend to do differently as a result of attending this session? jacqui provided colleagues with the inspiration, awareness, and some of the initial tools to start changing their practice: “it seems to me that we ought to increase the visibility of visual communication in our resources and the support we offer for project work. after the presentation i bartram bridges and barriers to developing visual literacy journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 6 wanted to go back to resources i currently am working on and rethink how they can become a bit less text heavy!” “i’ll be considering how to use images more thoughtfully in future and how to make visual literacy an explicit part of my teaching.” “in terms of my own practice i will consider the use of visual literacy when constructing my teaching resources. i will also think about applying ideas about visual literacy when teaching presentations and poster skills. i will look for the acrl [acrl, 2022] and cilip-endorsed resources [brown et al., 2016].” what potential next steps do attendees suggest? there was a clear appetite for more learning and exchange on the subject of visual literacy within learning development, and a particular interest in how to both influence and learn from academic practice in different subject areas: “in her presentation, jacqui was able to identify the importance of visual literacy across many disciplines. there were also many opportunities for this to be developed further. the item that struck me the most surrounds those bridges and barriers. support is always going to be an enabler of, or a ‘bridge’ to, student success. i think it raises questions for the role of learning development in this.” “jacqui spoke about the difference between a ‘deep-dive’ and a broad overview of her research. she gave us a broad overview. it would be fascinating to take a deepdive into some of the areas she mentioned in her work, especially in relation to those subject areas and courses who were doing particularly well at supporting students’ visual literacy. i would like to know how educators can develop their own visual literacy and how disciplinary conventions may affect perceptions.” one response took the reflections further, and started exploring ideas of how visual literacy is situated in cultural and historical contexts: “i wondered if interpretations in meaning making in some instances could be conflictual? similarly, what role does culture/language play in interpretation of bartram bridges and barriers to developing visual literacy journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 7 visually rich resources, assignments and communication? i wondered if there was anything we could learn from history where visual literacy was the primary form of communication for those who were illiterate (i.e. through religious iconography and symbolism).” “jacqui’s session reminded me of an article i read, ‘on an excursion through ec1: multimodality, ethnography and urban walking’ (lamb, gallagher & knox, 2018) discussing the shifting nature of the urban environment. it made me wonder about the shifting nature of visual representations we use and how we perceive them.” for jacqui, these thoughtful ideas connected back to reflections on how to start conversations about visual literacy when working with academics: “meaning making from and with visuals is indeed cultural and potentially conflicting – which is all the more reason to address this issue so that students are aware of potential misleading messages. what a good idea to frame this in terms of ‘the shifting nature’ of communication and the move to visual representations. i think it could be a better starting point to some conversations than ‘you are not doing enough’. academics who are comfortable with their logocentric world may be more open to change if it is framed as something that is inevitable but nevertheless acknowledges the text-dominated starting point of the shift.” it is rewarding to see this community dialogue emerging around a topic which looks set to become a greater focus for learning developers. in jacqui’s final reflections, as well as summarising her own takeaways from these discussions, she goes on to set out her own intended next steps. author’s reflections fittingly, i have created a visual reflection on my session. i will say here, though, that i had some fantastic conversations with attendees following the session and really appreciated the feedback. many of you had not considered the visual literacy of your students and, having heard my presentation, could see how important it is. i wish i had had longer to talk https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1468794118773294 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1468794118773294 bartram bridges and barriers to developing visual literacy journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 8 about my research and realise i had tried to fit too much into the time allocated. always a cardinal sin! figure 1. author’s reflections on own session. next steps in conversations following the session it became clear that people really wanted ideas about how to develop visual literacy in their students (not to mention themselves) so i am planning a more interactive workshop looking at this for the next aldinhe conference – thanks for the ideas, folks! acknowledgements thank you to all the contributors who shared their reflections and enriched our insight into this conference presentation and its impact on the audience. special thanks go to lee fallin, university of hull; georgia koromila, university of reading; anne-marie langford, bartram bridges and barriers to developing visual literacy journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 9 university of northampton; chenée psaros, queen mary, university of london; katie winter, university of surrey. references acrl. (2011) visual literacy competency standards for higher education. available at: http://www.ala.org/acrl/standards/visualliteracy (accessed: 24 october 2022). acrl. (2022) the framework for visual literacy in higher education. available at: https://acrl.libguides.com/irig/frameworkforvisualliteracy (accessed: 5 july 2022). bartram, j. a. (2021) bridges and barriers to developing visual literacy in uk undergraduate students. edd thesis. university of hull, march 2021. available at: https://hydra.hull.ac.uk/resources/hull:18418 (accessed: 12 january 2022). brown, n. e., bussert, k., hattwig, d. and medaille, a. (2016) visual literacy for libraries: a practical, standards-based guide. london: facet publishing. lamb, j., gallagher, m. and knox, j. (2018) ‘on an excursion through ec1: multimodality, ethnography and urban walking’. qualitative research. 19(1). https://doi.org/10.1177/1468794118773294. qaa. (2014) uk quality code for higher education. part a: setting and maintaining academic standards: the frameworks for higher education qualifications of uk degree-awarding bodies. gloucester: quality assurance agency. available at: https://www.qaa.ac.uk//en/quality-code/qualifications-frameworks (accessed: 24 october 2022). author details dr jacqui bartram has worked in staff and student support at the university of hull for over 30 years. with a background in supporting ict, she is currently employed as an academic and library specialist within the institution’s skills team. whilst her official specialism is http://www.ala.org/acrl/standards/visualliteracy https://acrl.libguides.com/irig/frameworkforvisualliteracy https://hydra.hull.ac.uk/resources/hull:18418 https://doi.org/10.1177/1468794118773294 https://www.qaa.ac.uk/en/quality-code/qualifications-frameworks bartram bridges and barriers to developing visual literacy journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 10 visual literacy, she supports all academic literacies. her edd thesis looked at the bridges and barriers to developing visual literacy within her institution and she has a keen interest in anything that promotes multimodal and visual communication skills. she is a steering group member for aldinhe and an enthusiastic cartoonist. bridges and barriers to developing visual literacy presentation abstract community response what did attendees learn from the presentation? what examples have attendees shared from their own practice? what do attendees intend to do differently as a result of attending this session? what potential next steps do attendees suggest? author’s reflections next steps acknowledgements references author details literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special edition: researching pdp practice, november 2010 blogs and e-portfolios: can they support reflection, evidencing and dialogue in teacher training? simon cotterill newcastle university, uk karen lowing newcastle university, uk karl cain newcastle university, uk rachel lofthouse newcastle university, uk cheryl mackay newcastle university, uk joanne mcshane newcastle university, uk david stancliffe newcastle university, uk david wright newcastle university, uk abstract a blog with explicit support for structured skills/competencies and community publishing was integrated within an e-portfolio and evaluated with three successive cohorts of pgce secondary students at newcastle university in order to support reflections on practice, weekly lesson evaluations, and to evidence teaching quality standards (tqs). the technologies were initially piloted with a single subject (english with drama) in 2007/8, with roll out to all thirteen pgce programmes in 2008/9 (156 students and seven tutors). focus groups and questionnaires were used to investigate students’ perceptions of using cotterill et al. blogs and e-portfolios: can they support reflection, evidencing and dialogue in teacher training? the blog to support both reflection and evidencing, to identify factors relating to engagement, and to explore informal use of external social networking with course-mates. tutors’ views were also captured. students accessed the portfolio an average of sixty three times each (the range being from 4 to 254) and uploaded a total of 1,785 files over a ten month period in 2008/9. students made an average of 27 blog entries each (36% published to a community). analysis of questionnaire data (37% response rate) indicated that students liked the approach of linking one item of evidence to multiple tqs and feeling ‘in touch’ whilst on placement. students (89%) used external social networking sites (47% of students used them for course-related purposes). the main barrier to engagement with the e-portfolio was the perceived lack of time on a busy course. this study informs debate on the level of structure required in e-portfolios/blogs for vocational subjects and factors relating to engagement and concurrent use of formal/institutional and informal social networking sites. key words: e-portfolios; blogs; reflection. introduction in common with many other professional disciplines, teaching has seen increasing demands for reflective practitioners with the skills and attitudes necessary for continuing professional development (hatton and smith, 1995). in addition, skills in evidencing achievement and ongoing development within professional frameworks are important for initial qualification, early professional development, annual performance reviews, and ongoing career progression. as such, electronic portfolios (e-portfolios), which can be used to facilitate both reflection and evidencing, have applicability to teaching. in addition, the technologies also bring new means of supporting dialogue between students and tutors, and also between peers. this may help meet the changing needs and expectations of new generations of learners who have grown up with social networking and other web 2.0 technologies. there is a need for research into the dynamics and implications of these new technologies. this ranges from basic questions around the levels of engagement with journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 2 cotterill et al. blogs and e-portfolios: can they support reflection, evidencing and dialogue in teacher training? these technologies to more complex issues, such as potential changes in reflective learning when writing (and reading) in a shared blogging ‘space’, rather than in a private diary. this action research study provides evaluation of an e-portfolio and blog within initial teacher training (itt). many of the findings have broader applicability in other contexts where there are common challenges, such as those related to engagement and tensions between reflection and assessment. context this study of e-portfolio and blogging was conducted at newcastle university on postgraduate certificate in education (pgce) programmes for secondary education. there are thirteen programmes in seven discipline areas (english with drama, geography, history, mathematics, modern languages, religious education, and sciences). the programmes are of ten month duration and lead to qualified teacher status (qts) as defined by the training and development agency for schools (tda) (tda, 2007). e-portfolio and blog this study used the epet portfolio which was developed at newcastle university over the course of a number of collaborative projects (cotterill et al., 2005; cotterill et al., 2006). a new blog was developed for this e-portfolio in 2007 as part of the jisc funded ‘epics-2’ regional project. the blog can be personalised and learners have the option of making each entry private, public or shared with defined communities. a key feature of the blog was its design to include explicit support for structured learning outcomes/skill sets (cotterill et al., 2007; cotterill et al., 2008). the learner has the option to link each blog entry with one or more skills, these blog entries are then automatically cross-referenced in the evidence area of the portfolio which is structured around the skill set. the rationales for these developments were to increase personalisation, reduce the amount of structure in the eportfolio and increase the opportunity for peer dialogue in the application to help meet the changing expectations of learners who are increasingly familiar with social networking and other web 2.0 applications. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 3 cotterill et al. blogs and e-portfolios: can they support reflection, evidencing and dialogue in teacher training? figure 1. three partial screen shots: a) initial menu; b) editing a blog entry; c) linking the blog entry to multiple qts standards. the programme-level customisation of the e-portfolio was utilised so that the qts standards were incorporated, including a description of each standard and a link to the relevant section on the tda site. these standards and descriptions were available through the structured evidence section of the portfolio and learners could link their blog entries to specific qts standards (figure 1). sections of the portfolio were given labels suited for the context (‘my evidence’ changed to ‘meeting the standards’, ‘my folder’ changed to ‘teaching file’). in 2008 new sections were created (‘reflections on practice’, ‘weekly lesson evaluations’ and ‘progress timeline and action plan’). these were modelled on an established paper-based portfolio used for itt at newcastle. the ‘reflections on practice’ (commonly referred to as ‘reflective teaching journal’/rtj) and ‘weekly lesson evaluations’ were part of the general blog, but incorporated brief guidance text and preselected the category assigned to each blog entry. as with the general blog, the learner had the option to link each entry with a qts standard. action research approach this is a longitudinal study taking an action research approach with adjustments to both technology and pedagogy over a three year period. this included minor adjustments within journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 4 cotterill et al. blogs and e-portfolios: can they support reflection, evidencing and dialogue in teacher training? an academic year in response to feedback from both students and staff, and larger design changes between academic years. the main evaluations were based on an electronic questionnaire administered to students in january 2009 which included both fixedresponse and open-ended questions, and analysis of usage statistics. a six point likert scale was used for non-categorical fixed-response questions, and for summary purposes the proportion agreeing is based on an aggregation of ‘weakly agree’, ‘agree’ and ‘strongly agree’. in addition, in-course evaluation has also been utilised, and self-selected students discussed issues and provided feedback in two informal focus group drop-in sessions (2008 and 2009). a short questionnaire with open-ended questions was sent to tutors after the 2008/9 year. year 1: single subject pilot the blog was initially piloted with twenty students and a tutor in a single subject (secondary english with drama) in the academic year 2007/8. the blog was introduced to students as part of a hands-on session facilitated by the learning technologist and subject tutor. as part of their use of the blog, the students were asked to discuss key educational articles with the tutor or a student posting a blog entry about the article to the community, and the students were then encouraged to respond with comments about the article or issues raised in other comments. small adjustments to the software, including ‘bug-fixing’, were made in response to student feedback during the year. evaluation of the blog took place as part of an in-course evaluation session; the students were asked to write comments on an anonymised sheet of a4 paper under three headings plus, minus, and interesting. text from the evaluation was categorised and results of this qualitative analysis are provided in table 1. table 1. qualitative analysis of 2007/8 evaluation (n=20). plus theory/ideas 14 social discussion 9 reflection 7 seeing other perspectives 7 supporting assessment 4 journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 5 cotterill et al. blogs and e-portfolios: can they support reflection, evidencing and dialogue in teacher training? informal 3 minus time 16 technical problems 9 access to internet 1 low engagement by some 1 topics too guided? 1 interesting seeing other perspectives 11 discussion 4 use blogs in my teaching 4 others’ experiences 2 reflection 2 use of theory and ideas 2 year 2: roll-out of e-portfolio based on the evaluation of the single subject pilot, the tutors decided to roll out the eportfolio to all thirteen secondary pgce programmes at newcastle university. there was a broadening of the scope of the e-portfolio with increased emphasis on evidencing of the qts, with trainees requested to provide three items of evidence for each standard (with one item potentially being used to evidence multiple standards). further sections were added to the e-portfolio, reflecting a previous paper-based portfolio. in addition to the groups based on the seven disciplinary areas, students were also assigned to crosssubject seminar groups led by a tutor, and to a global ‘pgce community’. year 3: further refinements the e-portfolio was largely unchanged from the previous academic year, though better support for sharing blogs with tutors was introduced (part way through the year). the journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 6 cotterill et al. blogs and e-portfolios: can they support reflection, evidencing and dialogue in teacher training? cross-subject community groups were dropped. students were assigned to disciplinebased communities and the overall pgce community. results usage and data statistics for the 2008/9 academic year are shown in table 2. all students used the e-portfolio and the mean number of logins was sixty three (the range being from 4 to 253). of the 4,124 blog entries made, 67% were linked to one or more qts standards, and on average each blog entry was linked to five standards. thirty-six percent of blog entries were posted to a community, mostly the community of all pgce students or to subject communities, but few to the cross-subject seminar groups. where comments were made to blog entries, these were mostly within the subject communities, with very few in the community of all pgce students. table 2. summary student usage and data statistics for the 2008/9 academic year. number of students 154 number of logins: total average (range) 9,687 63 (4 – 253) blog entries: total average per student word count average (range) 4,124 27 423 (7 – 3,420) blog categories: reflective training journal weekly lesson evaluations unclassified other 2,450 884 681 109 (59%) (21%) (17%) (3%) blog entry postings: private 2,634 (64%) journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 7 cotterill et al. blogs and e-portfolios: can they support reflection, evidencing and dialogue in teacher training? pgce community subject community seminar group 841 582 67 (20%) (14%) (2%) comments on blog entries in: pgce community subject community seminar group 7 411 40 (1%) (90%) (9%) files uploaded: number of files individuals who uploaded 1,785 100 evidence linked to qts standards: blog entries files url links 2,723 707 13 thirty-six percent of students completed the online questionnaire. a summary of responses to key fixed-response questions is provided in table 3. all respondents personally owned a laptop or desktop pc and all had broadband connections at their place of residence. of those who responded, 77% felt that the e-portfolio had helped them reflect on their learning and development (23% weakly agreed, 36% agreed and 18% strongly agreed). table 3. summary of responses to selected fixed-response questions (2008/9 cohort). question agree i have a clear understanding of the purpose of the e-portfolio 88% i had a clear understanding of the skills being evidenced in the e-portfolio 60% the skills included in the e-portfolio are important in studying for my degree 68% the e-portfolio is important for my programme 75% teaching staff regularly refer to the e-portfolio 87% journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 8 cotterill et al. blogs and e-portfolios: can they support reflection, evidencing and dialogue in teacher training? the e-portfolio is easy to use 64% it was easy to link blog entries to evidence my skills/competencies 67% i have built up a good evidence of my skills using the e-portfolio 64% using the e-portfolio helped me reflect on my learning and development 77% i would feel comfortable with sharing most of my blog entries with course-mates 29% i would feel comfortable with sharing most of my blog entries with tutors 94% ! would feel comfortable posting most of my blog entries on the public internet 13% did you view other people’s postings and comments in the community areas? 97% did you contribute postings or comments in the community areas? 66% it was useful to see other perspectives in the community discussion 59% participating in the community discussions helped my learning 52% emerging themes and illustrative answers to open-ended questions are provided in table 4 (what did you most like about the e-portfolio? what did you least like about the eportfolio? do you have any other comments about the e-portfolio/blog/community areas?). table 4. sample of responses to open-ended questions by theme. reflection the portfolio made me find the time to think more about my teaching. the rtj helped me get into the habit of reflection. [it was] good to read about each other’s experiences, and use it to creatively reflect on what we have done/read. i like the reflection side, i also think it is useful to look back on early weeks and refresh your memory. i like that the qts standards are attached to the e-portfolio as this helps me keep track. it's nice to have…a hard copy of the developments you have gone through during your teaching experience, however, in many ways it just regurgitates thought processes you are going through. with teaching preparation, 9-5 lectures (not journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 9 cotterill et al. blogs and e-portfolios: can they support reflection, evidencing and dialogue in teacher training? getting home till well after 6pm) and also tda key skills tests it sometimes feels superfluous. it is tedious having to fill in a weekly blog especially when i have many other things to do. time constraints it was quite difficult to blog and prepare for teaching at times, though i did manage. too time consuming while actually on placement. there are too many sections and bits to fill in a busy work schedule. evidencing what i do like about the e-portfolio is that it is designed for the purpose of building a skills repertoire, and allows you to connect thoughts and experiences to the key skills. being able to click on standards at the end of the rtj to link through, helps keep a record as you go along. having most of the evidence in one place. community/discussion other people’s school experiences were written about which helped us make sense of our own lessons. being able to discuss issues with other peers was really useful. good way to stay in touch with peers during placements and feel you are not alone! provides us with a forum for sharing files and resources if we wish. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 10 cotterill et al. blogs and e-portfolios: can they support reflection, evidencing and dialogue in teacher training? the private blog is quite useful to keep yourself on track but i do not feel happy using a public blog at present. i have only used the community blogging when asked to participate in a task. i did not find this useful. it's a bit boring to post, as not many people comment. and i find the common area all subjects – not interesting, as the other subjects are having a complete different experience. [there was a] lack of interest and engagement from some itt students. tutor / pedagogy rtj blogs were useful to me, as i was reflecting on my own practice. i keep these private, but have given access to my tutor, which i think is a good idea. it may be interesting to focus and emphasise the blog/e-portfolio as more public and communicative tool. if tutors were for example to highlight a theme/issue for the week, i.e. how can you cater for sen pupils in your lessons? or how does autism effect learning?, to which we post out responses to show that we are engaging with these things and learning from one another, demonstrating collaborative learning. we could…talk about personal scenarios and experiences we've had. tutors could then highlight what theory says and comment on these, so that we students are not just left to juggle our ideas without any idea of what academic research says. i'm aware there are not 'answers' as such, but i feel tutors should have more input. [it was] an interesting way of analysing yourself and your thoughts. it has been a kind of learning journal extension, but with a critical reference to theory. other makes me think about how i could use something like this with students as a learning tool. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 11 cotterill et al. blogs and e-portfolios: can they support reflection, evidencing and dialogue in teacher training? thinking about using blogging in my teaching. new thing for me, but it has been helpful. being able to access it online easily, it was easy to write whenever i wanted to and come back to it to add bits later. you could save your blog entries and go back to them later. easy to use and i have the option to keep things i type private. i liked that you could personalise the e-portfolio. it's not very clear exactly what parts of it are mandatory and what parts are optional. not very clear where and what to write. i found it easier to use paper and pen. a word count and spell check would be a useful feature. social networking the vast majority of students responding to the questionnaire (89%) used external social networking sites; predominantly facebook. these were used primarily for staying in touch with friends (88%), sharing photos, music and video (73%), and finding out more about people (57%). fewer (24%) considered it a forum to express their opinions and views and few (6%) as a way of making new friends with people they had never met in person. many (47%) had used social networking to communicate with classmates about courserelated topics, few (12%) to communicate with teaching staff about course-related topics. however, a frequent theme in the open-ended question about social networking in education was that social and work lives should be separate. some students made a distinction between formal learning/reflection on the institutional site and informal discussion on external social sites (see illustrative comments in table 5). journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 12 cotterill et al. blogs and e-portfolios: can they support reflection, evidencing and dialogue in teacher training? table 5. selected responses to the question ‘any thoughts or comments on the use of social networking sites in education?’. i prefer to keep social networking sites for personal use and for engaging in general conversation about essays etc. in a non-official/non-university domain where it's friends discussing a course. professional dialogue, opinions on educational matters, lesson plans, theory discussions i prefer to engage in face-to-face or via the official, nominated online spaces. social networking sites are for personal use and should not be confused with professional use. to be honest i think academic life and social life should be divided where possible. course-mates will naturally join together on sites such as facebook, and may discuss itt issues using facebook, but universities shouldn't expect to start up their blog forums on such sites. it could have a place. we were encouraged to discuss work in the e-portfolio and this was completed (if a little clinically). however, there were a few informal discussions about school and university work taking place on facebook, which more people were contributing to. these involved discussing work to be done, shared experiences in school placements etc. and i feel that these were just as important to our developing practice. staff perceptions issues raised by teaching staff in meetings with tutors and the learning technologist, and from staff responses to a short questionnaire, are shown in table 6. there were some differences in emphasis between individual staff (some more focussed on community/support and others on evidencing/monitoring) and issues changed over time. a key problem for tutors related to access to students’ portfolios. unlike the rest of the sections of the e-portfolio which can be shared on an individual basis, e.g. between a student and their tutor, the blog had been modelled on sharing with groups/communities. therefore, additional work was needed to enhance sharing of blogs with tutors. this was not ready until part way through 2009. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 13 cotterill et al. blogs and e-portfolios: can they support reflection, evidencing and dialogue in teacher training? table 6. sample of staff responses (2009). potential benefits setting online seminars to discuss set articles when group on placement. providing support network run by and for students. communication with students, peer support and tracking of progress by both tutor and student. links that can be generated between different aspects of students’ experience; ultimately should save time; and there are benefits in having so much in one place. motivation/benefits for students hopefully that [the blog] format would seem familiar to them and that they would see it as a means of accomplishing something complex in a more straight forward fashion. many of them prefer to save and share work in this way – e.g. their teaching resources tend to be largely electronic. i think [blogging to the community] is very worthwhile, especially with regards to the nature of secondary pgce, where subjects groups can be become isolated from each other; it encourages the wider sharing of good practice and professional development and, again, provides a wider support network for students. main motivation for tutors enables us to see links that were not previously evident…sitting together with the student and viewing their e-portfolio on the computer screen provided a helpful focus for end of phase one tutorials – and talking us through their e-portfolio gave students something concrete to do! journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 14 cotterill et al. blogs and e-portfolios: can they support reflection, evidencing and dialogue in teacher training? that for the secondary pgce it would allow us to have shared discussions with our students regarding their progress towards ‘meeting the standards’ or going beyond them rather than the process being one of checking that there were ‘sufficient’ pieces of paper in files. concerns technical problems. concerns about whether the substance could be shared with school colleagues and danger of ending up with two systems – paper and electronic. i do not think at present we can carry out our monitoring role effectively using the system as although we can see [blog entries have] been indicated as being evidence for the standards we cannot open [them all] (2008/9). we did not explain its operation clearly enough to the students – some of whom are still in a state of confusion…an electronic guide has been suggested for next year. discussion though the nature of reflection and critical reflection is often ill-defined (hatton and smith, 1995), there is a general acceptance in education that reflection is a ‘good thing’, with potential to aid the transition from surface to deep learning, and being a an important component of experiential learning (kolb, 1984) and of independent continuing development. the emergence of e-portfolio, blogging and social network technologies have applicability for supporting reflection and also assessment, and for enhancing communications. the technologies and changing experiences and expectations of technology bring to the forefront questions relating to tensions between reflection and assessment, and also issues around the context of developing reflection as either an isolated private activity, something shared with a tutor/coach, or as an open activity within a ‘learning community’. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 15 cotterill et al. blogs and e-portfolios: can they support reflection, evidencing and dialogue in teacher training? use of e-portfolios is becoming more widespread in education but it is important to recognise that the term represents a broad spectrum of technologies, with differing levels of structure designed to support different pedagogies and different purposes (such as reflection, assessment, personal publishing, and forward planning). likewise, there is variation in blogging and social networking, though these tend to be less structured and more public facing than e-portfolios. the blog within the e-portfolio developed at newcastle university provides a novel way of linking reflection and evidencing skills/standards, possibly reducing the tension between these. whilst there is good practice in the use of blogs in education, a common shortfall is that learners often don’t use free-text tagging (categorisation) or use it inconsistently. this can be problematic if a sub-set of blog entries needs to be used for a specific purpose, such as assessment (mason, 2007). the problem is especially acute with standards such as tqs, which tend to have lengthy titles for each standard, which would be difficult to record consistently with free text tagging. it was our aim to link unstructured blog entries with structured outcome/skill sets, with blog entries linked with standards being automatically crossreferenced in the evidence (‘meeting the standards’) area of the portfolio. there can sometimes be a tension between reflection and assessment (hilsdon, 2006). for example, reflective portfolios are often considered private, in which mistakes and weaknesses may be openly acknowledged, whilst portfolios for assessment have more emphasis on positive evidence for achievement of competencies, written for an assessor and structured around predefined criteria. recent advances in e-portfolio technologies may potentially lessen the tensions between reflection and assessment, by providing greater control to the learner over which of their entries are public, compared to a paper journal. in addition, technologies may provide opportunities for reducing duplication of documentation, for example, an entry in the ‘weekly lesson evaluations’ may also be cross-referenced with multiple standards as evidence in the ‘meeting the standards’. the use of technology to support reflection brings the option to open up reflections to a wider audience, with the potential for new opportunities for interaction and conversation. this may be in addition to, or complementary to, coaching and feedback from tutors aimed to develop learners’ skills in reflection and critical reflection. at newcastle the pgce students have engaged with blogging community areas and shared blog entries considerably more than students on other programmes (cotterill et al., 2009). however, many pgce students were uncomfortable with sharing their blog entries with their peers. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 16 cotterill et al. blogs and e-portfolios: can they support reflection, evidencing and dialogue in teacher training? on the other hand nearly all students did read the blog entries of their peers posted in the community areas and many found it useful to see the perspectives of others (see tables 3 and 4). in particular, the qualitative data suggests that students strongly valued seeing the reflections and thoughts of their peers in the context of discussions around educational theory and relating theory to experiences in teaching practice – although less so with ‘ad hoc’ postings from students in other teaching subject areas. a recent study of teacher education in queensland found that making reflection public had a positive impact on the quality and style of reflection (rocco, 2010); trainees valued seeing multiple perspectives, which built up confidence and competence for engaging in reflection and professional dialogue. blogging is usually a form of public publishing, however, private blogging (for example within a vle or other password protected environment) can be argued to give trainees the confidence to post entries without the fear of them being read by anyone else other than their tutor (hramiak et al., 2009). others have taken the opposite approach, using blogging environments where all posts are visible to all members to encourage trainees to ‘go out there and express an opinion’ helping to develop both individuals and the ‘collective learning network’ (bartlet-bragg, 2006). with this approach some individuals take to it straight away but many initially find it intimidating and lack confidence in publishing to the group. in this study the individual has control over which of their blog entries remain private, with the opportunity and expectation that they will contribute to the wider group. this paper documents the growing maturity in both pedagogy and technology in the use of e-portfolios/blogs and changes over a three year period in an itt context. implementing eportfolios can take time, usage, and numerous adjustments in response to feedback in order to achieve a ‘good fit’ to the curriculum (arter and spandel, 1992). engagement with the e-portfolio has been good in relation to many other subjects (cotterill et al., 2009). most students understood the purpose and rationale of the e-portfolio in relation to the skills/standards being evidenced, recognised that it was valued by their programme and promoted by staff (table 2), and that the portfolio was embedded in the curriculum and activities – all favourable factors for engagement. the study indicates the approach was successful in supporting reflection and evidencing, but the discussion/dialogue element was mixed and mostly confined within subject groups. some subject groups had more conversation than others, indicating the role of tutors and/or individual learners in initiating and engaging in discussion. a sub-set of students did actively engage in informal journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 17 cotterill et al. blogs and e-portfolios: can they support reflection, evidencing and dialogue in teacher training? discussion on external social networking sites. elsewhere, engagement and effective learning from discussion has been shown to depend on clarity of purpose: ‘students who do not understand how discussions can help them to interrogate, reflect on and revise their ideas tended not to approach either face-to-face or online discussions in ways likely to improve their understanding or their levels of achievement’ (ellis et al., 2007, p.83). limitations to this study include a modest response rate by the students (37%). it is also acknowledged that the practitioners are involved in both design/development and evaluation, as is the nature of an action research approach. the study indicates that the eportfolio/blog supports reflection, but it is not in the scope of this paper to address the depth and quality of the reflection. as reported elsewhere, considerable variability in quantity and quality of student reflection is not unusual (hramiak et al., 2009). conclusions the e-portfolio described here provides a novel approach of linking an unstructured blog to a structured set of skills/standards which has been used extensively by participants in this study. a large proportion (77%) of the students perceived that the e-portfolio helped them to reflect on their learning and development. encouraging dialogue by giving students the option to publish blog entries to communities has had mixed success, with most conversation restricted within subject groups. overall engagement with the eportfolio has been reasonably high, compared with many other subjects. factors thought to promote engagement in this context include a reasonably good clarity of purpose, active promotion and buy-in from tutors, and the fact that students understood and related to the standards being evidenced. a significant sub-set of students (47%) concurrently engaged with peers in an external social networking site, some making the distinction between informal discussion on facebook and formal learning and reflection in the e-portfolio, whilst others wanted to keep work and social lives separate. acknowledgement this paper is an outcome of the national action research network on researching and evaluating personal development planning and e-portfolio practice project (2007-2010). journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 18 cotterill et al. blogs and e-portfolios: can they support reflection, evidencing and dialogue in teacher training? the project was led by the university of bolton in association with the university of worcester and centre for recording achievement, and in national collaboration with the university of bedfordshire, bournemouth university and university of bradford. the project was funded by the higher education academy, national teaching fellowship project strand. more details about the project can be found at: http://www.recordingachievement.org/research/narn-tree.html. the study also built on software developed as part of jisc funded ‘epics-2’ regional eportfolios project. references arter, j. and spandel, v. (1992) ‘using portfolios of student work in instruction and assessment’, educational measurement: issues and practice, 11(1), pp. 36–44. bartlet-bragg, a. (2006) ‘reflections on pedagogy: understanding adult learners’ experiences of weblogs’, blogtalk reloaded. vienna, austria 2-3 october [online]. available at: http://2006.blogtalk.net/ (accessed: 12 june 2010). cotterill, s.j., horner, p., hammond, g.r., mcdonald, a.m., drummond, p., teasdale, d., aiton, j., orr, g., bradley, p.m., jowett, t., heseltine, l., ingraham, b. and scougall, k. (2005) ‘implementing e-portfolios: adapting technology to suit pedagogy and not vice versa!’, conference proceedings: eportfolio 2005. cambridge 26-28 october. cotterill, s.j., aiton, j., bradley, p.m., hammond, g., mcdonald, a., struthers, j. and whiten s. (2006) ‘a flexible component-based eportfolio: adapting and embedding in the curriculum’, in jafari, a. and kaufman, c. (eds.) handbook of research on eportfolios. pennsylvania: idea group inc, pp. 292-304. cotterill, s.j., horner, p., gill, s., mcdonald, a.m., drummond, p., teasdale, d., whitworth, a. and hammond, g.r. (2007) ‘beyond the blog: getting the right level of structure in an eportfolio to support learning’, conference proceedings: eportfolios 2007. maastricht 18-19 october. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 19 http://www.recordingachievement.org/research/narn-tree.html http://2006.blogtalk.net/ cotterill et al. blogs and e-portfolios: can they support reflection, evidencing and dialogue in teacher training? cotterill, s.j., horner, p., mcdonald, a.m., drummond, p., teasdale, d., moss, j. and hammond, g. (2008) ‘a blog for learning: blogs and social networking with explicit support for skills and learning outcomes, within an integrated eportfolio’, in conference proceedings: eportfolios, identity and personalised learning in healthcare education. newcastle upon tyne 28 february. newcastle upon tyne: hea subject centre for medicine, dentistry and veterinary medicine, pp. 91-96. isbn 978-1-905788-66-2. cotterill, s.j., horner, p. and edney, m. (2009) epics-2: north east regional collaboration for personalised, work-based, and life-long learning. final project report. available at: http://www.epics.ac.uk/report (accessed: 15 june 2010). ellis, r., goodyear, p., o'hara, a. and prosser, m. (2007) ‘the university student experience of face-to-face and online discussions: coherence, reflection and meaning’, alt-j, 15(1), pp. 83–97. hatton, n. and smith, d. (1995) ‘reflection in teacher education: towards definition and implementation’, teaching and teacher education, 11(17), pp. 33-49. hilsdon, j. (2006) ‘re-thinking reflection’, journal of practice teaching in health and social work, 6(1), pp 57-70. hramiak, a., boulton, h. and irwin, b. (2009) ‘trainee teachers' use of blogs as private reflections for professional development’, learning, media and technology, 34(3), pp. 259-269. kolb, d.a. (1984) experiential learning: experience as the source of learning and development. englewood cliffs, n.j: prentice-hall, inc. mason, r. (2007) ‘eportfolio for professional development’, conference proceedings: eportfolios 2007. maastricht 18-19 october. rocco, s. (2010) ‘making reflection public: using interactive online discussion board to enhance student learning’, reflective practice, 11(3), pp. 307-317. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 20 http://www.epics.ac.uk/report cotterill et al. blogs and e-portfolios: can they support reflection, evidencing and dialogue in teacher training? training and development agency for schools (tda) (2007) qts standards and itt requirements. available at: http://www.tda.gov.uk/partners/ittstandards.aspx (accessed: 15 june 2010). author details simon cotterill is a senior research associate and learning technologist in the school of medical sciences education development at newcastle university. karen lowing is a teaching fellow and pgce tutor for english and drama in the school of education, communication and language sciences at newcastle university. karl cain is programme leader and pgce tutor for history in the school of education, communication and language sciences at newcastle university. rachel lofthouse is head of teacher learning and development and pgce tutor for geography in the school of education, communication and language sciences at newcastle university. cheryl mackay is a lecturer and pgce tutor for modern languages in the school of education, communication and language sciences at newcastle university. joanne mcshane is a teaching fellow in education and pgce tutor for r.e. in the school of education, communication and language sciences at newcastle university. david stancliffe is a teaching fellow and pgce tutor for sciences in the school of education, communication and language sciences at newcastle university. david wright is a teaching fellow and pgce tutor for maths in the school of education, communication and language sciences at newcastle university. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 21 http://www.tda.gov.uk/partners/ittstandards.aspx blogs and e-portfolios: can they support reflection, evidencing and dialogue in teacher training? abstract introduction context e-portfolio and blog action research approach year 1: single subject pilot year 2: roll-out of e-portfolio year 3: further refinements results social networking staff perceptions discussion conclusions acknowledgement references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 21: september 2021 ‘we had a good laugh together’: using teams for collaborative learning katy jones cardiff university abstract this case study describes the journey of an undergraduate module in its transition from an in-person lectures-plus-seminar configuration to an interactive, online format using teams. i show how i created a sense of community and the opportunity for online group interaction by establishing small study groups that carried out weekly online group tasks in their own team ‘channel’. weekly roles were assigned to group members to spread the workload and ensure equal participation. student feedback was overwhelmingly positive, and students particularly appreciated the opportunity to interact with their peers, during a potentially lonely time, for summative marks. limitations to the model are discussed and potential solutions are offered. keywords: online learning community; student collaboration; ms teams. introduction in march 2020, most uk university teaching staff had to make a quick switch to emergency remote teaching. for many, this shift happened alongside extra caring responsibilities, home-schooling, illness and even grief. without much experience or training in the online delivery of learning, and given the constraints on my time (and patience), my online teaching experience during the initial lockdown period mostly consisted of uploading recorded lectures and existing classroom resources, resulting in largely disengaged learners and dissatisfaction and frustration on my part. it quickly became clear that the pandemic was not going away, and there was a need to move beyond ‘emergency remote teaching’ and to ‘adopt [technology] in a way that works for learning’ (mosley, 2020) for the next academic year. through attending training events over the summer (e.g. designing online learning materials; online teams training; engaging students online) and reading jones ‘we had a good laugh together’: using teams for collaborative learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 21: september 2021 2 literature related to online learning and teaching (e.g. bach et al., 2006; gillet-swan, 2017), i realised that adapted, not replicated, content and assessment was key to providing an environment where learners could engage in and feel part of an online learning community. it also became clear that effective online teaching and learning ‘requires a carefully designed classroom that promotes student engagement with faculty, peers and course content’ (tanis, 2020). this case study describes my navigation of a final year undergraduate module on second language acquisition (language learning and teaching; llt hereafter), in its transition from a typical in-person lectures-plus-seminar configuration to an interactive, learning-by-doing online format, using teams. my teaching is influenced by my background and scholarship in english language teaching. my teacher beliefs as a result of this training and experience are that: teaching should be learner-centred, sensitive and adaptive to different learning styles or approaches (biggs, 2003; harmer, 2015); and learning occurs most effectively when learners are actively and cooperatively involved in the learning process (thornbury, 2006; johnson and johnson, 2008), an approach which also has been shown to improve student engagement and outcomes (prince, 2004; felder and brent, 2009). further, when learning activities are flexible and vary in task-type, it is more likely that they will accommodate learner diversity (entwistle and ramsden, 1983/2015; borg and shapiro, 1996). i have developed my teaching over the years to reflect these principles, such as incorporating flipped-learning activities, investigative groupwork and peer-feedback, but these activities, until now, were carried out via in-person teaching. so the real challenge for the 2020-21 academic year, was to incorporate these principles into an online format. background to the module i developed llt in 2015. the module investigates theories and practical issues relating to second language learning and teaching, with an emphasis on learner differences and best practice in individual contexts, and attracts 60+ final year undergraduate students per year. as i am very familiar with the learning outcomes and the content of the module, i was able to focus its adaptation on the mode of delivery and assessment rather than the content. in pre-covid times, the in-person delivery of this module comprised two 50-minute lectures and one 50-minute seminar (with around 20 students per seminar group). i have always tried to create lecture conditions that are conducive to active learning, in order to jones ‘we had a good laugh together’: using teams for collaborative learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 21: september 2021 3 engage students in meaningful and deep learning (biggs, 2003). as such, i always incorporate in-lecture pair work tasks to break up the somewhat passive experience of being ‘talked at’ for 50 minutes. in terms of the online model of teaching delivery in my academic school, there was a timetabled 45-minute live session per seminar group (of around 20 students) per week, with most of the ‘content’ being delivered via short panopto recordings, required readings, and other online tasks and videos, ahead of the live session. the transition from in-person to online teaching and learning findings of a pearson/wonkhe survey (2020) following the initial lockdown showed that 41% of the uk higher education student respondents had struggled to manage their wellbeing in the absence of in-person engagement with friends, peers, and lecturing staff. these findings reflect feedback from students from my own institution during the emergency remote-teaching period, which showed that many students felt isolated, lonely and generally disengaged from their learning, lecturers and peers. with this in mind, and after researching principles of online-learning and teaching, i decided to establish systems for the 2020-21 academic year which would encourage online group interaction and collaboration, create an online learning community, and increase student engagement. indeed, evidence shows that group-based or student-student learning interactions have many benefits to individual student learning, including: increased motivation, self-concept and self-knowledge (biggs, 2003, p.90); more creative thinking and deeper understanding (slavin, 1996); and social outcomes such as increased social cohesion and development of new friendships (biggs, 2003, p.90), which seemed all the more important in an online learning context in a global pandemic, where social interaction was very limited. after considering the affordances and challenges of different online platforms to establish these systems, i settled on blackboard as a repository for the materials (which included module-maps, recordings, links to online tasks, readings, and videos) because i wanted to use a platform with which all students were familiar. i presented these materials in a weekly microsoft sway presentation on blackboard. sway offers an interactive web-based canvas which allows creators to present text, video recordings, links and images in one ‘storyline’, which users simply scroll through. this means that the sway is, in principle, read as part of a narrative, not individual elements, as they might be in a powerpoint, a jones ‘we had a good laugh together’: using teams for collaborative learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 21: september 2021 4 feature i thought would be helpful in an online learning context to provide a clear thread through the week’s content. sway also allows you to embed voice-recordings so i was able to present instructions and content orally as well as visually, which is important for learner diversity. the following figures show examples of some of the sway ‘cards’ i created for the llt module: figure 1: embedded short lecture recordings. figure 1 illustrates one card of the sway presentation, in which i embedded links to three short lecture recordings (in panopto). there is also an audio recording which explains the connection between the three lectures themselves and other content. figure 2: interactive content. users can click through the ‘storyline’ (i.e. week’s content) using these arrows jones ‘we had a good laugh together’: using teams for collaborative learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 21: september 2021 5 figure 2 shows an example of an interactive task where a link takes students to a flipgrid (a video discussion platform) to record a brief introduction of themselves for their seminar group. figure 3: instructions and links to online pre-seminar tasks. figure 3 shows a sway card which explains that week’s online group task and provides links to everything students need to complete it. student feedback shows that presenting the week’s content in a sway was well-received. having one place where students could find everything was appreciated, perhaps because there was considerable variety among teaching staff in terms of the teaching and learning platforms they used, and sway offered something that was easy to follow: sway presentations and module maps make the module easy to follow and make sure no tasks are missed out. it is handy having all of the content/instructions available on sway because it is easy to follow in order and all of the material is all in one place. as noted earlier, to create a sense of community and allow students to consolidate knowledge through discussion, i wanted to recreate the groupwork experiences of the inperson seminar classroom as closely as possible. however, as we only had 45 minutes of weekly live contact time per seminar group, i was reluctant to use this time with students in breakout rooms: synchronous ‘live’ interaction is important for relationship building (fawns et al., 2020), and what is more, community-building needs to start before the synchronous jones ‘we had a good laugh together’: using teams for collaborative learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 21: september 2021 6 session (fawns, 2021). the challenge was then, how to facilitate student-student interaction and groupwork in an online space, which did not eat into the short live time we had together each week. after consulting our digital learning team, ms teams was decided to be the best choice for the virtual classroom and live sessions because it offers a space for students and staff to meet, collaborate, create content, share resources, and submit tasks. for ease of access, a link to teams was embedded in each week’s sway presentation. as can be seen in figure 4, seminar groups had their own channel in teams, where we held the live session each week. to create the opportunity for student-student interaction, i then divided each seminar group into ‘study groups’ of six or so students, and assigned a private channel for each study group. figure 4: the teams space. study groups met weekly, ahead of the live sessions, to carry out online groupwork tasks, which were connected to learning outcomes. i ensured that tasks were varied to maintain motivation and cater for learner differences, and collaborative in nature, so students had to work together to complete them. tasks included: summaries of group discussions; peerfeedback on formative assessment tasks; and reflections on and syntheses of texts/videos (see figure 3 for an example). however, i had had mixed success with previous attempts at getting students to work in groups outside of the in-person seminar room, with complaints of some peers not pulling their weight while others did all the work. to mitigate this problem, i attached summative marks to the weekly group tasks. each of the 10 weekly online groups tasks was assigned 2%, which totalled 20% of the overall module mark. as a further measure to ensure equal participation and workload, i assigned roles to each student was able to see the general channel, their seminar group channel (where live-sessions took place), and their own private study group channel (where they carried out the online group tasks). jones ‘we had a good laugh together’: using teams for collaborative learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 21: september 2021 7 group members. these were organiser (who set up the meetings, confirmed participation and submitted the completed task); chair (who ‘chaired’ and kept the discussion going); and scribe (who had the most challenging task of writing up the task after the group meeting/discussion). roles alternated each week to make sure that everyone contributed. to achieve the 2% each week, the group task had to be completed successfully (i.e. measured against task requirements and the learning outcomes for that particular task), and the organiser needed to confirm participation of each group member. if a group member failed to participate, then the individual did not achieve the mark, but the rest of the group did. we used the live 45-minute sessions for consolidation, extension and feedback on the group tasks. because study groups had met up prior to the live session to at least start the group tasks, they had had the opportunity to familiarise themselves with the content, discuss it with their peers and support each other’s learning. the knock-on effect of this pre-seminar group work was students, on the whole, actively participated in the live sessions. students also felt the benefit of this procedure: the seminars are run brilliantly and the questions to discuss and prompt within study groups prepare us so we feel more comfortable contributing in the seminars. the in-seminar tasks have been helpful in tying together our study group tasks and lecture content. after the live sessions, study groups had several days to finalise their group tasks, before the scribe wrote it up and the organiser confirmed group participation and submitted the tasks via assignments in teams. it was a pleasure to see how engaged students were with the tasks, producing some excellent work as a result of the groupwork. in fact, 45 out of 60 students achieved fullmarks for this part of the assessment, which demonstrates excellent outcomes. however, for those students who felt unable to participate in the groupwork (for reasons of anxiety, for example), i adapted the tasks so that they could submit an individual piece of work, ensuring inclusivity and accessibility. jones ‘we had a good laugh together’: using teams for collaborative learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 21: september 2021 8 student feedback on the online groupwork was overwhelmingly positive, with students particularly appreciating the opportunity to interact with their peers, in a potentially lonely period of their lives: so good to collaborate with others and 'have' to meet with the study group weekly. i would have loved to have 'had' to do this in other modules! thank you! having the study groups and online participation being part of the assessment was a great idea! i've also enjoyed meeting as a group each week to do the tasks, if anything it's just nice to interact with other students again as right now learning feels incredibly isolating. as can be seen from these comments, as well as the opportunities for social interaction being a key motivator, the summative nature of these tasks acted as a good incentive for students to participate in them. on the other hand, there were a couple of less favourable comments centring on the amount of work that these online tasks required, which these students felt was excessive for 2% of the module mark each week. however, as i explained at the beginning of the module, the weekly tasks and participant roles were divided between the study group (approximately 6 students), so the workload should not have been too heavy for any one student. problems and potential solutions of course, any new, untested teaching and learning systems could have teething problems, and while this use of teams for group work and community-building resulted in very high levels of engagement, excellent results and very positive student feedback, it was not without limitations. the first issue relates to the assigning of marks for what could be seen as marks for ‘participation’. the group tasks were not marked as such, but rather marks were awarded if a student participated and the task outcomes were achieved, meaning that 2% was very achievable each week. however, there was a cautionary word from the external examiner jones ‘we had a good laugh together’: using teams for collaborative learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 21: september 2021 9 over this ‘all or nothing’ attribution of marks, which resulted in 75% of students receiving 100% for this part of the assessment. but without the summative marks attached to the groupwork, participation in the tasks would have been far lower, as confirmed by several students in their feedback. so the challenge for the next academic year is how to make the group tasks summative, without awarding marks for ‘participation’. there are several options: 1) to take a portfolio approach. that is, students carry out weekly group tasks, but then select four for assessment at the end of the semester for summative assessment. that way students will still have a concrete incentive to participate but the four tasks can be assessed more thoroughly; 2) for students to submit all of the weekly group tasks for 1% participation (10% for participation seems to be acceptable), and at the end submit a reflective task about their contributions and learning journey, worth 10%; 3) to replicate this year’s system, but mark the submissions with 0 (failure to participate or submit), 1 (participated but did not achieve the task outcomes), or 2 (participated and achieved task outcomes). half marks could also be awarded for partial achievement. portfolio assessment has a great deal of pedagogic value, and if ‘carefully assembled’, can become ‘an intersection of instruction and assessment’ (paulson et al. 1991, p.61), communicating what has been learnt and why it is important. however, there are difficulties in turning a group task into an individual submission, and careful measures would need to be taken to avoid collusion. in terms of option 2, the weekly task requirements would need to be reduced considerably in order to reflect the 1% decrease in marks. it might be challenging to come up with meaningful tasks each week for 1% of the module mark. finally, simply allocating separate marks for participation and successful task completion would be the most straightforward for the coming academic year (202122), which remains filled with covid-19-induced uncertainties and potential change. so given the current situation, option 3 is the most viable solution for this year, but i will certainly explore the use of portfolios in a more settled year. a further potential limitation of this set-up is the composition of and cooperation between group members. i assigned group members randomly because of the complexities of having students select their own groups (e.g. some students not having friendship groups jones ‘we had a good laugh together’: using teams for collaborative learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 21: september 2021 10 in the module). while my method had the potential for a lack of social cohesion and compatibility in some groups, the feedback pointed to the contrary: it was clear that, on the whole, groups got on well, and there were even comments that the study groups offered a good opportunity to work with peers they might not ordinarily have chosen to work with. concluding remarks while the negative impact of covid-19 on our academic and personal lives will likely be felt for many years to come, it is clear that the enforced shift to blended or online teaching and learning in higher education has also presented some opportunities. university structures are often the biggest impediment to meaningful change, and academic teaching staff often do not have the time to embrace new ways of teaching, resulting in repeating the same course content in the same format, year after year. while many of us update our materials regularly, it is a very different matter to change the mode of delivery, not least because it is very time-consuming work. but with the urgent need to switch to remote delivery in order to offer meaningful learning opportunities for our students came an opportunity to speed up the wheels of change. we found ourselves having to think creatively about technology to transform our practices in order to offer inclusive, accessible, authentic and collaborative learning opportunities. many of us realised that technology can actually enable learning, if used in a meaningful way. this case study is one example of just that thinking. by being forced to think creatively about this new mode of delivery, i adapted my module into an online format so there were opportunities for social interaction, inclusivity and collaboration, and where assessment was integrated holistically into the curriculum and weekly online activities. the result was very high levels of student engagement, excellent outcomes and very positive feedback. now, i strongly agree with jackson (2021) that there is ‘little sense in reverting back to the way things were before’. even if the complete resumption of in-person teaching ensues, i will certainly retain the use of study groups in teams (with the option of course to meet up in person should students wish) to create learning communities. in this case study, i have shown that it is ‘eminently possible to create an inclusive connected community online if the right learning design and lecturer training is put in place’ (jackson, 2020). all it takes is a bit of research and training, clear structures, systems and instructions and a small leap of faith. here’s a final word from one of my students: jones ‘we had a good laugh together’: using teams for collaborative learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 21: september 2021 11 it was a great way to feel more 'normal' in terms of the social side of a degree and i know my group really enjoyed catching up every week. we had a good laugh together. in a global pandemic, i’ll take that as a win. references bach, s., haynes, p. and lewis smith, j. (2006) online learning and teaching in higher education. maidenhead: open university press. biggs, j. (2003) teaching for quality learning at university (2nd ed). maidenhead: oxford university press. borg, m, o. and shapiro, s, l. (1996) ‘personality type and student performance in principles of economic education’, journal of economic education, 27(1), pp.3-25. entwistle, n. and ramsden, p. (1983/2015) understanding student learning. routledge revivals. fawns, t., jones, d, and aitken, g, (2020) ‘challenging assumptions about “moving online” in response to covid-19, and some practical advice’, mededpublish, 9(1). https://doi.org/10.15694/mep.2020.000083.1 fawns, t (2021) keynote 1 (1st july 2021). centre for education, support and innovation conference 2021. a flipped conference: building on the lessons from a year’s blended and online teaching. cardiff university. felder, r.m. and brent, r. (2009) active learning: an introduction, asq higher education brief, 2(4). gillet-swan, j. (2017) ‘the challenges of online learning: supporting and engaging the isolated learner’, journal of learning design, 10(1), pp. 20-30. harmer, j. (2015) the practice of english language teaching. 5th edn. harlow: longman. https://doi.org/10.15694/mep.2020.000083.1 jones ‘we had a good laugh together’: using teams for collaborative learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 21: september 2021 12 jackson, a. (2020) the expectation gap: students’ experience of learning during covid-19 and their expectations for next year. wonkhe.com. available at: https://wonkhe.com/blogs/theexpectation-gap-students-experience-of-learning-during-covid-19-and-their-expectations-fornext-year/ (accessed: 12 july 2021). jackson, a. (2021) the expectation gap ii – students’ hopes for learning and teaching in the next normal. wonkhe.com available at: https://wonkhe.com/blogs/the-expectation-gap-ii-studentshopes-for-learning-and-teaching-in-the-next-normal/ (accessed: 12 july 2021). johnson, r.t. and johnson, d.w. (2008) ‘active learning: cooperation in the classroom’, the annual report of educational psychology in japan, 47, pp.29-30. https://doi.org/10.5926/arepj1962.47.0_29 mosley, n. (2020) the evolution of digital learning in higher education, steal these thoughts podcast, episode 11. available at: podcast episode #11: the evolution of digital learning in higher education w/neil mosley – steal these thoughts! (accessed: 8 september 2021). paulson, f. l., paulson, p. r. and meyer, c.a. (1991) ‘what makes a portfolio a portfolio?’ educational leadership 48(5), pp. 60-63. pearson/wonkhe (2020) student expectations survey july 2020. available at: https://wonkhe.com/wp-content/wonkhe-uploads/2020/07/pearson-wonkhe-studentexpectations-survey-published-version.pdf (accessed: 12 july 2021). prince, m.j. (2004) ‘does active learning work? a review of the research’, journal of engineering education, 93(3), pp. 223-231. https://doi.org/10.1002/j.2168-9830.2004.tb00809.x slavin, r. e. (1996) ‘research on cooperative learning and achievement: what we know, what we need to know’, contemporary educational psychology, 21(1), pp.4369. https://doi.org/10.1006/ceps.1996.0004 tanis, c.j. (2020) ‘the seven principles of online learning: feedback from faculty and alumni on its importance for teaching and learning’, research in learning technology 28(0), pp.125. https://doi.org/10.25304/rlt.v28.2319 thornbury, s. (2006) an a-z of elt. oxford: macmillan. https://wonkhe.com/blogs/the-expectation-gap-students-experience-of-learning-during-covid-19-and-their-expectations-for-next-year/ https://wonkhe.com/blogs/the-expectation-gap-students-experience-of-learning-during-covid-19-and-their-expectations-for-next-year/ https://wonkhe.com/blogs/the-expectation-gap-students-experience-of-learning-during-covid-19-and-their-expectations-for-next-year/ https://wonkhe.com/blogs/the-expectation-gap-ii-students-hopes-for-learning-and-teaching-in-the-next-normal/ https://wonkhe.com/blogs/the-expectation-gap-ii-students-hopes-for-learning-and-teaching-in-the-next-normal/ https://doi.org/10.5926/arepj1962.47.0_29 https://stealthesethoughts.com/2020/11/13/podcast-episode-11-the-evolution-of-digital-learning-in-higher-education-w-neil-mosley/#more-3962 https://stealthesethoughts.com/2020/11/13/podcast-episode-11-the-evolution-of-digital-learning-in-higher-education-w-neil-mosley/#more-3962 https://wonkhe.com/wp-content/wonkhe-uploads/2020/07/pearson-wonkhe-student-expectations-survey-published-version.pdf https://wonkhe.com/wp-content/wonkhe-uploads/2020/07/pearson-wonkhe-student-expectations-survey-published-version.pdf https://doi.org/10.1002/j.2168-9830.2004.tb00809.x https://doi.org/10.1006/ceps.1996.0004 https://doi.org/10.25304/rlt.v28.2319 jones ‘we had a good laugh together’: using teams for collaborative learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 21: september 2021 13 author details katy jones is a senior lecturer in english language and linguistics at cardiff university. ‘we had a good laugh together’: using teams for collaborative learning abstract introduction background to the module the transition from in-person to online teaching and learning problems and potential solutions concluding remarks references author details editorial editorial jim donohue independent scholar nicola grayson university of manchester andy hagyard independent scholar jenny hillman open university eleanor loughlin durham university cathy malone middlesex university london craig morley university of manchester gita sedghi university of liverpool alicja syska university of plymouth september 2021 arrived out of nowhere, bringing with it unresolved uncertainties of the new academic year, and with it, we re-entered a ‘new normal’ in higher education. the ‘postpandemic’ university did not materialise and conversations around teaching in person versus online, blended or hybrid, in masks or socially distanced, still dominate our planning and delivery design. our readers might therefore find it comforting that the conversations in this issue of our journal include both pre-covid and pandemic-centred analyses, with most articles still reporting on the past world some of us long for and which does not rush to come back. our next issue, the compendium – a special issue on the impact of covid-19 on our teaching practices – will reflect on our eventful transitions to the ‘new normal’. we are very excited to see it shaping up and cannot wait to see it out in the world soon. unsurprisingly, our learning development community remains as strong as ever. colleagues have been fully engaged in the jldhe reading club, with three stimulating bi-monthly meetings already under our belt. in may, we discussed sam king’s article on metadiscourse; in july, we had the opportunity to find out more about nathalie sheridan’s guerrilla research tactics; and in july, we exchanged views on collaborating with academic staff when adopting flipped learning to support students, as well as gaining an insight into sheryl mansfield’s innovative asynchronous materials for flipped teaching. our next reading club will meet on 10 november 2021 and everyone’s invited – please contact jenny hillman for details on how to join. yet our ld colleagues have not only been reading; they are writing, and writing a lot. as a result, this issue 21 is the largest we have published since our last ‘normal’ pre-covid issue in late 2019. we bring you three new papers, four case studies, and two book reviews, whose summaries follow. yet our ld colleagues have not only been reading; they are writing, and writing a lot. as a result, this issue 21 is the largest we have published since our last ‘normal’ pre-covid issue in late 2019. we bring you three new papers, four case studies, and two book reviews, whose summaries follow. yoanita alexandra and septi fahmi choirisa’s paper ‘understanding college students' e-loyalty to online practicum courses in hospitality programmes during covid-19’ provides a timely discussion of the factors that contribute to students’ continued intentional use of online courses (e-loyalty) during the current pandemic. using quantitative research methods, the discussion is based on analysis of a survey completed by students on hospitality programmes. information quality, system quality, and system interactions are identified as key factors in student satisfaction and engagement and the author further provides suggestions of how to ensure that digital platforms and new curricula are appropriate and responsive to students’ needs. in ‘sharing ownership: placing peer assisted study schemes (pass) within the wider work of learning developers’, maxinne connolly-panagopoulos makes a case for the centralisation of peer assisted study schemes (pass). the author sets out to show that whilst pass is routinely positioned within specific faculties or schools in the higher education institutions, the evidence points to the value of a centralised model for pass – led by learning developers. what follows is an evidence-based discussion of the benefits of reconfiguring pass in this way – highlighting the unique position of the learning developer within heis for enhancing student awareness of, and access to, pass. and finally, maria moxey and edward simpkin’s paper, ‘harnessing the potential of extracurricular opportunities to enhance graduate employability in higher education’, addresses the emerging theme in the literature that graduates often do not demonstrate the relevant skills to employers, and that heis should harness the potential of extra-curricular opportunities to enhance employability. the results of the study show that although students were confident in articulating skills gained through extracurricular activities volunteering to employers, they did not identify many skills or expand on their transferability to the workplace. the findings contribute towards the growing body of literature on student employability and provide a model that can be adopted by other universities on a larger scale to investigate this further. moving on to case studies, camila devis-rozental and susanne clarke in ‘he staff’s attitudes and expectations about their role in induction activities’ investigate how higher education staff (both academic and professional) perceive and understand their role in induction periods. the aim of their research was to evaluate current practice at their institution and present evidence-based recommendations for practice. staff’s ideas and views were gathered through a qualitative survey, which was supported by relevant quantitative data. their findings revealed that the main areas for improvement were communication between teams, training to better understand and support students’ needs, and a more unifying recognition that every member of the university is involved in the induction period. this case study adds a valuable insight into the growing research on induction and transition. in ‘learners’ perceptions of the effectiveness of using self-reflection to understand english literary texts: towards an autonomous learning approach in libya’, hana el-badri and fatma abu-baker explore the challenges of moving towards autonomous learning in a teaching context they describe as largely teacher centred and lecture based. in order to understand the impact of introducing a self-reflection worksheet as a tool to improve reading comprehension, the authors focus on the students’ perceptions of the value of the worksheet. in so doing they show how it enabled some to identify not only areas for development but also ways forward. for others, however, the worksheets proved to be less impactful and, in some instances, confusing. the authors conclude that wider use of worksheets and increased scaffolding, guidance and support around their usage will enhance student engagement and increase self-reflection and autonomous learning. james elliott’s case study ‘task-specific short powerpoints™ for effective off-campus learning in diagnostic radiography’ explores the design and use of learning resources that can be used asynchronously to support independent learning. the author examines student usage patterns and looks at broad patterns of correlation between engagement with online resources and assessment results. while a number of positive inferences are drawn, recommendations include the need for more detailed tracking to understand precisely how students engage with such resources. the starting point for katy jones’s case study, ‘”we had a good laugh together”: using teams for collaborative learning’, is the transition from in-person lectures and seminars to online teaching. the author describes how the initial need to respond quickly to the challenges was replaced by the realisation that in order to promote interaction, build communities and enhance student learning, adaptation, rather than online replication of the face-to-face model was required. in deciding which tools and platforms to use, the author emphasises the importance of integration, functionality and ease of access and further outlines measures taken to ensure student participation and a fair distribution of the workload in online group meetings and collaborations. the case study further includes discussion of the thorny issue of whether it is appropriate to award marks for participation and concludes with recognition that the move to online teaching has resulted in creative solutions, in this instance the use of teams for study groups, that can be usefully integrated into in-person teaching. we finish this summary with kimberly hoffman and michelle breen’s review of the book library pedagogies: personal reflections from library practitioners by sam aston and andrew walsh. as the reviewers demonstrate, the book will help librarians to reflect on and improve their teaching to meet the contemporary needs of their learners and develop the information and digital skills of students. this book adds to the growing literature calling on the master of library and information science programmes to prioritise formal teacher training, since the majority of library jobs entail teaching and learning, even if only on an indirect or one-to-one scale. we hope that in this collection of articles, our subscribers and readers will find thought provoking and stimulating material. we also want to take this opportunity to thank our wonderful reviewers whose critical reading of submissions and thoughtful feedback and recommendations have made invaluable contributions to the quality of articles we publish. our heartfelt appreciation for the time, expertise, and work it took to review papers in this issue goes to the following reviewers: alan hayes alina congreve alison loddick arina cirstea david heading dustin hosseini gemma stansfield jennie blake liz wilding rosemarie mcilwhan stacey mottershaw paul chin eva shackel with best wishes, the jldhe editorial board journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special issue 22: compendium of innovative practice october 2021 ________________________________________________________________________ small worlds and short stories: play, pleasure and imagination deployed as a salve to isolated learning paul o'kane university of the arts london keywords: short stories; small worlds; walter benjamin; covid-19. the challenge the news came at the start of easter recess. teaching and learning in our fine art department was quickly shifting online in time for the pending summer term. first encounters with zoom, collaborate and teams were inauspicious. all looked dingy and everyone divided. this was a reflection of our unprecedentedly fearful and disorienting containment, rather than a fair representation of online teaching in general. it was this fear and this physical and psychological containment, brought about by the pandemic, that i perceived as the problem i needed to address. as we exposed previously unseen contents of our home offices, everyone seemed faintly amused, albeit masking an underlying existential threat. meeting students online involved a similar mix of novelty and nerves but also amplified awareness of pastoral duties. the staff wanted to help alleviate and reassure students, many of whom were now studying in the family home they had recently left to become a fine art student in london. the response at first, i fared badly; listening to pandemic news, or glimpsing news flashes on the edge of my screen made me feel depressive and panicky. i boycotted news. this helped, but i found a more effective antidote in a collection of short stories by haruki murakami (2006). i read these hunched against a closed window, maximising daylight falling on pages while o’kane small worlds and short stories: play, pleasure and imagination deployed as a salve to isolated learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 2 getting as close as i dared to the fearsome outside world. i had left murakami’s collection unread for several years, but now, my theory that every book has its day was proven correct. his breezy descriptions of comfortable lifestyles laced with a curious sense of anomaly brightened my vision sufficiently for me to regain psychological equilibrium. i had suffered some poor mental health as a mature undergraduate and developed strategies to deal with it. now i thought of colleagues and students who might be suffering in similar ways, and as i began to feel more hopeful, it struck me that even advocating a simple escape into short story reading could help others find a way back to working confidently and enjoyably. i have long been a fan of short stories, working through collections, comparing styles, techniques, nationalities and eras, as well as publishing some of my own. i had also provided a seminar titled a world of stories for international, culturally diverse groups of fine art undergraduates. this pivoted around walter benjamin’s essay the storyteller (1968) and also implicated the use of close and contextual readings of short stories selected from penguin’s parallel texts series printed in parallel translations (coward, 1999; balcom, 2013). it was not a great leap then to devise a new seminar based on short stories and aimed at helping students experiencing newly brief and fragmented learning, and whose imaginations and perspectives might be cramped and curtailed by the pandemic. a new seminar, small worlds and short stories, was born. the first part of the title referred to shrunken surroundings and emerged from the idea that an artist or art student does not necessarily need a lot of space, time or money to make interesting and valuable work. alberto giacometti supposedly returned to paris from switzerland following world war two with recent figurative works in a matchbox, while marcel duchamp made mini versions of major works available in a ‘boîte-en-valise’ like the sample case of a travelling salesman. around such precedents and resources, i wrapped further historical and contemporary art examples, plus some theorisation, for example, using susan stewart’s book on longing (1984), in which the miniature receives intimate intellectual attention. a catalogue for an exhibition titled small world at san diego museum of modern art in 2000 (kamps and rugoff, 2000) showed how contemporary art can be a minute proposition for a larger project, or simply revel in the reverie of small worlds – as we all do as children. another helpful text was bernd stiegler’s traveling in place: a history of armchair travel o’kane small worlds and short stories: play, pleasure and imagination deployed as a salve to isolated learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 3 (2013), a book that collects, edits and comments upon a rich archive of mostly 19th century literature created by witty and parodic writers describing adventures that take place within the home – often in one room. furthermore, resilient historical and literary figures, including defoe’s robinson crusoe (1994), swift’s gulliver (1994), anne frank, and nelson mandela came into play. the fictional characters provided examples of the ways in which literature can imaginatively explore possibilities and impossibilities of scale and of human invention given limited resources. meanwhile, the real-life figures provided models of belief and perseverance in inauspicious circumstances. given these models, and the creative licence to make the most of the seminar and turn our collective catastrophe into an opportunity, students responded well, using a variety of media, from high tech solutions to spoken and written word, animations to dioramas. they also revealed their personal enthusiasm for literature and made new connections between reading that they did ‘for themselves’ and reading they were required to develop in their studies. reflections i have provided this seminar, on several occasions now, to different groups and colleges, for ba fine art and ma fine art students. it always seems to liberate and relax, to show how beautiful the small and how voluminous the short can be, while revealing that even when confined, fine artists (providing models for all) can turn restrictions to advantage. in terms of students’ learning, this is a good model of how enjoyment, play and pleasure can be gateways into serious work and learning (james and nerantzi, 2019), and how an individual’s ‘small world’ of study can and should always be taken seriously as the core of something upon which a lifetime of learning will be built. i am not a scientific pedagogical theorist, but an artist deeply involved in the textures and senses of teaching; however, i would recommend, to interested others, roger caillois’ man, play and games (caillois, 2001) and a close re-reading of benjamin’s the storyteller essay (1968). these might deepen and extend an understanding or evaluation of my strategies here. i feel pleased that i was able to turn an oppressive and intimidating experience into a positive interpretation of our newly compressed environment. this created a space of possibility leading to some fundamental, yet recently overlooked aspects of contemporary o’kane small worlds and short stories: play, pleasure and imagination deployed as a salve to isolated learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 4 art as rooted in imagination, scale and the pleasures of play. the literature discussed helped show students (and me) that we often need to adjust our presumptions and adapt to our surroundings in order to maintain optimism and carry on sowing seeds of possibility – within ourselves and for others – even (and perhaps especially) in the most isolated and dispirited times and places. references balcom, j. (2013) short stories in chinese. new york: penguin. benjamin, w. (1968) illuminations. new york: schocken. caillois, r. (2001) man, play and games. urbana ill: university of illinois press. coward, r. (1999) short stories in french. new york: penguin. defoe, d. (1994) robinson crusoe. london: penguin. james, a., and nerantzi, c. (eds.) (2019) the power of play in higher education: creativity in tertiary learning. cham, switzerland: springer. kamps, t. and rugoff, r. (2000) small worlds: dioramas in contemporary art. san diego: san diego museum of modern art. murakami, h. (2006) blind willow sleeping woman. london: harvill secker. stewart, s. (1984) on longing: narratives of the miniature, the gigantic, the souvenir, the collection. baltimore: john hopkins university press stiegler, b. (2013) traveling in place: a history of armchair travel. chicago: university of chicago press. swift, j. (1994) gulliver’s travels. london: penguin o’kane small worlds and short stories: play, pleasure and imagination deployed as a salve to isolated learning journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 5 author details paul o’kane is an artist and writer, lecturing on art and culture at central saint martins college. paul is a founding member of eeodo artists’ publishers and a long-standing member of aica (international association of art critics). he has published a series of artists’ books, and numerous articles, essays, and reviews for leading journals and magazines, including third text and art monthly. paul’s research, writing, and lecturing is rooted in fine art but always informed by a broader cultural field and a historical model. paul is currently preparing a book on history in contemporary art for routledge. small worlds and short stories: play, pleasure and imagination deployed as a salve to isolated learning the challenge the response reflections references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 27 april 2023 ________________________________________________________________________ ©2023 the author(s) (cc-by 4.0) the centre for learning and teaching associates scheme: building a learning community for collaboration and impact susan virginia smith leeds beckett university georgi sinclair leeds beckett university ruth pickford leeds beckett university laura ettenfield leeds beckett university abstract this paper presents the outcomes of a small research project that sought to explore the value of a staff associate scheme linked to the centre for learning and teaching (clt) in a post-92 university. the associates are a group of academic and professional service staff seconded from their schools and services for one day a week, usually for a year, to work collaboratively with the core full time centre for learning and teaching team on projects of interest which relate to learning development and align with the strategic aims of the university’s education plan. this paper reflects on the findings from narratives provided from autoethnographic associate reflective diaries and survey responses that sought to explore the participants’ practice experiences, learning journeys, and perceptions of the value of their membership of the associate scheme. the discussion is widened by the consideration of findings from the participants, which contributed to the iterative development and enhancement of the scheme. findings showed a positive impact of the scheme on the associate participants and their practice. they viewed the scheme as beneficial to their collaborative skills, the building of unusual synergies, and in the supporting of innovation and impact as cross-university learning developers. the paper concludes by drawing together themes from the research, lessons learnt, transferability of findings to other universities, and consideration of the requirements for a successful future scheme. smith the centre for learning and teaching associates scheme: building a learning community for collaboration and impact journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 2 keywords: staff learning community; collaboration; qualitative research; learning development; impact. introduction this qualitative project explored the value of a staff associate scheme linked to the centre for learning and teaching (clt) in a post-92 university. the associates are a group of academic and professional service staff seconded from schools and services, for one day a week, usually for a year, to work collaboratively with the core clt team on projects, relating to teaching and learning, which align with the strategic aims of the university’s education plan. rationale for the associate scheme developing excellent academic practice (deap) was established in 2016 as a wholeinstitution, evidence-based approach to develop the organisational knowledge, attributes, and capabilities which would maximise our students’ success (pickford, 2018a). it is a practical framework for course design and teaching excellence that underpins a strategic, integrated approach to developing excellent academic practice. this focus on excellence drives our collaborative approach to building community and networks of excellent practitioners in the separate university schools. this, in turn, impacts on our institutional learning development, practice sharing and ultimately benefits our students, colleagues, and the wider community. the next step was for the clt staff to then identify what was needed from a team of new change agents (the potential associates) to bring this approach to life. to that end, all applicants for the associate roles needed to i) show a commitment to working with and learning from others, ii) have prior experience in learning development to sustain the deap framework, iii) demonstrate evidence of how that learning can be used to best effect for students, and iv) have expertise in using evidence for best practice and in supporting our institutional outcomes relating to progression, completion, and continuation. smith the centre for learning and teaching associates scheme: building a learning community for collaboration and impact journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 3 summary of the scheme each year seven associates were recruited from a wide and varied applicant pool. most were experienced teachers, all were hea fellows, three were national teaching fellows and four had teaching roles in the professional services. this study covered associates in the 2019 and 2020 entry group, a total of 14 different staff with two of the associates spanning both years. the associates worked alongside the full-time, core clt staff, a mixed team of academics, educational developers, digital experts, and a project manager who coordinated pan-university teaching related projects. the project this study aimed to provide an initial exploration of the associates’ experience and to ascertain the degree to which they valued their role, their development, and their project activities. in reporting the process and outcomes we seek to contribute to the scholarship of learning development and identify features of effective practice for other heis who may be interested in establishing similar schemes or refining existing ones. the project was ethically approved, and we explored the qualitative evidence derived from associates’ experiences. the exploration initially focused on how the associates valued participating in the scheme. the term value was assigned the meaning positive benefit or positive effect, this being clarified to participants at the outset. the notion of value could apply to either the participant themselves or to others, as they wished. we adopted a qualitative approach (creswell and poth, 2017) to exploring this initiative which amplified associates’ voices. two questions were explored. firstly, what was the reality of the associates’ working practices and did these have impact and reach? secondly, with a focus on their learning journeys, what was the impact of their own learning on their emergent role? to answer these questions, we used i) longitudinal qualitative surveys (pre-, middle-, and post-associate role) sent to seven associates each year, over two years, and combined this with ii) an autoethnographic approach which incorporated five submitted reflective diaries from seven of the associates over the period of a year. smith the centre for learning and teaching associates scheme: building a learning community for collaboration and impact journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 4 contextual literature literature relating to communities of practice, academic identity, the scholarship of learning development, and social capital informed the initial rationale, framing, design, and implementation of the scheme. this literature, summarised below, also informed the analysis and discussion of the surveys and diaries. the establishment of the associate scheme was informed and contextualised by a range of literature. lave and wenger’s (1998) original work on communities of practice (cop) was influential, specifically how the community itself creates the social structure that facilitates learning through interactions and relationships with others. their thinking that interacting with peers and networks in the workplace fosters learning and information sharing informed our approach to designing the associate scheme. in addition, mackenzie et al. (2010) and cox (2004; 2007) informed the scheme design, particularly their work relating to the benefits of communities of learning as a way of creating impact through a focus on scholarly activity, partnerships, and collaborative projects. mackenzie et al. (2010) also outlines how university staff in different learning communities felt a sense of belonging to the institution, valued the community itself for the learning it brought the members, and noted the enhanced student learning that resulted from the practice sharing. many of these ideas contributed to our emergent thinking about how to maximise the potential of our own associate scheme. literature on the scholarship of learning development also informed our planning and design stages. for example, fanghanel et al.’s 2016 work explored different institutions’ successful models of building excellence in the scholarship of teaching and learning. their examples of successful collaborative project working, learning communities which informed and influenced institutional teaching and learning policy, and noted enhanced career development for excellent teachers were all felt to be potentially beneficial for informing our own scheme. trigwell and shale’s 2004 work on the scholarship of teaching as a reflective and informed act engaging students and teachers in learning was also influential. as the scheme progressed and staff moved forward with their careers, we considered how engaging in communities of practice (lave and wenger, 1998) become core to developing academic and scholarly identities (ching, 2021). these are the core attitudes that determine how individuals approach the concept of work and continuing self-improvement and development through shared work and passions (ching, 2021). in addition, clegg’s smith the centre for learning and teaching associates scheme: building a learning community for collaboration and impact journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 5 (2008) useful work contributed to the thinking that underpinned the scheme design as it explored how individual scholarly identities, although all different, can be supported by participating in educational learning communities like an associates scheme. exploration of the literature on social capital, created when ‘the structure of relations among persons facilitates actions’ (sampson, 2008, p.168), deepened our understanding that trusting relationships between clt core staff and the associates were essential. as developers we were focused on creating relationships that facilitated action, progress, and opportunities for transformative learning. this has been described as ‘learning that transforms fixed assumptions and expectations . . . to make [learners] more inclusive, discriminating, open, reflective, and emotionally able to change’ (mezirow, 2003, p.58). the methods surveys surveys are a useful way of capturing rich, qualitative data (braun et al., 2020). all associates were invited to complete three surveys (see figure 1) which used open, reflective questions which focused on exploring the benefits and challenges of their working practice and personal journey through the scheme. these were issued to all before, during, and after the scheme for two cohort entries, to fourteen individual associates in total. the survey feedback was also used for iterative enhancement of the associate scheme. autoethnography in addition, reflective written diary entries were sought from both associate cohorts. autoethnography, a method that engages the individual in self-analysis and selfexploration (starr, 2010) underpinned the approach to the writing. this approach has gained traction in recent years, as it enables researchers to generate insights about a phenomenon by drawing from personal situated experiences (sparkes, 2002; ellis, adams and bochner, 2011; holman jones, adams and ellis, 2013). however, considering the critiques of solo autoethnography noting that ‘memory is flawed, experience is subjective’ (stanley, 2014, pp.148-149), we felt that the research was best undertaken using a mixed approach. smith the centre for learning and teaching associates scheme: building a learning community for collaboration and impact journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 6 participants were initially invited to a briefing meeting which explained the reflective writing style required. they were invited to submit three pieces of writing to track their involvement in the associate programme. they were encouraged to write freely and shape their own pieces. all the associate participants had previous knowledge of reflective writing skills, and many had taught reflective writing and theory to their own students too. five out of seven respondents completed the written pieces. two chose not to participate in the diaries due to their workloads. each participant focused on their critical learning points, using reflection on action (schon, 1991) to investigate new insights about themselves and their practice as a clta. they were guided at the briefing meeting and in explanatory guidance, to focus on experiences of listening to their students’ feedback and the realities of academia, research, and service delivery as an associate. the initial analysis, of the reflective diaries and surveys, was undertaken by an associate, (who did not write a diary and had no association with the leadership and operational management of the associate scheme) and one of the authors who also, had no connection to the management of the scheme. the unit of analysis focused on the participants’ written words to identify on experiential/emotional themes. the data were analysed inductively using thematic analysis (braun and clarke, 2013), a process which involved data familiarisation, coding, theme development, and review. the initial survey and diary analyses were undertaken separately, then the emergent sub themes were shared, separately read again, and the emergent sub themes and overall main collated themes discussed by the two staff (the authors) who completed the analysis. reflexivity is integral to qualitative research (corlett and mavin, 2018) and the researchers reflected on how their formal roles and knowledge of the individual associates impacted on the process of doing the research and how that might shape the outcomes and trustworthiness of the work. data limitations it is important to note the limitations of our surveys and the reflective pieces despite the integrated reflexivity on the trustworthiness of our data (tracy, 2010). firstly, all the data were self-reported from a small sample (seven associates per year over two years, which resulted in 11 different associates in total) representing recollections of their emotions, smith the centre for learning and teaching associates scheme: building a learning community for collaboration and impact journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 7 rather than direct observation of their responses in real time. such measures suffer from potential weaknesses such as misunderstanding questions or only drawing on one, rather than a range of experiences. secondly, although their own words were used to convey the meanings they ascribed to their experiences, these words were then interpreted by the researchers doing the analysis adding an additional layer of subjective filtering. overall, generalisation of the findings beyond this study should be made with these caveats in mind. analysis and generation of the themes sub themes from each data source were identified as follows: i) diary sub themes: eight reflective diary (d) sub themes were generated from the content analysis: (d1) professional and personal development; (d2) role juggling; (d3) opportunity & inspiration; (d4) the future growth and development of the clt; (d5) community; (d6) collaboration; (d7) inspiration and opportunity; (d8) innovation. ii) survey sub themes: seven survey (s) sub themes were generated from the content analysis. these were showing the value, the associates attached to teamwork and collaboration (s1); unusual synergies and new practice (s2); their sense of belonging to a learning community (s3); how they engaged student and staff voices in partnership to create change (s4); linking to senior management and other schools (s5) and their personal development (s6). one theme (s7) showed that sometimes some associates struggled with the duality of role – i.e., managing their substantive role and associate role together. all the subthemes were grouped to form three main thematic outcomes (c1-3) (see table 1). table 1: diary (d) and survey (s) sub themes derived from findings mapped to the main three collated (c) themes. collated themes (c) diary (d) and survey (s) sub themes collated themes (c) diary (d) and survey (s) sub themes d3 opportunity and inspiration smith the centre for learning and teaching associates scheme: building a learning community for collaboration and impact journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 8 c1 the collaborative work of the associate and its impact d6 opportunities for collaborative work s1 teamwork and collaboration s2 unusual synergies and new practice s4 engaging student and staff voices in partnership to create change c2 the associate role as an opportunity for personal development and innovation d1 personal and professional development d5 belonging to a learning community d7 new opportunities emanating from the associate scheme d8 opportunities for innovation and change s3 an enhanced sense of belonging to a learning community s6 their personal development and journeys c3 the wider strategic development of the clt d2 role juggling /balancing d4 the future growth and development of the clt s7 struggled with the duality of role discussion the three main themes (c1-c3) are now explored with supporting evidence from the survey and diary findings. theme 1 focuses on the first research question relating to the clta working practice. theme 2 explores the second research question about the associates’ personal journeys and experience. theme 3 encompasses both practice and personal experience but explores emergent issues that were regarded as having ‘bigger’ implications for the scheme, its sustainability, and its impact. the literature which informed the development of the clta scheme initially, informed the researchers’ analysis and discussion. theme 1 (c1): the collaborative work of the associates and its impact. collaboration and practice sharing across the clt core team and the associates as a learning community was fundamental to making this scheme work. smith the centre for learning and teaching associates scheme: building a learning community for collaboration and impact journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 9 a culture to enhance relationships and social capital: a collegiate culture, introduced as an expectation of behaviour prior to application, was strengthened by bi-monthly team meetings, and regular working lunches (in person and online) to build trust, work on projects, and generate and share ideas for new work streams.these were chaired by the associate scheme leader (a core member of the clt staff) with discussion points submitted in advance. these meetings were often free ranging and stimulated creative ideas and debate. the social capital that emerged from this structure as relationships strengthened (larsen and tascón, 2018) led to a shared approach to leadership developing across the whole team as the associates became increasingly confident in their specific project roles and built new links with other colleagues. furthermore, these links facilitated positive action as associates shared knowledge, offered support, and undertook collaborative projects. overall, as emphasised by other literature on learning communities (mackenzie et al, 2010; bell, 2006), membership of the scheme afforded valuable social capital to the individual members involved. furthermore, this did not end when they stopped being associates, but was valued and sustained, resulting in further collaborative endeavours in their own schools and disciplines. indeed, rooted in the findings, the associates wrote about how they ‘feel engaged and relaxed’ on clt days (survey) and how the social element bore fruit in terms of sustained productive working. each associate had explicit aims for the year which aligned with their school/service educational priorities. as reported later, projects became more successfully aligned as the scheme matured. prior to this scheme, there had been no allocated time for academic and professional service staff to undertake this type of work. it created two-way communication between disciplines to deliver and disseminate practice rooted in pedagogy. articulated by one associate, the scheme provides ‘opportunities to share ideas and best practice with colleagues at different stages in their careers and with different roles within the university, working together rather than separately and learning from each other’ (survey). smith the centre for learning and teaching associates scheme: building a learning community for collaboration and impact journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 10 practice sharing in a learning community the scheme provided the umbrella for separate schools and services to come together across all levels to share perspectives, practice, and context. one reflected on this clta learning environment, ‘it gave me an overwhelming sense of belonging and community . . . . i have been able to develop my ideas on pedagogy and have benefited from hearing the ideas from the working practices of the team’ (survey). all reported through their final survey how belonging to their learning community itself, with regular planned opportunities for meeting (whether online or in person) and the building of new relationships, had enhanced their knowledge, influenced their perspectives, positioned their work in a wider context, and allowed them to explore new areas and learn from each other. diverse, atypical, and productive collaborations associates had one day a week (usually fridays) to provide space and opportunity to collaborate. associates pre-planned their projects and group meetings for fridays. the impact of associates from different departments working intensively as a team immediately became apparent. four examples of specific collaborative project work are cited in appendix 1: these include collaborative projects focused on redesign of pre-arrival induction resources, inclusivity in student support in sport, podcasts to assess student work in history, and collaboration music and business to re-design the student online context. these diverse examples demonstrate how innovative practice can unite different subject areas, create novel courses, and scale up digital innovation to influence students. theme 2 (c2): the associate role as an opportunity for personal development, and innovation personal transformation and learning associates reflected on how they have developed personally and grown in confidence. they explored how their teamwork and clta collaborations had developed over time and what strategies worked well for them. they explored how leading specific projects and having safe space to discuss and resolve challenges helped both their own professional learning and their dealings with students. smith the centre for learning and teaching associates scheme: building a learning community for collaboration and impact journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 11 associates explained how they had gained ‘confidence in speaking to wider audiences out of my normal comfort zone’ (diary), and ‘a feeling of renewed energy for my l&t and supporting others in that role’ (diary). they mentioned their personal learning and how this then allowed them to become change agents themselves. another explained how being an associate had ‘raised my status within the subject group’ and ‘inspired (them) to do things differently’ (surveys). this aligns with the findings of christie et al. (2015), who explored how academics experiencing transformational learning themselves are then in a better position to act as change agents, influencing others to engage in similar experiences, which then have wider cyclical impact on all participants’ thinking. practice sharing for innovation and knowledge the ethos of transparent, evidence-based practice sharing opened colleagues’ eyes to the importance of being critical about pedagogy and the need for evidence informed practice. as a direct result of the scheme a member of clt core staff and one of the associates established an online network of critical pedagogues to share practice and research ideas. ideas from the online discussion are collated and curated by the associates for a regular workshop for network members. a growing understanding of evidence-based pedagogy is evident. the work of this group has had direct impact on the time available for authoring an associate-led publication (smith and seal, 2021), and a clt visiting professor whose work on elements of critical pedagogy (giroux,1997; freire 1998), especially student decision making, cocreation and active learning, dovetailed usefully with our own work (smith and seal, 2021). theme 3 (c3): beyond the associates: impact on wider activity through coordinated strands of activity that simultaneously target engagement of our university communities, the associate scheme catalysed cultural change and further embedded the development of the deap culture across the university. as time has passed, associate projects have become less focused on nurturing individual interests and more focused on alignment with strategy (or aligning their interests and research with our education strategy). other wider university projects to develop staff learning in pedagogic smith the centre for learning and teaching associates scheme: building a learning community for collaboration and impact journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 12 research and an internal project to address perceptions of grade inflation, were made richer by the associates’ interdisciplinary contributions. the associate scheme leader has become skilled at aligning the associates’ project work and interests to the priorities of our education strategy, school specific requirements and the deap framework. core clt staff work before the start of the academic year with each new associate cohort to map the projects to the strategic aims and our institutional student outcomes relating to continuation, completion, and progression. the purpose of the associate scheme was to bring about enhancement of students’ educational experiences through staff synergies and development. it seems that the clta’s reach, and impact goes beyond ‘business as usual’. being afforded the time to explore individual interests and create innovative collaborations is enriching for team members. the scheme has secured a wider value across the institution, externally and in peer-reviewed publications which explore their work (smith et al., 2021a; smith et al., 2021b; smith et al., 2022). the clta impact is strategic, inclusive, and mapped to the clt impact assessment framework (pickford, 2018b). senior management links the associate scheme leader timetabled meetings with the deputy vice chancellor (dvc) every two months. these were regarded positively by the associates offering them a broader lens into wide institutional strategic issues and an illumination of challenges beyond their own work. the agenda is based around a series of discussion points set by the associates. it also allowed them to voice issues with their teaching roles and university strategies and direction directly. these discussions also enabled associates to develop a deeper understanding of the institutional education strategy, approaches and future direction, and many said they ‘felt heard’ (survey). the dvc also used the associates as a valuable informal feedback group. their views (student-centred, borne of experience, and focused on the core business of education) offered unique, alternative perspectives from the ones that dvcs often hear from senior colleagues or union staff. smith the centre for learning and teaching associates scheme: building a learning community for collaboration and impact journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 13 struggles with role identity membership of our associates’ scheme had some challenges. like other institutions, colleagues sometimes struggle with their practice and identity in intentionally designed learning communities (whitton, parr and choate, 2021) but research has shown that over time they can change within it and within the wider institution (boyd and smith, 2016; mccune, 2019). despite evidence that members valued the experience, it was clear that sometimes, scheme membership contributed to, rather than alleviated anxiety. when involvement in the associates was perceived as being additional to members' normal workload, it became a source of stress. it’s been shown that a clear role identity is fundamental to performing effectively (clegg, 2008), indeed as time passed, and some school managers failed to confirm hours, some associates struggled with finding time to juggle their substantive school position with their associate role and admitted to role identity issues. the clt scheme leader has now clarified tight role requirements prior to appointment. the evolving nature of academic, professional role identity is evident with staff interpreting their given roles more actively and moving laterally across boundaries to create new professional spaces and relationships (whitchurch, 2008; baker and lattuca, 2010). as evidenced in the diaries, associates contributed when they could and lobbied the schools for more time as their confidence in their roles grew. this influenced core clt staff to make scheme enhancements such as improving the communication with managers, ringfencing time, communicating with the senior leadership teams, and monitoring project progress carefully. lessons learnt and future implications for practice it appeared through discussion and consideration of the supporting literature that many of the lessons learnt were not just relevant internally but are potentially useful for other universities. using research evidence associates said they now better understood how pedagogic research evidence could inform their teaching and this stimulated a growth in activity relating to research and critical smith the centre for learning and teaching associates scheme: building a learning community for collaboration and impact journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 14 pedagogy with the launching of the institutional centre for research in higher education which will encompass pedagogic research more formally. diversity of membership for effective learning communities like cox (2004; 2007) and fanghanel (2016), the authors argue that for effective community formation, members should come from different professional backgrounds to ensure the building of a safe space (by minimising direct competition) and to enhance the range and depth of experiences. central to this, is the proactive formation of the associate learning developers’ community which is crucial to effectiveness but doesn’t happen organically. this was prioritised in terms of our selection process, our regular project meetings, our active brokering of partnerships (between associates themselves and beyond) and the implementation of group forming activities. reinforcing expectations and requirements to sustain the scheme significant impacts from such a learning community scheme are only achieved through one that builds authentic research projects and effective communities (mackenzie et al, 2010). the scheme leader encourages openness about difficulties, flexibility around workstreams and space for socialising to interpret the new knowledge they are learning. in addition, the clt director attended associate meetings. this provided a channel for responsive action and shows associates’ views are taken seriously. pragmatic issues emerged for action. these related to: i) retaining the regular meetings for idea-sharing with senior management and other associates. ii) realistic ring-fenced time/day allocation from each school. iii) longer secondment periods. iv) clarity of role expectations. v) earlier identification of development interests to optimise aligned workdays and project collaborations. conclusion smith the centre for learning and teaching associates scheme: building a learning community for collaboration and impact journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 15 while definitions of higher education learning developers differ across the sector, at our university the role involves offering expertise, guidance and direction to course teams and professional service staff to ultimately enhance the students’ experience. this work is core to teaching and student support. it’s vital and transferable to in-person, hybrid, and online settings and focuses on enhancing course design, classroom activities, project work, and behaviours, through pan institutional or tailored staff development activity. by exploring the impact of associates’ learning journeys, it is clear that they were empowered to develop their teaching and felt a greater sense of belonging to the university. this type of learning community is useful for building creative, interdisciplinary synergies and supporting the development of impactful projects. in addition, they help to strengthen professional identity and enhance individual value and meaning in the participants’ professional practice. the associates proved more impactful together, as collaborative learning developers, across our university than before, when work was less coherent and less interdisciplinary. they used the opportunities and structures that the associate scheme provided as a powerful vehicle for them to develop skills to innovate as an effective coherent group of learning developers. the associates emphasised that their ‘whole is greater than the sum of their parts’ and they valued the impact of the scheme on their working practices. in addition, the associates evidenced a productive use of time and resources: for example, the production of measurable outcomes (more publications, external links, expansion of the hea fellowship scheme, improved student learning experiences, and increased numbers of learning development workshops with larger attendance numbers). the role also provided space for personal reflection which encouraged professional growth and thoughtful practice discussions which led to transformation of teaching practice. such transformation has led, and will continue to catalyse, benefits for the sector, the university and the students’ experience. the ‘outward thinking’ (survey) associates also appeared to ‘strengthen the bridge to the schools’, and ‘stops courses thinking inwardly in silos’ (survey). community ‘must begin by building relationships between community members’ and that emergent social capital embedded in those relationships can be used to improve the welfare of community members (mackenzie et al., 2010). applying these principles and practical ideas to our associates’ scholarly community, we have shown that by valuing smith the centre for learning and teaching associates scheme: building a learning community for collaboration and impact journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 16 relationships as a fundamental, and establishing support for joint project work, we were able to positively encourage atypical synergies. senior leadership support throughout the project proved crucial in creating multiple opportunities for informal discussion and connection which developed the trust between individual associate members. in summary, the three themes from the findings are relevant for learning development practice in other universities. theme 1 which focuses on collaborative working allows for different perspectives and solutions for educational issues. the collaborative work ‘doubles up’ the extending reach into schools and services to enhance practice and thus influence a greater number of colleagues. this translation often occurs through more tailored local development which can directly address student needs. new opportunities for more collaborative research to build the evidence base in terms of the scholarship of teaching and learning development has also occurred. for theme 2, individual associates’ own professional development was enhanced through a range of opportunities offered. these included fellowships funded external development, mentorship, a pipeline, and support for national teaching fellow evidence and application. in relation to theme 3, despite some issues relating to role identity and deployment, associates’ broader roles as credible learning developers and advisors on school practice and university strategy was valuable. this was particularly evident post-pandemic where new lenses were required to develop innovative approaches to address academic continuity, hybrid, digital and flexible learning. the central location of the clt as a hub for the building of learning development activity is important and has multiple functions. it is a locus for the associates to embrace a broader role as learning developers who, in parallel, work in their schools and services. they then translate their own learning into tailored, subject-specific, staff-facing multi-dimensional learning development activities. this subsequently strengthens how colleagues interact with their students (through course design and their teaching approaches) and ultimately the quality of the overall university offer to students. the scheme provides leverage to: smith the centre for learning and teaching associates scheme: building a learning community for collaboration and impact journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 17 i) influence both schools/professional services to improve practice, which thus improves their student facing offer and their students’ experience. ii) strengthen associates’ collaborative reach and impact, thus improving the critical mass of contributions to institutional good practice. iii) offers a forum for innovative practice sharing and subsequent cross-university reach. iv) supports an individual learning developer’s own professional needs and career path (i.e., promotion through our learning and teaching route, support for national teaching fellowships). v) helps influence university evidence based strategic direction. vi) helps staff, engaged in learning development in their separate schools and services to tailor thinking to their specific disciplinary needs whilst reducing silo thinking and enhancing the consistency of excellent practice (for example, through course and curriculum design). this model is translatable to other universities. there is a current necessity for institutions to update, refine, and improve their offer for students post pandemic. this scheme can contribute to that direction, as it clearly focuses on building innovative learning approaches, scaling up practice sharing and capitalises on atypical synergies which ultimately benefit student learning. the scheme is self-sustaining and now moving into a fourth cohort. with collaboration and cocreation at the heart of the scheme, there is an opportunity for a student associate scheme in the future. this paper invites colleagues managing similar schemes, to contribute to this discussion, become change agents themselves, and ‘thicken’ the data through analyses of their own experiences of these kinds of schemes to strengthen learning development in higher education. references baker, v. l. and lattuca, l. r. (2010) ‘developmental networks and learning: toward an interdisciplinary perspective on identity development during doctoral study’, studies in higher education, 35(7), pp.807-827. https://doi.org/10.1080/03075070903501887. https://doi.org/10.1080/03075070903501887 smith the centre for learning and teaching associates scheme: building a learning community for collaboration and impact journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 18 bell, s., bohan, j., brown, a. and burke, j. (2006) ‘the scholarship of teaching and learning: a university teacher learning community’s work in progress’, practice and evidence of scholarship of teaching and learning in higher education, 1(1), pp.312. available at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/46407166_the_scholarship_of_teaching_ and_learning_a_university_teacher_learning_community’s_work_in_progress (accessed: 10 may 2022). boyd, p. and smith, c. (2016) ‘the contemporary academic: orientation towards research work and researcher identity of higher education lecturers in the health professions’, studies in higher education, 41(4), pp.678-695. https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2014.943657. braun, v. and clarke, v. (2013) successful qualitative research: a practical guide for beginners. london: sage. braun, v., clark, v., boulton, e., davey, l. and mcevoy, c. (2020) ‘the online survey as a qualitative research tool’, international journal of social research methodology, 24(6), pp. 641-654. https://doi.org/10.1080/13645579.2020.1805550. ching, g. s. (2021) ‘academic identity and communities of practice: narratives of social science academics career decisions in taiwan’, taiwan education sciences, 11(388), pp.1-17. https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci11080388. christie, m., carey, m., robertson, a., grainger, p. (2015) ‘putting transformative learning theory into practice’, australian journal of adult learning, 55(1), pp.9-30. clegg, s. (2008) ‘academic identities under threat?’, british educational research journal, 34(3), pp.329-345. https://doi.org/10.1080/01411920701532269. corlett s. and mavin s. (2018) ‘reflexivity and researcher positionality’, in cassell, c., cunliffe, a. and grandy, g. (eds.) the sage handbook of qualitative business and management research methods. london: sage, pp.377-389. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/46407166_the_scholarship_of_teaching_and_learning_a_university_teacher_learning_community’s_work_in_progress https://www.researchgate.net/publication/46407166_the_scholarship_of_teaching_and_learning_a_university_teacher_learning_community’s_work_in_progress https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2014.943657 https://doi.org/10.1080/13645579.2020.1805550 https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci11080388 https://doi.org/10.1080/01411920701532269 smith the centre for learning and teaching associates scheme: building a learning community for collaboration and impact journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 19 cox, m. d. (2004) ‘introduction to faculty learning communities’, new directions for teaching and learning, 97, pp.5-23. https://doi.org/10.1002/tl.129. cox, m. d. (2007) faculty learning community: program director’s handbook and facilitator’s handbook. 4th edn. miami: miami university. creswell, j. and poth, c. (2017) qualitative inquiry and research design. 4th edn. sage. ellis, c., adams, t. e. and bochner, a. p. (2011) ‘autoethnography: an overview’, forum qualitative sozialforschung / forum: qualitative social research, 12(1). https://doi.org/10.17169/fqs-12.1.1589. fanghanel, j. et al. (2016) ‘defining and supporting the scholarship of teaching and learning (sotl): a sector-wide study’. york: higher education academy. available at : https://www.advance-he.ac.uk/knowledge-hub/defining-and-supportingscholarship-teaching-and-learning-sotl-sector-wide-study (accessed: 17 march 2023). freire, p. (1998) teachers as cultural workers: letters to those who dare teach. boulder, colorado: west view press. giroux, h. (1997) pedagogy and the politics of hope. theory, culture, and schooling: a critical reader. boulder, colorado: west view press. holman jones, s. l., adams, t. e. and ellis, c. (2013) handbook of autoethnography. routledge. larsen, m. a. and tascón, c. i. (2018) ‘social capital in higher education partnerships: a case study of the canada–cuba university partnership’, higher education policy, 33(1), pp.89-109. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41307-018-0100-1. lave, j. and wenger, e. (1998) communities of practice: learning, meaning, and identity. cambridge: cambridge university press. https://doi.org/10.1002/tl.129 https://doi.org/10.17169/fqs-12.1.1589 https://www.advance-he.ac.uk/knowledge-hub/defining-and-supporting-scholarship-teaching-and-learning-sotl-sector-wide-study https://www.advance-he.ac.uk/knowledge-hub/defining-and-supporting-scholarship-teaching-and-learning-sotl-sector-wide-study https://doi.org/10.1057/s41307-018-0100-1 smith the centre for learning and teaching associates scheme: building a learning community for collaboration and impact journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 20 leeds beckett university (2022) study ready module. available at : https://libguides.leedsbeckett.ac.uk/study-ready/welcome (accessed: 18 march 2023). mackenzie, j. et al. (2010) ‘from anxiety to empowerment: a learning community of university teachers’, critical perspectives, 15(3), pp.273-284. https://doi.org/10.1080/13562511003740825. mccune, v. (2019) ‘academic identities in contemporary higher education: sustaining identities that value teaching’, 26(1), pp.20-35. https://doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2019.1632826. mezirow, j. (2003) ‘transformative learning as discourse’, journal of transformative education,1(1) pp. 58-63. http://doi.org/10.1177/1541344603252172. morgan, m. (2021) ‘our students will never be normal again’, wonkhe, 22 february. available at: https://wonkhe.com/blogs/our-students-will-never-be-normal-again/ (accessed: 17 march 2023). pickford, r. (2018a) ‘a blueprint for teaching excellence’, journal of perspectives in applied academic practice, 6(1), pp.98-102. https://doi.org/10.14297/jpaap.v6i1.299. pickford, r. (2018b) ‘a holistic framework for developing excellent academic practice’, compass: journal of learning and teaching, 11(2). https://doi.org/10.21100/compass.v11i2.933. sampson, r. j. (2008) ‘what community supplies’, in deflippis, j. and saegert, s. (eds) the community development reader. new york: routledge, pp.163-173. schon, d.a. (1991) the reflective practitioner. ashgate publishing. smith, a. and seal, m. (2021) ‘the contested terrain of critical pedagogy and teaching informal education in higher education’, education sciences 2021, 11(9), p. 476. https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci11090476. https://libguides.leedsbeckett.ac.uk/study-ready/welcome https://doi.org/10.1080/13562511003740825 https://doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2019.1632826 http://doi.org/10.1177/1541344603252172 https://wonkhe.com/blogs/our-students-will-never-be-normal-again/ https://doi.org/10.14297/jpaap.v6i1.299 https://doi.org/10.21100/compass.v11i2.933 https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci11090476 smith the centre for learning and teaching associates scheme: building a learning community for collaboration and impact journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 21 smith, s.v., pickford, r., priestley, j. and sellers, r. (2021a) ‘developing the inclusive course design tool: a tool to support staff reflection on their inclusive practice’, compass: journal of learning and teaching, 14(1). https://doi.org/10.21100/compass.v14i1.1115 smith, s.v., pickford r., sinclair, g., priestley, j., sellers, r. and edwards, l. (2021b) ‘building a sense of belonging in students: using a participatory approach with staff to share academic practice’, journal of perspectives in applied academic practice, 9(1), pp.44-53. available at: https://jpaap.ac.uk/index.php/jpaap/article/view/448/585 (accessed: 17 march 2023). smith, s. v., priestley, j., morgan, m., ettenfield, l. and pickford, r. (2022) ‘entry to university at a time of covid-19: how using a pre-arrival academic questionnaire informed support for new first-year students at leeds beckett university’, all ireland journal of higher education, 14,2. sparkes, a. (2002) ‘autoethnography: self-indulgence or something more?’, in bochner, a. and ellis, c. (eds.) ethnographically speaking: autoethnography, literature, and aesthetics. new york: altamira press, pp.209-232. stanley, p. (2014) ‘writing the phd journey(s): an autoethnography of zine-writing, angst, embodiment, and backpacker travels’, 44(2), pp.143-168. https://doi.org/10.1177/0891241614528708. starr, l. j. (2010) ‘the use of autoethnography in educational research: locating who we are in what we do’, canadian journal for new scholars in education, 3(1), pp.1-9. available at: https://jmss.org/index.php/cjnse/article/view/30477 (accessed: 10 may 2022). tracy, s. j. (2010) ‘qualitative quality: eight “big-tent” criteria for excellent qualitative research’, qualitative inquiry, 16(10), pp.837-851. https://doi.org/10.1177/1077800410383121. https://doi.org/10.21100/compass.v14i1.1115 https://jpaap.ac.uk/index.php/jpaap/article/view/448/585 https://doi.org/10.1177/0891241614528708 https://jmss.org/index.php/cjnse/article/view/30477 https://doi.org/10.1177/1077800410383121 smith the centre for learning and teaching associates scheme: building a learning community for collaboration and impact journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 22 trigwell, k. and shale, s. (2004) ‘student learning and the scholarship of university teaching’, 29(4), pp.523-536. https://doi.org/10.1080/0307507042000236407. whitchurch, c. (2008) ‘shifting identities, blurring boundaries: the changing roles of professional managers in higher education’, research & occasional paper series: cshe.10.2008 [preprint]. available at: https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3xk701cn (accessed: 10 may 2022). whitton, j., parr, g. and choate, j. (2021) ‘developing the education research capability of education-focused academics: building skills, identities and communities’, [preprint]. https://doi.org/10.1080/07294360.2021.1946016. appendix 1 some practical examples of associates’ projects example 1: redesign of pre arrival induction resources an associate from the library developed a project collaborating with other associates, exploring students’ pre-arrival information (of particular significance given the months of lockdown which preceded the start of term). the wider statistics and outputs were used to inform the institutional induction steering group, modelling more tailored student-facing information to encourage beneficial early study patterns and support seeking. a further output was the redesign of lbu's online pre-arrival study ready and study smart study skills modules as open access to all first-year students. study ready is now available externally (leeds beckett university, 2022). the study smart intervention has led to the creation of additional new modules for second-year students, postgraduate researchers, and dissertation development. the range of associates’ expertise (from arts, humanities, science, and professional services) catalysed a holistic and relevant output. this impactful project has been published in an academic journal (smith et al., 2022) and disseminated to the sector through wonkhe (morgan, 2021). example 2: inclusivity in student support in sport https://doi.org/10.1080/0307507042000236407 https://doi.org/10.1080/07294360.2021.1946016 smith the centre for learning and teaching associates scheme: building a learning community for collaboration and impact journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 23 another example was led by an associate from sport collaborating with disability services. synthesising the associate’s experience of practice and disability services’ experience of process led to a more holistic approach to student support. this project gathered pace and ran across two academic years involving several current and former associates and professional service staff. this approach mainstreams design in inclusive practice and assessment and has resulted in the university moving its focus from what students are learning to how students are being supported to learn. this catalysed more educational development around inclusive assessment and teaching and a wider pan university development of the university inclusive course design tool now embedded in quality enhancement for all courses and supporting our institutional objective to narrow our award gap and build greater student belonging (smith et al, 2021). example 3: history: podcasts to assess student work another associate, whose work incorporates digital technologies, explored podcasts as alternative assessments to augment students’ reflexive thinking. diary entries evidenced how this approach helped students feel more engaged and empowered as they progress through their course. her work, disseminated through pan-institutional educational development workshops, discipline specific conferences, and recorded resources, has had a direct effect on course enhancements across the institution. many other colleagues cite, within their hea fellowship applications, a link between improved student progression and their use of these digital technologies for assessments. this ground-breaking work in digital delivery has now also been recognised nationally in the royal historical society awards. students praised her innovative work and how it enhanced their digital confidence and she spoke of how ‘it broadened our perspectives about the employment opportunities available for history graduates’ (survey). example 4: collaboration music and business: design of online context other collaborations between two associates from music and business, on the use of different online and physical learning spaces, has directly impacted on the redesign of all first-year business courses, incorporating ambient space and innovative digital photography. tutors commented on the student-centred nature of this model which was recognised nationally for its impact in the institute of student employers awards. figure 1: surveys to associates. starting point: smith the centre for learning and teaching associates scheme: building a learning community for collaboration and impact journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 24 what made you want to become a clta? what do you anticipate the benefits of the role to be? what support do you need, what do you hope to have achieved and what impact do you want to have made by the end of this year as a clta? in the longer term (beyond this year) what are your career goals and your interests and how can clt support you in achieving these? anything else you want to add? mid cycle: one thing that you think has worked well. one thing that hasn't worked so well. have there been any unexpected benefits to being a clt associate? in light of covid-19, what changes might you bring to the role? sustainability of the scheme -with a future focus, what might you change? end of cycle: one thing you think has worked well. one thing that didn't work so well. have there been any unexpected benefits to being an associate? with a future focus and sustainability of the scheme, is there anything you would change? can you name some project work or collaborations that might not have happened without being part of the scheme? author details professor susan smith, deputy director centre for learning and teaching, leeds beckett, university professor susan smith is deputy director of the centre for learning & teaching at leeds beckett university. she has responsibility for pedagogic research development and crossuniversity teaching and learning related academic practice projects. she has published many peer reviewed papers relating to relational approaches to student feedback, the student award gap and inclusive course design. email: s.v.smith@leedsbeckett.ac.uk mailto:s.v.smith@leedsbeckett.ac.uk smith the centre for learning and teaching associates scheme: building a learning community for collaboration and impact journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 25 professor ruth pickford, director centre for learning and teaching, leeds beckett, university professor ruth pickford is director of the centre for learning & teaching at leeds beckett university and leads the university’s educational research, development, and enhancement. her interests are the purposeful, coherent design of teaching, curricula and student support to maximise student success in higher education, and the implementation of integrated institutional strategies to develop the academic practices required to achieve this. email: r.pickford@leedsbeckett.ac.uk georgi sinclair, head of educational development in the centre for learning and teaching, leeds beckett university georgi sinclair is head of educational development in the centre for learning and teaching at leeds beckett university and is an hea principal fellow. she has responsibility for the development of colleagues in all aspects of learning and teaching enhancement and is the scheme leader for the internal advance he accredited fellowship scheme. she has previously published on developing students' sense of belonging. email: g.sinclair@leedsbeckett.ac.uk laura ettenfield, academic skills development manager, leeds beckett university dr laura ettenfield is the academic skills development manager at leeds beckett university. she manages the skills for learning team and oversees the service which offers an in-curriculum and open programme of academic skills workshops, online learning resources and international student support. she also has an interest in pedagogic research and staff development and contributes to the cross-university centre for learning and teaching team. email: l.ettenfield@leedsbeckett.ac.uk licence ©2023 the author(s). this is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (cc-by 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. see http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. journal of learning development in higher education (jldhe) is a peer-reviewed open access journal published by the association for learning development in higher education (aldinhe). mailto:r.pickford@leedsbeckett.ac.uk mailto:g.sinclair@leedsbeckett.ac.uk mailto:l.ettenfield@leedsbeckett.ac.uk the centre for learning and teaching associates scheme: building a learning community for collaboration and impact abstract introduction rationale for the associate scheme summary of the scheme the project contextual literature the methods surveys autoethnography data limitations analysis and generation of the themes discussion theme 1 (c1): the collaborative work of the associates and its impact. a culture to enhance relationships and social capital: practice sharing in a learning community diverse, atypical, and productive collaborations theme 2 (c2): the associate role as an opportunity for personal development, and innovation personal transformation and learning practice sharing for innovation and knowledge theme 3 (c3): beyond the associates: impact on wider activity senior management links struggles with role identity lessons learnt and future implications for practice using research evidence diversity of membership for effective learning communities reinforcing expectations and requirements to sustain the scheme conclusion references appendix 1 some practical examples of associates’ projects author details licence journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special issue 25: aldinhe conference proceedings and reflections october 2022 learning developers as their own cultural critics? christie pritchard university of plymouth, uk presentation abstract the values that guide the work of aldinhe and those associated with us as an organisation include ‘making he inclusive through emancipatory practice, partnership working and collaboration’ and ‘critical self-reflection, on-going learning and a commitment to professional development’ (aldinhe, 2022). however, considering this from a relational, or systems thinking perspective, how achievable are these values? can we truly be inclusive to all? exploring this notion in my doctoral research, using bourdieu’s relational framework (bourdieu, 1992; 1993; 1997; bourdieu & passeron, 1990) i was confronted with some uncomfortable truths. education is reproductive in the sense that it selects those with the necessary capital to succeed and nurtures them to develop further. the diversity of students’ prior experience, background and capital to succeed is clear, and learning developers know how difficult higher education can be to navigate, but how often do we turn the gaze to ourselves and reflexively consider how our work reproduces the cultural system? conference attendees, working in small groups, discussed a brief precis of my doctoral research, a copy of aldinhe values and a summary of bourdieu’s notion of autonomy (bourdieu, 1992). the following questions were posed to prompt discussion: 1. how autonomous are we as practitioners and are we able to change the education system that reproduces the inequality of society? 2. is being positioned by students as part of their curriculum through embedded practice advantageous all of the time? 3. do we focus on the knowledge and skills students bring, or are we forced to help them adapt to the game? pritchard learning developers as their own cultural critics? journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 2 community response each of these mini keynotes was very discursive and collaborative, as one participant noted ‘this session raised a lot of questions for me personally about my own practice’. one issue that emerged from discussion was the observation that ‘many of us are well aware that we are not reaching the students we would like to be reaching, and/or that we could do things differently to improve experiences for students.’ similarly, ‘sometimes it is hard, we know the assignment is not great, but we are still trying to support the student to write it’. the discussion seemed to tap into the very practical challenges learning developers face in enacting values-based education in their work with students (lovat & toomey, 2007; halstead and taylor, 2000), or ‘how we work as learning development practitioners in environments that often are not aligned to our values’. this exploration of the tension between values and practices connects with recent scholarship into education for social justice, something cochran-smith (2009) presents as relational and participative ‘a form of action rather than a state to be achieved’ (griffiths, 2009, cited in boylan and woolsey, 2015). this suggests coining a new term that captures the dynamic nature of working towards equity, learning development for social justice, which actively describes the ongoing process of aligning our goals and vision and our practices with students. as well as acknowledging the tension within learning development, navigating a space with conflicting demands, there was encouragement to examine the role and function of learning development more strategically. colleagues spoke about the constraints of ‘not having support from higher ups to implement changes’. there seemed to be an awareness of a need to move learning development ‘away from a failure-based model to a model that emphasises growth and development’ and consider our contribution and impact of learning development within current university structures. one way forward to navigate this poorly defined central space was to simply ‘ask for forgiveness not permission’ and to act according to your values in spite of lack of structural support. this prompted further questions from participants and resolutions to attempt to act and contribute more strategically: how did you get invited to that working group though, we are just seen as skills and not considered in anything more strategic? pritchard learning developers as their own cultural critics? journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 3 i am going to try knocking on the door of some of the people who oversee these areas [of strategic discussions] and contribute. these short sessions prompted participants to reflect on our role and purpose as learning developers and there was clearly greater appetite for further discussion as to how to act in ways that are both aligned to our values and contribute to the purpose of the university while addressing needs of the student body. author’s reflection a repeating theme throughout all three of these mini-keynotes was the idea that those in more senior roles within their universities do not provide the space to hear the views of learning developers. the participants felt they were simply not invited into the conversation because their role was seen differently. their view on key agendas such as access and participation plans, the teaching excellence framework, or ongoing education strategies was not often sought. few participants were directly involved in influencing these, and none were responsible for leading them. however, there was a shared understanding between participants that learning developers could help shape these agendas and strategies, if only their expertise, opinion and knowledge was included in committees, discussion groups, task and finish groups and other forums. they want to contribute. they feel they should contribute. interestingly, i think if we hold the mirror up to ourselves as a profession, the question changes and becomes, why do senior managers not seek our insights, or perhaps even why are we not considered to bring knowledge and expertise that is valuable to this discussion? how can we develop the language around our insight to ‘work’ for senior agendas? i tried to articulate bourdieu’s notion of the game at play (bourdieu and passeron, 1990) and how as a community as a whole there is further work that needs to be done to bring the worlds of learning developers and senior education leaders together. the aldinhe community needs to further understand the demands on senior managers, and ask themselves ‘what can learning developers do to address these demands’? however, this requires learning developers to work in a different way. rather than conversations around being frustrated and their insights not being listened to, these need to shift to articulating and demonstrating their value and practical and pedagogical knowledge they can bring to the table. pritchard learning developers as their own cultural critics? journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 4 conversations also turned to learning developers’ direct work alongside students, supporting them to develop and understand the hidden curriculum. most of the participants agreed and recognised their roles, at times, did reinforce the doxa of students needing to develop the skills for higher education as a separate activity to engage with their programme of study or curricula. in bourdieu’s words, we are helping students to understand and adapt to the game. we help them to understand the expectations of an assignment, what academic writing looks like, and how to demonstrate critical thinking. however, our power to change the game, change the assessment type, or include more structured learning around the skills needed to succeed was often beyond our control. changing ‘the game’ seemed a much harder challenge. this sits at odds with the values of aldinhe and if we are to truly try to make the higher education system change i would encourage the community to collectively think about how we solve this ‘problem’. much more discussion and sharing is needed in order to articulate and demonstrate the value that our insights bring to curriculum design, for instance. as a community, i think we need to be clearer on what capital we have that allows us to contribute to strategic change, not just at our own institutions, but to the sector through policy changes. next steps this session, alongside my more recent change in role within my university made me reflect on my own career and experience and how that seemed quite different to others around the table. it is something i have spoken about with a small number of other heads of departments and we seem to have found a way to raise the profile of learning development within our institutions. we have found a way to have a seat at the table in more senior meetings, where our advice, insight and expertise is considered valuable and helpful in shaping the future direction. the work now needs to turn to sharing how we achieved that in order to support others in the community. we need to demonstrate this by sharing our own journeys of influence. acknowledgements pritchard learning developers as their own cultural critics? journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 5 thank you to dr victoria yuskaitis, university of southampton, and cathy malone university of leeds and lindsay heggie, queens university at kingston, canada for sharing their reflections, which enriched our insight into this conference presentation. references association of learning development in higher education, aldinhe (2022) aims, values. available at: https://aldinhe.ac.uk (accessed: 5th september 2022). bourdieu, p. (1992) the logic of practice. cambridge: polity press. bourdieu, p. (1993) the field of cultural production. cambridge: polity press. bourdieu, p. (1997) 'the forms of capital', in halsey, a.h., lauder, h., brown, p. and wells, a.s. (eds.) education, culture, and society (pp. 241 – 258). oxford: oxford university press. bourdieu, p. & passeron, j.-c. (1990) reproduction in education, society and culture. london, newbury park, sage publications. boylan, m. and woolsey, i. (2015). ‘teacher education for social justice: mapping identity spaces’, teaching and teacher education, 46, pp. 62-71. doi:10.1016/j.tate.2014.10.007 cochran-smith, m. (2009). ‘toward a theory of teacher education for social justice’, in hargreaves, a., lieberman, a., fullan, m. and hopkins, d. (eds.), second international handbook of educational change, pp. 445-467. springer halstead, j. m. and taylor, m. j. (2000) the development of values, attitudes and personal qualities: a review of recent research. slough: national foundation for educational research. lovat, t and toomey, r. (2007). values education and quality teaching — the double helix effect. sydney: david barlow publishing. https://aldinhe.ac.uk/ pritchard learning developers as their own cultural critics? journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 6 author details christie pritchard is a senior fellow of advance he and an associate professor of higher education. her research and practice focus on promoting student success through creating a sense of belonging, designing inclusive curriculum and assessment, and developing social learning spaces for transformational learning. as well as leading the academic development department at the university of plymouth, she contributes to the strategic development of cross institution education policies and projects. she champions academic development and student experience at an institutional and national level, focusing on understanding students’ learning in a relational way. she has recently taken the role of co-chair of aldinhe. learning developers as their own cultural critics? presentation abstract community response author’s reflection next steps acknowledgements references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special issue 22: compendium of innovative practice october 2021 editorial: fostering student engagement gita sedghi university of liverpool engagement, linked with high-quality learning outcomes, plays a crucial role in student learning and experience of higher education. the concept of ‘student engagement’ is based on the belief that learning improves when students are fully involved in their learning (deslauriers, 2019). establishing constructive and collaborative relationships with students is a critical element of learning development practice but became hugely challenging during the pandemic, especially the first lockdown. although students’ presence in a classroom never guaranteed their engagement and participation, this engagement was significantly affected during the sudden shift to the virtual classroom. there were also several barriers to gauging student engagement, with turned-off cameras being noted by educators as one of the most prominent. this section showcases several practitioners’ innovations to enhance and measure student engagement during remote learning and teaching in higher education. the authors explain specific challenges they faced in hyflex classrooms, particular issues with international student engagement, student anxiety over entering the ‘cyber abyss’ of online learning, and delivery of courses that required greater attention and self-regulatory behaviour. conducting and facilitating small group laboratory sessions whilst considering any limitations due to covid-19 safety measures needed careful planning. the challenges the educators confronted included introducing students to a more active and engaged method of learning while having to accommodate limited access to technology and reliable internet connections. various responses to these challenges to enhance student engagement are introduced in this section. the authors show how playful learning and reflective thinking empowered students to construct knowledge and apply it to classroom discussions; attendance data, chat box comments, and feedback questionnaires were used to measure engagement. building relationships with students outside the classroom, establishing relationships of editorial journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 trust and integrating subject knowledge and learning development were utilised to enhance student participation; the shift to hybrid and online interactions was exploited to influence programme priorities, with student engagement in mind; the nature of personal tutor meetings was changed to offer greater support and enhance students' academic and personal development. this section offers a set of recommendations for enhancing engagement with staff and students in the hybrid context, student-to-student communication in group work, and tightening approaches to responding to absence. it demonstrates how learning developers helped ensure that individual students’ communications with staff, other students, and the institution were effective during the pandemic. the stories of challenges, responses and recommendations in this section showcase the learning developer role to help bridge the gap between subject teaching and ld provision. the collaboration between educators has been highlighted as a critical element in most initiatives to enhance student engagement. references: deslauriers, l., mccarty, l.s., miller, k., callaghan, k. and kestin, g. (2019) ‘measuring actual learning versus feeling of learning in response to being actively engaged in the classroom’, proceedings of the national academy of sciences, 116(39), pp.1925119257. available at: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1821936116 (accessed: 4 september 2021). https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1821936116 journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 23: march 2022 editorial jim donohue independent scholar nicola grayson university of manchester andy hagyard independent scholar jenny hillman open university eleanor loughlin durham university cathy malone leeds university craig morley university of manchester gita sedghi university of liverpool alicja syska university of plymouth a fairly consistent thread in current – optimistically often referred to as ‘post-pandemic’ – discussions around teaching in higher education is the theme of ‘reinvention’. academia must change; we must reinvent the way we teach, rethink how we design learning, and reconsider how we support our students. responding to these calls, critical realists in particular look beyond individual actions, calling for meaningful structural change and systemic shifts. but institutions rarely change overnight. change is often an accumulation of small acts by brave, determined people, who believe that their actions matter. as the dutch scientist j.m.j. van leeuwen has demonstrated, even a tiny object can knock over a significant mass if you trigger the right chain reaction. to illustrate it, van leeuwen created a domino with 13 planks ranging from 5mm to 45kg in size, each 1.5 editorial times larger than the previous one. in his experiment, the push and fall of the smallest plank, one by one, led to tumbling the giant. he also claimed that it would only take an extra 16 planks to knock over a skyscraper. the point is that little things matter. teaching better matters. writing more matters. reading with others matters. publishing and disseminating one’s practice matters. we bring change through small acts that have large reverberations. and it is those small acts that can help reinvent academia. we have seen the impact of small acts through our compendium, a special issue (october 2021) documenting the ramifications of covid-19 with regard to our teaching practices. these short reflections have so far attracted over 12,500 views, with readers looking to them for inspiration, leadership, and encouragement to practise better and, in turn, to influence their little corner of academia. we would like to invite colleagues to continue to write and submit these short pieces (we call them ‘brief communications’) so the more time-consuming and stringent requirements of research papers do not stop anyone communicating and sharing innovative ideas. this month was very inspiring to our editorial board as we met with colleagues to talk about our work in a ‘meet the editor’ event organised by the marketing education special interest group at royal holloway, london. we would like to thank dr lucy gill-simmen for inviting us to speak and for creating an opportunity for new colleagues to join our efforts to further the ld research and scholarship mission. we are also pleased to say that the jldhe reading club is going strong. in january, we discussed a selection of compendium articles related to wellbeing, and in march, we focused on fostering student engagement. our next reading club will meet on 11 may 2022 and everyone’s invited – please contact jenny hillman for details on how to join. while we celebrate the positive difference we make, as a journal we also go through constant change. this month we are saying the final farewell to our technical editor, andy hagyard. andy has been with us since the inception of the journal, working closely with john hilsdon on making jldhe a success. it is fair to say that without his contributions and expertise, we would not be what we are, not mentioning the number of times andy saved us from a complete technical disaster! we would like to extend our deepest gratitude for all the time, patience, and effort he gave to the journal – it was priceless. we https://journal.aldinhe.ac.uk/index.php/jldhe/readingclub mailto:jennifer.hillman@open.ac.uk editorial now look forward to welcoming dr katharine jewitt as our new technical editor – we are thrilled to have her in the team. in this issue we feature eight articles: five research papers and three case studies, whose summaries follow. in her paper, ‘engaging students online: an analysis of students’ motivations for seeking individual learning development support’, arina cirstea explores students’ reasons for engaging with self-selecting learning development online tutorials. cirstea used a mixed methods approach, which included an online survey and online interviews, to understand students’ perspectives. the research discovered that students’ motivation was constantly linked to attainment and confidence in their writing, and that students’ engagement in learning development support is often mediated by academic authority figures. joe greenwood’s paper proposes a framework for the design of english for very specific academic purposes (evsap) materials. the research is based on a digital marketing msc, where there is a strong rationale for embedded evsap provision. the research looks at related literature in eap, esp and esap, conducts a multi-stakeholder needs analysis, and incorporates the students into the materials design process itself. finally, the conclusion discusses the scope and limitation of the proposed framework – such as its application in other contexts or with different cohort sizes. the paper presents a compelling case for focussed and embedded eap provision. doug specht’s paper, ‘between the office and the coffee shop: an examination of spaces used for research degree supervision’, investigates the importance and impact learning spaces can have on doctoral researchers, a group often overlooked in this area of study. the paper examines theories around space-making and the experiences and opinions of doctoral researchers themselves to come to an understanding of how spaces can impact on the pedagogical approach to supervision. specht’s findings suggest that researchers feel more comfortable in traditional learning spaces rather than more public spaces. in their paper on student engagement and student voice in he, xiaomei sun and deborah holt bring our attention to the importance of finding sustainable and inclusive channels to make the student voice count. their research project elicited students’ perspectives on student voice mechanisms and the extent to which they are effective in reflecting and editorial responding to the needs of students. the findings reveal not only the occasionally limited or erroneous understandings of student voice, but also the challenges in enhancing existing sv mechanisms. in particular, it becomes clear that one-way communications, such as emails, are rarely effective and can be burdensome, while dialogic and live communication seem to be both preferred by students and more productive. the last paper featuring huan zhang and bob fisher’s research focuses on how the experience of teachers engaged in active blended learning (abl) at a british university might inform developments in college english teaching at a chinese university. following an outline of the models used at the respective universities, the authors discuss how semistructured interviews provided insights into current practice and attitudes to abl at both institutions. the case study further includes discussion of the inherent challenges for both tutors and students in moving to an abl model and emphasises the importance of institutional support, additional resources and incentivisation to both enable and embed developments. the authors conclude by emphasising the importance of a student-centred approach to abl and by highlighting five areas in which institutional support is key, namely pedagogical design, policy, staff development, technical infrastructure, and small class sizes. our case studies section opens with sandra abegglen, tom burns, and sandra sinfield’s exploration of collaborative writing as a method of inquiry. the authors challenge the prevailing focus on writing as a ‘skill’ and encourage promotion of writing as emancipatory practice, not only for students but for academic staff as well. they argue that taking a ‘different’ approach to writing, for example by collaborating or using visual modes, can be both more powerful and more productive when it comes to stimulating writing projects particularly within the learning development community. the piece is an extension of, and a refection on, the authors’ 2021 staff writing guide: supporting student writing and other methods of learning and assessment. geraldine huzar and hossam kassem’s case study, ‘supporting open university students in prison’ provides a fascinating insight into how the open university uses student volunteers to ensure students in prison can access the library resources they need to succeed in their studies. it examines why and how the scheme was established and reflects on the experience of running the service. it provides a peer-support approach that other university libraries may potentially look to emulate to support other student groups editorial who have limited access to library resources. it is hoped that this case study will be the first step in towards more research in this area. and finally, matt offord, sarah honeychurch, nick quinn, matt barr, and helen mullen focus on the implementation of an escape room game in an undergraduate business course. escape room games can be used to familiarise players with aspects of technology in a fun and challenging way, which avoids the anxieties or pressures associated with other teaching methods. they are popular games in which participants solve puzzles to ‘escape’ a fictitious situation. the authors highlight the ease of use of an escape room game and its robustness against connectivity issues and accessibility. they show that from a facilitator's perspective, the game is simple to run and can cope with large cohorts, with feedback confirming its positive perceptions among the students. as always, we hope that in this collection of articles, our subscribers and readers will find thought provoking and stimulating material. we also want to take this opportunity to thank our wonderful reviewers whose critical reading of submissions and thoughtful feedback and recommendations have made invaluable contributions to the quality of articles we publish. our heartfelt appreciation for the time, expertise, and work it took to review papers in this issue goes to the following reviewers: aileen breed harnahan alistair mcculloch andrea todd anne elizabeth davey annie bryan charlie reis donna grundy ei rudinow saetnan gemma stansfield ian johnson robert pin nang chang tamer osman editorial tom lowe victoria wilson-crane yang yang yateendra joshi yu wang with best wishes, the jldhe editorial board journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 26: special edi issue february 2023 ________________________________________________________________________ ©2023 the author(s) (cc-by 4.0) equality, diversity and inclusion: learning from laying our cards on the table matthew sillence university of east anglia, uk amanda clark university of hertfordshire, uk claire dickerson university of hertfordshire, uk hanh doan university of hertfordshire, uk joy jarvis university of hertfordshire, uk abstract this article presents preliminary findings from a study designed to evaluate, develop and disseminate a cards resource developed to support dialogue and learning about edi. experience of creating cards to explore disciplinary thinking at the universities of hertfordshire (uh) and east anglia (uea) (jarvis and clark, 2020) was instrumental in the design. the resource is based on the concept of using ‘serious play’, a ‘special kind of intense learning experience’ (rieber et al., 1998, p.30, 29, original emphasis) to support reflective, inclusive and transformational learning (peabody and noyes, 2017). staff and students at uh and uea who facilitate and attend sessions at which the cards are used are contributing to the research. before sessions, facilitators are briefed about the guidance, the cards, and possible exercises for using them. at the end of sessions, facilitators and participants are invited to take part in a reflection activity. facilitators are asked about the context, the activity, observations of participant response to the cards, their learning, the facilitator’s learning, and plans for future edi activities. participants are sillence, clark, dickerson, doan, jarvis equality, diversity and inclusion: learning from laying our cards on the table journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 2 questioned about the role of the cards in their learning and thinking, what was learnt, and how this will impact their interaction with others. preliminary findings indicate how participants are thinking about their working contexts, in particular how they initiate conversations around their personal lives, and share stories relating to equality, diversity and inclusivity, in order to make abstract terms more vivid. this study responds to a need to develop research-informed resources to use to encourage respectful, inclusive dialogue to address edi topics with staff and students in higher education. drawing on the preliminary findings shared here, new terms are being added to the current card set together with a blank card to allow users to generate their own cards; and a new resource comprising edi stories is being considered. keywords: equality, diversity and inclusion; cards; conversation; dialogue; he staff; students. background equality, diversity and inclusion (edi) are important and complex issues that need to be addressed in higher education. internationally, universities have introduced culturally informed edi strategies and policies, and provided training and activities for students and staff (claeys-kulik and jørgensen, 2018). such activities, and the environment in which they are used, need careful consideration, as edi issues are often deeply personal, and exploring them with others can cause anxiety. this article presents preliminary findings from a study that aims to evaluate, develop, and disseminate a cards resource previously created to support dialogue and learning about edi. experience of creating cards to explore disciplinary thinking at the universities of hertfordshire (uh) and east anglia (uea) (jarvis and clark, 2020) was instrumental in the design. the resource is based on the concept of using ‘serious play’, a ‘special kind of intense learning experience’ (rieber et al., 1998, p.30, 29, original emphasis) to support reflective, inclusive, and transformational learning (peabody and noyes, 2017). sillence, clark, dickerson, doan, jarvis equality, diversity and inclusion: learning from laying our cards on the table journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 3 the edi cards were created by the uh school of education student success and engagement team (sset). they used a staff-student partnership approach to learning development (bovill, 2020) to identify and agree the terms in the current pack (figure 1), and worked with an illustrator to design the set. finally, a member of the sset prepared guidance on setting an ethical, inclusive learning context for using the cards (clark et al., 2022). this guidance covers topics such as developing a ‘safe space’ (holley and steiner 2005, p.49), ‘brave space’ (arao and clemens, 2013, p.142) or ‘classroom of disagreements’ (flensner and von der lippe, 2019, p.284); agreeing ‘ground rules’ (jackson, 2014, p.56); deploying active listening skills (kisfalvi and oliver, 2015) and exercising compassion (gilbert, 2017). figure 1. the set of 18 equality, diversity, and inclusion cards. research study individuals at uh and uea who planned to run staff or student learning activities that had an edi theme were invited to participate in the study. before sessions, facilitators were briefed about the guidance, the cards, and possible exercises for using them. at the end of sessions, both facilitators and participants were invited to take part in a reflection activity. facilitators were asked about the context, the activity, observations of participant response to the cards, their learning, the facilitator’s learning, and plans for future edi activities. sillence, clark, dickerson, doan, jarvis equality, diversity and inclusion: learning from laying our cards on the table journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 4 participants were questioned about the role of the cards in their learning and thinking, what was learnt, and how this will impact their interaction with others. ethical approval was obtained, and potential contributors informed about the study aims, their role, and the management of their responses. individuals were invited to consent to take part if they wish. as addressing edi topics might cause psychological discomfort to participants, facilitators were apprised of ways of facilitating respectful dialogue and advised to provide information on sources of support. on completion of the study the researchers have been coding the responses to identify key themes that will inform the design of the cards and guidance resource. preliminary findings and discussion in evaluating the edi cards staff and student learning contexts, we present the preliminary findings from session participants, specifically what they learnt (q1). two themes of interest identified from three participants’ (p) responses relate to terminology of the edi card set and learning about the self and others through storytelling. one participant noted ‘that all of the cards interact with one another and also give rise to other “cards”, e.g. cultural awareness came out of language, as well as “justice” as a potential card’ (p6-q1), suggesting that the limited word set had stimulated and not confined their thinking. the prompts from participants and their facilitators have since given rise to eight new cards, and a ‘blank’ card, which allows individuals to define their own terms in future activities. in the following responses, participants highlighted the reflective and personal nature of the dialogue associated with using the cards and the opportunities provided for learning about themselves and others. i learnt a lot about my colleagues as the cards were a great resource for engaging in conversations about diversity and inclusion issues in our personal lives (p7-q1) i learned a lot about the team. a lot of issues and stories were shared with everyone (p9-q1) sillence, clark, dickerson, doan, jarvis equality, diversity and inclusion: learning from laying our cards on the table journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 5 this participant (p9) also noted in relation to a second question about the impact of the cards on interactions with others (q2): ‘i think it's an interesting exercise in self reflection … it's effective in bringing edi issues to life with stories and examples, instead of treating it as an abstract thing and could show individuals that they could have personal motives that are already edi related. stories, ‘constructions that give a meaning to events and convey a particular sense of experience’ (carter, 1993, p.8, original emphasis), have been used when teaching inclusion to show ‘that there are different ways of viewing and experiencing the world’ (jarvis and iantaffi, 2006, p.80). they continue to be used for edi learning and practice development (for example, saleh et al., 2014; chrysostomou and symeonidou, 2017; harrison-train et al., 2021). the participants’ responses about their colleagues ‘personal lives’ are also reminiscent of holley and steiner’s (2005, p.55) reports of the benefits of a multi-perspectival learning experience in a ‘safe classroom’. implications for practice this study responds to a need to develop research-informed resources to use to encourage respectful, inclusive dialogue to address edi topics with staff and students in higher education. participants have already suggested new cards, such as ‘justice’, leading to a revised guidance resource, which includes ideas for setting up activities. the edi set now includes a blank card, allowing users to generate their own terms and images. the importance of storytelling in offering multiple perspectives based on lived experience is also being considered to frame conversations in different contexts, such as the members of a staff team, or amongst small groups of student representatives. further analysis of participants’ and facilitators’ responses is being undertaken. sillence, clark, dickerson, doan, jarvis equality, diversity and inclusion: learning from laying our cards on the table journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 6 references arao, b. and clemens, k. (2013) ‘from safe spaces to brave spaces: a new way to frame dialogue around diversity and social justice’, in landreman, l.m. (ed.) the art of effective facilitation: reflections from social justice educators. sterling, virginia: stylus, pp.135–150.  bovill, c. (2020) co-creating learning and teaching: towards relational pedagogy in higher education. st albans: critical publishing. carter, k. (1993) ‘the place of story in the study of teaching and teacher education’, educational researcher 22(1), pp.5–12. available at: https://doi.org/10.3102/0013189x022001005 (accessed: 18 november 2022). chrysostomou, m. and symeonidou, s. (2017) ‘education for disability equality through disabled people’s life stories and narratives: working and learning together in a school-based professional development programme for inclusion’, european journal of special needs education, 32(4), pp.572-585. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/08856257.2017.1297574 (accessed: 18 november 2022). claeys-kulik, a. and jørgensen, t. (2018) universities’ strategies and approaches towards diversity, equity and inclusion–examples from across europe. european university association. https://eua.eu/resources/publications/311:universities%e2%80%99strategies-and-approaches-towards-diversity,-equity-and-inclusion.html (accessed: 27 june 2022). clark, a., dickerson, c. and jarvis, j. (2022) ‘creating inclusive learning environments’, link, university of hertfordshire. in press. flensner, k.k and von der lippe, m. (2019) ‘being safe from what and safe for whom? a critical discussion of the conceptual metaphor of “safe space”’, intercultural education, 30(3), pp.275–288. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/14675986.2019.1540102 (accessed: 18 november 2022). https://doi.org/10.3102/0013189x022001005 https://doi.org/10.1080/08856257.2017.1297574 https://eua.eu/resources/publications/311:universities%e2%80%99-strategies-and-approaches-towards-diversity,-equity-and-inclusion.html https://eua.eu/resources/publications/311:universities%e2%80%99-strategies-and-approaches-towards-diversity,-equity-and-inclusion.html https://doi.org/10.1080/14675986.2019.1540102 sillence, clark, dickerson, doan, jarvis equality, diversity and inclusion: learning from laying our cards on the table journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 7 gilbert, t. (2017) ‘when looking is allowed: what compassionate group work looks like in a uk university’, in gibbs, p. (ed.) the pedagogy of compassion at the heart of higher education. springer: switzerland, pp.189-202. available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-57783-8 (accessed: 18 november 2022). harrison-train, c., marock, c. and field, s. (2021) ‘what’s your story?’ building diversity, equity, and inclusion. the thinker, 87(2), pp.32-36. available at: https://doi.org/10.36615/thethinker.v87i2.530 (accessed: 18 november 2022). holley, l.c. and steiner, s. (2005) ‘safe space: student perspectives on classroom environment’, journal of social work education, 41(1). available at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/23044032 (accessed: 7 january 2021). .  jackson, r. (2014) signposts: policy and practice for teaching about religions and nonreligious worldviews in intercultural education. strasbourg: council of europe publishing. available at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/282656989_%27signposts%27_policy_an d_practice_for_teaching_about_religions_and_nonreligious_worldviews_in_intercultural_education (accessed:18 november 2022).  jarvis, j. and clark, k. (2020) conversations to change teaching. st albans: critical publishing. jarvis, j. and iantaffi, a. (2006) ‘“deaf people don't dance”: challenging student teachers' perspectives of pupils and inclusion’, deafness & education international, 8(2), pp.75-87. available at: https://doi.org/10.1179/146431506790560184 (accessed:18 november 2022).  kisfalvi, v. and oliver, d. (2015) ‘creating and maintaining a safe space in experiential learning’, journal of management education, 39(6), pp.713–740. available at: https://doi.org/10.1177/1052562915574724 (accessed:18 november 2022).  https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-57783-8 https://doi.org/10.36615/thethinker.v87i2.530 https://www.jstor.org/stable/23044032 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/282656989_%27signposts%27_policy_and_practice_for_teaching_about_religions_and_non-religious_worldviews_in_intercultural_education https://www.researchgate.net/publication/282656989_%27signposts%27_policy_and_practice_for_teaching_about_religions_and_non-religious_worldviews_in_intercultural_education https://www.researchgate.net/publication/282656989_%27signposts%27_policy_and_practice_for_teaching_about_religions_and_non-religious_worldviews_in_intercultural_education https://doi.org/10.1179/146431506790560184 https://doi.org/10.1177/1052562915574724 sillence, clark, dickerson, doan, jarvis equality, diversity and inclusion: learning from laying our cards on the table journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 8 peabody, m. and noyes, s. (2017) ‘reflective boot camp: adapting lego® serious play® in higher education’, reflective practice. 18(2) pp.232-243. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/14623943.2016.1268117 (accessed:18 november 2022).  rieber, l. p., smith, l. and noah, d. (1998) ‘the value of serious play’, educational technology, 38(6), pp.29-37. available at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/44428495 (accessed: 4 july 2022). saleh, m., menon, j., and clandinin d. j. (2014) ‘autobiographical narrative inquiry: tellings and retellings’, learning landscapes, 7(2), pp.271-282. available at: https://doi.org/10.36510/learnland.v7i2.665 (accessed:18 november 2022). author details matthew sillence is associate professor in humanities for postgraduate education and training at the university of east anglia. he works in doctoral education, focusing on the experience of postgraduate researchers and the professional development of academic supervisors. amanda clark is a student success and engagement senior advisor in the school of social sciences, humanities, and education at the university of hertfordshire. with a focus on wellbeing for learning, she provides pastoral support and academic skills through individual and group tutorials and whole class seminars. claire dickerson is a research fellow at the university of hertfordshire. claire’s research interests include pedagogy, professional learning and development and developing policy and practice, particularly through collaboration. hanh doan is a student success and engagement adviser (bame/equality champion) in the school of social sciences, humanities, and education at the university of hertfordshire. she delivers individual, group and class tutorials for academic skills and wellbeing. hanh is also a visiting lecturer and tutor for initial teacher education. https://doi.org/10.1080/14623943.2016.1268117 https://www.jstor.org/stable/44428495 https://doi.org/10.36510/learnland.v7i2.665 sillence, clark, dickerson, doan, jarvis equality, diversity and inclusion: learning from laying our cards on the table journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 9 joy jarvis is professor of educational practice at the university of hertfordshire. she works with colleagues who are new to teaching in he and with researchers who are undertaking practice-based doctorates. licence ©2023 the author(s). this is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (cc-by 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. see http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. journal of learning development in higher education (jldhe) is a peer-reviewed open access journal published by the association for learning development in higher education (aldinhe). supporting action research as a pdp and cpd process (provisional title) journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special edition: researching pdp practice, november 2010 turning the narn into an arc at the university of bedfordshire – some reflections and comparisons arti kumar university of bedfordshire, uk this paper is a modified version of kumar, a. (2010) ‘supporting action research as a cpd process’, in atlay, m. and coughlin, a. (eds.) creating communities: developing, enhancing and sustaining learning communities across the university of bedfordshire. luton: university of bedfordshire, chapter 18, p. 254. the concepts and quotes that have shaped this paper come from members of the action research consortium (the arc) at the university of bedfordshire. my thanks go out to my colleagues who participated in the arc and who contributed to my own research. abstract in recent years i have increasingly been involved with action research at several levels (as a leader and participant on the narn project and also on other institutional, collaborative and individual research studies). to fulfil my various responsibilities i convened and led the action research consortium (arc) at the university of bedfordshire from june 2008 to june 2010. evaluating the effects of this action provided a research topic and the context for my own personal and professional development, which i present in this paper as a reflective analysis. i focus on the main lessons learned and applied at a management level, through analysing the type of change arc participants reported and discussed, and that i observed. my insights and recommendations are broadly informed by theories related to action research, appreciative inquiry and positive psychology approaches. i argue here that action research can generate continuous improvements in pedagogy – but achieving this ideal for all staff crucially depends on cycles of action research operating in a productive dynamic with their personal and professional development (and this could extend to students). this will not happen by chance, and has not happened as extensively as expected, even though my findings show that the opportunities offered through the arc were motivating and beneficial for staff who engaged. for the potential impact of action kumar turning the narn into an arc at the university of bedfordshire – some reflections and comparisons research to be realised in the experience of practitioner-researchers and in the vision of universities, positive conditions must be created to support research-active programmes and communities, underpinned by congruent protocols and values. the recommendations i make here can help to promote and sustain an integral research culture and are therefore relevant to managers, as well as practitioners, who are doing, or thinking of embarking on, action research. key words: action research; appreciative inquiry; soar analysis; cpd; realising potential. introduction and background if you are a reflective practitioner (schön,1991) you will no doubt be hooked into cycles of ‘plan-do-review’, and you may already be involved in a process of pedagogic action research without calling it by that name, or indeed realising its full potential for personal and professional development. comments made by experienced practitioner-researchers during interviews conducted to explore their perspectives, as part of my research project, are illuminating in this respect: we’re doing it all the time really. …there were things we would have done anyway, but not as a project. i see more benefit now than i did a few years ago. i know that we designed and introduced personal tutor groups from action research, even though we didn’t call it that. but it is from action research that we introduced personal tutor groups because that’s what the students wanted. such perspectives reflect my own past experience when i evaluated and re-designed modules year after year, comparing students’ feedback with theories, consulting with my team and external examiners – even writing a student text and eventually a book (kumar, 2007), but not thinking that these cycles counted as action research. three implications arise: (1) many academics – especially traditional positivist researchers – would argue that cycles of ‘plan-do-review’ should not count as research, however defined and whatever journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 2 kumar turning the narn into an arc at the university of bedfordshire – some reflections and comparisons results they produce; (2) clearly, however, even small-scale activity of this type can make a big difference. in some cases it has brought benefits to individual academic practice, in others it has influenced or changed whole-institution policy and practice; (3) needed change is easier to implement when it builds on existing small-scale activity and taps into the real interests and values of practitioners rather than when it is imposed as large-scale, fundamental shifts in policy. with action research the possibilities are powerful because practitioners themselves put their research outcomes into practice. firstly, since perception and reality are closely and causally related, staff in management positions need to value, attribute and reward what practitioners perceive they already do and develop. however this should go further: action research that is defined, supported and conducted as ‘systematic, reflective (and preferably collaborative) enquiry made public’ (stenhouse, 1981) has greater potential for turning the small-scale cycle of plan-doreview into an upward spiral of plan, design, propose a project plan, gain consent and ethics approval, collect data, reflect/evaluate/analyse, record/write/publish, disseminate, share, cascade. literature searches and theoretical concepts add a robust dimension at any stage of the process. with this conceptual base in mind the arc attempted to invoke the power of action research that lies in its generative capacity: to transform rather than simply inform; to accept the complexity of naturalistic settings rather than create controlled environments; and to seek understandings that will improve aspects of practice. there is now an increasing body of literature on the methods and benefits of conducting action research. there seems to be far less research and writing on the topic of management frameworks which initiate and support those practitioners engaged in action research (beard, 2010). it therefore seems worthwhile to write from a management perspective here, about the insights gained into the potential of a robust, structured and supported action research process, following many muddled attempts to shape directions and destinations for and with arc members. through this experience i infer and argue here that action research can create a culture of continuous development – both for staff and (by extension) for students and institutions. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 3 kumar turning the narn into an arc at the university of bedfordshire – some reflections and comparisons what i set out to do the action in my action research the action in my action research came about partly as a result of my involvement in the narn project – as a leader of its midlands regional group and also as a participant researcher. i attempted to apply and cascade lessons learned from the narn back at the university of bedfordshire (uob), where they gained synergy to some extent by seeding into the fruitful ground offered by its centre for excellence in teaching and learning (cetl), aligned with my responsibilities as the cetl associate director. the main aim of the cetl was to integrate pdp and employability into a revised institutional curriculum (referred to as cre8) – a new delivery model which was essentially in need of evaluation to establish its effectiveness. cre8 has been achieved at uob through cetl fellows and associates working on individual and collaborative funded projects across all faculties, staff away-days and student involvement. a systematic review drawing on internal and sectoral good practice led to the formulation of five inter-related strands: personalised learning; curriculum; realistic learning; employability; and assessment. within cre8, soaring to success is an integral process which further develops and focuses on a student-centred process of realistic and personalised learner development. soar provides ways of animating the dynamic relationships between self, opportunity, aspirations and results. it is incremental when scaffolded within subject curricula, providing early support and gradually withdrawing it as students progress through their personal ‘zones of proximal development’ (e.g. see references to vygotsky in newman and newman, 2009). this method enables students to develop their skills, knowledge, attributes and experiences in a broad holistic frame, and to do this with more personal motivation, sense of direction and destination. it is underpinned by appreciative inquiry and positive psychology theories and practices (see watkins and cooperrider, 2000 – and more on this later in this paper). the arc initially attracted twenty six staff in june 2008, some experienced and some novice researchers, drawn from the centre for personal and career development, learning resources and all faculties including psychology, education, business, performing arts, sports studies, public health and media, offering opportunities as summarised in figure 1. however, only twelve staff from this group completed their projects very successfully. in the second cycle of my research, thirteen staff enrolled as students on the postgraduate certificate of academic practice (pgcap) were drawn in journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 4 kumar turning the narn into an arc at the university of bedfordshire – some reflections and comparisons under the arc to conduct small-scale action research projects as one of their assignments. four of the pgcap students were from the british school of osteopathy, two were academic liaison librarians, three from bio sciences, one practice educator, one from sport and exercise science, one from sport therapy and one from education. my interpretations are based on qualitative data gathered in the first cycle from focus group interviews with arc members (conducted by a research assistant to increase the chances of objectivity) and content analyses of written material in the second cycle (undertaken in collaboration with a second research assistant). the data analyses draw upon reported changes, but also on our own observations, reflections and discussions on how the arc has impacted so far on participants and on the wider academic practice at uob. i will return to the findings from both these groups later. figure 1. underpinning values and explicit expectations for the arc. my action: convening the action research consortium (arc) as a peersupported community of practitioner-researchers my research: to explore and evaluate the type and extent of change that might occur through supporting action research as a pdp / cpd process • convened by open invitation to academic and learning support staff across the university. • provided a series of seminars, research assistance and resources for staff to • build capacity and capability in undertaking action research • evaluate, evidence and improve practice to enable student learning, development and employability • share ideas and issues • act as constructive critical friends to each other • seek opportunities and funding to disseminate and publish respect and equity are key values narn arc pgcap aspirations and values behind my research question appreciative inquiry and a soar analysis if we wish to improve our personal and organisational efficacy, i believe we need to create and manage programmes and communities of learning designed for good and lasting effect. in doing so we need to ask questions in such a way as to ‘appreciate’ (increase in value) our assets, much as a house or business appreciates in value. in my case i brought journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 5 kumar turning the narn into an arc at the university of bedfordshire – some reflections and comparisons to the arc much prior experience and interest in developing the wider attributes of students, using appreciative inquiry (watkins and cooperrider, 2000) combined with selfassessment as an effective approach within discrete pdp and career development modules, when these existed in the uob curriculum between 1996 and 2007. there was considerable evidence from evaluations at the time that such positive psychology approaches enhanced student confidence and motivation. this gave me the impetus to develop the soaring to success process model and write about the conditions which can turn self-awareness into personal development plans and actions (kumar, 2007; 2009a; 2009b). appreciative inquiry can reinforce the ‘want-to’ and ‘can-do’ in the individual and the group to make a positive difference. a critical appreciation of the dynamic relationships between self, opportunities, aspirations and results was implicitly applied to the arc as well, in the sense that action research engages self with opportunities such as those offered by the arc, to tap into the aspirations of staff (aligned with those of the hei), producing results in relation to self-selected aims. ethically also it was important in my arc project to set at rest any concerns staff may have about discovering deficits and diagnosing problems. appreciative inquiry helps in this respect by replacing the usual swot analysis that often gets bogged down in negative considerations of weaknesses and threats, with a soar analysis that seeks to discover and amplify what works well. with this approach one can also use what does not work simply as raw material for learning and future success. connecting self with opportunity and aspirations appreciative inquiry aligns with other values and beliefs implicit in my research: • that most people are interested in and capable of self-development, given the right type of encouragement and supportive environment. • that subjecting cre8 curricula to action research would be desirable and justifiable as one way of realising the potential of e-pdp for students. • that staff would try out approaches such as soaring to success (kumar, 2007) and progressively adapt and refine them relative to their subject disciplines. • that synergy would be generated through collaboration between peers. the subjective nature of action research is inescapable as practitioners bring a set of personal values and expectations into the process at every stage. a key requirement for journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 6 kumar turning the narn into an arc at the university of bedfordshire – some reflections and comparisons action research to be as ethical as possible is for practitioner-researchers to recognise and declare the reasons and values which prompt their research aims. accordingly all arc members were required to define the key terms and objectives of their projects, and were given opportunities in arc meetings to refine these with peers acting as critical friends. in line with the practice and process derived from the narn approach, templates were designed to encourage reflection and ethical considerations so that participants would declare the values, interests and experience that lay behind their research ideas, identify practical opportunities and data collection methods they could use to answer their research questions, and clarify what results they aspired to achieve. the inclusive invitation to staff across the uob was based on a variety of positive psychology approaches associated with personal agency and goal setting (e.g. locke et al., 1990), and communities of learning (senge and scharmer, 2001). the results i aspired to achieve were aligned with an expectation expressed in our university’s education strategy (atlay, 2008) that all staff will engage in evidence-based and research-informed teaching practice. also aligned with the narn and the cetl, the arc was envisaged as a forum for creating shared understanding around e-pdp concepts and practices, through membership of a peer-supported community that would evaluate such innovations within their subject curricula. guidelines were issued to this effect, and for the purposes of my own research i formulated the question: ‘do arc participants make changes to their epdp pedagogical approaches and interventions for students as a result of the action research process?’. my earlier work in the field of personal and career development of students led me to hope we would identify collaboratively some key features of good practice in pdp and employability, and cascade the benefits to all students. in some respects the arc guidelines represented a departure from narn. action research was specified as the methodology we would all be using to investigate the processes and outcomes of interventions, for which cre8 provided a context of changes in the content and modes of implementation of new curricula. we favoured collaboration across areas on topics of common interest: project teams were actively encouraged to include other practitioners in academic and/or learning support areas, and students as partners. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 7 kumar turning the narn into an arc at the university of bedfordshire – some reflections and comparisons results – what actually happened what worked well the arc offer generated twenty six applications and considerable interest, sustained at first by our common goals and values such as respect for everyone’s professionalism despite diversity in the abilities, experience and disciplinary or practice backgrounds of arc members. arc projects have demonstrated equity and collaboration between academic staff and novice practitioner-researchers from ‘careers’ and ‘learning resources’. the core of twelve staff who persevered despite obstacles have reported considerable benefits at focus group and individual interviews. these include a renewed belief in and enthusiasm for action research, submitting articles to journals not considered before, disseminating at home and abroad, learning by doing, and discussing with others – thereby enhancing research capability. pdp requires a structured and supported process (qaa 2001, revised 2008), and the arc set up both structure and support within a developmental set of opportunities designed to engage staff collectively and individually (altrichter et al., 1993). structure was provided through a shared work plan with a timeframe and collective goals, a series of organised semi-formal arc seminars, a dedicated vle repository for resources, and informal peer support. two research assistants were appointed to help arc participants with their individual proposals and plans, and especially with data collection and analysis. feedback in focus groups shows that both this structure and the support provided has been greatly valued. an implicit value in the arc is that be(com)ing a reflective practitioner within a community of practice can enhance one’s personal meaning-making and professional development (wenger, 1998). my data collection methods were designed to provide opportunities for participants to reflect and plan. open questions on templates encouraged reflective narratives to capture interim progress, to record individual learning journeys at various stages, and prompt further action. staff could later select material from this record to use in dissemination and publication. this valuing of reflection in and on action resulted in one positive outcome: the inclusion of action research activity and assignments within the redesigned pgcap at our university. all pgcap students were enrolled into the second round of arc projects. the reflective prompts in their case contributed to final written assignments which required them to be analytical about their learning and development (kramp et al., 1995). from these reflections there is evidence of both benefits and issues: journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 8 kumar turning the narn into an arc at the university of bedfordshire – some reflections and comparisons the action research project, as part of the pgcap, has also helped me evaluate my own practice, but more importantly change it for the better. although this is a formal, assessed document, i see myself continually performing internal action research, where i can identify a problem or issue, and then change my practice to try and better it. i find the action research element of the course both challenging and interesting. despite the steep learning curve and limited time i am very interested to see what kind of data i collect and what, if any, conclusions can be drawn. to me, action research is personal, investigating things i have some control over and can make changes to myself, not just commenting on the current picture, but actually collaborating with others and changing the picture. as my learning styles questionnaire results suggest, i am a change agent and like to experiment and try things out, so this type of research really suits me. the difficulty with this, is change takes time and this sits outside of my core job function, therefore the demands of my usual business will make it difficult to continue further cycles and make this a more developed piece of research. it is clear from evaluations that the arc model is actually and potentially a powerful and motivating ‘structured and supported process undertaken by individuals’ (such as that envisaged and defined in the pdp agenda). why then did it not achieve wider participation and better engagement in the first cycle, with more evidence of developmental outcomes? between the first wave of enthusiasm and later project completion rates, the numbers steadily declined. as meetings progressed through the year, if engagement is judged by attendance, then both leave much to be desired. lessons learned from what did not work well i will focus here on three factors that impacted considerably on the willingness and ability of staff to engage with arc projects. the first is related to time and timing, the second is about the importance of constructively aligned values, and the third is about the ethics approval process. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 9 kumar turning the narn into an arc at the university of bedfordshire – some reflections and comparisons time and timing time constraints were mentioned by almost everyone in the arc as a major reason for discontinuing projects or missing opportunities – it has been a perennial issue that the arc could not include ‘36-hour wristwatches’ in its otherwise generous offer. my observations on time are two-fold: firstly we need a self-map (kumar, 2007), not a watch, to manage our time. the map (a grounded sense of one’s motivations, abilities and personal styles) serves the purpose of both map and compass, helping each individual to develop a sense of destination and direction, and navigate through the project’s learning journey. if we manage ourselves in this way we also get better at managing time and pressure through opportunities in learning and work. secondly, however, the ideal of practitioners engaging in ‘systematic inquiry made public’ is seriously at odds with the reality of life for staff whose activity is characterised by knee-deep marking piles and hundreds of reactive interactions with a diverse body of students in rapidly changing circumstances. they are caught up in what they must do rather than what they might also do. if we wish to create learning journeys in which pdp and cpd function as cycles of action research in a productive dynamic, then we must enable these journeys as the norm – ‘just the way we do things around here’. lack of time is similarly cited by many staff as a reason for not being able to take advantage of optional staff development workshops. not only is there a manifest lack of engagement with such options, there is also plenty of research evidence to show that most traditional workshop methodologies fail to promote meaningful cpd that transforms pedagogic practice. for example, joyce and showers (2002) show that fewer than 15% of teachers implement new ideas learned in workshops. the irony is that for staff cpd to result in more effective performance, exactly the same conditions and approaches are needed as for student pdp to be effective. if time is important, timing is equally so – a research design and timeline must fit with a congruent ethics approval process and exploit opportunities for collecting data. this has also been an important lesson for staff that will feed into benefits for students. for example, an arc member reported that she now appreciated how important it was to consider the time allocated for assignments and timing of research activity she was setting for students. in fact, my observations tell me that self-management, the drive for results, adaptability and using resources appropriately were key attributes in arc project completion – just as they are for students in coping with assignments. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 10 kumar turning the narn into an arc at the university of bedfordshire – some reflections and comparisons the importance of congruent values the following extracts from evaluation of the bridges-cetl indicate how contextual factors, views and values might have influenced the priorities and ability of the cetl and arc to achieve their objectives: some individual staff fully embraced bridges’ approach but getting widespread adoption of the more innovative aspects has proved more problematic. conflicting interests and priorities get in the way. (atlay, 2010, p.16) it has been really difficult to achieve shared understanding because there is no accepted structure or culture to achieve this. in academia we encourage 'critical thinking' about everything to the extent that shared thinking encouraged by a central body such as the cetl, agreement on concepts and practices etc. is almost impossible to achieve. it has been especially hard to achieve this in an area such as pdp which was initially so controversial (and may still be in some quarters). this is also to do with the traditional hierarchy of values in which we place disciplinary research first, then academic/pedagogic research, action research, teaching and learning – while pdp is a poor relation to all these. (cetl team member, taken from facilitate evaluation, january 2009). despite a subtle steer towards pdp, for a variety of reasons members of the arc chose a diverse range of projects, not always focused on pdp. added to this, a decline in numbers of staff engaging overtly with the arc left my initial research plan bereft of research participants (despite many having signed my consent forms). my data collection methods initially depended on staff attending meetings and completing templates. i modified my expectations to the premise that the arc could potentially benefit its members in a variety of ways. staff could, for example: • explore and evaluate any chosen aspect of their practice and pedagogy from different perspectives and experiences. • replicate an e-pdp process in their own cpd, as they reflect and record their personal learning journeys. • fulfil the university’s expectations in respect of evidence-based practice, and its requirements as written into the education strategy and research strategy. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 11 kumar turning the narn into an arc at the university of bedfordshire – some reflections and comparisons in retrospect it has proved important to allow self-selection of project topics in this way, as evidenced by pgcap students’ comments: enjoy doing research, especially as i can choose the topic so it’s directly relevant to my practice, and will lead to changes/improvements. action research has increased my ability to influence, challenge, change and improve effectiveness of clinical assessment. my initial research question embodied a grand and ambitious idea of what i wanted to evaluate, and contained an implicit expectation that staff would use action research methodology to introduce and simultaneously evaluate pdp; that this would not only inform but transform their practice and – by extension – transform their students! i later discovered very few studies have established connections of this sort, and complex social and psychological variables make it very difficult to validly do so. for others too, in both the narn and arc, a significant learning point was that we had to scale back our initial grand designs to what was practicable within our circumstances and limited timeframes. we often started by describing wobbly interventions with fuzzy boundaries, which went through several iterations before becoming practically feasible and ethically sound. learning by acting as critical friends to each other was effective and valued by all of us we challenged each other to clarify and focus on more precise definitions, intentions and actionable research aims, designs and plans. peer support and belonging to groups also sustained our commitment in the face of complex and changing realities. i gained a related insight about the value of allowing ‘marinating time’ in this process – periods of muddling when nothing seems to be working or moving. it took almost the first year in many projects for feasible research questions to be framed and implemented. in my case i was naively looking for a change of culture – but this takes time and sustained effort. as john kotter and paul lawrence (1974) found in their research in organisations, the more successful executives typically spent more than a year seeding and sounding out ideas with key stakeholders, gradually moving staff in a direction towards consensus in favour of a desired change. the same may be true for creating a new culture integrating action research, pdp and cpd in our university, and then evaluating the benefits of this. through my ‘marinating time’ i struggled to see how i might maintain any connection with pdp. the links between pdp for students and cpd for staff are now well established journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 12 kumar turning the narn into an arc at the university of bedfordshire – some reflections and comparisons (cra annual seminar 2009: whither cpd?), but perceiving the common ground between pdp, cpd and action research has been one of my ‘aha’ moments of realisation. in fact the processes involved in ‘doing, reflecting, conceptualising, evaluating, planning and improving’ are common to development in general – whether these are staff or student actions and interactions. eventually i realised that i was actually already applying pdp protocols and values to the functionality of the arc and that it would be a worthwhile project to explore the effects of this. i modified my aspirations and my research question thus: ‘can a supported action research process act as an agent of change? what type of change? under what conditions? what works, what doesn’t, and why?’. ethics approval at the time of writing there is still limited hard evidence of the type of change (development/transformation) that i was initially looking for, but much has been learned about the type of support that is needed in order to bring about the desired changes. one lesson shows that the importance of aligning espoused theories with theories-in-action (argyris and schön,1974) is not to be underestimated. due to the gap between the education strategy’s espoused theories and expectations around action research and the oppositional theories-in-action of the ethics committee, many arc members’ aspirations were rendered impossible to implement. the following comments illustrate this well: ethical approval in the education research institute is really problematic and slow. it seems impossible to do any research even though this university is striving to do more research. this should be sorted as a matter of urgency…it makes practitioner researchers feel like they are being ignored because they are not 'proper academics' and therefore this is disrespectful as well as damaging to the community of practice. (anonymous comment from an arc member, taken from facilitate follow-up) having promoted and encouraged action research through a range of positive values and approaches in the arc, i was concerned and frustrated about the unsympathetic and over-rigorous analysis of our project proposals, which dampened the enthusiasm of many members to engage with research. i did my best to resolve the situation and an arc member also represented our concerns to the ethics committee, but the problem persisted. the committee asked arc members to put their issues in writing and this is one of the responses elicited via email: journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 13 kumar turning the narn into an arc at the university of bedfordshire – some reflections and comparisons (we) suffered terribly last year with our t&l project when we had to submit to the education ethics committee at late notice. they wanted us to revise the proposal after t&l/cetl had agreed it. the form filling was for phd type activity and the length of time it took for them to agree imposed a long delay on data collection and frankly lost my interest in the whole thing. i don't think they really understood the purpose of these small scale research projects and i think for new researchers it would scare them off the whole process which would have a detrimental effect on developing a bigger research culture in the university. when arc project applications and proposals were submitted in the second round (200910) we were hopeful that our efforts had generated a more sympathetic ethics approval system, and indeed this was negotiated for pgcap students. for arc members, however, the situation was not resolved: …after three months since my ethics application started, i had to abandon the project, as the action research intervention point had passed irrevocably. i'm really disappointed, as this was a flagship project for our institution, providing an excellent chance to show the importance of the student voice in planning and delivery; now it's just a lost opportunity. aligning aspirations to changing circumstances as my project progressed (over the past two years) my original aims and design had to be modified still further due to changing circumstances, but that opened up new insights and led to the formulation of further questions at an institutional level: can support frameworks for action research model the protocols of pdp and cpd so that they stimulate a dynamic culture of evidence-based joint practice development? when undertaken with peers acting as ‘critical friends’, can action research create communities of self-motivated practitionerresearchers who continuously effect improvements in their practice? my findings from the arc (limited though they are) indicate that the model itself is worthy of being sustained and enhanced – but in a different way. if we are to achieve personal engagement in cpd combined with institutional development in pedagogic practice, aligning vision, values and practices will go a long way towards overcoming the barriers journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 14 kumar turning the narn into an arc at the university of bedfordshire – some reflections and comparisons that were encountered by arc members. i hope that readers will use the lessons learned section on ‘what didn’t work’ to deal with such barriers, or preferably prevent them arising in the first place. on the other hand, we can use ‘what works well’ in the spirit of appreciative inquiry. combined with a cascading model, it can become the starting point of further cycles and upward spirals of development. the main recommendation is that managing an effective and collaborative action research process for staff is not far different from facilitating cpd or a pdp process for students. all such developmental processes involve a number of complex social and psychological values as well as practical considerations. conceptually, a joined-up approach between these factors can turn the simple cycle of plan-do-review into systematic, collaborative enquiry made public – an upward spiral of plan, design, collect data, reflect/evaluate/analyse, record/write/publish, disseminate, share, cascade – then plan a further cycle, and so on. flash forward to the future if i were evaluating our university’s achievements in 2015 i would like to be able to report as follows (and my recommendations are implicit in what follows): ‘in the past five years the university’s action research programme, directed and supported by senior staff in t&l and hr, created an extensive research portfolio informing policy and practice across all subject areas. a university-wide programme has incrementally engaged staff by upscaling, enhancing and valuing small-scale, research-related activity so that it is now undertaken collaboratively as cycles and spirals of robust action research, creating a new culture of personal and professional development. the benefits and end-goals of action research concepts are explained in theory, but also promoted and demonstrated as normal, integral (and not optional) professional practice. ethics committees meet frequently, not only to consider project proposals but to provide support and help to develop them in a way that is sympathetic to the particular conditions affecting action research. staff are encouraged to learn by doing and reflecting, and to use peer support, coaching, feedback, individual and journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 15 kumar turning the narn into an arc at the university of bedfordshire – some reflections and comparisons group guidance provided for action researchers – all in the spirit of appreciative inquiry. there is a recognition that the opportunities provided are differentially available and needed by individuals, and they are enabled to engage with them by identifying how their self-map maps onto the demands of action research. since this process of self-mapping is also a central tenet in pdp, it is appropriately rolemodelled and replicated for students. working at several levels in a joined-up management framework, an integrated, structured and supported process of pdp, cpd and action research has created a professional community of joint practice development and a ‘practitioner research footprint’ through dissemination, publication and cascading techniques – influencing pdp, cpd and pedagogy across the he landscape’. if such progress were to be made it would be a testament to the powerful legacy of the narn and the arc experience. acknowledgement this paper is an outcome of the national action research network on researching and evaluating personal development planning and e-portfolio practice project (2007-2010). the project was led by the university of bolton in association with the university of worcester and centre for recording achievement, and in national collaboration with the university of bedfordshire, bournemouth university and university of bradford. the project was funded by the higher education academy, national teaching fellowship project strand. more details about the project can be found at: http://www.recordingachievement.org/research/narn-tree.html. references altrichter, h., posch, p. and somekh, b. (1993) teachers investigate their work: an introduction to the methods of action research. london and new york: routledge. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 16 http://www.recordingachievement.org/research/narn-tree.html kumar turning the narn into an arc at the university of bedfordshire – some reflections and comparisons argyris, c. and schön, d. (1974) theory in practice: increasing professional effectiveness. san francisco: jossey-bass. atlay, m.t. (2008) university of bedfordshire education strategy (2008-13): transformational education. luton: university of bedfordshire. available at: http://www.beds.ac.uk/learning/curriculum (accessed: 29 september 2010). atlay, m. (2010) bridges cetl: final report to hefce. luton: university of bedfordshire. beard, j. (2010) ‘organising small scale action research on a large scale: a case study of the pils cetl management framework at the open university’, in atlay, m. (ed.) creating bridges: a collection of articles relating to the implementation of the curriculum review 2008 (cre8) from practitioners across the university of bedfordshire. luton: university of bedfordshire internal publication, pp. 201-210. joyce, b.r. and showers, b. (2002) student achievement through staff development. alexandria, va: association for supervision and curriculum development. kotter, j.p. and lawrence, p.r. (1974) mayors in action. ny: john wiley & sons. kramp, m.k. and humphreys, w.l. (1995) ‘narrative, self-assessment, and the habit of reflection’, assessment update, 7(1), pp. 10-13. kumar, a. (2007) personal, academic and career development in higher education – soaring to success. london and new york: routledge, taylor and francis. kumar, a. (2009a) ‘using assessment centre approaches to improve students’ learning’, in nygaard, c., holtham, c. and hawthorn, n. (eds.) improving students’ learning outcomes. frederiksberg, denmark: cbs press. kumar, a. (2009b) ‘soaring for employability: can assessment centre approaches engage students?’ in atlay, m. (ed.) (2010) creating bridges: a collection of articles relating to implementing the curriculum review 2008 (cre8) from practitioners across the university of bedfordshire. luton: university of bedfordshire internal publication, pp. 84-103. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 17 http://www.beds.ac.uk/learning/curriculum kumar turning the narn into an arc at the university of bedfordshire – some reflections and comparisons locke, e.a., latham, g.p., smith, k.j. and wood, r. e. (1990) a theory of goal setting and task performance. englewood cliffs, nj: prentice hall. maslow, a.h. (1970) motivation and personality. new york: harper row. newman, b.m. and newman, p.r. (2009) development through life: a psychosocial approach. ca: wadsworth cengage learning. qaa, uuk, scop and coshep (2001, revised 2008) guidelines for he progress files. gloucester: quality assurance agency for higher education (uk). schön, d. (1991) the reflective practitioner: how professionals think in action. ny: basic books. senge p. and scharmer, c. (2001) ‘community action research: learning as a community of practitioners, consultants and researchers’, in reason, p. and bradbury, h. (eds.) handbook of action research. london: sage. stenhouse, l. (1981) ‘what counts as research?’, british journal of educational studies, 29(2), pp. 103-114. watkins, j. and cooperrider, d. (2000) ‘appreciative inquiry: a transformative paradigm, journal of the organization development network, 32(1), pp. 6–12. wenger, e. (1998) communities of practice: learning, meaning and identity. cambridge: cambridge university press. author details arti kumar’s work, as associate director of the centre for excellence in teaching and learning (cetl) at the university of bedfordshire, has been central in the university’s adoption of effective learner-centred pedagogies that connect personal and career development with good learning and employability approaches in higher education curricula. as part of her national teaching fellowship project (awarded in 2005) she journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 18 kumar turning the narn into an arc at the university of bedfordshire – some reflections and comparisons authored the book entitled personal, academic and career development in higher education – soaring to success published in 2007 by routledge taylor & francis. she was awarded an mbe in the queen’s honours list 2008 in recognition of her services to higher education. she is currently an honorary visiting research fellow at the university of bedfordshire and also a fellow of the national institute of career education and counselling (nicec) and of the uk higher education academy. she is an agcas lifetime achievement award winner 2010. journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: november 2010 19 turning the narn into an arc at the university of bedfordshire – some reflections and comparisons abstract introduction and background what i set out to do the action in my action research aspirations and values behind my research question appreciative inquiry and a soar analysis connecting self with opportunity and aspirations results – what actually happened what worked well lessons learned from what did not work well time and timing the importance of congruent values ethics approval aligning aspirations to changing circumstances flash forward to the future acknowledgement references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special issue 25: aldinhe conference proceedings and reflections october 2022 ________________________________________________________________________ the digital writing café: accessibility born from necessity nina kearney university of plymouth, uk cara baer university of plymouth, uk michaela moclair university of plymouth, uk jack pendlebury university of plymouth, uk presentation abstract the writing café is a creative space for students to talk about academic writing across disciplines, and to support them to become better writers, underpinned by the philosophy of inclusion and inquiry. originally located in a café on campus, in response to the pandemic the writing café transitioned online. this took into account the additional struggles that students might be experiencing as a result of the pandemic. within days, it had moved online with no interruption of service. attendance in the digital writing café increased by 50% during lockdown, and the service was highlighted by the gravity assist report as one of the most innovative examples of how universities and colleges have responded to the pandemic by providing online support to their students. due to the successes, the digital café now runs concurrently alongside the writing café in the library providing a flexible service to meet the varying needs of the students. though the writing café has always been a space that helps bridge the gap in supporting social mobility, this new flexible approach has seen a drastic increase in engagement from students who identify as from access and participation plan (app) categories. kearney, baer, moclair and pendlebury the digital writing café: accessibility born from necessity journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 2 the presentation explored the evolution of the writing café to the new hybrid dual delivery model, with provision located physically at the heart of the campus in our library café, alongside an online digital provision using zoom. our writing mentors will share their experience and will discuss the impact on our student engagement. community response would love to get something like this going. we are planning to develop a writing café, though in person only at this point. luckily, we have a café in our building, so i will be pushing for us to set one of our own up! it was a privilege to hear how the writing mentors translate the programme’s ethos of inclusivity and student empowerment and embed it into their practice of providing academic writing support for students. your students are an inspiration and testament to the fact that peer support is an essential pedagogical tool that helps democratise learning and empower students. i love the idea of a space in which students can compare writing styles and conventions across their disciplines and gradually understand how to write for their subject and develop a supportive community of practice. the sessions ultimately highlight the value of combining peer learning initiatives with core academic skills support, enabling cross-discipline conversations and a non-hierarchical approach for students to understand and hone core principles of learning within higher education. the writing café seems like such a huge way to overcome what cara spoke about – the stigmas around deficit and remediation associated with learning development work, and the type of student who might be told or advised to engage with it. it looks like such a democratic and non-hierarchical way of doing things. the mentors are co-owners of the writing café space; they actively work in partnership and shape future growth and development through their feedback and research (such as this piece). this partnership approach fosters a sustainable learning initiative that is flexible and adaptable to the changing needs of students, reflected in the success of running a hybrid writing café. kearney, baer, moclair and pendlebury the digital writing café: accessibility born from necessity journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 3 next steps and additional questions this is an excellent project, demonstrated by the length of time it has been running and the continued engagement of students. responding to the shift to online must have been a challenge, but as the students outlined it was clearly successful. i wonder how this will develop beyond the ‘covid’ years and how new students respond as we move back to a sense of ‘normality’? i wondered how this format could also be applied to specific disciplines or communities which find engagement with ld more difficult? it is an approachable and low risk environment which encourages students to seek support and could be utilised in those spaces. authors’ reflections nina kearney the writing café has been developed to provide students with a friendly and informal learning environment. adaptations for covid-19, moving the service online, were positively received and the service was developed into a hybrid model as students began returning, increasing the flexibility of how students can choose to engage. having the mentors as coowners of the space, working actively in partnership with us to shape the development of the space through their feedback and involvement in research, supports us to be proactive in adapting the service to meet the changing needs of students as we return to a new ‘normality’. the informal café learning format can easily be adapted to benefit students and communities in specific disciplines, foster conversations around developing academic writing, and engage participants through networking, by being part of a positive learning community. we have previously run one of the writing café roadshow days with health students based at off-site campuses, with really positive feedback on how this fostered a sense of learning community with the group around developing their academic writing. we discussed our hybrid dual delivery model in the presentation: the digital café runs online via zoom, concurrently with the writing café physically taking place in the library café. both spaces are run by our writing mentors, who are rota-ed to work either in the library or online for the shift. they follow a similar format: on arrival students are welcomed and asked about their writing questions, concerns, or areas they would like to develop. the writing mentor will ask them if they are happy to share a bit of their writing to kearney, baer, moclair and pendlebury the digital writing café: accessibility born from necessity journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 4 help shape the conversation. online the writing mentor and student move into a breakout room for the student to share their writing. at the moment writing mentors work in one space, either online or in the library, however there are opportunities to develop some fluidity between the two spaces moving forward. cara baer the appointment of interdisciplinary mentors is intentional, as is ensuring this is a paid role so that students from a range of backgrounds can afford to offer their time. these have been core points of reflection since the conference. both points link to a key aspect of the writing café: that mentors reflect the student demographic (subject and diversity), which can encourage a sense of belonging; we hope that the mentors reflecting a diverse range of students is empowering. the interdisciplinary nature of mentors can challenge ideas around deficit approaches to knowledge and support, repositioning the discourse around seeking support from being a stigma-based matter, to being one of development. we know from research and from speaking with other universities that the writing café is unique in its offering as an interdisciplinary space that focuses on academic skills, rather than course content. this is to promote a removal of the hierarchy that often exists with subject knowledge: we make students visiting the café the experts in their subject. however, we also see the value, and potential comfort, that knowing a face or feeling reassured that a mentor knows your subject can provide. this has been another key reflection point: why it is important that the café is not discipline specific but is able to highlight how the café can support students' disciplines, which is likely to improve engagement and awareness of the service. michaela moclair the writing café’s emphasis on the partnerships between student workers and students creates a dynamic workspace which can reinforce the resilience of the student. having a space which the students control can create a more comfortable atmosphere to encourage peer-to-peer learning. the hybrid approach of the adapted zoom online space and the physical writing café space has helped our writing mentors to reach a more diverse range of subject areas and given students flexibility on how to approach this learning space. kearney, baer, moclair and pendlebury the digital writing café: accessibility born from necessity journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 5 a huge part of learning development is a focus on students; allowing the student writing mentors to present as part of the conference gave us a chance to open new ways of thinking about the writing café’s achievements, while being able to discuss this with both internal peers and an external audience. the supportive community that the writing café has become not only upskills the writing café mentors and prepares them for postuniversity work, but also encourages different approaches to learning which were shared at the conference. jack pendlebury the conference was extremely valuable, with the audience engagement proving very encouraging to our work in the writing café. given the massive benefits we have seen, i’m excited to see other institutions implement their own versions. i’m hopeful that next year’s conference will see plenty of ideas from institutions that have put their own spin on the idea of a writing café or have taken some of our ideas to integrate within their own learning schemes. one of the questions that i found most interesting was regarding the diversity of our mentors, and what we were doing to ensure that we were recruiting from a widespread range of candidates, both regarding bame students, as well as ones from diverse backgrounds. additionally, the mentorship is biased towards humanities students. the writing café’s leadership is acting decisively on the former; an issue that i believe to be in no small part due to the geographic location of our university and the demographics therein. as one of the students from a less fortunate background and having spoken to some of my colleagues who shared the same difficulties that i had, i am happy with how the writing café has given us opportunities to improve our own academic writing skills as well as putting us in a position to help others who are/were suffering similar difficulties to us. whilst not all the mentors in the writing café share these sorts of backgrounds, i have always felt welcomed by both the leadership and my fellow mentors, and i am so glad that the space exists to provide this. a large push has been undertaken recently to market the writing café better, and make sure that it is reaching everyone. this is something that i believe will help make great strides towards diversifying our recruitment pool. i, myself, have been a part of the push to recruit additional stem students to the café, as currently kearney, baer, moclair and pendlebury the digital writing café: accessibility born from necessity journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 6 the lack of targeted outreach could be a contributing factor towards lesser uptake from students in those courses. i am excited to see what the future holds for the writing café, especially after taking on some of the potential ideas that we’ve gained from this conference! i’ve thoroughly enjoyed working with my colleagues on this presentation and was extremely grateful for the opportunity to share our writing café. acknowledgments thanks are extended to all members of the community that have engaged with the conference or these proceedings in some way. thank you to the following community members for their contributions to this particular paper: dr emily webb (university of leeds) and joshua manning (university of plymouth). author details nina kearney is a project manager at the university of plymouth, with experience in leading widening participation and peer learning initiatives. cara baer is a lecturer in education, researcher, and phd student with interests in inclusion, social justice, access to education, and widening participation. cara has worked as writing mentor throughout her studies, enabling insight into the peer interactions. michaela moclair is a phd student in creative writing, whose research focuses on greek mythology and posthuman feminism. michaela has a keen interest in positive partnerships founded from peer-to-peer learning and has experienced this during her work at the writing café. jack pendlebury is an meng robotics student with a focus on machine learning and artificial intelligence. he hopes to apply research in learning development to artificial intelligence applications within robotics. he has worked in the writing café throughout his kearney, baer, moclair and pendlebury the digital writing café: accessibility born from necessity journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 7 time at university, enabling him a first-hand look at peer learning and alternative learning methodologies. the digital writing café: accessibility born from necessity presentation abstract community response next steps and additional questions authors’ reflections acknowledgments author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special edition 25: aldinhe conference proceedings and reflections october 2022 ________________________________________________________________________ collaborative writing communities for learning development research and practice ian johnson university of portsmouth, uk karen welton arts university plymouth, uk kiu sum university of westminster and solent university, uk victoria rafferty arden university, uk ralitsa kantcheva bangor university, uk jane nodder northern college of acupuncture, york, uk paul chin university of bath, uk ursula canton glasgow caledonian university, uk silvina bishopp-martin canterbury christ church university, uk ed bickle bournemouth university, uk presentation abstract this workshop discussed how collaborative reflection and writing provides us, as a group of learning developers, with insights into our role and sense of identity. the wider potential for using collaborative writing to develop topics of mutual interest was also explored. our johnson, welton, sum, rafferty, kantcheva, nodder, chin, canton, bishopp-martin, bickle collaborative writing communities for learning development research and practice journal of learning development in higher education special issue 25: october 2022 2 reflections on the collaborative writing process arose from our first-hand experience of collaborative writing (bickle et al., 2021). therefore, we aimed to introduce participants to the tools we used for our writing and encourage them to experience the tools themselves to stimulate a discussion on the potential and challenges of collaborative writing for ld research and practice. we hoped to increase participants’ understanding of collaborative writing through practice and reflection, and provide ideas on how others can initiate a collaborative writing community. the introduction briefly outlined the insights we gained from our study, focusing particularly on the way collaborative writing served as a tool to examine and broaden our identities as learning developers. it also introduced the methodologies for creating (collaborative writing) and analysing (collaborative autoethnography) data. next, participants were invited to try out collaborative writing activities and reflect on their potential use as part of their own practice. we used a google document (figure 1) to collect their spontaneous responses to short writing prompts related to the challenges and potential of collaborative writing. finally, at the end of the session, participants left with tips and techniques on how to develop a collaborative writing group of their own. figure 1. screenshot of the collaborative google document used to capture experiences during the session. johnson, welton, sum, rafferty, kantcheva, nodder, chin, canton, bishopp-martin, bickle collaborative writing communities for learning development research and practice journal of learning development in higher education special issue 25: october 2022 3 community response respondents to this session appear to have embraced the challenges of collective authorship, offering positive encouragement as well as acknowledging the ‘productive discomfort’ that their questions engendered. firstly, there was a strong sense that this approach brought a welcome and enlivening challenge to writing practice. one respondent left the session feeling energised and encouraged to ruminate over the issues involved in collaborative writing. silvina’s reflection that collaborative writing made her feel like she could never live without being research active was well received and left respondents wondering whether collaborative writing could be seen almost as a ‘positive addiction’? could collaborative writing become a way of ‘getting into’ or initiating writing in the first place? like being inducted into a secret society? others similarly noted the feeling of seeing – through a glass darkly – what the experience might be like on ‘the inside’ for those who have tried collaborative writing. respondents found this engaging and the authors’ approach to sharing their experiences ‘refreshingly honest’ and something which warranted further discussion with a wider audience. secondly, there was an awareness that this approach to writing challenges normative approaches, publishing, thinking even. one respondent offered encouragement to the authors’ endeavours in this regard, noting that this is a potentially critical – if difficult – topic that requires delicate treatment, patience and persistence. there was a sense that what the authors were inviting us to try in this taster involved intellectual ambition but also some courage! respondents shared the feeling that we need to keep these challenges at the forefront of our professional thinking and theorising. after all, can we afford not to? others reflected on the synergies with similar, related efforts to establish a community of practice on critical learning development and a potential future stream at aldcon. one respondent went further and, in the spirit of deconstructing normative writing practices, challenged presenters on whether the efforts made to ensure a certain standard of coherence and consistency of ‘voice’ in the collaboratively produced article was ever necessary. this respondent was further struck by the thought that it would be interesting to ‘experiment with not seeking this consistency, or at least not always prioritising it’. it was https://leedsunilibrary.wordpress.com/2019/04/09/can-we-afford-to-indulge-in-theory-can-we-afford-not-to/ johnson, welton, sum, rafferty, kantcheva, nodder, chin, canton, bishopp-martin, bickle collaborative writing communities for learning development research and practice journal of learning development in higher education special issue 25: october 2022 4 posited that an alternative approach would be to foreground the ‘multi-voiced, multiperspective character of any collaboration’. further, they suggested, there would be value in reading pieces which ‘sought not to resolve differences (tensions even)’, or which were not generated under a ‘pressure to cohere’. instead, we should invite readers to mediate the differences between the authors’ respective positions. this would be less of a staged ‘debate’, and more an acceptance that contestation, open-endedness, provisionality, can – as with more creative forms of writing – be productive and engaging features of a piece of writing in themselves. editorial comments ‘hell is other people’, or is it? jean-paul sartre’s ‘l’enfer, c’est les autres’ must be one of the most well-known yet misinterpreted lines from theatre. put simply, it is not other people that make life hellish, but our inevitable dependency on how others think and feel about us. perhaps similarly, with collaborative writing and publishing, the challenge is not actually ‘other people’ but navigating our own discomfort and subjectivity. this presentation and the rich community responses to it surely remind us that such innovative writing practices are worth the effort. authors’ reflection it was unexpected to have a small number of participants, and to see that, although many learning development practitioners engage in supporting student academic writing, they are reticent about doing it themselves. for us, this raised questions about the priorities in practitioners’ roles and the areas where learning developers feel they need to develop their skills and practice. some of these areas seem to be prioritised because of institutional, local or governmental agendas. multiple authorship is not unusual for academic papers, particularly in stem (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) subjects, where members of hierarchically structured research groups contribute to projects in multiple ways. however, multiple authorship rarely refers to ten people developing a project democratically and nonhierarchically from scratch. because we agreed upon fully democratic and collective johnson, welton, sum, rafferty, kantcheva, nodder, chin, canton, bishopp-martin, bickle collaborative writing communities for learning development research and practice journal of learning development in higher education special issue 25: october 2022 5 ownership of our paper, several norms around authorship were naturally challenged. these included whether it was possible to achieve one coherent written voice for publication, given the eclectic input of voices. one participant’s response above, which suggests the potential of a deliberately contrary approach in which the individual voices are encouraged to remain, is of great interest to us. in fact, we toyed with this idea when writing the paper. interestingly, the mechanisms of the publishing industry became apparent during the various feedback rounds, and gradually manoeuvred us towards one voice – whether deliberately or whether simply due to habit and convention. as two authors performed the final editing round, they were highly conscious of wanting to make the paper sound coherent, yet not seeming to silence any of our co-authors’ voices. our experiences of writing, then reflecting on it through this session, therefore throw open deeper debates around authorship and publishing conventions. we hope to take these further within the aldinhe community in the future. next steps and additional questions both the conference presentation collective and respondents from our community of practitioners questioned the extent to which a collaborative approach to writing would be supported by publishers (journals, academic, commercial publications). in many ways, our approach to collating and publishing conference proceedings for this issue of jldhe has been experimental. key questions remain, however, about where the limits of innovation in publishing might be. these continue to be relevant, topical issues for our community to discuss. acknowledgements thank you to steve rooney, aston university, and alicja syska, university of plymouth, for sharing their reflections, as well as all the other respondents who enriched our insight into this conference presentation. johnson, welton, sum, rafferty, kantcheva, nodder, chin, canton, bishopp-martin, bickle collaborative writing communities for learning development research and practice journal of learning development in higher education special issue 25: october 2022 6 references bickle, e., bishopp-martin, s., canton, u., chin, p., johnson, i., kantcheva, r., nodder, j., rafferty, v., sum, k., & welton, k. (2021) ‘emerging from the third space chrysalis: experiences in a non-hierarchical, collaborative research community of practice’, journal of university teaching & learning practice, 18(7), pp.135-158. available at: https://doi.org/10.53761/1.18.7.09 (accessed: 26 october 2022). author details ian johnson is a learning developer in the school of education and sociology at the university of portsmouth, where he is about to complete his edd thesis on student and institutional perceptions of the learning developer role. karen welton is a learning development advisory in the learning lab at arts university plymouth. she has a particular interest in neurodiversity in learning, and co-leads aldinhe’s neurodiversity and inclusivity community of practice. kiu sum is lecturer in nutrition at solent university following a phd in nutrition at westminster university. she is an active pedagogic researcher, focusing on student engagement and student partnerships in higher education. victoria rafferty is lecturer in employability and professional practice at the university of sunderland. she is an experienced researcher in students’ learning experiences, and her phd was based on her research around academic literacies. ralitsa kantcheva is a study skills adviser at bangor university (wales). her primary research interest is students’ understanding of the threshold concepts embedded in academic writing and in scientific research procedures. jane nodder is currently studying for the award of phd in technology enhanced learning and e-research at lancaster university where her research is investigating the professional development needs of online educators. she has an msc in nutritional https://doi.org/10.53761/1.18.7.09 johnson, welton, sum, rafferty, kantcheva, nodder, chin, canton, bishopp-martin, bickle collaborative writing communities for learning development research and practice journal of learning development in higher education special issue 25: october 2022 7 medicine from the university of surrey and is now a research supervisor for the online msc courses and a lecturer for the msc nutrition science and practice. paul chin is the head of learning and teaching, centre for learning & teaching at bath university, where he manages the academic staff development team, curriculum development team and student engagement team. his main research interest is peer learning, having completed his phd in online peer learning and assessment. he is a certified leading practitioner in learning development, a principal fellow of the hea, and a co-chair of aldinhe. ursula canton is a senior lecturer in academic writing at glasgow caledonian university in the school of computing, engineering and the built environment. she also works with students at the royal conservatoire of scotland and supervises msc dissertations in education for the university of glasgow. her research focuses on interdisciplinary work and is shaped by her experience of studying and teaching at very different institutions and disciplinary contexts. interests include the evaluation of writing and teaching of writing, the role of academic and professional literacies in he and harnessing insights into the writing process for teaching. silvina bishopp-martin is the learning developer for all education programmes at canterbury christ church university. she has an ma in tesol, has achieved celp status, is a fellow of the hea and a certified cmi coach and mentor. her research interests include peer-mentoring, academic literacies, critical eap, and ld professionalism and identity. silvina is a member of the aldinhe research & development and peer mentoring working groups. she is currently undertaking a phd on learning development professional identity and its place in academia. ed bickle is a lecturer in learning development at bournemouth university, where he works within a small academic team to provide faculty level support to students. he has 20 years’ experience within the he sector is a member of the aldinhe research community of practice. he has held research roles within the widening participation field and worked within national schemes such as aimhigher. collaborative writing communities for learning development research and practice presentation abstract community response editorial comments authors’ reflection next steps and additional questions acknowledgements references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special issue 25: aldinhe conference proceedings and reflections october 2022 ________________________________________________________________________ working outside the box: breaking down barriers with a learning development peer mentor scheme sheryl mansfield university of northampton, uk sam thomas university of northampton, uk presentation abstract peer learning is simply described as students from similar social groupings helping each other to learn (topping, 2007). a recent document by the european centre for supplemental instruction-peer assisted study sessions (si pass) (2019) highlighted that 32 universities in the uk provide a system of peer support, and these vary both in how they operate and their nomenclature: schemes could be framed as peer assisted learning, peer assisted study sessions or peer mentoring. our aim was to create a supplementary, peer-led service which provides students with engaging, timely guidance and develops effective learning relationships based on parity and equality (collier, 2015). we decided to use a similar approach to the student learning assistant model of price et al. (2019), where the learning development (ld) mentors offer support to students from any disciplinary subject. eight students were recruited and funded to offer peer support to all students within the institution. all are current secondand third-year students who work four hours per week supplementing the ld provision via a daily drop-in as well as leading ongoing projects and tasks, including resource development and evaluation. a key driver is reaching students who do not currently use the ld provision by developing resources in physical spaces and digital platforms previously unused in our work (e.g., in student halls and using platforms like discord and tiktok). we will offer a perspective on the benefits and issues encountered when working with ld mentors, evaluate how the role was co-created with the students and assess the impact it has had on wider student engagement. mansfield and thomas working outside the box: breaking down barriers with a learning development peer mentor scheme journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 2 community response in its inclusion of the student mentors as presenters, this session exemplifies the aldinhe values of working alongside students and making he inclusive through emancipatory practice, partnership working, and collaboration. the emphasis on collaboration with peer mentors to develop support for students was impressive – examples like using discord and tiktok to raise awareness among students, or re-developing the plagiarism course to make it more relevant, demonstrated the importance of embedding the student voice into learning development activity. the student perspective was thus crucial to increasing student engagement with ld and with he in general. the success of this project demonstrates the importance of embedding the student voice into learning development activities. this has prompted me to consider our new peer mentor programme and how this programme could support and raise awareness for the academic skills hub (based in the library and staffed by learning development practitioners) more effectively. next steps and additional questions it is useful to consider and reflect on what we mean by ‘the student voice’ and how we envision this as integral to ld for the future. the value of co-creating programmes of support in partnership with paid student members of staff is self-evident but how can we build on this going forwards? how can we, as a sector, retain an authentic partnership which grants a creative role to learners but is also designed to support, empower, and facilitate learning in an inclusive and accessible way? what role should technology play in enabling us to retain and develop these all-important partnerships? authors’ reflection having the student mentors present and offering their perspectives on the scheme was vital and they did an excellent job! the student mentors developed and undertook most of the work, and they were able to address technical questions about the project in respect to producing content for social media. for example, they spoke about a series of tiktok mansfield and thomas working outside the box: breaking down barriers with a learning development peer mentor scheme journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 3 videos they produced to introduce students to the learning hub building and explain how to access the booking system. the mentors provide a different perspective and offer a different point of connection to the students compared to our regular learning development provision. it was great to share our initiative with the audience; the presentation and discussion generated a number of ideas that we’ll consider implementing and sharing at a future conference. for example, one of the areas we are focusing on for the coming year is promoting and publicising the service of the mentors, which in turn will increase student and staff knowledge of the learning development services we offer. we have started to do this by being more ‘visible’ at open days and welcome events where we can showcase merchandise (e.g., planners and post-its) designed by the learning development mentors to market the service. acknowledgements thank you to all the contributors who shared their reflections and enriched our insight into this conference presentation and its impact on the audience. special thanks go to dr victoria yuskaitis from the university of southampton. references collier, p. j. (2015) developing effective student peer mentoring programs: a practitioner’s guide to program design, delivery, evaluation and training. virginia: stylus publishing, llc. european centre for si pass (2019) ‘status report for european si/pass/pal – programmes’, european centre for si pass. available at: https://www.sipass.lu.se/en/sites/si-pass.lu.se.en/files/status_report_european_web_feb2019.pdf (accessed: 20 february 2021). price, s. wallace, k., verezub, e and sinchenko, e. (2018) ‘student learning assistants: the journey from learning advice to creating community’, journal of further and https://www.si-pass.lu.se/en/sites/si-pass.lu.se.en/files/status_report_european_web_feb2019.pdf https://www.si-pass.lu.se/en/sites/si-pass.lu.se.en/files/status_report_european_web_feb2019.pdf mansfield and thomas working outside the box: breaking down barriers with a learning development peer mentor scheme journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 4 higher education, 43(7), pp.914-928. https://doi.org/10.1080/0309877x.2018.1425379. topping, k. j. (2007) ‘trends in peer learning’, educational psychology, 25(6), pp.631645. https://doi.org/10.1080/01443410500345172. author details sheryl mansfield is head of learning development at university of northampton (uon) and she has worked in the field for over five years. she has a teaching background and uses her diverse knowledge of pedagogy to facilitate practical and engaging sessions to help demystify academic skills. externally, sheryl is chair of the professional recognition working group and a member of the aldinhe steering group. sam thomas has worked as a learning development tutor at the university of northampton for the last five years. prior to this she worked in academic and public libraries in a range of professional roles, including reader development, teaching digital literacy, and answering enquiries. her current research interests include the role of language in teaching and learning, accessibility and inclusion in learning development, and working collaboratively with students and colleagues to develop effective study skills support. https://doi.org/10.1080/0309877x.2018.1425379 https://doi.org/10.1080/01443410500345172 working outside the box: breaking down barriers with a learning development peer mentor scheme presentation abstract community response next steps and additional questions authors’ reflection acknowledgements references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special issue 25: aldinhe conference proceedings and reflections october 2022 ________________________________________________________________________ supporting students with the transition to university in a covid-19 world: expectations and reality sonia hood university of reading, uk edward powell university of reading, uk presentation abstract in the spring of 2021 concerns were being raised in the teaching and learning community at the university of reading regarding the incoming cohort of students. with such disruption to their education would they be adequately prepared for university level study? what impact would this, in turn, have on support services, like study advice, and retention and progression rates? and what of our returning students? are they adequately prepared for the academic challenges they will face at the next level of study? as a result, a university-wide working group was established to research the issue and offer solutions to support students and staff with the 2021 transition of our new and returning students. this paper will report on the findings from focus groups with year 13 students and sixth-form tutors, and questionnaire data gathered from our current students during the summer of 2021. it will highlight the perceived academic strengths and development areas from their various perspectives and their beliefs as to what issues they will face with transitioning to the next level. we will share our university’s response to this; how we supported students with their academic transition this academic year. finally, we will report whether our predictions as to what students would present to study advice this year materialised, how we believe the covid-19 pandemic will continue to affect students in the coming years, and how that in turn will affect demand levels and types of support we as a learning development service will offer. hood and powell supporting students with the transition to university in a covid-19 world: expectations and reality journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 2 community response this was an excellent session: thank you for sharing the insights you gained from engaging with fe practitioners and students, which will help us think about our own transition support for the coming year. the idea that we need to make more space over the whole first year (and beyond) to develop independent learning habits certainly resonates with what we’re finding at salford – it’s a real challenge where, as your work suggests, concerted effort from both learning developers and academics is needed. i also wanted to mention that colleagues did some work under our academic transition project to look at how btec students are taught to understand how we can better scaffold their transition into he-level study, and this led the university to focus on introducing more formative assessment, more personalised support, stronger cohort identity, and repetition of key learning concepts, amongst other things. (es). i think it’s interesting to think about each year group’s transition; how are the engagement and skills challenges different? e.g., the 2019 intake started university in person (so are not ‘online natives’) and, in our experience at least, seemed quite keen to get back to campus when that finally became possible in 2021-22. the 2020 intake were more like ‘online natives’ and for them, in-person university in the second year could seem uncomfortable, more like an outlier. then you have the 2021 and onwards intakes who should be used to a more hybrid approach from the start; they might come in with more of a ‘deficit’ in some areas (i hate using the word, but you will get my point) but be more digitally savvy and conditioned where education is concerned. i have noticed much more student concern about exams at university since the lockdowns. it is interesting that you have a gradual trend back towards face-to-face for one-to-one appointments – we’ve not completely experienced that this year. it started about 50/50 face-to-face and online; faceto-face then fell off the radar when the omicron variant of covid-19 arrived and has not really bounced back (although it has a little). more like 70% of our appointments have been online, despite always offering face-to-face too (slightly skewed by us being a school where many of our students are off-campus, part-time, work, do placements all day etc.). thank you for this session. it was really helpful to see the process you went through to develop your support and resources. i too have never before had to think in terms of such distinct ‘cohorts’. i really agree with one of the comments from the chat, that for the 202122 academic year, it was the second-year/ level 5 students who really needed lots of hood and powell supporting students with the transition to university in a covid-19 world: expectations and reality journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 3 support after an isolating level 4 experience. the overall intervention is clearly very inclusive, but one question i had in the back of my mind, was whether there was (or is any ongoing) impact or implication for people who come from non-traditional routes (mature entrants), and whether you have been able to capture and anticipate any change to their needs post-pandemic. thanks again! i found the way you have described and evidenced the process of supporting students and staff through recent changes really robust. i was not able to follow the link to your study smart resource but based on your discussion i can see similar trends with the work led by ld colleagues at my institution, demonstrating similar concerns and initiatives were present across the sector. i also thought that complementing this student-directed resource with a staff guide was an excellent idea, ensuring that the resource is thoroughly understood as part of the wider institutional support effort. this rigorous, evidence-based work on supporting student transition to he is definitely one dimension of ld work that should be further developed post-pandemic. (ac). this session raised a number of important issues regarding transitioning into he, which was very timely due to the circumstances entrants currently find themselves in. in particular, this session made me think about the key role ld has in supporting transitions and how some of what has been implemented in this institution (and others) could be added to my institutions’ approach to transitioning into he. i am currently working on an online module to support transition into he so i found the session quite inspirational. it has also given me hope that what i am currently working on has significance beyond my institution. (sbm). editorial comment that transition to university is a process that takes longer than an induction week has long been recognised (tinto, 1988) but during the past ten years it is an area that has attracted particular focus, with the advent of preand post-arrival online modules and inductions (shahabudin, hood and reid, 2018; jamieson and nolan, 2019), and ‘study guides’ aimed at supporting students not only in securing university places but also preparing for and adapting to the changes (cottrell, 2012; bartholomew and withers, 2019). this presentation disseminated the findings of a research study conducted at the university of hood and powell supporting students with the transition to university in a covid-19 world: expectations and reality journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 4 reading, where a cross-university working group researched in the summer of 2021 with prospective students, to identify developmental needs for incoming level 3 and 4 students joining in september 2021. these students were often direct entry students from further education, where they had experienced 18 months of disruption due to covid-19. the participants reported back similar findings in their own institutions including increased mental health challenges and worries about exams, and provided insights into the variations in students’ attitudes to returning to campus and preferences for online and/or face-to-face support. an observation relating to changes in student behaviour with the advent of the omicron variant is a further sobering reminder that this is an ongoing situation and of the importance, as identified by the authors, of working with academic colleagues, as well as school and fe partners to be able to ‘pick-up’ and respond quickly to issues to provide timely and effective support. this is a rare example of proactive research being taken beyond the university, where the presenters were commended on their engagement with further education (fe) and students’ pre-arrival through empirical data gathering. in response to the presenters’ recognition that there are often colleagues in heis with links to fe, a first step in this type of initiative can be building rapport with colleagues involved in access, widening participation, and outreach programmes who will have established relationships with schools and fe. authors’ reflection this session made us reflect upon the value of building stronger relationships with our secondary schools and colleges to fully understand issues of transition. we appreciate that there may be areas within our university already engaging in this way, yet communication needs to be strengthened if we are to truly understand the issues of transition. in addition, our research did suggest that the covid-19 pandemic, and the understandable pressures put on fe institutions to ensure students had sufficient subject knowledge, meant there was little room for academic skills development. this puts us, as learning developers, at the forefront of supporting students (and staff) – an opportunity for us to raise our profile and value within our institutions. and while we will continue to deal with the impact of the pandemic, we can only predict the skills students may need additional support to develop. hood and powell supporting students with the transition to university in a covid-19 world: expectations and reality journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 5 our strength this year came in our ability to communicate within our team and with our academic colleagues, to ‘pick up’ common ‘issues’ early and react with new webinars and resources. with improved communication and links with our fe partners, we should be in a better position to offer the support that will be needed to ensure our students are effectively supported to succeed in he. acknowledgments thank you to the contributors who shared their reflections and enriched our insight into this conference presentation and its impact on the audience. special thanks for their generous contributions to emma smith, university of salford, arina cirstea, dmu, and silvina bishopp-martin, canterbury christ church university. the authors are grateful for the contributions of the academic transitions group from the university of reading, who worked on this project. in particular: the chair, professor clare furneaux, and anne-marie henderson and dr richard harris for their research, and our cqsd team for pulling the toolkit together. references bartholomew, s. and withers, j. (2019) making it at uni: navigate your way through the first year of your degree. independently published. cottrell, s. (2012) you2uni: decide. prepare. apply. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan. jamieson, h. and nolan, j. (2019) ‘stepping up to edge hill university: the value and impact for students following the completion of a virtual pre-entry module’, journal of learning development in higher education, issue 16, december, pp.1-21. https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.v0i16.556. shahabudin, k., hood, s. and reid, m. (2018) ‘right time, right space? developing an online transition course for new undergraduates’, journal of learning development https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.v0i16.556 hood and powell supporting students with the transition to university in a covid-19 world: expectations and reality journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 6 in higher education, special edition, october, pp.1-14. https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.v0i0.469. tinto, v. (1988) ‘stages of student departure: reflections on the longitudinal character of student leaving’, journal of higher education, 59(4), pp.438-455. https://doi.org/10.1080/00221546.1988.11780199. author details sonia hood is study advice manager at the university of reading. her research interests are in improving students' self-efficacy with regard to their academic writing and transitions to university. edward powell is a study adviser at the university of reading. his research interests are in the role of learning developers in decolonising the curriculum, and in the professionalisation of learning development. https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.v0i0.469 https://doi.org/10.1080/00221546.1988.11780199 supporting students with the transition to university in a covid-19 world: expectations and reality presentation abstract community response editorial comment authors’ reflection acknowledgments references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special issue 25: aldinhe conference proceedings and reflections october 2022 ________________________________________________________________________ mix and match: student choice in accessing digital or face-toface academic skills support oli johnson university of sheffield, uk presentation abstract given the choice, will students opt for face-to-face or online learning sessions? the 301 academic skills centre at the university of sheffield provides academic skills training (including study skills and maths and statistics support) to students in the form of workshops, one-to-one appointments, and online resources. the transition to online learning during spring 2020 acted as a catalyst for us to develop our digital offer, which proved extremely popular with students studying remotely. as teaching has returned to the classroom we have been keen to retain some of the positive impacts of our online support and to continue offering students a choice in how they access our extracurricular service. throughout the 2021-22 academic year we have provided the option of attending one-toone appointments and workshops either online or face-to-face, which has provided us with a dataset of student preferences. we have been surprised by the ongoing scale of demand for online training and support, and student feedback on the service has provided us with an insight into the reasons behind this demand. this conference session presented data collected during the 2021-22 academic year to explore how and why some students may prefer an online learning alternative and how we intend to develop this delivery model in the future. community response the community response to this presentation consists of two different perspectives on the way in which learning developers – and other colleagues involved in delivering tutorials – might respond to the continued take-up of online appointments. johnson mix and match: student choice in accessing digital or face-toface academic skills support journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 2 benjamin there are obvious benefits to both face-to-face and online provision of tutorials, as oli outlined for us. however, from a wellbeing perspective, i wonder if we have a role to play here in not only offering more face-to-face as we continue to revivify our campuses, but actively encouraging it? online can often be the easier option, which is great, but can that sometimes be the lazier option, with some students continuing a house-bound ennui: a lethargic screen-based drift approach to their studies, when coming to campus and behaving in a more human way will have all the great energising benefits to mental health that were discussed? this encouragement of face-to-face could run alongside the offering of online, in much the same way that parents encourage outside play, while offering the convenience of the screen when beneficial. sonia this was a very insightful session which raised some interesting questions. why is it that students still continue to request online one-too-ones now they can have them face-toface, and should we worry about this trend? in answer to the latter, and benjamin’s comment above, i am not sure we do need to worry or ‘encourage’ them in for face-to-face sessions. it is interesting that some students find online sessions less intimidating – and indeed our own research suggested that students do get anxious before meeting one of us for a one-too-one (something that hadn't really occurred to me). if we can get them to attend an online one-too-one rather than not see us at all, i think this is okay. in fact online one-too-ones work well for sharing documents and i still have many online meetings with colleagues, even though we are encouraged to be on campus. i can see this as an argument for online versus face-to-face teaching – but do see the mental health benefits of the latter. i think one thing i will take away is that this year’s cohort has had different educational experiences to the ones before so our traditional ways of supporting them may no longer work – and next year’s cohort will be different again. it is also interesting to note that other universities have had issues with engagement this year. i don’t know why this is and would be interested in any thoughts. i think we need to work closer with our school/college contacts to understand the expectations and experiences they come with – so we can prepare for the transition. johnson mix and match: student choice in accessing digital or face-toface academic skills support journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 3 editorial comments the presentation and these dialogic reflections may serve as a reminder to us that there will be a complexity and nuance to student preferences which should guard against a straightforward policy decision on the offer of virtual and in-person appointments. a recent paper published in the journal of learning development in higher education, for example, found differences in preferences according to level of study, subject area, and the idiosyncrasies of students’ personal circumstances (parsons and johnston, 2022). whilst we cannot infantilise students or take away their agency to choose, we also have a responsibility to design interventions that offer holistic benefits to students. author’s reflection my paper dealt with the relative demand for online and face-to-face academic skills support and the somewhat confusing picture that has emerged of student preferences. when submitting my abstract for this conference, i wavered, as our students have done, over the choice of presenting online or face-to-face. participating online would be easier, more convenient, and would save me a long journey. i could eat snacks, put my feet up, and maybe get a few other things done during the other papers. i decided, however, to choose the face-to-face option; it has been a few years since i have been ‘at’ a conference, so i thought i would give physical participation a go, just for a change. yes, it was more of an effort, yes, it felt more intimidating, but it also reminded me what i have been missing. it was a pleasure to engage directly again in a series of presentations and to experience those off-the-cuff conversations between sessions. for those reasons, i am inclined to agree with the reflection from an audience member, which we also discussed on the day: learning should not always be driven by what students want but should also recognise what students need. online delivery will always have a place in our service post-pandemic due to the enormous accessibility benefits for students who are not able to make it to our building in person (as underlined by sonia’s comments above), but we will also focus on encouraging students back into our face-toface sessions. with a greater understanding of what the additional benefits are of learning face-to-face, we can make the most of that environment to make sure that our in-person johnson mix and match: student choice in accessing digital or face-toface academic skills support journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 4 sessions are interactive, discussion-based, and offer opportunities for peer-learning and sharing of ideas and experience. i can see our programme becoming more clearly differentiated in the future between more didactic, easily-digested online content and more active, face-to-face learning. next steps and additional reflections during the covid-19 pandemic, students were asked to adjust quickly to hybrid models of learning in schools and further education institutions, and across higher education. their experiences of learning and the forums in which it takes place dramatically shifted. students have adapted: how will we? together, the community responses and author reflections here capture a conversation that is likely to be relevant to our community of practitioners for some time. acknowledgements special thanks to benjamin olsen, arts university bournemouth, and sonia hood, university of reading, for sharing their generous and useful reflections. references parsons, b. and johnston, h. (2022) ‘understanding student preferences for one-to-one writing appointments post-pandemic’, journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24, september, pp.1-22. https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.vi24.871. author details oli johnson is an academic skills adviser at 301 academic skills centre at the university of sheffield. his background is in russian and slavonic studies and he is especially interested in helping students build confidence and overcome the imposter syndrome that he often experienced as an early-career researcher. at 301, he coordinates a programme https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.vi24.871 johnson mix and match: student choice in accessing digital or face-toface academic skills support journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 5 of study skills training that includes in-curricular and co-curricular workshops, one-to-one tutorials, and online resources. he works with a fantastic team of postgraduate student tutors who ensure that support is current, relevant, and accessible for the community of student users. mix and match: student choice in accessing digital or face-to-face academic skills support presentation abstract community response benjamin sonia editorial comments author’s reflection next steps and additional reflections acknowledgements references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 27 april 2023 ________________________________________________________________________ ©2023 the author(s) (cc-by 4.0) ready player one: using vevox to elicit student participation in lectures joe greenwood yeonsung university, south korea; (formerly of) manchester metropolitan university, uk abstract with the pivot back to on-campus teaching, many students find themselves in an unfamiliar learning environment: the lecture theatre. this can result in low rates of participation in lectures, especially with a diverse student demographic, including english as an additional language students. this can result in exclusion from learning for these students, as well as many students feeling nervous about participating in a lecture format. this case study looked at using the education technology vevox to elicit student participation in a lecture format. vevox was used to embed multiple tasks into a series of lectures with a cohort of third-year engineering students. vevox was found to be effective at eliciting high levels of participation, although some tasks had higher participation rates than others. an evaluation survey was also conducted with students where they responded positively to the implementation of vevox in the lectures. finally, the case study discusses potential applications and limitations of vevox, with a recommendation that similar research could be carried out across multiple courses and cohorts to improve efficacy. keywords: inclusive practice; educational technology; lecturing; student participation. introduction encouraging student engagement in higher education (he) is a task which has provoked scholarly research for decades (bloom, 1953; bligh, 1972). the classic lecture approach of the ‘sage on the stage’ (king, 1993, p.30), whereby the lecturer stands at the front of the theatre and transmits knowledge to the students seated in front of them, is a scene that will be familiar to most who have been through he in the uk. however, as king (1993) greenwood ready player one: using vevox to elicit student participation in lectures journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 2 notes, this approach reduces the students to passive learners, with no active role in the learning taking place. in fact, bloom (1953) discovered that in lectures only 1% of students’ thoughts were actively engaged in attempting to solve problems, organise, or synthesise information, whilst 78% of the lecture was spent in passive thought. consequently, many researchers have examined how to engage students more actively in lectures. in his paper ‘lecturing: a lost art’, penson recommends that lectures need to be a ‘learning event’, with activities, short group discussions, and other enhancements to increase engagement from the students (2012, p.73). however, whilst these enhancements can be built into lectures, it can be a challenge to encourage students to participate in them. participation is a key form of student engagement, but it can be difficult to elicit in lectures. eliciting participation in lectures can often exclude students who do not have the confidence to participate, so this research aims to utilise the educational technology tool vevox to elicit student participation in a lecture context and facilitate inclusive practice. context the research took place march to april 2022, and the chosen cohort were third-year engineering students, undertaking their final year projects. the projects consisted of primary research and a 6,500-word report following the structure of introduction, literature review, methods, results, discussion, and conclusion. the research took place within four one-hour lectures delivered to the entire cohort in a lecture theatre. the cohort numbered 185 students but due to poor attendance across the university for face-to-face provision significantly fewer students attended the lectures. this could reflect a wider issue in he, where cohorts who spent the majority of their learning experiences online could be reticent to return to the classroom (hood and powell, 2022). it was decided to use the educational technology vevox in the lectures, as it allowed students to participate in activities anonymously using an internet connected device. this anonymity could reduce ‘participative performativity’ whereby students feel obligated to actively engage in lectures due to ‘student engagement policies’ which reward participation (macfarlane, 2022, p.142). whilst there was no such policy in place in this context, the anonymity of vevox could still prevent this participative performativity and help promote meaningful greenwood ready player one: using vevox to elicit student participation in lectures journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 3 engagement. vevox was also chosen as the university has a licence for the software and it allows large numbers of participants to engage, which suits a lecture format. guiding questions • how can vevox be utilised for inclusive practice? • how can the use of vevox encourage participation in a lecture style format? • what is the most successful way to integrate vevox to encourage participation? • how will students perceive the use of vevox in lectures? ethical approval ethical approval for the research was obtained using ethos, the university’s ethics platform. a participant information sheet was provided to all student in two formats: digitally a week before, and then a paper copy during the first lecture. the sheet explained what the study would involve, what the data collected would be used for, and how it would be stored. a consent form was also provided to each student prior to the first lecture, and these were signed and collected. there was extra time immediately before the first lecture for this to be done, so it did not use any of the 60 minutes of allotted lecture time. the data collected using vevox is completely anonymous and cannot be attributed to any individual participant. literature review when considering how to elicit participation in lectures, the characteristics of the learner group must be considered. the engineering cohort this research took place with contained around 52% international students, who did not use english as their first language. this can affect their willingness to participate verbally in lectures, due to a fear of making an error (doyon, 2000). the cohort was also 80% male, which can lead to female students being unwilling to verbally participate in lectures by answering questions the lecturer may ask (jones and dindia, 2004). other studies have found this to be especially true in scientific disciplines (eddy, brownell and wenderoth, 2014; ballen et al., 2017). in addition to these student profiles above, even the most confident student can be hesitant to speak greenwood ready player one: using vevox to elicit student participation in lectures journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 4 out in a lecture context, due to the social pressure involved with speaking aloud in front of a group of their peers (liu and littlewood, 1997). consequently, activities such as verbal question and answer segments to the entire lecture theatre can be ineffective at eliciting participation and can exclude sections of the student demographic. it is also important to consider the impact the covid-19 pandemic has had on students’ willingness to participate. when this research took place, students had spent a large proportion of their university experience learning online. this often consisted of online lectures where the students’ cameras were off, and participation would mainly take the form of typing in the chat box. with the pivot back to on campus learning, especially in a lecture format, the prospect of verbal participation was potentially daunting for a large percentage of students. these factors necessitated the need for inclusive practice, to attempt to make students feel comfortable enough to participate in the lectures. denial (2020) discusses a pedagogy of kindness, which recognises students as active classroom partners; educational technology can be used to encourage this role as active classroom partners. to implement this, research by gilmour (2021) used the mentimeter student response system to analyse student perspectives on a wider scale, such as their opinions on the course and staff as whole. gilmour rationalised this use by claiming ‘the pandemic had the potential to create disconnection, so such opportunities to hear the student voice were important in building trust and supporting students to consider their agency’ (2021, p.2). the necessity of hearing the student voice is also important in individual lectures, as through student participation it is possible to check learning, formatively assess students, and allow them the ask questions and express their perspective. the use of vevox in this research aimed to involve the students as active classroom partners, and the anonymity of the software allowed this process to be inclusive. kuh and hu (2001) suggest that technology can be a motivating factor to encourage students to participate in learning through cognitive engagement. similarly, laird and kuh (2005) found a strong correlation between using educational technology and involvement in active and collaborative learning. research by gill-simmen (2021) utilised padlet to promote participation amongst a cohort. gill-simmen cited the multi-user interface, ability to interact asynchronously, and the potential for active engagement as key drivers behind the choice of padlet. this research utilised vevox as it allows many users to participate, greenwood ready player one: using vevox to elicit student participation in lectures journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 5 which is important in a lecture context. however, vevox differs from padlet as it provides feedback on students’ responses instantly, so is more suited for checking and working with responses within the lecture. methodology newsander and borrego (2009) define student engagement as a learning environment where students are actively engaged in a culture of participation and are provided with adequately resourced and interactive approach to teaching. consequently, the choice of software to elicit participation was key. unlike similar software such as mentimeter, vevox has several functions that allow students to participate: polls, word clouds, open text responses, and quizzes. this variety of functions allows for the student responses to be collected in diverse formats, and for the students to cognitively engage with the session content in diverse formats, which can increase motivation (kuh and hu, 2001; laird and kuh, 2005). the anonymity of vevox was also a key factor in the decision to utilise it as an engagement tool. the anonymity could help to reduce students feeling obligated to engage in the aforementioned ‘participative performativity’ (macfarlane, 2022, p.142). macfarlane argues that ‘performative environments encourage inauthentic behaviour as individuals endeavour to conform’ (2015, p.347). vevox not only allowed a diverse range of activities to be embedded into the lectures, but also allowed for students to remain anonymous and thus engage meaningfully with the activities, as opposed to feeling obligated. to operate vevox, students visit vevox.app on an internet connected device and then type in the session code when prompted. they are then logged in to the session, and any points of participation will appear on their device. vevox can be embedded into powerpoint presentations (ppts), so the questions appear on the slides, and the response options then appear on the student’s device. when the lecturer is ready, they close the activity, and the response data can be displayed on the ppt and on students’ devices. there were four sessions delivered, designed to help students write these elements of their project: aims and objectives, literature reviews, methodologies, and results and discussions. the format of the points of participation varied, with some poll questions, greenwood ready player one: using vevox to elicit student participation in lectures journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 6 some multiple choice and some word clouds used throughout the sessions. at the end of the final session the students were asked to complete a short evaluation survey using vevox, which aimed to ascertain their opinions on the use of the software. results participation in the polls can be seen from the results available on vevox: 125 individual students connected to the vevox, whilst 87 participated in the polls. this represents a 70% participation rate across all four sessions combined. session 1 figure 1 illustrates the results from a multiple-choice question in session 1 on aims and objectives, whereby students had to select whether the displayed sentence was an aim or an objective. as can be seen from figure 1, from the 72 who attended, 53 students participated. this represents a participation rate of 74%. figure 1 is shown as an example of the types of activity and participation rate from this session. figure 1. aims and objectives poll results. session 2 figure 2 shows the results from a word cloud participation in session 2 on literature reviews. after some slides illustrating the forms and functions of a literature review the students were asked to type in no more than three words what the function of a literature review is. words that were used more commonly by the students appear larger on the word cloud. after the results were shown, the lecturer commented on some points they considered important to raise. as can be seen from figure 2, from the 50 who attended, 13 greenwood ready player one: using vevox to elicit student participation in lectures journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 7 students participated. this represents a participation rate of 26%. figure 2 is shown as an example of the types of activity and participation rate from this session. figure 2. literature reviews word cloud results. session 3 figures 3 and 4 show an activity from session 3 on methodologies, whereby the students were tasked with reading the sentences on the slide extracted from a methodology. the sentences were numbered, and the task was to re-order the sentences correctly and post that order on the word cloud. as shown by figure 4, from the 16 who attended, 8 students completed the activity. this represented a participation rate of 50%. the number of students who attended session 3 was low, due to the session coinciding with industrial action at the university. greenwood ready player one: using vevox to elicit student participation in lectures journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 8 figure 3. methodologies sentence ordering task. figure 4. methodologies sentence ordering task: word cloud results. session 4 figure 5 illustrates the results from a multiple-choice question embedded in session 4: discussions. the students were tasked with reading the sentence at the top of a figure, which comes from a discussion section. as indicated by the figure, they then had to select two elements of a discussion they thought the sentence represented. as can be seen from figure 5, 9 students participated in the activity, out of a class total of 11. this represents a participation rate of 82%. the number of students for the final session was low, due to it unfortunately coinciding with extreme weather which made travel difficult that day. figure 5 is shown as an example of the types of activity and participation rate from this session. greenwood ready player one: using vevox to elicit student participation in lectures journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 9 figure 5. discussions multiple choice poll results. all sessions another element of participation built into the sessions was giving the students the opportunity to vote on what activities they wanted to be incorporated in the following week’s lecture. the lecturer selected a range of activities related to the following week’s topics, and the students selected any they felt would benefit them. figure 6 below is from session 3 on methodologies, and shows 10 students participating from 16 attending, for a response rate of 63%. greenwood ready player one: using vevox to elicit student participation in lectures journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 10 figure 6. activities self-selection. discussion evaluation survey results as evidenced by the research results, the use of vevox elicited a high level of participation from the students present in the lecture, with a participation rate of 70% of the students who attended the lectures. however, there was a significant drop in attendance at the sessions: 72 attended session 1, 50 attended session 2, 16 attended session 3, and 11 attended session 4. whilst this could have been partly due to external factors, such as industrial action and adverse weather conditions, parsons and johnston (2022) note students’ personal circumstances can have an impact on their face-to-face attendance. the reasons for using vevox to evaluate the use of the software were similar to the reasons for its use in the lectures; namely, that it allowed anonymity. however, as only 16 evaluation responses were elicited, this must be noted as a weakness in this study. this did not change the objective of the case-study, to utilise vevox to elicit student participation in lectures, as engagement is vital for students who attend lectures. arguably in this research, using vevox facilitated inclusive practice, as students who may not feel comfortable speaking out verbally in a lecture context were able to participate anonymously, which research has shown can improve participation rates (freeman, blayney and ginns, 2006). however, there was some discrepancy in participation rates amongst the different formats of task. the multiple-choice selection questions elicited higher participation rates than the word cloud activities. this could indicate that a lower workload for each participation task will elicit higher participation rates. consequently, the results indicate that several shorter greenwood ready player one: using vevox to elicit student participation in lectures journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 11 tasks in a lecture format may lead to a more successful integration of vevox in a lecture format. higher participation rates without a purpose are ultimately redundant, but a controlled study by mayer et al. (2009) found that students’ exam results improved when a class engaged in active participation in lectures, using a similar method as vevox. mayer et al. (2009) theorise that this is connected to the generative theory of learning, whereby students who are more cognitively engaged in lectures will retain information more effectively. this supports the use of vevox as a tool to elicit participation and thereby enhance students’ learning in a lecture context. evaluation survey discussion the students’ responses to the evaluation survey indicate a positive response to the use of vevox. the 16 responses were divided into 4 categories of meaning based on what the students stated they felt the use of vevox achieved. the categories are: • ability to respond anonymously. • agency in session design and contents. • helped understand the session contents. • improved engagement. some responses were included in two categories, due to their being multiple elements to the response. for example, ‘it allowed me to practise what was being taught in the session. also, it was nice to use if you are too shy to answer’ was included in both ‘ability to respond anonymously’ and ‘helped understand the session contents’ as it indicated both. the results of the evaluation are displayed in figure 10. greenwood ready player one: using vevox to elicit student participation in lectures journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 12 figure 10. evaluation survey response topics. as can be seen from figure 10, the students found the use of vevox most effective in helping them understand the session contents, with eight students responding thus. this correlates with research by mayer et al. (2009) and shimaya et al. (2020), which points to eliciting active participation in lectures using technology to be an effective way to enhance student learning. these results also indicate that students positively perceive the use of vevox in lectures, as indicated by the six students who responded that using vevox improved their engagement. two students felt the ability to respond anonymously improved the sessions. this connects with research by freeman, blayney and ginns (2006), who state that academics should consider the use of electronic response systems to design engaging learning environments. the results also support claims (denial, 2020; gilmour, 2021) that anonymity of response can form a key part in a pedagogy of kindness, and therefore inclusive practice. bearing these arguments in mind, lectures are arguably an ideal scenario to implement this technology. in hindsight, it may have been valuable to include a student self-evaluation on their levels of motivation to engage in the lectures, similar to work by minogue, murphy and salmons (2018), who used semi-structured interviews asking students to self-evaluate their motivation to engage in lessons. this could have been built into the vevox evaluation, perhaps by asking a question such as ‘did the use of vevox impact your motivation to 2 2 8 6 number of responses mentioning this element ability to respond anonymously agency in session design and contents helped understand the session contents improved engagement greenwood ready player one: using vevox to elicit student participation in lectures journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 13 participate in the lectures?’. this question would have arguably led to responses more targeted to the research question of how to elicit engagement from students in lectures. conclusions scope and limitations the scope for implementing vevox into lectures in he is vast. since returning to campus, many students will have attended a lecture, and may have experienced hesitancy in participating. vevox can be utilised to support educators to elicit this participation. there are limitations to this study. due to external circumstances such as industrial action and extreme weather, attendance for the second two sessions was significantly lower than for the first two. this lowers the efficacy of the study, as it is hard to know if vevox would have continued to elicit participation from a large group across four lectures. additionally, some activities implemented using vevox did not elicit high rates of participation. the word clouds elicited lower rates of participation than the multiple-choice polls, for example. this could indicate there is a ‘threshold’ to students’ willingness to engage with vevox tasks. if the task is too demanding, the anonymity inherent with vevox may tempt students to simply not partake. this could be a drawback to the use of vevox, or other anonymous audience participation software. recommendations for further research to improve the efficacy of this study, a similar research approach could be taken with multiple other cohorts. if these were in other disciplines and with other year groups, this would help ascertain whether vevox was effectively eliciting participation. a longer series of lectures with more consistent attendance would be a good measure of the prolonged effectiveness of vevox at eliciting participation in lectures. it would also be beneficial to utilise other forms of educational technology and compare them against vevox. for example, using a technology that allows anonymous participation, such as padlet, would allow for comparison and help to ascertain whether anonymous software would encourage students to engage in participative performativity (macfarlane, 2022). this comparison would allow analysis of whether anonymity encourages more meaningful engagement, as greenwood ready player one: using vevox to elicit student participation in lectures journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 14 students are not just participating to be seen as endeavouring to conform to the lecturer’s expectations (macfarlane, 2015) in this study, using vevox to elicit participation from students in lectures resulted in several benefits: good rates of participation, an ability to adapt to the students’ responses, and a positive response from the students. with the pivot back to on campus learning after the challenging period many students faced during covid-19, the need for inclusive practice is greater than ever, especially in a potentially intimidating environment such as a lecture theatre. educational technology such as vevox can support educators to design and deliver this inclusive practice. references ballen, c. j., danielsen, m., jørgensen, c., grytnes, j.-a. and cotner, s. (2017) ‘norway’s gender gap: classroom participation in undergraduate introductory science’, nordic journal of stem education, 1(1), pp.262-270. https://doi.org/10.5324/njsteme.v1i1.2325. bligh, d. (1972) what’s the use of lectures? london: penguin. bloom, b. (1953) ‘thought processes in lectures and discussions’, journal of general education, (7) pp.160-169. denial, c. (2020) ‘a pedagogy of kindness’, in stommel, j., friend, c. and morris, s. m. (eds.) critical digital pedagogy: a collection. washington. d.c.: hybrid pedagogy inc, pp.212-218. doyon, p. (2000) ‘shyness in the japanese efl class: why it is a problem, what it is, what causes it, and what to do about it’, lang teach, 24(1), pp.11-16. eddy, s. l., brownell, s. e. and wenderoth, m. p. (2014) ‘gender gaps in achievement and participation in multiple introductory biology classrooms’, cbe—life sciences education, 13(3), pp.478-492. https://doi.org/10.1187/cbe.13-10-0204. https://doi.org/10.5324/njsteme.v1i1.2325 https://doi.org/10.1187/cbe.13-10-0204 greenwood ready player one: using vevox to elicit student participation in lectures journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 15 freeman, m., blayney, p. and ginns, p. (2006) ‘anonymity and in class learning: the case for electronic response systems’, educ technol, 22(4), pp.568-580. https://doi.org/10.14742/ajet.1286. gill-simmen, l. (2021) ‘using padlet in instructional design to promote cognitive engagement: a case study of undergraduate marketing students’, journal of learning development in higher education, issue 20, march, pp.1-14. https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.vi20.575. gilmour, a. (2021) ‘adopting a pedagogy of kindness’, journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22, october, pp.1-6. https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.vi22.798. hood, s. and powell, e. (2022) ‘supporting students with the transition to university in a covid-19 world: expectations and reality’, journal of learning development in higher education, issue 25, october, pp.1-6. https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.vi25.991. jones, s. m. and dindia, k. (2004) ‘a meta-analytic perspective on sex equity in the classroom’, review of educational research, 74(4), pp.443-471. https://doi.org/10.3102/00346543074004443. king, a. (1993) ‘from sage on the stage to guide on the side’, college teaching, 41(1), pp.30-35. available at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/27558571?origin=jstor-pdf (accessed: 11 august 2022). kuh, g. d. and hu, s. (2001) ‘the relationships between computer and information technology use, selected learning and personal development outcomes, and other college experiences’, journal of college student development, 42(3), pp.217-232. laird, t. f. n. and kuh, g. d. (2005) ‘student experiences with information technology and their relationship to other aspects of student engagement’, research in higher education, 46(2), pp.211-233. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11162-004-1600-y. https://doi.org/10.14742/ajet.1286 https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.vi20.575 https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.vi22.798 https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.vi25.991 https://doi.org/10.3102/00346543074004443 https://www.jstor.org/stable/27558571?origin=jstor-pdf https://doi.org/10.1007/s11162-004-1600-y greenwood ready player one: using vevox to elicit student participation in lectures journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 16 liu, n.-f. and littlewood, w. (1997) ‘why do many students appear reluctant to participate in classroom learning discourse?’, system, 25(3), pp.371-384. macfarlane, b. (2015) ‘student performativity in higher education: converting learning as a private space into a public performance’, higher education research & development, 34(2), pp.338-350. https://doi.org/10.1080/07294360.2014.956697. macfarlane, b. (2022) ‘methodology, fake learning, and emotional performativity’, ecnu review of education, 5(1), pp.140-155. https://doi.org/10.1177/2096531120984786. mayer, r. e. et al. (2009) ‘clickers in college classrooms: fostering learning with questioning methods in large lecture classes’, contemp educ psychol, 34(1), pp.5157. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cedpsych.2008.04.002. minogue, l., murphy, c. and salmons, k. (2018) ‘embedding learning development; a model for collaborative practice’, journal of learning development in higher education, issue 13, april, pp.1-11. https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.v0i13.443. newswander, l. k. and borrego, m. (2009) ‘engagement in two interdisciplinary graduate programs’, higher education, 58(4), pp.551-562. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734009-9215-z. parsons, b. and johnston, h. (2022) ‘understanding student preferences for one-to-one writing appointments post-pandemic’, journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24, september, pp.1-22. https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.vi24.871. penson, p. e. (2012) ‘lecturing: a lost art’, currents in pharmacy teaching and learning, 4(1), pp.72-76. shimaya, j. et al. (2020) ‘active participation in lectures via a collaboratively controlled robot,’ international journal of social robotics, 13(4), pp.587-598. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12369-020-00651-y. https://doi.org/10.1080/07294360.2014.956697 https://doi.org/10.1177/2096531120984786 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cedpsych.2008.04.002 https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.v0i13.443 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-009-9215-z https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-009-9215-z https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.vi24.871 https://doi.org/10.1007/s12369-020-00651-y greenwood ready player one: using vevox to elicit student participation in lectures journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 17 author details joe greenwood currently works as assistant professor of english at yeonsung university in south korea, where his main responsibilities are teaching practical english courses and esp and content-based courses to students across the university. joe has been teaching english for ten years, as well as working in the he sectors in both the uk and south korea. holder of an ma tesol and applied linguistics and a pg dip tesol, joe is currently working towards his phd by published works. his research centres around needs analyses and their creation and application in he. licence ©2023 the author(s). this is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (cc-by 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. see http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. journal of learning development in higher education (jldhe) is a peer-reviewed open access journal published by the association for learning development in higher education (aldinhe). ready player one: using vevox to elicit student participation in lectures abstract introduction context guiding questions ethical approval literature review methodology results session 1 session 2 session 3 session 4 all sessions discussion evaluation survey results evaluation survey discussion conclusions scope and limitations recommendations for further research references author details licence journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special issue 25: aldinhe conference proceedings and reflections october 2022 engaging students online: an analysis of students’ motivations for seeking individual learning development support arina cirstea de montfort university, uk presentation abstract this presentation outlines the key findings of a small-scale research project aimed to explore the motivations for student engagement in self-selecting learning development (ld) online tutorials. the study used a mixed methods approach, including an online survey (n=43) and online interview (n=5). the recruitment invitation was emailed to all users booking a tutorial (n=390) within the project timeframe (october 2020-april 2021). the generalisability of findings is limited by the low response rate (16.8%) as well as age bias of the sample (the over-24 age group was overrepresented at 75% of the sample despite being only 30% of the ld user population). findings show that the main driver for engagement reported was participants’ limited confidence in their own academic writing abilities, which was consistently linked to attainment. engagement was further motivated through a range of perceived impacts, including improved confidence and awareness of academic conventions. participants reported a generally positive attitude towards online delivery, with key benefits including removing access barriers for students with complex commitments, travel and health issues. conversely, the main downside of online tutorials was seen as diminished interpersonal contact. qualitative data from both survey and interviews were further investigated using a discourse analysis framework. one key finding was that the path to ld engagement is often mediated by academic authority figures, who may exert a significant impact on learner self-views. the presentation was designed to initiate discussion on the implications of these findings for learning developers. one area of reflection i planned to submit for the participants’ consideration is how lessons learned from the enforced pivoting to online delivery can cirstea engaging students online: an analysis of students’ motivations for seeking individual learning development support journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 2 underpin the developmental dimension of ld, with the ultimate goal of promoting learner confidence and growth. community response a range of themes emerged from this fascinating presentation – from looking at online provision in the context of social justice, to treating it as a source of student empowerment, to making links with other online provisions, such as the writing café. what it made clear is that, despite the difficulties brought about by the covid-19 crisis, some of the changes it inspired need to be maintained, particularly when it comes to enhancing students’ sense of independence and ownership over their university studies. the affordances and obstacles of the online space require much reflection and analysis in order to humanise this new learning space and move forward in the most productive and meaningful way, especially when it comes to inclusivity and fair access (loon, 2021). figure 1. a visual reflection on the session by jacqui bartram. the point the presenter made about power relationships was particularly compelling and gives a clear indication of why learning development is so important. the fact that some cirstea engaging students online: an analysis of students’ motivations for seeking individual learning development support journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 3 respondents deferred to academic authority figures (lecturers and supervisors) shows a tendency to adopt a passive attitude to academic writing. on the other hand, the comments on the rapport with ld tutors demonstrated more balanced power dynamics through ‘mutual understanding’ and ‘conversation’. it would be interesting to do the same survey in a year or two to see whether anything has changed post-pandemic (if there is such a thing). the presentation was also a nice reminder for us as learning developers to focus on empowering students and to try and help them develop their confidence for learning. indeed, i would hazard saying that this underpins everything! introducing goodfellow’s (2005) analytical framework, inspired by gee’s (1999) discourse analysis book, was very illuminating. the presenter used three discourse models: identities, social goods, and sign systems and knowledge to analyse students’ responses to their engagement with an online module and to tease out the relationships between students’ communication of their own identities as learners; their positioning within a set of academic power relationships; and their perspectives on types of academic writing and knowledge systems. i find the tool very powerful for learning developers to interpret student feedback from surveys or interviews, and to better understand the strengths of our provision in a holistic and systematic manner. i have also observed some of the benefits of online learning reported by the presenter in my own practice. i find an online one-to-one especially effective when it focuses on an assignment draft. there is enhanced accessibility to me as i can read the student’s work easily on my device rather than looking at or using the student’s screen. this can be particularly consequential for those who prefer working with pcs (windows), like myself, and who struggle with mac computers, which many of our students use. in the online setting, i also find it easier to provide written feedback simultaneously, which seems especially useful to students whose first language is not english. what i was heartened to find in the presentation was the overall positive feedback the online tutorials received, as well as the fact that the majority of the students were seeking to improve their writing (n=38) over their grades (n=26). the findings are also transferable to similar contexts and schemes. for example, in the writing cafe where i work as a student mentor, we encounter similar behaviours, both positive and negative. when it comes to positives, the clear benefits of online spaces include accessibility for those with transportation issues, schedule conflicts, or health issues, the latter being a particular cirstea engaging students online: an analysis of students’ motivations for seeking individual learning development support journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 4 concern in a post-pandemic britain. but we have also observed challenges and limitations similar to the ones mentioned by the presenter. quality of delivery for the live sessions, for example, is greatly dependent on the absence of technical issues. the alternative presented in the talk – the email-based tutorials – sounds attractive and the writing café could benefit from something similar: an asynchronous method for students to receive feedback on specific issues. nonetheless, as a student myself, seeing students from another university struggling with similar aspects of academic writing was also interesting and could be taken as indication of a much more systemic problem, with students having key gaps in their knowledge and understanding before coming to university. this had been observed in students before the pandemic and has likely only been furthered by the effect the pandemic had on learning. overall, the presentation raised a number of critical points about online tutorials and provoked me to consider the email-based alternatives as potentially useful to the future development of the writing café. to further this study, a larger sample size would be excellent, as the study mentions it was held back by the low response rate. additional investigation into the skewed response demographics could improve this too, although it could just be an anomaly caused by the small sample size. next steps and additional questions this is worthwhile research in the context of social justice as raised in the conference keynote: who reaches out for support, why, and what barriers do they face? i wonder if you have any plans to look at why people might not access ld support, or to build on any of your findings to try to better reach those who do not use the service? one idea which came to mind in terms of increasing response rates was to perhaps add one question for students to answer whenever they sign up for a session asking why they are signing up, then one question after the session to explore what they got out of it. author’s reflection sharing details of this research project with the ld community has been exciting, and also an opportunity to reflect on this work with fresh eyes, almost a year after completion. it was also incredibly powerful to witness the community response building up through such cirstea engaging students online: an analysis of students’ motivations for seeking individual learning development support journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 5 thoughtful and creative reflections, insights from contributors’ own practice as well as practical suggestions. one of the recurrent themes that stood out for me focused on the project’s impact – how have the findings influenced practice? while impact on practice – at individual, team and broader levels – has in fact been the main trigger for the research idea, once the project was completed, i could see there was a high risk of moving on to other commitments and not making the most of the evidence already gathered. in the early days of the project, i was sharing data with my colleagues on the go – as soon as completed questionnaires were returned, or after i was conducting one more interview. we eagerly discussed the implications; moreover, as soon as i had put together a draft of findings, i shared a report which we debated wholeheartedly, considering implications on the restructuring of our online resources, our delivery modes and our provision. and yet, a few months on, it felt like we were once again looking for new sources of evidence. therefore, i feel that this conference presentation, as well as the publication of my research in jldhe (cirstea, 2022), followed by the lovely surprise to see the article selected as a topic of discussion by the jldhe reading club, all gave the data a new life and another chance at making an impact, and becoming part of conversations that matter. in terms of future plans, this heartening community response as well as a very productive discussion of the project’s findings with members of the aldinhe research community have rekindled my determination to pursue further research into motivations for ld tutorial engagement (or lack thereof). on a more personal level, revisiting the project has reminded me of the context in which i conducted the research, between january and may 2021, at a time when the uk was experiencing recurrent waves of the covid-19 pandemic, and most teaching and learning activities were conducted online or anxiously in person, within rigid restrictions. as i was awarded a 2-week sabbatical fellowship in the final stages of the project, i decided to start a research diary, to keep track of my progress with such a tight deadline. re-reading this diary, i was surprised how detached my entries were from the turmoil of the outside world, reminding me of this little gem from the thesis whisperer (mewburn, 2020): cirstea engaging students online: an analysis of students’ motivations for seeking individual learning development support journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 6 figure 2. screenshot from the thesis whisperer (mewburn, 2020). but while vividly ‘screaming inside my heart’, i also found that focusing on my research, and my teaching, were effective distractions and positively impacted on my ability to continue supporting students with their own struggles. a final thought i would like to share refers to the impact of this research project as ‘headspace’, as ‘thinking time’ on my own professional practice. in my diary, i had noted: it has been a long time since i had a whole day to focus on a single project; this is exciting and daunting at the same time. it reminded me that i have been missing research and at the same time the feeling of anxiety and excitement around starting out a new text or writing up something new. the best way to appease that, i find, is by looking back at things i have already done – the research data, past conference presentations that have tackled the topic, the literature i have already read and saved. i feel that research has intrinsic benefits for teaching-focused professionals, by simply offering an opportunity to ‘stop and think’, to enter into a dialogue with our teaching and learning partners – students, colleagues and voices from the wider academic community. all these have a major impact on one’s thinking, which will therefore influence subsequent practice though in not so easily traceable or quantifiable ways. cirstea engaging students online: an analysis of students’ motivations for seeking individual learning development support journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 7 for all these reasons, i feel my small project has had some impact, and more than that, it has found its place as a small piece of the puzzle among all the exciting projects, reflections and ideas shared and debated at this conference. acknowledgments thank you to all the contributors who shared their reflections and enriched our insight into this conference presentation and its impact on the audience. special thanks go to jacqui bartram from the university of hull for her brilliant visual reflections, as well as to robert ping-nan chang from university of the arts london and jack pendlebury from the university of plymouth. references cirstea, a. (2022) ‘engaging students online: an analysis of students’ motivations for seeking individual learning development support’, journal of learning development in higher education, (23). https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.vi23.809. gee, j.p. (1999) an introduction to discourse analysis: theory and method, london: routledge. goodfellow, r. (2005) ‘academic literacies and e-learning: a critical approach to writing in the online university’, international journal of educational research, 43, pp.481-94. loon, m. (2021) ‘flexible learninga literature review 2016-2021’ advance he. available at https://www.advance-he.ac.uk/knowledge-hub/flexible-learning-literature-review2016-2021 (accessed: 18 may 2022). mewburn, i. (2020) ‘while you scream inside your heart, please keep working’. thesis whisperer. available at https://thesiswhisperer.com/2020/12/02/please-keep-doingyour-work-while-you-scream-inside-your-heart-a-guide-for-research-projectmanagement-during-covid/ (accessed: 25 august 2022). https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.vi23.809 https://www.advance-he.ac.uk/knowledge-hub/flexible-learning-literature-review-2016-2021 https://www.advance-he.ac.uk/knowledge-hub/flexible-learning-literature-review-2016-2021 https://thesiswhisperer.com/2020/12/02/please-keep-doing-your-work-while-you-scream-inside-your-heart-a-guide-for-research-project-management-during-covid/ https://thesiswhisperer.com/2020/12/02/please-keep-doing-your-work-while-you-scream-inside-your-heart-a-guide-for-research-project-management-during-covid/ https://thesiswhisperer.com/2020/12/02/please-keep-doing-your-work-while-you-scream-inside-your-heart-a-guide-for-research-project-management-during-covid/ cirstea engaging students online: an analysis of students’ motivations for seeking individual learning development support journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 8 further reading lillis, t. and scott, m. (2008) ‘defining academic literacies research: issues of epistemology, ideology and strategy’, journal of applied linguistics, 4(1), pp. 5-32. author details arina cirstea is a senior lecturer in the centre for learning and study support at de montfort university, where she engages with students at all levels, in curricular as well as co-curricular contexts. central aspects of her role involve working in collaboration with academic staff from the faculty of business and law to design and implement the embedded learning development provision as well as curating the library’s self-selecting programme of workshops. her research interests focus on student engagement, and strategies to mitigate the impact of textual and spatial power structures on individual development. engaging students online: an analysis of students’ motivations for seeking individual learning development support presentation abstract community response next steps and additional questions author’s reflection acknowledgments references further reading author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 24 september 2022 ________________________________________________________________________ a book review of davies, m. (2022) study skills for international postgraduates. 2nd edn. london: bloomsbury academics. silvia colaiacomo university college london, uk keywords: international students; academic skills; internationalisation of the curriculum; intercultural learning. study skills for international postgraduates by martin davies (second edition) aims to support postgraduate taught students across different disciplines to manage expectations and navigate the requirements of their studies in ‘western’ academia, defined in the book as meaning english speaking countries of anglo-saxon heritage. the book seems to address mostly students at australian universities, and it is intended to be used independently for selfstudy before or at the start of a course/programme. the book is divided into eight parts, each comprising between one to six chapters and addressing different aspects of students’ experience of academia. parts 1 to 5 set the context of higher education studies by outlining expectations and possible challenges due to cultural differences, key skills such as time management, how to develop an awareness of the new academic environment – including considerations of academic integrity – and unpacking key terminology such as ‘critical thinking’. . parts 6 and 7 focus on developing writing and oral skills in relation to assessment types. they systematically cover the most common assessments generally used within social science programmes: reports, essays and reviews as well as presentations, groupwork and contributions to class discussions. in addition, section 7 offers guidance for managing communication with tutors and supervisors. finally, part 8 addresses research degrees and how to move towards the development of a research proposal. chapters are enriched by ‘focus boxes’ where key terms are unpacked and/or examples of practice are provided. these colaiacomo a book review of davies, m. (2022) study skills for international postgraduates. london: bloomsbury academics. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 2 sections are particularly extensive in parts 6 and 7, where assessment types are explained in detail. the book is part of the broad literature on study skills designed for independent use; it addresses the readers directly and in a supportive and encouraging tone to help them navigate challenges and possible setbacks. the abundance of examples and clear explanations and tips to approach assessment and academic writing are well-planned, easy to follow and applicable to learners that have just completed an undergraduate degree as well as those who are returning to higher education after a longer break. parts 6 and 7 are indeed the most practical and approachable of the book and possibly the most relevant and useful to readers. examples of practice are selected from a number of disciplines, and they balance an awareness of disciplinary specific discourse with a specific focus on language. in addition, parts 6 and 7 are not underpinned by assumptions about the readers’ preparedness for postgraduate studies, and they are rich in references and additional/external resources. the remaining parts of the book, parts 1 to 5 and then part 8, are far less neutral. the dominating narrative places international students in a constant deficit discourse, without considering individual variations, cultural sensitivity and previous experiences. the word ‘western’ is used across the book to identify an alleged norm and standard of quality against which students need to be acculturated. international students are otherised and constructed as needing support to understand why it is important to learn english or ‘commit yourself’. the initial chapter discusses the notion of ‘independence’ as opposed to ‘passive acceptance’ in western academia, as if international students need to be considered as an indistinct block completely alien to responsibilities or cultural and interpersonal awareness, as well as academic practice. the underlying assumption that emerges through the initial parts implies that postgraduate international students need support in all aspects of their life abroad, from socialising to approaching knowledge construction. by doing so, the book ignores the richness that a diverse student population brings to the classroom and, implicitly, considers the experience of international students as relevant or meaningful in relation to learning development when compared to that of western students. the book doesn’t encourage students to build on their existing learning schema, but to reframe their approach completely colaiacomo a book review of davies, m. (2022) study skills for international postgraduates. london: bloomsbury academics. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 3 by adjusting to the new education environment. by doing so, it seems to contradict the notion of independence and the active approach to learning that it claims to embrace. parts 1 to 5 make recurrent use of non-neutral terms like ‘foreigner’, while at the same time they discuss the importance of heavily culturally loaded concepts such as ‘wellbeing’ and mental health by taking them for granted as universal. the book outlines an approach to education that doesn’t appear to promote inclusivity or mutual understanding and dialogue; it sketches an approach where international students are solely responsible for their performance and integration. also the theme of accessibility is completely absent: an awareness of universal design for learning (rose, 2006) could actually prove useful for students looking for differentiating forms of self and peer support. the initial parts (1 to 5) could have benefitted from a more balanced and nuanced approach to students’ diverse experiences, and could consider some of the literature on the integration of cultural perspectives in an intercultural context (spiteri, 2017), or on internationalisation of the curriculum (leask, 2015). a second theme (or the lack thereof) running through the book and needing further reflection is the lack of awareness of technology and how this can support learning. in part 2 students are encouraged to keep a glossary of new terms. this is a valuable suggestion, but it ignores the large support that students receive from apps and dedicated software and websites, which can be used constructively to support language and academic skills development. in this respect the book seems to dismiss or simply ignore the networks developed during the covid-19 pandemic which are freely available online to both home and international students. equally, the section on plagiarism doesn’t mention broadly used software for plagiarism check that are now well-established and integrated in university systems. these are systems that students need to be aware of in the current environment of digitalised assessment, as they can also provide useful support during formative assignment tasks. in relation to academic misconduct, the book could outline the very timely and pervasive problem of contract cheating (dawson, 2020). we are aware that international students are often targeted by companies offering proof-reading services (slade, 2021) leading to a breach of academic conduct. to alert international students about this potential risk and its implication would be essential in a book that aims to support their preparation for postgraduate studies. colaiacomo a book review of davies, m. (2022) study skills for international postgraduates. london: bloomsbury academics. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 4 all in all, the book provides an excellent tool to support students wishing to reflect upon and improve their academic writing skills in relation to a variety of assessment types, mostly used in social sciences and humanities. it offers clear guidance, examples and easy to follow visuals and tables that unpack different formats and writing styles. there is a wealth of practical tips in relation to each form of assessment and step by step activities that students can complete at their pace to enhance their writing and communicative confidence in english for academic purposes. the main strength of the book is indeed its focus on writing for coursework and different assessment types. the other areas of the book addressing more generic skills are however underpinned by a deficit discourse that may appear less supportive for students, as it doesn’t consider the diversity of students’ approaches and the richness they bring to their postgraduate studies in terms of skills, competence and previous educational experience. references dawson, p. (2020) defending assessment security in a digital world. london: routledge. leask, b. (2015) internationalizing the curriculum. london: routledge. rose, d. h. and meyer, a. (2006) a practical reader in universal design for learning. cambridge, massachusetts: harvard education publishing group. slade, c. (2021) ‘upholding academic integrity: an institutional response to student use of contract cheating services’, the iafor international conference on education. honolulu, hawaii, 6-9 january. spiteri, d. (2017) multiculturalism, higher education and intercultural communication. london: palgrave macmillan. colaiacomo a book review of davies, m. (2022) study skills for international postgraduates. london: bloomsbury academics. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 5 author details silvia colaiacomo is a lecturer in the arena centre for research-based education at ucl. her main area of responsibility is overlooking the teacher training provision for postgraduate teaching assistants. her background is in history of art and modern foreign languages, which she taught in he in the uk and internationally. since 2016, she has been focusing on academic development programmes for teaching and support staff. she is particularly interested in internationalisation of the curriculum and exploring the interaction between space, pedagogy and technology in different disciplinary settings. references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 27 april 2023 ©2023 the author(s) (cc-by 4.0) university students’ digital world of work readiness in relation to their employability competency ingrid l potgieter university of south africa, south africa orcid https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0763-7632 melinde coetzee university of south africa, south africa orcid https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1154-4380 nadia ferreira university of south africa, south africa orcid http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0436-9289 abstract this research empirically examined the extent to which university students’ perceptions about their readiness for the digital-era work world predict their sense of employability competency. data were collected from 486 undergraduate students of a comprehensive south african distance learning higher education institution. regression analysis and structural equation modelling revealed that students’ perceptions of their world of work readiness (i.e. job/occupation certitude and job/occupation fitness) significantly predict their sense of employability competency. the study highlights the importance of building confidence or certainty within students during their academic career about the knowledge, skills and occupations they want to pursue in the digital-era work sphere to positively influence their sense of employability competency. should they feel positive about their work world readiness, they are more likely to exhibit the employability competency of business ingenuity and social digital agility which are deemed essential for the new normal work context. keywords: perceived work readiness; job/occupation certitude; job/occupation fitness; world of work competencies; employability; business ingenuity; sociodigital agility. https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0763-7632 https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1154-4380 http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0436-9289 potgieter, coetzee and ferreira university students’ digital world of work readiness in relation to their employability competency journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 introduction the discussion around graduates’ employability competencies and new digital world of work readiness remains essential for their fitness and readiness for the competitive and volatile technologically driven career space, also referred to as the new normal world of work (bates, et al., 2019; bridgstock, grant-imaru & mcalpine, 2019; ramnund-mansingh & reddy, 2021; tomlinson & holmes, 2017). a vast amount of research is found on the influence of external forces such as technological changes, digital disruption and artificial intelligence on the new world of work which profoundly affect the employability of graduates (atkins, 2020; hite & mcdonald, 2020; industry week, 2020; lent, 2018; potgieter, 2021; potgieter, ferreira & coetzee, 2019). higher education institutions should focus on additional skills and capabilities needed to develop graduates’ employability competency and increase their perceived readiness for the future workplace (ramnundmansingh & reddy, 2021). masole and van dyk (2016) found that graduates and employees alike feel ill prepared for the world of work. they noted that there is a need for graduates to develop competencies beyond their qualifications to prepare them for the stressful and ever-changing world of work. this article provides deeper insight into higher education students’ perceptions about their world of work readiness and fitness, and the degree to which these perceptions predict their sense of employability competency. this research thus goes beyond the study of mere skills and personal qualities in order to make an original contribution to the body of knowledge concerned with graduates’ employability in the digital-era work world. first, the study may spark a discussion on the employability competency graduates require for the digital-era world of work. secondly, the study findings can be used by higher education institutions and career development practitioners to guide students in developing the required readiness and employability competency for the 2020s world of work. literature review according to ramnund-mansingh and reddy (2021), graduates need to take proactive steps to prepare themselves and develop suitable employability competencies for the new digitally driven career space. bridgstock, grant-imaru and mcalpine (2019) suggest that employability preparation can be done by developing awareness and insight into one’s potgieter, coetzee and ferreira university students’ digital world of work readiness in relation to their employability competency journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 own career values, competencies and interests, as well as the available employment opportunities. choate et al. (2019) found that employees who are actively involved in their own career development and employability management show higher levels of work readiness, employability, job search success and mental wellbeing. wilton and jackson (2017) also emphasised that it is critical for graduates to feel selfassured about their employability if they are to succeed in the current turbulent business environment. several scholars in the field suggest that self-assured individuals are better able to present their employability competences while searching for job opportunities (coetzee, ferreira & potgieter, 2019; kim, kim, & lee, 2015; onyishi et al., 2015). berntson and marklund (2007) as well as kinnunen et al. (2011) reported that individuals with high levels of self-perceived employability show better work performance and wellbeing. it is also evident from the literature that the new digital world of work (characterised by rapid forces, digital changes, high unemployment rates, economic challenges and globalisation) negatively influenced graduates’ confidence to succeed in finding and maintaining employment (bezuidenhout, 2011; walsh & gleeson, 2022). reskilling and upskilling human capital and, therefore, producing graduates who are perceived by themselves and others as employable, is a global national strategic research priority (florek-paszkowska, ujwary-gil & godlewska-dziobon, 2021). south african scholars also continue to draw attention to the students’ orientation about the world of work and confidence in their own abilities on the actual world of work employability competencies required in the new normal digitally driven career space (coetzee, 2022; ramnund-mansingh & reddy, 2021). numerous literature is found on the associations between employment and other factors such as self-confidence, self-efficacy, personality attributes and quality of qualifications (beaumont, geyde & richardson, 2016; dacre pool & sewell, 2007; finch et al., 2016; kim, kim & lee, 2015; onyishi et al., 2015). coetzee, ferreira and potgieter (2019) confirmed that more research is needed on individuals’ perceptions about the employability competencies needed to find suitable employment within the new digital world of work. zakaria and alhassan (2019) raised the critical question that if students perceive that their qualifications are preparing them adequately for the digital work world, will it enhance their sense of employability competency? this paper addresses this gap potgieter, coetzee and ferreira university students’ digital world of work readiness in relation to their employability competency journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 and aims to determine whether university students’ perceptions about their world of work readiness will significantly influence their sense of employability competency. it is evident from the preceding discussion that it is important to assess the association between these constructs to determine whether it is useful to enhance students’ perceptions about their fitness for the current world of work and their employability competency. we propose that should graduates have a positive digital world of work readiness perception, they will exhibit higher levels of business ingenuity and social digital agility as an essential employability competency for the new normal digital career and work context. world of work readiness in the context of the present study, students’ world of work readiness alludes to their confidence or certitude in finding work in an occupation that suits their career and study interests. students also feel highly certain (self-assured) that their university studies are preparing them for the 2020s work world and open new career pathways for them. in other words, they feel confident that their career interests and studies fit the jobs and occupations that are emerging in the digital-era work world (i.e. they have perceptions of job/occupation fitness) (coetzee, ferreira & potgieter, 2021). students further exhibit a positive sense of certainty (i.e. certitude) about the knowledge and skills needed for the jobs and occupations in their field of study. they have certainty that their qualification will help them to qualify for jobs and occupations of interest to them and they have clear, written plans to get into the chosen occupation (i.e. they exhibit job and occupation certitude) (coetzee, ferreira & potgieter, 2021). higher education scholars express the need for students to build the necessary career capital and intrinsic motivation to confidently navigate their careers, while gaining a sense of control in the face of a rapidly evolving and uncertain technology-driven world of work (bridgstock, grant-imaru & mcalpine, 2019; choate et al., 2019; brown, hooley & wond, 2020). the view on employability has shifted from the focus being on ‘ability’ rather than to ‘employ’ (yorke, 2006). higher education institutions should aim to empower students and enhance their self-perceived ability to successfully transit from graduate to the labour market. clinkard (2018) noted that although higher education institutions have the responsibility to ensure that their curricula include critical employability competencies, the onus is also on the students to actively participate in developing employability potgieter, coetzee and ferreira university students’ digital world of work readiness in relation to their employability competency journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 competencies. if graduates believe they are ready for the world of work, their transition to the workplace will be better (keogh, maguire & donoghue, 2015). the interpretation of employability, in both the higher education context as well as the labour market, now places the graduate at the steering wheel of their own future and destiny (boden & nedeva, 2010). clinkard (2018) also indicated that graduates should adopt a growth mindset. it is thus the responsibility of a student to demonstrate the acquisition of non-technical skills and attributes, such as business ingenuity and sociodigital agility that are deemed essential for exhibiting digital-era employability competency (coetzee & veldsman, 2022). employability competency employability competency refers to students’ sense of business ingenuity and sociodigital agility as two important capabilities for digital-era employability (coetzee & veldsman, 2022; coetzee, ferreira & potgieter, 2021). business ingenuity encompasses a range of employability skills and attributes such as communication, critical thinking, numeracy, business acumen, leadership, adaptability, innovation and multidisciplinary problem solving. these employability skills and attributes are well-recognised in the research literature as valuable human capital (oliver & de st jorre, 2018; williams et al., 2016). sociodigital agility alludes to the employability skills and attributes needed for a technological-driven work world. these include people skills, the ability to work in a team and collaborate with others, valuing social and cultural diversity, agency and agility in career management, agile digital savvy and dexterity in adopting and using digital media, social media and other communication tools and platforms, and generating creative solutions for problems affecting the needs in society, the community and the workplace (coetzee & veldsman, 2022; dondi et al., 2021). the new digitally driven world of work requires graduates to continuously adapt to and advance with the changes and transformation of the career and work space (deloitte, 2021). only career agile employees will have the required competencies and employability to succeed in the fast advancing technologically driven world of work of the 2020s (coetzee & veldsman, 2022). valickas, raišienè and rapuano (2019) noted that graduates’ desires to build employability competencies is fuelled by their career mindset potgieter, coetzee and ferreira university students’ digital world of work readiness in relation to their employability competency journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 and their perceptions about the labour market and its requirements. the career capital theory (defillippi & arthur, 1994) is used to explain the perception of graduates’ world of work orientation and their career mindsets. according to the career capital theory, when students believe they have the knowledge and competencies to succeed in the world of work, they will actively search for job opportunities and opportunities to upskill themselves and build on their employability (sutherland et al., 2015). within the current digital era, it is also essential for graduates and employees to be agile and adaptable and be able to communicate effectively with people from a diverse workforce, both face-to-face as well as on digital platforms. graduates are perceived to have sociodigital agility when they show social awareness and can function and network successfully with colleagues both within a traditional, as well as a digital, work setting (coetzee & veldsman, 2022; dondi et al., 2021). the current study examined the degree to which students’ perceptions of their world of work readiness (job/occupation fitness and job/occupation fitness) predict their business ingenuity and sociodigital agility (employability competency). this research aimed to explore the extent to which university students’ perceptions about their work readiness predicts their employability competency. as such, the hypothesis was that university students’ perceptions about their work readiness positively and significantly predict their sense of employability competency. methods a cross-sectional quantitative approach was used to measure students’ perceptions about their work readiness and their sense of employability competency. a self-administered questionnaire was used to collect data. population and sample a total of 486 students enrolled for undergraduate studies in 2021 within the economic and management sciences field at a distance learning higher education institution participated in this study. ethical clearance was obtained to conduct this research. all registered potgieter, coetzee and ferreira university students’ digital world of work readiness in relation to their employability competency journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 students were invited to voluntary and anonymously participate in this research via an email sent by the system administrator. the invitation contained an url link to an online survey. informed consent was obtained from participants that all data can be used for anonymous group-based research purposes. the participants were predominantly women (65%), had a mean age of 34.34 years (sd = 9.12; age range 25–55 years) and were mostly in full-time employment (72%). measuring instrument participants completed two measures. the first measure related to students’ personal evaluation of their current digital-era employability competency (business ingenuity and sociodigital agility). the second facet measured their perceptions about the extent to which their studies contributed to their world of work readiness (job and occupation certitude, and job and occupation fitness). participants’ responses were measured on a likert-type of scale as such scales generate data for interval statistics such as descriptive statistics, correlations, regressions, and factor analysis (allen & seaman, 2007). employability competency the 2020s world of work orientation scale developed by coetzee, ferreira and potgieter (2021) was used to measure students’ evaluations of their business ingenuity (11 items, e.g. ‘my critical thinking and analysis skills are excellent’) and sociodigital agility (10 items, e.g. ‘i find it easy to work in a team and collaborate with others to solve business problems’). this scale was developed after a comprehensive literature review on the required additional employability competencies needed for the digital world of work (dondi et al., 2021). responses were measured on a 7-point likert scale (1 = strongly disagree; 7 = strongly agree). the internal reliability coefficients of the subscales were .94 (business ingenuity) and .91 (sociodigital agility). the construct validity of this scale was confirmed by coetzee, ferreira and potgieter (2021). world of work readiness the level to which students perceived their qualification to contribute to their world of work readiness was also measured by the 2020s world of work orientation scale (coetzee, ferreira & potgieter, 2021). the scale measured perceptions of students’ job/occupation certitude (6 items, e.g. ‘i feel confident in finding work in an occupation that might suit my potgieter, coetzee and ferreira university students’ digital world of work readiness in relation to their employability competency journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 career and study interests’) and job/occupation fitness (6 items, e.g. ‘my studies equip me with the knowledge and skills that i need to apply in my job’) were measured on a 7-point likert scale (1 = strongly disagree; 7 = strongly agree). the internal reliability coefficients of the subscales were .88 and .92, respectively. coetzee, ferreira and potgieter (2021) confirmed the construct validity of the scale. statistical procedures discriminant validity among the latent variables within the measurement model was measured using confirmatory factor analysis (cfa). maximum likelihood estimation was applied using the amos version 28 statistical analysis programme. firstly, a single factor cfa was tested and, thereafter, a multi-factor cfa. descriptive statistics, internal consistency reliability coefficients (cronbach alpha and composite reliability [cr]), pearson product-moment correlations and linear regression analysis were calculated and analysed using ibm corp spss version 28. significant regression effects at the 95% confidence interval were interpreted by using the bootstrapping stringent lower level confidence interval (llci) and upper level confidence interval (ulci) range not containing zero (hair et al., 2010). the observed statistically significant (p ≤ .05) work readiness regression estimates on the seven world of work competency variables were then subjected to structural equation modelling (sem) to assess the validity of the structural model. the statistical package amos version 28 was utilised. the following threshold fit indices for model fit suggested by hair et al. (2010) served as a guideline for cfa and sem model acceptance: cmin/df < 3; rmsea and srmr < .07; cfi ≥ .90. results testing the measurement model the fit statistics of two alternative models were compared to the baseline model. the single factor cfa model (loading all indicators onto a single latent variable) did have a good fit with the data: cmin/df = 2.96; rmsea = .06; srmr = .05; cfi = .91; aic = 1588.6. the final multi factor latent variable model (with indicators loading onto their potgieter, coetzee and ferreira university students’ digital world of work readiness in relation to their employability competency journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 respective factor) showed better and good model fit and, thus, discriminant validity among the latent variables: cmin/df = 2.96; rmsea = .06; srmr = .05; cfi = .91; aic = 1588.6. table 1. descriptive statistics and bivariate correlations variable α cr mean (sd) 1 2 3 4 1 job/occupation certitude .88 .88 5.27 (1.09) 2 job/occupation fitness .91 .91 5.37 (1.14) .74 *** 3 business ingenuity .93 .93 5.46 (.92) .71 *** .54 *** 4 sociodigital agility .91 .91 5.86 (.84) .69 *** .54 *** .86 *** 195 *** p ≤ .001; ** p ≤ .01; * p ≤ .05. r ≤ .30 (small practical effect size), r ≥ .30 ≤ .49 (medium practical effect size), r ≥ .50 (large practical effect size) table 1 provides a summary of the descriptive statistics and bivariate correlations. the internal consistency reliability coefficients (both cronbach alphas and crs) were higher (≥ .71) than the cut-off value (.70) for good reliability (hair et al., 2010). the perceived job readiness variables (job/occupation certitude and job/occupation fitness) also had positive and significant correlations (p = .0001) with the world of work competency variables (r ≥ .54 ≤ 86 [large practical effect]). regression estimates and validity of structural model tables 2 and 3 show the regression estimates results for the regression of the job readiness on the world of work competency variables. the f-statistic for the linear models was significant (f = 172.21; p = .001; adjusted r² = .41 [moderate practical effect]). potgieter, coetzee and ferreira university students’ digital world of work readiness in relation to their employability competency journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 table 2. regression of perceived world of work readiness on business ingenuity model variables unstandardised coefficients standardised coefficients t sig. collinearity statistics b. std. error beta tolerance vif (constant) 2.443 .17 14.28 .000*** job/occupation certitude .47 .04 .55 11.78 .000*** .55 1.81 job/occupation fitness .10 .04 .13 2.76 .006** .55 1.81 table 3. regression of perceived world of work readiness on sociodigital agility model variables unstandardised coefficients standardised coefficients t sig. collinearity statistics b. std. error beta tolerance vif (constant) 3.21 .16 20.14 .000*** job/occupation certitude .40 .04 .51 10.67 .000*** .55 1.81 job/occupation fitness .10 .04 .15 3.01 .003** .55 1.81 the variance inflation factor (vif) values for all the variables were inspected to determine collinearity issues to avoid bias estimates or misleading of the results (hair et al., 2010). no potential collinearity issues were detected as the results revealed vif values of <1.81. as shown in table 2, both perceived job/occupation certitude as well as perceived job/occupation fitness positively predicted business ingenuity (as a digital-era employability competency). job/occupation certitude (β = .55; p = .000) had a stronger explanatory function than job/occupation fitness (β = .13; p = .006). table 3 also shows that both perceived job/occupation certitude and perceived job/occupation fitness positively potgieter, coetzee and ferreira university students’ digital world of work readiness in relation to their employability competency journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 predicted sociodigital agility. again, job/occupation certitude (β = .51; p = .000) had a stronger explanatory function than job/occupation fitness (β = .15; p = .003). to further determine the predictive value of perceived work world readiness on employability competency and to assess the validity of the structural model, the results were subjected to structural equation modelling (sem). the structural model had a good fit with the data (cmin/df = 3.36; rmsea = .07; srmr = .07; cfi = .90). standardised path coefficients were evaluated to determine the convergent validity for the structural model’s factor structure. a significant standardised path coefficient of .30 or more indicates that a variable contributes effectively to the construct it intended to measure (loewenthal & lewis, 2018). figure 1 below provides the path coefficients for the regression model of perceived world of work readiness to business ingenuity and sociodigital agility as expressions of digitalera employability competency. potgieter, coetzee and ferreira university students’ digital world of work readiness in relation to their employability competency journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 figure 1. structural equation regression model it is evident from figure 1 that only perceived job/occupation certitude (wow-con_a) showed path coefficients above .30. this, thus, provides an indication that job and occupation certitude had a higher significant predictive weight to business ingenuity (wow_compa = .91) and social digital agility (wow_comp_b = .89) than job/occupation fitness. the structural equation model confirms the regression analysis results that job certitude was the most significant predictor of employability competency. discussion and recommendation the world of work is transformed by rapid changes and evolutionary technological advancement. the changes inevitably impacted on the nature of organisations, careers, jobs and occupations (ramnund-mansingh & reddy, 2021). as a result, higher education institutions have an obligation to prepare the students for the new world of work, by means of career development learning processes, knowledge about the world of work, selfpotgieter, coetzee and ferreira university students’ digital world of work readiness in relation to their employability competency journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 awareness, appropriate career mindsets and the required skills to successfully navigate their careers within a digital world of work (bridgstock, grant-imaru & mcalpine, 2019; choate et al., 2019). developing appropriate employability competencies is, however, a dual role and graduates themselves also need to adopt a growth mindset and engage in active competency development (clinkard, 2018). this paper contributes deeper insight into university students’ perception regarding their readiness for the new world of work through their university studies and the influence it has on their digital-era employability competency. the paper creates an awareness and provides empirical evidence of the contribution of higher education studies to students’ perceptions of their readiness for jobs and occupations in the 2020s work world. it appears from the findings that students’ certainty (i.e. certitude) about the knowledge and skills they gained from their studies, their knowledge about career paths that reside with the qualification field and having clear career plans contributed to their level of business ingenuity and sociodigital agility (as expressions of digital-era employability competency). their perceptions of these two employability competencies were further strengthened by their perception that the university studies helped them to find jobs and occupations that best fit their career interests and adequately prepared them for the 2020s world of work. the results of this study corroborate findings of coetzee (2022) as well as cortellazzo et al. (2020) that graduates’ perceptions about their careers and the work world explain their world of work orientation. abessolo, rossier and hirschi (2017) also highlighted the importance of understanding how an individual’s perceptions influence their career exploration process and engagement with the new world of work. a positive perception about being prepared and ready for what is required within the new world of work seemed to enhance the business ingenuity employability competency facet which alludes to individuals’ communication skills, critical thinking and analysis, creative problem-solving approaches, and an agile and adaptable mindset toward the digital-era world of work. a positive perception about being prepared for the world of work further seemed to enhance individuals’ sociodigital agility, which include competencies such as people skills, ability to communicate with a diverse workforce, career self-management and the ability to confidently use digital media, social media and other technological potgieter, coetzee and ferreira university students’ digital world of work readiness in relation to their employability competency journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 communication platforms and tools (coetzee, ferreira & potgieter, 2021; dondi et al., 2021). the results, thus, link with the research of bates et al. (2019), who noted that when an individual believes they have the ‘know-how’, they will more successfully pursue their career goals. the findings further corroborate the empirical results of cortellazzo et al. (2020), who found that an individual’s positive perception fuels the eagerness to pursue challenging goals, such as developing the appropriate employability competencies for the new world of work. the present study’s results are strengthened by stein and irvine’s (2015) observation that positive attitudes and perceptions about one’s own abilities strengthen perceived employability competency. the findings of this study further emphasise the need for higher education institutions to integrate career development planning and world of work readiness into the curriculum (choate et al., 2019). clinkard (2018) and hernandez-lopez et al. (2016) all confirmed that further refinement of the current curriculum is essential for graduates to obtain the required employability competencies for the marketplace. this might stimulate a positive perception about their readiness for the digital-era world of work. career development planning may deepen students’ insights about their own readiness for what the new world of work requires. it may also raise a curiosity towards understanding the new job and occupation requirements of the changing digital era towards a sustainable career success and required employability. as a result, graduates’ readiness and employability competency for the 2020s work world may be enhanced. limitations and future research the participating students were all registered for an undergraduate degree within economic and management sciences at a single distance learning university and the majority of these students were already in some form of employment. the study should, thus, be considered as exploratory in nature, without drawing any generalisations. it is suggested that future studies widen the sample to include more unemployed students, students registered within different qualification fields, postgraduate students and within residential universities as well. the study was conducted using a cross-sectional research approach and it is recommended that this study be replicated using a longitudinal research potgieter, coetzee and ferreira university students’ digital world of work readiness in relation to their employability competency journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 approach. a longitudinal approach may further assist in determining if a shift is present in the perceived readiness at the beginning and the end of a qualification. conclusion despite the research design limitations, the study revealed important preliminary empirical insights that extended research on students’ perception about their readiness for the new world of work and the influence it may have on their digital-era employability competency. previous research focused on employability attributes whereas this study focused on the skills and attributes of business ingenuity and sociodigital agility as two essential expressions of digital-era employability competency. the results may spark a discussion on the employability and competencies of graduates required for the new world of work. in addition, the findings may inform higher education institutions and career development practitioners in guiding students on developing the required competencies for employability in the digital-era world of work. references allen, e., and seaman, c.a. (2007) ‘likert scales and data analyses’, quality progress, 40(12), pp.64-65. abessolo, m., rossier, j. and hirschi, a. (2017) ‘basic values, career orientations, and career anchors: empirical investigation of relationships’, frontiers in psychology, 8(1556), pp.1–11. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01556 atkins b. (2020) the future of work is now. forbes. available at: https://www.forbes.com/sites/betsyatkins/2020/03/20/the-future-of-work-isnow/?sh=1b9f22451b47 (accessed 24 april 2023). bates, g.w., rixon, a., carbone, a. and pilgrim, c. (2019) ‘beyond employability skills: developing professional purpose’, journal of teaching and learning for graduate employability, 10(1), pp.7–26. https://doi.org/10.21153/jtlge2019vol10no1art794 https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01556 https://www.forbes.com/sites/betsyatkins/2020/03/20/the-future-of-work-is-now/?sh=1b9f22451b47 https://www.forbes.com/sites/betsyatkins/2020/03/20/the-future-of-work-is-now/?sh=1b9f22451b47 https://doi.org/10.21153/jtlge2019vol10no1art794 potgieter, coetzee and ferreira university students’ digital world of work readiness in relation to their employability competency journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 beaumont, e., gedye, s., & richardson, s. (2016). ‘‘am i employable?’: understanding students’ employability confidence and their perceived barriers to gaining employment’, journal of hospitality, leisure, sport, & tourism education, 19, pp.1– 9. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhlste.2016.06.001 berntson, e. and marklund, s. (2007) ‘the relationship between perceived employability and subsequent health’, work & stress. an international journal of work, health & organisations, 21(3), pp.279–292. https://doi.org/10.1080/02678370701659215 bezuidenhout, m. (2011) the development and evaluation of a measure of graduate employability in the context of the new world of work. unpublished masters degree thesis. university of pretoria. boden, r. and nedeva, m. (2010) ‘employing discourse: universities and graduate ‘employability’’, journal of education policy, 25(1), pp.37–54. https://doi.org/10.1080/02680930903349489 bridgstock, r., grant-imaru, m. & mcalpine, a. (2019) ‘integrating career development learning into the curriculum: collaboration with the careers service for employability’, journal of teaching and learning for graduate employability, 10(1), pp.56–72. https://doi.org/10.21153/jtlge2019vol10no1art785 brown, c., hooley, t. and wond, t. (2020) ‘building career capital: developing business leaders’ career mobility’, career development international, 25(5), pp.445–459. https://doi.org/10.1108/cdi-07-2019-0186 choate, j., demaria, m., etheve, m., cran, s. and carroll, d. (2019) ‘a professional development program with an assessed eportfolio: a practical solution for engaging undergraduates with their career development in large student cohorts’, journal of teaching and learning for graduate employability, 10(2), pp.86–103. https://doi.org/10.21153/jtlge2019vol10no2art788 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhlste.2016.06.001 https://doi.org/10.1080/02678370701659215 https://doi.org/10.1080/02680930903349489 https://doi.org/10.21153/jtlge2019vol10no1art785 https://doi.org/10.1108/cdi-07-2019-0186 https://doi.org/10.21153/jtlge2019vol10no2art788 potgieter, coetzee and ferreira university students’ digital world of work readiness in relation to their employability competency journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 clinkard, k. (2018) ‘are employability and entrepreneurial measures for higher education relevant? introducing agile reflection’, industry and higher education, 32(6), pp.375-390. https://doi.org/10.1177/0950422218808625 coetzee, m. (2022) ‘career agility for purposive career exploration: role of adult learners’ career orientations and digital-era world of work awareness’, african journal of career development, 4(1), a54. https://doi.org/10.4102/ajcd.v4i1.54 coetzee, m., ferreira, n. and potgieter, i.l. (2019) ‘employer requirements and employability mindsets influencing graduate workers’ self-confidence in gaining employment’, african journal of career development, 1(1), a4. https://doi.org/10.4102/ajcd.v1i1.4 coetzee, m., ferreira, n. and potgieter, i.l. (2021). world of work orientation scale. unpublished research report, department of industrial and organisational psychology, university of south africa. coetzee, m. and veldsman, d. (2022) ‘the digital-era industrial/organisational psychologist: employers’ view of key service roles, skills and attributes’, south african journal of industrial psychology, 48(0), a1991. https://doi.org/10.4102/sajip.v48i0.1991 cortellazzo, l., bonesso, s., gerli, f. and batista-foguet, j.m. (2020) ‘protean career orientation: behavioral antecedents and employability outcomes’, journal of vocational behavior, 116, pp.1–12. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jvb.2019.103343 dacre pool, l., and sewell, p. (2007) ‘the key to employability: developing a practical model of graduate employability’, education + training, 49(4), pp.277–289. https://doi.org/10.1108/00400910710754435 defillippi, r.j. & arthur, m.b. (1994) ‘the boundaryless career: a competency-based perspective’, journal of organizational behavior, 15(4), pp.307–324. https://doi.org/10.1002/job.4030150403 https://doi.org/10.1177/0950422218808625 https://doi.org/10.4102/ajcd.v4i1.54 https://doi.org/10.4102/ajcd.v1i1.4 https://doi.org/10.4102/sajip.v48i0.1991 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jvb.2019.103343 https://doi.org/10.1108/00400910710754435 https://doi.org/10.1002/job.4030150403 potgieter, coetzee and ferreira university students’ digital world of work readiness in relation to their employability competency journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 deloitte, a.b. (2021) 2021 transparency report. available at: https://shared.deloitte.se/docs/transparency%20report%202021.pdf (accessed: 21 april 2023). dondi, m., klier, j., panier, f., and schubert, j. (2021) defining the skills citizens will need in the future world of work. available at: https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/public-and-social-sector/our-insights/definingthe-skills-citizens-will-need-in-the-future-world-of-work (accessed: 21 april 2023). finch, d.j., peacock, m., levallet, n., and foster, w. (2016) ‘a dynamic capabilities view of employability: exploring the drivers of competitive advantage for university graduates’, education + training, 58(1), pp.61–81. https://doi.org/10.1108/et-022015-0013 florek-paszkowska, a., ujwary-gil, a., and godlewska-dziobon, b. (2021) ‘business innovation and critical success factors in the era of digital transformation and turbulent times’, journal of entrepreneurship, management and innovation, 17(4), pp.7-18. https://doi.org/10.7341/20211741 hair, j.f., black, w., babin, b.j. and anderson, r.e. (2010) multivariate data analysis: a global perspective. 7th edn. new york: pearson. hernandez-lopez, l., garcia-almeida, d.j., ballesteros-rodriquez, j.l. and de saápérez, p. (2016) ‘students’ perceptions of the lecturer’s role in management education: knowledge acquisition and competence development’, international journal of management education, 14(3), pp. 411-421. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijme.2016.10.001 hite, l.m., and mcdonald, k.s (2020) ‘careers after covid-19: challenges and changes’, human resource development international, 23(4). pp.427-437. https://doi.org/10.1080/13678868.2020.1779576 https://shared.deloitte.se/docs/transparency%20report%202021.pdf https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/public-and-social-sector/our-insights/defining-the-skills-citizens-will-need-in-the-future-world-of-work https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/public-and-social-sector/our-insights/defining-the-skills-citizens-will-need-in-the-future-world-of-work https://doi.org/10.1108/et-02-2015-0013 https://doi.org/10.1108/et-02-2015-0013 https://doi.org/10.7341/20211741 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijme.2016.10.001 https://doi.org/10.1080/13678868.2020.1779576 potgieter, coetzee and ferreira university students’ digital world of work readiness in relation to their employability competency journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 industry week. (2020). 9 trends impacting the future of work. available at: https://www.industryweek.com/covid19/article/21130761/9-trends-impactingthefuture-of-work (accessed: 21 april 2023). keogh, j., maguire, t. and o’donoghue, j. (2015) ‘graduate work-readiness in the 21st century’, higher education in transformation conference, technological university dublin, dublin, ireland 31 march-1 april, pp.385–395. available at: https://arrow.tudublin.ie/st4/2/ (accessed: 21 april 2023). kim, s., kim, h., and lee, j. (2015) ‘employee self-concepts, voluntary learning behavior, and perceived employability’, journal of managerial psychology, 30(3), pp.264–279. https://doi.org/10.1108/jmp-01-2012-0010 kinnunen, u., feldt, t., siltaloppi, m. and sonnentag, s. (2011) ‘job demands-resources model in the context of recovery: testing recovery experiences as mediators’, european journal of work and organizational psychology, 20(6), pp.805–832. https://doi.org/10.1080/1359432x.2010.524411 lent, r.w. (2018) ‘future of work in the digital world: preparing for instability and opportunity’, the career development quarterly, 66, pp.205-219. https://doi.org/10.1002/cdq.12143 loewenthal, k. and lewis, c.a. (2018) an introduction to psychological tests and scales. london: psychology press. masole, l. and van dyk, g. (2016) ‘factors influencing work readiness of graduates: an exploratory study’, journal of psychology in africa, 26(1), pp.70–73. https://doi.org/10.1080/14330237.2015.1101284 oliver, b., and de st jorre, t. (2018) ‘graduate attributes for 2020 and beyond: recommendations for australian higher education providers’, higher education research and development, 37(4), pp.821-836. https://doi.org/10.1080/07294360.2018.1446415 https://www.industryweek.com/covid19/article/21130761/9-trends-impactingthe-future-of-work https://www.industryweek.com/covid19/article/21130761/9-trends-impactingthe-future-of-work https://arrow.tudublin.ie/st4/2/ https://doi.org/10.1108/jmp-01-2012-0010 https://doi.org/10.1080/1359432x.2010.524411 https://doi.org/10.1002/cdq.12143 https://doi.org/10.1080/14330237.2015.1101284 https://doi.org/10.1080/07294360.2018.1446415 potgieter, coetzee and ferreira university students’ digital world of work readiness in relation to their employability competency journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 onyishi, i.e., enwereuzor, i.k., ituma, a.n., and omenma, j.t. (2015) ‘the mediating role of perceived employability in the relationship between core self-evaluations and job search behavior’, career development international, 20(6), pp.604–626. https://doi.org/10.1108/cdi-09-2014-0130 potgieter, i. l. (2021) ‘surviving the digital era: the link between positive coping, workplace friendship and career adaptability’, in ferreira, n., potgieter i.l, and coetzee, m (eds.) agile coping dynamics: emerging issues for research and practice in a smart digital technological world of work. springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70228-1 potgieter, i. l., ferreira, n., and coetzee, m. (2019) theory, research and dynamics of career wellbeing: becoming fit for the future. cham, switzerland: springer nature switzerland. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28180-9 ramnund-mansingh, a. and reddy, n. (2021) ‘south african specific complexities in aligning graduate attributes to employability’, journal of teaching and learning for graduate employability, 12(2), pp.206–221. https://doi.org/10.21153/jtlge2021vol12no2art1025 sutherland, m., naidu, g., seabela, s., and crosson, s. (2015) ‘the components of career capital and how they are acquired by knowledge workers across different industries’, south african journal of business management, 46(4), pp.1–10. https://doi.org/10.4102/sajbm.v46i4.104 stein, j., and irvine, a, k. (2015) ‘career preparedness and lifelong learning: a global perspective’, vocedplus: international tertiary education research database. available at: http://hdl.voced.edu.au/10707/384353 (accessed: 24 april 2023). tomlinson, m. and holmes, l. (eds.) (2017) graduate employability in context: theory, research and debate. london: palgrave macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1108/cdi-09-2014-0130 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70228-1 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28180-9 https://doi.org/10.21153/jtlge2021vol12no2art1025 https://doi.org/10.4102/sajbm.v46i4.104 http://hdl.voced.edu.au/10707/384353 potgieter, coetzee and ferreira university students’ digital world of work readiness in relation to their employability competency journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 valickas, a., raišienè, a. & rapuano, v. (2019) ‘planned happenstance skills as personal resources for students’ psychological wellbeing and academic adjustment’, sustainability, 11(12), 3401, pp.1–11. https://doi.org/10.3390/su11123401 walsh, l., and gleeson, j. (2022) ‘theorising and preparing students for precarity: how can leaders and educators better prepare students to enter an increasingly insecure workforce?’, journal of educational administration and history, 54(1), pp.7-9. https://doi.org/10.1080/00220620.2020.1868981 williams, s., dodd, l.j., steele, c., and randall, r. (2016) ‘a systematic review of current understandings of employability’, journal of education and work, 29(8), pp.877901. https://doi.org/10.1080/13639080.2015.1102210 wilton, d. and jackson, n. (2017) ‘perceived employability among undergraduates and the importance of career self-management, work experience and individual characteristics’, higher education research and development, 36(4), pp.747–762. https://doi.org/10.1080/07294360.2016.1229270 yorke, m. (2006) employability in higher education: what it is, what it is not. york, england: higher education academy. zakaria, h. and alhassan, y.n. (2019) ‘tertiary students’ perceptions about their prospects of employability: the case of students in ghana’, africa education review, 16(5), pp.134–157. https://doi.org/10.1080/18146627.2016.1227686 author details ingrid potgieter (dcom iop) is an nrf rated professor in human resource management at the department of human resource management at the university of south africa (unisa). she is a registered industrial psychologist at the health professions council of south africa (hpcsa) and a registered human resource practitioner on the south african board for people practices (sabpp). she has authored and co-authored local and international articles and scholarly books. https://doi.org/10.3390/su11123401 https://doi.org/10.1080/00220620.2020.1868981 https://doi.org/10.1080/13639080.2015.1102210 https://doi.org/10.1080/07294360.2016.1229270 https://doi.org/10.1080/18146627.2016.1227686 potgieter, coetzee and ferreira university students’ digital world of work readiness in relation to their employability competency journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 melinde coetzee (dlitt et phil) is a professor in industrial and organisational psychology at the university of south africa. she has published widely on graduate employability, career psychology, retention, and human capacity development. she is the author of numerous textbooks and international scholarly books in her research field. nadia ferreira (dcom iop) is a professor in human resource management at the university of south africa. she has published widely on career adaptability, organisational commitment, job embeddedness and retention. she has contributed to textbooks and numerous international scholarly books in her research field. licence ©2023 the author(s). this is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (cc-by 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. see http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. journal of learning development in higher education (jldhe) is a peer-reviewed open access journal published by the association for learning development in higher education (aldinhe). http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ university students’ digital world of work readiness in relation to their employability competency abstract introduction literature review world of work readiness employability competency methods population and sample measuring instrument statistical procedures results testing the measurement model regression estimates and validity of structural model discussion and recommendation limitations and future research conclusion references author details licence journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special issue 25: aldinhe conference proceedings and reflections october 2022 editorial jim donohue manchester metropolitan university nicola grayson university of manchester jenny hillman open university eleanor loughlin nottingham trent university cathy malone leeds university craig morley university of chester gita sedghi university of liverpool alicja syska university of plymouth carina buckley solent university erika corradini university of southampton melanie crisfield brunel university lee fallin university of hull lindsay heggie queen’s university, canada tom lowe university of portsmouth tania oxenham wintec, new zealand emma shackleton university of the arts london emma smith university of salford beautifully eclectic: collaborative conference proceedings and reflections we are thrilled to present to you the journal of learning development in higher education’s collaborative conference proceedings and reflections – a collection of collaboratively written reports from the annual aldinhe conference that took place online and in person in june 2022. the conference participants this year had a unique opportunity to interact with the content of the presentations beyond the conference space, by contributing to the presenters’ open documents that gathered audiences’ comments, responses, questions, and suggestions the presenters considered and reflected on after the talk. in this sense, these reports are so much more than conference proceedings – editorial they are an extension of the conference beyond the confines of the physical and temporal spaces demarcated by the event. none of us had attempted anything like this before. to our knowledge, no one had, yet it seemed like an initiative that was too compelling not to take on. here was our chance to create a platform for a deeper engagement with conference ideas and to see the talks and presentations as a beginning, rather than an end, of the scholarly conversations they started. we took it. what we did the ambition of this collaborative proceedings and reflections volume, and in particular the importance of finding a collective voice that would both reflect and serve our learning development community, dawned on us when we first met online as a significantly expanded editorial group to discuss the approaches, tasks and timelines involved in editing this special issue. huddled in a tightly packed screen of known and less familiar faces, and flicking between the conversations and the documents with my (alicja syska, lead editor) instructions and workflows, we all instantly realised that the word ‘collaboration’ meant many different things to us and that it would be tested on many different levels as we proceeded to understand the magnitude of what lay before us. the success of the volume would depend not only on our skills, experience and commitment, but also on the connections we would develop in the process and how these connections would then influence the negotiations around how knowledge is produced and what the role of editor is in bringing it to the reader. our special editorial group for this issue comprised eight editors and nine guest editors from three english-speaking countries (uk, new zealand and canada). while we were all experienced writers and learning developers, when it came to making this particular radical publishing idea work, many of us felt somewhat lost, experiencing emotions ranging from confusion to feeling ill-equipped, to finding ourselves slightly at odds with the entire idea. everyone understood that our authors presented a paper, a talk, or a poster at the aldinhe conference; that their audiences commented on those presentations in an open google document; and that the authors then had a chance to respond to these comments through their own reflections. the three-part collaborative writing format seemed simple. nonetheless, one look at all the submissions was enough to see that in editorial each case the discussions developed differently, reflecting the multitude of ways in which we all understand and practice collaboration. in some pieces, writers responded to one another; in others, the contributions were separate and insulated. in some cases, it was easy to identify themes we could build on; in others, no visible thread existed and would have to be extracted from the loose collection of thoughts. clearly, one golden formula that would allow us to impose a particular format, tone, and look across all the submissions was not in sight. in the true spirit of learning development, instead of forcing submissions into the straitjacket of a particular formula, we decided to work with a set of principles. first and foremost, we wanted to ensure that the collection would be of value to our readers. to this end, we shaped the articles in a way that aimed to reveal the essence of each conference presentation, offer an insight into the discussions and responses from its participants, and allow the authors to close the presentation loop with their reflections and thus remain in control of the story. secondly, we wanted to retain as much of the tone and voice of the individual contributions as possible in a collaborative exercise of this magnitude. therefore, we aimed for light-touch editing and only intervened where necessary, e.g. to avoid repetitions or to clarify the narrative. shorter pieces sometimes required editorial comment and we occasionally added references and made additional suggestions for reading or future action. in such cases, we as editors also became the contributors and added our own voices to the collective tapestry of contributions. lastly, we all agreed that our editorial sub-groups would have the freedom to approach the submissions as they saw fit and felt comfortable with. in our struggle for meaning-making, together with the authors and contributors, we would form what deleuze and guattari (1987) saw as ‘alliances’ and negotiate our own collective understandings of the end product through critical dialogical engagement. the result of this negotiation would be a narrative structure and a story presented in a way that would make sense to our readers. it is now up to them to judge how successful we were in this endeavour. how we did it when the project was first outlined to me (carina buckley, guest editor), i was excited at the possibilities it presented for an inclusive community and i thought i could see quite easily how it would work. putting the idea into practice soon showed me how wrong that was – so much variation! so many fragments to wrangle! so much uncertainty in what i felt editorial i was ‘allowed’ to do! yet the sense of excitement stayed alive, because those possibilities i’d imagined for an inclusive community remained within reach. in this way of working we were doing something genuinely innovative, grounded in community and inclusive of many more voices than those listed on the programme. figuring out how to take some of those voices and create a coherent narrative out of them wasn’t always straightforward, but it was made easier by keeping in mind alicja’s helpful mantra, ‘what adds value for the reader?’ as well as by having a supportive team of co-editors to share ideas and perspectives. it was rewarding, too. i worked with three shorter contributions – a lightning talk and two posters – which had its challenges in that there was less initial material in the document, but i took this as a starting point for providing space for the authors to expand on their ideas, their rationale and their purpose, and they were all keen to take up the opportunity. i felt gratified to be a part of what was genuinely a collaborative process, and i wanted to do both reader and contributor justice through my interventions. being able to revisit these pieces, as an editor and also as an author, has allowed me to make deeper connections and really think about a topic. and actually, once we got going, it didn’t seem as difficult to achieve as i might have first thought! i (jim donohue, editor) found our debate in the editorial team meeting about our sense of comfort/discomfort with intruding into the texts we are working on to be rather profound (if that’s not a contradiction between adjective and modifier). i have come some way in feeling entitled to re-sequence content and change wording. it was interesting to hear how other editors’ sense of that entitlement was – or maybe, wasn’t – emerging. i (jenny hillman, editor) agree with jim’s point about the editorial meeting where we discussed authorial ‘voices’ and how we maintain the integrity of what was written, whilst also seeking to pull together a narrative thread. on reflection, i think i initially found it challenging to navigate the boundary (or very blurred line, as it transpired) between my role as editor and contributor. i thought (read ‘worried’) a lot about whether i might be variously amplifying/ silencing/ misrepresenting voices in our ld community. reconfiguring my work as ‘editor-contributor’ made me realise that all of the editorial choices i made were legitimate when done so in the context, and spirit, of collaborative writing. it was comforting to see similar dynamics in the dialogue around the paper on collective writing spaces (in this collection) – where, similarly, ‘hell’ turned out not to be other people! editorial contributing to this special issue of jldhe has been quite a journey. i (lee fallin, guest editor) was excited by the opportunity and could not wait to get ‘stuck in’. the reality of how this would be achieved only really hit when the work started. it was hard to have the traditional editorial role with so many authors and contributors, some of whom were anonymous. it felt strange to have so much (theoretical) control over the work and ideas of others. i think the team has, however, done an excellent job of helping those authentic voices ‘shine through’. i love how a variety of approaches have arisen from this – and how these have been allowed to take shape independently. this volume is indeed beautifully eclectic, and i hope it is of use to the community that put it together. i should also expand my reflection to acknowledge that guest editing has led me on a path to joining jldhe as an editor on an ongoing basis. joining as a guest editor was a great way to get to know the team – and what i was getting myself into. i’m really enjoying it and look forward to the years ahead! i (emma smith, guest editor) would echo the observations made by my fellow editors: this process took me on a journey. at the outset, having attended the conference and experienced the excitement of writing a comment that might make it into a journal (rather than a fast-forgotten spreadsheet of post-conference feedback comments), i was of the view that the community responses should stand largely as they were written (except for corrections of spelling or syntax and obvious duplication edited out). but reading through each text, seeing how well they worked when deep engagement or genuine dialogue infused the community response, led me to recognise that, if we’re to have the readers’ interests in mind, in many cases we as editors needed to intrude, to give shape and flow to others’ voices. i still tried in my contributions to keep those voices intact as far as possible, but i also allowed my own to join the chorus, quietly, amplifying and connecting theirs. this guest editorial role has been my first interaction with the jldhe and its team: i was compelled by the warm and open invitation to join this community of authors, editors and readers that came through strongly throughout the conference, so i volunteered. just as this extraordinary collaborative writing endeavour welcomes presenters and attendees to share their ideas in new ways, so the openness of the journal team has created a real and warm welcome for me as a new editor. editing too has been a thoroughly participatory process which we all played a part in defining and refining. thank you all. seeing how the conference proceedings have changed and grown since the initial idea to publish the abstracts has been an amazing experience. when i (melanie crisfield, guest editorial editor) agreed to be an editor following the conference, i wasn’t sure how this marvellous idea would work in practice – it turns out, it worked so much better than i could have imagined! like many others, i was uncertain about how to apply my editorial skills and voice, but when i began reading through the community discussion comments, it became clear how commentators were discussing the same themes and exploring the same possibilities. putting those together into a thematic narrative was exciting, although i definitely had to rein in my inclination to over-edit. taking a step back and letting the voices of the contributors come through made all of the difference, and created insightful conversations about the presentations themselves. i’m really looking forward to seeing how this all comes together in a published issue. and finally, we complete these reflections with tom lowe’s (guest editor) commentary: curating conference proceedings is a challenge of all academic conferences, but particularly for conferences where the presenters are of professional services and/or a mixture of academic disciplines. this process enabled participant reflections conducted live at the conference where both delegates listening, and presenters delivering, wrote reflections following the wording of their abstracts. although many of the reflections were in note form, the editors were able to quickly synthesise these into a narrative, through adding some literature. although the editor had to become part of the authorship, the output of presenter, delegate and editor has created a community response in a remarkably efficient time. by striking while the iron is hot at the conference, a lively conference proceedings has been written which reads in present tense to bring the reader into the room of the event. what we achieved the result is what we see as a beautifully eclectic collection that extends conference ideas and conversations beyond the conference space, giving those who may not have been able to either join in person or make their voices heard a chance to be part of these conversations. as such, it aligns with our belief that a conference presentation should not be the end of the scholarly conversation, but serve as an opener for something more. we hope that we succeeded at creating this space for presenters in this special collaboratively created collection. editorial as editors, we also learnt new ways of working and drawing on each other’s experience in terms of understanding the role editors play in the publishing process. at times, we had to step outside our own comfort zones and open to the possibility that editors do not have to be gatekeepers but may play a more active role as supporters, developers, and even cocreators. while the experience was challenging and discombobulating at times, by the end of the process three of our guest editors – carina buckley, lee fallin and tom lowe – joined our editorial board as permanent members, which is a fantastic result for the jldhe team! overall, we feel that with this collaboratively written volume, which is so much more than standard conference proceedings, we have pushed the boundaries of scholarly publishing, allowing for new voices and unexpected conversations to emerge. our readiness to question the assumptions we bring into publishing and the traditional rules that govern it may have been radical but what we gained in the process is an authentic and empowering space that brought the community together. by inviting people to be heard in the way they want to be heard, we opened space for what is unknown and what might emerge if we are only bold enough to try. we thank you all for your active participation in it and we hope that you will be inspired enough to join us again next year. with best wishes, the jldhe editorial board and guest editors references deleuze, g., and guattari, f. (1987) a thousand plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia. trans. by massumi, b. university of minnesota press. journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 23: march 2022 ________________________________________________________________________ the escape room: using a simple text-based game to promote business undergraduates’ digital self-reliance matt offord university of glasgow sarah honeychurch university of glasgow nick quinn university of glasgow matthew barr university of glasgow helen mullen university of glasgow abstract this case study aims to highlight the ease of use and effectiveness of an escape room game by describing how it was implemented in an undergraduate business course. the case study demonstrates the simplicity of a straightforward text-based game and how this was used in a large course of online students. our case study aims to present our experience of implementing the escape room game from a practical perspective. we add to our narrative some descriptive statistics from a student survey conducted after the game. the case study builds on existing work in this field by extending its use beyond small face-to-face sessions to a technique suitable for far larger classes in an online format. keywords: escape room; games-based learning; digital self-reliance; business education; undergraduates. offord, honeychurch, quinn, barr, mullen the escape room: using a simple text-based game to promote business undergraduates’ digital self-reliance journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 2 introduction escape room games can be used to familiarise players with aspects of technology in a fun and challenging way which avoids the anxiety or pressure of other teaching methods (o’brien and farrow, 2020). the escape room is a popular game genre in which puzzles are solved by participants to ‘escape’ a fictitious situation. the need for the game arose during the pivot online in 2020 when it became clear that assumptions about digital literacy in students had led to a lack of support for online integration (jisc, 2020). an escape room game was designed and implemented to promote digital self-sufficiency among 333 business undergraduates in an online session of one hour. the game was devised to encourage student engagement with digital resources in a playful way to overcome barriers to digital self-sufficiency. this digital learning gap is significant since time lost due to online orientation could feasibly increase the risk of students failing courses. the technology itself is hoped to reach across the physical divide between student and teacher. failure to integrate technology can therefore result in isolation and a lack of motivation. students who find themselves unable to navigate the digital landscape become dependent on academics to help them adapt (oliveira et al., 2021). this can drive up workloads, especially when students use email to solicit answers. at our business school we adopted the use of an escape room game to promote the rapid assimilation of digital self-reliance focussing on ms teams as a gatekeeper technology, but also incorporating a range of other technologies, including a mobile app. by gatekeeper we suggest that ms teams allows responsive communication with the teaching team. it therefore mitigates the isolation and helplessness students may experience online. once students are familiar with ms teams, they can work with academics to improve their familiarity with other technologies and the layout of their course on the lms. although the game itself did not use ms teams as a platform, all students were encouraged to join the course site and use teams for communication through the game. this enabled some students who were unable to participate on zoom (due to connectivity issues) to remain in communication throughout. offord, honeychurch, quinn, barr, mullen the escape room: using a simple text-based game to promote business undergraduates’ digital self-reliance journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 3 the escape room game is predicated on a fiction that the participants are trapped and must solve various problems to escape. each solution allows the participants to escape to the next level, where they face another challenge, and so on until they can escape fully. in our game the challenges were based on finding physical facilities with a university app, finding digital artefacts on the lms, using the university mobile app, and virtual group work (teamworking is considered an important business skill). the game was played early in the first semester of 2021 with 333 participants (the course has 355 students in total). 86 students also completed a survey about their experiences. as the covid-19 pandemic runs its course, there remains a requirement for at least some online teaching. there is also a strong possibility of retaining some elements of online teaching in future education, not to mention the implications for an expanding industry of 100% online programmes. the joint information systems committee (jisc), a not-for-profit organisation supporting digital services in education, found that not enough was done to integrate students with the pivot online or to develop their confidence in virtual learning environments (jisc, 2020). furthermore, jisc discovered that only a few students had the opportunity to collaborate online (jisc, 2020). carrillo and flores (2020) reviewed online teaching resulting from the pivot from the perspective of the community of inquiry (coi) and advised that students' previous experience and dispositions to online learning should be accounted for in the underlying pedagogy of remotely taught courses. an exploratory study of the pivot by oliveira et al. (2021) pointed out that while the adoption of digital platforms was largely successful, the adaption experience of students was mostly negative. raaper and brown (2020) further point out the significance of dramatically dissolving the campus and the consequent need for robust student support networks. bayne et al. (2014) challenge the prevalent narrative that distance courses are unlinked to the materiality of campus, which remains symbolically significant even when students never visit the campus. online students still require some sense of connection afforded through technology. the escape room game was successfully used by o'brien and farrow (2020) to introduce 20 educators to ms teams. they argue that familiarising participants with new technology through traditional teaching is less effective and fun than playing a game. escape rooms emphasise cooperative puzzle solving (o'brien and farrow, 2020), which serves business offord, honeychurch, quinn, barr, mullen the escape room: using a simple text-based game to promote business undergraduates’ digital self-reliance journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 4 courses particularly well and also promotes social support networks during the covid crisis. online escape rooms have also been shown to motivate students within an elearning context by providing a novel active learning experience (grāvelsiņa and daniela, 2021). originating in japan at the turn of the century, these games are becoming increasing popular for both leisure and education (o'brien and farrow, 2020). playful behaviour can promote creativity and innovation (bateson et al., 2013), as well as developing skills associated with employability (barr, 2019). however, despite interest in the pedagogical affordances of escape rooms, educators require guidance on developing such resources (clarke et al., 2017). furthermore, veldkamp et al. (2020) note that educational escape rooms are often characterised by a misalignment between in-game goals and educational outcomes. our study involved invoking a sense of playfulness through a text-based escape room game – like that described by o'brien and farrow (2020) – for 333 students. we aimed to expand on their findings by employing the technique for students (rather than educators) and for a much larger group. by doing so, we demonstrated that running a game of this nature for large groups of undergraduates is not only possible but advantageous. a case study format was selected to disseminate our findings to the learning and teaching community, as case studies focus on how and why questions, and are anchored in realworld contexts in which the researcher has little control (yin, 2018). the project is framed as a bounded system (ashley, 2021 pp.135) to which researchers can return in order to explore new aspects of the game. here we describe the practical experience of implementation, although we draw on descriptive statistics from a student survey to highlight key areas. the aim of the case study is not to make statistical generalisations (ashley, 2021) but to share the particularity of applying an escape room game to a large online cohort to support digital self-sufficiency. the escape room the game was developed to support a foundational management course for level one undergraduates studying in the scottish higher education sector. in total, 355 students attended the 10-credit course (scottish credit and qualifications framework (scqf)), offord, honeychurch, quinn, barr, mullen the escape room: using a simple text-based game to promote business undergraduates’ digital self-reliance journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 5 which is one of the early courses on business and management programmes. the course launched in semester 1 of the 2021/2022 academic year, the second year to be affected by the covid-19 pandemic. the pandemic strategy used by our business school was to conduct lectures online, with tutorials (small group teaching) on campus. all learning objectives were to be asynchronous to cater for students disadvantaged by time zones or connectivity (honeychurch and offord, 2021). this caused concern – based on experiences from the previous academic year – that some students may fail to thrive in an environment which was relatively unstructured and based largely on an assumption of digital self-sufficiency (see also oliveira et al., 2021). the escape room game was built on microsoft onenote (see o'brien and farrow, 2020) using text. each onenote page (apart from the first) was password protected with the answer from the previous challenge acting as a key to unlock the next. this created the sense that participants were passing through successive phases to achieve their 'escape'. ms onenote was a rudimentary game engine while the challenge-password-challenge process was the game mechanic (andrade, 2015). all of the challenges combined to spell a word which was required to complete the game. figure 1 (below) shows one of the challenges on onenote. challenge 6 in the escape room game encourages students to use the moodle reading list to find a specific journal article. each challenge generates an answer, which also unlocks the next page. for example, the answer to challenge 6 unlocks challenge 7. the combined passwords reveal the answer to the final lock. offord, honeychurch, quinn, barr, mullen the escape room: using a simple text-based game to promote business undergraduates’ digital self-reliance journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 6 figure 1. challenge 6 in the escape room game. the aim of the game was to promote digital self-sufficiency in several areas. for example, the first challenge was to locate a subway station near to a campus facility. the challenge was to use the campus locator tool which is itself embedded in a university app that supports a wide number of other student activities. further challenges required competence in ms teams, moodle (the lms), ms onenote and using the internet academically, as well as engaging with digital resources about teamwork. in fact, students learned about virtual teamwork while simultaneously working in teams online. preparation once the game was developed, it was transferred to an online version using the share function in onenote. prior to the event, students were asked to link to the teams site and to make sure they had joined prior to the game. posters were made up to advertise the game and create a sense of anticipation. a fictional and playful scenario was devised in which students had become trapped online and would need to access the escape room to find their way back to the real world. the use of games in business schools is quite widespread, but these games usually model some complex aspect of business as closely offord, honeychurch, quinn, barr, mullen the escape room: using a simple text-based game to promote business undergraduates’ digital self-reliance journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 7 as possible. these are known as serious games (sgs) or simulations (lamb et al., 2018). the escape room game differs in having a more playful approach and the addition of a story to drive the game mechanic, characteristics usually attributed to serious educational games (seg) (lamb et al., 2018). additionally, sgs and simulations usually require the integration of a third-party provider and more complex set-ups. although, some preparation was required, this coincided with actions which are necessary to achieve digital self-sufficiency. a zoom meeting was set up using basic settings; there was no requirement to pre-assign breakout rooms. execution the execution of the game was straightforward. once the students assembled, a brief preamble explained the purpose and requirements of the game. students were randomly assigned breakout rooms in zoom allowing teams of four to five per room. students were told simply to read the instructions on ms onenote and then proceed with the game. students were instructed to use the help function if they needed it and given one hour to complete the challenges. the session was run by a single lecturer without any problems and only one call for help was received. around 50 minutes into the game, teams began to declare that they had completed the task and most teams had done so after one hour. after the participants reassembled, it was discovered that one team had completed the task in 30 minutes, but the one-hour duration worked for the majority of students. to test whether the students had completed the task, they were asked for the final password. all teams responded correctly. an ongoing issue was dealing with participants who had failed to join ms teams prior to the event. this generated quite a lot of chat requests and joining students had to be approved once they had requested to join. although this could have been smoother, it was within the capabilities of a single facilitator, and it resulted in over 200 students joining ms teams where previous announcements had failed. prior to winding down the session, the participants were asked to participate in an online survey after being briefed on the relevant ethics procedure and consent. 86 students (26%) of students complied with the request. the response rate is very similar to the offord, honeychurch, quinn, barr, mullen the escape room: using a simple text-based game to promote business undergraduates’ digital self-reliance journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 8 response to course evaluations experienced on the course in previous years and provided sufficient data for future research. the escape room game (as described by o'brien and farrow, 2020) was straightforward to use in a teaching environment. this case study demonstrates the efficacy of the game in a larger student cohort and online. provided the instructions are clear and the game is well prepared, it is very easy and effective to use. first impressions – student experience and behaviour our aim has been to present the technical and professional aspects of using the escape room game from an educator perspective. however, in keeping with case study methodology, we incorporate other methods to explore the case in more detail (ashley, 2021). we include the descriptive statistics from a student survey conducted after the game to compare the staff experience with the efficacy of the game, as well as other evidence. further systematic research of the data set will follow once the data have been thoroughly analysed to explore the student experience in more detail. case study methods allow researchers to return to a specific instance and explore different dimensions each time (ashley, 2021). evidence of efficacy can be drawn from the successful migration of students to ms teams. ms teams was identified as a possible solution to the communication problems of leading a large cohort of students. typically, students email questions to the course leader. with 355 students on the course, it is easy for email communication to become unmanageable. a chat function (such as that found on ms teams) allows a quicker response and for communications to be managed by teams rather than individuals. despite numerous messages, use of ms teams was still below that desired. within a few minutes of starting the game, however, 200 new students had joined teams. a student survey was administered using likert scales and comment boxes to find out how students had experienced the game. 83% of students completed the game in the allotted hour and only one respondent stated that they did not enjoy the game. 79% found the game easy or were neutral about the difficulty. 21% found it difficult, and none of the offord, honeychurch, quinn, barr, mullen the escape room: using a simple text-based game to promote business undergraduates’ digital self-reliance journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 9 respondents found it very difficult. 80% of respondents claimed to have learned something from the game, while the remainder were either not sure or felt they had not learned much. 71% of respondents would play the game again, and 20% were unsure. 9% of respondents said they would prefer not to play the game again. students claimed to have learned about ms teams and onenote. however, some challenged the necessity of playing games instead of attending serious lectures. others felt it was fun and asked if more lectures could be converted into fun experiences. the social aspect and meeting other students in breakout rooms were mentioned positively, although some students complained that breakout rooms were 'silent', requiring conversations to be conducted in the chat. others felt the whole experience was worthwhile but thought it should be done before the course begins. although we have provided a range of responses for balance, the comments were overall very positive, as indicated by the breakdown. on the whole, the students enjoyed the experience and learned something from it. its impact on course communications was quite noticeable. discussion our aim has been to demonstrate the ease of use of a simple text-based game on digital self-sufficiency. the evidence we have given in terms of a narrative shows that the time spent preparing the game paid dividends in terms of simple execution. we build on the findings of o'brien and farrow (2020), demonstrating the use of the escape room game for a much larger group of online students. most students felt the experience to be positive and completed on time with a single facilitator. this shows how the game can be quickly and effectively used. the game is not specific to business and could be used in a wide number of subjects (o'brien and farrow (2020) used it in an educational context). the subject of the game can be adapted (as we did) to the context, although we think digital self-sufficiency capitalises on the game engine and mechanics being closely aligned to the objective of the game, addressing concerns raised by veldkamp et al. (2020). we assess that the work rate of the facilitator is lower than delivering an online lecture and certainly less than using simulations and sgs, which can suffer from technical issues. offord, honeychurch, quinn, barr, mullen the escape room: using a simple text-based game to promote business undergraduates’ digital self-reliance journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 10 an intern was hired to develop our game independently, which led to a carefully considered and thought out set of challenges. the instructions were also very clear. this resulted in the lecturer simply setting up the game and allowing students to progress. apart from getting students to join ms teams at the beginning, there were no problems or challenges in using the game. the issue of joining teams was not caused by the game but by the logistics of orienting 333 students to a new digital platform. but even this issue was more expedient in integrating students than previous communications. most students found the game straightforward, so it might be argued that we should have set more difficult challenges and that the game should be at least moderately challenging. however, most students required a full hour to complete the game, suggesting the degree of difficulty was about right. it was interesting to see that some students questioned the use of games in a serious business course, which is a common challenge in the use of games (squire, 2011). the use of games clearly needs to be fully explained and balanced with other learning activities in the course design. conclusion the use of the escape room game was straightforward and reliable. the simplicity and text-based game engine made it quite robust against connectivity issues and accessibility. the take up by students and lack of problems joining and completing the game, suggests that it was not only experienced video game players that found the process simple. from a facilitator perspective, the game is simple to run and can cope with large cohorts. this builds on the work by o'brien and farrow (2020) in introducing the escape room for larger classes. while the aim of this case study is to share the specific practical experience of running the game as an educator, our high-level description of the student experience suggests it was largely positive (71% of our survey enjoyed the game). 81% of respondents learned something from the experience. 309 students switched to ms teams from email communication as a direct result of playing the game. offord, honeychurch, quinn, barr, mullen the escape room: using a simple text-based game to promote business undergraduates’ digital self-reliance journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 11 most students felt they had learned about the digital technologies featured in the game, and the migration of 200 students onto ms teams was also beneficial for course communications. preparation is key to using the game, so if the game design cannot be outsourced, academics must allow time to develop the game and consider the challenges carefully. the game should also be tested before use. this would take more time than preparing a lecture, but the game could be recycled numerous times after that. the construction of the game using onenote is not especially difficult and does not require developer or coding skills. the timing of the game should be carefully considered, and it should be balanced with more traditional and, dare we say, serious activities. references andrade, a. (2015) ‘game engines: a survey’, eai endorsed transactions on serious games, 2(6), pp.1-8. available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.4108/eai.5-11-2015.150615 (accessed: 12 february 2022). ashley, l.d. (2021) ‘case study research’, in coe, r., waring, m., hedges, l.v. and ashley, l.d. (eds.) research methods and methodologies in education. 3rd edn. london: sage publications. barr, m. (2019) graduate skills and game-based learning: using video games for employability in higher education. cham, switzerland: palgrave macmillan. bateson, p., bateson, p.p.g. and martin, p. (2013) play, playfulness, creativity and innovation. cambridge: cambridge university press. bayne, s., gallagher, m.s. and lamb, j. (2014) ‘being “at” university: the social topologies of distance students’, higher education, 67(5), pp.569–583. available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10734-013-9662-4 (accessed: 12 february 2022). carrillo, c. and flores, m.a. (2020) ‘covid-19 and teacher education: a literature review of online teaching and learning practices’, european journal of teacher education, http://dx.doi.org/10.4108/eai.5-11-2015.150615 http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10734-013-9662-4 offord, honeychurch, quinn, barr, mullen the escape room: using a simple text-based game to promote business undergraduates’ digital self-reliance journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 12 43(4), pp.466–487. https://doi.org/10.1080/02619768.2020.1821184 (accessed: 12 february 2022). clarke, s., peel, d.j., arnab, s., morini, l., keegan, h. and wood, o. (2017) ‘escaped: a framework for creating educational escape rooms and interactive games for higher/further education’, international journal of serious games, 4(3), pp.73-86. available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.17083/ijsg.v4i3.180 (accessed: 12 february 2022). grāvelsiņa, e. and daniela, l. (2021) ‘designing an online escape room as an educational tool’, in daniela, l. (ed.) smart pedagogy of game-based learning. cham, switzerland: springer, pp. 119-131. honeychurch, s. and offord, m. (2021) ‘developing a school-wide framework for blended and online learning and teaching (bolt)’, journal of perspectives in applied academic practice, 9(2), pp.109-117. available at: https://jpaap.napier.ac.uk/index.php/jpaap/article/view/481 (accessed: 12 february 2022). jisc (2020). student digital experience insights survey 2020: uk higher education (he) survey findings. available at: https://www.jisc.ac.uk/reports/student-digitalexperience-insights-survey-2020-uk-higher-education (accessed: 12 february 2022). lamb, r.l., annetta, l., firestone, j. and etopio, e. (2018) ‘a meta-analysis with examination of moderators of student cognition, affect, and learning outcomes while using serious educational games, serious games, and simulations’, computers in human behavior, 80, pp.158–167. available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2017.10.040 (accessed: 12 february 2022). o'brien, r.e. and farrow, s. (2020) ‘escaping the inactive classroom: escape rooms for teaching technology’, the journal of social media for learning, 1(1), pp.78–93. available at: https://doi.org/10.24377/ljmu.jsml.vol1article395 (accessed: 12 february 2022). https://doi.org/10.1080/02619768.2020.1821184 http://dx.doi.org/10.17083/ijsg.v4i3.180 https://doi.org/10.14297/jpaap.v9i2.481 https://jpaap.napier.ac.uk/index.php/jpaap/article/view/481 https://www.jisc.ac.uk/reports/student-digital-experience-insights-survey-2020-uk-higher-education https://www.jisc.ac.uk/reports/student-digital-experience-insights-survey-2020-uk-higher-education https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2017.10.040 https://doi.org/10.24377/ljmu.jsml.vol1article395 offord, honeychurch, quinn, barr, mullen the escape room: using a simple text-based game to promote business undergraduates’ digital self-reliance journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 13 oliveira, g., grenha teixeira, j., torres, a. and morais, c. (2021) ‘an exploratory study on the emergency remote education experience of higher education students and teachers during the covid-19 pandemic’, british journal of educational technology, 52(4), pp.1357–1376. available at: https://doi.org/10.1111/bjet.13112 (accessed: 12 february 2022). raaper, r. and brown, c. (2020) ‘the covid-19 pandemic and the dissolution of the university campus: implications for student support practice’, journal of professional capital and community, 5(3–4), pp.343–349. available at: https://doi.org/10.1108/jpcc-06-2020-0032 (accessed: 12 february 2022). squire, k. (2011) video games and learning: teaching participatory culture in the digital age. new york: teachers college press. veldkamp, a., van de grint, l., knippels, m.p.j. and van joolingen, w.r. (2020) ‘escape education: a systematic review on escape rooms in education’, educational research review, 31, 100364. available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.edurev.2020.100364 (accessed: 12 february 2022). yin, r.k. (2018) case study research and applications: design and methods. 6th edn. thousand oaks, ca: sage. author details matt offord is a leadership scholar and academic lead for technology enhanced learning and teaching (telt) at the adam smith business school, university of glasgow. he has an mba in leadership studies from strathclyde business school and a phd in management from durham university business school, completed in 2017. sarah honeychurch is a good practice advisor at the learning enhancement and academic development service at the university of glasgow. she has a ba and ma in philosophy from the university of southampton and a phd in education, completed at the university of glasgow in 2021. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjet.13112 https://doi.org/10.1108/jpcc-06-2020-0032 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.edurev.2020.100364 offord, honeychurch, quinn, barr, mullen the escape room: using a simple text-based game to promote business undergraduates’ digital self-reliance journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 14 nick quinn is a lecturer in entrepreneurship at the adam smith business school. he holds an mba, msc in marketing and ba hons in economics. he completed his phd in entrepreneurship from the university of glasgow in 2004. matthew barr leads the graduate apprenticeship in software engineering programme at the centre for computing science education at the university of glasgow and is the founder of the international student games studies journal, press start. he holds an msc in information technology and a phd in video games and higher education from the university of glasgow. helen mullen is a lecturer in entrepreneurship at the adam smith business school. she holds an mres and a first class ba (hons) in marketing. she obtained her phd in entrepreneurship from the university of glasgow in 2018. the escape room: using a simple text-based game to promote business undergraduates’ digital self-reliance abstract introduction the escape room preparation execution first impressions – student experience and behaviour discussion conclusion references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 23 march 2022 the implications of active blended learning for english teaching in a chinese university huan zhang henan normal university, pr china bob fisher university of northampton, uk abstract blended learning (bl), which is usually defined as a combination of face to face (f2f) and online instruction, has attracted considerable interest in recent years and has been increasingly adopted within the higher education sector. in this research, a thematic inductive analysis was conducted to explore how the practice of active blended learning (abl) at a british university, university of northampton (uon) might inform the bl college english teaching curriculum design at a chinese university, henan normal university (hnu), so that students may enjoy a more enhanced learning experience in both online and f2f contexts. in the study, 10 teachers from different disciplines at uon and 10 college english teachers from hnu were interviewed for between 45 and 60 minutes. the findings of this study suggest that the implementation of bl in college english courses at hnu should be supported by the institution in terms of pedagogical design, policy, staff development, technical infrastructure and small class size. keywords: college english teaching; active blended learning; blended learning; pedagogical design introduction in recent years, the demand and popularity of bl in higher education has increased and has become a common teaching phenomenon, particularly in the wake of the covid-19 zhang and fisher the implications of active blended learning for english teaching in a chinese university journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 2 pandemic, which prompted many universities to use bl as a means of delivering academic programmes, whilst at the same time minimising the spread of the virus. although there is no universally accepted definition of bl in previous research, most definitions focus on combining two components: f2f and online instruction (garrison and kanuka, 2004; graham, 2013). based on the two components of bl, higher education institutions around the world have adopted different bl models for the development and implementation of their courses. for example, henan normal university (hnu) in china, has delivered bl courses in different subjects. at hnu, college english is a compulsory course for all non-english major undergraduates. college english courses use unipus as the delivery platform, which is an english language learning application offering learning resources and exercises for each unit, automatic marking of exercises and statistical analysis. students and teachers can use unipus via mobile phones and the website. each unit of the college english course is divided into three stages: pre-class, in-class and after-class. during the pre-class stage, students access unipus and complete tasks according to the teacher’s instructions. the in-class stage includes two steps. the first is a series of f2f lectures delivered by hnu teachers, which mainly explains the difficulties in the learning content. then the classroom is flipped, with students actively engaged with learning activities and teachers offering guidance. students present the outputs they completed in the pre-class period and receive feedback and comments from the teacher. during the after-class stage, students use unipus to complete exercises, and teachers develop teaching plans for the next unit. meanwhile, the university of northampton (uon) in the uk developed the abl model, which has been defined as ‘a pedagogical approach that combines sense-making activities with focused student interactions (with content, peers and tutors) in appropriate learning settings – in and outside the classroom. abl focuses on engaging students in knowledge zhang and fisher the implications of active blended learning for english teaching in a chinese university journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 3 construction, reflection and critique, in developing learner autonomy and in achieving learning outcomes.’ (padilla rodriguez and armellini, 2021) abl is composed of 3 stages: pre-session, real-time session and post-session. (see figure 1). figure 1. an active blended learning framework (padilla rodriguez and armellini, 2021) during the pre-session stage, tutors release learning resource material to the virtual learning environment (vle) platform and assign the students’ pre-session tasks. students are asked to go through the learning resource on the vle platform in their own time. following this, students work individually or in groups to complete pre-session tasks assigned by the tutors in their own time and then upload the output of the pre-session task to the vle. tutors are available to guide and moderate students’ online work. the real-time stage is f2f. based on the students’ performance in the sense-making activity, the tutor makes use of this f2f session to explain difficult points. finally, during the post-session stage, students complete the post-session task set by the tutor to consolidate their understanding of the topic. zhang and fisher the implications of active blended learning for english teaching in a chinese university journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 4 uon staff have successfully used abl to improve their pedagogical design and teaching practices, creating more engaging interventions for uon students. while the abl model has much in common with the college english bl of hnu, such as in the learning sequence guided by the two models, there are differences in how learning activities are designed and supported at different stages. for example, there is the lack of tutor’s presence, intervention and guidance on students’ independent work in the pre-class stage of hnu’s bl model. the abl model emphasises active learning through small group interactions, both online and face to face, synchronously and asynchronously, whereas the group size in hnu is usually quite large, making it more challenging to design group work online. in addition, there are a number of additional advantages to abl worth exploring, which may enable hnu to implement college english bl more effectively. in this study, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 10 teachers from various disciplines at uon, and 10 college english teachers from hnu to examine how the abl practices developed at uon can inform the bl design of the college english teaching curriculum at hnu, thereby facilitating a more active learning experience, both online and f2f.the research findings will provide references for the research and practice of bl in hnu. literature review bl has many advantages which makes it popular among both teachers and students. one of the key benefits is the greater flexibility it affords students. bl allows students to work at their own pace and work from home, which enables them in turn to better balance family, work and academic commitments (vaughan, 2007). bl contributes to improved learning outcomes for students (o’toole and absalom, 2003; dziuban et al., 2006; lim and morris, 2009, woltering et al., 2009) and student motivation and satisfaction (woltering et al., 2009). in english language teaching, bl can be used effectively to develop the language skills of learners (ghazizadeh and fatemipour, 2017). positive findings have also been reported by lópezpérez et al. (2011), who found that bl raised students’ exam marks. vaughan (2007), meanwhile, suggests that bl increases student engagement and enhances opportunities for teacher-student interaction. zhang and fisher the implications of active blended learning for english teaching in a chinese university journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 5 in a bl environment, tutors can adopt a range of active learning strategies to promote students’ learning. for example, role playing can increase motivation (wishart et al., 2007), enhance collaborative learning (de wever et al., 2008) and stimulate greater problem-solving (clark and sampson, 2008) when implemented in online learning. problem-based and project-based learning have been shown to have improved students’ critical thinking (mergendoller et al., 2006), deepened their understanding of the learning content, prolonged their memory of the learning content (penuel and means, 2000), and improved their problemsolving skills (mergendoller et al., 2006). the use of ice-breaking activities in online classes facilitates student participation and interaction, thus building a sense of community (conrad and donaldson, 2004). the use of videoconferencing as a tool can promote students’ active learning (rodrigo et al., 2010) and increase student satisfaction (kliger and pfeiffer, 2011) in a bl environment. meanwhile, incorporating peer assessment using facebook with bl can be interesting and effective for college-level english writing classes (shih, 2011). although the potential benefits of bl are widely recognised, there are challenges when implementing this approach, perhaps the most important of which is student participation (alebaikan and troudi, 2010; lotrecchiano et al., 2013). for example, students’ difficulties in terms of self-discipline (alebaikan and troudi, 2010) and poor time management (kenney and newcombe, 2010) may also have a negative impact on participation in bl. increasing tutor workload has been identified as another issue within bl as tutors have reported spending more time in redesigning the modules, preparing bl materials, and moderating and assessing student’s online work (alebaikan and troudi, 2010; gedik et al., 2013). in addition, technical and internet problems are considered a challenge for the successful implementation of bl (al zumor et al., 2013). poor internet connection and lack of technological skills may inhibit students’ online discussion and interaction (al zumor et al., 2013) and cause considerable frustration (hara and kling, 2000), which may in turn have a negative impact on learning. the successful implementation of bl cannot be achieved without the support of institutions, which primarily comes in the form of staff development and infrastructure. staff development is regarded as critical by researchers and practitioners because, as owens (2012) notes, zhang and fisher the implications of active blended learning for english teaching in a chinese university journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 6 many tutors need to develop new technological and pedagogical skills to teach in a blended format. tutors must have the necessary technical skills to design and maintain an online component of each course (toth et al., 2008). when institutions do not provide sufficient opportunities for professional development, many tutors will be unlikely to adopt a bl approach, but instead replicate traditional teaching methods (garrison and vaughan, 2013). successful bl implementations require a flexible and robust technological infrastructure to support them (niemiec and otte, 2009; graham et al., 2013; moskal et al., 2013; castro, 2019). these technical requirements are determined by the availability of server, bandwidth and accessibility, security, infrastructure, hardware and software (singh, 2003). moreover, digital literacy of staff and students is also a key factor in the successful implementation of blended learning. hanson and carlson (2005) believe that teaching staff must have digital literacy in order to maximise the use of technology and must have a high degree of understanding of how technology supports teaching in an online environment. tang and chaw (2016) provided evidence that digital literacy is a prerequisite for students to learn effectively in a bl environment. in conclusion, very few studies have been found that compare the use of different bl models in different universities. this paper seeks to explore the implications of abl for college english bl at hnu. the conclusion from this study will contribute to the pedagogical design of college english blended learning and provide some suggestions for institutional policy regarding bl at hnu. methods research question to achieve the research purpose, the research question of this study is: what are the implications of abl for english teaching in a chinese university? zhang and fisher the implications of active blended learning for english teaching in a chinese university journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 7 data collection method to answer the research question, qualitative methods were employed in this research. data were collected through one-on-one interviews with 10 uon teachers and 10 teachers of hnu who teach college english. interview participants from hnu were recruited from the faculty of international studies at hnu. there are 27 teachers in the college english teaching and research section, and an email invitation was sent to all of them to participate in a personal interview with the researcher. before the one-on-one interviews with hnu teachers, they were introduced to the abl approach through documents, publications, presentations and videos, which were sent to them via email. at the beginning of the interview, the researcher provided further opportunities for the interviewees to ask questions before conducting the interview. interviewees from uon come from a variety of disciplines. an email invitation was sent to the potential interviewees to invite them to participate in a personal interview with the researcher. one-on-one interviews were conducted online using tools such as webex, collaborate or other online tools agreed by the participants. the interviews were conducted in september 2020, lasted between 45 and 60 minutes, and was recorded. data analysis method audio recordings of the interviews were transcribed for analysis. data were then analysed by data-driven inductive thematic analysis. the steps of data analysis in this research follow braun and clarke’s (2006) proposed six-phase framework: 1. familiarising yourself with data. interviews with 20 teachers were recorded and transcribed into text, and the interview data were read and re-read until the content of the data had been assimilated. at this stage, the researcher took notes and jotted down early impressions. zhang and fisher the implications of active blended learning for english teaching in a chinese university journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 8 2. generating initial codes. manual coding was adopted in this study. coloured pens were used to make notes on the text to make it easier to identify repetitions and these were then encoded. for example, active learning, student engagement, advantages of abl, issues of abl, institution support. 3. searching for themes. putting the same coded material together and searching for potential themes. different codes were integrated into broader themes. 4. reviewing themes. potential themes identified were reviewed and improved. some of the potential themes were not related to the research question, while others were combined into broader ideas or divided into separate themes. 5. defining and naming themes. a detailed analysis of each theme was conducted and a name was selected for each theme. in this study, three major themes and seven subthemes were defined and named. 6. producing the report. the three themes and seven sub-themes were analysed, and an analysis report was written up. results encoding, analysis and theme naming of interview data resulted in three themes and seven sub-themes (table 1). table 1. major themes and sub-themes. major themes sub-themes promote active learning through abl apply a range of teaching methods and strategies to promote active learning use of technology and tools to promote active learning issues of abl students’ non-engagement tutor’s workload the importance of institutional support provision of staff development training provision of a robust technical infrastructure zhang and fisher the implications of active blended learning for english teaching in a chinese university journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 9 providing resources for small group teaching promote active learning through abl data suggested that abl enabled uon tutors to adopt a range of teaching methods and strategies to promote student active learning. apply a range of teaching methods and strategies to promote active learning one tutor used group-based tasks in his computing course to engage students with active learning. for example, in one group-based task, students were required to design a lunch box as a pre-task and then each group was required to present their design during the f2f session of the abl course. the same tutor also used project-based tasks in his artificial intelligence course to promote active learning. for example, a technical engineer was invited to one f2f session to talk about problems he had encountered in practice. following that session, as part of a post-session task, students were asked to engage in a project-based task in which they come up with solutions to the problems identified by the engineer, requiring them to apply knowledge and theory to resolve real-world problems. peer feedback has been used by a number of uon tutors to promote active learning within abl courses. in one management course, the tutor used peergrade as part of a pre-task to engage students with active learning. students were asked to provide a summary of the key concept in peergrade. as part of the pre-task, students were also asked to score each other’s summary and provide feedback to justify the score they have given. increasing student choice in the learning process has been used as another strategy to engage students with active learning within abl. for example, in a computing course, one uon tutor designed different forms of post-session tasks within an abl course. students were able to choose one form of task which allowed them to demonstrate their strength, such as an analysis, a discussion or a practical application. zhang and fisher the implications of active blended learning for english teaching in a chinese university journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 10 course redesign in alignment with abl has encouraged the uon tutors to make active learning the top priority of student learning and enabled them to apply a range of teaching approaches and strategies in the design and delivery processes to promote student active learning. use of technology and tools to promote active learning a variety of tools, such as microsoft forms and perusall were used to promote active learning to take place at different stages of abl. a number of examples are illustrated below. one uon tutor used microsoft forms to design quizzes, questionnaires and polls for the presession tasks. for example: ‘i uploaded the presentation and videos related to the topic on blackboard vle and gave the students one week to preview. i then designed a quiz on microsoft forms to test if students had understood.’ (mr) in an introduction to management course, the uon tutor used perusall in the f2f stage to evaluate students’ collaborative learning and classroom engagement. the tutor uploaded the courseware, texts and video link to perusall. the students were then divided into groups of five for collaborative learning. each member of the group was required to read the courseware, texts and watch the video. after reading and watching, each student can take notes, ask questions and make comments on the courseware, texts and video. after that, each student can see the notes, questions and comments made by other group members, make comments on other group members’ notes and critical ideas, and answer questions from other group members. the tutor summarised the advantages of perusall as follows: ‘perusall records and grades students’ performance in collaborative learning and classroom engagement, for example, how many notes they took, how many questions they asked. so, it is a very useful tool in f2f stage.’ (ss) zhang and fisher the implications of active blended learning for english teaching in a chinese university journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 11 other tools such as whatsapp and skype were also widely used by uon tutors to communicate with the students. the use of technology and tools within abl environment has increased both teacher-student and student-student interactions, as well as the convenience and levels of interest in the learning process, so as to foster students’ active learning. issues of abl data also suggested that there have been some inevitable issues when using abl. student non-engagement students’ non-engagement is a major problem in the pre-session stage. for example, in an international marketing course, students only completed the pre-session task when it was linked to assessment. the uon tutor summarised: ‘the idea of designing pre-session tasks is perfect, but students have not been engaged well unless you grade or test them. if you go to a class and rely on students to complete pre-session tasks, your class will be destroyed.’ (mr) in addition, in an education course, the students did not engage in the pre-session stage due to poor time management. the tutor described the students as follows: ‘in my class, there are many mature students who have to balance family affairs and academic studies. as they are not good at time management, they do not always get enough time to go through the online content. they just go to the f2f class and listen.’ (cd) furthermore, in the introduction to management course, the tutor delivered preview content and tasks on the platform, but fewer students completed the pre-class tasks due to the lack of technical skills and self-discipline. zhang and fisher the implications of active blended learning for english teaching in a chinese university journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 12 student engagement in the pre-session stage matters because it is the basis of the f2f learning. in the abl environment, students’ non-engagement in the pre-session had a negative impact on f2f learning, so this may be considered as a major challenge for the successful implementation of abl. tutor’s workload the tutor’s increased workload is another challenge when using abl. bl can place a physical burden on the tutors, in the sense that tutors’ workload has increased to accommodate an increase in time dedicated to preparation and post-session feedback. a tutor commented on his heavy workload as follows: ‘i have been very busy since the preparation of the course. in the pre-session stage, it took a lot of time to redesign the models and upload documents. in the post-session, i also need to give feedback to each student, which also takes a lot of time.’ (mm) also, tutors have to repeat the same lectures two or three times, because a large class was divided into smaller classes. one uon tutor summarised: ‘the class size is small in the abl environment. i have more classes of the same module in a week. i have to repeat the class twice or even three times a week, increasing my workload.’ (mc) in short, the data indicate that course redesign in alignment with abl required a high level of effort in terms of course preparation, course delivery and homework evaluation, thus posing a challenge for the tutors. the importance of institutional support successful implementation of abl also requires support from the institution. the data revealed that institutional support should be provided in the following three ways: zhang and fisher the implications of active blended learning for english teaching in a chinese university journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 13 provision of staff development training setting up workshops is a commonly accepted approach to provide staff training. digital technology is a prerequisite for successful implementation of abl, which requires tutors to constantly improve their digital literacy based on knowledge reserve and teaching skills. workshops or seminars are important ways for tutors to acquire digital technologies. one hnu tutor suggested: ‘producing learning materials, interacting with students, and maintaining a bl environment all require a high level of technical skills that many tutors lack. as a result, tutors need to obtain technical training through workshops, seminars or regular training.’ (yj) workshops are helpful in improving tutor’s pedagogical strategies and teaching skills, but also, most importantly, in establishing a friendly relationship between tutors. through communication and cooperation, tutors can conduct peer observation, gain psychological support, share successful experiences and problems, and derive inspiration from their peers to generate new ideas. in addition, ‘the change of tutor’s role’ is another key aspect of staff training. tutors not only transmit knowledge, but also engage in unique and creative work. tutors therefore need to be transformed ‘from sage on the platform to guide on the side’ (king, 1993) and became professionals with multiple identities (facilitator, initiator, collaborator, service provider, supervisor, and so on.). one hnu tutor summed up the role change of tutor as follows: ‘teachers should change from ‘a person who teaches’ to an ‘organiser’, ‘facilitator’, ‘guide’ and ‘assistant’ to classroom activities and discussions, inspiring and encouraging students to form their own opinions through independent thinking.’ (hy) zhang and fisher the implications of active blended learning for english teaching in a chinese university journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 14 staff development training can help tutors improve their technical competence, enable them to receive support from their peers and establish long-term connections with each other, and help them to better achieve the transformation of roles. provision of a more robust technical infrastructure the successful implementation of abl depends on a robust technical infrastructure. it may be observed that, up to now, hnu has not provided sufficient technical infrastructure so far. one tutor talked about her experience: ‘we sometimes encountered network glitches at the f2f stage, which made the classroom activity unable to proceed. i believe that high-quality servers and sufficient bandwidth are both essential for the successful implementation of abl.’ (lj) reliable multimedia equipment is also crucial. in a college english listening and speaking course, multimedia equipment problems frequently arise, which seriously affect the classroom effectiveness in the f2f stage. one hnu tutor mentioned: ‘some of the multimedia equipment of hnu is old and often breaks down in the f2f stage. the university should provide high-quality audio equipment, headphones and microphones for english listening and speaking classes.’ (yj) all stages of abl require technical infrastructure as essential, hence, institutions ought to endeavour to support the technical infrastructure. providing resources for teaching small groups large classes are a typical feature of english classes in chinese universities, which leads to less teacher-student interaction and difficulties in carrying out classroom activities. in a class debate, for example, the tutor divided 100 students into many groups and asked them to conduct a debate between two groups. due to the large number of students, the tutor was unable to monitor the task or gauge the specific problems. the tutor noted that: zhang and fisher the implications of active blended learning for english teaching in a chinese university journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 15 ‘the class size is so large that many interactive tasks can be carried out but cannot be facilitated effectively. if we redesign our course adopting abl, we should reduce class sizes to 20 or 30, making it much easier to design and organize in-class activities.’ (dl) as noted above, large classes also lead to less interaction between teachers and students. if the large class is divided into smaller classes, the tutor will be able to provide support to each student. one tutor stated the advantage of small classes: ‘if there are 20 students in a class, each student will have more opportunities to speak in the f2f stage and the teacher will be able to pay attention to each student in all stages.’ (hy) another way to solve the large class problem is to increase the number of tutors. large classes can be divided into smaller classes or groups, depending on the student’s learning level, and additional tutors assigned to each small class or group. in this way, the teacher can adopt a teaching method that is appropriate for each class or group. one tutor suggested: ‘every student is different. we should consider the students’ ability to acquire knowledge. for example, divide a large class into small groups (classes) according to the level of study of the students. that means increasing the number of teachers and assigning different teachers to guide different groups (classes). every teacher should design tasks and activities that are appropriate to the level of the students.’ (lj) smaller classes can thereby increase the interaction between students and teachers at the three stages of abl and enhance the students’ performance at the f2f stage. furthermore, smaller classes support students at different levels of learning, thus improving each student’s performance and achievements. zhang and fisher the implications of active blended learning for english teaching in a chinese university journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 16 discussion in an abl environment, uon tutors applied various teaching methods and strategies to promote active learning, such as designing various tasks, peer feedback, competitions, and increasing student choice. in addition, they have deployed a range of technologies and tools, for example, peergrade, kahoot, microsoft forms, perusall, whatsapp, and skype within the abl environment. in a previous study by cummings et al. (2017), it has been observed that strategies, such as project-based tasks and peer feedback, can advance a tutor’s skill in engaging students in active learning. by using a range of methods, strategies, and tools, it can be seen that abl may successfully facilitate active learning. this finding is consistent with studies that have shown how blended learning has helped increase student motivation (vaughan, 2007; woltering et al., 2009) whilst also enhancing teacher-student interaction opportunities (vaughan, 2007). at the same time, however, the present study indicates that there are issues which may hinder the successful implementation of abl. one of the problems identified by uon tutors is students’ non-engagement during the pre-session stage, which may be caused by lack of self-discipline, poor time management skills or a lack of technical skills. this finding echoes a recent study by rasheed et al. (2020), who note that the key challenges facing students are the challenges of self-regulation and the challenges of using learning technology. the increase in tutors’ workload is considered another challenge within abl, because tutors have to devote a lot of time to f2f classroom teaching, evaluating students’ homework, course redesign, preparing blended learning materials, and interacting with students online. this finding is consistent with earlier studies by gedik et al. (2013) and alebaikan and troudi (2010), who found that increasing the tutor’s workload is a problem in terms of taking a lot of time developing digital content, learning new techniques and skills, and interacting with students when implementing blended learning. the role of institutional support is also crucial in facilitating abl and includes provision of staff development training, provision of a robust technical infrastructure and providing resources zhang and fisher the implications of active blended learning for english teaching in a chinese university journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 17 for small group teaching. staff development training can assist tutors in terms of improving their digital competence to ensure successful implementation of blended learning. this finding aligns with owens (2012), who advised that, if this approach is to be powerful, explicit educational and technological staff improvement is indispensable. all phases of bl require a technology infrastructure to support them, so institutions should work to strengthen this aspect of the institution’s infrastructure. in accordance with this finding, previous studies have demonstrated that adequate infrastructure is the foundation of an institution’s ability to conduct blended learning (niemiec and otte, 2009; graham et al., 2013; moskal et al., 2013). another finding of this paper is the value of providing additional resources for teaching small groups. by dividing a large class into smaller groups for instruction, or by introducing additional teachers to a large class, it is possible to increase student-teacher interaction in blended learning. it should be noted, however, that this finding has not been identified by tutors at hnu because large classes are a specific feature of college english teaching in chinese universities. the above findings have important implications for the provision of college english at hnu in the following ways: 1) at hnu, college english bl is still based on lecture-based blending in which tutors impart knowledge. to improve students’ engagement in class, tutors should add various active and meaningful classroom activities so that bl can transform from lecturebased blending to task-based blending. 2) the existing policy of hnu lacks support for bl delivery of college english. hnu should consider providing incentives to bl adopters (porter et al., 2014), which may include increasing the weight of bl courses in workload calculations, allowing tutors to hire teaching assistants (garrison and vaughan, 2013), and providing funding for bl. 3) professional development is an important factor in promoting bl. hence, hnu administrators should organise staff workshops to enhance communication between tutors, and conduct tutor training and encourage them to use teaching strategies to promote bl teaching, so as to promote students’ learning development. 4) in terms of infrastructure, the deployment of the necessary technical infrastructure, such as quality servers, sufficient bandwidth, is critical to the effective adoption of bl. therefore, it is imperative for hnu to provide tutors and students with the centralised technical infrastructure necessary to adopt bl effectively. 5) the delivery of lectures to large numbers of students is a typical problem in the zhang and fisher the implications of active blended learning for english teaching in a chinese university journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 18 delivery of bl in college english in china, which inevitably creates a distance between students and tutors. hnu should therefore reduce class sizes or increase the number of tutors for large classes to facilitate the interaction between tutors and students thereby ensuring that tutors can better meet students’ personalised needs. although this study has achieved its aims, there are some limitations. the first limitation is that the study was based on interviews with 20 teachers, 10 from uon and 10 from hnu, which might not represent the majority of the tutors in the two universities. therefore, the data might not be sufficiently generalisable. another limitation is that interviewees are college english teachers in hnu and general teachers in uon. this led to a decrease in meaningful data, which increased the difficulty of data analysis. it is suggested that future research should: (1) increase the number of interviewees in order to obtain more adequate data; (2) recruit interviewees who teach the same or similar subject as far as possible. conclusion the purpose of this paper is to explore how the abl practices developed at uon can guide the bl design of english teaching curriculum in hnu to enable a more active learning experience in both online and f2f learning. the implication from the findings reported in the study is that, if bl is to be implemented successfully in college english courses in hnu in a way that promotes student motivation, the university needs to provide support in 5 areas: pedagogical design, policy, staff development, technical infrastructure and small class sizes. in order to promote students’ learning development, institutions and teachers should strive to provide blended and student-centred learning opportunities for students. the research findings provide guidelines on the design and implementation of college english bl practice in hnu. moreover, it is anticipated that the findings of this study may shed light on some issues relating to bl in other disciplines at hnu, such as business, education, management, chinese literature, and provide references for future research. zhang and fisher the implications of active blended learning for english teaching in a chinese university journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 19 acknowledgements the authors would like to thank ale armellini and ming nie for offering their suggestions. funding the research is generously supported by the research foundation of the china scholarship council [grant numbers 201900790004]. references alebaikan, r. and troudi, s. (2010) ‘blended learning in saudi universities: challenges and perspectives’. alt-j, 18(1), pp.49-59. https://doi.org/10.1080/09687761003657614 al zumor, a.w.q., al refaai, i.k., eddin, e.a.b. and al-rahman, f.h.a. (2013) ‘efl students' perceptions of a blended learning environment: advantages, limitations and suggestions for improvement’. english language teaching, 6(10), pp.95-110. https://doi.org/10.5539/elt.v6n10p95 braun, v. and clarke, v. (2006) ‘using thematic analysis in psychology’. qualitative research in psychology, 3(2), pp.77-101. https://doi.org/10.1191/1478088706qp063oa castro, r. (2019) ‘blended learning in higher education: trends and capabilities’. education and information technologies, 24(4), pp.2523-2546. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10639019-09886-3 clark, d.b. and sampson, v. (2008) ‘assessing dialogic argumentation in online environments to relate structure, grounds, and conceptual quality’. journal of research https://doi.org/10.1080/09687761003657614 https://doi.org/10.5539/elt.v6n10p95 https://doi.org/10.1191/1478088706qp063oa https://doi.org/10.1007/s10639-019-09886-3 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10639-019-09886-3 zhang and fisher the implications of active blended learning for english teaching in a chinese university journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 20 in science teaching: the official journal of the national association for research in science teaching, 45(3), pp.293-321. https://doi.org/10.1002/tea.20216 conrad, r. m., and donaldson, j. a. (2004) ‘engaging the online learner: activities and resources for creative instruction’. san francisco, ca: jossey-bass. cummings, c., mason, d., shelton, k. and baur, k. (2017) ‘active learning strategies for online and blended learning environments’. in flipped instruction: breakthroughs in research and practice (pp. 58-82). igi global. https://doi.org/10.4018/978-1-52251803-7.ch006 de wever, b., schellens, t., van keer, h. and valcke, m. (2008) ‘structuring asynchronous discussion groups by introducing roles: do students act in line with assigned roles?’. small group research, 39(6), pp.770-794. https://doi.org/10.1177/1046496408323227 dziuban, c., hartman, j, juge, f, moskal, p, and sorg, s. (2006) ‘blended learning enters the mainstream’, pp.195–208, in bonk, c.j. and graham, c.r. (eds.) the handbook of blended learning: global perspectives, local designs,. san francisco, ca: pfeiffer publishing. garrison, d. r. and kanuka, h. (2004). ‘blended learning: uncovering its transformative potential in higher education.’ the internet and higher education, 7(2), pp. 95-105. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.iheduc.2004.02.001 garrison, d.r. and vaughan, n.d. (2013). ‘institutional change and leadership associated with blended learning innovation: two case studies’. the internet and higher education, 18, pp.24-28. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.iheduc.2012.09.001 https://doi.org/10.1002/tea.20216 https://doi.org/10.4018/978-1-5225-1803-7.ch006 https://doi.org/10.4018/978-1-5225-1803-7.ch006 https://doi.org/10.1177/1046496408323227 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.iheduc.2004.02.001 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.iheduc.2012.09.001 zhang and fisher the implications of active blended learning for english teaching in a chinese university journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 21 gedik, n., kiraz, e. and ozden, m.y. (2013). ‘design of a blended learning environment: considerations and implementation issues’. australasian journal of educational technology, 29(1). pp. 1-19. https://doi.org/10.14742/ajet.6 ghazizadeh, t. and fatemipour, h. (2017). the effect of blended learning on efl learners’ reading proficiency. journal of language teaching and research, 8(3), p. 606. https://doi.org/10.17507/jltr.0803.21 graham, c.r. (2013). ‘emerging practice and research in blended learning’, pp. 333-350, in moore, m. g. (ed.), handbook of distance education. london: routledge. graham, c.r., woodfield, w. and harrison, j.b. (2013). ‘a framework for institutional adoption and implementation of blended learning in higher education’. the internet and higher education, 18, pp.4-14. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.iheduc.2012.09.003 hara, n. and kling, r. (2000). ‘students’ distress with a web-based distance education course: an ethnographic study of participants’ experiences’. information, communication, and society, 3(4), pp. 557–579. https://doi.org/10.1080/13691180010002297 hanson, k., and carlson, b. (2005). ‘effective access teachers’ use of digital resources in stem teaching’, education development center, inc. kenney, j., and newcombe, e. (2010). ‘adopting a blended learning approach: challenges encountered and lessons learned in an action research study’. journal of asynchronous learning networks, 15(1), pp. 45-57. https://doi.org/10.24059/olj.v15i1.182 king, a. (1993). ‘from sage on the stage to guide on the side’. college teaching, 41(1), pp.3035. https://doi.org/10.1080/87567555.1993.9926781 https://doi.org/10.14742/ajet.6 https://doi.org/10.17507/jltr.0803.21 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.iheduc.2012.09.003 https://doi.org/10.1080/13691180010002297 https://doi.org/10.24059/olj.v15i1.182 https://doi.org/10.1080/87567555.1993.9926781 zhang and fisher the implications of active blended learning for english teaching in a chinese university journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 22 kliger, d. and pfeiffer, e., 2011. engaging students in blended courses through increased technology. journal of physical therapy education, 25(1), pp.11-14. https://doi.org/10.1097/00001416-201110000-00003 lim, d.h. and morris, m.l. (2009). ‘learner and instructional factors influencing learning outcomes within a blended learning environment’. journal of educational technology and society, 12(4), pp.282-293. https://www.j-ets.net/collection/published-issues/12_4 (accessed: 28 february 2022) lópez-pérez, m.v., pérez-lópez, m.c. and rodríguez-ariza, l., 2011. blended learning in higher education: students’ perceptions and their relation to outcomes. computers & education, 56(3), pp.818-826. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2010.10.023 lotrecchiano, g.r., mcdonald, p.l., lyons, l., long, t. and zajicek-farber, m. (2013). ‘blended learning: strengths, challenges, and lessons learned in an interprofessional training program’. maternal and child health journal, 17(9), pp.1725-1734. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10995-012-1175-8 mergendoller, j.r., maxwell, n.l. and bellisimo, y. (2006). the effectiveness of problembased instruction: a comparative study of instructional methods and student characteristics. interdisciplinary journal of problem-based learning, 1(2), p.49-69. https://doi.org/10.7771/1541-5015.1026 moskal, p., dziuban, c. and hartman, j. (2013). ‘blended learning: a dangerous idea?’. the internet and higher education, 18, pp.15-23. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.iheduc.2012.12.001 niemiec, m. and otte, g. (2009). ‘an administrator's guide to the whys and hows of blended learning’. journal of asynchronous learning networks, 13(1), pp.19-30. https://doi.org/10.24059/olj.v13i1.1674 https://doi.org/10.1097/00001416-201110000-00003 https://www.j-ets.net/collection/published-issues/12_4 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2010.10.023 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10995-012-1175-8 https://doi.org/10.7771/1541-5015.1026 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.iheduc.2012.12.001 https://doi.org/10.24059/olj.v13i1.1674 zhang and fisher the implications of active blended learning for english teaching in a chinese university journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 23 o'toole, j.m. and absalom, d.j. (2003). ‘the impact of blended learning on student outcomes: is there room on the horse for two?’. journal of educational media, 28(2-3), pp.179-190. https://doi.org/10.1080/1358165032000165680 owens, t. (2012). ‘hitting the nail on the head: the importance of specific staff development for effective blended learning’. innovations in education and teaching international, 49(4), pp.389-400. https://doi.org/10.1080/14703297.2012.728877 padilla rodriguez, b. c., and armellini, a. (2021). cases on active blended learning in higher education. igi global. https://doi.org/10.4018/978-1-7998-7856-8.ch001 penuel, w.r. and means, b. (2000). ‘designing a performance assessment to measure students’ communication skills in multi-media-supported, project-based learning’. in annual meeting of the american educational research association, new orleans. porter, w.w., graham, c.r., spring, k.a. and welch, k.r.(2014). ‘blended learning in higher education: institutional adoption and implementation’. computers & education, 75, pp.185-195. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2014.02.011 rasheed, r.a., kamsin, a. and abdullah, n.a. (2020). ‘challenges in the online component of blended learning: a systematic review’. computers & education, 144, p.103701. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2019.103701 rodrigo, c., delgado, j.l. and vega, j. (2010). ‘using interactive videoconference to promote active learning in a blended learning environment’. in 2010 10th ieee international conference on advanced learning technologies (pp. 658-662). ieee. shih, r.c. (2011). ‘can web 2.0 technology assist college students in learning english writing? integrating facebook and peer assessment with blended learning’. australasian journal of educational technology, 27(5). https://doi.org/10.14742/ajet.934 https://doi.org/10.1080/1358165032000165680 https://doi.org/10.1080/14703297.2012.728877 https://doi.org/10.4018/978-1-7998-7856-8.ch001 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2014.02.011 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2019.103701 https://doi.org/10.14742/ajet.934 zhang and fisher the implications of active blended learning for english teaching in a chinese university journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 24 singh, h. (2003). ‘building effective blended learning programs’, educational technology, 43(6), pp. 51-54. https://www.jstor.org/stable/44428863 (accessed: 4 march 2022) tang, c.m. and chaw, l.y. (2016). ‘digital literacy: a prerequisite for effective learning in a blended learning environment?’. electronic journal of e-learning, 14(1), pp.54-65. https://academic-publishing.org/index.php/ejel/article/view/1743 (accessed: 28 february 2022) toth, m., foulger, t.s. and amrein-beardsley, a., (2008). ‘post-implementation insights about a hybrid degree program’. techtrend, 52(3), pp.76-80. vaughan, n. (2007). ‘perspectives on blended learning in higher education’. international journal on e-learning, 6(1), pp.81-94. https://www.learntechlib.org/primary/p/6310/ (accessed: 28 february 2022) wishart, j.m., oades, c.e. and morris, m., 2007. ‘using online role play to teach internet safety awareness’. computers & education, 48(3), pp.460-473. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2005.03.003 woltering, v., herrler, a., spitzer, k. and spreckelsen, c. (2009). ‘blended learning positively affects students’ satisfaction and the role of the tutor in the problem-based learning process: results of a mixed-method evaluation’. advances in health sciences education, 14(5), pp.725-738. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10459-009-9154-6 author details huan zhang is a lecturer in the faculty of international studies at henan normal university in china. her research interests are blended learning and college english teaching. https://www.jstor.org/stable/44428863 https://academic-publishing.org/index.php/ejel/article/view/1743 https://www.learntechlib.org/primary/p/6310/ https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2005.03.003 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10459-009-9154-6 zhang and fisher the implications of active blended learning for english teaching in a chinese university journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 25 bob fisher is a principal lecturer and subject leader for educational linguistics at the university of northampton. his research interests include key english for academic purposes, phonology, data-driven learning and business communications. the implications of active blended learning for english teaching in a chinese university abstract introduction literature review methods research question data collection method data analysis method results issues of abl the tutor’s increased workload is another challenge when using abl. bl can place a physical burden on the tutors, in the sense that tutors’ workload has increased to accommodate an increase in time dedicated to preparation and post-session feedback. a... the importance of institutional support discussion conclusion acknowledgements funding references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special issue 22: compendium of innovative practice october 2021 editorial: supporting institutional change cathy malone middlesex university london in a sector not known for its flexibility or ability to respond rapidly to technological change (killen 2015) the papers in this section demonstrate a range of dynamic and successful institutional responses to the challenges of the pandemic. they reveal the processes and thinking by which so many institutions responded rapidly to the pandemic and brought about changes to practice at scale. setting the lens at the level of institution or large faculty provides a particular perspective on the change management process and these reflections provide an insight into how large numbers of staff and students were supported to engage in a new online learning and teaching environment. the challenges the pandemic presented here include the need to facilitate the mass shift to online learning, the need to rapidly digitally enable large staff groups while maintaining the quality of provision, and the institutional commitment to principles of accessibility and inclusivity. many of the papers in this section note the significant increase in engagement with all avenues and means of support and cpd, where participation, website views and resource downloads appeared to expand exponentially; small communities of practice were thrust into the spotlight and bespoke courses for small groups now needed to be delivered institution wide. the international range of authors and case studies included here tells us something about the global ubiquity of the challenge. there are also commonalities in both principle and process in how institutions responded to the task of managing institutional change and upskilling large staff groups. a common theme is the commitment to pedagogy and educational theory; when supporting institutional shift in mode of delivery, pedagogy has been prioritised over technology. many authors note that while the online pivot was sudden and unplanned, the response needed to be more measured and intentional: there was a need to avoid the editorial journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22: compendium october 2021 temptation to mechanically translate face to face teaching approaches to online activities and processes. rather, it was important to revisit core educational principles such as udl (universal design for learning) to more deliberately select how to teach online or in a hybrid mode. in practical terms this meant turning staff into conscious learning designers and to support them move between modalities (online, face to face and increasingly a mixture of the two) in an intentional way, able to distinguish between learning objectives and mode dependent instructional objectives. at the same time the human needs of staff at the heart of this change project are repeatedly noted. frequent reference is made to the diversity of the staff groups involved and the need to acknowledge and address the anxieties and lack of confidence manifested by many. this very diversity has implications for the differentiated practical response. some patterns in practice begin to emerge; workshops and online resources, blog posts and videos provide a consistent message concerning guiding principles and expectations, while tips, checklists and templates provide a range of ideas for staff to select from – these modes were followed up with opportunities for closer peer support and hands on practice. combining different modes of cpd delivery enabled small teams to deliver support at scale that includes choice and feels targeted and bespoke. working at a similar scale but focusing on mass delivery of student learning development during the pandemic, we see two case studies which outline the development of online resource repositories and how increased usage brought about significant benefits to local learner development teams. summing up, the papers in this section provide an exciting insight into teams who collaborated under pressure and for whom the pandemic proved a positive catalyst for change. the results of their work captured here demonstrate a creative response to the pandemic and as well as offering exciting blueprints for practice and development, are inspiring in the openness they demonstrate to new ways of learning and supporting institutional change. references: killen, c. (2015) ‘enhancing the student digital experience: a strategic approach’, jisc report available online, https://www.jisc.ac.uk/full-guide/enhancing-the-digital-studentexperience (accessed 22 october 2021). https://www.jisc.ac.uk/full-guide/enhancing-the-digital-student-experience https://www.jisc.ac.uk/full-guide/enhancing-the-digital-student-experience journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special issue 25: aldinhe conference proceedings and reflections october 2022 visual thinking: exploring current practices and perspectives re student note taking dawne irving-bell edge hill university, uk peter hartley edge hill university, uk presentation abstract despite its importance, student note taking is under-researched and under-theorised. many studies are outdated, analysing pre-digital behaviour. hence, we question whether earlier findings still apply (as does van der meer, 2012). although we find some innovations useful, such as collaborative note taking (orndorff, 2015), much recent research is also problematic. for example, consider widely reported claims that students taking longhand notes perform better than students using laptops (mueller and oppenheimer, 2014). recent studies suggest more complex relationships (luo et al., 2018) but typically adopt short-term experimental approaches. as a result, current advice and guidance for university students tends to be limited, often listing different techniques with relatively little commentary/analysis. this session enabled participants to review progress on this aldinhe supported project, inviting discussion on issues/development regarding our three main aims to: 1) investigate current students’ note taking practices/preferences and develop transferable models to inform guidance and further research. 2) pilot structured interventions, introducing different methods. 3) produce/disseminate tools/approaches for longer-term investigation and application/adaptation by colleagues elsewhere. our practical explorations with students have focused on two methods (sketchnoting & concept mapping), offering key differences in approach. while both offer visual representations, concept mapping (see figure 1) uses quite ‘strict’ conceptual links/rules, irving-bell and hartley visual thinking: exploring current practices and perspectives re student note-taking 2 journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 whereas sketchnoting (see figure 2) offers a more ‘free-flowing’ and personal approach. both methods are paper and/or computer based. most importantly, both are supported by research, demonstrating their contribution to learning and understanding (for example, fernandes et al, 2018; kinchin et al, 2019). during the presentation, we shared the outcomes of our research to date via a practical workshop informed by our theoretical explorations and discussed their implications. figure 1. a concept map (cc-by hartley, 2022). this map was produced in cmap which is freeware supported by the institute for human and machine cognition (available as a download at https://www.ihmc.us/cmaptools/). the map aims to answer the question at the top left of the map which always crops up in our workshops. it includes a few weblinks which work directly if you have the map in its original format. maps can be exported in a range of formats, such as jpeg and pdf. one of the questions we hope to resolve as our project develops is why and how individuals decide on particular tools. https://www.ihmc.us/cmaptools/ irving-bell and hartley visual thinking: exploring current practices and perspectives re student note-taking 3 journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 figure 2. a sketchnote (cc-by irving-bell et al., 2021). this sketchnote was produced using procreate®, a two-time apple design award winning digital creative application made for ipad (available as a download within appstore). sketchnotes may also be produced using similar apps (for example, paper 53) on other mobile and tablet style devices and exported in multiple formats (such as pdf and jpeg), and of course, by hand, using paper and pens. community response these community reflections were contributed by 12 members of the community. these reflections have been presented thematically (and split up where necessary to facilitate this). all indented content represents original, unedited content from the community. irving-bell and hartley visual thinking: exploring current practices and perspectives re student note-taking 4 journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 1) a visual overview figure 3. visual thinking (and note making) by jacqui bartram, university of hull. 2) general feedback and reflections there were many positive comments on the presentation and the approach to note taking. these are presented here to represent how well this work was received at the conference: irving-bell and hartley visual thinking: exploring current practices and perspectives re student note-taking 5 journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 a nice, quick overview of two types of note taking was very interesting and gave me food for thought thank you for the presentation! alongside these general comments, contributors went into more detail to support irvingbell and hartley’s work. one contribution notably supported sketchnoting as a positive approach to support memory and comprehension: sketchnoting combines text and visuals which is based on the dual coding theory. it is generally shown to have a greater impact on what the note takers (and audience) remember, comprehend and/or share. very good for revision as well. this links to clark and paivio’s (1991) work on dual coding, which argues that learning can be expanded through verbal associations and imagery. the positivity was furthered in another reflection, focusing on how the presenters had helped broaden their understanding of visual note taking approaches: starting with building one’s visual vocabulary helps to get people hooked! thanks for the presentation. will get in touch. there is also an offer to get in touch, suggesting there will be ongoing dialogue on this topic. 2) terminology multiple reflections focused on the terminology and phrasing associated with note taking, sketchnotes and concept maps. one of these comments nicely summed up the discussion at the conference session: there was some conversation in the chat about the friendliness of phrasing i.e., sketchnoting may sound quite daunting to students. is this another barrier to add to the ones mentioned in the session? i think irving-bell and hartley visual thinking: exploring current practices and perspectives re student note-taking 6 journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 students might find ‘concept mapping’ quite a scary prospect too. could we start to use different language to make these fantastic ideas more appealing? this presents an interesting question, suggesting that the terminology can be off-putting to students. one potential solution was raised in another reflection: this presentation certainly reignited my drive to consider how to teach such a valuable area. interestingly, ‘note taking’ along with ‘reading’ have often been problematic terms to use with my students. i have frequently resorted to hiding them underneath different guises and titles with the aim to ‘tempt’ students in! students frequently separate the concept of research/note taking from the act of writing when the two are clearly entwined. i go forth with renewed rigour for this often-overlooked skill. this suggests that covering note taking by stealth may be one solution to the terminology barrier. 3) language another aspect of language that was discussed related to students with english as a second language. for such international students, there was further reflections on how concept mapping and sketchnotes may or may not help: to some international students who may be struggling with the english language, the visualisation could also come in handy for them to quickly jot down important ideas whilst listening to a lecture or skimming a book. however, i am concerned how many details could be left out, which may be essential for students to do their assignments. this line of thinking was furthered by another contributor who asked some more specific questions about supporting international students: … following [the above] ideas, for those international students who may struggle with the english language, they may try to note down every word irving-bell and hartley visual thinking: exploring current practices and perspectives re student note-taking 7 journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 so as to present an accurate and precise description/argument in their exams/assignments. in this case, how may you help these students figure out the purpose of note taking? for example, exams might need professional and accurate vocab, while notes for understanding do not? this suggests further avenues of research are still to be explored in the support of international student note taking. 4) questions and recommendations for the author this session provided the opportunity for delegates to reflect on their own practice and experience, though it also raised follow-up questions that may be useful for learning developers to address: which students would benefit from sketchnoting/concept mapping? which purpose of note taking would they be most suitable for? there were also some substantial reflections based around questions and recommendations: based on the examples shown in the presentation as well as my experience of using mind-mapping tools to take notes, i am pondering upon the role of sketchnoting or/and concept map noting in students’ study. are they utilised to replace traditional text-based note taking, or to complement it? a sketchnote, or concept map seems very useful to capture what is in a lecture or in a piece of writing and provide one with an opportunity to digest or synthesise information in-situ. […] i also have a question about how to make a good sketchnote or concept map note. could you provide some online resources about this? i know some researchers who are very systematic about their digital note taking (in all areas of life, not just work!) and can quickly find ideas or information they recorded years ago. supporting skills development in naming, filing, and storing notes could be an interesting follow on. i will be thinking about this for our resources too. irving-bell and hartley visual thinking: exploring current practices and perspectives re student note-taking 8 journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 i have some questions about transferring ideas into notes and the retainment of information in a graphic form. i wonder if there were any resources or training you could recommend for students majoring in humanities and social sciences. i singled out these groups of students, as the knowledge they learn could be philosophical and might need the effort to transfer into graphics. and in this case, would visual note taking be more effective than the traditional text-based ones? besides, speaking from a student’s perspective, are there any effective note-taking methods you recommend to students when understanding the knowledge itself turns out to be a difficult task and when lecturers are not able to be re-listened to? i found myself overwhelmed with cognitive tasks in that situation, and my instant reaction turned out to be noting down every word the lecturer said, which may not be a clever way of retaining information […] and how would you construct a conversation to students who are high achievers, that visual note taking is a good way to go, and they do not need to note down everything in the lecture or in the textbook? this presentation has made me revisit key questions – what is the student doing when being presented with new information? how are they processing that information? when will they come back to their notes? as an extension, it could be interesting to explore how students are categorising and documenting their notes over time so they can hopefully revisit them later and make further connections in their learning. perhaps the physicality of one sketchbook per subject may help students develop a good structure to locate and revisit notes. this could be one advantage of physical doodles. irving-bell and hartley visual thinking: exploring current practices and perspectives re student note-taking 9 journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 5) note taking scholarship and the great global note taking survey figure 4. the great global note taking survey (slide 31 of the presentation). despite being viewed as an essential skill, van der meer (2012) argues that note taking is an area that is both under-theorised and under-researched. as part of their session, irvingbell and hartley introduced the great global note taking survey, which they have launched alongside baff, beckingham, faulkner, hallam, swanton, and wooff (baff et al., 2022, see figure 4). the survey aims to address the lack of scholarship on notetaking and was well received by delegates …interesting to hear about the current state of note taking support across the institutions, thank you. i have not had much to do with note taking as a skill since before lockdown, so it was useful to get a digital update! it will be interesting to follow the great global note taking survey. the presenters received many positive comments regarding their approach and the great global note taking survey. it is fair to say there will be much interest from the learning development community regarding the outcome of this survey. the conversation reflected that there is also a need for a broader scholarship on note taking within learning development. one delegate shared that they were also conducting research in the same field, focusing on: https://figshare.edgehill.ac.uk/authors/debbie_baff/9087277 irving-bell and hartley visual thinking: exploring current practices and perspectives re student note-taking 10 journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 … the impact of students' copying and pasting into their notes versus noting key concepts and the importance of engagement (deeper processing of the information) with the text was reflected in both the use of sketchnoting and concept mapping. this was noted by the presenters, who responded with: thank you for the comments and positive feedback! and for sharing how you are working with your students – we would be interested to speak to you – so if you revisit this page and would like to – please get in touch!!! there is certainly much discussion around note taking, and you can reach out to the conference presenters by contacting the corresponding author. authors’ reflections thank you to everyone who joined us and supported us in our presentation, and to those who have reached out since to share their practice, ideas, thoughts, and reflections. the great global note taking survey and the national teaching repository joined by a number of interested colleagues we are seeking to discover more about visual note taking practices and have created a short survey. if you would like to participate, we would love to hear your thoughts. here is a link to the great global note taking survey: https://doi.org/10.25416/ntr.20036534. https://doi.org/10.25416/ntr.20036534 irving-bell and hartley visual thinking: exploring current practices and perspectives re student note-taking 11 journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 we hope to use the data from the survey to inform our thinking, and to help us to shape a series of resources for use across the sector. once in place we will be sharing all resources via the national teaching repository (visit us on twitter: @ntrepository), which is an open educational resource (oer) hosted on a secure platform via edge hill university and figshare. there are already a few resources in place so if you wanted to have a look please visit https://figshare.edgehill.ac.uk/the_national_teaching_repository. we would also welcome your contributions, so if you would like to share your research and resources please visit https://figshare.edgehill.ac.uk/submit and select the national teaching repository or the ntr – visual thinking folder. work uploaded secures a doi and citation, so you can track engagement with your work via altmetric data. you set the level of cc licence permission you prefer, and your work remains your intellectual property. if you would like more information, help, or have ideas to share please do not hesitate to get in touch! community feedback: it was good to hear from delegates how they are using note taking, both in use of ‘software’ packages and approach. also, the mini discourse on ‘graphic recording’ (the professional recording of conferences) was interesting and highlighted that this activity can add to the intimidation of those taking notes due to the aspiration to create those ‘perfect pages’ – which detracts from the purpose of note taking which is to aid your own recall and improve your own learning. presenter reflections: firstly, we would like to thank the delegates not only for attending our workshop, but for taking the time after the session to share with us their invaluable insights. these have really given us ‘food for thought’ and combined with very early data from the global note taking survey, we have refined our thinking and the data is helping us to re-shape our research planning going forward. based on the comments and questions from our wonderful delegates it is clear that note taking in whatever form (pen and paper, tablet or mobile device, handwritten or computer https://figshare.edgehill.ac.uk/the_national_teaching_repository https://figshare.edgehill.ac.uk/submit irving-bell and hartley visual thinking: exploring current practices and perspectives re student note-taking 12 journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 generated, visual note taking, sketchnoting, mind and concept mapping) is of benefit to learners to aid cognitive recall. delegate feedback indicates that colleagues would like to know more and find out about the ‘best’ ways they can use visual note taking both for themselves and to support their learners. therefore, it is clear that more help, information and support around the ‘how’ of visual note taking would be of real value and benefit. working with our colleagues debbie baff, sue beckingham, suzanne faulkner, sarah hallam, katrina swanton, and david wooff in our next phase of work, in addition to continuing our research, we are looking at the feasibility of hosting a handful of practical (probably online) workshops. plus, as we develop resources, we will be sharing our research-informed resources via the national teaching repository oer platform. so please visit the repository, contribute if you feel able to do so, or to get involved and join us please get in touch. acknowledgements thanks are extended to all members of the community that have engaged with the conference or these proceedings in some way. thank you to the following community members for their contributions to this particular paper: a-k reck, (university of portsmouth), qi luo (university college london), robert ping-nan chang (university of the arts london). special thanks to jacqui bartram (university of hull) for her visual reflection on this session. references baff, d., beckingham, s., faulkner, s., hallam, s., hartley, p., irving-bell, d., swanton, k. and wooff, d. (2022) the great global notetaking survey. national teaching repository. https://doi.org/10.25416/ntr.20036534. clark, j. m. and paivio, a. (1991) ‘dual coding theory and education’, educational psychology review, 3, pp.149–210 https://doi.org/10.1007/bf01320076. https://doi.org/10.25416/ntr.20036534 https://doi.org/10.1007/bf01320076 irving-bell and hartley visual thinking: exploring current practices and perspectives re student note-taking 13 journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 fernandes, m. a., wammes, j. d. and meade, m. e. (2018) ‘the surprisingly powerful influence of drawing on memory’, current directions in psychological science, 27(5), pp.302-308. https://doi.org/10.1177/0963721418755385. hartley, p. (2022). concept mapping using cmap. national teaching repository. poster. https://doi.org/10.25416/ntr.21379242. irving-bell, d., cuthbert, k., tasler, n. and stinson, l. (2021). scholarship and impact. national teaching repository https://doi.org/10.25416/edgehill.16602089. kinchin, i. m., möllits, a. and reiska, p. (2019) ‘uncovering types of knowledge in concept maps’, education sciences, 9(2), p.131. available at: https://www.mdpi.com/22277102/9/2/131 (accessed: 25 july 2019). luo, l., kiewra, k. a., flanigan, a. e. and peteranetz, m. s. (2018) ‘laptop versus longhand note taking: effects on lecture notes and achievement’, instructional science. 46. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11251-018-9458-010.1007/s11251-018-94580. mueller, p. a. and oppenheimer, d. m. (2014) ‘the pen is mightier than the keyboard: advantages of longhand over laptop notetaking’, psychological science, 25(6), pp. 1159-1168. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797614524581. orndorff, h. n. (2015) ‘collaborative note-taking: the impact of cloud computing on classroom performance’, international journal of teaching and learning in higher education, 27(3), pp.340-35. available at https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ej1093744 (accessed: 20 october 2022). van der meer, j. (2012) ‘students’ note-taking challenges in the twenty-first century: considerations for teachers and academic staff developers’, teaching in higher education, 17(1), pp.13-23. https://doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2011.590974. https://doi.org/10.1177/0963721418755385 https://doi.org/10.25416/ntr.21379242 https://doi.org/10.25416/edgehill.16602089 https://www.mdpi.com/2227-7102/9/2/131 https://www.mdpi.com/2227-7102/9/2/131 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11251-018-9458-010.1007/s11251-018-9458-0 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11251-018-9458-010.1007/s11251-018-9458-0 https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797614524581 https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ej1093744 https://doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2011.590974 irving-bell and hartley visual thinking: exploring current practices and perspectives re student note-taking 14 journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 further reading andrade, j. (2009) ‘what does doodling do?’ applied cognitive psychology, 24, pp. 100-106. https://doi.org/10.1002/acp.1561. boggs, j. b., cohen, j. l. and merchant, g. c. (2017). ‘the effects of doodling on recall ability’, psychological thought, 10, pp.206-216. available from: https://digitalscholarship.unlv.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1165&context=edpsyc h_fac_articles (accessed: 21 october 2022). kinchin, i.m. (2014) ‘concept mapping as a learning tool in higher education: a critical analysis of recent reviews’. the journal of continuing higher education, 62(1) pp.39 49. https://doi.org/10.1080/07377363.2014.872011. kinchin, i.m. (2016) visualising powerful knowledge to develop the expert student: a knowledge structures perspective on teaching and learning at university. rotterdam: sense publishers. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-6300-627-9_2. meade, m. e., wammes, j. d., and fernandes, m. a. (2019). ‘comparing the influence of doodling, drawing, and writing at encoding on memory’, canadian journal of experimental psychology = revue canadienne de psychologie experimentale, 73(1), pp.28-36. https://doi.org/10.1037/cep0000170. novak, j.d. (2009) learning, creating and using knowledge: concept maps as facilitative tools in schools and corporations. 2nd edn. london: routledge. rohde, m. (2012) the sketchnote handbook. san francisco, ca: peachpit press. wammes, j. d., meade, m. e. and fernandes, m. a. (2018) ‘creating a recollection-based memory through drawing’, journal of experimental psychology: learning, memory, and cognition, 44, pp.734-751. https://doi.org/10.1037/xlm0000445. https://doi.org/10.1002/acp.1561 https://digitalscholarship.unlv.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1165&context=edpsych_fac_articles https://digitalscholarship.unlv.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1165&context=edpsych_fac_articles https://doi.org/10.1080/07377363.2014.872011 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-6300-627-9_2 https://doi.org/10.1037/cep0000170 https://doi.org/10.1037/xlm0000445 irving-bell and hartley visual thinking: exploring current practices and perspectives re student note-taking 15 journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 author details dawne irving-bell, ph.d. is a reader in teaching and learning. she is a national teaching fellow (ntf), principal fellow of the higher education academy (pfhea), holds a collaborative award for teaching excellence (cate) and received a national award from her subject association in recognition of her outstanding contribution to teacher education. with a passion for visual-thinking and technology education, dawne established ‘the national teaching repository’, an open education resource with proven reach and impact across the global higher education community. peter hartley is a higher education consultant, national teaching fellow and visiting professor at edge hill university, following previous roles as professor of education development at bradford and professor of communication at sheffield hallam. his ongoing consultancy includes mentoring ntf/cate applicants, institutional strategies for learning technology/spaces and assessment (see the pass project at https://www.bradford.ac.uk/pass/) now involved in the new seda/jisc student partnership impact award, he co-authored the second edition of success in groupwork, with mark dawson and sue beckingham (https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/success-in-groupwork9781350933491/). https://www.bradford.ac.uk/pass/ https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/success-in-groupwork-9781350933491/ https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/success-in-groupwork-9781350933491/ visual thinking: exploring current practices and perspectives re student note taking presentation abstract community response 1) a visual overview 2) general feedback and reflections 2) terminology 3) language 4) questions and recommendations for the author 5) note taking scholarship and the great global note taking survey authors’ reflections the great global note taking survey and the national teaching repository community feedback: presenter reflections: acknowledgements references further reading author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 26: special edi issue february 2023 ________________________________________________________________________ ©2023 the author(s) (cc-by 4.0) critical reflections on the racialised hierarchies of an ethnically diverse staff-student scholarship project team shannon martin the open university, uk jim lusted the open university, uk abstract this case study article reports on the reflections of the authors who were part of a staffstudent collaborative scholarship project investigating the learning experiences of black distance-learning students. although there is a growing body of research on the nature, experiences, power dynamics and benefits of staff-student collaborations in higher education contexts, there is much less discussion about how wider racialised hierarchies can influence such collaborations. the project discussed in this article consisted of an ethnically diverse team – including the authors of this piece who are a white male academic staff member and a female phd student from a black ethnic background. this case study offers a critically reflective account of the racialised hierarchy inherently present within our relationship. we briefly consider the ways in which the collaborative project was framed by potentially exploitative racialised hierarchies including the privileging of white staff members, before considering how we tried to mitigate these hierarchies by finding ways to involve and empower the ethnic minority student members of the team. these reflections might help those who are embarking upon ethnically diverse staff-student collaborations in higher education to ensure that ethnic minority students feel empowered and to help facilitate their role in promoting institutional change and disrupting exclusionary practice. keywords: staff-student collaboration; student-led research; empowerment; exploitation; black students; racialised hierarchies. martin and lusted critical reflections on the racialised hierarchies of an ethnically diverse staff-student scholarship project team journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 2 introduction collaborations between staff and students in higher education settings are becoming increasingly common, often part of a broader move to incorporate student representation into institutional decision making (luescher-mamashela, 2013). this ‘student voice’ can range from consultation (such as student feedback on a module) to student-led projects and interventions (matthews and dollinger, 2022). there is a longer history of formal research collaborations between phd students and their staff supervisors. less common are collaborations that involve students – particularly undergraduates – in research and scholarship into teaching and learning (allin, 2014), including those that examine students' learning experiences and the wider support and pastoral care students receive. it is recognised that staff-student collaborations have the potential to offer useful skill development opportunities (dickerson et al., 2016) and deeper insights into research questions concerned with student experiences (brown, 2019). they have also been shown to have the potential to empower, involve and give a voice to under-represented and minoritised students within the institutions they are part of (islam and valente, 2021). that said, there is evidence that students who put themselves forward for such collaborations tend to be ‘the usual suspects’ from ‘privileged social locations and identities who have the prior confidence or networks to self-select or be selected for involvement’ (mercermapstone et al., 2021, p.229). this lack of diversity mirrors a much wider experience of exclusion faced by many minoritised students in higher education. for example, there is a persistent, sector-wide awarding gap between white students and their ethnic minority peers, particularly those with black heritage, including in distance-learning he settings (advance he, 2021). research shows that black students are awarded lower grade degree classifications (connor et al., 2004; smith, 2017; mcduff et al., 2018; nguyen et al., 2020) and are more likely to leave programmes before their completion (e.g. richardson, 2015; ross et al., 2018; tight, 2020). disparities extend to distance-learning he settings, as research conducted by richardson (2012) notes an awarding gap in distance learning amongst ethnic minority students. nguyen et al. (2020) analysed online learning analytics to discover that black and minority ethnic (bme) students were less likely to complete, pass martin and lusted critical reflections on the racialised hierarchies of an ethnically diverse staff-student scholarship project team journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 3 or gain an excellent grade in comparison to white students, despite appearing to spend between 4-12% more time studying. in light of these trends and increasing requirements from regulatory bodies to address awarding gaps between student populations, there has been renewed interest in attempts to scrutinise the learning experiences of black students in higher education (he) institutions (e.g. osbourne et al., 2021). research into the causes of the ethnic awarding gap has exposed deeply rooted institutional, structural and cultural racialised inequalities in he in the uk (see, for example, arday and mirza, 2018). there is also increasing recognition, in this body of work, of the intersectional nature of inequalities related to higher education student experiences (solórzano et al., 2000; solórzano et al., 2002) and staff-student collaborations (mercer-mapstone, 2020), which recognises the complex interplay of factors including not only ethnicity, but also gender, disability, social class, age and other common socially significant categories. set within this institutional context, it is perhaps then not a surprise that staff-student collaborations tend to exclude ethnic minority students and can reinforce the elitist nature of higher education (mercer-mapstone and bovill, 2020). we might also assume that staffstudent collaborations led by white staff that do involve ethnic minority students could be susceptible to being framed by the long-standing racialised hierarchies that exist in higher education and wider society (mercer-mapstone et al., 2021). this case study article reports on the joint reflections of the authors on a staff-student collaborative project exploring the distance learning experiences of black students. jim is a white, male academic staff member (and was project lead), while shannon is a female phd student from a black ethnic background (and was a student-researcher on the project). these reflections focus specifically on the racialised hierarchies present within their collaborative project. although we recognise the intersectional nature of power hierarchies as noted earlier (particularly, in our case, gender relations), given the constraints placed on this short case study article, we have chosen to limit our reflections to issues of race and ethnicity to enable a deeper examination of this one particular nexus. we offer a critically reflective account of our collaboration with a particular focus on the racialised power dynamics inherently present within the project team. a short overview of martin and lusted critical reflections on the racialised hierarchies of an ethnically diverse staff-student scholarship project team journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 4 the staff-student project under examination is provided, outlining the practicalities involved in setting up and then undertaking the project. we then move on to offer some critical reflections on our experiences of collaborating on the project, noting particularly the importance of establishing mitigations to disrupt the racialised hierarchies that can frame such relationships. this involves a discussion of the hierarchical nature of our collaboration and how this created the possibility of exploitation – whether deliberately or unintentionally – and whether it was immediately felt or never recognised by students. consideration here is paid to the racialised nature of the relationship and how this contributed to the power dynamic between us. we then explore how the project attempted to mitigate these exploitative possibilities and what we collectively did to try to ensure the students were empowered through the experience. project overview – a staff-student exploration of black students’ learning experiences in distance learning our institution has an established reputation for promoting social justice through open access to distance-learning education. in addition, it is often assumed that distance learning might promote a more equitable learning experience for minoritised students compared to ‘brick’ universities (i.e. where the predominant form of interaction between students and staff is in person and takes place on a physical campus). evidence suggests, however, that persistent challenges associated with ensuring equitable outcomes for all students remain, while long-standing institutionalised practices that have led to discrimination against some student groups need addressing. our project was part of an increasing body of institutional scholarship exploring issues associated with equality, diversity and inclusion, which has become a strategic priority. the university has an access and participation plan (app) as a condition of registration with the office for students (the regulatory body overseeing higher education in england) which contains a number of targets in relation to equitable student outcomes, including reducing the awarding gap between black and white students achieving a ‘good’ module pass (defined as receiving the equivalent of a first or upper-second class level) from 31.1% (2020/21) to 11.1% by 2024/25. martin and lusted critical reflections on the racialised hierarchies of an ethnically diverse staff-student scholarship project team journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 5 while there is an increasing amount of statistical data available on such awarding gaps, as an institution we continue to know very little about the actual learning experiences of black students. the purpose of the project was therefore to create a student-led investigation to elicit a detailed, rich account of black students' learning experiences, focusing on modules associated with one particular degree programme. the project team consisted of six staff members and two students – the latter will be referred to hereafter as ‘studentresearchers’. of the staff team, there was one project lead and three core members, with two additional staff members taking a more distant role as critical friends to the project – one coming from a black ethnic background with all others being white. the decision to adopt a staff-student collaborative approach to investigate the topic was largely due to the project lead, jim, having previous experience conducting similar student-led projects at a ‘brick’ university and seeing the benefits of students being involved in research of this kind. in conducting these previous collaborative studies, jim had drawn upon the principles of action research, participatory research and a wider post-colonialist theoretical standpoint that recognises the impact of historical ideas of ‘race’ and racism on individuals, interpersonal relationships and wider social structures (hickling-hudson et al., 2004) – all of which have informed the approach taken in the project discussed in this case study. once the staff team was assembled, internal funding was secured to appoint two studentresearchers to the team. this funding enabled a fee to be attached to the studentresearcher role. the fee paid was in line with existing rates for staff ‘consultants’ and was an important element of the project design, as will be discussed later. it is noted that student roles that are unpaid invariably privilege those in comfortable financial positions and can exclude large sections of the student body from the opportunity (mercer-mapstone and bovill, 2020). we co-created an expression of interest that was advertised via internal communication methods, including general emails, online notice boards and notifications on module sites, and we encouraged tutors to share information with their student groups. the requirements included a short statement showing how they met the devised selection criteria, which included lived experience of the impact of race and racism in higher education settings. the aim was to recruit students who could lead the data collection in a student-only space, and we felt students with such lived experience could help to create a martin and lusted critical reflections on the racialised hierarchies of an ethnically diverse staff-student scholarship project team journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 6 ‘safe place’ for open discussions related to the learning experiences of students from black ethnic backgrounds. following a competitive shortlisting process, an undergraduate student taking the same degree programme as the target participants and a postgraduate phd researcher from a different faculty were recruited. it was felt that having two students on the team would reduce feelings of isolation and intimidation, while having a postgraduate work alongside an undergraduate might lead to opportunities for informal peer mentoring. focus groups with black students were then undertaken to find out more about their learning experiences, specifically related to their relationship with their tutor, other students and their connection to the module materials. the target student sample – students who had disclosed having a black ethnic background and having studied an ou module on the specific degree programme within the last year (approximately 90 students, around 3% of total cohort) – were contacted through an email message. the student researchers took a central role in this recruitment process, working with the team to design the email invitation and flyer (figure 1) and also creating a short video of themselves ‘selling’ the project to potential participants. figure 1: co-created recruitment flyer for student participants. martin and lusted critical reflections on the racialised hierarchies of an ethnically diverse staff-student scholarship project team journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 7 two focus groups took place online in june 2021, containing three and four participants respectively (7 participants in total). the focus groups lasted around one and a half to two hours long and were facilitated by the student-researchers with no staff present. transcriptions of the focus group conversations were generated by a third-party transcription company to enable some members of the research team – one of the student researchers and two staff members – to conduct thematic analysis on the transcripts produced. each team member initially undertook their own individual analysis independently of each other, followed by a meeting to share findings and finalise and agree upon the core themes that emerged from the data. a summary of the overall process followed can be found in figure 2 below. figure 2: stages of the staff-student collaborative project. critical reflections on racialised hierarchies in staff-student projects having briefly outlined the project, we move on to offer some reflections on our personal experiences of working together – from the position of staff project lead, jim, and studentresearcher, shannon. these reflections have been drawn from numerous informal conversations between us – both during and after the project. we have taken the agreed approach of open and honest dialogue with a willingness to challenge, be challenged and learn from each other’s experience. this reflective approach has been broadly informed by gannon’s thesis of ‘radical hope’ (2020), which leans heavily on the critical work of paulo friere (1996) in considering the transformative potential of teaching and learning. gannon martin and lusted critical reflections on the racialised hierarchies of an ethnically diverse staff-student scholarship project team journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 8 notes that adopting a critically reflective practice can pave the way towards ‘fundamental, root-level transformation…in which a better future takes shape out of our…refusal to abide by the limitations of the present’ (2020, p.5). the reflections that follow represent an iterative, collaborative writing process of ‘write-edit-re-draft’ and as such should be read as co-created reflections rather than individually written excerpts. a hierarchy between us existed even before we began working together, which was outside our own control. by their very nature, student and staff relations contain an imbalance of power and a presumed hierarchy drawn from the traditional binary of student/teacher and didactic learning. there are also long-standing social hierarchies that exist across gendered and racialised lines which also shaped the initial power dynamic between us. as project lead, jim also formally recruited shannon onto the team via the aforementioned application process which also created an implicit hierarchy between them before the project began. for a number of reasons, the nature and design of this project opened up the possibility of students being exploited – with the ultimate beneficiaries being the (predominantly white) staff team. although there were multiple reasons for jim to want to bring in students to help undertake the project, one was to ensure the data collection was an exclusively black student space. in this respect, the student-researchers could be seen to be ‘used’ to meet an objective of the project which could not be met by the staff members themselves. there was certainly the potential for the student-researchers to feel that their specific lived experiences (which included being subjected to discrimination and exclusion) were being exploited to enable staff to meet their own research aims. there are also wider ethical questions around who most benefits from a collaboration such as this one. while, as we discuss shortly, the student-researchers felt that they benefitted in multiple ways from taking part in the project, we did openly discuss the fact that it was really jim, as the project lead, who had the most to obviously gain from it – in terms of potential career progression, professional kudos and taking overall credit for the work. the racialised dynamics of our relationships were at play here too – with the uncomfortable colonialist history of white people claiming achievements, benefits and rewards often martin and lusted critical reflections on the racialised hierarchies of an ethnically diverse staff-student scholarship project team journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 9 through the result of the labour and exploitation of racialised people being potentially mirrored here. similarly, the allocation of tasks could also have been a potential site of exploitation for students; in any project there are more interesting tasks than others, and who gets to do the ‘donkey work’ can often be informed by these implicit hierarchies. it can be easy for those in power to delegate jobs or tasks they deem not to require particular knowledge or expertise to others to complete. again, we discussed together how this can be exacerbated by the racialised (and gendered) nature of a collaboration where, as was the case here, a white male is allocating tasks to a black female. finally, the way that a student’s time is recompensed also has the potential for exploitation; while staff receive a salary to cover their time and efforts, often students are asked to volunteer or are offered a small gift such as a voucher. we tackled this head on from the start by seeking funding to ensure that students received a fee for their time, following the guidelines for appointing paid consultants within the institution. this was to prove a consistently influential aspect of the project that served to reduce feelings of exploitation among the student-researchers and made them feel valued members of the team. with these hierarchies in mind, it was important that we recognised and acknowledged the dynamics within our relationship – to be both conscious of them but also to actively find ways to disrupt and mitigate them. we noted that the onus was on the power holder – project lead jim – to both acknowledge and find ways to reduce feelings of powerlessness and exploitation among the student team members. in this sense, the initial meetings and communication between us were important to set the tone and create trust between team members. once the student-researchers were recruited, we held a meeting to discuss – at some length – the principles and expectations of the study. we negotiated and then agreed some key expectations for all team members and worked out some practicalities about our working relationship; this included the principle of flexibility to ensure student and staff time could be accommodated equitably wherever possible. some meetings were held in the evenings, which required flexibility from staff, sometimes during the day when students were able to re-arrange their work schedules. martin and lusted critical reflections on the racialised hierarchies of an ethnically diverse staff-student scholarship project team journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 10 students were encouraged to be seen as equal members of the project team, in an attempt to try to disrupt traditional staff-student power hierarchies, and encouraged to always contribute their views. students were also invited to every meeting and included in all correspondence to try to ensure they had full involvement and were not seen as a separate group to the staff members. even with this inclusive and flexible approach, it was not always possible for both student-researchers to engage fully with every meeting and activity. the student-researchers were in quite different circumstances; shannon is a fulltime phd student and is the recipient of a studentship, whereas the undergraduate student-researcher was pursuing a self-funded undergraduate degree while working fulltime. this contributed to them having different experiences relating to the depth of involvement and additional time they could commit to the project. this also played a role in correspondence through email, where shannon found that she was usually able to respond to emails relating to the project at a faster rate than her student colleague due to his additional work and family commitments. in this respect, considering and adapting to the personal circumstances of the students recruited for a collaborative project appears to be an important factor. embedded in the project design was an opportunity for the student-researchers to input on the research question/s and method adopted. we were keen to take a co-creative approach to the project as far as possible. in practice, however, there were a number of limitations that made this difficult. first, in order to secure funding for the project (to facilitate the recruitment of the student-researchers), the staff team were required to scope out the project in advance, meaning that a plan had already been established. when it came to discussing it with the student members of the team, there were limitations on what could actually be amended at that point. relatedly, there was inevitably some variation in knowledge, skills and experience among the team members. we tried to adopt an approach in which all team members brought their own expertise in different areas – we could learn from each other, rather than just the staff team ‘developing’ the students. although shannon had completed research methods training during her undergraduate and postgraduate degrees, the second student researcher had no substantive previous studies related to research methods. in this martin and lusted critical reflections on the racialised hierarchies of an ethnically diverse staff-student scholarship project team journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 11 respect, it was perhaps unrealistic to expect students with limited research experience to be able to contribute fully to discussions around research design, questions and methodological approach. it became apparent that the student-researchers were much better placed to meaningfully input on more practical issues such as where and how to recruit participants while also helping to shape the focus group schedule and style. in light of this, it was agreed that some additional support to prepare to facilitate a focus group would be useful. as a result, one of the staff team with particular expertise in this area offered some informal training to the student-researchers. this took the form of a bespoke informal workshop on focus group methods, which was felt to be more appropriate than asking students to undertake readings or watching videos to learn about the method independently. this approach benefitted from shannon’s prior background in qualitative research training. without this prior experience it may have been necessary to extend this skills support with additional resources such as further reading and the use of supplementary online material related to focus groups. when it came to devising the focus group questions and schedule, shannon was able to take a lead in shaping the wording and framing of questions in a way that made them more accessible to students and easier for them to understand and engage with. this approach to skill and expertise sharing helped to reduce the ‘deficit’ approach that can be associated with student – particularly black student – interactions with staff. the deficit approach refers to the perception of minoritised groups as being inherently ‘flawed’ or ‘lacking’ appropriate educational skills or training that require ‘fixing’ before such students can achieve academically (smit, 2012). once the data had been analysed, the team worked together to produce a set of recommendations for change, related specifically to how tutors can develop more trusting relationships with black students and ways to encourage more peer support and communication between students to reduce feelings of isolation and lack of belonging among black students in distance learning settings. shannon played a central role in helping to shape these recommendations and also took part in a number of presentations where we disseminated the project findings. we tried to appear as a partnership of equals – as we have tried to do in writing this article, which we have both contributed to equitably. martin and lusted critical reflections on the racialised hierarchies of an ethnically diverse staff-student scholarship project team journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 12 perhaps the most important feature of the project for shannon was the empowerment she felt as a co-researcher in the project, as it allowed her to contribute towards wider institutional change to improve the learning experiences of black students. a project like this can begin to shift the position of black and other ethnic minority students – and indeed students who are often subjected to social hierarchies of many kinds – from the observed to the observers, from being identified as the source of the ‘problem’ in need of ‘fixing’ – in line with the aforementioned ‘deficit’ approach – to helping to shift the focus onto the institutionalised causes of persistent awarding gaps. conclusion this case study has provided an example of a staff-student project that consisted of an ethnically diverse project team, designed to further the understanding of the learning experiences of black distance learning students. the project has been presented as a case study to explore how staff-student collaborative research is often pre-framed by a number of established hierarchies which can be racialised in nature, particularly when white staff work together with ethnic minority students. this has the potential to create exploitative conditions that, without due consideration, can re-enforce rather than challenge wider exclusionary experiences for ethnic minority students. we recommend that staff-student collaborations of this kind must recognise and carefully discuss these racialised power dynamics right at the beginning of any collaboration rather than simply ignore or downplay the influence of such hierarchies. steps can then be taken to find ways to mitigate the potential exploitation that can occur, particularly with regard to who becomes the ultimate beneficiary of such collaborations (often white staff members). for our project, these mitigations included ensuring the full involvement of students throughout the project, paying a fee to students in line with regular consultancy rates, finding opportunities to share expertise, skills and experience between students and staff, and having students take a full role in disseminating recommendations across the institution. all these mitigations have contributed to ethnic minority students feeling a sense of empowerment through their involvement in the project. they have also helped to facilitate martin and lusted critical reflections on the racialised hierarchies of an ethnically diverse staff-student scholarship project team journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 13 a project that has collected rich, authentic data and been shaped by team members who have lived experience of being black students themselves. in a wider sense, the approach we have adopted appears to have the potential to help disrupt power hierarchies – in our case those informed by ‘race’ and racism – that are implicit in staff-student collaborations. in addition, we can claim that this approach can help to shift the position of black students as passive ‘recipients’ of institutional discriminatory practice and exclusion, to being central actors in the wider movement to instigate the institutional changes that are needed to challenge the persistent awarding gaps between black students and their peers. references advance he (2021) ethnicity awarding gaps in uk higher education in 2019/2020. available at: ethnicity awarding gaps in uk higher education in 2019/20 | advance he (advance-he.ac.uk) (accessed: 29 january 2023). allin, l. (2014) ‘collaboration between staff and students in the scholarship of teaching and learning: the potential and the problems’, teaching and learning inquiry, 2(1), pp.95-102. available at: https://doi.org/10.2979/teachlearninqu.2.1.95 (accessed: 29 january 2023). arday, j. and mirza, h.s. (eds.) (2018) dismantling race in higher education: racism, whiteness and decolonising the academy. springer. brown, n. (2019) ‘partnership in learning: how staff-student collaboration can innovate teaching’, european journal of teacher education, 42(5), pp.608-620. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/02619768.2019.1652905 (accessed: 29 january 2023). connor, h.c., tyers, c., modood, t. and hillage, j. (2004) why the difference? a closer look at higher education minority ethnic students and graduates. research report no. 552. london: department for education and skills. available at: https://www.education.gov.uk/publications/standard/publicationdetail/page1/rr552 (accessed: 29 january 2023). https://www.advance-he.ac.uk/knowledge-hub/ethnicity-awarding-gaps-uk-higher-education-201920 https://www.advance-he.ac.uk/knowledge-hub/ethnicity-awarding-gaps-uk-higher-education-201920 https://doi.org/10.2979/teachlearninqu.2.1.95 https://doi.org/10.1080/02619768.2019.1652905 https://www.education.gov.uk/publications/standard/publicationdetail/page1/rr552 martin and lusted critical reflections on the racialised hierarchies of an ethnically diverse staff-student scholarship project team journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 14 dickerson, c., jarvis, j. and stockwell, l. (2016) ‘staff–student collaboration: student learning from working together to enhance educational practice in higher education’, teaching in higher education, 21(3), pp.249-265. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2015.1136279 (accessed: 29 january 2023). friere, p. (1996) pedagogy of the oppressed. london: penguin. gannon, k. (2020) radical hope: a teaching manifesto. morgentown, us: west virginia university press. hickling-hudson, a., matthews, j. and woods, a. (2004) ‘education, postcolonialism and disruptions’, in hickling-hudson, a., matthews, j. and woods, a. (eds.) disrupting preconceptions: postcolonialism and education, brisbane: post pressed. pp.1-16. islam, m. and valente, i. (2021) ‘a critical dialogue reflecting on the potentials of bame staff-student partnerships’, the journal of educational innovation, partnership and change, 7(1). available at: https://journals.studentengagement.org.uk/index.php/studentchangeagents/article/vi ew/1037 (accessed: 29 january 2023). luescher-mamashela, t.m. (2013) ‘student representation in university decision making: good reasons, a new lens?’, studies in higher education, 38(10), pp.1442– 1456. https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2011.625496 (accessed: 29 january 2023). matthews, k.e. and dollinger, m. (2022) ‘student voice in higher education: the importance of distinguishing student representation and student partnership’, higher education, pp.1-16. available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-022-00851-7 (accessed: 29 january 2023). mcduff, n., tatam, j., beacock, o. and ross, f. (2018) ‘closing the attainment gap for students from black and minority ethnic backgrounds through institutional change’, widening participation and lifelong learning, 20(1), pp.79-101. available at: https://doi.org/10.5456/wpll.20.1.79 (accessed: 29 january 2023). https://doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2015.1136279 https://journals.studentengagement.org.uk/index.php/studentchangeagents/article/view/1037 https://journals.studentengagement.org.uk/index.php/studentchangeagents/article/view/1037 https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2011.625496 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-022-00851-7 https://doi.org/10.5456/wpll.20.1.79 martin and lusted critical reflections on the racialised hierarchies of an ethnically diverse staff-student scholarship project team journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 15 mercer-mapstone, l. (2020). ‘the student–staff partnership movement: striving for inclusion as we push sectorial change’. international journal for academic development, 25(2), pp. 121-133. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/1360144x.2019.1631171 (accessed: 29 january 2023). mercer-mapstone, l., islam, m. and reid, t. (2021) ‘are we just engaging ‘the usual suspects’? challenges in and practical strategies for supporting equity and diversity in student–staff partnership initiatives’ teaching in higher education, 26(2), pp.227245. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2019.1655396 (accessed: 29 january 2023). mercer-mapstone, l. and bovill, c. (2020) ‘equity and diversity in institutional approaches to student–staff partnership schemes in higher education’, studies in higher education, 45(12), pp.2541-2557. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2019.1620721 (accessed: 29 january 2023). nguyen, q., rienties, b. and richardson, j.t. (2020) ‘learning analytics to uncover inequality in behavioural engagement and academic attainment in a distance learning setting’, assessment and evaluation in higher education, 45(4), pp.594606. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2019.1679088 (accessed: 29 january 2023). osbourne, l., barnett, j. and blackwood, l. (2021) ‘“you never feel so black as when you're contrasted against a white background”: black students' experiences at a predominantly white institution in the uk’, journal of community and applied social psychology, pp.1-13. available at: https://doi.org/10.1002/casp.2517 (accessed: 29 january 2023). richardson, j.t.e. (2015) ‘the under-attainment of ethnic minority students in uk higher education: what we know and what we don’t know’, journal of further and higher education, 39(2), pp.278-291. available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0309877x.2013.858680 (accessed: 4 february 2023). https://doi.org/10.1080/1360144x.2019.1631171 https://doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2019.1655396 https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2019.1620721 https://doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2019.1679088 https://doi.org/10.1002/casp.2517 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0309877x.2013.858680 martin and lusted critical reflections on the racialised hierarchies of an ethnically diverse staff-student scholarship project team journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 16 richardson, j.t.e. (2012) ‘the attainment of white and ethnic minority students in distance education’, assessment and evaluation in higher education, 37(4), pp.393-408. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2010.534767 (accessed: 29 january 2023). ross, f.m., tatam, j.c., hughes, a.l., beacock, o.p. and mcduff, n. (2018) ‘"the great unspoken shame of uk higher education": addressing inequalities of attainment’, african journal of business ethics, 12(1), pp.104-115. available at: https://doi.org/10.15249/12-1-172 (accessed: 29 january 2023). smit, r. (2012) ‘towards a clearer understanding of student disadvantage in higher education: problematising deficit thinking’, higher education research & development, 31(3), pp.369-380. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/07294360.2011.634383 (accessed:30 january 2023). smith, s. (2017) ‘exploring the black and minority ethnic (bme) student attainment gap: what did it tell us? actions to address home bme undergraduate students’ degree attainment’, journal of perspectives in applied academic practice, 5(1), pp.48-57. available at: https://doi.org/10.14297/jpaap.v5i1.239 (accessed:30 january 2023). solórzano, d., cega, m. and yosso, t. (2000) ‘critical race theory, racial microaggressions and campus racial climate: the experiences of african american college students’, journal of negro education, 69(1/2) pp.60-73. available at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2696265 (accessed:30 january 2023). solórzano, d., allen, w. and carroll, g. (2002) ‘keeping race in place: racial microaggressions and campus racial climate at the university of california, berkeley’, chicana/o latina/o law review, 23(1) pp.15-111. available at: https://heinonline-org.gate3.library.lse.ac.uk/hol/p?h=hein.journals/chiclat23&i=21 (accessed:30 january 2023). https://doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2010.534767 https://doi.org/10.15249/12-1-172 https://doi.org/10.1080/07294360.2011.634383 https://doi.org/10.14297/jpaap.v5i1.239 https://www.jstor.org/stable/2696265 https://heinonline-org.gate3.library.lse.ac.uk/hol/p?h=hein.journals/chiclat23&i=21 martin and lusted critical reflections on the racialised hierarchies of an ethnically diverse staff-student scholarship project team journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 17 tight, m. (2020) ‘student retention and engagement in higher education’, journal of further and higher education, 33(5), pp.689-704. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/0309877x.2019.1576860 (accessed:30 january 2023). author details shannon martin is a phd student at the open university. her phd utilises qualitative methods to look at how decolonisation is conceptualised as a key approach to address issues of racism and racial inequality in higher education, specifically focusing on the open university. she has also undertaken research on a number of projects related to investigating the experiences of traditionally marginalised groups in higher education. she is particularly interested in issues relating to social inequalities in education. jim lusted is a lecturer in sport & fitness at the open university and has undertaken several staff-student scholarship projects related to teaching and learning, particularly focused around the learning experiences of ethnic minority students. his academic research profile includes publications on issues related to social inequalities in sport settings. licence ©2023 the author(s). this is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (cc-by 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. see http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. journal of learning development in higher education (jldhe) is a peer-reviewed open access journal published by the association for learning development in higher education (aldinhe). https://doi.org/10.1080/0309877x.2019.1576860 journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 26: special edi issue february 2023 ________________________________________________________________________ ©2023 the author(s) (cc-by 4.0) inclusive learning development practices: the consequences of flexibility and choice in the hybrid era ralitsa b kantcheva bangor university, uk ed bickle bournemouth university, uk abstract the covid-19 pandemic, and the move to online teaching and learning, has provided opportunities for the learning development (ld) community to find new and innovative pedagogical approaches to providing a more inclusive learning environment. many of these opportunities are now being incorporated into a new hybrid era of teaching, which seeks to build the ‘best of both worlds’. to embrace this new era of flexibility, hybrid learning and teaching strategies need to be developed rather than merely being a reaction to a global health emergency. based on the experiences of two learning developers at different uk institutions, this paper reflects on the benefits and disadvantages of a hybrid mode of delivery of one-to-one tutorials, one of the cornerstones of ld provision. within this paper we define hybrid teaching as a combination of online and physical environments (gamage et al., 2022). keywords: hybrid teaching; learning development support; flexible teaching practices; inclusive practices. the covid-19 pandemic, and the move to online teaching and learning, has provided opportunities for the learning development (ld) community to find new and innovative pedagogical approaches to offering a more inclusive learning environment. whilst inperson teaching has resumed after the pandemic restrictions ended, it is perhaps kantcheva and bickle inclusive learning development practices: the consequences of flexibility and choice in the hybrid era journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 2 unrealistic to imagine life will return entirely to the pre-covid world anytime soon. therefore, we are likely to be entering a new era within higher education (he), that of a hybrid teaching model. such an approach provides a whole host of advantages, such as the enhanced opportunities for personalisation and individualisation of hybrid teaching methods in he (khine et al., 2021), that learning developers (lds) can embrace in their one-to-one support to create a more inclusive learning environment. this is especially relevant for ld tutorials. for example, if students pre-covid had been hesitant in attending a face-to-face tutorial, a hybrid approach provides greater choice and efficiency in when and how students interact with ld support. thus, a hybrid approach can help ld support transpose time and space (khine et al., 2021). from a wider perspective, if one of the key roles of he is to prepare students for the world of work, then, given the widespread adoption of remote working, this will inevitably impact on the he environment (miroshnikov, 2021). in other words, hybrid teaching and learning becomes the logical step within he. in our two institutions, tutorials last 50 minutes, but provision varied pre-covid. in institution one, tutorials were offered face-to-face, with a few exceptions being made for virtual tutorials via skype, and were predominately arranged through email. in institution two, tutorials were booked using an online form, and students had a choice between a face-to-face or a skype appointment. in both institutions, tutorials would regularly be run back-to-back. from our experiences, the new hybrid era has helped to build a more inclusive environment, which can positively impact on motivation, learning, and student engagement in he (linder, 2017). firstly, students have been presented with a greater choice, enabling a more personalised approach, when interacting with our ld teams. in institution one this has meant that the faculty-based team now offers each student the opportunity to meet virtually or in person, where previously virtual tutorials were only offered in certain circumstances. moreover, the team are exploring more innovative pedagogic approaches, a good example being the use of urban walks as a way of engaging with dissertation students (psaros, 2022). consequently, offering multiple modes of delivery can help ld to be more accessible to meet the needs of the increasingly diverse range of students (lin, 2008). kantcheva and bickle inclusive learning development practices: the consequences of flexibility and choice in the hybrid era journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 3 whilst the inclusion of online tutorials has been of benefit, particularly in offering students a greater choice, it must also be noted that online support has a number of unique disadvantages. a major group of issues relate to social inequality, such as access to reliable technology, to stable and strong internet connection, to suitable software, and to secure private learning spaces (devkota, 2021; curelaru et al., 2022). indeed, goudeau et al. (2021), suggest that there is a social class disparity. moreover, the required hardware and software need to be regularly updated to be capable of performing the required tasks. on several occasions in institution two a lack of such updates prevented students from engaging with interactive online teaching strategies and in peer-learning techniques. similarly, in both our institutions a lack of stable internet connection has often hindered online tutorials, with students sometimes unable to switch on their cameras, for example. additionally, a major limitation of the online medium is the reduced non-verbal communication resulting in less efficient communication, potential frustration, and disruption to wellbeing monitoring during one-to-one ld tutorials (delderfield et al., 2020). moreover, geographical location, time zone, and varying weather patterns have a significant effect on human ability to invest cognitively and emotionally during an online ld tutorial. furthermore, online learning during the height of the pandemic led to increased levels of stress and anxiety amongst students for a number of reasons including isolation, difficulties in using technology (akpinar, 2021), and the loss of impromptu discussions that are part of informal face-to-face contact (morrison et al., 2021). a further challenge is that, based on our own experiences, online teaching and support is more physically tiring (bryson and andres, 2020) for students and staff. therefore, ld teams should plan shorter periods for online support than face-to-face. the lack of requirement for physical movement between meetings in online spaces, for example, unlike in the in-person environment, could lead to having multiple meetings following on from each other, resulting in screen fatigue (shoshan and wehrt, 2021; de oliveira kubrusly sobral et al., 2022; lepp et al., 2022), eye strain (ganne et al., 2021; salinastoro et al., 2022), and increasing the chance of cardiovascular disease (taylor, 2011) as well as other health-related challenges (baker et al., 2018). in institution two this has led the ld team, who are centrally based, to have a pre-planned 30-minute screen break after each 50-minute one-on-one ld tutorial. similarly, in institution one, rather than back-tokantcheva and bickle inclusive learning development practices: the consequences of flexibility and choice in the hybrid era journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 4 back tutorials, space has been built in for screen breaks. furthermore, in a hybrid environment both students and staff should be able to engage seamlessly with teaching and learning activities in both online and campus-based media. potentially, having a oneto-one online ld tutorial, followed by campus-based teaching, and then another online interactive subject-related workshop, will be part of the new hybrid era. thus, scheduling transition breaks will ensure gaps between online and face-to-face activities, and enable students and staff to have time to move effectively between the two media. flexibility of access to ld support and provision is another key feature of the new hybrid era that should be built in at the planning stage. in institution one, for example, the ld team has increased the number of ways in which students can book tutorials, adding an online booking system to existing email and face-to-face booking systems. this relates to a wider point around the need for ld teams to ensure equal access to online and campusbased support. this is particularly important in our own institutions given the lack of campus-based tutorials over the past two academic years, and the need to ensure that ld support is not perceived as solely an online activity. based on our experiences, the hybrid era can bring particular benefits in the delivery of ld one-on-one tutorials, such as greater choice in communication methods and increased flexibility for meeting with ld teams. by carefully planning hybrid ld support, practitioners can ensure that social inequality and health-related issues will be minimised, while effective communication is optimised. if this can be achieved, then ld tutorials can have a positive impact on the motivation, learning, and engagement in he of an increasingly diverse student population. references akpınar, e. (2021) ‘the effect of online learning on tertiary level students mental health during the covid-19 lockdown’, the european journal of social & behavioural sciences, 30(1), pp.52-62. available at: https://doi.org/10.15405/ejsbs.288 (accessed: 5 november 2022). https://doi.org/10.15405/ejsbs.288 kantcheva and bickle inclusive learning development practices: the consequences of flexibility and choice in the hybrid era journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 5 baker, r., coenen p., howie e., williamson, a. and straker, l. (2018) ‘the short term musculoskeletal and cognitive effects of prolonged sitting during office computer work’, international journal of environmental research and public health, 15(8), 1678. available at: https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph15081678 (accessed: 5 november 2022). bryson, j.r. and andres, l. (2020) ‘covid-19 and rapid adoption and improvisation of online teaching: curating resources for extensive versus intensive online learning experiences’, journal of geography in higher education, 44(4), pp.608-623. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/03098265.2020.1807478 (accessed: 5 november 2022). curelaru, m., curelaru, v. and cristea, m. (2022) ‘students’ perceptions of online learning during covid-19 pandemic: a qualitative approach’, sustainability, 14(13), 8138. available at: https://doi.org/10.3390/su14138138 (accessed: 5 november 2022). delderfield, r., riches-suman, k., ndoma-egba, m., boyne, j. (2020) ‘a learning development-faculty collaborative exploration of postgraduate research student mental health in a uk university’, journal of learning development in higher education,18. available at: https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.vi18.571 (accessed: 5 november 2022). de oliveira kubrusly sobral, j.b., lima, d.l.f., rocha, h.a.l., de brito, e.s., duarte, l.h.g., bento, l.b.b.b. and kubrusly, m. (2022) ‘active methodologies association with online learning fatigue among medical students’, bmc medical education 22(74). available at: https://doi.org/10.1186/s12909-022-03143-x (accessed: 5 november 2022). devkota, k.r. (2021) ‘inequalities reinforced through online and distance education in the age of covid‑19: the case of higher education in nepal’, international review of education, 67, pp.145-165. available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11159-021-09886x (accessed: 5 november 2022). https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph15081678 https://doi.org/10.1080/03098265.2020.1807478 https://doi.org/10.3390/su14138138 https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.vi18.571 https://doi.org/10.1186/s12909-022-03143-x https://doi.org/10.1007/s11159-021-09886-x https://doi.org/10.1007/s11159-021-09886-x kantcheva and bickle inclusive learning development practices: the consequences of flexibility and choice in the hybrid era journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 6 gamage, k.a.a., gamage, a. and dehideniya s.c.p. (2022) ‘online and hybrid teaching and learning: enhance effective student engagement and experience’, education sciences, 12(10), pp.651. available at: https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci12100651 (accessed: 5 november 2022). ganne, p., najeeb, s., ganne, c., sharma, a. and krishnappa, n.c. (2021) ‘digital eye strain epidemic amid covid-19 pandemic – a cross-sectional survey’, ophthalmic epidemiology, 28(4), pp.285-292. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/09286586.2020.1862243 (accessed: 5 november 2022). goudeau, s., sanrey, c., stanczak, a., manstead, a. and darnon, c. (2021) ‘why lockdown and distance learning during the covid-19 pandemic are likely to increase the social class achievement gap’, nature human behaviour, 5(10), pp.1273–1281. available at: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-021-01212-7 (accessed: 5 november 2022). khine, p.t., win, h.p.p. and naing, t.m. (2021) ‘towards implementation of blended teaching approaches for higher education in myanmar’, international journal of education and management engineering, 11(1), pp.19-27. available at: https://doi.org/10.5815/ijeme.2021.01.03 (accessed: 5 november 2022). lepp, m., luik, p. and tark, t.m. (2022) ‘how can web lessons be taught to reduce screen fatigue, motivational, and concentration problems in different disciplines?’, frontiers in sociology, 7, 871770. available at: https://doi.org/10.3389/fsoc.2022.871770 (accessed: 5 november 2022). lin, o. (2008) ‘student views of hybrid learning: a one-year exploratory study’, journal of computing in teacher education, 25(2), pp.57-66. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/10402454.2008.10784610 (accessed: 5 november 2022). linder, k.e. (2017) ‘fundamentals of hybrid teaching and learning’, new directions for teaching and learning, 2017(149), pp.11-18. available at: https://doi.org/10.1002/tl.20222 (accessed: 5 november 2022). https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci12100651 https://doi.org/10.1080/09286586.2020.1862243 https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-021-01212-7 https://doi.org/10.5815/ijeme.2021.01.03 https://doi.org/10.3389/fsoc.2022.871770 https://doi.org/10.1080/10402454.2008.10784610 https://doi.org/10.1002/tl.20222 kantcheva and bickle inclusive learning development practices: the consequences of flexibility and choice in the hybrid era journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 7 miroshnikov, g. (2021) how to make hybrid learning work in higher education. available at: https://wonkhe.com/blogs/how-to-make-hybrid-learning-work-in-highereducation/ (accessed: 1 july 2022). morrison, k., west, s., hogg, k. (2021) ‘maintaining a clinical learning environment for medical students during a pandemic’, journal of learning development in higher education, 22. available at: https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.vi22.732 (accessed: 5 november 2022). psaros, c. (2022) ‘“walk me through your dissertation”. using urban walks to develop students’ thinking about research’, aldinhe conference 2022. university of northampton, northampton 14-15 june 2022. salinas-toro, d., cartes, c., segovia, c., alonso, m.j., soberon, m., sepulveda, m., zapata, c., yañez, p., traipe, l., goya, c., flores, p., lopez, d. and lopez, r. (2022) ‘high frequency of digital eye strain and dry eye disease in teleworkers during the coronavirus disease (2019) pandemic’, international journal of occupational safety and ergonomics, 28(3), pp.1787-1792. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/10803548.2021.1936912 (accessed: 5 november 2022). shoshan, h.n. and wehrt, w. (2021) ‘understanding “zoom fatigue”: a mixed-method approach’, applied psychology, 71(3), pp.827–852. available at: https://doi.org/10.1111/apps.12360 (accessed: 5 november 2022). taylor, w.c. (2011) ‘prolonged sitting and the risk of cardiovascular disease and mortality’, current cardiovascular risk reports, 5, pp.350–357. available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12170-011-0174-4 (accessed: 5 november 2022). author details ralitsa kantcheva has been a study skills adviser at bangor university (wales) since 2016. she has experience supporting students both through subject specific and generic https://wonkhe.com/blogs/how-to-make-hybrid-learning-work-in-higher-education/ https://wonkhe.com/blogs/how-to-make-hybrid-learning-work-in-higher-education/ https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.vi22.732 https://doi.org/10.1080/10803548.2021.1936912 https://doi.org/10.1111/apps.12360 https://doi.org/10.1007/s12170-011-0174-4 kantcheva and bickle inclusive learning development practices: the consequences of flexibility and choice in the hybrid era journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 8 provision of academic literacy skills. her primary research interest is students’ understanding of threshold concepts embedded in academic writing and in scientific research procedures. ed bickle is a lecturer in learning development at bournemouth university. he has extensive experience in widening participation research, and his primary interests lie in the lived experiences of widening participation students. he is currently undertaking research that examines the future role of learning development within the higher education sector. licence ©2023 the author(s). this is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (cc-by 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. see http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. journal of learning development in higher education (jldhe) is a peer-reviewed open access journal published by the association for learning development in higher education (aldinhe). journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special issue 25: aldinhe conference proceedings and reflections october 2022 ‘walk me through your dissertation’. using urban walks to develop students’ thinking about research chenée psaros queen mary university of london, uk presentation abstract in the spring of 2020, during covid-19 restrictions that were prohibitive for in-person teaching, the learning development unit at a research-intensive university sought ways to support postgraduate taught students who had been learning online. creative dissertation walks were in-person, one-to-one tutorials that ran from may to august for students who were undertaking research. these walks enabled students to book an appointment with an experienced researcher to ‘walk and talk’ (stansfield, 2019) about any aspect of their dissertation. borrowing methods from dialogic one-to-one tutorials (boyd & markarian, 2015; wingate, 2019) this project focused on the development of students’ articulation about their thinking around their project and enabled experienced researchers to provide feedback about students’ ideas. the walks took place in a park close to campus because green spaces are thought to improve creativity and generate ideas (oppezzo & schwartz, 2014; keinanen, 2015; leisman et al., 2016;). walking improves mental health (roe & aspinall, 2011) and in conjunction with meeting another member of the university community in-person, students who participated in the walks stated that they thought the walks had improved their wellbeing and the outcome of their dissertation. this practical session provided delegates with the opportunity to experience how walking and talking can develop thinking and how learning developers might adapt the model for their own context. the session also discussed practical considerations when planning walking one-to-ones and reviewing questioning techniques that lend themselves to an environment that moves beyond the bounded notion of the campus (leander 2010; healy et al. 2015). psaros ‘walk me through your dissertation’: using urban walks to develop students’ thinking about research journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 2 image 1. participants taking part in walking discussions (photograph by alistair morey, queen mary university of london). community response four themes were identified in this community reflection: general feedback; emerging ideas and insights; the impact of the session on the audience; and questions, suggestions and recommendations for the author. the audiences’ quotes have not been changed but split into the relevant themes. 1) general feedback the format and content of the session was well received by the audience. the author not only developed a different way for students to learn outside the classroom but also explored an innovative method to deliver a workshop for the conference delegates. the audience also acknowledged the potential complications of running such a workshop and appreciated the presenter’s efforts to ensure a smooth walk and chat around the campus. psaros ‘walk me through your dissertation’: using urban walks to develop students’ thinking about research journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 3 ‘this was a brilliant session, both in terms of content and format.’ ‘i enjoyed the practical aspect of it as a delegate and a practitioner. it was great to be able to try out the technique, especially on a nice, sunny day.’ ‘this was a really thought-provoking session despite the logistical and practical restraints. the presenter was passionate and enthusiastic, and the presentation was clear and well structured. the maps were not that clear and the walks took a bit longer than billed. creating a walk in an area that has not been visited before is challenging, so the presenter did a great job.’ ‘this session will be a memorable one for me how often do you get to go on a walk with a workshop? i had chosen the gentle route, but found it quite pacey. it was a comfortable walk, but i was almost out of breath due to the conversation that was part of the purpose of our walk. we just made it within the allotted time (and were one of the first back). obviously, this was not by design – and was related to the presenter designing a walking route in an unknown town. i respect them for that. i think it was risky, but they pulled it off – the whole session really worked.’ 2) emerging ideas and insights the audience compared walking versus sitting to think, reflect and develop new ideas. although some used walking as a strategy for thinking of new ideas in the past, the workshop allowed them to walk and dialogue with other colleagues in a targeted way; the audience recognised that walking and talking with a colleague around the campus boosted their creativity. ‘the concept of using walking and thinking is great.’ ‘walking with a colleague made us think some quite big and daring thoughts in response to a problem, so it was definitely a worthwhile exercise.’ psaros ‘walk me through your dissertation’: using urban walks to develop students’ thinking about research journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 4 ‘this is a really innovative approach to talking through issues around research. it removes the typical power dynamic of sitting across a table from someone (or on the other side of the screen) and listening to their advice and becomes more of a conversation.’ ‘my position on that originates with the task – where we were to discuss something on our walk. it was nice to be able to chat something through and reflect with someone in the great outdoors. i think the walk gave us more ‘thinking time’, and we perhaps spoke a little less as there were things to look at on the walk. this did not feel awkward and worked well. the walking conversation was a strong contrast to a traditional workshop conversation where you are trying to talk with someone in a tiny room alongside 15 other pairs trying to do the same. somehow, i think the watercourses of northampton added to the experience, but so did the weather. i do not think i would have been as enthusiastic about venturing out in the rain.’ ‘walking has long been a strategy for me for thinking through ideas. the combination of being away from books, computers, etc., and the activity of walking frees up the mind to mull over possibilities. however, i had not used it to dialogue with another person in the targeted way we were encouraged to do. the exercise demonstrated many positives: it encouraged a more organic discussion than might be had sitting together in an office or via a screen. not looking at each other produced a different dynamic and made occasional silences easy to be with. the informal contact blurred barriers, allowing for a mix of personal and professional discussion, dialogue and quiet enjoyment of the outside space. the activity allowed time for the articulation of ideas.’ ‘i imagine there is a huge wellbeing benefit for staff and students involved.’ psaros ‘walk me through your dissertation’: using urban walks to develop students’ thinking about research journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 5 3) impact of the session on the audience the workshop inspired the audience to implement the walking and thinking method in their practice. some thought about the barriers to doing something similar, but they still were willing to find ways to experiment further. using the outdoors as a thinking space in the area of learning development and a collaborative research project to explore exploiting the external spaces by learning developers emerged from this session. ‘i felt really inspired to explore how something similar could be implemented in my own institution! the main thing i came away with is the idea of discouraging power structures, allowing for more organic conversations.’ ‘nevertheless, i am thinking about how i can use this in my practice – and i intend to give it a go!’ ‘i would love to implement this into my work, although it may be less feasible generally because i work with phd students. i can still think of some instances in which it would be useful though, and if my students are willing, i will put it into practice.’ ‘the northampton campus worked really well as a scene for the ‘walkshop’, and it did make me reflect on possible routes at my own institution.’ ‘i hope to find ways to experiment further with this format. this exercise was conducted with someone i had just met. i would like to see how it works with someone i know well, perhaps with the members of staff i line manage. i have attempted this once, in a one-to-one with a direct report, where we discussed his progress and plans while walking around a wildlife sanctuary equidistant from our homes. this certainly proved effective as a dialogic approach for many of the reasons outlined above, although it took up more of the day than i would usually give over to a one-to-one catch-up.’ ‘it made me rethink the way i, as a learning developer, had not considered using the great outdoors as a space for thinking, particularly during covid-19 when staff and students were in a persistent state of confusion as to when and where people could psaros ‘walk me through your dissertation’: using urban walks to develop students’ thinking about research journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 6 ‘go outside’. living by the coast, the beach offers an opportunity to have open-air discourse in a natural environment, which was not considered at the time. whilst this external space offering is not suited to all students or staff, it is a creative opportunity to have dialogue outside the four walls/online box. in terms of research, this speaks to further research on learning developers, natural spaces, and wellbeing, particularly as academic work can add pressure to those already experiencing challenges.’ ‘consider a collaborative project across the uk with learning developers exploiting their very focused external spaces (one learning development team do woodland walks, another team do coast walks, another uses museum space, another in cafes only etc.). from that, create a reflective comparison paper/blog/etc. – i would be interested in participating in something like that.’ 4) questions and recommendations for the author the audience’s insight into the walking and thinking method resulted in sharing some ideas and suggestions with the author and raising some thought-provoking questions. ‘i am wondering if rather than offering it as a specifically billed service whether it could be used as a general coaching tool. for example, say you are working with a student who has become stuck or lacks motivation. would walking and talking help them? is it sensible and practical to offer this ‘off the cuff’ in response to a situation or the needs of a student?’ ‘i do wonder how successful this would be if funding was not available, especially as it seems quite time-intensive both for the pgr tutors and staff.’ ‘many dissertation briefs are issued in the spring. how far ahead did you notify the students that this walk opportunity would be available? where was it promoted?’ ‘apart from the route planning, health and safety, risk assessments etc, with whom did you clear the walks practicalities with – for example, the health and safety committee? dean of education?’ psaros ‘walk me through your dissertation’: using urban walks to develop students’ thinking about research journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 7 image 2. the return to the workshop (photograph by lee fallin, university of hull). author’s reflections it is always quite nerve-wracking presenting; this time it was even more so since i had not done it for so long. many assured me that the people attending would be supportive and this proved to be true. i have always been really intrigued by how learning might take place outside of the classroom/campus as the container (leander et al, 2010). places of learning do not need to be restricted to time and location; the development of smart mobile technologies provide opportunities of learning ‘in the wild’ (kidd, 2019). i hope that this project is a precursor to exploring different ways students may learn beyond the campus. often projects such as these, projects that are unusual, different and do not use writing are seen as ‘passion projects’, quirky side-hustles that do not fit into the traditionally academic psaros ‘walk me through your dissertation’: using urban walks to develop students’ thinking about research journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 8 or show tangible impact. i was worried that delegates might have the same idea, that they would think it was something fun to do but ultimately walking one-to-ones would not fit within their context. it was wonderful to be proved wrong. i really enjoyed delegates’ insights about how we might expand on using walking within learning. there was a fascinating suggestion of doing the walking one-to-ones on a telephone call when the tutor and the student are not in the same location and would therefore walk different routes. another suggestion or area for exploration is how we might be able to expand the walking one-to-ones to group walks (or as stansfield, 2019, calls them ‘walkshops’). it was even more rewarding when a couple of people reached out to me after the conference because they were thinking about implementing walking one-to-ones in their provision. further reflections i have been delighted to hear from two different colleagues who are looking at implementing walking appointments in their offering. as i understand, they are using my approach as a model and adapting it to suit their context. i look forward to hearing about how their walks with students go. acknowledgements thanks are extended to all members of the community that have engaged with the conference or these proceedings in some way. thank you to the following community members for their contributions to this particular paper: steph allen (bournemouth university), anne-marie langford (university of northampton), lee fallin (university of hull), jonathan koestlé-cate (king’s college london) and katie winter (university of surrey). thank you also to alistair morey (queen mary university of london) and lee fallin (university of hull) for sharing photographs taken during the presentation. psaros ‘walk me through your dissertation’: using urban walks to develop students’ thinking about research journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 9 references: boyd, m. and markarian, w. (2015) ‘dialogic teaching and dialogic stance: moving beyond interactional’, research in the teaching of english, 49(3), pp.271-296. https://www.jstor.org/stable/24756959. healy, s., grant, g., villafranca, e. and yang, p. (2015) ‘beyond the bounded notion of the classroom: a theoretical orientation for evaluating the geographies of new generation learning environments’, in imms, w., cleveland, b., mitcheltree, h. and fisher, k., (eds.) mapping learning environment evaluation across the design and education landscape: towards the evidence-based design of educational facilities, melbourne: melbourne graduate school of education, the university of melbourne, pp.12-19. available at https://minerva-access.unimelb.edu.au/items/014cd837-9bf15367-a7cd-baf2fa77faf0 (accessed: 23 october 2022). keinanen, m. (2015) ‘taking your mind for a walk: a qualitative investigation of walking and thinking among nine norwegian academics’, higher education, 71(4), pp.593605. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-015-9926-2. kidd, j. (2019) ‘with new eyes i see: embodiment, empathy and silence in digital heritage interpretation’, international journal of heritage studies, 25(1), pp. 54-66. https://doi.org/10.1080/13527258.2017.1341946. leander, k. m., phillips, n. c. and taylor, k. h. (2010) ‘the changing social spaces of learning: mapping new mobilities’, review of research in education, 34, pp.329394. https://doi.org/10.3102/0091732x09358129. leisman, g., moustafa, a. a. and shafir, t. (2016) ‘thinking, walking, talking: integratory motor and cognitive brain function’, frontiers in public health, 4, p.94. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpubh.2016.00094. oppezzo, m. and schwartz,d. l. (2014) ‘give your ideas some legs: the positive effect of walking on creative thinking’, journal of experimental psychology: learning, memory, and cognition, 40(4), pp.1142–1152. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0036577. https://www.jstor.org/stable/24756959 https://minerva-access.unimelb.edu.au/items/014cd837-9bf1-5367-a7cd-baf2fa77faf0 https://minerva-access.unimelb.edu.au/items/014cd837-9bf1-5367-a7cd-baf2fa77faf0 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-015-9926-2 https://doi.org/10.1080/13527258.2017.1341946 https://doi.org/10.3102/0091732x09358129 https://doi.org/10.3389/fpubh.2016.00094 https://doi.org/10.1037/a0036577 psaros ‘walk me through your dissertation’: using urban walks to develop students’ thinking about research journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 10 roe, j. and aspinall, p. (2011) ‘the restorative benefits of walking in urban and rural settings in adults with good and poor mental health’, health & place, 17(1), pp.103113. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.healthplace.2010.09.003. stansfield, g. (2019). ‘walk and talk: a breath of fresh air for one-to-one study support’, aldinhe 2019 conference, exeter, united kingdom. available at: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1y6lm1bpt2zcr0f3kcytsbpre1pn-aby/view?usp=sharing (accessed 20 october 2022). wingate, u. (2019) ‘“can you talk me through your argument?” features of dialogic interaction in academic writing tutorials’, journal of english for academic purposes, 38, pp.25-35. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jeap.2019.01.001. author details: chenée psaros is a senior academic skills adviser at queen mary university of london. her particular interests are in digital education, multimodality, and learning environments beyond the classroom-as-container. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.healthplace.2010.09.003 https://drive.google.com/file/d/1y6lm1bpt2zcr0f3kcytsbpre1pn-a-by/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1y6lm1bpt2zcr0f3kcytsbpre1pn-a-by/view?usp=sharing https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jeap.2019.01.001 ‘walk me through your dissertation’. using urban walks to develop students’ thinking about research presentation abstract community response 1) general feedback 2) emerging ideas and insights 3) impact of the session on the audience author’s reflections further reflections acknowledgements references: author details: journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 24 september 2022 ________________________________________________________________________ understanding student preferences for one-to-one writing appointments post-pandemic bryony parsons university of liverpool, uk heather johnston university of liverpool, uk abstract the academic writing scheme at the university is a near-peer service, which provides students with the opportunity to book one-to-one appointments with an academic writing tutor. when launched in 2019, all appointments took place in-person in the university library. when covid-19 hit in march 2020, the service moved online, with appointments taking place over microsoft teams. however, with this, we noticed a drop-in appointment bookings. currently, there is a paucity of information regarding one-to-one writing appointments during the covid-19 pandemic, particularly for student preferences of online or face-to-face appointments. within this study, an online survey was conducted, and the 701 responses analysed to investigate students’ preferences in relation to the delivery of one-to-one writing appointments post-pandemic. the results indicated a preference for inperson appointments to be available, with 55.8% of the respondents choosing this. the main factor was the preference for communicating in-person as it allows for more questions and a natural conversation. however, there is clearly still an appetite for appointments to be delivered online, with postgraduate students in particular expressing an interest in this format. students indicated that the accessibility of appointments for students who are not on campus regularly was the biggest factor for choosing online as their preference. it can be concluded that a hybrid model, where students can choose between the two appointment types is most appropriate, which along with increased targeted promotion to specific faculties and year groups, should increase the usage of the service. keywords: pandemic; covid-19; academic writing; near-peer; academic skills; one-toone support. parsons and johnston understanding student preferences for one-to-one writing appointments post-pandemic journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 2 introduction since the emergence of covid-19, there have been several studies which focus on teaching students online in groups, and how these sessions have had to adapt to remain active and engaging. this has involved re-thinking the concept of ‘remote’ and changing the perspective from an ‘unemotional experience’ to more of a social event (vallis, 2021, p.2), and ‘humanising’ the online learning experience (kotula and beaumont, 2021, p.2). many of these studies also consider how some of these concepts may continue to be relevant and useful for staff to consider in a post-covid-19 world. prior to the pandemic, student preferences for learning face-to-face and online had been investigated. tratnik, urh and jereb (2019) reported that students were less satisfied with online learning, stating that drivers of satisfaction included course delivery/quality, expectations, motivation and student interactions. similar studies reported increases in anxiety and helplessness in online learning compared to face-to-face learning (butz, stupnisky and pekrun, 2015), and that 60.4% of students surveyed felt they learnt more face-to-face than online (alsaaty et al., 2016). conversely, stern (2004) identified benefits to online learning, particularly for shy students, and tagoe (2012) found that students preferred a mixture of face-to-face and online learning. however, literature on student preferences and perspectives post-pandemic, particularly in a one-to-one setting, is currently quite limited. there are several pieces which discuss the issues students have faced through being forced to learn online, with raaper and brown (2020) theorising the negative impacts of the pandemic on mental wellbeing and study motivation and lederer (2020) stating that students have been less likely to feel a sense of belonging to their institution when learning remotely, which may suggest that students would appreciate in-person appointments becoming available once more. there are also several articles which discuss the issues new students may face in transitioning to university. pownall, harris and blundell-birtill (2021, p.6) state that students may struggle to ‘reacclimatise’ to academic life due to the gaps in their education and lack of formal assessment. it has been suggested that those from disadvantaged backgrounds will be hit the hardest and will ‘suffer from prolonged absence from more traditional support’ (universities uk, 2020, p.4). parsons and johnston understanding student preferences for one-to-one writing appointments post-pandemic journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 3 academic skills providers and learning developers will have a key role to play in helping students overcome their worries around studying at this higher level and allowing them to feel more confident in their abilities and overcome any imposter syndrome they may be experiencing (raaper and brown, 2020). previous studies have shown that peer to peer and near-peer schemes can aid transition and allow students to feel more integrated and supported (yomtov et al., 2017), and pownall, harris and blundell-birtill state that these schemes can allow students to inquire about the norms of learning at university level ‘without judgement’ (2021, p.14). as restrictions are easing, and students return to campus, the one-to-one academic writing service needs to adapt in a way in which the maximum number of students feel comfortable in engaging with it, whether that be in-person, online, or more of a hybrid offer. to achieve this, it is essential to gather as many perspectives from as wide a range of students as possible. the academic writing scheme was launched in the university in 2019, although it had previously existed on a much smaller scale within a single faculty. it is a near-peer service, and all the academic writing tutors are currently studying for their phds at the university. they offer support to students with planning assignments, being critical, structuring their writing, understanding tutor feedback and referencing. any student, regardless of their subject or level of study, can book an appointment using the online booking system, which runs through libcal. although there are not tutors representing every school at the university, it is made clear that any tutor can provide helpful advice on planning assignments, being critical, structuring writing, understanding feedback and referencing. in the first semester of 2019-20, the service was popular, with 626 appointments attended. these appointments all took place in-person, in study rooms in the university library. when covid-19 arrived in march 2020, the service moved online, and appointments took place over microsoft teams. there was a significant drop in appointment bookings, with only 292 appointments being booked in semester one of 2020-21. this contradicted with online webinar bookings for library study skills sessions, which increased considerably compared to face-to face workshop figures the previous year. in the first semester of 202122, appointments have remained online, and although there has been an increase in bookings, with 419 appointments, levels are still lower than they were pre-pandemic. parsons and johnston understanding student preferences for one-to-one writing appointments post-pandemic journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 4 although there may be a wide variety of reasons for a lack of engagement in the one-toone element of the academic skills offer at the university, it is important to ensure students can access support in a way which suits them, and not just assume their preferences (or reasons for these preferences) as life returns to some form of normality. methods in order to gather student perspectives, a survey was created using jisc online surveys. using a survey allowed easy dissemination across the university and provided students with a quick and easy way to state their preferences. the survey was deliberately short to encourage greater participation from a diverse body of students, and so as not to result in self-selection of just a few highly motivated students. the survey consisted of four closed multiple-choice questions asking about the student faculty, level of study, whether they had heard of the academic writing appointment scheme and which format of appointment they would prefer. an open question was also included at the end asking the student to provide reasoning for their choice. this open question was included as a compromise between keeping the survey short, and encouraging participation, and obtaining higher quality responses. a participant information sheet explaining the study was also made available as a link at the start of the survey. an ipad was purchased as an incentive and every student who completed the survey had the option to add their email address, which entered them into the draw to win this. this contact information was only used for this aspect and was not considered when analysing the data. the survey was open for six weeks during semester one of the 2021-22 academic year. during this time it was promoted using various methods. these included promotional adverts on screens in the library, leaflets distributed by the student team (three students recruited as part of the study skills programme in the library), graphics on the library social media accounts and an announcement sent to all students via the vle (canvas). funding for the ipad was granted by the aldinhe research fund, and ethical approval was granted by the university’s ethics committee (ref. 5326). parsons and johnston understanding student preferences for one-to-one writing appointments post-pandemic journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 5 results in total, 701 responses were received (university population 27,900). the students were first asked which faculty they were from. the results showed that the survey had reached students in a reasonably proportionate manner in comparison to the overall university population (table 1). table 1. percentage of students from the various faculties who completed the survey, compared to the entire university population. note, ‘other’ may refer to students who do not know which faculty they belong. faculty % of respondents % of university population humanities and social sciences 37.8% 41.2% health and life sciences 27.2% 31.8% science and engineering 23.5% 26.9% other 11.4% the students were also asked to provide their level of study, and again this showed that the survey had reached students across the university (table 2). table 2. percentage of students from different levels of study who completed the survey, compared to the entire university population. level of study % of respondents % of university population one year part time diploma 0.7% 0.26% undergraduate year 1 25.2% 37.86% undergraduate year 2 24.3% 27.96% undergraduate year 3+ 21.7% 14.13% taught postgraduate 21.5% 12.70% research postgraduate 6.6% 7.09% the one year, part time diploma is aimed at students who do not have traditional entry qualifications. completion of the programme gains entry to degrees within the faculty of humanities and social sciences. the following question asked if students had heard of the academic writing scheme. overall, 41.2% of all respondents had, and 58.8% had not. when this question is examined by faculty, it can be seen that the highest levels of awareness of the scheme are parsons and johnston understanding student preferences for one-to-one writing appointments post-pandemic journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 6 in humanities and social sciences (table 3). the largest proportion of appointment bookings is also from this faculty. lowest levels of awareness are in the faculty of science and engineering, with only 26.1% of respondents aware of the service. table 3. percentage of students from different faculties who had heard of the academic writing scheme and completed the survey, compared to the entire university population. faculty % who had heard of the academic writing scheme % who had not heard of the academic writing scheme humanities and social sciences 53.2% 46.8% health and life sciences 38.2% 61.8% science and engineering 26.1% 73.9% when this question is examined by level of study it can be seen overall that students in higher levels of study seem to have more awareness of the scheme than those in the earlier stages of their studies (table 4). table 4. percentage of students from different levels of study who had heard of the academic writing scheme and completed the survey, compared to the entire university population. level of study % who had heard of the academic writing scheme % who had not heard of the academic writing scheme one year part time diploma 60% 40% undergraduate year 1 23.2% 76.8% undergraduate year 2 33.8% 61.2% undergraduate year 3+ 51.3% 48.7% taught postgraduate 51% 49% research postgraduate 52.2% 47.8% the next question asked: if students were to use the service, which type of appointment they would prefer? the results indicated a preference for in-person appointments (55.8%), whilst the online option was preferred by 40.4% of students. only 3.9% stated that they would not use the service (figure 1). parsons and johnston understanding student preferences for one-to-one writing appointments post-pandemic journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 7 figure 1. number of students who preferred in-person or online one-to-one writing appointments. when examining these results by faculty, it can be seen that all faculties reflected the same trend of interest in both appointment styles, with a slight preference for in-person appointments (table 5). table 5. percentage of students from different faculties who preferred in-person or online appointments. faculty % who would prefer an in-person appointment % who would prefer an online appointment % who would not use the service humanities and social sciences 58.1% 41.1% 0.8% health and life sciences 55% 38.7% 6.3% science and engineering 52.7% 42.4% 4.8% when examining the results by level of study it can be seen that postgraduate students have a preference for online appointments, whereas undergraduate students prefer inperson options (table 6). 391 283 27 0 50 100 150 200 250 300 350 400 450 in-person online would not use service what type of appointment would you prefer? parsons and johnston understanding student preferences for one-to-one writing appointments post-pandemic journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 8 table 6. percentage of students from different levels of study who preferred inperson or online appointments. level of study % who would prefer an in-person appointment % who would prefer an online appointment % who would not use the service one year part time diploma 80% 0% 20% undergraduate year 1 62.1% 35% 2.8% undergraduate year 2 67.6% 29.4% 2.9% undergraduate year 3+ 51.3% 43.4% 5.3% taught postgraduate 45.7% 51% 3.3% research postgraduate 32.6% 60.9% 6.5% the final question asked the students to provide reasoning for their choice. below are the responses from the 391 students who stated they would prefer an in-person appointment, grouped into nine categories (table 7). it should be noted that some students provided more than one reason in their response. the highest number of comments were around the concept that in-person appointments allow for better and easier communication, with students feeling like they can ask questions and partake in more of a natural conversation. parsons and johnston understanding student preferences for one-to-one writing appointments post-pandemic journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 9 table 7. responses from students who stated they would prefer an in-person appointment, grouped into nine categories based on qualitative data from an open question. note, some students gave more than one reason for their choice. reason for preferring inperson appointments number of mentions example responses % of respondents who chose inperson who mentioned this better communication 165 ‘in an online appointment its harder to read body language and facial expressions, which i believe are extremely important in any discussion’ ‘in person allows me to feel more comfortable asking questions and it just makes things a lot more interactive’ ‘information can be misinterpreted over a video call, and important tips and advice may be missed. i also feel that a face-to-face conversation would flow more naturally between two people’ 42.19% general preference for in-person 47 ‘i prefer in person teaching as a rule’ ‘face-to-face meetings work better for me’ ‘more beneficial to see someone in person’ 12.02% more of a personal experience 41 ‘i feel like i would feel less judged and be able to take the advice better as it would feel more personal’ ‘i want the personal connection’ ‘i think it would be more useful and productive to meet in person, and easier to build a personal rapport with the tutor’ 10.49% parsons and johnston understanding student preferences for one-to-one writing appointments post-pandemic journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 10 reason for preferring inperson appointments number of mentions example responses % of respondents who chose inperson who mentioned this easier to focus 40 ‘i find it difficult to concentrate sometimes when i am online but if someone is telling me something in person i feel like i might listen better’ ‘i believe that place and relationship are crucial for learning. over time my ability to focus and sustain concentration at home has decreased. i find that actively attending an appointment in a different setting helps me to enter a "work" frame of mind and get more from my studies.’ ‘i prefer face-to-face interaction and often find it difficult to concentrate whilst on a zoom/microsoft teams call due to the amount of distractions around.’ 10.23% easier to share resources and collaborate 34 ‘in-person appointments facilitate better communication and resources for discussions, such as papers and books, can be readily available as a hard copy.’ ‘as i have dyspraxia i find it better to have a printed version of things to work on as i sometimes find it hard to follow things on a screen’ ‘easier to bounce ideas, and to make references to materials by just showing it to the tutor (compared to having to go through sharing of screen etc over teams or zoom)’ 8.69% parsons and johnston understanding student preferences for one-to-one writing appointments post-pandemic journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 11 reason for preferring inperson appointments number of mentions example responses % of respondents who chose inperson who mentioned this technology issues 29 ‘i always experience technical issues over teams during lectures and meetings’ ‘my internet connection is so poor at my shared house that teams would not work’ ‘having an in-person appointment would mean that there is less worrying about connection issues and delays’ 7.42% feel more comfortable and less anxious 16 ‘i feel more comfortable meeting people in real life. i tend to be much more shy online so don't think i would get as much out of it’ ‘i struggle with interactions over video call, creates more anxiety and stress compared to in person meetings’ ‘i find it less intimidating to actually be sat with someone compared to online’ 4.09% wanting a return to normality 10 ‘having a face-to-face meeting would be like getting back to normal campus life’ ‘i like working in the library in general. the atmosphere is better than in my accommodation. i prefer in person because i spend enough time on my computer in normal uni hours it is good to have some normality.’ ‘i am tired of online study in the postpandemic world’ 2.56% parsons and johnston understanding student preferences for one-to-one writing appointments post-pandemic journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 12 reason for preferring inperson appointments number of mentions example responses % of respondents who chose inperson who mentioned this other – comments about how they would use their service or suggestions for a hybrid model 15 ‘i struggle with refining points and critically thinking about my writing’ ‘communicate online in advance, then meet offline to resolve writing issues’ 3.84% below are the responses from the 283 students who stated they would prefer an online appointment, grouped into six categories (table 8). it should be noted here that some students provided more than one reason in their response. the highest number of comments was around the accessibility of online appointments, allowing students who are not studying or living on campus to access the service. table 8. responses from students who stated they would prefer an online appointment, grouped into six categories based on qualitative data from an open question. note, some students gave more than one reason for their choice. reason for preferring online appointments number of mentions example responses % of respondents who chose inperson who mentioned this more accessible – especially for those who commute/are not on campus regularly 113 ‘i am a distance learner so would not be able to attend face-to-face’ ‘no time wasted on travel – much better to use travel time to actually do some writing!’ ‘i prefer the flexibility of online meetings as i am a commuter student’ 39.93% parsons and johnston understanding student preferences for one-to-one writing appointments post-pandemic journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 13 reason for preferring online appointments number of mentions example responses % of respondents who chose inperson who mentioned this more convenient – can fit around schedule 78 ‘this would allow the service to fit around lecture times and busy schedules’ ‘i work full time and am a part time student – teams meetings are more convenient’ ‘easier to slot an online appointment into my timetable’ 27.6% concerns about covid-19 43 ‘online meetings eliminate the risk of spreading the virus’ ‘with the situation at the moment and the number of cases of covid19 rising in the uk it would make more sense having online sessions where we can’ 15.19% technology enhances the appointment 29 ‘it is much simpler to work together on a piece of writing online rather than work on the same computer or using highlighters’ ‘sharing a screen in an online meeting is a lot more interactive’ ‘it’s easier to take notes or even record (with permission) and refer back to what’s been discussed when done online’ 10.25% more confident with communicating online 29 ‘since i am a non-native english speaker, i find online meetings helpful in relieving my nervousness’ ‘my anxiety is worse in person’ ‘less intimidating’ 10.25% other – e.g. comments about what they would use the service for 3 ‘useful for referencing and planning work’ 1.06% parsons and johnston understanding student preferences for one-to-one writing appointments post-pandemic journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 14 27 students said they would not use the service. their comments can be split into four categories. the most common was students not feeling like they needed the service as their course did not require much writing, they already felt confident, or they were happy using other resources to improve their skills (table 9). table 9. responses from students who stated they would not want to use the writing service, grouped into four categories based on qualitative data from an open question. note, some students gave more than one reason for their choice. reason for not wanting to use the service number of mentions example responses % of respondents who mentioned this don’t feel like they need it 15 ‘there isn’t much academic writing in my course’ ‘online resources seem to be enough’ 55.56% access issues 5 ‘i am a remote student’ ‘lack of time’ 18.52% don’t know what it is 4 ‘unsure what this entails’ ‘i don’t have knowledge about it’ 14.81% other 3 11.11% discussion awareness of one-to-one writing support there was greater awareness of the academic writing scheme from students in the faculty of humanities and social sciences than from the other two faculties. since the scheme existed in this faculty prior to adoption by the library, and their assignments are largely focused around academic writing, this result was not unexpected. postgraduate students showed the most awareness for the academic writing scheme, whilst first years showed the least. presumably this relates to the number of years spent at the university, although many postgraduates will not have attended the same university for their undergraduate degree. parsons and johnston understanding student preferences for one-to-one writing appointments post-pandemic journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 15 interestingly, only a small percentage (3.9%) of students stated that they would not use the academic writing service, with some stating they didn’t know what the service was, suggesting that a lack of awareness of the scheme is currently one of the main reasons for current usage levels, and that the majority of students appreciate this type of support. this is supported by gopee and deane (2013) who reported that academic writing support centres, offering one-to-one support, and informal peer learning, were enablers to academic writing skills. furthermore, research has also suggested that peer writing support can build relationships, provide emotional support and improve writing abilities, as well as providing the writing tutors with valuable teaching experience (capous-desyllas et al, 2021). therefore, any universities not currently offering this type of one-to-one support should consider ways to integrate it. furthermore, universities currently offering one-to-one writing support can use these results to strengthen the case to support these writing schemes. preference for delivery of one-to-one writing support overall, students in this study slightly preferred in-person appointments to online appointments. when this was examined by faculty there were no observable patterns, however when results were explored by level of study, some differences were noted. undergraduates showed a preference for in-person appointments, whilst postgraduates, particularly research postgraduates preferred online appointments. students enrolled on the one-year part-time diploma, aimed at students without traditional qualifications for university entry, were the only group to exclusively prefer in-person appointments, although it should be noted that only five students were part of this group. the recent covid-19 pandemic led to an increase in online learning and research has shown that students have felt more isolated as a result (hill and fitzgerald, 2020; raaper and brown, 2020). even before the pandemic, students have reported that learning inperson maintains a better connection to others and their campus (jaggars, 2014). therefore, it was not surprising that some of the reasons given for preferring in-person appointments related to this and ‘wanting to get back to normal’. however, this was not the most common reason for students preferring in-person appointments. the most common reasons for students preferring in-person appointments related to better communication, having a general preference, providing a more personal experience and being able to focus better. improved focus when learning in-person or a lack of focus when learning parsons and johnston understanding student preferences for one-to-one writing appointments post-pandemic journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 16 online has been reported in several other studies (hill and fitzgerald, 2020; ramachandran and rodriguez, 2020), and should not be overlooked in higher education. activities involving communication with others, have been identified as key predictors in student retention at university, which may be particularly challenging for online learning (rienties and toetenel, 2016). issues around technology and feeling anxious about online appointments were also mentioned by students preferring in-person appointments. having a quiet place to learn and a reliable internet connection have been described previously as important features which students may not have access to when learning online (ramachandran and rodriguez, 2020). undergraduates may also find themselves on campus more for lecturers meaning that in order for them to have an online appointment, they must have suitable equipment and a quiet/private space in which to have the writing appointment. therefore, it should not be assumed that in today’s world of advanced technology, that all students will have the same access to suitable working environments and equipment, or that students will be able to focus to the same extent when learning online versus in-person. of those students who preferred online appointments, the main reasons given were online appointments being more accessible off campus – particularly relevant for distance learners, convenience to fit in with schedule, concerns about covid-19, and conversely to those preferring in-person appointments, these students felt that technology enhanced the appointment e.g., screen sharing, and that they felt more confident online. remote learning has the potential to give students equality, for example by making learning more accessible to disabled learners, single parents, students with jobs and removes location as an obstacle to opportunities and learning (oswal and meloncon, 2014; gilbert, 2015). a study of 47 community college students from virginia also reported that convenience, flexibility and efficiency were the main reasons that students preferred online learning (jaggars, 2014). the same study found that only five of the 47 students would be prepared to do all their learning online, with some of these five students reporting a better learning experience online. in the present study, several comments were made referring to an improved learning experience in-person, for example: in person provides a more interactive environment to discuss, develop and learn. [it is e]asier to understand and respond as well as gather information when in a faceparsons and johnston understanding student preferences for one-to-one writing appointments post-pandemic journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 17 to-face environment because the person is present to help with any difficulties immediately. when responses from those who preferred online learning were searched for the word ‘learn’, the only matches were for phrases such as ‘distance learning’. work by others has also shown that 42% of students feel they learn less when learning online (public agenda, 2013). there is also some evidence to suggest that younger students, black students and males may have bigger performance gaps when it comes to learning online (xu and jaggars, 2014). conversely, a meta-analysis discovered a moderate improvement in performance of e-learners (means et al, 2013). overall, this suggests an important role for online writing appointments, particularly for students with other responsibilities or demanding schedules. however, it also highlights the need to not rely on online appointments only, since they may not enhance learning for all students. taken together these results suggest the need to offer in-person and online support for students, both during periods of uncertainty, such as pandemics, but also in times of ‘normality’. this is supported by eringfeld (2021) who encourages the use of hybrid learning and reported that although students would not favour an entirely online learning environment, they would not necessarily want to go back to pre-pandemic ways which were less accessible and meant less freedom. in addition, eringfeld (2021) argues that a more flexible approach may improve equality and diversity in universities, and this flexibility also has to potential to encourage more distance learners (kanwar and carr, 2020). considerations about this study overall, this study benefited from a relatively high response rate for studies of this nature, and although as a percentage of the university population, response numbers may seem low, the data indicate a fairly even split of different year groups and faculties. school and subject level was not taken into account, so it is unknown as to whether some subjects were overor under-represented. in addition, students were not asked to indicate their ethnicity, gender or other attributes, so it is unclear if certain groups would benefit more from in-person or online appointments with writing tutors. parsons and johnston understanding student preferences for one-to-one writing appointments post-pandemic journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 18 conclusions the survey responses clearly show a demand for both online and in-person academic writing appointments. there is little difference in demand for the different options between the different faculties, but demand for online seems to be more prevalent amongst postgraduate students. it can also be seen that there is a low awareness of the service, so targeted promotion will be useful, especially within the faculties of health and life sciences and science and engineering, and amongst firstand second-year undergraduate students. as this survey was conducted whilst covid-19 is still prevalent, it would be interesting to see changes in responses once covid-19 is no longer considered a risk. future work may also focus on the preference of in-person or online appointments by other student factors, such as gender, ethnicity and social economic status in an attempt to improve equality and diversity. other one-to-one support services can be found in universities, such as support with maths and statistics, and it would be beneficial to know whether the results in the present study would translate to other areas. references alsaaty, f. m., carter, e., abrahams, d. and alshameri, f. (2016) ‘traditional versus online learning in institutions of higher education: minority business students’ perceptions’, business and management research, 5(2), pp.31-41. https://doi.org/10.5430/bmr.v5n2p31. butz, n. t., stupnisky, r. h. and pekrun, r. (2015) ‘students’ emotions for achievement and technology use in synchronous hybrid graduate programmes: a control-value approach’, research in learning technology, 23. https://doi.org/10.3402/rlt.v23.26097. capous-desyllas, m., bromfield, n. f., nava, a. and barnes, b. (2021) ‘teaching note— strategies for enhancing writing among first-generation social work students: https://doi.org/10.5430/bmr.v5n2p31 https://doi.org/10.3402/rlt.v23.26097 parsons and johnston understanding student preferences for one-to-one writing appointments post-pandemic journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 19 reflections on the use of peer writing mentors, journal of social work education, 57(1), pp.189-196. https://doi.org/10.1080/10437797.2020.1798314. eringfeld, s. (2021) 'higher education and its post-coronial future: utopian hopes and dystopian fears at cambridge university during covid-19', studies in higher education, 46(1), pp.146-157. https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2020.1859681. gilbert, b. (2015) online learning revealing the benefits and challenges. available at: https://fisherpub.sjfc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://scholar.google.com/&ht tpsredir=1&article=1304&context=education_etd_masters (accessed: 25 january 2022). gopee, n. and deane, m. (2013) ‘strategies for successful academic writing—institutional and non-institutional support for students’, nurse education today, 33(12), pp.1624-1631. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nedt.2013.02.004. hill, k. and fitzgerald, r. (2020) ‘student perspectives of the impact of covid-19 on learning’, all ireland journal of higher education, 12(2), pp.1-9. jaggars, s. s. (2014) ‘choosing between online and face-to-face courses: community college student voices’, american journal of distance education, 28(1), pp.27-38. https://doi.org/10.1080/08923647.2014.867697. kanwar, a. and carr, a. (2020) 'the impact of covid-19 on international higher education: new models for the new normal', journal of learning for development, 7(3), pp.326333. kotula, j. and beaumont, k. (2021) ‘we’re all in the same boat: humanising teaching and learning experiences as a way to achieve engaging and interactive online provision’, journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22, october, pp.1-6. https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.vi22.755. lederer, a. m., hoban, m. t., lipson, s. k., zhou, s. and eisenberg, d. (2020) ‘more than inconvenienced: the unique needs of us college students during the covid-19 https://doi.org/10.1080/10437797.2020.1798314 https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2020.1859681 https://fisherpub.sjfc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://scholar.google.com/&httpsredir=1&article=1304&context=education_etd_masters https://fisherpub.sjfc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://scholar.google.com/&httpsredir=1&article=1304&context=education_etd_masters https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nedt.2013.02.004 https://doi.org/10.1080/08923647.2014.867697 https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.vi22.755 parsons and johnston understanding student preferences for one-to-one writing appointments post-pandemic journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 20 pandemic’, health education & behavior, 48(1), pp.14-19. https://doi.org/10.1177/1090198120969372. means, b., toyama, y., murphy, r. and baki, m. (2013) ‘the effectiveness of online and blended learning: a meta-analysis of the empirical literature’, teachers college record: the voice of scholarship in education, 115(3), pp.1-47. https://doi.org/10.1177/016146811311500307. oswal, s. k. and meloncon, l. (2014) ‘paying attention to accessibility when designing online courses in technical and professional communication’, journal of business and technical communication, 28(3), pp.271-300. https://doi.org/10.1177/1050651914524780. pownall, m., harris, r. and blundell-birtill, p. (2021) ‘supporting students during the transition to university in covid-19: 5 key considerations and recommendations for educators’, psyarxiv preprints. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/4fykt. public agenda (2013) not yet sold: what employers and community college students think about online education. available at https://publicagenda.org/wpcontent/uploads/2020/04/not-yet-sold-2013.pdf (accessed: 25 january 2022). raaper, r. and brown, c. (2020) ‘the covid-19 pandemic and the dissolution of the university campus: implications for student support practice’, journal of professional capital and community, 5(3/4) pp.343-349. https://doi.org/10.1108/jpcc-06-20200032. ramachandran, r. and rodriguez, m. c. (2020) ‘student perspectives on remote learning in a large organic chemistry lecture course’, journal of chemical education, 97(9), pp.2565-2572. https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.jchemed.0c00572. rienties, b. and toetenel, l. (2016) ‘the impact of learning design on student behaviour, satisfaction and performance: a cross-institutional comparison across 151 modules’, computers in human behavior, 60, pp.333-341. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2016.02.074. https://doi.org/10.1177/1090198120969372 https://doi.org/10.1177/016146811311500307 https://doi.org/10.1177/1050651914524780 https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/4fykt https://publicagenda.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/not-yet-sold-2013.pdf https://publicagenda.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/not-yet-sold-2013.pdf https://doi.org/10.1108/jpcc-06-2020-0032 https://doi.org/10.1108/jpcc-06-2020-0032 https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.jchemed.0c00572 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2016.02.074 parsons and johnston understanding student preferences for one-to-one writing appointments post-pandemic journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 21 stern, b. s. (2004) ‘a comparison of online and face-to-face instruction in an undergraduate foundations of american education course’, contemporary issues in technology and teacher education, 4(2), pp.196-213. tagoe, m. (2012) ‘students’ perceptions on incorporating e-learning into teaching and learning at the university of ghana’, international journal of education and development using ict, 8(1), pp.91-103. tratnik, a., urh, m. and jereb, e. (2019) ‘student satisfaction with an online and a face-toface business english course in a higher education context’, innovations in education and teaching international, 56(1), pp.36-45. https://doi.org/10.1080/14703297.2017.1374875. universities u.k. (2020) achieving stability in the higher education sector following covid19. available at: https://universitiesuk.ac.uk/news/documents/uuk_achievingstability-higher-education-april-2020.pdf (accessed: 1 july 2021). vallis, c. (2021) ‘designing workshops to be sociable rather than remote’, journal of learning development in higher education, issue 22, october, pp.1-5. https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.vi22.722. xu, d. and jaggars, s. s. (2014) ‘performance gaps between online and face-to-face courses: differences across types of students and academic subject areas’, the journal of higher education, 85(5), pp.633-659. https://doi.org/10.1080/00221546.2014.11777343. yomtov, d., plunkett, s., efrat, r. and marin, a. (2017) ‘can peer mentors improve firstyear experiences of university students?’ journal of college student retention: research, theory & practice, 19(1), pp.25-44. https://doi.org/10.1177/1521025115611398. https://doi.org/10.1080/14703297.2017.1374875 https://universitiesuk.ac.uk/news/documents/uuk_achieving-stability-higher-education-april-2020.pdf https://universitiesuk.ac.uk/news/documents/uuk_achieving-stability-higher-education-april-2020.pdf https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.vi22.722 https://doi.org/10.1080/00221546.2014.11777343 https://doi.org/10.1177/1521025115611398 parsons and johnston understanding student preferences for one-to-one writing appointments post-pandemic journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 22 author details bryony parsons and heather johnston are both learning developers at the university of liverpool. they deliver a varied programme of academic skills sessions and manage the team of phd tutors who deliver one to one appointments in writing and statistics. understanding student preferences for one-to-one writing appointments post-pandemic abstract introduction methods results discussion awareness of one-to-one writing support preference for delivery of one-to-one writing support considerations about this study conclusions references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special issue 25: aldinhe conference proceedings and reflections october 2022 ________________________________________________________________________ magic to conjure up academic skills for dissertation support emma kimberley university of northampton, uk amy west university of northampton, uk paul rice university of northampton, uk presentation abstract this project uses magic to explore dissertation skills with students. students in a session on preparing for the dissertation learnt a magic trick and then used their experience of learning the trick to reflect and to develop narratives around their dissertation topic focussing on the skills of researching and writing. we compared the results of the intervention group to those of a control group (who were given the same session but excluding the magic trick). the teaching sessions integrated skills essential for completing the dissertation such as critical thinking, linking, metacognitive reflection, and conceptualising the process of a long project. previous research has suggested that using magic can stimulate curiosity, engage and motivate students, and that they will find the session more memorable (see moss, irons and boland, 2017; wiseman and watt, 2020; wiseman, wiles and watt, 2021) the presentation reported the findings from preand post-session questionnaires completed by participants to evaluate the use of a magic trick in teaching dissertation skills by: • evaluating the effectiveness of using a magic trick to teach dissertation skills. • evaluating the use of magic to make skills teaching more memorable. • evaluating the use of magic to support motivation and positive emotions around dissertation tasks. • evaluating the use of magic to counter some of the negative affects students encounter such as lack of motivation or negative self-efficacy beliefs. kimberley, west and rice magic to conjure up academic skills for dissertation support journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 2 community response this work presented is valuable in its exploration of creativity in relation to teaching and in its practical demonstration of how to move away from entrenched modes of delivery. i appreciated that the speakers emphasised that they weren’t professional magicians; it isn’t so much about the magic itself, as the process of learning the trick and the creative space this opens up for the student. within the teaching profession, it is easy to become entrenched in enacting familiar tried and tested modes of delivery. so it was refreshing to see something completely different in this session! what really struck me is how students were able to draw connections between the experience of learning the magic trick and how to approach academic writing. i found it interesting that this approach took away pressures and worries about failing, which then allowed students to look at their work from a new perspective. fear of failure is closely associated with academic writing, particularly because, when reading, students are being exposed only to the final version of a piece of writing, not the entire process. this can create a false presentation of perfection in published writing, which can translate into students feeling as though they are doing something wrong in the process of drafting, editing, and organising complex thoughts into a written format (cameron, nairn and higgins, 2009; forster, 2020). the success of this innovative approach opens up the possibility of other creative approaches to academic writing and to using serious play to help students develop other academic skills. for a session to be memorable, we should strive to fully engage our audience by being original or unexpected. some subjects by their nature can be perceived as ‘dry’, but that’s not to say that we have to fulfil this expectation. the room loved the trick and the valid discussions that the research provoked and this made working magic into learning development seem a much more manageable prospect. it has also made me think about other ways that creative activities could be used to engage students about approaching the dissertation process and to question how this might be developed further for different topics/skills beyond the dissertation example demonstrated. given the time and resource constraints ld-ers often face it can be difficult to incorporate new teaching methods. however, the presenters demonstrated that incorporating creative approaches into teaching is feasible. a practical understanding of how to use this approach is therefore kimberley, west and rice magic to conjure up academic skills for dissertation support journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 3 valuable in giving ld-ers the tools and confidence needed to weave some magic into their teaching practice. the discussion around the research not going to plan illustrated the fact that problems will undoubtedly emerge in the course of research, and this was useful to hear because sometimes people do not admit this. it is rare for a conference presentation to focus on what didn’t work even though there is a great deal of learning to be had from any failure. transparency around problems and lessons learned like this helps to create realistic expectations for other members of the ld community; it is empowering to talk about how not everything will be perfect and to know that there are ways around such challenges. discussing potential solutions to such problems helps other learning developers who might seek to implement similar strategies in their own teaching. next steps and additional questions the popularity of this session and the community responses reveal a real thirst for innovative and memorable teaching techniques amongst the ld profession. how might we adapt the techniques demonstrated in this session beyond the examples used here and why is it important for us to deliver memorable, innovative teaching that also supports learners with the skills they need to navigate the landscape of he? also, let’s look at the power and importance of sharing our experiences with one another when things don’t go to plan; it is so useful to recognise that we (as a sector) need space to fail in order to be creative, just like our learners. is this a luxury we often deny ourselves? authors’ reflection preparing to present our work to the learning development community was a useful process. responses in the first part of the study were positive, indicating that students found using magic as a method for thinking through their dissertations fun and motivating, and that learning and performing the trick provided a useful metaphor for conceptualising the dissertation process and crystallising some key learning points. however, we encountered the challenge that one aspect of the research did not go entirely as expected: we had hoped to use data from focus groups with participants alongside our qualitative kimberley, west and rice magic to conjure up academic skills for dissertation support journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 4 questionnaires but timing and recruitment issues meant that this was not possible. despite this change to our original plans, the rich qualitative data we gathered from the questionnaires gave us a lot to work with. the conference prompted us to reflect on how best to communicate the significant findings of our research while also soliciting ideas for development from experienced peers that we can use in the next round of data collection. we found it encouraging that the audience engaged so enthusiastically with the session, and particularly that they ‘got’ what we were trying to achieve. beyond the engaging surface of the magic trick, we wanted to show the importance of playful learning experiences and how these link to the literature on creating learning spaces that liberate students from negative affects and the fear of failure around academic skills. colleagues applied these ideas more widely in their comments and questions, with an understanding that it was not just about motivating students with magic but also about opening up the process of learning, exploring the connections made, and uncovering the learning potential behind a creative space. the audience reaction was very validating for us; it gave us confidence that the ld community felt this project was worthwhile. we were pleased that colleagues saw the benefits and that our presentation sparked discussion and creative thought on where we could go next. it reinforced for us that we are doing something innovative that is also grounded in ld principles and useful for a wider audience. we will work with the suggestions on incorporating magic into a wider range of contexts and will look forward to sharing further results. acknowledgments thank you to all the contributors who shared their reflections and enriched our insight into this conference presentation and its impact on the audience. special thanks go to emily webb from the university of leeds and dr victoria yuskaitis from the university of southampton. kimberley, west and rice magic to conjure up academic skills for dissertation support journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 5 references cameron, j., nairn, k. and higgins, j. (2009) ‘demystifying academic writing: reflections on emotions, know-how and academic identity’, journal of geography in higher education, 33(2), pp.269-284. https://doi.org/10.1080/03098260902734943. forster, e. (2020) ‘power and paragraphs: academic writing and emotion’, journal of learning development in higher education, issue 19, december, pp.1-14. https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.vi19.610. moss, s., irons, m. and boland, m. (2017) ‘the magic of magic: the effect of magic tricks on subsequent engagement with lecture material’, british journal of educational psychology, 87(1), pp.32-42. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjep.12133. wiseman, r. and watt, c. (2020) ‘conjuring cognition: a review of educational magicbased interventions’, peerj, 8, e8747. https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.8747. wiseman, r., wiles, a. and watt, c. (2021) ‘conjuring up creativity: the effect of performing magic tricks on divergent thinking’, peerj, 9, e11289. https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.11289. author details paul rice is a learning development tutor at the university of northampton. he joined the department in 2009 and his specialist area is mathematics and statistics (including spss). paul completed his master’s in education at the university of northampton and his statistics undergraduate studies at reading university. his research interests are widespread and he often supports researchers with their data analysis. however, his own current research interest is in the area of using magic in education. amy west is a learning development tutor at the university of northampton. amy’s previous experience in the arts feeds into the performative elements of this project, and her experience teaching in schools aligns with the playful learning aspect. her current https://doi.org/10.1080/03098260902734943 https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.vi19.610 https://doi.org/10.1111/bjep.12133 https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.8747 https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.11289 kimberley, west and rice magic to conjure up academic skills for dissertation support journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 6 research interests centre on the teaching and learning of critical thinking, active learning and the use of metaphor in teaching. emma kimberley is a learning development tutor at the university of northampton. her research interests are in reading and in the affective and emotional context of academic skills. magic to conjure up academic skills for dissertation support presentation abstract community response next steps and additional questions authors’ reflection acknowledgments references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special edition 25: aldinhe conference proceedings and reflections october 2022 ________________________________________________________________________ finding balance: the positives and negatives of moving peer mentor training online jenny stowar london school of economics and political science, uk presentation abstract the student academic mentor (sam) programme at the london school of economics has only been in place for five years, and in that time, it has rapidly grown in scope and numbers. with the pandemic, training of the largely international cohort of undergraduates moved online and in-person training was removed. this continued in 2020/21. the result is a trained cohort, but a disconnection between the student volunteer and the programme co-ordinator. in a learning development context, with the new landscape of he emphasising hybridity, where do we find the balance between practical necessity and losing our personal touch with students? community response there were two key messages for me from this presentation. firstly, timing is a critical factor when engaging students. this often creates conflicts and impedes progress. asynchronous online learning can help to circumvent these issues but at the cost of personal interaction. another important thing raised here was how online training had made the project more accessible to students. i think this is a really good thing to come out of having to move delivery online and it would perhaps be a backwards step (in terms of accessibility) to remove this option going forward. the second take-home message is that it is ok not to love every project on which you work. my key takeaway from this session was that it is ok not to have all the answers, but that it is important to keep reflecting on our work, and presenting at the aldinhe conference allows you space to achieve this. jenny’s thoughts about whether an element of personal dissatisfaction is ok if the project is working as intended is so interesting! i stowar finding balance: the positives and negatives of moving peer mentor training online journal of learning development in higher education special issue 25 october 2022 2 think we are constantly seeking to be professionally, creatively, intellectually or socially fulfilled, but sometimes this does not lead to the best delivery of learning, and we need to accept that at times the best solution for the students may ‘feel’ lacking. i could have talked about this idea so much more. excellent observations. i found it reassuring to hear somebody talk about how you can be disappointed in a project and that you do not always love everything you might work on. it was refreshing to hear someone talk openly about their dissatisfaction with a project, even when it had gone as intended. we are often so caught up in trying to ensure our projects are great and that they are ultimately an enjoyable experience for the student, that we forget that we might not be enjoying the experience ourselves. my experience has always been that if the teacher is enjoying the experience, the learner will respond to that and often enjoy it more too. however, we will not always be satisfied by the work that we do, so will always have to ‘fake it’ to an extent. this made me realise how important it is to have the time and space to reflect on our practice; to think about what we enjoy and to question why we might not too. author’s reflection this talk evolved quite significantly in the process of me putting it together, something which i imagine is a common experience for many people putting these types of talks together after submitting the abstract! but i found that evolution quite helpful because it allowed to reflect on, and in many ways process, many of the feelings i had been having with dealing with our new hybrid ways of working. i have realised, as i stated in the final talk, that i do not really think, at present anyway, that as learning developers we will find the right kind of balance between in-person and online delivery of our work, and that it is ok, actually, that we have not got the balance right yet because we are all still very much finding our feet with this new way of working. i have also come to the realisation that the biggest draw of our work for the type of people who do it is the students we support, and that with online learning there will continue to be an element of distance between us and the student that may increase our feelings of dissatisfaction. but again, that is ok, it is to be expected. and again, all we can do is try to find ways to work through it and grab the opportunities for the moments that do bring us satisfaction – the chance chat with a stowar finding balance: the positives and negatives of moving peer mentor training online journal of learning development in higher education special issue 25 october 2022 3 passing student, the moments when someone takes the time to tell you they got a better grade, or that your support really helped – where we can! acknowledgements thanks are extended to all members of the community that have engaged with the conference or these proceedings in some way. thank you to the following community members for their contributions to this particular paper: anne-marie langford (university of northampton), jennie dettmer (university of hertfordshire), dr emily webb (university of leeds), claire olson (edge hill university) and katie winter (university of surrey). author details jenny stowar has been a learning developer at the london school of economics and political science since 2017. she manages lse life’s team of study advisers as well as leading the school’s student academic mentor (sam) programme. during her time working in universities, she has led on a range of diverse initiatives to improve the student experience, from peer mentoring to introducing a university-wide referencing standard, to introducing a pre-arrival study skills course for non-traditional students. she is very passionate about all aspects of student peer mentoring and peer-assisted learning, as well as other ways to build strong, supportive, student communities. finding balance: the positives and negatives of moving peer mentor training online presentation abstract community response author’s reflection acknowledgements author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 26: special edi issue february 2023 ________________________________________________________________________ ©2023 the author(s) (cc-by 4.0) a space for partnership and empowerment: how the writing café negotiates inclusion in higher education    cara baer university of plymouth, uk nina kearney university of plymouth, uk abstract  higher education (he) has traditionally been shaped for a specific type of student, but as widening participation initiatives are increasing opportunities for under-represented groups to attend (e.g., mature, disabled, those from a low socio-economic background, and care leavers), it is imperative to illuminate examples of best practice that are accessible and equitable once students are at university. this paper discusses the writing café, an interdisciplinary, peer facilitated space for students to explore writing techniques and strategies with trained student writing mentors. this will illustrate how the writing café is promoting inclusion for students who have been traditionally excluded from he. the writing café encourages student partnership through its interdisciplinary nature, which empowers students to be experts in their work. this is challenging deficit and hierarchical approaches in academia, repositioning who has the power and knowledge in he. the writing café provides a space out of formal teaching that has more support than independent learning, thus being considered a third space for learning (hilsdon, 2014). the offer of hybrid writing café spaces has boosted inclusivity and accessibility through improving comfort and ease of access. under-represented students are likely to face more barriers in he, so supportive and accessible provision can combat many such barriers. the writing café’s success is highlighted by engagement, with the development of hybrid delivery increasing participation by 45%, with engagement for under-represented students being 10% more than the university demographic of such students. the writing café is illustrating how inclusion in academic practices is possible. keywords:  inclusion; social justice; student empowerment; peer mentoring; belonging; third space. baer and kearney a space for partnership and empowerment: how the writing café negotiates inclusion in higher education  journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 2 introduction  under-represented groups (e.g., mature, disabled, those from a low socio-economic background, and care leavers) have inequitable experiences in higher education (he), particularly in relation to finances, feelings of belonging, and academic skills (reay, 2016). however, despite the implementation of widening participation (wp) initiatives, there are still barriers that under-represented students face prior to and during university (see ridge, 2011; timmis and muñoz-chereau, 2022). for clarity, equity is used here rather than equality, highlighting that inclusion does not mean equal treatment, but tailored support for individuals to access the same experiences/resources/knowledge, acknowledging that some individuals experience more barriers than others. motivated by the necessity for improving he for under-represented students, this piece explores how utilising peer-to-peer support can promote social justice, illuminating how spaces and relationships that work in partnership are empowering and inclusive (hinsdale, 2015). whilst complex, social justice and inclusion can be defined as equitable access, treatment, and experience for all, regardless of diverse characteristics and backgrounds (lambert, 2018). this opinion piece will explore how spaces like the writing café, which utilise peer support, interdisciplinary partnership, and non-hierarchical engagement(s), are crucial for improving participation and inclusion within he for under-represented students. many initiatives push for access but neglect to consider the experiences of students once they are at university (reay, david and ball, 2005). the following will contextualise he, draw on bourdieu’s theory of cultural capital (1986; 1993), illuminate and challenge hierarchical academic practices, and consider partnership, empowerment, and accessibility to emphasise the power of peer-to-peer learning and the third space. contextual background  the writing café has been operating in a uk university since 2014; it was created with the intention of providing a ‘a developmental, creative space’ existing outside academic norms (pritchard, 2015). the writing café space utilises peer-to-peer support and non-academic terrains (in-person and digitally) to engage students in discussions about their academic writing, including clarity of arguments and structure, with trained writing mentors. the baer and kearney a space for partnership and empowerment: how the writing café negotiates inclusion in higher education  journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 3 space is unique in its offering – being led in partnership between students and the peer learning team – and in how it challenges academic spaces by using a café format.  the culture of he in the uk is rooted in white-middle-class-non-disabled-heteronormativecis-gendered-english-speaking hegemonies (seal, 2019; tavares, 2021). consequently, under-represented students experience more inhibited access and participation; this is attributable to how he has been shaped around the traditional student profile that dominates university culture. arguably, this has influenced structural and institutional norms to favour such students (ardion, 2018), including how notions of independence and rigid entry requirements claim to ensure that the most capable attend he (barg, 2019). in reality, this positions those with the support, opportunities and/or resources to succeed academically and develop personally as better candidates. positively, there is a rise in wp for under-represented and diverse students (klinger and murray, 2012), but they must navigate and ‘decode’ the unfamiliar terrain of he (gibson et al., 2019). consequently, inclusive spaces and practices are imperative for combatting such structural, social, and academic barriers, as they challenge hegemonies surrounding who has the knowledge within academia. here, barriers include course-specific jargon, confidence with independent learning (linked to cultural capital), academic hierarchy, and how he is rooted in middle-class norms. how the writing café addresses such barriers is discussed below.   navigating academic terrains   to navigate a particular space or institution, one must be familiar with the dominant practices. as academia mirrors the dominant culture of society (douglas, 2016; arday, 2021), student demographics reflect this, and he is shaped around these groups, making it less aligned with under-represented students. current implementations of wp are attempting to change this (teichler, 2015); however, they often neglect intersectional and structural barriers, hidden below utopian and idealistic lenses (arday, 2021). therefore, we must acknowledge these (un)hidden discourses to consider how to unravel the challenges.  to theorise navigating unfamiliar academic and structural terrains, bourdieu’s theory of cultural capital will be drawn upon (1986; 1993). cultural capital can be defined as the familiarity, confidence, and experience(s) one has in the cultural world and dominant society (beckman et al., 2018). within he, cultural capital may involve linguistic skills, baer and kearney a space for partnership and empowerment: how the writing café negotiates inclusion in higher education  journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 4 knowledge of education systems, and participation in cultural activities (barg, 2019), rooted in socioeconomic processes. access to cultural experiences and knowledge can shape the confidence one has within other spaces that reflect this culture. subsequently, academic practices are more aligned with ‘traditional’ students, which makes academic language, social interactions, and writing processes more difficult to navigate, leaving students who are on-the-margins feeling isolated, uncertain, and lacking in confidence (pherali, 2012). this can contribute to an unwillingness to seek help, due to a fear of the stigma attached to not knowing (kelly and mulrooney, 2019). this clearly shows how those from more represented groups can navigate such academic terrains more easily, as he, and practices within it, are perhaps more familiar to them. consequently, by utilising peer-to-peer partnership, typical barriers of academic hierarchy can be reduced, as mentors and students engage in reciprocal discussions. since he has an increased focus on self-directed learning, time-management, and confidence with writing (linked to cultural capital (dittmann, stephens and townsend, 2020)), the writing café provides a space where one does not have to have mastered all the above, thus empowering students. accessibility created by peer-to peer partnership was exemplified in semester 1 of 2021/2022, where approximately 75% of attendees across both physical and digital spaces identified as being from an under-represented background. this highlights the power that the writing café has on levelling the power imbalance and increasing student participation; this is particularly impactful when noting that café participation is 10% higher than the under-represented student demographic. therefore, the writing café is shifting the dynamic of academic engagements through the ‘third space’ and successfully increasing engagements for all identified under-represented groups. arguably, through student partnership and challenging academic norms, this aspect of he becomes easier to navigate.  mutuality and partnership  the writing café is a student-centred, interdisciplinary, and non-hierarchical space (pritchard, 2015), situated outside the academic boundaries of he. it has been identified (cameron, nairn and higgins, 2009; moraes, michaelidou and canning, 2016) that there is discomfort when sharing writing, especially with course peers and/or academic staff. in the writing café, students are partnered with a mentor who is often non-subject specific; this baer and kearney a space for partnership and empowerment: how the writing café negotiates inclusion in higher education  journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 5 one-to-one support not only increases comfort with sharing working, due to the personal nature of writing (hall, 2014; hill et al., 2021), but is more likely to alleviate academic knowledge barriers through leaning together as non-experts in their subject. arguably, this empowers students, providing agency and increasing confidence with their subject knowledge, since they are the ‘expert’ in this space. students are encouraged to shape the discussion, where they must adapt their explanations for a non-expert, evidencing their expertise to themselves. in is known that with academic tutors under-represented students can feel pressure to articulate their work and use jargonistic language to meet perceived expectations and avoid potential stigmatisation (bowl, 2001; warnock and hurst, 2016). lillis and turner (2001) and raaper, brown and llewellyn (2022) support this, identifying a deficit-model placed upon non-traditional students who were unfamiliar with academic language and writing, but acknowledging that the barriers to academic writing are in inaccessible pedagogies and the lack of transparency from academics. in contrast to academic practices, discussion with a writing mentor requires students to unpack jargonistic terms, which is not only empowering, but can boost confidence, clarity, and understanding. thus, sharing ideas on a level playing field and encouraging a safe space where students can question academic meanings and feel unsure, can enhance a sense of belonging and enable a community of practice (lave and wenger, 1991; pritchard, 2015). therefore, this space is critical for promoting social justice and not providing a space for all learners to develop their language and writing would be a matter of exclusion (klinger and murray, 2012). additionally, the accessibility of the café encourages autonomy and allows students to seek support when needed with no expectations or commitment, since the library is a space for independent learning, and the online space can be accessed from anywhere. as attending is a personal choice, mutuality is established, as a two-way discussion is developed; again, since mentors are often non-subject specific, there is a mutuality in the way students share subject knowledge whilst mentors share academic writing skills – learning from one another. both spaces encapsulate the ‘third space’ for learning, a hybrid space between independent learning and experiences, and formal learning and teaching (hilsdon, 2014), moving towards individuals learning together in partnership. this informal space allows more mutual and reciprocal discussions to take place, with student partnership being core to knowledge production.    baer and kearney a space for partnership and empowerment: how the writing café negotiates inclusion in higher education  journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 6 boosting inclusivity and accessibility  the writing café has evolved to meet the needs of learners, alongside responding to changes in the academic environment, such as the covid-19 pandemic, which brought into sharp relief the necessity for a flexible provision. with the shift to online teaching, the digital writing café engaged more students and was recognised as a case study for best practice in the gravity assist report (barber et al., 2021), highlighting accessibility and inclusion, particularly for disabled students and parents/carers, placement students, and distance learners. now, both spaces run in tandem and, despite requiring additional resources, they are imperative for ensuring students from all backgrounds can utilise the space. providing an accessible space is empowering, as students can take ownership of, and make choices about, their support. it begins to normalise seeking support too, which challenges notions of deficit and promotes inclusion, both contextually (digital and/or physical) and through café practices (peer-to-peer interdisciplinary partnership). positively, through offering both digital and physical spaces, there has been a 45% increase in engagement compared to pre-pandemic. the digital space enables students to ‘step’ into accessing support, with camera-off options – particularly valuable for uncertain students who are wishing to ‘test-the-water’. this is emphasised by the participation of mature students in the writing café; the over-21 and under-21 split was 52% to 48% respectively, contrasting with the undergraduate population which has a higher proportion of under-21s.   while universities transitioned formal teaching online and student unions created online quizzes during the covid-19 pandemic, they were not as prepared to develop informal learning spaces. as formal teaching was replicated online, the writing café filled a gap where informal learning could happen, which is likely to have been absent without this service. further, ransing et al. (2021) identified the benefits of camaraderie during a time of uncertainty and isolation; arguably, the writing café enabled this kind of space. increased engagement has occurred (barber et al., 2021) despite the rise of online learning exacerbating pre-existing social injustices, particularly due to the increased demand on self-directed learning and the requirement for additional motivation in a time that challenged much of what was known in he previously (aparicio, bacao and oliveira, 2017). with under-represented students being less confident with self-directed learning baer and kearney a space for partnership and empowerment: how the writing café negotiates inclusion in higher education  journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 7 (lee, 2010), as discussed above, the necessity of digital formats that provide accessible academic support, e.g., the writing café, is brought to the forefront. conclusion the above discussion illuminates the power of peer-to-peer support for promoting inclusion, particularly since interactions with under-represented groups are higher in the writing café than with the general student population – clearly there is strength in the work done. the opportunity to develop non-hierarchical and mutual partnership can encourage agency to take ownership of writing and engage in discussions. through challenging traditional academic practices that have excluded under-represented groups, the writing café is developing an inclusive space. the non-expert and interdisciplinary nature of the space can alleviate expectations on academic skills and subject knowledge (linked to cultural capital), requiring students to strip-back their understanding to articulate ideas to a novice in their subject. since this removes academic knowledge barriers, students can feel more comfortable discussing their work, contributing to feeling included within he; comfort develops empowerment, which builds confidence, enhances a sense of belonging and improves experiences. the digital and physical writing cafés are operating as a means for all students to access support. the writing café support can contribute towards the academic development of all students, but particularly students who are underrepresented within he, potentially improving their attainment (and wellbeing). the writing café ensures that support is offered to all students in he, beyond simply improving access to it; in doing so, the writing café navigates the non-negotiables for inclusion within he.   references  aparicio, m., bacao, f. and oliveira, t. (2017) ‘grit in the path to e-learning success’, computers in human behavior, 66, pp.388-399. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2016.10.009. arday, j. (2021) 'race, education and social mobility: we all need to dream the same dream and want the same thing', educational philosophy and theory, 53(3), pp.227-232. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2020.1777642. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2016.10.009 https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2020.1777642 baer and kearney a space for partnership and empowerment: how the writing café negotiates inclusion in higher education  journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 8 ardion, s. (2018) ‘helping poorand working-class students create their own sense of belonging’, new directions for student services, 162, pp.75-86. https://doi.org/10.1002/ss.20263. barber, m., bird, l., fleming, j., titterington-giles, e., edwards, e. and leyland, c. (2021) ‘gravity assist: propelling higher education towards a brighter future – digital teaching and learning review', the office for students. available at: https://ofslivefs.blob.core.windows.net/files/gravity%20assist/gravity-assist-dtlfinalforweb.pdf (accessed: 11 october 2022). barg, k. (2019) ‘why are middle-class parents more involved in school than working-class parents?’, research in social stratification and mobility, 59, pp.14-24. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rssm.2018.12.002. beckman, k., apps, t., bennett, s. and lockyer, l. (2018) ‘conceptualising technology practice in education using bourdieu’s sociology’, learning, media and technology, 43(2), pp.197-210. https://doi.org/10.1080/17439884.2018.1462205. bourdieu, p. (1986) ‘the forms of capital’, in richardson, j. (ed.) handbook of theory and research for the sociology of education. connecticut: greenwood press, pp.241258. bourdieu, p. (1993) the field of cultural production: essays on art and literature. new york: columbia university press. bowl, m. (2001) 'experiencing the barriers: non-traditional students entering higher education', research papers in education, 16(2), pp.141-160. https://doi.org/10.1080/02671520110037410. cameron, j., nairn, k. and higgins, j. (2009) 'demystifying academic writing: reflections on emotions, know-how and academic identity', journal of geography in higher education, 33(2), pp.269-284. https://doi.org/10.1080/03098260902734943. dittmann, a. g., stephens, n. m. and townsend, s. s. m. (2020) ‘achievement is not class-neutral: working together benefits people from working-class contexts’, journal of personality and social psychology: attitudes and social cognition, 119(3), pp.517-539. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspa0000194. https://doi.org/10.1002/ss.20263 https://ofslivefs.blob.core.windows.net/files/gravity%20assist/gravity-assist-dtl-finalforweb.pdf https://ofslivefs.blob.core.windows.net/files/gravity%20assist/gravity-assist-dtl-finalforweb.pdf https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rssm.2018.12.002 https://doi.org/10.1080/17439884.2018.1462205 https://doi.org/10.1080/02671520110037410 https://doi.org/10.1080/03098260902734943 https://doi.org/10.1037/pspa0000194 baer and kearney a space for partnership and empowerment: how the writing café negotiates inclusion in higher education  journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 9 douglas, p. (2016) ‘higher education: a complex microcosm of a complex society’, herdsa. available at: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/highereducation%3a-a-complex-microcosm-of-a-complexdouglas/d26a4846f41e973c1298ca81899d3e72dcbd5b2b (accessed: 11 october 2022). gibson, s., grace, a., o’sullivan, c. and pritchard, c. (2019) 'exploring transitions into the undergraduate university world using a student-centred framework', teaching in higher education, 24(7), pp.819-833. https://doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2018.1511538. hall, a. h. (2014) 'beyond the author's chair', the reading teacher, 68(1), pp.27-31. https://doi.org/10.1002/trtr.1297. hill, j., healey, r. l., west, h. and déry, c. (2021) ‘pedagogic partnership in higher education: encountering emotion in learning and enhancing student wellbeing’, journal of geography in higher education, 45(2), pp.167-185. https://doi.org/10.1080/03098265.2019.1661366. hilsdon, j. (2014) ‘peer learning for change in higher education’, innovations in education and teaching international, 51(3), pp.244-254. https://doi.org/10.1080/14703297.2013.796709. hinsdale, m. j. (2015) mutuality, mystery, and mentorship in higher education. rotterdam: sense publishers. kelly, a. k. and mulrooney, h. m. (2019) ‘student perceptions of belonging at university: a qualitative perspective’, new directions in the teaching of physical sciences, 14(1), pp.1-11. https://doi.org/10.29311/ndtps.v0i14.3238. klinger, c. m. and murray, n. (2012) ‘tensions in higher education: widening participation, student diversity and the challenge of academic language/literacy’, widening participation and lifelong learning, 14(1), pp.27-44. https://doi.org/10.5456/wpll.14.1.27. https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/higher-education%3a-a-complex-microcosm-of-a-complex-douglas/d26a4846f41e973c1298ca81899d3e72dcbd5b2b https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/higher-education%3a-a-complex-microcosm-of-a-complex-douglas/d26a4846f41e973c1298ca81899d3e72dcbd5b2b https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/higher-education%3a-a-complex-microcosm-of-a-complex-douglas/d26a4846f41e973c1298ca81899d3e72dcbd5b2b https://doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2018.1511538 https://doi.org/10.1002/trtr.1297 https://doi.org/10.1080/03098265.2019.1661366 https://doi.org/10.1080/14703297.2013.796709 https://doi.org/10.29311/ndtps.v0i14.3238 https://doi.org/10.5456/wpll.14.1.27 baer and kearney a space for partnership and empowerment: how the writing café negotiates inclusion in higher education  journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 10 lambert, s. r. (2018) ‘changing our (dis)course: a distinctive social justice aligned definition of open education’, journal of learning for development, 5(3), pp.225244. https://doi.org/10.56059/jl4d.v5i3.290. lave, j. and wenger, e. (1991) situated learning: legitimate peripheral participation. cambridge: cambridge university press. lee, m. (2010) ‘researching social capital in education: some conceptual considerations relating to the contribution of network analysis’, british journal of sociology of education, 31(6), pp.779-792. https://doi.org/10.1080/01425692.2010.515111. lillis, t. and turner, j. (2001) 'student writing in higher education: contemporary confusion, traditional concerns', teaching in higher education, 6(1), pp.57-68. https://doi.org/10.1080/13562510020029608. moraes, c., michaelidou, n. and canning, l. (2016) ‘students’ attitudes toward a group coursework protocol and peer assessment system’, industry and higher education, 30(2), pp.117-128. https://doi.org/10.5367/ihe.2016.0296. pherali, t. j. (2012) 'academic mobility, language, and cultural capital', journal of studies in international education, 16(4), pp.313-333. https://doi.org/10.1177/1028315311421842. pritchard, c. (2015) ‘mentoring in the writing café: identity, belonging and ownership’, journal of learning development in higher education, special edition: academic peer learning, november, pp.1-20. https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.v0i0.305. raaper, r., brown, c. and llewellyn, a. (2022) ‘student support as a social network: exploring non-traditional student experiences of academic and wellbeing support during the covid-19 pandemic’, education review, 74(3), pp.402-421. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131911.2021.1965960. ransing, r. s., pinto da costa, m., pereira-sanchez, v., adiukwu, f., orsolini, l., gonzalez-diaz, j. m., larnaout, a., grandinetti, p., bytyçi, d. g., soler-vidal, j., https://doi.org/10.56059/jl4d.v5i3.290 https://doi.org/10.1080/01425692.2010.515111 https://doi.org/10.1080/13562510020029608 https://doi.org/10.5367/ihe.2016.0296 https://doi.org/10.1177/1028315311421842 https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.v0i0.305 https://doi.org/10.1080/00131911.2021.1965960 baer and kearney a space for partnership and empowerment: how the writing café negotiates inclusion in higher education  journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 11 syarif, z., kundadak, g. k., shalbafan, m., nofal, m. and ramalho, r. (2021) 'peer learning, research, and support in times of the covid-19 pandemic: a case study of the early career psychiatrists model', academic psychiatry, 45(5), pp.613-618. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40596-021-01464-5. reay, d. (2016) ‘social class in higher education: still an elephant in the room’, in cote, j. and furlong, a. (eds.) routledge handbook of the sociology of higher education. abingdon: routledge, pp.131-141. reay, d., david, m. e., and ball, s. (2005) degrees of choice: class, race, gender and higher education. stoke on trent: trentham books. ridge, t. (2011) ‘the everyday costs of poverty in childhood: a review of qualitative research exploring the lives and experiences of low‐income children in the uk’, children & society, 25(1), pp.73-84. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.10990860.2010.00345.x. seal, m. (2019) the interruption of heteronormativity in higher education: critical queer pedagogies. switzerland: palgrave macmillan. tavares, v. (2021) 'feeling excluded: international students experience equity, diversity and inclusion', international journal of inclusive education, pp.1-18. https://doi.org/10.1080/13603116.2021.2008536. teichler, u. (2015) ‘socially relevant and socially responsible higher education: a disputed goal’, journal for new generational sciences, 13(2), pp.113-126. https://doi.org/10520/ejc182364. timmis, s. and muñoz-chereau, b. (2022) ‘under-represented students’ university trajectories: building alternative identities and forms of capital through digital improvisations’, teaching in higher education, 27(1), pp.1-17. https://doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2019.1696295. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40596-021-01464-5 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1099-0860.2010.00345.x https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1099-0860.2010.00345.x https://doi.org/10.1080/13603116.2021.2008536 https://doi.org/10520/ejc182364 https://doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2019.1696295 baer and kearney a space for partnership and empowerment: how the writing café negotiates inclusion in higher education  journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 12 warnock, d. m. and hurst, a. l. (2016) ‘“the poor kids’ table”: organising around an invisible and stigmatised identity in flux’, journal of diversity in higher education, 9(3), pp.261-276. https://doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2019.1696295. author details cara baer is a lecturer in education, researcher, and phd student with interests in inclusion, social justice, access to education, and widening participation. cara has worked as writing mentor throughout her studies, enabling insight into the peer interactions. nina kearney is a project manager at the university of plymouth, with experience in leading widening participation and peer learning initiatives. licence ©2023 the author(s). this is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (cc-by 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. see http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. journal of learning development in higher education (jldhe) is a peer-reviewed open access journal published by the association for learning development in higher education (aldinhe). https://doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2019.1696295 journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special edition 25: aldinhe conference proceedings and reflections october 2022 ________________________________________________________________________ learning development 2030 ed bickle bournemouth university, uk steph allen bournemouth university, uk marian mayer bournemouth university, uk presentation abstract whilst the widening participation agenda and the impact of covid-19 has arguably increased the importance of learning development (ld) within the uk higher education sector, it is widely acknowledged that the role, and indeed title, of the learning developer varies greatly between institutions. some staff are employed on academic contracts with research requirements, others not. similarly, some staff are faculty based whilst others are employed within a central team. this means that, as bickle et al. (2021) explain, ld operates in a ‘third space’ (whitchurch 2008). the disparity within the profession has meant that the role of the learning developer is multi-faceted, as reflected in hilsdon’s (2011, p.14) definition of ld: learning development is a complex set of multi-disciplinary and cross-disciplinary academic roles and functions, involving teaching, tutoring, research, and the design and production of learning materials. this workshop provided participants with an opportunity to untangle the complex ld web and map out ideas for the future of the ld profession. acting as newspaper editors, participants got out their crystal balls and produced a front page of a newspaper in 2030 where the main headline has been dedicated to the field of ld. perhaps a ld staff member has won a prestigious award, maybe ld has received some form of international recognition. after presenting their front pages, participants engaged in a discussion around how as a profession we can achieve some of these aspirations. participants took ideas with them that they could apply to their own practice. bickle, allen, mayer learning development 2030 journal of learning development in higher education special issue 25 october 2022 2 community response this was a fantastic session; it was engaging, provoking, and stimulating. i loved the creative aspect to this session, and i will try to incorporate this into staff and student focus group scenarios. the free format of the session was really great for idea development and allowed an element of creativity – definitely something i will try with students. i am new to ld having worked in an academic discipline for a number of years, so i was interested in finding out about the field and how people think it will develop over the coming years. i would recommend that this session or a similar one is included in the ‘mini-keynotes’ section of aldcon23 to engage more of our community in this future planning process. this was a great session to kick these conversations off with. very thought provoking! being able to discuss how different aspects of the current ‘status quo’ could be transformed over the next 10 years led to a debate about the priorities different he institutions and educational systems in the uk have for the 2030 horizon. there was a tremendous amount of positivity in the room but a realistic realisation that there are huge institutional, political and personal barriers to overcome which will likely remain in the next decade or so. for instance, the exploration of the links between university education and the un s(ustainable)d(evelopment)g(oal)s as well as a reflection on the ‘true value’ of a university education from various angles gave me insights into other ld practitioners’ (more) localised educational goals and priorities for the near future. from a more pragmatic point of view, the looking to the future ‘wish list’ ideas and conversations were reflected in later sessions about the professionalisation of ld roles within universities, and the disparity between institutions in terms of contracts, workloads and models were also highlighted at various points. hopefully aldhe and the ld community can work together to create parity of pay and workload and provide professional recognition for our profession. this was an interesting dichotomy of those within the field and those on the outside – very different perceptions and beliefs. i found this a really interesting element and something i would like to think more about. many of the groups commented on this element. i also did not get a chance to consider in the session, but i think links with secondary education and fe institutions will need to become more central as we try to navigate the changing student demographics. understanding where the students have been and the skills they bickle, allen, mayer learning development 2030 journal of learning development in higher education special issue 25 october 2022 3 have (or do not have) can only improve our work, and this is something i think we need to think more carefully about. authors’ reflection given the impact of covid-19, this was an opportune moment for ld practitioners to reflect on our practice and to think about what we want ld to look like in the future. our aim was to leave the interpretation of what was required as flexible and as open as possible in order for participants to be as creative as they wished. i think this was reflected in the ‘posters’. whilst all ‘posters’ focused on the need for change, the ideas generated were very different – technological change, inclusivity, changing modes of assessment, and increased recognition of ld and ld practitioners. it was suggested that the ideas generated from the workshop could be used to write a #take5 blog piece. this was a great idea and is something we are very supportive of (we have already started the ball rolling!). this is an opportune and critical moment for ld practitioners to have their say on how the profession could look in the coming years. acknowledgements thanks are extended to all members of the community that have engaged with the conference or these proceedings in some way. thank you to the following community members for their contributions to this particular paper: dr emily webb (university of leeds), dr ralitsa kantcheva (university of bangor) and amy may (university of nottingham)’ references bickle, e., bishopp-martin, s., canton, u., chin, p., johnson, i., kantcheva, r., nodder, j., rafferty, v., sum, k., and welton, k. (2021) ‘emerging from the third space chrysalis: experiences in a non-hierarchical, collaborative research community of practice’, journal of university teaching & learning practice, 18(7), pp.35-158. available at: https://doi.org/10.53761/1.18.7.9 (accessed: 21 october 2022). https://doi.org/10.53761/1.18.7.9 bickle, allen, mayer learning development 2030 journal of learning development in higher education special issue 25 october 2022 4 hilsdon, j. (2011) ‘what is learning development?’ in: hartley, p., hilsdon, j., keenan, c., sinfield, s. and verity, m. (eds.) learning development in higher education. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan, pp.13-27. whitchurch, c. (2008) ‘shifting identities and blurring boundaries: the emergence of third space professionals in uk higher education’, higher education quarterly, 62(4), pp.377-396. available at: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2273.2008.00387.x (accessed: 21 october 2022). author details ed bickle is a lecturer in learning development at bournemouth university. he has extensive experience in widening participation research, and his primary interests lie in the lived experiences of widening participation students. he is currently undertaking research that examines the future role of learning development within the higher education sector. steph allen is a senior lecturer in learning development and academic integrity at bournemouth university. steph is a senior fellow of the higher education academy. her research interests are focused on learning development, academic integrity, academic offences, and the student and staff experience. she is involved in academic integrity projects within the university and is also a committee member of the university and college union (ucu) focusing on working conditions. marian mayer is a principal academic, leading a small team of learning development practitioners at bournemouth university. her research interests include challenging neoliberalism in higher education, transformative education, widening participation, the student experience, he policy, and student retention and success. marian has published on the subjects of reclaiming higher education, the neoliberal agenda in he and transformative education. marian’s praxis is deeply embedded in research and education practice, primarily within the context of learning development. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2273.2008.00387.x learning development 2030 presentation abstract community response authors’ reflection acknowledgements references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special issue 25: aldinhe conference proceedings and reflections october 2022 ________________________________________________________________________ chicken soup for the soul: promoting well-being and belonging through food and cultural competence skills karen lipsedge kingston university, uk hilda mulrooney kingston university, uk presentation abstract this conference paper asked a question: what does well-being and belonging in teaching and learning development look like in practice? the paper presentation focused on two kingston university initiatives to develop and enhance students’ sense of well-being and belonging: cultural food stories and cultural competence skills workshops were explored in the session to create a conversation about how learning developers could move into the extra-curricular space to create a sense of belonging through communal dining. food is universal and has cultural and social meanings (dunbar, 2017). during the physical separation experienced throughout the pandemic, the cultural food stories initiative explored whether recipe and story sharing could enhance staff and student belonging, while simultaneously honouring cultural diversity. given the importance of belonging in enhancing student learning, engagement, and retention (tinto, 2017), this is highly pertinent. to enhance student success, it is also essential to equip students with the skills they need to appreciate how cultural differences and similarities help to enhance personal and professional interactions rather than to stereotype or marginalise. the cultural competence skills initiative creates tailored workshops to support students’ ability to understand and respect their own and others’ cultural background and values. these strategies help to equip our students with the resilience and skills needed to thrive and be successful professionals in their future careers. in our paper, we argue that wellbeing and belonging are key tools for developing students’ learning and can be easily incorporated into educational practice. by inviting diverse students to participate within each of these initiatives, their cultural heritage is not only welcomed but also acknowledged explicitly. attendees will leave with a practical toolkit to embed our cultural lipsedge and mulrooney chicken soup for the soul: promoting well-being and belonging through food and cultural competence skills journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 2 food stories and cultural competence skills initiatives as part of their teaching and learning practice and devise associated activities that enhance professional development skills and better support all our students, regardless of background. community response i was very interested in hilda’s idea of asking students to share a recipe and the impact that this might have on a student’s sense of belonging and feeling valued. including how the personal, cultural, and/or religious significance of the recipe allows students to connect on a personal level. food is a commonality that we all share and it would be great to see this project replicated in other institutions, i will definitely be suggesting it at mine. please could hilda share the link to the online recipe book. thank you for this. here you go: https://www.educationopportunities.co.uk/wpcontent/uploads/cultural-food-stories_cookbook-2021.pdf. hope it is useful. it would be really interesting to hear if you do something similar, and how it worked out for you. i wrote the project up as a little paper which i can also upload, if that would be useful. i’d also be happy to talk to people at your institution about it, if that would help. there was something so affirming and positive about this presentation. i so enjoyed listening to how the projects had been created and responded to. it was great to hear about the ways you’d found of connecting and celebrating within the pandemic especially, when folks were disconnected from each other, from family, from travel, and potentially from home. next steps and additional questions looking ahead, there are many considerations when bringing community building practices into the curriculum and learning development space. questions such as, what strategies have you devised at your institution to enhance students’ sense of belonging and wellbeing? how do you think that our workshop will impact on your own practice? are there any possibilities of adapting our ideas for your own institutions, or are you already doing anything similar? if so, are there opportunities for possible joint working across institutions? what is your one ‘take home’ from our workshop? https://www.educationopportunities.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/cultural-food-stories_cookbook-2021.pdf https://www.educationopportunities.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/cultural-food-stories_cookbook-2021.pdf lipsedge and mulrooney chicken soup for the soul: promoting well-being and belonging through food and cultural competence skills journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 3 editorial comment this presentation explored methods of developing and creating a sense of belonging for students through learning development initiatives. reading the authors’ and participants’ considered and thoughtful contributions, gives a sense of the ‘affirming and positive’ nature of this session. the headline activity of this initiative was a recipe sharing exercise where students shared recipes important to them, their family, and their culture. this exercise built upon literature relating to belonging to give a sense of community and mattering to students. the group outlined how important belonging is and how ‘low hanging’ food could be as a common sharing opportunity for all staff and students. one comment outlined the importance of not alienating through the process, as food can sometimes be weaponised and alienate certain students (e.g., meat-based bbqs can alienate vegetarians, vegans, and students with cultural and/or religious meat prohibitions). the theme resonates with the contributions included in the ‘prioritising wellbeing through community and connection’ section of the journal of learning development in higher education’s special issue ‘compendium of innovative practice’, summed up eloquently in the editorial as addressing the ‘theme of uncertainty, anxiety, and disconnection, and the deep need to address it in an empathetic, kind, and supportive way’ (syska, 2021). authors’ reflection we wonder whether any of the ideas we shared will impact on your own practices, or offer possibilities for doing so in the future? i suppose an important aspect is ensuring that students (and staff) feel safe in whatever is offered to them. the food side can be very contested, with food sometimes weaponised as a way of excluding people or showing that they don’t belong. this can leave real scars which need to be navigated with care. so any food-related intervention should be approached with openness, and assumptions should not be made about the positive roles food plays in our lives – it often (even usually) does have positive associations, but not for everyone. similarly, with karen’s work, real care is needed in discussing potentially divisive issues. however, there is also the fact that offering these opportunities for staff and students is a clear sign that cultural diversity is not lipsedge and mulrooney chicken soup for the soul: promoting well-being and belonging through food and cultural competence skills journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 4 only recognised but valued, which in itself may be useful. we’d be interested in any thoughts about this. thank you for raising such important points about the value and also the challenges of discussing what can be challenging topics. conversations always require an element of courage as we do not know how our comments will be interpreted by those with whom we are talking to. what hilda and i try to do with our respective projects is to provide students and staff with the tools they need to be able to have those courageous conversations mindfully and with empathy, not only in he but also beyond. if you or your colleagues are engaging in similar work please let us know. we would love to hear from colleagues in our community to continue the discussion and possibly explore future research. acknowledgments we are really grateful to the participants of cultural food stories and cultural competence skills workshops. we know that sharing personal perspectives through food or courageous discussions is not easy, and without their generous participation, none of this work would have been possible. we do not take that for granted. we also thank those who attended our session and contributed to the discussion, which has given us a lot to think about. references dunbar, r. i. m. (2017) ‘breaking bread: the functions of social eating’, adaptive human behavior and physiology, 3, pp.198-211. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40750-017-0061-4. syska, a. (2021) ‘section editorial: prioritising wellbeing through community and connection’, journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 22, october, pp.1-2. https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.vi22.847. tinto, v. (2017) ‘through the eyes of students’, journal of college student retention: research, theory & practice, 19(3), pp.254-269. https://doi.org/10.1177/1521025115621917. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40750-017-0061-4 https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.vi22.847 https://doi.org/10.1177/1521025115621917 lipsedge and mulrooney chicken soup for the soul: promoting well-being and belonging through food and cultural competence skills journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 5 author details karen lipsedge is an associate professor in english literature at kingston university, and is part of the directorate for access, participation and inclusion, where she works as a senior adviser for teaching and learning, focusing on enhancing students’ ability to have courageous conversations about identity, racial inequality, and belonging. hilda mulrooney is an associate professor in nutrition at kingston university. her pedagogic research interests include belonging at university and perceptions of quality of higher education. she also carries out subject-specific research and is active in professional practice within the field of dietetics. chicken soup for the soul: promoting well-being and belonging through food and cultural competence skills presentation abstract community response next steps and additional questions editorial comment authors’ reflection acknowledgments references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 24 september 2022 ________________________________________________________________________ a book review of davies, m. (2022) study skills for international postgraduates. 2nd edn. london: bloomsbury academics. ivan newman keywords: study skills tutor; specific learning difficulties; he educational policy. summary of the book’s purpose, its main ideas and primary audience davies effectively distils many years’ pedagogic experience with international postgraduate students, within a western, english-speaking higher education culture, usefully brought up to date by addressing some of the challenges of increasingly prevalent online delivery, informed by the recent covid-19 related actions forced on he institutions. the book therefore delivers wisdom, both historic and forward-looking, making it ideal as a reference tool to take the newly arrived international postgrad, for whom it is primarily intended, from the early days of settling in and making friends, through their academic programme, closing with suggestions about doctoral research. offering the book to all incoming international students as part of a ‘welcome pack’ would be an excellent idea. uniqueness the book uniquely addresses not just the academic side of postgraduate activities but addresses the cultural and social elements vital to making international study inherently valuable. additionally, with increasing numbers of international students seeking entry to western-style, english-speaking he providers, and these providers actively promoting their ‘product’ in other cultures, this book is timely. how the book ‘works’ the title accurately reflects the books intended audience by focusing on master’s level study within western-style, english-speaking he systems for students whose prior academic experience lies outside that tradition. that said, there is much content which newman review: davies, m. (2022) study skills for international postgraduates. 2nd edn. london: bloomsbury academics. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 2 could be taken as excellent advice for all postgrads, although the generality of postgrads is not its intended audience. structurally, the book is conveniently sectioned broadly by timeline, opening with advice regarding the nature of postgraduate education, cultural challenges and adaptations such as how to create a supportive network, and basic survival skills such as information management and reading. the importance of avoiding plagiarism is heavily emphasised, illustrated with numerous examples to make the issue and its solution clear. the nature of research within the western tradition is addressed together with the requirement to develop, apply and express critical thinking skills. as essays and dissertations form key postgraduate metrics, their creation and refinement are well covered. the importance of multiple aspects of the spoken word is stressed and described in multiple areas – giving tutorials and presentations and even talking frankly to one’s supervisor. for postgraduate students who wish to take their studies further the book finishes with advice regarding preparation for doctoral studies. the lively text is enhanced by highlighted chapter summaries, key points, important notes and short blocks of text which are themselves clearly structured. schematics are used to illustrate structural or organisational aspects of various elements of postgraduate work. checklists are used both within the book and at its end to help the reader self-check progress. an extensive bibliography supports the author’s credibility and provides readers with useful further reading, both of an academic and more popular nature. a number of other ‘skills’ books are referenced and built upon. a clear index rounds-off the book. shortcomings two shortcomings are evident in davies’ distillation. groupwork or working collaboratively with others on projects, which is ubiquitous within the sciences, and seems increasingly so in arts, humanities and social sciences as universities respond to organisations’ needs to hire ‘work ready’ employees, is only addressed to some extent. guidance in the sensitive and subtle area of working with others would benefit those from other cultural backgrounds. the book does not provide specific advice regarding cultural and procedural differences for the international postgrad studying an experimental discipline. newman review: davies, m. (2022) study skills for international postgraduates. 2nd edn. london: bloomsbury academics. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 3 how the book supports the international student the eponymous title is supported by sage advice regarding the challenge of settling into different cultural, psychological and academic milieux. readers are encouraged to join clubs, become active in student life and to develop social networks outside their own linguistic or cultural heritage as a way of settling into their host culture. usefully, the book addresses the inevitable highs and lows – the u-curve – of the experience of international study, from early euphoria to mid-term blues through to the excitement of finishing and graduation – not forgetting the ‘reverse culture shock’ of returning home and missing the friends, ambiance and fun of having studied abroad. the core messages of the nature of study within western he systems are clearly addressed: the need to question and challenge, the importance of critically appraising the subject matter literature, of writing lucidly and succinctly, of speaking up both in support of a viewpoint but also in debating constructively and the acceptance of being wrong or making mistakes from which effective lessons can be drawn. relevance to learning development as a secondary readership behind this book lies the premise, based on many years’ experience, that international postgraduates will encounter challenges by virtue of their entry into a foreign social and academic culture; the book then addresses these challenges. it therefore follows that the academics who might be teaching these same international postgraduates would benefit from reading the book, firstly to enhance their knowledge of the challenges faced by their students and secondly to identify approaches which they could incorporate into their future pedagogical approach. indeed, with international students’ relevance and their importance to many he institutions it would make good sense for this book to become required reading for both newly appointed academics, through their pg certificates in higher education or academic professional apprenticeships, so that they could develop their pedagogy from its inception with the international student in mind. similarly, experienced academics might use the book as part of their continuing professional development. newman review: davies, m. (2022) study skills for international postgraduates. 2nd edn. london: bloomsbury academics. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 4 comparison to similar books books similarly published for the postgraduate students, such as grix (2010) and bell (2010) take their readers through the postgraduate research process, both in terms of its components and its timelines. whilst davies addresses both, he additionally and usefully orientates the international student to differences between their ‘home’ education approaches and the western, english-speaking higher education culture with which they will have to come to terms. in addressing the postgraduate, davies goes well beyond cottrell’s (2013) best-selling, and excellent, study skills handbook which, whilst aimed squarely at entrants into higher education is still useful to postgraduates as a refresher in study skills’ fundamentals. references bell, j. (2010) doing your research project: a guide for first-time researchers in education, health and social science. 5th edn. (maidenhead: mcgraw-hill open university). cottrell, s. (2013) the study skills handbook. 4th edn. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan. grix, j. (2010) the foundations of research. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan. author details ivan newman is an independent higher education specialist study skills tutor and qualified diagnostic assessor for specific learning difficulties/differences (splds) specialising in supporting master’s and doctoral students. long familial exposure to splds and other learning differences inform his practice. his doctoral thesis examined english he educational policy regarding the interplay between disabled students’ allowances and inclusive teaching and learning. he has published and presented extensively in the field. prior to entering he, his career encompassed business and corporate management, project management and business process engineering. his original discipline was physics and computing. a book review of davies, m. (2022) study skills for international postgraduates. 2nd edn. london: bloomsbury academics. summary of the book’s purpose, its main ideas and primary audience uniqueness how the book ‘works’ shortcomings how the book supports the international student relevance to learning development as a secondary readership comparison to similar books journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 24: september 2022 editorial jim donohue independent scholar nicola grayson university of manchester jenny hillman open university katharine jewitt open university eleanor loughlin nottingham trent university cathy malone leeds university craig morley university of chester gita sedghi university of liverpool alicja syska university of plymouth as post-postmodern, or digimodern (alan kirby, 2009), twenty-first century people, we are not good at waiting. patience seems to be the virtue of the past in a reality where almost everything is instantly accessible, including knowledge, products, distant countries, places and people we want to see. it took a global crisis to disrupt and frustrate this largely takenfor-granted ease of access, forcing us to reluctantly reach into our long neglected stores of patience. suddenly we had to wait for things – government decisions, institutional strategies, permission to enter the university library. and even though many aspects of our lives have now regained the pre-2020 rhythm, we still seem to be waiting for what the ‘new normal’ will be where we are. editorial this issue of the journal of learning development in higher education has been for us a harbinger of this ‘new normal’ that no one can yet define. it is much larger than our ‘pandemic issues’ and a quick glance at the article titles shows little indication that we have just been through a global crisis. have we already moved on? have we fully assessed the last two years’ impact on our work, our relationships, our morale and frame of mind? or are we merely in a ‘flight’ mode, fleeing from the unending days, weeks and months of waiting and anticipating? for we are certainly still waiting. waiting to see what will change in higher education and how it might still redefine our roles and working practices. waiting to understand the real impact of what we have been through and how it has shaped us in ways we still cannot fully appreciate. something new is emerging and, while we might not be able to predict or force the change we desire, we need to be part of this emergence – through thinking, writing, exchanging ideas. it doesn’t matter so much when, or even if, they will ever get adopted. putting them out there in the world is like planting seeds that one day, when the ground is less dry and the winds less tempestuous, might be able to sprout and yield a crop beyond our imagination. one day, someone might click on that article, dust that book cover, rediscover that blog post, and that ‘something’ we quietly dreamed of implementing will become ‘something more’. as the famed ‘spirituality of waiting’ writer henri nouwen, whose books were revived and widely cited during the pandemic, writes in waiting for god (1995, p.13), ‘we can really wait only if what we are waiting for has already begun for us. so waiting is never a movement from nothing to something. it is always a movement from something to something more’. the moment we are ready to paint an image of the future is the moment when the present already shifts, ever so slightly, in our minds. it may not feel like a lot, but it has the potential to seed a revolution. the challenge is to not keep our heads down, pushing ahead as we always have, but to keep seeding, dreaming, actively waiting for that better future. we might have to accept that change never follows a clear, linear, and consistent path. progress can be slow and sluggish, but every once in a while this dawdling gradual pace is interrupted by a radical intervention, leading to what palaeontologists stephen jay gould and niles eldredge (1972) called ‘punctuated equilibrium’. our equilibrium has certainly been punctuated. transformation is inevitable. editorial while we are still in unchartered waters, our fantastic authors are already reimagining and reinterpreting the aftermath, actively waiting for what higher education in general, and learning development in particular, will become. as a result, in this issue we feature a rich assortment of writing: nine research papers, two case studies, three opinion pieces, and four book reviews – eighteen articles in total. the first paper, by mary davis and john morley, sheds light on the ways students make use of academic phases and constructions in the ‘academic phrasebank’ resource to develop self-efficacy in academic writing. davis and morley interviewed 12 student users of the compendium to establish how they used formulaic phrases from the resource. the analysis shows that students felt enabled by the phrasebank as it helped their participation in academic discourse; it also reveals that this may be particularly the case for students with a specific learning difficulty. these insights will offer learning developers, and indeed all colleagues involved in teaching and learning, valuable guidance on when and how to refer students to the resource. the tension between the reported student preference for reading printed texts and the increasing prevalence of digital texts for academic study, serves as the impetus for helen hargreaves’ exploration of the different reading choices made, and strategies used, by students. focus groups with undergraduates were used to explore both the benefits and challenges of reading digital texts and the methods employed. the author highlights that although the students associated printed text with higher levels of enjoyment and concentration, they adopted pragmatic approaches to reading digital texts, making practical use of the functionalities afforded. the discussion concludes with a useful summary of how the insights gained have resulted in awareness of the importance of providing students with space to reflect on both their personal preferences and the different options available and the development of resources to support this process. ‘exploring course components as predictors of academic success in an online psychology course’ uses learning analytic data to investigate which factors may predict student success in online learning in higher education. john mingoia and brianna le busque seek to build on existing research by identifying which elements of course design can predict student success. specifically, they explored which course components can predict final grade, continuous assessment grade and major assessment grade in an online, undergraduate psychology course. through this investigation the authors argue that the editorial number of times students visit the course site, view activities and post in activities were the most powerful predictors. they also found that non-traditional, female, home students enrolled part-time engaged most regularly in these activities. overall, mingoia and le busque argue that online courses should provide students with regular activities and opportunities to participate in course content to encourage success. the paper ‘advancing the understanding of the flipped classroom approach with students' perceptions of the learning environment: variation between academic disciplines’ investigates the students’ perceptions of the flipped classroom approach and whether disciplinary differences can be observed in these perceptions. the findings showed that students from the academic disciplines related to the application of knowledge evaluated the four components of exposure, incentive, assessment, and activities more positively than those whose academic disciplines focus more on theoretical exploration. the paper identifies potential approaches, activities and modifications to teach specific disciplines, such as mathematics, language literacy and politics, to ensure these students benefit from the flipped classroom and to make class time more effective. bryony parsons and heather johnston’s paper presents evidence for student preferences on platforms for academic writing appointments. the context of the study was to establish whether appointments with an academic writing tutor held on microsoft teams should be continued, after a move to online appointments during the covid-19 pandemic saw a drop in the take-up of the service. analysing the results from a survey of students, parsons and johnston make a strong case for a ‘hybrid’ approach to virtual and in-person appointment types but also highlight nuances in student preferences according to the stage of their study, and the subject or faculty area. their findings will be of broad interest to academic and student services considering a hybrid support model. the paper ‘spaces and places in online learning: perspectives from students and staff’ investigates the suitability of the online teaching spaces to facilitate interactions that adhibit learning and teaching. the research brought learners, teachers and digital specialists together within online learning spaces and invited students to represent their experiences of the virtual space using simple analogue tools. the researchers stepped away from habitual online behaviours and captured personal and even emotional responses to digital experiences. the finding showed that such spaces could facilitate new kinds of interaction and not just mimic interactions from the physical world. they could editorial become places, not spaces, and embody their own vernacular memories. they would acquire a past and perhaps, a brighter future. the paper ‘interrogating a collaborative instructional approach to academic literacy: the missing link in supporting students’ language learning’ uses narrative inquiry to explore language tutors’ experiences of teaching discipline-specific academic literacies. it considers the internal conflicts and subjective experiences of language instructors themselves as a missing perspective in respect to a collaborative instructional approach and argues that these perspectives could advance a more holistic understanding of potential barriers to staff engagement with this approach. the findings show that feelings of undermined confidence or authority, constrained agency, resistance from students, and obligation, all constitute barriers to staff engagement. the study thereby illustrates the value of a more holistic appreciation of collaborative academic literacy instruction. higher education educators have implemented different pedagogical approaches to promote active learning and improve student engagement. the paper titled ‘improving student engagement using a video-enabled activity-based learning: an exploratory study to stem preparatory education in uae’ proposes an activity-based learning (abl) approach to enhance students’ motivation, engagement and academic performance in stem subjects, i.e., chemistry and physics. the findings of this study suggest that video-enabled abl could significantly improve student engagement and academic performance. however, the sole use of educational videos itself will not have the best results. the key is to use these videos to develop activities to foster better interaction and self-directed learning. the framework proposed in this study will assist stem educators to implement video-enabled abl. the last paper featuring xue zhou and peter wolstencroft’s research shows that the traditional student support systems used within uk higher education are no longer fit for purpose and proposes an organic student support system that is based on five features: agility in the environment, a tutor-student partnership, informal two-way communication, a student-led community, and the inclusion of a knowledge-hub. the authors discuss an alternative support system for chinese students at a large uk university who felt disenfranchised by the current support mechanisms. the system proved extremely successful and is something that could be replicated with other groups of students in the future in uk higher education. editorial our case studies section opens with a piece titled ‘the process of adapting an online induction course to support distinct student cohorts’. drawing on evidence of student engagement in a generic online induction course, kirsty mcintyre and jennifer o’neill discuss the process and results of tailoring the course to meet the distinct needs of two particular cohorts of stem students. through detailed and frank accounts of collaborations, processes and student engagement and feedback, the authors explore the importance of appropriate timing in the release of prearrival induction, ways to encourage engagement and completion and different types of content. the concluding principles provide a distillation of the points discussed and serve as a very useful starting point for others seeking to implement online induction courses. our second case study, by pamela thomas et al., shares the journey of creating a learning development toolkit at london south bank university. the toolkit is available on the lsbu website and comprises a database of formative academic skills activities which are available for academic staff to adapt and deliver during lectures and seminars. the case study discusses the difficulties faced with building such a resource within the context of particular organisational and logistical constraints but ultimately describes the path to creating a successful tool which was developed, tested and revised with critical friends. in the first of our three opinion pieces, julia bohlmann engages with the challenges that the decolonising the curriculum movement in universities presents for learning developers. she considers whether the goal of learning developers to support students to succeed in the curriculum is compatible with a commitment to challenging the colonial nature of that curriculum. she answers in the affirmative and proposes two ways in which the paradox can begin to be addressed: through ‘reflective’ and ‘relational’ practice by learning developers. an outline of the benefits of collaboration within and between universities serves as a starting point for richard heller’s discussion of a ‘new bloom’, a revision of bloom’s taxonomy that includes collaborate. a very useful discussion of the evolution of bloom’s taxonomy, since its inception in 1956, leads the author to suggest collaborate and associated educational objectives be added between apply and analyse on the traditional pyramid hierarchy. the limitations of the sequential model are explored and it is proposed that because collaborate is an important feature in each of the other components, it can editorial be positioned as the centre of a non-hierarchical structure. the author concludes by considering ‘new bloom’ in practice through highlighting the effectiveness and value of collaboration to learning. and finally, in the third opinion piece, constantine manolchev, allen alexander and ruth cherrington of the university of exeter business school, argue that ‘employability’ in he needs to move beyond simply encouraging an individual’s ‘trajectory of personal development towards aspirational job outcomes’. this focus on individual practice may support neoliberal performance management initiatives (such as tef), but is deficient in responding to diverse student backgrounds, and emphasises ‘getting to the front of the queue’ and graduate outcomes, rather than lifelong learning based on a range of critical skills and experiences. in pursuit of a more transformational model of employability, the authors turn to freire’s notion of praxis. this takes them beyond current models of ‘employability 2.0’, based on communities of practice, organisational learning and the connected curriculum. they claim that, in ‘employability 3.0’, the focus on praxis supports learners towards a life of true self-determination. we end our overview with insights into four book reviews. firstly, silvia colaiacomo and ivan newman review the book study skills for international postgraduates. the book aims to support postgraduate taught students across different disciplines to manage expectations and navigate the requirements of their studies in ‘western’ academia, defined in the book as meaning english-speaking countries of anglo-saxon heritage. as the reviewers demonstrate, it delivers wisdom, both historic and forward-looking, making it ideal as a reference tool to take the newly arrived international postgrad, for whom it is primarily intended, from the early days of settling in and making friends through their academic programme, closing with suggestions about doctoral research. offering the book to all incoming international students as part of a ‘welcome pack’ seems like an excellent idea. to close, maggie scott and retha schwanke review the book changes in the higher education sector: contemporary drivers and the pursuit of excellence. reflecting on the experiences of change within the english higher education sector, the book provides several essays that relate to the slippery concept of ‘teaching excellence’ and its achievement. the discussion builds on narratives engendered by the contemporary political and regulatory landscape, emphasising the role of the office for students, the uk editorial department for education, and the impact of the teaching excellence framework. various aspects of teaching excellence are discussed, from common measurements thereof to what exactly it constitutes and how to improve on it. even though the focus is mainly on the united kingdom context, it is an informative text that can be valuable in any setting. as always, we hope that in this collection of articles and conversations, our subscribers and readers will find thought provoking and stimulating material. we also want to take this opportunity to thank our wonderful reviewers whose critical reading of submissions and thoughtful feedback and recommendations have made invaluable contributions to the quality of articles we publish. our heartfelt appreciation for the time, expertise, and work it took to review papers in this issue goes to the following reviewers: anika easy anne elizabeth davey carol thomson celeste mclaughlin chad mcdonald christina magkoufopoulou craig morley dave lochtie dustin hosseini eleanor loughlin elizabeth tilley evan dickerson ivan newman jiani liu karen clinkard kate evans lee fallin matt hardy paul tuck peter hartley samantha jane ahern sarah pittaway simon cook simon goorney susi peacock vicky collins virna rossi with best wishes, the jldhe editorial board editorial references eldredge, n., and gould, s.j. (1972) ‘punctuated equilibria: an alternative to phyletic gradualism’. in schopf, t.j.m. (ed.) models in paleobiology. san francisco, ca: freeman cooper, pp. 82–115. kirby, a. (2009) digimodernism: how new technologies dismantle the postmodern and reconfigure our culture. new york and london: bloomsbury publishing. nouwen, h. (2017) waiting for god. u.s.: crossroad publishing. references ournal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 26: special edi issue february 2023 ________________________________________________________________________ ©2023 the author(s) (cc-by 4.0) ‘conscious' learning development: towards a pedagogy of race-consciousness ryan arthur birkbeck college, university of london, uk abstract this article advocates a pedagogy of race-consciousnesses (prc) to enhance the critical thinking abilities of all undergraduate students in higher education institutes (heis). it is envisioned that the cultivation of race-consciousness will be a means to not only value students’ home culture but also to draw from this culture to develop their innate critical thinking abilities. such an approach encourages students to critically engage with ‘perspectives that are different from their own, whether those perspectives are expressed by a teacher or by a peer’ (arday and mirza, 2018; wallace and rothschild-ewald, 2000, p.19). prc is situated in the ‘middle space between students’ own experiences and the expectations of the discourse communities in which they will have to achieve voice’ (wallace and rothschild-ewald, 2000, p.3). it is proposed that prc will be first developed in the field of learning development (ld) because of the unique position and mandate of learning developers (hartley, hisldon and keenan, 2010). this article hopes to spark conversations about race that have been largely absent from ld theory and practice. keywords: race; bme; bame; award gap; pedagogy; learning development. introduction the attention given to the bame award gap and the impact of covid-19 on the delivery of university courses has afforded learning development (ld) a unique opportunity to improve the learning experiences of students of colour. ld, in theory and practice, has largely remained unconscious about race and its impact on learning. our unconsciousness or colour-blindness is not our default position. it is a state of being that we have actively sought to maintain: arthur ‘woke' learning development: towards a pedagogy of race-consciousness journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 2 our research helps demonstrate that not seeing race, in a heavily racialised society, is a skill that has to be carefully taught and cultivated in order to be developed. it's not natural to just 'not see race'. our eyes detect pigment, and our society gives value and meaning to such pigment. when we don't see it, we are engaging in a strategic denial of something apparent . . . this strategy, ostensibly contrived to contribute to a world where race matters less, ends up making race matter more. (bartoli et al., 2016, pp.133-134). to stir us to action from our unconsciousness, this article advocates a pedagogy of raceconsciousnesses (prc) to enhance the critical thinking abilities of all undergraduate students in higher education institutes (heis). it is envisioned that the cultivation of race consciousness will be a means to not only value students' home culture, but also draw from this culture to develop their innate critical thinking abilities. such an approach encourages students to critically engage with 'perspectives that are different from their own, whether those perspectives are expressed by a teacher or by a peer' (arday and mirza, 2018; wallace and rothschild-ewald, 2000, p.19). race-consciousness as superpower my understanding of race-consciousness is derived from tatum's (2001) notion of a 'raceconscious society', which came out of her development of teacher education programmes to prepare white english-speaking teachers to respond to the educational needs of a multiracial, multi-ethnic, multilingual student population; a race-conscious society is 'a positive sense of racial/ethnic identity not based on assumed superiority or inferiority . . . for both white people and people of color' (p.53). seeing race is not the problem; it becomes problematic when we uncritically or unconsciously assign hierarchies to the differences (arday and mirza, 2018, p.273). race-consciousness is not something that can be achieved with a single workshop or completing unconscious bias training; the development of race consciousness is a 'lifelong process that often requires unlearning the misinformation and stereotypes we have internalized not only about others, but also about ourselves' (tatum, 2001, p.53). the concept of race-consciousness has a long history in african-american literature; just a few decades removed from the 13th amendment's abolishment of slavery, du bois sought to arthur ‘woke' learning development: towards a pedagogy of race-consciousness journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 3 answer a profound question, 'how does it feel to be a problem?' (du bois, 2007, p7). he laid bare the 'souls of black folk' by articulating their awareness of being perceived as a problem and their dichotomic experiences with their white counterparts (du bois, 2007). their othering by american society afforded african-americans an almost out of body experience in which they were conscious of themselves and how they were perceived by others (du bois, 2007; lemert, 2007). du bois (2007) saw this as a gift, though it was unfortunately given through being cursed, it was a gift that could be harnessed; the negro is sort of a seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this american world . . . . it is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of looking at one's self through the eyes of others . . . . one ever feels his twoness, – an american, a negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. (p.8). building on this, baldwin cultivated the idea of a superpower of race-consciousness: if we – and now i mean the relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks, who must, like lovers, insist on, or create, the consciousness of the others – do not falter in our duty now, we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world. (1964, p.141). the pedagogisation of race-consciousness there have also been some attempts to pedagogise this superpower. markowitz developed a pedagogical model to promote the development of race-consciousness in university students studying criminal justice: by creating race-consciousness through classroom experience, one could introduce an innovative perspective on the nature of crime and justice; such a perspective would increase students' awareness of the relevance of this social phenomenon while creating discourse on meaningful solutions to the problems it creates. (1997, p.218). arthur ‘woke' learning development: towards a pedagogy of race-consciousness journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 4 more broadly, to combat the discontinuity between the ideas and action of university educational leaders, agosto, karanxha and bellara (2015) sought to model a critical race theory-inspired 'race-conscious dialogue' for university educators to increase consciousness of how they may be implicated in institutional racism. in teacher education, ullucci (2010) explored how teacher education programmes shape the development of race-consciousness amongst white teachers. berchini (2016) looked at strategies to unobstructing pathways toward race-consciousness in english classrooms. though such studies show significant variation in the definition and application of raceconsciousness, they are united in the importance that they give to developing a raceconscious environment. emulating their example, it is important to identify why pedagogising race-consciousness is a worthy project. first, if we choose not to develop a race-consciousness classroom, we will implicitly embrace some degree of colourblindness (ullucci, 2010; flores and gunzenhauser, 2019). viewing these concepts on a spectrum, race-consciousness at one end and colour-blindness at the opposite end, the less race-conscious one's practice is, the more likely you are to fall victim to the many pitfalls of colour-blindness. colour-blindness is a figurative way of claiming an inability or refusal to be conscious of race or its implications (agosto, karanxha and bellara, 2015). every step away from race-consciousness leads us to the belief that 'discrimination is no longer a central factor affecting minorities' life chances' (bonilla-silva, 2014, p.77). thus, embracing colour-blind practice may dull our awareness to the hurdles faced by our students (see figure 1). we may leave 'racial microaggressions' unchecked, and we are less likely to take action against systemic oppression 'thereby supporting pro-racist ideologies by tolerating the status quo' (diggles, 2014, p.3). second, developing a race-conscious pedagogy is crucial to move our practice from cottrell's abstract, generic, and heavily cognitive how to approach towards regarding 'critical thinking as an affective and bodily process (rather than simply a cognitive one)' (danvers, 2016, p.14). similarly, crossouard states that learning is always 'embodied, relational and affectively charged', rather than restricting it to a purely cognitive process (2012, p.745). bailin and siegel stress the importance of emotion in critical thinking; they argue that critical thinking should not be seen in conflict with feeling but can include it. few topics outside of race are 'embodied, relational and affectively charged' (bailin and siegel, 2003, p.745). thus, a pedagogy of race consciousness is fertile ground to facilitate critical thinking amongst our students. arthur ‘woke' learning development: towards a pedagogy of race-consciousness journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 5 third, a pedagogy of race-consciousness is a means to capitalise on the doubleconsciousness that students of colour develop in societies that fail to appreciate their 'home cultures'. their superpower has remained untapped – their hyper ability to see how they are perceived through the eyes of others, and then process this information to inform the most 'acceptable' response (du bois, 2007; lemert, 2007). this is a calculation that is developed from the day the young child understands that their skin colour is more visible to others than themselves. arguably, this can pedagogised, or at the very least unpacked, for the benefit of students of colour who may feel that they have to constantly choose between their home cultures and 'privileged academic spaces' (danvers, 2016, p.45). at least for a moment, they can feel some type of release by channelling their home cultures into these 'privileged academic spaces'. moreover, white students will gain a greater understanding of the experiences of their black and brown counterparts. figure 1. a counter-storytelling of colour-blindness. i was asked to deliver a session on academic writing. i was surprised to find that the class, which consisted of a solitary white lecturer and only black and brown students, had name cards on their desks. i understand that this is a valid method for remembering student names at the beginning of the term but using these name cards near the end was a curious practice. after the session, i enquired about the use of the name cards. the lecturer noted that it was to help him remember students' names. i then mentioned that many black and brown people believe that some white people think they look similar. so, his prolonged use of the name cards may reinforce this conception, which will cause underlying tension. when you address them, you may look at their name cards rather than their human faces, objectification of the worst kind. as with everyone, your students want to be seen and treated as individuals, not just one mass. expecting the educator to embrace this revelation, i was shocked to hear, 'rubbish!'. such dismissal coming from a self-professed critical pedagogue, who had written and researched critical pedagogy for many years, was utterly surprising. he did not want to acknowledge his positionality; he did not want to recognise his whiteness; he was simply a teacher who used a simple method to remember his students' names. reddy (1998) explains that whiteness seems invisible, transparent, to those who are white: they are simply norms. however, the critical pedagogue failed to appreciate that whiteness makes itself 'hypervisible' to those who are not white. reddy refers to her experience: arthur ‘woke' learning development: towards a pedagogy of race-consciousness journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 6 like most white people, i never really thought about whiteness itself or its implications for my life until i married a black man and – far more consciousnesschanging – had a black child . . . i was performing white heterosexuality – quite unconsciously, in many areas of my life. (1998, p.57). of course, my assertion regarding the name cards may have been wrong, but this should not have stopped the pedagogue from reflecting on his race-neutral stance. the words of friere came to me at that point: 'those who authentically commit themselves to the people must re-examine themselves constantly' (2014, p.60). we must all reflect on these matters because as dyer notes, the sense of whiteness as a natural norm is an important component of hegemony, which 'secures its dominance by seeming not to be anything in particular' (1988, p.44). race and learning development learning development (ld), in practice and print, has not explicitly and meaningfully engaged with issues of race in the academy; race-consciousness is rarely invoked in relation to how it impacts one's pedagogy or positionality or as forming the content of a session. though there is significant literature on race and learning in higher education, this has not been reflected in the very specific field of working 'with students to help them make sense of the seemingly mysterious and alienating practices of academia; and to work with academics to rationalise and clarify such practices' (hartley, hisldon and keenan, 2010, p.16). this is a curious admission, considering race has always shaped a student's educational experience. historically, it determined access. today, it influences how teaching staff might respond to students when they reach the academy, whether people who look like them are directed to additional support services and whether their home culture, which is a fundamental part of who they are, is valued and respected (michael, 2012). a perfunctory search within journal repositories and the leading journal of ld (jldhe) did not yield a body of literature. moreover, the premier text on learning development, learning development in higher education, failed to explicitly engage with race (hartley, hisldon and keenan, 2010). though this text acknowledged the impact of diversity on he, there was not more than a passing reference to a conference paper written by lillis (1999). arthur ‘woke' learning development: towards a pedagogy of race-consciousness journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 7 this reference led me to the academic literacies (al) approach, which 'analyses texts to explore and reveal socio-economic, socio-cultural, and critical-discourse based perspectives' (richards and pilcher, 2018, p.162). there is considerable promise in this field of nquiry to lay the foundations for developing race-conscious discourses within ld. this is even more the case with the south african variant of al, which does not shy away from issues of race-consciousness and decolonisation (lillis et al., 2015). through the al approach, it is possible that expressions of race can be fused into the discourse around ld in uk universities. until the promise of al is fulfilled, it is worth contemplating why the relationship between race and ld has been so distant. ld is a relatively young and developing field. race is but one of the issues that ld has failed to fully engage with. as the diversity of ld practitioners increases, so will the diversity of ld's theory and practice. thus, studies that fail to engage with issues should not be considered blameworthy. learning developers are not alone in their inability to think or talk about the critical role race plays in the teaching and learning process; ld is simply a reflection of the broader slow-moving pace to theorise about race in uk heis (milner and laughter, 2015). the slow-moving pace is not helped by the fact that ld theory and practice lean towards umbrella issues under which race may fall under, rather than focusing on race explicitly. we see this in discussions about widening participation, new entrants, inclusion, diversity, equality, non-traditional students, access and participation, social deprivation, and inequalities: within the current socio-political context, it is unusual to name race, racism, or racial injustice so explicitly. such language is politely subsumed within palatable umbrella terms . . . . race or racism is seldom named or foregrounded, thus serving to maintain a racially sanitised norm which benefits whites and marginalises faculty, staff and students of colour. in this context, attempts to explicitly name or foreground race and racism are silenced or reworked and rebranded in an effort to preserve the institutional image as neutral, colour-blind and progressive. these acts of brand management do not challenge whiteness rather are preoccupied only with protecting it whether through inadequate forms of action or, as with the senior colleagues in the scenario above, inaction and avoidance. (arday and mirza, 2018, p.322). arthur ‘woke' learning development: towards a pedagogy of race-consciousness journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 8 at this point, it is unclear to what extent the above reasons explain the absence of race. nevertheless, what is important is that developers awake from our unconsciousness because of the unique position that we hold in the academy. hartley, hisldon and keenan note that learning developers are uniquely placed in 'mediating roles between the experience of students, the goals of academics, and the ambitions of our he institutions' (2010, p.24). as the link between learning development (student-facing support) and academic development (staff-facing support and professional development) strengthens, more learner developers will be called upon to support the professional development of the teaching and administrative teams. this presents an opportunity for learning developers to propagate the importance of understanding one's privilege and positionality into the heart of the academy. also, all uk heis are afflicted by the 'award gap' between the proportion of white british students receiving 'good' degree classifications compared to uk-domiciled students from minority ethnic groups. since, ld work is directed at these 'new' entrants, we often have to engage with significant numbers of students of colour who have been failed by the academy; it would be prudent of us to understand our positionality and the backgrounds of our students so that we do not replicate the same problematic institutional practices that led them to our doors (see figure 2). figure 2. reflection on 'unconscious' learning development. figure 2 is an ld advertisement for an introduction to critical thinking course at a prestigious uk university. it can be interpreted in a number of problematic ways; the advertisement states that ‘critical thinking is a vital skill’ which can be obtained if students ‘prepare for university now’; therein situating critical thinking as a cognitive skill outside the student. this notion is reinforced with a picture of a black student striving to think critically arthur ‘woke' learning development: towards a pedagogy of race-consciousness journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 9 like the exalted thinker. rodin's thinker is solitary, masculine, and european; this is ‘not accidental’, but reflects a specific embodiment of the critical thinker along masculinist and european lines (thayer-bacon, 1998; thayer-bacon 2000; danvers, 2016, p.48). there is no allegation of racism for the creators of this advertisement, far from it; instead, it appears to be indicative of the unconsciousness of ld, which has led to the perpetuation of the status quo. nonetheless, i am curious about the ld team's design choices; why was the student selected? is this the type of student most in need of these types of introductory courses? why the thinker? why not a real person like angela davis or stuart hall? what message did they want this advertisement to send? modelling race-conscious pedagogy in learning development moving from theory to practice, i will sketch a model that embeds race-consciousness into ld sessions. this model will be referred to as a pedagogy of race-consciousness (prc). the prc has four foci: ld-focused, assessment-focused, dialogic-focused, and critical thinking-focused. 1. ld-focused: it is envisioned that prc would work best in the hands of learning developers because prc is best harnessed by those whose core focus is to empower students as they are. developers truly meet students where they are – though many educators profess this, developers generally embody this; learning developers construct sessions in which students can confidently contribute without needing to engage with a prescribed reading list or be conversant with the received theory. 2. assessment-focused: though prc owes much to tatum's idea of a raceconscious society, its central goal is far earthlier, that is, to empower students to approach an assessment task confidently or, more broadly, obtain a good degree. if students leave the classroom with a 'positive sense of racial/ethnic identity not based on assumed superiority or inferiority' (tatum, 2001, p.53), then this is an appreciated bonus, but it is not the central goal. this is because students who engage with ld are largely 'non-traditional students' who tend to pursue higher education for career-oriented and pragmatic reasons. therefore, educators must put such goals at the centre of their sessions 'even if we incorporate other goals as well' (durst, 1999; gorzelsky, 2007, p.431). considering that developers largely arthur ‘woke' learning development: towards a pedagogy of race-consciousness journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 10 encounter non-traditional students, who will leave university with at least £30,000 debt, their goals, no matter how pragmatic or shallow, must be respected. it would be unprincipled to deliver sessions with other goals in mind, no matter how noble these goals may be. this is what differentiates prc differs from critical, disruptive, emancipatory, and feminist pedagogies; by encouraging students to tackle oppressive elements in their lives, educators 'are in fact, imposing our goals on students rather than doing what we are ethically obligated to do as teachers – to support students as they pursue their own goals' (smith, 1997; gorzelsky, 2007, p.431). moreover, the non-alignment of the pragmatic ambitions of students and the agenda of the activist teacher could lead to a 'collision course' in which neither party achieves its goals (durst, 1999; wallace and rothschild-ewald, 2000; gorzelsky, 2007). 3. dialogue-focused: due to the sensitivity of the content and the wide variety of students’ lived experiences, prc will most likely falter if expressed through a monologic or banking mode of instruction. prc is rooted in enabling understanding to take place through dialogic communication. this dialogue occurs in the 'middle space between students' own experiences and the expectations of the discourse communities in which they will have to achieve voice' (wallace and rothschildewald, 2000, p.3). there is no agenda, implicitly or explicitly. rather, the pedagogue wants himself or herself and the classroom to arrive at an understanding where multiple streams of consciousness flow without fear of epistemic violence. boler noted that our ethical responsibility is to listen with 'equal attention to all views and perspectives' (1999, p.179). without this consideration, 'too much discomfort may be counterproductive to learning and possibly unethical' (applebaum, 2017, p. 863). 4. critical thinking-focused: critical thinking is just one of the many areas covered by learning developers, but it offers the best entry point for prc (danvers, 2016). as discussed, 'race-talk' is most comfortable in the realm of critical thinking. there are also practical reasons; most areas of academic practice covered by developers, like referencing and paragraph structure, are too static, fixed and narrow to accommodate prc – it will most likely seem forced and not entirely clear to students how to make connections. also, significant importance is given to critical thinking by universities (barnett, 1997; danvers, 2016). arguably, it is one of the few areas of student development where universities appreciate the difficulties. arthur ‘woke' learning development: towards a pedagogy of race-consciousness journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 11 thus, there may be more of a willingness to provide opportunities for novel practices. prc is delivered through a simple three-step process: (1) intrigue; (2) connection; (3) tangibility (see figures 3 and 4): (1) the facilitator intrigues the students by starting the session with discussion points around a provocative scenario. this scenario has within it a problem or controversy that requires the class to draw from their lived experience to address it. (2) the next stage is establishing a connection between our intriguing discussion and a specific academic practice. in other words, the facilitator establishes a 'bridge' from the students' lived experiences to what is expected of them in their discourse communities. the facilitator needs to make this 'bridge' as simple and explicit as possible to enable students to recreate their own 'bridge' when they are alone writing their essays. wallace and rothschild-ewald, refer to this as the facilitation of 'interpretive agency', which involves 'bringing one's prior experience to bear in the construction of knowledge' (2000, p.16). (3) the last stage is tangibility; given that the goal of prc is to approach an assessment task confidently, it is important that students see an actual example. this way, they see the entire journey from dialogue to the 'finished product'. moreover, a tangible example is needed for students to review, deconstruct, and evaluate (wallace and rothschild-ewald, 2000). arthur ‘woke' learning development: towards a pedagogy of race-consciousness journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 12 figure 3. model of prc. intrigue the facilitator ‘intrigues’ the students by starting the session with discussion points around a provocative scenario. this scenario has within it a problem or controversy that requires the class to draw from their lived experience to address it. connection the facilitator establishing a ‘connection’ from our ‘intriguing’ discussion to a specific academic practice. in other words, the facilitator establishes a ‘bridge’ from the students’ lived experiences to what is expected of them in their discourse communities. tangibility the facilitator provides a tangible example of what this academic practice looks like in writing. arthur ‘woke' learning development: towards a pedagogy of race-consciousness journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 13 figure 4. example of prc. challenges intrigue present a provocative image and ask students to state a keyword to describe the image and any undertones. prompt a fuller discussion about the keywords that were stated. connection explicitly connect the activity of stating keywords to the academic practice of thematic analysis. the facilitator explains that their keywords were in effect ‘themes’, which could be expanded upon. rather than conflate or compound their observations, they can discuss each keyword or theme separately. each of the keywords or themes has a ‘life of its own’. prompt a discussion about their process of conjuring keywords: ‘if i had asked you to conjure “themes” instead of “keywords” would it had been as easy? what are the benefits of separating your work into themes? why is separating your work into themes considered evidence of critical thinking?’ tangibility provide a written example of arranging observations into themes. prompt a discussion about the written example; ‘what do you think? what is positive about this approach? anything that you could improve? perhaps the written example is a bit boring – any ideas to “spice” it up?’ context the formative assignments revealed that the undergraduate students’ case studies were marred by compounding different ideas in the discussion section of their ‘mock’ dissertation. it appeared that students struggled to separate their ideas into coherent sections. a means to remedy this was to deliver an introduction session to thematic analysis. arthur ‘woke' learning development: towards a pedagogy of race-consciousness journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 14 the difficult road ahead prc is not without its difficulties. there are two significant challenges for prc. first, the rise of online learning in higher education presents a unique challenge for educators committed to affective pedagogies. it remains to be seen how well affective pedagogies translate to the online classroom (boyd, 2016). this is a particularly important consideration given that 'we learn, we teach, we know with our entire body. we do all of these things with feeling, with emotion, with wishes, with fear, with doubts, with passion' (freire, 2014, p.3). harnessing students' lived experiences is best attempted with care, consideration, and intimacy (anderson, 1979; thweatt and mccroskey, 1996; baker, 2004). moreover, the hurdles of the 'digital divide' and 'digital literacy' make it difficult to see prc deployed in an online environment in any meaningful way (boyd, 2016). the second consideration is more of a dilemma that the pedagogue must wrestle with. should he or she seek to comfort the potential discomfort? on the one hand, it is unlikely that prc will cause a great deal of discomfort because it is unconcerned with advocating a particular perspective, rather it is rooted in creating an understanding of varying perspectives (see figure 5). as boler states, 'a pedagogy of discomfort is not a demand to take one particular road of action. the purpose is not to enforce a particular political agenda, or to evaluate students on what agenda they choose to carry out, if any' (1999, p.179). it is also worth noting that some discomfort should not always be regarded as problematic. there is this 'universal expectation' that education must create comfortable environments for students (applebaum, 2007). however, it can be a necessary catalyst for growth and learning (boler, 1999; kumashiro, 2002; mayo, 2002; berlak, 2004; applebaum, 2007; zembylas, 2015). felman insists that 'if teaching does not hit upon some sort of crisis . . . it has perhaps not truly taught' (felman, 1992, p.53; butler, 2004, p.136). moreover, the individuals that are most likely to feel discomfort are those who most benefit from being colour-blind. arthur ‘woke' learning development: towards a pedagogy of race-consciousness journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 15 figure 5. reflection on managing discomfort. the demands for comfort are not neutral; 'teach me' and 'care for me' are manifestations of privilege and reassertions of power. thus, leonardo and porter (2010) assert that when we observe the safety of those who benefit from being colour-blind, we inadvertently squander the opportunity for those who want to grow, learn and move out of their comfort zone (leonardo and porter, 2010, p.140). on the other hand, race is race. attempts to speak frankly about race are 'fraught with risk and challenge' (arday and mirza, 2018, p.319). leonardo and porter state that by sharing your real perspectives on race, you may become a target of personal and academic threats (2010, p.140). you put yourself at risk of violence and at risk of being conceived of as illogical or irrational. thus, the pedagogue, particularly the pedagogue of colour, must when delivering sessions that engage with affective matters, i anticipate moments of discomfort that may take away from the goal of the session, so i keep the picture on the left in my powerpoint slide deck. i explain to the students that goal of this session is to reach an understanding. understanding is represented by the sun. this sun that i’m trying to show you is something desired by all of us. we all want to understand, we all want to bask in the sun. however, the means of reaching this understanding may cause issues and it may cause disagreement. the means is represented by the pointing finger. the finger is simply a means to get us towards understanding. i want to show you the sun, so don’t focus on the finger, focus on where the finger is pointing. the finger is imperfect and flawed, but i believe it will help us see the glorious sun. arthur ‘woke' learning development: towards a pedagogy of race-consciousness journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 16 decide whether or not to place comfort as their central consideration. it would be inconsiderate for me to urge my fellow pedagogues, particularly the pedagogues of colour, to allow for some discomfort, therein jeopardising their well-being and possible career progression. parting words it is hoped that this discussion on race and learning development would encourage other learning developers to consider removing the shackles of neutrality in a manner that preserves their integrity, well-being, and chances of career progression. we are not empty vessels; we come to the academy with our rich lived experiences. instead of casting them away before we enter the classroom, why not use them in our sessions to enhance the learning experiences of our students and also feel a sense of wholeness? it would be a pleasure to see a deeper engagement of race, class, gender, age, or neurodiversity in ld theory and practice. we may struggle to get it right and face resistance along the way, but ultimately, i believe we will be appreciated: if you can talk to me in ways that show you understand that your knowledge of me, the world, and the 'right thing to do' will always be partial, interested, and potentially oppressive to others, and if i can do the same, then we can work together on shaping and reshaping alliances for constructing circumstances in which students of difference can thrive. (ellsworth, 1989, p.324). references agosto, v., karanxha, z. and bellara., a. (2015) ‘battling inertia in educational leadership: crt praxis for race conscious dialogue’, race ethnicity and education, 18(6), pp.785-812. https://doi.org/10.1080/13613324.2014.885420. anderson, j. f. (1979) ‘teacher immediacy as a predictor of teaching effectiveness’, in nimmo, d. (ed.) communication yearbook. new brunswick: transaction books, pp.543-559. https://doi.org/10.1080/13613324.2014.885420 arthur ‘woke' learning development: towards a pedagogy of race-consciousness journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 17 applebaum, b. (2007) ‘white complicity and social justice education: can one be culpable without being liable?’ educational theory, 57, pp.453-467. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1741-5446.2007.00268.x. applebaum, b. (2017) ‘comforting discomfort as complicity: white fragility and the pursuit of invulnerability’, hypatia, 32(4), pp.862-875. https://doi:10.1111/hypa.12352. arday, j. and mirza, h. (eds.) (2018) dismantling race in higher education: racism whiteness and decolonising the academy. london: palgrave macmillan. bailin, s. and siegel, h. (2003) ‘critical thinking’, in blake, n., smeyers, p., smith, r. and standish, p. (eds.) the blackwell guide to the philosophy of education. oxford: blackwell, pp.181-193. baker, j. (2004) ‘an investigation of relationships among instructor immediacy and affective and cognitive learning in the online classroom’, internet and higher education, 7(1), pp.1-13. baldwin, j. (1964) the fire next time. middlesex: penguin books. barnett, r. (1997) higher education: a critical business. buckingham: srhe. bartoli, e., michael, a., bentley-edwards, k., stevenson, h., shor, r. and mcclain. s. (2016) ‘training for colour-blindness: white racial socialisation’, whiteness and education, 1(2), pp.25-136. https://doi.org/10.1080/23793406.2016.1260634. berchini, c. (2016) ‘structuring contexts: pathways toward unobstructing race-consciousness’, international journal of qualitative studies in education, 29(8), pp.1030-1044. https://doi.org/10.1080/09518398.2016.1189620. berlak, a. (2004) ‘confrontation and pedagogy: cultural secrets, trauma, and emotions in antioppressive pedagogies’, in boler, m. (ed) democratic dialogue in education: troubling speech, disturbing silence. new york: peter lang, pp.123-144. boler, m. (1999) feeling power: emotions and education. new york: routledge. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1741-5446.2007.00268.x https://doi:10.1111/hypa.12352 https://doi.org/10.1080/23793406.2016.1260634 https://doi.org/10.1080/09518398.2016.1189620 arthur ‘woke' learning development: towards a pedagogy of race-consciousness journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 18 bonilla-silva, e. (2014) racism without racists: colorblind racism and the persistence of racial inequality in america. 4th edn. lanham: rowman & littlefield publishers. boyd, d. (2016) ‘what would paulo freire think of blackboard: critical pedagogy in an age of online learning’, international journal of critical pedagogy, 7(1), p.165. butler, j. (2004) undoing gender. new york: routledge. crossouard, b. (2012) ‘absent presences: the recognition of social class and gender dimensions within peer assessment interactions’, british educational research journal, 38(5), pp.731-748. https://doi.org/10.1080/01411926.2011.580047. danvers, e. (2016) rethinking criticality: undergraduate students, critical thinking and higher education. unpublished phd thesis. university of sussex. diggles, k. (2014) ‘addressing racial awareness and color-blindness in higher education’, new directions for teaching and learning, 140. https://doi.org/10.1002/tl.20111. du bois, w (2007) the souls of black folk. london: oxford university press durst, r. (1999) collision course: conflict, negotiation, and learning in college composition. urbana: national council of teachers of english. dyer, r. (1988) ‘white’, screen, 29(4), pp.44-64. https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/29.4.44. ellsworth, e. (1989) ‘why doesn't this feel empowering? working through the repressive myths of critical pedagogy’, harvard educational review, 59(3) pp.297-325. https://doi.org/10.17763/haer.59.3.058342114k266250. felman, s. (1992) ‘education and crisis, or, vicissitudes of listening’, in felman, s. and laug, d. (eds.) testimony: crises of witnessing in literature, psychoanalysis, and history. london: routledge. flores, o. and gunzenhauser, m. (2019) ‘the problems with colorblind leadership revealed: a call for race-conscious leaders’, international journal of qualitative https://doi.org/10.1080/01411926.2011.580047 https://doi.org/10.1002/tl.20111 https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/29.4.44 https://doi.org/10.17763/haer.59.3.058342114k266250 arthur ‘woke' learning development: towards a pedagogy of race-consciousness journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 19 studies in education, 32(8), pp.963-981. https://doi.org/10.1080/09518398.2019.1635278. freire, p. (2014) pedagogy of the oppressed. london: bloomsbury publishing. gorzelsky, g. (2007) 'review of who can afford critical consciousness? practicing a pedagogy of humility by david seitz', jac, 27(1/2), pp.430-438. kumashiro, k. (2002) troubling education: queer activism and anti-oppressive pedagogy. new york: routledge. lemert, c. (2007) thinking the unthinkable the riddles of classical social theories. london: routledge. leonardo, z. and porter, r. (2010) ‘pedagogy of fear: toward a fanonian theory of "safety" in race dialogue’, race, ethnicity and education, 13(2), pp.139-57. https://doi.org/10.1080/13613324.2010.482898. lillis, t. (1999) 're-defining the problem of student writing’, in graal, m. and clark, r. (eds.) (1999) partnerships across the curriculum. proceedings of the 6th annual writing development in higher education conference. university of leicester, leicester 20-21 april. leicester: teaching and learning unit, university of leicester, pp.15-32. lillis, t., harrington, k., lea, m. and mitchell, s. (2015) working with academic literacies: case studies towards transformative practice. colorado: parlor press. markowitz, m. (1997) ‘introducing "race consciousness" into criminal justice education: a pedagogical model’, journal of criminal justice education, 8(2), pp.215-223. https://doi.org/10.1080/10511259700086311. mayo, c. (2002) ‘the binds that tie: civility and social difference’, educational theory, 52, pp.169-186. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1741-5446.2002.00169.x. https://doi.org/10.1080/09518398.2019.1635278 https://doi.org/10.1080/13613324.2010.482898 https://doi.org/10.1080/10511259700086311 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1741-5446.2002.00169.x arthur ‘woke' learning development: towards a pedagogy of race-consciousness journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 20 michael, a (2012) raising race questions: whiteness, education and inquiry in seven teacher case studies. unpublished phd thesis. university of pennsylvania. milner, h. and laughter, j. (2015) ‘but good intentions are not enough: preparing teachers to center race and poverty’, urban review, 47, pp.341-363. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11256-014-0295-4. reddy, m, (1998) 'invisibility/hypervisibility: the paradox of normative whiteness' transformations: the journal of inclusive scholarship and pedagogy, 9(2), pp.5564. richards. k, and pilcher, n. (2018) ‘academic literacies: the word is not enough’, teaching in higher education, 23(2), pp.162-177. https://doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2017.1360270. smith, j. (1997) 'students' goals, gatekeeping, and some questions of ethics', college english, 59(3), pp.299-320. https://doi.org/10.2307/378379. tatum, b. (2001) ‘professional development: an important partner in antiracist teacher education’, in king, s. and castenell, l. (eds) racism and racial inequality: implications for teacher education. washington dc: aacte publications, pp.51-58. thayer-bacon, b. (1998) ‘transforming and redescribing critical thinking: constructive thinking’, studies in philosophy and education, 17, pp.123-148. https://doi.org/10.1023/a:1005166416808. thayer-bacon, b. (2000) transforming critical thinking: thinking constructively. new york: teachers college press. thweatt, k. and mccroskey, j. (1996) ‘teacher nonimmediacy and misbehavior: unintentional negative communication’, communication research reports, 13(2), pp.198-204. https://doi.org/10.1080/08824099609362087. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11256-014-0295-4 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11256-014-0295-4 https://doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2017.1360270 https://doi.org/10.2307/378379 https://doi.org/10.1023/a:1005166416808 https://doi.org/10.1080/08824099609362087 arthur ‘woke' learning development: towards a pedagogy of race-consciousness journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 21 wallace, d. and rothschild-ewald, h. (2000) mutuality in the rhetoric and composition classroom: studies in writing and rhetoric. carbondale: southern illinois university press. ullucci, k. (2010) ‘what works in race-conscious teacher education? reflections from educators in the field’, shaping new models of teacher education, 37(2) pp.137156. zembylas, m. (2012) ‘pedagogies of strategic empathy: navigating through the emotional complexities of anti-racism in higher education’, teaching in higher education, 17(2), pp.113-125. https://doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2011.611869. author details ryan arthur manages learning development in birkbeck college, university of london. he is a fellow of advance he. his research interests include the bme award gap, decolonisation, and disruptive pedagogies. licence ©2023 the author(s). this is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (cc-by 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. see http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. journal of learning development in higher education (jldhe) is a peer-reviewed open access journal published by the association for learning development in higher education (aldinhe). https://doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2011.611869 journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 24 september 2022 ________________________________________________________________________ constructing an academic skills toolkit for embedding academic practices pamela thomas london south bank university, uk nazmin khanom london south bank university, uk adebisi adelaja london south bank university, uk mohamed mehbali london south bank university, uk simon lambe london south bank university, uk abstract this case study explores the successes and challenges experienced while creating the academic skills toolkit1 for use by academic staff at london south bank university (lsbu). based on similar initiatives at queen mary university of london (mcconlogue, mitchell and peake, 2012), the university of derby (2021) and the university of huddersfield (hill and tinker, 2013), lsbu’s toolkit is a database of formative academic skills activities which are available for academic staff to adapt and deliver during lectures and seminars. the case study opens by explaining lsbu’s institutional context, including our curriculum framework, and the centre for research informed teaching’s (crit) role in supporting various features: employability, embedded learning development, pedagogy, inclusivity and assessment. the case study also discusses lsbu’s student profile, namely that we have a large proportion of students from non-traditional academic backgrounds. as such, the toolkit’s activities have been designed to enhance students’ criticality, analysis and confidence in their academic writing in a more general sense. the toolkit is freely available to the public on the internet. the link for this will be given to staff at other institutions at networking events. for the purposes of our institution our team can advise 1 academic skills toolkit (ast) formerly known as learning development toolkit (ldt) thomas, khanom, adelaja, mehbali and lambe constructing an academic skills toolkit for embedding academic practices journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 2 on its implementation by discussing ways to tailor activities to a given session with individual academics. the toolkit has five key areas: critical thinking development, quantitative analysis development, reading development, reflective development and writing development. the case study describes the elements within the toolkit and explains how it was developed, tested and revised to enhance its usability. it discusses the difficulties faced with building the toolkit within lsbu’s existing it framework and outlines how we ultimately succeeded in generating a comprehensive database of tasks to support student learning. keywords: academic skills toolkit; academic skills; embedded learning development; academic staff; teaching and learning; activities. introduction over the past two decades, many higher education (he) institutions have experienced an increase in numbers of non-traditional students, yet scholars have suggested that traditional teaching and assessment methods continue to be implemented without considering the changes in the student body (wingate, 2006; wingate 2007; bailey, 2010; leese, 2010; kaur, norman and nordin, 2017). non-traditional is an umbrella term that refers to students who come from a family background that does not include experience in he as well as students with identifiers from a lower social class or who are categorised as minority groups (chao, laing and robinson, 2005; elmes, 2015; mowat, 2015). these groups have complex characteristics which overlap with marginalised groups (mowat, 2015) such as students with disabilities and students who face any form of social exclusion. it includes care givers and care leavers, although statistics show they represent a small percentage of the student body, and the amount is thought to be higher than this in reality (office for students, 2021). furthermore, there has been scrutiny on government’s accountability in regard to inclusive practice for learners with disabilities (shaw, 2021). within this paper, we are unable to discuss each characteristic and the challenges they face as it is a multifaceted issue and, for this reason, we will discuss non-traditional students in general terms, taking different minority groups into consideration within our discussions. thomas, khanom, adelaja, mehbali and lambe constructing an academic skills toolkit for embedding academic practices journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 3 previously, non-traditional students were often viewed as ‘lacking’ and he institutions employed a deficit model (wingate, 2006) of instruction (wilkins and burke, 2015). consequently, academic practices were often viewed by core teaching staff as something that should be taught separate to the programme itself (bailey, 2010). this view is problematic as it detaches content from the writing and is not conducive to inclusive learning as it does not recognise the different levels of academic skills amongst a given cohort. more recently, there has been a wealth of research that advocates the breadth of diversity and strengths such as experiential knowledge that non-traditional learners contribute to he (mccall, western and petrakis, 2020). london south bank university’s (lsbu) academic skills toolkit (ast) is a response to the university’s staff and students’ learning and development needs, as outlined in the university’s corporate vision to transform lives, communities, businesses and society through applied education and insight (lsbu, 2020). initially it was part of our 2018-2020 educational strategy, ‘helping students to grow’, to embed our educational framework (ef). more recently this has been developed into the institutional curriculum framework 2021, providing a set of key principles which informs curriculum design and the student experience primarily for undergraduate and some postgraduate programmes. the distinct characteristics of the university’s educational framework and curriculum framework approach encompasses: employability, embedding learning development, pedagogy, inclusivity and assessment. one key focus for our team as learning developers is embedding learning development into course curricula for all undergraduate students to scaffold their learning (vygotsky, 1978; wingate, andon and cogo, 2011). the development of the toolkit was borne out of the frustration of repetitive requests from academic staff and students’ study skills support. in 2015, a two-year project where the learning development team piloted embedded learning development led to increased first attempt pass rates. the rationale behind the construction and development the toolkit is a resource built by learning developers to support academic staff in developing students’ academic practices, such as academic writing, reading and critical thinking, as well as quantitative analysis and reflective writing. it includes a range of formative activities that can be used in appropriate settings such as lectures and seminars. thomas, khanom, adelaja, mehbali and lambe constructing an academic skills toolkit for embedding academic practices journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 4 the toolkit contains multiple resources and activities with instructions and guidance for academics to teach independently to their students. each activity has been designed to be taught as part of a module at various stages. the toolkit is underpinned by concepts of teaching and learning that are research-informed and is guided by pedagogical themes and development areas that overlap with the literature (wingate 2006; wingate, 2007; bailey, 2010; ashton-hay and doncaster, 2021) and is consistent with academic skills in he. wingate (2006) presents a dichotomy where generic skills training is referred to as a ‘bolt-on’ approach and embedded practice, known as a ‘built-in’ approach (favoured by wingate), is content focused. the built-in model develops learning within the subject and discipline and employs a longterm holistic approach (boud and falchikov, 2006; wingate, 2006). discipline specific discourse is used to support students to enculturate within their discipline in line with institutional principles and, therefore, assists students’ academic socialisation (lea and street, 2006; street, 2009). embedding learning development is a key priority for learning developers in the centre for research informed teaching (crit) and over the last five years the team has been able to evidence our impact across the seven schools in the university (thomas and mehbali, 2017). as a result of our success working with targeted low performing modules that had pass rates of <60% there was an impact in a number of schools: sports science went from 43% to 72%, built environment from 56% to 90%, health and social care from 30% to 90%. this supported the team to pursue scaling up our embedded support which has led to the construction of the toolkit. the principle of the toolkit is to work as a practical guide for academic staff in teaching students academic practices in which reading, writing and critical thinking are central. our research informed toolkit is based on learning developers’ experiences of activities that have worked well in previous sessions that we have individually delivered and co-taught. in uk he institutions there are several challenges that our students face. for instance, they often have difficulty in building analysis which results in opinionated or descriptive writing (guba and lincoln, 1994; hendry, armstrong and bromberger, 2012; hendry, 2016). students are found to be more receptive when they can observe a clear link between the teaching concepts and their assessment criteria (biggs and tang, 2007; kinesh and knight, 2013; biggs and tang, 2015). the fundamental principles within biggs thomas, khanom, adelaja, mehbali and lambe constructing an academic skills toolkit for embedding academic practices journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 5 and tang's (2007) concept of constructive alignment are meaning-making and learner constructed knowledge with learning that is linked closely to the programme outcomes and assessment criteria (kinesh and knight, 2013). for this reason, many of the activities in the toolkit require the academic to refer to the assessment criteria when teaching the various academic skills. the toolkit encompasses some aspects of data analysis in the form of quantitative research methods to identify any pattern, association or relationship between datasets or the comparison of samples. statistics allow us to perform hypothesis testing, ultimately leading to the acceptance or rejection of the assertion or research question posed at the start. the ability to process, manage and draw tangible significance from a dataset is becoming increasingly important for any industry or business. given the rapid growth of the competitive global economy, the uk needs to meet the increasing demand for people equipped with valuable quantitative skills. bean's (2016) report on uk economic statistics highlighted the need for the office for national statistics to increase its analytical capability. universities play an essential part in the data agenda and a key role in overcoming its challenges (schulz, 2008). matthews et al.’s 2016 study evaluated the implementation of quantitative skills in life science degree programmes at several universities in australia. the authors performed thorough analysis of the curriculum development for quantitative skills underpinned by discipline-specific research and general theories of curriculum design. the study revealed wavering levels of embedding quantitative skills on the various programmes, showing there is room for improvement across the different years to support students better. in particular, the ability to support students transferring their maths skills for their discipline needed attention. it was highlighted that a hybrid model which seeks opportunities to embed and scaffold students’ quantitative skills over the programme is valuable to enhance support. thus, it is essential to review quantitative skills provision, considering the numerous skills that graduates will need to succeed in a range of industries. it is vital to consider embedding quantitative skills in he. harris (2011, 2016) assessed quantitative methods and statistics at degree level and observed the demand for developing quantitative skills within education, social sciences, business, applied science, health and social care and engineering. harris (2011) concluded that feeding this appetite for quantitative skills can thomas, khanom, adelaja, mehbali and lambe constructing an academic skills toolkit for embedding academic practices journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 6 be demanding, yet also highly rewarding owing to its role in preparing students for employment. moreover, a report by the royal geography society (2013) demonstrated the importance of student interest and engagement in data and its need to encourage this from school into university. data literacy is crucial to the outlook of competitive business in all disciplines; having these skills cultivated at university will make students more employable. the journey of the ‘toolkit club’ our journey to develop the toolkit started with numerous requests from the seven academic schools across lsbu. through discussions, the ld team noticed that we were receiving multiple identical requests, from essay writing and critical thinking through to technical lab reports and drugs calculations. as additional requests came in, with the team already co-teaching, co-creating curricula and delivering embedded sessions across the university, we were able to categorise the requests and began to record the types of sessions that were most requested (see appendix 1). this led to a small pilot project to develop a range of class-based formative activities for our academic colleagues. as dedicated time was required to devise and develop our resources and to keep the project on track, we held weekly meetings referred to as the “toolkit club”. clark and sousa (2018) discuss the balance between being creative and disciplined to complete tasks of this nature. during toolkit club sessions, we paired up to develop and adapt existing resources which had previously been used for teaching. all these resources were discussed, debated if necessary and reviewed accordingly. once a range of activities had been created we realised that they needed to be tested and set about scheduling sessions with our departmental colleagues who would be our ‘critical friends’. we also scheduled a series of cpd workshops for our academic colleagues from the schools. critical friends and cpd workshops our first critical friends workshop was held in december 2019 and was extended to the rest of crit, which included academic development, digitally enhanced learning and the academic quality assurance team, and was followed up with the continuing professional thomas, khanom, adelaja, mehbali and lambe constructing an academic skills toolkit for embedding academic practices journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 7 development (cpd) sessions with our academic colleagues in december 2020. all sessions were delivered via ms teams. these sessions brought to our attention the need to revise the following: a) style and design of the template (see appendix 1). b) language and purpose of the activities reviewed (see appendix 2). c) range of activities and additional activities needed to support all academics across the schools (see appendix 3). the cpd sessions delivered to our academic colleagues highlighted the activities that had to be redesigned or redeveloped and directed us to produce additional activities. here are feedback comments from the session: • ‘this is excellent and will support staff and students’ (director of education and student experience, the institute of health and social care team). • ‘thank you, great resources’ (associate professor, the school of law and social sciences). • ‘this is a great initiative – very keen to see how we can create uptake’ (pvc academic framework). project planning and site design following analysis surrounding the need for the toolkit, general project management principles related to design for learning (lynch and roecker, 2007) were employed to construct a plan for implementation. firstly, feedback from meetings held with colleagues from digital enhanced learning (del) and ict served to clarify design, accessibility, and portability objectives regarding what would be feasible for a project of this nature. secondly, although none of the team had undertaken any formal training in site design, there was an awareness of usability being a fundamental consideration when planning a website (elkins and pinder, 2017). working within the constraints of the existing infrastructure, our intention overall was to avoid overuse of text by including visuals where appropriate to produce a distinctive and user-friendly interface for the project. thomas, khanom, adelaja, mehbali and lambe constructing an academic skills toolkit for embedding academic practices journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 8 image 1. screen shot of the toolkit homepage. as shown in image 1 (a screen shot of the toolkit home page), the toolkit is mapped under the following themes: critical thinking development, quantitative analysis development, reading development, reflective development and writing development. the section entitled underpinning research for the academic skills toolkit provides research informed discussion to support pedagogy related to the academic practices demonstrated in the activities. the toolkit employs scaffolding (vygotsky, 1978) so students can link their prior learning and skills with the increased expectation. projects and dissertations supervisor resources originally designed a standalone moodle virtual learning environment (vle) site, further extending the toolkit offering. the toolkit is designed to be accessible on all platforms and devices. each toolkit activity has a summary sheet in the form of a microsoft word file documenting instructions on how to use the resource (see image 2 as an example). microsoft word was chosen as the file format for the summary sheet owing to its proliferation, familiarity, and ease of editing. associated teaching resources are stored with their activities in folders on onedrive. thomas, khanom, adelaja, mehbali and lambe constructing an academic skills toolkit for embedding academic practices journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 9 image 2. screenshot of the summary sheet from a literature reviews activity (setting through to outcome). thomas, khanom, adelaja, mehbali and lambe constructing an academic skills toolkit for embedding academic practices journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 10 image 3. screenshot of the summary sheet from a literature reviews activity (pre-task preparation and steps). challenges regarding generic resources and access the influence of discipline in shaping teaching and learning content cannot be underestimated (stark, 2000; young, 2010). the toolkit consists of generic activities and resources that can be adapted by academics to make them discipline specific and link with respective modules. the main challenge was to avoid ambiguity and jargon so that the toolkit activities were coherent and complete to a point so academics did not need to spend excessive time planning the implementation of these. for this reason, we regularly assist course teams to contextualise content for their specific discipline and assessment. thomas, khanom, adelaja, mehbali and lambe constructing an academic skills toolkit for embedding academic practices journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 11 feedback generated from team teaching and collaboration is utilised to differentiate toolkit resources for multidisciplinary use. additionally, a growing number of educational projects of a similar nature to the toolkit are freely available, meaning that they are accessible to those both internal and external to an institution (beetham and sharpe, 2013). queen mary’s innovative thinking writing resource (mcconlogue, mitchell and peake, 2012) and press, the university of derby’s blog-based recipe cards developed to address the attainment gap (university of derby, 2021) are just two examples of successful open access repositories. initially our toolkit was limited to lsbu staff use only, however, more recently it has become open access as it was recognised that practice-sharing and collaboration are central to the team’s collegiate approach both internally and with other institutions. the toolkit is now firmly established on lsbu’s external facing web platform (see appendix 4). conclusion construction of the academic skills toolkit has not come about without its challenges. however, the success of the project is testament to our advocacy for high quality, research-informed practice that enabled us to develop an inclusive multidisciplinary teaching and learning resource for all levels. currently, use of the toolkit’s precise activities is supporting academics to build knowledge and confidence across modules and courses, resulting in an improved student experience. the toolkit is freely available on the lsbu website so that all can benefit from our collegiate approach to learning, teaching and assessment. collegiality is often central to the success of projects of this nature, whether it be through collaboration with members of our team when constructing activities (toolkit club), working with departmental colleagues during “critical friends” sessions or whilst utilising activities team teaching in a classroom setting. external to lsbu, we presented the challenges and success of the toolkit at aldinhe symposia at their annual conference in april 2021 to support benchmarking and peer reviewing. this has allowed us to develop the toolkit further, so it is more comprehensive and easily adaptable for academics and module team members. thomas, khanom, adelaja, mehbali and lambe constructing an academic skills toolkit for embedding academic practices journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 12 moving forward, we will continue to assess the toolkit to monitor its effectiveness. learning developers at the lsbu are continuing to work with their respective schools to pilot the activities and ensure that academics feel supported to independently take an embedded approach to academic skills on their modules. we are working on several initiatives with a programme level approach which will equate to forthcoming research. in the meantime, we will continue to collate feedback from different perspectives to maintain critical rigour. references ashton-hay, s. and doncaster, n. (2021) ‘student success and retention: what’s academic skills got to do with it?’, journal of academic language & learning, 15(1), pp.102116. bailey, r. (2010) ‘the role and efficacy of generic learning and study support: what is the experience and perspective of academic teaching staff?’, journal of learning development in higher education, issue 2, february, pp.1-14. https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.v0i2.57. bean, c. (2016) ‘independent review of uk economic statistics: final report’, 11 march. available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/independent-review-of-ukeconomic-statistics-final-report (accessed: 1 september 2021). beetham, h. and sharpe, r. (2013) rethinking pedagogy for a digital age: designing for 21st century learning. 2nd edn. abingdon: routledge. biggs, j. and tang, c. (2007) using constructive alignment in outcomes-based teaching and learning teaching for quality learning at university. 3rd edn. maidenhead: open university press. biggs, j. and tang, c. (2015) ‘constructive alignment: an outcomes-based approach to teaching anatomy’, in chan, l. k. and pawlina, w. (eds) teaching anatomy: a practical guide. switzerland: springer international publishing, pp.31-38. https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.v0i2.57 https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/independent-review-of-uk-economic-statistics-final-report https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/independent-review-of-uk-economic-statistics-final-report thomas, khanom, adelaja, mehbali and lambe constructing an academic skills toolkit for embedding academic practices journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 13 boud, d. and falchikov, n. (2006) ‘aligning assessment with long-term learning’, assessment & evaluation in higher education, 31(4), pp.399413. https://doi.org/10.1080/02602930600679050. chao, k., laing, c. and robinson, a. (2005) ‘managing the expectations of non-traditional students: a process of negotiation’, journal of further and higher education, 29(2), pp.169-179. https://doi.org/10.1080/03098770500103572. clark, a. and sousa, b. (2018) how to be a happy academic. london: sage publications. elkins, d. and pinder, d. (2017) e-learning uncovered: adobe captivate 2017. st. augustine: e-learning uncovered inc. elmes, t. (2015) ‘higher education admissions success: what is the value of cultural capital?’, higher education research network journal, 9, pp.11-20. guba, e. g. and lincoln, y. s. (1994) ‘competing paradigms in qualitative research’, in denzin, n. k. and lincoln, y. s. (eds.) handbook of qualitative research. london: sage, pp.105-117. harris, r. (2016) quantitative geography: the basics. london: sage. harris, r. and jarvis, c. (2011) statistics for geography and environmental science. hoboken, nj: prentice hall. hendry, g. d., armstrong, s. and bromberger, n. (2012) ‘implementing standards-based assessment effectively: incorporating discussion of exemplars into classroom teaching’, assessment & evaluation in higher education, 37(2), pp.149-161. https://doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2010.515014. hendry, g. d., white, p. and herbert, c. (2016) ‘providing exemplar-based ‘feedforward’ before an assessment: the role of teacher explanation’, active learning in higher education, 17(2), pp.99-109. https://doi.org/10.1177%2f1469787416637479. https://doi.org/10.1080/02602930600679050 https://doi.org/10.1080/03098770500103572 https://doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2010.515014 https://doi.org/10.1177%2f1469787416637479 thomas, khanom, adelaja, mehbali and lambe constructing an academic skills toolkit for embedding academic practices journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 14 hill, p. and tinker, a. (2013) ‘integrating learning development into the student experience’, journal of learning development in higher education, issue 5, march, pp.1-18. https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.v0i5.172. kaur, a., noman, m. and nordin, h. (2017) ‘inclusive assessment for linguistically diverse learners in higher education’, assessment and learning in higher education, 42(5), pp.756-771. https://doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2016.1187250. kinesh, s. and knight, d. (2013) assessment @ bond. queensland: office of learning and teaching, bond university. lea, m. r. and street, b. v. (2006) ‘the “academic literacies” model: theory and applications’, theory into practice, 45(4), pp.368-377. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15430421tip4504_11. leese, m. (2010) ‘bridging the gap: supporting student transitions into higher education’, journal of further and higher education, 34(2), pp.239251. https://doi.org/10.1080/03098771003695494. london south bank university (2020) our mission, vision and values. available at: https://www.lsbu.ac.uk/about-us/mission-vision-values (accessed: 1 september 2021). lynch, m. m. and roecker, j. (2007) project managing e-learning: a handbook for successful design, delivery and management. abingdon: routledge. matthews, k., belward, s., coady, c., rylands, l. and simbag, v. (2016) ‘curriculum development for quantitative skills in degree programs’, higher education research and development, 35(3), pp.545-559. https://doi.org/10.1080/07294360.2015.1107875. mccall, d., western, d. and petrakis, m. (2020) ‘opportunities for change: what factors influence non-traditional students to enrol into higher education’, australian journal of adult education, 60(1), pp.91-112. https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.v0i5.172 https://doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2016.1187250 https://doi.org/10.1207/s15430421tip4504_11 https://doi.org/10.1080/03098771003695494 https://doi.org/10.1080/07294360.2015.1107875 thomas, khanom, adelaja, mehbali and lambe constructing an academic skills toolkit for embedding academic practices journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 15 mcconlogue, t., mitchell, s. and peake, k. (2012) ‘thinking writing at queen mary, university of london’, in thaiss, c., bräuer, g., carlino, p., ganobcsik-williams, l. and sinha, a. (eds) writing programs worldwide: profiles of academic writing in many places. colorado: the wac clearinghouse, pp.203-211. mowat, j. g. (2015) ‘towards a new conceptualisation of marginalisation’, european educational research journal, 14(5), pp.454-476. https://doi.org/10.1177%2f1474904115589864. office for students (2021) consistency needed: care experienced students and higher education. available at: https://www.officeforstudents.org.uk/publications/consistency-needed-careexperienced-students-and-higher-education (accessed: 25 february 2022). royal geography society (2013) rgs-ibg social and cultural geography research group. annual report. available at: scgrg2013reportfinal.pdf (accessed: 27 june 2022). schulz, b. (2008) ‘the importance of soft skills: education beyond academic knowledge’, nawa journal of language and communication, 2, pp.146-154. shaw, a. (2021) ‘inclusion of disabled higher education students: why are we not there yet?’, international journal of inclusive education, pp.1-19. https://doi.org/10.1080/13603116.2021.1968514. stark, j. s. (2000) ‘planning introductory college courses: content, context and form’, instructional science, 28, pp.413-438. https://doi.org/10.1023/a:1026516231429. street, b. (2009) ‘“hidden” features of academic paper writing’, working paper in educational linguistics, 24(1), pp.1-17. thomas, p. and mehbali, m. (2017) ‘embedding learning development in the curriculum: how, where and why?’, london and southeast regional aldinhe symposium. st georges university, london, december 2017. https://doi.org/10.1177%2f1474904115589864 https://www.officeforstudents.org.uk/publications/consistency-needed-care-experienced-students-and-higher-education https://www.officeforstudents.org.uk/publications/consistency-needed-care-experienced-students-and-higher-education https://scgrg.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/scgrg2013reportfinal.pdf https://doi.org/10.1080/13603116.2021.1968514 https://doi.org/10.1023/a:1026516231429 thomas, khanom, adelaja, mehbali and lambe constructing an academic skills toolkit for embedding academic practices journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 16 university of derby (2021) press (practical recipes for student success). available at: https://uodpress.wordpress.com/ (accessed: 25 september 2021). vygotsky, l.s. (1978) mind in society: the development of higher psychological processes. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. wilkins, a. and burke, p. j. (2015) ‘widening participation in higher education: the role of professional and social class identities and commitments’, british journal of sociology of education, 36(5), pp.434-452. wingate, u. (2006) ‘doing away with “study skills”’, teaching in higher education, 11(4), pp.457-469. https://doi.org/10.1080/13562510600874268. wingate, u. (2007) ‘a framework for transition: supporting “learning to learn” in higher education’, higher education quarterly, 61(3), pp.391-405. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2273.2007.00361.x. wingate, u., andon, n. and cogo, a. (2011) ‘embedding academic writing instruction into subject teaching: a case study’, active learning in higher education, 12(1), pp.6981. https://doi.org/10.1177%2f1469787410387814. young, p. (2010) ‘generic or discipline specific? an exploration of the significance of discipline-specific issues in researching and developing teaching and learning in higher education’, innovations in education and teaching international, 47(1), pp.115-24. https://doi.org/10.1080/14703290903525887. https://uodpress.wordpress.com/ https://doi.org/10.1080/13562510600874268 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2273.2007.00361.x https://doi.org/10.1177%2f1469787410387814 https://doi.org/10.1080/14703290903525887 thomas, khanom, adelaja, mehbali and lambe constructing an academic skills toolkit for embedding academic practices journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 17 appendix 1 critical friends workshop template of activities before workshop. template of activities after workshop. thomas, khanom, adelaja, mehbali and lambe constructing an academic skills toolkit for embedding academic practices journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 18 appendix 2 examples of critical friends workshop feedback thomas, khanom, adelaja, mehbali and lambe constructing an academic skills toolkit for embedding academic practices journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 19 appendix 3 list of activities: first draft of completed activities critical thinking quantitative analysis annotated bibliographiesassessing sources data analysis annotated bibliographiesimplementing effective examples data collection introducing a critical appraisal tool descriptive statistics introducing source credibility introduction to quantitative research methods what is socratic questioning introduction to statistics questionnaire design reading introduction to the normal distribution implementing jigsaw reading calculating probabilities with the normal distribution introduction to promoting analytical reading exploration of the central limit theorem close reading introduction to one-sample t-tests writing reflection constructing a mock report in class reflective models business report writing practice strategic questioning for critical reflection notetaking for assessment business reports differences between essays and business reports improving writing formal vs informal writing improving writing aligning structure with the assignment brief improving writing paragraphs summary writing what is a literature review report writing 1 language and purpose report writing 2 how to structure a report thomas, khanom, adelaja, mehbali and lambe constructing an academic skills toolkit for embedding academic practices journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 20 revised list of activities critical thinking quantitative analysis case study data commentary qualitative analysis visual analysis writing theory to practice for aci (praxis) writing in your own words evidence based practice writing an abstract l6 and pg arguments mindmanager for essays functions of writing: 1) compare and contrast reflection functions of writing: 2) discursive writing blog functions of writing: 3) argumentative writing understanding feedback posters miscellaneous reading simplifying the presentation of assessment brief notetaking apprenticeships appendix 4 academic skills toolkit – external facing web platform academic skills toolkit | london south bank university (lsbu.ac.uk) https://www.lsbu.ac.uk/research/academic-skills-toolkit thomas, khanom, adelaja, mehbali and lambe constructing an academic skills toolkit for embedding academic practices journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 21 author details pamela thomas is a learning developer in the centre for research informed teaching at london south bank university, a senior fellow of advancehe and associate member of the institute of leadership and management. she is responsible for embedding learning development in course curricula using an academic literacy approach to support student writers to navigate and negotiate their way through the academic writing process within their subject-specific discipline. nazmin khanom is a learning developer in the centre for research informed teaching at london south bank university. she is a fellow of advancehe, a ma in applied linguistics and english language teaching and most recently achieved a second ma in academic practice in higher education. she has been teaching in further and higher education for over 15 years and specialises in the implementation of embedded academic skills and curriculum development in the institute of health and social care. adebisi adelaja is a learning developer in the centre for research informed teaching at london south bank university. she is a fellow of the higher education academy, a member of the association for learning technology and the institute of leadership and management. her 17 years' experience of teaching in further and higher education has involved facilitating students from a variety of subject disciplines to become independent learners. adebisi's current research interests include examination of how far computerised forms of learning support critical thinking. mohamed mehbali is a learning developer in the centre for research informed teaching at london south bank university (lsbu). he is a senior fellow of advancehe. he is accredited as the professional development lead by the national centre for excellence in the teaching of mathematics (nctem), is a member of sigma network for excellence in mathematics and statistics support and a member of the institute of mathematics. since 2015, he leads the maths and statistics support provision at lsbu in numeracy skills to nursing students, maths to engineering students and data analysis across all programs. simon lambe is an associate learning developer within the centre for research informed teaching at london south bank university. he is a senior fellow of advance thomas, khanom, adelaja, mehbali and lambe constructing an academic skills toolkit for embedding academic practices journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 22 he, an associate fellow of the institute of historical research and an associate fellow of the royal historical society. professionally, he has used his expertise to support students in higher education to enhance their writing and academic skills. he has also worked extensively with academic staff on developing teaching quality and curricula across the university. he is particularly interested in peer-assisted learning (pal), learning technologies and learning and teaching theory and practice. constructing an academic skills toolkit for embedding academic practices abstract introduction the rationale behind the construction and development the journey of the ‘toolkit club’ critical friends and cpd workshops project planning and site design challenges regarding generic resources and access conclusion references appendix 2 examples of critical friends workshop feedback appendix 3 list of activities: first draft of completed activities revised list of activities appendix 4 academic skills toolkit – external facing web platform author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special issue 25: aldinhe conference proceedings and reflections october 2022 students’ perceptions of blended and remote learning and its impact upon sense of belonging alicja syska university of plymouth, uk christie pritchard university of plymouth, uk presentation abstract blended learning has been widely recognised for its ‘transformative potential’ (garrison and kanuka, 2004) in higher education, especially when it comes to its versatility and increased opportunities for distributed learners. nonetheless, the technological challenges it poses, alongside issues linked with policy, resources and support structures, have led to considerable resistance to the concept of blended practice. despite this mixed reputation (antunes, armellini and howe, 2021; lomer and palmer, 2021), few studies have attempted to explore students’ perceptions of blended delivery, with most research focussing on staff experience (torrisi-steele and drew, 2013). the session reports on a small-scale evaluative study on student perceptions of blended learning that we conducted in the academic year 2020/21. a critical realist framework that considers both agency and structure has been applied to situate these perceptions while our mixed methods approach offers a multi-layered insight into the captured diversity of experience. the aim of the conference session was to discuss with the participants the implications of the findings for future practice and, more specifically, consider the role of learning development in enhancing post-pandemic student experience. community response the audience reflections on this presentation underline the broad significance of this investigation into students’ experience of the transformative impact of blended learning during and after the covid-19 pandemic. by adopting a ‘critical realist’ model of research syska and pritchard students’ perceptions of blended and remote learning and its impact upon sense of belonging journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 2 which explores agency (of students) within structures (of blended – remote with face to face – higher education learning), the authors engaged audience members in an examination of the importance of students’ experience of ‘belonging’ in higher education. from their comments, it appears that this perspective led audience members towards fundamental questions about the purpose and value of higher education. several recommendations for key texts that deal with these questions were made by audience members and accepted gratefully by the authors as they take forward their research into blended and remote learning. as with perhaps all the presentations at aldcon22, the participants felt they had only just begun to ‘scratch the surface of this conversation’, as the authors put it in a response to one of their attendees’ reflections. the conversation here engages with themes that are also explored in the biggins and holley paper on ‘technostress’ in this issue. critical realism as a theoretical paradigm cb: critical realism was a new area of theory for me, so i was interested to see it applied in this context. it appealed to me in its privileging of perspective and experience on the part of the students included in the study, without recourse to the objective metrics that so often dominate higher education decision-making these days. what is clear, from my own experience as well as the findings of this fascinating study, is that blended learning is not simply a mode of delivery but rather a way of being at university, and we need to do more to address this in our own work. i am a big fan of the manifesto for online learning (bayne et al, 2016) (not least since sian bayne was a keynote speaker at the aldinhe 2016 conference, and inspired the creation of our own manifesto for learning development at solent university). in the context of this paper, i particularly like the line ‘distance is temporal, affective, political; not simply spatial.’ it seems to me that the shift online caused many (including learning developers) to forget what we already knew about socialising students into higher education, and focused only on the ‘online’ part of online learning. the critical realism lens provides a really helpful way to pull us back to that broader perspective. this feels to me like the opening move to an approach which could be extensively developed. https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/manifestoteachingonline/the-text/ syska and pritchard students’ perceptions of blended and remote learning and its impact upon sense of belonging journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 3 sr: i would have really welcomed more time for a detailed discussion of the critical realist (cr) perspective. i agree very much with the presenters that cr provides a rich set of (meta)theoretical resources for educational research. jennifer case’s (2013) researching student learning in higher education: a social realist approach, for example, employs margaret archer’s cr framework (e.g., 2000) for thinking through the relationships between structure and agency in student learning. case’s close attention to the development and negotiation of agency, within structures that both enable and constrain this agency, seems especially apt for learning development research. it is highly relevant, i think, to the presenters’ concerns with the complex and multi-faceted relationships between students’ sense of belonging and the different contexts within which their learning takes place. an example of this is how the agential work of belonging might be encouraged and sustained, or inhibited and frustrated, by the various structural factors that condition this work. blended learning as a transformation of practice gk: a key concept i found useful early on in this presentation was the distinction between seeing blended learning as a ‘transformation’ of practice, instead of a ‘translation’ of practice. my experience is that, during the urgent switch to blended learning in the context of the pandemic, this subtle but fundamental nuance was lost (or, at least, took a secondary place) against the need to deliver the intended course outcomes, especially considering that there was limited time for many academic staff to digest the implications of a blended learning approach. it may be, therefore, that the experiences of ‘blended’ learning were quite varied among cohorts, programmes, and/or institutions during the year of the pandemic. sr: i found this a really interesting and timely session. i particularly appreciated the exploration of factors that tend to be ignored or at best marginalised by more narrow, instrumentalist treatments of ‘remote’ or ‘blended’ learning. the interpretative framework outlined towards the end (‘national factors’, ‘institutional factors’, ‘individual factors’) invited us to engage with the complexity of the themes under discussion, and served as a warning against narrow, reductive approaches to making sense of students’ varied, contextdependent, experiences. https://www.routledge.com/researching-student-learning-in-higher-education-a-social-realist-approach/case/p/book/9780415662352 https://www.routledge.com/researching-student-learning-in-higher-education-a-social-realist-approach/case/p/book/9780415662352 syska and pritchard students’ perceptions of blended and remote learning and its impact upon sense of belonging journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 4 figure 1. a visual reflection on the session by jacqui bartram. student belonging and how to promote it gk: i found it very telling that the data reported in the presentation showed that the highest negative impact of blended learning during the months of lockdown was on sense of belonging. the presenters interpreted this mostly as the result of remote learning. i find this convincing, considering that informal interaction opportunities (between classes and in corridors, for example) seemed to me the most difficult element to address in online classrooms. i tried holding optional ‘virtual cafes’ in spring 2021, which were intended to provide an online space for peer-to-peer interaction, but invariably ended in becoming q&a sessions. the questions students asked, for example, about the dissertation process, indicated a degree of uncertainty about their role and activity which was not being mediated by implicit knowledge of what their colleagues were doing. this example would probably fall under the category of ‘sense of belonging in my course’, although arguably all syska and pritchard students’ perceptions of blended and remote learning and its impact upon sense of belonging journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 5 levels of community (friendships, programme identity, institutional belonging) are interdependent. cp: i was interested in finding out what students’ perceptions were of learning online during the pandemic. as my research interests lie in digital education, i was familiar with garrison and kanuka’s (2004) work about blended learning. i think that the types of activities used by educators in blended learning can improve students’ sense of belonging. in this respect, i have found bayne et al. (2020) the manifesto for teaching online to be really useful. one perspective that i think is particularly relevant concerning belonging involves moving beyond the notion of the university campus as a container. instead, the campus consists of people, curricula, networks and connections, not only buildings. i am left wondering how we can change students’ perceptions of what they think a university should be. for example, to what extent do educators provide opportunities for socialisation for students? this might improve students’ sense of belonging. i am also left wondering what kinds of opportunities students themselves prioritised in their responses to the research and how these opportunities could be adapted to enhance students’ sense of belonging? co: it was useful to hear evidence about what has been impacted during covid19/lockdowns for students. i felt it unsurprising that student belonging would have suffered a negative change and i think this really does highlight the importance of building strong student communities – whether that is online, in-person, or a mix of both. the importance of peer support and how this grew with time, in my opinion, echoes the needs we had as learning developers as well. we initially were focused on getting the tech up and running, moving our in-person sessions online and understanding how to deliver in these new spaces. but very quickly we also realised our peers/our team was massively important to how successful this was going to be. teams catch-ups or zoom calls over a cuppa were needed as we navigated our way through remote teaching. i refer to lizzio’s (2006) 5 senses of success in one of the sessions i run with students; sense of connectedness is one of those five senses and really does sum up how important it is for students to feel part of something or to belong. https://media.ed.ac.uk/media/event+2+the+manifesto+for+teaching+onlinea+we+are+the+campus/1_wchx77r6 syska and pritchard students’ perceptions of blended and remote learning and its impact upon sense of belonging journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 6 authors’ reflection this session was a continuation of the conversation we started at the aldcon21 (online) where we introduced our research design for the first time and experienced considerable interest in the results we were about to obtain over the course of the year. consequently, being able to present our findings this year was a thrilling opportunity for us. this excitement was quickly tested, however. as second presenters in the panel, we witnessed the formerly full room alarmingly emptying as the participants of the earlier presentation moved on to other rooms. we got flustered for a moment but did not lose our composure, which was rewarded by a stream of new colleagues steadily entering the room and refilling it to the brim. it would be an understatement to say that we felt relieved to see this newly formed beautiful crowd in front of us, and although a full room is not necessarily a measure of a session’s value, it certainly lifted our spirits and helped us deliver our message to the best of our ability. it also made us reflect on how easy it is to be thrown out of kilter by contextual factors out of our control, even when all the elements – knowledge, passion, content – are firmly in place. seeing the audience’s interest in what we were reporting on created a lively dynamic in the room. every participant's nod and scribble on the page made us want to delve deeper into the topics we discussed. the formal and rigid words we had written for the publishers about our research acquired new and deeper meaning when shared with colleagues, which reignited our commitment to continue exploring the topic. the post-presentation questions addressed both known and unknown elements of our work and made us think more about the larger issue of what universities are for (collini, 2012) and how we can all contribute to making them a place where every student can feel like they belong, whether studying in person or remotely. the session, in many ways, reflected what students were articulating when they adjusted to change. this was the first conference paper back in an in-person environment and we were both slightly apprehensive standing at the front trying to recall the data from our foggy brains of a two-year timeline that seemed to last forever without being punctuated by the normality of life. students are no doubt feeling that too. the engagement, discussions and thought-provoking questions and comments from the audience demonstrated exactly how we benefit from being together again though, and we come away with new ideas, research to follow up on, and a newly sparked energy to continue with this project. syska and pritchard students’ perceptions of blended and remote learning and its impact upon sense of belonging journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 7 we will definitely engage with the recommendations by participants to look at bayne et al. (2020), the manifesto for teaching online and lizzio’s (2006), 5 senses of success, and we have already incorporated jennifer case’s (2013) ideas in our revised article. what our study evidences is what we all now expect to be obvious but was so difficult to keep at the forefront of everyone’s minds at the time of crisis. in crisis mode, we usually resort to ensuring survival – securing the most basic necessities (cannot resist thinking of maslow, 1943, here) rather than more complex needs, such as a sense of belonging. what we are suggesting is that belongingness is actually a basic necessity when it comes to securing a satisfactory university experience. we appreciated the words from sian bayne (quoted by cb): ‘distance is temporal, affective, political; not simply spatial.’ our research findings support cb’s observation that the shift online caused many in universities, including in learning development teams, to sometimes forget what we already knew about socialising students into higher education, leading to a narrower focus on the ‘online’ part of online learning. acknowledgments thank you to all the contributors who shared their reflections and enriched our insight into this conference presentation and its impact on the audience. special thanks go to jacqui bartram (jb) from the university of hull for her visual reflection, as well as to carina buckley (cb) from solent university, georgia koromila (gk) from the university of reading, claire olson (co) from edge hill university, chenée psaros (cp) from queen mary, university of london, and steve rooney (sr) from aston university. references antunes, v. t., armellini, a. and howe, r. (2021) ‘beliefs and engagement in an institution-wide pedagogic shift’, teaching in higher education, pp.1-21. https://doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2021.1881773. https://doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2021.1881773 syska and pritchard students’ perceptions of blended and remote learning and its impact upon sense of belonging journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 8 archer m. s. (2000) being human: the problem of agency. cambridge: cambridge university press. bayne, s., ewins, r., evans, p., knox, j., lamb, j., macleod, h., o'shea, c., ross, j., sheail, p. and sinclair, c. (2016). the 2016 manifesto. available at: https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/manifestoteachingonline/the-text/ (accessed: 20 october 2022). bayne, s., evans, p., ewins, r., knox, j., lamb, j., macleod, h., o'shea, c., ross, j., sheail, p. and sinclair, c. (2020) the manifesto for teaching online. mit. https://media.ed.ac.uk/media/event+2+the+manifesto+for+teaching+onlinea+we+ are+the+campus/1_wchx77r6 (accessed: 20 october 2022). case, j. (2013) researching student learning in higher education: a social realist approach. london: routledge. collini, s. (2012) what are universities for? london: penguin. garrison, d. r., and kanuka, h. (2004) ‘blended learning: uncovering its transformative potential in higher education’, the internet and higher education, 7(2), pp.95-105. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.iheduc.2004.02.001. lizzio, a. (2006). designing an orientation and transition strategy for commencing students: applying the five senses model. available at: https://studylib.net/doc/5862488/designing-an-orientation-and-transition-strategy-for (accessed: 21 october 2022). lomer, s. and palmer, e. (2021) ‘“i didn’t know this was actually stuff that could help us, with actually learning”: student perceptions of active blended learning’, teaching in higher education, pp.1-20. https://doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2020.1852202. maslow, a. h. (1943). ‘a theory of human motivation’. psychological review, 50(4), pp.370-96 https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/manifestoteachingonline/the-text/ http://https/ https://media.ed.ac.uk/media/event+2+the+manifesto+for+teaching+onlinea+we+are+the+campus/1_wchx77r6 https://media.ed.ac.uk/media/event+2+the+manifesto+for+teaching+onlinea+we+are+the+campus/1_wchx77r6 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.iheduc.2004.02.001 https://studylib.net/doc/5862488/designing-an-orientation-and-transition-strategy-for https://doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2020.1852202 syska and pritchard students’ perceptions of blended and remote learning and its impact upon sense of belonging journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 9 torrisi-steele, g. and drew, s. (2013) ‘the literature landscape of blended learning in higher education: the need for better understanding of academic blended practice’, international journal for academic development, 18(4), pp.371-383. https://doi.org/10.1080/1360144x.2013.786720. author details christie pritchard is a senior fellow of advance he and an associate professor of higher education. her research and practice focus on promoting student success through creating a sense of belonging, designing inclusive curriculum and assessment, and developing social learning spaces for transformational learning. as well as leading the academic development department at the university of plymouth, she contributes to the strategic development of cross institution education policies and projects. she champions academic development and student experience at an institutional and national level, focusing on understanding students’ learning in a relational way. she has recently taken the role of co-chair of aldinhe. alicja syska is a hybrid academic, combining her role in learning development with lectureship in history at the university of plymouth. she is a senior fellow of advance he and a certified leading practitioner of ld. her research interests include writing in disciplines, blended learning, student perceptions of their university experience, community building through writing, and the development of ld as a discipline. she serves as co-lead editor for the journal of learning development in higher education. https://doi.org/10.1080/1360144x.2013.786720 students’ perceptions of blended and remote learning and its impact upon sense of belonging presentation abstract community response critical realism as a theoretical paradigm blended learning as a transformation of practice student belonging and how to promote it authors’ reflection acknowledgments references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 26: special edi issue february 2023 ________________________________________________________________________ ©2023 the author(s) (cc-by 4.0) encouraging critique: a stimulating and provocative examination of dominant discourses in the higher education sector book review: kinchin, i. m., and gravett, k. (2022) dominant discourses in higher education: critical perspectives, cartographies and practice. london: bloomsbury academic. stacey mottershaw university of leeds, uk keywords: critique; discourses; higher education. overview as noted in the title, this text seeks to explore dominant discourses in higher education, making use of critical perspectives, cartographies, and practice. the two authors come together from different disciplinary backgrounds to expose the neoliberal colonisation of dominant discourses through their own ‘epistemological shudders’ (p.4). in challenging the sanctity of terms such as ‘widening participation’, ‘student voice’, and ‘employability’ (p.6), the authors suggest that ‘all aspects of university practice should be subject to regular scholarly critique’ (p.6). the book is likely to be of interest to those working in the higher education sector, and particularly to learning developers who are seeking to explore, understand, and critique the pervasive narratives that underpin their work. whilst the book does not centre on learning development, it does draw on a range of inter-related narratives, including learning gains, employability, and analytics. structure and content the book comprises ten chapters, broken down into three sections: part one ‘considering the landscape’, part two ‘putting theory to work’, and part three ‘emerging polyvalent lines of flight’. mottershaw encouraging critique: a stimulating and provocative examination of dominant discourses in the higher education sector journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 2 part one introduces us to a range of theoretical concepts that underpin the rest of the book. this includes the rejection of inhibitory notions of ‘dualisms’ and referring to simplistic binaries such as ‘research and teaching’ or ‘academic and non-academic staff’ (p.6), and a brief overview of the reductive nature of ‘linearity’ (p.8). this is likely to be of particular interest to learning developers, who may recognise how such binaries influence their professional identity (johnson, 2018). following this rejection of dualisms and linearity (instead favouring plurality and relationality) and a helpful overview of ‘post’ perspectives, the authors present a combination of braidotti’s notion of ‘critical cartographies’ (p.26), manthunga and bottrell’s ‘polyvalent lines of enquiry’ (p.28), and taylor’s ‘patchiness in higher education’ (p.28). a key strength of part one is the clarity and systematic exploration of theoretical approaches, guiding the reader towards a broad, nuanced, and complex bricolage of the tools the authors go on to use throughout the book. part two does exactly as the title suggests, ‘putting theory to work’ through the application of theory to educational practice. the authors start by suggesting that ‘taken for granted’ dominant discourses about students ‘may not always bear much resemblance to the dayto-day lives of ‘real’ students’ (p.33) and as such, they need to be deconstructed. throughout the remainder of part two, they explore pervasive narratives around student positionality, the university environment, ecologies of teaching and ecosystems of learning, and expertise in context. the authors challenge ‘benign narratives’ (p.60), advocating for ‘experimentation of new ways of thinking about our university environments’ (p.61) and suggest that existing discourse around knowledge and expertise ‘impose a reductionist perspective’ (p. 95). the discussion of expertise ‘as a process of becoming’ (p.81) and the epistemological flexibility required by staff will be of interest to learning developers who often have to ‘navigate disciplinary borders’ (p.81). the individual sections of part two have considerable overlap, though this is to be expected when deconstructing messy, nuanced, and pervasive discourses, and the authors do an admirable job of drawing together an overall narrative, whilst also highlighting the ways that readers might start to think differently about each topic. part three initially moves away from the more theoretical aspects of part one and two, drawing on a series of conversations undertaken with teachers and educational researchers from a range of backgrounds. recent higher education articles are used to launch the conversations, with topics chosen for their prominence and representation of mottershaw encouraging critique: a stimulating and provocative examination of dominant discourses in the higher education sector journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 3 what the authors feel are the ‘most troubling narratives affecting our work’ (p.99). extracts from three dialogues are published on topics relating to teaching excellence, student engagement, and resilience (pp.100-114). the next chapter returns to earlier discussions of cartographies, acknowledging that whilst concept mapping can ‘tame confusion and complexity’, the authors are more inclined to use critical cartographies as a method to ‘provoke a novel view from an unaccustomed angle’ (p.115). somewhat unusually, chapter nine offers a dialogic exploration of the work of elizabeth adams st. pierre, before going on to outline some of the challenges for qualitative and post-qualitative researchers, including the ‘real challenges . . . to thinking differently’ (p.149). the final chapter ‘towards a relational pedagogy’ summarises the text, acknowledging that ‘there is no recipe for excellent teaching’ (p.154), suggesting that we must instead move ‘towards a perspective that considers a teaching and learning ecosystem as relational’ (p.165). it feels challenging to summarise part three succinctly, likely due to the variance in the structure and content of each of the chapters. however, each chapter has its place in guiding readers through the sometimes ‘messy qualitative research process’ (p.134) that the authors experienced, endearing the authors to those of us who have engaged in similar research. on the flip side, it is possible that this perceived messiness in part three could alienate readers who prefer the clarity of binary or structured outcomes in academic research. summary this text is likely to be a source of interest to those who work in the higher education sector, most notably teaching staff and learning developers. the authors encourage readers to unpick and critically assess the dominant and often homogenising discourses that underpin teacher, student, and institutional expectations of teaching and learning. given the broad scope of discourses that the book covers, it could also be used to inform staff training and development courses, encouraging staff to problematise, challenge and explore what they believe to be known about teaching and learning in higher education. although there is some crossover with the somewhat disruptive work of jones (2022), fleming (2021), and grant (2021), this book offers readers an alternative way to critique university discourses, drawing on tools such as concept mapping and conversational research to destabilise entrenched assumptions. readers are likely to put the book down mottershaw encouraging critique: a stimulating and provocative examination of dominant discourses in the higher education sector journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 4 feeling challenged, unsettled, and reflective – a sign that the authors have successfully facilitated the ‘fruitful disorientation’ that they themselves experienced and embraced (p.4). references fleming, p. (2021) dark academia: how universities die. london: pluto press. grant, j. (2021) the new power university: the social purpose of higher education in the 21st century. harlow: pearson education. johnson, i. p. (2018) ‘driving learning development professionalism forward from within’, journal of learning development in higher education, special edition, october, pp.1-29. https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.v0i0.470. jones, s. (2022) universities under fire: hostile discourses and integrity deficits in higher education. palgrave macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96107-7. author details stacey mottershaw is an associate professor (teaching and scholarship) at leeds university business school. she teaches on topics such as business ethics, corporate social responsibility, and sustainability, as well as around academic and employability skills. her research interests are predominantly focused on student and staff underrepresentation in uk higher education institutions. stacey is currently working towards her edd at the university of sheffield, exploring the career journeys and trajectories of working-class academics. licence ©2023 the author(s). this is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (cc-by 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.v0i0.470 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96107-7 mottershaw encouraging critique: a stimulating and provocative examination of dominant discourses in the higher education sector journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 5 and source are credited. see http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. journal of learning development in higher education (jldhe) is a peer-reviewed open access journal published by the association for learning development in higher education (aldinhe). journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special issue 25: aldinhe conference proceedings and reflections october 2022 ________________________________________________________________________ insights from a study on non-submission of assignments: how can students best be supported? samantha king university of northampton, uk alison loddick university of northampton, uk tim curtis university of northampton, uk deepak bhachu university of northampton, uk presentation abstract non-submission of summative assignments has an impact on a significant minority of students but is not well understood (prinsloo, 2019). at the university of northampton, 70% of integrated foundation year (ify) students have a non-submission on their academic profile as they enter level 4 and nearly 10% of all student assignments overall are not submitted (coulson and loddick, 2021). students who fail to submit initially are offered a second submission point, but their grade is capped at 40%: data suggests that addressing this could close 50% of the gem (global ethnic majority) attainment gap. a study was initiated in partnership with ify academic staff to research into the experience and implications of non-submission of assignments for gem and non-gem students in ify. the project aimed to understand the long-term implications in terms of academic outcomes through understanding why students fail to submit and how they recover from this. data on student outcomes in recent years was interrogated and interviews were planned with current and former ify students who had failed to submit at least one assignment. these interviews were conducted by existing ify students to encourage an open dialogue. following low levels of participation in the research, the project was widened by inviting all undergraduates who had failed to submit at least one assignment to complete a survey with open-ended questions exploring the non-submission. insights from this study will be reported, which will inform the practice of both learning developers and lecturers. if we king, loddick, curtis and bhachu insights from a study on non-submission of assignments: how can students best be supported? journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 2 can offer timely and appropriate support, we may be able to promote assignment submission, which in turn could improve student retention. this would allow more students to achieve their goals and contribute to a sustainable model of higher education. community response the issues surrounding retention and completion are complex and often influenced by a range of institutional factors. this research tried to examine foundation year students, who faced considerable challenges to feeling a sense of belonging in he and many of whom withdrew from he after their first year. these students are also comparatively less likely to graduate. a significant barrier to retention and completion is mental health challenges, and these are further compounded by intersectional factors. what i found most surprising was how white students were more likely than black students to report mental health problems or bereavements as a reason for not submitting assignments. the question of why students did not opt for mitigating circumstances when they would undoubtedly qualify was very significant. mitigating circumstances exist to address some of the challenges these students were facing and this data suggests that there may be institutional barriers preventing them from choosing this option that should be addressed. by supporting students in this way, universities could both mitigate the emotional difficulties caused by mental health concerns and foster the students’ sense of belonging in respect to the he community. this sense of belonging can be crucial to a student’s decision to remain at university and complete their studies (see thomas, 2012). often, foundation students faced considerable challenges with academic literacy and it was interesting to hear that btec students assumed that they could continue tweaking their work after the submission point. understanding these assumptions and their consequences is vital so that learning developers can work in partnership with students to make sense of assessment procedures in he and so students can fully engage with the process in an empowered and knowledgeable way. the institutional barriers impacting students are also evident in language used across the sector when discussing the disparity in degree awards in respect to gem and non-gem king, loddick, curtis and bhachu insights from a study on non-submission of assignments: how can students best be supported? journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 3 students. it is more appropriate to refer to this as an ‘awarding’ gap rather than an ‘attainment’ gap as the latter places some of the blame on the student’s lack of success and not the institution which creates and/or reinforces barriers. the students’ voices as part of this project are key to helping universities understand the needs and experiences of their students. it was really interesting to hear about how the research methods were adapted and how this improved the number of results to get a good representation. it would also be interesting to see what data comes out of the interviews that were taking place with students as some of the questions raised in the survey could be explored in more detail. hopefully this research will begin to help students feel like they can contribute towards addressing these challenges in partnership with education providers, and thus reduce the withdrawal rate in future years. next steps and additional questions the audience were so keen to engage with the rich data collected in this study and we need to ask ourselves: what can we in the ld community do to support the changes that are needed to address the awarding gap and promote assignment submissions? it would be very valuable if the recommendations which emerge from this research could set out some specific steps that we (in he) can take to address the awarding gap and to push for institutional change in respect to mitigating circumstances and non-submissions. authors’ reflection we found it very encouraging how well received our presentation was and have found the community responses very thought-provoking. the comments correctly identify that we are at an early stage in our research and, as a research team, we all found that the results so far raise more questions than they answer. in particular, we agree that the issue of mitigating circumstances is one which is worth investigating further along with the reasons for ethnicity differences in citing health issues and we intend to investigate these in our research going forward. king, loddick, curtis and bhachu insights from a study on non-submission of assignments: how can students best be supported? journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 4 regarding the use of language (awarding/attainment) we have found during our research in approaching students that we are more successful when we use language which incorporates the responsibility of the institution and need to ensure we use language which does not ‘blame’ going forward. acknowledgements thank you to all the contributors who shared their reflections and enriched our insight into this conference presentation and its impact on the audience. special thanks go to jennie dettmer from the university of hertfordshire and nicola grayson from the university of manchester. references coulson, k. and loddick, a. (2021) ‘non-submission of assessments – the impact on the bame attainment gap’, association for learning development in higher education (aldinhe) conference. online 7-9 april. prinsloo, p. (2019) ‘tracking (un) belonging: at the intersections of human-algorithmic student support’, pan-commonwealth forum. edinburgh 9-12 september. thomas, l. (2012) building student engagement and belonging in higher education at a time of change: final report of the what works? retention and success programme. available at: https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/assets/documents/retention/what_works_final_report. pdf (accessed: 9 september 2022). author details samantha king has been a learning development tutor at the university of northampton since 2018. prior to this, she gained several years’ experience as an eap lecturer in higher education. she is an aldinhe certified practitioner and a fellow of advancehe. her king, loddick, curtis and bhachu insights from a study on non-submission of assignments: how can students best be supported? journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 5 research interests include supporting widening participation in the he sector and the development of academic writing skills among students. alison loddick is a maths and statistics learning development tutor at the university of northampton. her research focuses on why university students engage and disengage with their studies. tim curtis is an associate professor in social innovation, systems thinking and sustainability. he is programme leader for the integrated foundation year at the university of northampton and has extensive experience of developing high impact learning and teaching strategies in higher education. deepak bhachu is a senior lecturer and cognate leader in business, management and marketing for the integrated foundation year at the university of northampton. a lecturer with 14 years of experience and a background in sociology, he is passionate about supporting students in their academic journey, with a specific focus on removing barriers to achievement in higher education. insights from a study on non-submission of assignments: how can students best be supported? presentation abstract community response next steps and additional questions authors’ reflection acknowledgements references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 27 april 2023 ________________________________________________________________________ ©2023 the author(s) (cc-by 4.0) using an online escape room as a formative assessment tool during a lecture on hiv: a case study stefano licchelli university of surrey, uk laura barnett university of surrey uk abstract escape rooms are becoming prevalent in their use as a form of playful learning and gamification in higher education, often used for a multitude of purposes to enhance students’ higher education learning experiences. whilst studies have reported their valuable uses in a range of contexts, they have often focussed on undergraduates and fewer have explored their use in formative assessment practices. this case study seeks to address this gap by exploring the perceptions of postgraduate students in completing an online escape room activity as a form of formative assessment during an msc lecture. postgraduate students from the school of psychology at the university of surrey were invited to complete an online escape room as a form of formative assessment and took part in a follow-up qualitative survey to explore their perceptions of the activity not traditionally used in their course. the results from the case study showed that (1) the escape room was viewed positively by students as a novel and creative formative assessment practice, (2) the role of peers was important in the design of the assessment approach, and (3) students welcomed challenge and mastery of the learning outcomes and activity. this case study demonstrates initial positive findings about the use of escape rooms for formative assessment and advocates for further research to be conducted in this area. we also encourage he teachers to think about how such practices could enhance students’ learning experiences in their own teaching contexts. keywords: online escape room; formative assessment; playful learning; gamification. licchelli and barnett using an online escape room as a formative assessment tool during a lecture on hiv: a case study journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 2 introduction during the last decade, there has been a focus on new ways to use games for learning purposes (rosas et al., 2003; haruna et al., 2018; campillo-ferrer, miralles-martínez and sánchez-ibáñez, 2020; fernandez-antolin, del río and gonzalez-lezcano, 2020; o’brien and farrow, 2020). this has resulted in developments including the gamification of learning experiences, game-based learning (gbl) (haruna et al., 2018), serious games (eleftheriou et al., 2017), as well as games informing playful learning pedagogies to support students’ learning. an educational escape room is one type of approach that has gained increasing popularity in he (higher education) learning and teaching in recent years. in their systematic review focussing predominantly on face-to-face escape rooms, veldkamp et al. (2020) discovered that escape rooms have been used for a wide range of educational teaching and research purposes including: recruiting students; helping students to get to know institutional services; student preparedness and skills development; understanding students’ learning, skills, and behaviours; as well as developing knowledge in specific disciplinary areas. more recently, and possibly as a partial consequence of the covid-19 pandemic, more studies have been published about the use of online educational escape rooms. for example, manzano-león et al. (2021) explored an online escape room as a motivational tool to in supporting students to review curriculum content in engaging and fun ways. there have also been a limited number of studies that have started to think about online escape rooms with assessment and feedback practices. for example, darby et al. (2020) developed an online escape room to evaluate nursing students’ obstetrical skills (including teamwork and communication skills) associated with learning objectives linked to clinical practice. bistulfi (2021) transformed a genetics final exam assessment for stem students into an escape room activity which resulted in additional outcomes including the development of students’ team working skills, problem-solving, leadership skills, and so on. whilst studies show a diverse range of uses of educational escape rooms in he teaching in both face-to-face and online contexts, few studies have explored the use of escape rooms as a form of formative assessment, and fewer have explored developing them within postgraduate-level teaching. formative assessment is a form of assessment that often calls upon students to evaluate their progress and obtain feedback (fry, ketteridge and marshall, 2008). feedback is an licchelli and barnett using an online escape room as a formative assessment tool during a lecture on hiv: a case study journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 3 invaluable source of information that students can use to check their understanding and identify knowledge gaps to help foster control over their achievements (fry, ketteridge and marshall, 2008). arguably, these skills and forms of self-regulation become increasingly important at the postgraduate level and are valued by accredited professional bodies. importantly, as asserted by morris, perry and wardle (2021), formative assessment and feedback support students’ development in he. however, they go on to suggest that many forms of formative feedback are traditionally verbal or written and that ‘we still know relatively little about the types, modes and features of these approaches that are likely to be most effective’ (p.20). thus, this study also seeks to contribute to this knowledge gap by exploring student perceptions of an online educational escape room developed as a new form of formative assessment. the aim of this case study then was to explore postgraduate student perceptions of completing an online escape room as a formative assessment and if it encourages stronger engagement in formative assessment in their course. the online escape room this case study focuses on the delivery of an online educational escape room as a formative assessment following a lecture on hiv, part of the chronic condition module at the university of surrey. this compulsory module is part of the health psychology msc degree but is attended by students from other master’s programmes in psychology as an optional module. the rationale for designing an online escape room as a formative assessment was attributed to recognising a need to promote greater independent learning at msc level and to support their developing knowledge to achieve their career aspirations (i.e., becoming registered health psychologists). when developing the hiv lecture and the educational escape room, we reflected upon and employed biggs’ (2003) constructive alignment theory to ensure that the learning outcomes, teaching, learning activities, and assessment were aligned. thus, the escape room was underpinned by learning outcomes for the hiv lecture, which was vital given that the escape room was developed for formative assessment purposes. all students were made aware of the online escape room study before the lecture, with a post on the virtual learning environment (vle) chronic conditions site. from there, licchelli and barnett using an online escape room as a formative assessment tool during a lecture on hiv: a case study journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 4 students were able to download the participant information sheet and consent form to take part in this study. they were also made aware that the escape room was a voluntary group activity and invited to form their groups autonomously before the lecture. of the 30 students on the course, a total of five students attended the hiv lecture and took part in the escape room. as attendance is typically higher for this module, it is postulated that fewer students attended the session due to the pressures of other assessment deadlines. nonetheless, the five students were divided into two teams to complete the online escape room which was delivered via google forms during the first part of the lecture which was face-to-face. the lecturer was there to support students if they encountered difficulties while completing the activity. the students were invited to provide a group name to create a sense of community. furthermore, they were encouraged to support each other through peer feedback, particularly with difficult puzzles, to provide an opportunity to reflect on their learning and knowledge gaps in a positive environment. they were not invited to enter any personal information during the escape room and no personal information was stored about their performance. students were given 20 minutes to complete the escape room. the aim was to work through a series of five sections (rooms). section 1 was introductory, where students generated their group name to commence community building. sections 3-5 contained a diverse series of puzzles to formatively test their knowledge from the hiv lecture including: multiple-choice questions to challenge students’ understanding of complex knowledge from lecture materials, a crossword including sub-activities to search for information online, and a map activity entailing cross-referencing learning. the puzzles/activities were designed using active learning approaches, moving away from traditional formative assessment approaches. they also increased in difficulty as the students progressed through each section in order to challenge their learning and encourage problem-solving (for example, finding and discussing information) aligned with postgraduate level study. the final section aimed to celebrate the completion of the online escape room, as well as consolidate the learning through concluding remarks and inviting students to ask questions about the activity with their peers and the lecturer. these puzzles often led to the formation of codes that allowed the students to move to the next section/room. as per wiemker, elumir and clare’s (2015) ideas for puzzle design, each puzzle in the escape room contained three important elements: (1) a challenge, (2) a solution, and (3) a reward. the escape room was designed in a linear configuration where each puzzle unlocks the next to ensure that students were following the intended learning licchelli and barnett using an online escape room as a formative assessment tool during a lecture on hiv: a case study journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 5 outcomes. importantly, not being able to solve a puzzle provided students with immediate feedback that they had not met the learning outcomes, allowing them to discuss knowledge gaps with peers and/or the lecturer to move on and complete the escape room. the immediate feedback was not being able to unlock the next room and a short message would appear with a clue on how to unlock the room. following the activity, a debrief was conducted that incorporated a summary of the learning outcomes to clarify any misunderstanding and give further feedback. indeed, such feedback may foster the students’ feeling of control over their achievements (fry, ketteridge and marshall, 2008), and could be revisited later in the module. methodology students were then invited to contact the lecturer if they wanted to take part in a follow-up qualitative survey to evaluate the online escape room for formative assessment purposes. participants were offered a £10 voucher to take part in the survey and were given one month to submit their responses. the study received favourable ethical approval by the university of surrey’s ethics committee (fhms 21-22 048 ega). a total of three students completed the qualitative survey following the escape room. the anonymised feedback was analysed using thematic analysis (braun and clarke, 2006) and reported verbatim. an online qualitative survey was used to collect data as this would allow the students to express themselves without the presence of the lecturer/researcher. demographic information was separated from the answers provided to the qualitative survey, ensuring answers were not linked to individual students. an inductive process was used where the feedback guided the generation of themes. the findings of this survey are presented and discussed below. findings feedback provided by the three students who completed the qualitative survey is outlined here to explore whether they have perceived the online escape room as a formative assessment. overall, the students highlighted how they did not expect to find an escape room activity as part of the lecture, perceiving it as a novel and creative form of formative assessment. furthermore, they suggested that the collaborative nature of the activity licchelli and barnett using an online escape room as a formative assessment tool during a lecture on hiv: a case study journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 6 supported them in completing the activity. lastly, participants reported feeling able to easily recall information from the lecture to complete the activity, giving them a sense of mastering and applying the knowledge learned through the formative assessment (escape room). the escape room activity as novel and creative the students reported being positively surprised about the escape room being incorporated into the teaching and learning activities of the lecture at the postgraduate level: • ‘i did not expect to find this activity in the lecture, nor did i expect it would be used in higher education’ [participant 1]. • ‘i had never thought an escape room activity would be included during a lecture’ [participant 2]. • ‘to be honest, no. this is creative method which i find it useful’ [participant 3]. as shown in the data, the students perceived the escape room as a creative type of formative assessment and broadened their preconceptions about traditional forms of formative assessment. as encountered by o’brien and farrow’s (2020) study, an element of surprise built around excitement can enhance student engagement, which appeared to work well in the context of this case study. not only was the formative assessment itself viewed positively for its novelty and creativity, but more importantly, the student responses reflected that the activity also enhanced their learning from the lecture: • ‘the escape room is an activity which can definitely support students' learning and i think it this would change the approach to learning as it is an original idea and quite creative’ [participant 1]. • ‘i think it could definitely be used as an educational activity as it requires participants to think critically, while also reflecting upon the content of the lecture’ [participant 2]. licchelli and barnett using an online escape room as a formative assessment tool during a lecture on hiv: a case study journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 7 aldemir, celik and kaplan (2018) also reported how creative activities can support students in reinforcing knowledge through consulting lecture content and encouraging selfassessment of understanding. in this case study, participants recognised the educational value in terms of formative assessment, not just its creative value. the value of peers in the formative online escape room assessment the students in this study explained how they enjoyed the structure of the online escape room and its activities as being group activities shared with peers, as opposed to a more individual nature: • ‘it is enjoyable working in a group and a motivating way to recap what we had learnt’ [participant 1]. • ‘i felt motivated to work out the answers to the questions. this was because i was working in a group and i wanted to complete the activity’ [participant 1]. • ‘i felt proud and pleased when we managed to guess the password correctly – it was very satisfying!’ [participant 2]. • ‘it was challenging so it is good to see some difficult ones, because it encourages to search more and recall the things learned in that lecture’ [participant 3]. the students appeared to find the group experience of completing the escape room positive and valued the support coming from peers and being able to share the experience of achieving the formative goals of unlocking each room. this is also highlighted by nørgård, toft-nielsen and whitton (2017) in their study where they found that students perceived learning as more enjoyable when there was an element of sharing the experience with peers. fry, ketteridge and marshall (2008) also suggest that the collaborative side of finding ‘suitable solutions’ is valued by students and that peers can be a valuable source of informal feedback. developing mastery through online escape rooms students also highlighted the importance of creating tasks that challenge them allowing them to recall and search for the answers, but without falling into the frustration of finding the activities too difficult and getting stuck. furthermore, they acknowledged that questions licchelli and barnett using an online escape room as a formative assessment tool during a lecture on hiv: a case study journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 8 would have been difficult to answer without some mastery of the core knowledge from the lecture. it might be possible to see the positive emotion of being able to solve a puzzle as linked with the understanding of the content of the lecture and the ability to independently find the information needed to solve the puzzle. for instance, students reported: • ‘i find myself good because i remember the answer of some questions, and i search to find the ones i did not know’ [participant 3]. • ‘i think the escape room allowed me to search for relevant information but this could have been furthered with more questions’ [participant 1]. • ‘i definitely felt i was applying the knowledge from the hiv lecture to the escape room tasks. i did check back on the powerpoint quite a bit too, which was helpful for answering the different questions’ [participant 2]. it seems that students were actively engaging with the feedback coming from the puzzle solutions and using the resources provided during the lecture to answer the questions. furthermore, the results from the survey showed that some students desired more questions to enhance their knowledge and experience. the online escape room activity then appeared to provide an opportunity to explore the students’ ‘zone of proximal development’ (vygotsky, 1978), where students could reflect upon their knowledge and abilities, and the lecturer could identify where further knowledge gaps existed and provide further scaffolding in their learning during the task or in the future. discussion this case study explored the perception of three postgraduate students who completed an online escape room as a formative assessment. students highlighted how they valued the novelty and creativity of the online escape room whilst focusing on the collaborative nature of the activity. furthermore, students reported how the activities of the online escape room encouraged them to recall the lecture content and consult the resources provided to solve different puzzles. overall, participants reported being surprised by the activities and reported positive emotions connected with those such as curiosity to know the password and to access the next task which worked as a motivator to complete the escape room. hence, this could licchelli and barnett using an online escape room as a formative assessment tool during a lecture on hiv: a case study journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 9 increase the engagement of students in formative assessment which is particularly important when considering curricula aimed at fostering independence, understanding complex knowing, and problem-solving at the postgraduate level. students also highlighted the positive effect of working in groups to complete the activity where they were able to discuss and find solutions collaboratively as well as provide feedback to each other. the collaborative and social side of the escape room appeared important and useful for students in supporting them and their learning, as found by nørgård, toft-nielsen and whitton (2017). students also mentioned the active use of educational material to complete the activities, such as slides and online resources suggested during the lecture, which is something that might promote their ability to retrieve the information needed. the positive emotions such as enjoyment, pride, and satisfaction reported by students are in line with the perception of students completing similar activities (gikandi, morrow and davis, 2011). from the feedback received, it is possible to say that students perceived the structure of the puzzles positively. this seems to confirm that the model provided by wiemker, elumir and clare (2015) to build puzzle activities is helpful and effective when applied to the online escape room used in this case study. thus, it might be useful to follow their framework when planning online escape rooms as it provides a well-structured framework for planning puzzles. however, while it is important to plan and build interesting and compelling puzzles, it is also important to make a clear introduction to the activity and a good de-briefing as also suggested by veldkamp et al. (2020) in their systematic review on escape rooms as educational activities. this case study has some limitations that need to be considered. firstly, only three students took part in the qualitative survey and a larger sample is needed to conclude the effectiveness of this online escape room. secondly, future studies should focus on confirming which elements might be linked with engaging online escape rooms and what students perceive to be the key elements motivating them in completing the activities in a more representative way. lastly, it could be useful to explore more explicitly if students engage more in formative assessment using this creative and innovative methodology compared with more traditional ways. licchelli and barnett using an online escape room as a formative assessment tool during a lecture on hiv: a case study journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 10 conclusion this case study provided the opportunity to implement an online escape room within postgraduate level teaching as a formative assessment and explore the feedback from students of this experience, allowing us to tentatively evaluate its uses and possibilities in future teaching. we discovered that postgraduate students in this study perceived the online escape room positively as an innovative practice at this level and appreciated this creative approach as a tool to support their learning and provide timely formative feedback. therefore, we will take this forward into our teaching practice, and argue that, like us, educators may wish to consider not necessarily reserving playful approaches like escape rooms for undergraduate level students given the positive responses at the postgraduate level. as the students also appreciated the online escape room as providing an opportunity to acquire support from peers in non-competitive settings and jointly share the achievement of meeting learning outcomes, we suggest that online escape room activities can offer the opportunity to develop a stronger learning community as peers can offer emotional and practical support during these types of formative assessment activity. the students also demonstrated degrees of mastery of their learning and skills through active learning approaches which allows the lecturer to identify in real time where their learning could be further scaffolded in the future. we conclude by suggesting that given the initial positive outcomes of this online escape room activity, we would encourage educators to think about the role of these in their teaching contexts to improve the learning experience and outcomes of students at a variety of levels and to enhance engagement in formative assessment practices. supplementary material readers are invited to contact the lead author to discuss the online escape room and expected learning outcomes for further context about the study and to share learning. you can contact stefano licchelli using the following email address: s.licchelli@surrey.ac.uk. licchelli and barnett using an online escape room as a formative assessment tool during a lecture on hiv: a case study journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 11 references aldemir, t., celik, b. and kaplan, g. (2018) ‘a qualitative investigation of student perceptions of game elements in a gamified course’, computers in human behavior, 78, pp.235-254. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2017.10.001. biggs, j. b. (2003) teaching for quality learning at university: what the student does. buckingham: srhe & open university press. bistulfi, g. (2021) ‘pushing active learning into assessment with a genetics escape-room final: gamification to develop team skills in stem, on ground and online’, journal of higher education theory and practice, 21(11), pp.73-85. braun, v., and clarke, v. (2006) ‘using thematic analysis in psychology’, qualitative research in psychology, 3(2), pp.77-101. https://doi.org/10.1191/1478088706qp063oa. campillo-ferrer, j. m., miralles-martínez, p. and sánchez-ibáñez, r. (2020) ‘gamification in higher education: impact on student motivation and the acquisition of social and civic key competencies’, sustainability, 12(12). https://doi.org/10.3390/su12124822. darby, w., bergeron, p., brown, n., defoor, m. and jones, b. (2020) ‘escape room relay race: “go for the gold” in formative assessment’, journal of nursing education, 59(11), pp.646-650. https://doi.org/10.3928/01484834-20201020-09. eleftheriou, a., bullock, s., graham, c. a. and ingham, r. (2017) ‘using computer simulations for investigating a sex education intervention: an exploratory study’, jmir serious games, 5(2), e6598. https://doi.org/10.2196/games.6598. fernandez-antolin, m. m., del río, j. m. and gonzalez-lezcano, r. a. (2020) ‘the use of gamification in higher technical education: perception of university students on innovative teaching materials’, international journal of technology and design education, 31(1), pp.1019-1038. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10798-020-09583-0. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2017.10.001 https://doi.org/10.1191/1478088706qp063oa https://doi.org/10.3390/su12124822 https://doi.org/10.3928/01484834-20201020-09 https://doi.org/10.2196/games.6598 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10798-020-09583-0 licchelli and barnett using an online escape room as a formative assessment tool during a lecture on hiv: a case study journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 12 fry, h., ketteridge, s. and marshall, s. (2008) a handbook for teaching and learning in higher education. new york: routledge. gikandi, j. w., morrow, d. and davis, n. e. (2011) ‘online formative assessment in higher education: a review of the literature’, computers and education, 57(4), pp.23332351. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2011.06.004. haruna, h., hu, x., chu, s. k. w., mellecker, r. r., gabriel, g. and ndekao, p. s. (2018) ‘improving sexual health education programs for adolescent students through game-based learning and gamification’, international journal of environmental research and public health, 15(9). https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph15092027. manzano-león, a., rodríguez-ferrer, j. m., aguilar-parra, j. m., martínez, a. m. m., de la rosa, a. l., garcía, d. s. and campoy, j. m. f. (2021) ‘escape rooms as a learning strategy for special education master’s degree students’, international journal of environmental research and public health, 18(14). https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph18147304. morris, r., perry, t. and wardle, l. (2021) ‘formative assessment and feedback for learning in higher education: a systematic review’, review of education 9(3), e3292. https://doi.org/10.1002/rev3.3292. nørgård, r. t., toft-nielsen, c. and whitton, n. (2017) ‘playful learning in higher education: developing a signature pedagogy’, international journal of play, 6(3), pp.272-282. https://doi.org/10.1080/21594937.2017.1382997. o’brien, r. e., and farrow, s. (2020) ‘escaping the inactive classroom: escape rooms for teaching technology’, the journal of social media for learning, 1(1), pp.78-93. https://doi.org/10.24377/ljmu.jsml.vol1article395. rosas, r., nussbaum, m., cumsille, p., marianov, v., correa, m., flores, p., grau, v., lagos, f., lópez, x., lópez, v., rodriguez, p. and salinas, m. (2003) ‘beyond nintendo: design and assessment of educational video games for first and second grade students’, computers and education, 40(1), pp.71-94. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0360-1315(02)00099-4. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2011.06.004 https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph15092027 https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph18147304 https://doi.org/10.1002/rev3.3292 https://doi.org/10.1080/21594937.2017.1382997 https://doi.org/10.24377/ljmu.jsml.vol1article395 https://doi.org/10.1016/s0360-1315(02)00099-4 licchelli and barnett using an online escape room as a formative assessment tool during a lecture on hiv: a case study journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 13 veldkamp, a., van de grint, l., knippels, m. c. p. j. and van joolingen, w. r. (2020) ‘escape education: a systematic review on escape rooms in education’, educational research review 31(1), 100364. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.edurev.2020.100364. vygotsky, l. s. (1978) mind in society. cambridge: harvard university press. wiemker, m., elumir, e. and clare, a. (2015) ‘escape room games: “can you transform an unpleasant situation into a pleasant one?’ available at : https://www.researchgate.net/publication/348870975_escape_room_games_can_ you_transform_an_unpleasant_situation_into_a_pleasant_one (accessed: 20 march 2023). author details stefano licchelli is a phd student in health psychology at the university of surrey and trainee health psychologist. his phd focuses on health and wellbeing in older people living with hiv. he has recently published a qualitative study on how older gay males living with hiv make sense of their health and how hiv has affected them over time. stefano has volunteered for several different sexual health charities in england and italy such as lila, the terrence higgins trust, and arcigay. he also works part time as a research governance assistant within cuh. laura barnett is a lecturer in higher education at the surrey institute of education, university of surrey, uk. she gained her phd in cultural studies at canterbury christ church university in 2018. her research interests broadly relate to the sociology of education including inclusion and inequalities in higher education. she is passionate about using and sharing playful learning approaches in her teaching. laura is a senior fellow of advancehe (higher education academy). licence ©2023 the author(s). this is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (cc-by 4.0), which permits https://doi.org/10.1016/j.edurev.2020.100364 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/348870975_escape_room_games_can_you_transform_an_unpleasant_situation_into_a_pleasant_one https://www.researchgate.net/publication/348870975_escape_room_games_can_you_transform_an_unpleasant_situation_into_a_pleasant_one licchelli and barnett using an online escape room as a formative assessment tool during a lecture on hiv: a case study journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 14 unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. see http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. journal of learning development in higher education (jldhe) is a peer-reviewed open access journal published by the association for learning development in higher education (aldinhe). using an online escape room as a formative assessment tool during a lecture on hiv: a case study abstract introduction the online escape room methodology findings the escape room activity as novel and creative the value of peers in the formative online escape room assessment developing mastery through online escape rooms discussion conclusion supplementary material references author details licence journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 27 april 2023 ©2023 the author(s) (cc-by 4.0) co-constructing teaching and learning in higher education: a literature review of practices and implications brianna vespone university of rochester, usa abstract the purpose of this literature review is to examine the assumptions and practices taking place in co-constructed learning spaces within higher education research literature, specifically for undergraduate students. this paper provides an overview of how co-constructed methods take shape in the university classroom and how those methods benefit student learning. a literature search was conducted via education-focused databases using search terms such as ‘higher education’, ‘co-constructed learning’, and ‘sociocultural’. only primary, empirical articles published after 2007 were included for review, with one exception from 2002. implications for student learning are discussed within four core thematic outcomes (skill development, engagement, meaning-making, having purpose) and two activators (learning through relationships, creating a safe space). implications for teachers include a discussion of teaching methods, classroom activities, and the role of teachers. rooted in theories of constructivist, sociocultural, and third space learning, this review of the literature provides rationale for exploring alternatives to traditional pedagogical methods, highlights barriers, facilitators, and potential downfalls of co-constructed learning spaces, and discusses implications for student learning and for teachers. keywords: higher education; co-constructed learning; sociocultural learning theory. vespone co-constructing teaching and learning in higher education: a literature review of practices and implications journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27, april 2023 2 introduction defining traditional pedagogical methods the traditional model for teaching and learning in education places the instructor at the literal and metaphorical head of the classroom. traditional, in this context, refers to the lecturebased, transmissional learning environment developed for university settings during the initial conception of higher education. although pedagogy has evolved, teachers still hold power (cook-sather, 2014). they are seen as the experts on a given subject matter and work to bestow their knowledge upon novice students, rooted in historical cognitive-and behavioral approaches to learning (wickman, 2004; kolb and kolb, 2005; fried, 2007; cook-sather, 2014; de royston et al., 2020). at its core, this paper assumes a counterapproach to traditional historical pedagogical methods in higher education. offering an alternative given the established precedent of traditional pedagogy and teacher-as-expert classroom practices in university settings, a co-constructed learning approach, incorporating sociocultural learning theories, offers an alternative method of creating student engagement and deeper learning. as a core tenant of learning development, challenging established norms in teaching helps pave the way to innovative approaches to learning. research has suggested that a collaborative, participatory approach to learning (i.e., a constructivist approach) results in more effective and meaningful learning for students. most of this research has been based in compulsory education settings and has been sporadically explored in a university setting over the past two decades, often with findings of similar, positive results of meaningful learning (fried, 2007; mascolo, 2009; sidelinger and boothbutterfield, 2010; faraon et al., 2020). rather than reinforcing the teacher-as-expert model, a constructivist approach to teaching and learning works to remove the hierarchy between teacher and student and values the contributions of both. in spaces where a constructivist approach is used, student perspectives and lived experiences are both acknowledged and valued, and teachers serve as facilitators in soliciting and encouraging those perspectives (morrone and tarr, 2005; fried, 2007; wang, 2007; roberts, 2016; ha and pepin, 2017; vespone co-constructing teaching and learning in higher education: a literature review of practices and implications journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27, april 2023 3 faraon et al., 2020). educators and researchers within the field of learning development are working hard to challenge traditional pedological structures, encourage more participatory learning, and decolonise higher education (e.g. roberts, 2016; bohlmann, 2022). taking a social constructivist, co-constructed approach to teaching and learning in higher education can be part of that larger movement that encourages innovative practices to serve the everchanging needs of students. the purpose of this paper is to examine the assumptions and practices taking place in coconstructed learning spaces within higher education, specifically for undergraduate students, an underrepresented population in the co-constructed learning literature. to meet this purpose, i will provide a brief overview of the theoretical framework of this review. after a summary of my methods, i will describe the juxtaposition between traditional and coconstructed pedagogical methods and the rationale for the consideration of constructivist and sociocultural approaches in the university classroom. these approaches will be discussed in connection to the core competencies of the council for the advancement of standards in higher education (cas), which is a consortium of professional associations in the united states whose mission is to assess and develop a set of standards to support a quality learning experience for students. next, i will review the implications for student learning as thematic categories based in empirical literature and discuss additional implications for teachers. this will be followed by an examination of the barriers, facilitators, and potential downfalls of co-constructed learning spaces and conclude with limitations and suggestions for future research. theoretical framework the research questions addressed in this paper focus on the organic evolution of coconstructed learning and how it emerges (or is stunted) in university classrooms. because of this author’s iterative, grounded-theoretical approach to understanding theories and practices, student development theories were excluded from the theoretical framework. rather than imposing a framework with predetermined aims and goals such as academic success, vespone co-constructing teaching and learning in higher education: a literature review of practices and implications journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27, april 2023 4 retention and positive transitions (long, 2012), i want to understand how co-constructed learning occurs without the systemic or socio-political implications that tend to exist in higher education. i recognise, however, that i cannot remove those systemic expectations and that students and instructors will always have to operate within some expectation of success or achievement. my goal is to attempt to view learning from what teachers and students themselves, as people with lived experiences, bring into the classroom space, rather than by what the institution believes is best for them. this is the fundamental distinction between the theoretical approaches i chose to use and exclude; for the purposes of this paper, i want to honour and value the social and cultural contributions of the individual over the system. therefore, the theoretical framework supporting this review is composed of three core learning theories: constructivist learning theory, sociocultural learning theory with vygotsky’s (1978) zone of proximal development (zpd), and cultural third space learning theory. epistemology of constructivism constructivism is rooted in the work of developmental theorists piaget, dewey, bruner, and vygotsky, among others. at its core, constructivism offers an alternative to positivist epistemology (fosnot and perry, 1996; prince and felder, 2006). the historical epistemological model in higher education assumes an absolute truth, centered on objectivity and the dissemination and receipt of established knowledge and facts. a constructivist approach challenges the notion of absolute truth and posits that knowledge is created (i.e. constructed) within an individual through their interactions with the environment (duffy and cunningham, 1996; fosnot and perry, 1996; prince and felder, 2006; mascolo, 2009). the learning process is complex and non-linear, and it requires the influence of ecological resources, knowledge from and interactions with others, and individual actions within the environment itself (prince and felder, 2006; mascolo, 2009; damşa, nerland, and andreadakis, 2019). that is not to say that social constructivism exists purely separately from the positivist perspective of realism. elder-vass (2012) discusses how social constructivism and critical realism can and should exist together as a way to recognise individuals as acting within a vespone co-constructing teaching and learning in higher education: a literature review of practices and implications journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27, april 2023 5 social context that is shaped and reshaped by discourse, language, and social norms. although social constructivists believe everything is socially constructed, there is still an element of what is believed to be real or true that exists within social norms (elder-vass, 2012), an argument that translates to the systemic influences of school as a formal place of learning. social norms are still imposed upon students and teachers, and although a coconstructed approach encourages autonomy and agency from individuals, that autonomy emerges within the limitations of school-related social norms and systemic expectations, which can be a struggle for teachers striving for a co-constructed classroom environment (grimmett, 1997; elder-vass, 2012). co-constructed learning constructivism is centred on the idea that ‘individuals construct their understanding of the world as a product of their actions on the world’ (mascolo, 2009, p.4, emphasis in original). in the formal classroom environment, a constructivist approach places emphasis on habitforming and making connections between subject matter and in-classroom phenomenon rather than simply the reception of new content, allowing students to ‘construct their own versions of reality rather than simply absorbing versions presented by their teachers’ (prince and felder, 2006, p.123). mascolo (2009) wrote: ‘the conduit metaphor of teaching portrays the learning process as one of accumulating knowledge. in contrast, the constructivist approach maintains that learning involves the transformation of existing knowledge into increasingly higher-order forms’ (p. 6, emphasis in original). co-constructed learning, rooted in constructivist theory, shifts the focus away from fixed outcomes and expectations (e.g. exam scores, predefined curriculum) and toward an understanding of how learning spaces are shaped (i.e. constructed) in a way that capitalises on available ecological resources, emphasises meaning-making, and promotes an environment most conducive to learning (wickman, 2004; kolb and kolb, 2005; prince and felder, 2006; mascolo, 2009; damşa, nerland, and andreadakis, 2019). vespone co-constructing teaching and learning in higher education: a literature review of practices and implications journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27, april 2023 6 sociocultural learning theory building on the foundational concepts of constructivism, with the development of knowledge as a constructed, individualised process, sociocultural theory elevates constructivist learning to include the social and cultural context in which learning takes place. the work of lev vygotsky (1978) serves as the seminal work upon which further sociocultural theories were developed. these theories account for numerous components within the sociocultural umbrella, including vygotsky’s zone of proximal development (zpd), scaffolding, social and relational learning, mediational tools, and communities of practice. zpd refers to the space between the individual’s cognition and the teacher’s influence. vygotsky (1978) defines zpd as ‘the distance between the actual developmental level as determined by independent problem solving and the level of potential development as determined through problem solving under adult guidance or in collaboration with more capable peers’ (p. 38). the process of closing that gap is what sociocultural theories call scaffolding (john-steiner and mahn, 1996; nash-ditzel and brown, 2012; faraon et al., 2020; damşa and muukkonen, 2020). the concept of a zone of proximal development and scaffolded learning are essential to understanding a co-constructed learning environment. overall, when social and cultural (sociocultural) influences are acknowledged within the formal environment of education, it becomes more evident that mental functioning (learning) is situated within context and shaped by external factors (john-steiner and mahn, 1996; wickman and östman, 2002; wang, 2007; gutiérrez, 2008; faraon et al., 2020). learning becomes more than just the development of internal cognitive structures. rather, learning is socially constructed (wertsch and tulviste, 1992; john-steiner and mahn, 1996; wickman and östman, 2002; wickman, 2004). cultural third space learning theory with the co-constructed classroom as a formal learning space and a community of practice for meaning-making, cultural third space theory (also referred to as hybridity theory) proposes additional spaces for knowledge to exist. gutiérrez (2008) argued that the cultural third space meets multiple criteria of vygotsky’s zpd, with the third space serving as an in-between for vespone co-constructing teaching and learning in higher education: a literature review of practices and implications journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27, april 2023 7 two other distinct spaces of learning. the first space refers to personal knowledge, lived experiences, and social practices of an individual, including physical, situational, and emotional experiences. the second space is where elements of the first space are conceptualised and made sense of much like the dynamic of a classroom. the third space is the in-between space where individuals draw from both the physical, mental, and cultural planes to explore other options, different perspectives, and new ideas (johnston, 2009). the cultural knowledge and lived experiences that students bring into the classroom (if given the opportunity to do so) are what theorists refer to as funds of knowledge (moll et al., 1992; gutiérrez, baquedano‐lópez and tejeda, 1999; moje et al., 2004; cook, 2005). funds of knowledge are the repositories of experiences, knowledge, and practices students bring with them into the classroom. these funds include knowledge that is learned and developed outside the formal educational space and instead from social encounters with peers, experiences in the larger community, exposure to the media, and life at home (moll et al., 1992; gutiérrez, baquedano‐lópez and tejeda, 1999; moje et al., 2004; cook, 2005). in a classroom setting, the mutual relationships and interactions between students, teachers, peers, activities, and content knowledge enable third space learning via the zpd (jørgensen et al., 2020). cultural third space learning strengthens the role of the student within the classroom setting by honouring their own levels of expertise, including cultural histories and lived experiences (johnston, 2009; jørgensen et al., 2020). based on these theories, which help establish a foundation for a deeper discussion of co-constructed learning, i will now discuss the methods used to gather literature for this review. methods a literature search was conducted via google scholar, university of rochester campus libraries, and education-focused databases (for example, jstor, eric, and ebsco) using search terms such as ‘higher education’, ‘sociocultural’, ‘third space’, and ‘co-constructed learning’. because different articles discuss higher education in different ways and interchange terms like ‘higher education’ with ‘university’ or ‘college’, the same searches for vespone co-constructing teaching and learning in higher education: a literature review of practices and implications journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27, april 2023 8 ‘sociocultural’, ‘third space’, and ‘co-constructed learning’ were repeated with each of those variations. sources cited within the relevant empirical literature were reviewed for additional context and seminal writings. a combination of theoretical and anecdotal articles and chapters, seminal theory pieces, and empirical examples of co-constructed learning in the university classroom were included in this review, with the empirical articles serving as the core content for discussions of implications. the intent was to provide sufficient context from empirical examples to explore how these theories emerge in practice. to be included, empirical studies must have been conducted in an undergraduate university setting and utilised a constructivist theoretical framework. because various countries may offer degree programmes on different timelines (3-year or 4-year degrees), i did not differentiate the type of degree or degree-bearing institution in my inclusion criteria. to keep this review relevant to the past 15 years, only primary, original research articles published after 2007 were included, with one exception from 2002. for articles providing theoretical context, no limitations were placed on year of publication. all empirical sources selected for this review are based in constructivist approaches to teaching and learning in a university setting, though not all of them emphasise sociological approaches, zpd, and/or third spaces. in total, 17 strictly empirical studies were selected for review, with many other articles serving as supporting context. this number refers to sources that were the primary product of a research study and not those who refer back to past research or generally reference a study to support their claims (although those were still included in the review but not counted as primary empirical examples). in order to capture a moderate size sample of sources, i did not limit my exploration to a specific field of study. of the 17 empirical studies examined, ten were conducted in a liberal arts setting (education, communications, and language courses), six were based in a stem environment (biology lab, and computer coding course), and one was centered in healthcare (nursing). studies were based in multiple regions, including europe, canada, australia, england, and the united states, and were from both public and private universities. vespone co-constructing teaching and learning in higher education: a literature review of practices and implications journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27, april 2023 9 after collecting examples from the literature, a process of systematic coding was used to identify themes across sources. more specifically, the qualitative coding software dedoose was used to organise and analyse each article. first, each article was assigned demographic codes to identify the type of article (empirical or contextual), student population (first-year, upper-class only, undergraduate unspecified), country of origin, and type of institution (public, private). then, each article was reviewed and coded within a set of thematic codes (see table 1). these thematic codes were created using an iterative procedure, starting out generally and evolving into more specific codes and subcodes as the coding process progressed. table 1. thematic codes and definitions. thematic code definition ‘barriers’ phenomena that prevent co-constructed learning ‘facilitators’ phenomena that encourage co-constructed learning ‘cautions’ potential downfalls of co-constructed learning ‘context’ theoretical or contextual evidence to support coconstructed approaches ‘engagement’ ways in which co-constructed learning influences student engagement in subject matter, class participation, and other forms of engagement ‘having purpose’ ways in which co-constructed learning contributes to students’ feeling of purpose ‘making meaning’ ways in which co-constructed learning contributes to meaning-making for students ‘skill development’ ways in which co-constructed learning contributes to skill building ‘safe spaces’ ways in which co-constructed learning relies on the formation of safe spaces ‘learning through relationships’ ways in which co-constructed learning relies on relationship formation ‘implications for teachers’ insight from authors related to teaching practices vespone co-constructing teaching and learning in higher education: a literature review of practices and implications journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27, april 2023 10 ‘general implications’ general key insights from authors ‘activities’ specific, tangible materials or activities used in the classroom ‘role of teachers’ ways in which the behaviours, assumptions, and core practices of teachers influence co-constructed learning ‘teacher relationships’ ways in which the relationship between teacher and student influences co-constructed learning ‘quotes’ eloquent words or definitions from authors, to be incorporated into the review results benefits and outcomes for student learning the literature suggests that there are a variety of benefits to implementing coconstructed/constructivist-based teaching and learning techniques in the university classroom, with additional benefits emerging from the inclusion of third space and sociocultural approaches. in exploring implications for student learning from co-constructed practices, four beneficial outcomes (skill development, engagement, meaning-making, and having purpose) and two core activators (learning through relationships, and creation of safe spaces) emerged. for this discussion, the outcomes identified rest on a fundamental assumption that skill development, engagement in learning, meaning-making, and having a sense of purpose are inherently good things. in addition, i am defining activators as elements that enable and promote the development and interconnectedness of the identified beneficial outcomes. activators differ from educational interventions and pedagogical structures in that they are not formal or scripted; rather, they exist organically as social and emotional phenomena in-between the formal learning outcomes of a classroom environment. although presented in distinct categories for the sake of discussion, none of these concepts exist in isolation. vespone co-constructing teaching and learning in higher education: a literature review of practices and implications journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27, april 2023 11 outcome: skill development studies of co-constructed learning practices in the university classroom setting support the philosophical shift of learning away from an input-output model that values what is right or factual, and toward a process of meaning-making, habit forming, and critical thinking. these processes allow for multifaceted skill development in both hard skills such as the use of technology, laboratory skills, and demonstration of content mastery (wickman and östman, 2002; wickman, 2004; stefaniak and tracey, 2015; towers and loynes, 2018; damşa, nerland and andreadakis, 2019; damşa and muukkonen, 2020), and soft skills such as adaptability, flexibility, communication, interpersonal relationships, self-awareness, and selfconfidence (bovill, 2013; cook-sather, 2014; stefaniak and tracey, 2015; towers and loynes, 2018; jørgensen et al., 2020). for instance, damşa, nerland and andreadakis (2019) found that the students’ path to learning was organic, non-linear, and transformative. the way in which the learning spaces emerged was dependent upon the interactions between group members and relationships with each other and with the educational environment (including the classroom and lab space, technological resources, and curriculum). the authors concluded that co-constructing learning promotes flexibility and adaptability, both of which are pathways to the student development outcomes of knowledge acquisition, construction, integration and application and cognitive complexity provided by the council for the advancement of standards in higher education (cas) (cas, 2015). a study from cook-sather (2014) exploring student and teacher experiences in a formalised student-staff curriculum development programme designed to explore pedagogical practices across disciplines, identified additional skills derived from student involvement in the coconstructed programme. these skills included stronger communication skills, increased sense of confidence in their abilities, a deeper sense of self-awareness, and increased comfort with asking questions and advocating for what they need. self-awareness, or intrapersonal development, is another cas core domain of learning in higher education (cas, 2015). vespone co-constructing teaching and learning in higher education: a literature review of practices and implications journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27, april 2023 12 the above studies from cook-sather (2014) and damşa, nerland and andreadakis (2019) offer examples of skill development that can emerge in co-constructed learning spaces. when co-constructed practices are utilised, university students are provided a foundation for the development of a variety of hard skills and soft skills, including but not limited to social skills, deeper self-awareness and reflection, improved attention, increased self-confidence, adaptability and flexibility, giving and receiving feedback, and general communication skills (wickman and östman, 2002; wickman, 2004; cook-sather, 2014; stefaniak and tracey, 2015; damşa, nerland and andreadakis, 2019). outcome: engagement when learning is co-constructed, it is inherently engaging. burress and peters (2015) write that ‘the very act of co-constructing new knowledge implies engagement, as working jointly to make meaning is in itself a form of engagement’ (p. 12). examples from the literature show how co-constructed learning can enhance student learning processes and skill development, and that co-constructed learning can increase student engagement in the classroom. engagement exists in many forms, including emotional, cognitive, conceptual, physical or behavioural, so for the purposes of this discussion, i will focus on engagement as it relates to behavioural encounters with course materials and class participation as well as the mental engagement of self-reflection. active classroom participation can take shape in a variety of ways, such as students exhibiting their agency, sharing their ideas in class discussions and curriculum creation, and building connections with peers and the instructor (johnston, 2009; sidelinger and boothbutterfield, 2010; cook-sather, 2014; mott and lohr, 2015). students become more engaged in course materials and content when they have a greater understanding of the relevance of the material, both to their personal lives and education/career (stefaniak and tracey, 2015). the process of co-constructing learning inherently places students inside the development of their own learning processes, allowing for them to make connections between academic content and their own personal/professional development. for instance, nash-ditzel and brown (2012) found that when students were allowed to have input and agency in their class vespone co-constructing teaching and learning in higher education: a literature review of practices and implications journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27, april 2023 13 writing assignment, students created more thoughtful written work with stronger critical opinions and thought-provoking questions. co-constructed learning is, by nature, active learning, and allowing students to influence the shaping of the curriculum and collaborate in the classroom promotes an increased level of buy-in, engagement, and productive, meaningful learning (nash-ditzel and brown, 2012; mott and lohr, 2015). beyond engagement in the course content, co-constructed learning can also encourage students to become engaged in the process of self-growth and self-awareness, both of which connect to the cas core domain of intrapersonal development (cas, 2015). when classroom learning is co-constructed, it can promote self-directed learning and personal reflection and allow students to construct knowledge that is of value to them. it gives students a role in their educational development, rather than having knowledge of assumed value bestowed upon them by an expert with a singular vision (mott and lohr, 2015; towers and loynes, 2018; sisson et al., 2021). engaging in self-reflection as a practice allows students to ‘...deepen their own self-awareness and their attention to others’ experiences and perspectives’ (cook-sather, 2014, p. 38). many teaching methods associated with coconstructed learning incorporate elements of reflection, often for both teachers and students. for example, towers and loynes (2018) concluded that students were able to develop a deeper, more personal understanding of the ethical implications of their work when experiential learning allowed them to develop a keen sense of connection and care with their academic learning and applied work. the authors attributed these stronger levels of connection as the result of their students learning the content alongside leaders and experts in the field while in the actual field setting (co-constructed learning, collaborative learning, and situated learning) and making connections back to their own professional development. the shift in the curriculum from teacher-centred to learner-centred combined with an experiential approach resulted in a learning process that was more meaningful and purposeful for students, both in content knowledge and in personal growth (towers and loynes, 2018). vespone co-constructing teaching and learning in higher education: a literature review of practices and implications journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27, april 2023 14 outcome: meaning-making many of the components discussed in the previous section on engagement apply to the concept of meaning-making as an implication of co-constructed learning. it is one thing to understand a concept and another to find meaning in it (wang, 2007). meaning-making can emerge in the form of building content knowledge, making meaningful connections to personal life and career development, and the validation of lived experiences (wickman and östman, 2002; wickman, 2004; ha and pepin, 2017; damşa, nerland and andreadakis, 2019; pedrosa-de-jesus, guerra and watts, 2019). in pedrosa-de-jesus, guerra and watts’s (2019) exploration of pedagogical methods taking places in university classrooms, they discovered that the use of instructor and peer feedback, as part of a co-constructed learning environment, allowed students to make deeper connections to the concepts of the class and enhance their critical thinking skills. similarly, stefaniak and tracey (2015) posited that it was the instructors’ effort to frame the course in ways relevant to both students’ education and career that made for successful engagement in the content since ‘learners are more apt to be motivated to learn the content if they can find significance and relevance to what they are learning’ (p. 96). in this sense, significance and relevance enhances conceptual understanding of a topic, a level of learning that extends beyond physical, tactile engagement with course materials and activities. ha and pepin (2017) found that spaces with collaboration, dialogue, and opportunities for reflection enhanced the co-constructed process and engaged students in more meaningful learning. wickman and östman (2002) and wickman (2004) also offer examples of meaningmaking when identifying language as an important mediational tool. when language was paired with collaborative and participatory activities, it emerged as a core mechanism for meaning-making. furthermore, when the students encountered gaps in their knowledge, those gaps were filled by connections with peers and/or lab instructors, conceptual connections with past learning (such as lecture notes and textbooks), personal life experiences, and the actual materials in the lab space including chemical compounds and insects (wickman and östman, 2002; wickman, 2004). within that deeper learning was enhanced practical skill building, part of the cas core domain of practical competence (cas, vespone co-constructing teaching and learning in higher education: a literature review of practices and implications journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27, april 2023 15 2015). in these examples, meaning-making emerged because of participatory, active, collaborative learning with peers, teachers, and mediational tools. outcome: having purpose numerous researchers have found that a sense of purpose can develop when students see connections to their lives outside of school, to their career goals, and to skill development. having a sense of the purpose of their learning facilitates students’ ability to embrace their sense of agency and to feel valued in the classroom space (grimmett, 1997; kolb and kolb, 2005; fried, 2007; barton and tan, 2009; nash-ditzel and brown, 2012; cook-sather, 2014; stefaniak and tracey, 2015; ha and pepin, 2017; cook-sather, 2018). in a commentary on rethinking traditional pedagogies, fried (2007) summarises how co-constructed learning can allow students an opportunity to not only construct knowledge and meaning but to construct their sense of self, formulate their personal beliefs, and identify their individual purpose within society. when students can identify the purpose and value of their learning, they are able to better engage and invest in their education. co-constructing teaching and learning is a mechanism with which to encourage students to uncover that purpose and recognise reasons why learning matters, and to do so in ways that are important to the students. activator: learning through relationships the four outcomes of co-constructed student learning described in the results section (skill development, engagement, meaning-making, and having purpose) cannot exist without what i will call activators that facilitate learning in co-constructed educational environments. the literature revealed two major themes of these activators: relationships and safe spaces. for students to develop skills, become engaged in their learning, make meaning, and identify purpose within a co-constructed environment, meaningful relationships, interactions, and connections must exist, all of which are core tenets of constructivist, sociocultural, and third space learning theories. vespone co-constructing teaching and learning in higher education: a literature review of practices and implications journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27, april 2023 16 for the purposes of this paper as an activator in co-constructed learning spaces, relationships are multifaceted and include both interpersonal relationships (see jørgensen et al., 2020) and mediated (relational) knowledge between students and educational tools (see epistemological objects in damşa and muukkonen, 2020). in alignment with the zone of proximal development, numerous studies demonstrate how these relationships can exist between students and teachers, between students and other students, between students and learning tools, and/or between students and physical or mental spaces (wickman and östman, 2002; wickman, 2004; sidelinger and booth-butterfield, 2010; nash-ditzel and brown, 2012; cooksather, 2014; cook-sather, 2018; jørgensen et al., 2020; sisson et al., 2021). activator: creating a safe space for learning to take place through relationships, it interacts with the activator of creating a safe space. safe spaces allow students to express their ideas more freely and allow multiple voices to be heard, especially those typically marginalised and oppressed (barton and tan, 2009). to foster meaningful connections, students need to feel mentally and emotionally safe, respected, and comfortable in the space (barton and tan, 2009; kolb and kolb, 2005). kolb and kolb (2005) argue ‘when psychologically safe conditions are present… [a foundation for] … effective learning’ is created (p. 208). similarly, burress and peters (2015) write that ‘knowledge…was jointly constructed as they dialogued, taught, and learned with one another in the comfortable and safe environment that they had developed together’ (p. 11). the deeper knowledge students were able to develop, beyond regurgitation of fact and memorisation, was in part due to the safe space that had already been established in the classroom, sustained by using dialogue and third space meaning-making strategies. to create safe spaces, a variety of tools and strategies exist to help develop and sustain that psychologically safe space. these strategies include small group discussions, intentional dialogues, storytelling, active listening on the part of the teacher and peers, removal of hierarchy and power dynamics, and openness to giving and receiving feedback (kolb and kolb, 2005; sidelinger and booth-butterfield, 2010; burress and peters, 2015; ha and pepin, 2017; cook-sather, 2018). vespone co-constructing teaching and learning in higher education: a literature review of practices and implications journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27, april 2023 17 relationships between outcomes and activators none of the major thematic outcomes (skill development, engagement, meaning-making, having purpose) or activators (learning through relationships, creation of safe spaces) exist in isolation from each other. based on the findings of this review, student skill development is reliant on having a sense of purpose and being engaged in the content. engagement is facilitated by having a sense of purpose and making meaning out of a task. being engaged in learning promotes and sustains its purpose and further develops meaning-making, yet in order to make sense of that meaning, there must be an inherent purpose. none of these elements can be nurtured or explored without the existence of relationships (both to educational tools and to others) or a safe space. i created a conceptual framework to better understand how the elements work together. the activators continuously circle around the four themes to keep them supported and active. see figure 1 for a visual representation of these themes and activators as well as the relationships between them. figure 1. outcomes and activators of co-constructed learning. vespone co-constructing teaching and learning in higher education: a literature review of practices and implications journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27, april 2023 18 discussion implications for teachers as demonstrated by the literature, numerous implications exist for the roles co-constructed approaches play in student learning processes. the studies reviewed for this paper demonstrated implications for teachers as well as for students. recognising that it is impossible to separate teaching from learning, the following section aims to focus on the implications for teachers, while recognising that implications for students directly connect to implications for teachers and vice versa. teaching methods the methods associated with constructivist approaches to learning emphasise learnercentred teaching methods, both collaborative and individual, such as inquiry learning, problem-based learning, resource-based learning, project-based learning with practical application, collaborative learning, and case-based learning (prince and felder, 2006; wang, 2007; mascolo, 2009; stefaniak and tracey, 2015). all these methods allow students to explore the content themselves rather than have content solely provided to them by an expert. by structuring the classroom in constructivist methods, teachers allow students to engage in more meaningful learning. classroom instructors hoping to tap into these deeper influences must work to frame their activities and classroom structure in an intentional and specific way to allow sociocultural and third space elements room to emerge and thrive. refer to studies by wickman and östman (2002), towers and loynes’s (2018), and sisson et al. (2021) for more details and examples of teaching methodologies, pedagogies, and structures conducive to deeper learning rooted in cultural and personal lived experiences in undergraduate university settings. vespone co-constructing teaching and learning in higher education: a literature review of practices and implications journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27, april 2023 19 classroom activities individual agency contributes to feelings of belonging, engagement, and a sense of purpose. to promote student agency, some authors encouraged the elimination of predetermined lesson planning and rigid class agendas to allow for students to select topics of interests and provide ideas/feedback for course activities (damşa, nerland and andreadakis, 2019; sisson et al., 2021). this flexibility allows for the inclusion of content that students find relevant, thus promoting engagement and investment in their education. utilising topics from popular culture and current events, the use of modern technologies, and incorporating variations in forms of communication and engagement (such as using the internet to facilitate discussion) are some of the ways in which teachers co-construct learning with their students while also tapping into the third space (kolb and kolb, 2005; nash-ditzel and brown, 2012; jørgensen et al., 2020). giving students a voice in curriculum development and/or the creation of class activities is a way to provide a stronger sense of purpose in their education (kolb and kolb, 2005; fried, 2007; nash-ditzel and brown, 2012; kessler, 2013). other examples of co-constructed learning classroom activities in the literature include: storytelling and dialogue (meaning the process of listening, commenting, and reflecting beyond a back-and-forth discussion) (kessler, 2013; kolb and kolb, 2005); small group work (kolb and kolb, 2005; wang, 2007; sidelinger and booth-butterfield, 2010; stefaniak and tracey, 2015 damşa and muukkonen, 2020); briefing and debriefing with the instructor (pedrosa-de-jesus, guerra and watts, 2019; stefaniak and tracey, 2015; towers and loynes, 2018); reflective exercises, both verbal and written (stefaniak and tracey, 2015; towers and loynes, 2018); and giving and receiving feedback from peers and instructors (pedrosa-de-jesus, guerra and watts, 2019). employing a variety of activities that tap into different learning styles, such as written tasks, spoken word, artistic assignments, kinesthetic methods, group work, and individual work, can help meet a wide range of student needs (fried, 2007). it is important to note that all these teaching methods and course activities to create a co-constructed classroom require action and influence on the part of both the student and the teacher. vespone co-constructing teaching and learning in higher education: a literature review of practices and implications journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27, april 2023 20 role of the teacher across the literature reviewed in this paper, authors described teachers in a variety of ways, such as facilitator, coach, guide, co-learner, and scaffolder. to challenge the traditional pedagogy of teacher-as-expert, teachers’ interactions within the classroom rely heavily on honoring student experience, empowering student agency, listening openly and actively, and promoting dialogue (kolb and kolb, 2005; wang, 2007; sisson et al., 2021). reducing or removing the power differential in the classroom is a crucial aspect in giving space for student voice and agency. teachers work to approach their students more as colleagues or partners in the learning process, rather than subordinates (wang, 2007; johnston, 2009; bovill, 2013; cook-sather, 2014; insua, lantz and armstrong, 2018). this is not to say that teachers no longer carry content expertise. in line with vygotsky’s zpd, it is essential for teachers to utilise their experience, skills, and knowledge as a mechanism for furthering student development. duffy and cunningham (1996) captured this distinction well: it is not so much that the teacher is seen as less important, rather the role of the teacher changes so that the focus is on aiding or providing the scaffolding for the learners rather than telling the learner. we fully appreciate this goal of decentering the teacher as the fount of knowledge (p. 16). a co-constructed classroom allows for the teacher to still serve in that scaffolder role without neglecting the value of the student’s role (wickman, 2004; morrone and tarr, 2005; nashditzel and brown, 2012; cook-sather, 2014; faraon et al., 2020; jørgensen et al., 2020; roberts, 2016). the power dynamic is altered in a way that no longer centres a teacher’s expertise as the governing authority of student learning but as an escort, supporting students along the way in their own process of creating and constructing knowledge. the teaching methods, pedagogical approaches, and classroom activities discussed previously, such as creating flexible lessons plans, capitalising on dialogue and group work, using student input in curriculum design, helping students understand the relevance of the content, making connections to real life, and providing frequent feedback, are a few examples of ways in which teachers can redistribute power in the classroom while still embracing the vespone co-constructing teaching and learning in higher education: a literature review of practices and implications journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27, april 2023 21 zpd role of expert (sidelinger and booth-butterfield, 2010; kessler, 2013; stefaniak and tracey, 2015). because these approaches are different from traditional pedagogical models, it is not surprising that teachers may find them challenging, confusing, and/or overwhelming (cook-sather, 2014; roberts, 2016). barriers to the creation of a co-constructed learning environment since co-constructed learning challenges traditional pedagogical approaches, it is understandable that barriers to implementation exist. primarily, a co-constructed classroom requires a rebalance of power and restructuring of classroom goals that incorporates the learner’s self-direction and internal motivation while also considering both the students’ and teachers' worldviews, priorities, and lived experiences. teachers must be invested in this restructure, including having a positive attitude and philosophical buy-in, and they must let go of rigid agendas and a sense of control in favour of allowing the students to direct the flow of the learning (grimmett, 1997; kolb and kolb, 2005; sidelinger and booth-butterfield, 2010; bovill, 2013; kessler, 2013; mott and lohr, 2015; roberts, 2016; ha and pepin, 2017; damşa, nerland and andreadakis, 2019). in addition, the expectations imposed on university instructors (such as evaluations, requirements for tenure, pressure to focus on the latest content theories, etc.) may directly conflict with the freedom needed for constructivist learning (nash-ditzel and brown, 2012; ha and pepin, 2017; jørgensen et al., 2020). teachers may be struggling with a sense of loss of control and need time to adjust to the new dynamics and to undo years of learned classroom hierarchies and divided responsibilities (burress and peters, 2015). to properly facilitate the co-construction of a viable learning space, beyond the role of the teacher, resources are needed, such as physical infrastructures, technology, knowledge and expertise, curriculum development, learning activities, reading/writing materials, qualified teachers, and staff support (kolb and kolb, 2005; bovill, 2013; damşa, nerland and andreadakis, 2019). if an institution wants to truly embrace a co-constructed learning dynamic, they must implement programmes around a centralised mission (at an institutional and/or programme level) and with appropriate support including proper faculty/staff, sufficient vespone co-constructing teaching and learning in higher education: a literature review of practices and implications journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27, april 2023 22 resources, experiential opportunities and a scaffolded curriculum (kolb and kolb, 2005; damşa, nerland and andreadakis, 2019). the foundation on which co-constructed curricula can be designed and implemented rests on the ability for the institution to understand and embrace a new definition of learning. cautions for the co-constructed approach although much of the literature promotes a positive view of co-constructed learning, some authors offer words of caution when using this approach (grimmett, 1997; pillay, 2002; morrone and tarr, 2005; mascolo, 2009). morrone and tarr (2005) suggest that educators ought to use caution when implementing one specific theoretical model for teaching and learning; instead, educators should consider which teaching and learning applications work best and for whom. pillay also (2002) offers caution in the hyper-fixation of learner-centred approaches in higher education in that there has been too much focus on the procedural and logistical elements of implementing constructivist methods that specific student needs have been neglected. the shift to learner-centred approaches has ‘assumed a degree of universality in learners’ needs.... however, we know that the only universality in learners’ needs is variations’ (pillay, 2002, p. 94). if educators assume how the meaning-making will take shape and develop a generalised idea of how knowledge is constructed on behalf of their students, there is potential for missed learning opportunities and neglect of diverse student needs (pillay, 2002). other authors give warnings not to lose the role of teacher in a co-constructed classroom (mascolo, 2009; pillay, 2002). fundamentally, teachers still have an increased level of expertise, and their role is necessary in the zpd, but there is a fine line between offering guidance in a way that advances student learning and giving too much space for learning that the student becomes disengaged. mascolo (2009) said it well: ‘the idea that students must actively construct their skills and understandings for themselves is not the same as suggesting that children must actively construct their skills and understandings by themselves’ (p. 7, emphasis in original). therefore, although the goal is for students to coconstruct their knowledge and make meaning for themselves, the literature cautions teachers vespone co-constructing teaching and learning in higher education: a literature review of practices and implications journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27, april 2023 23 to keep hold of some aspects of the teacher-as-expert model, especially when the element of power is necessary to create an equitable learning environment and to advance student knowledge with new content. in summary, taking a co-constructed approach in a formal learning environment is not easy and must be done with intentionality. the literature suggests various types of activities, frameworks, and materials that can be used in the classroom to encourage a co-constructed approach. in addition, teachers must be aware of and give space for students’ lived experiences to have a place in the learning environment. in doing so, however, there is caution to a one-size-fits-all approach and requires attention to individual student needs. if done thoughtfully and intentionally, co-constructed approaches can have a meaningful, positive impact on student learning. conclusion the field of learning development is already pushing toward a reimagined model of teaching and learning, placing more responsibility on learners and designing learning environments that rely on engagement and participatory collaboration (roberts, 2016). co-constructed learning methods, which are collaborative and participatory by nature, challenge the teacheras-expert model and replace it with an approach that gives students a more active role in their own formal education. this review explored how constructivist, sociocultural, and third space theoretical approaches to teaching and learning manifest in real university classrooms. from the literature, four thematic outcomes of student learning (skill development, engagement, meaning-making, and having purpose) and two activators of student learning (learning through relationships and creating safe spaces) emerged as factors that may enhance teaching and learning. implications were identified for teaching, including teaching methods and classroom activities that align with co-constructed learning and the role of teachers. this review suggests that co-constructed approaches, when implemented strategically, can offer important benefits for teaching and learning. vespone co-constructing teaching and learning in higher education: a literature review of practices and implications journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27, april 2023 24 limitations although this paper attempts to cover a range of theoretical and empirical support, it is limited by the small sample of literature due to inclusion criteria. many studies were excluded because they pertained to compulsory education or graduate school environments. this review assumes generalisability of the implementation of co-constructed learning, leaving potential oversight of the differences in teacher abilities, availability of resources, scopes of practice, and institutional limitations. in addition, when conducting initial literature searches, i discovered a lack of consistency with terminology. sometimes authors referred to collaborative learning or learner-centred teaching methods but were not addressing constructivist theory (having students engage in group work or practice case studies does not give way to constructivism by default). therefore, it can be difficult to tease out which studies are framed in my theories of interest and which are using the same key words to explore something different. beyond identifying relevant literature, this paper is limited by the cultural influences of its empirical examples. all studies were based in countries with a general acceptance of individualism (i.e. not strong collectivist cultures). this could have a significant impact on the understanding, acceptance, and implementation of co-constructed approaches to teaching and learning in other settings of higher education. for cultures with a larger emphasis on power differentials and/or the expectation to respect authority, co-constructed methods in a classroom setting may be difficult to conduct, if able to exist at all. future research the process of collecting sources for this review generated a substantial amount of theoretical and anecdotal support for co-constructed, constructivist, sociocultural, and third space learning in university settings. fewer results with original research or empirical analysis were found, especially covering a variety of cultural contexts. this suggests that there is room for further research to empirically support (or challenge) the well-versed theories of how coconstructed learning takes shape, particularly in university settings and across diverse vespone co-constructing teaching and learning in higher education: a literature review of practices and implications journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27, april 2023 25 populations. furthermore, given the suggested use of popular culture and relevant societal topics in the classroom as a way to encourage student engagement, the juxtaposition between using culture as a teaching tool with the emerging literature to decolonise higher education creates a fascinating area of future research. in addition, further exploration could be given to the nuances between arts, social science, and stem-based courses. given the fundamental epistemological differences between fields, it could be hypothesised that co-constructed learning approaches may emerge differently between those contexts. additional empirical research could support further consideration, by both teachers and higher education administrators, of innovative approaches in teaching and learning beyond or in conjunction with traditional pedagogical methods. references barton, a. c. and tan, e. (2009) ‘funds of knowledge and discourses and hybrid space’, journal of research in science teaching, 46(1), pp.50-73. https://doi.org/10.1002/tea.20269 bohlmann, j. (2022) ‘decolonising learning development through reflective and relational practice’, journal of learning development in higher education, 24. https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.vi24.913 bovill, c. (2013) ‘students and staff co-creating curricula: an example of good practice in higher education?’, pp. 461-475, in dunne, l. and owen, d. (eds.) the student engagement handbook: practice in higher education. bingley: emerald. burress, m. d., and peters, j. m. (2015) ‘collaborative learning in a japanese language course: student and teacher experiences’, sage open, 5(2), pp.1-14. https://doi.org/10.1177/2158244015581016 https://doi.org/10.1002/tea.20269 https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.vi24.913 https://doi.org/10.1177/2158244015581016 vespone co-constructing teaching and learning in higher education: a literature review of practices and implications journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27, april 2023 26 cook, m. (2005) ‘‘a place of their own’: creating a classroom ‘third space’ to support a continuum of text construction between home and school’, literacy, 39(2), pp.85-90. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1741-4350.2005.00405.x cook-sather, a. (2014) ‘multiplying perspectives and improving practice: what can happen when undergraduate students collaborate with college faculty to explore teaching and learning’, instructional science, 42(1), pp.31-46. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11251-013-9292-3 cook-sather, a. (2018) ‘listening to equity-seeking perspectives: how students’ experiences of pedagogical partnership can inform wider discussions of student success’, higher education research and development, 37(5), pp.923-936. https://doi.org/10.1080/07294360.2018.1457629 council for the advancement of standards in higher education (cas). (2015) ‘cas learning and development outcomes’, in wells j. b. (ed.) cas professional standards for higher education (9th ed.). washington, dc: author. damşa, c. and muukkonen, h. (2020) ‘conceptualising pedagogical designs for learning through object-oriented collaboration in higher education’, research papers in education, 35(1), pp.82-104. https://doi.org/10.1080/02671522.2019.1677751 damşa, c., nerland, m. and andreadakis, z. e. (2019) ‘an ecological perspective on learner‐constructed learning spaces’, british journal of educational technology, 50(5), pp.2075-2089. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjet.12855 de royston, m. m., lee, c., nasir, n. s., and pea, r. (2020) ‘rethinking schools, rethinking learning’, phi delta kappan, 102(3), pp.8-13. https://doi.org/10.1177%2f0031721720970693 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1741-4350.2005.00405.x https://doi.org/10.1007/s11251-013-9292-3 https://doi.org/10.1080/07294360.2018.1457629 https://doi.org/10.1080/07294360.2018.1457629 https://doi.org/10.1080/02671522.2019.1677751 https://doi.org/10.1111/bjet.12855 https://doi.org/10.1177%2f0031721720970693 vespone co-constructing teaching and learning in higher education: a literature review of practices and implications journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27, april 2023 27 duffy, t. m. and cunningham, d. j. (1996) ‘constructivism: implications for the design and delivery of instruction’, pp. 1-31, in jonassen, d. h. (ed.) handbook of research for educational communications and technology (1st edn.). macmillan. elder-vass, d. (2012) ‘towards a realist social constructionism’, sociologia, problemas e prácticas, 70, pp.5-24. available at: https://journals.openedition.org/spp/1041 (accessed: 16 april 2023). faraon, m., rönkkö, k., wiberg, m. and ramberg, r. (2020) ‘learning by coding: a sociocultural approach to teaching web development in higher education’, education and information technologies, 25(3), pp.1759-1783. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10639019-10037-x fosnot, c. t., and perry, r. s. (1996) ‘constructivism: a psychological theory of learning’, in fosnot, c. t (ed.) constructivism: theory, perspectives, and practice, new york: teachers college press, pp.8-33. fried, b. (2007) ‘higher education's new play book: learning reconsidered’, about campus, 12(1), pp.2-7. https://doi.org/10.1002/abc.197 grimmett, p. p. (1997) ‘breaking the mold: transforming a didactic professor into a learnerfocused teacher educator’, counterpoints, 67, pp.121-136. https://www.jstor.org/stable/42975244 gutiérrez, k. d. (2008) ‘developing a sociocritical literacy in the third space’, reading research quarterly, 43(2), pp.148-164. https://doi.org/10.1598/rrq.43.2.3 gutiérrez, k. d., baquedano‐lópez, p., and tejeda, c. (1999) ‘rethinking diversity: hybridity and hybrid language practices in the third space’, mind, culture, and activity, 6(4), pp.286-303. https://doi.org/10.1080/10749039909524733 https://journals.openedition.org/spp/1041 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10639-019-10037-x https://doi.org/10.1007/s10639-019-10037-x https://doi.org/10.1002/abc.197 https://www.jstor.org/stable/42975244 https://doi.org/10.1598/rrq.43.2.3 https://doi.org/10.1080/10749039909524733 vespone co-constructing teaching and learning in higher education: a literature review of practices and implications journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27, april 2023 28 ha, l. and pepin, j. (2017) ‘experiences of nursing students and educators during the co-construction of clinical nursing leadership learning activities: a qualitative research and development study’, nurse education today, 55, pp.90-95. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nedt.2017.05.006 insua, g. m., lantz, c. and armstrong, a. (2018) ‘in their own words: using first-year student research journals to guide information literacy instruction’, libraries and the academy, 18(1), pp.141-161. https://doi.org/10.1353/pla.2018.0007 john-steiner, v. and mahn, h. (1996) ‘sociocultural approaches to learning and development: a vygotskian framework’, educational psychologist, 31(3-4), pp.191-206. https://doi.org/10.1080/00461520.1996.9653266 johnston, j. a. (2009) ‘changing course: locating third space in a college classroom’, the journal of faculty development, 23(2), pp.30-34. https://www.proquest.com/docview/214600919 jørgensen, m., mason, a., pedersen, r. and harrison, r. (2020) ‘the transformative learning potential in the hybrid space between technology and intercultural encounters’, journal of studies in international education, pp.1-16. https://doi.org/10.1177/1028315320976030 kessler, g. (2013) ‘collaborative language learning in co-constructed participatory culture’, calico journal, 30(3), pp.307-322. http://www.jstor.org/stable/calicojournal.30.3.307 kolb, a. y. and kolb, d. a. (2005) ‘learning styles and learning spaces: enhancing experiential learning in higher education’, academy of management learning and education, 4(2), pp.193-212. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40214287 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nedt.2017.05.006 https://doi.org/10.1353/pla.2018.0007 https://doi.org/10.1080/00461520.1996.9653266 https://www.proquest.com/docview/214600919 https://doi.org/10.1177/1028315320976030 http://www.jstor.org/stable/calicojournal.30.3.307 http://www.jstor.org/stable/40214287 vespone co-constructing teaching and learning in higher education: a literature review of practices and implications journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27, april 2023 29 long, d. (2012) ‘theories and models of student development’, in hinchliffe, l. j. and wong, m. a. (eds.) environments for student growth and development: librarians and student affairs in collaboration. chicago: association of college & research libraries, pp.41-55. available at: https://ir.library.illinoisstate.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1029&context=fpml (accessed: 24 april 2023). mascolo, m. f. (2009) ‘beyond student-centered and teacher-center pedagogy: teaching and learning as guided participation’, pedagogy and the human sciences, 1(1), pp.3-27. https://scholarworks.merrimack.edu/phs/vol1/iss1/6 (accessed: 16 april 2023) morrone, a. s. and tarr, t. a. (2005) ‘theoretical eclecticism in the college classroom’, innovative higher education, 30, pp.7-21. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10755-005-3290-6 moje, e. b., ciechanowski, k. m., kramer, k., ellis, l., carrillo, r., and collazo, t. (2004) ‘working toward third space in content area literacy: an examination of everyday funds of knowledge and discourse’, reading research quarterly, 39(1), pp.38-70. https://doi.org/10.1598/rrq.39.1.4 moll, l. c., amanti, c., neff, d., and gonzalez, n. (1992) ‘funds of knowledge for teaching: using a qualitative approach to connect homes and classrooms’, theory into practice, 31(2), pp.132-141. https://doi.org/10.1080/00405849209543534 mott, v. w. and lohr, k. d. (2014) ‘co-constructed curricula: an adult learning perspective’, in wang, v. and bryan, v. (eds.) andragogical and pedagogical methods for curriculum and program development. igi global. pp.81-100. https://doi.org/10.4018/978-1-4666-5872-1.ch005 https://ir.library.illinoisstate.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1029&context=fpml https://scholarworks.merrimack.edu/phs/vol1/iss1/6 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10755-005-3290-6 https://doi.org/10.1598/rrq.39.1.4 https://doi.org/10.1080/00405849209543534 https://doi.org/10.4018/978-1-4666-5872-1.ch005 vespone co-constructing teaching and learning in higher education: a literature review of practices and implications journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27, april 2023 30 nash-ditzel, s. and brown, t. (2012) freedoms in the classroom: cultivating a successful third space for literacy growth. language and literacy, 14(3), pp.95-111. https://doi.org/10.20360/g24g6t pedrosa-de-jesus, h., guerra, c. and watts, d. m. (2019) ‘active co-constructive written feedback: promoting students' critical thinking in a higher education context’, in conde-gonzález, m. á., sedano, f. j. r., llamas, c. f. and garcía-peñalvo, f. j. (eds.) proceedings of the seventh international conference on technological ecosystems for enhancing multiculturality. association for computing machinery. pp.129-136. https://doi.org/10.1145/3362789.3362825 pillay, h. k. (2002) ‘understanding learner-centredness: does it consider the diverse needs of individuals?’, studies in continuing education, 24(1), pp.93-102. https://doi.org/10.1080/01580370220130468 prince, m. j. and felder, r. m. (2006) ‘inductive teaching and learning methods: definitions, comparisons, and research bases’, journal of engineering education, 95(2), pp.123-138. https://doi.org/10.1002/j.2168-9830.2006.tb00884.x roberts, e. (2016) ‘active learning in higher education as a restorative practice: a lecturer’s reflections’, journal of learning development in higher education, 10. pp.1-15 https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.v0i10.292 sidelinger, r. j. and booth-butterfield, m. (2010) ‘co-constructing student involvement: an examination of teacher confirmation and student-to-student connectedness in the college classroom’, communication education, 59(2), pp.165-184. https://doi.org/10.1080/03634520903390867 sisson, j. h., lash, m., shin, a. m. and whitington, v. (2021) ‘co-constructed leadership in early childhood education’, international journal of leadership in education, pp.1-23. https://doi.org/10.1080/13603124.2021.1914350 https://doi.org/10.20360/g24g6t https://doi.org/10.1145/3362789.3362825 https://doi.org/10.1080/01580370220130468 https://doi.org/10.1002/j.2168-9830.2006.tb00884.x https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.v0i10.292 https://doi.org/10.1080/03634520903390867 https://doi.org/10.1080/13603124.2021.1914350 vespone co-constructing teaching and learning in higher education: a literature review of practices and implications journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27, april 2023 31 stefaniak, j. e. and tracey, m. w. (2015) ‘an exploration of student experiences with learner-centered instructional strategies’, contemporary educational technology, 6(2), pp.95-112. available at: https://dergipark.org.tr/en/pub/cet/issue/25740/271527 (accessed:18 april 2023). towers, d. and loynes, c. (2018) ‘finding new ways: developing a co-constructed approach to excursions in higher education’, journal of experiential education, 41(4), pp.369-381. https://doi.org/10.1177/1053825918808329 vygotsky, l. s. (1978) ‘interaction between learning and development’, in gauvain, m. and cole, m. (eds.) readings on the development of children. scientific american books, pp.34-40. wang, l. (2007) ‘sociocultural learning theories and information literacy teaching activities in higher education’, reference and user services quarterly, 47(2), pp.149158. https://www.jstor.org/stable/20864842 wertsch, j. v. and tulviste, p. (1992) ‘ls vygotsky and contemporary developmental psychology’, developmental psychology, 28(4), pp.548-557. https://doi.org/10.1037/0012-1649.28.4.548 wickman, p-o. (2004) ‘the practical epistemologies of the classroom: a study of laboratory work’, science education, 88(3), pp.325-344. https://doi.org/10.1002/sce.10129 wickman, p-o. and östman, l. (2002) ‘learning as discourse change: a sociocultural mechanism’, science education, 86(5), pp.601-623. https://doi.org/10.1002/sce.10036 https://dergipark.org.tr/en/pub/cet/issue/25740/271527 https://doi.org/10.1177/1053825918808329 https://www.jstor.org/stable/20864842 https://doi.org/10.1037/0012-1649.28.4.548 https://doi.org/10.1002/sce.10129 https://doi.org/10.1002/sce.10036 vespone co-constructing teaching and learning in higher education: a literature review of practices and implications journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27, april 2023 32 author details brianna vespone is a doctoral student at the university of rochester in rochester, ny, usa. both her career and research interests focus on theories of teaching and learning that support good practices for meaningful learning in the university classroom. licence ©2023 the author(s). this is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (cc-by 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. see http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. journal of learning development in higher education (jldhe) is a peer-reviewed open access journal published by the association for learning development in higher education (aldinhe). http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ co-constructing teaching and learning in higher education: a literature review of practices and implications abstract introduction defining traditional pedagogical methods offering an alternative theoretical framework epistemology of constructivism co-constructed learning sociocultural learning theory cultural third space learning theory methods results benefits and outcomes for student learning outcome: skill development outcome: engagement outcome: meaning-making outcome: having purpose activator: learning through relationships activator: creating a safe space relationships between outcomes and activators discussion implications for teachers teaching methods classroom activities role of the teacher barriers to the creation of a co-constructed learning environment cautions for the co-constructed approach conclusion limitations future research references author details licence journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special issue 25: aldinhe conference proceedings and reflections october 2022 re-framing writing (support): centring audience and purpose in a community nursing course silvia rossi mount royal university, canada lauren cross mount royal university, canada presentation abstract this presentation examined the longitudinal collaboration between our learning development team and the coordinators of a community nursing course. it began with the question to the development team: ‘are our demands of students with respect to paraphrasing and referencing reasonable?’ the assignment was a formal report on a semester-long group project where students partnered with a community agency. the coordinators worried that students (and lecturers) were putting too much emphasis on referencing and the technicalities of paraphrasing, to the detriment of engagement with the community nursing process itself. our learning development team eventually realised that the problem was not one of expectations, but rather a genre-audience mismatch. although the assignment was called a report, the emphasis on integrating scholarly sources made it more like an academic essay, and the tone and length of the report limited its practical use by most partner agencies. over time, by emphasising genre, audience and purpose, we have contributed to a gradual loosening of the hold on the original report format. last year, we provided feedback on a range of digital deliverables, including infographics, videos, and mind maps, with each one designed to meet the specific partner agency’s needs. our model of providing feedback on the report during one-hour in-person meetings has also evolved into a flexible combination of synchronous and asynchronous collaboration with students. we continue to guide students towards thoughtful, transparent source use, but the conversations around referencing and paraphrasing are now more holistic. in this presentation, we shared how our perspective, external to the discipline of nursing, has supported meaningful student learning about authentic (and impactful) writing for different contexts. rossi and cross re-framing writing (support): centring audience and purpose in a community nursing course journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25 2 community response there was real interest in using a tight focus on audience as a key question to drive exploration of writing with both staff and students. the context clearly resonated with colleagues who identified with student confusion about ‘who their audience is supposed (to be) and saw this as accounting for a lot of students’ difficulties with academic writing’. similarly, others found this ‘genre-audience mismatch’ and the importance of raising students’ awareness of audience as key learning points. this approach to analysing the drivers of writing was seen as new for some in the audience, and one that offered a different approach to mainstream uk study support material; the links to underpinning theory (see elbow, 1998; 1999), were appreciated. this case study offers a rich example of how to explore the tension and space between ‘style guide and generic convention’ and how the learning development team used definition of audience as a way in to collaboratively examine writing mode, purpose and detailed textual features. this led to much more creative engagement with the course team concerning forms of assessment. this focus on audience raised a number of larger questions, relevant beyond this specific university. as well as exploring the implications for ‘diversifying assessment and questioning the kinds of (multimodal) texts that are appropriate for academic assessment,’ the presentation also prompted some in the audience to consider the role of the learning development team in facilitating this conversation between faculty staff, students, external agencies and the assessment. it provided a detailed account of the “long, long conversations with faculty” (o’neill, 2010) where learning development morphs into educational development and curriculum redesign. it provides a piece of solid evidence of learning developers’ impact as the learning development team clearly contributed to the course team’s shifting their focus from ‘report’ and mechanics of academic writing to consider purpose, and form. authors’ reflection our journey with this community nursing course has taught us a great deal, but perhaps the most important takeaway is realising how impactful it can be to place audience and purpose at the centre of our discussions with students about the texts they create (whether those texts are spoken, written, or visual). our aldcon22 presentation confirmed that we rossi and cross re-framing writing (support): centring audience and purpose in a community nursing course journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25 3 are not alone among learning developers in recognising that students do not get opportunities to create authentic texts nearly often enough. students become accustomed to writing for their teachers at school, and then for their tutors at university, so it is no wonder they forget to consider audience needs when they have the chance to create a text for a different audience. as learning developers, we can encourage tutors to boost the authenticity factor in the assignments they give students, and to write assignment briefs so that audience and purpose become more salient. when we work with students, we can commit to emphasising audience and purpose--even when we recognise that an assignment’s sole audience is the tutor. making connections to text genres that exist outside of the higher education context can help students to see the broader relevance of their assignments and the transferability of the communication abilities they are cultivating. in courses/assignments that do not involve community-based work or public-facing deliverables, sometimes the audience will be much less clear. in conversations with lecturers, learning developers can mention the benefits of students having opportunities to share their work with each other or with the public, or at the very least with an imaginary but clearly defined audience. in cases where it makes sense for the instructor to be the only audience, at least initially (e.g. for an essay that is not being turned into a bigger project), it seems worthwhile to make clearer to students why they are doing that assignment. how is that piece of formal academic writing helping them meet learning objectives? why is paraphrasing or citation or essay writing an important skill in and of itself, and something the instructor should be assessing? our colleague was right to bring up the systemic question of what makes academic writing worthwhile if students do not need it outside of the university. maybe this focus on audience might address that question, and make assignments more meaningful to students? aldcon22 gave us the opportunity to deeply analyse our involvement in this nursing course. writing the conference proposal abstract was a first step towards crystallising our thoughts on how our support has evolved over the years and what it actually means. then, as we prepared our presentation in advance of the conference, we discussed and debated our ideas more thoroughly. we attempted to pinpoint the factors that have allowed our involvement to expand and our influence to grow. and we asked ourselves, constantly, • what will learning developer colleagues already know?” • what might they want to know? rossi and cross re-framing writing (support): centring audience and purpose in a community nursing course journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25 4 • what do we have to offer that could possibly be new--or at the very least, interesting?” next steps we have identified specific actions and orientations that we are sure will contribute to greater success with future projects. firstly, we are going to add a section on audience and genre to an existing workshop entitled ‘university writing: decoded,’ which focuses on different types of assignments and arguments. secondly, we are going to be more assertive in bringing attention to audience and genre in our conversations with lecturers, especially when those conversations take place as an assignment brief is being developed or redesigned. in those moments, lecturers are most likely to be open to re-orienting assignments towards a genre that matches a particular audience and purpose. acknowledgements thank you to robert ping-nan chang, university of arts london, cathy malone, university of leeds, and lindsay heggie, queen’s university at kingston, canada, for your reflections that have contributed to this piece. references elbow, p. (1998) writing without teachers. 2nd ed. oxford: oxford university press. elbow, p. (1999) using the collage for collaborative writing. composition studies, 27(1), 714. o'neill, g. (2010) initiating curriculum revision: exploring the practices of educational developers, international journal for academic development, 15(1), 61-71, doi: 10.1080/13601440903529927 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13601440903529927 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13601440903529927 rossi and cross re-framing writing (support): centring audience and purpose in a community nursing course journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25 5 further reading abegglen, s., burns, t. and sinfield, s., (2021) supporting student writing and other modes of learning and assessment: a staff guide. prism. https://prism.ucalgary.ca/handle/1880/113457 abegglen, s., burns, t. and sinfield, s. (2017) ‘really free!’: strategic interventions to foster students' academic writing skills. journal of educational innovation, partnership and change, 3(1), 251-255. http://dx.doi.org/10.21100/jeipc.v3i1.589 molinari, j. (2022) what makes writing academic: rethinking theory for practice. london: bloomsbury. author details silvia rossi is a writing and learning strategist at mount royal university in calgary, canada. her primary role is to support students, through one-to-one consultations and group sessions, as they develop the skills, strategies and mindsets needed to become confident, self-directed learners and academic writers. her background is in tesol, and she takes a particular interest in helping students understand the intersection between academic integrity and transparent source use. lauren cross is a writing and learning strategist at mount royal university in calgary, canada. she has a background in english literature and professional editing, and she loves helping students build their confidence as writers and critical thinkers in 1-1, small group, and classroom settings. lauren is interested in innovating embedded and scaffolded academic writing instruction, and she also helps coordinate supports for students and faculty working with non-traditional digital writing assignments. https://prism.ucalgary.ca/handle/1880/113457 http://dx.doi.org/10.21100/jeipc.v3i1.589 re-framing writing (support): centring audience and purpose in a community nursing course presentation abstract community response authors’ reflection next steps acknowledgements references further reading author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special issue 25: aldinhe conference proceedings and reflections october 2022 ________________________________________________________________________ 1students’ view of hybrid assessment patricia perlman-dee university of manchester, uk presentation abstract this lightning talk aimed to evaluate and explain the outcome of students’ opinions on a hybrid assessment. it shared with the audience take away learnings, ideas, and tips from a postgraduate formative assessment that was delivered as a group presentation. the students had the opportunity to deliver in three separate formats: complete group delivering face-toface, hybrid group delivery, and all virtual delivery. the talk discussed the students' perception of ‘best form of delivery’, ‘fairness and equal opportunities’, and acting with professionalism, as well as final outcomes of the assessment. community response the talk highlighted a perception gap between students and clients regarding the value of hybrid assessments, with students valuing face-to-face more while clients saw no difference between face-to-face or online. i have had similar experiences with similar projects to assess students' pitches. the value of having a blended or hybrid approach is that it opens up participation where geography is a barrier. i wonder if it would help the students to consider how that opportunity to pitch might be framed if only face-to-face or online was offered as an option. who would be included/excluded? how does their experience pitching reflect the realities of the modern workplace? perlman-dee students’ view of hybrid assessment journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 2 author’s reflection the students' views and perceptions of hybrid delivery’s outcome are not necessarily based on reality, but on perception. this was a case study of a formative assessment; however, a similar study has also been done of a summative assessment. the outcome of the summative assessment showed no disadvantage in grades awarded based on the mode of delivery. the timing of when a hybrid presentation has taken place is essential. in the initial post-lockdown period of the covid-19 pandemic, there was limited experience of hybrid learning. there was the option of doing solely virtual or solely face-to-face learning. however, at this stage, it seemed like students were craving human contact and technology was less of a concern for hybrid teaching: benavidez states that ‘teacher-student interaction cannot be replaced by technology’ (2019, p.35). however, a common pitfall of hybrid course design is creating inclass activities and out-of-class experiences that are related to one another, but not explicitly connected for students in the hybrid classroom (linder, 2017). this could make students reluctant to engage with hybrid learning. in contrast to this, the future of learning report states that remote learners feel remote learning removes educator bias. it states that black and asian people feel more comfortable fully learning online, which could impact diversity and equality as well as unconscious bias (future learn, 2022). after the second covid-19 lockdown, students seemed more technologically aware and had a lot more experience of virtual delivery. confidence in a completely virtual delivery seemed higher than for hybrid and, to an extent, face-to-face learning. a definition of hybrid learning is ‘education in which the face-to-face classroom experience is combined with or replaced by an online experience’ (dictionary.com, 2022). in this context for assessment, students are physically together, whilst clients are virtual. this type of arrangement seemed to be less preferred. following the pandemic many workplaces have shifted to hybrid working arrangements. a study by ons claims that hybrid working is here to stay (office for national statistics, 2022). a study by beno shows that ‘hybrid workers are often more supporting, caring, rewarding, forgiving and inspiring than cubicle workers’ (2021). as hybrid arrangements don’t seem to be going anywhere soon, students should consider how their attitude and perception of hybrids can impact them when entering into the professional world. https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?ozrlp9 https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?yflc6n https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?dw6pxi https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?dw6pxi https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?82zvvq perlman-dee students’ view of hybrid assessment journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 3 acknowledgments thank you to all the contributors who shared their reflections and enriched our insight into this conference presentation and its impact on the audience. special thanks go to anne-marie langford from the university of northampton. references benavidez, t. b. (2019) ‘a review of voices: online and hybrid classroom education’, ortesol journal, 36, pp.34-36. beno, m. (2021) ‘on-site and hybrid workplace culture of positivity and effectiveness: case study from austria’, academic journal of interdisciplinary studies, 10(5). https://doi.org/10.36941/ajis-2021-0142. dictionary.com (2022) [website] available at: www.dictionary.com (accessed: 17 october 2022). future learn (2022) the future of learning report. available at: https://www.futurelearn.com/info/thefutureoflearning (accessed: 26 october 2022). linder, k. e. (2017) ‘fundamentals of hybrid teaching and learning’, new directions for teaching and learning, 149, pp.11-18. https://doi.org/10.1002/tl.20222. office for national statistics (2022) is hybrid working here to stay? available at: https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/employmentandem ployeetypes/articles/ishybridworkingheretostay/2022-05-23 (accessed: 17 october 2022). https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?i1wt2r https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?i1wt2r https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?i1wt2r https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?i1wt2r https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?i1wt2r http://www.proquest.com/docview/2544548319/abstract/80216d6e92384749pq/1 https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?i1wt2r https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?i1wt2r https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?i1wt2r https://doi.org/10.36941/ajis-2021-0142 http://www.dictionary.com/ https://www.futurelearn.com/info/thefutureoflearning https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?i1wt2r https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?i1wt2r https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?i1wt2r https://doi.org/10.1002/tl.20222 https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?i1wt2r https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/employmentandemployeetypes/articles/ishybridworkingheretostay/2022-05-23 https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/employmentandemployeetypes/articles/ishybridworkingheretostay/2022-05-23 perlman-dee students’ view of hybrid assessment journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 4 author details patricia perlman-dee, cfa, is a senior lecturer in finance at ambs. she has a master’s in finance and a pgce and is the employability lead at ambs. patricia has extensive experience working in large financial corporations such as citigroup, jp morgan, nomura and barclays in manchester, london, and new york. patricia teaches a range of courses at the university of manchester across all levels. in 2021, 2020, and 2019, patricia was awarded the faculty of humanities outstanding teaching award. she regularly presents at several educational conferences such as herdsa, edulearn, chartered association of business schools, and advance he conferences. 1students’ view of hybrid assessment presentation abstract community response author’s reflection acknowledgments references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special issue 25: aldinhe conference proceedings and reflections october 2022 ________________________________________________________________________ the impact of departmental academic skills provision on student wellbeing louise frith university of york, uk leah maitland university of york, uk james lamont university of york, uk presentation abstract student wellbeing in uk higher education is of serious concern, with high rates of stress and anxiety recorded among students (pereira et al., 2019). this is compounded for international students who speak english as a second or third language. however, international students are an integral part of higher education in the united kingdom, comprising 40.3% of the total postgraduate student population, with chinese students constituting 15.6 % of all international students in uk higher education institutions (stern, 2021). strategies that are specifically designed for international students that support wellbeing are somewhat lacking across the sector (shu et al., 2020). shu et al. comment that to justify the economic and academic advantages that international students bring, heis should improve the quality of international students’ experience and identify factors that impact their successful transition. sheridan (2011) suggests that this should include academic literacy development. we were particularly influenced by quan, he and sloan’s 2016 four stage model of chinese postgraduate students’ academic adjustment in uk higher education. their model suggests interventions targeted before students start, then at the point of highest stress (approximately week four), then as the year progresses allowing more time for student interaction, and finally towards the end encouraging more student-led questions and sharing their learning. frith, maitland and lamont the impact of departmental academic skills provision on student wellbeing journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 2 at the university of york many postgraduate taught programmes are dominated by international students. in response to this, york has recently established a new facultybased team called dacs (departmental academic and communication skills). the aim of this initiative is to embed academic and communication skills into students’ programmes of study in the form of weekly two-hour academic skills classes. this small-scale study is based on the experience of teaching ma education students, 95% of whom are chinese. classes focus on developing students’ understanding of critical thinking and writing, supporting their academic reading, and ensuring that they understand academic conventions in the uk, such as referencing and academic writing structure. classes also provide another layer of support and social interaction for students which we hope supports student wellbeing. we surveyed 40 students about how the classes support their participation and interaction, alleviate anxiety, and help to develop their sense of belonging. we followed this up with students interviewing each other on their experiences of academic skills development classes. the interviews were carried out in english. the students interviewed each other to allow them to rephrase, adapt, and clarify questions so that they could communicate more fluently. six students participated in the interviews. members of the teaching team observed the interviews and took notes. this paper will report on our findings and make recommendations for how to further improve support for international pgts. community response this presentation explored the connection between student belonging and academic success looking specifically at a cohort of international students. this broad topic has long been a focus of interest to the wider uk higher education sector with over a decade of research from the higher education academy (see for example their what works? student retention and success programme), and similar research from the higher education policy institute which explores how crucial a ‘sense of belonging’ is to a student's overall experience and success (neves and hewitt, 2021). this presentation can be seen as adding to that ongoing work to understand this connection while supporting international students to develop their academic skills. there was keen interest in the presentation, provoking reflection concerning this model of embedded, co-curricular provision affordances, something wingate (2015) describes as https://www.advance-he.ac.uk/guidance/teaching-and-learning/student-retention-and-success/what-works-student-retention-and-success-change-programme https://www.advance-he.ac.uk/guidance/teaching-and-learning/student-retention-and-success/what-works-student-retention-and-success-change-programme frith, maitland and lamont the impact of departmental academic skills provision on student wellbeing journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 3 academic literacy across the curriculum. there was particular interest in the pedagogic and affective implications for learning development, as the program was ongoing: ‘you are seeing students on a regular basis and [are able to] build a relationship with them over time’. this mode of delivery positions learning development staff to engage students quite differently to that of more traditional ld structures, such as workshops and appointments. colleagues observed that working with a cohort over a term would open up possibilities for developing ‘belonging within academic spaces’ and would thus support learning development to extend beyond academic skill development to include student wellbeing. parallels were identified with other forms of ongoing embedded, disciplinary support such as peer assisted learning sessions (pals). this presentation focused on exploring these themes with a predominantly international student cohort. the audience were intrigued by particular features of the intercultural space and reflections from the speakers on their changing interpretations of the importance and meaning of silence in the classroom. one colleague noted ‘the point about silence not always being passive is particularly important for us to reflect on as practitioners’. the sharing of recent research data and inviting the audience to contribute their interpretation also stimulated a lot of active reflection: i was intrigued by the students who ‘strongly disagreed’ that the classes reduced their anxiety – it seemed like such a strongly held feeling (not just disagree or neutral). i wonder what is behind this. sometimes students say to us that their anxiety increases because they become more aware of the extent of what is involved in postgraduate level study so their sense of confidence or expectations are challenged, which can be painful. the interaction between presenters and audience supported a collaborative interpretation of student feedback; this collective analysis seemed particularly successful as it included negative feedback, which was eagerly received by the audience and suggested an open, authentic discussion. this discussion contributes to the relatively modest literature on learning from failure in academia (e.g., hains-wesson, 2022) that seems particularly pertinent to learning developers who routinely move between learning development service evaluations and more scholarly enquiry. this change in mode of delivery and frith, maitland and lamont the impact of departmental academic skills provision on student wellbeing journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 4 context of engagement naturally requires a concomitant change in approach to evaluation. authors’ reflection delivering the paper at the conference has made us work together as a team to think about what has worked well this year and what we can do in the coming years to make further improvements. the three themes that we picked to focus on – student interaction, belonging, and academic anxiety were elements that we felt were important and interesting because they were frequently mentioned in the questionnaire data from students, and they were regular topics of conversation in our weekly planning meetings. the conference keynote (bali, 2022) and some of the sessions from the online day have inspired us to introduce new ways to try to engage students earlier in the academic year. it was interesting that a member of the audience picked up on the point about silence being a form of communication. as teachers in uk universities, we are troubled by silence, but we perhaps need to find ways of being more comfortable with silence and encourage students to participate and engage in our classes in non-verbal ways. over the year we have used different techniques to support students’ non-verbal participation. for example, through the use of technologies such as mentimeter and xerte. we also ask students to work in small groups and nominate one person to report back. like much of the audience, we found the question of student silence to be interesting and worthy of further study. this is an area of work which we will continue to investigate. the reflection on the students who expressed strong negative emotions about the classes also prompted discussion among the team. some students remain uncomfortable at being asked to answer questions, others perhaps have a realisation that what they thought they were good at, for example, memorisation and reproduction, is not highly valued in the uk system. our plans for next year will include a greater emphasis on induction activities to help students to interact with each other and support them to feel comfortable in the classroom. we will also place a greater emphasis on co-curricular activities which were highlighted by students as ways in which they could interact and feel a sense of belonging. however, the students we teach are a very long way from home, and uk he culture is very different from the environment they have grown up in. for some students perhaps frith, maitland and lamont the impact of departmental academic skills provision on student wellbeing journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 5 achieving a sense of belonging within a one-year master’s is too much to expect: a sense of connection might be a more realistic goal. this experience of community and shared discussion, with our team and the larger aldcon community acted as a catalyst for our own reflections as a team on our work. it was very useful to be able to share results and feedback. thank you to the attendees for a collaborative and collegiate discussion of the key issues involved. next steps the next steps in this project are based on quan, he and sloan’s 2016 four stage model. we plan to work with existing students to get them to share their learning to produce three short videos aimed at new students which address the three areas: participation and interaction, academic anxiety, and belonging. we know from our work with the students that they are passionate about these issues, so we want them to take ownership of the project. we will do this using a strengths-based approach (rapp and goscha, 2006). this means that we will facilitate the project but allow students to direct and manage their own work on it using their existing skills, strengths, knowledge, and connections. we hope that the videos will be ready to use with next year's intake of pgt students (october 2022). the videos will help us to address stages one (induction) and two (the point of highest stress) of quan’s model. we are planning to evaluate the process of co-production of the videos and to survey students who watch the videos and get feedback from them on the key aims of participation, reducing anxiety, and developing a sense of belonging. our aim is to be able to share the videos and our students' responses to them with the aldinhe community next year. acknowledgements special thanks to laura key, leeds beckett university, michelle reid, oxford brookes university, joshua manning, university of plymouth, cathy malone, university of leeds, and lindsay heggie queen’s university at kingston, canada, for sharing your generous and thoughtful reflections on this presentation. frith, maitland and lamont the impact of departmental academic skills provision on student wellbeing journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 6 references bali, m. (2022) ‘the delicate balance of community, care and compassion in equityfocused education’, the aldinhe conference. university of northampton, northampton 14-15 june. hains-wesson, r. (2022) ‘something went terribly wrong: failing successfully’, higher education research & development, 41(3), pp.729-742. https://doi.org/10.1080/07294360.2021.1872056. neves, j. and hewitt, r. (2021) student academic experience survey 2021: report on behalf of the higher education policy institute and advance he, https://www.hepi.ac.uk/2021/06/24/the-student-academic-experience-survey-2021/ (accessed: 21 october 2022). pereira, s., reay, k., bottell, j., walker, l. and dzikiti, c. (2019) university student mental health survey: the insight network. https://uploadsssl.webflow.com/561110743bc7e45e78292140/5c7d4b5d314d163fecdc3706_ment al%20health%20report%202018.pdf (accessed: 7 january 2022). quan, r., he, x. and sloan, d. (2016) ‘examining chinese postgraduate students’ academic adjustment in the uk higher education sector: a process-based stage model’, teaching in higher education, 21(3), pp.326-343. https://doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2016.1144585. rapp, c. a. and goscha, j. r. (2006) the strengths model: case management with people with psychiatric disabilities. 2nd edn. oxford: oxford university press. sheridan, v. (2011) ‘a holistic approach to international students, institutional habitus and academic literacies in an irish third level institution’, higher education, 62, pp.129140. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-010-9370-2. shu, f., ahmed, s., pickett, m., ayman, r. and mcabee, s. (2020) ‘social support perceptions, network characteristics and international student adjustment’, https://doi.org/10.1080/07294360.2021.1872056 https://www.hepi.ac.uk/2021/06/24/the-student-academic-experience-survey-2021/ https://www.hepi.ac.uk/2021/06/24/the-student-academic-experience-survey-2021/ https://uploads-ssl.webflow.com/561110743bc7e45e78292140/5c7d4b5d314d163fecdc3706_mental%20health%20report%202018.pdf https://uploads-ssl.webflow.com/561110743bc7e45e78292140/5c7d4b5d314d163fecdc3706_mental%20health%20report%202018.pdf https://uploads-ssl.webflow.com/561110743bc7e45e78292140/5c7d4b5d314d163fecdc3706_mental%20health%20report%202018.pdf https://doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2016.1144585 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-010-9370-2 frith, maitland and lamont the impact of departmental academic skills provision on student wellbeing journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 7 international journal of intercultural relations, 74, pp.136-148. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijintrel.2019.11.002. stern, v. (2021) international facts and figures 2019. universities uk international. https://www.universitiesuk.ac.uk/universities-uk-international/insights-andpublications/uuki-publications/international-facts-and-figures-2021 (accessed: 21 october 2022). wingate, u (2015) ‘academic literacy across the curriculum’, plenary address international conference on english across the curriculum. hong kong polytechnic university, hong kong 14-15 december. author details louise frith is an academic skills lecturer at the university of york. she has published three books for students: professional writing for social workers, the students' guide to peer mentoring, and mindfulness and wellbeing for student learning. leah maitland is a qualified efl teacher, conference interpreter and translator with over a decade’s experience of teaching english for academic purposes at universities in the uk, france, belgium, and germany. her professional interests are student confidence and motivation, critical thinking, and academic writing. james lamont is academic skills advisor for the department of education and associate lecturer at the university of york. he is interested in criticality and academic anxiety among postgraduate students. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijintrel.2019.11.002 https://www.universitiesuk.ac.uk/universities-uk-international/insights-and-publications/uuki-publications/international-facts-and-figures-2021 https://www.universitiesuk.ac.uk/universities-uk-international/insights-and-publications/uuki-publications/international-facts-and-figures-2021 the impact of departmental academic skills provision on student wellbeing presentation abstract community response authors’ reflection next steps acknowledgements references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special edition 25: aldinhe conference proceedings and reflections october 2022 ________________________________________________________________________ designing for diverse learners lee fallin university of hull thomas tomlinson university of hull presentation abstract learning and teaching are only sustainable if accessible and inclusive. for this reason, we produced the designing for diverse learners poster, a set of easy to follow guidance on developing learning resources to support learners with a variety of needs. this poster (figure 1) has been adopted by many institutions and has had a significant impact on practice for many teaching in higher education. this conference session launched the next version of the designing for diverse learners poster – a fully interactive and digital version that includes how and why each of these design decisions is made. an accompanying website was demonstrated for the first time, and delegates were invited to consider ways in which it could support their learning and development practice, give feedback, and suggest further improvements. the idea of ‘diverse learners’ is fundamental to the poster resource and to its use by learning developers. the practices outlined in our new website will benefit every learner – including those who may require specific adjustments. we hope the new version of the poster and the accompanying website will help support the development of greater access and inclusion in learning development practice. https://doi.org/10.25416/ntr.16840531.v1 fallin and tomlinson designing for diverse learners journal of learning development in higher education special issue 25 october 2022 2 figure 1. designing for diverse learners poster. community response respondents commented not only on the practical value of the resource but were anticipating and openly sharing how it would bring about change in their own practice and potentially their wider networks and institutional contexts. respondents shared that the resource reminded them about the power of simple design and visual representation, reflecting on how we can often become reliant purely on text to convey information as educators. it was noted that the use of relevant icons and graphics alongside text is a powerful technique that we can all employ across different mediums such as powerpoint fallin and tomlinson designing for diverse learners journal of learning development in higher education special issue 25 october 2022 3 and web resources, and that the designing for diverse learners poster will be a helpful quick reference point. a key theme here was the recognition that the project was a creation driving positive change, rather than a vehicle for condemning or blaming shortcomings in the sector. one respondent offered reflections in support of the idea that we should consciously avoid an ‘adversarial’ approach when promoting accessibility because it is counterproductive and often happens subconsciously. there was also an openness to reflecting on individual and collective practice using this tool by the ‘change champions’. a respondent observed that the poster could be used as a teaching aid in poster sessions with students, as well as an aid for their own practice. others noted that the online resources were being made publicly available online, enabling colleagues at other institutions to access them and direct academic colleagues to them in order to further promote good accessible design practice. editorial comments one way of conceptualising the dynamic of this conference session is to consider both the authors and their audience as part of a wider change initiative – in this case, the reception of the work of ‘change agents’ (fallin and tomlinson) by a community of ‘change champions’ (learning developers) (pearson et al., 2019). learning development practitioners are key stakeholders in the designing for diverse learners project, and this conference session offered a valuable opportunity for contributions to a process of continuing, iterative improvement – initially, to the poster, and more broadly to good practice. it seems worth acknowledging here the congruence between this rich, collective reflection on a ‘change initiative’, the #aldcon22 forum, and its host the university of northampton – a ‘global changemaker’ campus with a commitment to positive disruption, challenging norms and bringing about social justice (university of northampton, 2022). this sense of ongoing, continued change was reflected in the responses which observed the longer-term legacy of this project. it was clear to respondents how the designing for diverse learners project had developed from its original incarnation and was continuing to develop thanks to a collaboration between two ‘creative and committed’ members of the community. this fallin and tomlinson designing for diverse learners journal of learning development in higher education special issue 25 october 2022 4 reminded one observer that there is always space to evolve, grow and expand in ways that might not even have been imagined at the start of a project. authors’ reflection ‘change agents’, lee and tom, offered further helpful reflections. lee: i passionately believe in the values of inclusive education, and for me, the designing for diverse learners (d4dl) work embodies many of the considerations educators need to make in their resource design. it is for this reason, i am always slightly nervous when presenting our d4dl work, as it is something i wholeheartedly believe in. thankfully, the work was well received, and we had some great feedback from attendees. tom: the project allowed me to contribute to a very useful resource. i had seen previous versions shared on twitter and pinned to colleagues’ walls. i was aware of the poster’s utility, but supporting the new version helped crystallise why the resource resonated with so many people. on reflection, it seemed that the poster did three things exceptionally well: 1. presents salient points clearly. 2. does not burden the reader with technical complexity. 3. does not assume a deficit/shortfall with the reader. the project expanded my knowledge of accessibility, wcag compliance and the significance of making guidelines practical and actionable. design is not how something looks; it is how it works. initial feedback from the audience indicates we are on the right path. i would be remiss if i didn't express my thanks to lee fallin, for not only having a vision for this project, but also for having extreme compassion and belief in others. this was an overwhelmingly positive experience. lee: on a personal note, presenting at aldcon was also a nice opportunity to showcase the hard work of my colleague thomas tomlinson. i find thomas takes the role of ‘enabler’, working his magic unseen, behind the curtains. it was nice to co-present with him and have him take some of the spotlight himself. the work thomas has done to take fallin and tomlinson designing for diverse learners journal of learning development in higher education special issue 25 october 2022 5 the d4dl project into a native web format is phenomenal, and he deserves all the credit he can get! with the benefit of writing a few weeks after the conference, it is also nice to share that we had strong interest from others who wanted to join this project. we are already beginning to reshape and enhance this work further, and i cannot wait to see where this goes. there is still chance to get involved if you are interested – see the next section. read more about tom’s work on his blog (figure 2). figure 2. extract from tom tomlinson’s blog. presenting at aldcon was a great opportunity to bring the designing for diverse learners work back to our community for feedback. we have also recruited a broader range of people to help us take this work forward. i cannot wait to see where we go next with the project. https://designingfordiverselearners.info/from-print-to-web/ fallin and tomlinson designing for diverse learners journal of learning development in higher education special issue 25 october 2022 6 next steps and additional questions for many learning developers, this will prompt further soul searching – how can we become more actively involved in the positive, sustainable change the authors demonstrate such commitment to? to be involved in the designing for diverse learners project, respond to this call for volunteers. acknowledgments thank you to all the contributors who shared their reflections and enriched our insight into this conference presentation and its impact on the audience. references fallin, l. and tomlinson, t. (2022) designing for diverse learners. available at: https://figshare.edgehill.ac.uk/articles/poster/designing_for_diverse_learners_post er_3_2_2_/16840531/1 (accessed: 26 october 2022). pearson, v., lister, k. and coughlan, t. (2019) ‘accessibility coordinators: a model for embedded, sustainable change towards inclusive higher education’, proceedings of the 12th annual international conference of education, research and innovation (iceri 2019), iated pp. 3127–3136. available at: http://oro.open.ac.uk/68402/1/pearson%20et%20al%202019%20faculty%20acces sibility%20coordinators.pdf (accessed: 26 october 2022). tomlinson, t. (2022) from print to web designing for diverse learners. available at: https://designingfordiverselearners.info/from-print-to-web/ (accessed: 26 october 2022). university of northampton (2022) the changemaker hub. available at: https://www.northampton.ac.uk/student-life/changemaker/ (accessed: 26 october 2022). https://forms.office.com/r/ebnbksu0se https://figshare.edgehill.ac.uk/articles/poster/designing_for_diverse_learners_poster_3_2_2_/16840531/1 https://figshare.edgehill.ac.uk/articles/poster/designing_for_diverse_learners_poster_3_2_2_/16840531/1 http://oro.open.ac.uk/68402/1/pearson%20et%20al%202019%20faculty%20accessibility%20coordinators.pdf http://oro.open.ac.uk/68402/1/pearson%20et%20al%202019%20faculty%20accessibility%20coordinators.pdf https://designingfordiverselearners.info/from-print-to-web/ https://www.northampton.ac.uk/student-life/changemaker/ fallin and tomlinson designing for diverse learners journal of learning development in higher education special issue 25 october 2022 7 author details lee fallin is a lecturer in education studies at the university of hull. his research focuses on the intersections between education and geography, inclusive of physical and digital spaces. his current research interests include learning spaces and communities, inclusive digital practice, research methodologies and geographies of place. tom tomlinson works as a teaching enhancement officer at the university of hull. tom supports staff to make the best use of technology for teaching and learning. he delivers digital literacy and curriculum enhancement workshops via online, face-to-face and blended modes. tom has a background in design and explores the practical application of technology to enhance learning. designing for diverse learners presentation abstract community response editorial comments authors’ reflection next steps and additional questions acknowledgments references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 24 september 2022 student perceptions of reading digital texts for university study helen hargreaves lancaster university sarah robin lancaster university elizabeth caldwell lancaster university abstract an increasingly important aspect of undergraduate study is the ability to deal with reading academic texts digitally. whilst the literature suggests that students prefer reading print texts (foasberg, 2014; mizrachi, 2015) and often have a deeper level of engagement with texts in this medium (mangen et al., 2013; delgado et al., 2018), the reality is that, for most students, digital texts are the norm. study guides often focus on reading strategies that are considered broadly applicable to both digital and print formats. however, the differences between the two mediums are likely to impact on the strategies used, with students developing their own approaches as they gain more experience. in this paper, we present findings from a study exploring students’ perspectives and practices in relation to digital reading. we carried out focus group interviews with 20 students in their second or final year of undergraduate degree programmes. our analysis reveals that reading texts digitally does indeed form the bulk of students’ reading activity, with ease and speed of accessibility, cost, and environmental considerations influencing this choice, and in some cases, precluding reading in print. however, despite the prominence of digital reading, some aspects of print reading – in particular the scope for more sustained focus, detailed reading and enjoyment of the experience – were highly valued by the students. students’ approaches to reading digital texts varied depending on reading purpose, but, in general, students had developed a range of techniques to help them navigate digital reading. keywords: academic reading; digital reading; print reading; note-taking; reading preferences hargreaves, robin, caldwell student perceptions of reading digital texts for university study journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 2 introduction with the closure of physical libraries, the covid-19 pandemic brought into sharp relief the reality that, for contemporary university students, academic reading involves large quantities of digital text. even before the pandemic, it was clear that an increasing amount of students’ reading was done digitally. it is not uncommon for libraries to have ‘digital first’ policies and purchase only the e-book format of new texts, and many libraries no longer stock print editions of some journals (hardy and mckenzie, 2020; baxter et al., 2021). in addition, the proliferation of online sources has had an impact on the number and variety of sources that students can cite in their academic writing, making it increasingly less feasible for students to consult only print texts in their studies. in this article, we present the results of a research project that explored student perspectives on digital reading for academic study. we wanted to find out what influences students’ choices around reading medium, the strategies they employ when they read electronically and how they navigate the challenges associated with studying from digital texts. literature review since marc prensky (2001, p.46) described a generation of ‘native speakers of digital language’ 20 years ago, practitioners have wrestled with ideas about the inherent digital proficiency of students born in a digital age. palfrey and gasser (2008, p.22) depict native digital learners as flexible and skilled at managing digital mediums: ‘they get news and information through some kind of high-tech osmosis over the course of a day. they dip into rivers of information that are flowing by’. indeed, lea and jones (2011, pp.390-391) argue that students are ‘adept readers in an increasingly complex digital world’. however, several authors have argued that the digital native is too simplistic a concept (white and le cornu, 2011). for example, jones and healing’s (2010) research focused on first-year students’ transition to university and concluded that the lack of homogeneity within the cohort in terms of previous experience of technology meant that making blanket assumptions related to age and digital proficiency was problematic. furthermore, hansson and sjöberg (2019) found that, although students arrive at university with prior digital hargreaves, robin, caldwell student perceptions of reading digital texts for university study journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 3 experiences, they continue to develop their digital skills during their studies, particularly in relation to using software and critically evaluating digital sources. one important area of development for most students is the critical reading of academic texts. however, a number of studies have suggested that the skills students have gained as digital surfers may in fact reduce the ability to engage in deep and focused reading. delgado et al. (2018, p.34) suggest that on-screen reading leads to inferior comprehension and that people ‘adopt a shallower processing style in digital environments’. moreover, ben‐yehudah and eshet‐alkalai (2021) demonstrated a clear digital inferiority when students’ reading comprehension was determined through questions that tested an indepth level of processing. similarly, other studies have found that reading print text does facilitate deeper learning and less ‘mind wandering’ than with digital texts (ackerman and goldsmith, 2011; mangen et al., 2013; kong et al., 2018; clinton, 2019; latini, 2020). as such, it seems that neither general digital experience gained through surfing and scrolling, nor the digital medium itself are conducive to deep and focused academic reading. research on student preferences for reading shows that students often prefer reading in print for learning purposes (foasberg, 2014; mizrachi, 2015; hancock et al., 2016; jeong and gweon, 2021). some researchers have argued that the tactile nature of print can support memory encoding (baron et al., 2017; mizrachi et al., 2018) and aids in the immersive experience of reading, involving emotional and bodily interplay in the reading process. mangen et al. (2019, p.38; also mangen, 2016, p.248) refer to this as the ‘sensorimotor cues which are afforded by the manipulation of the book’. however, schwabe et al.’s (2021) research found no notable differences in the emotional experiences of readers using e-book and print versions of narrative texts. interestingly, mizrachi et al. (2018) found the type of digital device is of central importance to students’ perceptions of enjoyment and efficiency, and that some devices are more conducive to an enjoyable reading experience than others. it is clear that reading is about more than language and text, and the physical affordances of medium (print or digital) and device are important factors in the reading experience. the studies discussed above show that medium can influence both the depth of comprehension and the enjoyment of reading, yet when it comes to published guidance specifically on academic reading, the role of medium seems to be underplayed. from our hargreaves, robin, caldwell student perceptions of reading digital texts for university study journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 4 survey of over 20 different reading guidance publications and websites, the content tends to include little specific discussion on engaging with digital texts and implies that practices and strategies are transferrable across the two mediums. where there is guidance, it can be fairly light touch. for example, cottrell’s (2019, p.217) classic text the study skills handbook, asks students just two questions in the brief section on digital reading; if they know whether they ‘read best from screen or paper’ and if they ‘reformat text on-screen to make it easier to read’. van der gaast et al. (2019, pp.29-30) provide some guidance on how to deal with distractions when studying online and encourage students to make handwritten notes. reinders et al. (2017) devote a little more space to reflection and discussion of the differences between media, and the benefits and drawbacks of each. however, our overall impression is that advice on digital reading in such publications remains brief. this may be in part because, as the quality assurance agency for higher education (qaa) project investigating active online learning explains, ‘we know strikingly little about how students read online’ (qaa, 2021). this study aims to address this gap by exploring students’ experiences of studying using digital texts to gain insights into effective practices for digital reading. methodology the starting point for this research was a series of reflections from our work as learning developers. we had noticed that when students came to us to talk about reading, they no longer arrived with a stack of books, but rather a laptop with 20 windows open. it was clear that students were doing more and more of their reading electronically, and that our previous experiences of reading for university study were increasingly different to those of our current students. we felt that, in order to understand the reading practices of contemporary students, we should hear directly from them about their experiences of reading and studying from digital texts. we took a qualitative approach, as qualitative research ‘is interested in the perspectives of participants, in everyday practices and everyday knowledge’ (flick, 2008, p.2). moreover, baker et al. (2019, p.150) argue that qualitative methodologies focusing on recovering the student voice, reveal the ‘complex negotiations that students make in the reading process’. hargreaves, robin, caldwell student perceptions of reading digital texts for university study journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 5 as such, we set out to hear from students about their reading experiences, and we aimed to address the following research questions: 1. what are the benefits and challenges of reading digital texts for academic study? 2. what strategies do students employ to read effectively from digital texts? to answer these questions, we carried out a series of focus groups with undergraduate students at a research-intensive university in the north of england. as cleary et al. (2014, p.474) point out, focus groups have an advantage over one-to-one interviews as they may create a ‘synergistic “sparking‐off” between group members’, which can help participants with recalling and recounting their experiences. however, focus groups also need careful moderation to ensure that all participants feel comfortable about speaking and that more dominant personalities do not take over (sim and waterfield, 2019; denscombe, 2021). after we obtained ethical approval from the institution, we carried out six focus groups with 20 undergraduates from across the university (see table 1). we aimed our recruitment at second and final-year students, as we wanted to hear from students who considered themselves to be experienced academic readers, and in total 16 final-year and four second-year students took part. we recruited students on a first-come-first-served basis, although we acknowledge that this recruitment strategy may have led to an overrepresentation of engaged students who are not representative of all their peers (fletcher, 2019). the participants were a mix of nationalities, and four of the students in the study were non-native speakers of english. although some students voluntarily spoke about their lives outside of university, we did not collect detailed information from participants about their backgrounds. however, it would be an interesting avenue for future research to explore whether students’ particular circumstances had a bearing on their reading practices. hargreaves, robin, caldwell student perceptions of reading digital texts for university study journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 6 table 1. disciplinary area of focus group participants. participant (p) number focus group disciplinary area year of study p1 1 marketing 4 p2 1 marketing 3 p3 1 marketing 3 p4 2 human geography 3 p5 2 biomedical and life sciences 3 p6 2 fine art and creative writing 3 p7 2 geography 3 p8 3 french studies and linguistics 4 p9 3 politics, philosophy and religion 3 p10 3 french studies and linguistics 4 p11 3 history and english literature 3 p12 4 marketing 3 p13 4 english literature and creative writing 3 p14 5 computer science 2 p15 5 earth and environmental science 3 p16 5 geography 2 p17 5 linguistics and english language 3 p18 6 natural sciences 2 p19 6 geography 2 p20 6 geography 3 hargreaves, robin, caldwell student perceptions of reading digital texts for university study journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 7 the focus groups lasted up to one hour and were facilitated by two learning developers, with between two and four student participants in each. despite it being common practice for researchers to moderate their own focus groups (citizens advice, 2015), we acknowledge that using university staff as focus group facilitators may have influenced the way that students responded to questions. our focus groups took place between march and may 2020; one focus group was in person, but due to covid-19 restrictions, the other five were held online via ms teams. audio recordings of the focus groups were transcribed verbatim by a professional transcriber, and we used thematic analysis to analyse the transcripts (braun and clarke, 2006). the analysis procedure started with all project team members reading the transcripts individually, and from this initial read we developed a set of initial codes. following this, we came together to discuss and finalise the coding framework, and the first author then coded the transcripts. following this, we came together again to develop the codes into a set of overarching themes (braun and clarke, 2006). results for 18 of the 20 focus group participants, digital reading formed the majority of the reading undertaken for their studies. for the remaining two students, the balance was more even. most of the students had also noticed a general shift as they progressed through their studies, with a reduction in print reading as they moved into the final year of their studies. however, despite the prominence of digital reading, it became clear from the discussions that some aspects of print reading – in particular the scope for more sustained focus, detailed reading and enjoyment of the experience – were highly valued by the students. despite print reading being preferred in certain circumstances, immediacy of access to digital texts, along with the digital tools that facilitated reading and note taking, often led to this medium being the default choice. in this section, we present an overview of our findings, structured around the three main themes that emerged from the focus groups: (1) reading purpose and type of text, (2) reading and note-taking, and (3) reading experience. hargreaves, robin, caldwell student perceptions of reading digital texts for university study journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 8 reading purpose and type of text a general trend emerged from the focus groups in terms of reading medium and reading purpose. when researching for assignments and dealing with large numbers of texts, the students tended to find the digital medium the most practical and manageable. students were more likely to consider reading in print if the text was a core reading, if the purpose required detailed reading (e.g. to develop understanding of key concepts, to critically evaluate an article, to revise for an exam), or if they were reading literary texts for academic purposes. type of text, therefore, also overlaps with purpose, as students talked more about journal articles in the context of researching and writing assignments (mostly online availability), and textbooks for core readings and developing understanding of key concepts. reading for assignments the students gave several reasons for their tendency towards digital reading when researching and writing assignments. firstly, they mostly talked about journal articles in this respect, a text-type increasingly less available in print in university libraries. whilst one participant (p9) did regularly print out articles, the others tended not to, due to the large number of texts involved, along with environmental and financial considerations. secondly, accessing texts in digital format helped the students to manage the time pressure of assignment deadlines. immediacy and ease of access was a key advantage, and embedded links helped to speed up the research process. tools such as the search function, and copy and paste, were also seen as timesaving, contributing to efficient reading and note-taking practices. finally, the digital format also more generally lent itself better to the research process, as students could more easily interact with several texts at the same time, toggling between tabs. the students had also developed their own systems for storing, collating and retrieving information that fed into their assignment-writing process. reading to develop knowledge and understanding reading in print was often connected by the students to purposes that required in-depth, detailed reading of individual texts, either in their entirety, or of significant sections. some students explained that they would be more likely to consider opting for print format when the reading was a core text, when they wanted to keep the text and return to it, or when the text as a whole was short (keeping environmental impact and printing cost to a hargreaves, robin, caldwell student perceptions of reading digital texts for university study journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 9 minimum). several students also talked of opting for print when they wanted to learn or remember the information. p12 noted: ‘if i was reading to learn something, i would much rather read print because it’s easier for me to read that and i can do it wherever i want’, whereas for note-taking for essays, she would choose digital because ‘it’s easier for me to copy and paste some of the fragments’. similarly, p14 viewed print reading as helping with being able to ‘read and to remember information’ and p20 preferred print texts for readings that were ‘providing a basis for an essay’, but digital texts to ‘flick through something’ to find supplementary information and ‘pop it into an essay’. textbooks and novels two other text types that received specific attention in most of the focus groups were textbooks and novels. textbooks were discussed in five out of the six focus groups, and students typically expressed a preference for reading them in print. the physicality of hard copies was the main reason for this preference, as it helped students in their navigation of the information. being able to flick through, jump from one section to another, get an overview from contents and indexes, or get a quick sense of the length of a section or chapter, were all given as reasons for preferring the print medium. textbooks provide students with a way into a field, and typically have the purpose of ‘making established disciplinary knowledge accessible to large sections of uninitiated novice readers’ (bhatia, 2006, p.31). to achieve this purpose, their formats often include such features as chapter aims, examples, visuals, glossaries, summaries, and end-of-chapter exercises (bhatia, 2006). it may be that navigating such features for the purpose of building and checking understanding is facilitated more through the physicality of a hard copy. however, the students also talked of issues of availability with physical textbooks, and that they would use digital versions if it meant they could access the text more quickly. several participants in the focus groups were studying courses that had a literature element – either english literature, creative writing or french studies – that involved reading novels on a regular basis. it was clear that reading in hard copy was still the norm for this type of text, and strongly preferred by most of the students. reasons for this ranged from challenges with engaging with narratives digitally, to affordances of the hard copy that facilitated study of the text. one participant (p6) talked about a diary she had tried to read in digital format but ended up buying the print copy instead because she felt that the continuous scrolling made it ‘difficult to lose yourself in a story’. this echoes hargreaves, robin, caldwell student perceptions of reading digital texts for university study journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 10 previous research that showed reading in print to be more immersive, particularly for longer texts (mangen, 2016; mangen et al., 2019). the students in our study also explained that interaction with and ownership of hard copy novels was important to them for academic purposes – being able to annotate, take to seminars and read anywhere, were all given as reasons for using hard copies, as was the physicality of the text itself. reading and note-taking reading and note-taking practices were also influenced by reading medium. one key approach emerging from all focus groups was how students read to assess the relevance of a text for their purpose (usually assignment-writing). in all six focus groups, students used either the term ‘skimming’ or ‘skipping’, or both, to express reading activity that involved engaging with only sections or fragments of a text to make an initial judgement about its relevance, or to get a general overview. students were more likely to take this approach with digital texts because of the number of texts involved; whereas they were more likely to read the whole text if they printed it out. p15 commented that, ‘i’m probably more quickly dismissive when i’m doing digital because i do just focus on the abstract and conclusion straightaway, and if i don’t like that, i’m not going to read the whole thing’. students also incorporated word search functions (commonly ctrl + f) into their digital reading practices. this represented a key difference in how they read digitally compared with print. fourteen students said they found it useful – crucially it helped make their reading more efficient – whilst only one student (p2) said she did not use it, but instead had words in mind that she scanned the text for as she read. some students described starting their reading with a key word search to see if the text was relevant, whilst others described getting an overview of the text first before searching for specific information using key terms. p12 noted that one negative consequence of using the search function was that more often than not she ended up reading in a fragmented way. in terms of annotating and taking notes from texts, students expressed a range of preferences and approaches. some students expressed a strong preference for annotating hard copies and taking hand-written notes for specific purposes. for them, the more tactile experience of annotating a hard copy led to greater levels of engagement and enjoyment, and handwriting notes facilitated greater retention of the information. for hargreaves, robin, caldwell student perceptions of reading digital texts for university study journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 11 example, p11 spoke of liking being able to scribble notes over print texts, and touch and interact with them, and p16 highlighted his lack of engagement with notes when typing in contrast to writing. similar to the experiences of our students, research on note-taking has found that students encode memory more efficiently when handwriting notes as opposed to typing (crumb et al., 2022). the students also discussed the affordances of note-taking from digital texts, which included being able to highlight pdfs, add comments to documents, and use the split screen function to have a note-making document open alongside the digital text. the most commonly discussed affordance (spoken about by 11 participants) related to the copy and paste function, which shaped several of the students’ approaches to note-taking, in particular for assignments. some students used this function to add quotes to their own notes on a topic, whilst others read with the purpose of building a bank of quotes that they might want to use in their writing. this sense of mining a text for quotes is reflected in the following comment: if i’m reading something and trying to get quotations from it, i’ll usually have the online text on one window and the word document on the other where i’m copying and pasting quotes that i think are relevant, and putting a page reference (p6). students noted several advantages of gathering quotes in this way, such as the accurate reconstruction of the quote, the time saved on writing/typing out long quotes, being able to include the link to the source, and being able to use the search function to go back and read the quote in context. reading experience in terms of reading experience, students associated reading in print with more sustained levels of concentration, whilst digital reading presented more distractions and often led to headaches and eyestrain. in addition to distractions related to social media, some students felt that embedded links in academic texts had the potential to take their reading away from its initial focus. p3 described following such links as going ‘down a rabbit hole’ and had capped the number of additional articles she would access in this way; p19 described hargreaves, robin, caldwell student perceptions of reading digital texts for university study journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 12 it as a ‘research hole’. p13 highlighted online distractions such as instagram and facebook, whilst noting that when reading in print, their focus was just on the words on the page. in all six focus groups, either headaches/migraines, eyestrain or both were associated with on-screen reading, and impacted on students’ level of focus, ability to sustain reading for longer periods of time, and enjoyment of the experience. a further reason students gave for the increased focus with print texts was the tactile nature of the medium itself, which they also connected to greater enjoyment of the reading experience, echoing previous research (baron et al., 2017; mizrachi et al., 2018). p12 described how the tactile nature of reading in print helped her enjoy the experience more: i enjoy more reading the printed form, so because i enjoy it i’m more into it and i have all of my senses and mind focused more on this because i just feel that brings me the joy, and i want to do it more than i want to read online. a pattern emerged in the focus groups of students enjoying the reading experience itself when working with print texts, but that with digital texts, the enjoyment came instead from the ease and convenience of access and the additional affordances of the technology. for some students, the additional features of digital texts led them to prefer it overall as a medium. for example, p15 found print reading more enjoyable, but also added ‘i still prefer digital in terms of practicality’. a similar view was shared by p16: i’d say that in terms of enjoyment of the actual reading [. . .] it’s nice to have that hard copy book, but what puts me off doing that more is all the other things that digital reading can give you on top of just reading. device and familiarity with software/applications that support reading and note-taking also contributed to a positive digital reading experience. two participants, for example, had bought ipads part way through their studies, and both expressed greater engagement with digital reading as a consequence. this echoes mizrachi et al.’s (2018) study, which also found that the type of digital device was an important factor in the enjoyment of digital reading. our literature students also talked in a generally positive way about e-reading devices for reading novels, noting that they may have opted for this had it not been for the advantages of print for studying, such as annotating the text. hargreaves, robin, caldwell student perceptions of reading digital texts for university study journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 13 discussion our students’ views highlight the different affordances of reading in the two mediums for different purposes and text types, and show that reading medium does indeed influence the development of reading practices at university. in particular, the students reported finding print texts facilitated better concentration and enjoyment. this corresponds with the findings of previous studies which found that print texts reduced mind wandering (clinton, 2019) and that students perceived them as more immersive (hancock et al., 2016). the students’ comments also reflected the view that reading digital texts encouraged more surface-level reading and reported using processes similar to those described by liu (2005, p.700), such as ‘browsing and scanning, keyword spotting, one-time reading, nonlinear reading’. in general, our students connected reading in print with more focused reading and greater depth of understanding, whilst digital reading tended to be associated with more selective and fragmented reading, aided and motivated by the search and copy and paste functions, and often with a view to saving time. experimental studies of digital reading often suggest an inferiority when compared to print (delgado et al., 2018; clinton, 2019; ben‐yehudah and eshet‐alkalai, 2021); however, our students described practices specific to digital texts that played an important role in researching for assignments. the digital medium enabled students to efficiently navigate a range of varied and complex texts and make quick decisions about the relevance and importance of a text or section of a text for a specific purpose, drawing connections as they toggled between them. we would argue that whilst the style of reading itself may appear more fragmented and superficial, as part of the academic reading-to-write process, these practices were often underpinned by more complex decisions that demonstrate skill, judgement and criticality. this is supported by liu (2005), who points out that whilst the digital medium encourages surface reading, at the same time it also facilitates a more selective approach to reading. when reflecting on their practices in respect of digital reading, the students in our study showed differing degrees of critical reflection – particularly in discussions around their use of copy and paste and keyword search functions. some students reflected on the impact of their practices on the quality/depth of reading, acknowledging potential negative impacts of reading and note-taking in a fragmented, more de-contextualised way. other comments hargreaves, robin, caldwell student perceptions of reading digital texts for university study journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 14 suggested a more pragmatic view of reading in the digital medium, where practices had developed largely with efficiency in mind, again corresponding to associations made in the literature between digital reading and ‘speed and multitasking’ (delgado et al., 2018, p.25). in a similar manner to the students in hansson and sjöberg’s (2019) study, our students confirmed that, whilst they may have grown up with high levels of exposure to digital media, they still went through a process of developing strategies and techniques for working with digital texts in an academic context. almost all of the students had developed their practices for studying from digital texts on their own through trial and error, or by talking to peers. the students reflected on how their study strategies had developed as they moved through their degree programmes and talked about ‘breakthroughs’ or ‘life changing’ moments when they discovered a new tip or strategy, which largely occurred by chance. our focus groups specifically recruited students who considered themselves to be ‘experienced readers’ and so it is likely that there are many students who do not happen upon the tools and tips that make studying from digital texts easier. more research with a wider range of students at different points in their academic journeys would help shed light on the perceptions of students who are not yet at the point of calling themselves ‘experienced’ digital readers. our research has revealed that there is often a gap between students’ preferences and their practices in respect of choice of medium. although print was preferred for certain reading purposes, and often enhanced the reading experience, the students were more likely to access texts digitally. this highlights some of the challenges surrounding the role of choice. students spoke of constantly working under time pressures, as well as responding to expectations of reading high volumes of sources. both these curricular components encourage students to use digital reading practices that support immediacy, and which allow them to manage large quantities of reading. students also had to balance their preference for print against the financial and environmental costs of this medium. furthermore, some students’ comments highlighted the implicit assumptions conveyed through the way readings were made available to them; if the text was provided online as a pdf, then the default was to read it in that form, without considering print as an option. finally, the purchasing policies of university libraries, which are increasingly supporting digital texts, mean that the impetus or even ability of students to put preference for reading into practice is eroded. hargreaves, robin, caldwell student perceptions of reading digital texts for university study journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 15 our study has two key implications for our work as learning developers. firstly, in our work with students, we can more explicitly explore the role of medium in the development of academic reading practices. by drawing attention to the affordances of different media for different purposes and providing space for students to reflect on their own preferences, students may feel more in control of the choices available to them and more able to identify and unpick any default practices they may have developed. secondly, we can support students with their approach to digital reading through sharing the tools, techniques and strategies identified in our focus groups and wider research, and encouraging critical reflection on the effectiveness of these in the different study contexts they may be used for. we have developed resources to help meet these two aims and to begin to address the relative lack of focus on reading medium in study guides. these resources consist of an interactive online resource that students can work through or dip in and out of, and stand-alone resources that can be used to facilitate discussions in workshops and teaching sessions. the interactive resource is divided into three main sections: (1) reading purpose, preference and practicalities, (2) approaches to digital texts and (3) reading and note-taking. these resources will be made available through the learnhigher website. conclusion at the outset of this paper, we identified a number of factors that are making it increasingly less feasible for students to consult only print texts in their studies. the efficiencies that digital texts bring for both institutions and students mean that the trend for increased amounts of digital reading for students is unlikely to reverse in the near future. the experiences of students in this study correspond with recent studies (delgado et al., 2018; ben‐yehudah and eshet‐alkalai, 2021) that found print reading promotes a more comprehensive and in-depth quality of reading than reading digitally. our study has further demonstrated that our students are negotiating a series of complex decisions in relation to the purpose and practice of their reading, which impacts upon their reading experiences. the insights gained from conversations with students in the focus groups have fed into the resources we have developed. the resources encourage exploration of and critical reflection on reading habits, preferences and practices in both print and digital medium. hargreaves, robin, caldwell student perceptions of reading digital texts for university study journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 16 we also hope these resources will develop student awareness of skills and tools that will enable effective studying from digital texts and will encourage students to feed back to us with their experience of any new tools and approaches. we hope that this research and the subsequent resources will go some way to addressing the shortfall in development opportunities for enhancing students’ strategies for reading and studying from digital texts. references ackerman, r. and goldsmith, m. (2011) ‘metacognitive regulation of text learning: on screen versus on paper’, journal of experimental psychology: applied 17(1), pp.18–32. available at: https://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1037/a0022086 (accessed: 13 july 2022). baker, s., bangeni, b., burke r. and hunma, a. (2019) ‘the invisibility of academic reading as social practice and its implications for equity in higher education: a scoping study’, higher education research & development 38(1), pp.142–156. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/07294360.2018.1540554 (accessed: 13 july 2022). baron, n.s., calixte, r.m. and havewala, m. (2017) ‘the persistence of print among university students: an exploratory study’, telematics and informatics 34(5), pp.590–604. available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tele.2016.11.008 (accessed: 13 july 2022). baxter, g., beard, l., blake, m., greenhall, m., lingstadt, k., nixon, w.j. and reimer, t. (2021) ‘covid-19 and the future of the digital shift amongst research libraries: an rluk perspective in context’, new review of academic librarianship 27(3), pp.322-348. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/13614533.2021.1976232 (accessed: 13 july 2022). ben‐yehudah, g. and eshet‐alkalai, y. (2021) ‘print versus digital reading comprehension tests: does the congruency of study and test medium matter?’, british journal of https://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1037/a0022086 https://doi.org/10.1080/07294360.2018.1540554 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tele.2016.11.008 https://doi.org/10.1080/13614533.2021.1976232 hargreaves, robin, caldwell student perceptions of reading digital texts for university study journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 17 educational technology 52(1), pp.426–440. available at: https://doi.org/10.1111/bjet.13014 (accessed: 13 july 2022). bhatia, v. (2006) worlds of written discourse: a genre-based view. london and new york: continuum. braun, v. and clarke, v. (2006) ‘using thematic analysis in psychology’, qualitative research in psychology 3(2) pp.77–101. available at: https://doi.org/10.1191/1478088706qp063oa (accessed: 13 july 2022). citizens advice (2015) how to run focus groups. available at: https://www.citizensadvice.org.uk/global/citizensadvice/equalities/how%20to%20r un%20focus%20groups%20guide.pdf (accessed: 10 march 2022). cleary, m., horsfall, j. and hayter, m. (2014) ‘data collection and sampling in qualitative research: does size matter?’, journal of advanced nursing 70(3), pp.473-475. available at: https://doi.org/10.1111/jan.12163 (accessed: 13 july 2022). clinton, v. (2019) ‘reading from paper compared to screens: a systematic review and meta-analysis’, journal of research in reading 42(2), pp.288–325. available at: https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9817.12269 (accessed: 13 july 2022). cottrell, s. (2019) the study skills handbook. 5th edn. macmillan study skills. london: red globe press. crumb, r.m., hildebrandt, r. and sutton, t.m. (2022) ‘the value of handwritten notes: a failure to find state-dependent effects when using a laptop to take notes and complete a quiz’, teaching of psychology 49(1) pp.7-13. available at: https://doi.org/10.1177%2f0098628320979895 (accessed: 13 july 2022). delgado, p., vargas, c., ackerman, r. and salmerón, l. (2018) ‘don't throw away your printed books: a meta-analysis on the effects of reading media on reading comprehension’, educational research review, (25) pp.23–38. available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.edurev.2018.09.003 (accessed: 13 july 2022). https://doi.org/10.1111/bjet.13014 https://doi.org/10.1191/1478088706qp063oa https://www.citizensadvice.org.uk/global/citizensadvice/equalities/how%20to%20run%20focus%20groups%20guide.pdf https://www.citizensadvice.org.uk/global/citizensadvice/equalities/how%20to%20run%20focus%20groups%20guide.pdf https://doi.org/10.1111/jan.12163 https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9817.12269 https://doi.org/10.1177%2f0098628320979895 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.edurev.2018.09.003 hargreaves, robin, caldwell student perceptions of reading digital texts for university study journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 18 denscombe, m. (2021) the good research guide: research methods for small-scale social research projects. 7th edn. london: open university press. fletcher, j.r. (2019) ‘negotiating tensions between methodology and procedural ethics’, journal of gerontological social work, 62(4), pp.384-391. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/01634372.2018.1564718 (accessed: 13 july 2022). flick, u. (2008) designing qualitative research. london: sage publications. foasberg, n. (2014) ‘student reading practices in print and electronic media’, college and research libraries, 75(5) pp.705–723. available at: https://doi.org/10.5860/crl.75.5.705 (accessed: 13 july 2022). hancock, g.m., schmidt-daly, t.n., fanfarelli, j., wolfe, j.l., and szalma, j.l. (2016) ‘is e-reader technology killing or kindling the reading experience?’, ergonomics in design, 24(1), pp.25-30. available at: https://doi.org/10.1177%2f1064804615611269 (accessed: 13 july 2022). hansson, e. and sjöberg, j. (2019) ‘making use of students’ digital habits in higher education: what they already know and what they learn’, journal of learning development in higher education, 14, pp.1–20. available at: https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.v0i14.489 (accessed: 13 july 2022). hardy, a. and mckenzie, c. (2020) ‘meeting students where they are: just in time embedded delivery of information and digital literacy skills’, international information and library review, 52(1), pp.64-72. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/10572317.2019.1710672 (accessed: 13 july 2022). jeong, y.j. and gweon, g. (2021) ‘advantages of print reading over screen reading: a comparison of visual patterns, reading performance, and reading attitudes across paper, computers, and tablets’, international journal of human-computer interaction, 37(17), pp.1674–1684. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/10447318.2021.1908668 (accessed: 13 july 2022). https://doi.org/10.1080/01634372.2018.1564718 https://doi.org/10.5860/crl.75.5.705 https://doi.org/10.1177%2f1064804615611269 https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.v0i14.489 https://doi.org/10.1080/10572317.2019.1710672 https://doi.org/10.1080/10447318.2021.1908668 hargreaves, robin, caldwell student perceptions of reading digital texts for university study journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 19 jones, c. and healing, g. (2010) ‘net generation students: agency and choice and the new technologies’, journal of computer assisted learning, 26(5) pp.344–356. available at: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2729.2010.00370.x (accessed: 13 july 2022). kong, y., seo, y.s. and zhai, l. (2018) ‘comparison of reading performance on screen and on paper: a meta-analysis’, computers and education, 123, pp.138–149. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2018.05.005 (accessed: 13 july 2022). latini, n., bråten, i. and salmerón, l. (2020) ‘does reading medium affect processing and integration of textual and pictorial information? a multimedia eye-tracking study’, contemporary educational psychology, 62, pp.1-13. available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cedpsych.2020.101870 (accessed: 13 july 2022). lea, m.r. and jones, s. (2011) ‘digital literacies in higher education: exploring textual and technological practice’, studies in higher education, 36(4), pp.377–393. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/03075071003664021 (accessed: 13 july 2022). liu, z. (2005) ‘reading behavior in the digital environment: changes in reading behavior over the past ten years’, journal of documentation, 61(6), pp.700–712. available at: https://doi.org/10.1108/00220410510632040 (accessed: 13 july 2022). mangen, a. (2016) ‘the digitization of literary reading’, orbis litterarum, 71(3) pp.240– 262. available at: https://doi.org/10.1111/oli.12095 (accessed: 13 july 2022). mangen, a., olivier, g. and velay, j-l. (2019) ‘comparing comprehension of a long text read in print book and on kindle: where in the text and when in the story?’, frontiers in psychology, 10. available at: https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00038 (accessed: 13 july 2022). mangen, a., walgermo, b.r. and brønnick, k. (2013) ‘reading linear texts on paper versus computer screen: effects on reading comprehension’, international journal https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2729.2010.00370.x https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2018.05.005 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cedpsych.2020.101870 https://doi.org/10.1080/03075071003664021 https://doi.org/10.1108/00220410510632040 https://doi.org/10.1111/oli.12095 https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00038 hargreaves, robin, caldwell student perceptions of reading digital texts for university study journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 20 of educational research, 58, pp.61–68. available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijer.2012.12.002 (accessed: 13 july 2022). mizrachi, d. (2015) ‘undergraduates' academic reading format preferences and behaviors’, the journal of academic librarianship, 41(3), pp.301–311. available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.acalib.2015.03.009 (accessed: 13 july 2022). mizrachi, d., salaz, a.m., kurbanoglu, s. and boustany, j. on behalf of the arfis research group (2018) ‘academic reading format preferences and behaviors among university students worldwide: a comparative survey analysis’, plos one, 13(5), pp.1-32. available at: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0197444 (accessed: 13 july 2022). palfrey, j. and gasser, u. (2008) ‘opening universities in a digital era’, the new england journal of higher education, 23(1) p.22. available at: https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ej850701.pdf (accessed: 13 july 2022). prensky, m. (2001) digital game-based learning. new york: mcgraw-hill publishing. the quality assurance agency (2021) active online learning. qaa collaborative enhancement project. available at: https://www.qaa.ac.uk/membership/collaborative-enhancement-projects/currentcollaborative-enhancement-projects/active-online-reading (accessed: 10 november 2021). reinders, h., lewis, m. and phung, l. (2017) studying in english: strategies for success in higher education (macmillan study skills). 2nd edn. london: red globe press. schwabe, a., brandl, l., boomgaarden, h.g. and stocker, g. (2021) ‘experiencing literature on the e‐reader: the effects of reading narrative texts on screen’, journal of research in reading, 44(2) pp.319–338. available at: https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9817.12337 (accessed: 13 july 2022). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijer.2012.12.002 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.acalib.2015.03.009 https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0197444 https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ej850701.pdf https://www.qaa.ac.uk/membership/collaborative-enhancement-projects/current-collaborative-enhancement-projects/active-online-reading https://www.qaa.ac.uk/membership/collaborative-enhancement-projects/current-collaborative-enhancement-projects/active-online-reading https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9817.12337 hargreaves, robin, caldwell student perceptions of reading digital texts for university study journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 21 sim, j. and waterfield, j. (2019) ‘focus group methodology: some ethical challenges’, quality and quantity, 53, pp.3003-3022. available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11135-019-00914-5 (accessed: 13 july 2022). van der gaast, k., koenders, l., and post, g. (2019) academic skills for interdisciplinary studies. amsterdam: amsterdam university press. white, d. and le cornu, a. (2011) ‘visitors and residents: a new typology for online engagement’, first monday 16:9 – 5. available at: http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/3171/3049 (accessed: 23 february 2021). author details helen hargreaves is a learning developer for eap (english for academic purposes) at lancaster university, where she runs a range of language development opportunities for students at all levels, including one-to-ones, workshops and short courses. along with beth caldwell and sarah robin, helen has recently completed an aldinhe funded research project into students’ approaches to reading in the digital age. sarah robin is a learning developer at lancaster university. she works primarily with postgraduate students in lancaster’s management school supporting students with academic writing, managing peer mentoring and co-creating teaching materials for programmes throughout the school. her research interests include student agency and voice, inclusivity and curriculum design. prior to working in learning development, sarah gained her doctorate in history, publishing in the history of emotions, and teaching at lancaster and the university of manchester. elizabeth caldwell, fhea, celp, is the learning developer for the faculty of health and medicine at lancaster university. in addition to her learning development work, beth is an active multi-disciplinary researcher with current projects centred on health communication in children’s literature. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11135-019-00914-5 http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/3171/3049 student perceptions of reading digital texts for university study abstract introduction literature review methodology results reading purpose and type of text reading and note-taking reading experience discussion conclusion references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special issue 25: aldinhe conference proceedings and reflections october 2022 ________________________________________________________________________ integrating academic skills in the curriculum: a partnership approach emma smith university of salford, uk amy pearson university of salford, uk presentation abstract supporting our new students to make the transition to higher education, so that they stay with us and succeed beyond their first year, has been a priority focus for the university of salford over the past 18 months. as an academic skills team, based in the library, we have carved out an integral role for our service in responding to this challenge. building on the prior success of a standalone elearning programme, we have developed an extensive set of elearning pathways and complementary learning activities designed for academics to easily and flexibly integrate into their course delivery so that every student is connected with the right academic support at the right time. in this presentation, we aimed to share how our active blended learning approach is scalable and allows for local ownership and opportunities for contextualisation by academic colleagues. we explored how we established our role in this strategic project and the value of our partnership working with the academic community and the vle support team. we hoped to provide helpful examples of how it has worked in practice to support students to learn how to learn at university. finally, we sought to reflect on the journey so far – acknowledging the bumps and bends in the road – and initiate a discussion about where to go next. we anticipated that the presentation would be of particular interest to colleagues looking to influence learning and teaching practice, practitioners supporting students with the transition to university, and those with an interest in the role of elearning within learning development services. smith and pearson integrating academic skills in the curriculum: a partnership approach journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 2 community response the community response to this presentation provided a space for practitioners to reflect on the ways in which e-learning design could facilitate an embedded approach to academic skills at their institutions; it also prompted reflection on the potential for collaboration between learning developers and faculties. firstly, there was an acknowledgement that this type of project could potentially stimulate a ‘culture shift’ which required a level of commitment to, and investment in, using the resources from the academics or faculty colleagues delivering modules. respondents recognised that this is naturally more challenging where learning developers are not embedded in academic or disciplinary schools. others noted how significant it was that the presenters had successfully advocated for the use of the materials within particular courses and modules and that academics had ‘curated’ and ‘adapted the materials for this purpose. similarly, others shared their own journeys in attempting to embed skills into curriculum areas using features such as the reading list online (rlo) function in blackboard which academics could then choose to switch on or off. with this project, the evidence was that students preferred these resources to be carefully selected and embedded into the area where the assessment is placed. there was an acknowledgement here that academic colleagues are, in many cases, trying to embed academic skills but ‘careers, employability, sustainability, and graduate attributes’ can compound the issue. secondly, it is clear that practitioners in our community were interested in applying learning from this project in the context of their own organisations and organisational structures. one respondent noted that they had been exploring ways in which they might create some ‘curated learning pathways’ with resources that could punctuate the academic year and be ‘anchored within the curriculum’. this would guard against the ‘front loading’ of ‘skills acquisition’ that typically happens at the point of induction. others similarly noted that this model would support the structure of support throughout the student lifecycle and could be replicated using vle content for students. thirdly, practitioners from the community were considering how they could apply learning from the presentation in relation to particular student cohorts. one respondent noted, for example, the relevance of this approach for apprenticeship students who are supported smith and pearson integrating academic skills in the curriculum: a partnership approach journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 3 online and are often working full-time. it was also clear that facilitating student choice was key, with a ‘pick and mix’ approach allowing something tailored to individual needs. authors’ reflections introduction with this presentation, we chose to share a large, ambitious, and still-in-progress piece of work. it is rewarding to see, through both the live chat and the generous, rigorous audience responses within this collaborative writing piece, how it resonated with people across different institutions. we are glad to have offered some food for thought when it comes to tackling a challenge that many of us wrangle with: how to help as many students as possible to benefit from learning development by embedding it into the heart of their learning experience – their course. we recognise, though, that because we chose such a large topic we had to leave a lot out, and this was frustrating (or, if we might frame it more positively, tantalising) for some. we therefore take this unusual opportunity for postconference reflection and dialogue to address participants’ questions and responses, elaborating on the main themes where there was an appetite to know more or where we realise we neglected something important. in the spirit of exchange which ran through the conference, we then draw out some of the connections and thinking that other parts of the conference activated for us, and indicate key areas for future development we have identified as a result. extending the dialogue: responses to audience questions/comments the question of how we achieved academic buy-in to integrate our content into their modules was the one most often raised. in our presentation, we touched on some of those critical success factors: the institutional strategic project which set an expectation that firstyear students should receive essential academic support through their course to support their transition and the long history of effective relationship-building between our team and academics. we also shared that, in spite of these enablers, we have by no means reached or convinced everyone. this is true of some programmes that had not previously engaged with our provision, and of other programmes which have engaged with us in the past but had seen us as providers rather than partners. in these latter cases it has sometimes been challenging to shift the conversation away from what we can do for them and towards how smith and pearson integrating academic skills in the curriculum: a partnership approach journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 4 they might do things differently in their own teaching. the many rich discussions on the subject of academic engagement across the conference gave us some pride in where we’ve got to, but also a sense of mutual support and solidarity around the difficulties of reaching the hard to reach. last year, we had significant work to do even to reach those who were willing; the conference has made us think hard about how we might further develop our strategies for engaging those other groups. where we started – to answer the question some participants asked us – is a) by working with senior leaders in schools, who set an expectation and created opportunities for us to engage with their teams; and b) by making it as easy and flexible as possible for busy academics to make good use of our resources, for example, providing a toolkit of complementary learning activities they can adopt in their own teaching (this toolkit is a work in progress, with far more to do). that said, there were technicalities to negotiate around how to set up the content in the vle, which meant that sometimes the deeper, more valuable conversations about why and how to integrate academic skills development into the learning experience took a back seat to practical questions, so we are now focusing hard on simplifying the technical side of things as far as we can. and while the institutional strategic project has been an important enabler, it is no quick or easy matter to land that kind of strategic change, especially in the shadow of a pandemic and external turbulence, so that hasn’t been a silver bullet either. we know – and hearing others with similar challenges at the conference reinforced the fact – that to achieve our goals we need to sustain momentum, hold to our principles, and seek every opportunity to hook into wider institutional projects and priorities. we know this kind of change takes more than one cycle – indeed, probably more than three – and sharing our challenges and successes with aldinhe has provided just the kind of energising boost we need to do just that. another set of questions and comments related to how our elearning was delivered and to whom, and its relationship to the rest of our offer. on a practical note, in terms of the learning technology we use, amy pearson is our elearning developer who builds much of our content using articulate storyline. but as we grow our elearning offer, and work towards a fully blended offer where we use elearning content as an integral part of both synchronous and asynchronous teaching, we need to ensure it is not too labour intensive to create, update, or adapt. we are therefore now also using an authoring tool called articulate rise which is simple and quick to learn, so we are starting to grow our capacity for elearning development by upskilling other colleagues in the team. we welcomed smith and pearson integrating academic skills in the curriculum: a partnership approach journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 5 colleagues’ interest in our elearning, and are always happy to share what we do: indeed, apart from the quizzes we use to check learning which sit within our vle, the rest of our content is openly available via www.salford.ac.uk/skills. the digital-first model we shared in our presentation is the one we are using to integrate essential introductory academic skills content in a scalable way across as many level 3 and 4 programmes as possible. so far, our attention has been on level 3-4 education and supporting the transition to he. however, as was suggested at the conference, our intention is to develop content to support key transition/stress points at levels 5 and 6 over the coming two years and to roll this out using a similar model. at later levels, we expect more discipline-specificity to be necessary, so will need more of a focus on empowering programme teams, and likely a smaller core of generic elearning. we are keen to share this next phase with the learning development community at that point, as we have more to learn about supporting those transition points. alongside the model we shared in our presentation, our team also still very much does create and deliver – and where possible co-create and co-deliver – sessions within programmes. this is particularly the case at level 5 and above, but at levels 3 and 4 too there are programmes where more intensive or in-person library-led interventions are valuable and necessary. crucially, creating our elearning pathways cuts out multiple repetitions of the basics and allows for flipped classroom approaches, so the time we spend with students can be more interactive and specific to their course. but this is only one step on the journey towards a rich, active blended learning offer: until relatively recently our elearning and our classroom teaching were separate, and we still have more to do within our own practice to deepen their integration. in terms of how we influence academic practice, too, our ideal of a set of ‘pick ‘n’ mix’ content which academics contextualise, build on and bring to life in their own teaching requires capability, capacity, and buy-in which will take far longer to achieve. this is, evidently, a major barrier for many in the learning development community, and is the reason we have re-introduced a standalone option that students can be signposted to where a fully integrated approach is not yet feasible. hearing from other institutions where creative solutions to this challenge have been introduced – notably the ‘integrated learning support’ model in place at northampton – has been a particularly valuable takeaway for us, which we are already starting to talk about with senior colleagues at salford. http://www.salford.ac.uk/skills smith and pearson integrating academic skills in the curriculum: a partnership approach journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 6 we were asked about whether it is equitable for some programmes to make some of this content part of an assessment (formative or summative) when others don’t. the question of the equity and rigour of whether and how it is assessed is something we considered, in dialogue with our quality team. completion of our elearning alone should not result in credit, but, as with any other learning resource, students’ understanding and application of knowledge can be assessed through, for example, a reflective piece on their personal or professional development so far, if this aligns with the programme learning outcomes and assessment strategy. that is a decision for the academic programme team, depending both on assessment methods and on the extent to which they are integrating and scaffolding academic skills development within their teaching. encountering our elearning should be different on different programmes, if it is to be part of a coherent, contextualised learning experience. reflections on future work so what are we going to do with the feedback and reflections the aldinhe conference has generated for us? sharing our work with the learning development community has been valuable and energising, and there are a number of actions we want to take in response to the audience responses and the conference more widely. there were three areas that provoked and inspired us above all: one related to the topics we cover; another to how we are measuring engagement and impact; and a third to how we can better share our work and learn from the wisdom of the ld community on an ongoing basis. in relation to content: wellbeing is already a key feature in our work, but we returned from the conference inspired to further strengthen the ‘golden threads’ running through our resources relating to independent learning, belonging, and self-efficacy – all in the context of covid-19 – all of which were explored in varied and creative ways on the conference programme. the exceptional opening keynote by maha bali on compassion, equity, and social justice in higher education prompted us to think about how we could more fully address issues of social justice and develop even more inclusive and participatory pedagogical strategies within our elearning. how we are measuring engagement and evaluating impact was both a question raised by participants and arose in our own reflection, prompted by hearing about so much excellent action research across the field of learning development at the conference. while we have smith and pearson integrating academic skills in the curriculum: a partnership approach journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 7 engagement measures in place, these are imperfect due to the reporting functionality we have access to, but we have shifted our approach for the coming year which should enable us to paint a far richer picture. still, we have not yet adopted the kind of research methodology that would allow us to meaningfully evidence impact. we are conscious of the complex factors involved that would make it impossible to claim direct causal impact on student outcomes; however, there is of course value to telling a compelling story about our contribution to those outcomes. we have work to do here as a team and as an institution to embed pedagogical research practice in our everyday work. we have started to build this through recent small-scale research bids, but we have come away from the conference with new motivation and ideas to help us facilitate a more research-informed approach at salford, given the value it has for our services, our institutional profile, and our colleagues’ professional development. finally, we intend to invest more in sharing our practice with the community. there was real interest and appetite to see what our elearning looks like, and to understand how we engage academics, which we could only skim the surface of during our presentation. we want to think through how we might make more of our resources open (we’re already looking to build toolkits for our academics – could these be of wider benefit?). and we, along with other colleagues from our team who have been instrumental to creating and delivering this work, intend to use other aldinhe channels (including an ld@3 session) to continue the enriching dialogue that began at the conference and runs through this innovative writing project. next steps and additional questions the community response demonstrated an appetite for further discussion of this model of support and ways in which it has been or could be, evaluated. ongoing questions for our community include: ● would the authors be willing to share their learning at an ld@3 presentation? ● would the authors be willing to share examples of their quizzes and activities? ● how should we measure engagement for projects like this one? ● should we as learning development practitioners have a forum for discussing successes and challenges with embedding skills? smith and pearson integrating academic skills in the curriculum: a partnership approach journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 8 acknowledgements thank you to kate coulson, university of northampton, laura key, leeds beckett university, and sonia hood, university of reading, as well as all the other respondents, who enriched our insight into this conference presentation. the authors would like to thank colleagues in the learning and research support team at the university of salford: the work presented at the conference was the result of a major team effort and would not be possible without the expertise and commitment of everyone involved. author details amy pearson has worked with learning technologies for over 20 years: in an advisory capacity supporting academics in their use of learning technologies and in a creative, developmental capacity producing elearning content for staff and student use. in her current role as content developer in the library at the university of salford she has designed and developed a suite of online learning materials which offer students flexibility over how and when they develop their study and information skills. emma smith leads learning and research support services in the library at the university of salford: she is responsible for student academic, digital, information and numeracy skills development. she joined salford in 2017 from the university of warwick, where she was a learning and researcher development practitioner and coordinated skills provision for phd students. her career history includes lecturing in english and cultural studies at leeds and leeds beckett universities and working in independent publishing. she has a phd in english literature from the university of leeds, and is a fellow of advance he, accredited mbti practitioner, and mental health first aider. integrating academic skills in the curriculum: a partnership approach presentation abstract community response authors’ reflections introduction extending the dialogue: responses to audience questions/comments reflections on future work next steps and additional questions acknowledgements author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 26: special edi issue february 2023 ________________________________________________________________________ ©2023 the author(s) (cc-by 4.0) supporting the decolonization of university learning and teaching: practicalities, practices, and possibilities book review: tran, d. (2021) decolonizing university teaching and learning: an entry model for grappling with its complexities. london: bloomsbury academic. jo collins canterbury christ church university, uk keywords: decolonization; reflection; university teaching and learning; traac model, active inclusion. this book will be of interest to learning developers because it draws together and thematises existing scholarship on decolonizing learning and teaching, and provides a framework for conversations with colleagues to support learning and teaching practice which meaningfully probes how key decisions are made and relationships are built. this book creates a justification for its work as both a recognition of the decolonizing work that has gone before (p.ix), and as an antidote to apprehension around decolonizing university teaching (p.x). in asserting it is not ‘to be read as a handbook for decolonizing learning and teaching [dlt]’ (p.x) but rather to ‘highlight the benefits of dlt’ (p.166), the book makes it apparent that for dlt to happen effectively people need to be attuned to the need for, and the benefits and complexity of, the enterprise. such a text then becomes a necessary precondition for meaningful dlt. in its very framing it challenges lack of progress in the he sector (p.75) and it sees itself as scaffolding the dialogue and debate that will generate further knowledge. the book builds this scaffolding in a number of ways. firstly, at every turn the value of decolonizing university teaching and learning is documented: from supporting professional development to help staff think differently; to working more closely with students and eliciting and valuing their contributions; to thinking differently about using technology, assessment, and language; and finally recognising unconscious bias. secondly, throughout the book, the complexity of ‘decolonizing’ is explored across formal teaching as collins supporting the decolonization of university learning and teaching: practicalities, practices, and possibilities journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 2 well as the informal and hidden curriculum (cotton, winter and bailey, 2013). particularly striking here are bame students’ perceptions of belonging and validation in their surroundings, the impact of the interest shown in them and their integration into their schools and programmes, and the power they discovered by engaging in and shaping extra-curricular activity (e.g., carty’s and fairnington’s contributions). thirdly, the text is careful to situate dlt historically and socio-culturally and draws on contributions from different institutions and from colleagues and students across a range of disciplines, in academic and professional services contexts. finally, the text brings these various strands together through the traac model as a holistic framework through which to develop dlt. the traac model is introduced around a third of the way through the book, as a reflective framework to prompt consideration of teaching approach, relationship, activity, and assessment and content. the model is presented with reflective questions for each element to initiate discussion, and prompt consideration of how decolonization might occur in specific learning and teaching contexts. the framework focuses on the essence of how teaching and learning materials are developed (i.e., how the content, activities and assessments include and give voice to learners), as well as the relational aspects of how teaching is experienced and how relationships are built. the framework is offered as an ‘entry point’ to ‘challenging conversations’ (p.50), furnishing learning developers with a good foundation for supporting a wide range of dlt practices. the reflective questions prompted further thoughts for me: ‘how could your students contribute to content selection?’, ‘what assumptions do you hold about participation?’, ‘how can you build shared connections with your students?’, ‘how can you create a learning environment to empower your students?’ some readers might find that the delay in introducing traac softens the impact of the framework. however, i discerned this delay as a decentring move that resisted establishing a dominant authoritative framework as an organising principle, to focus instead on different people’s experiences and views. furthermore, the form of the book decentres singular authorship. incorporating a number of contributions from different standpoints, the text is poly-vocal: another key move in unsettling entrenched western notions of ‘individualism’ and monopolising ‘authorship’ (heble, 2002). because the contributors all discuss their personal engagements with traac, some readers might find the book repetitive. arguments are recycled, e.g., the ‘essay’ as a western invention and the challenges of decolonizing law assessments. however, this instils a sense of collins supporting the decolonization of university learning and teaching: practicalities, practices, and possibilities journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 3 authentic discussion across the text, with topics being returned to precisely because issues are still unresolved. the book is divided into eight chapters, organised around key dlt themes. it logically walks the reader through different dimensions of understanding dlt, firstly recognising implicitly and explicitly colonised processes, histories, and ideologies within institutions ‘not designed’ to do dlt work (chapter one). the ‘path’ to implementation and experimentation winds through how development could/should be meaningful in the light of dlt (specifically related to the pgche) (chapter two), exploring the traac model (chapter three), considering practicalities around building a decolonized curriculum (such as including students, involving librarians in improving the discovery of marginalised nontraditional work) (chapter four), and undertaking ‘active’ and meaningful inclusion as part of dlt (chapter five). supporting this are two chapters which highlight the impacts of unconscious bias in staff and student perceptions of ‘belonging’ (chapter six) and language and power dynamics in teaching (chapter seven). the latter, the shortest in the book, felt thin. there was the potential here to highlight student agency, and this chapter really missed the added perspective of a contributor. finally, the text explores testimonials of how traac has been implemented in different contexts (chapter eight). the text’s positionality is carefully considered and constructed in form and content. however, the possibilities of traac are framed somewhat defensively, as a ‘highlighting’, ‘rather than offering up solutions’ (p.166). there is potential to push traac further, without it necessarily becoming a fixed ‘solution’. concentrating on the curriculum rendered postgraduate research a blindspot. the framework might be extended so supervisors and doctoral students could use different aspects to consider how knowledge is being created through research and shaped through the research community. integrating ‘decolonization’ into supervision and underscoring the significance of bame access to postgraduate research felt particularly important in light of the book’s evidence of the significant impact of the underrepresentation of academic role models on bame students’ continuation and progression, and of the bame attainment gap at undergraduate level. the recent broken pipeline report (williams et al., 2019) highlighted exactly this: biases in ukri assessment criteria around ‘prior attainment’ and ‘research active institutions’ unfairly disadvantage bame students’ access to funding, which further impacts on equity in academia and what and how research is done. collins supporting the decolonization of university learning and teaching: practicalities, practices, and possibilities journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 4 overall, this book is valuable in a number of ways. it diligently integrates insights from a ‘canon’ of works on decolonizing the curriculum and from universities to develop a multifaceted approach to dlt. it provides evidence of the traac models’ success whilst providing a context for readers to consider what they might adopt for their own practice. the transdisciplinary, poly-vocal approach ensures its accessibility and relevance for university teachers and professional services colleagues who support decolonization initiatives. reading this book prompted a number of insights that i will integrate into my own teaching and curriculum design. this is a text that doesn’t want ‘to be read as a handbook for decolonizing learning and teaching’ (p.x), as something that can be formulaically and uncritically duplicated across contexts. instead, this book gives a framework so readers can ask the right questions to devise their own models for practice. references cotton, d., winter, j. and bailey, i. (2013) ‘researching the hidden curriculum: intentional and unintended messages’, journal of geography in higher education, 37(2), pp.192-203. https://doi.org/10.1080/03098265.2012.733684. heble, a. (2002) ‘re-ethicizing the classroom: pedagogy, the public sphere and the postcolonial condition’, college literature, 29, pp.143-160. williams, p., bath, s., arday, j. and lewis, c. (2019) broken pipeline report: barriers to black phd students accessing research council funding. available at: https://leadingroutes.org/mdocs-posts/the-broken-pipeline-barriers-to-blackstudents-accessing-research-council-funding (accessed 19 september 2022). author details jo collins is a senior lecturer in counselling, coaching and mentoring at canterbury christ church university. she is a qualitative researcher and coach, and her research has explored how students are 'validated' through their studies and how coaching and mentoring can support this. https://doi.org/10.1080/03098265.2012.733684 https://leadingroutes.org/mdocs-posts/the-broken-pipeline-barriers-to-black-students-accessing-research-council-funding https://leadingroutes.org/mdocs-posts/the-broken-pipeline-barriers-to-black-students-accessing-research-council-funding collins supporting the decolonization of university learning and teaching: practicalities, practices, and possibilities journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 5 licence ©2023 the author(s). this is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (cc-by 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. see http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. journal of learning development in higher education (jldhe) is a peer-reviewed open access journal published by the association for learning development in higher education (aldinhe). journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 24 september 2022 ________________________________________________________________________ changes in the higher education sector a book review of khan, k., gurbutt, g. and cragg, r. (2022) changes in the higher education sector: contemporary drivers and the pursuit of excellence. london: anthem press. maggie scott university of salford, uk keywords: teaching excellence; tef; pedagogic methodologies; higher education (he). overview reflecting on their experiences of change within the english higher education sector, the authors provide several essays that relate to the slippery concept of ‘teaching excellence’ and its achievement. the discussion builds on narratives engendered by the contemporary political and regulatory landscape, emphasising the role of the office for students (ofs), the uk department of education, and the impact of the teaching excellence framework (tef). he practitioners may find some close parallels between the discourses presented across the five chapters of this slim volume and those they encounter day-to-day with colleagues. the book was written prior to the launch of the most recent tef consultation (january 2022), and before the publication of the government’s long-awaited response to the augar report (february 2022). in a follow-up blog post, co-author rachel cragg notes that ‘[t]he current consultation on the new tef clarifies the relationship between ofs registration as meeting baseline standards and tef excellence above the baseline’ (cragg, 2022). this latest tef definition underlines the pejoration of ‘excellence’ in regulatory discourse where it has become an educational buzzword, bleached of connotations of exceptionality (allan, 2007). as the authors note, conceptualising ‘excellence’ in he remains a highly contested matter. scott a book review of khan, k., gurbutt, g. and cragg, r. (2022) changes in the higher education sector: contemporary drivers and the pursuit of excellence. london: anthem press journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 2 there are some caveats that need to be noted. several times the authors refer to the ‘uk’ he environment with a broad brush, but in practice their focus is very much on england. this becomes problematic when statements are made about the changes affecting student fees in the twenty-first century, without acknowledgement that the four nations have operated different policies and both student and practitioner experiences have differed as a result. it is simply not accurate to say that ‘[h]ome students currently pay £9,250 in fees per year’ (p.14) without clarifying that this applies in england only. the situation is different in each of the four nations, for example with fees currently capped at £4,530 (2021-22) for northern irish students studying in northern ireland (nidirect, 2022). if we further recognise that ‘of the four systems, england’s is the outsider’ (shattock and horvath, 2020, p.66), it becomes axiomatic that casual references to ‘uk’ he require careful reinterpretation by the reader. the book is very much a series of personal reflections. the three authorial voices generally work well together but are still discernible at times, most notably where the first person breaks through briefly in chapter two—it is not clear who is describing, amongst other things, their ‘own academic role’ and their completion of a pgcert in he in the 1990s (p.24). structure and content at 78 pages, the book is considerably shorter than most recent volumes on the subject of governance and change in he (e.g., austin and jones, 2016; byrne and clarke, 2020; shattock and hovarth, 2020; grant, 2021; scott, 2021). each chapter of the book focuses on a different theme relating to the evaluation of teaching ‘excellence’, its definition, evaluation, and achievement. there is some degree of overlap between chapters, perhaps inevitably given the contested nature of ‘excellence’ and ‘value’ in he, which is a recurring theme. chapter one provides a light introduction to the regulatory context for he in england, noting the repositioning of the student as ‘customer’ who evaluates their experience through the national student survey (nss). the tef and ref (research excellence framework) are contextualised in terms of their historical evolution. it is unclear if the scott a book review of khan, k., gurbutt, g. and cragg, r. (2022) changes in the higher education sector: contemporary drivers and the pursuit of excellence. london: anthem press journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 3 statement that assessment practices are typically reliant on ‘individual universities [ensuring] criteria are met through their own assessment processes’ (p.10) is intended as a criticism of the external examination (ee) system; the latter is not mentioned but remains one of the means by which universities ensure independent oversight of their practice. chapter two explores the concept of ‘teaching excellence’. on reading that ‘[e]xcellence in higher education (he) has more often become the expectation of all’ (p.13), it is difficult not to recall allan’s paper (2007) for its (prophetic) commentary; excellence is clearly the new normal. the authors further discuss the tef and nss, the influence of he league tables, and the recognition and attempts to address specific awarding gaps by student demographic. he ‘value’ is increasingly seen by the uk government as measurable in terms of graduate employability, with graduate outcomes and student progression data forming the focus of the ‘proceed’ metrics introduced by ofs (dandridge, 2021). the chapter does not comment on the graduate outcomes survey, or proceed, but provides some discussion of graduate earnings across different industry sectors (p.22) and the role of newer qualifications such as degree apprenticeships (pp.23-24). the authors tacitly align their positionality with the ‘well-intended approaches embedded in legislation, policy and cultural norms’, only making anonymous reference to ‘those who contest the approaches and definitions’ (p.25). the third chapter responds to its titular provocation, ‘what constitutes teaching excellence?’, by discussing the uk professional standards framework (ukpsf), describing the categories of higher education academy (hea) fellowship as they relate to professional recognition through advance he. other qualifications such as postgraduate certificates in higher education are also contexualised, although there is no discussion of the relationships between the uptake of such qualifications across the sector and their impact. some elements of educational and pedagogical theory are briefly mentioned, such as kolb’s well-known experiential learning cycle (1984), and reflective approaches to teaching (p.33). fanghanel et al. (2016) is offered as providing a ‘general agreement’ on what is meant by the ‘scholarship of teaching’, but the study’s findings are not explored in depth (p.34), and the authors underline that there is ‘no consensus on what is meant by the different categories of teaching excellence, teaching expertise, or the scholarship of teaching’ (p.33). scott a book review of khan, k., gurbutt, g. and cragg, r. (2022) changes in the higher education sector: contemporary drivers and the pursuit of excellence. london: anthem press journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 4 chapter four considers the key attributes of the ‘excellent teacher’, drawing from previous research, e.g., wood and su (2017), and suggests some tools and approaches that may be used to enhance teaching practices. the chapter provides a brief history of educational theory and the shift from teacher-centred to student-centred learning, noting the increased use of problem-based learning (pbl), particularly in subjects such as medicine. flipped classrooms and technologies to enhance learning such as virtual learning environments (vles) are contextualised historically and there is some discussion of additional software such as kahoot, socrative, and simulation technologies used to gamify learning and provide more immersive experiences. several studies of individual approaches are referenced here and would be further complemented by consideration of the chapters in e.g., branch et al. (2017). further discussion of the relative strengths and weaknesses of different software or platforms would have been helpful here; on vles see e.g., browne, jenkins and walker (2006) and costello (2013). the authors note that work-based learning (wbl) ‘has not yet been fully embraced’ (p.54) across the uk he sector, but note its increasing importance, given the growing focus on employability as a measure of the success and value of degree outcomes. in chapter five the authors recap their overall concerns with the uses and definitions of ‘excellence’ against the changed and changing landscape of he, noting the challenges of the covid-19 pandemic as a further driver of a rapid macgyvering of course provision online. they summarise the internal and external factors guiding the current areas of change, returning to the tef, the nss, staff professional development and the investment required to maintain the hardware and software necessary for quality blended-learning experiences. in closing, they also draw attention to the challenges they perceive are presented by non-traditional students, arguing that the successful widening of participation in he has resulted in ‘significant number[s] of students who may not be initially able to cope with the academic tasks that are required of them’ (p.62). while beyond the scope of the book, this assertion deserves much closer scrutiny, and indeed an assessment of available evidence; readers may find peter scott’s analysis of ‘mass higher education’ (2021) insightful here. a further point deserving serious consideration, not mentioned in the book, is the challenge faced by he institutions over the next decade (and perhaps beyond) as they attempt to address the support needs of young people coming into he scott a book review of khan, k., gurbutt, g. and cragg, r. (2022) changes in the higher education sector: contemporary drivers and the pursuit of excellence. london: anthem press journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 5 with their earlier educational experiences fractured and eroded by their often traumatic and disrupted covid-19 years. summary it is difficult to be certain exactly whom this text is aimed at. it is unlikely to prove revelatory to current he practitioners already familiar with the tef, the ofs, and the vexatious rhetoric of ‘excellence’. the book does provide a gentle introduction to these subjects through personal reflections on the instruments employed used to measure ‘excellence’ and ‘value’ in he, so to some extent it may provide affirmation of existing views relating to the evolving regulatory framework, and to approaches to teaching and learning in this context. anyone new to the politics of english he should therefore find this text informative, if reserved in its coverage of the challenges that continue to be posed against the regulatory positions of the ofs and the uk government. the university and college union (ucu), for example, remains opposed to the tef (ucu, 2017), but there is no mention of ucu, or its views, anywhere in the book. whatever one’s personal stance, it is important that the academic community remain an informed community, and critical analyses should include all relevant voices. references allan, k. (2007) ‘excellence: a new keyword for education?’, critical quarterly, 49(1), pp.54-78. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8705.2007.00749.x. austin, i. and jones, g.a. (2016) governance of higher education: global perspectives, theories, and practices. abingdon: routledge. branch, j., hayes, s., hørsted, a., and nygaard, c. (2017) innovative teaching and learning in higher education. faringdon: libri publishing. browne, t., jenkins, m. and walker, r. (2006) ‘a longitudinal perspective regarding the use of vles by higher education institutions in the united kingdom’, interactive https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8705.2007.00749.x scott a book review of khan, k., gurbutt, g. and cragg, r. (2022) changes in the higher education sector: contemporary drivers and the pursuit of excellence. london: anthem press journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 6 learning environments, 14(2), pp.177-192. https://doi.org/10.1080/10494820600852795. byrne, e. and clarke, c. (2020) the university challenge: changing universities in a changing world. harlow: pearson. costello, e. (2013) ‘opening up to open source: looking at how moodle was adopted in higher education’, open learning: the journal of open, distance and e-learning, 28(3), pp.187-200. https://doi.org/10.1080/02680513.2013.856289. cragg, r. (2022) ‘professor rachel cragg on new publication “changes in the higher education sector”’, 16 march. available at: https://www.bucks.ac.uk/news/professorrachel-cragg-new-publication-changes-higher-education-sector (accessed: 14 april 2022). dandridge, n. (2021) ‘ofs’ new metric will help students make sense of career prospects’, wonkhe, 20 may. available at: https://wonkhe.com/blogs/ofs-new-metric-will-helpstudents-make-sense-of-career-prospects/ (accessed: 14 april 2022). fanghanel, j., pritchard, j., potter., j. and wisker, g. (2016) defining and supporting the scholarship of teaching and learning (sotl): a sector-wide study. york: higher education academy. available at: https://www.advance-he.ac.uk/knowledgehub/defining-and-supporting-scholarship-teaching-and-learning-sotl-sector-widestudy (accessed: 14 april 2022). grant, j. (2021) the new power university: the social purpose of higher education in the 21st century. harlow: pearson. kolb, d. a. (1984) experiential learning: experience as the source of learning and development. hoboken, nj: prentice-hall. nidirect (2022) tuition fees. available at: https://www.nidirect.gov.uk/articles/tuition-fees (accessed: 14 april 2022). https://doi.org/10.1080/10494820600852795 https://doi.org/10.1080/02680513.2013.856289 https://www.bucks.ac.uk/news/professor-rachel-cragg-new-publication-changes-higher-education-sector https://www.bucks.ac.uk/news/professor-rachel-cragg-new-publication-changes-higher-education-sector https://wonkhe.com/blogs/ofs-new-metric-will-help-students-make-sense-of-career-prospects/ https://wonkhe.com/blogs/ofs-new-metric-will-help-students-make-sense-of-career-prospects/ https://www.advance-he.ac.uk/knowledge-hub/defining-and-supporting-scholarship-teaching-and-learning-sotl-sector-wide-study https://www.advance-he.ac.uk/knowledge-hub/defining-and-supporting-scholarship-teaching-and-learning-sotl-sector-wide-study https://www.advance-he.ac.uk/knowledge-hub/defining-and-supporting-scholarship-teaching-and-learning-sotl-sector-wide-study https://www.nidirect.gov.uk/articles/tuition-fees scott a book review of khan, k., gurbutt, g. and cragg, r. (2022) changes in the higher education sector: contemporary drivers and the pursuit of excellence. london: anthem press journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 7 scott, p. (2021) retreat or resolution? tackling the crisis of mass higher education. bristol: policy press. shattock, m. and horvath, a. (2020) the governance of british higher education: the impact of governmental, financial and market pressures. london: bloomsbury. ucu (2017) briefing on teaching excellence framework (tef). available at: https://www.ucu.org.uk/media/8643/briefing-on-teaching-excellence-frameworkjun-17/pdf/ucu_tef2briefing_jun17.pdf (accessed: 14 april 2022). wood, m., and su, e. (2017) ‘what makes an excellent lecturer? academics’ perspectives on the discourse of “teaching excellence” in higher education’, journal of teaching in higher education, 22(4), pp.7-11. https://doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2017.1301911 author details maggie scott is associate dean academic (quality assurance and enhancement) in the school of arts, media and creative technology at the university of salford. she has worked in uk higher education for over twenty years. her research interests include academic leadership, language and power, and the cultural politics of the english and scots languages. https://www.ucu.org.uk/media/8643/briefing-on-teaching-excellence-framework-jun-17/pdf/ucu_tef2briefing_jun17.pdf https://www.ucu.org.uk/media/8643/briefing-on-teaching-excellence-framework-jun-17/pdf/ucu_tef2briefing_jun17.pdf https://doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2017.1301911 changes in the higher education sector overview structure and content summary references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 24 september 2022 ‘it can facilitate so much!’ student writers’ practice of selfefficacy to develop their use of formulaic phrases mary davis oxford brookes university john morley university of manchester abstract this study is about student writers’ development of their own approaches to using formulaic phrases from a compendium (academic phrasebank). while the essential role of formulaic phrases in academic texts has been well established in research, teaching about the effective use of these phrases is not widely available, and little attention has been paid to how students learn to employ formulaic phrases in their own writing. therefore, this research aims to explore this gap in understanding how student writers develop individual approaches to using formulaic phrases through the lens of self-efficacy. twelve self-selected student writer participants at undergraduate, master’s and phd levels, who were all l1 english speakers, were interviewed and asked about how they used formulaic phrases from the resource. three key findings emerged from the data: firstly, that the resource may support inclusion as an empowering tool to enable student writers to participate confidently in academia; secondly, that students could employ the resource flexibly at different stages of the writing process depending on their individual approach to text construction; thirdly, that it could offer particular support with writing to students who have a specific learning difficulty (spld). this paper contributes to understanding these individual student learning processes in the use of formulaic phrases for writing through self-efficacy. the implication for learning development is that making more guidance about formulaic phrases widely available and accessible would be beneficial to students’ writing processes. davis and morley it can facilitate so much!’ student writers’ practice of self-efficacy to develop their use of formulaic phrases journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 2 keywords: formulaic phrases; student writers; self-efficacy; specific learning difficulty (spld). introduction developing competence in academic literacy and the mastery of suitable academic language is important for university students at all levels. however, it is very well established that use of academic language is not innate and must be learned (bourdieu and passeron, 1994). we use the term academic language to refer to the specific language register that is used in academic communication, including student assignments. it can no longer be assumed that most students come to university with strong, recent secondary education in which they learnt this academic register, given the diversity of the students’ prior experiences of learning and teaching, including those affected by ‘learning loss’ during the pandemic. while it is clear that, for students whose first language is not english, lack of familiarity with the academic register and its genres can present a major challenge, similar challenges have also been reported for l1 (english as a first language) students who are from widening participation backgrounds (in terms of ethnicity, social level, or age groups underrepresented in higher education), students who are returning to academia after a long gap, or those who have a specific learning difficulty (spld) (forster, 2020). when we talk of the academic register, a formal style and specialised lexicon often comes to mind. studies have shown that academic writing has an important phraseological dimension; that multi-word units or formulae play a significant role (biber, 2006; hyland, 2008). we are referring here to strings of words that are learnt, memorised and reused as wholes. examples of this kind of language, which in this paper we refer to as formulaic phrases, are given below: in this paper i argue that several studies have shown that a possible explanation for this might be that davis and morley it can facilitate so much!’ student writers’ practice of self-efficacy to develop their use of formulaic phrases journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 3 hyland (2008, p.46) emphasised that formulaic phrases are ‘important building blocks of coherent discourse and [. . .] characteristic features of language use in particular settings’. in addition to discourse organisation, other important functions include expressing attitudes or assessments of certainty, known as writer stance (hyland, 2008) and signalling membership of a particular discourse community by replicating expected linguistic norms (barks and watts, 2001). within the field of eap (english for academic purposes), practitioners work to prepare and support mainly l2 (english as a second language) international students in their academic studies and recognise the importance of raising their students’ awareness about this important area. thus, activities that encourage students to notice how phrasal combinations are used to achieve particular communicative functions feature on many eap courses. in our earlier paper (davis and morley, 2018), for example, we proposed teaching activities to assist in pedagogical approaches to developing an awareness of the roles of formulaic phrases. however, these kinds of pedagogical interventions are generally not available to l1 english students, even though, as argued powerfully by wingate (2015, p.152), ‘academic literacy needs to be learned by all students new to university, regardless of their backgrounds’. wingate contends that the failure by universities to offer academic literacy support, especially in the initial stages, has a highly detrimental effect on student experiences and outcomes, as students struggle to comprehend and enact what is required of them. there is a need to move away from remedial add-on approaches, and to look more holistically at academic literacies that are embedded in disciplinary teaching to assist all students (wingate, 2019; abegglen et al., 2019). however, there is some evidence that universities are beginning to offer academic literacy instruction and embed support more widely (thies and rosario, 2019). to manage the cognitive challenges of composing academic texts, student writers need to develop their own coping strategies as a means of strong self-efficacy, which involves motivation and perseverance with personal goals (bandura, 1997). research into the role of self-efficacy in student writing has grown significantly, and the importance of students taking responsibility and working out their own way to approach their studies has been well established (mitchell et al., 2019). at the same time, encouraging students to discuss their own struggles with academic literacies as a form of community building has been davis and morley it can facilitate so much!’ student writers’ practice of self-efficacy to develop their use of formulaic phrases journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 4 encouraged (shapiro, 2020). some students (for example, with different backgrounds including no traditional qualifications or being out of study for a long time) describe academic writing as ‘unfamiliar and remote’ and experience great anxiety (french, 2018). french highlights how the stakes are extremely high in academic writing and seeking support may be seen as failing by some students, so they try to manage alone. other studies have found that students with some diversity dimensions (such as first in family to attend university) label themselves as failures at university because they are not good at writing (forster, 2020). to help to support student learning, resources have been created, such as the academic phrasebank (ap), an online resource freely available to all students, which provides writers with an extensive list of commonly used formulaic sequences for reference and incorporation into their own writing. in this resource, the formulaic phrases are organised according to the typical communicative moves found in academic writing (swales, 1981). the authors have been researching user practices of academic phraseology for some years, and one of the authors created the ap resource (morley, 2005). analysis of data obtained by the authors indicates that, although this resource was designed with the needs of l2 speakers of english in mind, around half of those who use the resource are l1 english students. we felt that this was highly significant and that there is a need to listen to the voices of students who are attempting to navigate their own academic journeys in terms of phrasal use. therefore, in this small-scale study, we set out to examine the perspectives of l1 students at different levels of study with respect to how they experience and work with formulaic phrases in their academic writing. our research question was: how do student writers as users of ap develop their approaches to using formulaic phrases at different levels of study? methods respondents for this study were recruited after they completed an electronic survey about the usefulness of ap, available on its website, which currently has approximately 8,000 responses. the survey includes an option to indicate whether respondents wish to take part in a follow-on interview about their use of formulaic phrases by providing their email address. from this group, the researchers identified and contacted respondents who davis and morley it can facilitate so much!’ student writers’ practice of self-efficacy to develop their use of formulaic phrases journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 5 described themselves in the initial survey as having english as their first language (l1) and were studying at either undergraduate, master’s or phd level. in this way, we aimed to obtain a sample that was representative in terms of levels and subject of study in order to gain a broad range of perspectives. none of the participants studied at the researchers’ respective institutions, nor were known to the researchers prior to interview. for ethical purposes, participant information was provided, and consent was requested for the interview and our use of anonymised recorded data for research purposes. subsequently, 12 self-selected respondents were interviewed and audio recorded for approximately 30 minutes using zoom, then the interviews were manually transcribed for accuracy and analysed for emerging themes (see interview questions in appendix).3 table 1. participant profiles. participant level of study subject area country of study self-identified learner profile 1 ug business uk not mentioned 2 ug health uk not mentioned 3 ug sociology uk autistic with adhd 4 ug psychology and criminology uk adhd, mature student, dropped out twice 5 msc psychology uk neuro non-typical 6 msc medicine uk not mentioned 7 msc librarian studies uk not mentioned 8 msc psychology uk dyspraxic, slow cognitive processing 9 phd film studies ireland dyscalculic 10 phd psycholinguistics and neuroscience usa not mentioned 11 phd computer science education uk dyslexic 12 phd sociology austria not mentioned davis and morley it can facilitate so much!’ student writers’ practice of self-efficacy to develop their use of formulaic phrases journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 6 there were four participants at each level of study, undergraduate, master’s and phd. the majority of participants (nine) were studying in the uk, the remainder in other countries where the language of study was english. a large number (eight) were students of psychology or social sciences. it is striking that six out of the 12 participants self-identified as having a learning difficulty, although we did not ask them to supply this information. there was no trend related to level of study and learning difficulty – two out of four of students at each level of ug, msc and phd self-identified in this way. findings following analysis of the interview transcripts, three broad thematic areas of interest emerged. we grouped these under the headings of facilitating inclusion, adopting different approaches, and helping writers with learning difficulties, as discussed below. facilitating inclusion in academia perhaps the most important theme that emerges from the study is that access to a phraseological resource for academic writing such as the ap appears to facilitate the integration into the academic community of students who might have, at some point, considered themselves excluded. the fact that all 12 of our participants reported they found the ap resource to be very useful for their writing is unsurprising, given that we were working with a self-selecting sample of willing participants who had responded to a survey about its usefulness. however, it was especially notable that some participants demonstrated its impact on their sense of belonging at university. the comment below, for example, from a writer who originally felt that they were not ‘made’ for academic study, suggests that use of the resource, and the resulting awareness of academic phraseology, had a transformational effect on their perception of their own abilities to the extent that it influenced their decision to pursue a higher degree. actually, now it makes me really comfortable, and i am able to say i can definitely do a master’s now. before i was thinking i’m going to finish my undergraduate and that’s it, i am not made for this, but it has changed my mind, i am definitely going to do a master’s now, i feel more confident. (participant 3) davis and morley it can facilitate so much!’ student writers’ practice of self-efficacy to develop their use of formulaic phrases journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 7 another participant commented that, as a result of having access to the resource and having greater awareness of academic phrases which they felt could be compared to ‘stepping stones, academic pixels or academic essentials’, they had begun to develop their own ‘academic identity’ as a writer (participant 5). these comments demonstrate persistence in the face of difficulty and drive for individual improvement of performance, which are concordant with self-efficacy (bandura, 1997). the helpfulness of having a good command of academic phraseology does not seem to be restricted to the medium of writing. two of our participants spoke about the importance of understanding the academic phraseology in facilitating the reading of research papers. furthermore, five participants stressed the interdependence of reading and writing, and reported that, while they are reading, they either actively look for or simply take note of academic phrases used by more experienced academic writers, as this was one way that they themselves could develop as writers: being able to see how they implemented formulaic phrases within their own writing is something that you really have to do, and you should be reading journal articles every day because that is really the core of where your knowledge is going to be able to come from. (participant 4) one concern about academic phraseology was expressed related to plagiarism: i know which phrases are the formulaic ones, and which phrases are the content of the research or the idea, but what i worry about is the formula creates the structure, and it is also possible to plagiarise this way of presenting ideas, the structure, so that’s what’s trickier. (participant 10) we investigated this concern in a previous paper (davis and morley, 2015) and concluded that use of formulaic phrases should be a way of avoiding plagiarism by presenting alternative standard ways of using organisational language, but it is striking that this participant considered that it would be possible to plagiarise another author’s writing style from phrasal choices. davis and morley it can facilitate so much!’ student writers’ practice of self-efficacy to develop their use of formulaic phrases journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 8 data from this study suggests that many students felt unprepared for the life of academia and that unfamiliarity with conventional academic phraseology was an impediment to successful engagement, as the two participants below attest: we’re not taught this. we come out of secondary school, and we’re often not taught to look at text in this way, to look at language in this way. and for a lot of people, it’s very difficult. (participant 8) having a tool like this is so useful. even though you are supposed to know how to do essay writing on a master’s, it is so helpful to use these phrases to make your writing stronger. (participant 7) moreover, endorsing wingate’s (2019) contention discussed earlier that universities generally fail to offer adequate academic literacy support, especially in the initial stages, our participants explained that where support was provided by their institutions, it tended to be quite limited and/or tended to focus on areas that our participants felt were less useful. although a small number of our participants had been referred to the ap by tutors, none of them had been given any instruction about the use or role of academic phraseology. of significance is the fact that all of the participants in this study were keen to refer to their early struggles with writing at university, for example, one participant lamented the absence of any guidance on academic phraseology: it would have been helpful to have had an induction explaining how to use them, some instruction. i really don’t know how i survived the first five years without them! (participant 3) these responses suggest that inducting new students into the role of phraseology in academic discourse and introducing them to tools such as the ap is one of the steps that could be taken to reduce lack of familiarity and anxiety caused by academic writing (french, 2018). thus, enabling students to start using appropriate academic discourse could facilitate greater inclusion and enhance student experiences and outcomes. davis and morley it can facilitate so much!’ student writers’ practice of self-efficacy to develop their use of formulaic phrases journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 9 different approaches to using a compendium of academic phrases the ap is presented to users as an extensive compendium of commonly used phraseological elements and is freely available online. however, no advice is given about how the resource should be used, other than that some changes or substitutions to the phrases will need to be made to suit the writer’s particular purpose and discipline. therefore, we were very interested in the participants’ accounts of self-efficacy with their use of formulaic phrases, in terms of their motivation to improve their own performance in academic writing (bandura, 1997). one of the areas we focused on in the interviews was to ask how the participants were using the resource, and interesting evidence emerged that the participants had developed quite different methods. three broad methods were identified which we can call the ‘before’, ‘after’, and ‘during’ writing approaches. exemplifying the ‘before’ writing approach, one student reported that they use ap as the starting point for their assignments: i read my assignment brief, then i go straight to ap, and i check to see if i can find suitable formulaic phrases before writing. (participant 1) this suggests that the resource can be a helpful tool for starting the writing process, perhaps helping to overcome the hurdle known as ‘writer’s block’, which is widely covered in the study skills literature. as reported by murray and moore (2006), many academic writers talk about the ’agonies of just getting down to it’, and that getting started is often the most challenging aspect of the writing process (p.29). the usefulness of having a set of commonly used phrases at hand in helping with writer’s block and inspiration for starting writing is further highlighted in the following comment: you know how you get writer’s block, and you know what you want to say but you don’t know how? it really helps just to speed that process along and you’re able to have all these different phrases and being able to mix and match what could work and what couldn’t. and it just kind of helps to create a spark. (participant 4) similarly, one participant felt that overcoming writer’s block by adding phrases also contributed to making the text reader-friendly: davis and morley it can facilitate so much!’ student writers’ practice of self-efficacy to develop their use of formulaic phrases journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 10 it is easy to get stuck in your own words, your own way, and i try to introduce variation, so how i use it is to create a bit of interest. (participant 12) in contrast to the ‘before’ writing approach, other participants described how they prioritise writing their own ideas down on paper first, before turning to the resource to improve their text later. so rather than serving as a trigger or prompt as we have seen above, the phrases are being used to shape ideas that have already been written down – the ‘after’ writing approach: i try to make the first draft about getting words on the page and not structuring beyond a loose outline [. . .]. so once i know that i have a sturdy word count, then i start shaping it. i apply formulaic phrasing as part of a trimming and organising step. (participant 9) when i read over my essay, i tend to discover some weakness where i add formulaic phrases to make my text better. (participant 2) another approach to using the resource might be described as a ‘during’ approach where the writer looks to the resource to find alternative words and perhaps more suitable ways to express an idea while they are writing. this approach is explained in the two comments below: in the middle of writing an essay, i might think ‘oh how shall i say that?’, and then i check the list and think ‘ok that one suits this point’, so i will use that. (participant 7) i tend to be writing then i think ‘oh it would be good to have something here’. then i go to the website, and then i tend to have a look through which one [. . .] because usually i have a sort of idea in my head of what i want to say but the words aren’t quite there, so then i’ll just have a read through, and something will catch my eye and i’ll either directly use it or tweak it a little bit. (participant 6) davis and morley it can facilitate so much!’ student writers’ practice of self-efficacy to develop their use of formulaic phrases journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 11 in a strategy that appears to be applicable to both the ‘during’ writing and the ‘after’ writing approaches to using the ap, another participant commented that they consult the resource purposefully: i always go with a question. for instance, i used ‘however’ 13 times in an assignment, so i was looking for words to replace ‘however’[. . .] i always have a specific problem in my writing i’m trying to fix. (participant 8) with respect to how the participants actually use the phrases that they have selected, some were eager to point out that with most of the phrases they use, they try make some modifications to incorporate them seamlessly into their own work, using the resource as a kind of linguistic ‘scaffold’ (participant 11). while we were not able to reliably assess the degree to which participants made modifications to the phrases, from their comments it seems likely that all participants used modifications some of the time, and that some participants made a particular effort to extensively modify most of the phrases they used. in this respect, a few participants gave advice, warning about simply reusing the phrases without adequate care. one suggested that the writer should not ‘hold too tightly to it’ (participant 5); in other words, rather than employing them as fixed constructions, it is better that they serve as linguistic prompts for other possibilities. another participant stressed the importance of the writer having a fairly good idea of what they want to say before using the phrases, and they offered the following advice: try to visualise what you’re trying to say before you go to the phrasebank maybe. like having an idea of where you’re trying to go with something before having a look can be quite helpful in terms of not picking something that’s not that suited to what you’re trying to say. (participant 6) this advice to peer writers suggests building self-efficacy by first deciding the moves of a text individually, and then looking for appropriate phrases to make those rhetorical moves (swales, 1981). davis and morley it can facilitate so much!’ student writers’ practice of self-efficacy to develop their use of formulaic phrases journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 12 helping students with specific learning difficulties as noted above, it is significant that of the twelve individuals who agreed to be interviewed, six explained, without prompting, that they had one of the following specific learning difficulties (splds): adhd (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder), dyslexia, dyscalculia, dyspraxia, and one identified as ‘neuro non-typical’ which can be broadly interpreted as autistic. our self-selecting sample of participants, therefore, had a much higher representation of students with learning difficulties (50%) than for the student body as a whole; it is estimated that 5% of higher education students in the uk have a known learning difficulty of adhd, dyslexia, or other difficulty (hesa, 2021). it would appear that for these learners, a phraseological resource like the ap is found to be particularly helpful in developing their writing, and it is interesting to explore why this might be the case. at the same time, we acknowledge that it was not in the agreed interview protocol to enquire about these areas with the participants, and so we did not interrogate them directly about these questions, and we are only able to report on data that participants chose to reveal. difficulties with written expression are common in learners with adhd (graham et al., 2016), a condition primarily associated with problems sustaining attention. these difficulties affect many areas, including quality, output, genre elements, vocabulary, sentence construction, spelling, and handwriting (graham et al., 2016). it is also known that learners with adhd exhibit weaknesses in the utilisation of working memory (martinussen and major, 2011). working memory has been defined as ‘a limited capacity system allowing the temporary storage and manipulation of information necessary for [. . .] complex cognitive tasks’ (baddeley, 2000, p.418). composing a text is a particularly good example of a complex cognitive task, since the writer must plan and keep in mind the intended audience and the overall argument of the text, generate ideas, express these ideas using correctly spelt words and grammatically correct sentences, organise these into connected paragraphs, and monitor the text for overall coherence and errors. from this we can deduce that any tool that helps to reduce the processing load on working memory will assist with the task of writing, and we can see why ap is useful for these writers, as it provides the necessary language, in the form of functionally useful whole strings of words, together with indications of how these might be organised. this is what the student below seems to be alluding to when they say: davis and morley it can facilitate so much!’ student writers’ practice of self-efficacy to develop their use of formulaic phrases journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 13 i have a whole battle going on in my brain to write something out. so when i started using the ap, it cut down the time i needed to write a paragraph, so before it would take me seriously 2 to 3 hours to write a paragraph, using this would take me down to 45 minutes, and i could have a flow in the essay as well. (participant 3) interestingly, this student also commented that ap was particularly helpful for their writing because they were already learning and using linguistic scripts so that they could cope with interactive situations in everyday life. so, the idea of using functionally useful whole strings of words for writing – academic phrases – fitted in with their wider practices. dyslexia typically primarily affects the skills involved in accurate and fluent word reading irrespective of intellectual ability. like adhd, it is also associated with difficulties in written expression (mortimore and crozier, 2006). one explanation for this association is that impaired reading skills are likely to limit a learner’s opportunity to acquire linguistic and rhetorical knowledge for successful writing (shanahan, 2016). thus, it is likely that for many students with dyslexia, given the challenges they face when reading, the process of noticing useful phrases in academic texts is made that much more difficult when compared to their non-dyslexic peers. in addition, forster (2020) draws attention to the feeling dyslexic students have that they are not ‘clever enough’ (meaning good at academic writing) to be at university. the participant quoted below seems to be suggesting that ap provides them with the language they need to structure and formulate their ideas in an acceptable way. i use it quite a lot because i am dyslexic, so i find having the scaffolding to help me jump, you know, change topics between thematic elements [. . .] i think they are giving me the correct language that then helps me structure and formulate my ideas in a better way. so it’s actually sort of me presenting my arguments in a way that is readable to other people. (participant 11) in addition, it is recognised that students with dyslexia commonly have difficulty with spelling, a feature sometimes called dysgraphia, which is also associated with impaired ability to retrieve the visual picture of words. the spelling and word visualisation difficulties that these writers experience seem to further constrain the writing process, since they use more working memory resources and time on these features, at the expense of text davis and morley it can facilitate so much!’ student writers’ practice of self-efficacy to develop their use of formulaic phrases journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 14 generation and organisation, which non-dyslexic writers focus on (sumner and connelly, 2020). so again, with this group, we can understand why the ap can be useful in reducing the processing load in working memory by providing functionally useful strings of words. one of our participants indicated that they were dyscalculic. although this is a condition that is characterised by persistent difficulty in understanding numbers leading to a diverse range of challenges with mathematics, it may also co-occur with dyslexia and other learning difficulties. this participant explained their challenges with sequencing information: sequences are very difficult for me. it’s a real obstacle with academic writing. with dyscalculia, the way information is naturally presented seems very ‘mind map’, so it is contiguous but not necessarily sequential. formulaic phrases help make my explanations more sequential, so easier to follow for more mainstream minds [. . .] formulaic phrases help me participate in discussions too. i would be lost without such tools. (participant 9) it is notable that this participant found the formulaic phrases presented in the resource not only assisted them with text organisation and sequencing ideas, but also enabled them to participate more fully in seminars. lastly, there was one student in our sample who indicated that they had dyspraxia, which is normally manifested as impaired co-ordination, balance and movement. nevertheless, it is not uncommon for dyspraxic learners to experience some of the difficulties faced by adhd and dyslexic learners. unfortunately, as stated at the start of this section, because we did not set out to explore this area, and it was not mentioned in the information that we gave to the participants at the outset, we did not probe the participant on this question further. nevertheless, they leave us with an insightful comment about how using a resource like ap can help the development of greater linguistic and rhetorical awareness. the idea of phrasebank really is to point the finger for people to begin to read not just for content but to read for the rhetorical aspects of text and notice things [. . .]. once you show them the language, it can facilitate so much! (participant 8) davis and morley it can facilitate so much!’ student writers’ practice of self-efficacy to develop their use of formulaic phrases journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 15 this advice for peers also demonstrates empowering academic literacy through selfefficacy in terms of developing individual understanding and awareness-raising of the role of formulaic phrases. conclusion this study set out to examine the approaches developed by student writers at different degree levels towards the use of formulaic phrases in their writing, and in particular how they made use of a compendium of academic phrases (ap). the data from our interview participants demonstrates that the resource could be an empowering tool which facilitated the participants’ development of academic writing and helped them to participate in their academic discourse community. it is striking that none of the participants had received any instruction in how to use formulaic phrases in their writing; they had only been recommended to consult the ap resource. therefore, it is unsurprising that from our lens of self-efficacy, our participants constructed their own novel ways to make use of formulaic phrases and the resource, according to their needs, for example to consult and add phrases to help them start writing, to consult phrases in the middle of the writing process or to use them for improvement at the end of text production. it is notable that half of our participants reported a learning difficulty, which meant that they used the resource in particularly individual ways to support their writing with scripts, scaffolding, structure, sequences and triggers for writing. the findings from this study offer learning developers some new insights into student writers’ individual approaches to using formulaic phrases, to their challenges and strategies, and provides advice for other students. as well as drawing attention to the learning processes student writers, particularly those with learning difficulties, go through to use formulaic phrases, the main implication from these findings is that there is a clear need for widely available instruction for all students about how to use academic phrases in written texts. this could be delivered by writing/learning support centres at key developmental stages of students’ academic journey, such as in the preparation of initial writing assignments. davis and morley it can facilitate so much!’ student writers’ practice of self-efficacy to develop their use of formulaic phrases journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 16 this research was limited as a small-scale exploratory study involving only twelve participants. we did not examine any differences between student writers at different degree levels. we had not predicted that a significant number of our respondents would self-report as having a learning difficulty and therefore could not examine this systematically. further research into the use of formulaic phrases by student writers with specific learning difficulties is therefore recommended. references abegglen, s., burns, t. and sinfield, s. (2019) ‘it’s learning development, jim – but not as we know it: academic literacies in third space’, journal of learning development in higher education, 15, november. available at: https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.v0i15.500 (accessed: 14 july 2022). baddeley, a. (2000) ‘the episodic buffer: a new component of working memory?’ trends in cognitive science, 4, pp.417–423. available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/s13646613(00)01538-2 (accessed: 14 july 2022). bandura, a. (1997) self-efficacy: the exercise of control. new york: w.h. freeman. barks, d. and watts, p. (2001) ‘textual borrowing strategies for graduate esl writers’, in belcher, d. and hirvela, a. (eds.) linking literacies: perspectives on l2 readingwriting connections. ann arbor, michigan: university of michigan press, pp.246-267. biber, d. (2006) university language: a corpus-based study of spoken and written registers. amsterdam: john benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.23 (accessed: 14 july 2022). bourdieu, p. and passeron, j.-c. (1994) ‘introduction: language and the relationship to language in the teaching situation’, in bourdieu, p., passeron, j.-c. and de saint martin, m. (eds.), academic discourse. cambridge: cambridge university press, pp.1-34. https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.v0i15.500 https://doi.org/10.1016/s1364-6613(00)01538-2 https://doi.org/10.1016/s1364-6613(00)01538-2 https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.23 davis and morley it can facilitate so much!’ student writers’ practice of self-efficacy to develop their use of formulaic phrases journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 17 davis, m. and morley, j. (2018) ‘facilitating learning about academic phraseology’, journal of learning development in he, special edition aldinhe conference 2018, pp.117. available at: https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.v0i0.468 (accessed: 14 july 2022). davis, m. and morley, j. (2015) ‘phrasal intertextuality: the responses of academics from different disciplines to students’ re-use of phrases from sources in their writing’, journal of second language writing, 28, pp.20-35. available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jslw.2015.02.004 (accessed: 14 july 2022). forster, e. (2020) ‘power and paragraphs: academic writing and emotion’, journal of learning development in higher education, 19. available at: https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.vi19.610 (accessed: 14 july 2022). french, a. (2018) ‘academic writing: anxiety, confusion and the affective domain: why should subject lecturers acknowledge the social and emotional aspects of writing development processes’, journal of academic writing, 8(2), pp.202-211. available at: https://doi.org/10.18552/joaw.v8i2.487 (accessed: 14 july 2022). graham, s., fishman, e., reid, r. and hebert, m. (2016) ‘writing characteristics of students with attention deficit hyperactive disorder: a meta-analysis learning disabilities’, research and practice, 31(2), pp.75–89. available at: https://doi.org/10.1111/ldrp.12099 (accessed: 14 july 2022). hesa (2021) higher education student statistics: uk, 2019/20 student numbers and characteristics. available at https://www.hesa.ac.uk/news/27-01-2021/sb258-highereducation-student-statistics/numbers (accessed: 5 november 2021). hyland, k. (2008) ‘academic clusters: text patterning in published and postgraduate writing’, international journal of applied linguistics, 18(1), pp.41-62. available at: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1473-4192.2008.00178.x (accessed: 14 july 2022). https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.v0i0.468 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jslw.2015.02.004 https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.vi19.610 https://doi.org/10.18552/joaw.v8i2.487 https://doi.org/10.1111/ldrp.12099 https://www.hesa.ac.uk/news/27-01-2021/sb258-higher-education-student-statistics/numbers https://www.hesa.ac.uk/news/27-01-2021/sb258-higher-education-student-statistics/numbers https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1473-4192.2008.00178.x davis and morley it can facilitate so much!’ student writers’ practice of self-efficacy to develop their use of formulaic phrases journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 18 martinussen, r. and major, a (2011) ‘working memory weaknesses in students with adhd: implications for instruction’, theory into practice 50 (1), pp.68-75. https://doi.org/10.1080/00405841.2011.534943 (accessed: 14 july 2022). mitchell, k. m., mcmillan, d. e. and lobchuk, m. m. (2019) ‘applying the “social turn” in writing scholarship to perspectives on writing self-efficacy’, journal of learning development in higher education, 15. available at: https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.v0i15.512 (accessed: 14 july 2022). morley, j. (2005) academic phrasebank. available at https://www.phrasebank.manchester.ac.uk/ (accessed: 14 july 2022). mortimore, t. and crozier, w. r. (2006) ‘dyslexia and difficulties with study skills in higher education’, studies in higher education, 31, pp.235–251. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/03075070600572173 (accessed: 14 july 2022). murray, r. and moore, s. (2006) a handbook of academic writing. maidenhead: open university press. shanahan, t. (2016) ‘relationships between reading and writing development’, in macarthur, c.a., graham, s. and fitzgerald, j. (eds.) handbook of writing research. new york: guilford press, pp.194-207. shapiro, s. (2020) ‘inclusive pedagogy in the academic writing classroom: cultivating communities of belonging’, journal of academic writing, 10(1), pp.154-164. available at: https://doi.org/10.18552/joaw.v10i1.607 (accessed: 14 july 2022). sumner, e. and connelly, v. (2020) ‘writing and revision strategies of students with and without dyslexia’, journal of learning disabilities, 53(3), pp.189–198. available at: https://doi.org/10.1177/0022219419899090 (accessed: 14 july 2022). swales, j. (1981) aspects of article introductions (aston esp research report no.1). birmingham: language studies unit, university of aston. https://doi.org/10.1080/00405841.2011.534943 https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.v0i15.512 https://www.phrasebank.manchester.ac.uk/ https://doi.org/10.1080/03075070600572173 https://doi.org/10.18552/joaw.v10i1.607 https://doi.org/10.1177/0022219419899090 davis and morley it can facilitate so much!’ student writers’ practice of self-efficacy to develop their use of formulaic phrases journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 19 thies, l. c. and rosario, v. (2019) ‘partners in a changing dance: embedding academic literacies in unit and course curricula’, journal of learning development in higher education, 15. available at: https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.v0i15.538 (accessed: 14 july 2022). wingate, u. (2015) academic literacy and student diversity: the case for inclusive practice. bristol: multilingual matters. https://doi.org/10.21832/9781783093496 wingate, u. (2019) ‘achieving transformation through collaboration: the role of academic literacies’, journal of learning development in higher education, 15. available at: https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.v0i15.566 (accessed: 14 july 2022). author details mary davis is principal lecturer in learning and teaching at oxford brookes university. she is a researcher of academic integrity with a strong interest in inclusion and is currently leading a qaa funded collaborative enhancement project on improving student learning by joining up inclusion/accessibility and academic integrity. john morley is the former director of the university-wide language programmes at the university of manchester. he holds a phd in applied linguistics. as the creator of academic phrasebank, his research interests include the role of phraseology in language learning. appendix interview questions in this interview, we are going to discuss your use of formulaic phrases, by which we mean commonly-used functional groups of words such as ‘the aim of this study is to investigate…’ we are asking you these questions as a user of academic phrasebank. https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.v0i15.538 https://doi.org/10.21832/9781783093496 https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.v0i15.566 davis and morley it can facilitate so much!’ student writers’ practice of self-efficacy to develop their use of formulaic phrases journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 20 1. when do you use formulaic phrases in your academic writing? 2. how do you use formulaic phrases in your academic writing? 3. do you make a record or list of the formulaic phrases that you have used? 4. do you notice formulaic phrases when you are reading? 5. have you had any instruction about the use of formulaic phrases? 6. do you have any difficulty with using formulaic phrases? 7. do you have any advice for other writers about using formulaic phrases? ‘it can facilitate so much!’ student writers’ practice of self-efficacy to develop their use of formulaic phrases abstract introduction methods findings facilitating inclusion in academia different approaches to using a compendium of academic phrases helping students with specific learning difficulties conclusion references author details appendix journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 27 april 2023 ©2023 the author(s) (cc-by 4.0) choice matters: an investigation of students’ experiences selecting dissertation projects isabelle c. winder bangor university, uk abstract the final year dissertation is an important part of an undergraduate degree which delivers a wide range of subject-specific and transferable skills. it plays a significant part in students’ learning development and overall experience of university. finding the right project is emotionally important to students and may underpin their subsequent motivation and engagement. little is known, however, about how students make this important choice. this study aimed to learn more about students’ experiences of choosing a dissertation, how their choice processes varied and whether their choices worked out well for them. it surveyed 150 undergraduates in natural sciences at a uk university, asking a mix of qualitative and quantitative questions. findings indicate that students value a range of factors when choosing their dissertation, most prominently interest in the subject and approach but also their existing familiarity with the area, the perceived benefits and demands of the work and staff support. multivariate analysis suggests a variety of choice processes are in operation, with some students valuing content factors and others trading these off against relational ones. with hindsight, 91 respondents (60.7%) felt their choice process had worked well and 87 (58%) would choose the same way again. a subset, however, had felt unprepared to choose, and some of these were particularly unhappy with the outcome. the implication for learning development is that helping students learn to make conscious and informed choices and making dissertation modules student-centric is likely to significantly improve engagement and learning, especially for the less confident. keywords: self-efficacy; engagement; motivation; final-year project. introduction the final year dissertation (also called a research or honours project) is the capstone part of undergraduate degrees around the world (healey et al., 2013). completing such a winder choice matters: an investigation of students’ experiences selecting dissertation projects journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 2 project, or undertaking equivalent ‘research experience’, is thought to be key to students’ development of transferable and subject-specific skills and gaining entry to their disciplinary communities (greenbank et al., 2008; wilson et al., 2012; feather, anchor and cowton, 2014). dissertations are widely considered critical tests of graduate skills and abilities, ‘[a]mong the most telling of all indicators of the quality of educational outcomes’ (gibbs, 2010, p.48). performance on a dissertation, which tends to be highly weighted, can determine degree classification. the experience of actually doing a dissertation is also likely to have a significant effect on students’ current and subsequent learning development. in many ways, conducting a dissertation can be seen as the epitome of active or inquirybased learning, building on the principle that students should be producing as well as consuming knowledge (healey et al., 2012). students, however, have not mentioned ‘contributing to science’ when asked about why they value doing research, and many consider their work irrelevant to wider notions of progress (van blankenstein et al., 2019, p.221). instead, students report that they are more likely to engage with research, and persevere through difficulties, when they are emotionally and personally engaged with it – that is, when they find their work personally meaningful, experience positive interdependencies and relationships with others, feel welcome and safe in their research environment and enjoy their daily tasks (dewey, 1916; cooper et al., 2019; van blankenstein et al., 2019, p.222). with staff still believing dissertations matter primarily because they deliver advanced skills and offer exposure to and entry into research, as well as helping to recruit and retain the best students (wilson et al., 2012), there is a clear mismatch between what academics and students value about these capstone experiences. staff may also feel that dissertations should only be offered to more academically-inclined students, as others ‘haven’t got the motivation’ or ‘don’t have those core competencies and skills at dissertation level’ (feather, anchor and cowton, 2014, p. 19). motivation and performance, however, are interdependent in complex ways (honicke and broadbent, 2016). recent research into the links between personality, academic motivation and performance further suggests that self-efficacy beliefs and academic integration are important mediators of the motivation-performance relationship (bipp, steinmayr and spinath, 2008; clark and schroth, 2010; de feyter et al., 2012; clark et al., 2014; mcgeown et al., 2014; honicke and broadbent, 2016). this suggests that the emotional winder choice matters: an investigation of students’ experiences selecting dissertation projects journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 3 dimensions of engagement (fredricks, blumenfeld and paris, 2004; henrie, halverson and graham, 2015) may be particularly important to student experiences of dissertation modules, and ultimately their development as independent learners and graduates. one approach to making dissertations more personally relevant for students is to offer them choice: of topic, approach, study subject(s) (if relevant) or supervisor, or all of the above. while it is theoretically possible to assign students pre-designed projects with no element of choice, most departments allow some choice within a framework, and some allow students to design their own dissertations from scratch provided they can find or be allocated a suitable supervisor (harland, pitt and saunders, 2005, p.2). a few even use electronic matching systems to allocate students one of their chosen projects, reducing the demands on staff (hussain et al., 2019, p.3). it would be easy to assume that offering as much choice as possible will increase students’ feelings of ownership and therefore their engagement and motivation, but the reality seems to be more complicated (milner-bolotin, 2001). milner-bolotin’s (2001, p.ix) work, for example, found that the level of autonomy students had when choosing a project was not meaningfully related to either ownership or mastery goal orientation, but their initial interest in the project was. in contrast, a more recent study has found that students given a high degree of autonomy and choice tend to use more phrases linked to positive feelings of ownership, while those with no choice expressed negative ideas of ownership more often (hanauer et al., 2017). a third study found considerable variation in students’ self-reported propensities to choose and work autonomously (greenbank and penketh, 2009, p.466-467). greenbank and penketh (2009, p.466) also found that the studentsupervisor relationship was key to developing independence, and that students reported a tension between choosing a project based on interest and one they felt would attract more academic support. this fits with other studies that note that this relationship is both critical and challenging to navigate (shadforth and harvey, 2003; derounian, 2011), especially in its distinctive combination of the intellectual and the emotional (strandler et al., 2014). the findings above suggest that choice can be a mixed blessing, but there has been very little research into how undergraduate students make choices within their degrees, including about their dissertation (harland, pitt and saunders, 2005, p.1). student perceptions of their own skill and assessments of supervisory availability seem to be important in deciding to do a project, where this is optional (sellahewa and samarasinghe, 2021, pp.139-141). researchers who surveyed two cohorts doing dissertations in winder choice matters: an investigation of students’ experiences selecting dissertation projects journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 4 biomolecular sciences found these students identified their general interest in the subject area as the most important factor in their choices, followed in turn by the chance to extend knowledge in a familiar area and timing of practical work (harland, pitt and saunders, 2005, p.7). some of the factors harland, pitt and saunders (2005) included, however, would not generalise to other subject areas, and there has not yet been any follow-up research exploring student choice in a contemporary (post-covid-19) setting. given the major changes to student body size and diversity, the type(s) and topics of dissertations universities can support and the lived student experience in the last few years, this study aims to revisit this important topic. it asks three specific questions: 1. how do students choose their dissertation projects, and which factor(s) and values do they prioritise or trade-off when doing so? 2. do the factors influencing student choice differ between cohorts of students who have experienced different approaches to project allocation? 3. do students’ choice processes work well for them, and if not, what would they change or value differently with hindsight? method research context and recruitment of participants this study was carried out in a mid-sized uk university with a diverse student body. student respondents were recruited from degree programmes in the natural sciences, broadly defined to include biology, zoology, conservation, geography, environmental science and ecology. participation was entirely voluntary, with students given a detailed explanation of the topic and purpose of the survey and how the data would be used before opting in. survey responses were collected electronically and participants remained anonymous throughout. in lieu of collecting identifying information, participants were asked to specify whether they were in year two or year three of their degree, and which broad group of programmes (biosciences or environmental subjects) they were studying within. responses were solicited from three cohorts of students, namely second year biosciences students (n=58 participants from a cohort of approximately 180), third year biosciences students (n=66 from approximately 160) and third year environmental sciences students (n=26, from winder choice matters: an investigation of students’ experiences selecting dissertation projects journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 5 approximately 75). this lack of identifying information also meant it was not possible to explore respondent demographics. the cohorts surveyed, however, were all broadly representative of the university’s student body in terms of, for instance, gender, ethnicity, and proportion of first-generation students. the survey was administered in class time to ensure everyone had an equal opportunity to fill it out and ask any questions they might have. responses were collected between march and april 2022. at this time, the second year cohort had just submitted their dissertation research proposal, while both third year cohorts were writing up. biosciences and environmental sciences students had also experienced different dissertation allocation/choice procedures. in this university, bioscience students select pre-designed projects from a list and are allocated one of their six ranked choices, while environmental sciences students choose a subject area and negotiate their project with the assigned supervisor. survey design this study used a mixed-methods approach and a survey that combined qualitative and quantitative questions. first, it asked students to summarise in their own words the factors influencing their dissertation choice. the next six questions asked students to rank the importance of a particular (pre-set) factor (table 1). rankings used a five-point likert scale with 1 indicating ‘not important at all’ and 5 ‘extremely important’. these closed questions followed the open-ended one so we could see to what extent students’ own listings of factors matched those identified in advance by the survey writers. together, they provided the data we used to explore research questions one and two. finally, students answered two semi-qualitative questions about how well their choice process had worked and what (if anything) they would change with hindsight, which provided evidence to explore research question three. these semi-qualitative questions each included multiple choice options (yes, no and somewhat) and an ‘other – explain below’ option. winder choice matters: an investigation of students’ experiences selecting dissertation projects journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 6 table 1. the six pre-determined factors students were asked to rank from 1 (not at all important) to 5 (extremely important). factor name description (as given in the survey), as in ‘how important was it to you that your chosen project…’ theme/subject fitted within a certain theme or subject area, for example, conservation, animal behaviour or microbiology approach used a particular approach, for example, was fieldbased, lab-based or desk-based specific group/environment focused on a specific taxonomic group or a particular environment supervisor would allow you to work with a particular supervisor skills would develop specific skills, for example, in conservation assessment, using a questionnaire, gis (geographical information systems) or dna extraction autonomy would allow you to design a project based around your own interests data analysis quantitative data was analysed in microsoft excel and ibm spss version 27. descriptive statistics and boxplots were generated to summarise scores for each factor within and between cohorts, and pairwise mood’s median tests with bonferroni corrections were used to test for statistically significant differences between the three cohorts. mood’s median test was appropriate because the samples, particularly the third year environmental sciences group (n=26), did not meet the assumptions of a parametric test (mood, 1950). bonferroni corrections were used to reduce the risk of type i error that arises when conducting repeated pairwise tests of difference (bland and altman, 1995). to address more fully the element of research question (1) above that focuses on tradeoffs and patterning in rankings, principal components analyses were then conducted on the rankings for all six factors, first for the entire study sample and then for the three student cohorts individually. winder choice matters: an investigation of students’ experiences selecting dissertation projects journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 7 qualitative and semi-qualitative data, which included that for all the remaining questions in the survey, were analysed thematically (kiger and varpio, 2020). for semi-qualitative questions, where respondents could answer yes, no, somewhat or ‘other – please explain’, responses were first categorised as broadly affirmative (yes or variations on ‘mostly’), broadly dissenting (no or ‘a little bit’), and somewhat. if a respondent did not answer the question the response was removed. after proportions in each category had been calculated, simple yes/no responses were set aside, and the remaining answers were coded and classified into a set of themes (the inductive approach to thematic analysis). thematic analysis was also used for the initial wholly qualitative question, with a mixture of inductive and deductive themes used to accommodate both expected and emergent/unexpected content. mentions of each theme were counted and converted to proportions in microsoft excel. results how students choose dissertations our survey’s first question asked participants to describe in their own words which factor(s) had been important to them when choosing their dissertation. most respondents listed at least two factors and the answers clustered around fifteen themes. the most commonly mentioned theme was ‘interest or enjoyment’, which 103 of 150 respondents (68.67%) had considered (see figure 1). the second and third most popular were theme or subject matter and approach respectively, which were often mentioned alongside interest/enjoyment, for example, ‘interesting subject matter’ or ‘data collection that i would enjoy’. approach was mentioned by 68 respondents (45.33%) and theme/subject matter by 65 (43.33%). supervisor was the fourth most common factor, mentioned by 45 respondents (30%). winder choice matters: an investigation of students’ experiences selecting dissertation projects journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 8 figure 1. themes mentioned by survey respondents asked to summarise in their own words what was important when they choose their dissertation. these top four themes were anticipated in the survey design. interest, however, was not included in the quantitative questions because of its anticipated close relationship to theme/subject, approach and focal group/environment. the other themes mentioned in qualitative responses (figure 1), however, included a mix of anticipated and emergent ideas. emergent themes included confidence (whether the student anticipated being able to do the project well or that it would be difficult), familiarity with the subject and approach, being able to make a contribution or study something new, timing, fit with career goals, fit with other modules or degree specialism, a desire to avoid statistics (mentioned by 3 respondents) and the perceived feasibility of the project, for example, which resources a student could devote to the dissertation, including whether they drove. the quantitative rankings of how important a subset of pre-identified factors were to each group reinforced the importance of theme/subject and approach (see figure 2), which had the highest mean importance rankings at 4.09 and 3.96 out of 5 respectively. the third most important factor according to the weightings, however, was autonomy/choice, though winder choice matters: an investigation of students’ experiences selecting dissertation projects journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 9 the average here was 3.65 out of 5, closer to the mid-point of the five-point likert scale and indicating an average score somewhere between ‘neither important nor unimportant’ and ‘rather important’. figure 2. the mean weightings given to six potentially important factors in choosing a dissertation according to each student cohort surveyed. statistically significant differences are labelled (* = p<0.05, ** = p<0.01). skills to be gained and the focal group/environment of a proposed dissertation both scored between 3 and 3.5, and supervisor (which had been the fourth most commonly mentioned important factor in the qualitative data) scored just 2.87 overall, effectively a ‘neither important nor unimportant’ score. looking more closely at the rankings for supervisor, however, reveals a bimodal pattern with some respondents (the largest share, at 37/150 or 24.3%) saying supervisor identity was ‘rather unimportant’ to them while 35 respondents (23%) said it was ‘rather important’. there were few significant differences between student cohorts. third year biosciences students scored theme/subject as significantly more important than third year environmental sciences students (χ=7.961, p=0.005) and third year environmental sciences students scored autonomy/choice as significantly more important than second year biosciences students (χ=6.392, p=0.034). winder choice matters: an investigation of students’ experiences selecting dissertation projects journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 10 trade-offs and patterns in ranking of key factors this study has shown that students consider multiple factors when choosing a dissertation. it also suggested that students had made their choices using several different sets of values, for instance when it comes to supervisor, theme/subject and autonomy, which some students valued and others did not. are students trading off some factors against one another, and are there broad ‘types’ of choice process resulting in clustered scoring patterns? to find out, we ran a principal components analysis on the scores for all six factors. figure 3. factors linked and traded off along the three most important principal components summarising our quantitative dataset. key red = theme/subject, blue = skills, purple = autonomy/choice, orange = approach, yellow = focal group/environment, green = supervisor. winder choice matters: an investigation of students’ experiences selecting dissertation projects journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 11 factors appearing on the same side of the central dashed line have positively correlated scores, while those on opposite sides are traded off against one another (negatively correlated). the components are statistically independent. when all respondents are included, principal components analysis identifies three combined factors, each independent of one another, that together explain 62.7% of total variation. principal component one (pc1) explains 29.3% of the variation in the dataset, and shows that students who score theme/subject highly will also tend to value the skills a project develops and autonomy/choice. pc2, which explains 17.1% of variation, suggests students value either approach or the chance to focus on a particular group, species or environment of interest, and perhaps trade these off against one another. finally, pc3 explains a further 16.2% of variation and suggests another trade-off, with students who score supervisor highly tending to score autonomy and skills as unimportant, and viceversa (see figure 3). the three student cohorts scored a few factors differently to one another, so principal components analyses were also conducted for each cohort individually. the results (figure 4) suggest some minor differences between cohorts in terms of trade-offs and values. second year biosciences students, for instance, tended to score theme/subject, supervisor and autonomy/choice similarly, then traded off skills against focal group/environment and approach against focal group/environment (suggesting they valued either focal group/environment or skills and/or approach, but not other combinations). third year biosciences students scored theme/subject, skills and focal group/environment similarly, and traded off supervisor versus focal group. they also tended to score autonomy/choice and approach together, and independently of other factors. finally, third year environmental sciences students (who had experienced a more open-ended allocation process, with more scope to negotiate their own project) scored theme/subject, skills, autonomy/choice and supervisor together, then traded off theme/subject and focal group/environment against approach. they also traded off approach against supervisor. these differences may relate to the different project allocation processes the cohorts experienced or their different priorities. figure 4. factors linked and traded off along the three major principal components found in analyses of just second year biosciences students (left), third year winder choice matters: an investigation of students’ experiences selecting dissertation projects journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 12 biosciences students (centre) and third year environmental sciences students (right). colours and interpretation as for figure 3. red = theme/subject, blue = skills, purple = autonomy/choice, orange = approach, yellow = focal group/environment, green = supervisor. self-assessment of the choice process the majority of respondents (91, or 60.7%) said their choice process had worked well for them, while 23 (15.3%) said they had not and 36 (24%) said they had worked ‘somewhat well’. to categorise qualitative responses (some respondents had not ticked an option before choosing the text box labelled ‘please explain’) the overall emotional tenor of the text was used, for example, if a student mentioned ‘getting my third choice, so i am not happy’ this was categorised as negative, while ‘i got to design my own project’ was positive. most responses (119 or 79.3%) were simple, selected from the multi-choice options. qualitative responses were generally unique, but included eight mentions of getting a lower-ranked choice (all biosciences students, who chose projects from a list of adverts). seven respondents mentioned being happier than expected, while five said their preferred focal group/environment was not available, and five mentioned changing their project later. winder choice matters: an investigation of students’ experiences selecting dissertation projects journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 13 there were four mentions each of finding a project less relevant than expected and lacking confidence to complete a chosen project. a slightly smaller majority (87 respondents or 58%) said that with hindsight they would use the same criteria and choice process again, while 38 (25.33%) said they would change their process and 24 (16%) had mixed feelings. three respondents did not answer the question or considered it ‘not applicable’. among the 74 (49.33%) qualitative responses the most common themes were that a student repeating this choice would focus more on approach (18 respondents or 24.32%), or the theme or subject matter (14 respondents, 18.92%). ten (13.51%) used the text box to express contentment while 6 (8.11%) expressed generalised dissatisfaction. changing to designing one’s own project and changing to not designing one’s own project were both mentioned, and four students said they had had too little information to choose effectively. three more mentioned asking for more information or help choosing, with one saying they ‘didn’t know which [approach] you were going to get’ and another that the allocation ‘feels like pot luck’. two mentioned second year being ‘too early’ to know how to choose or choose well. discussion this study’s findings corroborate and expand upon those already published. respondents named interest in a dissertation’s subject as an important factor more often than any other single factor. this aligns with existing evidence that interest determines students’ feelings of ownership and motivation (milner-bolotin, 2001). likewise, subject/theme was given the highest quantitative importance ranking by the whole sample and the two biosciences cohorts. for third year environmental sciences students, however, approach was scored the same as theme/subject and autonomy/choice higher. the differences between environmental scientists and other cohorts in score for theme/subject and autonomy were statistically significant (see figure 2). they may relate to the fact that biosciences students chose from project adverts written by staff, and thus placed more emphasis on the information given (about theme/subject, question and approach), while environmental sciences students pick a theme and negotiate their project with a supervisor. the latter cohort therefore have more opportunity to experience and appreciate autonomy. winder choice matters: an investigation of students’ experiences selecting dissertation projects journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 14 harland, pitt and saunders (2005, p.7)’s biomolecular science students also considered interest in the subject the most important factor in dissertation choice, followed by the chance to extend knowledge in a familiar area and timing. this survey did not ask for rankings of familiarity or timing, but both emerged as minor themes in qualitative responses (mentioned by six and ten respondents respectively). contributing to science also emerged as a minor theme, mentioned by 13 respondents, and here there was an interesting skew: seven of 13 (53.84%) were environmental scientists, even though these made up only 17.33% of respondents. in contrast, mentions of wanting a familiar subject and needing to feel confident (23 respondents) were evenly spread across cohorts. timing was mostly mentioned by biosciences students, who were more likely to be working to fit around someone else’s schedule. it seems that a few respondents were keen to generate new knowledge (contra van blankenstein et al., 2019), but more were concerned with feeling confident. this fits with prior evidence that strong self-efficacy beliefs promote engagement, motivation and attainment (honicke and broadbent, 2016; cooper et al., 2019; van blankenstein et al., 2019). an extremely subject-centred approach to dissertations, as opposed to a student-centred perspective, has been found to reduce opportunities for both students and staff development (shadforth and harvey, 2003, p.150). our respondents clearly were not advocating for a wholly subject-centred approach, as is evident in the importance assigned to the supervisor by a substantial minority of students (30%) and in qualitative responses. having a supportive supervisor and good relationships with others was mentioned both as a factor that made some students feel their choice process had worked and as something others would focus on if choosing again. the supervisory relationship, and feeling valued and encouraged as a learner, is clearly important (as found also by derounian, 2011, p.96 and strandler et al., 2014). strong support networks involving peers, colleagues and supervisors are known to help with ‘sense-making’ and thereby coping with the emotional challenges of needing to try, fail and learn from failure as part of learning to do research (krishnan, 2021). timing within the academic year has also been listed as important by students before (harland, pitt and saunders, 2005, p.7). in this survey, furthermore, nine respondents mentioned ‘feasibility’ as important, though most did not explain further. subsequent qualitative responses indicated that two students had experienced unforeseen practical or winder choice matters: an investigation of students’ experiences selecting dissertation projects journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 15 financial constraints, one practical project been curtailed by the covid-19 pandemic, and another three simply said their project did not deliver what they had hoped for. several mentioned being underprepared to choose in second year, or feeling that the information given about projects was not what they needed (or, in one case, not accurate). one student said ‘the choices feel a bit all over the place, so [you] definitely need some sort of criteria to sort through them. but feels like pot luck on which you get allocated’, while another said ‘[t]here was too limited information on literature review, lab-based and fieldbased projects’ so they had not known in advance what they would get. with interest closely linked to intrinsic motivation (milner-bolotin, 2001; clark et al., 2014; mcgeown et al., 2014; van blankenstein et al., 2019) and the dissertation representing a particularly challenging and potentially daunting module (todd, bannister and clegg, 2000), this study thus reinforces the importance of designing dissertations to attract students’ interest. given prior evidence that academics’ assessments of student priorities often do not match students’ reports (harland, pitt and saunders, 2005, p.8), further investigation into what interests today’s higher education students might be a useful first step. this would need to be disciplineand context-specific, and could enable the kind of dialogic expression of the student voice that has been shown to lead to better student engagement (sun and holt, 2022). it would also allow students to start to co-create the values that structure their dissertation experiences (after dollinger, lodge and coates, 2018). furthermore, tailoring dissertation offerings to subjects and approaches students value might be possible even where resource or staff constraints mean a totally free choice of dissertation topic (meeting hopes of full autonomy) is not possible or desirable. we found only two statistically significant differences between the cohorts in their rankings of factors, which could have been a result of small sample sizes (particularly for environmental sciences students, n=26). the study was also limited in that it focused solely on natural science students. future work might fill some remaining gaps, but an interdisciplinary survey would need to be carefully designed to balance making questions relevant to all respondents with the need to gather meaningful information about student experiences and perceptions. our data shows diverse choice process in our student sample. principal components analysis suggested students were either trading off factors against one another or possessed several different recurring sets of values. for instance, students who scored approach highly tended to give a low score to focal group/environment and vice-versa, and winder choice matters: an investigation of students’ experiences selecting dissertation projects journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 16 there was a similar pattern for supervisor versus skills and autonomy. this fits with greenbank and penketh’s (2009, p.467) finding that students felt torn between choosing a project of interest and one they felt would garner strong support from a supervisor. to our knowledge, this study is the first to go beyond exploring the importance of specific factors to students’ dissertation choices to consider how they fit with one another and where there might be trade-offs and/or different value patterns. a slim majority of our respondents said that they were content with their choice process and would choose the same way again. this leaves approximately 40% who either were unhappy with their choice process or had mixed feelings, and an equivalent group who would have changed it with hindsight. this study provides some insight into why there is this diversity of responses and suggests some ways forward. firstly, as mentioned above, exploring student interests and exploiting the potential for co-creative approaches to dissertation module curricula is likely to lead to both greater student satisfaction (elsharnouby, 2015) and more active engagement with and motivation for learning. secondly, with a significant minority still feeling unequipped to choose well, more attention to scaffolding the choice process (including closing the feedback loop by introducing data on prior students’ experiences) could empower students to reflect upon and own the opportunities for personal growth that their dissertation offers. in particular, we found a strong emphasis on personal values in our respondents’ answers. this implies that encouraging students to see choosing their dissertation as both a personal and a professional process and framing the dissertation module as student-centric (after shadforth and harvey, 2003), might, in effect, give permission for students to consciously and independently explore their own preferences, needs, skills and aptitudes and eventually encourage them to direct their own learning development. conclusions this study has shown that interest, particularly in the theme/subject matter and approach of a project, is both the most frequently mentioned and the most highly ranked factor influencing natural sciences students’ choice of dissertation. it has also demonstrated diversity in the combinations of factors used to choose. some students either valued different subsets of those studied or traded off one factor for another, for example, by accepting a project that focuses on a less preferred species to ensure they would work winder choice matters: an investigation of students’ experiences selecting dissertation projects journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 17 with a supportive and engaged supervisor. the majority – but importantly not all – felt their choice process had worked well for them, but improvements could be made. learning developers might want to consider how they provide sufficient, well-targeted information about students’ options without overwhelming learners with possibilities they cannot yet imagine. having a module lead actively scaffold the choice process is important because it makes space for students to engage emotionally, cognitively and behaviourally with their dissertation early on in the process. a focus on guided choice may also help staff ensure a dissertation module starts off centring students’ development rather than their subject knowledge. acknowledgements i am grateful to dr kat jones, dr katherine steele and dr vivien shaw for feedback on the design of the dissertation choice survey and ongoing discussions about student experiences of research modules. dr steele also administered the survey to environmental sciences students on her module. references bipp, t., steinmayr, r. and spinath, b. (2008) ‘personality and achievement motivation: relationship among big five domain and facet scales, achievement goals, and intelligence’’ personality and individual differences 44(7), pp. 1454–1464. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2008.01.001 bland, j.m. and altman, d.g. (1995) ‘multiple significance tests: the bonferroni method’, bmj 310(6973), p. 170. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.310.6973.170 clark, m.h. and schroth, c.a. (2010) ‘examining relationships between academic motivation and personality among college students’, learning and individual differences 20(1), pp. 19–24. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lindif.2009.10.002 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2008.01.001 https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.310.6973.170 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lindif.2009.10.002 winder choice matters: an investigation of students’ experiences selecting dissertation projects journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 18 clark, m.h., middleton, s.c., nguyen, d. and zwick, l.k.(2014) ‘mediating relationships between academic motivation, academic integration and academic performance’, learning and individual differences 33, pp. 30–38. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lindif.2014.04.007 cooper, k.m., gin, l.e., akeeh, b., clark, c.e., hunter, j.s., roderick, t.b., elliott, d.b., gutierrez, l.a., mello, r.m., pfeiffer, l.d., scott, r.a., arellano, d., ramirez, d., valdez, e.m., vargas, c., velarde, k., zheng, y. and brownell, s.e.(2019) ‘factors that predict life sciences student persistence in undergraduate research experiences’, plos one 14(8), e0220186. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0220186 derounian, j. (2011) ‘shall we dance? the importance of staff-student relationships to undergraduate dissertation preparation’, active learning in higher education 12(2), pp. 91–100. https://doi.org/10.1177/1469787411402437 dewey, j. (1916) democracy and education: an introduction to the philosophy of education. new york: the macmillan company. dollinger, m., lodge, j. and coates, h. (2018) ‘co-creation in higher education: towards a conceptual model’, journal of marketing for higher education 28(2), pp. 210–231. https://doi.org/10.1080/08841241.2018.1466756 elsharnouby, t.h. (2015) ‘student co-creation behavior in higher education: the role of satisfaction with the university experience’, journal of marketing for higher education 25(2), pp. 238–262. https://doi.org/10.1080/08841241.2015.1059919 feather, d., anchor, j.r. and cowton, c.j. (2014) ‘supervisors’ perceptions of the value of the undergraduate dissertation’, the international journal of management education, 12(1), pp. 14–21. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijme.2013.06.002 de feyter, t., caers, r., vigna, c. and berings, d.(2012) ‘unraveling the impact of the big five personality traits on academic performance: the moderating and mediating effects of self-efficacy and academic motivation’, learning and individual differences 22(4), pp. 439–448. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lindif.2012.03.013 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lindif.2014.04.007 https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0220186 https://doi.org/10.1177/1469787411402437 https://doi.org/10.1080/08841241.2018.1466756 https://doi.org/10.1080/08841241.2015.1059919 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijme.2013.06.002 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lindif.2012.03.013 winder choice matters: an investigation of students’ experiences selecting dissertation projects journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 19 fredricks, j.a., blumenfeld, p.c. and paris, a.h. (2004) ‘school engagement: potential of the concept, state of the evidence’, review of educational research 74(1), pp. 59– 109. https://doi.org/10.3102/00346543074001059 gibbs, g. (2010) dimensions of quality. york: higher education academy. available at: https://www.advance-he.ac.uk/knowledge-hub/dimensions-quality (accessed: august 12, 2022). greenbank, p., penketh, c., schofield, m. and turjansky, t.(2008) ‘the undergraduate dissertation: ‘most likely you go your way and i’ll go mine’,’ the international journal for quality and standards 2(6), pp. 139–162. available at: www.bsieducation.org/ijqs (accessed: june 5, 2022). greenbank, p. and penketh, c. (2009) ‘student autonomy and reflections on researching and writing the undergraduate dissertation’, journal of further and higher education 33(4), pp. 463–472. https://doi.org/10.1080/03098770903272537 hanauer, d.i., frederick, j., fotinakes, b. and strobel, s.a.(2017) ‘linguistic analysis of project ownership for undergraduate research experiences’, cbe – life sciences education 11(4), pp. 378–385. https://doi.org/10.1187/cbe.12-04-0043 harland, j., pitt, s. and saunders, v. (2005) ‘factors affecting student choice of the undergraduate research project: staff and student perceptions’, bioscience education 5(1), pp. 1–19. https://doi.org/10.3108/beej.2005.05000004 healey, m., lannin, l., derounian, j., and stibbe, a. with bray, s., deane, j., hill, s., keane, j. and simmons, c. (2012) rethinking final year projects and dissertations. york: higher education academy. healey, m., lannin, l., stibbe, a. and derounian, j.(2013) developing and enhancing undergraduate final-year projects and dissertations. york: the higher education academy. available at: https://s3.eu-west2.amazonaws.com/assets.creode.advancehe-documenthttps://doi.org/10.3102/00346543074001059 https://www.advance-he.ac.uk/knowledge-hub/dimensions-quality http://www.bsieducation.org/ijqs https://doi.org/10.1080/03098770903272537 https://doi.org/10.1187/cbe.12-04-0043 https://doi.org/10.3108/beej.2005.05000004 https://s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/assets.creode.advancehe-document-manager/documents/hea/private/resources/ntfs_project_gloucestershire_2010_final_0_1568037223.pdf https://s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/assets.creode.advancehe-document-manager/documents/hea/private/resources/ntfs_project_gloucestershire_2010_final_0_1568037223.pdf winder choice matters: an investigation of students’ experiences selecting dissertation projects journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 20 manager/documents/hea/private/resources/ntfs_project_gloucestershire_2010_final _0_1568037223.pdf (accessed: february 10, 2023). henrie, c.r., halverson, l.r. and graham, c.r. (2015) ‘measuring student engagement in technology-mediated learning: a review’, computers & education 90, pp. 36–53. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2015.09.005 honicke, t. and broadbent, j. (2016) ‘the influence of academic self-efficacy on academic performance: a systematic review’, educational research review 17, pp. 63–84. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.edurev.2015.11.002 hussain, s., gamage, k.a.a., sagor, m.h., tariq, f., ma, l. and imran, m.a. (2019) ‘a systematic review of project allocation methods in undergraduate transnational engineering education’, education sciences 9(4), p. 258. https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci9040258 kiger, m.e. and varpio, l. (2020) ‘thematic analysis of qualitative data: amee guide no. 131’, medical teacher 42(8). https://doi.org/10.1080/0142159x.2020.1755030 krishnan, s. (2021) “without failure, it’s just not research”: investigating undergraduate students’ experiences of scientific failure in research settings. unpublished phd dissertation: the university of georgia. mcgeown, s.p., putwain, d., simpson, e.g., boffey, e., markham, j. and vince, a. (2014) ‘predictors of adolescents’ academic motivation: personality, self-efficacy and adolescents’ characteristics’, learning and individual differences 32, pp. 278–286. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lindif.2014.03.022 milner-bolotin, m. (2001) the effects of topic choice in project-based instruction on undergraduate physical science students’ interest, ownership, and motivation. unpublished phd dissertation: university of texas at austin. mood, a.m. (1950) introduction to the theory of statistics. new york: mcgraw-hill. available at: https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1950-05609-000 (accessed: august 14, 2022). https://s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/assets.creode.advancehe-document-manager/documents/hea/private/resources/ntfs_project_gloucestershire_2010_final_0_1568037223.pdf https://s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/assets.creode.advancehe-document-manager/documents/hea/private/resources/ntfs_project_gloucestershire_2010_final_0_1568037223.pdf https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2015.09.005 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.edurev.2015.11.002 https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci9040258 https://doi.org/10.1080/0142159x.2020.1755030 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lindif.2014.03.022 https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1950-05609-000 winder choice matters: an investigation of students’ experiences selecting dissertation projects journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 21 sellahewa, w.n. and samarasinghe, t.d. (2021) ‘the factors influencing on student choice of undergraduate research project’, in international conference on business research, pp. 137-142. university of moratuwa: sri lanka. shadforth, t. and harvey, b. (2003) ‘the undergraduate dissertation: subject-centred or student-centred?’, electronic journal of business research methods 2(2), pp. 145– 152. available at: https://academic-publishing.org/index.php/ejbrm/article/view/1183 (accessed: june 5, 2022). strandler, o., johansson, t., wisker, g. and claesson, s. (2014) ‘supervisor or counsellor? – emotional boundary work in supervision’, international journal for researcher development 5(2), pp. 70–82. https://doi.org/10.1108/ijrd-03-20140002 sun, x. and holt, d. (2022) ‘student engagement and voice in higher education: students’ perceptions’, journal of learning development in higher education [preprint] (23). https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.vi23.838 todd, m., bannister, p. and clegg, s. (2000) ‘independent inquiry and the undergraduate dissertation: perceptions and experiences of final‐year social science students’, assessment & evaluation in higher education 29(3), pp. 335–355. https://doi.org/10.1080/0260293042000188285 van blankenstein, f.m., saab, n., van der rijst, r.m., danel, m.s., bakker-van den berg, a.s. and van den broek, p.w. (2019) ‘how do self-efficacy beliefs for academic writing and collaboration and intrinsic motivation for academic writing and research develop during an undergraduate research project?’, educational studies 45(2), pp. 209–225. https://doi.org/10.1080/03055698.2018.1446326 wilson, a., howitt, s., wilson, k. and roberts, p. (2012) ‘academics’ perceptions of the purpose of undergraduate research experiences in a research-intensive degree’, studies in higher education 37(5), pp. 513–526. https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2010.527933 https://academic-publishing.org/index.php/ejbrm/article/view/1183 https://doi.org/10.1108/ijrd-03-2014-0002 https://doi.org/10.1108/ijrd-03-2014-0002 https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.vi23.838 https://doi.org/10.1080/0260293042000188285 https://doi.org/10.1080/03055698.2018.1446326 https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2010.527933 winder choice matters: an investigation of students’ experiences selecting dissertation projects journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 22 author details isabelle c. winder (@isabelle_winder) is a senior lecturer in the school of natural sciences, bangor university, a bangor university teaching fellow and a senior fellow of the higher education academy. her phd is in human evolution which led to a broad interest in how humans learn and why we behave (and think) the way we do. she has been actively working on equality, diversity and inclusion, student co-creation and the pedagogies of supervision and skills development for more than ten years. licence ©2023 the author(s). this is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (cc-by 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. see http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. journal of learning development in higher education (jldhe) is a peer-reviewed open access journal published by the association for learning development in higher education (aldinhe). http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ choice matters: an investigation of students’ experiences selecting dissertation projects abstract introduction method research context and recruitment of participants survey design data analysis results how students choose dissertations trade-offs and patterns in ranking of key factors self-assessment of the choice process discussion conclusions acknowledgements references author details licence journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special issue 25: aldinhe conference proceedings and reflections october 2022 ________________________________________________________________________ wellbeing in the workplace: exploring the vuca approach debbie holley bournemouth university, uk kate coulson university of northampton, uk carina buckley solent university, uk erika corradini university of southampton, uk presentation abstract this workshop was aimed at aspiring leaders/leaders/those interested in models of wellbeing and resilience. vuca stands for volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity, a leadership model based on the theories of bennis and nanus from the late 1980s (https://www.vuca-world.org/). leaders are often required to navigate uncertainties, paradoxes, conflicts, pressures and ambiguities. the vuca model calls for new approaches to management centred on a personal approach and is extensively used in intercultural business masterclasses (university of cambridge; mit; jagannath international management school kalkaji, india). the model inspires and encourages leaders to move from the idea of the leader who ‘knows all’ towards a vision of developmental leadership. this approach clarifies the leader’s ability to develop others’ capacity to handle problems and make difficult decisions, based on the idea that every individual can contribute their skills. in strategic terms, leading in a vuca world requires vision, understanding, clarity and adaptability/agility. learning development is starting to embrace this model of leadership, with a new aldinhe leadership cop offering a platform for sharing both theory and practice. the overarching aim of this approach is that of conveying positive energy into the development of meaningful approaches. https://www.vuca-world.org/ holley, coulson, buckley and corradini wellbeing in the workplace: exploring the vuca approach journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 2 the vuca model relies on six key skills, all of which connect to the values of learning development: 1. developing a shared purpose. 2. learning agility. 3. self-awareness. 4. leading through collaboration and influence. 5. confidence in leading through uncertainty. 6. growth mind-set. this was a creative discussion-based workshop and we aim to co-create a jldhe article with interested participants. we have interested participants from the ‘international women’s’ day workshop we ran, and we wanted to further broaden out this scholarship opportunity to the learning development community. the aldinhe leadership cop are considering how best to feed into notions of a leadership toolkit to support the community. attendees of the vuca workshop were asked to read the following two articles prior to the session: • ‘lessons leaders can learn from those living through change’ (hult education). • ‘leading in a vuca world: five essential skills to learn in a vuca world’ (culpin, 2018). community response when the session started i wondered if it was really for me. i was at a crossroads with my career and was worried about a potential loss of teaching with a move into management. i was resistant to this but also, i needed to progress and so i was interested to hear more about the vuca model and what it means for us, in ld. as we started to discuss the approach i found that the reflections of the presenting team echoed with my own feelings and paralleled aspects of my teaching journey and i began to view progression not as a step away from teaching, but as a means to shape teaching in a different sense. understanding how to apply teaching skills and strategies in other https://www.hultef.com/en/insights/research-thought-leadership/learning-to-lead-in-the-21st-century/ https://www.hult.edu/blog/leading-in-a-vuca-world/ holley, coulson, buckley and corradini wellbeing in the workplace: exploring the vuca approach journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 3 contexts is important for learning developers, who often have varied careers in he and may move into roles in which traditional teaching is less emphasised. i like the freedom and inclusivity of leadership viewed as ‘developmental’ and enjoyed hearing about the experiences and challenges faced by others. the honesty was refreshing and empowering and it made me feel less alone with my own worries and doubts. i found that the stories the group shared resonated with me and i enjoyed it when we worked together to articulate features of value and relevance that might help to support others in ld to navigate the challenges of leadership. the opportunity to reflect on leadership skills and practices is vital for learning developers, whose roles are not always seen as leadership positions outside of line management roles, but who employ many leadership strategies in their teaching and interactions with students. it felt exciting that we, as attendees in the room, could be helping to shape what leadership looks like for ld using vuca as a launching pad. next steps and additional questions sessions do not always run according to plan and any advice on how to adapt your content quickly to suit the audience you have is valuable and welcomed. as an everemerging discipline which combines an eclectic mix of people from a wide range of different backgrounds it is useful to try to gain consensus grounded on a model as to what leadership looks like in ld and how we might want to shape this for the future. what are the strengths and benefits of us working with a developmental concept of leadership and how can we turn this to our advantage? to what extent does the vuca model resonate with our aims and objectives as a sector? authors’ reflection the session didn’t run quite as we’d planned we were up against the magic-related workshop so we only had six-seven people attend, rendering the idea of more intense group work null. however, we swiftly adapted it into a broader discussion group and it worked really well; certainly, we had plenty of input from all of our attendees. holley, coulson, buckley and corradini wellbeing in the workplace: exploring the vuca approach journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 4 the original plan was for a well-structured hour: • five minutes: overview of vuca and ice breaking exercise. • four x ten minutes facilitated ‘snap learning activities’ at workstations. participants will circulate round four workstations in small groups and undertake a short interactive activity for each of: vision, understanding, clarity and adaptability/agility. • five minutes: conclusions and next steps via a collaborative padlet. in light of the attendance, our revised plan was much more collaborative and discursive: • rearrange the furniture into a large table. • twist the pc on the base station so participants could view the prompts, but focus remained on the flip charts on the table. • facilitate and scribe, rather than lead the conversations. in a way, the session seemed to fit the vuca ethos – it was volatile, but we had a vision for what we wanted to achieve: to work through the four different aspects of the new vuca model. there was uncertainty initially, in how we would spend the hour, but we used it instead to come to an understanding of each other and our roles. out of the complexities of our different perspectives and priorities came the clarity of seeing leadership as a distributed, developmental process, and we rejected the ambiguity of a disrupted session plan for the agility that comes from knowing everyone in the room has something valuable to contribute. having this experience showed us that leadership is not something out of reach, or confined to those in certain hierarchical positions, but is more of a mindset, a set of principles, that anyone can share. it reinforced for us the value of what we were able to achieve, and a need that the relatively new leadership cop has already indicated and begun to address. we now have four huge sheets of paper covered with ideas about how these aspects can be recognised and realised in our ld work, which is hugely valuable to ongoing work amongst us on the nature of leadership in learning development – claiming it as our own. our intention is to develop these ideas to a point where we have something useful to publish, potentially in the form of a toolkit for other learning developers to adopt. being holley, coulson, buckley and corradini wellbeing in the workplace: exploring the vuca approach journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 5 able to hear from delegates about their own experiences has gone a long way towards that, in terms of knowledge but also motivation! what does the vuca model mean in practice for learning developers? figure 1. vision. (figure 1: image shows delegates responses to the question of how ‘vision’ applies to leadership in relation to learning development roles and responsibilities). holley, coulson, buckley and corradini wellbeing in the workplace: exploring the vuca approach journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 6 figure 2. understanding. (figure 2. image shows delegates responses to the question of how ‘understanding’ applies to leadership in relation to learning development roles and responsibilities). holley, coulson, buckley and corradini wellbeing in the workplace: exploring the vuca approach journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 7 figure 3. clarity. (figure 3: image shows delegates responses to the question of how ‘clarity’ applies to leadership in relation to learning development roles and responsibilities). holley, coulson, buckley and corradini wellbeing in the workplace: exploring the vuca approach journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 8 figure 4. agility. (figure 4: image shows delegates responses to the question of how ‘agility’ and ‘being agile’ applies to leadership in relation to learning development roles and responsibilities). acknowledgments thank you to all the contributors who shared their reflections and enriched our insight into this conference presentation and its impact on the audience. special thanks go to nicola grayson from the university of manchester and melanie crisfield from brunel university london. references culpin, v. (2018) ‘leading in a vuca world’, hult blog. available at: https://www.hult.edu/blog/leading-in-a-vuca-world/ [accessed: 14 october 2022]. https://www.hult.edu/blog/leading-in-a-vuca-world/ holley, coulson, buckley and corradini wellbeing in the workplace: exploring the vuca approach journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 9 hult education, ‘lessons leaders can learn from those living through change’. available at: https://www.hult.edu/en/executive-education/insights/learning-to-lead-in-the21st-century/ (accessed: 9 september 2022). sinha, d. and sinha, s. (2020) ‘managing in a vuca world: possibilities and pitfalls’, journal of technology management for growing economies, 11(1), pp.17-21. https://doi.org/10.15415/jtmge.2020.111003. vuca-world [website]. available at: https://www.vuca-world.org/ (accessed: 15 october 2022). further reading george, b. (2017) ‘vuca 2.0: a strategy for steady leadership in an unsteady world’, forbes magazine, 17 february. available at: https://www.forbes.com/sites/hbsworkingknowledge/2017/02/17/vuca-2-0-astrategy-for-steady-leadership-in-an-unsteady-world/?sh=6363776d13d8 (accessed: 9 september 2022). author details debbie holley is professor of learning innovation at bournemouth university. a national teaching fellow and a principal fellow of advancehe she is a passionate educator, with expertise in learning design and blending learning to motivate and engage a diverse student body. her research interests in digital, augmented and immersive worlds influence national policy through her published work, keynote addresses and policy articles. kate coulson is currently head of learning and teaching enhancement at the university of northampton. she is passionate about the importance of ld advocacy to ensure that our work is understood and valued and has a particular interest in working within the 3rd space and women’s leadership within he. kate is an advance he senior fellow and a certified leading practitioner in learning development. https://www.hult.edu/en/executive-education/insights/learning-to-lead-in-the-21st-century/ https://www.hult.edu/en/executive-education/insights/learning-to-lead-in-the-21st-century/ https://doi.org/10.15415/jtmge.2020.111003 https://www.vuca-world.org/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/hbsworkingknowledge/2017/02/17/vuca-2-0-a-strategy-for-steady-leadership-in-an-unsteady-world/#725a041613d8 https://www.forbes.com/sites/hbsworkingknowledge/2017/02/17/vuca-2-0-a-strategy-for-steady-leadership-in-an-unsteady-world/?sh=6363776d13d8 https://www.forbes.com/sites/hbsworkingknowledge/2017/02/17/vuca-2-0-a-strategy-for-steady-leadership-in-an-unsteady-world/?sh=6363776d13d8 holley, coulson, buckley and corradini wellbeing in the workplace: exploring the vuca approach journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 10 carina buckley is currently instructional design manager at solent university, responsible for the on-going development of the vle as a student-centred, active and inclusive learning space. her research interests broadly connect to collaboration and community and have evolved recently to explore ideas around leadership and professional identity. she serves as the treasurer for aldinhe and also sits on the steering group for the international consortium of academic language and learning developers (icalld). following a phd in archaeology in 2006, she has since added advance he principal fellow and certified leading practitioner in learning development to her post-nominals. erika corradini is a principal teaching fellow in academic practice in the centre for higher education practice (chep). the remit of her role is to develop education and educators in the he sector. she is currently programme lead for the postgraduate certificate in academic practice, a professional development programme aimed at early career academics with teaching responsibilities. her research activity is largely centred on developing learning and education through evaluating teaching practice and through promoting the scholarship of teaching and learning. wellbeing in the workplace: exploring the vuca approach presentation abstract community response next steps and additional questions authors’ reflection what does the vuca model mean in practice for learning developers? acknowledgments references further reading author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 24 september 2022 ________________________________________________________________________ the relationship between engaging in online course activities and final course grade in an online psychology course john mingoia university of south australia, australia brianna le busque university of south australia, australia abstract online higher education is experiencing growth in enrolment and development which creates a need to continually evaluate the efficacy of online course delivery. prior research reported that performance in online education is equivalent to traditional face-to-face delivery; however, minimal research exists to identify which elements of course design predict academic success. we aimed to identify which specific course components are predictors of (a) final course grade, (b) continuous assessment grade, and (c) major assessment grade in an online, undergraduate psychology course using data collated by the learning management system. we also addressed gaps in existing knowledge by exploring group differences within scores on significant predictors of course outcomes to determine whether these varied according to student characteristics. we found the number of times students visited the course site, viewed activities, and posted in activities significantly predicted students’ final course grade, continuous assessment grades, and major assessment grades. the total variance explained by the regression models, was however, relatively low and therefore there may be additional factors not considered in the present study that may predict grades. we also found non-traditional, female, domestic students, enrolled part-time and in an online degree accessed the course site, viewed activities, and posted in activities significantly more frequently than their counterparts. universities offering online courses should provide students with regular activities and opportunities to participate in course content to promote online learning and academic success. keywords: online; predictors; engagement; learning management system; academic outcomes. mingoia and le busque the relationship between engaging in online course activities and final course grade in an online psychology course journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 2 introduction there has been significant growth in online university course enrolment, with the percentage of students undertaking one or more undergraduate class online in the united states rising from 15.6% in 2004 to 43.1% of to 2016 (snyder, brey and dillow, 2019). in particular, the covid-19 pandemic has led to a rapid increase in new course offerings (sun, tang and zuo, 2020). given the increase in demand and service provision, it is important to establish the efficacy of online course delivery. numerous studies have demonstrated that performance in online education is equivalent to, or better than, that of traditional face-to-face delivery. chernish et al. (2005) assessed whether enrolment in a traditional (face-to-face) classroom, instructional television, or internet-based classes had a significant impact on academic achievement over the course of one full semester. they found the delivery method did not contribute to significant differences in achievement. neuhauser (2002) reported similar findings, with no significant differences in test scores, assignments, participation grades, and final grades between students enrolled in an online and face-to-face sections of a course. interestingly, neuhauser (2002) reported a slightly higher group average in these grades for online compared to face-to-face students. these results are further supported by the metaanalytic findings of allen et al. (2004) who compared online and face-to-face groups and found online students outperformed traditional students. the evidence from these studies is clear: online provision of education is an effective method of achieving learning outcomes in tertiary education. research that focuses on open university courses in the united kingdom has also highlighted the importance of considering learning analytics, both to implement an evidence-based framework to create and evaluate analytics in online courses (rienties et al., 2016) and when training academic staff in online teaching practices (macdonald and poniatowska, 2011). however, few studies have attempted to tease apart which individual components of an online course foster student success in online study. learning analytic data are useful resources to determine how students interact with the learning management system and which factors may predict success in higher education. learning analytics involve the collection and analysis of learner (i.e., student) data to mingoia and le busque the relationship between engaging in online course activities and final course grade in an online psychology course journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 3 better understand the learning experience and optimise the learning environment (elias, 2011). instructors report the benefits of using learning analytics include predicting student performance, identifying at risk students (e.g., students with low engagement), monitoring learning and progress, and raising awareness of unfavourable learning behaviours (wong, 2017). in particular, interventions aimed at using predictive learning analytics to identify and support at-risk students have found that teachers can positively impact student performance when they utilise the data derived from learning analytics (herodotou et al., 2019). however, the current evidence is limited in that learning analytic data have primarily focussed on face-to-face education as opposed to open and distance education (wong, 2017). it is widely reported that class attendance at university is related to academic success in a face-to-face context, with students who attend class on a regular basis achieving higher grades than those who do not attend regularly (credé, roch and kieszczynka, 2010). in an online learning environment without dedicated classes, this would be analogous to the number of times an online student viewed the content pages on the course site. studies have reported a positive association between time spent online and final grade in the course (e.g., ryabov, 2012). beyond the time spent online, the evidence becomes limited and varied. some studies have measured individual components such as interaction with online forums and found students who interacted with online forums had better course outcomes than those who did not (cheng et al., 2011). however, other studies report findings which dispute this. for example, davies and graff (2005) found greater online interaction did not lead to significantly higher performance for students achieving passing grades; however, students who failed in their courses tended to interact less frequently. few studies have attempted to tease apart multiple individual components of course design to identify the most important predictors of academic success. of these, ramos and yudko (2008) found total page hits, defined as the frequency in which each student viewed the content pages at the class site, predicted students’ total score on all exams given during the course. further, participation in discussion (viewing or posting on course forums) had little to no effect on performance as measured by outcome on exams. further, nieuwoudt (2020) found a significant relationship between academic success and the number of hours students participated in and interacted with the online learning system; however, findings between courses were inconsistent as to whether watching the recordings of the virtual classes was associated with improved course performance. mingoia and le busque the relationship between engaging in online course activities and final course grade in an online psychology course journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 4 there are a few limitations in the online education and learning analytic literature that we will aim to address. firstly, the format of online delivery varies within the literature, with only a small number of cases reporting data on courses that were delivered 100% online (misopoulos, argyropoulou and tzavara, 2018). it is also a commonly cited limitation of learning analytic research that the findings may be educational culture-specific and not applicable in other settings (leitner, khalil and ebner, 2017). the present study aims to address these gaps in the literature by identifying which specific course components are predictors of course outcomes using data collated by the learning management system in a course that was delivered 100% online. further, there has been a paucity of focus on predicting student success, with many researchers instead opting to monitor or measure learner progress (yanosky and arroway, 2015). given this, variables such as self-selection of the mode of delivery or gender may need further exploration when comparing student performance as these factors may play a role in determining the success of online students (misopoulos, argyropoulou and tzavara, 2018). therefore, we also aim to explore group differences within scores on significant predictors of course outcomes to determine whether these varied according to student characteristics. method participants and procedure participants were undergraduate students (n = 455) enrolled in an introductory psychology course at an australian online university. participants ranged in age from 19-74 years (median = 27), with 409 domestic students and 46 international students. ethics approval was obtained from the university ethics committee and participants were recruited by email. participants were not required to do anything over and above the normal course requirements. data were retrieved at the end of the study period by the researchers from usage information data provided by the learning management system (lms). the university uses learnonline as its institutional lms. measures the following measures were selected based on available learning analytic data for the course. these data broadly align with the student-teacher, student-system, and studentmingoia and le busque the relationship between engaging in online course activities and final course grade in an online psychology course journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 5 student interactions proposed by agudo-peregrina et al. (2014). most interactions recorded were student-teacher which involved active participation in the form of posting and receiving feedback from the teaching team. student-system interactions were recorded in course site visits and time spent watching lecture videos and student-student interactions were not directly assessed, although these occurred through interactions with forums and activities in which teachers participated as well. demographic data demographic data collated by the lms included student age, programme enrolled in, gender, location, and study load. the following seven components were collected by the lms and analysed in the present study: • course site visits. course site visits were defined as the number of times in which a student logged into the course site. • course forum views. course forum views were defined as the frequency in which each student viewed post(s) in a public forum from another student or teaching staff. course forum posts typically included questions about the content or assessments and answers provided by the teaching staff. • course forum posts. course forum posts were defined as the number of times in which each student posted content in a public discussion forum. • activity views. activity views were defined as the number of times in which each student viewed post/s from another student or teaching staff in a weekly activity task. • activity posts. activity posts were defined as the number of times in which each student posted content in a weekly activity task. • announcement views. announcement views were defined as the number of times in which each student viewed dedicated post(s) from the course instructor. announcement posts typically included content such as assessment information, submission deadline reminders, strategies for success when engaging with course content. • time spent watching lecture videos. time spent watching lecture videos was measured as the total number of minutes a student spent watching lecture recordings. mingoia and le busque the relationship between engaging in online course activities and final course grade in an online psychology course journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 6 the following three outcomes were collected by the lms and analysed in the present study: • final course grade. students’ final course grade was calculated as the weighted average of five continuous assessment quizzes (weighted at 12% per assessment), as well as two written assessments (weighted at 10% and 30%). • continuous assessment grade. students’ continuous assessment grade was calculated as the weighted average of 5 quiz assessments. each quiz was equally weighted for a total contribution of 60% towards the final course grade. • major assessment grade. students’ major assessment grade was calculated as the weighted average of an essay plan and an essay assessment. the essay plan was weighted at 10% and the essay weighted at 30% for a total contribution of 40% towards the final course grade. online course: psychology concepts psychology concepts is an introductory course offered to students enrolled in psychology degrees as well as those who are enrolled in non-psychology degrees who may elect to enrol in the course as an elective. the course is open to students who are enrolled in a 100% online degree as well as those enrolled in an on-campus degree who may choose to study an online course within their degree. the course was delivered 100% online in a 10week period from october to december in 2020. each week covered a different introductory psychology concept including lifespan development, learning, personality, and clinical and abnormal psychology. each topic in the course was presented in a series of three to four webpages consisting of written text, video lectures, and links to relevant electronic readings and internet resources. students logged into the course site and engaged with materials by working through the weekly course content and participating in non-graded forum activities related to the weekly content that they could post in to receive feedback from the teaching team and their peers about their critical inquiry. this study analysed data relating to time spent watching lectures and engagement in activity forums, not data relating to the other resources such as readings as these interactions were not logged via the lms. there were no tutorial classes nor any practical components that the mingoia and le busque the relationship between engaging in online course activities and final course grade in an online psychology course journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 7 students were required to attend. the assessments included five multiple choice quizzes, an essay plan, and an essay. data analyses data were analysed using spss version 26. initially bivariate correlations between the individual online activities and student grade were calculated. variables with a significant correlation with the outcomes were then entered into the regression models to determine the significance as well as the amount of variance associated with each significant variable. this is a similar methodology to that used by zacharis (2015). separate multiple regression analyses were conducted for the following outcomes: (a) final course grade, (b) quiz assessment grade, and (c) written assessment grade. two outliers were transformed to the next highest values for participants who had extreme course site visit values as to retain their position within the data set. further exploratory analyses were performed with a series of independent samples t-tests to explore whether group differences were present in the significant predictors from the regression models depending on gender (male or female), age (traditional or non-traditional), degree delivery format (online degree or oncampus degree), enrolment type (domestic or international), course enrolment (core or elective), or study load (full-time or part-time). results sample characteristics most participants were female (80.4%), domestic students located in australia (89.9%), and enrolled in full-time study (58.2%). roughly equal numbers of students were enrolled in an online degree and an on-campus degree (50.3% enrolled on-campus), with the most common programmes being bachelor of social work (38.8%), bachelor or psychological science and sociology (20.4%), and bachelor of community health (8.3%). relationships between activities and outcomes students’ final course grade was significantly and positively correlated with all learnonline components. effect sizes ranged from small (number of times the student posted on the course forum) to large (number of course site visits: see appendix 1). mingoia and le busque the relationship between engaging in online course activities and final course grade in an online psychology course journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 8 course components as predictors of course outcomes/student grades three multiple regression analyses were conducted to predict (a) final course grade, (b) quiz assessment grade, and (c) written assessment grade from course activities. the first regression to predict final course grade was significant, f(7, 447) = 41.50, p = <.001, with an r2 of .39. we found that frequency of course site visits, activity views, and activity posts significantly predicted students’ final course grade. the second regression to predict quiz assessment grades was significant, f(7, 447) = 34.82 p = <.001, with an r2 of .35. we found that frequency of course site visits and activity views significantly predicted students’ final course grade. the third regression to predict written assessment grade was significant, f(7, 447) = 34.00, p = <.001, with an r2 of .35. we found that frequency of course site visits, activity views, and activity posts significantly predicted students’ final course grade. see appendix 2 for regression values and scatterplots with confidence and prediction intervals. group differences in engagement subsequent exploratory analyses were conducted to investigate potential differences in the three significant predictor variables from the regression models: course site visits, activity views, and activity posts. a clear trend emerged in the analyses of group differences in predictor variables. online, non-traditional, female, domestic students, enrolled part-time accessed the course site, viewed activities, and posted in activities significantly more frequently than their on-campus enrolled, traditional, male, international student, full-time enrolled counterparts (see appendix 3). effect sizes ranged from small to moderate. no group differences in predictor variables were found between students who were required to enrol in the course as a core course within their programme or those who chose to enrol in the course as an elective course (see appendix 3). discussion and conclusions the aim of the present study was to determine whether specific course components were predictors of online course outcomes using data collated by the learning management system. we found the number of times students visited the course site, viewed activities, and posted in activities significantly predicted students’ final course grade, continuous mingoia and le busque the relationship between engaging in online course activities and final course grade in an online psychology course journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 9 assessment grades, and major assessment grades. we also explored group differences within those predictors of academic success and found non-traditional, female, domestic students, enrolled part-time, in an online degree accessed the course site, viewed activities, and posted in activities significantly more frequently than their counterparts. we also found evidence that students enrolled in traditional on-campus degrees can be successful when enrolled in an online course. class attendance has been consistently associated with academic success at university (e.g., credé, roch and kieszczynka, 2010) and researchers exploring online course enrolment have found a similar relationship between time spent online and course grades (e.g., ryabov, 2012). our findings support the growing body of literature in this space by identifying that the strongest predictor of course grades in an online course was the frequency of course site visits. this is particularly important in an asynchronous online environment where students are required to self-direct their own learning experience rather than being presented with a fixed timetable for classes or lectures. given this, online educators in a tertiary environment should aim to promote drivers to regular course site access as well as reduce potential barriers to regular access. our findings have extended emerging research exploring the efficacy of individual components of course design. engagement in activities demonstrated through both viewing and posting significantly predicted students’ grade which demonstrated the benefits of an active learning environment for online students. this provides support for nieuwoudt (2020) who also reported significant relationships between students’ grades and posting as well as accessing the discussion board. our findings have implications for future course design in online learning which should incorporate greater opportunities for students to engage in activities and receive feedback from teaching staff. the option to view and/or post in activity forums likely appeals to learners who enjoy the opportunity to post and actively receive feedback as well as those who prefer vicarious learning through observing the interaction of others in an activity forum (nieuwoudt, 2018). the quality of the interaction is also important as engagement may be increased by including opportunities to learn in multiple ways through varied activities, and opportunities should be provided to engage with information in various ways (biggs and tang, 2007; hattie, 2012). we also note that the beta coefficients for activity views in the regression models were negative, which may be reflective of the manner in which the different student groups interacted with this online learning platform and their level of experience within their mingoia and le busque the relationship between engaging in online course activities and final course grade in an online psychology course journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 10 degree. for example, students enrolled in an on-campus degree who elected to enrol in the online course engaged in less online activities, and hence viewed activities significantly less than online students, but performed better in their final course grade than those students enrolled in a 100% online degree. this may be due to a difference in study strategies in which on-campus enrolled students are not typically presented with the same opportunities for online engagement whereas students enrolled in a 100% online degree are typically expected to regularly engage in all online activities. further research is recommended to better understand the study strategies of students who enrol in online courses as a single enrolment and whether these differ between the different cohorts. demographic differences in the predictor variables provide guidance on the patterns of course engagement. these findings are particularly useful for creating a profile of students who may need further support or encouragement to participate in visiting the course site or engaging with activities. non-traditional students engaged in activities more often than traditional students which demonstrates that providing non-traditional students with a flexible learning environment may promote engagement as it mitigates the challenges commonly experienced by non-traditional learners such as work conflict (kohler giancola, grawitch, and borchert, 2009) or family (meehan and negy, 2003). further, part-time enrolled students also engaged more frequently than full-time students which may indicate that a change to the traditional full-time study load expectations may facilitate engagement and course outcomes. future research should aim to explore demographic differences in more depth, such as potential barriers or strategies to encourage engagement in online activity forums. for example, future research could explore international students’ experiences to determine which online supports may be needed to assist international students in engaging more frequently with course materials online as this was a significant predictor of academic success in the present study. further, this current study did not obtain data pertaining to the students’ prior experience in online or blended education, which could be another potential influencing factor. the findings in the present study provide a foundation for understanding the way in which online students interact with the learning environment and how this may affect academic performance. the open university uk developed the analytics4action evaluation framework (rienties et al., 2016), using which our findings broadly align with phase one, reviewing key learning analytics metrics. the analytics4action evaluation framework proposes that such findings should be translated into response actions, determining mingoia and le busque the relationship between engaging in online course activities and final course grade in an online psychology course journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 11 protocols, outcome analysis and evaluation, sharing evidence, and finally building strategic insight. our findings could be used to inform specific actions to improve the learning environment and student support. recommended response actions for teachers include facilitating more critical discourse by including regular non-graded forum activities in the weekly content, organising additional video sessions to drive more regular access to the course site and promote teacher engagement, and providing summaries of activity responses to encourage easier viewing of the discourse within activities or assessments. interpretation of the findings in the present study should be made in consideration of the following limitations. the prediction intervals found in the study highlight that future observations of individual students may vary, which could be due to individual differences (e.g., previous experience, personality, aptitude for different types of assessment) that were not accessed in the current study. while course site visits were the strongest predictor of course success, the measurement of course site visits was limited to frequency rather than duration of site visits. future research could explore whether students who access the course site less frequently are doing so due to a lengthier visit duration as quality of visit may predict course outcomes in a different manner to quantity. it should also be noted that the total variance explained by the regression models was relatively low which indicated there may be other factors involved in the relationship between the course design elements used as predictors in this study and the outcomes. for example, while the number of predictors included was a strength of the present study, we did not have access to data for textbook usage or attendance of optional zoom discussions with the teaching team which were offered regularly to students throughout the course. further, the present cohort were enrolled in an undergraduate psychology course and future exploration of multiple courses or courses across disciplines would provide a more comprehensive understanding of the predictors of academic success in an online course. a final consideration when interpreting recommendations for online learning is the ethical collection of student data and the responsibility to act upon learning analytic data. learning analytics enable strategic decision making to develop a learning environment designed to support student success; however, it is important to note that these data may be incomplete in describing the student experience (prinsloo and slade, 2017). for example, the decision of what to measure is often guided by what we as educators’ value (knight and buckingham shum, 2017). simply knowing more about a student group does not mingoia and le busque the relationship between engaging in online course activities and final course grade in an online psychology course journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 12 always translate into more appropriate action (prinsloo and slade, 2017). this raises a call to action in that institutions and practitioners must act upon these student data. a common practice that achieves this is to contact the at-risk students with personalised support tailored to their learning concerns which has demonstrated effectiveness in prior research including improved grade point average, retention, and graduation rate (wong, 2017). therefore, using these data for predictive purposes to identify at-risk students and provide more customised support will enable pre-emptive action for practitioners to improve learner outcomes as opposed to being responsive after-the-fact. overall, engagement in course site visits, viewing activities, and posting in activities significantly predicted students’ final course grade, quiz grades, and written grades in an undergraduate, online psychology course. tertiary institutions providing online courses should aim to provide students with regular activities and opportunities to engage with the course content to facilitate learning and promote academic success online. references agudo-peregrina, á. f., iglesias-pradas, s., conde-gonzález, m. á. and hernándezgarcía, á. (2014) ‘can we predict success from log data in vles? classification of interactions for learning analytics and their relation with performance in vlesupported f2f and online learning’, computers in human behavior, 31, pp.542550. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2013.05.031. allen, m., mabry, e., mattrey, m., bourhis, j., titsworth, s. and burrell, n. (2004) ‘evaluating the effectiveness of distance learning: a comparison using metaanalysis’, 54(3), pp.402-420. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1460-2466.2004.tb02636.x. biggs, j. b. and tang, c. (2007) teaching for quality learning at university. 3rd edn. maidenhead: mcgraw hill education & open university press. cheng, c. k., paré, d. e., collimore, l.-m. and joordens, s. (2011) ‘assessing the effectiveness of a voluntary online discussion forum on improving students’ course performance’, computers & education, 56(1), pp.253-261. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2010.07.024. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2013.05.031 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1460-2466.2004.tb02636.x https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2010.07.024 mingoia and le busque the relationship between engaging in online course activities and final course grade in an online psychology course journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 13 chernish, w. n., defranco, a. l., lindner, j. r., and dooley, k. e. (2005) ‘does it matter? analyzing the results of three different learning delivery methods’, quarterly review of distance education, 6(2), pp.87-95. available at: https://www.infoagepub.com/qrde-issue.html?i=p54c3cb86a9a11 (accessed: 24 june 2022). credé, m., roch, s. g. and kieszczynka, u. m. (2010) ‘class attendance in college: a meta-analytic review of the relationship of class attendance with grades and student characteristics’, review of educational research, 80(2), pp.272-295. https://doi.org/10.3102/0034654310362998. davies, j. and graff, m. (2005) ‘performance in e-learning: online participation and student grades’, 36 (4), pp.657-663. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8535.2005.00542.x. elias, t. (2011) learning analytics: definitions, processes and potential. available at: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.456.7092&rep=rep1&type =pdf (accessed 25 june 2022). hattie, j. (2012) visible learning for teachers. new york: routledge. herodotou, c., rienties, b., boroowa, a., zdrahal, z. and hlosta, m. (2019) ‘a large-scale implementation of predictive learning analytics in higher education: the teachers’ role and perspective’, educational technology research and development, 67(5), pp.1273-1306. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11423-019-09685-0. knight, s. and buckingham shum, s. (2017) ‘theory and learning analytics’, in lang, c., siemens, g., wise, a. f. and gaševic, d. (eds.) the handbook of learning analytics. 1st edn. society for learning analytics research (solar), pp.17-22. available at: http://solaresearch.org/hla-17/hla17-chapter1 (accessed: 24 june 2022). leitner, p., khalil, m. and ebner, m. (2017) ‘learning analytics in higher education—a literature review’, in a. peña-ayala (ed.) learning analytics: fundaments, applications, and trends: a view of the current state of the art to enhance e-learning. https://www.infoagepub.com/qrde-issue.html?i=p54c3cb86a9a11 https://doi.org/10.3102/0034654310362998 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8535.2005.00542.x http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.456.7092&rep=rep1&type=pdf http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.456.7092&rep=rep1&type=pdf https://doi.org/10.1007/s11423-019-09685-0 http://solaresearch.org/hla-17/hla17-chapter1 mingoia and le busque the relationship between engaging in online course activities and final course grade in an online psychology course journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 14 springer international publishing, pp.1-23. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-529776_1. kohler giancola, j., grawitch, m. j. and borchert, d. (2009) ‘dealing with the stress of college: a model for adult students’, 59(3), pp.246-263. https://doi.org/10.1177/0741713609331479. macdonald, j. and poniatowska, b. (2011) ‘designing the professional development of staff for teaching online: an ou (uk) case study’, distance education, 32(1), pp. 119-134. https://doi.org/10.1080/01587919.2011.565481. meehan, d. and negy, c. (2003) ‘undergraduate students' adaptation to college: does being married make a difference?’, journal of college student development, 44(5), pp.670-690. https://doi.org/10.1353/csd.2003.0055. misopoulos, f., argyropoulou, m. and tzavara, d. (2018) ‘exploring the factors affecting student academic performance in online programs: a literature review’, in khare, a. and hurst, d. (eds.) on the line: business education in the digital age. springer international publishing, pp.235-250. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-627762_18. neuhauser, c. (2002) ‘learning style and effectiveness of online and face-to-face instruction’, american journal of distance education, 16(2), pp.99-113. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15389286ajde1602_4. nieuwoudt, j. (2018) ‘exploring online interaction and online learner participation in an online science subject through the lens of the interaction equivalence theorem’, student success, 9(4), pp.53-62. https://doi.org/10.5204/ssj.v9i4.520. nieuwoudt, j. e. (2020) ‘investigating synchronous and asynchronous class attendance as predictors of academic success in online education’, australasian journal of educational technology, 36(3). https://doi.org/10.14742/ajet.5137. prinsloo, p. and slade, s. (2017) ‘an elephant in the learning analytics room: the obligation to act’, proceedings of the seventh international learning analytics & https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-52977-6_1 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-52977-6_1 https://doi.org/10.1177/0741713609331479 https://doi.org/10.1080/01587919.2011.565481 https://doi.org/10.1353/csd.2003.0055 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62776-2_18 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62776-2_18 https://doi.org/10.1207/s15389286ajde1602_4 https://doi.org/10.5204/ssj.v9i4.520 https://doi.org/10.14742/ajet.5137 mingoia and le busque the relationship between engaging in online course activities and final course grade in an online psychology course journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 15 knowledge conference, vancouver, british columbia, canada. https://doi.org/10.1145/3027385.3027406. ramos, c. and yudko, e. (2008) ‘“hits” (not “discussion posts”) predict student success in online courses: a double cross-validation study’, computers & education, 50(4), pp.1174-1182. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2006.11.003. rienties, b., boroowa, a., cross, s., kubiak, c., mayles, k. and murphy, s. (2016) ‘analytics4action evaluation framework: a review of evidence-based learning analytics interventions at the open university uk’, journal of interactive media in education, (1), pp.1-11. http://doi.org/10.5334/jime.394. ryabov, i. (2012) ‘the effect of time online on grades in online sociology courses’, journal of online learning and teaching, 8(1), pp.13-23. snyder, t. d., de brey, c. and dillow, s. a. (2019) digest of education statistics 2018 (nces 2020-009). national center for education statistics, institute of education sciences, u.s. department of education. washington, dc. sun, l., tang, y. and zuo, w. (2020) ‘coronavirus pushes education online’, nature materials, 19(6), pp.687-687. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41563-020-0678-8. wong, b. t. m. (2017) ‘learning analytics in higher education: an analysis of case studies’, asian association of open universities journal, 12(1), pp.21-40. https://doi.org/10.1108/aaouj-01-2017-0009. yanosky, r. and arroway, p. (2015) the analytics landscape in higher education, 2015. louisville, co: ecar, october 2015. available at: https://library.educause.edu/~/media/files/library/2015/5/ers1504cl.pdf (accessed: 12 april 2017). zacharis, n. z. (2015) ‘a multivariate approach to predicting student outcomes in webenabled blended learning courses’, the internet and higher education, 27, pp.4453. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.iheduc.2015.05.002. https://doi.org/10.1145/3027385.3027406 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2006.11.003 http://doi.org/10.5334/jime.394 https://doi.org/10.1038/s41563-020-0678-8 https://doi.org/10.1108/aaouj-01-2017-0009 https://library.educause.edu/~/media/files/library/2015/5/ers1504cl.pdf https://doi.org/10.1016/j.iheduc.2015.05.002 mingoia and le busque the relationship between engaging in online course activities and final course grade in an online psychology course journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 16 appendices appendix a table 1. bivariate relationships between course activities and final grade. measure m sd 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 1. course grade* 58.34 24.70 .61** .36** .40** .29** .19** .29** .40** 2. course site visits 73.10 51.23 .70** .63** .63** .44** .57** .65** 3. activity views 60.67 81.56 .81** .53** .33** .51** .47** 4. activity posts 7.16 8.16 .32** .29** .36** .44** 5. course forum views 10.26 22.95 .63** .59** .30** 6. course forum posts 0.71 2.52 .17** .22** 7. announcement views 3.60 7.63 .34** 8. time spent watching lecture videos 85.84 115.29 note. m grade out of a possible 100 score. **correlation is significant at the <.001 level (2tailed). mingoia and le busque the relationship between engaging in online course activities and final course grade in an online psychology course journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 17 appendix b table 2. linear model of predictors of students’ final course grade. variable b se b β p 95% ci constant 34.31 1.73 <.001 30.91, 37.71 course site visits 0.35 0.03 .74 <.001 0.29, 0.42 activity views -0.07 0.02 -.22 .004 -0.11, -0.02 activity posts 0.50 0.21 .16 .02 0.09, 0.90 course forum views -0.04 0.07 -.04 .52 -0.19, 0.10 course forum posts -0.71 0.51 -.07 .16 -1.71, 0.29 announcement views -0.13 0.17 -.04 .45 -0.46, 0.20 time spent watching lecture videos -0.00 0.01 -.00 .96 -0.02, 0.02 figure 1. scatterplot of students’ final course grade and course site visit scores with 95% confidence interval and 95% prediction interval. note. ci = confidence interval. pi = prediction interval. table 3. linear model of predictors of students’ quiz grade. mingoia and le busque the relationship between engaging in online course activities and final course grade in an online psychology course journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 18 variable b se b β p 95% ci constant 37.48 1.88 <.001 33.79, 41.17 course site visits .37 0.04 .73 <.001 0.30, 0.44 activity views -0.06 0.02 -.20 .009 -0.11, -0.02 activity posts 0.40 0.22 .13 .08 -0.04, 0.83 course forum views -.08 0.08 -.07 .23 -0.24, 0.07 course forum posts -0.68 0.55 -.07 .22 -1.76, 0.40 announcement views -0.07 0.18 -.02 .71 -0.43, 0.29 time spent watching lecture videos -0.00 0.01 -.00 .86 -0.02, 0.02 figure 2. scatterplot of students’ quiz grade and course site visit scores with 95% confidence interval and 95% prediction interval. note. ci = confidence interval. pi = prediction interval. mingoia and le busque the relationship between engaging in online course activities and final course grade in an online psychology course journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 19 table 4. linear model of predictors of students’ written assessment grade. variable b se b β p 95% ci constant 29.56 1.94 <.001 25.74, 33.37 course site visits 0.34 0.04 .65 <.001 0.26, 0.41 activity views -0.07 0.03 -.21 .007 -0.12, -0.02 activity posts 0.65 0.23 .20 .005 0.20, 1.10 course forum views 0.01 0.08 .01 .93 -0.15, 0.17 course forum posts -0.77 0.57 -.07 .18 -1.89, 0.35 announcement views -0.22 0.19 -.06 .25 -0.59, 0.16 time spent watching lecture videos 0.00 0.01 .01 .88 -0.02, 0.03 figure 3. scatterplot of students’ written assessment grade and course site visit scores with 95% confidence interval and 95% prediction interval. note. ci = confidence interval. pi = prediction interval. mingoia and le busque the relationship between engaging in online course activities and final course grade in an online psychology course journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 20 appendix c table 5. group differences in course site visits according to programme delivery, gender, age, location, study load, and enrolment choice. measure m sd n t df p d 1. programme delivery -5.33 342.73 <.001 0.50 online 87.35 67.03 226 on-campus 60.44 35.80 229 2. gender -2.08 452 .04 0.25 male 62.65 51.93 88 female 76.18 55.52 366 3. age -5.95 352.35 <.001 0.52 traditional (18-21) 53.72 38.70 129 non-traditional (22+) 81.75 58.73 326 4. location 3.01 71.93 .004 0.33 domestic 75.66 56.69 409 international 57.33 36.63 46 5. study load -4.85 275.56 <.001 0.50 full-time 62.55 39.12 265 part-time 89.50 69.05 190 6. enrolment choice -0.56 453 .58 .07 core course 73.07 57.21 361 elective course 76.64 47.07 94 note. the sample size for gender comparisons was 454 as one participant identified as indeterminate, intersex, or unspecified gender and was therefore removed from the male and female comparison. mingoia and le busque the relationship between engaging in online course activities and final course grade in an online psychology course journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 21 table 6. group differences in activity views according to programme delivery, gender, age, location, study load, and enrolment choice. measure m sd n t df p d 1. programme delivery 6.03 346.41 <.001 0.57 online 83.10 97.75 226 on-campus 38.54 53.16 229 2. gender 3.30 147.34 .001 0.36 male 36.89 70.92 88 female 65.51 81.40 366 3. age 5.62 378.83 <.001 0.48 traditional 33.39 54.42 129 non-traditional 71.47 88.07 326 4. location 5.88 88.77 <.001 0.56 domestic 65.20 83.62 409 international 20.46 43.37 46 5. study load 5.83 249.04 <.001 0.62 full-time 40.59 49.66 265 part-time 88.68 105.74 190 6. enrolment choice 0.83 453 .41 0.10 core course 59.06 81.37 361 elective course 66.88 82.43 94 note. the sample size for gender comparisons was 454 as one participant identified as indeterminate, intersex, or unspecified gender and was therefore removed from the male and female comparison. mingoia and le busque the relationship between engaging in online course activities and final course grade in an online psychology course journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 22 table 7. group differences in activity posts according to programme delivery, gender, age, location, study load, and enrolment choice. measure m sd n t df p d 1. programme delivery -5.65 387.07 <.001 0.53 online 9.27 9.36 226 on-campus 5.07 6.12 229 2. gender -4.60 172.86 <.001 0.46 male 4.18 6.14 88 female 7.80 8.32 366 3. age -5.12 307.71 <.001 0.47 traditional 4.45 6.46 129 non-traditional 8.23 8.52 326 4. location 7.29 92.94 <.001 0.67 domestic 7.70 8.33 409 international 2.33 4.15 46 5. study load -4.64 312.15 <.001 0.47 full-time 5.60 6.56 265 part-time 9.33 9.58 190 6. enrolment choice -0.31 453 .75 0.04 core course 7.10 8.16 361 elective course 7.39 8.21 94 note. the sample size for gender comparisons was 454 as one participant identified as indeterminate, intersex, or unspecified gender and was therefore removed from the male and female comparison. author details john mingoia holds a phd in psychology and his research interests include higher education, mental health, and body image. he has been teaching in higher education at the university of south australia for seven years and is employed as an online course facilitator. brianna le busque holds a phd in psychology and her research interests include higher education, social psychology, and conservation psychology. she has been teaching in mingoia and le busque the relationship between engaging in online course activities and final course grade in an online psychology course journal of learning development in higher education, issue 24: september 2022 23 higher education at the university of south australia for seven years and also works as a behavioural scientist. the relationship between engaging in online course activities and final course grade in an online psychology course abstract introduction method participants and procedure measures demographic data online course: psychology concepts data analyses results sample characteristics relationships between activities and outcomes course components as predictors of course outcomes/student grades group differences in engagement discussion and conclusions references appendices appendix a appendix b appendix c author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special issue 25: aldinhe conference proceedings and reflections october 2022 ________________________________________________________________________ empathy and compassion: towards wellbeing in learning development daniela de silva university of westminster, uk emma dempsey university of westminster, uk presentation abstract wellbeing, empathy and compassion are increasingly discussed topics in relation to teaching, with one key question being the extent to which empathy and compassion in teaching can impact on student wellbeing as well as outcomes. wellbeing encompasses a broad spectrum of aspects, including health – physical, mental and emotional – life balance, and happiness and fulfilment, and it is not always easy to pin-point which actions can make a difference to the students and their learning journey. this workshop aimed to address some of these questions by giving attendees key information from a study skills professional on how they can integrate a compassionate approach into their teaching, which was followed by a facilitated discussion on this topic to enable attendees to form their own compassionate teaching plans. using mentimeter we exchanged ideas about the definitions of empathy and compassion and how they overlap and bring together a common goal in producing learning development sessions for a diverse range of students. the interactive part of the workshop divided participants into four groups (virtual) and gave them a jamboard link (online pin board application) where the groups were able to comment on whether compassion and empathy in the hybrid teaching and learning experience in the past academic year contributed to improved wellbeing in their students’ journey. the contributions from this activity are displayed in this paper. the groups commented on wellbeing in the social experience, learning experience, academic performance, and overall improved wellbeing in the student experience. the overall aim of the session was to give participants and the facilitators a deeper knowledge of empathy and compassion and their role in student wellbeing. de silva and dempsey empathy and compassion: towards wellbeing in learning development journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 2 community response in session jamboards table 1. question: how do learning and compassion in the learning developer’s teaching impact the wellbeing of students in different areas of their lives? group 1: wellbeing in the social experience at university (interactions with other students, lecturers, other services). group 2: wellbeing in the learning experience. group 3: wellbeing in the social experience outside the university (family, friends, work). group 4: wellbeing and impact on academic performance. feeling comfortable being their true self, to share and connect with those that share interests etc., but also the enriching experience of meeting others from different backgrounds etc. advocate for students. working with lecturers and programme areas to understand expectations. if someone's shared something with a learning developer that was difficult but got a positive experience out of it, the student may be willing to share that with other students, lecturers, etc. have better communications/ dialogues between staff/students. allows students to feel confident and comfortable in participating in class discussions. may prompt a positive change in mindset so that learning becomes more like ‘if you give me enough time, i can learn this’, rather than looking for barriers to learning. developing knowledge and expertise, skills, etc. that are emancipatory and fulfilling. allowing students to find their identity within their institution. to feel empowered and have a voice, to contribute confidently to discussions. opportunity to practice social communication! feeling heard and confidence building positively affects all the groups on every question here! feeling more confident managing their university experience themselves. i've used strengthsbased reflection tools before which have led to lightbulb moments for students where they realise how a difference in perspective is affecting personal relationships. increasing confidence and willingness to have a go – the imposter syndrome feeling can be powerful for many students – allowing them to see that these feelings are normal can be so helpful to them! just the power of recognising they're not alone (so compassion from fellow learners, not only us). the confidence to try and keep trying. being able to work with students regularly builds trust and compassion. feeling more confident about their work and understanding that learning is a process, not something that is ‘finished’. de silva and dempsey empathy and compassion: towards wellbeing in learning development journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 3 therefore, better university experience for all. often ld conversations turn into self-awareness conversations that give students strategies for approaching difficult conversations and managing relationships. it can give students more confidence to help other students, approach lecturers. learning how to ask questions of their lecturers and tutors (e.g., not just ‘what do i do/how do i do this assignment?’). makes them realise their opinion matters so they are more likely to speak up and get involved 'poor' wellbeing not having ability to concentrate or focus due to stress or anxiety, taking a more surface approach to just 'get by’. helping them realise that nothing is ever 'perfect the first time around’. more positive mindset: 'if you give me enough time, i can learn this’, rather than identifying barriers to learning. feeling like their anxiety or lack of confidence is normal and nothing to worry about can really release students. sessions focused on academic resilience have compassion at their heart, and really help students make better use of feedback and develop a learning mindset. the much-needed motivation for students to get through their academic challenges; wellbeing and academic performance go hand in hand, i think. it's about confidence primarily, and being in a place where they can engage with self-efficacy, and overcome procrastination or low motivation. de silva and dempsey empathy and compassion: towards wellbeing in learning development journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 4 in session word clouds activity findings image 1. question: what does compassion mean in your teaching? image 2. question: what does empathy mean to you in your teaching? this was a well-paced, sensitively-led workshop, providing plenty of opportunities for us to unpack what we understand by, and associate with, terms like ‘empathy’, ‘compassion’ and ‘wellbeing’, as well as to discuss how learning development can be a space for more consciously and intentionally empathetic and compassionate educational practices. the jamboard questions generated lots of insights and created a helpful resource to return to. it would be interesting to place work like this – work which pursues, by way of the cultivation of empathy and compassion, the goal of student wellbeing – into dialogue with critiques of the discourse of wellbeing in higher education. in particular, i am thinking about the way institutional emphases on individual wellbeing (together with regular reminders that personal wellbeing is something we all should be attending to) risk deflecting attention from how he practices reproduce the very conditions that make an explicit focus on wellbeing appear so necessary. we might also wish to question precisely to what ends our de silva and dempsey empathy and compassion: towards wellbeing in learning development journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 5 work on wellbeing is directed, especially in the context of a sector in which notions of educational value have become so thoroughly subordinated to the imperatives of ‘employability’ – narrowly-defined as the individual’s development of themselves as suitably disciplined, ‘work-ready’ human capital. sunny dhillon’s 2018 article, ‘whose wellbeing is it anyway?’, in the journal of learning development in higher education, would be an excellent starting point for such a dialogue – a dialogue that could further deepen the session leaders’ own reflections on what we mean when we speak of empathy and compassion in educational practice. image 3. empathy and compassion – wellbeing in learning development. editorial comment this workshop facilitated discussions and communicated literature relating to a growing movement within learning development to explore empathy, compassion, and wellbeing. the session was well received and planned, with the majority of the findings from the workshop showcased through the jamboards attached. it highlights the importance of empathising with learners, as opposed to teaching, developing and assessing, as empowering to both the staff member and the student. this paper begins a conversation, de silva and dempsey empathy and compassion: towards wellbeing in learning development journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 6 where further exploration could be undertaken by the learning development community and an interesting topic for further discussion might be whether the ‘imperatives of employability’ represent an issue or an opportunity for greater integration of wellbeing across employability and academic skills development (peila-shuster, 2016). authors’ reflection the authors feel that looking at empathy and compassion in the way it was presented at the aldinhe june 2022 conference made these concepts more tangible and academically framed. learning development sessions can give students more confidence to help other students and approach lecturers. learning development conversations have the capacity to turn into self-awareness conversations. working with students regularly builds trust and compassion and gives students strategies for maintaining their wellbeing. our main insight is that empathy and compassion contribute enormously to students’ wellbeing and that learning developers have a crucial role in building students’ confidence, motivation, and resilience throughout their university journey. acknowledgments thank you to the contributors who shared their reflections and enhanced our insights into this conference presentation. in particular, thank you to steve rooney, aston university, for his contribution to this piece, and special thanks to jacqui bartram, university of hull. we would like to thank the academic engagement and learning development (aeld) team at the university of westminster for being the first participants of the empathy and compassion in teaching workshop and who contributed valuable insights to our work. we would also like to thank the centre for education and teaching innovation (ceti) at the university of westminster for inviting us to deliver the empathy and compassion in teaching session, at the ceti learning and teaching symposium which enabled us to open constructive discussions on the topic with our academic colleagues. de silva and dempsey empathy and compassion: towards wellbeing in learning development journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25: october 2022 7 references dhillon, s. (2018) ‘whose wellbeing is it anyway?’, journal of learning development in higher education, special issue, october, pp.1-16. https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.v0i0.460. peila-shuster, j. j. (2016) ‘supporting student transitions: integrating life design, career construction, happenstance, and hope’, south african journal of higher education, 30(3). available at: https://hdl.handle.net/10520/ejc197301 (accessed: 24 august 2022). author details daniela de silva is an academic engagement and development manager (accessibility) in the library and archive services at the university of westminster. daniela is an experienced higher education practitioner with expertise and longstanding experience in supporting students with neurodiverse conditions such as dyslexia, dyspraxia, adhd, and asc. she also works as an academic professional development fellow with ceti (centre for education and teaching innovation) at the university of westminster and co-creates academic professional development sessions on innovative learning and teaching, inclusive course design, and digital accessibility. she is a senior fellow of the higher education academy (sfhea). emma dempsey is academic engagement and learning developer at the university of westminster. she started her career teaching english as a second language to international students in london and she enjoyed bringing together an international class of students. the importance of building rapport and making classrooms fun, informal, and secure places where each student feels comfortable to share and feels valued has always been the focus of emma’ s work. since then, she has worked in a variety of educational settings in the uk and abroad, in secondary schools, further education colleges, and universities, focussing on academic english, personal development and academic skills subjects. https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.v0i0.460 https://hdl.handle.net/10520/ejc197301 empathy and compassion: towards wellbeing in learning development presentation abstract community response in session jamboards in session word clouds activity findings editorial comment authors’ reflection acknowledgments references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 27 april 2023 ________________________________________________________________________ ©2023 the author(s) (cc-by 4.0) fostering a growth mindset in higher education for inclusive learning for all frantzeska kolyda university of westminster, uk abstract this article aims to encourage educators and universities to explore interventions and practices that cultivate a growth mindset to reduce inequality in the academic success of students from disadvantaged socioeconomic backgrounds and ethnic or other minorities, especially in stem. universities invest significantly in closing the achievement gap, particularly for such students. disadvantaged students who have excelled academically are often labelled ‘gifted’. however, this label may emphasise the importance of students’ innate abilities over cognitive ones. furthermore, it may foster fear of failure and lead to avoidance of challenges and lack of efforts, concealing the lack of understanding to retain the ‘gifted’ image, and create significant barriers to learning. as student diversity increases, pedagogical approaches must evolve accordingly. this article investigates ways to inspire students to remain motivated about their stem subject and discusses ways to cultivate a growth mindset, factors influencing students’ mindsets, recent criticisms of the growth mindset approach, and the role of learning development in fostering a growth mindset. when faculty and students embrace the idea that intellectual abilities can grow through diligence, determination, and correct strategies, they can transform how educators approach learning and help shift the focus away from content delivery to active and transformative learning. keywords: growth mindset; equality; diversity and inclusion; stem; higher education. kolyda fostering a growth mindset in higher education for inclusive learning for all journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 2 introduction students’ beliefs about their competence, intelligence, and skills play an important role in their learning experiences, engagement, performance, and reactions to setbacks. therefore, understanding how students develop their mindsets, particularly during university studies, is important. additionally, students must be supported in realising the power in perceiving challenges as opportunities for future growth and that intelligence is malleable and skills can be developed. a growth mindset refers to the belief that intellectual ability can be developed (dweck, 2017; dweck and yeager, 2019). today, universities make significant resource investments that help close the achievement gap, especially for students from disadvantaged socioeconomic backgrounds and ethnic minorities who often face challenges when pursuing a career in stem (science and technology committee, 2023). these students are required by their circumstances to adopt a fixed mindset, that is, believing themselves to be unable to achieve their aims and succeed (claro, paunesku and dweck, 2016). however, as dweck highlights, ‘the view you adopt for yourself profoundly affects the way you lead your life. it can determine whether you become the person you want to be and whether you accomplish the things you value’ (2017, p.11). simultaneously, developing a growth mindset helps students cope with setbacks and embrace and develop success strategies, perseverance, and resilience. hence, higher education (he) must prioritise the development of a growth mindset among students. growth mindset and attainment gaps in higher education universities and policymakers are exploring ways to reduce the inequality in academic success between advantaged and disadvantaged students. certain uk universities (office for students, 2022) are exploring interventions focused on closing the attainment gap for black and ethnic minority students and students from low socioeconomic backgrounds. universities must commit to changing, motivating, empowering, and supporting educators and students to overcome these biases. considering the concept of a growth mindset in institutional plans, universities can develop research-supported principles and interventions and tailor them according to institutional and departmental needs and cultures. kolyda fostering a growth mindset in higher education for inclusive learning for all journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 3 researchers such as campbell (2020) argue that growth mindset interventions must focus on developing collective mindsets in learning environments instead of developing individual students. by creating learning environments that support and sustain growth mindset beliefs and behaviours, the same can be further developed for students. the results of a large-scale study involving more than 90% of incoming first-year students at a large midwestern public university in the us suggested that a growth mindset and interventions for belonging can improve disadvantaged students’ academic outcomes (broda et al., 2018). light-touch interventions, such as ‘a series of eight weekly sessions in which students learned about the function of the brain and how the brain could become stronger by taking on challenges’ (broda et al., 2018, p.319), demonstrate positive results for racial and ethnic minorities and first-generation students from low-income families; however, they offer unique implementation challenges (for example, careful customisation to institutional context). further interventions may include workshops (for example, on neuroplasticity and self-efficacy, task value, and self-regulation), self-administered online modules (on neuroplasticity, trying new strategies, and seeking help from experts), and brief interventions in the form of classroom writing assignments (casad et al., 2018; bedford, 2017). further, bedford (2017) suggests that the impact of prior attainment on students’ motivation for learning science could be overcome through effective strategies and a suitable learning environment to enhance a growth mindset. to motivate students in stem, educators and universities must show them the value of the content and skills being learnt and their relevance in everyday life. hence, careful consideration of curriculum design and delivery plays an important role. developing interventions and inclusive teaching practices that normalise failure could build positive relationships and an effective learning environment where all students feel a sense of community and belonging. to produce graduates with successful careers in stem, students must understand that failure is a productive part of the learning process. open communication about failure can reduce negative stigma. promoting collaboration among students, instead of competition, could reduce anxiety, provide an inclusive and supportive environment, and foster a sense of community in classrooms. creating opportunities for students to explore, experiment, and take risks during their learning journey would help them normalise failures, cope with uncertainty, and become successful kolyda fostering a growth mindset in higher education for inclusive learning for all journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 4 in stem careers. processing failure together with students transforms fear into a learning opportunity in a safe environment. the results of a randomised trial of a growth mindset and belonging intervention at a large public university (in the us) indicated that light-touch interventions may be a minimally invasive approach to improving academic outcomes for disadvantaged students while offering unique implementation challenges (broda et al., 2018). disadvantaged students and mindsets disadvantaged students, when they excel and manage to secure a place at university despite all the barriers and challenges they have faced (see clarke and thévenon, 2022, for examples), are often praised as ‘gifted’ by society or by their communities; and this is supported by government policy's terminology. however, ‘gifted’ implies effortless achievement, which is inextricably linked to the view that intelligence is not malleable and, hence, that people who make an extra effort are deficient. such labels emphasise the importance of innate over cognitive ability in students and foster a fear of failure. consequently, students often avoid challenges (campbell, craig and collier-reed, 2020) and cease making efforts to conceal a lack of understanding and retain their ‘gifted’ image, further creating significant learning barriers. research, using a nationwide sample of high school students from chile, found that students from low-income families were less likely to have a growth mindset than their peers from high-income families (claro, paunesku and dweck, 2016). this suggests that students’ mindsets may aggravate the effects of economic disadvantages at a systemic level. hence, interventions to increase growth mindsets are most beneficial for students from low socioeconomic backgrounds and minorities. factors influencing students’ mindsets institutional, departmental, and educator teaching approaches are key to promoting a growth-oriented mindset. educators’ approaches and teaching practices are influenced by their understanding of how learning occurs. if students believe that stem subjects are difficult, they may not be able to develop autonomy in learning, self-efficacy, or the belief kolyda fostering a growth mindset in higher education for inclusive learning for all journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 5 that they can progress and further their intelligence. instead, task value must be emphasised in classes so that students feel that the content and syllabus are significant and relevant to them. the current emphasis on achievement in formal education and students’ abilities creates a culture that significantly emphasises success, in which students do not want to take risks because of fear of failure (cetin, ilhan and yilmaz 2014; heyd-metzuyanim, 2015; dweck, 2017; simpson and maltese, 2017). results (canning et al., 2019) from a longitudinal us university-wide sample (150 stem professors and more than 15,000 students) revealed that the racial achievement gaps in modules taught by educators who leaned toward a fixed mindset were twice as large as the gaps in modules taught by educators who leaned toward a growth mindset. educators’ mindset beliefs predicted student achievement and motivation beyond any other educator characteristics, including ethnicity, race, gender, age, teaching experience, and tenure status. these findings suggest that educators’ growth mindset beliefs have significant implications for the student experience and achievement of underrepresented minority stem students. if more educators create growth mindset cultures in their classes, students’ motivation and engagement in stem could increase, possibly inspiring more underrepresented ethnic/racial minority students to pursue careers in stem. canning et al. (2019) argued that even a small increase in stem module grades could mean a difference between completing the module, continuing to receive funding, and/or advancing toward a stem degree. this occurs when learning development plays an important role. mason, weeden and bogaard (2022) argue that an effective starting point for educators is learning about a growth mindset and focusing on actively generating their own knowledge toward an all-encompassing goal of applying such mindset concepts in their module assessment while mentoring students. ensuring that learning development plays an active role in this is crucial (for example, by providing practical resources or examples of good practice and support). in classroom contexts, students rely on lecturers’ feedback regarding their performance and competence. stem classrooms are often perceived as difficult and competitive learning environments and, in these environments, students may be extra vigilant to lecturer’s cues that may suggest that ‘students might not have what it takes’ (muenks et al., 2020, p. 2120) to succeed in a specific module or course. muenks et al. (2020) examined how students’ perceptions of their professors’ mindsets predicted their performance, engagement, and experiences in stem classes. they found that students kolyda fostering a growth mindset in higher education for inclusive learning for all journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 6 who perceive that their professor upheld fixed-mindset beliefs anticipated and experienced more psychological vulnerability in those classes. students reported less belonging in class, greater concerns about their evaluation, greater feelings of being an imposter, and greater negative effects. learning development could use such findings to support and educate university faculty about how faculty mindset beliefs and behaviours affect students’ learning experiences. flanigan et al. (2017) studied how students’ academic motivation and engagement may influence the development of their beliefs. their study suggested that students’ motivational traits influenced their mindsets. researchers (limeri et al., 2020) have identified five factors that may influence upper-level stem undergraduate students’ mindsets: a) prior academic experiences, b) observing their peers overcome academic struggles, c) logical deductions (reasoning from scientific principles), d) societal cues (common misconceptions about intelligence and iq), and e) formal learning. educators can leverage these factors to design and evaluate interventions for student success. recent criticism of the growth mindset approach recent criticisms of the growth mindset approach question whether such interventions work and whether mindsets predict student outcomes. yeager and dweck (2020) explained that mindset is a theory about responses to challenges or setbacks rather than academic achievement. it proposes that situational attributions and goals are fostered by more situation-general mindset beliefs about intelligence instead of being isolated ideas. mindset associations with outcomes are often stronger among individuals who face academic setbacks or challenges. however, the association between mindset and achievement cannot be condensed into a single effect size. there is also unexplained heterogeneity across and within cultures (yeager and dweck, 2020). these details are crucial for the effectiveness of growth mindset interventions. such interventions can be well or poorly crafted. further research on growth mindset can help us understand classroom contexts and how they may be changed so that interventions can be more effective (yeager and dweck, 2020). kolyda fostering a growth mindset in higher education for inclusive learning for all journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 7 the role of learning development in fostering a growth mindset the controversy that teacher-focused growth mindset interventions have not yet been effective offers an opportunity to explore the crucial role of learning development in guiding, supporting, and enhancing educators’ practices in ways that affect student perceptions and outcomes. new research is necessary to explore this while building on recent studies reporting on the role of teachers’ mindsets and respective practices in student achievement (yeager and dweck, 2020). such research will illuminate how best to design and implement academic professional development that focuses on supporting educators to help students develop a belonging and growth mindset and improve outcomes and student experiences. researchers (for example, boyd, 2015; baldwin et al., 2020) argue that the growth mindset approach is a powerful concept in learning and educational development. educators and he institutions play an important role in creating a culture that supports and promotes a growth mindset and sense of belonging. to achieve this, learning development can prepare and equip faculty and help in fostering a growth mindset culture (including how they provide feedback to students). when faculty and students embrace the idea that intellectual abilities can grow through diligence, determination, and correct strategies, they can transform how educators approach learning and help shift the focus away from content delivery to active and transformative learning. conclusion this study discusses the cultivation of a growth mindset to reduce inequality in academic success among students from disadvantaged backgrounds and ethnic or other minorities in he, particularly in stem subjects. by focusing on improving the current environment and considering factors that influence students’ mindsets, educators can foster a growth mindset that may reduce the inequality in academic success between advantaged and disadvantaged students. developing interventions and inclusive teaching practices that normalise failure could build positive relationships and create effective learning environments where all students feel a sense of belonging. learning development plays a central role in achieving this. kolyda fostering a growth mindset in higher education for inclusive learning for all journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 8 references baldwin, a., bunting, b., daugherty, d., lewis, l. and steenbergh, t. (2020) promoting belonging, growth mindset, and resilience to foster student success. stylus publishing, llc. bedford, s. (2017) ‘growth mindset and motivation: a study into secondary school science learning’, research papers in education, 32(4), pp.424-443. https://doi.org/10.1080/02671522.2017.1318809. boyd, d. e. (2015) ‘the growth mindset approach: a threshold concept in course redesign’, journal on centers for teaching and learning, 6, pp.29-44. broda, m., yun, j., schneider, b., yeager, d. s., walton, g. m. and diemer, m. (2018) ‘reducing inequality in academic success for incoming college students: a randomized trial of growth mindset and belonging interventions’, journal of research on educational effectiveness, 11(3), pp.317-338. https://doi.org/10.1080/19345747.2018.1429037. campbell, a. (2020) enabling' growth mindsets' in engineering students. unpublished phd thesis. university of cape town. available at: http://hdl.handle.net/11427/32505 (accessed: 1 august 2022). campbell, a., craig, t. and collier-reed, b. (2020) ‘a framework for using learning theories to inform “growth mindset” activities’, international journal of mathematical education in science and technology, 51(1), pp.26-43. https://doi.org/10.1080/0020739x.2018.1562118. canning, e. a., muenks, k., green, d. j., and murphy, m. c. (2019) ‘stem faculty who believe ability is fixed have larger racial achievement gaps and inspire less student motivation in their classes’, science advances, 5(2), eaau4734. https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.aau4734. casad, b. j., oyler, d. l., sullivan, e. t., mcclellan, e. m., tierney, d. n., anderson, d. a., greeley, p. a., fague, m. a. and flammang, b. j. (2018) ‘wise psychological https://doi.org/10.1080/02671522.2017.1318809 https://doi.org/10.1080/19345747.2018.1429037 http://hdl.handle.net/11427/32505 https://doi.org/10.1080/0020739x.2018.1562118 https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.aau4734 kolyda fostering a growth mindset in higher education for inclusive learning for all journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 9 interventions to improve gender and racial equality in stem’, group processes & intergroup relations, 21(5), pp.767-787. https://doi.org/10.1177/1368430218767034. cetin, b., ilhan, m. and yilmaz, f. (2014) ‘an investigation of the relationship between the fear of receiving negative criticism and of taking academic risk through canonical correlation analysis’, educational sciences: theory and practice, 14(1) pp.146-158. clarke, c. and o. thévenon (2022), ‘starting unequal: how’s life for disadvantaged children?’, oecd papers on well-being and inequalities, no. 06. paris: oecd publishing. https://doi.org/10.1787/a0ec330c-en. claro, s., paunesku, d. and dweck, c. s. (2016) ‘growth mindset tempers the effects of poverty on academic achievement’, pnas proceedings of the national academy of sciences of the united states of america, 113(31), pp.8664-8668. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1608207113. dweck, c. (2017) mindset-updated edition: changing the way you think to fulfil your potential. hachette uk. dweck, c. s. and yeager, d. s. (2019) ‘mindsets: a view from two eras’, perspectives on psychological science, 14(3), pp.481-496. https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691618804166. flanigan, a. e., peteranetz, m. s., shell, d. f. and soh, l. k. (2017) ‘implicit intelligence beliefs of computer science students: exploring change across the semester’, contemporary educational psychology, 48, pp.179-196, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cedpsych.2016.10.003. heyd-metzuyanim, e. (2015) ‘vicious cycles of identifying and mathematizing: a case study of the development of mathematical failure’ journal of the learning sciences, 24(4), pp.504-549. https://doi.org/10.1080/10508406.2014.999270. limeri, l. b., carter, n. t., choe, j., harper, h. g., martin, h. r., benton, a. and dolan, e. l. (2020) ‘growing a growth mindset: characterizing how and why undergraduate https://doi.org/10.1177/1368430218767034 https://doi.org/10.1787/a0ec330c-en https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1608207113 https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691618804166 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cedpsych.2016.10.003 https://doi.org/10.1080/10508406.2014.999270 kolyda fostering a growth mindset in higher education for inclusive learning for all journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 10 students’ mindsets change’, international journal of stem education, 7(1), pp.1-19, https://doi.org/10.1186/s40594-020-00227-2. mason, s., weeden, e. and bogaard, d. (2022) ‘building a growth mindset toolkit as a means toward developing a growth mindset for faculty interactions with students in and out of the classroom: building a growth mindset toolkit for faculty’, in proceedings of the 23rd annual conference on information technology education (sigite '22). chicago 21-24 september. association for computing machinery, new york, pp.137-141. https://doi.org/10.1145/3537674.3554750. muenks, k., canning, e. a., lacosse, j., green, d. j., zirkel, s., garcia, j. a. and murphy, m. c. (2020) ‘does my professor think my ability can change? students’ perceptions of their stem professors’ mindset beliefs predict their psychological vulnerability, engagement, and performance in class’, journal of experimental psychology: general, 149(11), p.2119. https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0000763. office for students (2022) university of portsmouth. changing mindsets: reducing stereotype threat and implicit bias as barriers to student success. available at: https://www.officeforstudents.org.uk/advice-and-guidance/promoting-equalopportunities/addressing-barriers-to-student-success-programme/abss-projectuniversity-of-portsmouth (accessed: 1 august 2022). science and technology committee (2023) diversity and inclusion in stem. fifth report of session 2022–23. parliamentary copyright house of commons 2022. available at: https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm5803/cmselect/cmsctech/95/report.html (accessed: 26 march 2023). simpson, a. and maltese, a. (2017) ‘“failure is a major component of learning anything”: the role of failure in the development of stem professionals’, journal of science education and technology, 26, pp.223–237. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10956-016-9674-9. yeager, d. s. and dweck, c. s. (2020) ‘what can be learned from growth mindset controversies?’, american psychologist, 75(9), p.1269. https://doi.org/10.1037/amp0000794. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40594-020-00227-2 https://doi.org/10.1145/3537674.3554750 https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0000763 https://www.officeforstudents.org.uk/advice-and-guidance/promoting-equal-opportunities/addressing-barriers-to-student-success-programme/abss-project-university-of-portsmouth https://www.officeforstudents.org.uk/advice-and-guidance/promoting-equal-opportunities/addressing-barriers-to-student-success-programme/abss-project-university-of-portsmouth https://www.officeforstudents.org.uk/advice-and-guidance/promoting-equal-opportunities/addressing-barriers-to-student-success-programme/abss-project-university-of-portsmouth https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm5803/cmselect/cmsctech/95/report.html https://doi.org/10.1007/s10956-016-9674-9 https://doi.org/10.1037/amp0000794 kolyda fostering a growth mindset in higher education for inclusive learning for all journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 11 author details frantzeska kolyda is a senior lecturer and edi school co-lead at the university of westminster, school of computer science and engineering, and a senior fellow of advance he. she has extensive academic and industry experience, including 11 years working for the bbc. she has expertise in human computer interaction, user experience, educational technology. and education research. she has been involved in the design and development of several (ug/pg/cpd) programmes, pedagogical initiatives, and successful interdisciplinary projects across the university. she has previously worked as an academic professional development fellow in the centre for education and teaching innovation at the university of westminster. licence ©2023 the author(s). this is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (cc-by 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. see http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. journal of learning development in higher education (jldhe) is a peer-reviewed open access journal published by the association for learning development in higher education (aldinhe). fostering a growth mindset in higher education for inclusive learning for all abstract introduction growth mindset and attainment gaps in higher education disadvantaged students and mindsets factors influencing students’ mindsets recent criticism of the growth mindset approach the role of learning development in fostering a growth mindset conclusion references author details licence journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x special edition 25: aldinhe conference proceedings and reflections october 2022 editorial jim donohue manchester metropolitan university, uk nicola grayson university of manchester, uk jenny hillman open university, uk katharine jewitt open university, uk eleanor loughlin nottingham trent university, uk cathy malone leeds university, uk craig morley university of chester, uk gita sedghi university of liverpool, uk alicja syska university of plymouth, uk carina buckley solent university, uk erika corradini university of southampton, uk melanie crisfield brunel university, uk lee fallin university of hull, uk lindsay heggie queen’s university, canada tom lowe university of portsmouth, uk tania oxenham wintec, new zealand emma shackleton university of the arts london, uk emma smith university of salford, uk beautifully eclectic: collaborative conference proceedings and reflections we are thrilled to present to you the journal of learning development in higher education’s collaborative conference proceedings and reflections – a collection of collaboratively written reports from the annual aldinhe conference that took place online and in person in june 2022. the conference participants this year had a unique opportunity to interact with the content of the presentations beyond the conference space, by contributing to the presenters’ open documents that gathered audiences’ comments, responses, questions, and suggestions the presenters considered and reflected on after the talk. in this sense, these reports are so much more than conference proceedings – they are an extension of the conference beyond the confines of the physical and temporal spaces demarcated by the event. alicja syska editorial journal of learning development in higher education special issue 25: october 2022 2 none of us had attempted anything like this before. to our knowledge, no one had, yet it seemed like an initiative that was too compelling not to take on. here was our chance to create a platform for a deeper engagement with conference ideas and to see the talks and presentations as a beginning, rather than an end, of the scholarly conversations they started. we took it. what we did the ambition of this collaborative proceedings and reflections volume, and in particular the importance of finding a collective voice that would both reflect and serve our learning development community, dawned on us when we first met online as a significantly expanded editorial group to discuss the approaches, tasks and timelines involved in editing this special issue. huddled in a tightly packed screen of known and less familiar faces, and flicking between the conversations and the documents with my (alicja syska, lead editor) instructions and workflows, we all instantly realised that the word ‘collaboration’ meant many different things to us and that it would be tested on many different levels as we proceeded to understand the magnitude of what lay before us. the success of the volume would depend not only on our skills, experience and commitment, but also on the connections we would develop in the process and how these connections would then influence the negotiations around how knowledge is produced and what the role of editor is in bringing it to the reader. our special editorial group for this issue comprised eight editors and nine guest editors from three english-speaking countries (uk, new zealand and canada). while we were all experienced writers and learning developers, when it came to making this particular radical publishing idea work, many of us felt somewhat lost, experiencing emotions ranging from confusion to feeling ill-equipped, to finding ourselves slightly at odds with the entire idea. everyone understood that our authors presented a paper, a talk, or a poster at the aldinhe conference; that their audiences commented on those presentations in an open google document; and that the authors then had a chance to respond to these comments through their own reflections. the three-part collaborative writing format seemed simple. nonetheless, one look at all the submissions was enough to see that in each case the discussions developed differently, reflecting the multitude of ways in which we all understand and practice collaboration. in some pieces, writers responded to one another; in others, the contributions were separate and insulated. in some cases, it was alicja syska editorial journal of learning development in higher education special issue 25: october 2022 3 easy to identify themes we could build on; in others, no visible thread existed and would have to be extracted from the loose collection of thoughts. clearly, one golden formula that would allow us to impose a particular format, tone, and look across all the submissions was not in sight. in the true spirit of learning development, instead of forcing submissions into the straitjacket of a particular formula, we decided to work with a set of principles. first and foremost, we wanted to ensure that the collection would be of value to our readers. to this end, we shaped the articles in a way that aimed to reveal the essence of each conference presentation, offer an insight into the discussions and responses from its participants, and allow the authors to close the presentation loop with their reflections and thus remain in control of the story. secondly, we wanted to retain as much of the tone and voice of the individual contributions as possible in a collaborative exercise of this magnitude. therefore, we aimed for light-touch editing and only intervened where necessary, e.g. to avoid repetitions or to clarify the narrative. shorter pieces sometimes required editorial comment and we occasionally added references and made additional suggestions for reading or future action. in such cases, we as editors also became the contributors and added our own voices to the collective tapestry of contributions. lastly, we all agreed that our editorial sub-groups would have the freedom to approach the submissions as they saw fit and felt comfortable with. in our struggle for meaning-making, together with the authors and contributors, we would form what deleuze and guattari (1987) saw as ‘alliances’ and negotiate our own collective understandings of the end product through critical dialogical engagement. the result of this negotiation would be a narrative structure and a story presented in a way that would make sense to our readers. it is now up to them to judge how successful we were in this endeavour. how we did it when the project was first outlined to me (carina buckley, guest editor), i was excited at the possibilities it presented for an inclusive community and i thought i could see quite easily how it would work. putting the idea into practice soon showed me how wrong that was – so much variation! so many fragments to wrangle! so much uncertainty in what i felt i was ‘allowed’ to do! yet the sense of excitement stayed alive, because those possibilities i’d imagined for an inclusive community remained within reach. in this way of working we were doing something genuinely innovative, grounded in community and inclusive of many more voices than those listed on the programme. figuring out how to take some of those alicja syska editorial journal of learning development in higher education special issue 25: october 2022 4 voices and create a coherent narrative out of them wasn’t always straightforward, but it was made easier by keeping in mind alicja’s helpful mantra, ‘what adds value for the reader?’ as well as by having a supportive team of co-editors to share ideas and perspectives. it was rewarding, too. i worked with three shorter contributions – a lightning talk and two posters – which had its challenges in that there was less initial material in the document, but i took this as a starting point for providing space for the authors to expand on their ideas, their rationale and their purpose, and they were all keen to take up the opportunity. i felt gratified to be a part of what was genuinely a collaborative process, and i wanted to do both reader and contributor justice through my interventions. being able to revisit these pieces, as an editor and also as an author, has allowed me to make deeper connections and really think about a topic. and actually, once we got going, it didn’t seem as difficult to achieve as i might have first thought! i (jim donohue, editor) found our debate in the editorial team meeting about our sense of comfort/discomfort with intruding into the texts we are working on to be rather profound (if that’s not a contradiction between adjective and modifier). i have come some way in feeling entitled to re-sequence content and change wording. it was interesting to hear how other editors’ sense of that entitlement was – or maybe, wasn’t – emerging. i (jenny hillman, editor) agree with jim’s point about the editorial meeting where we discussed authorial ‘voices’ and how we maintain the integrity of what was written, whilst also seeking to pull together a narrative thread. on reflection, i think i initially found it challenging to navigate the boundary (or very blurred line, as it transpired) between my role as editor and contributor. i thought (read ‘worried’) a lot about whether i might be variously amplifying/ silencing/ misrepresenting voices in our ld community. reconfiguring my work as ‘editor-contributor’ made me realise that all of the editorial choices i made were legitimate when done so in the context, and spirit, of collaborative writing. it was comforting to see similar dynamics in the dialogue around the paper on collective writing spaces (in this collection) – where, similarly, ‘hell’ turned out not to be other people! contributing to this special issue of jldhe has been quite a journey. i (lee fallin, guest editor) was excited by the opportunity and could not wait to get ‘stuck in’. the reality of how this would be achieved only really hit when the work started. it was hard to have the traditional editorial role with so many authors and contributors, some of whom were anonymous. it felt strange to have so much (theoretical) control over the work and ideas of alicja syska editorial journal of learning development in higher education special issue 25: october 2022 5 others. i think the team has, however, done an excellent job of helping those authentic voices ‘shine through’. i love how a variety of approaches have arisen from this – and how these have been allowed to take shape independently. this volume is indeed beautifully eclectic, and i hope it is of use to the community that put it together. i should also expand my reflection to acknowledge that guest editing has led me on a path to joining jldhe as an editor on an ongoing basis. joining as a guest editor was a great way to get to know the team – and what i was getting myself into. i’m really enjoying it and look forward to the years ahead! i (emma smith, guest editor) would echo the observations made by my fellow editors: this process took me on a journey. at the outset, having attended the conference and experienced the excitement of writing a comment that might make it into a journal (rather than a fast-forgotten spreadsheet of post-conference feedback comments), i was of the view that the community responses should stand largely as they were written (except for corrections of spelling or syntax and obvious duplication edited out). but reading through each text, seeing how well they worked when deep engagement or genuine dialogue infused the community response, led me to recognise that, if we’re to have the readers’ interests in mind, in many cases we as editors needed to intrude, to give shape and flow to others’ voices. i still tried in my contributions to keep those voices intact as far as possible, but i also allowed my own to join the chorus, quietly, amplifying and connecting theirs. this guest editorial role has been my first interaction with the jldhe and its team: i was compelled by the warm and open invitation to join this community of authors, editors and readers that came through strongly throughout the conference, so i volunteered. just as this extraordinary collaborative writing endeavour welcomes presenters and attendees to share their ideas in new ways, so the openness of the journal team has created a real and warm welcome for me as a new editor. editing too has been a thoroughly participatory process which we all played a part in defining and refining. thank you all. seeing how the conference proceedings have changed and grown since the initial idea to publish the abstracts has been an amazing experience. when i (melanie crisfield, guest editor) agreed to be an editor following the conference, i wasn’t sure how this marvellous idea would work in practice – it turns out, it worked so much better than i could have imagined! like many others, i was uncertain about how to apply my editorial skills and voice, but when i began reading through the community discussion comments, it became clear how commentators were discussing the same themes and exploring the same possibilities. putting those together into a thematic narrative was exciting, although i alicja syska editorial journal of learning development in higher education special issue 25: october 2022 6 definitely had to rein in my inclination to over-edit. taking a step back and letting the voices of the contributors come through made all of the difference, and created insightful conversations about the presentations themselves. i’m really looking forward to seeing how this all comes together in a published issue. and finally, we complete these reflections with tom lowe’s (guest editor) commentary: curating conference proceedings is a challenge of all academic conferences, but particularly for conferences where the presenters are of professional services and/or a mixture of academic disciplines. this process enabled participant reflections conducted live at the conference where both delegates listening, and presenters delivering, wrote reflections following the wording of their abstracts. although many of the reflections were in note form, the editors were able to quickly synthesise these into a narrative, through adding some literature. although the editor had to become part of the authorship, the output of presenter, delegate and editor has created a community response in a remarkably efficient time. by striking while the iron is hot at the conference, a lively conference proceedings has been written which reads in present tense to bring the reader into the room of the event. what we achieved the result is what we see as a beautifully eclectic collection that extends conference ideas and conversations beyond the conference space, giving those who may not have been able to either join in person or make their voices heard a chance to be part of these conversations. as such, it aligns with our belief that a conference presentation should not be the end of the scholarly conversation, but serve as an opener for something more. we hope that we succeeded at creating this space for presenters in this special collaboratively created collection. as editors, we also learnt new ways of working and drawing on each other’s experience in terms of understanding the role editors play in the publishing process. at times, we had to step outside our own comfort zones and open to the possibility that editors do not have to be gatekeepers but may play a more active role as supporters, developers, and even cocreators. while the experience was challenging and discombobulating at times, by the end of the process three of our guest editors – carina buckley, lee fallin and tom lowe – joined our editorial board as permanent members, which is a fantastic result for the jldhe team! alicja syska editorial journal of learning development in higher education special issue 25: october 2022 7 overall, we feel that with this collaboratively written volume, which is so much more than standard conference proceedings, we have pushed the boundaries of scholarly publishing, allowing for new voices and unexpected conversations to emerge. our readiness to question the assumptions we bring into publishing and the traditional rules that govern it may have been radical but what we gained in the process is an authentic and empowering space that brought the community together. by inviting people to be heard in the way they want to be heard, we opened space for what is unknown and what might emerge if we are only bold enough to try. we thank you all for your active participation in it and we hope that you will be inspired enough to join us again next year. with best wishes, the jldhe editorial board and guest editors references deleuze, g., and guattari, f. (1987) a thousand plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia. trans. by massumi, b. university of minnesota press. journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 27 april 2023 ©2023 the author(s) (cc-by 4.0) writing circles: developing learner self-efficacy and agency through peer review activities david busby university of bath, uk cathy malone university of leeds, uk abstract ‘fear and anxiety are the enemies of learning’ (gibbs, 2014). this paper outlines evaluation of practitioner research into a writing development intervention used with a group of international students studying at masters level in a uk university. the research was motivated by our understanding that academic writing is a task which provokes significant anxiety for students. our methodology was informed by evidence in the literature pointing to the utility of group learning and giving and receiving peer feedback. we aimed to explore the extent to which structured writing analysis and facilitated group feedback activities (conducted through writing circles) influenced student perceptions of confidence in academic writing. our thesis was that instruction in identifying and noticing elements of effective disciplinary writing combined with writing circles cycles of review and redrafting would lead to an improvement in measures of confidence in academic writing. we examined the impact on students through interviews in addition to preand post-intervention questionnaires which assessed self-confidence, anxiety and self-efficacy. this paper presents a clear, practical solution to the difficult problem of increasing students’ confidence in undertaking academic writing. our results indicate a positive impact on overall confidence in academic writing, increased perception of agency and a decrease in anxiety. the findings align with a large body of research which indicate the positive impact on students on being given opportunity to give and receive feedback on their work. this case study demonstrates the value of writing circles as a simple practical activity that acts as a generative frame for student activity. it affirms value of interdisciplinary practice sharing. busby and malone writing circles: developing learner self-efficacy and agency through peer review activities journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27 2 keywords: writing circles; student anxiety; academic self-efficacy; peer review. introduction if, as gibbs says, “fear and anxiety are the enemies of learning” (2014), then an examination of student feelings is both legitimate and pedagogically necessary in order to create conditions for learning to occur. the central premise here begins with an acknowledgement that while challenge can be a positive, indeed essential, aspect of learning, anxiety in the classroom has a debilitating effect on learning or skill acquisition. at the same time, we recognise that writing at university is for many students an anxiety provoking activity. the relationship between these co-related concepts of confidence and anxiety is not one of simple binary apposition. research that explores in a classroom context how anxiety and concepts of self-efficacy and confidence are related, suggests a fundamental link between learner anxiety focused on writing and a whole variety of factors, including negative past experience, limited reading skills, time, tutor expectation, concern about the opinions of peers, language competence, and cultural attitudes and approaches to writing (cheng, 2004; huang, 2014; genc and yayli, 2019). the learner’s selfperception as a writer, the writing context and the task set can result in negative emotions and have an adverse impact on the planning and writing process (atay and kurt, 2006; jahin, 2012). self-efficacy, the belief in the potential to succeed, for example, to plan and write successful assignments is an essential element of self-confidence and agency (bandura, 2006), and is an important quality in reducing anxiety with academic writing (huerta, et al. 2017). this may be especially true in a post-graduate higher education institution (hei) context where writing tends to be conducted in isolation and requires a high level of self-discipline. self-efficacy can also contribute to motivation, aspiration and performance in academic writing and may be linked to the learner’s past experience of feedback (martinez, kock and cass, 2011). this may suggest therefore, that classroom activities which encourage self-efficacy should result in greater agency and improved confidence. as academic writing is largely positioned as a self-managed activity (huerta et al., 2017) the learners’ belief in their own abilities and potential are essential. the research problem we were interested in exploring concerned the extent to which feelings of confidence and self-efficacy can be influenced via instruction and practice of writing skills. we examined this question through a practical action research project. as busby and malone writing circles: developing learner self-efficacy and agency through peer review activities journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27 3 practising teachers and applied linguists working in adjunct support roles, our focus is very much on the intersection of theory and practice. we work broadly within an academic literacies perspective (lea and street, 1998) that foregrounds the specificity of disciplinary ways of knowing. equally important to the theory we draw on are the wider practitioner accounts that provide clues as to optimum delivery and we briefly outline some of the key elements of classroom practice that informed our thinking : the value of exemplar analysis; the importance of group instruction; and use of writing circles as a set of practices adapted for teaching. a writing circle is a creative writing practice where writers come together to share drafts, read each of other’s work and then the group moves to providing constructive and supportive feedback to each participant. groups generally work collaboratively at any stage of the writing process from prewriting to reviewing and collaborate through structured reading, commentary and group discussion. they have proved quite a flexible tool and have been applied developmentally with children (vopat, 2009), with doctoral students (caukill, 2017), trainee teachers (roberts, blanch and gurjar, 2017) and with academic staff (pasternak et al., 2009). as a teaching tool they offer a low-risk, authentic and co-operative form of peer review activity which encourages peer collaboration. successful writing circles used in teaching contexts should involve learner choice and decision making. for more detail on the mechanics of running a writing circle see malone et al., (2020). we will start by outlining the practical details of the intervention and its scope, then we will move to outlining the methodology used, with reference to the literature which informed it. results from this small project indicate that attention to mechanics of text, combined with opportunities for peer review and redrafting of current papers led to increased selfconfidence, self-efficacy and reduction in anxiety among this small cohort. we set out some of the practical implications of these findings, chiefly concerning the balance and timing of activities and the importance of working in different modalities across a group. background anxiety and academic writing a certain amount of challenge is seen as central to learning: hattie describes “challenge and feedback” as “two of the essential ingredients of learning” (2009, p.24). however, the student experience of academic writing at university appears to be one that provokes a busby and malone writing circles: developing learner self-efficacy and agency through peer review activities journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27 4 significant amount of anxiety and a concomitant lack of confidence and self-belief, with potential impacts on student wellbeing and performance. the distinction between task focused distress and positive challenge and attention is both very personal and the focus of ongoing research. however, it is clear that the learner’s emotional state and subsequent effect on their cognitive ability has been linked to the quality of the writing produced (uzun and topkaya, 2018). low self-confidence has also been shown to impact negatively on learners’ self-efficacy resulting in vulnerability, poor performance, and leading to procrastination or avoidance of writing tasks altogether (cheng, horwitz and schallert, 1999; cheng, 2004). looking specifically at international students for whom english is a second language (as these were our focus cohort), they are very likely to feel challenged and anxious when working with the complex content, ideas, lexis and language in academic writing (zhang, 2019) that they are expected to produce while studying in higher education in english speaking countries. such anxiety may lead to low self-confidence and a reduced sense of agency, resulting in lower quality writing and lower grades (cheng, horwitz and schallert, 1999; huerta, et al., 2017), thus perpetuating a sense of powerlessness and concern when tasked to write assignments. international students may have specific needs concerning academic writing in a higher education context. anxiety with academic writing can also result from various types of feedback, from both teachers and peers, which can affect motivation (tsao, tseng and wang, 2017). research of multilingual contexts has indicated that problems with language and unfamiliar classroom cultures and activities, such as group work and group discussion, can inhibit how learners convey ideas in the second language and contribute to activities. as a result, their potential or self-efficacy may be supressed as the learner senses a lack of recognition of their expertise and knowledge, which may become a source of anxiety, resulting in the inability to produce well-reasoned ideas (kim, 2011). however, anxiety focused on academic writing is not limited to any particular student group. the research cited here indicates a complex relationship between overall measures of confidence, self-efficacy, and student performance; this research also suggests, if the relationship is bi-directional, there is an opportunity to improve confidence through focusing on the mechanics of writing and developing these technical features of writing. busby and malone writing circles: developing learner self-efficacy and agency through peer review activities journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27 5 peer review it has been suggested that peer review writing activities can make a major contribution to improving learners’ sense of empowerment and self-regulation, thereby improving their confidence, self-efficacy and agency (lee, 2017). arguably, the most common means to develop learners’ understanding of writing style and genre is tutor feedback. however, there may be little sense of student agency in this feedback process as tutors control the format and language in which the feedback is delivered (lee, 2008). in contrast, review and feedback on writing from peers can be more compatible with learner language levels and learning needs (rahimi, 2013). through discussion of writing and the development of skills among peers, learners may become better able to review and assess their own writing and thereby become increasingly independent and self-regulated, (lundstrom and baker, 2009; lee, 2017). many authors and practitioners have thereby concluded that peer review activities should be encouraged as learners can benefit from differing approaches, styles, and levels of competence in writing, and may be well-equipped to provide the necessary support to develop each other’s writing output (min, 2005). lee (2017) outlines multiple benefits to the peer review of written work, including: raising awareness of the reader; developing a better understanding of content, organisation, appropriate language and genre; providing a social-interactive environment with scaffolding and support between peers; and the facilitation of second language acquisition. research has also shown that both reviewer and reviewee may benefit from the peer review relationship (lundstrom and baker, 2009; kim, 20011; nicol, thomson and breslin 2014). group learning collaborative learning theories indicate that “feedback from peers has the potential to contribute to learning, which is considered a socially and collectively constructed activity” (yu and lee, 2016, p. 463). the benefits of peer review, therefore, can include the negotiation of meaning, promoting collaborative learning, encouraging social support and scaffolding, and facilitating independence in the learner by reducing reliance on tutors (hu and lam, 2010). there are also benefits for the peer reviewer in developing the skills required to critically evaluate and comment on peers’ academic writing, and the ability to identify issues surrounding organisation, argument and logical gaps, could potentially busby and malone writing circles: developing learner self-efficacy and agency through peer review activities journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27 6 empower the learners as better writers and reviewers of their own writing (lundstrom and baker, 2009; mcconlogue, 2015; huisman, et al., 2018). it is possible to argue that it is only when learners provide effective feedback that peer review of writing becomes meaningful. studies have shown that learners who are not provided adequate support to make the peer review process a constructive, positive discussion are likely to find the experience unsatisfying (berg, 1999). this suggests the need for training learners in the required skills and expertise in order to deliver effective feedback to peers (rahimi, 2013). feedback that is vague and open to misinterpretation can have a negative impact on the peer review process. therefore, providing learners with the skills needed to provide effective feedback and giving them instruction in appropriate responses will not only enable them to generate more effective and specific feedback but also build their confidence when evaluating peers’ writing (min, 2005; 2006; rahimi, 2013; lee, 2017). intervention the study consisted of a writing intervention, the impact of which was measured via a pre and post-intervention questionnaire (see appendix 1) measuring levels of confidence with academic writing, sense of agency with academic writing, and attitudes towards collaborative peer review activities. the intervention was provided in the form of eight twohour academic writing classes embedded weekly in the students’ main subject, with the entire cohort of approximately 60 students split across three classes. while all students completed the questionnaire in the first class, only thirty-seven (61.5%) completed both preand post-intervention questionnaires. students were subsequently invited to participate in semi-structured interviews; seven students came forward to participate. the questionnaire and interviews were focused on student awareness and understanding of themselves as learners in line with participatory action research methods (freire, 1976; reason and bradbury, 2001). results from the interviews were transcribed and repeatedly analysed and discussed by the authors to identify common themes (clarke and braun, 2017) in light of our reading of the literature on anxiety and self-efficacy in classroom contexts. busby and malone writing circles: developing learner self-efficacy and agency through peer review activities journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27 7 while we acknowledge the challenges of tutor-led research and the influence of teacher researcher on student respondents (see talmy 2010 for critiques of the way qualitative interview data is used), our focus as action researchers involved in participative research meant we prioritise student self-perception and their accounts of their development. a series of writing circle activities were developed, aimed at maximising opportunities for peer review of on-going academic writing. while we wanted to draw on the benefits of an authentic peer-led task where responsibilities were shared with peers and use writing circles to increase student engagement, we also wanted to combine a writing circle with a tutor-led input. in this way we adapted vopat’s (2009) model, where each session followed a theme (for example, how to structure a paragraph) and input was provided via a tutor-led presentation focused on analysis of exemplars before moving on to collaborative peer review. a series of writing circle sessions were planned which focused on the topics listed in table 1 and followed a regular format as outlined in table 2. table 1. topics of writing circle sessions. week number academic skills input writing group activity intended learning outcomes by the end of this session students will be able to… 1. understanding the task and structure groups develop questions about texts/writing. writing task set here. identify macro features of academic style, with a focus on organisation of writing and referencing conventions. 2. reading and notetaking to writing joint construction. students complete writing task as homework. select appropriate reading materials. use notes to support an argument or discussion. busby and malone writing circles: developing learner self-efficacy and agency through peer review activities journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27 8 3. paragraphs structure and planning students analyse a text for paragraph moves and signposting. students review first drafts of writing task. write a simple plan 4. critical reading to critical writing understanding description, analysis, criticality + critical reflection students analyse a text for criticality and use of sources. students review drafts of writing task. identify critical analysis particularly authorial stance 5. coherence and cohesion: making writing flow students analyse a text for use of cohesive devices. students review and edit drafts of writing task. recognise how to use signalling and linking devices to make arguments and information flow in academic writing. 6. critical writing (paraphrasing + combining sources)/academic integrity students analyse a text for academic integrity and synthesis. students review notes from reading for assignments. integrate sources of evidence into texts build on using sources to develop voice and criticality. 7. ensuring criticality/voice/language – building an argument students analyse a text for criticality and development of an argument. peer review of plans/paragraphs identify critical analysis in academic writing construct simple argument in own text 8. five principles of academic writing: accuracy, appropriateness, clarity, informed, concise peer review of paragraphs/drafts provide constructive feedback to a peer based on discussion of assignment plans, notes and first drafts of paragraphs. busby and malone writing circles: developing learner self-efficacy and agency through peer review activities journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27 9 table 2. format of exemplar analysis and writing circle. 1. tutor input exemplar analysis 2. exemplar analysis learners (in small groups) were given a section of an article (linked to their degree topic) that had been altered to match the session’s theme (for example, the paragraph structure had been poorly arranged). 3. discussion & writing task provided with discussion prompts, learners worked collaboratively to identify the problems and then reconstruct an improved version of the text. 4. comparison key features of effective writing learners compared their improved text with the original and were encouraged to notice and discuss similarities and differences between the two. 5. read and review: 2 stars and a wish groups discussed and reviewed each other’s writing (which could be in any form, such as rough notes, or first draft paragraphs). this stage included a task, for example, ‘two stars and a wish’: two things that the peer reviewer liked and one thing that could be done differently, to give the learners clear parameters for discussion. 6. plenary discussion and recap the class ended with whole group discussion of some of the key points from the peer review. aims the aim of this combination of activities was to develop assessment and feedback literacy and support the transition from exemplar analysis to independent production of writing. the activities were designed to prioritise active student engagement and maximise collaborative student writing and peer discussion through the design of activities that a student would not be able to complete alone. the initial activity was to explore an aspect of disciplinary writing. the writing circle focused on peer review through which learners would articulate their understanding of academic writing. through this combination of busby and malone writing circles: developing learner self-efficacy and agency through peer review activities journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27 10 activities, we aimed to develop understanding of specific features of writing and ultimately ability with academic writing, reduce any anxiety, and develop a greater sense of selfefficacy and agency. participants the participants were all female, adult, chinese students, studying a one-year, full-time post-graduate (pg) degree in education at an hei in the uk. all participants were using english as a second language and had a diverse experience of academic writing prior to attending the course, from attending international schools in their country of origin, to completing foundation and undergraduate courses in the uk, with some completing a tenweek pre-sessional course at an hei in the months leading to the start of their pg course. methods this project was a practical action research project which involved a reflective process of progressive problem-solving integrating research, action, and analysis. the research problem at its simplest is that students experience learning to write within their discipline at university as anxiety provoking, and this anxiety is a barrier to learning. we were interested in exploring the extent to which feelings of confidence and self-efficacy can be influenced via instruction and practice of practical writing tasks applied to disciplinary texts. results comparison of preand post-intervention self-report data table 3 shows results for student attitudes to anxiety, agency and peer work in academic writing, comparing student perspectives preand post-intervention. the total number of respondents was 20 (all female). table 3. student attitudes to anxiety, agency and peer work in academic writing: a comparison of pre-and post-intervention data (n=30). busby and malone writing circles: developing learner self-efficacy and agency through peer review activities journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27 11 topic/ question agree strongly agree neither disagree disagree strongly anxiety/confidence in academic writing i am confident about writing my assignments. +3% +25% +16% -35% -10% i feel nervous when i think about writing my assignments. no change -19% +6% +6% +6% i feel anxious about academic writing. -13% -10% +10% +6% +6% i am worried about the quality of my academic writing. no change -10% +13% -3 no change i am concerned about writing academic assignments. -15% -6% + 19% no change no change agency in academic writing i can express my ideas clearly in academic writing. +3% +19% +10% -32% no change i am confident i can edit and improve my own work. +3% +6% -13% +3% no change i know what i need to do to improve my own writing. +6% +10% +3% -16% -3% i understand where my writing needs to develop. +6% +6% -13% no change no change i am aware of my own strengths and weaknesses in academic writing. no change +29% -16% -13% no change peer work and academic writing i am confident i can give feedback to my peers on their writing -6% +32% -13% -10% -3% i am happy to share my ideas with my peers no change i can learn from discussing writing with my peers +32% -6% -22% -3% no change i can see the benefits of sharing writing with my peers +3% +13% -6% -6% -3% busby and malone writing circles: developing learner self-efficacy and agency through peer review activities journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27 12 there was a reduction in a number of negative emotions connected to academic writing; lack of confidence, anxiety and concern. the biggest change is a development in self belief concerning ability to express themselves with clarity. the final section of questions indicate that this intervention had a positive influence on student understanding and valuing of discussion with peers, and a similar increase in confidence in their ability to give feedback. these self-report measures are broadly indicative of a reduction in negative feelings associated with academic writing, increase in agency and an increased appreciation of the value of peer work, and a more detailed examination of student interview data appears to corroborate these findings and student quotes are provided as illustrative examples. interview findings in the interviews, the student comments largely aligned with the overall findings of the questionnaire. one student mentioned the reduction in negative emotions related to academic writing when asked generally about the impact of the study: ‘i am not afraid of writing an academic essay any more. writing circles actually inspire me a lot when starting to write an essay’. others described how they ‘became more confident’ and were ‘not so afraid of the academic writing’. there was also mention of how this intervention led to ‘feeling more control with writing’. a number of students elaborated on this connection between technical knowledge of writing, skill improvement and feelings of confidence: ‘the text analysis activity is a good way for me to practice the knowledge i have learned’. i can learn from reading other students’ work/ writing. +10% -16% +10% no change -3% busby and malone writing circles: developing learner self-efficacy and agency through peer review activities journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27 13 ‘[the intervention] really help me to have a better understanding of how to write [and] practice which truly help me to become a better writer’. ‘writing circle helps to improve my writing in organizing my thought into written words’. the benefits of reading each other’s drafts was frequently mentioned positively: ‘peer reviews can be inspirational. as regular readers, peers give intuitive and effective feedback’, within the comments concerned with peer review, a number of students mentioned the positive affective aspect of peer review and how it improved class dynamics by establishing group trust: ‘i know that group quite well … people won’t plagiarise your work. so, you have a good relationship … people don't judge … it depends on the classmates you'll get as well, i think my classmates were quite nice’. the reciprocity of support was key for learners: ‘i can get some ideas from others so and others can also help me…you can just help each other to get to know each other's ideas and help each other’. students also mentioned the value of a peer reviewer’s perspective, their ability to comment on your writing and the ideas as a knowledgeable informant: ‘my writing also to looked by my classmates, and they gave me really good suggestions’. ‘i can learn from other people's ways of thinking not only their writing but their ways of thinking how they approach the assignment question maybe in from a different angle’. busby and malone writing circles: developing learner self-efficacy and agency through peer review activities journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27 14 ‘you're likely to learn something that you don't have in your writing for from your peer writing and your peer writing just keeps you an inspiration’. ‘they are classmates … and everyone has some, some common mistakes or something. and it's okay we just look at each other's and we share our opinions’. ‘i feel like in the kind of the peer feedback ... i can learn from what others have done’. for some students, peer review seemed to prompt deeper reflection on their own work: ‘it will help you reflect. did i do that, the same in my essay, it usually helps.’ while for others peer review marked a development in their editorial skills: ‘she didn't have a topic sentence in the first position of a paragraph so i just reminded her’. discussion findings for this intervention study were largely positive, although there are obvious limitations to the generalisability of the findings given the small size of the cohort and the fact that the interviewees were self-selecting. this small total number of respondents needs to be borne in mind in interpreting these results, in order not to overestimate the significance of the percentages shown. given the small sample size, the percentage figures are indicative of trends reflecting changes in this particular cohort. while wary of overgeneralising from these results the figures do reflect some interesting broad patterns in changes of thinking in this group of students. acknowledging the multiple limitations, if we examine these findings in light of research then overall, results indicate engagement in a series of writing circles appeared to alleviate some of the more negative feelings associated with academic writing and there are initial indications of some improvements in agency and self-efficacy. overall, the interview confirmed the benefits of experience of writing circles resulting in the reduction in negative emotions related to academic writing, initial tentative expression of a connection between busby and malone writing circles: developing learner self-efficacy and agency through peer review activities journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27 15 technical knowledge of writing, skill improvement and feelings of confidence, and numerous benefits to devoting class time to detailed peer review as a platform for writing work. anxiety the first group of questions focus on nerves, worries and anxieties around academic writing. these results indicate an overall reduction in negative emotions associated with academic writing. it is worth noting, our results indicate the relevance of the intervention and are consistent with previous literature showing an initial high anxiety baseline. academic writing at university is a task that provokes anxiety, worry and concern. comparing preand post-intervention self-report measures indicates a reduction in these negative emotions and a related increase in overall confidence associated with academic writing. agency and self-efficacy have been linked with learner self-regulation and motivation, goal setting and positive behaviours and greater academic success (zhang and ardasheva, 2019) and there is some indication of these for learners in the writing circles activities. the learners expressed more control and understanding of the academic writing process suggesting the motivational and decisional processes key to developing greater selfefficacy (bandura, 2002) and appear to be better able to exercise choice in the application of the writing techniques modelled through writing circles, which is an essential element in agentic learning (lindgren and mcdaniel, 2012). the peer review process appears to have been beneficial for learners in that they were engaged in sharing good advice on writing and, whether by receiving or providing this advice, were displaying their improved understanding of academic writing (ngar-fun and carless, 2006). as a result, learners were in the process of moving from being ‘other regulated’ to becoming ‘self-regulated’ and better able to face the challenges of academic writing independently (lee, 2017). the findings show that there was a good sense of collaboration, trust and reciprocity, which are essential qualities of peer review activities (ludemann and mcmakin, 2014; mcconlogue, 2015) as without this, learners are likely to reject the advice from peers (ngar-fun and carless, 2006). there were clearly benefits to both the reviewer and the reviewee in the writing circle activities which would inform the reviewees’ understanding of problems in their writing and help the reviewers learn through busby and malone writing circles: developing learner self-efficacy and agency through peer review activities journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27 16 the feedback they provide, therefore giving both parties a sense of control over their writing (nicol, thomson, and breslin, 2014; huisman et al., 2018). that is not to say that all participants found the peer review activities an easy process as anxiety was expressed when the reviewer felt their writing was weaker than that of their peers. it is essential, therefore, that any programme of peer review begins with training the learners to become effective reviewers, focuses on the skills required to analyse texts in detail and develops awareness of how to learn from good models of writing. this will improve any trust issues, build confidence, allow learners opportunities to articulate understanding of good writing and provide greater motivation for the review process through exposure to a range of texts (kim, 2011, ludemann and mcmakin, 2014; mcconlogue, 2015). there is some evidence from the findings that a degree of anxiety remains for these learners, especially regarding time-management and use of english, both of which can be said to impact on the learners’ critical reading and synthesis of sources. it is possible to argue that a more flexible timetable for assignments could help these learners in the future, and it can be surmised that the learners’ confidence in discussing academic writing and future goals indicates a reduction in anxiety overall. conclusion this study was undertaken to find a practical means to address student anxiety focused on learning to write within a discipline. while we experienced some success that students attributed to this intervention, this small study demands we re-consider how best to address academic anxiety and consider the need to address this pedagogically rather than therapeutically. we would propose that this use of writing circles is a successful model of interdisciplinary practice that provides a frame for independent student development. as a set of classroom practices writing circles prioritise active student engagement and high challenge. this study has shown how peer review activities used in writing circles can enable opportunities for learners to achieve agency with their academic writing through analysis of model texts and collaborative tasks. the findings suggest that the writing circles structure, moving from tutor input, to peer discussion of a text, to peer review and opportunities for collaboration and sharing good practice, promote independent student development. writing circles offer a rich constellation of learning activities, an intense combination that supported a number of students move from anxiety to engagement. a busby and malone writing circles: developing learner self-efficacy and agency through peer review activities journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27 17 methodological implication of this study is that to fully appreciate and understand the benefit offered by such activity cycles requires more research fully grounded in the classroom (or wherever we encounter our students) that acknowledges and recognises the messy complexity of teaching and learning. the balance of activities and timing appears to be crucial. whereas more typical approaches to peer review activities involve learners discussing finished work, writing circles focus on ongoing writing and this allowed for closer analysis of specific features of disciplinary academic writing on a lesson-by-lesson basis. in practical terms, working on live texts (prior to submission) may allow for a more granular level of analysis and may make it easier to identify aspects needed for development. this finding, that the timing of the pedagogical input is crucial in determining the efficacy of the peer review process, also aligns with recent meta analyses of use of exemplars (to, panadero and carless, 2021). as we emerge from the pandemic, we would suggest that as a community there will be more focus than ever on identifying cycles of activities such as this that offer students opportunities to develop increased agency and confidence, and we would like to suggest writing circles for your consideration. acknowledgement this project was submitted for doctoral study at the university of bath and was also the product of a collaboration across the university of bath and sheffield hallam university, supported by an aldinhe grant 2020-21. references atay, d. and kurt, g. (2006) ‘prospective teachers and l2 writing anxiety’, asian efl journal, 8(4), pp. 100-118. available at: https://www.asian-efl-journal.com/maineditions-new/prospective-teachers-and-l2-writing-anxiety/index.htm (accessed: 9 april 2023). https://www.asian-efl-journal.com/main-editions-new/prospective-teachers-and-l2-writing-anxiety/index.htm https://www.asian-efl-journal.com/main-editions-new/prospective-teachers-and-l2-writing-anxiety/index.htm busby and malone writing circles: developing learner self-efficacy and agency through peer review activities journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27 18 bandura, a. (2002) social cognitive theory in cultural context. applied psychology, 51(2), pp. 269-90. https://doi.org/10.1111/1464-0597.00092 bandura, a. (2006) ‘toward a psychology of human agency’, perspectives on psychological science, 1(2), pp. 164-80. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.17456916.2006.00011.x berg, e.c. (1999) ‘the effects of trained peer response on esl students' revision types and writing quality’, journal of second language writing, 8(3), pp. 215-241, https://doi.org/10.1016/s1060-3743(99)80115-5. caukill, e. (2017) ‘learning to lead: how academic writing circles prepare doctoral students to extend their peers’ academic writing skills’, european association for the teaching of academic writing conference 2017. royal holloway, university of london, london 19-21 june. cheng, y. s. (2004) a measure of second language writing anxiety: scale development and preliminary validation. journal of second language writing, 13(4), pp. 313– 335. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jslw.2004.07.001 cheng, y., horwitz, e.k. and schallert, d.l. (1999) ‘language anxiety: differentiating writing and speaking components’, language learning 49.3: 417-46. https://doi.org/10.1111/0023-8333.00095 clarke, v. and braun, v. (2017) ‘thematic analysis’, the journal of positive psychology, 12(3), https://doi.org/10.1080/17439760.2016.1262613 freire, p. (1972) pedagogy of the oppressed, harmondsworth, england: penguin. genc, e. and yayli, d. (2019) ‘the second language writing anxiety: the perceived sources and consequences’, pamukkale university journal of education, 45, pp. 235-51. available at: https://dergipark.org.tr/en/pub/pauefd/issue/41649/447405 (accessed: 9 april 2023). https://doi.org/10.1111/1464-0597.00092 https://doi.org/10.1111%2fj.1745-6916.2006.00011.x https://doi.org/10.1111%2fj.1745-6916.2006.00011.x https://doi.org/10.1016/s1060-3743(99)80115-5 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jslw.2004.07.001 https://doi.org/10.1111/0023-8333.00095 https://doi.org/10.1080/17439760.2016.1262613 https://dergipark.org.tr/en/pub/pauefd/issue/41649/447405 busby and malone writing circles: developing learner self-efficacy and agency through peer review activities journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27 19 gibbs g. (2014) ‘fear and anxiety are the enemies of learning’, 53 powerful ideas all teachers should know about, seda. available at: https://www.seda.ac.uk/resources/files/publications_174_25%20fear%20and%20a nxiety%20are%20the%20enemies%20of%20learning.pdf (accessed: 9 april 2023). hattie, j. (2009). visible learning: a synthesis of over 800 meta-analyses related to achievement, london: routledge. huang, y. (2014) ‘self and language anxiety’, english language and literature studies; 4(2) pp.66-77, https://doi.org/10.5539/ells.v4n2p66 hu, g. and lam, s. (2010) issues of cultural appropriateness and pedagogical efficacy: exploring peer review in a second language writing class, instructional science, 38(4), pp. 371-94. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11251-008-9086-1 huerta, m., goodson, p., beigi, m., and chlup, d. (2017) ‘graduate students as academic writers: writing anxiety, self-efficacy and emotional intelligence’, higher education research & development, 36(4), pp. 716-29. https://doi.org/10.1080/07294360.2016.1238881 huisman, b., saab, n., van driel, j., and van den broek, p. (2018) ‘peer feedback on academic writing: undergraduate students' peer feedback role, peer feedback perceptions and essay performance’, assessment & evaluation in higher education 43(6), pp. 955-68. https://doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2018.1424318 jahin, j.h. (2012) ‘the effect of peer reviewing on writing apprehension and essay writing ability of prospective efl teachers’, australian journal of teacher education, 37(11), pp. 26. https://doi.org/10.14221/ajte.2012v37n11.3 kim, h. (2011) ‘international graduate students' difficulties: graduate classes as a community of practices’, teaching in higher education, 16(3) pp.281-292. https://doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2010.524922 https://www.seda.ac.uk/resources/files/publications_174_25%20fear%20and%20anxiety%20are%20the%20enemies%20of%20learning.pdf https://www.seda.ac.uk/resources/files/publications_174_25%20fear%20and%20anxiety%20are%20the%20enemies%20of%20learning.pdf https://doi.org/10.5539/ells.v4n2p66 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11251-008-9086-1 https://doi.org/10.1080/07294360.2016.1238881 https://doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2018.1424318 https://doi.org/10.14221/ajte.2012v37n11.3 https://doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2010.524922 busby and malone writing circles: developing learner self-efficacy and agency through peer review activities journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27 20 lea, m. and street, b. (1998) ‘student writing in higher education: an academic literacies approach’, studies in higher education, 23(2), pp. 157-172. https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079812331380364 lee, i. (2008) ‘student reactions to teacher feedback in two hong kong secondary classrooms’, journal of second language writing, 17(3) pp.144-164. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jslw.2007.12.001 lee, i. (2017) classroom writing assessment and feedback in l2 school contexts, singapore: springer. lindgren, r. and mcdaniel, r. (2012) ‘transforming online learning through narrative and student agency’, journal of educational technology & society, 15(4), pp. 344-55. https://www.jstor.org/stable/jeductechsoci.15.4.344 ludemann, p. and mcmakin, d. (2014) ‘perceived helpfulness of peer editing activities: first-year students' views and writing performance outcomes’, psychology learning & teaching, 13(2), pp. 129-36. https://doi.org/10.2304/plat.2014.13.2.129 lundstrom, k. and baker, w. (2009) ‘to give is better than to receive: the benefits of peer review to the reviewer's own writing’, journal of second language writing, 18(1), pp. 30-43. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jslw.2008.06.002 malone c., webster, j., coleman, c., freeman e., jamison-powell, s., & busby d. (2020) ‘appendix 3a: talking about writing (writing circles)’in palmour, l. and doubleday, j. (eds.) facilitating oral skills development: a guide for practitioners in higher education, british council, pp.20-22. available at: https://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/sites/teacheng/files/l018_eltra_final.pdf (accessed: 9 april 2023) martinez, c., kock, n. and cass, j. (2011) ‘pain and pleasure in short essay writing: factors predicting university students' writing anxiety and writing self-efficacy’, journal of adolescent & adult literacy, 54(5), pp. 351-360. https://doi.org/10.1598/jaal.54.5.5 https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079812331380364 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jslw.2007.12.001 https://www.jstor.org/stable/jeductechsoci.15.4.344 https://doi.org/10.2304%2fplat.2014.13.2.129 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jslw.2008.06.002 https://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/sites/teacheng/files/l018_eltra_final.pdf https://doi.org/10.1598/jaal.54.5.5 https://doi.org/10.1598/jaal.54.5.5 busby and malone writing circles: developing learner self-efficacy and agency through peer review activities journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27 21 mcconlogue, t. (2015) ‘making judgements: investigating the process of composing and receiving peer feedback’, studies in higher education, 40(9), pp. 1495-506. https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2013.868878 min, h. t. (2005) ‘training students to become successful peer reviewers’, system, 33, pp. 293–308. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.system.2004.11.003 min, h. t. (2006) ‘the effects of trained peer review on efl students’ revision types and writing quality’, journal of second language writing, 15, pp. 118–141. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jslw.2006.01.003 ngar-fun, l. and carless, d. (2006) ‘peer feedback: the learning element of peer assessment’, teaching in higher education, 11(3), pp. 279-90. https://doi.org/10.1080/13562510600680582 nicol, d., thomson, a. and breslin, c. (2014) ‘rethinking feedback practices in higher education: a peer review perspective’, assessment & evaluation in higher education, 39(1), pp.102-122, https://doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2013.795518 pasternak d., longwell grice, h., shea k. & hanson l. (2009) ‘alien environments or supportive writing communities?: pursuing writing groups in academe’, arts and humanities in he, 8(3), pp. 355-367. https://doi.org/10.1177/1474022209339958 rahimi, m. (2013) ‘is training student reviewers worth its while? a study of how training influences the quality of students’ feedback and writing’, language teaching research, 17(1), pp. 67-89. https://doi.org/10.1177/1362168812459151 reason, p. and bradbury, h. (eds.) (2001) handbook of action research: participative inquiry and practice. london: sage. roberts, s. k., blanch, n., & gurjar, n. (2017) ‘exploring writing circles as innovative, collaborative writing structures with teacher candidates’, reading horizons: a journal of literacy and language arts, 56 (2). available at: https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/reading_horizons/vol56/iss2/2 (accessed: 9 april 2023). https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2013.868878 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.system.2004.11.003 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jslw.2006.01.003 https://doi.org/10.1080/13562510600680582 https://doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2013.795518 https://doi.org/10.1177/1474022209339958 https://doi.org/10.1177%2f1362168812459151 https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/reading_horizons/vol56/iss2/2 busby and malone writing circles: developing learner self-efficacy and agency through peer review activities journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27 22 to j., panadero e., and carless, d. (2021) ‘a systematic review of the educational uses and effects of exemplars’, assessment & evaluation in higher education, 47(8), https://doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2021.2011134 talmy, s. (2010) ‘qualitative interviews in applied linguistics: from research instrument to social practice’, annual review of applied linguistics, 30, pp.128148. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0267190510000085 tsao, j.-j., tseng, w.t., & wang, c. (2017) ‘the effects of writing anxiety and motivation on efl college students’ self-evaluative judgments of corrective feedback, psychological reports, 120(2), pp.219–241. https://doi.org/10.1177/0033294116687123 uzun, k. and topkaya, e. z. (2018) ‘the effect of genre-based instruction on foreign language writing anxiety among pre-service english teachers’, journal of language and linguistic studies, 14(4), pp. 243-258. available at: http://www.jlls.org/index.php/jlls/article/view/1062 (accessed: 9 april 2023). vopat, j., (2009) writing circles: kids revolutionize workshop, portsmouth, nh: heinemann. yu, s. and lee, i. (2016) ‘peer feedback in second language writing (2005–2014)’, language teaching, 49(4), pp.461-493. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0261444816000161 zhang, x. (2019) ‘exploring the relationship between college students’ writing anxiety and the pedagogical use of online resources’, international journal of educational technology in higher education, 16(1), pp. 1-18. https://doi.org/10.1186/s41239019-0149-y zhang, x. and ardasheva, y. (2019) ‘sources of college efl learners’ self-efficacy in the english public speaking domain’, english for specific purposes, 53, pp.47-59, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.esp.2018.09.004 https://doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2021.2011134 https://doi.org/10.1017/s0267190510000085 https://doi.org/10.1177%2f0033294116687123 http://www.jlls.org/index.php/jlls/article/view/1062 https://doi.org/10.1017/s0261444816000161 https://doi.org/10.1017/s0261444816000161 https://doi.org/10.1186/s41239-019-0149-y https://doi.org/10.1186/s41239-019-0149-y https://doi.org/10.1016/j.esp.2018.09.004 busby and malone writing circles: developing learner self-efficacy and agency through peer review activities journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27 23 author details david busby is head of digital and academic skills, at the university of bath. interests include teaching academic study skills/eap, developing writing skills for he, second language teacher education and learner agency and self-efficacy. cathy malone is an academic development consultant at leeds university. with a background in tesol, cathy has published on academic literacy development in he and associated embedded learning development initiatives. cathy has particular interest in working collaboratively with students and the uses of feedback to drive learning. licence ©2023 the author(s). this is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (cc-by 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. see http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. journal of learning development in higher education (jldhe) is a peer-reviewed open access journal published by the association for learning development in higher education (aldinhe). http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ writing circles: developing learner self-efficacy and agency through peer review activities abstract introduction background anxiety and academic writing peer review group learning intervention aims participants methods results comparison of preand post-intervention self-report data interview findings discussion anxiety conclusion acknowledgement references author details licence journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 26: special edi issue february 2023 ________________________________________________________________________ ©2023 the author(s) (cc-by 4.0) supporting accessible learning resource design with designing for diverse learners lee fallin university of hull, uk ellie davison university of lincoln, uk gemma spencer university of central lancashire, uk thomas tomlinson university of hull, uk abstract this brief communication introduces the regulatory and ethical requirements of accessible learning design, and the designing for diverse learners project. this communication is a call to action, asking for educators to share, support and help develop the designing for diverse learners guidance. keywords: accessibility; disability; inclusion; diversity; learning design; digital. the context for inclusion accessible learning design has never been more important. one in five people in the uk are disabled (department for work and pensions, 2022) and the number of students in higher education with a known disability is rapidly increasing, with 15% of full-time undergraduate entrants and 18% of part-time entrants now reporting a disability (office for students, 2022a). the most commonly reported disabilities among students are ‘specific learning difficulties’ (higher education statistics agency, 2022), including conditions such as dyslexia, visual and auditory processing disorders and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (adhd). many of the barriers to inclusion are external to the individual and can reside in resources (campbell, 2009). fallin, davison, spencer and tomlinson supporting accessible learning resource design with designing for diverse learners journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 2 across the sector, course completion rates are lower for disabled students than nondisabled students, with disabled students also less likely to be awarded a firstor upper second-class degree (office for students, 2022b). meeting this need is therefore an ethical and moral requirement, just as much as it is a legal one. the legal context is, nevertheless, important. the 2010 equality act states that a higher education institution (hei) must not discriminate against students in ‘the way it provides an education’ (equality act 2010, s.91) and that where information is provided it must be in an ‘accessible format’ (equality act 2010, s.20). furthermore, a new 2018 statutory instrument requires online resources provided by heis, including teaching materials uploaded to vles, to conform to the international web content accessibility guidelines (wcag 2.1) for production of content that is accessible to everyone, including those with vision, hearing, mobility and thinking and understanding difficulties (w3c, 2018; hm government, 2022). while this sets a high standard for content, it can be challenging for educators to meet these requirements. with the ever-growing utilisation of online spaces for teaching and learning, and the increasing student appetite for flexible provision, there is further need for accessible learning materials that promote equal opportunities for all. the covid-19 pandemic further highlighted issues of access and quality (jisc, 2021) especially with the propagation of poor-quality teaching materials, such as voiceover presentations and flat pdfs or those without tagging, that lacked adequate consideration of additional educational needs for an increasing number of learners. disabled students uk (2022) did note that the increase in the provision of lecture recordings was a significant benefit, however, less than a quarter of students consulted felt they had received the disability support they required, such as lecture slides that are accessible through screen readers. furthermore, the disabled students commission and borkin (2022) noted that adjustments such as the provision of captions was inconsistent and have recommended the introduction of sector-wide standards for accessibility. many of these issues are well represented in the special compendium of jldinhe (syska, 2021). as shown in this section, there are many pressures that require accessible learning design. for these reasons, the designing for diverse learners guidance was produced, developed and maintained. fallin, davison, spencer and tomlinson supporting accessible learning resource design with designing for diverse learners journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 3 origins and development: designing for diverse learners when a team led by pun (2016) at the home office launched a series of six posters to help meet the accessibility needs of users, there was significant potential for their use in education. while this work identified guidelines for accessibility, it was separated into six specific conditions: autistic spectrum; deaf and hard of hearing; dyslexia; low vision; screen-reader users; and physical or motor difficulties. this was later expanded to include a seventh poster for supporting anxiety (uk home office, 2019). whilst going a long way to support the development of accessible content, we argue that this multitude of posters were only helpful when focusing on the needs of one specific person and did not help when aiming to design inclusively to meet the needs of (almost) any user. it would, therefore, be overwhelming for educators to strive for inclusive design while crossreferencing multiple sets of guidance. for this reason, fallin and watling (2018) set out to create designing for diverse learners, an amalgam of the six home office posters specifically for educators. since this first version, the designing for diverse learners poster has now gone through several iterations, each improving the quality of the guidance and its accessibility. the third version of the poster was launched on the national teaching repository (fallin and watling, 2021) where it has become one of the most downloaded and internationally shared resources. thanks to the creative commons license, other institutions such as ucl (2019), newcastle university (2019), and edinburgh napier (2021) have now adapted these guidelines as part of their own education practice, and aberystwyth (2020) have provided the welsh translation. for the association of learning development in higher education annual conference 2022, the fourth version of this guidance was launched by an expanded design team (fallin and tomlinson, 2022a). this version moved the guidance to a native web format to further accessibility, while retaining a print version for usability. the new website includes new pages to justify each statement of the guidance and additional alternative formats such as powerpoint (see: www.designingfordiverselearners.info). designing for diverse learners remains true to the original guidance format, but removes duplication and focuses on principles of universal design for maximum inclusion (see figure 1). https://designingfordiverselearners.info/ fallin, davison, spencer and tomlinson supporting accessible learning resource design with designing for diverse learners journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 4 figure 1. the original home office guidance compared with the latest designing for diverse learners poster v4 (pun, 2016; tomlinson, fallin and watling, 2022). designing for diverse learners: next steps the designing for diverse learners project is now supported by a conglomerate of academics and professional service staff from uk higher education institutions. we all have a passion for accessible teaching materials, student support, and widening participation. our group strives to develop easy to read and accessible best practice guidelines that would benefit not only those students with additional learning needs, but all learners. our work aims to be evidence-based, founded on pun’s original work (2016), influenced by w3c’s 2018 wcag guidance and tested with the community (fallin, 2018; fallin and tomlinson, 2022b). this work is constantly evolving as accessibility and inclusion requirements develop. our next steps are outlined below, and we’re actively looking for people to get involved to take this forward: • promote the use of the designing for diverse learners guidance in educational settings. • develop a student version of this guidance to promote good practice in assessment and peer-peer communication. • facilitate research into the use of the guidance and real-world impact. • develop further adaptations and translations of the core guidance. fallin, davison, spencer and tomlinson supporting accessible learning resource design with designing for diverse learners journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 5 if you are interested in getting involved, please contact the lead author of this article. references aberystwyth university (2020) dylunio ar gyfer dysgwyr amrywiol. available at: https://indd.adobe.com/view/106c07fc-838e-4009-b839-6b29e5c7a9b8 (accessed: 17 august 2022). campbell, f. (2009) contours of ableism: the production of disability and abledness. basingstoke: palgrave. department for work and pensions (2022) national statistics. family resources survey: financial year 2020 to 2021. available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/family-resources-survey-financial-year2020-to-2021/family-resources-survey-financial-year-2020-to-2021 (accessed: 10 august 2022). disabled students commission and borkin, h. (2022) exploring the impact of covid-19 on disabled students’ experiences: in-depth qualitative report. available at: https://www.advance-he.ac.uk/knowledge-hub/exploring-impact-covid-19-disabledstudents-experiences-depth-qualitative-report (accessed: 7 november 2022). disabled students uk (2022) going back is not a choice. available at: https://disabledstudents.co.uk/not-a-choice/ (accessed: 7 november 2022). edinburgh napier (2021) designing for diverse learners. available at: https://staff.napier.ac.uk/services/dlte/resources/documents/designing%20for%20di verse%20learners_enu.pdf (accessed: 17 august 2022). equality act 2010 (c.15) available at: https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2010/15 (accessed: 10 august 2022). https://indd.adobe.com/view/106c07fc-838e-4009-b839-6b29e5c7a9b8 https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/family-resources-survey-financial-year-2020-to-2021/family-resources-survey-financial-year-2020-to-2021 https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/family-resources-survey-financial-year-2020-to-2021/family-resources-survey-financial-year-2020-to-2021 https://www.advance-he.ac.uk/knowledge-hub/exploring-impact-covid-19-disabled-students-experiences-depth-qualitative-report https://www.advance-he.ac.uk/knowledge-hub/exploring-impact-covid-19-disabled-students-experiences-depth-qualitative-report https://disabledstudents.co.uk/not-a-choice/ https://staff.napier.ac.uk/services/dlte/resources/documents/designing%20for%20diverse%20learners_enu.pdf https://staff.napier.ac.uk/services/dlte/resources/documents/designing%20for%20diverse%20learners_enu.pdf https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2010/15 fallin, davison, spencer and tomlinson supporting accessible learning resource design with designing for diverse learners journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 6 fallin, l. (2018) ‘edit-a-thon: support diverse learners’, association of learning technology winter conference. online 11-12 december. fallin, l. and tomlinson, t. (2022a) ‘designing for diverse learners’, association for learning development in higher education annual conference. northampton university, online and northampton 9-15 june. fallin, l. and tomlinson, t. (2022b) ‘designing for diverse learners’, journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 25, october, pp.1-7. https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.vi25.973. fallin, l. and watling, s. (2018) designing for diverse learners, 5 july [blog]. available at: https://leefallin.co.uk/2018/07/designing-for-diverse-learners/ (accessed: 14 august 2022). fallin, l. and watling, s. (2021) ‘designing for diverse learners poster [3.2.2]’, national teaching repository. available at: https://doi.org/10.25416/ntr.16840531.v1 (accessed: 14 august 2022). h m government (2022) understanding wcag 2.1. available at: https://www.gov.uk/service-manual/helping-people-to-use-yourservice/understanding-wcag (accessed: 10 august 2022). higher education statistics agency (2022) uk domiciled student enrolments by disability and sex 2014/15 to 2020/21. available at: https://www.hesa.ac.uk/data-andanalysis/students/table-15 (accessed: 10 august 2022). jisc (2021) learner digital experience insights survey 2020/21. available at: https://repository.jisc.ac.uk/8488/1/student%20dei%20fe%20report%202021%20fi nal.pdf (accessed: 17 august 2022). newcastle university (2019) designing for diverse learners. available at: https://blogs.ncl.ac.uk/ltdev/files/2019/07/designing-for-diverse-learners-ncl.pdf (accessed: 17 august 2022). https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.vi25.973 https://leefallin.co.uk/2018/07/designing-for-diverse-learners/ https://doi.org/10.25416/ntr.16840531.v1 https://www.gov.uk/service-manual/helping-people-to-use-your-service/understanding-wcag https://www.gov.uk/service-manual/helping-people-to-use-your-service/understanding-wcag https://www.hesa.ac.uk/data-and-analysis/students/table-15 https://www.hesa.ac.uk/data-and-analysis/students/table-15 https://repository.jisc.ac.uk/8488/1/student%20dei%20fe%20report%202021%20final.pdf https://repository.jisc.ac.uk/8488/1/student%20dei%20fe%20report%202021%20final.pdf https://blogs.ncl.ac.uk/ltdev/files/2019/07/designing-for-diverse-learners-ncl.pdf fallin, davison, spencer and tomlinson supporting accessible learning resource design with designing for diverse learners journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 7 office for students (2022a) equality, diversity and student characteristic data. available at: https://www.officeforstudents.org.uk/media/79a7bb57-83cf-4c50-a3586bcfe80f165c/ofs2022_29.pdf (accessed: 10 august 2022). office for students (2022b) access and participation data dashboard. available at: https://www.officeforstudents.org.uk/data-and-analysis/access-and-participationdata-dashboard/ (accessed: 10 august 2022). pun, k. (2016) ‘dos and don’ts on designing for accessibility’, accessibility in government, 2 september [blog]. available at: https://accessibility.blog.gov.uk/2016/09/02/dosand-donts-on-designing-for-accessibility/ (accessed: 14 august 2022). syska, a. (2021) ‘compendium of innovative practice: learning development in a time of disruption: editorial’, journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 22, october, pp.1-5. https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.vi22.850. tomlinson, t., fallin, l. and watling, s. (2022) ‘designing for diverse learners poster [4.0]’, national teaching repository. available at: https://doi.org/10.25416/ntr.16840531.v1 (accessed: 17 august 2022). uk home office (2019) accessibility poster set. available at: https://github.com/ukhomeoffice/posters/blob/master/accessibility/dosdonts/posters_en-uk/accessibility-posters-set.pdf (accessed 17 august 2022). university college london (2019) digital accessibility guidance. available at: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/isd/files/accessibility-guidance-posterdocx (accessed: 17 august 2022). w3c (2018) web content accessibility guidelines (wcag) 2.1. available at: https://www.w3.org/tr/wcag21/ (accessed: 10 august 2022). https://www.officeforstudents.org.uk/media/79a7bb57-83cf-4c50-a358-6bcfe80f165c/ofs2022_29.pdf https://www.officeforstudents.org.uk/media/79a7bb57-83cf-4c50-a358-6bcfe80f165c/ofs2022_29.pdf https://www.officeforstudents.org.uk/data-and-analysis/access-and-participation-data-dashboard/ https://www.officeforstudents.org.uk/data-and-analysis/access-and-participation-data-dashboard/ https://accessibility.blog.gov.uk/2016/09/02/dos-and-donts-on-designing-for-accessibility/ https://accessibility.blog.gov.uk/2016/09/02/dos-and-donts-on-designing-for-accessibility/ https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.vi22.850 https://doi.org/10.25416/ntr.16840531.v1 https://github.com/ukhomeoffice/posters/blob/master/accessibility/dos-donts/posters_en-uk/accessibility-posters-set.pdf https://github.com/ukhomeoffice/posters/blob/master/accessibility/dos-donts/posters_en-uk/accessibility-posters-set.pdf https://www.ucl.ac.uk/isd/files/accessibility-guidance-posterdocx https://www.w3.org/tr/wcag21/ fallin, davison, spencer and tomlinson supporting accessible learning resource design with designing for diverse learners journal of learning development in higher education, special issue 26: february 2023 8 author details lee fallin is a lecturer in education studies at the university of hull. his research focuses on the intersections between education and geography, inclusive of physical and digital spaces. his current research interests include learning spaces and communities, inclusive digital practice, research methodologies and geographies of place. ellie davison is the director of teaching and learning for the university of lincoln foundation studies centre and director of digital engagement for the college of science. gemma spencer is a lecturer in adult nursing at the university of central lancashire with research interests in evidence-based practice, neurodiversity and facilitating creative and playful learning. tom tomlinson works as a teaching enhancement officer at the university of hull. tom supports staff to make the best use of technology for teaching and learning. he delivers digital literacy and curriculum enhancement workshops via online, face-to-face and blended modes. tom has a background in design and explores the practical application of technology to enhance learning. licence ©2023 the author(s). this is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (cc-by 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. see http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. journal of learning development in higher education (jldhe) is a peer-reviewed open access journal published by the association for learning development in higher education (aldinhe). journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 27: april 2023 ©2023 the author(s) (cc-by 4.0) the highs and lows of written feedback: student evaluation of writing centre written responses eva shackel bath spa university, uk abstract in-person, one-to-one verbal feedback has long been prioritised in learning development. however, there are instances where written feedback proves to be a more convenient option. this study investigated the reasons why students request, and how they perceive, the written feedback they receive from a writing centre at a university in the uk. to gather insights, 249 students who had received written feedback during the academic year 202021 were invited to complete a questionnaire. 54 students responded, representing a response rate of 21.6%. in addition, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 11 students. it was found that most students requested written feedback due to convenience, although some, particularly those with dyslexia, preferred written feedback over in-person feedback as it allows them to reflect on, and process, the information in their own time. the detailed nature of the written feedback increases the students’ perception that the university cares about them, which makes them feel valued and important. although the findings relate to written feedback, they are relevant for in-person feedback by emphasising how important it is to allow students with dyslexia the time they need to write, listen and speak, during writing centre appointments. key words: feedback; written feedback; dyslexia; learning development. introduction understanding how students use our feedback is fundamental to learning developers. the focus of this understanding has long been that of in-person, spoken interaction, but some writing centres also offer written feedback. this study reports on research into written feedback at a university in the south west of england where a high proportion of students shackel the highs and lows of written feedback: student evaluation of writing centre written responses journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 2 are studying creative subjects. in addition to one-to-one support through 45-minute appointments, students who are on placement can also send in a draft of their essay for written feedback. these are often students on teaching placement, and they can find it difficult to attend an appointment during the working day. during the pandemic, when the university transitioned to online delivery, the offer of e-mail feedback was extended to all students, not just those on placement. writing this feedback for students is a lengthy process. responses are provided in a letter format, encompassing 500-600 words of prose, with a focus on the three main things a student could do to improve their work. a typical e-mail of written feedback begins by addressing the students personally and indicating what the adviser particularly enjoyed about the essay. it then points out what the student has done well and what they could improve. it is structured as a letter, with paragraphs, in contrast to comments on the students' document, which is an approach that is often adopted in writing centres, and frequently found in lecturer feedback. this process takes longer than a face-to-face appointment, as word choice is more important when separated from tone of voice and body language. unlike face-to-face appointments, students' reactions in the moment cannot be judged. it can feel that, even with the level of care the advisors take during the writing process, there is the chance that this well-intentioned feedback may be perceived as unhelpful, demotivating or overwhelming. the learning developers in the team go beyond surface level problems such as referencing and formatting to provide feed-forward on the broader development of ideas and critical thinking. however, the team sometimes fear that students are hoping for a proofreading service, and might only pay attention to those aspects that are quickest and easiest to implement. this study was carried out in order to establish whether these fears are unfounded, and how we can improve the support offered to students. research in learning development has tended to sideline written feedback, focussing instead on the ways we talk to students about their work (babcock and thonus, 2018). this study addresses this by investigating why students request written feedback, and how they feel about the written feedback they receive. their responses centred around their motivation for seeking feedback, their response to the feedback, and finally, the broader context of where writing centre feedback sits alongside feedback from other sources. shackel the highs and lows of written feedback: student evaluation of writing centre written responses journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 3 literature review definitions feedback can be defined as information provided by one person to another about their performance regarding a task (hattie and timperley, 2007). burke and pietrick (2010) offer an overview of the literature on feedback, beginning at the start of the 20th century with thorndyje’s law of effect, moving through behaviourist theories that centred on the actions of the tutor, to more student focussed constructivist models. more recent research into feedback looks at the benefits of dialogic feedback, where the student’s response modifies the interaction (blair and mcginty, 2013). despite this, nicol (2010) points out that the oneway communication in written feedback makes up the vast majority of tutor/student interaction, and more needs to be done to encourage the kind of dialogue that enables students to understand and engage with the feedback they receive. the dialogic element is present in writing centre appointments, which reflects best practice as outlined by the qaa (2018); however, dialogue is reduced or absent from our written feedback. benefits of feedback feedback has many uses: to clarify expectations; provide learning opportunities; give praise; and show care in students’ wellbeing and progress (nicol and macfarlane-dick, 2006; rowe 2017). where it is future-focused and solution based, it is often termed ‘feedforward’ (duncan, 2007). students want to use feedback to rectify their mistakes and close the gap between the required performance for the task and their current level (ibarra-sáiz, rodríguez-gómez and boud, 2020). feedback is clearly an effective tool for this, as students who engage with feedback achieve higher grades than those who do not (sinclair and cleland, 2007; hao and tsikerdekis, 2019). given how helpful feedback can be, it is perhaps surprising that students often ignore or dismiss it (handley, price and millar, 2011). similarly, sinclair and cleland (2007) found that less than half of students do not read the commentary lecturers provide alongside their grades. the vast majority of studies on how students use written feedback are based on feedback by lecturers, rather than learning developers. one of the differences between the two is that the latter is actively sought, whereas lecturer feedback is frequently offered alongside summative assessment. shackel the highs and lows of written feedback: student evaluation of writing centre written responses journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 4 it is difficult to establish a causal link between writing centre feedback and student grades as there are so many factors at play (jones, 2001). however, there is research that shows a positive impact on grades, such as that by loddick and coulson (2020) who conducted a quantitative analysis of assessment data and writing centre tutorials and found both an increase in grades associated with writing tutorial attendance, as well as an improvement of 2% in subsequent assignments. more broadly, salazar (2021) conducted a metaanalysis of 82 quantitative studies regarding writing centre impact, which found overall that visitors to writing centres achieve higher grades than those who do not. however, there is also research that shows less impact, for instance keith et al. (2020) found that though involvement in an experimental class that received writing centre input improved students’ writing confidence, it did not impact on grades. so though impact is difficult to assess, it seems likely that in-person learning development feedback does tangibly improve performance. in addition to that received in-person, students value the ability to receive good quality written feedback (winstone et al., 2016), and hattie and clarke (2018) established that the most effective form of feedback focuses on what next and how to move forward. students particularly value feedback that is detailed and personal. this is because their work is special to them, and having invested so much time in it, they expect the same from the person responding (glazzard and stones, 2019). writing centre feedback is formative, rather than summative, and butler (1988) found that separating feedback from grades helps to improve student performance. in the same vein, winstone and boud (2022) discuss a range of issues arising from the entanglement of grades and feedback. the primary, formal feedback students receive from lecturers is alongside their grades when they have submitted work to turnitin, so writing centre feedback, delivered without a grade, is likely to be particularly effective. feedback as a source of dissatisfaction perhaps because students value feedback so much, the quality of feedback in he is one of the biggest causes of student dissatisfaction (blair et al., 2013; beaumont, moscrop and canning, 2016), with lecturers frequently believing that their feedback is more useful than students find it (carless, 2006). blair et al. (2013) claim that student dissatisfaction centres around the timeliness of feedback, and a lack of opportunity to engage with the feedback shackel the highs and lows of written feedback: student evaluation of writing centre written responses journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 5 as active participants. lecturers might have to be contacted multiple times, with students feeling that their opportunities for feedback are limited (blair and mcginty, 2013), and lecturers’ comments can also be more about justifying grades rather than the development of student skills (winstone and boud, 2022). conversely, hoon (2009) found that students are typically happy with the effectiveness of feedback received from writing centres. one of the downsides to written feedback for learning developers is that unlike in face-toface appointments, one cannot gauge the student's reaction through an assessment of nonverbal cues (dison and collett, 2019). we do not have control over the feedback environment when students receive written feedback, and it is a complex process to manage elements of tone to create a feeling of safety through friendly but distanced language (jolly and boud, 2013). this is important as ‘feedback… can crush their confidence, destroy their motivation and render them impotent for future learning’ (burke and pietrick, 2010, p.3). feedback is an emotive business, provoking a range of responses, from ‘gratitude, appreciation, pride and happiness ...[to]... anger, frustration, embarrassment, fear and sadness’ (rowe, fitness and wood, 2014). hyland (1998) says that through dialogue, misunderstandings that exacerbate these negative responses can be overcome. this would be helpful as ryan and henderson (2018) learned that students ignore feedback that provokes negative emotions. as written feedback is a one-way communication process, there may well be a greater opportunity for misunderstanding, as dialogue is removed. the process of receiving feedback can be a challenge in itself, but for students with learning difficulties such as dyslexia, this can be particularly pronounced. whilst many learning developers are not trained in how to support students with dyslexia, these students often turn to the writing centre in addition to other forms of help. a disproportionate number of students studying creative practice subjects have dyslexia compared with students in other fields (bacon and bennett, 2013), and may lack confidence, particularly when having to read and write when others are present (pino and mortari, 2014). in addition, mortimore and crozier (2006) found that students with dyslexia find it difficult to make notes and listen at the same time , which will affect how they process verbal feedback. however, these students place great value on the support offered to them by their university (sumner, crane and hill, 2021). shackel the highs and lows of written feedback: student evaluation of writing centre written responses journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 6 in conclusion, feedback is one of the main mechanisms that helps students rectify their mistakes and improve their work. feedback that focuses on how to move forward is the most effective form to help them close the gap between their current performance and the performance required for the task. however, student dissatisfaction with feedback is a common problem in higher education, and seeking to explore how students feel about written feedback from the writing centre will address this by helping to inform good practice in this field. method the writing centre conducts an evaluation week annually where students are asked to evaluate their one-to-one appointments. however, an evaluation of written feedback has not previously been sought. in the summer of 2021, it was decided to evaluate students' responses to e-mail feedback to assess how useful they found it, and how it might be improved. students who had sent their work to the writing centre for written feedback during the academic year 2020-2021 were identified through the department’s e-mail management system. all 249 students who had sent an essay for e-mail feedback were contacted and invited to complete an online survey using google forms (see appendix a), and two reminder e-mails were sent to encourage participation. it was made clear to participants that their names would not be linked to their questionnaire responses, and the team would not be aware if they had or had not responded to the questionnaire. they were told that responding would not affect any future feedback they might receive. they were also offered an alternative person to contact if they wished to respond outside of the research project. participation was on an ‘opt-in’ basis, to avoid students having to refuse to take part. this study received approval from the university’s ethics committee. the questionnaire contained nine items containing both closed and open-ended questions as suggested by singer and couper (2017). open ended questions were included to supplement the quantitative data from closed questions with more detailed and nuanced responses. the questions asked: if the right quantity of feedback had been delivered; how shackel the highs and lows of written feedback: student evaluation of writing centre written responses journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 7 easy the feedback was to apply; if the students have subsequently used the feedback for other assignments; how students felt about the feedback; and how the feedback could be improved. the questionnaire was kept brief to increase the completion rate. 54 students completed the survey, which was a response rate of 21.6%. 31.5% of respondents were 1st years, 9% were 2nd years, 29.6% were 3rd years, and 29.6% were studying for an ma. this means that 2nd year students were underrepresented in the survey and ma students were overrepresented in comparison to overall student numbers at the university. interviews were incorporated in order to gather data that respondents might not have thought to provide in response to the questionnaire. 19 respondents said that they were happy to be contacted for a follow-up interview and 11 interviews were carried out. interviews were carried out at the very end of the academic year over a two-week period. not all of the 19 were spoken to due to availability during the interview timescale. interviews were semi-structured (see appendix b for prompt questions) and totalled 225.79 minutes. they were recorded and transcribed using tactiq transcription software. interview data were coded using taguette, an open-access qualitative research tool. thematic analysis (braun and clarke, 2006) was used to guide the coding and theming of data with two rounds of coding being conducted. themes were determined inductively through comparison across the interviews. the themes were then checked against the data set and refined. findings and discussion questionnaire students were asked how they would describe the amount of feedback they had received, to assess if we should make the feedback more concise or more in-depth. there were three options to choose from, and 90.7% said that ‘there was the right amount of feedback’. 5.6% chose ‘disappointing: there was not enough feedback’, and 3.7% chose ‘overwhelming: there was too much feedback’. therefore, it seems that we are providing the right amount of feedback, and the fear that too much detail is offered by responding in full paragraphs is unfounded. shackel the highs and lows of written feedback: student evaluation of writing centre written responses journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 8 when letting us know how easy they had found it to apply the feedback, again students were able to choose from closed-ended options, with 93.1% of the students selecting that it was ‘easy’ or ‘somewhat easy’ to apply. one response to a later open-ended question asking how students feel about the feedback said, ‘the feedback was really helpful and very in-depth. the way the feedback is set out makes it incredibly easy to transfer into my essays.’ in addition to applying the feedback to the piece of work they had sent in, 88.9% of the students had been able to apply the feedback they received to subsequent pieces of work. this indicates that students are not simply using the writing centre as a proofreading service but are learning more broadly about academic writing. in response to the question ‘how did you feel about the feedback you received?’ the response was very positive, with 83.3% of comments positive; 33.3% of respondents who made positive comments used the word ‘helpful’. reasons that people felt positive about the feedback were centred around clarity, thoroughness and speed of response, and students expressed gratitude for the service. 11.1% of responses regarding how students felt about the feedback were mixed, with a variety of positive and negative comments, and 3.7% were negative. the two most common negatives were that the feedback was too vague and that there were inconsistencies in feedback response between different advisors. overall, 59.26% of respondents felt there was nothing we could do to improve the service, however, more than one student suggested that feedback could be more specific. interviews three themes were identified from the data: students’ motivation for contacting the writing centre; students’ reaction to the feedback they received; and the broader feedback context within which the writing centre operates. students’ motivation to request written feedback in the interviews, students discussed a range of motivations for requesting written feedback. they also examined their reactions to our feedback, both emotional and practical. feedback from other sources was discussed and the writing centre was shackel the highs and lows of written feedback: student evaluation of writing centre written responses journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 9 compared to both lecturers and friends/family. overall, students were positive about the help they had received, consistent with hoon’s review of writing centre research which found that writing centres are regarded positively by students (2009). regarding the motivation for accessing written feedback rather than online one-to-one appointments, 8 of the 11 students said that the request for written feedback was an active choice: some felt that written feedback was more convenient; there were no appointments available; or it was too close to their deadline for an appointment. in addition, there were others who prefer written feedback, as this gives them more opportunity to process and reread the information. some students particularly identified their dyslexia as a reason they preferred written feedback. they said that during one-to-ones their focus is on trying to capture what was said and make notes, leaving less ‘headspace’ available for making sense of the feedback. one student said, ‘although i might make notes when i go and talk to someone, it’s not the same as being able to see the points written down, because the feedback is so helpful, i can work through it’. this mirrors the findings of mortimore and crozier (2006) who researched the ability of students with dyslexia to simultaneously listen and make notes. this idea of being able to work through the feedback at the students' own pace was a key benefit identified by those who prefer written feedback. some of the students who found there to be positive benefits to written over verbal feedback, were those who like to approach their work in a systematic way. one student said that written feedback meant that she had time to go through her work methodically with highlighters, consider the points of feedback, and see where the feedback could be applied. then when writing subsequent essays, she ensured that this feedback was incorporated so that she would not receive the same feedback twice. another student spoke of having a spreadsheet that logged any feedback received in order to apply it to future work. the feedback as a stand-alone document independent of the essay at hand contributes to becoming a self-regulated learner (nicol and macfarlane‐dick, 2006), and shows the kind of reflective engagement that is often absent from the feedback process (handley, price and millar, 2011). students are able to revisit the feedback, allowing them to better process and apply it to subsequent assignments, and so proactively take control of their learning. shackel the highs and lows of written feedback: student evaluation of writing centre written responses journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 10 how students felt about the feedback they received though it is difficult to evaluate writing centre impact on grades (jones, 2001), students themselves were quick, and keen, to attribute high grades to our help. one said, ‘and actually i got a first…so i was actually made up about that and … i couldn't believe it, you know, absolutely couldn't believe it… but i know that your help helped me get that grade’. another student said, ‘i have received upwards of 80% in each of my submissions so i'm sure the writing centre have contributed in some way’. this type of feedback was consistent between the questionnaire and the interviews and supports previous research that shows that students who seek feedback receive higher grades (sinclair and cleland, 2007). one very positive aspect that students talked about in interviews was that they really felt that they could see the effort we had put into writing their feedback. one said, ‘it shows you there's genuine care there on your part and you guys want to see us improving and getting better. and that's a really nice feeling’. another said that the feedback was very personal and that the slightly more informal, introductory paragraph at the start, along with the advisor’s name at the end, contributed to how they felt about the feedback. another said, ‘it feels like we're really cared for’ and another, ‘it was clear that they really read what i'd written and were really thoughtful’. the personal nature of the feedback was cited as a reason that students felt comfortable contacting us with follow-up questions when they did so. whilst not resulting in the kind of dialogue blair and mcginty (2013) say is key to effective learning, it does go some way to mitigate some of the downsides of written feedback, such as not being able to build rapport, check for understanding, or read body language. the sense of the feedback as signifying care by the organisation was an unexpected finding, particularly as so few students reply to the feedback e-mails sent by the team. the care they feel may be since we do genuinely take time to give a thoughtful and careful response. this may be enhanced by the fact that the feedback is delivered in a letter format, often around a side of a4, in which the student is addressed person to person, rather than the alternative of feedback being via comments on their essay. in addition, this research was conducted during the covid-19 pandemic, when the previously normal shackel the highs and lows of written feedback: student evaluation of writing centre written responses journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 11 channels of informal feedback through conversations in classes on campus were limited. feedback from the writing centre might have felt more significant to the students, and improved feelings of belonging, that had suffered at this time. although most of the interviewees were very positive about their feedback from the writing centre, two of the interviewees were unhappy. one said she felt ‘devastated’ on reading the feedback, as she had worked very hard on the assignment and expected to receive positive comments. she did not feel her hard work had been acknowledged. another said that it really affected her confidence, supporting what burke and pietrick (2010) found regarding the consequences of damaging feedback. this student felt that the effort she had put into her work had not been acknowledged. also, her feedback was very similar to that sent to her friend, which made it feel ‘robotic’ and like it had been simply cut and pasted. both of these points support glazzard and stones’ (2019) findings that a personal response is important to students. therefore, when they feel that this is absent, it affects their perception of the quality of the feedback: if it has not been written personally for them, they feel it is not relevant and helpful. students said they had applied their feedback to subsequent essays so the work that writing centre tutors do can accurately be termed feedforward (duncan, 2007). referencing was an aspect of the feedback that students felt particularly able to apply to subsequent essays. perhaps students can more easily articulate this sort of learning, whereas concepts such as analysis or critical thinking are more nebulous. one student mentioned that the learning from the feedback often ‘rubs off unconsciously’, so referencing may become an aspect that students are more conscious about and find easier to recall. this idea that students use terms such as ‘referencing’ as a proxy for higher-level skills was explored by archer (2008) who studied the help students received from a writing centre. there were cases where the student felt they had received help with referencing, despite analysis of first and final drafts of their work showing little improvement in referencing. the greater improvement actually lay in the argument. so, the feedback that the writing centre is giving students, such as adding citations and using academic references, might help them to develop argument and analysis in a way that is not immediately clear to the student. it could be that which we call argument and analysis, students think of as being about using academic references, as both are centred on evidence. shackel the highs and lows of written feedback: student evaluation of writing centre written responses journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 12 the broader context within which the writing centre operates in addition to contacting the writing centre, students discussed a range of feedback sources such as friends, family and academics. students turn to a wide range of sources for advice, as they accept and learn from people they trust and in a place where they feel safe (ryan and henderson, 2018). it was notable that everybody who sent their work to friends and family for feedback, unprompted, gave that person’s credentials: an older brother who’s a lecturer; a mother who’s an author; an aunt who works for a publisher, and so on. students are discerning when looking for feedback and make active choices about who to listen to and who to trust. one concern felt by writing centre tutors when composing feedback is that students are sending their work through in a passive way, so it was positive to hear about their contact with the writing centre being one of a range of active choices made in feedback seeking behaviour. all interviewees were asked in what ways the feedback they received from the writing centre differed from the feedback they have received from lecturers. students consistently noted that the lecturers gave subject specific knowledge, whereas the writing centre gave feedback on writing skills, such as paragraph structure, which the students felt was the sort of thing that lecturers would not typically mention. as writing centre advisors are not subject specialists, we do not give subject specific advice and it was good to hear that this distinction was clear to students. students sometimes reported difficult relationships with their lecturers that can taint the feedback process: ‘my card is marked!’, ‘when you get feedback from lecturers, they assassinate you’. the writing centre, in contrast, is perceived as a neutral space as one interviewee commented: ‘i can see that … you know, you guys haven't got an ego problem’. this finding is consistent with the literature that discusses some of the difficult emotions triggered by feedback (burke and pietrick, 2010; rowe, fitness and wood, 2014). the idea that feedback from the writing centre felt less emotionally charged might be a result of the formative feedback process being separate from grades. limitations shackel the highs and lows of written feedback: student evaluation of writing centre written responses journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 13 the chief limitation of this study lies in its location in a single institution. it would be informative to discover how responses might differ elsewhere, where the student profile, learning needs, and subject focus might differ. this study did not analyse the feedback that was sent to students to see if there was a relationship between aspects such as the length of the feedback and how students felt about it. furthermore, this study only analysed student responses to one type of writing centre written feedback, provided in letter format, written in full paragraphs. within the team, there is a debate as to whether we should provide feedback on the student essay document through comments and further research could investigate the impact of different formats of feedback. practice recommendations this research has informed practice within the team in that it has resolved debate concerning the level of detail and format of written feedback. we have been reminded to focus on positive comments and the personal element, even during busy times when these can be the first thing to be dropped. we now all provide direct quotations from the student essay when giving feedback, which addresses the concern regarding inconsistency between advisors, and the desire for feedback to be specific. although this research was centred on written feedback, its biggest impact in changing practice within the team has been on in-person appointments. the insight into how students with dyslexia and processing difficulties can struggle to deal with talking, listening, reading and writing in tandem, has made us consciously allow more time, and silence, to allow for this. conclusion in this research, the participants articulated their motivations for contacting the writing centre for written feedback and provided their views about the feedback. one question that prompted this research was the concern that perhaps the feedback sent was overwhelming and demotivating. however, students told us that they like this level of detail, and this shows that we, and by extension the university, cares about them. some students, particularly those with dyslexia, prefer written feedback as they have additional time to process information. students were grateful for the support from the writing centre and felt that the written feedback helped improve their grades. although the participants’ shackel the highs and lows of written feedback: student evaluation of writing centre written responses journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 14 comments were overwhelmingly positive, when students were unhappy with their feedback, a deep impression was made on them that damaged their confidence. students differentiate between the feedback from the writing centre and academic staff and access our help as one of the active choices they make when seeking to improve their work. where students preferred written feedback over verbal feedback, this was often due to the difficulties that students with dyslexia have in appointments when they are trying to read their work, listen to feedback, ask questions, and make notes, all at the same time. references archer, a. (2008) ‘investigating the effect of writing centre interventions on student writing’, south african journal of higher education, 22(2), pp.248-264. https://doi.org/10.4314/sajhe.v22i2.25784 babcock, r.d. and thonus, t. (2018) researching the writing center: towards an evidence-based practice. oxford: peter lang. bacon, a.m. and bennett, s. (2013) 'dyslexia in higher education: the decision to study art', european journal of special needs education, 28(1), pp. 19-32. https://doi.org/10.1080/08856257.2012.742748 beaumont, c., moscrop, c. and canning, s. (2016) ‘easing the transition from school to he: scaffolding the development of self-regulated learning through a dialogic approach to feedback’, journal of further and higher education, 40(3), pp. 331– 350. https://doi.org/10.1080/0309877x.2014.953460 blair, a. and mcginty s. (2013), ‘feedback-dialogues: exploring the student perspective’, assessment & evaluation in higher education, 38(4) pp. 466-476. https://doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2011.649244 blair, a., curtis, s., goodwin, m. and shields, s. (2013) 'what feedback do students want?', politics, 33(1), pp. 66-79. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9256.2012.01446.x https://doi.org/10.4314/sajhe.v22i2.25784 https://www.researchgate.net/journal/european-journal-of-special-needs-education-1469-591x https://doi.org/10.1080/08856257.2012.742748 https://doi.org/10.1080/0309877x.2014.953460 https://doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2011.649244 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9256.2012.01446.x shackel the highs and lows of written feedback: student evaluation of writing centre written responses journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 15 braun, v. and clarke, v. (2006) ‘using thematic analysis in psychology’, qualitative research in psychology, 3(2), pp.77-101. https://doi.org/10.1191/1478088706qp063oa burke, d. and pietrick, j. (2010) giving students effective written feedback. maidenhead: open university press. butler, r. (1988) 'enhancing and undermining intrinsic motivation: the effects of task‐ involving and ego‐involving evaluation on interest and performance.', british journal of educational psychology, 58(1), pp. 1-14. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.20448279.1988.tb00874.x carless, d. (2006), ‘differing perceptions in the feedback process’, studies in higher education, 31(2), pp. 219–233. https://doi.org/10.1080/03075070600572132 dison, a. and collett, k.s. (2019) ‘decentering and recentering the writing centre using online feedback: towards a collaborative model of integrating academic literacies development’, stellenbosch papers in linguistics plus, 2019(57), pp.79-98. available at: http://www.scielo.org.za/pdf/spilplus/v57/07.pdf (accessed: 2 april 2023) duncan, n. (2007). 'feed-forward': improving students' use of tutors' comments. assessment & evaluation in higher education, 32(3), pp.271–283. https://doi.org/10.1080/02602930600896498 glazzard, j. and stones, s. (2019) ‘student perceptions of feedback in higher education’, international journal of learning, teaching and educational research, 18(11), pp.38-52. https://doi.org/10.26803/ijlter.18.11.3 handley, k., price, m. and millar, j. (2011) ‘beyond ‘doing time’: investigating the concept of student engagement with feedback’, oxford review of education, 37(4), pp. 543560. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23047914 https://doi.org/10.1191/1478088706qp063oa https://doi.org/10.1111/j.2044-8279.1988.tb00874.x https://doi.org/10.1111/j.2044-8279.1988.tb00874.x https://doi.org/10.1080/03075070600572132 http://www.scielo.org.za/pdf/spilplus/v57/07.pdf https://doi.org/10.1080/02602930600896498 https://doi.org/10.26803/ijlter.18.11.3 http://www.jstor.org/stable/23047914 shackel the highs and lows of written feedback: student evaluation of writing centre written responses journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 16 hao, q. and tsikerdekis, m., (2019), ‘how automated feedback is delivered matters: formative feedback and knowledge transfer’, ieee frontiers in education conference, 1 october, pp.1-6. https://doi.org/10.1109/fie43999.2019.9028686 hattie, j. and clarke, s. (2018) visible learning: feedback. london: routledge. hattie, j. and timperley, h. (2007) 'the power of feedback', review of educational research, 77(1), pp. 81-112. https://doi.org/10.3102/003465430298487 hoon, t.b. (2009) ‘assessing the efficacy of writing centres: a review of selected evaluation studies’. pertanika journal of social sciences and humanities, 17(2), pp. 47-54. available at: https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/153798306.pdf (accessed: 2 april 2023) hyland, f. (1998) 'the impact of teacher written feedback on individual writers', journal of second language writing, 7(3), pp. 255-286. https://doi.org/10.1016/s10603743(98)90017-0 ibarra-sáiz, m.s., rodríguez-gómez, g. and boud, d. (2020) ‘developing student competence through peer assessment: the role of feedback, self-regulation and evaluative judgement’, higher education, 80(1), pp.137-156. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-019-00469-2 jolly, b. and boud, d. (2013) 'written feedback: what is it good for, and how can we do it well?', in boud, d. and molloy, e. (eds.) feedback in higher and professional education london: routledge, pp. 104-124. jones, c. (2001) ‘the relationship between writing centers and improvement in writing ability: an assessment of the literature’, education, 122(1), pp. 3-20. available at: https://go.gale.com/ps/i.do?p=aone&u=googlescholar&id=gale|a80856249&v=2. 1&it=r&sid=googlescholar&asid=0eb45abc (accessed: 5 april 2023). keith, s., stives, k.l., kerr, l.j. and kastner, s. (2020) 'the role of academic background and the writing centre on students’ academic achievement in a writing-intensive https://doi.org/10.1109/fie43999.2019.9028686 https://doi.org/10.3102/003465430298487 https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/153798306.pdf https://doi.org/10.1016/s1060-3743(98)90017-0 https://doi.org/10.1016/s1060-3743(98)90017-0 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-019-00469-2 shackel the highs and lows of written feedback: student evaluation of writing centre written responses journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 17 criminological theory course’, educational studies, 46(2), pp.154-169, https://doi.org/10.1080/03055698.2018.1541788 loddick, a. and coulson, k. (2020) ‘the impact of learning development tutorials on student attainment’, journal of learning development in higher education, (17), pp. 1-24. https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.vi17.558 mortimore, t. and crozier, w.r. (2006) ‘dyslexia and difficulties with study skills in higher education’, studies in higher education, 31(2), pp. 235-251. https://doi.org/10.1080/03075070600572173 nicol, d. (2010) 'from monologue to dialogue: improving written feedback processes in mass higher education', assessment & evaluation in higher education, 35(5), pp. 505-517. https://doi.org/10.1080/02602931003786559 nicol, d. and macfarlane‐dick, d. (2006) ‘formative assessment and self‐regulated learning: a model and seven principles of good feedback practice’, studies in higher education, 31(2), pp.199-218. https://doi.org/10.1080/03075070600572090 pino, m. and mortari, l. (2014) ‘the inclusion of students with dyslexia in higher education: a systematic review using narrative synthesis’, dyslexia, 20, pp.347-369. https://doi.org/10.1002/dys.1484 qaa (2018) uk quality code for higher education advice and guidance: assessment, available at: https://www.qaa.ac.uk/docs/qaa/quality-code/advice-and-guidanceassessment.pdf?sfvrsn=ca29c181_4 (accessed: 2 april 2023) rowe, a. d. (2017) ‘feelings about feedback: the role of emotions in assessment for learning’, in carless, d., bridges, s., chan, c. and glofcheski, r. (eds.) scaling up assessment for learning in higher education. the enabling power of assessment, singapore: springer, pp.159–172. https://doi.org/10.1080/03055698.2018.1541788 https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.vi17.558 https://doi.org/10.1080/03075070600572173 https://doi.org/10.1080/02602931003786559 https://doi.org/10.1080/03075070600572090 https://doi.org/10.1002/dys.1484 https://www.qaa.ac.uk/docs/qaa/quality-code/advice-and-guidance-assessment.pdf?sfvrsn=ca29c181_4%20 https://www.qaa.ac.uk/docs/qaa/quality-code/advice-and-guidance-assessment.pdf?sfvrsn=ca29c181_4%20 shackel the highs and lows of written feedback: student evaluation of writing centre written responses journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 18 rowe, a. d., fitness, j. and l. n. wood, l.n. (2014) ‘the role and functionality of emotions in feedback at university: a qualitative study’, the australian educational researcher, 41, pp. 283–309. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13384-013-0135-7 ryan, t. and henderson, m. (2018) 'feeling feedback: students’ emotional responses to educator feedback', assessment & evaluation in higher education, 43(6), pp. 880892. https://doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2017.1416456 sinclair, h. and cleland, j. (2007) ‘undergraduate medical students: who seeks formative feedback?’, medical education, 41, pp. 580–582. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.13652923.2007.02768.x singer, e. and couper, m.p. (2017) ‘some methodological uses of responses to open questions and other verbatim comments in quantitative surveys’. methods, data, analyses: a journal for quantitative methods and survey methodology, 11(2), pp.115-134. https://doi.org/10.12758/mda.2017.01 salazar, j. j. (2021). ‘the meaningful and significant impact of writing center visits on college writing performance’. the writing center journal, 39(1/2), pp.55–96. https://www.jstor.org/stable/27172214 sumner, e., crane, l. and hill, e.l. (2021) ‘examining academic confidence and study support needs for university students with dyslexia and/or developmental coordination disorder’, dyslexia, 27(1), pp.94-109. https://doi.org/10.1002/dys.1670 winstone, n.e. and boud, d. (2022) ‘the need to disentangle assessment and feedback in higher education’, studies in higher education, 47(3), pp. 656-667. https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2020.1779687 winstone, n.e., nash, r.a., rowntree, j. and menezes, r. (2016) 'what do students want most from written feedback information? distinguishing necessities from luxuries using a budgeting methodology', assessment & evaluation in higher education, 41(8), pp. 1237-1253. https://doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2015.1075956 https://doi.org/10.1007/s13384-013-0135-7 https://doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2017.1416456 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2923.2007.02768.x https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2923.2007.02768.x https://doi.org/10.12758/mda.2017.01 https://www.jstor.org/stable/27172214 https://doi.org/10.1002/dys.1670 https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2020.1779687 https://doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2015.1075956 shackel the highs and lows of written feedback: student evaluation of writing centre written responses journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 19 author details eva shackel is a learning developer at bath spa university and a fellow of the higher education academy. licence ©2023 the author(s). this is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (cc-by 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. see http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. journal of learning development in higher education (jldhe) is a peer-reviewed open access journal published by the association for learning development in higher education (aldinhe). http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ shackel the highs and lows of written feedback: student evaluation of writing centre written responses journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 20 appendix a: questionnaire shackel the highs and lows of written feedback: student evaluation of writing centre written responses journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 21 shackel the highs and lows of written feedback: student evaluation of writing centre written responses journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 22 shackel the highs and lows of written feedback: student evaluation of writing centre written responses journal of learning development in higher education, issue 27: april 2023 23 appendix b: prompt questions for semi-structured interviews regarding written feedback • what year are you in? • how many essays did you send through for written feedback? • did you have any appointments in addition to e-mail feedback? • why did you choose to send in your essay for e-mail feedback? • how did the e-mail feedback compare to an in-person appointment, if you had one? • to what extent did you understand the feedback? • how did you find applying it to your essay? • was there anything that you disagreed with? • have you found yourself applying this feedback to other written work? • where else did you seek feedback? • to what extent is the feedback you get from them similar to or different from, ours? • how did you feel when you opened the email from us? • is there anything we could do to improve our feedback? • is there anything else you'd like to add? the highs and lows of written feedback: student evaluation of writing centre written responses abstract introduction literature review definitions benefits of feedback feedback as a source of dissatisfaction method findings and discussion questionnaire interviews students’ motivation to request written feedback how students felt about the feedback they received the broader context within which the writing centre operates limitations practice recommendations conclusion references author details licence appendix a: questionnaire appendix b: prompt questions for semi-structured interviews regarding written feedback literature review journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 3: march 2011 using socially constructed technology to enhance learning in higher education dr susan c. wilkinson university of wales institute cardiff, uk abstract this paper provides a short account of the educational benefits and pitfalls of using web 2.0 technology (e.g. wikis and blogs) in teaching and learning in higher education. it draws on constructivist principles to explain and support the use of collaborative learning tools in higher education, and explores the factors necessary to create a successful e-learning environment. support for use of such e-learning tools is placed in the context of recent shifts in pedagogical approaches to learning, the increase in demand for higher education, the widening participation agenda, and the technical revolution. it intends to convey the importance of developing collaborative learning communities within higher education, whilst keeping focus on the pedagogical, rather than technological, reasons for change. keywords: constructivism; virtual learning environment; collaborative learning. over the past few decades the demand for higher education has increased exponentially, with the percentage of the population who attain a degree rapidly rising. this has inevitably created funding issues and input costs related to output, and so institutions have been required to focus efforts on promoting self-directed learning outside of lectures. some educators have attempted to address this using technology to bridge the gaps between inclass learning and core unit requirements through online discussions and formative assessment. this expansion and widening delivery of education has coincided with a technological revolution. the online learning environment can offer educators new opportunities for adapting learning and teaching, and offers students a more holistic learning experience. wilkinson using socially constructed technology to enhance learning in higher education there exists high pressure on institutions to adopt e-learning technologies, which originate from policymakers and stakeholders who are driven by political agendas reacting to demands for economic and social development. anderson et al. (2006) outline two key drivers to adopting e-learning: the need to ‘upskill’ the population; and the need for accessible and flexible access to education to meet the lifelong learning agenda. with this shift towards online learning and the widening participation agenda, teaching staff must reassess and reconsider their conceptions of student learning and what students need (gibbs 2000, cited kahn and baume, 2003). with an increase in the use of the internet and the world wide web, the past decade has seen educators experimenting with different forms of distance, open and flexible learning. e-learning for education and training professionals spread rapidly over a few years (clarke, 2004) and is now extremely popular all over the world. it provides learners with an alternative to face-to-face learning, and allows for deeper engagement in learning. encouraging students to manage information rather than merely accumulate it will result in stronger connections in long term memory and a deeper level of understanding. deep learning requires the student to pay attention to the underlying meaning, as opposed to surface learning that involves mere description and rote learning, and which often occurs as a result of low levels of motivation. deep learning depends on levels of engagement, so the more the student is engaged with the topic the more likely it is that deep learning will occur (ramsden, 1997). with learning environments becoming more virtual and mobile, it seems no longer acceptable to simply use these environments to deliver content alone to students. in addition to critical assessment and evaluation of information, it is vital that collaborative and interactive communities are created within these environments, in order to foster the higher level thinking and reflective processes we want our students to develop. the purpose of this paper is to explore whether we should in fact be thinking of education and learning in terms of changes in communication and information technologies, and whether learning can be enhanced through the use of web 2.0 tools. are we at risk of placing too much emphasis on the technology whilst not giving enough consideration to the pedagogical implications of e-learning? why should we be using virtual learning environments (vles) for teaching and learning in higher education? recent pedagogical shifts in theories of learning have progressed journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 2 wilkinson using socially constructed technology to enhance learning in higher education from behaviourist models towards social constructivist models. society has now recognised that learning is contextual and more than a simple linear step from a to b. the author’s views on learning are supported by constructivist theory, which maintains that learning is developed through activity and emphasis should focus on creating social contexts for learning, rather than on individual tasks. vles may encourage students to work collaboratively, and share and re-use resources. e-learning may also develop student-centred learning, where the student is at the heart of everything that is done. collaborative communication tools within vles emphasise this shared social context of learning. however, this technology must be combined and supported with effective pedagogy and reflective teaching (garrison and anderson, 2003). online learning is tending towards a constructivist pedagogy, and by encouraging student interaction and learning through construction of personal meaning, collaborative learning is likely to rate high within this arena. it is therefore highly desirable that new tools and technologies such as blogs, wikis, and discussion boards are at least tried and tested in the hope that they assist in this constructive learning with which our education system is striving to align. many of the technologies that are now used in teaching and learning were not originally designed as pedagogical tools, but the introduction of social software into an educational setting has the potential to enable learners to become more active in their learning and provide more opportunities for learners to collaborate with peers and develop higher order cognitive skills. new tools such as wikis, blogs and podcasts all lean towards supporting a constructivist way of learning, as they encourage students to construct their own content. recent shifts in higher education have resulted in the view that university education should consist of ‘critical communities of learners’ (garrison and anderson, 2003, p.23). this has ‘become a practical necessity in the realisation of relevant, meaningful, and continuous learning’ (garrison and anderson, 2003, p.23). if the use of interactive learning tools in higher education aims to achieve higher order learning in these vles, then a community of learners is a vital element of this educational experience (garrison and anderson, 2003). this idea of communities of learners is supported by a social constructivist view of learning, underpinned by the premise that knowledge creation is not an individual experience, but a shared one, and knowledge comes about through negotiating within these collaborative discourse communities (prawat and floden, 1994). there have been journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 3 wilkinson using socially constructed technology to enhance learning in higher education many studies investigating the ways in which higher order thinking and increased cognitive processing can be encouraged in collaborative learning environments such as discussion boards (e.g. schellens and valcke, 2005; kanuka and garrison, 2004). however, simply setting up these discussion forums within web management tools and vles does not guarantee the efficient and effective use of these facilities. hung and der-thanq (2001) point out that people forming a community do so because they are able to identify with a common shared goal and identity, or a common need. these authors propose that the understanding of what makes these communities vibrant and sustainable may be possible through the exploration of situated cognition and the related notions of vygotskian thought and communities of practice. a vibrant and sustainable e-learning environment depends on the consideration of four factors: situatedness, commonality, interdependency, and infrastructure. learners are more likely to pick up implicit and explicit knowledge if learning is embedded in rich situations, if the tasks are meaningful, and if they have a reason to work together by having something in common. it also helps if they depend on one another in terms of varying degrees of expertise, competency etc., and if they understand the structure of the community with which they are engaging. due to the reflective and metacognitive nature of learning, the e-learning environment should concentrate on tasks to foster ‘learning through doing’. if the factors discussed here are the necessary ingredients for a successful and efficient elearning community, then simple discussion forums may not be able to negotiate the complexities of sustaining an online community. in this respect, the author believes that it is pertinent that web tools and technologies are applied to educational settings only if they can afford to engage and link the learners sufficiently. it is the author’s opinion that tools such as wikis and blogs attempt to move beyond the potentially unstructured notion of a discussion forum, by creating links and offering richer collaborative opportunities to its learning community. this computer supported collaborative learning helps to promote peer interaction, and can facilitate the sharing of knowledge amongst a group of learners (lipponen, 2002). blogs are sometimes used as a form of student communication in higher education, with increasingly more courses using this method to engage students and encourage more detailed and complex levels of communication and reflection. williams and jacobs (2004) propose that blogs are a product of convenience rather than design. blogs encourage the sharing of knowledge, interactivity, community and debate, and are therefore useful in journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 4 wilkinson using socially constructed technology to enhance learning in higher education increasing collaborative learning. oravec (2002a; 2002b) claims one of the benefits of blogging is that it is suited to students’ ‘unique voices’ (oravec, 2002b, p.618), thus empowering them and encouraging critical and analytical thinking. this follows from the assumption that if one wants to develop and sustain one’s ‘own voice’, then it is first necessary to create and defend opinions. writing blogs encourages students to confront their opinions, be critical and analytical of these opinions, and also consider how others may interpret or reflect on these opinions (armstrong et al., 2004) in order to assess the educational value of blogging ferdig and trammel (2004) suggest that it may be useful to draw on educational theories of vygotsky. they propose that blogging is able to support and encourage knowledge construction because of the immediate and comment based nature of the blogging system. the blogging interface is set up in a feedback system design and therefore naturally encourages reflection and analysis, and the revisiting and re-learning of information, thus enriching the learning experience. the interactivity that blogs engender has the potential to lead to active learning and higher order thinking. in contrast to a blog, which tends to be the reflections of one person, a wiki is a website that allows people to upload content, and others to add to and edit that content, thus making them much more collaborative in nature than a blog. a wiki eventually forms an inter-related network of ideas and issues and encourages cross linking that can be altered and built on by any member of the group. wikis promote collaboration and allow users to interact with it over time (duffy and bruns, 2006). some of the educational uses of a wiki include using it to develop research projects and as a record of their work, using it in distance learning courses for materials to be uploaded and commented on and edited by the students, and even to facilitate a presentation (duffy and bruns, 2006). paivio’s (1986) dual coding theory could also present support for the use of wikis to maximise learning benefits and experiences. information that is received in different modes is processed more efficiently than information received in a single mode, and as different parts of the brain process different modes this results in more encoding, in turn strengthening long term memory. wikis commonly comprise of information and ideas in various formats, including video pod casts, written text, pictures, and interactive components. presenting information in a number of formats also increases accessibility and goes some way to addressing a number of different learning preferences and needs. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 5 wilkinson using socially constructed technology to enhance learning in higher education information must be meaningful in order for learning to occur; learning cannot occur in isolation, it must be contextualised. familiarity can influence meaningfulness, and therefore recapping on what has previously been learned, allowing learners to make links between pieces of information will increase cognitive engagement, and therefore efficient learning. continuing in the vein of constructivist principles, it is important to give learners control over their own learning and allow them to choose their own sequence of learning, and to give them the opportunity to reflect on their learning and to internalise the information. this can be achieved through the use of wikis as engagement and collaboration with other learners helps to encourage reflection. collaborative and cooperative learning should also be encouraged, as working with other learners gives real life experience, and allows learners to share practice and advice. keeping learners active may also result in a higher level of processing (e.g., deeper engagement, reinforcement of ideas, contextualisation of content, assimilation of information), which in turn may facilitate the creation of personalised meaning. although there has been little research into the actual (measureable) benefits of using technology in learning, one study carried out by krentler and willis-flurry (2005) revealed that students who engaged with technology benefited from increased learning as measured by stronger performance on their course. studies by wheeler and wheeler (2007) also show that the use of wikis can improve academic writing skills. this paper only briefly addresses some of the issues surrounding the use of web 2.0 technologies in teaching and learning in higher education. technologies are developing rapidly and new tools emerge frequently, which shape the opportunities available to educators. of course, the exact tools used must always stem from the pedagogical needs of the teaching situation. these tools are social and community based, and depend on the interaction and engagement of the users: blogs offer personalised expressions of ideas and views; wikis offer more collaborative task-oriented developments. using these wikis and blogs encourages the learner to use and develop their cognitive skills, and the existence of these tools allows the students access to learning environments that are changing and evolving. these socially established technologies are well placed to support the opinion that learning is a socially constructed concept, which seems fitting given the popular journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 6 wilkinson using socially constructed technology to enhance learning in higher education pedagogical theory of recent times. although it may seem to some that blogs are somewhat limited in their success, there is some evidence that wikis promote and encourage the social construction of knowledge, and provide a place for students to draw upon resources and make sense out of things in order that they may construct personal and meaningful solutions to given problems. while the author accepts that technology should be used to enhance and improve learning and teaching in higher education, it should not be used to initiate or drive it. poorly designed e-learning can be damaging, and the benefits of collaborative learning will only occur if the set up and execution of tasks is carefully planned. where technology is utilised to help promote enhanced learning, collaboration and communities of practice; it can be a vehicle to enable change, rather than a rationale for change. references anderson, b., brown, m., murray, f., simpson, m. and mentis, m. (2006) global picture, local lessons: e-learning policy and accessibility. final report. wellington, new zealand: ministry of education. armstrong, l., berry, m. and lamshed, r. (2004) ‘blogs as electronic learning journals’, ejournal of instructional science and technology, 7(1) [online]. clark, a. (2004) e-learning skills, ny: palgrave macmillan. duffy, p. and bruns, a. (2006) ‘the use of blogs, wikis and rss in education: a conversation of possibilities’, in proceedings online learning and teaching conference. brisbane, australia, pp. 31-38. ferdig, r.e. and trammell, k.d. (2004) ‘content delivery in the ‘blogosphere’’, technological horizons in education journal, february [online]. available at: http://thejournal.com/articles/2004/02/01/content-delivery-in-the-blogosphere.aspx (accessed: 7 february 2011). journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 7 http://thejournal.com/articles/2004/02/01/content-delivery-in-the-blogosphere.aspx wilkinson using socially constructed technology to enhance learning in higher education garrison, r. and anderson, t. (2003) e-learning in the 21st century: a framework for research and practice. london: routledge. hung, d.w.l., and der-thanq, c. (2001) ‘situated cognition, vygotskian thought and learning from the communities of practice perspective: implications for the design of web-based e-learning’, education media international, 38(1), pp. 3-12. kahn, p. and baume, d. (eds.) (2003) a guide to staff and educational development. london: kogan page ltd. kanuka, h. and garrison, d.r. (2004) ‘cognitive presence in online learning’, journal of computing in higher education, 15(2), pp. 21-39. krentler, k. and willis-flurry, l. (2005) ‘does technology enhance actual student learning? the case of online discussion boards’, journal of education for business, 80(6), pp. 316-321. lipponen, l. (2002) ‘exploring foundations for computer-supported collaborative learning’, in stahl, g. (ed.) computer support for collaborative learning: foundations for a cscl community. proceedings of the computer-supported collaborative learning 2002 conference. colorado, usa 7-11 january. hillsdale, nj: erlbaum, pp. 72-81. oravec, j. (2002a) ‘blending by blogging: weblogs in blended learning initiatives’, learning, media and technology, 28(2 and 3), pp. 225-233. oravec, j. (2002b) ‘bookmarking the world: weblog applications in education’, journal of adolescent and adult literacy, 45(7), pp. 616-621. paivio, a (1986) mental representations: a dual coding approach. oxford, england: oxford university press. prawat, r.s. and floden, r.e. (1994) ‘philosophical perspectives on constructivist views of learning’, educational psychologist, 29(1), pp. 37-48. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 8 wilkinson using socially constructed technology to enhance learning in higher education ramsden, p. (1997) ‘the context of learning in academic departments’, in marton, f., hounsell, d. and entwistle, n. (eds.) the experience of learning. edinburgh: scottish academic press, pp. 198-216. schellens, t. and valcke, m. (2005) ‘collaborative learning in asynchronous discussion groups: what about the impact on cognitive processing?’, computers in human behaviour, 21(6), pp. 957-975. wheeler, s. and wheeler, d. (2007) ‘evaluating wiki as a tool to promote quality academic writing skills’, icl 2007 conference. villach, austria 26-28 september. williams, j.b. and jacobs, j. (2004) ‘exploring the use of blogs as learning spaces in the higher education sector’, australasian journal of educational technology, 20(2), pp. 232-247. author details sue wilkinson is currently working as a senior needs assessor in university wales institute cardiff (uwic) assessment centre. her role involves assessing students in receipt of disabled students allowance and making recommendations for study skills and technology support. prior to this sue has worked in e-learning, developing online learning modules, and also taught academic skills and carried out research in teaching and learning in higher education. sue has a phd in cognitive psychology and has experience of teaching psychology at different levels. her research interests include the psychological processes involved in learning, learner engagement, and e-learning. sue is currently developing interests in needs assessment and how assistive technologies can enhance learning for students with disability. sue is also a fellow of the higher education academy. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 3: march 2011 9 using socially constructed technology to enhance learning in higher education references author details journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 23: march 2022 ________________________________________________________________________ between the office and the coffee shop: an examination of spaces used for research degree supervision doug specht university of westminster abstract the last two decades have seen increased attention given to the role of space within the university campus, with numerous new learning spaces forming part of both the physical and the digital campus. much of the focus of how these spaces work to create supportive learning environments has been on undergraduate teaching. however, these spaces offer a great opportunity to also enhance the doctoral researcher’s supervision process through the creation of new learning spaces that break away from the traditional office setting. in taking the coffee shop as the antithesis of the office, this paper examines theories around space-making in relation to doctoral research, adding in the experiences of uk doctoral researchers to provoke further thought and discussion about how new spaces within a university and outside the campus might be considered part of the pedagogical approach to supervision. results suggest that although there is much to be considered, doctoral researchers spend the majority of their time in traditional spaces—where they feel the most comfortable—and become progressively less comfortable the further supervision moves towards public spaces. keywords: doctoral supervision; power; pedagogy; location; space; research degrees. introduction throughout the last two decades, higher education has increasingly examined the spatial dimensions of the campus. billions have been spent on buildings (else, 2017), and in recent years—accelerated by covid-19—universities have increasingly invested in virtual spaces. the development of these spaces has been influenced by learning theories that have pushed for more collaborative, student-centred learning spaces. investment is also specht between the office and the coffee shop: an examination of spaces used for research degree supervision journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 2 driven by the changing shape of many workplaces and the university’s shifting practical, emotional and symbolic roles (ellis and goodyear, 2016). many decisions around the use and roles of university spaces are informed by undergraduate programmes, and to a lesser degree, taught master’s degrees (deed and alterator, 2017; morieson et al., 2018). however, considerably less attention has been given to how these spaces affect doctoral supervision. supervision affects the success of doctoral researchers. although there are variations between disciplines, typically, this relationship involves a student’s work being overseen by one or more senior academic staff members (garvis and pendergast, 2012). despite the fact that universities have undergone many changes in their teaching approaches, the supervision process remains a distinct pedagogical practice in which only the supervisor (or supervisory team) and supervisee might take part, and this practice is resistant to change (firth, 2020). the supervision process is becoming increasingly scrutinised, both pedagogically and administratively. there is a growing body of research related to many aspects of the process including how interdisciplinary supervision might work (kiley and halliday, 2019), the introduction of co-supervisors and supervisory teams (olmos-lópez and sunderland, 2017), and the developmental quality of supervision (taylor, 2020). guides that provide education on supervision are also a large and established part of the academic market (hemer, 2012; grant, 2005). however, spaces or locations in which doctoral supervision can take place remain under-researched. to better understand how the location of and the spaces used for supervision meetings might affect the student experience, this paper undertakes a brief exploration of the literature around learning spaces before looking at supervisory spaces and the relationships they might foster. a small-scale study of uk doctoral researchers is then presented, along with a discussion of how the supervision spaces might be reconsidered in order to improve the experiences of doctoral researchers. transformed learning spaces space is a term that has been widely used in both social and educational research. its wide usage has also led to a wide range of physical and metaphysical meanings. the specht between the office and the coffee shop: an examination of spaces used for research degree supervision journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 3 relationships between physical spaces and the more abstract, social conceptualisations are ‘dialectically interactive [and] inter-dependent’ (soja, 1980, p.210). lefebvre (1991), in his thesis on the production of space, notes how daily routines give an identity to space. for example, a room might be called an office because of what happens inside that space. conversely, people act as if they are in an office (even when they are not) because of the norms that have become connected to the space that they call the ‘office’. or, to put it another way, social interactions can shape a space, but space shapes the way people interact (massey, 2008). ellis and goodyear (2016) also note how educational spaces, such as libraries, seminar rooms, corridors, and residences, are made meaningful as people use and interact with them. of course, spaces for teaching and learning should never be thought of as vacuums that are transformed by use; rather, the design and contents of a learning space create an environment that is conducive to learning and expression (fassinger, 1995; ellis and goodyear, 2016). indeed, in their 2005 study of what makes a classroom a safe space for exploring new ideas, holley and steiner (2005) found that the physical aspects of a space played a significant role, with participants in their research outlining 93 characteristics that indicate an unsafe classroom. the most prominent characteristic was seating arrangement—formal rows versus circles of grouped tables. these studies have helped make university learning spaces more diverse, inclusive, and varied, with informal learning spaces now making up the largest part of most university estate portfolios (ellis and goodyear, 2016). these transformations are generally welcomed. there have been important shifts in the ways in which people think about higher education and the learning that takes place on campus, and universities are increasingly moving away from traditional modes in which the lecturer organises, presents and structures learning (vaatstra and de vries, 2007). these spaces can perhaps be best understood through radcliffe et al.’s (2008) ‘places for learning spectrum’ (see figure 1, which seeks to map both informal [unstructured] and formal [structured] learning environments within and around the university, along with a simple taxonomy of learning modalities and those who support learning in different spaces). in contrast, some critiques of this framework—such as the conflation of structure with teacher presence—provide a useful jumping-off point for examining how doctoral supervision might fit into the learning spaces provided by a university. specht between the office and the coffee shop: an examination of spaces used for research degree supervision journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 4 supervision spaces and relationships given the wide spectrum of learning spaces now available to university staff, we might expect to have seen transformations in spatial thinking with regard to doctoral supervision. although there have been changes to the process of supervision—such as more emphasis on coor even team supervision—supervisory pedagogy remains heavily influenced by the oxbridge tutorial system that was introduced in 1917 (simpson, 1983). it is characterised by intensive individual relationships. the supervisor is the master, and the student is the disciple (manathunga, 2005). the student learns through observing the habits of their supervisor (maor et al., 2016). this symbiotic relationship mirrors those sought through the development of more inclusive and ‘safe’ learning spaces and takes the idea of nonjudgemental supervision (latting, 1990) further to consider the power dynamics within the process. under the master-disciple model, the location of supervisory meetings might move from the formal settings of the office to more casual spaces such as a coffee shops or other alternative spaces. these casual spaces are typically more natural and put both the supervisor and supervisee on an equal playing field, which ‘levels’ them and erases their distinctions (oldenburg, 1989). the broad spectrum of supervisory locations frequently used is noted in the author’s additional annotation of figure 1. here, though, even more important considerations must be given to the production of space – the kinds of work that might be facilitated through this production, as well as who is producing the space and to what end (lefebvre, 1991). although the seemingly hard boundaries presented by figure 1 might be contested as a little too rigid, the work of radcliffe et al. (2008) does help frame the wide range of spaces that form part of the university learning environment and explores how these might lend themselves to differing forms of learning and discrete learning moments. it is worth noting that radcliffe et al. (2008) position cafés within a more reflective learning modality and on the periphery of the campus community. using figure 1 as a reference point, it is possible to further interrogate the way different spaces might relate to learning modalities associated with supervision processes. specht between the office and the coffee shop: an examination of spaces used for research degree supervision journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 5 figure 1. places for learning spectrum (radcliffe et al., 2008), with the addition of supervision space added by the author. much like holley and steiner’s (2005) work on the characteristics of safe classrooms, in interviews conducted by hemer (2012) about supervision, space was one of the first topics that came up. particular attention was paid to cafés, which were seen as very different spaces for supervisions. furthermore, hemer’s work found that, through having a meeting in a café, the traditional models of power change because the location is not a ‘workplace’ and instead is seen as a more neutral setting. additionally, students in hemer’s study suggested that they preferred criticism in a more informal setting. this allowed them to accept and understand evaluation better than in an office, where they felt they were in the supervisor’s domain. not only does changing the location of meetings to less formal spaces begin to reject the master-disciple duality and allow for better collaboration, it also signals to the student that the supervisor has time. be it true or not, meeting at a café suggests the supervisor has endless time for the student. this can enhance the relationship between the supervisor and the supervisee, lending a sense that the supervisee’s work is of enough importance for the supervisor to set time aside. garvis and pendergast (2012) point to the romanticised notion of what it means to ‘be in’ the institution. this notion evokes an image that takes the form of ‘sit[ting] around and talk[ing] about philosophy while you sip coffee every day’ (p.26). to this end, coffee shop specht between the office and the coffee shop: an examination of spaces used for research degree supervision journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 6 supervision is perhaps less of a break from traditional supervision than a move towards another imagined tradition. the net effect of demonstrating time for the supervisee remains the same and should be welcomed. moreover, as doctoral research positions are now increasingly taken up by first-in-family students (although numbers remain low), the generally more familiar norms of coffee shops and cafés may serve other roles. as goffman (1959, p.79) notes, when an individual moves ‘into a new position in society and obtains a new part to perform, he [sic] is not likely to be told in full how to conduct himself’. a meeting that takes place in a space in which the norms of the space itself are already known—instead of the norms of typical supervisory spaces—might be of great benefit to some. it is also unlikely to have a detrimental effect on other students. bourdieu (cited in gaston and duschinsky, 2020) argues that those with sufficient levels of cultural capital and familiarity with the dominant culture within the university are much more likely to succeed. moving to a coffee shop is unlikely to detract from this. in this respect, a supervision meeting over coffee might offer several things to different students: (1) a return to long, philosophical conversations, (2) a move towards safe spaces, or (3) a reduction in the pressures of conducting oneself due to the familiarity of the setting (gaston and duschinsky, 2020). conversely, a short meeting in an office might signal the opposite of these. this is not in any way to suggest that all meetings should move to coffee shops or that one space is preferential over another. rather, these examples seek to highlight that, through an understanding of the messages that different spaces portray during a supervisory meeting, it might be possible to better strike a personalised balance for each student. cafés do not remove all power from supervisory relationships, and there are times when they might be either effective or inappropriate (hemer, 2012). a blend of locations for meetings, carefully considered for the content of the meeting, might well lead to a better navigation of the complex power dynamics between supervisor and student. power relations spaces alone will not transform the supervisory relationship. the close and tight nature of such work indicates that the interpersonal dynamics are perhaps more important than those occurring in a large class. power relations can mean that, although a space is specht between the office and the coffee shop: an examination of spaces used for research degree supervision journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 7 familiar, how that space is produced as a learning environment can be heavily influenced by one party, potentially at the expense of the other. therefore, it is worth giving some attention to the supervisory relationship as it might be performed within these spaces. there are two generally discussed forms of supervision: the hierarchical approach (campbell and campbell, 1997), in which the supervisor does the majority of the teaching and instructing, and mentoring, which is generally taken to be a more horizontal power structure (terrion and leonard, 2007). although many doctoral research relationships will consist of both forms—often moving from hierarchical to more horizontal approaches—the mentor style is becoming the prevailing pedagogical approach, driven by the suggestion that it can provide high levels of confirmation, emotional support, personal feedback and friendship (robertson, 2017; al makhamreh and stockley, 2019). it does present other challenges in terms of the power dynamics between supervisor and supervisee. however, there are significant pedagogical differences between being a supervisor and being a mentor, and this is borne of the differing balance of power within supervising/mentoring relationships. power is a recurring topic in the literature on supervision and is attributed to various factors, including levels of experience, expertise and training (murphy and wright, 2005). this power is often difficult to discern, even when used explicitly, and there is no consensus on whether such power is good or bad within a supervisor-supervisee relationship. murphy and wright (2005, p.284) see supervisors as being able to ‘use their power productively to enhance the supervisory relationship’, suggesting this can be done through an acknowledgement of the power dynamic, which enables students to learn about the power structures of the academy and thus trains them in how to assume their power (murphy and wright,2005). manathunga (2007) also suggests that power is important in a relationship in which the student is not seen as an ‘autonomous and rational being’ (p.208), and that the student is already subject to institutional powers and responsibilities, and so to attempt to remove the power from the relationship is to pull the rug of the academy from beneath the student’s feet. these pro-power ideas appear to contradict the ‘supervisor as mentor’ model, which some have suggested helps to remove the hierarchical nature of the relationship, moving away from the supervisor being in the position of master and the student being relegated to the specht between the office and the coffee shop: an examination of spaces used for research degree supervision journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 8 role of devoted apprentice (manathunga, 2007). the underlying philosophy and rationale behind mentoring are the same as that which underpins supervision as a whole – that the mentor is wiser and more experienced than the mentee (manathunga, 2007). this view is supported by eby et al.’s (2008) work, which found that ‘academic mentoring typifies the apprentice model of education where a faculty member imparts knowledge, provides support, and offers guidance to a student protégé on academic skills’ (p.255). for redmond (1990), mentors are seen as having two distinctive roles. the first deals with the transfer of marketable and discipline-based skills, behaviours, and attitudes. the second is related to social and emotional interactions that facilitate the transfer of knowledge. redmond (1990) believes this combination is of particular importance in supporting minority groups. the idea that imparting knowledge is only a component of the mentoring process also reflects the work of leung and bush (2003), who suggest the most desirable characteristics of students’ mentors are that they are (1) ‘understanding and sympathetic’, (2) ‘accessible to students’, (3) able to ‘communicate well’, and (4) ‘enthusiastic’ (p.268). supervision then is ‘not wholly about the exchange of knowledge, skills or advice, but . . . is often an exploratory process which needs time’ (garvey & alred, 2000, p.124). the supervisor should be more concerned with helping the supervisee use the method of understanding and exploring. yet, despite the noted benefits of blending pastoral and academic care, the concept of moving from supervisor to mentor is not without its opponents. it is, of course, once again an issue of power. ‘supervision as mentoring’, asserts manathunga (2007, p.218) ‘is not an innocent, collegial practice’. although mentoring ideas have emerged from a desire to move away from more overt displays of power, people have only succeeded in submerging these tensions and complexities (manathunga, 2007). as supervisors becomes more mentor-like, they may begin to transgress boundaries and offer advice on a range of personal issues that may only tangentially relate to research (manathunga, 2007). ‘supervising the writing of a thesis’, state strandler et al. (2014, p.79), ‘entails a close relationship, where the boundary between private life and work sometimes tends to collapse’. power remains an integral part of any form of pedagogy, and portraying supervision as mentoring and a neutral practice serves only to mask real and inescapable power specht between the office and the coffee shop: an examination of spaces used for research degree supervision journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 9 dynamics (manathunga, 2007). it is then the balance between informal and formal that is essential ‘to create conditions for cooperation, cohesion and innovation. . . the fine tuning of informality and formality is central to the creation of social trust’ (misztal, 2000 cited hemer, 2012, p.833). and although the supervisory relationship directly affects the performance outcomes of supervision (hemer, 2012), the beginning of this paper describes how different locations affect this relationship. thus, it is crucial to explore how location affects power. this leaves a rather tangled set of dynamics in which to place a supervisor. as the importance of social learning spaces on the university campus has grown, supervisors have an increasingly wide range of spaces in which they can conduct meetings. new opportunities have been presented by the reimagining of learning spaces in higher education in addition to the erosion of didactic teaching practices. however, within these new spaces, old modes of power and relationships can still persist. although changing spaces might change some aspects of the supervisees’ need to conform to certain norms, it does not, as the literature suggests, remove the power dynamic—even when supervisors take on a more mentor-like quality. indeed, these dynamics themselves influence the learning space more than the objects that make the space an office or a coffee shop. methodology hemer (2012) notes that, in her studies, supervision was undertaken in a wide range of contexts, from offices to meeting rooms, cafés and other third spaces, such as parks or museums. she also acknowledges that the use of different spaces differed for each individual student, and that both supervisors and supervisees sensed that a supervisory meeting over coffee offered a ‘different sense of time and space from the more formal and sometimes intimidating spaces of offices’ (hemer, 2012, p.833). following these tentative first steps and hemer’s (2012) call for further research, a methodology was set up to capture information about the spaces in which supervision happens and to understand how students felt in each of these locations. specht between the office and the coffee shop: an examination of spaces used for research degree supervision journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 10 an online survey (built in google forms) consisting of three closed questions was conducted among uk-based doctoral researchers. the questions, options and ranking choices were as follows: question options ranking q1. what stage are you at in your studies? • ma/mres as part of phd programme (preupgrade) • full doctoral candidate q2. where do your supervision meetings take place? • supervisor’s office • other private space on university campus • university café • public café • other public space (e.g., park) • supervisor’s home • online (zoom or other) • other • never • rarely • sometimes • often • all meetings q3. how comfortable do each of these spaces make you feel within the context of supervision? • supervisor’s office • other private space on university campus • university café • public café • other public space (e.g., park) • supervisor’s home • online (zoom or other) • other • very uncomfortable (i wish none of my meetings were here) • uncomfortable • indifferent • comfortable • very comfortable (i wish all my meetings were here) • does not apply specht between the office and the coffee shop: an examination of spaces used for research degree supervision journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 11 although answers were required for each instance of the above, a further three questions—all of which were optional—captured the gender of the supervisor and supervisee and gave respondents an open space to add any additional thoughts they might have. the survey was distributed through several jiscmail mailing lists containing primarily phd students throughout the second semester of 2019 (september through december). although the length of the survey is a limitation, its brevity allowed the researchers to capture more student responses than they would have been able to capture in a longer survey. the survey and analysis were also conducted pre–covid-19. although it is clear that the pandemic has reshaped some thinking in regard to higher education, the research team decided that re-issuing the survey to show the results of online-only supervision would not add much to the pedagogical discourse. indeed, given the small (often one-toone) nature of supervisory relationships, there is a high likelihood that supervision will return to being in person more quickly than large undergraduate courses. furthermore, there is extensive research about remote supervision, especially from australia. instead, this paper focuses on physical spaces and provides insights that will aid supervisors as campuses re-open their doors. results and discussion the survey yielded 110 respondents from uk higher education providers; disciplines were not recorded for this research. the survey comprised three questions enquiring about the stage of study, the place where supervision meetings occurred and the comfort level of students in each of these spaces. regarding the first question, the majority of respondents were doctoral researchers (n=88), with 19 respondents from mphil programmes leading towards a phd. three respondents listed themselves as ‘professional’, and these were removed when analysing the context elements of the survey. it was crucial to determine the places where supervision occurred. the second question was designed using a likert scale where the categories were pre-determined by the specht between the office and the coffee shop: an examination of spaces used for research degree supervision journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 12 researcher and from which the respondents could choose. all respondents (n=110) were included. figure 2: location of supervision meetings (n=110). figure 2 shows that most respondents (n=78) had supervision meetings in their supervisors’ offices, with online (n=38) and other university locations also being important. take note that this was pre-pandemic. this indicates that the transformation to other mediums—in contrast to physical spaces—had started occurring inevitably in the last few years. although it is not the focus of this paper, it has been suggested that supervisors might treat supervisees differently because of their gender (halse, 2011; conrad, 2017). in the data, no significant difference was presented, although female students responded that they are more likely (p=0.255) to feel comfortable having their meetings in a universitybased café compared with their male counterparts. the gender of the supervisor did not appear to change these results. full doctoral researchers were also significantly more likely to have meetings in a café (p=0.197) than those in the mphil stages of their programmes. hemer (2012) notes that a supervision meeting over coffee works to signal the availability of the supervisor for specht between the office and the coffee shop: an examination of spaces used for research degree supervision journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 13 discussions that are perhaps more difficult, or which go a little beyond the parameters of the subject. this kind of availability might be better suited to the later stages of the programme, as they lead to more ‘pure relationships’ as opposed to office-based ‘exchanges’ (hemer, 2012, p.833). in terms of other public spaces, for most respondents, this was either something they had not experienced (n=97) or something that they found more uncomfortable (n=23). figure 3. how comfortable do you feel being supervised in each location? (n=110). these ‘third spaces’, characterised by their informality (hemer, 2012), are then perhaps not utilised to the extent that might have been imagined when considering the higher education shift towards shared learning spaces in other aspects of teaching. although the literature notes the issues of power and hierarchy that come with supervising from an office, paré et al. (2011) are keen to point out that the department itself is a key home base for many students and that, for some students, being supervised in a third space constitutes being further alienated from the academy and the ‘invisible curriculum of academic life’ (paré et al., 2011). students who responded beyond the questions indicated that these third spaces might not always work for them. for example, students who had all or most of their supervision online responded, ‘skype works for me as i’m located in a different country. but—it also increases the feeling of distance and isolation in a way’. similarly, some students—specifically females—did not feel comfortable meeting outside the university. alarmingly, one student responded that their supervisor ‘would regularly meet his male students in the bathhouse, and leave his female students waiting specht between the office and the coffee shop: an examination of spaces used for research degree supervision journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 14 sometimes hours when we had meetings scheduled in his office’—raising serious ethical and safeguarding concerns. although this study was set up with only three short questions to ensure a higher response rate from time-poor doctoral researchers, the optional longer form answers helped shine more light on the importance of location in supervision. indeed, many respondents took the time to add longer responses, adding value to the qualitative aspect of the research. these insights also help us better understand the literature above and the nuances of how space can be formed through supervision. many of the open-ended responses echoed the idea that it is the supervisory relationship that most affects the student’s performance (hemer, 2012; gaston and duschinsky, 2020): ‘my supervisor is honestly such a good person that i’d have no qualms meeting him wherever’; ‘i think his availability and prioritisation of our supervisory relationship is much more important than the mode’; ‘location has no bearing, but content and approach does’; ‘i care more about the advise [sic] my supervisor gave me rather than the place’. others also commented that ‘the location of meeting does not make any difference. it’s about the discussion contents’; ‘it’s honestly the demeanor [sic] of my supervisor and i feel the location makes little to no difference’; and ‘for me the relationship with the supervisor is the most important factor in how comfortable i feel’. although these responses are all very positive sounding, they came from respondents who correlated location and comfort less strongly. for others, the location seemed more important. hemer (2012) warned in her research that, although some students prefer to meet in coffee shops when receiving critical feedback, these spaces are also difficult places in which to maintain a more traditional master-disciple relationship, professionalism that hockey (1995) asserts must be maintained. some respondents raised concerns over location: ‘i wish we had meetings in more of a formal setting such as an office, at least most meetings’ or ‘[it] helps create healthy boundaries if the meetings are in the office’. others were specifically against the notion of holding meetings in public spaces: ‘i feel less comfortable having work conversations in public as i’m having to be aware of who is around and who is listening’. some stated that they prefer ‘a neutral place—neither his or [sic] mine. but never in public’. these stronger reactions could be related to the sensitive specht between the office and the coffee shop: an examination of spaces used for research degree supervision journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 15 nature of a research topic or the student not feeling as confident in their abilities if they were overwhelmed. however, they could be practical: ‘i think the noise factor can be an issue in a public space […] we had a constant struggle to secure unused, semi-quiet space’. for others, location remained just as important, but they would rather not undertake their meetings in a supervisor’s office. one respondent, whose supervisor has a desk in an open-plan office, noted that they ‘feel uncomfortable about interrupting the meeting and the possibility that i might be intruding on their workspace. i also feel more conscious of my supervisor’s other workload when in their office and more acutely feel i’m taking their time, and so am more likely to end the meeting a little earlier in order to reduce this’. others reported that having meetings in the office can have negative effects because ‘just a quick catch-up can feel very ‘business”’. perhaps more alarming, though, are those who reported, without further comment, that they ‘would rather door is open rather than shut when meeting in supervisor’s office’, suggesting that they are extremely uncomfortable in this situation. missing meetings was also commonly reported: ‘he refuses to meet with me. we have only had a 15-minute call in the last 2.5 years. everything is in writing only’. there is a huge range of experiences of supervision, even within this small pool of respondents. an optimistic view might be that the supervision process responds to individuals’ needs by tailoring their supervision experience. for some respondents, this appears to be the case. for the majority, though, the location and space within which supervision takes places appear to remain by happenstance and under-considered. the office is the primary location for many, and where third spaces are used, this appears to be due more to constraints of shared offices (or no offices) and other managerial special decisions rather than those linked to pedagogy. the very nature of supervision means that power imbalances are hard to remove (maxwell and smyth, 2011), and changing physical locations does not automatically address this. without careful consideration, ‘traditional’ spaces can favour those whose habitus matches that of the university – middleand upper-class students (bourdieu cited gaston and duschinsky, 2020). a coffee shop, like other third spaces, would not solve this, as the students themselves throw into question specht between the office and the coffee shop: an examination of spaces used for research degree supervision journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 16 the roles of the supervisory relationship, which also requires sufficient cultural capital to negotiate and decode (bourdieu cited gaston and duschinsky, 2020). it is not impossible, though, to use space to enhance learning and growth within supervision. rather than looking for spaces to provide all the signals of learning, spaces for learning can be produced through the supervisor’s actions. as madikizela-madiya and atwebembeire (2020) note, these spaces can be developed through ‘trust, compassion and care’, creating ‘favourable space through these values’. however, as they also point out, there is still much to be done in revealing the social aspects of these micro spaces (madikizela-madiya and atwebembeire, 2020). it is clear that the development of researchers is becoming a priority for governments and institutions around the world, but it is also true that how this is implemented, and the range of experiences, is broad at best and that there is still a great deal more to be understood about the pedagogical and institutional circumstances within which supervision takes place (manathunga, 2005; 2009; firth and martens, 2008; madikizela-madiya and atwebembeire, 2020). conclusions this paper set out to open up a conversation about how location can affect doctoral supervision—noting that this is an area that remains under researched. the literature noted that there is an important set of questions to be asked concerning how moving from the office to other learning environments and even third spaces might affect the traditional master-disciple supervisory relationship (hemer, 2012), and how such changes in practice affect power (murphy and wright, 2005), isolation (paré et al., 2011) and pastoral care (hockey, 1994). the results from the short survey showed that there is still a huge range of different experiences and expectations of students, in terms of where they are being supervised, how comfortable doctoral researchers feel in these spaces and the impact this has on their education and learning. it is clear, though, given the respondents’ experiences, that the capability to ‘read and analyse emotional signals and psychological processes’ needs to be a fundamental part of the training process and pedagogical development of a supervisor (strandler et al., 2014, p.80). understanding that a lot of issues around trust, development, questioning and power can be resolved—or at least lessened—by changing the location in which supervision occurs is a great place to start specht between the office and the coffee shop: an examination of spaces used for research degree supervision journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 17 developing this practice and leads to questions of how university estates can be better designed to support doctoral research supervision. grant (2005) wrote 15 years ago that graduate supervision was a deeply uncertain practice and an important puzzle to solve. it would seem from this brief encounter that although more research is being undertaken around supervision, there is still much to be done in terms of examining supervision pedagogy and the production of space. ethics ethical clearance was given by the university of westminster ethics committee. all data was collected anonymously, and there was deemed to be no risk of harm to any participant. references al makhamreh, m. and stockley, d. (2019) ‘mentorship and well-being: examining doctoral students’ lived experiences in doctoral supervision context’, international journal of mentoring and coaching in education, 9(1), pp.1-20. available at: https://doi.org/10.1108/ijmce-02-2019-0013 (accessed: 21 february 2022). campbell, t. and campbell, d. (1997) ‘faculty/student mentoring program: effects on academic performance and retention’, research in higher education, 38(6), pp.727742. available at: https://doi.org/10.1023/a:1024911904627 (accessed: 21 february 2022). conrad, l. (2017) ‘gender and postgraduate supervision’, in zuber-skerritt, o. and ryan, y. (eds.) quality in postgraduate education. oxfordshire: routledge, pp. 51-58 available at: https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315799889-6 (accessed: 21 february 2022). deed, c. and alterator, s. (2017) ‘informal learning spaces and their impact on learning in tertiary education: framing new narratives of participation’, journal of learning https://doi.org/10.1108/ijmce-02-2019-0013 https://doi.org/10.1023/a:1024911904627 https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315799889-6 specht between the office and the coffee shop: an examination of spaces used for research degree supervision journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 18 spaces 6(3). available at: http://libjournal.uncg.edu/jls/article/viewfile/1439/1165 (accessed: 21 february 2022). eby, l.t., allen, t.d., evans, s.c., ng, t. and dubois, d.l. (2008) ‘does mentoring matter? a multidisciplinary meta-analysis comparing mentored and non-mentored individuals’, journal of vocational behaviour ,72(2), pp.254-267. available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jvb.2007.04.005 (accessed: 21 february 2022). ellis, r.a. and goodyear, p. (2016) ‘models of learning space: integrating research on space, place and learning in higher education’, review of education, 4(2), pp.149191. available at: https://doi.org/10.1002/rev3.3056 (accessed: 21 february 2022). else, h. (2017) ‘uk universities’ estate spending tops £3 billion for first time’, times higher education, 6 october, available at: https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/ukuniversities-estate-spending-tops-ps3-billion-first-time (accessed: 21 february 2022). fassinger, p.a. (1995) ‘understanding classroom interaction: students’ and professors’ contributions to students’ silence’, the journal of higher education, 66(1), pp.8296. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/00221546.1995.11774758 (accessed: 21 february 2022). firth, a. and martens, e. (2008) ‘transforming supervisors? a critique of post-liberal approaches to research supervision’, teaching in higher education, 13(3), pp.279289. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/13562510802045303 (accessed: 21 february 2022). garvey, b. and alred, g. (2000) ‘educating mentors,’ mentoring & tutoring: partnership in learning, 8(2), pp.113-126. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/713685525 (accessed: 21 february 2022). garvis, s. and pendergast, d. (2012) ‘the importance of supervision in higher education: key lessons learnt from a relational approach’, in garvis, s. and dwyer, r. (eds.) http://libjournal.uncg.edu/jls/article/viewfile/1439/1165 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jvb.2007.04.005 https://doi.org/10.1002/rev3.3056 https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/uk-universities-estate-spending-tops-ps3-billion-first-time https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/uk-universities-estate-spending-tops-ps3-billion-first-time https://doi.org/10.1080/00221546.1995.11774758 https://doi.org/10.1080/13562510802045303 https://doi.org/10.1080/713685525 specht between the office and the coffee shop: an examination of spaces used for research degree supervision journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 19 whisperings from the corridors. leiden, the netherlands: sense publishers, pp.2534. available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-6209-164-1_3 (accessed: 21 february 2022). gaston, a. and duschinsky, r. (2020) ‘students’ experiences of the cambridge supervision system: performance, pedagogy and power’, british journal of sociology of education, 41(8), pp.1218-1234. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/01425692.2020.1806038 (accessed: 21 february 2022). goffman, e. (1959) the presentation of self in everyday life. 4th edn. london: penguin books. grant, b.m. (2005) ‘fighting for space in supervision: fantasies, fairytales, fictions and fallacies’, international journal of qualitative studies in education, 18(3), pp.337354. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/09518390500082483 (accessed: 21 february 2022). halse, c. (2011) ‘“becoming a supervisor”: the impact of doctoral supervision on supervisors’ learning’, studies in higher education, 36(5), pp.557-570. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2011.594593 (accessed: 21 february 2022). hemer, s.r. (2012) ‘informality, power and relationships in postgraduate supervision: supervising phd candidates over coffee’, higher education research & development, 31(6), pp.827-839. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/07294360.2012.674011 (accessed: 18 february 2022). hockey, j. (1994) ‘establishing boundaries: problems and solutions in managing phd supervisors’ role’, cambridge journal of education, 24(2), pp.293-305. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/0305764940240211 (accessed: 21 february 2022). hockey, j. (1995) ‘getting too close: a problem and a possible solution in social science phd supervision’, british journal of guidance and counselling, 23(2), pp.199-210. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-6209-164-1_3 https://doi.org/10.1080/01425692.2020.1806038 https://doi.org/10.1080/09518390500082483 https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2011.594593 https://doi.org/10.1080/07294360.2012.674011 https://doi.org/10.1080/0305764940240211 specht between the office and the coffee shop: an examination of spaces used for research degree supervision journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 20 available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/03069889508253005 (accessed: 21 february 2022). holley, l.c. and steiner, s. (2005) ‘safe space: student perspectives on classroom environment’, journal of social work education, 41(1), pp.49-64. available at: https://doi.org/10.5175/jswe.2005.200300343 (accessed: 21 february 2022). kiley, m. and halliday, d.p. (2019) ‘candidate and supervisor experiences of doctoral study in a structured, interdisciplinary training environment’, innovations in education and teaching international, 56(5), pp.663-674. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/14703297.2019.1570306 (accessed: 21 february 2022). latting, j.k. (1990) ‘identifying the “isms”: enabling social work students to confront their biases’, journal of social work education, 26(1), pp.36-44. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/10437797.1990.10672132 (accessed: 22 february 2022). lefebvre, h. (1991) the production of space. oxfordshire: routledge. leung, m. and bush, t. (2003) ‘student mentoring in higher education: hong kong baptist university’, mentoring & tutoring: partnership in learning, 11(3), pp.263-271. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/1361126032000138319 (accessed: 21 february 2022). madikizela-madiya, n. and atwebembeire, j. m. (2020) ‘“colleague postgraduate supervision” and the production of space in higher education: a duoethnographic analysis’, qualitative research journal, 21(2), pp.166-176. available at: https://doi.org/10.1108/qrj-05-2020-0039 (accessed: 21 february 2022). manathunga, c. (2005) ‘the development of research supervision: “turning the light on a private space”’, international journal for academic development, 10(1), pp.17-30. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/13601440500099977 (accessed: 21 february 2022). https://doi.org/10.1080/03069889508253005 https://doi.org/10.5175/jswe.2005.200300343 https://doi.org/10.1080/14703297.2019.1570306 https://doi.org/10.1080/10437797.1990.10672132 https://doi.org/10.1080/1361126032000138319 https://doi.org/10.1108/qrj-05-2020-0039 https://doi.org/10.1080/13601440500099977 specht between the office and the coffee shop: an examination of spaces used for research degree supervision journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 21 manathunga, c. (2007) ‘supervision as mentoring: the role of power and boundary crossing’, studies in continuing education, 29(2), pp.207-221. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/01580370701424650 (accessed: 21 february 2022). manathunga, c. (2009) ‘supervision as a contested space: a response’, teaching in higher education, 14 (3), pp.341-345. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/13562510902990242 (accessed: 21 february 2022). maor, d., ensor, j.d. and fraser, b.j. (2016) ‘doctoral supervision in virtual spaces: a review of research of web-based tools to develop collaborative supervision’, higher education research & development, 35(1), pp.172-188. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/07294360.2015.1121206 (accessed: 21 february 2022). massey, d. (2008) for space. london: sage. maxwell, t.w. and smyth, r. (2011) ‘higher degree research supervision: from practice toward theory’, higher education research & development, 30(2), pp.219-231. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/07294360.2010.509762 (accessed: 21 february 2022). morieson, l., murray, g., wilson, r., clarke, b. and lukas, k. (2018) ‘belonging in space: informal learning spaces and the student experience’, journal of learning spaces 7(2). available at: http://libjournal.uncg.edu/jls/article/view/1667 (accessed: 21 february 2022). murphy, m.j. and wright, d.w. (2005) ‘supervisees' perspectives of power use in supervision’, journal of marital and family therapy, 31(3), pp.283-295. available at: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1752-0606.2005.tb01569.x (accessed: 21 february 2022). oldenburg, r. (1989) the great good place: cafes, coffee shops, community centres, beauty parlours, general stores, bars, hangouts and how they get you through the day. new york: paragon house. https://doi.org/10.1080/01580370701424650 https://doi.org/10.1080/13562510902990242 https://doi.org/10.1080/07294360.2015.1121206 https://doi.org/10.1080/07294360.2010.509762 http://libjournal.uncg.edu/jls/article/view/1667 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1752-0606.2005.tb01569.x specht between the office and the coffee shop: an examination of spaces used for research degree supervision journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 22 olmos-lópez, p. and sunderland, j. (2017) ‘doctoral supervisors' and supervisees' responses to co-supervision’, journal of further and higher education, 41(6), pp.727-740. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/0309877x.2016.1177166 (accessed: 21 february 2022). paré, a., starke-meyerring, d. and mcalpine, l. (2011) ‘knowledge and identity work in the supervision of doctoral student writing: shaping rhetorical subjects’, in starkemeyerring, d., paré, a., artemeva, n., horne, m. and yousoubova, l. (eds.) writing in knowledge societies. fort collins: wac clearinghouse, pp.215-236. available at: https://doi.org/10.37514/per-b.2011.2379.2.11 (accessed: 21 february 2022). radcliffe, d., wilson, h., powell, d. and tibbetts, b. (2008) ‘designing next generation places of learning: collaboration at the pedagogy-space-technology nexus’, altc priority project #627. australian learning and teaching council. available at: https://ltr.edu.au/resources/grants_pp_projectreport_nextgeneration_uq_jan09.pdf (accessed: 21 february 2022). redmond, s.p. (1990) ‘mentoring and cultural diversity in academic settings’, the american behavioral scientist, 34(2), p.188. available at: https://doi.org/10.1177/0002764290034002007 (accessed: 21 february 2022). robertson, m. (2017) ‘aspects of mentorship in team supervision of doctoral students in australia’, the australian educational researcher, 44(4), pp.409-424. available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13384-017-0241-z (accessed: 21 february 2022). simpson, r. (1983) how the phd came to britain a century of struggle for postgraduate education. society for research into higher education, monograph 54. soja, e.w. (1980) ‘the socio-spatial dialectic’, annals of the association of american geographers, 70(2), pp.207-225. available at: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.14678306.1980.tb01308.x (accessed: 21 february 2022). https://doi.org/10.1080/0309877x.2016.1177166 https://doi.org/10.37514/per-b.2011.2379.2.11 https://ltr.edu.au/resources/grants_pp_projectreport_nextgeneration_uq_jan09.pdf https://doi.org/10.1177/0002764290034002007 https://doi.org/10.1007/s13384-017-0241-z https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8306.1980.tb01308.x https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8306.1980.tb01308.x specht between the office and the coffee shop: an examination of spaces used for research degree supervision journal of learning development in higher education, issue 23: march 2022 23 strandler, o., johansson, t., wisker, g. and claesson, s. (2014) ‘supervisor or counsellor? emotional boundary work in supervision’, international journal for researcher development, 5(2), pp.70-82. available at: https://doi.org/10.1108/ijrd-03-2014-0002 (accessed: 21 february 2022). taylor, s. (2020) the research supervisor’s bibliography. uk council for graduate education. available at: https://cpb-euw2.wpmucdn.com/blogs.lincoln.ac.uk/dist/8/5425/files/2017/09/researchsupervisors-bibliography-ukcge-resource.pdf (accessed: 21 february 2022). terrion, j.l. and leonard, d. (2007) ‘a taxonomy of the characteristics of student peer mentors in higher education: findings from a literature review’, mentoring & tutoring: partnership in learning, 15(2), pp.149-164. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/13611260601086311 (accessed: 21 february 2022). vaatstra, r. and de vries, r. (2007) ‘the effect of the learning environment on competences and training for the workplace according to graduates’, higher education, 53(3), pp.335-357. available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-0052413-4 (accessed: 21 february 2022). watts, j.h. (2010) ‘team supervision of the doctorate: managing roles, relationships and contradictions’, teaching in higher education, 15(3), pp.335-339. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/13562511003740908 (accessed: 21 february 2022). author details doug specht is a senior lecturer and director of teaching and learning at the university of westminster. his research examines how knowledge is constructed and codified through digital and cartographic artefacts. he is both a chartered geographer and a chartered teacher. https://doi.org/10.1108/ijrd-03-2014-0002 https://cpb-eu-w2.wpmucdn.com/blogs.lincoln.ac.uk/dist/8/5425/files/2017/09/research-supervisors-bibliography-ukcge-resource.pdf https://cpb-eu-w2.wpmucdn.com/blogs.lincoln.ac.uk/dist/8/5425/files/2017/09/research-supervisors-bibliography-ukcge-resource.pdf https://cpb-eu-w2.wpmucdn.com/blogs.lincoln.ac.uk/dist/8/5425/files/2017/09/research-supervisors-bibliography-ukcge-resource.pdf https://doi.org/10.1080/13611260601086311 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-005-2413-4 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-005-2413-4 https://doi.org/10.1080/13562511003740908 between the office and the coffee shop: an examination of spaces used for research degree supervision abstract introduction transformed learning spaces supervision spaces and relationships power relations methodology results and discussion conclusions ethics references author details journal of learning development in higher education journal of learning development in higher education issn: 1759-667x issue 1: february 2009 a learning development team: three developers, one pedagogy pamela mckinney university of sheffield, uk jamie wood university of sheffield, uk sabine little university of sheffield, uk abstract with the inception of centres for excellence in teaching and learning (cetls), the demand for learning developers has increased in many institutions across the uk. operating largely in small teams, yet within the remit of facilitating large-scale institutional change, cetls often find themselves outside established institutional structures, with developers fulfilling newly defined roles and responsibilities. this short paper focuses on the way learning development support has been integrated in one particular cetl, the centre for inquiry-based learning in the arts and social sciences based at the university of sheffield. the paper explores the issues, challenges and experiences that are part of the 'learning development and research associate' role in relation to supporting staff and students in the development of inquiry-based learning (ibl) pedagogies, often through the use of collaborative inquiry approaches. it is suggested that the strength and benefits of the ldra role lie in its blended nature, the emphasis which is placed upon brokering support across the team and the institution as a whole, and the centrality of the inquiry approach to the way in which the position of ldra has developed. keywords: learning development; inquiry-based learning, team mckinney, wood & little a learning development team: three developers, one pedagogy   introduction: the cilass context cilass, the centre for inquiry-based learning in the arts and social sciences, based at the university of sheffield, is one of 74 'centres for excellence in teaching and learning' funded by the higher education funding council for england (hefce) in 2005 as part of a 5 year programme of learning and teaching enhancement at uk he institutions. the cetl programme recognised existing excellence in teaching practice; in the case of cilass this related to the use of inquiry-based pedagogies at the university of sheffield, particularly in the faculties of arts and social sciences. inquirybased learning (ibl) is a term used to describe a broad spectrum of approaches to learning that are based on a process of self-directed inquiry or research and has often been proposed as a means of engaging students explicitly with the processes of knowledge creation, facilitating the development of dispositions and capabilities that are particularly relevance for life and work in today's complex world (brew, 2006). cilass funding is currently employed to finance two main streams of curriculum development activity and associated evaluation, research and dissemination: departmental programmes of curriculum development in the faculties of arts and social sciences; and ibl grant projects that are smaller scale curriculum development, scholarship of teaching and learning or inquiry projects taken forward by individuals or small teams of academic staff (and, in one case, students) from across the university. in order to facilitate these developments, the cetl employs three 'learning development and research associates' (ldras) in ibl who each have their own specialism (information literacy, networked learning and dissemination respectively) and share the load of development support. whilst many cetls have created additional posts for learning developers and learning technologists, only a fraction of these operate within one particular pedagogical approach. this presents additional challenges as well as additional rewards. this article briefly outlines the pedagogical and professional context, describes the roles of the three ldras, before exploring how cross-brokering of knowledge and skills helps to provide coherent development support for ibl at the institution. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 1: february 2009 2 mckinney, wood & little a learning development team: three developers, one pedagogy   working within one pedagogical context ibl positions students at the centre of their own learning, inviting them to formulate questions, design their own research and investigations, and explore possibilities without necessarily needing to supply a 'correct answer'. an open-ended approach to tasks given by tutors means a variety of solutions and responses are possible (khan and o´rourke, 2005). learning through ibl can involve active, self-directed and taskbased learning and original student-designed research. inquiry is often a collaborative activity and features the development of information literacy capabilities through active engagement with information searching, evaluation and presentation. this allows students to build up a wide range of transferable skills as part of their degree, such as communication, teamworking and technical skills. new technologies are often utilised in order to facilitate research or online collaboration. the implementation of a programme of educational development with one particular pedagogical approach has helped to create an institutional community which shares a language for learning design and pedagogical thinking. (cilass, 2007d) for the ldras, the pedagogical focus makes it easier to support a large variety of projects, as the common denominator facilitates the exchange of information with other staff, the organisation of communitybuilding events, and the design of pedagogical resources (little, 2008a). the ldra blended role the role of 'learning development and research associate' within the cilass core team is a blended role that involves pedagogical and other support for curriculum development, project and programme evaluation and research. although the post was created specifically for the cetl, the role description largely corresponds with the work of surrey and robinson (2001), who researched and analysed 449 job adverts in the area of educational technology and support. their analysis identified requirements ranging from teaching to dissemination, as well as research, knowledge of new technologies, and managerial and administrative skills. to circumvent potential issues surrounding the image of 'jack of all trades, master of none', each ldra has a journal of learning development in higher education, issue 1: february 2009 3 mckinney, wood & little a learning development team: three developers, one pedagogy   specialist area: networked learning, information literacy and dissemination. the first two roles were included in the cilass team from the beginning of the programme and the latter was added in 2006. in addition to these requirements, the role of the ldra includes that of brokering of expertise between academic project leaders and professional services staff in the learning & teaching services department (lets), the library, audio/visual services and corporate information and computing services (cics), to ensure that projects run as smoothly as possible. the role of 'broker' is defined by the oed (2008) as: ‘a middleman, intermediary, or agent generally; an interpreter, messenger, commissioner’. of these descriptors, 'intermediary' is probably closest to how the ldras view this sphere of their activities, which involve identifying where in the institution the particular technical or pedagogic expertise lies and bringing that expertise to bear on the project in hand. cilass funding can smooth this process with colleagues outside the core team, but often a process of negotiation over project time and resource commitment has to take place before engagement can be secured fully. on this issue, there seems to be congruence with the findings of slack et al (2004), whose report on the subject of how brokerage works in communities and the workplace suggests that although the term 'brokerage' defies simple definition, and that the credibility of a broker relies on their understanding of the working context of their colleagues. the value of a broker, they state is in ‘providing new pedagogical and curricular approaches.’ (slack et al, 2004). handal (2008) identifies the academic developer as belonging to at least two communities on the one hand the community of academic development, in which they are full participants, on the other hand the wider academic community, with which they might only marginally connect, playing a small but vital role in the larger educational context. wenger (1998) describes the brokering role as a boundary trajectory, linking several communities of practice and spelling a delicate challenge for the developer. the three ldras have varied experiences to bring to the team, for example through school teaching, professional roles such as librarian, and masters and phd study in a number of subjects, and as academic teaching staff. none of the ldras has previously journal of learning development in higher education, issue 1: february 2009 4 mckinney, wood & little a learning development team: three developers, one pedagogy   worked as an educational developer and the wide variety of knowledge and skills required by the role has ensured a steep learning curve. the ldra role is a novelty in the institution and a degree of flexibility in defining our approach to educational development has been a feature of activities to date. project evaluation responsibilities are shared with the project leaders, with ldra support focussed at the start of the process, in the establishment of an evaluation framework and plan. project leaders take a greater degree of responsibility for the collection of evaluative data from students, although sometimes this is facilitated by the ldra, for example in the running of focus groups. cilass has adopted and expanded the theory of change evaluation approach (connell and kubisch, 1998), combining it with enabling, process and outcome indicators. through backward-mapping, project leaders identify the activities necessary to achieve their intended outcomes, and realise where potential barriers and enablers are situated within their context. this method, whilst work intensive, allows personalised evaluation and ownership on the project leader's part. occasionally, either learning development or evaluation support lead to joint research and/or publication between project leaders and ldras, further broadening the role beyond previous similar posts in the institution. the specialist roles for the three ldras are discussed below information literacy there are various definitions of information literacy (il) in use worldwide but one of the most often cited is that developed by the american library association (1989): to be information literate a person must be able to recognise when information is needed and have the ability to locate, evaluate and use effectively the needed information. the skills of searching for information, particularly in the electronic environment are essential for university students, but it is the so called 'higher order' conceptions of information literacy such as critical thinking, evaluation and synthesis (bruce, 1997a) that are particularly important for students to be effective inquirers. academics can have journal of learning development in higher education, issue 1: february 2009 5 mckinney, wood & little a learning development team: three developers, one pedagogy   very varied conceptions of what information literacy means (bruce, 1997b) and the use of information and what it means to be information literate is dependent on the subject discipline (boon et al., 2007). the society of college, national and university libraries (sconul) ‘seven pillars’ model of information literacy (1999) is used in the university and by cilass to define the scope of information literacy that should be addressed in a university education. the model describes abilities from recognising an information need (pillar 1) through constructing search strategies, searching for and accessing information (pillars 2, 3 and 4) to comparing and evaluating information (pillar 5), organising, applying and communicating information (pillar 6) and synthesising and creating new knowledge (pillar 7). some academic staff are familiar with the term 'information literacy' and project proposals can be very specifically aimed at building il through ibl. however it can be the case that the project proposal does not explicitly discuss information literacy but still involves students developing il skills, or sometimes a focus on il is not particularly appropriate within a project context. the seven pillars model can be very useful as a tool to initiate discussions with project leaders about the scope and depth of the field of information literacy. often activities that build what an information professional might label 'information literacy' are given alternative labels such as 'study skills' or 'research skills'. the challenge for the ldra (information literacy) is to work with project leaders to determine existing departmental strategies for building il competencies and to recommend suitable ibl strategies for the project context that build il skills to support inquiry. this can mean brokering support from colleagues in the library, for example, to develop electronic resource lists to support il and the provision and tailoring of online information skills tutorials that are made available through the virtual learning environment. networked learning cilass adopts a definition of networked learning which largely corresponds with that reported by jones (2004): journal of learning development in higher education, issue 1: february 2009 6 mckinney, wood & little a learning development team: three developers, one pedagogy   networked learning is learning in which information and communication technology (c&it) is used to promote connections: between one learner and other learners, between learners and tutors; between a learning community and its learning resources. (p. 89) within these parameters, ibl often takes the form of collaborative inquiry, using technology to facilitate collaboration and tutor support between face-to-face sessions. only on rare occasions is technology used as a substitute for face-to-face teaching, more often it is intended as a means for students to engage with the content in advance of or between sessions, leaving face-to-face sessions for more inquiry-based activities. whilst some project leaders approach their work with clear pedagogical design in mind, networked learning support can and does include an ongoing struggle to ensure technology is not adopted for technology's sake, but instead is tied to a solid ibl approach. at the same time, however, there is the lure of new technologies, and visions of how they might be used in ibl, leading to a number of innovative ideas which, as they have not been attempted before, can lead to various levels of success. in an environment strongly shaped by student evaluations and examination results, support will take place in a fine balance between encouraging innovation and maintaining or improving the departments' record of achievement. cilass funding can help here to create the space for pilot cases, which are then taken on board by the department in future years. in terms of technology, this can be particularly viable through funding of software or hardware to support ibl. support from the university's learning and teaching services (lets) often provides both a further opinion of the project (as the unit has its own educational developers), as well as the technical skill to produce videos, set up virtual learning environments, design web pages or identify additional technologies necessary to support a particular project. the brokering role is further discussed below. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 1: february 2009 7 mckinney, wood & little a learning development team: three developers, one pedagogy   dissemination as the cilass programme has progressed, increasing emphasis has been placed upon the need to share learning from projects in order to ensure that cetl supported teaching and learning initiatives have maximum impact at the university and beyond. there are two strands to this cilass authored or directed dissemination activities and those which project leaders engage in themselves. initially, significant resource was devoted to running events, and setting up informal and formal special interest groups. this was intended to facilitate the development of ibl communities of practice (wenger, 1998) and the sharing of good practice. more recently, the emphasis has shifted to the production of more formal, written pieces for publication and distribution to stakeholders and externally, although some early cilass projects have already reported through he academy subject centres and the scholarly press (verbaan, 2008; semmens and taylor, 2006; van oostrum & steadman-jones, 2007; carson, 2007; stafford & martin 2007; stafford, 2008). over the past months cilass has been developing case studies for a number of completed projects. these are discussed in greater detail and links to relevant materials are provided in "design for inquiry-based learning case studies" (wood, 2009) in this issue. in general terms, the cases provide practitioners with a range of resources that illustrate ways in which ibl is being designed and facilitated in cilass projects. they are presented via a website to provide greater flexibility for searching and analysis than would be possible with paper-based cases. by putting the cases on-line we can share a far wider range of resources, including multimedia materials, and we are able to exploit the possibilities of on-line interaction through the use of web 2.0 technologies. the central part of each case study is what we have termed an ibl 'design overview'. this document, which is standardised across projects, gives an informative guide to the context from which the project emerged, the ibl activities in which students engaged, the support which they received from staff, and some feedback from staff and students about their experiences. because a uniform template was created for the design overview, we (and the users of the website) can more easily abstract and compare journal of learning development in higher education, issue 1: february 2009 8 mckinney, wood & little a learning development team: three developers, one pedagogy   projects. the range of resources which accompany the design overview is large (photos, videos, podcasts, student work, staff evaluations and reflections, course documentation, journal articles, blog postings) and enables those who visit the website to get a richer impression of the project than is possible in a solely textual format. additional dissemination activities have included the development of the cilass newsletter, crucibl, the production of a series of briefing papers which focus upon the key outcomes and achievements of the cilass programme so far. references and weblinks for these publications are available in the bibliography. brokering within the team in the very first round of departmental funding, the ldra assigned to each project was identified by gauging the amount of information literacy or networked learning that was inherent in each individual project strand in reality, however, this was not sustainable, as it necessitated detailed knowledge of every single department strand by each ldra. work is now divided by departmental programme, with brokering of expertise between ldras taking place where necessary. sometimes this might involve a short, informal conversation between ldras or an exchange of emails, but on other occasions it can involve more extended brokered direct contacts with project leaders. for example the first departmental project in the school of law had a significant focus on networked learning so the networked learning ldra took responsibility for the support. however it became apparent as the project developed that one of the objectives was to develop il competencies in students so the information literacy ldra was consulted about the best ways to take this aspect of the project forward. sometimes, the 'brokered' ldra becomes the main support contact with the project leader, and this can be due to the subject area appealing more to the interests and experience of a particular ldra for example, the ldra for dissemination has a background in historical research and so took on support for the history department. in a fast-moving, busy environment, it can often appear easier to attempt to facilitate a project as a whole, neglecting the brokering role. with each brokering, an additional journal of learning development in higher education, issue 1: february 2009 9 mckinney, wood & little a learning development team: three developers, one pedagogy   element of complexity and member of staff is added to the team, resulting in more avenues to pursue and to keep track of (little, 2008b). however, brokering the real experts can only ever benefit the project, so a constant effort is made to ensure each project support team is tailored specifically to its needs, co-ordinated by the department's lead ldra, although individual strands might devolve to another ldra in the team. conclusion in conclusion, the generic ldra role involves providing a wide variety of support for project leaders and a significant degree of support for each other so that the pedagogical and strategic aims of cilass can be achieved. the 2007 interim evaluation report, based on data collected from project level evaluations and key stakeholders in the university provides some insight into the institutional impact of the cetl. the report (cilass, 2007d: 10) highlights the generally positive impact that the cilass programme has had on the student experience. outcomes identified include: ‘increased engagement, confidence and responsibility in relation to learning; improved information literacy and it skills; enhanced awareness of the inquiry/research process and of the role and value of inquiry within the wider social context’. high quality pedagogical support and intensive facilitation provided by the cilass team is cited as being greatly appreciated by the institution. all three of the ldras have to manage the tension between the requirements of academic project leaders and those of cilass. there can be a gap in understanding between what a project leader expects a project to entail and the activities that cilass expects all project leaders to undertake. this is rarely a problem for the curriculum development side of projects because the implementation of ibl initiatives in teaching and learning situations is often the primary focus of the project plan and has an immediacy that longer term aspects of the project may seem to lack. however ensuring engagement with evaluation and dissemination can be more problematic for the ldra. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 1: february 2009 10 mckinney, wood & little a learning development team: three developers, one pedagogy   the pedagogical focus on inquiry-based learning lends itself to the creation within and beyond the core team of an inquiry-based approach to educational development, evaluation and dissemination. for example the ldras are taking a reflective and inquiring approach to their own practice through engaging in scholarly activities such as literature review, a reflective blog and writing for publication, whilst the activities in which we engage with staff and students are almost exclusively based on inquiry-based approaches. in addition the ldras are all registered on the seda (staff and educational development association) fellowship scheme which requires participants to demonstrate a scholarly approach to their roles. it is beyond the scope of this paper to discuss whether the larger cilass community is as engaged with the ethos of inquiry as the ldras are, although evidence of an inquiry approach to teaching can be seen through the creation of a special interest group of academic staff and developers from the cilass community who are taking forward a collaborative writing project in the field of the scholarship of teaching and learning. what can be stated with some confidence, however, is that the inquiry approach underpins every aspect of the ldra role itself. the balancing of the needs of the project and the needs of the cilass team can be challenging, but ultimately the opportunity to work with such a diverse group of people within such a coherent pedagogic framework offers significant personal and professional rewards. references boon, s., johnston, b. & webber, s. (2007): ‘a phenomenographic study of english faculty's conceptions of information literacy’. journal of documentation 63 (2) p. 204 228 brew, a. (2006): research and teaching: beyond the divide. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 1: february 2009 11 mckinney, wood & little a learning development team: three developers, one pedagogy   bruce, c. (1997a): ‘the relational approach: a new model for information literacy’. the new review of library and information research, 3, 1-22. bruce, c. (1997b): the seven faces of information literacy. adelaide: auslib press cilass (2007a): ‘student partnership in educational development’. cilass briefing papers 001 [online] https://portal104.shef.ac.uk/content/1/c6/07/93/44/briefing%20paper%20001.pdf accessed 14/05/08 cilass (2007b): ‘cilass achievements 2005-2007’. cilass briefing papers 002 [online] https://portal104.shef.ac.uk/content/1/c6/07/93/44/briefing%20paper%20002.pdf accessed 14/05/08 cilass (2007c): crucibl: a melting point for inquiry-based learning. issue 1, december 2007 [online] https://portal104.shef.ac.uk/content/1/c6/07/93/44/j22144%20crucibl%20newslett er.pdf accessed 14/05/08. cilass (2007d): interim evaluation report, july 2007. [online] http://www.shef.ac.uk/content/1/c6/04/89/91/cilass%20interim%20evaluation%2 0report%20july%202007.pdf accessed 14/05/08 cilass (2008): ‘learning spaces’ cilass briefing papers 003 [online] http://www.shef.ac.uk/content/1/c6/07/93/44/j24045_briefing.pdf accessed 14/05/08 connell, j. & kubisch, a. (1998}: ‘applying a theory of change approach to evaluating comprehensive community initiatives’, in k. fulbright-anderson, a. kubisch & j. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 1: february 2009 12 https://portal104.shef.ac.uk/content/1/c6/07/93/44/briefing%20paper%20001.pdf https://portal104.shef.ac.uk/content/1/c6/07/93/44/briefing%20paper%20002.pdf http://www.shef.ac.uk/content/1/c6/04/89/91/cilass%20interim%20evaluation%20report%20july%202007.pdf http://www.shef.ac.uk/content/1/c6/04/89/91/cilass%20interim%20evaluation%20report%20july%202007.pdf http://www.shef.ac.uk/content/1/c6/07/93/44/j24045_briefing.pdf mckinney, wood & little a learning development team: three developers, one pedagogy   connell (eds), new approaches to evaluating community initiatives vol 2 (pp. 1544). new york: the aspen institute. handal, g (2008): ‘identities of academic developers: critical friends in the academy?’ in r barnett and r dinapoli (eds) changing identities in higher education: voicing perspectives. abingdon: routledge, pp. 55-68. jones, c (2004): ‘networks and learning: communities, practices and the metaphor of networks’ in alt-j, research in learning technology, vol 12, no 1, pp 81-93 khan, p. and o'rourke, k. (2004): guide to curriculum design: enquiry-based learning. york, higher education academy, imaginative curriculum network. [online] http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/assets/york/documents/resources/resourcedatabase/ id359_guide_to_curriculum_design_ebl.rtf [accessed 16/05/08]. little, s (2008a): ‘the role of the developer in institutional change: tales from the edge’. proceedings from networked learning conference, halkidiki, greece, may 2008, pp. 245-252. little, s (2008b): ‘oily rag or winged messenger: the role of the developer in multiprofessional teams’, in r donnelly and f mcsweeney (eds): applied e-learning and e-teaching in higher education. hershey, pa: igi publishing oxford english dictionary online 2nd ed. (2008): oxford university press. sconul (1999): information skills in higher education: a sconul position paper [online] http://www.sconul.ac.uk/groups/information_literacy/seven_pillars.html accessed 14.05.08 journal of learning development in higher education, issue 1: february 2009 13 http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/assets/york/documents/resources/resourcedatabase/id359_guide_to_curriculum_design_ebl.rtf http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/assets/york/documents/resources/resourcedatabase/id359_guide_to_curriculum_design_ebl.rtf http://www.sconul.ac.uk/groups/information_literacy/seven_pillars.html mckinney, wood & little a learning development team: three developers, one pedagogy   semmens, n. and taylor, m. (2006): ‘cilass: promoting inquiry-based learning and information literacy’. uk centre for legal education newsletter (directions), spring. [online] http://www.ukcle.ac.uk/directions/previous/issue12/cilass.html accessed 21/05/08 slack, k. thomas, l., quinn, j., casey, l., vigurs, k., and flynn, n. (2004): learning brokerage: building bridges between learners and providers. london: learning and skills development agency. [online] http://www.citizensonline.org.uk/site/media/documents/1034_learning%20brokers %20report%20-%20workplace1626.pdf accessed 27/10/08 stafford, t. (2008). ‘a fire to be lighted: a case-study in enquiry-based learning’. practice and evidence of scholarship of teaching and learning in higher education, 3 (1), 20-42. [online] http://www.pestlhe.org.uk/index.php/pestlhe/article/view/39/160; accessed 29/4/2008 stafford, t. & martin, c.j. (2007). ‘how to do a neuroscience lab class with 120 students’. hea psychology network newsletter, issue 45 november 2007 [online] http://www.psychology.heacademy.ac.uk/docs/pdf/p20071127_issue45.pdf access ed 14/05/08 surry, d., & robinson, m. (2001): ‘a taxonomy of instructional technology service positions in higher education’. innovations in education and teaching international, 38(3), 231-238. van oostrum, d., steadman-jones, r., carson, z. (2007): ‘taking the imaginative leap: creative writing and inquiry-based learning’. pedagogy, 7 (3), 556-566. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 1: february 2009 14 http://www.ukcle.ac.uk/directions/previous/issue12/cilass.html http://www.ukcle.ac.uk/directions/previous/issue12/cilass.html http://www.ukcle.ac.uk/directions/previous/issue12/cilass.html http://www.citizensonline.org.uk/site/media/documents/1034_learning%20brokers%20report%20-%20workplace1626.pdf http://www.citizensonline.org.uk/site/media/documents/1034_learning%20brokers%20report%20-%20workplace1626.pdf https://webmail.shef.ac.uk/horde/util/go.php?url=http%3a%2f%2fwww.pestlhe.org.uk%2findex.php%2fpestlhe%2farticle%2fview%2f39%2f160&horde=f214a966890581712181565cb245781a http://www.psychology.heacademy.ac.uk/docs/pdf/p20071127_issue45.pdf mckinney, wood & little a learning development team: three developers, one pedagogy   verbaan, e. (2008): ‘the multicultural society in the netherlands. technology-supported inquiry-based learning in an inter-institutional context’. teaching in higher education, 13 2008, 437-447. wenger, e. (1998). communities of practice : learning, meaning, and identity. cambridge: wood, j. (2009). 'design for inquiry-based learning case studies'. journal of learning development in higher education 1, 2009. author details pamela mckinney has a background as an information professional and is a chartered member of cilip: the chartered institute of library and information professionals. she is a learning development and research associate at cilass (centre for inquiry-based learning in the arts and social sciences) and is responsible for taking forward the information literacy strand of cilass development and research activity. sabine little currently works for cilass (the centre for inquiry-based learning in the arts and social sciences), a hefce-funded cetl based at the university of sheffield. she holds the position of learning development and research associate, specialising in support for networked learning and working with staff to incorporate inquiry-based learning (ibl) into their teaching. she also facilitates the student ambassador network. jamie wood is a learning development and research associate at cilass (centre for inquiry-based learning in the arts and social sciences) with responsibility for journal of learning development in higher education, issue 1: february 2009 15 mckinney, wood & little a learning development team: three developers, one pedagogy   taking forward the cilass dissemination strategy. jamie works with project leaders to develop case studies of ibl curriculum development projects and writes cilass briefing papers and newsletters. journal of learning development in higher education, issue 1: february 2009 16 a learning development team: three developers, one pedagogy abstract working within one pedagogical context the ldra blended role information literacy networked learning dissemination brokering within the team conclusion references author details